Appetizers!

I never know what to bring when someone asks me to make an appetizer. I don't do fried things well... and I don't do pastry well. So if it's 70-something degrees out, I skip the rustic tart and bring vegetables. From left to right: radishes, fennel, hard-boiled quail eggs, heirloom carrots, broccoli.
Three dips/spreads: clockwise, from left, shredded radishes with lowfat creamed cheese and salt, caramelized onions with equal parts greek yogurt and sour cream, beetroot pesto with toasted walnuts, orange zest, honey, and olive oil.

I made a beet cake for dessert. It was delicious. No picture!!! I'll have to make it again.

Remember when

On this stinking hot day, I'm remembering way back to last week when we had one day that was cool enough to turn the oven on.

 Luckily I had the foresight to start the dough the day before. (Here begin the bread geek details, for future reference.) I used the whole grain pizza dough recipe from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. I think it was 70% whole wheat, and 30% plain white flour. (I used half the suggested sugar, and -- due to misreading the recipe -- omitted the oil. I added a small amount of oil during the shaping prior to refrigeration.) It had about 22 hours in the fridge. The dough was quite sticky before refrigeration, but ended up being surprisingly easy to shape. I used Reinhart's instructions for shaping the pizza, rather than my usual rolling pin technique.

This crust was very tasty. The crumb was good, but not as good as my usual recipe. It reminded me a bit of focaccia in that it was kind of springy -- not in a bad or unpizzalike way, mind you.

(The pizza toppings were: Reinhart's crushed tomato sauce, kalamatas, green capsicum, and Cheezly mozzarella.)

Stuffed okra

This okra was so good that even this not very appetizing photo is making me want some more.

It's Onion Stuffed Okra with Mango Powder from 660 Curries. Stuffing the okra is kind of a pain, but it is so worth it. You make a filling with ground up onion, chile, ginger, garlic and various spices including mango powder, then stuff the okra and cook -- at first browning them in a pan until half cooked, and then adding water and tomato and covering the pan to finish cooking them.

Two accidents worth repeating: (1) use tomato paste instead of fresh tomato, and (2) let the okra and its sauce burn just a little bit. The burnt bits were the best part!

The recipe made twice as much filling as I needed, so I used the rest of it in an eggplant curry the next day (based on Stewed Eggplant with a Coconut-Chile Spice Blend from 660 Curries.) Alongside that we had a split pea and mango dal (again, based on a dal in 660 Curries. Perhaps I should just note when a curry I make is not from that book?).

Pomegranate tofu, lemony zucchini

A nice summery dinner courtesy of the Moosewood Cooking for Health cookbook: pomegranate glazed tofu, and sauteed grated zucchini with lemon and fried breadcrumbs. I liked the tofu technique: brown the tofu, then add the 'marinade' to the pan and simmer until it turns into a glaze.

(Alongside, we had some kind of blah couscous of my own invention. Luckily the tofu and zucchini made up for it.)

Dosa / injera

There is no teff in Australia.

Let that sink in for a minute.

It's so weird that there are ingredients that in the US you can just walk into Whole Foods and buy that just don't exist here. Another one that I miss a lot is hominy. (Okay, at certain import food stores here you can buy $10 cans of hominy, but I want the dried stuff. Plus, I think cooking with a $10 can of hominy would stress me out.) And unfortunately there are quarantine rules against bringing grains into the country. After living in the US, where it seems like you can buy anything you want, it's taking some getting used to.

Anyway, this is how I came to make injera out of dosa batter. First we had dosas with a traditional potato masala filling, and a cabbage and pea curry (both from 660 Curries). But invariably you get tired of making dosas before you've used up all the batter, so the leftover batter sat in the fridge for a couple of days.

Then I had a craving for Ethiopian. I used Kittee's recipes for yemiser w'et (lentils in a spicy red gravy) and gomen (greens), but with black eyed peas instead of lentils, and some mystery Asian greens (some kind of mustard?) and fenugreek for the greens. My first dosa-injera wasn't bubbly enough, so I added a little bit of baking soda, and they were perfect.