Posole

One of the foods I miss most from the USA is hominy. Occasionally you will see an overpriced can for sale here, but never dried hominy. For years, I've been hoping to try making it from scratch -- starting with field corn, and nixtamalizing it (cooking/soaking with slaked lime) -- but I couldn't even find field corn for sale.

Then, suddenly field corn turned up in my favourite continental grocery store. So, I made a trip to the Thai grocery store to pick up some slaked lime. I consulted a long-bookmarked post on the Cooking Issues blog. And then today I made nixtamal, and posole.

Only took 6 years or so...

Vegan chorizo and potato tacos

SO GOOD!

With homemade vegan chorizo, and perfect fried potatoes (parcooked with vinegar) -- all from Serious Eats.

Homemade tempeh

For a long time I wanted to try making tempeh, but I was put off because it sounded too hard. First, the whole process of splitting and getting the hulls off the soybeans seemed like a big hassle. And second, it seemed like you would need an incubation chamber to keep the fermenting tempeh at a stable warm temperature. But reading Sandor Katz' The Art of Fermentation convinced me that it was totally doable.

I bought my starter culture from Indopal.

I decided to skip the whole issue of splitting and hulling soybeans by using split hulled broad beans (fava beans) instead. I begin by soaking 460g of beans for 24 hours (the long soak at a warmish temperature allows them to start fermenting -- according to Katz this step probably creates a good environment for the tempeh mold to grow in).

The next step is to partially cook the beans. You definitely want to under-cook them: they need to be firm so that they don't mush together. Firm beans allow space between them for the tempeh mold to grow. I simmered these beans for about 12 minutes; they were firm but some were starting to get feathery on the edges.

Next, you let the beans cool to body temperature. It's important that they are dry -- with a batch this size it works well to tip the beans onto a towel and dry them. Then you put them into a bowl and stir through the starter thoroughly (the amount might depend on your particular starter -- mine calls for 1 tsp).

For the next step, you put the beans into sandwich bags, which you have poked some air holes into with the point of a knife. For this batch, I used 4 10x15cm bags. You should smush the beans down so that they fill the bags all the way to the corners.

I like to do all of this in the morning, on a day when I will be around to keep an eye on the incubation. For the first 12 hours, the tempeh needs to incubate at about 28 degrees. Luckily or unluckily for me, in the summer time in my house that's about room temperature, so I don't need an incubation chamber. After about 12 hours, the tempeh mold should have started growing and creating its own warmth. If you were using a heat source to incubate the tempeh, this would be the time to turn it off or down, and this is why I like starting in the morning: the cooler night time temperature arrives at the right time for the tempeh.

(When it's cooler, I've had success using my Excalibur dehydrator as a heat source. I run the dehydrator at its lowest temperature (85F) and put the tempeh on racks on top of the dehydrator, and then cover the whole lot with an overturned bowl to keep the warmth in. I check the temperature every so often, and turn the dehydrator off if it's getting too warm.)

After 24 hours, tempeh:

Burgers

I've been really into veggie burgers recently. I combine mashed beans (usually black eyed peas) and rice (Sri Lankan red keeri samba rice, which is short grained and fluffy), various random things for flavour (smoked paprika? soy sauce? vegan worcestershire? finely chopped onion?), chia seeds and or ground flax seed, and vital wheat gluten. Then, fry or bake. I really like the crisp crust that you get with a rice based burger.

Broad bean burgers

I had some leftover cooked-from-dry broad beans (fava beans), and remembered that there was a recipe for broad bean burgers in Ottolenghi's Plenty (also appears here). It turns out the recipe called for fresh beans, but the cooked dry beans worked really well. I also replaced the spinach in the recipe with a bunch of greens from the garden: rocket (arugula), fennel fronds, broad bean leaves, and nasturtium leaves. We ate the burgers with a 'coconut sour cream' with lemon and chives. (Inspired by a bunch of experiments with vegan nut cheeses, I made the sour cream by fermenting pureed young coconut flesh with rejuvelac.)

These were really good -- I made them again a couple of days later, which is saying something.

Nasi lemak redux

I haven't been too interested in cooking recently, but when I got Ottolenghi's Plenty for Xmas, I remembered how good his version of nasi lemak was. So here it is again, but with non-traditional chickpeas. The sambal is really tasty: not too hot, and the tamarind and sugar give it a sweet tanginess.

On top, I sprinkled some crispy fried shallots and some vegetarian anchovies (which I brought back from Singapore -- they are seasoned dried mushroom stalks). Unfortunately I left the bag of anchovies on the counter, and while I was out, Mackie ripped open the bag and ate the lot.

Broad beans

As a kid I hated broad beans (fava beans). I was totally surprised when I moved to Massachusetts to find out how excited people got about them in the spring. I was also surprised at the rigmarole involved in preparing them: my parents always served them with the skins on, but it seems that in the USA it's normal to parboil them and remove the outer skin. I have tried them this way but it seemed like a lot of work for not much return.

Anyway, now I am a convert, thanks to my dad giving me some small broad beans from his garden. These pods are very small compared to the ones you find for sale -- they are finger-sized and so tender that you can steam them and eat them whole. They are fantastic. I was surprised especially by the aroma of the pods when I lifted the lid off the steamer -- flowery, almost rose-like.


We ate these with risotto (again, this time it was lemon risotto with tiny cubes of smoked tofu).

Magical Fruit

For my birthday, my sister gave me some cold.hard.cash. to buy beans. This is my haul. I have a dish of them today -- Cannelini beans -- with roasted butternut squash and goat cheese. I went wrong on the dressing (sherry vinegar?) and on the other vegetable ingredient (radish sprouts). But the beans are beautiful.
They're FAR larger than the cannelini beans at the grocery, and I've blended them to bulk up a soup to good effect. Just this week, I followed a recipe for baked beans, and turned out a plump, gorgeous batch. (The recipe for baked beans is from the "Modern Vegetarian" cookbook, and calls for the following to spice: a quartered carrot, a celery sprig cut in half, one onion pierced with three whole cloves, a bay leaf, and some unpeeled garlic (+ kombu). Stir in, when the vegetables have seasoned plump beans and are discarded, 3T tamari, 4T maple, 2t dijon, and 2T olive oil. A terrific broth.
Will the popcorn be purple? Will the chia seeds improve the nutrients in my cells? Gosh, I hope so...

Rosemary and basil

So here we are in the middle of winter in Perth, and I find myself obsessed with basil and rosemary. Luckily winter in Perth is sort of a joke, compared to Massachusetts (a typical winter day time temperature here is 18C or 64F) so I actually still have basil growing in the garden.

And as for rosemary, many of our neighbours have rosemary hedges in their front yards. I don't feel bad about grabbing a few sprigs here and there while walking the dog.

So this is how we ended up eating some pretty summery looking meals this week. Here you see beans with pesto and cherry tomatoes, green beans and mushrooms, and baked polenta 'fries'. (The polenta was pretty great -- I made it quite cheesy-tasting with miso and nutritional yeast.)

And here is baked eggplant with a quick tomato sauce and pesto, stir fried cabbage with lemon and pepper, a quick focaccia topped with rosemary, and rosemary-roasted tofu cubes (from Vegan Soul Kitchen). The tofu was great -- the baking technique is really cool. The tofu cubes puff up and get crisp on the outside.

Avocado Relish

Oh my god, if you love Indian food and guacamole, you must try this. From 660 Curries, it's Kerala-style Avocado Relish with Tamarind and Chiles. We had it with Eggplant-smothered Yellow Split Peas (left) and old favourite Cabbage and Potatoes with Fennel and Chiles (right).

This was so good! It's like guacamole, with chiles and cilantro and tamarind, and with a tarka of mustard seeds and curry leaves.

I don't know why

Here you see my take on Cincinnati-style chili: beans and TVP in a tomato-based sauce spiced with cinnamon, clove and cocoa, served over fettucini (we had no spaghetti) with some cheddar-ish cheese (Kingland soy cheese) on top.

I don't know why I was craving this -- I mean, I've never even had the real thing. But it ended up being pretty tasty.

Fenugreek cauliflower and dal

     Sometimes I wonder what the point of these 660 Curries posts is. Every time I make something from the book that I love, I want to post it so that I remember it and can make it again. But, seriously, I think I've loved almost everything I've made from the book. I think flipping open a page at random has just as good a chance of ending up with a good dish, as does sticking with the tried-and-true. But I digress...

This meal was great. Here you see, at the front, Fenugreek-Perfumed Cauliflower, and at the back, a dal of Yellow Split Peas with Tomato and Chiles. 

The cauliflower curry was supposed to include ivy gourds, but the book suggested cucumber as a replacement and that's what I used. Cooked cucumbers are a revelation -- I know the idea takes some getting used to, but they're really good. The curry also used up the half of my fenugreek crop that didn't get eaten by snails. In the end, I couldn't really taste the fenugreek greens distinctly, but maybe they added something because apart from them, this curry has a pretty simple list of ingredients, and yet it tasted surprisingly good.

The dal was also simple and delicious: the split peas are cooked (I did them in the pressure cooker) and then you add a tarka with the usual suspects (coriander, cumin, chile, garlic, turmeric) and tomato. I don't usually put tomato in my dals, but it added a really nice tang.

Post-disaster cooking

This dinner got onto the table after a series of disasters. The fridge stopped working (but started immediately after I called the guy we bought it off to complain); we had an ant invasion; my battles with the electric stove continued, as evidenced by my ability to burn something with the element turned to the lowest setting.

These are both from 660 Curries: on the left is Cumin-scented Split Green Lentils and on the right is a very adapted version of Cabbage and Peas with Roasted Mustard Seeds and Lentils. (My first attempt involved burnt mustard seeds. I tried to cool the pan by throwing in almost all of the cabbage, which resulted, as you might expect, in burnt-mustard-tasting cabbage. My second attempt bolstered the small amount of remaining cabbage with potatoes and cauliflower.)

Two firsts tonight: my first use of asafetida powder (in the dal) and toasted urad dal (in the cabbage and peas).

Breakfast for dinner -- sort of

When I was a kid and my dad was out of town (which was a lot) we sometimes had breakfast for dinner. I thought it was so weird, and promised I'd never do it when I was an adult. Right... note that the cornbread was from the freezer, and the beans from a can.