The week of dill

For some reason, I bought a bunch of dill at the market last week. I'm not sure why. I like dill, but I don't have any in my herb garden, and the only herb I buy with any regularity is cilantro. So here we were, with dill, and I had to figure out what to do with it.

This week we had: baked potatoes with cashew sour cream and dill; a creamy potato, leek and lentil soup with dill; Cabbage with Rice and Currants (and dill) from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian (this was very good: kind of like the lazy person's dolma); and this New Year Noodle Soup from 101 Cookbooks. This sounds like dill overload, but it wasn't really.

My brother recommended this soup months and months ago, back in the summer when I couldn't even think about soup. It's really wonderful: the soup is spiced quite simply, with cumin, turmeric, black pepper and chile, and yellow split peas give it a nice richness. There's chickpeas and borlotti beans too, and spinach, cilantro and dill, and homemade pasta (I went for fettucini rather than thin noodles). And the toppings really make it special: (tofu) sour cream, caramelized onions, and walnuts.

I love walnuts in soup! They fall to the bottom and surprise you when you find one.

Blowfish for vegetarians

Recently in the New York Times, Harold McGee had a fascinating article about baking baking soda. It turns out that when you expose baking soda to heat, it changes its chemical composition (from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate).

After I baked the baking soda, I used it in two ways suggested by the article. First, pretzels, and second, alkaline noodles. The pretzels were okay -- I didn't think they were much different from my usual recipe which uses plain old baking soda. But the noodles! They were very exciting and I really want to make them again soon.

I didn't have any semolina on hand, so used plain, all purpose, white flour with some added vital wheat gluten. The noodles worked out so well -- they were bouncy and slippery (I'm not sure why the word 'bouncy' describes them so much better than 'chewy', but there you go). I had never really thought about what makes the family of yellow Asian noodles (I know them as Hokkien noodles or yellow mee, but they have lots of names) distinctive, but it turns out that they are all alkaline noodles.

R was very skeptical about my experiments with sodium carbonate. If you touch the stuff it could irritate your skin, so in his eyes I was dealing with a dangerous ingredient, like blowfish.

What we've been eating

This blog has been pretty quiet of late. We've been busy finding our way in our new city, not to mention dealing with some pretty flaky internet service at our hotel. But now I bring you some food highlights of the past couple of weeks:

1. Indo Mie brand mi goreng. There was something of a mania for these instant noodles in my family a few years ago. We were all addicted, and I guess I still am: when I saw this packet I think I started to drool a little bit. Inside there's five little packets of things to season the noodles, one of which the packaging calls 'seasoning powder', but which is obviously crack.

2. Surprisingly vegan dim sum treats we found in Northbridge: these are Chinese doughnuts (deep fried dough wrapped in rice noodle).

3.  Laksa and Malaysian/Nyonya-style food generally. We enjoyed the laksa at Utopia, and yesterday had a great lunch at Sri Melaka. Today I made this laksa-ish soup for lunch (curry paste from a packet, coconut milk, water, carrot, mushroom, napa cabbage, fried tofu, sprouts, yellow mee).