When Stinky Tastes Good

It is the gift that keeps giving.

May I suggest that you bring it to a party, leave it there, and remember to light a candle in your apartment so that you don't come home to the (ecchem) aroma of slow-cooked onions, fennel, and sharp Italian cheese.

I present to you - at a safe distance - the onion tart from SmittenKitchen.  Ta da!

Peppers 2 for a dollar

Cincinnati... it's the best.

This is Findlay Market, the tried-and-true been-there-forever Saturday farmer's market that I had never - not once - been to in all of the seventeen years I lived in the Queen City.

Lots of German butcher stalls, some Amish meats and jams, and spectacularly cheap produce.

Good, strong coffee too.  With cream.

  

Breakfast of Champions

I've been advised to start all my workouts with "a shot".

It's tri-berry.  ...At least it offers 100% of daily Vitamin C.

(Sigh.)  And it works.

Dal loves cranberries

Last night's dinner: baigan bharta, paratha, cranberry dal, saag.

The baigan bharta used up the last of my freezer stash of roasted eggplant from the summer.

The cranberry dal is based on this recipe from Mahanandi. It was amazing! (I used red lentils because I didn't have the toor dal that the recipe calls for.)

The saag is curly kale, rather than the usual spinach. I sauteed some onion in the pressure cooker, added a bit of crushed tomato, a little bit of water, and then the kale. It cooked on high pressure for 4 minutes (basically twice as long as it would normally take for kale) so that the kale was very soft. Then I added some mimiccreme, cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, ginger and salt, and pulsed it with a stick-blender. Yum.

Pizza dough from 2008

Our friend here looks worried, but he shouldn't be. This is the same batch of dough I used last time (last week, last year), and this time it was just as good. This pizza was topped with mushrooms, spinach, kalamatas, caramelized onions and FYH mozzarella. (Yes, I am plugging this pizza dough recipe again. I love it.)

Goodbye to How to Eat Supper

So, How to Eat Supper has to go back to the library.

I tried four recipes from the book: Curried cauliflower cream soup, Moroccan green bean tagine, Almond-turmeric potatoes and Greek pot-crushed potatoes.

The Greek pot-crushed potatoes were amazingly zingy and fresh (but how could they not be? -- potatoes mashed with garlic, red pepper flakes, black pepper, fresh oregano, parsley, scallions and lemon juice. I don't think it would have ever occurred to me to add all of that stuff to mashed potatoes at the same time). Here's the potatoes with orange-ginger glazed carrots, steamed kale, and seitan.
The cauliflower soup was unimpressive (but I disobeyed the directions and didn't finish the soup with lemon juice and yogurt, which I'm sure would've improved things). The soup ended up as a pretty good Indian-inspired pizza topping, though:
The Almond-turmeric potatoes tasted much better as leftovers than they did the first day. I definitely want to make this again. The green bean tagine (recipe here) was good, but didn't taste very Moroccan to me. I found that the spices were overwhelmed by the vinegar. But I like vinegar, so that was okay.

I liked this book a lot. While it's written for beginners, and people without much time to cook, I found it quite inspiring (or at least hunger-inspiring). It's very approachable, and the photos are gorgeous. Here are some things that I didn't get to try, but that sound interesting:

• Spring grill of asparagus and scallion salad
  
• Thai cantaloupe salad with chile
• Coriander-orange-scented red lentil soup
• Edna Lewis's sugared raspberries
• Green apple, cheese and chard oven omelet

Red food

I just realized that we've been eating a lot of red things recently.

Bean tagine from How to Eat Supper:
Posole from Tigers and Strawberries:
And one of my favourite dinners for when we need something quick and hearty: it's a kind of goulash-type thing made with seitan, peppers, paprika, tomato and sauerkraut. (It's inspired by a recipe in the Native Foods cookbook.)