Make Naan

Nothing sells dinner like a bread baked that day: whether we're talking actual loaves, or rolls, tortillas, biscuits, or naan.  All over the world, or among our ancestors, bread baked that day was UNUSUAL.  That's why being a bakers is the third oldest profession, and that's why so often a village has only one oven, and it's shared.

 That said, if today's a day you want to bake a bread, here's this great recipe for naan I've been using.  Note well: plan on three+ hours for the rise.

http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/2007/05/22/naan-bread/

Easy Pantry Thai Curry

An easy pantry curry from about.com's thaifood subsite, for when you don't have a good curry paste on hand..  The entire page is a nice fish curry recipe, but you can make just the curry sauce portion, to use as you like.

How easy?  How pantry?  Here's the ingredients I used tonight:

not pantry, but often in my house anyhow:
fresh cilantro
fresh basil
fresh ginger
garlic in cloves
green onions

pantry
can coconut milk
fish sauce
chili powder (yeah, like you make chili with)
ground cumin
brown sugar
turmeric
cayenne

I dropped without substitution:
ground coriander
shrimp paste

See Fish Curry Recipe for amounts and real directions

I'm pretty excited, because I don't have a brand of curry paste I'm excited about these days, it uses ingredients I'd stock for various dishes.  And this falls somewhere between curry paste and mortar/pestle in effort.

Why a curry sauce?  Over rice with a bell pepper, mushrooms, tomato, and potato it's a fabulous meal.  Add tofu if you like, or fish, or cashews or peanuts.

Roast Vegetables in Pita

School started, and looking for a little convenience, I bought a tray of those pre-cut roasting vegetables in the produce department for the first time.

What's cool: when you toss them in a little olive oil, they completely loose that exposed-to-air look. I tossed in some fresh thyme and basil I had leftover, and salt and pepper. Into the oven for 30 minutes at 450F, more than enough time to have them well cooked.

Serve with pita bread, and a little whole milk yogurt for those who want some creaminess and more sense of the Greek. I offered cubed meat leftovers to add for the insistently non-vegetarian.

Okay, and what was in the tray of pre-cut vegetables? Carrots, green beans, zucchini, summer squash, onion, yam. I thought I would be sad I didn't have mushrooms, but really, I didn't miss them.

Vegetarian Enchilada Pie

This is my riff on a Utah standby Chicken Enchilada Pie, that my dear friend Nicole taught me how to make back in Ohio in 1995. The Chicken version layered tortillas with sour cream, cream of chicken soup, sauteed onions, cheese, and cooked chicken. My new version, adapted to vegetarian tastes and my progress at Weight Watchers (25 pounds down, yay!) is a different kind of yummy, and it has that quality I love about a good casserole: leftovers that last in the fridge, handy for lunching or snacks for me and other adults in the house for the days that follow.

I hear Nicole's in China now. She's lived around the world since our days in Ohio. She's such an excellent cook (and seamstress and business manager) I wonder what great things she's done since our daughters were small.

1.5 to 2 TB oil
1 medium summer squash
1 medium-small zucchini
1 red bell pepper
red or other onion, half a large
8-10 oz mushrooms
half a pound frozen corn kernels
2 1/2 cups shredded cheese
5-7 corn tortillas, which tend to be small.
28-ounce can of enchilada sauce, I like the green kind.

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350F, because that's how to cook any casserole.

2. dice up small the vegetables, medium-high heat the oil in the pan, then add the vegetables and saute. Here you can see the proportions.

Oh, I forgot to add the mushrooms and corn. I buy the pre-sliced mushrooms, and then chop them further from there. The corn really ought to be microwave cooked first, but I just threw it in the pan, slowing down and reducing the quality of the vegetables cooking. Oh well.

Now it's all mixed together. I really love the colors--this is why one of my Christmas side dishes for years was zucchini-bell.pepper-corn.

Now that's cooked; it's time to layer. Cover the bottom of the pan with 1/4 of the sauce, layer two tortillas, half of the vegetables, and another dose of sauce, and some (1/3 of) cheese.

Let's peek ahead with this layers diagram for the finished casserole. The fraction is how much of that item to put in that layer.

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

tortillas (1/3)

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

vegetables (1/2)

tortillas (1/3)

cheese (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

vegetables (1/2)

tortillas (1/3)

sauce (1/4)

\________pan________/

Here I'm in process covering those first tortillas with my first layer of veggies.

Sauce on the second layer, and repeat as before.

Cheese going on just before another layer of tortilla. If I'm going to use cheese, I use real cheese, not reduced-fat stuff. It doesn't take much (relative to what I used to do, perhaps) to give it that cheese-in-mix taste. I would have loved a Jack cheese here, but was happy to use the sharp cheddar that was in the house. I think it really adds to the nourishing deliciousness of the meal to use what I have.

And on that front, I wasn't stopped by the fact I only had five corn tortillas in the house. I tore the last one into pieces and spread it around for the top layer thus.

Last layer of sauce and cheese.

Cover and bake the standard 350F for 30 minutes. This pretty dish (from IKEA years ago) didn't have a lid, so I used foil.

And it's done! I suppose you could remove the foil at the end, if you want the cheese browned as well as bubbly, but for me this is good. Too often I burn the cheese at the end trying to do that. Feel free to send me an acetylene torch.

Was delish, and delish as leftovers for a couple days. Loved and appreciated by everyone over the age of 16--probably could have won the heart of the younger teen if it didn't fall into the inaccurately-named category "Mexican Food." Apparently my love of all things bean, cheese, and tortilla more than met her quota five years ago.

But never mine.

Mother's Day Feast

Which I didn't prepare.  My vegetarian daughter, now in high school, prepared an full dinner from scratch for us in fulfillment of her Foods class requirements.

Veggie Daughter has been a vegetarian for seven years now, and is the reason I resurrected my college vegetarian meal planning skills.  Daughter reintroduced fish back into her diet two years ago; this is a fish menu we had tonight.

Gazpacho
Trout
Spinach-Strawberry Salad
Homemade rolls

Asparagus Dudes

Tonight's quick dinner was penne pasta with asparagus and cherry tomatoes in an alfredo-type sauce.  We had honeydew as a side.  It was my riff on the Bertollini frozen pasta dinner.

First, I boiled penne pasta in a separate pot.

I melted butter in a saute pan, added asparagus cut in 2 inch pieces, threw in some shredded parmesan, added cream.  When it was getting warm and melty, I added the pasta and the cherry tomatoes and mixed that in.

For some reason, I have it in my head that asparagus must always been steamed.  But this saute method worked well, the asparagus came out great.

I cut the cherry tomatoes in half.  I don't like my food to explode when I bite into it.

Anyway was delicious--why not with all that cream.  My son was bored though, and put the asparagus pieces into the penne pasta to make Asparagus Dudes.

This could be a split-meal for part-vegetarian families by serving slices of cooked chicken breast separately, for the meat-eaters to mix in on their plates.  My husband had to be away from us for dinner tonight, so only the youngest child wanted any meat.

Onigiri

Cute like sugar cookies, without actually being a dessert.  
We like it as an afternoon snack or in a packed lunch.

Leftover rice, about 2 cups
2 tablespoons of rice vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon sugar

I spread the rice out on a plate.
I mix the vinegar, salt, and sugar to make a dressing.
I sprinkle the dressing on the rice.

I pack the rice into molds to make shapes, using my rice paddle to push the rice into the mold and level it.  I've got a little onigiri mold with three little shapes, which I bought in a japanese market a few years back.  Before that I used to just mold with a 1/4 cup measure.

Real onigiri would have something hidden in the middle, like pickled plum.  I've never met a pickled plum.  We usually just make them plain--haven't come up with a filling that interests any of us.

Do you make onigiri?  Is your vinegar-salt-sugar dressing different?  Do you put a little filling in the middle?

Add the bouillon at the table

My own copy

The kids are in finals, so of course half the kids, and me, are coming down with a cold.  An excellent occasion to try at least the idea of Mark Bittman's Clean-Out-the-Fridge Vegetable Soup.  My soup was comparatively limited by what I had in the fridge to clean out, and I wasn't about to go out in the rain in my mildly sick and tired state to pretend I ever had on hand as wide a range of vegetables as Bittman.

Wannabe Mirepoix: leeks, carrots, mushroom.

Mine was a leek-carrot-mushroom-tomato-potato-spinach soup.  No pistou.  But served with cheese sandwich or hamburgers to take the pressure off.

I added my bouillon paste right into my soup bowl!

I serve a vegetarian soup at more than half our dinners in the winter, but tonight I was impatient with the thought of another vegetable bouillon broth.  So I did a crazy thing--I cooked the vegetables in water, and served a choice of vegetable or turkey Better than Bouillon soup base paste at the table.  I know this doesn't allow the vegetables to season in the broth while cooking, but it was worth it to me to serve vegetables in turkey broth to those who wanted it, without having to divide the soup into two pots so the vegetarian version would be available to those who require it.

Pasta, Kale, and the Kids Liked It.

Two tricks to Kale:
1. Slice it into thin strips, disguising it as an herb.
2. Serve it so there's more carb than Kale.

I cooked mine in the pot after the pasta was drained, in olive oil and then a little water to wilt it, then I threw it on top of the pasta in the strainer and mixed it in.  If you want pasta, you'll be eating kale.

At the table to assemble themselves:

• Pasta with Kale (The pasta is Campanelle instead of Penne, and it was just right.)
• Cannellini Beans (I substituted white navy beans, and warmed them in the microwave)
• Parmesan Cheese and That Fancy Olive Oil with Herbs we were given for Christmas.
• (then leftover ham for the meat eaters, deliberately sweet to counteract the kale, since meat eaters are wimps.)

sides:

• bread
• crudites
• milk.

What next? Thinking aloud about menus.

The kids are back in school today, and I'm still trying to go from standstill to speed.

I *bought* dinner on the way home.  So pathetic.   At least my son talked me out of Jack in the Box and across the street to Wahoo Fish Tacos.

What I have are leeks and potatoes, cabbage (several kinds), kale that we've had more than enough of.  One bunch of carrots, two tired-looking tomatoes.   Lettuce, pears that may finally have ripened now the holidays are over.  A couple apples and oranges.  A bag of lemons (great Christmas present).   Half a pan of cornbread to snack on.

Soupe Pistou and Salade Nicoise require green beans.
Hamburger-less cabbage-vegetable soup is really only loved by me.
The potatoes are beautiful fingerlings.  I'm wondering about trying the Crash Potatoes from the sidebar.
I'm stuck.

Mormon Wassail

I think these days most wassail is without alcohol anyway, right?  Or it that just the circles I run in?  This wassail is culturally Mormon because it's the wassail I make, it's made in a crockpot, and it is frugal in how it uses relatively inexpensive ingredients to make something fancier.  You can usually get a deal on the oranges this time of year.

One gallon ordinary apple juice
1 cup of good applesauce, to cloud up the juice.
Zest of one orange (zest!  not grated peel!  No pith!  No chunks!)
Tablespoon of cinnamon, or more to taste.  Stir to get that cinnamon powder to get wet and stop floating.

Put that in a crock pot on high, at least an hour before you're serving this.

Decorate the bottom of two or three oranges or tangerines by sticking ~20 cloves in each.  I like to do circles.  Slice the bottom of the fruit off, float it into the punch, peel side up.

Make the same number of pretty slices of the oranges or tangerines, float those as well.

Serve in crock pot, with cinnamon sticks on the side for stirrers.

December Food Plans

What are your Christmas season food ambitions?

I did make Latkes during Hanukah week.   Kinder, Gentler Latkes from Food.com had good detailed instructions.  And, they were delicious as leftovers too.  Yes, I made that many.  I also made the Un-Fried Potato Latkes, but they weren't as successful.

So during the holiday my ambitions are:

Uh-Sides
--make wassail tomorrow so my daughter can take it to her church activity.
--I want a bunch of pomegranates in a bowl to admire and also to eat.

--more delicious salads like lettuce/pears/fresh cranberries/cheese/dressing, like this NYTimes salad winner.  The directions on the NYT site are better than on the original blog.

Meals
--I'd like to get a fondue set for Christmas and try fondues of cheese, of spicy peanut butter, or of chocolate.
--individual homemade pizzas?  I've discovered I like pizza without cheese.
--my daughter had some kind of delicious baked eggs in New York City.  Must try to imitate.
--what easy stuff dinners can we have, so we can eat but also run around shopping and having Christmas outings?

Desserts
--I want to make an orange cake again, with chocolate frosting.
--those frosted cookies my mom always made and we always decorated.


And not:
--the feast of the seven fishes.  I have NO impulse to do it; so much for my vaunted ambition.

(pescatarian) Eel for Thanksgiving

My vegetarian daughter loves Thanksgiving, and has put down my vague guilty suggestions that I should make some main dish for her, alternate to the Turkey.  She loves the vegetable sides, and declares herself more than delighted just to have all those vegetarian versions of the carb ones (mushroom gravy, stuffing that baked in the oven with vegetable broth, mashed potatoes without broth, etc.)

This year, early in the November, I heard a radio spot about the eel industry, how it is mostly processed, cooked, and vaccum-wrapped in China, even if you buy it in a restaurant here.  And, I heard one of the inevitable "what our Pilgrim ancestors really ate," which mentioned the importance of eel.

Eel.  My daughter loves unagi, and now I'd learned that I wouldn't be expected to prepare it, just warm it up from frozen.  All it took was a quick trip to my local Ranch 99 Asian market to get the prepared frozen eel.   It became the "dare" food on the Thanksgiving table, and lots of people, including the kids gave it a try.

Family Salad Nicoise

I'd only had Salad Nicoise at a restaurant, so it never occurred to me to make a family version. Instead of composing each plate, you just compose one platter or casserole dish for everyone. In our family, this works because it lets one person take more potato, while the next person skips the spuds, another person skips tomatoes, and I require everyone to take certain number of green beans.

I like the sensible Nicoise Salad recipe directions at Simply Recipes, which tell me what to do while the potatoes are boiling so the salad comes together quickly, and how to lay out salad for a group beautifully.

In general terms, Nicoise Salad is:
Lettuce
warm boiled small potatoes
warm cooked green beans
hard boiled egg
tomato
thin small slices red onion (but I use the scallions I have on hand.)
capers (sometimes we forget)
oil-cured olives (but we substitute familiar canned ones)
tuna (canned is fine--we skip the tuna sometimes and up the eggs.)
And all dressed with vinaigrette.

It's really fun with french bread and Orangina.  Viva la Faux France.

They've been vegetarian longer than me

A few months ago I discovered an email list of Vegetarian Mormons.  It's not high traffic, but friendly with lots of ideas.  For example, right now there's some emails being exchanged on vegan food storage.  I wasn't on the list a week when I learned that Protein Combining (eating a vegetable with a whole grain, frex, at each meal to get a "complete protein") is unnecessary.  Which everyone else figured out in 1988.

MormonVeg is a discussion forum for Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who wish to understand the reasons to reduce the consumption of meat and other animal products or get help in doing so. Participants do NOT have to be vegetarian, vegan, or even LDS to subscribe or participate actively. A genuine interest is all that's necessary.  (emphasis mine)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MormonVeg/
I won't be reposting any of their emails here or elsewhere, of course.  That would not be cool.

A week of everyday dinners

(This is what I actually prepared and we ate. As opposed to, y'know, those grand plans which I make, but then redistribute the ingredients into simpler, easier foods)
You can browse more weekly menus here.

Monday, split meal
Burrito Bar
--Vegetarian refried beans (from a can) with taco sauce
--Leftover Roasted Butternut Squash
--Lettuce
--Warmed tortillas
--seasoned hamburger for the meat-eaters
side: sliced apples

I don't think the tomatoes are worth eating this time of year. But roasted butternut squash is quite nice in a burrito.

dessert: blackberry cobbler

Tuesday
Tomato Curry with Pulao Rice
Green Salad
Velvet Cake for dessert

Wednesday
Mushroom Ravioli
Marinara Sauce
Caesar salad

Thursday, split meal
Homemade cream-of-broccoli soup

3 cups cooked broccoli, 3/4 cup vegetarian broth.  Warm and puree.  Add 1 cup of milk.  Garnish with parmesan.  

yam fries
(chicken for the meat-eaters)
--and/or--
whatever is leftover. There's leftover ravioli (most unusual) due to eating our Wednesday afternoon purchases at the kids' school bake sale for Haiti, proceeds went thru UNICEF.

Friday
Pizza, always pizza. I think this week I need dinner AND the movie to get away from the kids' pizza.

Umami Mommy

We're a part vegetarian family, but I will admit to looking for ways to sell the meat-eaters on more vegetarian dishes. It's not that I really care who's eating what, having no strong philosophical underpinning to my personal vegetarianism. It's just that I find it tedious making double dinners many meals a week.

So, here's what helps sell a vegetarian dish to a meat-eating family. Umami. (oo-ma-me). Many of us have heard of bitter, sour, sweet, and salty as tastes our tongues can detect, but a fifth taste vector has been proposed, coyly named umami. I've heard the umami flavor described as a meaty or savory flavor. It's an aspect of the taste of meat, but it's also an aspect of the taste of mushrooms, soy sauce, miso soup, parmesan cheese, and nori. Even in (ugh) MSG. I've read that it's in the taste of tomato too, and even in potatoes, carrots, and asparagus. Ketchup, vegemite, and worcestershire sauce are said to have that umami kick.

I'm convinced that umami is the reason I can serve mushroom ravioli and everyone in the family will be pleased.

Do your family's favorite vegetarian dishes coincidentally feature that umami taste?

more on umami: SF Gate article on Umami from year 2000; umami skepticism on page 2 of 4.

Those Mormons and their no-tea tea

Here is the lovely tea I had at a cafe, which came in a pyramid-shaped tea bag. Of course, there's no tea in this tea: it's things like camomile and lemon zest ready to steep in hot water. Sometimes there is awkwardness placing the order--no one seems to know the old terms "tisane" or "infusion" so I end up asking if they have an herbal tea with no tea in it.

Ah, "tea" is lovely, good for food storage, and calorie-free. (I copied Elizabeth-W today and installed the "Lose It!" ap on my iPhone. Of course, I went on to eat a thousand calories or more over today's recommended guideline. But every journey begins with a single ap.)

Drinking herbal tea isn't essentially vegetarian, but avoiding real tea is very Mormon. Also, I was drinking this tea while on a date with my husband; I think the weekly still-married date is very Mormon too.

Food Pairing from Belgium

Harvest is but a memory in the slough of winter, but what goes with zucchini? I would have said tomatoes, mushrooms, bell peppers and/or cheese. Also soy sauce--I had a friend who used to marinade long slices of zucchini in soy sauce, but frankly I would say the marinade never penetrated; she was kidding herself.

Now an outfit called "Sense for Taste" out of Belgium has an online food pairing calculator. Just the thing when I'm looking at the end-of-the-week ingredients that somehow didn't make it into any dinners. I'm intrigued but sometimes skeptical of the food pairing suggestions for zucchini, a food which can be a bountiful summer challenge.

http://www.foodpairing.be/FoodPairable.aspx?f=Zucchini

We'll be skipping the tea and Chardonnay, I add, wiping my hands on my apron.

Whether or not this internet toy leads you to your next culinary invention, or causes your frozen food conglomerate to hire them, Food Pairing is fun to play with. There is a long list of set foods, by category, on the right-hand column (you may have to click an arrow triangle to see them). The search box doesn't work for me and my machine--I don't know if that's because their coding is broken or because an ASPX database only interacts with Microsoft products.

Zucchini with ginger? maybe. Zucchini with apricot? Two Utah-ish ingredients I'd never have thought to combine.

Potato through an Apple Peeler-Slicer-Corer

Yes, that's a (sweet) potato in an apple peeler/slicer/corer. I'm making "Double Potato Soup" from Leanne Ely's Saving Dinner and I couldn't find a vegetable peeler in my kitchen to save my life. Then I noticed that potatoes--aka pommes de terre--are as solid and thin-skinned as apples. And I've easily peeled and sliced some 15 pounds of apples for Thanksgiving pies, using a handcranked apple peeler-slicer-corer. I was going to pull back the slicer/corer blade and only peel tonight's potatos, when I realized I needed the potatoes cut for soup anyway.

I had to cut the potato in half--the ones I bought were too large to fit the hand-crank machine otherwise. I'm loving this shortcut. The potatoes were all peeled and cut miraculously fast.

Leaving me with plenty of energy to enforce dishwashing upon children this evening, making sure this time all my cooking tools go back into proper place.