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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spätzle with mushroom cream sauce

Fifteen years ago, my neighbor, who was a great cook, invited me over for dinner. She had made homemade spätzle with a spätzle maker she'd found in a yard sale during a visit to her home state. The maker looked like a cheese grater with a shuttle across the top of it. I was delighted when she demonstrated it: the dough drops through the holes as the shuttle scrapes over them, dropping drippings of spatzle dough right into the boiling water. How clever; how sensible!

Spätzle fascinates me. I classify it as a homemade pasta or egg noodle, and I love that there's no running the dough through a pasta maker several times to make it smooth, and no figuring out where to hang the pasta to dry. But there's still enough effort involved that it feels like a homemade food project, a bit of an adventure, a bit celebratory.

I've been wanting to make spätzle for years since, so on my recent trip to Austria I purchased a spätzle maker of my own. It has a curved surface with holes, and a rubber scraper for pushing the dough over them. It's wide enough to rest over any of my boiling water pots. I understand you can substitute a large-holed colander for a spatzle maker, but I've never tried.

The recipe I used: 500 g flour, 6 eggs, 150ml water, teaspoon of salt. I let my stand mixer do the work.

I brought a potful of water to boil, adding salt and oil.

I put a big scoop of dough on the spätzle maker. I could tell the consistency was right because it drooped through the holes but didn't fall or run out. I scraped back and forth which forced the dough out. The spätzle that floated was done; I pulled it out with my mesh kitchen sieve.


Now, what to serve with it? Spätzle is a German food I associate with chunks of meat and gravy. Yet like egg noodles, it's good with butter and a little salt. I made a simple mushroom cream sauce by sautéing chopped onion and finely diced mushroom (used food processor to chop) and then adding some cream and cooking it a bit more. Add a side salad, and we had a delicious dinner tonight.

Make Latkes!

Latkes are a treat at any time, but I especially love to have them when my neighbors are celebrating Chanukah. It's my own downmarket version of holy envy.

I was intimidated about making latkes for years. It helped when I figured out they're not much different than hash browns.

I grate a potato or two per person having dinner. I put the gratings in a bowl of water as I work, to keep them from discoloring. I like to put a little vinegar in the water, but then I think vinegar is the universal seasoning.

Then I put the grated potato in a clean tea towel and squeeze all the water out. (This does produce some good quality potato starch water, which I always intend to use in baking or something, but so far I never have.)

I put the drained and mostly-dry gratings in a bowl. I add one beaten egg per 3 or 4 potatoes.

(Ages ago, before I was always making these for kids, I put chopped onion in as well.)

I heat oil in a frying pan--enough oil to cover the whole bottom of the pan. Olive Oil is always delicious, but I tend to use a more ordinary, less delicate, vegetable oil. Except this year I ran out of ordinary oil (how ironic!) and had to go with the virgin olive oil.

I use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to scoop potatoes into the pan, pushing them down in the middle so the middle's not the thickest part.

I flip them when the down-side is starting to color golden.

I stack them finished ones on papertowels on an oven-safe plate, and keep them in the oven (on the lowest temperature, or "warm") until I've made all the latkes. I like to have two pans going, so I can get them all finished more quickly.

Serve with applesauce and sour cream.

Protein: Shopping in your kitchen

Before I decided to become a vegetarian, getting enough protein was a major concern. I've done Weight Watchers' Points plan before and since I didn't eat enough lean meat, and couldn't eat half the foods I normally did, the new diet would give me headaches. It felt like a pair of big ice tongs were squeezing the sides of my head. Sure, I lost some weight, but I was miserable. Which is better, skinny or happy?

Only after I found out how much protein I actually needed, and that I could get enough without eating meat, did I decide going veggie was a possibility for me. Those links on the sidebar about protein - they're all mine. I wanted them close by for future reference.

Since I'm between the ages of nineteen and forty-nine, I need 45 grams of protein a day. The challenge now is eating enough protein-rich foods to meet that requirement. I decided to look around my kitchen and see how much protein I had hanging around.

First the cereals: I have five kinds. Here's the amount of protein for each.

Kellogg's Corn Flakes = 2 grams per 1 cup serving
Total Whole Grain = 2 grams per 3/4 cup serving
Rice Chex = 2 grams per 1 cup serving
Kellogg's Raisin Bran = 5 grams per 1 cup serving
Post Grape-Nuts = 6 grams per 1/2 cup serving

I was happy to see that Grape-Nuts, a.k.a. Colon Blow or "Avoid the middle man and just pour it in the toilet," did so well for protein and fiber (7 grams). I do put sugar on it, but I figure it's better to eat it with some sugar than not eat it at all.

In the freezer I found, along with all the frozen meat I'll have to figure out what to do with, a bag of shelled walnuts and some single-serving bags of sweet peas. Here's the breakdown for those:

Diamond Shelled Walnuts = 5 grams per 1/4 cup serving
Birds Eye Steamfresh Singles - Sweet Peas: 5 grams per bag

That's pretty good. Buy more peas. Nuts are a little fatty (20 grams), but it's good fat, right? We're supposed to have more good fat than bad fat, aren't we?

I also found some Umpqua vanilla ice cream in there but sadly, the package had been manhandled to the point that the protein gram statistics were no longer visible. It's probably just as well.

Moving on to the refrigerator:

Small curd lowfat cottage cheese (2% milkfat): 14 grams per 1/2 cup. YOW!
Whole dill pickles: NO protein. But at least they're also fat, sugar, carb and calorie free. What are they good for? Putting on your peanut butter sandwiches. You heard it here, girls.
Applesauce: No protein.
Gold-n-Soft spread: No protein there either.
1% lowfat milk: 11 grams per 1 cup
Large eggs: 6 grams per egg, but they provide 71% of your daily cholesterol limit, so I'll probably eat one a day, if that.

Looks like we're sticking with dairy. Now that I've gone veggie, I find myself craving lots of milk.

This post is long enough (some might say "too long") so we'll save my cupboards for another time.

Thanks for humoring me during my protein search. Happy Eating!