Indian Feast

Leo and Jenny were coming over for dinner, and Ed wanted to make some Indian food. By this, I thought he meant one dish, some dal or something. With some rice, and maybe some naan if he was feeling like going crazy. Well. He emailed me, with a seven-course menu, asking what I thought. Um, how about, we don't make seven dishes on a weeknight? Alas, I could only talk him down to six. They were all yummy, except for the dal, into which I dumped a little too much turmeric, so I had to keep diluting it and adding more lentils, and salt, and some sugar, until the bitterness was manageable. Lets just say we had lots of dal left over.

The man with his creations.

Leo with the bowl of tomato chutney.

Jenny grinning in front of a huge pile of naan.

Jenny brought the naan, and Leo brought the beer, which really are my favorite parts of Indian food anyway, but on the menu was: Red dal, mango chutney, tomato chutney, raita, tofu tikka masala, chana masala, and basmati rice. Given that our stove currently has three burners, this was an ambitious project for sure, but we actually ended up eating by 8pm. I was quite impressed. Most of these dishes are variations on onions and tomato with spices and other stuff, I can't remember what went into each one and I have no idea what happened for the mango chutney - I wasn't there when Ed was making it. By the time I got home, he had most things started, the tofu was marinating and the dipping sauce-type things were done (raita, mango chutney, tomato chutney). The mango stuff was quite delicious, so I'll have to get the recipe from Ed at some point, although he doesn't really do recipes...

I also didn't get pictures of everything - too hungry! This is the Chana masala:
1 can chickpeas
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1-2 tbs tomato paste
1/2 can tomato chunks
water to thin it out
pinch of sugar
various spices, to taste (cumin, coriander, turmeric, salt, pepper, red curry paste)

Cook down the onion a bit in some oil, add the garlic, add the tomato paste and water and chickpeas, add the spices and keep tasting as you go along. Who cares about authenticity if it tastes good?

Mango chutney. No idea what went in here, although the black bits are toasted cumin seeds. It was good.

Dal - I wasn't really paying attention to this one, but I know there are onions, garlic, green lentils, red lentils, a can of tomatoes, some tomato paste, lots of spices (similar to the chana masala), and then more lentils and tomatoes and salt and some sugar in an attempt to dilute the bitterness from too much turmeric...

Tofu tikka masala - Basically the same as the chana masala except with tofu instead of chickpeas, and the tofu was marinated in yogurt and ginger. I think this needed to be ground up a little, maybe some coconut milk added, some cashew butter, more yogurt, but it tasted good as it was, too.

I didn't get a picture of the tomato chutney - mostly just onions and tomato paste - and the raita, which was yogurt, cucumbers, and mint. And maybe with sugar and vinegar, but I don't remember.

Tenderloin with chantarelles and celery root

MEAT! MEAT! MEAT! ARRRRRRRRR!
(nevermind).


I wanted steak, so we got a tenderloin, and it was delicious. The sauce is chantarelles, cooked in butter, and then the steak juices and some red wine to deglaze the pan and another pat of butter to enrich the sauce.

The white stuff below is celery root puree, it was alright but nothing special. Basically celery root and onion and a little sage and a little chicken broth, all pureed together. Then some broccoli rabe, which really is better when its sauteed with garlic, just boiled the stuff is fairly bitter.

Apple-filled crepes

Due to a plethora of apples, we made an apple filling for crepes the other day. It was two apples, chopped up into little cubes, 1/3C brown sugar, and 3 tablespoons of butter. Put all this stuff in a small pan and simmer for a while, stirring occasionally, until the apples are pretty soft and most of the water has boiled off - it should look like something you'd love to put on ice cream.

Meanwhile, chop up some pecans and toast them (5 minutes in a 400F oven).

Make some crepe batter. I use a pretty fluid recipe, you could really just use flour and milk, but I went with a modified version of buckwheat crepes from David Lebovitz this time. This is changed from his version, I'm sure his would taste better, but I only had two eggs at the time.

Buckwheat Crepes
1-1/3C milk (any kind of milk)
2 eggs
1 tbs melted butter
1/4tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2C white flour
1/3C buckwheat flour

Mix it all together, David Lebovitz says you should let it sit overnight, but I didn't plan ahead, so I just cooked them, in plenty of butter in a non-stick pan, and it was fine.

Pour your crepe batter into the pan, swirl the pan around to spread the batter, and let it sit there smelling delicious until the top is looking pretty firm - not raw batter anymore. Flip it - this is where Ed took over and managed to not land the crepe on the floor - and cook for another minute or two.

(my flour was lumpy, thats why its not smooth-looking). This is just before flipping it.

Fill the crepe with the apple stuff and the pecans. I rolled mine up, your could fold it too, or your could just leave it open like an open face sandwich. Either way, eat the darn thing and enjoy it!

Watercress soup

This would be my mom's recipe. I may as well rename this blog to something like "things that other people cook and Alex takes pictures of". Or, "things that Ed cooks" might be more appropriate. Although he didn't cook this soup, but he did cook the steak that followed...

Anyway, I'd never thought of putting watercress in a soup, but the cream mellows any bitterness, plus she sauteed the watercress first. Approximately:

3-4C chicken stock (homemade is best)
2-3C watercress
1/4C cream
1 onion
1 potato
Cheese for grating on top
flour and butter for a roux

For the stock, we boiled a chicken leg with a bay leaf, some mustard seeds, cumin seeds, a carrot (broken into pieces) and an onion (chopped into pieces) for about an hour. Then we drained it and let it cool enough to skim off some of the fat.

I didn't observe the making of the roux, but the way I would do it is to saute the onion first in some butter, then add another tablespoon or two of butter once its sweated, then add an equal amount of flour, cook it for a while, then add some of the chicken stock, and then add the whole mess back to the pot with the chicken stock. The potato should be already in the soup boiling away - cut it into little pieces to make it cook faster. Then saute the watercress in the same pan, add it to the soup, and then blend the soup. Add the cream, a little bit at a time until it looks properly creamy. Then serve it, we had some grated pecorino on top, and it was good.

Rack of lamb and broccoli rabe

The last Costco trip yielded a rack of lamb, that despite being purchased at Costco, was quite delicious. I can claim some credit for this, since I made the broccoli rabe, and seasoned the lamb - Ed just did all the cooking of it. Its a caveman instinct, I'm sure, that need to be the one dealing with the meat.

Anyway, there was a big sheath of fat over the back of the lamb, which you have to remove - not all of it, because you definitely need some fat for the flavor, but if you leave too much you'll have chunks of gristle in your mouth, and that is NOT pleasant. So, I trimmed the fat until it looked like this:
and then seasoned it with salt and pepper - lots of salt and lots of pepper, rub it into the meat with your fingers.

As I said, Ed took over the cooking, so I tried to take a picture. Its blurry. He left it cooking one each side until the pepper had made a nice little crust. To test if its done, first you poke the meat, it shouldn't feel raw anymore, not as squishy as when it was raw, but mostly raw, since overcooking it has got to be one of the major sins in the world. Anyway, cut off one of the lollipops, and decide if that is cooked enough for your tastes. It'll cook a tiny bit more when you pull it out of the pan to let it rest, but not that much more. I think we ended up cooking it in a hot pan for 4-5 minutes on each side. If you don't wiggle it around too much, it'll get that delicious crust.

Slice some garlic, throw it in a pan with olive oil and some salt. Then add the broccoli rabe, which you've already blanched for a couple minutes in boiling water. Toss it around for a while, taste a piece, and serve.

We had some other stuff with this, lentils and onions and some random baby artichoke hearts that Ed found at Russo's and wanted to cook RIGHT NOW NO IT CAN'T WAIT FOR TOMORROW. I've gotten those urges too, best to just play along... But doesn't that piece of meat just make your mouth start watering? The great thing about lamb is you can basically eat everything, the fat just melts into the meat and into your mouth, there is none of that gristle that you get with steak.

And then you can boil the bones for a while and get lamb stock. Two meals for one!

French onion soup

Ed made French onion soup the other day. Why do I feel like hes doing all the cooking recently? Or at least all the cooking that isn't an uninspired pile o' rice and beans... It was fairly simple, but definitely delicious.

The broth was dashi, which is some sort of dried tuna flakes that get used in Japanese cooking to make broths. It worked well enough, I mean, it was salty and tasty and liquid, although I'm sure a homemade chicken stock would have been better. The only thing in the soup were onions, and then there were croutons on top of that, with lots of cheddar cheese sprinkled on top. Yes, gruyere would have been more appropriate, but we used what we had.

Cook the onions (1-2 per bowl of soup, cut into long-ish slices) in butter in a pan until they're just starting to caramelize, lightly brown (10 minutes or so). Add them to your bowl of home made chicken broth. Turn the oven on to broil. Put the croutons on top of the soup, and sprinkle a hefty layer of grated cheese on top. Put the bowl under the broiler until the cheese is all melted. Be careful when you take it out, that lil' sucker is gonna be hot.

Easy, and delicious. We're out of cheese now or I'd do it again for dinner.

Polenta with sauce

This may sound crazy, but I put tuna fish in a tomato sauce, and it actually tasted good! It was sort of a spin off from the sardines in tomato sauce that Ed made, the tuna didn't dissolve as well, but still lent that faint sweetness of fish, without tasting or smelling like canned tunafish. Aside from the tuna it was a pretty generic vegetable sauce. We ate it over polenta, and Ed actually liked the goopy polenta. Crazy.



For the polenta, it was 4C water to 1C polenta. Cook at just below a boil, stirring constantly, until it pulls away from the edges, then take it off the heat and add some grated cheese. Cheese of any sort will do, we used pecorino.

For the sauce, gosh its hard to actually have a recipe for something like this. I barely remember. Try:
1 onion, diced
1 can chopped tomatoes, with their juice
1/2 a green pepper
1/2 a red pepper
1 skinny purple eggplant (the chinese variety is what we had)
olive oil
dried sage
some mushrooms
fresh basil, more is always better
1 can tunafish

I think thats about it, basically just heat the oil, sweat the onions, add everything else with plenty of salt and pepper, cook it for a while until the vegetables taste cooked, and pour some on top of the polenta. Spiciness is good too, I added some pepper flakes to the leftovers the next day for lunch.

Apple chunk muffins

Anna and I went apple picking, and after we went back into the field, having discovered that we did indeed like empire apples, we had more than enough apples to keep us applefied. Anyway, she recommended the King Arthur Flour apple muffins, and so I went and looked up the recipe and thought, yeah, those are gonna be really tasty.

And then, because I am utterly useless at actually following recipes, I didn't really follow the recipe at all. I sort of wasn't paying attention, and then when I got around to adding the wet to the dry I checked to see how well I'd been following the recipe, and it turns out I'd actually put in two eggs and regular milk instead of one egg and buttermilk, but you know, these turned out alright anyway. Funny how that works. I think I'm just not too picky when it comes to muffins.

Apple chunk muffins
Makes 16

1C white whole wheat flour
1C white flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2C brown sugar (add more if you like a sweeter muffin)
Some cinnamon
Some nutmeg
Some ground ginger, but not too much
2 tbs oil
2 eggs
1C milk
2 apples
1/2C walnuts
1/2C golden raisins
More brown sugar for sprinkling on top

Preheat the oven to 350F. Grease a muffin tin.
Mix together the flours, baking powder, salt, spices, and sugar. In a 2C measure, mix the eggs, oil, and milk. Add the wet to the dry, don't overmix it while combining. Add the apples (peeled and chopped), walnuts and raisins. Fold those in. Fill the muffin tins just about to the top. Its a chunky batter, some chunks will be higher than others. Sprinkle brown sugar on top of each muffin, and bake for 15-20 minutes, until they're golden brown and delicious.

So, not quite the King Arthur Flour version, but they're still darn good.