multicoloured carrot pilaf

After a few days of holiday food, it's nice to get back to normal food. This is simple and easy and homey, but not at all boring. You can easily double or triple the recipe for potlucks or to have leftovers for lunches. The fancy-pants carrots and easygoing spices make it great for bringing to shared food-ish events. It's also the perfect break from rich foods after the crazyness of Christmas and before the impending culinary lunacy of Hogmanay. And I love multicoloured carrots! The ones here are orange ringed with purple. So fun!

Multicoloured carrot pilaf

3/4 cup brown basmati rice
1/2 cup puy lentils (dry measure), cooked and drained (about 3/4 cup cooked)
1 tbs cumin seeds
2 bay leaves
3 cardamom pods, crushed,
1 red onion, in half-moons
1/2 tsp smoked salt
1/3 cup chopped dates
1/3 cup currants
1/3 tsp cinnamon
2 multicoloured carrots, in thin rounds
black pepper to taste
lemon juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup chopped parsley (optional)

Cook rice separately, as usual. Let cool a little bit. Heat up a pan and throw the cumin in. When it smells amazing, add the onions ,bay leaf and cardamom, and saute over low heat until the onions are (I did them in a bit of white wine). Add everything else up to the cinnamon and cook until combined. It should be dry, but not sticky. Add a splash of water or wine if it starts sticking to the pan. Add carrots and cover for a minute or two. You want them to steam, but not get mushy. When the carrots are ready, add lemon juice, pepper, and parsely and stir. Serve immediately. This is also really good as a cold salad, in which case I would garnish it with fresh pomegranate seeds. I served this with roasted okra (in pomegranite molasses and lemon vinegar).

homey, chill, and interesting music: the dubliners, played nice and quiet so that you can sing along without shouting and dance along while you cook in a peaceful candlelit kitchen.

beets, lentils, and homemade mustard.

...which is a lot for one little post, but they all go together. This lentil and beet dish is incredibly versatile. You can change the ratios to make it mostly beets, mostly lentils, mostly onions, or anything in between. You can also make it as simple or complex as you want by adding some or all of the extras.

For the lentil and beet salad:

3c cooked black beluga lentils

2 beets

1 large onion

1/2c dried mushrooms (nice strong ones, like porcini)

fresh dill, chopped (I used about 1/2c, but others are usually more, um, moderate with herbs. I don't see why.)

balsamic vinegar OR vincotto + a splash of lemon juice (I used my new favorite thing, which is vincotto with carob)

scant 1 tsp good carob powder

salt and pepper to taste

optional add-ins

any or all of: chopped walnuts or toasted hazelnuts or green olives or capers or chopped fresh parsley to taste.

Bake or caramelize the beets and onions. Rehydrate the mushrooms in as little hot water as possible. When the beets and onions are done, take them out of the oven to cool a bit, and simmer the mushrooms briefly in their own juice. Chop up the beets and onions. I like big slices. When the mushrooms are done, hopefully there will still be some liquid left. Combine everything, including the mushroom liquid. Add the optional add ins. Or don't. They are, after all, optional. Serve this salad warm (or cold) on chopped bitter greens and apples. Or just chopped bitter greens. Either way, you can schmancy it up if you toss the greens first with a mustard/agave/vinegar dressing (which is those three ingredients in a 1:1:1 ratio, using apple cider or red wine vinegar)

I like mustard, and it's insanely easy to make your own. Here, I used my homemade whiskey mustard. Yes, whiskey. Because what's the point of living in Scotland if you can't cook with whiskey? 

To make your own whiskey mustard: put mustard seeds of the colour(s) you want in a glass container and cover them with whiskey and leave it in the fridge for a day or two or three (the exact length of time will depend on whether or not you forget it's there). Then blend it to the smoothness you want, add apple cider vinegar until it's the right consistency (the consistency you want), and return it to the fridge for a week so that it can calm down a bit. Make sure you put a lid on it. There. Now you have mustard, made to your own taste. You can even add sugar (agave nectar) or salt or other flavours (tarragon is yummy, for example). Don't you feel smart?  

While your beets are baking and your mustard is mustarding, dance around wildly to whiskey-mustard music with a sweet side: The Pubcrawlers

bittersweet

Ok folks, despite what the last few posts might suggest, I don't live on desserts, I promise.  So here's a dinner, albeit one that incorporates fruit. You see, the saffron was staring at me, and then all I wanted was saffron. And there were some greens that needed to be used up, like, yesterday. It ain't pretty, but it is super duper yummy. If you want pretty, use white rice, though I rather liked the dark red/orange combo, which just isn't done justice by my cheap camera. 

Baked cauliflower (1 head, including leaves), caramelized red onion (1), mint (1 tbs dry), oregano (1 tbs dry), chopped green olives (6), currants (small handful), dried sour apricots (6), some water and salt, garlic (2 cloves), saffron (more than I like to admit), bitter greens (a bunch, chopped). Add to the pan in that order, turn the heat off when you add the garlic.  Cover for a bit and let the flavours meld. Eat it all on red rice cooked with puy lentils, a few cardamom pods and a bay leaf.

...and as I was doing this, I was singing and kitchendancing along to Le Tigre. Nanny nanny boo boo. Lather, rinse, remix.  

lentil cakes: east meets west meets Bogle

East meets West meets Bogle

Inspired by Bogles and the chickpea blondies here, I thought I'd invent a decidedly east-ish take on a west-ish dessert, and then use it for this years Bogle festivities, which have taken over the entire month. I dialed down the fat and sugar by a bit (depending on how sweet your quince paste is). Using legumes in desserts is nothing new in Indian and Japanese cooking (and I suspect other types of cooking too, but these foods were my gateway into leguminous desserts).

Just for the record, we seem to have decided that traditional Bogle celebrations must include: 1) gin, 2) cakes and 3) poetry. You should also bring your own Bogle, as prized for "best Bogle" are encouraged at any Bogle event. And this (I've decided) is one of many Official Bogle Cakes.

1 cup red lentils (I cup raw), cooked in as little water as possible, and mashed to a paste (I ended up with about 1.5 cups cooked)
1 cup quince paste or quince jam
1 tbs almond or pistachio butter
1/4 c ground flax seeds
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 tbs rosewater
zest from 1 lime plus 1 tbs lime juice
optional: 1/4 c chopped dried sour apricots

1/2 cup flour OR 1/4 cup wheat flour + 1/4 c chestnut (or chickpea) flour. Note that using either chestnut or chickpea flour will change the taste (I think for the better) and make the cake more dense.
1 tsp baking powder
dash cardamom
dash cinnamon
pinch salt

Mix first group of ingredients together. Mix second group of ingredients together. Then (oh the shock!) mix the two groups with each other. Spread into an oiled and floured baking pan. I find a small pie dish is the ideal size. Bake at 180C for 35 minutes. Remove from oven and spread with a very thin film of adhesive, um, I mean agave, then sprinkle with dried rose petals and the tiniest tiniest bit of cardamom. Allow to cool a bit before slicing.

For cupcake versions, decrease baking time to 25 mins. Note that these don't rise very much, so fill the cupcake moulds up almost as full as you want them to be in the end.

stuffed shells

I've been wanting mole-inspired things ever since I made that chocolate dinner cake a while ago, but mole takes forever, and it was Friday night, and I was at work until 7:30 and had had a looooooooong week of being repeatedly struck down by the fickle and vindictive gods of molecular biology. So I wasn't up for making anything futzy and neat and delicate. On the other hand, I had spent the entire week being repeatedly struck down by the fickle and vindictive gods of molecular biology, so I wanted something cushy and comforting and chocolatey. So this is relatively easy, but still enough to feel like a celebratory dinner. After all, I suspect that the gods will eventually find a new victim. This was a very satisfying dinner, and since I already had cooked lentils in the fridge, only took about half an hour to pull together. I love how it looked so messy, especially after a week of extra carefully moving around microliters of ridiculously expensive enzymes, and taking care of microorganisms under sterile conditions, and keeping all the damn identical tiny tubes of minute amounts of clear liquid carefully labelled and organzied. A chocolatey mess was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Pasta shells stuffed with this:
In enough white wine to just cover , cook these (you can also use veg stock, or diluted white wine, or even a light beer):
a chopped onion
a chopped parsnip
some capers
some garlic (4-5 cloves)
some oregano
4-6 chopped sundried tomatoes (no need to rehydrate them first, they'll cook up)

When the onion is translucent, add:
2c cooked puy lentils
1/3 c cocoa nibs
1/2 tsp cinnamon
dash cloves
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp grated ginger
black pepper
a chopped chipotle pepper
dash smoked paprika
about a tbs of chopped capers
salt to taste

Simmer for a while (any liquid should evaporate) When it's all done, put your pasta on to cook. Once you have the pasta going, add 2-4 tbs flour dissolved in 1/2 c water to your hot lentils, keeping them on low heat. This will thicken them up. Once they thicken up, turn the heat off.

Sauce: 1 c balsamic vinegar, reduced to a third of a cup. Once reduced, add 15g good chocolate. It will just melt in. set aside.

When the pasta's done, stuff each shell with the lentil mixture. Drizzle with the balsamic sauce. If you want to make this fancier, make ravioli out of it using fresh pasta dough. Serve with steamed broccoli that's been doused with lemon juice. A carrot salad would also be nice, but I was out of carrots.

roasty toasty smoky parsnips

This was perfect for a dark rainy night...approaching the darkest of the year, in fact. I made chipotle parsnips using the recipe for carrot oven fries from Tofu for Two, doubling the chipotle and adding a squeeze of lime at the end. I topped that with blended firm silken tofu with lemon, salt, a bit of agave, espazote, nutritional yeast. The rice is brown basmati rice cooked with puy lentils and dark tvp (about 1.5 c rice, 1/2 c lentils and 1/2 c tvp...just throw it all in the pot together with some water) and then 2 chopped caramelized onions + toasted cumin seeds + salt mixed in at the end. The salad is mixed bitter greens + pears + a dressing of miso mustard, maple syrup, vinegar, salt and pepper. I love this salad dressing. I make it all the time. It takes about ten seconds, and tastes like heaven. Before I discovered miso mustard, I just used whatever mustard I had around, usually just plain non-dijon (because the greens are bitter enough without the added heat of the dijon, though go for it on a milder salad). The dinner was a wonderful blend of spicy, sweet, salty, vinagery and starchy. There are lots and lots of leftovers, which is good, because we need lunches for work, and lentil rice is wonderful cold. Just add some chopped raw bell peppers or carrots or whatever other veg you have lying around, and a squeeze of lemon (maybe some chopped cilantro or parsely if you have it on hand...I don't, and I'm not going out in the rain to get it) and it's magically lentil salad.

I filed this under quickie even though it takes a while to cook, because really, you don't actually have to do anything while the parsnips bake and the rice cooks. Read a book. Have a wee dram of whiskey. Listen to music.

simple lentils and rice

I've had a few requests now for more "everyday food". Here's a staple. Simple lentils over (insert whatever vegetable needs using) rice.

Rice: dry roasted black cumin seeds, leeks, brown basmati, pinch of salt. I just cook the leeks in the rice directly. If you want to be fancy, saute the leeks first. Tonight I' not feeling fancy. Nope, not even a little. I might even be dining in my jammies...Simple lentils: Cook yellow or red lentils with turmeric and salt. When they're done, turn heat off, and add chopped fresh ginger and garlic to taste and some lemon juice. C'est tout. A friend of mine made me this this weekend, and it's so simple, and so perfect. Eat this with green salad or steamed broccolli, or just on it's own if you want a big plate of comfort. You can also eat these lentils over potatoes, or any other grain. You can steam up other veg (I just happened to have some leeks around) and add that. You can add some chopped tomatoes and water or stock and you have lentil soup. You can dress this up with chillis, cilantro or parsley, roasted tomatoes and some good olive oil or slices of pickled lemon if you want and you have some quite fancy lentils (for nights when you feel quite fancy). See? Anyone can do this. And the leftovers make great lunch (use as a dip for bread, or eat the whole lentil rice combo cold, it's yummy that way too).

uncomplicated music: johnny cash.

try a little priest...

Ahem. We interrupt Ducky's Modern Medieval to bring you: Halloween! My favorite holliday of the year. Why can't we do this every month? My costume this year had a culinary component. The Demon Barber of Fleet Street presents: PIES!

Filling: 2 onions, chopped. 1 cup or so of walnuts, also chopped. About a pound of mushrooms, also chopped (are you seeing a theme with the chopping here?) and tvp (it comes pre-chopped, sadly). Fry everything in your best olive oil except the tvp. Add sage, thyme, a bit of garlic and more black pepper than you really think is advisable. This thing depends on the pepper, so don't be shy. Add tvp and enough soup stock to cover, or water + a good tablespoon of marmite. Make pies. Dress up like Sweeney Todd. Sing. Eat.

If you replace the tvp with cooked puy lentils and then blend it all up, this makes a killer pate. Oh yes.

I used the pastry recipe from Tofu for Two, but I used water instead of soy milk. Usually I hate making pastry, but this was nearly painless.

music: uh... do I really have to tell you?

I also couldn't resist posting this turnip soup. It was fast and oh-so-autumnal and yummy

Onions, turnip, water, garlic, cumin, bay leaf, salt (cook these) and when the turnip is done add: lemon, saffron, chopped bok choy and heat through but don't make the bok choy mushy. Garnish with pomegranite seeds. That's it. Fast and simple.

No aplogies for the short and near-incoherent post. I'm doing NaNoWriMo and still have a job, so all of my grammar is going towards those at the moment. Deal with it. The soup is still the yum. What more do you want?

never say never

Now, usually I dislike celery. It is, in fact, the *only* vegetable that I'm not happy to see in my vegbox. And this week, there it was, staring at me. Taunting me even. Saying: So Iron Chef, whatcha gonna do now, eh? Also, I have fresh tarragon. Having never used tarragon, I had no idea what to do with that. For some reason, I was feeling too kewl to use teh Googles to figure out what to do with tarragon, and had this sort of "fuck you, celery" attitude going on. In a moment of rash Iron Chef macho-ness, I decided that I would not only *add* celery to the dish, but I would feature it. So I cranked up some very silly music and just went for it.

And... I may actually BUY celery to make this again.

Lemony celery soup: I started with about half a cup of soup stuff (bought as a mix of barley, lentils, legumes of various sorts) that I left soaking before leaving for work this morning. Then I added an onion, 3 giant cloves of garlic, some chopped ginger and a small (but serious) chili pepper and let that simmer while I chopped the celery (stalks only, about 1 small head) and a tomato, which got thrown in. Then I added a lot of toasted cumin and a tsp of marmite. Then, the chopped celery leaves (remember what I said about eating ALL the food?). When the celery appeared suitably disguised by the rest of the soup, I turned off the heat and added about 1/4 c. chopped fresh tarragon, some salt, and a whole lemon worth of juice. Yup. The tarragon manages to taste remarkably like anise here, and the whole soup is best described as what hot and sour soup would taste like if it were made in the middle east. For someone with a severe hangover. Anyways. It took one pot and about 20 minutes of cooking time if you remember to put the barley and legumes on to soak in the morning. Have some bread or a salad (or just a plate of olives, actually...this soup is pretty substantial), and you have a full dinner. See? Everyday food. (worry not, I shall post something fancy-schmancy soon enough) Oh yeah. And the reason I seem to be living on soups lately is because it is fall. I love fall. And for some reason in my head soup makes fall even more fallish.

singing along with the Arrogant Worms. If I still lived in my native Canada, I would want to be a pirate on the river Sas-kat-che-waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

spicy pink loooooove/ginger dal. call it what you will.

Beets + ginger + lentils = threesome that was meant to be. And oh so pretty. Beetroot dal: boil up a cup or so of red lentils, 2 beets chopped into little cubes, half a tsp tumeric and a few cloves of garlic. In a pan, drop a bit of oil and let it heat until it's really really damn hot. Add a little sprinkle of asafoetida, then a tsp or so of mustard seeds, then an extra-giant tsp of black cumin. Step back, and if/when you get brave enough to approach the pan again, add a small handful of curry leaves. When the fun subsides, add a chopped onion, and when that kinda gets coated in the whole spices add a tablespoon of ground coriander and a tsp of ground cumin. Fry on low heat, adding water as necessary (I use less than a tsp of oil for this...just to pop the seeds). When the onions are cooked through, add 2 chopped tomatoes, as much ginger as you can stand (I used about 3 heaping tbs of grated fresh ginger), and some salt. Drop the heat to low and cook until mushy. When it's mushy, add this mush to the cooked lentil mixture. Taste. Adjust salt and pepper. Add lemon or tamarind. All the heat in this comes from (some would say overly) liberal use of ginger and black pepper, but if you feel the need to be manly, add chilli. See if I care. I am secure enough in my manlyness to be able to enjoy the ginger/black pepper combo of heat here. Throw in at least half a cup of chopped fresh coriander, or a big dollop of coriander chutney. Eat over rice. I imagine it would also be damn good with potato roti, but I'm tired of potato roti, which I never thought would happen, but it did. I'm so fickle.

Spicy pink love music: Ella Sheilds

saffron and spring

Feed me!

Lately, I have been in love with saffron, especially since I found some saffron vinegar. So, I decided to make a saffron themed dinner. Leek pie (potato crust that I use for pizzas + thyme), leeks cooked in white wine and then mashed together with okara+miso+vinegar+salt, along with lemon zest, lemon juice and sumac. The crust is prebaked, and then filled and then the whole thing gets baked again. Lentil salad (puy lentils in veg stock, drained, then mixed with multicoloured tomatoes, toasted walnuts, roasted cumin, saffron vinegar, pomegranite molasses, pink peppercorns, chopped capers, salt and some cocoa. Topped with pomegranite seeds. Spring salad: strawberry and asparagus. Dressing is just saffron vinegar, sugar, salt, a few drops of very good olive oil, and a bit of black pepper. Oh, and that's all on my favorite plate, which is polkadotted and has *ears*. I found in at the Cologne flea market. It is the happiest plate I've ever met. Dessert: little rice puddings (jasmine rice cooked in almond milk, with saffron, rosewater and a little sugar and a pinch of salt added at the end, though it wasn't all that sweet. Topped with melted chocolate, a fig, and candied rose leaves.

It was a lovely afternoon and a wonderful dinner. I love making food for people I love. Mmmmmmm on so many counts. And this dinner was extra fun because M was here dealing with the lentils. I think that M and lentils have a special understanding.

running through my head: you and me, from Victor Victoria.

soy milk maker madness! and carrot pickle.

One fine day I was taking out the recycling, and I realized that I had about a kazillion soy milk tetra packs and that this was ridiculous. So finally, I bought a soy milk maker. I *heart* ebay. Oooooh. Look. Fancy schmancy weekend cappuccino. Yuuuuuuuuuuuum. Some people dislike the beanyness of homemade soymilk. For soymilk, I add about a tablespoon of rice to the soaking soybeans, and then a bit of agave to the finished soy milk, and it's all I can do to hold myself back from drinking the entire batch right there.

Then, much to my dismay, I realized it was going to be one of those days where I just want to cook. Sigh. Nearly everyone I know is out of town, so I only have one brave soul coming for dinner tonight. I hope she's up to the challenge. I used the okara to make an indian-inspired dessert. And finally, the novelty of making my own tofu was too much to resist, so I made some, just following the instructions, and made saag tofu. Oh, and the fun didn't stop there.... While I was in Montreal, I had the most amazing carrot pickle. Yup. As in, I spent the entire plane trip back plotting and scheming the re-creating of this carrot pickle in my kitchen, and here's what I came up with: the problem with pickle is that it needs time to pickle. The problem with me is that I am impatient. Luckily, I am also not adverse to faking it when need be. So, here is my highly dubious carrot pickle method: I filled a 2 cup measuring cup with carrot machsticks. Toast and then grind some fenugreek seeds. Add these, some turmeric, some chilli, some salt and a bit of garlic to your carrots. Go easy on the chili. You can add more later if you need to. Chop up 3 pickled lemons, fearlessly creating the hybrid pickly love child of moroccan and indian food. Throw 'em in, along with a bit of the lemon pickle water. From experience: DO NOT taste the pickle at this stage. Trust me. Then pop some mustard seeds in a pan with a bit of oil, and throw on some asafoetida for good measure. Dump this on the carrots and other spices, and then mix up the whole thing. Microwave for a few minutes. Cover and refrigerate. It worked! I suspect my methods would have traditional cooks wringing their hands, but I'm not a traditional kind of girl. Plus, I have this damn good pickle, which makes me feel rather smug about the whole situation.

As for what happened to the okara (that's the leftover soybean pulp), I noticed that it had a consistancy similar to that near-solid milk that one uses for indian desserts...and I had some moong dal on hand, and well, sometimes these things just happen. Random dessert: boil up some moong dal with piles of green cardamoms until you have a paste. While that's going on, dissolve some saffron in a tbs of soy milk, and mix the saffrony soy milk into the okara. Also, dry roast some cashews. Pick out the cardamoms from the dal paste (chopsticks work well for this). Heat up a little bit of oil in a pan, and pour in the dal paste and stir it around until it starts sticking to itself and then add brown sugar to taste. I imagine jaggery would work better, but that would have required me leaving the house. Not going to happen. Once the sugar has dissolved, add the okara mix, and keep mixing until you have a giant ball of goo. Press into a plate. I have used my "fancy" plate. Cool, slice, eat. Yum. I know that this dessert, or at least the more authentic version of it, has a name. But at my favorite indian dessert shop in Montreal (ahem. Pushaps), we always just called it "the vegan one".

obsessive cooking sing-along: those pretty, those pretty, those pretty little things.

lentils

Mmmmmmmmm....lentils. Cumin, fenugreek, black mustard seeds, fennel, onion seeds (in equal amounts), curry leaves, onion, turmeric, green chillies, tomato, garlic, ginger, obligatory spud, puy lentils, salt and pepper. I like puy lentils because they're kind of peppery, though this time I just thought they would look pretty against the spinach. On the side are roasted parsnips and leeks. The bread making continues, and I had this with spelt bread hot out of the oven and some eggplant pickle. Because eggplant pickle goes with everything.

lentil lullabies: cole porter