The Roast Beast Conundrum

Christmas is a difficult time for me, cooking-wise. My side of the family (carnivorous Lutherans) has certain expectations about what should be eaten, and my husband's side of the family (strict vegetarian Hindus) has very definite rules about what should NOT be eaten. My side, like the Whos in Whoville, wants some sort of roast beast. The other side is sickened by the mere thought of roast beast. Sickening people is not something to which a cook aspires, yet at the same time making one's family upset about missing Christmas dinner is also no fun. (I've always been jealous of people who brag about making things like sushi for Christmas dinner. This simply would not fly in my family. Nor would Tofurkey or lentil-nut loaf. Vegetarian lasagna with red sauce, not white, is as crazy as I dare to go without inciting rebellion.)

In early December I got into a conversation with an acquaintance who was raised on a farm in rural Mississippi. The mice were starting to run rampant in the barn, so one day when he was about seven or eight years old, his grandmother called him over and had him kill all the mice one by one with a pitchfork. After relating this story, he told me, "I really think people who have been brought up on farms have the greatest respect for life of any people."

I thought about what he said, my brain buzzing with cognitive dissonance. My dad grew up on a family dairy farm in northern Minnesota. He declined taking on the farm, saying "there's no living in it," (which was sadly true), and went to college and became a research scientist instead. Yet every year he went back Up North to go deer hunting with his brothers. We'd hear tires crunching gravel, then run to watch from the front window as they strung the deer up, blood dripping and making a red mess in the pure white snow. One year I told my little cousin, "Your dad shot Bambi's mom," and he cried for half an hour. Not one of my finest moments, but it was my true sentiment. Having grown up in the suburbs eating meat that came from styrofoam packages covered with plastic wrap, I thought my dad and uncles were callous and cruel. I didn't understand their need to "go out and kill something" at all.

But then we all moved to Seattle, and my dad didn't go deer hunting anymore, and I didn't really think about it much until my friend's pitchfork tale. Then I struggled: pairing "killing mice with a pitchfork" with "respect for life." Then something clicked: No matter what we do, others must die so that we may live. Maybe people who live on farms understand this better than most, because they witness it firsthand. Maybe the question is not "What should I eat?" Maybe the question is, "How can I live in a manner that is most respectful of life?" (For what it's worth, I have long believed that anyone who respects life on this planet would do better to fight corporate control of the world's resources rather than simply stop eating meat.)

With these thoughts fresh in my mind, and feeling ornery about the approach of Christmas and my annual inexplicable need to work myself to the point of absolutely insufferable irritability for a meal that no one was truly excited about, I decided to lobby for a Christmas ham. I did this by picking an argument with my husband wherein I questioned the ethics of his vegetarianism.

I asked him, "What if you have to kill a hundred mice to protect the grain that makes your bread? How is that better than killing one pig for a ham?"

He didn't have an answer to that question. Or rather, he has several answers, but he's still thinking about it. So did we have ham for Christmas dinner? No, we had vegetarian lasagna with red sauce. But however our argument ends, I think we both agree that logic alone does not control our food choices. That, and nothing beats the sheer determination of the Tamil Brahmin vegetarian to not eat meat or have it cooked in the home. (Sorry, no pictures. I was too busy with life. Here's a picture of the new casserole dish I bought, sure to be the vessel of many Christmas lasagnas to come.)

Chocolate Truffles: Easy Last-Minute Homemade Gift

It's T-3 days to Christmas morning, and I know time is short for you as well as me, so I'll make this brief: If you are looking for last-minute little Christmas gifts, you easily have time to make chocolate truffles. People love buttery smooth chocolates so much more than useless junk you get at the mall. (Uh, gee, thanks, Aunt Madge. The red and green sequins really make Rudolph seem to jump right out of the sweater.) And everyone will be so impressed that you made them yourself. Better yet, get your kids to make them. I know they need something to do now that winter break is here. Even more important, they need something to do that is actually useful. I think making Christmas gifts fits the bill. If your child can roll play dough into a ball, then he or she should be able to make truffles.

There are only four ingredients (cream, butter, chocolate, and cocoa powder), so be sure to use high quality ingredients, especially with regard to the chocolate. Ghirardelli is a good choice. I used their recipe, which conveniently was on the back of my bar of chocolate. It's dead simple, and turned out nicely. You can find the same recipe here, using chocolate chips. Replace the chocolate chips with two bars of bitter-sweet chocolate if you wish. If you want to get a little bit fancier, you could go over to Simply Recipes and try Garrett's truffles. You could also try rolling little bits of dried fruit into your truffles. I had intended to incorporate dried cherries into ours, but we ate all the dried cherries before I had a chance to do this. Oh well, such is life.

To wrap our truffles, we placed several into a foil cupcake liner, then tied a square of tissue paper around the liner. Easy! Word of warning: You will likely need to make a double batch if you are planning on giving any away at all. Merry Christmas!

Sweet Potatoes with Your Cumin

When I was a childless, carefree twenty-something in Seattle, I lived a couple blocks away from the food co-op.  At that time in my life, I was fairly undisciplined, and thought nothing of jaunting over to the co-op deli counter and spending five bucks for a small container of cumin roasted sweet potatoes. How I loved those sweet potatoes. The key to their fabulousness lay in the heavy-handed application of cumin. No light dusting for these sweet potatoes. No, on first bite you had to think, "Whoa, cumin." Then, "Oh, sweet potatoes!" And I also loved their chicken salad, which had purple grapes sliced lengthwise, and chunks of walnut in it. I would still pay good money for that. It was the perfect blend of sweet and savory, with nice big chunks of chicken. Not too mayonnaisey, either.

But back to the sweet potatoes. My thirty-something self wants to give my twenty-something self a sharp rap on the knuckles for paying that much for something I can buy for $0.79 a pound, and cook without even batting an eyelash. I am unfortunately still relatively undisciplined, but my lack of discipline currently expresses itself through buying half-off baked goods after 6 pm at the local bakery/deli/meat shop. But then again, it's a lot harder to make a Faux-stess cupcake (Hostess cupcake copy-cat) than it is to make these cumin roasted sweet potatoes.

These make a good side dish with Mexican food, or would be good as sweet potato tacos served in soft corn tortillas with crumbled cotija cheese and avocado sauce* drizzled on top. (And kids seem to love them.)

*By avocado sauce, I mean avocado, sour cream, garlic, and lime juice blended together, with a little salt.

Cumin Roasted Sweet Potatoes
5 or 6 small sweet potatoes, peeled and cut in rounds about ½ inch thick
one onion, halved crosswise and sliced, cutting along the root/top axis
a few glugs of canola oil
approximately 2 tablespoons ground cumin
salt

Preheat oven to 425°. Place your sweet potatoes and onions on a large sheet pan, then pour a good amount of canola oil on them. Use your hands to mix the oil so that it fairly evenly coats the sweet potatoes and onions. Add the cumin and again use your hands to mix, so that it is evenly distributed. Spread the sweet potato mixture evenly over the sheet pan, and sprinkle salt over it all. Place on the center rack of the oven and  bake for about 40 minutes, or until sweet potatoes are soft and lightly browned, and onions are soft and caramelized at the edges.

And now, because I can, I ask you to go and listen to this. You might want to be up on your feet first.

Latkes for All

As you know, the Holiday Season™ is upon us, which in our family kicked off a bit early with Diwali at the beginning of November. Then Thanksgiving came around at the end of November. Honestly, Thanksgiving is always a let down for me. I am just used to the Thanksgivings of my childhood, where we'd go to my grandma's and there'd be twenty aunts and uncles and forty cousins and so much cigarette smoke you couldn't smell the turkey in the oven, or even breathe for that matter. How I miss those days. I say that with not even a touch of sarcasm. It really was a better time we lived in back then.

Anyway, last week as I was wallowing in post-Thanksgiving self pity, looking ahead toward Christmas, my four-year-old approached me demanding to know when we were going to celebrate Hanukkah. "But honey," I tried to explain, "see, we don't celebrate Hanukkah because we're not Jewish."

The child stared at us for a moment, then repeated in a much louder voice, "WHEN ARE WE GOING TO CELEBRATE HANUKKAH?"

So I figured, what the heck? Why not? Maybe it'll cheer me up to make some latkes. And it actually did cheer me up. It's amazing what the lack of expectations and pressure will do to lighten the holiday mood. Even better, some Jewish friends heard about my daughter's determination to celebrate Hanukkah, and thought that was a great excuse for them to hold their own latke party. So we got to have latkes two nights in one week. Ironically, my girl wouldn't touch the latkes with a ten-foot pole. (Of course, she did eat the applesauce.) Thank goodness I can count on the six-year-old to eat anything, so I can blame the perversity of genetics and not my lack of parenting skills.

Now the four-year-old wants to celebrate Kwanzaa, as well as Bahala, which as far as I know is a holiday she made up completely on her own. I have a feeling we've created a monster.

Latkes (How I Made Them)
Latkes are, as you may already know, nothing more than potato pancakes. This is how I made them, and I thought they were quite tasty. It seems everyone has a different way of making them, and I am sure they are all quite tasty. It's hard to go wrong with potatoes and onions fried in lots of oil, is my thinking.

I based my recipe on Joan Nathan's recipe in The Children's Jewish Holiday Kitchen. Ms. Nathan's variation called for zucchini and carrots in addition to potatoes. I decided to go with just carrots and potatoes. The carrots added an attractive touch of color, and stayed a little crunchier for added texture. But I did something else that was even more unorthodox, and purely my own inspiration: Instead of adding matzo meal or flour, I used pulverized yellow corn tortilla chips. Please don't hate me if you're a purist. Just use matzo meal or flour. But the tortilla chips did taste good. I didn't intend to make my latkes that way. I had intended to use matzo meal. But the first store I went to had no matzo meal, and for some bizarre reason only light sour cream. (Yes, I know, what is this world coming to? I mean, if you're that afraid of the fat just don't eat the sour cream. Don't force the abomination known as "light" sour cream on us, with its modified corn starch, guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum, gelatin, etc. Have you no decency?) The second store I went to had normal sour cream, but still no matzo meal. Don't ask me why. It was the first day of Hanukkah, so I thought it'd be easier. I really didn't have the time to visit a third store, so I called it quits on the matzo meal. I'm sure flour would have worked just as well, but you know me. Once I thought of using the tortilla chips, I had to see what would happen.

One more thing: Our friends included baking powder in their latkes. Some recipes call for baking powder, some don't. It makes for a fluffier latke, so feel free to add a couple teaspoons of baking powder if you like fluffiness.

Traditionally, latkes are served with sour cream and applesauce. (I'm not going to tell you to serve them with salsa and black beans. Wink, wink.)

3 medium sized russet potatoes, peeled
3 medium sized carrots, peeled
1 onion
3 eggs, beaten
1/2 to one teaspoon salt
pepper
3/4 cup corn tortilla chips, pulverized in food processor (or same amount of matzo meal, or flour)
oil for frying

Grate potatoes, carrots, and onion together into a large bowl. Gather the grated vegetables into a clean cotton towel and squeeze all excess liquid out, then return the vegetables to the bowl.  Add the eggs, salt, and pepper, and combine. Add the pulverized tortilla chips and combine.

Heat several tablespoons of oil in a skillet, and heat. Form 3-inch wide patties with the potato mixture, and fry a few minutes until deep brown on one side. Flip, and fry the other side until deep brown. Serve immediately, with applesauce and sour cream.

Cabbage Eaters of the World, Unite!

[The demands of my job, my family, and my household have gotten the better of me this week. So I leave you with this re-rerun, which originally aired on January 23. It's one of my favorite posts. By the way, I can't believe I've been doing this long enough to have material for re-runs. Almost a year! I think I'll need to celebrate that anniversary somehow.]

I come from a long line of cabbage-eaters. While I’m only half German, and therefore technically only half cabbage-eater according to the official definition (as defined by Cassell's Dictionary of Slang), I’m pretty sure the Finnish side has eaten more than its fair share of cabbage through the ages. The sad thing is, I can’t remember once in my life being served cabbage by any of my blood relatives. In fact, the only time I’ve ever been served cabbage (by someone other than myself) has been in the form of curry cooked by my Indian mother-in-law. Well, unless you count coleslaw. Which doesn’t really count, as it’s not cooked and therefore doesn’t carry the same baggage (ie: smell, much associated in times past with working class immigrant homes).

I’m not sure why it took me so long to be exposed to the wonders of cooked cabbage – maybe my relatives wanted to distance themselves from its pejorative connotations. Or maybe I just grew up in a time and place when all vegetables came from a can, and as far as I know, they don’t sell canned cabbage. (Very fortunate.) I think I was finally in my early to mid-twenties before I gave it a try and cooked some for myself.

As a side note, as I write this, I have in the back of my mind an M.F.K. Fisher essay from 1937 – “The Social Status of a Vegetable.”

    At the word spinach her face clouded, but when I mentioned cabbage a look of complete and horrified disgust settled like a cloud. She pushed back her chair.
     "Cabbage!" Her tone was incredulous.
     "Why not?" James asked, mildly. "Cabbage is the staff of life in many countries. You ought to know, Mrs Davidson. Weren't you raised on a farm?"
     Her mouth settled grimly.
     "As you know, she remarked in any icy voice, with her face gradually looking very old and discontented again, "there are many kinds of farms. My home was not a collection of peasants. Nor did we eat such – such peasant things as this."

At the end of the essay, Ms. Fisher asks, "Who determines, and for what strange reasons, the social status of a vegetable?" I really don't know, but I bet someone somewhere has written a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject since then. The question that's been troubling me is this: If cabbage is the low-brow vegetable, then what is its opposite? What is the high-brow elitist vegetable of our time? One that immediately sprang to my mind was arugula. And then I laughed, because arugula is actually in the same plant family as cabbage (Brassicaceae), so they're related! Poor country bumpkin cousin cabbage.

At any rate, I love cabbage and I'm not afraid to admit it. And while cabbage curry is delightful, sometimes I don't want too many extra ingredients coming between my taste buds and the sweet taste of the cabbage. So I was browsing my usual internet haunts, and came across this lovely recipe for Noodles and Fried Cabbage on Salon. It calls for nothing more than cooked noodles, cabbage, salt, pepper, and a truly ridiculous amount of butter (which believe it or not I actually reduced by more than half in my own version below). The author claims a Hungarian origin for this recipe, but I found that it's also considered to be German and Polish (the Polish name for it being haluski, and apparently it's hugely popular in Pittsburgh). Some people also fry onions along with the cabbage, and I briefly considered doing so myself, but swiftly decided against it, as I think for this dish it should be all about the cabbage. It might seem crazy, but it really worked for me. Really. And don't be scared of the butter. We peasants need it, to keep our backs strong. Well, I don't know if it will keep your back strong, but it will keep you pleasantly full figured. As my great-grandmother always said, and I really do believe this is true, "You need a little bit extra on you, in case you get sick."

Here's the version I came up with:
Fried Cabbage and Noodles
Adapted from Ann Nichols on Salon.com
Ingredients
1 large head of cabbage, thinly sliced in two-inch long pieces
1 and a half sticks of salted butter
1 pound of egg fettucine, cooked (You need egg noodles, it's just not the same without it. You could use the regular wide egg noodles, but I thought the egg fettucine had a nice toothsome thickness to it which worked well with the tender cabbage.)
salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper

Cook the noodles and drain according to package directions. Melt the butter in a pot large enough to hold all the cabbage. Throw in the cabbage and some salt and cook on medium to medium-high heat until the cabbage is very tender, and a bit brown in spots. Throw the drained noodles into the pot with the cabbage and mix thoroughly. Add more salt if needed. Serve with freshly ground black pepper on top. Don't skip the pepper – seriously, it's really important.

Green Tomato Pickle, South Indian Style

For some reason it took me a long time to find green tomatoes here in Georgia in the fall. But find them I finally did, a couple weeks ago, at the tail end of the season just before the first frost. Which ironically came early, after an unusually warm fall. It was also ironic that my friends in Minnesota and Seattle had plenty of green tomatoes – the summer never got warm enough for their tomatoes to ripen. I don't think they had much sympathy for my green-tomato-less plight.

If you happen to have a pile of green tomatoes lying around, and are sick of the usual suspects (fried green tomatoes do get tiresome after awhile) I recommend making this South Indian style green tomato pickle, which I learned from my mother-in-law.  Like all Indian pickles, it's salty, tart and spicy, and this one has that nice tomato umami flavor to round it out. Traditionally, Indians consume a bit of pickle with yogurt rice. Yogurt rice at its most basic is just that – plain yogurt mixed with rice. You could get fancier with the seasoning, and someday I will try to get around to explaining that, but you don't have to. Yogurt, rice, and a bit of salty pickle will do the trick. Typically South Indians will eat yogurt rice at the end of the meal. It's said to have a cooling effect and to help digestion. Sometimes, yogurt rice with pickle is my meal. What can I say? I love it.

Which leads me to a little story. In the very early days of our relationship, my husband had me over to dinner at his place. This dinner consisted of yogurt rice, pickle, and potato chips.  This was one of two standard dinners for him at the time. The other dinner consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips. We sat down at his dining table, without silverware. He looked at me. "My people eat with their hands," he said. I looked at him. "OK," said I. So we both dug in. He ate quickly and neatly, blithely flicking balls of yogurt rice into his mouth without touching his lips. I ate like an eighteen-month-old toddler, smashing white mush into my face with my ham-handed fist. But I ate that yogurt rice with pickle all up. And had seconds and thirds. He has told me it was at that moment he first thought he could marry me.

Now you know the story of yogurt rice with pickle, and how it led to my family's existence. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

South Indian Green Tomato Pickle
4 tablespoons sesame oil (not the brown roasted sesame oil; unroasted sesame oil is golden in color, also known as gingelly oil at the Indian grocery)
2 teaspoons brown mustard seeds
¼ teaspoon asafoetida
2 teaspoons whole fenugreek seeds, ground
Approximately 15 medium-sized green tomatoes, chopped into one-inch pieces
2 teaspoons chili powder* (from ground dried birdseye chilies, or cayenne pepper)
1 teaspoon turmeric
Salt
Heat the sesame oil and mustard seeds in a large saute pan, until the mustard seeds start to sputter and pop out of the pan. Turn down the heat and quickly add the asafoetida and fenugreek. Stir for just a few seconds, then add the green tomatoes. (Do not burn the fenugreek, as it will become very bitter.) Stir to combine, then add the chili powder, turmeric, and some salt. Stir to combine. Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally to prevent scorching, until all the tomato juice is cooked away, and the tomatoes are completely broken down and sauce-like in texture. This may take up to an hour. Taste and add more salt if necessary. The pickle should taste very salty. Store in jars and serve with yogurt rice. Or be creative. I'm sure there are several uses for this I haven't thought of yet.

*The chili powder found in Indian markets is made from ground dried red chilies, and is different from the spice mix called "chile powder" found in supermarkets. Cayenne pepper is a good substitute.

Sick Person's Soup

It's just over a week until Thanksgiving, and the food blogosphere is rife with Thanksgiving recipes. Call me contrary, but I'm writing about this spicy soup instead. You could serve this soup for Thanksgiving, but its gingery explosiveness would probably cause steam to come out of your Aunt Mildred's ears. She might start gagging, and gesticulating wildly just as Uncle Simon was passing the gravy, knocking it out of his hands and down onto the front of her flower print dress, and then she might scream in pain as hot gravy spread across her ample bosom, jump up and accuse you of trying to kill her and storm out of the house, get into her car and drive away, never to speak to you for twenty years until she's on her death bed and finally relents and calls you to her side to tell you she's decided to leave you her collection of cow figurines in her will. And we don't want that. Better stick to turkey and mashed potatoes. But after Thanksgiving, when you're sick of all those heavy carbs, and feeling run down from all the cooking and having to bite your tongue to ensure civility at the dinner table, you can make this soup and eat it all by yourself if you so desire.

The soup is based on a recipe for Sick Person's Soup from the excellent "Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen." (Deborah Madison is the author of "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," my go-to tome for pretty much everything.) I wasn't sick when I made this, and hopefully now I'll stay that way. This soup packs a wallop, enough to keep those germs away at least through New Year's, I'd say. Never underestimate the power of 12 cloves of garlic and three tablespoons of grated ginger. And the cabbage and miso and lime juice work their magic as well.

The original recipe called for even more ginger. You can add more if you want, but three tablespoons was more than enough for me. I also added a little soy sauce, soft tofu, and Asian wheat noodles (they resembled fettucine) to make it more of a meal. You could sub in another noodle if you wish. Just use what you have. Rice noodles would work well, or soba. Or heck, just use fettucine. I really liked the heft of my thick fettucine-like noodles – their solidity really worked well as a counter-balance to the intense sour lime, fiery ginger broth.

Sick Person's Soup
Adapted from "Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen"
5 cups Chinese cabbage, chopped
1 celery rib, sliced
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 carrot, thinly sliced
12 garlic cloves, 6 sliced and 6 finely chopped
16 oz. soft tofu, cut in 1-inch cubes
3 tablespoons grated ginger
1 jalapeño pepper, diced
Juice of 1 lime
¾ cup white miso
Splash of soy sauce
Splash of roasted sesame oil
Salt to taste
Noodles, cooked according to package directions (flat Asian wheat noodles would work well)

Bring 8 cups of water to boil in a large pot. Add the cabbage, onion, carrot, and 6 sliced garlic cloves, lower the heat, and cover. Simmer for 15 minutes. Add the tofu and simmer for a couple of minutes more. Turn off the heat and add the finely chopped garlic, jalapeño, lime juice, and miso. (It's helpful to first dissolve the miso in a bit of the soup water before adding it to the pot.) Add a splash of soy sauce and splash of roasted sesame oil. Add salt to taste. Ladle soup into bowls and add a serving of noodles to each bowl. Add more soy sauce and garnish with sriracha if desired.

At Long Last, Sambar That Tastes Like Sambar

I've known my husband for more than eleven years, and in that time I've cooked a lot of Indian food. I started out not knowing anything at all, but I like to flatter myself that I've gotten pretty good. Still, in all that time, a prize has eluded me. The prize of sambar. It seems simple – just a vegetable-lentil stew, flavored with sambar powder spice blend and the tang of tamarind. It's daily fare in millions of South Indian homes. Every home's sambar seems to taste different, and I love that. I'm OK with 'different,' and mine was decent, but just not... right. Not the way I wanted it to be.

 Awhile back we were staying with my in-laws, and my mother-in-law asked me to roast a combination of channa dal, dried coconut, and red chilies. Then she had me grind it into a paste and add it to the sambar.

Suddenly the clouds parted and a ray of light shone down from the heavens. As the angels started to sing, I thought, "I haven't been doing this. Maybe this is what I need to do."

"Amma," I asked, "Do you do this every time?" She answered something to the effect of, "You don't need to, but it's a nice touch." Translation, in my own mind: "Yes, this is why my sambar tastes so awesome."

In all my years of making sambar, this final step had somehow escaped me. You wouldn't believe how many things get lost in translation – and this one was a biggie. (Which proves my own personal philosophy: Doing is better than talking.)

Fast forward to Diwali Celebration 2010, ie: last Friday's dinner. In honor of the Festival of Lights, I decided to make onion sambar, adding the previously missing channa dal/coconut paste. Eureka! Rama and Sita return to Ayodhya, good triumphs over evil, and my sambar tastes like sambar! Happy belated Diwali!


Onion Sambar
First, start cooking the lentils:
1 cup toor dal*
4 cups water
Rinse the toor dal three times in a large sauce pan, then add four cups water. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer. Skim off any foam that appears. Cook for approximately 40 minutes, or until the lentils are very soft and falling apart. Add water if the lentils look like they are drying out. When lentils are done cooking, take a wire whisk and whisk them into a rough puree.

While the lentils are cooking, start cooking the onion:
2 tablespoons coconut oil
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 Thai green chili, halved lengthwise (or about ¼ of a jalapeno)
2 teaspoons sambar powder**
¼ teaspoon asafoetida
one onion, cut in half crosswise, then cut lengthwise along the grain into pieces slightly less than an inch wide
2½ - 3 cups water
1 slightly heaping teaspoon of tamarind concentrate
salt
Heat the coconut oil, mustard seeds, and green chili in a large heavy-bottomed pot until the mustard seeds turn grey and start sputtering out of the pot. Turn down the heat, add the sambar powder and asafoetida, and stir for a few seconds. Add the onion and stir to coat with the spices. Cook the onion for a few minutes, then add the water to cover the onions well. Dissolve the tamarind concentrate in a bit of water, and add it to the onion mixture. Add some salt, and bring to a boil. Once the mixture starts to boil, lower the heat and simmer, covered, until the onions are soft, about 20 minutes.

While your onions are simmering, make the coconut/channa dal paste:
2 teaspoons coconut oil (plus 1 additional tablespoon, for finishing)
2 dried red chilies (small, like Thai chilies)***
3 tablespoons dried flaked coconut
3 tablespoons channa dal****
small amount of water

Heat the 2 teaspoons of oil in a small skillet (reserve the 1 tablespoon for the end), then add the chilies, coconut, and channa dal. Roast on medium heat until the coconut is light brown. Take care not to scorch it. Puree the coconut/dal mixture in a blender with a small amount of water to make a paste.

When the separate elements are done, you just need to put them together. Add the whisked toor dal to the cooked onions (reserving a small amount of plain dal for your kids if necessary), then add the coconut/channa dal paste, and mix. Add more salt if necessary. Add the final tablespoon of coconut oil, and simmer the sambar for a few minutes. That's it. Serve with rice and a nice vegetable curry.

*You will most likely need to go to an Indian grocery for toor dal, though an upscale grocery like Whole Foods, or natural foods grocery may carry it. The Indian store will be the least expensive.

**Sambar powder can also be found at your local Indian store. My mother-in-law makes her own, and gives me a huge jar periodically. However, I recently ran out and ended up buying some from the store. I used Priyom brand, which contains red chili, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek, asafoetida, pepper, curry leaves, urad dal, gram dal, and salt. It tasted authentic to me.

***Go to, you guessed it, the Indian grocery store. Lots of dried red chilies there.

****Did I mention you really should get yourself on over to the Indian grocery store?

Reforming Bad Apples: Roasted Applesauce

You know the saying, “One bad apple spoils the whole barrel”? That saying didn’t just come out of nowhere – the ethylene gas given off by the overripe apple signals the other apples to ripen. (Pretty amazing that they can do that, don't you think?) So you can imagine my dismay when, during our recent family apple picking outing, I realized the four-year-old had been picking the windfalls up from the ground and putting them in our bag, along with all the good apples.

“Stop! Don’t do that!” Her hand froze, hovering with worm-eaten apple just above the bag. “We can only use the apples from the trees. Those apples on the ground are bad.”

“OK, Mommy.”

“Did you put any others in there?”

“No,” she said, smiling up at me angelically.

I rooted through the bag, and pulled out as many wormy, faintly rotting apples as I could find.

I realized I probably didn’t find them all a couple weeks later, when I smelled the tell-tale fragrance of apple cider vinegar. I inspected the apples one by one, found three or four fully rotten ones dribbling their vinegary juices all over the place, and determined the others were now prematurely past their prime, mealy and definitely not vibrant in flavor.

Bummer. Only one thing to do with them: Make applesauce.

The great thing about applesauce is that you can use less than stellar apples, and no one will ever know the difference. This is because applesauce gives you the freedom to doctor up your apples, and remedy whatever ails them, through the judicious addition of lemon juice, sugar or honey, and spices.

I decided to try roasting my apples rather than boiling them, first and foremost because I am lazy and don’t want to hover over a pot of boiling apples, much less peel and slice them. But I also know that roasting tends to concentrate flavor and sweetness, and decided that this was the way to go with my very unflavorful, unsweet apples. Whatever flavor there was would be intensified.

Anyhow, it worked. The roasting process gave the sauce a faintly caramel taste, and the texture was fantastic – very thick and a bit lumpy. (I don’t like my applesauce to be watery and smooth like baby food.) And you don’t have to peel or slice anything! Woohoo! Nor do you you need a food mill! Double woohoo!

 Roasted Applesauce
A little note: If you are going to add a little spice to your applesauce, why not forego the usual cinnamon, and try a small amount of Chinese five-spice powder instead? The spices in it work really well with apples, and if you just do a small amount, it will have a lovely, subtle effect, and everyone will say your applesauce tastes great, and wonder what the heck you did to it. (My five-spice powder has cinnamon, star anise, fennel, ginger, cloves, white pepper, and licorice root, which technically is seven spices, but who's counting? Different brands will be slightly different, but still good. The traditional version has Szechuan peppercorns, star anise, cloves, cinnamon, and fennel. Just five. )

Oil, for greasing pan
8 apples, halved and cored (keep skins on)
Sugar, or honey, to taste
Lemon juice, to taste
Dash of salt
¼ to ½ teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder (Taste first before adding more. A little goes a long way.)

Preheat oven to 375°. Grease a large sheet pan with a neutral-flavored oil. Halve lengthwise and core eight apples, leaving the skins intact. Arrange the apples cut side down on your baking sheet, and place the sheet on the rack in the center of your oven. Bake for approximately 45 minutes, or long enough for the apples to start browning on the cut surface. (This is the delicious caramelization that you want.)

Remove apples from oven, and using an offset spatula remove them from the pan onto a plate to let them cool. Once apples have cooled, use a large spoon to scrape the apples out of their skins into a bowl. Mash the apples with a fork to desired texture. Add and mix in sugar or honey, lemon juice (usually just a generous squirt is needed), salt, and five-spice powder as desired. Or just be normal and add cinnamon – your sauce will fail to be anything but delicious. This sauce freezes well.

Waffling: A Tribute to Irma S. Rombauer

My kids are like wolves: If they sense the slightest hesitation or weakness, they will hone in for the kill. The four year old will issue deeply wounded, plaintive cries beginning with phrases like, "You NEVER let..." And the six-year-old will badger me into submission with her impeccable memory: "Remember, LAST WEEK, you said..."

So that's how I ended up making waffles for Sunday breakfast, even though I didn't really feel like it at first. I was planning on making pancakes, which I'd already promised the day before, and knew I couldn't get out of, even though I was tired. You see, I'd stayed up into the wee hours watching a particularly bad John Travolta movie on TV, all by myself because my husband was away at a conference. I don't know why I did it; but I did, and now it was 7:30 am, and they wanted waffles. "Well," I said, "I don't know... they take more time... I have to get out the waffle iron..."

You know that feeling of inertia which is so great it makes even the simplest of tasks seem like an unscalable mountain? That's how digging out the waffle iron felt to me. The kids sensed my indecision, my incoherence, my waffling, if you will, and unzipped their sheep costumes. The wolves came out and went for the jugular. I had no choice but to get down on my knees and root around in the back of a very full cabinet for the waffle iron.

Despite my grumbling, it wasn't so bad. It only took a couple of minutes to extricate it from the tangle of cords and jumble of seldom used pans. I plunked the waffle iron on the counter with a self-satisfied feeling of achievement. There! It felt good. I felt the boulder of my inertia slowly starting to roll downhill. I thought, why not try a different waffle recipe? Why not seize the day, accomplish something in life? I had already gotten the waffle iron out. What could be harder than that?

So I turned to my favorite mother-daughter team, the Rombauer ladies, to see what they had to say about waffles. It turns out quite a bit. You don't write a book containing more than 4,300 recipes by being taciturn. (I'm talking about my 1964 edition of The Joy of Cooking.) In addition to several creative serving suggestions, including illustrated instructions for cooking strips of bacon directly into your waffle, I learned that the more fat you add to your waffle batter, the crispier your waffles will be. I never knew that! Then, I hit this: "We also suggest beating egg whites separately for a superbly light waffle."

Internal groan. Oh crap, do I have to? I already got out the waffle iron. Isn't that enough? Can't I just mix the eggs in whole?

Then I thought about Ms. Rombauer, and how her husband committed suicide by shooting himself through the mouth with a shotgun, and needing a source of income, she, a complete amateur, decided to write what turned out to be one of the most ubiquitous, and used, cookbooks in America. (She self-published the first edition. I like to think of her as a proto-blogger.)

No. You are going to separate those eggs, if it's the Last. Thing. You. Do.  So I did it. I let the mucousy whites slip through my fingers into a bowl, and I deposited the velvety yolks into another bowl. I beat those egg whites until my arm hurt, and then beat them some more until my arm was numb. Then I gently folded the white foam into the batter, just like Ms. Rombauer told me to.

And? She was right. My waffles turned out superbly light. In fact, they turned out so superbly light that I'm going to have to make my waffles like that every time from now on. There's no going back, sore arm be damned.

(A little tip: Put your leftover waffles in the fridge or freezer, and then warm them up in the toaster when you are ready to eat them. Just like store bought! But way tastier, as long as you don't burn them.)

Superbly Light Waffles
Adapted from The Joy of Cooking (1964 edition)
1¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons canola oil
1½ cups milk
3 egg whites

Start heating your waffle iron. Add the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar to a large mixing bowl and mix well. Separate three eggs, then beat the yolks. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, and add the yolks, oil, and milk. Stir until just combined and moistened. Do not over-mix. Using a wire whisk, beat the egg whites until they are all foamy. Fold the egg whites very gently into the batter. Scoop ladlefuls of batter onto your waffle iron and make the waffles according to your waffle iron's instructions. (On mine, the little green light which signals the waffle is done is broken. I can tell the waffle is done when no more steam is coming out.) Serve with butter and maple syrup or honey. And a badly needed cup of coffee.

Make Yourself Some Dang Spicy Pickles

What is there to eat? Sometimes, you've got to listen to Napoleon Dynamite's grandma, and make yourself a dang quesadilla. And then say, "Fine!" huffily, just for fun. But there's no need to be huffy. Why should anyone get huffy about melted cheese between two tortillas?

Especially if you jazz it up a little bit. First, I recommend using asadero cheese, which is sometimes called, fittingly enough, queso quesadilla. It's a white cheese, similar to mozzarella, which melts nice and velvety smooth. If you can't find asadero, Monterey Jack is a decent substitute. Just arrange your sliced cheese on top of a flour tortilla, place another tortilla on top, and place the whole thing in a dry skillet on medium heat. Heat both sides until brown spots appear and the cheese is melted. You can add other vegetables to the cheese before you cook. Mushrooms, onions, cilantro, whatever strikes your fancy. But might I suggest pineapple? People add it to pizza, so I figure it's not totally crazy. My husband and I like it a lot.

OK. So you've got your quesadilla. Salsa, sour cream, guacamole, etc. are all good accompaniments. But what I'm really here to sell to you today are carrot-jalapeño pickles. I've found them in countless taquerias, and enjoyed them with many a taco. So when I found myself with a surfeit of jalapeños from my freakishly bountiful plant (still going strong), I decided to give them a go. They were super easy, I used up 13 jalapeños, and they are awesome with quesadillas, especially ones with pineapple in them. The sweetness of the pineapple just works really well as a counterbalance to the spicy acidity of the pickles.

I found these pretty "rainbow carrots" at my market, but regular old orange carrots will work just fine. I do like working with the pretty carrots, though. (Did you know that carrots originated in Afghanistan, and that orange carrots did not exist until the 16th century? Well, now you do.)

Carrot-Jalapeño Pickles
2 cups apple cider vinegar
about 1/2 tablespoon sugar
9 small carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds
13 jalapeño peppers, sliced into rounds
1/2 a medium-sized onion, sliced

Add the vinegar and the sugar to a medium-sized non-reactive saucepan, and heat until the liquid is hot but not boiling. A few tiny bubbles should be starting to form. Remove pan from heat and add the carrots, jalapeños, and onions. Steep for one hour. Add the pickles to clean jars and keep refrigerated. The pickles should last for a few weeks. Feel free to halve the recipe if you don't think you'll be eating that many quesadillas (or tacos, burritos, etc.). We eat a lot of Mexican food around here. Beans and rice, beans and rice, it's nice. But it's also nice to have lots of spicy pickles to make things interesting.

(This post has been entered in this month's Grow Your Own round-up, hosted by MomGateway.)

Pretty Pita Pizzas

The request: Pizza. The problem: No mozzarella cheese in the fridge, and no desire to drag tired, hungry kids or my tired, hungry self to the store. The other problem: Not enough time to make dough.

The solution: Pizzas on pita bread. For the kids I used an olive oil base topped with garlic, sliced tomato, and zucchini, with a little Parmesan cheese. The adults got a rosemary-caramelized onion base, topped with thinly sliced zucchini, capers, and an egg, also with a bit of Parmesan.

The result: Momentary happiness, full bellies, and the feeling of satisfaction that comes from making a pizza that looks like a flower.

These pizzas are very easy, and open to individual interpretation. This was my general method: For the kids' version just place a piece of pita bread on a sheet pan, then spread some olive oil on the bread, sprinkle with salt, then top with minced garlic, tomato slices, zucchini, and a little more salt. Bake in a 450° oven for about 10 minutes. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan after you remove the pizza from the oven.

For the adult version, you follow the exact same principle: Put your pita bread on a sheet pan, spread the caramelized onion sauce (recipe follows) on the bread, then arrange very thinly sliced zucchini in a circle around the edge. Crack an egg into the middle, and sprinkle capers and a little salt on top of everything. Bake for about 10 minutes in a 450° oven, or until egg is set. Remove the pizza from the oven and sprinkle grated Parmesan and black pepper on top.

Rosemary Caramelized Onion Sauce
The only thing that takes any time worth mentioning in this whole process is the caramelized onion sauce, which needs to cook for about 35 minutes. You could always make this ahead of time if you manage to plan ahead. Or you can just let it cook while you prepare your other pizza ingredients. The sauce tastes even better the next day, and would be great on a piece of crusty bread or crackers.

6 tablespoons olive oil
3 medium-sized yellow onions, peeled and sliced
Salt
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
Dash of sherry vinegar

Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan. Add the onions and a little salt and cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, for a long time, until the onions turn a nice golden brown. (Be careful not to scorch the onions. If they start cooking too fast, turn down the heat. Slow and steady is the idea. It took about 35 minutes for my onions to be done.) During the last few minutes of cooking, crush the rosemary in your palm and add it to the pan. Stir to combine and cook for a few minutes until the onions are done. You will then need to puree the onions in a blender or food processor, adding perhaps a bit more olive oil to get a thick, fairly smooth sauce with some lumps in it. Pour the onions into a bowl, and add a dash of sherry vinegar and more salt to taste, if needed.

Incidentally, this sauce makes a really nice salad dressing if you add a dollop to some balsamic vinegar. Make a salad of toasted pumpkin seeds, chopped apples, and very fresh lettuce, then toss with this dressing. I did this with some of my leftover sauce, and it was quite lovely.

Just Good Dal

Sometimes there's a story behind a dish. You know, like, "I'll always remember when I first ate _______. It was springtime in Paris and I was a young lass fresh out of boarding school, making my way in the world for the first time. It changed my life, for that's when I first met...." etc. This is not one of those dishes. I have no epic story for dal – I just make it about once a week, it's a quick, easy, cheap source of protein, and it tastes really good. Perhaps there is an epic tale to be found in potato curry or yogurt rice, but those are stories for another day.

This is a South Indian style of dal (lentil stew). One of the South Indian elements of this dish is the use of mustard seeds, which are tempered in oil at the start of the cooking process. (Some folks do the tempering at the end and add the mustard seeds to the finished dish, but that's not the way I roll.) The mustard seeds add a pleasant nuttiness, but the trick is to fry them until they turn gray and start popping all over the place. If you don't do that, your mustard seeds will be bitter, and you will miss out on the pleasant nuttiness, which would be sad. I usually use a sliced yellow onion when I make this dal, but this time switched things up by using scallions instead. Either works just fine, but the scallions nicely accent the ginger, and make the dish sing just a little bit more.

One other note: I use mung dal when I make this. You could try other lentils, and I'm sure the result would be tasty, if unorthodox.

Oh, and one more thing: If you are unfamiliar with cooking Indian food this may seem a little complicated, but it really is easy enough for me to whip this up any time during the week. Just go to your local Indian grocery and stock up on the lentils and spices, and you'll be fine. Added bonus: Everything is much less expensive there.

Ginger Scallion Dal
To cook the dal:
1 cup mung dal, picked over and rinsed three times
About 3½ cups of water (you can always add more if things start to dry out)

In a medium-sized pot, bring the dal and water to a boil, skimming off any foam that appears. Lower the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, until dal is soft and starting to become mushy. Add more water if the dal starts to dry out.

While the dal is simmering, you will need to cook the seasoning:
2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil
1½ teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 jalapeno pepper, sliced in half lengthwise
⅛ teaspoon asafoetida
1 tablespoon cumin powder
2 bunches scallions, chopped in 2-inch pieces
1-inch length of ginger root, peeled and minced
Water
Salt
¼ teaspoon turmeric
Juice of 1 lemon
Handful of cilantro, chopped

In a large pot or very large saute skillet, pour the oil and begin to heat it on high. Add the jalapeno and mustard seeds, and wait for the seeds to turn gray and pop. Some will fly out of the pot, and that's OK. Immediately reduce heat and add asafoetida and cumin. Stir for a few seconds and take care to keep the spices from scorching. Add the scallions and ginger, and saute for a few minutes, until the scallions have started to soften. Add water to cover the scallions, salt, and turmeric. Simmer until the scallions are quite soft. Once the scallions are soft, add about 2½ cups of the cooked dal to the pot (or add all of the dal, if you are not reserving the bland stuff for children). Add more water if necessary, to reach the desired consistency. Add salt to taste. You will need a lot, as the dal you have added has no salt in it. Don't be afraid. Turn off the heat, then add the lemon juice and cilantro, and stir to combine. Serve with rice.

Lucky Chicken-Fried Tofu

I owe my friend Margie for this one. A few months ago she loaned me her copy of Miriam Ungererer's Good Cheap Food (sadly out of print, but definitely worth nabbing a copy if you can find one used), and I finally got around to reading it. Most of the recipes center around meat, which doesn't do me much good practically speaking, but I'm curious and Ms. Ungerer is an engaging writer and maybe someday I'll need to know how to cook veal kidneys, though I doubt it.

When I arrived at the recipe for "South Carolina Fried Chicken," I found a four-leaf clover that had been pressed between the pages. Taking it as a sign, I stopped and thought about fried chicken for a bit. I thought about how good it is, and what makes it so good, and about how I wished I could share how good it is with my husband, and how sad I felt about never eating fried chicken with him. Then I spent a good two or three minutes chafing at the bonds of my partner's unyielding vegetarianism. Then I thought some more. I thought, what really makes fried chicken so tasty? Is it really the chicken? Or is it the salty, crispy, fried crust that covers the chicken? I think you can guess the answer I came up with. (The crust.)

So I put the fried chicken crust on some "tofu fingers" and they were pretty awesome. The trick is to make the crust nice and salty, so you get an initial salty jolt, which contrasts nicely with the more bland tofu inside. We enjoyed them with stir-fried greens and roasted potato slices. Thanks, Margie, for the four-leaf clover. It really was lucky. (Readers, go check out Margie's blog, Fun Simple Food. You'll be glad you did.)

The only hard part about making this is planning ahead to put your block of tofu in the freezer overnight. Freezing and then thawing the tofu makes it a bit chewier, and also seems to significantly decrease the amount of water it exudes while cooking. I just put my whole unopened package of tofu in the freezer, and it was fine. The package expanded a bit, but did not burst its seams. The next morning, I took the frozen tofu out, and let it thaw on my countertop for several hours.

Chicken-Fried Tofu
1 package of extra-firm tofu (frozen, then thawed)
All-purpose flour
Salt
Pepper
Oil (for frying)

Remove thawed tofu from its package and squeeze it a bit to remove excess water. Slice the tofu into 12 rectangular "fingers" of equal size. Heat about a half inch of canola oil in a non-stick skillet. While the oil is heating, place about a half cup of flour in a small bowl, then add a very generous amount of salt and black pepper to it and mix it together. When the oil is hot, dip a tofu piece in the flour mixture and roll it around until it is coated, then place it in the skillet. Repeat for the other tofu pieces until you run out of room in your skillet. You will have to do this in batches. Fry the tofu until it is golden brown on the bottom, then flip the pieces over using tongs and fry the other side. Drain on paper towels, add more salt if you wish, and serve immediately. Use barbecue sauce, ketchup, Sriracha, or whatever condiment you think would work.

Too Saucy

I recently had a conversation about tomato sauce with my four-year-old. You see, she refuses to eat anything but butter and salt on her pasta, and I am having a hard time just letting it go. I give her pasta with sauce. "I don't like it," she says, her jaw set, head tilted slightly to the side, with the steely glint of certainty in her eyes that belongs only to four-year-olds talking about food they don't like. "But why?" I ask. She thinks for a moment. "Too saucy," she replies.

Unfortunately I am no molecular gastronomist and I don't have equipment like liquid nitrogen tanks and candy flossing machines at my disposal, so I can't do anything about sauce being saucy. (But maybe this is a future career for the four-year-old? Perhaps she will follow in the footsteps of Ferran Adrià, and make sauce that is in no way saucy at all, but instead is foamy, crunchy, or stringy, or gelled in the shape of a cube, or perhaps take it a step further, and make sauce that is merely an essence to be inhaled in a puff of air.)

At any rate, today I present you with a sauce that the four-year-old did eat on her pasta, despite its innate sauciness. After much struggle and cajoling, and some respectably convincing faux-gagging, we somehow overcame the initial hurdle of the first bite. After that, the rest was easy. In the words of her six-year-old sister, it is "double hundred million good."

This is a sauce I made with roasted cherry tomatoes and onions. The onions are mellow and much more subtle than garlic, and balance the bright acidity of the tomatoes. If you've ever tried Marcella Hazan's famously simple tomato sauce, the one that calls for a can of tomatoes, a halved onion, and a stick of butter, you know what onions can do for tomatoes. (Make them taste really good, that's what. I'm sure the stick of butter helps too.) After roasting, everything is emulsified a bit in the blender, so the sauce has a creamy texture despite the fact that it has no cream. Which is cool, because you get the benefits of creaminess without the unwanted dilution of the tomatoey-oniony flavor.

And, um, I know this is weird, but this sauce goes really well with sliced cucumbers. It's no molecular gastronomy, but maybe you should try making a cucumber sandwich with this sauce spread on the bread. Don't say you don't like it until you try it. Of course,  it's also very, very good on pasta with a little Parmesan cheese. Angel hair or spaghetti would work best.

Roasted Onion and Cherry Tomato Sauce
2 pints cherry tomatoes, washed and dried
1½ large yellow onions, chopped into inch-wide chunks (go against the grain of the onion)
A few glugs of olive oil
Salt
Dash of sherry vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 425°. Place the cherry tomatoes and onions on a large, rimmed sheet pan. Pour a few glugs of olive oil over them, then mix with your hands to ensure all tomatoes and pieces of onion are coated with oil. Spread the onions and tomatoes evenly over the sheet pan, and sprinkle all with salt. Place the pan on the middle rack in the oven and roast for approximately 20-23 minutes, until cherry tomatoes are done. The skins should be wrinkled and split, but not charred. Remove all of the tomatoes from the pan and set them aside. Return the pan with the onions back into the oven and continue to roast until the onions are fully cooked and soft, approximately 5-7 minutes.

Scrape the onions and any juices from the pan into your blender container, and add the tomatoes. Puree until the mixture is fairly smooth and emulsified, but still has some lumps. Pour the sauce into a bowl, add just a faint dash of sherry vinegar, freshly ground black pepper to taste, and more salt if needed. Serve with pasta (or cucumbers, if you trust me).

You Can Never Have Too Much Squash

It was Wallis Simpson who said, "You can never be too rich or too thin." She never did mention whether is was possible to have too much squash. My guess is that if she ever had her staff make squash bhajis for her, she would have appended "or too much squash" to her famous statement (and amended the "too thin" portion of it). But back then, there really wasn't much Indian food in England (my, how times have changed), so she probably never even tried a bhaji. Too bad for her – poor skinny rich girl.

A bhaji is essentially just a vegetable dipped in a chana dal (besan) flour batter and fried. (Chickpea flour would also work well, if that is easier for you to find.) I wrote about them back in February, and the formula remains the same regardless of choice of vegetable. My husband is the potato bhaji king, and even makes them for our six-year-old to snack on after school. She brings the extras to school in her lunch box the next day, with a little container of ketchup. Indian French fries!

This time of year, most people are drowning in squash, so I thought I'd just throw the bhaji idea out there. I made a cucumber yogurt sauce to accompany the bhajis. Just add peeled, grated cucumber to plain yogurt, stir, and salt to taste. I should note that in this batch I also did tomatoes and jalapenos. The tomatoes tasted good (and spattered in the oil a lot, so beware), but were a bit soggy. I think green tomatoes would work better. The jalapenos were delicious, but extremely spicy. If you do these, consume them with lots of yogurt sauce, and at your own risk.

Squash Bhajis
Slice squash (about three or four small ones) into rounds a little less than half an inch thick.

For the batter: *
Mix one cup chana dal flour (besan) with one teaspoon of salt, about 1/8 teaspoon of asafoetida, the desired amount of red chili powder. Add enough water to make the batter the consistency of pancake batter (it should cling to your vegetables). I used around 3/4 cup of water.

Frying the bhajis:
3. Heat about an inch of canola oil in a small saucepan or wok. Make sure the oil is good and hot before you fry the bhajis, or the batter will fall off the vegetables.

3. Dip a squash slice in the batter, drop gently into the oil, and fry until crisp and browned. Turn the bhaji to brown the other side if necessary. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon, drain the bhajis on paper towels, and serve fresh.

*You can use a little more or less asafoetida, or none at all. It gives a sulfurous, garlicky flavor which some people find a little strange at first. I happen to like it, but you definitely don't want to overdo it.

The Spice of Life

This past Labor Day weekend we drove 14 hours to Chicago in order to attend the wedding of my husband's cousin. Three days after arriving, we drove 14 hours back to Atlanta.*

Before heading off to the wedding in the 'burbs, we were able to spend a day in Chicago with some of the extended family, and I came upon a realization of sorts. There are two kinds of people in this world: Those of us who seek novelty in what we eat, and those of us who want to eat pretty much the same thing every day, and are just fine with that, thank you very much.

I have nothing more to say on that subject, but suffice it to say that not eating at [insert name of ubiquitous chain restaurant at random] led to a fine meal of beer, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and potato pancakes. The German half of me was very satisfied.

All of this is just to segue into a description of what we had for dinner tonight. I have a ridiculous amount of basil I need to use up, and am sick to death of pesto. Pesto is good, but at this point in the summer, a little creativity is needed, a little novelty, if you will. So I decided to mix things up a bit, and came up with this creamy basil pasta salad which doesn't use cream, so is vegan to boot. (Ironically, a bee flew over my boiling pasta pot, fell in and died, so a living creature was unfortunately harmed during the creation of this dish. I am not sure if that de-veganified it – one for the philosophers, maybe.)

The cashews provide the creaminess, and jalapeño pepper adds a subtle kick.  Lemon and tomatoes provide an acidic contrast to the creamy, sweet basil. It was good, it was basilly, and it wasn't pesto. (Needless to say, I highly recommend leftover sweets from an Indian wedding for dessert. For if you've ever been to an Indian wedding, you know there are lots and lots of sweets that must be eaten, enough to last you at least a month after the event takes place.)


Creamy Lemon Basil Pasta Salad
For the basil sauce:
2 cups cashews (plus soaking water)
2 jalapeño peppers, roughly chopped (more, or less, to taste and depending on spiciness of the peppers)
1 cup firmly packed basil leaves
1 or 2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 cups water
1 teaspoon salt (plus extra to taste)
juice of one lemon

For the rest:
One pound package fusilli noodles
Two tomatoes, chopped and salted
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1/2 cup cooked fresh corn, salted
Handful of basil leaves, cut in chiffonade (that means rolled up together and cut into thin strips)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Salt to taste
Lemon wedges

Soak the cashews in water to cover by a couple of inches for approximately five hours. Drain the cashews and place them in a blender or food processor, along with the jalapeños, basil, garlic, salt, and water. Blend until creamy and smooth, adding more water if necessary to reach the desired consistency. Stir in the juice of one lemon, and adjust salt to taste.

Meanwhile, boil a pound of fusilli pasta in salted water until al dente. Drain pasta, and return to pot.
Toss with enough basil sauce to make a rich, creamy mass of pasta. (I used about half of the sauce. You can freeze the rest or use it as a vegetable dip, or a sandwich spread, or make more pasta the next day. Or halve the recipe.)

Add the tomatoes, shallot, corn, basil, and black pepper to the pasta. Mix everything gently to combine. Add salt if necessary. Serve with lemon wedges to be squeezed over each individual serving. (Don't skip this: It adds a very refreshing lemoniness that you don't want to miss in combination with the basil.)

*Yes, this was insane, but cheaper than flying. And when all's said and done, I still prefer a 14-hour drive to a two-and-a-half hour flight, which is really longer than two-and-a-half hours anyway, when you factor in all the other nonsense you have to deal with. Driving allowed us to not only eat in Chicago, but in Louisville (with friends visiting from Seattle!), West Lafayette (Indiana, just off-campus from Purdue), and Chattanooga. We did the whole thing no fast food, strictly independent restaurants, though I was pretty bummed that the incongruously named 'XXX' Family Restaurant was closed for the holiday. I make fast food exceptions for restaurants more than 80 years old. Conversely, flying allows you to eat on an airplane. Blech. No thanks.

The Amazing Miracle Mystery Squash

After clearing away the brown wreckage of my month-long, mid-summer absence from my garden plot, I was left with one eggplant bush, two pepper plants, a few bedraggled bean plants that were being mercilessly attacked by Mexican bean beetles, a ton of insanely vigorous basil, a lot of empty space, and one tiny squash seedling that had somehow started to grow, despite the fact that I had not planted it. I decided to let it stay, and see what happened. That single vine has spread to cover half my plot, and threatens to entirely take over if the squash bugs and cucumber beetles don't kill it first. (They have quite a battle on their hands, because this vine obviously wants to live. )

I'm not sure what kind of squash it is. They are shaped like yellow crooknecks, but are smooth, and colored pale green, with faint white stripes. The flesh inside is a very pale, creamy orange. I cooked them with some onions for dinner tonight, and was delighted with how squashy they tasted. Sometimes when I cook summer squash, it just doesn't taste like anything. I think the key is to get young squash, with the dried up remnants of the squash blossom still intact on the end of the squash. Sometimes you can find them like this in the farmers' market, so if you do, go for it. That said, I do think these squash are unusually tasty, so if my vine does survive the Southern onslaught of insect pestilence, I'll try to let a few squash mature so that I can save the seeds and plant them on purpose next year.

Yellow crookneck squash stewed with onions is a traditional Southern dish. The traditional method cooks the onions and squash down to a tender mush. I believe mush has its place in the pantheon of vegetable cookery, but I wasn't in the mood for it, so I decided to give my squash and onions wok hai instead. (Check out the link – it gets quite esoteric. For my purposes, I'll just say the dish had the taste of the wok seasoning, and the vegetables didn't have the bejeesus cooked out of them. They were nice and firm. Sad to say, you really do need a wok to achieve wok hai, but if you don't have one, it's not the end of the world. Just do the best you can with whatever skillet you have, and it'll still taste good.)

 I then used the squash and onions in a dish I dubbed Three Sisters Tacos, which were corn tortillas filled with cooked dried lima beans (seasoned with onion and smoked paprika), corn, the aforementioned squash, chopped cucumbers, chives, chipotle pepper sour cream, and a dash of Tabasco sauce for good measure. (Oh, and in case you don't know, Three Sisters refers to the Native American agricultural triad of corn, beans, and squash.) The older daughter was skeptical about the squash, but ended up liking it and eating a full portion of everything, though not all on the taco. The younger daughter refused everything, and had leftover pizza. Ah well, she'll come around someday. And if not, one out of two ain't bad.

Wok Hai Miracle Mystery Squash and Onions
This is my general method. Put some canola oil in a wok and heat to very hot. Thinly slice half an onion, and add to hot wok, stirring frequently. Cook the onions for a few minutes, then add about three cups worth of squash chopped into one-inch pieces, and a generous amount of salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the squash reaches the desired level of doneness. I like it to be fairly firm. Add a few dashes of sherry vinegar, black pepper and more salt to taste if needed. Stir to combine, and serve. Go very light on the sherry vinegar; you don't want to taste vinegar, just brighten the flavors.