Sabbath Meals

Purim seudah/Shabbat meals 3/25/05 and 3/26/05

Friday evening:
carrot coconut soup
spinach kugel
roasted curried cauliflower
semolina bread (pictured)

Saturday lunch
Chickpea soup in crockpot
tempeh pate (adapted from Lorna Sass New Soy Cooking)
fabulous salad brought by guest

Isn't this exciting! I have photographs! This is a picture of the Pane Siciliano from The Bread Baker's Apprentice that I decided to make this past week. I need to use up all the different kinds of flour in the house before Pesach. That was my excuse! Doesn't it look great? It's a great recipe. If you have the book, you will recognize it from the back cover. If you don't, I know you are going online to your public library right now and asking them to reserve it!

The recipe calls for a pre-ferment dough, you actually make a full-fledged French bread dough called a paté fermentée the night before you make the full dough. I made my hamantashen dough and the pre-ferment dough with my son on Wednesday evening. He loves to make dough. He stands on a step stool next to the kitchen table where I cook and says "Dough! Dough! Dough!" and wants to help put ingredients in the bowl. On this evening, I set out all the ingredients and the doorbell rang. I went to answer the door because our apartment is small and I figured I could see him down the hallway. During the time I was getting the door, he dumped almost the entire box of baking soda into the (fortunately) empty mixing bowl of the Kitchen-Aid. It was pretty funny!  I put the baking soda into a plastic container, cleaned the bowl and we kept going.                   
   Here is a photo of my spinach kugel. It's not very easy to photograph kugel. I empathize with the kugel. I am also more appetizing in real life than I am in photographs. Somehow I'm always curling my upper lip or giving myself a double chin. There is really not much you can do to make the nice crust on a kugel appear to good advantage. I didn't even try to take a photo of the carrot soup, because I knew my picture was going to be less beautiful than the one on the page where I got the recipe. Yes, I actually made a recipe that I found by googling. I admit it was in part to facilitate posting about it. I didn't follow every direction in the linked recipe. I realized that they were assuming that I didn't have a blender and that was why they were saying to remove the solids from the soup, squeeze them, process them and then return them to the soup. I just used my immersion blender that I got for making baby food. Those things are dead useful. (That was a Britishism. The author whose book I am editing lived in London for awhile and we have been exchanging British English expressions, like "knackered" and "bollocks." I know those are somewhat rude things to say, but they sound really cute to the American ear.)

Now I have to complain. Everything in these two meals came out very well except the chickpea soup, that same soup that was so incredible the last time I made it. Like many people, I have trouble getting beans to cook in a slow cooker. This time, I soaked the beans, but not for as many hours as the last time, so they didn't cook fully. I do start the soup cooking on "high" for a few hours before Shabbat, but this was not sufficient. I try to make sure that there is at least one hot thing at my Saturday lunch table, in honor of the principle of having a hot meal on Shabbat. But I can't put out a hot plate because there is no surface my two year old can't reach, and anyway we have very few electrical outlets. Our stove is gas and the burners sometimes spontaneously go out, so I don't put a blech (a metal sheet you stick on top of the stove) on top, and our oven automatically shuts off after a few hours. That leaves the crockpot.  Soon it will be too hot for a hot dish to be appetizing, so it won't be an issue.  After Shabbat I simmered the beans in a pot on the stove for a long time, and my son and I ate them for lunch on Monday and Tuesday. He is way into chickpeas.

Our Saturday lunch guest brought a salad with lettuce, fennel, parsley and blood oranges, dressed with some special olive oil. She is a wonderful cook and a raconteuse. She's another one of my peeps that I feel like I never see. She brought me some novels to read, which I unfortunately finished by the end of the weekend. One of them was The White by Deborah Larsen. It's a historical novel that was based largely on a single memoir, which I mean to read. I think I have a huge gap in my education because public schools in the United States teach almost nothing about American Indians. I read Lies My Teacher Told Me finally this year and have been confronting the implications of it for some months.

This week I'm going to a wedding in Philadelphia so I won't be cooking. Catch you later!

Shabbat meals 3/18/05-3/19/05

I can't believe that I spent almost all of Friday cooking  in my pajamas! I must get my act together. I remember I used to work full time and also cook, now I have this little part time gig and I can barely plan a weekday meal. Parenthood can take it out of you.  I know that if I had planned ahead more, I would have had to work a lot less.

These were the menus I planned this week:

Friday evening
challah
red lentil soup (Claudia Roden's infinitely adaptable recipe)
cauliflower and tempeh coconut milk curry (loosely based on a Lorna Sass recipe)
fenugreek sprouts and potatoes curry (based on  a Julie Sahni recipe from
Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking)
pineapple fried rice (from Real Vegetarian Thai--really good and easy)

Saturday lunch
Black bean chili (?) in the crock pot
corn bread muffins
leftovers from Friday night
cucumber salad with sushi dressing from Moosewood New Classics

The lentil soup was really good as always, and even better, I just found the recipe posted on the web by this neat peacenik blogger. So now I am even happier that I made it. Sharing a recipe is almost as good as having someone at your table. I hope  that somehow the happy sighing of my sweet guests over the good honest soup at my table will mingle with similar sighs of contentment over at Leila's house.

The problem with cooking "ethnic" food is that it's basically any food that is not from one's own culture. Which means that you have work really hard to get familiar enough to improvise. I am not familiar enough with many Thai and Indonesian ingredients to improvise. For example, lemongrass--I have no idea how to use it correctly. I think from now on, instead of buying fresh lemongrass, I'm going to get bags of lemongrass tea. This time, I was going to use a recipe from Lorna Sass' New Soy Cookbook for tempeh with lemongrass and coconut milk. I didn't have quite enough coconut milk, I thought abstractedly as I chopped the fresh lemongrass into tiny pieces. Then I reread the recipe--uh oh. Didn't I do this once before? You are supposed to put the lemongrass in with other vegetables, and then remove it from the stew before serving. No way I could remove these tiny pieces! So I soaked the lemongrass in boiling water, and then poured off the resulting tea, and then soaked coconut in that, and then removed it, squeezing out the coconut.

So much for the easy recipe I was going to follow to the letter. Anyway, I didn't have the vegetables she called for either, except for the leeks. So then I boiled some cauliflower in water seasoned with turmeric, salt and ginger, and added it to the tempeh with some carrots and frozen organic greenbeans. I also thickened the sauce with cornstarch. It was really an entirely different recipe--bright yellow and really pretty.

The fenugreek sprouts dish calls for fenugreek greens and tiny new potatoes, and butter. I figured sprouts that had greened would have the same bitter flavor as the greens, cut up old winter potatoes would be similar if not the same, and ghee would work instead of butter. All true, but it was definitely not the same dish. I really like the way the sweetness of the potatoes emerges in the bitter greens, butter and black pepper sauce.

(If you want to sprout fenugreek seeds, you can follow the directions here. I let mine green up instead of leaving them small and sweet, since I wanted them for this recipe. This company sells sprouting devices, including the really simple one I have--a perforated plastic lid for a wide-mouth canning jar. I didn't buy mine from them, I got them some 15 years ago at the local food co-op.)

The pineapple rice was also good.

For Saturday lunch I made black bean soup again. It was really improvised, but to give you a feel for it, I soaked and pre-cooked 2 cups of black turtle beans, fried an onion and some garlic in the olive oil from the bottom of the dried tomato jar, and  threw it all together with chopped up bits of canned and  dried tomato, chipotles in adobo, and salt. I realized that with my crockpot, presoaking and even pre-cooking the beans can really help. We finished the soup before Shabbat ended.

My husband and the baby went out and bought frozen dessert and cookies before Shabbos. He thinks it's not a Shabbat meal without dessert. I am afraid the baby is getting his sweet tooth, but he doesn't really get the concept of cookies. He just demands cold cereal. I really think I need to reconsider my ideas about menu planning!

Cookbooks rock--Shabbat 3/4/05-3/5/05

Friday evening:

Potato and Shallot Soup (From Thai Vegetarian Cooking)
Steamed wontons with crunchy filling (ditto)
Rice noodles with vegetables and curry sauce (ditto)
challah

(passed out in the bed with the baby before I could eat any dessert!)

Saturday lunch:

Chickpea soup with garlic  (based on a recipe from Claudia Roden)
Marinated roasted beets (based on a Mollie Katzen recipe from Still Life with Menu but without the cheese and mint)
Cauliflower Fritters
(plus, our one guest brought spinach salad and marinated green beans!)
challah
organic mango
Paul Newman orange chocolate chip cookies
mango fruit leather

I decided that if I was going to break out of my rut, I had better consult a cookbook. I have a copy of Thai Vegetarian Cooking by Vatcharin Bhumichitr. It's out of print, but you can buy it online. There is a lot to like about this book. The food is really great--the author, a chef, explains that there is no vegetarian tradition in Thailand, but that Thai vegetarians just eat regular Thai food with the meat omitted, and a lot of dishes that just happen not to have any meat in them. The food is photographed beautifully in Thailand against backdrops that are somehow thematically related to the dishes. Since I have never been to Thailand, I love looking at the photos. You can't get all the ingredients for every dish but it's still worth reading for the ideas.

(I also have a copy of Real Vegetarian Thai, by Nancie McDermott. The author is not Thai and she doesn't run a restaurant, but she is more aware of  which ingredients people in the US can obtain. She has a very nice authorial persona, very likeable, and she writes some lovely passages about being a Peace Corps volunteer in a small town in Thailand. Many of the dishes are good and pretty easy to make, but a lot of the main courses don't look pretty when you present them. I really like my Shabbat food to be beautiful to see as well as eat. I do use the book though. I made her very delicious roasted chili paste and almost burnt us out of the house with the fumes! My favorite dish from this book was probably the Pad Se Ew, stir-fried rice noodles with sweet soy sauce, fried eggs and broccoli, but it's more of a weeknight dish. Perhaps I will blog some about weeknight cooking.)

I made the wontons on Thursday morning in about 45 minutes with my toddler helping me. It was really easy, even though we had a small episode of rubbing onion juice in our eyes. (Oy!) I realize that next time I can just chop all the filling ingredients--onions, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots-- in the food processor. Like a lot of the recipes in this book, this one calls for coriander root, which you can't get very easily, so I use the stems, mashed with black peppercorns. The only thing that's challenging about steamed dumplings is figuring out how to steam them without having them stick to the steamer. I also made the soup on Thursday--it's a very good soup. It's kind of neat to come up with a new soup made of potatoes, onions and carrots!

The noodle dish was great for our family, because I served the curry sauce, vegetables and noodles separately. My son loves rice noodles, broccoli and green beans, so he was very happy. I also put out my home-grown bean sprouts and some store-bought potato chips. (It seems homemade potato chips are a part of native Thai cuisine!) I didn't really like the way my curry sauce came out, but I might try again and tinker with it.

The best thing I made was the Saturday soup. If I hadn't read the Claudia Roden book, I'm sure I would have added many more ingredients, but since I saw her recipe for Tunisian chickpea soup I stayed with just chickpeas, garlic, cumin and water. At the table I put in little croutons of whole wheat toast in the bottoms of the bowls and drizzled them with olive oil, and then put the soup in and gave everyone lemon wedges to squeeze on top. It was so good! I think one thing that made it work was remembering to pre-soak the chickpeas on Thursday night so that they were very soft before they even went into the pot. Our guest D. talked about how happy it made him to eat the simple soup. The beets were also really good, as always.

The only dish I actually invented on this list was the cauliflower, and I based it on a recipe from the Millenium cookbook. I broke up a head of cauliflower into large florettes and steamed it lightly for seven minutes. Then I filled one bowl with one cup of soy milk and two tablespoons of mustard, and another bowl with a combination of cornmeal and flour. To the flour I added some curry powder that my husband mixed awhile ago, the Hyderabad curry powder from Julie Sahni, and some other spices: cumin seeds, thyme, paprika, coriander. I dredged the cauliflower in the flour and spices, then dipped it in the milk/mustard zutz, then dredged again. I fried the coated cauliflower in hot fat until it was crispy. By the time we served it, it was all soft and not that great. We slathered it with mango chutney and that made it tastier.

Balabusta's Shabbat meals 1/28 and 1/29/05

I was feeling pretty wiped out by cooking time on Thursday evening, and didn't have a lot of creativity for planning a menu. On Thursday night and Friday I made:

Whole Wheat Challah (story below)
Rassam (from the recipe in Laurel's Kitchen)
Spinach Kugel (recipe to follow in another post)
Glazed Turnips
Roasted Cauliflower with shallots and garlic (similar to this one, if you've never made it)
Baked Tofu (of course!)
improvised rice pilaf

The soup was great! It was not very spicy, but it was warming and pleasant. It's supposed to be very spicy. This is the problem with Laurel's Kitchen. Or maybe it's with my leftover-from-Passover ground black pepper? Spicy or not, it was delicious.

The kugel was good, it had a crust of wheat germ on the top and bottom which made it extra tasty. I will have to post my recipe now that I have made this common recipe my own.

I bought turnips again because the turnip soup was good two weeks ago. I had never eaten a turnip growing up. Had you? This dish was not a success. It was supposed to balance the sharpness of the turnips with an unctuous sweet glaze. Well it was bitter and mushy. Blech.

My husband has a thing about how challah should be made with white flour. Generally I abide by this unreasoning prejudice. This week, I ran out of the white bread flour I have been buying every week at Whole Foods, but I still had several bags of whole wheat flour. My poor life partner didn't realize that all those bags of flour were whole wheat! He gave me the go-ahead to make 100% whole grain challah in order to save us some money and a trip to the store.  I decided that since the whole wheat bread in The Bread Baker's Apprentice had come out so light, I would use that as a base recipe. This recipe calls for two pre-ferments: a soak and a poolish. The poolish is a sponge made with flour, water and yeast, and the soak is just flour and water. In order to make the challah taste like challah, I added 5 teaspoons of sugar and two eggs to the recipe, plus some oil. I made a pleasantly sweet whole wheat bread, nice and light, but it didn't ring my challah chimes.

The baked tofu, this time:

two cakes tofu
three tablespoons each: Braggs, leftover white sweet kiddush wine, balsamic vinegar, olive oil
fennel powder, dried basil, thyme
three cloves pressed garlic

It was good, but a little too sweet.

I thought the rice pilaf (ginger, sesame and shallots) was good, but my husband was unenthusiastic. The cauliflower was good.

We went to a potluck Melavah Malkah on Saturday night. I made a coleslaw of purple cabbage, carrots, scallions and mung bean sprouts, dressed in a sweet sesame dressing from the Moosewood Restaurant New Classics Asian Slaw recipe. I added some canned chickpeas. It didn't get finished, though there wasn't much left. I thought it was pretty good, but maybe people aren't in the mood for coleslaw in the middle of the winter.

All together, kind of an off week for me in the kitchen! Next week I will be visiting my parents. Probably I will be doing some cooking. At least I expect to be baking my son's birthday cake. This is the subject of some contention. My skinny husband, who eats dessert with every meal and is a sweets fiend, doesn't want to offer my son sweets until he asks for them. (By name? Who knows.)  My mom, who is perpetually dieting and obsessed with her weight, is equally extremely interested in giving my son cake. (She wanted to give him some disgustingly sugary birthday cake at his first birthday, but he was quite satisfied with some delicious--and I'm sure sugar-sweetened-- challah instead.) I feel like I'm caught in the middle. I don't totally know what I think about it. But I'll let you know what kind of cake I wind up baking!

We did have some pleasant rest on shabbat, some menuchah. I am back to work right now, Sunday afternoon, on an editing job. I hope to have time to post on some other things later in the week, and I wish you a happy week! As we sing in my favorite Havdalah song, Laner V'livsamim :

Behold the days of work renew themselves perpetually,
May peace and good be renewed in them. 

Cooking with a Toddler

My son is going to be two years old in ten days! Incredible. These are some things he does with me in the kitchen:

• Reads cookbooks and identifies the vegetables and fruits in the pictures.
• Brings vegetables from the fridge or the onion drawer to the table.
• Stands at the table on a step stool and encourages me in my prep by exhorting me to "Cut! Cut!"
• Cuts tofu and tempeh into reasonable pieces with a table knife.
• Breaks up broccoli into even florets and lines them up neatly in a row.
• Peels garlic cloves.
• Tears cabbage into individual leaves.
• Waves around leeks, scallions and celery while marching around enthusiastically.
• Grates ginger...sort of.
• Carefully dumps measured ingredients into the bowl when we are making "Dough! Dough!"
• Pats the dough when we are kneading.
• Taps all baked goods to make sure they are done, even if they aren't bread and even if they have been out of the oven for a few days.

I'm sure there will be more things. He doesn't have much patience for me devoting my full attention to cooking, but he does like to help.

How about you? Do you have children to help you in the kitchen? Or do you have memories of how you learned to cook, as a child?

Balabusta's Shabbat meals for 1/14 and 1/15/05

We had some nice meals this weekend, even though we only had one guest. Our friend came over on Friday and I wanted to make sure she had nice things to eat, so we had:

Turnip Soup (I made it with soy milk instead of milk and cream but otherwise as written--it was delish)
French bread (instead of challah--from The Bread Baker's Apprentice)
Polenta-filled acorn squash
Seitan Bourginon
Steamed spinach with toasted sesame seeds
and this awesome tapioca dessert with some pineapple added to it

Also, our guest brought some dried mango and some salad greens. We adore dried mango in our house.

The polenta in squash with seitan was from The Millenium Cookbook pp. 140-141, but I made some changes. I didn't think anyone would be able to eat a whole acorn squash full of polenta and stew, so I just sliced the squashes in half and baked the leftover polenta in a pan to serve later. (What a great leftover that was!) Also, I didn't plan to make this recipe ahead of time, so I didn't have all the vegetables that the book calls for the stew. So I made mine with shallots, leeks, celery, carrots and potatoes, store-bought seitan and fewer spices. If I had realized I was going to start blogging about it, I would have written down exact quantities! I generally find this cookbook, like most restaurant cookbooks, a bit too ongepochket for home cooking, but I didn't have any trouble with this recipe, even though I made changes. I think I'm going to make more stuff from this book.

I have been making challah since I'm not working full time. One can buy a nice bakery challah where we live, but it's expensive. This week I made French bread because I have this incredible new baking book on loan for a few weeks, and I want to make as many breads from it as I can. The crusty bread (Pain de Campagne, if you have the book) was so delicious with the creamy soup.

For Saturday lunch we had kasha varnishkas and Sesame Carrots on a Bed of Soft Cabbage from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven. My son likes me to page through Vegetable Heaven with him, there are great pastel drawings of vegetables and he yells out their names. We actually do this with a lot of my cookbooks and it's a great way to find recipes! The sesame carrots were really good. I think he ate more of the cabbage while we were chopping it up than in the finished dish though.

I need to post about cooking with a toddler. I would love to see what other people do to involve their children of different ages in cooking. Also, I want to know how people who work outside the home and have kids get to cook at all! Maybe you don't! I know some families have a tradition of pizza for Friday night dinner. Hey, if you're relaxing with your family, it's all good!  Our guest this past Friday is practically family to us, and we had a lot of enjoyment getting to be with her after too long of not getting to see her.