Sabbath Meals

Shabbat cooking, right! meals 9/16-9/17/05

I have not been keeping up with posting my menus, recipes and recipe links. For one thing, my cooking is getting boring again, especially as I haven't been planning the menus in advance. This week the food was delicious, though, and I guess kind of typical of my Ashkenazi cooking.

red lentil soup (improvised)
carrot kugel (improvised)
baked tofu (improvised!)
rice noodles from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cookery
potato salad with pesto (improvised!)
steamed broccoli
fresh tomatoes (present from guests!)

The red lentil soup was a variation on the famous Claudia Roden recipe. I put a cup of lentils and four cups of water in the pot with a finely diced shallot, and cooked them together until the lentils were a fine purée, about 30 minutes. Then I added a teaspoon each of turmeric and cumin, a tiny pinch of powdered chili pepper, the juice of a lime (out of lemons!) and a can of the Muir Glen roasted organic tomatoes.

The kugel I also improvised using the famous "shit method." I grated about 6 carrots. I did it by hand because I just couldn't find the grater attachment to the food processor. I added a little less than a cup of wheat germ (of course, I am the wheat-germ-in-kugel person) a big spoon of tofu mayonnaise, four eggs, a dollop of honey and a big handful of yellow raisins. I baked it in my fabulous oval casserole dish on 375  (fahrenheit, because I am an American you know) for 40 minutes, until the top was nicely brown. My son really liked the kugel! He's often nervous about eating mixtures of things, but not this. Since it was little better than a carrot cake, it's not a surprise.

The baked tofu was two sliced cloves of garlic, sprinkle of soy sauce and sesame oil of random proportions, baked in oven with kugel. Why did it taste so great? Don't know. When the kugel and tofu looked done, I just turned the oven off and didn't take them out, so maybe that helped the tofu absorb more marinade.

I improvised the basil pesto for the potatoes (basil, walnuts, garlic, olive oil in food processor) and then the potato salad (boiled potatoes, pesto, champagne vinegar and more olive oil, salt.) But it was good. Better with the tomatoes from our guests' garden.

If you don't have the Julie Sahni book, it's not from my not having flogged it sufficiently. That rice noodle recipe is the best of a whole book of fabulous bests.

Sometimes I can cook well even when I don't feel like it.

Shabbat meals 8/26-8/27/05

I made:

Chickpeas in coconut milk curry from Vegetarian Thai Cooking  By Vatcharin Bhumichitr
Thai-style fried rice
potato salad with mustard-raspberry vinegar dressing and basil
steamed cauliflower
gazpacho

(we also had delicious black plums, cookies and non-dairy frozen desserts)

This was a successful week in the kitchen! I made almost all of the dishes in about an hour and a half, with no sweating or cursing. I have made the chickpea dish many times; it's not a typical Thai dish, since as Mr. Bhumchitr explains, whole beans aren't a usual part of Thai cuisine. He collected the recipe from a Buddhist monastery. It calls for a paste of coriander roots, garlic and black pepper, and then for additional curry powder. This time I had made the master curry powder recipe from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. I also had both fresh August garden tomatoes and fabulous basil. Then I decided to improvise a fried rice based on all the recipes I had around--I fried sliced shallots and scallions, then added grated carrot and pineapple chunks, then the rice, sugar, soy sauce. If it had been authentic I would have used chili peppers, but I was worried that my son might accidentally smear chili in his eyes.

We didn't make the gazpacho until Saturday morning. My little guy got me up and we went into the kitchen, and he helped me, sorta, as I grated and chopped cucumber, tomatoes, scallion, cilantro. We added a bit of oil and vinegar and some tomato juice, salt and pepper. The tomatoes were a combination of some organic heirloom ones I got on sale at Whole Foods and a windfall of garden tomatoes. Every imaginable huge and texture of tomato: red, yellow, red with orange stripes, orange, green with stripes. It was a beautiful gazpacho. My son ate his at lunch saying "pretty, pretty!"  We had it again with some friends at Seudah Shlishit.

Oh it made me happy to have them over on the spur of the moment, we picked them up on our walk, took them to the playground with us, and then kind of lured them home. I used to have people over for summer suppers on Shabbat all the time. We would study, or I would read stories to one of the children, and then we would eat, and sing songs, and say Havdalah. I really love that and we haven't been doing it much. This time we talked about community issues. We didn't dwell too much on the anti-Semitic fliers, but instead talked about ways that people where we live have been trying to make inter-community contacts. We also talked about parenting--our friends are expecting--and how intimidating it can be to make friends with other moms.

I just want to tell you that my 2 1/2 year old has picked up a bunch of prayer vocabulary. We have explicitly been reciting the Shma to him at night before he goes to sleep, and I knew that he knew what a siddur was. But lately he has pointed to the siddur and said "shma!" and also "kedushah!" (It is amazingly moving to have your child say "kedushah!" which means "holiness!" He was saying it because it's the name of a prayer, as is "Shma". I think that's why, it might also have been because I refer to the siddur as a "sefer kedushah.")  I don't want to give you the idea that he is some kind of genius, though. Tonight he had my copy of the Alfred Kotlach name book. He saw that the book had Hebrew and English and said "Siddur! Shma! Hebrew!" So yes, he knows which is Hebrew and which is English, but no, he doesn't actually recognize the Shma on the page. It's amazing what he can pick up without trying.

Sabbath meals, 6/10/05-6/11/05

It's very hot here. In meal planning terms, it's cold soup weather. In order to bake challah and not sweat buckets in our apartment, I made challah on Thursday evening. I had great success with my yud-beis pull-apart loaf. This time I used a smaller pan, a 9" layer cake pan with lower sides. I used parchment paper and greased the sides. I didn't overbrown the bottom and it looked gorgeous. My son helped me make the dough so there were lots of raisins in every loaf. This even though he also ate the raisins out of the dough as he went along.

For Friday evening (just the family) we had:

challah
Eggplant curry with tamarind
brown rice
green salad (baby arugula, Jerusalem artichokes, cucumber, red pepper, oranges)
mango for dessert + storebought cookies

My husband and my son went out on an errand right before dinner time. My son was pretty hungry when he arrived. He stood up on a kitchen chair in front of the salad bowl and ate most of the orange sections and some of the pepper slices and cucumber pieces out of the salad bowl. I didn't stop him. Should I stop him from eating fruits and vegetables? Are you fainting with envy, my sisters in mothering two-year-olds? In fact I was happy, I don't really like red bell pepper. I only bought the outrageously expensive organically grown thing because I know he likes them.

We had a really great meal together. My son said "Amen!" to the blessing over the wine for the first time we could remember. The eggplant was a little too sour (I made it as written) so I added some sugar to it. Hey, it might be less healthful, but we are Jews. According to my main woman Claudia Roden, sweet-and-sour flavors are a hallmark of Jewish cuisines. That doesn't mean just plain sour, you know? I really liked the website where I got the  recipe. I found it a lot of fun to prepare, very simple. Unfortunately the author hasn't updated since last year, but there are seven years of recipes on there. So perhaps I'll be back to try some more. (I hope that if she comes to visit me here, the original author isn't horrified that I sweetened her recipe.)

Speaking of Claudia Roden, the theme of my Saturday lunch was Claudia Roden:

Cucumber and avocado soup (recipe follows)
Lentil salad (recipe follows)
Mashed Zucchini and Tomatoes (Claudia Roden, New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
Georgian Spinach Salad (Claudia Roden, Book of Jewish Food)
homemade hummus
pineapple and oranges + storebought cookies

The cucumber soup is based on a recipe from the Millenium cookbook, but I made a few changes that I think improve the dish:

Cucumber and Avocado Soup
2 large cucumbers
1 avocado
1 cake firm, water packed tofu
juice of three lemons
1 tablespoon white miso
3/4 teaspoon salt
freshly ground pepper to taste
handful fresh mint leaves (or cut open one mint herbal tea bag and use the innards!)
2 scallions, chopped

Peel or pare and chop all vegetables and put it all into a food processor. Purée until very smooth. Transfer to a bowl that has a good cover. Add enough water to make the right consistency and taste for sourness. It should look and taste like it was made with whole milk yogurt.

Lentil Salad
1 1/4 cups dried green lentils
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablepoons raspberry vinegar
1 orange, peeled, sectioned and then chopped
1 teaspoon coriander powder
chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Boil the lentils in plenty of water until they are soft but not mushy. This could take 20-30 minutes on the boil, depending on the age of the lentils. Drain them and put them into a bowl. Add the oil, garlic, coriander, salt and pepper while the lentils are still warm. Stir and let cool just a little. Then add the vinegar, orange pieces and cilantro.

I didn't have a fresh pomegranate for the spinach salad, and one of my guests is allergic to nuts, so I changed the dressing slightly. I added pomegranate molasses to the oil and vinegar, and also dried pomegranate seeds from the Indian food store. I let the seeds sit in the dressing overnight before I poured it over the salad. It was pretty credible. I didn't wash the spinach enough and it was embarassingly gritty. I haven't made that mistake in many years.

Luckily our only guests were our very close friends, a couple that we have decided should be our son's guardians in our will. We talked about serious health stuff, also about dealing with our moms, but there was also a lot of joking. I am so happy we have them in our lives. She's the person whose picture should illustrate the word "integrity" in the dictionary. I think his word might be "focus" but I'm not sure. Anyway they are coming back tomorrow after yoga class to help us clean our apartment. They have given us a lot of help with this place in the last weeks, it provides me with an excellent pretext to invite them for many meals.

I was going to invite some new people from schul but felt exhausted by the heat. Some excuse! You know you are doing something right when your Jewish communityfaces a problem making a minyan every year on the day of Gay Pride.  Yes! Readers! My toddler eats vegetables and my Jewish community  is welcoming to gay people!  My apartment is not clean but my life is very good!

Shabbat meals, 6/3 and 6/4/05

I didn't post any meals for last week. We went out of town to my mother-in-law's house. I did bake a challah to bring to her, but I didn't do any cooking. I didn't even make a salad! My mother-in-law is a great cook, she makes plain but tasty vegetarian food. She always makes the salad in the mode of Adele Davis, dressing the greens with oil and lemon and putting some spice blend on them.

This week, my parents came to visit. For Friday evening, I made:

Challah
spinach with chickpeas (Claudia Roden, New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
tomato rice (ditto)
roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and garlic
roasted beets in mustard vinaigrette
baked tofu with lemon and sesame

for Saturday lunch:
challah
Potato-leek-carrot cold puréed soup
green salad with romaine, arugula, walnuts, oranges and dried cherries
(and lemon-sesame dressing)
Israeli cous-cous with French lentils (Moosewood New Basics)
leftover beets and brussel sprouts

One thing that was super about this meal was the challah. I made two batches by hand simultaneously--meaning I had two bowls going. I let my son put raisins in one of the doughs. He measured out a full cup of yellow raisins and then added some more! When I made the loaves, I decided that one should be a "yud-beis" challah--a pull-apart challah with 12 sections. I made each section out of a knotted roll. It looked like a crown.

Another thing that was good was providing beets for my mom and brussel sprouts for my dad. They were both really happy to have a vegetable they each like but don't each much at home. The beets recipe is one my mother-in-law makes that my son liked a lot. My dad is a big fan of puréed potato soups, this one was just very slightly golden from the carrots. It was very creamy and I didn't need to add any soy or rice milk to make it flow.

It's very hard to cook for my mom, because 1) she's always on a diet and 2) she likes to express her disapproval frequently, and this extends to not liking food I've made. But I am most grateful to say, it does not extend to my son, who is the apple of her eye. Both of my parents are completely wonderful grandparents. They are generous with gifts and with time and with love. My son figured out that they would each read to him if he asked, and kept walking books over to them.

I tried to make sorbet in my ice cream maker, and wound up sticking the whole bowl of the ice cream maker back in the freezer full of slush. I didn't have to mix anything together, I just took a relatively sweet bottled mango juice and poured three cups of it into the device. So it wasn't like I lost much effort there. The slush finally froze and we are eating it slowly now that Shabbat is over.

Shabbat meals, 5/20/05 and 5/21/05

For Friday night:
challah
baby artichoke and spinach risotto
cold gingered asparagus (Mollie Katzen Still Life with Menu)
baked tofu with wine
canned pineapple and store-bought baklavah

Saturday lunch:
invited out, brought a challah

Seudah Shlishit (Saturday supper)
deconstructed guacamole (avocado with tomato, sliced on a plate)
cold cereal with raisins and rice milk
leftovers

I barely cooked at all this week because I am determined to get my horrendously messy apartment into some kind of order. My husband is doing a lot of the work with me, plus we have some friends who are joining us in moving around all of our furniture. As you know if you have been reading this blog, my beloved grandmother died in February at the age of 95. She left me a lot of things, including furniture. Our apartment was already crammed with stuff. Books overflow every shelf, and we have some kind of problem with filing our papers. Also there is the whole toddler element, a young enthusiastic household member who likes to put things away but not necessarily where his parents think they go.

With help, we seem to be beating back the chaos. But that left me unenthusiastic about my ordinary routine of leisurely Friday cooking. My son really wanted to help me prepare baby artichokes again. As his vocabulary increases and his articulation improves, I find that "baby artichokes" is a phrase he can say very well! He likes snapping off the leaves. Using the basic formula in Sundays At Moosewood, I made a risotto. Somehow the fresh artichokes did not mess with the wine. My husband, who isn't that into artichokes, ate the risotto but now doesn't want to deal with the leftovers.

The asparagus recipe is really great, but I knew that because I've made it before. If you haven't, do. It has everything: it's sweet and sour, with garlic and ginger flavors and sesame oil and soy sauce. The ginger is like home-pickled ginger. I'm very psyched that Mollie Katzen put it on her website, that was so generous!

On Saturday we were invited to friends. They set up a room where my son could nap. I nursed him to sleep and then we sat down to our meal. My friend made a lot of recipes from Crescent Dragonwagon's book The Passionate Vegetarian. I really like Crescent Dragonwagon's authorial personna, but I had tried some of her recipes that were posted on Epicurious for Thanksgiving, and was not enthusiastic about either the process or the products. My friend's Dragonwagon picks were really good! My friend made the Moroccan carrot dip, an ersatz chicken salad made with tempeh that had poppy seed dressing, pineapple and grapes, a nice salad with cucumber and tomato, and plain steamed asparagus. I brought a challah I made on Friday and everyone tore into it and ate it in the first five minutes of the meal.

As usual, even though I have cookbooks coming out of my ears, my hosts had new cookbooks that I coveted. I was especially excited to see the new Gil Marks book of Jewish vegetarian recipes from around the world. I can't tell you much about it though.

Okay, tell me if you think this is funny: my husband teases me whenever one of us drinks Constant Comment tea by making constant comments about it. No, huh? It really cracks me up. Am I a cheap date?

Shabbat meals 5/13/05-5/14/05

Friday night:
Challah
Carrot Rice Pilaf (from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food)
Spinach with Chickpeas (Claudia Roden)
Baby artichoke pie with crumb crust
Roasted Zucchini with Lemon
Beets in orange sauce
sorbet and Tofutti Cuties

Saturday lunch:
leftovers of all of the above plus
guacamole
green salad
fruit salad (mango, orange, apple, yellow raisins)

Seudah Shlishit:
salad and cold cereal with raisins

My two year old son loves to prepare baby artichokes, we did them together for the first time during Passover. When we were in the store on Wednesday I mentioned that we would buy them and he became quite enthusiastic! I know he is bolder about actually taking off enough leaves than I am. You have to break off so many leaves that the remaining leaves are yellow at the bottom and all the same length, then you slice off the tops of the leaves so that the artichoke looks squared off and yellow. So there I had my nicely trimmed flowers--I like to leave on some of the stem, because it's tasty, and that makes them look even more floral. I thought, how about a quiche? I improvised a crust based on one of the ones in Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest. (I see that I have linked to the New Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and my tattered copy is the old edition.  I learned a lot of cooking skills from the old book and haven't seen the new one.)

Anyway, my pie. It was just okay, not very special. Plain, unmarinated artichokes discolor the custard in a quiche, at least if you make the custard with rice milk they do. I also included a hard boiled egg at the last minute, and the chemicals in the egg yolk and the artichoke did not like each other and made some weird bright green streaks. Everyone who ate the pie liked it, but it was in my estimation not a successful experiment.

Also, you shouldn't make Persian rice with brown basmati if you have never successfully made it with white basmati rice. Everyone thought the carrot rice was great because it was sweet, but I am not sure that I did that right!  If only I had an Iranian grandmother stashed away somewhere that I could call. I bet one of my readers does. I have an Iraqi-Jewish grandma (a friend's mom) but she can't really cook at all. I went to interview her for a class I was teaching on Jewish food and we wound up talking about the history of Zionism and how she learned to shoot pool in the Zionist youth movement in India in the 1940s. But I digress, big time.

The beets were mind-bogglingly delicious. Try that recipe, it's good. I used raspberry vinegar, too.

Apparently authentic guacamole is made with fruit, at least according to Diana Kennedy. I did not make authentic guacamole. I made midwestern Ashkenazi Jewish guacamole. I finely chopped a shallot because I knew that the last time we had guac, the red onion was way too strong, and I added that to three mashed avocados and the juice of two lemons. Then I finely chopped a very wintery tomato and mixed it in. It was good. I guess tomatoes are fruit. Why am I self-conscious about cultural appropriation with Mexican food and not at all worried about chickpeas and spinach?

We had Friday night guests, two exhausted friends. One is doing finals--in school and also working-- and one is pregnant (and working). I found pregnancy hormones like a 40 week soporific. My son has been increasingly interested in social interaction with adults in his life, and was very happy to have our friends there. For Saturday lunch, we had our very close friend and a new person from schul, but my son napped through the whole meal.

My husband encouraged me to blow off schul on Saturday morning because we got a late start and he was worried that I wouldn't get the baby home on time for his nap. Usually he does the nap but this week wanted to read Torah for the anniversary of his bar-mitzvah. My son and I took a walk around the neighborhood and went to the playground. Does it count if you hear the leyning practiced around the house? My son has decided that he wants to know more about the tikkun (the book from which one practices cantillation of the Torah portion.) There is something very sweet about this. My friends' child has begun to say "Torah! Torah!" when the scroll is removed from the ark. I know at two my son is below the official age of education in Judaism, but I want him to have many strong and positive impressions under his belt.

Passover cooking!

We went to my parents' house for Pesach and as usual, I did a lot of the cooking. This year my mom was pretty good about letting me take part in the meal planning. Probably if I had planned the meals myself I wouldn't have chosen a list of vegetables I knew my father didn't like. I even said, "You know, Daddy doesn't like any of those vegetables" and my mom replied, "Your father never eats any vegetables at the seder anyway." I thought that was hilarious.

Anyway, we arrived Thursday and this is what we made:

artichokes (1st night--this recipe is from Joan Kekst, a Passover maven who writes for the Cleveland Jewish News)
boiled potatoes
boiled eggs
Passover rolls
homemade horseradish
gefilte fish (not homemade, just plated!) 
chicken soup for matzah balls
vegetarian vegetable soup for matzah balls
asparagus (steamed plain)
Chicken—two kinds (made by my mom)
Stuffed eggplant Provençal (adapted from Sundays at Moosewood--2nd night)
Sweet potato kugel (from No Cholesterol Passover Recipes by Debra Wasserman)
sweet and sour leeks (from Claudia Roden New Middle Eastern Cookbook)
two savory matzah kugels (2)
apple matzah kugel
Tzimmes (from Nira Rousso The Passover Gourmet, one of my mom's favorite books)
Cut vegetable platter
Glazed beets (which my mom makes, yucky feh)

Desserts/Baking
Fruit compote (my mom's)
Meringues (my mom made these from a new recipe that I don't know)
Brownies (two varieties, my great-aunt's recipe)
Sponge cake (my great-aunt's chocolate-wine cake recipe)

For Shabbat, I made some roasted cauliflower and potatoes with garlic and some steamed spinach, and we ate one of the savory matzah kugels. My mom also served soup chicken to the meat eaters.

We served the artichokes at karpas, when we handed around the saltwater, boiled potatoes and parsley. I thought this was my original idea, until my mom said that Joan Kekst had suggested artichokes in her column. My sister helped me pare them, which was fun--we cut each one in half and removed the choke, peeled the stem so we could leave it intact, and then snipped off the thorns at the tops of the leaves. I love artichokes and this was a good recipe. What was even more fun was that my son learned to say "artichoke." I think that karpas is a vestige of some Hellenistic salad course, so it makes sense to me to serve a healthy portion of appetizers then. That way, people can sit through more of the seder service without whining.

Though I am apparently not the first person to think of using this recipe in my seder (which I didn't know until I googled) I am going to give you my adaptation of the eggplant recipe from Sundays at Moosewood, with the caveat that you really should get this book for yourself because it is so wonderful.

Stuffed Eggplant Provençal
from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (Simon and Schuster, 1990)p. 551-553.
Adapted for Pesach

3 medium or large eggplants (I used 4 small)
1/4 cup olive oil
salt

Slice the eggplants, in half brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake in a 500 degree oven for 20 minutes. Turn oven down to 350.

Filling:
2 cups chopped onion
2 garlic cloves
2 carrots
1 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1 cup diced zucchini
(original recipe also calls for 1/4 cup mushrooms)
1/2 cup pine nuts
2 tablespoons currants or other raisins
1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
1 tablespoon fresh thyme

Sauté onions first for 10 minutes until translucent, then garlic and carrots for another 10 minutes, and then add the rest of stuffing ingredients and cook another 15 minutes.

Topping:

Sauté 2 garlic gloves in 1/2 cup olive oil and then add 2 cups matzah meal. I add salt because since the original recipe calls for bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, it needs salt when you make it with matzah meal.

Push the flesh of the cooked eggplant with a spoon, creating hollows to stuff. Stuff the eggplant generously until all the stuffing is evenly distributed among the eggplants. Pat the topping firmly on top of the stuffing so it doesn’t fall out and bake eggplants for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

I made the horseradish by soaking the whole root in water for a couple of hours. Then I peeled it with a vegetable peeler and grated it on the smallest holes of a box grater while wearing super-duper rubber gloves. The fumes were so strong that my father could feel them blast him as he entered the kitchen. The key to very strong horseradish is to keep it moist, and it's best to grate it as finely as you can. I added cider vinegar, sugar and salt according to the instructions of one of my mom's many community cookbooks. I can't tell you proportions, but I added enough vinegar to make it moist, a teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon salt. It was very good.

Another reason to miss my grandmother: I think I'm the only one left at the table who really loves horseradish. The second night, my second cousin came with her husband, who is from Venezuela, and he was completely smitten with the horseradish, so that was nice.

Perhaps I will put some more recipes in another post. I think my posts get a bit unwieldy to read, and this was a very long cooking session! To close, let me say that if you like sweet things at all, you had better make that Epicurious apple-matzah kugel because it is so delicious that you could faint, and it's especially good if you use green and red apples together.

Okay, I love you! I hope you are having a wonderful Pesach and being liberated!

Shabbat meals 4/15/05 and 4/16/05

Friday
Leek Spinach Pie
Potato curry with poppy seed masala (from Vegetarian Punjabi by Nita Mehta)
Steamed asparagus
Cauliflower Curry (cooked by my dear husband)

Saturday
more of the same plus green salad with watercress, peas, cucumber and oranges

My husband was surprised that I said he had purchased the Nita Mehta cookbook for me! No, he fully intended to re-enter the Shabbat cooking club at our house. In fact, he has already made a pea and potato curry from the book, which he enjoyed very much, while I was out of town for the wedding two Shabbatot ago.

This week I made a potato and poppy seed curry from the Nita Mehta book. It was quite easy and good, and featured kalonji (nigella, not to be confused with Nigella Lawson, another Jewish cooking celebrity and all-around cutie) as well as the white poppy seeds. No, it did not taste like mun hamantashen, as I feared.  Now, if you go to her website, you will see that Nita Mehta is New Delhi's answer to Martha Stewart. She has cookbooks in every style of Indian cooking (apparently the right word is "khanna") in both vegetarian and omniverous versions, in English or in Hindi. Also, she can teach you how to make vegetarian or non-vegetarian specialties from other countries, including China.

Variation on a Theme by Theodore Geisel

We took a look
we saw a Nook
on his head he had a hook
on his hook he had a book
on his book was How to Cook by Nita Mehta.

But a Nook can't read
so a Nook can't cook
and anyway a Nook doesn't know the Hindi word for poppy seeds
so what good to a Nook is a hook cook book by Nita Mehta?

You can guess what I have been reading to my two year old: cookbooks and One Fish Two Fish. I am a little nervous that he is going to think that a Gack is a real animal. He is in a cool phase of repeating all two word phrases or any polysyllabic word he thinks is interesting. He likes the word Passover (pronounced Pah-Oh!) and the word peachtree, which he says correctly but with a little pause between the first and second syllables.

Anyway we have learned a lot about Indian cooking but there is so much more to learn. We do know enough to realize that the recipe for cauliflower curry we found should not be on a website for north Indian recipes where we found it, since it's precisely like several recipes we have for south Indian dishes. It's a good recipe though. My husband made it perfectly. It was, as our favorite Shabbat guest always says, "delicate." (It's also true that we know you aren't really supposed to serve vegetable curries with no rice and no rotis, at room temperature, etc. etc. But we do it anyway. If it's not authentic, it's still very tasty.)

Here is my recipe for the leek and spinach pies I made. I know, I know, it's more frozen spinach. Okay, but I had to use up frozen spinach! Also I had to use up flour, so I used whole wheat bread flour instead of whole wheat pastry flour for this. The crust was pretty flaky anyway.

Crust:
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine (two sticks)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon brown rice vinegar and 2 tablespoons water

Blend all of the above in a food processor until it makes a ball. Divide the pie crust dough into two halves. Roll out between sheets of waxed paper. (I don't have pie crust expertise, so I always use the waxed paper trick.) Put a bottom crust into each of two  9" pie plates. Put the pie crusts in the fridge while you make the filling.

Filling:

four leeks
two 10 oz. bags frozen chopped organic spinach, thawed
2 T. fat
1 T. prepared mustard (approx.)
4 eggs
about 1 cup rice milk
tamari and black pepper

Chop the leeks coarsely  and wash them in a colander to remove all dirt. Chop cleaned leeks finely in the food processor. Sauté the leeks in margarine or oil or whatever until wilted and sweet. Mix the leeks and spinach in the pan. Whisk the eggs with the rice milk and mustard to make a custard and add the vegetables, season with tamari and pepper. Pour half the filling into each crust and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-40 minutes or until the stop is firm and lightly browned. (My husband graciously removed the pies from the oven while I was out doing an errand with the baby.)

Oddly enough, my son, the former spinach fiend, was only interested in eating the crust of the pie. It was whole wheat crust, and he's a relatively skinny toddler, so no tears, but it's weird. I thought the filling was delicious, but he didn't try it so he didn't like it. He did eat a lot of salad, mainly the cucumbers, peas and oranges.

This Shabbat marked the first time my son enjoyed a cup of tea. His dad, who usually drinks coffee, was having herbal tea to nurse this cold that he can't seem to entirely kick. So when my little sweetie began to talk about "Tea! Tea!" his dad poured him a demitasse of this nice spice tea and diluted it with a little water to cool it off. After each sip of tea, my son smiled widely, that especially charming two-year-old smile.

We had only one guest, for Shabbat lunch, our good friend who finds the cooking "delicate." My husband was a bit under the weather and we couldn't handle more. Our conversations were deep and personal, mostly. We did talk about Indian food and cooking, as our friend has developed a sudden interest in Indian culture. If you want to recommend a book that is  not superficial on Indian culture--okay, I guess any book that covers all of Indian is going to be necessarily superficial. If you want to recommend a book that is not that superficial on Indian culture, please do.

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!