Sabbath Meals

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 2/25 and 2/26/04

I think my meals are getting increasingly boring. What was the factor that kept things experimental and edgy for so long? Oh yeah, my husband used to cook more! He always wanted to make Indian food. Hey I remember before I even met him, I used to make crazily elaborate ethnic menus from Sundays at Moosewood and other cookbooks. Now it feels like I have nothing worth blogging about, even though the food is still pretty tasty.

This week we had a potluck on Friday night and I made a dish from the Millenium Cookbook called Tamale Torte with Black Bean Chili. I had made it once before, but didn't have the right kind of corn meal. The recipe calls for Masa Harina, so I bought a whole huge bag of it. (Supposedly it is a simple matter to learn to make one's own corn tortillas. Ah yes, Ashkenazi Jewish women from the midwestern United States can learn to slap together tortillas in a good 15-20 minutes. Can you spell cultural appropriation, I knew you could.) Anyway I made the torte recalling the famous MFK Fisher story in The Gastronomical Me in which a tamale pie made her cry for several hours.

...the tamale pie was very good indeed. It was probably one of the best that has ever been made, anywhere in the world where anyone would bother to make one, and I hope it was the only one I shall ever eat. Of course it was not the concoction itself that broke my spiritual back. I know that well. But a little while after I finished ieating it (I should say well within the four-hour period of a more or less normal digestion), I began to cry. It was the first time Al had even seen a tear in either of my eyes. Now there were thousands. They fell down my cheeks without a sound or a sign from me...

I thought "Ah, that's why they called it a torte, not a pie." My friend who is vegan who was eating at the potluck was delighted by the torte--both by its lack of dairy products and by its taste.

But I was nevertheless quite sick to my stomach for the next day. I think not from the torte, maybe something I caught from the baby who was sick last week. But even so, I don't think I can eat any of the leftover torte. I barely ate anything from the whole menu of stand-bys that I made for Saturday lunch:

Challah
Lentil Soup with a Hint of Fruit from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven
Spinach salad with organic blood oranges and cucumbers
Broccoli, Carrot and Cauliflower Kugel with wheat germ crust
Baked tempeh in sesame-ginger marinade

I was trying to create a vegetarian menu that is high in accessible iron. The lentil soup is made with dried apricots. I did it in the crockpot so it was no work at all. I had some this evening and it is pretty good.

I made the kugel by combining three or four recipes. (Should there be a word for that?) It was mayonaise + 3 eggs+6 tablespoons of flour+baking powder to bind together the grated raw carrot and the cooked, mashed up cauliflower and broccoli, plus tamari and black pepper, plus the wheat germ.

The most exciting (and not nauseating) thing on the menu was the salad, which was a reflection of my husband's procurement abilities.

I'm going to scheme and plot this week and I'll let you know if I come up with anything more exciting.

Balabusta's Shabbat meals 2/18 and 2/19/04

This past Wednesday was my husband's birthday. I wanted to make a cake, but I knew that he was going to be out tutoring bar mitzvah students in the evening, so we instead invited people to our house for Shabbat lunch. Our friends decided to make us lunch. (We almost never go out for Shabbat meals because of our zealous fanaticism about our son's sleep.) So I made Friday night dinner and our friend D. made most Saturday lunch. I contributed the cake, the challah and some soup.

For Friday night I made:

baked tofu (this was a sesame ginger one, with black sesame seeds)
roasted cauliflower with shallots
noodle and spinach kugel
Peter Reinhart's challah recipe (plus 3 tablepoons of sugar!)

Are you noticing that I keep making the same food? I am starting to think that blogging is not good for my creativity. The food was great though.

I succeeded with the Reinhart all-white-flour challah again, big time. I liked my braids, I got them fatter in the middle and tapered on the ends. There was none left for making French toast. Our family ate the first loaf and the Saturday lunch guests ate up the second.

The kugel I basically invented on the spot, it was very eggy. I had made another recipe (for the cake, below) that called for three egg whites, and the Reinhart challah calls for brushing the tops of the challah with two beaten whites. Of course you never use up the white on the challah, but there is still some left. So I made the kugel with one whole egg, three yolks and what was left of the egg white from the challah--a LOT of egg. I also used a 1lb. package of skinny egg noodles, a 10 oz. package of frozen organic spinach, a chopped carmelized onion, tamari, black pepper, and wheat germ for the top. It was, unsurprisingly, very good, being so rich.

For lunch, D. made and carted to our house in a shopping cart:

Spinach salad with "smashed" radishes (marinated and sooooo delicious)
puréed squash with ginger, molasses and roasted garlic
strata with tofu, peppers, spinach and some other stuff
roasted eggplant spread
baked bananas in chai

I love D.'s salads, they are always so creative and wonderful. He is a great cook. Unfortunately, the strata--a kind of bread pudding-- got burnt, but fortunately, it tasted good anyway. The bananas were not successful--he used red bananas and therefore couldn't tell that they were quite underripe. They were as astringent as unripe persimmons. Let that be a lesson to us all!

I made a soup in the crockpot out of black beans, french lentils, sundried tomatoes, carmelized onion, and a small piece of chipotle pepper with some adobo sauce. I also put a piece of kombu (that's kelp) and a dried Chinese mushroom in the water to help give the soup some  umami flavor. I know my husband doesn't like mushrooms so I fished it out. I though it was an exceptionally good soup, but it wasn't salty enough.

I also made a birthday cake from a recipe in the My Most Favorite Dessert Company cookbook by Doris Schechter. It was fun to make the cake with my electric mixer--in the past I have mainly made cakes by hand, but I have been using the mixer more often lately to make baking easier with my toddler guy. The best part was making an Italian meringue. I set up the eggwhites, started making the sugar syrup--as soon as the syrup was hot, turned on the mixer--and when the syrup was 150 degrees, poured it into the whirling eggwhites. I got meringue everywhere, but it was totally interesting and fun. As enjoyable as it was to make, the cake was disappointing. I saw that Mrs. Schechter usually tells the reader to pour orange syrup over the cake before icing it, but I didn't take the extra step, and the cake was somewhat dry. The icing, which looked beautiful, tasted strongly of the Earth Balance shortening I used to make it. The chocolate, vanilla and sugar in it were not sufficient to drown out the echo of insipid shortening taste, even though I used the wonderful Green and Black's Maya Gold chocolate. It was good cake, just not as good as I had hoped.

I actually prefer the vegan chocolate ganache in the Millenium restaurant cookbook, which is just a ton of chocolate melted into soymilk. Soymilk ganache has the best flavor of any frosting, but it's also really melty so you can't frost the cake in advance. Another good non-dairy frosting I have made was in Recipes from an Ecological Kitchen, it was carob, maple syrup and almond butter, whirled in the food processor. It made a glossy and beautiful icing, but was nearly as messy as the gobs of meringue I had to get off of everything.

In the end there were nine adults around the table, three of whom came for dessert only. Part of our conversation was about dreams. It was pleasant and relaxed and I felt like some people got to know each other better.

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. 

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.