I just got done making Cauliflower-Potato Mash from "The Garden of Eating." Holy cow, but it's tasty. Although I'm a fan of cauliflower, I was the teensiest bit skeptical of the recipe, but I think even my niece and nephew would eat it. I didn't have any nutmeg handy, so I substituted allspice instead, which worked wonderfully.

The recipe made 4.5 cups of mash, so that makes 163 calories per 1 cup serving. That's perfectly fine for a comfort food dish.

Hm. Now I've opened up a can of coconut milk and only used 1/4 of it. That leads me to my next entry: improvised curried lentils.

Last night I made the basic pinto bean recipe from p. 137 of “Special Mexican Dishes.” Turned out well. It's simple but time consuming. Next time I'll use half the amount of bacon grease, and maybe throw in some actual chopped bacon, fried up crisp. The beans tasted even better the next morning.

I made gallina en pipián again last night. I didn't have quite enough pumpkin seeds, so I increased the proportion of peanuts. I'm not all that fond of peanuts, but I'm growing fonder of this recipe. I may try the recipe once more in a large batch to prepare for making it for the family at Christmas.

I've been wanting to add dark greens to my diet since they are so healthy. I tried to use some recipes from "The Garden of Eating…" but I didn't much care for them. The book suggested that they were almost indigestible without cooking. Last night I decided to try them just raw. I liked 'em. They had a slightly bitter taste, which is something I rather like these days. Chopped up in a bowl with some flax seed oil and some balsamic vinegar, it was pretty good. Now I'll have to try kale the same way.

Tonight I made for the first time "Cowboy Frijoles" from p. 233 of "366 Ways…" Not bad at all, although to be honest I substituted like crazy. I didn't have any ancho chiles, so I threw in two chipotles and one ordinary dried red chile. I didn't have cider vinegar, so I substituted red wine vinegar. I didn't have honey, so I substituted agave nectar.

The other thing I did differently was to soak the beans in advance for an entire day, the way Rachel Matesz advises. I don't know if that made any difference or not. We'll see over the next day or two as I eat them.

October 15, 2008

Yup, the beans are tasty. It's a good recipe. It uses no fat, and beans without fat or lard definitely are not quite the same as with.

This evening I made "curried spinach with chickpeas" from p. 212 of "366 ways…" Tasty. Next time I'll probably spice it up a bit more.

I made this recipe from p. 210 of “366 delicious ways to cook rice, beans, and grains.” I was very pleased with the result. Savory and mild, since I had left out the hot peppers since I was cooking for someone else who had a gentle palate. It's worth making again.

A week or two ago I was at the farmers market and spotted a vegetable I had never seen before; turns out that it's called Serpent of Sicily. I bought one on the spot out of culinary curiosity. The woman at the booth was kind enough to hand out a printed recipe for cooking the vegetable, which today I made. The recipe is simplicity itself, and it was home-cooked tasty.

Procedure

1. Cook one onion in a small amount of water. Use a red onion and the broth turns out a rose color.
2. Skin the gourd and cut into slices.
3. Once the onion i scooked, add the gourd, one chopped tomato, and a touch of salt.
4. Cover and cook
5. Serve with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, crunchy bread, and shaved baked ricotta,

The longer it cooks, the richer the flavor.

I think the one I bought was just a bit too big: parts of it were getting woody, and some of the seeds were too tough to chew. Next time I won't buy one longer than two feet or thicker than two inches.

Today I cooked my first recipe with kombu. Kombu is the Japanese name of a sea vegetable mentioned in the recipe I wanted to make. I wasn't confident that I could find it. Oh, sure, there are Asian stores here in Phoenix, but have you ever been in an Asian store??? All sorts of things are labeled in Thai, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and I'm a total gringo who has never studied an Asian language. So before I shopped I went to Wikipedia and looked up kombu. Down the road there is a store that seems to be run by Korean people, so I wanted, among other things, to figure out that Korean characters for whatever the Korean equivalent to kombu was.

Go figure, right off the bat the Wikipedia article mentions that the Korean equivalent of kombu is dashima. I copied down the Korean characters and went to the store. In the seaweed section I found packages that seemed to have something sort of like the Korean characters, but I wasn't entirely confident. Up the row walked an Asian couple. The man approached first, so I asked him about kombu/dashima. He looked confused and said to ask his wife. Fortunately she had a much thicker accent and knew exactly what I was talking about. “Oh, yes, this is dashima. Are you making soup?” I said 'yes,' although chile is not exactly soup, but I had read that kombu's main purpose in Japanese cooking was for soup base. Then she pointed out the ugliest package of dashima I could imagine. “This looks like good dashima.” Yuck! But of course I'm not stupid enough to think that things that look like good pre-packaged assinine Yankee products necessarily taste the best, so I bought what she pointed out. (Picture attached.) It's so nice when complete strangers are so nice to you, even though there spouses are monolingual gringo-equivalents.