Indian Cooking

Saturday I wrote about my Bollywood dancing experience that inspired an Indian meal that evening.  I promised you the recipe, and I deliver.  It was taken from the last issue of Food & Wine magazine and adapted just ever so slightly.  Get all the recipe details from my other blog, Lookin' Good Sister.

Bollywood Dance

For a while now I've been wanting to learn Bollywood dance. When I got back from Hawaii in January, I got in touch with a local woman who does dance instruction on evenings and weekends and set something up. Today my friend Lauren and I went to our very first lesson, which took place in her home studio. We had a total blast. For an hour we learned basic moves, which require more coordination than I imagined, and then put it together in a set of four moves.

One interesting thing I learned is Bollywood dance moves are descriptive of the lyrics, so if the song says something about women, there are specific feminine moves that illustrate that word. It's sort of like sign language with a beat.

The thing I love the most? It's all about the hips.

I was so inspired by the dance session today that I came home this afternoon, turned Pandora to the Contemporary Bollywood station (sorry, Andrew - you are a wonderful man for letting me explore my passions), and made a delicious Indian-inspired dinner: chick peas in a spicy fragrant tomato gravy served with yogurt and naan. It was unbelievable. All my vegetarian friends need to know about this dish. I'll post the recipe in a few days.

Anyone else have any experience with Bollywood dance? Do you love it as much as I do??

Winner Winner Chili Dinner

 Yesterday our office held its second annual chili cook-off.

As contenders arrived at the start of the workday, they plugged in their respective chili-laden crock pots and simmered their concoctions all morning.

I participated, of course, with a three-meat, two-bean chili that had won last year's first prize: "the golden spoon of victory," which is nothing more than bragging rights.  I had to bring it back to see if it could hold its own.  There was much less trash-talking, and since I helped organize it this year, imagine my embarrassment when I counted the votes to reveal:

Yep, still a first place winner.  Don't get me wrong, I'm very proud of the accomplishment.  It was just sort of anti-climactic to announce my own win.  So I had Ken, our IT guy do it.

[booming announcer voice] BEHOLD! THE GOLDEN SPOON OF VICTORYYYYY!

Aaaaand I signed it again this year to commemorate my fantastic chili.

Here's the recipe with the latest tweaks:

Ingredients

1 lb bacon, diced
2 lbs beef chuck roast, cut into 1.5-inch cubes
2 lbs pork roast, cut into 1.5-inch cubes
1 cup mole sauce
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 Tbsp kosher salt
3 cups stock of your choice, divided
2 med sweet yellow onions, chopped
1 anaheim pepper, seeded and diced
5 garlic cloves, minced
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 cup chili powder
2 tsp cayenne pepper + more to taste
1 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
2 14-oz cans black beans, drained and rinsed
2 14-oz cans kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 Tbsp fish sauce
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

Directions

Cook bacon in large soup pot, and remove meat to a bowl, reserving bacon grease on the side.
Use small amounts of bacon grease to brown your meat (in batches so as not to crowd the pan) and dump them into your slow cooker with juices and all as you go.
Set the slow cooker on low, stir the mole, kosher salt, brown sugar, and 1-1/2 cups stock in with your meat and cook for 4 hrs.
Meanwhile, return the rest of the grease to your pot and cook your onion, anaheim pepper, and garlic until onion is translucent.
Add your ground spices and simmer a few more minutes to bring out their flavor.
Add the remaining 1-1/2 cups stock, tomatoes, cooked bacon, and 1 can of each kind of beans, and bring to a boil.
Using a hand/stick blender, puree everything in pot.  If you don't have a hand blender, wait for the chili to cool a little and do it in batches in your food processor.
add in your remaining beans, the fish sauce, and apple cider vinegar, stir and add meat after it has slow cooked for an appropriate amount of time.
Refrigerate over night.
The next day, reheat chili slowly, and taste before you tweak.

Serves an army.

Meatballs Galore.

source: Bon Appetite

I love sandwiches.  It's a deep, deep love.  I eat them whenever I can.  Recently, during a weekend getaway with some friends to Leavenworth, I was sucked into an issue of Bon Appetit magazine with a feature on meatballs.  This reminded me how delicious they are on sandwiches, and then I flipped the page to the pork meatball bahn mi.  Cue the heavenly choirs.  Sunday I went to the store and got all the fixins so I could make it ASAP.  It.  was.  amazing.  I modified the recipe a little and used asian quick-pickled cucumbers instead of the radish, and did a lime-sesame oil sriracha dressing instead of the mayo-based one.  I liked it so much, I ate it again for lunch the next day.

Tonight?  Another meatball extravaganza:

source : Bon Appetit

Galettes/Pies/Tarts

I've been obsessed with pies lately.  It happened when my talented baxtress friend Abby mentioned she hated making pies.  I happen to love baking pies and offered my services as an overflow option if she ever needed it.  I usually try not to do this because there are few things more annoying than someone trying to weasel her way into your culinary project.  In fact, I'm a firm believer in staying out of another cook's home kitchen entirely.  That being said, Abby is my PLP and I know she would feel comfortable saying, "Monica, stay the eff out of my biz," if she had to.  So I offered, and then stayed the eff out her biz, but I made pies anyway.  For myself.  Of course.

So Abby got pies back on my brain, but with a twist.  I'm usually an apple pie baker with a full top crust, but she got me thinking about galettes - rustic topless pies.  Pretty sexy, eh?  Indeed.  My first go was a mixed berry version, which Andrew still requests.  It was great.  I'm a big proponent of lemon in pies, so any pie I make will get the juice of at least 1/2 lemon.  It's just for some extra zing.  For me, a berry pie/tart with no hint of tart zing is a failure.  I hate failing.

Then, a couple weeks ago I got up at an ungodly early hour on a Sunday morning while spending the weekend at my friend Sabina's place in Gig Harbor.  I raided her kitchen for pie ingredients and threw together this:

Okay so it's not rustic, but it was delicious and simple to throw together - literally.  I put six eggs, some provolone, ham, zucchini, dill, and a shallot int a bowl, stirred it up, and threw it in a pie crust (which I half-baked ahead of time). We ate it like this:

While we ate, I had this in the oven:

This one is indeed a rustic pie, which just means I pay more attention to the way the fruit looks and forget the top crust altogether.  It was scrumptious.  We ate it like this:

The secret's in the crust.  I am fortunate enough to come from a long line of pie-baking women who have a tried and true crust.  I'm sure it dates back before Grandma Miller, but that's as far as I have ever bothered to ask.  That was four generations ago and out to the plains of Kansas, a generation before the Great Depression.  It's damn good crust and even if she didn't create the recipe, she gets a nod for keeping the pie tradition going, as does Gma Benton and Gma Shank, and especially my mama.

So I've been making these galettes since Memorial Day weekend and I just can't get enough.  It's a lazy way to make pie without compromising on any of the deliciousness or presentation.  Last night I made a recipe I saw on Smitten Kitchen for a zucchini ricotta galette with some of my own mods.  I plugged the recipe in HERE so I could calculate the nutrition info per serving too, because I like to do that.  We all loved last night's galette so much, I made it again this morning for lunch/dinner tonight, plus a peach one with lemon-scented ricotta.  My car was extremely fragrant.  Here they are in my back seat:

Happy July to you all!

Food.

I like to cook.  A lot.  Monday night I made one of the more delicious dinners I've had in a long time.  The pasta dish was inspired by a recipe I'd seen on Smitten Kitchen for asparagus, goat cheese and lemon pasta, but I simplified it for my own ingredients, using peas instead of asparagus, and leaving out the tarragon.  The peas were actually really nice in the dish because it offered a subtle sweetness rather than the subtle bitterness asparagus has.

The herbed cucumber salad was inspired by a dish I saw in my latest issue of Food & Wine Magazine.  I didn't actually go look at the recipe; I just gawked at the picture with its chunks of cucumber tossed in fresh herbs, and thought, I could do that.  I just peeled a hothouse cucumber, sliced it, and tossed it in the Splendid Table's Basic Vinaigrette, and snipped some fresh dill and fresh mint I had on hand.  I lightly salted and peppered it before serving.  It was fresh and delicious.

It is the pork chop I'm most proud of.  Safeway was having a 30% off special on thin-cut pork chops, so I snagged a package of three.  I rinsed the chops under cold water, patted them dry, let them sit at room temp for about 30 minutes and rubbed them with Montreal steak seasoning before putting them on a pan to sear them.  Andrew always gives me a face when I suggest pork, probably because of a bad past experience he had with over-cooked dry pork.  One bad experience and he tends to write off an entire food.  Same thing happened with an over-garlicy lamb burger (not mine), but I've done lamb he said was delicious, so I take his protests with a grain of salt and as a challenge to prove there's a delicious way to prepare all food, and it doesn't have to be masked in butter and cheese.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the proper way to cook meat, and I think I've got it down: pat it dry, rub it with seasoning, place on medium-high heat and don't touch it until it's ready to flip.  It's also a cardinal sin to stab your meat with a fork in order to pick it up and flip it - I got myself some silicone-coated tongs to turn meat, and they work great.  Above all, don't over-cook it!  I allowed the meat to rest for a couple minutes after taking it off the heat and it ended up being super flavorful and juicy.  Andrew said a couple times how delicious it was.  See, Andrew?  Pork is delicious if you do it right.

The best part?  There were leftovers, and I get to have them for lunch today.  Yessssss.

[update: the pasta does not reheat well, but it tastes great cold!]

Simple Suppers

Please excuse the cell phone upload.  My camera battery was dead and I wanted to share this with you.

Monday night marked our four year anniversary.  It was the end of a long rainy weekend and we had been celebrating for three days, so we wanted something simple and fresh to cap off the day we'd spent at Green Lake.  A bowl of garlicy salty steamed clams seemed just the thing.  We decided to forgo the wine and give our livers a break, but I did include a little dry white wine in the broth of my clams.  Paired with a bright herby green salad and some fresh baked bread, it was the ideal light feast.  I have to do this more often.

Burgers, Round Two

Last night was raid-the-fridge night again.  I had the GF buns in the freezer and some left over grilled chicken cubes from pizza night.  I made those into patties and topped them with some pesto, fresh basil leaves, and low fat mozzarella.  The salad fixins were tossed in a light bright red wine vinaigrette.  In Andrew's words, they were damn good.  We washed it all down with a vodka lemon fizz (vodka, triple sec, club soda, lemon squeeze).  They were little guys, but super duper filling.

Gluten-Free Salmon Burgers

Remember in my last post I mentioned I did some baking on Sunday?  You didn't think I'd miss a chance to tell you in detail how pleasantly and deliciously surprised I was with the results, did you?  Of course not.  This story gets its very own post.

So it all started on Thursday with a fantastic sunny evening that turned into a grill night with two of our good friends.  I did sides and a dessert, Abby brought the salmon, and Alex came over with great wine and the most amazing chocolate macaroon that's ever passed my lips.  We feasted.

There was quite a bit of salmon left over, but it was on the dry side so it needed some attention before it could be reserved.  Salmon burgers were a perfect solution.  I've been craving a good burger lately anyway.

Most of you know I'm trying to be gluten-free these days, but I relapse all the time because bread is so delicious, and it's tough to find tasty alternatives.  Also, it's super inconvenient.  Sometimes it just makes more sense to go with the flow and suffer the consequences.  Not to mention, bunless burgers suck.

This brings me to the baking portion of this post.  I decided yesterday to take matters into my own hands and make some gluten-free buns for future summer grilling opportunities.  I have had a package of Bob's Red Mill gluten-free bread mix in my arsenal for a couple months.  It was time to bust it out.  I was unsure about the results because BRM is really heavy on the garbanzo bean flour, a flavor I really don't like.  However, the recipe called for quite a bit of eggs (or egg replacer), so even though the dough tasted grassy and bitter, the end result was actually really delicious.  I also kneaded in some extra sweet sorghum flour, which may or may not have had any effect at all.  Just thought I'd mention it.  here's what they looked like out of the oven:

They were so light and delicious, they were almost biscuity.  I was darn impressed, because I did not have high expectations for these bad boys.

While those were baking (rather than the recommended 60 min for the loaf, I did 10 min uncovered + 10 min covered with foil for the buns), I whipped up the salmon cakes.  My friend Kori had given me a package of gluten-free breadcrumbs, left over from her gluten-free cooking experiment, so I used that as well as an egg, which gave the salmon the right amount of moisture and texture.  It was already flavored from its first life as grilled salmon fillet, so I just added a little kosher salt and cooked them on the skillet in a little olive oil.

I topped them with some pesto, balsamic-caramelized red onions, and goat cheese.  My bf got dubliner cheese on his instead of goat cheese.  They were phenomenal.  I was halfway through wolfing my burger down when I realized I'd probably want to tell you about them.  Here's the pic I snapped with my phone:

As you can see, I'd been chowing pretty good by this point.  So amazing.  The best part?  It was done entirely with leftovers and condiments I already had in the fridge.  Boo-yow!

Dear Deb of Smitten Kitchen, I Love You.

Now I want to talk about food. I'm thinking about all of the delicious things I want to make but can't because they require an oven or a stove.

I made the poor decision of turning on my oven last night. I had my heart set on pizza, because I'd made some pizza dough out of Cooking Light July and nothing else would do. MISTAAAAAAAAKE! The pizza itself was delicious, but what a dumb idea to preheat my oven to 500 and bake a pizza! Who does that when it's 92 in the SHADE? Apparently, I do.

I think we'll be grilling out today, if we can stand that heat outside. I have a million hot dog buns left over from my birthday BBQ, so that seems the right way to go. But what I reeeeeeeally want to do is browse Smitten Kitchen and choose a recipe from her stock to try. For those of you who don't know, Deb of SK is the best food blogger out there. She is the Barefoot Contessa of the blog world: simple, delicious recipes made accessible to cooks of all levels. When I didn't know what to do with my remaining half a roasted chicken, I looked to Deb for a chicken and dumplings recipe that ended up being one of the most delicious meals I've ever eaten (I improvised a little and left out the tarragon because that's what I do). She is a constant source of culinary inspiration to me. Oh, hell; I'm going to browse her recipes anyway and daydream.