Warm Savory Pumpkin Scone

Recipe for " A warm pumpkin scone for a winter's afternoon" from Nigel Slater's "Tender: A cook and his vegetable patch". This is a savory scone; there is no sugar in it.

Mathura Palak (Spinach and Mustard Seeds Sauce)

This recipe is "Cheese Cubes with Spinach and Mustard Seeds (Mathura Palak Paneer)" from "660 Curries" by Raghavan Iyer, except that I left out the paneer and used sun dried tomatoes that had been soaked in some water instead of cherry tomatoes, since I didn't have either around.

Buckwheat Crepes (Galettes)

Recipe for buckwheat crepes from David Lebovitz, though he says that buckwheat crepes actually aren't called crepes in France, they are called galettes. I left out the sugar and used 1 tsp salt, since I wanted to make savory crepes.

I stuffed the crepes with the leftover vegetable korma:


The second time I made this, I filled the crepes with:

• Gruyere cheese, sautéed mushrooms, and a small piece of ham. The mushrooms should be thinly minced; thickly sliced mushrooms make the crepe harder to eat. The ham should only be a small bit of a deli cut; using the whole deli cut is too much. Gruyere cheese was great with this combination of ingredients!
• Gruyere cheese and a sunny side up egg. The white of the egg should be spread out to the edges of the crepe with a fork or table knife to help it cook faster. Otherwise it will take to long for the whites to solidify.
• Nutella and strawberries

Nine-Jeweled Medley with a Cashew-Raisin Sauce (Navratan Korma)

I used the recipe for "Nine-Jeweled Medley with a Cashew-Raisin Sauce (Navratan Korma)" From "660 Curries" by Raghavan Iyer, except I made a few changes. For starters, I didn't use nine jewels, instead I only used cauliflower, potatoes, yellow summer squash, and frozen peas. I blanched the cauliflower and potatoes separately until they were tender-firm (about 5-10 minutes). The recipe cooks the vegetables separately from the sauce, so you can include pretty much any assortment of vegetables that you like.

The sauce is sautéed first, and then blended. I didn't think my blender would be able to grind the spices, so I actually ground the cashew nuts, whole cloves, cardamon seeds, and bay leaf with a coffee grinder before sauteing them. I also added 1 minced Serrano pepper to the sauce for increased heat, and used a yellow onion instead of a red onion, and left out the cilantro. I also didn't include paneer since I didn't have any around. The sauce ended up sweeter then I expected from the onion and raisons; next time I might reduce the onion to cut down on the sweetness. The next day the sauce was even better since the sweetness had mellowed out, and the vegetables had time to absorb more sauce.

Recipe, with changes:
an assortment of vegetables (up to 9 types), about 1/4 cup each: cauliflower florets, fresh green beans, yard-long beans, bottle gourd squash, yellow summer squash, carrot, potato, bell pepper, frozen green peas (no need to thaw). All vegetables should be cut up into bite sized pieces
2 Tbsp Ghee
1 small red or yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup raw cashew nuts
1/4 cup golden raisins
1 tsp minced ginger
1 tsp minced garlic
1/4 tsp whole cloves
1/4 tsp cardamon seeds from green or white pods
1 or 2 fresh or dried bay leaves
1 serrano pepper, minced (optional: this will make the sauce extremely hot since there is already a lot of cayenne in it)
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 tsp garam masala
(optional) 4 oz paneer, cut into 1/2 inch pieces and pan-fried

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Blanch the vegetables in boiling water until they are tender firm. Cook the vegetables that take different amount of cooking time separately, or with staggered starting cooking times. Rinse with cold water or place in an ice bath to stop the cooking. You should be able to piece vegetables such as potatoes and cauliflower with a fork once they are cooked. Vegetables which cook in a short amount of time (about 5 minutes), such as frozen peas and yellow summer squash, don't need to be blanched, since they will be heated in the sauce. Reserve the cooking water for use in making the sauce.

Grind the cashews into a nut flower using a coffee grinder reserved for spices only. Also grind the cloves, cardamom seeds, and bay leaves.

Heat the ghee in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, cashews, raisins, ginger, garlic, cloves, cardamom seeds, bay leaves, and the serrano pepper (if using). Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion and nuts are browned and the raisins have swelled, 10-12 minutes. Pour in 1/2 cup of the reserved cooking water to deglaze the pan, and loosen any browned bits.

Transfer the onion blend, liquid and all, to a blender. Add the tomato paste, salt, cayenne, turmeric, garam masala, and 1/2 cup of the reserved cooking water. Puree, scraping the inside of the jar as needed, to make a thick reddish-brown sauce. Transfer the sauce back into the skillet. Pour in 1/2 cup of the reserved cooking water into the almost empty blender jar, and whir the blades to help wash out the sauce from the jar. Add the washings to the sauce pan. Add an additional 1/2 cup reserved water to the blender jar and repeat.

Bring the sauce up to a simmer, and fold in the fried paneer (if using), and the vegetables. Cover the pan and simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 5-8 minutes or until the vegetables are warmed through.

Serve with rice or naan.

Meatballs

Someone made me meatballs from Alice Waters "The Art of Simple Food"!

We ate these as 1) appetizers 2) in red sauce on pasta 3) on top of an arugula salad with vinaigrette, avocado, cheese, and hard boiled egg and 4) crumbled pieces of meatballs with cheese and a bit of tomato sauce inside of an omelet. The omelets were baby yellow, as they should be (otherwise if there is any browning, they are overcooked).

Valentine's Day

Mark Bittman's "No Knead Bread"



Provencal-Sytle Fish Soup from Alice Waters "The Art of Simple Food"


Rouille from Alice Waters "The Art of Simple Food"


"Date, Rum, and Pecan Ice Cream" from "The Perfect Scoop" by David Lebovitz

Gougères (Cheese Puffs)

Recipe from 101 Cookbooks. I like how the formed dough balls are freezable and can be put directly from the freezer into the oven so that you can have cheese puffs anytime, and don't have to cook the whole batch all at once.

If you lightly coat your hands with water, then the dough balls won't stick to your hands, and you can actually roll the balls between your palms to make them round. This helps them to stay rounder in the oven. You should smooth any peaks in the dough balls, since they might burn.

If you use Guinness beer, the milk and Guinness with curdle and you will have to use a fine mesh strainer to remove the milk solids from the liquids before you add flour.

Tomato Sauce

Recipe very roughly based off of "Tomato Sauce" in "The Silver Spoon".

1 can whole peeled San Marzano tomato from Italy (28 oz)
olive oil
a few cloves of garlic, smashed and peeled whole
salt

Heat a saute pan on medium with some olive oil. Empty entire contents of the tomato can into the saute pan. Add garlic cloves and a pinch of salt. Once the sauce is boiling, reduce heat to a simmer. Break up whole tomatoes into pieces. Simmer for about 30-45 minutes, stirring every so often.

You can also add basil if you like, and puree the sauce to make it smoother. Extra sauce can be frozen.

Here I added a dash of half and half and tossed some just cooked ravoli into the sauce.

Gingery Split Pea Soup with Toasted Coriander

Recipe from Melissa Clark's "Cook This Now". Her split pea soup has Indian inspired spices, sort of similar to a dal.

I made a few modifications. The first split pea soup that I ever liked was a spit pea and jalapeno--what can i say? I like spicy foods! This split pea soup also had a runny consistency, and it made me reconsider split pea soup since all the previous versions I had had were a grossly thick solid mass. I added a chopped serrano pepper to mine because "Super Natural Every Day" Heidi Swanson mentioned that Jalapenos are like a donkey kick, all fire, but serranos are fire and flavor. I also added some left over charcuterie, since I'm trying to use it up. I left out the celery and lemon since I don't have any around. And I left out the rosemary, since I didn't think it went with Indian Spices.

Can you believe that there is one pound of split peas in this soup? And from my quick search of the internet, using 1 pound of split peas appears to not be unusual.

Sunchoke Soup

My education in sunchokes continues--this time with sunchoke soup because Nigel Slater said that when sunchokes are blitzed into a soup, the soup ends up being creamy without the addition of cream. I was intrigued, so I tried it. He also says that bay leaves are a must in artichoke soup.

The recipe that follows was recreated from the following description in Slater's book "I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don't think it's necessary. The soup is velvety enough."

This is a soup that tastes good and different from the norm, but you find yourself only wanting to eat small portions of it. Next time I would use a leek to cut down on the sweetness (which is suggested in a different sunchoke soup in Slater's book) because my soup came out fairly sweet. In this picture, the soup is served with croutons, since I had some slate bread around that needed to be used up.

1 yellow onion, minced
about 1 pound sunchokes, scrubbed and coarsely chopped
1 pint good quality chicken stock
butter
1 or 2 bay leaves
salt
walnut oil for garnishing (optional)

Melt a pat of butter in a large pot on medium. When the butter foams, add the minced onion. Cook slowly until the onion becomes golden brown and just slightly caramelized (about 20 minutes).

Add sunchokes to the pot and saute for about 2 minutes. Add stock and bay leaves; if the stock does not full cover the sunchokes, then add water until the sunchokes are covered. Bring to a boil. Partially cover the soup, and simmer until the sunchokes soften (this should take 15-20 minutes, though mine took about 30).

Let cool slightly or add a small amount of cold water to cool the soup a little bit. Blitz the soup in a blender in batches. Return to the pot, and bring to a boil. Taste and add water (and rebring the soup to a boil) if the soup is too thick. Taste and salt, as necessary to the soup. Serve hot, garnished with walnut oil.

Double Coconut Granola

This time, I mostly followed Melissa Clark's recipe for "Double Coconut Granola" from "Cook This Now", except:

• I made a half batch. (Only because my oven is small.)
• Instead of just pecans, I use a mixture of pecans and almonds. Half the nuts are whole, and half chopped. If you use a rolling pin or kitchen hammer to crush the nuts, then the pecans and the almonds must be crushed separately, because the almonds are much harder then the pecans.
• I used twice the suggested amount of cinnamon.
• I used golden raisins, instead of dried cherries. And I bake the golden raisins with the rest of the granola, instead of adding the dried fruit after baking, as Clark suggests. I accidentally did this the first time I made this recipe, and found out that I prefer the raisins this way, since it condenses and caramelizes their sugars.
• Last time I made this recipe I used olive oil. This time I used virgin coconut oil, and added dried coconut, which is why it is a "double coconut" granola.