jinjurly

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 03:28:55 GMT

i have no idea what the name is for this pasta shape. but it is charmingly evocative of a bandaid, and i now wish i could find more.

an open letter to orrechiette:

dearest,
i'm sorry to break it to you, but you are no longer my pasta shape boyfriend. i hope we can still be friends, though. i like hanging out with you, and i still think you're nice.
sincerely,
allison.

Wed, 31 May 2006 03:07:48 GMT

so i really like glommy food. gluey things and comforting things, and soft starches.

mochi is right up my alley.

i prefer the savory stuff, the japanese type, grilled or toasted so it's crisp and brown on the outside, eaten with nori and soy or ponzu. it's fantastic, worth tracking down a big bag of hard, plastic rectangles of the stuff at the asian grocery. or the korean sort, discs vacuum sealed in a packet, dried hard or frozen fresh for dropping into the soup pot. or in chewy rice-stick form, cooked into main dishes.

when i was in japan, my friend freya told me a recipe, mochi layered in a deep dish alternating with cheese and spinach and microwaved til it went soft and rich. (i think about how good that would be a lot - but it isn't going to make me get a microwave.)

here all the natural foods stores have the grainassance version, all whole-meal and healthful, strange textured and more sticky, less elastic. unevenly puffing. i like to eat that kind fresh out of the oven, sticking cold chunks of butter in the hollows. but only the plain flavor, the others seem a bit outré. perhaps if the were just called something different: not-mochi.

the newest big asian grocer to the area, hua xing, is the place to go if you want all sorts of wonderful things, but they skew hard toward chinese fare - there aren't any bags of mochi in blocks. (and no instant sweet green milk tea mix, either, though that's probably for the best, what with the sugar-crash-deliciousness of it all.)

they do, however, have a nice, small selection of fresh japanese sweets in one cooler.

so i've been eating kinako mochi.

it's chewy and sticky and not too sweet and frances loves it too, we've been sharing. i've never made it, but i probably should - it isn't exactly complicated - a cup of mochiko (glutinous rice flour), a cup of water, a quarter cup (maybe less? that sounds like too much) of sugar, stirred together, put it a dish and sealed with plastic wrap, nuked for four minutes. cooled and cut in chunks and rolled in kinako (toasted soy flour).

i miss kushi dango. it's almost the same thing, but unsweetened soft mochi, skewered and dipped in sugared soy sauce and maybe run under the broiler. mmmmmm.

here is a song about kushi dango: だんご3兄弟

here is someone else's picture of kushi dango:

at least i'm grown up enough to reach the counters by myself.

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 18:08:00 GMT

making culinary strides on behalf of six year-olds everywhere.

today for breakfast i made peanut butter cream of wheat.

yeah, recipe: make cream of wheat, put it in a bowl, stir in a couple of generous spoonsful of natural peanut butter, pour in a random amount of honey, stir, eat. ASK MOM FOR HELP WITH THE STOVE ITS HOT.

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 15:15:04 GMT

no matter what they might tell you, buttery toast with hot cocoa mix on top is not an adequate substitute for chocolate cake.

it's sad but true.

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 16:08:49 GMT

i would really like some homemade buttermilk pancakes with real maple syrup for breakfast.

but i think i will actually have cornmeal mush with blackstrap molasses. it's sort of a cognate.

faking it.

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 17:00:47 GMT

so this morning we had bubble and squeak for breakfast.

kind of.

except that instead of cabbage, matt used cauliflower greens. and the leftover mashed potatoes he used were actually leftover mashed boniatos that i made for dinner last night. and there was no bacon or whatever involved, and it was fried in butter. you know, because butter = better.

anyway. it was good.

as a sidebar? boniatos aren't hugely well suited to petending to be mashed potatoes, unless you generally use baking potaoes instead of the waxy sort. but a surfeit of butter and heavy cream covers a multitude of sins. so good. i miss mashed potatoes.

crazy cravey.

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:45:53 GMT

jam packed schedule lately is leading to very little as far as thoughts about food. except hey! mmmm jam.

but i've been having the oddest sharply focused cravings. tuesday at lunchtime i really really wanted chocolate ice cream and marlboro reds, simultaneously. last night when i got in from work i could have killed for a glass of red kool-aid. and right now? boy could i ever murder a slice of white toast.

not exactly food for thought, but foodish thoughts.

you know what odd combo really is terrific? bazooka gum and red stripe. at least i remember it being good.

the most important meal of the day.

Wed, 04 May 2005 00:47:23 GMT

you know how sometimes you are hungry and bored, so you make slightly odd food choices? well, apparently i was having a low protein moment saturday morning, because i decided that the very best course of action would be a peanut butter & fried egg sandwich.

and actually? it was pretty darned good. except that the hot egg made the peanut butter all melty and it dripped all over my fingers. but there you go. i guess it helped that i use regular plain peanut butter made of only peanuts. i think the slightly sweetened name brand stuff might have been a mistake in this situation.

imbb 14: orange

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 23:52:48 GMT

it's that time again, and as luck would have it, i was actually prepared this time! well, prepared probably isn't the right word for it, but that's ok.

it's edition 14 of is my blog burning, and the theme is orange. the color. i like plenty of orange things, and if i had known that the event was today before, well, today, i might have really gone to town on it - but as it is, i give you the best carrot dish evar. it was originally a recipe out of yamuna devi's lord krishna's cuisine, but we returned that to the library a long time ago, so i think it's safe to say that the 10+ times it's been made since are more in the spirit of the original recipe than anything else. one of these days we'll get the book out and actually copy out the recipe. in the meantime, this is close enough.

for two people (who like carrots), here's what you need to do. put a couple of tablespoons of ghee in a medium pan over medium heat. break the seeds out of around 6 cardamom pods and grind up the seeds a bit in a mortar & pestle. pour the cardamom into the pan along with around a pound of baby carrots (halve them if they're big, but don't bother if you can't be arsed.) bagged baby carrots are not only convenient for this, they are actually better. trust me. (or rather trust my husband, as this is actually the first time *i* made this. destroys some illusions, really, i always thought it would be more complicated - i guess now that i know, i can divorce him.) unless you have a line on some really fresh sweet little organic carrots, those might be good. throw in about 1/2 t crushed red pepper, 2 T apple juice (any fruit juice is ok, really), 1 T maple syrup, 1/2 t salt, and some ground pepper. splash in a little water if you like, and lid it. when the carrots are cooked, you're pretty much there, and it doesn't take very long - 5-10 minutes. then unlid it and boot up the heat a little to make things syrupy. throw in a little extra ghee at the end if you like (wasn't it gordon gekko who said "ghee is good"?) it's also best if at this point you throw in some chopped cilantro, but we don't have any in the house right now.

seriously, this is more than the sum of its parts. and you could probably get away with using veg oil rather than ghee, but i don't recommend it. i mean, it's pretty oily, in a good way, and who wants to think about eating veg oil?

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 12:59:47 GMT

the current influenza virus? really bad for writing about food. i mean, thankfully it had no tummy element, but a week later and i'm still all "food? eh." which isn't like me. thankfully i do have a bit of a backlog, but of course being bedridden for a week has also put me a bit behind in both schoolwork and workwork.

but i have a backlog, thankfully.

a couple of weeks ago a coworker was out for surgery, so i mailed him a batch of get well cookies. he likes mocha flavor stuff, i know (he also likes rum raisin ice cream, or so i hear, but that's not very mailable), and i have a great chocolate chocolate coffee flavor cookie recipe, so that's what i did. they aren't the prettiest things in the world, but they're good.

and i so need to post the recipe because it's one of the three that i've been making since i was a teen and have to email my mother to ask for again every single time. which gets embarrassing.

so. melt together 2 oz unsweetened chocolate with 2 T butter and 6 oz semisweet chocolate. in a little bowl, mix together 1/4 c flour, 1/4 t baking powder, and 1/8 t salt. in a large bowl, mix together 2 eggs, 3/4 c sugar, a tablespoon of instant espresso powder (don't scoff! it's great for cookies & buttercream & whatever - i like medaglia d'oro), and a teaspoon of vanilla. mix the cooled chocolate into the eggs mixture, then mix in the dry ingredients. dump in 6 oz of chocoalte chips and 2 1/4 c walnut pieces. put cookie-size globs on a foil lined baking sheet and bake 10-12 min at 350. be very careful not to burn them. let cool at room temp. they're great fresh when the chips inside are still melty, but also great when the chips are solid. mmmmmm.

shf 5

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:59:22 GMT

time again for sugar high friday - with puff pastry this time!

i was pretty excited about this one, i rarely have occasion to use puff pastry, though i love sweets made with it. and i was excited to have an excuse to actually make the pastry! i've never been able to justify that before! but my calendar got in the way.

a long day at the end of a long week, and the only option left was to run into kroger on the way home at 9 pm to buy a packet of frozen dough, and throw together something simple. i decided on palmiers because they didn't take anything i didn't have on hand, and, well, i like to eat them and have never made them before. i always assumed they were more complicated! turns out they are just pastry, brushed with beaten egg, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, rolled, sliced, and baked! i feel like a chump. and i see more fresh palmiers in my future.

i decided on a half batch, taking one of the two pastry sheets from the box (pepperidge farm, i think. i accidentally looked at the ingredients list. corn syrup, what a shock. :( )

even though i was using half the amount of dough, i decided to roll the dough out to full size (12"x16"), and use a full batch worth of sugar (1/2 c + 1 1/2 t cinnamon). it seemed like a good idea at the time. the dough should really have rolled out to 1/4" thick, but i got it thinner than 1/8".

that meant more folds though! which was a good thing, as look at what high design pomo coolness i wound up with!

then i cooked them (400, about 20 minutes) and screwed it all up, so no photos. they were still good, and i've learned from my mistakes (one mistake was too much filling - it got messy.) and damn they were good with my coffee this morning.

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:58:27 GMT

now before anyone starts in on me about it, yes, i have already heard plenty of stories about ladies from india laughing at non-indian people cooking indian food who make paneer from scratch. it hasn't happened to me, maybe i know nicer ladies, who knows.

but! making paneer from scratch is almost easier than going to the store and buying it! and it is, obviously, super duper fresher when you make it two hours before eating it. i admit that it doesn't get you out of going to the store, though, unless you live on a dairy farm of some description. also, it's fun due to curdling milk on purpose, because when else are you going to do that?

you need about a half gallon of milk to make enough paneer for two dishes (unless you're just making paneer sandwiches - then you are on your own, portion-wise, because i haven't actually done that yet), and a lemon. well, half a lemon. or you can use vinegar, particularly if you are on a dairy farm and can't be arsed to go to the store for citrus.

put the milk in a big pot and turn up the heat, because you need it at a rolling boil.

then change your mind and put it in a bigger pot because, well, you know how milk tends to overboil? you get the picture.

when it's at a rolling boil, stir in about half a lemon worth of juice, and get it off the heat. it will separate pretty much immediately into curds and whey.

then strain the milk through cheesecloth so that you wind up with a bundle of curds. the whey is good for the garden, or so i hear. also you can use it for some cooking things.

rinse the curds well in cold water to get rid of the coagulant and its flavor.

then bundle it up

and squeeze it out.

then set it on a board to drain and set a weight on it for at least an hour, though longer is good. tada! it's paneer!

bonus: we were at local indian restaurant temptations a while ago, and an indian movie star/actor/director was there! it was all very exciting, he had to have his picture taken with everyone forever, then he sat at the table next to ours. i was too shy to take a picture of him, so i took a picture of the after dinner sweet at our table instead, with my cameraphone.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:03:22 GMT

i just made matt celebrate setsubun with me, despite the fact that:
a) we're not japanese
b) we're not in japan
c) setsubun was a while ago

oni wa soto! fuku wa uchi! throwing beans is fun!

anyway, we had to do it because apparently tomorrow is pancake day. and paczki day. so it's important to kick out the bellyache demons before those events.

not that i'm likely to be able to get paczki at this point. which is probably for the best.

writing about it two months later.

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 14:40:49 GMT

for christmas i got a box of pears from a company i deal with. last year they sent a tin of candied pecans. that's my total history of corporate swag, right there. i suspect that the pears mean i've been upgraded in some database somewhere.

corporate food gifts are very odd. i guess it helps that they are so eminently redistributable, if, for example, you happen to hate pecans or pears.

anyway, this one came in a crate of 12 from harry & david. can't link to them now, the variety i got is out of season and thus not on the site. they really were fantastic.

the box came with instructions on how to eat the fruit - but it didn't really work. they were so juicy they were sloppy, and the skins were so thick and slightly bitter that you didn't want to eat them. they suggested cutting the fruit in half and eating the flesh with a spoon, which seemed a little contrived. i tried it anyway, but my spoon kept tearing through. so i wound up wedging them and sucking the flesh away from the skin. bizarre.

the last one never got eaten. like so many other last things, it never seemed to be the right time.

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 03:23:42 GMT

boy, you'd really never know that one of my resolutions this year is to do more cooking. though actually i am, but apparently i don't have time left afterwards to post about it. though i have taken pictures of lots of things, so perhaps i'll remember to do so at some point.

well, it's been cold, so although matt continues on his indian food making kick, i felt like making something a bit stodgier. also i had tofu and mushrooms in the fridge.

so tofu ricotta mushroom spinach pie! a recipe adapted from this book. well, the first edition.

anyway, it's an ok book, but i have to admit that in the twelve or thirteen years i've owned it, i've only made three or four things out of it, they've all been good, i'm not sure why that is.

anyway, here's the gist. make a pie crust and cook some sliced up mushrooms (3/4 #, button or whatever) with some onions and garlic and salt and pepper and whatever herb type things sound good. I'm a fan of thyme in this situation. cook them until they're pretty dry.
cook some spinach too, about 3/4 # as well, and drain it. mix up a cup of ricotta with a bit less than half a pound of tofu (crumbled up), and a couple of eggs. it would be just as good (possibly better) with 2 c of ricotta and no tofu, but whatever. i love tofu, but there's not much point to it completely hidden away like that. i mean except yes it's healthful. make a roux with 2 T butter and 2T flour and turn it into a sauce with a cup and a quarter of milk and a pinch of nutmeg and a splash of sherry.

assemble - pie dough, mushrooms, spinach, then ricotta mixture. then the sauce over the top and then toasted pecans and some parmesan. then baked about 20 minutes at 350. let it sit for a bit or it's a mess. it's good, but i think if i make it again, i might make the ricotta part a little more interesting.

my five favorites: sandwiches.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:30:23 GMT

right off, i have to say that i have a particular love for food that requires assembly and interaction. particularly things that can't really be put together too far in advance, like burritos (well, the way i make them) or moo-shi or things that require dipping. you get the gist. sandwiches aren't entirely in that family, but they are better that way, mostly, and they also are something else i love - a food wrapped in another food. like onigiri or pierogis or pasties. and you can eat all of the above with your hands! (though with pierogis, you may get some funny looks.) which is fun. i rest my case.

sandwiches, though, are all too often part of a packed lunch. not to put that down, they're still good - but it takes part of the fun out of it all. or at least part of the spontaneity. not that i usually venture far from familiar territory, at least with cold sandwiches.

my five favorites:

- peanut butter & homemade roasted chili paste.
i prefer the nothing-in-it-but-peanuts-and-maybe-salt type for pb. and whatever kind of bread happens to be around. a slather of one on one slice, the other on the other, slap 'em together. belive me, it's good. i'm on my third right this minute for lunch!

- egg salad.
big drawback? takes too much planning. hardboil the eggs, shell them, chop them, mix them with mayo (mixing eggs with other eggs always strikes me ironic at that point), throw in a little dijon or whole grain mustard, salt & pepper. if you've got them, some chopped scallion. or fresh parsley. the other drawback? i am notoriously stingy with the mayo, so the egg salad tends to fall out of the sandwich as i'm eating it. whatever bread is on hand - there's less salad loss with a soft bread, like challah, but it's great with rye or pumpernickel.

- cream cheese and orange marmalade.
i don't keep marmalade on hand. or cream cheese. because it's just too good. best with pretty bland bread.

- cream cheese and onion.
mmmmmm the other side of the cream cheese coin! big juicy slices of sweet onion embedded in a thick layer of cc. best with non-bland bread. good on toast.

- peanut butter & banana.
thick slices of banana and lots of peanut butter. it all stays together best if you put the pb on both slices of bread. whatever bread happens to be around. also good on toast. inevitable messy banana slice loss.

also: i am philosophically opposed to butter on sandwiches. unless it's some sort of butter flavored sandwich. but this isn't backed by any sort of moral stand, and i seem to have married a sandwich butterer. i just think it tastes funny.

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 16:45:13 GMT

i kept forgetting to post about it, until now when it has disappeared once more from the stores, but has silk nog been available in half gallons before? i don't think i drank any more this year than i have in years past (about a gallon all told, spread over the holiday season), but seeing it in big cartons made me feel like i should buy it all up and take a bath in it or something! which would have been both cold and unpleasantly sticky. but man i love silk nog. i also love egg nog, but i feel like i need an occasion to justify it, as it's really more of a meal than a beverage.

and i thought this was funny, because i would totally sign up for that lecture. well, both of them might be helpful:

sugar high friday 4

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:53:18 GMT

nuts.

it's sugar high friday once again!

my favorite nut, for cooking or eating, is the pecan. i was well into adulthood before i realized that walnuts weren't nasty at all, and often i find i am so used to substituting pecans in sweets that i forget that recipes originally called for walnuts. which is a shame, because recipes that call for walnuts are often best with walnuts in them. but that's all neither here nor there, as the two things i made for this particular event are, indeed, meant to be made with pecans, and would actually not be that great with walnuts in them.

onwards. apparently pecans are pretty hard to get in the uk, so this year my mother in law actually requested a batch of homemade sugary pecan thingies for christmas. of course, i failed to get round to it in a timely manner, and they are only now ready to be mailed. but they're worth it. they taste buttery and are hard to not eat up.

you need a pound of pecan halves to start. a bigger batch won't fit in a pan, so i wouldn't try to double it. heat the oven to 250 and oil a jelly roll pan or a cookie sheet that has sides (i'm 80% sure that "cookie sheet with sides" is a euphemism for jelly roll pan, but whatever.) get a big bowl and crack an egg into it and add about a tablespoon of water. beat beat beat it until it's frothy and no longer stringy in that creepy eggy way. dump in a cup of white sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of salt. mix that all up well and dump in the pecans.

mix that up well, too. it takes a little patience to get the pecans all nicely coated. then spread them out in a single layer (or as close to it as you can reasonably get) in your pan and chuck em into the oven. after 15 minutes, pull the pan out and stir to turn all of the pecans over (more or less.) my preferred method is to scrape them all into the middle of the pan, then sort of flip the pile and spread them out again.

then back into the oven. 15 minutes more, and flip them all again. then 15 minutes more, and flip them all again. my mother says this is important, otherwise you will wind up with lots of globs of sugar unattached to nuts. i sort of trust that she knows this from experience, so you should trust her too.

once the pecans have cooked for all 4 15 minute stretches and been stirred all 3 times, they are done! let them cool a little bit on the pan, as burns from hot sugar in your mouth are not fun.

once they are totally cool, they should go into something more or less airtight. a pound fits into a small cookie tin pretty nicely, but you may want to line it with plastic wrap or wax paper first. cleanup is scary looking, but pretty easy, as the sugar mixture sticks, but hot water takes it off fast.

so i made pecans because i had to. but this event was a great excuse to make the best oatmeal cookies ever and eat them all myself. well, i did take about half of them to a knitting event, but still.

the recipe is from one of the silver palate cookbooks, and makes buying a copy completely worthwhile. well, that was what i told myself when i bought it years ago.

these have raisins, dates, and pecans in them. the important thing if you really want them to be wothwhile is to buy whole pitted dates, not those weird little conglomerations of date bits and oat flour. i get mine at the pound store. you want them to be nice and mushy, not all hard and dried up. you will notice the difference when you cut them up, seriously. the dry nasty ones are hard as little sugary rocks, but the fresh ones have a sticky jelly candy consistency.

see? the one on the left is fine to just eat out of hand, but don't put it in your cookies if you can help it!

so you need to slice or chop up (i like the way the slices look) 3/4 of a cup of dates. that's not really very many, don't worry. you also need 3/4 cup of raisins and 1 and a half cups of slightly broken pecans. i just break the halves in two or three pieces with my fingers instead of chopping them - these cookies are chunky, and bigger bits are better.

ok. now for the cookie part of the cookies. cream together a cup of butter and 1 and a half cups of dark brown sugar. throw in 3 T of honey (basic regular old clover honey from the supermarket) and beat in two eggs.

then mix up 1.5 c of flour, 1 T cinnamon, and 1 t salt. dump it into the wet mix, blend.

now comes the part that uses muscles. i hope you've been doing all of this in a big bowl, because otherwise you are going to wind up with stuff on the floor. also, everything up to now could have been done very quickly in your stand mixer, if you weren't too lazy to get it out of the cupboard like me...but stop using it now! it will break everything (especially the oats, but also the pecans) up too much, and instead of charming, lumpy, delicious cookies, you will have a sort of concrete mush.

so. pour 4 cups of old fashioned rolled oats (recipes always say not to use instant rolled oats, but i don't think you would die or anything if you did. your cookies might be slightly odd though. i've never tried it.) into the bowl with the cookie dough stuff. then dump in the pecans, dates, and raisins. then mix mix mix and mix some more. the recipe actually claims these cookies are healthy, but i think the only really healthy thing about them is the benefit to your arm muscles.

seriously, you are going to be stirring for a while. but it's worth it! while you are stirring, take a break and turn on the oven. 375. also get out your cookie sheets and line them with foil if you want. they don't really need to be oiled. once the cookie mix is really blended, get a spoon and scoop up glops that are about 2" around. you can shape them slighly with your other hand, and flatten the globs a little bit onto the cookie sheet. bake them about 15 minutes and let them cool slightly before you remove them to a rack to finish cooling.

and now, a showcase of my real kitchen skill! deciding to put things into containers that really aren't big enough.

i put the entire batch in the bowl! until matt asked if he could have one and foolishly removed the cookie from the very top, which was actually functioning as a keystone and holding many of its cookie brethren in place. then when i rebuilt the structure i couldn't get three of them to stay in the bowl, so i had to eat them.

little debbie.

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:59:08 GMT

View Poll: #411254

take my advice, though. steer clear of the double chocolate swiss cake rolls. sounds like a refreshing variant, is not even interestingly nasty.

best superhot condiment ever.

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 02:46:29 GMT

we've just finished our nye dinner, which was mostly produced by matt. but i sort of contributed! and one of my resolutions for the new year is to make time to cook a bit more often, despite my ever-shrinking free time. because it makes me happy and less tense and gives me nice things to think about.

so late last night, while i was off gallivanting around town at what turned out to be a mobile retirement party held in a borrowed city bus, matt was languishing at home with my favorite cookbook. and he made a terrific dinner tonight as a result, none of which i documented as i was too busy eating it.

but i made spicy onion relish, which is both delicious and damned near instant. and requires only about a minute of access to the stove, which was necessary as we really have yet to figure out how to both use the kitchen at once. i have a feeling we may never learn to do so.

so here goes. chop a medium onion, one that looks likely to yield a cup. throw it in a bowl (not a melty plastic bowl! important! can be made directly into a glass jar, though.) toss in about 1/2 t of salt. cut a large lemon in half and slice one half thin and chop it up relatively finely. yes, this includes all skin and pith! no, this does not include seeds. good luck. give the other half to matt, he will use it in some dal or something.

get a little frying pan. i use a beat up nonstick thing i found in the back of a cupboard in an old apartment. which is also where my second stew pot came from, but i didn't use that today. anyway. put about 1 and a half tablespoons of canola or veg oil in the little pan, and put it over hot heat until it is as hot as can be. while it is getting hot, put one teaspoon of cayenne and one teaspoon of paprika in a little dish so it is ready. when the oil is as hot as it will reasonably get, take it off the heat and dump in the cayenne and paprika. you need a heat-proof spatula, to stir it around a little. by the way, this pan does not go back on the heat, and in the seconds that it took to dump in the spices and mix them with the hot oil, you should also have been walking over the the table where the bowl of lemon and onion is. dump the hot oil mixture into the bowl, scraping the pan to get it all out. toss the hot pan in the sink, then stir up the bowl contents. then put in 1/2 teaspoon of chaat. stir again, and it's done! best if it sits 10-15 minutes, but if you hold it longer than an hour, the onion loses its crispiness. it's still good, just soft. i have kept this stuff a week or two, but it's probably best fresh.

so the onion relish is on the left, and a spicy tamarind sauce leftover from when i made the christmas dinner pilaf is on the right.

if you haven't got chaat, here's a simple recipe, from julie sahni: 1 t ground cumin, toasted; 1/2 t cayenne; 1/4 t asafetida; 1/4 t amchoor; 1/2 t garam masala; 1/2 t black salt; 1 t coarse salt. mix all ingredients in a little jar, keeps indefinitely covered tightly. i have the benefit of the best bulk store ever, locally, which sells black salt and asafetida, so i have them on hand. they are necessary, honest.

and to finish out the year, finally, from something like a month ago - the biggest pakora ever:

i mean look at it! it's nearly as big as the bottom of the sauce pan (at the back of the stove.)

though in retrospect, even the normal pakoras, seen here with the giant mutant guy, were a little on the large side.

i wouldn't eat it now, though.

Tue, 28 Dec 2004 00:16:48 GMT

i wasn't quite a latchkey kid. i have a little brother, so when i was very little my mom was home being pregnant and being a mom. when he was old enough to be at our nextdoor neighbor's house all day, she went back to work. so when i got home from school, until i was deemed old enough to be responsible for a house key, i went to the clarke house.

leaving aside mark clarke, who was a Bad Boy and a teenager who was often around due to being expelled or skipping classes or whatever, it was not a bad place to hang out. it smelled interestingly different than our house. cabbagey, in retrospect. mark's mom, lou, watched us until mom or dad got home, and my brother and i mostly watched tv or i read books or whatever. well, when i wasn't hanging out with mark reading comic books, playing with knives, and watching him smoke.

i did a lot of sitting at the kitchen table after school though, pretending to do my homework (well, at the time i didn't think i was pretending, but i was add as all hell as a kid, and so i made it into stacks then made it into new stacks and then said it was done. usually.) and talking to lou while she smoked and read magazines or smoked and cooked dinner or smoked and drank coffee. i mostly sat their because the kitchen chairs would spin and that was fun. but also, because lou would pour me a cup of extremely milky coffee and let me ladle sugar into it, and i would sit there, spinning my chair, drinking my syrupy coffee, and smashing up the cigarette ashes in the ashtray with the butts until they were all a uniform texture. it was fun. and when i got hungry, lou would let me make a snack of wonder bread thickly spread with what my heart would now like to proclaim was butter, but my brain is pretty sure was margarine, and covered in white sugar, carefully sifted from a spoon to make a thick, slightly crunchy layer.

when i got a little older, and got a key, i mostly checked in with lou when i got home, then stayed by myself in our house. where there were no spinny chairs, no coffee, and far fewer cigarette butts...but i still made sugared bread for myself from time to time.

christmas.

Sat, 25 Dec 2004 23:18:03 GMT

we're about to sit down to a nice indian dinner we've put together to share with my parents, but in a more traditional vein, i roasted chestnuts thursday and we ate them for lunch. things to remember about chestnuts? they're pretty filling, so if you're going out to eat later that night, they may not be your best bet.

anyway.

i don't have a chestnut knife. lots of specialized kitchen gadgets just take up space, but that's a good one to have on hand, as i think it would make cutting your fingers off slightly less a danger. it took forever to score them while retaining all of my bits.

so tonight's dinner. matt made lemon tarkha dal and a velvety eggplant curry, and i've made a spicy tamarind pilaf and a lemony pilaf and raita. we neglected to bring either pappadams or pickles as thursday when we were shopping the roads were crap.

and yet again i fail to post the pakora that ate the world. oh well. i've looked at the photos again and it looks little in the pics.

happy day off!

gravy.

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 03:14:43 GMT

my history with food cooked by english people started in junior high - a british family moved into my school system, and the girl was in my grade. no we did not become pals, but she did become pals with some of my friends, which led, eventually, to me having dinner at their house once.

and i remember the gravy.

at my house, gravy was something you ran into pretty much twice a year, for thanksgiving and possibly christmas. this was just a normal dinner, and not only did it have gravy, the gravy went all over everything, not just a modest ladleful over the slices of turkey. it was amazing and seemed strange and exotic.

so now i'm married to an english person, and while we don't eat turkey (or even tofurkey, though we are sure to buy one someday as a joke), we eat gravy pretty often.

and yes, currently i'm reduced to posting pictures of food my husband made because i'm too busy to cook (ok even when i'm not too busy he does the lion's share because i win the award for laziest human person in the house. go me!) but in the next day or two, i will post about the pakoras i made tonight, and the tale of the giant pakora that made us all quake with fear. or possibly quake with the eating of more pakoras and lime pickle than was strictly wise.

art.

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 21:05:12 GMT

this is the best painting of an egg i have ever seen.

my favorite painting is of a pan of eggs, but that's multiple eggs, not singular eggs.

i don't actually like eggs very much, flavorwise, but something in me just cannot resist them in art.

the artist's website also has some gorgeous pb&js.

i had blood drawn today and i'm feeling sorry for myself, so i'm making a big pot of tapioca pudding, which i'm going to eat while it's still hot. it has an egg in it but vanilla masks the egginess out. also we were out of sugar. i used golden syrup instead. we'll see...

magpie food.

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 03:57:19 GMT

today someone brought homemade halwa decorated with silver varak to work. i couldn't resist it (failed to resist at least 3 times) even though i am not a huge fan of halwa. because i am a huge fan of fanciness.

also, eating silvery food makes me feel like i am living in the future.

the above is my first official camera-phone photo, as you could probably guess by the fuzziness. although i got the phone for my birthday in september, i didn't figure out how to get the photo off of it and onto my computer until just now. because i was motivated by fanciness. there are some other photos on there too, i just didn't care enough about them.