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Category: vegetarian

food list – Eggplant & Cauliflower Curry

food I have
Produce
2 tomatoes
1 broccoli stem
cauliflower
collard greens
wee baby eggplants
cilantro
scallions

meat
chicken stock
leftover rotisserie chicken
leftover roast pork

dairy
milk
cheddar cheese
gorgonzola
cream cheese

scheduling food
Wednesday, April 4
dinner:risotto with chicken, broccoli, and stock

Thursday, April 5
Asian grocer: oyster sauce, sesame oil
start: pork leftovers, diced onion, oyster sauce – long cooking until the pork completely shreds
breakfast: collard greens w/ tomato over bagel with cream cheese
dinner: eggplant and cauliflower curry

Friday, April 6
produce truck: scallions
grocery: buy cream cheese and chicken leg quarters
breakfast: collard greens w/ tomato and egg in tortillas
dinner: make sticky rice balls with pork and scallions

Saturday, April 7
now that the large pot is empty of pork, make stock with chicken and duck carcasses.

recipe? for eggplant & cauliflower curry
Well, here’s the plan of approach for the eggplant & cauliflower curry

Char eggplant skin under broiler and then scrape out the goody once the eggplants have cooled enough to be handled.

Set to making basmati rice with turmeric.

Melt a chunk of ghee. Grill down onions. Add minced garlic and ginger. Add diced cilantro stems and jalepeno pepper meat. Add spices… I think I’ll crack open the garum masala mix from Penzey’s and see how that does.

Once the spices have grilled a bit, add the eggplant and a can of tomatoes.

Cut off just the cauliflower heads, in rather small pieces. Mix the cauliflower into the pan.

Taste and fiddle. And cilantro leaves?

Problem: I cut the cauliflower finely because nothing else had much texture, but that leaves me with cauliflower stems to figure out what to do with.

Roman Recipes – Roast pork w/ cumin and honey, Sauteed mushrooms, Split Pea Pulse, Elberberry Custard

So for making Roman Recipes, I first consulted the Vehling translation (because that was the one my mother let me take with me when I moved), but then later I consulted a more reliable translation, the Flower & Rosenbaum translation, which has the Latin and the English on facing pages. Oh, and then I am referencing a completely different translation after the fact – it’s not a good translation, but it is online so I can show you what I’m talking about.

So here’s what we had for dinner last night:
Roast Pork
The whole point of making this dinner was that I had bought a huge pork loin and had cut it into three, still large, roasts. And then my mother had been making pork roasts and sending me the leftovers. And my freezer has been slowly filling up with pork! If I made a roast on my own, I’d then still have 2/3 of the roast right back in my freezer. So I came up with the nifty theme and invited people from the SCA to join me for dinner.

I was intrigued by the Vehling translation’s description of a roast that was first broiled and then braised. And I was all, hmmm… that’s like browning it before you braise it, only we usually do that in a pan rather than an over – cool, it’ll be like brisket.

Only then I checked the Flower & Rosenbaum translation and found that Vehling had been smushing together two recipes that were supposed to be separate. I’m still a bit dubious and I am half inclined to check a manuscript edition because the Flower & Rosenbaum have very clear punctuation and separations of one thing from the next, and I suspect that is a modernization. I did not, however, get around to actually checking before I made the dinner.

So I made the simplest recipe – the one that is a lot like the way I make pork when I do not have a fancy recipe to go from: cover it in salt and roast it and then drizzle with honey right at the end.

Only I usually do all kinds of fancy things like embedding garlic cloves in the meat, and sliding sprig of rosemary between the fat layer and the meat, and studding it with cloves of garlic. The honey, however, was new.

So I figured that a little “roman inspired” creativity never hurt anything, so I lightly dusted the fat on top with asafoetida, and then a heavier dusting with ground cumin. Then I added a nice, thick coating of kosher salt. Oh, yeah, and I pinned bacon rind to all of the exposed surfaces so that the edges wouldn’t dry out during cooking.

I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, and then I lowered it to 250 as soon as the meat went in. Since I had no idea how heavy this roast was, nor do I own a meat thermometer, I went for long, slow cooking that would end up with the meat very thoroughly done, but still tender. I think it ended up cooking for about 4 hours.

And I completely forgot about adding the honey.

It was still quite tasty.

Not satisfied with how simple the roast was going to be, I gave in and decided to make one of the sauces for roasts. Since I was unable to obtain laurel berries or myrtle berries, I went for the third one – and still ended up having to skip half of the ingredients.

I put into a mortar:

  • a lot of pepper
  • dried lovage
  • dried celery leaf instead of celery seed
  • dried dill
  • asafoetida
  • cumin

and then I added slightly damp ingredients

  • ginger, cut into slices against the grain
  • parsley, shredded

then I started working in the liquid ingredients to form a paste

  • a splash of worchestershire sauce and thai fish sauce to make the equivalent of liquamen
  • olive oil
  • a wee little bit of red wine vinegar, which wasn’t in the recipe, to keep it from getting too oily

The sauce turned out very tasty and complemented the pork perfectly.

Mushrooms
This is just mushrooms sauteed with oil, liquamen, and pepper.

Almost every translator has you taking time to dry the mushrooms in the middle of cooking. Having cooked mushrooms, and read how modern cookbooks describe the process, I think Apicius is just talking about how mushrooms release a lot of liquid when the start cooking, and that you need to keep cooking through that point until the liquid evaporates before you start to add seasonings (esp. liquid ones) or you’ll end up boiling your mushrooms more than sauteing them.

Peas

Again, I chose to use yellow split peas because I like them so much that I had bought a brand new bag a while back only to come home and find that I still have 2/3 of a bag already.

So first I boiled and skimmed the peas.

In a mortar, I ground up black pepper, lovage, and cumin. I added cilantro and liquamen (worchestershire sauce & fish sauce) to make a paste. I then added about half a cup of wine (Manischewitz!) and let it sit and get happy together while the peas finished cooking, and I finished cleaning my apartment.

Then I put a decent amount of olive oil in a pan, poured in the spice and wine mixture to start

I also made some non-Roman accompaniments

After having tasted the peas, I decided that this was a rather spicy and pepper-heavy meal. So I got some yogurt, drained it, and made a raita. There are no yogurt sauce recipes in the cookbook even though there are references to soft cheeses. I think that’s because it’s a rather cold, wet sort of thing to be mixing with ones food and you never know what sort of digestive complications that might create.

And while there are recipes for cucumbers, I chose to serve them just drizzled in white balsamic vinegar to make them as refreshing as possible.

Both additions were good choices.

Elderberry Custard
I posted about this day before yesterday, when I made the first part of the recipe. While looking for the spices for the pork, I found dried elderberries for sale. So I stewed together the dried berries with a few raisins (as I did not have raisin wine, and I thought any sweetness added would be a good thing), a lot of wine (Manischewitz), and some pepper. I did add some honey because I was adding honey to the hard cider I have going, and I was very worried about the lack of sweetness to the dish.

So after it had boiled down and reduced, I strained the liquid out and refrigerated it.

After the roast was out of the oven, I beat together 6 eggs and poured in as much of the elberberry concentrate as looked right, beating it all together. Then I ladled it into greased ramekins and set them in a larger casserole that had an inch of water.

They were ready just as the musical episode of Xena (The Bitter Suite) was finishing.

I thought the end result was just too eggy, and everyone ended up adding some honey to it. I think I would like to try again with just egg whites (elderberry meringue?) and just egg yolks (elderberry zabaglione?) to see whether either one yielded a more favorable result.

party at the work place – Spinach Dal

My boss bought us a deli platter for lunch, and I had three tasty half sandwiches.

Now I am all full and I still want another corned beef sandwich because I never get those…

only I have to save my appetite for the amazing indian food a co-worker is cooking for some of us tonight because a woman is leaving on sabbatical. And the woman making the indian food is know as a very good cook – I think she used to own a restaurant.

Such difficult choices for me!

ETA: recipe from the Indian co-worker
Spinach Dal
Take yellow lentils (tur dal or arhar dal)

and boil until they are halfway cooked

Add a box/bag of frozen spinach and continue to cook.

In a separate pan, fry:

* small white “lentils” (gram dal or udad dal)
* fresh shredded coconut
* a couple red chilis
* asofoetida

When cooked, blend smooth with 5 or 6 spoonfuls of the spinach mixture.

Then combine everything together an finish cooking to desired consistency.

Kenyan Collard Greens

Before my lovely and friendly neighbors moved out, they had me over for dinner and served collard greens. The husband, who cooked, told me that it was a traditional recipe from Kenya, but that the spice/spice mix he used was one available at a couple markets around town – available in either powder or a cube.

The resulting greens were smooth and velvety and tasty.

After he left, I tried making it myself with a cube of bouillon from Nigeria hoping that was the seasoning he meant. It was close, but not quite right and too salty.

Last night I tried again, and got something that tastes spot on perfect – Woo!

Kenyan Collard Greens (a version of Sukuma Wiki)
start some nice white rice to cooking (you know whether you like a lot of rice or a little)

(Optional step – his wife was a vegetarian, but he told me meat was traditional – any kind of meat) Cut up two slices of bacon into 1/2 inch strips and scatter them in a pan. Start to cook them.

Dice small on medium onion and add to pan once the bacon is fully cooked and almost crisp. Add garlic when the onion is mostly cooked and you are almost ready to add the other ingredients.

Wash carefully 5-7 leaves. Shake them off, but don’t try to get them perfectly dry. Fold in half and cut out the spine. Slice lengthwise into two or three strips depending on the size of the leaf. Stack the strips. Now cut widthwise into narrow ribbons. Add the ribbons to the pan.

Season with two healthy dashes of 5 spice powder and half a bouillon cube crumbled.

Peel and dice one tomato and add.

Serve over rice.

ETA (11/12/2010): I just found another blogger who discovered this recipe – The Noshery makes Sukuma Wiki

vegetarian food help?

Last March, the apartment of one of my coworkers burned down, and she is still looking for a place. Since a couple apartments near me are opening up, and she looked really tired last night, I invited her over tonight – and even offered to feed her… because that’s what you do with guests, especially tired ones.

Only I forgot about it.

And now I am looking in my fridge and realising that I have been in the eating down stage of food buying and have gotten down to one bag of spinach of dubious virtue.

Did I mention that this woman is vegetarian and dieting? Did I also mention that she is a very good cook in her own right? And she is from india, so I probably don’t want to try making my amateur versions of indian food… which takes out most of my best vegetarian dishes.

I do have a grocery on the way home and the produce truck, but I need a plan.

Asian food? I can cook the spinach up and have rice – and season them with a sauce or spice that’d be appropriate. Or I could try to buy eggplant and tofu on the way home – I make a great eggplant and tofu stir fry… but that would mean stopping three different places: produce truck for the eggplant, grocery for peanut butter, and asian grocery for tofu.

Italian food? I could whip together pasta and spinach and olive oil with parmesan. … which would be great with sausage or bacon, but those are out. But I think it’s a low carb diet… maybe. I could stop by the produce truck for eggplant and squash and grill them to make sandwiches… but that takes time, and I’m likely to get distracted and burn them because my oven is tetchy.

American food? Well, I could see if the spinach is up to turning into a salad, but she usually has salads for lunch. I’d want to buy a blue cheese on the way home to crumble in.

So do any of you have any better ideas?

ETA: Suggestions in comments included – Pasta Primavera, an egg white frittata with spinach, lentil soup, chilled cucumber soup, hummus, peanut soup, and this recipe:

Here’s an adapted recipe, quick and tasty, good for two people (or more), great for vegetarians – the walnuts have protein, so it’s fairly complete, and the pasta gives it good heft. You can obviously leave the apple out, but it’s a fun, springy addition.

1/2 tablespoon table salt
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/2 pound cavatappi, fusili, rotini, penne, or other small-sized pasta
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 pound asparagus , bottom 1 inch trimmed and discarded, spears halved lengthwise if larger than 1/2 inch in diameter and cut into 1-inch lengths
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 cup walnuts , chopped
2 cups spinach (lightly packed), washed and dried thoroughly
3 ounces blue cheese , preferably Roquefort, crumbled
1 tablespoons cider vinegar
1/2 Granny Smith apple , peeled, for grating over pasta

1. Bring 4 quarts water to boil in stockpot. Add 1 tablespoon salt and pasta, stir to separate, and cook until al dente. Drain and return to pot.

2. While pasta is cooking, heat 1 tablespoons oil in 12-inch nonstick skillet over high heat until beginning to smoke. Add asparagus, pepper, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt; cook, without stirring, until asparagus begins to brown, about 1 minute. Add walnuts and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until asparagus is tender-crisp and nuts are toasted, about 4 minutes; toss in spinach until wilted. Add asparagus mixture, cheese, vinegar, and remaining 1 tablespoon oil to pasta in stockpot; toss to combine. Serve immediately, grating apple over individual servings.