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Category: vegan

Carrot Ginger Coconut Milk Soup

Carrot Ginger Coconut Milk Soup

Orangette had a post that briefly mentioned Carrot Ginger Soup with Coconut Milk, and it just sounded like the best idea ever. Now, I think that soup had a much higher concentration of carrots and it looks like it might have had more dairy fat, but mine turned out rather tasty, too.

I started off with half a can of coconut milk – the full fat foreign stuff where it is actually possible to fry ingredients in it like the directions in Indian cookbooks. Real coconut milk was a revelation, but it’s also hard to get enough coconut flavor with it without having way too much fat. I ended up giving my remaining unopened cans to the Thanksgiving food drive.

So heat the coconut milk until it separates. Add a wee knifetip of asaphoetida and inch of ginger (peeled and minced). And peel three carrots, cut them into rough chunks, and add them to the coconut milk. I only had three, but this soup would probably do well with several more carrots. Simmer for a bit, and then add stock (I had vegetable) until the volume doubles.

Then I decided I wanted a sort of curry seasoning, but neither the green thai curry paste in the fridge nor the generic indian curry powder in the pantry seemed right (nor the vindaloo… and probably not the garam masala), so I decided to make my own random spice mix:

  • 1/8 tsp kala jeera
  • 1 black cardamom seed
  • 3 fenugreek seeds (yes, i know these quantities are ridiculous, but I was working by smell)
  • less than 1/8 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp ground coriander
  • 2 black peppercorns

Grind that all up with a mortal and pestle and tip as much into the soup as smells right. (I ended up using all of it, but I hadn’t expected to.) I also added a pinch of salt (note: my stock didn’t start off with any salt at all).

Cook cook cook

Taste – at this point I added more salt and a squeeze of lime. And half a teaspoon of creamy peanut butter to mellow it out a bit.

Cook a bit – pour it into a blender. When smooth, it seemed finished, so it went straight into a bowl. I topped it with some toasted almond slivers, ground chipotle, and a handful of young arugula. A dollop of sour cream or yogurt would have been nice, too.

Playing with eggplant

So I liked the Imam Bayildi so much that I started making vows such as, “I shall never use any other method to prepare eggplant!”

And I immediately set out to bastardize the recipe. And since they are chinese eggplants I’ve got, I was thinking something vaguely chinese in flavor. Especially since I was reminded of the buttery texture of the stuffed and fried eggplant in black bean sauce at my current asian restaurant.

But I wasn’t about to start messing with pork mince and shrimp… actually, I could even be bothered to thaw a hamburger patty of (nothing but) ground turkey and repurpose it… but I did have a zucchini looking for a home.

So I actually ended up jumping out at bed at 2am after I made the Imam Bayildi to jot down notes for modifying it. But let me spoil the ending of the story and tell you that it just didn’t end up as perfect. I don’t know if it just needs tomatoes to have the perfect synergy of flavors or if it would have been perfect if I’d just added more sugar (or oil!), but I’m still liking the result enough that I will be tinkering with this recipe some more – even the disappointing version is entirely edible.

Tinkered Imam Bayildi

Peel 2 chinese eggplants in stripes, cut in half widthwise, and cut deep slits into each of the 4 pieces. Drop them into a pan with 1 Tablespoon hot oil (see, I’m still trying to minimize the oil, and maybe that’s just going in the face of the whole point of the original recipe), and turn them at intervals until the outside is evenly golden.

Meanwhile, fry cleaned leeks in 2 tsps oil until just starting to brown. (And this here is another place I might need to tinker. See – using all the way up the greens of the leeks was great when I was also capturing the chlorophyll taste of parsley, but it ended up being a bit too much damp green leek in this version. Then again, maybe it would have been better if the leeks had gone into the pan drier (or if there were more oil) – this experiment and reading about Orangette‘s perfectly cleaned and dried leeks has my pondering the purchase of a salad spinner.)

Once the leeks are soft, add minced garlic and ginger. A minute later, add zucchini diced a little smaller that 1cm (so it will stuff inside the eggplant nicely, but not so small that it loses justifiability). Cook just another minute or two longer – maybe with a splash of a stir fry sauce, if you have a good one. I had just finished a bottle, so I did without.

Turn the eggplants so they are slit side up, wiggle a spoon into the slit to open it up, and then stuff with the leek/zucchini. If there is any left, pile it on top.

Mix together – the juice of one lime, 1/2 tsp sugar (I ended up using a teaspoon of the lime simple syrup I had leftover), 2 tsp soy sauce (and I still ended up seasoning both versions with more plain salt while eating, but that might just be me), and 1/2 cup of water. Pour the mixture into the pot with the eggplant, put on the lid, and simmer on low for 45 minutes.

~*~

So, as I said, not perfect – nowhere near as exciting as the original – but still decently tasty.

And then I’ve been using the leftovers.

1 day I microwaved a whole stuffed eggplant piece and wrapped it in a piece of bread and ate it as a sandwich. 🙂

Another day, I made a salad of spring mix, 1 ounce sharp cheddar cheese pieces, a tomato, and a de-seeded and sliced serrano pepper. Topped that off with microwaved (and sliced into smaller pieces) Imam Bayildi. And dressed it with some balsamic vinegar stirred up with half a teaspoon of dijon mustard.

I think tonight I’ll make a salad with carrots and crispy noodles and top it with one of the modified versions (and dress it with black vinegar mixed with a 1/4 teaspoon chinese mustard).

Imam Bayildi

So I had eggplants and a lot of time to kill last night, so I started looking though my cookbooks for something exciting. So I ended up attempting Imam Bayildi for the first time.

I’ve never ordered this is a restaurant, so I have no idea how authentic the taste ended up being, but I liked it.

I used the recipe from Tess Mallos’ Complete Middle East Cookbook. Only I didn’t have any parsley, and I had leeks to use up, so I swapped them for the onions and parsley both. And I added the juice of half a lime because I had already used its zest in popcorn, so it was just going to dry out if I didn’t use it quickly.

So here’s how I made it –

Imam Bayildi

ingredients
1 leek
2 chinese eggplants
roughly 3 Tablespoons of olive oil, YMMV
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tomatoes, peeled and chopped
salt
pepper
juice of 1 lemon (+ half a lime – optional)
1/4 tsp sugar
1/2 cup water

Cut off the root bit of the leek, slice it in half lengthwise, and then cut into strips that range from 1/2″ where it is white to 1mm where it is dark green and tough. Dump all of the slices into a large bowl of water and rub them through your fingers to make sure they are as clean as possible. Wash the cutting board, and let the leeks sit in the water while you prepare the eggplants. Then rub them through your fingers some more and lift the floaters out of the water and let drain. Don’t try to get every piece of leek out of the bottom because you’ll stir up the sediment.

Wash 2 long chinese eggplants. Remove the stem, and peel off strips of the skin so that it looks striped (I accidentally peeled 4 stripes consistently, and that really helped to make them nice and square for turning evenly – worth doing again on purpose). Then, so they’d fit in my pot, I sliced them in half widthwise. Cut a deep slit lengthwise in each piece, stopping short of each end.

In a pan (I used my soup pot because I don’t have a lid for any of my deep saute pans), pour enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pot (the recipe called for 1/2 cup for 8 medium eggplants – I used more like 2 Tablespoons). Turn the burner on to medium high, and once the oil gets up to temperature, add the eggplant sections. While doing the next step, check in with the eggplants occasionally to turn them and make sure that the brown (lightly) evenly – but you want them still a bit firm.

In a saute pan, add another 2 teaspoons of olive oil and fry down the leeks with a sprinkle of salt. Once they start to brown, add 3 chopped cloves of garlic. Cook 1 more minute, and then pour the leeks and garlic into a bowl with the peeled and diced tomatoes. Mix that together with pepper (since you already salted the leeks, take a taste before adding more salt to the mixture).

Squeeze the citrus into a cup, and mix in the sugar and water so the sugar dissolves.

By now, your eggplants are probable nicely golden. Turn them so the slits are up and wiggle the slits open with a spoon. Now spoon in the tomato/leek mixture (or tomato/onion/parsley mixture, if you were following the real recipe). Any filling that does not fit inside can be piled on top, but all of mine pretty much fit. Add the lemon juice/sugar/water mixture and cover the pan/pot tightly. Cook on gently heat for 45 minutes.

And then, even though it is supposed to be served cool or room temperature, I ate two pieces right away – on bread to sop up the juice. And I put away the other two pieces to have later (maybe with a salad).

Poached Egg over Tomato and Spinach, Salad with Za’tar salad dressing

I made an amazing breakfast.

The initial plan was to cook down some spinach and tomato and then scramble an egg in it – pretty standard.

And it started out simple enough with about as much fresh spinach by volume as the tomato (so there ended up being a lot more tomato once everything cooked down).

But this was a big, luscious tomato from my mother’s garden, so it released a lot of liquid. So I poured off some of the liquid (into a jar to keep since I could put it in rice or soup or something – and it’d be wasteful otherwise – and don’t judge me because just wait until the depression or the apocalypse hits because then you’ll all want me to be managing your foodstuffs so you won’t get scurvy), and then I poured off some more. And then I realized that it was just willing to cook down into sauce.

I added a bit of 5 spice powder for fun.

So instead of scrambling the egg, I just cracked it in and gave it a lot of channels into the goody and poached it right there, covering the pan occasionally so that the top would steam cook, too.

And I ground some pepper and sprinkled kosher salt on top.

And oh my, it was like pudding – tasty savoury egg, tomato, and spinach pudding. Only sexier.

I have enough spinach to try it again and see if the results are repeatable.

~*~

And there was a salad with za’tar

I went home last weekend, and I ended up cleaning out and organizing my mother’s space cabinet. A while back, she had purchased a tiny container of zatar from Penzey’s because it sounded unlike any of the other stuff in her cabinet (we’ve never cooked with sumac much). A few years later, it still hadn’t been used, and it wasn’t sounding like anything my father would enjoy, so it came home with me.

My initial plan was to soak it in lime juice and then taste it and build a salad dressing from there. Luckily, however, I looked it up online before I started, since apparently it has a sour taste that can replace lime/lemon/tamarind in recipes. So once I knew that was how it slotted in, it became easy and I’ll be able to use it regularly.

Cold bits
spring mix
spinach
sliced tomato
serrano pepper

Hot bits
roasted zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, and bell pepper (rewarmed in the microwave)

Dressing
3/4 tsp za’tar
1/2 tsp crushed mustard
2 Tbsp white balsamic
2 tsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp red wine
3 small scallions, sliced

Asian-ish food fortnight – Dipping Sauces, and many ways to eat a Pork Roast

So it all started when I was hosting a bridge night at my house, and I thought that a nice low-work thing to serve would be various frozen dumplings steamed and fried. Turns out – this was an amazing plan!

And I made several dipping sauces to go with:

From The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bley Miller

Mustard Dressing (p.717)

1 Tablespoon powdered chinese mustard
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 Tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
a few drops of sesame oil

1. combine in a jar, cap tightly, and shake well to blend
2. refrigerate 3-4 hours to develop the flavor.

**verdict: nasty! Despite vigorous shaking, the mustard rose to the top and the whole thing tasted mostly of vinegar. This one got one taste and then wasn’t served that night.**

From Real Thai by Nancie McDermott

Nahm Jeem Gratiem
Sweet-Hot Garlic Sauce (p.189)

official proportions:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 Tablespoons finely minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon chili-garlic sauce (tuong or toi sauce) or coarsely ground dried red chili

how I made it –
Brought to a boil:

  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar

And then added:

  • 2 Tablespoons finely minced garlic
  • 2 generous pinches of salt

Once it hit a rolling boil, reduced the heat and simmered until it thickened to a thin syrup (longer than the 20 minutes the recipe called for, but I didn’t make it too thick because it still had too cool and be dip-able).

Then I poured it into a jar already containing:

  • and the tail end of a bottle of sambal olek (I guessed there was about 2 teaspoons there, but I could have been off)

And stirred. Then I tasted it and said, “Oh, god that’s good, but hella spicy!”

So I mixed up another batch of syrup:

  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 1 Tablespoon finely minced garlic
  • 2 generous pinches of salt

and added that to the jar and stirred.

**Verdict: This sauce is amazingly tasty! It was also amazingly hot served the day I made it. Oddly, two days later, when I went to steam up some leftover dumplings, it no longer seemed so hot. So either the sauce mellows, or I just like spicy food and don’t have to notice how odd that is when no one is looking… la la la! Still, even the people who didn’t like spicy agreed that it was an awesome sauce**

From Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

Dumpling Dipping Sauce II (p.112)

1/2 cup soy sauce
2 Tablespoons Chinese black vinegar
1 Tablespoon chili oil
(plus a pinch of sugar)

**Verdict: I thought it tasted amazing and made a double recipe, but I was promptly informed that while it was tasty, it was too hot. So I sliced some scallions in this one to differentiate it and went on to make…**

Dumpling Dipping Sauce I (p.112)

1/2 cup soy sauce
3 Tablespoons Chinese black vinegar
(plus a pinch of sugar)

**Verdict: So this was judged not to be the dipping sauce found in every chinese restaurant, but it was still found to be quite acceptable and very tasty.**

But even after eating up all of the tasty dumplings we hadn’t gotten through at bridge and after giving away about a third of the sweet-hot spicy sauce, I still had a ton of these dipping sauces left over.

So I thawed a pork loin roast.

After one evening in the fridge, it was thawed enough that I could take it out of the plastic back and score it with cross-hatched knife cuts. I put it back in the back and added some marinade:

  • a couple ginger slices
  • some 5 spice powder
  • and about half a cup of the two dipping sauces combined (I just dumped the two containers together after people left, since I didn’t mind the heat)

And I left it for another night.

It still wasn’t completely thawed, but I went ahead and roasted it anyway – with three cloves stuck in the crosshatching cut into the fatty side, a light dusting of powdered thyme, and salt over the fat (because it’s tasty!).

I cooked it according to the directions in my Joy of Cooking. Pre-heat oven to 450F; insert roast and turn down to 350F; cook 30-35 minutes/pound. I was generous in my time estimate because it was still a bit frozen in the middle, but I ended up with thoroughly a cooked roast I would not have wanted to have in the oven all that much longer.

So that first night, I just cut off bites and ate it slathered in the sweet-hot garlic sauce to finish that off – they went together perfectly.

~*~

But now I have the rest of the (cooked) roast in my fridge. So I took a few slices of pork, cut them into strips and made wraps/quesadillas/soft tacos with them.

In a bit of olive oil, I grilled down

  • half an onion, cut into short strips
  • 2 jalepeno peppers with just the flesh (no seeds or white part) diced
  • 4 cloves of garlic, sliced
  • a little less that a tablespoon of pickled ginger, ripped into smaller pieces
  • a fistful of baby carrots cut into matchsticks
  • pork strips
  • shredded napa cabbage
  • and sprinkled over with black vinegar and some of the dipping sauce

Then I warmed a tortilla, piled on some lettuce from an oriental mix that had been on sale at my supermarket, and then put the pork/veggie mixture on top – and ate it. With a bit of homemade chinese mustard. Yum yum yum.

~*~

So last night, I not only still had leftover pork in my fridge (which I’ll get to next week), but also I had leftover wrap filling. So I put it on a salad.

Pretty much just more of that same salad mix, the rest of the filling popped into the microwave for a bit, and a salad dressing (made from a quarter of a teaspoon of chinese mustard, some plum sauce, some black vinegar, some more of the dipping sauce, and a dollop of honey).

The only thing I could have done to make it any better was slice up some more napa cabbage to refresh the cooked-down cabbage in the filling.

~*~

Now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of the roast (though sandwiches, with mayonnaise on white bread, are high up on the list).

ETA: There was also random fried rice (made from French red rice because I had acquired it randomly, and I thought its nuttiness would be kinda like brown rice and all that – it ended up being tasty food). It took a lot more work that brown rice to make the flavors play nice with the strong ricey ones.