Monday: Re-Roti

 

Warm black-eyed pea and golden chard salad, served with roti.

Elizabeth Schneider's Vegetables: From Amaranth to Zucchini attributes this recipe to Cyprus.  Chard leaves and stems are just simmered briefly and tossed with black-eyed peas, lemon juice, and olive oil.  We were enamored of the roti we made on Friday (why haven't we made it in so long??) so we made another short stack.  Roti is really not that hard:

ROTI

Put 1 cup whole wheat flour into a bowl, and slowly add up to 1/2 cup water, mixing until the dough adheres and you can knead it.  Knead 7-8 minutes.  Then roll into a ball, put it back in the bowl, and cover with a damp cloth.  Leave it there for 1/2 hour to 3 hours.

Put a cast iron skillet on a medium flame to let it heat up.  Meanwhile, knead the dough again and then divide it into eight balls.  Roll each one out on a floured board until it's about five inches in diameter (it should be pretty thin).  Then place each roti directly on the skillet and within about 30 seconds it should start to puff up.  If this doesn't happen, the griddle probably isn't hot enough yet.  Flip the roti and let the other side cook about 30 seconds again.  Remove and gorge.

PS: this recipe, from Madhur Jaffrey's Invitation to Indian Cooking, is technically for "chapati."  But that is apparently the same as roti.

Saturday: Beet-kes

First D4SA dinner of 2010: Beet-kes (shredded beet pancakes) on sauteed rainbow chard.

Mark Bittman endorses latke-style shredded veggie pancakes made out of plenty of things other than potatoes. Here, we used part of our strategic stockpile of CSA beets. The beets were shredded on a box grater and mixed with shredded onion, one beaten egg, and a cup of flour. Then the mixture was formed into patties and pan-fried.

These came out really well - the texture was surprisingly light, and they retained the characteristic sweet earthiness of beets. We didn't have anything in the way of sour cream or soft cheese, which might have added something, but they went well with a glass of local milk. They also worked well as sandwiches, layered with a few anchovies.

The chard from our CSA held up remarkably well while we were out of town, although it needed a bath before use:

Christmas Dinner 3: Return of the Brisket

Philadelphia Christmas 2009, clockwise from top: beef brisket, garlic-sauteed chard, butternut squash with mustard seeds, Lukas's cabbage, spinach-mushroom kugel, and mashed potatoes with gravy.

Well, you all KNEW we had left the door open to a sequel, didn't you?

We helped Lizz's parents with Christmas dinner in Philadelphia. They were mainly responsible for the brisket, cooked with 36 cloves of garlic (from the Gefilte Variations cookbook), and the mashed potatoes. You'd think we'd have tired of kugel by now, but we really liked this variation in which we swapped out the leeks for fresh wilted spinach. The squash recipe was a particularly nice addition to this meal since it is cooked with some brown sugar and is very sweet - it filled the spot typically occupied by something like a sweet potato casserole. (Which comes with marshmallows, if you are in Ohio. Which we luckily are not.)

Dessert was once again a couple of lovely pies made by Lizz's dad: one made with real mincemeat, and one pecan.



Merry Christmas everyone!

Thursday: Red beet pasta

Penne pasta with red beet, rainbow chard, and walnuts.

The world of pasta sauces is truly vast: this is another of our favorite non-tomato-based options. We usually use goat cheese rather than walnuts, but it's good both ways.

Chard, for anyone unaware of this fact, is actually a variety of beet grown for its big, glossy leaves rather than for the root. For that reason, chard and beet greens are more or less interchangeable. (When we buy beets with nice-looking greens, we just use the beet tops in this recipe.)

Dinners this week

Pardon the prolonged absence, faithful readers. We've been too busy cooking up a storm to actually... update the blog about our cooking. Here's what we've cooked in the past week:


Monday, 7-6-09: White bean croquettes with mashed purple heirloom potatoes




Tuesday 7-7-09: Fresh fava beans sauteed with thyme and sardine-caper toast




Wednesday 7-8-09: Hake with red chard and couscous


Thursday 7-9-09: Curry of golden beet, red cabbage and adzuki beans




Friday 7-10-09: Garlic scape omelettes with a purslane, arugula, and chickpea salad




Saturday 7-11-09: White bean salad with red quinoa and sauteed field mustard greens




Other miscellaneous cooking: a purslane frittata, a blackcurrant cake (sort of a coffee-cake style recipe, using no leavening), and a green gooseberry crumble. Lots of baked goods lately for all of the sour berries that are in season - we have been using local stone-milled pastry flour from Wild Hive Farm.