Thursday: Left behind

Fried rice with bok choy, garlic chives and pink radishes.

Lizz was out of town for her college reunion, so I threw together an easy dinner which had the bonus of using up leftover rice: a quick stir-fry of day-old rice and fresh veggies, with a beaten egg mixed in to transform it into fried rice.

Tuesday: These are a few of our favorite things

Karela pulao (bitter gourd and cashew curry).

Three amazing new entrants to the D4SA universe are featured in this meal: bitter melon, curry leaves, and jaggery.  We've used these ingredients many times, but for some reason they haven't made it onto the blog until today.  (Apparently we haven't been shopping in Jackson Heights frequently enough in the past year...)

Bitter melon (also called bitter gourd or karela) is one of the weirder vegetables you may ever encounter.  In this country, it comes in two common varieties: the Indian, smaller and bumpy version, which is dark green and might remind you of a crocodile, and the Chinese, larger and smooth type, which is a lighter green and looks something like a puckered cucumber.  Its most important characteristic is its flavor: a shocking, strong and fascinating bitterness which is utterly unlike the flavor of any other food.  (The closest analog might be the taste of quinine in tonic water, but even that is a pretty impoverished comparison.)  In both of our experience, the first time you try a taste of bitter melon, the flavor spreads through the mouth and seems totally overpowering.  That first bite must trigger some kind of reaction in the brain that renders subsequent encounters permanently less intense.  The next few times we cooked bitter melon after that fateful first taste, we still had to select recipes that include methods of dulling its flavor, such as draining it using salt and turmeric.  But these days we could eat plain sauteed bitter melon and not find it overly strong.  We're not really sure why the human brain would experience bitter melon this way, but we promise you have to try it to believe it.

Curry leaves are less dramatic, but they are one of our favorite food flavorings.  We don't have them as often as we'd like, so we pick them up every time we see them.  Apparently they're a Mediterranean member of the lettuce family, but they have a potent, spicy and complex flavor that plays a role more like bay leaf when added to a dish.  (Note: don't confuse curry leaves with curry powder, which doesn't contain any of this leaf, and is instead a widely varying mix of ground spices.) This is the characteric flavor of many South Indian dishes, which can't really be replicated with any substitution.

Finally, jaggery is just palm sugar.  It's sold in a large brown block, and pieces can be broken or grated off for use.  Like molasses, it has its own totally distinctive aroma in addition to being a sweetener.  We ran out of jaggery quite a while ago and had been using brown sugar as a substitute, which is acceptable, but this recipe made us remember how much flavor we had been missing by doing so.

That was all quite a mouthful for describing a simple pilaf (regionally known as pulao, pillau, paella, etc).  This Mahanandi recipe may be pretty easy to put together, but your three new BFFs above are more than enough to make it totally distinctive.

Tuesday: Stuffed acorn squash

Acorn squash stuffed with wild rice, oyster mushrooms, toasted almonds, and melted Sun Cheese.

We improvised this squash stuffing, as we often do. Basically any cooked veggies can be mixed with a grain and a nut and used to stuff a pre-roasted winter squash. We particularly liked the flavor added by the fresh mushrooms.

Sunday Lunch: Something Old, Something New

Leftover gyoza dumpling and carrot-cabbage stuffing with fried rice.

With a few odds and ends left in the fridge from Friday's meal, we put together this quick lunch. Fried rice is a way to repurpose leftover plain rice, adding a little egg for protein and some ginger and soy sauce to pump up the flavor.

Sunday dinner: Pilaf party palace

Green bean and black-eyed pea pilaf.

A pilaf (or pullao, depending on where you're coming from geographically) is any dish in which vegetables are cooked slowly in rice. This can be done on the stovetop over very low heat, or in a sealed pot in the oven. We improvised this dish, in which frozen green beans from our CSA were mixed with sauteed onion, canned black-eyed peas, coriander powder, fenugreek seed, garam masala, and a little cayenne. Here we used two cups rice to three cups water, about the correct ratio if you want to replicate this in any quantity.

Sunday: Seasonal Flavors

Warm spiced rice with roasted chestnuts and broccoli.

This recipe uses the traditional fall flavors of cinnamon and clove along with delicious freshly-roasted chestnuts. The warm spices draw out the natural sweetness of chestnuts even more.

These particular chestnuts are an Asian/American hybrid. Sadly, this country suffered a massive chestnut blight in the early part of the 20th century which basically wiped out native American chestnut trees, so you aren't likely to see real 100% American chestnuts around.

Tuesday: Mahanandi's "hoppin' john"

"Indian hoppin' john" from Mahanandi.

We both love mustard greens and are always tempted by them at the market, but sometimes have trouble finding dishes that can handle their potency. Although we've never made the Southern recipe this is based on, we really liked Mahanandi's take on it.

This meal incorporated a tomato that had many an admirer during its time on our kitchen table. We wanted to share it with the rest of you, our faithful readers:


Most amazing tomato ever

Tuesday: Octopus fried rice

Fried rice with octopus, plus roasted acorn squash (not pictured).

Somehow, over five years of cooking, we've never until now attempted fried rice. That's rather silly, considering that it is not too difficult: just saute garlic, ginger and scallion in oil, then add cooked rice and stir for a few minutes; next, pour two lightly beaten eggs into the center of the rice and continue stirring until the egg scrambles throughout. We added tinned octopus to this dish, as well as soy sauce to flavor.

Herbed rice with favas and zucchini-purslane soup....and butter!

Herbed rice with fava beans and zucchini-purslane soup.

Our friend Tom came in from out of town last night (because he happens to like New York) and he kindly joined us for dinner. The rice dish was somewhat like a pilaf, but baked, so that the herbs infused the surrounding rice with flavor. It contained dill, parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes (our substitute for scallions), and we threw in some chopped walnuts at the end for added texture. Lizz picked up local summer squash at the Morningside Heights greenmarket to supplement last week's haul.

For dessert, Lizz also picked up some local blueberries. We were so enchanted with our discovery of last night that we planned to use our last quarter-cup of cream to make whipped cream for a topping. We supplemented it with a little bit of milkfat from the top of a nonhomogenized bottle. However, as Tom graciously whisked the cream with a little sugar, the mixture didn't seem to be reaching the same hard peaks stage we had seen the previous night. And then, in just a couple of seconds, it suddenly turned into THIS:



After we all got done exclaiming in shock and horror at the unexpected transformation, Lizz bravely took a taste, and suggested that perhaps we had just accidentally made butter. It seemed too good to be true that we would stumble on TWO different whipped dairy products within two days, but indeed, a little internet research confirmed that this actually IS how butter is made! If you continue whipping plain cream past the hard stage, it will in a matter of seconds fall out into butter and the thin buttermilk you see in the picture.

So we didn't have any whipped cream with our blueberries, but we were extremely pleased with the discovery nonetheless, and decided to incorporate it into the dessert in another way.



Blueberries with cinnamon toast....with homemade butter.

Tuesday night risotto

Beet and beet greens risotto.

...The picture doesn't really do justice to the color.