Friday: This is your brain on tofu

Scrambled tofu with bell pepper, green beans and carrots.

By "scrambled tofu," we really just mean a stir fry with hard tofu crumbled in and cooked gently until warmed through. This is an easy way to use up odds and ends of vegetables you have lying around. In addition to a little ginger and garlic sauteed to start, we seasoned with some soy sauce at the end.

Friday cat blogging, obstruction edition

Lizz was going to make the bed, but as you can see, Oscar filibustered.

Thursday: Peas, love, harmony

Yin (macaroni and cheese) and yang (peas).

Not much new to say about this meal - faithful readers will have seen it a few times before - but for your viewing pleasure, we have resorted to playing with our food.

Farmer's Market Supplement, 2/4/10

VEGGIES:
garlic

FRUIT:
macoun apples

OTHER:
milk from Ronnybrook Farm
yogurt from Ronnybrook Farm
butter from Ronnybrook Farm
eggs
cheddar cheese from Millport Dairy
seven grain bread from Buon Pane
apple cider
buckwheat flour from Cayuga Pure Organics

Wednesday: Bringing it dal back home

Chana dal with cucumber.

This recipe is an old favorite of ours - another filling dish that can be made when quality vegetables are sparse. Strictly speaking, it should be made with bottle gourd (dudhi or lauki), which is easy enough to come by if you frequent the Indian market. Cucumber makes an adequate substitute, however, and that's what we used here.

The recipe comes from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East, one of our first cookbooks.

Tuesday: Yo mama(liga)

Mamaliga with roasted beets and dill garnish.

You might better know "mamaliga" by the name polenta, which is the Italian iteration of this creamy food. Mamaliga/polenta is ground cornmeal cooked in liquid (typically water, or sometimes milk) until it reaches a final texture which can range from creamy-soft to stiff and cakelike. Cooled pieces of hard polenta can also be fried or broiled.

Lizz first encountered mamaliga on a trip to Moldova, where it may have been served with some type of cheese or cream folded in. Whatever it was, it was rich and comforting. Mamaliga is also made in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and we couldn't find a consensus recipe on the internet, so there seems to be some variation in its preparation across the region. Here, we cooked our cornmeal with milk and then stirred in crumbled pieces of Bulgarian feta when it had reached our desired texture. (We left this mamaliga quite soft.)

The beets were just roasted, and we topped it all off with some chopped dill. We considered calling this "deconstructed borscht" and charging you all $15, but thought better of it at the last minute.

Monday: Thai stew

Thai kabocha coconut stew served on rice.

This easy stew (which basically just involves cooking the squash in some coconut milk, plus a couple other ingredients) was the first dish we had ever cooked using fish sauce. Fish sauce (or nam pla) is a condiment often used in Thai food which consists of fermented fish, often anchovy, along with salt and possibly some sugar. It can be added to dishes during the cooking process, but can also be served with the meal as a substitute for table salt, much as soy sauce is in some cultures. In this stew, the fish sauce added a little pungency along with its salty kick, but was surprisingly mellowed by the richness of the coconut milk.