Wednesday: Yet another vegetable that can be purple, continued

Stir-fry of purple bok choy, tofu, and roasted cashews.

Bok choy (which you may also encounter as "pak choi" or other variations thereof) is yet another member of the illustrious brassica dynasty.  We think all the brassica go well with cashews, so we roasted a few and threw them in to this improvised stir-fry, which was also flavored with garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. 

We couldn't let these particular bok choy go because they were purple:

We had never encountered this color before.  Like many purple veggies, these leaves shed their color into the dish during cooking.  As you can see up top, the tofu ended up a little worse (or maybe just weirder) for the wear. 

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: Veggie pasta

Whole wheat pasta with broccoli-white bean-cashew topping.

This is our usual broccoli-based pasta sauce, but for a little protein we added white beans and cashews which we toasted separately.

Monday: Cashew Curry

Coconut milk cashew curry on basmati rice.

For some reason unknown to us, cashew nuts go extremely well with cruciferous vegetables. In fact, a nice way to punch up plain broccoli or kale is a topping of chopped, toasted cashew nuts. This curry takes advantage of that natural pairing, adding green beans, tofu, and coconut milk. Served on basmati rice, it was a filling and straightforward almost-one-pot meal.

Tuesday: Holiday Antidote

Mustard greens sauteed with ginger and topped with fried cashews, served on quinoa.

Having finally finished the first batch of Christmas leftovers, the last thing we wanted was another rich meal.

Tuesday: Prettiest Root Ever

Lotus root korma, with coconut milk and cashew paste, on basmati rice.

A korma is an Indian dish with a creamy, nut-based sauce. This recipe was heavily spiced and extra rich due to its reliance on coconut milk - and it was delicious.

Our loyal readers may remember that D4SA's first encounter with the lotus plant was non-culinary in nature: we visited a few lotuses this past summer at the New York Botanical Garden. But we've actually cooked with lotus root a few times now. We find they're very versatile: they don't have a very strong flavor, but their most unique characteristic is a pleasing crunchy texture that holds up under cooking. They fit well in contexts that suit other firm, plain vegetables like jicama and potato.

Lotus roots themselves grow in a long series of segments - on the plant, they look like linked sausages. The links are sold individually or in pairs; for cooking, they are peeled and then sliced into rounds. The interior of the root naturally has a symmetrical pattern of empty chambers, resulting in the pretty lacy patterns you can see in the picture above.

You have the best chance of finding lotus root in fall or winter at Chinese or pan-Asian groceries; they also pop up in Indian grocery stores. We used to always find a bin of them caked in fresh mud (a good sign!) at a grocery in Boston Chinatown.

Saturday lunch: Fall Feast

Butternut squash braised with spices (from Madhur Jaffrey via Nate - thanks Nate!), turnip greens with roasted cashews in sesame oil, and cornbread.

We made the cornbread with local whole wheat bread flour, which in our opinion really improved the flavor and texture. We also omitted the canola oil that was in the original recipe (since Giselle has purged the canola from the house) and added an extra egg instead.

The turnips themselves are destined for another recipe later this week, but today we used their greens, which don't store very well. One nice way to add a little protein and bulk to greens is to throw in some roasted chopped nuts, so that's what we did.

These butternut squash were an AMAZING saturated dark orange color on the inside, as you can see in the photo of their innards below.


squash, deconstructed

They also provided the opportunity to make one of our favorite snacks - roasted winter squash seeds. This is a fun thing to do anytime you carve a pumpkin or make any variety of winter squash for dinner. First, pick out the seeds from the pulp and wash them in a few changes of water until they are fairly clean:



Pat as dry as possible with paper towels. There are a few ways to go, flavor-wise, with the actual roasting: one option is to stir the seeds with some olive oil and salt. Another is to stir them with a clear oil (we used peanut), some ground cinnamon, and a little sugar. Either way, next spread the seeds into a single layer on a baking sheet, and roast in the oven at 350F for about a half hour, stirring occasionally so they roast evenly.


cinnamon-sugar seeds