Cauliflower Coconut Curry

I don't know what to do with cauliflower except smother it in cheese sauce, which is delicious and comforting if not kind of unhealthy. Luckily, inspiration came through in the form of Indian food and Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook, a very hippie-ish cookbook full of veggies, grains, and good ideas. This recipe is super easy once you've got all the spices together - just whizz them up in a blender to make an aromatic sauce to simmer your cauliflower in. The resulting dish is not exactly Indian, but a very earthy-tasting, spicy approximation that goes best with basmati rice.


Cauliflower Coconut Curry

Sauce
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
3 medium garlic cloves, peeled
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon cloves or allspice
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup water

2 tablespoons ghee or vegetable oil
1/2 cup onion or shallots
1 teaspoon salt
1 large cauliflower, cut into florets
1 tablespoon black mustard seeds
1 tomato, diced
3-4 tablespoons lemon juice

Combine the coconut, garlic cloves, ginger, peanut butter, turmeric, cloves, cumin, sesame, cayenne and water in a blender and puree to form a smooth sauce.

Heat the ghee (clarified butter) or vegetable oil in a large saucepan over medium heat and add the onion and salt. Saute till lightly browned. Add the cauliflower and saute for another 10 minutes. Add the sauce and cook till the cauliflower is tender. Add water as needed to loosen the sauce and prevent the cauliflower from sticking. Add the mustard seeds and tomato and cook till the tomato is softened. Finally, take the pot off the heat and finish off the dish with a squeeze of lemon to pick up the flavour at the end.

Gorgeously rich, spicy cauliflower!

Improv Cooking: Key Lime Realemon Yuzu Bars

I became enamoured with a tiny bag of tiny Key limes the other day at the grocery store. I ran gleefully into the house, showing them off as if I had just sold a company I'd built with my bare hands and then gone out and bought myself one of those gigantic right hand rings. Only I'd rather have Key limes than a ring. They're just so...limey. That is to say, sharp and aromatic, but much more than a regular lime. I converted some of them into Key lime tortilla soup, and then began casting about for a way to hide the rest. Eventually, I settled on the brown sugar shortbread lemon bars from the Tartine cookbook, which looked beautiful in a thickly yellow sort of way. So I started squeezing Key limes. And squeezing. And squeezing. And then, exhausted and in pain from the citric acid, I realized that I had a mere three-quarters of a cup of Key lime juice whereas I needed one cup and two tablespoons. So I topped it off with a quarter of a cup of Realemon and two tablespoons of yuzu juice (see my previous post on the mysteriousness of yuzu). They are buttery crisp, citrusy and smooth. Please try them cold with a cup of hot lemon tea for a real hit on the tongue.
Tartine Lemon Bars on Brown Butter Shortbread

Crust
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsalted butter

Filling
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice
lemon zest grated from 1 small lemon
6 large whole eggs
1 large egg yolk
pinch salt

confectioners' sugar for topping

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 9-by-13 inch baking pan. I generally use the wrapper the butter came in to butter my pan.

Crust: Place the confectioners' sugar and flour into a mixing bowl and stir together. Add the butter and beat on low speed just until a smooth dough forms. Press into the bottom of the baking pan and up the sides by 1/2 inch until the entire crust is 1/4 inch thick. Bake the crust until it is a deep golden brown, 25 to 35 minutes. And I mean a deep golden brown - you really want this crust to be crisp and have a deeply browned butter flavour. The authors of this recipe also sifted the flour and sugar as well as using pie weights while baking, but who has the time? Not me. I also would add a half teaspon of salt to the crust next time to add an extra dimension of flavour to the shortbread crust.

Filling: Place the sugar and flour in a bowl and stir together. Add the lemon juice and zest and stir till the sugar dissolves. In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and egg yolk with the salt. Add the eggs to the lemon juice mixture and whisk till blended. I had a ton of pits from the key limes, so I let them settle to the bottom of the cup, then used my fingers to strain out the pits from the juice. Also, I didn't use the extra egg yolk. I know the filling would be richer and more custardy, but I just don't know what I'd do with a single egg white hanging around my fridge.

Make sure the crust is hot, either by taking it out of the oven directly or warming it up, then pour the filling into the hot crust. Reduce the oven temperature to 300 degrees Fahrenheit

and bake 30 to 40 minutes until the filling is no longer wobbly in the center.

Cool. Dust with confectioners' sugar. Cut. I used a small tea strainer to dust with sugar, as I don't have a large strainer. Just open it up and snap up some sugar, then knock it against a knife to cover the soft yellowness with sugar drifts.

President's Choice Diet Litchi Soda

Well, I am a sucker for Superstore. I remember when they first came into being and it was a gigantic uproar - small grocery stores would go out of business! Safeway would be run into the ground! Dogs and cats - living together! Mass hysteria! Sure, it's a gigantic store, but the things they have crammed on those shelves...it boggles the brain. My shopping trips would take two hours on average. On average. I found lutefisk crammed away between the freezer shelves somewhere between a whole frozen milkfish and sheep intestines. I found Dutch syrup waffle cookies on top of pfeffernusse. But President's Choice is a product line that stays right on top of consumer tastes. And they batted it out of the park with Diet Litchi Soda. At first, I was confused. How could they make litchis...diet? But once I cracked open a can and tasted it, I realized that they had captured a fresh, light, tropical taste of sparkling, not too sweet canned litchis (not fresh - that flavour is just too darn ephemeral). Just try it with some spicy grilled meat, chili paste and a small salad with some mango and cucumber hacked in. It's tropical summer in a can.

Ketchup Chips Part 2

Just a quick note since I came back from a trip home, where I crammed a bag of ketchup chips in my mouth as I stepped off the plane: Hostess chips are gone, bought out by Lay's. I cannot recommend Lay's chips except as a vehicle for dill pickle dip, and they are make a sad sort of ketchup chip. The chips are reddish brown, versus the bright red #3 of Old Dutch chips, which I always feel lends a more ketchupy flavour mentally. As well, they skimp on the flavour powder. Sweet, sweet flavour powder. Most importantly, however, Old Dutch chips taste deeply and honestly of potatoes, whereas Lay's chips are soft, crumbly and greasy. Any potato flavour has long since left the building when you pop open a bag of Lay's ketchup chips.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Have you tried Haagen Dazs new ice cream flavours? Even though they were endorsed by Gourmet, the sticky toffee flavour is a good idea for the Pride and Prejudice set: caramel, cake, cream and dates. Be still my beating heart beneath my restrictive social norms. I definitely incline towards those squishy steamed English desserts. Sticky toffee seemed as good as any to try and so I yanked the recipe from the Gourmet cookbook, with a few revisions. It is wonderfully sticky and gooey and tastes best with a chunk of vanilla ice cream plus the molten caramel sauce layered over top. It is also a good way to convert a date-hater into a date-lover. Mr. Darcy not included.

Sticky Toffee Pudding
Cake:
2 cups (10 ounces) pitted dates
2 2/3 cups water
3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup packed dark brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups self-rising flour (not cake flour) [I added 1/2 teaspoon baking powder to 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour instead of using self-rising flour]
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Sauce:
1 cup heavy cream
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon Lyle's Golden Syrup (I used 1 tablespoon corn syrup instead)

Make the Cake:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The original recipe called for six 8-ounce ramekins, which I don't have, so I used a buttered and floured 9x13 oval baking dish.

Combine dates and water in a 1- to 2-quart saucepan and bring to a boil. Cool to room temperature. Puree cooled date mixture with baking soda in a food processor until just combined (I used a food mill).

Beat butter and brown sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and beat after each addition, then beat in vanilla. Mix in flour. Add pureed date mixture and stir until just mixed. Divide mixture among ramekins.

Place ramekins on a baking sheet and bake 20-30 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Make the Sauce:
Combine cream, butter, brown sugar and syrup in a 1- to 2-quart saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring. Boil until sauce is reduced to 1 1/3 cups and thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Outlaw Breakfasts: Ensaymada with Creme Fraiche and Marmalade

This is my tribute to John Thorne's awesome breakfast feature on his website Outlaw Cook, which features unconventional breakfasts like sausage skins and a five-month-old croissant. I like his breakfasts because they are hearty, often fried in butter, and utilize leftovers, which to me is the best and most creative part of cooking. I felt our vernal equinox dinner required a sweet, eggy sort of bread and conveniently happened upon ensaymadas at Costco. These are a rich, sweet eggy bun often topped with butter, sugar and cheese. This ones didn't have a sweet topping, which I was rather sad about because that's how my mom makes them but beggars couldn't be choosers. We shared one after our dinner, but it was hard going since we were completely full of ham and perogies by that point. So, I ate the rest for breakfast for the rest of the week, topped with leftover creme fraiche and marmalade I made that week. The marmalade came from giant bags of oranges my husband hauled back from a friend's backyard. My aversion to wasting food is acute, so I made marmalade. I have to say the beautiful burnt orange color of the marmalade really makes this breakfast, as well as the bitter orange caramel flavor on the cream and faintly sweet bread.

Masses of Perogies

Perogies are a sensitive topic to me. This is because I come from Saskatchewan, the breadbasket of North America, home to the largest population of Ukrainians outside of the Ukraine, and smack dab in the middle of a perogy, cabbage roll and kielbasa vortex. My mother-in-law made four kinds of homemade perogies for Christmas: buttered cheese, onion-and-butter cheese, cheese with cream sauce, and cheese with mushroom dill cream sauce. I've only just lost the weight. You can get perogies at the rink, deep-fried perogies at the pool, and perogies for brunch. There is a perogy section in the freezer aisle at the grocery store. My mother gathers at her neighbor's place for perogy-making day: bacon, onion and cheese-flavoured. Vera, my mom's neighbor, has six deep freezers. San Francisco was a horribly rude wakeup call of perogy deprivation. In desperation, I mixed up my first batch in a kitchen equipped with two pans and cutlery stolen from my roommate. My husband and I ate them on the floor, washed down with a Molson. Still, the sour cream, butter and egg dough was horribly rich and tore easily and my filling was lumpy. There had to be a better way. My mom-in-law pointed me towards the oil-and-egg dough that most ladies use back home. I lifted this recipe from the Growing Alberta website and never looked back. It works like a dream, stretches forgivingly and cooks up soft. The sight of masses of plump-bellied perogies floating in hot water never ceases to make me smile greedily.

Perogy Dough
Makes about three dozen.
3/4 c. warm water
2 tbsp. oil
1 well beaten egg
2 1/2 c. flour
1/2 tsp. salt
Mix water, oil and egg. Sift flour and salt. Add liquid to flour and mix well. Knead on board until dough is smooth. Cover and let stand two hours in a warm place. Later, roll out dough, cut into rounds and place a small spoonful of filling in the centre. Fold over and pinch to seal.
To cook, place perogies in boiling water with 3 tbsp. oil. When they float to the top they are ready. Scoop out, toss with butter/oil to prevent sticking together. Serve with fried white onions and sour cream. To freeze, coat generously with flour and freeze individually on pans, then in freezer bags.

Potato and Cheddar Filling
2-1/2 lb medium red or Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut in half
2 c. mild or medium Cheddar cheese, shredded
1 tbsp. salt

Boil potatoes till soft; drain well. I then placed the pan over the heat to dry off any excess moisture. Rice the potatoes to remove lumps and mix in cheese while hot to melt the cheese. Add salt to taste.

Guilty Pleasures: Semi-Ambrosial Salad

I called this semi-ambrosial not because it is not ambrosial, but because I omitted one of the four total ingredients: coconut. I just don't like those chewy, dried out little bits of coconut hanging around in what should be an ecstatically creamy, fruity experience. This salad always presented itself to me in American cookbooks - it just seemed the sort of thing ladies in the South might serve alongside a ham dinner as a faint, fleeting gesture towards fruits and vegetables. I buy sour cream only to make this salad, and stock up on the rest of the ingredients at the drug store. This also seems like an American sort of gesture towards cooking for a buffet. Let this salad sit in the fridge overnight before you serve it - that way the marshmallows soak up the fruit juice and sour cream and get squidgy and creamy.
Semi-Ambrosial Salad

1 20 oz. can of pineapple bits, well drained
2 11 oz. can mandarin oranges, well drained
1 16 oz. bag mini marshmallows
1 cup sour cream

Mix together the fruit and half the bag of mini marshmallows. Fold in the sour cream. Refrigerate overnight. Serve. Beautiful.

Dinner for Friends

I really love cooking for friends but, let's face it, you're always trying to impress them. Or at least give them the best kind of hospitality you can manage. Now that I'm in my thirties, all of us are trying to make our way and prove it by talking about our stock, our real estate or our salaries at every possibility. It's exhausting, to say the least, and so are some of the parties thrown - rife with intimidating ingredients and the guilt of an organic provenance draped all over them. Some of the best parties I've been to were totally unapologetic: rolls, a vegetable platter, a fruit platter, sliced cheeses, ham and a big knife. I just like delicious food that makes you feel as if the host and hostess haven't been sweating madly and arguing over whether the vegetable brunoise is in fact a brunoise. Every dinner party I've thrown so far has made me feel as if I have been that mad hostess, except for this one. My husband came up with it, and it's a nice mix of plain but special food. Be forewarned, though: it does take a bit of time, especially if you're not used to rolling out pie dough or noodles. In that case, I would bake some cored apples with cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon rind earlier in the day to have with the ice cream.

Lemon Chicken
Fresh noodles with butter and Parmesan

Pesto

Green salad

Apple pie


Lemon Chicken
This is a variation on Chicken Escoffier, which I gleaned from the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. The best part of the recipe is the use of clarified butter, which doesn't burn or smoke or cause problems when frying up the chicken. I did away with the whole problem of melting the butter and skimming off the clear butter by buying a jar of clarified butter from the Indian grocery down the street. If too much butter stresses you out, just use olive oil instead.

2 whole large chicken breasts
3 lemons
Salt and pepper
4 tablespoons clarified unsalted butter
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup dry bread crumbs
1/2 cup Parmesan
1/2 cup white wine

Cut the chicken breasts in half and salt and pepper on both sides. Zest the lemons and mix in with the chicken. Put the chicken in the fridge for 3-4 hours to marinate. Melt the butter and coat the chicken on both sides with butter, then pat the breasts in the breadcrumbs on both sides to create a crust. Let the chicken stand for 10 minutes. Heat two tablespoons butter plus two tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Put two breasts in the pan, reduce the heat to medium-low and saute for 5 minutes on each side, till the crust is a rich golden brown. Remove the chicken to a separate plate to keep warm and cook the remaining chicken the same way. When finished cooking all the chicken, squeeze the lemons into the empty pan, pour in the white wine and scrape up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Season this pan liquid with salt and pepper and pour over the chicken breasts. Sprinkle with some flat-leaf parsley if you've got it and surround with quartered lemons to squeeze over top.

Yucca Flux

Yuccaflux is one of those urban myth sorts of recipes - everybody I know has heard of it and knows what it is, but nobody has actually tasted one. Even the name is totally odd - I know what yucca is, and I know what flux is and, believe me, yuccaflux has nothing to do with either an ornamental plant or surface flow rates. Yuccaflux is fruit soaked in alcohol, but I really think of yuccaflux as a variation on the plugged melon, where you cut a plug out of a watermelon or cantaloupe or honeydew, fill it with rum and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Slice and enjoy the boozy fruit. Once I even tried to inject oranges with vodka using 60ml syringes, which could be another variation on the recipe. Yuccaflux could also be a kind of sangria, with the booze to fruit proportions switched. Yuccaflux, however, is plugged melon, injected oranges and solid sangria on a gigantic scale, suitable for celebrations way, way, way out of town or seventies-style key parties.



Yuccaflux (Yukkaflux/Yuckaflux)

Fruit:
Watermelon, peeled and sliced
Oranges, quartered
Cherries, stemmed
Peaches, quartered and pitted
Cantaloupe, peeled and sliced
Bunches of green and red grapes
Strawberries, cored
Mango chunks
Pineapple chunks
Lemons, sliced

Sandwich bags filled with water and frozen

Fill up a container with fruit. It could be a quart jar, ice cream pail, cooler, or even a garbage pail. I prefer the cooler with a spigot at the bottom so you can drain off all the delicious booze and fruit juice when you are done. Pour over a lot of dark rum and white rum. I mean a lot - probably 4-5 forties of booze. Close the top and let sit for 12-24 hours in a cool place. Then throw in the sandwich bags of ice and have at it! Another, more communal variation on this recipe is for everyone just to pour in whatever alcohol they brought to the party. Anyhow, there's no way Thomas Keller can put a classy spin on this one.

Diners, Drive-ins and Posers

You know, I really love the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I love everything about it. The show reminds me of the wonderful articles Jane and Michael Stern used to write for Gourmet before their space was severely edited and their intricate tale-telling was reduced to blurb form. DD & D puts a spotlight on local food oddities like lobster chow mein and proprietors' eccentricities like tater tot pizza. Yep, I love the show...except for the host. Guy Fieri may be a great chef but as a host he just grates. His persona teems with the usual SoCal dribs and drabs. Bleached hair with roots? Check. Tattoos? Check. Sunglasses worn on the back of his neck? Oh, please. Check. I find the way he chats with the owners and chefs off-putting and insincere. It's a strange mix of surfer dude talk, catchphrases of the day and buddying up to chefs and owners. I actually find myself hitting mute whenever Guy speaks, then hitting unmute when the chef speaks. It's that bad. Please, Food Network, hire someone sincere for the job! It's too good of a concept to waste.

Fusionista Food: East Indian Tacos

Mixing Mexican and Indian food sounds really strange and is most likely a huge disaster. I, on the other hand, didn't even know I was doing it until it had already been done. Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid wrote the cookbook Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Travels Throughout the Subcontinent. Their writing style includes photographs, travel stories and delicious, unusual recipes. Cookbooks can be hard to trust if the first recipe doesn't work. In their previous book, Seductions of Rice, I tried a recipe for Tofu with Tomatoes and Cilantro. I was skeptical but it tasted wonderful.

Once I received their cookbook for Christmas, I chose my first recipe, Mint-Cilantro Beef Patties, collected spices and scouted out the nearest Indian grocery, which turned out to be Namaste Plaza in Belmont. There, I bought mint, cilantro and cucumbers and stared hard at the flours before realizing atta (durum) flour could only be bought in 20 pound sacks. So instead I picked up an aluminum foil-wrapped package of roti made by a lady in Santa Clara. I went to other extremes instead: I ground my own chuck for the patties, making the mix a 90:10 ratio of meat to fat. So I shaped and grilled the patties, heated the chapatis and brushed them with ghee, made a vegetable plate of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, cilantro and limes, and stirred up a quick garlic and salt raita. Then my husband started piling everything into the chapati, and I started to laugh. Spicy, herbal and hot beef wrapped in chewy, wheaty chapati with vegetables, herbs, creamy sauce and a spritz of lime is nothing if not a cultural and culinary collision of the most delicious sort.

Cumin-Coriander Beef Patties (From Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid)

About 1 pound best-quality lean ground beef
1/2 cup finely chopped or grated onion or shallots
1 teaspoon minced ginger or ginger ground to a paste (optional)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 plain (full- or reduced-fat) yogurt
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1/4 to 1/2 packed chopped coriander leaves or 1/4 cup minced mint leaves
Peanut oil or vegetable oil

Mix beef, onion (which I didn't use), ginger (which I also omitted), spices, yogurt, vinegar and herbs. For this recipe I used 1/4 cup chopped coriander and 1/4 cup chopped mint. Knead the mixture together well to obtain a smooth, well-blended texture. I shaped the mixture into 16 smaller oblong patties rather than 8 larger patties. I then grilled the patties on a well-oiled cast iron grill pan till both sides had deep black grill marks and were cooked through.

A Ukrainian-Saskatchewan Christmas

My mother-in-law never tasted a vegetable that wasn't cooked in cream until she was married. She lived on a regular working farm, with chickens, cows, a big garden and grainfields. She also ate her eggs cooked in cream. This was no thin pasteurized cream in little cartons from Safeway. This was farm cream, yellow and thick, with an even thicker layer of solid cream sitting on top. She mused, "We ate what we had! No wonder all of my uncles died of heart disease in their mid-fifties." Marian cooks the best comfort food I've ever had. I don't like Gourmet Christmases. I don't like potatoes mashed with weird things and beef cooked with strange mushrooms at this time of year. No, what I want at Christmastime is exactly what I've eaten for every Christmas for the past 32 years. I want perogies, cheese-and-potato filled dumplings. Marian makes three or four kinds: plain, with onions and butter, cooked in cream sauce and with mushroom dill cream sauce. Plus, Marian makes turkey and ham and stuffing and cabbage rolls and lasagna (for something new) and mashed potatoes and cheese mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and peas and a fruit platter and a vegetable platter and a cheese platter and Jell-o salad. It's a crazy-making whirl of food, one that prompts people to take two plates at a time in an effort to cram as much food as possible into one sitting. Last year, she made holubtsi, Ukrainian for little pigeons, which can also refer to cabbage rolls, but in this case meant tiny bits of bread dough rolled up in beet leaves, baked and then cooked in a cream sauce. It's a heart-stopper, but utterly delicious. Then come desserts: pumpkin cream, angel food and what ladies in Rouleau call a "dainty platter". You basically take a giant platter and fill it full of homemade baking. This included the all-purpose "squares", which is any kind of dessert you can cook and serve in bar form. Saves a busy farm wife a load of time when guests come over. Again, the dainty platter is a cornucopia of sweets and guilt, including brownies, shortbread, poppyseed rolls, cherry cheesecake tarts, cherry tarts and cinnamon rolls. These last items are called scuffles. Not sure why. The year Marian had shoulder surgery she held back and only made nine kinds of sweets. Unfortunately, everyone's turned into a diabetic and were forced to hold back on everything except the green beans. But not me. Not yet.