Geek of All Trades

Dragon fruit

With our kitchen finally intact again, we've been grocery shopping and cooking - nothing fancy, just mundane meal preparation of the sort that ought to be completely unremarkable.  Four months of take-out dinners and microwaved Indian food from a box has given me a whole new appreciation for even the simplest home-cooked meal. 

A couple of trips to the wonderful gigantic Asian grocery store, Super 88, have yielded some nice treasures.  This incredible fluorescent fruit caught my eye and I had to take it home. 

It's a dragon fruit, also called a pitaya, the fruit of a certain kind of cactus.  It's native to North America but is evidently now cultivated in southeast Asia.  It's dramatic, beautiful, and quite tasty too.

The flesh is white and peppered with tiny black seeds, and after I cut the fruit in half it peeled easily out of the fuchsia rind. The flesh is similar in texture to kiwi, and its taste is crisp, very refreshing, and not terribly sweet. 

First meal

Yesterday I cooked our first meal in the new kitchen!   

It's not completely done yet - the tiles still need grouting, there are still no handles on the cabinets and drawers, and the light over the table has yet to be hung - but it's close enough that we could start unpacking dishes and pans out of the boxes they've been in for more than four months, and close enough that I could cook a meal.

The tile looks great; it will look better when it's grouted, because the spaces in between won't be as dark.  The stove is a pleasure to use - very powerful, very spacious. 

I cooked orecchiette and broccoli rabe. 

When the pasta and the broccoli rabe were done, I mixed in some grated Parmesan cheese and served it up.

It's a very simple meal, the kind of thing that only takes about 15 minutes to prepare; the kind of thing I might cook on a weeknight.  But it tasted wonderful!  Our first meal cooked in our new kitchen after four months of waiting. 

I also used the new shower for the first time, but I'm not posting any pictures of that!

 

Passover

It's chol hamo'ed, the middle days of Passover.  I've eaten matzah with almond butter for lunch every day this week.  But there is great food associated with Passover as well.  We had seder at the home of our good friends Charlie and Abby; Abby talked about the menu here.

Then there's my favorite, matzah ball soup.  The matzah ball soup I made this year is above.  I use my great grandmother's recipe for the matzah balls, which comes out dense and chewy - I love them, no light and fluffy matzah balls for me.  This year I used a whole chicken and some carrots and celery for a tasty and hearty soup. 

The other passover standby is matzah brei, a mixture of broken and softened matzah pieces and egg that gets fried in a pan.  For most of my life I'd always eaten them sweet - adding nothing to the matzah and egg while cooking, and then sprinkling sugar and cinammon or spreading jam on the finished product.  A couple of years ago, though, we got a little sick of that, and I came up with the idea of making a savory matzah brei.  I sauteed some onions and mixed these back into the egg and matzah mixture before cooking, along with some salt and pepper.  The result was a nice change from the tired plain matzah brei, a little more satisfying and less breakfasty.  Last night I made such a savory matzah brei for dinner; in addition to the salt and pepper I added some garam masala for bite.

Birthday dinner

For David's 41st birthday last weekend, I cooked a giant feast of Indian food, much as I had for his 40th.  We had seven friends over and I served them:

• Hyderabadi-style lamb biryani
• Masoor daal
• Mughal spinach
• Cauliflower with ginger and green chilies
• Cucumber raita
• Saffron rice
• Rosewater lassi
• Rice pudding (payasam or kheer)

all of which I prepared.  I was so caught up in getting the meal on the table that I forgot to take any pictures.  Below is a blurry picture of some of the leftovers:

At the bottom is the spinach.  Proceeding clockwise from there: the biryani, cauliflower, and daal. 

Most of the recipes - the daal, the spinach, the cauliflower, and the raita - came from one slim little cookbook that I love, Madhur Jaffrey's Simple Indian Cookery.  I've made many recipes from this book in the past and they always come out wonderful.  (The first time I cooked from this book, I made the rogan josh, which we found a little fiery using the full amount of cayenne.  When I relayed that to my Trinidadian-desi ex-friend, she said, "Really? I found the recipes in that book a little bland.")   The payasam and lassi recipes came from the internet, and for me were probably the highlights of the meal.  The saffron rice was my own creation, just simple basmati rice with saffron, peppercorns, mustard seeds, and cardamom pods thrown into the water while cooking.

The biryani was the real adventure, and the recipe came from the most ridiculous source.  Hyderabadi biryani is a festival dish, descended from dishes served at resplendent feasts in the Mughal courts.  To prepare it, I slowly stewed some lamb with onions, coriander leaves (cilantro), mint, and a mixture of spices.  Some lightly spiced basmati rice was prepared separately.  To assemble the dish, I placed alternating layers of rice and stewed lamb in a deep dish, decorating the top layer of rice with saffron milk.  It looked gorgeous, and the layered structure did make for a dramatic presentation. 

The ridiculous source of the recipe?  It's Shabana Azmi's favorite, of course.  The recipe came from a fluff piece I came across via Google News some months ago, in which a food reporter asked my favorite Indian actress what she liked to eat, and extracted a recipe from her for publication.  I consider this meal a dry run, so that I will  be ready when Shabana ji comes to dinner. 

Korean food in Oakland

When I was in California with David's family, I excused myself to spend an afternoon and evening with my very dear friend C., who lives in Oakland.  It was a chilly, rainy day, and after a brief walk in Lake Temescal park (where I took the above picture), we curled up on C.'s sofa and watched Seeta aur Geeta.  Then we went to a Korean restaurant called Jong Ga House, on Grand Avenue at the edge of Lake Merritt. 

C. had taken me to this restaurant once a couple of years ago, and I haven't stopped raving about it since, so I was delighted to go back.   It is the best Korean food I have ever had.  The fun begins right after you place your order.  Most Korean restaurants that I've been to give you one or two side dishes - some kim chee, a little pickled bean sprouts, maybe some seaweed.  At Jong Ga House you get no fewer than the 12 side dishes shown above.  There's the kim chee and the bean sprouts.  There is also pickled cucumber (delicious!), spiced tofu, pressed fried tofu, fried potato, several kinds of seaweed, and some other tasty little bites that I can't even identify. 

The entrees are excellent too.  There is a delectable a broiled flat fish - moist and tasty with a perfectly crisp salt crust.  We also ordered a spicy fish and tofu stew served in a sizzling hot pot.  Here's C. serving herself some stew.

After you are done with your entrees at Jong Ga House, the server brings a sweet and refreshing rice drink to top it off, a perfect finish to a perfect meal. 

Our only complaint about this visit was the music.  A satellite channel of Christmas songs was playing - which would have been bad enough on its own - and in the course of our meal, we heard not one or two but four different versions of a vapid, inane pop Christmas song "Last Christmas I gave you my heart."  I wouldn't be surprised if there is a room in hell where all the incarnations of that dreadful song play in an eternal loop.

At the Thai grocery

Not too far from my home is an excellent Thai restaurant called Dok Bua.  It's in a space that was originally a grocery store, and the glass-door refrigerators still line the restaurant's side wall, though in the last couple of years they have put pretty silkscreened images in the doors to conceal the restaurant's supplies stored within. 

The decor is random, eclectic, and beyond kitsch - garish plastic light-up palm trees stand side-by-side with Buddhust iconography and glowing neon clocks and strings of Christmas lights. 

One of the fun features of Dok Bua is the menu - there is an ordinary laminated menu that lists all the available dishes segregated by type in the usual way, but when you are shown to your table you are also handed a photo album whose pages feature the restaurant's staple dishes and specialties.  You can flip through the photo album and just choose what looks good. 

Dok Bua also has a grocery section at the front of the restaurant, perhaps a vestige of its history.  This section features mostly packaged sweets of varied east Asian origin, but there are other products, too, that are a bit less appetizing to this western eye:

There were several brands of these dried cuttlefish snacks, but "Squidy" was my favoite.  It may be difficult to see the "Squidy" mascot at the lower right of the can.

My last purchase at the Dok Bua grocery counter was a package of addictively good, tangy little tamarind candies.  This link shows a similar candy, though not the exact brand.  I really didn't need to know how good these candies were. 

Tagine

For chanukah, my parents sent me a gorgeous Le Creuset tagine.  A tagine is a traditional Moroccan pot used to prepare slow-cooked stews.  Traditionally they are made from glazed ceramic, but the Le Creuset is enameled cast iron.  A tagine is characterized by its wide, bowl-shaped bottom and tall conical top.  Here on my stove is my lovely new Le Creuset tagine (click on any of the images for a larger image in a pop-up window):

 

Tonight, I broke in the tagine with a recipe from the booklet that came with it:  Moroccan lamb stew with fennel and dates.  First, I sauteed some garlic some very thinly sliced fennel bulb and red onion in some olive oil in the base of the tagine.   

    

Next, I took the vegetables out of the pan and browned the lamb (in two batches, to make sure it all browned well).

Then I added some good flavorful Middle Eastern spices - cumin, coriander, cayenne, and ground ginger (along with some salt), tossed the vegetables back in, and mixed in a cup of deliciously sweet chopped dates.  Finally I added a little bit of water, replaced the conical cover on the tagine, turned the heat way down, and let it cook slowly for more than two hours.  Here's the result, served over cous cous with a little sauteed broccoli rabe on the side. 

It was fantastic.  I'm not sure I've ever cooked lamb that came out so tender.  And the flavors were exquisite - the sweetness of the dates, the cayenne's bite, the savory spices, the rich lamb, the exotic fennel all blended together in a smooth synthesis that was all of those things and yet something different still.  A wonderful, wonderful meal.  Thanks to mom and dad for the tagine! 

"A towering figure on the culinary front"

Julia Child passed away on August 12, 2004.

I am sad today thinking of the loss of this culinary icon whom I have admired for so many years. Apart from being over six feet tall, Julia Child was confident, brassy, gutsy, smart, accessible, and real. She worked for the OSS in World War II. She was the first woman inducted into the Culinary Institute Hall of Fame. Her legendary Cambridge kitchen is now in the Smithsonian.

Raise a glass of Bourgogne to the memory of this great and grande dame of French cooking in America.

Bon appetit, Mrs. Child.