Here’s what we had last night with the mashed potatoes. It’s really tasty, and what’s funny – it all turns pink, because of the beets, which makes it funny, too. Also – for the Jewish mothers in the crowd – full of minerals, and warming, in Chinese Medicine terminology.
2 large beets 2 large turnips 3 carrots 1 big broccoli stem 4 onion cloves olive oil 1 cup vegetable broth 1 tsp fennel seeds 1 large handful each: dill, parsley, cilantro
Prep: chop beets, turnips, carrots and broccoli into 1-inch cubes. Heat up a wok with some olive oil in it. Chop up garlic cloves and add to the oil. Fry up until a nice smell fills the kitchen. Then, add the vegetable cubes, fennel seeds, and handfuls of herbs. Shift them around in the work until they all absorb the heat and spices. Then, add broth, cover the wok, and cook for about half an hour, occasionally mixing.
Serve on top of mashed potatoes, or in a bowl as a sort of stew. Makes a nice addition to veggie burgers.
Have you had any of those horrible nights, when, say, you break up with your partner, or someone does something horrible to you, or you have the flu and feel miserable? Some folks lose their appetite when confronted with such miseries; that has never been the case with me. When I’m upset, I really like to eat – and preferrably something nice and creamy and comforting. My top choice, in my twentysomethings, for situations like this – mashed potatoes.
In these days of crazy carb counting, folks tend to look down on the humble potato, and see it as a blob of carbs out there to get us and live in our thighs. Well, potatoes themselves are not extremely calorie-rich, and while they do consist of starch, there’s also good quality fiber in them. However, we do need to think of the relatively recent (and sound) nutritional recommendation to eat foods whose glycemic index is low; that is, foods that become sugars in a slower process and thus do not make our blood sugar level rise and crash like crazy. Potatoes happen to have quite a high glycemic index. My solution? Mix them up with sweet potatoes, and have a beautiful and tasty light-orange colored mash.
6 large potatoes 3 large sweet potatoes water 2 cups vegetable broth 3-4 spoons of olive oil, or butter onions, fried (optional)
Wash and scrub potatoes and sweet potatoes (do not peel! mash with peels is good stuff), put in a large pot, and cover with water. Add vegetable broth. Cook for about forty minutes, or until all roots are soft and can easily be pierced with a fork. Transfer to a bowl, and then mash them with a masher, or with any other handy tool. As you mash, add in the oil or butter (if you’re using butter – I prefer goat butter). Also, gradually pour in up to one cup of the cooking liquid, which tastes “brothey” and nice. The additional liquids work just as well as heavy cream or milk, and will make the mash fluffy and complex-tasting. When done, add black pepper to taste, and if you like fried onions, you can decorate the mash with some of these on top.
No pic, today, I’m afraid – that’s the problem with mash: it gets eaten before anyone has a chance at whipping out a camera!
Sometimes, only comfort food will do. Remember franks ‘n beans, that old bonfire favorite? It has a nice, vegetarian, easy-to-make version – provided that you have the right ingredients in hand.
This is something you may want to serve with some whole wheat bread, for dipping, or simply as a nice stew, with a spoon. It’s lots of fun to eat! True, textured “meat” stuff isn’t exactly the best thing for you, but it’s better than the original, and if you miss this homey favorite, this is probably the best way to go. Enriched with some vegetables, it can really be a nice family dinner.
10 tofu dogs (in the US , Smart dogs work best; in Israel, use Tivall) 1 can of white beans in tomato sauce (organic varieties contain as little additives as possible) 2 ripe tomatoes 2-3 red bell peppers 1-2 large white onions olive oil chili, black pepper
Chop up onions and fry them in olive oil in a large pot, until golden brown. Then, chop dogs into little rings and add them. After they get brown and a bit puffy, add chopped up tomatoes and peppers; sautee for about three minutes, then add contents of bean can, and spices. Sautee for another five minutes or so, or until it looks like what you remember from happy childhood days.
I know I’ve been very neglectful of the blog; I hope some freshly cooked/baked entries will improve the situation! One thing we don’t like talking about is constipation, and how important “being regular” is to our wellbeing throughout the day. Here’s a nice treat that’s excellent with your breakfast tea, and can be a daytime snack, as well.
Heat up the oven to 200 degrees celsius.
1 1/2 cups oat bran 3/4 cup corn flour 2 tsp baking powder 1 tsp cinnamon 1 apple, chopped into tiny pieces 1/2 cup dried prunes, chopped up 1/2 cup raisins, or cranberries, or both
Mix up in a bowl. (bowl #1)
2 egg whites 3 tbsp oil (I use canola) 4 tbsp honey 1/2 a cup apple juice concentrate, or apple sauce/puree 1 tsp vanilla extract
Mix up in another bowl. (bowl #2)
Gradually add contents of bowl #2 to bowl #1, while mixing.
Pour mixture into muffin pan, and bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until tops are golden and a fork stuck into the cakes comes out clean. Enjoy!
Every day you learn something new. The other day, for example, we were handed a flyer in the street, inviting us to join a vegetarian dating service.
A quick checkup when we got home (we were curious) revealed that the board is a project of Anonymous, one of Israel’s oldest and most active organizations for animal rights. On their website, they are operating a vegetarian dating board, to which people post about their interests. Is this a unique venture? Apparently, there are others, like the American Veggie Date, which allows vegetarian applicants to specify whether their vegetarianism is related to religious or ideological concerns, and of which flavor.
Of course, what I asked myself was why. I mean, is vegetarianism such a fundamental trait that folks would apply to a specified board, because they wouldn’t even consider dating meat eaters?
I suppose everyone’s answer to that is different. Mine is, yes and no. There are some personal habits that I more easily identify as deal breakers. Smoking is one of those; nearly any dating board you see has a smoking/nonsmoking information. It’s quite difficult for smokers and nonsmokers to live together. One could also think of more than one milieu where people of different political opinions would find it difficult to share a household.
But what about nutrition? I’ve seen Israeli families successfully negotiating the issue of keeping Kosher in the house. Usually, the solution is that the secular person gives in, since the religious person can’t. It seems that vegetarians and carnivores can coexist even more easily, particularly if no separate dishes are required for meat. Even if the vegetarian party dislikes having anything to do with meat – including cooking it – the carnivore can chip in (actually, this could happen even with squeamish, not necessarily vegetarian, spouses).
The substantial problem arises when vegetarianism comes from a strong ideology, where the person can’t live with someone who eats meat because that’s taken to signify that the prospective partner is a cruel, insensitive person. I imagine in this case, vegetarianism in itself is not the issue, but it is rather an index of a whole other set of values.
The schoolyear is here! It begins on Sunday. With all the joy and the preparation comes, for some of us, the concern over what we’ll be eating throughout our academic days. Cafeterias abound, but one not always has time to sit through an entire meal, when a hefty tome can be read in one’s office while snacking.
The usual answer to this problem is the quintessential sandwich, sold at every cafeteria on campus. But what will those of us with wheat allergies do? I can’t possibly have a sandwich every day; crime, in this respect, doesn’t pay. Therefore, I have to get creative about my snacking habits.
Here are some ideas for sandwich substitutes I’ve come up with. Usually, if I stick to them, they keep me happy until the end of the day.
Microwaved Potato
Microwaving a potato takes five to six minutes, and can be done during your morning cup of tea. They are very easy to pack, and can be filled with various sandwichlike stuff, like pesto, cheese, and cooked vegetables from yesterday meal. Pack in foil or in a ziplock bag and enjoy.
Squares of Cheese
Nice hard goat cheese keeps me happy in a way vegetable sticks never can. Simply cut out squares and stick in a bag (better on cold days, of course).
Vegetable Sticks
The trick: pack them in a plastic box with a little bit of water. Keeps them from becoming shrivelled, dry and unappetizing. Want this to be more satisfying and less masochistic? Take with you a small container of tchina or eggplant salad.
Organic Soup Packages
If there’s a hot water machine at the office, you can have yourself an instant cup of soup. Somehow, soup feels more filling than tea, perhaps because we tend to categorize it as “food” rather than “drink”. Better yet, keep a bag of miso and a block of tofu at the office and get instant miso soup.
After the beginning-of-the-year-stress, we’ll be back cooking and writing about it. Good luck with school, and everything else!
Not much cooking this week… we were not home. Locked up the door, gathered some clothes up in a suitcase and went off to beautiful Istanbul, once capital of the vast, corrupt, excessive Ottoman empire.
Istanbul is beautiful. That can be read in any tourist guide. The city showcases the magnificent architecture of Sinan, a genius employed by Suliman the Magnificent for planning gorgeous mosques with blue domes and sharp-pointed minarets. The insides of the mosques are also beautiful; in the absence of religious imagery, Muslim artists perfected calligraphy and did wonders with it.
Now, as to the food (that’s what we’re all here for, after all): we were warned that there would be no vegetarian options. And, we were warned that the food is not hygienic and we should exercise great care in eating. The first of these warnings is a myth and has been thoroughly debunked. We ate plenty of very good vegetarian food. Fresh salads are available everywhere; and so are various interesting dishes made with beans, rice, eggplant, and excellent yogurt. A good example is the wonderful kidney bean salad in the picture, which you can find in this Turkish recipe website. The second, however, should be remembered well. While travellers with iron-clad stomachs will probably feel okay even eating things in the street, folks with some sensitivity to food might experience diahorrea, nausea, or (as in my glorious case) a combination of the two.
What do you do when you get food poisoning or sensitivity on a trip?
My suggestion: eat nothing. The body needs some time to work things out and get well again. Drink plenty of clean good-quality water, supplementing it occasionally with something sweet, like some honey or a date or raisins (so you can keep your energy). The stomach needs some rest and it will eventually sort itself out. When you feel a bit better, often on the second day, the Mapa Guide for Natural Healing recommends eating some fruit, drinking some juice, and having some bio yogurt and/or mashed potatoes. Following these instructions, I recovered within two days, and though they weren’t very pleasant, they taught me something about the body’s ability to clean out agents that cause toxicity and bad sensations.
This final post in the “olives” series is also my entry for my dear, dear pal Barbara’s spice challenge (“going back to school” and learning about spices). Now that the olives are ready – and that bay leaves had such an important part in creating their beautiful flavor – let’s learn a tad about them.
Bay Leaves or Laurel, are the dried leaves of the evergreen tree, Laurus nobilis. The elliptically shaped leaves are light green in color and brittle when dried. They have a distinctively strong, aromatic, spicy flavor. Bay Leaves is the approved term for this spice, but the name “laurel” is still seen frequently.
In Ancient Greece and Rome, bay leaves and branchlets were used as wreaths to crown their victors. Champions of the Olympic games wore garlands of bay leaves. Our word “baccalaureate” means “laurel berries” and signifies the successful completion of one’s studies. It alludes to the bay wreaths worn by poets and scholars when they received academic honors in ancient Greece.
Whenever I make soup, pasta sauce or anything that needs to taste rich, I add a leaf or two. They somehow add that little extra punch, and it’s hard to explain what, exactly, it is they do, but somehow they make any less-than-perfect soup, chowder or sauce, perfect.
Since bay leaves are quite strong in flavor, they are to be used in small quantities and discarded before eating. In the process of making olives, we added one or two leaves to each of the jars.
The picture really doesn’t do the olives justice. They came out delicious, and I suspect if we give them a few more days they’ll be even better. So, here’s the now-tried-and-true way to do it:
1. Upon getting your olives off the tree, soak them in clean water, for three days. Change the water daily. Optional but really improves the olives: make a small cut in each of them with a knife, or pound them with a heavy object so they are cracked. They will be tastier and absorb the marinade better and faster.
2. On the fourth day, get nice, clean jars and the following ingredients per 1 kg of olives: * 1 red hot pepper * 1/2 lemon * 1 tablespoon black pepper, unground * 1 tablespoon mustard seeds * 1 bay leaf optional ingredients: * 1-2 garlic cloves sliced in half * 1 rosemary twig
3. Make a water-salt solution – 1 heaped tbsp salt to 1 cup water. You know it’s salty enough when an egg placed in the solution floats up.
4. Place the olives and the spices in the jars: * First, put a couple of red peppers and two lemon slices in the bottom. * Cover with a thick layer of olives. * Sprinkle some pepper and mustard on top. * Cover with olives. * Place bay leaf and additional stuff, if you want to. * Cove with olives. Repeat until jar is full.
5. Then, pour on top of the olives the salty solution, all the way to the top.
6. Seal with a layer of olive oil and/or wine vinegar.
7. Let stand in a cool, dark place, for about two weeks.
8. Find out when your friends’ birthdays and anniversaries are, so you can give them olives. Don’t have any olives? Let us know and we’ll send them some!
Seasoned readers of this blog have probably gathered that I don’t eat a lot of dessert.
I try to stick to fresh fruit for my sweets, and it works out fine for me, especially as I really love fresh fruit. This week’s fare has included juicy nectarines and cactus fruit (peel carefully! the thorns, which protect the cactus for predators, do exactly what they are supposed to – and it stings!). But there’s one big exception to this rule – and that’s when Chad makes Flan!
Flan, a lovely and creamy milk, egg and caramel custard, is a dessert we both grew up with as kids in Ecuador. There are commercial versions, which are not bad at all, and then there’s the home-made variety, which is fabulous.
The trick with flan is to mix the milk and eggs really well and leave some bubbles in the mixture, though not for too long, because too much foam ruins the creamy texture. It can also be seasoned with various treats – I’ll place some good recommendations below. The picture above is taken of an anime site, battleangel.info (of all places!), because ours was eaten too fast to be photographed. But it was equally delicious!
Flan
Deep baking dish (shallow dishes make for shallow flans).
For custard: 2 eggs + 2 yolks 2 cups of milk (for this dish, cow milk works better than goat milk) 1 tsp vanilla optional: 1-2 tsps sugar (if the topping is sweet, you can do without) optional seasonings: lemon peel; cardamon; cinnamon; nutmeg; or, for coffee flan, a teaspoon of good espresso powder
For caramel topping: 1 cup sugar 1/8 cup water
Heat up oven to about 180 degrees celsius. Heat up milk with spices and let cool. Meanwhile, caramelize the sugar: heat it with water, constantly mixing it, until it reaches syrup consistency. It doesn’t have to become solid, but it’s preferrable if it’s solid enough to be sticky. Whisk milk with eggs until there’s little bubbles everywhere, but don’t make too much fluff. Coat baking dish with caramel, then pour milk and egg mixture on top. Bake for about 30 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick or a knife goes in the flan and comes out clean and dry. Wait till it cools, then slowly and carefully use a knife to separate sides of flan from the dish. When you’ve done this to the best of your ability (patient people do better at this stage), invert the flan onto a plate. Whoa! There’s caramel on top! Have fun.
In her fabulous book Sunlight Cafe, Mollie Katzen devotes a special chapter to whole grains and their cooking methods. In her honor, and as a service to the public, I’m posting a modified version of her excellent grain cooking chart.
Grain Water (cups) to 1 cup grain Cooking Time Yields (cups) Oat Groats 2.5 40-45 mins. 3 Brown Rice 1.5 35-45 mins. 3.5 Wild Rice 2.5 1 1/4 hours 4 Pearl Barley 3 1 1/2 hours 4 Quinoa 1.5 25-30 mins. 3 Millet 1.5 25-30 mins. 3 Buckwheat 1.5 10 mins. 3.5 Amaranth 1.75 25 mins. 2
