Middle eastern

I love Middle-eastern food. I first discovered it on my first visit to the US. My friend took me on a tour of New York, walking around all the famous avenues and streets and we finally wound up in the Village that evening for dinner. She ordered food that sounded strange – Baba ghanoush, falafel and so on – but because I knew she was vegetarian, I was safe and so eager to try it out. I fell in love with the fresh, light and zingy flavours but there was at that time no chance of getting anything similar in India. Many years later, when A and I moved to France, any time I felt too tired to cook, we'd go to the nearby Lebanese and order a take-out meal that sort of replicated a typical Indian meal. There was Baba ghanoush – similar to our beloved Baingan ka Bhurta, Mujaddara – lentils cooked with rice, akin to our Masoor Dal, and Pita bread.

Somewhere during that year we also discovered many other lovely flavours of this region – the parsley and Bulghur wheat salad and of course Hummous. I loved the simplicity of the hummous and its contrast with almost anything I could dip into it – crunchy crudités, chips, bread, croissants…It was a rediscovery of the humble Chickpea. Once back in India, we found many more restaurants serving hummous and other middle-eastern food items, but rarely did I find one with Hummous to my liking.

So much so that I've started making my own hummous and freezing large quantities so we always have some stock handy. My elder son loves it too, and is happy to have hummous with toast for breakfast or with crackers for a snack. I recently made it for a dinner with old friends, and we just all curled up around the living room table, eagerly dipping our pita bread chunks into it, while music and conversation both flowed. Bliss!

Ingredients:

1 cup chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked, or cooked using the quick soak method

1 tsp tahini paste ( or just use plain sesame seeds – 2 tsp)

Juice of 2 limes

4-5 cloves garlic

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

½ cup water

Salt to taste

Olive slices and paprika to garnish

Grind together the chickpeas, sesame seeds, garlic and lime juice along with the water in a blender until you have a smooth puree. Tip out and add salt to taste. Top with half the olive oil and stir to mix well. Store in a fridge until 15 minutes before serving.

To serve: serve out into the bowl you intend to use. Scatter the olive slices and add a decorative sprinkle of paprika. Top with the olive oil and serve with toasted pita slices.

This is my entry for MLLA 12, begun by Susan and now continued by Haalo, hosted this month by Apu.

Second Chance

There are some things one just doesn't get the first time around. Trigonometry (actually, I'm not sure I'd get that even a second time around!), statistics, economics…peanut butter…

Yup, peanut butter. I grew up in India, where you don't get it – either to buy or as a taste – until I was about 12 and then we headed out to first Bangkok for a few years and later, Singapore. I went to the International/ American schools there. I discovered a whole new world of reading – Beverly Cleary with Ramona and Henry, Maud Hart Lovelace with Betsy, Lastuff.ura Ingalls Wilder and so on. I also discovered some interesting things in the cafeteria, which included something many of the American children's books and sitcoms rhapsodized about – peanut butter. At first I wasn't very adventurous about food except for an unfortunate predilection for strawberry flavoured things (synthetic strawberry flavor sucks, I've discovered). Eventually I tried a peanut butter sandwich or two, coaxed on by American school friends but I never understood what exactly about it was a big deal. Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that it was cultural differences, a conclusion that helped me accept a lot of peculiar things that year.

A couple of years later, when we were in Singapore and I was ready to be more adventurous about vegetarian food, at least, we bought a couple packs of Skippy's Peanut butter. I tried the smooth, I tried the chunky. Hmm, not so much, I thought. Then I tried something called Chocolate strips – the peanut butter and chocolate paste were packed in alternating stripes, so when you spread it on a piece of bread or toast, you got a light and dark brown striped thing that finally – finally – tasted good. We came back to India a couple of years later and peanut butter became something one had vaguely tried at some point, kinda like cigarettes, and decided to live without, with no regrets.

Well, recently I was at the neighbourhood hypermarket and came across Ben and Jerry's icecream. I'm not someone who liked fruit-flavoured icecream ( for that I prefer gelato or sorbets) so eschewing the Chunky monkey which is banana flavoured, they only had Chubby Hubby so I picked up a tub. Ben and Jerry's is one of my favourite icecream brands so I hoped for the best after I realized it had peanut butter in it. That night, after all three kids were finally asleep, A and I decided to treat ourselves to a little CH. One spoonful later and I was hooked. This was a lovely mélange of flavours and textures, with the sweet, silken chocolate and vanilla rubbing up against the slightly salty, chunky peanut butter. Awesome, was our verdict.

Then, a little while later, I was flying out of SFO airport and spotted a Ghirardelli's stand so I made a beeline for it and bought a pack of assorted chocolates. Back home, I found a peanut-butter flavoured chocolate. One bite and I was hooked, with the tiny pebbly peanut butter contrasting against silken chocolate all over again. Hmm, peanut butter seems like a good thing, I thought and bought a jar of Skippy's smooth PB. I made myself toast for breakfast a few days later and with a smear of PB and J on it, I realized I had found a new food taste to get hooked on to.

Now the only problem is that Skippy's is quite expensive. There is an Indian brand, Sundrop, which has just launched PB but it's from the house of a tobacco giant, so A and I being conscientious objectors, I can't buy that. Gee, did anyone ever envisage the day that peanut butter would be classified as a 'luxury'?

Sweet Chile of Mine: MLLA 11

I recently blogged about the terrific Chile I had at the Steelhead Diner in Seattle. So naturally when I got home I wanted to recreate it for my family, but didn't know how to make it taste different from regular Rajma chaawal, apart from the accompaniments. Thankfully I found a great recipe in Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Feasts. I made it a couple of weekends ago when we had some close friends over for dinner. I didn't want to make a typical Indian meal with half a dozen dishes and spices, because it was really too hot to live that weekend. So we had my mom's yoghurt-paneer dip with crudités and hummus with pita bread as appetizers during drinks, followed by Spanish almond-grape chilled soup:

Middle Eastern tabbouleh and Mexican Chile for dinner. The cocoa powder adds a lovely, smoky depth to the flavour of the Chile, so it was a densely flavourful main course in contrast to the light, fresh flavours of the soup and tabbouleh.We had planned to serve a fruit salad with melon and mango for desert but we and our friends were too stuffed by that point.

The Chile was a breeze to make, and I served it with sides of sour cream and salsa.

Ingredients:
Kidney beans – 1 cup, soaked for 8 hours and then cooked or cooked using the Quick-soak method
Cumin powder – 1 tsp
Coriander powder – 1 tsp
Cocoa powder – 1 tbsp
Red chili powder – 2 tsp
2 onions, finely chopped
3-4 garlic pods, crushed
200 ml tomato puree
Salt to taste
Vegetable oil – 1 tbsp
Cheddar cheese, grated – 1 cup

Heat the oil and add in the cumin and coriander powder. When they start to brown, add the onions and garlic and cook until they turn pale brown. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30-40 minutes until the mixture turns thick.

If you want to assemble it the way the Diner did, top the Chili with the cheddar cheese and bake in a 220 degrees C oven for about 10-15 minutes until the cheese melts and just starts turning brown.

Serve with sour cream ( we don't get it here so I mixed sour yoghurt with cream and whipped the two together until it was thick and tasted like sour cream) and simple salsa – tomatoes and onions finely chopped with green chilies, coriander leaves and lime squeezed in and salt to taste.

The nice thing about this Chile is that you can eat it for days – served on toast or good crusty bread or as is, heated through or cold from the fridge…

This is my entry for My Legume Love Affair 11, begun by Susan, hosted this time by Taste with the eyes.

Red, white and green...

...Was the theme for the royal foodie joust this month. And with the weather here touching 45 degrees c last week, I couldn't help but remember our wonderful vacation two years ago in Santorini…we landed during a freak spell of cold, driving rain in May, and wondered what kind of beach vacation this would be. But once it cleared up we had an amazing time, marveling at the beautiful white colour of buildings (A's theory was that they were regularly daubed with Greek yogurt) and the blues of church domes, the sky and the water. We also had amazing food – delicious, low calorie, incredibly healthy and flavourful and just perfect for hot weather.

I decided to do more than reminisce and to recreate at least some of the culinary flavours of Greece tonight in my kitchen. So at long last I experimented with the perfect summer salad – watermelon, with feta topped with crushed mint. A splosh of balsamic vinegar and the bite of thinly sliced red onion just accentuated the flavours more and left us feeling fulfilled and cooled down in this hot climate.

Conversely enough, the red of the watermelon looks cool despite the weather, perhaps because of the remembered juiciness, while the cool white of the feta reminded me of an incident in Santorini, where we had seen far-off snow-clad peaks...or so we thought until we drew closer and realised it was a hilltop covered with snow-white houses! And the green of the crushed mint and its fragrance add just that little spring in one's step, that light touch of freshness...

Steelhead Diner

Last week I was in Seattle on business. Luckily our meeting wound up by 3:00 pm, leaving us lots of free time to walk around and explore the city. Seattle, particularly the downtown area, is pretty compact and easy to get around on foot, unlike many other American cities. We quickly changed into casual clothes, and especially for me and V, flat shoes as opposed to the stilettos we had worn in the morning on our way to the meeting and rued heavily while on the so-called 10 minute walk to the meeting from our hotel, armed with ton-weight of laptop.

It was fun to wander around and we quickly found our bearings as we headed down to the famous Pike's Place Market, famous for its fresh produce. Much of the produce was stuff that dad and I didn't really appreciate, i.e. fresh seafood, though V had fun posing with a giant crab. But the flower section was beautiful with the most stunning riot of colour from newly bloomed tulips. There were lots of interesting artsy craftsy stalls with jewellery, stuffed toys and the like at one end, as well as some fabulous black and white photographs of Seattle, which however were quite expensive.

We wandered across the waterfront all the way to a deck-ey area which opened onto Puget Sound which was beautiful and also got a concerted glimpse of Seattle's skyline. By this time we were pretty hungry but unfortunately most places down by the water seemed to have almost nothing vegetarian on offer, apart from bread and mashed potatoes. Dad and I wanted a proper meal so we split off from the rest of the group and wandered back over near Pike's Place, where we remembered seeing lots of restaurants.

The Steelhead Diner was right opposite the Sur La Table store, and we remembered having passed by so we stopped on the off-chance that they might have something to offer. We asked the hostess and she said they have an awesome vegetarian Chili. By this time, Dad and I were both tired out as well, so we thankfully agreed and were lucky enough to get a table by the windows, which offered a lovely glimpse of the sun setting over Puget Sound.

We ordered two small cups of the Chili, one side of mashed potatoes and asked for a glass of white wine and some beer to cool ourselves down. The Chilean wine was very nice, crisp with a fruit edge, and Dad liked the dark beer they served. The Chili was going to be a first for us and I was curious to see how it would be different from Indian Rajma. The drinks came with some lovely bread served with butter partially softened in an olive oil + fresh coriander sauce, which was incredibly flavourful and which I've got to try out asap at home.

We enjoyed the lively music, the wonderful view and the buzz of action, while savouring the bread.. The restaurant was clearly very popular, and lots of people came in as the evening turned into night. By the time we left, around 9:00 pm, the restaurant was packed. In fact, the next night when V and I went back for dinner, we couldn't find a free table and had to have our meal sitting at the bar, it was so full.

The chili looked awesome. They served it topped with Monterey Jack cheese, sour cream and some pico de gallo. Dad and I dug in cautiously and then wholeheartedly after the first bite. The mixture of flavours just exploded in our mouths – the spicy Chili offset by the bland sour cream, the warmth of the cheese broken by the piquant salsa – it was like a symphony playing on our tastebuds. The cup of chili finished all too quickly. While there was some similarity to Rajma, the overall mix of flavours was quite different and a welcome difference, too.

The mashed potatoes came drowning in butter and while it tasted great, dad and I could only have so much before we were feeling sated.

We ended the meal with a rhubarb sorbet, since neither of us had had rhubarb before. It was a lovely, tart, fresh-tasting sorbet and the colour was just so intensely saturated that it was a treat for the eyes as well.

The service at the diner was fabulous, with the waitress very helpful in guiding us regarding the size of the portions and on what mixture to order, being very attentive as to when we needed something. The bill for a wonderful meal for two came to an affordable $ 46.50 + tip.

Steelhead Diner

1^st Avenue and Pine,

Seattle, WA

Persian Inspiration

The weather's been hot enough here lately to remind anyone of the Sahara – it was 45 degrees Friday. So hardly surprising that we didn't feel like having the usual suspects of dal and sabzi for dinner over the hot, hot weekend. In fact, the kiddos and I had an inebriated-type long 3 hour nap Saturday afternoon, in celebration of the awful weather. So when it came to figuring out what we wanted to eat for dinner this weekend, I definitely leaned towards lean cuisine. Suddenly I remembered couscous which, while not a husband favourite, does qualify as a light meal. We had had a really lovely meal of what I then thought was cous cous last week in Seattle – on reflection I figured it was probably bulgur wheat, but the thought of couscous inspired me.

I had planned to make hummous over the weekend, so I decided I wanted to give my cous cous a middle-Eastern flavour. But it was too hot to look through cookbooks so I had me a mini-brainstorm. What flavours truly went with Middle-Eastern? Hmmm…mint, for one. Pomegranates would add a Persian touch…and somehow the thought of Persia has always enthralled me…Pistachios would add crunch and further the connection. Lime…

It was really fun improvising this cous cous, and I realized that cous cous is going to get added to my mental list of 'foods I like cooking because I get to be creative'. It turned out really well too, and had that zing of freshness that a hot weekend like this one really needed in a meal. The pomegranates added a lovely burst of tart sweetness to offset the strong mint flavour and the crunch of pistachios was a lovely addition. With this and some litchi icecream for dessert, we had a wonderful summer dinner.

Ingredients:
250 gm couscous

Water (enough to cover the couscous and 1 inch over)
Handful mint leaves

Handful coriander leaves

1-2 Snake gourds, diced
Juice of 1-2 limes (depending on size and juiciness)
Half cup pomegranates
Half cup pistachios, lightly toasted/ dry roasted in a frying pan
1 onion, julienned
Salt to taste

Add the water to the couscous and let it soak in for about 5 minutes. Use a fork to fluff it up once the couscous has absorbed all the water. Meanwhile, finely mince the mint and coriander leaves. Add the herbs, the onion, snake gourds ( like long, crisp cucumber), the pomegranates and the lime juice to the couscous. Make sure the lime is juicy – the ones I used were very tart and flavourful but not juicy and so the couscous was a little drier than I would have liked. Add salt to taste, mix and fluff up with a fork again. If you like a touch of spice, add zatar mix or just a touch of paprika. Chill for about half hour and serve, with pomegranate juice on the side, to add more Persian-ness to the meal.

How's that for this weekend's herb blogging # 182, hosted by Chris.

Srivalli’s Mithai Mela

Srivalli's lovely blog has its Mithai Mela on and I just scrolled through my archives to find my favourite dessert recipes, since I'm trying not to make any right now for weightloss and too-hot-weather reasons - a crisp slice of really cold watermelon is the perfect dessert for now. It turns out there are a couple of themes running through my archives: Indian being one, and crazy-about-chocolate being the other. It turned out this is a great way for me to collate my favourite dessert recipes in one place, too.

So here are links to the Indian ones:

There's our favourite winter dessert - exotic, rich and completely unexpected... (I realized when I scrolled through my archives that I haven't put down a specific recipe for this, so you'll just have to live through the experience…J)
Then there's the annual feast standard - rich, exotic and favorited by all our friends. I've been known to get threatening phone calls before our annual Id party if I even think about not making this...

Ingredients:
1 cup almonds
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup ghee ( clarified butter)
a little milk ( about 1/2 cup)
5-6 strings of saffron

Soak the badaam so the peel gets loosened and peel them. Puree them with as little of the milk as you can add to still get a very fine puree.
Soak the saffrom strands in 1 tsp hot milk until the orange colour infuses the milk.
Put the sugar into a pan and add 1/4 cup water. Let it cook on a medium flame until it gets a one-string consistency. ( You can test this by dipping your index finger into the syrup and then pressing your finger and thumb together and then pulling them apart. If you get one strand of sugar syrup between your thumb and finger that's it. But be careful - this syrup can burn the skin off your hand!)
Put in the almond paste, turning the heat to low and add the saffron. Cook, stirring frequently but slowly until the mixture starts sticking to the bottom of the pan.
At this juncture, add the ghee (clarified butter) little by little until the mixture takes on a halwa texture and stops sticking to the pan. Keep stirring throughout the process!

Serve hot or cold. This quantity would be enough for about 10 people (it's very rich).

And of course, festival times are synonymous with this dish, which is a classic...

Ingredients:

Fistful of dried, thin vermicelli
1 tablespoon of ghee
1 litre milk
1 and a quarter cups sugar
4-5 saffron strands soaked in hot milk
Handful raisins
Cashews broken up into quarters and fried in ghee until somewhat brown
2-3 cardamom pods, coarsely powdered with a rolling pin or in a mortar and pestle

Break the vermicelli into about 1 cm pieces by hand. Fry it on medium heat in the ghee until it starts turning a light brown and emanates a fragrance. Add the milk, ideally full cream, the sugar and the saffron and let it cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the vermicelli is fully cooked – it'll look translucent. Add the raisins and cardamom and serve it hot or cold garnished with cashews.
I usually like it cold so I refrigerate it and sometimes serve it with vanilla icecream.You can also choose to serve this dish as dessert, garnished with a few pomegranate bits, halved green or puple grapes or almond slivers.

And this one's perfect for every day, any day of the year...
And then there are my two favourite chocolate recipes. I'm always after recipes that have a big inflexion point - i.e. easy on effort but seemingly difficult and having maximum 'theater'.

This is a restaurant favourite - most restaurants love to show off their chops to unsuspecting customers who're impressed with molten chocolate cakes, little knowing how easy they are to make...
Ingredients:
350 grams best quality dark chocolate, softened
150 gms caster sugar
50 gms good butter ( try and get French butter if possible), softened
1 tsp vanilla - or Frangelico/ Godiva, maybe even Tia Maria - or Cointreau...Drambuie...ok, now I'm drooling all over again!
50 gms flour ( Nigella recommends Italian 00 which I don't know what it is – I just used plain maida)
4 eggs
Pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C ( if baking right away).
Grease 6 pudding cups ( I used aluminum muffin cups, not having any other kind to hand, but am immediately inspired to invest in ceramic ramekins, since I think the possibility of making these on a regular basis is quite high) and line the bottoms with baking sheet.
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the eggs and the salt and beat together.
Add the vanilla and the flour and blend together well.
Scrape in the softened chocolate ( try not to be greedy enough to leave lots behind in the bowl so you can lick it off all by yourself!) and blend the batter well together.
Pour into the pudding pans and pop into the oven for 10 minutes.
If not baking these immediately, you can make the batter ahead of time and keep it in the fridge. In that case, keep the timer at 12 minutes for the baking process.
As soon as it's done – the tops will look done, but don't pop in a knife to check, the inside will be wet unlike a conventional cake – take out of the oven and invert onto individual dessert plates or shallow bowls.

And then there's the unexpectedness of a cake with no flour...

Ingredients:
435 grams chestnut puree
125 gms unsalted butter, softened
6 eggs, separated
250 gms best dark ( but sweetened) chocolate (softened)
50 gms caster sugar
20 gms light muscovado sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp dark rum
Pinch salt
As always, didn't have all the ingredients, so went along and improvised. Also, have done the best in terms of photography, what with my meagre camera skills and the morning light which is harsh as opposed to lambent - but do, please, do try making this cake. You'll never regret it!
In a deep bowl, mix together the butter and the chestnut puree until well mixed. Then add the vanilla, rum, the egg yolks and the chocolate and blend until well mixed.
In a separate bowl, beat the whites of the eggs with the salt until foamy. Add the caster sugar gradually, and continue beating until the peaks are stiff and glossy. Scatter the muscovado sugar on top and fold in until well mixed.

Working confidently, fold the egg whites into the chocolate-chestnut batter, one third at a time.

Pour the batter into a 22 cm Springform greased and lined tin. Bake at 180 degrees C for 45 minutes ( or thereabouts). The top of the cake will have cracks in it, but who cares - it's meant to look that way. Cool on the rack for 20 minutes. Before serving, dust icing sugar on top and make sure whoever you're sharing this with is already in the room. Otherwise, all you'll have to show for your efforts is a pile of crumbs and a tiny brown smear on your chin!

And oh, ok, for a while back there I'd joined the Daring Bakers and made this rather hideous and decoratively challenged but amazing tasting cake...

Enjoy!