Let's eat aloo gobi

One of the delivery foods you can't get in silicon valley is INDIAN. There are lots of Indian restaurants; none of them deliver. This is pretty terrible when you really, really want some palak paneer, but have ridden your bike thirty miles already that day. On the other hand, it is an excellent reason to start expanding your skills in all directions.

This time I made aloo gobi. I've made the exact recipe before, for the grand feast of John's 26th birthday last birthday week.

Birthday week: the week including both my and John's birthday; the first week in October. Activities for birthday week include cooking at least one item we've never made before every night, with various addenda, then eating it.

So last birthday week included aloo gobi, Nigel Slatery aromatic rice, and homemade naan all in one night. It was excellent, but also required a large variety of supplies and pans. This week we were not quite having a grand feast; I just made aloo gobi and rice, and warmed up some pitas in the oven. It was still a pretty good idea.

The only thing I really severely changed in this recipe (although I did several minor things as well, such as scaling down amounts) was the use of water. You may notice that the original calls for ZERO but still somehow expects the potatoes and cauliflower to get steamed. I don't know how that would happen, so perhaps it's just an editorial omission. In any case, I tried it without water, served it out and tasted it, noticed how dry everything was, then added it whether or not the recipe said so. It was fine. Experimentation pays off sometimes.

Aloo gobi

most of a cauliflower
several boiling potatoes
an onion
garlic
fresh ginger
a hot pepper, in this case jalapeño
dry spices: cumin, garam masala, turmeric, coriander (seed), salt
water
oil

This is really easy; it just requires patience.

Warm oil in a sauté pan. I used olive oil because we have lots of it and none of any other kind. Chop up your onion and throw it in with a bunch of cumin. I used powder since I don't have seeds. I should probably get some of them at some point.

Peel and mince garlic; peel and mince ginger; do not peel but mince hot chili pepper. Floretify a cauliflower and dice three or four potatoes.

Is the onion soft and correct? Add the garlic, ginger, and hot pepper. Cook a few minutes, then add the rest of the spices and mix. I just add several good shakes of coriander, turmeric, and garam masala, plus several good pinches of salt. Don't oversalt; you can always taste and add more later.

Let the spices all cook and aromaticize for a minute, then add the potatoes and maybe a half cup of water. Mix it up and get everything good and spicy. It is particularly easy to tell if this spice mixture has spread by the use of yellow turmeric. Put on the pot lid and simmer until the potatoes are mostly tender. Then add the cauliflower pieces, plus more water if necessary, and simmer again. I think I ended up using about a cup of water total.

Cook everything together until soft and delicious, taste and correct spices, and you are done.

Eat with rice or naan. We also had a dry French white wine that was a mix of different grapes. White wine works pretty well with this. Beer also works well, as you might imagine. Everyone wants a big bowl of spice and a big can of freezing beer to wash it down on a very hot afternoon.

Tofu = delicious

I often do not know what to do with tofu, which is unfortunate since it is totally cheap, vegetarian, and filling all at the same time. Mostly this is because preparing tofu well is difficult. Freeze press stomp cube! et al. Then you have to know/figure out what to do with the prep and spicings of a culture you did not even remotely grow up with, especially if you are Me: White Girl From the Midwest. I mean, you would perhaps not know it to read these entries, but a normal dinner at my house was almost always meat plus 3 vegetables, whether frozen, starchy or salad. Can you imagine making that many individual dishes for one meal? I suppose that's why the advent of frozen junk and the microwave adventified.

ANYWAY

I've definitely done lots of tofu experiments. I now know to always press my tofu, for instance, though it seems like I would get better results with a real press lined with cheesecloth instead of two cutting boards weighted with a pot of water. I know how to crispify my tofu via dry-fry. I know how to spice.

This means I can now do things like "take the spices from one thing I made once and try them with tofu." It was a good idea.

I got the spicing here from a Pakistani curry recipe. That link doesn't match where I found it, but it's the exact same recipe with same title and measurements, and my printout has a specific reference to that blog as well, so there you go. I remember first making this to the letter several years ago, and being very excited that the aroma of the spicing exactly matched the aroma of the perfect in every way tandoori swordfish at Shalimar in Ann Arbor. I worship the tandoori swordfish. Clearly, this is a good set of spices to apply to anything whatever. Perhaps tofu would be an idea!

I didn't have any yogurt, as required in original as well as tandoori versions, but clearly the spices were still good. I would totally add yogurt to this in future, however.

Curry tofu business

extra-firm tofu, pressed
small eggplant of the Italian or Asian variety
green pepper
olive oil
garlic
fresh ginger
coriander, cumin, turmeric
rice over which to serve

Pressing tofu is easy. Cut it into wide layers about a centimeter thick, put it between two cutting boards, put the whole business in the sink, and stick something heavy on top. I use the aforementioned pot of water. Leave it there for at least a half hour, preferably more, and let the weight of the pot compress the tofu and squeeze out the extra water.

When you're ready for main prep, put rice on and remove tofu from the press. Get out a big sauté pan and warm some olive oil. Smash and chop garlic; peel and chop ginger. Use as much as you like. Stick those in the warmed oil with a good huge shake of coriander plus smaller shakes of cumin and turmeric. Let them soften and aromaticize while you cube the tofu.

Add the tofu to the pan; stir to distribute spices; dice up the eggplant.

When tofu has browned a little on its first side, add eggplant. Stir to distribute spices; turn tofu so unbrowned sides touch the pan; let cook; chop a green pepper.

Add the pepper and stir a few more times so the tofu gets browned on all sides. Taste. Do you want more spice? More spice. Now is also the point at which I might add yogurt.

Cook a little more to get any new spices infused, then eat with rice.

Green dinner

It's been so busy and exhausting that we just want food to appear in front of us. Sometimes we are lucky and this does happen, usually by virtue of a telephone call to Maldonado's. Sometimes pizza is not the answer, however. You'd think this area of CA would have its share of delivery of something that is not pizza, but no. So instead you go to the store and say hmm hmm hmm up and down the aisles and eventually come up with something like this.

That's another Sapporito pasta from Redwood City, one stuffed with ricotta, pine nuts, and spinach. It's not a standard type, though, as you can tell from the totally plain and non-logoed package. Clearly someone got a shipment of too many pine nuts and was all "What shall I do with these? I know!"

So, sauce. The clear choice here is a pesto...OR IS IT? There are already pine nuts inherent in the pasta itself! So perhaps we should do something else, something like a metric ton of parsley instead of one of basil.

ALL RIGHT THEN

Ravioli and not pesto

some good fresh ravioli, made or bought
olive oil
garlic
parsley
salt and pepper

Cook ravioli. Fresh ravioli takes maybe five to eight minutes to cook all the way through.

In the meantime, make sauce. The sauce is not really a "sauce" per se but a variant on aglio e olio. Get out a big sauté pan and heat some olive oil. Smash, peel, and mince garlic; add and cook slowly until delicious. I mean, until highly scented and beginning to get golden. If you cook it slowly enough the garlic should be perfect just as the ravioli is done.

Drain ravioli and dump it into the pan with the oil. Add as much parsley as you can stand to pick and chop, plus some salt and pepper. Mix it up. You now have green dinner.

For optimal green dinner experience, you want raw things along with the cooked. Here's the salad: butter lettuce and icicle radishes.

Execution:

- Ravioli is obvious.

- Bring some pulverized sea salt to the table. Dip radish chunks in the oil from your ravioli, then in the salt. Eat them.

- Drink lots of frigid white wine. Ours was 2006 Cartlidge & Browne Sauvignon Blanc. It's organic, which was what prompted us to buy it in the first place. That was a good idea. If you ever see this stuff, and have any interest in dry white wine whatsoever, you should buy a case.

- Go to bed.

Quesadilla action

There are always the quesadillas when you have zero ideas about what to do for food and eating. I find them best when stuffed with as much stuff as you can possibly fit.

Very thick quesadillas.

tortillas
black beans
rice
cheese
green onion/other onion
jalapeño/other pepper
any spices such as cumin or chili powder
salsa/various desired garnish

Black beans:

Get some, soak them overnight, and boil them until tender.

Rice:

Put it in the rice cooker/in a covered pot with double the amount of water and cook until done.

When the black beans and rice are done, make quesadillas. Get out a tortilla and layer it with a little cheese, a little rice, a little spoonful of beans, a few slices of jalapeño, a handful of green onion, some spices, and a second little layer of cheese. This amount of stuff should fill a quesadilla to the point of bursting.

You can also add anything else you can think of. Bell peppers of various colors are good. The cheese can be any kind that sounds appealing; we mostly use cheddar, but white cheeses in the monterey jack/queso fresco/even mozzarella area are better. For spices, I mostly just add a tiny bit of cumin. This time I didn't add anything. There's already a jalapeño in there!

I like to layer only half of each tortilla and fold it over, such that I can pick up the whole thing and shovel it into my mouth as swiftly as possible, but a whole flat tortilla covered by another clearly also works.

Heat a frying pan, add quesadilla(s), and cook until the underside is crisp and golden. Flip and cook the other side. This side will take less time since it's already been warmed. You can also put a lid on the pan, which is a good idea considering the fullness of the tortillas. You want them hot through as well as goldenified.

When done, eat as soon as you aren't going to burn the skin off the roof of your mouth. Eat them plain or with salsa or sour cream or plain yogurt or guacamole or lemon or lime or all of the above.

Mushroom extravaganza

What happens with the tiniest brown mushrooms are on special at the store?

OH I DON'T KNOW

MAYBE THIS

Super mushroom with pasta

lots of best mushrooms ever
olive oil/maybe butter if you want
garlic
dry vermouth
salt, pepper
pasta
parsley

First you get the best mushrooms ever from the store and gloat over them all day while you scheme about what to do with them. They are so tiny and delicious! figuratively as well as literally! My tiniest ones were maybe 3/4 of an inch across; the biggest were an inch, and had lovely skin that peeled upward in little scales. Clearly you can also use a more normal standard white mushroom, or any other kind that's around. Mushrooms! Use a whole bag of them.

Boil water and make pasta throughout the course of operations.

Rub the dirt off the mushrooms and cut off any particularly bad stem ends. If the mushrooms are too big for your satisfaction, cut them into halves or fourths.

Get out a sauté pan, add a bunch of olive oil, and warm it all up on medium-low. You can also add butter if you so desire. Crush, peel, and mince a bunch of cloves of garlic. I used maybe five; more would be good. Sauté the garlic gently until it softens and just barely begins to turn golden. Then add the mushrooms and stir to get the garlic-infused oil all over the place.

Let the mushrooms sit and cook in the oil for maybe five minutes before stirring. Then shake it all up and do it again, making sure to flip all the bits over appropriately. You may also want to add some more oil at this point, if things are dry. I used pretty abundant quantities of oil, considering.

When the mushrooms have clearly decreased in size and are starting to get golden and possibly a little crusty, add a big glug of dry vermouth and stir it all up. Cook for another five minutes or so to absorb all the liquid. Salt and pepper, and they are done.

Is the pasta done and drained? Dump it into the mushroom mixture and stir. Get the oil everywhere. Maybe add some more pepper if you find that the speckage has totally vanished. Then get the pasta out onto plates.

Deglaze the hot pan with another slug of olive oil. Just stick it over heat and scrape madly to get all the bits off the pan and into the vermouth. Pour this over the pasta. Add a bunch of torn parsley and you are done.

Eat it with a tomato salad.

Tomato salad

good tomato
salt

Cut up the tomato and sprinkle it with a little salt. Eat it.