Dal / daal Makhani and the Haven

Hello all! This week has been amazing - I matched for residency, my dear friend/roommate got married to a great guy, I ate at my favorite hoagie restaurant in New Jersey (let the gloriousness of this moment not be underestimated), the Ravens are going to the super bowl, and Obama got inaugurated. Pretty hard to beat. Not unsurprisingly, Monday afternoon felt like a bit of an anticlimax. How do you top all that awesomeness?! With an unnecessarily elaborate Indian supper, that's how! I love Indian food - spicy, delicious, and (much of it) vegetarian. Now that I am comfortable with the basics of Indian cooking, I LOVE making it at home - all the great flavors of an Indian buffet without all the salt, butter, cream, and MSG.

If you're into Indian home cooking, Anupy Singla is a great resource. She is an Indian-American author with several cookbooks, none of which I own (sadly). She specializes in Indian slow cooker recipes as well as healthy vegan recipes. She has a great blog, Indian as Apple Pie. None of the recipes I have tried from her site have been duds - none. Today I made her Dal Makhani. I followed her recipe pretty closely, but I made enough changes that it bears a re-write here:

Rinse 1.5c dried lentils and 3/4c dried kidney beans. Black lentils are ideal, brown OK. Soak overnight.
Cover the beans and lentils with water and simmer with 1 cinnamon stick, 6 balls allspice or 3 cloves, 2 bay leaves, and 1t turmeric powder for about 1 hour, until soft enough to eat. Turn off and leave covered when done.
When the beans are done, process 4 cloves garlic, 1 onion, 1" fresh ginger, and 1.5 jalapenos (I left the seeds in - use your judgement depending on how much spice you like).
Next, heat 4T butter or EVOO in a saucepan.
Toast 1t cumin seeds until they sputter, ~1".


Add the garlic/onion/ginger/jalapeno mixture and saute until it becomes fragrant and slightly browned, 3-4".
Add 6 oz tomato paste and stir. Add a little water if needed to keep the mixture from sticking to the pan.
Put the lentils/beans and the contents of the saute pan into your slow cooker.
Stir in a few shakes of cardamom powder and salt to taste (~1t).
Cook for about 6 hours on low. Stir in 1/4 cup coconut milk at the end.

I paired it with garlic naan, saag, and raita. Note that if you get lazy with that saag recipe, you can replace most of the spices with a few shakes of garam masala and call it a day.

Pictures of the best hoagie place on the planet:

Hoagie Haven, Princeton, NJ. Can't get the photo to rotate =(

Grease stains in front of the bench out front: this is how you know it's good.

Fennel, Bean and SAMBUCA soup - our 500th post!

I thank Suzanne and Jody for putting me back in Chez Toby's good graces so that I can post this soup, which I cut out of the Post years ago and made today for Suzanne and Reeves.

Soak a bag of white beans in a big pot.  When they're soaked, drain the water, pour in enough vegetable stock to cover, and cook them for an hour.

Meanwhile, you can slice the 2 bulbs of fennel in the FP, which gives you 1/8" slices if you push hard and fast on the bulbs.  Recipe calls for 1/4" slices but so what.  Spread them out on 2 greased or lined trays, sprinkle and toss with 1/4 cup roasted almond oil or some non-California wannabe oil, along with 4 big cloves of unpeeled garlic and roast at 350 until they are a bit crisp - - maybe 30 min or more.  At the same time, saute 1/2 sliced onion in some oil until soft.  When the beans are tasty, add the roasted fennel, the garlic extruded from its peel, and the onion to the pot and cook for 10 min or so.  Run this thru the FP (will require a repeat).  Add white pepper, and, once the puree is reasonably cool, 4 T. Sambuca or Pernod, and, if you like, 1/2 cup half and half.  I didn't so I'm not going to dignify this with bolding.   REcipe calls for topping with 1/4 c crumbled blue cheese.  We used parmesan.  Recipe calls for toasted walnuts in the bottom of the bowl.  That or hazelnuts would be a lovely surprise.  You can put a fennel frond atop.

Indian Peas & Tofu (Vegan Sukha Mattar Paneer)

Just tried this delicious recipe from Anupy Singla's blog, Indian as Apple Pie. Fabulous and flavorful - a tofu dish that is easily as good as paneer! The only thing I changed was that I blotted the tofu prior to cooking to ensure maximum flavor absorption. Not sure if this is necessary, but I prefer a firmer tofu.

Mexican Fiesta, Part Quatro: Huevos Rancheros

Today, I will share with you my favorite dish of that weekend of Mexican delights. On Sunday morning, we made huevos rancheros. I love this dish. It would be a perfect follow-up if you had too much tequila with your Mexican feast on Saturday.

I did not have huevos rancheros until our trip to Mexico last year. Yes, it took me until age 25! You might be surprised to learn that Northern Virginia is not known for the quality and variety of its Mexican cuisine.

Huevos in Mexico. With agua di pina.

It has that perfect combination of spicy, crunchy, and creamy. I love how it looks perfect on your plate and then the moment you touch it with your fork the egg yolk explodes all over everything.

Here's my take. All ingredient values are per person:

Huevos Rancheros
Turn on your oven's broiler.
Brush two corn tortillas with EVOO. Place under broiler for 2-3 minutes, or until crispy but not burnt.
Meanwhile, fry two eggs over medium-high heat.
Heat a generous scoop of black beans in the microwave.
Place the crispy tortillas on a plate. Top with your two eggs, the beans, a big spoonful of salsa, a few slices of avocado, and some grated cheddar.

Huevos in Baltimore.

Mexican Fiesta part tres: Black Bean Tacos

I love this black bean recipe. They turn out thick and flavorful, perfect for tacos or serving with rice.

Black Bean Tacos
Reanimate 1 1 lb bag of black beans, set aside
Saute 1/2 onion over medium heat, chopt
After the onion softens, add 6 cloves garlic, diced and hot peppers to taste, diced. We used 1 jalapeno and 1 red habanero. Not for the faint of heart. The (excessive?) heat was well-balanced by the rice and tortillas, though. Chipotle peppers would do well here, too.
After ~ 1 minute of cooking, add the beans and barely cover with vegetable stock.
Stir in 2T tomato paste.
Sprinkle in 2T cornstarch and stir.
Season with cumin, oregano, black pepper, and salt to taste.
Simmer until the dish thickens to a consistency of your liking.

I served it with cilantro-lime rice, corn tortillas, avocado, cheddar, salsa, and chipotle hot-sauce. Queso fresco and fresh tomatoes would be good, too.

Mexican fiesta part dos: Cilantro-lime cole slaw

Is cole slaw Mexican? Probably not, because if it were, it would have a far more attractive Spanish name. It does go well with Tex-Mex, though.

I make cole slaw often--you can use different oils and vinegars to give it all kinds of different flavors and it tends to last a while in the fridge. It even gets better with age. This incarnation was particularly easy and delicious. Cabbage varies a surprising amount with season and its appearance gives little clue to its quality, beyond obvious rot. (Seriously, if you have any tips about how to pick out a flavorful cabbage, I'm all ears!) Cabbage season seems to pick up in MD in the late spring and last through the fall, so I am looking forward to months of tasty slaws!

Cilantro-lime cole slaw
Chop a large handful of cilantro. I use the food processor.  Basically, I use the food processor for all of the chopping/slicing in this recipe and then just empty it into a large bowl whenever the processor's bowl gets too full.
Chop-shred 1 small head of green cabbage.  I chop the head in half, remove the core, then slice the cabbage into 1-2" wide wedges. I then run it through the food processor on the 2mm slicing blade.
Shred 2 carrots.
Dress with the juice of 1 lime, ~3T rice wine vinegar,  and ~2T EVOO. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Mix the salad and then knead it with your hands for a few minutes to soften the cabbage.
Optional: stir in a big handful of sunflower seeds (I do this if I'm pairing the cole slaw with a lighter main dish or having it alone.)

Enjoy in tacos or as a side. Yum!

Mexican Fiesta: Salsa!

I spent last Memorial Day basking in the sun in Mexico. It was fabulous.

We spent this Memorial Day hiding from the heat in our apartment, me too tired from last week's trip to the South West to want to go out and do anything.

This gave me the perfect opportunity to create last year's trip with a weekend of Mexican cooking. Yum!  I set out to make Mexican food on Saturday evening with a very empty belly and ended up with enough food for the entire weekend. Our Saturday evening feast consisted of:

• Mojitos
• Chips and salsa
• Bean tacos
• Fish tacos
• Chipotle-style cilantro-lime rice
• Cilantro-lime coleslaw

M. is our bartender, so I will leave descriptions of mojitos to him. The cilantro-lime rice was amazing--see the link to my friend Carolyn's blog above for instructions. The fish for the fish tacos was leftover Fish Tikka from The Ambassador (Indian and Mexican go surprisingly well together. Must be the cumin and hot peppers.) That leaves us with the salsa and the beans.  I'll start with the salsa.

This salsa is a great, versatile recipe. You use canned tomatoes, so you can make it in the winter, but it tastes fresher and is much more customizable than jarred salsa. I adapted the recipe from the White Grass Cafe cookbook. This cookbook is excellent and I recommend it to all of you! It has lots of delicious vegetarian meals and, since it comes from a ski shop in West Virginia, requires few fresh or seasonal ingredients.

Salsa
1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
1/2 onion, chopt
2-3 green onions, thinly sliced
1/2 red or green bell pepper, thinly sliced
hot peppers to taste, diced (we used 1 jalapeno and 1 red habanero)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1t ground cumin
1/2 t black pepper
big handful cilantro, finely chopt

Stir together and let sit in the refrigerator for a few hours to allow the spices to mingle. Serve with tortilla chips, in tacos, over huevos rancheros, etc. Yum!