Cookbook Case Study - Potato Pepper Bake - Food Legends of the World

The second recipe I made from Food Legends of the World was Potato Pepper Bake. Essentially, this was scalloped potatoes with blue cheese, capsicum, and fresh herbs. I'm all for blue cheese, so I was into it...

The potato's legend comes from Peru, and tells of conflict between the people living on the plains, and those living in the Andean mountains. The people of the plains had grown strong on quinoa, and wishing for more land on which to grow their crops, they began stealing the food of the mountain-people in the hopes of starving them out. The mountain people prayed to their gods, and were answered when a great bird dropped large fleshy seeds form the sky, which the mountain people planted. However, the people from the plains stole these crops, too, before the berries on the plants were harvested. The great bird returned, telling them that the plains people had fallen for a trick taking the poisonous berries, and that they should dig the hidden crop of potatoes from the ground.

The mixture of chopped red capsicum, fresh herbs, and spring onions that goes between the layers of potato was delicious by itself. Here it is:


Tasty tasty foods. Tasty!


In a fit of laziness, I used frozen potato slices. (Also, our potatoes were soft and sprouting, and I'd just bought the newly released frozen pre-sliced potatoes, so it was quite lucky.) Here's a hint for working with frozen potato slices: don't put them on a wet chopping board if you want to be able to get them off again easily! Uh... how do I know? Oh, just a guess, I certainly didn't let them freeze onto the chopping board by mistake...


Frozen potato. Wet chopping board. Oops.



Product placement! These are like the first frozen potato product I've come across that wasn't battered for roasting. It's just potato! Perfect! Oh, I have no stake in this company and bought the product myself, blah blah. :)


I made half with blue cheese as called for, and the other half with feta, so I didn't have to inflict blue cheese on Neil. The feta was easier to crumble than the blue cheese, so probably not a bad alternative. Neil appreciated the swap, and though he was brave enough to try a bit with blue cheese just in case, he still didn't like it.


Potatoes, blue cheese, and feta.



Left half has feta. Right half has blue cheese. Bottom half has red pepper - though after I took the photo I sprinkled it over the whole lot ;)


Because I used frozen potatoes, and the instructions had only short cooking times listed, I baked them for 30 minutes rather than the 60 called for in the recipe (followed by 15 minutes without a cover to brown the dish). This worked a treat.


It didn't get particularly brown, but good anyways.


This was seriously tasty, I was more than impressed. I preferred the blue cheese to the feta - it had a smoky flavour while the feta half was strangely slightly sweet. This was also good as leftovers. It didn't serve 4-6 though - perhaps it would as a side to something else. We started off making it into four servings, then we polished off another half-serve each at the same meal. I had the final serve for lunch the next day, and was still slightly peckish afterwards.


Yum!


This will definitely be a make-again sort of dish! I'll have to think of a nice protein dish to pair it with, I think, to make the recipe go a little further.

Cookbook Case Study - Beans Tijuana - Food Legends of the World

Here's a post that's been a long time coming!

The first recipe I tried from Food Legends of the World was... Beans Tijuana!

As I mentioned in my previous post (almost a month ago!), the book presents the legends of 25 ingredients and follows each with a recipe. My first recipe choice was based upon beans, and a Mayan legend is told.

A clever, virtuous man, finding himself in unfortunate circumstances, decides to make a deal with the Devil - trading seven wishes for his soul. His first six wishes are the predictable ones: his home, family, food; health; riches; friends; power; travel. His seventh wish, "one last whim", was to wash some black beans until they turned white. Once he had granted the final wish, keen to get his hands on the "full and luminous soul", the Devil saw that he had been tricked - no matter how much the man washed the black beans, they would not turn white. In order to prevent such trickery in the future, the devil demanded that there would also be beans of all different colours: white, yellow, green, brown, red... and so there are today.

Now for the cooking - Beans Tijuana

It's quite a simple recipe, calling for red beans, adzuki beans, and kidney beans, as well as onion, garlic, chilli, tomato, and other seasonings. I used adzuki and kidney beans - aren't red beans red kidney beans? Probably not, I don't know that much about beans, but that's okay.


Chilli!


The recipe called for four tablespoons of fresh chopped chillies (maybe four or five chillies), and then asked for another tablespoon of chilli powder and 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper. Both Neil and I thought that sounded like a lot, so debated putting in less chilli, but in the end decided to follow the recipe and see what would happen.


Onion before adding chilli



Onion after adding chilli! Yum!


No more photos... I guess I got distracted :)

Apart from a small spoon to check for cookedness, I didn't try it the night it was made (instead, I felt unwell and had plain rice with honey). Neil had some and said it was quite hot - and he does like things hotter than I do in general, so neither of us were sure I would be able to palate it!

It made a quite thin chilli - almost soup like. We've been serving it mixed with rice, which does well. I've frozen some and have found it good defrosted, too. I've also drained some and scooped it onto pizza (with leftover greens), which was actually pretty stunning. I wrote about that pizza already, here.

The beans were on the only just cooked side, though I think the freezer improved this. I had read previously that beans should not be cooked with anything acidic, else they would not soften. This recipe cooked the beans with lime and tomato, among other things, perhaps explaining the lack of cookedness?

As for the heat - It's much hotter than the last chilli I made, but luckily not too hot for me! It also has quite a nice tang to it. Due to its thinness, it would probably be best for an accompanying dish, like a spicy bean soup. Nice!

Cookbook Case Study - Food Legends of the World

The third book I have chosen to review is 'Food Legends of the World: Traditional Tales with Recipes of Today', by Linda Bremford. More information on this book can be found at this address.

I bought the book from a local craft market, directly from the author. A storyteller by trade, the author tells the legends of 25 ingredients, following each one with a recipe. I loved this concept and was tempted to buy the book.

While not all the recipes are suitable for my diet, I was able to choose some recipes that I could play with. My choices were:

Potato Pepper Bake
Tomato chilli with marinated mozzarella
Beans tijuana
Maple syrup, ginger, and rum ice cream
Egg and milk in a baked ice cream dessert

Cookbook Case Study - Quick and Easy - Wrap Up

I really enjoyed the recipes I made from Quick & Easy: Vegetarian Recipes from Around the World for Western Kitchens. Despite burning myself making pot-roasted rice, I really enjoyed the rice and the cardamom mushrooms I made with it. I'll keep the frying-rice-in-peanut-oil technique in mind for next time I want to subtly dress up rice, but I'll be a bit more careful with temperatures.

The two sweet recipes I made from the book were more interesting to me than the savoury. I don't make as many international desserts as I do international main meals, so making dal and jaggery payasam was as exciting and fulfilling as it was delicious and filling! Heavily palm-sugar flavoured, this best accompanies banana and coconut milk to cool it down a little. However, the introduction to the recipe did claim that jaggery is considered to be a 'heating' food, given to children in lumps to nibble during winter. (Nibbling on lumps of jaggery certainly appeals to me!) The second recipe that I made after quite a delay, was for peanut cookies, making a delicious light peanut macaroon that I am looking forward to making again already.

I'm far from finished with this book. There are a number of pages I've stuck bookmarks on, which include recipes such as 'khatti mithi masoor dal' (sweet and sour red lentils), aloo mattar, and 'kab el ghzal' (almond crescents made with ground almond and rose or orange blossom water). Yes, I can see myself enjoying the book for some time. I would certainly recommend it to anyone - vegetarians and omnivores alike - especially to people interested in cooking simple international meals. One thing I particularly like about this book is that it goes beyond India and Asia, including recipes from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East - culinary regions that I know much less about.

Cookbook Case Study - Peanut Cookies - Quick and Easy

For some reason, I'd been putting off making this last recipe from Global Vegetarian Cooking: Quick & Easy Recipes from Around the World. I'm not sure why - perhaps I had some perception that it would be difficult or complicated - or I thought I didn't have time, expecting it to take much longer than it did. Happily, my procrastination has come to an end! I made the Peanut Cookies (macaroons) from Guadeloupe last night while I was avoiding making dinner. (Okay, perhaps my procrastination hasn't come to an end - it just moved on to something else.)

The recipe truly is simple. Beat egg whites, beat in sugar, stir in ground peanuts and vanilla essence. Bake. The only caution I have is to perhaps use baking paper, as I had some trouble getting the cookies off the baking tray once they were done. I even managed to scrape the surface of my baking tray off with a knife in the process - slightly worrying.


Ready for the oven


We had a cookie each with icecream and chocolate syrup for dessert. As they are meringue based, they go better with icecream than cookie cookies do, I think. I managed to avoid eating more until the next day, when I brought four cookies in to give to a friend, and two for myself. (Apparently, the four cookies for my friend disappeared that afternoon - they are so light and moreish that I'm not surprised!)

I received the following by email shortly after handing them over:

that was one of the best things I've eaten in ages - so nice and light and lovely tasting~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was certainly pleased that she liked them as much as I did! On arriving home, two more cookies quickly evaporated into my mouth, while I worked on making some bread. From the batch of 12, this leaves two. If she's lucky, there might be one for my sister to try if she drops in later tonight. (If there's not... I hope she doesn't read this and find out!)


Pile of Cookies


So, the verdict is: cookies that are quick, easy, and delicious! Also, not overly loaded with sugar (the recipe from the book has more egg white and much less sugar than the similar recipes I've found online) or fat (only really the fat from the peanuts). They are crunchy, crumbly, good enough to share or to keep greedily to yourself... I am already planning when I'll make these next, and I can see myself getting a lot of use out of the recipe.

In fact, the only problem is thinking of what to do with spare egg yolks! (Hint: it's not putting them in a stirfry - sometimes I wonder how I can even justify having a food blog when I do questionable things like that!)

Cookbook Case Study - Dal and Jaggery Payasam - Quick and Easy

I had to make a special trip to buy the mung dal (split mung bean) required for this recipe. A visit to Moshims made me yearn to live in a suburb like Newtown, with its rich cultural diversity and local ethnic grocery stores.

Some days later, while researching the cooking time for whole bkack gram (black lentils), I discovered that mung dal comes in two forms: split, or split and skinned. The variety I had bought was not skinned - and though the recipe was non-specific, I suspected skinned mung dal was the intended type of dal for the recipe.


Split mung dal


Not worrying too much about it, I started cooking the dal. As soon as I mixed the boiling water with the soaked dal, many skins started to float to the surface. Seeing my opportunity, and not wanting to eat a dessert with mung bean skins scattered throughout, I took the dal off the stove and started to scoop out the skins with a tea strainer. I spent quite some time stirring the dal to agitate the skins into a swirling vortex, and scooping them out before they sunk to the surface of the dal again. Once there were so few skins that this task diminished in its returns, I put the dal back on the stove to continue cooking.


Mung dal with some skins removed


Jaggery, or palm sugar, I already had on hand from a recipe I'd made some time ago. This sugar comes in cake form - mine were so hard, perhaps from absorbing too much water in their long storage, that my small grinder struggled with them, and I decided to grate them by hand. (It turns out that this was probably unnecessary, if I had only managed to break them into chunks, the moisture from the dal and coconut milk would have dissolved them with little effort.)


Piles of grated jaggery



Grinding cardamom seeds



Putting it all together


After grinding some cardamom seeds, I mixed all the ingredients together, and heated for a few minutes. Expecting a thick, semolina-like consistency, I was surprised that the dessert was more like a thin porridge. The taste was very sweet, with a hint of cardamom - but the coconut cream taste was disguised by the sweetness of the jaggery. The recipe called for a cup of jaggery, or to taste. I think next time I make this dessert, I would use between 1/2 and 3/4 of a cup to make the dessert slightly less syrupy. Next time, also, I would prefer to use split skinned mung beans, though the skins did not bother me while eating the dessert - and I do have a few cups of mung dal left in the pantry.


Dal and Jaggery Payasam



Same payasam, different angle!


I had enough leftover to last me another couple of days. The dal was good as a dessert or sweet breakfast. I liked it best served over chopped banana, and with a drizzle of extra coconut cream over the top.


Dal and jaggery payasam with banana and coconut cream

Cookbook Case Study - Cardamom mushrooms and pot-roast rice - Quick and Easy

Here's what my version of the cookbook looks like!:


Quick & Easy: Vegetarian recipes from around the world for Western Kitchens


I decided this time to make two recipes from the book at one time, mostly because neither would do alone as a main dish. I made the mushrooms with cardamom, and com chien (pot roasted rice). Both recipes were also vegan!

The mushrooms are chopped up and mixed with cardamom, ginger, and lemon. These were really simple to make (especially with an assistant!), and were so tempting to snack on while they sat in their bowl waiting for their time.

This is what the mushrooms and cardamom looked like before I put them on to cook:


Very exciting photo of chopped mushroom and spices!


As the mushrooms went on to cook, I started the rice. Basically, the rice is fried in peanut oil before boiling water is added and the rice is steamed. Simple! However, reading the instruction "pour in the hot water, which will immediately boil" should have hinted that perhaps I should be somewhat cautious during this step...

Here's a picture of the mushroom cooking. If you look closely, you may see rice scattered around on the bench, that was not there in the previous photo. This is evidence of the rice leaping out of the saucepan to burn me! Evil rice.


Mushroom cooking; and spilt rice of treachery


Basically, I must have had the heat too high. Pouring the recently boiled water into the rice which had been fried in peanut oil for some time, there was an almost explosion of oil, water, rice, and steam. Pulling my hand away, not even having finished pouring all the water in, the dish started to boil so vigourously that the rice and water formed a series of geyser-like spouts that reached over twice the height of the top of the saucepan itself. It was seriously scary - and due to our slow to change temperature stovetop, I had to be brave enough to pull it from the heat to stop it all ending up on the bench.

I ran my fingers under the cold tap for as long as I could stand - nowhere near ten minutes, it's impossible to do that! The I put aloe vera gel on the sore bits, to try and cool them down, as per photo:


Burned fingers


You can't really see that they're burned, probably because of the flash, but they were! They were a bit swollen (less wrinkly than normal!), and about two and a half weeks later (yes, it's taken me a while to get around to writing this), I couldn't figure out why my fingers on my left hand were peeling. It wasn't until I started writing this post that I made the connection, and realised they had peeled exactly where I was burnt. I've never had steam burns before, either. Strange!

Anyway, despite the burns, the meal turned out quite tasty. I served the two dishes up with roast parsnip (idea first taken from Veganomicon I think, but I just make them however, now).


Com chien, mushrooms with cardamom, and roast parsnips


The mushrooms were less cardamommy than I expected, but very very tasty. The treacherous rice had a nice and rich, subtle flavour, and good texture because of the oil. I think the rice was even better as leftovers. However, for anyone using this technique, be really careful, and don't use too much heat!