Continuing with my series of burning off somewhat boring but potentially useful posts, here's this one in time for your holiday partay.
I had a bunch of cilantro left over the other day, and the answer to "What do I do with this now?" was, as it so often is: frozen dessert.
I looked around and found this recipe for a Tequila-Cilantro Sorbet. I didn't have enough lime and no tequila, but I did have some leftover cans of pineapple juice and some rum, so I made up this recipe for Pineapple Rum Cilantro Sherbet (cuz to my American mind, sorbets don't have dairy).
It worked really well. While the rum does make this more a grown-up treat, I wouldn't skip it as it helps keep the texture smoother.
If you don't have an ice cream maker, there's also a granita method below.
Ingredients
1 1/4 cups whole milk
1 1/4 cups water
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro
3/4 cup pineapple juice
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
3/4 cup rum
Pinch of salt
Process
In a saucepan, bring milk, water, and sugar to a boil, and stir to dissolve the sugar.
Remove from heat and add cilantro.
Chill overnight in fridge.
Strain mixture through a fine sieve set over a bowl.
Stir in pineapple and lime juices, rum and salt.
SHERBET: Freeze the sorbet in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.
GRANITA: Pour mixture into a chilled 9x13 baking dish. Freeze for about 2 hours or until the mixture has frozen around the edges. Use a fork to break up the ice crystals around the edge and draw them into the middle. Repeat this process 3 or 4 times, about every 1/2 hour or so, or until the mixture is completed converted to ice crystals.(The goal of the breaking up is to keep those crystals small to make the mixture smoother.)
(Hey check out the Summer Ice Cream Social Poll over to the left there. I'm trying to whittle down some ice cream choices. Help me out and you will be rewarded with the warm glow of self-satisfaction!)
Elizabeth Falkner was on Top Chef Masters tonight. She lost on the episode, but she is still a winner in my book, because one of her recipes is the base for the dish that won me the most praise of anything I've ever made.
I was involved this guy for a while who had a habit of making a lot of backhanded critical comments that I was too naive to understand were backhanded critical comments. (The naivete, incidentally, also explains the "for a while" part of why I continued hanging around someone who liked to make backhanded critical comments to me about me.)
One time, we were talking about a meal we were eating (it was, in fact, one of the first times I had Pad Kee Mao, the Thai dish I'm still obsessed with), and he said, pointedly, "I'm not one of these people who's always saying 'This is the best thing I've ever had' but this is seriously one of the best things I've ever had."
It was about three months later, when I was no longer hanging out with him, that it hit me in one of those apropos-of-nothing waves of epiphany that you have after climbing your way out of a confusing whirlpool of a situation: he was talking about me. Because I AM one of those people who is always saying something is the "best thing I've ever had."
And whatever, man. I'm trying to come to grips and accept the fact that I am hyper and overenthusiastic. I'm constantly simmering over with too much too-muchness no matter how much I try to rein myself in. I'm not cool or reserved.
But imagine for a minute that I am. I am a cool customer, rarely moved to effusive exuberance, to hyperbolic excess. And imagine it is that person, that phlegmatic, calm, impassive person who is exclaiming to you: "This is the best dessert I've ever made."
Remember this dessert? Of course you do, because who doesn't have an encyclopedic recall of this blog?
What I did this time was the Chipotle Gingerbread + Caramel Ice Cream + Coffee Sauce (So just imagine the above picture, but with a dark brown sauce.)
I didn't make up the recipes, I just made them and put them together. But I did think of the combination all by myself, so look what I can do!
It was a huge hit. I mean HUGE. People are usually very forgiving of desserts, and sweets usually please most folks. I am used to bringing an ice cream or cake to a party and people being excited.
But I feel like there was some real genuine amazement at just how well these three flavors worked together. My friend Jan also said it was one of the best desserts she's ever had. Even a real live food professional, Becky of the great blog, Chef Reinvented, liked enough to tweet about it. (Yeah, I linked to her tweet. That just happened. I did that. I can't unbecome becoming a person who linked to a complimentary tweet about herself. The slippery slope has slipped. Hemingway-esque unassuming stoic machismo is off the table as an option.)
Anyway, the great thing is, although this is a multiple recipe dish, it really isn't that hard, and totally worthwhile to consider making if you are entertaining and want a crowd-pleasing dessert.
Here are the recipes and a few other tips.
Chipotle Gingerbread. I do NOT use the crystallized ginger called for in the recipe. This recipe fit into 2 12-mini muffin tins. It is very very quick and easy, and could be made in advance. The actual cupcakes I used were, in fact, leftover from last Thanksgiving (!) that Will and Carolyn had in their deep freezer.
The Caramel Ice Cream could be swapped out with storebrought if you don't have a maker.
The Coffee Sauce is probably the only "challenging" part, just because it involved the scary caramelizing of sugar, but other than that, it's very fast to prepare.
A couple months ago, Sarah was over for a visit while I was cooking. She had just made some seitan from scratch, and we talked about fake meat and my history of a disappointing experience cooking with it.
If I buy something that is highly seasoned and processed, the fake meat equivalent of a Dorito, then I enjoy it just fine, as I do all junk food.
But if I took something in its basic form – say, plain tofu – and tried to cook with it, I invariably seemed to end up with that kind of thin-tasting, unsatisfying meal that, until recently, had been the hallmark of cooking for myself.
Prior to…well, really, the learning experience that has been this blog, most of my cooking experience has resulted in an end product that has been as hearty and satisfying to eat as a stick of celery.
Is it food? Sure. It has volume, texture, some kind of flavor. But on the Hearty Satisfaction Scale, it’s about a 2.
Maybe it is all a question of umami.
While I do eat seafood now, my cooking life has always been primarily vegetarian and often lo-cal focused. When you cook primarily vegetarian/lo-cal food, it’s just not…automatic that what you produce will click with the savory/heart/umami receptors in your brain.
This is what cooking very often seemed to result in for me. It’s also one of the reasons why – despite my interest – I never stuck with it until I had a blog. At least with a blog, I could write about my failures and feel creatively fulfilled, even if the food was one big vat of celery-stick disappointment.
The President of the Debate Club and her hubs were here right after the New Year. She’d last been here at the end of September. I cooked for her then and I cooked for her this trip and she could taste a difference.
I think this maybe has happened with my cooking, some kind of development that, like most things in my life, I unthinkingly stumbled into, got it to work and then retroactively articulated it to myself.
The epiphany: to a person with my sorts of taste buds, (ta da!) satisfaction is an investment.
What does that mean? Basically that if, like me, in order to feel satisfied you’re going to need some richness, some umami action, some depth and body to your food, it isn’t going to come cheap.
It could require fat: butter or oil. And so, if calories are a concern, this means you are spending them on satisfaction and ergo won’t have as much currency left over for quantity.
This is an important distinction for me, because, as I wrote about recently, sometimes the main thing I do want is quantity. I want a big bowl of something, not a little sliver of savory or a ramekin of richness. I am hungry in such a way that only an actually large physical volume of food will make me feel satisfied. So I need a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of something on top of it, or something else.
But if what I’m looking for is that complex umami action, then that I could eat my way through that bowl of vegetables and feel like I missed the boat. So if that’s what my hankering is for, maybe it is the time to spend the calories on butter.
At other times, the investment is time, as in the case of making stock.
I have the patience of a cranky toddler. In my cooking world of days past, making stock – 45 minutes for ONE ingredient in something else??? – seemed beyond the pale. God just buy a box of it. Then I found Mark Bittman's Roasted Vegetable Stock. (His version is here, my go-to version with a couple of tweaks is below.)
It’s actually even more time-consuming than a regular stock in that one must roast the veggies for around 45 minutes. But for some reason, Bittman’s description convinced me to try it once, and after that, I was convinced to continue making it all the time.
Where previous all-veggie soups or stews started out with the highest of hopes, only to end up watery-tasting and being eaten out of sheer duty only, things I made with this stock were satisfying in a way I previously associated only with eating out.
Ergo, now it’s a staple in the Three-Bowls kitchen. I make and freeze it on a regular basis.
One of my tweaks from Bittman’s original to double the mushrooms. I don’t feel like it makes it particularly mushroomy, just that it adds to the overall savoryness. I use it as a base for almost every vegetarian soup or stew that I make, cook grains in it if there isn’t a lot of flavoring in the recipes, etc.
If you cook a lot of vegetarian food and also find yourself slightly underwhelmed by your home-cooked stuff compared to processed food or what you eat out, try this and see if it might make a little difference.While it is a time commitment, this cranky toddler finds it worth it.
When it comes to food, my cravings are easily triggered.
In the early oughts, when, as the newscasters always says, tensions ran high between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, I once turned on the radio midway through the newcaster saying the name of the region. Upon hearing "-shmir" I immediately thought, "Hmm. I'd like a bagel."
So as you can probably imagine, since I started volunteering at the East African Community Services, I have been thinking about East African food a LOT. Most of the folks there are Somali, but I don't know much about that cuisine, so instead, my appetite drifts a little to the northeast and lands in Ethiopia.
I first had Ethiopian food on a visit to Cleveland, and ate it in the traditional fashion of sitting around the basket table lined with injera. That was several years ago, before I'd really started learning about food and cooking, so I went in with no expectations.
I loved it, though. Of course I did: many of the dishes are spicy heaps of vegetarian mush eaten with a relatively plain starch. What's not to love?
I've had it a few times since then, and since I started volunteering, find myself thinking about it quite frequently.
So with this Ethiopian food obsession on constant simmer, a couple weekends ago I took a trip down to Amy's Merkato to find a pre-made berbere mixture and just poke around. The store shelves are somewhat bare for most products but well-stocked with what you would probably go there for anyway: Ethiopian spices and injera.
I always feel a sort of conflict when I go into Real Deal ethnic market. On the one hand, I find the lack of familiar products exciting and full of possibilities. On the other, I don't know what the heck I'm doing, and generally go into my usual retail-induced ADD fog, forget everything I know about the cuisine, and find myself wandering around in the hopes I can recognize a word on a label somewhere.
And that's why Amy's was a little tricky: nothing was labeled. Now that's some Real Deal. Luckily, the woman working there that day (maybe the actual Amy? dunno) was very helpful, and we overcame our language barrier enough for her to show me which one was berbere and how to use it.
She then described using another spice mixture, and to be honest, I didn't actually catch it, in good part because I'm just a little deaf anyway, and after the second repetition, I was too shy to ask her again what she was saying. I know it is something you sprinkle into a dish at the end. I've since researched it at home and think it might be Wot Kemem? (That is what is now labeled with in my house, question mark and all).
Now armed with one key spice component, I set out to make another, the clarified spiced butter called Niter Kibbeh that is the base for many dishes.
My cooking has been improving a lot lately. I had one big improvement that came with the Taste-and-Season epiphany of a while back. But the next bump has come from a mental shift that I am calling Investing in Flavor.
My impatience used to make it impossible to consider the idea of infusing butter with spices for an hour before I even got to cooking the dish.
But my beloved Mark Bittman Roasted Vegetable Stock has made so many previously watery and unsatisfying vegetable soups and stews so much richer and more delectable that I no longer balk at spending two hours to make it before I can even start the dish it's going to go into.
And what underscored my own direct experience was reading the stock section of Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking. His impassioned argument that the home cook use veal stock, "one of the most powerful tools in professional kitchens, one of the biggest guns in the professional chef's entire arsenal" made me feel all...wrapped on the knuckles with a ruler for my frequent kitchen laziness (which usually results in culinary dissatisfaction).
I'm not about to start making/using veal stock, but after reading all that, now when I read a recipe that says "6 cups of vegetable stock or water" where I used to feel a sense of relief that I could just use water, now I'm dragging out my roasting pan and pulling my saved up bag of mushrooms stems out of the freezer to make some stock.
So with this new frame of mind, I was happy to make the clarified butter, hoping this would give me a shot at getting a little closer to the delicious I'd had in restaurants. Itwould also allow me to achieve some Cooking Resolution #2: Resourcefulness by using up some underutilized spices like fenugreek and tumeric.
Other than the time, the niter kibbeh process is simple as could be, simply simmer the spices in the butter over the lowest possible heat for an hour or so. Pour through cheesecloth and you are done.
The finished product can be frozen, so you can make a big batch all at once. The recipe can be loosey-goosey with the spices. I saw some with onion, some without, so I opted to not use it. Some include nutmeg, some don't, There is a vegan version using soy margarine. Basically, don't get too worried if you don't have them all or don't like a spice or two.
Once that was done, I used it to make Yemiser Wat/We't, a lentil dish with brown lentils, tomatoes and peas that are cooked in the flavorful butter, with onions, garlic, ginger and that berbere.
Cooking the onions, ginger, garlic and berbere in the niter kibbeh
There were a couple less-than-ideal issues with this particular version of it that I made. Not enough tomatoes, so it did not have quite the tang I was looking for. But the overall flavor profile was definitely a departure from what I usually cook, and I am looking forward to trying this again with more tomatoes. It was still tasty over some basmati rice.
I just made another batch of the butter today and hope to attempt either it or a spicy red lentil dish called Mesir Wat.
If you are also a fan of Spicy Heaps and haven't ever tried Ethiopian, I'd highly recommend giving some of these recipes a shot. If you don't have access to an Ethiopian market at which to buy some berbere, the pretty-available company India Tree makes a blend, or you could attempt your own.
Last year, I managed to land an interview at a Well-Known Food Site. A second interview, even. Check me out. I didn’t get a job (which wound up probably being for the best), and, in the usual not-getting-a-job process, I got no feedback and have no idea why.
But I have to imagine that my space alien way of relating to food probably doesn’t translate well to the standard job interview process.
For example, they asked me what I was most into cooking at that time, and since I was just in the midst of attempting some higher-level stuff (for me), I of course responded “Fancy times.” Because in my brains, that somehow makes sense.
Not Italian, not Seasonal and Local, not New American. Not anything that one would normally see as a tag or category on a Well-Known Food Site. (Except maybe Chow. I could see Chow.com having that and that's one of the reasons I like Chow.com. So, there's a clue. It wasn't Chow.)
No, I had to say "Fancy Times." Like I’m some sort of poorly-programmed robot whose speaking module includes a down-market translator from Mandarin to English or something.
And now I have a new poorly-programmed robot answer to the perennial favorite food-and-cooking question: what is your favorite kind of food?
At any given moment of the day, I am wanting spicy Ethiopian lentils. Call me in the middle of night, ask me what I’m dreaming about and I will sleepily reply “I think it’s called Yemiser W’et.”
I ate through four boxes of Trader Joe’s Pav Bhaji in one 24-hour period. Dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner.
I only stopped because I ran out of Pav Bhaji. And once I ran out, I started looking up recipes online.
It turns out that the Pav in Pav Bhaji actually refers to the bread usually served with the bhaji – the vegetable curry – but I guess one shouldn’t expect to learn Indian cooking traditions from a box.
The dish is considered a kind of street snack food, and contains enough butter to be of concern to healthy eaters. Which is appropriate: what is snack food without the frisson of sin?
It’s made on a tava. The vegetables are cooked with spices and continually mashed until they form a thick paste. A delicious thick paste.
I researched it and came up with a recipe that I thought would most approximate the stuff in the box (recipe in entry below). I tried it this past weekend, and while it doesn’t taste quite like the stuff in a pouch, it still tastes pretty darn good. This version could have used a few more tomatoes so the recipe posted has a higher quantity of those than this, so expect that to look a little looser than this.
I said it's a spicy heap, not necessarily a pretty one.
As mentioned, this is usually eaten with bread, AND there is an additional pat of butter added when served. But my goodness! I like a frisson of sin, not a whole cartload of guilt, so I swap out the carbs for the slightly less anxiety-producing brown basmati or some cross-cultural whole wheat couscous and skip the extra pat altogether.
I have no idea how this stacks up against the real Pav Bhaji, but until I taste that and learn better, I’m happy to have this stocked up in my freezer.
This makes makes more than you need for the below; you can put into an airtight container and save for next tme.
Something Approximating Pav Bhaji
(about 4-6 servings, can be frozen)
3 yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 head of cauliflower, stem removed and cut into sections
3 cloves minced garlic
2 tsp finely grated ginger
2 Tbl canola oil
1 medium chopped onion
7 finely chopped roma tomatoes (do not seed, include liquid)
1 C peas, fresh or frozen
1-2 Tbl Pav Bhaji Masala
4 Tbs unsalted butter
Salt to taste
Boil potatoes in salted water until tender and set aside.
Steam the cauliflower until tender and set aside.
Mash garlic and ginger into paste in mortar and pestle.
Heat oil in a deep saucepan over medium heat and add onions. Cook for about seven minutes or until onions have started to lose their raw smell. Add the ginger and garlic paste and cook for about 1-2 minutes.
Add potatoes, cauliflower, tomatoes, peas, pav bhaji masala and butter.
Cover and cook, frequently mashing the vegetables down with potato masher. Taste and add more pav bhaji or salt as needed. Cooking until the tomatoes have broken down, the mixture is a thick chunky paste, and the flavors are well-combined.
Traditionally served with bread and a pat of butter. I like mine fine without the butter and generally use this as a curry on rice or whole wheat couscous.
See the post (with picture and video of traditional Pav Bhaji process) accompanying this recipe here.
I have so far resisted the urge to buy Carolyn and Will's extra deep freezer, but I nevertheless want to keep my regular freezer well-stocked over the next year.
Over the holidays, I had two sets of houseguests, and reaped the rewards of some pre-planning I’d done. I had taken advantage of being housebound with the freak Seattle snowstorm to do some make-ahead cooking.
When my guests were here, I did, of course, still wind up in the kitchen longer than I should have, but significantly less than I could have, had I attempted to come up with the same volume of output without that pre-work.
And in addition to being prepared for out-of-town visitors or planned dinner parties/book clubs/etc., I still entertain some fantasy that I will once again have a people-dropping-in kind of life. I had that back in Phoenix, but not here. I’m newer to Seattle, super-busy with multiple jobs and projects, and have friends who are super-busy themselves with jobs, partners and new babies. But I miss what it was like in Phoenix with friends nearby who would swing by for a glass of wine, and aim to get back to it at some point. If might sound silly, but for me, having breadstick dough in the freezer feels like I’m making some tiny step back towards reclaiming a lifestyle that makes me feel happy.
I don’t only want to stock my freezer for entertaining purposes, though. I want to have quick and tasty meals for myself, too. I work from home, and it seems like I should be able to stop and take the time to make myself a lunch from scratch every day if I wanted.
The truth is, though, that some days I don’t change out of my pajamas out of busy-ness, not just sheer laziness. On those days, I don’t have any more time for cooking than I would if I were in an office. I’d rather not resort to processed or packaged food, or worse, eating sweets mindlessly because they’re faster to get at than a salad. So a full freezer will help me stick to a healthier routine between houseguests, too.
Here are the items I want to make sure I always have one variety of available at all times:
Sweet Little Breads - I made this Lemon-Lavender Tea Bread from Epicurious and it was delicious! I baked it in a six-mini-loaf pan, froze it, took one mini-loaf out the night before I planned to have it with breakfast, and added a quick lemon juice/powdered sugar/crushed lavender glaze right before serving. It was tasty alone or with some Pear Butter I’d also made.
Soup - I’ve noted before that my family is not a big food family, but we do have a few food traditions, and one is my mom makes a really nice vegetable soup in giant batches, which she freezes. I now do the same with my favorite soups, which came in handy with this set of visitors.
My two successes this go-round: the spicy Red Lentil Soup and a Mushroom-Potato Soup, which I will post a recipe for soon. I made the mushroom soup before the first guest arrived, froze half, and served the second when the second set arrived. The Red Lentil Soup came in handy on a night we needed to eat something a bit less sinful than all the eating out we’d been doing. My guests actually requested it another night, so it’s not just me that likes this soup. I was able to just hack another block of it out of the freezer and was able to – gasp – actually make dinner on the fly for once.
Spiced Nuts – A jar of Chipotle Spiced Nuts came in handy for a quick snack my guests could help themselves to.
They were also a good quick last minute take-along thing for holiday parties or little gifts.
In addition, they can bring a little interest to a salad, and lord knows I need all the help I can get encouraging me to eat more salads. I exist in the tension between my natural ambivalence about eating salad and my grandma-like insistence that eating adequate roughage is like a folk remedy for nearly all disease.
Salad Dressing – Obviously this is a fridge, not freezer item. I also have a grandma-like insistence about the healing properties of my SuperPower Salad Dressing (recipe forthcoming). But it’s sort of annoying to make, so I need to make sure I’m making it at my leisure, instead of at the last minute before a meal when I’m already suffering from low blood sugar and on the verge of losing patience with the whole cooking process.
Food Celebrity Beans or Lentils – This is more for me than for entertaining. Having some tasty cooked Black Beans a la Russ Parsons or Tom Douglas Green Lentils in the freezer at all times means I am halfway to a good salad or beans and rice without too much effort during the week. Rice – I’m pretty good at keeping frozen rice on hand already for quick stir-fries or topping with lentil dals and such, but I’m putting it here so as to ensure I remain vigilant with the rice level in my freezer.
Cookie Dough – Easy to freeze! Slice off and bake a few cookies at a time! In a toaster oven, even! Fresh-baked cookies for yer guests! Simple!
Dessert – I don’t want to eat more dessert than absolutely necessary, so it seems dangerous to keep it in the house. BUT...I’d rather eat something I made myself than some junk I buy when I’m jonesing for sugar. So in addition to the cookie dough, I’d like to keep one ice cream or something on hand for myself.
And here are a few things that I don’t need to make, but want to be sure to keep on hand for entertaining purposes:
Cheese
Bottle of wine
Couple bottles of beer
Bubbly water
Stuff for one solid cocktail (what cocktail, I’m not sure yet)
Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 03:59PM 
Ingredients 
