Pasta with steamed mussels

Now that it's getting warmer, I'm starting to move away from hearty winter stewlike dishes in favor of simple pasta dishes with olive oil, garlic, and whatever else might be good with it. In this case, I decided to try my hand at mussels.

Aside from shrimp, cooking seafood intimidates me--it seems so easy to overcook, and in the case of mussels, clams, or oysters (reading, in my formative years, a Sweet Valley Twins book about vomit-heavy illness and hijinks caused by a carelessly prepared clams dish incident really didn't help), downright scary.

I couldn't have been more wrong--at least in the case of mussels. The hardest part of dealing with them is cleaning and prepping them, but steam them and they cook in a matter of minutes, seem forgiving even if you cook them a little long, and are sweet, somewhat briny, and delicious. A complete success on my first attempt. I've had some fishy tasting clams, but mussels are mild and wondeful on pasta tossed with the mussel broth and a bit of parsley and red pepper flakes. So simple yet so good, and the finished dish is quite pleasing to the eye.

Dal with coconut milk

I have this fondness for using turmeric to make my food yellow. I don't know why I find this so appealing, but it's fun! This, the first and only (so far) dal I've ever made, was simple and yet delicious. Red lentils, clarified butter, some aromatics like bay leaf, mustard seeds, and garlic, some coconut milk and the fun yellow turmeric and you've got yourself a quick, tasty, yellow (I may have slipped in a little extra turmeric) dish. It's great over rice, and if I had some naan I bet it would have been great with that as well.

Polenta with kale and sausage

Here's yet another way to serve and eat tasty, nutritious kale--on top of creamy polenta made with milk and some parmigiano reggiano, along with slices of sausage. I always keep parmigiano reggiano on hand--it goes so well with so many dishes and is extremely delicious on its own as well. A little goes a long way in polenta. It doesn't make the polenta explicitly "cheesy" but it does add a nice savory depth and subtle cheesy quality. I had some nice lamb sausage on hand from my meat CSA as well as some braised kale tossed with some onions and a little bit of vinegar which contributes a slightly sweet yet acidic note to the dish, providing a contrast to the rich meat sausage and the creaminess of the polenta.

Pear sorbet

My very favorite sorbets are the kinds that taste just like the fruit itself, simple and yet intense in flavor, especially when eating them is like biting into a piece of fruit but in sorbet form. This sorbet accomplishes all of this. You take some ripe pears, puree them, mix in some cooled sugar syrup (basically some sugar dissolved in water), throw in a little bit of pear brandy or vodka, and freeze in the ice cream maker. Out comes something that tastes remarkably like a fresh, delicious pear!

A word of warning: This preparation is actually extremely simple and easy--and yet. I had to make this twice to get it right. The original recipe called for what seemed like a suprisingly large amount of sugar (one cup of sugar to 5 ripe pears), and I probably should have trusted my instincts. Ripe pears are already quite sweet on their own, but I figured some sugar was warranted, since after all it's pear sorbet, not simply ground up frozen pears, and also thought it might taste less sweet when it's frozen. The end result was an overly sweet sorbet. Not terrible, just pretty darn sweet. Also, this didn't occur to me until it was just a bit too late, but like apples, pears turn brown after you peel them. The first time I made the sorbet I made the mistake of letting the processed pears sit in the fridge while I tidied up the kitchen and before I started freezing the sorbet mixture.

Mistake!! It's a purely cosmetic failing, and didn't affect the taste, but I don't really want to eat brown sorbet. For my next attempt at the sorbet, I didn't want the sorbet so brown. Or so sweet. I halved the sugar and I decided not to introduce another ingredient - I didn't want to toss in some lemon juice to keep the pears from browning because while I love lemon, I didn't want it in the pear sorbet at all--not even a trace. So instead, I decided to simply work faster. I peeled and cut up and processed the pears as fast as I could go (which isn't really all that fast, but definitely faster than attempt number one), and got the whole mixture into the ice cream maker right away.

Much, much better. My second batch turned out just right in terms of sweetness, and while slightly browner than I prefer, it was so much more appealing. This definitely is a contender for my favorite sorbet flavor along with blood orange sorbet and lemon sorbet.

Chicken and broccoli stirfry

I love a good stirfry, and this is a delicious one courtesy of Cook's Illustrated--saucy, and saucy with the type of sauce you'd actually want to eat - savory and flavorful thanks to rice wine, soy sauce, a little sesame oil, and of course ginger and garlic, it goes perfectly with broccoli and chicken. Really, you don't even need the chicken--it's delicious with broccoli alone--but it's a good one-dish sort of meal and looks great with the green of the broccoli and the red of some red bell peppers. This is equally great over a crispy noodle cake, where you get the contrast of the crispy noodles and the stir fry and its sauce, or even just plain rice.

Tofu with ground pork and fermented black beans

Fermented black beans add a great dimension to both tofu and pork, so why not combine the two? This is a very simple, homestyle dish that is quick to make and tasty over rice. Tofu, ground pork (or not), fermented black beans soaked briefly in rice wine, scallions, garlic and ginger, some soy sauce--yum.

Cauliflower soup

Now, I finally understand why restauraunt soups taste so good.

The recipe for this creamy pureed cauliflower soup, which comes from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home, calls for a TON of heavy cream--at least compared to the proportion of cauliflower to cream. After reading the recipe and doing the frankly terrifying math, I couldn't in good conscience use the whole amount called for, so I decided to use half the amount of cream and 2% milk for the rest.

The soup was still very rich, creamy and wonderful. I like cauliflower, but I loved this soup. I think in the future, even less cream might be just fine. A little goes a long way.

Fried beet chips as a garnish added a nice bit of color and another layer of sweetness to the soup.

Hand pies

We picked up some incredible hand pies from the Hoosier Mama stand at the Green City market one day--one a savory sausage, one apple--and they were so delicious I was inspired to try my hand at them. It wasn't the crust alone or the filling that was so good, but the combination of the two, and I hoped to be able to achieve that myself.

I foolishly thought hand pies would be relatively simple, but not so! Instead of making one big pie you shape to fit a pie plate, meaning you have to roll out one piece of pie crust, two at most--you're making a bunch of little ones and shaping them free form. And crust and shaping pies is really my weak point. My crusts rarely come out the enviable pretty crimped edge you see in cookbook photos, but more like lumpy bits of utilitarian forget-pretty-let's-just-get-the pie-closed-ness.

But as always, as long as they taste good, no real problem. I used a galette dough recipe that is dependable, easy and nicely buttery. More importantly, it's a little more forgiving than "regular" pie crust.

For the sausage hand pies, I took some ground pork, minced garlic, and fresh sage and shaped the meat into little nuggets of meat. Not having a hand pie recipe to consult, I decided it would be best to cook the sausage before baking the pies so that I wouldn't have to worry so much about juices oozing out and making the crust soggy, or the sausage shrinking, leaving a tiny piece of
meat inside a huge empty crust.

So. The sausage itself was really quite tasty--better and fresher tasting than pre-made sausage, and just as easy. I wasn't quite ready to take the step of grinding my own meat, but supposedly that makes even BETTER sausage....

Mmmm....sausage hand pies--success!


The apple hand pies proved a bit more difficult. Juices really abound in cooked apples! I decided to cook the apples first, to try to avoid the pies oozing too much. But putting that filling into the crusts, I found that there were still plenty of juices....when I baked them, the juices came out again, with a life of their own--and most of those pies opened during baking. I'll gladly make more savory hand pies, but I think I'll leave the fruit ones to the professionals.

Thai carrot salad

This dish is one of the reasons I started becoming interested in food and cooking, though I couldn't articulate it at the time. When I was a kid we had a subscription to Eating Well magazine, and their recipes were geared toward healthy eating without cost to taste. While my adherence to making only "healthy" dishes has certainly fallen by the wayside, one day when I was still a kid, I decided to make this salad and it made quite the impression on me. This was way back before I became a fan of fish sauce and, really, Thai food in general, but it just tasted so fresh, light and different, I knew I'd be making it again and again.

The versatility of lime juice and fish sauce always amaze me, and this salad makes the most of the delicious combination. Grated carrots and tomatoes get an incredible boost of flavor from a simple dressing of lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, chili pepper, and peanuts. I'm a sucker to get either this or green papaya salad (which uses a similar dressing) any time I get Thai food from a restaurant, but I decided to make my own the other day and was reminded of how simple and good this dish is.

Feijoada

Another one of those dishes which I don't know how it's "supposed" to be, not having ever tasted an authentic version (or in fact any version), feijoada is a classic Brazilian dish that has a number of variations depending on who you're asking.

The very basics are black beans and some sort of meat. The version I made was a stripped down version using black beans, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, and ham hocks for flavor. Hot sauce is a wonderful addition to the cooked dish. Feijoada can be made either thick and stewlike by taking some of the cooked beans and pureeing them, then mixing them with the cooked whole beans--or soupy, which is what I did. Partly out of laziness, partly intentional. Prepared this way, they cried out to be eaten with rice. Since my mission in life is often to be able to eat as many carbs as I can justify to myself, the soupiness served me very well. My version of feijoada? A dressed up version of beans and rice. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Green curry

Green curry is not only incredibly flavorful and delicious, it's unbelievably easy to make--at least the way I make it. A can of green curry paste, which I get for something like 59 cents at the local Asian store, does the heavy lifting to make a potful of curry--that, a can of coconut milk, lime juice, and a splash of the very best smelly ingredient of all--fish sauce. I like to make my own variation based on whatever vegetables I feel like having in my curry, but typically I make a tofu curry with carrots, peas and bell peppers and, of course, eat it with plenty of rice. A cilantro or thai basil garnish adds a nice extra note of flavor.

The only downside to this dish is that coconut milk is incredibly fatty! I've tried cutting it down with regular milk or chicken broth, but it's not the same. The richness of the coconut milk counteracts the spiciness of the curry paste, and without enough coconut milk the flavors become a bit too sharp. My advice--don't read the nutrition label too closely. Even if you do, though--the dish is well worth it.

Lamb curry

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me this recipe of his mom's. It's so easy and good (and cheap to make!) that I come back to it over and over again. I also love having this homestyle Indian dish always at my fingertips, so I can act like I know how to cook authentic Indian food. This dish can probably be made with ground pork or beef as well, but the lamb adds a wonderful--for lack of a better word I have in my arsenal--lamby flavor that goes perfectly with the assertive spices. I've also been known to make this dish with chickpeas and potatoes instead of lamb though the end effect is, unsurprisingly, a bit different given that lamb has a much stronger flavor than the chickpeas. Still, it's great either way.

Ground lamb (or chunks of lamb, though I've never tried it this way), onions, garlic, spices, tomatoes, cilantro and a few minutes are all you need to make this dish. The amount of garlic is up to you--I LOVE garlic so I always tend to up the amount of garlic when cooking from recipes. Serve this over rice and you've got a very tasty meal.


Lamb curry recipe (adapted from the recipe courtesy of my friend's mother!)

-2 t. oil
-1 onion, chopped
-2-3 serrano peppers (optional)
-2-4 cloves garlic, chopped
-1 lb ground lamb
-1/4 tsp turmeric
-1/4 tsp red chili flakes (or to taste)
-1/2 tsp salt
-1/4 tsp ground black pepper
-2 1/2 tsp ground coriander
-1/2 tsp garam masala
-1 15 oz can diced tomatoes or 1-2 fresh tomatoes, chopped
-1 1/2 cups water
-Cilantro for garnish (optional)


Saute onions, serrano peppers, and garlic in the oil over medium high heat until onion starts to brown. Lower the heat slightly and add the lamb and spices, breaking the meat up into pieces. Stir frequenty until the lamb is cooked through.

Add the tomatoes and water, less water if you want a thicker dish with less "gravy." Once the mixture starts boiling, lower the heat and simmer for 5-10 minutes. Taste and adjust spices if necessary. Add some chopped cilantro over the top if desired (the cilantro adds some nice color and flavor to the dish).

Chickpeas with Moroccan spices

I've made this dish several times, and each time it's been delicious. I made it first with canned chickpeas--I like canned beans for their convenience, and I've never had bad canned beans. But I was dying to know - what was I missing by not cooking my own? So the next time I made it marked my first foray into cooking dried garbanzos.

Either I don't have enough sense to tell, or the canned chickpeas I use are quite good--but I didn't notice much of a difference in this dish. The canned chickpeas were definitely more uniform in their texture, but otherwise both were equally good. I have to say, opening a can is a lot easier than soaking, cooking, etc...

My level of familiarity with Moroccan food is pretty nonexistent. Going by this recipe, Moroccan spices, herbs, and aromatics are a lot of the same ones I use already but ones I don't always use all together--paprika, garlic, pepper, salt, parsley, cilantro, cumin, turmeric...I would never think to put these all together. For this recipe these all get pounded together into a paste--the most delicious smelling paste I can think of--at least because the word "paste" doesn't conjure up terribly fragrant things in my mind's nose.

The paste, combined with chickpeas, greens (kale in this instance, but swiss chard is also wonderful), and tomatoes, makes an amazing stewlike dish, perfect with rice. (It's been my lunch at work for a couple weeks--I did say I've made it several times, right? I love variety in food, but for office lunches I get into ruts of eating the same thing for many days in a row. They are always tasty ruts though.) I found the recipe in the great cookbook "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison one day while looking for a good chickpea dish--and--serendipity!--it also happened to have preserved lemon as an ingredient. It's so funny how things jump out at you when you're looking for them, even if you never took notice of them before.

I'm still trying to figure out how else to use my salt-preserved lemons, but this recipe uses them to great effect. The lemon only gets added at the end, after all the cooking is done, and it adds an amazing dimension to the flavor. All in all, a wonderful and easy dish--especially, I suspect, if you have a mortar and pestle. I don't have one, though I intend to get one at some point--so I basically ended up chopping and chopping and chopping the garlic before attempting to pound it into a paste with the bowl of a spoon. For the end result, this extra time is totally worth the tired arm.

Soy-braised ham hocks

Call this an inspiration from the sad state of the economy. I'm not sure if that's even accurate, because I can't recall the actual reason, and it's likely there are several...but lately I've been fascinated with cheaper cuts of meat and how delicious they can be when prepared right. Some of these cuts are more like formerly cheap ones, until they became more popular and trendy (short ribs, for example) and then their prices went up accordingly, but others are, well, still cheap and sometimes overlooked.

Ham hocks have become one of those cuts for me. Sometimes they're almost all fat and skin, which isn't all that great, but sometimes they're meaty enough to create something delicious. You can use a smoked ham hock to flavor a pot of soup or beans or greens, which was my first experience with hocks, or you can use a "fresh" ham hock to make a dish that actually centers around the hocks themselves.

These ham hocks were very labor-unintensive. They simply braised for a couple of hours, with me checking in occasionally, in a soy sauce, brown sugar, rice wine, broth, ginger and star anise liquid, until they became quite tender and developed a beautiful glossy dark color from the soy sauce. Once they were done, I removed the skin and any extra bits of fat, cut the meat into pieces, and served it over rice with some greens.

Can I say again how great braising is? The hocks turned out delicious, if a bit salty--my mistake was to leave a lid off too long while the hocks cooked in the oven, allowing a lot of the liquid to evaporate and become quite concentrated, i.e. salty. Rice does help counteract this somewhat. I'll definitely make this dish again--with appropriately meaty hocks and a more diluted broth to compensate.

Arroz con pollo

Arroz con pollo is one of those dishes I try out because it sounded tasty in a cookbook but I don't know if the recipe is authentic and if how it turns out is how it's "supposed" to turn out because I haven't actually eaten it before. I always worry about this a great deal, but ultimately, my most important factor of course has to be--does it taste good? (Unless I was trying to make and serve a dish to someone very experienced in eating it or making it, like say they grew up eating their grandmother's arroz con pollo, in which case, I'd probably be too intimidated to mess with that and end up making them Chinese food or something...)

This recipe, which I got from "How to Cook Everything," is delicious. There were two versions, basically a very stripped down, basic recipe, and a "deluxe" sort of recipe. I made a version somewhere in between the two and loved how it turned out, but would love to try the stripped down version as well. I think the key factor is the fact that the rice cooks in a tasty sauce--along with the chicken--how convenient can you get? The delicious byproduct is that the rice absorbs the flavors of the tasty broth and any vegetables you include, not to mention the chicken itself. Not just the chicken broth, but some of the chicken fat also gets absorbed into the rice as the fat renders. You end up with really chickeny rice, which is also pleasingly yellow thanks to a bit of saffron or turmeric. There is a Chinese chicken and rice dish which also works on the principle of the chicken flavor absorbing into the rice for maximum tastiness...I'll be trying that one out sometime too, of course.