Category: food

The Indian Slow Cooker

We’ve just received word that the powers-that-be have green-lit Cookbooks on Trial for a second season! I’m going to kick off this round of reviews with one of The Indian Slow Cooker by Anupy Singla, or as I like to call it: “Lentils, Lentils, Lentils!”

I first read about this book at CityMama and since Stefania is a fantastic cook and she liked the book I put it on my wishlist. I’m really glad I picked it up.

Aloo Gobi is one of my favorite Indian dishes and so it was the first recipe I tried from the book. We liked it so much that I made it again a week later but decreased the amount of red pepper a bit. I love really spicy food but the first time around my mouth was ON FIRE.

Aloo Gobi on the right with some curry shrimp and rice

Aloo Gobi (Spiced Cauliflower and potatoes)
from The Indian Slow Cooker
Yield 7 cups

Ingredients

  • 1 large cauliflower, washed and cut into 1-inch pieces (about 8 cups)
  • 1 large potato (russet or yellow), peeled and diced (about 2 cups)
  • 1 medium yellow or red onion, peeled and coarsely chopped
  • 1 medium tomato, diced (optional)
  • 1 2-inch piece ginger, peeled and grated
  • 3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped, minced, or grated
  • 3-4 green Thai, Serrano, or cayenne chilies, stems removed, chopped or sliced lengthwise
  • 1 Tablespoon cumin seeds
  • 1 Tablespoon red chili powder (Too much for me–decreased it to a heaping teaspoon)
  • 1 Tablespoon garam masala
  • 1 Tablespoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon turmeric powder
  • 3 Tablespoons vegetable or canola oil
  • 1 heaping Tablespoon fresh cilantro, chopped

Directions

  1. Put all the ingredients except the cilantro in the slow cooker. Mix well.
  2. Cook on low for 3 hours. Mix once or twice during cooking, especially in the beginning. Eventually the cauliflower will release enough liquid to prevent anything from sticking to the sides of the slow cooker
  3. Add cilantro. Mix well but gently so as not to break up the cauliflower. Serve with roti or naan and a side of onion and cucumber salad.

The Verdict
4 1/2 (out of 5) stars. If you want to learn to cook Indian food this slim volume (130 pages) is surprisingly useful. Cooking Indian food can be pretty time-intensive but the recipes in this book enable you to dump everything in your slow cooker and go along your merry way. The book focuses on healthy recipes and leans heavily towards the vegetarian (the breakdown is 27 recipes for lentils and beans/peas, 11 for vegetables, 8 for meat dishes, and a few for sides/desserts) so if you’re looking for a book to help you recreate heavy Indian restaurant food, this is not it.

This book is useful for cooking vegetable sides to go along with other dishes. I can get flustered when I have too many dishes going on at once so when I want to make Indian food for dinner I like being able to have a side bubbling away in the slow cooker so I can focus all my attention on a more demanding main dish. The list price of $19.95 seems a little high but it’s under $12 at Amazon which is a good deal and where I got mine.

Sundance Film Fest 2011: Part Two

On Saturday night N and I went out to dinner at The Copper Onion which is conveniently located next to the Broadway theater where our first movie of the night was playing. After seeing a parade of restaurants open and close in this space over the years I’m so glad to see that The Copper Onion is still going strong a year after it opened. The food is great! I love their sides in particular. Everything is very fresh and flavorful. In the summer N and I fight over their beet salad but the star of this last visit was the roasted cauliflower with anchovy cream and capers (in the middle of the photo below).

It was SO GOOD. I would have happily have eaten a big bowl of it for my entree. I also really liked the shredded brussels sprouts; the spinach with raisins and cashews was good but just okay. N got a plate of sweet breads and I got the pasta special and we shared everything. It was delicious but somewhat bittersweet because after the baby’s born I’m cutting out all dairy, eggs, and nuts from my diet while I’m nursing and I’m really going to miss food like this.

About the movies: the first film was saw was Incendies which is nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Based on a play by a well-known Lebanese-Canadian playwright, Wajdi Mouawad, the film opens with the reading of the unusual will of Nawal Marwan, a secretary of a Canadian notary. In her will Nawal’s twin children Jeanne and Simon are charged with finding their father (whom they understood to be dead) and their brother (whom they didn’t knew existed) and delivering sealed letters to them.

The film cuts between scenes of Nawal’s life in an unspecified Middle Eastern country (Lebanon) as a civil war breaks out between Muslims and Christians and those of the twins traveling around their mother’s homeland in the present day searching for their father and their brother.

The film is really great and was my favorite of the three things we saw this year. The director, Denis Villeneuve, does a great job conveying the sense of place that is so critical to the story. And he handles several big plot reveals with a light hand and allows the story to tell itself.

After the screening Villeneuve conducted an excellent Q&A and provided some thoughtful insights into the movie as well as patiently answered a few moronic questions from the audience. One tidbit was that for a while the studio wanted to release the movie with the title Scorch but then backed off once they realized it made the film seem like a B movie. For more details about the film see N’s review here.

After Incendies we drove to the other end of downtown and saw Martha Marcy May Marlene. The movie rests on the shoulders of Elizabeth Olson (younger sister to Mary Kate and Ashley) and she carries it handily. Olson plays Martha, a young girl who falls in with a group of young people living commune-style on a farm in upstate New York. The group is headed by a older man who exercises absolute authority over everyone. The movie never uses the world “cult” but it becomes obvious that’s what life on the farm is.

Soon into the film Martha runs away from the farm and seeks refuge with her estranged sister Lucy and Lucy’s husband Paul. The rest of the movie cuts between Martha’s life with the cult and her struggles to integrate into Lucy and Paul’s upper-middle class life. The movie rides on Olson’s ability to depict her character’s inner turmoil without turning it into melodrama and I think she did a great job. It’s especially impressive since it’s one of her first feature films. For N’s take on the movie see his review here.

Birthday Dinner

We’re having a great time here in Pusan but sadly I haven’t figured out a way to download pictures from my camera yet.

But before we left I uploaded some pictures of the birthday dinner N treated me to while we were in Vegas. It was the first time I’d been to a schmancy French restaurant and it was delicious.

Mussel soup

Basil langoustine fritter

Roast Chicken Thai-curry style

The most adorable selection of tarts EVER

I’d like to think that the hours I’ve invested watching Top Chef adequately prepared me to fully appreciate the food which was delicious. I don’t think I embarrassed myself but then again I did keep whipping out my camera to take photos of the food which is pretty tacky. (I told myself that since it was Vegas no one cared–they’ve probably seen a lot worst.) I just wanted to document the occasion because it was such a rare treat.

Hopefully I’ll located a memory card reader and have some pictures to share sometime soon!

Vegas, baby, Vegas!

Sorry for being MIA lately. We got back from Vegas early Monday morning and ever since then I’ve been rushing around like mad trying to wrap things up for our trip to Korea. It doesn’t help that my monthly reports for work are due before before we leave so I had to spent about 6 hours yesterday on them. BUT, that’s not what this post is about.

This was the first time N and I had gone away together without E and it was so much fun. I’ll leave it to N to discuss in detail the concerts we went to but I will say that for me the highlight of the festival was seeing Belle and Sebastian play. Stuart Murdock was ADORABLE and the show was great.

Belle and Sebastian

The two other things I wanted to do besides going to the shows were to sleep in and eat some great food. I had mixed success with sleeping in (due to my pregnant bladder and some vague anxiety about E being okay/the upcoming Korea trip) but got the chance to take a few naps which was great. But the food, well, the food was delicious.

One of our goals for this trip was to go back to Lotus of Siam which has the reputation of being one of the best Thai restaurants in the country. They specialize in northern Thai cuisine and have an extensive menu. We had been before and really enjoyed it and this time was just as good.

Pregnant me ready to eat some Thai food!

Nam Sod Salad

Crispy duck with Chu-Chee sauce (by far my favorite thing–SO good.)

If you like Thai food I’d definitely recommend checking out this place the next time you’re in Vegas. It’s fairly well-known (When we were there Mac McCaughan from Superchunk was at the table next to us.) and pretty busy so you have to make a reservation at least a day before. The restaurant’s located in a dicey Asian strip mall but the food is fantastic and reasonably priced.

Marination

I hope you guys aren’t too sick of my vacation posts yet. Don’t worry, this is the last of them.

One day when I was in WA I took E and we drove up to Seattle to hang out with my sister-in-law Mindy and my brother-in-law Ken, two of my favorite people. They know how much I like Korean food and how I adore street food so we headed downtown to catch the Marination Mobile, a food truck that specializes in Korean/Hawaiian fusion food. It was AWESOME.

I had a kimchi quesadilla, a SPAM slider, AND a kalbi taco. (Hey, I’m pregnant–so not a word!) Ken and Mindy tried the pork sliders which are also in the above picture. The quesadilla was incredibly (and surprisingly) delicious and the slider was super tasty (Yum, SPAM!) but I thought the kalbi taco was a little too salty.

We took our food and walked down to the sculpture park and then down to a little beach where the kids had fun throwing rocks and sticks in the water.

E gets his sunglasses at the same place Bono does.


It was a lot of fun. I had a great time chatting with Mindy and Ken and E had fun with his cousins. One of the worst things about living in Utah is that we only get to see these guys a few times a year. (And that there are no awesome Korean fusion food trucks.)

The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook

This week I decided to make something from The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook since it was kind of a hectic week with the last day of photo class. (By the way, thanks for the feedback on my photos!)

What should have been an easy dump-it-in-and-forget-it-experience went awry when on Wednesday morning I pulled out the roast I had just bought on Tuesday afternoon only to discover that it had turned rancid. N smelled it himself and confirmed it so it wasn’t just my wacky pregnant sense of smell. By the time I bought a new roast and returned the bad one to the store it was already after 2pm. And it was supposed to cook for at least 8 hours.

Add to that E had been in rare form all day due to teething and I was ready to call it a day. So I stubbornly popped the roast in at 2:30 pm and informed N that I thought we should order pizza for dinner after E went to bed and that we’d have the beef the following night. So last night after I got home from class we had the sandwiches which were pretty good (if a little heavy on the liquid smoke.) And E LOVED the meat and ate a whole bowl of it for dinner which is awesome.

Texas Barbecued Beef Sandwiches

Ingredients

  • 4-pound chuck roast
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 2 cups ketchup
  • 10 oz cola
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 T prepared mustard
  • 1 T liquid smoke
  • 1/4 cup Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce

Instructions

  1. Cover and cook the roast with the water in the slow cooker on high setting for 8 hours, or until tender
  2. Remove the roast. Shred the meat, trimming off the fat and discarding it in the process. Place the shredded meat in the slow cooker along with ketchup, cola, Worcestershire sauce. Mustard, liquid smoke, and hot sauce. Cook covered on high setting for 1 hour. Ladle over buns to serve.

The Verdict
3 (out of 5 stars). If you’re looking for a book containing the slow cooker dishes you remember your mom making when you were a kid this will do nicely. It covers main dishes, appetizers, soups, etc… More puzzlingly it also includes a chapter on bread(apparently you bake it inside a #2 coffee can inside the cooker). Recipes heavily rely on pre-prepared ingredients such as ketchup and canned goods but for me part of the joy of slow cooking is just being able to dump everything in. However, it seemed like many of the recipes are variations of the same.

It seems like many of the recipes aren’t that great, health-wise (high in sodium and fat) but nutritional info isn’t included. Photos are also missing but that probably helped keep the list price down. If you don’t have a slow cooker cookbook you can probably find most of the usable recipes at allrecipes.com or someplace else online.

Takashi’s Noodles


Cookbooks on Trial: Back with a Vengeance! I know that I haven’t been posting every day lately but I’ve just been swamped–swamped and reeeeally tired. I think I might go back to posting M/W/F so I can focus more on each post. I might post more often than that but telling myself I only need to post on M/W/F makes me feel less stressed. Anyway, I actually got my crap together this week and cooked a new recipe!

I don’t think I necessarily picked the best recipe out of Takashi’s Noodles to try, though. My basic thought process was something along the lines of “It’s so hot today, cold soba noodles would be really good for dinner. But wait!–I have to do something for Cookbooks on Trial today…” So I made the cold soba recipe from Takashi’s Noodles.

The recipe was more labor intensive than the way I normally make cold soba (i.e. using store-bought concentrated dipping sauce). The homemade dipping sauce tasted a little off but I’m not even sure if I used the right type of kelp for the stock so all bets were off. Overall, it was pretty tasty though.

Left to right: what I hoped was kombu and bonito flakes.

Cold Soba from Takashi’s Noodles

Broth

  • 5 cups Dashi (see below)
  • 1 3/4 cups Japanese soy sauce
  • 1 1/4 coups mirin
  • 3/4 cup packed katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes)

14 oz. dried soba noodles

Garnishes

  • 1/2 cup shredded nori (seaweed)
  • 2 tablesppons yuzu peel (can substitute with lemon zest)
  • 2 scallions, both white and green parts, thinkly sliced
  • 4 teaspoons wasabi paste

Directions
To prepare the borth, ready an ice bath and set aside. Combine the dashi, soy sauce, and mirin in a stockpot over high heat. Bring to a boil, then decrease the heat to a simmer and add the katsuobushi. Simmer for 2 minutes, then turn of the heat and let sit for 3 minutes. Strain througha fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and place the bowl in the ice bath to cool

Once the broth has cooled, place a pot of water over high heat and bring to a boil. Add the soba noodles, stirring to prevent them from sticking together. Cook for 4 or 5 minutes, or until the noodles are al dente. Drain into a colander and rinse under cold running water. Wash the noodles with your hands until the water runs clear and the noodles are cold to the touch.

To prepare the garnishes, set up garnish plates by arranging the nori, yuzu peel, scallions an d wasabi in small bunches on each of 4 small plates. Pour the broth into 4 teacups or small dipping bowls. Divide the noodles among 4 large plates. Each person will have a garnish plate, dipping bowl, and cold soba plate.

To eat, top the noodles with the shredding nori and add the yuzu peel, scallions, and wasabi to taste to the broth. Grab some noddles with chopsticks and dip them into the broth to coat the noddles then quickly slurp them down.

Dashi (Makes 2 quarts)

  • 2 large pieces kombu, approximately 10 by 4 inches each, gently wiped with adamp towel
  • 2 quarts plus 1 c water
  • 3 cups packed katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes)

Place kombu and water in a large stockpot and let it soak at room temperature for at least 20 minutes. Bring to a boil over high heat. Remove the kombu and decrease the heat so the liquid is simmering. Add the katsuobushi and gently mix into the liquid–don’t stir vigorously. Simmer for 10 minutes longer, then strain through a fine mesh sieve.

Garnishes, dipping sauce, and soba noodles.

The Verdict
4 (out of 5 stars). If you are serious about learning how to make and cook Japanese noodles this is a wonderful book written by a master of the field. Takashi Yagihashi is a highly respected Japanese chef and the book is blurbed by fellow luminaries like Eric Ripert, Daniel Boulud, and Susur Lee. For the most part the recipes are pretty straightforward but they do demand commitment to such things as making your own dashi and other stocks. Some details are omitted (as in a recipe calling for 4 oz of beef but not specifying the cut) which might cause confusion for beginners like me. Nutritional info is also omitted.

It’s a gorgeous book with lush photographs and is fun to look through and read. It covers all sorts of Japanese noodles: ramen, soba, udon, somen, plus some fusion dishes. It is for the serious noodle fan. To me it’s more of an aspirational book rather than something that will help you put dinner on the table on a weeknight.

But sometimes it’s nice just to flip through a cookbook and dream.