Cooking On Sundays

Since the post about indian food is still in the “technical difficulties” stage, and beet soup post has disappeared into the ether (where did it go?), I will write up the first day of the farmers market season.  Farmers market!  Best produce in town!  Cheaper too!  I bought 10lbs of apples for $4, some rabe, some turnips w/greens attached, some oyster mushrooms (in hopes they were as good as the ones bought for a couple dinners ago–which also got lost in the technical difficulties, but you don’t want to read about that dinner anyway).  Oh and two humongous leeks for $1.50 (why are leeks always cheap at the farmers market but frighteningly expensive in stores?  I almost refused to buy them until the vendor listed various ways leeks could be used which did not involve soup).

So this week I did not actually make dinner.  It was a friend’s birthday, so I went to his house instead.  Others had made burgers, sausages, falafels, chips and dip, so I made the salad.  I looked at my ingredients, debated what I could do with them, and decided “anything goes in a salad!”

• A huge head of cauliflower (actually bought at a supermarket rather bargainously, there were none at the farmers market)
• The rabe
• The pink eggs
• Walnuts, dried currants, and dried cranberries
• And a salad dressing of lemon, tahini, olive oil, salt, cribbed from a few weeks ago

I steamed the rabe and cauliflower–the rabe doesn’t take much at all! and the cauliflower was barely cooked.  Chopped and into the salad bowl followed by “what do I have in my closet that might work with this”, hence the walnuts and dried berries.  Then I got the idea for the eggs!  If I don’t use the pink eggs now, who will I show them off to (besides my awesome blog readers)?  And deciding I wanted more complicated than just oil and vinegar, I went and made that dressing, which was good because my lemon had been sitting for a while and it would be sad if I didn’t use it.

I have to say I felt awkward bringing an unusual salad to a party.  The people who like salads loved it–I didn’t expect it would be that well loved!  The rabe was somewhat bitter, but I put in enough dried berries and cauliflower that it was balanced out.  The dressing also added a good flavor.

However, I’d say more people skipped it and went straight to the burgers, than actually ate it.

Before we start on today’s recipe, we have a special surprise.  See, in the past, I tell people bring a bottle of wine, because while I can feed everyone for not too much money, I can’t bring enough wine to make sure everyone is happy.  It was difficult to get people to do this, but suddenly, everyone was bringing wine, and last week I had two half-full bottles of wine at the end (as well as three unopened bottles!).  So what does one do with several bottles of wine sitting around in the fridge for a week?

• Two oranges
• One lemon
• One grapefruit
• One tangelo
• A bottle of “cranberry juice cocktail” (sugar, cranberry juice, color, etc, what else goes in that?)
• All the leftover wine, which was the two leftover bottles of red wine, and the remainder of a boxed pink wine

Sangria!  Made the house sticky, but it was worth it!

This week was one of those days which I had no idea what I was doing, until someone said “you can make anything into curry!”, which I guess I have that talent.  So let me try to remember what went into the curry:

• Garlic
• Two poblano peppers
• Four thai peppers
• A block of firm tofu
• Frozen little shrimps
• A huge cauliflower.  It cost a dollar.
• A portobello mushroom cap
• Turmeric
• Red curry paste (it was the only one at the store I found that seemed to have real ingredients)
• A can of coconut milk
• Some scallions (I had them, I wanted them used)

I’m sure there was other stuff too but you’ll have to wait until I remember.  I sliced the garlic and peppers first, threw them in.  There was a lot of poblano in there, but I threw the tofu in there next anyway, but this meant it didn’t really get fried which is how I prefer it.  I coated this mixture with the turmeric but I think it may have been too little for everything in the end.  I let it cook, try to cook the tofu more than the rest, and when the tofu was either yellow via cooking or yellow via being coated by turmeric, I put in the can of coconut milk.  I added to this the curry paste and stirred.  Then I threw every thing else in.

Just a warning about the shrimps, if you attempt to do this yourself.  I got a huge bag of frozen “cocktail” shrimps, the little kind (about an inch or two long).  When I threw them in the curry (and threw is a good word to describe it), they made the curry smell distinctly shrimpy, but, themselves, shrank down to very tininess, and suddenly it wasn’t entirely fair to call it shrimp curry anymore.  Suddenly it was far more cauliflower curry.

I also made a spinach salad.  This got a little fancy, but cheese was on sale, so I went all out.

• Spinach (I normally buy bunch spinach, I bought a tub of “baby” spinach this time…  bunches are better, but I think baby spinach works better in this case)
• Brie
• Dried sweetened cranberries
• Chopped walnuts
• Clover sprouts
• Olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Easy!  Fancier than I’m used to.  I actually didn’t make the salad–I just handed all the ingredients to my lovely assistant and when I got around to paying attention, there was salad!  She also made the sangria!  Fabulous!  I should try cooking by this method more often.

I was at a latino butcher shop with my friends, somewhere between planning on abandoning dinner plans due to the multitude of parties to go to, and determined to still make dinner, despite the lack of eaters (I did end up with two eaters besides myself).  While carefully examining everything on the shelves, I found fufu flour.

I asked Ickabod, who is a master chef, what is fufu flour?  He didn’t know.  So I bought it, and looked it up on Wikipedia.

The box said it was made from cocoyam, which took me through several Wikipedia redirects and disambiguations pages, which led me to decide that it was the root of xanthosoma.  The directions were easy–just add hot water and turn into paste.  It was then I really realized what fufu is–pasteballs.

After some searching the internet, I found an interesting recipe.  My original plan was to follow this recipe, fufu with okra soup.  However, I couldn’t find the broth, and due to vociferous objections against okra from my eaters, the soup turned out radically different.

With this dubious start I worked on the soup.  I was planning on using Golden Curry as a broth base–it’s like this weird beef base thing for making curries, but it’s really thick, so it’s easily adaptable to soup, and I didn’t have any beef broth.  But the store didn’t have any, so I found a coconut/lime/red curry soup instead.  And becuase of the objections of okra, I made it with cauliflower instead.

• One cauliflower
• One can of “Red curry soup” (see picture above)
• Half bag of spinach
• One small onion
• One habanero
• Some string beans
• Some onion sprouts
• All the spices I found in the closet (curry powder, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper)

Hm, was that it?  I started the soup with sauteeing the habanero and onion in the the soup pan with oil, and adding some finely chopped cauliflower in the idea that it might become some kind of little crispy crunchy stuffs, which it didn’t.  I added the can of soup with lots of water, which turned out to have lots of interesting things in it, like bamboo and basil and I’m not sure what else.  I added the rest of the ingredients, nervous the whole time that it wouldn’t taste good.

For the fufu, I carefully followed the directions.  While the principle was easy, add hot water and turn into paste, all sorts of details were given, either by the box or the wisdom of the internet, such as wet all the surfaces the fufu will be in contact with prior to mixing, add the water in small amounts, etc.  Really I think you could just pour water on fufu flour and mix with your hands.

I made smaller balls of fufu rather than the large mounds I find images of on the internet.

I also made a simple salad, adding some chopped string beans and onion sprouts to the salad.  Onion sprouts are tasty!  I give up rewriting the salad recipe every time and just put a page here, which will be linked probably weekly.

Do I dare tell you the results?  The soup was fabulous!  It was the tastiest thing ever!  Raven attempted to make it again as soon as my back was turned!

But what of the fufu?  The fufu was universally despised.  Many suggestions were given to make more palatable, such as throw the box of fufu flour out the window, throw fufu balls at people you don’t like, or use it to paste things to walls.  The general consensus was that if you weren’t a starving african, there was no reason to eat fufu.

I think that review is a little harsh, and that if you added flavor to it (any flavor!), it would be better.  Make pancakes out of it!  Deep fry it, call it donuts!  One person said it was meant to be made with soup broth, not just water, that’s another idea!  But in the form of water and flour, it’s just pasteballs, although pasteballs in soup is not that bad (after all, people like matzo ball soup, right?).