Cooking On Sundays

I found a recipe in the New York Times, and thought I’d try it out.  I normally keep an eye out for recipes, but unless I don’t know what I’m doing (which happens more frequently than I care to admit), I usually don’t follow it that closely.  Usually I’ll find a recipe, and I’ll say “what a great idea!  Except I have … instead of …, and I like this better than that”, but in this case, I actually acquired ingredients.  I doubled the recipe, and when I veered, it was because I forgot, not because I was trying to change things.

• Two huge broccolis
• A pound of chick peas (garbanzo beans), soaked overnight (I think I was supposed to use a cup–not the same!)
• A bunch of italian parsley
• Half a large red onion
• Dash of salt

And for the dressing

• The juice of one meyer lemon
• Two spoons of spicy “Chinese” mustard (horseradish based)
• Four spoons of champagne vinegar
• Small garlic clove, minced and mashed
• Eight spoons of olive oil

I soaked the chick peas overnight, and in the morning I realized how many there were…  so I set some aside and stuck them in the freezer with the theory I will use them elsewhere.  I cooked the garbanzos in water with a dash of salt until they were done, and then I chopped up the brocolli, peeling the stems and chopping them up too, and and let them cook.  As per the directions in the NYTimes, I chopped the onion, put it in a bowl, submerged the onion with water, and let sit for five minutes.  I’ve never done that and can only guess the purpose is to remove some of the onion sharpness, but I can’t say I  noticed the difference.  I drained everything, put it in a large bowl, chopped and added the parsely, and stirred it all together!  I forgot to add the dill, which I have some and wanted to use it up, oh well.

For the dressing, I didn’t have mustard, and so my neighbor said she had some, but when she brought it she was almost crying.  “It tastes horrible!  I tried it on a sandwich and it was dreadful!  It’s not normal mustard at all!”  I looked at the label and said “Perfect!”  Dijon is nice, but so is horseradish.  I mixed up the dressing, and kept making more because I was trying to get the proportions right–it went like this:  “too much lemon–add a little olive oil–too much oil–add a little vinegar–not enough mustard–add another spoonful–hm, we are close….”  She was surprised to find that it added a good flavor without making it taste dreadful, and this dish came out incredibly well, in my humble opinion (and I was glad for leftovers!).

I did another curry, because I had no imagination.

• Half a cabbage–the hugest cabbage I found
• A portobella mushroom
• Half a bag of string beans
• Some scallions
• Some of the frozen shrimps from last week
• Two pasilla peppers (poblano)
• One habenero pepper
• One serrano
• One yellow onion
• A can of coconut milk
• A half a brick of “Golden Curry”–a curry “bar”
• And this was served on spaghetti, rather than rice

This is a straight up curry recipe–olive oil, stir fry the onion, peppers, cook cook cook, add half the cabbage and decide the other half won’t fit in the pan, and cook cook cook, I swear the cabbage will get smaller, c’mon now I need room in this pan for other things, cook cook, add coconut milk and curry, cook cook cook, finally the cabbage is small enough to not fill me with fear of overflowing the pan everytime I stir, and add mushrooms and string beans.  At the very end I add a bunch of scallions.

This was very tasty, though the not-so-spicy people thought it was too spicy, but I thought it was just right, but I think it would have been much better on rice than pasta.

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.

This week was a week of removing old veggies from my shelves.  I had acquired many root vegetables, and my neighbor grows rosemary in his front yard, so I thought I’d do the New England traditional roasted vegetables.  This involves many root vegetables, that I had acquired quite a period of time, put into a large pan and then merely set the oven until cooked.

I suppose I could have roasted them on an open fire, and in fact I have been meaning to test my fireplace out, but for now I just cheated and used the conventional oven.

The tubers were:

• Half a butternut squash
• A few potatoes
• A turnip
• A parsnip
• A rutabaga
• A sweet potato (aka yam)
• A couple carrots
• Elephant garlic (three elephants for a dollar!)
• And seasoned with olive oil, salt, and rosemary

I simply chopped everything up into bite sizes, and dumped them into a cast iron pan.  Stirred them up with olive oil, salt, and rosemary.  Threw them in the oven at 375, and took them out about once every 20-30 minutes to stir them and verify their done-ness.  Unfortunately, I had washed them right before using them, so somehow a layer of water got in there.  I was hoping it would steam out fast enough, but clearly it’s too humid around here and it stayed for most of the cooking.  Fortunately, I did manage to bake them to be tasty and not to soggy as feared.

After chopping up all the tubers, I found myself with a considerable amount that would not fit in the skillet.  I had an idea–I made a butternut curry once before, how would various other tubers work for a curry base?  Or for that matter, a mix?  I took the tubers that didn’t fit and boiled them until soft.  Then I set about my usual curry recipe but with throwing in the tubers and mashing them into a sauce.  The rutabagas did not mash so well, so I let them go into the curry as chunks, but mashed the rest.

Instead of a list of ingredients, I offer you a picture:

That’s cilantro and spinach in back in bowls, anaheims and thai peppers on the left of the plate, string beans on the back of the plate, a daikon, carrot and zucchini, ginger and garlic, and tofu on the left.  The onion was not actually used.  Actually, I don’t think the carrot was either.  I sauteed peppers, ginger (I generally chop the ginger, then crush the choppings), and garlic, and then added the tuber mush, then the tofu.  Let the melt together for a while and then chop and add the remaining veggies (daikon, zucchini, string beans, spinach).  Add the cilantro in last and don’t really cook it; just stir it in.

It was tasty!  It was declared this was one of my best curries yet.  I wasn’t as pleased with it as the eaters were, but they certain made happy noises.  The roasted tubers also got a lot of happy noises, although I would say this was not my best roasted tubers day.  Also, I only used rosemary–if I were more together I’d use oregano and sage and I’m not sure what else.

So continuing last weeks’ saga of the ham bone, I left that boiling on the stove for the week.

Well, not the whole week.  Maybe a couple days.  And generally left it sitting on the stove otherwise.  I boiled it once more this morning, just in case it was breeding cooties.

I soaked the split peas since the morning.  I meant to do it overnight, but I forgot.  I’m really not a soaker, in the bean-soup wars, I prefer to just toss them in and go.  If you soak them, it does reduce cooking time, which is nice.

Split pea soup is tasty stuff–it’s about one of the only recipes I’ve taken from my mom that I like (the other being lasagna).  It’s also dirt cheap–I added up the ingredients, and it was roughly nothing–I already had the ingredients, and was wishing that the peas in the freezer would go away, potatoes that needed to be used up sooner or later, and a half-dead onion.  Realistically speaking, it was roughly $5, or possibly more if you follow roommates suggestion of  using a tad more ham mentioned below.

Ingredient list:

• A huge amount of green and yellow split peas
• An almost-dead onion
• One leek
• Half bag of carrots
• Half a turnip
• A small tupperware container filled with precooked chopped ham
• Oregano, thyme, pepper, salt, and probably something else I’m forgetting

No garlic?  No garlic, I would typically use a huge amount of garlic, but I’ve done that in the past, and it makes everyone reek of garlic for days.  I chopped the onion and leek, threw it in the boiling pot.  Tossed the peas in until they turned to mush, stirring constantly.  This takes some time–about two hours–and you need to stir with regular frequency to prevent the soup from sticking to the bottom.  Towards the end, I chopped up the carrots, potatoes, and turnips, and tossed them in.  I actually had got this all done well in advanced enough that I turned it off and worked on the other foods.

I particularly skimped on the ham.  See, that’s what happens when you let the vegetarian cook!  The ham lovers in the audience added more, and said it was tastier with much more ham.  One person had a bowl filled with ham, and just poured some soup on top.

For the cumin potato salad, I used a recipe I’ve had for some time now.  It’s basically roast some cumin on a pan.  Then grind the cumin, add enough oil/vinegar to potatoes to make sure cumin gets everywhere, and stir.  You could probably do this with other foods, like eggs (and I commonly use eggs) or maybe even make a “oil and cumin” type dressing, the way oil and mustard dressings are popular.

• Potatoes (about enough to feed four)
• Carrots
• Two hard boiled eggs
• A (measured) teaspoon of whole cumin
• A (measured) teaspoon of whole coriander seeds
• Two peppercorns, because last week someone said one wasn’t enough
• Enough olive oil to mix everything together

To make this, roast the spices on a stove, with no oil.  I miss my cast iron pan, because doing this with other pans isn’t quite the same.  After the cumin smells cooked and is slightly brown, toss it into the grinder.  Boil the potatoes and eggs (separately) and chop them up small, and chop the unboiled carrots very small.  Mix everything together with olive oil, until everything is well coated.  Normally I would use tomatoes instead of carrots, but I didn’t have any today.

The hard part in this making sure the proportions are correct.  Here I think I used too much cumin/coriander compared to potatoes.  My original recipe said “makes enough to feed four”, which I think is about how much I actually made.  Fortunately my vast eaters did not in fact show (I expected ten, and only four showed up) so there was plenty.  I still think this one is tasty, however, others were not as appreciative as I was.

Perhaps I should have shown the bowl before people devoured, instead of after.

And, for the curry.  This was a slightly bold recipe, and I followed it from a book exactly.  Wait, let me quantify that “exactly”, I followed the directions exactly, however, I used varying ingredients.  In fact, at some point I looked at my counter, said “this is what I have”, and looked at the recipe, and said “well, how different can it be?”  It came from a book entitled “Spicy Vegetarian Feasts” and was labeled as “Braised Vegetables in a Cardamom Nut Sauce”.  Things I was missing included onions and ginger and green peas and I’m not sure what else.

The ingredients were something like:

• One habanero chili (the recipe was written for an english audience, we use chilis, not peppers)
• One serrano chili  (the recipe called for “one very spicy green chili”)
• One cup of yogurt
• 12 24 green cardamom pods
• 24 12 cloves (I got the amounts backwards from the original recipe)
• A cinnamon stick
• Two cloves of garlic
• Two pounds of potatoes, chopped small
• Half a turnip, chopped small
• Some remaining carrots
• A  zucchini
• Half a thing of spinach
• A few string beans

The book says put the potatoes and turnips in a bowl of water and let soak while doing everything else.  Okay….

I threw some olive oil into the pan, with the garlic, chillies, cinnamon stick, cardamom, and cloves.  “Add two spoonfuls of yogurt, and let the yogurt boil down to nothing, and repeat, until that cup of yogurt is gone”.  As I’m doing this, I’m thinking to myself, “am I  making cheese?”

“Then, throw in the potatoes and turnips, along with a cup of water”.  I throw in the potatoes and turnips, and put enough water to submerge them all.  I let the water cook until it’s not there any more and the potatoes and turnips are cooked.  I throw in the spinach and carrots and zucchini and just a hair more water and let it cook long enough for the veggies to cook.

I carefully warned everyone “this is a cardamom pod, don’t eat it, this is a clove, don’t eat it, you all know what a cinnamon stick looks like, don’t eat it”.  So who was the one chewing on a cardamom pod wondering why it was way way over cardamomed?  Yours truly, of course.

It was tasty enough if you were careful enough not to bite any of the pods or cloves.  Of course, they were mixed in well enough, so we all did, and everyone said it was way too spiced.  The habanero and serrano didn’t really show through at all, or at least I didn’t taste them at all.  If I were to do this, I would remove pods, cloves, and cinnamon stick before adding anything else.  Otherwise, they get far too in the way of enjoying this.

Next time I try this, I’ll follow the recipe a little closer–with ginger and onions and no spinach but with green peas peas and I’m not sure how many other variations  I made.  It was tasty, but I would say it was over cardamomed, another eater said it was over cloved, and another said it was her favourite.

The fortunate side of getting four when you expect ten is now I don’t have to cook for the rest of the week.  Woo!  They better get used to cardomom breath at work!  Someone better help me eat some of this soup, as it takes up a huge amount of space in the fridge!

I’m getting better with the photos–but it’s still not on top of my mind.  There are no photos of completely made soup or curry.

I didn’t have the usual masses to cook for this weekend, so it was just me and my roommate.  Also, due to me being all over the place, I was less than energetic to cook.  So I went to the store, and bought cheap veggies, and hoped the spices and such in my closet would be enough to make it work.

I bought:

• One bunch of spinach (they sell fancy spinach by the bunch, about 3/4 lb for $2)
• One bell pepper
• Some carrots
• An onion (which I didn’t use)
• Some rice

I found in my closet

• An ancient red onion
• Some ancient garlic
• Can of coconut milk
• Not enough rice (actually this was in the freezer)
• Cumin
• Dried arbuelo peppers in a jar
• Patak’s curry paste
• Olive oil

I threw the rice with cumin in the rice cooker.  Then, I ground the peppers, threw them in a pan with olive oil, and sauteed the garlic and onions in that.  Cut the carrots thin, tossed them in.  Added the coconut milk and a spoon of the curry paste.  Let that simmer for a while, adding water as necessary.  Cut the spinich and bell pepper up and threw it in, and impatiently waited for the rice to cook.

Wow.  I didn’t know it’d cook that fast.  Also, I added too much water, so that I was trying to boil some of the water out, but trying not to let the veggies lose thier crunch.  I kind of failed at that task (the veggies did lose their crunch), but with thin coconut milk, there is more for the rice to soak up.

Also, I forgot to make a salad.  What can I say, I was out of it!

This was comparatively quick and easy, I’d recommend it.  By not attempting to use tofu or meat, there isn’t anything that has to sizzle or burn or whatnot.  The only catch is making sure you have enough spices (note to self next time: more curry paste, less peppers) to make sure it tastes good.

Update: I took leftovers to work the next day.  It was so much tastier the next day!  I’m not sure how or why this occurred.  I suspect it was the flavors didn’t come out as well when hot.

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?).

I found a Romanesco broccoli at the farmers market yesterday.  This is a food I’ve never actually seen before, but have read about in math books.  I couldn’t let the poor thing go ignored.

Edit:  New picture, rather than the picture stolen from Wikipedia.  Supposedly it’s my hand holding that fractal flower, however, this is not the one we ate.  There are some inconsistencies in the story here.  Thanks to raven for supplying the photo.

Not sure what to do with it, but it tastes a lot like cauliflower, all I could think was some sort of cauliflower recipes.  But what are cauliflower recipes?  Well, I came up with the idea of thin noodles plus vegetables, or perhaps a curry, like aloo gobi.  I asked one of the people to be fed which they’d prefer, and it was decreed, curry.

So I looked in my Indian cookbook, and did not find any good cauliflower recipes.  Undeterred, I sought out the great internet, and found this recipe.

On the salad front, a friend of mine told me about a spicy salad she had made, and she also gave me a recipe.  Oddly enough, cucumbers were near impossible to find, and I wound up getting them from the supermarket at $1.19 a piece.  Cilantro wasn’t much cheaper.

The aloo gobi was made first, and thus I’m listing it first:

• One of the romanesco broccolis, chunked into bite sized pieces
• A bunch of potatoes, diced into little cubes
• A spoonful of chili powder (yes I actually measured)
• A spoonful of cumin, whole seeds
• A spoonful of cumin, powder
• A spoonful of tumeric
• A spoonful of ground coriander seeds (I used a spoonful of whole coriander seeds, and then ground them.  It’d be more if I ground first and then measured a spoonful).
• Some salt
• A bunch of scallions, chopped
• A can of unsalted, chopped tomatoes with juice

I put way too much oil in a pan and cooked the potatoes, not quite deep frying them.  I added very little salt, tasted a potato, and went “OMFG that’s way too salty!”.  Of course, they’ll be added to other stuff, so hopefully that will mute the saltiness.  After they were done, I poured the oil into two other pans–a small one for the salad, and a large one for the rest of the curry.

I actually followed the recipe pretty closely–I hadn’t done this before and didn’t want it being yucky–so I added the whole cumin, tumeric, and red chili powder, just let the oil get hot and stirred it up.  I chunked up the fractal flower into bits and put it in, stirring it all around.  I added the can of tomatoes, and in the juice, added the rest of the spices.  Added the potatoes, chopped and added the scallions, and lots of stirring, until I felt everything was done.

The only thing I noticed was everyone except me added salt to this.

The thing I learned–romanesco broccoli is delicious.  And, when you’re afraid your cauliflower or broccoli would be too soggy from cooking too long, the romanesco holds up well.  And it does this while still looking cool.  It’s not a true fractal (I looked at it under a microscope) but as you get smaller, you approach a limit where you can no longer be self similar, so no real-world object can be a true fractal.  I think.  But it is certainly fractal-like!

The salad was made nearly exactly to the recipe as well, except I used lots of bell peppers.

• Two large cucumbers, chopped into bite sized pieces
• A considerable amount of rice wine vinegar
• A huge amount of ginger, diced fine
• half a spoon of sugar
• Six thai chilies, sliced and chopped
• A bunch of cilantro, chopped
• Two huge yellow bell peppers, chopped into bite sized pieces

Again I followed the recipe fairly closely.  The cucumbers went into about a half-inch of vinegar with the ginger, mix in the sugar, with lots of stirring so all the bits could sit in there.  Saute the thai chilies.  After some sitting, toss the vinegar (what a waste!) and add the chilies and oil.  Stir it up.  Add all the other ingredients, and stir some more.  You might think you need to worry about the temperature, but no, really, it doesn’t need much (if any) cooling.

People were surprised by the salad being spicy and the curry being not.  One commented it worked perfectly–the salad gave a good kick, and then you eat the curry, and it “feels” as spicy as you would expect it.

I got two butternut squashes from the farmers market yesterday.  They were $2.50.  I only actually used half of one of them for two recipes.

Both recipes came from http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com.  I had never tried to make a butternut squash curry before, it seemed like an odd idea.  The soup seemed almost natural, and came out tastier than I expected.

I also made a salad involving tomatoes of every color.  Wish I had a picture now.  I had green zebra tomatoes, lemon finger tomatoes, chocolate tomatoes, and some italian red tomatoes that I actually forget the variety of now.  Some cucumbers, some bell peppers, and some balsamic, very basic yet still tasty.  Bell peppers and cucumbers are strangely cheap at the farmers market ($2 for five bell peppers, $2 for two cucumbers or $1/pound).

Salad:

• Two large cucumbers.
• Tomatoes of every color I could find at the farmers market
• A large bell pepper
• Balsamic vinegar

Chop up and stir together.  That’s about it!  Actually no I think a hair of salt was added.

The other two were much more involved.  I baked the squash, potatoes, garlic, carrots, onions, and a couple peppers all at once before starting.

Soup:

• 1/4 squash
• Several potatoes
• A small bulb of garlic
• Half an anaheim pepper
• Half an onion (sorry to these folks)
• Carrots
• Some powdered chicken boullion
• Lots of water
• Salt and pepper

I followed their recommendation of “when baking, drizzle everything in olive oil and salt”.  They are right in that it makes everything tasty.  After baking everything, I boiled a small amount of water and threw in the boullion.  Actually, I threw in all the ingredients, wandering around the house looking for anything else that needed eating before it became icky.  Then I scooped the ingredients out of the boiling water, into the blender, added more water (not from the pot), blended, and back into the pot.  Since not all the ingredients could fit in the blender, I did this process about five times

The curry was a bit more involved, but not much, not really.

• 1/4 Butternut squash
• One small summer squash
• Block of tofu
• One clove of garlic (normally I’d do much more, but being as there is a bulb in the soup, I decided against it)
• The rest of the onion
• A small can of coconut milk
• A bell pepper
• A spoonful of Patak’s curry paste
• Two arbol peppers

This was easy, just saute onions, garlic, peppers in olive oil.  When the oil has those flavors, cube the tofu, and sizzle as much as possible.  When you’re convinced the tofu won’t cook anymore, put in the coconut milk.Turn the heat down, and add water if the coconut milk gets too thick.  Stir in the curry paste, and add all the other vegetables.  Let the glodge cook until you are satisfied (I generally just let the veggies get as hot as the rest of the food, you may want to add them before adding coconut milk).  Serve with rice.

Edit:  I can’t believe I forgot to mention this!  After curry paste, but before veggies, get the mushiest chunks of the butternut squash.  Mash them up into the coconut milk/curry paste mixture.  It makes for a creamy yummy tasty curry sauce.  You can leave some of the squash as chunks, or not, as you like, I mushed all of my chunks up into the coconut milk.

The original recipe calls for Thai curry paste, but I used Indian curry paste, mainly because I found myself lacking Thai curry paste at the last moment.  It didn’t matter-it still came out very tasty.  The only thing I’d suggest is a more serious vegetable-the summer squash was as white as the tofu, I’d recommend a broccoli or red cabbage or something.