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.

We’ve got a a triple hitter here, especially with the salad being bigger than the entree, and the cake being fancy enough to impress everyone….

We started with salami and mushrooms.  Really, my friend made these, and it literally was just fancy salami and some portobello and criminy mushrooms.  The ingredient list is already done!  It was just stirred fried in olive oil, and that was that.  We kind of didn’t make enough, despite usual cooking style, although I suggested we throw everything else in there too, we didn’t.  Also, I almost forgot to mention, we boiled some pasta to go with this.

I made a salad where I did live up to my reputation of “everything goes in it”.  I planned on following this butternut squash salad recipe, but in the end, I only used the salad dressing.  In this salad I put:

• Garbanzo beans
• String beans
• Green cauliflower (I think it’s advertised as “broccoflower” or something)
• Half a red onion
• A bunch of cilantro
• Green bell peppers
• The remains of a small red cabbage

I steamed the cauliflower just a little, boiled the garbanzos enough that they were cooked, but I just did this so that they were soft enough to eat, and I did this ahead of time so that it was a cold salad.

And I made a tahini dressing out of:

• Tahini (in a jar) (I didn’t make it)
• Finely chopped garlic (one of these days I’ll get a press)
• Some of the onions above got into the garlic, so they were finely chopped as well
• The juice of three lemons
• Olive oil
• Salt

I mixed with the quantities in the dressing until I feared that I wouldn’t have enough lemon juice to balance it if I added any more tahini, and while straight the salad dressing was not the best.

Then the cake.  I didn’t really make the cake, I just helped pour and such, so I might suddenly hand the keyboard to raven, but the cake, if I remember, started something like this:

• Half a block (not stick, like two sticks) of butter
• A block of fancy dark (60%) chocolate (9.7 oz, I think)

I’m stealing this.  So the recipe came off the inside of the chocolate wrapper, because I had planned to make this cake and been thwarted by Stanza’s kitchen.  (You might have noticed that he doesn’t seem to go in for precisely measuring things; he doesn’t have a measuring cup, and there’s no way I’m making imprecise buttercream by hand.)  I needed an emergency easy recipe.  Fortunately for all of you, Scharffen Berger (the Co-op had fancy chocolate, what can I say) puts the recipe online.  You need:

• One brick of chocolate, 9.7 oz, give or take a smidge
• 7 oz of butter. (Half a brick, equivalent to 7 tablespoons.)
• Five eggs
• A cup of white sugar

I whacked the chocolate into little pieces with a knife that was probably bigger than was wholly safe (I’d recommend a hammer instead; this was one thick brick of chocolate.) Then I melted the butter and the chocolate together - they recommended a double boiler, but I was feeling lazy and this chocolate has enough cocoa butter that it was okay in the microwave.  The eggs and sugar went into another bowl until the liquid chocolate was done, at which point they all got mixed together.

The recipe is one of those chocolate cake recipes that tells you to bake it in another pan full of water.  We tried this and found - panic panic! - that our newly acquired springform pan leaked, so I dried the batter out as best I could while Stanza tried to see if the pan could be made non-leaky.  Finally we gave up and cooked the thing without the second pan of water, but with a piece of tinfoil underneath just in case.  Three-fifty for an hour and a half.

The finished product was not the best looking cake ever, since it was kinda flat, so I thought I’d make it prettier by covering the whole thing in homemade whipped cream.  I halved the amount of sugar I normally put in whipped cream and added a little vanilla, because the cake was really sweet.  There was some old nutella in the cabinet, so I mixed a little milk into it and spread that on top.  (The cooking style around here is perilous and catching, let me warn you.)  Then I covered it in whipped cream and chopped some hazlenuts up for the top.  Done, and it even looked fairly impressive.  Everyone certainly said it was tasty enough - but how can you go far wrong with that much  chocolate involved?

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.