Indonesian Food Festival : Part 3

Cornucopia time, bitches!

Risotto with Vegetables and Rosemary

The first early summer vegetables are here. Risotto was called for.

This one contains squash, carrots, peas, corn, and rosemary.

If you chop the rosemary as well as add whole pines, you will get both the fragrance as well as this bitter edge that adds a low bass note as counterpoint to the alto sweetness of the carrots and peas.

Indonesian Food Festival : Part 2

The classic - gado gado.

Please note the use of the rice crackers for textural variation. (This is a very big thing in Indonesian cooking.)

Palak Paneer (Redux)

The CC was asked for the recipe here.

Follow these steps, and you will nail this delicious dish every single time.

The CC will assume that you can buy paneer at a local store. If not, you can make your own but that's a lot more work (and grist for a future post.)

Be aware, that this version sticks fast and close to the peasant roots of the dish. You will find innumerous fancified versions of this, mostly on the spicing front, but there's a time and place for fancification and there's a time and place for eating a "down home" cooked meal.

This is the home-cooked version that screams "comfort food".


Ingredients

paneer
4 large bunches of spinach (read below)
1" ginger
4 garlic cloves
4 green chillies
1 large red onion
1 tsp cumin
1 tbsp garam masala
salt

peanut oil (read below.)

Recipe

Cube the paneer into uniform cubes. Heat about 1/4 cup of peanut oil and fry the cubes. This takes a while because you need to keep flipping the cubes to make them uniform. Also, a tad problematic because the paneer contains moisture so there's a tendency for the oil to splatter. Be VERY careful!

(And yes, this step is crucial.)

Drain the paneer on paper towels. Set aside.

Wash the spinach carefully, and dry. (The local spinach that the CC buys is covered in dirt. His basin is filled with a full layer of dirt when he finishes washing the spinach. Your's may differ but you have been warned.)

Be aware that spinach shrinks a lot when cooked. A lot.

You are better off buying more than you think you need than ending up with a huge amount of paneer with some green things hanging on. The CC has made this mistake so many times that he routinely tells people -- buy more spinach -- more, more, more.

In a food processor, process the onion, green chillies, ginger and garlic to a loose paste. This should not be totally smooth just till they are all shredded into fine pieces. (This is a standard step in many many North Indian recipes so you should memorize this.)

Fry the paste in some oil. Toss in the cumin till it is fragrant. Add the spinach. Toss it around. Marvel at the forces of nature that an entire pot of spinach turns into so very little. Where did it all go?

(Also marvel at the fact that raw spinach is poisonous but cooked spinach is absolutely delightful. Take that, you "raw food" fetish fuckers! Bet you didn't know that one.)

If you have an "immersion blender" (the CC highly recommends it!), blend the mixture to a smooth paste. Otherwise use an ordinary blender.

Add the garam masala, salt, and the paneer cubes. (The quantities for the masala are approximate. You may need more.)

Heat and serve.

Indonesian Food Festival : Part 1

The CC goes to this monthly Indonesian food fair in Queens. The money goes to charity.

As the CC has repeatedly mentioned, if you are willing to hop on the subway, you can live like a God in modern-day New York. Something that Roman emperors would've envied. (Not that many of them would've hopped onto the subway.)

First up, a salad with an "edge".

India : Day 8 : Post 2

We're doing a repeat eatery. Original eats post was here.

Why mess around when it's this good, eh?

Dinner at Mexican "Bistro"

The CC and a friend from out of town had dinner at a local spot. The friend was vegetarian so the CC ordered a compatible meal so the friend could try everything.

The friend was in raptures. The CC says "DUH!!!"

Butternut Squash Soup (with corn)
Huitlacoche Enchiladas
Gnocchi with Squash in a Saffron-Epazote Broth

India : Day 8 : Post 1

Black chickpeas, potatoes, onions, green chillies, black salt, lime.

This shit is addictive, yo!

India : Day 7 : Post 2

Perfectly "ordinary" lunch (by Indian standards.)

Those of you are salivating (and the CC sees you there, in the corner), time for some reevaluation.

Oh, and lunch for four cost less than a typical New York lunch sandwich. And this is a "tourist town" hence "absurdly overpriced".

Capisce, paisano?

Palak Paneer

Aristocratic Banquet

From Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's only novel Il Gattopardo:

Beneath the candelabra, beneath the five tiers bearing towards the distant ceiling pyramids of home-made cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coraline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-lined fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the oven's heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, dawn-tinted galantine, and a dozen other cruel, coloured delights. At the end of the table two monumental silver tureens held limpid soup, the tint of burnt amber. To prepare this supper the cooks must have sweated away in the vast kitchens from the night before.

'Dear me, what an amount! Donna Margherita knows how to do things well. But it's not for me!'

Scorning the table of drinks, glittering with crystal and silver on the right, he moved left towards that of the sweetmeats. Huge sorrel babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate-covered pastry, brown and rich as the top soil of the Catanian plain from which, in fact, through many a twist and turn they had come, pink ices, champagne ices, coffee ices, all parfaits and falling apart with the squelch of a knife cleft; a melody in major of crystallised cherries, acid notes of yellow pineapple, and green pistachio paste of those cakes called 'Triumphs of Gluttony', shameless 'Virgins' cakes' shaped like breasts. Don Fabrizio asked for some of these, and as he held them on his plate looked like a profane caricature of Saint Agatha claiming her own sliced-off breasts. 'Why didn't ever the Holy Office forbid these puddings when it had the chance? 'Triumphs of Gluttony' indeed! (Gluttony, mortal sin!) Saint Agatha's sliced-off teats sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well! Well!'

Hot Sex in a Bottle!

Suka Pinakurat
You need it, baby! You just don't know it yet!

Thai Tricks of the Trade

Salacious title but it refers to food, you perverts!

The CC was taken to a "home-style" Thai restaurant. This was extraordinarily good cooking. What an extraordinarily competent mom (not grandmom, mind you!) would make.

If this sounds like "damning by faint praise", rest assured, it's anything but. The CC has impossibly high standards, and this is quite excellent food.


What surprised the CC was how quickly they could tailor the recipe. The owner ("Charlie") would quickly gauge the heat quotient of the tables and either amp it up or down.

What was extraordinary was that they could tailor the heat using dry chillies or Thai green chillies, on demand (the two taste nothing like each other!)

This is almost impossible. There's gotta be a trick.

It took the CC a day to figure it out.

The clue was given by the friend who took the CC there. He remarked, while eating, that the heat seemed to be on the "surface" of the noodles -- an extraordinarily perceptive remark -- the significance of which the CC didn't quite latch on to for that night and the morning after.

DOH!!!!!!

It's an old Thai cooking trick. One of the oldest in the book.

In fact, the CC has used it here (in the first dish.)

Dry rice is roasted on a skillet and ground to a fine powder. You can mix it with anything. This powder is the glue of cooking. It will stick to anything that it comes in contact with. In fact, it's hard to get this powder to unstick!

This is precisely the trick they use to get water-based salad dressings to work!

Rice powder mixed with powdered chillies!

Pan-Seared Cod with Quinoa, Roasted Vegetables, and Wild Arugula