Chotee Gobi (Brussels Sprouts from Eastern India)

This is one of my favorite ways to fancy up Brussels sprouts.

Chotee Gobi

1 large onion

4 cloves garlic

Olive or vegetable oil

Slice onion and garlic. Fry in 2 tablespoons oil until soft.

Stir in the following spices and fry for two more minutes.

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2 teaspoons poppy seeds

2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 teaspoon sesame seeds

Add:

2 teaspoons ground coriander

1/2 to 1 cup yogurt

Juice of 1 large lemon

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon honey

Stir to combine and simmer for a few minutes.

1 pound Brussels sprouts, trimmed and cut in half

Meanwhile, gently boil the sprouts in water to cover until barely tender. Drain and add to the sauce. Cook and stir for about five minutes until flavors blend.

Indian Lamb and Garbanzos

I've really missed cooking these last few months. I've had a lot of evening work -- mayoral debates, late nights in the office -- and haven't had time for the kind of messy, unfocused cooking I like to do. We've had a lot more pasta dishes and tuna melts for dinner. I've made good stuff, and so has Lawson, but it's been different. It'll get better after the April city election.

Anyway, last night was a completely sprawling, right-brain, organic (in the procedural sense) night of cooking, and it was wonderful.

We were going to have grilled wings, naan and salad, but it started raining. Bad weather for an outdoor fire.

I'd already made the naan dough, so I decided to build a meal around that instead. I started cutting up some lamb we needed to use, leafing through Indian cookbooks, seeing what we had and what would taste good.

Here's what we ended up with, clockwise from left:

- Swiss chard sauteed with garlic and chiltepins, finished with a big squeeze of Meyer lemon juice
- lamb with garbanzos
- Boddingtons Pub Ale
- naan
- yellow lentils with spices (cinnamon, ginger, garlic and coriander, mostly)
- pickled okra

Lawson made the spice blend for the lentils. I made the rest.

The lamb-garbanzo dish grew out of a lamb recipe in an old cookbook called "Classics of Indian Cooking." It was called Cumin Lamb but I left out the cumin, added garbanzos, left out the bell peppers, and more, so it really is a completely different dish. You could use a teaspoon or two of cumin seeds in the spice paste; I didn't use them because there was a lot of cumin in the yellow lentils.

Lamb and Garbanzos
Blend in blender until smooth:

• 1" piece of ginger
• 3 garlic cloves
• cardamom seeds from 10 pods
• 2 whole cloves
• 20 almonds
• 1 t chile powder or cayenne
• 1 t brown sugar
• 1 t salt
• 1/4 cup yogurt
• stock as needed to moisten (I used lamb cut from the shoulder, so I simmered the scraps and bones for an hour or so beforehand and used that. Chicken stock would work, too. Leftover lamb stock goes to the dog.)

Heat in casserole or Dutch oven with lid:

• 3 T butter

Saute until golden brown:

• 1 onion, diced

Add and brown:

• 1/2 lb or more lean lamb, cubed

Add the spice mixture and fry it for a while, making sure it doesn't burn on the bottom. Add:

• pinch of saffron (10 threads?)
• 1 can garbanzo beans
• Stock to moisten but not make soupy

Cover and cook on low until lamb is very tender, 75 minutes or more, adding stock or yogurt as needed.

The beans keep this from being too rich, but it stills needs to be paired with some bright flavors and green foods to balance it out.

Spicy Indian Kohlrabi

I bought some kohlrabi recently for the first time. I wrote to ask you about it because I remembered you and Dad used to grow it in Alaska. And while I want to try it the simple way you told me about -- boiled, with butter, salt, and pepper -- we were in the mood for something spicy. Also, it's easier to approach a new vegetable when garlic and chiles are involved.

So I was pleased to find that kohlrabi is used in Indian cooking a lot. This is a combination of several recipes I found.

***

• 3 kohlrabi (kohlrabis? sputniks?) with greens
• 2 T olive oil
• 2 bay leaves
• A few garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 2 small hot chiles, fresh or dried -- I used a fresh immature tabasco and a few chiltepins
• 2 t ground coriander
• 1 t cracked black pepper
• salt to taste
• 1 cup water
• 1-2 T fresh lemon juice

Peel the kohlrabi and cut it into fat matchsticks, about 3/4" per side. Roughly chop the greens.

Heat the oil and saute the bay leaves, garlic, turmeric, chiles, and coriander, being careful not to burn them. Add the greens and saute for a few minutes. Then add the chopped kohlrabi and salt and pepper. Saute a few minutes more.

Add water, cover, and simmer until tender. Some recipes called for as many as 40 minutes, but I think we had some very young kohlrabi, and it was extremely tender in about 15 minutes.

Let the water cook away and add the lemon juice. Serve.

***

Lawson was quite charmed, and I think he is going to grow some kohlrabi now.

In the back there is a half-invented chicken-rice dish. Lawson said it was like an Indian chicken bog. It was okay, but not perfectly balanced. It contained onions, garlic, cardamom, saffron, a cinnamon stick, ginger, almonds, yogurt, jasmine rice, chicken thighs, and some other stuff I can't recall. Nice idea, one I'll try again, but with some modifications.

Naan

We made some Indian food while Mark was here, including a batch of naan. Very easy, with full flavor even though it only took a few hours. The yogurt gave it a nice complexity.

I used my KitchenAid dough hook for this one. The dough is easy to work with, probably because of the fat in the yogurt and the oil.

Adapted from Joy and a few Indian recipes, naturally:

Naan

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 teaspoons yeast
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3/4 cup yogurt (A variety with some fat in it would be best. We are addicted to Seven Stars plain yogurt around here.)
• 1 tablespoon water

Preheat oven to as hot as it will go (550 in my case).

Mix, knead for 10 minutes, and let rise 1.5 hours, or more if refrigerated.

Separate into four pieces, roll into balls, and let rest 10 minutes. Preheat a thick pan if you don't have tiles or a baking stone already in the oven.

Roll out dough into strips or ovals about 10" long, 1/4" thick.

Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with poppy seeds or sesame seeds.

Slide into oven. I used a floured pizza peel.

Bake 6 to 7 minutes, until golden.

Indian Fish Curry with Tamarind and Cucumbers

I couldn't get a pretty picture of this dish, so here instead is a cucumber plant from Lawson's 2006 garden. No good pictures from 2007 -- it was a bad garden year for the ol' cucurbits.

This curry was a wonderful surprise. I'd bought a fresh coconut on sale at the grocery store the week before, and we needed to use it quickly. I'd also bought some flounder, plus the usual assortment of buy-first-figure-meals-out-later vegetables. So Lawson found this recipe for which we happened to have all the ingredients, plus a few more. It's from Jennifer Brennan's One Dish Meals of Asia, which is one of Lawson's cookbooks I've never really looked at.

It's easier than many other curries because you can use the food processor. And it's refreshing -- not so aggressively rich and creamy as a green curry made with coconut milk.

First, mix together and set aside:
- 1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate or 2 tablespoons wet tamarind (the recipe says you can use 1 tablespoon molasses and 1/2 cup lemon juice if you have no tamarind)
- 1 1/2 cups hot water

Run through the food processor to make a paste:
- 1 onion
- 4 or fewer small fresh hot green chiles, seeds and ribs removed
- 1/2 cup fresh coconut, broken or cut into chunks, or 1/3 dried unsweetened shredded coconut moistened with some water
- 1 small bunch cilantro
- a 1" chunk of ginger

Heat in a wok or big saucepan over medium-high heat:
- 4 tablespoons peanut oil

When just smoking, add and fry until they pop open:
- 1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds

Add and cook:
- 1 red bell pepper, sliced

Then add the curry paste and a bay leaf. Reduce heat to medium and stir-fry for 3 minutes.

Add and blend:
- 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of firm white fish, cut into 2" strips (the flounder broke down quite a bit, which was fine, but cod or something would stay together better)
- the tamarind water
- 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cucumber, peeled and cut into 1" chunks

Bring to a simmer, cover, and let cook for 3 to 5 minutes, until fish and cucumber are just cooked. Serve over rice.

Satay Triple Threat and Indian Okra II

I like when one meal feeds another -- when something left over can be used again in a new way. There are lots of brilliant examples of doubled meals: spaghetti sandwiches, your post-Thanksgiving turkey chowder, rice pudding.

It wasn't quite so magical as those examples, but the peanut dipping sauce I made Saturday to go with Lawson's shrimp-vegetable kebabs and stir-fried noodles became the dressing for Sunday's salad: another iteration of the Thai watermelon salad. This time the salad had hard-boiled egg, raw red pepper, watermelon, arugula, and Thai basil. I served it with Indian curried okra.

We still have some peanut sauce left. I don't know what's next for it -- a topping for chocolate ice cream? In a burrito with lettuce, black beans, tomatoes, chiles, and pumpkin seeds?

Anyway, yesterday I was happier with the okra. Here's my modified version of Madhur Jaffrey's Sweet and Sour Okra.

Indian Curried Okra

Mash in a mortar and pestle to form a paste:
-5 cloves garlic
-1-2 small dried red chiles
-1 teaspoon coriander seeds
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon water, if needed

(Jaffrey had me pureeing garlic and chiles and 4 T water in a blender, but getting such a small amount of liquid out of my blender was awful. Plus, then the blender smelled like garlic and red chiles. With cleaning and scraping factored in, the mortar and pestle took less time.)

Stir in:
-1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Heat over medium in large skillet with lid:
-3 tablespoons oil

When hot, add:
-2 teaspoons cumin seeds

When they seeds begin to sputter and fry, turn down heat, add the paste, and stir, letting it fry but not burn for about a minute.

Add:
-1 pound okra, rinsed, tops chopped off and pods sliced into 3/4" pieces
-1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
-1 teaspoon sugar
-a few tablespoons of water

Cover and simmer for 10 minutes or until okra is tender. Add more salt and lemon juice if necessary.

Okra Indian-Style

We ate a lot of meat over the weekend: Genoa salami on pizza Friday, burgers and salmon Saturday, bacon for breakfast Sunday. By Sunday night I was ready for a meatless dinner, and I wanted good Indian food after an overly rich and generally disappointing Indian restaurant experience the week before. So I made:

• Lentils with spinach and onions -- no particular recipe, just lentils boiled and then sauteed in with onions, garlic, spinach, and a bay leaf
• Cubes of sweet potato roasted with salt and olive oil -- one of the world's best foods
• Madhur Jaffrey's sweet and sour okra -- turmeric, cumin, coriander, garlic, dried red chiles, lemon juice, and okra

The Jaffrey recipe was a bit cumin-heavy but otherwise glorious. I predict that some variation of it will become one of my favorite okra recipes. I'll tweak it a bit and post it soon.

Project Spice Purge

Last weekend I decided it was time to do something about this:


When I moved in several years ago, Lawson and I combined our rather large and old spice collections without any weeding whatsoever, and it's gotten pretty ugly. So I took everything out of the racks and cabinets and hauled it out on the back porch. There I arranged everything on the railings, with each type of spice arranged along the x axis and duplicates on the y. We had about 14 horizontal feet of spices, with the highest redundant tower at about 16 inches. Alphabetical arrangement wouldn't have worked at this point, so I used a rough taxonomy: seeds/pods, leaves, blends, things we have a kajillion of, bad ideas, unidentifiable, etc.

Here's part of the kajillion sector:

That's four containers of baking powder (not an herb or spice, but whatever), four containers of paprika, two of nutmeg, three of cream of tartar, and three of ground ginger.

And here is the grossest thing I found:

After I had it all arranged, I began sniffing, tasting, and throwing things away. In most cases I tried to get us down to one of each thing, unless that thing was garlic powder or lemon pepper, in which case we needed to get down to none, and not just because the ones we had were nine years old and rancid (and contributed by me, I'm sorry to say). For some items, like dried basil, everything we had smelled and tasted like dusty dirt, so I kept a list of what we needed to restock from the bulk herbs at the health food store.

The price of the average herb has increased tenfold since Lawson purchased this dill seed:

It took a few hours, but I managed to get it all cleaned out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look a whole lot better in the cabinet than it did before.

When I was done, I made lentils with garlic, mustard seed, and cilantro; and a vegetable curry with sweet potatoes, corn, and okra: