My Food Geek

The eater always tells me I make the best sandwiches. My formula for a good sandwich starts with good bread. Leave the Wonder bread for toast and find something good - something with a good crust, something with an unusal flavor, or something with a nice airy texture. I then try to match the ingredients in the sandwich with the bread. You can never say too much about good, fresh vegetables or top-quality deli-meats, don’t skimp here! Finally, to hold everything together, you need a good spread. Dry sandwiches just aren’t any good so find something to bind it all together and marry the flavors. To top everything off, garnish the sandwich with something fun, like olives, and pile on the potato chips…mmmmm, potato chips.

Here’s one I almost deleted and didn’t show everyone.

• Whole Foods focaccia bread
• Fresh mozzarella
• Homegrown sprouts
• Red leaf lettuce
• Ripe, hydroponic tomato (hey, it’s still winter in New England)
• Olive tapenade /mayo mix

It was a damn good sandwich, I can’t lie.

Here’s a quick photo recipe of banana curry. I used green plantains here which worked out real well. Since I’m not doing so well writing these days, I’ll leave you with a photo recipe. Any questions?

In an attempt to get some more cooking inspiration, I signed up for Taste and Create VII. The idea of Taste and Create is you are randomly paired up with another food blog, find a recipe listed on their site, make the recipe, and blog about it. I thought it would be a great way to try something new and get a little more involved in the community. For my first T&C I was paired up with Food and Laughter.

Food and Laughter is a blog mostly about Indian food. I find this fascinating because Indian food is something that I don’t usually cook but often eat out at restaurants. My lack of experience with this cooking style made this event even more exciting. The Eater and I checked out the site and decided to make a dish called Toovar Dal.

My first reading of this recipe I was a little bit overwhelmed with all the ingredients that weren’t familiar to me. I was worried that I was going to have to special order these ingredients and wouldn’t be able to finish the dish in time. After a little bit of research I found out that many of these ingredients just have different names in different parts of the world. Here’s some examples and what I did with the ones I couldn’t find:

toovar dal - Pigeon Peas
chana dal - Chick Peas
jaggery - a type of Palm sugar. I substituted regular light brown sugar here.
jeera - cumin

I didn’t have any real sources for these two:

kokum - this is similar to tamarind so I substituted chopped raisins
asafoetida ( heeng) - I had no ideas for this one, so I omitted it.

Cooking this dish was pretty exciting. The sights and sounds of the popping mustard seeds was something I was not expecting; they really pop and go everywhere. The dish came together quickly and quite nicely, there were no surprises after the mustard seeds. I opted for both dals but skipped the yams because I felt like it. I also decreased the spice level a bit because I was afraid it may be too spicy for the eater.

While I’ve never had this dish before, I don’t feel like my substitutions adversely affected the dish. In my mind, a large part of cooking is being able to adapt recipes to ingredients that you have on hand without sacrificing results. I’m sure I broke some sort of rules, but both the eater and I thought the dish was a keeper, as-is.

The pigeon peas really are the star in this dish lending a nice, subtle sweetness. The peanuts added a bit of a surprise crunch that I was not expecting even after cooking this dish myself. This really is a good dish, sweet, tangy, spicy, and a little sour, pretty much everything I wanted in a dish. I served up the dal with some long grain rice. I opted for a little extra spice on mine in the form of red pepper which worked out nicely.

On Tuesday, I usually scan the refrigerator and try and use up whatever is leftover from last week’s CSA delivery. I’ve been slacking off a bit on my duties lately and have a whole bunch of carrots, cabbage, and lettuce. I figured I could use up at least two of these in a tasty stir-fry and I’d only need to supplement a few things here and there to round out the dish. Tonight I decided on Kung Pao Tofu. I love to eat this stuff when I go out for Chinese food and I’ve finally started to get it close to authentic Chinese take-out Kung Pao. I think the missing ingredient that manages to bring the dish to the next level is Szechuan peppercorns.

For many years these little peppercorns were ILLEGAL! I mean really, what kind of crazy person would declare these tongue numbing jewels illegal? Only the most connected Chinese person was able to work back-room deals to get these little numbers in their hands. Alas they were taken off of the FDA’s banned food lists just a few years back and now we can all enjoy them once again.

There’s not too much to stir-fry. Gather some fresh, crisp vegetables, your protein of choice, some aromatics, and a sauce. For the most part, it takes more time gathering the ingredients than actually cooking them. My stir fry sauce is almost always soy sauce, vinegar, mirin, and water; I then thicken up the works with a cornstarch slurry until it coats everything nicely. There’s nothing easier than stir-fry!

It’s been a slow week at the foodgeek household. We’ve been getting the same old veggies from the CSA and I’ve been slacking off in the interesting food department. For a change, I decided to make something fancy for Monday’s dinner: Beet Tartare. I’m definitely not much of a beef person, never mind raw beef, so this dish isn’t all that scary. I served the tartare on fried radicchio risotto and topped the whole thing off with some wilted garlicky arugula.

I have to be honest here, when I decided on this dish, I had no idea how it would turn out. Sure I know the risotto would be good, the roasted beets would be sweet, and the arugula peppery, but I had no idea how they would get along on the plate. I gathered up all the parts of the recipe, roasted the beets, fried the risotto, wilted the greens, and then just plated it all up, restaurant style. I handed the plate to the eater and used my plate to take photos. I quickly took the photos and walked over to ask how the dish was, and the eater’s plate was empty. While the portion was rather small, I was surprised to see how fast it disappeared. With my first bite, I declared this dish was actually a success, who would have guessed?

I don’t really have a recipe for this sort of dish; I just made it up on the fly. If you guys would like a formal recipe, let me know in the comments and I’ll try and hammer one out.