redfox

Martinis with cheese (Leerdammer) and crackers (Akmak), followed by: Spicy pan-fried spinach and cauliflower croquettes Egg rice Shredded carrots with cumin and lime Raita with homemade yogurt Mint chutney (storebought) -- I want to know more about butter-frying tofu. It sounds delectable.

This is off to a great start! I can't wait to see what you have next. But dammit, now I really want enchiladas for dinner, and it is not what we were planning or even what we have any ingredients for in the house. I've spent only a very little time in New Mexico and hadn't encountered the bowl of red/bowl of green before. It sounds great.

Steel-cut oats, toasted a bit before cooking, topped with brown sugar, frozen blackberries and blueberries that had been heated through with some cinnamon, and cold milk. Moka-pot coffee to accompany, as usual.

I'm enjoying this very much as well! Thank you for reporting on your adventures. We tend to spend a lot more on food in the winter (all those imported vegetables, and no farmer's market), which makes me feel pinched. Soup is very handy, and fortunately there are a zillion types. Lentils are wonderful, and quite versatile, especially with all the different varieties. All sorts of beans are really a favorite for cheap, versatile, and tasty. I've become very fond of cabbage, too, which gets a bad rap as smelly or redolent of poverty, when really it is generous -- so much food in a single head! -- and keeps beautifully, which means it is easy to get a nice one in even sub-par markets. I like to shred and braise some with butter, salt, pepper, and a splash of water, and then use that to make a frittata with; or lately I've been into Kadai Gobi, which is a sort of Indian cabbage stir-fry. Bubble and squeak is good too, sez I. I've been buying some vegetables very cheap and perfectly nice though definitely not organic from the little bodega around the corner -- you can get something like a pound and a half of serrano peppers for 99 cents, and limes at 25 cents apiece! Onions and garlic and things like that are also very cheap there and have rapid turnover, so they are firm and pleasant. Then we get the rest rather exorbitantly at the whole foods market.

OKRA!

I'll try to ask my mother what she'd recommend and report back. Do you know what part of town you'll be spending the night in? By the way, Pittsburg (no h) is in California! I never got used to seeing that on signs and BART trains when I lived in the Bay Area. It just looked so. very. wrong. Still does!

You surely mean fries (and cole slaw) inside a hot pastrami sandwich! I have the impression from my family back in Pittsburgh and the visits I've made in recent years that the dining scene has gotten a lot better. There is not an enormous supply of truly "fine dining" offerings, but there are some that are quite good, I hear, and there are a lot of little independent casual places that are good. There's good Vietnamese food in Bloomfield, Jean-Marc Chatellier’s French bakery in Millvale, some really good shopping and eating in the Strip District (though not on Sundays)... I don't know the area well enough any more to make a lot of recommendations, but it's come a long way since chip-chopped ham, which was a specialty of Isley's way back in the day. Though I grew up in Pgh, I have never encountered chip-chopped ham in BBQ sauce -- I actually had no idea that was a way it was served. I thought it was more of a cold cut.

Chickpeas with slow-cooked onions, spices, and spinach, topped with homemade yogurt. Cooked the onions to brown browner brownest, with occasional splashes of water near the end of the procedure, added spices (cumin, coriander, cloves, fresh ginger, cayenne) and cooked a little more, added the (cooked) chickpeas and water and stewed for a bit, then stirred in the chopped parboiled spinach and heated through. Very good.

Stonyfield Farms yogurt that I drained for about 7 hours yesterday, with orange blossom honey.

I was raised very very firmly in the milk-first tradition. Strong Indian black or (weirdly?) Earl Grey, sugar optional but looked down upon. Usually mugs, with occasional forays into china cups by the more aspirational types. Lemon, never. That seems to nicely reflect my family's working-class origins and migration into the academic and arts bit of the middle-classes.

Ooh! This is very exciting. I finally made a batch of yogurt of my very own, and am thrilled to find that it has set up beautifully. I wanted to have both some drained, greek-style yogurt and unstrained, regular yogurt, so rather than buying enough to do both, I bought just a single container of Stonyfield Farms cream-on-top, despite its pectin, a half-gallon of organic whole milk, and a box of dried milk. I read this thread and then heated about 3 1/2 cups of milk and 1/4 cup of milk powder to steaming hot (not boiling), whisking vigorously every now and then. I let it cool to about the temperature I like a nice hot bath to be (lots of science here). Then I put 1/4 cup or so of the storebought yogurt in a little bowl, beat it soundly, and sloshed in a little of the milk. Whisked that, dumped it back into the pan, whisked some more, and then poured the lot into a nice clean quart-sized yogurt container. I put the lid on loosely and put it in my gas oven with just the pilot on for about 5 hours. The rest of the storebought went into a colander to drain. And lo and behold, my milk is now yogurt! It tastes good, too. Creamy and yogurty and wobbly and delicate. Next time I may leave it out longer for more tang, but right now the sweeter version seems more exotic and desirable. So now my question is: I've seen people suggesting keeping out a little bit to be the starter for the next batch right at the beginning, and freezing it, presumably so you aren't starting with oldish, sourish starter. Anyone who's done that, do you have any tips about container or thawing?

Tonight I went on the cooking-ahead spree I meant to go on yesterday, which means that tonight's actual dinner is a little ad hoc. I think we'll have roasted cauliflower (seasoned with *cough* Spike, mmm!) topped with poached eggs and accompanied by my favorite of many excellent recipes from Suvir Suvan's Indian Home Cooking, the grated carrots with curry leaves, cumin, various other spices and lime juice. It's rapidly becoming a prominent staple at our house -- it keeps well and is so very good cold, easy to make in quantity, and cheap! So nice for suppers that want a little something extra or for brown-bag lunches.

What about rasam?

If I cleaned my kitchen with bleach, all my clothes would have hideous bleach spots. Is it really so standard? We don't eat meat, so maybe that's part of it.

Parathas are a flaky Indian bread that are indeed quite similar to scallion pancakes. Often they're stuffed with potatoes or onions or other things (you may have encountered them in this form in Indian restaurants). These are unstuffed, and also not quite really parathas because they're made with olive oil rather than ghee. As it happens, I just made another batch of them and took photos for my own website, so I'll give you the really full version, if you're interested.

Everyone is putting me to shame here! This morning we realized we really had to hustle to get out and do our shopping before the snow hit, so we didn't take the time to make a proper weekend breakfast. So we just had those same parathoids again, but now at least we will not suffer the hideous fate of being snowed in without coffee! (Being short on groceries is one thing, but running out of coffee... too hideous to contemplate.) Tomorrow we'll do better.

Those market photos are lovely!

I'd made some bastardized parathas using olive oil (!) as the main fat (though there was also a dab of butter on each one after it came off the griddle). Authentic to no cuisine on this earth, but awful good. We had these this morning, reheated in the toaster oven, with some lime pickle and a cup of our usual moka pot coffee with steamed milk.

We had a nice spicy dal over scrambled eggs (weird, I know, but we like it) and a salad of shredded carrots with cumin and lime and other nice things.

This morning we had scrambled eggs with a pinch of cumin, accompanied by leftover bhindi masala I made for dinner the other night. The okra was even better reheated than it had been the first time around, and super good with the eggs. To drink: moka pot coffee (Peet's Italian roast beans) with steamed milk.

It is not quite the same (and not as flavor-neutral, obviously, but often harmonious), but fennel root also adds a very nice smoothness and body to soups in a puree.

Jeez. I eat things out of season, but I am totally down with Russ' sentiment here. And I'm 29. So there.

(It's "tarka," I believe.)

Grated carrots with cumin and lime, at room temperature Mushrooms with coriander and tomato, hot Raita, cold Maker's Mark on the rocks

Let me add another voice to the chorus. These are really lovely and make me want to pick up and run off right now! My own Indian cooking at home tonight has been both enhanced by and dwarfed by seeing these.