Dinner 2025

[Smithy]

My best friend has been visiting, and tonight was our last night to try new recipes together. We chose another New York Times recipe: Eggplant Chickpea Salad with Olive Dressing. (The recipe should be unlocked in this link.) Basically, you cut chunks of eggplant into 1" cubes, add a couple cans of chickpeas that have been drained and patted dry. Put them on a sheetpan, toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and crushed fennel seeds, and roast at 450F until the eggplant is soft and the chickpeas are starting to crisp. In the meantime, make a vinaigrette of lemon juice and olive oil, and mix that with chopped olives and finely chopped shallot or the equivalent amount of red onion. Serve the lot over chopped or torn lettuce. Top that with crumbled feta cheese and, if you wish, yogurt. (The recipe says "drizzle" with the yogurt, but it calls for full-fat yogurt. I only have Greek yogurt, which isn't amenable to drizzling. So it goes.) Garnish with herbs if you have them.

 

 

We both liked it, to different degrees, and with different adjustments. She thought the fennel seed was overpowering, and she would prefer rice or beans to the lettuce. I loved the lettuce and didn't find the seasoning too strong, except in a couple of bites. Maybe we didn't mix things well enough. She would have added more roasted vegetables (red bell peppers, for instance). We think that a tahini sauce would do better than the yogurt, and we both thought it needed crunch of some sort: toasted walnuts or pine nuts. 

 

A trick I learned from her tonight was to ease the punch of fresh onion by soaking it in vinegar for at least 10 minutes, then draining it, before adding to a recipe as fresh onion. Without that vinegar soak she gets a violent headache although she loves the flavor. With the vinegar soak she gets the flavor without the headache. I'll keep that in mind. I do think it tamed the onion's punch without robbing it of flavor.

[Neely]

Another Sunday roast, this time lamb. It was nicely pink but I don’t mind it roasted a little longer as well. The ubiquitous roast potatoes, roast pumpkin, beans, mint jelly and gravy.

 

[liamsaunt]

Some lemon garlic chicken with garlicky dill yogurt sauce, a salad, and some flatbread

 

[gfweb]

Pork schnitzel

 

[C. sapidus]

Gonna call this palak jheenga (spinach with shrimp instead of paneer): Spinach and cilantro sauteed with serrano chiles, ginger, and salt. Separately saute fenugreek seeds, diced onion, garlic, and cumin seed, cook down with crushed tomato, and then combine with the spinach, moistened with a little chicken broth. Shrimp were seared and added in last.

 

Basmati rice pilaf with onions and broccolini: Fry cardamom pods, cloves, and canela, then add sliced onion and fry slowly with a little sugar. Broccolini was sauteed separately with black mustard seed and cumin seed, then everything was mixed together. I was supposed to divide the onion, half with the rice and half as garnish, but I goofed up. Oh well, no complaints.

 

 

[Honkman]

Dan Dan Mian - chili paste made by slowly roasting ground sichuan peppercorns, sichuan chili powder and cinnamon in oil and then mixing with soy sauce, tahini, hoisin sauce and zhengjiang vinegar. Baby bok choy quickly blanched and ground pork stir fried either ginger, garlic and ya cai. Served with Chinese wheat noodles and topped with scallions 

[Dante]

Kelly asked for meat and potatoes, so I made meatloaf with black beans and halved hard boiled eggs in, with tomato glaze, and kumpir twice baked potatoes on the side.

Edited 2 hours ago by Dante (log)