5 posts tagged “veganmofo”
Yesterday at work, a psychologist in the department stopped me to ask, 'Excuse me, but are you Indian?' Now I know that's a perfectly reasonable question, but it never ceases to amuse me. I can't get my egomaniacal head around the fact that there might be people who can't recognize my nationality, or just don't want to assume. Anyway, I said yes, and she offered me a bagful of yard-long beans that grow in her backyard.
You can make this quick stir fry with french beans, or any other beans that you have growing around. :)
Ingredients:
2 cups beans, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
1 tbsp oil
1 dried red chilli
1 tbsp grated coconut (fresh/frozen/dried)
1 tbsp mustard seeds/cumin seeds
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp lime juice
- Heat the oil in a saute pan. Add the cumin/mustard seeds, red chilli, turmeric, and coconut, in that order. Saute for a few seconds and add the beans. Season with salt and pepper.
- Turn the heat to medium-low, cover and cook for five-eight minutes, stirring the beans around once or twice. Add the lime juice in the end and serve. If the beans get too dry/start to stick during cooking, sprinkle a spoonful of water.
We had these with flatbreads, but they are great with rice/served on toast.
I really like this recipe from vegan food author Bryanna Clark Grogan. This is a simple bread made of half whole wheat flour, salt, water and yeast. The recipe is quite flexible and needs little planning. If you're like me and suddenly decide to bake a bread on a weekend morning, you don't have to worry about a starter; the sponge can be risen in an hour or two. 4-5 hours later, you have fresh crusty bread.
The only problem was that the flour absorbed too much water. Maybe it was because I used Indian atta, fine ground whole wheat durum flour. I could only use 4.5 cups instead of the 6, and ended up with two tiny loaves. We made sandwiches for dinner and I gave the other loaf to my neighbors- they made all the right noises, so I assume they liked it as well. :)
Its Sunday morning. I have had a cup of tea, set my bread dough for the final rise, made a chickpea curry, read NYT online and even done 50 questions from the PRITE papers. What else to do but take a food survey? I found it on Singing Horse's blog who found it on Liz's blog. This is technically vegan, but easily adaptible, so go ahead and have fun! Don't forget to link back to Liz's blog.
Roasted squash
Tea
Back home, my German Shepherd loved melons. If we bought melons, he could sniff them out from outside and would not rest until allowed to demolish one.
Summer squash.
Nothing.
Roasted tomato soup.
My mom! :)
p.s. All spacing snafus courtesy the fact that Vox and Firefox don't play well together.
Back home, pickling season was a time for frenzied activity. The season begins in April-May, when mangoes are still hard and raw on the trees. The sourest of the sour are picked and sold by the bushel in the local markets.
Several kilos of mangoes were bought at a time, washed and scrubbed dry. They were then chopped, salted heavily and dried on the rooftop/courtyard, laid out on old saris. When my mom took her afternoon nap, we would sneak out to steal as many sour-and-salty mangoes as we could. The very thought of it still makes me salivate drool. After drying for a few days, the mangoes were tossed with ripe mustard oil and tons of spices, then packed tight in huge ceramic jars and placed in the sun once again. More opportunities to steal. :)
After a few days out in the sun, the pickles would be ready for consumption. The same process was followed for other sour fruits like limes and gooseberries. To non-sour produce like chilli peppers, ground black mustard (rai) was added as a souring agent. Pickles preserved in oil and salt would survive at room temperature for months and even years, just like the reputation of a good pickler.
Come winter, it was time to pickle radishes, carrots, cauliflowers and turnips. This 'winter pickle' was a huge favorite in our household, partly because it could be consumed in huge quantities.
Of course, with nuclear double-income families, few urban women have
time for pickling anymore. But homemakers in India still continue to
preserve pickles, mailing them out to daughters and daughters-in-law.
For the past two years, I've been living on pickles sent from home. It
was time to try some of my own.
Since it has been raining off and on and sunshine cannot be relied upon, I decided to make a fresh pickle, to be stored in the fridge and consumed within a couple of weeks. I chopped up hot peppers, tossed them with lime juice, salt, Indian pickling mix (store-brought, a mix of some 25 spices) and hot mustard oil, and kept it in the sun for a few hours. Voila! The perfect accompaniment to any Indian meal.
This month's theme at my fave food blog is crusts. I made Focaccia from Rose Levy Berenbaum's Bread Bible. Just a piece of advice- do not attempt to make high hydration dough mixer recipes by hand. Our hands are not powered by electricity, as I realized a bit too late.
My arm is still aching, but the bread was delightfully crusty.
If you would like to make focaccia and you don't have a dough mixer, just use this recipe. If you do have a mixer, Rose's recipe is a sure shot winner.
