Paneer – Vegetable Whole Wheat Enchiladas

A word of caution: these are not super authentic Mexican enchiladas. Not that I don’t love me some good, authentic Mexican (or even Tex-Mex) dishes. Let’s just say this is merely my homage to the enchilada!

Here’s what you need:

• 1 chopped large onion
• 2 chopped green peppers
• 2 chopped red peppers
• 2 chopped squashes
• 5 chopped tomatoes
• 400 grams of paneer
• Shredded cheddar (or any other cheese you like. Queso blanco?)
• 8-10 whole wheat tortillas
• 1 ½ teaspoons garlic paste
• 4-5 bay leaves
• Fresh cilantro leaves
• 1 ½ teaspoon cumin powder
• 1 teaspoon coriander powder
• ¼ teaspoon red chili powder
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper
• Olive oil

Here’s how I do it:

1. Sauté the onion on high then medium heat.
2. As onions turn translucent, add the garlic paste and the bay leaves and cook in.
3. Add the tomatoes, cook to a mush.
4. Remove the bay leaves.
5. In a different pot, sauté the vegetables.
6. Add the vegetables to the onion-tomato mixture.
7. Add about 400g bite sized chopped paneer and the spices (Cumin powder, coriander powder,red chili powder, black pepper and salt).
8. Now we need to cook the paneer, vegetables and spices in together. Stir the spices and paneer in gently, cook on high heat, then medium till the paneer is cooked through and the spices are ‘infused’ through the paneer and vegetables. Add water if there isn’t enough.
9. (Tip: If the spice mix seems a tad dull, add ½ or so teaspoon sugar).
10. The cooking should have evaporated the excess liquid.
11. Cook 8-10 medium whole wheat tortillas on a skillet in olive oil, browning them lightly. Ensure they don’t harden.
12. Put some paneer-vegetable mix into each cooked tortilla and roll it up. Place the tortillas side by side into a lightly greased oven-safe pan.
13. Top with shredded cheddar (or any other cheese of choice) and cook in an oven heated to 300 F for 5-10 minutes or till the cheese is just melted. Serve immediately, garnish with fresh cilantro leaves.
    
14. An epilogue of sorts: it’s fun to replace the paneer with ground, cooked turkey too if you want to go the carnivorous way.

 

Panna Cotte

This is yet another all time favorite. It is also supremely easy to make, comforting and delicious.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of navy/white kidney beans
• 1 bunch of escarole
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 1/2 teaspoon garlic paste/crushed garlic
• 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese.
• Black pepper
• Salt
• Pieces of crusty bread

Here’s how we do it:

1. Soak the beans overnight (at least 6 hours). Drain and wash.
2. Chop and sauté the onion.
3. Add the sautéed onion, 3-4 cups of water, 1 teaspoon salt (or to taste) to the beans and cook this mixture. The easiest way is to pressure cook the beans/water/salt/onion mixture.
4. Separately, wash 1 bunch escarole, remove the core, tear up the leaves and sauté them (in a different pot) in olive oil along with 1 ½ teaspoon of garlic paste/crushed garlic. When sautéing, start at high heat then lower it so escarole wilts and the garlic does not burn.
5. Add the cooked beans to the cooked wilted escarole/garlic mix.
6. Add black pepper, freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste. Mix it all in gently. Cook 4-5 minutes at low-medium heat to evaporate some liquid.
7. Add some crusty bread pieces and mix them in.
8. Place the soup in oven safe bowls, top with freshly grated parmesan cheese and heat in the oven at 250F to melt the the cheese. 
9. All done!
   

 

Quinoa Kale Salad

I am writing a post after several months. I certainly have not, not been cooking (Ah, the wonders of double negatives). In other words, I’ve been cooking but not writing about it. In fact, I’ve managed to stick to my resolution of making new dishes and/or making previously made dishes in a new way as well! So, there’s lots of recipes and posts to catch up on, which I will, slowly!

To re-start, I am back with one of my favorite recipes ever. Hopefully that will make up for the long absence! You can think of this as a salad: it has tons of kale (green stuff!). You can think of this as a cold pilaf – since basically, that’s what it is. It has quinoa, greens, dried fruit and nut. What can go wrong?

Also, it is a perfect summer/fall dish. It works perfectly as lunch, all on its own or as a small plate at dinner.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of kale

2 cups of quinoa

Anything else now is completely your choice:

1 cup of dried cranberries

A handful of (roasted) cashewnuts

Ghee

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Freshly squeezed lemon juice

1/2 cup of freshly grated parmesan or romano cheese

How to put it together:

1. Prepare Quinoa: Soak the quinoa for half an hour. Then rinse and thoroughly wash it. Cook it as you would cook white basmati rice: typically takes the same amount of time. Add twice the amount of water, let it come to boil. Let it boil for a few minutes (4-5 minutes), lower the heat and cover the pot most of the way. I like it not covered all the way so the steam can escape. By 16 minutes or so, the lovely strings on the quinoa would have come loose – that’s how you know it’s done. Drain excess water (carefully!).
2. Prepare kale: Thoroughly but gently clean the kale. Now you have to shred it –  remove the stems. (This is a matter of preference, but I even remove the stems from the smaller leaves if I find them too woody). This takes me a while to do: best sit down and open the chilled bottle of white wine that you know you’ll want to drink with this! (Or chilled wheat Belgian beers: Grimbergen? Leffe Blonde?). Anyhow, remove the stems, shred it – perhaps the photo can show you how small you have to shred it?
3. Prepare other ingredients: roast the cashew nuts in ghee or the extra virgin olive oil. Grate that cheese. Squeeze the lemon. Grate the black pepper.
4. Put it all together: wait a little for the quinoa to cool down somewhat. Then, mix the kale gently into the quinoa. Add in cranberries, black pepper, lemon juice, salt, the cheese and mix it all up with a generous dab of EVOO: extra virgin olive oil.

All done! You have a bright salad/pilaf ready. Quinoa has a lot of protein, so it’s pretty filling too – and healthy! I love the fact that this dish has several taste components to it: slightly citrus, the gentle sweetness of the cranberries, the quinoa, the nuttiness of the cashews and the quinoa and light saltiness of the cheese that somehow completes the taste palette. It comes out nicely subtle and balanced!

Enjoy – and don’t forget that glass of pinot grigio, or even a dry riesling. And those folks that will try a Grimbergen or Leffe Blonde for the first time, you’re welcome!

And oh, one more thing: this was inspired by something I had at one of my favorite pizza places (ever) – Fat Cat Pie Co in Norwalk, CT.

 

Sweet Onion Sandwiches from the Fall

I am a fan of flat breads and pizzas that have sweetened, cooked onions on their base. It adds this mellow, lightly sweet taste to the dish which can then be complemented by a large variety of meats, vegetables and cheeses on the flat bread/pizza.

Two of my favorite places in CT are Arugula in West Hartford (great flatbread) and Fat Cat Pie‘s (Norwalk) caramelized onion topping on their delicious thing crust pizzas.

Inspired by that, combined with having just picked some yellow squash and zucchinis from a nearby farm, I decided to make some sandwiches which would be very Fall-inspired, warm and showcase the vegetables. We had some fresh ciabatta from the very good, local (!) Chabaso bakery: in fact, I was pretty pleased to note most of this dish was pretty local!

Here’s what I used this time around:

• 1 loaf whole wheat ciabatta, sliced
• Gruyere, sliced
• 2 large onions, chopped to get long strands
• Cream sherry
• Brown Sugar
• 2 small – medium zucchinis, chopped into thin slices
• 2 small – medium yellow squashes, chopped into thin slices
• 1 small butternut squash
• Salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Cherry tomatoes
• Butter
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Basil leaves
• Rosemary

Here is what I did:

• Prepare the butter nut squash

1. Split the butternut squash into half (along the length) and scoop out the seeds
2. Smear each open face with 1/2 tablespoon butter, sprinkle brown sugar generously on each face and then season with salt and the freshly ground pepper.
3. Pre-heat the oven to 400F and roast the two halves face up for 30 minutes or until it has softened (You should be able to pierce easily with a fork)
4. Take it out of the oven, and carefully (It’s going to be hot!) peel off the skin.
5. Chop into slices that you can use on top of the sandwiches
6. After you take the butternut squash of the over, lower the heat in it to 250F – we’ll use it for preparing the sandwiches (last step)

Note: one can also add garlic – but since this time I knew I was going to make open face sandwiches, I did not want garlic.

• Prepare the onions: you can start this while the butternut squash is roasting in the oven

1. Saute the onion ‘strips’ in the olive oil on high heat and then on low heat.
2. As the onions start turning translucent, add sherry and cook slowly on low heat. Keep stirring
3. Taste once a while, and add brown sugar and stir it in if you’d like to make it sweeter.
4. At the end, you should be left with slightly browned, soft, translucent onion strips in a thickened sherry sauce (Not too thick)

• Saute the squash and zucchini

• Prepare the sandwiches:

1. Lightly butter one side of the sliced ciabatta bread
2. Top with onions, and add a little of the remaining sherry-sauce on top (Not too much, it will soak the bread!)
3. Sprinkle rosemary and if you like, some freshly ground black pepper
4. Add the sliced cheese
5. Put this in the oven for 5 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the bread has toasted
6. Take the slices out of the oven, reduce the heat to 175F
7. Top the slices with the basil leaves and your choice of topping: sliced cherry tomatoes, sauteed squash or sliced, roasted butternut squash
8. Return to the oven for a few more minutes to keep warm

Serve immediately!

Note to self: I have to figure out a way to perhaps cook the butternut squash a bit more. Sarandipitea’s mother suggested broiling the sandwiches in the last step (after adding the vegetable topping, rather than using the oven at 250F). I could have also sauteed the butternut squash lightly  (Although I can see that can be messy!)

 

The simplest dal

Dal. It’s probably the food memory any Indian person has growing up. So it was with me. The inevitable pressure cooker whistles, the smell of dal being ready and roasting ghee and spices: it is so well ingrained in my memory, that anytime I even recall it I think of lunch.

For most vegetarian households in India, it is the prime provider of protein. Dal – the generic Hindi word for lentils – are healthy, have lots of fiber, protein and in India at least often taken for granted. So much so, that dal is the taken for granted, staple food on almost every meal’s plate. If you would take it to a pot luck, you’d be frowned upon (Well, we make this everyday!). Nonetheless it is one of my favorite dishes and quickly becoming one of Sarandipitea’s as well.

I could go on and on, but here’s the wiki link and it’s pretty good.

On with the recipe: this recipe will work with most dals. It’s just the cooking time you have to vary a bit depending on how much time that dal takes to cook. You can vary things up any which way like: add whatever spices you want, or even add vegetables. This recipe, is absolutely the simplest version. I am writing this one keeping the most commonly used dals in North India: arhar (or toor), masoor (matka or sabut)

The idea is simple: cook the dal separately in a pressure cooker. Cook the chaunk and mix.

Ingredients: (For about 4-6 servings)

For the dal:

• 2 cups of dal (arhar/matka masoor/sabut masoor)
• 2/3 teaspoons of tumeric
• 1 teaspoon of salt (or to taste)

For the chaunk:

• A generous teaspoon of ghee
• 3/4 teaspoon of cumin seeds
• 1/2 teaspoons of red chilli powder
• A generous pinch of asafoetida (hing)

Method:

Dal:

1. Wash the dal thoroughly
2. Add and mix the dal ingredients (dal, salt, tumeric)  to the pressure cooker. Close properly, cook on high heat till you can smell the dal. On mine, this takes about 2-3 whistles. Take off the heat and let it pressure cook the dal.

Chaunk:

1. Heat the ghee on high in a frying pan and as the ghee heats, add some cumin seeds.
2. When the cumin seeds start browning and crackling, add the asafoetida powder and red chilli powder, mix them in for an instant and remove from heat.

Once the pressure has subsided – open the pressure cooker and mix in the chaunk to the dal.That’s it!

 

Red Risotto

This risotto came about from a ‘clean up the fridge’ and a ‘let me not waste this beet from the farmer’s market’ and a ‘what’s for dinner?’ I did put a little thought into it and was very happy with how it came out.

Ingredients:

1. 1 large beet
2. 1 lb chopped (bite sized) carrots
3. 1/2 lb peas
4. 1 1/2 cup arborio rice
5. 1 1/2 cup white wine (Dry pinot grigio?)
6. 1 1/2 cup water
7. A little sherry
8. Salt to taste
9. Fresh basil leaves (About 20 or so)
10. Thyme
11. Rosemary
12. Black pepper
13. Freshly grated parmesan
14. 2 tablespoon butter

Method:

1. Cook the beet: gently snip off the tail/ greens off the beet. Make sure it’s a clean cut and you don’t cut off the skin from the beet.  (It’s not a disaster if you do, but it’ll bleed red color for the time you boil it!)  Boil the beet for half hour or till it softens up in a pot after fully covering it with water. After it’s cooked, place it under cold water and peel the skin carefully (The beet itself may still be warm).

2. Chop the beet (keep away from your clothes!), carrots and saute them in 1 tablespoon butter. Keep the heat on high for a couple of minutes and then lower the heat and cook in lower heat, stirring occasionally.

3.  As they get soft, add the peas in as well and saute them in. When you add the peas, get heat back up high for a few minutes and then lower it again and cook all three vegetables in. Stir occasionally so nothing burns but take off the heat once everything is softened up. On this occasion, I even added a bit of sherry. What this does is the liquid helps cook the vegetables quicker. I chose sherry because carrots, beets and peas are naturally sweet, and adding the sherry would enhance the sweetness as well, as sherry would get infused with the softened, cooked vegetables.

4. Remove the vegetables from the pot, add the second tablespoon of butter and raise the heat to high. Add and coat in butter the arborio rice. Keep stirring so it does not burn. After the rice is fully coated and has been on heat for say, a minute or two, add in 3/4 cup of wine and 3/4 cup of water. Continue to cook on high for about 3 minutes, till the liquid has been bubbling for about a minute and then lower the heat.

5. Add the vegetables back in, mix them in. Slowly add the rest of the water and the wine an occasionally stir gently as the rice cooks to that lovely al dente texture. Once in a while stir up from the bottom of the pot to make sure nothing burns.

6. Add in the herbs and spices as it cooks, reserve the basil leaves and parmesan for last. Keep stirring gently.

 

The Fuji Melt

Just before you put the two sides together and gobble it up!

I never thought I’d blog about a sandwich, but I am. I thought this one up while we were driving back home from Boston and I was getting increasingly hungry. I decided I was craving apples (Fuji apples are absolutely my favorite) and cheese at the same time. So we stopped off at the grocery store on the way back and picked up some good cheddar, Gruyere and of course: Fuji apples.

To keep it short: we sliced up some ciabatta. Layered up a few apple slices which we covered (generously!) with cheddar and/or Gruyere. Into the toaster oven this went. Don’t make it too hot – these cheeses melt easy and that’s really all you want. We dabbed on some basil-pesto mustard from Stonewall Kitchen (It really is quite tasty, try it!) and added some leafy greens.

We loved this so much for Sunday lunch, we made this for lunch for the rest of the week, till we ran out of apples!

The apple then stays the star of the show, while good cheddar/Gruyere has that wonderful texture and salty taste to balance the juiciness and sweet taste of the apple.  The greens add well, some more character here while the mustard adds in the right tangy element to complement everything else in here. It helped that we used ciabatta – the heartiness helps keep everything together while adding depth to the sandwich.

 

Toor dal with beet greens

So with the last thing I made, http://bitesandsips.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/winter-risotto/ I was left with bunches of beet greens. The internet mentions them being all nutritious so I felt I should use them. I recall that my mother used to make arhar (toor) dal with spinach – and I used to love that.

The only difference between making regular arhar dal and this is really the beet greens. I just washed them really well and removed the leaves from the stems. Finally, I just tore the leaves into smaller pieces with just my hands and cooked them with the dal and spices.

 

Winter Risotto

As I may have mentioned, I definitely love a good dish with plenty of stuff in it – the big pot dishes. Of such big pot, dishes, I am constantly trying out different variations and today I decided to use the seasonal fall-winter vegetables in a ‘winter risotto’.

So, right -what vegetables to choose? And more importantly, how to put them together in a dish that has its own cohesive taste. I thought of a pea and wild mushroom risotto I had some time back – that felt good. What if I would add on to the sweetness that peas bring, and build on that? Soft, yet not mush pieces of butternut squash would go well in a risotto, I felt. If cooked suitably, butternut squash has a similar, soft, yet tangibly separate creamy texture, just like the arborio rice keeps in a good risotto. What else – I decided on complimenting the butternut squash’s sweetness further with another seasonal beauty: beets. And just because I am all whimsical, could I add more? Might the risotto need something else to ‘bring the edge’ – some turnip, perhaps? (And when I picked some of those up, I could not just resist picking it’s cousin – the rutabaga up. I may have also been influenced by a dish Sarandipitea’s mom made a few days ago – mashed, spiced rutabaga. Yum). I choose green onions to do their thing ) felt this sweet, wintry risotto needed it to make it a more rounded dish!

So here goes: the ingredients I used for a nice big pot, say 6 generous portions:

• 2 cups, arborio rice
• 1 pound chopped butternut squash
• 3 small-medium golden beets (or red)
• 2 medium turnips
• 1 medium rutabaga
• 2/3 lb peas
• 3/4 cup (after chopping) green onions
• Butter
• Olive oil
• White wine (I used a dry riesling, mostly because this was going to be a sweeter risotto than usual)
• Spices: sage, thyme, basil, dill, oregano, freshly ground pepper, salt
• Freshly ground parmesan cheese to put on top

What did I do?

I prepared the vegetables:

1. The first thing I did was wash the beets gently, then chop off the greens and most of the stem (till say an inch off the top) off the beets and let them boil in a small pot for about 30-40 minutes.
2. I washed the turnips, the rutabaga and peeled, diced and sauteed them in olive oil. Bear in mind that turnips and rutabaga basically suck up olive oil! So I made sure the olive oil was spread evenly on my pan and then I stir fried the diced turnip + rutabaga first. I stirred it in quite a bit, ensuring an even coating of olive oil and making sure nothing burns. Eventually, I added some water in the pan (leaving the heat on high) and covered the pan. This helped soften and steam cook them. When done, I put these aside.
3. I similarly sauteed the butternut squash first in olive oil and then adding water, stirring and covering it – to help soften and cook it through.
4. In a big pot – the one where I will eventually mix it all up, I sauteed the chopped green onions.
5. In the same pot, I melted a tablespoon of butter, added 2 cups of arborio rice – coated it with the butter, all while on high heat for a few minutes, stirring continuously to ensure the rice does not burn.
6. I added 1 cup of wine and 1 cup of water and let it cook on high for a few minutes
7. By this time, the beets were done boiling. I removed them from the heat, ran cold water over them in a colander. Once cooled, I peeled them (this should be dead easy by now), chopped them into bite sized pieces.
8. Then I added the cooked turnip, rutabaga, butternut squash, the beets and the peas along with half a cup of water and half a cup of wine. I also added 1.5 teaspoons of salt and the other spices (fresh ground pepper, sage, thyme, oregano, basil, all to taste, better to err on the higher side ) and mixed it all up gently so as to not mush the vegetables.
9. After a little while I lowered the heat, added another half cup water and half cup of wine and let the risotto cook on medium high, then medium, then finally low heat to let the rice cook through. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing’s burning at the bottom of the pot and things are all mixed up nicely!
10. Serve warm, top with freshly ground parmesan cheese!

 

Pad Thai!

Pad Thai needs no introduction. Right? Right.

A well made pad thai is absolutely one of my favorite dishes ever – but I’ve never made it. So last weekend, I made a run to multiple grocery stores – an Asian one for some ingredients, and about 10 miles in the other direction to Trader Joe’s for other ingredients and last night I buckled down and made it. I also have a confession to make: I pretty rarely use an actual recipe. But last night I was very glad I did – I think I made a fairly acceptable version.

The recipe is here:

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm

Notes to self:

1. The only things I might do differently next time:

a. Not toast peanuts up front – some got over toasted while some were under toasted and I shy away from blackened peanuts. Although this might have to do with the fact that I used a normal pot, not a wok.

b. Use peanut oil or sesame oil – oils that can withstand higher heat than the usual vegetable oil. This way, I keep the oil really hot without ‘burning’.

2. Of course – one can substitute soy sauce for fish sauce, tofu for shrimp/chicken – to keep it fully vegetarian!

And the picture is of the leftovers – sorry I took no pictures of the while cooking it, but the site linked here has plenty of pics and oh man, was I hurried and hungry while cooking! So I had no time to take pics anyway!