The Lonely Plant

This is proof that life exists. In our vegetable bed. That life can survive. In our vegetable bed. Proof that there’s enough food and water there. That life can grow there. Most important of all that we’ve more than a tinge of green thumb!

Can you see those cabbage-like leaves towards the top right? Well that is cabbage. Those greens to the top left? Yes those are some salad greens.

The title of the post should actually be the lonely cauliflower. It did have a lot of its clan for company but looks like they couldn’t survive the heavy snow. I’m totally ignoring the fact that we planted them so close that they hardly had any space to breath. Have you heard about “survival of the fit”? We know it by heart. So much so that when we were planting these we figured that all these cauliflowers would fight each other to grow the best and hence we would get a bumper crop! Ok honestly – yes they were uncomfortably close to each other but it was the snow that killed them.

We have this 8 ft X 8 ft vegetable/flower bed and we wanted to grow vegetables like we’d just bought a farmland! It was quite a learning experience. For example little did I know that the tiny cauliflower head that I buy at the supermarket takes up 6 times the space in our vegetable bed! Jokes apart, as you can see, the leaves of the cauliflower do spread almost 1ft in each direction!

On a more serious note, despite the fact that only 1 out of 12 cauliflowers survived and that too doesn’t look too healthy – we were so happy to see it! Fruit of our labor as they say.

I was reading the Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Guide and it’s foreword struck a chord with me. To quote, it said

“Digging in the dirt, planning a spring garden, weeding, and watching seeds become healthy plants both soothes and lifts our spirit. Gardening is indeed about hope. We believe seeds will sprout or we wouldn’t sow them; we plant a tree so that our grandchildren can enjoy one day.”

So true! I can tell you that every time we plant something we would watch it daily to see if it has grown or not and then admire it.

The cauliflower and the quote above have totally motivated me to start planning for the summer vegetables!! Yippee!

Sweet and sour tamarind (imli) chutney

It’s been such a long long time since I chattered here. I went on a nice long  vacation and then after coming back just couldn’t get my fingers and mind to type something up here. Well in the meantime I was looking at the stats for my blog on Google Analytics, just to see if my long absence had put a dent in my viewership and what do I see! The recipes on my blog seem to be the most popular of all my content – that quite surprised! I never thought of my blog as a cooking.recipes blog so I must say it was indeed a pleasant surprise!

Continuing that spirit I thought I would bring to you another recipe. Sweet and sour tamarind chutney. Or as we call it in Hindi, Khatti (= sour) Meethi (= swet) Imli (= tamarind)ki chutney.

I don’t make it often but when I do, I make it more-than-required quantities and have it ready in the fridge. Every time I want to make it, I forget the proportion of the ingredients. Of course, I learnt this from my mom – I mean to make this chutney not to forget the ingredients! So this time I made sure that I measured everything that I add. It’s quite simple to make and is so yummy! Yum! Yum! Yum!

Ingredients:

• 3 tbsp Tamarind paste – easily available in Indian stores
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1/4 tsp chilli powder
• salt to taste

Method:

1. Add all the ingredients to a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Take a big enough sauce pan so that it doesn’t ooze out on boiling.
2. Let it boil till it reaches desired consistency. If it’s oozing out of the pan then simmer. I like mine to be flowing consistency but not watery. Note: The chutney thickens a little after cooling.
3. Quick and simple!

I got approximately 3/4 cup of chutney from the above ingredients.

Be more with less

Sometime back somehow I landed on a post at this blog, Be more with less, The post struck a chord with me and since then I’ve become a huge fan of this blog. Courtney’s writings always make so much sense and they’re always so new! Many a times with popular blogs that you read regularly, you tend to find that the author runs out of things to say and is simply trying to fill. I haven’t found that true with her, at least not till now. Initially I wanted to link a few posts of hers which I simply loved and then I realized that that list was growing and growing. So I figured I would instead mention her blog itself. If you’re a minimalist or want to be one, hop over to her blog and I’m sure you’ll get highly motivated!

Oats Idli

Sounds weird doesn’t it?!?! It doesn’t taste weird, trust me! In fact it’s delicious and it is healthy! How many times have you heard delicious and healthy in the same sentence?!?! I found the recipe here.

Ingredients:

• Instant oats - 1 cup
• Suji - 1/2 cup
• Curd - 1/2 cup
• Water - 3/4 or as required
• Carrot - 1 medium sized grated
• Mustard Seeds - 2tsp
• Green chilli - 1 tsp finely chopped
• Salt - to taste
• Hing - 1/2 tsp
• Coriander leaves - 2 tsp finely chopped (I didn’t have these)
• Baking soda - 1/2 tsp
• Oil - to grease idli plates

Method:

1. Dry roast oats for 3-4 minutes. Let it cool and then grind to a fine powder ( I used my coffee grinder to do the job).
2. Dry roast rava for 3-4 mins.
3. Heat a tsp of oil and add mustard seeds. Let them splutter. Then add green chillies and grated carrot. Saute till carrots are slightly cooked.
4. Mix all the ingredients (except oil for greasing plates). If the batter is too thick, add a more water.
5. Fill cooker about 1” with water. Heat to a rolling boil. Grease the idli plates.
6. Spoon the batter into the plates. The idlis are going to fluff up so leave the idli cups half empty.
7. Put the idli stand in the cooker (do not put a whistle). Steam for 15 minutes.
8. To remove the idlis from the idli plate, use a spoon dipped in cold water. I’ve found that it works the best for me.

Notes:

• If the idlis are hard, it’s quite possible that the batter was thick. The batter should not be running consistency but it shouldn’t be too thick either.

Potato Leek Casserole

Since we subscribed to the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) , we’ve been inundated with new and never-eaten-before vegetables. Well not that the CSA forces that on us, we can pick what we want but we always feel like getting new vegetables to break the ennui resulting from the same-old-veggies! So one time we got leeks. Now let me tell you  there was a time when I wasn’t sure that leeks were vegetables!

Thus began my search for a recipe that uses leeks as the primary vegetable. My favorite source is allrecipes.com but sometimes I like to search foodgawker too – it’s a feast for the eyes! And it’s the last site you should go to if you’re hungry! Anyways, I found this Cheesy Potato Leek Casserole through foodgawker and I must say that we absolutely loved it! Here’s a poor photo of it – unfortunately I couldn’t grab a photo when it came right from the oven. Our tummies beckoned it more than the camera.

Well you must be thinking being half eaten is not the only problem with the photo There’s poor lighting, bad background and so on and so forth. However I though no photo is better than a not-so-good photo!

I modified the ingredients a little bit based on what I had at home and would suggest the same to all. There’s no need to stick to the veggies listed here – feel free to substitute them with what you like and what you have. Having said that I’m not sure how it’ll turn out with veggies that contain a lot of water like tomato, zucchini, etc.

Here’s what I used:

• 4 leeks
• 1 onion
• 1-2 big potato
• 3-4 fresno peppers (or any other mild pepper)
• 2 carrots
• 4 oz cream cheese (= 2 mini tubs of cream cheese)
• some leftover heavy cream (around 1/4 cup)
• 1/2 cup shredded mozarella
• 1/4 cup panko bread crumbs

To cook:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
2. For the veggies:
• Potato – peel and slice thinly about 1/8 inch
• Peppers, Leeks and onion – chop them
• Carrot – grate it.
3. Stir fry all veggies except potato.
4. Soften the cream cheese by microwaving it and then whisk it a little.
5. Add the cream cheese and the heavy cream to the veggies and mix well. No need to heat them together.
6. Grease a 8” X 8” baking dish.
7. Line it with potatoes and then spread the veggie mixture on top of it. Spread the bread crumbs and the mozzarella cheese on top.
8. Bake for 30-40 minutes.

Winter/Fall vegetable gardening

Back in June, we’d planted a few vegetables. Except for the zucchini and eggplant, all did well. We didn’t get a bumper crop of tomatoes thanks to the lack of heat in northwest. I’m so glad we didn’t plant any peppers! However to compensate we did get an Indian summer which turned a few our tomatoes bright red. Here’s a look:

All the tomatoes we got were from the hybrid plant, didn’t get any from the heirloom variety. If you compare the strawberry plant from this post, you can see how much it’s loving it’s new location! We found that it too like most of the plants loves sunlight.

Motivated by our summer trysts, we planted some fall/winter veggies:

Yep – that’s the zucchini plant at the very back. It grew pretty well but unfortunately some animal would eat away all the baby zucchinis. Ok so we’ve some cauliflower in the front, then a row of cabbage on the right, behind the cauliflowers are come herbs and you can see some starters around which weren’t planted then. This photos was taken when we just planted these veggies and I can tell you they’ve grown – like really grown! So let me snap a photo of them soon to show you how well they’re doing!

Strawberry Ice cream

As a child it always fascinated me that some people on this earth could make ice cream at home – the kind that you get at stores! It was like a dream come true! That fascination wore off a little when I came to US and I saw that you could buy ice cream in “tubs” and they were so economical!! However when I started looking at the list of ingredients I put an ice cream maker on my wish list so that I could make pure and natural ice cream! My initial thought was to purchase a used one as I wasn’t sure how long my fad is going to last. However that wasn’t God’s intention. He intervened in the form of a costco coupon which made a brand new IC maker cheaper than a used one. So my “dream” came true and we brought home a glossy red Cuisinart ice cream maker! Enough with the stories let me get down to what I did with this beauty!

My first attempt was a peach frozen yogurt – though tasty it was a little icy for a frozen yogurt. Second was a mango tango sorbet – I simply churned some Naked mango smoothie. It was quite tasty considering how healthy it was; but I wasn’t there yet. I wanted to make some “real” ice cream. So I hunted and found this Eggless strawberry ice cream recipe. The ice cream was AWESOME! It brought back childhood memories. It was just like the Amul ice cream we used to have in India (except mine had real fruits )! That was the first time I realized the difference between the ice cream in US and India. In my research for an ice cream recipe I’d found that ice creams here were more custard-like and in most cases had egg; they were dense. Indian ice cream is more creamy and light (I don’t think there’s anything good or bad with either – just that they’re different). That’s exactly what my home-made ice cream tasted like – creamy and fluffy! Eureka!

I halved the recipe to fit in my ice cream maker. Since I didn’t have whole milk as well as coloring and I forgot to put salt, these are the ingredients from the recipe that I ended up using:

• 1/2 cup low fat milk
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cups mashed pureed fresh strawberries – I pureed the strawberries because I didn’t want big chunks. I left some tiny little chunks while pureeing.
• 1-2 tsp honey – I’d read that honey prevents crystallization. Did it really? I don’t know but since my ice cream turned out perfect I’m not making it without honey!

To make ice cream:

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients. Prepare the ice cream in your machine per manufacturer’s direction. In my machine, I’d to switch on the machine and pour the mixture through the opening. I believe in churning a little more so I timed it for 30 minutes; and off I went to do my chores. When I came back, the machine was almost overflowing. Thankfully the batter was all frozen otherwise I would’ve had a mess.

Do you see the rose pink color of the ice cream? Pureeing the strawberries gave that. I didn’t use any coloring!

I think this is a great basic recipe and I’m going to try it out with different fruits.