The passionate tofu

A lot of people I know treat tofu as the poor step sister of paneer, the creamy rich Indian cheese. I first began using it in my cooking as a convienience (since it is more readily available) and later in my classes, to accomodate my vegan students. Eventually, firm or extra firm tofu has now become more of the norm for me rather than an exception. It actually absorbs flavor beautifully. This lovely delicate sauce that showcases two of the seasons gifts - tomatoes and red peppers offer a perfect match for the mild tofu.

The base of the sauce needs very little effort but some planning because a large part of the recipe is cooked in a slow cooker, but here again, I actually do this while I am out and about doing errands or even before I go to sleep ( now, my slow cooker does shut off, by itself), so the overnight works. Anyhow, the deep flavors of the base are coaxed to gentle flavorful sweetness and then married with a hint of spice and melowed with the richness of a touch of cream. The cubed tofu is simmered in this sauce for about 15 minutes and voila, you have a dish that is elegant, healthy and quite luscious to eat.

Tofu in a fenugreek spiced pepper cream sauce

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 4 hours and 20 minutes (4 hours in the slow cooker unattended)

Serves 6

Ingredients

4 medium red bell peppers

4 tomatoes

1 tablespoon grated ginger

3 pods garlic

1 teaspoon red chili powder

1.5 teaspoons salt

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons agave nectar

1.5 cups of half and half

3/4 cup water

1 tablespoon dried fenugreek leaves (sold in Indian grocery stores)

2 cups extra firm tofu cubed

1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

Method of Preparation

1. Dice the red peppers, removing the seeds and stalk.

2. Dice the tomatoes.

3. Place the peppers, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, chili powder and salt and oil in the slow cooker and cook on the 4 hour high setting for 4 hours.

4. Place the cooked pepper mixture into a blender and add in the agave nectar, half and half, water and blend to a smooth puree.

5.Place the puree in a cooking pot and bring to a simmer, add in the dried fenugreek leaves and tofu and simmer for about 15 minutes.

6. Turn off the heat, drizzle well with the black pepper and serve with rice or crusty bread.

I think our kitchen tables, must be at their all time messy state competing only with the dinning table. We have supples and school paper work, yes, its back to school time, almost!

Tiffinwalah - An amazing meal

It is hardly a novelty to find good food in NYC, one can get almost anything that ones heart desires. This was a rainy sleepyI afternoon, my favorite kind of eweather, cool but not too cold, wet but more a rainy mist rather than pouring rain. I would have loved to walk miles and miles, but since I could not I settled for the next best thing - to walk a few blocks to find a place that caught my eye. Tiffin, in Indian parlance, referrs to snack and in South Indian cuisine this refers to items such as Dosa (lentil and rice flour crepes.

The restaurant was vegetarian, and had a simple fairly South Indian menu. What was amazing about the place was how well, it hadher created a wonderful, homey atmosphese with very little fuss.
The ambience was simple but had lots of simple character - ther decor consisted of steel Indian tiffin carriers, there are layers containers joined with a carry on handle. Each compartment is for a separate dish to make a complete meal. The simple small tables all had little ivy plants. The buffet self service had large plates and for a nice and very homey touch lots of steel bowls. A very simple accent but again very authentic and very Indian. The small tables had little ivy plants as centerpieces and a corner of the restaurant had a bookshelf and a tiny alter to Krishna.

Nothing still had prepared me for the wonder and delight of their food. My taste buds woke up with the pure crisp sharpness of black pepper in the vadas (lentil dumplings), sang with the taste of fresh ajowan in the spinach whole wheat flat breads and was cooled and satiated by the fragrant mint and cilantro chutney and cool tangy raita. I wanted to eat five times more, but time and my stomach were full. I will be back and highly recommend checking it out if your are in that neck of the woods.

Tiffinwalah
127 East 28th Street
New York City
http://www.tiffinwallah.us/

Ps. The food is very affordably priced as well.

Watermelon Sangria

Outside of my obsession with playing with spices, I love wine and playing with wine. I used actually be noted for my spontaneous cocktails. People loved them as much more than the food that I cooked. I have a theory on this, it is what I call the cheap wine theory, basically after a couple of glasses folks do not really complain about the edge or lack of smoothness of cheap wine. Nonetheless, I have significantly reduced dabbling with cocktails, not because I have reduced my drinking but it is sort of in line with my general hasstle free approach to cooking. Doing a creative syrup, cooling it, takes time. However, a couple of weeks back, I made this Watermelon Sangria, inspired by this recipe.

Now, what a difference the wine makes, while Doug's sangria looks like the pale red of the watermelon, my version looks much deeper and yes, you got it right I used red wine. Actually, I skipped the agave nectar, because I used a slightly sweet red wine.

This red is very happy served chilled and hence, just perfect for Sangria. I had to through in the black salt, it is a quintissential Indian combination to add black salt to fruit juices.

So I made about 4 glasses of sangria following the following measures,

Watermelon Sangria

Cook/Prep Time: 1 hour (mostly chilling)

1.5 cups of fresh watermelon juice (about 1/2 a medium sized water melon, cut and pureed in the blender and then strained.

1.5 cups of a sweet red wine

1/2 teaspoon black salt

1.5 cups of seltzer

Method of Preparation

1. Mix in the watermelon juice, red wine and black salt.

2. Chill for at least 45 minutes to an hour.

3. Place 2-3 ice cubes in serving glasses (you do not want too much or it will dilute the watermelon flavor).

4. Add in 3/4 glass of the wine-watermelon mixture.

5. Top off with some seltzer and enjoy.

Breakfast at the Market

General view of the market, walking from the station

My son loves pickles, believe it or not!

Picked up a whole bunch of peaches, made some peach crisp,

Loved these streaked squashes, wonder if they have a special name.

Cheddar cauliflower, I steamed some for dinner.

Now this cofee place was wonderful, a new addition this year, drank their iced coffee with a peasant roll from bread alone.

Thanks to all the wonderful veggies in the garden, I have not needed to get to the markets this year, I did stop a couple of weeks back at the Pleasantville Farmers market to get some breakfast and meat.

Bruised tomato mint salad in yogurt

This is a really simple inspiration from all the lovely tomatoes that we have in the house and the tons of fresh mint that is blossoming in a planter. Ok, the mint and all the summer herbs are really a big deal, because they are actually being grown by me and not the husband. I have had them from May, they are this far thriving. I have mint, oregano, rosemary, marjoram, lemon thyme and lemon verbana. I have been doing things with them as and when I can. Today it was the mint and oregano's turn. This recipe is almost like an meeting of Tzatziki and tomato raita, the flavors certainly work well together, but then again I always, say, if its fresh and local it works!

Bruised tomato mint salad in yogurt

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 7-8 minutes

Serves 4

Ingredients

4-6 small fresh tomatoes

1/2 cup fresh mint leaves

1 tablespoon fresh oregano

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1/3 cup olive or raw sesame oil (sold as gingely oil in Indian stores)

1 teaspoon red chili powder

1 cup strained or greek style lowfat yogurt

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup lightly roasted coarsely ground peanuts

Cilantro and green chilies to garnish (optional)

Method of Preparation

1. Place the tomatoes in a bowl.

2. Finely chop the mint and oregano and add all but 1 tablespoon of the chopped herbs to the tomatoes.

3. Mix in the garlic and the oil and chili powder and set aside for 10 minutes.

4. Cook lightly on a grill for 3-4 minutes, till the skin of the tomato is barely bruised.

5. Place in a mixing bowl as they are done and pour any remaining oil marinade into the bowl over the tomatoes.

6. Whip the yogurt with the salt and pour over the tomatoes.

7. Lightly mix in the peanuts and garnish with the reserved mint and the cilantro and green chilies if using.

Note: This salad can be served warm or chilled.

D Thai Kitchen

When is a good thing, just too much to handle?

Possibly if you are an absolutely lovely emerging little restaurant that receives a, “worth it” review from the times.
A couple of Fridays ago, we went over to the D Thai Kitchen and I have to tell you that despite the extreme chaos, resulting from having just way too many customers to handle the food was just so amazingly good. Interestingly enough, amidst the chaos and commotion we ending up chatting quite a bit with dinners on the adjacent tables something that we rarely do in restaurants.
The food in this charming little place was wonderful. It would have been a beautiful night to sit outside, but it was just too packed. The restaurant manager (the chef’s wife) was amazingly poised calm and composed and smiled amidst all the chaos.

I was actually really quite amazed to see how calm she was under the stress of running out of linen, (she had paper napkins), irate customers and in general what might seem like mayhem. Folks, I am not saying all this to make it sound bad, in fact, I am hoping that if anyone did make it to the place they might actually look at the bright side and also remember how amazing the food was.
We started out with a green papaya salad, while the salad was a little sweeter than what I am normally used to for this recipe, the flavors were amazing. A nice touch in this salad was that it used two types of nuts, crunchy crushed peanuts for the body and roasted rich cashew nuts for the garnish. The appetizers have a nice option of a sampler that they refer to as Thai Tapas, we tried the a Thai take on the Malaysian Roti Canai, fried calamari with a sweet chili sauce and chicken satay. The place is a BYOB and we enjoyed all of this wonderful food with some plum wine
Actually we ended up getting rather late, so we got our main dishes of red shrimp curry and Pad Thai to go. The flavors for these dishes were just as good. Here is what I have to say to everyone at D Thai kitchen, please grow up and get settled, we are dying to come back and still be able to do something outdoors before it gets too cold.

Actually, as a testimony to their food, I just went today to pick up some takeout, they seem much calmer, so we shall be back soon!







D Thai Kitchen

677 Commerce Street
Thornwood, NY 10594
(914) 741-1313

Chinese Mirch

There are several fusion variations of food, that are naturally inherent in Indian cooking – a combination of cross border influences and of course cross cultural migration. The Indo-Chinese cuisine in my assessment is probably the most popular (certainly in India) of these hybrids.

While we do not have any Indo-Chinese food in Westchester ( we only barely got a Ethiopian place, and now I want it all!), just across the border in Stamford, CT we have a couple of interesting finds. We stopped by Chinese Mirch (translates to Chinese Chili, mirch is Chili in Hindi) just on the spur of things to try out a thing or two, the place certainly does not disappoint. The décor of red and black is festive yet modern and the red is a nice change from the brick red or earthier tones that are more Indian.
We had gone earlier in the evening, and the place was really just warming up, however the staff were warm and spurred into action to accommodate us. We tried a few of their dishes and liked most of them. Their rock shrimp is quite addictive I could probably eat platters of these crisp little sweet shrimp nuggets every day. The rock shrimp was served with two dipping sauces – a sweet sauce and a more savory chili garlic sauce, both the sauces were nice and varied on the palate but not overly spicy. We also had an order of the crispy orka, which essentially had cut the vegetable into thin long shoestring pieces and coated with batter and fried them. This was good but could have been a little lighter on the batter.
Now, the restaurant takes its chili ratings seriously. We had the chili basil fish that was labeled with three chilies and I have to tell you that this fish was spicy! Very flavorful though! Lastly, we also had an order of their chicken Manchurian, this dish while flavor and well done was a little disappointing, in that it lacked the crispy punch usually associated with the dish. All in all, we liked the place a lot and if you have not tried Indo-Chinese food, take a drive to Stamford and I do not think you will be disappointed.
BTW, out of sheer co-incidence I stopped by their NYC branch for a takeout! While the food here was just as good the space was more constricted but not cramped.


As Liz ( I know she only does) would say, the 411 on Chinese Mirch is,

Chinese Mirch
35 Altantic Street
Stamford, CT 06906
http://www.chinesemirch.com/ct_stamford.h

So, please do take the initiative to cross the statelines and do take me along to visit this rather delectable spicy find.

A peachy take on chicken..

While we are more than self-sufficient in summer with our vegetables, but we do not grown enough fruit to meet all our needs, which is just as well. This allows me the joy of being able to go the farmers markets. Well a few weeks back, I came home with these lovely beautiful and ripe peaches. We ate a lot of them and I made a nice peach crisp and I actually used them for a marinade. I though the chicken turned out really nice, deep dense and flavorful! I actually also through in some lemon tyme, which were in my opinion a nice and delicate substitute for carom seeds, I have played with thyme and oregano before as a substitute for carom or ajowain.

Here is how this worked

Peach, Cumin Butter and Lemon Thyme Chicken

Prep Time: 24 hours (to marindade)

Cook Time: 25-30 minutes

Ingredients

1 cup lowfat yogurt

2-3 inch piece coarsely chopped peeled ginger

2 pods garlic

3-4 green chilies

3 peaches, peeled and stones

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon coriander seeds

1 teapoon fennel seeds

2 teaspoons agave nectar

1 tablespoons lemon tyme leaves or 1/2 teaspoon carmon seeds

2 pounds skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into pieces

To baste and finish

2 tablespoons ghee or butter, melted

1 tablespoon freshly ground cumin

1 teaspoon red chili flakes

1 teaspoon salt

Method of Preparation

1. Place the yogurt, ginger, garlic, chilies, peaches, salt, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, agave nectar, lemon thyme or ajowain in blender and blend for a good 5 minutes till the mixture is smooth and dense like a good smoothie.

2. Place the chicken and the marinade in a large ziplock bag and keep in the refridgerator overnight. (note on a milder day you can do this outside for about 5-6 hours)

3. Mix the butter or ghee, ground cumin, red chili pepper and salt.

4. Thread the chicken onto skewers.

5. Place on the grill, and brush well with remaining marinade and the butter spice mixture. Cook for 5-6 minutes, turn baste and repeat. By this point the chicken should be moist tender and crisped.

6. Garnish with lemon thyme and serve.

Note: If you do not want to grill, the chicken can be broiled on skewers, drizzled generously with the cumin butter topping. Also, good olive oil would work as a baster.

Spicy Shrimp Curry with Bell Peppers

This week it was fresh peppers, a nice collection of them, fresh green and bursting with their sweetly intoxicating flavor. I was amazingly spice adverse growing up, and by most Indian standards I think my touch is still gentle with the use of spices. Anyhow,  I loved the bell pepers because they have the fresh flavors of the green chili, without the heat. It has been a long time since I have found peppers with such amazing flavor, until of course we started growing them.

This recipe is simple but is high on the spice index.

Spicy Shrimp Curry with Bell Peppers

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Makes 2-3 servings

Ingredients

1/4 cup of grapeseed oil

1 small onion, very finely chopped

1 tablespoon minced ginger

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

1/2 teaspoon red chili powder

1 teaspoon dried fenugreek leaves

2 fresh small red tomatoes, cut into eights

1 small onion, cut into eights and separated

1 large or 2 small bell peppers cut into a dice to match the onions

1 teaspoon salt

1 pound of large shrimp, shelled and deveined

Method of Preparation

1. Heat the oil and cook the chopped onion on low heat for about 6-7 minutes, until the onion is soft and begining to turn golden.

2. Add in the ginger, turmeric, black pepper, fenugreek leaves and the tomatoes and cook for another 3-4 minutes, until the tomatoes soften and release their juices but are not mushy.

3. Add in the onions, peppers and salt and stir well and cook for another 2-3 minutes.

4. Add in the shrimp and simmer for 6 minutes until the shrimp is cooked through.

I have actually been cooking up several wonderful recipes (at least that is what we think, I have been unable to keep up posting them). I do hope I remember and can post them when I have time. More a matter of remembering how I cooked them, rather than remembering to post them. Although the later happens too!

Lalibela - Mount Kisco

Sometimes a good dining experience, is all about time and expectation. We had so been missing a good Ethopian restaurant in the Westchester area, to the point we actually ended up trekking all the way in a deep snow snow storm when we were in the Washington DC area, earlier this year to U-street area and eating Ethiopian. Now all of this changed a couple of months back with the opening of Lalibela, I remember seeing this video, a couple of months back.  Well, this Saturday, I packed the husband and we headed to Mt Kisco. Our GPS has a bad habit of stopping a good 2-3 blocks before the destitination, so when I parked he had no clue where we were heading and looked rather skeptically at Cosi across the street.

My sense of direction is rather bad, so he was sure either we were headed for a late night sandwich pick, or I had lost my way.

His expression seeing the Lalibela sign was one of pure delight, he went - "Since when did we have an Ehiopian restaurant here?".

The restaurant is small and cosy. The staff are very hospitable. We tried the Lalibella sampler, I skipped the two beed dishes in favor of lamb, the collards were lovely, have to get the recipe, misir wat and gomen (lentils and split peas respectively were all wonderful), loved the dor wat a chicken stew with boiled egg and two lamb dishes. These are all served with Injera a spongy Ethiopian bread.

We had a glass of the cabernet and the Ehiopian honey wine. The restaurant has a compact but very food friendly wine list. The bottles are well priced as well. The tiramisu that we had as the desert was nice but not expectional.

All in all, I am delighted and think Lalibela was well worth the wait. We shall be back to this beautiful little nood with cheerful yellow walls, warm wooden tables and smiling staff for many more times. Until then, I encourage you to give this place a try, that it if you have not been there before.

Chilled Carrot Soup

Weather and nature is often the mother of invention. I have generally shied away from cold soups, just for some unknown reason. Well, the NYT magazine last Sunday has a nice piece about a teenager who had launched her own CSA and a nice recipe for pink beet borcht. A nice and spicy departure from the classic recipe. This week, we ended up with 25-30 carrots in our yard, I had to adapt the recipe for carrots. Instinctively I felt that the sweet taste of the carrots would be a good substitute. I also made an interesting carrot salad that I shall post about. The carrot soup also ended up turning pale orange, I color that facinated by better half. I have to confess, this time of the year, I end up with so many fun recipes, I sometimes lose them because I do not have time to blog them. This soup actually would be nice and refreshing in the morning as well.

Chilled Carrot Soup

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Chilling Time: 3-4 hours (note this soup improves significantly in flavor the following day)
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

2 tablespoon olive oil
1 red onion, coarsely chopped
2-3 pods of garlic, grated
1 teaspoon of freshly grated ginger
10 carrots, peeled and sliced
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chili powder
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 bay leaves
2 cups of water
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 cup of drained low fat yogurt
1-2 teaspoons chopped cilantro

Method of Preparation

1. Heat the oil and add the onion, garlic and ginger and saute for about 3-4 minutes until the mixture is soft and very fragrant. Note, I do this in the base of a small pressure cooker.
2. Add in the carrots, salt, red chili powder, coriander seeds, black pepercorns, bay leaves, vinegar and water and cook under pressure for about 7 minutes.
3. Cool and remove the lid of the cooker. Discard the bay leaves.
4. Puree the mixture in a blender with the yogurt until smooth.
5. Chill for a couple of hours or overnight.
6. Serve with the cilantro.