Dahl with Spinach Rice

When I was growing up, we never ate Indian food. We actually hardly ever ate any regional foods except for Italian (part of my heritage) and Chinese takeout (when we were sick of pizza). I didn’t try sushi until high school, hadn’t had Korean food until college, and even many European specialties never crossed my plate until I traveled there.

One type of food I was really hesitant about was Indian food. I’d figured out at some point during my life that I don’t like what we traditionally think of when we say “curry,” and for a while, I was one of the folks that thought Indian food=curry, which is totally incorrect. The great thing about Indian food is that there’s often a ton of vegetarian options, so really, once I figured out what I liked, I was golden. (I just have to watch out for the super spicy stuff! I absolutely can’t do really spicy things – I think it has to do with sensory overload in relation to my fibromyalgia.)

My favorite Indian dish is dahl, which is a spiced (but not too spicy) lentil dish, usually served over rice. Sometimes it’s got some veggies like cauliflower or spinach in it, though it comes plain, too. Where we live, there aren’t many Indian restaurants, and the ones here are kind of pricey, so it’s a rare treat to be able to go out for Indian food. Funny enough, we’re actually kind of broke this month since we just bought a used car from a friend, so we turned to our bulk foods like lentils and rice instead of expensive fake meats. And then… our attempt at dahl was born.

Since I was busy baking cookies for a cookie contest, Charlie took the helm on this recipe. And, as usual when Charlie cooks, he estimates a bit more than I do (since he’s not used to writing down exact quantities for a blog, haha), so you might need to adjust these all a tiny bit to taste.

Ingredients: (Dahl)

sesame oil to coat pan
1/2 onion, chopped finely
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon ginger, minced
4 cups vegetable stock
1 cup lentils, soaked in water for 45 minutes
1 1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon corriander
1 teaspoon tumeric
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cayanne
2 small tomatoes, chopped
2 tablespoons lime juice
dash cilantro
salt and black pepper to taste

Directions: (Dahl)

In a medium stock pot, saute the onion, ginger, and garlic in sesame oil until the onions are translucent. Add tomatoes and cook for one minute. While stirring, add the stock and lentils. Add the spices, including the salt and pepper. Cook covered for 20 minutes. Cook uncovered until it reaches desired consistency (we like it less runny). Stir in lime juice. Serve over over spinach rice and/or with naan.

Ingredients: Spinach Rice

4 cups of cooked white or basmati rice
1/2 onion, chopped finely
4 cloves of garlic, microplaned to create a paste
1 tablespoon ginger, microplaned to create a paste
2 tablespoons lemon
2 cups of spinach, finely chiffonaded
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon ground corriander seed
salt to taste

Directions: (Spinach Rice)

Saute the onion in a bit of oil in a large pan. When the onion is translucent, add the garlic and ginger pastes and cook very briefly. Add the spinach, lemon, cumin, and corriander seed, and cook for about a minute. Add the rice and stir. Salt to taste.

Traditional Pumpkin Pie

I should have posted this around Thanksgiving, but of course, it was a busy time. I know that some folks like to have pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, too, so hopefully this will be a handy recipe to have around. It is super easy and really delicious. Not too sweet, as usual, great texture, and lots of flavor. This one is based off the King Arthur Flour Guaranteed Pumpkin Pie recipe with a handful of changes.

Ingredients

1 graham cracker crust (I used the store bought kind)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
3 large eggs, beaten
2 cups (or one 15-ounce can) pumpkin purée.
1 can evaporated milk

Instructions

In a large bowl, combine the brown sugar, flour, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Whisk them together.

In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, pumpkin purée, and evaporated milk.

Slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, mixing thoroughly. (King Arthur actually suggests covering this mixture and refrigerating overnight for better flavor, but I didn’t have time for that.)

Preheat the oven to 400*F.

Pour the mixture into your graham cracker crust.

Bake for 40-50 minutes. Most recipes call for you to take the pie out a bit wobbly in the center, but that has never worked for me. This time, we left it in until it wasn’t wobbly, and it was perfect.

Winter CSA Day Vegetable Tart

As you all know, I’m extremely dedicated to the idea of Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, a way of supporting local farms and getting local, (usually) organic food that’s in season. When our farm share is delivering from June until the end of October, we eat healthier meals with more vegetables, and we cook more instead of going out to eat or getting takeout, since our fridge is already stocked with great veggies to eat.

Our second year with our summer/fall CSA was coming to a close, and we were getting pretty sad about having the other half of the year without our farm-fresh food. I decided to research winter CSAs, and I managed to find one in the city with once-a-month pickups that was reasonably priced and would deliver December through May, meaning we would have nearly year-round CSAs. Although our new pickup for the winter share isn’t quite as convenient, since it’s only once a month, it’s still pretty great.

Our winter farm is Norwich Meadows Farm, and our winter share varies a bit from our summer share. Our summer share includes fresh vegetables, fruit, garlic, and herbs. Obviously, we don’t live in a climate that’s great for growing veggies all year round, so the vegetables we’ll be getting will be greens that are hearty to the cold at the beginning and the end deliveries, as well as storage vegetables like winter squash, onions, and potatoes. This week we also got brussels sprouts, sunchokes, carrots, leeks, and shallots in addition to the aforementioned storage veggies. And perhaps the neatest thing about this farm is that it offers lots of extras like yogurt and canned goods like pickles and heirloom tomato sauce and dilly beans (all made on their farm), and eggs and, if you choose, meat.

We decided to get a meat share since Charlie is omni. The meat raised on the farm is eco-halal. After spending the last 16 or so years of my life primarily as a lacto-ovo vegetarian [originally for animal reasons, now for broader reasons including sustainability], the meat will be just for him, but I’m glad that if he is eating meat, it was slaughtered in a dignified way, and that it was raised in a more sustainable way. There’s a little bit on the farm’s practices here if you’re interested in reading more. I’m also really glad to be getting eggs from a pasture-raised source, since I’ve been really unhappy with the ethics of many eggs that claim to be “cage free.” I’ve pretty much decided that the only real way to know if I’m getting eggs that are ethical is to develop a relationship with the farmer, and I have done that (if you’re in the Bergen County, NJ area, I know a great place to pick up from for a reasonable price!). Meanwhile, I’ve drastically cut down my egg consumption, but when our eggs arrived in our first winter delivery, I decided that a quiche was in order.

When I was in college, quiche was something that my mom always sent with me to keep in the freezer, along with little containers of soup. I ate soup and quiche for lunch many, many times a week, from freezer to microwave. Quiche freezes so well and is filling and delicious, so I like to keep some in the freezer for when I’m not feeling well and Charlie is too tired to cook. To make things a little larger, I made this in my tart pan, so technically, I suppose it’s a tart… but it’s really just a quiche recipe.

The thing I love about quiche is that you can put pretty much anything into it. I like to put potatoes in so that it’s a little more filling, and something green so it’s a bit more healthy. Other than that… whatever happens to be in the fridge goes in there!

Ingredients

1 1/2 broccoli florets, chopped
1 small zucchini, chopped
1 big handful of spinach
1 small sunchoke, peeled and chopped
2 green onions, chopped
4 oz edam cheese, shredded or cut into strips
4 oz shredded jack/cheddar mix
3 eggs
1 cup whole milk
salt
pepper
herbs (I tossed in some fresh parsley from our now-indoor herb garden)
pie crust (I cheated and used a store bought one since I was doing a lot that day)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350*F.

Press the pie crust into the tart pan.

Arrange the vegetables, herbs, and edam cheese in the crust. Try to make sure that they are evenly distributed.

In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and milk together. Add salt and pepper.

Pour the egg mixture into the crust over the vegetables. Top with the remaining shredded cheese.

Bake on a baking sheet in case of any drips or leaks! Bake at 350 for 40 minutes or until it is no longer wobbly in the center.

Mom’s Sweet Potato Pie

It’s December! And what does that mean? I have absolutely no excuse to avoid posting on my cooking blog. (Ok, so I have a few excuses – I’m still about 10-15k from finishing my novel for NaNoWriMo, even though I technically “won,” and I’ve been having a particularly nasty flare of my rheumatoid arthritis lately, leaving me pretty wiped out.) Excuses aside, there is definitely some exciting stuff brewing around here, like the arrival of my stuff from CSNStores.com!

The first thing I want to share with you is my awesome sweet potato pie recipe, as well as reveal one of the things I chose to review that we talked about in this post.

The first thing that arrived was perfect for use in this recipe. It was a potato masher from OXO!

I absolutely love OXO products, and I’m so glad that CSN Stores carry them. OXO was actually started by a guy whose wife had arthritis in her hands, and the kitchen tools they make are designed so you can grip them easier. This masher has a really comfy handle, and it is super sturdy. I have no doubt that I’ll have this in my kitchen for a long time. The handle might be a tiny bit short if you’ve got a really steamy pot, but all in all, I am super pleased. Shopping with CSN was easy (except for deciding what to get…) and two out of the three items I ordered arrived with lightning speed.

Hmmm…. now aren’t you curious to know what the other two items were? More recipes will be coming soon with the reveal. For now, check out this awesome masher action:

Disclosure: I was given this product by CSN Stores in exchange for writing this review, though this is my otherwise unpaid, unbiased opinion.

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled programming. As a kid, I was never into sweet potato pie, but every year at Thanksgiving and sometimes at Christmas, my mom makes a sweet potato pie. She mashes up sweet potatoes with some brown sugar and butter, dumps it all into a graham cracker pie crust, and tops it with pecans. In the past couple of years, I’ve started to get more into various types of veggies like beautiful acorn squash and gorgeous yams, and the sweet potato pie really started to grow on me! At Thanksgiving this year, my immune system was particularly crummy from having just taken my RA medicine two days before, so I really wasn’t up for seeing the entire extended family (and all of the germs they might have), so we kept it low-key. I did have a serious hankering for my mom’s sweet potato pie, though, so we whipped up a slightly dressier version of our own.

Since I wasn’t sure exactly how many of the four of us at dinner would be interested in the sweet potato pie, I opted to make adorable little mini pies! This allowed me to customize them, too, since I actually prefer walnuts over pecans, and since one of the diners is diabetic and had to avoid the sweetness of the marshmallow topping. And if you’ve got vegan dinner guests, this recipe is easy to adapt. Many graham cracker crusts are actually vegan – or you can easily make one yourself. Natural foods stores also carry vegan marshmallows, which can be snipped apart with kitchen scissors to trim them down to the appropriate size for these tiny treats.

As for my thought that we might have too much… I think these were gone by the end of the night. I had to have my brother bring reinforcements of my mom’s leftover sweet potato pie when he came to visit the next day.

Ingredients

3 large yams/sweet potatoes
6 mini graham cracker crusts
3 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons Earth Balance (or butter)
pinch of salt (more if you used unsalted butter)
pecans or walnuts for topping
mini marshmallows for topping (optional)

Directions

Wash your sweet potatoes. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Boil the sweet potatoes (skins on!) until soft (probably about 30-40 minutes, depending on their size – test with a fork).

Remove the sweet potatoes from the water and put them on a cutting board to cool. Carefully remove the skins with a paring knife, or just grab them with a potholder and the skin should slide right off.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Mash the Earth Balance or butter, brown sugar, salt, and sweet potatoes with your awesome potato masher. (Oh, you don’t have an awesome potato masher? You can get one here.)

Divide the sweet potatoes between the mini graham cracker crusts. You’ll want to heap the sweet potatoes up and out of the crusts. Decorate with nuts and marshmallows to your liking. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes, or until your nuts and marshmallows are nice and toasted.