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.

Cardamom Lime Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

Yes, I admit it. I bake my own birthday cakes. (I should probably mention that I turned 26 this year, not 6, right?)

For some reason everyone always has a problem with this right up until they lift their forks up to their mouths, and then… well, then they sigh a little, and admit, “You’re right, you’re a baker, no one else here could have made this,” or some similar praise that puts me up on a pedestal.

I’m not a huge cake eater. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I prefer ice cream above all other sweets, but I’d take a good cookie over cake. But, birthdays are birthdays, and for birthdays, there is cake. (If you’re wondering about my ridiculous decorations… I felt weird telling myself “Happy Birthday!” so instead I declared, “I Was Born!”)

My favorite cake is usually the classic yellow cake with chocolate frosting. When I go to a cupcake shop, like Billy’s Bakery on 9th Ave, that’s what I’ll get, perfectly topped with just a few adorable sprinkles. I wanted to make something nostalgic, but also something a bit more refined, something that showcased how I’d grown in the way that I use flavors. I started thinking about cardamom, with just a bit of lime zest… and finally a chocolate cream cheese frosting to match the tang of the lime.

I don’t bake regular old cakes very frequently, and I still don’t have a go-to recipe for yellow cake. I’ve tried Wilton’s, I’ve tried Betty Crocker’s, I’ve tried some random chick from the internet’s. This time, I tried the “Fluffy Yellow Cake” from America’s Test Kitchen. It was decent, but still not exactly what I was looking for, and it would have been far too sweet had I not (as always) reduced the sugar.

Another thing to note about me is that I almost never bake cakes that require separating eggs. It usually ends up being wasteful around here, but since I had plans for a Lemon Blueberry Chiffon Cake with a Lavender Glaze, my eggs actually worked out!

Cardamom Lime Cake – Ingredients

2 1/2 cups cake flour, plus extra for dusting pans
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon table salt
1 cup sugar
10 tablespoons unsalted butter , melted and cooled slightly
1 cup milk, room temperature
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons cardamom
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon lime zest
6 large egg yolks, room temperature
3 large egg whites, room temperature

Cardamom Lime Cake – Directions

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a giant round cake pan if you’re going to make the ridiculous thing that I did, otherwise, this will make two 9″ pans. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar together in large bowl. In medium bowl, whisk together melted butter, milk, oil, vanilla, and yolks.

In clean bowl of stand mixer fitted with whisk attachment, beat egg whites at medium-high speed until foamy, about 30 seconds. Continue to beat until stiff peaks just form, 30 to 60 seconds (whites should hold peak but mixture should appear moist). Transfer to bowl and set aside.

Add flour mixture to now-empty mixing bowl fitted with whisk attachment. With mixer running at low speed, gradually pour in butter mixture and mix until almost incorporated (a few streaks of dry flour will remain), about 15 seconds. Stop mixer and scrape whisk and sides of bowl. Return mixer to medium-low speed and beat until smooth and fully incorporated, 10 to 15 seconds.

Using rubber spatula, stir 1/3 of whites into batter to lighten, then add remaining whites and gently fold into batter until no white streaks remain. Divide batter evenly between prepared cake pans. Lightly tap pans against counter 2 or 3 times to dislodge any large air bubbles.

Bake until cake layers begin to pull away from sides of pans and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, 20 to 22 minutes. Cool cakes in pans on wire rack for 10 minutes. Loosen cakes from sides of pans with small knife, then invert onto greased wire rack. Invert cakes again and cool completely on rack, about 1 1/2 hours.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting – Ingredients

Well, Bo woke up before I did on the day of the party, so he got started on the frosting. I can’t be sure exactly what ratios were used, only that it was based off of my Maple Cream Cheese Frosting recipe that he found on here, haha, and that when I did wake up, I kept saying, “I want a darker chocolate.”

So, I’m guessing that it was something like…

1 stick unsalted butter
8 oz cream cheese
1/2-3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 cup confectioners sugar

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting – Directions

Make someone else get up earlier than you on the day of your party. Have them dump all the ingredients in the stand mixer and have at it until smooth. If desired, add more confectioners sugar or more cocoa powder. Refrigerate for 30 minutes before frosting.

Lime Bar Pie

It’s been two weeks since the pie-eating contest, so any remnants that you may have smuggled home are long gone, unless you were smart enough to pop a slice into your freezer for a delicious treat in the future. For most people, though, the pie coma has worn off, the nausea from inhaling the equivalent of several slices of pie at once has passed, and, well… you’re kinda craving some pie again.

Thankfully, friends, we’ve been renovating at my place of work, so my normal workload has been reduced significantly. Hell, I couldn’t even hear the phone ringing over the jackhammers at one point yesterday, so, while I had to be in the building, I certainly had a bit of time to get these pie recipes all sussed out, and they should appear in dribs and drabs in the next few days.

First, let’s get down to the Lime Bar Pie. Our recent guest baker, Jack, “does not eat of the cooked fruit,” so we had to come up with some kind of alternative for the competition. Charlie and I had agreed that all of the pies had to be double-crusted to ensure fairness, so something like a meringue was out. We copied my lemon bar recipe, except with lime, except into a pie crust, with a few alterations. In our haste of frantic pie-baking, we neglected to take some glamour shots of a few of the pies, but I thought these pictures of the aftermath of the contest would work just as well. Today’s photo is by one of our guests, Jordan Cooper.

I made one big lime pie just for eating, and it didn’t have a double crust. You can make yours double or single, or even just make the lime filling to top the crust from the London Ladies Lemon Bars recipe.

You may want to double this recipe. One of our guests, Lawrence, rang me a day or two after the contest. I’d sent home a piece of lime pie with him, and he left me a voicemail saying, “I was wondering if there was any of that lime pie left because I gave my piece to [his friend] Nick… and it was [pause] so good.”

Edit: I almost forgot that I meant to give special thanks to Bo Randall, who zested and juiced alllllll of the limes for this pie. When we were making our Epic Brunch the other day and he was grating sweet potatoes, he grumbled playfully, “I feel like I’m zesting limes all over again!” <3

Ingredients

1 pastry for single-crust pie (I used Charlie’s Consistent Win Pie Crust) or 1/4 the crust from London Ladies Lemon Bars
2 eggs
1 cup white sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour, maybe another tablespoon or two
3/4 cup limes juice, with pulp
Zest of 3 or so limes
confectioners sugar for dusting

Directions

Preheat oven to 375.

Roll out pie dough for bottom crust and place in pie pan. Trim edges.

In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, white sugar, flour, limes, and zest. Taste mixture to ensure that it is not too tart. If needed, add more sugar.

Pour lime mixture into pie pan. Put aluminum foil around the edges of the pie crust so that it doesn’t burn. Remove the foil a few minutes before taking it out of the oven.

Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until the pie crust is golden brown and the lime filling has set.

Let cool, and dust with confectioner’s sugar immediately before serving.

Honeydew Lime Sorbet (Minus the Ice Cream Maker)

Written a night or two ago.

Tonight we are desperately clinging to the last days of summer. Sure, it’s still hot out, but Charlie goes back to school in a matter of days, and up here in the downstate-of-upstate New York, some of the trees are already starting to look suspiciously like fall.

Don’t get me wrong. I love autumn. I love apple picking, and crisp air and sweatshirts, and pumpkin everything, but there’s still a sadness that lingers when the summer disappears.

That’s why we’ve got to capture it, and the way we can do that, on these last hot and humid days, is with sorbet.

Charlie and I don’t have an ice cream maker, so not only is the recipe new, but the technique is experimental. I don’t mean that we just don’t have one of those fancy electric churning things, I also mean that we don’t have a hand-cranking setup like the one they had at camp when I was a kid (mmmm, vanilla ice cream with wild blueberries for the win!).

I’ve heard on some parts of the internet that this technique yields “satisfactory” results, but others seem to think it’s A-OK. With the delicious flavor combination, I don’t think we’ll care if we end up getting honeydew lime ice cubes that we put in glasses of seltzer or have to smash up with a hammer in a ziploc bag in order to consume.

We picked up a honeydew melon on Sunday and expected to eat it with our Epic Brunch, but there was just too much other delicious going on for us to cut into it. This afternoon, I finally did, and I found a sweet, falling-apart-in-your-mouth-from-ripeness piece of fruit. It only took me a matter of seconds, and the same for Charlie when I mentioned that I’d cut into it, to recall the amazing Italian ice I’d had at Clyde’s on Maywood Ave right near the Maywood, NJ train station. The honeydew Italian ice wasn’t too sweet, tasted fresh, and was a great texture. It was marvelously layered with soft serve vanilla ice cream. It’s understandable, then, why we’d want to have something similar in our mouths again without driving 30+ minutes to retrieve it.

Ingredients

About 2 1/2-3 cups of ripe honeydew
1/4 cup sugar
1 lime (zest and juice)
1 tablespoon water

Directions

I wanted the honeydew to be the feature flavor in this sorbet, and it’s rather delicate, so I went easy on the amount of lime I used. Feel free to adjust the ratios.

I’ve gone ahead and simplified this recipe by using my stand mixer, but if you don’t have one, you can use a standard metal bowl and a fork for more of a granita texture, or a hand mixer for a smoother texture. Put your stand mixer bowl (or your metal bowl) in the freezer for a few minutes before getting started.

Puree the honeydew in a food processor. If you have an ice cream maker, you may want to save a few small chunks to toss in at the end, but throw it all in there if you want it to be totally smooth.

*If you are fortunate enough to have an ice cream maker, add about 2 tablespoons of vodka or another hard alcohol to your mixture. It will help the sorbet from freezing into one solid block.

Mix the pureed honeydew, sugar, lime juice and zest, and water in the cold freezer bowl until the sugar is dissolved.

Place the bowl in the freezer for about 40 minutes or until the mixture has frozen about two inches in from the edge of the bowl. Remove the bowl from the freezer, mix it on low for 1-2 minutes or until the crystals have been disturbed, and then return to the freezer. I did this process maybe 3 or 4 times. The last time, the entire top of the mixture had frozen over, and I mixed it one more time, poured it into a tupperware, and left it in the freezer overnight.

In the morning, I let it sit on the counter for a few minutes, then was able to scoop it with a metal ice cream scoop. It was more of a snowy texture than a bona fide sorbet, but it was delicious and pretty awesome considering we didn’t have an ice cream maker. Very refreshing!

All Over Your Face 2009

Yesterday, we held the first annual “All Over Your Face” hands-free pie-eating contest and BBQ. I mention this here because, well, it’s ridiculous, and because over the next few days, you’re going to see a lot of recipes related to the contest. The “competition sized pies” were seven inches and each had a double crust. They came in blueberry, strawberry, apple, peach, and lime (for our friend, Jack, who “does not eat of the cooked fruit” – you may remember zir from the Mocha Pillow Cookies recipe). There also obviously had to be plenty of pies just for eating, too.

The thing is, though, that Charlie and I baked all the pies from scratch. We figured it would be cheaper, more delicious, more fun, and so on and so forth. Over the course of seven days, despite my recent back problems (two herniated discs), we managed to make twenty 7″ pies and five full sized pies. We had a little help here and there, but mostly, Charlie made the crusts and I made the fillings. That includes peeling about six pounds of apples, hulling four pounds of strawberries, peeling nine pounds of peaches, and zesting and juicing ten limes.

We also made macaroni salad, gluten-free pasta salad, mini cupcakes, a watermelon keg, and a cucumber tomato salad, so, there will be recipes galore related to this contest.

For now, please enjoy a few pictures of the contest. Charlie’s going to make a video as soon as everyone sends in their footage.

The winning pie.

That’s my partner, Charlie. He almost edged out Mike for third place, but Mike took it.

Fortunato is looking up in awe at Joseph, who won the contest, seated to his left.

Our first, second, and third place winners, after the awards ceremony. Joseph, Micah, and our local Councilman, Mike.

These photos, I believe, were taken by our lovely friend, Gina R Snape.

Watermelon Keg and Punch Recipe

We saw the idea for this in Food Network magazine a few months ago and decided that we absolutely had to make it happen. We procured a plastic tap, added a bit of tubing to make it a little more secure, and made it happen! Warning: This is really, really messy. I got watermelon juice all over the kitchen trying to do this.

Tools

Spigot
Sharp Knife
Sturdy bowl or other means of supporting the watermelon
Pastry blender or potato masher
Strainer
Toothpicks

Ingredients

1 large watermelon
1 L bottle Mount Gay Rum (do yourself a favor and don’t use Bacardi – use something nicer)
1 package fresh mint leaves, stems removed
6 limes
lime juice to taste
lemon juice to taste
ice

This is what the drink mix looked like just before adding the rum, I believe…

Directions

The first thing you’re going to need to do is hollow out the fucking watermelon. It’s a task. Make sure you allow enough time for it. Take a sharp paring knife and slice the top of the watermelon off at an inward angle, like when you’re carving a pumpkin. Have a big bowl handy and a metal spoon and scrape the watermelon out until you’re down to the rind. See the video link for a demonstration. It’s less of a two person procedure than it looks like – I’ve just got two herniated discs and can’t lift anything.

So, once you’ve scraped out your watermelon, cover the top with plastic and put it in the fridge. Take a pastry blender, potato masher, or a big fork and mash up the watermelon as best you can. You’re basically juicing it. Take another bowl and put a strainer on top of it, preferably with fairly big holes, but not big enough for the seeds to fit through. Pass your squished up watermelon through the strainer, and you’ll get tons and tons of bright pink watermelon juice. If you’re not getting very much, continue to mash the pieces of watermelon.

Set aside the juice in a container that is not the watermelon. You can see that there’s a lot of juice. Since we were making lime pies, we had about 10 limes that we’d already juiced and zested but that still could contribute flavor to our cocktail. We threw them into the watermelon juice and let them sit there for the duration. What you can do is cut the limes in half, (pick out any obvious seeds), give them a good squeeze, and toss them in. They’ll bob around and flavor your drink.

Throw in the mint, then stir in some lemon and lime juice. Pour in the bottle of rum, then taste it, and if you want, add more lemon or lime. Refrigerate until serving.

When you’re ready, set the watermelon in its base. Use a sharp knife to poke a hole, close to the bottom of the watermelon, for the spigot. Insert the spigot snuggly. You’re now ready to fill the watermelon!

I wasn’t sure exactly how much the watermelon would hold, so I alternated a cup of ice, then a cup of punch until I was about halfway up, and then added some more punch. Since we didn’t want the fruit to just be rotting in the sun, we made sure to put a lot of ice inside. It kept the watermelon very cold. We left about half the punch inside the house to refill the watermelon with later.

I secured the lid of the watermelon to the top with two toothpicks, then we carefully carried it outside. Everyone loved it!