Kinda Blog Famous

Hello, faithful readers. There’s literally too much to write – we’re back from our honeymoon in India and Thailand, we ate a pile of amazing food, discovered new dishes to figure out at home, had incredible experiences and made it back safe and sound. We’re still sifting through it all, figuring out what it all was and meant.

And somewhere in the middle of that, we got word that our wedding was going to be featured on a popular wedding blog. You see, our photographer, Rosetta Li, chose to submit her photos to a number of blogs for potential showcasing (with our permission, of course) including one called Style Me Pretty. Apparently this is a Very Important Wedding Blog (I don’t follow these things) because Anuja immediately went giddy when the email arrived telling us we had been chosen. We were sitting on a king sized bed in Chiang Mai when the blog went live, dripping with sweat from a humid night eating banana roti and wandering the streets on the Best Honeymoon Ever.

This is the blog entry.

As you can imagine, we were pretty happy with how the photos came out. We had a lot of great advice from our planner regarding vendors, and were steered towards Rosetta to handle photography. I was immediately drawn to her work as she had a few sets of highly colourful images in her portfolio – very different from the really trendy, washed-out, faux-vintage pastel look that all the hipster weddings seem to be going for these days. Our wedding was all about colour and gold and shiny things. We needed a photographer who “got” that, and she nailed it 100%. As a designer myself, I was pretty picky about this stuff (I designed all the invitations and stationary stuff myself, besides baking the macarons) and I can say I am completely satisfied with her work on all levels.

Anyway, this post is completely self-serving. I apologize. I’ve been thinking I will include more non-recipe posts in the future. Like, I can talk about this hand-crank pasta machine we just bought, and how awesome it is (but I’ve vowed to keep all my recipes on this site non-Western, so… problem), or how I made a dinner for my friends using only ingredients that are native to the Americas, pre-Columbus. Bison, blueberry, juniper and mushroom stew, with a succotash of corn, butternut squash, kidney beans and smoked chili pepper topped with avocado, roasted zucchini and fried maple cornbread were on the menu. This was for a Dungeons and Dragons night. Don’t ask. I’ve said too much already…

Plus, I’ll have travelogues. Everyone loves hearing people brag about their vacations, don’t they? I’ll restrict mine to mostly food, cuz there was a LOT of that. So much to eat… so much to write…

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

If someone were to wander onto this site a week ago, they’d probably be like, “oh, dead blog”. And they would be mostly right.

Except they’re wrong. As of right now. WRONG. You see, things have been absolutely bonkers at home for the past year. So busy. Almost too busy to cook.  And what could possibly be so important as to avoid updating a simple food blog? Oh, I don’t knowwwww… how about…

GETTING MARRIED?!??!?!?

Macaron Lab 3

Cookie: Chocolate Hazelnut

Cookie Recipe: Laduree Sucre cookbook recipe for basic macarons

Baking Details: my oven at 300 F for 14-15 minutes, sheets on middle rack

Filling: Chocolate Hazelnut Ganache (1/4 cup 18% cream, 2 oz bittersweet chocolate, and around 2 tbsp of drained hazelnut butter)

Environment: April 22nd, afternoon, dry

Macaron Lab 2

Cookie: White Chocolate, Cardamom, Kewra Water

Cookie Recipe: Laduree Sucre cookbook recipe for basic macarons

Baking Details: my oven at 300 F for 15-16 minutes

Filling: white chocolate ganache (4 oz white chocolate to 1/4 cup 18% cream) + 1 tsp kewra water, 1/2 tsp cardamom powder

Environment: February 12th, afternoon, dry as dust, 1 C

Dal Makhani

I’ve always thought this was one of the worst-looking food dishes I’ve ever seen. Brownish-red slop with lumps in it. Totally awful. Then I tasted it.

That was, oh, 5 years ago, give or take. I’ve realized since then that your perception of food’s appearance is highly dependent on your experience with and enjoyment of the flavour. Now I see the same slop and think about how marvelous the deeper red colours are, how rich it looks with cream floating on the top. I understand now how black gram’s luxuriously creamy texture is one of the finest selling points of this dish.

Fresh Coconut and Shrimp Curry

You could subtitle this post “Or, a recipe that uses all that fresh coconut meat you just produced, because you followed my previous post’s instructions like the awesome person that you are.” Yes, it’s a shrimp curry that features fresh coconut. This is loosely inspired by South Indian spices and ingredients, and requires a medium amount of work because, hell, I like doing work in my kitchen. Why do you have to have everything done so fast?

How to Crack a Coconut (Without Hurting Yourself)

So, let’s say you have a coconut. Maybe you bought it, maybe it was a gift. Maybe you smuggled it out of a tropical island on a speedboat. Doesn’t matter – you’ve got this coconut, and it’s hard as hell. You want to get inside it, and get into that creamy coconut heaven but you just. Can’t. Crack. This. Damn.

Ethakka Appam

There are actually dozens of recipes for this snack online, with few variations from one to another. I suppose, then, it’s not essential to write my own, but damn it if these aren’t one of the tastiest mid-day snacks ever. I have to write about them. More importantly, I have some information to add about plantains.

WTF is Asafoetida?

Alternate names: asafetida, devil’s dung, stinking gum, hing (India)

The first thing you need to know about asafoetida is that foetida is Latin for “stinking” or “ill-smelling” (the word “fetid” comes from the Latin). Asafoetida stinks. Like sulphur. It’s not pleasant.

Dal Tadka

About 3 years ago, I purchased a large bag of dried chana dal from Loblaws, having no idea what chana dal was, or what to do with it. What I did know was “lentils are healthy and I should be eating some lentils”. So I took this bag home and tried out a recipe from an Indian cookbook I had.

It turned out mostly terrible. Not only have I learned that the cookbook in question routinely calls for 50% of the salt needed to make anything taste good, the preparation steps were vague about how to cook the lentils themselves. Over the next few years, I tried the dish a few more times with mixed results – the lentils were too hard, not seasoned well, too dry, etc. Of course, it didn’t help that I had never actually eaten dal before. All I had was a picture of something that looked pretty good, and some brief descriptions of the finished product. I have this problem often.

Paneer Jalfrezi

We were out looking at possible wedding venues a few months ago, and were at what has turned out to be our choice location: The Sheraton Parkview. Like many venues, they deal with The Host, a popular Indian caterer in the Toronto area and, as luck would have it, The Host has a restaurant location directly below the Sheraton in an underground mall. A perfect chance to “test” some wedding menu options!

One of our meal picks was a tawa paneer dish – paneer pan-fried with peppers and onion. It was good, and seemed simple enough to make at home. I gave it a few whirls and had quality results each time (it also works well with mushrooms) but I got the idea to build a sauce base for it as well, thinking I was inventing a brand new curry. I wasn’t – what I was actually doing is making a jalfrezi-style curry.

Macaron Lab 1

Cookie: Rose Water and White Chocolate

Cookie Recipe: tant au tant mixture, 1+ tsp neon pink colour, added pinch of salt to meringue, otherwise basic recipe

Baking Details: my oven at 360 F (need to test heat with oven thermometer) for 10 minutes

Filling: white chocolate ganache (4 oz white chocolate to 3/8 cup 18% cream) + 1/2 tsp organic rose water, steeped cream with 3 green cardamom pods

Environment: July 10th, 10 pm, very humid, 30 C

The Macaron Challenge of 2012

Me and my bright ideas.

I’m getting married next year in June, and we’re in the planning phase – booking a venue, arranging vendors and the like. One thing we have to consider are “guest favours”, because it is not, apparently, good enough to offer guests 5 hours of open bar service, entertainment and a great meal – you also have to give them a take-away trinket worth a few percent of the cost of the rest of the evening. Why? I do not know, but you do.

Early in the Spring, we did a small tour of Toronto-made macarons, and blogged about it here. I’ve had a growing fascination with the cookies since I first tried them in Paris last summer. Lemon macarons in particular. I love them. Anuja enjoys them enough to suggest we offer them as our “guest favour”. We canvassed our favourite bakeries and got some price estimates and had it in our mind to go ahead with this plan, at a cost of about 4-5 dollars per favour. Total: approx. $1,600. Sheesh. That would provide 2 cookies in plastic packaging, with a tag attached (that we would make ourselves), for about 300-350 people. Pricey, yeah? Yeah.

Vegetable Biryani

This recipe is going to get a bit ridiculous. Fair warning. I was heading out into the Ontario farmlands with my two friends, Jim and Andrew, to record a rock and roll album at Chalet Studio, and since we were staying overnight, we needed to bring food. One problem: Jim is a stubborn vegan, and Andrew leans vegetarian (or at least, he did) so I built a hybrid vegan biryani out of recipe ideas for 3 or 4 vegetable curry and rice dishes. The end result was pretty great: a spicy-hot tomato curry infused into richly flavoured baked rice, with large pieces of potato, cauliflower, and carrot mixed throughout. The whole thing was topped with fried cashews and raisins, and lidded with phyllo pastry (egg-free, naturally).

Bhatoora

Edit: I’ve modified this recipe as of May 9th, 2011. The recipe and directions have changed. Deal with it. This one is better, and simpler.

As I mentioned in my Kheema post, the first time I had bhatoora/bhatura was in an Indian shop in Singapore. Before then I had tasted several kinds of naan. Naan is pretty popular now in North America and is manufactured by companies like President’s Choice and Dempster’s (don’t ever buy these if you’re craving Indian breads – they probably won’t taste the way you want them to) but India offers many kinds of breads that aren’t normally offered at buffet lines (which was, at the time, the only place I had ever had naan) and are not available commercially in most Western supermarkets including bhatoora, a puffy, deep-fried bread served often with chana masala (spiced chickpeas).

Shanghai Fried Noodles

Most of my Chinese food consumption happens at home (or in Scarborough). This dish has been a lunch mainstay in my family for years. The whole dish is cooked pretty quickly, but like with most Chinese dishes, there is a bit of prep that needs to be done before you fire up the stove. It’s simple, yet hearty and satisfying, and definitely not as oily as something you’d find in a mall food court.

This recipe is more of an outline rather than something set in stone. Feel free to swap the pork with other meat like chicken or beef, and while I’m only using napa here, you could also put some onions in to give it a little more flavour. Hell, put some other vegetables in there too if you want. However, the mildness of the napa works well with the other elements of the dish without complicating it too much.

Lastly, this recipe uses both light and dark soya sauce. This is important to point out because, unlike light soya sauce, which is salty, the dark soya is sweet. When combined, both sauces impart a more robust flavour onto the noodles. When it comes to eating, I like to pour a little bit of Scotch Bonnet hot sauce over the noodles for a bit of a sharp kick. If you’re not into spicy flavours you can leave it out.

A Fresh Start

If you’ve visited in the past, then you know this site has recently undergone a facelift. I chose a new skin for the blog – one that allows me to customize the graphics a lot more than the previous minimal design. I haven’t necessarily settled on any particular design yet, so I expect to be phasing in new images as I get them (I’m not crazy enough to cook food just for photographing – not yet anyway). As I work through some new recipes, I’ll also be revisiting some of the other site content as well.

In other news, my brother’s wife gave birth to twins – two girls – and I got engaged to my fabulous girlfriend – now fiancee – Anuja. It’s been a very busy 7 days. We’ve been eating out a lot as a consequence, so I haven’t been writing any recipes lately, except for bread pudding, but that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, here’s to new beginnings. 🙂

Cremini Mushroom and Eggplant Curry

Cremini Mushroom and Eggplant Curry

This recipe is not really based on anything specifically traditional. Mushrooms are a fairly new addition to Indian cuisine, after all, so there’s not much history to speak of (and many restaurants don’t serve them). But, my girlfriend loves both mushrooms and eggplant, so there’s motivation to create right there. Plus, we’ve been looking for ways to eat a bit lighter (with more vegetables) lately, and this definitely fits the bill.

Rice Porridge

Rice Porridge

Years back, on my trip to Thailand, I was taking an overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. It was a long enough trip for them to include dinner and breakfast in the ticket price. It was an interesting experience without even mentioning the food; the sleeper accommodations featured two seats that transformed (through your own labour) into a bunk with retractable opaque screens and your neighbours placed literally 5-6 feet away behind their own screen, across the aisle. I’m not exactly a luxury traveler and I wasn’t expecting much, but I’ll admit it was a little disconcerting to know I was changing my underwear in such a vulnerable situation. Still more disconcerting was the train staff’s wake-up call tactic of sticking their heads into your compartment without knocking (or in this case, tapping on the fabric screen?), yelling “Good morning! Time for breakfast!” in Thai-accented English with a huge smile. I’m a morning person, but please.

Simple Chicken Stock

This is a Chinese-inspired chicken stock; something a bit different from Western chicken stock and employing flavours that compliment Asian and Southeast Asian foods. A lot of Asian recipes will ask for chicken stock (Thai curries, or noodle dishes, etc) and while basic Western stock will work OK, this version will add a nice subtle touch of Asian influence. Why not?