curry for dinner (plus a sunrise)

I turned to a recipe yesterday that I hadn't made in a while.  In truth, I don't even remember where I have the recipe written down.  At this point, I'm just going off recollections of things and winging it when I make the dish.  It's a long time favourite of mine, though:  eggplant and green pea curry. 

Tasty stuff.  A mound of rice, a dollop of yogurt, and it's a satisfying vegetarian dinner.  Take away the yogurt, and Bob's your uncle:  vegan!  Happy to have returned to this one again and make it for Van.

In other news (and thanks to Van for the photo), I am gay as a French horn and a real ham at times.

It's Friday, and Conrad comes home tonight.  Alas, we'll be down in Santa Monica for dinner and a concert (and I hope to blog those) and unable to pick him up.  It will be good to have him home, though.  It's an easy Friday so far, working away on program review today, a nice walk under my belt shortly after sunrise this morning.  And oh, a pretty sunrise through the oaks trees!

Happy weekend!

cleanse, day 11

I am sure that there is little that a Moroccan would recognize or consider authentic about this one-dish meal, but the inspiration for it does come from that corner of the world somewhat. Not that I've ever been to Morocco - ah, to have gone to World Masters there in 1998... - but it does draw on the recollection of a vegetarian couscous I ate in London in 1994 and, more directly, on a recent browse through a Paula Wolfert cookbook. Our meal was a stew of chickpeas, cauliflower, carrots, and rutabaga with Moroccan spices, almonds, and apricots.



I was working at home Thursday, so after lunch I was able to get this cooking fairly easily and let it gently simmer a good while until the vegetables were tender. Here's the outline of the dish:

I sauteed a mix of paprika, true cinnamon stick, saffron, cumin, salt, and pepper to remove some of the rawness of the spices. To this I added diced white onion, then some slivered almonds and sliced unsulphured dried apricot. Next came the chickpeas and large chunks of cauliflower, carrot, and rutabaga. These were coated in the spice mix, then I added a can of diced tomato and some water. I brought the mix to a low boil then reduced to a low simmer, covered, and ignored for a while. Every do often I'd come back and stir and bit, but that was about it. The sauce picked up real sweetness from the apricots, so close to serving, I adjusted the seasoning with salt and pepper. The crowning touch was a bit of fresh cilantro chopped up and sprinkled on top of the bowls of stew.

It made for good leftovers for lunch on Friday, and there's enough left for one more lunch this weekend some time.

cleanse, day 9

It may not come as a surprise to people, but I spend a lot of time thinking about food. There was I, swimming a good 3.5 miles this morning, and keeping me company were thoughts of what to make for dinner. Throughout the day I thought of it from time to time, and on the bus ride home, I was still undecided. All I knew was I wanted to use what I had in the fridge, not buy more stuff.

Well, mission accomplished. A few disparate ideas pulled together, and I ended up serving us a fairly simple meal of four things that worked well together, or so I thought.



I got home and set to work. A can of cannelini beans, opened and drained. Four large garlic cloves, skins on, charred on each side in a hot, dry pan. Rosemary chopped. Put it all in a food processor, and a smooth puree was ready to anchor the plate.

I had some nice little grape tomatoes, so I tossed them with a little olive oil and salt, put them in a pie dish, and let them rest a bit in the toaster oven. Once they'd hit a certain point, I turned down the heat a good bit so as not to char them.

Half a cauliflower and a shallot went into a pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper to caramelize lightly.

I washed a bunch of red chard, de-stemmed it, and tore it into large pieces. Close to time for plating, I put the still-wet chard into a hot pan and covered it with the lid to steam to tenderness.

I think the flavours worked well together. I also liked the variety on the plate and that I didn't resort to a curry or some vaguely East Asian stir-fry. We ate, pleasurably, and watched an episode of Coupling. When the dinner was done, I had a nice ripe mango for us to share. And so the cleanse continues....

vegan dinners in Philadelphia

Pre-cleanse, there I was in Philadelphia for conference, rooming with Martin and dining out with him. It was almost as if the cleanse had started early. Smack me if I run on too much about the cleanse, by the way. Anyway, two nights last week I enjoyed a couple of meals that I might aspire to while cooking at home. Give me some good produce and let me see what I can do.

Thursday night we dropped by a casual social for our fellow gays then headed over to Mi Lah. I found it through a quick Open Table search, and it turned out to be a good choice. When we arrived and were seated, and after I got back to the table from washing my hands, I found Martin chatting with the man at the next table. They'd crossed paths earlier that day at a conference session, it seems, and we ended up pushing tables together, enjoying food (until the guy, Jeff, left), and talking conference stuff. Good conversation throughout the evening. Oh, and BYO! Always a nice thing.

Mi Lah was interesting. The name suggested Asian cuisine, and the staff appeared to be Asian, too (Chinese? I regret not knowing better). The food, however, ranged about globally. There were a number of tasty-sounding options on the occasionally comically-spelled menu (cauliflower stake? dinner for Buffy?), and picking was not easy.

Appetizers: yucca tarts for Martin and sweet potato "pattie" for me. Substantial appetizers, and tasty.

Entrees: grilled seitan for Martin and African peanut stew for me. I couldn't finish the large portion, though it wasn't for lack of enjoyment.

We finished the wine, declined dessert, and headed back to the comfort of the hotel for a good night of sleep.

The next night was a more refined meal at a restaurant Martin had found out about, Horizons. We sat upstairs, Martin enjoyed a cocktail and I, a glass of wine. A tough menu - I wanted everything. Truly. Not a hint of meat or fish or cheese, but goodness it all sounded good. As much as I liked Mi Lah, Horizons was a better choice still.

Appetizers:
Martin's ramen bowl with grilled baby bok choy, pickled shiitakes, menma, pho broth.

My salt-roasted golden beets served chilled with smoked tofu, avocado, capers, house baked pumpernickel, cucumber dill sauce.

Entrees:
Martin's Pacific Rim grilled tofu with spicy gochujang, edamame pureé, royal trumpets, yu choy, smoked miso dashi.

My cauliflower and smoked eggplant braciole with roasted olives, english peas, grilled garbanzos, sicilian salsa verde.

Again we declined dessert, though given the sophistication of the two courses we ate, I am curious to know what the desserts would have been like. Perhaps another visit to Philadelphia. Contented, we enjoyed the cool night walk back to the hotel.

cleanse, day 2

Dinner number two on the cleanse, and I learned afterward from MG that I should have gone with brown basmati instead of white. Ah well, no sense making a fuss over things. In principle, it was a meal to meet the intention of the cleanse.

I learned this recipe at the restaurant years back from Megan. It actually makes a lovely side dish for lamb, I find, and perhaps for some chicken or fish preparations. On its own, it fills a roti quite nicely, or sits with rice well, too.

The curry starts with sesame seeds, mustard seeds, and cumin seeds. These are sauteed in oil until the mustard seeds just start to pop. At this point I added turmeric, salt, and cayenne and sauteed the spices a little more. Next came chopped onion, and once that had softened a bit I added cubes of eggplant. Not too large, mind you. The eggplant gets sauteed with the mix to coat it well and begin cooking, and then water is added. In fact, I added water a few times so that it was never too soupy but always had a nice nit of liquid for braising the eggplant to tenderness. Near the end of that process I added the frozen peas and let them cook to tenderness. Yes, frozen - it's April, for goodness' sake!

As for the rice, little adornment - I added some green cardamom pods when I cooked it for a bit of scent, but that's it.



In other times, I might have used some yogurt with this as a garnish, and perhaps a homemade chutney. Not last night. Still, it made for a satisfying dinner, and one that gives me some leftovers for a couple of days ahead.

cleanse, day 1

So this is a little crazy and odd of me, I admit: I'm doing a month-long cleanse of sorts. Let's call it the MG cleanse in honour of Martin, who was undertaking it in January.

Why? Well, truthfully, Conrad and I live a life of overindulgent dining. And wining. And for some time now I've been feeling kind of off on a regular basis. I'd like to get rid of that feeling. I'd like to get back to a certain equilibrium. And once I regain that, then I can balance fun eating with a healthier approach. For a month, though, it's tipped to healthier.

A month, then, of

• no caffeine
• no dairy
• no alcohol
• no meat (but I will allow fish during the cleanse)
• no refined carbs (sugar and white flour)

The downside of this all is finding snacking at home. Also, the morning ritual of getting coffee is a certain comfort. And arranging proper food at work is a little tricky, too. On the plus side, it is fun to try out some other recipes, some other cooking.

Monday was the first day of the cleanse. Dinner? Simple. Two eggs poached with some deliciously plump asparagus and a sprinkling of black pepper and wild mushroom salt.



It worked out quite nicely, and not having Conrad home made it easier for me to cook and eat what I wanted when I wanted.

Autumn vegetarian dinner

You know, a challenge in the kitchen can be fun. No, really. I don't mean some sort of horrid, demeaning Quickfire Challenge thrown at me, no. Instead, I like the notion of having some sort of restrictions or parameters tossed my way and going ahead in respect to them.

This time, it was vegetarian cooking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say. Big whoop. Lots of vegetarians out there. And I agree. But Conrad and I are not vegetarian, and it's second nature for me to reach for chicken stock (to name one thing) to get some good food going. A little bacon to enhance that? You get the idea. Worse: given Conrad's need to regulate his starches, I couldn't do a pasta or risotto and thereby take an easy way out. I didn't eliminate carbs, but they were in check.

Deborah and Harry came for dinner, and a nice dinner it was. Conrad and I had all the clean up/set up well in hand by the time they arrived, so that started the night off for us on a good note. Table set, flowers out.

All was ready.

First up, with a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, was a bowl of a white bean puree, plus some nuts, caperberries, and buttered toasted bread slices. Simple.

First course: empanadas.

Or quesadillas, I guess - perhaps I need to re-consult the Rick Bayless cookbook I took the dough recipe from. I filled the little turnovers with roasted trumpet mushrooms, sauteed with white onion, thyme, and chopped reconstituted New Mexico red chile, and mixed with grated chihuahua cheese. Fried them up, set them atop a roasted tomatillo sauce and some sour cream atop. Despite my normal aversion to mushrooms, these were rather good.

Round two (three?): salad. Water cress with roasted grapes glazed with sherry vinegar, toasted pistachios, and manchego cheese. Once again, a simple course, but decent. The grapes are my new obsession.


The "main course": savoury pumpkin souffle.
I fried sage leaves and used them for garnish along with some thin slices of Parmesan.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with the meal. Some new recipes, for starters. Tasty food. Decent plating. Easy clean up. Can't ask for more than those, not for a dinner party, and not with such enjoyable guests. Bonus: having guests means we cleaned up the place a bit. Always nice.

Also, it must be said, little is hotter than a husband who does my dishes on the rare occasion I ask him to. ROWR!

Deep South culinary delights

As soon as I typed that title, I thought, "Someone - Dale, for example - will come along and lecture me on how Canadians don't know the South from the Deep South and that North Carolina isn't anywhere near the Deep South."

To which I say: accents, heat and humidity, and food like hush puppies. Deep South enough from my perspective.

Again, no work chat on this blog, but a dip into a work-related thing (and heck, why not? I blog social activities when I'm away at library conferences, after all).

These, my friends, are some of the culinary delights I experiences last week in Chapel Hill. No, that is not snark. I rather enjoyed the food I ate, simple as that.

For starters (though not a the first meal), I had lizard chips. How cool would it be if they actually were going out to the back yard, snaring some iguanas (they must roam free in those tropical climes, right?) and slice and dice them into tasty chips? Well, maybe not, and I admit the name was a little too bar-food chic/cheesy. But come on, pickles and jalapeno rings batter dipped and fried? Good stuff.

The South is known for barbecue. A lot of places are known for barbecue, of course. In this case, it was a vinegary-tasting shredded pork dish - pulled pork for the one or two of you in Canada who are reading this.
Don't look at me like that: it's not common outside of the South, truly. The Hopping John on the plate, however, was nothing more special than rice, beans,and salsa. The collard greens, not pictured, were fine. That was at a place called Crook's Corner on the Tuesday night. Good as it was, the dessert was better: banana pudding. Nicely done, topped with a fluff of meringue lightly browned. Good.

Dianne and Meredith do not look happy with the meal, and fairly so: the vegetarian option wasn't quite as good as what we had. But see? Carolyn and Jake also partook of the barbecue-laden Carolina sampler and were mighty happy.

Back to the home of lizard chips, the Top of the Hill. Oddly, I didn't photograph my steak dinner, a tender and tasty piece of meat. Instead, I caught Dianne, happier with her dinner, portabello grits cakes. Oh, and Richard,
the adorable and whipsmart roomie from this past week. I don't know what he had for dinner, however. Steak?

My last night in Chapel Hill I went with Dianne and Meredith, Jason and Hilde (shown in the photo) for some music and a drink on the lawn of the Carolina Inn. Hilde went back to the dorms after that, but the rest of us continued on to the Carolina Brewery for dinner. Cheap, and good beer. Jason's Tarheel Burger looked impressive, I admit. I had the barbecue again, and it was fine, but not as good as the Tuesday night meal. Dessert was lovely, though: gelato from a little sweets shop in the thick of the Franklin Street crowd. A cup of pistachio and pomegranate gelati brought out my best come-hither look. And that capped a week of North Carolina dining quite well, I do think.

Green Zebra (dinner with Dale)

I'll get this post started, at least, before we head out for the day. A sunny morning in KC, and it promises to be warm. Summerlike, in my view, but then, I have the skewed northern Canadian perspective on what constitutes "warm".

Backing up to Thursday...

Dale (a better shot, though blurry - he cursed me already this morning for yesterday's photo) is vegetarian. Apparently not even bacon will work its magic on him, and accordingly, I picked a restaurant I thought would offer him many good options. I am not a fan of the bean-y/rice-y/tofu-y approach of Chicago Diner and its imitations of real meat dishes, and I've enjoyed Green Zebra in the past, so we met there at 6:30.

I'll deal with the food in a moment. I should say that dinner was enjoyable for the company - Dale and I have known each other through mutual friends and through social networking for some time, but this was the first time meeting face to face. He was utterly charming, his haircut was quite fine, and I hope I held up my end of the conversation well.

I especially hope that because the restaurant was noisy. We each had to lean in a number of times and ask the other to repeat what was just said. When we'd finished dinner I badly wanted to head for a quiet place so that we could chat and hear each other. Strike one against Green Zebra.

Strike two was how off the timing and some of the service seemed. At times there seemed to be a lag - getting our drinks was the first such I noticed - and Dale eventually commented that he felt he was losing his appetite because of the pace of the meal. As for the service, mostly it was reasonable if not especially attentive. The oddest instance was the soup service. The bowls were set before us and we heard what the soup was (the tasting menu was not printed, so we had nothing to refer to). The person bringing the soup left, and we sat there, wondering if we were meant to drink it directly from the bowl because we had no spoons. After a minute or two, we caught the attention of someone who was supporting the waiter in the section and asked him for spoons. He told us that he would get our waiter but that it would take a few minutes because the waiter was with another table. Hmmm. So we sat politely until the waiter came. He told us what the soup was, and we thanked him and asked if we should drink from the bowl or could we have spoons. That got us spoons. We can laugh - and the soup was chilled, so no worries on that - but funny as it was, it shouldn't have happened.

So I felt a little badly about the choice of restaurant, and worse when Dale told me he had enjoyed Chicago Diner the night before. Still, the food was no less than interesting and some courses were very good. Onward (and without the assistance of a menu)...

Amuse-bouche: spiced eggplant and pine nut.

A salad of papaya, grilled white asparagus, and champagne sabayon.

Soup. I loved this despite the spoon issue. So clean and simple and lovely. Green pea with creme fraiche.

Curried potato potstickers with coconut, red pepper threads, and a lime-cilantro sauce. Dale had mushroom-filled potstickers instead, though I don't think he cared for them.

Another tasty course: gnocchi with artichoke, parsnip, carrot, fava bean, and lemon zest.


Dessert. Another strong showing for the restaurant. Mint panna cotta with a topping of bittersweet chocolate and two chocolate macaroons. The flavour of mint was green and herbal, not the cloy sweetness of extract. Good stuff!

Alas, unless another vegetarian friend comes to town, I may not be back to Green Zebra soon. Conrad, CG, and I are trying another of the owner's restaurants in a couple of weeks, though, and I feel a little anxious now. I am sure the food is fine, but I hope the overall experience lives up to it. Dale, we'll head up to Devon for Indian food next time you're through town.