Punjabi bitter melon (karela)

This is the first time I've ever cooked bitter melon.  I like the bitter taste of bitter melon, but Iyer doesn't, so in this recipe he calls for salting it for 2 hours to extract the bitter liquid.

Home-fried potatoes with a paprika-onion sauce

Layered paratha w/ spinach raita

It took me a few iterations to learn how to make paratha, but now it's as easy as rice.  I suppose I could have made this one a little rounder though!

Trenette with smothered onion sauce

Marcella Hazan's recipe for a smothered onion pasta sauce is one of my all-time favorites.   Sliced onion is sweated with butter and olive oil for an hour or so on very low heat, and then "browned" on medium high heat until golden.  The sweating caramelizes the onion and makes it very soft and sweet, while the browning gives it a deeper flavor.

Other flavor comes from white wine (cooked into the golden onion until fully reduced), black pepper, grated parmesan, and parsley.

Chana masala w/ roasted curry leaf rice

I made these recipes out of Raghavan Iyer's extraordinary cookbook 660 Curries. The chana masala is restaurant quality.  I used dried chickpeas soaked overnight and boiled for an hour and a half.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the recipe is its use of cumin seed in two ways -- roasted whole and unroasted ground.  Iyer's book has a passage in which he marvels about how a single spice can take on many different personalities.  In the finished dish here, one can readily distinguish between the flavors of the whole roasted cumin seeds and the ground cumin powder.

The rice, like so many of Iyer's rice recipes, is fantastic.  It's seasoned with sauteed mustard seeds and a powder made from roasted curry leaves, lentils, and dried red peppers (all ground together in a spice grinder) along with unroasted asafoetida and turmeric.  It's indescribably delicious.

Spaghettini with tomatoes and minced vegetables al crudo

One of my favorite recipes in Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is her tomato sauce with chopped vegetables that are not sauteed, but rather simply simmered along with the tomatoes.  The fresh aroma of carrots, celery, and onion is wonderful.

I was lazy today and decided to chop the veggies in a food processor.  The result was a mince much more fine than I'm accustomed to.   Bite for bite, this food processor version may be even tastier than the original.  I prefer the hand chopped version, however, because the larger chunks of vegetables seem to maintain a more fresh garden aroma.

I used these canned San Marzano tomatoes, which I think are much superior to fresh tomatoes, except during the summer from the Farmer's Market.  I seasoned the sauce with lots of olive oil, salt, dried oregano, a crushed red chili, and romano.

Sauteed fish in mojo de ajo

I essentially followed the recipe for pescado de mojo de ajo in Rick Bayless's Authentic Mexican.  I have a fair amount of experience sauteeing fish, so the recipe came our well.

I made the refried beans by cooking pinto beans in a pressure cooker along with a couple of sprigs of epazote, some onion, some duck fat, and some olive oil.  Then I mashed them and fried them in duck fat with a little bit of onion.  Not bad, but not great.  The duck fat didn't do much for the beans.

I also made rice, following Bayless's recipe for arroz verde.  Essentially, it calls for boiling rice in a puree of chicken broth, roasted poblanos, celery, onion, cilantro, parsley, and garlic.  I liked the flavor, but next time I would use considerably less liquid than the recipe calls for.

Toast with chocolate, olive oil, and sea salt

I read about the combination of dark chocolate and olive oil in Anya von Bremzen's The New Spanish Table.  She calls it "revelatory."  I have to agree.  Chocolate and olive oil pair beautifully together.  I sprinkled on flaky Maldon sea salt.

Bulgur pilaf with pine nuts and golden raisins

This is a simple bulgur pilaf that I made for dinner.  I flavored it with chicken stock, black pepper, salt, and butter.  I was struck by the richness of the Plugra butter and the spicy fragrance of the Tellicherry black pepper from Penzey's.

Low-temperature baked salmon with vanilla oil and salmon roe

I baked the salmon at very low temperature until cooked through and creamy.  The sauce is an infusion of whole vanilla bean seeds and pods in grapeseed oil.

Toast with avocado spread and boquerones

Adapted from Anya van Bremzen's the New Spanish Table.  I used a couple of salted anchovy fillets in the avocado spread, as well as aged sherry vinegar, lemon, parsley, garlic, and tomato.

Spaghetti aglio e olio

 I didn't have any parsley on hand; I tried chopped scallions in their place.  I also added some sauteed pine nuts and dried Italian red chilis, nutritional yeast, and romano cheese.

Balouza

Balouza is the Middle Eastern counterpart to Jello.  It is thickened with cornstarch, not gelatin.  I followed Claudia Roden's recipe in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.  It is very easy to make and the result is interesting and tasty.  Most of the flavor comes from orange blossom water and/or rose water.

Brown lentils with coconut and tomato sauce

This is a recipe in 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer.  I cooked the lentils in a pressure cooker.  The lentils are seasoned with mustard seeds, curry leaves, ground fenugreek seeds, sauteed onion, chilis, and cilantro.

Penne with tuna sauce

I make this Marcella Hazan recipe often because it is easy and wholesome.  The sauce is just olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, salt, and pepper, with crumbled Italian tuna and chopped parsley added at the end.  I often add capers to the sauce and let them simmer a bit.

Sauteed chicken breast with lemon caper sauce w/ potato-celeriac puree

In The Best Recipe, Cooks Illustrated stresses that lightly floured chicken breasts should be sauteed at high heat so they brown on the outside and cook through to the middle.  That's sage advice that I've learned to follow over time.

The lemon caper sauce is simply a reduction of sauteed scallions, chicken stock, lemon juice, and capers, with butter stirred in off heat.  It's important to reduce this sauce quite a bit, because the butter only thickens it so much.

I served the chicken with a celeriac and potato puree, following the recipe in Chez Panisse Vegetables.  Celeriac isn't one of my favorite vegetables.  Alice Waters' advice to flavor it with white wine vinegar substantially improves the taste.  Vinegar and salt are essential to balance the strong vegetal flavor of the celeriac.

Fusilli with pesto

 I've made pesto several times with a mortar and pestle.  Recently, I bought a food processor and decided I'd try making pesto in it.

I loosely followed Marcella Hazan's recipe in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Somewhat surprisingly, considering her no-compromises approach to cooking, Hazan approves the food processor method of making pesto.  I thought the result was excellent too.

The most interesting thing about Hazan's recipe is that it calls for both olive oil and butter.  I don't think the butter is necessary, but it does add a nice fullness, and it softens the taste of the raw garlic and basil.

Dukkah

Today I made dukkah--an ultra-popular spice blend in Egypt, but one I'd never eaten before.  I followed Claudia Roden's recipe in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.  The ingredients are skinned hazelnuts, sesame seeds, coriander seeds, and cumin seeds, all roasted and ground with some salt and a little bit of pepper.  I thought it would be easy, but it was an adventure.

Hazelnuts don't come skinned.  No problem, I thought--I'll just blanch them.  I boiled those suckers for 10 minutes and it didn't work; the skins weren't coming off.  So I did some web research.  Most sites recommended roasting them and then rubbing them hard against each other inside a dish towel.  Sounded awful.  I tried this approach with the hazelnuts I had boiled, and it was a mess.  I wasn't too optimistic about the roasting and rubbing approach.  Luckily, a bit more online research led me to THE way to skin hazelnuts.  Boil them...in water that contains a bunch of baking soda.  The skins come right off after that.

Another problem was that I didn't recognize just how many coriander seeds were required for this recipe.      I saw "coriander seeds" and thought CHECK--got that in the cabinet.  But Roden's recipe calls for 1 3/4 cups!  That's about 3 big bottles worth of coriander seeds.  I may have had 1/4 cups worth in the cabinet.

When I finally was able to make this recipe, it turned out great.  It is addictive when combined with olive oil as a dipping sauce for bread--much like zaatar in concept, but very different in taste.

Red lentils in onion sauce w/ tomato biryani

Both of these recipes are from Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries.  I decided to make them because I already had all the ingredients on hand.  Cooking Indian food is difficult at first, when you're unfamiliar with the spices, where to source them, and how they're used.  Gradually, as you build up a cabinet of spices, it becomes a breeze.

Red lentils (masoor dal) are actually split, skinned brown lentils.  They have a salmon pink color before cooking and turn yellow when cooked.  (They should be distinguished from "yellow dal"--split, skinned chickpeas that are yellow to begin with.)  They cook very quickly into a puree-like stew, which can be flavored in innumerable ways.  

The lentils in this picture may look boring, but they are fantastically flavored.  The flavor comes from red onion that has been caramelized and browned (for over 30 minutes) along with smoky cardamom seeds, cloves, black pepper, cumin, chilis, and salt.  Diced tomato and turmeric are added when the onions are fully cooked, and then the contents of the skillet are spooned into the lentils.  I used 1/4 ghee, 3/4 canola oil.  I love the taste of ghee, but it's awfully unhealthy and isn't necessary in this already full flavored dish.

I also made a recipe that Iyer calls "Nimmy Paul's Tomato Rice" (or tamatar biryani).  The colors are amazing.  The rice is briefly sauteed and then boiled with a bed of sauteed tomatoes, onions, cinnamon, cloves, green cardamom, whole mace, ginger, garlic, chilis, and of course turmeric.  The orange shreds are from a blade of mace that disintegrated while cooking, adding even more flavor.

Lime-flavored rice with roasted yellow split peas

So far, every rice dish in Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries has been well worth making.  This dish is no exception.  Iyer notes that it is traditionally packed in banana leaves for the party of the groom on the way to a south Indian wedding.  Indeed, it struck me as comfort food--albeit very foreign comfort food.  The combination of curry leaves and roasted mustard seeds is ubiquitous in South Indian dishes.  These flavors are combined with nutty roasted peas (chana dal), lots of lime, a little turmeric, roasted dry chilis, and fresh chilis.  It makes for a delicious, easy dinner.  I served it with some cucumber raita, following Iyer's excellent recipe.

Sauteed chicken breast in brown butter sauce with pureed parsnips and potatoes

I followed, the best I could, Julia Child's recipe for supreme de volaille a brun (chicken breast sauteed in butter) in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  The recipe calls for sauteeing the chicken breast in clarified butter without letting the butter brown, taking the chicken out, adding some more clarified butter and browning it, mixing in lemon juice and finely chopped parsley, and pouring it on top of the chicken.  Sounds simple, but takes some skill.  I struggled with it.  My chicken breasts were still raw in the middle after Child's suggested time of about 5 total minutes.  Next time I will use more heat, since the butter didn't come close to browning in those 5 minutes.  The dish ended up pretty good when I turned the heat up and cooked the chicken a couple of minutes more.

The pureed parsnip and potato idea came from Chez Panisse Vegetables.  I seasoned the puree with butter, milk, salt, black pepper, and nutmeg.  This was fantastic.  Adding parsnips is a great way to make mashed potatoes more interesting.  Next time I'll use ground Sarawak white pepper.  It's white for one thing, and less assertive for another, but still plenty flavorful.

Rajasthani biryani with chickpea flour dumplings

From Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries.  Iyer's book has numerous recipes that use chickpea flour (besan) as a main ingredient.  This recipe involves forming dumplings out of seasoned chickpea flour dough, boiling them for 45 minutes, dicing them into chunks, and steaming them along with basmati rice and other seasonings to form a biryani.  It was an interesting dish, but I wouldn't make it again.  The chickpea flour dumplings were just too grainy for my tastes.

This grew on me when I ate it as leftovers.  I'd like to experiment with the dumplings.  Some recipes call for adding yogurt to them.  Alternatively, they may have benefited from more oil.

Homemade Amaretto

This is a recipe from Chow.com.  It's the first time I've tried making my own liqueur.  It turned out quite well.  The recipe called for dried apricots.  I used excellent quality Turkish apricots, and they ended up being the most pronounced flavor.  Though the end result tasted good, it didn't really taste like amaretto to me.

I bought a $10 bag of the bitter apricot kernels -- an essential and controversial ingredient -- online.  They're controversial because they contain a high amount of cyanide, and they can be lethal in surprisingly small amounts.  (Eating the whole bag could do it.)  In low doses, however, our bodies are able to process cyanide just fine, so I plan on experimenting more with the apricot kernels.

Milk and almond pudding

Adapted from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden.  The key to this recipe is making sure that the rice flour doesn't lump up.  This is very important for two reasons.  First, the most obvious: you don't want lumps of rice flour in your pudding.  And second, almost as obvious: the rice flour is there to thicken the pudding, which it won't do if it lumps up.  But what's not obvious is how to ensure that the rice flour doesn't lump up.  The simplest solution is to stick an immersion blender into the pot a few minutes after you stir the rice flour into the boiling milk.

I threw in a bunch of dried safflower flowers for color and mellow floral flavor.  They are often called "poor man's saffron," which I think is silly.  They gave this pudding some color and a hint of intrigue without dominating it like saffron would.

Braised cabbage

From Chez Panisse Vegetables.  Excellent recipe.  Very easy to make.  Everything is in tune -- cabbage, duck fat, onion, shredded apple, sherry vinegar, black pepper, and salt. This was so good that I happily ate only cabbage for dinner.