Tag Archives: Indian

A Random Vegan/Vegetarian Products Review

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Last weekend I decided to do it…to just try to go 99% vegetarian.  Meaning there are only exceptions for holidays and maybe sushi a few times a year. While I am generally a fabulous cook and can make some darn good vegetarian unprocessed stuff myself (lentil loaf, lentil meatballs, chili from dried beans, etc.), my grad student life style means I don’t have a ton of time to prepare food from scratch all the time.

As such, I’ve been buying more vegetarian fake meat products.  In order to not eat a metric buttload of calories, I need a lot of protein.  Soy products suffice.  I’ve also been curiously trying vegan things, just for the sake of trying them, knowing that a vegan lifestyle is generally most sustainable for the environment.  Here’s a review of what I’ve tried that was memorable from the past few years up to more recently:

Frozen Meals/Quick Food:

  • Kashi frozen meals -  Mayan harvest bake, Three Cheese Penne, Spicy Black Bean Enchiladas.  The first and the last are better than the middle.  Kashi’s frozen meals retain a good texture and taste wholesome and satisfying, with complex flavors you wouldn’t usually find in frozen meals.  Only downside is that the instructions for cooking are a bit more complicated than some other frozen meals (2 to 3 step rather than 1 step).
  • Sukhi’s Naanwiches, Garden Vegetable – Very good flavor, especially with the naan.  Probably best if toaster ovened though.  Not super filling.
  • Fortune Avenue Vegetarian Potstickers – presteamed, so they’re quick to cook.  You can microwave these in a minute and a half.  These are my favorite vegetarian potstickers.  They don’t taste like meat, but they have a nice rich flavor and good texture and chewy veggies in there!
  • Amy’s Tofu Scramble Breakfast Wrap – Avoid!  How can something taste so much like cardboard through the entire bite?  Bleh.
  • Trader Joe’s Black Bean and Cheese Taquitos – These are addictive and surprisingly fairly low calorie.  They make a great snack or meal when paired with some salsa to dip them in.  A bit dry, but good flavor.
  • Trader Joe’s Paneer Tikka Masala – While this has a great flavor and good texture, it’s just not enough to keep me full.  I like the green rice with it though, and the tikka masala sauce is good.
  • Trader Joe’s Eggplant Parmesan – Good flavor, but not enough in the meal to keep me full.  And definitely not enough cheese for an eggplant Parmesan!
  • Trader Joe’s Tarte d’Champignon – A flatbread pizza type thing with cheese and mushrooms.  Amazing and rich and so good.  Bring it to a foodie potluck and people will be amazed.  Wait no, bring me one please.

Meat Substitutes:

  • Gardein Beefless Tips – The *best* beef substitute.  Hands down.  I’ve used them for many things, from stew to sliced and browned in vegetarian pho.
  • Gardein Chick’n Scallopini – a decent chicken substitute.  It has a good texture, but the flavor is a bit celery-like.  Browns nicely.
  • Trader Joe’s Soy Chorizo – uh-maaaay-zing.  Same flavor profile as the meaty version but with less fat.  Great scrambled with eggs.
  • Tofurky Peppered Deli Slices – skip these.  Go for the Hickory Smoked and add your own fresh ground pepper.
  • Tofurky Hickory Smoked Deli Slices – the best fake meat lunch meat.  It has the best texture and a rich flavor and a slight hint of smokiness. Enough protein to be satisfying.  I make my sandwiches that I eat on the train out of these!
  • Trader Joe’s Chickenless Strips – I didn’t let myself eat chicken strips before.  Now I do.  These are healthier but also tasty.  They also make great sandwiches.
  • Gardein Chipotle Lime Chick’n Fingers – yuck.  It tasted someone dipped chicken fingers in lemon cleanser.  No taste of Chipotle at all.  Gardein should retire these or reformulate them.  They have a nice texture of crust on the chick’n though.
  • Morningstar Farms Bacon Strips – eh.  They’ll work in something (like deviled eggs) if you really have a hankering for bacon, but they’re not that great by themselves.  Salty for sure.  Texture is kind of crunchy, vaguely cardboardy, but none of the chew of meat bacon.
  • Morningstar Farms Grillers Veggie Crumbles – these are fine.  Nothing to rave about really.  They add the meaty texture to whatever you’re cooking (chili, shephard’s pie, veggie sloppy joes) but wouldn’t stand by themselves as much.  You could just as soon just get TVP and do the same thing for cheaper.
  • Morningstar Farms veggie sausage products – Skip the links and go for the patties.  The links don’t have a great texture.The spicy patties are hard to find but particularly good.  Better than the fake bacon.
  • Whole Foods 365 Brand Veggie Sausage Patties – good flavor, but not low on calorie.  Nice spices and seasonings, good texture.  A little spicy but not too much for me!

“Dairy”:

  • Trader Joe’s Soy Mozzarella – Trader Joe’s does it again.  This soy cheese has a great texture and melts well, without the soy flavor of some vegan cheese substitutes.  However, it does contain casein (a milk protein) so it’s not truly vegan.  However, it didn’t bother my lactose intolerant tummy.
  • Trader Joe’s Soy Creamery Chocolate Chip and Cherry – Love Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia?  Lactose intolerant or vegan?  This is like crack.  No overwhelming soy flavor.  You will have to stop yourself from eating the whole dang tub.
  • Trader Joe’s Coconut Strawberry frozen dessert – Pretty good.  Tangy strawberry flavor, slight hint of coconut, good mouth feel and moderately rich flavor.  Different from strawberry ice cream, but in a good way.  It’d probably make some good summer cocktails if blended with rum!
  • Daiya Vegan Mozzarella/Cheddar Shreds – tastes like processed cheese product.  If you like Kraft singles, you’ll probably like this.  It melts well, but the Mozzarella and Cheddar kind of taste the same just with different colors.  However, works ironically well in scrambled eggs… (I can see some vegans face-palming right now!)
  • Pacific Organic Plain Unsweetened Almond Milk – almond milk generally works much better in coffee than soy or rice milk.  The latter curdle. Yuck!
  • Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet Cream Cheese – Bleh.  Can the Daiya people make some cream cheese substitute?  It’d definitely be better than this.  This faux cream cheese has that cardboardy overwhelming soy flavor and texture that I dislike. This will probably sit in my fridge for a long while…maybe better in desserts though.

Seasonings/other:

  • Better than Bullion Vegetarian Beef Bullion: kind of flat and honestly doesn’t taste much different than their vegetable bullion (which is still a nice bullion substitute).  Salty like a good beef bullion with a fair amount of umami, but adding it to vegetable broth and adding some mushrooms (crimini or porcini) will make the flavor better.
  • Nuoc Mam Chay/Vegetarian Fish Sauce – similar funk to fish sauce, similar saltiness, but not fish sauce.  But it will do in a pinch for Thai and Vietnamese cooking.  Find it at Vietnamese grocery stores.
  • Vegetarian Oyster Sauce – oysterless, but still great on broccoli.  Stir fry with Gardein’s Beefless Tips and some chopped broccoli and satisfy your broccoli beef craving in no time!
  • Amoy-D Curry Paste: Most Thai curry pastes are not vegetarian (most of them contain some shrimp product).  However, Amoy-D is.  It lacks a bit in the umami depth of the shrimpy curry pastes, but it works fine to make a good curry at home.
  • Hummus: Trader Joe’s is the best.  Sabra (sold at Costco and Safeway) is okay.  It’s easy to make your own though if you have a food processor or blender and some canned garbanzos.

I hope you enjoyed those reviews above and avoid the things I’ve advised you to avoid!  Unless you’re desperate, I guess.

As a side note, my mom (one of my greatest inspirations and person who I have to thank for my cooking capabilities) may be making a guest post sometime in the near future, so keep your eyes open for that!

A Highly Inadvisable Cooking Technique

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Today’s epic (and possibly somewhat manic) cooking journey was the result of being done with midterms and hoping to cook a nice big batch of something delicious for the week. I first decided on Indian spiced butternut squash in the slow cooker, then some lentils, and then….  To find out what I wound up with and why this story is titled as such, follow me down the rabbit hole of my version of Indian cooking.

I had this butternut squash sitting around from my CSA that I really felt like cooking for some reason.  I went through a list of ideas on my head and then finally decided I wanted something spicy/salty/sweet– something Indian.  After a quick Googling, I came across this recipe over at The Perfect Pantry that looked simple and delicious enough.

I had all the ingredients but fenugreek, so I whipped it up sans that and plus half a habanero from my garden.  I set that going before I left for the gym with my friend, and when we came back the house had started to smell delicious.

…but what was I going to eat it with?!  I didn’t have any basmati rice. I needed some protein if I was going vegetarian this week, and something savory would balance out the squash well.  Well, I thought to myself, lentils are simple enough.  So I pulled together a batch of my favorite yellow lentil recipe, one I made up myself.

My favorite lentils aren’t entirely Indian.  First I put oil or ghee in a pot and heat it up, then I add black mustard seeds and cover the pot quickly, swishing it around and letting the mustard seeds pop.  Then I add in the lentils and stir them, then add at least double the amount in water of the lentils I’m cooking, a few star anise flowers, salt, and maybe some dried chili peppers.  I let that simmer, stirring constantly and adding water as necessary until it becomes a delicious yellow mush.

But there wasn’t anything green! Or tangy/salty!  I’m such a color fiend when it comes to food.  I’d want the whole rainbow on my plate if I could naturally get it.  And I did have that okra sitting in the fridge…time for some bhindi masala!

That was simple enough to cook.  But still, no starch.  How was I supposed to sop up all these delicious juices?

…and this is where it all took a turn for the “way more than was necessary” side.

…I wanted naan.  I’d never cooked naan at home before, other than premade stuff.  I wanted warm, fluffy, slightly garlicky naan.  How hard could it be?

Once again, I dug around the internet.  It seemed to be a little more labor-intensive than I thought, because it’s actually a yeasted bread…but I wanted it, dammit.  I found a recipe on Allrecipes (one of my go-to recipe sites) that seems to be delicious and reasonably simple, albeit time consuming.  I knew that with yeast, you had to proof it first (which that recipe didn’t do), so I had to add a little sugar to the yeast/water mixture, but soon enough I was off!

Mix, let proof.  Add flour, egg, milk (lactose free worked fine), salt, (I also added a little baking soda), and mix.  Knead into a smooth ball.  Let rise in a oiled bowl, covered with a damp towel.  Punch down, add minced garlic. Form into littler balls. Let rest to rise again on a baking sheet covered with a towel.  Stretch it out…and?

Well, that’s where I got stuck for a bit.  Naan is a grilled bread.  My oven is pretty dicey (it melts my refrigerator because of poor forethought by the designer of this place, among other things), so broiling it wouldn’t work.  I could pan fry it, but it wouldn’t taste the same and I wasn’t sure it’d get the right color going on.  I really wanted to grill it, but I didn’t have any charcoal for my Weber grill.

And this is where things turned for the highly inadvisable. I don’t really recommend trying this, though I seem luckily to be alive and have not set anything on fire.

I took my wok ring, inverted it, and set it on top of my gas stove (on top of the existing gas burner square cover things) to get things away from the direct heat. Then I put the grill part of the weber on top of that… and turned it on at a very, very low heat.  Nothing caught on fire, there was no excessive smoke, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I turned up the heat a little, let the grill get warm, then stretched out one of the balls of naan.  I gently brushed just a little ghee on one side (barely any because a drip of hot ghee onto the flame would’ve been bad news), and placed that side down on the grill.   I hovered over it with my tongs and spatula, ready to pull it off at any second if things went south.

…but they didn’t.  It seemed to firm up enough to turn it, so I did, making sure that the different corners got some heat.  When it seemed firm enough, I brushed the other uncooked side with a little ghee and flipped it.  It had perfect golden grill marks on it.  I hovered over it and watched the other side, curious if the whole thing would firm up enough.  Sure enough, it did.

It's not chicken.

So I pulled that one off and ate it.  Hot damn, it was delicious!!

Then I proceeded to cook the rest of my dough balls, to great success.  None of the dough stuck to the grill in my experiment (probably because I made sure to put ghee on it and carefully lay it down on the grill, making sure none got stuck between the grill bars), and there was only a negligible amount of smoke– less than when I cook meat in a pan.

I would NOT NOT NOT NOT DEFINITELY NOT use this method for anything greasy or drippy or juicy.  NO meat. NO veggies. NO grilled cheese or quesadillas.  That’s just asking for a really, really sad disaster.  The bread seemed to work out okay because I elevated it enough, the bread had enough structural integrity (my dough wasn’t too thin or gooey), and I made sure to very, very carefully lightly oil the bread with ghee (which has a high smoke point).  Also, the heat could be turned off immediately at any point in time.

So in short, I think I got lucky.  I wouldn’t advise this.  There are so many factors that could lead to big problems.  You’d have better luck if you used a grill outside and had a fire extinguisher nearby.  A George Foreman might be great, and a toaster oven might work okay if you’re really careful. (Unfortunately, because my place is so freaking tiny, I have no room for any of these gadgets!)

…but at least I got my naan fix, have a fantastic spread for lunches next week, and have an interesting story to tell for it!  I do recommend giving the butternut squash recipe a shot, that was pretty tasty and dealt well with being ignored while it was in the slow cooker.  And the naan recipe is pretty solid if you want to try cooking it in a more safe manner.

P.S. I’m not sure when my next post will be because I have to find my camera battery charger.  I’m not willing to subject you all to posts without pictures!

Japanese-Indian Fusion BBQ?

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I’m lucky to have a lot of friends with very good taste in food.  I proposed a BBQ for this weekend since I didn’t have plans to go anywhere.  I bought some chicken drumsticks at like $1 a pound and a small rack of pork ribs at the local Chinese supermarket, along with some mushrooms and corn.  My friends Mee, Chris, and Brian provided half of a frozen seedless watermelon, veggie and steak kebabs made with a friend’s family’s home grown beef (!) and rice.

Who needs a yard to have a BBQ? A carport and a couple of Weber grills will do just fine.

I’m also lucky that I have guy friends well versed in the art of setting fires and cooking on a grill effectively.  I usually just throw the coals on, light them, let them sit for a bit then plop stuff on and it usually turns out fine.  Apparently there’s technique to BBQ.  Guess I just get lucky most of the time.

Getting lucky with some chicken legs

This time I marinated each of the meats overnight in a sake mixture.  They each had different seasonings.  The chicken seasoning was sake, fresh grated ginger, tumeric, garam masala, korean chili powder, and a little curry powder afterward because I didn’t put enough seasoning in to begin with.

The combo of tumeric and chili powder give grilled chicken a nice orange color

 

The pork was marinated in sake, brown sugar, and rosemary and then basted on the grill with more sake/brown sugar mixture but with hoisin sauce, pepper, and garlic powder added.  This made the ribs nice and sticky and sweet and kept them moist.

Brown sugar sake pork ribs

For dessert, Brian had bought a whole melon a week ago and I told him he should just freeze the unused portion for drinks later.  Turns out you should probably remove the rind before you freeze it, but it does make an excellent sorbet.  Recipe below!  Thanks to Mee for helping come up with the idea. :D

Tangy Watermelon Sorbet

Serves 6

  • 1/2 large seedless watermelon, rind removed, and frozen thoroughly
  • 4 ripe strawberries
  • 4 limes
  • 1/4 Grand Marnier or other citrus liqueur
  • 1-2 cups water

Place strawberries in blender or food processor.  Add cut up chunks of frozen watermelon, juice of 4 limes, citrus liqueur, and water.   Blend until sorbet consistency.  Serve before it melts!  No sugar needed.

 

In the end, we had so much food that I sent them home with some drumsticks…because apparently most of my friends go out of town for 3 day weekends.  Their loss, though, because we had a relaxing time with BBQ in the carport, some beer, and watermelon sorbet.  Thanks, Mee, Brian, and Chris, for helping me indulge my BBQ craving!

Turn the grill upside down after grilling and you have chicken flavored stalagmites?!

 

Spicy Nectarine Salsa

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I’m not sure how I came across this one, but I did a while back.  I was reminded of it because my friend Mee and her boyfriend had some mango papaya salad with fish the other day and nectarines are just beginning to start to come into season in the US.  Thanks for reminding me, guys!

Originally, I just kind of threw it together and it turned out to be even more amazing on my tastebuds in real life than in my head.  I remember eating this on the lofted patio of my cousin’s amazing mountain-y home last memorial day while sipping some sangria, then going off to soak in the hot tub.  The slight floweriness and tang of nectarines works so well with the bright cilantro and spicy habanero peppers.  It’s great on fish, as you’ll see below.

Kestrel’s Nectarine Salsa

Makes 3 servings as a topping for fish.  Feel free to double, triple, or even quadruple.

  • 1 nectarine, somewhat firm, just starting to ripen up and get soft (too firm will be too sour, too soft will be too mushy). Make sure it smells good!
  • 1 habanero pepper, minced (more if you’re a masochist, or substitute jalapenos or anaheims if you’re a wimp.  Here I used serranos because they were cheaper, but they weren’t as spicy as I’d like.)
  • 1/4 of a red onion, finely diced
  • 5 sprigs cilantro, minced
  • fresh juice of 1 lime

Combine all of the ingredients, prepared as listed above, in a bowl.  Let it sit for at least 10 minutes and stir so that the flavors have a chance to mingle.  For the best flavor, let it sit an hour or two, but make sure you use it within 2 days (keep refrigerated).

This is great to serve with a nice light white fish (cod, tilapia) in the summertime, or just to eat with chips while sitting outside.  Here I served it with a fresh fillet of cod that I just lightly coated with rice flour and a dusting of curry powder (mostly for color) and pan fried (I used butter, but you could use olive oil) for no more than 10 minutes total.  It’s a super quick recipe that seems quite fancy!  The key is getting quality ingredients and keeping it simple.


It’s quite healthy, but the flavors in this are so stunning that you won’t notice.

 

Naan grilled cheese

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I bought some garlic naan at Trader Joe’s last week.  It’s certainly not authentic naan, but it’s nice and fluffy and has a very garlicky flavor.  Marco, who apparently wants to see my thighs turn into the Hindenburg, gave me some brie as a thank you for helping him in his job search.

What does this all mean?  Grilled cheeeese!

Ah, this sandwich was sexy. Fluffy garlicky bread, melty brie, fresh basil.  Adding anything besides a little sea salt and fresh ground pepper would make it harder to appreciate, I think.  For an extra crispy sandwich, grill it with a little melted butter or bacon fat spread on each side.  You can get all of the ingredients for this in Trader Joe’s, but I’m sure you could pick up stuff elsewhere over multiple locations and make the same sandwich.

Président now makes a brie log, bless their hearts.  So if you just want to gnaw on a stick of brie, you damn well can. Or, it’d probably be perfect size for slicing onto a baguette or crackers.  While Président may not have the most character of the bries out there, it’s still got that brie-y goodness and intense meltability.

I recommend you try this garlicky wonder someday.  Your socks may be knocked off.

Chana Masala a la Kestralia

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I loveee chana masala (a.k.a. chole masala)– it’s one of my favorite Indian dishes, next to bhindi masala.  I guess my favorite Indian dishes are anything stewed with onions, tomatoes, spices, and cilantro.

I decided to rock the wok on this one!  My wok is one of my favorite cooking vessels, because it’s great for impatient people who like to cook fast so they have more time to enjoy things.  The big key is learning how to season your wok appropriately and knowing NOT to scrape off the color that gets on to the wok.  But that’s another day.  You do have to be careful cooking acidic things in it (like tomatoes), because it can ruin the patina– so I realized afterward that the wok may not have been the best choice for this.

My Chana Masala involved some other veggies because I had stuff lying around that needed to be used — okra and eggplant.  So it’s kind of like a confused child of bhindi masala and chana masala.  Also, I don’t like pureeing the vegetables like in some recipes; I like mine in gloriously happy chunks.  I’m sorry I wasn’t on top of this post, so I don’t have an exact recipe, but I can give you an approximation:

Chana Masala a la Kestralia

  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 c chopped onion
  • 4-5 cloves minced garlic
  • 1″ wide coin of ginger, minced (~1-2 tbsp)
  • About 1 tsp each coriander, cumin, cayenne, salt
  • About 1/2 tsp each garam masala, tumeric
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 very large roma tomato (or medium other tomato), diced
  • 1 good sized Chinese eggplant (or a few Indian eggplant), cut into coins that are then halved
  • ~10 pieces of okra, cut into coins
  • 1 serrano chili (optional, use if you really, really like hot stuff)
  • additional chopped cilantro & onion for garnish

Heat up the pan until smoking, add oil.  Reduce heat to medium low.

Add chopped onions, minced garlic, and minced ginger.  Stir around and let the onions caramelize a little bit (about 5 minutes).

Add spices (I used cayenne, cumin, coriander, a little turmeric, and garam masala that I mashed up using a rolling pin and a ziploc freezer bag because I don’t have a mortar and pestle, and threw in two bay leaves on top of all of that– not ground).

Bring heat back up to medium.  Add diced tomatoes, stir around.

Add cilantro, stir.

Add eggplant and okra (I pre-cooked the okra a bit in the microwave with some water, then drained it before adding it in…I might recommend adding the eggplant to that too to be honest, unless you have lots of time to stew stuff.)

Stir, reduce heat a bit.

Add chickpeas (drained & rinsed).  Stir, let stew for a while on a low heat until the eggplant disintegrates a bit and not all of it retains its shape (probably about 8-10 minutes).  Serve with additional fresh chopped cilantro and onions if you’d like!

Sunday Bento #2

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Channa masala with eggplant & okra (recipe coming soon), wehani rice, and cucumber slices.

I’ve been so busy this weekend!  I did cook several things (including the items in the bento above), though, so hopefully some new posts will be coming later this week.  Until then, here’s a tease of my lunch tomorrow. :)

Ooh La La Bhindi Masala

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Bhindi masala with a cup of peach kefir

I can’t eat Indian food every day, and despite my recent part-time vegetarian kick (made it 4 days this week!), I was not able to force myself to finish the massive amount of dal I made.  Somehow, though, I was inspired to make bhindi masala.

I’m not sure why (especially given my previous vehement dislike of okra) , but bhindi masala has always been one of my favorite Indian dishes.  The meaty, curryish dishes are good, but I will always find myself wanting to order this dish of deliciously sauteed okra, tomatoes, and spices.  Reading the Indian cookbook I bought, I thought to myself: cooking this really cannot be that hard.

So today I Googled it, and after a few times of being corrected on the spelling by monsieur Goog, I found a nicely illustrated and well-written recipe over at “Honey, what’s cooking?”.  Being a little impatient, I didn’t let it cook long enough, and didn’t exactly follow the recipe to a T.  I also omitted the nigella seeds (which the author seems to indicate aren’t really necessary anyway) and the mango powder (still haven’t found a source nearby) and used less oil.  It came out pretty much fantastic and very close to what I’ve had while eating out, albeit a little crunchy (required some microwaving). It made my tummy very happy.  A nice big bowl was less than 300 calories.

Now that I know how to make this for myself, I think I’ll make it more often!  Thanks, “Honey”!

Eating okra in Indian food makes me wonder if folks in Southern areas of the US would like Indian food and vice versa– both have peppers, onions, heat, okra, legumes…who knows!

Luxurious Legumes

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So I’m still trying to continue this part-time vegetarian kick.  It’s gotten harder lately, especially when going out to eat.  I realize how much meat I really used to eat– chicken sausages for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, then some sort of meat dish for dinner.  It really doesn’t seem necessary to me to have meat at more than one meal a day, but this is easier said than done.

One of the main problems I have with vegetarianism in America is the whole attempt at “fake meat”.  If you substitute something in for meat into dishes you already loved with meat, you’re pretty much always going to be disappointed.  At least, that’s how it is for me.  Take a dish that you already love and take out an integral part of the flavor and replace it with something with a completely different or weaker flavor– it’s just not going to work out.

My approach has instead been to try making dishes where I have no preconception of them needing meat, and also learning to appreciate the flavors of other protein sources– especially legumes.  The second part of this approach has been looking for vegetarian recipes from other culinary traditions that I don’t have much experience with so that I won’t be so disappointed with the lack of meat.

You might see that this sort of pointed me in the direction of Indian food.  India has a very long culinary tradition of vegetarianism, unlike America.  This tradition has had a long time to refine itself and as a result it has many fabulous dishes that work without meat in them.  My friend who grew up in a household that made heavy use of Indian cuisine suggested checking out Laxmi’s Vegetarian Kitchen .  This book is packed full of information and is quite well-written; it’s very honest and it almost feels as if the author is speaking very candidly and openly to you.  She even offers suggestions for western substitutes for ingredients in some cases.  It has a ton of recipes for all sorts of things, but the one thing it is significantly lacking is pictures.  It does have detailed descriptions of all sorts of Indian ingredients, but pictures would be helpful to be able to identify spices and ingredients easily.   Thank god for Google.

Kestrel dalishness...

Indian cuisine is fairly easy, it seems– if you have all the ingredients.   That’s the kicker.  We have lots of ethnic markets around this area, but it’s hard for me to make it 10 miles to hit up the Indian grocery.  Also, my shelves are already packed full of so many spices that it’s hard to find room for say, 15 additional spices (cumin, asofedita, coriander, mustard seeds, fenugreek, cardamom, tumeric, fennel seed, dried mango powder, chili, kari, tamarind, cloves, and so on… for more info, Julie Sahni has a good reference for spices.) that I wouldn’t normally use.  I picked up some spices at a natural foods store, but when I went to make something it seemed I was always lacking in some other spice.  Each Indian recipe seems to require at least 5 different spices.  It’s kind of daunting… so anyway, I’ve just taken Indian food as an inspiration and started winging it. The results have been decent and get me to eat legumes more often.  I just won’t feed any Indian friends anytime soon, because I’m sure my food would make them wince.

I’ve also been looking into other vegetarian ethic cuisines.  After some Amazon.com searching, I picked up Delicious Jamaica by Yvonne McCalla Sobers .  I’m not a big fan of this cookbook.  Maybe it’s just because as far as I know, I have absolutely no source of Jamaican ingredients nearby.  I think I’ll have to peruse the spice aisle at the grocery store and see if they have allspice.  This cookbook is also lacking in photos or drawings, but it does have calorie/nutrition information and a lot of unique dishes that seem like they have great potential for being delicious.  It also has some tidbits about Jamaican culinary history which are sort of interesting, but a little dry.  Overall, though, I don’t really seem to sense any particular organizational system to the book.  It sorta just seems to be a bunch of recipes thrown together, willy-nilly.

See, now my problem with cookbooks is that I actually almost never cook from the recipes…I only use them for inspiration.  I wonder if anyone else has this problem.  Hopefully I’ll actually make use of some of the recipes, but if not, I only spent like $10 total on the two used books.

I hope to have some more recipes and photos for you all soon, but until then…be leguminous!