A filling dinner with enough leftovers to last all week
One of my favorite things to eat is, without a doubt, Indian food. Personally, this is one situation where I often prefer to order out. I know of a couple great Indian restaurants in Madison, and it’s usually a safe bet when you’re looking for a nice meal in any city. There’s something about the authentic spices they use (and also the deliciously fried poori). But when I’m feeling like being a little more frugal and health-conscious, I make Indian food at home.
This week I invented my own Indian dish, Saag Aloo. Basically, I chopped up an onion and some garlic and sauteed them with Bahart (an Indian spice that can be prepared by mixing more conventional spices and herbs, although I don’t have the recipe myself). I love the way Baharat smells – it’s spicy don’t get me wrong, but it smells sweet somehow. Then I added a whole bunch of diced potatoes – red, purple and white for variety – and a large can of diced tomatoes. To top it all off, I put a 1/2 pound of farmers’ market spinach into the pan and let it wilt down. I let that simmer for a while, and when it was ready to eat, I added a spoonful of yogurt to my dish to make it a little creamy. Hence, Saag (spinach) Aloo (potato).
I’ve got leftovers for the rest of the week, but tonight I took the dining experience up a notch by making chapati. When I first realized how easy it is to make this Indian flatbread, I was thrilled – the bread is a great addition to any Indian dish. Here is my chapati recipe:
The chapati should puff up in the pan after the last time you flip it
Chapati (Makes 8-12 pieces of chapati)
2 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
Mix together the flours and salt. Add 1 cup warm water and mix together. You may need to knead the dough to get all of the wets and drys together (add additional water or flour very slowly). Let the dough rest for at least 30 minutes. Then pinch it off into 8-12 sections and flatten them to form disks. Roll out each disk as thin as you can manage. Place the disks one at a time into a griddle over medium heat. Count to 15 and then flip. Let sit on that side until it starts to blister (brown spots will appear and the chapati will start to puff up). Then flip again. It should puff up (quite dramatically) pretty quickly. Keep the chapati under a moist cloth towel while you cook the others. Recipe courtesy of Mr. Mark Bittman.
Alright, I’ll admit it, the actual assembly of Handmade Butternut Squash Ravioli is a bit of a time commitment. But once you’ve prepared the delicious pouches of winter squash goodness, they instantly become fast food. Seriously, I have to prep all other parts of my meal (make a sauce, grate some cheese) before the ravioli goes into the boiling water – it only takes a moment before they’re floating on the surface, ready to eat.
I cheated and went home to use my mother's pasta machine. But pasta dough can be rolled out with a rolling pin fairly easily as well.
I’ve had a butternut squash sitting in my fridge for a few weeks now, and so rather than baking and eating it straight, I decided to get a little fancier with it. I’ve made ravioli with my sister a number of times and it’s actually easier than it sounds. This ravioli was my dinner all week and I still have some in the freezer for the next time I’m in a pinch.
Pasta Dough
Make sure not to put too much filling into each square. They become really hard to seal shut if you do.
3/4 cups semolina flour
3/4 cups whole wheat flour
3 egg whites
2 Tbsp water
2 Tbsp olive oil
Butternut Squash Filling
2 cups cooked butternut squash
2 eggs
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and freshly grould black pepper
1/2 cup freshly grated Pamesan cheese
Mix together the flours for the pasta dough (you can do just semolina flour, but I prefer whole wheat pasta). Add the egg whites and stir. Add the water and oil and then knead the dough for about 10 minutes, or until it’s springy. Be very careful about adding more water or flour. A little can go a long way.
Let the dough rest while you mix together the filling. I ran my squash through a food processor which made it smooth but also far too soupy to be a good filling. I ended up mixing in some flour to get it to shape up, but I was just say go easy on the blending, and try and squeeze off any excess water before adding the other ingredients. Mix together all the ingredients listed.
Cut the pasta dough into about four pieces. Using a pasta machine or a rolling pin, roll the dough out into long sheets, the thinner the better. Then cut the sheets into squares (choose your own size). Put a dollop of filling on one square, wet your fingers and the place another square on top of the first, squeezing tightly around the edges. You want to make sure the dough of the two squares really becomes like one sheet of dough. Then you can either freeze the ravioli or cook it right then and there. When you do cook it, set a pot of water to boil, put the ravioli in the boiling water, and take it out a few minutes later when it rises to the top.
Here's a few raviolis served as the side to a salad with Farmers' Market greens and potatoes. Yum!
While my ravioli was cooking, I would prep my sauce by mincing up some garlic, putting it into the bowl I was going to eat out of, adding some olive oil (and a little salt and pepper) and then microwaving the bowl for about 30 seconds. This really infused the olive oil with the garlic taste…and really cut down on my dirty dishes. All in all, I would call this a success!
Side note: Every time I’ve made ravioli, I always end up with quite a bit of leftover filling. When this happens, I make lemonade, or rather, lasagna. It’s easier to throw together because there’s less assembly required, but it still tastes great.
Winter break is ending. After the holidays, a week-long trip to volunteer on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and a weekend trip with my sister to Chicago, I’m not sure I feel rested. But whether I like it or not, classes start again tomorrow. So it’s time to get back into the routine…
Spring semester is always hard to ease back into food-wise. After traveling more than I usually do over break, I returned to my apartment to find very little in my pantry, and not a lot to stock it with from the farmers’ market. But with the help of a few things I put up this summer with my parents and the root vegetables that are still staples at the market, I’m going to try and get really creative over the next few weeks to make tasty, nutritious meals that use the maximum number of local ingredients.
There's quite a few meat recipes in my new cookbook...but the pictures are really pretty. A great resource for some fresh ideas.
Tonight I’m making a potato/carrot stew because I wanted something low key. But I got new cookbooks for christmas. So keep an eye out for more daring dishes in the near future. I’m contemplating making some butternut tortellini from scratch this weekend. A new year. A new semester. So many meals to enjoy!
I only had two actual exams this semester (hate me, it’s fair), but for my other two classes I had to prepare some written assignments – and they both ended up being about food. I wrote a paper for my Environmental Studies class proposing that teaching kids about how to grow and prepare their own food can save the world. And I also did a news report about the local food debate in Madison for my Journalism class. I found out some interesting tidbits for that assignment – so I figured I’d post a link here.
Thanks to everyone for checking out my blog this semester! I’ll be posting more about recipes, cooking shortcuts, and the importance of food as the holidays carry on.
The other week I forgot to buy my favorite preserves at the farmers’ market and I was forced to go back to my old standby – Smuckers Low Sugar Raspberry Preserves (what else could I possibly have on my pancakes?). The smuckers preserves just don’t compare though. This weekend, I made sure to get my Tomato Mountain preserves – now I just have to figure out what do with the rest of the Smuckers.
Tomato Mountain Preserves - just enough sugar for the preserving process so that real fruit taste can come through.
And if I’d had access to a car, I wouldn’t have had to wait all week to get my favorite jam. Metcalfe’s Sentry sells Tomato Mountain jam as well. Seriously, if anyone has any recipes that use a lot of raspberry preserves…send ‘em my way. I don’t know when I’ll be eating Smuckers again.
A few weeks ago my sister introduced me to something deliciously local – raw milk. I prefer to think of it as real milk though (raw leads for weird mental images). Basically it’s milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. This means you can’t transport it long distances or leave it out of the fridge for very long. But if you keep it cool and drink it fresh, it makes for a heavenly milk experience. Plus you can make things like yogurt, buttermilk and mozarella cheese from it. My sister has and I can’t wait to try!
I’ve had it over cereal, in hot cocoa and mixed into my family’s Thanksgiving dinner – and there is no going back to skim now.
But raw milk is under attack. Under current Wisconsin law, raw milk sales are illegal – because of the higher risk of bacteria forming in the product. Like I said, my sister transported her glass jugs of raw milk from La Crosse to Madison in an ice chest, and keeping it cool meant I didn’t see any health risks from the fresh milk. And the irony is, Wisconsin – the dairy state – is one a handful of states where raw milk is completely illegal. To learn more about raw milk and what you can do to protect it, check out my sister’s blog Lost Between the Letters. And look for your next opportunity to share in this local treat!
…This is the slogan of General Mills’ breakfast cereals – including everything from Wheaties to Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And I hope most people can recognize that it’s probably not the healthiest choice. Even before I became food-conscious, I knew that. I usually started my days with bran cereal, like All Bran. But over the summer, it started to bother me, that I didn’t really know what All Bran was.
The nutritional information lists ingredients I can recognize like wheat bran and sugar, but others I really don’t like calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate, the fourth and fifth ingredients on the list. Here’s what the FDA has to say about calcium carbonate, and while they conclude that it’s perfectly safe to eat at current levels, it’s not the most reassuring background info about breakfast.
I use sunflower oil to cook these in, keeping these as local as I can get
In June I started making my own breakfast. It takes some extra time, but it’s pretty easy, and it’s delicious…it’s pancakes! I have a lot more control over what goes into these compared to my bran cereal (or as my mom has begun to call it, “fiber worms”). I use farmers’ market eggs and flour and I buy some spices from my local co-op to mix into the batter. For me, it’s worth it to take ten extra minutes in the morning to make my own breakfrast from scratch.
Here’s my recipe for two pancakes:
1/4 cup buttermilk
1 egg white
2 tablespoons whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon white flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
A pinch (or more) of cloves and cinnamon
Here are the instructions. Mix the ingredients. Put on the griddle. Flipping takes a little practice, but mostly you just have to be a little brave (and willing to clean up a mess or two at the beginning). I like to eat my pancakes with yogurt and jelly – both I buy locally. Yum! I’ve done this every day for so long now, it doesn’t feel like a chore. And what a healthy start to my day.
Thanksgiving was a great success (my family and I even whipped together a repeat performance on Sunday for my grandparents in Racine). Farmers’ Market mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, cranberries and our main course was polenta dome with yeasty gravy…so tasty. Dessert was my responsibility this year, and I created a hybrid of the traditional pumpkin pie in more ways than one.
Pumpkin prailine pie...my sister made the crust from scratch too
My first change was purely to satisfy my sweet tooth…I added a pecan prailine topping to the pie, which the family agreed takes the whole thing up a notch. But my second tweak was a little more experimental. My mom bought both a pie pumpkin and a pumpkin-like squash (apparently there was a shortage of pumpkins this year)
Cooking your own pumpkins takes a little extra time...but then you get pumpkin seeds!
I was expecting to prefer the pumpkin hands down. But upon taste-testing the two after they had been roasted in the oven, everyone agreed the squash was sweeter and smoother. The pumpkin, while still good is more fibrous and I think I’ll be using it for more savory meals for now.
We used equal parts of both the squash and the pumpkin in our pies. But it turns out I wasn’t cutting back on pumpkin compared to the canned variety. I was adding it in entirely.
Apparently, Libby’s (the main distributor of canned pumpkin) also uses squash that looks more like butternut squash than pumpkin. The squash they use, Dickinson, has been deemed similar enough to pumpkin for Libby’s to still put “100% pumpkin” on their label. Seems harmless enough in this case, but this still makes me question the reliability of food labels.
I’d say both my experiments were a success. The prailine topping was delicious, and I may have to agree with Libby’s on this one…there’s something tastier than pumpkin to put in pumpkin pie. I don’t know that I’ll lose the traditional pumpkin entirely, but it looks like I’ll be adding a little diversity to my pumpkin desserts from here on out.
As an aside to my Thanksgiving Take 1 post, I’d like to share my ongoing struggle with finding a simultaneously tasty and local cranberry recipe. In the past I’ve mixed anything from pineapple to mandarin oranges to pecans and raisins into my cranberry sauce…and with a lot of sugar, this has always been tasty. But sadly, oranges are not part of Wisconsin’s tasty produce.
There are some leftovers left in my fridge (not for long...), but this white dish is such a prettier backdrop than my tupperware
This year I made a cranberry relish (two cups Wisconsin cranberries, two Wisconsin apples, and one orange borrowed from my roommate put through the food processor until roughly chopped). And with the obligatory cup of sugar, it was quite tasty. But does anyone out there have a good cranberry recipe that doesn’t rely on the (delicious) food-mile-rich flavor of citrus?
Also known as: The one with the bird.
My nuclear family is entirely vegetarian. So our Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t feature a turkey (check back next weekend to hear what we do cook up though!). But for the past three years, my roommate and I have hosted a “friends Thanksgiving.” This one does have a turkey…it’s called Turkey Party.
Turkey Party was Saturday this year, and it was a pretty big success. Together, my roommmate and I cooked up a 20 lb. turkey and gravy, green beans with carmelized onions, stuffing, cranberry relish, stir-fried sweet potatoes, roasted carrots and beets, and two pies (pumpkin prailine and caramel apple). It was quite a day – especially considering we took two and a half hours to go to the bar near our apartment to watch the Badgers play horribly.
As food ethics go, I think I’d give us a C though. I let my roommate make the judgment call on the turkey. And while we got a lot of our veggies at the market Saturday morning (sweet potatoes, onions, beets, carrots, among others), we ended up getting a cheap and easy bird rather than a local one. We got a Butterball and the grade that bird gets seriously lowers our average.
While none of our guests seemed to mind “eating misery” (as my mother puts it), they didn’t get a chance to compare it to. And since I don’t eat turkey myself, I won’t get a chance to improve on this dish on Thursday. One of these years I’d like to see what a real turkey looks like, but for now I’m thankful that I get a chance to make some of these delicious dishes again on Thursday…and try some new ones too!
