m. 20 mung bean, carrot and feta salad

if as a kid you ever dreamed of eating candy for dinner you would have never imagined that it would look like this:

it is the last of the ottolenghi recipes that we have been waiting to try, and my first thought when i tasted it was candy: the caramelized carrots, spice infused oil, and lemon together make this salad the perfect mixture of sweet and savory ... we will definitely make this again! m said that it was perfect for a spring-like october, which is kind of what we're having now.

m. 19 black eyed peas, brown rice and chard (aka. hoppin' john)

m, our star chef, has been making rare appearances in our kitchen recently (for obvious reasons), but tonight dinner was all hers, and the result was this:

amazing black eyed peas (or beans as their called here) over brown rice with chard, the recipe came again from deborah madison, we have been meaning to make black eyed peas for a while now (with our pressure cooker we can really make any bean dish we want on short notice) and m thought about this southern classic, it was delicious!

also, we have decided to eat more brown rice (especially since the 5 kilos of brown rice that came with our suma order will need to be eaten!), so this was a great first effort, in this case we used the last of some brown basmati that we had lying around, but next time we will use long-grain (which is i must say less popular among some of the mouths in our kitchen) ...

m. 18 puy lentil, chard and tomato soup

wow, even more soup, this time from a hugh fearnley-whittingstall recipe, which uses spinach, but we swapped it out for the chard (certainly a crime somewhere in the culinary world), this was an amazing soup, and it was so easy to make:

two wonderful bowls of soup, soon there will be three!!!

m. 17 red lentil soup with fried paneer

now back to the food, over the last week we have made a frenzy of recipes from the guardian, including this red lentil soup that tasted amazing from yotam ottolenghi (his carrot and mung bean salad is on our culinary to do list too):

unfortunately we had no tofu, so we used paneer instead, and in the center of the bowl is a bit of cumin and chili infused oil, m stole the leftovers of this for lunch the next day, a common crime in our kitchen.

intermezzo 1 our suma order

so when we first imagined this page we viewed it strictly as a food diary, and the idea was that there would be no scattering of all thoughts food related, but it would be about precisely what we are eating (because ... one evening we had a chat about all the things we were forgetting that we liked to eat and make, so the answer was to keep a diary), but now comes an event so "monstramental" in our kitchen that we cannot resist to write about it ... the suma order:

basically suma is a wholesaler of bulk, organic foods and if you get enough people together to buy enough food they will deliver it to one of you for free, we wanted to do it for one thing and one thing only: their canned tomatoes! 

but in the meantime we got other things too, such as these hazelnuts, enough to make 5 hazelnut and blue cheese loafs!

or these ground almonds, to make all kinds of other goodness (especially smoothies and almond cakes!)














the really fascinating thing about receiving these 1 kilo bags is that it tells you precisely where your food is coming from: the us, turkey, china, brazil, posing a tough dilemma for foodies, cut out the big box grocery retailer in order to get very cheap good food and you are still faced with a food miles nightmare (this conversation will make little sense to those in the us where a discussion of food miles is non-existent).

m. 16 homemade ramen noodles

ramen noodles is another one of those foods that are seared into the food portion of my brain both because of, again, college, where i ate an entire container ship of 25 cent ramen and also because simple noodle soups are so common in thailand that it is very easy crave something so simple and good ... and of course, it is very simple to make it yourself, in fact too simple to not feel guilty that i once thought that those strange crystalized flavor packets were all there was in the world, here was lunch a couple of days ago:

yummy!

m. 15 cardamom cookies and apple sauce

what is a traditional dessert that you would always think of having after a great saturday night dinner, why cardamom cookies and apple sauce, of course!

the cookies are the invention of deborah madison, while the apple sauce was all m's creation (with the help of a local apple tree!), the taste of the two together are amazing ...

m. 14 zucchini and potato soup

i have long been suspicious of zucchini soup, there is so much pressure to use up as many courgettes as possible at the end of the season that to turn to a zucchini soup could be seen as a sign of desperation rather than culinary mastery, but now i am convinced, it didn't take a lot of effort, but that effort did come a long way: all the way from new zealand ... at least by way of our neighbor, who kindly appeared at our door the other day with a recipe for this beautiful (though blurry) soup:

it is a simple courgette and potato soup with cream, lemon juice, and parmesan, we'll be making it again soon!

m. 13 spelt bread

two ugly loaves of absolutely gorgeous tasting spelt bread: 

those seams on top should not be there, and i saw this train wreck coming when i put them in the tins after the second rise ...

we used deborah madison's classic sandwich bread recipe adapted for spelt flour, nice!

m. 12 beet risotto

there is a little bit of a risotto renaissance taking place in our kitchen, partially because we have mastered the very simple process for making risotto and now the fun part is just coming up with the flavors ... luckily that task was not difficult this time, we found hiding in some unexplored corner of our very tiny fridge a little cache of beets! left over from the summer, still fine to roast and put in risotto (pictured below in our perpetually dimly lit kitchen):

beet risotto has always been one of my favorites, and today i even had the luck of being somewhat organized, roasting the beets while i made the rice, good work!

with our risotto we had a salad of rocket/arugula, lettuce, spinach, and carrots all from the allotment, and in the middle of october too!

m. 11 tamarind-ginger cookies

recently we have been making a lot of dan lepard's recipes from the pages of the guardian, our new love affair started with his amazing mustard seed and onion rolls and ever since then we have stuck with his off-beat baking, so when we saw the recipe for these:

we wasted no time to start creaming the sugar, but in this case we were creaming sugar, butter and TAMARIND! of phat thai fame, the tamarind remained together in bits during the creaming and this gave each cookie a little burst of citrus, they were just simple gingery goodness!

m. 10 stuffed peppers

when i was a kid my grandmother terrorized me with her stuffed peppers, they were green and had a quality (like all of her cooking) that seemed completely incongruous with a sterile culinary childhood in the suburbs, to me her cooking seemed alien and inedible ...

it has taken 20 years and a lot of cooking to help me understand what i was missing and why her food seemed so different, and tonight we crossed the ultimate barrier and made stuffed peppers:

we went for something simple, zucchini and mushrooms mixed with rice with cheddar on top, i'm sure that my grandmother would have been nonplussed by the fact that we skipped the meat, but hopeful this would have made her proud!

m. 9 minestrone

we cook a lot of meals from mark bittman's how to cook everything vegetarian, it's pretty much a staple, but some things have become classic for us, and perhaps one of the best and most flexible recipes in the entire book is for minestrone:

every single time i make it i think back to the 1000s of cans of minestrone that i ate in college, never again ...

m. 8 courgette pakoras and palak panir sag

much of the south asian food that we eat in our house comes from one source: yamuna devi's the art of indian vegetarian cooking, and the reason can be summed up in just two words: zucchini pakoras!

so, while the rest of britain consumed stale onion pakoras from the deli counters at sainsbury or asda, or had a drunken snack on frozen pakoras from a kebab van, we for once were spared that tragedy with fresh, homemade courgette pakoras, together with creamy spinach with panir and some leftover curried potatoes and green beans ... it all tasted wonderful:

the creamy sag was amazing, and the seared panir was a nice touch:

ps. my camera takes ridiculously uneven pictures

m. 7 lemon-almond cake

we have finally made something sweet for the first time in a week, this lemon-almond cake:

the recipe was from this interesting food blog called rachel eats, which has beautiful pictures on it, this is the first thing we made from it and it came out rich and tasty, its a great basic almond cake recipe ...

m. 6 lentil, mint, and yoghurt salad with breaded halloumi

recently, we have been experimenting with bits and pieces of yotam ottolenghi's plenty, the recipes are pretty involved, so we usually trawl the book looking for anything small that we can accomplish in just under 5 hours ... in this case we had some puy lentils that we had cooked in our amazing pressure cooker a couple of nights ago, we wanted to use them up and luckily we came across his puy lentil galettes recipe that has as the "topping" for the galettes this lentil, mint and yoghurt salad, without the galettes (which we will save for another day) it wasn't too difficult to make at all and we had it with our favorite breaded halloumi (more on this below):

we also had some string beans from our garden that we absolutely had to eat so that meant we ended up with some strange pairings: the cool mintiness of the salad went perfectly with the halloumi, and the beans strangely went well with the halloumi, but the salad and the beans DID NOT go together, still a great meal nonetheless ...

we have been making breaded halloumi for a while now, just a couple of weeks ago we started doing it using jerk chicken flour that we have had for ages, but in london recently our friends took us to this normal looking pub for a usual lunch and it had VEGETARIAN FISH AND CHIPs, with battered halloumi, it was amazing (both in a tasty way and also in a whoa-how-much-fat-was-in-that-meal-way that you don't normally get to experience as a vegetarian), i enjoyed it (in both ways).

m. 5 zucchini/courgette bake

today, m for lunch stole the leftovers of our courgette bake, baby likes zucchini! and this bake is a great way to use up a lot of it:

1. saute onions (a clove or two of garlic is optional here)
2. add as many courgettes as you like, maybe two or three medium sized, chopped into thin quarters and sweat until tender (this could take some time with a lot of zucchini), this can be seasoned with a pinch or two of dried or fresh thyme
3. at the same time cook a cup of dried white rice (this could also work with brown but we haven't tried it yet)
4. once the courgettes are done, mix them with the rice and two large eggs
5. at this point you can add whatever you like, typically we add a cup of gruyere cheese, and last week we also added a half cup of sundried tomatoes, that tasted great!
6. add salt and pepper and place the mixture in a buttered or oiled 9 x 9 baking dish, bake at 175c/375f until brown on top (or 15-ish minutes)

mushrooms can also be added to the mix, in addition to the courgettes, we didn't have any so we decided to add the sundried tomatoes, a very tasty decision!

once we made the zucchini-potato charlotte two weeks ago we realized that this courgette bake was in effect a rice version of the charlotte (but sans cream), each is infinitely edible in its own way ...

m. 4 sweet potatoes

a couple of posts back on 16b i posted about a beautiful meal we made with our friends in london: sweet potato fritters with sweet potato humous, it was really amazing and we just made them again, here are the fritters:

they were just as good as the first time we made them! we tracked down the recipe for them here and simply swapped out the carrots for the sweet potatoes, yummy! we had a little picnic out in the incredible early october sun ...

m. 3 fennel red sauce

i am totally recycling this post from our other blog, but today we revisited our fennel red sauce, i am always amazed at how such a simple recipe can result in such great sauce, the best part about tonight's dinner was that the fennel came from our garden and the pasta was dried pasta from a batch that we made a week ago ...

m. 2 potato salad

m made this yummy potato salad to go with our sandwiches today (she used apple cider vinegar in its mustard vinaigrette):

it was such a nice day today that we actually ate outside, look at this lovely spread!