Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Last week I got a Chanukah package in the mail from my sister. In it was India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food by Manju Malhi, a British food writer with a popular UK cooking show, Simply Indian, on home-style cooking. One of my sister’s food-savvy friends had tried out the recipes and raved about [...]

Impatient for Orange Peels

The standard recipe for candied orange peels takes over 2 hours. My inner child is whining. Following up from my microwaved kumquat marmalade experiment, which worked beautifully, I decided I could probably do something similar to candy orange peels. The result is not perfect by professional confectioners’ standards, but it was done in 15 minutes from peeling oranges to dredging-and-drying, and the taste is not bad, not bad at all.

Jazzing up Creamed Spinach

Standard creamed spinach, the old Norman Rockwell American standby, is one of the easier and frankly quicker side dishes to put together. But gawd, is it bland. Of course, I grew up wondering “If there’s no garlic, is it really food?” Here are a couple of possibilities from non-British cuisines that taste satisfying without relying on heavy cream or butter, and they can be done either on the stove or in a microwave.

Adventures with Cheese

A French marketing expert once announced the difference between French and American attitudes towards cheese based on his research: “In America,” he declared, “Cheese is dead. I can assure you of that.” Cheese was ok as long as the cheese was processed, uniform, free of visible mold, refrigerated, odor-free, pasteurized and–most important–wrapped in plastic so nothing could possibly escape. Otherwise, he said–you could hardly miss the sneer–Americans considered cheese unsafe. They–we–were culturally afraid of it. In France, he maintained, “Cheese is alive.” The French focus groups brought out words like culture, flavor (something the Americans forgot), and the names of many, many specific types of regional cheeses that were their personal favorites. I really do have a thing for cheese (damn my cholesterol-packin’ genes), but good artisan-type cheeses are often pretty expensive–$15 and up per pound–and the more affordable varieties of things like brie or gorgonzola usually lack something in the way of flavor. For the last couple of years I’ve been playing around with the idea of taking an inexpensive fresh cheese and culturing it further to get to something approaching the aged artisanal cheeses. Starting with a fresh cheese means you skip the clabbering and pressing and pot washing, and you don’t need your own cave out in the countryside, just a fridge, some plastic sandwich bags, and a handy Trader Joe’s or the like. Here, the cheater’s guide to a make-your-own goat cheese brie or bleu/brie combination.

Another Reason to Make Your Own Salad Dressings

Make your own salad dressings or you could be dousing your lettuce with a lot of salt and some mighty strange ingredients.

A Bowl of Dough in a Book

“Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”, developed by an avid home baker and a professional pastry chef, uses the same basic strategy I do–a bowl of dough in the fridge–but with lots of variations off a couple of basic master recipes. They don’t call for kneading at all–just mix, rise and chill. That’s solid enough for the chewy hard-crusted no-knead bread style of bread, but will it work for challah, which usually calls for extensive kneading to develop the classic long feathery crumb? Inquiring minds want to know.

Dolmas by microwave

When we first moved to Pasadena 10 years ago, one of my favorite places for Sunday dinners out was Pita! Pita!, a family-run Lebanese restaurant in the “Old Town” section of the city. One of the reasons I loved it was the usual reason to love middle eastern food: the mostly vegetarian mezze were wonderful, [...]

“High Protein Bran Muffin”–A good idea gone bad?

This is what’s wrong with American thinking today:

That muffins are healthy, or as in the example below, “healthful”
That bran muffins are really healthy and therefore can be eaten big
That such healthy muffins should be eaten as a source of protein.
That muffins this perfect can and perhaps even should be eaten as a substitute [...]

“But it’s organic! But it’s vegetarian!”

Vegetarian and organic foods are gaining popularity in supermarkets around the country–it’s been happening for at least a decade. Vegetarian- and organic-seeking customers assume they’re getting something closer to fresh if it’s labeled vegetarian or organic, and most of them also assume that vegetarian automatically means healthy. So, apparently, do nutrition researchers when they’re not [...]

How to Nuke an Eggplant

Eggplant is one of those warm-climate foods. It’s big, cheap, and plentiful, it goes with everything from garlicky oregano-and-fennel laden tomato sauce to nutmeg-tinged custard or cumin/cinnamon-scented Greek and North African dishes, to curries and darkly soy-glazed Chinese and Thai dishes. You can deep-fry it, panfry it, grill it and serve it room-temperature under a [...]