Coconut, minus the hype

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. But should you really be buying coco butter to cook with? It’s loaded with saturated fat. On the other hand, actual coconut, used sparingly for flavor, can be a sophisticated and not necessarily diet-busting addition to many dishes, particularly the aviyal “dry curries”. Here I try out coconut as part of an aviyal tailored to the unexpectedly smoky and bitter edge of cowpeas.

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

The issue today is tofu; see under: how to feed a vegetarian preteen some protein without overdosing her on sodium. Our favorite Chinese restaurant dish is tofu in black bean sauce, but no doubt about it, it’s loaded, both on salt and on fat. A reasonable home version needs a sauce that’s bigger on flavors other than salt and can help the tofu brown without deep-frying.

The Broccoli Bogeyman

Average US per-person consumption of fresh broccoli has skyrocketed since 1980. So why is broccoli always the Republican go-to monster under the bed? And yet they like…pork rinds? Forget pigs, I’m breaking down a broccoli, live and on camera.

ANDI Scores, Whole Foods, and diet scheme cha-ching

“ANDI Top 10 for Produce”, “ANDI Top 10 Super Foods” and so on abound at your local Whole Foods. Is it a sound nutrition ranking system or just another commercial diet fad?

Stuffed onions in a hurry

Why, you have to ask, should I make such a big deal about stuffed onions–they’re a party trick, after all, not standard cooking. But we discovered we really liked them, and they’re a pretty good kind of party trick. But they take over an hour the traditional braise-and-roast way. My way’s so quick I can make them for supper after work, and they’re so good they may actually be better than the long-roasted ones.

Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants. So we adapted this sweet spinach tart with the spices from an earlier era.

A Slow Food Fast Thanksgiving

Despite my firm resolve after last week’s marathon kiddush that I will strive Not To Cook (could I possibly be Peg Bracken’s unacknowledged lovechild? Unfortunately, no), I know that most of us don’t have the luxury of not cooking tomorrow. If you absolutely have to cook, here are a couple of posts for speeding up a few of the obligatory or not-so-obligatory Thanksgiving items. Most can go in a microwave and none are really boring.

Tomato paste rules…

School lunch debates now apparently hinge on the 30-year-old question: if tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable, what’s tomato paste?

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

When I got “Aromas of Aleppo” for my birthday this week, the stuffed eggplant with quince was the first thing I had to try. It took two hours in the oven–not counting the time it took to make the tamarind concentrate earlier this week–but it worked beautifully the first time around, even with my vegetarian version, and it made a great addition to the Rosh Hashanah table. Next time, I’m going to use the microwave to cut the roasting time to a few minutes just for finishing, so my house doesn’t heat up in 90-degree weather.

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors in “Aromas of Aleppo”–allspice in meat dishes, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. And like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The stuffing is easy enough, even in my vegetarian lentil version. The tamarind concentrate? I decided to mechanize a little to see if I could speed it up.