Wanted: cooler heads, warmer hearts

…and less inflammatory bloat.

Warning: This is kind of a long make-up post with 3-4 related recipes out of my experiments since April. They’ve been helpful and fairly fast for coping with hot weather and hot tempers, mostly my own.

It’s been a long spring and summer not posting and just trying to get through, and wondering what kind of food post could possibly make up for the mess we’ve seen unfolding in this country.

So my thinking has kept roiling around in the manner of the following rant (much cleaned up):

We have to do better. As a nation, as a people, as individuals and members of our communities, as responsible and worthwhile human beings.

The proof is in the pudding, they say. This is true of both government and cooking. Right now we’re learning the hard way that you get out of it what you put into it. So watch what you put into it, and don’t treat yourself or your country like a garbage can. Prepare to vote like it matters, and in the meantime contribute as best you can to your local public schools’ support organizations to get students in low-income families the food and tech they need during distance learning.

— — —

I can’t help but cook, and usually I like to experiment, but with my husband and daughter suddenly home 24/7 for the past half year (my kid just went back to university across the country), and with temperatures getting up to 100+ some days here, staying creative about food without a lot of excess shopping trips or extensive cooking has meant staying fairly simple and more about fresh produce than about artiness in the kitchen, and maybe just using more herbs–one of the few things I seem to be growing successfully in the backyard. We all could use some shoring up healthwise and flavorwise, with some trimming back after a stressful winter and spring. So I’ve been trying hard to make the veg and fresh fruit more prominent and easier to grab-and-go for self-made lunches, without any of us having to work too hard.

But I have been cooking, and some of it has been good, and a lot of it has been anti-bloat AND good, surprisingly enough.

And it has in fact worked, most impressively for our daughter before she went back east.

So this is worth passing on, especially now: forget the “stress-baking.” Go for basic vegetables and fruit. Seriously. It makes a difference, and it might help lower your health risk, and possibly your food expenses, as well. Maybe even help de-stress.

My daughter came home from university in March seriously stressed out from the shift to online and upended plans. She’d been suffering acid reflux badly enough to be on daily medication, and had to ask me for mild zucchini-type vegetables only for the first couple of weeks home, because tomatoes were too much, and so were the hot peppers she loves.

Being home with us during the shutdowns meant a lot less “student” food, aka greasy takeout with its oversized portions. More beans and lentils and fresh veg and fruit every day. More sleep, more water, more hanging out with friends online or by phone, more socially distanced walks to get a break from us parental units (yay!). By June, she was already in visibly better shape, needing less insulin per day to stay in range, had lost the “freshman 10” from last year without major effort, and possibly (probably?) as a result, she was able to stop taking the acid reflux meds. Just in time for Anaheim peppers and Fresno tomatoes. And Indian food.

(okay, back to food):

For my husband’s birthday this summer, I took requests and ordered celebratory takeout from our favorite restaurant, which has been in Pasadena for over 20 years and just keeps getting better. We’ve only done takeout anywhere a total of three times since the shutdowns, partly because it’s a splurge and partly because the logistics are more nerve-wracking now (were they wearing gloves? were you? do you wipe down the containers? should you nuke them?) You don’t want to know how it went on our first try back in April when the bad news was first ratcheting up. Not at all fun. I vowed to my still-beloveds afterward that we’d do it again and this time I’d be calmer, and just decide ahead how to handle the containers safely.

In any case, by my husband’s birthday, we’d finally got the hang of it enough for us, and there’s no denying that it was delicious. It also inspired a couple of microwave-friendly dishes I plan to pass on to my kid now that she’s back and cooking for herself. Two (well, three) of these dishes are hot, the other frozen, and all are cheap, fast, surprisingly easy and pretty good–they’re even fairly close to the dishes I was trying to imitate, but a bit lighter fat- and calorie-wise.

Which is good because today we’re in a massive heatwave in Southern California, and it’s so hot I decided to try hanging wet sheets out on an old clothesline I’ve never used. I think they were dry by the time I finished pinning them up 5 minutes later. I know I was.

Lightening up Makhni Paneer

Makhni paneer-style tofu with pumpkin sauce, plus added green beans and cooked chickpeas for a microwaveable next-day lunch. Or in this weather, just eat it cold.

One of the dishes we ordered from the All India was makhni paneer, which is cubes of fresh-pressed cheese submerged in a very rich tomato cream sauce. I’ve looked in a number of cookbooks and online–could be ghee and cream or full-fat yogurt in the sauce, could be coconut milk. Tasty but way, way, way too rich for my blood (cholesterol, that is). Way.

Still–the ideas started churning. The makhni paneer had a slight tang and a suggestion of sweet under all the obvious richness, and showcased the spices in a completely different way from the other dishes at the table.

How do you do that, but lighter, and possibly a little faster?

I love paneer but my daughter prefers tofu, at least for my home renditions of saag paneer. That actually fits a recent wave in US Indian communities of making heart-healthier substitutions–unsaturated vegetable oil for ghee, tofu instead of paneer, lower-fat yogurt where possible, and hopefully backing down a little on salt. Even the All India offers tofu as an alternative. So we obviously start there.

But the cream sauce is really the main challenge. The bhuna (browned-onion/spice flavor base) works fine with unsaturated vegetable oil instead of ghee. You can precook the chopped onion in the microwave for a minute or so to get it going a little faster when it hits the frying pan without the need for salt. But for the bulk of the sauce?

A large can of pumpkin sitting on the shelf for one of those just-in-case moments (why do we always seem to have them?) caught my eye, and it suddenly seemed right.

Pumpkin? right color, right substantial thickness, smooth, decent taste, likely to go well with everything else, easy to thin out just enough with milk or soymilk to get it a little more like the sauce I was going for, only without fat and with lots of vitamin A and fiber. Use enough of it to make a difference and it counts as a vegetable. Check.

Plus, I’d once used it successfully as the base for a fat- and egg-free eggnog back in my 20s, the early days of cooking for myself. Squashnog? That’s what I’d put in my little blank-book cookbook. Maybe it would work here too.

To get at least a hint of coconut flavor in the background without coconut milk, I added a spoonful of coconut shreds to the toasting spices and onion, then added the pumpkin and some milk. Then it was just some experimenting to get the balance of flavors leaning in the right direction. I went with a combination from a productive fridge-dive–tomato paste, a spoonful of leftover tamarind sauce and a small dollop of half-the-fat labne (a cross between thick yogurt and sour cream), which would make it taste richer and a little tangy with only 2-3 grams of actual fat. But really, because the pumpkin is so thick, it’s pretty forgiving. If the milk separates and gets a little grainy, just stir it back in. So plain regular or Greek yogurt would probably have worked too.

For the background hint of sweet, I added a pinch of cinnamon and a dusting of clove to the spices, and added a small spoonful of brown sugar to the sauce–it’s not jaggery but close enough. Taste and stir, taste and stir….when it was ready, balanced and just thick enough, I scooped in the tofu cubes and let it all simmer a few minutes.

Upfront bonus veg with z’khug (because I can’t count straight)

I’d originally microwave-steamed some cauliflower and green beans to add in at the end, but the tofu won out on its own, and pumpkin is its own vegetable, at least in quantity. So I tossed the vegetables in a frying pan with a little garlic, hot pepper and shredded cilantro, basically the ingredients for z’khug for a couple of minutes and served both dishes over basmati rice. A nice combination, very quick and easy, and good for leftovers.

Makhni Paneer-style Tofu with Pumpkin Sauce

• 1 pad (14-19 oz.) firm or medium tofu in 1/2-inch cubes or larger triangle slices, as preferred, microwaved on an open plate 4 minutes to press (optional here)
• OR, if going for paneer itself, 10 oz paneer, storebought or homemade (or panela, or queso fresco, or Syrian-style “Chicago cheese”), cut in 1/2-inch cubes
• optional veg: a couple of handfuls of cauliflower, green beans, maybe carrots and mushrooms, all chopped in small bite-size pieces and microwave-steamed for a few minutes with a drizzle of water in a lidded container

Bhuna (onion-spice base)

• 1-2 T mono/polyunsaturated vegetable oil for nonstick frying pan
• 1/3 big onion or half a medium one, diced
• large clove of garlic, grated, minced or mashed
• 1/2-1″ piece of fresh ginger, grated, minced or mashed
• 1-2 T commercial curry powder or paste, if that’s what you have, OR a mixture of 1 t each cumin and coriander plus 1/2 t each turmeric and fenugreek, OR 1 T amba powder (amchur or mango powder plus turmeric, salt, maybe mustard and other spices)
• a little extra cumin and coriander (half-teaspoons) as needed, to taste
• large pinch of cinnamon, up to 1/4 t, and a small pinch of cloves
• shake of hot pepper flakes, to taste
• 1-2 t partially-defatted or regular unsweetened shredded coconut, optional
• cup or so of water at the ready

Sauce and adjustments

• 15 oz canned packed pumpkin
• cup or so of milk (skim or low-fat is okay) or soymilk
• 1 T tomato paste or 3-4 T tomato sauce or a chopped tomato
• 2 T (dollop) of plain yogurt or labne or sour cream, preferably reduced-fat
• 1-2 T tamarind sauce if you have it, or a spoonful of vinegar (any, but cider vinegar would probably be best because it’s a little sweet but not decorator like balsamic)
• 1-2 t brown sugar or to taste

Garnishes

chopped cilantro leaves, drizzle of tamarind sauce, sprinkle of crumbled feta, hot pepper flakes–all optional

To cook:

1. Start with the onion–dice it fairly small and microwave it a minute on an open plate to parcook.
2. Cube or slice the tofu in triangles and (optional in this recipe, since you’re not browning it) microwave for 4 minutes on an open plate or until it starts releasing liquid but the surfaces of the cubes or triangles aren’t dried out. Drain the tofu carefully and let it sit while you make the sauce. You’ll probably have to drain it again before adding it. >>>If you don’t care about pressing the tofu, just skip this step and be a little careful about stirring it into the sauce at the end because it’ll be a little more fragile.
3. While the microwave’s going, put the oil and spices in a nonstick pan, grate the garlic and ginger in, and start heating on medium-high for a few seconds. Add the parcooked onions and after a few seconds pour a small splash of water in. Stir gently to unclump the spices. Fry until it looks like it’s drying down, then add another splash of water and let it cook down further–do this 2-3 times until the onions are translucent and starting to brown but not sticking to the pan badly. You don’t want them or the spices to scorch, so keep adding small amounts of water just as needed.
4. Add the tomato, tomato paste or sauce, cook a few seconds and add the pumpkin and stir to mix with the onions and spices. Then pour in milk a little at a time, stirring until you get a thick pourable sauce texture. Keep the heat fairly low at this point–just at a simmer or a little lower.
5. Add the tamarind sauce or vinegar just to taste–you want subtle tang, not pickle juice, so keep it light. Stir in the labne and add sugar one spoonful at a time, tasting between to adjust it to your preference. It shouldn’t be overtly sweet, so just hint at it. Don’t forget to add the cinnamon and clove.  It may also need a pinch of salt, but probably not more.
6. Add a little extra milk or water as needed to keep it from thickening too much as it simmers. Add the cubes of tofu or paneer and fold in very gently with a spatula to avoid breaking them up. Serve with chopped cilantro, a sprinkling of crumbled feta, maybe some extra hot pepper flakes if you want them.

Tofu in Peanut Curry Sauce

The same idea led me to try again this week with a different take–only I was thinking Thai curries, or maybe gado-gado. I made more or less the same onion/spice mix as in the “makhni” tofu. Only I’d dumped 2 tablespoons of the dry amba powder into the pan instead of curry spices, more than intended, and the onion paste was a little harsh on both turmeric and salt, almost as if I’d opened a jar of mango pickle. To mellow and dilute it, I threw in a chopped tomato and cooked it down with a little added water, then stirred in a golf ball-sized amount (2 heaping tablespoons) of peanut butter as the thickener instead of pumpkin again. As long as you stir the water or milk in very gradually with a spatula after that to bring it up, it makes plenty and thickens up well.

This time I added in bite-size vegetables to simmer briefly in the sauce with a lid on before adding the tofu. I skipped any salt or soy sauce because the amba is quite salty, and went cautiously with the vinegar and sugar. The end result was smokier, stronger and less sweet than the pumpkin sauce, and certainly less sweet than standard Thai peanut curry, but pretty good as well.

Pistachio Khulfi in the Microwave

With a title like that, you must think I’ve been reading the headlines so often I don’t know hot from cold anymore, but I’m serious. The microwave is a lot faster and easier for making custard bases, and it doesn’t heat up your kitchen. The ice-bath trick is also a lot faster than trying to refrigerate before freezing.

Khulfi is the Indian still-frozen answer to gelato. Which you really need once in a long while when it’s 90+ outside. Or even when it isn’t. But certainly when your husband’s birthday dinner is in July and it’s so hot you don’t think the restaurant’s khulfi will make it home still frozen. So I decided to try my own version.

I had made a semi-decent frozen yogurt-based version of this a few years ago while playing around with lower-impact ice creams, but I wanted something more definitely pistachio and less acidic. Also easier, faster and hopefully with better texture if I could. Also, all the authentic khulfi recipes involve a lot of boiling down milk, milk powder and sugar for half an hour to make the base. Not in my overheated galley kitchen.

I had an interesting light(-ish) recipe for pistachio gelato from David Lebovitz in my recipe archive, and it sounded like most of what I was aiming for. He made his with a Sicilian-style cornstarch-thickened milk base rather than an egg custard, and it looked easy enough and pretty good on his blog post, even though he didn’t think to employ a microwave at any point. Which as I say is key in this weather. Or any weather.

Without eggs, you won’t have salmonella-type problems if you want to taste the cooked base before freezing it, and you could probably use another starch as the thickener–arrow root, tapioca starch (powdered, not granules), potato or rice starch. Just don’t use wheat flour, I’d say, based on the “gluey” factor of some of my previous tries.

One problem, though: Lebovitz’s gelato recipe featured a very, very expensive hard-to-find jar of exclusive Sicilian pistachio nut paste. He admitted it was a splurge. We’ve been through this before–Leo Bulgarini of Bulgarini Gelato makes use of the same Sicilian Bronte pistachios, which he grinds himself for his signature gelato. But California pistachios are perfectly fine for homebrew.

Freshly ground toasted pistachios

I used the ordinary Trader Joe’s shelled, roasted and unsalted California pistachios and it came out not only well but pretty inexpensive for something designerish. An 8 oz. bag was $6; I made a pint of khulfi with only 3 ounces, so you could get about 2 1/2 pints (1.25 qt or l) from an entire 8 oz bag.  All told, this recipe comes to something like $3 for a pint of gelato or khulfi, enough for 6-8 smallish golf ball-sized scoops  (90-100 g), which is pretty reasonable dietwise and it’s the classic non-American serving size both for gelato and for khulfi.

But the proof is still in the pudding. Custard, anyhow. Although whole milk is traditional, skim milk worked very well in this. It really does not taste skim, maybe because the pistachios add just enough fat–unsaturated, at that–to keep the texture good. Also because khulfi includes cardamom. Even a very little is enough.

I still-froze mine, so it’s a little icier on the bite than if I’d used an ice cream maker to churn it, but it turns out that khulfi is not traditionally churned either–it’s poured into metal cones like popsicle molds and still-frozen.

And we had a fabulous birthday dinner. The All India Café is still doing amazingly good food after 20+ years. Then it was time to try out the khulfi on my two severest critics. Would it be preferable to cheesecake? Would it be at least okay?

It was–sublime, in fact. My husband said it was pretty close to the homemade khulfi from Mela, our (long-closed) favorite Maryland Indian restaurant from way back when. It even had that traditional caramel creaminess in with the pistachios and cardamom, and I’m not sure what made that happen, because I didn’t do anything special to the sugar, I just stirred it in.

The only thing that’s not ideal about this pistachio ice, if you’re not already expecting it, is probably the color. It’s full-on pea-soup green. It’s not your screen. Unfortunate, but I’m not sure if there’s a better way to deal with it.

That’s because it’s not pretend, it’s not extract or food coloring or a couple of chopped pistachios scattered photogenically in a white, non-pistachio base. It’s 3 full ounces of pistachios in 2 cups of milk, which is fairly robust. You’re not going to hide that, even if you know how to adjust a white balance better than I do.

And it’s still delicious.

If you have a coffee grinder and a microwave and a freezer, this is seriously easy and quick to put together, maybe five minutes, and it’s not too finicky about chilling overnight in the fridge first before freezing it. Room temperature is good enough.

The cornstarch method below is a snap in the microwave, as long as you stop and stir every minute or so to keep it smooth, and it’s pretty versatile for other types of nuts. I’ve already tried partially defatted coconut shreds plus a little almond meal stirred into the hot base, which worked decently and tasted good without having to add coconut flavoring or a cloying ton of sugar. I plan to try almond and hazelnut too.

One final note about using nuts or nut pastes in gelato or khulfi recipes:

There’s a fine line between using enough for good strong flavor and creamy texture in a lighter base, which is obviously what you want, and going overboard, which can be not only expensive and wasteful but potentially unpleasant. I learned this the hard way once with a peanut butter ice cream that came out inedibly rich. At the time I was still young and hadn’t suspected there could even be such a thing! It was gagging, though. Freezing affects flavor and fat content affects the frozen texture, so it came out much stronger-tasting, kind of pungent from the peanuts, and more than slightly chewy. Very weird and not that nice–although nowadays I would at least try a simple save by breaking it up and blending it in a food processor with more skim milk and then refreezing.

Anyway, this is good and fast and refreshing and not a heart attack on a plate. Perfect for cooling down the hot end of summer. Now I just have to find a set of those khulfi molds….

Microwave Pistachio Khulfi

Yield: 2.5-3 cups; about 700 g total weight; makes 6-8 servings

Note: I use a digital food scale, so the exact amounts I used in grams are included here. But as my daughter discovered once this summer, you probably should just use a spoon for things like baking soda (not in this recipe) or cornstarch to avoid spilling too much into the bowl on the scale and then having to scoop some back out and hope for the best…

• 2 cups (500 ml, or 500 g on the scale) skim milk
• 3 oz or about 1/3 c (90 g) toasted unsalted pistachios
• 1/2 cup (100 g) sugar; adjust to your taste once it’s cooked
• 2 flat T (20 g) cornstarch
• good pinch of ground cardamom, to taste; about 4-7 pods’ worth of seeds
• 1-2 T plain nonfat yogurt or a few drops of lemon juice, optional

In a 2-qt./liter heat-proof microwaveable bowl, gradually add the milk to the sugar and cornstarch, whisking constantly as you pour, to keep it from clumping. Heat the mixture 4 minutes in the microwave, stopping every minute to whisk it again and keep it smooth as it heats. If it’s not thickened to a cream-of-mushroom-soup consistency after 4 minutes, add a minute or two, whisking between and rechecking. It’s thickened enough when it’s like custard–coats the back of a spoon and you can draw a trail through the coating with your finger. Let it sit a few minutes to cool.

Grind the pistachios and seeds from 5-7 cardamom pods together in a coffee grinder, pulsing it until you get a reasonably fine powder. Whisk the pistachio powder into the milk custard completely. You’ll probably discover a few larger pistachio bits when you stir it into the custard, but that’s okay.

Taste the custard for sweetness and if you think it’s okay but needs something, a spoonful of plain yogurt or a few drops of lemon juice will probably do it. Whisk well.

Scoop it into a snaplock container with a lid and sit it in a shallow ice bath (big baking tray or salad bowl with ice cubes and a little bit of water) to cool quickly. It will thicken to pudding texture as it cools.

Once it’s cool, either churn the mixture in an ice cream maker or still-freeze it as-is: either pour into individual popsicle or khulfi molds to freeze, or stick the snaplock container in the coldest part of the freezer for an hour, remove it and stir up any frozen bits from the edges as well as you can into the liquid part, and put it back in the freezer. Take it out and stir it up again once or twice until it’s frozen through.

To serve, let it sit out a few minutes at room temperature or microwave 15 seconds, just enough to get to a scoopable texture.

Carb counts: about 20 g carb per 1/8th.

— — —

Stay cool, stay safe, hang in there and let all our hearts calm down enough to make this a better fall.

Next post–less political, more pasta, with a few new microwave and produce tricks.