3rd Annual Christmas Extravaganza: South Indian Dosa to Scoop Up Your Pork Vindaloo or Saag

Dosa is the easiest wrap to make ever. I don't know why more people don't eat it. It's a little coarse from the ground lentils, a little tangy, and deliciously sponge-like. Lots of people buy tortillas at the grocery store that come with so many preservatives and things you wouldn't really want to put in yourself if you looked at the ingredients list. Then other people buy things like tortilla presses, or even crepe pans and combine either hard to find ingredients or just lots of ingredients. Most people with wheat sensitivities just stick to sad, sad rice cakes.Traditionally dosa are eaten in Southern India with breakfast and lunch, but I keep having it for dinner. Kind of like having cereal for dinner, but less refined sugar and a lot more protein. It's just lentils and rice after all.

Dosa has 3 essential ingredients. Sure, it won't be as sweet as a crepe (though you could add sugar, I suppose), but it's about the most natural gluten-free wrap you'll ever make. Now "raw" food dehydrating, no kneading, no pressing, and it's as easy and fun as making pancakes. You can make the big elaborate cone-shapes one like you get in restaurants but actually making them pancake-sized helps them cooperate and be less brittle and fussy.

Ingredients:
3 cups basmati rice
1 cup urad dal ("black gram", but the black skin is removed, leaving you with something that looks like a very small split pea. It's easily confused with other kinds of dal such as moong dal, so make sure you ask)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp fenugreek (optional)

Instructions:
Soak the rice and dal in separate bowls for at least 6 hours on the counter. Add 1/2 tsp fenugreek (optional) to each bowl. The rice and dal should be covered by at least 1 inch of water.

Drain the water, rinse the rice and dal thoroughly, and place them in a blender or food processor along with 1/2 cup water. Add more water if you need to so you end up with a thin batter somewhere around a thin pancake batter or thick crepe better. I think too thick is worse than too thin, but there'll be lots of opportunity to add more water later, so for now err on the side of too thick. If the batter won't blend because it's too thick, don't be scared to add more water.

Pour the batter into a bowl and add the tsp of salt. Now cover the batter and leave it to ferment at room temperature for 12 hours. After that you can put it in the fridge if you don't use it right away. I haven't noticed any problem with keeping it a few extra days in the fridge. It doesn't go bad that quickly. I also figure that in India it would go bad more quickly, but this seems like the kind of batter you just leave lying around fermenting and it's okay for a good while.

Heat a skillet or electric frying pan like you would for pancakes and add a tiny bit of oil to the pan. In my last dosa recipe I used a much more complicated system of wiping down the pan with water and all but I don't think it's necessary. Instead, just pour out the batter a tablespoon at a time and then use the back of a spoon or ladle to swirl the batter outward in a circular motion rom the middle of the circle of batter to the edges. If holes appear that's fine. You can try to fill them in with drops of batter but the fine, embroidered look of the hole-y crepes is beautiful.

Cook for about 5 minutes or until you can get a spatula under the dosa to flip it. The edges should be slightly browned. The bottom should be a light brown. Cook a few more minutes. Done. You can do a few dosa at a time if you make them small enough and your frying pan is big enough. Normally you'd do big dosas for each person but the small one is more like giving soft-shelled tacos to your diners instead of a big burrito shell. that way you can also put different fillings in each one. Especially for the Christmas Extravaganza, it made sense to do smaller ones, so no one took a whole meal's worth of pork vindaloo or saag. I think I probably took a meal's worth of saag...but it is my heaven, after all.

Saag Again

I make a lot of saag, and so it's not really necessary for me to re-post the recipe I don't think. I'll just explain that this time I quadrupled the recipe, added some grated asoefetida for digestion, mustard seeds to make it more South Indian than North, (and also digestion), skipped the green chili, and this is a photo (above) of how much spinach was involved.

Normally I use frozen spinach because you don't need to slice it up and wash it well (the annoying parts of spinach prep), but Newfoundland ran out of frozen spinach in the lead-up to Christmas. I doubt it was because Newfoundlanders went out and bought it up. Somehow I think that it's just not that popular a frozen food. I mean, you don't boil it up with Jiggs Dinner of peas pudding, so what are you supposed to do with it?

This. This is what you're supposed to do with it. Mustard seedy, asafoetida-laced gloop. I love it.

Volk/Watson Christmas Extravaganza 2010: Heavenly Hosts

The Spread

"Heavenly Hosts", aka the 3rd Annual Volk/Watson Christmas Extravaganza can be described as follows:

A selection of dishes with divinity in mind. From the angel food cake to Philadelphia cream cheese sundried tomato spread, each recipe has heavenly associations (ex: the Philadelphia cream cheese commercials) and is fit for angels. Of course, not all angels can digest dairy, so there are always alternatives, even healthier alternatives for all those eco-friendly angels. The "raw" dips are not heated above a certain temperature, are vegan, and are made with nuts soaked in water to remove digestive enzyme inhibitors, for any inhibited angels. Then there are the "Land of Milk and Honey" dishes (ironically, naturally dairy-free) - the Prosecco zabaione (Italian custard) and melomakarona (Greek semolina cookies soaked in honey syrup).

The other dishes are the personal heavens of the Volk/Watson family.

My dad's heaven: pork vindaloo
My mom's heaven: dairy-free, gluten-free dark chocolate hazelnut torte
My brother's heaven: Well my brother likes most things, and I refuse to make sushi with farmed antibiotic-laden Atlantic salmon (unsustainable, at that) so I've created a heaven for him of baguette (the manna of heaven) with Quebec Oka cheese, caramelized onions, smoked herring, crab, and fig jam. That way he can mix and match.

My heaven? Saag. Indian spinach. It's sweet and slippery and delicious. The onions, mustard seeds and asafoetida are amazing, and wrap it up in a fermented rice and lentil dosa and I'm a happy, happy person.

Here are the pictures. The rest of the food included daifuku (Japanese red bean desserts that I broiled), chicken mochi with a sweet soy-sesame dipping sauce (soy and szechuan peppercorn studded meatballs wrapped in savoury rice pastry), frozen grapes (what's heaven without branches of grapes?), home-made caramel (life - and death - are not worth living without caramel), and bottles of natural wines (again, grapes). I think that was everything? Here's most of it in pictures:

Sundried Tomato Cream Cheese Spread, Quebec Oka Cheese, grapes and pistachios

3 "Raw" Dips: Macademia Nut Ricotta, Basil Walnut Dip, Sundried Tomato Macademia & Pecan Dip with a selection of Gluten-Free Breads

 Caramelized Onion, Encircled by Home-made Fig Jam, and Smoked Herring

 Lentil and Rice Dosa with My Heavenly Dish of Choice: Saag

 The Land of Milk and Honey: Melomakarona Greek Honey Cookies with Walnuts

My Dad's Heaven: Slow-Cooked Pork Vindaloo

Raspberry-Blueberry Compote

 Almond Angel Food Cake with Honey Icewine-Soaked Figs, Maple Honeywine-Soaked Apricots, and Home-made Ginger Confit

The Zabaione was incredible...mmm...prosecco foam. The intense sugar of the dried fruit sauces and honey sauces, and caramel...and the mild sweetness of the saag with the chew of the dosa...the crunch of the dips, the sweetness of the fig jam with the caramelized onions and macademia nut ricotta, the basil walnut...the Szechuan peppercorns. Oh I love Szechuan peppercorns.

 

Setting up

Couldn't have done it all without some great help. Thanks to everyone involved, and thanks to everyone who came and enjoyed the party. Merry Christmas. Recipes to come.

Seasonal Cooking: Spring Spot Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas

The Atwater Market and Jean Talon have exploded. That means it's Spring. When the flower vendors come in and the fresh fruit and vegetable sections expand to four times their normal size I get really excited. The downside of the new consumer obsession with eating locally and seasonally is that whatever's in season tends to be really expensive when it first hits the market. That's why I avoided buying fiddleheads. They went from an item nobody wanted, and nobody certainly knew how to cook, to a highly prized delicacy. Like wild leeks. Wild leek pesto seems so generic to me now. Soon Martha Stewart will be carrying a line of it, I'm sure.

I meant to wait until the end of each vegetable's season to buy it, so that the prices would reduce, but I caved. This last week I saw fiddleheads at the market and after comparison shopping a few different places, I bought them from Michaca Farms at a decent $5 a bag. I think it was asparagus' fault, since I'd avoided buying those until I found them VERY reasonably priced at the McGill Organic Campus tent on rue McTavish north of Sherbrooke on Tuesday last week. When I tasted them, and compared them to the organic ones I'd actually found fairly reasonably priced at Jean-Talon, I remembered how beautiful it was to eat in Spring. They were sweet and mild and you didn't even need to crack off the bottoms they were so fresh. Once I had fresh Spring produce, I needed more, and that meant fiddleheads.

I planned to make them very simply, using a basic Indian spicing of asafetida, onions, mustard seeds, garlic and cayenne, and salt, but I forgot I'd also bought some pois mange-tout (the kind of peas you where you can eat the whole pea...what's the word in English? It's not sugar-snap), and then I'd seen some sept-iles (local Quebec) spot prawns on for incredibly cheap (less than $6 a pound) and tried to buy a pound but the man gave me 2. That was fine...

The plan was to make quasi-sushi with them since I had leftover sushi rice, but in the end the photo above is what happened: Indian-Spiced Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas. Somewhere between a shrimp stir-fry and an Indian shrimp saag (since the spicing originally came from a saag recipe) the dish was so, so good, and good for me. The only annoying part was shelling the prawns. You don't get a whole lot of meat off one of those guys, but you get tons of shells for making shrimp stock!!! I now have 4L of stock in my freezer waiting for my next soup or sauce. I love Spring. Did I mention that?

Fiddleheads need to be cooked twice. If you eat them raw they're toxic. So blanch them first and then cook them however you want (boil, steam, blanch again, stir-fry, grill, etc). So I threw them in boiling water for 3 minutes and then drained them and rinsed them under cold water. They have a lot of loose green threads that kind of fall off. It looks like they're pretty dirty, but it's just threads falling everywhere. Give them a good rinse before and after blanching and they'll be fine.

Then stir-fry. I heated a bit of oil (you can use anywhere from a teaspoon to 3 tablespoons. If you use more you won't need to be as diligent about stirring or adding water to keep it from burning, but you up the fat a lot) on high heat (this is a high-heat stir-fry, not medium-high, or medium, so be careful not to use olive oil or another oil that burns).

When the oil got hot in my large pot, I added the grated asafetida and then the mustard seeds "a few seconds later". When they started to pop (another "few seconds"...oh, Madhur Jaffrey) I added the onion that I had sliced finely and some minced garlic.

Stir, stir stir. The onions were going to burn a little, so I added a tiny bit of water to keep that from happening. They get soft this way, not crispy but I still like the flavour. It's more important to cook them through than to undercook them by not adding more liquid. 2 minutes later I added the fiddleheads and peas, and two minutes after that I added a pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup of water, 1/4 tsp salt, and my spot prawns. They don't need much time at all; 2 minutes, max. If they're over-cooked they taste like rubber. What I didn't realize was that they're salt water prawns, so I didn't need to add any salt to the recipe. Still, the extra didn't make the dish less delicious. Madhur Jaffrey's recipes are often heavy on salt and cutting out a little (except in the lentil and bean dishes) is usually fine.

The picture isn't amazing, I know, and I think the peas were on the end of their shelf life. I'd been saving them for too long probably. That's the thing about fresh, good food - it doesn't last. You need to eat it right away. No holding back or delayed gratification. The food necessitates immediate satisfaction. Long live Spring, though I know, like the produce, it won't, and I will just have to take advantage of it while I can.

"Saag It To Me"...what the recipe would be called in the LooneySpoons Cookbooks...but it's not

I've recently had a very little bit of encouraging success with saag. It's tricky, because spinach is gritty and annoying to wash and chop properly. It either tastes too chewy because there are stems or it's too bitter, or the pieces are too big. As much as I usually promote fresh over frozen vegetables, saag-making is a much nicer experience using organic frozen spinach. If it's pre-chopped, all the better. Buy two bags and you're set. It'll be sweet, it'll be convenient and it'll be a whole lot harder to mess up. Also, for money to quantity ratio, buying frozen spinach is a pretty good deal. It cooks down so much that to get the 2 lbs called for in the recipe, you end up working with a lot of big pieces of spinach that get caught in everything and stain your kitchen green. So saag is now my quick and easy Indian dish because of the wonders of packaging. It's sad, and I'm sorry.

I've looked for a long time for a good saag recipe, always thinking the spices weren't quite right. And they weren't, but the spices really aren't that complicated because it's such a mild dish. You don't want to overpower the flavour of the spinach and it's not like you need a really complex combination like you would for a piece of red meat. This recipe is for Mughlai Saag, or spinach cooked with onions from Madhur Jaffrey's (my Indian cooking goddess') book "Indian Cooking". If you want something chewier try the recipe on the opposing page for saag aloo (spinach with potatoes), but for a light side dish, keep it simple with:

spinach
an onion
oil
a green chili pepper (or not, if you prefer, but you'll lose flavour)
fresh ginger
more salt than you think
a little sugar
water
garam masala (store-bought or homemade)

That's all.

Dice the onion. Chop the spinach into small pieces (if not already chopped). Combine the green chili (very finely chopped...actually I substitute red chili flakes. Not at all what the recipe called for, and it did change the flavour, but there was no green chili to be found, and, well, some like it hot?), about a teaspoon grated ginger, about a teaspoon salt, and a generous sprinkle of sugar.

Basically I messed this up the only way you can...I didn't cook the onions long enough in the oil before I added the spinach. So they were a little too crunchy. They shouldn't really add to the texture. When the onions are actually soft, add the spinach and combined spices (not the garam masala). Stir and cook five minutes. Then add 1/3 c. water, bring to a boil, cover, and reduce the heat to low to simmer very gently for 10 minutes. The spinach really doesn't need to cook this long but it does need the time to absorb the flavours of the spices, so make sure you're not over-boiling it. It's already wilted, dead, and not getting any tastier. After 10 minutes uncover the skillet or pot and boil away some of the extra liquid (there will be some, assuming you didn't over-boil the spinach in the first place). Then sprinkle with garam masala and serve. Oh, I forgot! I actually turned this into Callaloo. Though I didn't add any coconut milk or almond breeze, I did add smoked mackerel. It's traditionally supposed to be salt cod, but the flavour of the mackerel wasn't too strong or too fishy, and it substituted nicely, without having to soak the cod forever and then hack it into smaller pieces, watching for bones and skin. It's a nuisance, and since this is my easy dish, there was no way I was going to do it. So by adding the fish I didn't have to add salt as it was definitely salty enough. It gave it a nice flavour too, kind of like using bacon instead of oil to fry onions for a soup...though I don't do that. Anyway, that's my addition to fusion cooking for the week. Hope Madhur Jaffrey doesn't mind that I didn't follow her lovely recipe.

25 minute recipe, max, if you're a slow chopper...or if you touch your eyes after chopping the chili. Takes a bit of time to get the burning sensation out. Don't do that please.