Indian Lamb Cocktail Koftas (Chhote Kofte): Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking

The other hot hors d'oeuvre for the Great Christmas Party 2010 were a gourmet take on meatballs. I'm sorry but taking lumps of meat on a toothpick and dunking it in barbecue sauce down-grades the class of a party. That may seem snobby, but meatballs have a time and a place, and that was not at my family's party. This recipe was as close to meatballs as I was willing to go, but gourmet and exotic enough to evoke "oohs" and "ahhs" from party attendees. Never once did I refer to them as meatballs when distributing them to guests. "Would you like a lamb kofta?" sounds exponentially more appealing than "Want a meatball?"

"Delicious Cocktail Koftas" - Chhote Kofte - I somehow don't think "delicious" is translated in the recipe title...
For the kofte:
ground lamb
salt
ground cumin
ground coriander
garam masala
cayenne
cilantro
yogurt

For the sauce:
garlic
ginger
water
ground cumin
ground coriander
paprika
cayenne
vegetable oil (or other oil that can take high heat)
cinnamon stick
cardamom pods
whole cloves
onion
tomato
yogurt (I substituted almond breeze here but not in the koftas, to keep the consistency, but figured it didn't matter so much for the sauce since it mostly evaporates and thickens anyway)
salt

This is one of the easiest recipes in the cookbook. There is none of this "Add first spice. 30 seconds later add....30 seconds later add....2 minutes later add...."

For the koftas you simply combine all the ingredients...yeah, that's it. It feels like cheating it's so easy. Shape into 30 balls, dipping your hands in water as necessary.

The sauce takes a bit more work, but is well worth it. The nice thing is you don't have to chop the garlic or ginger as they go straight into the blender or food processor with 4 tbsp of water. Pour out into a bowl, and add the cumin, coriander, paprika and cayenne straight to the garlic/ginger paste.

Then put 1 to 6 tbsp of oil in a frying pan on medium-high heat. The recipe says six, I say two, depends how much skimming you want to do later. Basically you need the oil for the whole spices to release their flavours, but you can achieve this by making a pool of oil on one side of the pan to trick the spices into thinking they're swimming. They only need to be overwhelmed by oil for 3-4 seconds before you add the chopped onions, stirring all the time until brown. The onions won't brown the same with less oil, but trust me, they'll be fine, and you won't mind because of all the other flavours. Fried onions in a biryani are important because they're a subtle flavour that really comes through, but in a tomato-based lamb dish it's overkill.

When the onions are brown add a tablespoon of yogurt (or almond breeze) and stir until it's incorporated into the sauce. Add Add the remaining 3 tbsp of yogurt 1 tbsp at a time.

Add 1 1/4 c. water and salt.

Bring the sauce to a simmer and add the lamb koftas. Cover, leaving the lid a bit ajar, reduce heat to low and cook 25 minutes. You need to stir every now and then make sure there's still liquid in the pan and the meatballs aren't sticking to the pan or to each other.

Remove the lid and turn the heat up to medium-low if the sauce isn't clinging to the meatballs. This is just to evaporate off the excess. There should be a layer of fat at the bottom of the pan. The sauce is to die for, so you can either pour the whole contents of the frying pan into a dish, or lift the meatballs one by one, removing excess fat and whole spices that just don't know when to let go.

Alternately, you could serve these as a main course and leave more of the sauce to soak into basmati rice or soak up with naan.

These are, as the boastful recipe says, delicious. You won't find an easier authentic Indian recipe for lamb, or most anything else. Certainly not one with such a high taste : work ratio. They melt in your mouth, and the hot, sweet and savoury flavours of the cayenne, tomato, and garam masala are present in each luscious bite.

Wild Mushroom Risotto (Balls) with Black Truffle Oil

This is pure comfort food.

I admit I shy away from (or cheat at) risotto because of the time of stirring involved. I also more often have basmati or brown rice sitting around, neither of which are the perfect arborio rice required for traditional risotto, but it's Christmas, and exceptions must be made.

Traditionally a risotto is made of sautéd onions and garlic in olive oil, to which rice is added. After the rice is coated with the oil mixture and begins to stick, the pan is deglazed with white wine. Then broth or wine is added in 1/2 cup quantities until the rice is al dente, just tender. Apparently you can just keep adding wine from a bottle until it's gone, but more often I'll use what's leftover from a bottle of white in the fridge and then finish it with MSG-free vegetable or chicken broth. Still haven't mastered the home-made versions of these...broth that is, not wine. Maybe wine someday.

This recipe calls for a lot of mushrooms for flavour, and a recurrence of the white (or black) truffle oil used in the polenta. In restaurants risotto will often be partially pre-made, or ready to be re-heated, so the traditional parmesan or romano may already be added, but if you want (or need) to skip the cheese when making this at home, there should be enough creaminess from the slow-cooked rice and broth to satisfy. Maybe add a little extra salt if there's not enough in the broth to substitute for the salt in the cheese.

Dried wild mushrooms
warm water for soaking
olive oil
onion
garlic
portobello or other fresh wild mushrooms (I love the Fromagerie Atwater's selection [Montreal] but stick to the brown crimini, which are a steal)
short grain rice (arborio)
vegetable or chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste
white truffle oil
fresh parsley
parmesan or raw swiss cheese (optional. The swiss is what I ended up using as a dip for the risotto balls made out of the leftovers)

Soak the first wild mushrooms in warm water for 30 minutes while you chop the garlic and onion. Then drain the mushrooms through a strainer lined with a paper towel to remove the grit but save the liquid. Rinse and chop the mushrooms.

Sauté the onions and garlic until soft and add fresh mushrooms, chopped. Cook until the liquid has evaporated and then add the soaked and chopped wild mushrooms. Stir in the rice and cook a few minutes more.

Bring the broth and reserved soaking liquid to a simmer, so that with each addition to the skillet it doesn't need to waste time heating up before it is absorbed by the rice.

Add 1 cup of stock to rice and raise heat to medium high stirring constantly, but lightly(!), until liquid evaporates or is absorbed. Most of the liquid actually does evaporate but the flavour from the broth stays, which is why this tastes so much more intense than regular rice. Just be careful your broth doesn't have too much salt, or all you'll taste is sodium and the mushrooms will be wasted. Add all the rice in 1/2 cup quantities until the rice is tender, about 18 minutes. Remove from heat and add salt (or not, probably not), pepper, and truffle oil, and finally, parsley. Optionally stir in parmesan or other cheese.

This was such a good texture. Luxurious cream...but the flavour was hollow. I was disappointed. I think it was the truffle oil, but it was definitely missing something. We did try the risotto at this point but it was mostly left for the following day when it had dried out a little. We shaped it into meatball-size spheres and baked the risotto balls (instead of frying in butter). The risotto balls were served as hot hors d'oeuvres, brought around on platters with a small dish of raw, grated swiss cheese (unpasteurized, so acceptable for most lactose-intolerant people as the un-killed bacteria eats the lactose). The risotto was much better with the swiss cheese, mostly because it overwhelmed the hollow earthy flavour. Seemed like cheating, but was still very warm and comforting, definitely not heavy like it can be when you stir in the cheese. This way you get to taste the swiss in every bite, instead of having it melt into the ball's already-creamy texture.



Verdict: I'd make it again, but use white wine instead of all vegetable or chicken stock. Probably a dry white would work nicely.

Disgusting Smoked Trout Spread on Baguette

I should have left the poor baguette alone.

I love smoked trout (and smoked salmon, the recipe's substitute if no trout is available), I love dill, I like yogurt, lemon, chives and pepper, but this was gross. 50% of the testers of this spread disliked it violently.

I don't think I like horseradish. It's either this or the yogurt was too bitter or runny.

1/2 lb smoked trout
1 c. yogurt cheese or ricotta
lemon juice
horsradish
dill
chives
pepper
salt to taste

This is a simple recipe. You blend the first 4 ingredients in a blender or food processor and then stir in the rest.

But I used plain yogurt instead of yogurt cheese. Yogurt cheese involves draining the excess liquid from the yogurt by using a cheese cloth. I also think ricotta would have worked better, but we made two versions of this, one with soy yogurt and one with probiotic yogurt and neither was particularly good. We used less yogurt in the soy version and it was better, but not even a little extra salt could save it. No one at the party disliked it, but lets just say that when I was testing it I didn't want to have to keep testing it after each subtle change, like adding a little more salt, or a little more lemon. We didn't have more trout to add, which may have worked better. I wish we'd just put out the trout as it was. There was nothing wrong with it. Poor trout, all coated in gross yogurt and horseradish. Simple is better. This is a good lesson.

Next post...risotto balls. Simple recipe, fancy presentation. Step in the right direction.

Party Prep: Pastry, Peppers and imPerfect Polenta

With all the preparations for the 2nd annual family house party in full swing, I tackled the ''P's".

Fresh off my mousse mistakes, I decided to separate the great Mocha Buche de Noel into sections. This is first of all necessary, as the mousse needs to be frozen, the soufflé pastry needs to cool and all these layers need to not fall apart inside or outside of your freezer, and second of all good for my self-esteem. The pastry seemed by far the least intimidating step.

The idea for a Buche de Noel is you make a baking sheet of chocolate cake (in a low-fat chocolate cookbook this becomes a soufflé pastry to keep it light), a baking sheet of chocolate mousse (the good recipe for bittersweet truffle mousse rather than the dreaded mocha mousse), unpeel the chocolate layers from their respective baking sheets, roll them up, wrap it all in a meringue layer and stick it in the oven for 4 minutes like a Baked Alaska. The effect is one of frozen mousse inside, warm maringue coating outside, and the meringue looks like the bark of a tree, a Christmas tree, or "buche".

Cocoa Soufflé Pastry:
eggs, separated
vanilla
sugar
cream of tartar
cocoa
jelly-roll pan (the baking industry's money-grab item - it's only a baking sheet with a lip, as most have anyway)

This recipe from Alice Medrich's Low-Fat Chocolate Cookbook certainly got off on the wrong foot when no length of beating was suggested. In the last recipe I had undertaken, the dreaded mocha mousse, she was so adamant that under no circumstances should the beating time of 3 minutes be cheated, but here she did not say a peep? Well I beat it for 3 minutes and hoped there wasn't a third recipe somewhere hiding in the book which read "Actually, you never want to beat for 3 minutes as the egg yolks will turn white, become very scared of chocolate, and never, ever fold correctly, resulting in unsuccessful Christmas parties".

I had decided to make the pastry layer thinking it would be a nice break from mousse, but no, soufflé is just like mousse in the egg white/yolk separating, beating, and folding EXCEPT there's no need to make sure they get to 160 degrees because it's going to be safe no matter what once it's in the oven. Oh hurray! Soufflé now seems easy to me. The hardest part was after:

1. Beating the egg whites to soft peaks (still a bit of a guess) on MEDIUM speed,

2. Adding the remaining sugar, increasing the beating speed to HIGH until stiff but not dry (again, hope and a prayer),

3. Folding some of the egg whites into the yolks and then everything back into the whites after sieving the cocoa on top

you have to make sure the whole thing does not collapse as you fold and finally spread into a baking dish lined with aluminum foil. I've had a few too many soufflés collapse in the oven on me and if this happened, the buche de noel would be a little non-cylindrical, probably resulting in the mousse oozing out the sides. Not a bad thing, necessarily, as it would be the most delicious tree sap created since maple syrup, but no so good when trying to surround it, eventually, with meringue.

Well it didn't implode. The middle didn't sink. My self-esteem would last one more day until the next mousse-making.

On to easier tasks, or so I thought...

Polenta Diamonds


I doubled a recipe for polenta from Bonnie Stern's Heartsmart Cooking

10 cups of milk or water (I did a mix)
4 cups of cornmeal
salt
pepper
white truffle oil

Seems simple, and it was. Bring the water/milk to a boil, add salt and pepper, whisk in cornmeal. Reduce heat to low and let cook for 30 minutes, stirring. Remove from heat and stir in truffle oil. I cooked it and stirred and poured it into baking dishes to cool. In Northern Italy polenta is everywhere. It's served as a porridge, with more liquid to cornmeal ratio, and then the leftovers harder up, some of the liquid evaporates, and are grilled, fried in butter, or baked into a cornbread-like consistency to be topped with other ingredients the next day. Kind of in the same way you take stale bread and turn it into bread pudding, or toss leftover dried-out rice into a soup. So my concept with the polenta was to cool it in pans, leave it to dry out and cut it into the diamond shapes you see everywhere in bars in Milan, and top it with:

1. Goat cheese spread and Wild Mushroom Sauté (and a version using a lactose-free feta)

2. Moroccan Cooked Tomato Salsa topped with scallions


(This worked well with the "layer" theme of the party), but the polenta did not dry up. Even after baking it for 20 minutes it stayed mushy inside, like a pancake that won't cook through. With assistance, I tried frying them in butter, only to come to the conclusion that the butter was used to make overly dry polenta softer after, not to make soft polenta harder. The outsides solidified but the second you move them from the pan they fall apart. It was still delicious, but you can't have layers if everything squishes together, and messy finger-food at a party is a recipe for disaster, and labour-intensive cleaning, neither of which are good.

So the polenta got left for two days to see if anything could be evaporated. In the end I think we baked all ten cups of it twice, tried frying 1/4 quarter or it and left the left to be scooped up with a spatula. It actually worked out alright. Instead of cutting the pieces individually, the diamond-shapes were made with a knife as guides for party-guests to try to scoop, and then each diamond was topped with a mound of the salsa or cheese and mushrooms. The colour contrast between the two layer toppings was beautiful and the diamonds weren't so mushy by the party.

Oh, for the white truffle oil, I did splurge and go to a specialty store. White truffle oil is olive oil infused with truffle, a mushroom. It's all very chi-chi, yes, and I'd never tried it before. It gave a woodsy-flavour to the cornmeal and is a nice touch as long as you don't overpower it with salt.

The Moroccan Cooked Salsa was so easy to make! Five ingredients:

Red peppers
olive oil
A head of garlic, separated into cloves and finely chopped
4 jalapenos
3lbs plum tomatoes or 3 cans drained and chopped

You broil the red peppers until their skins are black, let them cool and peel the skins off of them. This is not so fun sometimes. If they broil unevenly then all the skin doesn't blacken, and it's kind of hard to remove it all. Two tricks are to cut the peppers so the skin is equidistant from the broiler so it blackens evenly, and once broiled, leave them to cool in a plastic bag. I think this makes it easier to remove the skins though I'll admit I don't fully understand.

12 cloves of garlic? Seriously? It cooks down so it's not too strong. This is not raw garlic. Honestly, in the end, you don't really taste the garlic. The jalapenos you do taste, and feel, though. Dicing four jalapenos should be done in kitchen gloves. One is bad enough but four stays in your hands, can cause irritation, gets in your eyes, and generally overwhelms your kitchen. Also, don't skimp on the oil when you sauté them with the garlic or they'll smoke up your entire kitchen. Cook these a few minutes, add the tomatoes and cook 20 minutes. The taste would be completely different if you use fresh tomatoes, but it's December in Newfoundland, so you can get mush better quality from canned. Just don't add any extra salt in the end when the recipe says "salt to taste". I don't care if you're addicted to sodium, the extra salt would add nothing.

After 20 minutes add the reserved roasted peppers, which have subsequently been skinned and diced, and cook 15 minutes more. Also delicious on toasted or un-toasted baguette, instead of mush polenta.

2 dips down, 1 to go.

Great Expectations-Christmas Challange 2010

Perhaps I'm being a bit overly ambitious.

I am catering my family's Christmas party. This is not chips and dip. This is not even fruitcake and pigs in a blanket. To give you an understanding of what I have to live up to, last year my buffet and hors d'oeuvres menu was grouped into three sections: fish, fruit and cheese, and desserts. Oh, and a bunch dips and roasted vegetables (toasted asparagus, nutty cauliflower and broccoli to go with a miso honey dip) on other tables in the house. All with wine pairings. Fish included seared scallops, shrimp martinis, lobster sushi, and a smoked salmon sushi pizza. Fruit ranged from figs to blackberries. A wild mushroom and lentil paté, and two creamy leek dips (in addition to the miso, one version with honey and one with agave nectar). Cheeses were probiotic, lactose-free...or just really, really good and in excess. The hot hors d'oeuvres were bite-size corn and red pepper pancakes with jalapeno salsa and chicken (or vegetable) kebabs with mango chutney.

and desserts...oh desserts.

Fudge brownies with broiled coconut frosting, and a variation with a rich chocolate frosting. My family's traditional gumdrop cookies, blackbottom cupcakes, an assortment of chocolates and candies, and a chocolate fondue dip for the fruit. All, except the cupcakes, in vegan and non-vegan, but often lacto-intolerant-friendly forms.

Then the wine.

We started with champagne, because everything goes with champagne.

Then light whites with the fish. Pinot grigio to complement the touch of lemon on the scallops. Sauvignon blanc for the shrimp. An Alsatian Gewurztraminer and organic chardonnay for the fruit and some of the cheeses (goat's milk, brie, camembert) and cabernet sauvignons and pinot noir to go with the fruit and chocolate combination. Then merlot and shiraz for the richer chocolate desserts and finally port and ice wine to finish the desserts, or by themselves.

Also a slow-cooked mulled cider. I couldn't forget that.

but that was last year. This year I'm more ambitious. The theme is layers...

On toasted baguette:
Smoked Trout Spread
Wild Mushroom Bruschetta

On polenta diamonds:
Moroccan Cooked Salsa
Southwestern Brisket, optionally with avocado cream

On the side:
Arugula Salad with shrimp, roasted asparagus and fennel
Fruit, dried and fresh, for garnish

Hot hors d'oeuvres:
Lamb Koftas
Wild Mushroom Risotto balls

and desserts (this is where the theme of "layers" truly shines):

Lemon mousse cake
Blackbottom (white top) cupcakes
Thin oatmeal cookie sandwiches with either gumdrops, dried apricots, or bittersweet chocolate, filled with frozen chocolate mousse (vegan and non-vegan options) or fresh lemon
Mocha Buche de Noel

If I can make a mocha buche I think I will cry from joy. It involves making two meringues. The lemon mousse cake involves making a third, and a fourth will be made to be frozen for the cookie sandwich filling. That's a whole lot of opportunities to mess up. Fortunately, I planned for this inevitability, and figured the more people drink the less they will care. With this in mind, I brought home three Quebec dessert wines: a blueberry hydromiel (honey wine), a a blackcurrent wine, and a strawberry mistelle (a lot of fermented fruit juice and straight alcohol). And, of course, my dad's apple cider.

But wait! There's more. I also plan on making a traditional Indian dinner of lamb rogan josh, bund gobi aur matar (cabbage with peas), and basmati rice. but then I get interrogated: "Are you making naan???" *sigh* My non-mousse arch-nemesis, rising bread dough. Ah, we meet again, but I come well-prepared. Decent flour, good yeast, a lot of determination, and help.

So now, off to make the blackbottom cupcakes, then prep the lamb, saving the mousse and naan for last. These things don't combine...

and yet, it's a time of miracles. I'll skip the prayer, but keep my fingers crossed that it all works out.