Roasted Cauliflower. And Leftovers.

Yah, I eat a lot of earth-toned food. Yes, yes I do. And I never think about a photo until its impossible to get a good one.

Be that as it may, this piece of a picture features a couple of things I do all the time (1. make something via the fried rice engine, this time, using carrots, onions, and mushrooms and 2. make lentils) and one new thing. It's the new thing I want to mention.

I tried roasted cauliflower. It was wonderful. I did look over multiple recipes, as there are tons of them, and decided that this one was the starter recipe for me.

Except I subbed nootch for Parmesan cheese. And I left off the vinegar. It's all good and stuff, but I was just wanting the veggie and the spices. My modification:

* 8 cups 1-inch-thick slices cauliflower florets
* 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
* 1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* Freshly ground pepper to taste
* 1 t nutritional yeast
* 1 t garlic


Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 450°F.
2. Toss cauliflower, oil, spices in a preheated, great big, cast iron frying pan. [Don't burn yourself!] Spread on a across pan and roast until starting to soften and brown on the bottom, check and stir every 15 minutes until done.

Yum. This was certainly Cauliflower FTW! and I expect the regular recipe is quite nice, too, but I wasn't interested in missing the flavor of the spices by tossing with my exceedingly expensive and super flavorful 18-yr-old Balsamic.

Roasted Eggplant

Briefly, a note about a portion of a recipe that worked well:

I ran across several recipes I would like to try on EatingWell.com, and I decided to try this one: Spiced Eggplant-Lentil Salad. Unfortunately, it depends largely on a fruit that I pretty much hate: mango. Still, it seemed easy enough to just leave the mangos off and go from there.

Unfortunately, the lentils got cooked way past the "individual lentils" stage, and so that got carried on into the usual lentil stew I make myself. Good thing I like them that way!

What I did get to try was the roasted eggplant bit:

# 4 tablespoons peanut oil or olive oil, divided
# 2 teaspoons chili powder
# 2 teaspoons curry powder
# 2 medium eggplants (3/4 pound each), trimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes

# Preheat oven to 500°F.
# Combine 1 tablespoon oil with 2 teaspoons each chili powder and curry powder in a large bowl. Add eggplant and toss well. Spread the eggplant on a large, rimmed baking sheet. Roast, stirring once halfway through, until tender, about 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, my oven takes far longer than 15 minutes to roast eggplant cubes to what I consider done, so in future, I'm going to have to remember to throw some potatoes and other vegetables in there, as well. It's a shame to waste all that fuel on a couple of eggplants.

The eggplants were very good, though, and I think I would like this even better if I subbed out the spices listed here and subbed in some of my many, many spice blends.

ETA, much time later: I tried the above with Auntie Arwen's "Sheik of the Desert Ras el Hanout" blend instead of the listed spices. OMG. So good. Must remember that.

Some simple cookery notes, because it's only simple cookery going on right now.

I've been hurt since late December or so, and it waxes and wanes in terms of the injury's ability to interfere with what I am doing, and right now, it's a great big wax--I'm hobbled right now, hardly moving. Some notes based on things I've started but have not been able to follow on through as much as I have wanted.

Lima Bean Spread: I love lima beans, frozen, but have noticed that the big lima beans that come dried are a different beast all together. I don't really like them as entities that one can cook up for a larger dish, like a lima bean stew or something. What I have noticed: they cook from dried to mush pretty quickly, and so with the addition of just enough flavoring to mask the faint hint of lima bean, you can make a pretty decent protein spread for a sandwich. It's not as good as hummus, of course, but then, chick peas have a nice flavor that works with vegetables and breads and whatever else. The Lima Bean spread, however, isn't lima bean-ish enough to be really distinctly delish for lima bean lovers, but sufficiently lima-beanish to make it less than invisible, like a sandwich spread based on white beans. My fist solution: a couple shakes of liquid smoke, which worked very nicely. I will be playing with that, because it was nice just served on flat-breads, but it needs a little more to really make it something I am going to be handing around as a recipe. Dried lima beans cooked to mush and a little smoke flavor certainly produces an acceptable spread, but my suspicion is that it can be something more without needing to go quite as complex as hummus-from-dried-chick-peas.


Garlicking Up Sauces: In this old Ars Gratia Artis post, I mentioned my tendency to buy expensive Italian sauces (because it is the expensive ones that have sugar instead of corn syrup, olive or canola oil instead of soy bean oil) and then, after a few bites, garlic it up to the point that any crap sauce would do. Well, I'm running a little low on fundage right now, so I thought, well, maybe I'd try me a can of Hunts spaghetti sauce. At 89¢, it seemed like it might be worth trying despite some of the low quality ingredients--I shouldn't have the soy, true, but if I could get a decent taste out of it, it might not be too bad to use once in a while to make my moola stretch, and I have a very large amount of fresh garlic to use up.

Yeah. It was a waste of good garlic cloves. I pulled out the powder immediately, I could not get that stuff good with anything less than plenty of powder and heaping spoonfuls of giardiana. It's too sweet. Whether one calls that as a WIN or a FAIL kind of depends--if I just need a reasonable sauce to overwhelm with powerful flavors, then... well, it works, but I may as well just use some tomato paste and avoid the soy and the corn syrup.

I dunno. I read the ingredient lists on so many foods, and I'm thinking to myself that it's not really a wonder that so may people are not healthy. It's probable that we will all use *some* processed foods; it's hard to completely avoid it *all* and we'll just have to chant the mantra "everything in moderation." However, it's really easy to go to a grocery story and buy food enough for a month and come out with meals that are all technically appropriate for health according to the "food pyramid" and still have nothing but good-tasting death in your cupboard--which sort of rolls me along to the next small bit.

Real Pancakes from Scratch: Baby K loves pancakes, and wanted some for breakfast. Having none of his favorite pancake mix in the house (whatever that mix might be), I made them from scratch, via the recipe for griddle cakes in the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking. Things I noted: it's better with a smidge of vanilla added and using 2 eggs. It needs more milk than the recipe calls for. I need to stop putting cooking spray/butter/margerine on the pancake pan I have, as this burns quickly and makes the pancakes look burnt when they are not. But what took me by surprise was the realization that for him, the idea of cooking pancakes from a recipe in a book was worrisome. He knew what he was going to get from a box, and he knew that there are some kinds of pancake mixes that he does not like. But the idea that someone might make them without depending on the "magic" of a boxed mix was weird enough that he wondered if it was going to be something edible. His voice was full of joy and delight when he sang out that they were wonderful and gobbled them up, but his voise also had that tone of relief that indicated he had expected otherwise.

Huh. We never had pancakes much when I was a kid, although I was certainly aware of pancake mixes. But it never occurred to me that cooking them from scratch had become such a rarity in this culture that simply by following a recipe from the 1975 edition of a popular cookbook I was engaged in a resurrected recipe. I knew how to make pancakes from scratch, I just didn't bother. That's true of a lot of people. However, sometime between now and then, that's become more and more rare, to the point that I don't think I know anyone who *does* make them from scratch unless, like me, they have some reason for avoiding particular ingrediants in mixes (generally powdered milk, soy, and eggs), or they want something you can't get in a box (sourdough). It was a weird, weird moment. Pancakes are so simple, after all.

Vegetable Bowls I want to Remember: No pictures here, either, just a bit of recollection. 1: I often stirfry veggies as a simple meal, something I have been doing a lot of these past injured weeks. Two things I noticed: all that peanut oil that I have accumulated from pouring it off of the natural peanut butter I buy (rather than mixing it in) mnakes a very nice stir fry oil when serving the veggies over rice--I've been using olive for so long that I had forgotten about the nice qualities of peanut for anything other than the neat trick of making a chocolate cake taste like a chocolate-peanut butter cake by simply substituting the peanut oil for the "vegetable oil." And 2: I used to eat a lot of somen noodles, but had gotten away from that while with Michael. He hears somen, he thinks ramen, and that's the end of it. But I recalled my love for these, and for soba, and went and got some recently. I used to usually eat this with just some plain mixed vegetables mixed in, but the other day I tried stir-fried mushrooms, onions, garlic, eggplant, and seaseme seeds. A few days latter, I went with green beans, onions, garlic, and I liked that, too, although it takes a much larger amount of green beans:noodle ratio to make me happy than it takes mixed veggie:noodle ratio to make me happy. Not sure what's up with that, but I have plenty of time to try it all out.

Curried Beans instead of another Hoppin' John!

Now, I have a ton of cook books. Once upon a time, I looked at all the books of Medieval cookery I have and decided that I needed to try a recipe from each book I owned. I managed, and then I found that online sources tend to be more useful because I can look up a whole bunch of variations of recipes across time and space, and come up with something that represents my tastes and time interests--something I really love doing--rather than following something redacted by one cook and wondering if that dish, delicious though it might be, really represents the flavors and techniques used.

Now, I love beans. And I love rice. And I love greens. So, as I have fallen in love with Joanna Vaught's Veggie Burger Engine (which is still in my recipe books despite the sad loss of it on the internetz), and realized that I have my own Veggie Pie Engine, I'm also aware that I have my own Vegan Hoppin' John engine. Now, a hoppin' john engine is not as fabulous as a veggie burger engine, but it does indicate a cooking habit that suggests that I love, love, love dishes that are greens, rice, and beans cooked with oils and spiced to please my palate and complement the primary components in the hoppin' john*. Of course, it's meatless for me, but I'm not trying to feed it to a soul food aficionado, I'm cooking it for myself.

However, although I could eat Hoppin John and all the various versions of it from all the cultures that have taken to beans and rice as a dish with a silly regularity, I don't want it all the time. It occurred to me that it was time to try some of the recipes in my vast (or, at least, larger than most folk's) library of cook books. The first to catch my eye? "Black-Eyed Pea Curry" in a book called Hot and Spicy Cooking



I liked the dish a lot. I did serve it over brown rice, because, hey, that's how I like it. Beans and rice. It would do fine over any grain, however. I did think about serving it with corn tortillas instead, but that's for next time. The celery was very nice addition.

On the whole, though, I was waiting for the hot, and it never arrived. This is supposed to be spicy? I recollect thinking. So I spiced it up, and it was better. The primary point here, of course, is that it isn't as spicy as I thought it would be, but then, I think Tabasco sauce is a needed ingredient in most dishes. Anything you make is improved by lots of hot peppers, in proportion to their Scoville rating, so you are talking about an overall heat of 10,000 to 150,000 SU in the dish. Anything less will get Tabasco sauced. This got sauced, suggesting that I didn't find it to get to 10000 SU, despite the use of chillies.

I did not copy out the recipe. Instead, I took a picture. The original recipe is here. I did make some substitutions:

Ghee => Olive oil
4 Chopped Tomatoes => Tomato sauce. Non-awful fresh tomatoes can not be obtained this time of year.

And that would be about it for the subs. It worked out well and I'll likely make it again, next time treating it as a taco filling or some such and adjusting the SU as I may. :-)