Soups gonna kill me

With two data points I am ready to conclude that soup will be the death of me. The first instance was chronicled in a previous blog entry. Essentially as I was boiling water for pasta, one of the burners on my stove got stuck in the on position, filling the room with gas. Disaster was averted by turning off the gas behind the stove. With a large pot of hot water, I decided the only viable option was to make soup. I had already chopped garlic and opened a few cans of chickpeas... so I mixed it all together with some extras and made a soup. Perhaps the soup didn't cause the catastrophe but it was certainly in the picture.
Last night I gathered a second data point. I was attempting to make my mothers Tuscan Bean soup, which I posted about a few days ago. Everything was going well (I used Kale which was super yummy) until I heard my fire alarm. This was rather unfortunate because it was already 1am, and one of my roommates was in bed and asleep. I felt horrible that my cooking had triggered the alarm. But I also was confused -- I couldn't smell and smoke and the soup seemed to just be simmering. Upon further inspection of the smoke detector I realized the alarm was no for smoke -- it was for CO (carbon monoxide). What???? Why would the CO alarm be going off?
Not sure what to do, I opened as many windows as I could around the apartment and turned on the ceiling fan. Still, the alarm continued. Luckily my pressing the silence button I could get the alarm to turn off for a few minutes at a time. After about 15 minutes the alarm was going strong, so I decided to turn off the stove and even turn off the gas line behind the stove (this was a tough decision considering that my soup was not quiet done). I feared the stove was expelling CO, or that the flame was not burning efficiently. But again, no effect.
By this time I was starting to feel a little woozy. Perhaps it was the CO or perhaps it was a combination of staring up at the fire alarm while the fan make periodic motions... but I was worried.
I knocked on my roommates door (the one who was not sleeping) to let her know about the alarm. Then I decided action was needed. I placed a call to 911 and they directed me to the local fire station. In under 5 minutes 4 firemen were at my door! They came inside and checked out the CO alarm. Their own CO meters registered no CO --- a false alarm and a malfunctioning CO detector! I thanked them and after they left managed, with some difficulty, to remove the battery from the alarm so I could go to sleep.
I finished the night by completing the soup. Again, perhaps the soup did not play a role in the catastrophe, but it was certainly there watching.

Mom's Tuscan Bean Soup

Today I had a really good soup my mom made and I figured that I would share the recipe. Even through my stuffed nose this soup was really yummy and full of flavor. My mom want me to make sure to give credit to Lidia Bastianich from whom's cookbook she got this recipe. Of course she added a bunch of stuff (carrots, tomato paste, and some extra herbs...)
Soup Base (White Bean)
1 lb (2 1/2 cups) small white beans (navy beans, northern beans, or just small white beans) soaked overnight or quick soaked.
4 qt water
3 bay leaves
1/4 cup olive oil
Boil (cover a jar) adjust to gentile boil. Cook 1 hour or until beans are tender. Stir in 1 1/2 tsp salt. Uncover and continue cooking for another hour until there is about 3 qts. My mom added some sage, rosemary, time and some kale after the first hour of cooking.

Much like the spices oil mix which is often added to Indian Dal before serving (my former Indian roomate --- nb. he's still Indian --- called this a Vagar), this soup has a Soffritto.
Soffritto
3 Tbs Olive Oil
6 garlic cloves sliced
1/2 tsp hot red pepper flakes
[3 ounces tomato paste]
Saute until garlic begins to color. The tomato paste (my mom's addition) goes in after the coloring of the garlic begins. Add this to the soup base at the end of cooking and mix it up.

[Note: So as not to be too laudatory to mom, I have inserted a few "witty" spelling mistakes, most of which occurred organically]
[Note: After having written this I realize that most of my mistakes are not in fact funny, nor are they witty, but rather just a sad reflection on my state of education. Unfortunately I am not as quick as individuals like "iron_h8r" or "microraver", or even the elusive "anonymous" from my previous posting. Each of those multiple personalities showed humor in singularly unique fashion.]

Latkas and Blintzs

By the end of the night I had two swollen fingers, a sink full of potato peels, a kugel made from left over cheese, latkas and vegis, and many new stains on my pants and shirt. But on the upside the Giants won... and my Hanukkah party had been successful.
I boasted the evening before to a friend who was staying for the weekend that I would be able to make 300 latkas for $10. This, however, was predicated on my shopping in Chinatown. This, however, did not happen -- I woke up too late, the weather sucked, and it turns out (as my roommate informed me later in the day) that the 21st was actually a Chinese holiday for the winter solstice. In any case, I resigned myself to shopping nearby --- probably a good thing in retrospect. Rather than buying 20 lbs or potato, 5 lbs sweet potato, 10 lbs onion, 5 lbs zucchini, 6 lbs carrots as I had planned, I about halved everything.
If I have any strengths in cooking, they certainly do not include calculating how much food raw ingredients will yield. I expected company at 6pm, so at about 4pm I began, with the help of my weekend guest, to peel and grate potatoes. I don't have a food processor, so everything was done by hand on a box grater. To keep the potatoes from discoloring, I kept them pre and post grating, soaked in water. When it was time to grate the onion I donned a pair of ski goggles and went to town on the bulbs. (I'm going to try to post a photo of this).



By 5:15 or so the first batch of latka mixture was ready for frying. To keep the potato and onion together I added flour and oats, plus a few beaten eggs (and pepper for flavor). No salt touched the latkas until they were fried, dried and ready to eat. I've heard this keeps them crunchier. When it came to frying the latkas I am of the three castiron school of thought. So, despite the three skillets not exactly fitting on my stove, I managed to have three pans going at the same time, allowing about 15 laktas to cook in any given moment.



For the next two hours or so I fried. At some point people began to come and between flipping of the latkas I tried to be friendly. I had determined that I should keep count of the number of latkas I made, but somewhere after 5 I lost count. My best guess is that I made about 150 of them --- some with a mix of potato and sweet potato, others just straight up potato.
Since I was afraid that there wouldn't be enough food (I'm a little crazy --- I didn't use half of the stuff I bought, so how could there not be enough food??) I had defrosted about 20 blintzs which I made a few weeks back (see the post). These fried up very nicely and went out with the latkas.
The latkas went over really well. Many of my friends had never had them before and enjoyed their oily goodness. What surprised me the most was how well the blintzs went over. This has prompted two conclusions -- first is that I will have shavous party in May, and second is that I really should try to apply for that NYU top chef competition and use blintzs as my breakfast dish.
Other lessons to learn
1. Four containers of sour cream is too much for any number of people. In fact, one container is probably too much.
2. Three jars of apple sauce (50 ounces each) is also too much.
3. Two castiron pans is probably enough to fry latkas.
4. One day a year for making latkas is probably enough.

Well... that last one might be wrong. In fact, I did it again today (though much scaled down) at my brother's house near Albany. We had latkas, this time cooked on an enameled castiron. The flavor and consistency was just as good. However, the feeling of having contributed positively to the seasoning of a castiron pan was just not there when cooking on enamel.

Returning to the end of my night (last night), as my last guests we leaving, I realized that I still had 6 peeled potatoes soaking in water, plus many cheese ends, and a bunch of vegis which would certainly go bad while I was away this week. The only conclusion which seemed reasonable was, at 1 in the morning, to make a kugel. Oh, I forgot, there were also about 15 latkas left over, which formed a wonderful base for the kugel. Now I am starting to realize why latkas and blintzs are relegated to special holidays while kugels are an everyday food --- its much easier to make. And while it was cooking, somehow, with a last bit of strength, I cleaned the kitchen!

[Gross-out warning]
As a last remark to this remarkably long post, my two swollen fingers should be accounted for. One was a simple mistake in opening a wine bottle. The second was a lesson to all who make latkas via box grating potatoes --- keep your finger nails short. I thankful, and unwittingly had heeded my present advice, or else things would have turned out much worse. In grating, my finger slipped and my nail got caught in the potato, driving a wedge of the potato under my nail. Pain ensued, but thankful, due to my diligent hygiene of cutting my finger nails, my nail was short enough that it did not break on account of this. Whew.

Frying and statistical mechanics

Certainly the two items in my title have nothing to do with each other. They are just the two things on my mind recently. This past week I have been rather negligent in posting and cooking. This is because I've been eating the majority of my meals at a conference in Rutgers University. Every morning I take the blasted nj transit there to listen to lecturers about statistical mechanics and now about probability and discrete systems. Any connection to food? There is of course a ton of instances where statistical mechanics plays a large role in food science (I'm not an expert in either fields, so I'll just mention some examples briefly).
1. Ice cream making (preventing large crystals from forming during freezing).
2. Bread making (creating a matrix of starch and protein so cause wholes and rising).
3. Emulsions (like mayonnaise).
4. Chocolate (my brother mentioned this to me. It turns out that chocolate has like 5 different phases which must be properly navigated in order to have all of the characteristics desired).
I'm sure there are books about this... maybe if you know of one you can post it in the comments.
Another observation about statistical mechanics is that almost all of the old generation of practitioners have breads... I thought that was kind of funny.

Changing gears, I'm preparing myself mentally for my latka cooking this coming sunday. I expect to make upwards of 300 latkas, plus maybe cook some of the blintzs I made a few weeks back. If I have time I may make some fancy schmancy latkas with sweet potato or the likes. Anyway, I'll post on monday likely to update as to the success of the latka party. Hopefully by that point my hands and clothing will have ceased being translucent from the excessive amount of oil on them.

Still pretty bad at roasting chicken

One of my favorite food memories while growing up is the Friday night chicken my mother would prepare. It was, for a number of years, almost always the same and it was consistently great. In an attempt at being healthy, my mom would remove the skin from all of the chicken --- that is except the wings for which skin remove was nearly impossible. The skinless chicken would get a little mustard and ketchup and maybe a few other spices. I never eat the skinless pieces though. For me, there were wings --- juicy and skin covered. So every Friday evening I would tempt nose burns while trying to get as many whiffs of the roasting chicken. These memories are a large part of why I don't think I could ever become a vegetarian (though I seldom eat chicken and almost never eat red meat).
I'm not sure why, but I'm pretty bad at cooking any type of meat. I think its the pressure. If I mess up some zucchini - no big deal. But if I mess up my chicken and make it too dry, or under-cook it, to me, this is a disaster. So with all of this pressure I over think things, doubt myself and usually end up doing the same, non-spectacular preparation of chicken.
The above mentioned preparation is essentially cooking the chicken with some garlic chunks, onion and potato in a deep cast iron pan, on the stove. What usually happens is that some pieces I cook are too large (like breasts) and others too small (like wings) and I end up needing to cup the breast open to cook the inside. This, of course, lets all of the juiciness of the meat out, and I end up with slightly dry dinner.
Last night I tried to oven roast the chicken, but impatiences, an oven which has no other settings than super hot, and an overly reactive smoke-detector cut this idea short. I needed to finish cooking my food on the stove top.
Perhaps I should look at a recipe book? Still, I'm afraid that a lack of control over my ovens temperature would make it nearly impossible to cook a thick piece of meat without charring the outside. Maybe I should try using my crock pot...
Anyway, I tend to learn from failures, but its been at least a year that I keep stove cooking my chicken and I haven't really learned better.

Blintz

[First announcement is that I will begin to post some pictures stuff I make. My brother gave me his old camera (my old camera had broken)!]

I'm considering applying for an NYU version of top chef. The first task is to design and then cook a breakfast spread. So yesterday I tried out some of my ideas --- all of which involve blintz. For those who do not know, a blintz is an east European (Jewish) food which involves a filling wrapped in a crepe like shell, and then pan fried until golden crispy. They are often eaten on Shavuot, as their filling is usually dairy, and Shavuot is associated with dairy. In any case, I decided to experiment with different types of fillings, and to pick a few to form a breakfast platter of blintz. Unfortunately for me, most of my ideas involve ingredients (types of cheese mostly) which are not available for the contest. I made them anyway for fun.



The shell is really fun to make. The recipe I used called for
4 eggs
1 cup milk (or water)
1 cup flour
1 tsp salt
I used jumbo eggs, and so I increased all of the 1s, to 1.3 or so to adjust for the larger sized eggs. Mix this until the flour is fulling mixed and there are no pockets of dry flour. The consistency should be runny but able to coat a spoon. Refrigerate and make the fillings. After about an hour, take the batter and mix it again. Then take a small (5" diameter) cast iron pan and put it on a medium to low flame. Before pouring on the batter, take a paper towel, or a piece of bread and rub some butter on it, and then rub that on the pan. Repeat this before pouring the batter for each blintz shell (though you don't need much butter --- i used maybe a half an inch of a stick of butter for the whole process). Take a measuring spoon and pour enough batter to coat the bottom (turn the pan in the air to coat) and then pour out excess into your batter bowl. It will take maybe a minute per blintz to cook, and you'll know its done when the top is dry and the sides start to curl a little. Remove the shell (only one side is cooked) with the cooked side up, onto a plate on which all shells will be piled. Repeat until done.



The fillings: I made three different fillings.

The simplest filling is just farmers cheese. Some people mix in an egg yolk, or some honey, or some butter. I just used the farmers cheese.



Getting a little more complicated now.
2 medium red onions
1 large sweet potato
1/2 lb Gorgonzola cheese crumbled
a few splashed of port, or red sweet wine
a few sprigs of rosemary
cinnamon
brown sugar
In a heavy stainless steal pan caramelize two onions, chopped into half rings. When nicely browned, add a splash of port and deglaze. Meanwhile cook a sweet potato. The easiest way to do this is to poke some holes in it, wrap it in a wet paper towel and microwave it for 5 or 6 minutes. When done, skin it and chop into chunks. Add these to the caramelized onion and cook together for a few more minutes. Also add in some chopped rosemary and salt. Before turning off the heat, deglaze the pan again with some more port. Transfer this all to a bowl and add the crumbled cheese. Mix until uniform and add some brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a little more rosemary.



The final filling was a more earthy mix of flavors. In fact, the cheese I used (which I don't know the name of since I got it at a Courant party) had a rind which almost look like it had been buried in the ground for a while. Weird.
2 cups frozen chopped spinach (or fresh if you are some sort of rich person)
1 package of mushrooms (the small white/brown type you usually see in packages -- though small field mushrooms would be good too)
6 cloves garlic
1/2 onion
garlic/onion powder, pepper, salt
a hard earthy flavored cheese (again, not sure of the name...)
Saute the onion and garlic for a little, then add in the spinach and cook until nicely wilted. Add in the mushrooms, chopped into half inch spices. Add some additional garlic/onion powder, and some pepper and salt. Cook until mushrooms are tender. Put into a bowl and add the earthy cheese, shaved and chopped. (You could probably also include pine nuts here. The whole idea is to attain a very earthy flavor.)



To fill the blintz, lay the cooked side up, and about an inch in from one edge put a large spoonful of filling down. Fold the symmetric sides over this filling leaving you with a rectangle of blintz, with the filling on one side. Roll this, starting from the filling side, to make a roll.
These can be frozen and then thawed in the fridge, or immediately cooked.

I froze mine, but here's how one would cook them.
Fill your favorite large cast iron skillet with oil to cover the bottom. Heat, then add a few of the blintz. Cook until browned and flip. Once both sides are browned, remove onto a paper bag to absorb excess oil. Eat with apple sauce or sour cream, or be more creative and thing of something good to pair with the filling. I haven't thought that far yet though.

Pizza Dooh

For almost two and a half years I've been doing way more work to make pizza than I have too. Yesterday evening I went to a dinner at the apartment of a college friend. Her boyfriend, one of my college roommates, enlightened me as to quick and easy way to make pizza in a city: Buy the dough from your local pizzeria! Wow... that is smart (this roommate always had a knack for doing things in the most intelligent yet time efficient manner...)
This is not to say that I begrudge the hours of mixing, kneading, and rising. But to know that I could have gone around the corner to the pizzanini and payed three dollars for enough dough to make 6 pizzas... again... Wow.
And this dough was good. They made two different type of very thin crust pizzas - both featured ample rosemary. One was butternut squash thinly cut, caramelized onions and goat cheese; the other was thinly cut potato, mounds of potato mashed with rosemary and cream, and Fontana cheese.
While I'm really excited about this way of making pizza, I do want to briefly defend the merit of making your own dough. I like making half whole wheat dough... and its pretty darn hard to find a pizza joint which uses that. So, I think I will try this idea, and maybe even freeze some of the dough, and then alternate between types.

The other side of Salmon

In my last post I wrote about the apex of salmon products. Here I will briefly write about two acceptable recipes for the cat food of salmon --- canned salmon (nb: this is not actually cat food, but rather I mean to say this is the lowest grade of fish sold for humans). This stuff is super cheap. Its even cheaper than Chinatown fish. Plus, if you get the good stuff (and by good I mean nastiest) it will come with skin and bone. There is a plus to this however. The bones in the salmon have had ample time to soften, and can be eaten without any difficulty. This, in fact, provides you with a really great source of calcium, which in addition to the protein etc of the salmon is a homerun nutrients-wise.
Still... the canned salmon is one of the more fishy forms of fish out there, and unless you really like that, you need to be pretty selective in the type of recipes you use this stuff in.
Here are two which I consider pretty good, the second of which I just made tonight (for the first time).

Salmon Latkas:
My grandmother makes these in the style of hamburgers, but with salmon in place of the ground meat. This is a good way to do it, but I'm going to propose another type of latka based on the "Tuna Kabobs" which my former roommates girlfriend showed me. Surprisingly the ginger/garlic/pepper flavor really goes a long way towards cutting the fishiness, and actually has a rather nice flavor.
1 can salmon
a few cloves garlic crushed and chopped
an inch cube of ginger finely chopped
ample black pepper
an egg
~Mash the salmon and mix in all ingredients, including some salt. Form into patties and fry in oil.

Pot of stuff
This recipe (aptly named for its nature) took shape while I was at a Jazz show tonight. I hadn't eaten much since lunch and so my mind flickery back and forth between Jazz, math and food. In fact I often forgot which one I was thinking about. In any case, I followed my imagined recipe through to a tee, and got a pretty good result. I'll split it up into a few small parts.

Salmon mixture:
1 can salmon mashed
3 limes juiced
1 hot pepper chopped
1 clove garlic crushed and chopped
Mix everything together and let the salmon sit in the mixture until most of the fishiness has departed.

Take one large sweet potato, skin and chop into 1/4 inch slices. Then cook these with a little oil in your favorite cast iron skillet until tender. Reserve and once cooled chop into inch by inch squares.

1 large onion
6 cloves of garlic
1 hot pepper
cumin powder
1 can salsa
1 can tomato sauce
1 can black beans
1 can pink kidney beans
1 head cabbage
1.5 cups of brown rice
First cook the rice in the microwave for like 25 minutes. It will be almost done but still a little tough. Meanwhile chop the onion and garlic and pepper and cook in a large pot with some oil until a little translucent. Add a teaspoon or so of cumin. Then add in both cans of beans plus the salsa. While this cooks, chop the cabbage and slowly add it into the pot, so that it comes into contact with the surface. Add some salt. The cabbage will cook down pretty fast. Add in the rice, plus the tomato sauce. Cook all of this together until the cabbage has cooked down. Then add in the sweet potato squares and the salmon mixture. Mix thoroughly.
I ate this today in a soft tortilla which I heated on my cast iron. It was a pretty nice dish and super good for you. The lime really neutralizes the salmon fishiness, and the brown rice gets cooked tender. The flavors are not amazing though, but it makes for a nice warm meal none-the-less.

Salmon Bacon (Brekfish)

A little under a year ago my brother had a son, and in the Jewish tradition had a Bris for his eight days later. Probably the second most important Jewish tradition to circumcision is the eating of smoked salmon afterwards (in fact, much like most of the other Jewish occasions, a large part of the mitzvah of a bris is to have a meal there). My brother purchased a rather massive cut of smoked salmon from his local Price Chopper (Albany area --- price chopping is king), which has a rather nice kosher deli. The fish was spectacular. Where was it from? None other than the Springfield Smoked Fish company (http://www.springfieldsmokedfish.com/). This was a rather nifty coincidence since my family (up to my parents generation) has been almost entirely from Springfield Massachusettes. Yet somehow we had never found out about this smoked fish company.
How you ask? I don't want to get into family politics, but some members of my family have less than cordial relations with the smoked and cured fishes. In any case, this discovery, lest I say this revelation has since changed the nature of our trips to visit Springfield.
Even before having a chance to go to the source, my brothers and I researched this smoked fish company online. Suddenly there it was: Brekfish Salmon Bacon--- what in the world could salmon bacon be like? This quesstion haunted us for the months leading up to our next visit to my grandmothers. The day came, the car drove and the gps led. Finally we had arrived at the Springfield Smoked Fish company. The building was not too impressive and the inside was as can be expected (a half a dozen clean metal tables with various implements for cleaning and preparing fish). The man who greated us was very helpful, and showed us a list of the items which could be purchased. I know we bought a few things, but what has lingered in my mind was that first purchase of Salmon Bacon.
I waited a few days until returning to New York before being able to actually try the fish. Here is what I found when I had defrosted my first package. The salmon was very soft and free from any sort of fibers. It was cut into thin strips (about 1 inch thick) through the fish's natural grain. I heated up my favorite cast iron skillet and with a little butter, threw a few pieces on. After about 4 minutes the bottoms had cooked to a nice browned color, so I flipped and finished them off. When properly cooked the salmon got very crunchy and held its shape really well. The favor was (and its been a while since I've had this) out of this world. Every little piece was enfused with a smoky, sweetness. The fishiness and saltiness of regular lox was almost not present. I'm not even kidding when I say that I savored every little piece.
The rest of my family had varying responses. What seemed to be the consensus was that it was excellent unless you have had real bacon, in which case it was a little weird.
This Thanksgiving I gave thanks for many things, including the opportunity to get more Salmon Bacon. I even came to Springfield with a few requests from friends to purchase it for them. Unfortunately for me, there was to be no salmon bacon this time. The newest batch just finished today, not last friday when I went to purchase it. So I write today a man without his salmon bacon. I've looked into shipping it here to New York, but it will cost like 40$ just for the shipping. I've asked if they have any distributors here in New York, but the answer is sadly no. So, for the next few months I will need to salivate to the thought and not the smell of Brekfish Salmon Bacon.

Yummy side dish alert, or the Cabbage Point

This one is going to be short. In my monthly (or maybe less often) ritual of Chinatown shopping I make sure to purchase vegis which will last for different periods of time. Always included in my purchase is cabbage --- both heads of cabbage and Chinese cabbage. These items last extremely long without any marked decrease in flavor or quality. So, since its been a little over a month since my last purchase trip to Chinatown, I'm getting to the point of cabbage. This is the point at which all of the greens in my fridge have disappeared, and my meals begin to draw more heavily on my remaining supply of cabbage. Having bought a good amount, this period usually lasts for about a week.
So, today I made a cabbage side dish which was simple, fast and really yummy.
I used semi-heading chinese cabbage (http://www.evergreenseeds.com/semchincab2.html). Here's the recipe

Sesame seeds
Red pepper flakes
Garlic Powder/ Onion Powder/ Salt/ Pepper (I used a Steak seasoning I like)
Semi-heading chinese cabbage
A little honey
Olive Oil

Heat the olive oil and then add the sesame seeds and pepper flakes. Let the seeds start to toast. Meanwhile chop half in wide slices of the cabbage (chop more than you think you need, since its gonna lose volume a lot). Throw the cabbage into your pan and after a little sprinkle some of the seasonings (be sure to include some salt at least) onto the cabbage. Once the cabbage has cooked add a little honey and finish cooking for just a drop more. Thats it.

I'm sure there are lots of good variations on this, so if you try it I'd like to hear what your try differently.

Diners and brunch

This weekend I went up to Boston to see many of my college friends who were around Harvard for the Harvard-Yale football game. I have very little interest in Harvard football (the Giants an Jets are more fun), but this was a good chance to meet up with many of my friends I haven't seen recently. As typical of these type of visits, the main meal everyday was brunch, generally eaten at a local diner. I've been thinking recently a lot about breakfast/brunch foods, since there is an NYU cooking competition I would like to apply for, which requires a submission of a breakfast menu to be prepared in the first round of the contest. I applied last year, but offered a somewhat stupid menu (I'll paste it in at the bottom of the post). This year I am trying to find a more traditional breakfast approach, so I really valued the chance to eat at the diner. My Jewish gene kicked in for the first brunch I had, and after just a little bit of wavering, I purchased a bagel with lox. I should have thought a little more critically about this: I was in Boston and the lady I ordered from did not know what lox was... and needed me to restate my order as "smoked salmon". The meal was nothing special, and there wasn't really enough lox in the sandwich. Today however I wised up and got a breakfast combo. But here in lies the beauty. For the same price as a bagel and lox, I got 2 slices of french toast, 2 eggs, and some home fries. Plus, the combo came with meat. I can't eat the meat, so I asked the waitress if she could substitute lox for the meat. She obliged and I received more lox than I had in my sandwich the previous day. I reserved this lox, and at the end of the meal ordered an everything bagel with cream cheese, and made myself a bagel with lox sandwich, for a third of the menu price.

Now that I have told everyone of my craftiness, I want to solicit people for breakfast/brunch ideas. The constraint is that I have just 1 hour to make the meal in the competition. Last year, prior to settling on the "Breakfast Bento Box" below, I toyed with making some sort of Dosa like crepe. This was a complete failure and involved me running rice and lentils through a blender, and then making a mess out of my pan when this mixture failed to cook.
Ideas I have had so far this year:
- Making a nice omelet with just fresh spices and a little cheese.
- Crepes
- Eggnog french toast. I'm not sure if I can get eggnog in the competition (note about eggnog -- I will, in about a month, need to write a posting about eggnog, since my brother gets the worlds best eggnog enmasse every Christmas time).
- Salmon bacon (again I don't think I can actually get this, and again this deserves its own post)
- Blintz

The problem I have with breakfast food is that I very seldom eat breakfast food for breakfast. My usual breakfast involves eating the same food I had the night before. In fact, aside from my granola experiment and an occasional omelet, I have not made any breakfast food in quite a while. The most common meal I make at breakfast time ----- roasted chicken. I cook this for after a morning run.
Anyway, I need some help thinking of breakfast foods that will be good for this competition.



********************************
Breakfast Bento Box

Lightly Browned Vegetable, Bean and Egg Burrito with Cilantro Salsa
-Take a large soft torilla and cut it into a square. Then lay a thin layer of white rice. Meanwhile make an omlet with some pepper and garlic in the mix. And saute large slices of onion and red pepper til tender. Heat black beans. On the layer of rice, in the middle lay a 1.5 inch row of beans. On that place in pattern long slices of egg, pepper and onion. Then using a sushi rolling board, roll into a roll. Cut into pieces and dip in tempura batter and fry.

Blueberry / Apple Blintzes with Sour Cream
Form blintzes skin mix and then pan fry to form blintzes. Use Ricotta (or farmers if available) plus creamcheese and sugar. For blueberry just add fresh. For apple, saute apple with cinnamon and nutmeg. Then fill and roll. Then pan fry till brown. Sour cream on the side.

Mango and Smoked Salmon Lettuce Boats
Take medium piece of lettuce --- optimally bib. Make balsamic vinager, brown sugar and olive oil dressing. Dice mango, smoked salmon and red onions and put in lettuce boat. Dressing on the side.

Thin Strawberry fruit soup with treats of mango and raspberries
Blend strawberries with lemon juice and orange juice, squeezed, plus some water. Drop in small chunks of mango and raspberries. Garnish with mint if available.

Traditional orange slices.


Arrange as a bento box. The soup is like a miso soup --- serve with similar spoon. The burrito like temura sushi rolls, the blintze like sashimi and the lettuce boat the salad.

Borracho Beans or Meshugas Lentils

My girlfriend (yes... for all those online admirers of mine, I do have a girlfriend) suggested a recipe to me a few days ago called Borracho Beans. As I understand, Borracho means drunk, and Beans is pretty clear. Her recipe called for certain parts of certain animals which I am certain not to use. However, it seemed like the major component in the mixture was the inclusion of beer.
So, last night, as the weather became cold, I decided I would make myself something warm to eat today. Out came the crock pot (my dairy one) and into it went:
1 lb lentils
1 chopped red onion
one head of garlic
3 chopped carrots
3 bay leaves
3 sprigs of rosemary
lots of chopped hot pepper, and some dried whole red hot pepper
cumin
dried parsley and dill and savory
1 can tomato paste
salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder
1 beer
3 or so quarts water
I turned this on last night before going to sleep, and this morning awoke to a wonderful smell of meshugas (Jewish for drunk) lentils. The beer actually had a pretty good impact. Often lentils have a little too much of bland flavor. The cooked beer modifies that flavor just enough. I eat this before teaching this morning. I think I will add a little more salt into my next bowl of soup, since it still was a little on the bland side.
On a related note, I have come to appreciate the quality of my mothers soups (and generally every meal she made) as I have been cooking more and more. It seems like through my experimentation and inventivity with cooking, I often end up roughly approximating her previous sucesses.

Free cheese necessitates pizza

Two years ago, while I was still flying high in the world of finance, my fund had a Halloween party accompanied by far too much cheese. My roommate at the time and myself were catching a ride up to Boston for the weekend, but because of traffic (or some other forgettable delay) we were left at work pretty late. With our extra time alone with the massive amount of cheese left over from the party, we hatched a plot. We would bag it up and bring it home. So, into two gigantic ziplock bags went a mixture of fancy cheeses --- some hard, some smelly, some blue... While we were at it I think we also took a case or two of the left over wine :>
In any case, someone the cheese survived the weekend. This is surprising because as I recall, we almost didn't. While driving up to Boston we hit traffic -- literally. The drive was slow to respond to the changing traffic conditions and we were not able to stop fast enough to keep from hitting into the back of the SUV in front of us. Damage done. Then, on the way back from Boston, just a mile outside of Cambridge, the hood of our friends car (which had been damaged in the prior accident) became unhinged and flew up and smashed into the windshield. This left us blind to the highway traffic. We were able to navigate to the side of the road thankfully.

Needless to say, the next day (I took a train home rather than chance a drive in that hell car) when my roommate and I got back from work we were faced with like 5 pounds of random cheese. The answer was to make pizza. We experimented to our hearts content with different types of toppings and cheeses. Even the stinky cheese became manageable once baked in the oven.

Now, in graduate school, the parties are not quiet as decadent, but there still is cheese. Courant, for most of their parties, gets really good cheeses from Murrays Cheese shop in Bleeker near 6th. Yesterday was such a party, but unfortunately it was not well attended. The result was that I was able to bring home two large chunks of cheese: One of Asagio and one of Piave. Asagio is a cheese which is used in some of the more famous pizza joints in NYC and is kind of like Mozzarella when cooked. Piave is a harder cheese, like a young Parmigiano Reggian. In any case, the obvious thing to do today was to cook pizza.

My mother makes a very nice dough, a mix of whole wheat and white, just made with yeast, flour and water. I've been making my pizzas using moms recipe for a while and it is very good. It comes out pretty crunchy and keeps its shape well. However today I wanted to try something different. Yesterday my office mate told me that when he makes pizza he uses an egg, milk and sugar in addition to my three ingredients. I figured that I would try to include that, plus use beer instead of water. I have heard that this makes for very yummy dough.

Well, I warmed up some McSorrley's Ale (1 beer) and then mixed some of it with a single packet of yeast and some sugar. The yeast was a little old so it took like 10 minutes to start to bloom. Meanwhile I mixed one egg and the rest of the beer, plus some powdered milk in another container. This all got mixed together, as well as a ton of flour, some salt and some dried Italian spices. I used too much liquid and as a result needed to use about 5 cups of flour (mixed whole wheat and white). Eventually this formed a reasonably springy dough. This went into a bowl and sat for about an hour.

Meanwhile I threw together a pizza sauce. I was tempted to try to use Persimmon in the sauce, but my sense of propriety got the best of me - darnit. The base was one large onion diced, one head of garlic diced, and one large red chili pepper diced cooked in olive oil with some Italian spices. Once translucent, I threw in a large can of whole tomatoes and their juice, plus one can of tomato paste and one of tomato sauce. The usual suspect spices went into the mix, plus I threw in some grated Piave cheese. This stewed until nice some of the excess water cooked off.

The pizza dough was way too much for me to cook tonight. In all there seem to be 6 pizzas worth. So I cut it and froze four of the balls. I cooked one tonight and will do another one in a day or two. The dough was not as stretchy as I would have hoped and I needed to roll it rather than pull it into its shape. Still it was pretty resilient and it didn't tear. When shaped I threw it onto a pizza pan with some corn meal to keep it from sticking. My oven is great for pizza because it gets really hot. I usually cook the pizza dough without sauce until it is a little crunchy. This time I didn't give it as much precooking time before saucing it. I regret this because the inside part of the dough didn't hold its shape as well as usually. About two minutes before the pizza was done I threw the cheese and some chopped fresh Basil, Oregano, Thyme and Rosemary onto the pizza. Once melted, the pizza was done.

I wish my old (a different old roommate) was hear, because I think he would have really liked this pizza. He was a really pizza snob, but I made this pizza with his tastes in mind. The cheese went really well, and the sauce was a little sweet. I needed to add a little salt to bring out the full flavor. My only change (and I have five more chances to do this) is that I would have cooked it more before adding the sauce. I really did like the dough, though it was nothing like what I expected to get. From the springyness of the dough, I expected that it would be a pretty springy pizza. Maybe I need to let it rise some after rolling it? The dough was very thin and crunchy, and aside from having a little more flavor than my mothers, pretty similar.

Maybe this is evidence that it is the hands that make dough and not the ingredients.

A kosher foodie?

I want to bring up a question I have been asked and thought about a lot. How can I really be interested in food, but still keep kosher. At the cost of sounding like I'm rationalizing being kosher, I'd like to venture an answer.
First of all, let me outline the restrictions which being kosher imposed upon me food wise.
1. Ingredients: I can not cook with any pig ingredients, nor can I cook with any seafood ( lobster, crab, scallops, clams, oysters, ect). I can only cook explicitly kosher meat, and even then I can not mix it with dairy ingredients. In general I try to only buy things with kosher marks on it (though this I sometimes disregard).
2. Restaurants/Friend dinners: When I eat out I only eat fish and vegetarian. For instance, today I went to the Jets football game (J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets ---- nb. I'm more of a Giants fan) and was surrounded by amazing looking tailgating meats. I eat carrots and celery, and a rather ill-made bagel and lox sandwich from a kosher breakfast place (B&H breakfast on 2nd sucks --- they don't have good bagels and don't know how to make a lox sandwich). My restrictions also keep me from eating lots of interesting ethnic foods, street foods, and great foods my friends make.
3. Equipment: In my kitchen I have two separate sets of dishes and pots and pans and utensils. If I want to have a meat meal, I can only use my meat tools, and likewise for dairy. This is actually difficult because of the limited space in my kitchen, plus since I don't cook too much meat, I don't have nearly the same options of cookware as I have with dairy. Also, this can be tough with non-kosher roommates since I need to ask them not to use any of my stuff, and also I need to be careful about them washing their dishes with my stuff in the sink. Luckily this has always worked well for me.

Ok, so I may have left some stuff out, but as you see, its pretty restrictive being kosher. I should mention one aspect which I do not follow is that I freely drink unkosher wine (the kosher stuff really sucks).

So, why would I impose all of these restrictions upon myself, and how does it not significantly detract my from ability to appreciate food? The why is relatively simple: I grew up kosher, its comfortable, and its part of my way of following Judaism. As to the second part of the question, I believe that by restricting myself I do lose out on many culinary experiences. However I think that there is worth in limits.
Lets see if I can articulate this idea. I will never taste bacon, nor will I ever have crab or scallops or street-meat. From what I have heard, these foods have exceedingly great flavor. To me this creates a challenge --- how can I attain the same level of flavor and enjoyment from food, without resorting to eating these items. It becomes something worthy of a quest. I imagine that if I ate bacon, and it really did live up to my expectations, then it might all be spoiled. I would have reached culinary nirvana and would have no where more to go.
This quasi-argument is, of course, dependent on my having been kosher for quite a while. If you didn't grow up kosher, I don't suggest you start. But given my history, being kosher and limited in my cuisine has certainly driven me towards culinary exploration.

Hmm.. maybe I need to think more about this. Thoughts?

Perogi's at Streecha

I'm now going to do what so many New Yorker food bloggists (and the NY Times) have done before me and praise the little know Perogi cafeteria by the name of Streecha. I first heard of this when my roommate from two years ago read about it, just weeks after moving from NY back to Boston. I was very excited and planned to go... but nothing materialized until today, my office mate and I decided to check it out. The place (on 7th street, between 2nd and 3rd, in the downstairs of a building) resembles a small cafeteria you would see in a religious center (probably because that is what it is). The food is awesome. Perogi's (potato dumplings) go for .50$ each, and stuff cabbage is 2$. They also have desert (apple cake) and borscht. Its only open fri-sun, and the money goes to the Ukranian Church near by. I'm definitely going to be going there again. My one reservation was that the onion mixture which came on the Perogi's was a little too heavy with the butter and oil. I might, next time, ask for just the Perogi's.

Dinner Club 2

Last night was the second meeting of the famous dinner club (recall Flounder and Asparagus Risotto posting). This time around we went to the upper west side to my friend sweet apartment. I'm gonna try to get the recipes which were cooked there and post them, because they were all really really good, and more over they were recipes and preparation techniques I would have never thought to use.
There were three dishes. The main dish was tuna steaks, prepared in a Sicilian manner. Since I don't have the recipe, I'm gonna make some guesses as to exactly how this was done. The tuna was lightly floured. In a large skillet, red onion was cooked until translucent. Then the tuna went onto the pan, and once cooked a little a mixture of white wine, vinegar, bay leaves, olives and yellow raisins was added to the skillet, and the tuna continued to cook in this. The tuna was cooked to medium well done, with still a little pinkishness inside. This preparation was wonderful, as the tuna and onions really took up a lot of the flavors of the mixture. In the past I held the belief that the only good way to prepare tuna is rare, but this would not have been as good if the tuna was rarer.
The second dish was really cute and the most flavorful of the dinner -- it was mushroom bundles. I'm a little sketchier on exactly how this was made. I believe that small mushrooms were precooked until tender, perhaps with some accompanying flavors. Then large collar green leaves were cooked until tender in boiling water. Once cooled, the mushrooms were placed into each leaf, and then a little bundle was constructed. These were placed in the oven sitting on some sort of flavorful sauce and cooked. These bundles were brimming with flavor, and the mushrooms were really tender.
The third dish was brussel sprouts, cook with pistachios until green, but not mushy. The more I have them, the more I like brussel sprouts. They can be great cooked in a wine sauce, or braised, or sauted.... just as long as you don't over cook them, they are really very nice.
Anyway, the dinner was topped off with a watermellon pudding desert, served in a small tea cup with chocolate chips placed around the sides. The flavor was very good, though I do agree with the hosts that arrowroot would have yielded a better consistency. There was a little too much of a corn starch flavor at times. However, I'm a fan of any use of watermellon since its my favorite fruit.
I was very impressed by the quality of food and also by the presentation. When I make food it usually ends up in a large pot.... nothing too pretty. Here the food was in three different serving devices, plus the bundles were a secondary form of food serving device.
I hope that we are not peaking too early with the dinner club. For the next meal I cook, I'm going to really dimish peoples expectations for how good food needs to be ... maybe some food poisoning, or I'll use some spoiled cheese, or maybe I'll try to just use Persimmons, and nothing else.
In any case, I'll try to get the recipes and post them.

Indian patties and curry (with persimmon)

Yes, I have found another use for the 50 some-odd persimmons I bought last week --- its as a sauce thickener (and slight sweetener). I was have been contemplating this for many days and finally, yesterday, decided to chance disaster and mix persimmon with tomatos as a base for an Indian curry. I dare say it went off without a hitch. I also found use for much of the 1.5 kilogram brick of goat cheese I got at the cheese shop for a measly 6$. Stay tuned and you too will learn how to cobble together a meal out of stuff you bought on impulse without thinking.
That premise of dinner last night was that my cousin Johanna (who was very helpful in the kitchen) was visiting (I got tickets to the Daily Show and she was coming with) and we had decided to have my other cousin and my brother and sister-in-law over for dinner. Cooking didn't commence until like 8. The menu was to be Indian vegi and cheese patties, rice, and a thick curry sauce. Think Malia Kofta... but don't think that too much.
Highlights of the evening were:
1. Tricking everyone into thinking that they were drinking Johnny Walker Blue Label and listening to their high praise (it was really old Canadian club in a Johnny Blue bottle).
2. Realizing that despite trying to make Indian patties, I was really just making Indian Latkas (no potato, but they really look the part).
3. The success of Persimmon as a thickening/creamening agent.
4. The use of a significant portion of my goat cheese.

Wow, as I write about the evening I realize that what I am saying is pretty boring. So rather than blabbing more, here's the recipes.

Indian Patties. (I'll try to make this a recipe for 4 or 5)
1 can chickpeas
2 carrots
1 zucchini
1 cup goat cheese
1 cup crushed cashews
some flour
1 long hot pepper
1 or 2 eggs (depending on size)
1 small onion
4 cloves garlic
Curry mixture (red pepper powder, cumin/ coriander, tumeric, or curry powder)
Drain and was chickpeas. Add to large glass bowl, with the cheese and eggs and cashews. Peel and julienne carrots, zuchinni and pepper into almost thick pieces (the thinner the better). Mix in with diced onion and well crushed/chopped garlic. Spice with indian spices and salt/pepper. Then add in a few spoonfuls of flour to thicken up the mixture. Let sit for a little. Take you favorite cast iron skillet and cover bottom with oil. Heat and then (just wait until Hannukah's post) shape into latka like patties (maybe 2-3 inches in diameter) and place into the pan. Let these get browned before flipping and repeating. Occasionally add more oil, and when cooked place them on paper bags for draining. Yum.

Curry sauce (also with 4-5 people)
2 Persimmons, ripe (if you don't have these, no big deal... it just makes it a nicer, creamier consistency)
1/2 cup goat cheese
1- 1.5 large can of whole tomatoes
1 cup peas
1 cup cauliflower
2 carrots
1 large onion
5 cloves garlic
bayleaves
dried whole red pepper
crushed cardamom
garma masala
tumeric
mustard seeds
Heat oil in a deep pan. Add bay leaves and dried whole red pepper and let sizzle for 30 seconds. Add mustard seeds, sizzle another 30 seconds, then add powdered spices and crushed cardamom. After about 15 seconds add medium sized pieces of chopped onion and garlic and hot pepper. Cook for a few minutes until onions start to get a little translucent, but not browned. Add in vegis and cook until they get a little tender. Meanwhile take 1 can of tomatoes and the two persimmons and blend in a blender to a slurry. Pour into the pan and add any additional tomato. Cook for 10 minutes or so then add in goat cheese and mix until smooth. Add salt and pepper and any additional spice to taste.

Rice
Cook Indian rice.

Eat.

Dosas 2

So I let the remainder of my Dosa batter ferment over night. When I got to it this morning, it looked like it had fermented a fair amount more (it was more murky). I whipped it up a little and added a little more water to it and some salt. This time around the Dosas came out a lot better. In fact, my last attempt (I made three this morning) actually looked and tasted like a proper Dosa. My conclusion (and I will test this in the next few days) is that in our climate you need to let this ferment for at least a day, and then you also need to give it enough water. This aside, the Dosa cooked up pretty well.
I'm going to make another batch for Wednesday as a post election celebration (hopefully).

Dosa making take 1 (or 2 perhaps)

This morning, before heading off to watch the NY Marathon, I started on the path to making Dosas. Knowing that this would likely not work well, I used only a small amount of ingredients. The directions I found online where to mix 1 part Urad Dal, 2 parts rice (short grained), and 1/4 part Channa Dal, plus some Metha (Fennigreek) seeds. You wash them and then soak them in water for at least 6 hours. Then you blend them to a course batter in a blender. I did this. In my first attempt at actually cooking the Dosa I used a large cast iron skillet with some oil, and poured the batter into the middle, then used my pouring cup to spread the batter. Unfortunately, the batter was too thick and didn't spread. It also didn't cook that well. I ate the creation with some of my indian/bangladeshi greenbeans I made earlier, but it was not particularly good.
With this failure under my belt I figured I should add a little more water and let the batter continue to ferment. I did this for about 3 more hours an then just a few minutes ago made another Dosa. This time the batter spread better, and it cooked better. However, it still seemed a little to course and in my opinion there has not been enough fermentation. I still have some of the batter left, so my plan is to let it ferment over night, and then blend again in the morning and try once more.
This exercise in Dosa making today reminds me of my first Dosa attempt about a year or so ago. My friend Evan and I decided to apply for an NYU iron chef type contest. The application was to design a breakfast menu. I had the idea of making Dosas. There was a problem though. Most importantly you only had an hour to prep and make the breakfast. Secondly, they didn't have the right types of lentils. Still, I persevered and figured that ingredients and time are only in the mind (a common act of hubris I suffer from). So, I took my lentils and my rice and threw it in the blender with some water. Sure enough I got a nice paste which looked kind of like Dosa batter. The only issue was that when I tried to cook it, IT TASTED and FELT HORRIBLE. It was all gritty and I'm pretty sure my body was unable to make anything of the protein locked deep inside of the ingredients. An utter failure, I just tossed the mix. In retrospect I should have just let it ferment for a day and then tried again.

Persimmon Smoothies

I wasn't sure if I had slept through Persimmon season and missed out on my favorite exotic fruit buy of the year, but just a few days ago I saw my first persimmon being sold at a fruit cart. Yesterday, after a month and a half of eating my previous chinatown cache of vegis, I took a trip to the outdoor markets under the Manhattan bridge. As providence would have it, it was a great day for shopping: Not too warm or cold, lots of stands with nice looking food. There was even a man selling freshly caught fish from the east river (I had heard people do this, but yuck). After making countless purchases of vegis, plus a nice ripe pineapple, I came to the persimmon selling. The deal was 6$ for a large box of smaller sized ones, or 8$ for a large box of larger sized ones. So as not to be bothered with regrets about getting the wrong size, I bought both boxes, a sum total of 14$ for approximately 50 persimmons.
You should ask yourself (if you didn't bother reading the title of the posting) why I would ever want to buy 50 persimmons. The answer comes in the form of the silkiest, creamiest, best smoothies ever. I happened onto persimmon smoothies after a similar purchase of a box of persimmons last year. I tasted them and was not particularly smitten with their flavor --- a little honey tasting, but nothing special for me. Left with a bunch of their fruits I figured that I'd throw them in with some yogurt, and some juice or other fruits. To my surprise, the persimmon, when blended, yielded the aforementioned attributes to my smoothie.
So, I have begun my daily smoothie regiment. A few spoonfuls of plain yogurt, a persimmon or two skinned and cut in half, some orange juice, or strawberries, or blueberries, or mango etc, and some ice. Blend it up and enjoy. In fact, since I have so many, I might just freeze some for a warmer day (yes... smoothies in the late fall are not optimal, but still with ny apartment heat they way it is, you sometimes need a smoothie to cool down).
I've been considering trying to use my previous thoughts on bok choy to make a citrus smoothie with persimmon. I'll update if I do.
Also, I have been toying with using persimmon to create creamier sauces.
Lastly, as I type I have a bowl of fermenting urad dal, channa dal, and short rice sitting five feet from me. In a few hours this will be blended and hopefully will become Dosas. I will post as to the success, and more likely failure of this exploit.

A string of culinary misfortunes

I'm pretty sure Obama is going to win. I know this because things have been going bad for me this week, and therefore must go better (Obama winning) next week.
Both misfortunes have at least been partially brought on by my own doing. The first deals with my kitchen stove. A few nights ago I decided to cook the turkey dumplings which Lori had given me a while ago. Don't worry, they were still excellent and had stayed frozen the whole time. However, I don't have a ton of meat pots or pans, so I used a shallow pan to boil water and cook the dumplings. In this process I spilled water onto the dials for adjusting the amount of gas. No biggy... well, later that night the gas wouldn't spark. Usually when you turn the dial, it sparks and you get fire, but no such luck. Miraculously the next day, the stove sparked again. However, last night I realized that one of the dials wouldn't turn. Apparently the spilled water had caused it to become sticky and hence it got stuck. I started cooking on the other burners anyway, and tried to clean the stuck dial. All this achieved was to short out the sparking mechanism again. In the process I turned the gas on with the stuck dial. What sucked was that the dial became stuck in the ON position, and gas started to rush out of the burner, without being lit. I immediately turned off the other flame and opened the window, plus turned on a fan. But still gas was pouring into the kitchen and I couldn't turn off the dial. Now, I like to think I am good at acting in tough positions. However, time and time again when confronted with a situation which requires decisive action, I take decisive, yet much more damaging action.
So, in this spirit, I decided to get my vice grips and, by removing the dial, try to manually turn the screw off (the dial was on a screw of sorts). I ran and got them, plus my cell phone to call my super. The vice grips turned out to be a horrible idea, since all I achieved was to crush the screw. Gas kept rushing.
Getting my super on the other line, I explained the situation and he gave me the advice I would have never thought of --- turn off the gas at the back of the stove. Problem solve. Well... I still need him to fix the stove, but no gas or massive fire risk.
Without a stove I had a new problem --- what to eat for dinner. I had been boiling water for pasta, and had already opened two cans of chickpeas, and chopped some garlic and pepper. So I just threw it all into the hot water, added a bunch of chopped cabbage, and heated in the microwave some soup mix to add to the pot. Not a bad soup for having been made only using the residual heat of boiling water. Oh.. I also crumbled some romano cheese into it.
Ok. second misfortune was this morning. I decided to get a bagel with lox cream cheese from a deli on the way to school. The cream cheese was horribly rancid (I still ate the bagel). I did what I think was my duty and called 311 to report a health code violate. As it turns out, I didn't even need to get a bagel, because I totally forgot that courant gets bagels every wednesday for the grad students. Stupid stupid stupid.
Anyway, in my opinion there is nothing worse than expecting the wonderful salty, oiling, creamy goodness of a bagel and lox, but instead getting bad cream cheese- YUCK.

My application video and questions to you

I've been planning out my application video and was intending to tape it today, but it is raining so it will need to wait until tomorrow. The general idea will be that I will interview the Dosa Cart man who serves up lunches at the south west corner of Washington Square park. After learning about his experiences making Dosas, I will ask him to give a short lesson on Dosa making. Following this I will make them myself, showing the major steps in the preparation. The end of the video will be a critique of the success of my homemade Dosas. The video can not exceed 3 minutes.
I'm curious what people have thought about my application answers. On anonymous person seemed to think that America was not prime for a show on authentic ethnic cuisine. What are other peoples thoughts? Also, what sorts of dishes do you think I should have in mind to cover on the show?

Application with significant changes and completed sections

Show Name: Food Deja Vu
Tag line: Hi. I'm Ivan Corwin and I want to welcome you to Food Deja Vu (or other title) -- the show where we rediscover the foods of our past which have not made their way into the mainstream american food culture. These are the foods of our parents and grandparents, foods on which we once lived and now foods which we are dying to have again. Come with me as we learn and explore the rich stories, recipes and cooking techniques which once ruled our kitchens.
Structure: Each week select a new authentic vegetarian dish which has not found its way into the mass american food scene.
1. Give a short historical sketch of the food and its significance.
2. Discuss how, if in any way, it has found its way into popular cuisine.
3. Find an expert at making it and have them give me a cooking lesson, also have them relate their memories and thoughts about the food.
4. Take it back to my kitchen and try to follow and translate their lesson. Talk about how the implications of their techniques and their choice of ingredients and why they developed as they did.
5. Experiment with alternative methods which might be more suitable for working people --- premade mixes, substitutions, healthier ingredients.
6. Solicit people who have or know someone who has a great, authentic dish, or story about dishes of days past.


1. Why do you want your own Food Network Show?
Americans are more interested in diverse, ethnic foods now than ever. To attract this new market interest, purveyors of ethnic cuisine have modified and refocused much of their menus towards dishes heavy on meats and cheese, and have overlooked many vegetarian options. The result is a mainstream culture of often inauthentic food which grossly neglects the rich heritage and colorful histories of ingenious cooking techniques and flavorful recipes from traditions spanning the globe. I keep a kosher kitchen. Some may see that as a disadvantage to exploring ethnic cuisine, but I feel that it has given me an opportunity. I look past marquee meat dishes --- the meatballs and chicken tika masala --- and in their place I see homemade pastas and Dosas, I see principles of fermentation and methods of dough creation, I see stories of culture and of history. This opportunity and these sights are what I want to share with my audience.

2. Do you have any formal/profession cooking training? If so, please describe. Did you graduate from cooking schoool?
No.

3. If you did not go to cooking school, how did you learn to cook?
I watched and listened to family, friends and food network. I asked questions to my Bubbee (grandmother) and mother about my own Jewish cooking traditions.

4. What is the greatest lesson you've learned about cooking?
To open myself up to every smell, taste and sight around me. In particular I have learned the most from watching people like my Bubbee, or the mother of my former Indian roommate, or the Bangladeshi fiance of another of my roommates make the foods which they love. By trying to reproduce or at least approximate the dishes I watch them prepare, I gain a better perspective about the ways of their respective cuisines.

5. What do you feel you can teach someone about food, or cooking? Please make something specific to you -- not about "having fun in the kitchen" or similar.
I can teach people to embrace thousands of years of knowledge and tradition which has created excellent dishes. People have learned to appreciate diverse cuisines but often stop short of exploring beyond the one or two dishes they feel save with. I will show my audience the gems of culinary experience which are found in cultures the world over.

6. Who was the greatest influence on your cooking, and why?
Before I began to delve into the culinary heritage of other cultures, I looked deep into my own. This culinary introspection was prompted by memories, both mine and my families, of the delicacies and baked goods of my great-grandmother, Bubbee Kerlin. Her nearly 100 years of cooking traditional Jewish food gave me a sense of longing to experience and understand the cuisine of my family. And now I look to experience and understand the cuisine of those around me.

7. In addition to any cooking jobs listed above, list any other culinary experience:
None aside from preparing meals for friends and family.

8. What is the largest number of people you have ever cooked for? Please explain.
At my apartment, or during family vacations I have prepared meals for upwards of 10 people. While in college I volunteered at a homeless shelter and on a few occasions I prepared basic food for a larger population.

9. What makes you different from anyone else on food television?
Everyone wants to teach others how to cook. I want to learn alongside the audience as real greats, people who have been cooking for upwards of a century, teach their many lessons.

10. Briefly sum up your unique "Culinary Point of View." That us, what specifically makes you and your food different from everyone else's (not just "I cook with fresh ingredients."); what is special about what you can teach Food Network viewers?
Diverse environmental, social and religious factors have influenced the cuisine of different regions. Over thousands of years and usually driven by necessity, equally diverse cuisines and methods of cooking have developed. In America today we are free of many of the limiting factors in determining what we can eat. However, without these external constraints, many culinary traditions have begun to fade away. In their place stand mainstream menus claiming to be Indian, or Italian or Chinese, but sharing non of the distinctive traits or histories of the true cuisine. My approach to cooking, which has been driven in part by my own constraint of being kosher, is to look past the mainstream ethnic foods and to try to understand and recreate foods which have been developed and tested over thousands of years, by millions of families --- not foods developed in the last 25 years for quick service. There are many lessons to be learned from the evolution and ultimate product of cultural cuisine. People will jump at the chance to learn these lessons, discover their history and look past the takeout menu.

11. Complete this sentence: "If I were an ingredient, I would be _______________." Why would you be that ingredient?
If I were an ingredient, I would be the seasoning on an old cast iron pan. Well seasoned cast iron (the only choice of our ancestors) has many layers built up over time to create a wonderful surface on which to cook. Every meal adds a layer to the pan, and every meal draws from the flavors and oils of the layers below it. In this way, every time I cook with my cast iron, I am connecting to all of my previous cooking experiences. In my show I will seek to establish this physical connection to our culinary history through interviews with and tutorials from people whose own cast iron (be it literal or figurative) has many more layers than mine.

12. Tell us 3 things about food, or ingredients, that demonstrate your food knowledge.
1. In south east Asian cuisine fermentation plays a very natural and positive role. The warm and wet climate prevented dry storage of foods and accelerated the process of fermentation and molding. Indigenous cuisine learned to use and control this. For instance, lentils and rice could be soaked together and fermented and then ground into a paste which would only take a few minutes to cook. Compared to the hours of cooking to make lentils without fermentation, this was a godsend.
2. Oil is an excellent vehicle for holding and preserving spices in foods. Rather than adding spices to a final product, consider adding them to the hot oil before other ingredients. Adding spices at the end of cooking results in the spice's flavor being localized to the spice itself. By heating the spices directly, their aromatic oils are expelled and mixed into the other oil. This oil mixture is then evenly distributed throughout the food, resulting in a more intense flavor without hot spots of spice.
3. The principle of spicing foods cooked in a slow cooker is different though. The only spices which should be in the slow cooker are large solid spices - onion, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, peppers, bay leaves, etc. The long heat will slowly pull the flavorful oils from these large spices. Small powder spices will become over powdered during the long cooking and should only be added in the end in the manner described in question 15 part 4.

13. Do you have any dietary restrictions or food allergies? Are there any foods you cannot or will not eat? Please give complete details.
I keep kosher. For me, this means that I will no eat any meat or fish which is not kosher, or anything with these ingredients. I will also not cook with unkosher meat or fish, nor will I mix meat and milk in my cooking. For ingredients which are not meat or fish I do not require them, however, to be explicitly kosher and will eat at a restaurant which serves both meat and vegetarian (though I will only eat vegetarian).

14. Clearly describe 3 of your "signature dishes" that best represent you and/or are most popular with your friends/family. Tell us why they represent you so well.
1. Flour Paposas. A flour and baking powder dough stuffed with cheese, chilis and beans and then pan fried with just a little oil in a cast iron pan until golden. This is my adaptation of the dish I had while staying in El Salvador, and then again at the Red Hook sports field food stands.
2. Dal and Rice porridge. A simple Indian porridge spiced with freshly roasted cumin seeds, including Dal, rice and a small amount of peas, carrots and potatoes. I learned this by watching the Indian mother of my former roommate prepare it at our apartment. During this lesson in Indian cooking she taught me about roasting Dal for a minute or two before adding liquid, and also about the order of Indian spicing. The dish, to me, epitomizes simple, wholesome foods which are nowhere to be found in popular Indian cuisine.
3. Sweet, sour and spicy green beans. A base of ginger, garlic, pepper and curry powder cooked with green beans and then tossed with honey, balsamic vinegar and pre-roasted almond shards. This dish, which I sometimes eat as a whole meal, comes from two sources. The first was is a childhood memory of eating something like this at the table of the Indian mother of an elementary school friend. The second is from lessons I learned from the Bangladeshi fiance of a former roomate. She taught me that, as opposed to Indian foods, Bangladeshi foods are often sweeter and also more sour. She would commonly use vinegar and honey in her curries. I likely would have never thought to do this to curries, yet by drawing on her knowledge of traditional cooking, I learned a very interesting and scrumptious lesson which I now apply to other dishes.

15. What are your top 5 original cooking tips? (Be specific, Give us information; teach us something. This is a chance to show us your technique and your culinary knowledge)
1. To make tofu with a firm, crunchy skin, without much oil use honey. After marinating remove the tofu and squeeze a little honey onto the precut pieces. Use a large cast iron skillet with oil to coat the bottom and pan fry for five minutes on each side, or until browned and firm. The honey coating locks in the flavor the tofu absorbed, so even when mixed with vegetables in a sauce, the tofu keeps its own flavor and firmness.
2. When making matzoballs, replace the water with seltzer. This creates fluffier balls which are easier to eat and have a nicer texture.
3. When making Risotto with a vegetable, precook the vegetable in large pieces. Then leave enough time for the vegetable to cool before cutting and adding to the Risotto at the end of cooking. Cooking large pieces and cutting when cool keeps more of the flavor in the vegetable, and adding when cool helps keep a distinct flavor separate from that of the rice.
4. If a soup or porridge like dish is lacking in flavor, rather than adding spices directly into it, consider using the Indian method of flavoring Dal. Take a small pan and heat oil. Add in the desired spices, with large spices or onion, garlic, ginger etc, going first followed by powdered spices. When spices have cooked, pour the oil directly into your pot and then stir to distribute.
5. When ever possible use cast iron. Of course there are many benefits to cast iron including its heat distribution, safe non-stick properties, and affordability. However, I encourage cast iron use also for the joy of creating and enhancing the seasoning of your pan. A cast iron pan which is well seasoned carries with it the stories and flavors of everything which has been cooked on it. Pass it on to other family members and children so that they can recall your food when they cook theirs.

Show tag line

What do you think of this as the tag line (the first few lines) of my cooking show.

Hello. I'm Ivan Corwin and I want to welcome you to Food Deja Vu (or other title) -- the show where we rediscover the foods of our past which have not made their way into the mainstream american food culture. These are the foods of our parents and grandparents, foods on which we once lived and now foods which we are dieing to have again. Come with me as we learn and explore the rich stories, recipes and cooking techniques which once ruled our kitchens.

Flounder and Risotto dinner

It has become a family tradition for me to cook fish during our summer vacation in Cape Cod. The impetus for this was a bet with my oldest brother. One morning, before going swimming he challenged me to eat a clove of garlic raw. In return for this he would buy fish for dinner for me to cook. While I'm pretty sure he would have done this either way, I consumed the clove. By the time I cooked dinner the rank garlic smell emanating from my every pore had subsided. Needless to say, this past year he bought the fish without a bet.
The first year I cooked a blue fish and cod. This past year I took the advice of my father and decided to cook local flounder. This is a very thin, light tasting fish which is easy to cook. Well, the dinner went well.
So when faced, this week, with the decision of what to cook for the first kitchen club meeting, flounder came to my mind. To complement it I decided to make an asparagus risotto. And to give the plate a little color, I determined to have simple roasted carrots on the side. Below I'll give the recipes, but for now I want to remark on some things I learned in my cooking last night.
First lesson: Don't try to pan fry anything with any cheese on the outside. I hadn't planned to, but on the spur of the moment I decided to put a little Romano cheese on the flounder, in addition to the herbs, before pan frying it. This resulted in a lay of burnt cheese on the bottom of the pan. Luckily this didn't really hurt the flavor or surface of the fish. It did, however make it impossible to make a good pan sauce.
Second lesson: Be a little picky about the type of wine used in making sauces. It just threw what ever wine into the already mucked up pan sauce. The wine didn't have a particularly nice flavor, and so the sauce was further worsened. In the end, I just trashed the idea of having a sauce.
Other than the sauce, I think that most of the food worked out well.

Recipes (I made this for six adults and these amounts worked very well)
Risotto:
2 cups of Arborio rice (important to use right rice)
Hard cheese, like parmesian or romano grated
Medium onion
A few garlic cloves
A bunch of asparagus
A cup or two of white wine
Vegetarian thin soup stock (chicken style)
Instructions:
Trim ends then, with a little garlic powder, pepper and grated hard cheese roast the asparagus on tin foil until tender. Reserve and when cooled some chop into one inch pieces. Chop onions and garlic. Heat olive oil in deep bottomed pan and then add in onion and garlic. Cook until onion becomes translucent but not caramelized. Add in special risotto rice (possibly with a little more
oil before hand). Cook the rice for two minutes so that the pieces become also a drop translucent around the edges. Then pour in enough wine to cover the rice and onions/garlic. From this point on you need to stir the mixture ever 5 seconds or so. Keep stirring until the wine is cooked off/ absorbed. You are looking for something close to the point where you can use your spoon to clear an area on the pans bottom, and the rice does not immediately rush back into that cleared area. Have on had warm, but not boiling, stock. Pour in a cup or so and continue this process of cooking the liquid into the rice. Keep doing this until the rice is the desired level of tender. Make sure to
let and residual liquid get absorbed by the rice. Once this is done, turn off the heat and add the cooked asparagus, plus pregrated hard cheese. Mix, add salt to taste, and let cook a little before serving. The consistency should be creamy and smooth, and the rice should be soft.

Fish:
Mixture of Thyme, Oregano, Rosemary
6 fillets Flounder
Olive oil
Butter
White Wine
Lemon
Heat olive oil and butter in a heavy bottomed skillet until melted and hot. Wash and clean flounder and pat dry. Scatter herbs onto the fish. One or two pieces at a time, place into the skillet. The fish is very thin and will not take long to cook. It will also shrink in its dimensions as it cooks. Once the edges begin to curl up, flip and finish cooking. Do not overcook. Remove from heat and place on a serving plate. Continue until all fish is cooked. Then crank up the heat. Deglaze plan with white wine (rose works too) and free up burnt particles into the mixture. Add in squeezed lemon and possibly some lemon zest. Cook until saucelike then pour onto the flounder. Reserve any extra sauce for dipping ect. Before doing this, of course, make sure the sauce tastes good --- otherwise you don't really need sauce with the fish since it should be very flavorful anyway.

Roasted carrots
Skin and cut 8 carrots at an angle so as to make elliptical shaped pieces of roughly 1/4 inch in thickness. Cut on cookie sheet or tin foil, add some olive oil and mix them up. Then add a little garlic powder and pepper and roast until tender.


These items can be prepared an hour or two early, and then just pop the fish and carrots in a warm oven for a few minutes to rewarm before serving. Risotto will keep its heat well for a while with the top on.

Application responses: Please help

I'm going to post the application questions and my responses. Let me know what you think.
1. Why do you want your own Food Network Show?
Recipes and techniques have evolved from rich cultural traditions. I have explored my own family's culinary heritage, now I would like to widen my horizon to encompass many other populations. Each week I hope to explore a different food, learn from masters --- grandmothers or grandfathers, chefs or cooks --- how it should be prepared, and then help guide my audience to do it themselves.

2. Do you have any formal/profession cooking training? If so, please describe. Did you graduate from cooking schoool?
No.

3. If you did not go to cooking school, how did you learn to cook?
I watched and listened to family, friends and food network. I asked questions to my Bubbee (grandmother) and mother about my own Jewish cooking traditions.

4. What is the greatest lesson you've learned about cooking?
To open myself up to every smell, taste and sight around me. In particular I have learned the most from watching people like my Bubbee, or my former Indian roommates mother, or my another roommates Bangladeshi fiance cook. By trying to reproduce or at least approximate the dishes I watch them prepare, I gain a better perspective about the ways of their respective cuisines.

5. What do you feel you can teach someone about food, or cooking? Please make something specific to you -- not about "having fun in the kitchen" or similar.
I can teach people to embrace thousands of years of knowledge and tradition which has created excellent dishes. People have learned to like diverse cuisines but too often do not have the chance to learn about or experience them prepared authentically. I will connect the audience to those people who holds these gems of culinary experience.

6. Who was the greatest influence on your cooking, and why?
Even though my great-grandmother, Bubbee Kerlin, passed away when I was young, I feel as though her nearly 100 years of cooking has lefts its mark deep on me. From my scattered memories of her apartment filled with Jewish delicacies, to her countless cooking stories and recipes I have been told, her kitchen legacy has driven my curiosity into my own heritage, and now into the heritage of others.

7. In addition to any cooking jobs listed above, list any other culinary experience:
None aside from preparing meals for friends and family.

8. What is the largest number of people you have ever cooked for? Please explain.
At my apartment, or during family vacations I have prepared meals for upwards of 10 people. While in college I volunteered at a homeless shelter and on a few occasions I prepared basic food for a larger population.

9. What makes you different from anyone else on food television?
Everyone wants to teach others how to cook. I want to be a learner alongside the audience as real greats, people who have been cooking for upwards of a century, teach their many lessons.

10. Briefly sum up your unique "Culinary Point of View." That us, what specifically makes you and your food different from everyone else's (not just "I cook with fresh ingredients."); what is special about what you can teach Food Network viewers?
Centuries of work has gone into creating many of the great recipes which our parents ate growing up and which we have only hear of. In the recent years people have become more open to diverse types of restaurants and foods and have even begun to draw on many different cultures in their food preparation. Much good has come from this. However, this trend has also contributed to many dishes being radically altered or discarded from culinary traditions. Before people learned their own kitchen traditions through fork, knife and stove. Now people learn through takeout menu. People recognize and lament their loss of culinary identity and will jump at the chance to learn about their own history and that of others.
My approach to cooking is to try to understand a recipe or a technique both at a practical level: why and how it works; and from an evolutionary perspective: why did our ancestors use the ingredients and methods they did, and why did it survive to us today?

11. Complete this sentence: "If I were an ingredient, I would be _______________." Why would you be that ingredient?
If I were an ingredient, I would be the seasoning on an old cast iron pan. Well seasoned cast iron (the only choice of our ancestors) has many layers built up over time to create a wonderful surface on which to cook. Every meal adds a layer to the pan, and every meal draws from the flavors and oils of the layers below it. In this way, every time I cook with my cast iron, I am connecting to all of my previous cooking experiences. In my show I will seek to establish this physical connection to our culinary history through interviews with and tutorials from people whose own cast iron (be it literal or figurative) has many more layers than mine.

There are the four questions below remaining, but they are of a different nature so I'm going to do them later.

12. Tell us 3 things about food, or ingredients, that demonstrate your food knowledge.

13. Do you have any dietary restrictions or food allergies? Are there any foods you cannot or will not eat? Please give complete details.

14. Clearly describe 3 of your "signature dishes" that best represent you and/or are most popular with your friends/family. Tell us why they represent you so well.

15. What are your top 5 original cooking tips? (Be specific, Give us information; teach us something. This is a chance to show us your technique and your culinary knowledge)

Announcing my candidacy

My fellow food people. I have decided to announce my candidacy for the next food network star online rather than on broadcast television. Why you may ask --- well I believe that while TV is a thing of the past, we must strive now to integrate our history with the present. I am, of course, open to network interviews (if Katie Curic asks, my qualifications as a chef are essentially that I grew up in Poughkeepsie and you can basically see the Culinary Institute of America from there).
Enough banter though. I did print out the application and read over all of the rights I would be signing away. The app is about 12 pages, of which 5 or so ask meaningful questions. As I struggle with writing answers which will get me selected, I will likely post the questions here. But for now, one question piqued my interest: What ingredient are you most like, and why? My first thought, and likely my best thought, was the seasoning on an old cast iron pan. Think about it --- pretty darn deep. Its not something that you necessarily consume (unless you decide to cook tomatoes in the pan and destroy the seasoning) but it is integral to having the food prepared in a particular manner. It is deeply rooted in seasoning of many years past, however every new dish cooked in the pan leaves its own flavor and lay to the seasoning. Its also my favorite kitchenware to cook on. So in these ways, it kind of captures my show idea --- I want to explore the heritage of particular foods and dishes as they have developed and been flavored by different people's own methods and techniques --- in a sense I want to understand a core sample of the seasoning of the pan of our culinary history.
Well that was pretty bad, but anyway, I'll work on it.

Quick and easy Indian green beans

I was just reading my friend's cooking blog (http://themistaskitchen.blogspot.com/) and she gave a very nice recipe for roasted green beans (when you make my recipe and it turns out terrible and you are left with a pound of untarnished green beans, you should look at here recipe) prepared in an Indian, or dare I say Bangladeshi way. I, of course, can not claim that these are really authentic Indian or Bangladeshi, but I'll give my best rational for why I think they are. First, I have a vague memory of one of my close elementary school friend's (he was Indian) mother preparing a meal which included a spicy green bean dish; and second, I had a roommate last year whose fiance was Bangladeshi, and many of the recipes she made included the very nice mixture of sweetness and sourness which figures into this dish.

Well enough storytelling:
A few handfuls of green beans (if you want an exact number 87 will do)
Between a cup and half a cup of slivered almonds
A cubic inch of fresh ginger
A few cloves of garlic
Curry Powder
Honey
Balsamic Vinegar
********
Take you favorite cast iron pan and roast the almond slivers until they get a little toasted, but not burned. Let them cool (I usually let them cool on the pan). Then take you second favorite cast iron pan and heat a little olive oil, then add the ginger and garlic (which you should dice before hand). After cooking for a minute or so add the beans (make sure they are not really wet when you add them). While this cooks add in the curry powder to taste, plus some salt might help. Cook until done and then transfer to a glass bowl. Add in the now dried almonds (when you roast almonds they get a little soft, so letting them cool keeps them crunchy in the mix), and then give the mixture a few splashes of Balsamic plus a few squirts of honey. Mix thoroughly and taste.

I really like this dish and often when I make it I end up making a meal out of it. Yeah... I'm pretty lame, but it tastes good, so why not.

Granola and the worth of buying things

The jury is out in my mind, given recent events, on the question of whether it is cheaper/better to make you own food or go buy prepared food. Don't take this as my letter of resignation from the kitchen, or as a solicitation for offers on my cast iron pans. What I mean is that given some of my recent cooking adventures, I had begun to think that there are many items never worth making for your self. Take my ravioli quarter-of-a-day. Some of them break open while bowling, and the filling is nothing sensational. For the time cost (had a been tutoring for 6 hours instead) I could have bought a thousand pre-made ravioli, or gone to every little italian place in the east village and tried their ravioli.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but let me make another illustration in a slightly different vain. Yesterday I made granola (I'll give the recipe below). It didn't take 6 hours --- more like 1 hour. My question here is about cost. I used almost a bag of almond, and then a good portion of sesame seeds and sunflower seeds, plus almost a whole bag of apricots and dried cranberries. Estimating the cost of ingredients, I'd say it was about $7. The yield was a big freezer bag worth. On the pro side, I was able to control the ingredients and the amount of fat/sugar. On the con side, I probably should have used more honey and my oven (like all NY ovens) was way too hot and burned some stuff. Moreover, I probably could have bought the same amount of granola from trader joes at about the same price. The jury is still out as to whether I will continue to make my own granola.

Lastly, I want to remind everyone about my attempt at making paneer --- such a waste of time, money and milk.

What these episodes have taught me is not anything profound but is worth stating. If something is labor intensive and can be bought for a reasonable price Don't Try to Make It. Things worth making combine cheap ingredients in ways which are not too complex, to make meals. Things not worth making combine expensive ingredients to complex ways to make small parts of larger dishes.

I feel now, thinking this over, that I don't actually have a great understanding of what to make and what to avoid. I guess I'll wing it, and likely, I'll be writing some time soon about another wasted evening trying to make ... oh... say homeade dosas.

Heres the granola recipe:
4 cups oatmeal (not the minute or fast stuff, just the good old fashion kind)
1 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1 1/2 cup chopped almonds
1/3 cup canola oil (i probably used less though)
honey (to taste and coat)
a splash of vanilla extract
cinnamon and nutmeg (just a little)
2 cups chopped dry apricot and cranberries

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a big bowl. Add oil and honey until everything is coated and sticks together a little. Spread out on cookie sheet (lined with parchment paper) and cook in oven at like 350 until a little golden. Then mix stuff to expose more uncooked area. Don't overcook or burn. When done let cool then enjoy.