Tag Archive for 'food'

Indian Cucumber and Coconut Salad

Published on April 20, 2008 in food. 1 Comment
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I like my dals with something refreshing on the side. Lately, I’m all about this salad, adapted from Das Sreedharan’s “The New Taste of India”, a fantastic cookbook filled with delicious vegetarian recipes from Southern India.

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The salad takes a bit of chopping, but it’s totally worth it, both for its flavor, and for the rave reviews it gets everytime I serve it.

Indian Cucumber and Coconut Salad

For the salad:
1 cucumber, peeled and finely chopped
2 Tbsp desiccated coconut (or more to taste)
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 tomato, finely chopped
1 fresh green chilli, finely chopped
a small bunch of fresh cilantro (i.e. coriander), finely chopped
salt

For the dressing:
2 tsp olive oil
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 dried red chilli, halved
1/2 tsp asafoetida
~10 dried curry leaves
juice from half a lemon

  1. Place all the salad ingredients in a bowl and set aside in the fridge.
  2. Put the oil in a large frying pan with the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, red chilli, asafoetida and curry leaves. Turn the heat up to medium and wait for the seeds to start sizzling and smelling delicious.
  3. When the mustard seeds begin to pop, pour the oil and seeds over the salad. Add the lemon juice and some salt to taste and mix thoroughly. If you can wait, cool in the fridge before serving.

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

Chai Pani Restaurant Review

Published on March 22, 2008 in Freelance Writing, London and food. 0 Comments

Chai Pani

64 Seymour Street
London, W1H 5BW
020 7258 2000
http://www.chaipani.co.uk/

Category: Indian

Travel: Marble Arch
Open Daily 6pm-10.30pm; Mon-Fri 12pm-2.30pm; Sat-Sun 1pm-10.30pm

Devotees of chicken tikka masala will be disappointed by Chai Pani’s menu, which proves that India brings more to the table than fried samosas and korma curries. Chai Pani is the only restaurant in London to serve the vegetarian cuisine of Marwar, a desert region in west India. With dishes like Bhindi Subzi Vg (okra in “a sauce”) and Ker Saangri (a “concoction of desert berries and desert beans”), the vast menu leaves everything to the imagination.

Times like these, it’s usually best to let the kitchen decide, so I ordered a vegan thaali (another tough choice as Chai Pani offers a staggering 16 thaalis, including wheat-free, low GI and ayurvedic). Everything arrived hot and on time, and the waiter was only too happy to decipher the mysterious array of dishes before me. I now know that “dessert berries” look and taste more like shriveled twigs than actual food, and “sauce” is Chai Pani’s code word for “oil”. Fortunately, other dishes were more inspiring. The veganized raita was good enough to eat with a spoon thanks to a liberal dose of salt and chili. The daal was the best I’ve had in London - simple, fresh and very spicy, just begging to be sopped up with Bajra roti, a traditional Rathasthan millet bread. The chilled Ghugri salad of wheat berries, tomatoes and tangy lemon dressing was a refreshing accompaniment. When it came to endings, however, Chai Pani pushed the envelope of simple cooking a little too far, with bowls of jaggery (sugar) passing for dessert. This was a poor lead-in to the bill, which came to nearly £40 a head (including drinks).

Adventurous diners will go giddy over the eclectic offerings of Chai Pani, and the dietarily-challenged will find comfort in their meatless and wheatless offerings. But others will be confused. Chai Pani means well, but they need to come to terms with the palate (and pocketbook) of its western audience.

Dinner for two with drinks and dessert: £66

Seeded Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

Published on March 9, 2008 in food. 1 Comment
Seeded Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

Tim and I both agree that this is the best batch of no knead bread ever to emerge from our oven. It’s a perfect balance of sunflower seeds, flax seeds, white and whole wheat flour. The nuttiness of the seeds and whole wheat is buttery and wonderful. The white flour gives the bread a spongy lightness. But everything really comes together with the crust. I coat the entire dough ball in olive oil (a delicious trick I discovered accidentally and is much more effective than Jim Lahey’s cornmeal technique) then sprinkle on a generous dose of sesame seeds.

Seeded Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

300g white flour
170g whole wheat flour
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
13g salt
olive oil
sesame seeds

  1. In a large bowl combine flour, seeds, yeast and salt. Add 350 grams of water and stir. Add more water a little bit at a time and stir until the dough has the consistency of a shaggy ball. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours, preferably closer to 24. The dough is ready when it’s about double in size and spotted with big bubbles.
  2. Give the counter top and your hands a generous sprinkle of flour. Turn the dough onto the counter. Pull the dough at either end to form a strip. Fold this strip into thirds (like a business letter). Give the dough a quarter turn and fold in thirds again. I’ll refer to these folds as “seams”, i.e., “right now your dough is on the counter, seam side up.” Cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
  3. Oil a large bowl with olive oil. Lightly dust the dough ball with flour and put it into the bowl seam side down. Cover with the plastic wrap and let sit for 2-3 hours. The dough is ready when it has more than doubled in size.
  4. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, remove the HOT pot and pour in a bit of olive oil. Swirl it around so that oil covers the entire inside of the pot. Now, take the bowl containing the dough and quickly turn it upside down over the pot so that the dough falls in seam side up. Cover the pot with a lid and bake for 40 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake another 5 or so minutes, until the loaf is browned and the sesame seeds are toasted. Cool on a rack at least 45 minutes before slicing.

Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

A Food Diary That Tracks More Than Just Calories

Published on March 2, 2008 in Personal, food, nutrition and photos. 0 Comments
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Time’s photo essay, “What the World Eats”, made me wonder what my typical food week looks like. So as of last Monday, I’ve been writing down everything I eat and when. For example, today’s log so far looks like

  • 6:15am: Two glasses of filtered water
  • 6:30am: Earl Gray Tea with organic semi-skimmed milk
  • 7:00am: Organic porridge oats with an organic Gala apple, organic raisins and organic un-sweetened soy milk

This started as a simple project, but it’s given me so much more to think about than just my week in food:

  • I eat a lot. And often.
  • It’s much more fun to track my diet this way than to tediously count calories.
  • The diary is growing in detail. For instance, on February 25th I wrote “Coffee with milk”. On February 29th, I wrote “Clipper Assam tea and Tesco Organic Un-sweetened soy milk”. Today I started noting which foods were organic.
  • I am still fighting an addiction to Diet Soda, which has only grown worse by my discovery of Pepsi Max, a beverage I shamefully find delicious.
  • Food is much more than a sum of its protein, fat and carbohydrate calories.

Calorie tracking is useful - this is how I painstakingly learned portion control. But I wonder if this could have been achieved by tracking food on this level instead? After all, isn’t our foods’ variety, origin, and quality just as important to our health as our foods’ calories?

This has been such a fun and fascinating exercise that I think I’ll keep it up. Until now, I’ve logged everything in a Google document but have moved it over to the SmarterFitter forums under a new topic, “Food Diaries” (an idea stolen from the FatFree Vegan Board - I hope she doesn’t mind; non-vegans need a place to log their food, too!).

If you’re interested in joining in, feel free to start a new thread with your diary. I’d love to see what other people’s food week/month/year looks like. And I’d also love to hear your ideas on food tracking in general. What works? What matters? What’s easiest?

  • Link to Food Diaries forum
  • Link to Monica’s food diary
  • Link to “What the World Eats”

    • Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com

    Easy Tempeh Sloppy Joes

    Published on February 24, 2008 in Uncategorized, food, nutrition and recipes. 0 Comments
    Tempeh Sloppy Joe (before things got sloppy)

    When I made the list of High Protein Vegan Foods, tempeh stood out as most mysterious. I mean, what is it? The dense speckled brick looks more like a diseased internal organ than food. But in fact, tempeh IS food, and a highly nutritious, protein-rich food at that.

    Like tofu, tempeh is made from soybeans. However, unlike tofu, which is made from soy milk, tempeh is made from whole soybeans, fermented through a natural culturing process that binds the beans into a cake. Because tempeh retains the whole bean, it is higher in protein and fiber than tofu.

    Aperture-1.jpg My easy tempeh recipe is an evolution of my Auntie Jo’s sloppy joes, a quintessential American food for sure, traditionally made with ground beef, onions, tomato sauce, and bbq seasoning, then slopped on a bun and eaten with lots of napkins. You don’t need to make this with tempeh - my mom makes hers with MorningStar Farms soy crumbles. I tend to prefer cooking with unadulterated whole ingredients and the tempeh does a nice job of crumbling into the sauce and soaking in the flavors.

    The hardest part about this recipe is finding vegan bbq sauce; many sauces contain Worchestershire sauce (i.e. anchovies), honey, and dubious processed ingredients. The only bottled vegan bbq sauce I’m aware of is Annie’s Naturals BBQ Sauce. Of course, you can always make your own, which would make this recipe less easy, but probably much tastier!

    Tempeh Sloppy Joes

    serves 4

    200g tempeh, roughly crumbled
    100g bbq sauce
    1 tbsp olive oil
    2 sticks celery, finely chopped
    1/2 green bell pepper, finely chopped
    1 onion, finely chopped
    1/2 can of stewed tomatoes
    A dash or two of liquid smoke
    salt to taste

    1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan
    2. Add the onion, celery and green pepper and sauté until tender
    3. Add remaining ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes or more (the longer the better, the tempeh will crumble more as it cooks)
    4. Serve on hamburger buns with lettuce, tomato and sliced onion (if desired). Or, for a tidier sandwich, stuff it in a pita, or wrap it in a tortilla!

    Per serving: 200 Calories (kcal); 9g Total Fat; 11g Protein; 22g Carbohydrate
    Per serving (with whole grain bun): 310 Calories; 12g Total Fat; 15g Protein; 41g Carbohydrates

    Approximate total cost of preparation, including buns: £6.30 (£1.60 per serving)

    Nutrition information derived from the USDA food database.

    What the World Eats

    Published on February 24, 2008 in food and photos. 0 Comments
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    Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo
    Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
    Family recipe: Potato soup with cabbage
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    United States: The Revis family of North Carolina
    Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
    Favorite foods: spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken

    I discovered Time’s Photo Essay, “What the World Eats” on Mark’s Daily Apple. I agree with Mark: these photos are a fascinating window into the world’s food cultures:

    From a traditional MDA perspective, we were struck by not only what the collective grocery items say about each culture’s diet, but also by the relative cost and what we choose to pay for in each society. Finally, some photos were all too telling with the comparative “volume” of food that feeds each family.

    From a not-so-typical MDA stance (if you’ll allow us the liberty), we found ourselves fascinated by this photo essay’s window into the cultural and, well, simply human experience of food – in its traditional significance and regional roots, its healthfulness and indulgence, its necessity and scarcity. It’s a view that is, at once, intimate and universal.

    The photos are part of a larger book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio.

    Crossposted to SmarterFitter.com