Happy Halloween!

Yesterday Fiona and I made a load and a half of these black cat cookies for school parties:
Then in the evening I recovered from the sugar haze in the air by making two of my favorite Indian spiced dishes, one an old favorite and one brand new (apologies for the quality of the photos--we started gobbling before I remembered the camera).

The main course was a chicken dish that I can't believe I haven't posted here before. It's one of the dishes I learned along with the terrific biryani rice in the Indian cooking class I took in 2005.
The sauce has a richness that I've only tasted in restaurant Indian dishes, but there is no cream, not even ghee in it. It is the layering of spices that makes it so good. It is cooked up with potatoes; the original recipe calls for 2 medium potatoes but I recommend more, something closer to 4. I had some nice little fingerlings so substituted these and kept the skins on.

One of the coolest things is that despite the fact that the chicken is highly spiced, it is cooked with its skin on and I was able to pull a couple of pieces out, peel off the skin and pull it off the bone and both kids ate it. Neither had a clue that the sauce covered stuff on my plate was the exact same food as what they were consuming. True, Ian dunked his in honey mustard so he probably couldn't taste any of the spices, but Fiona chowed hers down without a blink. Score one for mom!

The vegetable side dish is Spaghetti Squash with Indian Spices out of this month's issue of Fine Cooking and I probably would have overlooked it if two friends, Lea and Sarah, hadn't raved about it. I got to taste Sarah's version and became very territorial of the bowl, circling around it on the buffet and swooping in for seconds as soon as everyone had their first serving.
I've never had spaghetti squash this good--onion, ginger and garlic are the base flavors. There are mustard and cumin seeds that provide little pops of flavor and tomato and cilantro to brighten it up. Oh, and there is also 3 T of butter in there...I'm sure it could be removed without much effect, but it does make this dish feel decadent and a little less virtuous (in a fun way!)

So without further blathering, here are the recipes:

Chicken Curry with Potatoes
by Bhanu Hajratwala

serves 4-6

2 lbs chicken, cut up in pieces
1/3 C oil
8 whole cloves
4 cinnamon sticks, approximately 2 inches long each
8 whole cardamoms
8 curry leaves (get them at Indian grocery stores in the produce section--then freeze or dry some, they are better fresh but ok frozen or dried and much more convenient)
1 large onion, chopped
2 T fresh masala (chop together about a 1 inch piece of peeled ginger, two big cloves of garlic, 1 chili, about 1/2 t turmeric and a squeeze of lemon juice--I make this in big batches blended together with some canola oil in the food processor and freeze it in 2 T sized portions so it is always ready to go--it is an excellent flavoring base for daal too.)
1 t red chili pepper powder
1/2 t turmeric powder
2 t salt
2 C water
2-4 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered (or use and equivalent quantity of skin-on fingerlings, cut in half lengthwise)
1 medium tomato, diced
2 T Garam Masala
2 T chopped cilantro

1. Heat oil with cloves, cinnamon sticks, cardamoms and curry leaves till lightly brown.
2. Add the onion and saute at medium heat until lightly brown (approx 10 minutes, stirring every few minutes).
3. Add the Fresh Masala, chili powder, turmeric and salt. Cook for a further 3-5 minutes, stirring frequently.
4. Add the chicken, stir well, and cook covered until the chicken is no longer pink on the outside.
5. Add the water to cover the chicken and bring to a boil for about 5 minutes.
6. Add the potatoes and tomatoes and cook covered until the potatoes and chicken are done (aproximately 20 minutes).
7. Remove from the heat. Add Garam Masala and chopped cilantro.
8. Serve with any Indian bread or rice.

Spaghetti Squash with Indian Spices
from Fine Cooking, October/November 2008

serves 4-6

1 small spaghetti squash (about 3 lbs)
1 T vegetable oil
1 t brown mustard seeds
3 T unsalted butter
1/2 C finely chopped onion
2 t minced ginger
2 t minced garlic
1 t cumin seeds
1/2 t ground coriander
1/2 C chopped tomato
1 small serrano chili, seeded and minced
kosher salt
1/2 C coarsely chopped cilantro

1. Preheat oven to 350. Halve the squash lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Set the squash halves cut side down on a heavy duty rimmed baking sheet, and bake until strands of flesh separate easily when raked with a fork, about 45 minutes.
2. Set the squash halves aside until coole nough to handle. Use a fork to rake the cooked squash into strands.
3. In 10-inch skillet, heat the oil over medium hot heat until hot. Add the mustard seeds and cover. The seeds will start popping; cook until the popping subsides, about 1 minute.
4. Uncover, reduce the head and add the butter. As soon as it melts. add the onion, ginger, garlic, cumin seeds and ground coriander and cook until the onion softens, about 3 minutes. Add the tomato, chili and 1.5 t salt, stirring, until the tomato beins to soften and the chili is fragrant, about 2 minutes.
5. Increase the heat to medium high and add the squash to the skillet. Toss with tongs to distribute spices and heat through, 1-3 minutes. Toss in the cilantro and taste to see if you want a little more salt.

7 random food facts

Mother's Kitchen tagged me for a meme of 7 random (food) facts about me. Here goes:

1. I dislike intensely two words often found in food writing "toothsome" and "veggies". Not sure why, but they both make my skin crawl (or in the case of "toothsome", my teeth itch).
   
2. I often pick an entree at a restaurant based on the sides. In fact, I care a lot more about sides than main courses which I often think of as pain-in-the-ass necessities for blood sugar stability. I love the fact that in a lot of southern BBQ joints you can get a plate of sides and skip the meat (collards or mustard greens, slow cooked green beans with bacon, coleslaw, baked beans, mac and cheese and some sort of corn--creamed, fried, cob).
   
3. I have a salt tooth more than a sweet tooth. I like to bake deserts more than eat them which has probably increased my welcome at a number of sweet-toothed people's houses. Not that you won't see me indulging in cookies/cakes/pies, etc. but I don't really crave them and rarely binge on them. Potato chips, olives, and pickles are another story entirely.
4. I learned to cook as a defensive measure because my mother is British. She has many gifts but the kitchen is not the arena for displaying them. Thanks to her though, I have a pretty decent fake British accent and my kids make me use it to read Harry Potter out loud to them.
   
5. I presently subscribe to three cooking magazines (Gourmet, Food and Wine and Cook's Illustrated). At times in the past I have subscribed to 6 at a time, but I had trouble keeping up. Of course, I am thinking of asking for a Fine Cooking subscription for Christmas...
6. My favorite food? A good salad. Really.
   
7. I've bitched about it enough here that most people already know this, but my punishment for gluttony is having two kids who are suspicious at best when it comes to eating. When I think about the foods I enjoyed when I was their age (green bean and sweet potato tempura, curry, pomegranates, beets, SALAD!) that my kids would never put in their mouths, it makes me want to tear my hair out. I know, there are plenty of people who outgrow their kid-palate and I live in hope of the day I can share my pleasure in food and cooking with one of them.
   

Tag, you're it!:

Ed at Vacuum
Stella at so beautiful and so ordinary...
Jen at A2eatwrite

Cool stuff

Random cool stuff:

• Last.fm radio You type in the name of a musician or group you like and it makes a station with similar artists that you can listen to on-line. This has to be the best way to find new music that suits your particular tastes. This morning I've been listening to a station that branches out from the band Fleet Foxes.
  
• Little paper zombies craft for Halloween decorating. I made two of these last night while watching crap tv.
  
• New favorite breakfast. Thankfully I still have a load of kale in the garden (and I make this in its most basic form because usually my coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet).
• There is a sequel to one of my recent favorite children's books, Toys Go Out. I'm looking forward to laying my hands on Toy Dance Party.
• Purple cauliflower (and cabbage) from the farmer's market. The girl critter picked out the cauliflower and may even agree to eat some of it.

snort!

The critter thought it was fun. When I told him that today wasn't a test day and he'd have to wait until Thursday, he gave a big sigh of disappointment. Yet again, I am left scratching my head.

I had another head-scratching moment today in relation to my vegetable garden. I think I've mentioned how disappointing my garden has been this year: 3 of the tomatoes got wilt and 2 got the bottom rotting fungus, beans died, cucumber withered, lettuce was nibbled by cute baby bunnies, spinach bolted, zucchini plants flowered then turned yellow and died, carrots stayed stumpy and barely edible, need I go on? The only vegetables I got enough of were arugula, kale, peas, scallions and basil. So I've decided to get a farm share next year and just plant fun stuff in the garden--pumpkins, potatoes, peas, (only vegetables that start with the letter P?), stuff that we never can have too much of and that won't impact our diet too much if they fail.

With such a track record of plant death and destruction, when I saw one of the few surviving tomato plants dropping its tomatoes before they turned red I assumed it was another failure and my thumb was turning a fine shade of black.
Only today I remembered that I had planted a yellow tomato plant and they were falling off the vine because they are ripe. Snort!

The MEAP tip toe

Tomorrow my oldest critter takes his first standardized test. Sigh.

A friend whose son goes to another Ann Arbor public school, one that is really well regarded and not a struggling school by any stretch of the imagination, told me that they started MEAP prep in the second half of 2nd grade and that her son's teacher had to cut the dinosaur unit from their curriculum in order to get in enough test prep. This just breaks my heart (she was very disappointed about this too).

In her weekly note last week, the Principal at my son's school wrote a strong statement about how standardized tests are contrary to the holistic program at the school but that, darn it, the kids have to take the thing. The preparation for the test consisted of showing the kids a sample test a couple of weeks ago and telling them to get a good night sleep and eat a good breakfast. I'm trying to take a similarly resigned-but-supportive attitude, but since my kid is a lousy sleeper and eater, I gotta admit that I do feel a little tense.

So I'm doing what I can and am churning out batches of mini banana chocolate chip muffins (without the ground almonds and with soy instead of cow milk to accommodate allergies) for the kids to snack on between testing blocks.
So hey, my house smells great and for all I know, my kid is quirky enough to think that the test is fun!

Heh heh heh

I'm feeling good this morning after hearing that McCain has given up on Michigan. And my sister sent me this link to a hysterical Sarah Silverman video about the election called The Great Schlep. My favorite moment in it? When she compares "Yo!" and "Oy!" because Jews read from right to left.

And lowering my political anxiety means that I'm not expending a nutso amount of energy worrying and can instead focus on writing and food and some knitting. So here's an update:

WRITING
The writing is still going really well. It's pretty cool to sit down each day and be able to see and feel the shape of the whole book--it's like the book is a crossword puzzle I know I can complete, and I just have to keep plugging away and filling in the little boxes. Except that makes it sound tedious and it is actually really fun. I'm also fleshing out some of the supporting characters and liking them more and more as they develop.

FOOD
On the cooking front, I have a few plans. I have to try this recipe for Deconstructed Turkish Dumplings that was in the NYTimes food section recently. And there is another NYTimes recipe for Zucchini Egg Lemon Soup that I want to make before zucchini season is over. If I make it with yellow summer squash I might even be able to trick the small critter (who loves basic Avgolemeno soup) into eating it.

I'm also going through a little Korean food phase right now. This was triggered by a visit to the improbably named JC Rich restaurant. JC Rich is where Steve's Lunch used to be, but unlike Steve's, where you could get diner food like eggs and hash browns in addition to Korean food, JC Rich is all Korean. It is a happy discovery in the cheap/campus Korean category; far better than the (also deceptively named) Coffee Break Korean restaurant a few doors down on South University.

(I just did a little Googling and apparently the JC in the name stands for Jesus Christ. And someone noted that there are Korean translated bibles next to the salt shakers. Frankly, I was too busy woofing down the food to notice or care.)

Next time I go, I'll bring my camera. Brian and I went there on our gym/date night and I got my favorite, Dolsot Bi Bim Bop (Brian had spicy squid) and I thought it was really good--there was a wider variety of vegetables than you usually get at the cheap places (shitake mushrooms, spinach, cabbage, carrots, bean sprouts) to mix with the egg and beef. It came with little banchan portions of bean sprouts, pickled daikon and turnip kim chi that they refilled often. The portions were insane and if I had got regular Bi Bim Bop I might have eaten less (that is to say, a reasonable amount), but I love the crunchy rice crust that forms on the bottom of the stone bowl and so I ate my way to get to it. That's my excuse for gluttony and I'm sticking with it.

You'd think that eating so much would satiate my appetite for Korean but you'd be wrong! This week I made a trip to Manna International Foods/Korean grocery (on Broadway) and bought some supplies for home treats--a quantity of fresh kim chi (I love seeing the gallon sized jars in their coolers), mung bean pancake mix, some thin sliced beef for bulgogi and lovely vermicelli noodles for Chap Chae, which I haven't made in way too long. I have a quantity of scallions that are finally ready from my garden so I've been making kim chi scallion pancakes at every opportunity--I even had them for breakfast this morning and they go well with black coffee.

KNITTING
And knitting wise, I'm working my way up the sleeves for my Urban Aran. I've added a half-hour of knitting time to my week by signing the smaller critter up for a Little Ninja's Karate class. And the smartest thing I have done with this sweater is knitting the two cardigan fronts and the two sleeves at the same time. It is totally worth the hassle of untangling the double balls of yarn not to have to remember the changes I inevitably end up making to the pattern when working on the second sleeve or front. This may be the first really symmetrical sweater I knit...

Crisis

I wasted a whole lot of writing time this week with a big old crisis of confidence. On Tuesday I convinced myself that I didn't like my main character and needed to make her more spirited and less cautious and that had a ripple effect all the way down. If she was confident, then all the people around her would have to change and her entire journey over the course of the novel would change. And that left me with what? Maybe just a concept?

For my fellow dweebs out there, just think of if Tolkien had decided that Boromir actually did get to carry the ring instead of Frodo. Different book, eh?

So I spent a chunk of Wednesday moping about and feeling bad about all the effort I'd put in so far. I revised my supporting documents which track my heroine's journey and rewrote my character sketches and remembered how one of my favorite profs from undergrad said that editing your own writing sometimes feels like you are "slaughtering your little darlings" and what a sucky a feeling that was.

I didn't get to write on Thursday because the small critter had a day-long field trip that I helped out on. And not writing was probably the smartest thing I could do--take a flipping break and get a little distance from my crisis.

Today I went back and decided to just read what I had written so far. No writing expectation, just a chance to see if my Tuesday freak out was justified or not. And it is with a big sigh of relief that I can say that my crisis of confidence was not warranted--I like my main character the way she is and while I'm sure I'll be doing some severe editing in the weeks and months to come, I don't have to slaughter this little darling just yet.

The tahini devotee

I think I might be kind of sick of humus. I used to eat it voraciously and while I appreciate its blood-sugar-level stabilizing effect, it has started tasting a little pasty to me. Or maybe I just ate too much not-so-good industrial humus rather than the stuff we get in Dearborn and have dubbed "white velvet." But even my homemade stuff hasn't pleased me of late.

But not to worry. I have something even simpler that I'm presently eating in great quantities: tahini lemon sauce (pictured above drizzled over roasted cauliflower and rice).

I think I need to keep a container of this tahini sauce around, sort of like the way I always have a jar of mayo in the fridge. It would be terrific tossed over some diced tomatoes, cucumbers and minced parsley and mint. It would taste mighty fine on a roast beef sandwich. If you happen to have some spare falafel or kofte around, serve them with this. It would probably be an awesome topping to a pile of sauteed tofu and asparagus. And you could dip carrots in it when feeling peckish (excuse me for a moment while I go get some carrots and the leftover tahini sauce. Ah. Now. That's better.)

The roast cauliflower with tahini sauce can be found in many Lebanese restaurants, though whenever I've ordered it the cauliflower has been deep fried (no batter--just golden brown all over). If deep frying doesn't seem like a pain in the butt to you, be my guest! But if you are somewhat fearful of boiling cauldrons of oil (like me!) the roasting route is far easier and does a pretty good job in sweetening up the cauliflower and tempering the strong cabbagey flavor that some people find off-putting. You probably already know that plain roast cauliflower is pretty terrific, but give the sauce a try and, like me, you might get hooked. As soon as the florettes come out of the oven, I'm snatching them off the roasting pan, dunking them in the sauce and risking burning my tongue--the combo is that good. If you don't like the white on white coloring, feel free to sprinkle with a little chopped parsley or mint and maybe a sprinkle of sumac or paprika for snazz.

Tahini Lemon Sauce

1/2 C tahini
1/2 C hot water
juice of one juicy lemon (3T maybe?)
1 small garlic clove
1/2 t salt

Puree together in a blender. That's it!

BAM!

I sat down at the computer shortly after dropping the critters off at school and just about when I was opening the documents that house my novel I heard: BAM! BAM! BAM!

My office is about 10 feet from the street where they were DROPPING a huge METAL thingy to BREAK up the STREET surface. The impact was also rattling the glass in my windows, and, truth be told, rattling my brain.

So I closed the documents and decided that the city of Ann Arbor road crew was telling me not to write today. Not that I usually check with the road crews to decide whether it is a providential day for creative expression, but it was pretty clear that today wasn't.

But hey, it gave me an excuse to go to the Farmer's Market and there I discovered that it is the time of year when farmers pretty much pay you to take their tomatoes. I bought all these romas for slow roasting for $5:

That's pretty nutty.

I also picked up some prune plums, courtland apples, and zucchini.

I've never made slow roasted tomatoes, but as it takes about 9 hours, I should have some for sampling shortly after I put the critters to bed. I'm thinking some tomatoes, a baguette, some shavings of Parmesan and a glass of wine will be my companions this evening (Brian is off on a work trip this week).

Be gone, Steam Fangs and Flack Gobbler

It has been a long time since I read a piece by Anne Lamott (her last piece in Salon was in March 2007), but the woman got me through many a rocky parenting time, particularly in the early days, with her book Operating Instructions.

And now she has written what feels like the wisest thing I have read about the coming election.

Steam Fangs and Flack Gobbler (the names of the candidates who I do not support after, as Anne Lamott suggests, running their names through the the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator) can get the hell out of my nightmares--I kid you not--I was up at 3 am the other night freaking out about Flack Gobbler.

I really hope that the folks running the Obama campaign, and the candidate himself, read her piece because it gave me a blast of good karma energy and hope that I'm thinking they could use a little dose of right about now.

And now I'm going to follow up with at least a little bit of Anne's prescription--drink some water, eat the bar of chocolate, and get the damn lawn sign put up.