Day 83/240: New Year's Day

I made up a slaw salad with carrot, broccoli and red cabbage shreds mixed with some of my tofu mayonnaise.

I should say something about the tofu mayonnaise. It's a really easy recipe and takes spicing and flavoring well, but a lot of the formulas for it call for the use of silken tofu. I don't agree.

Silken tofu does not press easily and because of its consistency it makes far too soupy a product. The consistency ends up closer to a "ranch" salad dressing. This is fine if that's what you want, but I like a thicker result. I'm also willing to put up with a slightly grainier mouth feel for it.

At some point, I'm going to try hanging the silken tofu (like you do when you make panir or Greek yogurt) and see if I can improve the texture and thickness simultaneously.

That, being said, I have a couple of tips:

1. Making zkhuk yarok with basil instead of cilantro gives you a high octane pesto! I think that there are many ways these two sauces might intersect to my tongue's advantage.
2. Making tofu mayonnaise with either zkhuk yarok or zkhuk pesto is a grand idea and works really well. Start with a small amount and scale up according to the flammability of your taste buds.
3. Using serrano peppers in zkhuk significantly increases the SHU. Be forewarned and taste test before slathering it on.

  

Day 82/240: New Year's Eve

The rest of the family, including my wife's sister and her grandson (my grandnephew) had take-out Chinese (damn them!), I had the Spiced Melitza again, this time with some mushroom paté experimentally slathered on. It was good, but not as appreciated as it should have been since it had to compete with General Gau's Chicken, Chicken Pad Thai, Sweet and Sour Chicken, and Crab Rangoon.

Day 81/240: Mushroom Paté

This wasn't for dinner but it's worthy of a recipe.

Mushroom Paté

Ingredients:

• 3 Tbs olive oil
• 1 medium white or yellow onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp dried tarragon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Freshly ground pepper
• 1 lb portobello mushrooms
• 1 cup lightly toasted walnuts
• 1 Tbs balsamic vinegar
• Up to 1/4 cup cold vegetable broth, or water

Process:

1. Dice the onion (it should yield app 1 cup).
2. Peel, smash, and mince the garlic.
3. Chop the mushrooms (coarse dice).
4. Toast the walnuts lightly in dry skillet.
5. Put walnuts aside to cool.
6. Heat 2 Tbs olive oil in the skillet on medium. 
7. Add onions.
8. Saute for 3 to 5 minutes until translucent.
9. Add garlic, thyme, tarragon, salt and pepper.
10. Cook for a minute. 
11. Add the mushrooms.
12. Cook for 7 to 10 minutes (until mushrooms are very soft).
13. Put walnuts into a food processor and pulse until very fine. 
14. Add the cooked mushroom mixture to the food processor.
15. Add the balsamic vinegar, whatever's left of the olive oil. 
16. Process until smooth, drizzling in the stock until the pate is a smooth, thick paste. 
17. Put pate into an airtight container. 
18. Chill for at least an hour before serving.

Disloco

I have to say that I was disappointed in the vegetables I picked up from a farm stand in Sudbury. The place was very Whole Foodsy for such a small place, but I suppose that's to be expected in such a ritzy suburb.

I picked up an English (seedless) cucumber, an eggplant, a bunch of parsley, a bunch of cilantro, some purple potatoes and some baby Yukon gold potatoes. The prices were what I would have expected at WF.

The vegetable quality, however, was not!

The next day, the cucumber was covered with soft moldy spots. I recovered what I could, but my frugality lost out to disgust and most of it ended up in the compost bin. I turned to the eggplant. It had no obvious faults but it was going soft far faster than I'd expected. I decided to cook that immediately to forestall any loss. That was the Melitza recipe on the 29th.

What had been a nice bunch of parsley the previous afternoon was now slimy with half-rotted dark green glop. Some of it was salvageable so I rinsed it really well and used it and what was left of the cuke to make a tabbouleh.

I had gone through the zkhuk yarok from mid-December faster than I'd expected, so, while I was in the kitchen I decided to replenish the jar. I pulled the bag of cilantro out of the veggie bin. This was completely unusable. I couldn't even discern any leaves in the dark green sludge. With some trepidation, I checked the potatoes. They looked okay.

But the next day, I decided to slice up some of the purple potatoes and roast them. I have to say that I was surprised and disappointed to find that they were not what they seemed. Rather than purple-fleshed potatoes they were merely purple-skinned.

On the whole, I have had better shopping experiences, and for less money.

Although tempted, I decided not to document the rotting veggies with photos.

Spiced Melitza with Tabbouleh

For dinner, tonight!

Spiced Melitza
Ingredients

• 1 medium melitza (ok, ok dammit eggplant)
• 1 tsp lemon zest
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tsp cumin seed
• 1 tsp coriander
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 dried Thai bird chilis
• Olive oil

Process 

ETA I didn't use the bird chilis. Instead I used
dried habanero chili from my garden

1. Slice melitza in half lengthwise.
2. Score the cut surface about 1/4 to 1/2 " deep as if for two games of tic-tac-toe.
3. Salt the cut surface.
4. Place the half melitzas, cut side down in a shallow roasting pan and leave on the counter at room temperature for 2-3 hours.
5. Drain the expelled liquid and add it to your stock pot.
6. Turn the melitzas cut side up.
7. Dry roast the cumin and coriander in a small skillet.
8. Grind the cumin, coriander, paprika, cinnamon and chilis in a suribachi or mortar.
9. Peel crush and mince the garlic.
10. Put the garlic, lemon zest and spices powder into a small bowl.
11. Add enough oil to the bowl to make a loose paste.
12. Rub the spice paste onto the cut surface of the melitza.
13. Roast at 350 for 50 minutes.

I don't need to repeat my recipe for tabbouleh.

Here's what dinner looked like:

First the plate:

Plate by Droll Designs, Salem, MA

Then the food on the plate:

That's tabbouleh at the top left, two types of zkhuk at the top right, 1/2 the melitza in the middle and a couple of pappadums balanced on the left edge.

Day 80/240: Eggplant

"Eggplant" is such an unwieldy word, it has altogether too many stops and starts, the ratio of consonants to vowels is out-of-whack. It is the auditory equivalent of porridge hitting the floor.

I'd prefer to use "aubergine", but then nobody knows what I'm talking about. When I lived in Italy, I knew it as melanzana, Greeks call it melitza, elsewhere it's melongene. In India it's brinjal and in Lebanon batinjan.

Since most of my recipes seem to have a middle-eastern quality, I'm really tempted by batinjan. Y'know ... come to think of it melanzana and melitza have Zs in them. There's a certain etymological aesthetic thrill at imagining putting some zkhuk on my melitza. It reminds me of the duke in The 13 Clocks who was prepared to slit minstrels from their guggle to their zatch.

So, dinner tonight will be ... wait ... am I going to have to explain what a melanzana is over and over? Will Google's spiders  pass me by unless I list the most common name each time? Will I have to sacrifice aesthetics on the altar of search engine optimization? What a dilemma.

Day ~79/240: A handful of days

At first I was shocked that it had been so long since I last posted last (this actually being Day 80), then I said to myself, "it's one a.m. so it's not been that long." I've got to stop lying to myself.

Instead of trying to force you into my altered reality (in which I firmly believe that there's a kind of blog limbo where posts are cached and not released until the maximum degree of procrastinative embarrassment has been achieved), and instead do a brief retrospective before returning to my chair ... here ... by the fire ... with a book.

Sunday - Day 76/240: Chili Seitan Steaks with boiled potatoes, some butternut, squash and a salad. Just me and my wife and younger son at her Uncle Bob's house. They had roast beef and I was the little piggy that had none. The old wolf (to twist the metaphor painfully) beat me three times in a row at Mancala. He's got a killer instinct that hasn't dimmed at all. I hear he's even more ruthless at Backgammon. (Note to self: avoid getting sucked into one.)

Monday - Day 77/240: A nice seitan salad sandwich made from diced chili seitan, diced onion, diced celery, mixed with my tofu mayonnaise.

Tuesday - Day 78/240: A delightful plate of roasted vegetables. Nothing fancy, just easy to prepare and pretty enough to take a picture of.

Wednesday - Day 79/240: On the way back from an hour ride (each way) to an appointment today, I suddenly realized that my wife was with me, sitting quietly, knitting diligently, listening to some tediously inspirational tripe on NPR. "So!" I said to her suddenly, hoping to startle an honest and non-self-effacing answer out of her, "Do you want to stop somewhere for an early dinner on the way home?"

After the usual dithering, it turned out that she would be perfectly happy to have an early dinner. After substantially more dithering, intended to point out to me the additional effort, forethought and self-sacrifice my dietary choices had forced upon her, and how with a Brave Heart, a Good Will, and Boundless Patience with the Awefull Trialls I had inflicted upon her (I note, in passing, that we were passing at the time past the City of Salem and it may have affected my psychic hearing somewhat) it was then determined that, despite all of choices available, we would go to the restaurant we nearly always go to.

I had some guacamole and chips followed by the veggie burger which was ... okay. A construct of beans, rice and a couple of other veggies partially held together by some searing with barbecue sauce. It needed more texture or more spice but, preferably, both.

It's now 0145 I'll be making a spiced eggplant dish tonight with some tabbouleh.

Whee! I'm up-to-date. I'm au courant, I'm ... going to put the trash out front and go to bed.