a little salty, a little sweet
I love cooking with new ingredients and have been looking for a recipe using lotus root since I first noticed it at the grocery store. Lotus root has a very subtle, slightly sweet taste and a crunch similar to water chestnuts, even when cooked, and I found that this curry using Sri Lankan curry powder is a great complement for it. If you can’t find fresh lotus root, you may be able to find packaged sliced lotus root.
In honor of Halloween, let me regale you with a tale of cooking horror: It was a (dark and stormy) Wednesday night, and after a long and stressful day at work, I was determined to make a Sri Lankan curry that night for dinner. I stopped by an Indian grocery store to pick up some curry leaves (an ingredient for which there is really no substitute – if you buy fresh leaves, any leftover leaves will freeze quite well), and by the time I made it back to my empty house (none of my roommates were home – and have I mentioned that my house is over 100 years old?),
Up to the last minute, I was debating what to call this salad. The simple “Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad,” the slightly more intriguing “Warm Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad,” or the fully informative “Warm Lentil and Sweet Potato Salad with Maple Vinaigrette.” I ultimately went with simplicity, but I want to make sure to give due credit to all the components that make this salad so very tasty. Served warm (or at room temperature), the flavors here feel very seasonally appropriate for autumn. The maple syrup and mustard harmonize seamlessly in the vinaigrette, playing nicely on top of the lentils’ and sweet potatoes’ earthiness.
When I’m at the grocery store, I often can’t resist buying whatever produce is on sale. I find this forces me to be a little more creative, using ingredients I might not normally use and trying to combine what I already have around (to avoid another grocery store run). When I picked up a whole pineapple on sale, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do something savory or sweet with it – so I decided to cook a jam that could go either way. This jam is sweet, but not too sweet, and has an extra exotic flavor from the use of cardamom.
Now that you have some Thai red curry paste (if you didn’t make your own, feel free to use a store-bought version), it’s time to cook a Thai red curry. In this rendition, I used the vegetables I had on hand which happened to be mushrooms, cabbage, and zucchini, but this recipe is incredibly versatile and you can easily use your favorite veggies or chicken – just think about what you’ve liked in past Thai curries you’ve eaten! My curry here doesn’t look too visually appealing (that’s because I didn’t use enough red bell peppers in the curry paste), but the taste is still spot on.
For those of you who liked my recipe for homemade peanut butter cups, this recipe uses the same technique to make homemade peppermint patties! The filling here is creamy and very minty, and if you want, you can easily adapt this recipe and make different flavored fillings by using different extracts (I think almond extract would be especially tasty!). I even made a strange (but surprisingly tasty) concoction by layering the peanut butter cup filling with this peppermint patty filling (at the request of some co-workers).
It may already be October, but my garden is still producing some last tomatoes, so I used them to make this delicious roasted tomato salsa. Popping the tomatoes (and some of the other components) in the oven adds a nice sweetness to the salsa, and I included both jalapeno and chipotle peppers to give this salsa a good spicy kick. The great thing is how truly easy this salsa is – give some veggies a rough chop, toss them in the oven, and then blend with a few other ingredients. I love having salsa around for adding to sandwiches, putting in burritos or tacos, or having with my eggs in the morning.
I first made this jerk chicken chili when I went camping for the first time. I was tasked with choosing dinner recipes, and this recipe stood out because it seemed relatively simple and could be made in a single pot yet had an interesting combination of flavors. It turned out delicious, and I set about making it at home recently, wondering if I only remembered it being so tasty because we had been starving and in the wilderness (well, relatively so – we were actually at a well-established campground with treehouses). But this chili turned out equally delicious prepared in more traditional surroundings!
For the most part, I’m more than happy to stick to my native dialect of English (mid-Atlantic American, thank you very much), but there is one item in particular where I can’t help but prefer the British word. Rocket. Called arugula in American English, this leafy green (probably my favorite) deserves all the excitement conjured by references to space travel. Rocket has been touted as an aphrodisiac and is full of vitamins A, C, and K, as well as calcium. And the rich spicy taste can’t be beat. Some may find it a little too peppery (it is often mixed with other greens for this reason), but in the context of this salad, the flavor of the rocket is in perfect balance with the other ingredients.
I recently had the pleasure of dining at Rasika, a very popular DC Indian restaurant, and trying their famous palak chaat. This dish is an amazing medley of textures and flavors, with crispy spinach playing off a sour-sweet chutney and sweetened yogurt, and I knew almost immediately that I had to try my best to recreate it. I’ve dedicated this week to a series of posts on recreating all the pieces of Rasika’s palak chaat. This post is the second in a series of three. See post 1: Chaat Masala and post 3: Palak Chaat.
This date tamarind chutney balances the sweetness of dates and jaggery sugar with the sourness of tamarind.