Work for both of us started off with a bang on Jan. 2 and shows no signs of letting up for months to come, so it would be understandable if our culinary ambitions trailed off from the high points of the recent holiday.
But we have to keep our strength up, so Pam is making sure we eat our vegetables.
Last night, she put together a couple of dishes from the new cookbook that Kevin got us for Christmas, The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. The first was Aloo Sak, or potatoes and spinach, and the other was Baigan Simla Mirch Tarkari, sauteed eggplant and bell peppers.
A couple of surprises here.
The eggplant dish involved steaming the eggplant first, then combining with a giant mound of peppers (three large ones, sliced thin) that were sauteed with mustard seeds until they were blistered and shrunk down to little shreds of their former selves. Add freshly mixed garam masala according to Lord Krishna's recipe, and you have a remarkably dense and flavorful dish that is served with yogurt and cilantro.
Potatoes and spinach? That one you start by making French Fries! Once nicely browned in a thin layer of oil, you pull out the potatoes, dump a hot red spice mix into the oil, sizzle away the moisture, add the spinach and a bit later add the potatoes back in. Squeeze on some lemon and eat with some garlic nan (from the frozen food case at the wildly popular Fresh Farms International Market, 2626 W. Devon), and you have yourself a decent meal.
To keep the momentum going, Pam made some toasted mango, avocado and mozzarella sandwiches for brunch today with Granny and Carolyn. The sandwiches were marvelously light and clean-tasting, almost bland, but the side dish of fiery chipotle potatoes balanced things out.
We'll see how long we can keep this up before falling into the inevitable food rut.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
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6 comments:
Cute video, you two are really stepping up to the anti-climatic documentation video trend.
The spinach and potato's were great, Trish and I heated them up for a snack last night.
Thanks, Carolyn. I know what you mean about the trailing-off-into-nothing aspect of the videos.
But you should have seen it before we edited and cut it down to size. We had 45 seconds of sizzling potatoes, followed by nothing but our own laughter at how silly the whole thing was.
Even ten or fifteen seconds of sizzling potatoes made me laugh out loud.
What kind of video camera do you have? Do you like it?
We're using a pocket size digital camera, Canon SD750, that also does video.
For our latest production we used the new version of i-movie. According to Kevin the the old version has more features. The new version is dumbed-down, perfect for anti-climatic documentation.
Very artistic video. You guys also did a nice job of holding off a blog rut. With no posts for 5 days, I was hoping to see something new and entertaining soon. And I haven't had the energy to contribute myself. Well done.
Wow, video. You guys are really leaving us in the dust. Michael took pictures of several dishes he made lately and even got them downloaded onto the computer. Then he got busy at work and the blog entry still waits. I'm loving everyone's contributions!
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