Thai Yellow Curry with Chicken

There is something intimidating to me about making curry paste. I'm not really sure what it is, but I never make my own curries. (I suppose I have made butter chicken from scratch in the past, as well as aloo gobi, but otherwise.) That cookbook I kept talking about in the last few entries, Jamie's Food Revolution has several not-entirely intimidating recipes for curry pastes, but... I don't know.

Anyway, I keep trying out different packets and jars of curry pastes and sauces, hoping to find something good, and this one was very good. I've gone and thrown away the package without paying very much attention to what company created it - maybe Asian Home Gourmet or Thai Kitchen or... I don't know. In any case, the suggested recipe called for sliced chicken, diced potatoes, and sliced carrots, so what's what I did.

I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to how much I was tossing in with my curry sauce, but I probably doubled up on the potatoes and carrots, so by the time everything was cooked, there wasn't an awful lot of sauce to go around. Nevertheless: delicious.

It was spicy enough to make my nose run, but didn't really feel hot on my tongue. Thoroughly enjoyable and probably something I'll make again, though next time I'll watch my proportions of vegetables.

Roasted Curried Chickpeas with Pilau and Sautéed Vegetables

I think I'm going to be full for days after this dinner, and I didn't even eat all of it. (There's a lot of food in that bowl. There's a lot more in the fridge. I'm usually pretty good about not cooking more than one day worth of leftovers, but forgot to cut down the pilau recipe.) When I was planning what to cook for the week, I had some vague idea about making ginger pork, stir-fried vegetables and some rice noodles I've got in the cupboard, but I kept wibbling about it and going back and forth between that idea and the idea of making Kickpleat's Brown Rice Bowl with Vegetables and Roasted Chickpeas, which she'd posted a while back at Everybody Likes Sandwiches. Then the brand of chickpeas I like - Eden Organics - went on sale at my work, so decision made.

I started out more or less following her recipes, the chickpeas are pretty much exactly the same, as are the sautéed vegetables, though I used what was in my fridge - carrots, zucchini, mushroom, onion and snap peas. Then I suddenly found myself making pilau rather than the plain rice I'd meant to make. (I've got bags of rice languishing in my cupboards because I always seem to fall back on my very favourite: basmati. White basmati, brown basmati, doesn't matter. I love it so much more than any of my brown rice blends or wild rice blends or plain white or plain brown rice.)

The pilau is a version of the pilau recipe you can find at videojug. I vary my method depending what I want to eat it with and depending what I've got, but this is one of my favourite ways to eat it. (I should have skipped the turmeric though. I think I've had that turmeric since I lived in BC - moved away in 2002 - and it doesn't make for very yellow food any more.) Here's what I did today:

1 cup basmati rice, rinsed
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 handful cashews
1 cinnamon stick
4 cloves
2 cardamom pods
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 small onion, diced
1 tsp turmeric
salt
2 cups water
1 handful green peas

First, heat the oil in a pan. Add the cashews and all the spices except the turmeric. Cook until the cashews start to brown and the spices become fragrant, just a couple minutes. Add the onion and continue cooking, stirring to coat with the spices. After 2-3 minutes, stir in the turmeric and some salt. Now add the rice, stirring to coat, then pour in the water. Bring to the boil, cover, reduce the heat and let cook for about 15 minutes or until the water is absorbed and the rice is cooked. Stir in the peas at the end. (Or you could probably add them with the rice, if they're frozen, but I wonder if they'd get mushy.)

I could eat nothing but this rice, never mind the rest of the food, for days. Every bite is delicious and satisfying and good. I don't very often make this with cashews because what they do is make me want to stuff myself full of cashew-laden rice and never eat another food again.

Despite my deep and abiding love of rice with cashews, I really enjoyed the rest of the meal as well. The vegetables were perfect, even though they didn't quite belong with the other two thirds of the meal. (I mean, it was a 2/3 Indian-inspired meal. The vegetables sort of broke rank, but that's okay.) In the summer I like to make mushrooms and zucchini with herbs like this to eat with barbecued anything, but I think I liked them even better with ginger and garlic.

I could take or leave the chickpeas - I think I was wishing for something more soft and saucy by the time I sat down to eat - but they are delicious, especially mixed with a bit of rice. What I didn't finish of my dinner was mostly chickpeas though because the rice and the vegetables were both so good I couldn't leave room in my stomach for anything else.

Yellowish Chicken with Yellow Peppers

Yep, it was yellow day today. Actually, it was orange day, but I didn't feel like making soup, so I bought some chicken breasts and a lemon for yellow day instead. I'll be glad when orange day is done because eating like this, even eating like this sporadically as I have been, is weird.

The thing is that food goes together or doesn't regardless of colour. So just because lemon and mustard are both yellow, doesn't mean they're flavours I want to enjoy at the same time. All three parts of this were tasty, but they didn't belong together.

This day was tough in part because there aren't a lot yellow vegetables and in part because most of them aren't available to me right now. We nearly never get yellow squash in grocery stores around here and even more rarely do we get pattypan squash, so neither of those were an option. And then... what was left? Yellow pepper. I don't know what else. Corn, which I wasn't in the mood for as I'd made creamed corn on Sunday. If I'd had saffron, I could have turned my cauliflower yellow...

In any case, from the left: the cauliflower was marinated for a bit in the juice of a lemon, then steamed quickly in the lemon juice and some water. I added a bit of celery salt and pepper and it was very, very tasty.

But not with the chicken, which was covered with a mixture of Dijon mustard, finely diced shallots, thyme and some salt and pepper. This was very tasty. I added a drop of stupidly hot hot sauce to the mustard so it was pleasantly hot and the mustard was lovely and it was all around very good. Just not with the cauliflower.

The yellow peppers were very nice - roasted until they were soft and sweet and flavourful. They were fine with the lemon cauliflower (delicious, even) and fine with the chicken, alas they could not unify the two.

Chive and Goat Cheese Frittata

This picture is getting to be several days old now, almost a week even. I've been wibbling about whether or not to post it because I think I've done a similar frittata before, maybe just without the cheese and chives. I can't remember though.

And then too it's not a very interesting picture. I always make and eat frittatas on their own, but they aren't that easy to photograph on their own. I always feel like I should have put a pile of mixed baby greens on the plate, even if I don't intend to eat them, just for appearance's sake. But I don't particularly like dressing a plate. I don't often garnish things, and if I do it's because I intend to eat the garnish. (My next photo in the backlog has a sprig of cilantro on the plate, which I ripped up and mixed into the soup before I ate it.)

Anyway, I've been looking for ways to use up that goat feta that I've got and I've been kind of miserable about food lately, not wanting to cook and just not wanting anything, so I thought what I really needed was to make something yellow. (My love of yellow food should be well documented by now. If I don't have a tag for yellow food, I should.) The yellow peppers didn't look that nice at the store the other day, but the orange peppers were pretty good, so I picked one of those up instead (and orange is practically yellow anyway, right?) And finally, eggs? Easiest thing in the world to cook when you don't really feel like cooking anything.

And so, yes. Eggs with potatoes, orange peppers, chives and goat's feta, cooked to deliciousness. (Which was also a great lunch for work. I should make these things more often to take to work.)

Mushroom and Spinach-stuffed Chicken with Green and Wax Beans

I have no fish pictures again this week, but I did actually eat fish once this week. I went out to a restaurant here in Calgary last night, Redwater Rustic Grille, for my birthday and had Salmon with Pear and Thyme Gastrique with Roasted Red and Yellow Peppers and Asparagus. Tonight's dinner was plated as an homage to yesterday's dinner, this time with chicken stacked up on the vegetables rather than salmon.

I'm not sure that I've actually got anything else to say about this meal. It tasted very good, the beans especially, but I am a fiend for fresh beans. (My favourite thing about going to my parents' house in summer is raiding their garden for fresh beans and peas.) It probably wasn't a special enough dinner for a birthday, but I got to combine two of my favourite food things - stuffed things and yellow things - and also I cooked it for myself and ate it alone, so it's just lucky I didn't eat peanut butter on rice crackers or something.

Red Beans and Yellow Rice

Well, I don't know when or if this will get posted, at this rate, as my internet is up and down tonight and every time I try, I wind up having to retype this message. And that's nothing if not annoying.

At any rate, this is another recipe from a cookbook I recently picked up on Volumetrics - I think I mentioned it a couple days ago, with the Pasta Primavera recipe. Basically it's about a way of eating that lets you eat a lot of food in terms of volume, without eating a lot of calories. (IE. Eating mountains of vegetables.)

So this is a volumetrics version of rice and beans. I've never had whatever proper rice and beans would be, so I'm not sure how this compares to a more standard version of the dish, but it was quite tasty. Spicy and flavourful, even though it sort of had more bell peppers than I'd necessarily go after in any one sitting. I think it could have benefited from roasting the peppers first, just to get the skins off, because it bothered me to have little bits of skin peeling off here and there as I ate. (I don't like tomato skins in things either, if I cook them.)

The rice part I sort of made up on my own, trying to remember the ingredients for a yellow rice that I often make when I made Indian food. All I could remember is that it's got cumin and turmeric in it, so I did that again, and added some garam masala as well. It looks like it needed more turmeric to brighten up the colour, but I've never tried making yellow rice with brown rice before, so that might be why the colour didn't really take.

Anyway, this is what I'll be taking to work for lunch for the rest of the week, since the recipe makes a ton of the stuff.

Cinnamon-Lemon Pork with Stuffed Pimento and Spanish Rice

I made Spanish food today, from my Tapas cookbook, though I kind of changed it up a bit so it's not so much tapas as it would have been. (And also, I made rice from a packet. Also not really part of the tapas family, I don't think.)

The pork chop was meant to be the a nicer sounding "Miniature Pork Brochettes" but I couldn't see the sense in cubing it and putting it on skewers when I was only doing it for myself. It worked as well, I imagine, leaving it in one piece, anyway. And tasted as good.

I had to make my own Ras El-hanut, which is the spice blend used on these, as I couldn't find it at any of the local stores (I need to find a Middle Eastern store somewhere, I guess). The ingredients for a proper ras el-hanut are as hard to find as the pre-made blend - it's meant to have rosebuds, lavender, galangal, nigella, cassia, and a whole host of other things I CAN find in a regular grocery store - so I used (again) an easy recipe that I found online some time ago. The flavour of the cinnamon is what stands out most in that variation, and it tasted really nice with the lemon juice that makes up the bulk of the liquid in the marinade.

Apparently the recipe is Arab in origin, and so this would generally be done on lamb, rather than pork (outside of Spain, anyway), and if I weren't scared of cooking lamb, I'd try that some time in the future. (I've got a terror of ruining lamb, since it's so expensive.)

The stuffed pimento was... amazingly good. I used quark for the cheese in the stuffing, since the recipe only asked for a 'curd cheese' and I wasn't really sure what to use. I think a ricotta would probably work as well, but I don't like the texture of ricotta, so I decided to try out quark instead. This particular quark, which is made in Canada, was a lot healthier than ricotta, anyway, and didn't have a grainy texture and was thicker than low-fat ricotta, so I'm glad I decided to try it out. The quark was flavoured with a bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper, garlic, and diced mint and parsley.

At any rate, I liked all of this a lot, so I'm definitely keeping the recipes in mind for the future. (I could take or leave the rice, but that's generally how I feel about rice from a package anyway.) Definitely food I'd cook for someone else, if I were ever cooking for more than just me and my sister/bro-in-law. (Who don't like peppers anyway.)

Curried Red Lentils with Caramelized Onions and Cinnamon-scented Rice

This looks, as my grandma would say, like a dog's breakfast. But did it ever taste good.

I find it sort of... odd and distracting that the lentils, which start out red, cook up yellow. But they're a fantastic shade of it, at least. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I decided to try out this recipe, but I think I imagined something a little more thick than it turned out. It's a bit like a very thick soup or a very thin stew. It could have used a bit more salt, and I think I'd like it a touch spicier, but it was really good.

There's such a big pile of caramelized onions on there (half an onion, actually) but they're so lovely, I don't think there could be enough. The rice was cooked with a stick of cinnamon in it. I thought maybe it'd colour the rice a little, but it didn't at all. It makes only a subtle change in the taste of the rice, but it was nice.