Mmm… Food

Yesterday was Indian Food Mania #2. Tuesday is the celebration of Diwali, Festival of Lights, which I learned about from Manjula aided by wikipedia and decided to celebrate by making more Indian food on Sunday!  Sadly I got so caught up in the prepping, cooking, and packaging of the food (I was cooking at home but bundling it all to take to our friends J&R’s house to eat) that I forgot to take a single picture!!!  So so so sad.  But ultimately doesn’t matter. Good food was still consumed even if there isn’t any pictoral evidence to present to you.  Those whose mouths it was destined for ate it all and handed out grins for tasty food.  All my selections were again made from Manjulas videos found at www.manjulaskitchen.com.  Her vegetarian meals are helpful as we move to cut meat from our daily intake.  I made three dishes using her recipes.  Main Entree: Aloo Baingan, which is made from potatos and eggplant mixed with tomatos and other spices.  Very tasty, but I may increase the spices if I make it again.  Side dish of bhindi masala, which is okra made with a variety of spices including turmeric, cumin seeds, paprika among others, that was a hit last time and a hit again this time.  But really the reason I even decided to endeavor on Indian Food Mania #2 was the dessert.  Gujia.  Oh so freaking tasty!!!  They are a fried pastry with a filling made from heavy cream, milk powder, coconut powder, and almonds.  Then they are wrapped in dough to make what looks somewhat like a dumping.  They are deep fried, dipped in a sugar glaze and garnished with chopped almonds and pistachios.  They were uber tasty and I would love to make them again.  I will use the excuse that I need practice folding dumplings to get the technique down so that they stay stuck together and don’t tear as I fold the dough over the filling.  Really she makes it look so easy in the video, but oh so much harder in my reality.

I didn’t plan it at all.  Which is kind of unlikely for something like a risotto.  I would normally plan out making risotto on a nite where I had plenty of time and didn’t think I would mind standing over the stove stirring the risotto “frequently” to prevent it from burning and ensuring it absorbed the liquid small portion by small portion.  But no, I came across the recipe when I examined the torn magazine page that was currently functioning as my bookmark.  It has the picture of the sweet potato risotto, but no recipe, only the date for the current November issue of Real Simple.  We had gotten a sweet potato in the food share just a day earlier, and I knew April would be home later, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I went home found the magazine that the page had been torn from and we had everything on the list.  What was kind of nice about this recipe is that it used 1 cup of white wine and 4 cups of water for the liquid instead of the more standard chicken or vegetable stock to cook the rice.  I may try this with other vegetables.  We don’t keep stocks on hand the way we do wine and water! HA!

Last Wednesday we had one of my old roommates over for dinner and I cooked up Martha’s Butternut Squash Soup.  Our food share just keeps bringing on the squash so I’m trying to come up with more new ways to prepare it.  The soup was relatively easy to make skill wise, with almost as much time spent prepping as cooking.  I still have not mastered the art of peeling a butternut squash.  I still think there must be a trick to doing this.  (Pause while I check youtube for a video)  See this is why youtube is amazing.  This video has been posted for over a year with 18666 views so far.  Brilliant!!!  I will be trying this technique the next time I have to cut up a butternut squash.  Maybe I’ll be able to avoid covering my kitchen floor with peels.

Anywhoozle, the soup was filling and very hearty, but not an enthusiastic must do again.  The part of the soup that got bigger raves than the the puree was the garnish of the Spicy Pumpkin seeds.   They are simply pumpkin seeds tossed with cayenne pepper, chili powder and lime juice and roasted @ 350 for about ten minutes. You can hear them cracking and jumping a little off the baking pan when they are nearing done. Super simple to make, and a great midday snack too!  I plan on making a new batch of these this evening as they only took about 10 minutes in the oven.  Oh, and a note that I learned about pumpkin seeds.  There are pumpkin seeds (like what you get out of a jack-o-lantern which is both the seed and the hull covering) and then there are pumpkin seeds, known as pepitas, often used in Mexican cooking which is just the seed inside with the hull removed.  They are small and green and much more tender than their straight from the pumpkin counter part.