We are Back–Look for a Recipe Tonight….

Well, the family has returned safely from our sojourn in Boston. I could say that the trip was uneventful, but that wouldn’t be exactly true–it was just harmlessly eventful. That is a more accurate way to put it.

Right now, I am madly sewing 8 foot long black velvet curtains–14 of them–with a friend to use in her MFA thesis project. The show opens in ten days. So, posting will happen after that is done–probably tonight!

Meanwhile, here’s a photo of spring in my flower garden for you to enjoy. My Flower Lady looks pleased, doesn’t she?

On The Road Again…

Well, early in the morning today, Zak, Kat and I are on the road, heading toward a gathering of his family in Boston which he has entitled, “Mayday, Mayday, It’s the Kramers!”

We’ll be gone all weekend and driving back on Monday, so look for a Meatless Monday post on Tuesday. I figured that would be nice and confusing.

And, to keep everyone company while waiting patiently for me to return, I leave you the first luna moth of the season, whom Kat and found resting by our front door two afternoons ago.

Isn’t he a beauty? I think luna moths are even prettier than most butterflies….

Have a good weekend!

Kitchen Gardens Grow Food and Families

Having grown up helping my grandparents tend their farm, I have a healthy respect for a good kitchen garden. I know exactly how much work goes into putting a garden together, how much time it takes to keep it going and how frustrating it can be when weather, bugs, and marauding raccoons do their level best to destroy every food-bearing plant in sight.

But I also know how good a garden can be for a family.

Not only does it provide nutritious, flavorful food to a family, it also gives a bounty of other benefits.

Let’s look at just a few of them.

First of all, it builds bonds between family members and generations. This is true of any shared creative endeavor, of course, but truly, a garden is a very large project and any time a group of people come together to make something that big, they grow closer in the process. Relying on each other and helping each other strengthen our respect for each family member’s abilities as well as affection for our foibles. We work, we strive, we build, we sweat, and we laugh. We have fun. It’s fun to make something appear out of what was once just a piece of ground with grass and weeds covering it.

Sometimes I think that living in the city as most of us do these days has made us forget how much fun all that work is–it’s satisfying in ways that putting together pre-fab furniture–something most urbanites do regularly–just isn’t. With the manual work of gardening, it’s all you. Garden plots don’t come with step-by-step instructions. It’s just you, your shovel and the ground, and when people work together like that, there is problem solving involved, and creativity. And that is good for minds of all ages.

It builds physical strength and endurance. This should go without saying, but I’m saying it anyway. The best shape I have ever been in my life has been when I have had a garden to tend. Until my Grandpa grew too ill to work in the last two years of his life, he kept a great big garden, and he worked in it every day. He was a wiry, skinny fellow his entire life and pretty darned fit. Morganna’s father’s grandfather died in his garden, near the asparagus patch. I remember when she called to tell me that and I comforted her by saying, “That garden was his pride and joy, and I think he died right where he was most at peace. There in the garden with his face to the sun and the blue sky and his back to the earth he tended most of his life.”

She said she knew I’d know what to say to make her feel better.

But both of those men were well past their eighties when they died and I cannot help but think it was those years of labor in the fields beneath the sun and in the fresh air that kept them so spry for so long. The same goes for my Gram who tended her beloved flower garden until the last year of her life. Caring for living things-plants, animals and people- and tending them–keeps us strong and healthy.

Gardening exercises our brains, too. It’s all problem solving, thinking on the fly, watching the signs in the weather, the birds, the earth itself, as we try and figure out when to plant. It gives us something to think about as we work–how many beans should we plant here? Will those tall tomatoes shade the lettuce enough in the summer so it won’t bolt? What are we going to do about those rabbits coming in and eating our baby peas? What are we going to do with all of those radishes?

Working in a garden gives children of all ages mental stimulation, too. It’s enough for the little ones to plant seeds and then watch in wonder as they grow from itty bitty inedible rock-like thing into a full-blown, tasty carrot. Kids get to see and experience so much in a garden. They get to see worms at work, ladybugs feasting on aphids, praying mantis hiding, camouflaged among green pea vines, and ants marching in endless parades. They get to smell the scents of newly turned earth, rain, and squash blossoms, they get to touch the prickles of an eggplant stem and the velvety softness of a haricot vert. They get to hear the song of the bluebird, the raucous call of the crow and the chopping sound of the hoe.

All of the sensory inputs make connections in a child’s brain, connections that will serve to teach the child so many things that will serve them well in later life. not to mention stimulating the growth of essential neural pathways. I personally am of the belief that humans can have no better classroom for a young child than a garden.

Gardens give us peace.

I can attest to this my own self. A few months ago, my blood pressure dove up precipitously. Stress was the probable reason, stress and a genetic propensity for high blood pressure. But, it was weird because it went up so quickly, and for decades my blood pressure had been on the low end of normal. I’m on medication for it, and the medication is working, but I also vowed to exercise, give up drinking coffee all day (now it is one cup in the morning and truly, I feel better for it), and try and meditate.

With the exception of the giving up the coffee part, working in the garden has provided what I needed to help control my blood pressure. Digging and clearing, hoeing and weeding, lifting and toting, all have helped give me lots of physical exercise, while planting and weeding, tending and just -being- out in the sunlight among the bluebirds and neighbors, has done wonders for my mental state. I feel more peaceful, less anxious and less angry the longer I work in the garden.

The same has been true with Morganna. The hard labor of clearing the ground gave her an outlet for her aggression and stress while the act of planting seeds and tending plants calms her down and makes her more able to slow her breath and just be.

Gardening puts urban folk back in touch with nature, with the world beyond iPods, laptops and reality television. Getting our hands dirty reminds us of where our food comes from, where all of life comes from. We are reminded that everything that humans have ever done, everything we have ever built, every concerto ever written, every novel, every skyscraper, every car and even the Mars Rover has come from one simple thing: the soil.

Without dirt, we are nothing. We depend on the fertility of the earth as much as we rely on the sun, and all of human culture is built upon the ground we walk on and ignore every day, the ground we encase in concrete and asphalt.

When we garden, when we grow some of our own food, when we get the dirt underneath our fingernails, our families are reminded of the glue that holds us together isn’t just bonds of love and respect.

It’s also plain old dirt.

Gandhi said it best: “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”

Potassium-Happy Mixed Mushroom and Greens Masoor Dal

Yeah, I should’ve saved this for Meatless Monday. BUT, the truth of the matter is I cooked this dish back in January, so it’s waited this long and I decided it couldn’t wait any more. It’s just too tasty and nourishing, and while it was great in January, mushrooms are always in season and greens are great in the spring, too.

So, here’s a dish I put together to get some more potassium in my diet in a form other than bananas. Why?

Because i loathe bananas. I used to love them, but sometime during my pregnancy with Kat, I ate one too many (again, for the potassium) and now just the smell of them makes me faintly queasy. The taste makes my stomach twist uncomfortably, so I just don’t even try anymore, so when my doctor suggested more bananas in my diet to offset the loss of potassium that my blood pressure medication was going to cause, I looked at her like she had grown an extra head and shook my own head adamantly. “Nope.” I said. “Anything BUT bananas.”

My doctor was aghast, because she thought chefs like to eat everything, and what was wrong with a harmless banana, anyway? When I begged her to tell me what other foods had potassium in them, I was happy to hear that leafy greens and oranges all have high amounts of the mineral floating about in their happy little plant cells, just waiting to be metabolized in my body and turned into good stuff.

Everyone knows I love my greens. And later, I did some research on the Internet and did a happy dance because mushrooms have high amounts of potassium as well. Better and better–I can eat mushrooms until I burst. (For the record, avocados also have lots of the stuff, but they aren’t featured in this recipe–I just thought I’d mention them because I learned about them the same day I found out about the mushrooms.)

And, even more importantly, greens and mushrooms taste like heaven together. The lightly bittersweet richness of the greens melds perfectly with the earthy fragrance of mushrooms and makes a happy culinary marriage.

For a while, I just sauteed onions and garlic in olive oil, then browned some mushrooms in it and tossed in greens and a bit of chicken stock (chicken has potassium, too), and braised it until the greens brightened and wilted a tiny bit. Then, I seasoned with some balsamic vinegar and salt and Aleppo pepper and ate that with whatever dinner was nearly every day. And it was delicious–but you know, after a while, the same basic dish, no matter how loverly gets monotonous after a while.

So, I decided to take my combination of mushrooms and greens out of the rut I had driven them in and put them back on the road to culinary joy. I decided to take my saute, and turn it into a tarka, and use it to season masoor dal (red lentils). This would necessitate the addition of some spices–oh darn, you know I hated that–and a substitution of ghee or canola oil for olive oil and lemon juice–if I used it at all–for the vinegar, but who cares? It would still be good.

Oh, what’s a tarka? Well, yeah, I wrote a post about that, oh, umpteen years ago and in case you missed it, here it is. But for those who don’t want to read an entire post, a tarka refers to taking ghee or oil and cooking aromatics and spices in it until they are nice and brown and filled with flavor. Then the spiced ghee or oil and the aromatics and spices are all stirred into a curry, dal or other Indian dish to give it a big old whompin’ burst of flavor. And it works like a charm. A dal without tarka is a pretty boring lentil dish. A dal with it is like eating lentils with firecrackers exploding with flavor on your tongue. It’s amazing. So, don’t ever let dal leave your kitchen without a tarka. Please.

Oh, and by the by, in Southern Indian cookbooks you will see “tempering” referred to–that is just another way to say making a tarka, which is a Northern Indian term. By any name, the technique makes superior dishes, and you should learn how to do it.

And I was right. It was good. I cooked up a big old pot of masoor dal only seasoned with a pinch of asafoetida, a teaspoon of powdered turmeric and about two teaspoons of finely grated fresh ginger, and after it had turned into a lovely yellow puree, I was ready with the contents of my saute skillet, which was onions cooked to a deep reddish brown, thin slices of golden garlic, thin, browned slices of fresh chili peppers, browned fresh curry leaves, crisped and golden fresh shiitake mushrooms and button mushrooms, whole cumin and mustard seeds and wilted finely sliced lacinato kale leaves and baby spinach leaves.

The sizzling tarka was scraped into the finished dal, and stirred into it with a generous sprinkling of salt. The lid was clapped on the lentils and left for about five minutes so the flavor of the tarka could completely infuse the legumes and voila–it was suddenly ready to be sprinkled with fresh cilantro leaves and served with steamed basmati rice and yogurt or raita.

So easy, and so tasty–and even better when heated up the next day. And the next day.

And the next one. One big pot of this fed three adults for the first dinner and then made lunch for me for three days running.

Not bad for a dish that really only took an hour or so to make.

Especially considering it helped me to avoid eating bananas for four more days!

Mixed Mushroom and Greens Masoor Dal
Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups masoor dal, picked over and rinsed
water as needed
pinch powered asafoetida (optional, but it helps digest legumes)
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
3 tablespoons ghee or canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups mixed fresh mushrooms, thinly sliced (stems removed as needed)
3 large cloves garlic, thinly sliced
10 fresh curry leaves
1-3 fresh green chilies, (to taste) thinly sliced
1 1/2 teaspoons brown mustard seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 bunch lacinato kale, thinly sliced
1 cup packed baby spinach leaves (or any other green you have around. But the kale is essential…)
1 teaspoon mild red chili flakes
salt to taste
cilantro leaves for garnish
lemon wedges for garnish

Method:

Put the picked over and rinsed masoor dal in a deep saucepan and add water to cover by about an inch. Add the asafoetida, turmeric and ginger and over high heat bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer, stirring as needed, and adding water as needed, until the lentils cook down to a thick, yellow puree. Turn off heat, cover and let stand.

While the lentils cook, prepare the tarka:

Heat ghee or oil in a heavy, deep skillet over a medium high fire. Add the onions, sprinkle with salt, and cook, stirring, until the onions are a pale golden color. Add the mushrooms, and cook, still stirring, until the onions brown on the edges and the color of the onions deepens to a medium golden color. Add the garlic slices, curry leaves and chili slices, and keep cooking and stirring.

Stir, stir, stir, and stir some more. Are you tired of stirring? Too bad, keep stirring. It’s good exercise.

When the garlic picks up a very pale golden color and the onions are starting to actually brown and are dark gold, add the mustard and cumin seeds. Cook, stirring (I bet you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) until the cumin seeds brown and smell wonderful and the mustard seeds sputter and pop.

At this point, the onions should be a nice almost reddish brown, the garlic should be golden brown and everything should smell utterly divine. At that point add in the kale and spinach and red chili flakes, and cook, stirring, just until the leaves wilt.

At that point, scrape the whole mess into the dal (remove the lid on the dal pot first) and stir it in (you are almost done with stirring, I promise) really well to combine and then pop the lid right back on the pot, and let it sit for five minutes.

Taste, add salt as needed, and serve with rice and yogurt, sprinkled with cilantro leaves and lemon wedges on the side.

Note: In the summer, you could add tomatoes at the end of the tarka cooking–right after the greens–because tomatoes are yummy in dal and you guessed it–they have lots of potassium, too. Just sayin’.

Green Garlic Masala Chicken Curry

My favorite dish at Reethika in Columbus is their Green Chicken Curry. Mrs. Reddy makes hers with coconut milk, and it is a haunting, complex, aromatic version of a South Indian favorite.

While I didn’t want to copy her curry completely, I did want to use it as a starting point to make my own version of Green Masala Curry, so I thought about the melange of flavors that make up her version. Fresh curry leaves are definitely involved, as is cilantro. Methi greens and bay leaves also smell like they are a part of her palette of herbs, so I decided to use those as well.

But, in addition to these gloriously green herbs, I wanted to use a large amount of a seasonal favorite in my kitchen–locally grown green garlic grown by Rich and Ann Tomsu. Why? Because green garlic is like baby garlic–all of its brashness has been toned down to a sweet gentleness that is so delightful, yet rich, that it cannot help but complement any food which is cooked with it.

The other ingredients I used in the green masala paste were fresh ginger, a few cloves of regular garlic, green Thai chilies and thinly sliced well-browned yellow onions. For the cilantro, I used the thick stems from the root end all the way up to the leaves–two bunches worth of them. The leaves, I kept separate, to be finely minced and added near the end of the cooking process.

For spices, I made a garam masala out of toasted cinnamon stick, green cardamom pods, a few cloves, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, black peppercorns and fenugreek seeds. After the whole spices were toasted, I ground them up, and stirred in a half teaspoon of ground turmeric for its fragrance, color and health-boosting properties.

Instead of the traditional coconut milk base for the curry sauce, I thinned the very thick green masala with a bit of homemade chicken stock and used this as the cooking medium for the chicken. I found it imparted a very rich flavor to the sauce–and besides–I was fresh out of coconut and coconut milk and really didn’t want to go out to the store. (Instead of stock, one could use chicken broth, or vegetable stock or even water, though water would be my last resort.)

At the end of cooking the chicken, to soften the sauce and enrich it, I stirred in about a heaping half cup of Greek yogurt–a very North Indian touch, which makes this Green Garlic Masala Curry is uniquely my own variation.

Finally, at the end, I stirred in some very finely minced cilantro leaves–and allowed them to cook for about three minutes in the sauce, and added salt to taste.

The results were very good, and I was pleased with them, but it wasn’t until I had a bit of the leftover curry two days later, reheated, that my socks got knocked off. After two days in the fridge, the flavors deepened and melted into each other, the individual fragrances and tastes becoming less distinct and pronounced, instead, weaving themselves into a complex symphony of gustatory goodness. The garlic was still quite present, but the fragrance was not unpleasantly bold, but instead, it joined the browned onions in giving an underlying sweetness to the curry, while the curry leaves, methi, cilantro and cardamom all danced together on the tongue, singing as a choir instead of several competing soloists vying for attention.

So, I am quite happy with the end result of all of my experimentation and work and will certainly make this as often as I can while green garlic is in season. After that, I will have to adapt the recipe to the lack of baby garlic in the marketplace.

Green Garlic Masala Chicken Curry
Ingredients:

2 tablespoons ghee or canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
the stems from 2 bunches of cilantro, chopped roughly (reserve the leaves)
15 very fresh curry leaves
2 heaping tablespoons dried methi leaves, soaked in warm water
1 dry bay leaf, soaked in warm water until lightly softened
7 stalks green garlic, white and green parts, roughly chopped into 1/2″ pieces
2″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
3-6 fresh green Thai chilies
2 cloves regular garlic
water as needed
3/4 inch piece of cinnamon stick
12-15 green cardamom pods
1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons coriander seeds
1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 cup chicken stock or broth
2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breasts and/or thighs, trimmed and cut into 1″ cubes
generous half cup of unflavored Greek yogurt (whole milk is best, but 2% works almost as well)
1/2 cup finely minced reserved cilantro leaves
salt to taste

Method:

Heat ghee or canola oil in a wide, heavy-bottomed deep skillet over medium heat. (Le Creuset cookware works wonderfully in curry making.) Add onions, sprinkle with salt, and cook, stirring until they are a deep golden color. While the onions are cooking, put the next nine ingredients (from cilantro stems to water as needed) into a wet-grinder or blender jar and blend into a thick, deep green paste. When the onions become the deep golden brown color I mentioned, add them to the masala paste and puree again.

In a dry skillet toast all the dry spices but the ground turmeric until they brown a bit and are fragrant. Grind into a powder with a spice grinder. Put the masala paste and the ground spices back into the pan the onions were cooked in (adding a tiny bit more ghee or oil if needed) and cook over medium heat again, stirring constantly until the color of the paste deepens and dulls somewhat from its brilliant green to a more yellow green, and the fragrance is amazing–about three to five minutes.

Deglaze the pan with the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium low so the sauce simmers and add the chicken, stirring until all the meat is covered. Cook until the chicken is just barely cooked through and amazingly tender–about ten minutes.

Stir in the yogurt and allow to simmer again, then stir in the cilantro leaves. Cook for three more minutes, then add salt to taste. Serve over steamed basmati rice.

Note: You could cook this curry up to three days ahead of time for a party or dinner and it will taste even better reheated than it did when you made it the first time. Just don’t add the yogurt and cilantro leaves until you have reheated the dish. THEN, add them and cook as directed above.