Another Everyday Quick Curry: Safaid Keema Mattar

Keema is ground meat–most often it refers to lamb, but it can also mean chicken or beef. I like to make this particular North Indian recipe with lamb, although I am certain it would taste good with ground beef or chicken. Unlike keema sookh, which is ground meat cooked in spices with vegetables without a sauce–safaid keema has a dairy-based creamy pale curry sauce that is primarily made from milk and yogurt. It is really good with lots of rice or bread to soak up the delicious, delicately flavored sauce.

Along with the ground lamb, this curry features tender new potatoes and sweet peas. I use frozen peas in the curry for their convenience, but if you want, you can certainly use fresh baby peas in it–making an Indian variation on creamed new potatoes and peas. If you have mint, use that as a garnish, but if not, the cilantro I used here is quite delicious and adds just the right note of freshness to the curry.

The milk in this recipe can be either whole milk or two percent; I am not sure skim would make a very tasty sauce. The yogurt I used is Greek-style–which is thicker and creamier with a nicer tangy flavor than regular yogurt. It is made with a different strain of lactobacillus, than most American yogurts, so it has, I think, a richer, tangier flavor that I prefer. When you use Greek yogurt, since it is strained, you don’t have to reduce the sauce as much, since the excess liquid is already removed from the yogurt.

You can use either whole milk yogurt or two percent–I used whole milk and prefer it. Also, if you cannot get Greek yogurt, you can strain your regular yogurt overnight in cheesecloth to remove the excess liquid and thus, when you cook with it, you will not have to simmer it as long to reduce it.

This is a quick and simple curry recipe that is ideal for dinner after work–the one thing that takes the longest is parboiling the potatoes. I start them at the same time as I start the rice in the rice cooker, and by the time the curry is ready for the potatoes to be added, the potatoes are ready for the job.

I like this served over rice to soak up the sauce, but Zak likes to dip bread into it–so you can serve it either way, or with both basmati rice and naan, if you like.

Leftovers taste even better when reheated the next day, as is often the case with Indian foods.

Safaid Keema Mattar
Ingredients:

10 fingerling potatoes or other type of new potatoes, scrubbed and quartered
2 tablespoons ghee or canola oil
1 1/2 cups onions, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
5 cloves fresh garlic, sliced
1″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
1 1/2 tablespoons coriander seeds
12 green cardamom pods
4 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
1 or 2 fresh Thai chilies (optional–if you want the curry to be completely mild, leave these out)
1 pound ground lamb
1 1/2 cups whole or 2% milk
10 ounce package frozen peas
2 cups whole or 2% Greek yogurt
salt to taste
1 cup roughly chopped cilantro leaves (or 1/2 cup roughly chopped mint leaves)
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper flakes for garnish

Method:

Put potatoes into small saucepan, cover with lightly salted water, and bring to a boil. Turn down to a fast simmer, and cook until fork tender–then drain. If you are careful with how fast the simmer goes, you can have the potatoes done in exactly the amount of time it takes to get to where they go into the curry. If not, you can drain them and let them sit in the colander until you need them.

Heat the ghee or oil in a heavy-bottomed, deep skillet. Add onions and sprinkle with salt and cook, stirring, until they are dark golden brown.

While the onions cool, grind together the garlic, ginger and the spices up to and including the turmeric. Grind into a paste.

When the onions are the dark golden brown, add the spice paste mixture and cook, stirring until fragrant–about two minutes.

Add the lamb to the pan, and the milk. Break up the lamb with a wooden spoon, and cook, stirring, until the meat stops being pink. Add the peas, cooked potatoes and the yogurt, and cook, stirring, until the peas are thawed and cooked lightly, and the sauce thickens slightly. Add salt to taste, stir in the cilantro or mint leaves and serve over steamed basmati or in a bowl with naan or chapati on the side.

Sprinkle with Aleppo pepper flakes for a garnish.

Food In The News: Is Organic Cane Sugar a Health Food And Other Burning Questions

Since When Is Cane Sugar A Health Food? Zak sent me a link to an extremely interesting NY Times article where I learned that since consumers have decided that high fructose corn syrup is the devil that has caused rampant obesity in the United States (and yes, it may be -one- factor among -many- involved in the obesity problem–but by no means should anyone believe it is the sole cause), cane sugar is being used as an ingredient in many processed foods, and this fact is being used as a marketing tool.

Which is fine–there are people who want to avoid HFCS, and that is great, so labeling the absence of it and the presence of cane sugar is fine. However, calling cane sugar a “healthy alternative” to HFCS is stretching the truth just a wee bit.

Oh, hell, let’s just say it is patent bull crap. Sugar is still not good for you in large quantities, no matter whether it comes from sugar cane, beets or corn. Cane sugar may be more cleanly metabolized by our bodies, but it is still sugar, and frankly, I don’t think it needs to be in every brand of spaghetti sauce, salad dressing and bread in copious amounts on the grocery store shelf.

Mark Bittman Says: Eat Better Food, Don’t Worry About Organic I like Mark Bittman. Even when I disagree with him, I like him–he just has such a sensible, no-nonsense way of putting his opinions that I respect and enjoy. In his recent article in the NY Times, Eating Food That’s Better For You, Organic Or Not, he points out that he would rather see Americans eating more conventionally or organically grown fruits and vegetables and other whole, minimally processed foods than have them get the idea that an organic Oreo cookie is somehow healthier than a regular Oreo cookie.

And that is a point that I have found over and over in talking with people who are not in my immediate circle of friends. A lot of people in this country have the idea that the USDA Organic label on a package of cookies, crackers or cereal instantly imbues that particular food with immediate healthy to eat status, which is just not true. “Organic” does not necessarily equate with “healthy,” “sustainable,” or “local,” when it comes to food. All it means is that the food is grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, that it has not been treated with sewage sludge and that it has been processed with minimal artificial ingredients and chemicals. That’s it.

As Bittman points out, it can be organically grown in China, then shipped to the United States, which is still not very sustainable. And as he quotes author and nutritionist Marion Nestle, “Organic junk food is still junk food.”

So, as he says, let’s all get off our duffs and eat more vegetables and fruits and leave the organic Oreos to themselves.

Will The Food Revolution Be Televised? If you get the reference to the subhead for this bit, you get a cookie, because you win extra points for obscure cultural awareness. Zak, you don’t count, because I know you know what I am talking about.

Once again, we come to a NY Times article, Is a Food Revolution Now In Season? to see that all of those foodie activists and authors I have been reading and writing about for years: Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Marion Nestle, thrilled to finally have their voices heard by the new presidential administration. So thrilled in fact, that they are pushing their agenda for a better, healthier food system for the United States, that they are heading to Washington, writing letters, meeting with Tom Vilsack, our new Secretary of Agriculture, and First Lady Michelle Obama, armed with copies of the film, Food, Inc.

Of course, the change these activists want will not come as fast as they want, but it appears that even among farm-state Senators, copies of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma are being seen tucked in briefcases and under arms.

That leads me to think that change is coming–faster than I expected, but still slowly.

And that is fine–as any ecologist or gardener will tell you, slow, steady change is the way natural systems work.

Fast change is what is likely to be unsustainable and not stick. Slow change is the way to work toward long-term goals.

Morganna’s Quilt II–The Finished Photos

I promised that I would take some photos of Morganna’s quilt after she came home for Spring Break, so here they are.

This one shows the overall effect, including the backing fabric, which is another batik that has nearly all of the colors of the quilt included in it, except for the black, indigo, clear blue and clear purples. But it looks great with the other fabrics, as you can see.

The thread we chose is multi-colored so in some parts of the quilt, it shows up readily, while in others, it fades into the background, so the quilting is either obvious or subtle, depending on what part of the quilt you are looking at. From the back, it is very subtle.

Here are close-ups so you can see the funky continual line quilting that Susan and I came up with for her to do. Lots of swirlies and spirals and waves with leaves and flowers worked into the design.

These designs thematically echo the flowery, swirly, spirally designs of the various batiks on the quilt top.

As much as I love Susan’s quilting, I want to do more of my own quilting work, because when I free motion on smaller projects, I can do some really pretty stuff. But on large quilts, I am not there yet.

That is, not yet.

My dear friend Amy, who is living between two homes, one here in Athens and one in Stow, Ohio. Once she finishes her PhD in Geography at Kent State, she will be moving back here, but until then, her quilting frame is going to have to be put into storage.

Well, she had me come to her place and give it a go–and she is not kidding–quilting on it is just like drawing. Even without a stitch regulator to keep the stitch length perfectly even, the thing is the next best thing to a long-arm machine. I think that after a couple of evenings’ practice, I should be able to quilt beautiful free-motion continual line-designs.

And bless her, she offered to let me baby sit it for her while she moves–rather than put it all into storage.

So, needless to say, I am cleaning out a place to put it–it is a large bit of equipment–so I can maybe quilt the baby quilt I am making for a new cousin–Claire Marie–all on my own!

Weekend Kat Blogging: Speech Delay and Fish Oil Supplements

I have wonderful news: last night, at about two in the morning after Kat woke up from a bad dream, and insisted she was hungry (she wakes up hungry in the middle of the night during a growth spurt), we brought her downstairs to make her a scrambled egg.

She saw her big sister, Morganna, who was still up after a night shift at the restaurant, and squealed with delight, ran to her and hugged her tightly, insisting that Morganna hold her. She ate her snack on Morganna’s lap, and then the two of them started to play.

Since neither of them had seen each other much for the past couple of months (Morganna is on spring break from OU), I figured, to heck with bedtime and let them go. While they were galumphing, chasing and tickling, Kat said Morganna’s name, perfectly and clearly, not once, but three times in all of our hearing, much to everyone’s absolute delight.

I even got a little choked up, because Kat has had a hard time with expressive speech. Her receptive speech has always been perfectly fine–she has always understood us, at even a more advanced level than is normal, but she could hardly make any words and would get stuck on one-syllable sounds that stood in for every other word she couldn’t say. She relied on gesture and signs to get her meaning across, and we all had to essentially develop psychic skills to converse with her.

Well, we took her to a really great speech therapist here in town, Kim Hale, and she said that it had to do with Kat’s facial muscle development, which is tied in to her premature birth, and is tied up with her learning to walk so much slower than normal. She couldn’t feel how the shape of her mouth needed to be for the sounds to be produced, so she had trouble making sounds. Kim showed us how to manipulate Kat’s face to help her make proper sounds, and eventually, Kat would do the little manipulations with her own hand to help her mouth move correctly and she started talking, right away.

At this point, she doesn’t even need to do that, and while she is still going to speech therapy, she is on track again, and is picking up words–even complex ones like Morganna’s name, like they were pebbles on the beach. And she is so much happier–as are we.

We were pretty worried about it.

One thing that we also did, is on the advice of her pediatrician, we started supplementing her diet with Nordic Naturals fish oil, which is full of Omega-3 fatty acids. Dr. Wapner said that he likes all of his patients to have it, but he especially wanted her to have it because it can help kids who have speech delays, including kids with Oral Apraxia or Vocal Apraxia.

None of the speech therapists Kat has gone to have thought that she had verbal apraxia, but her expressive speech patterns were similar to kids with this neurological disorder. And as we read the book, The Later Talker: What To Do If Your Child Is Not Talking Yet, by Marilyn Agin MD, Lisa Geng, and Malcolm J. Nicholl, which admittedly does deal primarily with verbal apraxia, we came across some preliminary studies which indicate that fish oil supplements do indeed seem to help kids, often dramatically, with their expressive speech delays.

So, I took it upon myself, upon the advice from Kat’s pediatrician and the advice of the pediatrician who wrote the aforementioned book, to give Kat fish oil supplements. I chose Nordic Naturals, because Dr. Wapner assured me that it didn’t taste bad, and when I brought it home and tried it, he was correct. It was quite refined, and the addition of orange essential oil for flavoring rendered it quite palatable. And, when stirred into Kat’s orange juice–it was nearly undetectable.

I want to say this–even though this is purely anecdotal, and I am certainly not a pediatrician, so am not giving medical advice–within a week of taking daily doses of the fish oil–Kat’s speech improved dramatically. Part of it was getting her to a good therapist who helped show us how to model sounds with Kat by molding her mouth while she spoke, but I am pretty sure that the fatty acids in the fish had something to do with it.

One theory, as stated in The Late Talker, is that kids who don’t have a lot of Omega 3’s naturally in their diets do not produce as much myelin, which is the sheath to neurons and that promote connections in the corpus collosum, which is the membrane between the two hemispheres of the brain. (I am simplifying here, so bear with me.) The myelin sheath also promotes electrical conductivity in the neurons, and is made primarily of fatty acids including the Omega 3 fatty acids. It is thought that deficiency in these Omega 3’s can slow brain development including in areas that involve speech production.

So, that is the deal.

Kat is finally speaking, and in addition to being able to thank great speech therapists, and having Mom home full time along with Dad, I think we can also thank fish oil supplements.

I just wish we lived where there was abundant, fresh, safe to eat fish!

The Foodie-in-Chief and The First Locavore?

These are my new titles for our President and First Lady, and I think they are probably apropos, in addition to being cute.

I find it fascinating how everyone wants to know everything about the Obamas–what they wear, where they send their kids to school, and what they eat, all being included in the exuberant public curiosity that follows their every move. I can understand some of it–after eight years of having a pretty uncharismatic First Family for Americans to look at, the Obamas are most certainly a breath of fresh air. They are a beautiful, young, and friendly couple with two really adorable kids, and of course, they came into office on a wave of hope and promise for a new way of doing things in America.

So is isn’t really surprising that people are focusing on what foods the First Family likes to eat. And, all of the media interest makes sense, because as the many new designs of sleeveless fashion can show us, the Obamas are now role models whom Americans seem ready to embrace and emulate.

When it comes to food, the Obamas seem to have come in favor of home gardening, local food, and sustainable agriculture.

How do I know this?

They are breaking ground today on the first full-fledged large kitchen garden on the White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden during WWII. Local food activists, including Alice Waters, who have been working for decades to get a kitchen garden on the lawn of the White House for years are ecstatic.

As a symbolic act, planting a kitchen garden is a potent one. It harkens back to America’s agrarian roots. It ties in to First Lady Michelle Obama’s call for Americans to eat more fresh, nutritious food, and her commitment towards making such food more available to the masses. It shows that when it comes to her support of community gardening, and edible schoolyard initiatives, Ms. Obama is willing to put her money where her mouth is: apparently, she and the rest of the family will work in the garden along with some lucky kids from Bancroft Elementary School, who are helping to break ground today.

I have to say I am thrilled to see this strong symbolic support from the First Family in areas of local, sustainable food production and food self-sufficiency and security for our nation’s citizens.

As far as I am concerned, it is a breath of fresh air that has been a long time in coming, and I welcome the idea of a president and his family who are willing to get down and get dirty and help produce the food for their own table–just like many other Americans are doing.

Maybe many more Americans will try it, inspired by the Obama’s example.

And whatever gets Americans back into the soil, back into the land that sustains them, gives me hope for our future.