A Deeply Aromatic Curry for a Cold, Rainy Day

It's been raining a lot here. To be more precise, it's been raining almost every day since I got home to my parents' place last Tuesday evening.

Today was no exception - it poured the entire afternoon and the general weather was gloomy, grey, dreary, and cold.

Perfect weather for a mildly spicy warm curry.

In the spirit of Nigel Slater and his Luxurious and Deeply Aromatic Noodle Dish, I flipped through the Kitchen Diaries for a little inspiration, and rustled up this mild, creamy curry with a slight touch of heat (as per requested by my mother, who didn't want it too spicy this time) and a beautiful fragrance from the use of lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves and curry leaves.






A Deeply Aromatic Curry for a Cold Rainy Day
Adapted from Nigel Slater’s Luxurious and Deeply Aromatic and Soup

Spice paste:
2 thick slices ginger, or a small knob of it
Half a small onion, sliced
1 stick lemon grass, sliced thinly
A small handful parsley or coriander (Coriander would be more correct for this sort of Southeast Asian-influenced curry, but I only had parsley on hand)

Curry ingredients:
Half a medium head of cabbage, cut into bite-size wedges
3 potatoes
2 carrots
2 tomatoes, one diced, one sliced (or you can dice them all if you want, I just wanted a bit more colour and texture hence the slices)
2 large mushroom stems (or half a pack of any other mushrooms you like)
1 pack fishballs (optional)
2 tsp (or more) curry paste
2 tsp Seville orange marmalade
1 tbs cooking oil
Handful curry leaves
2 kaffir lime leaves, julienned finely
1 kaffir lime, or 1 small ordinary lime
1 ½ cups milk (you can also use coconut milk, but my mother can’t take it, so milk it was)
Salt to taste

Serves: 2 with leftovers, and could probably be a meal for 4


Preparing the spice paste:

In a mortar, pound the ginger, onion, lemon grass and parsley together till pulverised and fragrant. Set aside.




Preparing the curry:

Over a medium flame, heat the cooking oil in a large pot. Throw in the spice paste and stir it around until fragrant and small bits of onion are slightly brown, but don’t let it burn. Add in 1 tsp of curry paste and fry, stirring constantly, for about 30 seconds. Toss in the curry leaves, stir for about a minute with the spice paste, then add the julienned kaffir lime leaves and stir for another minute more.

Add in the diced tomato and stir-fry til the tomatoes are soft and somewhat mushy-looking. Add in the carrots and potatoes and stir well to combine. In about five minutes, when the potatoes and carrots are slightly cooked through, add the cabbage and cook, stirring constantly around, till the cabbage begins to wilt and become translucent. Add the sliced tomato and stir again for about a minute.

Pour in the milk, stir vegetables to combine, add the remaining 1 teaspoon spice paste and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer, cover, and let the entire thing simmer for about 15 minutes. Uncover, add the sliced mushrooms and fishballs, and squeeze the lime juice into the pot. Stir to combine, and simmer for another 10-15 minutes, this time with the lid half-off. The gravy will thicken up later, so don’t worry if it looks watery now.

Add in the marmalade (it sounds strange, I know, but trust me – it added just that little bit of tangy kick I was looking for.) Stir through to combine, and taste for seasoning. You’ll probably need a bit of salt to counteract the sweetness of the milk, but you won’t need too much. If you want to add more spice paste to bring up the heat, by all means – I wanted a mild curry with just a hint of chillies, so I used far less than usual.

Simmer for 10 minutes, turn off the heat and let sit for another 5-10 minutes so the flavours can blend and marry. By now the gravy should have thickened, so it will look more like a curry, and less like a soup.

Serve hot with rice.

Tofu Batons and Pea Shoots

I've mentioned Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid in a previous post. I love this book. Not only does it give some wonderful insights into the less-commonly known ethnicities of China, but a great many of the recipes are inherently gluten-free and require little to no modification at all.

There were a few recipes I'd been itching to try since getting hold of the book. The Tofu Batons with Hot Sesame Dressing was one of them. It looked easy and as it turned out, it -was- easy to put together but I ran into problems with overly soggy tofu batons as per following the recipe's instructions to put them into boiling water, submerge, and cover for 30 minutes. A lot of it turned into mush, not all of which could be dried out even with a good hot frying in the wok.

I was skeptical of taste, given the dressing was rather mouth-puckeringly sour when I put it together. Once it was poured over the tofu batons however, the combination mellowed out the sharpness into something amazingly comforting and smooth. Fantastic. I'd definitely make this again, but I think I'll be soaking the batons in cold water for 30 minutes instead of boiling them. It should help with the sogginess problem.

The other recipe that I'd been dying to try out was the Pea Tendril salad, except pea tendrils proved remarkably elusive. It wasn't until yesterday that I got hold of 2 packs of pea shoots (the recipe wanted the tougher pea tendrils, but I'd only seen those in a vegetable shop near my workplace - and that was 2 hours and 2 buses to get to, so I just went with pea shoots instead.) Given this is me, I accidentally changed the recipe through misreading the instructions, of course. The recipe called for frying the shallots till they were pale to medium brown; I just fried them till they were translucent and soft. Then again, I never really liked crispy shallots, so I think I liked the end product a lot better.

This is a tart, salty salad with very sharp, clean flavours. I thought it might be too tart for my liking, but I was surprised to find that it was pretty addictive - I kept going back for seconds and thirds till I finished half the plate all on my own. Yep, definitely another keeper.




Tofu Batons with Hot Sesame Dressing
from Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Serves: 4

3 ounces tofu sticks (4-6 sticks)
1 tbls peanut oil
1 tsp roasted sesame oil
1/2 tsp chile pepper flakes, or to taste
1 tbls rice vinegar, or to taste
2 tbls gluten-free soy sauce, or to taste
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup coriander leaves

Bring 2 inches of water to boil in a medium pot. Add the tofu sticks, breaking them if necessary to make them fit, and use a wooden spoon to push them under the surface of the water. Turn off the heat. Weight down the sticks with a plate that fits inside the pot to keep them submerged. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.

Remove the plate and drain the tofu well. Cut the sticks into 2-inch lengths, trimming off and discarding any tough bits. Cut the sticks lengthwise into half or into quarters, to make narrow batons. Set aside.

Heat a wok or wide heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the peanut oil and sesame oil. When the oil is hot, add the chile flakes and tofu batons, and stir-fry for 2 minutes, stirring and pressing on the batons to expose them to the hot surface of the pan.

In a small bowl, combine the vinegar, gluten-free soy sauce, and sugar, and whisk well, then pour over the tofu batons. Stir-fry briefly to distribute the flavours, then bring the liquid to a boil Immediately lower the heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer for 5 minutes.

Turn out into a wide shallow bowl. Taste and add a little more gluten-free soy sauce or vinegar if you wish. Sprinkle on the coriander leaves and serve warm, or at room temperature.

Note:
Next time I'd soak the tofu batons in cold water and just leave them to sit for 30 minutes instead. Less soggy that way. Also, I didn't have coriander so I used sliced green onions, and it tasted just fine. No chile flakes either, all I had was Japanese red pepper, so I used that.




Pea Shoot Salad
Adapted from Pea Tendril Salad in Beyond the Great Wall by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Serves: 4 as a salad or side dish

1 lb pea shoots

Dressing:
2 tbls rice vinegar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp roasted sesame oil
2 tbls peanut oil or vegetable oil
3 thinly sliced shallots

Wash the pea shoots well, drain, and set aside.

Place the vinegar, the 1 tsp salt and the sesame oil in a small cup and stir well; set aside.

In a large pot, bring 3 quarts salted water to a boil. Toss in the pea shoots and stir to immerse them in the water. Cook for 3 minutes, or until just tender to the bite - because pea shoots vary considerably in terms of toughness, the cooking time may vary a little. Drain thoroughly in a colander and refresh briefly under cold water, then drain and press out excess water. If the pea shoots are very long, cut them into about 1 inch lengths so that they will be easier to eat. I didn't bother, with mine. Press out the excess liquid again.

Place the pea shoots on a wide serving plate. Stir the sesame oil dressing again, pour it over the shoots, and toss gently to coat.

Place a wok or heavy skillet over high heat. When it is hot, add the peanut or vegetable oil and swirl gently, then add the sliced shallows, lower the heat to medium-high and fry until the shallots are translucent and soft. Use chopsticks or cooking spatula to keep the shallots moving so they don't burn. Take the pan off the heat and pour the oil and shallots over the pea shoots. Add a dash of cayenne pepper to taste.

Toss the shallots, pepper and pea shoots well, then serve.

Note:
I misread the directions and wound up tossing all the oils together for the dressing, rather than saving the peanut oil for the shallots later. This resulted in me having to add about half a tablespoon extra oil into the frying pan. It was perhaps a bit greasier, end result, but still just as good. The original called for frying the shallots till pale or medium brown, but I don't like them that way so much. This way, I think they're sweeter and still maintain their lovely purple colour.

Kitchen Sink Style: Cauliflower Pasta and Pudding Cakes

I am not an intuitive baker, at least not since my diagnosis. By that I mean I don't quite have some people's knack of putting together various gluten-free flours to give a certain characteristic to a certain sort of baked goods - I suspect this comes with practice in the kitchen and a lot of reading up on each of the flours (tapioca, sorghum, millet, buckwheat etc.) and what characteristics they have as individual flours, before I can throw them together with any sort of abandon.

Funnily enough, the opposite is true for my cooking. Give me a set of flavours or tell me what you want in a dish and I can pretty much put it together in my head and figure something out. Granted, it took a while before I stopped just throwing stuff together and began finally analyzing ingredients and flavours properly whenever I combined them into some dish or other.

So there's probably a touch of lurking amusement in the fact that I decided to cook two things on the same day that showcased these two opposite sides of the pole.

I've been wanting to make Aran's pear, hazelnut and brown butter cakelets for a while now since reading her glorious recipe. Since I had an entire afternoon free, I decided why not, put together all the ingredients, and went ahead.

I realised belatedly into the flour-combining process that I'd inexplicably misplaced my cinnamon. Three rounds of searching didn't turn it up so I did the next best thing - I yanked out my trusty mortar, half a cinnamon stick and pounded away. I managed to get the required teaspoon of ground cinnamon out of that (yes, that's the mortar and half-ground cinnamon stick up there in the photo.)

From there on everything went nicely - until I had to strain the melted brown butter as the recipe called for. I had a strainer, a cheap plastic affair that's lasted me about 3 years and probably would have lasted a few more years of careful usage. The operative word in that sentence is 'had'. Because when I poured the hot butter into the strainer, it promptly melted the plastic netting and I only just got the wretched thing into the sink before it decided to melt into the butter proper.

Now if I'd been a proper baker and all, I'd have remembered that hot oil melts plastic and hot butter is hot oil.

But the butter was saved, that's the important thing, because I didn't have any more in the fridge and that'd have been a total waste of good butter if I'd had to throw it away due to my own high-class stupidity.

Making the brown butter left me with a saucepan bottom full of brown milk solids, and when it had cooled enough for me to poke a finger into them, I realised they were quite salty. I didn't quite want to throw them away though.

So I decided to save them. And use them for Sicilian cauliflower pasta afterwards.

(It's all part of what I call a Victorian Kitchen Sink mentality, in honour of Agatha Christie's Jane Marple. She saw the mind as a kitchen sink - you throw everything into it whether it's tasteful or not, and it's an utterly necessary piece of equipment. In my twisted culinary world, that means I throw into my cooking anything I have on hand - just like putting everything into a sink. Improvisation is usually indicated.)

The logic behind this rather incredibly fattening idea was that the salty browned milk solids would take the place of the anchovies I'd seen in the recipes for Sicilian cauliflower pasta that I'd looked up before. The version I knew was one I'd been using since college days that didn't include anchovies at all, and which I couldn't find any more (given it's been about ten-odd years since I printed that recipe, it might well have gone the way of obsolete web pages.)

But back to the cakes.

By the time I'd mixed up the ingredients (having substituted honey for maple syrup since I didn't have any at hand), I'd begun to have a feeling that perhaps the batter needed to be just a tad more moist as the consistency was now rather muffin-like and thick. I divided the batter into muffin tins anyway, and realised I still had enough for another twelve cakes - so I added a little water to the remaining batter to moisten it up. Call it an experiment.



Well. The first batch came out moist and rather puddingy, and required about ten minutes more baking time. Since I hadn't smoothed down the tops of these muffins, they were about as lumpy as a boulder-strewn highway since they didn't settle as I thought they might.

Batch two got its tops smoothed down properly, rose beautifully and...came out exactly like pudding - nice outside, very soft and mushy insides. It probably required a bit more baking, but because I was hot and lazy, I left them to cool anyway. They tasted fantastic and were still more than passably edible so I'll just consider them pudding-cakes for now and eat less of them since they're rather filling.

Once baking was done, I got started on the cauliflower pasta - boiling the cauliflower till soft, boiling the pasta in the cauliflower water, frying up the cauliflower with garlic and chopped Chinese chives till slightly brown.

The original recipe called for onions. I hate chopping onions because they make me cry, and I had a few too many stalks of Chinese chives at hand - and those taste a lot like onions anyway, so I used 'em in typical kitchen sink style and put in the brown butter solids when the time was right. To be honest, I have no idea whether or not that had any effect on the taste of the cauliflower because I still wound up having to add salt anyway. It did use the butter solids up rather than wasting them though.

The dish tasted rather plain when I finished with it. Not quite like I'd remembered. And then I recalled reading somewhere (it might very well have been Frances Mayes, I'm not sure any more) that a slight drizzle of olive oil over warm food would improve the taste, so I went ahead and did that.

Just that bit of olive oil transformed the entire dish of pasta into something absolutely incredible. It blended all the flavours together into something subtly fragrant and creamy, and utterly addictive - just how I remembered it from college, and just what I needed to round off the day.



Victorian Sink Style Sicilian Cauliflower Pasta
Adapted from a basic Sicilian Cauliflower Pasta recipe that I can’t find anymore

Servings: 2 people, or 1 small eater who'll have lots of leftovers

1 head cauliflower
4-5 cloves garlic, smashed
2-3 stalks finely sliced green onions or Chinese chives
Uncooked gluten-free pasta (spaghetti, vermicelli, rotelle or fusili work fine)
Brown butter solids (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil

Preparing the cauliflower and pasta:

Cut the cauliflower into quarters or fifths – whatever fits a medium-size, heavy saucepan nicely. Barely cover with water – you want to have most of the florets submerged if you can, but just a few bits poking out here and there are fine. Bring to boil, and keep boiling half-covered for however long it takes for the cauliflower to become soft enough to be detached easily with a fork.

Using a slotted spoon, drain the cauliflower well and set it aside. You want to save the water that the cauliflower was boiled in; you’ll use this to cook your pasta.

Top up the cauliflower water, as there’s going to be a lot less in there than when you started. Bring to boil, salt the water well, and put in the pasta. Cook until al dente. Drain the pasta and set aside.

Cooking the cauliflower:

In a medium or large non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat, drizzle about a teaspoon of olive oil to heat for about 30 seconds. Throw in the garlic and fry until the bottoms of the garlic are just a little brown, not completely browned through. Add in the green onions or Chinese chives and fry for about a minute or until soft. Add in the drained cauliflower and mash with cooking spatula as it cooks; it will brown a bit and that’s what you want. If you have brown butter solids, add them in now and stir to combine with the cauliflower. Add salt and pepper to taste – make sure you add sufficient salt or the cauliflower will be very bland.

Fry for a while more until the cauliflower takes on a slightly brownish colour. Turn off the fire and add the cooked pasta, combining it well with the cauliflower mash. Add a further drizzle of olive oil and stir into the cauliflower-pasta mix – this is the step that makes all the difference in the final taste of the pasta.

Serve immediately.

Simmered Burdock and Lotus Root

There's nothing like bland comfort food after one has been immensely ill from being badly glutened.

Now don't get me wrong. I love spices and strong flavours. Heck, I live in a country where bold cooking and pungent spices are the norm for meals. But there are times - like today - when all my system wants is something warm and soothing rather than fiery stimulation.

Lo and behold, in a beautiful display of serendipity, Shauna of Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef posted a wonderfully simple recipe for coconut brown rice. Not only that, I even had all the ingredients necessary except for coconut milk, which I could get by just walking downstairs to the little convenience store in the apartment complex. No argument about it, that was my dinner all set and planned.

I wanted something else to go with the coconut rice though - something that would complement the flavours, not overpower it. Since I had a length of burdock that's been sitting on top of my oven for umpteen weeks (burdock keeps incredibly well, as I know from personal experience), I decided to make simmered burdock and lotus root for an accompanying dish.

I never cease to marvel at how beautiful lotus root is when I slice it up. All those lacy holes like some couture piece of jewellery! Can you wonder that lotus flowers are so beautiful when they have roots like this?



I put the rice on to boil in my rice cooker, and got the vegetables prepared. Just the smell of all the cooking made me smile.

And when everything was done, the flavours of the rice and the vegetables went together so beautifully, they could have been made for each other.

Serendipity. There's nothing quite like it.




Simmered Burdock and Lotus Root

1 length of young lotus root
1 length of burdock (if it’s a large one, even a quarter of a burdock root will do)
1 pack instant dashi powder
1-2 tsp cooking oil
Water
1-2 tsp mirin (Japanese sweet cooking wine)

Preparing the vegetables:
Wash and scrape the brown skin off the lotus root – you may use either a knife for this, or a vegetable peeler. Slice into thin rounds cross-wise. Set aside.

Prepare a big bowl of water. Wash and scrape the burdock. I’ve found the back of a knife very handy for this, as the skin is thinner than that of the lotus root. Sliver the burdock like you would sharpen a pencil with a pen knife – into thin, long shavings. As you sliver, drop the burdock into the bowl of water. This helps prevent discolouration, as burdock tends to oxidize very fast when exposed to air. Keep the burdock soaked until you are about to use it.

Cooking the dish:
Drain the burdock well in a colander.

In a heavy medium saucepan, heat the cooking oil until drops of water flicked into the pan fizzle and pop sharply. Toss in the burdock and fry it, stirring constantly, for around 2-3 minutes, or until it changes colour and begins looking less opaque. Add in the lotus root and fry for another 1-2 minutes, stirring the entire time. The starch content in the lotus root may cause it to stick to the pot, but don’t worry, the next step will take care of that.

Pour the packet of dashi powder into the saucepan, and add the water. Stir to combine with the vegetables. Eyeball the water a bit; you don’t want to have too much, but you don’t want to have too little either. The water shouldn’t cover the vegetables; maybe about ¾ way up is enough. Add the mirin and stir.

Bring the saucepan to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cover the pot. Let the whole thing simmer for about 15-20 minutes to give the burdock time to soften.

When the burdock is soft, turn off heat and serve hot with rice.

Notes:
You can use any cooking oil – I sometimes use sesame oil when I have it to give added fragrance to the dish. I sometimes also julienne a bit of carrot to add to the dish to give it some colour – if you do use carrot, add it when you put the lotus root in to fry.

For Shauna's rice, I halved the recipe as there's just one of me in the house and in this tropical weather, coconut milk in food spoils quite easily. I didn't have coconut oil so I used sesame oil instead. As an extra bit of flavour, I sliced up one kaffir lime leaf into thin shreds and added it to cook with the rice.