white bean asparagus gratin with saffron

It's late October, and I'm casserole-ing like an aproned housewife. Minus, of course, the large quantities of cream of mushroom soup that so defined my childhood. Ew.

Dinners on Walnut Street pose a special, satisfying challenge. I'm a vegetarian, she's iffy on cheese. I need protein, she hates tofu. I will cook meat as long as I don't have to cut it, look at it or smell it.

So we eat a lot of vegetables.

I am a goddess of stir fries. I have sauteed so many vegetables with so much garlic. My cast iron wok is old and tired. I boil white rice, black rice, green rice, short grain, long grain, couscous, quinoa, freekeh, wheat berries, kasha, farrow. There are infinite combinations of grains and greens, and they are all somewhat boring.

I crave interesting and well-rounded dishes that can stand alone, because lord knows I don't have time for side dishes (when you're a vegetarian, everything is a side dish!). In the summer, I love grain and bean salads, but crunchy red onions are incongruous with these blustery evenings. I want something warm, oozing and piled high with woodsy carbohydrates. The combination of honeyed wheat bread, ricotta cheese and saffron made this casserole subtly sweet and spicy, indulgent, but no surprises.

Recipes that fill my apartment with the smell of earth and buttered bread are in high demand this season. Fall 2009 has been one of startling and disturbing surprises, where the universe has taken my need for measured, gradual transition and blown big, spity raspberries all over it. Amid the sudden change of weather, the sudden death of my grandfather, a sudden car accident and a host of other "suddens", I am finding my self gratefully reminded that my various frets and frowns are largely useless given the frailty of life, and through it all, I'm desperately craving casseroles.

I'm not sure if gratin is truly a casserole, but I'm calling it that because I feel like gratin deserves to be served in something that is flawless, elegant and porcelain, and not my mom's ancient pyrex pan flecked with baked-on remnants of lasagna. This dish was cooked and served in the latter, and is, as such, a casserole.

white bean asparagus gratin with saffron

1 onion, chopped
1 bunch asparagus, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 cups canned or cooked white beans (of your choice)
2 cloves garlic, mashed
several threads saffron
several dollops ricotta cheese
salt and pepper
4 slices honey wheat bread
butter
olive oil

Preheat oven to 350. Soak saffron in hot water for 20-30 minutes. Saute half of the chopped onion and garlic in olive oil until tender. Add in chopped asparagus, and season with salt and pepper. Stir in beans and set aside. Toast 4 slices of bread and crumble in to bread crumbs. Saute the other half of the onion in a good amount of butter, then add bread crumbs. Place bean and asparagus mixture in a buttered baking dish and top with soaked saffron threads. Nestle small amounts of ricotta in the mixture and top with bread crumbs. Bake for 15 minutes, or until bread is brown and crusty.

sweet potato wraps

One might term this dish "weeknight" dosa.

One might think of flour tortillas as dosa's fat, balding cousin.















Subbing tortillas for the delicate, lacy crepes of which dosa are traditionally made is, without a doubt, cheating. I happen to know, however, that a similar shortcut is practiced by a certain Indian restaurant that sells fantastic samosas to my dad's store, which, on cold market Saturdays, are snatched off the shelves by noon. Customers clamor for the pockets of potatoes and curried peas, the deep fried tortilla crusts go unnoticed, if not adored.

Somehow, knowing this secret makes me feel less dirty.

Tortillas brushed with a cumin-infused roux will hardly offer the crisp crack of an authentic dosa. The tortillas were a little gummy, and lacking that satisfying give a properly browned crepe offers. But having neither fermented rice flour, nor any real knowledge of South Indian cooking, these wraps were a hearty, tasty weeknight substitute for a meal normally reserved for special occasions. [Like Christmas 2008. My dad doesn't know a christmas turkey from a christmas tagine, and so we ate rice cakes at Udupi Cafe in Cincinnati with the Indians and Jews on December 25th of last year].

Provided that you can stomach a little cultural inauthenticity, these wraps are complex, flavorful and fast.

masala sweet potato wraps

1 large sweet potato, cubed
2 large leeks
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp. ginger
turmeric
mustard seeds, toasted
2 tortillas
a small bowl of water combined with 2 tbsp of flour, a bit of cumin, tumeric and mustard seeds, mixed to a thin paste

Parboil sweet potatoes for 5-7 minutes, or until tender. Heat oil in a pan, saute garlic and ginger, and when garlic sizzles, add leeks. Add in cooked sweet potatoes, and top with turmeric and mustard seeds. Set aside.

Brush tortillas with paste. Heat a large skillet with a good amount of oil until sizzles when a drop of water is added. Fry tortillas until they are browned on both sides. Spread with coconut chutney and add sweet potato filling.

lazy american coconut chutney

2 tbsp grated coconut, chopped fine
1 tbsp coconut milk
1 tsp mustard seeds, toasted and popped
dash curry powder
dash red pepper flakes
bit of salt

mix ingredients together until they are a thick paste, and spread on dosas before adding filling.

Cakey Plum Cobbler

This one is for my mom.

The running joke in my family is that my mother is a less-than-stellar cook because she recklessly substitutes ingredients in what are otherwise recipes followed with precision and care. Writing this now, I can't actually recall a specific instance when this wanton replacing took place, proof positive that if you ever make a mistake in my family, you can expect it to follow you around for the rest of your natural life. One time, one dash of tarragon in place of oregano, and she's forever marked as the nutty professor in the kitchen.

And so, in solidarity, I baked this cake for her. This cake that began as a clafouti.

Having never made clafouti, I didn't have a very good understanding of what it actually was. This was made clear by the fact that I only had about 4 tablespoons of milk left--I misread the recipe, and thought it said 1/3 cup instead of 3/4 cup. It was 9:30am and my hungry family would be knocking at my door in an hour. There was going to be no custard in my house that morning.

I did a quick search for plum + brunch and found a recipe for plum bread, which, thanks to my lack of ingredients and ancestral ingeuity, turned into this moist, sweet cakey plum cobbler. The plums oozed and bubbled their way to the top of the cake, giving it a tart and shiny crust. The inside was just barely done, not doughy, but juicy.

My experience is that playing with cake can be dangerous business, especially when folks are counting on you for a meal. But I also knew that the worse case scenario was that we pick up some cruellers from Donuts Plus if it didn't work. That, and I would be forever marked by my family as a kitchen disaster, of which I would be in good company.

Cakey Plum Cobbler

Adapted from Diana's Desserts

1 cup butter

2 cups sugar

1tsp vanilla

3 eggs

2 cups flour

1 cup almond meal

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 cup mashed bananna

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour cake pan.

Dice plums.

Cream butter, sugar and vanilla until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time.

Sift flour, salt, and baking powder

Blend in banannas and almond meal

Pour in cake pan and bake 55 minutes or until knife comes out clean.

Dust with powdered sugar and serve warm!

Inspiration

If I needed an excuse to get back into blogging, this is it. Three boxes of groceries from Mediterranean Imports arrived at my door yesterday [thanks to Mama Z's long haul from Cincinnati]. My kitchen is now fully stocked with a dizzying array of grains, beans, nuts, olives, pastes, dried fruits, and rices.

My dad's care packages explain a lot about the origins of my neuroses, such as my tendency for excess and my inability to throw anything away. Much hilarity ensued when I opened one of the boxes to find an ENTIRE CASE of almond meal. Other weirdly wonderful items included several packages of dense, cinnamon dusted muffins suitable for passover, about a pound of aleppo pepper, 192 boullion cubes, and an unlabled, unidentifiable can. Does anyone have ideas for what to do with two boxes of Jordanian cream soup stock?

So, back to blogging it is. It will have to fit it in somewhere between working, biking, reading, sewing, cooking, hanging out, snuggling and watching the second season of The Wire. But, my motto is, with cranberry beans, all things are possible.

green peppers stuffed with lemon-mint couscous

The first meal on Walnut Street.

I decided that I wanted to live with K. while riding home on an Amtrak train from a conference in Harrisburg, on an unseasonably warm and terrifically rainy November Saturday. I miscalculated the distance from the conference site to the train station, and had to walk three miles through our post-industrial capital city, cheered on by flocks of crows congregated on the smokestacks. I walked for hours, plodding but purposeful, thinking, thinking, thinking.

Encouraged by a weirdly red and glowy sky, I felt a budding, firey intensity building up inside me. K. and I had been together for about 6 months. It was no longer new. It was no longer easy. But it felt solid, sustainable, as if it were in no danger of wilting. Living together suddenly seemed like the only option. I sat on the idea for as long as I could, but finally caved, and asked her in December, and she was, thankfully, excited by the idea of co-habitation.

And so, the second half of our one year together has been spent planning, and dreaming, and searching. And, to be perfectly honest, worrying, negotiating, and compromising. All culminating last weekend, when we moved in and started building our home together.

I guess technically, this is not a big move. I am literally two blocks away from my old apartment: I take the same bus to work, I shop at the same grocery store, I fall asleep to the same comforting roar of traffic barreling down Walnut Street. It feels, however, earth-shatteringly different, and wholly new. K. noted last night, over our dinner of stuffed peppers and Victory beer, that this apartment is exactly how she wanted it, and a little bit better. Which is kind of how I feel about my life right now.

This apartment is perfect for basking in my favorite season; the windows face due east, and the early morning sunlight glints through the open windows, bathing everything in gold. For our first meal, I wanted to cook something that had summer spilling over the edges, that crunched and popped with freshness.

These peppers were sturdy and perfect for filling. I thought of this dish as a fresh, contemporary spin on koosa mashi, or Lebanese stuffed squash. The lemon, mint and olive oil dressing lent a familiar and upbeat tang, and the peas helped wake up the heavy grains. I swear I did not cook this because it matched our kitchen decor, but it did help in making our first dinner together feel really special.

green peppers stuffed with lemon- mint couscous

4 large green peppers

3 cups whole wheat couscous

1.5 cup of fresh or frozen peas

enough fresh or dry mint to make it tasty

juice and zest of one lemon

salt

glug of olive oil

handful of parmesean cheese

Cook couscous as directed. Once cooked, stir in oil, lemon, mint, peas, salt and cheese. Cut and hollow peppers. Stuff, and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Top with cheese while still warm.

Vegetarian Buckwheat Korokke

Laziness is the mother of invention.

Sunday was day six of rainy and cloudy weather in Philadelphia. I had perfectly no desire to leave my house. After six days of rain, I can barely bring myself to leave my slippers.

But my lunch club obligation called, so I made do with what I had, which was 3 potatoes, an odd assortment of grains, and some frozen peas.

Oh, and PANKO!

See, I'm also moving in less than a month (!), and this process of purging the two years of accumulated crap in my apartment certainly applies to my pantry. It provides a fun challenge; I pick one ingredient and build a meal around it, like the Iron Chef minus the pressure of competition. Though I'm not sure even the Iron Chef's would know what to do with a large box of stale dates or 3lbs of flax seeds.

Panko are Japanese bread crumbs, and are airier than their midwestern counterparts. While regular bread crumbs add density to casseroles and meatloaf, a panko crust assists heavy meats and starches with a light and satisfying crunch. They fry up to an elegant golden-brown, and don't seem to absorb too much fat, though that might be a willfull illusion on my part.

Finding a vegetarian use for panko proved to be more challenging than I thought, especially in the absense of any mushrooms, squash, tomatoes, and as previously noted, a complete unwillingness to leave my house. I thought about making my own seitan, but couldn't stomach the 3 hours of washing and boiling flour, as well as the unfortunate association with militant vegan counter-culture that diy seitan will always carry in my mind.

Thanks to the internet, there exists a world of culinary invention at my finger tips, and I found recipes for the japanese version of croquettes that proved to be just what I needed. Most of them called for meat, but I substituted buckwheat and peas. I was a little worried that they wouldn't stick together as well without the added fat of beef, so I threw in a glug of truffle oil, and they held together magically.

They turned out a little bit bland, so I indulged my obsession with emulsification, and did a quick yogurt-based dressing, with more truffle oil and a splash of champagne vinegar, spiked with garam masala and cayanne pepper.

Vegetarian Buckwheat Korokke

3 potatoes, chopped
1 1/2 cups cooked buckwheat [kasha]
bullion cube
1 cup peas
1 small onion, minced
curry powder
salt
cayanne
panko
truffel, olive, walnut or some other flavorful oil
2 eggs [1 for buckwheat, 1 for frying]
flour
neutral oil for frying

Boil potatoes until they are tender, remove from water with slotted spoon, reserving cooking liquid. Mash while hot. Chuck a bullion cube into the cooking liquid.

Cook kasha as directed on the package, which will probably involve coating it with a beaten egg and toasting it in a skillet. Add about a cup of cooking liquid to the skillet, and cook until the buckwheat is tender and all the liquid has been absorbed.

In another skillet, fry the onion in truffel oil until golden. Add garam masala, cayanne, and salt to taste. Toss in the frozen peas and sautee until they are tender and uhh...no longer frozen.

Stir buckwheat into potatoes, and then add the peas and onions, including the oil. Mix it up real good and form into patties about the size and shape of a hockey puck.

Coat the patties first in flour, then dip in beaten egg, and coat in panko. Fry in high heat until each side is golden brown.

Note: I had some trouble with frying the sides. These might work better deep fried instead of pan fried, but pan frying works just as well. I just had to awkwardly stand them on their sides to let them brown. Awkward, but do-able.

Cupcake delivery, West Philly

It's real, people.

Chestnut Diner Restaurant, that strikingly unpopular pizza joint on 41st and Chestnut, will deliver gigantic, oddly flavored cupcakes to your door until 3am.

Occupying the building that was formerly College Pizza, Chestnut Diner Restaurant is clearly an attempt to differentiate from the 20 other pizza and hoagie shops in my hood. It worked: while the tri-fold paper menu is a leftover from CDR's previsous incarnation, the upgrade to orange, dim lighting and green pleather booths was a smart one. Chestnut Diner Restaurant has decent food, pleasant atmosphere, and more importantly, cupmakes.

The cupmakes [they are spelled cupmakes on the menu. Typo or trademark, I'm not sure] are not exactly good. They are something more complex than good. Cupmakes are probably exactly what you wanted. Huge amounts of baked and whipped fat and sugar and probably a few chemicals that you couln't pronoune. They are the baked good equivalent of a Dairy Queen Blizzard.

I've had the pleasure of dining on the Slammin' Samoa, the Classic Chocolate, and the Peanut Butter x3 both at the restaurant and in the comfort of my own home. The cupmakes get added to the list of cheap, a la carte food oddities that West Philly has to offer. The quintesential punk rock West Philly experience is now a tofu hoagie from Fu Wah, a samosa from Internatioal Foods, and a cupmake from the Chestnut Diner Restaurant.

I rarely see anyone inside the Chestnut Diner Restaurant, and it makes me very sad. Undoubtedly, it is owned by hard working immigrants who [not unlike my father and uncle] sunk their entire life savings into a secondhand pizza oven, endured divorce and health department violations so that they could avoid the humiliation of a boss who cheats them because they say their p's like b's. One block away is the hip multi-story neon light atrocity that boasts a famous chef multi-story food. It will inevitably propagate more of its kind, and the fate of the Chestnut Diner is anything but certain.

So, do your part for humanity and the entreprenuerial class of West Philadelphia. Order a cupmake. Since you might have a hard time tracking them down on the internet, here is the number and the cupcake selection:

215-386-6000, or order online at www.grubhub.com

• Peanut Butter x3-with reeses cups!
• Rainbow Classic-sprinkles and m&ms
• Cocunut Island Breeze-marshmallow, caramel and coconut
• Pink and Fluffy-pink lemonade and marshmallow
• Chocolate Classic-with m&ms
• Chocolate Wedding Cake-fluffy icing
• Cookie Monster-"submissive" choclate chip cookie [that's what the menu says!?!]
• Just Broke Up-the works: cookie, peanut butter cups, m&ms and butterfinger
• Slammin Samoas -coconut and caramel

Don't worry...I'm still cooking! I've had a few interesting experiences with marzipan that I will be posting shortly.