December 8, 2008: Locro

For the final calendar meal of the year, the World in Your Kitchen Calendar served up Locro, an Ecuadorian pumpkin stew. Like most of the dishes from the calendar (with one or two exceptions), it was pleasant and filling without being something interesting enough for us to bother making again. I used fresh corn and peas, but it was probably an unnecessary effort - they were kind of buried in the stewy mush, so their freshness didn't stand out at all. The main flavour is the sweet pumpkin, and with some cheese on top and a fresh salad on the side, this was a reasonable end to a year of international recipe adventures.

Locro - pumpkin stew

1 cup sweetcorn
450g pumpkin, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup peas
4 potatoes, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons tomato paste
200g cheese, grated
1 teaspoon nutmeg
oil
salt and pepper

Boil the pumpkin for 10-15 minutes, until soft. Drain and mash into a thick paste.

Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the onion over low heat for five minutes. Add the garlic and fry for another minute or so, stirring.

Add the tomato paste and potatoes, along with enough water to submerge the spuds (about 1.5 cups in our pot). Bring to the boil and simmer for 5-10 minutes.

Add the corn, pumpkin and peas and stir everything together. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Sprinkle the grated cheese and nutmeg on top and serve with a salad.

November 12, 2008: Spiced new potatoes, curried green beans & yellow rice

Another month, another recipe. For November, the World in Your Kitchen Calendar offered up spiced new potatoes from Sri Lanka. This was clearly intended as a side dish, so I did a bit of poking around the web to try to find some Sri Lankan themed goodies that could accompany the spuds. Thankfully, this website: http://asiarecipe.com/sriveg.html came through with the goods - dozens of vegetarian Sri Lankan options. I decided to go nuts and turn out three dishes: the spuds, some curried green beans and yellow rice.

Everything involved was relatively simple - even with three burners on the go this didn't take me much more than half an hour, with most of the background jobs finished by the time the spuds had boiled. The potatoes were fantastic - tangy, spicy and tender. Cindy even suggested they could replace her standard potato accompaniment. The rice was equally impressive, creamy and flavoursome, almost sweet enough for a dessert. It's probably not a healthy idea to soak rice in coconut milk, but it sure is a taste sensation. The problem was the beans. I'd popped in a couple of teaspoons of curry powder that we'd been given as part of a fancy Oxfam present, thinking it would be relatively mild. Turns out it was anything but - the beans packed a firey, firey, whallop. Too much for us to enjoy unfortunately, so the beans got shunted to one side of our plates to be frozen and rejigged into something more manageable later on.

So dinner ended up being rice and potatoes - a little colourless and dull, but rich, warm and flavourful nonetheless.



Spiced new potatoes

500g small potatoes
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon turmeric
1-2 tablespoons chopped coriander
juice of 1 lemon
oil
salt

Boil the potatoes for about 15 minutes, until they're well cooked. Drain and peel.

Heat the oil in a pan and add the mustard seeds. Once they pop, throw in the potatoes and cook for five minutes.

Throw in the rest of the spices, salt and coriander and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Stir the lemon juice through just before serving.



Curried green beans

500g green beans, trimmed
3 tablespoons oil
2-3 teaspoons of curry powder (make sure the curry powder is not ridiculously spicy)
1 tablespoon mustard
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
salt

Fry the beans in the oil for about five minutes. Add all the other ingredients, stir everything together and cook for another five minutes or so. And you're done.



Yellow rice

3 cups rice
4 tablespoons butter
2 onions, sliced
10 cloves
20 black peppercorns
12 bruised cardamom pods
1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric
3 teaspoons salt
5 cups coconut milk

Heat the butter in a saucepan, fry the onions until browned.

Add the cloves, peppercorns, cardamom pods, salt and turmeric.

Add the rice and fry, stirring constantly until it's well coated.

Add the coconut, bring to the boil and then cover and leave on low heat cooking until the rice is done (maybe 25 minutes). The spices should come to the top while the rice is cooking, meaning you can scoop most (but not all) of the cloves and cardamom pods out before serving it all up.

October 19, 2008: Banana soup

   

This month's World In Your Kitchen recipe was one I had to take on by myself - banana soup from Malawi. There was no way that Michael was going near banana anything! Unperturbed, I cooked up a half-quantity for my Sunday breakfast and was pleasantly surprised. It's thick and nourishing, though not as heavy as porridge. Though it's unmistakably banana, the orange peel adds something special. Regularly dirtying up the food processor for breakfast doesn't exactly appeal to me but I can see myself making this again.

Banana Soup

4 bananas, peeled
3 cups milk
grated peel and juice of 1/2 an orange
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon cornflour
salt

Use a food processor to thoroughly blend the bananas, then gradually add the milk (reserving 2 tablespoons for later) to form a thick liquid.

Pour the banana mixture into a saucepan. Add sugar and salt to taste, then stir through the orange peel and juice. Bring the soup to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

In a cup, dissolve the cornflour in the remaining 2 tablespoons of milk, then stir the mix through the soup. Serve the soup hot or cold, sprinkled with cinnamon.

October 4, 2008: Stuffed zucchini

   

After the stunning success of August's World In Your Kitchen recipe, we somehow let all of September slip by without getting around to the recipe of the month. We were too busy making the noodles again and again I guess. Even though Cindy was heading out for dinner on Saturday night, I figured it was time to turn the calendar page, so I decided to tackle stuffed zucchinis alone.

Like all the recipes in the calendar, this was pretty easy to prepare - I may have slightly overboiled the zucchinis, so my little zuch-boats were a bit floppy, and shed some filling in the oven. The filling itself was a bit on the bland side - I probably should have upped the chilli to give it a bit of zing. Instead I compensated by really slathering on the cheese, which meant that it all turned out tasty, but pretty oily. A little disappointing really. I think the version that Cindy invented last summer was better.

Stuffed zucchini

4 zucchini (we used 3 big ones), sliced in half lengthwise
2 small onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons pine nuts
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1-2 cups grated tasty cheese
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
pinch of chilli powder
oil
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Boil the sliced zucchinis for about 5 minutes or so - you want them to soften, but not to turn too mushy. Once they're done, scoop them out of the pot and rinse them under cold water. When you can handle them without burning yourself, scoop the middle of the zucchini out and chop it finely.

While the zucchini is boiling, heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the onion for five minutes or so. Add the garlic and the pine nuts and stir through. After another minute throw in the cumin and half of the parsley.

Add the chopped zucchini pulp to the frying pan and cook for 10 minutes, stirring often.

Once the filling is cooked, scoop it back into the zucchini shells (which should already be sitting on a baking tray) and bake for 5-10 minutes.

August 31, 2008: Noodles with basil

   

Typical. Last month I passed judgment on the World in Your Kitchen Calendar, saying that the recipes tended to be adequate and nothing more. And this month: bam! A real winner. These noodles are incredibly simple, insanely tasty and generally a damn good time. The only downside to this recipe is its lack of variety - you really need to make something to accompany it, otherwise it'd get a bit dull and veg-free. We threw together a quick tofu and bok choy stir-fry, with a few splashes of sesame oil, ginger oil and hoisin sauce to liven it up.

The key to this whole meal was the bean paste I think - it added an unusual flavour: salty and slightly spicy, with the fermented beans adding something indescribable. It was wonderful. And so easy that we made it again the next night to accompany the leftover tofu mush.

So I've been reconverted to the World Kitchen Calendar - hopefully the next four months will live up to September's standard.


Noodles with basil

225g of flat rice noodles (we bought them dry and soaked them in hot water for a few minutes to soften them up)
4 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped (keep a few whole leaves aside to garnish things)
3 birdseye chillis, halved and deseeded
1 teaspoon seseame oil
1-2 teaspoons concentrated yellow bean paste (we were forced to substitute some spicy bean paste)
1-2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
a splash of water
Some peanut or canola oil for frying

Mix together the soy sauce, sugar, water and bean paste in a small bowl.

Heat the frying oil in a wok and fry the chillis for about a minute.

Add the noodles and fry for a couple of minutes, stirring the whole time.

Add the sesame oil and the chopped basil, still stirring.

Pour in the pre-mixed sauciness, stir fry for another couple of minutes and then you're done.

If you're keen for a nice garnish, remove the noodles from the wok, add a little more oil and, when it's hot, throw the remnants of the basil in for a few seconds - they'll come out crispy straight away and make a perfect garnish.

July 24, 2008: Coconut Rice Pudding

   

Cindy and I had spent most of July living without a kitchen, so we were running out of time to get to our monthly World In Your Kitchen recipe. July's treat was a coconut rice pudding from Venezuela. I think I say this every time: the recipes on this calendar are simple - this one has just 6 ingredients and was completely easy to pull together. As usual though, this has a downside: often the dishes we make from the calendar are inferior versions of slightly more complicated recipes of the same dish (see these two harira soup recipes for example).

This was no exception - it was tasty, with the cinnamon and lemon adding a little spark to the sugary base. Still, it was a bit lacking in textural variety (some nuts or dried fruit might have kept things a bit more interesting), and fell well short of the rice pudding heights that Cindy has previously taken things to.

Coconut rice pudding

225g rice
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
grated rind of 1/2 lemon

Put the rice into a saucepan and cover with boiling water. Cook for ten-fifteen minutes, until the rice is almost cooked. Drain the rice (careful not to burn yourself!)

Return the rice to the pan, add the coconut, milk, half the cinnamon and the sugar and mix it all together.

Cook over low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until the rice is cooked properly.

Plate it up and then sprinkle with the lemon rind and remaining cinnamon.

June 17, 2008: Mushroom and eggplant stew

Our Oxfam 'World in Your Kitchen' calendar has been relatively successful so far. The focus is really on simple recipes, with relatively few ingredients that take less than half an hour to throw together, which is ideal for a lazy workday dinner. June's treat was from Ghana: mushroom and eggplant stew. I was a bit skeptical of this recipe - it seemed to be relying entirely on onion and a pinch of chili to flavour up the vegies. I ended up adding in a few teaspoons of garam masala towards the end of the cooking to boost the taste a bit.

It turned out to be a hearty, warming mush for a winter's evening. The extra spices were probably necessary - I think it would have been too bland for me otherwise. I'm not sure I'll rush back to make it again, but it was simple and reasonably tasty - full of chunky mushroom bits swimming in a mashed up eggplant sauce, with crispy onion bits providing the only textural interest. We opted to serve it on top of some quinoa, which worked pretty well - you really need something to soak up the liquid.

Mushroom and Eggplant Stew

1 eggplant, diced
225g mushrooms, sliced
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, sliced
1/2 teaspoon chili flakes
150ml vegie stock (you can use the liquid you boil the eggplant in if you want to)
oil
salt
2 teaspoons garam masala

Boil the eggplant pieces for 10 minutes or so until they soften up and then drain them (keeping the boiling water if you're using it for stock). Mash it up into a coarse mush.

In the meantime, saute the onion in oil for five minutes and then add the mushrooms, tomatoes, chili and salt. Fry the mix for 10 minutes or so until the mushrooms and tomato have softened.

Now stir in the mashed eggplant and stock and simmer for at least 10 minutes while your quinoa/rice is cooking. Stir in the garam masala about a minute before you want to serve it all up.

May 7, 2008: Watercress salad

May's calendar dish of the month is a light but vibrant and intensely flavoured watercress salad from Laos. As with most salads, there's little more involved than a quick vege slice and dressing shake. Substance and that little extra prep come from hard-boiled eggs.

This salad was playing a losing game from the start - I can't handle hard-boiled eggs any more than Michael enjoys raw tomato. We took a courtesy bite each of our respective nemeses before playing swaps. Otherwise the dressing and fresh herbs were most agreeable, so there may be a future adaptation of this salad that Michael and I could both enjoy.

Watercress salad

2 eggs
2 tomatoes
12cm cucumber
1 tablespoon fresh mint
1 tablespoon fresh coriander
225g watercress
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon peanuts, toasted

Put the eggs on to boil for 8-10 minutes, until hard.

While they're boiling, quarter the tomatoes, slice the cucumber into rounds and chop the herbs. Toss these ingredients in a bowl with the watercress.

When the eggs are done, allow them to cool before peeling and chopping into quarters.

Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar, then whisk in the sesame oil and soy sauce.

Arrange the eggs over the top of the salad and pile the nuts in the centre. Pour over the dressing and serve immediately.

April 6, 2008: Bean and cheese tomato quesadillas

Month by month we're working our way through our 'World in Your Kitchen' calendar. April threw up this delicious sounding Argentinian delight. Having spent a few hours on a fruitless search for lyrebirds in the Dandenongs (we couldn't even find the lyrebird track, let alone an actual lyrebird), we were pleased with the simplicity of this recipe - mush the fillings together in a frypan, whack them in some burritos and bake. Nothing to it.

I was given a free hand with the spices and, typically, over-chillied the mix slightly, leaving Cindy a bit lacking in enthusiasm for the meal. I found them much more amenable - even throwing on some jalepenos to liven things up a bit. The mix is a bit more veg-tastic than some of our previous burrito fillings, with capsicum and tomato adding some freshness to the general beaniness. I've decided I'm not a huge fan of the baked quesadilla style Mexican - I'd rather have had these tortillas soft and folded than rolled and covered in cheese, but this was still a relatively easy and satisfying weekend feast.

Bean and cheese tomato quesadillas

Tortillas (the recipe says 6 - we used up most of the mix in 4)
1 400g can red kidney beans, drained
3 tomatoes, chopped
1 green capsicum, chopped
1 onion, finely sliced
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder (be conservative here if necessary!)
1/2 teaspoon cumin
oil
salt
pepper
~ 2 cups grated cheddar cheese

Preheat the oven to about 190 degrees.

Cook the onion in the oil for about five minutes. Add in the tomatoes and capsicum, the spices, and seasonings and cook for another five minutes, stirring frequently.

Add in the beans and stir them through. Mash them up a bit with a fork or masher.

Plop the mixture onto each tortilla, roll them up, cover with cheese and bake for about 15 minutes.

March 24, 2008: Harira

This month's recipe from our World in Your Kitchen calendar comes from exotic Morocco and also entails some distant deja vu. Back in October 2006, we sampled harira for the first time and fell for its complex flavours and nourishing beans. We've not been particularly inspired to create new and nutritious dinners for a few weeks, so our bodies needed this as much as our taste buds did.

The calendar's recipe is quite similar to our previous rendition, but I'll include it anyway. If you've an appetite for more spicy soups, take a look at the most recent round-up of the No Croutons Required blog event, where every entry is a bowl full of punchy vegetarian goodness.

Harira (bean soup)

400g can chickpeas, drained
400g can haricot or other beans, drained
800g can crushed tomatoes
1 onion, chopped
a pinch of saffron threads soaked in a little warm water
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
500-1000mL water or stock
juice of a lemon
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon harissa or chilli powder
1 tablespoon flour
salt and pepper

In a large saucepan, combine the beans, tomatoes, onion, saffron with water, turmeric, cinnamon, ground coriander and some pepper. Add half of the fresh coriander and parsley. Add enough water or stock to completely cover the mixture. Bring it to the boil, and then simmer for 10-15 minutes.

Remove a little of the liquid from the saucepan and mix the flour into it, then stir the flour back into the soup. Cook the soup for a further 5 minutes.

Just before serving, stir through the harissa/chilli powder, lemon juice and season to taste. Ladle into bowls and garnish with the remaining herbs.

February 3, 2008: Khatti mithi masoor dal plus leeks in chickpea flour with sweet red pepper

The Indian food is coming thick and fast at the moment with thematically appropriate meals for SBS's weekly Bollywood movies. This week the movie was Devdas, the most lavish and expensive Bollywood film of all time (full disclosure: it's also one of the longest and we're still getting through it on tape). To match, I went for a lavish meal: dal from our Oxfam calendar and a vegie dish from Mridula Baljekar's trusty low-fat Indian vegetarian cookbook.

The dal was nice and simple and was meant to be sour, sweet and hot. To be honest it was mostly sour (tamarind puree) and tangy (ginger), but that's probably mostly due to my lax measurements. Despite not quite measuring up on the 'hot' front, this was one of the better dal recipes we've come across - maybe not quite up to these standards, but then there's no can of coconut milk in this one to fill us up with creamy, fatty goodness. Anyway, this was basically all about the ginger and tamarind flavours, and from my point of view, that can only be a good thing.

The second dish for the night was much more complicated. While I was getting all the ingredients together, I realised I had no real idea of what this dish was even supposed to look like, let alone how it would taste. Indeed, even after I'd got about three-quarters of the way through preparing this, I thought it was going to be a complete failure. The thing to remember is: leeks shrink. A wok overflowing with leeky bits and looking pretty uninspiring, quickly became a dense and tasty mush of leek with generous splashes of capsicum-provided colour livening things up. Lucky. It's hard to describe how this turned out, it was kind of chewy and full of spicy flavours, with the leek flavour notable but not as overpowering as I'd feared. It worked really well as a side to the dal, but might be a bit much on its own.

It's worth noting that it works really, really well as filling in a pastry, as Cindy demonstrated a few days later.


So, the recipes:

Khatti mithi masoor dal

225g red lentils
8 cloves of garlic
2.5cm piece of fresh ginger (I think I used something roughly twice this size)
2 dried chillies
1.5 teaspoons cumin seeds
1.5 teaspoons tamarind concentrate
1 tablespoon brown sugar
400ml water
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 tablespoons fresh coriander, chopped

Put the lentils and the water in a pot and bring to the boil. Add turmeric and a dash of salt and simmer for 10 minutes or so.

Grind the garlic cloves, ginger, chillies and cumin seeds to a rough paste in a mortar and pestle.

Heat a little ghee or oil in a frying pan and add the spice paste. Fry for a minute or so (stirring) with a splash of water if things start to stick.

Stir the fried spice paste into the lentil mush along with the tamarind and sugar. Stir well and simmer until the dal has reached the consistency you like. We like it pretty mushy, so I simmered for maybe 15 minutes. You could get away with just a couple of minutes if you liked your lentils to retain a bit more texture.

When it's ready to go, stir through the coriander and serve it up.


Leeks in chickpea flour with sweet red pepper

4 leeks (seriously - I was sure this was going to be too many, but remember: they shrink!)
1 red capsicum
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
10 fenugreek seeds
8 cloves of garlic, peeled and chrused
1 dried red chilli, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons chopped coriander leaves
3/4 cup chickpea flour (besan), sifted.

Trim the green bits and the roughest root sections off the leeks and slice them in half longways. Wash them thoroughly and then chop them finely.

Remove the seeds from the capsicum and chop it into 1 inch strips.

Heat the oil in a wok and add the mustard seeds. As soon as they pop, lower the heat and add the cumin and fenugreek seeds, plus the garlic. Stir-fry for about a minute.

Add the crushed chilli, the leeks, capsicum and salt. Increase the heat and stir-fry the whole lot for at least five minutes. It took us a bit longer because there was too much food mass for our wok - maybe 10 minutes.

Add the coriander and a splash of water and then sprinkle in the chickpea flour, stirring it evenly through the vegetables. Cook for another minute or so, stirring well.

We love our legumes, but none could be more devoted than Susan, the Well-Seasoned Cook! She's hosting a beany blog event this month, called My Legume Love Affair. Make sure to visit her website later this week for many more delicious dishes.

January 20, 2008: Caribbean rice dessert

As Michael hinted in his last post, the Caribbean-themed wraps we enjoyed for dinner were chosen to match this Caribbean rice dessert. The dessert is January's featured recipe in our World In Your Kitchen 2008 calendar. I must admit that I'm not a big fan of rice desserts (this one excepted) and the Caribbean treatment didn't do much to sway me. I liked the sweet buttered nuts and coconut, but there just wasn't enough of them! The mixture was fairly dry and bland, but perked up with a few cherries on top. (Not only are they in season, but a bit of internet research revealed them to be appropriate to the theme.)

Here are three ways that I might alter the recipe for future use:

1. Halve the amount of rice. This'll up the flavour with a greater density of sweet, buttery fruit and nuts.

2. Fresh fruit on the side. I already sorted this out the first time around, and I think it's essential.
3. Use the rice as a savoury side. Retaining the original proportions of rice to flavourings, this is a cute (if less healthy) alternative to plain rice, much like a peshwari naan. In fact, we poured a dhal over the second half of the rice and couldn't get enough of it. It's neither Caribbean nor Indian, but it's good.

Caribbean rice dessert

225g rice
6 brazil nuts, chopped
1 tablespoon sultanas
1/2 - 1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon butter or margarine

2 tablespoons desiccated coconut

In a saucepan, cover the rice with hot water and add half the coconut. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and cook for 10-15 minutes until done. Drain the rice.

In a large pan, melt the butter. Fry the nuts, sultanas, sugar and remaining coconut for a couple of minutes, until golden and fragrant. Add the drained rice, combine well, and serve.