Indian Spiced Green Beans

Green Beans with Stewed split peas and potatoes and collard paratha

My sister planted a ginormous garden this year and I'm reaping the wonderful benefits.  Last week she gave me several bags of produce from her garden and today I turned them into an Indian vegetarian meal.

Flaky Collard Paratha

  The collards I blanched and processed
   into a dough I used to make paratha.

Raiti with fresh cucumber and tomato

The sweet, juicy tomato and crisp cucumber got chopped up and added to a tangy raita.












The green beans I fried in ghee with cumin and mustard seeds and then stewed them in a bit of water.  This recipe is so simple and quick that it qualifies as an Emmi.

This recipe comes from Yamuna Devi.  She has written one of the most comprehensive cookbooks on Indian Vegetarian Cuisine that I've ever seen!  The book is called Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking and no collection on Indian cooking can be considered complete without it.  If you don't own it, what are you waiting for?

Ingredients:

• 1 lb green beans, cut in 1 inch pieces
• 4 T ghee or light oil
• 2 t black mustard seeds
• 1 t cumin seeds
• 1/4 t crushed red pepper (more or less to taste)
• 1/2 c water
• 1 t corriander
• 1 t kosher salt
• 1 t sugar

Method:

1. Heat the ghee or oil over medium high heat.  Toss in the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and red pepper.  The cumin seeds will turn dark reddish brown and the mustard seeds will turn gray and pop.  
2. When the mustard seeds are done popping, add in the green beans and fry for about 3 minutes, stirring to coat with the seasoned ghee
3. Add the water.  Lower heat to medium low.  Cover and cook until crisp tender (about 10 - 12 minutes.)
4. Uncover and stir in corriander, salt, and sugar.  Raise heat and cook until water evaporates.

Indian Spiced Green Beans

To finish out my meal, I made stewed split peas and potatoes.  If you are interested in that recipe, click here.

Portobello mushrooms stuffed with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes

I've been gone so long, it's doubtful I have any followers left at all, but just in case......   I've come to share the promised recipe for stuffed mushrooms.  But before I share the recipe, I must make my excuses!  Firstly, I just returned a few days ago from a trip to Haiti, where I went for days and days without an Internet connection making it impossible for me to blog!  You can read about my visit to a Haitian kitchen by clicking this link.  Secondly, shortly before leaving on my trip, I began writing articles for an online magazine called Examiner.com.  My articles are food focused (surprise! surprise!) with a local connection.  If you are interested, you can read my articles by clicking this link.

Now, back to the mushrooms.  I found this recipe in a book called Crescent City Collection.   It's a fabulous cookbook that I purchased in New Orleans when Eddy and I where there celebrating our 20th anniversary.  If you can get your hands on this cookbook, I recommend you purchase it!  So far, everything I have tried from its pages has turned out delicious!  These mushrooms are very easy to make and always bring me compliments when I serve them to guests.

Here is my edited version of the recipe for spinach-stuffed mushrooms:

Ingredients:

1 recipe Red Wine Vinaigrette (see below)

6 large portobello mushroom caps

Olive oil

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 large clove garlic, minced

a squeeze of lemon juice

3 tightly packed cups of spinach,

8 sun-dried tomatoes, packed in oil, drained and and chopped

hot sauce to taste (I prefer a habanero sauce over Tabasco)

salt & pepper to taste

1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Method:

1.  Marinate the mushroom caps in the vinaigrette for several hours

2.  Heat a swirl of olive oil in large saucepan over medium heat.  Add the onion and garlic and saute until tender.

3.  Add the lemon juice, spinach, and tomatoes and continue to saute until the spinach wilts.  Season with s&p and hot sauce.

4.  Remove the mushrooms from the marinade and broil (or grill) for about 6 minutes per side.  Let cool.

5.  Place the mushroom caps on a baking sheet and sprinkle half the Parmesan over the insides.  Mound the spinach mixture equally into each cap.  Sprinkle with remaining Parmesan.  (the recipe can be made ahead to this point.)

6.  Just before serving, broil the stuffed mushrooms until cheese is golden (about 5 minutes).

For the Red Wine Vinaigrette

Combine and whisk until well mixed:

2 T red wine vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil

3 t Dijon mustard

1/2 t sugar

1/2 t salt

1/2 t pepper

1 t chopped chives

Fava Beans: A Labor of Love

Monday, I visited a CSA farm.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and these organizations provide their members with a weekly bag or box of organic produce in exchange for a few hours of work a week or a membership fee.  A friend of mine who lives out in Seattle was telling me about the CSA that she recently joined.  I got so jealous, I had to search my own community to see if we had anything like this in my area.  I found one online, but it only accepted 20 members a year and it was already full. 

In the meantime, my daughter had been asking me to go out and visit this farm that a friend of hers works on.  So Monday, we went.  And, in a random act of coincidence as so often happens, it turned out to be a CSA farm!  Furthermore, it was my lucky day because although I was not a member, they were bagging up fava beans and the owner let me buy a couple of pounds.  I had never had fresh fava beans before but had been stumbling across recipes for them for ages!  I recently had visited all my area grocery stores looking for fresh favas and found them to be more illusive than a fresh spring morel!  Now, I was the happy owner of two whole pounds worth!

I hurried home with my bag of fava beans and began to look up recipes online.  I discovered that preparing fresh fava beans is very time consuming!  First, you have to remove them from their pod.  Each large pod contains about four or five beans.  They are a pale green in color.

Once the beans are removed from their pods, you need to further remove the kernel from it's shell.  To do this, you blanch the beans in rapidly boiling water for three minutes and then plunge them into cold water.  The skins will crack (or not!) and you can now slip the emerald green kernel out of its shell.

The beans are a beautiful, vibrant color and I tasted one raw at this point and found it to be tender, sweet, and delicious!

I sauteed the beans in some olive oil along with about a cup each of chopped fennel bulb and onion and about three cups of chopped swiss chard.  I only had to let them cook for about 20 minutes before I decided they were done.  A little salt and pepper and they were good to go!

I served them along side Haitian chicken and rice.  The meal was delicious!  Unfortunately, I don't know where or when I'll be able to get my hands on some fresh fava beans again but I can promise you that if the opportunity should present itself, I will be buying them!

"Left Over" coleslaw

Tonight  I made coleslaw out of bits and pieces of stuff I found in my refrigerator.  Literally!  This coleslaw has sugar snap peas,  red and yellow peppers, fennel bulb, daikon, carrots, red onions, bok choy, and radicchio.  In fact, just about the only thing it doesn't have, is cabbage! 

I pulled out bits of vegetables left over from previous nights, julienned everything and tossed them in a bowl.  I made a simple dressing with pomegranate-infused red wine vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and olive oil.  I was really happy with the way it turned out and will probably use this method to clean out my refrigerator again.  I think next time, I might add some raisins, or other dried fruit.

I sprinkled chopped peanuts on my serving.  (The only reason I didn't add them to the whole salad is because my husband and son don't like peanuts in their food.  Imagine that!)

So, why am I blogging about something as boring as coleslaw?  Because the salmon I made to go with it (which was my intended topic) turned out to be a disaster!  A friend of mine gave me some planks which she told me she uses to grill salmon.  I thought they'd be just the thing to grill my bourbon-teriyaki glazed salmon.

I soaked the planks in water for about an hour and a half prior to putting them on the grill.  I had a bit of a problem with this as the planks floated.  In order to keep them submerged, I had to weight them down.  But, I devised an ingenious method to do this so didn't anticipate any problems with the grilling.

My planks weren't on the grill 3 minutes when they burst into flames.  I would have taken pictures so that you could have a good, hardy laugh at my expense, but I was too busy trying to save my fish and didn't have time to go searching for the camera!  It was a mess! 

I had to quickly remove the fish to the grill, where they got stuck and consequently fell apart when I tried to remove them.  And then I had to remove the planks and find a place to toss them where they wouldn't cause any damage.  I share this story with you so that you won't think all my adventures in the kitchen are unqualified successes!

Pasta for supper....

I've been thinking about pasta all day so as supper time rolled around, I decided to make a big pot for supper.  I didn't have a particular recipe I was following but I had an idea in my head of what sounded good.  I started by oven roasting a bunch of vegetables; red onions, zucchini, baby portobellos, sugar snap peas, and red peppers.  I tossed them with olive oil, a handful of fresh sage, and some s&p and roasted them at 400 until they caramelized.

While that was going on, I mixed up some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, crushed garlic, Indian chili powder and salt and marinated about a pound of chicken tenders.

When the vegetables were done, I heated up a T or so of olive oil and pan fried the chicken.  I did this over high heat because I wanted the chicken to caramelize a bit and take on a rich, deep golden brown.  After removing the chicken, I deglazed the pan with some dry sherry and then stirred in some chicken broth and heavy cream.

I sliced the veggies and chicken and added them to the pan.  Finally, I stirred in a handful of fresh basil.

To serve, I ladled the sauce over farfalle pasta, topped it with a couple dollops of goat cheese and sprinkled it with toasted pine nuts.  It turned out great!

It's now going on 7:00 and I'm still the only one home.  I wonder if that means I can finish off all the pasta myself?