cooking and eating (second try)
food 035, originally uploaded by spigotshark.
One of the nicest things about cooking with another person is that I’m much more inclined to try a new recipe which I’d not have attempted alone. Last night Kelly and I tried out Sara Moulton’s recipe for shiitake mushroom pot stickers. They’re store-bought wonton wrappers with a mushroom-Napa cabbage-scallion-cilantro-ginger stuffing, pan-fried and then steamed. They were awesome.
We barely managed to paused long enough to take this picture before devouring the entire plate. This is the second Sara Moulton recipe we tried this week, the other being her lemon bars, which were fantastically tangy, and had a really nice brown sugar shortbread crust. We improvised by replacing half the lemon juice with lime juice. It was such a successful substitution that it got me thinking about the possibilities. Grapefruit bars, maybe?
Not to be undone by my rekindled love of Sara Moulton, I should also mention the reliable aid of Madhur Jaffrey whose World Vegetarian . I decided to try a couple of Indo-Trinidadian recipes, a potato-chickpea curry and tomato choka. [Some of my readers will remember my other notable interaction with Indo-Trinidadian culture, an obsession with Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms At Night during a college course on Asian-American writers.] The curry was similar to chana masala, but with the surprising addition of a lot of thyme, parsley and scotch bonnet peppers. The choka was a sort of tomato chutney with a lot of chilies and garlic. Served with raita and naan, it was a ton of food; Kelly and I both had huge plates of it, and still there was enough for lunch for the next two days.