coconut is delicious

So, a while ago, I left New Haven while totally forgetting I was supposed to be cat-sitting. So I had to ask another friend to do it, and as a reward, I made her cookies.  However, James stole my cookie cookbook;  so I made do with my new favourite cookie recipe from online, namely "Choconut Cookies."  I actually modified them a bit--I didn't have enough coconut, so I added in some walnuts I had lying around. They were good--added a nice texture--but it's really the coconut that makes these so dangerously addictive.

While I'm on the subject of coconut, a while ago I made banana bread, on account of I had some old bananas. And I used the recipe in How to Cook Everything, which also uses coconut! It is certifiably delicious. 

1 stick butter, softened

1.5 cups flour

.5 cup whole what flour (didn't actually have any; I think I approximated with the dry cereal again)

1 tsp salt

1.5 tsp baking powder

.75 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 ripe bananas

1 tsp vanilla

.5 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (I used both!)

.5 cup coconut

Mix together dry ingredients. Cream butted and beat in eggs and bananas. Stir into dry ingredients, just to combine. Stir in vanilla, nuts, and coconut.  Put into greased 9 by 5 loaf tin and bake at 350 for 45 to 60 minutes. Cool 15 minutes before removing from pan. 

yum.

ahoy

Alright, I don't know what all y'all are up to, but I have been cooking a LOT so I am sharing.

The first thing I'd like to mention, though, is not a recipe, but a reminder: food is a good way to hang out with people! Last week my new apartmentmates and I decided we should do something with the pizza dough hanging out in our freezer, and so we made pizza! I don't think you need to know how to make pizza, but here is a picture of the finished product: Not only was it 100 percent awesome, it was also 100 percent a cool thing to do. So if life gives you pizza dough, you should make pizza.

Among the other mysterious things in our kitchen that got abandoned during the course of many move-ins and outs is a jar of sun-dried tomatoes. I don't really know what to do with these--I made some sort of tomato-pine nut-spaghetti, but any other suggestions would be welcome.

part the third--garam masala

Mostly I am making this post because we haven't had anything about spices recently and so I will change that.
So, I do not have any "garam masala," nor does my grocery sell anything by that name, as it is small and mostly Italian in disposition, and thus has a lot of olive oil and tomato sauce but little in the way of curry spices. How to Cook Everything has a recipe, but it relies on having a lot of spices in their original state--cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks and the like--which again is not my grocery's forte. So I just mixed some stuff together myself. When I was at the grocery getting some appropriate ground spices, I forgot whether I wanted cardamom or coriander, and so got both; this turned out to be a good thing, as both are delicious (if equally specialized).
 SO my garam masala was basically 1/4 teaspoon of each of: cinnamon; cloves; cardamom; and cumin; a shake of nutmeg and coriander; and then a little extra cumin and cardamom because it was smelling too cinnamon-y. You would think you would end up with about a teaspoon by this method, but I got about two, which is curious. Anyway, this is delicious and also to be recommended.

Palak Paneer!

So, now that I had paneer, the obvious thing to do was to make palak paneer. I really love palak paneer. In order to make it, I had to increase my spice cabinet considerably, so maybe this is not the most practical thing in the world unless you have a lot of spices lying around. If you do, it is dead easy. Basically, I synthesized a number of internet recipes  (like here and here ) and so it went something like:

This is the best picture I could take.

In a saucepan, sautée in olive oil one onion, two fat cloves of garlic, some pepper flakes, and about a half-inch chunk of grated ginger.  [I am sure technically it is supposed to be ghee, but who has ghee lying around? Not I. Also I think green pepper is more proper, but too bad. ] When this is nicely done, add a spoonful of yogurt, and some spices--turmeric, coriander, cumin, garam masala, that sort of thing (about 1.5 tsp each?) . The coriander I think is especially delicious. So now you have like a sauce thing. Add two packages of thawed frozen spinach to your pan, and a can of tomato paste. Mix! Then fry up the paneer and add that in. I tried to fry my paneer in the same pan, but it didn't work very well. It was still good though.

Look how enthusiastically I am eating! It must be good.

And there you go! Delicious curry. I would serve this to friends. I do not know if I would buy it in a restaurant, as the spicing still needed tweaking and I am not sure how. Somebody should try it and tell me. Anyway, hooray spinach, and hooray spice cabinet!

Fallish Food

Recently, a friend of mine linked me to this recipe for apple and cheddar scones. Also, recently the grocery store down the street was selling bruised apples for really cheap. Clearly, it was meant to be! So I made scones. I always thought cheese and apples was sort of weird, but I guess it isn't. It's hard to tell though, because actually these scones need a lot more cheese than the recipe says--mostly they taste like apples. I also used somewhat sweeter apples than you're probably supposed to, so that might also be a contributing factor. Also they're kind of gooey? Usually my scone recipes have issues being too dry, but this one was super sticky, and the resulting scones are kind of over-moist. So, maybe add some flour or something. Also I don't know why they say it makes six scones--I made eight, and they were big, and they got HUGE in the oven, so pay no attention to that either. They are delicious, though.

The other thing I acquired recently is kale! It turns out that the school "farm" (=vegetable patch) has lots of kale, and it is free for the taking, and I think I may be one of the few people really excited about this. The Dutch eat kale! The Dutch eat kale with potatoes and sausage, in a dish called "stamppot". So, it is childhood memories. Not that I was really excited about the stuff then, but now it is nostalgia. Problem is that all the recipes I could find were sort of assuming you went and bought a nice package of kale at the greengrocers, so it was nicely measured in grams, and then you had several kilograms of potatoes, and none of it seemed very applicable to me so I just winged it and boiled up some potatoes to a mashable consistency. Then I drained them, lest I have too much water, and then added some sliced-up kale with what seemed like an appropriate amount of water for it to cook in, which turned out to be really stupid because the kale shrank and I had way to much water and my already-cooked potatoes were now disintegrating into a slurry and I was getting cream-of-kale soup and it was bad, and the potato/kale ratio was all wrong. So, don't do that! Probably it's best to cook the kale a few minutes first and then add it to the potatoes. Also I kept adding more and more bundles of kale to the mixture every time I reheated it, so the lesson is basically to have way more kale than you think you need--like a bundle of leaves for every potato you use. And to cook it first, or maybe cook it with the potatoes so you can drain out excess water before it's too late. And then spice with salt and pepper and nutmeg or whatever you have lying around. And if you do have too much water, oatmeal makes it all coagulate nicely, unless you REALLY have too much like I did and you get a kale porridge. Serve the result with red wine vinegar and some smoked sausage with mustard for a good cold-weather sort of meal.

today's spice: tarragon!

Guys, until recently, I had no idea what tarragon was, other than some kind of herb. Then more recently I learned it can make a sort of interesting vinegar, but it still seemed sort of strange and obscure. One of those spices that's in your spice rack (or rather, your mother's spice rack; I have no spice rack) for completeness but you've never seen it used. Who wants one of them high-falutin' herbs anyway?
Friends, I have been converted. Tarragon is amazing. Principally, it is another way to Make Chicken Delicious. I made chicken salad today with tarragon and it was so. good. And I threw some tarragon in my tuna salad yesterday and it was also super delicious. It might be good in a salad dressing too, but I don't know because I have no vegetables. But basically, tarragon is really good. Hooray!
[The chicken salad recipe isn't super practical, unless, like me, you happen to have a hunk of gorgonzola in your fridge that needs to get eaten, and also a bunch of grapes. But it you have those things, you can add them into a basic chicken salad made by poaching yourself some chicken and cutting it into bits and adding mayo and sour cream. Which you also have, because you love sour cream. And add the tarragon!]