Recipe 2: Rice and Split Peas (Daal Khichadi)

One of the current challenges I'm having with using cookbooks for inspiration is that I've also been working on eating down my pantry and freezer this winter. So on top of trying new recipes, I'm trying to try them with whatever ingredients I happen to have on hand. This means really getting creative.

I knew I wanted a bean dish, so I grabbed The Art of India's Cookery, by William I. Kaufman and Saraswathi Lakshmanan (Doubleday & Company Inc., 1964). I know this book has a good selection of vegetarian dishes in it, although I have primarily used this book for other curries.

I got this book at a thrift store a couple years ago. It has a very colourful cover, and looked fairly authentic. It wasn't until I got it home that I realised it had previously been owned by a very heavy smoker. It reeked of cigarettes. I couldn't stand to look at it for more than a few minutes at a time. It ended up spending a significant amount of time in a plastic bag with a generous dusting of baking soda. Now it just smells like a book, and I'm not as hesitant to use it.

I chose this recipe because I do have some split peas in the cupboard that I'm trying to use up. I've used basmati rice, a rather large sweet onion, coconut oil for shortening, and black cardamom pods, since these are what I had available. Everything else I had on hand as described.

I've never tried to crisp onions before. I set the burner to medium heat, and fried them for what seemed like forever. They got brown, but were nowhere near crisping up. I'm guessing I didn't have the heat set high enough, but I'm not really sure. Research will be needed.

I served this with a dollop of plain yoghurt, and the not so crispy onion. It's very good. Mildly spiced, but not bland. The crispy onions would give it some nice texture I think.


Rice and Split Peas (Daal Khichadi)
1 cup raw rice
1 cup lentils or split peas
1/4 cup vegetable shortening
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
4 whole cardamoms, crushed
4 cloves, crushed
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
Hot water

Wash rice and lentils separately. Steep in warm water for half an hour. Heat shortening in large skillet and fry onions until crisp. Remove and keep warm. Drain lentils. Fry until water is evaporated, Drain rice and add to frying lentils. Add cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves, and black pepper. Stir well. Pour on hot water to reach 2 inches above level of rice. Cover tightly. Cook over slow heat until rice is cooked, approximately 1/2 hour. Place rice in serving dish and cover with crisp onions. Serve with yoghurt. Yield 4 to 6 servings.

2015 recipe goal, recipe 1: Oatmeal and Fruit Stew

One of my resolutions for 2015 is to make better use of my cookbook collection by selecting one recipe I haven't cooked before each week, trying to hit as man of the cookbooks as possible.  The point is to get away from the regular recipes I have in databases on my computer, and to use what I have in the house instead of Googling. Computers will fit into my meal planning at times, but I will need to dig through my books for some ideas as well.

I have a pretty decent collection of cookbooks, many of which are older books I've picked up second hand. The earliest dedicated cookbooks I have show original publishing dates in the early 1940s. I have a reprint of the New Galt Cookbook from 1898. I have a few Girls' Own Annuals that date back to the mid-1800s which do contain recipes amongst their articles... I'm hoping to hit some of those as well.

I also have cookbooks from the 60s and 70s. To be honest, those are the ones that really scare me. Food during that period was... odd. I know I have a variety of recipes for various food items in gelatine, and at least one fro deep fried parsley. None of these will feature in my cooking this year or, hopefully, ever.

I'm starting today with breakfast. My husband is down with a bad bug, and an oatmeal dish sounded like a good idea. This recipe for Oatmeal and Fruit Stew is from Best Quebec Recipes of Bygone Days by Suzette Couillard and Roseline Normand (Editions Suzette Couillard, copyright 1986).

This seems to be a pretty straightforward oatmeal recipe. Changes I made were mostly around what ingredients I have on hand regularly. I used almond milk, and white sugar with a drizzle of molasses instead of brown sugar for the main recipe. I did without the toppings out of personal preference more than anything else.

"Uncooked oatmeal" is always one of those challenging ingredient translations for me. What kind of oatmeal? It's a traditional recipe, so is it steel cut? The book was published in the 80s, so should it be rolled oats? I have both, but decided to go with rolled because the cooking times seemed to favour it.

End result? A very pleasant and rich oatmeal, nicely flavoured, without the soupiness of porridge. Substituting white sugar and molasses instead of brown sugar gives it a nice little kick of flavour as well.

Oatmeal and Fruit Stew
2 cups milk
1 Tbsp butter
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1 cup uncooked oatmeal
1 cup seeded, dark raisins
2 Tbsps brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt

Place the first 6 ingredients in a heavy saucepan. Cook until  milk comes to a boil and mix.

Add other ingredients. Cook until it begins to bubble. Pour into a 1-qt size greased casserole. Bake in the oven at 350F for 15 mins. Mix the whole and bake another 15 mins.

Remove from the oven and sprinkle with a generous amount of brown sugar and dab with butter.

Return to moderate oven for 3 mins before serving.

NaNoWriMo Short Story 2: The One With Toby

It was going to be a long day.

Toby wandered around the dark house, wondering why no one had fed him yet. There were mere millimetres of food in his dish. Almost completely gone! He’d starve if someone didn’t wake up soon. 

Ignoring a sleeping Cali (how could he chase her if he didn’t have the energy because there was no food?), Toby trotted up the stairs, trying to move as quickly as possible while at the same time reserving his precious energy stores. This wouldn’t work if he ran out of calories on his way to getting fed. He’d be skin and bones and not much else. It was bad enough his food was restricted in the first place, forcing him to go through this every day. 

The dog-thing was sleeping at the top of the stairs. Toby took a sniff. The dog-thing always had this strange odour, as if she never cleaned herself at all. Disgusting. Toby stared at the sleeping face that was almost as big as his whole body (how weird!), and took a peremptory swipe at the soft back nose. Better to be safe, in case the dog-thing suddenly decided to get ideas above her place and attack first.

The dog-thing raised her head, whimpering. She stared at Toby. Toby stared back. After a few seconds the dog-thing tucked her nose back under her paws and closed her eyes. 

Toby felt victorious. 

Tip toeing around the dog-thing, Toby headed to the room where the servants slept.

There was snoring coming from the bed. Typical. The secants were waiting for the black box to make noise and wake them up, instead of waking up when they knew that he had to be starving. So rude.

Toby jumped up onto the bed. The one male servant kept snoring. The female servant rolled over, almost knocking him off the bed.

Impertinence!

Toby walked up the length of the bed, perturbed. This just wouldn’t do. One day the servants would have to figure out who was boss.

Stopping inches away from the female servant’s face, Toby did the best thing he could think of to wake the female servant. He head butted her chin. Hard. He was going to have a headache (on top of extreme and deadly hunger!), but he would worry about that later. 

The female servant opened her eyes. “Oh, good morning, Toby!”

Toby tried to tell her about the hunger and the starving and the wasting away.

“Of course we can have a snuggle!” she said, petting his head, and scratching under his chin.

Toby began to argue about the hunger.

But the scratching felt so nice.

He resigned himself to dying a horrible death, as he enjoyed the scratches and the snuggles, purring so that everyone would know that he was just putting up with this for as long as he and to.

Someday, he would win this battle. Maybe tomorrow.

The Elephant in the Room

I'm writing short stories for NaNoWriMo again this year. Here is story 1, from a prompt by my friend Pauline.

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David's dreams had been strange, stranger than liver wurst and buttermilk could ever explain. Someone hd been trumpeting during an earthquake, and the smell that had resulted from the ground opening up beneath him was too horrible to describe. 

That scene in Holiday Inn had totally lied about the foods that created dreams of beautiful women.

Rolling over, David whacked his nose soundly against something large, warm, and putrid.

He was pretty sure he'd been alone last night. Bringing a girl home after eating liver paste wasn't easy, and he was pretty sure that he still wouldn't have brought one home that smelled this bad.

Slowly, he brought a hand up and patted the bed beside him.

He met with the same large, solid object as his nose had.

Refusing to take a deep breath because of the smell, David slowly and deliberately opened his right eye. All he could see was a wall of grey. 

Struggling to remember if the buttermilk had tasted like someone had slipped a mickey into it, David opened his left eye. 

A large brown eye stared back.

David blinked.

The large brown eye winked back.

The next thing David knew, he was on his feet, tangled in bedding, back to the wall of his small room.

Staring at an elephant.

David fainted.

When he awoke, he was laying tangled in a duvet on the floor, alone.

His bed was a pile of splinters.

A strong odour permeated the room as David ran, quietly, out the door.

Hills and bumps and a roadtrip to Orangeville

We did a lot of riding this Civic holiday weekend. We went to Stratford, to Guelph, to Listowel. We drove through the most Mennonite of Mennonite areas, where entire country blocks don't have utility poles. We got too much sun, too much food, and a great deal of our errands accomplished.

Fort Oak

We have an old chair in the living room.¹

A challenge: How to save money by looking at your utility meter

Some backstory, for those who don't know what I do for a living: I work for Noesis Energy, a company that has a website dedicated to tracking energy usage for large buildings, and assisting businesses and industry to find energy savings, as well as the funds to  implement those savings. I'm a software tester, and my job is to help make sure that the site is working correctly, and iron out the bugs before new features are put out in public.