Lentil Rice Salad

Craving vegetables like a madwoman, as usual. Since my recent move, I've recently stocked up on spices that were running low, or that had gotten lost in the transfer somewhere. I've also stocked up my staples, brown rice and lentils being obvious pantry necessities for me.

I'm still making a lot of Indian food lately, maybe it's just a phase, but ironically I received a package from JoNaners today. Tibetan prayer flags. Love them- just the perfect decoration to go in my new flat. Next I'll have to do a little traditional Tibetan food.

This salad is really nutritious and satisfies hunger for a long time. With lowfat yogurt in the sauce and minimal oil used, this is really healthy. Nevermind the carbs, brown rice is long carbs and great fiber :) Omit the yogurt sauce or use soy yogurt and this recipe is vegan.

• 1 cup brown rice
• 1 cup green lentils
• 2 tsp tumeric
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp anise seed
• a couple bay leaves
• 1 tbs lemon juice
• 2 tbs peanut oil
• 200 grams broccoli (I used ready frozen florets)
• 2 carrots, jullienned
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 red bell pepper, jullienned
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp garam masala, crushed
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1/2 can of peas, drained
• yogurt dressing (recipe follows)

1. Boil 3 cups of water and the first 4 spices in a large pot. Add the rice and lentils, bring back to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and let fully cook, about 40 minutes.
2. While the rice and lentils are cooking, chop all of the vegetables.
3. Heat oil in a pan to medium high, add the onion, garlic, coriander and garam masala and stir for a few minutes.
4. Add the broccoli and carrots and cook for another 5 minutes.
5. Add the bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. And then add the peas.
6. Once the rice and lentils are ready, remove the bay leaves, and drizzle a little more oil and lemon juice through the rice.
7. Mix rice and vegetable mixture together in a large salad bowl. Let cool.

Yogurt Dressing

• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 1 tbs lemon juice
• 1 tbs mint leaves, dried or fresh
• 1 tsp of cumin or anise seed (I used both separate times and liked both equally)

Mix all these ingredients together and spoon on top of the salad for a little extra moisture and flavoring.

Yellow Zucchini-Okra Curry

I guess yellow curry is a bit more Thai than Indian. Anyone give me a heads up if you know the difference. Maybe one day sooner than later my travels will take me to India, where my bestest JoNaners is going to be just weeks from now. I'm sure she can report back to me on this, after she compares a bit. Jealousy sunk in when I realized the absolute freedom she would have. But, ater a bit of frenzied research, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't afford a trip just yet.

Until the day I get to travel to India, I can live vicariously through the stories of my friends and through the food. Which brings me to this curry. I don't normally make curry for first time dinner guests, because I don't want to scare them off with anything too exotic. (Yes, some of my experiments have looked like molten lava or tasted of only keffir lime). But in this case my dinner guest of choice has proclaimed a devoted love for curry. Now hopefully he's not too much of a critic. I can only compare mine to restaurant quality, not to the real thing, but I think it tasted pretty darn good!

• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2'' piece of ginger, peeled and grated or crushed with a garlic press
• 3 tbs peanut oil
• 2 tbs yellow curry
• 1 tbs tumeric
• 1 tbs garam masala
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 medium sized zucchini, diced into 1/2'' cubes
• abotu 7 large okra, chopped into quarters
• 1 cup peas
• 1/2 red bell pepper, diced
• 1 can crushed tomatoes
• 1/2 cup coconut milk
• salt and pepper to taste

Alright I know this is a loooong list of ingredients, but it's not as hard as it sounds. Afterall, it's really just like stirfry, only you add a sauce and let it simmer for a while, right?

1. First heat the oil in a large pan. Add the garlic, ginger and spices and let brown a bit.
2. Add the onion and bell pepper and stir until soft.
3. Add the zucchini and okra and continue stirring about 5 minutes.
4. Add the crushed tomatoes and cocunut milk.
5. Add the peas last, because they don't need much time to heat.
6. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Sometimes, If I'm allowing this to simmer long enough, the liquid evaporates, so I add a few table spoons of water occassionally to keep a saucy consistency. (Saucy, I will now be). This also gives the flavor time to condense. Serve with warm basmati rice.

Sweet Potato Spinach Quiche

The reason I love quiche is obvious- it's so easy to make and hardly ever turns out badly. You can make a number of infinite combinations of ingredients in a quiche and have it turn out well. Just try it for yourself. The other reason to love quiche? The crust, I guess, if you make it the way I do, loaded with butter.

• 
  
  1 pie crust
• 
  
  2 tbs olive oil
• 
  
  1 red onion, sliced
• 
  
  1 large sweet potato, peeled and sliced thinly
• 
  
  2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 
  
  4 eggs
• 
  
  1/2 cup cream
• 
  
  frozen spinach (I used about 90g)
• 
  
  spices (coriander, cilantro, mustard seed, parsely, salt and pepper)
• 
  
  grated parmesan cheese to sprinkle

1. 
   
   Preheat the oven to 175C. Set some salted water to boil and add the slices of sweet potato and allow to soften, approximately 10 minutes (depending on how thinly you sliced them). Drain
2. 
   
   Meanwhile, roll the pie crust out thinly and shape it to the quiche dish. Bake until lightly golden, about 10 minutes.
3. 
   
   Heat the olive oil in a pan and add the garlic, onion, and spices. Let the onion soften and the spices become fragrant.
4. 
   
   Add the spinach and stir until thawed and combined.
5. 
   
   While the spinach is cooking, in a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, cream, salt and pepper together.
6. 
   
   Layer half the slices of sweet potato in the pie crust, top with the spinach and onion mixture, and layer the remaining slices of sweet potato.
7. 
   
   Pour the egg mixture over everything. Sprinkle with a few tablespoons of grated parmesan.
8. 
   
   Bake quiche for approximately 45 minutes or until set and golden brown.
9. 
   
   Allow to cool slightly  before slicing.

Also, this quiche is good eaten cold, if, like me, you don't have a microwave and have the midnight munchies!

Pesto Pasta Salad

I have recently developed a true love for pesto. Well, I guess I've always liked it. But now I sense some kind of cravings for pesto that I never knew before. Being that I am without any kind of blender, food processor or the like, making pesto on a regular basis is difficult. Not impossible, of course- rustic pestos can be made with simply pestle and mortar. Check out these fabulous variations of homemade pesto.

For this recipe you can feel free to make your own pesto, but I am taking shortcuts recently. Anyway, a girl's gotta have a life outside of school and cooking, so premade pesto it is.

• 
  
  1/4 cup basil pesto of your choice
• 
  
  1 lb pasta, such as shells, orecchiett or cappelli (as I used here)
• 
  
  olive oil
• 
  
  small jar of capers, drained
• 
  
  5 cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 
  
  2 cloves garlic
• 
  
  200 grams asparagus, thick parts removed, boiled until al dente
• 
  
  2 tablespoons balsalmic vinegar
• 
  
  a couple handfuls of arugula
• 
  
  parmesan to garnish

1. 
   
   Boil the asparagus until al dente. I like to chop the asparagus in half and put the thicker bottom half in first for a few minutes and then the tops so that all parts are equally cooked at the same time. Drain, and save the water for boiling the pasta.
2. 
   
   While the pasta is cooking (to instructions on the package), heat some olive oil in a sauce pan. Add the capers and garlic and fry for several minutes until fragrant.  Drain the asparagus and add to the pan.
3. 
   
   Drain the pasta, and add to a large salad bowl. Toss with the pesto to coat.
4. 
   
   Add the hot caper, garlic, and asparagus mixture.
5. 
   
   Add the arugula and the tomatoes and toss together. Sprinkle with parmesan.
6. 
   
   Serve warm.

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Before it gets too warm for creamy soups, I wanted to try cream of mushroom soup after I bought half kilo of mushrooms.  And in April it has gotten quite cold again, after teasing us with +9C , it even snowed last weekend for a spell.

This was a pretty easy soup, and I took an extra shortcut here.

This was just something to give it the forest-y taste, because the jumbo crimini mushrooms I bought were rather mild in flavor.

I started this soup with the standard basics:

• 
  
  1 onion, finely diced
• 
  
  3 stalks celery, diced
• 
  
  2 carrots, sliced
• 
  
  olive oil
• 
  
  4 cups millk or water
• 
  
  3 vegetable boullion cubes
• 
  
  1 pck Knorr premade mushroom sauce
• 
  
  1 cup cream (7%)
• 
  
  .5 kilo jumbo crimini mushrooms, sliced on the diagonal

1. Add the onion, stalks, carrots to hot oil in a dutch oven.
2. Add the mushrooms, saute for about 5 minutes until they have softened and lost most of their moisture.
3. 
   
   Add the water and vegetable stock and bring to a boil.
4. 
   
   When the vegetables are soft, turn down the heat to medium low.
5. 
   
   Add the sauce and cream.

Yellow Tomato Salsa over a Smokey Quesadilla

I love these cute little yellow 'cherry' tomatoes, because they're so colorful and they have a nice sweet tanginess that reds don't. Problem is, what to do with them? These are a relatively new food commodity to me, so I am hesitant to do too much experimentation until I start to have a taste for them. So for this recipe, I adapted something from one of my favorite food blogs, the Gluen Free Goddess, for a tasty roasted salsa recipe. This woman's a great writer, photographer, and obviously she must be a pretty good cook. If she were vegetarian, I'd be down-right devoted. For anyone out there who's a celiac, I highly recommend.

Making the salsa was so easy because there's really only two steps: chop all the ingredients, and put them in the oven to roast.

• 1 kg yellow cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1 large red onion, diced
• 1 cup canned sweet corn
• 2-4 cloves garlic, crushed
• salt
• 3 tbs olive oil
• 3 tbs dry white wine

1. Preheat oven to 200C.
2. Toss all ingredients together.
3. Bake for about 35 minutes, stirring once half way through, until tomatoes are becoming slightly browned.

Enjoy chilled with chips, or on a quesadilla. I recommend with smoked cheese, it goes well with the roasted flavor. If you like cilantro, chop some fresh and mix with the salsa when it's cool. Otherwise you can use some other fresh herb. I used parsely.

Tangyuan

A common Chinese dessert is Tangyuan, or glutinous rice balls. They've got to come up with a better name because 'glutinous' and 'balls' together doesn't sound so appetizing (ok maybe a few of you need to wipe the drool from your mouth, but only a few of you) . Actually, it's a popular dessert in various Asian cultures, although each culture has different adaptation of this. The version I've made here is very simple and easy to make if you take a few shortcuts. The cooking time will vary depending on how you prepare your filling, and if you make a syrup or not. Since the recipe will vary according to how much you want to make and what you want to put as your fillings, I'll provide only a simple explanation:

Start with the glutinous rice flour- Using about 1 cup of flour will yield about a dozen filled balls.
Mix cold water slowly into the flour, enough to form a stiff dough.

Your fillings can be either savory or sweet, in this case sweet- depends on how you like your balls! Examples of typical fillings include peanuts, sesame paste or mung bean paste (as I used). In this case, the red mung bean paste was bought from the Asian market pre-made, but can also be made by soaking mung beans in water over night. Then blanching the mung beans and removing the skin, and finally mashing the beans into a paste with sugar (or if you're really awesome you'll grow your own organic mung beans first).

.

I would recommend portioning small marble sized balls of filling and then freezing them on a baking sheet. This makes it much easier to encase in the dough when it comes time to wrap them. Using about a large marble-sized ball of dough, flatten into a pancake in your palm. Place the filling in the center, and gently wrap dough around the filling to seal. Avoid tears in the dough or else the filling will come out when boiled.

Next, boil the balls in water for approximately 3 minutes. If you'd like to eat them in a syrup, syrup can be easily made by melting brown or white sugar in a saucepan, adding aromatics, like ginger, orange peel, or star anise.

The last time I made this, I rolled the balls in flaked coconut, making them easier finger food. Next time I want to try the Japanese version with salty balls, and maybe fill 'em with smoked salmon or avocado inside. Suggestions for other filling combinations welcome :)

Madal Ravintola

Saturday, some friends and I went to a new little restaurant in Kuurvi, Sörnäinen (Kulmavuorenkatu 4) called Madal for lunch. For a little restaurant in Sörnäinen, this place was pretty upscale, with a long menu, a wine list, and both domestic and Nepalese beers to choose from. I've tried the Nepalese beer, Gorkha, at another restaurant in Kamppi, called Pikku Nepal, and I'm not wildly impressed. Somehow there is a nice bitter after bite to it, but otherwise I prefer just regular old 'kotimainen,' domestic Karjala. (Never thought I would say that!) It makes me miss Fordham's Copperhead Ale from Ram's Head in Annapolis....

I ordered the Madal salad with king prawns (ok that's what normal shrimp are called in Finland, and if you ask for 'katkarapu' you'll get a tiny version of regular shrimp) By the time the food came, I was really hungry- the wait was about 30 minutes for the food, but it was worth it.


The boys all got some kind of lamb, beef or chicken, but the girls' table went veggie. M and A both had the paneer (soft homemade cheese) in a red curry sauce.

I would recommend this place to anyone that likes good Indian or Nepalese food, but wants something a little more fancy, for a date or special outing. The portions were modest, but the flavour, presentation and service from this restaurant were outstanding. Also, the restaurant has a lunch buffet with 3-4 choices before 3PM for only 8,50e. I'll have to check that out some other time.