{this moment}

lifted from my sister, who lifted it from SouleMama. In the words of its creator: A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Chicken Tikka Masala

If you've ever forayed into the making of Indian food, you've realized that, on the whole, Indians aren't exactly shy with the spices. It's not a "add 1/2 teaspoon of oregano and 1/2 teaspoon of thyme" sort of thing, it's a "this is why spices are sold in bulk" sort of thing. This recipe calls for well over 1/2 cup of spices when all is said and done. I would definitely recommend keeping all of the non-pepper spicing, regardless of whether or not you think you like "spicy" food. If you don't like it hot, I would cut the peppers in the marinade in 1/2 (if that still seems like a lot to you, keep in mind that the yogurt cuts the hotness significantly) and start with 1/4 t. of cayenne in the sauce and work your way up from there, tasting as you go. This is why we have spoons. And also why the cook is not hungry by the time dinner is served (or is that just me?).

A note on hotness: I was using extra hot cayenne powder and this came out around a 7 on Maria's Scale of Hotness. Apparently my 7 kills the average Midwesterner (or so I have been led to believe). I thought that this was a bit much as when you get past a 6 or so, the hot begins to overwhelm the spicy. Next time I make this, I will likely keep the amounts the same and use a regular cayenne powder, which puts it around a 5 on Maria's Scale of Hotness. That is precisely where Maria prefers her Tikka Masala to be: hot enough to make your lips tingle a little bit, but balanced enough that you can still taste everything else in the pot.

A note on sauce: If you plan to use your blender/immersion blender/food processor, you can be a little bit lazy when cutting up the veg. If you don't want to do that step, get everything down as close to a proper mince as possible. You'll thank yourself later.

Day 1 (or the morning of):

Cut 1 1/2 lbs. boneless skinless chicken cut into 1" cubes

Marinade:

1 T cumin
1 T red pepper flakes
1 T black pepper
1 t salt
1/2 T cinnamon
1 T paprika (I generally use 1/2 sweet paprika and 1/2 hot paprika)
1 t turmeric
1" ginger, grated or minced
1/2 lemon, juiced and zested
1 c. plain yogurt

Grind up any spices that haven't been ground already, and mix everything together in a big tupperware or plastic bag (whatever you like to marinate in). Add the chicken and stir/squish about to coat the chicken thoroughly. Throw this in the fridge and try to remember it in the next few days.

Now let's get cooking:

For the sauce you will need:

(I like a saucy curry, so I make a lot. You can halve this if you prefer your curries dryer.)

3 T butter
1 c chopped onion
2" ginger, grated or minced
10 cloves garlic, minced (just trust me on this one)
2 T cumin
1 1/2 T. sweet paprika
1/2 t. cinnamon
2 t. cayenne powder (Note to self: halve this if using super hot cayenne)
1/2 t. turmeric
~1 T. salt (start with 1/2 this and then taste as you add more. It seems like a lot, but it actually works out well)
2 c. tomato sauce (I generally use canned)
1 c. cream

Start by pulling the chicken out of the fridge so it can warm up enough that you don't freeze your hands and end up with claws when making the kebabs later. Trust me on this one. And turn on the broiler while you're at it.

Heat the butter in a ~3 qt. heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat and grind any spices that aren't already. Once the butter is melted, add the onion and stir. cook until onion is softened. Add the garlic and ginger and continue cooking for a few more minutes. Next add all of the spices, stir, and marvel at the colors. Cook, stirring frequently for a couple more minutes and add the tomato sauce, stir, cover and turn the heat down to low, stirring occasionally.

Spray a cookie sheet with high-heat nonstick spray and assemble chicken kebabs, placing them on the cookie sheet as they are completed. Broil for ~5 minutes, turn and broil for another ~5 minutes or until the kebabs are fully cooked. Remove kebabs from oven and set aside.

Back at the stove: add cream to sauce and puree.

Remove chicken from kebabs and add to sauce, stirring to coat.

Serve with cumin rice and naan.

Edited to add: Holy crap! This stuff is even better a couple of days in. The hot spices mellow a bit and step back from center stage and the curry spices make friends with one another and become even more delicious than they were fresh. Yum. Tragically, I think I'm going to run out of naan before I run out of curry, and I don't see cooking time before Friday...

Cumin Rice

This one's a teaser, and there will be no pictures for the foreseeable future due to time/give a damn constraints.

Cumin Rice (Goes with curry...yes, this is foreshadowing)
1 c. Basmati rice (I use brown basmati)
2 c. Water
1/2 T. Cumin (whole seeds)
1-2 T. Butter

Combine ingredients in a pan. Heat on high until boiling. Reduce heat to a simmer on low and cover. Let it cook for ~20-30 minutes, until all liquid is absorbed.

Or you can use a rice cooker, if that's your thing. We don't have them-thar fancy small appliances around these parts, so I stick with a pan.

No-Sun Dried Tomatoes

My lab scheduled a picnic potluck for Jazz in the Park. Leading up to our the day of our scheduled picnic, the weather was beautiful with sunny skies. Following the day of our scheduled picnic, the weather was beautiful with sunny skies. The day of our picnic was unceasing torrential downpour creating Escalade-eating sinkholes and flooding every basement in the Midwest.

We rescheduled our picnic for River Rhythms the following week. The weather report was identical, with gorgeous skies before and after and epic flooding scheduled for our picnic, but we stuck to our guns and were rewarded for our tenacity with a beautiful evening and six surprisingly good bands.



Given my need to over-plan all things except vacations, I had already bought tomatoes for a bulgur-tomato-oregano salad-thing before the floods. I figured I could still use them with a slight change of plan: Dried tomato slices with goat cheese and a sliced baguette. My labmates approved mightily of Plan B.



The secret ingredient is a dead simple not-even recipe, everything else was store-bought.

Ingredient:
Delicious tomatoes you can't use before they spoil

Directions:
Slice tomatoes ~1/4 inch thick (you will really want a sharp knife for this)
Line baking sheet(s) with parchment paper
Arrange tomato slices in a single layer on the parchment paper(s)
Put in oven on LOWEST setting until dry (if you have a pilot light and your oven is generally above 100 degrees F, don't even bother turning it on)

You will know they are done when they don't squish anymore when you poke them. I left mine overnight. If your oven is on, it will take less time to dry the tomatoes, but you may end up cooking some of the flavor out of them.

Peel dried tomatoes off of parchment paper. Store in tupperware or a bag. I got six romas into a 1 cup container.

Bitchin' Banana Bread

I ended up with a ridiculous surplus of bananas. Not shockingly, they went a little bit sketch. There is one word for this situation: Awesome.



My solution to this non-problem is adapted from the ABC Children's cookbook



To participate in the awesome, you will need:

3 sketchy bananas
3/4 c. of sugar
1/2 c. of vegetable oil
2 eggs
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 t. vanilla extract
3/4 c. chocolate chunks (I really, really like the 365 organic mini-chunks from Whole Foods. Feel free to substitute whatever you want.)
1/2 c. chopped walnuts (optional)

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and grease up a bread pan. (I use PAM)
2. Put the sketchy bananas and the sugar in a bowl and mash them up with a wooden spoon. I like to leave mine a little bit lumpy.
3. Add the vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla and stir until the liquids are incorporated.
4. Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and stir until incorporated.
5. Now mix in the chocolate chunks and walnuts.
6. Pour the batter into the baking pan and put it in the oven for 60-70 minutes.
7. Lick the bowl.
8. Test the bread with a toothpick or cake tester. When it comes out clean, your bread is done. Take it out of the oven and set the bread, in the pan, on a cooling rack and let it set for 10 minutes. (Fair warning, if it comes out dirty after 65+ minutes try sticking a clean tester somewhere else. You probably hit a banana vein.)
9. Turn the bread out onto the cooling rack and let it cool to room temperature.
10. Slice and enjoy.

When you've had your initial fill, wrap the banana bread in saran wrap and it will keep for longer than it will last. I also have it on good authority that it freezes well, but I haven't had any last long enough to test this myself.

Spicy Pineapple Teriyaki Flank Steak

Let's get something straight: There are few things that I enjoy more in life than picnics and barbecues. Any chance to combine them is even better. This lovely meal was pre-meditated grilling combined with impromptu picnic. Does it get any better?



This also serves as an excellent reminder that my memory of recipes is somewhat (read: extremely) unreliable. I ended up with a couple of un-identified greenish-yellow peppers. This made me think of a recipe for flank steak that I just knew was a spicy-fruity-teriyaki in Cooking at the Academy. Fun fact: there is a recipe for flank steak in that book, and it bears precisely no resemblance, aside from the cut of beef, from what I was imagining.

Left to my own devices, I came up with the following:

2 peppers
1 can crushed pineapple
1 1/2" ginger, peeled and grated
1/3 c soy sauce
1/8 c brown sugar, packed

I started by seeding the peppers by cutting around the tops with a thin-bladed knife and pulling out the seeds by the stem:


Next, I sliced the peppers into thin pepper rings, roughly 1/8" thick. I threw those in a large, well-sealing plastic tupperware-thing along with the crushed pineapple, and then grated the ginger into the mixture. Then I added the soy sauce and brown sugar, put the lid on, and gave everything a good shake to mix the ingredients.

At this point, add the flank steak, making sure to bury it well in the marinade. Put the tupperware in the fridge and leave it there for at least a few hours, and up to overnight.

When you are ready to cook, heat up the grill, fish out the flank steak, wipe off any excess marinade, and grill to your heart's content. Keep an eye on the meat so that you get it to whatever level of doneness pleases you. I generally go for a true medium, where it is still pink inside, but is warm throughout.

When your meat is cooked how you like it, pull it off and let it rest for a couple of minutes on a cutting board to let the juices re-distribute and then slice it against the grain. Serve and enjoy.

(Food safety hint: NEVER EAT A MARINADE WITHOUT COOKING IT. If you want to make a sauce from the marinade, strain out the chunks and BOIL the marinade. Would you lick raw hamburger? Then why would you use a marinade as a sauce?)

Door County's Finest

My coworker, PK, came in today and set down a giant (seriously) tupperware on the lunch table.

Inner Voice: Cherries?

PK: My friend went to Door County this weekend and gave us a bunch of cherries.

Inner voice: Cherries!

PK: But they are not really good for eating...

Inner voice: Jam?

PK: they are really sour, not sweet like regular cherries.

Inner voice: Jam!!!

PK: I was wondering if you wanted to do anything with them, like make a pie or something.

Outer voice: I will bring you jam tomorrow!

After a quick consultation with the almighty Google, I found a man after my own heart. The link is David Lebovitz's non-recipe for cherry jam. I think I may follow his example of non-recipes, because frankly, I seldom really cook by them. Writing up the hummus I felt like I was focusing so much on trying to figure out how much of whatever I was using, I couldn't replicate my standard hummus because I was using too much of my engineer-brain and not enough of my food-brain. I'm thinking future posts will be more in the vein of knitting recipes, where the focus is getting the end product by trying on as you go and making any necessary alterations, than chemistry experiments, which tend to be explicit about the steps while strictly prohibiting putting things in your mouth.

Ingredients:
Bucket 'o Door County's Finest
Lemons
Sugar
Almond Extract

I started by pitting the roughly 10-12 cups of cherries , and then chopped them into bits, ending up with roughly 5-6 cups of this:



(I highly recommend putting your phone on hands free and catching up with your calls for this part. I also highly recommend a cherry pitter. It is a unitasker, but it does its job very, very well.)

To the cherry bits, I added the zest and juice of two lemons and then threw the whole mess into an enameled cast-iron pot, brought it slowly up to a simmer, and then cooked it, stirring, for about 25 minutes (in an un-air-conditioned apartment, in July, no less. This has been killing my desire to cook of late. A donkey cart full of cherries solves all of life's problems).

After everything was nice and soft, I measured out my cherry mush (in my case, 3 cups) and added 3/4 as much sugar as there was mush (which was 2 1/4 cups). Usually I don't put in nearly as much sugar as recommended because I don't like super-sweet jams, but these puppies were sour and two lemons sure didn't help. After stirring in the sugar, I put everything back on the heat, this time cranking it as high as it would go. I brought the now-rather-sticky goop back to boiling, stirring the whole time, and kept it going strong until it was jelling on the my frozen spoons (I put all of my tablespoons in my beer-mug in the freezer before starting this bit). After pulling everything off the heat, I added a tiny splash of almond extract, because cherries and almonds were meant to be together (now I want scones).



I canned two using a water bath, and the half-jar is in the fridge, silently willing me to make bread tomorrow.

I seem to have a tendency to over-thicken my jam. This doesn't bother me texturally, but I am somewhat disappointed to get 1 1/4 pints of jam from a metric arse-ton of cherries, awesome though that jam may be. I consulted my sister, and she recommended actually using pectin next time, or at least using my candy thermometer to make sure I'm not boiling past jelly, i.e. 220 deg. F.

In conclusion, JAM!!!