The Rice of the Incas

Quinoa (spelt Kin-vah) has been a traditional South American staple for centuries. Its supposedly as common as our millets here. The missus and me, being frequent visitors to Heidi Swanson's website, where she uses quinoa extensively, often wondered what it would be like.

I happened to lay my hands on some red quinoa in the course of my travels. After a packed Saurday night schedule, neither of us were in a mood to make anything elaborate for breakfast. I took it on myself to try out this cereal. The instructions said it could be treated as rice and cooked as such.

I'd decided to try something simple which wouldn't overwhelm the grain. I tossed some onion and garlic into a soup pan and then mixed in the quinoa, toasting it well in the olive oil. 2 cups of water and 20mts later, my grain was cooked, with a translucent look. I added some newly bought grand padano, toasted pecan halves and pine nuts and fresh coriander.

The texture was nutty with a delicious bite, but certainly something that is an acquired taste. The olive oil and salt balanced the nuttiness with the cheese providing just the right amount of sourness.

This is definitely wort exploring more. Apart from its obvious health benefits, its a great texture grain to add into any salad.

My first Baguette

With the missus getting really good at breads, I decided it was time I did some experimenting of my own. My bible on this has loosely been The Breadbakers Apprentice. The problem is the time you need to invest in getting the traditional process completed - about 20hours, of which you need to be in the vicinity for the last 6. Given work schedules, this is only possible on the weekends.
I wanted to see if I could get this done in the course of a work week.
The original poulish was kept for around 14hrs and the rest of the ingredients were added in using a slightly modified recipe found here.

The resulting bread was ok, not great, but just about ok. The adage 'Practise makes perfect' is definitely true in this case. All in all, the left overs of the baguette go into making some perfect summer gazpacho - now thats something I'm really looking forward to.

Lazy Fridays

The best part of Friday evenings is that you don't have to run against time to get something ready for dinner. Its also a great time to get into the kitchen to get those biceps working and work up some fresh pasta.


The fun thing about pasta is that you can use pretty much any veggie as a filler with minimal fuss. Come to think of it, you're having chapati's with veggies--very Indian.

Its also simple food to chomp on when you have guests, great for kids to experiment with (different shapes) to keep them occupied enough to eat it as well.

I personally love fresh pasta with a dash of olive oil, garlic, salt & pepper, hydrated sun dried tomatos and a generous sprinkling of romano. Way to my heart....

The Havarti Chronicles - part 2

So here I am, a few months after my first attempt at a hard cheese.

Delighted with my second attempt. The cheese is edible! and just about aged - around 4 weeks. The difference being the constant monitoring over the first few weeks to make sure there was no mould developing, once the mould developed, cleaning it, rubbing with olive oil and tightly packing it in clingfilm. This demands that I increase my production to be able to sample more batches and improve on where I need to. Plan to increase batch size to at least 3 litres and build the necessary equipment to manage it – maybe even a cheese press :-)

Thrilled that simple buttermilk can help create this kind of texture and taste. This one is haphazardly infused with fresh basil - as an afterthought so its not very uniformly distributed.

The challenge is to get fresh milk, being summer there seems to be a sudden shortage at the local cowshed's.

Gone Crackers at Midnight....the Cinderella Chef

The wife and me have a strange problem on our hands. Junior has suddenly advanced his bedtime by nearly an hour. That means we've got that much less time on our hands in the evening to sit back and chat.
Junior has also grown up a fair bit. To him, if he's gonna sleep, so too must the parents. Were both pretty tired by the end of the day and land up napping with him.

On one such night, I got up at around 11.30 and for some strange reason wandered into the kitchen (where else!) half asleep. The missus was in lala-land so didnt want to disturb. Looked around and suddenly felt hungry. The oven was inviting and thats all I needed.

I've always had an urge to make my own wheat crackers. The salty stuff that's passed off as 'saltines' is much too drab after a while where all you can taste is the salt and buttery biscuit. Scrolling through the recipe library at home, settled on one that seemed fairly easy.
I havent copied recipe's before but the missus insists that I should. So here goes

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/8 tsp salt
1 tbsp oil
3 tbsp water

This makes about 20 9-inch long crackers (around 3/4 inch wide). The recipe called for pre-heating the oven to 180C while I was mixing ingredients.

The recipe is a scaled down version of the original so I guess that threw the water measure out of whack. Anyways, landed up with at least 3 more tbsp of water to get the dough to be pliable enough.
the recipe also called for the rolled out dough to be not more than 1/8 inch thick.
At 12pm, i wasnt going to try and get that done with the conventional rolling pin. Eyes fell on the ever dependable pasta machine. Rolled it out to the 2nd mark on the machine - same as i would for all the regular pasta's as well.

Once done, the sheets went into the oven for 10 mts. seems that was a little too long so landed up burning the first batch. Brought the timer down to 7mts - just right. As a side, I roasted some peppers as well with a thought of creating something later.

Had a peaceful bite before tucking on for the night.

Methinks this is a good step to a life of cracker & dip addiction. (Evil thoughts come to mind - of cream cheese, salsa & muhammara). More to follow on the weekend.....

Gnocchi adventures

Gnocchi, I believe is the ultimate in Italian pasta's. Flavourful and light, requiring patience to make and simplicity in presentation are its hallmarks.
I make it a point to ask the waiter at an Italian restaurant whether they serve it and if yes, I close the menu and ask for it. I've had some great gnocchi at the F&B restaurant, spoken to the chef and tried to replicate it many a time.

My attempts thus far have resulted in tough, rubbery bits of potato and flour. This time, I decided to go easy on the flour to test the other side of the recipe. Heidi Swanson in her blog talks about her method of making gnocchi. Thats what I based my recipe on this time, minus the egg and russel potato's - I dont believe the chefs in Bangalore bother much about the type of tuber they use.

With the wife busy with glasswork, cooking for lunch on Saturday fell on me.

Step1. Boiling the potatos. Thanks to that ubiquitous kitchen gadget - the pressure cooker, this got done in under 10mts. Added some sweet potato as well to the mix.
Once done, skinned and mashed the potato's with a fork to get it all together. The recipe calls for seasoning with salt at this stage, once the mash has cooled. In hindsight, I believe this most probably resulted in the mass getting gooey with all the water being expelled from the tuber.

Started off bringing the dough together by sprinkling dough over the lump of potato and gently kneading the mix with a fork. I must have used about half a cup of flour for 2 standard sized potato's

Once done, I cooked these in boiling water. Was pleasantly surprised to see them bob up to the surface in a few minutes. Of course, its not magic - they were cooked and done at the time and so the rising.

The accompaniments to this were a simple zucchini and cherry tomato combination with a cream and blue cheese sauce, which eventually turned out to be over the top. Notes to self - cut down on creamy sauces and use pesto or tomato based sauces instead, there's more you can innovate with those.

Verdict - ok for a genuine first attempt. As is evident from the photographs, the gnocchi came out gooey. I'm ok with that since I've now straddled the boundaries of flour addition quite well. The next attempt should be better.

If its Friday it must be Chinese!!

The remaining pasta dough from the previous ravioli adventure and some great bok choy and fresh looking oyster mushrooms were good enough to think 'Chinese'!!
No expert at cooking it, but had a general idea on what I wanted to make. Quickly thawed out the dough from the refrigerator. While that happened, added the ubiquitous ginger-garlic to hot oil. I'd bought some poblano chillies from the US a while ago and decided it was a good idea to experiment. I dunked one gigantic chilly in hot water for 10mts, drained, de-seeded and cut it into ribbons to add to the bok choy and oyster mushrooms. Mixed in a bit of soy sauce and was good to go with my topping.
Cut out tagliatelle-shaped noodles, cooked these in hot water and ladled them onto serving plates directly. Topped these with the veggie mix and toasted pecans and pine nuts.

Verdict - quite good. could have made do with a little oil for the noodles coz they dried out pretty quick when left on the plate.