It's all about comfort foods this week. Noodles and curry coconut sauce in this case.. I started with one of Bittman's braised tempeh recipes. Have you ever tried tempeh? I have come around to really liking it, although I was laughing with friends recently that I can't even tell what a normal person would consider good anymore, because my taste for food is so varied these days. I do drink fermented beet juice, after all (yes, yes, it sounds horrific.. but you don't even know how good it is). I think tempeh falls in to the same category for many people.
I remember years ago buying tofu and putting it in stir fries, and then eating around it because the truth was, I didn't like it. But now that I have learned the tricks to cooking it up properly, it is a fantastic satisfying meal.
I had the same experience with tempeh. Tempeh is an Indonesian invention, traditionally made of whole soy beans formed into a cake and fermented. It is very high in B vitamins. Like all fermented bean foods, it has a full, earthy flavor, and can be a bit much for some palates. When I first tried it out I would use entire blocks of the stuff, grilled or whatever, and I just didn't like it.
Bittman is a genius with these kinds of things though. In his discussion of tempeh, he explains that because it is so strong, it does well paired with really rich or sweet and sour tastes. Also, he suggests crumbling it into dishes instead of trying to eat a huge piece of the stuff. In this recipe, you crumble it into an oiled pan and fry it with garlic, ginger, and curry powder and then add even parts veggie stock and coconut milk and let the sauce boil down for 15 minutes or so. The original recipe calls for some chopped cabbage added near the end, but I had some kale on hand and it worked nicely.
Fortunately kale, like other substantial and slightly bitter greens, also mellow out beautifully with the addition of something rich (coconut milk) or sweet and sour (for example, try kale sauteed with some apple cider vinegar and maple syrup).
I served the dish with rice noodles. With help from Bittman, the tempeh was fantastic.
Check out this sweet logo. I got a t-shirt from Black Sheep Heap on Etsy. I am also tempted by Yes We Can. How awesome is that?
My SO and I have taken on the (little did we know) epic task of converting a former RV pad covered in sod into a productive garden. We are also aiming to do so on a budget. This has meant tilling the soil the old fashioned way.. pulling out stones one at a time. We discovered, much to our dismay, a huge amount of pea gravel underneath the sod. Here is the garden in process, SIX WEEKS after we (and by 'we' I mean mostly E, with me pitching in for a few hours at a time..) began. We have removed over 20 wheelbarrows full of gravel, no joke. Filled every pothole in the alley, with some to spare.
We could have done raised beds and avoided all this, however that's where the budget factor comes in. That much wood and trucked in loam is expensive. It probably would have cost us $600.00 or more. We have brought in some loam ourselves, which reduced costs significantly. Locally, a delivered square yard of loam is $125, but if you go pick it up yourself at Burnco it's $20.
After a ton of work, we have one third of the garden space ready for planting. We amended the soil with two garbage cans of organic matter and compost, and some composted manure. Hopefully we will only need manure for the first two years as we build up the soil. We will also need to add some phosphate rock and blood meal (that just sounds gross, doesn't it?) as we discovered through testing that the soil is depleted in phosphorous and nitrogen.
It's all about comfort foods this week. Noodles and curry coconut sauce in this case.. I started with one of Bittman's braised tempeh recipes. Have you ever tried tempeh? I have come around to really liking it, although I was laughing with friends recently that I can't even tell what a normal person would consider good anymore, because my taste for food is so varied these days. I do drink fermented beet juice, after all (yes, yes, it sounds horrific.. but you don't even know how good it is). I think tempeh falls in to the same category for many people.
I've been looking for alternate grains to wheat, and millet has proven to be a great option. I especially appreciate that I can find local millet, as I read that it is best consumed within 6 months because it is technically a seed, not a grain and therefore contains volatile oils. It is high in B vitamins, and one cup of cooked millet provides 26% of daily magnesium requirements. In looking into millet, I found that it is a major subsistence crop in Africa, often ground into flour for injera, which is a crepe-like fermented bread. Injera is definitely on my to do list.. I have had the pleasure of home made injera in the past and it is really, really nice. In Ethiopia, the bread serves as a base for meals, and is used to scoop up the food in the same way naan is used for Indian dishes. Our friends told us that forks are associated with the colonialist oppressor! Injera is a powerful cultural symbol in Ethiopia, in the same way that rice is in Asia. (In South Korea, the friendly 'how are you' greeting is 'have you eaten rice today?')
The Asian food kick continues. A trip to Superstore led to a fridge full of gai lan (what I would do for organic gai lan, sigh..) and many delicious meals. I also picked up some daikon, which became daikon kimchi and Dubu Mu Jorim (tofu and daikon in soy sauce). I hadn't had the tofu dish since I was living overseas and it was as good as I remember. Daikon is really nice cooked, it feels like comfort food. I don't think I've ever seen it in a cooked dish in Canada.
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