with Mary Anne Mohanraj
Still a little too harried to bake from scratch (Kev comes back today, yay!), but I’ve found a banana bread mix I really like (yes, I know those are pumpkins, but I have multiple pretty pumpkin molds, no banana molds (haven’t found any pretty ones), and a habitual excess of bananas in our freezer), and that makes it easy. Miss Jones mix (link in comments). Zinnias by neighbor Sera Sera.
Didn’t sleep well last night, which is very frustrating, because while I made it through teaching okay, I’ve just been dragging since 3 p.m., too tired to do anything. But lying on the couch not doing things (and playing Polytopia while watching re-runs of New Girl with Kavi) eventually just makes me feel depressed. Gah.
I finally managed to eat some dinner, which helped, and Kevin made me tea, which helped, and then I came up and lay in bed instead of on the couch, and looked for a dumb but pretty movie to watch, and settled on Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love, which is kind of perfect because what sounds really nice right now is jetting off to a foreign country, ideally a warm one.
She’s just made it to India, and I’m rested enough to pause and post a few photos off my phone from the last few weeks, clearing it out a little, which is sort of like being productive.
This is a mix of basmati and Sri Lankan red rice, served with chicken curry and chili leeks.
Chai-spiced pumpkin muffins with chocolate chips. They are very delicious, and my kids have been devouring them, but I forgot the baking soda, oops! So they didn’t rise properly.
I’m going to make another batch soon, I think, so will post photos & recipe then – the next batch will go in the autumn treat boxes, which I’m hoping to ship out next week. Lots of sweets-making in the days to come. Watch this space. 
I haven’t had the chance to eat a lot of interesting food on this L.A. trip — mostly serviceable hotel food. But was amused to see this take on elotes (Mexican street corn) — with Hot Cheetos! I haven’t had that before, and it was fun. Anand loves both corn and Cheetos, so I’ll have to try to make this for him.
Though I have to say, this dish was dry enough that I had them bring me some extra sour cream to accompany it. Charred corn = great. Dry corn = bad. I love elotes (one of my favorite foods to eat on a Chicago beach at the end of summer, along with a huge cup of ripe mango with chili, salt and lime), but elotes are supposed to be slathered with something creamy, people. I’m not a Mexican food expert, but I’m going to stand by this claim. Fight me.
Along with the classic cotija cheese, you can use Mexican Crema (ideally), mayo and butter, or sour cream. Just don’t serve elotes to me dry!
One of the things that was fascinating to me about Sunday’s event was seeing people’s reactions to cooking and eating Sri Lankan food for the first time!
For one, several of them said that it seemed much lighter to them than Indian food, which surprised me — I think that’s perhaps because they’ve only had Americanized restaurant Indian food, which tends to be loaded with extra butter / oil. (Which I think is common in lots of restaurants?)
But yes, Sri Lankan food is generally fairly light, I think. Unless you really load up on the rice, or the fried treats at parties.
Okay, so this was my first instant pot experiment, and I definitely went wrong in a few ways. For one, red lentils are delicate and don’t actually take that long to cook, so it doesn’t really make sense to make them in a pressure cooker — the stovetop works fine. All the lentil recipes I looked at warned against red lentils for the pressure cooker!
But I love them, and they’re what I normally cook if I’m making a Sri Lankan lentil dish — I’m pretty sure that’s common throughout the country. Also, I’m nothing if not stubborn. So I figured what the heck, let’s try.
And so I cobbled together a recipe from suggestions here and there, using my own regular Sri Lankan red lentil recipe as the base, and set it going. Only to hear a beep and see the ‘burning’ alarm! OH NO.
(I admit to a brief moment of panic there, that I had perhaps just broken my new expensive device!)
But it turned out to be basically fine — when my instant pot thinks it doesn’t have enough water, and things have started sticking to the bottom, it turns itself off (and tells you it’s burning). So I opened it up, took the lentils out, and there was a little stuck to the bottom, yes, but I’d say more caramelized than burnt; I didn’t feel like it hurt the flavors at all. (A bit of a nuisance to clean, but not bad. Soaking took care of it.)
The lentils overall were quite porridge-like in consistency, but that’s actually how I usually cook them on the stovetop anyway; I like them better that way than the more soup-y preparation that is common. But I’m pretty sure that if you just added 1-2 c. of water, you’d get that version, and without the ‘burning’ warning!
I’ll try that next time, just to know for certain, but here’s the ‘burning’ porridge version, for your amusement. I served it to guests, and they said it was delicous!
2-3 T oil or ghee
2 medium onions
1 stick of cinnamon
3 strips of lemon rind (about a quarter lemon)
dozen curry leaves
2 c. red lentils
1 can coconut milk + 2 can water
1 dried red chili, broken into pieces
1 pinch saffron
1 t. salt
1. Dice two medium onions and put in Instapot with oil, cinnamon stick, lemon rind, and curry leaves. Sauté 2 minutes, stirring. Hit cancel to stop the sauté function.
2. Add lentils, coconut milk, chili, and saffron to pot (should not be more than 1/2 up the pot interior).
3. Seal the lid, then set to cook on HIGH pressure for 10 minutes. (It will take about 8 minutes for the pressure to build, then the timer will begin.) [note –I’m not actually sure where in here it turned itself off, but close to 10 minutes, I think]
4. Once the timer has stopped, let the pressure release naturally for 15 minutes, then vent to release the pressure completely.
5. Open the lid, taste, and adjust seasoning as desired. Serve hot with rice, garnished with cilantro.
Happy Pongal! Pongal is a four-day-long harvest festival celebrated in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (this year it’s Tues Jan 15 – Fri Jan 18) — when crops like rice are harvested. Yes, it’s a little goofy celebrating it in Chicago in midwinter, but any excuse to celebrate, right?
I haven’t made pongal (rice & lentil porridge) before, but I think it came out pretty well. A quick, simple, one-pot dish, packed with protein, that would be even better accompanied by a nice curry –– eggplant, perhaps? Coconut chutney and sambar are traditional accompaniments.
Pongal
20 minutes, serves 4
1 c. rice
1 c. moong dal
4 c. water
1/2 t. salt
2 T butter or ghee
1/2 c. cashews
1/2 c. sultanas
1 t. cumin seeds
8-12 fresh curry leaves
1-2 green chilies, chopped, optional
1. Add rice, dal, water, and salt to a pot. Bring to a boil, cover, and let simmer 15-20 minutes, until cooked.
2. While rice is cooking, heat butter or ghee, sauté cashews, stirring, until golden. Add cumin seeds, sultanas, curry leaves, and green chili if using, stirring for a few more minutes. Mix into cooked rice & lentils and serve hot.
Other standard ingredients: chopped ginger, pinch of asafoetida, turmeric, black peppercorns (whole or crushed).
Delicate and fragrant, with a little nutty goodness to add to your morning or teatime. (If you don’t have a mini scone pan, you can cut and shape these by hand, and bake on a regular baking sheet, placing them quite close together. If you pop them in the freezer for 30 minute before baking, they’ll hold shape better.)
I’ve been experimenting with alternatives to white rice, and alternatives to the traditional Sri Lankan way of eating rice, which is a big plate of rice with a little curry on top. That’s reasonably frugal, but also pretty high in starch and low in fiber (things I pay attention to as I get older and my metabolism slows down).
The problem is that it just doesn’t work to simply reduce the amount of rice and add in quinoa, because you can’t eat it the same way, rolling up the rice and curry into satisfying little balls with your hand and popping them in your mouth. The texture is wrong, the rice and curry won’t hold together in those proportions, etc.
So I figured maybe there was something to this quinoa bowl thing that’s so popular right now, and maybe if I tried to compose a Sri Lankan bowl, that might work better. The red rice + quinoa (cooked in a mix of chicken broth and water) on its own was a little dry, esp. after the first day, so I knew I wanted to add plenty of unctuous rich flavor. Fried egg was an obvious contender (egg hoppers are classic Sri Lankan food, and so delicious), and mackerel curry is nicely traditional (and deliciously spicy). Avocado lent another creamy element, and a cool balance to the heat, and a crisp kale-coconut-onion-tomato sambol was the perfect vegetal accompaniment.
I wasn’t even hungry, but dear reader, I DEVOURED this bowl, and was tempted to fry another egg and go back for seconds. Experiment: wildly successful. (Bonus, this would be easy to pack up and take to work to eat with a fork in the office.)
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll try it with beef curry, for poor Kevin, who doesn’t appreciate fish. Pretty sure that will also work great, keeping all the other elements the same. (A little seeni sambol added in wouldn’t hurt either…)
Okay, this is slightly tricky, since you need to cook it in two batches, but a) tasty, b) nutritious, and c) pretty! I cooked a mix of red rice and quinoa in the rice cooker (on the brown rice setting, which is very slow, so allow extra time). And then cooked some short-grain white rice also in the rice cooker (faster). And then mixed them all together. Yum!
Nutrition comparison below (based on quick googling).
One cup cooked of:
– short-grain white rice (267 calories, 58.9 g carbs, 4.8 g protein, 0 fiber)
– long-grain white rice (205 calories, 44.5 g carbs, 4.3 g protein, 1 fiber
– red rice (216 calories, 45 g carbs, 5 g protein, 4 g fiber)
– quinoa (222 calories, 29 g carbs, 8 g protein, 5 g fiber)