Upside-Down Pear

I’ve been trying hard not to buy too many vegetables in addition to my CSA box, but this week I needed some hot peppers for a dinner I had planned: asparagus curry with chickpea pancakes. I decided at the last minute to make a nice thick curry sauce to go with it all, so my hot peppers ended up stretched a little thin — one each in the asparagus curry, the pancakes, and the sauce.

The asparagus curry, to my taste, needed a bit of black pepper — Nat is always accusing me of thinking everything needs more black pepper — so I added some and it was perfect.

For the sauce, I flipped through my copy of 1000 Indian Recipes until a recipe caught my eye — chickpeas in “traditional curry sauce”. I stole the sauce from that recipe; it cooks up warm and thick, creamy and cuminy.

I also found my chickpea pancake recipe in that book – Crispy Chickpea Crepes – and mixed the batter a little thick, so that they were less crispy and crepelike, more chewy and pancakey.

To serve, we put a spoon of asparagus curry and a spoon of sauce in the pancake and sprinkled it with sliced green onion, then folded the pancake up around it.

I keep remaking this meal in my head, with different components: a mustardy green bean curry and vindaloo sauce; a dry meat curry and raita…it seems endlessly flexible, one of the million million cross-cultural variants of “flavored foody mess wrapped in bready goodness”. It’s a formula that has always served me well.

(In other news, my awesome teammate Katy done got herself married today! Congratulations to Katy & Corey!)

The past week it’s been warm enough that we actually turned our AC on for a few days, and being in the kitchen was miserable; turning on the oven unimaginable. Today, though, it was cool enough that I decided to make two pies featuring produce from our farm share box: rhubarb and ramps.

Ramps are wild leeks, and they’re quite strong-flavored. I had earlier used some in pasta sauce and been very happy with their flavor, so I thought I’d substitute them into my favorite quiche. I’m not sure where the quiche recipe I have comes from; it is the one my mom makes, and I have it scribbled on a post-it note. It’s a fairly basic recipe, with cheese, bacon, and carmelized onion in it, so I just substituted the ramps for the onion and went my merry way.

The other pie is called “rhubarb cream pie”, but has no cream in it — something apparently common to many rhubarb cream pie recipes, because I found about 7023948234 written that way.  It’s just an egg/sugar/flour filling; I figure that if there are that many recipes without a dairy custard, there is possibly a reason.  It might not be a good reason, but I’m not very familiar with rhubarb, so I thought I’d play it safe.

And after almost 2 hours of running the oven, the kitchen was still a reasonable temperature.