Upside-Down Pear

Last night, I made broiled head-on chili shrimp, Chinese noodles, and vegetable stir-fry for dinner. The stir-fry was simple — just onions, bok choy, oyster mushrooms, and some seasonings — but delicious. We had noodles and some stir-fry left over, and it occurred to me that it might make a good breakfast, paired with an egg somehow.

Scramble the egg and go frittata-style? Scramble it and fry up like pad thai? Egg on the side? Egg over top?

I settled on a variant of the Greek fried egg: 1/4 c. olive oil in my big skillet, and an egg for each of us in that. It seemed to me that the crisp brown edges and silky-smooth middles of these eggs would compliment the leftovers well.

As for the leftovers themselves, I warmed them in the microwave, then added them to a pan where I’d sauteed some extra onion in chili oil, and tossed to coat. Once they were thoroughly warmed, I divided them into two shallow bowls, popped the fried eggs on top, and dressed them with a sprinkle of soy sauce and a dash of chili oil.

They were hot and crisp and fresh-tasting, with just enough spice to be interesting.

Nat rated it “A+! Would eat again!” — and that’s good enough for me.

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!)

I’ve had a cup and a half of mashed bourbon sweet potatoes sitting in my fridge since Monday-ish, and today I got around to using them.  There are lots of options for using up mashed sweet potatoes — you can usually sub them one-for-one in recipes calling for mashed pumpkin, butternut squash, or bananas, for example.

I found a recipe for molasses pumpkin bread, changed it around to suit myself, and made it.  Mmmmm.

Ingredients
Dry
* 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon cinnamon (true cinnamon, if you have it)
* 1 1/2 teaspoon ginger
* 1 tsp five-spice powder
* 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 3/4 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/8 teaspoon black pepper

Wet
* 6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
* 2/3 cup blackstrap molasses
* 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 cup mashed sweet potatoes (leftover is fine, even if pretty heavily spiced)
* 1/4 cup milk
* 3/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease a 9×5 loaf pan.

Whisk together the first 8 ingredients.

In a separate bowl (preferably in a stand mixer), beat the butter for a minute or so, then gradually beat in the molasses.  Because blackstrap molasses is so dark, it won’t lighten like brown sugar or lighter molasses does, so keep an eye on it and beat in the eggs, one at a time, when the butter and molasses look well-blended.

Beat in the sweet potatoes, milk, and vanilla.

Add in the flour mixture and stir until just combined (by hand is better than in the mixer).

Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for about 1 hour.  (Always check center with a skewer or clean knife before removing from oven!)

Cool 5 minutes in pan, then run a knife blade around the edges and unmold.  Place on wire rack to cool the rest of the way.

Nat claims that this combines the best aspects of pumpkin pie with the best aspects of gingerbread.  I think it’s not quite right, yet.  I’m toying with the idea of upping the spice levels next time, or possibly modifying Ray’s Wicked Gingerbread into a sweet potato recipe. Just in case I end up with leftover sweet potatoes again, you know?

This morning, I went looking for coffee cake recipes. I found one that at first glance, looked interesting, but on a deeper read…well, I thought it would be pretty dreadful. I was too lazy to look up more, though, so instead I altered it on the fly into some tasty muffins.

Spicy Winter Muffins

dry ingredients
2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 c crystallized ginger
1/2 c diced dried apricots
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder

wet ingredients
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk or clabbered milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix by muffin method.

Bake in greased muffin tin, 20-22 minutes for regular muffins, 25-28 minutes for large muffins, or until a knife stuck in the middle of a muffin comes out clean.

Yield: 12 regular muffins, or 6 large muffins.

The “muffin method” is very simple: mix dry ingredients together in one bowl. Mix wet ingredients together in another. Add wet to dry and stir until just combined. (Yes, this will be lumpy.)

That’s all. If you do this properly, you will never know the sadness of a tough chewy muffin. Instead, all your muffins will be tender and delicious.

These particular muffins are true to their coffee cake heritage, and are scandalously delicious split and buttered, with a mug of joe on the side.

One of the few spice blends that I buy instead of making myself is garam masala, a spice blend common in India and South Asia. There are about as many recipes for garam masala as there are people who make it, but most recipes include cardamom, cinnamon, fennel, coriander, and black pepper at a minimum; fenugreek, cloves, cumin, and nutmeg are also frequent players. I keep all of these ingredients around, so why not make my own? It’s no harder than the curry spices I blend, and I love making spice mixes: measuring, weighing each thing in my hand, crushing out the scents and dust of the spices with my mortar and pestle.

The real reason, I think, is that I go through garam masala so quickly that I’d be making a fresh batch every week, and there’s only so much time in my life. I use it not only in savory dishes such as curries and chili, but also in sweet ones; I often replace the half the cinnamon in dessert recipes with garam masala. It took me a while to start doing that, and you can’t do it with all commercial blends (the one sold in bulk by Whole Foods, for example, is far too heavy on the cumin for this use; the one from Penzey’s, on the other hand, is about perfect). The garam masala imparts a warmer, softer flavor than plain cinnamon.

Here is one of my favorite uses for garam masala:

Special Pancakes with Fruit and Whipped Cream
Pancake recipe (makes 10-12 medium pancakes):

Wet ingredients

• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

Dry ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp garam masala

Blend dry ingredients. Blend wet ingredients. Blend blended ingredients - it will be a bit lumpy, and that’s fine. Cook in butter as you would any pancakes.

Toppings

Fruit: Raspberries, sliced strawberries, blueberries.

Whipped cream: whipping cream & confectioner’s sugar. Whip cream with a whisk in a metal bowl, or in a mixer. Add confectioner’s sugar while whipping, to taste.

Other: dark brown sugar

Bringing it home

Make the pancakes, then top with fruit and whipped cream, and sprinkle with brown sugar.

I keep a well-stocked spice cabinet; I tend to spice on the fly, often without tasting, putting flavors together in my head and trusting in my eye and hand to make things come out correctly. It’s a dangerous enterprise, and not for the faint of heart - and not something to do with unfamiliar spices. Once, my mother-in-law had me spicing a beet salad for her, and stopped what she was doing when she saw me tip the hot Chinese pepper into my hand, press a fingertip into it, and taste it. She seemed surprised and pleased, and I wondered what maniacs she had encountered who would willy-nilly toss spices in without knowing the flavor of them.

I remember tasting that pepper, calculating the flavor of beets and onions, and asking for cumin: the heat from the pepper would not be enough to set off the sweetness of the vegetables, and it would sparkle so much better against the cumin. I remember eating that salad, cool and sweet, with a depth and consequence to it, and a brightness, like sunlight on the ocean. (It was, I think, my first pleasant experience with beets, which I had previously encountered in some dreadful borscht and in my paternal grandmother’s pickled eggs. It seems strange to me, now, that I knew enough of their flavor to spice them appropriately.)

At home, with my intimately-known and well-loved spices, I am not cautious. This has more successes than failures, fortunately for me - though the time I wasn’t paying attention and put ground cumin in the hot cocoa will haunt me forever.