The Delicious Element of Surprise

I've been inspired by Indian cuisine for some years now. Learning to prepare it under the tutelage of a special friend introduced me to the alchemy of cooking, It stimulated my curiosity about recipes, unusual ingredients, and intriguing tastes and aromas that one could concoct.

I love basic American comfort food, but it now lacks for me the surprise; the unusual flavor that sneaks up on you. Good ole' American Green beans and onions with a little bacon or some bacon grease can bring fond memories. Now with my Indian cuisine inspiration I take those beans and onions to another level with a can of diced tomatoes and a little Garam Masala (a dry Indian spice mixture) - a Comfort food/Indian fusion! Chicken salad with celery and onions for crunchiness, pickles for tang and Best Foods Mayonnaise, of course, is a fond memory for most. You cannot imagine how that same chicken salad can be taken to another level using left over tandoori chicken and tossing in some pecans and dried cranberries - Yum City!

Recently I came across an unusual chicken salad recipe with that "surprise" dimension. I had to try it, I did, and it was a keeper. Everyone who tried it loved it. It caught my eye because it used some ingredients with which I've become more familiar, chutney and curry powder. (Interestingly, though, many of the Indian recipes I make do not include curry powder.) I keep Trader Joe's Mango Chutney in the larder at all times now. It's a perfect dipping sauce for pot stickers and pork or shrimp balls (available frozen from Trader Joe's). It's a perfect replacement for that mint jelly on lamb. (See the link to the food blog below on creative ways to use Chutney) This interesting chicken salad recipe also caught my eye because it would be easy to keep all the ingredients on hand for a quick hors d oeuvres or lunch. I made it the first time exactly as described and used canned chicken. Left over chicken, cranberries instead of cherries and cashews or pecans rather than peanuts would work.

Not Our Mother's Chicken Salad

2 cups shredded cooked chicken or1-12 oz can chicken meat *

1/3-cup mayonnaise
6 ½ oz. can crushed pineapple, drained
¼ cup mango chutney *
1 cup dried cherries *
Curry powder to taste (I ended up using about 1 teaspoon for a light curry taste )
¼ cup chopped peanuts, if desired *

·Available at Trader Joe’s

 Mix the mayonnaise, pineapple, and chutney. Season with a little curry I started with ½ teaspoon. Add chicken, cherries and peanuts and more curry if desired (I used canned chicken and it was great).

I could see using dried cranberries and cashews or pecans in the place of the cherries and peanuts.

Here is a link to some other great ideas for using chutney
http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com/2005/03/all-about-chutney.html

The Oriental Restaurant

The Oriental Restaurant was the first and only source for Chinese food in my 1950’s American community. It was something unusual and became a hit with my family very quickly. Even my grandparents, kids from the back woods of Idaho, became fond of the unusual food mixtures.

Chow Mien, in those days, was a mixture of celery, onions, water chestnuts and bean sprouts with julienne chicken, pork or small shrimp served on top of crispy noodles. It was served with rice cooked in a way no rice had ever been cooked in our house, fried with egg, vegetables and a savory sauce. Been sprouts, water chestnuts, rice with egg, these ingredients and mixtures were unusual but so tasty. My Dad expanded his menu favorites to include Almond Chicken, sort of a Chinese version of good ole fried chicken, breaded chicken pieces with a savory sauce graced with chopped almonds. The Won Ton soup preceding the dishes was a simple clear broth with a fat stuffed noodle. Noodles and broth were familiarly American but seemed oddly exotic served in this simple way and the adding of soy sauce was my first introduction to enhancing dishes with sauces.

The ubiquitous soy sauce that sat atop each table to enhance the dishes served played a role in one of my earliest memories as a maturing child. I remember sitting in a booth with my folks at the Oriental Restaurant and hearing them jokingly refer to the soy sauce as ‘bug juice’. I believed it and think it was much later as an emerging adult that I thought about that, learned different and went on to expand my ethnic food horizons. I wonder now about the ‘bug juice’ incident, was it a clue about some remaining reticence of common American folks to trying foods from cultures very unfamiliar. I have fond memories of the Oriental Restaurant and of being introduced to different foods. It was the beginning of my awareness of lives different from my own.

Gladiolas and Mom

Red Gladiolas lined up stately along the flower bed in front of the short retaining wall that contained our small sloped lawn. I remember my mother standing next to them posing in a short sleeved dress, short brown hair and in her hand-made shoes from the White Shoe Company in Spokane. Those shoes made a statement about my mother. Clearly the small round shoes indicated a handicap of sorts. She never exhibited any handicap, though. She rarely spoke of the twelve operations she had endured, before age twelve, to enable her to walk on club feet. She never complained, she danced and ran and volunteered and had a career. Others should learn from her. And she felt good about herself, you could see it as she smiled next to those red gladiolas.

Restaurant Bliss

We roamed the aisles of Uwajimaya today. The Bellevue, WA Oriental supermarket moved, after thirty some years, to a new location near downtown Bellevue. All the years we lived on the East Side (around here what we call communities across Lake Washington to the east of Seattle). The old location was across from a restaurant we used to frequent in the 1980’s, Kamon of Kobe. Husband loved the sushi, and I loved the tempura, Udon soups the side salads with a sweet tangy sesame dressing and sometimes the soupy beef of Sukiyaki. It was a familiar Wednesday night destination. The rich and peaceful ambiance, the laughter and quiet conversation in a favorite booth--what memories.

Eating out has been hobby and since Husband cooks gourmet and went on to write a food column for two magazines for eight years, food has been a serious hobby. McCormick’s on 4th Avenue in Seattle was another favorite place and the site of our first date. They have a Bouillabaisse with a deeply satisfying broth. They won’t serve it until the broth has aged a couple days. Oh, and their Chocolate Decadent, a small round dense and moist indulgence.

Another type of restaurant memory comes from the Farmhouse restaurant in Anacortes, ninety minutes north in the San Juan Islands. Living weekends on our ketch up there, Sunday mornings, especially Seahawk mornings, would find us relaxed in the bar having breakfast. We were football fans then, in the era of Craig and Largent. Husband would always get a few pull tabs (he’s from Vegas and sometimes they would buy our breakfast). He loved their perfectly appointed Eggs Benedict, always enjoyed with shakes of Tabasco. I enjoyed the breakfast buffet and can almost taste the fried potatoes and thick smoky bacon. If we lunched there it was always the hot turkey sandwich (they roasted turkeys daily). And, it was one of those places with homemade pies piled high with perfectly browned meringue, oozing with berries, or the pumpkin pie with huge dollops of fresh whipped cream. The only trouble was their meal portions were so large there; you’d have to stop by for dessert only.

We’ve been fortunate to have many memories of enjoying delicious food together starting with the thick and juicy stuffed pork chops from a local meat market that husband cooked on the Weber grill for our first serious evening together. Yes, I was seduced by pork chops, but you’d have to taste my husband’s pork chops to really understand.

Not Many Food Surprises Left

We love Chorizo sausage fried up with eggs. We have many good memories of casual, lingering breakfasts with the Sunday paper at Halisco's on 1st Avenue in Seattle, savoring Chorizo and eggs. We'd tear off pieces of warm flour tortillas and maybe add a bit or sour cream and salsa or maybe just savor the flavors of the mildly spicy sausage.

It was a new treat for me. My husband, though, has loved the dish since young adulthood. He remembers when stationed for training in the Army at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He had no money for luxuries like eating out. He recalls walking by a restaurant one day and being stopped by amazing aromas. He stood there transfixed watching folks through the window eating a big plate of chorizo sausage fried up with eggs. They would tear off pieces of hot tortillas and scoop up some of the egg and sausage mixture. "I was salivating, it looked and smelled so delicious", he remembered. "I vowed to myself that when I got rich, I was going to have that for breakfast every day!"

Today was a hallmark in our lives. There are few food surprises left for people who love food as much as we do and who have been as adventuresome with it as my husband. We are open to everything. We each have a couple things we truly don't like, but which we've been willing to try at least once. For me it's raw oysters and most sushi for husband it's beef tongue and for both of us it's tofu. We are comfortable with our quirks and certainly not deprived. One year, sometime back, cilantro was showing up in foods more often and we realized we really didn't care for the taste. Husband decided, though, that we were going to learn to like its flavoring potentials. I was game, so, during the year of Cilantro, we tried it often, he cooked with it and it became a flavor favorite. So you food stubborns out there, you can evolve!

Tofu, though, was a different matter. Yes we'd tried it. Husband couldn't stand the tasteless, pudding-like texture of soft tofu and, to him, the barbecued chunks weren't worth the bother of chewing. He would tolerate small pieces of it floating in Miso or Hot and Sour Soup but, to him, it had no redeeming qualities and could never fool his palette. I would try to convince myself I enjoyed the taste of the barbequed chunks of harder tofu I'd try at the deli counter of the natural food market, but I never could really perpetuate the lie on myself. I saw no redeeming feature and I'd rather have a noodle floating in my soup than some slimy tofu.

Then came a gift from someone who knows our food tastes fairly well. She gave it as a gift because she knew we would never buy it and would only try it because of her kindness in sharing. A ten-inch loop of Chorizo.......TOFU. It looked just like a loop of sausage with the deep orangish red characteristic of Chorizo. We assured her, with a bit of laughter and some smirking, that we would try it. "Take about a 1/4 of it out of the casing and fry it up "like sausage" she offered. "Whisk two eggs and add them, frying the mixture up just like chorizo and eggs". OH KAY...we rolled our eyes. Then it sat in the fridge for about a week. We'd look at it, and then decide on something definitely more tasty. But it sat there guilting us. We were adventurous eaters...yeah but it's TOFU!...yeah but who knows...SURE, we know!. Imagining that white-gooey-Miso-soup-floating stuff,

I finally took it out on a Saturday morning. How were we going to get past knowing it's TOFU? I melted a bit of butter in our coated electric frying pan, and then squeezed about a quarter of the loop into the pan, breaking it up a bit with the turner. Hmm, it looked amazingly like Chorizo sausage. The aroma of the familiar spices wafted up from the warming mixture. I turned it over and it had browned nicely still looking eerily like the real stuff. I whisked the eggs and dumped them on top and began mixing them in and frying. Husband was watching all this with a very wary eye, but so far nothing had assaulted or insulted his senses...just the familiar, pleasant memory of the aroma of Chorizo and eggs from that youthful, Arizona morning.

I scooped up some for each of us into half a warmed flour tortilla with just a light smear of butter. Then we both had a Twilight Zone moment. It was delicious. The texture, the flavor, the aroma, everything about it was perfect. In fact, it didn't have the grease which is the only down side to real Chorizo. This moment was a first for husband who has never been turned around by a food he's spent years determined he didn't like on many planes. We loved it; we will eat it again. It isn't one of those flukes you try in a store and think you'll like again but can't figure out what you were thinking when you try to make it. Chorizo Tofu, who in the world would have thought!

If you're intrigued and have a Trader Joe's market near you, it's Trader Joe's Soy Chorizo.

I made a tasty fritatta! I made a tasty fritatta!

Yes, I'm singing. I've been trying fritattas off and on for a while never really hitting the mark of delicious. Last night I had fried up 3 lbs of hamburger with onions, celery, bell pepper and garlic and froze it in 1 cup packages for future use. I had purchased a cauliflower to make a potato cauliflower curry (recipe in a past post). I had some fresh cilantro and I had purchased a new bottle of oregano. It all came together perfectly. My sign of excellence - my excellent but discriminating cook of a husband went back for a second slice!

Here's my recipe for the resulting, delicious fritatta (an Italian omelet)

Ingredients:
4 eggs, whisked together
1/4 cup milk, whisked into the eggs
1/4 cup cheddar cheese, finely grated
3 or 4 tablespoons very small cauliflower floweretts, steamed (for ease I use a microwave steamer)
1/3 cup hamburger mixture (made with onion, green pepper, celery, garlic)
2 tablespoons chopped onion/green pepper (if using plain hamburger add more chopped onion/green pepper)
2 Tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
1/4 teas oregano
a couple shakes of red pepper flakes
Johnny's Seasoning Salt to taste, (about 1/8 to 1/4 teas.)

Instructions:
Whisk eggs and milk together.
Steam cauliflower flowerettes.
Thaw hamburger (if frozen, thaw by putting in steamer)
Chop cilantro
Mix together then add to egg mixture - hamburger, cauliflower, cilantro, chopped onion/garlic, oregano, red pepper flakes, Johnny's Seasoning Salt.
Add most of the cheese to the egg mixture (retaining a bit for browning under the broiler.
Melt a generous amount of butter to coat bottom and partial sides of about a 10" frying pan that can be placed under the broiler.
Fry the fritatta, lifting the sides as they solidify to let the uncooked egg run underneath.
When the fritatta is fairly solid, place the pan under the broiler to brown the top. When it begins to brown add a bit of cheddar cheese and melt.

Serve with sour cream on the side.

Risotto Stuffed Peppers

With my foray into Indian Cuisine, I've developed a creativity in cooking that is carrying over into non Indian dishes. I had a couple nice bell peppers and I made packages of hamburger mixture that I had frozen last month (hamburger sauteed with celery, onion and garlic). Perfect for stuffed peppers but since recently tasting a bell pepper stuffed with a delicious risotto, that sounded boring. So, off I set to create a delicious risotto for my waiting peppers. I did choose to add some of the hamburger mixture to the risotto but it could have been served with out it.

The ideas of taking the time to carmelize the onion and the sauteeing the rice with the onion and garlic came from things I've learned creating Indian recipes. I, also, looked at four or five risotto recipes, took a little from each and added my own ideas. That confidence definately has come from my mastering an initial learning curve with the Indian Cuisine.

Here's my recipe.

Risotto Stuffed Bell Pepper

Ingredients:
4 large bell peppers (freeze extra stuffed peppers for easy suppers later).
1 cup brown rice or wild rice
1 cup diced tomatoes (I used canned)
3 Tablespoons butter, divided
1 small red onion
2 large cloves garlic
1 can chicken broth
Johnny’s Seasoning Salt
½ cup grated or finely chopped Provolone
A sprinkling of grated cheese of your choice for the top
I added in some precooked hamburger mixture (hamburger sauteed with onion, celery and garlic) leaving the risotto predominent. This could be left out.)

Instructions:
Rinse the rice, set aside. Chop onion fine. Melt 2 Tablespoons butter and sauté the onion until caramelized. Toward the end crush two large garlic cloves and sauté them with the onion. Add 1 Tablespoon butter and rice, make sure rice grains are coated and toasted a bit. Add Tomatoes and mix well. Transfer to a pot, add the chicken broth. When it cooks down a bit, add the Provolone. Season to taste with Johnny’s Seasoning Salt. Simmer until the broth is absorbed and the rice is tender but still has texture.

Core 4 large bell peppers. Fill with the rice. Bake at 400 for ½ hour or until peppers are tender. At end of baking melt some grated cheese of your choice on top. I used cheddar.