Everything but the Kitchen Sink

So a lot has happened since I last posted. Last you heard from me, I was exploring the storm damage from Hurricane Gustav in my neighborhood. Soon after that, I found out that my office building was badly damaged. We've packed up and moved to temporary offices way across town, and I am now a wretched commuter.

I got engaged. And I got a lovely kitten.

Meet Desomond. Some fool dumped this kitty off outside my work, and I just couldn't say no. Desmond enjoys sleeping in my lap and helping (or hindering) making the bed.

And lately I've been testing out Thanksgiving recipes. First I tried a Mark Bittman recipe: Autumn Millet Bake.

It's millet, squash, and cranberries with a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds. The very essence of all things fall. But this isn't The One for me. I don't think I really care for whole cranberries. I know the stuff is full of all that is wrong with food, but I'm an in-the-shape-of-the-can cranberry jelly kind of girl.

Next I tried a portobello mushroom en crote.

En crout is just of fancy way of saying wrapped in puff pastry. If you've been letting puff pastry intimidate you, don't. Working with this stuff is really easy.

This recipe is much more what I was hoping for. It's impressive (who wants dry turkey when you can have decadent, flaky puff pastry). I can serve at room temperature if I can't get to the oven to heat them up. And it's pretty easy. Unfortunately, it's just too much food. We'll be having salad (with my family's special only-on-Thanksgiving salad dressing), roasted Brussels sprouts, rolls, cranberry jelly, stuffing, and sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving. The side dishes are really the stars, and there's just no room for a main that will stuff you to the gills.

I think in the end I'll be going with some kind of cremini mushroom mixture en crout so I can make smaller portions. And I suppose I'll just have to suffer through a trial run. Mmm flaky.

Photos from my neighborhood

This is just a sampling of the hurricane damage in my neighborhood.


The sidewalk here buckled probably from all the water in the soil. I walk here every day.


Many people in Baton Rouge are still without electricity. Some of my coworkers don't expect to have their electricity restored for a month. That's a month without air conditioning, hot showers, cooked food, refrigeration, or the ability to charge your cell phone. Some people and businesses have generators. This generator is powering a hotel where many first responders (and politicians) are staying.


Even though my neighborhood is powered right now, it's a precarious situation. Many trees like this one are just a good gust away from pulling down power lines. This tree was outside the oldest home in my neighborhood and was likely over a hundred years old.

All throughout the city, power lines are down and stoplights are out.

Many streets are blocked because of fallen trees. People are piling the debris on their sidewalks in an effort to get rid of it before Hurricane Ike's winds hit. Right now, all these broken limbs are potential flying objects.

This is the Old Governor's Mansion.

And this is why we shouldn't be complacent about Louisiana's levee system. The levee outside of Baton Rouge is the highest, and probably the safest, in Louisiana. But when even the safest levee is bulging and losing sandbags, something needs to be done. This bulge in the levee first appeared after the Mississippi flooded in the spring.

On ice cream and evacuation

Hello everyone. It's been a while. I evacuated from my hometown for Hurricane Gustav, and I'm so glad I did. Pretty much all of my city was without power for days. It's four days later, and my workplace and many of my friends are still without electricity. I lost several trees, and one narrowly missed hitting my house. The city is under a curfew to prevent crime and new emergencies. (Lots of trees in the roads and dead stop lights make driving interesting.)

I've been holed up in Austin for about a week, and the city has been very nice to me. On my first night here, Dewey and I stopped by Amy's Ice Cream, an Austin tradition. I had a lovely grapefruit sorbet, and Dewey had Shiner Bock ice cream. I was so intrigued I had to recreate it myself. Since I'm in the land of magical second-hand shops, I picked up an ice cream maker at Goodwill.


I took a basic ice cream recipe (the one from Veganomicon) and dropped the vanilla extract and replaced 1/2 cup of soy milk with 1/2 cup of shiner. Dewey has been dying for cinnamon apple ice cream, so that will be our next try.

My Weekend: A Photo Essay

Indian food

I used to be really intimidated by recipes for Indian food. They always had a mile long list of ingredients. Last year I took an Indian cooking class through the local university. Everyone in the class was intimidated by the instructor. "You didn't practice making all the recipes this week!" she would bark at people. "What could be more important than that?" The teacher didn't intimidate me though, and by the time the classes were over, Indian recipes didn't either. If you prep all your ingredients ahead of time and measure out your spices, all that's left is combining everything in the right order.

Going clockwise from the left, that's raita, pulau, rajma, tandoori tofu, and saag. And in English, that's spiced yogurt; rice with vegetables, fruit, and nuts; red beans; tofu baked with a spicy rub; and spinach.

Pulau, sometimes called pilaf, is really flexible. You have to have rice, but you can vary the vegetables, nuts, and dried fruit you use. Here's how I made it.

Pulau

4 cups cooked brown rice
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 onion, sliced
a cinnamon stick
a cardamom pod
2 cloves
1 clove garlic, minced
1 inch ginger, minced
1 teaspoon cayenne
bay leaf
salt
1 cup frozen mixed vegetables (carrots, peas, lima beans, corn, green beans)
1/4 cup raisins
2 tablespoons sunflower seeds
garam masala (optional)

Combine all the spices and set aside. Heat the oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Add the spices, garlic, and ginger and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the onion and cook for another three minutes or until the onion begins to look translucent. Add the vegetables and cook until warmed through. Add the raisins and sunflower seeds and cook another minute. Salt to taste. (You may want to remove the cinnamon stick, cardamom pod, and bay leaf now.)

Combine the vegetable mixture with the cooked rice. You can sprinkle everything with garam masala if you want.

Ratatouille

I once told my mom that she only made two vegetable dishes: stir fry and ratatouille. And the only difference between the two was that the ratatouille had tomatoes. My mom didn't find this funny.

And of course, I've inherited a lot of my mother's cooking style. She may have been right about this one. (Don't tell her I said that though.) This family recipe is another one of those 'throw a bunch of things in a pot and let it cook' types. The beauty of this Mediterranean peasant dish is that all of the ingredients grow at the same time. All of the vegetables in this dish can be found in my parents' garden (probably why it showed up so often). As an apartment dweller, I don't yet have a garden, but I found all of these vegetables at my farmers market (and I snagged the rosemary from a bush outside the museum. Shhh!)

Ratatouille

1 onion, chopped
1 medium eggplant, chopped
3 summer squash, a mixture of zucchini and yellow squash, sliced into rounds
2 tomatoes, chopped
6 mini or 2 medium bell peppers, assorted colors, chopped
2-4 garlic cloves, smashed
1/2 cup olive oil
rosemary (and/or oregano, thyme, marjoram, chervil, or basil)

Combine all the ingredients in the largest pot or sauce pan that you have. Simmer uncovered (don't brown) on medium low for 45 minutes to an hour, until everything is soft. Stir occasionally. The eggplant will be the last to soften. By the time the eggplant is ready, the tomatoes and the onions will have almost disintegrated.

That's it! Use what vegetables you have on hand. My mom sometimes adds mushrooms.

Other eggplant recipes
Eggplant dip
Spicy eggplants

Eggplant dip

When I was learning to cook in college (not what I went to college for!), one of the things I did was keep a recipe box just for vegetables. I made it a goal to find five recipes I liked for each vegetable. I never got to five for everything, but I developed a good pile of recipes and ate a few more vegetables than I would have otherwise. Now that I've discovered some new vegetables (kale) and I'm trying to cook more seasonally, I've decided to revive the practice. So starting now, five recipes for eggplant.

Eggplant is one of the things my parents usually plant in their vegetable garden. And this eggplant dip, similar to baba ghanouj, is something my mom made often.

Roasted Eggplant Dip

1 medium eggplant
4 cloves garlic
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
salt
cayenne pepper

Cut the eggplant in half lengthwise. Separate the garlic cloves from the head of garlic, but don't remove the skin from the cloves. Place the eggplant and garlic in your roasting dish and drizzle a tablespoon of olive oil over them. Roast at 350 degrees until the eggplant and garlic are soft, stirring once or twice. The entire process will take 45 minutes to an hour depending on how big your eggplant is. The garlic may finish earlier. If so, remove the cloves and set aside.

When the eggplant is soft, remove from the oven. Scoop the eggplant flesh from the skin and squeeze the garlic from the skins. Combine the eggplant flesh, garlic, and remaining olive oil in a food processor and process until smooth. Salt to taste.

Place the eggplant in a bowl, drizzle with sesame oil and sprinkle with cayenne.

Other eggplant recipes
Spicy Eggplants