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Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Notes from Bangladesh: typhoon holiday

We got off-season rates at Cox’s Bazar on the Bay of Bengal. It was a wonderful time to be there. Every day we had stretches of sun parenthesized by downpours and impressive winds.

Boats in the Bay of Bengal

Sunken bridge

In the bay

Food ranged from the sublime to the grotesque. The grotesque included the high-carb ‘free’ breakfast at our hotel—flatbreads, Chinese noodles, curried vegetables, dals with beef or mutton, chicken curries, oatmeal, sweet rice puddings, omelettes, boiled eggs, croissants—where families and honeymooners fueled up for the day’s activities.

The sublime included the best grilled fish I’ve ever tasted at a hole-in-the-jungle eco-restaurant that we got to by hiring an electric baby-taxi to drive us up the coast past army teams repairing washed-out roads. The most exotic, and by far the least expensive, was a dining hall where families, labourers, businessmen, and ladies with their friends filled benches at tables on either side of a corridor that allowed waiters to whiz up and down delivering delicious fish curries, bhotas, vegetables, rice, pickles, and much else and where the three of us could eat splendidly and take home doggie bags for an equally splendid evening meal for just over $5.00.

The best grilled fish I’ve ever tasted

On a hotel-arranged tour of beauty spots, little boys with prehensile feet carried Isha up a gully to see a waterfall and across a channel over a decorative bridge.

Carrying Isha up a gully

Next week after a Vancouver visit, I’ll be heading back to drought-ravaged Ottawa, where Danjuma tells me he has plenty of peppers ready to garnish Italian sausage.

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

Notes from Bangladesh: Change of season and culinary implications

Filed under: Beli,food,Isha,Notes from Bangladesh,weather — alison @ 10:55

My father is back in Dhaka, the cricket pitches are wet, the goats amuse and the food is good.

*** *** ***

Dear Family and Friends,
 
It rained this morning in Lalmatia. The sky was dark and it was going to rain when the marketers (Beli and Lippy) set out for the bazaar in a rickshaw. Everyone was laughing. We are now at the beginning of Asharh, the first month of the two month “monsoon season.” Isha and I were watching cricket from the rooftop when the first large droplets began to fall and the boys scattered. Rain was shooting in through open windows when we got back to our flat.
 
Within an hour, the big boys were carrying pallets of sand onto the field to fill the puddles. The smaller boys were swimming in larger puddles beyond the cricket-playing areas; or they were building canals, dams, and drainage systems to the ditches around the park. The windows in our flat were open again. Isha and I were following a goat around on the cricket pitch, watching it eat the seed-tops off the grass. The marketers were buying vegetables and fish that hadn’t looked so fresh for months. There is nothing subtle or gradual about this change of seasons, and it feels good to everyone.
 
Fish

The pictures speak for themselves. Some shrimp was curried for lunch and two of the fish were fried. Most of the fish will be prepared and frozen for use over the next week or two. The second tiniest fish will be individually cleaned with the heads reserved for a bhota (a paste for kneading into your rice), one of the three or four or five dishes served up at every meal.
 
Water lily stems

The water lily is at the top of a rolled up two or three metre stalk, which is the part we eat. There are at least three types of, including sweet potato leaves, greens in the big white bag; several varieties of cucumbers for cooking or eating fresh; tendrils that hang down from lattices supporting gourds, cooked as a vegetable; and an impressive pile of what is sold in Canada as ‘bitter melon.’ There is a bag of achi (roasted and coarsely ground red rice) and a bag of attah (the wheat flour used for making roti, fresh flat bread, for breakfast). And there are guavas, three varieties of mangoes, and a large clutch of lychees. There was going to be a jack fruit, but the load was too heavy for an additional fruit about half the size of Isha. That will have to come tomorrow.
 
Seasonal best wishes!
P

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

Summer Sauce for Pasta

Filed under: Conversation,food,Kate,recipes,Satisfaction,Vera,weather — alison @ 09:57

I’m hung over this morning, I think. It’s been about thirty years since the last time so I’m not sure, but I had a lovely time last night eating and drinking in the garden talking about current affairs and unions and now I’m kind of fuzzy-headed.

Picture me now, lying in my hammock as I copy out the recipe for what we ate from the New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant cookbook. I would be happy to eat this every warm day all summer long.

Summer Sauce for Pasta
Serves 4

On those hot, lazy, sultry summer days, when, like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, you haven’t got the energy to do much more than lie around the house in an old tattered slip, try this quick, uncooked sauce. It’s fragrant, refreshing, and light.

6 ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 cups sliced mushrooms (8 ounces) [500 g]
6 to 8 ounces [200 g] mozzarella cheese, grated or cut into thin strips
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt

1 pound [500 g] spaghetti or linguini

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (1 ounce) [30 g]

Mix all the sauce ingredients together and let sit at room temperature for an hour or so, for the flavors to mingle.

Cook and drain the pasta. While the pasta is piping hot, serve it in well-warmed bowls, topped with a ladleful of sauce and garnished with Parmesan cheese.

Of course I don’t make it exactly like that. I use fewer mushrooms, less olive oil, more garlic (which I crush instead of mincing) and I hate Parmesan so I use Romano instead. But you won’t make it exactly like that either.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

scrambled eggs for Alston

Filed under: Alston,children,food,how to,recipes — alison @ 22:12

Scrambled eggs are so simple that most people don’t know there’s a way to make them. I have often seen people break eggs directly into a hot frying pan and stir frantically until they had a pile of tough, dry crumbs. This does not produce a yummy meal, but scrambled eggs can be very yummy.

Eggs
1 tbs milk or water per egg
Butter to taste
Salt and chili (not cayenne) powder
Cheese (optional)
Heavy frying pan (use a cast iron pan for more nutrition unless you can taste the iron)

Melt butter in the frying pan on medium-low heat.

Beat the eggs and milk or water gently with a fork. You aren’t going for perfect uniformity and you certainly don’t want froth.

Pour the eggs out into the frying pan… and don’t touch them. Not right away. If you want you can lay thin slices of cheese in the liquid egg at this point. Let them cook gently until the bottom 2-3 mm are set. Use a spatula to gently push the set egg into a heap in the middle of the frying pan, letting the liquid egg flow back out to set. Continue until all the egg is set.

Sprinkle with salt for taste, chili powder for looks.

Eggs cooked this way will be soft and delicious. If soft eggs aren’t your thing, put a lid on the frying pan and leave it off the heat for a few minutes to let the eggs continue to heat.

Eat with hot buttered toast and maybe ketchup. Ketchup sounds scandalous, but scrambled eggs are comfort food. If you loved them with ketchup when you were a little kid, then let yourself enjoy the ketchup now.

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

watercress soup and (leek) quiche

Filed under: diabetes,food,how to,Montréal,recipes — alison @ 22:25

This week we went to Sami Fruits, a wholesaler/retailer of fruits and vegetables with an almost exclusively foreign-born clientèle. We love Sami Fruits. When we have guests from out of town we try to take them there because we think they’ll love it too. As usual we bought more vegetables than would fit in the fridge. I was watching the leeks (12 for $2.99) wither on the counter and thinking I should make leek and potato soup forthwith, but I had bought watercress for soup too and watercress goes bad if you don’t use it right away.

Mark wandered by, complaining that having diabetes is very boring because you can’t eat cake and cookies. It’s true, and I can’t do anything about it, but I can make an alternate rich baked treat. Quiche to the rescue of both the leeks and my beloved! To be accompanied by watercress soup!

Watercress Soup
2 large bunches of watercress
3 small potatoes
(other vegetables you might have on hand: spinach, carrots, celery, parsley, zucchini, rutabaga)
garlic and a little fat for heating it
2 or more cups vegetable stock (I use vegetable bouillon cubes)
1 or more cups soy milk

Cut the bunches of watercress in half at the elastic, separating the stems from the leaves. Chop the stems small, chop the leaves big. Prepare all the other vegetables. You  can leave the skins on the potatoes. Divide them into soft (watercress leaves, spinach, zucchini) and hard (watercress stems, potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, parsley).

Heat the garlic in a little oil or butter. Before it browns, add all the hard vegetables and cover with stock. Cook until soft. Add the soft vegetables and cook a little more. Spoon most of the vegetables into the food processor or blender. Process or blend. Put back in the pot. Add the soy milk. Thin with more water and soy milk as desired. Heat through.

Eat.

Basic Quiche
1 10-inch uncooked pie crust in a flat-bottomed pie dish
As much grated cheese as you think is nice (I seem to think about 7 oz is nice) (for the leek quiche I used cheddar and mozzarella, but whatever you like and have on hand will work)
Vegetable filling
4 eggs
1 cup  milk

Sprinkle a little more than half the grated cheese on the bottom of the pie crust. Fill with vegetables. Mix the eggs and milk and pour over the vegetables. Sprinkle the whole with the remaining cheese and bake at 375 for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven, let rest 5-10 minutes and enjoy.

Leek Filling
5 leeks
8 oz mushrooms
Dill
Olive oil

Trim off the toughest, darkest green ends of the leeks. Wash the leeks by cutting down through the leaves towards (but not through) the bulb and root, exposing the insides of the leaves so you can rinse them under the tap.

Slice the leeks thin. Slice the mushrooms thin. Chop the dill fine. Heat everything in a little oil until soft.

(You really can use anything for the vegetable filling. Another great version is fresh sliced tomatoes sprinkled with basil and black olives. The same formula but completely different, especially if you use feta or goat cheese for the cheese.)

Pie Crust
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup butter
3 T ice water
1/2 t salt

Make the pastry dough the usual way: stir the salt into the flour, cut in the butter (I use a food processor, but a pastry cutter is better), stir in the ice water, form into a ball and refrigerate. If you’ve thought ahead, wait four hours. Otherwise use it whenever you need to.

Try rolling it out, but whole wheat pastry dough doesn’t roll out as well as white flour pastry dough. Rather than working the pastry dough with a rolling pin forever and making it tough and getting frustrated, content yourself with rolling out smaller pieces and patching them together in your pie dish. It’s fine.

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Overheard at the vet

Filed under: dogs,food,holidays,vet — alison @ 06:17

“Fifty grams of dark chocolate? For a twenty-kilo dog? Ok, I’ll write that down and make a note, but that’s less than half the toxic dose. … Oh, no worries, I’ve been getting these calls all week.”

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