ginger – The Kitchen Illiterate

Kale Paneer

One thing about moving back to California that has been really amazing is living close to my family again. I grew up in San Diego, and my parents, my oldest brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece (along with aunts and uncles and cousins) still live there. My youngest brother, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, live here in the Bay Area. So I get to see family a lot more often than I did when I was entrenched in the snow on the other side of the country. About a month ago, my youngest brother graduated from college, and a mess of family drove up to celebrate. We had a weekend full of laughter and, as always when Kriers are involved, great food. Including this home cooked Indian food dinner on Saturday night.
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Five-Spice Beet Soup

I have a hard time putting beets on the menu. I love them, but I feel limited in how to prepare them. It can be difficult to introduce them into a meal because of their overly exuberant tendency to tinge everything pink. They’re delicious roasted, but they can dominate when roasted with other vegetables. I learned long ago they aren’t necessarily a great addition to pasta. I love them in a salad, but the beet and goat cheese combination, while admittedly perfect, sometimes feels a little dull. And most beet soup recipes look a lot alike. Sometimes it’s like the whole recipe-writing world has a case of beet boredom.
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Curried Lentils and Grilled Branzini

Sometimes I see a recipe somewhere and I think, “That looks awesome, I’m making it for dinner this week.” The ingredients go on the shopping list and I think I’m all set. Then the time comes to cook the meal and I can’t find the recipe anywhere, like it was a figment of my imagination. There are so many places I find recipes, so many ways they pop into my life every day, it can be like a wild goose chase trying to hunt down any one in particular. Lucky for me, this one was simple enough that I was able to re-construct it, or at lease a pretty good facsimile, with little trouble. But I still have no idea where I got the idea in the first place.
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Soba Noodles with Bok Choy and Tahini

When I got my first bundle of bok choy from my CSA, I started searching around for new ways to prepare this Asian green. I must admit, I’ve been getting a wee bit tired of garlic-sauteed greens and rice, so I wanted something unique. Unfortunately, the Great Google turned up many, many of the same recipe: bok choy sauteed or steamed, and seasoned with toasted sesame oil and soy sauce, with some ginger thrown in for extra flavor. Of course, that sounds delicious, and I made it once or twice, but when I wanted to branch out, it took me awhile to find something different.

I’m glad I searched so diligently, because this Tahini sauce has become one of my new favorites. It’s reminiscent of a peanut sauce, but a little more bitter. It’s easy as heck, but could probably be fancied up, too. And it is filling and delicious.
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Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles

It’s always amusing for me to go back to the early archives of this site and realize how little I knew about cooking. And I posted everything, no matter how lackluster the final product. A lot of these early culinary endeavors, despite being executed poorly, do hold some promise, and I’ve been having fun re-creating them and trying to improve where I went wrong back in the day. One of these improvements turned out so much better, and was so easy, that I suspect I’ll be making it more often: The Spicy Shrimp and Red Onion Pasta of 2007 became the Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles you see here, and they were much more palatable this time around. It was all about the balance of ingredients, and using the right kind of noodles.
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Greek Celebration Bread

Crazy, but true: I have been writing this here blog for three years today. A lot has happened in three years, and not just in the kitchen. I know I’ve said it many times before, but it’s true: When I first started writing here, I really didn’t know much about cooking at all. I’d always enjoyed doing it, but my technique left much to be desired. My favorite meal was rice and beans from a box, and I was so freaked out about raw shrimp I didn’t look closely enough to see that they weren’t de-veined before cooking them. I thought baking bread from scratch was Little House on the Prairie stuff, and I didn’t have the first clue that broccoli has a season.

In celebration of three years of cooking and writing and taking pictures of food, and learning my way around an oven, I decided to splurge this week and bake this lovely Greek Celebration Bread, from Reinhardt’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, as my weekly breakfast loaf. And it does feel like a splurge from my usual plain, whole wheat loaf. This bread is fragrant and tender and rich and really freaking fabulous.
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Soy-glazed Red Snapper with Spring Vegetables and Roasted Potatoes

It’s finally spring in New England, though we are still about a month away from farmer’s market produce. I’m only four days away from finishing grad school, and miraculously, am actually finished with all my finals—I had to finish early because we had a trip to take: I’m in Los Angeles for my good friend Kim’s wedding! It’s already been a great party, and the wedding itself is this evening, at a ranch in Malibu.

I kind of forgot that eating in Southern California tends to take place in chain restaurants more often than not. We went to the San Fernando Valley’s “restaurant row” last night, which consisted of The Cheesecake Factory, El Torito, Fuddrucker’s, Quizno’s, and P.F. Chang’s. That’s about all there is in walking distance of our hotel. We did get room service for breakfast this morning, which is certainly never the best food, but I love having someone bring a tray of covered plates to my room and being able to eat breakfast on a fluffy, white King-sized bed.
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Mahogany Glazed Chicken

I have a tendency to go through my printed recipe folder, pull out things I want to try, stick them on the refrigerator, and completely forget about them. Our refrigerator is pretty much covered in random stuff that none of us ever looks at, so I suppose it’s easy to see how recipes could be so easily forgotten. And every now and then one of us will go on a kitchen cleaning spree, and my tacked up recipes will be taken down and put on the counter, which is a nice reminder to cook them (and also not to clutter up our common areas with my random stuff).

This one had been stuck to the refrigerator for I don’t even know how many months before it was brought to my attention again, and I finally decided to make it. I originally saw something similar on one of those random cooking competition shows on the Food Network. I think it was a chicken competition, or something equally boring, but the winning recipe, Mahogany Broiled Chicken with Smoky Lime Sweet Potatoes and Cilantro Chimichurri, was very intriguing. Of course, true to form, I didn’t end up cooking the winning version but rather this Eating Well version, which is completely different, so, um, yeah, that’s pretty much how things operate around here.
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