Posts Tagged ‘Recipe’
Aloo sorrel
This could be a case of me reinventing “Runny eggs and soldiers” …
Sorrel isn’t something you buy at the grocery stores here. They pop up in spring mixes, but they aren’t available in a bunch. I have been growing red veined english sorrels for the last few years. They had started with a skinny seedling and spread. Now I have three pots in my courtyard and some growing wild in the yard. They are hardy. They are pretty to look at. I have been adding them to Zhingyalov Hats (Armenian flatbread) along with other store bought greens. More recently, I learned that they are the same family as South Indian gongura. My local South Indian restaurant, Varam, makes a mean gongura chicken biryani.
The sorrels in my pots needed picking. And I didn’t want to get store bought greens and make Zhingyalov Hats. I also had a leftover Idaho boiled potato from the low fiber diet last week. This recipe is inspired by flavors of South India (gongura theme), but made the way northern Aloo Methi (fenugreek) is made (what I am familiar with).
With one large potato, one small chopped onion and a two cups of cleaned and chopped sorrel, this is a side dish for two. Chop and pan fry the potatoes in one tablespoon of coconut oil. The goal is to get some color on the potatoes so it looks nicer on the plate. You will want to use the pan that you would typically use when frying potatoes. I am using my iron kadai – it is an Indian wok that is smaller and heavier than Chinese wok. Set the potatoes aside, salt them to taste. Add one more tablespoon of coconut oil to the pan. Now add 1/2 tsp of fennel seeds. Once they are toasty and aromatic, add the chopped onions and let them caramelize. If you have curry leaves at hand, fresh or dry, you can chop/crush a few and add to the frying onions. I ran out and picked a fresh stem from my curry leaf plant, it is thriving in the yard thanks to our friend, Sudha, who trained the plant to tolerate Bay Area weather. If you prefer a little heat, add a chopped green chili and fry. If you want heat but don’t have green chili, you can use dry red chili, but I prefer adding dry chili to the oil along with the fennel seeds to get toasted chili flavor. Finally, add the sorrel and fry. Add salt to taste. At this point, add 1/2 tsp of coriander power. If you have other flavorful southern masala or garam masala, you can substitute the coriander powder with that. I did have some home made sambar powder at hand so I used that. Once the aroma is released, add the potatoes. At this point, you can smash some of the potatoes. Toss a bit to coat the potatoes uniformly and serve. I had a flax seed podi in my fridge that I scattered on top. I served the potatoes with a desi style plain omelette.
Sambar masala has fenugreek seeds in it, hence it gives the dish a faint hint of aloo methi taste. It is also a little tangy from the sorrel and very aromatic from the coconut oil and fennel. Last time the sorrels needed picking, I had made gongura pappu, a classic recipe from the Telangana cuisine. While both lentils and potatoes are forgiving ingredients, I prefer this recipe over the lentil dish. Partly because my gut continues to be sensitive to Indian lentils. Partly, potatoes and egg make for a fun balanced breakfast.
A proud bowl of Laksa
Have you noticed that sometimes youTube algorithm gets stuck and wants to show you a particular video. It happened with me recently and the video that kept popping up on my stream was, “How to make 8 Kinds of Laksa from Southeast Asia” by the Analytical Cook. South Asian food is complex and I have barely scratched the surface of this complex cuisine. The thought of grokking eight different kinds of a complex dish was overwhelming but at some point, I gave in and started watching.
A few minutes into the video, I realized that I have been growing “Laksa leaves” in my yard. I have known them as Vietnamese coriander or rau răm (persicaria odorata). They don’t look or taste anything like coriander, but the reason I had started growing them is because they had looked unfamiliar. I am a sucker for unfamiliar herbs. The reason they have continued growing is because of its nature, it is a hardy perennial spreader in the USDA hardiness zone 9-11. For the last two years, I have been using them somewhat haphazardly – they remind me of the pepperiness of the Indian paan leaves (piper betle).
The Analytical Cook was presenting how to consume the laksa leaves correctly and that too in huge amounts! In a Laksa curry, these leaves are foundational.
My rau răm was in desperate need of a trim and hence, I decided to make a bowl (or four) of laksa. I chose simplicity – tofu skin and tofu for protein. The laksa paste was prepared in Vitamix and contained lemongrass stem (homegrown), onion, ginger, and galangal in an oil base. For color, I decided to rely on turmeric, a subsequent splash of coconut milk gave the laksa a golden color. The broth was made by hot steeping ginger skin, laksa stem and leaves, muddled makrut lime leaves (also homegrown) and lemongrass leaves. For spiciness, I used my salt fermented habanero chili sauce (habanero/orange capsicum/celery). For the salt and sour, I added fish sauce and makrut lime juice. For the sweet, I added some jaggery, a highly prized date palm jaggery (khejur gud) from my hometown, an ingredient I use on special occasions. For toppings, I used store bought buna shimeji (brown beech mushrooms) and sugarsnap peas. And the final touch – a sprinkling of finely chopped laksa leaves.
You bet I was proud. Not because it tasted great – south Asian curries taste great by design. But because several of the ingredients were labor of love – the two dozen year old makrut lime tree that started its life in a small pot and now grows wild in the yard, the lemongrass bunch that I had propagated from a store bought one (and a clone is waiting in a glass jar on my window sill for the next planting), the rau răm that I had neglected the last two years, and the salt fermented chili sauce.
If, like me, you decide to make Laksa, don’t forget to read the Analytical Cook’s further analysis (link).
I too like to take the scenic route when I cook!
When I took a whiff of Matsutake mushrooms at Signona’s, I knew that I would have to make Matsutake Gohan. My version has Minnesota Lake wild rice, the ghost varietal, matsutake mushrooms, pearl couscous, pine nuts, dried tomatoes, salt fermented plums, green Szechuan peppercorn, black cardamom, bay leaf, cinnamon leaf and leeks. This meal was in honor of the Day of the Dead, a tradition I have adopted to honor those who are are no longer with me today. The first to pass away was my grandad, in fact, it was many decades ago this day. I was still a child then. He used to write long letters to me and might have played a strong hand in nurturing my contemplative nature.
The phrase “I Like to Take the Scenic Route When I Cook” is the title of a November 2025 newsletter from Yotam Ottolenghi. My cooking style has been described as my love language. I don’t see it that way but I didn’t have words to describe it until I came across Ottolenghi’s Nov newsletter. And then it clicked. I too prefer the scenic route when I cook. In any month, there is at least one day when I would just like to open a can of sardines and a bottle of wine for dinner. But most times, food is a journey, sometimes an hour, sometimes a day or three, and sometimes, a few seasons.
Here are some of the journeys I undertook with this dish.
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Alford and Duguid and parboiled rice
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Husband and wife, Alford and Duguid met on a hotel rooftop in Tibet in 1985. They have been traveling together and writing James Beard Award winning cookbooks since. While leafing through an old copy of New Yorker, I re-discovered them recently. Most of their travels are through South Asia and consequently the cookbooks reflect the tastes and stories of Asia. I present here an excerpt from their introduction to “Seductions of Rice“.
In the course of working on this book, we were walking early one morning along a narrow path past fields of rice just outside Calcutta in Bengal, in India. It was early November, dry season in Bengal, and the sun was already bright and warm. The rice was golden, it was harvest time, and in every field out across a large flat plain as far as we could see, there were groups of villagers working hard cutting and threshing rice. Their voices, together with the songs of birds and the occasional bump of a bicycle riding along a dirt path, were the only sounds to be heard… We were there taking pictures, asking the odd question, but mainly just being there. We were happy to be outside the city at harvest time, to see the water buffaloes chomping on the stubble in the fields already harvested, to see farmers slapping long bundles of cut rice against a threshing table so that the grain would dislodge from the straw.
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Written by locomotoring
April 2, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Posted in India
Tagged with Chefs, Commentary, Cookbooks, Cookstr, Jefferey Alford, Naomi Duguid, Panta Bhat, Recipe, Seductions of Rice