omurice [Japan]

It's been a long time since I last cooked anything, and I *might* be going on a restrictive diet soon to diagnose why my immune system is so unhappy with my body that it is destroying my organs. But before I share those recipes from hell (a bit of an exaggeration; I'd be going from a low-protein vegetarian diet to a conveniently high-protein, low-carb meat-heavy diet), I'm trying one recipe which uses so many of the things I won't be able to eat: omurice.

I accidentally used 2x the onion I should have, but it's fine. I also used too many mushrooms. Also fine. Reflecting on it, I think I also used too much "ham". I tried Yves brand fake ham. It's actually pretty good, at least when it's cooked in omurice!

I got a chance to try out my new salt box. It's very convenient and definitely better than shaking salt out of a 1-lb box of salt. 

I didn't end up getting ketchup, so I just used 2x the tomato paste and some vinegar. The only vinegar I had was zhen jiang vinegar (a black rice vinegar), which seemed to work just fine. I also left out the milk in the eggs because I didn't want to buy more milk than I need (it always goes bad because I don't drink milk anymore).

Here is the finished product:

Verdict: It's not pretty. It didn't stay together and it definitely doesn't look like an omelette. But it's the taste that counts, and this tasted pretty good!

tomato chitranna [Karnataka]

Last meal I cooked was tomato chitranna, a simple rice dish. For some reason, my electric stove was working even better than before, so I ended up scorching the spices just a bit. It didn't seem to affect the taste though.

I made the sambar powder beforehand, toasting the spices in my pan and then grinding them with a mortar and pestle. The rest of the recipe was pretty straightforward.

Verdict: tasty, though not the best dish from the Indian subcontinent I've made during this project. I probably should have cooked it for longer, or took more care in chopping the onions and tomatoes small -- the tomatoes still had bite to them in the final dish.

pomme purée + omelette [France]

Today's dishes were French. They were very indulgent, and by that I mean I probably consumed a half stick of butter at lunch alone. 

***Pomme purée ***

The recipe is here. I used my new potato masher / ricer. It's a pretty self-explanatory recipe.

Verdict: Tasty, especially when hot. But I ate lunch after it sat while I cooked the eggs, so they were somewhat lukewarm. They were just too rich in my opinion, or maybe the combination of these two dishes was bad. I think that's probably it...

*** Omelette ***

This is a very simple omelette. It's supposed to look a lot prettier than my photo (recipe) because I think you really, really have to wait until it's very thin and firm to roll it up. Well, I'll try again tomorrow when I make it again!

I accidentally bought cilantro instead of parsley, and I'm not about to put that on my eggs. So I just left the greens out. This was, yes, a very beige meal.

Verdict: Tasty! Unfortunately, too rich with the mashed potatoes. And, I think they were too salty. But I'll try again later this week and see if I can get it right next time.

"beef" croquette [Rio de Janeiro]

Today I tried out another fried recipe, this time from Rio de Janeiro / Southeast Brazil. Here's the recipe link.

I used Beyond Meat instead of beef (I actually wanted to use Impossible Beef, but it appears my local grocery doesn't stock it). I completely forgot to buy parsley or green onion, so I left those out. For the breadcrumbs, I used panko.

 

During frying. I used oil leftover from the pakoras.

 

Finished product.

They don't look anything like the photo in the recipe, and the chunks of onion reminded me a lot more of the mystery croquettes from Kill la Kill.

Verdict: Very tasty! Hard to go wrong with fried food. I might should have chopped the onions smaller. I do wish I had some kind of sauce to go with them.

kadhi pakora, patta gobi, and masala chai [Pakistan]

Right off the bat, this is the best meal I've cooked, and maybe one of the best home-cooked meals I've ever had. It's definitely convincing me that, as a vegetarian, I should just cook from that region of the world. 

*** kadhi pakora ***

These are pakora in a yogurt-based sauce. The recipe itself is somewhat complex, since it requires first making pakora, then cooking them in the sauce. They were really fun to make, though.

The dish right after tadka. I served it with plain steamed basmati.

Verdict: Sooo good! It wasn't too spicy, but wasn't that mild. Honestly, the recipe is a bit more than 4 servings. I had so much food for each of my meals.

*** patta gobi ***

This is basically just sautéed cabbage. Still, it was pretty good. I used plain cabbage (not napa) and left it in larger chunks than the recipe shows. In the end, it was pretty tasty, if a bit more oily than I expected.

Verdict: Very tasty! Good as a side dish but slightly too oily for my taste (perhaps I just added too much oil).

*** masala chai ***

I had some good masala chai from a Tibetan food truck a few weeks ago, and was excited to try making it myself. 

Verdict: Really good, though next time I might try to make it a bit spicier. Also, though it was very relaxing to drink in the evening, it takes quite a long time to make, and requires keeping milk which I don't regularly do. But, it was delicious.

The full meal, served with rice and chai.

matapa [Angola]

This week I made matapa, which is an Angolan dish. The recipe I found was in Portuguese, so there were probably translation / cultural miscommunications (for example, the photo in the recipe appears to have red peppers and carrots, but the recipe didn't call for that, so I didn't put it in).

The first step was to grind up a bunch of peanuts into powder. I used my new mortar and pestle for it. It was pretty fun but got tiring after a while.

Instead of actual shrimp, I used All Vegetarian vegan shrimp. This was a mistake. I bought 6 packs of it (currently in my freezer) and used two for this dish. Somehow I'm going to have to figure out how to use the rest (or maybe I just overcooked it in this dish) but it was not good.

I used cabbage instead of cassava leaves. Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty closely and served it with white rice.

It didn't end up looking like the photo in the recipe, like... at all. 

Verdict: unfortunately, I am not going to be able to finish this. I don't think it's the recipe's fault at all; I think it's the fake shrimp I used. It just has the wrong texture and taste. It doesn't help that the recipe itself is quite rich due to the peanuts and coconut milk, and not seasoned much at all (it probably does require seasoning, but it's not called for in the recipe).

重庆辣子鸡 + 私房小面 [Chongqing]

When I was researching cuisine around the world, it was very difficult to find recipes from regions of China outside of, e.g., Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine. I found that by searching in Chinese-language websites, there were tons of recipes. These recipes were my first attempts at cooking from these recipes by using Google Translate. My first takeaway is that I really need to ask some of my Chinese-speaking friends to help with the translations (and potentially also where to get particular ingredients). I thought I could get by with wiktionary and Google Images search when translators failed on ingredients lists, but I think that failed just a little bit.

This week I found two recipes from Chongqing. The first recipe, 重庆辣子鸡, is basically a spicy chicken recipe. The second, 私房小面, is a noodle recipe.

*** 重庆辣子鸡 -- spicy chicken ***

I'm (mostly) vegetarian, so I replaced the chicken with seitan. I used a prepared seitan that was supposed to substitute pork. I used way fewer chilis than I should have. I have a very pretty pepper garland I've been taking peppers -- large dried cayennes -- from, and I only took three of them, because otherwise the entire garland would be gone. That meant I used about a third of the peppers I should have. 

I couldn't find actual Welsh / naganeni long onion, so I just went with plain green onion instead. I'm not sure if Welsh onions should be easy to find in the US. 

I also had a really fun time going with a good friend to Uwajimaya to grab a *bunch* of dark brown liquids. For this recipe, I got shaohsing wine, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, and peanut oil. 

The recipe was pretty easy to make. It just involved sauteéing. The problem is that partway through, as I'll explain later, my saucier became unavailable and I couldn't cook the chilis/fragrant bits without the seitan. This meant that the minced ginger was undercooked.

Verdict: I should have used more peppers than I did. I actually do have a large pack of dried chilis that I haven't opened yet (and I didn't open them because I don't have another good container to put them in yet...). This turned out... not spicy. I think when cooking with seitan I just have to spice things 2x as much as I would with meat, because the seitan taste was still pretty overpowering compared to the other seasonings (personally, seitan tastes fine to me, but I really wished it was more flavorful).

*** 私房小面 -- Google translate says this is "private room noodles" ***

The first issue with this dish was the noodles. Uwajimaya is a Japanese grocery, and though it's a huge store, the selection of Chinese-specific ingredients appears to be a little slim (maybe I should have tried H-mart?). I had some trouble finding the right kind of noodles, and the store was super busy so I just grabbed 300g of whatever wheat noodles weren't marketed as ramen. 

I replaced the ham with tofurky deli slices. I know I like those, so not really a problem. I also didn't garnish with tomatoes, cucumber, or cilantro... just didn't have it in me after the cooking experience. I also bought more dark brown liquids for this meal: toasted sesame oil, and zhenjiang vinegar.

The biggest problem I had here was cooking the noodles. I don't know why I thought I could cook them in my saucier, rather than in my stock pot. I think I was hoping it would be faster to get the water boiling (which is true), and that I didn't need much water if the cooking time was only 1-2 minutes (this was false). The first problem was that as the water was almost boiling, one of my old dirty rags fell right into the pot. Great. So I had to re-boil the water. Once it got boiling again, I put the dry noodles in, and they did immediately start cooking. But there was a twist in the dry noodles, so that parts of the noodles were still dry (because that part was super dense) and the other parts were getting overcooked. I ended up cooking them for probably like 8-10 minutes... oof... they were extremely overcooked. They were basically congealed once I tried cooling them in the fridge. Oh, and my nice saucier got noodles completely burnt to the bottom.* So that was an absolute failure. 

Verdict: This was edible. The fact that it was only edible was entirely my fault.

*thankfully, after soaking for 48hr, it's sparkling clean again :)

 

 The "spicy chicken" here looks a lot tastier than it was, unfortunately.