Things I have learned

The finished Aloo Matar dish Today was a nice, but cool, day without much wind. We did not have a lot of leftovers from the prior day. It was time for a nice Indian curry dish. Lets start. My prepped ingredients. I peeled 4 Yukon Gold potatoes and cut them into 2cm cubes. We had some leftover canned tomatoes (I my particular case 3 tomatoes and their juice). I also chopped a small onion, 3 garlic cloves, a knob of ginger (about 2 to 3cm long) and 2 Thai birds eye chilies. I took some frozen peas out of the freezer (1 cup give or take). Last but not least I chopped a handful of cilantro leaves (not visible in the above picture). To that assortment I added the spice and salt containers and voila, everything was ready for the actual cooking. Frying the cubed potatoes in the wok with some oil. The potato frying phase in the picture is close to its end. I started with frying the potato cubes in some oil in my wok over medium heat (typically I try to avoid overheating wh...

Swiss Chard with Rice Making Swiss chard with rice is maybe the recipe that made it out of no-where to my top three list of dishes I cooked in the last year. Before that I did not even know what a Swiss chard was or what todo with it. The dish is easy to cook, if the ingredients are available. It is a vegetarian dish that can serve as a light lunch. It can be eaten as a cold or warm dish. I picked up the basic recipe from one of Deborah Madison's vegetarian cookbooks. But I have seen similar recipes with other greens as pilaf rice dishes in Persian and Afghan cooking books. Here is a picture of the red Swiss chard I used in this recipe (after I washed the leafs): The Swiss chard I used for this recipe. So lets get started with my preparation: I chopped a medium-to-large onion and some cilantro (I could have used more cilantro). I also poured about 3 to 4 tbsp of vegetable oil into my Dutch oven pot and layered the chopped onions into the oil and salted the onions with ...

My Chinese Three-Sliver Tofu Salad We had from the previous week some rehydrated and quick boiled kombu (edible kelp) sheet leftovers from making dashi type soups. Originally I thought I would use the kombu to make a mushroom-kombu relish. However this morning I decided to use all I had up as part of a Chinese style Three-Sliver Tofu salad. First I started with my initial preparation steps: I cut 2 larger carrots into matchsticks (about 250g carrot matchsticks). I cut the kombu sheets, which were already rehydrated and short-term boiled a while ago, into very narrow 1.5 to 2-inch length strips. This is not necessarily straight-forward, because the kombu sheets often develop a quite slippery surface after rehydration. The amount of kombu sheets I used, were about 3 10x10 cm sheets. Finally I cut about 200g of tofu skin sheets into similar length strips. Afterwards I blanched the carrot sticks for about 30 seconds in boiling water, removed them from the water, and after a brief st...