Curry, Curried turkey, Pizza, and Ice Cream Delights

This week I made:
Fall Vegetable Curry, Cooking Light October 2010
Pizza
Margarita Ice-Cream Sandwiches, Cooking Light June 2011
Salted Brownie Sundae Bites, Every Day with Rachael Ray (issue unknown)
Curried Turkey Sandwiches on Naan Bread, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013

On Monday I made this light vegetarian dinner. It's got a lot of good vegetables-- onion, sweet potato, cauliflower and tomatoes, with chickpeas for a little protein. It's very simple too, with some of the vegetables getting briefly sautéed in curry powder before being simmered in broth. This cooked faster than the rice, even on the "fast" setting. It was pretty light though, so when I ate it for lunch the next day I got hungry mid-afternoon.
The smell of the curry powder reminded me of this bread I made when I was in Japan and taking baking classes. The dough had curry powder in it and rolled up with cheese and chopped onion (sprinkled with more curry powder, if I remember correctly), then cut up like cinnamon rolls and baked individually. It sounds like a weird combination of flavors but was really good, so I ended up making it a lot. The selection of cheeses in Japan is pretty limited, this kind being called "factory cheese." I made it a couple times back in the states, but I can't remember what I substituted for factory cheese, ha.

There was  a pizza recipe in this issue of Rachel Ray which made me think of making pizza, but G said he'd prefer to just make pizza on our own. This one had pepperoni, sausage, marinara sauce, and cheese. Pizza is pretty fast when you can buy bags of dough at the grocery store!

Wednesday was our House Cup Competition. The House Cup is a competition between the different halls in our dorm. The competition changes each month, with scavenger hunts, trivia, cooking contests, food drives, etc. This was the dessert night. I brought a few recipes to share with my neighbors, and we selected these two ice cream recipes that might be unique enough to garner up some votes.
The margarita ice-cream sandwiches are not actually alcoholic, but are lime cookies sprinkled with salt and filled with lime ice cream (actually, lime sherbet mixed with vanilla. And by lime sherbet, I mean lime frozen Greek yogurt, because apparently lime sherbet isn't really a thing). The salted brownie sundae bites are a brownie halved vertically and filled with a mix of fudge sauce and coffee ice cream. This one is also salted.
So, both of these recipes demanded like 3-8 hours of cooling, freezing, etc. I just figured that this was a bit overkill and that we could make these both in a 2-hour window. Um, yes and no. The margarita ice-cream sandwiches came out fine. I skimped on the dough cooling (3 hrs -> maybe 30 minutes) with no apparent effect. The sandwiches were not assembled and then refrozen for 4 hours-- instead, at the event we scooped ice cream onto a single cookie for each person. The cookies were great on their own, too. The ice cream unfortunately melted as the event went on, and probably could have used some more time refreezing after warming and mixing together. All in all, these were pretty normal. The brownie bites were not very successful as the recipe stands. There were a few problems-- In particular, the brownie batter totally did not fill out a 9x13 baking pan as promised. It was not thick enough to cut crosswise, so we ended up folding it over on top of itself instead. Then, the recipe calls for 30 minutes of cooling in the pan, 30 minutes of freezing after being cut, and then another 30 minutes of freezing with the ice cream. I tried to collapse this into just maybe like 10 minutes in the freezer before adding the ice cream because we were running out of time. But the brownies apparently had a lot of internal heat still, and ice cream was also pretty warm at this point (we had put it in the fridge to make it spreadable, but then it got a little too spreadable), so when I went to check on it a bit later the ice cream was all melty and pouring out and/or soaking into the brownies. Basically, the two brownie halves were directly touching and sitting in a pool of coffee cream. And then it was time to go to the event!
I cut and plated the brownies, spilling out the remainder of the ice cream. It looked really messy and awful, but I quickly renamed them "salted brownie bites drizzled in coffee ice cream" and poured the rest of the liquid ice cream on top. It looked a little funky, so I grated some chocolate on top which made it look fancy. This ended up being a pretty popular dessert too!
People seemed really excited to try our desserts, but in the end we got 4th (first loser), so we were a little disappointed. We had dared to hope!

On Thursday I made these naan sandwiches. The recipe is for 6 for some reason, and while our grocery store does carry naan, it cost $12 for 6 pieces :-P G was the one who went shopping, so I didn't realize how much it was until he came back. But we probably should've just stopped by one of the many Indian restaurants in the neighborhood for a basket of naan! Oh well. The inside of this sandwich is a patty of ground turkey mixed with mint, spinach, garlic, yogurt, and garam masala. Since the patties are thin, they cook pretty fast. It's topped with a mix of more mint, tomato, and red onions. Pretty good! G dropped half of his naan into the kitchen sink and was very distraught! So I guess it is good that we had 6 servings :)

Month 11 day 14: This dinner brought to you by the color yellow

Today I made:
Buttery Pigeon [yellow split] Pea Dal (Mitti Handi Dal), Food & Wine December 2010
Spiced Potatoes (Aloo Bhaji), Food & Wine December 2010
Served with Trader Joe's garlic naan and chai tea (decaf Tetley's British Blend simmered with cloves, cardamom, a cinnamon stick, and milk)

Today I made an Indian dinner. The grocery store didn't have quite exactly all the spices called for, or pigeon peas for that matter, so we had to make a few substitutions, but it ended up being pretty good. There was a lot of tumeric in everything, which is why everything is so yellow. Also a lot of cumin seeds. These are both pretty quick recipes, taking about 30 minutes of hands on time each (the peas take an additional ~30 minutes of soaking first), so that was nice. They were pretty flavorful too. I didn't have quite 2 lbs of yukon gold potatoes, so I threw in a sweet potato (a white-fleshed kind) in just for fun. It looked identical to the normal potatoes, but every once in a while you'd get a very sugary piece! Kind of fun.

Month 9 day 9: Chana Masala with Roti and Pumpkin Hot Cocoa

Today I made:
Indian Chana Masala with Roti, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011
Pumpkin Pie Cocoa, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011

This was a good recipe! It seemed like something you might get at a restaurant, but it's very easy too. I made the garam masala from this recipe since it's not something we have on hand, but we do have all the components on hand. G had to hammer some cardamon seeds in a baggie though, because we didn't have ground. He did a good job though :) I used just one serrano and 1/2 of a leftover jalapeno, and that was a good amount of spice-- you could feel it, but it wasn't bad. The tomatoes we used weren't very juicy, so this ended up being much drier than what was pictured in the magazine. I think you could get away with using canned tomatoes though, and then this would qualify as a from-the-pantry recipe. I love it when I find a good recipe that can be made from the things I always have around! The curry itself is also a really fast recipe, just about 20 minutes. So serving this with store-bought frozen naan instead of making the roti would make this something you could make at any time in no time.

For dessert we made pumpkin pie hot cocoa. It's basically just hot chocolate with a bit of pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice mixed in, topped with whipped cream. Normally I think hot cocoa is too sweet, so I tend to put in less than is called for on the canister. But G said we should follow the proportions called for in the recipe: basically a 1:4 ratio of cocoa mix to milk. That was 3 cocoa packets! It was soooo sweet! The pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice was really good, but next time I will use less cocoa powder. Or just melt in chocolate and adjust the sugar myself.

Month 1 day 5: Tandoori-Spiced Chicken and Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry

Today had some excitement-- when we woke up there were emails in our inboxes about a gunman sighted on campus! We were supposed to shelter in place. I wasn't planning on going to work today anyway, so it was all the encouragement I needed to stay at home in PJs. Anyway, I had a term paper to write for my education class. It turned out to be kind of just a rant the lack of clear goals and learning objectives in Intro Bio and what a lame class it is.

We had a couple no-cooking days since the last post. On Thursday G attended our dorm's hot-pot night while I attended a panel discussion and dinner about careers in education for graduate women. It was actually a great panel-- the ladies spoke candidly about realizing that they weren't meant for academia (mostly in the infamous 4th year of their PhD programs...) and how they bumbled along and randomly wound up working in other sorts of education/outreach jobs that turned out to be their dream jobs even though they never would've thought of it. Friday was another event at our dorm, Open Doors Night. On this biannual event, residents can volunteer to host a party in their room. The dorm pays for the food and non-alcoholic drinks, and residents can just go from party to party. We decided to go with a selection of cheeses and chocolate. We have so much leftover cheese now, we will be eating this for breakfast for a while:

With all the preparations (and me losing, but luckily recovering, my wallet) we didn't have time to cook beforehand, and mostly filled up on cheese and baguette ourselves, but afterwards we did end up getting hungry so we fried up some Italian sausage with bell peppers and onions. We cooked it for long enough that the onions were caramelized and the peppers were nice and soft too. Yum.

Anyway, today I got the chance to cook again. We meant to make this earlier, but had forgotten to soak the chickpeas. So it was delayed until today:

• Tandoori-Spiced Chicken, Cooking Light January/February 2011
• Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry, Food Network Magazine January/February 2010

These were both dishes that took a long time, although not so much hands-on time. The tandoori chicken was supposed to marinate for two hours. I don't know how long we actually let it go... probably somewhere between one to two. Is it accurate to call it tandoori chicken? It's not cooked in a special oven, it's not pink, and it doesn't seem to have much overlap with what are typical spices at least according to wikipedia. The only similarity is that the marinade has yogurt in it. I don't know if it's because of the yogurt or not, but it was really juicy! That was nice. It wasn't super flavorful, and the flavor didn't penetrate, but the outer layer at least was good. I could see setting up the marinade in the morning and letting it sit all day, and then it would be a quick meal because it actually only broiled for 15 minutes.

The curry (can we call it a curry if it doesn't actually have any curry powder?) was kind of interesting to make. For Open Doors Night, I had just bought these empty tea bags that you can use with your own loose leaf teas, so I used one of those to put all the spices in. It smelled like we were making chai! The curry took a while, but didn't require much supervision, so this is a fine recipe for lazy weekend days. It wasn't spicy at all. I may have used the wrong type of pepper. Our grocery store has a chart of different chiles and their spiciness levels, but the pictures don't particularly look like what is in the baskets down below. It's always a gamble.

We happened to have some leftover rice from Indian takeout in the freezer, and G got some naan at the grocery store. He made some mango lassi too! It was really frothy and good.