Tamarind Fish

 

I made Tamarind Fish from Madhur's Jaffrey's Flavours of India for the I Heart Cooking Clubs Challenge at http://iheartcookingclubs.blogspot.co.nz/

Each week there is a different topic and you can find some really interesting variations of her recipes here which are well worth trying. 

 

 This week the challenge was a Potluck Theme. I interpreted it literally and chose to make this dish

because I thought it would be easy to pack up and carry and could be served at room temperature. This means it would not need to be reheated at its destination. Guests could just help themselves to chunks of it with a fork.

 

I hadn't made this recipe before but it looked reasonably straightforward and I thought it would not take too long to make, especially as I had already made the tamarind sauce the day before (as described it in a previous post.) 

 

In the finished dish the tamarind and turmeric flavours were less dominant than I thought they would be, making this a dish that would not be too challenging to eat for those who are unfamiliar with Indian Food.

 

The recipe is traditionally made with Hilsa, which Madhur describes as a " beautiful silvery fish" found in the estuaries of Bengal;s rivers where it comes from the sea to spawn. It is very expensive and revered so it is reserved for special occasions. We can't buy it here but salmon makes a good substitute.

 

I don't like using too much fat in my cooking so adapted the recipe by frying the salmon in 3 tablespoons of oil rather than the 1/2 cup originally called for.Madhur does drain the fish after frying but I think that it would still have absorbed rather a lot of fat by this stage. What I may have sacrificed in the way of crispness was outweighed by fewer calories.

 

Her preferred oil for this dish is mustard oil. I have seen mustard growing in India but I have never seen mustard oil on sale here, I thought ( wrongly) that it was only grown for the seeds. It may well have added to the flavour and I'd like to taste it .

 

The original recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper but I used a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper whick I think is more aromatic ( especially the black pepper I have in my pantry which I brought back from a visit to Kerala last year)

 

.For the sugar I substituted brown for white.

 

I have presented the fish as is, but I do think it would have benefited with a garnish of some kind as it looked a little bare, although it tasted good.

 

Ingredients:

 

450 grams of salmon ( Madhur used steaks but I used one large piece of New Zealand King Salmon)

3/4 teaspoon of ground turmeric

3/4 -1 teaspoon of salt

3 tablespoons of rice bran oil

3 tablespoons of thick tamarind paste

1 teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon of brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon of brown mustard seeds. ( I used yellow , this was fine)

200 ml of water

 

Method:

 

Rub 1/2 teaspoon of the turmeric and 1/2 teaspoon of salt over the salmon. Leave it to stand for 10 minutes.

 

Whie the fish is standing mix the tamarind paste , the remaining turmeric and salt and sugar  with the water. Stir well to make the sauce.

 

Heat the oil in a preferably non stick frypan and when hot fry the salmon  for 2-3 minutes on each side. Remove from the frypan.

 

Heat the oil which remained in the frypan till medium hot before putting in the mustard seeds. They will pop within a few seconds ( It's wise to hold a lid over the frypan as they do to stop them splattering in your face or over the kitchen)

 

Add the tamarind sauce and bring to the boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10-12 minutes, stirring regularly, until the oil bubbles to the surface and the sauce has become very thick.

 

Put the fish back in the pan. Simmer for a further 5-8 minutes turning the fish gently once. By this time the fish should be cooked through and it should just be coated with the sauce.

 

We ate most of it straightaway but the leftovers also tasted good at room temperature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Healthy Semi Dried Tomato and Feta muffins

I still have a stash of semidried tomatoes to use up so I created a batch these healthy muffins. It's January. I can only just squeeze into my jeans.And I'm not the only one similarly afflicted in our house. Healthy is good!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup of rice bran oil ( you could substitute part or all of this with the oil from the sundried tomatoes)
75  grams of semi dried tomatoes (oil drained off and finely chopped)
100 grams of feta cheese (crumbled)
1 garlic clove crushed
280 grams of plain flour
1 tablespoon of baking powder
a pinch of salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 eggs
100 ml of Greek Yoghurt
150 ml of trim milk
1 garlic clove crushed

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C
Sift together the flour and bakign powder
Add the salt and pepper
Stir in the semi dried tomatoes and the garlic
Beat the milk, eggs, yoghurt and milk together
Stir into the dry mixture until just combined. Do not overmix.
Spoon mixture into the muffin  tins ( This batch made 12 mini muffins for snacky moments as well as 10 medium sized muffins )

Bake in the preheated oven till well risen and golden brown.
This took 20 minutes for the medium sized muffins and 12-15 minutes for the minis.

 

 

Honey Roasted Vegetables

 

 

At the Sunday market this morning I bought semi dried tomatoes preseerved in canola oil and decided to bake them with aubergines, red peppers and courgettes in a honey and orange marinade.It was delicious.

This was influenced by a Paul Gayler recipe in "Pure Vegetarian." In this recipe he used lemon instead of orange. I also substituted his red onion (cut into wedges) with the drained semi sundried tomatoes.

What I liked about his recipe is that after baking the vegetables for a little while he pours over vegetable stock and continues roasting.

The roasting intensifies the flavour and the braising makes the vegetables softer and more like a traditional ratatouille.

Gayler insists that a good quality honey will make a difference in this dish.  I had some rather special honey from Blueberry Farm in the Bay of Plenty so I sacrificed 4 tablespoons of it to make this dish. But I'm sure ordinary clover honey would be good as well.

This made a large amount which served 6 people easily at a barbecue with sausages, baked potatoes and a green salad to complete the meal.


Ingredients: 

600 grams of aubergine ( 2 fairly large ones)
450  grams of sliced zucchini ( 3-4)
1 cup of semi dried tomatoes (drained)
3-4 red peppers ( seeded and chopped into pieces)
4 tablespoons of honey
1/4 cup of olive oil
1 large orange
500 gm of hot vegetable stock
Salt and Pepper to taste

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200C
Use a fine grater to zest the orange.
Mix the orange juice and honey together. If necessary put them in the microwave for a few seconds to dissolve the honey.
Toss the vegetables in the orange and honey marinade.
Sprinkle the orange zest on top.
Drizzle the olive oil over and toss well together again
Roast the vegetables in a large roasting dish for 15 minutes or so until lightly caramelised
Give them a stir
Pour over the hot vegetable stock
Keep baking ( stirring from time to time) until the vegetabels have cooked and the liquid has become thickened and caramelised.
This took another 35 minutes in my oven. In some ovens the time could be alittle less or more, but do keep a careful eye on them towards the end of the cooking time to make sure they don't burn.

This can be served hot or at room temperature.











 

Mini Cheese Scones : A Baker's Dozen

We woke up this morning to find that by the 3rd day of the New Year blue skies and sunshine were already history.The  cold, drizzly and windy weather was a good excuse to hunker down and create some little cheesy scones to have with a coffee .

Big chunky scones with cream and strawberry jam are delicious for afternoon tea , but first thing in the morning these tiny savoury bites  made a lighter start to the day.

The secret to making a good scone is to rub room temperature butter into the flour lightly with a  pastry cutter or finger tips, and not to knead the dough. Just bring it together until it is just combined. Overworking is not only too much like hard work, it makes the scones tough.
.
For a change,  rather than cut the dough out with a cookie cutter, I just grabbed small lumps with floury hands and dropped them onto the baking paper to make rough little shapes.

Mini Cheese Scones

100 gm of self raising flour
1 teaspoon of castor sugar
A pinch of salt
25 gram of butter (at room temperature not straight out of the fridge)
3 tablespoons of yoghurt ( or a little more if needed)
1/2 cup of finely grated tasty cheddar cheese

Method

Preheat the oven to 200C

Sift the flour into a bowl.
Add the sugar,
Chop the butter into small cubes
Rub the butter  into the flour with your fingertips until it resembles fine breadcrumbs
Lightly mix in the cheese and yoghurt
Bring the mixture together and pat lightly and quickly into a ball
With floured hands pull off small pieces and put these little clumps onto an oven tray lined with baking paper.
Bake for about 8 minutes unti well risen and golden brown.

Serve with some buttter alongside.




 

Marinated Mushrooms with Basil and Ginger

I made a bowl of aromatic mushrooms for lunch today. You could easily serve them by themselves with toothpics or scoop them with a spoon straight out of the bowl . But we had a fresh baguette. I decided to fill it.

Fot two of us I cut 2/3rds of the baguette in half horizontally. This may sound rather greedy but the other one of us has rather a large appetite.

I spread the bread with some mascarpone ( cream cheese would have been fine too) added a layer of rocket fresh out of the garden , then the mushrooms and on the very top a layer of sliced tomatoes. This is the kind of soul food that you would only want to eat in familiar company as some of the filling could easily escape as you munch it. We  really enjoyed it.

This mushroom recipe was adapted from Paul Gaylor's book " Pure Vegetarian which I has been our since 2008 but I have only just come across it. BBC Food magazine called it "Inspiring,,,well written and easy to follow." and it is.

He used oyster mushrooms but the 400 grams needed for this recipe would make it a very expensive dish. I settled for 200 grams of button mushrooms but I didn't halve the marinade. Intuitively I felt that these mushrooms would relish the full amount in the original recipe, and they did.

And yes, one green chilli  ( not the two in the original recipe) was enough. My partner baulks at anything too spicy.And  I used sweet basil.

It was a little more time consuming than I had thought to smash the ginger, garlic and green chilli with my pestle and mortar. They never quite turned into the smooth paste called for in the original recipe, as before long I had tired of the pounding, but actually I think stopping when there was still a little texture was good.

Ingredients:

1 cm piece of root ginger, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced,
1 green chilli , desseded and thinky sliced
200 gm of button mushrooms
2 tablespoons of groundnut or vegetable oil
2 tablespoons of light soya sauce
1 teaspoon of palm sugar or brown sugar.
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice
30 gram of thai baisl ( or sweet basil)

Method:

In a mortar place the  chopped ginger, garlic and chilli (with a little salt If you wish) and crush to a  paste with a pestle and mortar
Heat the oil in a frypan/wok. Add the paste and let it infuse and flavour the oil for about 20-30 seconds.
Throw the mushrooms in cook them for about 3-4 minutes stirring as you go. Then add the soya sauce and sugar. Fry for a further minute and then add the lemon juice and basil. Toss just to combine and then take the pan off the stove and spoon the mixture into a bowl . Leave it to cool before serving the mushrooms at room temperature. Paul advises not to chill as the delicate marinating juices would dilute the flavour.

 

Foodie forecasts for 2013: What's new on the horizon?

Veggies will be King in 2013
 

What's likely to appear on our culinary horizon this year ? Seeking enlightenment I surfed the net and looked at what the foodie forecasts are for 2013. Interestingly experts from throughout the Western world are making similar predictions including:

•  Veggies will move to centre stage and will become a bigger part and sometimes the whole meal.  I love my veggies but my carniverous partner will rebel against this trend. It will test my culinary creativity to the limits to make him like them so much that he no longer craves meat for dinner each night.
• The demand for local, organic and natural will continue to grow.Kiwis are a forward looking lot and we have already been taking this on board over the last few years. Our Sunday and Farmer's markets are a treasure and hopefully they'll continue to grow and proliferate.
• Artisan products will increase in popularity. I'm all for it. I love buying quality products made by small kiwi producers, and there are lots of them. .Even when we try to spend less on food, one small luxury item like this can lift our whole eating experience.
• Sustainable fish will be preferred by an increasing number of consumers around the world, including kiwis as they become aware of how scarily fast the depletion of fish in our oceans is progressing. But although fish is very healthy it's expensive in New Zealand ( which never fails to surprise me as we're an island nation) so it is not on our dinner table as often as it should be. Canned tuna is very affordable. Pam's and Ceres Brands are line caught so I buy these.
• At restaurants small desserts will be served  and they will be very creative takes on old favourites. No more large slices of apple pie, cheesecake or crumble. Most women won't mind, blokes might.
• More streetfoods and pop up restaurants.These will not just sell greasy chips and burgers. They will sell healthy, local food that is nourishing and cheap. Sounds great. I love grazing in unexpected places.
• There'll be oodles of noodles in all their varieties including fresh. If this means  lots of quick nourishing dishes that can be whipped up in no time at all I'll happily embrace this trend.  
• Oddly, popcorn keeps popping up. But not the unhealthy kind loaded with saturated fats sold in movie theatres. Out will go the fat and in will go flavours. And  popcorn will be served as part of a dinner plate or even in icecream. It sounds strange but I'm happy to try anything which  is full of goodness: fibre rich and low on calories.
• Korean Food will become the new ethnic favourite. There's a whole lot to explore starting with kimbap (sushi) and the korean barbecue.
• Tea will be a hot item. Fine as long as it's looseleaf and available alongside a good cup of coffee in  local cafes. It would take a lot to move me away from a flat white when I'm out although I love a good cuppa at home, any kind gumboot, herbal or green.
• Fair trade and Ethical. In New Zealand  Fair Trade Coffee, chocolate and bananas are already capturing a sizeable chunk of our market and hopefully this trend will continue to increase . Fair Trade ice-blocks have just made an appearance. But what  ethical means needs to be more clearly defined. It's easy for a producer to say they are ethical but in what way and how can the consumer be sure?
•  One glaring omission is any mention of  the continued popularity of home baking. I can't see kiwis doing less of it in 2013. Why should we ? There's nothing wrong with an occasional home baked treat. And what would cafes be without cakes. muffins and slices?
• Last but not least let's hope the price of food staples stays the same or better still goes down so every family can afford to put food on the table and send their kids off to school with a healthy lunch.

     

 

 

Baked Ricotta with Cumin and Oreganum.

 

Making Ricotta cheese at home is immensely satisfying and easy as I discovered when I  tried the recipe from the Mad Millie's Italian Cheesemaking kit which my daughter Rachel gave me as a present. She knows how much I love cheese. The ingredients are few : 2 litres of whole homogenised milk, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 heaped teaspoon of citric acid dissolved in a tablespoon of water. The recipe makes 400 grams of fresh ricotta.

The kit comes with a little draining basket which you line with a double thickness of butter muslin . It doubles as a mould. I wanted to make a reasonably firm ricotta so  as the cheese was draining I put a heavy preserving jar on top.I pressed it for several hours so it was firm enough to slice and use in this simplified version of a recipe from Peter Gordon's new cookbook Everyday ( another, already well thumbed, Christmas present).

His slices are thinner but I wanted to use them for a vegetarian dinner rather than an appetiser so made them thicker and more substantial. He uses dried thyme. I had fresh origanum. He adds a little finely grated Parmesan cheese. I had run out but may well do this next time. He adds smashed peas which aren't really to my taste. He served them cold but we liked them hot.

But I think it's a brilliant recipe to play around with. There are many other recipes I can't wait to try in this book.

Ingredients:

200 gram of ricotta sliced into 3 rounds.
1-2  teaspoons of fresh origanum (finely chopped)
1 teaspoon of roasted cumin seeds
1-2 tablespoons of olive oil
Salt and freshly grated black pepper to taste.

Method:

Cut the ricotta cheese into three rounds.
Stir the origanum and cumin into the olive oil. Season to taste.
Spread over the ricotta rounds.
Bake at 190C until they begin to colour. This will take about 20-25 minutes.
Serve at once with some baked tomatoes and a little mesclun salad tossed with some basil leaves alongside..

Baked Tomatoes:

Halve the tomatoes. Dribble with a little olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Bake alongside the ricotta rounds.








 

Chilli Chocolate Mousse

 

 

 

This orange flavoured chocolate mousse is sprinkled with a hot Japanese spice called  Nanami Togarashi which you will find  in the ethnic section of some supermarkets.I couldn't resist creating this dessert one day to challenge the  tastebuds of some visitors.Luckily they loved it!

 

Nanami Togarashi is a complex spice, made out of 7 ingredients: red chili peppers, roasted orange peel, Japanese pepper, white and black sesame seeds, nori (seaweed) and ginger.

The tiny granules are a colourful mix of creamy, brown, black, burnt orange and red. It’s hot, but not so fiery that it will  burn your tongue.Once you’ve had your first taste it can easily become addictive.

 

The spicy taste enhances the clean and simple flavours of Japanese food and can be added to many different kinds of dishes such as soups, noodles and rice crackers.

My favourite way of using it, however, is to make this orange flavoured chocolate mousse and to allow guests to sprinkle over as much Togarashi as they dare. The Fair Trade orange chocolate bars available from Trade Aid shops throughout New Zealand are perfect for this recipe. It can be prepared the day before and as it’s rich a little will go along way.

 

Orange Chocolate Mousse
 

Ingredients

2 100g bars of Fair Trade Dark Orange Chocolate.
125 ml of water
3 eggs separated
1 tablespoon of Grand Marnier ( optional)
3 tablespoons of sugar

 

Method
Heat the chocolate with the water in a saucepan.
Stir until it is melted.
Keep on simmering the mixture for about 2 minutes until it thickens slightly.
Take it off the heat and let it cool slightly for a minute.
Beat in the egg yols one at a time. The hot choclate mixture will cook them slightly.
Beat in one tablespoon of Grand Marnier (optional)
Beat the eggwhites until stiff.
Gradually beat  the sugar into th eegg whites until the mixture is glossy.
Fold the eggwhites lightly into the chocolate mixture.
Put the mousse into small pots or glasses. Depending on their size it will serve 6-8 .
Leave them to set in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Allow guests to sprinkle their own Nanami Togarashi on. The most timid may leave it off, the chocolate mousse on its own still tastes superb.

 

Making your Own Tamarind Paste

I was about to embark on a recipe for tamarind fish for a Madhur Jaffrey I Heart Cooking Club Challenge when I noticed it included her home made tamarind paste. The recipe was at the back of the book ( Madhur Jaffrey's Flavours of India) and it looked so simple I decided to make it straightaway rather then use the bottled variety which has all sorts of unwelcome chemical additives.

Tamarinds are the fruits of a tall shade tree. Their sour green flesh changes to a chocolaty brown colour as it ripens and develops a sour sweet flavour. The fruits are harvested, peeled, seeded , semi dried and then pressed into blocks .Before you use this it needs to be broken up and soaked in water and then pushed through a sieve to produce tamarind paste .

I made a smaller quantity than Madhur , but it can easily be doubled or trebled and what you don't use straightaway can be stored in the fridge for several weeks or frozen for longer.

To start with I chopped 60 gm from a block of compressed tamarind pulp which is readily available in any of our local Asian shops . I was supposed to tear it into small pieces but it was too tough so I simply left it in one piece, put it into a ceramic bowl and just covered it with very hot water. After a few minutes it had begun to soften enough so that I could break it into smaller clumps with a fork.

You can leave this to soak for 3 hours or overnight or microwave it for 3-5 minutes . Always in a hurry I chose the latter option. I should have transferred it to a slightly larger bowl as a little of it spluttered over, but not enough to ruin the recipe.

The next instruction was to put a sieve into a non metallic bowl and  to empty the tamarind and its soaking liquid into it. Before doing this it would have been a good idea to leave it to cool a little as it was too hot to push through with my fingers, but I could extract most of the pulp with the back of a wooden spoon. When it had cooled a little more I used my fingers to push through more. I also scraped quite a lot of the paste from the underside of the sieve where it was clinging.

By this time only one fat seed and a very little fibrousy pulp remained in the sieve and the tamarind  in the bowl had been transformed into a thick, but still runny chutney like paste, which I felt was just right.

So I didn't need to follow her next step, which was to put whatever tamarind remained in the sieve back into the soaking bowl, add more hot water, mash again and return to the sieve to extract more pulp.







 

Spicy Cucumber Bruschetta

Madhur Jaffrey's Spicy Cucumber Sandwiches ( in Food for Family and Friends) was the inspiration for this recipe.She cleverly spiced up that iconic British afternoon tea item first enjoyed by the upper classes in Victorian times.

Madhur said it was best to make them with fine-textured white sandwich bread , although fine-textured brown bread would do as well.

I liked her flavour combination  but we snack on bruschetta rather than sandwiches . Would her filling work as a topping for rounds of toasted French Bread?

Madhur had said one green chilly or more. I added a couple which was a mistake as I  burnt my mouth at the first bite. I cut it back to 1/4 green chilli.Then the butter was a little too bland for my taste so I substituted it with a more tangy cream cheese.

She used small pickling cucumbers. To make them less watery (so less likely to seep into the bread and turn it into a damp sponge) she salted them , put them aside for an hour then drained them and patted them dry. As we would eat them immediately I wasn't worried about sogginess, so I didn't bother to do this. If I had wanted to serve them later this would have been a good idea.

Pickling cucmbers were not available but telegraph cucumbers are plentiful and cheap. The slices, however, were too big for my French stick so necessity being the mother of invention I cut into each slice to the middle and then twisted them over.

Victorian English Upper Class ladies would no doubt have turned up their noses at chunky rounds of toasted French bread instead of wafer thin sandwiches, and they would probably been horrified at Madhur's spiced up version as well. But tastes change and I'd happily serve these bruschetta with a chardonnay or a cup of chai under the sun umbrella out on the deck on one of the hot summery days we are  enjoying right now.

Spicy Cucumber Bruschetta

1/4 stick of French Bread ( sliced and toasted)
1/4 cup of cream cheese/ creme fraiche
1/2 teaspoon of Dijon -style mustard
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
1/4-1/2 hot green chilli very finely chopped
2 tablespoons of very finely minced fresh green coriander ( plus a few extra sprigs for garnishing)
1/4 telegraph cucumber ( fnely sliced)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Method:

Mix the mustard, lemon juice, coriander and chilli into the cream cheese and season to taste. Spread this on the rounds of toasted French Bread.
Add a slice of cucumber.
Decorate with a sprig of coriander or parsley.


I created this recipe for the I Heart Cooking Club Challenge. This week we were challenged to create an appetiser or finger food based on one of Madhur Jaffrey's recipes. Take a look at the other entries at

http://iheartcookingclubs.blogspot.co.nz/