Coconut Muffins With An Orange Glaze

I don't have a terribly sweet tooth (although I know that doesn't sound right to those of you who've followed this blog for a while and been witness to the vegan baked goodies and Indian sweets I've posted here). But it is the truth-- I'd pick a savory snack over a sweet one any day.

For breakfast, though, and especially for breakfast on a Sunday morning, I love a bite of something sweet, although not cloyingly, richly sweet.

I was thrilled, then, to come across a recipe for Maui Muffins with an Orange Glaze in one of the vegan cookbooks I've owned for at least a year now and that has some truly unique recipes-- the Candle Cafe Cookbook (I really love their chocolate cake with a ganache frosting. In fact, it was after eating it at a friend's home that I rushed out to buy this cookbook).

These muffins sounded perfect-- delicious and complex with many layers of flavor, but healthy as well with whole wheat and fruit juices and coconut.

I have a quirk about coconut. I love it in curries and Indian dishes, and I adore it in traditional Indian sweets like modaks and karanjis and naralachi vadi. But I absolutely, positively cannot stand it in cookies, cakes, candies and other baked goods.

But I'd bought a bag of sweetened coconut a while back that was lying in my refrigerator asking to be used, and I thought, what the heck. The muffins sounded good enough to try.

I doubled up on the coconut in the original recipe because I didn't have pineapple, which the recipe called for and which is perhaps one of the reasons why these are called Maui muffins. So I am renaming mine Coconut Muffins instead. Also, instead of whole-wheat pastry flour, which the recipe called for and which I'd just run out of, I used durum whole-wheat flour which I did have on hand because that's what I use to make my chapatis. The substitution worked very well-- the muffins were moist and had a great crumb.

Curried Cabbage with Whole Masoor

Evenings in my kitchen sound something like this:

Me to Desi: "So what would you like for dinner tonight?"
Desi: "Kuch bhi chalega" (Anything will do)
Me: How about something light, like an upma?
Desi: Mmmmm...okay. (Translation: Not really)
Me: It's too late for dosas, but what about some sambar and rice and bhaji, although you just had that yesterday.
Desi: Fine (Translation: No)
Me (hopefully): Potato chips and cookies?
Desi: No!
Me: Okay baba, I'll just come up with something on my own, but don't complain later.
Desi: I can't promise that!

As you can tell, I don't get much help in picking out what to cook from my picky eater. And left to my own devices, I tend to think up recipes as I peer into the vegetable bin in my refrigerator at what's still there and not yet growing something.

This week, with barely an hour to put dinner together, I pulled out an uninspiring half a head of cabbage (left over after making this paruppu usili) that I knew I had to use up fast. Then I peered into my bean and lentil pantry.

Voila, a jar of whole masoor that I hadn't touched in a while!

Makai Patties Tamatar Ke Rassedar Saucewalle

Think back on your life to the people you've most looked up to. For most of us, I am sure, it is not people who are rich and successful. Instead, most likely, it is those who always did exactly what they loved to do, even if they didn't make a lot of money doing it, or weren't considered successful by the usual parameters.

The people I envy are the young man who left a well-paid software job in the United States to start and run a school for poor children in rural India. The woman who runs a mobile veterinary clinic in an Indian city that spays and neuters stray dogs and vaccinates them for rabies. The couple who left powerful careers in New York City to retreat to a simple life in rural America where they grow their own food, live without most material trappings, and yet have lives that are blissfully rich and meaningful.

Sure, money and a fulfilling career have their rewards and can be the means by which to get to your goals, but setting limits in your pursuit of success, as the rest of the world defines it, is more important.

I am probably not a great person to advise people on reaching goals, but I do know the importance of keeping your dreams in sight because, for a while,I let mine slip away in pursuit of a better paycheck.

I've been very lucky. I've had interesting jobs: I've worked for newspapers in three countries, I've interviewed governors, members of Congress, movie stars, music stars, and even a First Lady. I've traveled extensively and learned things I'd never have learned otherwise: things I might never use again, but which I am glad to know nonetheless.

But before I started on my latest job where I work on issues close to my heart and interests, I spent nearly four years in the most boring newsroom, writing about education policy and working under an editor I did not respect. I thought I wanted the job because it paid a little better than the more interesting jobs I'd had before. Yet, when I look back on those four years now, all I can see are lost opportunities to do something I truly valued, and work with people I really cared about. The better paycheck was by no means a better trade.

Cabbage Paruppu Usili and 10 (More) Honest Things About Me

 
If you're Tamil or if you have read this blog for any length of time, you know all about Paruppu Usili, the side dish that makes healthy eating both decadent and delicious.

But if this is the first time you've heard about it, trust me, you're in for a treat.

There's really no way you can go wrong with this really simple, very traditional dish that rolls in the wonderfulness of veggies -- all kinds of them-- with the rich, nutty flavor of tiny lentil dumplings. I may have said this before on Holy Cow! but I'll say it again-- paruppu usili is perhaps my most favorite of all the amazing South Indian comfort foods I've learned from being married to a Tamil guy.

The basic paruppu usili paste for the dumplings (or rather crumbles) is a very simple one, and I often tweak it slightly to add more flavor to the vegetable I am using. For instance, I add a smidgen-- or more-- of garlic to my Broccoli Paruppu Usili, or sometimes I just go plain as with my Green Beans Paruppu Usili. In today's Cabbage Paruppu Usili, I added a teaspoon or so of sambar powder which took no effort but produced an amazing flavor.

Cracked Wheat Upma With Thai-Style Peanut And Sweet Potato Curry.

I like mixing things up in the kitchen every now and then, and when the flavors are a good match-- Thai and Indian, for example -- it is easy to get great results. Like my Cracked Wheat Upma with Thai-Style Peanut and Sweet Potato Curry.

The cracked wheat upma is inspired by a recipe I saw this week at Chitra Amma's Kitchen and wanted to make right away. I made the upma more like I usually make a regular rava upma with the only real difference being that I was using cracked wheat instead of rava, which is also wheat but more finely ground.

I became a fan of cracked wheat as a rice substitute when one of Desi's diabetic relatives recommended it to us. Because cracked wheat is made from the whole wheat kernel, it is a high-fiber food that makes a healthy addition to any diet. I usually cook it exactly as I would rice-- boil two cups of water, add a cup of cracked wheat, bring to a boil, cover, lower the heat and simmer for 15 minutes until done. Eaten with curries just like you would rice, it is really delicious.

For the upma, I varied this basic technique just slightly, but I first roasted the cracked wheat because I like the nuttier flavor the dry-roasting creates.

We Are What We Eat: Revisiting My First Post

I am not terribly sentimental, but I do like to revisit now and then. So when Jaya announced her repost event, asking participants to dig up one or more of their first 10 food-related posts, I was happy for the chance to look back.

I chose a non-recipe post because, well, I am not a big recipe revisitor, if you know what I mean, and also because I like chatting with you about the importance of eating right. So I chose the very first post I put up on Holy Cow!, for two reasons: I still believe in it more than ever, two years since I wrote it, and because no one likely read it in the first place. After all, who ever reads the first post on a new blog other than friends and family?

It was called "We are what we eat."

That post was meant to get my readers thinking about what lay behind the food they ate as we explored recipes together. Here's what I wrote:

Food is political.

Most of us know this to some degree. What we put in our mouths has consequences that range from animal cruelty to environmental degradation to simply depriving someone else somewhere on Planet Earth by taking more than what we need.

And then there is the question of where your food comes from, and who brings it to you. And do you really want to enrich them?

I could not say it better today. Despite all the awareness around us and documentaries like Food, Inc., Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, most of us still believe in food as just a simple source of pleasure and sustenance. We don't like people telling us what we should and shouldn't eat, including our parents, spouses, friends and even doctors, and certainly not a food blogger.

But how far do we control our food, really? Scrape the skin of your chicken-- or eggplant-- and you'll find a vast, powerful network of business and political interests working relentlessly to make sure you eat what they want you to eat. Agricultural subsidies that make certain foods (not necessarily the healthy ones) cheaper and more attractive to the bargain shopper, factory-farming practices that create disgustingly cruel conditions for sentient animals to get cheap meat to your dinner table, genetically modified foods that can cause complex diseases. Even our taste buds have been rendered senseless by too-sweet, too-salty packaged foods and fast foods and I won’t even begin on what senseless eating has done to our health.

Your food also has costs beyond what you pay out of your wallet. Most of us are always on the lookout for bargains in the grocery aisles because, let's face it, we have limited budgets within which we'd like to feed our families well. But really cheap food usually has hidden costs-- for others. Take Walmart, for instance, which raised its advertising blitz on its cheap food prices in the recessive economy and saw its sales bounce upward. The retailer, not one to lower its bottomline, is notorious for human rights violations against employees, including underpaying them, not giving a large number of employees health insurance, causing them to depend on government health schemes, and arm-twisting farmers to sell their foods at extremely low prices to Walmart. And then, of course, they pass some of those savings on to you. Do you really want that?

I don’t want to go on and on, and hopefully I’ve got you thinking enough that you will want to educate yourselves more about this. So I’ll just end by saying this: most of you are already great cooks. But be a conscious one as well. Food can only taste better when you know exactly what’s in it and behind it.

Velvety Herbed Pumpkin

Here's an easy but sumptuous recipe that's perfect for the incredible winter we've been enjoying/enduring in the northeast. Velvety Herbed Pumpkin.

Right now our roof is balancing more than two feet of snow from three snowstorms that have made this the snowiest winter recorded in Washington history. Desi's spent about half of the last week shoveling snow, and there's more that's collecting right now and will have to be taken care of tomorrow. And as I write this, I can't help but worry just a little about how on earth am I going to get to work tomorrow when Metro has canceled most services and my car is buried out of sight?

But all the work and stresses seem trivial when you look outside the window at a world cloaked in incandescent white. Trees hang low, their branches delicately balancing neat, inches-deep fingers of snow. The sidewalks, streets and winter-brown lawns roll together into an unending stretch of pure white, marked, perhaps, by the long, parallel tracks of a cross-country skier delighted that the ski resort has landed at their doorstep. Occasionally, lightening sends an unusually deep-blue flash lancing across the bright night sky.

Yes, it's hard to be angry at the snow. Certainly not when it gives you the chance to stay indoors and cook up delicious food.

Easy Pepper-Mushroom Stir-Fry

 
I've been seeing some stories in the media lately about a spike in vegetarians going back to eating meat. These are usually people who went vegetarian after learning about the cruel ways of factory-farming animals raised for food. But then they found out that meat from "humanely" raised animals is easily available, and wham! Now they get to have their burgers and keep that halo around their heads too because, they reason, after all these animals lived decent lives on farms before being passed through the meat grinder.

Here's my question to these reconverted meat-eaters: I am sure most of you have lived pretty decent lives too. So would you be happy if you found out you were going to die tomorrow?

I didn't think so.

There's nothing like a humane death for a healthy animal, and there's nothing like humane meat. In fact, the term is an oxymoron if I ever saw one. Death is always unwelcome to the one it's thrust upon, including all those animals we hold captive for dinner. So assuming that it's okay to go back to eating meat because someone stamped "humane" across the top of the meat package is plain stupid-- or ignorant. Take your pick.

Besides, who but an ignoramus can really believe that most of the animals that are raised "humanely" are actually treated any differently than their counterparts on factory farms. In fact, investigations have often shown that some operations claiming to be humane are far from. Cage-free hens, for instance, are not usually really cage-free: the enclosures where they will spend their short, miserable egg-bearing lives are perhaps a little bigger, but they don't get to do anything a bird should be free to do, like feel the sun on their feathers, and fly just a little bit, as hens do. And in the end they get to die for your nuggets too.

That said, if you are still adamant about eating meat, it is a better idea to seek out local sources of meat where you can verify that the animals you eat lead lives of some dignity, instead of being raised on grisly, miserable feedlots and inside crates where they cannot move an inch. But do think about this: death, no matter what adjective you tag it with, is still just death. And it still smells pretty damn awful.


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And now on to other, more cheerful matters like this delicious stir-fry vibrant with red and yellow peppers, onions and mushrooms. I often stir fry peppers when I am really short of time because this is a vegetable that needs the minimum amount of seasoning and a short time on the stove before it turns into something so delicious, you want to snack on it straight out of the pot.

Ribbon Pakodas

Share When life piles two feet of snow at my door...I cook up a storm.

This weekend, DC is buried under the second mega snowstorm of the season which, to understate the matter, is highly unusual. Typically we are overjoyed to get five or six inches of snow (if that) three or four times each winter. We take pictures of the dogs frolicking happily in the backyard, semi-grudgingly shovel the stairs and the walkway, and grumble about county plows that have cleared the snow from the roads and dumped it right in our driveway. And then, we move right back on with our lives.

But getting on with life as usual is a bit difficult when you cannot get out your front door. Which is not such a bad thing-- not when I can spend some quality time at home and in my kitchen doing some of the things I haven't been able to in longer than I like...cooking, and writing about it for you.

Last night, the mood was perfect for a delicious treat Desi's been after me to make for some time: Ribbon Pakodas.

Pasta With Cauliflower And Chickpeas

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Here's a pasta dish so simple yet so elegant and so nutritious, you'll want to make it every night. '

The beauty of this dish is that it requires just a handful of ingredients you likely already have in your pantry. If not, it's surely worth a run to the grocery store to pick them up.

The cauliflower here -- it's one of my favorite vegetables and this turned out to be one of my favorite ways to eat it-- can be substituted easily with broccoli. Try not to overcook the cauliflower or the broccoli because it wouldn't taste so good without a bit of a snap and a crunch.

One tip on the pasta: I always specify cooking it al dente and what that means is you don't let it turn mushy on you. Instead, it should have a slight bite. Besides the fact that mushy pasta doesn't taste so great, there's a good nutritional reason for not overcooking pasta. Most of you are likely aware of the term glycemic index, which is a measure of the amount of sugar released into your blood when you eat a particular food. As is obvious from that description, a healthy diet should include foods lower on the glycemic scale because, honestly, you didn't think all that sugar in your blood was actually a sweet thing, did you?