Quick Ciabatta

Ciabatta is my favorite Italian bread, but it is not always the easiest and quickest bread to make, even for a seasoned baker. The dough is rather wet and sticky and can seem impossible to work with when you're new to the process, but that wet stickiness is also vital to the light, bubbly, airy texture of this bread. This also is a bread that requires some planning ahead because you need to let the starter stand overnight or at least several hours. And planning ahead is not my favorite thing to do.

I was resigned to making ciabatta only when I have the time, which is not often, until I found this video and tailored the procedure to my usual ciabatta recipe that involves overnight rising. The initial rise time for this ciabatta is under two hours, and the second rise is just about an hour. So in under four hours, including prep and baking time, you are rewarded with a fluffy, crusty, delicious bread that you won't be able to stop dunking in olive oil and popping into your mouth. Imagine that.

I have a busy Sunday, so I can't chat too long. My neighbor Heather and I are trapping some feral cats in our neighborhood and I am transporting them to the spay and neuter clinic this afternoon. But before I say ta-ta, here's the recipe. Enjoy, all!

Restaurant-Style Vegetable Biryani

As I recuperated at home last week, my stomach went through some wild food swings, ranging from an extreme apathy to anything food to a hunger for nothing but salty crackers to a deep craving for Indian restaurant food. While in the Indian restaurant phase, one of the foods I had to have at every meal was a vegetable biryani.

Everyone's familiar with a biryani and I've posted about half a dozen versions of this popular Indian dish over the past four years. But there is something about a restaurant biryani that sets it apart and is rather challenging to capture in a home kitchen. It's not that it's better-- it's just different.

Sourdough Pretzels

Pretzels may or may not make you thirsty, but the idea of a twisted, chubby, salty cloud of dough baked to golden perfection is enough to make just about anyone hungry.

I began a sourdough starter last week for the first time in my life. As much as I love to bake breads, I had long resisted sourdough because of Desi's aversion to any foods that are fermented (he can't even stand dosas and idlis made with batter left to ferment overnight). But the starter was so easy to make, and when --in a couple of days-- it started to work exactly as the instructions at the King Arthur Flour website said it should, I got a little more than excited about making something really special with it.

Pretzels seemed perfect because much as I love them, I had never baked them at home before. Besides, the recipe was simplicity itself, requiring just a minimal rise time. I did have to veganize the recipe because the original contained milk powder (I subbed soy milk and reduced the amount of water), but my vegan pretzels turned out so beautifully that I am sure nothing was lost. They had a subtle flavor of sourdough, which was perfect for Desi, and they were soft and fluffy and super-delicious.

Saffron Shankarpali

Anticipating festivals can sometimes be more fun than the festivals themselves.

The evidence is all around us. Take the holiday season when just about everyone you meet appears to wear a halo of enchantment and goodwill. Charity spikes, and so does courtesy. The day before Thanksgiving, for instance, you just can't do anything to annoy anyone. Even that woman whose foot you stepped hard on while trying to stumble out at your Metro stop gives you a broad smile and a "don't-worry-about-it" wave. Of course it would be a different story if you were waiting with her and a thousand others outside your favorite store for the hot sale the day after Thanksgiving, but we won't get into that here.

In India, the Diwali season brings on a similar sort of magic. Cities light up, people shine, and there appears to be no dearth of delicious things to eat.

In the India where I grew up, sweets for Diwali were usually made at home. In my home, it was a collaboration between my mom and my very handy-around-the-kitchen dad who would together come up with amazing treats that would be made days in advance and then stashed away for the big day.

Summer's End Pesto

Summer's End Pesto is my culinary au revoir to the lovely months of sunshine and gardening that must inevitably end as fall begins its slow creep over the northeastern United States.

By early October most of my vegetable plants have stopped producing but the herbs are usually still in form, especially the hardy perennials like sage, rosemary, thyme and chives. The sage, a round-leaf, silver-green plant that my friend Bess gave me years ago, is so hardy that it usually stays quite healthy until the first heavy snowfall has smothered all of its energy.

The annuals are another story. The one annual herb I plant each year is basil because what would a summer kitchen be like without its sweet-spicy aroma? This year I also planted some coriander but by now it's long gone. And the basil too is beginning to wilt and turn brown.

"Kheema"-Stuffed Naan-Calzones

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I think people who don't like pizzas are a little weird. No, a lot weird. Especially when they are married to me.

Yes, Desi-- my Desi-- is not a lover of the almighty pizza pie. Sure, he will eat it quietly when we order in a pizza, or when I make one at home, but I can honestly tell that his tummy is longing for something else. Most likely something that involves rice or pooris.

I, on the other hand, couldn't love a pizza more. It is right up there among the foods I might order for my last meal. In fact, after going vegan I missed ordering pizza so much that I almost dropped to my knees and said a tiny prayer to the Italian gods when a Z Pizza opened in my neighborhood with multiple vegan choices.

Mango Biscotti

There just aren't enough ways in the world to eat the glorious mango. So here's one more: Mango Biscotti.

Baking with mango -- and thinking up new goodies to make with mango-- is one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen, as all the mango-based recipes here on Holy Cow! will attest. There are my Mango Cupcakes with Mango Buttercream Frosting. My Mango Bread which friends, relatives and coworkers can never get enough of. My Mango Cheesecake which puts dairy-based cheesecake to permanent shame, hands-down. Then there's Mango Cornbread, Mango Halwa, Mango Muffins, Mango Lassi, Mango Cashew Cream...you get the idea of just how deep this madness runs?

Aval Upma

Aval Upma is the Tamil cousin of Maharashtra's celebrated Kande Pohe, and it makes for some delicious tea-time tiffin (as South Indians call their snacks) or a hearty breakfast.

The base of the Aval Upma is aval which is nothing but flattened grains of rice that cook up in no time at all. In fact, it takes a lot less time to cook up this perfectly sumptuous dish than you'd honestly believe. Even better, it's an extremely healthy dish because you can add to it all kinds of veggies and peanuts. You can find brown rice aval in Indian supermarkets that cooks up in about the same time as the white rice version. I prefer the brown-rice aval, but the grocery store was out of it the last time I visited.