Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

Imagine a pile of plain yogurt and some Indian pickle for dipping I saw a Pinterest recipe for samosa-filled quesadillas, which led me to  this recipe  from Nadia's Healthy Kitchen for baked samosas using tortillas, which led me to just use the giant tortillas I had in the fridge and make them into full-sized burritos. They were a hit! I largely followed the recipe from Nadia's Healthy Kitchen, but I added some potato, omitted the chana masala powder and just added a bunch of cumin instead, added bell pepper and fresh chilies, didn't bother with the "sealing paste," and basted them in a little bit of melted butter (omit for vegan version). Everyone except the 5-year-old liked them! The Recipe (adapted from  Nadia's Healthy Kitchen ) 2 cans (30 oz total) cooked garbanzo beans, rinsed (I eyeballed the equivalent from dry beans) 1 small onion, chopped 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 thai chili, minced 1 bell pepper, chopped 1 potato, baked until soft (or microwaved for...

Cucumber salad is key. This dal is perfect. Most of us took seconds, and I'm really excited to eat the last portion that's sitting in the fridge right now. The accompanying salad is really great for adding texture, crunch, and acidity to the meal. I wouldn't skip it. I got it from  Tea for Turmeric  and prepared it pretty much as written, but doubled and with none of the optional ingredients. This recipe doesn't mention any seasoning/dressing on the salad, but adding lemon and salt to it really brightened things up. The Recipe: (from Tea for Turmeric) 2 c red lentils splash of avocado oil 2 tsp cumin seeds 2 small onions, finely chopped 1 inch ginger, grated 4 small tomatoes, chopped 2 thai chilies, minced 2 tsp cumin powder 2 tsp coriander powder 1 tsp cayenne 1 tsp turmeric 2+ tsp kosher salt 2 tsp lemon juice 1/2 c cilantro, chopped For serving: basmati rice and plain yogurt Salad ingredients: 1/2 english cucumber, sliced 10 cherry tomatoes, quartered 1/4 onion, slic...

  This looked like too much red onion, but it was actually not enough. I watched  this Beryl video  about meals that kids love around the world, and it said that kids in India love pav bhaji. I had doubts that my kids would be into it, but I thought it looked delicious, so I looked it up.  I used  this recipe  from Ministry of Curry. The only changes I made were 1 red bell pepper instead of half of two different peppers, snap peas instead of frozen peas because I have lots in the garden, no tomato paste because I didn't have any, a few more tomatoes to make up for that, and unbuttered untoasted brioche buns instead of buttered toasted potato buns, because that sounded better to me. When I saw Beryl's plate with all of the red onions, I didn't get it. I get it now. Lots of red onion is the way to go. One kid didn't like it and the other wasn't even willing to taste it, but I have hopes for the future. Also, it seems like it would be good just over rice with ...

The weird meat-looking thing on the lower right is Indian pickle. I like my lentils best when they are broken down into mush, and I like bean/rice combination recipes, and I like when the beans and rice are mixed together so the leftovers can be stored together and maybe even cooked in one pot. And obviously, I love any excuse to try something new in the Instant Pot. And so, when I came across khichdi on Pinterest, I was pretty excited. I'm kind of surprised I've never had it before, because from my reading it sounds like it's a pretty common Indian dish. And there are lots of variations. I chose a variation that made it into a totally uniform porridge-like mush, and I used urad dal and jasmine rice because that's what I had, though I'll definitely try it with basmati rice in the future. Apparently khichdi is commonly served to people with sensitive stomachs - sick people, babies, etc. It was already in my meal plan for the week when I ended up with s...

New Year's Day Lunch This recipe comes from  Carve Your Craving , thanks to another Pinterest search for Instant Pot recipes. I am still amazed at how much better garbanzo beans are when prepared from dry beans, versus the canned version. Another thing I really like about this recipe is that you mash the chickpeas a bit and then cook it more, so the chickpeas act as a natural thickener. It gives it really good texture and heartiness. Once all of the ingredients are prepped (onions/garlic/ginger chopped, spices measured, chickpeas soaked), it's mostly hands-off. If I make this on a weeknight, I'll prep the ingredients in advance so I can just throw it together that night. Normally I prefer dishes like this served over rice, but this has such good texture that it works without the rice too. With naan of course. My only changes from the original recipe are things that the Carve Your Craving post suggests as options: omitting the chickpea flour and the green...

The potatoes are hiding. The chard in my garden has grown like crazy this summer. Previously my only chard recipe was  this pizza , which is delicious, but it was time to branch out. After some Pinterest searching, I came across  this recipe from Food.com  for saag using chard. This kills two birds with one stone - it uses up some chard, and it also continues my quest for a good saag recipe.  And it succeeded! This will be my go-to saag recipe for now, and I hope it works just as well with spinach when I don't have chard sitting around. In addition to the fresh chard, I used potatoes that I grew, garlic that I grew, and onion that I got at a farm stand. With all of this freshness abounding, I felt a little weird using curry paste from a jar. But the flavor turned out to be really delicious. Some of my Indian recipes fail from either my unwillingness to measure spices or from not having fresh enough spices, so I might start using  this curry paste ...

Melty spinach <3 On the winding road toward the perfect Indian lentil recipe, I'm not willing to say that this is "the one," but it's a good one. I intend to make this one for at least a while, until I'm inspired to find a new one. This recipe comes from the lovely  Aarti Sequeira , and I followed it exactly except: I doubled the spices upon recommendation from reviews on the foodnetwork site, I used powdered cumin instead of cumin seeds because that's what I had, I used chili-garlic sauce instead of serrano chile, and I added spinach. This recipe does take a few steps to make, but they're all fairly easy and the timing between them is flexible. Nothing gets ruined if the lentils soak too long or cook too long. I recommend eating it over rice with plain yogurt and Indian pickle. The Recipe:  1c red lentils 2c water 1 onion, diced 4 cloves garlic, minced 1 tb ginger root, grated 1 pint crushed tomatoes 1 tb chili-garlic sauce s...

This makes me want to sing. It's possible that I should just delete my blog postings and make this URL redirect to  Pinch of Yum , because a good portion of the things I cook now are from that site. And almost all of them have become favorites.  I'm at the point now where I'm trying recipes from  Pinch of Yum  that don't initially sound that good to me, because I trust Lindsay that I will love it. She has yet to let me down. In this case, I'm not big on stew, or coconut milk, or anything with chunks of potatoes. But I was lured in by how healthy, cheap, and easy it looked to make. And guess what? It was delicious. Bonus: SO MANY LEFTOVERS. I'm more excited about going back to work now that these are waiting for me. My only change to the original is that while she uses 3 cups of vegetable broth and 1 cup of water, I used 4 cups of vegetable broth, because that's the amount in a box and I hate having ingredients left over. And I added th...

I haven't yet mastered taking non-foggy photos of hot food. Is this possible? Note:  this saag recipe  is better. Motherhood has changed me in many ways. One of these ways: I now understand the allure of the Crock-Pot. Previously, I would have said, "How hard is it to stand at the stove for 3 minutes to sautee onions and spices before adding the other ingredients and turning down the heat to low?" Now I get it. Dump things into cooking vessel, return to baby, and don't worry about burning anything. Eat sometime between the next 4 and 8 hours. Pack lots of leftovers. Done. I used  this recipe  as my guide because I was looking for something non-dairy. I omitted the peas and tofu (though I want to try it with tofu next time), added chickpeas, added onions, and improvised my own garam masala by combining crushed cardamom seeds with pumpkin pie spice. A good reason to be friends with your neighbors: In case your immersion blender dies partway through blend...

Just pretend that I'd had the patience to cook it longer, and those lentils were broken down a bit more. The leftovers were delicious. The perpetual mission: Take healthy things and make them even healthier. The inspiration: a craving for urad dal, and massive quantities of kale and spinach in the garden. The result: somewhere between urad dal and saag. If this is an actual defined dish in India with a name of its own, someone let me know. Until then, "green urad dal" it is. I used the food processor to get the vegetables really small, so it would all meld into one mushy mix of deliciousness. I love the way the spinach and kale practically melt into the lentils.  Mmm, melting vegetables. The Recipe: 1.5 cups urad dal 1 onion, minced 1 tomato, chopped finely (or pureed in the food processor) 1 potato, chopped finely 1 bunch kale and/or spinach, finely chopped (food processor recommended) 2 tb fresh ginger, grated 1 tb olive oil 1 tsp c...

You could totally play the cloud-shapes game with these. The last  chickpea pancakes  were pretty good, but I wanted to try another recipe for comparison. And since I really, really wanted to give the last one some Indian flair, I decided to just go ahead and follow a recipe for pudla (Indian chickpea pancakes). I used  this recipe , minus the asafetida powder because I didn't have any. I did my best to convert pounds to cups and then scale everything down for the 2 cups of chickpea flour that I had, so my proportions may not be true to the original. I blame this for the extreme density of my pancakes. Next time, I will add more water and go for thin-and-crispy, rather than thick-and-hockey-puck-like. Don't get me wrong - they tasted good. But they were dense. Dry ingredient art. In other news, I've been growing cilantro in the windowsill for a few weeks and this was the first time I got to use some of it! For that reason alone I was going to enjoy my p...

In retrospect I should have put eyes and a mouth on this oblong pile of dal. For someone who grew up thinking I hated All Things Lentil, I've become quite the fan of dal in adulthood. In fact, I haven't met a dal that I didn't like. This one is the sweetest that I've made (thanks for the mango), which is a nice change of pace. Speaking of the mango, I must spend a moment raving about one of my favorite kitchen gadgets. I usually adhere to Alton Brown's rule against single-purpose kitchen tools, but my mango slicer has more than earned a spot in my kitchen drawer. I used to be like the "before" shots in infomercials, trying pathetically to cut mango effectively away from the pit. The mango splitter easily glides down and separates the pit from two fleshy halves. It does leave a tiny bit of mango stuck to the ends of the pit, but I certainly don't mind snacking on that part. Overall it's saved me a lot of grief. If you're a mango lover...

Can you smell the spices just LOOKING at this? I can.  Part two of the two-part series of favorite south Indian brunch foods brings us another traditional goodie: upma. This is one of my go-to dishes when people come over for brunch. They always look at it with skepticism and end up loving it (or at least they tell me they do, and they usually have seconds). It's just semolina, cooked and seasoned into a mush of spicy complexity that works for any meal of the day. A good day in the garden. In the middle of winter, this dish works pretty well with frozen peas and carrots. But on this day, I had collected tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes, a chili pepper, garlic, and shallots from the garden. So that's what went into the upma. And oh my, it was delicious. I've made upma many times without the urad dal. In that case, it looks and feels more like couscous when it's done. The urad dal causes it to be more creamy and risotto-like, not to mention healthie...

Toooooasted cooooooconut. For the first in a two-part series of my favorite southern Indian brunch foods, I present dhokla. It's sort of like a heavier version of cornbread, made with a mixture of chickpea and rice flours, with Indian spices and optional vegetables to make it savory and delicious. I can eat this for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It'll look fancier with the topping. I make my Indian brunch foods from the mixes that they sell at Asian markets, because that's how I learned. However, it sounds pretty easy to do this totally from scratch if you are so inclined. The magic is in the topping. While the whole recipe is pretty flexible, I am going to insist that you top it with toasted coconut flakes and mustard seeds. Think of this as the ketchup to your burger. There is no compromise here. The Recipe: 1 box khaman dhokla mix 1 tb plain yogurt, plus more for serving Vegetables of your choice (I used 1 cup chopped spinach and 1...

Little pot of bubbling goodness seeks lentil patties, sweet potato fries, or pretty much anything else. I recently made  this recipe  from Crumb Blog for lentil patties with tomato jam. The lentil patties were pretty good, but the tomato jam was really something to write home about. It's one of those foods that makes you feel warm, even when it's cold. It has just the right balance of sweetness, acidity, and spice. The mustard seeds are a must (haha, must ard seeds). Their crunch, and the little burst of toasty peppery flavor that follows, are amazing in contrast to the rest of the flavors. The next time you're tempted to put ketchup on something, consider this instead.  I have a little bit of this gold left over in the freezer. I'm thinking I may thin it out with vegetable broth and use it as a sauce for a stir-fry. Stay tuned for the results. The only change I made to this recipe was upping the amount of mustard seeds. I think 1 tsp is the perfect a...

I hope I don't turn any readers away by featuring cilantro in my first photo. My current food obsession is black rice. I was first introduced to it at  Sushi Pure . It's purple when cooked, and I was completely smitten when purple sushi arrived at our table. I mean, purple sushi! It was like my birthday or something. Actually, it might have been my birthday, because I pretty much always have sushi on my birthday, but anyway. It's kind of sweet and has this great chewy texture. When I learned  how healthy it is , my crush evolved to full-out love. Sushi Pure's Spicy Tuna Roll (photo from FoodSpotting.com) In my ongoing research for ingredients that are low in calories but high in nutrition, adzuki (also spelled azuki) beans came up. I learned that these are the sweet red beans used in Japanese desserts, including red bean ice cream, which I've been obsessed with since I was a kid. But since turning them into ice cream probably negates the health benef...