Adventures of a healthy-ish pseudo-foodie

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...

Best cracker topping ever. Also good with a fresh blackberry on the cheese. Like my post about  making mozzarella and ricotta cheeses , I'm not going to go into much detail about methods here. I used a kit from Ricki's, and whatever kit you buy will have instructions. But I guarantee you those instructions will be easy and well worth your time. Goat cheese is made by the same process as ricotta cheese. Heat milk, dump in a tablet of cultures, and strain over cheesecloth for a little while. It's incredibly easy. And it tastes SO much better than store-bought goat cheese. Fresh, creamy, crumbly. Amazing. I bought the goat milk at Trader Joe's (pasteurized is fine, just not "ultra-pasteurized"). In the end, the homemade goat cheese was marginally cheaper than buying Trader Joe's goat cheese, which is already pretty cheap. My next goal is to locate a farm where I can get cheaper goat milk to make this really cost-effective. Highly reco...

Are you refreshed just LOOKING at this? It all began with a heat wave, mint taking over the yard, half a bottle of sake in the fridge, and a fateful Facebook post by a friend who had just enjoyed some Watermelon Sake Mint Yogurt Soup at  Soup Nation . The next day, I rushed out to purchase a watermelon. And on day 3, this soup was recreated to the best of my abilities. Obviously, this was going to turn out well. I searched the internet and didn't find a recipe specifically for this concoction, but I found some watermelon gaspacho recipes that included lemon juice, so I decided to include lemon. Sea salt also seemed like a good idea. Beyond that, I just threw the title ingredients in the food processor in unmeasured amounts and it was fabulous. And I think it would be fabulous even with wildly different proportions of each ingredient, too. Blending in batches requires patience. I made a mess instead. I topped with a dollup of yogurt (SO good for variety of...

Sorry, I didn't make you one. Fresh strawberries from the farmer's market, basil in the garden, and a hot lazy Sunday afternoon... what to do? Oh, I know! Make a delicious alcoholic drink. The Recipe:  2 strawberries per drink A few basil leaves 1 tb lemon juice, preferably fresh Ice Rum Sugar, to taste Muddle strawberries and basil in the bottom of each glass. Add lemon juice and a sprinkling of sugar. Add your desired ratio of rum, water, ice, and perhaps more sugar. DRINK IT.

I dare you to look at this and not crave seafood. I knew that at some point, the 22 pounds of tomatoes that I crushed and canned last summer would be gone. But when this time approached, I went into serious hoarding mode with the last few jars. It had to be a REALLY special recipe to warrant the use of one of these final jars. And then there was one. I loved this jar of tomatoes. It spent a couple of months of lonely existence on the shelf that used to hold all of its tomato friends. Finally, there was only about a month left until I knew I could get another 22 (or 30 or 40) pounds of tomatoes for more canning, and so I decided I could part with it. But only for the specialest of special recipes. Enter cioppino. Tomatoes fulfilling their destiny: swimming in red wine with some veggies. I pretty much follow  this recipe from Epicurious , except for substituting whatever seafood looks good that day. I don't think the taste could possibly be improved, and it...

Ridiculously healthy tastiness, served. You know when you go to the farmer's market and every single vegetable looks so good that you want to buy one of each, but you can't figure out how to possibly prepare them all before they go bad? Enter this versatile quinoa (or couscous) and adzuki bean (or any other bean) salad. The more veggies, the better. On this particular day, I had acquired: sugar snap peas, carrots, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and cucumber. Add to that some avocado, dried cranberries, mandarin orange slices, capers, and parsley from the garden, and we have the beginnings of something delicious. My only quinoa trick is to cook it in stock. It's 10 times better than it is in water. I've come to love adzuki beans, and they're extraordinarily good for you in their natural form (as opposed to in their sweet paste form in Japanese sweets). I boil them with a piece of kombu (which I acquired for this bean and rice recipe ) because I ...