malai kofta

The best Indian dish I've ever had was in Bloomington, Indiana. I had it many times and could never remember what it was called - like this recurring mental block. After I moved, I still couldn't remember what it was, except that it was vegetarian, spicy, and in a creamy sauce which surrounded some kind of cylindrical dumpling.

Finally when I saw the words I remembered them: malai kofta. Kofta, as in meatball (albeit vegetarian in this case) - related to the Greek keftedes. Malai means it's a food introduced by the Mughal Empire's reign in India, when a Mongol dynasty introduced Persian ingredients and techniques (one of the many examples of Persia's tremendous impact on the history of cuisine).

If you google, there are a million different recipes for malai kofta. Like macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs, or gumbo, it's a meal that allows for great flexibility and variation while remaining recognizable as the thing in question. I looked around, aimed for something using ingredients I had (no time-savers that would make sense for an Indian household but would require a special trip for me, like gulab jamun boxed mix), and then cherrypicked and made the kofta from some of my favorite ingredients - smoked mashed potatoes, turnip greens and spinach, peppadews - and Mexican frying cheese, a recommended substitute for paneer.

One thing that surprised me is that none of the recipes I saw used egg as a binder for the kofta, and indeed mine turned out pretty fragile. Maybe paneer is a better binder; maybe I should add egg next time; I don't know. I'm not going to give you a full recipe because this is a first draft. It was delicious - especially the sauce, some of which I had last night as a dip for naan - but it's not there yet.

The short version is that the sauce is rich and complex: it starts with a paste of ground onions, garlic, and ginger being cooked until dried, with additions of tomato puree, almond paste (which makes it creamy), and spices including Penzey's curry powder, curry leaves, fenugreek leaves, asafoetida, and arbol chiles.

A Lenten lunch.

More pan-fried gnudi, as described the other day. The gnudi were pan-fried in garlic-sage brown butter, which is why they're so flecked. After they were pan-fried, I sauteed the rest of the blanched turnip greens in the butter in the pan, along with a few cloves of garlic and some crushed red peppers. Pecorino Romano on top.

If you were intrigued by the finger limes I loved so much, they're available to the public now. Yes, the price is high - that's supply and demand, there just aren't many finger limes out there yet. $30 will give you a good number of limes to play with, though.

It's crazy how ... available things are. When I first started cooking, the "ethnic" aisle at the supermarket was mostly tomato sauce, some Goya products, some soy sauce and Chinese food in a can. Now that same supermarket - well, its successor in the same location - carries black garlic. And what you can't get locally, well - in the past I've gone online to order beef cheeks, fresh huckleberries, fresh curry leaves, jaboticaba, Sechuan buttons, Japanese caramel Cheetos, licorice Mentos, and those Haribo sour fizzy cola bottles.

It's the food equivalent of what I'm always saying about music: when I was a kid I depended on trips to Newbury Street in Boston two or three times a year to find good records, but now you can get on the internet, and anything you can't download for free you can certainly find for sale somewhere. Availability isn't the limit anymore, it's just knowing what to look for.

First dinner of Lent! Ma la tofu and potatoes.

Ma la simply means the dish has both the heat of chiles and the numbing of Sichuan peppercorns. It's one of my favorite flavor combinations, and for whatever reason, I usually include greens in a ma la dish.

There are several components here:

Rice, steamed;

Potatoes, cubed and fried twice, once at 350 and once at 375, to keep them crisp;

Tofu - "extra firm, cubed," bought that way from the supermarket, marinated in soy sauce, garlic, ginger, chiles, and Sichuan peppercorns, and then dusted with Zatarain's fish fry (why not) before being deep-fried with the potatoes in their second frying;

A sauce of soy sauce, vinegar, honey, water, Sichuan peppercorns, chiles, ginger, garlic, and cornstarch to thicken;

Turnip greens - blanched, squeezed dry (well, moist), chopped, and added to the sauce to heat through.

The greens would be greener if I hadn't had to hold the sauce while waiting for the rice to finish.

Tofu has a flavor, but like potato, it's a flavor that is quickly overpowered by whatever other flavors you're surrounding it with - here, it's mainly a textural contrast to the fried potatoes, the rice, and the crunch of the raw scallion.

I want to be super excited that Bulleit has a rye whiskey coming out, but it's sort of silly to be: Bulleit's bourbon is so high in rye that I've used it as a substitute for rye before. I just can't imagine that the product is going to be all that surprising - it's like hearing about a Milky Way that uses twice as much caramel. You basically know what you're in for.

On the other hand, if this makes rye whiskey easier to find, and puts more common brands out there, great. I don't know how much of a push is behind the product. You still can't even get Rittenhouse in New Hampshire, despite cocktail writers treating it as though it's a universally available brand.

calas

You're probably familiar with beignets - fluffy little doughnuts covered in powdered sugar, served at Cafe du Monde and other places in Louisiana. You're less likely to be familiar with calas, Louisiana's other fried bit of business - a ball of fried dough that uses up last night's leftover rice.

My recipe is scaled to one egg, which is enough for two people (more than twice what you see pictured):

2/3 cup cooked rice (not hot, but room temp is fine if you feel like cooking some rice and spreading it out to cool on the counter like I mighta done this morning)
1 egg
5/6 teaspoon baking powder (obviously you have to eyeball this - just fill a teaspoon and knock some back out)
1/6 cup sugar
a dash of vanilla extract or whiskey, optional
1/6 to 1/2 cup flour

Combine, adding just enough flour until it sticks together like cookie dough - you need it to stay in balls when you drop it in the deep-fryer, not spread out like a pancake.

Divide into about 6 portions and deep-fry for 6 minutes or so, flipping once. Serve hot with powdered sugar, syrup, or powdered sugar mixed with whiskey.

The rice adds structure to the interior - you can see that from the one cut in half - and some crunch on the exterior where it fries.

"This is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich," I said, and it was clear Caitlin was not enthused. "But not really."

The bacon:

Pork belly cured with curing salt, regular salt, a little sugar - your basic bacon cure - and The Spice House's Baharat seasoning, the ingredients of which they list as "Tellicherry black pepper, coriander, cumin, Ceylon select cloves, Saigon cinnamon, cardamom, Spanish paprika and Chinese Tien Tsin chile peppers." After curing for a week, it was simmered for an hour and a half, cooled in the simmering liquid, cut into bite-size pieces and popped into the oven until they crisped up.

So there's no smoke in the bacon element, and the spice profile is completely different.

The peanut butter:

Regular peanuts simmered until as soft as cooked beans, then smoked (along with the stock, so they don't dry out) for a few hours. It's possible they could have been simmered in the smoker had I originally planned to smoke them, but they'd take much longer, I suspect.

The smoked peanuts were then pureed with a couple peppadews and a little melted butter, until the consistency of hummus.

The sandwich:

A straight-out-of-the-oven baguette slit open, spread on both sides of the interior with the smoked peanut puree, and filled with chunks of pork belly and freshly fried and salted French fries.

I'm telling you, it worked. It was awesome.

This is my last week of unbridled meat eating before Lent. What am I farewelling to the flesh with? Fried chicken and oxtail/kimchi tacos, I think.