SereneCooking

I am not one of those people for whom food is love. I don't think that people who don't like my cooking are rejecting me. That said, there's something really happymaking about hearing the teenager say, "This is AWESOME" about the food I put on the table.

Today's curry was super-simple. I think it was actually more work to get the photo than to make the food (curry is notoriously hard to get a good shot of). I wasn't sure what I was making for dinner at first, but then lcohen started talking about potato and chickpea curry, and the die was cast.

What I made



Coconut curry with potatoes and garbanzos (and yellow rice)

[Note: This makes 8 generous servings. I made enough rice for 4 servings; the curry leftovers are excellent cold.]

2 tbsp oil (I used olive)
2 small onions, chopped
1 tbsp red curry paste
1 tsp ground coriander
3 carrots, cut however you want them cut
4 cups cooked garbanzo beans (about 2 cans, or cook them yourself)
1 lb tiny red potatoes (or larger ones, cut up)
1 14-oz. can coconut milk
1 tbsp fish sauce (or more to taste)

Sautee onions and curry paste in oil until onions are soft. Add remaining ingredients along with enough water to just cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20-30 minutes, until potatoes and carrots are cooked. Serve over yellow rice (below). I also served store-bought chutney.

Yellow rice

For 4 servings:

1 cup long-grain white rice
1 teaspoon each oil and turmeric

Sautee rice in oil and turmeric until the rice starts to smell a little toasty. Add 2 cups water. Bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat to the lowest setting. Allow to simmer for 20 minutes, then remove from the heat and let stand, covered, 5-10 minutes more. Fluff with fork and serve.

Cost per serving (approximate)

The curry: $.59
The rice: $.14
The chutney: $.32 (I used half of a $2.49 jar for the 4 of us)
Total: $1.05 per serving


How we liked it

wtfpotatoes: "This is AWESOME."
sogwife: "The curry was tasty, though I think I was expecting [punk rock chickpea] gravy, so the bite took me by surprise at the first taste."
someotherguy: "It was good. I think I would have liked it better with chunks of dead cow in it, but it was good. It wasn't very spicy."
serene: I loved it. It's basically my perfect curry -- coconut based; Thai flavors (as opposed to Indian or Korean); not too spicy.

1) A fat-free, vegan version of my mom's spaghetti sauce is on the
stove. It takes hours and hours to cook (hers takes a day and a half,
but her version has lots of meat and fat that keep it from reducing as
quickly). My house smells GOOD.

2) We were picking up fruit at the store, and I decided to buy a bag of
grape tomatoes to eat by themselves as my fruit for the day. Yum,
tomatoey joy.

3) We've been saying lately that with such a wonderful produce section
at our store, we should be buying something besides romaine lettuce,
bananas, and all that usual stuff. So yesterday we bought two spiny chayote squashes. I made a kind of gratin out of them, and it was pretty good:

2 medium chayotes, peeled, seeded, quartered, and sliced thinly
2 medium potatoes, ditto except the seeded part
1 small onion, ditto
2 cups unsweetened soymilk
1/2 teaspoon of salt or to taste
pepper to taste
parsley (I used about a teaspoon of dried)

Preheat the oven to 350F as you cut the veggies. (You can also cook it
on a higher temp if you're doing something else in the oven; just lessen
the time.)

Place the veggies in a baking dish. Mix the remaining ingredients
together and pour over the veggies -- it may be more or less liquid,
depending on your baking dish, as the liquid should almost cover the
veggies.

Bake 60-90 minutes, uncovered, until the top is browned, liquid is
bubbly, and veggies are nice and soft.

I know a lot of folks think vegan versions of meat-laden foods are silly and affectoid, but gosh, was tonight's dinner good.

I made our favorite vegan gravy (which is essentially the method for the punk rock chickpea gravy in _Vegan with a Vengeance_, but without the chickpeas today). Then I mashed some potatoes with vegan margarine, boiled some cut-up broccoli, carrots, and onions for just a few minutes, and fried up some small tofu cubes.

Mixed the tofu and veggies together with the gravy, put it into a casserole dish, and topped with the mashed potatoes, and sprinkled some paprika on top as a nod to my mom. Baked for 20 or so minutes at 400.

Oh. My. God. So good.

Have you tried this gravy? sogwife said if she didn't know I was doing the vegan thing these days, she would have sworn this was meat-based gravy.

Breakfast was one of our standards -- store-bought O'Brien potatoes, sauteed with water, seasoned salt, and pepper. Eggs for the gang, none for me.

For lunch, I made a really decent fat-free coleslaw, but now someotherguy wants to use it as the veggie for dinner (he's making steak hash for himself and sogwife, I'm having barbecued Riblets, because I've been craving them, and that's what I wanted the cole slaw for). And now, of course, I have no idea what I'm having for lunch, but maybe just soup and crackers.

I'll post the recipe for the cole slaw once I get it into MasterCook.

Today, I'm hoping to spend some time doing some meal planning. I eat more veggies when I *plan* for more veggies, and I've really been craving fresh food, so no better time to try new recipes and stuff.

Next week, we start getting our organic produce box, too, so it'll be fun to find ways to use the variety of stuff we get.