Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Coconut rice

Leftovers - always inspiring for new dishes. So I want to recommend another podcast  (A taste of the past) that I listened to. No recipe from there but it reminded me that we had fantastic savoury coconut rice in the Caribbean part of Costa Rica. So I wanted to try that out. There were a couple of large coconut pieces left, some of the white and red rice, I paired with Zaalouk the day before and some frozen and cooked squid pieces I had from am meal some time ago.
Ingredients:
Olive oil
1-2 gloves of garlic
1 large onion
chili to taste
coconut
cilantro

Make your base with olive oil, garlic, onion and chili, add coconut, rice and squid - add water or something else like juice or wine - I added water and a touch of gin which provides an interesting counter point to the coconut. Rum would be great as well




Sunday, June 18, 2017

Zaalouk

Hello again, some new input for cooking - finally. I have discovered a new podcast which is about cooking - like the format because it is very entertaining, with good tips and various stuff, paleo, vegan, ketogenic - hadn't even heard this last one before.
So I got inspired by the recipe for Zaalouk, a Moroccon recipe. As I heard in the podcast, these are the ingredients: Garlic, shallots, olive oil, eggplant, diced tomatoes - very ripe or canned -, salt,
turmeric, cumin, paprika, black pepper, cilantro and parsley.
More or less it went like this:
make your base with olive oil, minced garlic and diced shallots, add diced eggplant and let it simmer with a medium low temperature. - It takes some patience because the eggplant needs time to take up the oil and get cooked, maybe even 30 minutes, add the rest and let it simmer for another 10 minutes. With a fork, mash the whole mixture up, so there will still be texture but not large pieces of eggplant
Since I still have frozen eggplant here which I brought from Italy, I took up the idea at once.
Here is what I did:
1 onion
1 cup of wild garlic
olive oil
1 eggplant
1 can of italian cherry tomatoes
turmeric
cumin
chili powder
cilantro
parsley
Zaalouk with home made spelt flour bread and white and red rice with avocado




I was a bit disappointed because it somehow seemed to bland for me, I would have thought that it is more interesting - and I am not talking about spiciness from the chili. Maybe it was the absence of garlic and the wild garlic wasn't strong enough in taste or just not enough, who knows.
So the next day, I cooked it some more, with a little water added, lots more of turmeric and cinnamon. I mashed it some more with a food processor and added a generous sprinkle of lemon.
Next time I would even add more of these spices, maybe roast the cumin in a pan first. However, it is a great vegan  and gluten-free dish to eat with some rice or couscous or use it as a spread on some toasted bread.
For the whole procedure, why don't you listen to this podcast. It is called harvest eating and really worth listening to.