Borsch

I made a big batch of this tasty Russian beet soup before I left, and left it in the fridge for the boyfriend. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, isn't it? :-) Every cook has his/her own version of this, so don't be afraid to try someone else's! Mine's quite basic, but I love it anyway. And so does someone else!

Borsch

Ingredients:

*For stock:
*2 beef short ribs
*1 onion
*1 carrot
*bay leaf

1/4 small head of cabbage
3 small potatoes
1 carrot
3 small cooked beets
sunflower oil and butter for frying (a tablespoon or two of each)
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 tablespoon of vinegar
2-3 tablespoons tomato paste (I use roughly somewhere between the two)
salt to taste

Method:

*Start by making stock. I use my handy 3 quart pot for this (and for everything). Use a bigger one if you want more stock; I end up with about 2 quarts of quite rich stock. Place the ribs your pot with an onion peeled and halved, a carrot halved and a bay leaf. Add water (I add as much as my pot will take) and bring to a boil, then simmer for 2 to 3 hours, or until meat is soft. Fish out the onion and discard; fish out the carrot and eat it. :-) Remove the meat; take it off the bones and cube it, removing any huge globs of fat. Salt the broth to taste.*

If you already have stock, begin to warm it. For veggies, start with the cabbage; shred it. Cut the potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes (I peel them first). Bring the stock up to a boil, then add the cabbage and potatoes. Grate the carrot and beets. 20 minutes after the cabbage and potatoes were added to the stock, melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the beets. You can add broth from the pot if it's too dry. After the beets sautee about 10 minutes, add the sunflower oil and carrots (my boyfriend's mom fries them separately, carrots in oil, beets in butter. I mix it all together and it's fine). Sautee another 10 minutes. Now add the tomato paste and the sugar and vinegar (I stir them together first in a small glass). Stir well and sautee another few minutes. NOTE: If at any point during the sauteeing the mixture is too dry and may burn, add stock! Now, add the mixture in the frying pan to the pot with cabbage and potatoes and stock. Also add the cubed meat. Let it all cook together for a few minutes, then taste and add salt as needed.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: the best way to serve this is with a generous dollop of sour cream, and chopped dill and parsley scattered over the top! Also have some rye bread on the side. Delicious! You can make the stock beforehand; if you want to take the fat from the stock, just put it in the fridge overnight. The fat will rise and solidify and you can just scoop it off the next day. My boyfriend would be horrified if I did this, though. :-) You can play with the flavor by adding more/less vinegar and/or sugar; I find that the amount listed here works pretty well. You can also use lemon juice instead of vinegar, and experiment with adding a mix of crushed tomatoes, or chopped tomato, and tomato paste. For vegetarian borsch, leave out the meat and use a vegetable stock. For fast borsch, you can use boxed stock (I've used chicken with decent results) and just follow all the directions (except you won't have meat).

Food in America

So, it isn't a recipe, but this is a food related post.

I came back home (to the States) for a visit starting on Thursday, after having lived in France for the past 7 months. French food is DELICIOUS, but naturally, there were some American foods that I missed. Surprisingly, a lot of them are fast food/restaurant food, which I never ate very often at all when I actually lived here.

I came here with a list of foods to buy and bring back, and a list of restaurants I wanted to go to. Now, after just being here a few days, several are crossed off, not because I've gone there and eaten the food/bought it, but because I've realized that my palate has changed and there are certain things that I don't want anymore. Also there are certain things (peanut butter and marshmallows, brownies) that I've been able to find or recreate in France in the past couple of weeks.

Here's what I've eaten so far being here, and what I've thought about it:

-Thursday: A reuben sandwich in Newark airport. It was great, but I had to take half the cheese off of it. The fries were disgusting! They were so different from the crispy French ones I'm used to now; they were so doughy!

-Friday Lunch: I had some refried black beans that I made, and some microwaved plantains (Goya brand). They satisfied most of my craving for Mexican/Latin American food.
-Friday Dinner: We went to an Indian chaat place. I had some pani puri, some dahi wada, some masala dhosa, and for dessert, gajar halva and rasgulla. The dessert was ok. The pani puri and dhosa were dissapointing, the dahi wada was the best dish (yogurt was good, the wadas were not). It was something I had been CRAVING, but I realize now that after India, no chaat in America will ever compare. A dissapointing realization.

-Saturday Lunch: We went to a new Vietnamese restaurant. I had very decent eggrolls and spring rolls, and the best pho I've ever eaten!
-Saturday Dinner: It was a religious holiday at my dad's mosque. I am no longer an observant muslim, so I didn't attend, but I joined my family afterward for the food (at my dad's request, I'm not freeloading here). It was biryani made with mutton or goat (I think mutton), and a really tasty salad (yogurt, beets, onion, cucumber and cilantro). The cake afterwards was tasty, just white cake layered with cream and fruit. The beverage was milk with tapioca pearls and rooh afza (sharbat). The sharbat was fantastic, as was the salad and cake. The biryani was ok. My portion had too much masala, not enough rice. The mutton was fatty and mostly bones.

-Sunday Dinner: My dad made steak, and my mom made mashed sweet potatoes, sauteed spinach and sauteed mushrooms. I feel bad saying it ... but tonight was when I realized I've become a much better cook than my parents. Things were mostly poorly seasoned and overcooked. :-( Sorry parents!

Things still to eat on my list: some good tex-mex, some more southwestern mexican food, my favorite thai restaurant, chik-fil-a, a burger from this place by my university, some lemon-chicken soup from this one Greek restaurant, sushi from my favorite sushi place and this one Persian restaurant. Out of all of them ... I think that only the sushi and the Greek place, maybe the tex-mex, will be disappointing. I've taken a few things off my list: Quizno's and Subway (which for some reason I was craving), several things that Mom makes that I can now make too. I think there were others, but I already deleted those so I don't remember!

In general I think the food in France is much better quality. I bought expensive organic eggs here, and they don't compare in color or taste to the cheapest ones in France. But there are some things that just AREN'T in France, like good cheddar cheese. I had a cheddar cheese pretzel today and it was great. Only in America: German pretzel, English cheese. :-)

Cheap but Good: Chana

This is a very easy Indian recipe. It's perfect for winter: warming, cheap, good the next day, hearty. It's nice and spicy too!

Chana

Ingredients:

1 large can garbanzo beans
2 small onions or 1 large one
1 t cayenne pepper
1 T chili powder
1 T cumin
2-4 T oil
about 5 cups of water
salt to taste

Method:

Open your garbanzo beans, and drain them and rinse them well. Set aside. Sautee chopped onion in about 2 T of the oil. Let them get really nice and brown (but not burned). If you don't let them caramelize, this will have almost no flavor. So be patient. When they're ready, push them to one side of your pot. Pool the oil on the other side by tilting the pot a little. You may need to add a bit more oil if the onions have soaked almost all of it up. Ok, put the pot back on the burner now, and dump your spices into the oil pool (not on the onions). Let them fry for about 30 seconds, and then stir everything in the pot together. Dump the beans into the pot, and stir them well. Let that cook for about a minute, then add the water. Allow it to come to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. It can cook longer if you want, but should cook at least 30 minutes for nice soft beans. Add salt to taste. You can also add a bay leaf when you add the water.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: This is perfect with a loaf of French bread ... soft on the inside, crusty on the outside. And soup + bread makes for a pretty darn cheap meal. To make the soup more or less spicy, you can change the amount of spices in it. The important thing is the ratio: 1 part cayenne pepper to 3 parts chili powder and 3 parts cumin (ground).

Cheap but Good: Don't buy flavored yogurt!

I'm always kind of wary about buying things that come in portable, individual packages, when I have several small plastic containers at home. I also don't like to buy flavored stuff if there's a plain option available, unless there's a flavor I really like.

So, I don't ever buy flavored yogurts. Instead, I buy a 1 kilo tub of delicious plain yogurt, and take it to work in a small 1 cup container. I can make it taste different by adding nuts, honey, dried fruits, or fruit jams/jellies. These are things that I have on hand anyway, for snacking and breakfast.

This is also great because then I can use the yogurt in savory applications. I can serve it with rice and dhal, or make a sauce to go with kebabs. I can use it in a salad. If I had bought vanilla or strawberry, I couldn't, and would have to buy twice as much--one plain, one flavored. This would make a lot of it go to waste.

When I was in the States, I compared the prices of individual cups of yogurt, and the plain ones were 10 cents per cup cheaper! Besides that, in the large (cheaper) tubs the available flavors are usually only plain or vanilla.

So, I don't buy flavored, or individual cups, of yogurt. The only exception for this is that I sometimes treat myself to cups of Wallaby Mango Lime flavored. It's so good, and the consistency is more like kefir.

Spicy Eggplant Rolls

These are a really tasty and simple appetizer. I had them in Ukraine this summer at someone's dacha (countryside home).

Spicy Eggplant Rolls

Ingredients:

1 eggplant
1 T oil
1/4 c flour
sprinkling of salt
1 tomato
1 bunch of parsley
2 cloves of garlic
2 T mayonnaise

Method:

Cut the eggplant into long thin strips. I do this by cutting it top to bottom in half, and then each half into half (top to bottom again), progressively until I have eggplant slices (cross sections of the whole veggie) that are about 1/4" thin. I then cut those in half to make 2 strips from each cross section. Sprinkle with salt on each side, and toss in a plastic bag with the flour so it coats them lightly. Pan fry the strips in the oil on medium-high heat until soft and golden brown on both sides. Set aside on paper towels to drain and cool slightly. Dice the garlic finely, and cut the tomato into strips that are about the same length as the width of the eggplant strips. Rough chop the parsley. To make the rolls, take a fried eggplant strip, spread with a little mayo, sprinkle a little of the garlic over that. Put a couple of the tomato pieces at one end, then roll up. Stand it up like it's a piece of sushi, then sprinkle parsley over the top. Complete procedure for all eggplant strips.

Serving Suggestion and Notes: For thicker slices of eggplant, you may need to use a toothpick to keep them rolled up. For thinner slices (or if you can cram a bunch of rolls into a bowl) it's not necessary. These are really tasty, they're kind of a summer food, which I'm missing. They were so good on a hot summer day, eating in the backyard of a house near the sea.