Roti and The End of Overeating

Here's a fresh roti (with chickpeas and roasted sweet potato)...

...and here's what happens to a roti when you take it out of the freezer and put it in the toaster. (The toaster worked so well for the plain and aloo parathas, but turned the roti into a cracker. I wonder if that has something to do with the roti's "no oil" content.)


This is a better picture of tonight's dinner, although it's harder to see the detail on the food. Of course, when your yogurt is bleeding into both the chickpeas and the steamed spinach, maybe it's better to avoid too much detail.

So today I read the latest crazy hit book, David Kessler's The End of Overeating. The title is a bit misleading; the book should be called something like Chain Restaurant Food Is Full Of Fat And Sugar and Chemicals and They Mix It Up In A Lab and an Underpaid Line Chef Defrosts It For You. That's essentially what the book is about, and for what it's worth, it's interesting--though it's nothing that anyone who has read Fast Food Nation or seen Super Size Me hasn't heard before. Kessler's particular take is that we overeat because the food itself is addictive, which again is not a new idea, but he peppers his book with delicious anecdotes like "the chicken in Chili's Southwestern Eggrolls is ground into a smooth puree so you don't have to chew it, which Chili's food scientists did deliberately because they knew that the faster you ate, the more you would eat."

Kessler's solution to overeating, which he claims is inevitable given the state of American food (high-fat, high-sugar which melts on the tongue and creates an instant craving for more), is nothing more than sheer willpower. He says you have to tell yourself every day, at every moment, that you choose not to eat the HFCS muffins at the office meeting or the 1,000 calorie burger at the fast food joint or the Cinnabon being pumped through the air vents at the mall. And eventually, he says, you'll stop wanting to.

It's a bit of a dismal idea but I understand where he's coming from. The more I step away from packaged food and the dreaded HFCS the more I understand how eating it changes my brain. After every dinner, for example, I eat one square of an 85% cocoa Lindt chocolate bar. (Sadly, the chocolate never makes it into any of my photographs.) Last night, my sister brought over some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. She took two and gave me two and put the rest of the bag on the sofa; the minute I had the first one in my mouth I was already thinking about how excited I was to eat the second one, and then the entire time we were watching The Golden Girls ('cause of Bea Arthur, natch) I was sitting there thinking "there are more peanut butter cups on the sofa..."

But before I sound too "my diet is more FTW than yours," here's the kicker. You all have seen what I eat. I have Kashi and homemade yogurt for breakfast, dal or soup and homemade bread for lunch, and a sensible dinner followed by a square of chocolate. I take apples for my morning and afternoon snacks. Maybe twice a week I have a cookie at work (because there are always cookies and I can't always resist them). And on the weekend I go to Tryst and have a chai or cappuccino with two inches of steamed milk on top.

On top of that I'm active; I walk four miles a day and I practice Ashtanga six days a week.

And I've put on ten pounds in the past ten months.

*sigh*

Explain that, Dr. Kessler.

Roti (Step-By-Step)

Today was a bread day. In the oven, I had a no-knead whole-wheat oatmeal flaxseed loaf, and on the stovetop I made rotis. Or roti. I'm not quite sure of the plural. At any rate by the time I was done there were twelve of them, and I took pictures at every step of the way!

This is the oatmeal flaxseed whole-wheat no-knead Mark Bittman magic bread that I make every week. Has nothing to do with the roti(s) but I do like playing with my camera. ^__^

So this is all you need to make roti(s). 2 cups whole-wheat flour and 2 cups water. Jaffrey says you can cut the whole wheat with cake flour for a lighter roti, but... well, if I wanted to make a cake, I'd make one. (She also says I can use 100% chapati flour if I prefer, but if I wanted to make a chapati... *__^)

Notice what's missing, too. No ghee, and no oil. Not even for the cooking part. This bread is probably even healthier than the Bittman one.

So. Slowly mix water into flour, knead for 5-10 minutes or until it forms a smooth ball, let sit for 1/2 hour.

Once again it looks exactly the same, but I'm sure science has done something in the meanwhile.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. You probably didn't need to see the picture of this step, but I like playing with my camera. ^__^

Dip the roti balls in flour until they are completely covered. It took me a few rotis to figure out why this was important. Trust me--it's important.

It's important because without any ghee/oil, there's nothing to keep the dough from sticking to every available surface as you roll it out.

Oh, and yes, my rolling pin is made from an old Snapple bottle. Food isn't the only thing we don't waste in this house...

Slap the roti onto an ungreased frying pan (I liked the slapping part), let it cook for about a minute, flip it over (Jaffrey says "it works best if you use your fingers" and so I dutifully did, although it does burn a little) and let it cook for another minute.

And that's all.

Roti(s) are so easy. Unbelievably so. And so tasty. And there's no oil. And--probably because I wasn't substituting whole wheat for white flour or olive oil for ghee (in fact, I didn't have to substitute anything for anything)--they tasted right. I could see myself whipping out a dozen of these every week or so.

Sorry, Bittman Bread. I have a new favorite now.

Cabbage Thing

The Farmers' Market has stopped selling cabbage. I guess it's out of season.

I kept this bunch in the freezer for a month or so, not wanting to use the last cabbage in the house, until the other night when I needed something I could cook in ten minutes.

So... no cabbage now until fall? I should have frozen more. How will I survive without my weekly allotment of "cabbage thing?"

On the plus side, it's almost asparagus season...

Me And Jyoti: Any Rice You Can Cook, I Can Cook Better

Two recent dinners.

On the left, an aloo paratha (oddly shaped, perhaps, but a paratha to be sure), yogurt, raisins, and some more of that stuff that would have been mattar paneer had the cheese not melted.


Here on the right is leftover dinner from Jyoti. Aloo gobi, naan, and rice. (I added the raisins into the rice for what will soon be obvious reasons. Also squirted some honey on top.)

I'm going to avoid making comparisons. After all, we all know the story of how that fantasmic "mattar black bean" dish came to be. I am still at the young grasshopper stage of cookery. That's part of the reason why I ended up at Jyoti; I wanted to steal the taste memory of "real" aloo gobi so I could try to improve my own.

But... that gobi was all soggy and mushy, and the rice was terrible. Oh-my-that-rice-was-awful. Thick and overcooked and chewy and not at all fragrant. When I was plating the leftovers for dinner tonight I almost chucked the rice to replace it with my own delicious steamed basmati, but (say it with me, people) IN THIS HOUSE WE DO NOT WASTE FOOD. We do, however, dilute it with raisins to avoid constipation.

One of the more unfortunate things about teaching myself to cook is that it has made me like restaurant food less and less. I know I don't always create perfect meals and my samosas don't always close, but I don't make food that tastes like it's been sitting in an industrial vat all day long, either.

At the same time I want to go out to eat other people's cooking so I can learn more about my own; so I don't get stuck in a "food culture" of half-Madhur Jaffrey, half-Barbara Kingsolver, and half-weird. But when I go out to places (Indian or otherwise) I find myself thinking things like "well, this is mushy" or "this is bland" or "this rice is a crime against humanity."

I am becoming a food snob.

(BUT SERIOUSLY WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH THAT RICE????)

What do I do now?

Next Dinner In Jerusalem Artichoke

I said to myself "eat the plain paratha instead of your new aloo parathas or your potato-filled samosas; you've already got a starch on that plate."

So I did.

And then when it was done I ate a samosa anyway. ^__^

Strange Loops and Samosas (Step-By-Step)

I've been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter and his twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer-Prize-winning treatise on recursive mathematical properties and their paradoxes. And it's thinking like that that makes my jumbled pile of person think that I should be working on my seminal work... whatever that may be.

But... I sat down and considered for a moment that it took me ten years of writing half-finished, short-sheeted novels before my consciousness generated the story that would, in fact, become a novel; ten years after that and I haven't been able to recreate the experience. (Lots of short sheets, though.)

So I sat for a while with my book this afternoon and puzzled how I could possibly ever get it revised and published, or if I even wanted to, or if I should use the power of the internet to push my characters off into the cloud for viral consumption. (It doesn't help that the only copy of said book is in paper; it was written on way-too-old technology and before it can go anywhere will need to be all-three-hundred-pages retyped.)

I even read the first chapter aloud, into my audio recording software, to hear how it sounded.

And then I got discouraged.

And then I made samosas. ^__^

1 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons ghee/oil. Mix with your fingers until it looks like "thick breadcrumbs."

Add one tablespoon of water at a time and slowly knead until the dough forms a ball. (You'll need between 4-6 tablespoons.) This is the hard part because you've got both hands in the dough and you've got to stop, turn on the sink, stick the tablespoon under the water, turn off the sink, dump the tablespoon of water into the dough, and try not to notice how covered with flour your kitchen is getting. ^__^

(Probably next time should fill up measuring cup with 1/4 cup water beforehand and pour it on the dough in increments.)

Here's the dough after it has sat, covered, for the requisite 1/2 hour. In honor of Douglas Hofstadter I added the recursive feedback loop in the background. ^__^

I am still not sure what happens to the dough in that mysterious half hour between kneading and rolling out. For all intents and purposes it appears exactly the same. Is it a science thing?

Here's the leftover aloo paratha stuffing from this weekend, to which I have added the necessary peas.

I guess I skipped the photo of the step where I cut the ball of dough into eight pieces and roll each piece out into a circle. At this point I've cut the slit in the circle of samosa dough and folded over on itself to make the "cone." That's not exactly a cone, as you can see. The dough is pretty limp, so I have to help it out.

I have no idea how this picture turned out so interesting. Didn't know my camera could do that. ^__^

As you can see, they are closed before I put them into the oven. I don't know why some of them choose not to stay that way.

Also, I think I need to work on my samosa-shaping. Proper samosas are shaped like tetrahedrons, equilateral on all sides, and they have that ridge down the one side. Like this:

(Wikipedia.)

Nine happy samosas, after baking. They really are delicious, even if they aren't perfectly tetrahedral.

This samosa is ready for its closeup. It is also ready for some constructive criticism. I know that using white flour and deep-frying would make a difference, but... is there a way to make better samosas even when baking them?

And here they are on the plate, along with yogurt, the chutney powder that I seem to be putting on everything these days, and the mattar black beans. What's that stuff on the beans, you ask? It's the cheddar cheese that melted in the frying pan yesterday. I let it sit on my cutting board until it chilled and then I cut it into smaller pieces and put it back in the refrigerator. IN THIS HOUSE WE DO NOT WASTE FOOD. ^__^ (Especially expensive Farmers' Market cheddar from happy cows.)

Aloo Parathas, Step-By-Step

Since I had so much fun with the last "step-by-step" cooking experiment, I thought I'd do another one. This time: aloo parathas. (Mostly because I had an extra potato.) Recipe comes from Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian, obvs. ^__^

I should warn you ahead of time that these parathas took nearly two hours, start-to-finish, to make. And the kitchen was a mess afterwards. But they were well worth it.

2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon or so of salt, 2 tablespoons oil, 2 cups water. Mix and knead until it forms a ball. We should notice right away that these parathas require considerably less oil than the "delicious, flaky" ones. I'm all for that. In fact, except for greasing the pan that's all the oil we'll need for the entire process; there's no "rub the ball with oil" or "rub the parathas with oil" or anything like that. Oh, and Jaffrey says we can use ordinary veg/canola/olive oil for this one; no need to haul out the ghee. Clearly these parathas are much less high-maintenance.

Here's the potato.

The ball of dough is supposed to sit, covered, for at least 1/2 hour. I'm not sure why. It doesn't feel any different, in terms of texture or heft or malleability, after it's sat. I'm suspicious that it may have less to do with the dough itself than that it gives you a 1/2 hour block in which to cook up the potatoes. Let's see... chop, boil, drain, mash, use the Magic Bullet to grind up a masala of fresh ginger, green chili, garam masala, cumin, and coriander seed, add masala to the mash. Let it cool so it won't burn your fingers when you add it to the parathas.

Uncover the paratha ball-of-dough, divide into eight parts. Roll each part out into a palm-sized circle. Put a small spoonful of potato mix into the circle.

Bring the edges of the circle together and twist them so they close over the potato mix. Unlike my samosa experiments, this dough actually made a seal when I did this. No idea why. (Maybe the oil-flour-water ratio???)

Gently press down on the top of the filled paratha with the heel of your hand until it begins to flatten.

Then roll it out. These will be approximately 6 inches in diameter. What's really cool is at this point you can feel that there is, in fact a potato mixture inside there, surrounded by a thin layer of dough, but the dough seams are completely gone.

Be careful not to roll it too thin, or you'll squeeze the potato out.

Heat up the pan and put just enough oil in to keep the thing from sticking. This was the hardest part of the whole process. Too much oil and the parathas never developed tasty brown spots; too little oil and my smoke alarm went off. Cook on both sides until they look like the one in the picture.

Freeze the ones you don't use and eat the rest!

And now, a note about the other dish in the picture. It's a little embarrassing. See... um... back when I tried to microwave my Farmers' Market cheddar cheese and realized I couldn't get it to melt in the microwave (low oil content), I thought "ooh, then I can use it in recipes instead of paneer!" (This is again because there's nowhere I can buy paneer in a 60-mile radius, and the stock I bought in January has run out.)

I pulled out the recipe for mattar paneer and found out, to my unfortunate surprise, that Farmers' Market cheddar does in fact melt when it's put into a frying pan. In fact, it melts almost instantly. So I hauled it out of the pan and decided to replace it with canned black beans since it was the quickest protein I had on hand.

But there was a problem. Canned black beans come in their own goo, and I did not want all that brown goo to pollute my pretty red-and-green dish; I was going to take a picture of it, after all! So here I am in my kitchen, tomatoes and peas bubbling in their ginger sauce on one burner, a paratha activating my smoke alarm on the other burner, a glopful of melted cheddar cheese on the counter, and I'm rinsing off canned black beans in the sink, a handful at a time, letting the water run through my fingers until it ran clear.

I'd do a handful, throw them into the mattar mix, flip a paratha, and then rinse another handful. (In hindsight I should have just gotten out the colander.) But those black beans did not turn the dish brown! (I also would not recommend recreating the mattar black bean recipe; it doesn't taste awful or anything but it's not the kind of thing one would want to cook on purpose. The beans are way too heavy for the spices.)

Royal Basmati

So I have to write about this basmati.

I bought fifteen pounds of Royal Basmati brand basmati (the brand that comes in the woven cloth bag) and it is wildly, completely different from Tilda brand, which was the one I had come to know from desi groceries. (Since there are no desi groceries in DC, I got the Royal Basmati at Safeway.)

It may have been because I cooked it according to Madhur Jaffrey's directions, which can be summed up as very little water, let it cook in its own steam.

But for whatever reason the Royal brand tastes much more substantial than the Tilda brand, and it's so incredibly fragrant. I didn't use any oil or butter; it was delicately rich and flavorful on its own, straight from the pot.

Another advantage of Royal over Tilda is that I've been eating Royal for the past three days and it has not at all... um... plugged up the system. (Do you think that's because of the steam vs. water thing? Does adding more water to rice increase both its bloat and one's own?)

Anyway. So I had basmati with silverbeet/chickpea and yogurt/chutney, and then that bottom picture is basmati with black beans and peas.

Yay basmati!

Two Dinners (Taco Bell and Weird Food)

Hmm. This is what I feed other people...

...and this is what I eat by myself.

First of all, that top pic is unduly influenced by better lighting. But the truth remains: at a request that she not have to suffer "any of my weird food," I cooked my sister a quasi-Taco Bell spread of beans (from a can!), salsa (from a jar!), and chips (from a bag!). The cheese, like the apple, is from the Farmers' Market, and believe it or not it would not melt in the beans. I think it must have something to do with the low oil content.

The bottom pic is my handmade paratha, yogurt, chutney powder, piece of cheese (which I ended up putting back in plastic wrap; too much dairy on the plate), and chickpeas/silverbeets. A genuine plate of weird food. So weird, in fact, that I spent the past two days soaking the chickpeas in my crockpot. (Did you know that dried chickpeas, after being soaked, actually taste kinda like peas? That's pretty cool.)

Where does one go from here? Every once in a while I consider the "food culture" I've created for myself and wonder if anyone else will want to jump on. Sure, everyone loves a freshly baked loaf of bread, and most people will tolerate homemade yogurt, but chopping up silverbeet and soaking chickpeas? After all, that first meal looks way better. Why not go with the bag and the jar and the can?

(Not to mention the whole other issue of my food culture being the white girl who brings dal to work every day... in a bento.)

Dunno. All I know is that I have a potato sitting in the bottom of my refrigerator that needs to be turned into samosa filling tomorrow. And--today, at least--I don't care if I'm the only one who ever eats it. ^__^

Leftovers

I stretched out the sambar by throwing two handfuls of mung dal into the liquid and letting it bubble for an hour or so.

And then I ate it with leftover silverbeet, rice, yogurt, and chutney powder...

...and with a Granny Smith apple, Farmers' Market cheddar, and another third of handmade paratha.

(I love my little Fiestaware bowls, but dinner looks so much nicer when I put it on a plate.)

It's odd--and maybe unfair--that leftovers, even when they go straight from the pot into the freezer and back again, even when they are reheated on the stove instead of the microwave, taste less "alive" than food that is cooked and eaten right away. Particularly because right now I have rows of leftovers in my freezer; soups, dals, etc., not to mention the parathas. (Those, of course, taste just fine reheated, which adds to my theory that if you put enough oil on something it's going to taste good no matter what.)

And here's today's breakfast. I have to say I love these weekend morning breakfasts. Mostly because I do the best photography in the mornings. ^__^

Silverbeet: Five Colors Plus One I'd Never Tasted Before

Barbara Kingsolver claims the one vegetable she would save, if she were taken away to a place where she could only have one vegetable, is the silverbeet, aka Swiss chard.

The magical thing about the silverbeet is that it grows up, in a single bunch from a single root, with five different-colored stalks. Red-orange-yellow-pink-white.

I cooked this using Kingsolver's recipe; onion/garlic in olive oil, then add the silverbeet and a protein (I picked chickpeas!), serve over rice. (Yes, I subbed in asefoetida for the onion.)

There it is from the top; you can see the steam.

I'd never eaten Swiss chard/silverbeet before. Never ever. Eating it was like discovering a new color. It was so different that I stopped and turned off Jon Stewart so I could focus solely on the experience of eating the silverbeet.

It's hard to say exactly what the silverbeet tasted like, because it didn't taste like anything else I had ever tasted. It was very good. It had a hint of an artichoke-leaf taste. Parts of it were bitter, but parts of it seemed sweet. It tasted much better cooked than raw (I know, because I tried a raw leaf and it just tasted like a leaf), but it's hard to describe exactly what it tasted like except that the whole experience was just fascinating. (Now I know how that guy who discovered umami felt like.)

I know, I know, I'm going on and on about a chard. ^__^

Still, it's not every day one gets to taste something completely new and exciting. The people behind Coke or McDonalds or Ben & Jerry's spend their entire working lives trying to create this experience. I should send them all silverbeets.

Chickpea-Flour Pancakes!

The chickpea-flour pancake. So... perfect, and I can't believe I haven't yet taken a picture of it for all of you. (If you follow my Twitter, you might notice that I tweet about the chickpea-flour pancake way too much.)

This is how it's done: 1 part chickpea flour (I use about 1/3 cup for one pancake) to 2 parts water. Stir the water in very slowly to avoid lumps. Add spices to taste; chilis or mustardseed or turmeric for a savory pancake, cardamom or cinnamon for a sweet one.

Oil your pan and pour in the pancake. Cover and keep on low heat for about six or seven minutes. The top will look "silky" (Jaffrey's term) but not cooked like a pancake. The underside, meanwhile, will be getting all brown.

You'll know when it's done. That is to say, you'll know when it's started to burn. Stop right before that point.

Take the lid off of the pan and put some filling into the "silky" side before folding the whole thing up with your spatula and sliding it onto your plate. As you can see, I've filled mine with some of the potato mixture left over from the sambar. My favorite thing to stuff inside a chickpea-flour pancake is Jaffrey's cabbage recipe (recipe itself at the link), but you can put just about anything in there, including sliced fruit and honey.

Oh, and that other thing on my plate? Chutney powder. That stuff is so awesome. I tasted it for the first time in Bangalore and was so excited to get some of my own.

Tonight is silverbeet night and there will be pictures...