Sunday Lunch

I have a bunch of cookbook reviews on deck, but until then, here for your delectation is today's lunch:  chipotle baked tofu from Vegan Eats World, yellow garlic rice from Viva Vegan, and  "kaleidoscope chard" from Trader Joe's, cooked according to the directions on the package.  All the colors made me so happy.

  

Improvised slow cooker posole

Posole (or if you prefer, pozole) is one of the foods I discovered when we visited the Southwest last fall.  It's a soup made with chile, hominy, and, traditionally, something dead.  According to Wikipedia, the original posole was made by the Aztecs and included meat from human sacrifices.  Ew.  After the Conquistadors arrived there were no more human sacrifices, so people used pork, the other white meat.  Still ew.  I make mine with beans -- in this most recent instance, cute little Sangre de Toro beans.

The hardest thing about making posole on the east coast is finding dried hominy.  Canned hominy is easy to find, but canned hominy is gross.  The first posole I made was with blue corn hominy I found at Whole Foods in  Santa Fe.  I haven't been able to find that here.  The closest I've come is at our local mercado latino, where I found Goya brand white and golden hominy, which according to the people at Wegman's (where I searched in vain) is positively loaded with iron.  Who knew?  Goya hominy is not whole kernels, it's cracked, so it's not nearly as dramatic looking, but unless I'm going to nixtamalize my own corn it appears to be the best I can do.

One thing about making posole -- even after you soak it overnight, the hominy takes forever to cook.  Hours.  Longer than beans.   So this time, I decided to try making it in the slow cooker.  I soaked a pound of hominy and a pound of beans overnight, then the next morning I put them in my biggest slow cooker crock with an onion, a bunch of ancho chile powder, some Mexican oregano, a little cumin, and water to fill the crock.  Lots of water.  Plenty of water.  Or so I thought. 

When I got home from work, the corn and beans had slurped up all the water.  Instead of soup, I had a big pot of stew thick enough to stand a spoon up in.  Fortunately, it didn't stick to the crock.

I suppose I could have added some broth and tried to soupify it, but I decided just to eat it as is: 

That's garnished with raw cabbage, a raw bell pepper, guacamole, and a lime wedge.  It was kind of bland the first day, so I added some of my new favorite commercial spice blend, Trader Joe's South African Smoke.  Over the next day or two, the flavors developed, and it was perfect as is.

My girlfriend doesn't like posole -- I think she had a bad experience with canned hominy as a child -- so I ended up eating the whole pot myself, mostly for breakfast.  I didn't intend to make a stew rather than a soup, but I might actually prefer it this way.

In praise of Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato

I love sweet potatoes.  To me, they are one of the yummiest, most satisfying starches around (and I take my starches very seriously).  It was not always thus.  When I was a little kid, I would only eat sweet potatoes if they had been candied.  I don't know whether sweet potatoes have gotten sweeter or my tastes have changed, or both, but now I like plain, baked sweet potatoes the best.  I bake them until they are sitting in sticky puddles of caramelized sugar, and they are perfect without anything added to them.  They certainly don't need to be candied -- they already are candy.

Sweet potatoes come in several different colors.  A week or so ago I bought these purple ones from Trader Joe's:

Butter knife included for scale

 They were kind of puny and unassuming, albeit with an intriguing purple tinge to the skin.  But look what happens to them when they're baked, peeled, and mashed:

Purple sweet potatoes are very high in anthocyanins, the same antioxidants that are in blueberries.  I don't know if the sweet potatoes mugged some blueberries for their antioxidants or what, but whoa.  That is some purple food.

I'd say the main reason to buy these is the color.  I baked them, and because they were so small they got kind of dry.  I also think the flesh is naturally drier than that of the typical orange sweet potato.  The taste is about the same.   Peeling all those little potatoes was kind of a pain.  But it was worth it because purple!

Yesterday I went produce shopping at Wegman's, which is usually a good place to get sweet potatoes.  I didn't see any purple ones, but I got about 7 or 8 pounds of orange and two pounds of white.  I had never tried the white ones before and thought I would check them out.  This morning I baked them all and peeled them, so they'd be ready to eat throughout the week:

The "white" ones.  As you can see, the flesh is more of a Yukon Gold sort of color.

 

Classic orange.  Look at all those dark spots where the sugars caramelized.  Om nom nom.

  Wikipedia says the white sweet potatoes are not as sweet as the orange ones.  They must be thinking of some other white sweet potatoes.  These were hella sweet, maybe even sweeter than the orange ones.  They were so sweet, in fact, that I couldn't eat my usual lunchtime fruit because I was on sugar overload.

My lunch.  "White" sweet potato, broccoli, and soy kheema.  Yes, we are still eating that stuff.

Some fun facts about sweet potatoes:

• They are native to Central America and were first cultivated in what would become the Southern United States in the 16th century.
• They are members of the same genus as morning glories.  Check out this blossom: 

• They are not yams.  Totes different genus, family, everything.  According to the World's Healthiest Foods web site, which I am not linking to here because there is a disgusting picture of a dead turkey that follows you everywhere you go on it, the archetypal orange sweet potato was first introduced to the U.S. in the mid-20th century, and the growers called them "yams" to distinguish them from the sweet potatoes everyone was familiar with, which were white.  Of course the people responsible for this web site also appear to believe dead birds are among the world's healthiest foods, so I don't know how much credence to give this story.  Wegman's calls both the orange and the white sweet potatoes "yams." 

 I baked 10 pounds of russet potatoes this morning, too.  When it comes to starchy tubers, I believe in equal opportunity regardless of genus.

Edible gifts redux

I wanted to follow up on my post about soup in a jar and show you how it turned out.

My girlfriend decided she wanted to give these as office gifts, too.  We set up an assembly line and ended up making 14 of them.  She tied the labels on with some festive yarn.

A few tips, if you decide to do this:

• If you're making up a big batch of the spice blend in advance, as I did, it will not go as far as you think it will.  We had to stop midway through and make some more.  I think this is probably the result of settling, since I made the spice blend the night before.  
• A canning funnel was a huge help when it came to pouring the lentils and rice into the jars without getting them all over the table.
• Tap the jar firmly on the table after each addition, to keep the layers level and make sure the jars are packed tight.  That will keep them looking nice when you shlep them to wherever they're going.

We packed these in gift bags with tissue paper, and included a can of coconut milk with each jar (another protip:  Trader Joe's coconut milk is only $0.99 a can!  They also had good prices on red lentils and jasmine rice.).  

Everyone really seemed pleased to receive these.  They were also impressed that we had made them ourselves, which made me laugh -- yes, I poured ingredients into a jar all by myself!  Also, I was afraid this was a hackneyed idea, but people acted like it was a great novelty.  Several commented on how creative I am (!).  Of course Glue and Glitter is the creative one, and I did give her credit.  I guess it all depends on what you're used to.

We wanted to know how it tasted, of course, so I made a batch with some ingredients we had left over:

 
I followed the printed directions exactly (except I used a little less olive oil than called for).  I like the combination of the two kinds of lentils.  The red ones disintegrated and the brown ones stayed relatively firm, which was a nice contrast.  I also love the aromatic spices, and the creamy richness of the coconut milk.  If I were going to make it again:

• I would add more liquid.  The rice really drank it all up, and as you can see above I ended up with a porridgelike consistency (in fact, I have been eating this as my breakfast starch and it fills that role nicely).
• I would use brown rice instead of white.  I think I just prefer a little more chewiness.  Wild rice might be nice, too.  I've been eating a fair amount of wild rice lately.
• More spice.  Maybe some garam masala.  Maybe more black pepper.  Maybe a little cayenne.  Also, the recipe calls for "salt to taste" and it definitely needed the salt.  It might not if there were more heat in it.
• Maybe change the proportions of beans to rice.  As written it's about half and half.  I think I would prefer 2/3 beans to 1/3 rice, or maybe even 3/4 to 1/4.  But I'm a huge bean fan and your mileage may vary.
• Maybe throw some more veggies in there.  Cabbage.  Carrots.  Spinach.  Of course then we're really moving away from the "just about everything you need is in the jar" concept.

To sum up -- it's a nice bowl of comfort food and probably a good starter recipe for people who are afraid of Indian cooking, but I don't think I would make it as written again.  I do think it would be a good starting point for my own creation, though, and that's often how I use recipes, especially for soup.

I had to laugh, because unbeknownst to me, my boss had bought me two bags of chili mix from a group called the Women's Bean Project.  I'm soaking the beans from one bag this morning, and will be making chili later today.  I'll give a review of that one when it's done.

Trader Joe's Tomato Paste in a Tube

Just a quick note to say that this is a thing that exists, and I am thrilled.  99 cents, and no more freezing half a can of tomato paste and forgetting about it.  I bought three, because Trader Joe's has a nasty habit of discontinuing my favorite products, and I was terrified I'd never see it again.