Spicy black eyed peas with kale: cooking your way to a happy and prosperous new year!

When I was a fourth-grader in a little town our school teacher once told us that whoever studies very hard on the new year's day gets excellent grades and wins all the academic prizes in the next year. You know how it goes, right? at that age a word from your favorite school-teacher is like a word of a God! We all took her very seriously and made it a point to study hard on the new year's day. It was sort of like a tradition that we followed in our class; the point of which was that the direction you give to the first day of the year, thats the direction your rest of the year takes :) Now I look back and laugh at the innocence with which we studied on 1st of Jan hoping that good marks and prizes will follow, but all along I think somewhere there was a hidden innocent satisfaction of trying to shape up the new year to be :) Such do-no-harm traditions are my favorites!

I learnt of a similar new year's day tradition recently which is observed in the southern United States and best of all this is a food tradition! In southern US it is traditional to eat a meal of black eyed peas alongwith some greens (usually sautéed collard greens) with cornbread on the first day of the year. The symbolism behind this is really cute! The black eyed peas swell during the process of cooking (from dried to cooked). The swelling of the peas indicates prosperity in the coming year. The greens indicate 'greens'=money for the new year! and the spiciness of the food is symbolic of the the spice in your life for the year ahead! More than the symbolism though I just love to follow this food tradition because I simply just love black eyed peas and would not pass up a single opportunity to cook a big batch of these delicious legume!

Being a lazy and greedy person that I am though I decided to cook all the prosperity, wealth and spiciness in one single pot instead of making multiple dishes :) hey, one pot meals rule, right? Anyway, so here is to prosperity, wealth, spiciness and happiness to all of you in the coming new year! Happy New Year!!

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Beets and greens salad with mint, almonds and lemon

Last few weeks have been a sweet overdose for me.. You know what I mean, right? Cakes and cookies and chocolates and truffles and sweet breads: you name it and this holiday season I have ate it! Since I am one of those minority people who are low on a sweet-tooth, a sweet overdose of this magnitude is likely to take me off sweets for a while.. or may be just for a few days, we'll see, depends on how hard the box of cookies and chocolates sitting on my dining table stares at me (like that Geico add where the money stares at people!) :D

Anyway, today morning I just wanted to eat a simple and light lunch to make up for all the desserts that I have had last few weeks (and particularly yesterday!). I looked in the pantry and saw a bunch of golden and red beets that I had bought from farmer's market last week. I instantly thought of my favorite beet salad! I started making this recipe a year or so ago; the origin of which comes from one of my most treasured cookbooks "Vegetarian cooking for everyone" by Deborah Madison. This is a great book and I'll highly recommend it to anyone who cooks or wants to cook simple vegetarian foods most of the time (no ties with Amazon). I refer to this book not so much for the ready to go recipes but more for the information about a vegetable, like its flavors, how to store, methods of cooking, ideal pairings etc. The book is particularly good in describing flavor pairings for vegetables and seasonings. I guess I use this more as a reference cookbook where I get an idea of a recipe and then eventually make my own version of it. That being told, the book does have excellent recipes too :)

Espresso Chocolate Truffles and a wish for a very Happy Holidays!

Every year around this time the same question starts popping up into my mind: what should I make for the holiday gatherings? I think everyone has atleast a few dashing staple stars; these are the dishes that you can whip up with no worries at-all, with very less preparation and they are sure to please every tummy! I am always awed by all the fellow food-bloggers who whip up these delightfully scrumptious baked goodies; seeing the pictures of which make me wish I had more of a baking woo-doo :) But with my limited baking talent all I feel comfortable taking to any holiday gatherings is usually a banana nut bread or some fruit cake!

This year though when I saw this chocolate truffles post on Yasmeen's blog I knew exactly what I wanted to make! Chocolate truffles are a type of chocolates made with a chocolate ganache inside and coated with various coatings, the most ubiquitous of which is cocoa powder but powdered sugar and toasted nuts are common coatings too. Ganache is just a fancy name for smooth melted chocolate with cream (low-fat milk or heavy cream). Occasionally ganache is flavored with flavorings such as vanilla and espresso. Chocolate truffles are named for the look-alike wild truffle fungus/mushroom variety which is a delicacy. Now the truffle-police will insist that the real chocolate truffles must be uneven and rustic to resemble the mushrooms they are named after.. but I am raised in a round and perfect laddoo tradition and what the heck I took pride in making my truffles perfectly circular and round so the pictures will look better (don't tell the truffle-police!) :D

Roasting chestnuts...

Come December all of my car's FM radio preset channels seem to be falling pray one by one to the ever pervasive Christmas music. Now I love the holiday tunes and enjoy them most of the time, but there just isn't something right when I am driving to work burdened with an impending end-of-year deadline and the lady on the radio is cheering happily "its the most wonderful time...!":-). Anyway, one such morning I was driving to work and heard the song "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.." by Nat King Cole and I was suddenly inspired to roast some chestnuts at home in the spirit of Christmas!

I shared the idea with a friend at work who looked at me with a why-in-the-world-would-you-do-that kinda way. "It is just so much easier to buy pre-roasted pre-shelled chestnuts and they don't really taste that different from the ones from your oven, you know!". Well, I didn't have much of an answer to her other than "I have never roasted them before and I want to give it a shot". Sure thing, a little while and a lot of googling later I knew what she meant, it did look like a reasonable work, particularly the shelling part.

Hearty Lentil Soup for the Wintry Soul

My favorite winter evenings go something like these: come home early from work (hey it gets dark earlier!), pour yourself a hot cup of cocoa, put on something nice on TV and sit on the sofa cuddled in a shawl and do nothing! Now you might ask what happens to the dinner? and that's where this soup comes in.. this is my favorite one pot wonder meal. Wonder because its an absolutely delicious and healthy soup, cooks entirely with the pantry staples AND most of the cooking time is unattended. Now isn't that a win-win! I am usually game for any hot soup dinner during winter and this one being with lentils is even more heartier and feeling. I usually enjoy this soup with some make-do garlic bread which is just regular whole wheat bread toasted and then flavored with some olive oil and some fresh crushed garlic!

Baked Acorn Squash Stuffed with Apples and Cranberries

Is there something like a sweet tooth or is everything an acquired taste? I wonder sometimes.. pretext being that neither me nor my husband have strong sweet cravings. Even as a kid all I asked my mom to prepare on every single of my birthdays was a simple fruit-salad! So preparing desserts is a rarity at our place (special occasions or family friends over for dinner). Sweet dishes that I do prepare at home are either a) traditional Marathi sweets that we do crave once in a while or b) some light fruit based desserts (tarts, crustless-pies.. you get the idea). Its not so much about watching sugar or calories, but just that neither of us really crave sweets. Okay, now before you think that I am this saint person who gets no sweet cravings let me assure you that like everything else in nature there are exceptions to this rule :-) First, I do get my bulk-load of non-saintness craving fried snacks like samosas and kachoris and second, did you say Tiramisu, Chocolate molten lava cake or coconut ice-cream!?!!

Anyway, ever since I saw this recipe of stuffed acorn squash on Mark Bittman's website I have been getting cravings for a similar dessert. The original recipe had stuffing of apples and bacon which I changed to apples and cranberries and for good measure spiced it up with an apple-pie'ish flavor. Acorn squash has been one of my favorite squashes - it tastes wonderful simply roasted with a bit of butter, sugar and cinnamon; but I must say that the apple-cranberry stuffing gave this dish such a depth of flavor! I loved this dish so much that I think I am going to try making this next with a baked apple base instead of an acorn squash just so that I can keep making this even when the acorn squash is out of season!

Acorn squash has a soft nutty flavor. It is not overpowering

Broccoli and Potatoes

If you are like me then you know what I mean when I say that sneaking broccoli into your diet in a "love-it" fashion has been sort of a challenge (well, atleast for me :-)). Don't get me wrong, I love the "concept" of eating broccoli; it's health benefits are well-known and pretty much any healthy cooking show you tune to now-a-days has the hostess screaming eat more greens with a background picture of spinach, kale and broccoli! Well, I love all my greens except for broccoli.... or may be that I just hadn't come across a recipe of broccoli that I really liked. This all changed one evening last week when my husband prepared this broccoli dish!

Now to be fair, broccoli-potato with Indian spices is something I have cooked many times before but always either the broccoli would be too raw, too unwilling to mingle with Indian spices or the whole concoction would be mushy. In contrast this dish was a delight to eat (and not just because I was sipping a Chai and reading a book while my husband was cooking, though that was surely a part of it!) but because the potato was so crunchy and the broccoli was so cooked to perfection... the dish was brought to a whole new level by the sprinkled lime juice-chili flakes and black pepper on top!. I could just eat this dish as a snack without chapati or roti, it was that good! After persistent questions about how this was cooked, finally I learnt the secret: it was the way broccoli was prepared.