Easy breezy pad thai

I have always had a love-hate relationship with pad thai. I ate pad thai for the very first time at a Thai restaurant in San Diego. An evening dinner out on a student budget used to be a huge treat then! A group of us had once visited a decently good Thai place which was bus-accessible (bus-accessibility was a must for any outing!). As it was our very first Thai experience, we had pretty much asked the waitress to order the menu for us and she had suggested a spicy pad thai followed by some sweet coconut ice-cream! I absolutely loved the flat rice noodles drenched in a tangy, hot and sweet sauce and crunchy peanuts on top.

Over the time though I realized that a good pad thai is not easy to come by. Many times either the sauce is too strong or the whole dish is soggy or oily! After a few unfortunate encounters with pad thai I eventually changed my thai restaurant go-to dish from pad thai to a green curry dish which probabilistically is always decent.

But the cravings for a good pad thai won't stop! Then recently I came across this Mark Bittman's minimalist column urging people to think about pad thai as a make-at-home option and I wondered why I never thought about making pad thai at home. Strange how sometimes in your mind some dishes just get so associated with restaurants that you don't ever think of making them at home! The recipe seemed easy enough, was uber-flexible and luckily I had all the ingredients at hand (thanks to my new work route which is en-route an ever-inviting asian store).

Gobi matar masala (Spicy cauliflower with peas)

While I was preparing this gobi matar masala (spicy cauliflowers with peas) last night I wondered why this recipe is not yet on my blog! Some variation of this cauliflower dish is very often made at our place. Come to think about it, very few of my everyday I-am-so-tired-so-let-me-whip-up-something-fast recipes are on this blog. I suppose because they are so simple and common-place that subconsciously I might not have thought of them as blog-worthy (this is one question we have often come to ponder as a family now a days -- is the dish blog-worthy? :)) but thats an unfair disadvantage to the simple everyday go-to recipes of every food blogger, right. So here it is, finally, it sure is simple, it sure is everyday, but by no means any the less tastier!

The recipe is very flexible and this is usually a kitchen sink sabji for me. If I have tomatoes I'll add them instead of red bell peppers; if I have mushrooms I'll add some, if not, I'll skip; if I feel like I'll add garam masala or I'll skip that too; the gist is that the sabji is equally tasty even with just cauliflowers, potatoes, peas along-with the spices and the aromatics.

The dish takes not more than half an hour to make from start to finish making it an ideal weeknight meal. We usually eat it with some whole-wheat pita breads or chapati and a cool yogurt mint raita which my husband prepares in a jiffy.

Green split pea soup

I am the sort of person who gets an irrational amount of fun and excitement when I can whip up a healthy and filling dinner with an almost empty fridge. A bit weird, isn't it. It gives me the satisfaction of saving a last-minute restaurant trip and of my pantry keeping efforts. See, all those times when I am buying pantry staples my husband occasionally says, why do we need all this; but a meal entirely out of pantry is exactly the ticket to convince him of all its goodness. 

Yesterday I came back home late after visiting the new gym (so many things change when you change a place, isn't it, like driving to a new gym rather than walking a few steps to the apartment gym). Fridge barely had anything and even my freezer was running low. My long scavenger hunt ended with 3 bread slices, an onion, few last bits of a celery and a very oldish looking carrot. Whenever I see the onion-celery-carrot trio, soups always jump to my mind.. but I did not have limes or lemons.. no, hang on, there was that guy in office who had brought a whole bag of yard grown lemons and was asking everyone to help themselves.. and I did take a couple.. another scavenger-hunt in my office purse (yes, there is _always_ scavenger hunt there!) and I found lemons. Perfect!

I made a new green split pea soup. I mostly opt for lentil soup but as I was out on lentils an old half packet of green split peas hidden at the back of the cupboard came in handy. On the side I whipped a quinoa salad which is quite similar to the quinoa salad I had posted long back and roasted one and half odd yams. (Roasted yams is one of the fastest and delicious dessert that we both enjoy!).

Soba noodles with mushrooms and lime ginger dressing

The weather God has been quite unpredictable recently. It seems it can not quite decide between whether to shower us with bright sunny spring days or to go back into the cold rainy lapse. I do not mind either. Rainy days like this weekend is just another excuse to finish up the ever pilling indoor work -- like say doing taxes!

I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon sitting on the dining table finishing up my taxes (phew, done finally!). The weather was getting cloudier by the hour but once in a while sun would shine through the tiny pockets between the clouds basking the surrounding foggy green hills with a warm glow. It was so easy to just give up the laptop and take a nap for a while or just stare outside mindlessly. I lost count of how many times I refilled my coffee cup after three. Just as I was finishing up the last of the state taxes I thought wouldn't it be nice to have some chinese takeout for dinner today? Telling you, its the weather making you crave all sorts of things. I figured a visit to the asian market to buy some soba noodles after the taxes was enough of a carrot for a foodie like me :)

These soba noodles are a standby in my house next to the spaghetti. Soba are a type of Japanese noodles made out of buckwheat flour and often flavored with dried wild yam. They can be served either cold or hot. They are darker in color and have a wonderful bite to it that I so much like! I can eat cooked soba just with some soy sauce and vinegar dressing.. its that good!

Apple crisp for two!

Am I the only weird one out there who likes to eat just the filling of an apple pie and throws away the crust? I know what you are thinking, that's unheard of indeed.. I mean, who does not like the moist, flaky, buttery crust! Well, me. And precisely for the same reasons.. its flaky, too buttery and way overpowers (in my opinion) the flavors of freshly baked apples with cinnamon, nutmeg and a dash of sugar!

Which is why I love this apple crisp so much! Remember that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's boss steals her idea of selling just the top of the muffins instead of whole muffins as she reasons people like to eat only the top anyway? Apple crisp is something like that for me.. its my perfect 'top of the muffins for me'! 

Bad analogy, never-mind, coming back to the apple crisp: it is a baked dessert with just the apple pie filling without the crust. Instead of a crust, it has a topping which is mostly made up of rolled oats, sugar and a little butter and since its a topping rather than a crust (topping need not be strong enough to hold the pie) its much more flexible to a lot of new variations and experimentations for people like me who don't prefer the standard heavy crusts.

Suralichi wadi (chickpea flour rolls with coconut stuffing) and a bookclub book review

(I am so happy now that all the packing, moving, unpacking is all done; internet is setup at the new place and I am finally back in the blogging and the cooking world! I know I missed a lot of excellent posts but I am going to try to catch up with everything that has been happening in the next week or two!)

Can you imagine what would happen if suddenly all of your secrets were out in the open? No, not the real big secrets just some small little things that we all would rather keep to ourselves. This is exactly what happened to Emma from 'Can you keep a secret?' book by Sophie Kinsell. This was my first read of Simran's book-club. This month's pick was a chik-flic about Emma who happens to blurt out all of her everyday secrets to a complete stranger on a turbulent air-plane ride only to discover that the stranger is none other than the big boss of the firm she works at! One thing leads to another and suddenly all her secrets are out in the open... are secrets ever 'secrets'? Thats the question we all get to ponder as we trace through Emma's hilarious encounters around her secrets and her boss.

Banana walnut bread

What is it in human nature that makes you crave precisely those things that you _know_ you shouldn't crave? Its like reverse psychology or something...

So, listen to this: the other day I took a day-off from work to finish my catch up packing (makes me wonder actually how a 2-bedroom apartment can even stock so much STUFF! but the stuff kept coming out and we kept packing!). I was in the midst of packing when it first happened:

Four sad looking over-ripe bananas were staring at me from over the fridge almost scolding me for letting them go to waste. I ignored their plea, see, I am quite fussy with bananas and won't eat an overripe one unless I am starving. A banana bread came to my mind, but I quickly stashed the thought in a deep furthermost inaccessible corner of my mind.

Few more boxes packed and its time to clean the fridge itself. Now a lone egg and a used stick of butter are staring from the egg basket, okay, now that's it, too many divine signs for me to make a banana bread. Look at the irony of the situation though: last time I baked a sweet bread was atleast 6 months ago and I never craved it until today when, as luck would have it, all my bakeware was packed as was the AP flour!

Afternoon arrived, and my craving for a banana bread and coffee kept increasing. Finally I gave in to the impulse, opened a couple of packed boxes until I found the one with my loaf pan. AP flour luckily was sitting on the top of a box. Quickly I packed everything back in, lest my husband should find out about my craziness! So as a result I ended up unpacking and repacking a couple of boxes, spending 15mins taking a photo.. but hey, atleast I enjoyed a warm bread slice with a nice hot cup of coffee which I so needed after a hard day's work :D

Spiced lentils and mushroom rice and an update!

Everyone has a select list of kitchen appliances that they can't live without. These are the ones which occupy the very precious counter space in your kitchen. For me its my coffee maker and my rice cooker. A few years ago I was debating very heavily whether to invest in a rice cooker or not. Our old pressure cooker was working fine and buying a rice cooker on student budget seemed like a luxury. 

I bought my rice cooker when I was newly married and I must confess one of my main motivations for buying a rice cooker was that even simple things like making a perfect rice were not my domain then! To add to my misery, my husband would almost always churn out a perfectly cooked rice using our old pressure cooker and mine would always be a bit overcooked as I would start the pressure cooker and wander off in my own world forgetting to turn the cooker off at the right time. 

So, well, you can imagine, the allure of a perfectly cooked rice everytime without human intervention was oh so very tempting to a new-bride racing her husband for the perfect rice! I bought a modest 16C Black & Decker rice cooker. Whatever my motivations may be, today I can safely say that it was the best $30 (I think) I spent.

16C is enough to serve a party of 6-8 people and I have been generally happy with the quality of the rice cooker. Now I use it for all sorts of things like making khichadi, rice, pulav, masale-bhat etc. Another thing my rice cooker cooks beautifully is quinoa! So if you are wondering whether to buy it or not, I strongly recommend one! Its a good investment that will keep paying off.