Vegetarian Sushi Rolls!

We love Sushi (our toddler also enjoys veg sushi rolls!). On many weekend afternoons we hang out at our favorite downtown sushi restaurant enjoying delicious sushi rolls & sashimi, sipping miso soup & hot tea with a side of tempura noodles.

So it was only natural that the sushi bug would bite me at home too. I have been attempting sushi rolls at home for a few weeks now. I am not yet brave enough to handle raw fish so my attempts have been limited to vegetarian sushi rolls or imitation crab.

My sushi rolls are not as good as our favorite restaurant yet, but they are definitely good enough for a weeknight sushi craving :)

Sushi is simple yet complex. You only need handful of ingredients but there is still an endless art to bringing out the best from your ingredients for a perfect sushi rolls.

So as much as within your means, go for the freshest or best quality ingredients. You can find them at your nearby Asian grocery store. What you will need to get started is:

1. Nori sheets (the seaweed wrapper in which to roll sushi)
2. Wooden sushi mat
3. Sushi rice - a small grain sticky rice variety
4. Filling - thinly sliced blocks of avocado, imitation crab or roasted butternut squash
5. Pantry staples - a good quality rice vinegar, sugar, salt
6. Wasabi paste and soysauce as sushi roll dipping

Cook sushi rice per package directions. Our requires 1C rice with 1.25C of water and ~20 mins in rice cooker. Once rice is ready, remove from cooker and let it cool slightly.

Mix 2Tbsp vinegar with 1tsp salt and 1tsp sugar. Warm the mixture in microwave for a few seconds. Mix with the rice - mix well with hands. Taste the rice; adjust to your taste.

Cover the sushi mat in a plastic wrap. This prevents rice from sticking to the mat when you are rolling sushi.

 

Break the nori sheet into two halves. Spread one half over the sushi matt. Take 1/2C cooked rice and spread over the nori sheet leaving a slight empty space on the side away from you to seal the rolls. Tip: dip your hands in cold water before handling the rice - it will prevent rice sticking to your hands.

Then add the filling like so. Do not overfill.

Roll the suhi roll with the help of matt like this. Press slightly to seal.

Methi Thepla (Fenugreek Flatbread)

For a long time I did not know the difference between methi paratha and methi thepla. 

Methi paratha was prepared quite often at our Marathi home while one of our Gujarati family friends used to bring methi theplas frequently to any potlucks or picnics. They both appear to have the same ingredient list and how different could the prep methods of two flatbreads really be, but as anyone who has tasted both can tell, thepla tastes very different than paratha - there is no denial to that!

After some serious Google searching and talking to a Gujarati friends, difference is finally clear to me: it's whether you cook the methi before mixing with flour or not. 

In a traditional thepla, you make a quick dry methi subzi, let it cool and then mix it with flour and besan for a dough. While in methi paratha, methi is usually chopped and added raw to flour along with spices. A relatively small difference but makes a great difference to theplas taste and texture.

It took me a long time to get methi theplas tasting like theplas but now that they are, I don't think I am going back to parathas anytime soon :)

Recipe:

Serves hungry 3

Ingredients:

3C loosely packet methi leaves

3 garlic cloves - minced

small piece of ginger - minced

1.5C whole wheat flour

1/2C besan (roasted gram flour)

3/4C water

1/4tsp turmeric powder

3Tbsp vegetable or canola oil

Recipe:

• Clean and chop methi leaves into small pieces
• Heat 1tsp oil in a pan and add minced ginger garlic.
• After a minute add methi leaves and 1/2C water. Cover and cook for 5-6mins. Remove from heat
• Mix whole wheat flour, besan with 1tsp oil. Add salt and turmeric powder and cooled methi mixture to the flours and start kneading a dough with oiled hands.
• Add remaining 1/4C water 1Tbsp at a time - only as needed to knead the dough.
• Knead the dough for 5-10mins. Add upto 1Tbsp oil as needed for kneading. Cover and set aside for 2 hrs.
• After 2 hrs, make about 10 balls of equal size from the dough.
• Flatten each ball with a rolling pin to a thin large circle.
• Transfer the rolled disk to a heated cast iron skillet
• Cook for about a minute then flip the thepla over letting other side to cook
• Add few drops of oil to the cooked side on the top.
• Then flip again and add another few drops on the other side (now cooked)
• Remove from heat and store in a small covered pan wrapped in a paper towel

My Favorite Baby/Toddler Meals

I know it's a cliche repeated God knows how many times, but really, kids grow sooo fast!! Time literally flies.. I still vividly remember taking that first pregnancy test at home and having butterflies in my stomach, a lot of questions on our mind and a broad smile on our faces :) I can not believe that moment was close to 3 years ago! Seriously, where did the time go?!

So before it's too old and out of my mind, I want to jot down some of my favorite baby/toddler meals.  

As regular readers of Ginger & Garlic know, I have a pretty consuming job (which I love btw so no complaints there!) so by the time I come back home, I would rather spend remaining free time playing with little one or taking her to park or reading books with her. As a result I am always looking for quick, fresh and easy meals which are toddler approved. 

Most days our little one eats whatever we are eating. I am blessed with a foodie daughter, I must say! She loves trying out everything and with the exception of Karela (bittermelon) has liked each and every dish offered to her so far (touch wood!). But we do eat lots of left overs at our home. I cook few different dishes on Sunday and we eat them through Wednesday. Little one also eats some left overs but I generally don't feed her left overs more than a day old. So on such days, she gets a special freshly cooked meal for herself!

My favorite toddler meals have few things in common: 1) my toddler must like those dishes - a lot! 2) healthy dishes with seasonal vegetables and no canned or prepared items 3) Ideally quick cooking but if not quick cooking then >80% of hands-off cooking time and takes no longer than an hour from start to plate on table.

And here are some of my favorites:

1) Simple rice, lentil and vegetable khichadi: simply put 1/4th cup rice and 1/4th cup lentils (moong daal is my favorite for this khichadi but any quick cooking lentils such as pigeon peas or small brown lentils will work). Add any chopped vegetables - I usually add carrots and spinach. 1.5C Water, salt, turmeric and pressure cook for a soft liquidiy khichadi. Let cool, add a little ghee or butter, sprinkle some lime juice and watch your toddler gobble it all up. 

I bought a kiddie size rice cooker recently and it has come in very handy on many a busy nights! 5 minutes of hands-on time and 30 minutes of hands-off cooking time is all it takes.

2) Another favorite meal (toddler and elders alike) any day of year is freshly steamed idlis. Making idlis seems such a time consuming task, until I heard about these microwave idli makers. You can make batter over the weekend or buy prepared batter from Indian grocery stores (Shasta brand is our favorite) and it takes <10mins to put this idle and chutney dinner on table. Chutney is just beaten yogurt with salt, cumin powder and torn mint leaves or coriander leaves or grated cucumber or zucchini.

3) I never considered pasta to be a quick cooking meal - I mean you need to make sauce and cooking dried pasta takes about 15mins of hands-on time too. However, at our home noodles are the busy weekday quick throw together meal. They only take a few minutes at most and variations are endless! We make vegetable noodles with whatever you have at hand - tofu, carrots, green onions, mushrooms, soy sauce and ginger. On cold winter nights, we also make a noodle broth - just make a quick broth by simmering large onion, carrot pieces and grated ginger with water. Once broth has simmered for 15 minutes, add Japanese noodles. Garnish with green onions!

4) Soups! Soups are not quick cooking unless they are roasted vegetable soups and you do all the roasting on weekends. On many weekends, I roast few seasonal vegetables for weeklong eating - red peppers, tomatoes, butternut squash, carrots etc and keep in fridge. Then on a weekday, you can just blend roasted vegetables, add some cream, salt & pepper to taste and soup is ready. Warm it up on stove or in microwave and serve with bread of choice for a quick dinner!

5) On the same track of roasting, we also roast a large batch of yams or sweet potatoes often in fall and winter. Bake them at 375F for between 45 minutes to an hour and they literally become as sweet as candy. We bake them whole with skin on (after cleaning the skin). And then on a later day, just pop one potato in microwave for one minute, cut open the skin and eat the sweet flesh inside! This is my little one's favorite winter

breakfast at home!

6) Baked chickens are always winners! Requires some prep ahead to marinate the chicken in the morning so they can be put into oven first thing in the evening - they do need around an hour to cook and cool but almost all of it is hands-off time.

If you are a busy mom of a little toddler, which are some of your favorite meals?

My Favorite Baby/Toddler Books

I love to read. My reading habit is fueled by the mild insomnia I carry. I fall asleep much easily if I read something just for around 20 minutes before going to bed. It helps flush the brain from all the day's thoughts. 

Ever since my daughter was a few months old baby, I have been reading lots of baby/toddler books to her. And I don't know whether it's nature or nurture, but she also loves being read to. She now has a library of over 35 books, some of which I bought, some of which are gifted and yet others are hand-me-downs from our family friends. She daily picks out 10 some books and asks me to read them. 

She pleasantly surprised us recently by "reading" a book on her own! Of course she can't read yet, but she has pretty well memorized her favorite books and can recite them back all with actions and tones and everything :)

It took me a long time and many book dollars to figure out which ones are great baby/toddler books. Here is an overview of what worked for us. I am hoping it helps another Mom or Dad in need :) 

Preferences may differ baby to baby but I hope the basics remain the same:

1. buy board-books only, no paperback or hardcovers. Babies and toddlers are not known for being gentle with books! 
2. Each page should have large pictures
3. Each page should ideally have only one small sentence so it's easier for toddler to digest and helps later in speech development 
4. Rhymes rock! My daughter loves to read along or finish sentences of her rhyming books. 
5. This is more of a personal preference, but I love any lift the flap books. Your child can start interacting with the flaps and participating in the book reading process long before he can understand the words. I think that makes a big difference in kids enjoying the reading experience.

So here are some of the books we loved the most:

Image: goodreads.com

Where is baby's belly button is a really cute lift the flap book about finding a baby's body parts which are each hidden behind something. I love lift the flap books; they are very interactive and kids love to play along. Lift the flaps and simple sentences make this our go-to book. This book is also the first book my daughter "read" on her own.. I love it!

Image:goodreads.com

Dear Zoo is another lift the flap book we love. It's about a kid who wrote to the zoo for a pet and zoo sent him various animals but each had a characteristic making it not right for a pet. Finally the zoo sends him a puppy which he loves and keeps as his pet. Great book for kids to learn their animals in a fun and entertaining way!

Image: goodreads.com

Blue Hat, Green Hat is a wonderful book specially for speech development, I think. Story is really simple: there is this silly turkey who can't get any of her clothing items put right compared to her other animal friends.. so lines go something like "blue hat, green hat, red hat... oops". The oops is for the turkey who is wearing hat on hands instead of his head. Initially my daughter loved completing the "oops" in every sentence. Then eventually, she started saying "blah hat, blah hat, blah hat, oops" and now that she is learning her colors, she is attempting to get the lines right. One of our favorites!

Image: goodreads.com

Oh, the Binky! This was one of the first few books I read her, so I have fond memories of it. A hand-me-down from a family friends but absolutely a keeper! Of all Leslie Patricelli books, this one is my favorite. Story again is a simple one.. a little kid looses his binky and looks for it everywhere and then asks fish, dog, mom & dad who has binky. Finally he finds it in his own crib! Again a fantastic language development book with very simple day to day sentences and attractive pictures.

Image: goodreads.com

Potty is another of Leslie Patricelli's book which we are recently finding very useful. It's about a little boy going through potty training and how he overcomes his reluctance of potty. This is a perfect time for us to introduce this book to little one as she and we are entering the much dreaded phase of potty training!!

Image: goodreads.com

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See is a book to introduce little ones to animals, colors and basic sentence creation. I have the rare lift the flap version of this book and we all absolutely love it! My daughter is still calling most colors blue or green, but we are getting there and enjoying every step of it :)

Image: goodreads.com

All of Dr. Seuss books are great, but my two favorites are: Are You My Mother and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You. Former is a very sweet story of a little newborn baby bird who can't find his mother and asks various animals on the way if they are his mother. Later is about making funny noises! As with many Dr. Seuss books, they have simple writing and great rhymes. Are You My Mother is my daughter's favorite story to listen to when she can't fall asleep and my favorite one to tell her :)

Image: goodreads.com

Last but not least is a really good collection of nursery rhymes. I did not grow up in US so I did not grow up to these rhymes, but I am thoroughly enjoying making up tunes and sing along with my little girl :)

Image: goodreads.com

These are our favorites so far! When I am looking to buy new books for her (always the case every few months), I searched around on Internet to find such compiled list, but did not come across many - so here is my attempt in case it helps another parent along.

Whichever book you choose the most important thing is to make sure you and the little one both enjoy the book and cherish the time you spend connecting with each other, making great memories and opening up their worlds! Enjoy!

Spicy Black Eyed Peas Stew

Every year on the first of the year we try to cook up a big batch of black eyed peas. So as the first of the year is just a night away, thought I will post one of my favorite (slightly adapted from previous) recipe of black eyed peas.

In parts of US it is considered a good luck to eat a meal of black eyed peas alongwith some greens (usually sautéed collard greens) and 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 follow this food tradition because I really like black eyed peas and this is a good opportunity to cook a big batch of these delicious but often side-stepped legume.

Being a lazy and greedy person that I am, I tend to cook all the prosperity, wealth and spiciness in one single pot instead of making multiple dishes :) One pot meals rule in our house-hold! Anyway, so here is to prosperity, wealth, spiciness and happiness to all of you in the coming new year! Happy New Year!!

Holiday Cookies and A Wish for a Very Happy New Year!

Hi there! It has been so long.. sometimes life and work have a way of taking over things you love, don't they? Neverthless, I am committed to keeping this little space alive and buzzling, even if that means, ummm, 10 posts a year. A slow going is better than no going, right?!

For me Holidays are always the best time of the year. I have come to realize that holidays gain a special meaning and bring even more happiness and joy if you have a little one to share it with. May be it's a parent's deep desire and drive to make a perfect holiday for their little ones or it's the joy it brings to see a full blown smile on their faces seeing the Christmas tree at home lit up for the first time.. but holidays do take a special meaning with a little one around.

My little one just turned two. I have been meaning to start a holiday tradition with her, something simple, something just the two of us share every year - mother and daughter thing. And what else a foodie can think other than cooking or baking! So baking Christmas cookies is it. 

This was our first year of baking Christmas cookies at home. They turned out very tasty (much better than what I was expecting out of sugar cookies to be honest!). Although our hands could get more skilled with cookie decoration, overall we are quite happy with the results..

Little one was very excited and took a very active role baking the cookies, much more than I expected her to do at this age. I called her my baker's little assistant :)

I followed a simple but clearly a winner recipe from Allrecipes for making sugar cookies. The only change I made was to quarter the recipe - making only 15 servings which was more than enough for us to enjoy and share with few friends we met over Christmas.

(Trader Joe's) Chicken Parmesan

Chicken Parmesan has always been a go-to restaurant favorite at our place. Every time Chicken Parmesan craving strikes, we used to head over to a nearby Olive Garden for our periodic Chicken Parmesan fix. There are some dishes one for some reason thinks must be too elaborate and time consuming to make at home for our busy life-styles; Chicken Parmesan was one such misconception for me...

With a toddler at bay, we are entering a phase of being very wary of fine dining places. Combined that with the fact that we were never the "takeout-types" means I now have an extra incentive to take a crack at making our usual restaurant favorites at home - there is always a bright side to everything in life, right?!

I call this recipe "Trader Joe's" Chicken Parmesan because 1) ingredients picked up from TJ's makes this "recipe" an assembly task really rather than a real cooking task and 2) I just absolutely love shopping at that place! (I am not getting paid to advertise for TJ's, just a very happy customer!)

The hands-on time in this recipe is around 15-mins which consists mainly of pre-assembly preps while unattended cooking time is 30-mins - so as long as you have the right ingredients at hand, fear no more - a restaurant style Chicken Parmesan is less than an hour away. And, making at home has his advantages too - you can customize it just the way you like. I usually skip the mozzarella cheese and pan fry the chicken cutlets to be extra crunchy. 

Toss together a quick simple green salads while the chicken is baking, and there you have it - a true restaurant style meal in 1/4th the budget and under an hour :)

It's Not a Tomato; It's an Idea of a Tomato

When did our food choices become so complex? From a society of people who spent majority of their time hunting, gathering, fishing and then turning their daily haul into simple delicious meals - to the society of people today who are navigating aisles and aisles of highly processed supermarket foods, packaged with attractive colorful labels and a long non-pronounceable ingredient list. Between food industrialization, clever food marketing and food lobbyists, collectively I fear we have given very little thought to what this ready-to-eat culture is doing to our own planet, society and our long-term health and well-being.

"It's not a tomato; it's an idea of a tomato" it's a tagline by one of my favorite authors Michael Pollan from an old food documentary Food Inc. that struck a deep cord with me. He was explaining how the supermarket culture is erasing the seasons and the meaning of seasonal produce. Now a days most fruits and vegetables are available year long - shipped from across the globe preserved in ethylene just so it's available all the time. Such a year-long tomato is picked when it's still green, preserved, artificial ripened and packaged carefully and shipped for thousands of miles - what it does to the taste of the food is quite imaginable. If you have tasted a fresh tomato picked from garden or from a local farmer's market, you know what they mean when they say that you don't know how a tomato tastes like until you pick one fresh off the vine yourself! What you find in supermarkets year-around is something that sure looks like tomato, is called a tomato but in reality is just an idea of a tomato - a notional tomato.

What prompted all these thoughts? I visited a super-market recently to buy milk for my daughter. As the usual readers of Ginger & Garlic know, we have switched over to eating local produce and minimally processed foods in our household. Some weeks are better than others towards this goal and this was one of the weeks where we had just come back from vacation and the grocery-shopping schedules were off.

So anyway, I am in the milk aisle looking for organic whole-milk. I see one priced at $5.99 and right next to it is a plain regular whole-milk priced at $2.49. I picked the organic one. Right next to me was an old lady from Greece (she told later) who was visiting family in the area. She was curious why I bought $6 milk instead of the cheaper one. As I explained to her the whole business of organic versus non-organic and why for my daughter I don't mind paying extra bucks for organic and saw the incredulity on her face - I wondered  how did we get here? 

As I was growing up in India in a small town "organic" was the norm or I should non-organic did not exist. The cowman of the village neither fed his cows highly processed corn and soy nor did he inject them with growth boosting stuff. It was just plain old natural milk (albeit a bit diluted with water at times). Now with many engineered profit-boosting means readily available, the non-organic milk is the one omnipresent and so very cheap - while the old "regular", the natural one is the one we have to pay hefty premium for.. so strange!

I have been reading a lot recently about food industrialization. How the history of agricultural and food policies of post world war II era helped create this culture of highly processed foods, animal factories and ready-to-eat everything. As a result today an American household spends merely 31mins on average prepping meals including clean-ups (source: an excellent article from Michael Pollan). While processed food revolution has had a great impact in making food accessible to everyone (one of the main reasons for it's invention), I worry we have minimal data to the health-impacts of highly processed, shelved foods.

As a mom of a one-year old I think a lot of what to put on table, where the food is coming from, is it sustainable, fresh, free from all the genetic modifications, pesticides and growth induced drugs. Sometimes it scares me a lot where our food culture is going to take us.

Anyway, enough of the serious thoughts - now coming back to this recipe, it's a simple gajar ka halwa or gajaracha sheera as we call it in Marathi. It's an Indian dessert made with carrots, milk and sugar. Recipe is very simple. You can serve it cold or warm - it's sure to be crowd pleaser!