recipes
So, uh, I have to start cooking dinners for myself now. Does anyone have some great recipes lying around, at the ‘grad student’ bugetary, time, and skill levels?
So, uh, I have to start cooking dinners for myself now. Does anyone have some great recipes lying around, at the ‘grad student’ bugetary, time, and skill levels?
August 31, 2006 at 2:44 pm
A couple of times this summer I have made vibrant vegetarian sauces that can go over rice or other starchy things. Here are the ones that have worked really well. They’re not exact recipes; you can vary the ingredients according to taste. The spices are definitely a good thing to have in them but you can skip them or change them to other spices according to what you have around and what you like. (I will asterisk the essential ingredients.) Sorry I don’t have terribly good ideas of what quantities you’ll get from these or how much time they take. You probably will want to use a good-sized frying pan, as these start out with a high water content and cook down.
Note: silken tofu should work nicely for an additional protein source when added into any of these mixes, or of course you can add chopped or ground meat if you don’t want it vegetarian
1. Green sauce (saag)
Ingredients:
*olive oil (or other cooking oil)
*finely chopped onion (plenty of it)
*SPINACH lots of spinach
(*)plain yogurt (possibly not essential, but close; more authentic is paneer cheese, if you can get it)
*salt
coriander
allspice
ginger
Saute the onions, boil some fresh spinach (probably two bags’ worth if you want any leftovers) in a pot until it’s a vivid green (i.e. don’t overcook it), then add it to the onions in the pan. Mix the stuff around till the spinach is broken up into more manageable pieces; add salt to taste and yogurt to make a texture you like, and add the spices to taste. Keep cooking until the sauce is at a state that you like. This will probably be sometime before the spinach turns entirely gray-brown.
2. Red sauce
*oil
*a bunch of finely chopped onion
*canned tomatoes, maybe 3 cans? 2? I dunno (if you can get tomatoes that are already chopped up in a can, it will save a little prep time; I do not know if this exists)
cayenne pepper
cardamom (or you can substitute chopped celery, celery seed, or something else with a similar taste)
salt
Saute the onions, chop the tomatoes if they are whole out of the can, add the tomatoes, add the spices to taste. YOU MAY NOT NEED ANY SALT so don’t go adding a bunch without caution. Let it cook down for a while (highish heat is probably all right) till it’s pretty thick. Mmm-mmm.
3. Black sauce
*oil
*plenty of chopped onion (it is a theme)
*black beans (1 or 2 cans)
*a good amount of chopped mushrooms
black pepper
maybe some sweet spices like cloves (I haven’t actually tried this)
salt
Saute the onions. Add the mushrooms and saute them, if you like, or you can add them after the beans and they’ll still cook fine. Add the beans right from the can. Add the chopped mushrooms if you haven’t already. Add pepper etc. to taste and PROBABLY NOT SALT since the black beans are good and salty already. Let it cook down; again, highish heat is probably ok.
Serve over brown rice or some similarly hearty and reasonable starch source. If you have time, possibly over multiple days, you could have all three sauces on hand for a single meal and be able to sample each of their highly different flavors in one sitting. DELICIOUS.
September 4, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Saag? Sweet, that stuff is goooooooood. And the Ithaca Wegman’s has a giant international section so maybe the paneer cheese would be obtainable. Sometime I’ll try it out and see how my saag compares to actual Indian restaurants…
September 12, 2006 at 12:59 am
[...] Delicious, easy to make, and wicked wholesome! Note also, for more foodity, the gauntlet of sauces that I threw down earlier. [...]