sabotabby | New Recipe Sunday

I fear I am getting sick. I'm always tired these days, but today I feel particularly flattened. This is worrisome. My information processing abilities seem to be affected as well, which is even more annoying.

Anyway, that shouldn't stop me from reporting on our fantastic New Recipe Sunday. These things just keep getting better and better.

The Menu
~~Smoky soup of win~~Red Chileatole with Fall Vegetables (only with spinach rather than green beans)—

zingerella
Smoky vegetable salad—

mycrazyhair
Falafels from scratch—

frandroid
Mushroom and kale risotto—

neeuqdarzil
Chickpeas with garlic, tomato, green chilis, and amchoor*—

sabotabby
Dolorous porridge—

curgoth
Apple tart—

captainmushroom

* Except kind of not.

Photobucket

This is awesome. ~~It has a name, so stay tuned and hopefully zingerella will post the actual recipe.~~ Recipe here.

Photobucket

Grilled and flavoured with something yummy.

Photobucket

I didn't even know that it was possible to make great falafels without a deep-fryer, but

frandroid somehow managed. Here's how he did it.

Photobucket

The staggering variety of ways to make risotto continually surprises me. This is a particularly nice one. The recipe is here.

Photobucket

I stole this recipe from

springheel_jack, who adapted it from one by Madhur Jaffrey. I had all of the ingredients except for amchoor, which is the whole point of it, but the recipe said that you could substitute lemon juice, so I did.

Chickpeas with garlic, tomato, green chilis, and amchoor, unless you don't have amchoor.
(With apologies to s_j.)

What you need
8 big cloves of garlic, or 10 small ones
A few tablespoons of ghee, or veg. oil (I used niter kebbeh, because hey, why not?)
1 heaping teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1 cup plain bland tomato sauce
2 cans of chick peas, drained
1 teaspoon salt (to taste)
2 hot chili peppers, quartered and seeded
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons amchoor (sour mango powder) or 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
2 cups water
An unspecified amount of coriander. At some point, the recipe mentions coriander. I was pretty sure we had some but half of our spices are unlabeled. So I used some seeds that smelled vaguely like coriander, ground them up, and they seemed to do the job.

What you do
Puree the garlic cloves and a little water in a blender to make a garlic paste. Heat ghee in skillet to about medium. Throw in the whole cumin seeds and fry them for a few seconds. Then add the garlic paste and fry for a minute or so, stirring continually. Add tomato sauce and cook for a minute more until heated. Add the chick peas, green chilis, ground cumin, ground coriander, cayenne, salt, amchoor, and water. Lower heat and simmer uncovered for about 20 min, until the flavors are melded, the chick peas softened slightly, and the sauce/gravy reduced - at the beginning the chick peas will be swimming, but at the end they shouldn't quite be covered by the liquid. You end up with a lot of chick peas and a lot of sauce - a sort of stew. Remove the chilis. (For those who want it a bit less hot, just leave the chilis in for a few minutes.) [I didn't remove the chilis at all; I just ate them.]

This is completely easy and super tasty. It takes maybe a half hour, prep included. I highly recommend it. Oh, and I served it over couscous because I'm lazy.

Photobucket

The Dolorous Porridge is hard to photograph, as it is a black hole of pain and woe. Here is what it looks like with my flash on so you can see the detail.

Photobucket