Birthday Daffodils

Mansaf

For awhile I'd been dreaming up sharing a traditional Jordanian recipe with my friends here. Last year we'd done a potluck and I'd brought kusheri, a traditional Egyptian recipe. This time it was Jordan's turn. I had made mansaf once before with Matt to celebrate passing the two-year review, but now I wanted to make it for my roommates and close friends so I followed the recipe from here fairly closely for amounts. I used a thick Middle Eastern yogurt from the grocery store (labnah) and some lamb chops and put together a small feast with the help of my friends. One was tasked with the Egyptian fatoosh salad (chopped bell peppers, cucumber, and tomato drizzled in a garlic, lemon, olive oil, and salt dressing). One couple brought soft and fluffy pita bread and lemonade. My roommate helped me with the baklava (a somewhat-combination of this recipe and this recipe) which I had a few setbacks on but overall it ended up tasting amazing (and I'm about to go for a piece...). Everyone arrived, we laid out the feast, washed our hands, and then dug in. It was stupendous, we ate ourselves into a stupor, and then sat around trying to conversate. :)

The Italian Cravings

So having happily tried my fingers at Indian food I moved on to give in to some serious Italian food cravings. First stop, after reading a chapter about lasagna from Duncan's The Brothers K, I decided I needed to try my hand at vegan lasagna again. I had tried this awhile ago with a recipe from my mom but had grown tired of it after several potlucks. I searched the web and ended up creating my own recipe based on the experiences of several other chefs. I present it to you here:

Monique's Vegan Lasagna

9x9 pan (deeper is better)

Box of noodles (I used non-boil ones)

1.5 jars of tomato sauce of choice

1 onion

1 zucchini

1 yellow squash

1 bell pepper (I used yellow)

1 bunch of spinach

1 package tofu

1-2 garlic cloves pressed or finely minced

Optional: Small amount of vegan pesto mixed in with tofu, see pizza recipe link below

1. Dice onion and fry in skillet with olive oil. After starting to turn clear add diced zucchini, squash, and pepper, then garlic and fry until soft. Remove from skillet and place in separate bowl.

2. Crumble tofu into the same skillet and fry it a bit to soak up the flavors from the vegetables and dry out a bit. Add any spices you want for flavor.

3. Remove tofu and then lightly saute spinach very briefly (30-60 seconds?) in same skillet. If you want the spinach more fresh, skip this step.

4. Follow directions on back of lasagna noodle box for layering, or place 1 cup sauce in bottom of pan, then layer of noodles, then 1/3 of vegetable mix, tofu, spinach, and repeat two more times. Top off with noodle layer, remaining sauce and sprinkled layer of (fake) cheese if desired.

5. Cover pan with tinfoil and bake at 375 F for 50 minutes. Remove tinfoil and bake another 5-10 minutes. Let sit 10-15 minutes before cutting.

I produced this magnificent lasagna that I consumed throughout the week and then promptly made another with the pesto leftover from the pizza venture (described below) the following weekend.

It held together surprisingly well and the layer of rice cheese on top was the perfect touch. According to my dairy-friendly roommates, you couldn't really tell this didn't have ricotta because of the tofu texture and the flavors from the vegetables.

A couple of nights after my first attempt I decided to give a vegan pizza recipe a try that combined a cashew cheese with vegan pesto. It turned out amazing, but was much better fresh and not so great the days following. I used my regular pizza crust recipe but it's a basic recipe so I'm sure the one on this blog would work fine.

 Pre-cooking, the lemon slices really added a nice flavor

 Post-cooking, so amazing

All the fixings!

Food!

Catching up on some of my baking activities over the past month or so I have to start out with something I didn't actually make but found quite by accident and immediately fell in love with. I introduce to you the lactose-intolerant-yet-ice-cream-loving person's best friends:

Almond Dream makes some of the best non-dairy ice cream around, and now they make ice cream bites!! I was beside myself when we had a heat streak in mid-March and I just happened to find these in Treasure Island's frozen food aisle. The LaLoo's goat's milk ice cream is also superb. The chocolate version has a bit of a goat taste to it when you first try it but you soon forget about it altogether. I've recently tried the vanilla version and don't taste goat at all. Maybe it's just me, but this is the texture and creaminess of real ice cream and I love it.

Sometime in late March/early April I found on sale and purchased The Everything Indian Cookbook for my kindle and tried out a couple of the recipes that caught my eye. The recipes were really easy to follow and called for ingredients I could find and had you built from a paste combining serrano peppers with garlic and ginger, adding on other ingredients as desired. I tried a potato recipe, a salmon recipe, and a five dahl delight recipe. It was a delight, all three were actually. The dahl turned out looking like green pea soup even though it contained yellow and red lentils as well as mung beans and pigeon peas. It was pretty tasty and inspired a twin pot soon cooked up by my roommates. We had a lot of dahl, to say the least.

Salmon 

Potato

A few days later I wanted to try making samosas and not finding anything by that name in the cookbook, I decided to try the parathas. I completely forgot Talea's experience with this ridiculous food item and so repeated the same near disasters. :) Not my favorite food ever and we ended up throwing out some of the last of it after both myself and my roommate-who-likes-my-food-experiments couldn't take anymore.

In all, it was a fun time with Indian food but I was done with that cookbook for awhile and my taste buds turned to other things...