Dare to confine

This month's Daring Cooks Challenge is hosted by Debyi of healthyvegankitchen.com. She chose Indian Dosas from the refresh cookbook by Ruth Tal, and you will find the detailed recipe and procedure on her website. I'll just say here that they have a chickpeas filling and a coconut-curry sauce.

Dosas weren't that hard to cook, but the challenge was to go and see how you can have a delicious meal while going vegan. And lactose free. Am I forgetting something? Oh, yes, about 99% oil free, considered that you will need some oil to grease the pan while preparing the dosas.



The dosas were very quick to prepare, and not harder than panning crepes.



What I loved most of going into this challenge was the mise en place.



I find it very relaxing to prepare all the things I will need to cook or bake something, the more the better. I love checking the ingredients on the recipe and marking them off, lining up all the bowls, even washing them afterwards (if anyone living with me is reading, he's invited not to comment the last one).

Besides, what's not to love in handling such vivid colors in a late summer Sunday morning?



I do not like it when garlic's flavour is too strong, so I leave the whole cloves in my recipes while they're cooking, then pull them out in the end, so that there's just a hint and I don't pay it forward too much.

All the colors melt in a golden and fragrant concoction of mildly spicy and tangy fragrances:



Coconut milk was required to prepare the sauce, which usually I find here, but not the morning I decided to take the challenge.
Did it stop me?



I'm afraid the coconut's are the only pics of the saucy part.




When it came to assemble the dosas with filling and sauce, I made what I often do with normal crepes: pile them up.
Maybe it was the Dobos Torte of teh last Daring Bakers Challenge that wasn't letting me go.



This configuration was very convenient when it became clear that I would be the only consumer of my hard work.
I should know by now that my husband has a very low spicy-ness threshold: the first meal I cooked after getting married was a pretty hot chicken curry. After 3 bites he politely asked if he could stop eating; he was all red in the face and some tears were rising in his eyes. I couldn't swear it but I clearly remember some smoke coming out of his ears.
The kids were not that enticed, either.



And that's how I ended having my own Indian week!



(Thanks Lisa Michele for kicking my butt! It was the first day of school yesterday, and with all the excitement I was forgetting to post this!)

Traveling in my own cookbooks #1

One of the things I always try to bring back from a trip/journey/vacation is a local cookbook, just because.
This started way back, as soon as I started to travel without my parents, when I still didn't even approach a stove.

I realized years ago that I never get to actually use them, but still that's something I have to bring home with me.
I seldom get to actually open these books other than for looking at the pictures, even if I carefully moved them around Italy and the world everytime I moved. Thing is, most of the time I'm more lured by recipes in magazines, or from some friends, and more recently from the Internet, of course. And also, something always seemed to go wrong; I would blame myself for my inexperience, but that was before discovering the concept of badly written cookbooks.
I thought that just because something was written in a book, it had to be right and thoroughly proved, but I've been questioning this idea for awhile, now.

Well, this is the time, I will pick every cookbook I own, starting from the first on the left at the top shelf, choose a recipe from each and share the outcome.
It's not an original idea, I know, I saw that there was a community with a similar cookbook challenge, but they stopped. So, if you know of some other group bringing on something like this, let me know. Or if you want to join me, you will be more than welcome.

First book is "Cocina Aragonesa": I bought it during a vacation through Spain and Portugal when I was 24. There were 10 of us, friends from University, just driving around from Barcelona to Madrid, to Lisbon, To Algarve and back on the South coast.
Beautiful, I would do that all over tomorrow! Except maybe for the part where I put my life at risk, 2 or 3 times, but I was young and free, and probably that was my wildest holiday.
Anyway, I remember that 4 or 5 of us got together and decided to buy one specific region cookbook each, so we could trade them during the years to follow.
Of course, that never happened.

I would have liked to make something savoury, but everything I set my eyes on had tons of garlic, or was about eels, and I needed a softer start, so I headed to the dessert pages.

The one I picked was called "Yemas de Coco" (Coconut Buds).




Looked pretty simple: make a syrup with one glass (3/4 cup) of water and 1 1/2 cup of sugar (if you're wondering about the quantities in the pictures, I made half batch),



Then add 3 cups of grated coconut,



then leave the mix in the fridge overnight.
The subsequent passage would be to form buds by hand and roll them in melted chocolate.



At this point I thought "Wow, how will this simple mix aggregate? How will I be able to form those little balls that keep together in melted chocolate?"
I wasn't.
The mix didn't hold together.
I tried to wet the mix, I tried to dry the mix, but no.

So, in the end I made layers and refrigerated, and found myself with a home version of a Bounty bar.



Nice, healthy and everything, but still too much fuss for the result.

I probably should have made the buds, frozen them, and then rolled them in the chocolate.

Mmh.

I decided to give the book another try, there and then, and I picked the recipe soon after: "Leche Frita" (Fried Milk)

Put 1 liter/1 quart of milk and a pinch of cinnamon on a stove, and when it starts to boil add 4 tbsp of flour and 4 egg yolks, always beating in the meantime.



Pour in a dish and refrigerate overnight (this overnight refrigeration seems recurring).
The day after you should have this unsweetened pudding



that has to be cut in pieces, rolled in a mix of one yolk and two eggwhites, then in flour, then fried in hot vegetable oil.



At this point, I had the feeling I was in front of a book meant for tourists, printed in a time when cooking wasn't really much of a hobby.
Either that, or I suddenly have an issue with aggregation, because the 4 tbsp of flour were not at all enough to make the pudding dense enough to handle it with ease.
I made it, but another time I will use 4 tbsp of corn starch (the book said I could use corn starch instead of the flour, but only 2 tbsp).
This should also reduce the ratio between fried surface and fresh content.
Dust with sugar and serve.



They were pretty good, actually, it's just a matter of texture, not of taste.


I have a feeling that this project, started just for fun, will help me understand a few things about cookbooks. I'm looking forward to discovering the differences between one book and another, old and new, small and big, with a theme or not.