Hearts of Palm Seviche

I don't regularly surf for recipe ideas. Between my brain that thinks in flavors and Ann's wonderful incessant stream of "make this" and "make that," I never want for ideas. But still ideas do come at me from various places, such as when I am wandering through the produce section of the grocery store and the sight of some piece of produce gets my mind riffing. Recently, in something of a surprise, at least to me, one came from an advertisement.

Like a lot of folks, we cut the cord a long time ago and don't watch regular broadcast or cable TV, but we have a couple of streaming channels. We were watching a show the other night when some kind of pre-roll ad starting talking about Hearts of Palm Seviche. And that's all it took to spark an idea.

We both looked at each other and said, "Hearts of palm seviche sounds great."

Hearts of Palm Seviche

It probably sounded great because we have been eating fall vegetables for a couple of months now and are looking for a summery change-up for our vegetarian dinner entrées. Next trip to the store, I bought a couple cans of hearts of palm and all the vegetables that I wanted for the seviche.

It turned out so well that I made it again the week following and it is certain to go on our wintertime dinner menu. 

Hearts of Palm Seviche

You can add whatever you like to your seviche. I thought my first impromptu version was outstanding, so I wrote it down and haven't changed a thing in subsequent versions. This recipe makes two healthy portions or 4-6 appetizer portions.

1 cup grape tomatoes, diced

1/2 seedless cucumber, diced

1 yellow pepper, diced

1 red pepper, diced

1 orange pepper, diced

1/2 red onion, in fine dice

1 avocado, diced

2 15-ounce cans of hearts of palm, sliced into coins

1 bunch cilantro, destemmed and chopped

1 teaspoon Kosher salt, to taste

juice of two limes

Chop and mix. Season to taste. Serve immediately.

Pad Thai

Last week, after our weekly weigh-in in our battle against COVID lethargy, our weight totals continued to drop and this caused Ann to ask, "After we weigh in next week, I feel like a treat. Would you make pad thai?"

Pad Thai with Tofu and Dried Shrimp

Of course I would make pad thai, for it is one of my favorite foods, so much so that I continue to blog about making it. It seems that I make it so infrequently that I feel compelled to blog about it on those occasions when I do make it. If you want to see how my versions vary, here is one from 2015 and another from 2012. Each dish is different, yet they all share the same common steps and ingredients.

Making pad thai is really our only option, if we want to eat it. If going out for pad thai weren't a non-starter because of COVID, we still wouldn't go out for it here. We have one Thai restaurant and one Thai food truck and neither make food that we would pay for. Both make especially un-noteworthy pad thai. It's probably a good thing. If either made a decent version, I might have real trouble keeping the weight off.

Soapbox alert. Why is the average dish of pad thai in the US so terrible? Even restaurants that I really respect make crap for pad thai. Why? There's nothing hard about it. Is it because it is the one Thai dish that every American knows and will order and therefore restaurants knowingly serve slop to these unadventurous diners? Maybe as pizza is to Italian food in the US, so goes pad thai for Thai food: Americans will eat anything you put in front of them as long as it is cheap, massive in portion, and not challenging. Off my soapbox now.

I don't keep the ingredients that I need for pad thai at home, so our dish had to wait for a run to the grocery store to pick up tamarind, dried shrimp, and rice stick. Rice stick especially, along with all forms of pasta, is in that class of carbs that we would decimate were it in our pantry. So we don't keep it in our pantry. That forces me to make a special trip to buy it eliminating the temptation to carb out after a couple of glasses of wine. Don't judge. It works for us.

Pad Thai Mise en Place

Similarly, we cannot have peanuts in the house. We're down a combined 38 pounds now during COVID and all that might go out the window if we had peanuts to feast on, because neither of us has any self control when it comes to roasted peanuts. So, as a salty crunch for our pad thai, I substituted some tiny dried shrimp. Not peanuts exactly, but not bad either.

The rest of the ingredients are eggs, bean sprouts, green onions, firm tofu, and lime wedges for garnish.

Pad Thai Sauce

Pad Thai Sauce: Tamarind, Palm Sugar, and Fish Sauce

To sauce the rice stick, I make a sauce separately from the noodles and combine the two at the last minute. First, palm sugar is hard to get into solution. Second, I don't have enough firepower on my range to reduce the sauce ingredients quickly and efficiently without overcooking the noodles.

1/2 cup tamarind water

2 tablespoons palm sugar

1 tablespoon fish sauce

Mix the ingredients in a small sauce pan and cook until the sugar is well dissolved. Follow this link for a primer on making tamarind water. Adjust to your taste.

Pad Thai Procedure

This makes enough for two nice portions.

1/2 pound rice stick
2 eggs, beaten

4 ounces firm tofu, in bite-sized pieces

1 ounce dried shrimp

2 green onions or a few Chinese or garlic chives, in 1-inch lengths

1 cup bean sprouts

1 recipe of Pad Thai sauce, above

Soak the rice stick in hot water until it is pliable and ready to eat.

In a very hot pan, add the beaten eggs and scramble.

Add the tofu, dried shrimp, chives, and bean sprouts. Cook for a minute.

Add the soft noodles, then the sauce.

Cook, tossing until the sauce coats the noodles and everything is hot. Serve immediately.

My only regret about this dish? I wish I had some preserved vegetable to put in it, some radish or mustard pickles.

Kitchen Basics: Making Tamarind Water

Tamarind is a wonderful culinary tool, tasting a good bit like lemon, but a little darker and fruitier. While tamarind is not commonly used in the US, it is really popular in a lot of other places, often as a substitute for citrus and used as a souring agent. In India, tamarind makes a great chutney and is commonly used in cooked dishes all over the south. In Mexico, tamarind makes a wonderful agua fresco, very similar to lemonade. Here in Oregon, you seem to be able to get a bottle of tamarindo at any taco shop or truck.

But I mainly use it to create the national dish of Thailand, pad thai, in which tamarind is a key component of the sauce for the noodles.

Tamarind comes in several forms: as whole pods, in bricks of pulp and seeds, and as a purée. If you have (and likely overpaid for) tamarind purée, you're all set. If you have pods or a brick of pulp, follow the steps below to make tamarind water, which is what you'll need for pad Thai, tamarind chutney, or to flavor a curry.

A Whole Tamarind Pod

What we call tamarind is the seed pod of a leguminous tree with African heritage. If it looks to you like the seed pod of an acacia or pseudoacacia, you're right. They're in the same family. Covered by a suede-like peel, the flesh is sticky and contains large seeds. It is the flesh that we use to make tamarind water.

I'm not sure what conditions are like where you are, but out here in Oregon with our large population of people of Mexican heritage, you can find tamarind pods in many large groceries. We can buy just what we need without having to buy an entire brick of pulp or container of purée.

Peeled Tamarind Pod

Tamarind peels easily with your fingers. As you work with it, you'll see that the pod has transverse ridges. Between every two ridges is a seed. My working rule of thumb is that the flesh of every six seeds will make a half a cup of tamarind water. If I'm cutting tamarind pulp from a brick of tamarind, I'll use the same amount, about one and a half to two ounces of tamarind.

Six Sections Per Half Cup of Water

For each half a cup of tamarind water, I break off six sections containing six seeds. In a bowl, I submerge the tamarind under warm water and let it soak, periodically rubbing the flesh off the seeds.

Tamarind Water

After a half an hour in warm water, you'll be able to work the tamarind with your fingers and rub all the flesh into the water. Discard the seeds and you're ready to use the tamarind water in your dish.

Vegetable Tacos

Vegetable tacos are something that I started making seriously this summer during grilling season and because they are so delicious, have become a regular quick dinner chez nous. Since I first posted about them back in October, I have formulated a strategy for making them that I will outline below, using vegetables that I prepared stovetop.

Vegetable Tacos

As I have been experimenting with dozens of veggie tacos, I have fallen into a procedure which involves mixing cooked ingredients with raw ingredients just before serving. This yields a warm, but super fresh taco.

Preparing the Raw Ingredients

In a large bowl, I mix the raw ingredients: green onion, cilantro, tomatoes, cotija, and finely minced chipotle. In season, I would likely include raw corn in this mix.

Searing the Cooked Ingredients

For the cooked ingredients, which I grill in good weather, the mix varies depending on what I have on hand. This pan contains onions, poblanos, yellow squash, and asparagus. Almost anything goes in veggie tacos and I have used eggplant, zucchini, and green beans this past summer. To mimic the intense cooking on the grill, sear the veggies hard if you are using a pan.

When the veggies are done, mix them immediately with the raw ingredients and season to taste with salt and spice. Serve with slices of lime on warm corn tortillas.

Although veggie tacos don't sound all that great, I assure you that they are delicious and addictive.

Halibut Cheeks with Masoor Dal Tadka

Even though I am retired and have long stretches of time at the house, I still find many nights that I am looking for something quick to get on the table. My days these days seem to be filled with renovation and remodeling tasks. By the time dinner time rolls around, I don't want to make a huge investment in time in the kitchen, yet I do want a healthy and tasty dinner. By quick, I mean something on the order of 15-20 minutes of active work in the kitchen.

To help with this, I am trying to keep a few quick fish portions in the freezer. That is, when I buy fish at the seafood merchant, I try to buy 3 or 4 meals of fish and freeze that which I don't want to cook right away. Which brings us to the halibut cheeks that I IQFed a few weeks ago. IQF is a food service term for Individually Quick Frozen.

What it means in my home setting is that I spread halibut cheeks out on a sheet tray (coated with pan spray) so that none of them touch and freeze them. Once the cheeks freeze hard, I pluck them off the sheet tray and put them in a freezer bag. In this way, I can pull out as few or as many as I want for a meal. And because they are so thin, I can either defrost them under running water in 20 minutes or so, or I can leave them in the refrigerator overnight. In either case, they are ready to cook quickly.

Halibut Cheeks with Masoor Dal Tadka

Our local grocery has a vast bulk section and as I was wandering through last trip to the store, I spied a bin of red split lentils which I know by their Hindi name as masoor dal. I brought some home for the pantry because they too are a quick cooking food, great for when you don't have a lot of time to cook. A lot of folks use a pressure cooker to have the dal ready very quickly, but even without a pressure cooker, they are done in less than an hour.

One of my very favorite dal preparations is called a tadka or "tempering" in which spices are warmed in hot oil and then mixed into the cooked dal. So I made a quick masoor dal tadka for our halibut cheeks by cooking onion, garlic, ginger, and cumin in a bit of oil until the cumin seeds started to pop. For spices, most people use garam masala, the pseudo-generic Indian spice mix, but I tend to individual spices ground at the moment in my spice grinder: coriander, cumin, fennel, cayenne, and mehti (fenugreek seeds). I stir in the spices and then add the masoor dal. I add water as necessary and cook the lentils until they are tender and falling apart a bit, but still have some texture.

For the tadka, I heat a little ghee or oil and add whole cumin and mustard seeds. When they start popping, I drop in a touch of cayenne powder and turn off the heat. Then I pour this mix over the lentils and they are ready to serve.

All this was done in advance of cooking the fish and while the fish was finishing on its second side, I sautéed a bit of baby spinach for a garnish. One hour start to finish is a pretty quick dinner in my book, especially when most of the time was spent having a glass of Pinot Noir with Ann while the lentils simmered away gently.

Shakshuka

It's cold, gray, and dreary here in Oregon during the shortest days of the year and only about 2 and a half months into our 8-month rainy season, there's no relief in sight. This drab weather has put me in the mood for warm, comforting, bright, and sunny food so I have planned to make shakshuka for dinner.

Shakshuka, a dish of eggs poached or baked directly in a tomato-based sauce, is common to North Africa and the Mediterranean. It's probably most commonly known as an Israeli breakfast dish, but the dish feels African to me, and I believe that it came to Israel when Jews from North Africa emigrated to Israel.

But who really knows. It is quite likely that eggs baked in tomatoes developed simultaneously in a lot of places, eggs and tomatoes both being inexpensive and common foods. Certainly the dish is also common on the northern side of the Med (think uova in purgatorio from Italy and oeufs à la provençale in France) and who among us in America has not feasted on huevos rancheros at our local Mexican restaurant?

No matter the dish's provenance, it is what I wanted to chase the dreary skies away and bring me back to summer for a few minutes.

Shakshuka: Baked Eggs

With shakshuka in mind, last week at the grocery store, I bought bright and cheerful yellow, orange, and red peppers, the best reminders of summer that I could find.

Garlic, Onions, Poblanos, and Colored Bell Peppers

Although the vegetables for shakshuka are traditionally chopped, I prefer to slice mine to give the resulting dish more texture.

Peppers and Onions Starting to Cook

In a deep sautoir, I heated enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan and then added all the sliced onions and peppers. Stirring frequently, I cooked the vegetables until they started to go limp. At this point, I added minced garlic, a little bit of cumin (not more than a teaspoon and a half for this large pan), and my secret spice, the barest hint of cinnamon. A touch of crushed red pepper flakes complete my spicing.

In a departure from many versions of shakshuka, mine is not a spicy dish in either of the senses: neither piquant from pepper nor containing a lot of spices. I've not found cinnamon to be a typical spice in other people's shakshuka, but for me, the barest pinch of ground cinnamon adds that mysterious hint of je ne sais quoi. It is at once subtly exotic, but wholly unrecognizable as cinnamon.

After Adding Tomatoes and Juice

To this large pan, after the vegetables became limp, I added a couple of large (28-ounce) cans of diced tomatoes in juice and I let it cook down for a good 45 minutes, wanting all the flavors to meld into a deliciously chunky sauce.

Eggs Ready to Cook

Once the sauce is thick and ready to eat, I season it and moderate the flame so that it just simmers. I make small wells in the sauce with a spoon and crack an egg into each hole. At this point, I will either place the pan into a moderate oven and bake uncovered or I will leave the pan on the stove top and cover it with a sheet tray. In both cases, I will serve the eggs with a copious amount of sauce once the egg whites have set.

Sweet Potato-Quinoa Cakes

Going through the pantry the other day, I ran across a very large container of quinoa, something that I don't eat very often because it just doesn't do anything for me. Don't get me wrong. I will eat just about anything, quinoa included, but I've just never found it to be worth the effort to prepare. Ann likes it more than me which is probably why we have so much on hand.

Sweet Potato-Quinoa Cakes

In an effort to start using it, I thought that I might try to make some kind of cakes. In trying to figure out how to hold the quinoa together in a cake, I thought I might try mashed sweet potato.

To that end, I sautéed some onion, poblano, cilantro stems, and garlic with a little cumin, then added a drained and rinsed can of black beans, a cup of cooked quinoa, and then a couple of medium roasted sweet potatoes. The resulting mix was very tasty and would have made a great vegetarian stuffing for poblanos rellenos, but proved to be really soft for cakes.

I added a cup of rolled oats to the mix and refrigerated overnight to see if I could stiffen them up. They were stiffer and I was able to form cakes, but they were a bear to handle in the frying pan without breaking them. Still too soft I would judge. And the quinoa was not noticeable either.

Delicious but not ready for prime time, I judge this dish. Tasty, but without adding a lot more undesirable carbs, I just don't think this idea is going anywhere. To be honest, I would just as soon do a hash by sautéing raw cubes of sweet potato with the onion and poblano and then mixing them into quinoa for a warm salad.