Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

I’ve made a few pasta salads in my day, but this one, well, it just doesn’t even make sense.

When I first started cooking, I threw in EVERY SINGLE SPICE I owned into a dip or a dry rub or a marinade.  Then I went through a stage of simplicity: salt, pepper, garlic and maybe one other weapon.  Now the pendulum has swung back and I’m sticking crazy shit together again.  I guess it’s an ES trend.

The ingredient list: whole wheat fusilli, olive oil, dijon mustard, garlic, onion, cucumber, serrano chili, parm cheese, queso fresco, cumin, pine nuts, salt and pepper.  With leftovers, I added in wilted swiss chard.

This is what happens when I buy way too many vegetables at the farmers market.  I end up throwing cucumbers — which is great to use as an alternative to chips for a dip, but suck in most other instances because they’re so watery and plain — in with freaking pasta.

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I’ve been thinking about Baked Stuffed Zucchini ever since Rooms brought them up last month. My vegetarian GF has already made this a couple of times, mostly because when she asks me what she should cook for dinner, it’s the only thing I can think of that doesn’t have bacon. So I decided to give it a go myself last week.

I followed Rooms’ basic instructions, mixing it up with what I had in my fridge, and ending up with a spicy, Asian take on the stuffed zukes. The outside part is the same at Rooms:

- Cut your zucchinis in half. Rub them with extra virgin and salt and pepper, then bake at 400 for about 10 minutes.

Then I got a little crazy…

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Thank you for your suggestions on what to do with my crazy blended vegetable concoction.   But like a true blogger, I really didn’t listen.

Chickpeas and Serrano Spiked Blended Vegetables

Toast a handful of pine nuts.  When starting to brown, set aside.  Warm up the sauce in that same pan.  In another pan, warm through chickpeas and precooked bulgur wheat.  When everything is warmed up, spoon sauce on plate.  Top with chickpeas, bulgur wheat and pine nuts.  Or if you don’t care about presentation, throw everything together and heat up.  Blogging means extra pans and plates, unfortunately.

If your coworker happened to give you a fabulous sack of homegrown tomatoes (thank you Edy!) then top the dish with raw chunks of tomato (sprinkled with kosher salt.)

If you hate tomato, skip that step.

Oh, and not that I even know what this does for my body, nor what it really tastes like, but you can sprinkle nutritional yeast over the chickpeas. I’m trying to find more uses for the yeast.  Although my two nut. yeast experts — Maidelitala and Elizabeth — claim you can’t mix it with yogurt.  We’ll see.

Tag clarification
So this is not Indian, I know. But with the slight heat and chickpeas and cumin and yogurt, 80 and I felt like it had an Indian flare and texture.

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Holy poop it’s finally here.

Endless Simmer would like to congratulate bobby c for winning the Spice Master challenge!

You can learn all about the magical bobby c on ES’ newest way to exploit our readers, Endless Eater Hall of Fame.

And, bobby, please email contests@endlesssimmer.com so we can send your Amazing Taste seasoning packets to you (or to the friend/enemy of your choice.)

Thanks to everyone for playing.

PS–we’re still accepting entries for the Pine Nut contest.  Better luck next time, JoeHoya…

Photo: Disco Music

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Sometimes I’ll be at home and I’ve already cooked dinner, and I’ve already made lunch for tomorrow (and the next day) yet I still feel like cooking.  Well, this is when it gets dangerous.  Especially this time of year with all of the amazing vegetables available from the farmers market.  Actually, let me take that a half step back.

I’ve finally had my first fight with the market.  I could deal with the limiting hours (only 9-1 on Saturdays from May through November); I could deal with the price spikes (a bunch of parsley for 3 bucks instead of 50 cents at Bestway); but I was not prepared for invaders.

So I was taking lettuce out to be washed for a salad and all of a fucking sudden - there was a SPIDER in my bag-o-greens.  I didn’t scream.  I backed away.  I was pisted.  I was scared.  And then I gently tied the bag together - spider inside - and threw it in the trash.  My love affair hit its first bump.  And I might be off the salad for the rest of the summer.

Regardless, so there I am, in the kitchen, having already cooked what most people don’t even put together in a week, and I’m ready for more.

Recipe for something, post jump

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After a long journey of identifying spices, declaring a tie, and performing a spice-off, we have finally come to the end of our Spice Master contest.  And it’s up to Endless Simmer readers to decide who will be the Spice Master (and win a few packets of spice blends - exactly what these creative contestants do not need…) You’ve already seen what our contestants bobby and JoeHoya have to offer in the way of Tunisian cuisine.  So, it’s time to vote.

Will it be bobby and his Tunisian Coucha and Vegetable Couscous with Harissa (left)
Or JoeHoya’s Shrimp and Riso Tomato-Curry Soup (right)

Some election pointers: you must vote, voting is the only way you can bitch about the outcome, get familiar with the issues, your vote does count, and do judge by what dish you’d like to have a beer with.

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Editors Note: Yesterday you got to see how a pack of 12 spices inspired bobby to create an intricate lamb and couscous dish.  Today, you’ll find out how JoeHoya reinterpreted those same Tunisian spices.  And tomorrow - we’ll leave it up to ES readers to pick the Who Cooked It Better: Spice Master.   

Spice Master Contender: JoeHoya

“It’s a walk-off.”

When the Who Cooked It Better gauntlet was thrown down, I couldn’t help but smile.  As anyone who knows me can tell you, most of my kitchen improvisations involve cumin, paprika, chili powder, or a combination of the three.  Working three of the spices from the Tunisian fun-pack wouldn’t be the problem - editing would.  I needed to find a dish that highlighted the spices without going overboard.

And I wanted to do my best to incorporate that elusive Tunisian flare, so I did some reading and found out that Tunisian cuisine involves a fair amount of seafood (I also found a recipe for a pine nut pudding and a garlicky chickpea soup, but I figured both would be dismissed as obvious pandering to BS and Gansie).

In the end, I turned to John Ash’s “From the Earth to the Table,” a cookbook my wife and I picked up after we saw it in a winery in Temecula, California.  We’ve found some real winners in this book before, and Elizabeth reminded me that one of them is a delicious tomato-curry soup served with riso (a rice-like pasta, similar to orzo only smaller and easier to overcook.)

Full disclosure - I’m not really a recipe person.  I like to use them more as inspirations than blueprints, adding ingredients that make sense (or that I happen to have on hand.)  In this case, however, I tried to stay relatively close to the original recipe and then supplement or replace with the Tunisian spices we had to work with.

Click through: full recipe, another pic, serving suggests

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Editors Note:  I’ve got to be honest.  So I hadn’t cooked in a while and was trying to think of something I could post on ES.  And then I remembered those kick-ass spices that I got from Gypsy’s travels to Tunisia.  Contest - now that’s an easy post.  I had no idea that people would actually try to figure out that impossible 12.  Especially for the lame prize of pre-made seasoning packets - basically the most opposite item anyone savvy enough to enter the contest would actually want. 

Regardless, after checking the entries, we had a tie.  And without even asking the co-winners, we decided to ride out the enthusiasm of the Spice Master Contest.  So here we are, we demanded that ES readers guess spices they couldn’t even smell and now we’ve demanded that the co-winners give us recipes based on those same foreign spices.  Luckily, both bobby (aka bobbyc) and JoeHoya took this opportunity to send in breathtaking recipes.  Thank you to both.  

 So here we are with bobby’s Tunsian recipe.  Tomorrow we’ll post JoeHoya’s recipe.  And on Wednesday we’ll offer you a chance to vote for the winner in a special Who Cooked It Better: Spice Master Edition.  Stay tuned. 

Spice Master Contender: bobby

Typically when I cook a new dish, I look at a bunch of different recipes, get an understanding of the basic concept of the dish, keep the essential ingredients the same, and play around with the rest. For Coucha (spelled Koucha in some references), I couldn’t find any recipes — only descriptions. Odd, since most references describe it as a “Tunisian favorite.” The basic idea seems to involve cooking a young lamb shoulder smothered in oil and spices at low heat in a sealed earthen vessel — similar to a Moroccan tajine. The low heat for an extended period of time breaks down the fat, making everything delicious, and the sealed vessel keeps everything super-moist.

I built my own clay vessel out of flower pots at Lowes — just had to make sure everything sealed fairly well.

From the rest of my reading on Tunisian cuisine, I gathered that nearly every meal is served with couscous. It is prepared in a special couscoussière, which steams the grains while you cook a stew of meat, vegetables and spices below. I didn’t have one of these, so I put the couscous in boiling chicken broth, then mixed in an assortment of spiced vegetables.

To finish everything off, I mixed up some harissa — spicy pepper & garlic sauce. From what I gather, harissa is the ketchup of Tunisia, only with flavor.

Click through: full recipe, more pics, serving suggests

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Regular ESers know that I’ve been on a crusade to prove that pretty face Padma Lakshmi actually can cook. I’ve made my way through her appetizer and soup recipes, so now it’s on to course three: salad.

Cilantro is one of the most divisive foods on earth. Many people claim there’s a genetic aspect to it: If you’ve got the cilantro gene, you can’t get enough of it; if you’re born without it, the very thought of cilantro makes you turn into an angry, hulk-esque opponent.

Grace be to god, I fall on the cilantro-loving side of this supposed genetic divide. I really think it puts all other herbs to shame. But here’s the problem for us cilantro-fiends: you only need a little bit of it to season any food, yet it inexplicably is sold exclusively in gigantic bunches, which of course go bad before even the most devoted cilantrite can finish them. For years I’ve avoided buying the stuff because I’m always afraid I won’t be able to finish it. That’s where the genius of Padma Lakshmi comes into play yet again…

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