In the Mood of the Season

This picture was taken in the Yummy House – a small Asian place at 1725 Haggerty Rd, Commerce Township, MI 48390. It came as a little pleasant surprise to us and our friends.

The food tasted as good as it looks, if not better. The nicest thing about it was freshness of everything we tried and a really light feeling in our stomachs after the meal. Please notice that their pickled ginger (bottom right) is not dyed artificial red as it is done practically everywhere else. And of course, presentation! It seems that being recently open their owners make a real effort to offer good-quality Asian food for a moderate price. We just hope they stay this way in spite of all the challenges of the business. They are really small: 3 booths, one larger table and a bar.

And here is another picture taken recently by our friend Marina Holkin http://www.facebook.com/yacht.delma#. I think it is very much in the mood of the season.

Organic Apple Cider to celebrate the season

 

Enjoy!

Almost Raw Pumpkin

Currently we have 2 old friends all the way from Russia visiting with us. It just happened that they are also into vegetarian and organic food. So here is the pumpkin recipe that we half-checked on the Internet and half-improvised.

We bought 4 small pie pumpkins, because they are the cutest of them all. We cut them around the stem to make lids and scraped out all the seeds from inside to make 4 little edible pots. We actually scraped some more flesh from inside to make the walls thinner. Whatever pumpkin flesh we got, was cut in smaller pieces and started our stuffing.

I think that stuffing can be made of all sorts of things (vegetables, grain, even meat). Ours included cabbage thinly sliced (arpx. 1/4 of a small head), 1 sweet pepper, 3 celery stalks, 1 large yellow onion, a cup of frozen corn, 2-3 table spoons of olive oil, 4-5 generous drops of apple cider vinegar, allspice, salt, pepper and whatever other spice you like. Our choice was a Mediterranean mix that included cumin. Oh, and we put some fennel seeds as well.

We then stirred the stuffing with our bare hands (a habit that I quite forgot lately) and then stuffed our orange jolly pots by pressing the stuffing in as hard as we could. A little-bit of stuffing that was left we just ate as it was. This gives me the right to say that it can be eaten raw. It seems that all the range of cooking fits this recipe and depends entirely on your taste and convictions.

We baked our pumpkins with lids on at 450 F (just keep in mind that my stove is old and might not heat too well). It was ready in 45 min, or we just were too curious to let it stay in the oven for more.

This is the result

It tasted great - hot, though stuffing was still crunchy. I tried it with goat yogurt and chopped dill, my friends preferred sour cream instead. I think preparation time is about 30 min. If you like to make a use of the seeds, you will need additional time to rinse them and spread on a paper towel to dry.
From our husbands we've received rave reviews.
 
And I wish all my friends to have a wonderful season!

Indian Food

With people I know it is like this: one either likes Indian food right away or hates it forever!

Heading for India we were set on trying new things. It made us easy to go from ‘Oh, this is so... different’ to ‘We definitely like it’, and then - to ‘We like it a lot!’

I mean traditional Indian food, full of flavors, spicy and completely vegetarian.

My first introduction to it happened in the middle of the night in the Delhi airport, while waiting 6 long hours for our flight to Chennai.

At a pretty ordinary food stand I bought a cup of coffee with a pretty ordinary-looking pastry named ‘Samosa’. The first bite surprised me though.

‘Why is this stuff so hot? It seems unsuitable with sweet coffee’   

But after a while I forgot about spiciness and started enjoying the yummy factor. Strangely enough through all those exotic flavors I recognized bold and earthy taste of my grandma’s beef-and-potato stew. Was it caramelized onion, or beans in this pastry? I could not tell. My grandma’s stew was never vegetarian, and yet…

Learned that we liked Indian food our hosts In Chennai, where we provided seminars, started enthusiastically introducing us to it.  In the morning they offered us a really strong coffee or black tea with milk and some fragrant seeds. At first we stuck to our habits and asked for these drinks to be straight. But often we forgot to make the requests and then we just had it Indian way.

There is something special about Indian milk and cheese. Those skin-and-bones extraordinary peaceful cows that walk and lay freely in the middle of any mad urban traffic (and all the traffic in India is mad!) apparently do a very good job.

 Maybe it is a trade-off:

‘You do not eat me, and I give you a really good milk of a free-roaming, naturally fit and content creature’.  

Every lunch in India was a feast of great variety. Because the rule was followed in so many different places, not only in hotels and restaurants, but also in small offices and at huge manufacturing plants, I dare to assume that hospitality was only part of the equation; another part of it was table tradition. Lunch in India is important and good variety of dishes is expected.

Another pleasant surprise of the vegetarian - Indian style, was the feeling of satiety that usually came pretty quickly and then lasted for hours without fail. It was quite sudden, like ‘yes, I had enough’, but without a brick feeling in your stomach that is almost an eminent companion at our ‘western’ parties. Where this signal of ‘enough’ comes from at Indian meals I do not know, but it always seemed to be more of emotional rather than of physical nature.  

Every meal in India includes sweets. They do not make any break between non-sweet and sweet food, just follow one with another. Indians believe that sweets aid digestion and I shared this belief with enthusiasm.  Desserts are usually small and often honey-based.

One sweet thing called Jalebi felt like kids’ ultimate dream and had been confirmed as such by our partner in Delhi – the burly man with thick mustache. We tried it in a street eatery at the Delhi bazar.

It was a nice, breezy evening. Amazingly bright fabrics in garland-illuminated stores, and crowds of people around proved of perpetual festival.

The lace-like Jalebi came straight from iron grill; it was sizzling hot, crisp on the outside with honey liquid inside.

And yes, I could not resist another one.

Indians seem to give digestion a very thorough attention. For this purpose they like to end every meal with plain yogurt. I also often saw the sets of small boxes with various seeds in them, which people would approach after breakfast or lunch and partake liberally. These seeds were to assist digestion and to make breathe fragrant. One of the seeds I recognized – it was fennel.

Another interesting digestion/breathe remedy was a minty leaf smeared with honey and spices,  and some seeds wrapped in it. You were supposed to chew it like a gum for about 30 min. rather than eat it right away. They also clean your teeth. 

Raw food was present on many occasions but I dared not to try it particularly warned against anything uncooked in India. Even locals did not encourage us to eat raw.

 ‘You have different immune system’ they said.

It looked very good though. I gazed with envy at the sprouted beans and cabbage salad, which my husband tried without hesitation. He said it was spicy (and he was completely OK afterwards).

In the very nice hotel in Bangalore I tried passion fruit and Indian melon.

To the end of our trip I was ready to go back to our usual food and was glad when on Delta flight Amsterdam – Detroit dinner came completely ‘European’. 

But in 2 weeks afterwards I started missing Indian and looking on the Internet for a restaurant in the area.