I like piadina, the lard-enhanced soft, cracker-like flatbread of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. But I don’t use a lot of pork lard in my vegetarian kitchen. On the other hand, the toasted ghee I made last week stands in just fine; in German clarified butter is actually known as Butterschmalz, and other kinds of rendered fats are known as (Animal-)schmalz. So I always thought it would work as a fair alternative if I decided to make a piadina- or crespelle-like flatbread at home. The ingredients are functionally equivalent, though the flavors are certainly not the same. It's definitely a respectable fat.

I wasn’t really trying to make something particularly Italian, though; I just wanted a nice thin crispy-soft flatbread. Given my tendency to cook vaguely Indian food over the last few days, I actually thought something with the nuttiness of chapati would actually be nice, but I wanted something closer to the texture of piadina to hold up to my filling. So I balanced the two concepts by using a 50–50 ratio of whole wheat to white flour, as would be fairly typical for chapati, I blended in my toasted ghee, then added some water until I had a stiff dough.

My lentil cravings haven’t quite disappeared, but I didn’t want something as dense as my koftas, so this time I made a big lentil-potato pancake. I incorporated parboiled potatoes into a spiced ground lentil mixture. I made patties and cooked them in a substantial amount of oil. I browned it on both sides. The patty took a fair amount of time to cook, along the lines of a Rösti, but had a nice texture, flavor and color. Even with the lengthy cooking time, I’d definitely recommend finely grinding lentils for this kind of application rather than using cooked lentils.

I placed this lentil-potato “patty” between two layers of the flatbread with some sliced tomatoes, sweet onions, and raclette cheese.

I served this with a signature salad of mine, mixed greens with a yuzu-honey vinaigrette.

In the morning I made buttermilk waffles with some Hawaiian coconut syrup I got at the Beaverton Uwajimaya. It’s full of saturated and trans fats and has a very nice coconut flavor. It doesn’t look like it would photograph well when plated, so I didn’t try.

I got a late start doing business-like things. I should have worked harder today, but Monday seems to be the one day I give myself the luxury of working a little slowly… But I didn’t come home to make dinner until about 8pm, so I ate fairly late. But I sent off oustanding orders.

My car’s brakes have been making disturbing noises recently, so I am afraid I’ll have to get them checked… another irritating expenditure.

I thought it would be fun to do something else for Is My Blog Burning again, but this weekend I think today is my last chance. I am planning to drive to Portland tomorrow and will probably be a bit exhausted upon my return.

Yesterday I bought a big brick of paneer cheese. I never got around to cooking a real dinner last night, so except for nibbling a bit and eating the paneer with a little harissa, and eating some snacks, I never got the energy to do anything more substantial with my ingredients.

Today I came home relatively early because today’s promo event was an outside thing at Uwajimaya Bellevue, and everything shut down around 4pm. I brought the luggables from that event back to my office and went home and relaxed a bit. I’m afraid I’m a bit pink… I didn’t remember to bring sunscreen today.

This month’s theme was “Let’s Get Frying,” and although I was inclined to do another matcha fritter recipe, I’ve eaten a lot of sweet stuff in the last few days, so I decided against it.

I remembered that I have a couple of peaches still, so I made quick peach chutney, seasoned with a bit of lime juice, ginger, and various spices. I thought the bittersweetness of toasted fenugreek and the aroma of a little clove would work well, so those were the dominant accents. I did add a bit of sugar after tasting to balance the acid and spices.

I cubed paneer and coated it with some seasoned katakuriko; I had mixed in a bit of salt and garam masala, plus a bit of cayenne pepper. After coating, I let the cubes rest a bit in the freezer, atop the remaining katakuriko to prevent anything from sticking.

It might seem strange to use katakuriko when chickpea flour would be far more typical for such a dish, but I love using katakuriko for frying tofu and I just wanted to see how it would turn out. It was quite nice because the coating was very light and crispy, whereas chickpea flour tends to produce a dense and not all that crispy result. I might have used a thicker coating than would really be required, though… my fried tofu is not usually this well-covered. The most interesting thing about this little experiment is that the cheese seems to have browned inside, but the katakuriko remained mostly translucent.

Fried Paneer with Peach Chutney

The chutney was better than I expected, and was a very suitable accent for the mild paneer. Unlike European cheeses, where the compliment to the cheese would tend to be either mild, such as quince paste, or salty, like olives or almonds, the paneer benefits from something a little more aggressive; in this case, sweet, acidic, fruity, and moderately spicy.

I don’t know what’s possessed me to be doing so many spicy cream sauces lately. Actually, this is only the second one this week, but I can count the times I’ve otherwise made anything resembling a spicy tomato cream sauce in the last year on one hand. This one I cut a bit with some milk, but it was still quite rich.

This second dish isn’t meant for the “frying” event, but I was actually looking forward to making this ever since the idea to pick up some paneer popped into my head on Friday.

Paneer in a spicy tomato cream sauce

The dish also proved a fair way of highlighting the paneer’s texture while allowing flavors from the sauce to coat each little piece.

I was surprised at how durable the paneer was. Although it softened, it didn’t show the slightest hint of melting, either in the fryer or simmering in my sauce.

Of course I ate leftover rasam and grilled eggplant from a couple of days ago. I couldn’t finish everything today by myself, and my roommate is not around, so leftovers will likely languish in the refrigerator until Monday.

Peaches were looking nice this week, so for breakfast this morning, I diced some peaches and added them to some sweetened ricotta with a few drops of vanilla, surrounded them with sliced peaches, and placed them atop a buckwheat buttermilk waffle.

It’s a very simple set of flavors… refreshing, and a bit nutty from the buckwheat. The peaches were sweet and fairly flavorful, though I’ve had some far more incredible peaches in previous summers.

Tonight I was craving some soup, and something hearty involving lentils… I think I have recently mentioned this strangely unseasonal craving. I decided I wanted something rich, something refreshing, and something comforting.

I’m far from expert on Indian cooking, but I’ve got a surplus of garam masala around right now, so I thought I’d go for something slightly Indian. I don’t have any ghee in the house, and Ballard Market didn’t seem to have any clarified butter where I looked, but I had an extra pound of butter from baking cookies on Saturday, so I decided to clarify some butter.

I made a little tomato soup, roughly inspired by the South Indian “rasam”, without really bothering to remind myself what goes in a rasam. This tomato has some amchur (mango) powder and lime juice, some good fresh tomatoes, and some onions. I cooked some mustard seeds in oil and drizzled on the soup upon serving.

I had a bit of a lentil craving, and a stash of urid daal. I didn’t feel like boiling a lot of lentils, so I ground them up and mixed them with water, salt, and some spices, then hydrated a bit. I added some onions and cilantro. These were then deep-fried, as I prepared a tomato cream sauce; this time, I cooked mustard seeds and garam masala in ghee, and incorporated this into the cream. After the lentil croquettes, or, more loosely, koftas, were finished, I cooked them briefly in the cream sauce to coat.

I wanted something refreshing, too, so I grilled some eggplant on my All-Clad grill pan. I let them soak in some lime juice and chilies. On the plate I added some cilantro and Hermiston sweet onions.

I served more rice than necessary; it was a way to abuse some saffron. I steeped some saffron in hot water before cooking the rice in it.

Dinner is served…

My internet orders seem to be quieter the last few days so I hope I can finally make a dent on some long-neglected wholesale work and bookkeeping… but now I am a little frustrated at the sudden calm…

It looks like the weather is slowly turning into September-ish weather. Today it was pleasantly clear but not very warm.

I drank a lot of coffee today.

I did make a delivery and take care of some orders today, but I worked at a relatively slow pace today.

One of my wholesale customers called and dramatically increased their reorder size, so that makes me happy. They used to take a cautious 2 cases per order, but they bumped that up to 5 cases this time. It shows a lot of confidence in our ability to sell, and indicates they are more worried about running out of items than having too much of it.

I started building out my community site, MoriAwase.com, which I’m hoping will be a attractive forum to discuss contemporary Asian food, craft and lifestyles. Alas, it’s pretty skeletal now.

Dinner was very late… I had an egg sandwich on a soft Essential Bakery dinner roll, a little lettuce and provolone. It was already 11 pm.

I struggled to figure out the quirks of the high-powered convection oven at Floating Leaves Tea in Ballard yesterday, but after the second test batch I figured things out and started to get a rhythm. The oven fits about 5 baking sheets at a time, so I baked about 60 cookies at a time. I stopped counting how many batches I made.

When I finished, I know I had baked somewhere between 300–400 cookies…. If I recall correctly, it involved about 5 pounds of butter, about 8 pounds of flour, about 4 or 5 pounds of white chocolate, and a fair supply of pine nuts, not to mention a lot of matcha. Anyway, after baking an absurd amount of cookies, and cleaning up after myself, I rushed to Cash & Carry for some disposable cups, ice, and milk, then I made a brief stop at home to pick up my cooler and some ice. I managed to encounter some traffic on the freeway heading over to the arboretum, but I arrived just about 5 minutes before people started to line up at the Japanese Garden.

A few people were a bit confused about where I was supposed to set up refreshments, as is the nature of volunteer things, but I met my contact and got myself a little table to offer refreshments to guests of the moon-viewing festival. I stayed until about 10pm, since a fairly constant flow of visitors moved in and out of the garden. The sunset came a little late for moon-viewing, but I think the reason for staging the event so early in the year has something to do with the unpredictability of September weather.

I served iced tea donated by Floating Leaves, including a Jasmine, a Chinese Green, and something herbal, and of course I sampled matcha latte. I managed to use up absolutely everything I came with… It turns out that at least 500 people came for the festival.

I passed around a lot of business cards, and close to closing time I spoke a bit with Elizabeth Falconer, who is a well-known Seattle-based Koto player, and her family.

With some leftover raspberries, a bit of sugar, and some buttermilk, I made a kind of raspberry lassi today… No mangoes around, but raspberry works quite well.

Today, I finally made a dent in an upgrade from DotText to Community Server v1.1, although it did not go completely smoothly. My photo gallery is missing as of yet, and I haven’t had time to migrate my previous skin design, or tweak any of the new ones.

In Germany, I remember buying a short-grain rice called Milchreis as an awful substitute for japonica. It was the cheapest possible rice we could buy and available in mainstream supermarkets. It tasted adequate and the price was right for a starving student’s budget, so I frequently used it even when I cooked Chinese-style or Japanese-style dishes. On rare occasions I was able to get some decent basmati or Jasmine rice for a slight premium from Asian markets, but Japanese-style rice required a bit more difficult a journey from our little university town, Marburg.

The typical German way of making use of this rice involved cooking it with milk, sugar, and maybe a bit of vanilla, sometimes with a knob of butter. It was always cooked with substantially more liquid than if you meant to cook rice for eating with savory foods, so it is almost the texture of okayu. Essentially, it’s a rice pudding. It works best simmered at a low temperature with about 4 milk to 1 rice, by volume.

I think I can count the times I ate Milchreis in this manner in Germany on one or two fingers, but somehow I craved the idea last night, and I prepared some in anticipation of this morning’s breakfast.

It turns out that I have more ready access to California-grown Japanese-style rice than “Milchreis,” so I just used that. I made a quick raspberry sauce with a medium-heavy syrup and raspberries, and topped my molded milchreis with some more fresh raspberries.

Raspberries were incredibly cheap yesterday…

Somehow I’ve been in a salad kind of mode at dinner lately.

The weather’s been a bit hot and I guess I’ve got only a summer appetite… I seem to be more interested in big lunches, or small lunches and little afternoon snacks.

Normally I don’t eat salads as a meal… I tend to make little, simple, refreshing salads as a contrast to something heavier, or to balance pasta.

But I was kind of in the mood for something a little more dramatic, and a little spicy. At the same time, I wanted some kind of crunch… so I made a kind of taco salad. I made a simple guacamole, with only some chopped tomatoes added to my usual basic crushed avocado with lime juice. I used a Trader Joe’s salsa only because I was a bit lazy tonight, and some pinto beans cooked with a bit of garlic. I grated a mild cheese that I had handy, and served with some more chopped tomatoes and some mixed greens—mostly romaine—which I mostly obscured with the toppings.

I stopped at PFI and Trader Joes to get some supplies for some matcha cookies I will be baking tomorrow for an event at the Japanese garden. Now I have an insane amount of white chocolate, butter, and pine nuts. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much butter in my possession at one time.

Standard operating procedure for Americans confronted with tofu is to cover it up as much as possible. People think it “absorbs” flavors of things around it. This isn’t really true, though because water in tofu keeps the flavor mostly at the surface, unless the tofu is freeze-dried or otherwise altered in texture.

I usually don’t do much to tofu… I love yudoufu (湯豆腐), which is simmered tofu with sometimes as little as a sliver of dried kelp, served with a dipping sauce; hiya-yakko (冷やっこ), which is really just some good tofu with some garnish, such as grated ginger and soy sauce, occasionally some oroshi-daikon, and for many, shaved katsuo, is also perfectly simple and wonderful. With suitably fresh tofu, the whole point is to make the custardy, or sometimes slightly chewy texture stand out, accented by the hint of bitterness that the soybean origin contributes.

Today, though, I was craving some grill marks. I had just a bit left of a medium-firm or momen-style tofu from a local Vietnamese tofu maker. Normally I’m happy to just grill some slices on my little grill pan and maybe use a dipping sauce. Today, I decided to grill until some nice marks were established, then I brushed a little bit of shouyu, grilled a bit more, and finally brushed a slight wash of mirin.

I had a bit of a yuzu-shouyu dressing that I made a while back, so I used that to dress my salad, and I sliced some nice tomatoes and sprinkled a bit of coarse gray salt atop.

Yesterday I noticed an email that was apparently trapped by a spam filter. It came from someone at Seattle’s Japanese Garden, located in the Washington Park arboretum. I got a return phone call tonight, and I signed up to bring some things for the reception of this weekend’s moon viewing event. I hope I can squeeze as much work as I need to into Saturday.