Tomato and Eggplant Burek

The food I find the most aesthetically pleasing is Mediterranean food. The colors, the textures, the different consistencies... all make for some wonderful eye candy. And the flavors are no less satisfying.
Feta cheese, tomatoes, capsicums, olives, eggplants, artichokes, goat's cheese, cherry tomatoes, spinach... I could go on and on and on..

Today, I made some burek. At least that's how I think it's spelled although I see BOREK everywhere. Anyways, same thing. Good food. And what I was glad about was that I made the pastry myself... I didn't get any filo pastry or anything of the sort. And it isn't really filo pastry.. anyways, on to the recipe..

Ingredients
75g butter, melted
80ml olive oil
185g plain flour
250g tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 chopped onion
2 tsp ground cumin
300g eggplant, cut into tiny cubes
2 tsp tomato paste
1 tbsp fresh coriander, chopped
1 lightly beaten egg

Procedure
Put butter, oil, and 80ml water into a large bowl and season with salt. Gradually add the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon to form an oily, lumpy dough that leaves the sides of the bowl. Knead gently to bring the dough together, cover with plastic, wrap and refrigerate for one hour.
Plunge the tomatoes in a bowl of boiling water for one minute, followed by plunging them in a bowl of cold water the next. Remove and peel the skin off.. chop roughly, discarding seeds.
Heat oil in a frying pan, add onion and cook, stirring, over low heat for 2-3 minutes or until soft. Add cumin, cook for 1 minute, then add eggplant and cook, stirring until eggplant softens. Stir in tomato and tomato paste. Cook over medium heat for 15 minutes or until mixture is dry. Stir in coriander and leave mixture to cool.
Preheat oven to 180C and grease two baking trays.
Roll out half of pastry onto floured surface until 2mm thick and cut out rounds with a 3 inch cutter. Place a teaspoon of tomato and eggplant mixture on each round and fold the dough over. Crimp and seal with a fork and wash with beaten egg.
Bake in the top half of the oven for around 15 minutes until pastry is browned through.
Serve hot, with a spicy sauce if desired.

Quick Canapes

I was walking home yesterday and happened to look at the window in the building to my left- and there was a guy in his kitchen, chopping some basil leaves and frying some tomatoes in a pan. I actually stopped and stared and had this intense yearning to go cook something. Sigh. I miss cooking up meals. I love those times when you just have to make do with what's the in the fridge. It fuels creativity. And so today, I created two little bites that would be perfect for a snack- or a canape (I feel like being fancy).

First one is crackers with marmalade and feta cheese. I was so tempted to try the marmalade and feta combination and Yasmin at Red Panda Bakes said she has them all the time! And so I piled them on top of little crackers and bit into them.

Marmalade and Feta Cheese Crackers
Ingredients
1 packet cream crackers
1 jar orange marmalade
40g crumbly feta cheese

Procedure
Spoon a generous teaspoon of marmalade over the cracker and top with crumbled feta cheese. That's it!

Next, I made bruschetta. I was GOING to make risotto and bought all the ingredients for it.. BUT, ended up forgetting the onion and garlic. And right now I'm not bothered to go down to the Tesco Express and buy any. And so I sliced up a mini baguette and spread some basil pesto on each slice. I topped each with a piece of sundried tomato and some feta. I thought the whole thing was going to be rather salty but surprisingly it wasn't!

And they looked pretty cute.. If I may say so.

Basil Pesto, Sun-dried Tomato, and Feta Cheese Bruschetta
Ingredients
1 baguette
1 jar basil pesto
1 jar sun-dried tomatoes
20g crumbly feta

Procedure
Slice the baguette.
Spread a teaspoon of the basil pesto.
Top with one sundried tomato slice
Add some feta.
Eat.

Yes, eating is part of the procedure.

http://redpandabakes.blogspot.com/

The Ultra Candlelit Dinner

I decided to have a small dinner gathering last Friday. I missed setting the table, choosing a theme, deciding on a menu, and cooking a million things. The last time I did it was in August. There's nothing like sitting down to a good homecooked meal with a bunch of people you love. And especially when that meal has been cooked by you. There's something so fulfilling about feeding those you care for. There's nothing to compare.

Aaanyways, everyone asked me to just make three dishes.. Two main courses and one dessert. I said OK, but secretly made seven things... that's just me. I don't know why. I can never just cook ONE thing. Well, I do, sometimes.. for a quick dinner... but most times I cannot.

I chose to make leek, rice, and parmesan frittatas and basil pesto and semi dried tomato crostini for starters. Then, I made seven-vegetable tagine with couscous and roast chicken with dumplings for main course. For dessert, I had fruit salad with orange sugar syrup and rich chocolate mousse.

The recipes were all fairly simple. I loved the main courses the best.

For the roast chicken with dumplings, all you had to do was chop up some potatoes and carrots and put them in a roasting tin with some pieces of chicken breast. Of course, don't forget to season. Making the dumplings are fairly easy, too. Fry some onion with butter. Once softened, put in a bowl and add a cup of breadcrumbs, add as many eggs as needed to make the mixture a dough that will be easily shaped into round balls.

The tagine was also just as easy to make. Chop some zucchini, carrots, sweet potato, parsnips, capsicum, fennel, and eggplant and toss together in a roasting tin with some freshly cracked pepper and sea salt. Add some cumin seeds and let the whole thing cook in the oven for about one hour on medium heat. For the sauce, heat some canned crushed tomatoes, add some freshly squeezed orange juice and cranberry juice. Place the couscous in a large bowl and fill with boiling water, cover with a plate. After 3-4 minutes, fluff with a fork, add lemon juice, raisins, and chopped dried apricots.

The crostini was VERY easy.. just because instead of guacamole on the ciabatta bread, I spread basil pesto. What happened to the guacamole? Well, it never happened. This was my second attempt at making guacamole.. and it never works with me! Very irritating. I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I placed one semi dried tomato on each crostini (is the singular crostino?) and ta-da, it was done! .. sans guacamole.

For the table decor, I didn't use any flowers. Very rare for me not to do so since I'm always using roses and carnations in pinks and reds.. ( like here and here and here) Instead, my centerpiece was candles. Lots and lots of them. All over the table, actually. It was made possible because instead of placing all the dishes on the table family style, I brought the courses out one by one with the food already arranged on a plate. Fun.

I don't think my photographs captured the candles that well, but they looked magical.

Asparagus and Puff Pastry

Perfect for a light supper or as individual starters, these puff pastries are super easy to make.

Just roll out your puff pastry and cut the sheet into as many pieces as you want (based on how big you want each portion to be). Using a knife, make a thin border around the edges of the puff pastry, but make sure you don't cut all the way through. Then, cut the asparagus to a size that fits within the portion and brush with 2 beaten eggs. Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with freshly grated parmesan cheese.

A variation to this that I made a while back was that I brushed the individual puff pastry squares with beaten egg, I then spread the squares with tomato pesto, chopped up some olives and capsicum and placed them on the puff pastry. Then, I cut up some feta cheese and shredded some fresh basil leaves and tossed them on the squares. Amazing dinner!

Random Recipe: Pea and Potato Pakora

At 5PM this afternoon, I was browsing through food blogs and came across Belleau Kitchen. Specifically, I came across this post in Belleau Kitchen. It was a blog challenge with a closing date of.. TODAY. I had never taken part in a blog challenge and I immediately thought that I should participate in this- especially since I loved the theme.

Often, when I am bored and do not know what to make for dinner.. I close my eyes, pick up a random cookbook, blindly flip through it, and then open my eyes to see what I'll be having for dinner that night. This blog challenge called for exactly that. I rushed over to my bookshelf and since I didn't want to "take all your cook books off the shelf and shuffle them" as the challenge called for, I closed my eyes and picked out around six cookbooks at random. If I were to take all my neatly organized cookbooks off the shelf, the perfectionist OCD in me would throw a fit....

Anyways, the book I ended up picking (by further closed eyes) was one called 500 Appetizers by Susannah Blake. The recipe that the book opened up to was "pea and potato pakora with yogurt".

Very ironic. I'm half Pakistani and have never made pakora.. something of a staple in a South Asian's diet. I have eaten it though.. a lot. Apparently pakoras are perfect for when it's raining- as I'm told so often.

(I sent some of these over to my aunt for her to try and she said that these actually aren't PAKORAS.. they're something called batata wara... sounds funny, I know. Sounds like Hakuna Matata. The batter for these is the same batter used in pakora.. only difference is that this contains potato.. hence batata wara and not pakora....)

Anyways, back to the pakoras. I usually try to avoid making anything deep fried... because of the high oil content... but I made these because obviously that was the spirit of the blog challenge.. randomness and spontaneity... and who better to indulge in spontaneity than The Spontaneous Euphoria herself? Hmm.

These were exceptionally easy to make (and fun!). I loved swirling the pakoras around in the oil as they fried....

Here's the recipe.. I added double to triple the amount of chili powder and fresh green chillies though.. also, don't forget to SEASON it!

Ingredients

450g potatoes, boiled and mashed

125g frozen peas, thawed

2-3 fresh green chillies, seeded and finely chopped

4 spring onions, finely sliced

2tsp ground cumin

1tsp ground coriander

3tbsp chopped fresh coriander leaves

115g gram flour

1/2tsp chilli powder

1tsp turmeric

1tsp baking powder

200ml cold water

Sunflower oil for deep frying

Salt

Procedure

Mix the potatoes, peas, chillies, spring onions, cumin, ground and fresh coriander. Season with salt and stir to combine. Shape into 16 walnut-sized balls, place on a platter and chill for at least 30 minutes, until firm.

Mix the gram flour, chilli, turmeric, and baking powder in a bowl. Using a fork, stir in a quarter of the water to make a thick, smooth paste. Stir in the remaining water smoothly.

Heat oil for frying to 180C. Dip the balls in the batter and fry for about 2 minutes, until golden. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper. Keep hot until all are ready.

Sang Choi Bow

One thing I love making and eating is Sang Choi Bow. It's a wrap made out of LETTUCE and is full of flavours. I don't know how versatile the classic sang choi bow really is.. but I tend to experiment a lot with it.. I add tofu instead of mince and vary the spices and sauces. Here's one I made yesterday with capsicums, bok choy, corn, green beans, and a sauce made of oyster, soy, and sweet chili.

Spicy Chicken Pitas

This is one of our signature dishes at home and last night I finally learnt how to make it! It was much easier than I expected it to be. The best thing about it is that it's very versatile. You can make it with lamb mince instead of chicken mince and you can vary which vegetables you use.

Ingredients:

2 medium onions, finely chopped

1 garlic cloves, crushed

2 medium tomatoes, chopped coarsely

1 medium green capsicum, chopped

500g chicken mince

2 teaspoons soy sauce

3 teaspoons vinegar

2 teaspoons turmeric

1 tablespoon coriander powder

1 teaspoon garam masala (indian mixed spice)

2 teaspoons cumin powder
2 teaspoons chilli flakes

1/4 cup water

4 lettuce leaves, shredded

1 tomato, extra, sliced

3-4 chopped gherkins

1/2 cup chopped coriander

20 slices small white arabic bread

1/2 cup mayonnaise

Procedure

Heat oil in pot. Gently fry onion until softened. Add chicken and stir for two minutes. Add the soy sauce and vinegar, stir.

Add all the spices, stir until fragrant. Add water, mix well. Place lid on pot and cook for 10 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.

Then, add capsicum and cook for five minutes. Next, add tomatoes and coriander.

Slice the bread in half and lightly spread the inside of each with mayonnaise . Fill bread with chicken and top with lettuce, tomatoes, and gherkins.