Things I miss from France — Sauce Forestiere

Pasta... and sauce

For the most part, I don’t really miss the cuisine of France. 

For a vegetarian, the food scene was weak, to say the least. Ranking somewhere around Russia’s vegetarian cuisine, in my opinion. 

One thing I really miss, however, is the simple Carrefour store brand pasta sauce with mushrooms. These aren’t the white button mushrooms we Americans are used to eating in sauce. No, these are “cepes.” I’m not really up on mushroomology, so I don’t know exactly what makes a cepe  a cepe. I just know I like them. 

My last bottle

I was reminded of this last week as I finished my last bottle of “sauce forestiere.” Before we left France, I bought a couple bottles of it, knowing I would get nostalgic for my favorite quick-lunch-in-a-bottle. Warm this up and put it over some rotini, and you’re all set. The sauce has this creamy, sweet flavor to it that is quite unusual, and its peppered with little tiny, yet chewy, pieces of mushrooms. 

Sauce Forestiere, I will miss you. 

As a side note, if anyone goes to France and visits a Carrefour, I will make it worth your while to bring back a few bottles of this stuff. Yum.

Stinky Radish Raita

Daikon radish side salad

One of the Hindi vocabulary words I have learned this summer is “khushboo.” It can be a girl’s name, but it literally means a pleasant fragrance.  

Let’s just say no one would ever use the term khushboo in reference to this salad.  

I’d heard of daikon radishes for a long time, but I’d never actually eaten one until last winter, when I joined the in-laws for a few days in Los Angeles. One afternoon, my mother-in-law pulled out a large white radish and started grating it up, telling me she was going to make a raita. 

Aai told me that this radish is very good for you — and that it has qualities that lower blood pressure. I didn’t find any research out there on the Web that backs this up, but she repeated it several times. So, if you have high blood pressure — give it a whirl. You never know. It also has a lot of Vitamin C, from what I can tell, and it “aids digestion.”  Which could mean it makes you burp. 

She also told me that many younger people don’t like using these radishes anymore because they stink up their houses. Once she started grating it and the pungent stench began wafting its way through the kitchen, I sort of understood their point.  

The radish can also really stink up your fridge, so I would suggest only making the amount you plan on using for the day. That way, you can  avoid stinking up a Tupperware container and/or your entire refrigerator.  

All this is not to say, however, that this salad isn’t tasty. Because it is. Think about it – there are a lot of stinky ingredients that are good to eat: Camembert and Epoisses cheeses would be my top examples.  

This raita is very simply prepared so most of what you taste is just the radish itself — fresh, energizing, with a definite tangy bite. It goes well as a side dish to something like palak paneer or dal. And it’s best if you eat it, not with rice and a fork, but with chapattis — there’s something about the bite of the radish and the heavy grainy flavor of the bread that compliment each other.  

I noted in a few online recipes that some people finish this raita off by making a tadka – using a couple teaspoons of hot oil, and letting a smattering of mustard seeds heat up on it until they sputter, then putting a few slices of green chili on the mixture, letting it all cool, and mixing it in the raita. I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law didn’t do this, but I’m not sure if that’s just because she was in a hurry or if she doesn’t like it that way. You can try both and decide, but I’m staying with the simpler, healthier, preparation. 

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure this is similar to what I ate in Finland, where it was served as a side dish to a rye bread and whitefish pastry. So you can always pair it with a plain fish dish and see how you like it.  

Apologies for the photo: But, hey, what can I do — It’s not a very photogenic food!  

White Radish Salad  

Ingredients  

* Small White Radish  

* 1/3 cup cilantro, chopped  

* 1 tsp. cumin powder  

* 2 tbsp. yogurt  

* salt, to taste  

Directions  

1. Peel the radish and grate it.  

2. Mix other ingredients in with the salad. These measurements are just based on my personal tastes, but if you want more cilantro, more cumin, more yogurt, whatever, go for it. It will also depend on how large and watery your radish is. The salad shouldn’t be too watery, so if you need more yogurt, add it slowly and mix well in between additions.

Rhubarb Buttermilk Bread Pudding

Crusty bread pudding

It’s summertime — and, therefore, rhubarb time,  again.  

Last summer, in France, I was able to cut rhubarb stalks out of my landlady’s garden. That was nice. 

This summer, I’m in Jersey City and, of course, there are no rhubarb plants hanging around my high-rise. So I had to keep checking the NYC farmer’s markets when I got my hankering for rhubarb. And, wow – it’s not cheap!

At $4 per pound, it actually seemed pretty steep to me, but that’s the going farmer’s market rate at Union Square, so I sucked it up and bought some. 

And then it sat in my refrigerator for a week because, now that it costs so much, I want to be really careful about how I use it  

Eventually, though, I had some old baguette and some old buttermilk that needed to be used up, so I created this recipe. It turns out that you can make just about anything taste better by adding buttermilk into it — a fact I first learned after making this cake . 

I don’t really think you need a recipe for bread pudding, so follow this recipe’s specifications with a grain of salt. Just make sure you have enough liquid to soak your bread pieces in. 

Oh, and as you can tell, the top of my bread pudding came out a bit charred. I like it that way, because the sugar from the rhubarb syrup sort of caramelized on the top, giving it a really rich flavor. However, if you are one of those people who doesn’t care for the burnt, crispy little bits of food, knock a few minutes off the baking time. 

Rhubarb Buttermilk Bread Pudding 

Ingredients 

 * 1/3 sourdough baguette (about 4 cups of bread pieces) 

* 1.5 cups buttermilk, well shaken 

* 2 eggs, whisked 

* 1/2 cup milk 

*1.5 tsp. salt 

* 1 cup sugar 

* 1/4 cup brown sugar 

* 6 stalks of rhubarb, chopped 

* 1 tbsp. butter 

* 2.5  tsp. cinnamon 

* 2.5  tsp. ground cardamom 

* 1. tsp. vanilla 

1. Whisk eggs, buttermilk, milk, salt, spices and vanilla together. Add bread pieces into the bowl, mix around to makes sure all of them are wet, cover and refrigerate for about 2 hours. Occasionally, if you are around, you can check and push down any pieces that aren’t submerged. If, for some reason, there isn’t enough liquid, just add a bit more buttermilk or milk. 

2. When ready to assemble, chop rhubarb and put in saucepan with brown sugar and butter. Add about two spoonfuls of water, heat until it starts sizzling, cover, and simmer for about 7 minutes, or until rhubarb starts looking a bit soggy. Remove from heat. 

3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Take a 9-inch pie pan and butter it. Now, pour the rhubarb mixture into the bread pudding mixture and stir well. Pour all of this into the pie pan. Place it into the oven and bake for about 40 minutes.

4. Top with vanilla ice cream and enjoy!

The Indian Grocer #2: Aloo Paratha

DEEP Aloo Paratha

You have to be careful with the frozen breads.

Sometimes they’re pretty good, but the bad ones are BAD.

Fortunately, DEEP brand aloo parathas are pretty darn tasty. I was introduced to them by my Hindi tutor, who made a few for lunch one day and told me they were the best frozen parathas she’d tasted. And once I tried them, I was hooked.

Aloo parathas are basically an Indian flatbread, stuffed with mashed potatoes and spices. According to Wikipedia,  “Paratha is an amalgamation of the words parat (Hindi: परत) and atta (Hindi: आटा) which literally means layers of cooked flour.” There’s your fun India Fact of the day.

To cook them, you simply heat up a frying pan – without oil –  on a pretty high heat for a few minutes, then take a frozen paratha out, place it on the skillet and cook for a few minutes on each side. Eat with your hands, dipping in yogurt, or Indian pickle, if you want.

These are great for a light lunch or a snack.

I’ve tried the other types of DEEP parathas, too (they make many kinds, including radish, fenugreek and cheese) and some are tasty, but the potato ones take the proverbial cake.

There are no sketchy ingredients in these parathas, either: Potatoes, wheat flour, water, corn oil, spices, salt, green chili, ginger, mint leaves, citric acid and fennel seeds. Each paratha has 265 calories and 9 grams of fat – so, you know, you don’t want to live off of them or anything, but they’re OK.

Each package contains four parathas and typically sells for somewhere between $2.50 and $3.