Recipes – Page 5

Indian Chickpea Curry

January 15, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Today I’m joining the “Try a New Recipe Tuesday” blog hop over at Home to 4 Kiddos. In a previous post, I mentioned my New Year’s resolutions. I withheld a few from that list, lest anyone should think me overly ambitious and, well, crazy.

But one of my resolutions for the year was to introduce more vegetarian cooking to my repertoire. Back home in Canada, my parents have started eating on the Hallelujah Diet–primarily raw foods. While I’m not ready to go in that direction, I am interested in going vegetarian more often, partly for the health benefits, and partly because the cost of beef and lamb has risen dramatically while we’ve been here for the last (almost) year.

The other thing I wanted to do is use my crockpot more and shop once a week. The habit here is to go to market daily, and since it’s right around the corner, and if you’re not organized, it’s an easy one to fall into. The problem is I don’t really have time to be schlepping to the market every day. Once a week shopping and a little planning affords me much more time in my daily schedule to be with my kids, or even–dare I say it–to sit down and put my feet up once in a while.

I stumbled on a slow cooker vegetarian cookbook, and I’ve been trying a few of the recipes out on my family. Since a friend who was visiting brought me some bags of dried chickpeas/garbanzo beans, something we normally can’t get here, I decided I’d give this a try. It was a big hit!

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoons garlic, minced
1 small sweet onions, peeled and diced
1 Tablespoons ginger, minced
1 large carrot, peeled and diced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
1 Tablespoons curry paste, mild or hot
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
2 cans chickpeas
1 can diced tomatoes
salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Rinse and drain chickpeas.

2. Heat oil in large saucepan and saute garlic, onion, ginger, and carrot until onion is translucent.

3. Transfer vegetable mixture to an 8-10 quart crockpot.

4. Add all other ingredients and turn crockpot on low heat.

5. Add more vegetable stock if liquid does not cover all the ingredients.

6. Cook curry on low for 6 hours.

7. Season to taste and serve.

Notes: Okay confession time. Whenever a slow cooker recipe tells you to put things in a frying pan first and cook them, then dump them in the slow cooker, I skip this step. Works fine. Maybe it would taste better if you made it the other way, but I wouldn’t know because I never do it that way. Call me lazy. Go ahead. But I just saved 15 minutes and a second dirty dish.

If you don’t have (or can’t get) Indian curry paste, like we can’t, this worked great as a substitute: dashes of cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, a pinch of turmeric and a whole fresh red chili.

Don’t have any cans of beans on hand? Did you know that 1/2 an hour in the pressure cooker using the natural cooling method afterward allows you to cook beans from the dry state without any pre-soaking and have them ready to use in less than an hour? Favorite tip for using any kind of bean. And every self-respecting Chinese kitchen has a pressure cooker, so naturally, so do I.

Menu Monday

September 10, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

Well, the official first day of school came and went and it does not bode well for the organization of the upcoming school year! I won’t be discouraged, however.

We had guests all weekend and our girls were flower girls in the wedding of some friends. The same friends invited us to her parents’ farm, and as plans go in China, things have been rather last-minute. There’s also the issue of a certain too-teeny kitten that we are hand-raising (don’t even ask)!

So the morning dawned late and when I arrived at the homeschool room discovered that the day before, everyone had gotten into everything and the room was completely disorganized and messy!

So the first day back to school became the first day to organize instead. We accomplished much, and the kids now know where everything in the room is supposed to be put away. I’ve made chore cards so they can keep up with things that will be distributed at the end of the school day to break the tasks into easy jobs like putting away the pencils, sweeping the floor, etc.

The menu plan, obviously, will be thrown out the window this week, but this is what we planned on eating:

Monday

Breakfast: Leftover Homemade Granola

Dinner: Crockpot California Tamale Pie

Tuesday

Breakfast: Pumpkin Muffins (make double batch and freeze the second batch)

Dinner: Crockpot Tandoori Chicken

Wednesday

Breakfast: “Buffet Oatmeal”

Dinner: Crockpot Paprika Chicken

Thursday

Breakfast: Toast with Gluten-Free Bread & Scrambled Eggs

Dinner: Country-Style Veggie Soup with Fresh Salsa

Friday

Breakfast: Breakfast Apple Crisp (this isn’t the recipe we use–ours has mainly yogurt–but it comes close)

Dinner: Homemade Pizza

Saturday

Breakfast: Pancakes & Real Maple Syrup

Dinner: Orange Chipotle Wings

Sunday

Dinner: Lamb and Cilantro (This is a recipe from one of my Chinese/English cookbooks, and I should post it here because it is a HUGE family favorite. If we get back in time from our trip, and our internet is working again, I’ll post it here.)

Don’t forget to look up last week’s post for the printable meal planner.

Menu Monday

September 3, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I am determined to get this year off to a good start. I’m excited about the fact that we’ll be spending the whole year in one place and in our beautiful new (soon-to-be-furnished) homeschool room! I’ve taken a lot of steps to getting things off on the right foot. Today, I spent the day printing out all my printables for the first few weeks of school: copywork, Bible memory plan, math worksheets and some grammar review. I also made some chore cards to simplify tidying the homeschool room at the end of the day. I’ll share those in another post this week.

One of the biggest hurdles for me staying organized is meal preparation. So I’ve made a complete September menu plan, heavy on slow cooker use, and I’ll be sharing that here, one week at a time on Menu Monday. Wherever possible, I’ve hyperlinked the recipes. For our family, breakfast is almost as big a deal as supper. Eating gluten-free involves coming up with a lot of alternatives to baking gluten-free bread constantly, so our breakfasts are pretty varied.

But in order to get breakfast eaten and start homeschool at a decent time, a lot of planning ahead is required. Here are this week’s meals, breakfast and dinner:

Monday

Breakfast: Leftover Sweet Potato Oatmeal Breakfast Casserole

Dinner: Indian Butter Chicken

Tuesday

Breakfast: Banana Muffins (make double batch and freeze the second batch)

Dinner: Crockpot Stuffed Peppers

Wednesday

Breakfast: Homemade Granola with homemade almond milk

Dinner: Chicken & Mango with Ginger-Curry Topping

Thursday

Breakfast: Toast with Gluten-Free Bread & Scrambled Eggs

Dinner: Country-Style Beef and Green Pepper Soup

Friday

Breakfast: Bircher Muesli (this isn’t the recipe we use–ours has mainly yogurt–but it comes close)

Dinner: Sushi

Saturday

Breakfast: Mexican Breakfast Casserole (this is my own creation–a variation on this recipe with salsa added to the eggs and fried up in the electric skillet–oh yum!)

Dinner: Vegetarian Southwestern Soup

Sunday

Breakfast: Orange-Date Muffins (make double batch the night before and freeze half)

Dinner: Thai Chicken with Basil and Coconut Milk

To make this work even better, I downloaded, printed and laminated the poster below for our fridge. Now I’ll never have to wonder about the answer to the question, “What’s for dinner?” I’ll be able to simply point to the chart! To download this poster yourself, click on the image to be redirected to the designer’s site.

Name that Bean!

July 24, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I have food issues.

Not the kind you might imagine I’d be talking about–issues of eating too much or body image-associated issues–although it’s true I’ve had my share of those.

I’m talking about the daily challenge of what on earth are we going to have for dinner (or breakfast and lunch for that matter–especially lunch).

Part of my problem I blame on my mother. Like her, I’m addicted to variety. I don’t want the same old thing every day. I don’t even want the same old 30 things every month. Shortly after we arrived here I sat down to make a list of the things we like to eat. This may sound strange, but the list of foods available to us here is different than what we would consume back in Canada, so after almost two years back “home,” it was time to get my head around my modified menu list again. I don’t eat pork, and I’m not sure whether I should trust the fish pulled out of the ocean here, although our city is somewhat renowned for its seafood, so my choices really boil down to chicken or beef. I made a list of about 35 possible meals.

The problem is, when I sit down to examine this list on a daily basis, almost nothing inspires me. So I branch out. I add a new meal to the menu list. But after that meal is consumed, I don’t want to eat it again for a while to come.

My family is no help at all. If I ask Sweetpea what she wants for dinner, her answer is always the same: spaghetti or sushi.

If I ask JavaMan for his input, again the answer is always the same. “Whatever you make is good, hon, I don’t care.” He regularly reminds me that we eat more variety than the average family likely does, so just cook something easy.

Thanks. (He obviously doesn’t understand my food issues.)

My parents recently embraced The Hallelujah Diet. Eating vegetarian has always interested me, but I’ve never figured it would work for my carnivorous bunch over the long haul. I have been interested, however, in having the occasional vegetarian meal.

With this thought in mind (and hoping for some potential variety for the cooking schedule), I headed to our local market. At one end of the market is a “grains lady,” or at least that’s what we call her. Her little shop is stuffed with big bags of grains and legumes of various descriptions. I long ago figured out which were black beans and which were kidney beans, so I could use them. I also buy my brown rice, cornmeal, sorghum, oat groats and buckwheat flour from this lady.

On this trip, I asked her if it would be all right for me to take one bean out of each of her bags and examine them to try to figure out what I could cook with them. She let me help myself.

Beans in Market

Problem is, even though she taught me the names of some of them in Chinese, I haven’t been able to accurately identify them, even with my online Chinese dictionary or the help of my old friend Google.

I was able to figure out a number of the beans from the Chinese I was given and from referencing pictures on the internet. Some were a big surprise. What I assumed was a lima bean was actually a hyacinth bean!

I was told two of the beans are the same kind–one is the “white” variety and the other the “red” variety, so I grouped those two together as one “mystery bean.” The third “mystery bean” may or may not be a “mottled kidney bean,” which is a legitimate variety in China. The problem with all three beans is I couldn’t make out the scribbled Chinese characters on my cheat sheet with any confidence. The pinyin didn’t help either as a reference. One of them is a “红__圆“ (I think.) I’m missing the middle character. And for the final variety of bean, marked with a “???” I was able to make out the characters, but they don’t particularly make sense. My dictionary came up with nothing. The literal translation of the characters is “river bean.”

So I’m putting it out to the blogosphere: Can you name that bean? (And if you have any great recipes for any of them, I’d love to hear them.)

Beans

The future of dinner in our house depends upon you.

- Carey Clark

P.S. – No children were starved in the making of this blog post. I promise there’s dinner on the table every night, I’m just occasionally challenged about what it should be ;)

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