Bok Choy Soup

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey Books, 2006.

With bok choy in the refrigerator and dried mushrooms in the pantry, this seemed the perfect recipe to use them up.

I took three dried mushrooms and soaked them in 250ml hot water for about half an hour.

I chopped a bok choy and added it to a saucepan of hot oil and stirred it around until it had wilted. To this were added the mushrooms now drained and finely chopped, the mushroom water, a chopped garlic clove, 4 slices of fresh ginger, a chopped red chilli and a stalk of crushed lemon grass. Stock was added to make the liquid up to about a litre. This was cooked for another 5 minutes and it was ready.

It was served in plates and topped with finely sliced spring onions and coriander leaves roughly

chopped.

The soup was light and slightly spicy.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

Batter Bread

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey Books, 2006.

I wanted some bread to have with the black-eyed bean soup I was making so decided on this one, the recipe for which says ‘you couldn’t find a simpler bread’. It did turn out to be an easy bread to make.

I used 205g of a strong bread flour and 250g of a normal plain flour. To this I added about a handful of wheat bran. The recipe calls for using lots of 250g of flours in any combination.

It was now only a matter of placing in a bowl the flour, a tablespoon of olive oil, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of dried yeast and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. To this was added about 400ml of tepid water and it was stirred until it had become a batter-like consistency.

 

I had chopped an onion before I began the bread mixture and fried it. This I added to the batter with a pinch of dried thyme.

The batter was now placed in a greased pan and left to rise. When the batter in the half-filled pan had risen to the top of the pan it went into a 180ºC oven for about 40 minutes.

This was quite an acceptable bread though its texture was more cake-like than that of bread. The addition of the onion gave it a pleasing variation to plain bread.

I have recently been enjoying reading about the history of food in William Sitwell’s A History of Food in 100 Recipes. The earliest recorded description of making bread seems to be the paintings on the walls of the tomb of Senet that show in detail step by step the process from pounding the grain to baking the bread. Senet obviously wanted to ensure that she had plenty of good food in the afterlife because there are also scenes of meat preparation and beer making. The recipe of batter bread that I just made was certainly an improvement on method for Senet's bread.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

Caramel, Ginger and Apricot Sponge Pudding

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey, 2006.

I find recipes from this book rather annoying in their measurements. They use mls for non-liquid ingredients, although not always. In one recipe, for example, they use mls for butter and then g for butter. Nevertheless, once I got my guide for equivalence out it was not that bad.

Hot sweet desserts are just right for cold winter nights and this one looked as though it would fit the bill. Milk (250 ml) was combined with a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of apricot jam and heated so that the ingredients were all blended. It was then taken off the heat and left to cool.

An egg was beaten with three-quarters of a cup of sugar until it was fluffy. The recipe suggested beating over a bowl of hot water, but I found this awkward to achieve and abandoned the hot water. When the beating was done a tablespoon of white vinegar was stirred in.

I sifted a cup of flour with a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda then added the milk mixture. When they were well mixed I folded in the egg mix. At this stage there was a choice of adding preserved ginger, dried apricots or glacé fruit. One didn’t seem enough for me so I added half a cup of chopped ginger and a cup of chopped apricots. This was all placed in a greased casserole and baked at 170°C for about an hour.

A sauce was made by boiling a cup of cream, half a cup of milk, half a cup of sugar and 50 g butter for about 5 minutes. When the cake came out of the oven it was pricked all over with a skewer and the sauce was poured on a little at a time until it was all absorbed.

This was called ‘Comforting Caramel’ in the recipe book and it certainly fitted that name. It was gooey and richly sweet with little bites of ginger and the chewier apricot pieces. The sponge was quite light in the upper half but tended to be heavy towards the bottom—possibly the result of me adding two instead of one of the extra ingredients.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔

Summer Moussaka

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey Books, 2006.

I’m not really sure why this has been called a summer moussaka. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the recipe that makes it more one season than another. But since it is supposed to be summer at the moment, despite the weather which definitely isn’t, I decided to give it a go.

It’s one of those recipes where you cook lots of sections one after the other and then combine them for the final dish. This would suit the premise of the book that suggests moving from fast food to slow food and then on to quiet food. By ‘quiet food’ I suspect that the cook, by taking time and enjoying the cooking process, reaches a state of relaxed being where they can sit back and eat in a calm manner.

Eggplants (or brinjals as the recipe calls them) are sliced and fried.

A white sauce is made and some grated cheese added. I used a mixture of cheddar and Parmesan.

 Mushrooms are fried.

Onions are fried and garlic added in the last few minutes. Then canned tomatoes are added with tomato paste, marjoram, ground allspice, dried basil and seasonings. The fried mushrooms are now added to this mix and it is cooked at a simmer level.

It is then time to put all the sections together. First in a casserole goes a layer of eggplant, then the tomato mix, then the cheese sauce. The layers are then repeated. Over the top of this to finish it off is sprinkled a mixture of breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese.

This is all baked for a good 30 to 40 minutes. A good time for relaxing.

The recipe calls for it to be served with noodles. I couldn’t go with that idea. It also suggested it be served with crusty bread and a salad. I wasn’t sure about that either. What it really needed was a crisp green salad but I, choosing poorly, had a warm lentil and rice salad with it.  It all ended up a lot of muddy brown items on a plate. They tasted all right though. And was I calm? Relatively, I guess.

Taste: ✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔

Cathay Rice Salad

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey Books, 2006.

I never feel that a rice salad is a salad but, whatever the naming, a warm spicy rice and lentil mix makes a pleasant accompaniment.

I actually misread the instructions for this one. The lentils had to be cooked for 20 minutes before using. The details for this were in the ingredients list rather than in the recipe instructions themselves. In a hurry I just read the quantity of lentils from the ingredients and failed to take in that they needed to be cooked first.

This was a little ironic as the book Quiet Food has a subtitle ‘A Recipe for Sanity’ and its philosophy is to take time over your cooking and eating. It encourages us to slow down, not only in the eating but in the cooking and enjoy the process. In my eagerness to get moving I slipped up in the instructions and prepared a less-than-perfect meal.

I fried the onions and garlic and placed them in a rice cooker. I washed the rice and added it to the cooker with the lentils and all the other ingredients (star anise, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon and raisins). I measured in the water and turned on the cooker.

When it was done the dressing with touches of lemon juice, ginger and brown sugar was added.

The resulting rice salad was a pleasing one, though it did have a bit of nutty crunch from the undercooked lentils.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔