gjelina

• garlic confit
• shallot confit
• peeled asparagus
• sottocenere
• fontina
• raclette
• nettles
• bloomsdale spinach
• cherry tomato
• stracciatella
• burrata
• basil
• mushrooms – cremini or chantarelle
• truffle tremor
• tomato confit
• roasted red pepper
• anchovies boned and rinsed
• guanciale thinly sliced
• castelvetrano olive quarters
• bacon thinly sliced
• grilled radicchio
• broccoli rabe
• lamb sausage
• Asiago

chams

• Fennel sausage and treviso, celeriac cream and fior di latte
• Kale sauce, potato, smoked onion, Gorgonzola, hazelnut
• squash sauce, black futsu squash, preserved lemon, mozz, pumpkin seeds
• bechamel, calabrese, confit shallots, olives, Parmesan
• toasted peppers and tomato, kulen sausage, fior di latte, capers
• creme fraiche, leeks, chorizo, potato, mozz
• kale sauce, ferm pear, brie, walnut Swiss chard

In April of 2021, I was home in India visiting family. I came upon this article in The Hindu.

In the ‘exchange trade practice’, the middlemen have the privilege of deciding the worth of the forest produce, exploiting the tribals who run after them for various commodities

I’d been thinking for a while around food equity and who is doing the work to feed people and who benefits off of other folks’ work without much value add. I was also reading Bread, Wine and Chocolate by Simran Sethi, which gave me a good framework to position these ideas and feelings within.

I was getting to the point where simply consuming content and ideas without adding my own ideas/voice/actions would make me complicit in ongoing food injustices. Seeing this article in the newspaper, given the amount of privilege I had in India, motivated me to start actively planning an intervention of some sort in this field.

This field is ripe for change, given the work folks like Aditya Raghavan, Garima Arora, Foodforward India and Thomas Zacharias (+ many many many more) were doing in India (to highlight indigenous ingredients from India) along with work Sana Javeri Kadri of Diaspora Co has been doing in the US (to build markets and an customer base around these beautiful ingredients).

As I see it there’s a few well documented problems

1. Food growers not getting a fair price for their produce. What is fair price? Is it one that covers their cost, along with some safety nets in place? Does it provide insurance against climate change and bad weather?
2. Disconnectedness from food (You don’t know where this food is from)
3. Food as a traded “commodity” priced according to options purchased on commodities exchanges in London and New York
4. Pesticide concentration up the food chain to humans (Organic isn’t necessarily better unless the farmer is supported against crop failures and risk)

There’s also a few open questions

1. Foraging vs. Farming (Diversity vs. Efficiency)
… (To be expanded)

I’ll be outlining some of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past few months in a series of posts.

Baba Ghanoush

• Kenji Lopez-Alt’s recipe
• 2 pounds Italian eggplants
• 3 minced cloves of garlic
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 6 tbsp tahini (as per taste?) 
• Olive oil, parsley, paprika
• Broil eggplants until no resistance to toothpick, up to 1 hour
• Remove skin, transfer flesh to salad spinner to remove water, increase flavor
• Garlic and lemon juice + above to blender
• Add Tahini, Emulsify with olive oil

• Soak can of Chickpeas in scalding hot water
• Grind 3 large Garlic cloves to a paste
• Grind Chickpeas to a chunky paste
• Add 2 heaped tablespoons Tahini, ~50ml Lime juice, Olive oil and Garlic paste. Grind again
• Optional: Add Garam Masala
• Add a small amount of water, <100ml and grind to a Hummus consistency
• Taste. Add more Lime (tanginess), Garlic (garlickiness) or Tahini (Rich Creaminess) depending on personal taste.
• Coat with olive oil during storage to prevent water evaporation

• Soak 2 glasses of Basmati Rice in 2 glasses of hot water.
• Pressure cooker vessel
• 2 Cardamom, 4 Cloves, 4 Cinnamon sticks broken into smaller pieces, 2 dried Bayleaf
• Brown above in 6 spoons of oil until cardamom swells
• Onions sliced (not diced) into thin long pieces. Add to oil. Don’t let them burn.
• Add 6 green Chillies cut lengthwise in half.
• Cook Onions down until they’re no longer sweet and lose color.
• Add a heaped tablespoon of Ginger Garlic paste at this point
• Cut Green Beans, diced Mushrooms, Potato and a teensy Tomato. Also half a bunch of Mint leaves. In that sequence
• Add salt and let vegetables cook while releasing water.
• Once they cook down, add the water and the rice
• Add a can of Coconut milk, measuring the amount with the glass used for rice.
• Add (4 – volume of liquid used already) glasses of water.
• Heaped teaspoon of Garam Masala.
• Enough salt that the liquid tastes slightly salty
• Rest of the mint leaves
• Pressure cook for 2 whistles
• Wait 30 minutes.
• Makes 6-7 servings.

• 1 large onion
• 4 chillis
• 2 tomatoes
• Cook down tomatoes until it forms a gravy
• Salt, Kaaram, Turmeric
• Grate a half slab of paneer
• 1/4 glass water
• 1/4 glass milk (more milk than water)
• Not too thick, as the curry solidifies further when it cools down
• Good with roti. This recipe makes 3 servings 🙂

Apologies, the recipe segues between Telugu and English

• Cardamom, chekka in oil
• Onions, not too many. 2-3 green chilies
• Ginger garlic paste 1 teaspoon (Heaped)
• Tomato in pieces
• Chicken, Salt – 1.5 tsp, Karam – 2 tsp
• Masala – 2 Cardamom, 5 Lavangalu 5, 2 Chekka, 4 Vellulli, 4 Jeedipappu, 0.5 tsp Jeelakarra
• Then add Kobbari 3-4 spoons
• Water added slowly to make a paste
• Perugu – 1 garita
• 2 glasses water
• Salt as per taste
• Garnish with coriander

Is much amaze really.

 

Mum got me this 750W grinder from India, which for me was christmas come early. You see a grinder, I see Idlis and Dosas. It turns out this grinder is available on Amazon Canada too.

It certainly didn’t disappoint as mum treated me to dosas and idlis that tasted better than any I had before (she suspects it was possibly related to living in Vancouver rather than anything else). A recipe for the batter will come up soon! No more 6$ batter from Thurga that is barely enough fo 2 meals.