Curried cauliflower rice

Cauliflower is in season and very cheap at all the local produce stores. So I bought several heads and have been eating them incessantly the past few weeks. It is definitely one of my favorite vegetables, especially when I was a child, and I have been very happy the past few weeks experimenting around with the versatility of this cruciferous vegetable.

I made delicious cauliflower curry rice from my base recipe of fried cauliflower rice. It’s pretty much the same thing except with curry and no proteins. I just added curry with the browning garlic so that it would enhance the fragrance of the spices.

Ingredients
1 lb, or 4 cups, raw cauliflower
1/2 cup or 6 sprigs of parsley
4 cloves garlic
1/2 Tbsp curry
2 Tbsp cooking fat
2 eggs (optional)
salt and pepper to taste (I used about 1/8 tsp each)

Directions
1. Rice the cauliflower via grater, food processor, blender, or manual chopping method. Set aside.
2. Dice garlic and set aside. Roughly chop parsley and/or other vegetables and set aside.
3. Heat butter on high heat. When hot, add in garlic and curry powder and cook until the garlic browns, about 2 minutes. Add cauliflower and stir for several minutes, until also slightly browned. Turn down heat to medium and add parsley. Stir to combine. Add salt and pepper. Stir to combine.
4. (optional) In another bowl, beat 2 eggs together. Pour over the fried rice and stir to incorporate evenly. Cook for a few more minutes until the egg is almost no longer raw.
5. Turn off heat and let sit for a few more minutes. Serve hot.

Enjoy!

Dai Dai

Lindt 90% chocolate bar

Okay, so I cheated on my month of no chocolates. How can I help myself if every time I go shopping at the produce stores, there’s a good European chocolate bar right in front of me while I wait at checkout? Grocery stores and their layout tactics…damn them.

Anyway, I ended up buying a 90% Lindt bar, since I haven’t tried this cacao percentage yet. It was nothing short of delicious.

For those of you who are addicted to Nutella and are trying to cut down on sugar, this is a good chocolate bar to end up having. There are a lot of hazelnut hints with a slight buttery taste on the end of coconut and vanilla. There wasn’t much acidity; just warmth and nuttiness. Appreciation of low-sugar chocolate bars is a must, though.

This bar contains chocolate, cocoa butter, cocoa powder pressed with alkali, sugar, and bourbon vanilla beans (probably how I got the vanilla feel in the taste). The nutritional info for the entire bar was: 600 calories, 55g fat, 30g carbs, 12g fiber, and 10g protein. Calcium content at 10% and iron at 37%.

Oh, so delicious. But I now have to start my no-chocolate month over again…

Dai Dai

Lamb curry

What to do with all my lamb leftovers without getting sick of the taste of rare lamb five meals in a row? Oh yes, a thing called curry.

Since my last post on the roast lamb, I’ve been hoarding up all the meat in the fridge, and worried that it would go bad. So earlier this week, I decided to make a large batch of lamb curry with some of the leftover meat. With the edges laced with rosemary chopped off, of course.

I’m usually not a fan of Indian food, and I am pretty sure that this is not specifically an Indian-type curry, as normal Indian recipes usually include garam masala, and my generic curry powder was a blend of only turmeric, cumin, garlic, onion, black pepper, and chili. It still made the house smell strongly of an Indian restaurant when I was finished cooking, though.

I basically guesstimated the amount of the ingredients I put in, and it tasted fine to me in the end. I served it atop some steamed cauliflower rice. Courtesy of the microwave.

Ingredients
1/2 lb cooked lamb (can be raw, just sear it for a bit before making curry)
1 Tbsp coconut oil (or other cooking oil if preferred)
1/4 cup coconut cream (I used 1/2 cup coconut milk works too)
2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp grated ginger
4 cloves garlic
1/2 large onion
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 Tbsp lime juice

Directions
1. Heat up coconut oil in pan and add garlic, onion, ginger, curry powder, and cinnamon. Saute until garlic and onion are slightly browned.
2. Add the lamb meat and saute until thoroughly browned.
3. Add coconut cream/milk and simmer over low to medium-low heat for 30 minutes, adding water if necessary. The sauce should be thick and pasty.
4. Incorporate lime juice into the mixture prior to serving curry. Spoon atop starchy food.

Enjoy!

Dai Dai

Roast lamb with rosemary and garlic

If there exists a common meat that I love more than beef, it is lamb. I normally don’t comb Costco for meats, since most of it is completely grain-fed, but I decided to look last weekend to see if that changed. Imagine my surprise when I found an entire Australian boneless lamb leg for $6/lb, sitting near the beef. A quick web search showed that the same leg is even cheaper in non-Silicon-Valley locations, if I ever travel elsewhere, and the lamb is grass-fed and grain-finished for the last 30 days. Good enough for me.

It came wrapped in red netting, which is useful if I planned on stuffing the inside of the lamb with herbs and spices. I chose not to because 1) I am lazy, and 2) I love rare meat, and more slits would mean more surface area to cook. I left that alone and just slathered my meat with lime juice, salt, pepper, chopped garlic, and rosemary.

The saddest part for me was the wait. I had to wait a little more than an hour for my lamb to cook, and an extra 10 minutes for it to rest outside of the oven for easy cutting. My pieces were cut pretty thickly because of the dullness of my Chinese butcher knife. If my knife were sharper, I would have been able to cut it into even thinner pieces.

This rare baby (literally?) tasted absolutely wonderful. I ate it for 3 days straight for all my meals, and I did not get tired of it. I used some of it as ingredients in other recipes, while the rest was laid atop a bed of cooked spinach to be consumed after a quick reheat in the microwave or stove. I highly believe this was a great investment of time and money. Time to scope my area for cheaper and entirely grass-fed cuts.

Ingredients
1 lamb leg, about 5 pounds
1 large lime
1 bulb of garlic
1/4 cup fresh or dried rosemary
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp black pepper

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Juice the lime, chop the garlic, and portion out the spices and set aside.
3. Place the lamb leg in a shallow baking dish, and rub with lime juice. Pack on the garlic and rosemary as best as possible, and finish by patting on the salt and pepper.
4. Place the lamb in the oven and roast for 30 minutes.
5. Reduce baking temperature to 350 degrees and roast for an extra 45 minutes for rare, and 60 minutes for medium-rare for a 5lb leg. Add 10 minutes for every pound over 5 pounds, or subtract 10 minutes for every pound under 5 pounds.
6. After roasting, take lamb out of oven and rest for at least 10 minutes.
7. Slice into pieces and serve.

Enjoy!

Dai Dai

Spaghetti squash in beefy marinara sauce

I fortuitously stumbled upon some house-brand marinara sauce at Costco for a little under $9. That’s a great deal considering the size of the jars, the packaging, and the ingredient list. The ingredients included tomatoes, water, tomato concentrate, onions, garlic, basil, sea salt, extra virgin olive oil, oregano, and citric acid. Sounds like the perfect basic marinara sauce to me! On top of that, they were encased in huge glass jars, so I didn’t have to worry about BPA poisoning from cans.

The entire jar has 280 calories: 7g fat, 56g carbs, 14g fiber, and 7g protein, with 70% Vitamin A, 105% Vitamin C, 14% calcium, and 28% iron. Not bad considering they weren’t using fresh tomatoes. And the sauce was tasty to boot.

Of course, I still had plenty of spaghetti squash left over from one of my previous local grocery shopping sprees a month ago, with about four or five of them sitting in my box, in line to be cooked. So it was perfect that I had these huge jars of marinara to accommodate all the squashes.

I threw the marinara on top of some sauteed garlic and ground beef, and the chunks of beef turned out to be more like small meatballs swimming in the sauce, which I liked a lot better than trying to break them into smaller pieces and disperse them around the sauce. But to each his own.

Ingredients
1 3-4lb spaghetti squash
1 lb ground beef
1 bulb of garlic
1 32oz jar of marinara sauce (or less, if desired)
any cooking fat, if needed for leaner cuts of beef
ground pepper, to taste

1. Prepare spaghetti squash by microwave or oven. Set aside to slightly cool.
2. Coarsely chop the garlic and set aside.
3. Heat cooking fat on high, if using, and brown the ground beef until almost fully done. Both large chunks of ground beef or small bits of ground beef would work, depending on personal preference of meat marinara sauce. Add the chopped garlic and continue to brown meat until no longer pink.
4. Add the marinara sauce and cover. This prevents the fat from splattering all over the stove once heated strongly. Keep stove on medium-high until marinara begins to boil, then reduce to medium or low, depending on cooking time. Partially uncover if a thicker sauce is desired. Cook for at least 15 minutes if on medium, and at least 30 minutes on low. The longer the wait, the better, up to several hours.
5. Meanwhile, chop the spaghetti squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Using a fork, create strands by running the prongs from the top stem part to the bottom part of each squash half. Set aside in a large container, or several plates. Keep warm if the marinara sauce will still be simmering for over half an hour.
6. After the marinara sauce is finished cooking, ladle on top of the spaghetti squash if on plates, or mix with the spaghetti squash in the large container. Serve warm.

Buon Appetito!

Dai Dai