Grandma Cake (Sour Cream Coffee Cake)

Published November 7, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I am going to a potluck tonight where we have been asked to bring a dish that was traditional in our family. This is the cake that was at every occasion. It was at holiday dinners (okay, not Passover) and at casual family gatherings. There was usually some left over to be eaten later for “coffee with a little something”.

My Grandma Fredyl, being from the “old country”, never used a recipe when she cooked. She threw in a handful of this and a pinch of that until it felt right. Whatever she made always turned out fabulous, especially the baked goods. My memory of my grandmother’s little apartment is that it was full of long taffeta gowns (she was a seamstress) and always smelled cozily of baking butter and cinnamon.  Family legend has it that Aunt Gladys, fearing that the formula for her mother’s wonderful cakes and cookies would vanish when Grandma passed on, shadowed Grandma around the kitchen as she baked. (My image of this is rather funny, Gladys being a large woman about 6 feet tall, and Grandma a diminutive white-haired lady, barely 4’10”.) Each time Grandma threw a handful or a pinch into the bowl, Gladys stuck out a measuring cup so she could codify the ingredients.  This cake is one of the results of her efforts.

I was surprised when I dug out the recipe that it wasn’t all that high  in fat. It doesn’t have as much butter as some cakes, and all I did to lighten it up was to use egg substitute and non-fat sour cream. I also used fewer nuts, although my memory of the cake is that it only had a sprinkling of nuts. I toasted the nuts to bring out their flavor.  It also makes a lot of servings without the slices having to be paper thin. Given that this was a dish to take to a gathering, I didn’t try to bring the fat down to 2-3 grams/serving by substituting applesauce for some of the butter, but it is still reasonably low fat/serving.  And when I baked it the whole house smelled like a memory of home,

Grandma Cake (Sour Cream Coffee Cake)

Cooking spray
1/4 pound butter (1 stick) softened
1 cup sugar
2 cups all purpose flour (plus a little for the pan)
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup egg substitute
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup non-fat sour cream
1/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted (my mother used walnuts, but I knew that someone at the gathering tonight was allergic to them)
cinnamon sugar mix (see hint)

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a tube pan (the standard size) with cooking spray and dust lightly with flour. Be sure to tap the pan so that excess flour comes out.

Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.  In the bowl of a mixer, beat butter and sugar at medium speed until smooth and well blended. Add egg substitute and vanilla and beat until well blended.  Add flour and sour cream alternately, starting and ending with flour. (I usually add the flour 3 times and the sour cream twice. I used to think that this alternate adding was the result of Aunt Gladys’s recipe recording technique, but I’ve actually seen it in other recipes.) Beat on low speed after each addition until combined. Don’t over beat.

Put I/2 of batter in tube pan and spread more or less evenly. Sprinkle generously with cinnamon sugar mix and then sprinkle nuts evenly over cinnamon and sugar.

cake batter

Spoon remaining batter over cinnamon-sugar-nut layer, spreading gently so the batter more or less covers that layer. Bake at 325 for 40-45 minutes or until a wood pick inserted in the cake comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool in pan for 10 minutes. If you have the kind of tube pan with a removable center, loosen the cake around the sides with a knife, and cool for 20 more minutes otherwise cool in pan for 30 minutes.  Remove from cake from pan and sprinkle  top with cinnamon-sugar mix (my mother sprinkled the top with more chopped nuts, but that would have added another gram or so of fat, and besides, it’s my recall that most of them fell off when you cut the cake. Cool completely on a wire rack.

cake on rack

This makes  20 servings at about 6 grams of fat/serving.

cake on grandma plate

Grandma cake on Grandma’s glass serving plate.

cake on my plate

Grandma cake on my plate. Ooops, it didn’t make it to the potluck. And it tasted just like my mom’s.

Hint: If you don’t keep cinnamon-sugar mix handy, you should mix some up.  It’s useful for sprinkling on so many things – oatmeal, toast, bananas, whatever.  There’s no recipe – just add enough cinnamon to the sugar to make it as cinnamony as you like.  I keep mine in a shaker right on the table.

cake cinnamon

Oh Decadence!

Published November 3, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Decadence upon decadence. I have just eaten French toast stuffed with thick, gooey Nutella and topped with strawberries.  I worked all day getting the house ready for various contractors working on my remodel project.  I climbed up and down the step ladder packing away decorative items, taking shelves down, and moving furniture away from where they will be working.  It was definitely not a day for intense dinner cooking. I needed easy and indulgent.

I made the usual French toast – 2 slices of French bread soaked in egg substitute thinned with non-fat milk. When the French toast was done, I spread a tablespoon of Nutella (a hazelnut-chocolate spread) on it (this shows 2 slices for 2 servings).

nutella french toast

I must say I was tempted to eat the slathered slices right then and there.  I may do this next time.  I topped the Nutella-covered slices with another slice of French toast, and then spooned defrosted sugared strawberries on them. If you have fresh strawberries and the time to add sugar and let them release their juices, I think this would be even better. This made one serving (I’ve pictured 2) with about 6 grams of fat/serving. What a low fat indulgence. If I had whipped cream in the refrigerator, I would have measured out a squirt or two.

nutella strawberry

Hot and Sour Pork with Cabbage

Published October 30, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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The weather people have been hyperventilating about the season’s first snow. Oh, I just can’t wait!  Especially after last year.  And then I woke up this morning and it was snowing vigorously!  Mind you, it was only about a quarter of an inch, but it was still hanging around ominously when I get home this evening.

I have been wanting to make this dish for some time. I had the ingredients in my refrigerator, but somehow it always got too late when I came home from work to start chopping cabbage and trimming pork tenderloin.  I usually eat a bit later, but 10 p.m. is a little late to sit down with a substantial dinner dish.  Then I got a useful idea sparked by a memory of visiting China many years ago. I noticed that instead of buying prepared foods, people were stopping on their way home from work to buy fresh cut-up vegetables. The shops displayed various combinations of chopped vegetables in their windows. I suppose these were combinations that could be made into popular dishes. A person could buy these chopped fresh vegetables, pick up a small bit of meat, and go home to make a quick home-cooked meal that had their own spices and flavorings.  How practical.  So I trimmed and cut up the pork and chopped up the cabbage and green onions the night before, putting them in separate bags in the refrigerator. Ready to go when I got home the next day.

The preparation of this dish is quick once you get through the chopping, which actually didn’t take all that long.  It is one of those dishes where it is best to prepare all the ingredients in advance, so that you can add them quickly at the proper point as you cook. I combined the pork with the garlic since they were added at the same time, and had all the other ingredients mixed and at the ready.

hot and sour babbage ingrr

I warn you that this dish is quite hot – great for a chilly day with %#$!# snow on the ground  You are adding two sources of heat: white pepper which is actually very hot and Sriracha sauce wihich is even hotter.  I was a bit fearful of adding a tablespoon of Sriracha, a hot chile sauce, because I had a traumatic experience with Sriracha once, where I added too much and ruined an entire pot of chili. But I plunged ahead, and it was hot, but not inedible.  Also, I don’t really see how this was sour at all.  There was no sour element like lemon juice involved. It was quite tasty – and hot.

Hot and Sour Pork with Cabbage

1 pound pork tenderloin, trimmed of all fat  and cut into strips
1 Tablespoon cornstarch, divided
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon water
1/2 cup ketchup
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 Tablespoon Sriracha (hot chile sauce); use less if you’re timid – you can always add more
2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 Tablespoon peanut oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 pounds coarsely chopped green cabbage
1/3 cup chopped green onions

Combine pork, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, white pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon salt in a medium bowl; set aside. (Whisk the dry ingredients well before you add the pork so you don’t get a piece of pork with a high concentration of white pepper, says the voice of experience) Put minced garlic in same bowl as pork, but don’t mix it in.

Combine remaining 2 teaspoons cornstarch and 1 tablespoon water in a small bowl; set aside.

Combine ketchup and next 3 ingredients (through soy sauce) in a small bowl; set aside.

Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork mixture and garlic; sauté 2 minutes or until pork is no longer pink on the outside. Remove pork from pan; set aside.

Add cabbage; sauté 2 minutes. Here is the point where the cooking became a bit frenetic. I cooked this (as I cook almost everything that isn’t soup) in a large flat-bottomed wok. Two pounds of chopped cabbage came to the very top of the wok. The heat was on medium high and I was stir-frying like mad trying to keep the bottom pieces from burning.  The cabbage was not cooking down, and pieces kept leaping out of the pan as I stirred. I was going to take a picture of the cabbage, but I was frantically trying to keep the flying cabbage pieces from landing in the flame below and setting the whole kitchen on fire. I finally added 2 tablespoons of water and stirred mightily. This had the salutary effect of loosening the browned bits of pork and garlic from the bottom of the pan and creating steam to soften the cabbage.  I heartily recommend this procedure.  Crisis averted and house fire prevented, I continued on with the recipe.

Add ketchup mixture; sauté 2 minutes. Stir in pork; sauté about 1 minute. Stir in cornstarch mixture; cook 30 seconds or until a bit thicker. Remove pan from heat; stir in onions. This made four tummy-warming servings at about 8 grams of fat/serving.  At first, I didn’t even make rice for it to go over. I ate it with a fat slice of French bread to sop up the juice.

hot and sour cabbage

The original recipe was from Cooking Light, and although the Sriracha sauce hinted at Asian origins, this did not seem to have that flavor orientation. Later, when talking to a friend, she thought that cabbage, pork, hot and sour sounded Russian, or at least Eastern European, so next time I served it over noodles.

hot cabbage on noodles

Ginger Cranberry Muffins

Published October 28, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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It’s definitely time to bake muffins, if only to warm up the kitchen. I always leave the oven door open after I bake to use the leftover heat – after all, I already paid for it.  I have cranberries in the freezer left from last holiday season.  I need to use them up, even though I’m probably just going to put more bags in the freezer from this year’s crop.  You only seem to find them in the store during the holiday season.

This recipe is originally from Coconut and Lime, I just lightened them up a bit so I can eat them for lunch or as an evening snack.  They were prettier than expected, with the red cranberries poking through the dough. I opted to bake them in paper liners, because I thought the cranberries might stick to the pan.  I have to say that my first bite of the muffin was a little disappointing, a trifle bitter.  But then I ate a bit more and it was really a pleasantly unexpected combination of flavors, with the ginger giving the muffin a little bite in contrast to the tart cranberries.

Cranberry Ginger Muffins
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 Tablespoon canola oil
3 Tablespoons unsweetened applesauce
1/4 cup egg substitute
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1 1/4 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries (if you use frozen berries like I did, just rinse them under cold water, don’t defrost them)
1/3 cup chopped candied ginger, preferably uncrystallized

Preheat oven to 350. Line or grease and flour a 12 well muffin pan. In a large bowl, thoroughly mix together the oatmeal, egg substitute, oil, applesauce, buttermilk, and sugar. Spoon flour into measuring cups. Add the flour, salt and baking soda to the liquid mix. Stir until thoroughly moistened. Fold in the cranberries and ginger chunks. If you are using frozen cranberries, make sure that frozen clumps of berries are broken up in the batter. Divide the batter evenly among 12 muffin cups. Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a center muffin comes out clean.  Cool on wire rack. Makes 12 servings at about 2 grams of fat/serving.

ginger cranberry muffin

Mulligatawny Soup

Published October 25, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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It rained yesterday – the kind of straight down, all day soaking rain under grey cloudy skies that chills you to the bone even if you are in the house. Cooking soup is a wonderful activity for cold, rainy days.  There is something comforting about sitting at the kitchen table with the gentle bubbling sounds of soup simmering on the stove, and the smells of cooking onions and spices filling the warm kitchen air.  And of course, a bowl of hot soup on a blustery day feeds the soul as well as the stomach.  I’ve already made a big pot of bean soup, freezing most of it for future meals.  I decided to try Mulligatawny soup, which I have eaten, but never made.

Mulligatawny is a mildly curry-flavored soup of Anglo-Indian origin. Translated literally from Tamil, “Mulligatawny” means “pepper water”. Despite the name, however, pepper itself is not a vital ingredient. I never actually had anything like Mulligatawny soup in India. I expect it is actually a British interpretation of some Indian dish, made milder for the Western palate.  Mulligatawny soup found its way into American cookery well before the Civil War. It appeared in the original Fannie Farmer cookbook of 1896.

There are many variations of the recipe for Mulligatawny soup.  Sometimes, the soup has a turmeric-like yellow color and is rather thick and creamy. That is the way I have experienced it in restaurants. I decided to modify the rather simple recipe in my Fannie Farmer Cookbook, which makes what I would call a thick, mildly curried, chicken vegetable soup.

Mulligatawny Soup

2 Tablespoons butter
1 small onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 green pepper, deveined and diced
1 apple, peeled, cored, and diced
1 cup (about 1 pound) raw chicken breast, diced
1/3 cup flour
1-2 teaspoons curry powder
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
5 cups non-fat chicken broth
2 sprigs parley, chopped (I used dried parsley)
1 14 ounce can chopped tomatoes, lightly drained
2 cups cooked rice
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Melt the butter in a large soup pot. Add the onion, carrot, celery, green pepper, apple, and chicken.  Cook over medium low heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Mix flour with curry powder and nutmeg, add to the pot, and cook over low heat for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the broth, parsley, and tomatoes.  Partially cover and simmer for about 1 hour. Stir once in a while to make sure it doesn’t stick.  Add salt and pepper to taste. Spoon some cooked rice into the bowl when serving the soup. (I did this the first time, and then mixed the remaining rice into the soup for later servings.)  This makes 6 servings of soup at about 5 grams of fat/serving.

Mulligatawny

Variation: There are many recipes for Mulligatawny Soup that have more ingredients and elaborate preparation. I chose the Fannie Farmer version because her recipes tend to be simple and doable. Most recipes seem to add cubed potatoes, which I think would be an admirable addition. I think you could easily add a few other vegetables as well (peas come to mind, although I’m not terribly fond of them). Other recipes add turmeric for a pronounced yellow color. I ate a bowl of the soup with a dollop of yogurt in it, which was quite good. This soup is not particularly spicy-hot, so those who want heat can add more black pepper, or a splash or two of hot sauce.

Roasted Yams and Plantains

Published October 22, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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When I saw this recipe, I didn’t look very closely at it. Plantains, yams, what could be bad. I finally had three very ripe plantains – the only way I can get ripe plantains is by buying them when they are yellow and letting them turn black on the back of my kitchen counter. Then I looked more closely at the recipe, from Cooking Light, and realized that it was a pureed dish with dates and nuts sprinkled on top. It was sort of a Thanksgiving side dish, on the sweet side – but I was more interested in something more hearty – or maybe more chewy. So I fiddled around and came up with what is essentially a roasted vegetable dish that could still be used as a side dish. Plantains roast quite well so I may experiment with them some more in the future.

Roasted Yams and Plantains

Cooking Spray
2  pounds of sweet potatoes or yams, peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces
3 very ripe plantain peeled, halved lengthwise, and cut across in ½ inch slices
1/3  cup packed brown sugar
1/4  cup fat-free milk
1/4  cup non-fat sour cream
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 cup pitted dates, chopped
1/2 cup sliced almonds,

Preheat oven to 350°. Spray a baking pan with cooking spray. Mix  sugar, milk, sour cream, and allspice in a medium bow; beat 2 minutes at the high speed of a mixer until smooth. Mix in dates. Set aside  Put yams and plantains in prepared baking pan. Spray lightly with cooking spray and toss.  Bake for one hour or until potatoes are tender. Remove from oven. Pour milk mix over  yams. Toss well. Sprinkle almonds evenly over top.  Bake for an additional 20 minutes. This makes 8 servings at about 3 grams of fat/serving.

yam platain bake

Variation: This was pretty sweet. You could probably use less sugar.

Chocolate Marble Banana Bread

Published October 19, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment
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Still cold. Makes me feel like baking. Turn on the oven and the kitchen becomes warm and cozy. Since my family room is part of the kitchen, I have a toasty place to read and catch up on household tasks at the kitchen table. I’ve already baked 2 loaves of my regular no fat banana bread, one of which is sliced and in the freezer to take for lunches. I still had bananas, so I decided to make a banana bread that I made quite a few years ago.

Back then, the non-profit organization that I manage was just starting out, and we wanted to have a press conference to announce some accomplishment – I don’t remember the details.  Knowing that  mostly junior reporters get sent out to cover low-level community events, we decided to lure the press with home made baked goods. We were then small and new, and we invited everyone we knew for goodies so the press would see a little crowd. We did get some television coverage, which thrilled us.  This was one of the home baked goodies I made.

The original recipe came from Cooking Light. It is not as dense and moist as my regular banana bread, and it seems much sweeter to me, almost like cake.

Chocolate Marble Banana Bread

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons butter, softened
2 Tablespoons unsweetened applesaucw
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe banana (about 3 bananas)
1/2 cup egg substitute
1/3 cup plain non-fat yogurt
1/2 cup  semisweet chocolate chips
Cooking spray

Preheat oven to 350°.  Spray an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan (see note) with cooking spray.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups, and level. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt, stirring with a whisk.

Place sugar and butter in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended (about 1 minute). Add banana, egg substitute, applesauce and yogurt. Beat until blended. Add flour mixture; beat at low speed just until moist.

Place chocolate chips in a medium microwave-safe bowl, and microwave at HIGH 1 minute or until almost melted, stirring until smooth. Cool slightly. Add 1 cup of the batter to chocolate, stirring until well combined. Spoon chocolate batter alternately with plain batter into prepared pan. (I did 3 layers of plain batter and 2 of chocolate.) Swirl batters together using a knife. Bake at 350° for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack.  This makes 12 servings at about 4 grams of fat/serving.

marble banan

NOTE: This recipe called for an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan, which I used.  I wasn’t totally satisfied with the way it baked – a little too dark around the edges.  I think the last time I made it I used a regular 9 inch loaf pan, and it might work better in that pan.  Also, the original recipe said 16 slices, which in the smaller loaf pan was really not realistic.  A slice would be only /2 inch thick.

HINT: Many recipes call for softened butter.  I don’t use much butter, so I keep my butter in the freezer.  When I need softened butter, I really do not want to defrost an entire stick to cut off a piece and and then refreeze it.  But trying to hack off two tablespoons from a hard frozen stick of butter really isn’t feasible. So I cut thin slices off the stick of butter until I have the proper amount. The thin pieces soften quicker than a whole chunk, too.

What To Do with Leftover Eggplant

Published October 17, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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The previous recipe for Lamb-Stuffed Eggplant said to hollow out the eggplant, and discard the centers. This seemed very wasteful to me. And I am sure that my good Mumbai housewife friends would be horrified at the thought of wasting all that good eggplant meat. Frugality – or rather who was most frugal in tending home and family – was a frequent topic of conversation. In late afternoon on our way back from the open air market across the railroad tracks, we would gather in Mrs. Bidikar’s ground floor corner apartment…the one with the best view from which to see and comment on passers-by on Goregoan Road. Sandals left outside the door and saris draped comfortably around us, we drank sugary, hot black tea boiled with milk and spices – the original chai – and we would share the contents of our market baskets, discuss prices and which merchant was honest or a thief. Women would regale one another with how they used every bit of the produce to stretch their husband’s salaries. One confided that she was more frugal than another – using even the stems of cauliflower or finding a use for potato skins. So wasting the interiors of eggplants – I think not.

Being of equally frugal bent, while the stuffed eggplants were baking, I chopped up an onion and the innards of the eggplant, and sautéed them in a frying pan sprayed with olive oil cooking spray.  I sprinkled them with dried herbs – marjoram, thyme, and chervil – but any combination of your liking would do, and added a bit of garlic.  I cooked the mixture down until the eggplant and onions were quite soft.  At this point, I could have tossed the mixture into a food processor and made a nice eggplant dip, adding  bit of salt and pepper, or maybe even a spoonful or two of nonfat yogurt.  But I really didn’t need dip, and I was in the mood for something warm. So I put the mixture into the refrigerator to keep until I had more time.

The next day, I decided to make a casserole similar to moussaka, the Greek eggplant and lamb dish.  I had 3 ounces of ground lamb left, so I browned it and added it to the eggplant mixture (I think you could also make this meatless).  I crumbled about 2 ounces of fat free feta cheese into the mixture, added about ¼ cup of fat free half and half, and 1/4 – 1/2 cup of egg substitute.  I poured the whole thing into a baking dish sprayed with cooking spray and baked it at 350 for one hour.

eggplant casserole pan

This made 6  servings at about 2 grams of fat/serving.

eggplant casserole plate

And I didn’t waste any eggplant. The women of Goregaon Road would be proud of me.

Eggplant Stuffed with Lamb

Published October 15, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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I have a lovely cookbook “Healthy Indian Cooking”, which was published in England and has measurements in milliliters and the like – fortunately translated into our more familiar teaspoon and cup measures. It has charming turns of phrase, where eggplants are aubergines and zucchini are courgettes. It also has some translational hilarity, where one recipe tells you to make sure the cod pieces are well-coated in spices (look it up to find the giggles if it doesn’t make sense to you).

Indian cooking as I learned it many years ago always started with large amounts of oil to cook the inevitable onions, garlic, and spices that made the “gravy” of curries. The authors of this book use much the same methods as I do to make their recipes low fat. They cut the amount of fat down, and use very lean cuts of meat. In cooking their recipes, I have often cut the fat even further by using cooking spray and “sweating” the onions rather than cooking them in fat, or using a teaspoon rather than a tablespoon of fat.

The weather has turned unseasonably cold (is weather ever seasonable – but 17 degrees in early October is just plain wrong.) Cold weather has me thinking of turning on the oven to get warm. After baking several loaves of banana bread, I decided to find a baked Indian dish to make with the eggplant I just bought. This dish is quite festive looking. I recommend that you grind your own lamb, either in a meat grinder (more on meat grinding in a later post) or in the food processor. Don’t over process, though. You want lamb burger, not lamb pate. This dish also mixes a lot of vegetables in with the meat, making the dish not as heavy as lamb dishes can be.  Also, it is not very spicy in terms of heat – not all Indian food is. But you could add a chili pepper or some cayenne pepper to heat it up.

Aubergines Stuffed with Lamb (That’s Eggplant to you)

Cooking spray
2 medium eggplants
1 teaspoon canola oil
1 medium onion, cut in half and sliced vertically
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 medium tomato, chopped
12 ounces of lean leg of lamb, ground
1 medium green pepper seeded and coarsely chopped
1 medium orange or red pepper seeded and coarsely chopped
2 Tablespoons chopped fresh coriander (cilantro)

stuffed eggplantingredients

Stuffed eggplant ingredients

Preheat the oven to 350. Spray a baking pan large enough to hold the eggplant halves with cooking spray. Cut the eggplants in half and scoop out most of the flesh, leaving enough shell to hold the filling. (More about what to do with the eggplant innards shortly.)  Be careful not to pierce the shell. Spray the outside of the shells with cooking spray.

stuffed eggplant shells

Spray a large saucepan (or wok in my case) with cooking spray. Add the oil and heat over medium high heat. Add the onions and fry until golden brown.  Don’t let them burn. Gradually add the ginger, chili powder, garlic, turmeric, salt and ground coriander (I mixed them together in a small bowl before I started cooking). Add the chopped tomato. Lower the heat to medium low and stir-fry for about 5 minutes.  Add the ground lamb and continue to stir-fry for 7-10 minutes, or until the lamb is no longer pink. Add the chopped peppers and chopped coriander to the lamb mixture and cook for 5 minutes more.  Spoon the lamb mixture into the shells and spray the outer edges of the shells with a little cooking spray.

stuffed eggplant pan

Bake until the eggplant has softened and the top of filling has browned.  The recipe said that this would take about 25 minutes, but mine took almost an hour.  I think maybe the eggplants I bought were larger than the British ones.

stuffed eggplant plate

Serve on a bed of plain rice.  This makes 4 servings at about 8 grams of fat/serving.

Variation: When I ate this, the eggplant was a little hard to tackle, although it looked really nice. So I wound up cutting the stuffed eggplant into pieces and mixing it with the rice. I wonder if you could just chop an eggplant and mix it in with the filling and bake it like a casserole?

NOTE: I couldn’t find this exact cookbook, by Shehzad Husain and Manisha Kanani on Amazon. I got it at Costco quite a while ago.  But there were similar books by these authors, written both singularly and together.

Orange Plum Preserves

Published October 11, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Back in the day when I was an Earth Mother – and I have the pictures to prove it: portly frame sitting between rows of tomatoes and squash…anyway, back in the day, I did all sorts of canning and preserving. There were peach preserves with rum, cherry conserve with walnuts. I stored them in the basement, and gave the little jars as gifts with fancy labels and calico wrapped around their tops.  I still have the canner stored downstairs.

But this time, I didn’t feel like fussing with the canner, and I wanted to use up as many plums as possible. So I experimented with refrigerator jam.  It made about 5 cups of jam. I put it in little one cup containers.  I gave two to friends, froze two for later, and used one up. I put it on toast and bagels, stirred it into my oatmeal, and even used a spoonful or two as a glaze on chicken. It is actually kind of jewel like in color – although it didn’t photograph particularly well.

Most of the recipes I looked at to get ideas called for 3-4 cups of sugar. I reduced it to 2 cups, and it was still very, very sweet.

Orange Plum Preserves

4 pounds ripe Italian/prune plums, pitted and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup orange juice
2 cups sugar
3 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 Tablespoons orange zest (confession – I used dried grated orange peel from a bottle)

Combine plums and orange juice in a heavy pan, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer, uncovered, 20 minutes or until plums are tender. Stir in sugar, lemon juice, and zest. Cook over medium heat 40 minutes, until thick or a candy thermometer reaches 210°. Stir mixture occasionally. (Do not overcook or mixture will scorch.) NOTE: My mixture took more like and hour and a half to get to 210. You really need to keep stiring frequently as it begins to thicken or it definitely will scorch and you’ll have to throw it all out. I lowered the heat toward the end. I also found that the candy/jelly thermometer was really the way to go, as I couldn’t judge if it was thick enough. Remove from heat and cool. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks or freeze.  This has no fat.

plum jam

And that, my dear, is finally the end of the plums!

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ABOUT KAREN

I have lost 200 pounds. I did not do it through surgery – I don’t like knives and needles – or by joining a club, vigorous exercise, or rigorous dieting. I did it by gourmet cooking. To be precise, by cooking low fat, really delicious food. I love to cook as much as I love to eat. Food magazines are some of my favorite reading. I would feel deprived if I couldn’t have the sensuous experience of good food crossing my lips. This blog is about my perpetual feast, my passionate love of food, with recipes, photos, and occasional advice and principles that I have learned along the way.

More about me.

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