Public transport and spinach and feta egg casserole

I ride public transportation, even in Texas.

Yes, that’s right, Texas.

I became a fan of public transport while I went to college in Boston.  The city was at your fingertips!  There was nowhere I couldn’t get to in a reasonable amount of time for just a buck (now more, alas).  Then I moved back to Texas.  Woe, woe, woe.  As much as I love our great state, public transportation is just not our forte, and its cost is rather high in comparison to what I am used to.

That said, the Dallas area has been making a concerted effort, however, to improve the maneuverability of its city, and I am grateful.  I actually can now ride every day to work using the dart, which means I save, at a minimum, 100 bucks a month.  All the more coffee and chocolate to drink and eat!  Plus I get to update my blog (hi guys!), read or work on my lesson plans on the road, all of which are much better options than dealing with Dallas drivers.

It also gives me good stories.

A while back, for example, I hopped off my train and onto my bus with my usual crew.  There’s a guy I think of as iPad man because he always gets on and reads his iPad for 3 or so stops before getting to his destination.  I never talk to him because he obviously wants to read whatever he’s reading.  However, a guy we’d never seen before hopped on after iPad man and immediately accosted him to chit chat.  The conversation went like this:

“I gotta do 130 hours of customer service,” said new dude (GREAT way to introduce yourself).

“Herm.” iPad dude

“I got traffic violations. Those guys don’t play.” New dude

“herm” iPad dude (not unsympathetically).

“Yeah, I gotta work at the Salvation army.  I gotta work in the back sorting stuff and preparing food palets.  They have a cooler with soda water for us and all.  I just hate it. The work’s so BORING! I mean, I get my own radio to listen to, and that’s nice, but there’s not much work.  I work with these Mexicans, man, and they keep saying “esse, slow DOWN! You’ll run outta work!” but I just keep working.  They lazy.” New dude shining strong.

“So you’re doing this how long?” iPad man engages.

“They let me pick my own hours, so I’m just going to go when I can.  I want to get my car out of hock soon though.  See, they did this to my sister.  She got stopped in Ft Worth and they took her car because it wasn’t registered.  Then they MADE her get her license renewed because it was expired and MADE her get the car inspected and registered and MADE her get insurance.  Man, I ain’t going through that rigamarole.” New dude looks for sympathy.

“Good luck.” iPad man got off the train, no reading done. 

New dude=my negative image of entitled America.  

However, a few stops later, this kid who goes to a nearby middle school hopped on the train and started talking to one of the women who works at a hospital close to my school.  He and she have been chatting lately, and she seems to have taken him under her wing.  Their conversation restored my faith in America.  It went like this:

“So, I got suspended.” Guess which one.

“Really.  What did you do.” Nurse. I love how some people make those statements and not questions.

“I got in a fight and sassed a teacher.” Munchkin

“Hon, you are close to the end of the school year. Don’t get rowdy now.” Nurse.

“But I KNOW everything! The teacher don’t like me because I know too much.” Munchkin.

“Now I know that’s a lie.  You need to get your education and go to college.  That’s the only way to make your way in this world.” Nurse. I really love her about now.

“But she grabbed my neck and smacked my head into the desk.”

“No she didn’t. If she did, you deserved it. Don’t get smart with her.”

Love.

Anyway, the rest of my day was pretty awesome as well, but by the time I got home I was wiped.  I was faced with the need to cook dinner and prep lunches for the rest of the week.  I ate some leftover saffron rice and leftover thai food for dinner and made our classic, go-to spinach, cheese and egg casserole. Enjoy.

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped coarsely
1 T olive oil
1 bag frozen, chopped spinach
12 eggs
1/2 c cottage cheese
1/4 c sriracha (because I add it to everything; it tastes fine without)
2" square of feta, shaved or chunked into however much feta you like to taste at once

How to:
1) Sautee onion until translucent.  While that's going on, melt spinach in microwave.  I tend to pour spinach from the bag into a big pyrex bowl, melt it, and then whisk the rest of the ingredients in from there to avoid mess.
2) Preheat oven to 350.
3) Whisk in eggs, cottage cheese (added for creaminess) and sriracha.
4) :Layer onions in 13X9 baking dish.  Pour egg mixture on top. Stud with feta chunks. (The sweet of the onion and salty of the feta go really well together!)
5) Bake at 350 for 25ish minutes.

Chappati chatty bo batty banana fana fo fatti....

Man.  Life is good.  A few days ago, Tom got a new job that looks just wonderful-- even better than his last!--and we found the perfect wedding and reception site!  Such a great day!  I hope you guys can celebrate with us from afar!

Today was good-- no such momentous happenings, but good!  I went to go observe a few classrooms for preparation leading up to my big Teach For America leap in the summer, and I had a great time!  Being in the classroom feels so right, especially teaching English.  I observed for about 3 hours (not including my hour commute to the school), got my fingerprints taken for my FBI background check, and headed for lunch with Betsy to discuss the upcoming things for our ministry project.  We also chatted in general, and it was a great lunch.  I was ravenous and ate half of France.

Another good part to the day: I escaped awful "learn to speak French" lady whose voice is piped into the bathroom.  I have extreme dislike for this tape.  Firstly, it's idiomatically iffy.  Secondly, the girl can't pronounce French to save her life.  It drives me CRAZY to hear her pronounce "cinque" as "sink."  One stroke of fortune, larger than you can know, was that I was able to run out of the bathroom right as she got to four.  I didn't even have to hear her butcher "quatre."

My trip to the doctor was good (just a whole chain of goodness going on!), and on the way out, I stopped into an Indian grocers whose proprietor I had met a few days earlier at the gas station.  He'd told me to come by, so, I did.  I'm adventurous like that, and I need to find a good purveyor of Indian foods.  Even for this very week's menu, I needed red lentils, black mustard seeds and curry leaves, all of which he had!  I was so happy to find the curry leaves.  Not every Indian market around here carries fresh curry leaves.  More fortuitousness.  So tomorrow will be a catfish curry recommended by my friend and fellow nature adventurer, Esther.

Raj also gave me a sample of his mango lassi (gorgeous) and a sack of his potato chips, which he makes himself and which have been named among the best in Dallas.  He also has a selection of food to-go which he and his family make.  Apparently he cooked in fancy schmancy hotel restaurants for a good chunk of his first years in the States, and he helped me decode some recipes.  A second try at saag paneer is coming up!  Dallasites, go check him out.  It's a small, modest market, but Raj is great, friendly, helpful and makes awesome food.  It's on TI boulevard and called B&P Snacks.

But today is actually not chappati, in spite of what the title says.  I came up with the title before I made the recipe and before I compared it to other chappatis.  It doesn't so much resemble other chappatis, soooo....Of course, this was irrelevant, because I had thought up that name song.  Once I had thought up the name song, I had to use it.  To further mar the chappati's authenticity, I added some pesto because I had some left over from last night.  In fact, if you investigate these ingredients, you find that this meal is exactly the same as last night's--pesto, ricotta, whole wheat flour product, veggie.  Of course, today's veggie is spinach whereas yesterday's was zucchini.....

All the same, I present it to you as something unique and different!  I served it with a beans and greens course: spinach, garlic and white bean.  In all honesty, this bread thing isn't good yet.  The goodness train hopped off the tracks during dinner preparations.  I will need to tweak it.  But the beans and greens was truly a star-- a mash fit for a king!  And since this blog post is more to chatter about my day and to share my experience with this bread thing than to encourage that you go out and try the bread thing right away, I'll toss in the beans and greens recipe too.

Non-Chappati
Ingredients:
1 c whole wheat flour
.5 c spinach
.75 c cottage cheese (I used ricotta)

Method:
1)   Blend the spinach, pesto (if using) and cottage cheese until smooth.
2)  Add the whole wheat flour and mix until smooth.  Cover with fresh kitchen towel for 30 minutes.
3)  Roll the dough out to 6 inch circles
4)  Cook in a hot skillet until bubbles form on the surface, flip, repeat.

Cost:
ricotta: $1
pesto:  $.50
whole wheat flour: $.30
spinach:  $.4
Grand total:  $2. 20 for 10 or 22 cents apiece

Beans and Greens

Ingredients:
1 c white beans, over-cooked
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp evoo
1/2 c spinach, chopped
salt to taste

Method:
1)  Give the garlic a soak in the oil as the oil heats up in a sauce pan.  Add the white beans and spinach, mix well, and stir until heated through.  Salt to taste and serve!

The easiest healthy pasta dinner I know

I know, I know.  I've been a very bad girl about updating.  We had a few outrageously large lunches with friends and then ate little or nothing for dinner, and then we went out for thai.  But I'm back.  Plus, I figure you needed time off after my eggcellent article before you could respect me and my cooking again.  

Tonight is going to be the simplest of simple meals.  This is something I concocted in Italy when I wanted a more substantial pasta meal.  I used to get these little containers of pesto at the Italian supermarket that looked like jello containers.  You'd open them and pure spring heaven would fill the air all around you.  I ate pesto for several weeks straight with whatever meal was at hand.  It went on chicken, beef, fish, pasta, veggies... you name it, I pestoed it.  And I never got tired of it.

Woe, however, to storebought pesto in the states.  I tried the Classico pesto once and nearly died of sadness and repulsion.  Tonight's meal features some pesto made by Central Market, but I intend to make my own as soon as I get that food processor.  I will say that the Central Market batch is excellent.  The green is very vivid, the flavors fresh and well balanced.  Kudos to CM.


I also have decided to get all chummy with other bloggers, and some of them have really great ways to connect us and help us share recipes with a certain focus.  One such focus is Presto Pasta Nights, which you can find at http://www.prestopastanights.com.  This week, Cynthia of The Kitchen Slave (http://thekitchenslave.com) is our gracious host!  Go check out their pasta wisdom and inspiration:-)

Also, a terrific way to lighten this up is by using all zucchini instead of noodles.  I often use a a veggie peeler to make thin strips of zucchini.  These zucchini strips make an excellent elegant crudite or side dish.  

Without further ado....

Ingredients:

.25 box whole wheat penne

1 zucchini, sliced

.25 c pesto

.5 c skim ricotta cheese.

Method:

1.  Cook pasta according to directions, adding in zucchini for the last minute of cooking time.

2.   Drain pasta and zucchini, reserving a quarter cup of the starch water.

3.  Put the pot back on the heat and toss in the ricotta and pesto.  Warm it up and thin it out with the starch water if needed.  

4.  Add pasta back into pot and stir to coat.

5.  Serve!


This serves two happily, and pesto is the most costly thing.  It also only sports about 235 calories a serving, freeing up some space for that glass of wine.



Ingredient Cost penne 0.25 pesto 2 ricotta 0.4 zucchini 0.39 Grand Total 3.04 for two

Saag Paneer, or, an introduction to the least intimidating Indian food ever

This photo ain't great, but it's the only saag picture I have.

I love saag paneer. Indian restaurants close their doors when they see me coming.  They know that if I get a table, it’s all over.  Their saag paneer container will empty in record time, with no consideration shown for fellow diners.  The Greeks could commiserate with the Indians as I am the same way over their fried/roasted cauliflower.  I try to vary my restaurant visits so as not to overwhelm any given restaurant with my gastronomic demands.

Naturally, I felt the need to conquer aspects of these cuisines in my own kitchen.  Roasting cauliflower: check.  Super easy.  Hardly even worth a blog entry, but I will do so just so you see the simplicity and gorgeousness of that humble, luscious dish.

But Indian food seems to really intimidate us whiteys.  With spices like asafoetida and black onion seed (which isn’t even related to onion), we get overwhelmed by the unknown.  And we just know that we are missing some great cultural culinary secret even when we have a recipe.  It seems saag paneer is the perfect food to use to dip my toe into the Indian food– it’s the food that white people who are more adventurous than other white people but are still white people make.  At least, that seems to be verified by the following conversation I just had with my roommate:

Me: “I made CHEESE while you were gone!”

Her: “My father made farmer’s cheese once.”

Me: “That’s what I made, too.”

Us: “It was for saag paneer.”

Case-in-point.

From the moment I stepped foot in the Indian grocers close to my office, I was drawn in.  The various smells and colors were remarkable.  My first visit was spent slowly going down the aisles, imagining I could pronounce things, wondering if the staff would be able to understand me if I tried to ask for the spice blend I was looking for.  I found amazing fruits and vegetables I don’t see anywhere else in Dallas.  And I found the courage to buy a jar of spice taste unknown.  That night I prepared an amazing lentil dish with said spice, and that courage blossomed into a demand for more experiences.

My next foray was the paneer, which I used in this dish.  I was too lazy to go get all the spices needed for some of the more complicated saag recipes, and this one did the trick and is approachable for the neophyte.  I will venture farther into the store and come out with a more traditional approach shortly.

From the blog CheapHealthyGood, a favorite of mine, with a few small adjustments.

• 2 tsp canola oil
• 1 bunch spinach
• 5 oz paneer, cubed
• 8 oz canned tomato sauce
• 3 jalapeños, finely diced
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 T garlic-ginger-cilantro paste (or more to your taste)
• 1/2 tsp coriander powder (or freshly ground coriander seeds)
• 1/2 tsp cumin powder (or freshly ground cumin seeds)
• 1 tsp salt

1) In a large skillet, saute the jalapenos and spinach until the spinach wilts.

2) Blend the spinach and chilies with a pinch of salt in a food processor, blender or food mill until smooth. Set aside.  I recommend a food mill if you have it or a food processor.  Getting the stringy bits of spinach out of the blender was… tedious and perhaps more work than the rest of the recipe combined.

3) In the skillet, heat a teaspoon of oil over medium heat and sauté onions until translucent. Add the garlic-ginger-cilantro paste, cumin, and coriander, and continue to cook for 2 – 3 more minutes.

4) Add the pureed spinach and tomato sauce to the onion mixture along with 1 tsp of salt. You may add a bit of water, if necessary, but it should not be runny or soupy. Simmer for 5–10 minutes.

5) Add paneer cubes and simmer for 2–3 more minutes, stirring occasionally.