h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

2nd November Vegetable Biryani.

Some of the best vegetarian food is Indian and some of the best Indian vegetarian food is Gujarati. If you're in the Leeds area, try Prashad's Gujarati vegetarian restaurant. Today's vegetable Biryani comes from Hansa's Indian Vegetarian Cookbook.

I think there are different kinds of biryani, but this one consists of two parts. First you make a tomato sauce spiced with ginger, garlic, garam masala, turmeric, cumin, coriander and chilli. This should be allowed to simmer gently and stirred occasionally.

Then you cook basmati rice pilau style - frying it with spices, then adding water and cooking until the rice is soft and the water has been been absorbed. You add peppers, mushrooms, cashew nuts,and diced potato. The recipe calls for the mushrooms, potato and cashew nuts to be deep fried, but I prefer to shallow fry.

Then you combine the two. The recipe suggests letting the rice cool down completely, adding the sauce and heating the biryani in a microwave or oven. I have never seen the need for this. I keep my sauce simmering slowly, then add the rice mixture as soon as it is done.

We serve this with a simple raita, made with yogurt mixed with cucumber and flavoured with a little turmeric and some mint.

Thank you Minorvogonpoet for your very two lovely recipes. For the first other recipe could I substitute aubergines and use squash/pumpkin.

Squash or pumpkin could work. They would give a sweeter taste probably.

Pumpkin doesn't seem like it would work well (and I adore pumpkin) just because it's not exactly something that slices easily... Courgettes/marrow (if I've finally figured out what marrows are...)/zucchini would work well, though.

3rd November. What to make for Christmas?

Oh dear, it's that time of year again. I've usually made a traditional Christmas cake, with lots of fruit and nuts, eggs, margarine, sugar and flour. However, we like experimenting with making different types of bread, and we've got a book called All You Knead is Bread. This features a stollen and we were tempted.

The recipe calls for raisins and almonds to be soaked in alcohol overnight. The stronger the better, as the alcohol preserves the stollen. Although we don't drink much, we seem to have acquired assorted bottles over the years. I found some powerful ancient rum.

Tomorrow, we will need to mix yeast, sugar and milk with flour, add butter and knead. The difficult part looks like folding the stollen up before leaving it to rest and baking it. We'll have to see how it goes.

[ Amy P ]

4th November

I sometimes think that my cooking would horrify my mother! So much garlic, so many spices. Today I made paneer skewers. The recipe for these comes from the Prashad book. The original is intended as barbeque food, but we've found they work fine as a main meal, if you serve them with naan bread and a raita.

The dish involves making a marinade of yogurt with garlic, coriander, chillis and vegetable oil. Into this I put 8 pieces of paneer, 4 of green pepper, 4 of yellow pepper, 4 halved shallots and 4 mushrooms. (The mushrooms aren't in the original recipe.) I left this, covered, in the fridge for most of the day.

My husband skewered the pieces, and I grilled them. They only need 20 minutes.

I'm not sure about the stollen. I followed the recipe as far as I could. I added yeast and milk to flour and sugar and left it for a while. Then I added butter and tried to knead it, without much success, because the mixture was too dry. I added the second amount of butter and kneaded again, which made it look better. After more rising time, I added the fruit and rolled it up. I'm not sure how much it's risen and some of the raisins are burnt.

[Amy P]

5th November

It was my husband who did the fancy food today. In the past he's made felafel, by cooking and mincing chick peas, mixing with onion and garlic, coriander, cumin, turmeric, chilli and an egg. He makes the mixture into balls and deep fries them but has found they tend to fall to pieces. So, this time, he left out the egg, but coated the balls in mashed potato. They stayed together nicely but I'm not sure the flavour is strong enough to cope with the coating of potato.

[Amy P]

6th November
Today was beetroot and goat's cheese tart. Beetroot and goat's cheese is a lovely combination - the flavours complement each other and the colours look pretty too. This one is from a recipe by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall but there are other variants.
You need to cook the beetroot first. The recipe says roast them for an hour, but I tend to put them in the microwave with some water. Then I make a shortcrust case, but I have seen variants that use puff pastry. I put in one layer of slices of goat's cheese, then a mixture of beetroot, red wine, honey and herbs.

[Amy P]

7 November
Today was fisherman's soup/stew. This is a variant of a Basque fish stew I found in a book but I add paprika, making it almost a Hungarian fisherman's soup.
I chop an onion and some tomatoes (though you could use a tin,) and crush a garlic clove. Add pepper and a generous spoonful of paprika, then simmer this mixture until the tomato is soft and the flavours mixed.
Meanwhile chop a few potatoes and carrots into chunks and cover them with water. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.
Cut a piece of tuna into chunks. Add the tomato mixture and the tuna and simmer for about 6 minutes until the tuna is soft.
Serve with crusty bread. This is a good warm winter dish and, because there's so much else in it, you can skimp a bit on the tuna, which is expensive.

8 November
The other day, SuperFrenchie was wondering what to do with a squash. The answer is - stuff it!

I had a red onion squash in my Riverford vege box. My husband cut it in half round the equator, I covered the cut sides with garlic, salt and olive oil and roasted the squash halves for 45 minutes. In the meantime, I cooked some basmati rice and mixed it with a few raisins, chopped olives, chopped coriander, turmeric and ras-el-hanout. I then stuffed this mixture into the cavities.
Ras-el-hanout is a Middle Eastern spice mixture. We once went to the trouble of finding it in a French supermarket, only to discover their version was basically curry powder. The sort we get in the UK is better.

This is amazing mvp! Can I come to supper please? Like, every night? heheh.

No, seriously, we're two vegetarians who really could benefit from these recipes!!

You get a Riverford Veg Box? We used to live in Dartington, Devon, about a mile from the original Riverford farm shop, and lived out of it for years. I didn't know they delivered to the South East? Mind you, I've seen Riverford vans near Brighton, so they must have other farms now?

How interesting.

Great NaJoPoMo! Shine on, writerlady and culinarylady!

[Amy P]

Thanks Cactuscafe.
Riverford deliver to much of England now I think.And they do recipes.
My recipes come from a variety of sources -Rose Elliott, Hansa's Indian cookery book, Prashad's, Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall, Yottam Ottolenghi (though his tend to be very complicated), Riverford and my much thumbed book The Greatest Vegetarian Recipes.

Actually that last should be 'The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook'. (Comes of doing this in a hurry, when my husband wants his computer back!)

9 November. Today was paneer saag- Indian cooking cheese with spinach. This is a combination of paneer and a spinach curry (bhaji) recipe in Hansa's Indian Vegetarian book.
The paneer needs to be fried first. Be careful when frying it, because it spits like a wildcat. Keep the temperature setting down and don't get too close.
Chop an onion, crush a garlic, chop two green chillis and a slice of ginger. Chop a small potato and at least 300gms of spinach. Put a teaspoon of fenugreek in a big pan and then fry the onion. Add garlic, ginger, chilli, turmeric, cumin and coriander and garam masala and cook briefly. Then add tomato puree in water (I always find I need to add more water than the recipe says) and the chopped potato. Cook until the potato pieces have softened, then add the spinach. As soon as the spinach leaves have wilted, stir in the paneer pieces and heat through.

[Amy P]