May Book Club Lunch

Now if you've read earlier posts, you know that some friends and I have our own book club and try to meet each month. We started last May, so this month's meeting marked our 1-year anniversary! While we haven't met every month due to life getting in the way sometimes, we have met most months. I do have to admit that as time has gone on, the amount of time spent discussing the book has gone down and the amount of time devoted to the food at our meetings has increased!

Since we started our inaugural meeting with a book by a Bengali author, we felt it appropriate to come full circle and center this meeting around another South Asian author. We ended up choosing "The Hindi Bindi Club," by Monica Pradhan. Not only did the whimsical title catch our attention, but the book also contained recipes! How fun to read the book and then make some of the recipes out of it!

So that is exactly what we did. After reading the book (ahem, 2 of the 3 of us, that is), we made a list of all the recipes in the book and picked 3 to prepare. Since we pretty much followed the recipes as written, I'm going to be a tease and not post the recipes here. Plus the book is good and you should read it! We ended up making Preity's Goan Shrimp Curry, Saroj's Famous Samosas, and Uma's Shorshe Salmon Maach. What are all these dishes?




Preity's Goan Shrimp Curry is pretty much what it sounds like, a shrimp curry with a South Indian touch by way of tamarind, curry leaves and coconut milk. Now I'm normally not a fan of curries made with coconut milk, but with all the different flavors going on, the coconut taste was in the background. We made this one without any tweaking.

Uma's Shorshe Salmon Maach was a Bengali-inspired salmon dish. It used paanchphoran, which as I have mentioned before is best described as a Bengali 5-spice mixture. The salmon fillets were coated with mustard oil, another Bengali staple. The paanchphoran was supposed to be ground into a paste with water and dried red chilis, but my mini chopper doesn't seem to like spices, so they remained whole. The fish was supposed to be grilled, but since we needed the stove for the shrimp curry, rice, and making the potato filling we baked it instead. I have to say of all the dishes we made, this one didn't turn out as I'd expected. That was probably because of the spices not being ground into a paste.



I've talked about samosas before on here! So I don't need to explain Saroj's Famous Samosas in great detail. We did tweak the ingredients a bit because we felt it needed a little extra "something." And because we were a bit short on time we didn't make the samosa shell from scratch. I'd wanted to use refrigerated pie crust since it's ready to go, but we ended up with crescent roll dough instead. No matter, I just rolled the dough into circles using a glass as my makeshift rolling pin, cut each circle into halves and we made the samosas out of those, baking them instead of frying them. These turned out great and we scarfed down most of the batch.

Next month's book club pick has to do with zombies, so it'll be interesting to see how we plan our food around that!

Bring on the bentos!

Wow, it's been a while since I've done a bento post! I'm hoping to get back into it so hopefully you'll see more of these! Let's see what I packed for tomorrow at the office . . .




The left container has 4 of the mini frittatas I posted about earlier. When I said mini, I wasn't kidding! These are about the size of a quarter! I plan to have those with some oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow. I also have some cucumber slices and a Laughing Cow wedge. The right container has some leftover lemony spinach couscous with parmesan and some garlic shrimp I cooked up to go with dinner last night. Just need to figure out an afternoon snack and I'm set!

I also want to remind you that my 100th post is coming up -- this one is #93! I plan to do a give-away of some awesome stuff like spice mixes, maybe a cookbook or two, and maybe a couple of surprise items. Intrigued? :)

Recipe Review: Shrimp and Orzo with Cherry Tomatoes and Romano Cheese

Disclaimer: I was experimenting with our old digital camera today, please forgive me for the ugly picture.

I love the combo of pasta, shrimp, and garlic, if previous posts haven't been obvious enough. I've had this recipe from Cooking Light saved in my recipe file for what seems like forever and finally decided it was time to try it out. It seemed yummy enough, calling for orzo, shrimp, and garlic among other ingredients. I'd never made orzo before but happened to have some in my pantry (funny how that worked out!), evidence of past shopping expeditions.

As usual, I tweaked it to fit what I had in the fridge and to my tastes. I subbed Campari tomatoes for cherry tomatoes (they were getting wrinkly), shaved Parmesan for the Romano, and added baby spinach to the mix.

Shrimp and Orzo with Cherry Tomatoes and Romano Cheese

Adapted from Cooking Light

Ingredients:

1 cup uncooked orzo
1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled and deveined (I used frozen)
2 tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup chopped onion
1 tbsp. minced garlic
crushed red pepper to taste
2 cups halved cherry tomatoes
1 cup baby spinach
1/3 cup shaved Romano or Parmesan
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil

Cook the pasta in boiling water, then drain and let sit.

While the pasta is cooking, heat up 1 tbsp. of the olive oil and saute shrimp, adding salt and black pepper. Remove from pan when pink. Add remaining oil, then add onions, cooking until they start to turn golden. Add garlic and crushed red pepper, cook for a minute. Add the tomatoes and spinach and cook until spinach begins to wilt. Now add the pasta and shrimp back in, mixing to combine thoroughly. Add more salt and pepper to taste, then add cheese and basil.

Serves 4.

Verdict: Ehhhhh. I think I need to make it again to give it a fair shot. I'm not a big fan of cooked fresh tomato, so might need to tweak that. Less onion or even omitting the onion might be something else to consider. Using fresh shrimp instead of frozen would be an improvement. Oh and not forgetting the basil would be good too -- I thought it was missing a little something.

The original recipe says that leftovers taste good as a cold pasta salad. Hope so, because that's getting packed into my bento for tomorrow's lunch!


UPDATE:

The leftovers tasted MUCH better cold at lunch, so maybe this would be better off as a pasta salad rather than a warm entree.

Garlicky shrimp and spinach with pasta

Major confession: this is one of my "toss stuff in a pan" dinners where I don't measure anything. So if you're okay with figuring out what works for you, then read on. If not, then read on anyway!

Garlicky Shrimp and Spinach with Pasta

shrimp (I used frozen, uncooked, peeled shrimp -- fresh would be better)
spinach (I used frozen chopped spinach - fresh baby spinach would be nice here)
olive oil
minced garlic
salt & pepper
crushed red pepper
parsley flakes (yes I know fresh is better, but this is what I had)
lemon juice
"light" butter spread (you can use real butter if you want) (or use fake butter spray if you're being REALLY good)
pasta (I used Ronzoni Smart Taste rotini)

Start boiling water in a saucepan for the pasta. Make the pasta according to directions on package. While cooking pasta, start shrimp and spinach.

Heat a large frying pan over medium high heat. Add shrimp and spinach -- all the water will come out so you're kinda steaming it all. Cook off the water, then add the olive oil and minced garlic, salt & pepper, and crushed red pepper. Cook for a few minutes, the shrimp should be nearly cooked at this point. Now add a small spoonful of the light butter spread, the lemon juice, and the parsley flakes. It should smell very yummy at this point.

Once the pasta is done, drain it. By this point the shrimp and spinach should be done, so dump the pasta into the frying pan and mix it all up. Try to coat the pasta with the garlic and spinach. Taste for seasoning and add whatever you think is lacking. Does it taste right?

Eat up! I sprinkled a little parmesan cheese on mine and we served with garlic bread. If you're piggies like us you'll eat the whole pan and won't have yummy leftovers for the next day.