Cilantro-buttermilk salad dressing

Last week I was making vegetables in buttermilk and got hungry in the middle of cooking.  I made myself a salad and poured some of the buttermilk sauce over it, which turned out to be a very nice dressing.  This week I made a smaller amount of the sauce specifically to use as a salad dressing.

Origin

The dressing is based on the sauce for majjiga pulusu.

Ingredients

• 1/4 long green chilli pepper
• 2 Tablespoons fresh grated coconut (not dessicated)
• 1 Tablespoon fresh coriander/cilantro leaves
• 2 Tablespoons Greek yoghurt
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• salt

Process

Make a paste of the chilli pepper (including seeds and lists), the coconut, and the cilantro.  In another bowl, beat the yoghurt into the buttermilk until it is smooth.  Add the chilli-coconut-cilantro paste to the buttermilk-yoghurt mixture and beat until mixed.  Add salt to taste.

Dinner salad with cherries and blueberries

I ate alone tonight and decided to make up for eating out last night by having a salad.  Because I have a sweet tooth, I made it both dinner and dessert by adding fresh cherries, frozen blueberries, and sugared almonds.

This triple-berry salad provided the inspiration but I adapted to the ingredients I had on hand and decided to make it vegan by leaving out the cheese.

Midweek meal: chickpea fritters

This is just one of the vegetarian meals I made this week.  It consists of pan-fried chickpea-cilantro fritters, with Turkish bread, steamed carrots and peas, and a yoghurt-garlic dip.

I mixed up the yoghurt and made the fritter batter over the weekend, so last night I just had to prepare the vegetables and cook the fritters.

Lots of strawberry ice cream

A friend came over to cook with me yesterday and we made strawberry ice cream.  Lots and lots of strawberry ice cream.  I had to churn it in two batches because it wouldn’t all fit in my ice cream machine. The six of us that were eating that night only managed to eat half of it!

I wouldn’t have chosen the flavour because I’m not much of a fan of strawberry ice cream, but homemade ice cream is always the exception.

Pizza with friends

Some friends came over for pizza last night. The crust and sauce (for which I use my own recipe) were made in advance, so it took only 10 minutes to prepare a pizza (a few minutes to roll out the crust and add the toppings, and 5 minutes to cook). That was handy, because there were five people and five different topping preferences!  Each pizza was divided into halves or thirds and after two pizzas everyone had gotten a slice to specification.

The first pizza was an interesting mix of vegan cheese and piles of meat.  The second was part cheese and pesto, and part meat and chilli peppers.

Taking pictures of the third pizza would just have made us look gluttonous.

The nice thing about homemade pizza is that even if you are indulging in a less healthy meal, you can still make a few changes.  I like a lot more sauce and a lot less cheese than I’d get if I went out for pizza, and making my own lets me have this tastier (and healthier) configuration.

Thai beef salad: a summer dinner

Tonight’s meal was Thai beef salad with a side of oven-roasted sweet potato.

Mix-and-match Indian meal of the week

Tonight’s meal featured a rather eclectic mix of dishes.  I’d already made several northern dishes for this week, which I planned to serve with rice: channa chaat, bhindi masala and aloo matar.  But yesterday a friend and I made a south Indian meal and there was a lot of dosa batter left over.

It turns out dosa is pretty nice with aloo matar.

A simple dessert: carrot kheer

I had a guest for dinner last night, so I made a dessert of carrot kheer, which we ate chilled.

Another June night, another new recipe

Another dish I tried this week for the first time was ‘nacho’ roasted chickpeas, which I served with some vegetables with Italian herbs.  I like to make at least one recipe I haven’t tried before each week, although lately it’s been far more often than that.  Yet somehow the list of recipes I want to try never seems to shrink significantly.

Another day, another Indian meal

This week I made daal with tomato, lemon rice, rasaam and vankaya nuvvula brinjal.