Week 9 - Thai

So behind on catching up from last year's challenge! I've already made Week 9's dish for this year, so I really need to get going!

The Week 9 challenge was Thai, one of our favorite cuisines but one that we haven't had as often in recent years. Although I made larb gai back in 2017 when the challenge theme was also Thai, and in 2015 when the challenge theme was ground meat, it had been so long since I'd made it that I thought it was time to try it again. I used the same recipe from Eating Thai Food, and it was just as good as I remembered. I always forget that I can make this at home, and that I should do it more often.

Our adapted version of the larb recipe consisted of ground meat (used chicken here), roasted rice powder, lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, shallots, red onion, scallions, mint, and cilantro. Usually, there would also be Thai chili flakes, which I've used in the past, but we skipped that here in the hopes that B would eat it (but I can't remember if he did). Larb just makes me so happy, so I was very glad to make it again.

Since I had made larb before for two other (unofficial) challenges, I wanted to add on something else to make this Thai night different - mango sticky rice! Larb is one of my favorite savory Thai dishes, and mango sticky rice is one of my favorite desserts, so they were a good match. It's been over a year now since we made this, so I don't remember any specific recipe that we followed, or if we mostly went from our memories of what mango sticky rice should taste like.

For mango sticky rice, you need a nice, ripe, sweet mango (and we had a perfect Ataulfo one ready for it). The other main components are glutinous rice and a coconut sauce, made from heated coconut milk with sugar dissolved in it. The hardest part of this was making the glutinous rice because we didn't really have a perfect steamer for it. I guess we could have put the rice on parchment paper in our regular steamer, but instead we tried a method I found online from She Simmers, where you put the rice on a splatter guard over boiling water, cover it with a metal bowl, and steam it. It worked far better than we expected. Whenever we get good mangoes, we may have to make this again, since it's such a great dessert. Very happy with our Thai night!

Gandana Bolani

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I love, love, love garlic chives. In reading the Parwana cookbook, I learned that in Afghanistan, there is a type of leek called gandana that is often used as a filling for bolani, and that outside Afghanistan, it's often substituted with garlic chives (similar taste and texture). That sounded delicious. I had made bolani once before for the 52 week cooking challenge, and since we already revisited one dish for the AtWCC from this cookbook, why not do another (and another and another)? In addition to the gandana bolani, I also decided to do kachaloo bolani, which was bolani stuffed with potato.

The first step for bolani was to make the dough. This version consisted of flour, yeast, water, oil, and salt. This was different from the last version which was not a yeast dough. After proofing twice, the dough is rolled out into circles, then filled and sealed. Unlike the last time, where I got mostly strips and ovals, I did get a few circles this time and other almost-circles or shapes that somewhat resembled circles. I guess over that two year span, I got a little bit better at that.

For the filling last time, I made mashed potatoes and mixed them with scallions, spinach, and seasonings. For the potato one this time, I added onions (from the recipe) and scallions (because I had extra), and I will confess that I used instant mashed potatoes. There was enough to do with the dough rolling and making two fillings that I just didn't think I had the time to peel and mash potatoes too. (I was right.) The filling was fine with instant. Instant mashed potatoes are so underrated.

The chive filling was the one I was most excited about. It called for 2 cups of finely chopped garlic chives, along with a bunch of cilantro, scallions, onion, and seasonings, so lots of chopping, lots of time-consuming prep. This filling was fantastic, even eaten alone by the spoonful, so I was at least relieved that even if the bolani didn't turn out that well, the filling would be good. Our bunch of garlic chives was gigantic (wish I had taken an ingredients picture, but I was short on time and space), but it was far more than 2 cups of garlic chives. I guess I should have found a second recipe to use them in, but instead I used them all here. The leftover filling was amazing mixed into oatmeal for breakfast. I could eat that all the time if I had a daily-replenishing bowl of chive filling.

The last time I made bolani, I baked them, but this time, they went into the air fryer. That process took a little longer since the air fryer could only fit two or three at a time, but I think we liked the results better. The last time, the outside was crispy like a cracker, and everything was kind of bland, which was not the case here. It still didn't look like a thin flatbread, but it was just like eating a stuffed bread roll. The potato filling here was also a little on the blander side, but the chives one was wonderful. I have no idea how the bolani in the recipe photo (or what we had at the restaurant) were so flat while ours were huge, but at least these were tasty.

The last component was a chutney for dipping. A few days before I made these, Eater had published an article about bolani (talk about timing). In it, they profiled a refugee in Albania (funny coincidence, we were in the Albania part of the AtWCC as well when we made this) who started an Afghan restaurant that served bolani. I didn't want to make two days of bolani, so I decided to try the chutney recipe from the article even if I didn't make the bolani itself. The chutney was a blend of tomatoes, jalapeño, garlic, vinegar, salt, and sugar.

Usually, we would try to tone down the spice of these dishes for B, but he hadn't been very into dipping or sauces, so we just made it the same way but with one jalapeño instead of two and removing all the seeds. We were right in our prediction, and he had no interest in the chutney, but we really liked it. It was such a good match for the bolani. It reminded us a little bit of the salad dressing at our favorite Yemeni spot which we have always loved, and now we have the recipe for something close to that!

Even though they didn't turn out looking like the photo, we deemed our second Parwana experiment a success, and couldn't wait to see what else was in the cookbook!

Parwana

I've mentioned the Parwana cookbook here before, and besides the pizza, it was a big reason why we revisited our exploration of Afghan cuisine. The cookbook existed back when we cooked the first time in 2020, but somehow, in all my googling, I never found out about it until early 2022. I usually like including recipes from a cookbook in the challenge when I can, so it didn't feel right to leave it out just because I didn't find it in time. Looking through the cookbook, I found a recipe for a meat kofta sauce which accompanies aushak, and it sounded remarkably similar to the one we had tried at Ariana. I wondered, even though that was meant to go with the aushak, if I put it over noodles, would that actually get a little closer to what we remembered about aushe burida?

The first thing I noticed about the Parwana recipe was that the meat sauce included chana dal, a component that I remembered from Ariana but didn't have in our previous version. It also included pureed tomatoes, onion, garlic, ground lamb (which I substituted with Impossible), turmeric, curry powder, crushed coriander seeds (I used ground), tomato paste, and white vinegar. The spices were a little different from the first time, but the general flavor profile was very similar.

The third component to the dish, after the noodles and the meat sauce, was the yogurt topping. I had forgotten when I made this that the Ariana description specifically included mint in the yogurt sauce, so I decided to try out a yogurt dressing in the Parwana cookbook that just consisted of plain yogurt and garlic powder. This came from a recipe for aush, a thick soup with hand-rolled, knife-cut noodles and seasonal vegetables. That also reminded me a lot of the dish from Ariana since it included the noodles, the same meat kofta sauce, and the yogurt dressing, but it was in more of a soup form with additional vegetables. Could it be that this dish is more common in this form, and maybe that's why I couldn't find any recipes for the dish we got at Ariana itself? B doesn't really eat soup still, so I stuck with just trying to replicate the noodle dish by itself, but I was certainly intrigued by the (possible) connection.

The sauce was wonderful. At the time we had this, it had been even more years since we had the original dish, so it was even harder to compare, but we were very happy with this kofta sauce over some fettuccine (because I still didn't have time or space to add on a pasta-making project to this one). The yogurt sauce didn't add as much as the last one with the fresh garlic and the mint, so I think in the future, we'll probably mesh the two recipes together and make the meat kofta sauce from here plus the yogurt sauce that we had before. Whether or not that's authentic, and even close to what we tried originally that made us fall in love with this sauce, we're happy with what we have now!

Week 8 - Flu Remedies

They just announced Week 8 of the 2023 challenge, so I better start getting these 2022 posts done...

Khichdi is one of those comforting dishes, kind of like congee, that are so soothing when you're sick. I am so slow at recapping that I made this almost a year ago now, and as a result, my memories, other than what I wrote in our cookbook, are a little hazy. One of my resolutions this year is to be better about these recaps and catching up, because otherwise I won't remember what I liked and how I made it! (Note: I wrote that in the beginning of January, and I have been better about this year's posts but just haven't put them up yet.\ because I'm not done with 2022!)

I found this recipe for dal khichdi on Indian Healthy Recipes, and liked that it was a quick Instant Pot recipe. The ingredient list was long, including rice, moong dal, lots of spices and seasonings, and vegetables (tomato, green beans, potatoes, and spinach for us). We had most things in the pantry already, just not the moong dal and the asafoetida (I had recently gotten rid of our old one, since we bought it in London back in 2015), so it was also a convenient meal to make.

Gathering the ingredients and measuring things was probably the hardest part of this recipe, and even that wasn't very difficult. For prep, the rice and dal soaked for a little bit, the only thing I had to chop was an onion since I used a bunch of cans, and then it was just measuring things out. Ingredients got added to the Instant Pot a little at a time while sautéing, and then once the water went in, that was it. Set the Instant Pot to go, let it cook on high pressure for about 8 minutes, release, and done. I love easy meals like that.

The khichdi was really warming, comforting, and tasty. It was also great timing for this challenge, as I was actually sick when I made this. Seemed to help!