Curried Lentils with Sweet Potatoes and Spinach

My beautiful Bride was making a vegetarian meal, and was washing and cutting some spinach we had bought from the Farmer's Market on Sunday, and I happened to be reading this copy of Delicious Living magazine that I had got recently, it has numerous interesting articles on Organics. This recipe caught my eye, mostly because it is a curry and has lentils and sweet potatoes (of which we had also bought some on the weekend), but it calls for spinach, and so we decided to divide the spinach and make this. I like it when things converge like this. It turned out really good tasting, and it was easy to make (15 minutes of prep time and 15 minutes of cooking time). We had it over rice. You could probably up the amount of liquid to make it into a soup. We used canned lentils; if you use dried lentils, you will have to cook them for 10 minutes and then add the sweet potato and cook for another 10 minutes. To finish it off, the magazine suggested you put a dollop of whole-milk yogurt with some sliced almonds.

Curried Lentils with Sweet Potatoes and Spinach
Adapted from a recipe from Delicious Living Magazine
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 large garlic cloves, minced
1 Tbsp curry powder
1 Tbsp minced fresh ginger
1 tsp ground cumin
1 cup canned lentils, rinsed
2-1/2 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/4-inch cubes
4 cups baby spinach leaves
salt, to taste

Heat olive oil in a medium pot on medium heat. Add onion and garlic and sauté until soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in curry powder, ginger and cumin and let cook for 1 minute. Stir in lentils and broth. Bring liquid to a boil. Add sweet potatoes and bring back to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes, until sweet potato is tender and water is reduced. Stir in baby spinach and cook for 1 minute longer, covered, until spinach is just wilted. Add salt to adjust seasonings.

Blog Action Day

The idea for Blog Action Day is to get bloggers together to blog about a subject; this year's subject is the environment, what is wrong and what we can do about the problems. I'm a day late, it's supposed to be October 16th, but I'm posting my small contribution.

A particular thorn in my side regarding the environment, is the plastic bags one gets from every store, it is hard to recycle them, one can only use so many for garbage, and they don't break down when they do end up in the waste system. These plastic bags clog the environment in so many ways. Even recycling them is not so good, as the plastic ends up being more brittle and does not last as long. Cities and towns are taking the initiative, banning plastic bags, and now I see stores selling large canvas or plastic bags to replace the thin plastic shopping bags. The idea that I have, which probably is not new, is for these same stores to provide some sort of credit if shoppers use their bags, say 5 cents for each bag used. I don't see why it wouldn't be a win-win for the stores, each bag could be sold for 5 dollars, that means 100 visits to the store for each bag before they would lose their investment, plus the savings in plastic bags, and the good public relations.

Just my two cents, but I think that people would embrace this idea sooner if they received some sort of compensation for using this new shopping bag.

Saray Prens Sandwich Biscuits with Hazelnut Cream

I found this Turkish product in a Chinese supermarket, honestly the only reason I bought it, was that it has hazelnuts. The ingredient listing looks pretty similar to any store-bought cookie, at least it contains real hazelnuts as opposed to artificial flavour.

The buttery sandwich biscuit is fairly tasty, the hazelnut flavour comes through, mixed with chocolate, overall these were not bad.

Hershey Kissables Special Dark

This candy coated dark chocolate offering from Hersheys is likely another example of a Chocolate company bringing out a version of their regular milk chocolate product, with dark chocolate, to join the bandwagon, to offer consumers what they are slowly beginning to prefer, dark chocolate. Hopefully, they will begin to demand good dark chocolate, this, while better tasting than its milk chocolate kissing cousin, does not have a great flavour. It is crunchy on the outside, less so than Smarties or M&Ms. I don't think I would buy this product again.

The candy coating is interesting for its colour choices, lilac, purple, red and brown.

Thai Frozen Banana Cake

This is a traditional Thai dessert found in local markets, my beautiful Thai Bride remembers enjoying them since Primary School. They are prepared fresh, usually steamed, and are not found frozen like this; this product is likely only for the export market, we found it at a Chinese supermarket. Why have it frozen when you can have it fresh? Too, they are not sold in restaurants, only at certain local markets.

Inside the package are two wrapped banana leaves tied together, four in total.

The ingredients are glutinous rice (60%), banana (25%), coconut milk (13%) and sugar (2%).

The bananas used are not the ones found in North American supermarkets, they are smaller and have more flavour. Definitely quite delicious.

Civet Durian Pancake

Another of the varied baked goods that I came across recent that contain something of the King of Fruit, the Durian, is these crispy pancakes.

These are quite tasty, they both smell and taste of Durian, and, looking at the ingredients, I see that they contain Durian juice, along with Coconut Juice; at least the flavour does not come from artificial Durian flavour.

Dede Instant Thai Tea

Having tried and sort of liked the Thai Instant Coffee by DeDe, I wanted to try the Instant Thai Tea offering. I enjoy tea, mostly in the morning, and, like how I drink coffee, usually drink it "black", meaning without cream or sugar, and more than likely it is a herbal tea or a green tea, so I looked at the ingredient listing of this instant tea with trepidation. Instant Thai tea, sugar, non-dairy creamer (with glucose, palm kernel oil, casein and artificial colour), FD&C Yellow No. 6 and vanilla flavour make up this instant tea. I find it has a little too much sugar; my beautiful Bride added some black tea to it, to give it a little more flavour. Overall, it's not bad.

Russet Apple Hitchhiker

We found this lucky hitchhiker in our bag of russet apples. We were lucky to get some russets this year, the season for them is quite short, two weeks, so some stands at the Farmer's Market had one. Luckily, we found one with lots.

Ceasar's Imperial Cocktail

This is the first of the recipes that we tried from the cookbook Cooking With Asterix, my beautiful Thai Bride thought it looked tasty. To make a nice presentation, dip the rim of glasses in the juice of half a lemon, then in sugar and allow to dry, and decorate with a slice of orange. We found this to taste mostly of grapefruit juice, next time we'll likely half the amount, or omit it altogether. Grenadine syrup is flavoured pomegranate syrup, used mostly in cocktail drinks. I imagine that you can double or triple this recipe, as is, it makes four large glasses worth.

Ceasar's Imperial Cocktail
Adapted from Cooking With Asterix
400 mL orange juice
200 mL pineapple juice
200 mL grapefruit juice
3 Tbsp grenadine syrup
400 mL sparkling water

Pour the orange juice, pineapple juice and grapefruit juice into a jug. Add the grenadine syrup and whisk. Add the sparkling water water and mix well.

Serve with ice cubes.

Cookbook Review - Cooking With Asterix

I grew up liking the cartoons of Goscinny and Uderzo about the adventures of a tiny band of Gauls, the heroes are called Asterix and Obelix, who successfully defended themselves against the advances of Julius Caesar of Rome, with the help of a magic potion that gave them unusual strength; if you haven't heard of them, and want a great laugh, check them out.

One of the many tie-in products for the 33 cartoon books, and several movies, is the 1991 cookbook Cooking With Asterix. There are four main sections, Snacks and Starters, Main Courses, Sweets and Beverages, each of them contain recipes that feature a character or characters from the series, like Unhygeniex' Crispy Sardine Sandwiches (the Village fishmonger); Impedimenta's Chicken Drumsticks (the wife of the Chief of the Village); Dogmatix Hot Dogs (Asterix and Obelix' pet guard dog); Pirate's Dark Chocolate Mousse (who recurringly lost ships to the pair); Cleopatra's Exotic Gateau (Asterix and Obelix went on many adventures around the world, one of them they visited Cleopatra). All of the recipes are easy to make with easy to find ingredients, though they use the European measurement of a 'glass' (which equals 200 mL).