Polenta Lasagna with Creamy Marinara Sauce

This one gets me the "gourmet quality" award from my sole taster.

I made more than necessary for two persons because I knew I could play with each of the following ingredients in different ways, separate from one another. For instance, the roasted vegetables filling can easily be made into an omelet.

For the Polenta:
(8x8 baking pan)

• 1 cup cornmeal
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 teaspoon chopped rosemary
• Sea salt and black pepper to taste

1. Bring water to boiling. Stir in cornmeal and keep whisking until cooked and thick. Add rosemary, salt and pepper to taste.
2. Line a 8x8 baking pan with aluminum foil. Pour polenta over. Let cool and chill for at least 1 hour.
   

For the filling:

• 1 eggplant
  
• 1 red bell pepper
  
• mushroom, chopped
• 1 red onion, chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 Tablespoons water
• 1 Tablespoon basil leaves, chopped
• 1 tablespoon oregano, chopped
• 4 oz mozzarella cheese
• Shaved Parmesan cheese for topping
  

Preheat oven to 200C. With the eggplant, use a fork to punch a few holes throughout and bake until the skin is charred and flesh is soft (about 45 minutes). Cut roasted eggplant into halves and scoop out the flesh from the skin. Chop coarsely.


With the red bell pepper, turning and roasting until the skin is charred. Peel off the skin once it's cool. Remove the seeds and chop coarsely.

Saute onions, garlic and mushroom with 1 tablespoon of butter and a generous pinch of salt. Stir to coat evenly. Add water, cover and cook until onions are soft. Uncover and cook until water evaporates. Remove from heat. Stir in eggplant, red bell pepper, basil, oregano and mozzarella cheese.

For the Marinara Sauce:

I twisted and combined two marinara sauce recipes into one. You may skip the cream cheese - it's good though. I didn't bother to puree the mixture - it's kind of good in its chunky, rough way.

While I was searching through the fridge for ingredients, the container where this Ethiopian spice-mix has been resting in for more than 6 months stared right into my eyes. I took a sniff at it - smelled good to me - and decided to use it in place of chillies flakes. Hey! It worked! I can now declare it "keep well in refrigeration for more than 6 months."

Once again, I'm showing my unrelenting effort in making homemade crushed tomatoes. Feel free to ignore my stubbornness. The tomatoes tasted better this time. Lucky strike!

• 2 large ripe tomatoes
• 1 red onion, chopped
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon Ethiopian spice-mix (or chillies flakes)
  
• 2 Tablespoons basil, chopped
• 2 oz cream cheese, cubed
• sea salt to taste

1. Bring a pot of water to boil. Throw in tomatoes and cook until the skins break. Remove and let cool under running water (or cold water). Peel the skins and cut into quarters. Mash roughly. Set aside.
   
2. Saute onions and garlic with spice until fragrant (watch out for browning). Add crushed tomatoes. Cook until boiling.
3. Stir in basil and cream cheese to blend.
   
4. Taste and season with salt if necessary.
   

To assemble:

Preheat oven at 180C. Cut polenta into sizes that best fit your baking pan. Layer in this sequence (from the bottom): sauce, polenta, filling, sauce, polenta, filling..... End with sauce and top with shaved Parmesan cheese. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes. Uncover, reduce the temperature to 150. Bake for another 10 minutes. Allow it to cool before serving.

Roasted Pumpkin Lasagna with Butter Beans

Piping hot and bubbly out from the oven, it looks "alive".

This recipe uses two ingredients that I don't normally cook with: 1. carrot - I'm ok with carrot, I just don't give much thought about cooking or eating them; 2. celery - I'm better with celery now than when I was a kid. There's this other issue with celery: they come in big packages - I don't want to be thinking what to cook with celery for 7 consecutive meals. So it's not hard to see this is a combination that I'd usually avoid. It's probably the frozen cooked butter beans that called me to this recipe, which ironically plays no part in the original recipe.

I kind of messed up the part with the roasted pumpkin and cooked butter beans. The original instruction is "Clear a spot in the bottom of the pan and add the chopped roasted butternut squash and about 1/4 of the beans with their liquid. Mash the two together with a potato masher or the back of a spoon, and then add the rest of the beans to the pot." I didn't de-froze the beans fast enough (I forgot we now have a microwave). I also think butter beans are not as easily mashed as canned cannelini beans. Therefore, after some considerable futile attempts, the butter beans remained mostly "unharmed" and intact in my recipe.

The lasagna noodle recipes that I found online seem pretty strict forward. I'm not a pasta person or I wouldn't mind investing in one of those pasta maker and make my own noodles.

I'm glad I didn't reduce the recipe and made what's enough for 6 persons. Adrian did have a little comment "look like we'll be having lasagna for a few more dinners." When I said we could give it away, he looked surprised "give it away? WHY?" Yes, the lasagna is G.O.O.D.

For the filling:

• 1/2 a large pumpkin, roasted with olive oil, salt and black pepper. Mashed.
  
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• small bunch of fresh thyme, leaves picked and chopped
• small bunch of fresh oregano, leaves picked and chopped
• 2 big handful of cooked butter beans
  
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
  
• salt and pepper

1. Saute onions with salt. Add celery and carrots. Stir to coat. Cover and let cook over medium heat for 10 minutes.
   
2. Stir in thyme and oregano. Stir to coat. Cover and let cook for another 5 minutes.
   
3. Stir in garlic and fry till fragrant.
4. Add cooked butter beans and mashed roasted pumpkin.
   
5. Deglaze with white vinegar. Add some water to thin it out if necessary. Season with salt and pepper.
   

For the béchamel:

• 5 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup flour
• 3 cups milk, heated
  
• 2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg

1. Melt butter over medium heat. Whisk in flour. Continue to whisk until the mixture turns golden brown (about 6 - 7 minutes).
2. Add heated milk, one cup at a time, stirring constantly until the mixture is smooth.
   
3. Bring it to boil and cook for another 30 seconds. Season with salt and nutmeg.

To assemble:

• filling
• bechamel sauce (set aside 1 cup for topping)
  
• 4 oz. of mozzarella cheese
• 3 oz. of ricotta cheese
• Lasagna noodles
  

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Grease a 10cm x 20cm Pyrex baking dish with butter. Mix together mozzarella and ricotta. Set aside 1/4 cup.
2. Layer from the bottom in this order: bechamel, lasagna sheet, filling, and cheese. Repeat as many times as necessary. End with 1 cup of bechamel sauce and sprinkle the top with 1/4 cup of cheese.
3. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes, until golden brown and bubbly. Cool before serving.
   

Grilled Corn Soup

I know I have made a corn soup somewhere somehow sometime before this. I wanted to use this recipe because I was intrigued by the promise of basil-infused oil - Love it! The original recipe uses cream and stock, which I didn't It also recommends to strain out the solids from the liquid, which I skipped - I like my soup thick and chunky.

If you are using fresh corn like I did, start with cooking the corn over salted boiling water for about 3 - 5 minutes. Once cooked, remove and put it to grill. I just discovered I can grill certain foods using Teflon pan! Eureka!! Let it cool before you attempt to remove the kernels. You'll need to reserve the cobs for use in the soup.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 large onion, roughly chopped
• 1 small potato, cubed
• 2 cups whole milk
• 1 cooked cob of corn, kernels removed
• one generous pinch of sea salt
• Corn kernels
  
• dash of paprika
• pinch of ground cayenne pepper
• Freshly ground black pepper

1. Saute onions with a generous pinch of salt.
   
2. Stir in potato cubes to coat. Add milk, and stripped corn cob. Simmer for 10 minutes.
3. Add kernels, paprika, cayenne and black pepper. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Taste and adjust with salt.
   
4. Process into puree, and serve with basil-infused oil.
   

Basil-infused Oil

• 2 TB Olive oil
• a handful of fresh basil leaves

Bring olive oil to heat (not boiling) over medium heat. Remove from heat and throw in basil leaves. Let it sit for 10 minutes or so. Swirl oil over soup to serve.

Red Chillies Butter Beans and Chickpeas

I took the recipe from 101 Cookbooks and revamped it to its entirety, almost, due to resources restriction. First off, adobo sauce from canned chipotle pepper. Never see fresh or canned chipotle pepper for sale here in Bangkok. I once read somewhere that I could substitute adobo sauce with cayenne pepper, and had been doing it a few times. Now I'm curious about this sauce. I found a homemade recipe here. The only dried chillie they sell here is either Thai chillie or red chillie. I have both but I have no idea if they are different or same. Not knowing which to use best in place of anaheim, I decided to give each type an equal chance.

Homemade Adobo Sauce

• 4 dried red chilies
• 4 dried Thai chilies
• 2 garlic gloves
• 1 TB flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• lime juice
  
• sea salt to taste

Roast chilies in hot pan fragrant and not burnt.

Pour in enough hot water to cover and soak for 30 minutes.

Puree chilies with soaking water. Add the rest of the ingredients and puree to a paste.

Heat a spoon of pure sesame oil. Cook paste for a few minutes until thickened. Taste and season with salt and lime juice.

The recipe mentions use of any big white beans. I saw dried butter beans in the store and despite not having heard of it before, they looked familiar enough that I picked them over haricot beans. It took 0.17 seconds for Google to come out with 670,000 search results, faster than the time I took to click on the link that sounded like the answer I was looking for. Apparently butter beans are large, flat and white lima beans. Mystery solved.

Adrian and I also have some reservation about canned tomatoes. First of all, I didn't know why anyone would buy canned whole peeled tomatoes and crushed tomatoes if it's tomatoes you need. Convenient, perhaps? Having returned from our trip in The State and France, I came to accept what my friend Dia once told me: there's no good tomatoes in Thailand. Also Sandra who once defended her love for canned tomatoes because of the consistency in quality. Like strawberry and avocado, tomatoes just don't taste as good here as they do in the West.

Summer display of tomatoes of various shapes and colors at Seattle's Sunday Farmer's Market on Broadway.

Having said that I'm still concerned about the chemical leach that claimed to happen with canned tomatoes due to acidity of the produce. So what to do? For now, I'll make myself contented making crushed or whole peeled tomatoes with local tomatoes, or, I can pay double the price for French tomatoes. NOT. So how do you make crushed tomatoes?

Throw them into hot boiling water and remove to cool running water (or iced water) once the skins start to break. Peel the skin (or not) and crush them however you like. Done.

I somehow managed to make the adobo sauce just right (newbie's luck!), and used just enough of the paste for the right amount of spiciness. The taste went well with the slightest hint of saltiness of feta, and the toasted breadcrumbs were best to have more than less!

Red Chillies Butter Beans and Chickpeas

• Dried butter beans and chickpeas, soaked overnight, cooked according to instruction.
  
• 1 big pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1 generous pinch of sea salt
  
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• Two medium-size home-crushed tomatoes
  
• 1/2 tablespoon fresh basil leaves and rosemary leaves, chopped
• 1/2 - 1 tablespoon homemade adobo sauce
• 2/3 cup kale, washed, de-stemmed, and very finely chopped
• 1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
  
• 4 slices of whole grain French bread (process into crumbs and toast in a skillet with melted butter, or buy ready made bread crumbs)
  
• Green Pesto (Instead of cilantro pesto as suggested in 101 Cookbooks, I used every wilting-greens in the fridge: cilantro, basil and parsley, and blend them with garlic, parmesan and extra-virgin olive oil.)

1. Preheat oven at 200C.
   
2. Gently saute red pepper flakes, garlic and salt over medium heat until just fragrant. Do not brown the garlic.
3. Immediately add crushed tomatoes and herbs. Stir and cook for a few minutes.
   
4. Remove from heat and add adobo sauce. Taste and adjust with salt or more adobo sauce to your own liking.
5. Toss beans, kale and sauce together. Transfer to a baking pan. Sprinkle with feta cheese. Bake for 30 minutes or until cheese brown and beans are crusty. Remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes.
6. Top beans with toasted breadcrumbs. Drizzle with green pesto just before serving.
   

Another Long Absence

It's been 3 months since I posted anything on this blog. We had a great time spending summer in West Coast of US. It was an educational and eye-opening trip - the best trip I've had so far. We first spent two weeks in San Diego, going in and out of Generative Trance for two weeks at Stephen Gilligan's Trance Camp at Rancho Bernardo. It was followed by a road trip up along Highway 1 to Seattle. We were totally in awe with the beauty of the coast, and how diverse it gets from town to town just within California. I also got pulled over by the highway patrol because I was driving "on" the solid white line. I thought of asking for a photo session but was too intimidated by the uniform.

Things just got better when we got to Seattle. Adrian's brother, Ian, rented a propeller plane from the club that he's a member of and flew us from Washington to Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Oregon. It was incredible to see the landscape changes. America is truly a beauty.

We then flew to St Tropez, France, to teach Yoga to a Russian family whom we have come to befriend over the last couple of years. Not only were we treated to their private chef, but also given a Mercedes cabriolet to drive around in. We were blessed to get a taste of the life of rich and famous without the means.

Since then, apart from a couple of group classes at the studio, I have been busy giving private Yoga lessons everyday. I still cook although most of the times it was either old trick or nothing worth blogging about. Also, there came the laziness, again. Looking back, it seems to have taken on a trend of lazy-no-blog whenever I come back from travel. Today I decided to break into that blogging cycle again, before I travel, again, to KL next week. Guess how long it's going to take me to start blogging again?

Here's a few recipes that I did over the last couple weeks that were the least boring.

A friend brought us fresh roasted cocoa beans from Bali. I immediately tried it on a no-bake fudge recipe that I had my eyes on before.


Life is good now that I have a food processor. Thanks to Sandy and Nicolas, who kindly left it to me before they moved out of Bangkok for good.


Made of three kinds of nuts and two seeds, this fudge lacks the sinful pleasure from conventional ones. It makes you feel good about eating it though.


Cheddar polenta with homemade roasted bell pepper sauce. Topped with fresh herbs and parmesan to bake. Served on a bed of honey-vinaigrette rocket leaves and roasted tomatoes.


I made this because of the promise of roasted garlic. One whole head of it in one dish for two persons. Simply fry them with cherry tomatoes and long beans. I'm not crazy about this recipe but I do love the roasted garlic.


A one-bowl dish with pesto quinoa + amanath seeds, corn, roasted tomatoes, mushrooms and grilled tofu.


What was life like before food processor?


Vegetarian burger made with grilled tofu, mushrooms, cashew nuts, sunflower seeds, and Camembert. Instead of using buns, we had it with potato rosti. GOOD!


Chickpea and avocado salad, with some fresh blueberry thrown in on last thought.


I always wished I had cooked more caramelized onions than I did.


On a random night when I just felt like getting my hand dirty and bake. Parmesan biscuit topped and baked with white sesame seeds. We had it with French sea salt butter (something we were introduced to and quickly became devoted to while in St Tropez) and honey.


The walnut crust was made of teff flour bought from a Ethiopian store in Seattle. Filled with cream cheese and mascarpone, topped with fresh strawberry and thawed frozen blackberry (wish we were still indulging in wild summer berries in US). Adrian said he used to think this dessert was only possible bought (I'm pretty sure I made something like this before), and that he could eat this for breakfast everyday (I made just enough for two so that I could proceed to the next dessert the next day).


It may not look like much and you may wonder about the strawberries. It's called Balsamic Strawberry Chocolate Fudge. Intriguing?

I happened to browse through some of the old food pictures when I was working on this post. I was immediately taken over by an indescribable sense of awe. It took me a few seconds to recover and wonder aloud "why did I stop?!?!?" I need better discipline to stay on track. Period.