Cauliflower-Feta Fritters with Pomegranate

I really love a good fritter but I am often disappointed in the fritters we make at home.  We have made a few different versions of zucchini fritters at home (here and here) and both times I found the texture of the fritters to be disappointing.  They were soggy and a little oily.  Even when the flavor of the fritters is perfect (like it was with these Sweet Potato and Kimchi Pancakes), I just can't get them to crisp up enough.  One exception to our fritter disappointments was this Thai recipe for Corn Fritters.  They were delicious and had great texture.  Somehow our fritter disappointments haven't in any way dissuaded me from making more fritter attempts.  This version was among the most successful and I think I have discovered the trick to making fritters at home - you don't want a batter per se.  Instead you want a mixture that barely holds together with chunks of vegetable and just enough flour and egg to bind the fritters together.  All of our fritter failures have featured batters with more liquid than vegetable (or included watery vegetables like zucchini).  And that is totally where we went wrong.  This recipe made for a very thick batter that had almost no liquid to it at all.  It was almost like a chunky dough rather than a batter.  Of course that type of consistency makes the fritters a little more delicate because they have so little filler.  They are hard to flip and don't hold together particularly well, but the flavor and texture of the cooked fritters are both excellent.  The fritters tasted gloriously cauliflower-y.  I liked the flavors of garlic, lemon and salty feta.  I also thought that the contrast of the heat from the cayenne and crushed red pepper flakes against the smoky cumin-flavored yogurt and the sweetness of the pomegranate seeds made for a really interesting and flavorful dish. 

Recipe after the jump!

Indian-Style Broccoli with Spiced Yogurt

For some reason I have been talking about broccoli all weekend.  Alex finds it totally mystifying when I get so fixated on vegetables but I can't help it.  Apparently he never craves vegetables.  All I can think about right now is broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts.  Don't get me wrong - I am happy to eat other things along the way, but I need some veggies in my life ASAP.  Luckily, Sunday is farmers' market day.  I also wanted delicata squash, but they didn't have any so I ended up getting a nice spaghetti squash along with my broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and fresh bread.  I also thought about getting green tomatoes, but Alex shot me down.  I admit it - sometimes I need to be reined in a little.  We already had more produce than we can easily eat in a week.  Anyway, since I have been babbling about broccoli all weekend I decided that the first order of business would be to make some broccoli for lunch.

It is pretty easy to sum up my thoughts on this dish.  The flavors are fantastic - I thought the spiced yogurt worked beautifully with the broccoli.  And the slight gritty-ness of the coarsely ground spices added some nice texture and little bursts of flavor.  We were both a little worried at first that the spices should have been more finely ground, but I actually really enjoyed biting into the occasional toasted cumin seed or fennel seed.  My one complaint/modification would be to the cooking method - instead of blanching and then pan-roasting the broccoli in the future I would just roast it in the oven.  There is no point in boiling something and getting it kind of soft and soggy before trying to sear it up and crisp it around the edges.  It doesn't make sense.  So in the future I would totally toss the broccoli florets with a little evoo and s&p and throw it in the oven at 425 degrees F for roughly 25 minutes - until the broccoli is crisp-tender and starting to brown around the edges.  And then I would drizzle it with the sauce.  I think that would be a better (and easier) variation on the dish.  As an added benefit there would be one less pan/pot to wash!

Recipe after the jump!

Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chile

This recipe was one that immediately drew me once I opened up Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi by Yotam Ottolenghi.  I can't express to you how much I love baked eggs.  It has gotten to the point where certain individuals (and I am not going to name names here, but you know who you are) make fun of my obsession with baked eggs.  I can't help it.  They are uber yummy.  Plus I am on a Middle Eastern kick of sorts right now so I am drawn towards anything with that flavor profile. 

I have to say that these eggs were very interesting, although not the most successful baked eggs we have ever made.  I liked the addition of the yogurt sauce and the addition of the chilis, but I'm not sure how I felt about the arugula.  I think in the future I would potentially use a different green (maybe spinach).  My biggest complaint was that it never quite felt like it came together at the level that I wanted it to.  It smelled great and looked delicious, but it was good (verging on, but not quite making it to, very good).  The bottom line is that it wasn't amazing and I wanted it to blow my mind.  I guess my expectations were set a little too high here...  We didn't use the sage or the amount of butter that the recipe called for, but we added some scallions and I think the butter level in our dish was more than sufficient.  If I had added more butter I worry that it would have felt heavy and/or greasy.  And sage sounded like an odd ingredient to me.  When I think sage I think Thanksgiving - stuffing, turkey, butternut squash.  I don't think arugula, eggs and Greek yogurt.  But maybe that's my bad.  It's entirely possible that if we had made the dish exactly as written that it would have been the mind blowing experience I was looking for.  Instead I had to settle for good. 

Recipe after the jump!

Eggplant with Buttermilk Sauce

First and foremost, I wanted to say how excited I was when we bought Yotam Ottolenghi's new-ish vegetarian cookbook, Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi.  All of the recipes in there looked so interesting and the pictures were so beautiful, but I kept picking it up and putting it down because we already have so many freaking cookbooks.  I just didn't want to buy another.  But I am really excited that I finally caved.  Second, my pictures of this dish look awful compared to the pictures in the cookbook.  Just look at the cover of Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi and you can't help but be impressed by how utterly gorgeous his food (and the pictures of his food) is.  And then you look at my picture.  And the eggplant kind of looks like a... well I'm not going to say it because it's not at all appetizing.  But my pictures are nowhere near as pretty.   

Since this recipe is the picture on the front cover of the book and therefore a large part of the reason that I bought the book, I thought it was a fitting first dish for us to make.  And if this dish is representative of the other recipes in the cookbook, I am infinitely glad that we did.  Of the two of us, I thought that I would be a bigger fan of this dish but it turned out that Alex was.  He said that love was too strong of a word, but he "enjoyed" the dish and described it as having an interesting blend of flavors - the buttermilk/yogurt sauce was kind of tangy and the pomegranate gave it a nice sweetness without the whole thing being too sweet.  I would agree with all of his comments, but add that the fresh thyme was a really nice herbal (slightly floral) addition.  The eggplant itself was almost creamy and with the pop of the pomegranate seeds you ended up with a nice textural contrast as well.  My one complaint is that some bites of the dish just weren't as well seasoned as others, but you run into that problem with most roasted vegetables.  I know we make that comment/criticism of a lot of roasted squash recipes.  The layer of eggplant at the top that really absorbed the evoo and buttermilk sauce was delicious.  The layer that you scraped off the bottom (even after the addition of more buttermilk sauce) was less so.  All things considered it was a really interesting dish.  It was not my favorite dish that we have ever made, but the recipe is definitely worth trying.

Recipe after the jump!

Pistachio-Crusted Halibut with Spicy Yogurt and Green Beans with Lemon and Parsley

For the first time in a LONG time, I left work at 5:00 pm, which meant I had time to hit the grocery store on the way home, buy nice seafood, take the dog to the park, and then cook a nice meal.  In case you haven't noticed, we have been making mostly vegetarian meals lately, which is partially due to the fact that we have all of this wonderful produce from the farmers' market, but is mostly due to the fact that I can't commit to buying nice seafood or any other proteins when I don't have any idea if I will ever make it home for dinner.  I refuse to buy seafood or meat (both of which are expensive in NYC) and end up throwing it out because of work.  I hate throwing produce out, but that I can stomach because it's generally much cheaper.  Every time I go through weeks/months like this with work we eat a lot more tofu and pasta than usual because they require less planning and far less commitment on our part.  But because of the Fourth of July, this week was blessedly quiet and we actually had the opportunity to make a really nice meal for dinner!

And not only did we have the time to make a really nice midweek dinner, this recipe goes down as my favorite recipe we have made thus far in the month of July.  Actually, why don't we go ahead and include June too (seeing as we barely cooked in the month of June it's not much of an addition, but whatever).  Dinner was delicious.  The halibut was perfectly cooked and the pistachio-crust kept it moist, while adding some lightly crunchy texture.  The spicy yogurt sauce had a great blend of flavors.  It was tart, spicy, fresh and vibrant.  I loved it.  When you ate a bite of halibut dipped in the yogurt sauce it worked together brilliantly.  The green beans were a simple side dish that worked really nicely with the halibut.  They were fresh and green and lemony, and the simple flavors complimented/mirrored the spicy yogurt.  Actually, at the end of the meal Alex was dipping his green beans into the leftover spicy yogurt.  I guess they went with the yogurt even better than I thought...

Recipes after the jump!

Spice-Crusted Salmon with Ginger-Cilantro Yogurt Sauce

The smell of this salmon is going to stick with me for days to come (in more ways than one because the smell of cooked fish is still lingering in our apartment).  When I was crushing up the fennel and coriander seeds they were both releasing a wonderful scent. They were so aromatic that I could smell them through the ziploc bag.  The crushed coriander seeds smelled nicely floral (and just slightly peppery), whereas the crushed fennel seeds smelled like licorice or anise.  And then when we cooked the salmon you still got those aromatic scents, combined with the smell of the salmon itself.  I thought that overall the salmon was nice.  The floral warmth of the coriander and fennel rub paired nicely with the richness of the salmon and the lime juice (and the yogurt sauce) really cut through the richness and gave the dish some acidity.  I thought the flavor of the yogurt sauce was a little overpowering at times - particularly when you happened to bite into a piece of minced ginger.  In the future I would probably grate the ginger instead of mincing it to avoid any such mouthfuls of ginger.  I would also probably cut back on the amount of yogurt sauce that I serve with each piece of salmon.  I don't think you can get rid of the yogurt sauce entirely because the spices might otherwise prove a little too powerful - I think you need the creamy coolness and acidity of the yogurt sauce to act as a counterpoint to the spices.  All in all, I would say that this was a nice salmon dish and a nice alternative to our usual salmon recipes, but it was just "nice" and nothing spectacular.

Recipe after the jump!

Cumin Seed Roasted Cauliflower with Yogurt

In case you couldn't tell, I am still clearly in the midst of my cauliflower obsession.  But this is our last cauliflower dish for the week.  I think.  I try to plan out all of my meals for the week over the weekend, but I rarely stick to my plan.  Sometimes I just can't find an ingredient and end up scrapping or revamping a dish.  Sometimes I end up picking up some random ingredients that I have to cook ASAP that bump another dish off the menu.  And then sometimes work comes up and messes up my plans.  This week I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do towards the end of the week, but everything came together really well.  I picked up a bunch of nice fish at Citarella on Tuesday and I really wanted to cook some of it.  So we had the striped bass on Tuesday and on Friday we cooked up some Salt and Pepper Salmon to go with this cauliflower.  I had originally intended for this cauliflower dish to go with a nice bowl of stracciatella soup, but since we made Smoky Shrimp, Hominy and Tortilla Soup on Thursday and I bought those nice organic salmon fillets we went with the salmon instead.

This recipe came from one of the cooking blogs that I read regularly - Smitten Kitchen.  The blog always has beautiful pictures and wonderful recipes.  This recipe was featured recently and I knew I had to make it because it incorporated a lot of flavors that I know work together well.  I really liked this cauliflower dish just like I thought I would.  It had a lot of interesting flavors that worked together very nicely.  I wouldn't say that it was my favorite cauliflower dish that we have ever made, but if I had to give it a letter grade I would give it at A-. I told Alex that this was the type of dish that if I happened to have the ingredients in the apartment (or if I happened to be at the grocery store conceptualizing dinner and picking up a few necessary things) I would be excited and happy to make it again, but I might not make a special trip to the grocery store to pick up ingredients specifically for it.  I think that make sense.  It made sense in my head.

Recipe after the jump!