March 20, 2006
how you know you are feeling better
you make something not only full of vegetables but also containing spicy chile sauce. And eat it, AND don't feel nasty afterwards. Praise the lord.
I had a bag of unsweetened coconut that needed using. Here is what I did with it:
made thai coconut rice (jasmine rice cooked in coconut milk + water + small slice ginger, then sprinkled with toasted coconut)
made indonesian spicy stirfry (chicken, broccoli, carrot, onion, snow pea, mango & spicy sambal - no coconut in this one)
made curried greens from a Saveur recipe that I've been ogling for years now. The green beans in the supermarket looked nasty, so i got mustard and turnip greens instead. This worked out awesome, since I shorted the water in the recipe a bit and instead relied on the not-fully-moistened coconut to absorb the residual water from the greens, making the final product nice and dry. I am totally making greens this way again, and I might even truck up to Devon St and see if I can find curry leaves, though the recipe is delish without them.
made a german chocolate cake - since TNR can't eat sugar or dairy, i took it on as a challenge to find a way to make German Chocolate Cake she could eat. We used unsweetened coconut, made a maple+butter+florida crystals frosting (thickened up by cornstarch and the dried coconut), and did the chocolate cake recipe from the current issue of Cook's Illustrated, swapping applesauce 1 for 1 with the sour cream and cocoa+oil for the solid chocolate. (Who knew unsweetened chocolate had milk solids in it?) The cake came out awesome, very moist and fluffy and chocolaty -- the recipe is a bit fiddly, but worth the trouble.
