chana masala

Ryan and Lisza drove up to Orange County yesterday and spent the day with my family. By all accounts it was a successful day. First Ryan won the lottery(!) and then we cooked up a yummy dinner. A chick-pea curry (something like chana masala), tilapia fillets, cucumber and tomato salad. The chick pea curry was quite delicious, cheap, and easy to prepare. The recipe (made up on the spot) consisted of:

- an onion or two (diced)
- two cans of chick peas (drained)
- can of tomato puree (or tomato paste + water)
- huge amount of curry powder
- juice from one lime
- salt
- a little sugar
- fresh cilantro/coriander
instructions: saute onions in oil, then combine (almost) everything and let simmer for a while; add fresh cilantro just before serving (of course)

I used at least a fifth of a big jar (200g) of "hot curry powder" (ingredients: coriander, tumeric, chili, mustard, ginger, cumin, fenugreek) i had bought at the persian grocery store.

key lime pie

Inspired by my recent (and as-yet-unblogged) trip to Key West, we also decided to make a key lime pie. Though references to this pie were rife in the Keys, I did not actually see a single example of the essential fruit while in the area, nor did I sample any local concoction of the eponymous dessert. At the market here in California we picked up a bag of small limes and a few cans of sweetened condensed milk. After checking out photos of key limes on the internet, I'm not sure these small green limes were really key limes as true key limes are apparently spherical and yellow and taste a bit different.

The folkloric tale of the key lime pie is a believable one. The Florida keys were(are) hot and remote, hence canned milk instead of fresh milk; and these little fruits grow everywhere, or so we're told. Feral chickens roam the streets, presumably depositing an egg here and there. The acid from the limes curdles the eggs, making baking unnecessary. If this apocryphal tale holds true, the key lime pie is a dessert borne of its native geography.



My mom's kitchen proved a treasure-trove of applicable gadgets. A juicer for the limes, a zester for their zest, and a food processor to pulverize graham cracker cookies and mix them with butter and sugar for a crust.

After juicing twenty of the little limes, my fingertips were well-eaten by the acid. The Internet People warn against it, but I see no harm in buying a bottle of lime juice instead. Alternatively, one of those little cast-aluminum lime squeezers you can buy in Baja California would be just perfect.



Here my mom shows off her freshly baked graham cracker pie crust.



The finished product. Should have gotten a pic of satisfied customers devouring it.