Salad: kale, chickpeas, onion, sumac

Still largely apathetic about cooking much, due to the heat and also an abundance of tasty fresh veg that needs nothing more than a wash and a chop to make it good (Alvin is bringing me excess from his CSA every week and won't take no for an answer!).  I did manage to switch on the oven for a few minutes on Friday night to make some muffins to take to M's for brunch on Saturday, but that's been about it.

While I was in the kitchen that night I also made this kale salad: I'd been thinking about making something different with kale - I always end up either making kale chips, sauteeing it with garlic, or just adding it to stew or curry.  I remembered a tasty kale salad I tried from the Boston Veg Food Fest last year, and with the aforementioned heat-induced apathy the idea of not cooking the kale at all seemed good.  A quick Google immediately threw out a recipe that seemed to be exactly what I wanted: kale with sumac (one of my current favourite spices) and chickpeas (my alltime favourite bean), plus a few other things that sounded like a great combination.

1 bunch (about 1 lb) kale, tough inner stems discarded, leaves roughly torn
2 tbsp olive oil
salt
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
1 tsp dried ground sumac
1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted
1 tbsp lemon juice (or cider vinegar)
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp wholegrain mustard
equivalent of 1 tin of cooked chickpeas or white beans, defrosted
pepper

Put prepped kale leaves in a large bowl. Add olive oil and salt and rub and toss with your hands until all the kale is coated. Rest at room temperature until kale is lightly wilted, about 1 hour (or overnight in the fridge).

Meanwhile, put the prepared onions in a medium bowl and cover with cold water.   Rest for 15 minutes. Rinse in several changes of water then pat dry. Sprinkle with sumac and sesame seeds, and salt if desired.

Mix lemon juice or vinegar, garlic and mustard in a small bowl.  When the kale is ready, put everything together in a large bowl, toss and season.


In all, this was a great experiment.  The kale was super tasty and green, and went well with the onions.  The kale was just softened enough to be good - I wondered if I might have added a little more oil to make it a little easier to bite.  And the soaking of the onions in water seemed to negate their pungency - I was initially wondering if the raw onions and garlic might generate the old everything-tasting-of-allium-for-a-day-after-eating problem, but actually it was totally fine.

Another good point about this salad is that it really does keep overnight / for days, in fact I thought it was better the next day as the kale had softened a little more.  Which was especially lucky in this instance, as S was going to make pretzels to take to R's party but discovered at the crucial moment that he had no sodium hydroxide at home - this salad, which I had made the night before and discovered there was rather a lot of - stepped in and saved the day (ie we took it to the party instead, and S stopped into work on the way home from the party and then finished off the pretzels the next day - very good they were too - leaving them shaped overnight caused no problems).

Cucumber and coconut vinegar

I bought some coconut vinegar and came by a lot of cucumbers, wanted to test it all out.  I haven't yet noticed a coconutty taste to the vinegar (it seems quite sharp), although I suppose there are a lot of other strong, distracting flavours in this recipe.

3 tbsp coconut vinegar
3 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 large cucumber
1 tsp chilli flakes (or chopped fresh chilli)
1-2 tbsp roasted unsalted peanuts, chopped
1-2 tbsp coriander or mint, chopped

Mix the coconut vinegar, sugar and soy sauce in a small pan and heat til the sugar is dissolved.  Allow to cool.  Peel, deseed and dice the cucumber and put in a bowl with the remaining ingredients.  Add vinegar-sugar mixture, toss and then eat.

Best Indian restaurant in Greater Boston?

It's taken a while, but we have at last found a really good Indian restaurant in Boston.  Well, it's in Somerville, near Union Square.  Increasingly, a lot of my favourite things are around Union Square.  There are nice music venues, a great farmer's market on Saturdays, it's close to my aerial studio, lots of our friends live round there...

Dosa Temple was recommended by my colleague Kishore, who is originally from Hyderabad.  We were talking about Indian food one day and I developed a real hankering for some.  So the next time S and I were on the hunt for a snack we stopped at Dosa Temple.  It is pure vegetarian, no booze, the interior looks and feels like places we ate at in India -from the wipe-down booths to the Bollywood music videos.

On our first visit I had a masala dosa, which was so massive it looked like a paper dosa (American portion sizes?  I dread to think what their paper dosa looks like), but was really good and crisp in all the right places, with decent coconut chutney and sambal.  I also had some tomato rasam, which was rich with tamarind and really hit the spot (portion was quite tiny, in contrast to the massive dosa).  We shared some gobi fritters, with tamarind and coriander chutneys for dunking, which was wonderful (although we were hungry for sure after a day at the beach).  And S had this dish that I've never seen before, apparently some kind of savoury veggie curry crossed with bread pudding.  He liked it, I was too busy with my dosa to eat much of it.

This place beats out all the other Indian places I've tried in Boston for authenticity, range of the menu, and tastiness (Punjabi Dhaba, Kebab Factory, Dosa Factory, Grain of Salt...).  None of those are bad, Dosa Temple is just really, really good.  I can't wait to go back and continue eating my way through the menu.