Eggs and toast

Following serves 2:
Soft boil couple of eggs, preferably from organically fed and farm raised hens.

Cut up two slices of fresh sourdough bread into thick cut french fry style pieces. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil on a pan and saute these bread slices until golden and crackle-y.

Crack open the top of your soft boiled egg, add some fleur de sel and freshly ground black pepper, dip the fried bread sticks in the yolk and enjoy.

Cup of espresso at the end with a slice of pannetoni is nice but not absolutely essential for a great start to the day.

Padrón peppers tossed with smoked salt and sichuan peppers

These Spanish peppers have caught on in San Francisco Bay Area. Last few years they were expensive and scarce at the farmer’s market, a small basket for $5. This year, our neighborhood Asian market has a large bag of these for $5. Last year, I fried these peppers in oil until blistery. This year, I got lazy and decided to push these under the broiler. Surprisingly enough, they came out at least as good as fried if not better.

Following recipe serves two. Rinse 3 cups of Padrón peppers and dry with a paper towel. Add 1/2 tsp of sesame oil and toss. Place 3 inches under the hot broiler. They start popping in a minute or so. When appropriately blistered, turn them over and blister the other side. Sprinkle with crystal salt (this is the time to pull out the smoked salt you have been hanging on to) and sichuan pepper (flower pepper) before snacking. They are best had warm and fresh out of the oven. They can be a little hot once in a while, but only just a little. The hint of sichuan peppers adds a different, though still peppery, flavor.

Peppers with sesame oil before broiling

Broiled peppers ready to eat

PS: Note that quality of sichuan pepper can be very varied. The best ones are very flowery and tongue numbing. The poor quality ones lack aroma and can be a bit sandy.

Home grown radishes	Frying lentil balls
Fried lentill pakodas	Add grated carrots and radishes

Following recipe serves 4. To prepare the pakodas, start with soaking 1/2 cup of mung daal and 1/2 cup of chana daal for 4-8 hours. Grind together with minimal water into a thick cake like batter. The batter should be grainy. Add 1 tsp salt and pinch of asafoetida. Let ferment optionally for upto 24 hours. Fermentation will add an additional tanginess and crispness but it is great without.

Prepare coriander chutney and tamarind chutney. Grate 2 cups of radish or radish/carrot mixture. Set aside while the pakodas are prepared.

Heat 4 cups of peanut oil in a deep wok. Shape the lentil batter into round one inch balls using two spoons and drop into hot oil and fry until golden. This should take 4-6 minutes per batch. Four of the lentil balls can be fried simultaneously. Drain on paper towels and keep warm in a 250F oven. The batter would make about 20 pakodas. To serve, plate 4-6 pakodas, place 1/2 cup of grated radishes on top of the pakodas and drizzle with chutneys.

Sugar Butter Flour

Our local pastry shop, “Sugar Butter Flour” serves up excellent pastries. Here is a loot from a recent trip – tiramisu, chocolate hazelnut, flourless chocolate and a key lime mousse.

• Start with a dozen tender okra. Wash and dry thoroughly.
• Slit open with a paring knife and stuff a pinch of the following spice mixture – 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp amchoor (dry mango powder), 1 tsp anardana (dry pomegranate seeds), 1 tsp toasted and crushed cumin, 1 tsp red pepper powder
• Prepare a thin cake like batter by mixing 1 cup of besan (bengal gram flour) or chickpea flour with sufficient water, a pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp cracked pepper, 1/2 tsp anardana, 1/2 tsp crushed coriander seeds, 1/2 tsp nigella seeds, 1/2 tsp turmeric powder, 1/2 tsp of red pepper powder/flakes
• Prepare a mustard oil bath for frying – 1-2 cups depending on your fryer.
• Heat mustard oil to smoking.
• Coat the okra in batter, a few at a time, and fry until golden.
• Drain on a paper towel and serve with chutney.

Stuffing Okra with spices

Batter dipping okra (and eggplant from our summer garden)

Let drain

Serve with ketchup or your favourite chutney

Washington Street in Yountville has been taken over by Thomas Keller. So, holding your own out here has perhaps been fun for the rest of the great chefs in Napa. Nearly a decade ago, we ate our first lamb tongue dish at Bistro Jeanty and instantly fell in love. Now that we have been to Paris pilgrimage, we can safely assert that the food here is authentic French bistro cooking. Ambiance is Californian, with golden sun, crisp air, and spacious seating. On a summer day, sitting out on the patio, sipping one of the local Napa wines is a delight. Here is what we ordered this time around: Warm lamb tongue salad,  pigs feet, duck and goat cheese pate’, butter cooked snails, a bottle of their table red and a plate of cheese for dessert.

Lamb tongue is mellower and sweeter meat compared to rest of the lamb and was served the same way as we ate a decade ago, with warm potatoes and salad greens, a light and delightful dish. Pigs feet was slow braised, the fork tender meat was shaped into pig feet shaped log, coated with flour and deep fried – a bit on the heavy side. Rillettes was rich but it was mellow and sweet on the nose. Snail came with a lot of heavenly butter. I unloaded each snail on a slice of baguette, perhaps 1/2 a teasoon of butter per snail. Yummy. A light red wine and my better half provided delightful accompaniment to the meal.

Lamb tongue with warm potato salad

Snail in butter and parsley

Alas, no more ...

Duck pate'

Pigs feet

Cheese plate with poached pear and candied walnut for dessert

Askinosie Chocolate Hazelnut Spread ...

Balancing hazelnut and chocolate can be tricky. My better half has been wanting to take a crack at making a chocolate hazelnut spread. He eventually will, but for now, after some suitable procrastination, he surprised me with mail order from Askinosie, a chocolatier we have grown fond of over weekly doses of Scream sorbet. With chocolate as good as Askinosie, you don’t want the chocolate flavor overpowered, even with something as good as hazelnut. This spread is nearly perfect and since its arrival, has made its way on our home made biscotti, and crepes. A more recent guilty pleasure is with s’mores (marshmallows and graham crackers).

... with smores

I am mulling over the thought of crepes, chocolate hazelnut spread and marshmallows a la Breizh.

Edamame does bring its characteristic nutty flavor to the paratha. If you have a good hand with rolling the paratha with coarse filling, you can finely chop the thawed kernels and mix with necessary spices. They have lower water content compared to frozen peas and therefore don’t really need any pre-cooking.

Don’t let my culinary excursions make you forget what parathas are supposed to be like. Here is a recent article from Odd Ends discussing ghee fried parathas from Old Delhi’s Parathe wali Gali. Maybe for every year of eating healthy paratha, one can indulge in a bite of the ghee fried one.