healthy | fungi foodie

Ok, so yes, I know you are thinking – why is this girl calling herself fungi foodie when all she cooks is middle eastern food? Well guess what everybody – it’s been raining! A lot! In Berkeley! So I’m going to go mushroom hunting this weekend :) So with any luck I will have a delicious wild mushroom recipe for next week! Yay for wild mushrooms :)

But in the meanwhile, I’m continuing on my theme of cooking healthy, delicious vegetarian recipes from Jerusalem and Plenty. This week, I cooked the chickpea saute with Greek yogurt from pg. 211 Plenty and featured online here and the couscous with tomato and onion from pg 129 of Jerusalem and featured online here.

These dishes were on the less complicated side for Yotam Ottolenghi and my trip to Berkeley Bowl for groceries was one of the easiest and shortest trips yet! Either I’m getting much better at this whole grocery shopping thing or I am indeed choosing simpler recipes :P Here are all of the lovely fresh ingredients for the chickpea saute – look at all those fresh herbs and veggies! I really need to consider getting some potted herbs!

Ingredients for the chick pea saute

The first step is to separate the green part from the stalks of the chards – I’m totally falling for this stuff! It’s so pretty!

Swiss chard centers

So you blanch the chard stalks for 3 minutes in boiling water, then add the greens and blanch them for 2 more minutes, then remove from boiling water, rinse in cold water, and drain. Then you heat up 1/3 cup olive oil in a pan – Dan was appalled at this amount of oil – but I reminded him that olive oil is good for you :) He remained unconvinced but I decided to stick to Ottolenghi’s guidelines despite Dan’s rumblings. So you peel and chop up the carrots and saute them in the olive oil, then add caraway seeds. I’d never used caraway seeds before cooking from these books but they are such a good spice! I bought them super cheap from the bulk spice section at Berkeley Bowl and I’m totally hooked.

carrots sauteeing in olive oil with caraway seeds

So after the carrots are cooked, add the blanched chard back in, add in the chick peas (yes I used canned – perhaps a faux pas but after the disaster of trying to cook fava beans from scratch, I’m sticking to canned. It’s just so much easier!), add in garlic and fresh mint and parsley.

carrots with swiss chard, chicken peas, garlic, and herbs

Look at this ginormous bowl of vegetables!

Chick pea saute

But the finishing touch that really completes the dish is adding the Greek yogurt sauce on top. It just makes it so much tastier! And it adds a ton of calcium and protein – win-win :)

The greek yogurt on top really takes it up a notch!

chick pea saute with greek yogurt

So to accompany the delicious and healthy chickpea saute we made some couscous with tomatoes and onions. The first step is to dice and sautee an onion, then add sugar and tomato puree. Then dice two tomatoes (I added 3 because I love tomatoes!) and add them to the pan.

sauteed onions with tomatoes

In the meanwhile, add boiling vegetable stock to some couscous and leave it to sit in a bowl covered in cling wrap for 10 minutes. Once the couscous is cooked, then you mix in the tomato and onion mixture and wipe off the pan and add some butter to it. The next part gets a little bit complicated…at least for a novice like me….making the couscous crispy was no easy task! You are supposed to add butter then put the couscous back in the pan and cover it and let it steam for 12 minutes. Well, I did this and it was not quite crispy. Probably I should have let it steam for longer but we were hungry so I decided to just go for it…What followed was an EPIC FAIL where I flipped the couscous onto a dish and some of it landed on the floor but luckily most of it made it to the dish! I think I need to buy bigger dishes….

cous cous with tomatoes and onions

Ottolenghi has an amazing way with making vegetarian dishes that are completely satisfying and don’t make you miss meat one bit. These dishes are healthy, relatively cheap and easy, and super flavorful and fulfilling. The only complicated step that I utterly failed at was getting the couscous crispy and then flipping it over “expertly” onto a dish – so I did not manage to get that beautiful crispy crust that they claimed makes this dish. I still think it tasted amazing, but I think I will have to practice some more with the crisping and flipping..Here is my couscous with a corner of it looking crispy…it still tasted really good without the crispy crust but I will definitely need to practice with this one..

couscous with tomatoes and onion

Here is my completed meal :) It was a totally satisfying, healthy, flavorful, and fulfilling vegetarian middle eastern inspired meal. Thanks Ottolenghi for two more great dishes :)

Bon apetit! Healthy vegetarian mediterranean inspired meal!

So this past weekend I spent at a research conference in Bodega Bay. This conference was for students conducting research at UC natural reserves, which is an incredible research network spanning many of the ecosystem types in California from the redwood tanoak forests of Big Sur where I work to the beaches where elephant seals spawn in Ano nuevo to the coniferous slopes of the eastern Sierras. The conference was for students who won awards to do research on reserves and was a chance for us to share our research with each other. Seeing everyone get so excited about their research gave me renewed enthusiasm about my own project studying the effects of Sudden Oak Death on fungi associated with the dying tanoaks in California. So while the meeting was really fun and I met some really interesting people, I was super tired when I finally made it back to Berkeley on Sunday. Luckily I had been planning on making this risotto last week but didn’t get around to it because I was busy preparing my talk for the conference, so I had all of the ingredients waiting for me in my kitchen!

So I invited over my friend Lauren who fortunately has lots of experience cooking with barley and we made the barley risotto with marinated feta from pg 109 of Jerusalem and also featured online here. If you are in the mood for a relatively low key but satisfying and unique vegetarian dish, this one is it! Compared to some of his other recipes, the ingredients are not that complicated and the cooking is not that difficult, other than the barley does take over an hour to cook (he says 45 minutes but I left mine simmering for at least an hour – the barley was still pretty chewy at 45 minutes!). Luckily Lauren and I had some episodes of Girls to catch up on, so we kept ourselves entertained watching the trials and tribulations of Hannah Horvath while our risotto simmered away.

I must say, this dish is really tasty. The marinated feta in olive oil and with toasted caraway seeds and fresh oregano leaves really sets it off and takes it up a notch. Ottolenghi is so good about adding those extra finishing touches that really make the dish! I didn’t have celery stalks on hand but I did have some leftover celeriac from when I made the parsnip dumpling soup, and I added that to the risotto and it tasted delicious! The shallots, garlic, celeriac smelled so good while they sauteed in olive oil and butter. The addition of fresh herbs and fresh lemon peel make this dish flavorful and refreshing! Unlike traditional risotto, which while delicious is creamy and heavy and makes you feel a bit guilty while eating it, this risotto feels fresh and healthy. I highly recommend you try it!

Ingredients:

1 cup pearl barley
2 tbsp unsalted butter
6 tbsp olive oil (this seemed excessive to be so I used 4 but under your discretion)
2 small celery stalks (I didn’t have celery so used celeriac instead and it tasted great!)
2 small shallots
4 cloves garlic
4 thyme sprigs
1/2 tsp smoked paprika (I used regular paprika)
4 strips lemon peel (I just peeled some off with a vegetable peeler)
1 bay leaf
one 14 z can chopped tomatoes
3 cups vegetable stock (I ended up using quite a bit more than this as I added more vegetable stock at the end when the risotto wasn’t cooked after 45 minutes)
1.25 cups passata (sieved crushed tomatoes – I wasn’t sure where to find this so I used canned crush tomatoes)
1 tbsp caraway seeds
10.5 oz feta cheese (this is A LOT of feta, I think I used more like 8 oz)
1 tbsp fresh oregano leaves
salt

Instructions: So the first step is to rinse the pearl barley well under cold water and leave it to drain. Then melt the butter and 2 tbsp olive oil in a large pan (I didn’t use a large enough pan at first – make sure it’s big!!), then dice up the celery, shallots and garlic and cook them under gentle heat until soft. Add all the rest of the ingredients save the feta, caraway seeds, oregano, and olive oil and stir to combine. Bring to boil, the reduce to gentle simmer and cook for 45 minutes to an hour (the barley takes a really long time to get less chewy). To prepare the topping, toast the caraway seeds in a dry pan. Crumble the feta in a separate bowl, add 2-4 tbsp olive oil, marinate it, and add the seeds. Spoon that along with some fresh oregano leaves on top of the risotto – don’t forget them because they really make the risotto extra special!

Barley risotto with marinated feta

Barley risotto with marinated feta and fresh oregano

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Chickpea saute with Greek yogurt and couscous with tomato and onion

Barley risotto with marinated feta