Tortillas in Black Bean Sauce

We love many things at Picante, but our favorite brunch item hands-down is the enfrijoladas, a homey dish made of their handmade tortillas smothered in black bean sauce and drizzled with crema. We decided to attempt enfrijoladas using our new favorite Cook's Illustrated method for cooking beans: brining them overnight in salt water. The brining allows salt flavor to fully penetrate the beans, leaving them tender and delicious. Throwing the beans into the slow-cooker once they've been brined saves active cooking time and develops a rich sauce.

3 tablespoons table salt
2 cups dried black beans, picked over and washed
1 tablespoon cumin
1 tablespoon butter
2 cloves garlic, peeled and left whole
3 cups vegetable stock
10 corn tortillas

For toppings:
wedges of lime
chopped cilantro
fire-roasted chiles or salsa
crumbled queso fresco or cotija

First, stir the salt in 4 quarts (16 cups) cold water in the slow-cooker vessel and add the beans. Let the beans soak overnight, at least 8 hours. In the morning, drain beans, rinse well, and return to the slow-cooker with the cumin, butter, garlic, stock and 5 cups water. Cook on low heat for 8 hours.

Puree the beans and their liquid in small batches in a blender. Warm the tortillas in a dry skillet or in the microwave. Douse the tortillas well with black bean sauce and fold into quarters. Serve immediately, topped with lime, cilantro, spicy stuff, and cheese.

If you're saving any to eat later, wait to add the sauce until just before serving.

South Indian Pancakes

We've been working on our recipe for dosas--savory fermented rice and dal pancakes--for years now. Sometimes the batter came out well, but we had trouble getting it to rise consistently. Our eureka moment about dosas happened in India last winter, watching the cooking instructor pour perfectly bubbly batter onto a hot griddle. It's hot in India! That's why the batter ferments so perfectly and gets so bubbly. So, if we could just get our dosa batter to India temperatures at home, we could make real Indian dosas that stay together and fold nicely. Success!

Making dosa batter takes a few tries to master, so don't bust this one out for that big first date until you've practiced a few times. You can also use dosa batter for uttapam, which thicker and sturdier, like a personal pizza. We've provided recipes for both here. If you want to make some of each, make the uttapam while the batter is still thick, then thin it down for dosas.

1 cup parboiled rice (boil 1 cup rice in a large pot of water for 5 minutes; drain.)
2 cups raw rice
1 cup urad dal
2 teaspoons fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon salt

This works equally well with brown rice, white rice, or a combo.

Combine everything, except the salt, in a large bowl with enough lukewarm water to cover and allow to soak overnight. Drain, reserving the liquids. Blend until you have a consistency like thick pancake batter, adding only enough of the soaking water to lubricate your blender. Pour into a bowl that leaves room for the batter to double in size.

Cover with a towel and place somewhere warm. The batter likes to be 85-95 degrees Fahrenheit. In Kerala, that's just room temperature. Here in Berkeley, we use our dehydrator, which has adjustable temperature settings. We've heard of other creative solutions like leaving it in the oven on low, with the door propped open, or near a radiator. Within eight hours, the dough will double and fill with tiny bubbles. You should detect a pleasantly sour, yeasty smell. If your dough doesn't rise after the first eight hours, you don't have to give up! Try adjusting your heat source and give it another eight hours. Once your batter has risen, mix in the salt and proceed with one of the following recipes.

Uttapam

1 batch of batter, risen
coconut oil for frying (Coconut oil is solid in cold weather, but will quickly become liquid if you leave the bottle somewhere warm. Liquid oil is much easier to drizzle!)

Choice of toppings:
chopped red onion
finely minced green chili
chopped cilantro leaves
chopped tomato
chopped nuts
minced fresh herbs
cubed feta (not traditional, but quite delicious!)

Heat a well-seasoned cast iron or crepe pan over medium-high heat, and coat the pan lightly with oil. When the oil is as hot as possible without smoking, pour about a 1/4 cup of batter into the center of the pan. Quickly toss on some toppings, plus a little drizzle of oil around the edges.

When the pancake looks firm enough to flip (3-5 minutes), gently loosen it with a clean, greased metal spatula. Flip it over and cook for another 3-5 minutes. Carefully scrape away any bits that stuck to the pan and add a little more oil. When the oil is hot, begin your next pancake. Serve warm, with a selection of curries and chutneys.



Dosas

1 batch of batter, risen
coconut oil for frying

Stir a little water into your batter for a crepe-like consistency. Heat a well-seasoned cast iron or crepe pan over medium-high heat, and coat the pan lightly with coconut oil. When the oil is as hot as possible without smoking, pour about a 1/4 cup of batter into the center of the pan, spreading it around in a spiral pattern with the back of your ladle. It should be thin, with some lacy areas, but no large holes. Pour a fine drizzle of oil around the edges to help them get crispy.

Cook for about 3 minutes, or until the dosa easily lifts from the pan. If your dosa is nice and thin, you won't need to fry on both sides -- just transfer to a plate, fill with a thick curry and serve. If your dosa came out a little too thick, there's no harm in flipping it over to make sure it's cooked on both sides.

Broccoli Noodle Casserole

What can we say?--it was rainy out and we were feeling nostalgic for the vegetarian casseroles of the 1970's, so we crafted this adaptation of a noodle casserole recipe in our favorite Eastern European cookbook. Parents, consider this dish a useful weapon in the battle to get your pasta-worshipping kids to eat their broccoli. It's Mollie-Katzen-tastic with both sour cream and cottage cheese, and we've tinkered with it to ensure that the broccoli doesn't get overdone during the baking process.

16 ounces whole wheat fusilli or rotini
1 head broccoli, broken into bite-sized pieces
2 cups cottage cheese
1 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
black pepper
1 onion, chopped fine

Optional toppings:
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
olive oil
more paprika

Preheat oven to 350. Cook the pasta until al dente. Steam the broccoli (try this in a steamer basket over the pasta!) until barely fork-tender. Meanwhile, mix the cottage cheese, sour cream, salt, paprika and pepper. Grease a casserole dish. Combine all of the ingredients, except the toppings, in the casserole dish. Drizzle the top with a little olive oil, then breadcrumbs, then a sprinkling of paprika. Bake for 45 minutes.

Hamine Eggs, for Grandma Olga

We had been planning since last Passover to post this recipe around now, reasoning that you'd be most interested in Seder recipe ideas right before the big day. Now that it's finally posting time, we want to dedicate this post to Hannah's Grandma Olga, an amazing cook and a fabulous lady who passed away earlier this month. While she never used the internet and thus never read the blog, she has been such an inspiration for our work: Grandma Olga was all about making things from scratch with the best produce she could find, and her recipes are behind many of our posts, like date charoset, mjeddra and fried eggplant. We feel so lucky to have inherited her recipe journal, a 1964 date book packed with her own handwritten recipes, recipe cards from relatives, recipes clipped from the newspaper, recipes from the back of a Quaker Oats box. There is no time of the year I associate with Grandma Olga more so than Passover, when she would to make jars of her famous date charoset for all the households in our family, lemony-minty hamud that perfumed the whole house, and perfectly-tanned hamine eggs. So Grandma Olga, this one's for you.

Hard-boiled eggs are a traditional fixture on the Passover Seder plate. The Syrian-Jewish version, hamine eggs, involves slowly cooking the eggs overnight with onion skins and coffee grounds, which turns the flesh a beautiful tan color. Last year, we started to make hamine eggs for Passover and realized that while we had plenty of onion skins, the tiny bag of 2-year-old coffee in the freezer had vanished. We did, however, have a box of lapsang souchong tea bags and decided to try them instead. Lapsang souchong is a smoked black tea with an amazing flavor, and our finished eggs were deliciously rich and smoky. Throw these on your Seder plate and everyone will be hooked!

This does take a while, but nearly all of the time is inactive and you can either do this overnight or try it in a Crock-Pot if you don't feel like being confined to your house for 6-8 hours.

12 eggs
Skins from 3-5 onions
10 Lapsang Souchong tea bags
1 teaspoon canola oil

Place eggs in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Add the onion skins, tea bags and oil and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to very low. Simmer, partially covered, for 6-8 hours. Any cracks in the eggshells will create beautiful dark veins on the egg whites. Drain the eggs, discard the tea bags and onion skins, and peel the eggs once they've cooled.

Nettle Frittata (not to be confused with Nelly Furtado)

Our outdoorsy friend Tanya makes an annual pilgrimage into the wilds to pick nettles. Then she makes some of them into a savory pie for her yearly Pi Day party. This year, we went along for the nettle harvest and made a frittata variation on her delicious pie. If you would like to try Tanya's version, she uses a mashed potato crust from Mollie Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and a spinach pie recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

Why nettles? They're full of iron, calcium and antioxidants. They taste like sort of like spinach, but with more integrity and less sliminess. You can substitute spinach if nettles are inaccessible in your area. If you do get your hands on some nettles, make sure those hands are gloved--nettles, when raw, are covered in stinging hairs.

A big bunch of nettles (two cups, once steamed and chopped)
1 tablespoon ghee (or butter or oil)
1/2 an onion, chopped fine
3 scallions, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped dill
2 eggs
1 tablespoon sour cream
2 cups small curd cottage cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt
black pepper
zest of one lemon
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put on some heavy gardening gloves and remove the stems from the nettles. Steam the leaves until wilted. (This will kill their stingers.) Rinse and drain well, then chop.

Meanwhile, melt the ghee in a 10-inch cast-iron pan on medium heat. Saute the onion until softened, then add the scallions and saute for two more minutes. Remove from heat; stir in the nettles and dill.

Combine the eggs, sour cream, cottage cheese, salt, pepper and lemon zest in a separate bowl. Once the cast-iron pan has cooled for a few minutes (enough to keep the eggs from cooking on contact), fold the egg mixture into the nettle mixture. Sprinkle the top with Parmesan.

Bake at 350 until the eggs are set and the top is browned (about 30 minutes).

Paprika, Green Bean and Potato Stew

Phoebe was a pretty picky eater as a kid, but always made an exception for her mom's paprika-flavored potato stew. The recipe, which originally included chunks of hot dog or sausage, was passed on to Phoebe's mom by a Hungarian girl back in the 70's and Phoebe's mom started using green beans instead of hot dog chunks. Phoebe's family always called this dish paprikash, but a little wikipedia research revealed that paprikash is a chicken and sour cream sauce over noodles, while this dish is actually called paprikás krumpli.

3 tablespoons butter or olive oil
1 yellow onion, chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons paprika
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
4 cups green beans, chopped into 1" pieces
4 cups Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into 1" cubes
2 cups canned tomatoes (diced or pureed)
3/4 teaspoon salt

Melt the butter in a sauce pan, then saute the onions until softened. Remove from the heat and immediately stir in the paprika and cayenne. Add the rest of the ingredients and enough water to cover the vegetables. Return to the heat and simmer until the potatoes and green beans are cooked, but still tender.

Syrian Orange Salad

It's still citrus season in Berkeley, which means we can't get enough of the mandarins, pomelos and sweet limes overflowing at the farmers' market. Alongside these more exotic offerings, we're adoring the navel oranges and wanted to share this simple preparation we've been enjoying for years. It can be breakfast, dessert, a snack or a palate cleanser. What we love about this dish is how easily it transforms a plain old fruit snack into something special; we even used to make this in our dining hall in college with nothing but an orange, a knife, a bowl and some honey. But if you have or can seek out the orange blossom water (you can find it in Middle Eastern grocery stores), the extra citrus perfume elevates the entire experience to something pretty heavenly.

We've blathered about the elegant potential of supreming citrus before, and once again refer you to this helpful tutorial if you need a visual to go with our instructions.

Per person:
1 navel orange (the slightly reddish one pictured above is a cara cara)
Honey or agave nectar to taste, depending on how sweet the orange is
A pinch of cinnamon
A few drops of orange blossom water (optional)

Slice off the top and bottom of each orange. Carve off the peel from the sides and then cut out the orange sections over a bowl, leaving the membranes behind. Squeeze the extra juice from the membranes into the bowl with the oranges. Stir in honey or agave, cinnamon and optional orange blossom water.