Salty Cumin Lassi

You may notice that this post is tagged "work snacks" and wonder what kind of tricked-out office kitchens we have. But seriously, you can do this--Hannah does happen to have a tricked-out office kitchen, but all you need is a glass, a water cooler, yogurt, salt, and a fork. If you keep a 32-ounce container of plain yogurt in your office fridge, you can enjoy lassis all week, either with your lunch or as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. You can even leave out the cumin and it's still delicious. And while everyone else is microwaving a soggy burrito, you'll be dreaming of India.

These measurements are approximations--just eyeball it if you're at the office with no measuring cup, since what really matters is texture.

1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
1/3 cup cold water
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cumin

Whisk. Enjoy.

Another Kale Recipe Roundup & Dehydrated Kale

We know, we know, there's no such thing as too many kale recipes. We hear you, we respect your insatiable need for kale, and we offer the following solutions.

1. Check out our Kale and Friends Tag for easy access to all our kale recipes.

2. Try a kale recipe from our favorite blogs:

101 Cookbooks:
Too many to list, but Heidi has her own Kale tag!

Eggs on Sunday:
Lacinato Kale and Ricotta Salata Salad
Breakfast Strata with Greens, Gruyere and Sausage
Greens & Beans Over Polenta

Orangette:
Boiled Kale with a Fried Egg and Toast

Wheat Free Meat Free:
Coconut Curry Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

Desert Candy:
Tuscan Kale and Black Lentil Soup with Crispy Pita Chips
Kale and Gruyere Panade

JustBraise:
Tuscan Kale & Bean Soup
Kale Salami Sandwich with Celeriac Chips

Parsnips Aplenty:
Kale-Potato Soup with Balsamic-Roasted Garlic

Raspberry Eggplant:
Israeli Couscous with Kale, Butternut Squash and White Beans
White Bean, Kale and Butternut Squash Pizza

Raw Epicurean:
Winter Nori Roll with Ginger Garlic Dipping Sauce

3. Dehydrate your own kale!
We've gotten several comments from readers who like to make kale chips in the oven. We wholeheartedly endorse their recipes and would like to offer up a dehydrated variation of our own. In this recipe, we've stuck to the 112 degree limit set by raw foodists, so your kale will theoretically retain more of its natural enzymes and vitamins. More nutrition and also, it's tasty.

You can dehydrate kale without dressing of any kind. (We sometimes do this and then run it through the spice grinder to make kale powder.) You could also dehydrate it with your favorite salad dressing, lemon juice or a custom spice mix. Just keep in mind that the kale will reduce in size, but the spices will not. (We ended up with a few batches of burning hot cayenne-flavored chips before we learned our lesson!)

1 bunch kale (for us, that meant 20 leaves of lacinato from Riverdog)
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 teaspoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
1 tablespooon water
1/8 teaspoon salt
pinch cayenne

Remove the kale stems and roughly chop the leaves. Whisk together all the ingredients except for the kale and then pour the dressing over the kale, massaging well for full coverage. Lay the kale on trays and dehydrate at 11o degrees until crispy and fully dry, about 7 hours.

If you don't have a dehydrator, you can make still make kale chips! Set the oven to 400 degrees and keep a close eye on the kale -- it will be done in about 10 minutes.

Work Snacks: Muhammara with Pita Triangles

First things first: no, we don't take a chip-and-dip bowl to the office. We made this for work snacks last month, forgot to take a picture, and then whipped up a batch as a games-and-mezze snack last night, hence the non-lunch-box presentation. But picture this in a work snacks container--doesn't that look like the answer to your 3 pm slump?

Muhammara is a red pepper and walnut spread, tart with pomegranate molasses. You can reduce or even omit the garlic and chile depending on whether you have the kind of job that involves breathing on other people--it's delicious no matter what, since the main flavors are the smokiness of the roasted peppers and the je ne sais quoi of the pomegranate molasses. Pomegranate molasses is available in well-stocked grocery stores (it's next to the honey at the Berkeley Bowl for you East Bay folks) or Middle Eastern food stores. Once you have some in your fridge, you'll drizzle it on everything; it's delicious over yogurt and granola.

Also, no need to limit yourself to pita triangles--tortilla chips, zucchini rounds, carrot & celery sticks or crackers will work too. And if you're serving it at home, it's delicious with fried eggplant slices as an appetizer.

The Antidote to a 2-Hour Conference Call

2 red bell peppers (when you have access to gypsy or marconi peppers, by all means substitute those and use a few more)
1 and 1/2 cups walnut pieces
1 minced jalapeno or serrano chile (with seeds if you like heat, without if you don't)
2 cloves garlic, minced (optional)
3 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt

Now, About That Toner Cartridge...

Roast peppers in the broiler, turning until blackened on all sides. When peppers are completely blackened, remove from broiler and place in a paper bag to steam for about 15 minutes. When the peppers have cooled down, peel off the charred skins, discard cores and seeds and chop roughly. Throw the peppers and everything else in the food processor and pulverize for a minute or so, until you have a thick paste. If you want it thicker, add more walnuts; if you want it thinner, drizzle in extra olive oil.

Buttery Soft Fried Eggplant with Smoky Tomato Sauce

You may notice that this post is tagged "work snacks" and wonder what kind of barn I was raised in. I'll tell you: one in which my dad and my grandma made meltingly tender fried eggplant spiced with paprika and served it cold or at room temperature. This is actually a common thing for Syrian Jews to serve at room temperature for Saturday lunch, so why not have it for Tuesday snack in a little Tupperware? Of course, it's also delicious over cooked grains for dinner (we chose a red quinoa-brown rice mix), with lemon wedges to cut the grease. We've moved the paprika from the eggplant to a seat-of-the-pants dipping sauce we created with our abundance of roasted tomatoes, but if you're not into big canning projects, we provide alternate instructions for roasting tomatoes while you do other stuff.


Forget Parmesan

1 large eggplant, sliced into 1/4-inch thick rounds
Salt
Peanut or canola oil for frying
7 roasted tomatoes (if you have them) or 7 medium fresh tomatoes
Olive oil for roasting tomatoes
1 chipotle chile
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon salt

Ratatouille is So Last Year

If you don't have roasted tomatoes, start here: roll the whole tomatoes in olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and bake on 300 for 1 and 1/2 to 2 hours.

In a small bowl, pour boiling water over the chipotle and cover with a plate while you do everything else.

Place eggplant slices in a large bowl and sprinkle with salt. Let sit for about 30 minutes--the salt will leach out all the bitterness and it will collect in a brown pool at the bottom of the bowl (and to think you usually eat that!). Pat the eggplant slices dry, which will make them fry up nicely.

Heat 2 inches of oil in a large frying pan. When a drop of water sizzles on contact with the oil, add the eggplant slices in a single layer (you'll need to do more than one batch). Fry for about 3 minutes, flip, and fry for 3 minutes on the other side. Remove finished slices to a paper-towel-lined plate.

When all eggplant slices are fried, remove the stem and seeds from the chipotle and drop in the food processor with tomatoes (recently roasted or from your fridge), paprika and salt. Process until smooth. Drizzle sauce over eggplant and serve with a lemon wedge.

Work Snacks: Oven-Dried Charantais Melon

My sister's friend Tom is the (un?)official melon man at the Saturday farmer's market Happy Boy Farms stand. He's been generous with samples and melon advice all summer, so when I ran into him on Saturday en route to the Happy Boy stand and heard that someone had just stolen $100 from the Happy Boy cash box, I was even more determined to buy melons before the season ended. I picked up three small charantais melons ($7 back in the Happy Boy cash box, you soulless thief!), which are so densely flavored that sometimes I forget I'm not eating a butternut squash. We love the dried melon from Full Belly Farm, so we decided to try it out on our own, undeterred by recent oven-drying mishaps. (Apparently dried melons also have their fair share of haters, presumably because the drying intensifies that meaty, musky flavor. Whatever; people are crazy). And-YAY!-we emerged unscathed from this oven-drying experiment, with a nice heap of dried melon for mid-afternoon noshing.


We took a two-pronged approach: slicing half of the melon as thin as possible to dry on top of the stove, and slicing the remaining melon 1/2-inch thick to dry in the oven.

We stovetop-dried the thinly sliced melon for 5 hours while roasting tomatoes in the oven, then finished them by briefly oven-drying on 200 for 10 minutes. The result: Terra-Chip-like crisps of paper-thin melon.

The thicker slices went in the oven on 175 for 4 hours, and we flipped the slices over halfway through cooking. Then we turned off the oven and let them sit overnight. The trick is to use the hot oven to get the melons close to finished, then take away the heat at first sign of burning and let them coast. The result: dried-apple-like consistency with heavenly melon scent.

Work Snacks: Raw Zucchini Discs with Mint-Tahini Sauce

We both love to nibble at work, and we like to mix it up a little so we're not eating yogurt and Luna Bars all the time. We'll be posting innovative office snack ideas as they come along--to start, here's *another* way to use summer squash. The recipe for the sauce is from a recent acquisition, RAWVolution by Matt Amsden. We spent a few days snickering at the multiple gratuitous photos of Matt Amsden looking smoldering and raw-fed: Matt on the beach canoodling with some girl, Matt doing topless yoga that hints at his Kama Sutra-like abilities, Matt seductively smelling jars in the bulk section of a natural foods store! But once we stopped smirking, we came across this fragrant hummus alternative, and it's fantastic as a mid-day snack with raw veggies.

The Recipe

3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup Nama shoyu (we used Braggs Liquid Aminos)
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 cup raw tahini
1 bunch fresh mint leaves, stems removed

In a high-speed blender (we used a food processor), combine all of the ingredients and blend until smooth.

Notes from the test kitchen: This makes 2 cups--we decided to scale it down to 1/4 recipe. Also, we added a squirt of agave nectar, because we're addicted like that.

Serving suggestion: slice a zucchini on the bias into oval-shaped discs. When you want variety, try it with carrots, snap peas or tortilla chips!