pomegranate marlin and dill pilaf

So we came back home from our Vancouver trip loaded down with new cookbooks, and of course I had to immediately find something new to cook. The first recipe that jumped out at me was a pomegranate molasses-marinated swordfish from the Casa Moro cookbook. Hey, I thought, we still have pomegranate molasses! And, as fate would have it, we were able to buy big fat steaks of Hawaiian marlin at the store - plus the weather was good enough for outdoor grilling!

To go along with the fish, the book recommended a pilaf, so I tried out the Moro recipe for rice with dill and pine nuts.  It involved rinsing and then soaking basmati rice so that it took very little cooking - not a technique that I’d tried before, but it worked like a charm.

About two hours ahead of time, I combined pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, cilantro, garlic and salt in a pie pan and rubbed it all over the fish steaks, which then went back into the fridge. Then I measured out the rice, rinsed it several times and set it to soak in warm water and salt. J got the grill started, then sliced eggplant and rubbed it with olive oil and salt.

Ethiopian beef tartare

I may have mentioned my deep and abiding love for the book Flatbreads & Flavors by Toronto-based husband-and-wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It introduced us to cooking all sorts of ethnic cuisines that we might not have attempted, by making the recipes simple yet authentic. Each chapter has a limited number of recipes, but they fit together perfectly - there might be two different breads, a beef dish, a chicken dish, a vegetable and a condiment. So just from this one cookbook, you could make a feast from Georgia, the Middle East, India or Italy!

I had fallen in love with Ethiopian food from the first time I had it, at a restaurant in Minneapolis, of all places. It never occurred to me that you could make it at home - then I got this cookbook. When I made the chicken stew from it, with its simple combination of chicken, butter, cardamom, berbere paste and red wine, it was like an Ethiopian restaurant had opened in our kitchen. We’ve also made injera at home (with mixed success, frankly) and tibs wett. But our favorite go-to dish is definitely the partially-cooked beef tartare, kitfo lebleb. It’s fast, rich, and very very spicy.           

For this dish J defrosted a sirloin steak and chopped it very finely. You could certainly use ground meat but we’ve always preferred the texture of chopped. The original recipe calls for onions, but we usually leave them out. Adding mint is great if you have it, but I don’t think dried mint is a good substitute - leave it out if you don’t have fresh.

Cookbook: Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen

This little book is a powerhouse of Indian cooking. It’s small, it doesn’t lie flat, it has no pictures (except a few line drawings), and it’s far from comprehensive, but this one book revolutionized Indian food for us. Not right away, though.

It was a gift from a friend many years ago, after I had already given J a copy of Yamuna Devi’s Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking, and we felt (rather smugly) that we had everything we needed for cooking Indian food. But if you’ve ever used the Devi book, you may have noticed that her ingredient lists are enormous, her instructions are tiresomely exact, and she puts a somewhat intimidating weight on the history and context of the food. We had the book, but I mostly used it to make flatbread and hot yogurt drinks to go with our Patak’s Curry Paste concoctions. Spice Kitchen sat on our shelf, unappreciated.

Then one day we opened it.

Cookbook: Baking Illustrated

J and I have been religious subscribers to Cook’s Illustrated for years. We keep every issue, and occasionally drag the whole pile out and paw through it looking for that really great shrimp recipe we remember seeing - was it last month? Hmm, no, actually, it was two years ago…so we get to see all the old issues again and maybe find something new to try. And don’t get me wrong, Cook’s isn’t always perfect - they know nothing about Mexican food, and frequently their product reviews have not a single thing that’s available on the west coast. But many of their recipes have become gospel in our household, and sometimes you just want to be able to find it quickly.