Food Porn: India, Italy, and the Carribbean

I've had some cooking pictures sitting on the camera for a while, and I've finally gotten around to downloading them, so here's a mass food porn post. First, we made moong dal, a lentil curry, a while back. At least, we made it with red lentils; various recipes on the internet call for split peas and moong beans. The recipe for this one comes from a book, 50 Great Curries of India, by Camellia Panjabi.

I think I'm okay sharing the recipe, since I had to do a bit of substituting. Besides, this is a free plug for the book, right? Anyway, the ingredients include...

• 1 cup of red lentils
• 1 can of diced tomatoes with green chilis
• roughly one cubic inch of ginger root, peeled and chopped
• 3 teaspoons of minced garlic
• 1/4 teaspoon of powdered tumeric
• salt to taste
  
• cilantro to taste (which is a lot, in my case)
• 1 tablespoon of butter

I brought five cups of water to boil in a large pot, then added the lentils, tomatoes, ginger, most of the garlic, some salt, and the tumeric. When it came back to a boil, I lowered the heat, covered it, and let it simmer for half an hour. Then, I tossed in cilantro and let it simmer a bit more while I browned the remaining garlic in butter. The "golden brown and delicious" garlic then goes into the pot, and the curry can be served over rice. Better yet, put the moong dal and rice in a tortilla.

Second, I was scrounging for lunch one day and found we had some packaged gnocchi in the cupboard. A bit of net searching and a further check of on-hand ingredients later, I was able to make this sage-parmesan gnocchi (with a bit of grilled chicken thrown in).


And finally, tonight I really wanted to do something with some black beans that were already cooked, so I found a recipe for Jamaican Curried Rice. In the spirit of "fusion", it too goes well in a tortilla.

And I actually remembered to take some pictures of the process for this one.