Recipes

something different

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Chicken Lentil Curry

(Based on a recipe in the House of India cookbook)

• 4-5 lb boneless chicken thighs

• 1/2t - 1 t red pepper flakes

• 1c lentils

• 1 lb+ sliced onions

• 8 cloves+ sliced garlic

• 2 28 oz cans tomatoes

• 1 c raisins

• 4T curry powder

• 3T olive oil or equivalent

• 4 t salt

• 1/4 c lemon juice

Combine lentils, pepper flakes, 1 qt water, boil until lentils are soft.

Sauté onions and garlic in oil about 5 minutes in a large pot (1 ½ gallon+), add curry, lower heat and cook another 3 minutes or so, stirring. Add tomatoes and chicken. Simmer another 15 minutes. Add lentils, their water, raisins, lemon juice, salt, simmer another 10 minutes+.

Cold Cut Chicken

(Based on a recipe in Joyce Chen’s cookbook)

• 1 chicken

• 1T sherry

• 3 slices ginger root

• 1 stalk scallion.

Put enough water in a large pot to cover the chicken. Bring the water to a boil. Put in the chicken, sherry, ginger root, and scallion. Bring it back to a boil, cover it, turn off the heat, wait an hour. Bring it back to a boil, turn off the heat, wait an hour. Pierce the thigh with a chopstick; if no blood comes out you are done, if there is blood repeat for another hour (I have never had to do so, but that’s what the cookbook says). Serve cold with dipping sauces — soy sauce flavored with sesame oil, garlic, or ginger.

Hummus bi Tahini

(Based on a recipe in Claudia Roden’s Book of Middle Eastern Food)

• 1 c dried chickpeas

• ½ c tahini

• Juice of 2 lemons (or to taste)

• 5 cloves garlic (or to taste)

• ¼ t salt

• Olive oil

• Paprika

• Parsley

Soak the chickpeas over night. Boil them about an hour until soft, drain them. Combine chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon juice and salt in a food processor; if they are too stiff for the food processor to handle well, add a little of the water they were cooked in or a little olive oil. Process until smooth. Put in a bowl, pour on olive oil, sprinkle paprika on the olive oil to turn it red, add some chopped parsley. Eat with pita and/or sliced apples.

Rishta

(from al-Baghdadi, 13^th c. Islamic)

Cut fat meat into middling pieces and put into the saucepan, with a covering of water. Add cinnamon-bark, a little salt, a handful of peeled chickpeas, and half a handful of lentils. Boil until cooked: then add more water, and bring thoroughly to the boil. Now add spaghetti (which is made by kneading flour and water well, then rolling out fine and cutting into thin threads four fingers long). Put over the fire and cook until set to a smooth consistency. When it has settled over a gentle fire for an hour, remove.

• 1 lb lamb

• 4 c water

• 1⁄2 stick cinnamon

• 1 t salt

• 6 T canned chickpeas

• 3 T lentils

• 2 c flour

• 3⁄8-1⁄2 c water

Cut up meat, combine it with water, cinnamon, salt, chickpeas and lentils, simmer about half an hour. Mix flour with about 1⁄2 c cold water (just enough to make an unsticky dough). Knead thoroughly, roll out, cut into thin strips. Add to pot — I stretch them before dropping them in to make them thinner — simmer another half hour being careful not to let it stick to the bottom and scorch, serve.

(This recipe is from a cookbook written more than fifty years before Marco Polo supposedly brought pasta from China).

Icelandic Chicken

(Called that because I found it in a medieval Icelandic medical miscellany, but it is one of several daughter manuscripts of a lost original believed to be from southern Europe)

One shall cut a young chicken in two and wrap about it whole leaves of salvia, and cut up in it bacon and add salt to suit the taste. Then cover that with dough and bake like bread in the oven.

• 3 lb chicken

• 5 c flour

• ~1 3⁄4 c water

• fresh sage leaves to cover

• 1⁄2 lb bacon

(We find the bacon adds salt enough.)

Make a stiff dough by kneading together flour and water. Cut chicken in half. Divide dough in half, roll out each half to a size sufficient to wrap half a chicken. Cover the dough with sage leaves and the sage leaves with strips of bacon. Wrap each half chicken in the dough, sealing it.

You now have two packages which contain, starting at the outside, dough, sage, bacon, chicken. Put them in the oven and bake like bread (325° for 1 ½ to 2 hours, to an internal temperature of 200°F).

The part of the bread at the bottom is particularly good because of the bacon fat and chicken fat. Baste the top with the drippings or turn the loaves over when they are half done, being careful not to tear the bread wrapping.

If you have a larger chicken, increase the bacon, flour and water by [weight of chicken/3 lb]**2/3

For more historical recipes …

My wife and I have a cookbook, How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes. It is available as a paperback on Amazon or a free pdf from my web page. It contains about 300 recipes, dating mostly from the tenth to the sixteenth century.

For readers who live in the southern hemisphere or like planning for the long term:

Mulligatawny Soup: A Recipe for Cold Weather

• 1/2 cup  lentils                                     

• 7 cups chicken broth, divided

• 4-1 inch chunks fresh ginger, peeled

•  1 medium tomato       

• 2 medium carrots,                              

• 1 celery rib

• 1 1/2 T butter

• 1 T olive oil

• 1 T garam masala

• 1/2 T ground cumin

• 1/2 T ground coriander

• 1/2 t ground turmeric

• 1 medium to small onion, coarsely chopped                                

• 4 garlic cloves, pressed

• 3T  flour

• 1 t tomato paste

• ~1/2 T salt

• ~1/2 t pepper

Simmer lentils in 3 cups of chicken broth for about 30 minutes, until soft.
Combine the remaining 4 cups of broth, chopped carrots, celery, tomatoes and ginger in a blender or food processor. Blend and set aside.

Melt butter, add olive oil in a sauce pan and sauté spices, onion and garlic, stirring frequently so as not to burn, for about 5 minutes. Stir in flour, cook about 1 minute. Add tomato paste, stir. Add the contents of the blender, bring to a boil, cover and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Put the contents of the saucepan plus most of the cooked lentils back in your blender or food processor and puree until smooth. Return to pot along with the remaining lentils and the broth they were cooked in. Season with salt and pepper to taste, bring back to a simmer, turn off, serve.

What I use for pureeing is a vita-mix, a very high powered blender. My guess is that a food processor would work but I haven't tried it.

Sourdough Bread

(loosely based on a recipe in the King Arthur Flour Cookbook)

• 6 c white flour

• 1 ¾ water or a little less

• 2 ½ c (1 lb) ripe sourdough starter¹

• 1  c raisins

• 2.5 t salt

Combine raisins and flour. Dissolve starter in water, stir into the flour, mix, cover, leave 20-30 minutes.

Add salt, knead until smooth, cover, let rise for 1 hour. Fold it. Let rise, covered, another hour. Divide in three, shape into boules; the one tricky bit is that you want to try to get all the raisins into the interior, since if they are on the surface they will burn. Leave to rise for two hours. Preheat the oven and baking stone to 450°, score the top of the boules with a knife, put into the oven on the baking stone, bake about 40 minutes to an internal temperature of about 200°F.

A Low Glycemic Variant

I found a number of recipes online that claimed to produce a tasty low glycemic index bread and tried them. None, despite the claims on their web pages, was close to the quality of ordinary bread. I also bought one variety of low glycemic bread online — better, but still not very good. 

Sourdough bread has a lower glycemic index than yeast bread. Whole wheat flour has a lower glycemic index than white flour. Almond flour has a glycemic index of about zero. It also has no gluten, which means bread made with it (or coconut flour, or chickpea flour, or ...)  won't rise. 

The obvious solution is to add gluten. Wheat gluten has a glycemic index only a little lower than whole wheat flour but a much lower percentage of carbohydrates, hence a much lower glycemic load, which is what really matters. 

Here is the recipe for two loaves; use whole wheat or white flour or a mix, depending on your tradeoff between taste and glycemic load. It isn’t as good as my standard bread but better than what I could buy.

• 2 ¼ c wheat flour

• 2 ¼ c almond flour

• ¾ c gluten

• 3/8 c Golden flaxseed meal 

• ½ lb sourdough starter

• ~2 c water

• 1 c raisins

• 2.5 t salt

Mix together the flours, raisins, meal and gluten. Stir the sourdough starter into the water and add to the flours, stirring to mix. Let it sit for half an hour.

Add salt, knead smooth (this takes only a minute or two). Let it sit for an  hour. Fold it. Let it sit for an hour.

Form into two boules. Cover and let it rise for two hours.

Put in a 450°F oven, bake until the internal temperature is 200°F.

Let it cool. Eat it.

It isn't the best bread I ever ate, but  better than what I could make from a webbed low glycemic recipe or buy. By my calculation the glycemic load from the flours and gluten is about a third what it is for the white flour in my standard bread. That does not include the raisins, which are the same for either recipe, but you can leave them out if you want — I like raisin bread.

I also have a low glycemic granola that I found online. Unlike the online bread recipes, it’s actually as good as ordinary granola.

• 1 cup Almonds

• 1 cup Hazelnuts

• 1 cup Pecans

• 1/3 cup Pumpkin seeds

• 1/3 cup Sunflower seeds

• 1/2 cup Golden flaxseed meal

• ~ 3/4c Coconut chips (my addition to the recipe)

• 1 large Egg white

• 1/4 cup Butter (measured solid, then melted)

• 1 tsp Vanilla extract

(the original recipe also had erythritol as a sweetener. There is now evidence that erythritol, a widely used sugar alcohol, is seriously bad for you, so I leave it out and add a non-erythritol diet sweetener when I eat the granola.)

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line a large cookie sheet (~12”x18”) with parchment paper.

Pulse almonds and hazelnuts in a food processor intermittently, until most of the nuts are in chopped into large pieces (about 1/4 to 1/2 of the full size of the nuts).

Add the pecans. Pulse again, stopping when the pecans are in large pieces. (Pecans are added later since they are softer.)

Add the coconut chips, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and golden flaxseed meal. Pulse just until everything is mixed well. Don't over-process! You want to have plenty of nut pieces remaining, and most of the seeds should be intact.

Add the egg white to the food processor. Whisk together the melted butter and vanilla extract in a small bowl, and evenly pour that in, too.

Pulse briefly until everything is coated evenly. Again, avoid over-processing. At the end of this step, you'll have a combination of coarse meal and nut pieces, and everything should be a little damp from the egg white and butter.

Transfer the nut mixture to the prepared baking sheet in a uniform layer, pressing it down. Bake for 15-18 minutes, until lightly browned, especially at the edges.

Cool completely before breaking apart into pieces. (The granola will be soft when you remove it from the oven, but will crisp up as it cools.)

1. I keep sourdough starter in the refrigerator. To wake it up before using, combine ½ c flour, ½ c water, ¼ c starter, let sit 24 hours. Repeat for 12 hours, using ¼ c from the first round and using the rest to refill the jar of starter in the refrigerator. Repeat, this time with 1c flour, 1c water, and 1/2c of the starter you produced by the first two iterations, for 6-8 hours. You now have the 1 lb you need for the recipe.