Tofu burgers
I saw the recent post on 101 cookbooks for tofu burgers, and I figured I had to try them. I still don’t have a food-processor, so I made only half the recipe in my mini-processor. I laughed when I went to put in the mushrooms and discovered that 27 grams of mushroom is only one large mushroom! The recipe calls for 1/4 cup bread crumbs, but my 1/4 cup of panko only weighed about 14 grams, so I doubled the amount. Other than that, I made the burgers exactly as the recipe described, but my burgers weren’t nearly as brown as the one in the photo. It looked more like tofu with brown speckles on it. It was definitely cooked through though. The flavor wasn’t bad–a little nutty, but ultimately rather bland. We ate our burgers with tomato and red onion, but the burger couldn’t really stand up to the intense onion flavor. The burgers did hold together quite well though. The texture was certainly better than the texture of other tofu burgers I’ve made in the past. I might use this recipe as a base recipe, and add more seasonings next time. But I don’t think I’d make this exactly recipe as written again. Rating: somewhere between a B and a B-.
Chana dal
I wanted to make sambar for dinner tonight, 
but when I went to rinse my toor dal, I discovered that it was full of bugs. I thought about trying to sub in some other kind of dal, but I only had masoor dal and chana dal, and I wasn’t sure whether sambar would taste right with either type of dal. Instead, I decided to make a new recipe for dal. I looked in my Madhur Jaffrey World of the East cookbook, and she had one recipe for chana dal with cucumbers. But then I looked online and I was won over by the picture of the chana dal on the dinnerdiary.org blog (her photo is shown at right). The dal just looked so creamy and delicious, plus the author says that she’s “struggled at times to produce an Indian dish that’s rounded and deep in flavour, which this definitely was.” Sounded perfect! Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 