Extra Rich Creamed Potatoes

Extra rich creamed potatoes aren't just creamy because they are well mashed; they must have added cream. These are a family favorite.

The secret to smooth, lump-free mashed potatoes, if that is your thing, (I thought they were everyone's thing until I watched Friends, Season 1, Episode 9 when Ross wanted his with lumps, please.) is mashing them while they are hot and warming anything you want to add to them: butter, cream, milk or stock.

These are my very special extra rich creamed potatoes and they make an appearance at Thanksgiving, Christmas and other occasions where there will be gravy and roasted things, like chicken. Tonight is possibly my last Pokeno night in Kuala Lumpur. The promised roasted chicken and gravy, with creamed potatoes, almost cheers me up. Gonna miss these ladies terribly.

Ingredients
4lb or almost 2 kilos russet potatoes
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup or 113g butter
1 cup or 240ml whipping cream
1 tablespoon or 30g vegetable stock granules
A couple of good grinds fresh black pepper

Method
Peel your potatoes and drop them into a pot of cool water as you do. This keeps them from discoloring or turning brown.



Slice them and pop them back in the water.



Dump that water and add fresh water. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and put on the fire to boil, uncovered.



Meanwhile, gently melt your butter in the microwave.



Add the cream and warm it through too. Add the tablespoon of stock granules.



Whisk well. Add the black pepper to the cream/butter mixture.




When the potatoes are very fork-tender, drain and leave in the hot pot. Using a potato masher, get all the lumps out before it cools and before you start adding anything to it.




Add the cream/butter mixture and continue to mash.





Stir it around as well. Finally, use a spoon to stir the potatoes to make sure they are thoroughly mixed.



(To rewarm, it is best to put the potatoes in a microwaveable dish and give them a quick zap. Potatoes rewarmed on the stove tend to stick and burn.)

Enjoy!



P.S. It looks like my house hunting trip to Cairo will have to be postponed because of the coming elections and unrest. Now I am really sad again.

Habanero Pepper Sauce

Almost pure habanero peppers, this sauce has just a little vinegar and salt. The flavor and heat of the peppers really comes through.

First, a word of warning: Only make this on a day when you can open your windows and get full ventilation going in your house. Habanero peppers are some of the hottest on the planet and you will suffer lung damage if you breathe in these fumes. I am not even joking a little bit.

In our house, we eat this on everything. Well, everything savory. It is indispensable and irreplaceable and when we run out and Hock Choon (or Fiesta in Houston, or my little Géant in Dubai) doesn’t have fresh peppers to make more, we are sad beyond belief. When we lived in Singapore those three semesters, I would trek back after visits to KL with a cooler full of these beautiful peppers.

Used to be that I could get the orange ones which I think are somewhat hotter.  
I am happy to get red, if that's all they have. 

The customs guys would make me open my cooler and I looked like a dealer, I had so many. (Fortunately, Singaporeans understand an addiction to chilies and they would wave me through.) We just can’t live without them. If they don’t have habaneros in Cairo, we’re in trouble. (With the current stockpile of sauce, we'll be okay for a few months. After that, I'll let you know. You may need to send peppers.)

Ingredients
800g fresh habanero or scotch bonnet peppers
1/3 cup white vinegar
1 tablespoon sea salt

That’s it! We are talking almost pure-pepper sauce.

Method
Remove the stems and wash your peppers in a clean sink, full of water.

They float!

If some of the stems don’t come off clean, use a knife to remove the green. Likewise, if any of the peppers have a bad spot, cut it off. We are not really cooking this sauce so any bacteria is a bad thing.

Open your windows and ensure good cross ventilation in your house. Avoid inhaling in the direct vicinity of the peppers for the next step.

Grind the peppers in a food processor. They may not all fit at first, so grind what you can fit on your fastest speed and then add the balance.

Stop occasionally to scrape down the sides of the food processor with a rubber spatula. Remember not to breathe too deeply when you open it to scrape.

Meanwhile, wash and sterilize a few old jam jars with lids that close tightly without leaking. Which means, after washing well with dish soap, rinse them and then fill them with boiling water (putting a spoon in each to avoid breakage) and then drain. Avoid touching the inside of the lid or bottle now.

I always sterilize more than I think I'll need. It's hard to tell how much sauce you will get out of your peppers. 

Continue grinding the peppers for a few more minutes on high. Add in the salt and vinegar, scrape the processor vessel down again and put it back on high twirl for another few minutes.

You can see, I have scraped the sides down again. 

When your sauce is thick and pasty, put it in a pot on the stove and heat to boiling. If it is too thick, you can add a little water. You want to see it bubbling.

I added a little water.  About 1/4 cup.

We are not really cooking the sauce so this won’t take long. We just want to be hot enough to further sterilize the insides of your jars so the pepper sauce will last longer.

Meanwhile, set your jars out, with one teaspoon in each one. The spoon will keep the jar from breaking when you put the hot sauce in it. I am sure there is a good thermodynamic reason for this, but all I know is, it works. If you have a wide-mouth funnel, this will make transferring the boiling hot sauce to the jars much easier.

Once the sauce is boiling steadily, remove the pot from the heat and spoon or ladle it into the clean jars.

See that wide-mouthed funnel!  Great for this job.

Using a towel so you don’t burn your hands, tighten the lids as much as possible and turn the jars upside down. Once again, this helps the hot liquid sterilize the lid.

Every once in a while, when you pass the jars, try to tighten the lids a little more.

When the jars have cooled almost completely, turn the jars back upright. The round circle in the middle of the lid should be sucked in, just like when the original jam came from the manufacturer. If any of them don't seal tightly, store them in the refrigerator.

This will keep in a cool dark cupboard for months.  Once opened, keep the sauce in the refrigerator.

Even if you are a pepper eater, I suggest caution when adding this to food. It doesn’t take much!

Enjoy!

Harira or حريرة

Harira or حريرة is a rich soup full of tender lamb, chickpeas, vegetables and noodles, the perfect iftar meal to break a Ramadan fast or a delicious meal anytime of the year.

The western world has the Food Network. Over here, we have the Asian Food Channel. And, as luck would have it, they opened a store and class kitchen in Singapore, just after I moved back to KL. 

The couple of times I've returned to Singapore, there was always an agenda and no shopping or class-taking time.  Imagine my delight when I was invited to go again, all expenses paid – yay, even an executive club room in the hotel, which means open bar and canapés at happy hour! – with my days off and no agenda. 

I immediately got online to sign up for a class.  I really didn’t care what they were teaching; I just wanted to be in the AFC kitchen. The class available on my Saturday there was called Exotic Favorites and we learned to make baklava, a lamb and tomato soup named harira, and the roasted eggplant dip baba ganoush, as part of a traditional mezze.

Now, a confession:  I lost my notes.  All I have left are a bunch of photographs, my memories and this pen.

Pretty cool, huh?

So I am recreating this harira rather slap-dashly and with the help of a few different online recipes.  

I don’t see how it can turn out badly, since all of the ingredients are fresh and tasty but it will not be the same as the one we made at AFC.  For one thing, since we didn’t have two hours for the soup to simmer, the chef had made stock from the lamb and started with that instead of putting it all in together to simmer, as below.  But, hey, all alone here, just me and the hound, I have all the time in the world for simmering.

Ingredients

Olive oil

400g or 14oz lamb

1/2 kilo or 1lb fresh tomatoes

2 medium onions

3 stalks celery – well-washed

1 big bunch cilantro or coriander leaves

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Good pinch of saffron

Sea salt

Black pepper

Cayenne

60g or about 3 oz tomato paste

1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

30g or about 3 oz fine pasta, broken into short lengths

1 lemon, cut into wedges for squeezing at will (at serving time)

Method

Cube your lamb and brown it in a little olive oil.  Season with black pepper, sea salt and cayenne.

Add two liters or a little more than two quarts of water to the pot.  Bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, chop the celery, tomatoes, onions and the stems of the cilantro and add them to the pot.    Chop up the cilantro leaves and save them for later.

Add in the cinnamon, ginger, saffron and tomato paste.  Simmer, covered, for two hours.  Or more. 

About 10 minutes before serving, add in the chickpeas, dried pasta and chopped cilantro leaves.  Check the seasonings and add more salt and cayenne as needed.  Cook till pasta is al dente.  

According to our AFC chef (I believe his name was Khalil) harira is a traditional iftar soup, originally from Morocco, which means it is commonly eaten during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan as part of the sunset meal. He said sometimes lentils are added as well, for more substance.

In a side note, I love Google Translate.  When I looked up harira, it gave me that lovely word you see in the title. (Arabic is so beautiful. If only I could read it.) When I turned it around and asked what that word meant, the translation was “calorie.” Now I have one thing I can recognize on a nutrition label, should such a thing exist, when we move to Egypt.

For a vegetarian version, forget the lamb and start from where you add water to the pot.  Add vegetable stock (homemade or from a couple of cubes and water) and go from there.  You might want to add the lentils for extra protein. 

Here are a few photos of the AFC kitchen and store. It seems that since then, the Asian Food Channel was bought out by an American company so the test kitchen is no longer open, more's the pit. 

* I paid for my own class and received no compensation for writing this post.