The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

This dal recipe comes from my mother-in-law and is as close to perfect as I’ve ever come with making Indian food at home. For me, Indian food is one of those things that is generally always better in restaurants, for some reason despite how closely I follow a recipe it never turns out quite right in the end. While many Indian recipes seem to be fairly straight forward, I was always suspicious that there was a secret ingredient I didn’t know about that was present in Indian cooking, which was preventing me from being able to enjoy making a recipe at home that would not disappoint.

I don’t know what’s going on this year with those small mandarin oranges I love so much. They continue to disappointed me. I’m not talking about your garden-variety mandarin either. You know those mini ones that are the size of large grapes? I look forward to those every year and for some reason it’s looking like this is going to be a really bad season for them not to mention every other mandarin orange variety I have purchased since November in Vancouver.  It seems that no matter what variety I’ve come home with each week they are all sour and lacking in some way. I’m quite disappointed and have almost given up hope.

After a month of failed attempts, I recently decided to go in an entirely different direction with my orange consumption: navel oranges. While I don’t dislike these oranges, I was always a bit indifferent to them. They seemed too involved as a snack for work, considering I’m not the type to go and slice them up in the kitchen, not to mention that peeling a navel orange is tedious at best. But this weekend I found myself in my grocery store with a choice: give the navel orange another chance or become an apple eater. I went with the orange.

Does anyone else find eating an apple, by just biting into it, to be somewhat vulgar? I do eat and enjoy apples, I just don’t really like myself when I do. But that’s a story for another day…

Springerle are a traditional German Christmas cookie, known for there beautiful embossed designs and stark white color. I’ve heard their origin can be traced back as far as the 15th century, maybe earlier (wikipedia says 14th century) and are undoubtedly one of the prettiest cookies I’ve ever come across. My family is German and on my mothers side they are from the south where these cookies originated. I grew up with stories of these cookies as they were a big part of my mothers traditions and I remember them distinctly from those years we spent in Germany over the holidays.

As a kid who grew up with very little in the way of sweet treats, I can still remember one of the first times I tried a springerle cookie. I remember looking wide eyed at this beautiful cookie, white as a marshmallow with its amazingly intricate design and thinking if it was anything like the rest of Christmas in Germany it would surely be the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Even more distinct is biting down into its dense almost cake like surface and realizing that there couldn’t be anything further from the glorious taste of a marshmallow then this. Needless to say, for a kid of my generation who did not grow up in Germany they fell a little short of what I had imagined. I didn’t hate them as I would imagine a kid with a refined sense of what a cookie should taste like would, I wasn’t that discriminating, but I definitely was not as impressed as I thought i would be.

This year more than others I have been struck by the amazing variety of beautiful gifts that can be found online. I’ve spend a considerable amount of time this year browsing sites and not just those amazing kitchen creations! I came across so many great gift ideas that I thought I would share a few of them here, even if it is a bit late for some holiday celebrations. Here are some of my favorite kitchen items this year.

This dish towels are from Anthropology and probably too nice to actually use. I have a collection of pretty dish towels and I have to confess that I generally use them for decorative purposes rather than their intended use.

Have you ever attempted a rather complicated and somewhat curious dish for the first time? You know the kind of recipe you look at and have absolutely no idea how its going to turn out but for some reason you feel drawn to it and even compelled to invite people over for dinner the night you make it? If you’re anything like me this has happened on several occasions, yet despite the fact that the recipe SCREAMS failure you still can’t keep yourself from talking about how MINDBLOWING it’s going to be. The humiliation that comes from this sort of failure is worst kind for me. Unfortunately, it’s also something I had a lot of experience with in my early days of dinner parties.

Fortunately I hadn’t invited anyone to dinner this time around and I’m extremely thankful for that! This weekend I was tempted by a soup recipe from a  certain famous British celebrity chef, the end result of which produced one of the most offensive things to ever come out of my kitchen. I’m pretty sure this had absolutely nothing to do with my inability to follow a recipe and everything to do with the fact that this recipe was clearly flawed to begin with. I will spare you the details and just say that it was enough to make me consider fasting and silent meditation for a month.