Sneaky Chef Paratha (Indian Flat Bread)

Score for mom. My very picky eater—my youngest who eats nothing that bares any resemblance to actual, whole food—ate his entire spinach paratha. And a second. Granted, it was shaped like a gingerbread man and served with a heap of ketchup.

The other day, a friend of mine, who is originally from India, taught me her favorite sneaky chef recipe: veggie-packed paratha. Paratha is a sort of Indian flat bread, but it’s not baked like naan or as thin as chapatti. (I grew up with white sandwich bread, white dinner rolls, and my Norwegian grandmother’s lefsa, so the diversity of Indian bread is new to me.)

This born-and-bred American immediately embraced this tasty, versatile, one-dish trick of Indian mothers.

Here’s how it works:

Cook moong lentils in water until soft. Moong lentils are tiny yellow lentils packed with protein. Although everyone pretty much eats them in India, these lentils are favored by post-partum women because of their easy digestion. But any lentil that cooks up soft will work in a pinch. You could skip this step and use moong daal flour instead.

Add chopped (or pureed) spinach that’s frozen, fresh, or already cooked. Cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, or whatever you have on hand can be substituted.

Add salt and chili pepper to taste. When I say chili pepper, I’m not talking about the chili powder that your American neighbor adds to his blue ribbon kettle of chili. I’m referring to the stuff from the Indian store that will burn your tongue off in the right quantity.

Add sesame seeds and flax seeds. (Or not.)

Add warm water and a spoonful of whole-wheat flour from the Indian store. The flour, or atta, from the Indian store isn’t like the stuff from Whole Foods. It’s much finer. You could substitute a combination of common all-purpose and whole-wheat flour if you can’t get your hands on the powdery stuff. Sifting common whole-wheat flour through a fine mesh to remove the chunks is another option.

Keep adding water and/or flour until you get a fairly firm ball of dough.

Roll out a small ball at a time on a floured surface. Fold the dough like you’re wrapping a present and then roll out again. Cutting the dough into gingerbread men, triangles, and orbs is optional. I left the edges rusticly ragged for the grown-up pieces.

Brush the flatbread with oil and cook on medium high until brown spots appear on the underside. Flip, poke holes, and cook until done.

Serve with yogurt or hummus, but if you’re into dinosaurs and/or silly bandz, ketchup also pairs excellently with paratha.

Kale Recipes and Dirt-Stained Hands

“It’s lacinato kale,” Rod Pittman said.

The slender, blue-green leaves of this kale differed from the curly kind in the grocery store and the pink-streaked variety in my garden. Its embossed leaves reminded me of fancy wallpaper from the eighties. I’d never heard of lacinato kale, but I didn’t even know kale of any variety existed until three years ago, around the time I planted my first garden.

I adore Rod Pittman, as many gardeners do, which is why I chose to spend a muddy Sunday morning with him standing between rows of greens at The Veggie Patch at Bouchard Farms, an organic farm in north Georgia, where he consults seven days a week in what is clearly a labor of love. In the three years I’ve known him, he’s introduced me to no-till gardening, sweet pea inoculant, myccorhizal fungi, and the purple globes of artichokes in bloom.

Rod passed me some of the lacinato kale. Commas of dirt under his nails punctuated his slender fingers.

“Taste one of the small leaves.” He waited for me to pinch a leaf from the bunch and slowly chew it. His eyes widened in satisfaction as I nodded my head.

“It’s sweeter,” I said. The lacinato kale had a tell-tale brassica flavor, but somewhat nutty, and not at all potent like I sometimes find collards and mustard greens.

Rod used his well-worm pocketknife to harvest more kale for me to take home.  I’ve never seen him use gloves. Dark earth has permanently wedged itself into the wrinkles on his hands to form a roadmap of his eighty-two years: he tended his first garden at age nine and hasn’t put away the trowel since then.

I began to ponder with anticipation the many ways I could eat the lacinato kale, and I felt thankful to Rod yet again. I now had lacinato kale to add the list of things I’d learned from him.

As Rod handed me the lush bouquet of kale, I acknowledged the sheer beauty of those dirt-stained hands.

Braised Kale

Sautee red pepper flakes and minced garlic in olive oil. Add chopped kale and a little stock if there isn’t enough liquid for the kale to braise in. Season with salt and pepper. Add some walnuts. Finish with a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Salad with Kale

Add baby kale leaves to salad greens.

Pasta and Kale

Steam kale and add it to tomato sauce or pesto. Puree it to hide it from picky eaters.

Kale Chips

Toss kale with olive oil. Spread on a baking sheet and sprinkle with salt and perhaps a bit of garlic powder. Bake at 350 until crisp.

Kale and Garlic Soup

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add a couple cloves of minced garlic, salt, a bit of olive oil, and herbs, such as thyme. Simmer for fifteen minutes. Add chopped kale and cook a few minutes. Add noodles and cook until al dente. While soup is cooking, whisk an egg and then add a couple spoonfuls of soup broth to it. Remove the soup from the heat and add the egg mixture a little at a time to create a silky, not scrambled, broth. Garnish with parsley and Parmesan cheese.

Kale and Butternut Squash Muffins

In a food processor, shred 14 ounces of butternut squash. Mix squash with 2 ¼ cups brown sugar, a handful of kale, and 4 eggs. Then add ¼ teaspoon salt, 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour, 2 heaping teaspoons of baking powder, a handful of walnuts, and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes or until done.

Kale and Onion Frittata

Steam kale (or not). Whisk eggs, milk, salt, a dash of cayenne, and chopped herbs, such as thyme, oregano, or rosemary, in a bowl with a handful of chopped kale. Sautee diced onion until tender. Add the onion to the egg mixture and pour it back into the pan. When the bottom is done, flip it like a pancake. Add cheese on top. Place under the broiler if you want a browned top.

How I Became a Coffee Lover

“Taste this,” Richard Lipner said as he pinched a fruit off a coffee plant on his farm in Boquete, Panama and handed it to me. Following his lead, I sucked the pulp and spit out the husk and beans. The juice from the coffee cherry surprised me with its sweet, almost floral, flavor. But the experience differed from that of eating, say, pomegranate arils or muscadines because I could taste a cup of Arabica waiting to be brewed.

But I wasn’t a coffee drinker. (I stored a mini-Mr. Coffee in my cupboard back home solely for guests who enjoyed the flavor of black tar.)

My family and I arrived at Lipner’s organic coffee farm, Finca Dos Jefes, on a bright morning at the start of harvest season. Coffee plants, loaded with cherries from green to blood red, formed a patchwork across the sloped land, and brightly colored fabric ruffled between the rows of crops as Ngobe-Bugle women dressed in traditional molas dropped ripe beans into 5-gallons latas. Mountains and cloud forest formed a backdrop to the scene, which begged to be photographed.

The owners, Richard and Dee Lipner, immigrants from California, bought the farm several years ago after Lipner retired from his position as Executive Director of Meals on Wheels of San Francisco. On a visit to the highlands of Panama, they looked at the property and bought it the next day, despite knowing little about coffee farming, and even less about organic practices.

So why the whirlwind purchase? “The farm was abandoned and somewhat overgrown when we purchased it, but clearly reminded me of the wine country in California 40 years ago,” Lipner explained. Plus, he’d roasted his own coffee as a hobbyist for years, so learning to grow it wasn’t an unreasonable next step.

As Lipner led my family around his farm, we ran our hands through the cherries drying on the bamboo racks. The coffee cherries sun-dry on these raised racks until they reach a moisture content of eleven percent. From there, the cherries rest in a cool, dark place for at least ninety days, and finally, they are hulled and cleaned and ready for roasting.

After the tour of the farm, including its composting and seed-starting operations, we headed back to a porch surrounded by lilies in bloom for cupping time. I cradled each cup of coffee—a light, medium, and dark roast—and concentrated on the smell. 

As a novice, I smelled coffee, coffee, and coffee.

Then I took a sip from each cup, and as Lipner explained, let the flavors roll across my palate. As a non-coffee drinker on a coffee farm, I’d prepared for this moment: do not grimace your face!

In my prior experiences with coffee, I cringed at the bitterness. And the undertones of burnt rubber. And the lingering notes of shoe leather. That explains why when I drank coffee, I actually drank coffee-flavored sugar milk.

But Lipner’s coffee, Cafés de la Luna, tasted smooth. I didn’t have to pretend.

The lighter roast tasted, well, light. I noticed a slight acidity to it, and as a lover of lemonade, I found it pleasant. The darker roast tasted somehow fuller, and dare I say, complex.

I drank two cups.

After I settled on a preferred roast, Lipner showed me inside where a glossy red roaster waited. Under his direction, I weighed out four pounds of green coffee beans, lit up the roaster, and loaded the beans into the drum. I adjusted the flame to keep the temperature at 450 degrees, periodically slipped a few beans out to examine the color, and waited for the first pop, which means you’d best be on your toes or risk burning the whole lot. After releasing the beans into the swirling tray to cool, Lipner bagged up a half-pound for me to take home.

And then I bought five more bags.

How do I take my Cafés de la Luna you ask? Light on the sugar and just a splash of milk. I want to taste the coffee, after all.

The original version of this article was published on Patch.com on February 17, 2012.

The Chickens and the Eggs

I adored the chickens roaming the streets of El Valle de Anton, a sleepy town in Panama nestled inside the crater of a dormant volcano.

(I was not, however, as fond of the free-range dogs, like the stray that walked into our casita when I was pouring myself some jugo de naranja, and stared at me like I were rude for not offering him some. His banishment involved me yelling, vaya!, and my husband making strange whooping sounds.)

The eggs sold in the mini-supers came from the cageless cluckers in the village and went for 15 cents each, so I gathered up four, which I carried in my hands, somehow not cracking them, back to our casita. I made a dark-yolked frittata with onions, tomatoes, and peppers from the open-air market and the queso nacional that my husband picked up at a panaderia on our way out of Panama City.

Now that we’re back in the States, my daughter has started hounding me for a pet, a conversation I promised her we’d have post-Panama.

A dog? she suggests.

Chickens? I counter.

Comfort Food, Panamanian Style

I recently traded in the kale and broccoli in my garden in Dunwoody for the plantains and coconuts in Panama. We arrived in Panama, my husband’s home country, just before Christmas, at the tail end of the rainy season, for a one-month visit.

My mother-in-law welcomed our family to her home with warm hugs, exclamations of niños lindos, and comfort food from my husband’s childhood: milanesa, arroz con frijoles negros, and platanos maduros.

Read the rest of the article and get Abuela’s black bean recipe on Patch.com.

Articles from my Patch.com Column

A Candy-vore Gone Mostly Herbivore


A Veggie Hater’s Journey to Healthy Eating
Published October 28, 2011

Welcome to my recovery. I used to be a junk food junkie, practically mainlining Tootsie Rolls and Pepsi during my college years. The occasional “healthy” meal meant eating a serving of pot roast, but not the veggies, or forgoing a cookie for a slice of buttered white bread. Until my mid-twenties, I subsisted primarily on high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and Red No. 3.

Click here to continue reading this article.

Five Lessons about Home Cooking


Do you want to cook from scratch more often, but find the prospect daunting? Keep these five lessons in mind. And then go for it.
Published November 11, 2011

When I first started cooking from scratch, I had to start from scratch. I wanted to eat healthy, seasonal meals prepared by my own hands in my own kitchen more often, but I didn’t know quite where to begin. Not only did I need ingredients and skills, I needed confidence.

I could follow the directions on a package of Hamburger Helper, reheat frozen fish sticks, and scramble an egg. But make my own stroganoff sauce? Turn an egg into a vegetable frittata? No way. I feared such daring acts. Didn’t you need a tall white hat and a culinary arts degree for that sort of thing?

Click here to continue reading this article.

A Thanksgiving Soup


An offer of thanks for the food on my plate, not only for its nutritional value, but also for its power to unite people.
Published November 23, 2011

I first met Faiza, one of my cooking muses, over lousy pizza in a corner booth at a Chuck-e-Cheese. Not exactly your typical hotspot for culinary matchmaking. Our toddlers attended the same preschool and her family had accepted our daughter’s birthday party invitation, so there we were, sipping Cokes and nibbling on cold pizza, not quite sure how to pronounce each other’s names.

That meeting took place three years ago, shortly after Faiza’s arrival to Atlanta from her home country of Pakistan, although it now feels like a lifetime ago. We’ve become close friends in the meantime, having shared Christmas and Eid, grits and biryanis.

Click here to continue reading this article.

Sancocho Panameño

I tasted the Latino version of chicken soup for the soul during my month-long trip to Panama. It goes by the name sancocho panameño.

People all over the country have memories of abuelitas serving warm bowls of sancocho to them as sick kids. After tasting the soup, I could understand the nostalgia. The flavorful soup filled my gringo belly like a warm tonic. So I went back for seconds.

I tasted my first sancocho at the Miraflores Restaurant at the Panama Canal. My guess at their ingredient list includes chicken, onions, celery, cilantro, and ñame. I only knew about the ñame because my Panamanian in-laws identified the fibrous, potato-like vegetable in my soup as the same mysterious root crop I’d examined on the grocery store shelves a few days earlier.

Elena Hernandez explains the dish on her blog… if you can read español. My Spanish reading skills are on par with a Panamanian third grader, so I had to make heavy use of an online dictionary.

Here’s my translation of her recipe:

• Whole chicken cut in 8 pieces
• ½ cup of diced onion
• 8 springs of cilantro or to taste
• Salt to taste
• 4 cups of ñame chopped into medium pieces
• Oregano to taste

Preparation: Buy the whole bird, on the bone, of course. Season chicken with salt, onion, and cilantro. Let it rest and then put in a covered soup pot on medium heat. Don’t add fat or liquid, but let the chicken sweat for about 20 minutes. Add water to cover the chicken. Bring to a boil and then lower heat to cook slowly. Remove the chicken and set aside. Add the ñame, some grated and some chopped, and cook until it breaks down to the thickness you prefer. When it’s almost ready, add more cilantro and oregano. Place chicken in soup bowls and pour in the broth. Serve with white rice or bread.

Most importantly, Hernandez emphasizes Don’t Skip the Cilantro. It’s what makes sancocho panameño, panameño.

I plan to cook a pot of sancocho soon. I have free-range chicken in my freezer, cilantro and oregano growing strong in my garden, and ñame at my Publix. I’ve bought overpriced plantains and avocados from the two-foot by two-foot ethic stand at my grocery store before, but I’d never seen ñame. But low and behold, the same day I returned to the States from Panama, I found that little pile of ñame waiting there, as though I were destined to gorge on sancocho again.

Tropical Lemonade

I know I’m back in Atlanta because my toes are cold and I just paid 99 cents for one organic lemon. A very standard lemon: yellow flesh with flawless yellow skin and what must be regulation supermarket shape.

I miss Panamanian lemons already with all their bumps and variations.

I bought a handful of these lemons from a roadside stand on my way from Panama City to Boquete. And yes, that’s USD. Six lemons for a quarter.

While in Panama, I guzzled freshly squeezed lemonade by the gallons. Nothing tasted quite so delightful in the tropical heat. Lemons grew everywhere—lined in orchards, next to mansions with designer iron work, next to huts with thatched roofs, and wild on roadsides.

The ingredient list of my lemonade often included bright yellow lemons, but I discovered lemons also come colored green or orange, some with striations and lumps. My favorite lemon boasted a green rind with orange flesh and delightfully tangy flavor.

My Secret Muscadines

We went back for the muscadines.

The other afternoon, my kids led me to the creek near our neighborhood park, and since the rainclouds have gone on strike in our parts, we hopped right off the bank into mere puddles of water. The kids went to work squishing the purple globes scattered along the creek bed, while I surveyed the treetops.

Loads of muscadines. Loads. I’d stumbled upon a secret bounty.

Vines heavy with wild grapes dripped from branches. I snagged a plump beauty from a low-hanging wine and sucked the pulp out of the thick skin right there. There was no question: Hell, yeah, I was coming back! I spit out the tiny seeds, the sweet juice still lounging on my tongue, and knew I wasn’t coming back alone.

A couple days later, my gardening entourage—kids included—converged in the creek bed with fruit-pickers and a ladder and several empty buckets. My friend, Shawn, a northern transplant, had never tasted a muscadine before, so I polished a grape on my t-shirt and insisted she eat it immediately so that she’d fully grasp the high value of this venture. Another friend, a man in his sixties, and no newcomer to gleaning, took charge of the harvest by climbing up the ladder and giving the vines a hearty shake with a rake. He told us the story of his first drink of wine—homemade from the muscadines he’s foraged with his brother when he was thirteen—as the purple fruits rained down on us.

“Muscadine wine?” Shawn asked with a lilt in her voice.

“Muscadine wine,” he said.

And so we all knew Shawn’s plans for her blemished grapes.

I made muscadine sauce with half of my bucket. (I used this recipe, but pureed the hulls.) I’ve been eating on the other half for days now, a handful at a time, while standing over the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the freshly amended soil in my garden where the tomatoes and corn–now gone–had flourished all summer.

I’ve used the sauce as syrup for pancakes, drizzled it between layers of banana bread before baking, and licked it off a spoon. I’ll probably freeze a portion of what’s still left in the mason jar and use the rest to make one more batch of secret muscadine-banana muffins… to share.

Sweet Potatoes

Today, the temperature finally dropped from the depths-of-hell, Deep-South highs to the comfortable mid-70’s. And it’s raining too! I can’t remember our last deep soaking.

Our Labor Day plans were thwarted today by the host’s sick one-year-old, and the rain took care of our back-up pool plans. So I moved on to plan C: gardening. I love gardening in the drizzle—not in lightening or near ominously swaying trees, mind you, but in puttering rain, like we had all afternoon.

My friend, Pattie (Buy her new book here!), told me to check my sweet potatoes, so I finally did today, convinced that only spindly roots awaited me, since I’d planted on the late side. But I was wrong. I harvested twenty pounds of sweet potatoes, some the size of a newborn puppy, from the little plot in my front yard.

Out there in the rain today, I dug around for food, but also for some sort of meaning. As I pulled up stretches of vines and roots, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. I found clusters of pinky-sized nubs that mocked my efforts, but I also found fat treasures.

Just when I thought I was done, I wasn’t. My friend Farmer Bob says that when it comes to harvesting sweet potatoes, “The more you dig, the more you find.” After I’d stuffed my wheelbarrow with vines and weeds and started to level out the soil in the now-empty plot, I discovered this beauty:

I dig, not sure what I’ll find. But I unearth surprises in the garden and in life.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

• Peel and cut into pieces. Coat with oil, salt, and pepper. Spread on a pan and cover with foil.
• Roast at 425 F, but don’t preheat. Put the pan in the cold oven.
• When the potatoes are soft, uncover.
• Coat with maple syrup and thyme (my favorite) or any combination of sweet and savory. Add a little butter if you’d like.
• Roast until the edges turn brown.