No longer updating, but hope you enjoy the recipes!
Unfortunately, I got too busy to go back to blogging, after I was forced to take a break from it in 2015 because of tendonitis.
But you can still follow my cooking, eating, and travels on instagram: (@spontaneoustomato)
My dissertation stress has been catching up with me recently, more than ever before. So much that I actually considered not posting a recipe this week.
I have all sorts of big and little deadlines, self-imposed and otherwise, and I sometimes fall into the trap of too much calendar-checking—trying to conceptualize too many future obligations at once. This always leaves me feeling overwhelmed: while working on one task, I can’t help but feel guilty that I am not working on others. (As absurd as that sounds.) So inertia takes hold and instead of getting to work, I do nothing, while feeling increasingly… awful.
The one thing that helps—other than working on the dissertation (but even that doesn’t help sometimes)—is cooking.
Continue Reading: Asparagus Salad with Preserved Lemon Dressing and Passover Potatoes…
Spicy Tomato Soup
Paula loves Campbell’s tomato soup, but to me it tastes metallic and sweet. Far too sweet—like it’s been loaded up with sugar. (It’s mystifying to me that Paula can’t taste the sugar in it at all!)
I’ve put up with my share of canned-soup buying and even cringed through eating it, since my reward was grilled cheese sandwiches on Paula’s homemade bread. But every time, I’ve told her that I wanted to try making her a from-scratch tomato soup that she’d like even better than Campbell’s.
This was not supposed to be that soup. This was just a recipe I came up with in honor of my new immersion blender. (My last one broke after only three uses… six years ago.)
It’s just about as different as you can get from Campbell’s—that was the last thing on my mind when I was creating it—so I had no idea that this soup, warmed up with aleppo pepper and thickened with creamy red lentils, would be the one.
Lemon Lime Thumbprint Cookies
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I love Jewish holidays for the food, so the glutton in me is pretty much devastated when I let one slip by without celebrating (i.e., eating) properly… but the jew in me just can’t remember when the holidays are! (My younger sister always seems to know, but I think she’s given up on reminding me.)
Typical typical… I forgot it was Purim this past weekend, and when I should have been making hamantaschen, I accidentally made these instead. Eerily similar though, right? Instead of lemon-lime curd, they just need to be filled with sweet poppyseed goop or fruit jam, and then squeezed into triangular shapes…
The photos are not from this past weekend, but are actually from about a month ago when I first planned to post this recipe, but then other things took precedence—I guess I was too excited about sharing the past few dishes with you (especially the momos!) so I just kept pushing these off until later.
And wouldn’t you know it, I somehow LOST all the notes I’d taken on the recipe!
So this weekend, when I sat down to write up the recipe, I instead ended up baking another 4 dozen thumbprints, just to take extra good notes this time about how I (think I) made them in the first place!
Nepali Momos (Steamed Dumplings) with Tomato Chutney
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It’s finally here! The recipe I’ve wanted to share with you for ages. (Not that I’ve mentioned that to you, since I had no idea just how many rounds of recipe testing it would take.*)
I’ve never been to Nepal, but I have an immense love and nostalgia for these dumplings from one of the Nepali restaurants in Madison, WI, where I grew up. The momo dumplings at Himal Chuli on State St. are one of my must-eats in Madison, and momos are one of my favorite types of dumplings.
Momo fillings are seasoned with fresh ginger, cilantro, and the same types of hearty, savory, curry spice flavors you’d find in a samosa, but the delicate dumplings are steamed rather than fried, and can be served with spicy or mild tomato chutney.
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I am a sucker for steamed dumplings, but especially when they are packed with peanuts and cilantro, and surrounded by a moat of tomato cilantro sauce.
Continue Reading: Nepali Momos (Steamed Dumplings) with Tomato Chutney…
Cheesy Skillet Potatoes and Eggs
You might be aware that California is in the midst of a terrible drought this season. Well this past weekend it finally rained in Santa Barbara—and it rained hard! (We’re talking torrential rains and coastal flooding.)
Although they’re reporting that the storm wasn’t enough to re-fill the state’s dried-up reservoirs, those few days of rain were still good news for California. And bad news for my car.
For some reason that none of the various mechanics I’ve taken it to can figure out, my car seems to hate the rain.
Unfortunately the rainstorm followed an exhausting dissertation week—when I’d still managed to do quite a bit of cooking—so it was one of those lazy weekends when Paula and I both wanted to throw in the kitchen towel and just go out for brunch.
But of course we couldn’t drive anywhere in the rain without my car threatening to die. Good thing we had this brunch-worthy recipe up our sleeves.
Easy Thai Peanut Curry
Paula keeps suggesting that I post a recipe for Thai coconut milk curry… she doesn’t care what kind—yellow, red, green, panaeng, whatever. But I’ve rejected this idea every time, with the (lame perfectionist food blogger) excuse that I’d want to make my own curry paste first.
You know, so I could seem extra impressive with my authentic made-from-scratch curry paste, never revealing that I usually just use the Mae Ploy brand (which is delicious by the way).
Maybe someday I will post a recipe or two for homemade curry paste (after all, I used to make some about once a year and then freeze it for future use!).
But besides my laziness, there’s another problem with that kind of blog post. I start imagining the response: “That’s nice that (she’s a graduate student so) she has time to make her own curry paste, but who else has time for that?! I’m going to stick to my storebought brand!” Or worse yet, “That looks like way too much work and way too many ingredients; I’m going to stick to never making Thai curry!”
Lucky for all of you hypothetical pessimists, I came up with a way to make a quick, easy, peanutty version of a yellow Thai curry without needing any curry paste at all.
spontaneous tomato 