Vegetable Curry

A very easy curry, despite the number of ingredients. Experiment with the spice amounts to get the flavour that you want.

1/3 Cabbage, one-inch squares
1 small stalk of celery, finely chopped
2 carrots, sliced diagonally
1 to 2 tablespoons peanut oil

2 small onions, diced
large handful of green beans
2 potatoes, cut into parallelepipeds

2 cups water
1 can coconut milk

5 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon fennel seed
salt, to taste

Put the cabbage, celery, carrots and peanut oil in the pot on high heat, stirring occasionally. This will start to smell like chow mein. Add the onions. Once the onions are translucent, add the green beans and potatoes. Add the water (you may have to adjust the amount). Simmer until the potatoes are done. While this is happening, grind the spices and mix them together. Add the coconut milk and ground spices. Simmer briefly, serve and eat.

Potato-Fennel Soup

This potato-fennel soup recipe straight from the New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (strangely not available on the Moosewood Restaurant website) coincidentally given to us by Ryan's aunt Marcia for Christmas. We didn't know we were moving to Ithaca then. Here is what we made, it's different from the book mainly because we didn't have the right amounts of anything. But that's one of the best things about the Moosewood Cookbook - that sort of stuff does not matter.

some oil/butter
2 cups thinly sliced onions
some salt
3 strangely shaped, quite large potatoes
1/2 a fennel bulb, minced (in retrospect, we wished we had used the whole bulb)
toasted caraway seeds
4 cups of water
white pepper

Add oil to soup pot, then onions and a little salt. Cook over a low heat, so they are soft and brown. Add potatoes, some salt, fennel, caraway. Sautee for a few minutes and then add
water.

Bring to a boil and then simmer until potatoes are soft. Blend resulting soup so it is nice and creamy (that wasn't in the recipe book). Serve with minced fennel feathers on top (that was).