The Slapdash Cook

As a rule, I am not as excited about writing restaurant reviews as I am about writing recipes. However, I am pleased to say that I am making an exception for the Kogi truck. What is Kogi, people outside LA and NYC might ask? It is, and I am not making this up, a food truck that serves Mexican-Korean hybrid food. For that reason alone, it is very LA.

For reasons too boring to go into, I ended up invited to a summer afternoon picnic involving free food from this truck! While I have reservations about Mexican-Korean food — neither individual cuisine is particularly vegetarian-friendly, at least in un-Americanized form — I am a big fan of free foodie stuff. And Kogi caters to the drunk twentysomething hipster crowd, which is sprinkled throughout with vegetarians. So off I trundled to the park!

Before leaving, I did some googling to see if any other vegetarians had reviewed the food, and discovered that their corn tortillas use lard. (I am a bit confused by this — as I understand it, corn tortillas don’t need any fat except whatver you use to cook them, and flour is where you have to watch for the manteca.) So I arrived determined to skip the corn-tortilla tacos in favor of the flour-tortilla burritos. They also offered a kimchi quesadilla.

Burrito Verdict: Okay!

The tofu is soft, not baked or fried. This works out surprisingly well with the kimchi, cheddar cheese and… something starchy… that was also in there. The blandness of the tofu works well with the kimchi in particular. It was a bit boring, but that’s tofu for ya.

Quesadilla Verdict: Oy!

I have a tragic weakness for things involving large amounts of cheese. Also spicy things. So on the surface, this seemed great. It’s also much prettier to look out. In practice, however, kimchi and cheddar didn’t really work for me in such large amounts. (Maybe they needed tofu for a mediator.) Also, big pieces of kimchi slop out of the tortilla, which can be messy and socially awkward. However, I could envision the appeal of this food going up substantially if I were drunk.

J. heartily recommends the short rib tacos, by the way.

Finally, along with normal American sodas, they also offered something called milk soda. They ran out before I got there, so it can’t be that bad, but I’m afraid I have no firsthand report. New feeling of soda beverage!

It’s summer in Southern California, so of course I’m in love with a food that grows in humid forests! Actually, we got another good price on button mushrooms — so good, in fact, that I ran out of ways to give them the starring role in dishes that I haven’t made recently. So J. intelligently suggested a rerun of a favorite: the Spicy Mushrooms with Ginger and Chilies recipe from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. He did the mushrooms, I did a split pea side dish, and boom!

I have recently had my awareness raised about copyright issues vis-a-vis reprinting cookbook recipes wholesale, so I’m not going to. Sorry. This book is worth owning anyway, even if you do routinely have to reduce the oil/butter. I will say this:
1. Thai birdseye chilis work fine where they call for serranos etc., and indeed can be used more sparingly.
2. Chopped cilantro is nice to have, but it doesn’t seem to make or break any dish in this book if you leave it out.
3. J. is a lot more patient than I am about roasting and grinding whole spices. In fact, in general I would say he is a more patient cook than me!

We’re obsessed with rice pilaf around here. Leftovers rarely last 24 hours. Because the rice-sauteeing stage is boring, and because I love the slow cooker, I decided to try doing it in the slow cooker. At first, I thought I’d only be able to do the sauteeing part in the slow cooker and then move the rice to the stovetop, but some Googling revealed that, in fact, rice can be made in the slow cooker without many, if any, changes.

Results: Mixed. Due either to an error in judgment or the water content of my veggies, the rice came out kind of gluey, although not like outright paste, which was a problem for some of the people who posted recipes. I also forgot to rinse the rice, which was totally my fault. So I’m trying it again with less liquid, because I very much liked not having to stand over the stuff while it cooked.

Slapdash Rice Pilaf
This recipe is very flexible, as long as you keep the rice-to-water ratio even. Throw in whatever you think would taste good with the rest of your meal.

2 tb olive oil or butter (a lot, but kinda necessary to make the consistency of the rice come out right. Cook’s Illustrated suggested THREE tablespoons! If you aren’t watching cholesterol or dairy, you might as well use real butter for the flavor.)
1/4 to 1/2 onion
1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of any other veggies you wanna saute (yellow crookneck squash was used here)
Any dried fruit you think would be nice in the pilaf
1/4 cup split peas (optional — you might also use lentils, but I’d want to soak them first because I think they take more time to cook.)
1 cup rice
A small amount of Chinese noodles (what I used) or spaghetti, broken up into smallish pieces. Let’s say 20 noodles before breaking.
2 cups broth or boullion of your choice. I usually dilute boullion because it’s sooo salty, but don’t bother here — salty is good for pilaf, at least in J’s estimation (he’s used to the boxed ones from the grocery store). You might even want to add a little salt.
Dried mushrooms — optional but nice. I have a ton of dried shiitakes that were reasonably priced at 99 Ranch Market.
Chopped veggies, nuts, etc.

Heat your slow cooker on high with the olive oil or butter. (Or low if you have the time. I ain’t trippin’.) Add the onions and — this is important — remove the lid so that the steam isn’t trapped. It needs to be dry so the rice-to-water ratio isn’t messed up. Ignore 1-2 hours, stirring whenever, until soft.

Add any vegetables that need cooking. Ignore another 1-2 hours, stirring whenever, with the lid off.

Rinse your rice off! Don’t forget like me! Add rice and noodles to slow cooker. Ignore, stirring occasionally, until noodles have been toasted. I got impatient here, but I’m guessing it was another hour or so.

Meanwhile, if you have dried mushrooms, boil your broth, stock or boullion, then add the mushrooms, weigh them down with a plate and let them soak for a while. The goal is to get the lovely mushroom flavor out.

If using dried mushrooms, strain broth to get any schmutz out. Add broth and any split peas or dried fruit to slow cooker. Stir to get everything nicely oily.

Cover and cook until done. Internet recipes said this would take 3-4 hours on high; it ended up being more like an hour and a half for me. So you’ll probably need to check every now and then.

When rice is done, use a fork to “fluff” (? — but recipes all use that word) the rice and stir in the ingredients you didn’t want to cook. I used red bell pepper, but I’ve also used nuts and frozen peas in the past. Take the pot part of the slow cooker out, put it on a kitchen towel to protect the counter and put another kitchen towel over the rice. Put the lid back on and ignore it for at least 10 minutes. The recipes say this steams the rice some more, and in the interest of fluffy rice, I do what I’m told.

The end! Feed to J as a side dish, or add some protein and make it a main dish. Do not expect leftovers.

I went to a catered event last night, an event that included dinner. People attending got a choice between grilled salmon or chicken breasts in a mushroom cream sauce. As a vegetarian, I am not a big fan of chicken — but I am a huge fan of mushrooms and (unfortunately) dairy fat. Since I also managed to score some button mushrooms on manager’s special (they’re soooo expensive!), I thought I’d try an imitation for tonight’s dinner, using tofu and skim milk. This one worked, my friends. I regret only that there wasn’t lots more of it.

I should confess that this isn’t a totally new idea for me — I worked out something similar last fall when I figured out that green bean casserole is really good, even though it’s also full of unhealthy things from cans. But at that time, I was sorta flying blind, using an idea from a Weight Watchers mac and cheese recipe to thicken the mushroom sauce without using tons of butter. So I think it counts.

Mushroom ‘Cream’ Sauce, for tofu or pasta or the protein of your choice

Serves two mushroom lovers or four people who just kinda like them.

Note: This recipe gives you a sauce that’s really thick with delicious mushrooms. I could easily have doubled the milk and made lots more sauce. I didn’t because I’m trying to conserve milk, and because it doesn’t do to use anything too soupy to put over a solid piece of protein. But if it had been for pasta sauce, I would have, so I’m adding directions for that here. You might also consider doubling if you have really big chicken breasts or something.

One 8-oz package white button mushrooms, or mushrooms of your choice, sliced. I’d cube portobellos.
1/2 tb olive oil or butter
2 mediumish cloves garlic, or to taste, crushed or diced
1/4 to 1/2 onion
1 tb flour, white or whole wheat, or 2 tb for more sauce
1/4 cup skim milk, or 1/2 cup for more sauce. You could use unsweetened soy milk or some higher-fat dairy product if you like.
1 bay leaf
1/8 to 1/4 tsp dried rosemary
(hey, a pinch of red pepper flakes might be nice too!)
salt to taste — I probably used 1/8 tsp, but I would double that if I did it again and take it to 1/2 tsp for the doubled recipe
enough ground black pepper to make you bored and/or your wrists hurt
Glug or two of white wine (I actually used sake) — optional but nice

As with so many of my recipes, this begins in the slow cooker. Melt butter in slow cooker (or high or low — depends on how much time you got), add onions. Ignore until soft and translucent, stirring occasionally. You can, of course, also do this in a saucepan.

Turn slow-cooker down to low. Add mushrooms, garlic cloves, rosemary and bay leaf. Stir and ignore mushrooms until they’ve all released their liquid.

Turn off slow cooker. The goal here is to preserve the liquid; I’ve cooked it off before, and what fun is that? You can now ignore the liquid until it’s time to make dinner.

Transfer the whole mess into a saucepan. Add all the other ingredients, stir to combine the flour and milk and then turn on the heat to medium. Stir often, until thickened. Fish out bay leaf. Ta-dah! At that point, I dumped in my tofu, which was already baked to a toothsome consistency, and covered to keep it warm while I did the rest of dinner. You could easily do this with pasta or any other pre-cooked protein.

I think you could probably thicken the sauce in the oven, pouring the pre-thickened sauce over chicken parts and then baking until the chicken is done, but don’t trust me on that. I don’t know how long it takes to bake chicken.

Rice pilaf not included. Sorry for the bad photos; my camera ran out of battery juice.

We bought way too much fruit last weekend. I would say there’s no such thing as too much fruit, but there is — when it goes bad. To prevent that terrible outcome, I took the liberty last night of transforming our excess stone fruit into a crumble.

This is the first cooking experience on this blog that I would consider a FAIL. It tasted fine, but the crumble topping didn’t end up with the look or texture I think of as crumble-appropriate. Instead, it was more like a rich, sweet pie crust. Not bad, but not what I was aiming for. I made many substitutions, but I think what did it was either the wrong dry stuff-to-fat ratio or the use of tub margarine rather than butter in the first place. (Because we’re basically out of butter.) Tub margarine doesn’t have that irritating hardness that cold butter has, making it difficult to cut into “crumbs.” While I really hate that property of butter, it’s a feature rather than a bug in baking. Lesson reinforced: Don’t mess with the chemistry of baking!

But, as I said, it tasted just fine. In fact, someone who’s really cutting down on fat could skip the topping and just bake the fruit and serve with plain fat-free yogurt, which is what’s in the pic above.

Slapdash Stone Fruit Crumble
(With the actual crumble topping recipe listed and my substitutions in parens.)

Filling:
4-5 pieces of stone fruit: Peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, pluots, or substantially more cherries. Original recipe calls for 4 1/2 cups fruit.
Pinch of sugar, or to taste. I could probably have left it out altogether, this fruit was so sweet and juicy.
A cautious sprinkle of ground ginger and/or cinnamon. Say, 1/4 tsp each.
a teaspoon to a tablespoon of lemon juice

Crumble topping (from pear crisp recipe in Jane Brody’s Good Food book, inherited from my mom):
1/2 cup instant rolled oats (Didn’t have these. Substituted 1/4 cup ground almonds and 1 tb each chopped walnuts and shredded coconut.)
1/4 cup whole wheat flour (she calls for pastry flour, I have none, all-purpose went in instead. White is fine too.)
1/4 cup packed brown (or turbinado or whatever) sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon (didn’t really measure this, just shook it in.)
3 tablespoons butter or margarine

Preheat your oven to 350. Brody said to grease the pan, but I didn’t bother.

Slice the stone fruit directly over the baking dish you’re going to use, to catch the juice. Mix with lemon juice, spices and sugar. Set aside.

In either a food processor or another bowl, combine all the crumble topping ingredients. I am giving you a choice because if you use the bowl, you will have to mix/cut the butter with a pastry blender or two knives, which is a long and boring process. On the other hand, if you use the food processor, it’s almost instant but you have to wash the food processor. I know, tough life I lead. You’re done when it has a crumb-like or crumbly texture.

Once it’s ready, sprinkle it over the fruit mixture. Since my texture came out wrong, it wasn’t really sprinkle-able; it was more like dropping drop cookies or even spreading batter.

Bake 45 minutes or until top is crispy. This needed extra time, possibly because of the topping being wrong and possibly just because we have a slow, cheap renters’ oven. J. kindly volunteered to periodically taste it.

Done! The juicy part always burns a little around the edges because of the sugar, but if you cook off enough moisture, it also makes this great syrupy liquid. Serve with dairy or fake dairy product of your choice.

J. let me get the purple cherry tomatoes last weekend (didn’t take much arm-twisting), but another batch of pesto alla trapanese revealed that purple tomatoes are still rather red when you put them through a food processor:

This batch is disappearing almost as quickly as the last one. BTW, I think two to three tablespoons of oil are enough for a nice liquid-but-not-runny pesto.

I later made a bit of conventional Genovese pesto for the 101 Cookbooks squash casserole. That came out purple, but sadly, I didn’t take pictures and the casserole vanished muy pronto. With some tweaks (pesto + cheese = death by fat consumption), I think that one’s a winner.

Tonight, perhaps, a crumble or a cobbler to deal with all the delicious ripe stone fruit we have…

I love my slow cooker more than I love any other kitchen appliance. It allows me to put things on to roast or simmer and walk away for hours at a time, saing me the boredom of actually monitoring them. (If that sounds dangerous to you, remember that I usually work at home.) When I return, presto — browned onions, or marinara sauce, or roasted veggies or soup or oatmeal. Etc! Because it traps moisture, it can’t do everything, but it can do a LOT. If you work at home, or feel comfortable leaving it on low while you’re out of the house, I recommend buying one yesterday. It’s saved me hours of boredom from caramelizing onions alone.

I had already planned to make stuffed zucchini because a) I had a coupon for fake ground beef and b) summer squash is everywhere right now. Then I realized that the slow cooker would allow me to skip the most annoying part about stuffed squash — cooking the squash shells to a fork-able texture. In this recipe, I took advantage of the moisure-trapping to steam the squash shells while the stuffing cooked directly underneath them. Win! They still have to get finished in the oven if you like them with nice hot sauce and melted cheese, but once it’s in the oven, you can ignore that, too.

I doubt that I made up this recipe, but I no longer remember where I first saw it. I’ve been making it as a quasi-Italian dish, but there’s no reason not to take it across the Mediterranean — maybe use sumac, mashed chickpeas and feta for a Middle Eastern dish served with couscous, or use lentils, paneer and curry powder (hush, purists!) for an Indian-ish squash served with basmati or biryani. Not sure what kinda sauce you’d use, though.

Slow Cooker Stuffed Summer Squash
(serves 4 — I planned to have leftovers)
Two medium zucchini, yellow crookneck or other stuff-able summer squash (patty pans seem like they’d be hard to use)
Half a box of fake ground beef
Half an onion (to make about a cup chopped)
Veggies of your choice, chopped fairly fine (I used carrots and red bell pepper)
Dried basil, oregano and rosemary (or fresh is awesome, if you have it)
salt & pepper
Olive oil
Parmesan and/or mozzarella cheese. If you are not a cheese fan, you could use bread crumbs or ground nuts instead.
A fair amount of red sauce — say, two cups
pasta

Add a glug (~2 tsp) of olive oil to your slow cooker and turn it on high. Ignore for 15-30 minutes. Add onions and stir. Ignore on high for 3 hours or so, stirring if you get a moment, until onions are transparent and soft. The onions on the outside do tend to burn a bit, but not in a way that seems to affect flavor.

Meanwhile, cut the stem and flower ends off your squash and cut in half lengthwise as evenly as you can manage. Take a serving spoon and scoop out the guts, leaving enough of a shell in the edges to keep the whole thing from collapsing. The guts should be easy to scoop. Reserve guts on a cutting board and chop them up. Also chop your veggies.

When the onions are ready, stir in all your veggies along with the salt, pepper, basil, oregano and rosemary. I didn’t really measure this, but I’d say there was about 1/4 tsp rosemary, 1/2 tsp oregano and closer to 1 tsp basil, plus just a pinch or two of salt and as much black pepper as I could stand grinding before my wrist got tired — maybe another 1/2 tsp. You probably don’t need to put the herbs in right then, but the more time, the better. Plus I like the smell. You could probably also put in the fake meat now — it’s dry and can burn in a frying pan, which made me hesitate to do it with the slow cookier, but there’s usually a fair bit of moisture in the bottom of the pot by now.

Ignore this for another hour or two, stirring if you want. Then layer your squash shells over the veggies, facedown, without stirring.

Ignore for another hour or so. I had to leave about a half hour after I did that, so I dashed off an email to J. asking him to please remove the whole shebang when he got home (probably 15-30 minutes after I left), stuff the shells and bake them (at, let’s say, 350 F for 20 minutes) with red sauce and cheese. He didn’t remember the part about the sauce, but they came out well anyway!

I subscribe to Cook’s Illustrated, which is a little magazine with no ads, lots of line drawings and lots of articles written by people who are trying to perfect their recipe for one particular thing. I mean, really, the articles talk about making the same dish 50 times in order to test things like whether Yukon Golds or russet potatoes cook better in large amounts of oil. They might as well use the scientific method. So I ♥ this magazine, even though it always has 2-4 recipes I can’t use because I’m a vegetarian. (Also, these people are also really not afraid of fat, so their desserts tend to be special-occasion-only stuff.)

One thing I can always use: more pesto recipes! The basil-pine nut pesto that Americans know (pesto genovese) is just one of many pestos they make in Italy, or so I’m told. This latest issue had a recipe for pesto alla trapanese (from the Sicilian city of Trapani), which is made with almonds and cherry tomatoes along with the other stuff. I had the recipe at the back of my mind Saturday when I hit the farmers’ market, where I found purple basil. Yes, basil can be purple! The same stand had purple heirloom cherry tomatoes, which put visions of an all-purple pesto into my head. J. talked me out of the purple tomatoes on the grounds that they are hideously expensive, and while he was right, I kind of wish I had defied him. Instead, it was off to Trader Joe’s for the remainder of the stuff. TJ’s is a good place to shop, but freshness and ripeness matters with tomatoes. Plus, purple!

I didn’t go TOO far off the reservation for this one, unless you count the purple basil. The biggest change I made was buying ground almonds instead of slivered, which is what the recipe called for. I am currently working my way through Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking, by Julie Sahni, and every korma recipe in there calls for ground almonds. Plus this house keeps Passover, and that means getting creative about flour substitutes. So ground almonds just made way more sense than the sliced ones. The downside, if you consider it a downside, is getting a fine rather than chunky texture.

The other major thing I did was omit the pepperoncini they called for, since I just didn’t see myself buying a jar of them and only eating one, then leaving the remainder to languish in the fridge. Instead, I took the recipe writer’s own advice and substituted red pepper flakes. Then I ignored the recipe and added more. Maybe my pepper flakes are weak, but the pesto needed a bit more to have some kick. The kick I ended up with was subtle but definitely there.

This pesto is vegan, which is great for people who don’t eat dairy for whatever reason. Plus since you don’t need tons of olive oil, you’re looking at way less fat than with green pesto. That is not to say that the stuff doesn’t taste good. Since it debuted yesterday afternoon, it has been a pasta sauce, a sandwich spread and a dip for pretzels.

Pesto alla Trapanese
1/4 cup ground, silvered or otherwise skin-free almonds
(If your almonds have skin, boil some water, add them to the boiling water for a moment, then drain and plunge into cold water. The skins slide right off.)
12 oz (~2 1/2 cups) cherry or grape tomatoes. Seriously, get a kitchen scale. They are so useful!
1/2 cup packed fresh basil
1 medium garlic clove, pressed or minced (to make 1 tsp)
1 small pepperoncini, minced and seeded
OR
1/2 tsp red wine vinegar (I actually used sherry vinegar) and 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, then three more pinches of red pepper flakes or to taste
1 tsp salt
olive oil to taste (recipe calls for 1/3 cup)

Toast your almonds in a small skillet over medium heat until they’re golden and fragrant. This did not take me long. But don’t burn ‘em! Let them cool.

Put almonds in a food processor along with everything else but the oil. Blend until smooth. Thanks to the tomatoes, which are full of water, this is actually possible without oil! I imagine that the farmers’ market tomatoes would have been even jucier.

Scrape down the side with one of those handy rubber scrapers. Start the machine again and drizzle olive oil in slowly to emulsify (fancy word for “blending stuff that doesn’t mix well”). I don’t actually know how much olive oil I used, because I knew 1/3 cup was going to be way too much. Even in normal pesto, that seems like it would give you a really soupy sauce. With the juicy tomatoes, it didn’t even really need olive oil to liquefy; it was all about getting the olive taste.

When you’ve got the consistency you want, you’re done! Well, taste and see if you think you need more pepper flakes or salt. The recipe later suggests using pasta cooking water to thin it out more, but if I had done that and used the full amount of olive oil, I would have made a beverage. I can only assume that they have weird juiceless tomatoes in Massachusetts.

I’m kind of glad I went with the purple basil for this, because green basil, while adorable in its own right, seems like it would make an unappetizing brown when blended with red tomatoes. Instead, I got a red sauce flecked with dark specks, a bit like a roasted salsa. Oh! And, like salsa, it probably benefits from being left in the fridge a while so the flavors can marry.

This is my brand-new blog about cooking the slapdash way — substituting, omitting or adding things at will. Rather than repeat everything on my About page, I’m just gonna send you there to read all about my goals here. But in short, this is a chronicle of my adventures as a non-detail-oriented cook who’s found remarkable flexibility in most recipes. Do not be afraid to innovate, my friends.

Now, on to the cooking! For my first post, I took it a bit farther than I intended. Some back story: I dropped J. off at the airport yesterday, which meant two things: I’m cooking for one this weekend, and I missed my usual farmers’ market. I picked up some fresh fruit & veg at Trader Joe’s to fill the gap until I could get to one today. Since they don’t sell bananas at the farmers’ market, I picked up a couple of those, and I picked ‘em green because I like ‘em green. Sadly, I picked ‘em too green. Ever bite into an unripe banana? It’s like an underripe persimmon — mouth-drying and bitter. I bet there are tannins in there. Anyway, so there I was with a green banana that probably wasn’t going to ripen.

Rather than waste it, I did some Googling for green banana recipes. (It turns out that Africans use them like potatoes because potatoes are expensive there. Seems ironic from an American perspective.) The most interesting one I came up with is a dish from the south of India called [kache] kele ki sabzi, a curry involving green bananas and either coconut milk or yogurt, depending on your recipe. Unfortunately, it also seems to require curry leaves, which I do not have and know is not something that I can just find a substitution for. Solution: Abandon efforts to stick to the recipe and make something under Indian curry principals, but with different spices!

Quasi Kele Ki Sabzi for One

Ingredients:

One green banana

1/2 zucchini

1/2 skinny Asian eggplant

1/2 to one carrot

(any South Asia-appropriate veggies would be fine)

Juice of half a lime

chopped cliantro

Onions of any kind (I used green because I need to use ‘em up)

half a standard (13-ish ounces) can of light coconut milk; normal is fine

one clove garlic

about a tablespoon of grated fresh ginger (you can use powdered, but it’s a different flavor)

1 tsp to 1 tbsp chopped hot chili (I used a Thai birdseye chili) , or use cayenne or chili powder to taste

1 tsp curry powder of your choice

1/2 tbsp cumin seeds

pinch of fennel seeds (optional)

pinch of turmeric

1 tbsp oil

chopped cilantro for garnish (plus I used the green part of green onions too)

Optional: protein of your choice

Bring enough water to cover the green banana to a boil. While it’s heating, peel the thing, which may require a knife if it’s really underripe. Parboil with a pinch of turmeric until it’s soft. Drain and set aside.

Meanwhile, chop your veggies, grate your ginger and crush your garlic. Heat 1 tbsp oil over high heat and add the cumin and fennel seeds, then quickly cover the pan so they’ll pop without burning you. Once they’re done, lower heat to medium and saute onions until they look a little soft. (If you’re using the whites of green onions, just give ‘em a moment.) Add garlic, ginger and chili and saute for a minute or so. At this point, you should probably have the windows open.

Now it’s time to throw in all those chopped veggies along with the drained green banana (and any tofu you’re using). Cook them for however long it takes for the eggplant to be cooked through. Undercooked eggplant sucks. When that’s done, add curry powder and stir long enough to mix. (If I were using pre-baked tofu or tempeh or seitan, I’d put it in now.) When that’s done, add half a can of coconut milk, stir to mix, cover your pan and turn the heat pretty low so nothing burns, because you’re going to ignore it for ten minutes. Wash the dishes; read the newspaper. La la la! When the timer goes off, all you have to do is stir in the lime juice and sprinkle with the chopped cilantro for a garnish. You can skip the cilantro, but I highly recommend not skipping the lime juice because it’s a lovely contrast with the coconut milk. The end! Serve over rice.