Cooking for vegetarians is like playing with magnetic poetry. Faced with limited material, one can go one of two ways. The first is to use vegetarian ingredients like tofu to mimic the taste and texture of meat. That’s a little like stacking words on top of each other and overlapping them to create new words, and the result isn’t that great in either case. The second is to embrace the limits and see them as a challenge, like letting the few words one does have dictate the subject of one’s poem. When Mira, who eats kosher and mostly vegetarian, came to visit, I ended up looking for dinner ideas in a cookbook featuring Indian food, which I almost never make.

All three recipes are from Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of India. Our copy is very little used, but the book has beautiful pictures. The writing focus is on Indian regions and the local cuisine, with the recipes as incidental, but they didn’t disappoint. While some dishes featured more exotic ingredients than others, I managed to make these three without going to a specialty foods store.

This eggplant dish is apparently eaten by “aristocratic Muslim families of Bhopal,” though I don’t know if this is still the limits of its audience. Though yogurt, in my experience, is usually used in dishes to counter spiciness, that isn’t the case here. The eggplant’s lack of heat is attributed to the dish’s Afghan and Persian origins. Jaffrey recommended serving a crunchy relish such as sliced cucumber along with it, but I left that out.

The recipe calls for a lot of oil, but I didn’t use nearly that much. I find that most Indian food tends to be pretty rich, so I didn’t think it would hurt to lighten the dish. Also, I always find that no matter how much oil I fry eggplant in, it never seems to be enough, so I feel that I might as well not use much in the first place. Besides, when it sits after cooking, as it does in this dish, it seems to get greasier. By the time it was ready to eat, the eggplant was soft and sweet, and I think any more oil would have been too much.

Spinach is one of my favorite vegetables in any form, and I’ve mentioned before my love for saag paneer. I thought I’d try a different dish this time, and chose this sixteenth century moghul recipe. I won’t lie; it’s not very pretty. The spinach is cooked a long time for something that wilts so easily, and ends up looking like some kind of camouflage. Like many ugly things, however, it tastes good. I thought it needed some salt but others disagreed, so it’s probably best to leave the seasoning as is and allow people to correct it individually if needed.

The one ingredient with which I had trouble was garam masala, an Indian spice mix that comes up in this and a couple other recipes I’ve read. I combed the supermarket for it, looking especially hard in the international foods aisle. For some reason, said aisle is entirely pasta on one side, with rice occupying another quarter of the shelf space. Are pasta and rice still considered the exclusive domain of Italians and Mexicans? There were only a paltry few shelves assigned to Asian foods, and they were filled with soy sauce. I could probably have made up the garam masala myself from individual spices, but at that point it was just too much work.

What would vegetarians do without fish? Or rather, what would lacto-pesco-ovo vegetarians do without fish? I chose this recipe for the main dish, expecting that it would yield pieces of fish accompanied with sauce. Instead, it’s kind of a curry fish stew. It’s from Kerala and is apparently usually spicier than the recipe instructs. It is usually served with rice or bread, so I had Drew cook some Jasmine rice to go with it. Traditionally, seer fish is featured, but Jaffrey recommends halibut, haddock, cod, scrod, monkfish, and bream as well.

This dish was my favorite of the three. I thought the sauce needed a little more salt, but again, not everybody agreed. The recipe calls for thin and thick coconut milk, which are used seperately. Since I didn’t have fresh coconuts on hand and wasn’t about to juice them myself if I did, I used canned milk, skimming the creamy top for the thick milk and using the lighter juice for the thin.

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All things come to an end. Top Chef being one of them, part two of the finale aired Wednesday, bringing an end to the end.

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I read on some food blog, I forget which, that all cooks go through a phase of constantly baking bread. I seem to be going through such a phase.

Because I don’t have a baking-specific cookbook, I’ve been relying on the website for King Arthur Flour for recipes. I had great success with my last experiment, and the following two worked similarly well.

I spontaneously decided to reread Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, with the result of my being in a rather British frame of mind recently. When feeling Anglophilic, I turn to the lovely Nigella, but in this she failed me, although it may not have been her fault. I tried Bill Granger’s simple scones from her website, which yielded dense, flavorless little biscuits. If I had known more about scones, I might have guessed from the directions, which had me adding melted butter to the dry ingredients, that the recipe was no good.

I don’t know why I took a another chance with a King Arthur Flour recipe, but I’m glad I did. This one approaches the scones like a pastry dough, with butter cut into dry ingredients and then moistened. The results were crusty but tender and subtly sweet without ruling out the possibility of savory toppings. I split one and spread it with grapefruit marmalade, but I liked them best plain.

Emboldened, by my success, I went on to bake my second loaf of bread ever. I made the starter last night and let it sit until this afternoon. After adding the rest of the ingredients, it was a bit of a sticky process, literally, to wrestle the flour into the dough. This time, I got to punch the dough down after it rose, which was a little disappointing. I had imagined jabbing at a solid glob, but it was more like pressing down on an air mattress to deflate it. I may have actually overdone it, since the bread came out a little denser than I think it was intended. It’s hard to say, though, what I would have done differently. Denseness aside, the bread was springy and moist. It had a fine, even texture, especially as compared to the ciabatta I made before. I think it would be ideal for sandwiches, and I’ll be trying it out soon.

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