Khyber Pass – Karahi gosht
While this dish isn’t connected to a specific winter holiday celebration, it takes Khyber’s owner Malik Jawid on a sentimental journey when days get shorter, colder and memories gain a nostalgic hold on the mind.
“Back home, cozy, family together,” Jawid said. “I remember always enjoying that smelling and being cooked.”
This savory, warm meal comes from northern India and Pakistan. Traditionally made with goat or mutton, at Khyber Pass it’s made with lamb.
“Around that time of the year, it’s a little bit more specially prepared,” Jawid said. “With spices you don’t use usually.”
A kadai is the deep, round, flat-bottomed cooking pan used to prepare the dish. Unlike curries which marinate the meat first, here it is simply sauteed in ghee or oil, then slowly simmered in sauce to delicate tenderness. The method gives the unique taste that is different from curries made with the same meats.
The sauce includes ginger, garlic, green chilies and a special coarse ground spice blend known as kadai masala. The “gravy” didn’t traditionally include onions, but modern recipes add them to balance the tangy zip of tomatoes. Overall, the dish pairs well with naan to mop up the playful combo of sweet, spicey and hot flavors.
Khyber Pass is on Lake Street in Downtown Oak Park.
Cucina Paradiso – Pumpkin ravioli with brown butter sage sauce
Customers at Cucina start asking for it about the time PSL lattes hit the menus elsewhere. Once the idea of fall is in the air, tastebuds are ready.
“Servers are coming to us and saying, they’re asking about the pumpkin ravioli,” Mike Bouse, Cucina Paradiso’s operations manager, said. “It’s like, all in good time. if it wasn’t a little bit limited, it wouldn’t be so sought after.”
The fall favorite starts with a puree of pumpkin and ricotta cheese. That is plumped inside egg pasta with fresh herbs and formed into ravioli.
“The sauce is very simple. We take brown butter and with a little bit of garlic and some sage that we toast in the brown butter. We add stock and white wine to it and then very carefully emulsify it with Pecorino Romano cheese.” Bouse said.
On top goes toasted pepitas and another generous helping of Pecorino.
Sage is spotlighted here. But do you know why fall foods are so often sage-flavored?
“Sage can definitely withstand even some snow. It’ll withstand a freeze,” Bouse said of the herb that lasts longer into cold weather than most others. “It lends itself so well to things like squash, gourds, game meats that would normally be harvested during the fall season – turkeys, venison, that sort of thing. At home, I am pulling sage out of the garden for the Thanksgiving turkey.”
Cucina is on North Boulevard in Oak Park.
Daly Bagel – Cranberry orange bagel & gingerbread bagel
Two different bagels, packed with ingredients with deep connections to end-of-year holidays, show up on the menu for a limited time each year at Daly Bagel on Chicago Avenue in Oak Park.
Cranberry orange will be the featured special the first week of December, just as we are all fully digested from Thanksgiving and looking for another blast of turkey-time flavor. Whole dried cranberries mix in with bagel dough that gets its liquid from orange juice rather than water.
The week of Christmas gingerbread bagels roll out. Most Daly bagels are made with honey, but this recipe calls for molasses to set the right tastebud-bed for chunks of crystalized ginger inside and a ginger topping outside.
“We’ll have both flavors again in January. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder,” Adrienne Guldin said. “You do appreciate it more when it comes back, than if it’s something you can’t get all the time.”
Guldin has a favorite cream cheese combo for each of the flavors.
“We have an apple cinnamon roll cream cheese that I really like with the gingerbread, because you’ve got so many of those spices that just come through them, just warm it all up. For the cranberry orange, I think goat cheese is probably the most popular with that. It’s a nice mix of sweet and sour,” she said.
