Looking forward to lefse

Today I'm cooking up some mashed potatoes in anticipation of our New Year's Day tradition of five or six years running: making lefse.

Lefse is a Norwegian flatbread made with both flour and cooked potatoes, baked (not fried in oil) with a griddle or frying pan, rather than in an oven, until it gets brown spots on it. It's delicious spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar, the traditional serving method in our family.  I've also enjoyed it wrapped around a piece of fish, spread with peanut butter and jelly, or sprinkled with cinnamon added to the sugar.

Grandma Evert's recipe specifically calls for leftover mashed potatoes, making lefse baking a great activity on the day after a holiday meal. Fresh and hot mashed potatoes would be too sticky to make lefse dough. Usually at our family gatherings the potatoes are passed through a ricer and may not be mixed with butter and cream, but the amounts of oil and flour in the family recipe can be adjusted to account for additional fat in the potatoes.

I've never taken pictures of my husband and me making lefse because we are both too covered in flour and busy watching pans on the stove to touch the camera. We've got an efficient system: I make the dough and roll out all the little dough balls, and my husband takes care of knowing when to flip the lefse in the four pans we have going at once. We don't have the traditional flat flipping stick (according to lore I was told as a child, the stick should be blessed by a troll), but a spatula works just fine for our small rounds. If we make a double batch, we have enough lefse to share with friends and neighbors.

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All I want this week is a pot of stew

It's all about stew and soup this week at our house, with seaweed soup early in the week followed by red lentil and vegetable stew that we took to friends for a shared dinner Wednesday, then spinach and lentil soup the next day, and finally, Friday night's cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage. Since I have a head cold that started really bothering me on Thursday, I'm glad there are lots of soupy leftovers today.

Friday night special: Cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage
serves 4 to 6

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 lb hot Italian turkey sausage (bulk sausage, not in casings)
2 celery ribs, sliced
3 carrots, sliced
2 parsnips, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lb white mushrooms, halved
1 tsp Penzey's Spices Adobo seasoning (www.penzeys.com) or 1/4 tsp each of Mexican oregano, fresh ground pepper, cumin and cayenne pepper
3 to 4 cups chicken stock (more if you like it more soupy, less if you like thick stew)
flesh of 1 roasted pie pumpkin (see note)
salt to taste

Saute onion in a large soup pot in olive oil until translucent, then add sausage and break up into small pieces while it browns. When sausage is almost done, add celery, carrots, parsnips and garlic and stir occasionally until vegetables are starting to cook. Add mushrooms and keep stirring and cooking until some liquid appears at the bottom of the pot. Pour in stock and seasonings. When stock comes to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cook the vegetables about 10 minutes. Add in the pumpkin flesh, bring to a boil and simmer again for 20 minutes. Add salt if you wish and served piping hot.

Note: to roast a pie pumpkin, place the entire pumpkin on a baking pan in a 375 degree oven and bake one hour. Cut pumpkin in half, scoop out seeds and discard, then scoop out the cooked flesh.

Beware, this stew is spicy, and the cayenne pepper will need to be skipped if you can't handle a lot of spice. You may even have to mix mild and spicy sausages, because the sausage itself has a good spice kick. I like to eat extra spicy foods when I have a head cold because they encourage my nose to run.

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This season's very special dinner experiment

In this time of brisk late-fall winds and precipitation that may decide to be snow or rain or a little of both, the chilly journey home from work can be forgotten over a plate of hot food.

Tonight I played around with using spaghetti squash like pasta to hold a sauce. That sauce was today's special experiment, a low-fat, "just had to sneak in another vegetable" sausage gravy. The side dish was seasoned oven-roasted potato wedges.

To prepare spaghetti squash (I had a pretty small one), I put the whole, uncut squash in a baking pan in a 400 degree (Fahrenheit) oven and baked it for a little under an hour. While the squash was baking, I prepared the rest of the meal. For a larger squash, it may be better to cut it in half before roasting. I removed the seeds when the squash was done and scooped out stringy squash onto plates, topping it with...

Sausage Gravy with Just One More Vegetable
4 servings

2 Tbsp butter or margarine
4 or 5 celery stalks, chopped (other vegetables could be substituted, like carrots or turnip bits or chopped fennel)
one pound hot and spicy Italian turkey sausage (not the kind in casings, but bulk sausage)
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
2 Tbsp flour
1 to 2 cups milk (I used unsweetened soy milk)
fresh ground black pepper to taste

Heat butter/margarine in a large nonstick skillet, add vegetable and cook until nearly tender. Add garlic and sausage, breaking sausage into small bits as it cooks. When sausage is cooked through, sprinkle with flour and stir over the heat a few minutes. The flour will coat the sausage and vegetable. Add milk in small amounts, stirring, until it simmers and thickens to the desired consistency. Use more milk for thinner gravy. Add pepper to taste.

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The big pot of vegetable beef soup

Sorry for the long hiatus. When I started volunteering for a weekly show on my local college radio station, the blogs started suffering accordingly. This recipe has been kicking around in draft for a long time, so it's about time I get it finalized and out there for folks to read.

I was asked to do something soup-like with about three pounds of beef leftovers at work, and this is what I created.


Vegetable beef soup with potatoes and fresh herbs

1/4 cup olive oil
4 large onions, chopped
2 to 3 cups diced celery
6 carrots, sliced or diced
6 medium-sized zucchinis, quartered and sliced (or cubed)
1/4 cup chopped fresh rosemary
1 to 2 tsp dried thyme
about 4 pounds potatoes, diced
about 3 pounds beef leftovers: brisket, roast beef
6 quarts beef broth
1/2 cup chopped parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Sweat the carrots, onions and celery in olive oil until tender. Add other vegetables, broth, herbs (except parsley) and beef bits and bring to boil. Simmer until potatoes are tender and flavors have blended, add parsley and season to taste. Best when served one day after cooking.

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Falling in love with fall produce: sweet and spicy squash

For this invention, I put together yummy late-season hot peppers from the garden of a colleague at work, a squash from the farmer's market, and a little of the brown sugar-cayenne pepper mixture left behind by a friend after our last mini-bonfire party (it was a originally a coating for skewered pineapple).

Sweet and Spicy Squash

Cut a winter squash in half and put it cut side down on a greased or parchment-paper-covered baking pan. Be sure the pan has a lip around all the edges because squashes give up some juice while baking. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until, when poking at the skin with your finger, the flesh underneath feels mushy.

In another pan at the same time, roast a handful of whole hot peppers, turning peppers occasionally. The peppers will be done when the skins are dark brown and starting to char, long before the squash is ready. Put the peppers in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Leave to steam until the squash is ready, then peel the paper-thin skins off the peppers and discard skins, seeds and stems. Mince the roasted peppers.

Scoop the squash out of its skin into a bowl and mix in about one tablespoon of butter/vegan margarine for each pound of squash. Depending on how hot the peppers are, add all of them to the squash or just some until the desired level of heat is achieved. Sweeten to taste with brown sugar and add cayenne pepper if the roasted peppers just aren't spicy enough for your taste. Season with salt and pepper and serve.

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Breakfast skillet today

Something easy, warm and comforting for a late breakfast on a day full of chores today. This one is a nice mishmash of leftovers I had in the fridge. The basic recipe is not a really strongly flavored breakfast and could probably use some chili-garlic sauce or fresh herbs or salsa to dress it up.

Veggie breakfast skillet
for one very hungry person or two lighter portions

1/2 cup liquid egg substitute
a splash of milk or soymilk
1 or 2 tsp dijon mustard
1 or 2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp chopped green bell pepper
6 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup leftover cooked rice
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

Whisk together the egg substitute, milk, and mustard in a bowl. In a large skillet, heat the oil and saute the mushrooms and green pepper. When tender, add the cooked rice and cook, stirring, until rice is heated through. Pour the egg mixture over the contents of the skillet and stir occasionally to scramble the eggs. Sprinkle with salt and pepper just before the eggs are done.

Ideas for additional vegetable add-ins: roasted red pepper, leftover cooked broccoli or carrots, onions, tomatoes (at the end of cooking), leftover stir-fried vegetables

Eggs and meat are a classic combination and this breakfast would also be good with bits of leftover sausage, ham, bacon, steak or roast beef or pork. Keeping the same amounts of other ingredients, meat packs enough calories to make this a recipe for two or three servings.

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First squash soup of autumn

Fall has truly arrived in the kitchen when one of us makes the first soup from farmer's market squash. Butternut is definitely the favorite soup squash in our household. In fall and winter, we often have a container of roasted squash hanging around in the refrigerator or freezer, waiting to be turned into stew or casserole or dessert. My long-time favorite squash soup recipe is a spicy bisque with coriander and jalapeño scalded with the (soy) milk, and Andrew's is a thick curry stew with potatoes.

This year's first squash soup was a team effort. We both were hungry and in a little bit of a hurry to get to other engagements after dinner, so we tossed together a quick soup that combined elements of both favorite recipes, plus the new additions of apples and The Spice House's Vadovan curry mixture.

Curry Squash Bisque with Apples
makes four large servings

2 or 3 Tbsp oil or butter
1 medium-sized butternut squash, previously roasted
1 pound potatoes, peeled and diced large
3 carrots, sliced thickly
4 small apples, sliced thickly
1 medium-sized onion, chopped
2 or 3 hot peppers (jalapeño preferred, but others are great too), halved
2 cups unsweetened soy milk or 2 percent milk
1 tsp whole coriander seeds
1 or 2 Tbsp Spice House Vadovan curry mix
4 cups chicken broth or vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste

In a soup pot, heat oil/butter and cook potatoes, carrots, onion until the onion is tender. In a separate pot, scald the milk with the hot peppers and coriander seeds. When hot, remove from heat and cover. Let stand until other soup ingredients are cooked. Going back to the vegetable pot, sprinkle on the curry mix and toss in the apples. After a minute of stirring, add the butternut squash and the stock. Bring to a boil, then cook covered over medium-low heat until the potatoes and carrots are tender (about 20 minutes). Stir occasionally. Lastly, pour the milk through a strainer held over the vegetable pot. Heat through, stirring often, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

[To roast squash, cut in half, oil cut sides and place cut-side-down in a baking pan and roast at 400 degrees until tender, then scoop out flesh from squash halves]

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Modern subtleties: painting cookies

Subtlety, in the context of feasts during the Middle Ages, is some sort of food-related spectacle that makes the feast entertaining. It could be a very dressed up item of food (such as roasted peacock re-dressed in its feathers), or it could be an outlandish way of serving something (such as on horseback), or it could even be a piece of extravagant entertainment between courses (like re-enacting a naval battle).

Last night, in preparation for my local Society for Creative Anachronism group's 25th anniversary party, I helped decorate shortbread cookies that were pressed into the shape of our shire's device (visible in the top left corner at the website http://www.scolairi.org/Scolairi1.html).

The method for this subtlety was fun and novel for me: glittery food paints. What we used was something called "luster dust," a shimmery dust that can be mixed with liquid or frosting or fondant or something to make it sparkly. We mixed it with rum to suspend the dust in liquid so it could be painted onto the cookies with small paintbrushes. The result is gorgeous and, if the label on the dust is accurate, nontoxic.

Telling folks about the cookies is okay before the event, but no pictures please, says the feast steward, who wants the appearance of the cookies to be a surprise at the feast on Saturday. They look too pretty to eat and making them was fun, even after the number of cookies reached the multiple dozens.

Checking a website that sells the dusts, the ingredients listed are Titanium Dioxide, Iron Oxide, Carmine, Mica, the amounts of which will vary according to the color of the dust. All of these things appear in cosmetics and are considered nontoxic (especially in the small amounts that would be ingested with one of these cookies), but none of them are food. Part of the allure of using these minerals is that they don't actually dissolve in food or liquid, so the shimmer will last without fading. Since I don't fancy the idea of licking my eyeshadow (same ingredients in there), I'd be more likely to look but not eat.

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Historical baking in an outdoor oven

I was thrilled to have the chance to bake in a wood-fired, outdoor clay oven this weekend at the Society for Creative Anachronism event "For Hands" in Wood River, IL.

The leader of the hands-on experiment in building and using the oven is known in the SCA as Master Philippe de Leon. He said that he had used a design that had been used successfully at the Pennsic War http://www.pennsicwar.org/penn39/directory.html but that he found out through trial-and-error and further discussion with the Pennsic oven builders that the ovens are meant to be temporary structures. For that reason, Philippe thinks he'll use a different design for the next oven to be built right next to the current one at Wood River's Camp Dubois, a recreation of the winter quarters of 1803-04 used by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Pictures of preparing the oven for baking and baking the first loaves of the day:

Philippe tells about the building process while tending the fire in the oven

Oven firing -- when the fire is really going, tongues of fire start licking around the top of the oven and out the top of the doorway

Repairs made to the clay skin of the oven. The basic construction was clay applied both over the base "igloo" of bricks and over a wooden plank supporting the igloo. The pedestal was masonry using local limestone from the Wood River area.

Raking the coals out of the oven

Sweeping out the oven before inserting loaves of bread (in baskets in foreground)

Uh-oh. The floor of the oven has a hole, which proves to be part of some problems later in the day with keeping stable high temperatures in the oven.

Simon Hondy slashing loaf on the peel before baking

First loaves of the day in the oven, before and after

Simon removes the first loaf of the day

Foibles and all, the oven was great fun to play in and watch, and I'm glad the baker known as Simon Hondy in the SCA invited me to bring a recipe and make something myself to bake in the oven for the evening's feast at the event.

My recipe is not provably a pre-1600 recipe. I know the ingredients themselves would have been known, but I don't have a definite date on when these shaped buns were first seen in Italy. I got a happy feeling from watching the dough rise outside on a sunny day.

Panini all'Olio

3 cups white bread flour (I used all-purpose this time because it's what I had on-hand)
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp salt
4 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup homemade wild yeast starter (obtained from Simon)
1 cup lukewarm water
cornmeal

Mix together dry ingredients. Add starter, oil and wet the dough with as much of the one cup of water as is needed to make shaggy dough. Pull dough together and knead about 10 minutes on a floured surface. Grease large bowl with additional olive oil and turn the dough inside the bowl to cover it with oil. Cover with a cloth and allow to rise until doubled. Punch dough down and break into 12 to 16 equal-sized pieces. Preheat oven (modern ovens to 400 Degrees Fahrenheit). Form into shapes as desired and cover with flour.  Place buns on a cornmeal-dusted peel or baking pan, cover with a cloth and rise about half an hour. Bake about 15 minutes in baking pan (or on clay oven floor) or until buns make a hollow noise when their bottoms are tapped. Dust off the excess flour before serving.

Shape options:
1) artichokes: form dough into a small ball and let it do the second rise. Then snip horizontal cuts in rings around the bun with scissors to approximate artichoke leaf tips.
2) pretzels: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and twist into pretzel shapes.
3) fingers: before second rise, make flat ovals of dough and roll up like crescent rolls.
4) twists: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and twist them, then join the two ends together
5) spirals: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and form into a spiral shape.

Some photos of my own baking in my persona of Heregyth Ketilsdottir:

 Mixing dough

 Kneading dough

Buns on the baking peel waiting to go into the oven

 The closed oven during baking

Finished buns, ready for feast!

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Chinese-style eggplant

After eating this, my husband declared that I had successfully replicated his favorite eggplant dish from his favorite Chinese restaurant in Madison, WI, which, sadly, closed a few years back. At least we can remember Yan's fondly when we eat this dish.

General note on stir-fried dishes: once cooking is underway, there is no time between steps to prep things, so make sure that all vegetables are chopped, all ingredients are collected and sitting next to the stove, all condiment containers are opened and have spoons in them already. Letting the pan go unattended while you look for a spoon to scoop sauce out of the bottom of a jar means overcooked stir-fry.

Chinese-style eggplant
serves 2 to 3

2 large Asian eggplants (the long, skinny purple ones), sliced thickly on bias
2 cloves garlic, sliced
2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
2 to 3 Tbsp oyster sauce
fresh grated ginger, soy sauce and sugar or honey to taste

Heat sesame oil in a large pan or wok on high heat. Cook garlic slices briefly, then add in eggplant slices and stir-fry until some browning occurs. Add a little soy sauce and water to the pan to finish cooking the eggplant with boiling water and steam. Add oyster sauce, fresh ginger and honey or sugar and stew the eggplants a few minutes until tender. If the liquid in the pan is getting sticky instead of making a smooth sauce, add more water. Serve over cooked brown rice (my preference with this dish) or white rice.

If a meaty dish is desired, this dish could be started by cooking very thinly sliced beef in the sesame oil until browned and then adding the rest of the ingredients in order. If you already have leftover cooked beef bits, add them in near the end of cooking to heat through.

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Easy chicken stock

Flavorful, frugal and lowfat, homemade chicken stock adds special taste without salt and artificial additives. My freezer always has containers of stock and of ingredients waiting to become stock.

The most exciting part to me about making stock at home is that it re-uses ingredients from other dishes. Just keep freezer bags or plastic containers with bones from roasted chickens and trimmings of vegetables in your freezer and add to them (keep the vegetables separate from the bones). The best vegetable trimmings are the ends of carrots, the tops of celery, the washed tops of leeks, the stems of parsley and the ends of summer squashes (minus the hard stem). Cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon recommended adding apple peels to stock, and I've done that with good results too.
If you're in no mood to keep vegetable trimmings, just make simple stocks with the bones only.

I used to leave a stock pot on the stove all afternoon a few times a year, but I found a way to make stock that requires even less attention to the pot: use the slow cooker (aka Crock-Pot).

Fill a slow cooker with bones. Cover all the bones with water, put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on the low setting about eight or ten hours. After about four or five hours, add vegetable trimmings and a couple cloves of garlic if desired. If I'm cooking stock overnight, I have no desire to set an alarm clock for four hours later to add veggies, so I just make the bones-only stock if I'm not awake while it's cooking.

If you forget about the stock and cook longer than 10 hours, the more the bones and connective tissues dissolve, and the more jelly-like the stock will become when it is cooled. This gel is nutritious, containing protein and calcium, and it returns to its liquid state when reheated.

When the stock is finished cooking, put the bones in a mesh strainer over a pot so they will drain. Then toss them out and ladle the stock through the strainer into the pot. Use the ladle so that sediment in the stock stays at the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the pot into the refrigerator overnight to cool. Remove the fat layer the next day and store the stock in plastic containers in the freezer. My favorites are 32-oz yogurt containers because it's a way to re-use what would otherwise be trash, and 4 cups of stock is a convenient quantity to use.

Although I don't make other stocks like beef or veal or fish, I'm sure the only part of this process that would change is a slightly longer cooking time for beef bones and shorter time for fish bones. The same stock process I describe works for turkey carcasses after the holidays, too, or for starting a soup from a ham bone.

Save your food containers and food "waste" for stock, and you get a large quantity of nutritious liquid for the cost of leaving a light bulb on for the day.

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Playing with garden produce: enchiladas

This week's experimental dish was a way to make a large amount of yellow summer squash flavorful.
The contents:
three medium yellow squashes, peeled (they had tough peels) and chopped
1 to 2 onions, chopped
1 15-oz can black beans
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
about 16 corn tortillas
6 to 8 oz crumbled queso fresco
assorted garden peppers (poblano, jalapeño, banana, bell), chopped
cumin and Penzey's Spices Adobo Seasoning to taste
salt and pepper
22 oz can enchilada sauce (I found a red sauce that was all chiles and no tomatoes at the grocery store -- score!!)


Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Saute the onions and carrots till tender, then add the squash and peppers. When vegetables soften, stir in the spices and beans and cook a until beans are heated through, stirring. Spoon squash filling into corn tortillas, sprinkle some cheese onto filling, roll into cylinders and place seam side down in a baking dish. Pour enchilada sauce over all tortillas, spread it around to cover all. Bake until sauce is bubbling.

Upon tasting, Andrew and I found out that the hot queso fresco squeaks like cheese curds but does not melt and does not have much flavor. I might have preferred quesadilla cheese or monterey jack. This recipe made enough for six people and it keeps well as leftovers. Many thanks to Laura for asking me to look after her garden for a week in exchange for all the produce that ripened during that time.

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This is a corn fungus. Instead of throwing it out, I ate it for lunch.

Sitting on my cutting board here in nice little slices is huitlacoche, or corn smut. It's a fungal disease that happens to corn kernels, turning them into giant gray bulbous mushrooms instead of tightly packed rows of yellow kernels. It's not considered a problem so much as an alternate food source to our Mexican neighbors, and they introduced the idea to Americans.
More info about huitlacoche and a scarier-looking photo available at http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Mexican-Ingredients-1032/huitlacoche.aspx
I'm sure it's easy to come by here in Illinois corn country, but I've only seen one seller of huitlacoche so far, the person I talked to at the Bloomington Farmer's Market who sold me a little clump for a dollar.

My plan: cut it in slices, saute it and add it with some sauteed zucchini to a quesadilla.

The result: my huitlacoche did not live up to its vaunted reputation for truffle-like smoky goodness. Maybe there wasn't enough, maybe I didn't use the correct method for cooking it, maybe the batch I had was unusually bland, but you know your corn fungus isn't impressive when zucchini has a more pronounced flavor. I found that although there was fungus in every bite of my lunch, it was too subtle for me to notice it most of the time.

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The most romantic tomato

Today, my boss gave me a perfect tomato to take home, and she told me the romantic details of how it came to our kitchen.

Sorry the photo is less than perfect.

The local farmer who grew the tomatoes planted the tomato seeds with his wife on Valentine's Day. When the fruits of the summer's labor were ready, he filled a tub of water and left it in the sun to heat up so it would be the same temperature as the tomatoes, then he dipped each tomato he picked into the warm bath and polished it with a terry cloth. When he takes his tomatoes to the farmer's market, if a customer picks out an imperfect fruit, he picks out a better-looking tomato and says, "if you want that tomato, you should also take this one because it is more perfect." For the box of tomatoes he brought to our kitchen, he separated out the less perfect tomatoes from those that met his high expectations, placing them in the lid, so we wouldn't have unpleasant surprises inside the box.

I think that this well-loved tomato is just what my kitchen needs today. It earns the French tomato nickname "love apple."

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What's cooking this week? Berries!

Our friends who have turned their entire back yard over to food production occasionally find some of the crops getting away from them. My husband and I benefit when they invite us over to help with the picking in exchange for some of the harvest.

This week, we helped pick blackberries and gooseberries. Many thorn scratches and pokes later, we had enough blackberries to eat them for breakfast a few days and make jam plus enough gooseberries for a pie.

I have not eaten a gooseberry pie since I was a kid in Minnesota, where my parents found some growing wild one year and brought them home. This year's pie is just out of the oven, so I can't say yet whether it tastes the way the first one did. The berries are different, since the ones we picked this week were light red and sweeter than the tart green ones I remember from the childhood pie.

Here is the recipe I devised after looking up a few recipes online and picking out what I liked from about three of them.

Gooseberry Pie
makes one double-crust 9-inch pie

3 1/2 cups gooseberries
250 to 300 grams (about 1 1/2 cups) sugar (use more or less depending on tartness desired)
3 Tbsp instant tapioca (e.g. Minit)
1/2 tsp salt
two 9-inch pie crusts (my favorite recipe is from Cooks Illustrated, part of their "Best Blueberry Pie" article from 2008)
Optional: 2 Tbsp of milk and 1 Tbsp sugar

Prepare pie plate with bottom crust. Place in refrigerator while cooking filling. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Crush 1/2 berries in a saucepan, add sugar, tapioca and salt and 1 tsp water to wet the sugar.  Cook gently until mixture comes to a boil, stir frequently and cook another 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the rest of the berries.

Roll out top pie crust. Pour filling into prepared bottom pie crust, then cover with top crust. Cut off excess crust and crimp the edges to seal in the filling. If desired, brush top crust with the optional 2 Tbsp milk and sprinkle with the optional 1 Tbsp sugar. Cut slits and holes in top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake 35 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Cover edges with aluminum foil if the crust edge starts to brown.

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Dreaming about cherries until next spring

Andrew and I recently moved to a new house, and we were pleasantly surprised to find a cherry tree loaded with fruit in the back yard on moving-in weekend. The tree is pictured below.

The cherries are of the red tart variety. Sadly, this year, few of them were picked and processed because it took a while to find both the time for picking and the pots and sugar for preparing the cherries. Also, I needed to make time to buy a cherry pitter, since I had no intention of fussing around with paring knives or hairpins for extracting the pits from pounds of cherries.

We got a pound or so of cherries off the tree as the last of the fruits ripened. I pitted them and stewed them with a little demerara sugar, making a simple but special oatmeal topping for breakfast with our first houseguests. The flavor was described by one guest as "like mixing cherry cobbler and oatmeal."

Dreaming about what to do with the crop of cherries next year, when I'll be ready for them. Cherry pie. Cherry crisp/cobbler. Cherry jam. Dried cherries. More stewed cherries. Cherry bread pudding. I just hope there are enough cherries to supply all my ambitions.

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The impermanence of purple asparagus

Enjoy the purple color of purple asparagus in the store, in the fridge, in pieces in the prep bowl. Take a picture and admire the color while you can, because as soon as the purple asparagus is cooked, it turns into green asparagus.

Asparagus Salad with Southeast Asia Sauce and Sesame Oil

one pound green or purple asparagus

1 tsp Thai fish sauce

1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil

1/4 tsp fresh grated ginger

juice of 1/2 lime

1 tsp honey

Snap tough stem ends off washed asparagus. Break spears into bite-sized chunks. Steam until crisp-tender, about five to seven minutes. Whisk together the dressing ingredients and toss with steamed asparagus. Serve warm or cold.

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Soup for summer: fruit soup

I was inspired 1) by the flavor of mrissa's berry soup that she served for brunch when Andrew and I visited at Thanksgiving time and 2) by the overwhelming sweetness of many of the wines served at the local Mackinaw Valley Vineyard when I visited the winery for a friend's birthday party in May.

I can't recommend any of the Mackinaw wines I tried for drinking because they only came in two varieties: cloyingly sweet and nose-wrinkling sour.

Once I stopped sipping around the Mackinaw wine list for a wine to serve alone or with dinner and started looking for a wine to make fruit soup, I began to find the sweet red wines a lot more interesting. I halted the search with Eric's Red, which had just the right sweet fruitiness with a hint of spice to go with the cherries I'd been saving. Seemed appropriate to use a wine with a Viking ship on the label for a Scandinavian-inspired cold soup.

I recommend serving this dish for brunch or dessert and not serving it to the kids because of the noticeable amounts of alcohol in it. The garnish in the photo is dried strawberry slices I made a few days before.

Eric's Red Tart Cherry Soup
serves 6 to 8

1.5 pounds frozen red tart cherries
3/4 to 1 c sugar (I used vegan demerara sugar)
2 cups water
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 to 1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 Tbsp quick-cooking tapioca (such as Minit)
2 cups Mackinaw Valley Vineyards Eric's Red or other very sweet red wine

Combine all ingredients except wine in a pot, let sit five minutes, then bring to a boil. Cook until sugar dissolves completely. Remove from heat, add wine and puree. If puree is very thick, add more wine. Serve chilled.

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My first fried chicken

I did not grow up with home-cooked Southern-style fried chicken, as frying things with a lot of oil happened very rarely in my parents' home. I've been attracted to the idea of making a batch of fried chicken as a picnic food, which I've read about in older cookbooks and novels set in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Enter the motivation of needing a dish for a Memorial Day weekend potluck, the availability of fryer chickens at the Bloomington Farmer's Market, and Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything, and I'm in business.

Of course, I departed from the original recipe in order to use the ingredients I have at hand. I did soak the chicken in buttermilk overnight as recommended by the recipe for added tenderness and flavor, and I think it helped.
Mixed in with the flour was 1/2 cup matzo meal for a little coarser texture to the breading. The next time I make this dish, I'm definitely using more spices. I didn't have nearly enough pepper and salt at 1 tsp each, and I should have had much more of the Penzey's spice mix (I don't recall whether I used the Jerk Seasoning or the Adobo Seasoning) because its taste didn't come through at all.

Using my cast-iron covered Dutch oven and a mix of Crisco and canola oil (Nigella Lawson highly praises the results from solid vegetable shortening, and I had a cup of Crisco on hand), I fried at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for seven minutes with the cover on and seven minutes with the cover off, one batch for the dark meat and one batch for the light meat. The dark meat stayed in a couple more minutes with the cover off.

The final taste test at the potluck was successful. The chicken was, alas, fried earlier in the day and had been refrigerated, so it was not at the peak of its crispness, but the texture was better than acceptable, even when I ate leftovers another day later. Can't wait to try this again and improve upon the spice mix.

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Sekanjabin: drink syrup of endless possibilities

Reference: Cariadoc's Miscellany, http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/drinks.html

I first ran into sekanjabin as a refreshing cold drink offered at an Society for Creative Anachronism event. When the basic flavored syrup is diluted with water, the effect is much like lemonade: tart and sweet. With a bit of sekanjabin to freshen it up, even stale or bad-tasting water is enjoyable.

The basics are: 4 cups sugar to 2.5 cups water, boil, add 1 cup vinegar, boil 1/2 hour, remove from heat and throw in a handful of flavoring, then strain that out after the syrup has cooled in the covered pot. To drink, dilute syrup with water. I prefer a ratio of about five parts water to one part syrup. After receiving the basic sekanjabin syrup recipe from my friend Jean, I started experimenting with new flavors. The traditional flavoring is fresh mint leaves, but I don't like mint much myself, so I'm always looking out for something new.

My old standby is sliced ginger root w/apple cider vinegar, with thinly sliced lemon w/white vinegar coming in a close second place. I haven't really goofed around much with wine vinegars, although I've enjoyed Jean's efforts with red wine vinegar and that type of vinegar would be more appropriate to pre-1600 cookery.

Other fun experiments have included the pale pink syrup from using pomegranate arils and white vinegar; rhubarb and mulling spices with brown sugar and apple cider vinegar (molassey flavor, not my favorite); and fennel seeds, anise seeds and ground coriander with apple cider vinegar, which was vaguely medicinal tasting, but refreshing.

My favorite sekanjabin of all so far was made with white vinegar and sea buckthorn berries (German name: Sanddorn) from a bush around the corner from our house in Calgary. The berries are bright orange, tangy and juicy, and they made the most beautiful and most exciting-flavored syrup yet. Here's a picture of my bottles of Sanddorn sekanjabin:

Other possibilities I've got in mind but haven't tried yet: white wine vinegar with raspberries, lemongrass and red wine vinegar, citrusy lime basil and red wine vinegar. I'm looking forward to finding out how those turn out. Just as soon as we get to the bottom of the half-gallon of ginger sekanjabin syrup that's in the house now.

Food safety note: although the syrup keeps for months when bottled in clean jars/bottles with clean lids, it's advisable to refrigerate diluted sekanjabin if you don't drink it right away.

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Smoothie #5

Andrew's latest creation:
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1 banana in chunks
a couple tablespoons of juice concentrate for sweetener
1/2 cup frozen peach slices
unsweetened soy milk to taste (he likes less for thick smoothies, but I like more milk)

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Baking disappointment

I baked bread today with some yeast that has been in the cupboard for a while and if it had an expiration date on the package, the date probably would have passed already.
The yeast was sluggish to form bubbles in the liquid I started it in, but it didn't do too badly, so I figured I'd just need to give it some extra time with the risings. I gave it some extra time to rise and the bread rose nicely, so into the oven it went.

The disappointment: no oven spring. The bread had risen to the tops of the bread pans before I put it in the oven, and the bread was still only at the tops of the bread pans when it was done baking. It didn't rise another millimeter while it was baking. I think I'm going to be in for some pretty dense bread when it comes time to eat it for dinner. I fear the center may not be cooked all the way through.

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What to call this potato salad?

So far, this potato salad

has no well-written recipe, and no name. I threw the sauce for it together in a bit of a hurry to get out the door and on to my birthday hike and picnic in the county park yesterday.

The ingredient list, use these items to taste:
potatoes, scrubbed and boiled with skins on in salted water, then chilled and chopped
mayonnaise
plain yogurt
finely chopped pickles (I used kosher dills)
Worcestershire sauce
freshly ground black pepper
spicy brown mustard (I used a mix of store-bought and homemade-by-friend spicy brown mustards)
cider vinegar
fresh rosemary (from my herb pots), chopped very fine
fresh parsley (from my herb pots), chopped
fresh cilantro, chopped

Salad tasted wicked spicy and reeked of rosemary when the dear husband and I ate it three hours after mixing, but mellowed out and tasted more blended and mustardy on Day Two. Obligatory food safety tip: with salads dressed in mayonnaise, be sure that they are kept very cold in your picnic cooler and aren't left outside the cooler more than half an hour before or after serving.

I'll measure the ingredients next time. So far, the best name I've come up with is a pretty lame pun: "Herb-y Birthday" Potato Salad. Any suggestion from the readers?

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Try a different grain for breakfast: bulgur wheat

This dish was my second response to the challenge posed at work by an entire batch of bulgur wheat that I had overcooked. (First response: mixing it with parmesan cheese to make a crust for quiche). It was just a little bit too exploded and sticky for the tabbouleh for which it was intended, but it was still fine to use for something else. If only we had another bulgur wheat recipe...

Bulgur Breakfast Pudding
makes at least 6 one-cup servings, more if served in small ramekins

3 cups cooked bulgur wheat
2/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup dried cherries
1/3 cup craisins
1/3 cup pecan pieces
2 cups whipping cream*
1 3/4 cup whole milk*
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ginger powder
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp flour

* lower-fat options: 2 cups half-and-half and 1 3/4 cup 2 percent milk OR no cream and 3 3/4 cups whole milk, but resulting pudding will not be as thick when hot and won't taste as creamy

Mix all ingredients in large saucepan except the flour. Bring to a simmer SLOWLY over medium-low heat. Stir frequently. When the mixture is hot, add flour by stirring in small amounts with a whisk to avoid lumps. Simmer on low heat until mixture is thick like oatmeal, stirring frequently to avoid scorching the bottom. Spoon into cereal bowls or ramekins. Serve hot or cold. Keeps a shape if chilled in a greased mold.


Note on cream: for best quality and flavor, don't bother with creams that have anything besides dairy products listed on the package. Filler ingredients make both the price and the quality lower.

It's sad that I could never eat this for breakfast myself as the dairy in it would make my guts very unhappy first thing in the morning. I really enjoyed the little tastes I took while creating the recipe.

Although I intended it to be a stand-alone breakfast food, I'm sure a small serving would be a nice addition to a brunch or make an interesting molded dessert.

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Smoothie #4

Pink and frothy! This smoothie was a "clearing of the decks" of fruits left over in freezer and fridge from previous smoothies. Need to make room for fresh fruits now that spring is here again.

2 to 4 oz frozen strawberries
about 8 oz frozen tart cherries
1 cup kesar mango pulp
1 banana in chunks
unsweetened soy milk
frozen non-citrus juice concentrate, thawed

Place all fruits in 5-cup (1.25L) blender and add 1 to 3 Tbsp juice concentrate to taste. Fill blender the rest of the way with soy milk. Use less soy milk if you like your smoothie extra-thick. Use even less milk to make a spoonable dessert.

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Honey-candied orange peels

Another recipe from the aforementioned SCA event lunch, which was held this past Saturday. I served the orange peels as a little sweet bite for the end of the meal.

My recipe is a bit of a mishmash of modern method, a 13th Century Andalusian cookbook recipe translation of "orange paste" I found at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Andalusian/andalusian10.htm#Heading528 and a recipe from Menagier de Paris translated in Pleyn Delit by C. Hieatt, B. Hosington and S. Butler as follows:

Cut the peel of an orange into five pieces and scrape away the skin inside with a knife; then set them to soak in pure fresh water for nine days, and change the water every day. Then boil them in pure water, but only until they come to a boil, and when this is done spread them on a cloth and let them dry out well. Then put them in a pot with enough honey to cover them and boil over a slow fire, skimming. And when you think that the honey is cooked (to test whether it is cooked, take some water in a spoon and pour into this water a bit of honey, and if it spreads it is not cooked; and if the honey stays in the water without spreading, it is cooked), then take out your orange peels and arrange them in a layer, and sprinkle powder of ginger over, then another layer, and sprinkle, etc., until finished; and leave a month or more before eating. (recipe 133, "Orangat")

I dispensed with the instructions for nine days of soaking orange peels and went with the more streamlined instructions from Judy Knipe and Barbara Marks' The Christmas Cookie Book, which tell the reader to soak the peels in cold water to loosen the membrane, scrape the webby membrane off the peel with a spoon, cut the peels in strips and do this four times: cover with cold water in a pot, bring to a boil, drain, rinse, drain. I didn't let the peels dry out for very long before starting the process of boiling them in honey.

I followed the candying instructions given in both the Andalusian recipe and the Menagier recipe, using the Menagier's candy-temperature testing instructions for soft-ball stage. Then I pulled the peels from the honey with tongs and spread them onto parchment paper on a table and let them dry out for about a week. After the week, they were still pasty and sticky, but I didn't try to make up for it by layering them with powdered ginger. I didn't want to have ginger in too many items at the lunch (it was already in the pies, the bread pudding, the pickled mushrooms and the sekanjabin). I considered cinnamon, but decided it overpowered the taste of orange. Instead, the peels were folded into little waxed paper packets for serving.

I do agree with the Menagier de Paris that the peels taste better with aging. After one week, they were less syrupy and mellower. After two weeks, the orange oil in the peels had more bite.

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Black garlic: seems weird, tastes delicious

My co-worker introduced me to an ingredient an Asian friend of hers insisted that she try: black garlic. The description of its flavor was intriguing to me, so my co-worker brought me some from her stash at home.

I looked up a little more information about the process of creating black garlic and found these sites about it helpful: http://blackgarlic.com/how-its-made; http://passionatefoodie.blogspot.com/2009/04/black-garlic.html; http://www.philly.com/inquirer/food/20100107_Garlic_in_a_new_hue__Black.html?viewAll=y
I had no idea that the process of creating black garlic out of ordinary garlic was so time-consuming. We're talking fermentation for weeks and then a drying process.

Straight out of the papery skin, the name "black garlic" is not kidding about the color. The skin is brown and smoky-smelling, and the cloves themselves are black and shriveled. They pull away pretty easily from their papery cases because they have shriveled and have fairly dry exteriors. When I cut them, they had a gummy texture a bit like licorice candy, which is the same color as black garlic. The flavor is reminiscent of roasted garlic, but there is an added tang from fermentation.

Not knowing quite where to start with the stuff, I thought I'd just substitute it for ordinary sauteed garlic in a recipe I already had planned for the week: meatless mushroom Stroganoff sauce on pasta. Here is the garlic on the cutting board with the mushrooms:

I halved a few cloves lengthwise and sliced them, putting the garlic into the saute pan with the mushrooms to cook in olive oil. Then in went the sour cream, lots of pepper, a little salt. I served the sauce on spaghetti noodles.

The smell in the pan was fascinating: garlicky, something a little smoky or roasted with that faint whiff of fermented tanginess, mixed with the savory scent of cooking mushrooms. The mixture was intriguing to my nose and heavenly on the tongue, especially since every drop of the sour cream was imbued with a light black garlic flavor. I came away from the meal believing that black garlic and mushrooms were eternal soul mates.

The next experiment with the rest of the black garlic was using it to dress up some smashed potatoes (a more rustic mashed potato in which I don't bother peeling and don't bother mashing until smooth). Again, I just substituted the black garlic for ordinary garlic. When I make a potful of smashed potatoes, I often put five or six cloves of whole, peeled garlic in the cooking water to cook along with the potatoes. When the potatoes are done, the garlic is softened enough that it just melts into the potato mash. No so with the black garlic. Those cloves, even after cooking longer than 20 minutes, were determined to remain intact and squishy-rubbery. The potato masher cut a couple into some thick slices, at best. The black garlic flavor didn't really transfer to the potato mass as a whole, but some bites were punctuated by strong smoky-tangy flavor and the garlic gave a bit more resistance to the teeth than the potato chunks. Nothing unpleasant about it, but the experience left me wishing I had cut the garlic cloves in smaller pieces before cooking.

Fried potato mush made from the leftovers was an awakening for the nasal cavities as the black garlic pieces touching the frying pan launched a smell that was like dark brown toast close to burning, smeared with roasted garlic. A couple of times, I flavored my mush with slices of leftover turkey Italian sausage. The sausage and garlic were bright lights in a fog of plain potato, making for a more exciting mush than I've ever eaten before.

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Easter dinner and other springtime foods

Mmmm, I like serving springtime food at Easter. There is always a fun mix of stuff that has kept over the winter and new spring produce.
Here are some photos of our Easter foods.

The food above is called Osterbrötchen in German, and they are a yeast-raised bun with dried fruits. I serve them as a breakfast food about every other year, alternating with a German cake (which is not served for breakfast), Osterlamm. The cake is baked in a lamb-shaped mold. Here I am with last year's cake, which has homemade chocolate frosting for a black sheep.

At this year's Easter dinner, the first course was a deceptively "cream"-y soup (soymilk thickened with a little roux) filled with carrots, spinach and peas, accompanied by blanched asparagus with a faux bernaise sauce. I found another application in which Ener-G egg substitute is a terrible idea. The sauce texture was sticky and elastic, meaning that it acted a bit like melted cheese when we dipped asparagus in it. It had a lot of lemon juice, which tasted nice on the asparagus, so at least it was edible. Here's the table shot before we eat the soup and asparagus. Daffodils are from the backyard. The wine is Beaujolais.

And for the main course at Easter dinner, I had planned something that wasn't an Easter ham, but did have ham in it. I had some minced ham left over in the freezer after ham pie, and I wanted to add it to fried potatoes. I boiled sliced potatoes in salted water, then fried them, and although they tasted fully cooked and well-salted like I wanted them to, I had to adjust to a new textural reality from what I had in mind. The potato slices fell apart when I turned them in the pan, so now I had potato hash. No big problem. The hash tasted great with the ham bits and a generous sprinkling of fresh-ground black pepper.

Also wonderful in springtime are mangoes and the new crops of berries. Of course, none of these items grows anywhere near here in April, so they are an occasional indulgence until the local fruit appears in May or June. This week, Andrew mixed blackberries with the banana slices I had in the freezer for an impromptu fruit salad.

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Lower-fat, no-coconut korma

I found a recipe I wanted to try from a slow-cooker cookbook in my collection, one that promised delicious curry slow-cooker style. It was a chicken korma with a coconut milk base, thickened with ground toasted almonds. "Lite" coconut milk still isn't light enough to make the cut in my diet, and there are already ground almonds in the recipe, so I thought, "why not kill two birds with one stone? I'll make almond milk instead of using coconut milk and then I'll have ground almonds to use for the thickener."

Lorna Sass offers a delicious almond milk recipe from the 1400s in To the King's Taste: Richard II's book of feasts and recipes adapted for modern cooking. That almond milk is sweetened, which I didn't want, so I changed things up a little in my most recent almond milk.

The most fun part about making the almond milk comes after Step 1: blanch whole almonds, drain, rinse with cold water, drain. Then I get to squeeze them until the almonds pop right out of the skins. The flying almonds have a surprising velocity when they hit the bowl. Sometimes they leap right out of it. For this recipe, since it was going to cook down for a long time, I made a rather thin almond milk by putting 1/2 cup almonds and 2 cups water into my blender to whirl until the almonds were ground and the water was white. I strained out the almonds to add to the curry later in the cooking.

I also decided there was no reason why I couldn't, when I didn't want to wait four hours for dinner, make the dish on the stove in about an hour. 

The rest of the recipe:

No-coconut chicken korma 
serves four to six

Almond milk made with 1/2 cup almonds and 2 cups water, ground almonds strained out
2 Tbsp butter or ghee
3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into bite-size pieces
1 onion, chopped
4 green cardamom pods, cracked
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 dash ground turmeric
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp ground chilies
1/2 cup chicken stock, if more liquid desired
1 Tbsp lime juice
1 tsp garam masala
salt and ground black pepper to taste

Heat ghee/butter in a pan and cook chicken pieces until they start to brown. Fry onion for a few minutes, then add cardamom pods and garlic and fry 2 minutes. Add ground almonds, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon stick, ground chilies and cook about one minute until fragrant. Add liquids and simmer until chicken is cooked through. Stir in the citrus juice and garam masala and cook until liquid has thickened and reduced to your liking. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Serving suggestion: spoon curry over saffron rice -- rice sauteed in butter/ghee and then steamed in water with a pinch or two of saffron for color and flavor
Garnish suggestion: toasted sliced almonds

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Smoothie #3

Classic smoothie for my household. Canned mango pulp from the Indian grocery is the best dual-purpose smoothie ingredient. It's a fruit and a sweetener.

1/2 can kesar mango pulp (28 oz can)
6 oz frozen strawberries
1 banana
cold soy milk (My husband and I have differing opinions on how much. He says less for thicker, spoonable smoothies, so start at 1/2 cup. I say more for more easily drinkable smoothies, so add at least 1 cup if not more.)

Place fruits in blender. Add soy milk amount for desired consistency. Blend until smooth.

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Tartes de Chare: Playing with 15th-Century pork pie

Another recipe for the previously-mentioned SCA event lunch. I combined parts of two 15th-Century English recipes that appear in the same text, starting with the simpler of two filling preparations and adding a little fruit for color and flavor.

The part that may be a bit of a stretch from the original recipe is using roasted ham as the meat filling. In the interests of making this a very economical lunch so we can charge each diner only $5 for a full meal including beverages and sweets, I'm using a meat that we all know will be on sale right around Easter time, which is near the date of the event. Meats were preserved by salting and curing before 1600, but I have not done sufficient research on the topic to be able to claim with confidence that 21st-Century America's familiar Easter ham was also known to medieval Europeans.

The original recipes were taken from A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of English recipes compiled and left largely unaltered by John L. Anderson. The first Tartes de Chare recipe calls for a filling of ground fresh pork, raw eggs, fried pine nuts and currants, pepper, ginger powder, cinnamon, sugar, saffron, salt, dates, prunes, and small birds browned in grease. These are put into a large "cofynne," a double-crust pie dough that stands by itself around the filling without a pie pan, and baked. The second recipe, "Tartes de Chare Another Manere," also available on the website Gode Cookery, is also baked in a "cofynne" and has a filling of broiled pork that is ground and mixed with egg yolk, pepper, ginger and honey. Neither recipe gives any indication of amounts of any ingredient or baking time or the ingredients for the pie crusts.

I had a little help with the "cofynne" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks, a website that gives modern measurements for early recipes. The one I chose is called "Good White Crust," which was adapted by ATOC from Gervase Markham's 1615 book The English Housewife. I divided the dough into two portions, one of about 2/3 to 3/4 of the dough for the bottom crust, the other 1/3 to 1/4 for the top crust.

Here is my recipe for the filling:

1 1/2 pounds roasted bone-in ham (not honey ham or precooked canned ham), minced (I don't have a meat grinder, so I minced and minced and minced)
3 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz raisins or currants
1/4 tsp ginger powder
2 Tbsp honey
freshly ground black pepper

Mix ham thoroughly with eggs. Sprinkle liberally with black pepper, add fruit and ginger and honey and mix. Roll out bottom crust and lay on baking sheet. Pile filling inside, press into shape and raise the crust up around the filling with straight sides. Lay on the top crust and crimp to seal. Cut an X in the top crust to let out steam. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until center of pie bubbles and crust browns, about 1 hour 10 minutes (I also gave it an additional 10 minutes with the oven off, which may not have been necessary). Cool on rack, wrap in dishtowel and refrigerate.

The pie is best served cold a day or two later because the pie slices so neatly and the fruit flavor is not overpowered by the ham. I served it with a sauce made from dry mustard, red wine vinegar and honey, which tasted great, but really cleared out the sinuses like horseradish. On leftovers, I tried a milder mixture of dijon mustard and honey, which I liked better. Mustard sauce, my tasters told me, is really essential to making the crust less dry and more appetizing.

If I ever baked a ham for Easter, I'd definitely bring out this recipe to take care of the leftovers. Most of the other ingredients are usually hanging around our house. For a dish with this many eggs and this much meat, I was pleasantly surprised that eating a piece for lunch the day after the tasting dinner didn't give my guts fits.

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Dyeing eggs with natural colors

I realize it's a little early for Easter, but I experimented with natural dyes for eggs this weekend because I'd like to serve them as part of a medieval lunch for an Society for Creative Anachronism (www.sca.org) event next month.

I’m very excited about the eggs because the dyes actually worked, contrary to the experiences of many online contributors I've read.



The lighter pink circles are where the egg (being too fresh) was sticking out of the water, and the marks that look like scratches on the yellow and blue eggs come from bits of cabbage or from the spoon I scooped them out of the dye with. The colors in the photo are very true to how they look in real life.

I followed (more or less) some recipes I found online.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/holidayhowtos/a/eastereggdyes.htm
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Eggs/EasterEggDye.htm

I think the most important bits of the instructions I followed were:
1. wash the eggs first in soapy water to remove any oils from the eggshell.
2. use a lot of dyestuff: I used a little over half a small head of red cabbage for blue eggs, 2 or 3 Tbsp turmeric for yellow eggs and 2 cups of juice from beet pickles for pink eggs (plus a little water to make sure the eggs were covered). I didn’t dye as many eggs as could have fit in the pot, but I figure this would be enough for a pot of a dozen eggs of each color.
3. add white vinegar to the dye bath. I just kind of guessed and probably poured in 2 Tbsp or so in each bath.
4. leave the eggs in the dyestuff overnight in the refrigerator.

I also added the instruction myself of cooking the eggs right in the dye bath, since you’d have to cook the dyes anyway. We'll see at my tasting party Monday whether the eggs taste like the dyestuff. Next time I would make sure to strain out all the cabbage because I think cabbage bits stuck to the eggs and prevented them from dyeing uniformly.

Next step, presentation. I know plastic Easter basket grass didn't exist prior to 1600, and since I want people to eat them, the eggs also won't be served in baskets full of lawn grass. Something easy would be a brightly-colored cloth in a basket or bowl framing a pile of eggs. Less easy but pretty would be gathering up nontoxic flowers and using them as the "grass" in a basket. I have this vision of little origami packages to hold salt and pepper to dip the eggs in, but I don't know what shape to make.

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Stuffed dough pockets: the food of many folk

These scrumptious, savory pockets of bready dough with a surprise inside are beloved in many cultures. They come in fried versions, like empanadas in Latin America or samosas in India. Some are boiled, like German Klösse and (sometimes, when not fried or baked) Polish pierogi. Some are baked, like Italian calzone or Jamaican patties or like this week's experiment, Russian pirozhki.

A Russian-speaking colleague of Andrew's and neighbor of ours in Calgary gave me a cookbook for my last birthday, Cuisines of the Caucasus Mountains by Kay Shaw Nelson. Following her recipes, I made pirozhki and a vegetable-anchovy relish that tasted pretty good as a dip for the bready pockets. Our dinner was freshly-baked pirozhki (including one for each of us that I stuffed with cherry jam for dessert), relish and leftovers of lentil-barley stew flavored with smoked turkey tail.

Most interesting parts of the recipes: the mushroom filling for the pirozhki is flavored with nutmeg and the thickener for the relish is ground almonds. I had plenty of both to spare for a meal for two new parents.

I was amazed at how much the relish's flavor mellowed out over time. The first meal, eight hours after I made the relish, the taste was predominantly green onion and anchovy. Two days later, when I ate leftovers, the flavors were fully incorporated into a fresh, herby mixture with a hint of salt and fish. 

Note to self for next time: seal the pirozhki better before baking. Many of them broke open along the seam and leaked some juices onto the baking pan. Maybe instead of just folding over and pressing closed, I should have rolled the filled bundles in my hands to make them seamless.

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When not to use egg substitute

Spectacular failure this week gives me another addition to the list of dishes where my favorite egg substitute Ener-G is just not acceptable: homemade pasta. My pasta dough didn't even begin to come together into something kneadable, even after squeezing it for 15 minutes and adding a little water.

My list so far:
1. custards
2. omelets
3. rosettes
4. peach pie filling (really, just another custard)
5. egg-drop soup
6. pasta

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Broccoli soup experiment update

This week, I repeated the broccoli soup experiment at work to use up the broccoli stem pieces and broccoli buds left over from prepping the big box of broccoli. I discovered that my estimate of the amount of soup created by my original recipe was WAY off. I think I meant to write six servings and not six quarts. It made about two quarts. Nowhere near enough for a restaurant, so I repeated the recipe with broccoli florets standing in for the broccoli stems. Here's the final write-up of the recipe as it turned out at work:

Cream of Broccoli Soup with Potato and Cheddar Cheese

2 pounds broccoli stems
2 pounds broccoli florets
2 cups broccoli buds
5 or 6 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and diced
1 large onion, diced
10 cups chicken stock
10 cups whole milk
2 tsp black pepper (we didn't have white pepper, which I would have preferred)
9 to 10 cups shredded cheddar cheese
2 Tbsp butter
salt to taste

Cook broccoli stems, potatoes and onion in stock until starting to get tender, add broccoli florets and cook until tender. Make a not-so-smooth puree with an immersion blender. Add milk and pepper and heat through. Add broccoli buds and cheese and butter and stir until cheese is melted. Season with salt to taste.
Yield: 4 or 5 quarts

This amount still isn't enough to last through a busy lunch day, but it's something we could start with. The way this would work in the future as a broccoli-stems-only soup would be to save up stems and buds from 3 or 4 boxes of broccoli (both freeze well), then make a double batch of this soup recipe (minus the florets) when eight pounds of stems have accumulated. Otherwise, it could always be a stems-and-florets recipe as above, made after every other box of broccoli.

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Asafoetida for the first time

Yesterday, I brought a new spice into use in the kitchen: asafoetida. The reason for trying it was to experiment with a potato curry recipe. The one I chose to start with was "Indian Curried Potatoes, Peas and Carrots" from Heather Van Vorous' book Eating for IBS.

I usually enjoy Heather's lowfat and gut-friendly recipes using flavors from around the world, but this one was a real stinker. In the literal sense. With an entire tablespoon of asafoetida in the recipe, the curry reeked of this spice to high heaven (I'm convinced it's not coincidence that part of the name of this spice is "fetid") and the house still has a faint lingering odor of it in the air on the next day. The smell of the spice is far worse than its taste, which is pleasing to some of the same taste/smell receptors that like onion, garlic and stinky cheeses.

The most serious problem in the recipe is that asafoetida in such a large quantity overpowers all the other spices in the dish. We couldn't even taste a hint of the chili powder, cumin or coriander. We started thinking maybe what was missing from this one-note curry was ginger and garlic, but a small bit of research I did last night with another Indian cookbook in my collection, Vegetarische Indische Küche by Sumana Ray, alerted me to two patterns: 1) curries consisting mostly of potatoes and including asafoetida do not usually also have garlic and ginger and 2) asafoetida is used by the dash, not by the tablespoon.

I'd like to continue looking in other collections of recipes from India to determine whether this pattern holds true in other Indian curry collections. My other three sources of Indian or Indian-style recipes do not use asafoetida at all or don't put it in the potato dishes.

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Today's sandwich: Tzatziki chicken wrap

Leftovers used: chicken fingers from take-out dinner, tzatziki sauce from Falafel Fun Fest 2010 The Reckoning: Mediterranean Extravaganza of Extreme Fun and Festivity (a recent potluck party -- don't ask me why the name is so ridiculous, I just approved it), cilantro also from FFF10TRMEEFF.

Instructions: cut chicken fingers into thin strips, warm a burrito-size flour tortilla in the microwave for 20 seconds, lay out chicken strips in center of tortilla. Spread liberally with tzatziki and sprinkle with lots of cilantro leaves. Fold up bottom of tortilla over chicken, then one side, then finish wrap by folding over the other side and pulling tightly.

Tzatziki sauce

1 cucumber
1 or 2 large cloves of garlic
1 cup plain Greek yogurt (or strain lowfat yogurt through paper towels/cheesecloth/coffee filter)
fresh ground black pepper
optional: 1 to 2 tsp fresh chopped dill

Peel cucumber and scoop out seeds with a spoon. Grate with the fine holes on a box grater and squeeze the juices out of the grated cucumber. Place squeezed cucumber in a bowl. Run the garlic through a garlic press (use this tool because it minces very fine and squeezes juice -- mmmm, extra garlicky) into the bowl with the cucumber. Mix in yogurt (and dill, if using) and a dash of black pepper, garnish with more black pepper.

Tzatziki is used as a sauce on falafel and gyros, and I've had it served to me over sauteed mushrooms and onions at a festival food stall. It's great on many fried foods, sandwiches and meats. I also like it as a vegetable dip and I make it a snack by scooping it up with crackers.

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Autumn Loaf

Turkey meatloaf tends to get a bit dry, so I looked for another option for keeping it moist. Also, I had a bunch of cloves of roasted garlic hanging around from the weekend that needed to be used. The initial working recipe I created yesterday:

Autumn Loaf
Serves 4

1 pound ground turkey
10 cloves roasted garlic
1/2 cup roasted squash (leftovers of unseasoned roasted, mashed squash)
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Grease a bread pan. Mash garlic in a bowl with a fork. Add meat, squash, seasonings and combine thoroughly with your hands. Press mixture into pan and bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes.

Observations
This recipe's cooking instructions didn't work. Especially when I tried to bake a pan of potato wedges at the same time. I put the potatoes in 10 minutes before the loaf (needed some time to create the recipe, take some notes and mash everything together), but neither was done after 45 minutes. I turned up the oven to 400 degrees and left everything in another 20 minutes to get some browning, which worked a little for the loaf, but the potatoes still weren't tender in the middle, so they got another 10 minutes in the oven. To make this dinner again, I'd start out at 400 degrees and still put the potatoes into the oven before making up the loaf. The potatoes baking so long at a lower temperature were tougher and less golden than my usual crispy baked wedges done at a higher temperature for only 30 to 45 minutes.

The loaf was moist, but still held together fine without being too crumbly, which was exactly the texture I wanted. The loaf mix recipe needs a bit of salt and pepper. We sprinkled salt on each portion as we ate it.

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Work at home: the broccoli soup experiment

After a couple of rounds at work of turning a 20-pound box of broccoli heads into a box of pretty florets, I got concerned about the waste that arises from this task. I mean, everyone likes the florets best, but there are still pounds of good, edible broccoli in those stems that are going in the trash. Chef says we don't keep them for other dishes, and I was distressed at tossing out so much food.

At my last job, we kept vegetable leavings in the freezer until we'd accumulated enough for stocks, and the broccoli stems were kept separately for making broccoli soup. I mentioned the idea of making broccoli soup from trimmings to my current chef and she invited me to take the trimmings home to experiment with.

The amount of broccoli coming through our kitchen is not huge, probably giving us enough trimmings to make broccoli soup once every couple of weeks, unless we made smaller batches and served it more often.

This week, I tried my first recipe for this experiment:

Broccoli Stems Soup
approximately 6 quarts

about 2 pounds broccoli stem pieces (just the tender stems, tough woody parts cut off)
1 cup broccoli buds (the tiny little green buds that end up all over the cutting board when I'm cutting broccoli florets, which I scooped up and saved separately)
1 small onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
2 potatoes, diced
4 cups water
2 Tbsp chicken bouillon powder
1 tsp ground white pepper
5 cups unsweetened soy milk (I'd use dairy whole milk if I were at work)
1 Tbsp butter (I added this for finishing after tasting the first time, not necessary if using cheese)
optional: 2 cups shredded cheddar or cubed American cheese
vegan option: use 4 cups vegetable stock instead of chicken bouillon with water and use margarine as the finishing fat

Boil vegetables in water until tender. Puree in blender. Add milk, bouillon, pepper, butter and simmer until heated through, stirring occasionally. Add broccoli buds during last minute or two of cooking. Add salt if needed. Stir in cheese until melted (if using) or pass cheese at table as a garnish when serving.

Notes to self: don't add the milk and then go knit in the next room and forget about the soup. It was foamy on top when I got back because it hadn't been stirred and had boiled. Also, don't forget to add the pretty green broccoli buds next time.

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