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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