Henne en Bokenade

For the Thanksgiving feast this year, I used my friends as guinea pigs took the opportunity to get some immediate feedback on a stew recipe I was dying to try, but needed some help in eating the large quantity of food produced. I experimented with a recipe from the compilation by John L. Anderson called A Fifteenth Century Cookry Boke, a collection of recipes from several manuscripts written in England in the 1400s, and carted the results along in a big pot to reheat at the home of the hosts.

This chicken dish (in addition to two other meats) was substituting for turkey, since our hosts, who grew up in Sri Lanka, have never acquired a taste for that bird. My dinner offering was definitely standing on the far side of tradition among the foods at our Thanksgiving table. It was more like a tagine or a curry rather than the typical glorious platter of roasted poultry.

As per normal with these 15th-Century recipes, very little guidance is given in quantities or cooking times. The method is laid out with regard to what order things should be done and what mode of cooking should be used, but nothing more detailed than "take these and put them together," "cut it in pieces," "temper with this/allay with this" or "sethe (simmer/boil) it." Sometimes the recipes are written a little out of sequence when the writer goes back to add something that should have been earlier in the list. In this case, I had my choice of two different ways to make the same dish called "Vele, Kede or Henne en Bokenade" or "Autre (another) Vele en Bokenade." They are wildly different from each other, one being made with fresh herbs like parsley and sage and thickened with egg yolk, the other being flavored with warm spices and onions and including some dried currants and other thickeners. But, they are both "en bokenade," meaning a sort of one-pot main dish or potage.

The original recipe is for "Autre Vele en Bokenade," using veal. Since the recipe beforehand offered "henne" or chicken as an option, I decided chicken would be an acceptable option for the second recipe as well.

The original text:
Autre Vele en Bokenade
Take Vele, and Make it clene, and hakke it to gobettys, an sethe it; and take fat brothe, an temper up thine Almaundys that thou hast y-grounde, and lye it with Flowre of Rys, and do there-to gode powder of Gyngere, & Galingale, Canel, Maces, Quybybis, and Oynonys y-mynsyd, &Roysonys of coraunce, & coloure yt wyth Safroun, and put there-to thin Vele, & serve forth. 

My quick-and-dirty version for modern cooks:
Take veal and clean it and cut it into small pieces and simmer it. Take that broth and thicken it with ground almonds and rice flour. Add powdered ginger, galingale, cinnamon, mace, cubebs. Add minced onions and dried currants. Color it with saffron, put the veal in the sauce and serve.

The recipe I devised:
Henne en Bokenade 
Cut up a whole chicken so you have wings, breasts, thighs, drumsticks and a back piece. Place the chicken pieces in a large pot with the wings and legs and back on the bottom and the breasts sitting on top. If you have a young chicken, use stock for simmering. If you have a stewing hen, simmer in water. Simmer the deboned chicken in 3 cups chicken stock (or 4 cups water and a much longer cooking time for stewing hen) with 1 tsp salt, 8 white peppercorns and a dash of powdered ginger. Remove the meat when it is cooked through and make a sauce with the broth. Skim fat from the broth if desired.

Mix 2 heaping Tbsp of rice flour with at least 1/4 cup water until it becomes a thick slurry that looks like cream. Use more water if needed. Whisk the rice flour slurry into the hot broth. Add 1 minced onion, 1 tsp ginger powder, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 3/4 tsp ground mace. Grind 10 cubebs and add them to the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer and cook until thickened, whisking occasionally. While the sauce is simmering, remove the meat from the bones and discard the skin. Pull the meat into smaller pieces that would fit on a spoon. When the sauce is close to the desired thickness, add 1 cup dried currants and a generous pinch of saffron. Add the cooked meat to the sauce and add a little salt if desired. The finished dish looks like chicken pieces and currants swimming in a fragrant yellowish-brown gravy.

Notes:
1. I did not have ground almonds or the time and desire to grind almonds on my own in a mortar and pestle on Thursday, so my sauce is thickened only with the rice flour this time.
2. I skipped the galingale because I had just run out, but I used more ginger than I otherwise might have.
3. This sauce thickens considerably as the dish cools. Serve immediately (just like the original recipe says) for the best presentation.
4. For those who are asking, "What's a cubeb?" A cubeb is a a dried berry from a plant related to black pepper. It is somewhat similar to pepper in flavor but also has a tangy, clove-like flavor. I got mine as a gift from a friend, but I know of a source in my area: Spicewell's Essentials. http://spicewells.us/Home.html
5. When I try this one again, I'd go for the ground almond and change up the spice mix to blend more successfully with the saffron; possibly, I would use less saffron than the approximately 1/4 tsp I had when I just dumped the rest of my saffron in the stew. Mine had a bit of an overpowering saffron flavor that blended well with the ginger, but left the other spices far less present.

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Bunny Buns

I'm on attempt #3 to make the perfect sweet bun to stuff with marzipan, shape like a bunny and serve up at the local Shire of Baile na Scolairi event at the end of the month.

The concept: make bunny-shaped buns and display a few of them on a platter at lunch with some piles of raisins, making it look like "the rabbit's revenge" on lunch is some rabbit droppings left behind as the bunnies hopped around the plate. The buns have to taste good, though, because those bunnies not on display will be served up as food.

I've finally arrived at a bread recipe I'm happy with, so I'm ready to share that here.

Advantages of this recipe:
1. sweet, but not as sweet as the marzipan, so there is some contrast
2. tastes great (not dry or stale) as day-old bread, which it will be on the day of the event
3. easy to shape
4. variable for multiple purposes -- I may end up using this recipe some other time with other stuffings or with dried fruits or other spices in the dough.
5. one recipe makes more than 12 buns -- good, because I have to make at least 50
6. does not require me to buy milk -- great because we didn't have any at home yesterday

Bunny Buns
makes about 20 small buns

1/2 cup lukewarm water
1 package active dry yeast
1 tsp granulated sugar
1 cup lukewarm water
1 egg
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
prepared marzipan (preferably a brand with sugar as the only sweetener)

Proof the yeast: pour water into a large bowl, sprinkle on yeast and 1 tsp sugar. Let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.

Mix in the remaining water, the egg, 1/2 cup sugar, oil, salt, cinnamon. Whisk in 1 cup all-purpose flour, then 1 cup whole-wheat flour. Use spoon to mix in the remaining all-purpose flour. Knead with well-floured hands until well combined. Dough should be soft and pillowy and a little sticky.

Clean out bowl with soap and hot water and coat with vegetable oil. Return dough to bowl, turning to cover dough with grease. Cover with plastic wrap or thin towel and leave in a warm place until doubled in size. (see note below)

Punch dough down and knead with floured hands for 1 to 2 minutes. Divide into 20 portions of equal size. Place a small ball of marzipan on each portion, wrap the dough around it, and roll dough between hands into a round ball. Shape the balls into teardrops, leaving the marzipan in the fat end of the teardrop. Place on greased baking sheet or baking sheet covered in parchment paper. Let rise, covered by thin towel, for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and brush dough with egg wash (see note below). Use scissors to cut long rabbit ears near the narrow end of the teardrop of dough. Bake buns for 15 to 20 minutes, until they are golden brown and sound hollow when the bottom is tapped. Be careful not to burn the tips of the ears too much. Cool on a wire rack. 

Note on rising: if the weather is chilly, bread dough does not rise quickly. Try one of these tricks:
1. Place covered bowl of dough in a closed oven with just the light on
2. for winter days only: turn the oven on to the lowest possible temperature for five minutes. Turn off and then let the bread dough rise in the oven with the door closed.
3. Boil water in a pan slightly smaller in diameter than your mixing bowl. Remove the pan from the heat and put the covered bowl on top of the pan.
4. Boil a cup of water in the microwave oven. Remove cup, place covered bowl with dough in it inside the microwave and let the dough rise with the door closed. Don't microwave the dough, it gets too hot and will kill the yeast.

Note on egg wash: egg wash is one egg beaten well with a little water. Use a pastry brush to brush the wash on the dough. It adds a pleasant sheen to the dough.  Egg wash can be used to help seeds stick to the top of breads (e.g. sesame seeds, poppy seeds, etc.). Some recipes will use a wash made only with egg yolks to add yellow color to the dough, or only with egg whites to prevent yellow color. This site has an interesting table of the different properties of different egg wash recipes: http://www.piemaven.com/egg_wash.html

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Playing with 15th-Century pork pie again

Not only are pork pie recipes available in the Harleian manuscripts from 15th century England, there is also a pork pie recipe in the 14th-century collection called Forme of Cury. The last time I tried to recreate a pork-and-fruit pie and described it in this blog, I was going with a 15th-Century source, but the recipe I used most recently from the prior century isn't much different. It's still ground/minced pork inside a crust with fruit and spices, although this one also includes some fowl, as did the first Tarte de Chare recipe I found.

This latest experiment with pork-and-fruit pie was a big hit at the local Society for Creative Anachronism shire's holiday party potluck, where a few of us took the challenge I'd posed to bring pre-1600 food to the party.

Here's the recipe I worked from this time (with special characters replaced with "th" where they appear):
Tartee
Take pork ysode. hewe it and bray it. do thereto ayrenn. Raisouns sugur and powdour of gyngur. powdour douce and smale briddes theramong and white grece, take prunes, safroun & salt, and make a crust in a trape & do ther Fars therin. &bake it wel & serue it forth. 

That is, take cooked/boiled pork and grind it, mix in eggs, raisins, sugar and powdered ginger, powder douce (sweet powder, a spice mixture). Add small birds and white grease (fresh fat, not drippings). Take prunes, saffron and salt. Make a crust in a trap (a pie dish) and put the farce (meat mixture) in it. Bake it well and serve it forth.

I departed from the original recipe's instruction to grind previously cooked pork and used fresh ground pork, easily available these days from the butcher shop. I also decided to do a double-crust pie that would stand on its own instead of putting a single-crust pie in a pie plate, because I wanted people at the potluck to be able to easily eat pieces of pie with their hands. As it turns out, the fresh pork may have been an unwise choice because the pie's juices steadily bubbled over through my vent holes in the crust and created quite a mess on my baking sheet. Cooked pork may have been more well-behaved and stayed in its crust.

I can only hope that entire small birds would have baked up to a safe temperature when mixed in with the rest of the meat. I didn't have the time the day I was baking to go looking for quail or doves, so I used 1.5 to 2 pounds chicken thighs, which for the convenience of my potluckers I deboned before cooking. And to be sure I'd get fully cooked fowl, I fried the chicken pieces in oil until browned before adding them on top of the pork mixture in my pie.

My recipe for the rest of the pork-and-fruit mixture:
1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
3 oz prunes, chopped
2 oz currants
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 to 3/4 tsp salt
2 whole cloves, crushed to powder
dash cinnamon and nutmeg
pinch saffron, crushed
2 tsp sugar

Once again, I used the "good white crust" recipe from A Temperance of Cooks that was their version of Gervase Markham's crust described in The English Housewife, a manual from 1615. It is sturdy, but just fatty enough to be a little flaky. The flavor is appealing, especially when the pie is still warm, and it bakes to a nice golden color at 375 degrees Fahrenheit without threatening to burn before the pie filling is done and bubbly in the center.

I should mention that I was instantly won over by the Project Gutenberg e-book version of Forme of Cury by Samuel Pegge, which I acquired for my iPod through iBooks, for the simple reason that it has every recipe listed individually in the table of contents, so I can just look for the title I want and go directly to that recipe without having to page through the entire book. A big win over the HTML version on the Project Gutenberg website because the recipes in the book are not organized alphabetically or even necessarily by course in the meal.

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Easter leftovers idea: orange stew

This stew gets its name not because it has oranges in it, but because it is a bright-orange-colored, warm and nutritious resting place for the last bits of ham left over from Easter dinner. Since our balmy spring weather of March this year turned chilly and wetter as April went on, a new soupy dish was exactly what I needed to stay invigorated.

Orange Stew
2 Tbsp butter
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and chunked (about 2 to 2.5 pounds)
4 medium-sized carrots, peeled and chunked
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp ground sage
seasoning salt (such as Lowry's) to taste
black pepper to taste
1/2 pound leftover Easter ham, diced

Melt the butter in a large pot. add the vegetables, stock and seasonings (go easy on the salt, the ham will add more later) and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat, cover and simmer until the vegetables are tender enough to mash. Add additional stock if stew is too thick for your liking. Mash vegetables, add ham and cook over medium-low heat until ham is heated through. Reseason if needed.

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Easter menu: violets and some other food

It's the start of the third year of having a yard without chemicals like fertilizer or pesticide (I don't know what the previous owners did, so I'm starting from when we moved in). To celebrate, this year we're eating edible flowers that appear in the yard.

At the special Easter lunch I made for myself and my husband, violets were the stars. They are the first of the edible flowers to show up in the spring. We went out in the morning to pick a bowl of the teeny purple flowers from our backyard.

In documenting the Easter lunch here, let's start with dessert. I found a recipe for flower pudding with dates and spices in Lorna Sass' To the King's Taste, a collection of recipes from the time of King Richard II of England and Sass' modern interpretations of the recipes. The original recipe called for roses, but Sass indicated violets might be appropriate in early spring, so I tried it out. Into the saucepan go the flowers and some almond milk along with thickeners, spices, and sweeteners.

After chilling and setting and a bit of garnishing with some fresh flowers, here's the end result:

This dish did not meet expectations, but I would not call it a failure. The pudding is delicious despite the drawbacks of its slightly grayish purple color and the fact that the pudding ends up tasting much more like dates than like violets, which have a very light and subtle flavor that may have been destroyed by cooking. I'll try the same recipe again in a few weeks when the first roses bloom and see if the stronger flavor of roses holds up better in the pudding.

Violets turned up again in the first course of lunch, which was spring mix greens and sauteed asparagus with a balsamic vinegar reduction sauce.

Next year, I'm going to have to pick more violets for salads. They are fantastic with greens!

The usual main attraction of Easter dinner, the ham, was hardly an afterthought, it just didn't have the same level of novelty as the edible flowers. I've never made a glazed ham before, and Andrew and I recalled Easter hams of our growing-up years were unglazed. I pulled the basic ham glaze ideas from  Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook of 1950 and dressed it up with balsamic vinegar. It was served with buttered peas with caramelized shallots.

Final verdict from the eaters? Glazed ham is here to stay on our Easter menu, for as long as we don't mind all our ham leftovers being a little sweet. The payoff of taste sensations was definitely worth the extra effort of pulling out the ham in the middle of baking, scoring and glazing. Also, I love how the pink and green food looks so appetizing on my pink-and-white china.

Wine served: a surprisingly apt German Riesling from the Mosel, Ernst Loosen's Dr. L from 2010. Hooray to the liquor store that has everything, including good wine recommendations for ham!

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Are krumkaker still good after being frozen?

The Christmas baking experiment results are in: frozen krumkaker get a little moist upon thawing and the texture is undesirable, but keeping them tightly wrapped or sealed in an airtight container will allow for continued crispiness into early February. I had a chance to taste these leftovers from three days before Christmas at the beginning of this month, and they tasted like they were, at most, two or three days old. Still well-flavored by the cardamom and vanilla, still light and somewhat crunchy. The samples I brought home were gone in about five minutes.

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To good fortune in 2012

For our New Year's Eve party, the most fun part about party preparation was baking our own fortune cookies and filling them with homemade fortunes! Ever since Andrew's grad school roommate and friends made their own fortune cookies for a mathematicians keg party, we've been very attached to the idea of making better fortunes (and possibly better cookies!) than the ones in Chinese restaurants.

I dug out a recipe I've been hanging onto for a few years in anticipation of just such an opportunity: the recipe from Sara Perry in Holiday Baking. The interesting flavoring element is one-and-one-third tablespoons Grand Marnier. Also surprising was finding out that these fortune cookies are pretty low-fat since they are made with just a little oil and just egg whites.

The finished products:

Here are some of my favorites from our list of 40 unique fortunes:


You will be disappointed by all other fortune cookies this year
You will gain fame and fortune when a ton of gold is dropped on your head
You will learn what the Higgs Boson is and why everyone cares
Zeno’s paradox will fail to stop you from kissing your sweetheart
Starting tomorrow, your farts will create alternate universes
Dec. 22, 2012 will be the end of your dominance of the pop charts
Your next fortune cookie will drip with sarcasm
This time, having another drink will make you smarter and more attractive
Your skills will be useful to many – in bed
Mass murder will prove to be an unsuccessful election strategy

Part of the glory of making our own fortunes was having the chance to totally dork out with the science references and to make light of bad luck -- because really, how could it be the case that everyone opening a fortune cookie will have a great year with no unpleasant surprises, stupid accidents or days that are just really awful?

And if bad luck should find you this year, if you want to kick back and burn out some bad memories or take a breather from burning the candle at both ends, try out this punch I made that really knocked our socks off this New Year's Eve.

Burnt Embers Punch

3 parts añejo rum
1 part apricot brandy
2 parts pineapple juice
12 parts club soda (I only used six parts at the party and the punch was stiffer than an overstarched shirt)

Depending on the size of your vessel, make the base measurement of one part an appropriate size. For a couple of drinks, use a shot glass and make the punch in a small pitcher. To fill a big punch bowl, use a one- or two-cup measuring cup. Serve over a couple ice cubes in each glass or put a frozen ice block with pineapple chunks/apricot nectar in it in your punch bowl.

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On the 14th Day of Christmas, my true love sent to me / An updated blog entry

Sorry for the unexpected one-month hiatus, all. This past December was a time of action, not written words. Much baking and cooking took place, but none of it was documented here at the time it was happening.

Some highlights of the Christmas season in my kitchen:
1. Testing out a household favorite, tofu-carrot scramble, on a potluck group. Positive comments from people who liked the gingery taste. The basics of how Andrew and I make this recipe come from the recipe in the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook. We just don't measure things anymore and I think I dropped an ingredient or two from the recipe long ago before I taught it to Andrew. I'm still debating on whether I should make this dish at work. Its appearance is not as good as its taste, I'm afraid. It's a bit like chunky yellow-orange vomit on rice. Maybe a nice garnish of chopped cilantro and using julienned carrot instead of grated would make it look more appealing.
2. The 15th-century pie recipe that looked doomed to fail until the moment I put some in my mouth. Another potluck experiment, going from a historical recipe that gave zero amounts or proportions, just a list of what ingredients to add when (and I think even these were out of order, so I adjusted based on the order of instructions in similar recipes from other sources from the same country). This pie was like a savory custard with dried fruit for sweetness. I messed up baking the crust blind (forgot the parchment paper under the pie weights), the crust shrank considerably, the custard took much longer than expected to even start pretending to set, I used far too much beef marrow so the filling looked a bit greasy while baking, I added the spices during the wrong step of the process (no matter, it seems). I couldn't believe how good it tasted after all those mistakes and how ugly it looked. And the crust was the flakiest I've ever made. Gives a whole new understanding of a "foolproof" recipe. However, my version needs some serious revising before putting it out here for others to try.
3. Are krumkaker still good after being frozen? This year's batch of Norwegian Christmas cookies was donated to science. I have also learned that the plural of krumkake is krumkaker. I packed the cookies in a box and gave them to one of the owners of the cafe/kitchen store where I work so she could experiment with how long they are still delicious when wrapped tightly in plastic (she reports the batch from two days before Christmas was still good on New Year's Day) and whether they could maintain crispness after being frozen and thawed. Still waiting on the lab results from the frozen portion of the batch.

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Quiet Thanksgiving dinner for two

Thanksgiving Day was not a large celebration this year, just me and my husband. Since we both had the day off work, I slept in and spent the rest of the morning cooking up a special small feast with lots of local items.

Here's our feast table just before we dig in:

The menu

Main dish:
a locally-raised organic chicken, roasted with rosemary sprigs (from my own backyard) stuffed in the cavity

Side dishes:
golden beets from the special Thanksgiving farmer's market, roasted in the pan with the chicken
spaghetti squash from a friend's backyard, roasted and seasoned with salt and pepper, butter and brown sugar
rose heart radishes from the CSA, boiled and then sauced with a roux-based white sauce with chicken bouillon base and lactose-free milk

Dessert:
pumpkin custard in pie form, with prosciutto bits rolled into the crust

To drink:
a California Chardonnay

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Chocolate frosting, versions 2 and 3

I made a nice chocolate frosting for my Osterlamm (lamb-shaped German Easter cake) a couple of years back, but didn't write it down and didn't remember it well. This week, I wrote a frosting recipe down, but it didn't work. Here's the failed recipe and the way I fixed it.

Chocolate Frosting, version 2

1 stick unsalted butter
1 package semisweet chocolate chips
about 1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 Tbsp powdered sugar

Melt butter over medium heat. Turn off heat and whisk in small batches of chocolate chips until they melt. Whisk in cocoa and powdered sugar. Cool in separate container.

I should add to these instructions "do not put the bowl of frosting in refrigerator" because when I went to look at it the next morning, I had a large, solid truffle instead.

How to rescue it to frost a cake before taking it to a party later that day? Break the truffle into pieces and whisk in 3/4 cup hot milk (in my case, I used almond milk). This turns the truffle back into something more like fudge sauce. Whisk in a bit more cocoa powder to stiffen it up a little more and cool to room temperature for frosting. The end result is a cake covered in ganache, which is kind of like turning the Osterlamm into the best-tasting chocolate bunny ever.

Once again, if stored in the refrigerator, this will turn solid again (although much softer with the liquid milk in it). It needs to come back to room temp again to be at all spreadable. Warmer than room temp would be easier to frost with. I just ended up putting slightly warmed "version 3" in big globs on chunks of leftover cake yesterday. A chocoholic's dream.

Next time, I'm using cream for a proper ganache frosting, or I'm making chocolate buttercream. None of this fence-sitting butter-ganache, delicious and decadent as it may be.

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Creating again in time for St. Pat's Day

I've had a short hiatus because I wasn't doing any recipe creation that was noteworthy for a few weeks. I experimented with some new recipes from the New York Times that turned out to be fantastic, the Hungarian casserole rakott krumpli and vegan enchiladas (but used a canned sauce I like, so can't comment on whether this chef's enchilada sauce is good). I did some home versions of recipes I liked from work. But nothing that I could call my own and write up here.

For St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to bring home some of the excitement that was going on in the kitchen at work as our chef and baker turned out Irish-inspired dishes for the holiday: soda bread, potato and mushroom soup with cabbage, and the most decadent colcannon ever topped with sausages. And cheese. That colcannon was delicious, but had crazy amounts of cream and meat. Waaaaay too rich for me to eat more than one bite.

So, it was back to the drawing board at home, going for something a little more in the traditional meatless variety of colcannon. I won't claim that this is a low-fat dish. In fact, if I were to make it again next year, I'd probably go whole hog and use more cream and (maybe) less butter.

Colcannon with Kale
serves 4 to 6
serve as a main dish with other brightly colored vegetables, as a side to a soup or Irish stew, as a colorful topping to a shepherd's pie

2 pounds red potatoes
2 medium-sized onions
1 pound bunch of kale
8 Tbsp butter
1/2 cup milk (dairy milk or unsweetened soy/almond/rice milk)
dash of mace
white pepper and salt to taste

Scrub potatoes well and cut into large chunks. Peeling is optional. Place in large pot, cover with water, and boil until tender (approximately 20 to 30 minutes). Wash the kale and strip the leaves off the tough stems. Cut the kale into ribbons or other small shapes. Saute the onions in 4 Tbsp of butter until tender, then add the kale and saute for 5 to 10 minutes until tender. When the potatoes are ready, drain them and let them dry a little in the colander or in the pot. Warm the milk, then mash together the potatoes with the milk, 4 Tbsp butter, mace, pepper and salt. Stir in the kale/onion mixture and serve hot.

The leftovers of this dish taste great browned in a pan as hash the next day.

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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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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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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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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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Rosettes, attempt #2

Ah, rosettes, one of my favorite Christmas treats from childhood. For those who are unfamiliar with them, they are a Swedish fried-dough cookie with sugar on top, formed by putting a hot iron with the rosette pattern into the bowl of batter, then dipping the iron, now partially covered in a thin layer of batter, into hot oil and frying. The last time I made Swedish rosettes with my grandma's recipe, the result was this (as I described in writing to some friends):

"Yesterday I made my first stab at making one of my grandma's traditional holiday treats: Swedish rosettes.
Hoping that the first batch ever would be great, against all indications from experienced rosette makers including my mom's mother, a friend in Madison and my dad's mother that the first batch would be disappointing, I dove with gusto into the frying process.
At six o’clock, I was sad and gave up before I even came close to running out of batter. Entering the third dozen of them, I only had one that looked and tasted and crisped right. Andrew and I shared it. The rest, which after half an hour were floppy and tasted like cold grease, I trashed so they would stop sitting there and reminding me of failure.
Someday I will try making this treat again, but I need a little time to get over being sad about the wasted batch."

For the second attempt this weekend, I tried to control more of the elements that can be finicky. Those include: weather conditions, oil type, oil temperature, oil depth, batter consistency, iron temperature, fry time, cooling apparatus, getting the rosette off the iron without breaking. Really, as Grandma would say, every part about it is finicky.

Weather
Grandma recommends making rosettes on a clear, dry, sunny winter day. These don't come around all too often in central Illinois, and I've decided that the attempt #1, which was closer to Christmas, must have been on the wrong day because it was too warm. There was a little snow melting, which I think must have added moisture into the air. The temperature on Saturday was below freezing, it was sunny, and the humidity level according to the local weather website I checked said humidity was 50 percent.

Oil
I had already fried before with canola oil and I didn't think that the oil was the problem, so I used canola again. Last time, I fried in my 9-inch cast-iron skillet. The oil didn't seem all too deep, but I forged ahead anyway. This time, I trotted out the cast-iron Dutch oven and filled it halfway. This ends up being about a quart of oil, which is 2 or 3 inches deep in my pot. Wanted to have more oil so that the temperature would be easier to maintain. The recommended frying temperature in Grandma's recipe was 375 degrees Fahrenheit. This time, I checked that temperature with the instant-read thermometer before the first rosette and after every other one thereafter. At the very least, the temperature was easier to read reliably with the deeper oil, because I could dip the entire end of the thermometer into the oil without coming close to touching the bottom of the pan.

Batter
As the recipe is not my own, I won't be providing it here on this site. There are usually recipes included with the rosette irons when you buy them. For added friendliness to my tummy, I substituted two egg whites for each egg and used soy milk instead of dairy milk. I also measured the flour differently, measuring with the cup before sifting instead of the other way around. I think I ended up with a little more flour in the batter, because it looked slightly thicker than the batter from attempt #1. That seemed to be a good thing in the end.

I'll go back to the original recipe when making them again, I think, as I always want to eat so many that the grease itself starts making my tummy unhappy. Maybe I'll rein it in a little when I know they are chock-full of dairy and egg.

Irons
Thanks to my employer making a special order for me and giving me some extra rosette irons that were laying around in ancient inventory, I have a nice little set of irons now. There are two different cup shapes, one five-pointed star and one eight-pointed star. They really are made of iron so they can hold heat and not warp. In both rosette attempts, I seasoned the irons properly before frying and between each rosette, I let the iron sit in the oil to heat up before putting it in the batter.

Dipping the iron in batter

Fry time
In attempt #1, I counted to 30 after plunging the battered iron into the oil. In attempt #2, I tried to get a closer approximation of 30 to 35 seconds, as I think I had been counting too fast before. I also took a more critical look at the browning before pulling the rosette from the oil. If I'd already counted to 35 and the thing wasn't golden brown yet, I kept it in the oil a little longer. In all, the rosettes in attempt #2 each had a longer frying time than most of those in attempt #1.

Frying the rosette

Cooling apparatus
As in attempt #1, I made do with the cooling rack possibilities available to me, as I don't own a proper cookie cooling rack. I pulled a rack out of the oven and laid it on the counter, covered with paper towels to soak up stray oil. This worked out fine.

Rosette cups waiting to be eaten, cooling upside down so the bottoms won't sit on the oily paper

Removing rosette from the iron
My preferred method after attempt #2: run a very small knife around the pattern to loosen the edges from the iron, push off gently with a fork. Attempt #1 was no problem getting the rosettes to come off: some came off right in the oil, some just flopped off the iron as soon as they came out of the oil, some needed a little push from the fork.

The end result
Success!! Attempt #2 yielded crispy rosettes, and dipped in granulated sugar they were sweet and delightful. I have to admit there were still a few soggy ones, which I ate before letting Andrew pick which ones he wanted to eat.

I didn't notice any difference in taste between the original recipe and the one with Heather-friendly substitutes. I recall when Grandma made them Heather-friendly once she commented that they were a bit tougher than with the original recipe. I didn't notice this until eating the ones that were still left on Sunday. But hey, a little tougher than the original was better than "floppy and tasting of cold grease."

The learning curve for me on these cookies is about as steep as for pie crust. With limited success under my belt, I'm motivated to try again.

As long as I had a pot full of oil, I fried up some homemade "chips" for dinner. I like crispy homemade potato chips, but Andrew prefers something thicker like potato wedges, so I compromised and cut my potato chips thick. They ended up being extra-crispy on the outside and soft in the center, and we were both very happy. I first boiled them all in low-temperature oil at 250 degrees Fahrenheit until they were tender. For the second fry, I turned up the oil temperature to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and waited till they were light brown. This is a picture of "almost done."

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