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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Two more ways to use a mountain of chili powder

I taught a fermented foods workshop here at our house in July and, in the course of researching recipes and techniques, decided I had to finally try to make kimchi/kimchee (choose your favorite English spelling, it's 김치 in Korean).

The three different batches of white radish kimchi I made before I got one that was edible (sorry about that still-super-salty batch you were subjected to, Mom and Dad) is another story. This story is about the chili powder that goes into kimchi.

There's an Asian grocery here in town that I like to frequent called Shanghai Market. The proprietor always knows which item to recommend. You see a shelf with five different types of soy sauce in several brands from three different countries and don't know which you want? This guy can tell you what the Japanese cooks are using, what the Chinese restaurants prefer and what sweet soy sauce is good for, plus let you know the run-down from least to most expensive. He helps me translate the labels on  pickled vegetables so I know what's in the package and hasn't yet said "I don't have that" to my occasional requests for unusual ingredients.

He can also sell you the right Korean chili powder to make kimchi. The only question you have to be able to answer is, "Would you like five pounds or three pounds?"

Once I took a minute to get over my disbelief that any ground spice would be sold in such massive quantities, I decided on three pounds and immediately started thinking about how to give away at least two pounds. This is the gallon jar I stored it in when I got home. It’s sitting on the table next to a 12-oz glass. 

Of course, I had to start giving it away to everyone I could think of who might be even just a little bit interested in trying some. And for every person who said yes, there was at least 1/3 to ½ cup. And I still have enough to make several batches of kimchi at home. Heck, I’ve made three batches already and still have more than a cup of chili powder left. I figure the original three-pound quantity must be enough to make batches of kimchi for a family of eight to eat every day for an entire year. And have enough powder to make each batch really spicy.

So, clearly this chili powder needs to turn up in some other dishes, too. The first was a savory rice porridge, since I was inspired to try more savory breakfasts after reading Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice Chinese home-cooking book this summer. 

Breakfast Porridge “Better Luck Next Time”
Serves two, or one VERY hungry person who doesn’t mind the taste

1 Tbsp butter or vegetable oil
1 tsp Korean chili powder
2 cups water
1 cup leftover cooked rice
1 Tbsp miso paste with dashi included
10 sorrel leaves
2 eggs
toasted sesame oil to taste

Melt butter or vegetable oil in a large pan. Cook Korean chili powder in the oil. Pour in water and rice. As water nears boiling point, stir in miso paste. Drop in sorrel leaves and crack eggs on top. Let eggs poach without stirring them as the rice and sorrel cook. When finished, drizzle with toasted sesame oil.

Sadly, I would not recommend making this one again the same way. I liked the look of the reddish stew with cooked rice and the poached egg on top, but sorrel was the wrong choice of vegetable for the dish. Too sour. I was going for a salty-fishy flavor with the miso that has dashi in it, but this was an odd combination with lemony sorrel. Sorrel is also not good with toasted sesame oil, so clearly a different green is important for the next try.

The next soup was a light dinner inspired by a pork and tofu soup recipe in my Korean cookbook. It uses some of the same ideas from the breakfast recipe, but meshes them with this much better soup recipe’s ingredients and some Malabar spinach from our weekly vegetable box. This attempt turned out to be good enough that Andrew and I each wanted seconds and he asked me to make it again whenever we get the same greens in the CSA box. 

Malabar spinach is not actually spinach, but a different equatorial plant that has a spinach-like flavor. Its texture is a bit slippery like okra when cooked in soup. 

Here are some of the soup ingredients lined up on the cutting board, waiting their turn to go into the soup pot:

Asian-style Rice and Vegetable Soup with Malabar Spinach 
Serves 2 to 4

2 Tbsp canola oil with 1 tsp dark sesame oil
½ cup small-diced onion
2 garlic cloves, smashed
2 cups Malabar spinach leaves, measured and then chopped
4 oz shiitake mushrooms, thickly sliced
1 cup leftover cooked rice
1 tsp Korean chili powder
8 oz firm tofu, cubed or cut in strips
2 Tbsp miso with dashi included
3 cups water
soy sauce 

Heat oil, cook onion until tender, add garlic and cook a minute or so. Stir in chili powder. Add mushrooms and cook until tender. Add rice, separate the grains with your spoon, pour in water and add tofu. Bring to a boil. Stir in miso paste and Malabar spinach and cook until spinach wilts. Serve with soy sauce on the side so each diner can season to taste.

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My new "pet"

As I quipped this week to a co-worker, my ideal pet is a single-celled organism. My kitchen is a great place to keep them. I have managed to keep a sourdough starter alive and still sweet for about a year, and it is still yeasty enough to raise bread. The latest addition to the menagerie is a kefir (kəˈfɪər/ kə-FEER) culture, which I purchased dry at a local natural foods store and rehydrated at home. Kefir is a bacterial culture that ferments milk. It has been used for centuries to make milk safe to store for longer periods than fresh milk can keep. Other advantages are that the process adds to the vitamin and probiotics content of milk and reduces the amount of lactose, since the kefir bacteria feed on the lactose sugar.

After only two changes of milk, my kefir "grains" started producing kefir, and, if I wasn't careful to monitor more than once a day, curds that I then had to turn into cheese. Here is a kefir grain (the little protein mass at the top left that has the culture in/on it that starts fermenting the milk), floating on a new batch of kefir:

Care and feeding of kefir is much easier than looking after, say, a dog, but it has added several minutes of prep work to my day. I'm regularly changing jars from active kefir fermentation on the kitchen counter to storage jars in the refrigerator, moving extra kefir grains to the storage vessel in the refrigerator, sterilizing containers and utensils at each step. It's not a lot of work, but it is something that requires a little bit of attention each day unless I take a few days off and put all the kefir and grains in cold storage.

The flavor and texture of kefir is similar to a very thin yogurt. Uses I've put it to so far:
1. pouring on morning cereal instead of milk
2. in a salad dressing
3. making a spreadable cheese
4. putting the cheese into cooked dishes
5. mixed with juice as a breakfast drink

Here is a jar of kitchen-counter actively-fermenting kefir:

I keep eating the kefir cheese before I get a picture of it. Just imagine spreadable goat cheese like chevre, and that's pretty much what I'm getting when I strain a batch of over-curdled kefir in a cheesecloth for a day. It tastes great with the addition of a little salt and some dried or fresh herbs. If I heat little chunks of the cheese, it changes texture to something like a fresh cheese curd.

In a couple of weeks, I'm hosting a workshop at my place about fermented and cultured foods, through the Meetup group Radical Homemakers of Bloomington-Normal. I'll give away starter kefir grains to those who attend. I also have sourdough starter available, and a friend said she'd bring kombucha culture for fermenting tea.

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This post brought to you by foods that start with the letter G

Food is arriving weekly through Henry's Farm CSA again ("what's a CSA?" check this link), and at the beginning and end of the season, the major vegetable group is GREENS. We eat a lot of salad and stir-fries and search around for other options to keep up our interest in greens. When gnocchi (small Italian potato dumplings) went on sale recently, I bought a couple packages and figured they'd eventually come in handy, so bring on the unfamiliar greens!

Lamb's quarters showed up at the CSA pickup, and I traded some onions to get some more of this stuff in the hopes that we'd like it enough to eat it for two meals.
"Use as you would spinach" was the take-home message about this edible weed on the Brockman Family Farming blog. So Andrew and I did so with this earthy-tasting dish that was a team effort. We discovered that like most of the cooking greens, these are great cooked with garlic. Garlic shows up twice in our recipe: once as minced cloves, once in the pesto.
If you have leftovers, I recommend adding a bit of liquid when reheating to soften up the gnocchi.

Earthy Greens and Gnocchi
serves 4

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic, minced
12 oz white button or cremini mushrooms, sliced 
One 17-oz package potato gnocchi
grated parmesan cheese, optional
1 bunch (about 8 oz. by weight) lamb's quarters, spinach, or Swiss chard
1 Tbsp basil pesto
1 Tbsp dried Italian seasoning
salt and pepper to taste

Clean all dirt and grit from greens, remove stems and chop greens down to bite-size if needed. Heat water to cook gnocchi according to package directions. Cook other ingredients while waiting for water to heat. Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet. Saute onion until tender, then add garlic and mushrooms and continue cooking. Stir in lamb's quarters, then Italian seasoning. Keep warm on low heat while waiting for gnocchi to cook. When greens are wilted, turn off heat and stir in pesto. Drain gnocchi and add to mixture in skillet. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with grated parmesan if desired.

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Curried ravioli: Asian ingredients in a European-style dish

This one's an attempt from work, so no pictures, alas. The bright yellow sauce was very attractive, as was the orange-with-green-bits stuffing for the ravioli. Just try to imagine, eh?

At my last workplace, I learned a trick for making ravioli with wonton wrappers. The process moves along quickly enough that with a bit of practice, I was able to make several dozen in half an hour there. I'm a little rusty now, so the work was a bit slower.

I love how this works, so I wanted to share with you here. Start with your favorite filling, a very small portion scoop (the kind that have a spring handle that you squeeze and then a wire draws across the scoop to empty it out), a stack of wonton wrappers, a bowl of water or thinned-out beaten egg and either your fingers or a pastry brush. Lay out 12 wrappers on a countertop or cutting board, arranged in a pair of lines. Brush half of them (just one line) with water/egg. Plop a scoopful of filling on each of the wet wrappers. Now brush the wrappers in the other line. Flip the wrappers onto the ones with the fillings, match up the edges and corners and be sure to "burp" any air caught around the filling. Seal the edges with a fork or special ravioli tool. Repeat the process until either the filling or the wontons run out. These can now be frozen for later use, or dunked for a few minutes into boiling water until they are cooked through.

Wonton wrappers come in various sizes, so change your scoop size to deliver the amount of filling you can reasonably fit onto your little wonton squares and still seal them properly without having filling leak out the corners/edges. 

The filling for my most recent batch was mostly cooked sweet potato with Indian spices (I hope I'm remembering correctly that I used garam masala, ginger and garlic and possibly some extra ground coriander), some leftover filling from an earlier stuffed vegetable Indian dish, and green peas. I had a frozen batch of maybe about 30 ravioli or so to prepare and I knew I'd want them swimming in sauce because they wouldn't be served until the next day. To start the sauce, I pureed four or five cloves of garlic with a couple of tablespoons of chunks of fresh ginger, cooked the paste in a couple tablespoons of canola oil for just a few minutes, then added the spices that would flavor and color the sauce: ground coriander and cumin, plus Spice House Hot Curry Powder blend. After the spices had a chance to bloom in the oil, I stirred in three 15-oz cans of coconut milk and waited until the sauce came to a boil and thickened slightly. After a bit of seasoning with salt, the sauce was ready for pouring over ravioli.

This dish is a mixed success. The flavor and color were amazing, especially with a little sprinkling of chopped cilantro leaves for a garnish to contrast with the bright yellow sauce. The downside is that after an overnight of hanging around in the sauce, the ravioli got so soft that many broke apart when being spooned out of the dish for serving the next day. Although they were swimming in sauce when entering the cooler, they stuck together anyway. Also, the coconut milk sauce dried a bit and had cracks in it after cooling down. Clearly, this dish is best served immediately, with hot sauce poured over freshly-cooked ravioli. I'd also prefer, if making this at home, to let the frozen ravioli thaw before cooking them, or to cook the ravioli without freezing them at all. The filling was still a little cold after I cooked the ravioli straight from the freezer.

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Multicolor currant-berry jam

It's backyard berry season again at the home of our friends Susan and Larry, and they kindly let me and Andrew pick to our heart's content in the currant and black raspberry bushes. Currant bushes, having no thorns, are much kinder on the hands than raspberry bushes. The fruit hangs in these adorable little vertical clumps, with the berries on the end of the clump sometimes ripening and getting larger before the others. It's much easier to gauge ripeness of red currants than white currants. White currants seem to be the same color whether they are ripe or not.

Susan informed me that currants have an impressively high natural amount of pectin, so they make very firm jam and can be a great addition to a jam of other fruits that would otherwise need long cooking with lots of sugar and lemon juice or pectin-rich store-bought canning additives to make a good jam. I'm not too familiar with currants, having never cooked with them before, so I wanted a jam that mostly tasted like currants so I'd know if I liked them. With the day's harvest of currants and blackberries,

it was just the right volume of fruit to fill a few jam jars. I didn't even have to measure the sugar closely, I just added enough to make the mixture a little sweeter.

Susan was so right about currants being rich in pectin. This jam was the most solidly gelled jam I've ever made. It's stiff enough to offer some serious resistance to my spoon and keep its shape as I scoop it out of the jar onto my toast. With a little additional work, this jam would make a fantastic dried preserve like those dried marmalades put up in boxes in Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, a collection of late 16th-century and early 17th-century English recipes.

I deemed the experiment a success. Currants have a sweet-tart fruit flavor I love, the seeds are small enough and soft enough not to bother me when I left them in the jam, and the color of the jam is bright red and very appealing. If I have the privilege of picking currants again, I'll try mixing the berries with other fruits for new jam combinations.

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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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Μυζήθρα: It's all Greek cheese to me

We've been experimenting this week with a new cheese that I'd only heard of and never tasted, Greek mizithra. I purchased a large chunk of the salty, aged version of this goat cheese on a whim and have found that, overall, I like it better than Andrew does. But, then, I've always been a lover of salty things.

To describe it for those who don't know if they might be interested in trying out this cheese, it's chalk white, a little spongy-looking in appearance, very dry, lower in fat than many other cheeses, with a taste that is similar to feta because it is tangy, but aged mizithra seems much saltier. It does not melt when heated. It is brittle and crumbly instead of sliceable.

Successful applications:
substituting shaved or crumbled mizithra for parmesan on pasta
crumbled on salad, especially good paired with roasted/sauteed red peppers

Questionable uses:
complement to a breakfast with sweet items -- contrast is too great
garnish to crackers spread with ajvar -- overpowers the spread
eating a chunk straight off the cheese -- taste buds overwhelmed by saltiness

Looking forward to trying:
mixing in with a potato dish
garnish for veggie burgers that include some spinach

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Pumpkin Impossible Pie: "impossible" because it's inedible

For a few years, I've had a found-on-the-Internet recipe called Pumpkin Impossible Pie in my recipe box, waiting for the right time to try it out. I was always a bit curious about Impossible Pie since reading the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box as a kid.
Bisquick Impossible Quiche
Bisquick Impossible Cheeseburger Pie
I may even have eaten one of these before, come to think of it, but I forgot what it was like. My husband met my announcement of the plan for dinner with enthusiasm, declaring he had always liked Impossible Pie when it was served during his childhood.

Being all excited about a crazy new idea for dinner, I didn't follow the recipe exactly and decided to dress it up a bit. When I found the recipe, I was attracted to the idea of a totally vegan, low-fat pie without the hassle of making pie crust on a weeknight. The basics remain the same, but instead of using sugar and pumpkin pie spices, I went for a rosemary-flavored savory pie with caramelized onions and just baked the pie in the skillet I cooked the onions in.

After 60 minutes of baking, the pie had a crust on the outside, was not done at all in the center, and appeared to be underdone on the bottom as well. I used a plate to flip it over so the bottom would be on top and, hopefully, bake more fully.

After 80 minutes of baking and an attempt to remove a piece for eating, here's what it looked like:

The end result? Pie that is about to burn on the outside, but is still undercooked on the inside. Disastrously undercooked. It tasted salty like baking powder and starchy like uncooked flour. The texture was gummy. Additionally, the rosemary was so strong it was astringent and medicinal, and the brown and savory onions had nothing positive to add. To sum up, below is a recipe NOT to follow.

Impossible-to-eat Pumpkin Pie, or How to Ruin the Happy Nostalgia Your Spouse Had for Impossible Pie

2 Tbsp vegan margarine
2 medium-sized onions
pinch salt
1 1/2 c soy milk
1 Tbsp Ener-G egg replacer
1/4 cup water
1 Tbsp cornstarch
2 c pumpkin puree (perhaps my thawed frozen pumpkin puree was part of the problem? it still had a little moisture, which the original recipe recommends against)
1/2 c rice flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp crushed dried rosemary

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Melt margarine in 10-inch oven-proof skillet. Slice onions thinly and cook slowly until lightly caramelized and tender. Whisk or blend soy milk with Ener-G, water, cornstarch, then whisk/blend in the rest of the ingredients. Pour pumpkin mix into the skillet with the onions and bake 50 to 80 minutes until top and edges are browned and the center begins to set. Allow to cool, then discard and eat something else for dinner.

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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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Spanish Tortilla

This one's not a flat, floppy bread. Tortilla in Spain is a thick, eggy dish fried in a skillet, filled with potatoes and possibly other vegetables and meat. It is reminiscent of an omelette in that it's eggs filled with whatever you think would taste good, but it isn't an egg wrapped around the filling. It is reminiscent of quiche in that it's solid and served in wedges, but it does not have a crust and isn't baked. Tortilla has commonalities with other dishes, but it isn't really exactly like anything else.

To treat my friend Laura yesterday for lunch, I improvised a tortilla, made in the spirit of one that I've made before at work. Not having a photo of the whole thing, I'll describe it in words. My tortilla was a thick, seasoned "cake" of eggs holding together a lot of potatoes and parsley, browned on all sides by the frying pan. Here's how the recipe works:

Spanish Tortilla
serves 6 as main dish, 8 to 12 as tapas dish

7 large eggs
4 medium-sized potatoes, diced
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 tsp smoked paprika (Spanish pimentón)
seasoned salt to taste (the kind with garlic and spices mixed w/the salt)
fresh-ground pepper to taste
4 Tbsp olive oil

Heat olive oil in a nonstick 10-inch skillet with sloping sides. Fill the bottom of the pan with diced potatoes and fry until golden brown on most sides. While potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk until yolks are fully incorporated. When potatoes are browned, sprinkle with paprika and stir until oil is red. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with parsley, then pour over the eggs. Cook over medium heat. When eggs start to set, use a heatproof spatula to pull up edges and lean the pan so egg mixture that is still liquid gets to the edge of the pan. When eggs are fully set and starting to get a bit of a crispy skin on the bottom, put a large plate over the skillet. Flip the pan upside down, depositing the tortilla on the plate. Slide it back into the pan to cook the other side. When the second side also gets a crispy skin, cut the tortilla into 6 wedges and serve hot.

Serve in smaller wedges if you are making the tortilla as a tapa (appetizer to go with drinks). I served the tortilla with a salad for a light lunch. More fillings to go with the potatoes might include chickpeas, Spanish chorizo sausage, greens, cooked mushrooms, cooked garden vegetables, anything that tastes good with eggs and isn't going to give off a bunch of liquid to make the tortilla lose its texture.

I'm told that the tortilla tastes good cold as leftovers, but I'm more excited about eating it hot.

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Iron Chef: Battle Cornucopia

As mentioned in a previous post, my co-worker Ware's discussion with me and our co-workers Kelly and Seth about combining his favorite flavors of fall: pumpkin, pork, apple and chai spices (cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, clove and black pepper) in a "paleo-diet" fashion without grains or lots of sweets quickly turned from idle musing into a plan for a contest.

With a poster I created (including hand-drawn pictures of pumpkin, pig, apple and cup of chai), the challenge was issued to all cooks at our cafe (not just those of us who are paid to cook there) to put forth our best efforts on Oct. 24 in what was being billed as Iron Chef: Battle Cornucopia.

Many co-workers had great ideas, but for various reasons (forgot, broke foot, best effort failed the taste test, no time to prepare) failed to produce the goods on Monday. Two of us (Seth and I) competed against Ware for having our dishes declared the best of fall. We decided, after finding out the week before that Kelly couldn't come to work or participate in the contest because she had broken her foot, to make the contest a benefit for Kelly. Food left after the tasting was immediately taken to Kelly at home for her dinner.

The dishes, when we finished preparing and plating, became a three-course tasting:
1. Seth's pumpkin soup with bacon, onions fried in bacon grease, rosemary and thyme, chicken broth, and sliced Granny Smith apple garnish sprinkled with ground cinnamon and cardamom.
2. Ware's pork chop, which was a) stuffed with onions and apples cooked with fennel and cardamom, b) topped with gingered beet cubes and cinnamony pumpkin cubes and c) drizzled with a frothy sauce of sour cream mixed with chai-infused apple cider vinegar.
3. my creamy pumpkin custard flavored with fresh ginger and ground chai spices with bits of prosciutto, served atop organic Cortland apple slices that had been dipped in acidulated water with apple cider vinegar.

Photos of samples of our three dishes will be posted at Ware's blog, www.primitiverenaissance.wordpress.com
Tasting them all together was exciting, especially because the same four ingredients were used in such divergent ways by the three cooks.
My favorite elements: 1) Seth's soup was a bit rustic with the coarsely chopped onion and bacon and it tasted like meat all over because of the infusion of everything with bacon flavor; 2) Ware's tangy foam really set off the root-vegetable topping and his plating presentation was the most beautiful of all three; 3) I was shocked at how good salty prosciutto tastes in a mildly sweet custard. The original plan was to use the prosciutto as tart cups, but it shrank too much in the blind baking, so I decided to finely chop it and put it in the bottom of each custard cup. Turned out it was a great idea to spread the saltiness out with the sweet instead of having it be the first layer to hit the tongue.

Tasters included our boss, her husband, and about five other co-workers who were available at the time. Scoring was done by awarding points to each dish according to how each taster ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Each 1st place vote was 3 points, each 2nd place was 2 points and each 3rd place vote was 1 point. Splitting up most of the votes for 1st and 2nd places evenly between us, Seth and I tied for the title of Iron Chef.

Here's the recipe for the custard:

Pumpkin-Chai Custard with Prosciutto Surprise
about 8 servings

6 very thin slices prosciutto
1 cup canned pumpkin
8 oz carton heavy cream
2 eggs and 1 egg yolk
2 Tbsp sugar, optional
1/4 tsp fresh grated ginger
2 black peppercorns
1 clove
2 green cardamom pods
1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Bake the prosciutto on a rimmed baking sheet at 335 degrees Fahrenheit until crisped, but not very brown. Keep the oven at this temperature for the custard. Use the grease left by the prosciutto to grease a muffin tin or small ramekins. Chop the prosciutto finely and sprinkle about a teaspoonful into the bottom of each muffin cup or ramekin.
With mortar and pestle, finely grind the peppercorns, clove and the black seeds from the cardamom pods. In a saucepan, whisk together the pumpkin, cream, sugar, ginger and all the ground spices. Cook over low heat until warmed, but not boiling. While the cream heats, whisk together the eggs and egg yolk in a bowl. Pour some of the heated cream into the egg mixture while stirring with the whisk, then whisk the contents of the bowl into the saucepan.
Pour the custard over the prosciutto in the muffin cups/ramekins and bake until set (when a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean), approximately 20 minutes.
Can be slipped out of the muffin cups and plated with the help of a flexible spatula when cooled, or just served in the ramekins.

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Yup, I'm definitely not from around here

(repost from my other blog, http://hbevert.livejournal.com/)

This week's example: until this week, I didn't know what a Texas sheetcake is. I also don't know how it's different from a sheetcake when I'm talking to a customer at work who wants to make a special order of salads and cake for a party. My locally-raised co-worker insists that all sheetcakes are Texas sheetcakes, but I know that the sheetcakes on our price list are the kind I'm used to and not what the customer is describing. I tell the customer that I'll ask the baker to call her back the next day.

When I ask the baker, "so what's a Texas sheetcake anyway?" the next day, other co-workers filtering in and out of the kitchen during the conversation all indicate that for them, the Texas sheetcake is a family-gathering staple. I get this feeling everyone in Illinois and Indiana knows what this thing is except me, and they can't wait for the next time they'll eat it after this conversation. Clearly this is yet another Southern dish that didn't make it across the Cheddar Curtain (the border between Illinois and Wisconsin).

Here's a description for any of you readers who have never heard of Texas sheetcake either:
1. Texas sheetcake is very flat because it is made with a pretty runny cake batter.
2. This cake is usually a chocolate cake made with cocoa.
3. The frosting is a cooked frosting a la Red Velvet cake, but once again it is chocolate. (Yeah, I had no idea what Red Velvet cake tasted like or how to make it before I got here either, but I'd at least read about it.)
4. There are actually baking pans sold as "Texas sheetcake" pans. They are basically just a larger-surface-area jelly roll pan, perhaps slightly deeper.
5. Very important for a proper Texas sheetcake: spread on the frosting when the cake is straight out of the oven. It will melt all over and make the cake fudgey.

Illinois is a place where the northern smelt fry meets the southern cheesy grits, where the local tastes may vary in the same town on whether hockey puck-style or fluffy biscuits are the vehicle for the sausage gravy, where you have to ask whether the tea is "sweet" or "unsweet" because it could be either. Where we are just far enough south to grow peaches but just a little too far north to see many black-eyed peas. It's a place of regional food fence-sitting, where the sheetcake is from Texas, and the fried cheese curd is from Wisconsin.

I don't have to always feel like an out-of-sorts northern transplant who likes weird "foreign" foods. My Canadian-American co-worker and I can wax poetic about the joys of the Nanaimo bar or poutine. One of the owners grew up in Minnesota, so she knows what I mean when I talk about hotdish, krumkake and lefse. She brought me back some smoked trout from her trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior this summer. It's divine on an English muffin for breakfast. Reminds me of Fischbrötchen Andrew and I ate on the Baltic Sea shore on our honeymoon.

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What else can we do with mustard greens?

I brought some mustard greens home from the supermarket last week in the hopes of making something with them myself instead of only relying on the packaged pickled mustard greens I like to get at the Asian grocery and serve on white rice.

The ideas tried so far:
1. sauteed mustard greens with turkey kielbasa slices and onions, served over leftover colcannon
2. more mustard greens and the kielbasa/greens leftovers in a curried potato soup
3. raw mustard greens on sandwich of corned beef on rye
4. bell pepper, zucchini and shredded mustard greens stir fry with sweet soy sauce and fresh ginger

All these applications of mustard greens were delicious, and my husband was downright shocked at the difference in spiciness between the very mild and limp cooked greens and the raw greens on his sandwich, which were as peppery as nasturtiums.

In five minutes of poking around on the Internet, I've found recipes that treat the mustard green much like greens of other sorts:
1. just like collard greens with pot liquor
2. just like sauteed kale with garlic and chile flakes
3. just like bok choy, stir-fried and braised and served with soy sauce and sesame oil
4. as part of a mixed salad, especially baby greens

With their frilly edges and bright, spring-green color, the mustard greens available here are just begging me to use them more often with less cooking time. Perhaps blanched and simply dressed as a wilted salad, or tossed into a pot of beans at the last minute so they don't lose their peppery bite.

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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 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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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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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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