Recipes to try again later

I promised to share recipes that were successes and failures when I set up this blog. Spectacular failures often come with a good story, which is probably why I've been hanging onto this group of recipes without posting them. They were not highly impressive dishes (or haven't been tested yet) and they don't come with good stories. Despite that, I'm posting them here today because the blog entry is easier to find (and read) later than a little slip of paper with pencil marks on it. Hopefully in the future there will be revisions with photos and more exciting tales. Perhaps someone out there will try them out with the suggested "note to self" revisions and let me know how it goes.

Choco-cherry Smoothie

1 cup cherries from cherry bounce
1 1/2 cup seltzer water
2 cups homemade kefir
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tbsp cocoa powder

Blend until smooth. 
NOTE TO SELF: try with 1/2 cup seltzer next time, possibly less kefir. Great chocolate and cherry flavor, but beverage ended up too thin to be a good smoothie. The tanginess was nice, but perhaps less kefir and/or a teaspoon more sugar would bring taste into better balance. Booziness of the alcohol-preserved cherries sneaks up on you, so warn people if you serve this to others. 

Lemon-Chicken Pasta

3/4 pound thin spaghetti, cooked in boiling salted water
2 cups shredded leftover roasted chicken with lemon-pepper-garlic seasoning
75 g bunch parsley, chopped
juice and zest of 2 Meyer lemons
5 Tbsp olive oil
grated Parmesan cheese to taste

Whisk together the lemon juice, zest and olive oil. Toss with chicken and pasta and parsley. Sprinkle each serving with grated Parmesan. 

NOTE TO SELF: I'm sure that this dish could be done with plain salt-and-pepper roasted chicken with just the addition of a minced clove of garlic and some pepper to the sauce. Next time, consider using at least 1 Tbsp less oil. This version was a little too oily. 

The Large-Crowd Meatball Experiment

5 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 large onion, minced
2 Tbsp minced garlic
4 oz fresh bread, processed into fine crumbs
3/4 cup vegetable stock or milk
3 eggs, beaten
2 oz (by weight) sour cream
1 1/2 Tbsp kosher salt
2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
2 Tbsp dried Greek oregano
2 Tbsp dried basil

Place ground beef in large mixing bowl. Saute minced onion and minced garlic in olive oil. Moisten breadcrumbs with vegetable stock/milk in a small bowl. Add sauteed onion/garlic and moist breadcrumbs to meat along with all other ingredients and mix thoroughly. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake.
NOTE TO SELF: These would taste great with ground lamb or beef-lamb mix. Salt was not quite overpowering, but could easily be cut to 1 Tbsp plus 1/2 tsp. Dried basil and oregano amounts (especially oregano) should probably be cut in half. Devote another blog entry to this experiment and its theoretical variations with Korean, sweet-sour, American meatloaf and Middle Eastern flavor profiles. 

Bloody Mary Meatballs

3 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup minced onion
1/4 cup Bloody Mary Mix
1 Tbsp prepared horseradish

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil and mix thoroughly with meat and other ingredients. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake. Serve in a Bloody Mary sauce I haven't written a recipe for yet or make Bloody Marys and eat meatballs as snack with cocktail.
NOTE TO SELF: Mixed parts of three different recipes together to create this one, can't try it out until there is a sharing occasion to make this with a Bloody-Mary-inspired tomato sauce to serve them in.

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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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Today's summery salad

I typically assemble salads according to my whims and what's in the refrigerator/cupboard. The only real planning involved is how to obtain the salad greens: backyard, CSA, friends or shopping?

The basic principles: Using whatever is around, find some textural variety, a mix of sweet and sour and savory, and make a homemade vinaigrette or a creamy dressing based on kefir, yogurt or mayonnaise.

Apples, berries, pears and dried fruits are frequent attenders in the sweet category, as is honey in the vinaigrette dresing. Textural variety is provided by mixed greens, edible flowers, nuts, fruits (fresh or dried), crunchy or fibrous vegetables like cucumber or raw zucchini or bell pepper or carrot, and, occasionally, cheese.

In keeping with the basics of "whatever ya got" and switching up the flavors and textures, today's salad was a greens mix of half lettuce, half sorrel. It was topped with fresh blueberries, pecan pieces and cucumber batons, with a honey-sweetened balsamic vinegar-Dijon vinaigrette spiked with a little lime juice.

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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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Cherries!

The sour cherry tree in our backyard is back in its best form this year, yielding an impressive amount of cherries. There are enough for the squirrels to get some dessert-on-the-branch plus we have as many as we can stand to pit for cooking now or freezing for later.

Here's the crop from the first two days of excellent picking, filling four 32-oz yogurt containers:

Sorry, no pictures of us at the table with a pile of cherries on the table and two cherry pitters. Too much juice squirting all over, didn't want to get any on the camera. Thanks to Andrew's mom, Diane, for warning us that cherry juice will even get on the wall during the pitting process. We're glad we put up that old bedsheet to catch any stray cherry spray.

Some close-up views of the fruit on the tree:

So much more exciting than last year, when there was only one cherry we found that ripened well enough to eat. We've been out to pick about every two days for a week and the bounty hasn't stopped yet. These cherries are very tart to eat plain, but their flavor when cooked and lightly sweetened is dramatically more complex and delicious.

The ongoing list of things we've made with our cherries so far:
cherry puree (kind of like applesauce, but with cherries)
cherry sauce (cherries cooked in light syrup)

honey-sweetened cherry sauce
cherry bread pudding, recipe from Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks by Butler, Hieatt, Hosington
frozen cherries
cherry bounce (cherries preserved in sugar and whiskey)

 cherry jam

It's been a busy two weeks of cherry harvest.

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Roasting, baking and blanching on the fire

This weekend at my local SCA shire's event, we had a potluck lunch. I decided to challenge myself a bit by trying recipes and techniques that could have been used in Italy during the 16th Century. Only one recipe was an original from an Italian cookbook, the other two were more based on known ingredients and techniques from the time period.

I wish I had made some arrangements for photography, because I probably looked delightfully goofy standing over this large open-fire grill outside the event all morning, standing in the smoke, wearing my apron over my coat and with a very-not-appropriate-to-period Polartec fleece hat for warmth. The day was quite windy, so starting the fire was difficult and keeping it at a constant temperature was impossible.

The plan: get to the event site to unload the woodpile and start the fire at about 8 a.m., have three items prepared for lunch by 11 or 11:30. Planned items: spit-roasted leg of lamb, blanched asparagus with dressing and herbs, bread baked in a pot in the coals. And if anyone showed up to watch me cook, I intended to ask that person to roll marzipan stuffing to put inside dates for something to do while we chatted.

Considering the setbacks with the fire and the fact that I've never tried to cook over an open fire on a deadline before, I was pleased that my plan worked. It only did because I had an assistant, who turned up without being asked, who could watch the fire while I did a few last-minute preparations or who could deliver plated items while I continued cooking the last item. She also stuffed the majority of the dates.

Spit-roasted leg of lamb
recipe inspired by Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: Secrets of the Papal Table by Mariangela Rinaldo and Mariangela Vicini
four-pound leg of lamb, organic and free-range (mine also happened to be certified halal, which becomes irrelevant when you see the next ingredient)
1/2 pound pork fat (I used a very fatty bacon)
1 Tbsp dried rosemary leaves
5 cloves garlic
salt and pepper
2 cups red wine

Mince the pork fat and cut it together with rosemary and garlic that have been minced. Cut lamb into two nearly-equal pieces. One piece will likely have the bone in it. Make deep incisions on the side of each pieces of meat and stuff with the pork-garlic-rosemary mixture. Meat may need to be tied with kitchen twine so the stuffing does not fall apart while loading it onto the rotisserie spit. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and roast indirectly over hot coals that are still sending up a little bit of flame. Turn occasionally while the lamb roasts at a temperature that is hot enough to cause some sizzling, but not hot enough to quickly burn the lamb. Baste by brushing occasionally with wine.

The leg of lamb was the item that got the most effusive praise from eaters, and it proved to be the most difficult. Lesson one: spit-roasting is to be done with indirect heat, not flames leaping up to the food. On the other hand, having a bit of an overbrowned (okay, blackened) crust did add lots of flavor until I figured out how far away from the flame to place the spit. Lesson two: bring a secondary cooking vessel in case roasted meat needs finishing in a pan or covered pot. So glad I had that cast-iron skillet handy so I could pour in the rest of my wine for basting and just cook off the lamb in pieces in the skillet. The wind was cooling off the lamb leg on the other sides while it cooked on one side over the fire, so the very center never came up to temperature on the spit. If I'd had an extra hour to leave it over the fire, it eventually would have cooked fully, but I didn't have the time to wait. If the fire hadn't been constantly blown around by wind, I think the 2 1/2 hours the lamb roasted on the spit would have been long enough.

I was very excited about the bread for its flavor and texture. It came out of the baking pot with a black bottom, a caramelized-looking top and springy texture. I have learned quite a bit about bread from another shire member, Simon, in the past year or two, plus I have received tips whenever I ask from Laura, who bakes where I work. A bit more practice with baking hasn't hurt me either. Simon got me started with using sourdough starter instead of always relying on packaged yeast. Finding motivation to start sourdough is simple when Simon hands out little packets of dried sourdough starter from his own collection at a class. Sourdough starter is a pre-1600 technique, as is baking in a pot buried in hot coals. To accentuate sour flavor and add a bit of beery yeasty taste that could have come from using ale barm for yeast, I followed the recipe for Almost No-Knead Bread from Cooks Illustrated. That recipe uses beer and vinegar for part of the liquid. Instead of the instant yeast called for in the recipe, I added some of Simon's sourdough starter. The bread dough sits in a bowl at room temperature overnight to develop flavor. The pot I used for baking was not made of the correct materials, being a cast-iron pot instead of the more-likely-for-pre-1600 Italy clay baking pot, but it was the only heavy covered pot I have that I'd be willing to put in a fire. Lesson from this experiment: the bread probably only needs half as much baking time as in the oven at home. I checked it after 45 minutes of the expected hour, but I think I could have gotten away with only 30 minutes of baking time and had less burnt crust to cut off.

The part I know would turn out fine in this experiment even if nothing else did was the asparagus. I found some directions from a Renaissance Italian cook indicating that asparagus should be boiled until just tender, then dressed with oil and vinegar and fresh herbs. Even at my worst with outdoor cooking, I can manage to boil water as long as I have enough fuel. The vegetable was perfectly crisp-tender the way I like it, then I dressed it with a simple red wine vinegar-olive oil vinaigrette (with a dash of sugar), salt, pepper, and chopped fresh parsley. No need for the cold-water shocking after blanching. The air was brisk enough that the asparagus cooled off right quick after I put it on the serving plate. I was pleased to see that the plate of vegetable disappeared just as quickly as my other dishes. I guess the people who like asparagus ate it enthusiastically.

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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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Scrambling veggies and eggs

The ingredients in today's lunch:
1 small zucchini, sliced thinly
3 Tbsp butter
2 eggs, scrambled with a little milk (I chose unsweetened almond milk, you may choose differently)
salt and pepper strewn over all to taste
1 heaping tbsp each of ajvar and light sour cream, mixed together in a separate bowl

The cooking method: butter melted in pan, zucchini browned on both sides in butter, heat turned down and eggs cooked in pan w/zucchini, seasoned the whole mess and place on a plate, smeared with ajvar/sour cream and served with multigrain bread. This dish is very green and orange, and it's delicious!

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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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My favorite food of late summer: peaches

I assumed I was leaving behind the best stone fruits in the world when I left Alberta, where the amazing orchards of between-the-mountain-ranges British Columbia provided summertime fruit bliss. But here in Central Illinois, our farmer's markets are graced with freestone peaches from southern Illinois, where the trees grow large yellow-orange fuzzy peaches with magenta centers. They look gorgeous, they smell divine when they finish ripening on the countertop, and I can buy them for $8 a half-peck bag (12 to 15 peaches). The farmer who comes up to Saturday's market in Bloomington often gives me an extra peach or two so the bag is overflowing. They are every bit as delicious as the best offerings fresh from the farm stand in B.C.

I get so excited seeing the piles of peach crates in the farmer's truck that I can't get that stupid "Peaches" song from the 90s from the Presidents of the United States of America out of my head.
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
Millions of peaches, peaches for free

Each year for three summers here, I've tried a new recipe or two that I hope will bring out the best in Illinois peaches. Here is the stand-out dessert of peach season 2011.

Peach Cobbler
about 8 servings

Peach sauce:
8 to 10 fresh peaches, peeled, pitted and sliced
2 Tbsp Minute tapioca
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 to 1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp cold butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix all the above ingredients in an 8-inch by 11.5-inch glass baking pan. Dot with small pieces of butter. Let the mixture sit while you prepare the topping.

Cobbler topping:
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup cold Crisco shortening
3/4 cup milk (or almond/soy/rice milk)
1-2 Tbsp sugar

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in shortening until no lumps are present. Mix in milk to make a thick but wet batter. Add more milk if batter is dry or doughy. Drop batter onto peaches by large tablespoons. Sprinkle batter with sugar. Bake 30 minutes uncovered in 375 degree oven until batter is golden and sauce is bubbly.

Serve warm or cold, with or without cream poured over each serving. I eat this cobbler straight out of the oven as dessert with dinner, then again at breakfast with yogurt and/or granola and one more time after dinner if there is any left.

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What grows together, goes together: strawberries and rhubarb

All of the rhubarb recipes in my recipe box are from family members and friends who passed along their new ways of serving up this stalk so that it would take us a good long rhubarb season to start running out of ideas.

Grandma's strawberry-rhubarb jam and mom's strawberry-rhubarb bars are old favorites of mine that pair up the sweet tang of spring's fresh strawberries and the assertive tartness of rhubarb. This week, I decided to try out the classic combo in a new application, a revision of my other grandma's recipe for rhubarb sauce. The original sauce, using rhubarb and canned pineapple, is phenomenal on ice cream or mixed into yogurt or oatmeal for breakfast. But I had 2 pounds of strawberries, a very small bunch of rhubarb from the CSA box, and no pineapple.

I was not a good little girl about measuring my sugar as I was adding it, so I leave that amount up to your taste. Start at 1/2 cup and if the sauce is not sweet enough, add 1/4 cup more at a time until it's right.

The new sauce was a hit on ice cream at our anniversary/birthday party last night, with one guest asking for the recipe. If I'm lucky, he'll thank me by dropping off some rhubarb from his back yard.


Strawberry-Rhubarb Sauce
at least 10 servings

1/4 cup instant tapioca
1/2 tsp salt
2.5 cups water
2 pounds strawberries, sliced
1 cup rhubarb
1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cup sugar, to taste

Put all ingredients (start with 1/2 cup of sugar) into a large pot and bring to a boil. Taste for sweetness and add more sugar if needed. Turn down heat and simmer briefly until fruits are slightly softened, stirring often to prevent tapioca from sticking to bottom of pot. Serve when cool. Best after overnight refrigeration.

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Soy substitute week

This week has been a week for experimenting with soy products to stand in for eggs and dairy. The impetus and guide for the experiments was the book Tofu and Soyfoods Cookery by Peter Golbitz, specifically the recipes Mock Sour Cream Tofu Dressing and Scrambled Yuba.

Experiment 1: vegan mushroom stroganoff sauce, with Mock Sour Cream Tofu Dressing based on silken tofu standing in for sour cream. The basic ingredients are silken tofu, oil, lemon juice, and salt. I served the sauce over no-yolk egg noodles. I am perfectly comfortable putting vegan sauce on non-vegan noodles, but I would have used other noodles if I were serving actual vegans.

The results here were mixed. The sauce's flavor, which I initially thought was too lemony, settled down by the time I ate leftover noodles the next day and I liked how closely it tasted to sour cream. Better than other packaged soy sour creams I've purchased in the past. The texture was disappointing. The oil tended to separate out, making the sauce greasy instead of creamy and smooth. I think if I were going to make this dish again, I'd prepare the mock sour cream with a stabilizer like cornstarch or mustard or something and do it a day ahead to let the flavors blend.

Experiment 2: scrambled yuba, which I served on toast. This no longer seemed like a breakfasty scrambled egg dish when I added carrots, onions and mushrooms, nor did the garlicky tamari-flavored seasonings recommended scream breakfast to me. It was a nice light dinner.

Major challenges included finding yuba and making it taste like something when I didn't have all the ingredients called for in the recipe.

First, how I found the item. The owner of my favorite local Asian grocery had dried yuba on hand, but he didn't know it right away because he was not familiar with the Japanese name yuba for the product. His native language is Chinese, but he understood exactly what I wanted when I described it in English. Yuba is the skin skimmed off of boiled soy milk. I wasn't prepared to make gallons of homemade soy milk and skim its skin to get fresh yuba, and frozen just isn't available in my area.

Second, yuba does not naturally taste like anything. This ingredient is mostly about texture, like tripe or oatmeal. To borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams, it is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike scrambled eggs. No fluffy softness. No eggy richness. No buttery finish. Not even yellow, more like beige. In the pan, it vaguely looks like slices of very thin fried egg whites. I had run out of nutritional yeast flakes and forgot to get some for this dish, so therefore I didn't have the most essential flavoring called for in this recipe. I decided not to worry about it and make it taste entirely different. I used sweet soy sauce (kecap manis), garlic powder, chicken broth powder, the above-named vegetables, and sesame oil and fresh parsley for garnish.

If the goal here is to make something that is like scrambled eggs for breakfast, the experiment failed. I believe it would continue to fail even if I had followed the recipe exactly but with my dried yuba. Reconstituted dried yuba does not look, feel or taste like egg. I don't know whether the fresh or frozen could entirely take care of these issues, but it would at least probably be closer in texture to slightly overcooked eggs. The nutritional yeast flakes would have lent a more cheese-like flavor. If the goal is to make a yummy protein and vegetable dish with a new food, I think the experiment was successful. My husband and I like yuba enough to try it again sometime in the future. The possible flavors to combine with it are endless, so we'll keep trying new ways of preparing it.

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Thinking spring, in 14th Century France style

I've been thinking about 14th Century French foods recently because our local Society for Creative Anachronism group http://www.scolairi.org/Scolairi1.html has an upcoming spring event http://www.atomicvole.org/AW24/ where there will be a feast.  Below are some recipes from my collection that are "thinking spring." I sent these recipes to my local SCA newsletter for an article to appear in the February edition.

Cameline Sauce, for roasted lamb, pork or veal, was a very popular sauce throughout W. Europe in the Middle Ages and it appears in more than one recipe source from SCA period. I adapted this recipe from the version in the 14th Century housekeeping guide by the man known as the Menagier de Paris. It yields about 1/2 cup sauce. Think of early flowers and mud under melting snow while preparing this sauce for spring lamb.

Cameline Sauce

2 Tbsp breadcrumbs
1/2 cup red wine
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 to 1/2 tsp ginger powder
1 clove, ground to powder
1 tsp cinnamon
Blend all ingredients together. Serve without cooking, or simmer slowly for a few minutes or substitute 1/3 c red wine vinegar mixed with a little water if no-alcohol sauce is desired.

Another simple version of cameline sauce is provided at http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec13.htm, which provides a recipe based on another 14th Century French recipe source, Le Viandier de Taillevent.

A delicious sauce for fish days -- of which there are many, since Lent falls in late winter and early spring -- is the ubiquitous Sauce Vert/Verde, or "green sauce," also popular outside of France. At its simplest, the sauce is a puree of parsley mixed with vinegar-soaked breadcrumbs and salt. I've adapted a variation of the sauce in the 14th Century English source Forme of Cury that has garlic in it. It's delicious on fried fish because its vinegary-garlicky tang adds a nice countering note to the grease of fried food.

Green garlic sauce

about 1 cup sauce

100g parsley, stripped to leaves only
1 Tbsp ginger powder
4 Tbsp white wine vinegar
8 Tbsp water
1/2 Tbsp ground pepper
1/2 Tbsp salt
2 slices white bread, crusts removed, in chunks
1 clove garlic
pinch saffron, optional
Place all ingredients in blender and blend on very low speed, stopping blender to stir occasionally. When ingredients are well-mixed and moist, blend on high speed until smooth.

Spring pea pods that are young enough to be eaten whole are good in the following recipe, as are sugar snap peas. For both of these types of peas, pull off any stringy or potentially tough stemmy parts first.

Peasecods for six

adapted from Menagier de Paris

1 lb sugar snap peas
1 Tbsp butter
Bring pot of salted water to a brisk boil, cook peas five minutes or less until crisp-tender, then remove peas and dress with butter.

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This season's very special dinner experiment

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

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

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

Sausage Gravy with Just One More Vegetable
4 servings

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

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

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Chinese-style eggplant

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

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

Chinese-style eggplant
serves 2 to 3

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

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

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

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Playing with garden produce: enchiladas

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


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

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

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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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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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Stuffed dough pockets: the food of many folk

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

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

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

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

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

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