an open cupboard

This weekend, I went to the local farmers mark in Berkeley. The poor California farmers have taken quite a beating. Many farmers brought their citrus fruits to market. Stand after stand of forlorn oranges, tangerines, and clementines were mottled with grey grime and lumpy with frostbitten flesh. Some farmers offered samples, others didn’t bother, choosing instead to sell whatever fruit they could in sealed bulk bags. Seeing the sad bins of damaged fruit, and the worried farmers, I felt compelled to buy as many citrus fruit as I imagined we could eat in a week. I managed to find some tasty Washington navel oranges as well as some decent paige mandarins.

The key to finding good citrus is, of course, tasting before you buy. And if no samples are available, ask the farmer if you can sample a piece of fruit. Segments with dry, fibrous bits of flesh have been damaged by frost. Once you’ve found some fruit you like, look for firm fruit without a lot of blemishes or great differences in firmness. Once you’ve selected your fruit, be prepared to pay more than usual to help the farmers make up for their losses.

All citrus woes aside, I was pleased to see green garlic and green onions at the farmers market. These goodies generally appear in the spring, so I was pleasantly surprised to find them at the market in January. The delicate flavor of green garlic is a boon to any dish, particularly when cooked in butter. The piquant freshness of green onion adds a little kick in the pants to most dishes. When I spied the meyer lemon fettuccine at Phoenix Pastificio, my mental image of dinner was vibrant enough to be smell-o-vision: meyer lemon pasta with green garlic and onions, the artichokes and fennel I had at home, the curd I picked up at the Spring Hill Cheese stand, all fragrant and moist with meyer lemon juice and butter.

You could make this dish with regular pasta, but fresh meyer lemon pasta adds another dimension of citrus that complements the other ingredients well. If you don’t have lemon pasta, and don’t feel like making any (who can blame you?), ordinary fresh or dry pasta would work, and spinach pasta might be good as well. If you’re using regular pasta, you might want to zest a lemon and use the zest in the sauce. To make this a more citrusy dish, you could try adding fillets of blood orange, clementine, or half a pomelo. I haven’t tried this variation, but fennel and citrus always make a happy couple.

meyer lemon pasta with fennel artichoke sauce

340 gr fresh meyer lemon pasta, or regular pasta, fresh or dry
butter and olive oil
2 cooked artichoke hearts with stems, cleaned and trimmed
1 fennel, cored
1 stalk of green garlic
1 stalk of green onion
1 small lemon (a meyer lemon if available)
1-2 handfuls of curd, haloumi, or mozzarella
salt and pepper

• Boil water for the pasta in a large covered pot. If using dry pasta, cook it now. If using fresh pasta, boil the water now and cook the pasta while preparing the sauce.
• Chop the fennel and artichoke hearts and stems into thick matchsticks. You want to match the size of the vegetables with your pasta. For example, if you’re using fettuccine, make thicker matchsticks. If you’re using angel hair pasta, julienne the vegetables.
• If you’re using regular pasta, zest the lemon.
• Slice the lemon in half and squeeze the juice over the artichoke pieces to prevent discoloration.
• Chop the whites of the garlic and onion.
• Chop the green parts of the green onion stalks into matchsticks.
• Place a large pan on a medium flame and melt some butter in olive oil.
• Saute the garlic, then the fennel, then add the artichoke pieces along with the lemon juice.
• If using fresh pasta, cook the pasta as directed (typically about 3 minutes for fresh pasta).
• Toss in the onion greens and rip in some fennel fronds. If using regular pasta, add in the lemon zest.
• Throw in the cheese and turn off the flame.
• Season to taste with salt and pepper, and squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.
• Toss and correct seasoning. Add a little of the pasta water to the vegetables and toss with the pasta.

Serves 2

There’s been a cold spell out here in California. You can see your breath in the morning, and the cars are covered with a thin layer of frost. Lawns gleam and sparkle with frozen dew, and my dog—who goes into fits of ecstatic anticipation at the sight of a leash—is quite eager to shorten her morning walks. It’s cold, perfect weather for a good stew.

One of my favorite stews is cholent, a traditional Jewish stew cooked very slowly in an oven. Cholent is traditionally eaten as a Sabbath meal as it is well suited to the rules regarding Sabbath food preparation. Religious Jews are prohibited from cooking food on the Sabbath. But food may be kept warm on a pre-existing flame. By starting the cooking process on Friday morning or afternoon, the cholent cooks by sundown—the beginning of the Sabbath. The stew continues to simmer on a very low heat overnight. The oven is not quite hot enough to change the state of the food (the Talmudic definition of “cooking”), but the long, slow heat is enough to build layer upon layer of subtle flavors. Deeply caramelized onions soften into gravy, the meat falls off the bone and infuses the beans and grain with its flavor, while chunks of waxy potato take on an almost smoky flavor.

In the old days, Jewish women would bring their cholent to the village bakery where the pots were kept warm for the Sabbath. On Saturday afternoon, they would gather at the bakery to fetch their pots, bringing home a filling and tasty Sabbath lunch to their families.

Jews the world over made their own style of cholent, with ingedients varying from region to region. Typical ingredients of Eastern European cholent are potatoes, barley, beans, and meat on the bone. (More meat if you could afford it, more bone if you couldn’t.) Sephardi cholent is called hamin, and often includes eggs in their shells. Huevos haminados, as they’re called, turn brown and creamy after a long night of cooking. Iraqi and Kurdish Jews make a version with chicken and rice, called t’bit. North African Jews make a stew called dafeena, with copious amounts of North African spices and often featuring garbanzo beans.

The crown jewel of any cholent is the dumpling or homemade sausage that cooks on top of the stew. The North African dumpling is called kokla, a slightly richer and more savory version of a matzah ball. The Eastern European version is called kishkeh, a sort of poor man’s sausage. Instead of meat, Kishkeh is made of whatever a poor family might have in the larder: an onion, a carrot, some chicken fat, some breadcrumbs or matzah meal. These are grated, mixed, and seasoned simply with salt, pepper, and a little paprika. The mixture is then stuffed into a clean section of beef intestine, or “kishkeh,” loosely translated as gut. When stuffed into the skin of a chicken neck—sewn shut on each end with a needle and thread—this treat is called helzel, or by its typically Yiddish diminuitive, helzeleh.

To the modern, western palate, kishkeh and helzel might sound, well, unpalatable. We’re not used to consuming offal. For many of us, a filet mignon induces an immediate Pavlovian response while the thought of eating intestine triggers a gag reflex. Historically, however, the less desirable parts of the animal were the only parts most folks could afford to eat. This is particularly true for Jewish culinary traditions that feature such delicacies as chopped liver and jellied calf’s foot. And so they should. Ask any Jew of Eastern European descent what they ate at their grandmother’s house, they’ll likely describe bubby’s ethereal chopped liver—neither creamy, nor chunky, and with just the right amount of carmelized onion—on matzah or a slice of warm, toasted challah.

But the beauty of cholent is you don’t have to make yours the way your bubby did. Cholent is infinitely expandable—use garbanzo beans instead of navy beans, steel cut oats instead of barley, osso bucco instead of a large roast. Or try one of the many ethnic varieties of the dish. And leave the window open after dinner.

This post is part of the Waiter, there’s something in my stew! event hosted by Andy of Spitoon extra. Check out Andy’s site for the roundup of stews.

cholent

I used steel cut oats instead of barley. Barley tends to plump nicely and thicken the gravy somewhat. Oats tend to disappear a bit more into the sauce. Millet might work, although I haven’t tried it. I used a combination of new and old world beans, but just about any beans will do. You might want to try using different sizes of beans to achieve a varied texture.
oil for frying
2-3 large veal osso bucco
3-4 potatoes
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
3-4 cloves garlic
1 TBS sweet paprika
1/2 TBS smoked paprika
pepper to taste
1 1/2 c mixed beans, soaked overnight
3/4 c grain, such as barley or oatmeal
4-8 washed raw eggs in their shells

for later:

1 kishkeh (recipe to follow)
1 TBS salt

• Preheat the oven to 200° F (about 93.33° C).
• Heat some oil in a large, heavy frying pan and brown the osso bucco on both sides. Meanwhile, slice a potato into 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick rounds. Use these slices to cover the bottom of your pot. Double up if you still have slices leftover after covering the bottom of the pot.
• Remove the osso bucco from the pot and place on top of the potato slices.
• Add more oil to the pan if necessary, and brown the onions. Season with both paprikas and freshly ground pepper. Press the garlic cloves into the onion mixture and continue frying until the onions are fragrant and have softened.
• While the onions are cooking, coarsely chop the remaining potatoes into large chunks.
• Drain the beans and layer the beans with the onion mixture in the pot. Sprinkle over grains. Add the potatoes and pour over water to cover.
• Carefully nestle the eggs in various nooks and crannies of the uncooked stew.
• Cover and bake in the oven overnight. Before going to bed, check to make sure the stew has enough water. If not, add some hot water, cover, and put back in the oven.
• In the morning, see if the stew needs any more water. Add hot water if necessary. Taste a few beans. If they’ve softened, season the cholent with salt. If they haven’t softened, your beans are too old or you added salt at the beginning of cooking. Start over!
• Place the kishkeh on top of the cholent and continue baking. If the cholent is too liquidy, leave the top off so some of the water can evaporate. Otherwise, cover the cholent.
• After 18 to 24 hours, remove the cholent from the oven. Serve each diner some potatoes, beans, grains, meat, and a chunk of kishkeh. Peel the eggs and serve as an appetizer with challah, chopped liver, and pickles, or eat with the cholent.

Serves 8-10

kishkeh

Rather than buying pre-made frozen kishkeh, you can pretty easily make your own. I love the sweet, salty taste of kishkeh, and the textural contrast between the soft filling and the crisp edges of the sausage.

1 large onion
1 large carrot, or 3 small ones
1 large potato boiled and peeled
1/2 c bread crumbs or matzah meal
1/4 c schmaltz or rendered goose or duck fat
1 TBS salt
1 TBS paprika
freshly ground pepper to taste
2 ft (61 cm) sausage casing

• Grate the onion, carrot, and potato into a medium bowl. Alternatively, process the onion and carrot in a food processor.
• Melt the schmaltz.
• Add the breadcrumbs or matzah meal, the schmaltz, and the spices. Mix to combine.
• Cut the casing in half to make it easier to work with. You’ll end up with two kishkehs, one for now, one you can freeze for later. (You could just as well cook them both.)
• Rinse the casing and tie a knot at one end. Use a sausage funnel, or your fingers, to stuff the casing. (This is a bit messy, but it works.)
• Use your thumb and forefinger to find the opening of the casing. Insert one finger into the opening, then another. Pull your fingers apart slightly, forming an upside down peace sign. Use this space to force stuffing down the casing with your other hand. When you’ve got a lump of stuffing in the casing, carefully push it down towards the knotted end by wrapping your hand around the tube. If air bubbles form, push the stuffing up a bit to let the air out, then back down.
• Continue stuffing the casing and letting out air bubbles. Stop when you have an inch or two of empty casing left. Let out any last air bubbles and knot the casing tightly.
• Repeat with the other casing.
• To cook kishkeh, do any one of the following:
• Poke holes in the casing and fry.
• Poke holes in the casing and fry. Slice into rounds and fry until crisp on both sides.
• Poke holes in the casing. Cook on top of cholent.

Makes 2 kishkehs

The mystery ingredient is khoa, also known as mawa or khoya. Khoa is made of milk (buffalo milk, traditionally), cooked for hours on a low flame until the liquids evaporate. The milk sugars caramelize and the proteins solidify. Think of it as a solid cake of dulce de leche without the sugar, or an unsalted gjetost. That’s pretty much what it tastes like too, almost cheese-like with a caramel flavor that is so subtly sweet as to not be sweet at all.

Khoa is the basis for many traditional Indian sweets, among them burfi, a treat similar to fudge. To make burfi, grate a cake of khoa into a large oiled wok or pot and add sugar and a pinch or two of ground cardamom. Cook until the sugar melts and the khoa solidifies again. Then remove the mixture from the heat and spread onto a greased tray. Decorate with ground pistachio nuts and the traditional edible silver leaves. Alternatively, you can mix in ground nuts just after removing the burfi from the heat. I mixed in ground almonds, and then sprinkled the top of my burfi with ground almonds as well. Cut the burfi into very small pieces, as a little bit can go a long way.

The result is an interesting take on caramelized desserts. The texture is distinctly fudge-like, but the flavor is a deep caramel, and very sweet from the added sugar. Cardamom offsets the sweetness somewhat, and adds another taste dimension that complements the nuts with its spiciness while underscoring the mellow burnt sugar flavor of the khoa.

I’m not sure I got the texture quite right, but all in all, these burfi are completely snackable. Perfect for a little something sweet after dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast, with a mug of strong, hot coffee.

Can you guess what this is? It’s an ingredient for making sweets, and no, it isn’t funky looking brown sugar. Extra points if you can guess what it’s made of.

Sheba’s quite the climber. She enjoys a good romp around the yard, and a leap up onto the fence in the corner where she has a good view of all the goings on. She also likes to run around the roof and walk along the boughs of trees. Here she is up among the leaves of the lemon tree:

So close, I can smell it…

Maybe if I scrunch myself up a bit and hide….

Excuse me? Can I help you? I’m trying to hunt a lemon, if you don’t mind!

Do check out the other beautiful felines at What Did You Eat.

Tags: WCB84, weekend cat blogging

I love getting packages in the mail. Even if I know what I’m getting, I tingle with anticipation—tearing at the masking tape, prying open the box, ripping out the wrapping paper or rummaging around the packaging popcorn, wondering all the while what the contents will look like. Finally wresting my hidden treasure from its cardboard prison, I ooh and ahh, pleased that my new toy has safely found its home.

So it was the other day, when a box arrived, playfully sealed with colorful polka dot masking tape. What could this fun little package contain? I honestly had no idea. The customs declaration sticker gave me a clue: chocolate and a book. Aha! I had completely forgotten about the chocolate shop food destinations blogging event. The package contained the prize for the event, chocolate from Australia and a book about food. This is why I love receiving packages. Like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

Inside the carefully packaged box was my copy of Digital Dish, a little box of truffles from Melbourne’s Koko Black, and a lovely card from Emily, the event organizer.

The delicate truffles had melded together a bit, forming one large truffle. That’s to be expected though, truffles are so delicate. No matter. The chocolates are smooth, creamy, and delicious. Each bite is different, because it’s composed of a different truffle. I’m trying to make the box last by limiting myself to one luscious bite per day. Except for the day I got them, of course.

Thank you Emily, for the chocolates, the book, and the card, and for hosting this chocolatey event! And thank you for reading!

Ilva of Lucullian Delights recently announced a fun little blog event, Show us your kitchen. So here it is, the crown jewel of my tiny, cramped apartment kitchen—my mizuya tansu, or Japanese kitchen chest. The photo doesn’t nearly do it justice, but it’s a beautiful yet functional piece of kitchen history.

My mizuya tansu is around one hundred and thirty years old. It has an ancient grace, yet its lines are clean and modern. I particularly love all its little details, the small sliding cupboard, the tiny, narrow drawer (for chopsticks?), the small, deep cupboard with the pull-out door (for tea? sake?), the decorative iron lock (a cash box for paying home-delivery food vendors?).

I’ve found uses for all the nooks and crannies of my mizuya. The tiny, narrow drawer is perfect for small or narrow items that get lost in larger drawers, such as meat and candy thermometers, a syringe and needle for injecting brine. The wide, shallow drawer holds a shortbread mold, a marble cheese board (good for rolling pie dough), some extra aprons, silicon muffin “tins”, and a madeleine tin. Pots are in the largest cupboard, bowls on the top cupboard, and baking dishes in the lower cupboard. The mysterious pull-out cupboard sometimes stores a bottle or two of olive oil, or loose bags of spices. Come to think of it, that unusual storage space might be a good spot for keeping tea and coffee.

The mizuya tansu is a silent testament to the past. Looking at it, I wonder about its previous owners. Were they rich or poor? Did they live in the city or the country? What did they store in their mizuya tansu? Were they good cooks? Only the tansu knows.

Ever get an idea that sounds really interesting in theory but turns out to be, well, a bit strange in practice? I like to expand my ideas about foods that complement each other by trying new combinations, often using whatever fresh produce I have in the fridge. That’s what I tried to do when I prepared my version of macaroni and cheese for the Mac and Cheese Off. The idea was intriguing, the results—less so.

A bag of Italian faro (spelt) penne caught my eye while browsing around my local gourmet shop. The pasta was a light brown color, and one of the store employees said it had a nutty flavor. “Hmmm,” I thought. “This could be an interesting base for my mac and cheese.” Think bechamel with nutmeg on a nutty pasta. Sounds good, doesn’t it? I bought a half gallon of whole milk and a tub of terrific French butter. My refrigerator was already stocked with an array of cheeses, so I was all set for the mac and cheese challenge.

I cooked a simple bechamel, and grated copious amounts of cheese: grana padana, raw milk cheddar, petite basque, and manchego. As I prefer creamy stovetop mac and cheese, I poured the bechamel over the pre-cooked pasta, letting simmer. I then added washed and drained baby bok choy leaves and the mix of grated cheeses.

The bok choy, pasta, and cheese sauce were tasty. Jut not all together. I rather like the idea of bok choy in a creamy cheese sauce. But the spelt pasta was all wrong. Spelt pasta is indeed nutty, but also very slightly bitter, like the aftertaste you get when you eat wheat germ. This flavor clashes harshly with the cheese sauce, throwing off the entire dish. Each ingredient sings a different tune and the result is like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, La Marseillaise, and God Save the Queen at the same time. Worse, the pasta was the wrong size, a factor I should have anticipated. Penne is fine for baking in a cheese sauce, but it doesn’t work very well in a creamy cheese sauce on the stove. I had wanted the cheese sauce to envelope the pasta in its creaminess. This doesn’t happen with penne. The cheese sauce sort of stuck to the penne in an eery looking glaze (see photo).

Oh well. I still think bok choy with mac and cheese is an interesting idea. I’ll have to try again, only this time with actual macaroni.

technorati tag: mac-n-cheese-off

Next time you buy a pound of chuck at the supermarket, think about where it comes from. If the FDA approves the sale of cloned meat and milk, you won’t know whether that roast was cut from a cloned cow. Similarly to GMO foods, the FDA has decided it will not label foods as products of cloned animals if cloned meat and milk is approved for sale to the public. But you may have already bought milk from a cloned animal. Despite the FDA’s request not to sell cloned animal products until they are officially approved as safe, milk from cloned cows has already been on the market for some time.

The research on the safety of consuming cloned animals does not appear particularly extensive, at least according to this article. The Center for Food Safety raises other concerns, such as the health of cloned animals and the ethical treatment of animals that are cloned.

I wonder what will happen when the clones are cloned? And the cloned clones are cloned? How will cloning only the most popular breeds affect biodiversity?

Once again, it looks like we’re jumping head first into a powerful, large scale experiment whose ramifications we don’t entirely understand.

Check out the full text of the FDA’s draft proposal, and submit your comments before April 2, 2007.

I took this photo right outside my home a few weeks ago, during a spectacular red dawn. Something about that warm, cloudy sky is infinitely reassuring, like a celestial watercolor painting by Nature herself.

A harbinger of the new year? Why not?

May this year be full of adventures culinary and otherwise, and many happy occasions to celebrate.

- shelly