an open cupboard

On a recent bright Saturday morning at the Ferry Plaza farmers’ market, I was pleasantly surprised to find large bouquets of za’atar. Star Route Farms grows the herb and sells large bunches of it at the market.

Za’atar is more commonly known as an herby spice mix spiked with sesame seeds. The mix is named after the plant, which is dried and mixed with a variety of ingredients such as sumac, cumin and salt. Traditionally, people in the Middle East have mixed their own za’atar according to family recipes and the local palate. The dried mix is sprinkled on labneh (a sour sheep’s milk yogurt cheese) and on small round flatbreads drizzled in peppery olive oil.

Fresh za’atar is a rare treat. I’ve never seen it in bay area farmers’ markets. It was hard to find the herb even in the markets of the greater Tel Aviv area. Once you get your hands on some, you can use it fresh and dry the rest in the sun. Store it in a tightly sealed jar.

Fresh za’atar has an aroma and flavor somewhat similar to wild oregano, but different. Za’atar has a little more attitude. It’s oregano’s hot-headed cousin. Its scent is a little more heady, its taste a little more powerful. Za’atar goes very nicely with soft cheeses, especially goat and sheep cheeses, as well as hummus. It spices up a roast chicken, along with a little lemon, sea salt, pepper and olive oil. Sprinkle some on sliced heirloom tomatoes in lieu of basil, or add it to cheese kreplach. Gently fry some leaves in olive oil as a sauce for pasta, then top with chunks of cooked chicken or fish and olives with a squeeze of lemon juice. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect it would go well with lamb kebab. It might also enliven a packet of shrimp or fish en papillote.

My favorite use of za’atar—dried or fresh—is on a round of traditional flatbread, warm and redolent with toasted sesame seeds and a thick layer of za’atar mix drenched in strong olive oil.

What do you like to do with za’atar?

I was at Ikea yesterday, buying some odds and ends in an effort to make our new place home. Yes, I know. Ikea. Great design that disintegrates faster than it goes out of style. Still, they do carry some handy knick knacks.

Take these nesting spoons for example. As soon as I saw them wrapped in plastic fishnet, I was curious. These little lovelies have a magnet on the handle, allowing for easy stacking and keeping them together in your drawer by sheer magnetic force. No fiddly little key ring to corral your wayward measuring spoons. No searching for that one tiny Barbie-sized measuring spoon you never use but invariably need when you least expect it. These spoons stick together like diminutive stainless steel family. (I’m imagining these spoons lined up, largest to smallest, swaying on the kitchen counter, singing “We are family/I got all my sisters with me.” Is it completely bizarre that my kitchenware performs Sister Sledge songs?)

I tried pinning the set to the side of the fridge for storage—no luck. You could probably hang them on a magnetic knife rack—another goody from Ikea which I have yet to install. Meanwhile, these ladies are going in the cutlery drawer where they can sing their little hearts out to an audience of assorted flatware.

Claravale Dairy is now selling milk, cream, and colostrum at the Berkeley Farmers Market every Saturday. They plan to set up a stall at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market soon. I suggested they join the Sunday Temescal Farmers Market as well.

Claravale raw milk is sweet with grassy overtones, and deliciously rich. Try a couple tablespoons of their cream with strawberries—an ethereal experience.

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I’ve recently received Clotilde Dusoulier’s new cookbook “Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen” from Amazon. If you haven’t done so already, buy this book! It’s full of creative recipes that don’t appear too difficult to prepare. It’s also full of Clotilde’s elegant photos and delightful prose you’ve grown to love. Most of all, her book is a source of inspiration—leaf through its pages for ten minutes and see if you don’t come up with a fabulous idea for dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast.

Pies are all about the crust, which is to say they’re all about the dough. Well, not really. At least half the fun is eating the gooey sweet fruit that fills the buttery cavern of your pie. But the best filling in the world won’t save a poor crust, turning an otherwise tasty pie into an abject failure. Knowing this, and with Thanksgiving just around the corner, I signed up for Shuna’s pie dough class in Berkeley. Let me tell you, having been to that class, I now recognize all the horrible errors I had previously thought were standard pie-making protocol.

For example:

• Fancy, high-fat, European style butter isn’t necessarily better. If you do use fancy butter, cut back a bit on the amount you use (six ounces rather than eight is a rule of thumb).
• Processing the dough until it forms a ball is a very bad idea. If your dough has formed a ball, your crust will be be tough.
• Roll your dough from the middle outwards, not from the edge.
• Once a crack, always a crack. If your dough starts cracking as you begin to roll, the cracks will stay and grow. To fix the crack, gently mush together the cracked dough back together with the blade of your hand.
• Rotate pie dough frequently when rolling so as to avoid it sticking to the work surface.
• Lightly rolled dough produces a light crust. A large, fairly heavy rolling pin is preferable, and easier to use. It requires less physical effort on your part, resulting in a flakier crust.
• Use a whole lotta beans. When baking blind, fill the entire shell with beans.

These are just a few salient points. By touching the dough at various stages of processing, listening to it (a dough that makes lip-smacking noises is not only rude, it’s way too wet), tasting it blind-baked and non-blind baked, I began to see pie dough as its own unique creature. A professional pastry chef is a dough psychologist, gently coaxing the dough to wellbeing while working through its potential for multi-faceted neuroses. Warm pie dough is insecure, resulting in a melted, self-conscious crust. Over-working the dough results in an aggressive, tough pastry. A dough might look perfectly well-adjusted in the mixing bowl, but do anti-social bits of flour and butter lurk at the bottom?

The ingredients themselves have their own unique personalities. Flour must be aerated and weighed. Butter must be kept as cold as possible and chopped coarsely. Water must be absolutely ice cold. Understanding the behavior of each ingredient—and why it behaves the way it does—is just as important as understanding the whole. A pastry chef is both scientist and artist.

After all you learn about pie-making, Shuna’s pie is magic. How can flour, butter, sugar, and water produce such ethereal flakiness? And how do crunchy apples become sweet, buttery velvet in your mouth? To me it’s alchemy.

I’ve been collecting recipes over the past month or so, storing the links in an e-mail draft in my gmail account. This is standard practice for me before every big holiday meal. The process goes something like this:

1. Think about seasonal ingredients that pique my interest for the holiday menu, such as cranberries, pecans, pumpkins, squash, chestnuts, sage, fennel, celery, beets.
2. Scout the blogosphere and epicurious.com for recipes that sound good.
3. Save links in an e-mail according to topic, for example, 15 pie recipes that all sound really good.
4. Prepare certain staples in advance, such as ordering the most expensive turkey I’ve ever purchased and canning my own cranberry sauce.
5. As the holiday hype snowballs in the media, search for and save links to yet more recipes.
6. Consider the number of guests and their particular dietary requirements. Current estimates: thirteen people, including two vegetarians, two young children, two people who hate peppers and cilantro, 1 person who dislikes turkey, 1 hater of all things chocolate.
7. Panic.
8. Take a deep breath and thank the gods I don’t need to prepare a fat-free, sugar-free, salt-free, low-carb holiday meal.
9. Look over the list of recipe links, realize I haven’t a clue which I will actually prepare, which I won’t, and which I will use as a springboard for my own recipes. I have no idea what items I need to buy and how much of them I need to get, let alone an actual shopping list.
10. Panic.

That’s about where I’m at right now. I need to narrow down the menu by the end of this week, and fill out an order with Fatted Calf as well as my CSA/organic food delivery service. This involves printing out the most appealing menus and fleshing out a shopping list based on the ingredients. After that, I’ll have to plan the preparations down to the hour or so. I will begin by following the plan religiously, and then run dangerously late and panic again.

I’m not sure whether the key is planning too many dishes, and not managing to prepare them all, or planning just enough dishes, and making them all on time. On the other hand, I could print out one of those pre-planned menus with recipes developed by chefs and a to-do list with e-mail and cell phone reminders. But aside from the utter annoyance of being spammed by your own to-do list, a pre-planned menu means actually sticking to the recipes, and that’s just no fun. In the end, toying with the menu as I go is well worth the cost of driving myself just a little bit batty.

Here is my current, tentative menu:

heritage turkey preparation

• Stuffing and gravy
• Preparation tips and dressing between skin and breast
• More specific gravy and roasting instructions

vegetarian dressing baked on its own, one or a combination of the following

• Sausage, cranberry, and cornbread stuffing (sausage omitted)
  
• Cornbread, pecan, and apple stuffing
• Pomegranate cornbread stuffing
• Cornbread recipe for the dressing

poultry alternatives for the turkey hater

• Jamie Oliver’s chicken in milk
• Roast chicken
• Stuffed quails from the Fatted Calf

sides and vegetarian staples

• Squash, spinach, and leek salad with maple syrup dressing
• Green beans with grapes and possibly parmigiano
  
• Whole roasted cauliflower with capers and olive oil
• Jansson’s temptation (not vegetarian, but damn tasty)
  
• Potato parsnip casserole with apples
• Roasted yams with citrus coriander butter
• Braised fennel with lemon

bread

• No-knead bread (hat tip to Rebecca’s Pocket for posting the link)

dessert!

• Apple and pumpkin pies
• A la mode?

On my way back from New York, I found myself wandering around aimlessly during a stopover at the Dallas airport. It was one of those stopovers that is long enough to drive a person to boredom but not quite long enough to actually exit the airport and walk around the city. Having experienced the hydrogenated plastic that is domestic US airline food—the pleasure of which you are often required to pay extra—I decided to look around the airport for something a little more appetizing that I could take with me on the flight. Sandwiches aren’t yet seen as a security threat in the world of airport security, so I figured I could safely carry on a little bite of something or other.

The Dallas Fort Worth International Airport is an interesting place. Every five minutes a stern, yet friendly recording announces that “any jokes about security may result in your arrest.” And nowhere, but nowhere, can you find a fresh vegetable of any kind. Sure, there is the prerequisite smoothie stand selling half gallon sugary fruit drinks that could sustain an African village for a month. But there is not a single leafy green to be found, and believe me, I checked the sandwiches at Starbuck’s. Nada.

So I looked over my options. Starbuck’s, Popeye’s, Chilli’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell. Given a choice of boring franchise food, what do you eat? Why, whatever’s local, of course! And what’s local in Texas? Barbecue! Off I went to Dickey’s BBQ, just left of Popeye’s in Terminal C.

In keeping with what I can only assume is a Texas tradition, Dickey’s offers no vegetables to speak of, unless they’re doused in mayonnaise, deep-fried, or battered and deep-fried. But then, you don’t go to a barbecue joint for a salad.

I bought two barbecue sandwiches: the slow-cooked brisket and the spare ribs. The brisket sandwich consisted of an ordinary hamburger bun with a big ol’ honkin’ slab of meat bathed in barbecue sauce. For the second sandwich, two large sets of ribs were placed in a bun, forming an enormous pork seesaw with a flimsy bun fulcrum. Eegads! Naturally, Dickey’s packs a substantial wad of napkins along with your foil-wrapped sandwich.

I ate the brisket sandwich on the plane. The sauce was pretty good, with a nice balance of sweetness, tanginess, and spice. The meat was tasty, and still somewhat red on the inside, but it was missing something. A little too dry, perhaps. Still, I was grateful to eat a decent lunch, considering that the airline’s “chicken BBQ” meal was pretty much inedible (and since when do Texans barbecue chicken?). I saved the rib sandwich for my arrival at home, to be shared with A. Naturally, A was pleased. The sandwich was very good, best enjoyed at home where you can eat large, messy barbecued ribs that leave your taste buds happy and your face shiny with fat and sauce. Barbecue is an impolite food by definition. You may as well embrace the chaos, just use the napkins when you’re done.

I often bring home bags of beautiful, fresh herbs which I fully intend to use in dishes I imagine I’ll cook throughout the week. Who can say no to a crisp, bright green bunch of Italian parsley, or fragrant fresh oregano, or thyme? Sadly, the herbs often look better in my imaginary meals than they do in real life. A week later I wind up with a refrigerator plagued by bags of soggy, gray specimens for the compost pile. Surely, fresh herbs are destined for a tastier fate.

Rather than waste away in the refrigerator, I recently started drying unused herbs at home. It’s very simple to do, and I wonder why I hadn’t thought of it before. All you need is a sunny spot outside, or on the window sill, and some kitchen twine. Suspend the bouquet of herbs using the twine–make sure it’s high enough to be out of pet’s reach–and wait for the sun to do its work. In a day or two you should have a bunch of fragrant, dry herbs. Store them in a tightly covered, labeled jar for future use.

Dry herbs add a lot of flavor to slow-cooked foods, when added at the beginning of cooking. Drying your own herbs means less waste, and less money spent on commercially dried herbs. And eliminating the bags of weird gray stuff in the fridge is a nice perk too.

Home dried herbs

1 bunch fresh herbs
kitchen twine
scissors
sunny spot

• Pick over the herbs and remove any blackened leaves and stems.
• Cut some kitchen twine, say 6-10 inches for wrapping and more for hanging, depending on where you want to hang it.
• Tie the twine around the stems, wrap it around the bouquet several times and tie again.
• Suspend in a sunny spot for a day or two, or until dry.
• Check for any bugs, then cut off the twine and pick off the leaves, storing them in a jar. If you’re drying thyme, just store the tiny little leaves along with the stalks.