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...of extra Blueberry Cream Cheese Frosting!Yesterday, I made a cake. It was a very special cake, but a cake for which you all will have to wait (so I can do it justice!) But today I find myself studying away on a grey and blustery afternoon, in dire need of a little snack. I should note that, upon completion of the aforementioned cake, a glorious amount of frosting remained, unused, in the bowl. And I was then given a particularly valuable piece of knowledge which I shall now share with you: "Eat leftover frosting on graham crackers."
And so I did! (Well, actually, as I'm doing right now...) The graham crackers are cinnamon-sugar. The frosting is Blueberry-Lemon Cream Cheese. The combination should not be legal. 
Imagine tart blueberry yogurt, made thick and creamy and then sticky-sweet. But it's still blueberry tart, (I think that's where the lemon helps out a bit.) On the cake it was almost too much. On the graham crackers, however, it makes the afternoon lovely, cozy, and sweet as the cracker crumbles and blueberries dance through your mind. (I swear it's not actually hallucinatory, though it is purple.)
Oh, and rose tea happens to pair particularly well.
Call them what you will: fleurs de courgettes, fiori di zucca, or the coarse English "squash blossoms." They're flowers. They're edible. They're delicious. 
I was introduced to them in France, in the simplest preparation possible in a restaurant whose menu was scrawled on a chalkboard, the back of which read "Pas de telephone, pas de cartes de crédite, pas de problème." Feel free to go - it's La Merenda in Nice, France. But don't expect fleurs de courgettes because they'd only be on the menu if they are in the market down the street. The blossoms are extremely fragile - if you see them at a market they were picked that morning and if you don't use them that night or by the following morning at the latest, you might as well toss them. But if you find them, rearrange whatever plans you have to make the time to cook and eat them. The simplest way to cook them, which admittedly takes some finesse, is to lightly batter and fry them. Use the light flour-and-water batter called pastella which I found in Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking." In short: well-mixed 2/3 cup of flour to 1 cup water. This batter is awesome - thin, light, and crispy, it turns golden and slightly toasty brown when done, forming a nice shell around the battered food.
There are two kinds of squash blossoms - some have mini-squash instead of stems. You can do anything you like with these mini-squash - I sliced my up and fried them as zucchini fries. They're meatier and moister than potato, and I think I like them better. Still crispy, but not as bland and starchy. Some recipes call for doing fancy things with these squash-stems, which can be very pretty. 
The blossoms themselves are a little awkward to handle because they're delicate and floppy. First you have to clean them gently (cold running water is good) and remove the stamen from the center of the flower. If you're frying them, drag them through the batter to coat them all over and then let excess batter drip off before frying. Fry them in enough oil that they are half-submerged, hot enough that the oil bubbles and hisses energetically immediately when they're put in. When one side is golden brown, flip and repeat. 
Drain excess oil and eat as soon as possible. The challenge with these blossoms is that they can carry enough batter and take long enough to cook that they get a little lost. Cooked well, they're light and crispy, but still have some substance. Their flavour is typically very mild, slightly earthy but also clean and fresh and crisp and green. In fact, many recipes call for stuffing them with goat cheese fillings because they function very well as wrappers that complement the flavour of fresh goat cheese while not disintegrating under heat like other leafy vegetables. I prefer them plain - I think the cheese makes them overly heavy and rich and drowns the delicate flavour of the delicate flower.
I love the simplicity of fiori di zucca - it's a flower, like so many others. It displays the intent of the plant to produce a fruit. And in this case, we get to taste that remarkable evanescent potential for fruit. It's like eating a crispy golden moment in time.
In Jerusalem, in the old city, there are bakeries. As you walk down the narrow, roofed-over streets, occasionally you'll catch a wafting smell of fresh baking. Follow your nose. Most of the bread being baked is pita - puffy and dusty-sweet. If you can see into the oven, you can watch as the dough goes from a raw, flat, white round to a toasty-tan balloon in about 30 seconds, before either it tumbles from the oven's mechanical conveyor belt or it is yanked skillfully from the brick oven and tossed onto a large wooden tray to cool. 
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
There's something about being out near a river on a warm, but crisp, day that makes me crave a particular kind of steak. There is something about taking a thick slice of beef tenderloin, stuffing it with garlic and wrapping it with bacon, and then grilling it, preferably over hot coals of a wood fire, until the bacon is crispy and the garlic is soft, that makes me feel alive. It's a complicated desire.
I was recently confronted with the above situation, thankfully with the means to satisfy that craving. Good beef tenderloin is ordinarily delicious, so much so that some of you might call it blasphemy to then poke holes in it and shove in halved garlic cloves - as many as will fit, ideally. And then perhaps it is further blasphemous to wrap the steak in thick slices of applewood-smoked bacon. But holy hell is blasphemy tasty! 
Allow me first to extoll the virtues of good meat and a good butcher: A good butcher is worth his (or her) weight in gold or chocolate - whichever you value most. Animals are complicated, especially the large ones, and carving the perfect steak or chop is an exercise in craftsmanship. There's a reason that, like in the other crafts, butchers would have to apprentice - there's a lot to know that you can't exactly learn in school. And a butcher is someone to whom you rather literally entrust your life. While much less true in the current, highly-regulated food-safety system (despite the pervasive horror stories...,) even now a good butcher will not only strive to give you the perfect piece of meat for your intended purpose but will also make sure that you won't get sick from it, if for no other reason than wanting your repeat business! A good butcher knows where the meat comes from, maybe even knows the farmer, and takes pride in your dinner even if not invited.
Good meat can, theoretically, be obtained anywhere in developed nations. Ok, you might have a hard time finding meat on a vegan, raw-foodist commune, but that's not what I'm talking about. While you can walk into most grocery stores and stagger out under a massive mound of meat, it will probably only cook up to be generically tasty. The few times I've had really good meat, adorned with little and cooked only simply, it has been remarkably rich and complex, and subtle, too. Some will say meat should not be complicated. To that I respond: too late, it already is. Cows and pigs and chickens, to only name the most common, taste different in different places - they eat different things, walk on different ground, drink different water. And let's say nothing about different varieties of cow or pig or chicken (or turkey, since Thanksgiving approacheth.) Beef can be sweet, grassy, like dense sunshine. Or it can be dark, sultry, seductive. Or it can taste of minerals and evergreens - trees and rocks.
This is why I like a good butcher - one with whom you can have a conversation about the flavour of different cuts of different kinds of meat. One with whom you can brainstorm interesting new recipes or consult about reproducing a grandmother's grandmother's roast. One who will understand the want, nay, the need, to stuff a tenderloin to bursting with garlic, wrap it in bacon, and put in on a fire.
Incidentally, that bacon-garlic special is more than ordinarily tasty... The tenderloin is a soft, un-fatty cut. This one was corn-fed regular black angus - mild, but slightly sweet and a little rusty. The garlic doesn't cook all the way. It roasts a bit in the beef juices but the cloves are still sharp and a bit spicy. And the bacon adds a gratuitous baste of smoky fat and saltiness. Unfortuantely, this one was cooked on a gas grill. Convenient, but you don't get the same crispy exterior as when you cook just above the white-hot coals of a 3-hour-old campfire. But that's just a hint of a totally different immersive experience - on in which you might just have to fend off ravenous bears to save your precious steak. Would you? I might - this steak's just that good.
What is a burger? Is it a beefy lump of beef with extra beef and nothing else, except maybe ketchup? Or is it simply a type of sandwich wherein some form of primary meaty substance (hot) is placed between two pieces of a bread-like carrying vehicle, with or without buffer areas of cheese, leafy or unleafy vegetables, and/or sauces of various kinds? Such is the fundamental and existential question I faced in preparation for dinner tonight.
A brief background explanation: My friends and I get together roughly weekly for a themed potluck dinner. Not everyone can make every week, and people have joined or left the active group as their lives have brought them to town or taken them away again. But the dinners have been occurring regularly going on five years. The formula is simple: each week a different person hosts, and each week the host chooses the theme. Over time, we've all become better cooks and had our share of transcendent glory and epic failure. But mostly we just have a good time. And the themes are really what make the food special - it's a challenge and an enticement to experimentation, and it has made for some rather interesting meals. (Please feel free to replicate - it's awesome.)
So, tonight: The theme was "Gastro-diner," like gastropub, only diner food. The explanation was, and I quote, "Your favorite diner foods, dialed up to eleven." (Totally in character for the host, too.) So what leaps to mind when you think of a diner? Well, the Burger. And the Meatloaf. And the Pancake. And the Rootbeer Float. Which pretty much provided the basis for our meal, actually, and I quickly claimed the Burger/Meatloaf territory. :-)
Now what you have to understand about our dinners is that part of the fun is seeing just how unexpectedly and differently you can interpret the theme and still produce something delicious. (I shall never live down my bringing Garlic Chocolate-Chip Cookies with Lavender Icing to a dinner themed "Hybrids." But that's a different story...) So I was faced with the question: What is a burger? And how does one dial that up to eleven in an unexpectedly delicious way? And now's probably a good time to mention that I had not cooked anything elaborate in a while and needed to scratch that itch. So here's what I decided to make:
Looks like a burger, doesn't it? Well...
I decided I wanted to make a recognizable as a burger but about as un-burger-like as possible, and also dial it to eleven. The finished product ended up being as follows (in my best nouvelle-cuisine gastro-diner menu-speak):
A rondelle of roasted melange of cherry-smoked coho salmon, fresh pork, sweet corn and quinoa, served atop crispy Indian flatbread with organic arugula, lime tzaziki and tomato-tarragon jam perfumed with cumin and Amontillado sherry.
And here's the layman's description: A slice of a cylindrical meatloaf containing salmon, pork, corn and quinoa. Fried naan dough that didn't rise as expected so became more like tortillas. Garlic-lime greek yogurt. Tomato jam.
God it was good! (...no matter what you call it.)
Let's start with the meat. I wanted to make something that was light and yet still rich and smoky like a BBQ hamburger. So, living in the Northwest, my first thought was to hot-smoked salmon. Unlike lox, &c., which are cold-smoked (exposed to the smoke only, not the heat of the fire,) hot-smoked salmon has the texture of cooked fish, if a little drier, as well as a rich smokiness akin to bacon. And I decided to make my own. In my kitchen. Of my apartment. Oy. 
The making of the salmon is a story for another time, but suffice to say it basically worked and I quickly had a pound of hot-smoked salmon to play with. I combined it with a pound of ground pork, some sweet corn, and some quinoa, as well as a little oil, some bread crumbs and a few eggs to hold it together. And then I roasted it rolled in a cylinder inside foil. And then it came out of the foil, got a coat of apricot jam, and went under the broiler to crisp up the outside. It tasted warm and smoky, and held together even though it wasn't heavy. And the corn provided little pockets of sweetness that burst open in each mouthful. Overall it was an unusual combination of tastes I associate with either warm or cold weather. On it's own it would probably be a little overly smoky but combined with the other pieces it was lovely. 
The tomato jam is something I've always wanted to try to make. We think of tomatoes as a vegetable, usually associated with salads or savory sauces, and even when really ripe and wonderful, they're not exactly what I'd call sweet. Not like a peach or strawberry. But when you cook down a pasta sauce, for example, you start to get a rich sweetness that can come from nowhere else but the tomato. And I'd tasted sweet-ish tomato-based pastes in restaurants before so I decided to make tomato jam. Since tomatoes by themselves, plus a bit of sugar, reduce basically to a simple, warm stickiness, I added tarragon to give the flavour a green high note, and cumin to fill in the middle of the register.
The bread was a challenge. I followed this recipe here. And while I usually don't follow recipes to the letter, this one I did. And I failed. I have no idea what went wrong but the dough didn't rise as expected. Oh it rose a bit, but not enough for me to make the expected little rounds of lovely, poofy, stretchy naan. Instead, it got stuck at the beginning of it's second rise so I had to cut my losses and flatten out the little balls of dough into thick tortillas and then quickly fry them. They actually tasted really good and provided a good vehicle for the burger, with enough crispness to contrast but enough chewiness to stay together. I'll try the recipe again, maybe messing around a little more next time...
The arugula and the tzaziki were last-minute thoughts. I wasted something green and fresh and arugula is a green that can hold its own in a swirling storm of flavours and textures. Alone it's a little bitter, but in this combination it tasted just tart enough to prevent the sandwich flavours from all mushing together. And the tzaziki was to do just the same thing. After I tried the tomato jam I could tell the sandwich needed something cold and tart and fresh to keep the whole thing balanced - something with a little bit of kick to keep the eater awake. Plain greek yogurt with lime and garlic is harsh on its own, but a good foil for sweetness.
Overall, it really was a storm of flavour and sensory experience, all at once hot and cold, sweet and tart, smoky and fresh, bright and crispy and deep and rich. And it was really satisfying to make - from washing the tomatoes and setting up the smoker all the way to slicing the loaf and assembling the first sandwich. When I finished mine, my felling was really "I needed that." Not just to eat it, but to get back in the kitchen and dial something up to eleven.
Here are the recipes. Keep in mind that each one could be really good on all sorts of other things. I'll give some ideas with each.
TOMATO JAM
Could be good on a bagel with cream cheese, as a glaze on a roast, on steamed broccoli, or with cheese and crackers.
12 Roma Tomatoes
½ C Sugar
¼ C Amontillado Sherry
¼ C Tarragon Leaves, dried
½ t Cumin, ground
1. Clean and halve tomatoes and remove stems. Puree in food processor until mostly smooth.
2. Pour tomato puree into saucepan with sugar. Cook on medium heat, stirring frequently. Reduce to one-third original volume.
3. Add spices and sherry. Reduce heat to low and cook down to sticky paste. Do not brown or burn.
INTERESTING MEATLOAF BURGER MEAT
This could be a good stand-in for ground meat in various places, whether on the BBQ or as meatballs in sauce or as ground meat for filling pasta.
1 lb Salmon, hot-smoked, shredded
1 lb Pork, ground
2 ears Corn, sweet, kernels cut off
½ C Quinoa, dry
4 Eggs, beaten
¼ C Olive Oil
½ C Panko breadcrumbs
3 T Paprika, smoked, ground
1 T Tumeric, ground
1 t Salt
1 T Pepper, black, freshly ground
2 T Pepper, white, finely ground
1 T Urfa Biber, coarsely ground (A chili pepper with a mild, warm heat. Substitute ¼ t Cayenne)
Apricot Jam
Heavy-Duty Aluminum Foil
0. Preheat oven to 500°F.
1. Steam quinoa until completely cooked (no opaque white spot in the middle of the grain.) [I use the microwave: 1:1 quinoa to water in a bowl covered with a plate, on high for five minutes. Let sit five minutes, stir, add half as much water again, and microwave another five minutes.]
2. Combine meat and grains in large bowl and mix thoroughly. Add eggs and oil and mix thoroughly. Add breadcrumbs and spices and mix thoroughly. Refrigerate 30 minutes.
3. Make two cylinders of the mixture wrapped in heavy-duty aluminum foil - 1 foot long and about as big around as a soda can or tunafish can. Cut of all but one inch extra foil at each end of cylinder, leave partly open (you want some excess moisture to escape so the log solidifies a little more.)
4. Bake logs on roasting pan in the top of the oven for 40 minutes.
5. Remove foil, replace logs on roasting pan, spread with thin layer of apricot jam.
6. Broil until jam bubbles and browns. Roll ¼ turn, spread a little more apricot jam, broil again. Repeat 4 times until all sides have been broiled and are brown and sticky.
7. Cool for 5 minutes. Slice diagonally about ¾-inch thick.
LIME-GARLIC TZAZIKI
Try as salad-dressing, sandwich spread instead of mayonnaise, or sauce for chilled roasted vegetables.
1 C Nonfat Greek Yogurt
½ Lime
3 Cloves Garlic, twice through garlic press.
½ t Salt
1 t Pepper, black, freshly ground.
1. Mix all of the above.
2. Eat :-)
The internet is an amazing, if sometimes bizarre, twisty, enormous, and convoluted place. It has made it possible for us cooks to have one gigantic collective recipe box. And in said box tonight I discovered a very easy recipe for fresh pizza dough. It takes less time to make than to defrost that rock of dough in your freezer. And it seems a very flexible recipe that enables the creation of pizza both thick and poofy or thin and crispy, depending on how long you let it rise in the pan.
Here's the recipe, courtesy of this link:
3 C Flour (I used a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat)
1 package (.25oz) Yeast - active dry
2 T Vegetable Oil (I used olive oil)
1 t salt
1 T sugar
1 C warm water (110°F or 45°C)
Preheat your oven as hot as it will go.
Mix the dry ingredients and then pour in the wet and mix and knead. Knead as much as you like, though at least enough to make the dough smooth. Use a normal baking sheet, oil and flour the baking sheet, and then lay out the dough. Instead of rolling out the dough, just gently turn and stretch it between your hands before laying it in the pan. Then finish stretching it out in the pan.) Top with whatever you like. The interesting thing is that if you cover it and let it sit in a warm place it will rise, so just keep an eye on it lest it take over your kitchen!
And then bake it until it's done (about 15-20 minutes...)
I look forward to lots of experimentation with this recipe.
This time of year, the berries start to ripen and the lavender blooms. The combination is heavenly. 
LAVENDER SUGAR
You'll need a spice grinder or an old coffee grinder that you've cleaned well enough to remove the smell of coffee.
1 t Lavender, dried (Some is called "culinary" - just make sure it is chemical-free.)
3 t Sugar, granulated.
Put both into the grinder and whiz around in 20-second bursts (so it doesn't get to hot and melt the sugar) until all that's left is a fine powder. Taste. If too lavendery, add more sugar and whiz some more. Or just mix with granulated sugar. Sprinkle on anything.
Have you ever been walking down the street and suddenly been bowled over by an irresistible smell, one that absolutely, positively requires you to find the source? Common examples are butter, bacon, barbeque, coffee, bread, curry - you know, smells that just grab you by the nose and pull (rather than those opposite kinds that push you away and make you feel ill...)
Well, the small and oft-overlooked country of Belgium is famous for a few foods but the one that carries the name and flag far and wide is the waffle. Now "Belgian Waffles" in an american diner are not terribly Belgian, and certainly not the kind that you can buy on the streets of Brussels and munch as you walk along. These are called Gaufres de Liège, are ragged-edged, dense and chewy, and have a slightly crispy, caramelized sugar crust that comes from the particular kind of sugar crystals which must be used in the batter (or else it's not the real thing, of course.)
In Brussels, the widely-regarded best gaufres can be found in little yellow vans parked at random places around the city. Despite the fact that, a) I did not know this to be the source of the quintessential gaufre, nor b) did I (or anyone) know where such a fount of waffly gastronomic pleasure might be found on a particular day, find one I did - entirely by nose. I had just finished touring the European Parliament building (which is large) and was hungry. All of a sudden I was practically knocked flat by a wave of caramel, yeast, butter, and chocolate. Dazed and stumbling I looked around, but didn't see anything that might be emitting such an intoxicating cloud. I kept walking - one block, two blocks - towards a square, and then I saw it. Like the sun peeking over the horizon in the morning, bright yellow and with the huge word "Gaufres! " emblazoned on the side. I almost couldn't make it to the window, such was the glorious aroma. But make it I did, accepted my freshly made gaufre with chocolate sauce, and then proceeded to eat with messy abandon, all the while making slightly obscene noises and grinning like an idiot. I didn't notice until days later that I had chocolate sauce on my pants.
Gin has never been much to my liking. In fact, for the longest time, when asked what I do not like to drink, I would instantly and firmly respond, "Gin! *shudder*" I have tested this conviction time and agin, especially in light of the fact that my grandmother was a great fan of the gin martini - by my reasoning, if someone so wonderful liked it so much, how is it possible that I detest it so? But alas, my palate has remained obstinately opposed to accepting as enjoyable the unique flavor of gin.
There are likely many who will recoil in horror at my assertion that I have never tasted a Gin and Tonic. (In fact, if there has been one drink I have historically detested more than gin it has most certainly been, and likely will forever be, tonic. Yuck. Though this also has a longer explanation...) I have never drunk a gin martini. Rarely have I enjoyed a cocktail that contained gin. It is one of the admitted failings of my tastebuds and their associated neural circuitry that seems to be set in stone. Or was, until I went to England and tasted a gin that has recalibrated my understanding of the drink.
Image source here.
Webb deVlam is the design firm consulted for the recent Plymouth brand update.
Part of the problem with developing a taste for gin is that most gin that is widely available adheres very strongly to the "London Dry Gin" style of the drink. A quick look at Wikipedia will give a basic understanding of the requirements for something to be called "gin." In short, a spirit in which the dominant flavour and aroma is that of the juniper berry. There are other technical requirements about alcohol content and permitted basic ingredients, but I'll let you read up on the minutae yourselves rather than transcribe them here. There is also a storied history of the evolution of modern gin from the Dutch drink "genever," a drink that is being revived in the current old-school cocktail craze. But that history, too, you may read on your own.
Important here is that not all gin is created equal, a fact for which I am grateful.
Gin has a very complex flavour. The very different vodka is simply the basic spirit distilled from a fermented mash of starch- or sugar-bearing plant matter (I'll let you argue about what must be used to make "Real Vodka".) The flavour of vodka comes from the very slight impurities carried through the distillation and also the water used to create the mash and to dilute the distilled alcohol to the correct strength. Gin, by contrast, starts with a base alcohol that is distilled to the point that it is almost 100% alcohol and has no flavour whatsoever. The only reason to drink that stuff would be to cauterize your epiglottis, disinfect your stomach, and cause instant and catastrophic drunkenness. To this liquid gin-makers add things like juniper berries, coriander and cardamom, lemon and orange peel, pepper, rosemary, etcetera. After steeping the flavourings for a while, the mixture is filtered and distilled again, this time so that only the volatile flavours that taste good will remain in the final spirit. Then the spirit is diluted with water down to regular strength, bottled, and sold. So what you taste when you drink gin is really the mixture of added flavourings and the technique of the distiller and there is infinite variation in both. 
The London Dry style of gin is a very astringent one. (Astringency can be described as the feeling of dryness in the mouth and throat.) The flavour and "texture" of juniper can range from lightly tart and refreshing all the way to parching. And there are other spices, too, that add to the quality and quantity of the astringency. London Dry gins tend to live at the parching end of the spectrum, hence the description as "dry." Beefeater, Gordons, Bombay Sapphire, and Tanqueray are good examples of the style, if you're curious. And since these are basically the most common brands I was surprised when I tasted Plymouth gin and encountered a totally different animal.
Image source here.
The Plymouth distillery, which actually is and forever will be in Plymouth, England, makes a big deal of many aspects of their history - being the original Navy gin, having the terroir of the building and town and water that they use, etcetera. And while most of that is interesting to a point, most important is that they make a gin that still tastes like gin but which warmed my throat and pleased my palate and did not make me pull a hideous and awkward face while trying to force it down. Instead, I could appreciate the flavours rolling around in my mouth - not fighting each other and my tongue, as the dry gins seem to do, but dancing and blooming and then settling to a warm, yet refreshing finish.
Gins, especially smaller-market, craft-distilled gins, are becoming increasingly popular, so I expect to be surprised again, but Plymouth is an old-school, traditional gin. I am happy to have it as a reference point, both for future tasting and for the quality of taste I can try to coax out of cocktail recipes I make up that involve gin. I have been served a few surprising gin cocktails that have further broadened my horizon and look forward to more, though I may never like Gin and Tonic and it may be a while before I can really enjoy a gin martini or two like my grandmother would.
Don't forget the olives!
To you, Grandma.
Apparently I have a food allergy. This is tragic. I am used to being able to try most any food without being afraid that it would kill me, only that it might, at worst, cause me to pull a funny face and shudder in disgust before I spit it out. Now I am trying to avoid being afraid of fruits I do not know. If you think this reaction is a bit extreme, here's the story:
I arrived in Israel at about lunchtime after flying all night and eating what politely can only be called "food-like semi-nourishment" along the way. I was to stay with a family friend named Ian who generously prepared a delicious Israeli-style salad (cucumber, tomato, olive oil, salt, and feta, though the presence of feta supposedly means it is called a "Greek salad") for lunch. After lunch, we spoke for a while about family, etcetera, and then were to go walk the resident dog. Just before going out, I was presented with a fruit that looked like an apricot. It had been washed, peeled and seeded so the only thing I ate was the flesh. On the upside, it was delicious - like a firm but sweet apricot that had been drizzled with lime juice.
On the downside: I left the house and walked across the street and my ears started itching. I got to the end of the block and felt like I'd just swigged some bad vinegar. I walked another fifty feet and I was coughing and it hurt to swallow. And I had to work very hard to stay calm enough to breathe. I walked quickly back to the house, grabbed a bottle of water, and took two Benadryl and an Allegra (my other antihistamine) though, in retrospect, I should have taken more Benadryl. At this point I was trying not to panic and not to pass out from panic. I could breathe if I did so slowly and deliberately, but I couldn't swallow. My tongue started feeling funny so I looked at it in a mirror. It was covered with little blisters. Ian had returned just after me and I said something along the lines of "If I'm not feeling better within five minutes I think I should go to the hospital." The poor man was understandably mortified. Five minutes later we got in the car.
We got to the emergency room and I tried to communicate to the receptionist that I was having an allergic reaction and having trouble breathing. I must have succeeded because within the next 5 minutes I had been taken in, sat down in a chair, my veins plumbed for an IV, blood drawn, two nurses and a doctor consulted, IV fluids hooked up and some serious steroids pushed into my bloodstream. And then I sat there with Ian for several hours under observation to make sure the drugs worked and I didn't die. Coming down from panic plus IV steroids plus ridiculous jet-lag made me very loopy and sleepy for the next few hours even though I tried to stay awake and conversant with Ian. I do remember several moments where I was in the middle of a sentence and then the sentence just carried on into a very bizarre dream for the next indeterminate length of time. And then I'd wake up and not realize I'd been asleep.
Eventually, an E-N-T specialist came to inspect me. An older man, built like a troll, with magnifying-glass eyes, he grabbed my tongue with a gauze pad and peered down my throat and then said yes, I'd had a reaction to something, and yes, I'd be fine, and yes, I could leave. Amazingly, for the pleasure of much time and care in the Israeli emergency room, the total bill came to $250. I was very pleased not to have to die of shock at the bill after being saved in the ER, like would be typical in the US.
But the most bizarre thing about the whole episode was that none of the doctors, nurses, specialists, receptionists, or even anyone else I met over the entire course of my trip had ever heard of someone being allergic to the fruit known in Hebrew as "shessek" and in English as "loquat." Lucky me. Here's the offender:
Of course there's always the possibility that I was allergic to something microscopic on the fruit or in the water or in the air or anywhere. But the reaction was consistent with a food allergy, especially the way that all of the surfaces in my mouth reacted where they had touched the fruit. I'll go get allergy tests to confirm that it was the fruit so long as they can find essence of loquat with which to test me... So now I'm supposed to carry an emergency epinephrine shot, just in case.
Ah, food, the things I do for you.
p.s. If you're not allergic to them, loquats are delicious. Well, they're delicious even if you are allergic to them, but death rather takes some of the pleasure away, I think. I prefer to live to eat another day!
Germany may be the place known for its wurst, but I am a particular fan of what stands in for hot dogs as Paris street food. The merguez sausage is thin, unassuming, and perhaps not terribly attractive, but full of flavour, especially if it has been slowly cooking in a giant round steel pan with onions, peppers, lamb and chicken kebabs, and probably a year or two of built-up daily leftover grease. It looks like this when served on the French version of a hot-dog bun which is really just half of a day-old baguette (though the missing bite was my doing - I just couldn't wait.)
Merguez is tough to get in the US, though I've never quite figured out why. Perhaps it's too tasty... I'll see if I can get the butcher in my neighborhood to make me some. It has good spice without being too spicy, though I imagine that depends on the maker more than anything. Perhaps that's part of the charm - you can't be sure what exactly you're going to get but you know it will be delicious!
The moose is currently eating an adventure around the world. Soon, there will be many stories of many delicious things, and also a few tragic ones, as well. A preview:
A tragic day!
On which I discover that I have a food allergy and visit the aptly named emergency room.
Gin I actually like.
(Hint: it's made in Plymouth, England. Care to guess what kind of gin I'm talking about?)
They don't make Caerphilly in Caerphilly :-(
Silly Welsh cheesemakers. Or maybe just the Welsh in general?
What do they eat in The Gambia?
Peanuts. Lots of peanuts.
A real Belgian waffle. With chocolate sauce.
Reasons to follow your nose.
How on earth do Israelis stay thin?
This will have to be multiple entries...
The land of Cheese, Wine, and Nutella crepes. What more is necessary for life?
Ok, maybe a baguette, too.
You may have heard the saying "When in Rome..." used to justify or support activities undertaken abroad which might usually be considered out of character. I seem to carry my interests with me and pursue them wherever I happen to be - more along the lines of, say, when a Martian might find itself in Rome.
I like salt, much to the consternation of my father. But not so much the ordinary iodized, granulated, abrasive stuff that food distributors sell in unrefillable plastic shakers. Rather, I am intrigued - nay, fascinated - by the incredible variety of edible salts that exist. Some among you may say, "For Pete's sake, it's SALT!" And to a point you would be right, but the chemists among us would remark that pretty much any combination of cation and anion can be considered a salt, whether these ions are single atoms or charged molecular fragments. There are some exceptions - please explore. But I like the ones we can eat.
With little exception, the one we can eat and which our bodies require (to a point) is sodium chloride (Na+, Cl-). But rarely in the wild can it be collected in pure form, and hooray for that! Otherwise we would not get pink salt from the Himalayas, grey salt from the Norman coast, pink and yellow salt from Australia, black salt from Cyprus, "black salt" from India, or red salt from Hawai'i, just to name a few... In reality, these are all mostly Sodium Chloride, but either they contain "impurities" in the form of other mineral or salt compounds or they exist in a mixture or matrix with things like charcoal, certain types of dried algae, seaweed, or clay. Any of these additions change the flavour of the salt. Some processed salt is iodized so as to prevent goitres, but rarely does this have much of an effect on taste unless way too much iodine is used.
The other widely variable quality of salts is the texture. Most people are familiar with granulated table salt, rock salt for melting the ice on the stairs, and maybe the superfine variety sometimes used on popcorn. But when salt crystallizes on its own and is then subject to meteorological or geological forces it comes out in amazing shapes (all admittedly based on the cubic crystal structure of NaCl.) Salt from deep underground comes in great big lumps and slabs, solid as the rock it is. Tidal rivers leave thin, wispy crystals along their edges. Salt pools drying in the sun produce the delicate flowers of salt - fleur de sel, and also hollow pyramids that grow upward on their own. And further slow drying produces smaller, crunchy crystals that are fantastic in salads. Each of these textures adds a different something to the dishes to which they're added. Cyprus Flake on a slice of radish, French grey salt on a salad, Hawai'ian red salt as a garnish on sesame noodles or roasted fish.
And I'm not even going to get into the myriad flavoured salts - the most incredibly deadly (in a good way) being black truffle salt. SaltWorks is a good place to get some idea of the global variety.
All of the aforementioned salts exist in the rarefied reaches of the gourmetosphere. Salt as a commodity and ingredient is seemingly commonplace (even if it was not always so - see Mark Kurlansky's Salt.) But as you'll see below, people sometimes bypass the processor/middleman and get their salt directly from the source.
I was recently in The Gambia, where they dearly love their salty food. And not just NaCl, but NaC5H8NO4, otherwise known as MSG. [Aside: when it is used in such prodigious quantities, you can definitely taste MSG...] Leaving MSG aside, since that must be commercially produced by distilling fermented algae, for example, salt in The Gambia can be taken directly from the river Gambia, which is long, flat, tidal, and brackish for more than half the length of the country. The village I stayed in was close enough to the river (and to large salt flats) that raw gathered salt was sold in the daily women's market for the price of roughly 18 cents for a large coffee can full of crystals. Women in the village would sometimes process the salt with iodine but usually would use it raw. And in this case I do mean raw.
The Gambia river is not exactly the cleanest, though there is little, if any, industrial pollution because most industry of any kind happens within about ten miles of the coast. As you go upriver there is little besides fishing villages and one town on an island far upstream. Parasites and bacteria abound, as does very fine silt and some larger particles of plants and plastic. The additional challenge is that often the salt was simply scraped from the top of the salt flats, bringing some of the riverbed with it. 
Being the cook, chemist, nerd, salt-lover, and perfectionist that I can be, I decided to purify and refine some of the salt to bring home. In the process of doing so I thoroughly grossed out some of my friends, covered much of the kitchen in super-saturated salt water, and produced a mountain of tiny, fluffy, pale-grey crystals. Here's the process:
Step 1: Get salt. I bought two cans-full of raw river salt from a woman in the market, mostly using gesticulation to communicate. It was grey-yellow-brown and in lumps.
Step 2: Boil, boil, and boil some more. When in doubt of the sterility of something, boil the Dickens out of it. And by Dickens, I mean all of the little creatures that might want to take up an inconvenient and distressing residence in your intestines. And hot water dissolves more salt than cold, which is useful if you're trying to purify a lot of it. Thankfully I found a very large cauldron (though I didn't dance around it...much.) 
Step 3: Skim. Some of the lighter stuff floated to the top in a rather nauseating scummy film that I poured off. However, this still left a really murky brew.
Step 4: Make filter apparatus. The kitchen had a tall ceramic teapot (tea being one of the foundations of Gambian social interaction) and I combined this with an old milk-powder can, some Melita paper coffee filters (God only knows why they were there - coffee in West Africa seems to be entirely instant Nescafé), and another funny small filter funnel that didn't seem to have much of a purpose elsewhere. Ultimately, the Melita filters were the most useful and removed the most crud ("crud" being a highly technical term, of course.) I punched some holes in the bottom of the can and used it to hold the paper filters, and then also cut a hole in the can lid to fit the filter funnel. Voilà! A two-stage filter.
Step 5: Filter! I had to pour slowly because both filters would clog and the paper filters would either disintegrate or get crusted with salt after a bit of work.
Step 6: Results. See the difference? (I actually filtered twice.) And see what the filters removed? Degutante!
Step 7: Boil dry. Or almost - it's hard to remove all of the water from a big bunch of salt by boiling. Some of it started climbing over the edge of the pot, too.
Step 8: Bake until fully dry. Baking the pan of salt produced a solid brick since I did not keep it constantly moving to break up the crystal structure as it dried. It also produced some areas of bluish-tinted salt. I found a small handful of these tinted crystals and I have no idea what caused the color. Trace minerals? Any ideas?
Step 9: Powder. I used the back of a spoon and also a wooden pounding mallet to crush the salt into a relatively uniform powder. 
It came out surprisingly light and soft. And then I packed it up - and hoped I didn't get too many questions about the plastic bag of white powdery stuff in my suitcase.
Really the most striking difference between this other salt I've eaten is the texture. The taste is slightly different - it does taste a little more like sea water - but the texture is light and fluffy, like powder snow that you can't pack into a snowball because it does not stick. I haven't had a chance to use it much for cooking or eating yet, but I'm excited to do so. And if I get the chance, I'll test it to see what makes it chemically unique.
Who knew Salt could be such an adventure?
Decadence is a term that communicates luxury and excess, richness and indulgence. So what better term to describe the ideal birthday cake. Credit for this one goes almost entirely to this post of Orangette, where a great many scrumptious things may be found. But, as usual, a twist was in order - in this case a little touch of lavender. The cake truly is sumptuous as well as scrumptious: It is light without being thin, and yet heavy without being a rock settling in your stomach. It's full of carroty goodness both in flavour and vitamins, and yet it could get anyone to eat vegetables. And it would be completely in its element in the exalted company of the Black Forest Gateaux, Flourless Chocolate Cakes, Strawberry-Caramel Cheesecakes, and Custard Cream Pies of cakey heaven. 
I very slightly changed two things about the recipe, in addition to the lavender twist. First, I baked the layers in pyrex pie-plates, since I'm increasingly uncomfortable with cheap non-stick-oleum cookware. Apparently the conversion is easy. If anything, lower the oven temperature 15-25 degrees, or shorten the baking time by about 10%. Just don't forget to grease and flour the baking dishes - I even used parchment paper in the bottom just in case, which turned out to be a good move since this cake is so moist it is a bit sticky until it cools a bit. The other thing I changed was the amount of lemon in the icing. As I was adding the lemon juice, it kept tasting better and better, so I probably ended up with about triple the recommended amount purely as a matter of taste. It did make the icing a little soft...
The lavender twist was as follows: I took a little of the plain icing, before adding the lemon, and added a very few drops of lavender oil to it. Careful! Lavender oil is strong stuff and many people think it tastes like soap if it is at all overdone. The trick is to make the flavour the same as a passing whiff of a fresh lavender field - sweet, warm, herbal, and a little dusty - with none of the astringency that comes with the concentration of the oil. In short, lots of sugar to very little oil. Once flavoured, I colored the icing to lavender purple and then used it to write on the cake. It was a little soft for cake-writing, but it worked and it gave each piece just the slightest hint of lavender, which went really well with the lemon in the rest of the icing and the deep, slightly savoury sweetness of the cake. 
I'll not reproduce the recipe here, since the link above will suffice. If trying the lavender experiment, start with ONE drop in about 1/2-cup of icing, mix well and taste. Then increase in strength one drop at a time until you think it is good. Oh, and I also dusted the whole thing with powdered sugar when finished which helped retain the icing and also looked a bit like snow.
The natural world is full of things that resemble other things, sometimes in look, sometimes in smell, and sometimes in taste, too. And after all, human description of food often resorts to simile: "It tastes like chicken." Of course, this gives rise to the joke that God, when defining the tastes of things, ran out of ideas when it came to chicken so just made chicken taste like everything. But I digress.
Lobster would seem to be one of those very delicious, prized, and, above all, unique tastes that is not found anywhere else. Well, whether by reality of the tastebuds or by sheer power of suggestion, a non-lobster lobster seems to exist. The lobster mushroom is so named because it is the speckled orange color of a cooked lobster and also has been described as having a taste that is both earthy and lobster- or shellfish-like. I should clarify that the lobster mushroom is not actually a single species of mushroom in itself, but rather is the result of a parasite fungus colonizing a host mushroom - mushrooms on a mushroom, as it were. 
The parasite responsible for the unique coloring and flavour is Hypomyces lactifluorum and it colonizes various host species, most of which are edible. (The Mushroom Expert) This presents a challenge when determining if a bright orange speckled mushroom you happen across on a hike will make a good mushroom fry-up followed by a pleasant afternoon nap or by agonizing pain and death. In short, DON'T PICK THEM YOURSELF UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. 
Identifying the host (and therefore the edibility) can be very hard since the parasite causes the mushroom to deform a lot as it matures. In France, you could take your mushroom to a pharmacy and they'd tell you if you could eat it, but I think bringing a muddy orange blob to your urban neighborhood pharmacy might cause some consternation. Some universities may have people in the mycology department willing to help determine if a mushroom is edible and these folks also occasionally have mushroom festivals, usually in later autumn or spring. 
But, lest we get carried away with the fear-mongering, more important is that when you find lobster mushrooms that are edible, you should eat them. They really are quite fabulous and different from other mushrooms I have eaten. My favorite mushroom preparation is to saute mushrooms in a little butter with a pinch of sugar, salt, and pepper until the mushrooms are cooked and the edges are starting to brown. Many mushrooms I have tried cooking like this have become soggy because I have messed up in one of many ways, but the lobster mushrooms did not. They stayed meaty and springy the entire time, so much so that I had some trouble determining when they were done. Finally I poured them and the chantrelles I had cooked with them out onto a bed of spinach, tossed a little salt over the top, and ate. The taste surprised me as I did not expect them to taste at all lobstery, but they did. Perhaps it had something to do with the preparation - buttery with a little salty sweetness? I like to think that somehow the mushrooms are imbued with the aura of lobster. The texture was also surprising, striking me as more bamboo-like rather than mushroom. They were not fibrous, but definitely toothsome - as in "al dente" like pasta. A little meaty even. And really really satisfying.
Not long ago, a remarkable man and dear family friend passed away. Illness prevented Gene from frequently indulging in decadent gastronomy, but I imagine that made him appreciate those experiences all the more. As it happens, I sent cookies to my mother one day and she took them over to Gene and Wendy's house for dinner. And the cookies promptly disappeared. Freed from a restrictive diet, Gene could eat what he loved and happened to love my cookies, and so did Wendy. Not only did this bring them pleasure, it made me feel good, too, to be able to help keep up their strength and spirits.
Later, as Gene's condition worsened, I told my mom how to make the cookies so she could maintain a ready supply. Gene was no longer eating very much, but apparently he kept consistently eating cookies. As did Wendy, as she later told me, who joked that they were what kept her going as she wasn't eating much, either. She closely guarded them to ensure they didn't run out.
Gene died, and while I was not there in person, Wendy tells me that I was certainly there in spirit and I feel I was, too. And that's something that I value about the experience of cooking and eating: sharing is as much a part of the experience as the actual chopping or chewing. By sharing a recipe, a flavour, a technique, you can share so much more, even across continents, becoming part of the interwoven fabric of humanity.
I feel very fortunate to be woven closely with Gene, Wendy, and Eliana, and this one is definitely for you.
GENE COOKIES
A variation on the more common Mexican Wedding Cakes, Russian Tea Cakes, and Pfeffernusse that often show up among Christmas Cookies.
Note: These are basic proportions - multiply as appropriate.
1 C Butter, chilled but not cold.
1 C Flour
1 C Mixed Nuts, ground - a good mix is Hazelnuts, Pecans, Cashews, Almonds, and Walnuts. Grind them in a food processor until very fine and starting to clump.
1/2 t salt
1/2 C Confectioners Sugar, plus more for dusting.
1/2 C Candied Ginger, chopped - you can buy this in bulk in many stores now and the pieces are about 1/2 in cubes. Avoid the expensive stuff that is sold in little jars.
1 t Cinnamon
1 t Nutmeg
1/2 t Ginger, ground
2 t Vanilla Extract (NOT fake)
2 to 4 t Orange Extract
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Mix all ingredients in a bowl until well incorporated. (You can do this the quick-and-dirty "throw-everything-in-at-once" way or you can do the more formal "sift-all-powdered-ingredients-together-and-then-mix-in-butter-and-then-liquids-and-then-chunky-stuff" method but they end up coming out about the same.) The dough will be crumbly but will hold together when you roll it into a ball in your hands.
3. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on parchment-papered cookie sheets. They expand hardly at all and do not flatten so you can space them close together.
4. Bake for ~15 minutes (every other recipe seems to indicate too short a baking time - they should start to squat a little and turn golden, and have a dry exterior that yields to the touch only a little when hot.)
5. Transfer to cooling rack and dust liberally with more powdered sugar. Some recipes say when hot, some when cool. It's up to you.
Enjoy with a steaming mug of spiritual humanism.
It has been an eventful month since I last posted, but I hope to pick up the pace of cooking and writing about it here shortly. Here's a preview of what's to come:
The great pasta-making adventure!
In which I try to figure out how to make pasta without being an Italian grandmother and without owning a pasta-roller.
Dark-chocolate-honey-rosemary truffles.
In which my first official foray into chocolate-making turns out a little squishy and time-consuming, but rich, smooth, delicious, perplexing, and knee-weakening nonetheless.
Birthday cake.
In which I pay homage to the birth of my lovely occasional photographer with a particularly sumptuous creation, moslty from Orangette, but with a twist of my own.
Soon!
Imagine tart blueberry yogurt, made thick and creamy and then sticky-sweet. But it's still blueberry tart, (I think that's where the lemon helps out a bit.) On the cake it was almost too much. On the graham crackers, however, it makes the afternoon lovely, cozy, and sweet as the cracker crumbles and blueberries dance through your mind. (I swear it's not actually hallucinatory, though it is purple.)
Oh, and rose tea happens to pair particularly well.
