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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 :-)
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.
