SOLC 15: More Cooking

Today I followed a recipe. It’s a very good recipe. I had made this dish before. Cod & Harissa Tagine with Olives and Almonds. I found it in a magazine called Milk Street, published by the man who 

started America’s Test Kitchen and put out “Cooks Illustrated,” a magazine in which articles described how the recipe testers tried different methods, which ones worked and which ones didn’t. I still follow their method for roasting vegetables. 

       The cod tagine is Moroccan, and the harissa is a somewhat spicy red-chili paste. The harissa is cooked with garlic and thinly sliced fennel, while the cod fillets marinate in a harissa-turmeric-olive oil paste. When the fennel is soft, the fish goes into the pot with just a bit of water to scrape any browned bits in the bottom of the pan. The fish cooks pretty quickly, just giving me time to zest a lemon and squeeze out its juice. When the fish is done, stir in the zest and juice.

            It’s to be served with toasted almond slices and chopped stuffed green olives. I do add the almonds (often not toasted), but I’ve never liked stuffed green olives so leave them out. I should have taken a photo of my plate, but here are my leftovers. 

           (Sorry for the amateurish layout. Blogger is very poor at this.)

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 15 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLSC 10: To Recipe or Not

            About 25 years ago, I wrote a short essay for a friend’s small magazine about my relationship with cooking and recipes. Then, in my mid-50s, I was trying to find my way from relying on recipes, as my mother did, to thinking about the ingredients I had and what I could do with them on my own, as my aunt (my mother’s younger sister) did.

            Finally, well into my 70s, I think I’ve finally made it. Today, I had a small piece of leftover

chicken in the refrigerator and about a cup of orzo and a quart of chicken stock in the pantry. What could I do with that? Chicken soup!

            I only needed to get a potato and carrots at the supermarket. In the kitchen, I put the stock on and brought to a boil while I cut up the potato and peeled and cut up two carrots. Everything when into the boiling stock and cooked, while I cut up the chicken. The chicken went into the pot when the potato and carrots were softened, just to heat up. Done in less than 30 minutes—and 2-3 servings.

            The only thing missing was a thyme sprig from the packet in the fridge. Next time!

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 10 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

My Life in 50 Objects, 8: Enameled Cast Iron from Vermont

This oval Dutch oven (or cocotte) looks like Le Creuset, but it is literally from a Dutch company, DRU. This pot belonged to my Aunt Nita, and I took it from her kitchen after she died in 1997. I wonder whether she brought it from their seven-year sojourn in Paris in the 1950s, or one of her many trips back over the years. I don't remember any particular dish she made in this pot, just that it was lovely and substantial, and it fits my kitchen's color scheme.

            The internet tells me the company was founded in 1754 as a blast furnace making cast iron products, though it now concentrates on gas-fired heating and wood-burning ovens. Its enameled cast-iron cookware is now sold as “mid-century vintage” at websites like Olde Kitchen and etsy; it’s much cheaper than Le Creuset, but seems just as sturdy and long-lasting.

            I don’t use this pot often because its shape seems most suited to roasting a chicken, and its surface area isn’t as big as a round Dutch oven would be—I think. But I did use it last night to sauté four chicken thighs, then sautéed onions and mushrooms, and braised it all together—really delicious. And I have a deep round Le Creuset covered skillet, which is my kitchen workhorse. I think I should start using the DRU pot more often.

SOL29: Polenta Problems

            I love corn on the cob. I love cornbread. And I like polenta when I eat it in restaurants. However, my attempts to make it at home have been been very successful.

        First, there’s that stirring, stirring, stirring, as the cornmeal thickens in broth, much like risotto. So when I saw a recipe that said that long stirring process could be skipped, I thought it was time to try again.

            The idea was to bring broth to a boil, add the cornmeal slowly, and stir until it begins to thicken. Then pour into a greased baking pan, cover with foil, and bake for 40 minutes.

            I wasn’t sure I’d gotten all the lumps out in the stirring process, but popped the pan into the oven. Forty minutes later, when I removed the pan, it had sort of separated, with a thicker layer on the bottom, but a still liquid layer on top. Clearly, this wasn’t working out as expected. At least I need a better method for adding the cornmeal to the liquid.

            Fortunately, I had some leftover rice that I could use as a base for the vegetable topping I’d made (leek, onion, asparagus). About half an hour after eating, I saw that the polenta had solidified somewhat, but didn’t have much flavor. Alas, I sent it into the trash.

            Have you made polenta? Do you have any tricks?  

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

#AtoZChallenge: F Is for Food

(I haven’t had any Internet connection for the past few days, so I’m filing F, G, H, I, J, and whatever we’re up to, as fast as I can. Gotta keep up.)

            I love food. Jack, my late husband, loved food. I love to eat. Jack loved to eat. I love to cook. Jack liked to cook—I don’t know if he loved to cook. I love to try new dishes; last week I made a vegetarian chili verde for my writers’ group and had no idea how it would turn out until it was almost done and I tasted it. Jack had his specialties—broiled chicken, black bean soup, tuna casserole, spaghetti sauce, brownies—which were always very good. I often thought of writing down his marinade for the broiled chicken, but never did—and now it’s too late. But it wasn’t really a recipe anyway: juice, olive oil, wine, dried herbs or spices, whatever was handy or he felt like.

            I’m a recipe person myself, wrote about this years ago for a tiny magazine, And/Then. Called “Recipes for Life,” it contrasted two ways of approaching cooking: following a recipe, or sensing what went well together and winging it. At that time in my life I followed recipes. I needed to know quantities: how much juice, how much wine, how much oregano and what if I’d run out of oregano? Then, I was hoping to be more adventurous in cooking, and in life as well. Now I use recipes as guidelines, looking at 1, 2, 3, what ingredients do I know I like, what combos taste interesting in my mind.

          That vegetarian chili verde? I had a chili verde a friend had made, but it was full of pork. One of the writers in my group is vegetarian, so I had to improvise. (I used the basic pork version but substituted beans for meat and added bell peppers and about half as much green chilis.)

            I love to cook, but not every day. Even the few years I was a full-time parent, I didn’t cook every day. We ate out a fair amount, and our school-age daughter had her favorite restaurants: Symposium (Greek), 107 West (new American), Japonica (she liked sushi at age 8). When Jack was the full-time parent, he’d go to the farmers market late in the day and buy a quantity of tomatoes and sale price. Then he’d make a quantity of tomato sauce and freeze most of it. We even had a free-standing freezer, which felt very suburban in our New York apartment.

            My mother didn’t teach me to cook, though she was a pretty good cook. She didn’t have enough patience, she said. She’d been a home-ec major in college (a compromise with her immigrant parents; she wanted to major in biology) and relished modern technology: frozen vegetables, TV dinners. We did have a garden for a few years when I was a child, and I learned the luscious taste of sun-warmed tomatoes and crisp peas right out of the pod. I also read my mother’s cookbooks from college and started clipping my own recipes as a teenager. Perhaps the first one was a tuna melt from Seventeen.

            And I wanted my daughter to learn the fun of mixing ingredients into some new concoction that tasted good. So when she was 4, 5, 6 and had to stand on a stool to reach the counter, I’d have her take a turn mixing the cake batter and frosting, rolling out the pizza dough, filling the dumplings. When she was a teenager, she wanted to make her own meals and start experimenting. I suggested she master some recipes first and improvise once she’d learned the basics. Now in her 40s, she still cooks, makes leftovers to take for lunch, and has found a partner who likes to cook as much as she does.

SOL Tuesday: A Blast of Memories

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Putting away my new carry-on suitcase after my trip to Paris, I decided it was time to get rid of the small purple wheelie with the handle too short to be comfortable. As I pulled it out of the closet, I noticed there was stuff in it. The “stuff” turned out to be relics of my mother’s, her sister’s, and my sister’s after they died.

     There’s a Google map to Stratford, Connecticut, where several of the family stayed when we went to my sister’s memorial in Westport. Stratford was close to her home, and family and friends gathered there afterwards. There’s a printout of two kinds of meditation, with the hand and with light; my sister became an interfaith minister late in life and loved meditation. I must have thought I might try these, though I am not much of a meditation-person. There’s a letter my mother wrote to me in 1981, about a book of China photos, a Russell Baker column annoyed about the New York Times style book accepting pinyin spelling (stemming from my mother’s Sinophilia), and a hint to my parents’ divorce two years later, only clear to me now. There’s the program for my aunt’s memorial, as well as cards from her friends to my mother, along with two notes my aunt, who lived in Vermont, had written to my mother, revealing her interests in ballet (she’d seen Giselle in Montreal), cooking (she’d taken a class in low-cal French cookery at the nearby New England Culinary Institute), movies (she’d seen Babette’s Feast), and politics (it was right after the 1988 presidential primary).

     There’s a copy of my aunt’s will, now almost 20 years old. I know why my mother would have kept it (she kept almost everything), but why did I? Did I want her list of charitable bequests?

     There’s a journal my sister started two years after her third breast cancer diagnosis, which she titled “Morning Pages”; she kept it for five days. I know now that she had two more years, but she didn’t know. She writes about her bodily feelings, but also her spirit as different from her body, prayer, positive thinking, visualization – all areas I feel little connection with, but find interesting to read. I think I’ll see if her older daughter wants the notebook.

     Lots of photographs, family and otherwise. some I have, but others are of people I don’t know and don’t know why I took them. A clipping from the Miami News, December 19, 1975, is about my mother's talk at a local YWCA about her recent trip to China, one of the early visits organized by the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.

      Finally, the stash included recipes, two from my aunt, her Vermont baked beans and a Spicy Rice & Nuts from Montpelier’s Hunger Mountain Co-op. I can barely deciper my aunt’s handwriting for the baked beans, but the Spicy Rice & Nuts looks like something I will try out for my vegetarian days. There are also two recipes in my handwriting that I must have sent to my mother, one for Ghivetch, a Balkan vegetable stew, which I remember making, and another for poached bass with sweet peppers. I made this dish for dinner tonight, though I had to use cod since no striped bass was available. It was delicious. 

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Slice of Life, #20

            When we first moved to our neighborhood years ago, there was a hole-in-the-wall eatery called Amir’s Falafel, run by a Lebanese family. Over the years it expanded into a little restaurant, but it was still mostly a take-out place. The falafel was terrific, and you could get a platter of falafel, hummus, and baba ghanhoush, with a small salad and of course pita.

            One of my favorite dishes was moujadarah: lentils on rice, topped with caramelized onions. The onions were the best part. Then new ownership came in, the moujadarah was gone, and even the fattoush salad acquired sour pickles, an unwelcome taste among the brightness of fresh tomato, cucumber, red onion, lettuce, and toasted pita chips.

           

            In one of my other lives I have been a journalism professor. One of my former students, Annia Ciezadlo, went to the Middle East to cover the Iraq war as a free-lance and ended up married to a Lebanese journalist. When they came back to the U.S., she wrote a book, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, complete with recipes. Heaven. The book has a recipe for Mjadara Hamra (transliterations can vary so widely), and I finally tried it tonight.

            Well, I adapted it quite a bit. What I really wanted to do was reproduce Amir’s dish, and Annia’s was somewhat different. First of all, Amir’s had rice, Annia’s had bulghur. Secondly, Amir’s onions were sliced, and Annia’s were finely diced. Finally, one of Annia’s instructions seemed dangerous to me: pour two cups of cold water on onions that have been cooking in one cup of oil? Just thinking about the splatters scares me.

            So I improvised. Cooked a cup of lentils in two and a half cups of water, with Annia’s spices (ground coriander, cumin, white pepper, cinnamon, ground cloves instead of allspice, cayenne instead of Aleppo pepper). Cooked a cup of rice. Sliced up two good-sized onions thin, heated maybe half a cup of olive oil and canola oil, and when it was hot, added the onions. Stirred frequently to keep some slices from getting too brown while others were still softening. Annia’s signal for when the onion is done was when they smell “bacony, almost burnt,” so I waited for that moment – and did not add any cold water. Mixed everything together, and had my Lebanese dinner. (I know, I should have taken a picture, but I haven't been Instragramed yet.)

P.S. It's the first day of spring and it snowed... what a bummer.