books | Slow Food Fast

Couscous, its own fine self

Posted on November 27, 2010 by DebbieN

When I’d just come back from a year in Israel after college, I read through Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco several times. Her descriptions of the market stalls, the kitchens of the aristocrats, and the very down-to-earth cooks making tricky components like warka leaves for bistilla or rolling and sieving different sizes of couscous from farina and flour fascinated me. They filled in parts of the culture I hadn’t understood in the Moroccan Jewish community I’d just left.

Two of the dishes in the book, two only, have I actually made in all the time since. But if you get the right two, two is enough.

I first ate couscous in Ma’alot, up in the north of Israel in the western Galilee. On my first night in the volunteer program, my new roommates brought me to a tiny 4-table restaurant in the town center after a very miserable and cold trudge up to the top of the hill in a January downpour. The restaurant would have been a real hole-in-the-wall anywhere else, and even here it seemed to cater to the few single men who had neither hope nor prospect of a girlfriend, and whose mothers had finally nudged them out the door. Israel’s amenities–grocery stores and the like–are still often a grade or so down in appearance from what we’re used to in the US, and I’d been there half a year already, so I was used to ignoring it and discovering what was good. Still, even 25 years ago, most restaurants in the larger towns were not this dowdy. This was card tables and folding chairs. My heart sank. Where had I come to?

Not 5 minutes after we’d been seated, however, the lady who ran the kitchen fetched us out a huge platter mounded with couscous and chicken legs and vegetables, steaming hot and smelling incredible. The chicken was delicious (everybody sing; I’ve just been subjected to another showing of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother at our in-laws’ over Thanksgiving weekend) but the couscous itself was so light and fine it was like eating hot curried snowflakes. What was it? How do you do that? And in half a year of eating at Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Eating out, Grains, haute cuisine, history, Pasta, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: couscous, Israeli food, Ma'alot, Moroccan cooking, Paula Wolfert, pickling, preserved lemons | Comments Off on Couscous, its own fine self

Going retro for real croissants

Posted on November 23, 2010 by DebbieN

I’m not really a follow-the-recipe-in-the-cookbook kind of person. But I love looking through cookbooks that have interesting techniques. Learning to cook means, for me, being willing to eat your mistakes or half-good attempts and try again with tweaks. It also means playing with your food until it works for you.

So croissants are one of those things I try out again every once in a while, because the dough is really not as much trouble to put together as it sounds. Most of the time is just letting the dough rest in the fridge.

Mostly I keep trying because I’d really like it to work well eventually, as opposed to half-right. It’s something about the baking that’s always giving me trouble–the outside will be hard and the inside will be steamed and still doughy. Or else the things will puff up enormously but will be more like a popover with absolutely no layering inside because the butter layers melted away into the dough during the long rise. Or if I roll them and bake them right away straight out of the fridge they won’t rise at all in the oven and they’ll be tough. Or they’ll be gummy. Or flat tasting. Or even a little bitter.

None of this would be so bad if it were just my own fault for noodling around with a classic. But the last few times I’ve tried to follow Dorie Greenspan’s instructions from Baking with Julia more dutifully than usual, and it just hasn’t worked out right at all. Worse, in fact, than some of my offhand attempts a couple of years ago when I changed nearly everything there was to change, starting with cutting the fat in half and ending with an almond-flour attempt that actually didn’t come out so far off. Except, of course, for the gummy insides.

But last week I stumbled across the elusive two-part The French Chef series of DVDs from…not PBS, which is probably still out of stock, but…my local library. The disks (2 and 3 disks, respectively) are a bit scratched up and tend to halt at awkward moments unless you fast-forward or skip or rewind or whatever tricks I could come up with.

But there was a croissant episode from the late 1960s in black-and-white, just as I remembered the show from when I was 4 or 5 years old. So I watched it, wondering how dated it was, whether the old recipe was anything like the one she lent her cachet to in the mid-1990s with all her guest expert bakers, and what the results would be like. At the time of this early show, she’d been home in the States less than 10 years, had just delivered Mastering the Art of French Cooking a few years before, and was still extremely rigorous about everything. Or was she?

For the croissant show, she discusses different flours, the toughening effect they might have on the dough and how to counteract it with a bit of salad oil or by mixing 2 parts pastry flour to 1 part all-purpose. But then she includes a frozen commercial bread and pizza dough as a possible alternative to making your own yeast dough. Not the tenderest choice, she says, but for someone who doesn’t yet feel at ease making their own, it’s an encouragement to try making croissants at all, and it works all right. She’s astoundingly practical in these early shows even though some aspects of her cooking aren’t (exaggeratedly rich sauces for sole, for example). And I remember that back in those days, you couldn’t get real croissants in American bakeries. If you wanted them, you had to make them at home.

Dorie Greenspan’s modern, supposedly streamlined, layering process calls for cutting the butter into cubes and mixing them into the dough before rolling out, doing six “turns” with three rests in the fridge, cutting, stretching and rolling the croissant triangles in an elaborate way with some extra scrap dough in the middle for shaping, rising them for 2 1/2 – 3 hours, gilding with egg wash and baking at 350 F for about 20 minutes.

Julia’s 1960s version is somewhat different–more aggressive, and probably much closer to classic boulangerie technique. It’s also simpler. She makes a very simple milk-based yeast dough in a bowl with her hand and kneads it a couple of minutes, picking it up and slapping hard on the work surface, all while talking flour grades (you could talk Yankees versus Red Sox if you want–she probably could have too, come to think of it).

She takes a stick of butter and bashes it into a softened flat mess with a big solid rolling pin, then scrapes it up and flattens it into a square and rechills it. She lets the dough rise until double on a heating pad, then chills the dough. Then she takes the butter and the dough out of the fridge, wraps the square of butter in the larger piece of dough and then rolls and folds and turns and chills for a full 2 hours each time, but only for a total of 4 turns–2 sets of 2–before rolling and cutting out the croissants.

She doesn’t put an extra lump of dough in the middle when she rolls the croissants. She doesn’t stretch them a lot. And she does let them rise in a relatively cool room, but only for an hour or hour and a half until just Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, breads, cooking, Desserts, Food TV, haute cuisine, history, Revised recipes | Tagged: baking, Baking with Julia, croissants, Dorie Greenspan, Julia Child, The French Chef | 2 Comments »

No-Furkey!

Posted on November 23, 2010 by DebbieN

In the freezer case at Whole Foods this month you’ll find big boxes announcing Turtle Island’s Tofurky Feast, Field Roast’s Celebration Roast, and VegeUSA’s Vegan Whole Turkey –this last shaped and glazed brown like a large chicken, drumsticks and all. I’m not sure how I feel about this concept–I thought the idea of being vegetarian when you have enough money for a choice was not only not to eat meat, but not to want to be eating meat either.

Not that I’m against decent vegetarian meat substitutes for Thanksgiving or any other time of the year. As someone who’s kept kosher since my college years, and often in places where there was no kosher meat (or I didn’t have the budget for it), tofu or wheat gluten “mock chicken” have made eating in Chinese restaurants a lot more fun, and the good restaurants make their vegetarian dishes as serious and well-balanced as their meat dishes–sometimes better. But they generally don’t try to disguise them this far or process them this much.

Still, to each her own. But $42.99 for the big VegeUSA box at Whole Foods. The box states that it feeds 25 at 2.5 oz/serving, which is probably enough protein but only about half the volume most adults would expect. And it’s kind of expensive for something that looks very much like a well-browned rubber chicken. What’s in it? I scan the nutrition panel and don’t really notice anything but the sodium–everything else is low or moderate, especially for a holiday meal.

But the salt! 450 mg for the “turkey”–double it to 900 mg if 2.5 oz isn’t enough for you and you want seconds. 1400-plus mg for the stuffing–huh? a whole day’s worth of sodium for one serving of stuffing? Is it that bad for conventional stuffing mix as well? You’d do better to make your own from scratch.

At this point I didn’t even look at the gravy.

Tofurky isn’t much different–650 mg sodium per serving, including stuffing. Field Roast–in the same range too. They also sell separate tubs of frozen “giblet” gravy.

Of course (full disclosure here), I’ve never actually liked gravy, and I doubt it would really go well with anything tofu, not even tofu in a rubber chicken costume.

Why do I think you could do a better and probably a lot cheaper and more festive vegetarian Thanksgiving with some kind of authentic, fresh-made main dish? Because very clearly you could. Do you want it to taste good? Or do you just want it to look like an imitation turkey?

Of course, the main thing about these frozen concoctions, even the simple cylindrical “roasts”, is that they look like centerpiece dishes, and there’s really no knocking that desire to serve something impressive and festive and most of all, shareable at Thanksgiving. It’s important. Thanksgiving feasts demand a monument to plenty, and an inedible cornucopia with gourds and Indian corn doesn’t really cut it. Nor does a big pasta salad (although a timbale, as in Big Night…)

Surprisingly–sadly?–enough, very few vegetarian cookbooks, not even the big tomes like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian or Veganomicon, really try for a vegetarian centerpiece dish that looks and feels like an important dish. Mollie Katzen’s title dish from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is about the only intentionally designed centerpiece vegetarian dish I’ve ever seen. A very long time ago I actually was served this thing once at a friend’s house, with very sadly overcooked broccoli stalks stood upright in a flat casserole of brown rice. Oy, is all I can say. Not a moment of pride. Both Katzen’s and my friend’s cooking improved in later years.

None of the currently hot vegetarian cookbooks out there have an index listing for “Thanksgiving”–very telling. A lot of them have portions for 2 or 4 or just one person. Only vegetarian chili and pasta dishes are intended to serve a crowd of any size.

So vegetarian centerpiece dishes deserve some consideration. Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times blog “The Well” has been edging around this topic for a week or so, but I don’t feel she’s really gotten to the heart of the matter–neither has anyone else. Perhaps it’s because she’s not thinking like a vegetarian?

What makes a dish a centerpiece dish? Think about the turkey, then, or a whole salmon, or a rack of lamb or the like. It’s big. It’s unified–one big item before you cut into it for serving. It’s elegant and impressive. It’s sliceable. It’s savory enough to draw people into the dining room with a sigh of Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition, Odd food, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: bistilla, Field Roast, meat substitutes, stuffed cabbage, Tofurky, vegan turkey, vegetarian centerpiece dishes, vegetarian cooking, vegetarian Thanksgiving, VegeUSA, Wellington | Comments Off on No-Furkey!

Somewhat Scary Food

Posted on November 1, 2010 by DebbieN

Today’s topic is particularly revolting, because it’s never too late to start considering what lies ahead at the end of this month I mean, tonight–and yes, we’re already late for the door. Yes, buying bags of generically sorta-chocolate Hershey’s and Mars brand mini candies is the accepted, sterile, utterly safe way to go on Halloween. But really, it’s not very interesting. Especially not for kids. And it’s gotten a lot more expensive in the last year, as far as I can tell.

(Though if you’re going that route–or your kid is going out trick-or-treating elsewhere–check out the Buzzle.com comprehensive candy carbs list if you need to know about that kind of thing in detail, or the little rule-of-thumb chart at the bottom of my Carb Counts page. If nothing else, it’ll keep you away from the communal candy dish at work.)

When I was a kid we went out trick-or-treating with the exhortation to touch nothing, TASTE NOTHING, until we got home and my mother could inspect it all for razor blades or dimes or other nasties that might unimaginably (except to my mom; dimes are not something most people will part with these days except for a venti with extra whipped cream and a cherry on top) be stuck in things like apples. It was an annual ritual of paranoia that lent that unnameable something–a hint of danger and excitement–to the otherwise blatantly fake costume horror. Because, of course, we were usually walked strategically to the homes of families our parents knew, just as they walked their kids to ours.

Then there was the time a friend invited me to her church’s haunted house–the activities mostly consisted of blindly sticking our hands in bowls of cold spaghetti or reaching out for something that turned out to be grapes with the skins peeled off. We were getting too old for it, really, and it was more icky than scary. But still. Somehow the innocent days of bobbing for apples and sticking your hand in cold spaghetti have gotten lost in the too-adult fear of sharing germs or getting pneumonia from having to plunge your head into a bowl of cold water.

Kids don’t get to help set up anything but the store-bought decorations anymore, and if they have any say in what treats to hand out, it’s through the universally accepted point-and-whine technique at the supermarket Halloween aisle. Reading the teeny-tiny fine print on the ingredient lists for all those mini candies, spooky and mysterious as the 4-syllable chemical names may be, just doesn’t cut it for scariness or adventure. Nor do the huge blowup animatronic decorations–the creepy hand, the dancing skeleton, the vampire rising from the coffin to a boogie-woogie soundtrack like so many Halloween versions of the Singing Trout–is this Robert Pattinson’s future?

Most kids can’t even make their own toast these days. How are they supposed to cope with creating pickled porcupine quills or tarred hornet brittle?

Fortunately, a number of cookbooks (from before the sterilized-and-wrapped-for-your-protection era) are available from the ether or at your local library with answers to just these sorts of dilemmas. If you have a stove and a freezer and possibly a food processor or electric mixer, you stand a good chance of rescuing your young innocents from the debilitating descent into middle-aged indifference, incapacity and accountancy.

I refer here, first and foremost, to the slim but venomous contents of Roald Dahl’s culinary imagination (and that of his widow, Felicity Dahl, who unearthed these books and made sure they saw light of day). To be absolutely sure I’m doing it right, I’m starting with Volume II, Roald Dahl’s Even More Revolting Recipes (Penguin Putnam, 2001), because Volume I, Revolting Recipes, clearly wasn’t revolting enough. Only the best for my child!

What could such books possibly contain? Roald Dahl’s Even More Revolting Recipes is a fair mix of candies, sweet drinks, desserts and actual non-sweet food–this last is the real surprise. But no vegetables, unfortunately, other than a bit of decorative tomato and some oddly Martian-looking potatoes (I fervently hope they don’t sing).

In keeping with modern ideas about kids and cooking, a number of the recipes call for prefab products (the one for Tongue Rakers, a kind of onion-and-garlic-laced bread shaped like a pitchfork, calls for a “packet” of your favorite pizza dough mix rather than the basic flour-water-yeast-and-salt), and several involve the strategic use of food coloring (Hornets Stewed in Hot Tar, a black-dyed pumpkin- and other-seed brittle) or fluorescent paint Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, kid food, Odd food, unappetizing | Tagged: candy carbs, cookbooks for kids, Even More Revolting Recipes, Halloween, Roald Dahl | Comments Off on Somewhat Scary Food

Spice Mix Rx

Posted on October 28, 2010 by DebbieN

Sunset magazine surprised me this month with a big feature on complex spice mixtures that have found their way into big-name restaurant food in the past few years–panch phoran, garam masala, baharat, za’atar, ras el hanout, quatre épices, Chinese 5-spice and berbere. Sunset tends to focus on California and southwestern US travel, home decor and food styles, so it was good to see something a little more world beat and exciting…right up until I started looking at the recipes.

The opening spread showed glossy pictures of the various whole spices included in generic versions of each mixture, but the author then blithely left all of these spice mixes and their proportions out of the recipe section!

Her reasoning, if I have it right, was that these spice mixes are getting popular enough that you can find them all premade at your local supermarket. Well…not in mine. And I live in an area with a lot of Indian, Arab, Armenian and Chinese neighbors–the only ones I’m missing are French. You can get Chinese 5-spice powder next to the double shelf of soy sauces, and you can usually get a jar of unsalted generic curry powder (which Indians don’t use but North Africans occasionally do) or some Colonel Sharwood’s and Patak’s curry pastes, and occasionally some garam masala in a jar. Who knows how close they are to real, but they’re highly salted and in jars or packets, so not exactly fresh-made.

Online commenters at the Sunset web site say that the recipes the spices are supposed to be used for are good…if you can find the spice mixes in your area, which many of them can’t. Which is why I’ve done yet another longish post…I’ve decided to dig around and post general recipes for most of the spice mixes myself. Some I’ve tried personally, but most I haven’t made at home, yet, so I’ve tried to find reliable and knowledgeable cookbook authors and where I can I crosscheck with another appropriate author’s recipes–these days it’s so easy for restaurant chefs to publish recipes they can barely pronounce and claim expertise without ever having traveled to India or Morocco or Turkey, or only the tourist routes, much less lived in a village and learned to cook a traditional cuisine for any length of time.

My local favorite family-owned Armenian greengrocer’s caters to most of the Silk Road cuisines, from Morocco to Turkmenistan and even further east. The store carries a couple of brands of premixed za’atar and its own (unfortunately salted) curry powder as well as shawarma and seven spice blends, but for me the great value is that it offers bulk pricing–loads cheaper than supermarket spices–for all the whole and ground individual spices in the mixtures that the October Sunset article mentioned. And the informality of buying spices in tubs rather than little jars encourages you to use them more often, experiment a bit, and improve on what you find in all the new Turkish, Middle Eastern, Indian and Moroccan cookbooks that have come out in the past few years.

Storing spices

Freshness counts even with dried spices. One thing I really appreciate about my corner grocer is that their tubs of spices are labeled with packing dates so you know how fresh the spices are–very important especially for preground spices. I heartily wish McCormick’s and all the store brands (Kroger, Inter-American, etc.) would do the same.

From my own experience, coriander seed and green cardamom in particular should both be left whole and ground as needed at home, preferably just before using them. Both seem to lose their oomph in ground form a lot quicker than cumin or caraway or fennel, at least in my kitchen. Perhaps it’s just that Pasadena is so dry most of the year, but ground coriander can go lifeless and flavorless in a matter of a week or less here, its delicate volatile oils evaporate so quickly, and what a waste.

If you’re going to make your own blends, cloves and allspice are also better left whole, assuming you can get them at a good price, and so is nutmeg–get a ~ $4 lemon zester to grate it with and keep it in a bag with your whole nutmegs. Then just watch your knuckles.

Powdered cinnamon and ginger are usually fine for a longer time, but of course they will weaken a bit. Always, always use whole black peppercorns, not the preground rubber-flavored stuff. And hot pepper flakes? I never realized how much flavor they lose over time–not just heat but the aromatic green edge as well, so don’t buy them in huge cafeteria-scale quantities (live and learn from my mistaken enthusiasm over a $3 quart-sized container…) or your hot mixtures and salsas will be disappointingly bland.

Even some whole spices are vulnerable to flavor loss–or rancidity. Nigella seed, which tends to get used only in small pinches because its flavor expands and permeates stews and curries as they rest overnight in the fridge, should definitely be stored double-wrapped in the freezer so it doesn’t lose all its taste before you can use it up. Poppy and sesame seeds should always be stored well-sealed in the freezer–so should most raw nuts, and so should washed fresh herbs if you can’t use them up within a few days.

Anyway, here are some tested versions of the spice mixes mentioned in the Sunset article. All of them are adapted from their source cookbooks (i.e., the proportions and ingredients are the same, but with my comments, mostly in italics).

The first two are from Manju Malhi’s India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food, which includes directions on how to use these mixtures and in what approximate amounts for a dish of 4 servings.

Panch Phoran (adapted from Manju Malhi)

Bengali 5-spice mix; good for lentil, bean or potato dishes, samosas, etc.

Malhi’s recipe says this makes 7 teaspoons of spice mix. I’m not sure how she counts that, given that there’s a total of 5 teaspoons of individual dry whole spices in the recipe. However, she says 1 teaspoon of the mix is enough to use in a recipe for 4 servings, and the whole or ground spices can be mixed to a wet paste with 2 teaspoons of water, vinegar or yogurt per teaspoon of spice mix, then tempered in hot oil or ghee (clarified butter) before adding the other ingredients in the dish.

1 t. each (or if more, then even proportions of all five spices):

fenugreek seeds
cumin seeds
fennel seeds
brown mustard seeds
nigella seeds

Mix the seeds together and store in an airtight container in a dark place for up to 6 months.

Alternate version: Raghavan Iyer’s 660 Curries specifies two parts fennel seed per one part each of the other spices. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, haute cuisine, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: 5-spice, 660 Curries, baharat, berbere, Claudia Roden, garam masala, Greg Malouf, Indian cooking, Manju Malhi, Moroccan cooking, panch phoran, Paula Wolfert, quatre epices, Raghavan Iyer, ras el hanout, Ruth Reichl, spice blends, spice mixes, Sunset Magazine, The Gourmet Cookbook, Turquoise, za'atar | Comments Off on Spice Mix Rx

Roden, with Reservations

Posted on September 7, 2010 by DebbieN

This week, after reading through Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Alfred Knopf, 2000) I decided it was so good I wanted to go ahead and buy a copy for myself. Another cookbook? These days I start my searches at the library rather than the bookstore, not only to save money but to save space for the ones I really want to use a lot.

Claudia Roden, "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" at Amazon.com

Claudia Roden, "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food", Alfred Knopf, 2000

The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Alfred Knopf, 2000)

Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food was a big hit in 2000, a major revision and expansion of her first cookbook from 1968. She included new instructions for food processors and quicker and lower-fat cooking methods, and reintroduced the original authentic spices and other specialty ingredients for many dishes where she’d had to list Western substitutes 30 years earlier.

So why review it again? Ten years later, I find myself doing a thing I almost never do: reading the introduction. It’s an amazing piece of writing, and a full chapter in length. Roden combines scholarship and a look back at the history of the Middle East–politically and gastronomically–with personal notes about her Jewish family’s life in pre-revolutionary Cairo and their eventual exile to Europe. She also looks back at the younger, exuberantly naïve 20-something self who sought out authentic recipes for the original edition from relatives, restaurant chefs, farmers’ market vendors, street hawkers and private cooks of all kinds. In honor of her younger spirit, she decides to leave some of the earlier, more emotional writing in the revised edition rather than smoothing it all out.

But as a mature scholar, she delves into cooking techniques for the major classes of Arab, Turkish, Persian and North African food, the medieval sources of dishes that haven’t changed very much in centuries, and the trade routes and Crusader voyages that brought so much of Middle Eastern cooking back to Europe to be integrated into what we think of today as French.

The book itself is beautiful, with good photos but not that distracting excess of tabloid-sized food-glam that dominates today’s coffee table cookbooks. This is a working cookbook, sized right for the kitchen counter, with emphasis on the recipes.

Even though the basics are familiar by now, Roden includes enticing variations I haven’t run across elsewhere, and she makes them accessible and reader-friendly. While authentic technique and ingredients matter to her, Roden focuses on what counts most about these dishes to the people who make and eat them, and on the social experience of hosting guests and eating happily.

The recipes are generally simple, without huge laundry lists of ingredients or elaborate descriptions of technique. Roden groups similar recipes like fillo appetizers or eggplant salads from different countries so you can see how each has migrated, and for dishes with a wide following (fava purée, grilled meat skewers) she provides regional and national variations on flavorings or dressings at the end of each recipe, where they’re most useful. Roden’s writing really comes through here as she explains the differences in a way that makes me want to run, not walk, to my fridge and then to my greengrocer so I can try out something new.

Folk tales, poems and memories of her childhood in Egypt appear between recipes and three insert sections of color photos are supplemented with black-and-white drawings for specific techniques such as folding fillo triangles. Even though I’ve done more than my share of folding fillo and may not be the right person to judge, I think in comparison with what I’ve seen elsewhere the drawings in Roden’s book manage to look very doable and kind of adventurous rather than intimidating for someone new to these techniques. My only complaint, really, is that she doesn’t use a microwave for any of it.

So I was looking forward to seeing the same generosity of spirit and depth of connection in her encyclopedic-rated The Book of Jewish Food, which came out in 1996, four years earlier. Rosh Hashanah is nearly upon us (Wednesday evening already) and I was eager to see what she had made of her ambition to cover Jewish food styles world-wide.

Roden was born into a wealthy Syrian Jewish merchant family in Cairo. They had servants, cooks, and cordial relations with local shopkeepers, spoke French and Italian in preference to Arabic, were “modern” (secular and didn’t keep kosher) and enjoyed a broad and lavish culinary repertoire. It did not all suddenly come to an end when Nasser threw the Jews out of Egypt in the 1950s–the family maintained its ties to other Egyptian and ex-Ottoman Jewish exiles in Paris and London, and they seemed to thrive.

Eventually, Roden shocked her family by marrying an Ashkenazi Jew, because her well-heeled family had always considered Ashkenazim beneath contempt–provincial, downtrodden, poor, too religious, pathetically lousy cooks, with women who were too loose or who–gasp–worked, and otherwise socially inferior. And that’s where things start to unravel in this book. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, history | Tagged: Claudia Roden, Jewish cookbooks, Middle Eastern food, Moroccan cooking, Sephardic recipes | Comments Off on Roden, with Reservations

Lightening Up Apple and Almond Cake

Posted on September 5, 2010 by DebbieN

Since Nigella Lawson’s Feast came out a few years ago, her “Damp Apple and Almond Cake” has been praised by food bloggers, morning tv show hosts, and just about everyone else who’s tried making it.

Most of her dessert recipes are not for the health-conscious. In the past 10 years, most of her food has become if anything a lot heavier and gooeyer and richer, migrating from Thai and Vietnamese summer salads with sharp clean flavors to avocado AND bleu cheese AND sour cream WITH taco chips, or chocolate bar AND non-natural peanut butter AND whipping cream AND caramel as an ice cream sauce. Or chicken pot pie WITH a lot of bacon in it and no vegetables AND a store-bought puff pastry top (a whole sheet goes for a mere two servings). I can’t think how far she’ll take things next.

But the “Damp Apple and Almond Cake”–despite the less appetizing connotation of “damp” in American speech (I think “moist” would probably be the equivalent word over here, or at least I hope so. It would at least conjure up fewer images of seeping rot under the stairwell)……….. okay, where was I with all the parentheses? Oh yeah.

What people have to say about this recipe is that it works as written, and it’s really good. No mean thing these days.

So okay. I have almond meal, I have apples, I have a fresh lemon, and I have some decent vanilla for a change (the Kroger stuff I bought for my daughter’s birthday cake back in mid-summer was shamefully weak). And I have eggs. That’s basically what you need to make this cake.

But it’s blazingly, disgustingly hot, 100+ Fahrenheit, yet again in Pasadena. And–AND–I look at the original recipe (serves 10-12) and realize that while the almond meal is a good move–much, much lower carb than flour–the recipe requires 8 eggs. Eight. E-I-G-H-T. Which puts it in the European spongecake class of baking. My grandmother made a similar thing, only with flour and chocolate chips, and probably 12 eggs, for a huge wheel of a cake.

And the directions call for simmering the apples down to a thick applesauce, then cooling and blending in the food processor with a huge, heavy amount of almond meal and a fairly high amount of sugar and all the eggs, and it’s a “dense” cake. No wonder.

Three and a quarter cups of almond meal. Dense. And almond meal tends to require a little less sugar than flour-based cakes to register sweetness–maybe that could be cut down too?

Those eggs–do you need all the yolks? Do you need all eight eggs for that matter? And while you’re at it, why not take advantage of what eggs do best, since it’s a European-style cake with no other leavening. Separate them and whip the whites to fold into the batter.

So here was what I came up with on a hot September pre-Rosh Hashanah afternoon.

Lightened-Up Apple Almond Cake

3 fairly big Granny Smith apples, peeled and sliced or chopped (~23-25g carb each or ~75)
2 c. almond meal (see Trader Joe’s for a decent-priced 1-lb bag at about $4) (20 g carb/cup or 40)
2 T. flour or matzah cake meal (~10 g carb)
1 c. sugar (200 g carb)
3 yolks
4 egg whites
1 t. vanilla
juice of a lemon
1-2 oz. orange juice (optional) (~3-5 g carb)
grated rind of half a lemon
grating of nutmeg

Put the apple slices or chunks on a microwaveable dinner plate and microwave on HIGH 3 minutes.
Blend the almond meal and sugar in a food processor until very fine (whiz several seconds, good enough)
Add the yolks, apples, flour or matzah meal, lemon juice and rind, vanilla, orange juice and nutmeg and blend well.
Whip the egg whites separately in another bowl large enough to pour in the batter from the food processor. When the whites are stiff (can be done easily enough by hand in only a minute or so with a big balloon whisk, just tip up the bowl and hold it at a slight angle in your other hand, or else use your method of choice), start pouring the batter into them a little at a time and folding with the whisk. I know this is backward from the usual method but it works out ok and saves a third bowl…
Pour into a deep-sided microwaveable casserole or a deep dish pyrex pie plate (chancy, may spill over a bit).
Set a microwaveable soupbowl upside down in the middle of the microwave turntable. Center the casserole or pie plate on top, and microwave uncovered 7 minutes on 70% (for an 1150ishW oven). Stop if it seems to be overflowing and wait a minute before continuing. When it stops rising and settles back in the plate, you might cover with a dinner plate and microwave another minute or so on HIGH until you’re convinced it’s cooked all the way down to the bottom.

Cool and slice–the total carb count is about 325 for the recipe, so 1/16th should be about 20 grams, 1/10th, if you can eat that much, is 33 grams, etc. It’s light, soft, substantial and rich-tasting, and 1/16th slice was pretty good tonight for all the testers at my table. And it only took 4 eggs and a cup and a quarter less almond meal. And about half the sugar of Nigella’s recipe but all the apples.

Lightened-up microwave version of Nigella Lawson's "Damp Apple and Almond Cake"

Not a looker in the microwaved version here, which doesn't brown the top, and I didn't decorate with slivered almonds or lemon slices, but the flavor's so intense and tangy that the 1/16th wedges here were perfect for a quick light dessert.

Verdict—Really, really good, and when I do it again maybe I’ll have cool enough weather to try out the oven so it’ll brown as well (about 25 minutes). I would probably go for a deep-sided casserole or even a soufflé dish. Then I could top it with slivered almonds as in Lawson’s version, and perhaps capture a little more of the rise from the egg whites without it collapsing down afterward.

In a regular oven it’s best to oil the pan and dust it with a little almond meal, but I didn’t have to for the microwave–probably for the same reasons it doesn’t brown on top, it also doesn’t cause a lot of sticking on the bottom.

Another change I might make next time would be to add just a couple of drops of almond extract–not enough to overpower the lemon and apples, just enough to play up the almond meal. This time around when I reached for the little bottle I discovered it was bone dry–hence the nutmeg, which actually worked out quite well.

But all in all, and despite the fact that it LOOKS like a typical Passover choke cake, it really isn’t. It’s very moist and even this way the flavor was wonderful and satisfying. So b’te’avon (bon appétit in Hebrew) and kudos to Nigella Lawson, and maybe this will encourage you (and her) to lighten up a little.

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Food Blogs, Food TV, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: almond torte, almonds, damp apple and almond cake, Desserts, low cholesterol desserts, low-carb desserts, microwaving cakes, Nigella Lawson, Passover recipes, Rosh Hashanah | Comments Off on Lightening Up Apple and Almond Cake

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Posted on August 22, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve just uploaded a new page (see the top menu tabs) with a couple of tables of the most useful rules of thumb I’ve found for carb counting. Since my daughter became a Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetic back in February, we’ve both had to become pretty familiar with the amounts of carbohydrate in a given amount of different foods.

Although the American Dietetic Association’s “Choose Your Foods” carb count guide for diabetics is pretty helpful (and pretty inexpensive, about $3 per copy if you order from them direct on www.eatright.org), it’s written from the perspective of the eater, not the cook.

So (as the cook in the family) I’ve worked out the approximate ratios of carb grams per total weight of some common foods I serve routinely. Rice and beans are easy enough to remember. But when I want to know how much of a given potato my daughter can eat as one carb serving (15 g), it helps to be able to know that a regular potato is about 1/6th carbohydrate. Then all I have to do is weigh it on the food scale in grams and divide by 6.

The 2/3 carb ratio for moderately sweet baked goods like pie, scones, cookies and muffins is also pretty helpful if we’re home and can weigh a portion for my daughter. Sweets are one of the hardest things to guess right consistently by eye, even when you’ve made them yourself. If there’s a nutrition label, by all means go with it; if not, weighing a portion and figuring 2/3 has been a pretty good approximation so far.

Ice cream is its own thing–again, hard to figure. Dreyer’s 1/2-the-Fat is our standard home brand, and hovers around 15-18 grams per half-cup (small scoop). But Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors are all over the map–when you go in for a cone, you really need to ask them to look it up for whatever size scoop, then figure the cone separately. A junior scoop in a cake cone for pistachio almond turned out to be something like 25 grams, plus 4 grams for the cone. Almost double what a plain scoop would have been at home.

Over-the-top caramel-syrup-fudge-frosting types of confections are a little out of my league, closer to candy bars than cakes, and would probably be more like 80-90% carb by weight (or mass, if you’re being excessively metric about the properties of grams). I haven’t listed them because they’re so laden it’s hard to think of serving them very often, but I do have a basic rule-of-thumb candy list at the bottom of the carb counts page (saving the best for last) and a link to a much better, more comprehensive one so kids don’t have to feel completely shut out at Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Or birthdays.

I also have a short (for me) bit of hard-won advice on how to strategize with a (school-aged) diabetic kid before they have to face candy-prone situations where their friends are free to eat right away and they aren’t. Good for braces-wearers too…actually maybe we should all take the hint.

In any case, I hope you find this new page helpful whether you’ve got diabetics in the family or you just want to know what you’re eating.

Let me know what you think!

Filed under: baking, Beans and legumes, books, breads, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, fruits, kid food, nutrition, Pasta | Tagged: carb counts, carb ratios, carbs in baked goods, carbs in candy, childhood nutrition, dietary guidelines, juvenile diabetes | Comments Off on New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Italian Impromptu: Not Bad for an Actor (and Son)

Posted on July 27, 2010 by DebbieN

Don’t Fill Up On the Antipasto by Tony and Marc Danza (Scribners, 2008)

I wasn’t expecting very much from a celebrity cookbook–mostly schmooze, a few loosely slapped-together recipes. I wasn’t actually wrong, but aside from a little kitsch here and there, and a dopey, gushy foreword from Jackie Collins, Don’t Fill Up On the Antipasto is a better-written, more down-to-earth read than you might think. Instead of a prolonged bout of “Remember me? I used to play —- on Taxi!” drivel (though there is a little; practically obligatory in a celeb cookbook), it’s mostly a Brooklyn childhood memoir with old-style Italian recipes–a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s, but a version that didn’t make it on-air in all those 1970s sitcoms.

Although the book is co-written with his son, with a few asides to Marc for his “modern” Southern California-style recipes and confirmation of one or another family anecdote (and repeat photos and mentions of the all-important toddler grandson), most of the stories and recipes are Tony’s.

Danza’s stories of his childhood in Brooklyn are the real draw for this book. He grew up in the postwar generation, at a time when children were given a lot less privilege and a lot less stuff, spanked a lot more often (and not just by their parents–any family member had authorization), and expected to be much more self-reliant at younger ages than they are today. The uncles and aunts and grandparents all lived close enough to see each other every week, and their personalities (and recipes, and foibles, and jokes, and tempers) feature prominently in the book. The result is a look back into a simpler, more direct, and often warmer way of family life than the one most of us recognize today, even if we’re old enough to remember it.

Danza was not born into a down-and-out family, certainly not for the times right after World War II. His parents were working-class, first-generation American, and when his father came home from the war with a Bronze Star, he went to work as a city garbageman. Unlike today, it was a respected job that could support a family. Instead of jeering, the neighborhood kids envied Danza for getting to ride down the street in his father’s truck. The family sent him to a Catholic parochial school and expected him to work hard at his studies, stay out of fights and gangs, and go into a profession.

It was the typical pattern for immigrant families almost anywhere in New York at that time and very close to my parents’ childhoods. Right down to the Army photo of Danza’s father, which suddenly appeared in the middle of the book and startled the hell out of me. Except for the face and the specifics of his uniform, Matty Iadanza’s official Army portrait with its distinctive Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, frugality, history, Pasta, sauces and condiments | Tagged: Brooklyn, celebrity cookbooks, Italian food, Italian-American cooking, lasagna, Neapolitan food, Pasta, postwar generation, Sicilian food, Tony Danza | Comments Off on Italian Impromptu: Not Bad for an Actor (and Son)

Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

Posted on July 20, 2010 by DebbieN

Today’s (and last week’s, and the week before’s) topic is STILL the lentils-and-prunes challenge.

Before I get on a roll about lentils, I should mention that the first Prunes and Lentils post was my 101st post for this blog. I don’t know if we should celebrate, but why not. Woo-hoo! Good enough. Consider it celebrated.

It’s taken me a full two weeks to put up this post because this is where the rubber meets the road, or at least where the lentils meet the prunes. The moment of courage. And I don’t know whether it’s going to be great or whether people will go back to wondering why anyone ever let me in a kitchen. (That’s easy: because no one wanted to do the cooking themselves.)

Ordinary brownish-green lentils are kind of a workhorse ingredient in European, Mediterranean and Near East cooking (also in Indian and African cooking, though red lentils are better known). Unlike restaurant chain buffalo wings, lentils are actually rich in protein and iron, and they aren’t surreptitiously pumped up with sugar, salt and fat to entice you to overeat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is not likely to sue, because a bag of lentils doesn’t come with a deceptive toy to con the kids. (See? we can be topical and up on the hot news of the moment even while discussing an arcane Slow Food subject like lentils).

And lentils are CHEAP–the whole point of starting this Prunes and Lentils challenge in the first place. Somehow even the big supermarkets that push shoppers to the middle aisles to buy boxes instead of actual food always carry dried store-brand lentils over near the bags of rice and split peas and kidney beans and such. It’s one of the few middle-aisle purchases that are worth it.

I don’t know if lentils have even kept up with inflation over the past 20 or 30 years, because they’re always something like $1-$1.25 for a one-pound bag. Same as when I was a student on a $20 a week food budget. And a pound makes 5-10 meals, not just one serving.

Actually, the recent agroeconomics of growing lentils in the US makes unexpectedly interesting behind-the-scenes reading for policy wonks like me. Lots of people are now clamoring for the US to change the crop subsidy laws to encourage more nutritious crops than corn, soy and wheat. Lentils are still a minor crop, but apparently the USDA introduced new marketing loans and other incentives for lentils, peas and chickpeas under the Farm Act revisions of 2002 and 2008, and exports for pulses have risen by about 45% in the last few years to India, Spain, the Philippines, and other major lentil and chickpea consumers. The rest are bought for animal feed and international food aid programs, especially those for sub-Saharan African nations.

That’s because lentils still fly under the radar here. The average annual consumption in the US is still just about a pound per person. Up from 0.8 pounds in 2008, so a 20 percent jump, but still. One pound per person in a year. If my continuation of the Prunes and Lentils Challenge posts has no other benefit to humankind, I would hope that it inspires you to buy and cook–and eat–at least one additional pound per year in a creative and satisfying way. Pass it on–Two pounds per year? At a cost of $2-3 total? We can but dream…

Of course, now that bean cuisine has become a point of pride for Meatless Mondays and other trends in eating green (if not eating local), lentils don’t just come dry in bags or bulk anymore–not glamorous enough, perhaps? If you’re upscale, you can get them precooked in little cans at your Whole Foods or steamed in vacuum packs at your Trader Joe’s, but those chic packages are much, much more expensive per meal and don’t taste as good. I frankly wouldn’t bother unless you’re on the road or camping or something and don’t have a kitchen at your disposal. Dried lentils don’t need a presoak to cook up within about half an hour even on the stove top, and they’re so easy to cook in a microwave (and avoid the watched-pot-never-boils problem) that the extra expense and time trying to find the precooked ones is usually not worth it. (And what about all that extra plastic and metal packaging? Be righteous–buy ’em dry.)

If you cook up a whole pound bag at once, you can use it throughout the week or (better, for a lot of people) freeze half of it with a bit of cooking liquid in a microwave container and save yourself some time the next time you want a batch. I keep thinking of that old “Cook Once, Eat Twice–That’s Italian!” lasagna ad (can’t remember if it was for noodles or sauce) from the 1970s. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but still a good idea for when you’re too tired to cook for real.

In this post, I’ve got 3 or 4 main “strategic” ideas for the prunes and lentils challenge, along with more recipes and variations than should really go in a single post (and THREE more prune accompaniments as well), so just roll your eyes, bear with me, and if you decide never to let me in your kitchen, I’ll understand (plus I’ll never have to do the dishes–win/win!).

So first things first–gotta cook that bag of lentils (and recycle the bag). This recipe is probably longer than the actual process but it contains valuable Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: A Fistful of Lentils, beans and pulses, Chicken Marbella, cigares, crop subsidies, Gregory Malouf, Italian food, Italian sausage, Lebanese food, lentils, Meatless Mondays, microwave cooking, Microwave tricks, prunes, rice, samosas, shawarma, stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, Turkish food, Turquoise, USDA, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

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Couscous, its own fine self

Going retro for real croissants

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Spice Mix Rx

Roden, with Reservations

Lightening Up Apple and Almond Cake

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Italian Impromptu: Not Bad for an Actor (and Son)

Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

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