frugality | Slow Food Fast

The Hummus Debate

Posted on July 29, 2010 by DebbieN

Hummus is a highly politicized food these days, a situation most eaters outside Lebanon, and at a guess, most inside as well, consider slightly ridiculous. “Owning” hummus has become a point of national pride for a few higher-ups in Lebanon, which has in the past year or two followed Greece’s feta-labeling strategy and tried to appropriate sole credit for authentic hummus. At its more light-hearted, this struggle for hummus supremacy takes the form of an annual stunt in which chefs produce a hummus bowl almost the size of an Olympic swimming pool (or at least an Olympic-sized wading pool) and the triumphal photo makes the international news. But those who really take the Lebanese official origin issue seriously and grimace whenever hummus is served somewhere else are, as far as I can see, only hurting themselves.

The trouble with demanding official status is that both feta and hummus long predate the borders of the countries trying to claim them. Both are simple enough to make and so consistent from batch to batch that they don’t really exhibit much in the way of “terroir” the way aged cheeses, wines, vinegars and so on might. Feta–equally good, equally real, equally part of the native fare–is made in a lot of places neighboring modern-day Greece. Places like Bulgaria, which don’t have as much political clout in either the EU or the Slow Food organizations, and which don’t get half the international tourism. Also places further away, notably Denmark and France, which still have reasonably large sheep’s milk production. Greece may actually have succeeded for the moment in the food labeling tug-of-war, but it’s made the country look somewhat silly and petulant, unwilling to face the fact that they’ve closed the barn door at least a century after the sheep got out. Will they profit from the exclusive labeling? doubtful–and it might have been better ambassadorship to claim credit for spreading feta’s popularity and offer more recipes and products made with it.

Much to the chagrin of whoever decided in the past couple of years that hummus should be exclusively Lebanese, this simple spread is made and eaten in lots of other countries. In Egypt, it’s made with a half-and-half mixture of favas and chickpeas. And Israel, which is probably the “other country” being targeted most directly by the Lebanese hummus campaign, has eaten, breathed, and slept a more or less chickpeas-only version of hummus as an essential food (along with felafel) for longer than the state has been independent.

Unlike the partisanry in Lebanon (not that Israel has no partisanry of its own), when it comes to food, everyone in Israel–Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druse–gives credit with a certain degree of pride that hummus is Arab food, especially if they’ve made it themselves rather than trotting down to the corner grocery to buy the bland ready-made version from a vat in the deli at the back.

That’s because everyone likes to eat it. It’s also because being a good host is really important and something of a formal habit and a chance to show off just a little–actually, I think that’s still true all throughout the Middle East. Everyone expects friends and neighbors and friends-of-friends to drop by at a moment’s notice, without invitation, especially on the weekend. The least you can do is have a bag of roasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds and a pot of hideously sweet mint tea to bring out if they show up to schmooze after supper, but in the afternoon, better if you can bring out a platter of pita, vegetables, and a bowl of hummus.

Hummus is simple Arab fare at its best–humble, nutritious, appetizing, and (now that we have food processors) easy to make a lot of so you can bring out a wide platter of it for your guests and drizzle a little olive oil and some za’atar or sumac or cumin or paprika over it for the finishing touch–right before everyone tears pita and dips in. The ceremonial thing is what makes it good hosting and is part of the fun.

Here in the US, most people buy their hummus in little plastic containers at the supermarket–not elegant at all, and a lot of money for what you get. Kind of depressing, even. Look at the ingredient list and it’s as long and discouraging as any other processed food–that’s so it can be shipped nationally and stored for a week or two in case it doesn’t all sell out the first day. Look at the nutrition label and you see highish salt, lowish protein and fiber. It’s been fluffed out with canola oil to stretch the expensive ingredient, tehina (sesame paste), and there’s not so much in the way of chickpeas even though they’re supposed to be the base.

While I’m not so much against the fluffy smooth stuff (it tastes ok, if all you’re expecting is a spoonful or two of party dip), I prefer homemade because it’s denser and more nutritious, with more iron and protein from the chickpeas, something you could eat packed in half a pita for lunch and not be starving within an hour. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, chickpeas, hummus, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern food | 1 Comment »

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

Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Posted on July 8, 2010 by DebbieN

Following on from Sunday’s post (have you recovered yet? Should I be selling Tums futures?) I should add that NOWHERE in Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible can a mention be found of prunes paired in any way, shape, or form with lentils. Don’t have the faintest why not. They do state that plain old green lentils have more flavor than red or brown. They also pair prunes with olives, mushrooms, gorgonzola and walnuts as well as sweet spices and red wine. Somewhere in that crossroads there’s got to be some confluence of flavor, but wherever it is, they haven’t considered it.

Others have, however–notably Nathan Lyon of the Discovery Channel, ABC’s “Beat the Chef” show in Australia from a few years back, Hello! magazine (OK, copying straight from the California Prune Board’s UK division–wait a minute, they HAVE a UK division?!–and borrowing its press photo)…Oh well.

The benefit to considering prune sauces is that you can serve them with a lentil dish if you’re ready for that or to lift a more familiar savory dish with meat, fish or poultry.

Pan-seared tuna steak with microwave prune and wine chutney

And yes, I said “lift”. Make of it what you will, but any one of the sauces below is better than whatever Hello! magazine has to offer, even if it were original.

Stéphane Reynaud’s Prune Sauce (excerpted for consideration from French Feasts, 2009)

This was designed to go with a simply pan-fried foie gras for six–probably 3-4 oz per person, which seems like a hefty kind of serving, even though I do like liver. But the sauce–why 18 prunes? 3 per person? and it seems a heavy load of spice for a small amount of wine. Also he has you rest the stuff overnight at room temperature before finishing it. Not sure why–to thicken up, probably, like Elizabeth David’s recipe for peach jam, which also sits out overnight after the first boil-up before resuming.

18 pitted prunes
1 c red wine
1 t ground cinnamon
1 t quatre-épices
2 star anise pods
2 T light brown sugar
2 1/2 T butter, chilled

Boil the prunes 5 min with the wine, spices and sugar, cover and leave O/N at RT. Remove the prunes and reduce the spiced wine to a syrupy sauce. Whisk in the butter, then return the prunes to the sauce.

Microwave Prune Chutney with Wine

My microwave version started out as Reynaud’s wine-based sauce and suddenly morphed, as I was grabbing things out of the fridge for it, with a half-remembered cranberry chutney recipe my mother-in-law served a number of years ago at Thanksgiving. This turns out to be a potent combination, aromatic and sharper, no doubt, than Reynaud’s sauce, with a definite suggestion of saltiness about it–but no actual salt. I don’t recommend eating it straight–too pungent for me, though it’s uncannily close to the relish my mother-in-law served and pretty decent with poultry and stuffing or rice and so on–but cooking 5 minutes or so extra in a saucepan over direct heat or with the food you’re saucing and some extra wine turns it into something pretty special. The whole cloves in particular (which you can take out before using the sauce) do something incredible for any meat or steaky fish you cook with this sauce. Like brisket but just…better, more sophisticated, elevated to the level of cuisine. In fact, put some of this prune sauce with cloves in your next brisket too.

Makes about 1 cup

½-1 c leftover dark red wine–syrah, aglianico, something inexpensive but rich
8-10 pitted prunes, quartered
grating of fresh ginger (1/4 t)
grating of 1/2 decent-sized clove garlic or 1 small clove
1/4 red onion, chopped
1-2 t. wine vinegar
sprig of thyme
pinch of fennel seed
4-5 whole cloves, loose if you can stand picking them out or else stuck through a scrap of onion

Toss the onions with the vinegar and let sit a few minutes while chopping the prunes into quarters–it cuts down on the bite. Mix the onions, prunes, and the rest of the ingredients except the cloves in a soup bowl with a microwaveable lid that can placed on with a gap for steam to escape. Poke the cloves into a larger scrap of onion and add that to the bowl so you can fish them back out easily after cooking. Microwave 1-2 minutes loosely covered on HIGH or until it’s boiling, let sit 5 minutes, stir, microwave again. The prunes will have taken up a lot of the liquid, the onions should be cooked through and garnet-colored, and the wine should be reduced and a bit syrupy.

. . . . .

From France to China, then:

One year I was determined to make a low-sodium substitute for fermented black bean sauce with roast salmon. I soaked some prunes in a little boiling water and mashed them to a paste, then dressed them up with garlic, ginger and a few other things. It turned out, to my surprise, like homemade hoisin–-dark, glossy, tart and aromatic, less sweet than the commercial stuff, a little smoky from the sesame oil and scallions, with the suggestion of salt Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, fish, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: barbecue sauces, Beat the Chef, California Prune Board, frugality, hoisin, lentils, microwave cooking, Nathan Lyon, prune chutney, prune sauces, prunes, Stephane Reynaud, The Flavor Bible | Comments Off on Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

Posted on July 4, 2010 by DebbieN

When I was a kid, PBS, which had made a gourmet name for itself with The French Chef, decided that if one chef was good, six or seven had to be better. Suddenly the public and cable airwaves were bursting with the Frugal Gourmet, the Galloping Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, Cookin’ Cajun, various shows with Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin, and one…ummm…less glamorous show called Cookin’ Cheap.

This was hosted by Larry Bly and Earl “Laban” Johnson, Jr. out of Roanoke, VA–-not too far from where I grew up–and featured two viewer-submitted recipes per episode, which the guys bravely cooked and sampled on the air. At the end of each show, just like Julia Child, they sat down at the table for the tasting… and decided whose recipe had come off worse.

Now, Cookin’ Cheap was not for tenderfoots–if you couldn’t handle ingredient lists that included whole sticks of margarine and self-rising flour, or bring yourself to shop in one of the ordinary supermarket chains that had never heard of organic anything (this was the South in the ’80s), you would have done better not to watch. But if down-home cooking delivered with a touch of schadenfreude was your thing, it was a great little show.

Unfortunately, my favorite early episode doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the ‘net. But the clip above, the Cookin’ Cheap 2.0 (YouTube) version of about a third of Episode #609, will give you some idea. (see copyright disclaimer below…)

In my actual favorite episode, Bly and Johnson hit their personal limit with a recipe that had them both making faces and apologizing to the audience that “there’s cheap… and then there’s too cheap.”

The dish in question was “Lentils ‘n’ Prunes” (you can guess the entire ingredient list). And it was indeed cheap. Unfortunately lentils, though incredibly cheap and nutritious, cook up kind of gray, especially on a semi-rural public TV station with early-’80s (i.e., yellow-ocher) set lighting. Trust me when I say the addition of mashed prunes did nothing for them aesthetically or otherwise. How on earth could they have put this on the air?

Of course, these guys didn’t have to take the blame for the recipe, and it was great entertainment to see some of the strange things your neighbors might be cooking at home and writing in to the show about with high hopes of being selected. I understand the Food Network is now copying Bly and Johnson’s reality-cooking formula shamelessly for the fall lineup…

[Actually, I didn’t realize the show had such a good run, but it started locally in 1981 and only ended its nationally syndicated run in 2002. Johnson passed away a few years before the end, but he managed to publish the Cookin’ Cheap Cookbook in 1988. Bly kept the show going with Johnson’s friend and successor Doug Patterson and has since made a couple of rescued episodes available on DVD. And the show still has fans on YouTube and — surprisingly just this March–in the New York Times.

Disclaimer: YouTube removed the first clip I linked to for copyright violation–so my apologies to Bly; the intent in linking here isn’t to rip anyone off but to highlight a too-little-known show. Because the original Roanoke station managers were too shortsighted to save the episodes (they apparently trashed them!), Bly was only able to rescue a couple of episodes for the DVD, and I think some of the others posted at this point were recorded at home from TV.]

Ah, well. Times change, horizons broaden, and we aim to challenge our palates in a sophisticated world beat kind of way even with limited cash and ingredients. The wolf may be at the door, we may be on the rice and beans yet again to make up for unreimbursed conference travel, but we are determined to do it in style–that means Indian, Moroccan, Mediterranean–French? Well, at least by not mixing plain lentils and prunes together in a hideous gray mash.

…I’m not actually sure how the French feel about lentils with prunes, or what they’d do about it if you suggested it. But I have a huge bowl of cooked lentils to deal with from a 1-lb. bag at $1.29. And a 1-lb. bag of non-sorbate pitted prunes at $2.99. Less than $5 total. And a number of ideas about how to deal with each of them, separately or together. Enough ideas that I’m probably going to have to split this post so it doesn’t turn into War and Prunes.

This, I think, is going to become my How to Cook a Wolf Challenge, 21st Century Edition.

Because I have fantasies (not many, and relatively tame though entertaining) of the Iron Chef America and Top Chef hosts announcing, for the next quickfire competition, a challenge to find three or four good ways to combine lentils and prunes in dishes where they’re the main ingredients and for which the total bill for the tasting menu comes to something like $10, including spices (prorated as used…) Can’t you just see the contestants’ faces? Take a moment to enjoy their obvious panic. The restaurant industry hasn’t trained them for this.

But seriously. What was actually behind this Cookin’ Cheap dealbreaker, other than the obvious frugality factor plus the even more obvious digestive humor that follows prunes and lentils wherever they roam?

Is there any way on earth that prunes and lentils could really go together?

Well…yes, as a matter of fact. You don’t run across prune and lentil recipes everyday, but good-tasting and intriguing variations, or at least the components of them, exist in a number of respected cuisines around the globe. Even French. For very little more than it cost the Cookin’ Cheap guys, Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, history, movies, Odd food, Oddities, Revised recipes, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: Cookin' Cheap, cooking shows, frugality, Iron Chef, Laban Johnson, Larry Bly, lentils, prunes, Top Chef, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

The Dirty Roots of Veg-phobia

Posted on June 14, 2010 by DebbieN

In one of my favorite Doonesbury cartoons, a very old one from the early 1970s when hippies still had a trace of hip about them, it’s Zonker’s turn to cook dinner, and he serves his housemates a big bowl of salad.

Mike Doonesbury peers into the bowl suspiciously and says, “Hey Zonker, the lettuce is dirty!”

“Yes, but it’s clean dirt! Ecologically pure dirt! No chemical additives–you’ll love it!”

Mike and Bernie opt for McDonald’s.

Somehow, though, the way they agree on it suggests the understanding of the early 1970s: McDonald’s was cheap, it was easy to find in your town, but it wasn’t really dinner, it was what you did when there was nothing decent in the fridge.

For decades now, government health agencies, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and whole parades of morning talk show guests have been advocating that Americans eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and juices don’t count. The studio audience members, mostly soccer mom-looking women, only with impeccable makeup and pristinely unwrinkled clothes, bob their heads on cue at this wisdom.

But nobody’s gotten serious about how veg-phobic most people suddenly become when they actually approach the vegetable aisle in the supermarket, and no one’s taking enough pictures of what’s really in the fridge or on the cutting board most nights in most houses. All I can say is that many, many of them, if they buy vegetables at all, buy prepared or precut vegetables instead of bulk. Why?

Bulk vegetables–a whole head of cabbage or lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower, a bunch of celery or carrots–are bulky. Heavy. Hard to lift and hard to maneuver into those thin plastic produce bags.

They’re also round. They take up a lot of space in the refrigerator. They don’t stack neatly and they don’t necessarily fit into the shallow, measly vegetable drawer that comes with today’s Lean Cuisine-friendly slimline refrigerators.

They require washing, and here I wonder if we’re getting to the part people are most squeamish about. There’s…there’s (I can’t say it) … there’s DIRT on them!

Why washing it off scares people so much these days I have no idea, but maybe it’s all that liquid hand sanitizer and overly perfumed liquid hand soap that have poisoned the atmosphere this past 10 years or so. When your soap company can convince you to buy watered-down soap in a decorator squirt bottle, your friendly produce-packing plant can probably sell you overpriced broccoli florets in a small plastic bag.

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Doonesbury, hand sanitizer, liquid soap, organic foods, packaged foods, vegetables, Zonker | Comments Off on The Dirty Roots of Veg-phobia

Bistro + Cartoons = Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts

Posted on June 9, 2010 by DebbieN

French Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals and Gatherings by Stéphane Reynaud (2009 Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $40.00)

It’s a huge book. Daunting. Heavy as a couple of bricks. Padded cover, even, with a zillion miniphotos of intimidating French bistro classics in their raw and cooked forms (an octopus, a roasting tray of vegetables with leeks, a crème caramel, and several red-checked tablecloths, for that seemingly effortless retro chic, laid out under rustic-looking pot-au-feu types of stews. And a cutting board with six stuffed marrow bones stood on end.)

Flip open the front cover and you get a classic bistro menu with way too many choices (luckily it’s printed with a little English and page numbers, not handwritten on a chalkboard across the room, so you don’t have to squint). Read down the page (continue inside the back cover) and you start to dig up little puns and odd bits of humor here and there. They finally bubble up into something definite in the introduction, where the author, a medium-youngish guy seated in front of a casserole with a chef’s knife and a two-pronged barbecue fork, reminisces about a childhood stuffed with too much good food on family Sundays with his grandmère. Replete with escargot-burping uncles.

And from then on, you realize why this book is so fat: not only is there a heavy emphasis on meats and charcuterie (and six or seven different preparations for foie gras, 12 or so variations on soft-boiled eggs and omelets, etc.), but every other page is a photograph, or a profile of a couple who run one or another bistro, a venerable Lyonnaise sausage maker, vintner, baker, or cheese affineur…

Or — quite frequently — a cartoonist’s demonstration, only a little less improbable than Rube Goldberg’s, for making wine or cheese, or canning preserves (watch out for the orange tabby in the “catsup” jar). Check out the last chart, next to the Armagnac and Cognac page, which presents increasing girths and grades of cigars appropriate for the increasing girths and ages of the smokers. Is it by way of including the classic end to a classic meal, never mind the known risks, or a subtle message the other way–that these days it’s more savvy to laugh at the cigar nostalgia die-hards than become one?

And speaking of nostalgia…There are even songsheets for Moulin Rouge classics so you can join in with your French friends after dinner. You kind of need those. You definitely need those.

Just what kind of cookbook have we lugged home?

Actually, Stéphane Reynaud is a well-regarded restaurateur on the outskirts of Paris and the well-trained son and grandson of a line of pork butchers. His previous book, Pork & Sons, arrived in the US a couple of years ago, and this one was published here in English sometime last fall. Despite the fact that I don’t eat pork and don’t think it’s a glorious profession to “break down a pig” or any other large animal, as glamorized on adventure cooking shows, French Feasts is well worth the read. Because Reynaud clearly knows his stuff, and not just about meat.

I’m not sure whether he got a translator to help, or he’s just really fluent in English–if so, my hat’s off to him, because his sense of humor really comes through fairly naturally, and it probably meant rewriting a fair amount of the text to come up with accurate and still funny equivalents for English speakers. Translating (and having to explain!) puns from French to English would be a job and a half for just about anyone. Most people would rather scrub dishes than have to explain a joke. Even me.

The recipes themselves are classics–untrammeled and unfutzed-with–and unexpectedly instructive in their simplicity.

Most have fewer than 10 ingredients, and often fewer than six. Here there are no dishes calling for 20 different special vinegars or sweeteners, as in American food-glam magazines and cookbooks. Not too many luxury ingredients, other than that many of the “proteins”–shellfish, goose, duck, game, foie gras–are hard to find in the US and kind of chi-chi expensive these days outside of Europe, but you could probably substitute with some success. And the titles are simple too–English translations of the classic French names, not mile-long lists of every special new “twist” ingredient it’s been tweaked with to up its audience appeal. Or advertiser appeal.

And the food photos. Nice photography but no attempt to make restaurant-pretty “tall food” plates with lots of garnishes. These are stews and soups and unsliced terrines–unstyled, many of them, or at least not overstyled with voguish background blur and enhanced color and gloss on every dish. Cooked cabbage looks like cooked cabbage. Turnips look like turnips, not like flaming purple orchids turned suddenly solid. The stews look like stews you’d make at home–well, except for the lobster one, or the terrine with the crossed strips of fatback over it, or the baked fish in a glossy brown flake pastry crust. That’s just showing off, right there.

But really, most of these dishes are photographed while still in the cooking pots–which aren’t the bright shiny brand-new brand-name items you can order directly by clicking on the picture. They’re well-used, old, blackened, ugly even. Not glamorous. They don’t go with the brushed steel decorator kitchens we’re used to seeing in all the glossy cookbooks on our shelves. They have a bit of grime and wear about them, and make us feel better about our own dowdy day-to-day kitchenware that we’ve been using since we got out of school umpty-nine years ago and haven’t replaced because it’s reliable.

And now what I thought at first was a detour:

To my great surprise, given the author’s “slow food” cred, Reynaud’s recipes don’t contain any of the rote “1 teaspoon of salt” in each recipe that most recent American cookbooks have fallen into. Few of his recipes are seasoned more than once if at all, and usually just the sauce, or just the surface, right before serving. He doesn’t dictate how much, but from the context it’s obviously closer to a pinch than a spoonful, and often he skips it altogether.

He also doesn’t boil his vegetables in salted water, which is very chic right now in the US just because Thomas Keller said he does it and Michael Ruhlman trumpeted it as gospel. With only one exception–in fact, the only recipe in the book with a specified teaspoon of salt–even the desserts in French Feasts, including all of the pastry doughs from shortbread to puff pastry, are almost entirely free of added salt. The sheet cakes have baking powder, and a handful of the pastries call for salted butter rather than plain, but neither comes anywhere close to a contemporary American version’s salt content.

It’s not that Reynaud never uses salt or salted ingredients like capers or sausage or parmesan. But unlike American recipe developers, he doesn’t throw extra salt on top of them, and in fact he warns against it in one of the smoked pork-plus-sausage-plus-three-other-preserved-meats kinds of dishes.

SO—If these are the classics and the methods American chefs and recipe test kitchens have been aping and trying to bring to the table in our best restaurants for decades, French Feasts makes it clear there’s been more than a little “tweaking” or “drift” going on, particularly for the increasingly popular baked goods. Almost every American version of the classic French desserts, from mousse to napoleon to baba to charlotte and crêpes and on to cannelés, has had an automatic teaspoon or worse of salt dumped into it before it went to press. In comparison with the traditional style of French Feasts, we seem to be pickling ourselves. You have to wonder who put it there and why, and what our sorta-French desserts are really supposed to taste like when you skip the commercial interest that seems to be behind all the routine, mindless oversalting.

And you have to ask–in romanticizing Slow Food but presenting commercially tainted, overly fussy, overly expensive and oversalted versions of traditional European dishes, how far has American foodieism drifted away from reality? How badly have we lost the thread?

In contrast to the younger wave of foodie restaurant chefs and specialty purveyors in the US, most of the folks profiled in French Feasts are not sporting extensive surfer tattoos or orange clogs to proclaim their indy cred. They’re also not Glamorous-Looking French People With Scarves ™, except Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Desserts, Food Politics, frugality, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition | Tagged: book reviews, cookbooks, French Feasts, French Laundry, French restaurants, gateau St. Honore, Julia Child, low-salt cooking, Michel Richard, pot-au-feu, Ripailles, Stephane Reynaud, Thomas Keller | Comments Off on Bistro + Cartoons = Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts

Sweet Potato Ice Cream

Posted on June 6, 2010 by DebbieN

Some time back I was bemoaning the lack of reasonably priced butternut squash at the height of the season in my local markets–I was clearly spoiled by last year’s bargains, or so I figured. So when I tried making pumpkin ravioli at home, I substituted yams, which were a lot more plentiful and much less expensive per pound.

But as it turns out, there’s more to the missing squash mystery than I realized. Just before Thanksgiving last year, Libby’s sent out a public warning that they were facing deep shortages due to heavy rains during harvest in central Illinois, where most of their pumpkins are grown. Heavy rains and soggy fields meant harvesters couldn’t get out every day to pick, and a lot of pumpkins mildewed on the vine and had to be plowed under. Oregon’s organic pumpkin growers, who had an unusually good crop, were able to step in as an alternate source for buyers running short, but organic pumpkins are still only a few percent of the national consumption each year.

Following on a short crop in 2008, the Midwest is looking for a better harvest this fall, but right now the shortage is pretty noticeable on store shelves. A global produce outlook web site even posted a recent factoid that, at the moment, Libby’s remaining inventory of 100% packed pumpkin stands at something like six cans. Six.

According to the article, people have been bidding up to $30 a can on eBay for those extras you probably squirreled away in the corners of your pantry and never got around to making.

But it still doesn’t explain why winter squash was so scarce and expensive in California this past year–unless our supermarkets were importing all the way from Illinois as well. Hmmmph.

Where’s the Charlie Brown Theme Song when you really need it?

In any case, yams and sweet potatoes nearly the size of footballs have been pretty plentiful in Southern California, and cheap with it. There’s very little waste on a sweet potato–just the peel, usually (or buy organic, if you can find them, and scrub them well before cooking so you can eat the peel too).

So I’ve been finding a place in my refrigerator for them and microwaving them in a lidded pyrex bowl or casserole with a little water in the bottom for about 8-10 minutes (for a big one). Because I don’t like the prospect of nasty kitchen accidents, if I can’t cut into them easily right away I wait to split these monsters in halves or quarters about 6 minutes into the cooking time, when they may not be fully cooked yet but at least they no longer require an axe.

Sweet potatoes and yams substitute pretty well in standard pumpkin pie recipes, but you generally have to bake twice as long as for the canned pumpkin, which has had a lot of the water cooked out before it was packed. They also make good fillings for large ravioli–pretty easy with wonton or gyoza wrappers, and microwaveable too.

But…it’s now June in Los Angeles, which means “June Gloom” overcast cool weather in the morning, burning off to the mid-90s by lunchtime. And my daughter looks at the huge quarters of yam cooling on the counter and says, suddenly, “I wish we could have pumpkin ice cream instead.” I think about it and decide I wish that too.

I have buttermilk, regular milk, sugar and a variety of pumpkin pie-type spices on hand. I don’t think I’ll need eggs because the sweet potato has so Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, frugality, kid food, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: buttermilk, ice cream recipes, Illinois, Libby's, microwaving sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie ice cream, pumpkin shortage, sweet potato ice cream, yam ice cream | Comments Off on Sweet Potato Ice Cream

The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Posted on May 13, 2010 by DebbieN

A food marketing study released findings a few days ago about the top 10 fastest growing snack food preferences for kids 2 to 17 years old. Yogurt came out as number one, then potato chips, then–very surprisingly to me–fresh fruit. The others down the rest of the list were a soggy but predictable mash of candy, chips, “donuts” [sic], and other junk foods, though I think cheese cubes were in there somewhere. If yogurt and fresh fruit are in the top three, though, the news must be good, right?

Um. Maybe. But both of them are sweet or sweetened (in the case of most flavored yogurts, very heavily sweetened compared with plain)–so they kind of fit in with the candy, donut, carb-carb-carb kinds of snacks in the rest of the list.

What’s missing from the top 10 list? Plain milk, pasta or beans, bread and jam, the simpler unpackaged, unprocessed, or unbranded stuff you could bring from home, are all missing. But most of those are hard to take to school, and none of them are crunchy, which is a big part of the pleasure of snack. Actually, few of the packaged snacks are crunchy any more either. It’s a sad state of affairs, but there is a simple way to restore the full joy of snacktime.

Because mostly what you don’t see on the marketing study list are vegetables. Raw, crunchy vegetables, low in calories, starches and sugars, fats and sodium, are high in potassium and fiber and vitamins, easy to prepare (another chorus of “just wash and nosh”) and perfect for snack. A handful of red cabbage or a couple of carrot or celery sticks along with a piece of cheese or a few nuts will keep kids from hunger for a lot longer than the carb-laden snacks on that list, and they’re a lot less expensive–on your wallet or your kids’ waistline.

Parents at school complain all the time that vegetables are too expensive, too time-consuming, take too much preparation by hand, and are not convenient to deal with, and their kids “won’t eat them”. But I wonder if that’s true, because whenever I go at lunchtime, I see many of those same kids enjoying the vegetables that come out of the school garden. They aren’t whining and they don’t appear to be suffering, and nobody seems to be sneering at anyone else that their lunch has Brand A taco chips and all the other poor schlub’s mother packed was vegetables. They’re all waving broccoli or lettuce leaves around, holding them up for comparison, and using them as props for one or another comic performance before chomping into them with savage glee.

And I know an ordinary bunch of celery–even a head of cauliflower–is the same price or cheaper than an econo bag of Doritos. Even at the big brand supermarkets. Celery. Carrots. Red or green cabbage. Raw green beans or if you’ve got the extra cash, snow pea pods. Broccoli or cauliflower. Lettuce wedges. Tomatoes. Cucumber. Bell pepper. None of these are hideously expensive, all of them taste good raw, and all of them store well washed, dried gently, and kept in the fridge.

So what’s stopping the parents from packing vegetables as lunchbox fare? The fact that they have to wash them to get the dirt off? Get their hands wet doing it? Maybe peel some of the vegetables? Find a knife to cut them up with? Use them up within a week or so of buying them? I honestly don’t know, but a lot of the parents seem whinier than their kids. Maybe they should all learn to just wash and nosh.

It only takes a minute or two to deal with a full head of broccoli or cauliflower, or a bunch of celery, and it’ll last you several days’ worth of school and work snacks at a cost of under $2. The most prep required is for carrots, if you start with an actual bunch. Not that I’m advocating the prepacked “baby cut carrots” bags, which are more expensive, but if you really hate peeling and cutting up carrots, you could go this way and still do better than chips and snack packs and the like.

All I can tell you is, if the vegetables are fresh and crunchy, most kids will get into them as long as their friends are doing it too, and there’s no great way to overeat them (except maybe for carrots). And some vegetables are just plain fun–red cabbage in particular is handy for revealing secret invisible baking-soda messages, and if your kids eat it at recess they can compare purple tongues with their friends afterward. Can’t do that with taco chips.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, kid food, nutrition, shopping, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: brown bag lunches, child nutrition, healthy kids, low sodium, processed food, school gardens, school lunch, snacking | Comments Off on The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Adventures with Cheese, Part II: Paneer in the Microwave

Posted on April 18, 2010 by DebbieN

Paneer is the fresh white curd cheese used in Indian dishes like saag or palak paneer, aloo mattar paneer, and so on. Panela or queso fresco are okay substitutes, if you can get them, and they taste a lot better than tofu.

But you can also make paneer very easily (if a bit messily) at home in a few minutes, if you have a pyrex bowl, a microwave, and a colander. If milk is going cheap in your neighborhood market this week or you have half a gallon that you really need to use up quickly before you go on vacation, making paneer isn’t a bad way to do it.

You’ll get about 5 oz fairly dry curd for a quart of milk, so not a great yield, but it’s pretty versatile. Whole milk makes a richer cheese than skim, obviously, but both work okay. Press the curd hard when you drain it and it’s sliceable. Press lightly and it’s spreadable. If you use a quart of buttermilk on its own rather than mostly milk, you can blend in a little garlic and some herbs and a drop of olive oil to the drained curd, and you’ve got something close to Rondelé cheese spread.

And don’t just toss out the whey–it still has a lot of soluble smaller proteins and calcium in it, so it’s worth keeping if you can use it within a day or so. You can use some of the warm whey instead of water to make a moist, chewy-textured Italian-type yeast bread (whey is extremely good for rosemary focaccia). Or puree the whey with some lightly cooked broccoli or cauliflower or canned pumpkin, a bit of onion or garlic, and some marjoram and/or thyme for a quick fresh cream-of-vegetable soup.

Paneer from scratch (makes about 5 oz, can scale up if you prefer)

A quart of milk
1 cup of buttermilk if you have it
juice of a lemon

1. Pour everything into a 2.5 qt. pyrex mixing bowl, mix, and microwave on HIGH about 5 minutes, until the milk solids separate from the clear yellow whey. The solids should float in a mass and be pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

2. Take a colander or strainer over another large bowl, line it with a couple of layers of cheesecloth or 3-4 overlapping round paper coffee filters, whatever works for you. Carefully pour the whey over first, keeping the curd back in the bowl with a serving spoon or spatula for as long as possible, until you’ve poured most of the whey through (otherwise it takes forever to drain…). Then drain the curd on the filters and press it until it’s fairly firm and could be cut into cubes without crumbling apart.

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: buttermilk, cheesemaking, curd, Dairy, frugality, Indian food, microwave cooking, palak paneer, paneer, recipes, vegetarian cooking, whey | Comments Off on Adventures with Cheese, Part II: Paneer in the Microwave

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

The Hummus Debate

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

Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

The Dirty Roots of Veg-phobia

Bistro + Cartoons = Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts

Sweet Potato Ice Cream

The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Adventures with Cheese, Part II: Paneer in the Microwave

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

Blog Stats

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

What's cooking

Blog Stats