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Stuffed onions in a hurry

Posted on December 15, 2011 by DebbieN
Stuffed onions ready for steaming in the microwave

With a microwave and a frying pan, you can make stuffed vegetables like Mehshi Basal quickly, and they taste even better than with long roasting. These are just rolled and ready for a few minutes of steaming in the microwave.

Just after Rosh Hashanah I posted my first-ever attempt at an elaborate Syrian Jewish dish of sweet-and-sour stuffed eggplants with quince, and because I had more stuffing than I needed, I went for seconds with Aromas of Aleppo on the spot and tried out the Mehshi Basal, or stuffed onions with tamarind sauce, which was actually even better. It was easier to put together and I was patting myself on the back when we tasted the results.

Still, given that I was using a lentil stuffing in place of ground beef, I was a little dismayed at how long the traditional braising and roasting took to cook the onions all the way through–an hour and a half at least, and that was after stuffing them. A second attempt in November, this time exclusively with stuffed onions for a congregation brunch, did no better on time, and I came away thinking that roasting was an extremely inefficient way to cook these–might even have toughened them inadvertently.

Why, you have to ask, should I make such a big deal about stuffed onions–they’re a party trick, after all, not standard cooking. But we discovered we really liked them, and they’re a pretty good kind of party trick. They were a surprise hit at the brunch. If I hadn’t snuck myself one while setting up in the kitchen, I’d have missed out altogether.

Actually, I think they fascinated everyone as much for the magic trick as for the flavor. People who’d never tasted them before kept coming up to me–and even my daughter–to ask, “How do you get the filling into the onions???”

If they hadn’t been so time-consuming I could have made double the amount and they’d still have disappeared. Or I could throw them together easily just for us on the odd weeknight as a treat–but one with some iron and fiber in it–instead of the standard pasta or rice.

So in the time since, I’ve finally rethought the process and come up with something that requires no oven time and cuts the actual cooking after stuffing them down to about 20 minutes or so–as long as you already have some cooked lentils (microwaved to perfection in about 10 minutes of cooking time and 30-4o minutes of standing time) and tamarind sauce (or “mock tamarind” sauce, a 5-minute microwave-assisted blend of prunes and/or apricots with water and some lemon juice, plus-or-minus tomato paste, applesauce and other flourishes you don’t really need for this) to hand.

I know, you probably don’t have these things sitting around. But this recipe might change your mind. Lentils are good stuff even on their own, and the stuffing here is a knockout.

Even genuine tamarind sauce isn’t so bad anymore, assuming you don’t or can’t just buy a prepared concentrate. I’ve sped the process up from an hour-plus to a few minutes just by nuking it, pulsing in a food processor, and this time, neither filtering it quite so aggressively as I did back in September NOR bothering to boil the stuff down to a sticky residue. It’s so much less painful, and I think it even tastes better, with more of the fruit character left in. See my notes at the end of the post for how to do it the quickie way (in modest jam-jar quantities, not quarts).

Anyway, back to the stuffed onions. I’m actually proud of myself for this one, and I’ve tried it three times in a row so I can vouch for it–the last time, I put my daughter to work stuffing the onion layers, and she did a great job.

For this method all you need are a microwave oven, a frying pan and a food processor. Instead of boiling the onions for 20 minutes to separate the layers, you microwave them in a drizzle of water for 5. Instead of braising the stuffed Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, haute cuisine, history, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Stuffed onions in a hurry

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

Posted on September 30, 2011 by DebbieN

Stuffed Eggplant with Quince and Stuffed Onion Rolls

I did it. It was 90+ degrees outside yesterday afternoon and felt a lot hotter inside when I started cranking the oven to try this dish right away rather than wait for the weekend, but I’m just no good with delayed gratification.

If I have the mini-eggplants and I have the quinces and I have the tamarind concentrate (homemade! two days ago! it’s practically crying out to be used already!) and I have the “hashu” filling for the vegetables sitting in the fridge smelling wonderful, then it just doesn’t matter that Rosh Hashanah dinner is in what, maybe 3 hours, and I still haven’t braided the challot, to say nothing of baked them. Obviously I’ve gotta try this extra-credit dish out RIGHT NOW.

Actually, I figured the house was going to be heating up anyway once I started baking the challot, so why not get it all over with at once?

There was a more serious reason to try it. Today in services I was still thinking about Dweck’s book and her recounting of her parents’ horror in 1947, when, about to return from a vacation in Europe, they learned the government back home had started massacring whole Jewish communities in reaction to the announcement that the UN had accepted Israel as a Jewish state.

The Syrian Jewish community fled wherever they could–just as my family did under the pogroms in the Ukraine back in the 1880s and 1920s. Dweck maintains that the reception the Syrian Jews got in the US from those of us who were already here was so aloof–they didn’t speak Yiddish, they didn’t look the same, they did a few things differently for kashrut and prayers–that her community kept to themselves ever after.

I can believe it, unfortunately–the period right after World War II and the Holocaust was one of paranoia and circling the wagons for American Ashkenazim.

Eastern and Western Jews had similar discomfort with each other in postwar Europe. Reading between the lines a little in Claudia Roden’s and Colette Rossant’s memoirs, the two, who had just lost everything, thought their new Ashkenazi neighbors were cold and inhospitable and indifferent to their exile; the Ashkenazi neighbors and relatives, meanwhile, thought the wealthy young Egyptian arrivals were horribly spoiled and indifferent to the European disaster they had just missed. Altogether, the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi communities were in closer touch before World War I than they were after the 1940s.

I can only hope that now, 60 or 70 years on, we have more in common and more regard for each other, no matter where we came from. Israel’s great mix of cultures has been a good influence, even though it originated in hardship, and perhaps today we are in better shape to appreciate what we have in common than we have been for nearly a century.

When I look through Dweck’s family’s photos, I see so many people who look astonishingly like several members of my family–my dad and my sister especially. The dignified lady presiding at the seder table on the front cover is a shockingly exact adult version of a girl I knew from my synagogue’s youth group–it’s the sturdy mouth and chin and the set of the eyes, certainly, but also the irrepressibly thick and curly hair (the 1920s formal chignon has it all over my friend’s 1970s braids, which took her hours to corral her hair into). The formal photographs of families in the 1920s, all the daughters dressed beautifully but in the same fabric the mother is wearing, sailor suits on the boys, stern dignified expressions all–I’m pretty sure each of my grandmothers had at least one of those in her collection. The 1930s-era engagement portrait with pearls and bobbed hair–so modern! Pin it up next to the one of my dad’s parents, who married in 1939 and looked so incredibly naive and young then. The family gatherings at Pesach, grandma presiding over the white lace tablecloth and all the seated cousins glancing behind them at the camera from over their shoulders–there’s probably one or two with my mother as a toddler on someone’s lap in Brooklyn and another of her as a teen, whipping her glasses off and blinking myopically for the photo. It could be any of our families. It could have been us in Syria and Egypt and Turkey, it could have been them in the Ukraine or Germany or Poland. We none of us have entirely safe histories, and none of us are entirely separate.

In any case, Dweck’s book is important to me not only for capturing her community’s traditions, tastes and history but for reaching out to the rest of us and giving us a chance to share it, compare it with our own, and reconsider what it means to be part of the Jewish world now.

So–and this is not to trivialize but to explain, since we sometimes live and remember through food, especially at the holidays–it was a great time to try out a challenging dish (challenging for me, anyway) from her book and serve it last night to my family for Erev Rosh Hashanah. I cook from scratch, I cook a lot, but I’ve never really done  the legendary great-aunts-at-Pesach kind of slow cooking where everyone groans in pleasure and declares “nobody does it like this anymore” when they taste it. I’ve only once cooked a whole turkey, and I’ve rarely tried anything else that took more than an hour and a half to cook. It’s a transformative experience, one that teaches me a lot about my great-aunts and great-grandmothers, both in the shtetls with the wood-fueled pripitschoks and communal ovens, and here in America with modern kitchens and big lace-covered tables. Trying this long-cooked dish gave me the chance to experience both my family’s past celebrations and Dweck’s at the same time.

To my very great pleasure, her recipe worked the way it was supposed to on the first try and tasted like the effort was worth it, even though her instructions are pretty simple and brief. That’s a huge achievement.

So–if you’re ready for this, keep reading–otherwise, glance at the pictures and skip to the bottom…

The “Stuffed Eggplants with Quince” Experience

First of all, let me just say that I LOVE my local Armenian corner grocers for a lot of reasons, but the fact that they have all the ingredients for Dweck’s dishes (other than kosher meat, that is) is a big, big plus.

I would have tried microwaving–and I still will–instead of a 2-hour braise, but I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to taste, whether microwaving would cook the raw rice in the filling well enough, and how the sauce was supposed to interact with the stuffing and the eggplants. I knew from a previous hard-luck experience that quinces don’t do especially well (or even well at all) in the microwave and really need long stewing under conventional heat to get tender and turn bronzy pink and sweet. So all in all, I decided following the directions in Aromas of Aleppo might be the wiser course for a first try. Even though, from my usual 15-minutes-tops perspective on conventional-heat cooking, Poopa Dweck’s method is glacially, almost outrageously, slow.

Basically, you core the baby eggplants, stuff them with hashu (beef-and-rice filling, rice and tomatoes, or in my case lentils-and-rice), and layer them in a saucepan with quince slices. Then you dilute some tamarind concentrate and add a bit of sugar and salt, pour the sauce over the pan and heat for 10 minutes on the stove until the eggplants start to sweat, add water to come about 3/4 of the way up , simmer half an hour to reduce the liquid and cook the rice in the filling, then transfer to the oven to braise covered for about 40 minutes and then uncovered for another 30. It’s a lot like making brisket, actually.

Dweck gives two allspice-laden recipes for the filling, one for ground beef with rice, the other a rice-and-tomato filling that’s close to what I use for dolmas. I opted to follow the ground beef recipe but substitute an equal weight of cooked green lentils for the meat and add a little garlic. It would work, I was pretty sure, and in fact it turned out to be the best, most delicious part of this recipe–which, skipping to the punchline, was pretty terrific and worthwhile, even for the work Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Posted on September 28, 2011 by DebbieN

I was born halfway between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so on any given year, I could be stuck eating honeycake or none at all on my birthday. I think I’ve had maybe two actual birthday parties in my life. It’s a concept my daughter, born in June, doesn’t get.

But occasionally I luck out–and this year was one of the best. My husband asked what I wanted and I had a real answer–a cookbook I’ve been lusting after at the library and that costs only slightly more than my probable library fines if I don’t return it.

So this is it–feast your eyes, I’ll turn the pages:

Aromas of Aleppo by Poopa Dweck

And this is the project that sold me on it:

Stuffed Eggplant with Quince

Stuffed Eggplant with Quince

Poopa Dweck, a cousin by marriage to Claudia Roden, has edited the New York Syrian Jewish community’s version of a sisterhood cookbook (every synagogue in America’s sisterhood seems to have put out at least one of those) for something like 20 years, only people in her community actually used it frequently. My birthday gift is the 2007 culmination of Dweck’s experience, and it’s just a very beautiful cookbook to leaf through–visually but also for the possibility that when you try the dishes, they’re actually going to work.

It doesn’t take much reading for me to realize that despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors–allspice in meat stuffings, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. So, somewhat exotic in flavoring but utterly familiar in spirit. (And actually, as I discovered in another Syrian Jewish cookbook, A Fistful of Lentils, by Jennifer Felicia Abadi, a few dishes, like stuffed cabbage with a sweet-and-sour sauce, and manti, a kind of ravioli, are pretty similar to Ashkenazi holishkes and kreplach.)

Like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The beef I’m not worried about–my first try on this is going to be vegetarian, because I’m not planning on heading out to the kosher butchers in the Valley. I can use a green lentil and rice filling that I already know will taste fine with those flavorings of allspice and cinnamon and onion. Maybe a hit of garlic too, and maybe a bit less salt than for the beef–as I discovered a few weeks ago, with the green lentil sausages, lentils don’t hide the salt flavor as much as beef might.

The other item, tamarind concentrate, turns out to be inexpensive but somewhat unlovely to make–though still something of an adventure. Especially for a blog called Slow Food Fast.

Here’s what’s on page 42 of Aromas of Aleppo for how to work the tamarind pulp into something that will give up its flavor to a sauce:

Poopa Dweck's Aromas of Aleppo--instructions for making tamarind concentrate

Working the tamarind pulp

Now, I’m not all that squeamish, but bleaaghhh. First ya gotta soak the stuff overnight, then ya gotta get in there and mish around–I dunno. I decided to speed it up where I could…

I thought about the little 1-lb. brick of pressed seedless tamarind pulp I’d bought from my Armenian greengrocers for this dish. It just seemed like a tougher version of dried prunes or apricots, which I usually soak up successfully enough in a few minutes by heating them with water in the microwave. Would it work here or would it ruin the flavor? I cut off a chunk, submerged it in water in a microwaveable bowl, and tried it.

Tamarind pulp rehydrated in the microwave

Five minutes of microwaving, covered, plus about 20 minutes sitting time–it was definitely done. And really, really incredibly tart, a surprise given tamarind’s distinctly plummy aroma. Success! But no wonder they call it “ouc” (pronounced OO-rgh, according to Dweck)–that was my immediate reaction when I tasted a tiny sip. It’s THAT sour. My second reaction was that I should probably say Shehekheyanu–the blessing for any new venture, especially for holidays and the first taste of a new fruit in the year.

I realized only afterward that I should have done the whole brick while I was at it–I was about to discover why Dweck calls for preparing three pounds of pulp at a time, not a couple of ounces.

Next step–squishing the pulp in the water to extract as much flavor as possible before filtering through cheesecloth and reextracting the pulp left behind in fresh water…no. Just no. I am not a cheesecloth girl–it never, never cuts neatly, even with Fiskars shears.

So, I was thinking, I have a microwave for a reason. I also decided I have a food processor for a reason, and this is definitely it. I stirred once with a fork first to make sure there really weren’t any pits in there, as advertised on the package front. Then I poured it all into the food processor, and gave it a whirl. That worked too. I seemed to be on a roll with the speed-it-up-immensely daydream.

Filtering the tamarind liquid

Filtration–I’ve used overlapping coffee filters in a colander whenever I make paneer in the microwave, and it worked pretty well here too–maybe better than Dweck’s photos, which show a cloudy filtrate coming through the cheesecloth. Mine was clear and amber–maybe too clear? Was it going to taste authentic without the silty stuff? I could only hope. It sure was sour, even dilute as it was. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, fruits, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »