Dave invented a cocktail. I remain not much of a drinker, but I like green drinks, so he concocted this one for me. Hooray! It tastes like being alive, and like chill breezes on perfect warm days, and like the first day of spring when it’s warm enough to spread your toes in the grass.

(Scotty: “What is it?”
Data: “It is… green, sir.”)

Actually, what it is is delicious!

The Fort Greene
4 gin (Dave happened to use Tanqueray, but you surely know gins better than I do)
4 grapefruit juice
4 cucumber juice
2 simple syrup
1 lemon juice

This recipe is written in proportions, not quantities.

To make cucumber juice you just blend some cucumbers, strain through a fine strainer, then [optionally] strain through coffee filters. Squeeze your citrus fruits to get at their juices, as one does. Simple syrup is equal parts water and sugar, boiled until the sugar is fully dissolved, then allowed to cool. That’s about all there is to it, really. Mix, serve over ice, enjoy, think happy springtime thoughts my way!

Hurry, hurry, you have to make this soup! I took a Hipstamatic photo just so I could post it for you all the sooner!

I adapted this from one of the fantastic Moosewood cookbooks, with just a few adjustments. I like to have extra meatiness and protein in my soups, so I use pork stock instead of water. Less liquid, too – I like my soups thick and hearty, not too watery – more like stews than soups, perhaps. I’m also opposed to puree soups, so I did a minimal immersion blender partial puree of this one before adding the peas, to retain some texture.

It’s absolutely delicious, and I think I’m about to go back for a third bowl…

Ingredients
2 C coarsely chopped onion (about 3 medium onions)
safflower or other neutral oil for frying
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp grated fresh peeled ginger
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
3/4 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
1/4 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground clove
1/8 tsp cayenne
2 tomatoes, diced into 1/2″ cubes
1 sweet potato (approximately 2 C diced), diced into 1/2″ cubes
2 C pork stock
1/2 C water
1 lb frozen green peas

Directions
1. Saute the onions in a splash of oil over medium heat in a medium pot, until they just turn translucent.

2. Stir in the spices, salt, ginger, and garlic and saute for another minute or two, until very fragrant.

3. Stir in the diced tomatoes and sweet potato until coated with spices, then immediately stir in the pork stock and water to dissolve the spices and deglaze the pot.

4. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, until the sweet potato chunks are tender (about 20 minutes).

5. Partially puree. I like lots of chunks, so I just use an immersion blender to puree just enough to thicken the soup some.

6. Stir in the frozen peas and simmer just until everything is nice and hot again.

7. Adjust seasonings to taste, and serve.

I’ve gotten seriously lazy with my sour cherry pies.

I make at least half a dozen every year, or my father sulks. It’s just one of those things. The tree is ready in mid-June, so everyone gathers together to pick, pit, barbecue, and eat. I’ve learned to make the crust dough in advance at home and just bring it over and stick it into Dad’s freezer before we attack the tree. These things get easier over time.

But since the tree keeps growing and I make more and more pies each year, I’ve had to learn a few shortcuts along the way. A few improvements. How do you make so many pies without anyone getting bored, without driving yourself nuts with irritation, while maintaining high quality and tastiness? Well, I think I’ve finally figured it out. This is how.

Forget pie tins. Forget measurements and mixing up the filling carefully. Forget lattices or double crusts. Forget everything you’ve ever learned about how to make a beautiful pie. No one cares if these are beautiful. If they’re delicious, dayenu, it’s more than enough for us. Don’t lead us through the desert. Just make us a few more pies!

Lazy. Haphazard. I make an almond-meal based tart dough, roll out chunks of it, and just splat them onto foil-covered baking sheets. I squeeze much of the juice out of cherries, handfuls at a time, and spread them across the middle of the sheet of dough. Sprinkle on some sort of starch to absorb the liquid, brown sugar, flavorful booze, a bit of cinnamon, some vanilla and almond extracts.

Want variety? Sure, make a few wishniak pies, a few with whisky, some with amaretto. Whatever makes you happy. Just splash it right on top. Then cover all your sins with crumblies, and stick it in the oven. One or two pies per baking sheet. My oven fits four baking sheets. We get the job done. Someone else runs out for ice cream in the end.

Sour Cherry Archives
2008: Sour Cherry Coffee Cake
2007: Almond Buttermilk Biscuits with Sour Cherry Compote, Butterscotch, and Candied Pickled Ginger
2007: Sour Cherry Braised Lamb Shanks
2006: Dave’s Sour Cherry Barbecue Sauce and Baby Back Ribs
2006: Sour Cherry Almond Milk Sorbet
2006: Sour Cherry Sage Flower Jam
2006: Sour Cherry Pie (Old Version)


Lazy, Rustic, Haphazard, and Amazing Sour Cherry Pies
For the crust:
2 C flour
1/2 C almond meal
1/2 C sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 C butter (slightly softened, but still cold)
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
For the filling (and no, this section doesn’t have precise measurements):
Sour cherries, rinsed and pitted
Flour or corn starch
Dark brown sugar
Almond extract
Vanilla extract
Salt
Cinnamon
Booze (I prefer wishniak (a sort of cherry liquor), but kirsch or amaretto or whiskey or rum or whatever you like will work just fine)
For the crumblies:
1/2 C flour
1/4 C sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/3 C butter

Mix together the dry ingredients for the crust. Add the butter and mix or squish together by hand until the dough reaches a texture like bread crumbs. Add the egg and vanilla and mix until the dough just starts to come together. Slam it against a hard surface to remove the air bubbles, as you would if working with clay. Form it into a squat, chubby cylinder, and cut the cylinder in half so that you have two disks. (Or into smaller chunks, if you prefer smaller pies.) Wrap each disk separately in plastic wrap. Refrigerate them for at least half an hour, and up to twenty-four hours. Alternatively, you can stick them in the freezer and they’ll keep for a few months. This makes enough dough for two reasonably large tarts (or more smaller ones).

Preheat the oven to 425° F.

Prepare an aluminum foil lined baking sheet. (Or several!)

Take one chunk of dough out of the fridge at a time. I like to roll out my dough between floured layers of waxed paper, to keep my rolling pin clean and make it easier to flip it as I go. Every few moments, just gently remove the wax paper and sprinkle on a bit more dough to keep it from sticking. When it’s about 1/8″ thick, flip it out onto a prepared baking sheet.

You’re going to build a really haphazard filling right on top of the dough, keeping about 1.5″-2″ clear around the edge.

First, the sour cherries. Squeeze as much liquid as possible from the cherries before piling them on top of the dough – no matter how much liquid you remove, you’ll still end up with too much remaining. I promise. (Save the liquid you squeeze out – you can use it to make syrup for soda!)

Next, sprinkle on some flour or corn starch to help absorb the liquid. A nice dusting over all the cherries should do just fine. You really can’t go wrong here. Then sprinkle on a light dusting of cinnamon as well.

Drizzle a few little dashes of vanilla and almond extracts over the cherries.

Heavily sprinkle brown sugar over the cherries next. My brown sugar tends to solidify, so more often than not I use a knife to just slice the brown sugar over the cherries. I use rather a lot, but it’s just a matter of taste. Sour cherries are more flavorful than sweet ones, and you add a lot of sweetness with ice cream at the end anyway.

Last, splash some booze over the whole mess. Rather a lot more than you did with the extracts. Definitely more of a splash than a drizzle, this time. Don’t panic. The alcohol will cook off, and it’ll be lovely.

To finish things up, make the crumbles by mixing together the non-butter crumbly ingredients and then cutting in the butter until the texture is, well, crumbly. Sprinkle over the cherries.

At this point, if you’re making pies in bulk for a parent who sulks if he doesn’t get enough pie each summer, you can just freeze your pie in his freezer and instruct him on how to bake it himself whenever he wants. That’s a bit silly, though. He always bakes and eats them all within the first week anyway.

Bake for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 375° F and bake for another 30 minutes, or until it looks done.

Serve with vanilla ice cream for best effect.

We had a big going-away barbecue for my brother Jordan, who is off to Ghana for the summer as of yesterday. How better to say goodbye than with cherries and satay and live music from all his fabulous musician friends?

It was a fantastic excuse to remake my favorite satay recipe, chicken marinated in a vibrant yellow concoction fragrant with lemongrass and turmeric and coriander, sharp and floral with galangal and ginger, and sweet with rich, dark brown palm sugar, and served Thai-style with chunks of fresh sweet pineapple on the end of each skewer.

I’m in love with this sauce, as you can see. I want to put it on everything now. Steak. Eggs. More chicken. Duck! Everything!

That’s my Dad, following my instructions with rolling eyes and good cheer, basting the skewers of satay with a smashed stalk of lemongrass as a brush, and oil that was steeped with lemongrass for half an hour or so before the grilling began. There is no better smell than lemongrass oil dripping onto the coals and the smoke bursting up around intensely spiced meat.

Have a great summer, Jordan! We miss you already! And in your honor, everyone else who reads this should go make and eat some of this bright, intense, tasty chicken satay!

Archives
2009: Saffron Turmeric Cake with Meyer Lemon Sorbet, Argan Oil Whipped Cream, Almond Brittle, and Thyme
2008: Chocolate-Whiskey Pudding Cake
2007: Strawberry Tarragon Sorbet
2006: Apricot Ketchup


Malaysian Chicken Satay
(adapted from Cradle of Flavor by James Oseland)
For the marinade:
1 tbsp coriander seeds (whole)
1/3 of a small star anise (more if you’re into anise, but I hate it, so this is just enough to add depth of flavor without tasting like licorice to me)
2 thick stalks lemongrass
3 shallots (about 110 grams), peeled and coarsely chopped
3 large cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
1″ long piece of fresh (or frozen and thawed) galangal (approximately 40 grams), peeled and thinly sliced against the grain
2″ long piece of fresh ginger (approximately 30 grams), peeled and thinly sliced against the grain
1 tbsp ground turmeric
1/4 C palm sugar (approximately 50 grams), thinly sliced (or somehow made grind-able)
2 tbsp safflower [or other neutral] oil
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
For the satay:
3 lbs boneless chicken thighs
1 thick stalk lemongrass
1/4 C safflower [or other neutral] oil
1 fresh pineapple (1/3 or so is really enough, but you can eat the rest!)
a bag of thin bamboo skewers, soaked in water for at least half an hour and drained

(Serves… well, I don’t know. I made a triple recipe for a big party where more and more people kept stopping by, but there was plenty of other food there, too.)

Set up the marinade:

1. Set up your food processor, and grind the coriander and star anise together in it. Try to get them into powder, but ultimately don’t drive yourself nuts over it at this stage.

2. Prep the lemongrass for the marinade by cutting off the hard bottom and the grassy green tops, leaving about 5-6 inches of usable lemongrass from each piece. Peel off the tough outer layers (usually there are two tough leaves wrapped around that yo don’t want) and discard those. Slice the remaining tastiness into thin rounds, the thinner the better.

3. Add the prepped lemongrass, galangal, ginger, garlic, shallots, turmeric, palm sugar, safflower oil, and salt into the food processor, and process until you have a fairly smooth thick sauce. I like to actually transfer it into my blender once it’s as close as the food processor can get it, and use the blender to get it even smoother. This works delightfully well.

4. Prep the chicken by removing the fat and such and cutting the meat into pieces approximately 1 inch wide by 2ish inches long by about 1/4 inch thick. Again, don’t drive yourself too nuts with this – it’s really not that big a deal.

5. Squish the chicken with the marinade such that all pieces are fully coated. Let it marinate at least an hour or two, and preferably overnight.

Prepare for imminent grilling:

6. While your skewers are soaking, cut up the pineapple into bite-sized chunks.

7. Prepare that last stalk of lemongrass for use as a basting brush by cutting off the hard end and then smashing the bottom with something heavy until it gets all bristly. Soak that bristly end in the basting oil to infuse while getting the rest of your prep work done.

8. Thread the chicken onto the skewers, adding a bite of pineapple in the middle and at the end of each skewer.

9. Grill! Baste each skewer with lemongrass oil (with the lemongrass brush!) as soon as it goes on the grill, and again after you flip it. You want the chicken just cooked through, with some nice char on the surface if you can get it. If you don’t feel like setting up the grill, you can cook these under the broiler, but they’re honestly nicer when grilled.

10. Serve immediately. Enjoy!

My favorite urban forager and educational hike leader, Wildman Steve Brill, finally made my dreams come true when he released his Wild Edibles app this spring.

Now, I’ll start with my full disclosure – the Wildman gave me a promo code to download a free copy of the app, so that’s what I did. But in all honesty, I would’ve happily paid for it anyway. I’ve been hoping he’d create a wild foraging app ever since I bought my iPhone two summers ago, after all! My fantasy involved some sort of 20 questions style tool, but the well-organized database he put together instead serves just as well as what I’d envisioned.

I love his hikes through NYC parks, where he teaches us how to identify edible and medicinal plants around the city. I love his beautiful artwork, which is all through his cookbooks and now the app. And I love his recipes (even when I adapt them to suit my ovo-lacto palate).

The Wildman’s new Wild Edibles app is an incredibly thorough directory of the edible and medicinal plants you’re likely to find in North America. It’s easy to browse and search through, and full of photos and drawings to help you identify what you’re looking at. I particularly appreciate the big pink warning (and yellow alert sign on all images) when a plant has poisonous lookalikes, and the tasty looking recipes included with many of the entries.

A friend and I had a lot of fun playing with the app when trying to find cattails out on Long Island, and seeing how her recollections of eating cattails matched up with the Wildman’s advice. I’m going on a big road trip this summer, and I can’t wait to put it to good use then!

I’m also very proud of my [tiny] involvement – the Wildman emailed me to say that he put a note in the app about prickly ash and Sichuan peppercorns, which he hadn’t known about until I got excited and mentioned the connection when we found prickly ash trees in Prospect Park last summer!

(And speaking of using the iPhone with urban foraging – when we found those trees last summer, I immediately dropped a little pin into my maps app on my phone to mark the spot. So now, I can just search for ‘prickly ash’ on my phone and follow the gps directions straight to the right spot in the middle of the park. This sort of nifty use of technology is probably my favorite thing about living in the future!)

So, have fun! I’m getting more and more into urban farming, with my bees and my Dad’s sour cherry tree and the myoga (a Japanese ginger relative, with delicious flowers) I planted last fall. But nothing really beats being able to wander around and identify what you’re looking at as you go. At least in the context of urban foraging, this is the future I wanted.

Rose was going on and on about how incredibly easy and delicious Welsh cakes were, so I had to make them! But I couldn’t find my nutmeg and had to substitute mace, and then it occurred to me that I have slightly more flavorful turbinado sugar around, and then I glanced upon the candied ginger and dried apricots when hunting for the currants… and how could I resist messing with the recipe then?

These are sort of pancake-ish, sort of scone-ish, and really fantastic for breakfast. You can make the dough in advance (though really, it comes together very quickly), and the cakes are fried up in an ungreased pan just before serving (none of them lasted long enough to test whether they’re still good the next day).

Also, I’m still a Hipstamatic addict:

Archives
2008: Goose Stew
2007: Curried Cauliflower
2006: Freeform Caramel Prawn Pies


Welsh Cakes with Dried Apricots and Candied Ginger
(blatantly stolen and tweaked from King Arthur Flour’s recipe)
3 C (12 3/4 oz) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1 C (7 oz) turbinado sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
1 C (8 oz) cold unsalted butter, cut into smallish chunks of some sort
2 1/2 oz (a bit under 1/2 C) candied ginger, chopped into currant-sized chunks
3 oz (a bit over 1/2 C) dried apricots, chopped into currant-sized chunks
2 large eggs beaten with enough milk to yield 3/4 C liquid

1. Get a bigger bowl than you think you’ll need, and whisk together the powdery ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and mace).

2. Smoosh in the butter by hand (I love my nitrile gloves for this sort of messy operation) until the mixture is fairly evenly crumbly – as with scones, a few bigger chunks of butter remaining will be just fine.

3. Mix in the candied ginger and dried apricots.

4. Mix in the milk/egg mixture, until the everything is fairly evenly moistened.

5. With this sort of sticky dough, I like to roll it out between two sheets of floured wax paper. So, get a big sheet of wax paper out onto your counter. Sprinkle it liberally with flour. Turn the sticky, moist dough out onto it, and flour it on top until you can gently pat it into a nice mount. Cut the mound of dough in half, and shape each half into a thick 4″-ish disc. Wrap one of the disks in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge.

6. Roll the other disc of dough between two floured sheets of wax paper until it’s about 1/4″ thick.

(To keep dough from sicking, I tend to occasionally pull off the top sheet of wax paper, sprinkle on some more flour, put it back down, flip over the whole operation, pull off the formerly-bottom-now-top sheet of wax paper, sprinkle on some more flour (or spread the remaining flour around a bit more evenly), and keep going.)

7. Using a 2 1/2″ to 3 1/2″ round cookie cutter (or the rim of an appropriately sized wine glass), cut the dough into circles. Gather and re-roll the scraps, cutting until you’ve used all the dough. Or if you don’t care about circularity, cut it into squares. Whatever makes you happy.

8. Heat an ungreased (yes, really!) non-stick (possibly not necessary, but that’s what I used) pan (or skillet or griddle) over medium heat.

9. Fry the cakes for about 2 1/2 minutes on each side, until they’re golden brown and cooked all the way through. Definitely try just one sample cake at a time for the first few until you’ve figured out the right temperature, and then of course do as many at once as you can manage.

10. Transfer the fried cakes to a rack to cool. Don’t expect them to actually have time to cool before they are scarfed down by everyone in the immediate vicinity.

11. Repeat with the refrigerated dough. After you roll it out and cut it, let the circles (or whatever shapes) warm at room temperature for about 10 minutes before frying.

12. King Arthur Flour suggested dusting the cakes with cinnamon-sugar or splitting them and smearing on some butter and jam. Personally, I think they’re dead perfect eaten totally plain, straight out of the oven. Though they certainly do go well with tea.

Yield: About 6 people worth of breakfast around these here parts.

God, look at those charred peppers! They’re the long, vaguely gnarly, kinda slender but not really, fairly spicy but not very, probably Italian ones I find at my local organic Korean grocery store. I love them with a deep and abiding love. Dave, however, is pretty sure that nightshades give him stomachaches, so I don’t get to cook with them very much lately.

He’s out of town for a conference this weekend, and I was trying to make up for missing him by cooking delicious foods that he can’t eat. This tasty, spicy, black bean sauce pork dish was perfect!

I find that I’m losing my interest in refined food lately. I don’t want to deal with the tiny dabs of sauces and careful presentations. My photography oomph is being taken over by marketing photos for my glass work, and I’m less interested in taking the time to arrange careful photos of my food. But I still love variety in my food, and I’m still particularly in love with Chinese cuisine. I actually just read Fuschia Dunlop’s memoir, and now I’m even more hopeful of managing to come to like more of the unfamiliarly textured foods I mostly shy away from nowadays.

But peasant food doesn’t have to be boring or bland. The peppers are vivid here in flavor as well as in heat. I raised the proportion of fermented black beans because I love their intensity, and I threw in an ice cube of the trotter gear I made with trotters and pig tails from Bobolink farm according to Fergus Henderson’s recipe, which calls for intense homemade chicken stock as a building block for building that tasty building block.

I’ve come to prefer peasant food, sure, but my peasant food is damn good.

Archives
2008: Kumquat Marmalade
2007: Chewy Maple Cookies
2006: Cocoa Nib and Currant Rugelach


Farmhouse Pork with Black Beans and Green Peppers (and Trotter Gear)
(adapted from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuschia Dunlop)
9 oz long Italian green hot frying peppers
2 oz pork belly
14 oz pork tenderloin
1 tsp shaoxing wine
1 tsp light soy sauce
1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed and coarsely chopped
oil
corn starch
Optional: 1 ice cube worth of trotter gear (recipe below; needs to be made way in advance if you plan to use it here)

Thinly slice the meats against the grain and place into separate bowls.

Stir the sliced pork tenderloin (or other lean pork) with the soy sauces, shaoxing, and a good hefty sprinkling of corn starch, and set aside.

Cut off and discard the stems of the peppers, then slice them at an angle into oval-ish rounds about 1 1/4″ long and 1/4″ wide. Keep the seeds and ribs – as Dunlop aptly points out, this is a peasant dish! Man, I love peasant dishes.

Prep the garlic and black beans as described in the ingredients list.

Heat your wok until it is nearly smoking and feels like a radiator with your hand a couple inches above the bottom. Swirl in some oil, then stir-fry the peppers in batches as needed until they get a nice tasty bit of char to them. Pour them out into a bowl and set aside.

Wipe any pepper seeds remaining out of the wok and return it to the heat, swirling in some more oil.

Add the pork belly and stir-fry until it’s lightly browned (and not necessarily fully cooked), then stir in the garlic and black beans and fry for just a moment until they’re gorgeously fragrant.

Add the lean pork and stir-fry until mostly done, then return the green peppers to the wok and keep going until everything looks totally done.

Shove everything in the wok out up the sides, and toss an ice cube of trotter gear into the bottom to melt it. When it’s melted, stir everything else back down in with it until hot and melded, then remove from the heat and serve with lots of rice and perhaps some sort of nice, sweet-ish tofu as a second entree.

Trotter Gear
(adapted from Fergus Henderson)
3 trotters (pigs’ feet) (I threw in some pig tails, too)
2 red onions, halved
2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, coarsely chopped
2 leeks, coarsely chopped
1 head garlic
2 bay leaves
12 black peppercorns
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 cup Madeira or other sweet wine
Chicken stock to cover (about 1 quart) (ideally the homemade good stuff)

If your trotters or tails are a bit bristly (and sometimes they are), shave them. A disposable razor works wonders, and it’s very straightforward. Sort of comfortably homey, even. No shaving cream, though, please.

Put all the solid ingredients into a pot. Pour in the madeira or wine, and then add enough chicken stock to cover all the stuff in there. (Homemade chicken stock really is best. We condense our chicken stock down to fit into our freezer and then often use it condensed, so this was some pretty intense stuff to begin with.)

Bring to an almost-boil, and then simmer for 3ish hours, until the trotters/tails are “very wobbly” and the meat is falling off the bone (or easily pierced by a chopstick, or whatever measure you tend to like for this sort of thing).

Take the trotters (and tails!) out of the pot and put on a cutting board. Strain the stock and set aside.

Pull all the meat, flesh, skin, tendons, and other wobbly bits off the bones. Discard the bones. If you missed any hairy bits, just pull those bits off and throw them away too. But keep all those weird, gross looking wobbly bits – they are the magic here.

Chop your meat and skin and wobbly bits and such sort of medium finely – not a superfine mince or something, but more along the lines of pieces around the size of a pinky fingernail that’s been trimmed down to the quick. (Not the pig’s. Yours.)

Stir your chopped up wobbly mess back into the stock.

Set up a few ice cube trays lined with plastic wrap, and portion out the wobbly-bit-filled stock into ice cubes of meaty goodness. Freeze. Once they’re frozen, store them in your freezer in a big ziplock bag of meaty chunks. Add them to fried rice, to finish other stir-fries and sauces, soups, what-have-you. Instant tasty umami injection!

Dear people who live in or visit London,

Have you stopped by Ottolenghi yet? You should. It is a happy place that makes people happy. I spent about 2 hours fighting through insane crowds and delayed buses to get there during a London tube strike once (not counting the time spent flying across the pond and back, of course), and it was worth it. (Though to be fair, partially for the adventure and nearby chocolate shop.)

In other news, we made a modified version of Ottolenghii’s black pepper tofu, modified for us carnivores who keep Momofuku-style pickled chilies in our fridge, just in case. Though the black pepper is incredibly spicy all on its own, no chilies needed, which I’ve never experienced before playing with this recipe. And I’m really learning to love tofu in spicy dishes. It’s absolutely marvelous!

My apologies for the terrible photography. We made this dish while my mother was borrowing my good camera, so this is the iPhone Hipstamatic version of food blogging instead. It’s hardly ideal, but it’s better than failing to get my version of the recipe out to you.

Archives
2008: Shredded Burdock Root
2007: Lamb Kofta with Apricot Sauce


Black Pepper Tofu with Pork
(adapted from Ottolenghi)
800g (1.75 lbs) firm tofu
Corn starch, to dust the tofu
454g (1 lb) ground pork
3 tbsp sweet soy sauce
3 tbsp light soy sauce
4 tsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp sugar
Safflower [or some other neutral] oil, for frying
65g (~4.5 tbsp) butter
12 small shallots (~350g), peeled and thinly sliced
12 garlic cloves, crushed and then minced
3 tbsp minced ginger
5 tbsp crushed (or very coarsely ground) black peppercorns
16 small, thin scallions, cut into segments 3cm (~1″) long
Optional garnish: sliced pickled chilies (recipe below)

1. Stir the pork in with the soy sauces and sugar and set aside.

2. Cut the tofu into cubes (3cm x 2cm, or about 1″ x 1/2″) and toss them in corn starch, shaking off the excess.

3. Heat your wok until it starts to smoke and feels like a radiator with your hand held a few inches above the bottom, then pour in enough oil to really coat the bottom in a thin pool. Fry the tofu in batches in the oil, turning the pieces as you go so that they’re golden and crispy on all sides. Once they are golden all around, and have a thin crust, transfer to a paper towel. It’s important to do this in batches, because if you overcrowd your pan the tofu will steam instead of frying and will never develop that wonderful crisp, dried texture.

4. Clean the oil and tofu bits out of your wok, then throw in the butter. Once the butter melts, add the shallots, garlic and ginger, and stir-fry until it’s all shiny and soft (should take about 15 minutes, but of course your mileage may vary).

5. Stir in pork once the shallots are soft.

6. Stir in the black pepper once the pork is pretty much cooked.

7. Stir in the tofu and keep going for just a minute until it’s thoroughly warmed up and coated in the sauce, then stir in the scallions and remove from heat.

8. Optionally, serve with sliced pickled chilies and a bit of their pickling liquid (recipe below). I really like the flavor and extra heat these offer. Though seriously, even without the extra pickled chili garnish, it was ridiculously spicy considering that all the heat came from just the black pepper, not chilies of any sort. Really tastily so. Serve with lots of rice.

Pickled chilies
(adapted from Momofuku)
1 C water, as hot as your tap can get (~120 degrees F in most American kitchens)
1/2 C rice wine vinegar
6 tbsp sugar
2 1/4 tsp kosher salt
4 C Thai birds-eye chilies (or other small (less than 2″ long) chilies)

Combine the water, vinegar, sugar, and salt, stirring them until the sugar dissolves.

Wear gloves when handling chilies, please. Just rinse them off and remove any stems if you feel fussy. You can slice them however you like when you actually use them later on. I like using green Thai chilies, because I enjoy their flavor and the green ones are supposedly spicier than the red ones. Really, use whatever makes you happy, and it’ll turn out just fine.

Pack the chilies into some sort of fringe-friendly, long-term-storage-friendly container (tupperware or mason jars), and pour the brine over them to cover. Stick them in your fridge for at least a few days. They’ll last approximately forever, to make every day a happy spicy vinegary day.

The last half dozen times or so we made peposo, we ate it all too quickly for me to get a photo for you and post about it. It’s a winter staple in my household, and I regret not having posted it sooner. Sorry about that! I happened to have my camera out at the right moment today, though, so here you finally go.

We’ve adapted this recipe pretty thoroughly to make a lot of perfect winter stew in one go, a huge batch of amazing winy braised meats drenched in a thick, luscious sauce just begging to be soaked up with crusty bread. The original recipe called for a kilo of 2″ chunks of stewing beef. Here, well, we cook about 10 lbs of mixed cuts of beef and lamb and veal on the bone, good meaty braising cuts to cook low and slow in the wine. The mix of meats drastically improves the flavour, and using shank allows you to stir the marrow back into the sauce in the end, thereby elevating the dish to so much more than a simple winter braise.

The cookbook this recipe was inspired by, Piano, Piano, Pieno by Susan McKenna Grant, claims that Peposo originated in Impruneta, a town famous for its pottery where workers would cook this meal while keeping endless watch over the kilns. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy, but I like to let it simmer while I’m working at the torch and keeping watch over my kiln myself.

This recipe is going to look expensive, I’ll warn you. It calls for 10 lbs of meat and 2-3 bottles of wine. But go for the cheap wine, and keep in mind that this is enough at least a dozen meals, probably more. (Looking into my fridge now, I know we’ve eaten 5 meals of it already, and there’s about 6 C of it left. So that’s maybe closer to 17 portions, total? Something like that. It’s pretty intense, with bread and a nice salad on the side.) We make it in huge batches, and if we get sick of eating it (highly unlikely!), we freeze individual portions for later. But if you’d rather keep it cheap or smaller, feel free to scale it down! It’s very forgiving.

It’s dead simple, ultimately. There are basically five ingredients, and mostly you just let it simmer while you putter about doing whatever else you feel like doing for a few hours. Watch a movie. Go for a walk. Read a book. Write that novel. Get some damn work done. Enjoy the smell. Eat the glorious results.

Archives
2009: Miso Almond Romanesco
2008: Saffron Duck Pot Pie
2007: Stewed Garlicky Black Bean Spare Ribs


Peposo
(adapted from Piano, Piano, Pieno by Susan McKenna Grant)

10 lbs mixed red meat on the bone, ideally including: beef shank (sliced like osso bucco), lamb shoulder arm chops, ox tail, veal shank or tail, and if you feel like it, maybe some lamb neck bones or beef short ribs – whatever you can find!)
Safflower or other neutral oil
3 heads garlic
3/8-1/2 C coarsely ground black pepper (no, that’s not a typo)
2-3 bottles red wine (ideally a young Chianti, supposedly, though we’ve used all sorts of inexpensive reds to good result)
Salt to taste

Salt the meat a bit. Don’t go overboard, you can always finish salting the dish later. A light sprinkle on each side will do for now.

Got a big pan (or two at once, is what I do) nice and hot, grease it up a bit with safflower or some other neutral oil, and brown your meat nice and good, tossing each piece into a big bowl once it’s good and dark on all sides. Set out snacks to get you through a few hours of that delicious smell that’s only just starting to fill your home.

For this much meat, I use three pots to cook a batch of peposo – a nice big cazuela (a Spanish clay pot), the bottom of my tagine (a Moroccan clay pot), and a big cast iron pan.

Any heavy-bottomed pot should be fine, though, so don’t worry if you don’t have any clay pots on hand. I’m a bit obsessed with them, but I haven’t really experimented properly to figure out yet whether they actually improve flavor or if they just make me happier by looking nice on the stove. Relax, it’ll all work out in the end.

Lay out your meat in a single layer, tightly packed into the pots or pans you’re using to cook it. (Note: If you use short ribs, I find that they come out better when packed on their side, rather than bone up or bone down.)

Take the garlic heads apart, discarding the outer skin but not peeling the individual cloves. Tuck the garlic cloves in the various crevices between the meats.

Sprinkle the black pepper over everything, then pour in enough wine to mostly (but not completely!) cover the meat. This usually turns out to be the first 2 bottles, for me.

Cover the pots with tin foil (I don’t actually have lids that fit the pots I tend to use for this dish – your mileage may vary, just make sure they’re covered!) and put them on your stove at its lowest possible setting.

Now you just have to be patient. Some cuts start feeling tender and wonderful and done after about 3 hours, while others take closer to 4 or 5. After about two hours, if you got that 3rd bottle of wine, you can check in and pour some more in to make up for whatever may have cooked off. If not, don’t worry, it’ll still be delicious.

Start checking the meat after about 3 hours. Poke every piece with a fork, and take out whichever ones feel done. I like to shred the meat off the bone and connective tissue while the rest of the meat cooks further, then do another check, and so on.

As the meat comes off the bone, make sure to push the marrow out of the bones and into a small bowl you’ve set aside for that purpose. As each pot finishes up, take out the garlic cloves and squish them from their skins into that same little bowl. Discard the garlic skins, emptied bones, and bits of connective tissue or other questionably textured bits (if you’re picky like me). Stir the marrow and garlic together with a fork until it’s a nice squishy tasty mess.

Once everything is out of the remaining braising wine, stir the garlic/marrow into the wine to create the sauce. Turn the heat back on and reduce the sauce until it’s nice and thick – it doesn’t have to be super dense, but you want it thick enough to really coat every bite and stick to it.

That’s it. Stir the meat back into the sauce, and salt to taste. Eat approximately forever, with enough bread to sop up the sauce and something green and vivid and crunchy on the side to contrast with the deep rich ultimate winy meatiness of the peposo.

The tea shelf in my pantry is absurd. Dozens of teas from everywhere I go, stacked and falling over next to nearly as many varieties of honey on the other end of the shelf. I’ve been a bit obsessed with Lupicia teas for the past few years, ever since I discovered that they make teas that taste like roasted chestnuts and salty sakura mochi and sweet beans. But I’ve never found a commercial chai that tastes as good as the one I’m posting here now. Just a bit of toasting and pounding, and you have enough chai to last months, perfect rich spices to ease you into your day each morning.

In other news, I finally put together a main site to gather up all my projects and portfolios. I’ve also started an etsy shop, where I’m selling my lampworked glass beads and jewelry.

My bees are doing well. It’s been a rough summer for them, and I had to replace the queen once, but the hive is now going strong. I’m pretty confident that they have good odds heading into winter, at least, and still have hope that they’ll manage to make some honey for me if we get a good nectar run this fall.

I finally got stung for the first time by my hive. Turned out that it’s much less of a big deal than it was back when I was a kid! And I totally deserved it – I was doing a hive inspection alone, and I squished more bees than usual when stacking the supers back up at the end. But that’s okay – I’ll still gladly go in wearing shorts and tanktops and a loose veil, and pet fuzzly walls of bees in the hive. Me and the ladies, we get along just fine.

Archives
2008: Black and White Cookies
2007: Dolmas (stuffed grape leaves)


Toasted Hazelnut Chai
37g black tea leaves
50g toasted hazelnuts
12g rose petals
20g cinnamon sticks
15g cardamom pods
A couple vanilla beans (optional)

A mortar and pestle honestly is the best and easiest tool for the job, this time.

I toast hazelnuts on a baking sheet in the oven, 315 F for about ten minutes (or until they smell good to you). Let them cool for a couple minutes, then coarsely crush them and mix them in with the tea.

My rose petals come in the form of curled up rosebuds, so I crush them just a bit until the petals separate out and break up enough to be mixed in with the rest.

Crush the cinnamon sticks into shards small enough to fit into your tea strainer. (It ended up being about 5ish 3″ cinnamon sticks, for me.) Mix in with the rest.

When you crush the cardamom pods, get in there with your fingers and rub the seeds out of the pods – but pour the pods along with the seeds into the mix with the rest.

If you’re using vanilla beans, just snip them into little pieces with a pair of scissors and mix those in.

That’s it. Sniff it to see if you’re happy, and adjust the proportions to taste. Store in a sealed container. Use like you would any other fantastically delicious chai.