Fruit Salad

The CC just adores the name mostly because it totally lies about the underlying subject — well, maybe not about the "fruit" part — but this ain't no bloody salad!

This Indian dish has so much amazing science and trickery inside of it that it's worthy of the slipperiest of slippery gods. (Oh, Agni! Oh, Loki!)

What is it?

Fruits in a milk reduction with complex spicing.

When stated like that, it sounds so boring which it totally is not. It's a masterpiece of complex chemistry with that assured magician's sleight of hand which veers it towards genius.

One day the CC returned to his apartment where his roommate greeted him sheepishly, "I'm sorry. I ate it all. I couldn't resist."

The CC knew even back then the kinda effect this dessert has on people so he just said, "Why don't you go shopping? We'll make it again, and we'll make a party of it on Friday?"

And we partied.

He grilled the steaks, his girlfriend (now wife) cooked the rest of the meal, and the CC had already spent his time earlier reducing milk for dessert. We were poor graduate students but we had a blast.

How does it work?

You reduce whole un-homogenized milk until it resembles a thick soup. You add cardamom, saffron, and slivered almonds. Then you cool it down till it's really ice-cold. You add fruits in a bowl, pour the soup all over it and eat it.

When the CC added the citrus fruits to the bowl, the roommate yelled, "It's gonna curdle." Logical thinking but dead wrong! That's the magic trick.

When the proteins are denatured and the final product ice-cold, the citrus doesn't have enough time to make the milk curdle. Eat it right away or GTFO, as the kids might say these days.

The more variety of fruits you add the better. The CC prefers apples, oranges, pomegranates. You may prefer something else. Go nuts!

(The citrus fruits must be peeled. The tannins in the skin have a higher probability of making it curdle.)

What's the problem?

It's hard work. It's an insane amount of work specifically since the kinda burners that we have in apartments are rather puny.

All you're doing in the most important step is "reducing" milk i.e. you're removing the water from the milk and simultaneously denaturing the proteins.

This is one of the truly rare cases where the CC is going to talk about specific equipment. You are best off with a enamel-coated cast-iron pot — something like a Le Creuset.

There's a reason for this. The CC grew up with this dish. It took hours and hours and hours and hours of stirring. It always does. Back in the day, the CC thought that having a book would be an antidote which was logical until he dropped the book into the flames and the house almost caught on fire. Not so great after all.

What's so great about the enamel-coated iron pot is that it heats the milk uniformly.  From the sides as well as the bottom. The milk bubbles away at a uniform rate. You stir occasionally and try not to worry too much.

You'll worry anyway.

You want the milk to reduce by half. It'll change color because the water goes away and the bright white milk turns cream-colored.

The CC wants to point out that most Indian desserts involve reducing milk into various levels of submission. When looked at in that light, this is the easy end of the spectrum!

Ingredients

(serves 6)

2 gallons whole milk
sugar

6 cardamom pods
saffron
1/4 cup slivered almonds

1 orange - segmented, skin peeled
1 apple - cut into cubes
1 pomegranate - seeds separated

Note 1: The product itself is not amenable to storage but the milk mixture absolutely is. You can make more and just pour it over the fruits right before serving.

Note 2: When you serve it, it's great if you can chill the bowls ahead of time. It's not strictly necessary but it's nice.

Recipe

Heat up the milk in a pot. When it comes to a boil, reduce the heat and start stirring. Keep stirring. This is gonna take the better part of two hours or so.

Add the sugar to taste. The CC prefers less but your tastes may vary.

Keep stirring.

Seed the cardamom pods and crush them to a powder in a mortar and pestle.

The milk should reduce by half and the color changed from bright white to almost cream-colored.

You didn't miss the memo about keeping on stirring, right?

When reduced by half, add the cardamom powder, the saffron, and the almonds and take off the heat. When it has cooled down, stick it in the refrigerator till it is ice cold.

Put the fruits in a bowl. Pour the milk mixture all over it. Serve at once.

Holi Hai! (होली है। )

It's the festival of colors and even though New York is hit by the largest snow storm in years, it would be remiss of the CC to not present the ne plus ultra of Indian recipes.

It's called thandai (ठंडाई - literally: coolant.)

It's traditionally served with bhang (edible cannabis - which is legal in India!) but even without that it's truly terrific. It's very sweet but you can cut back.

Ingredients

(serves 2)

2 cups milk

8 cashew nuts
8 blanched almonds
8 pistachios
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp black pepper
4 long peppers (pippali)
4 green cardamoms
4-6 dried rose buds
1 tsp poppy seeds
pinch of saffron

2 tbsp sugar (or more to taste!)

Note 1: The CC has gone easy on the sugar. It's much more sugary than this.

Note 2: The rose buds are not optional. That's what gives the dish its characteristic fragrance. You can find them in your local Chinatown.

Note 3: It also sometimes features magaz seeds (edible kernel of watermelon seeds) but it's reasonably exotic and the CC left it out. Add 8 of them if you have them.

Note 4: The sugar in the recipe catalyzes the bhang in your brain and gives a "higher high". The nuts which have fat help dissolve the fat-soluble cannabis.

Note 5: The recipe has connections to Mughal culture. The Mughal Emperors were massive opium addicts. Oddly, alcohol wasn't much in fashion possibly because of Muslim edicts. The same logic of catalysis and sugar applies to opium.

Note 6: All the spices used are considered "cooling spices" in Indian cooking which makes sense since Holi comes on the cusp of the absurdly hot Indian summer.

Note 7: The black pepper and long pepper are "hot spices" and they're there for "balance". A ridiculous concept but you must enter into the medieval Indian mindset.

Recipe

Soak all the ingredients in the milk for at least two hours. Blend in a blender finely.

Strain and serve cold.

Tarhana aka Trahana

If Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language as George Bernard Shaw so memorably put it, then Greece and Turkey are two countries separated by a common cuisine.

Oh the horrors and the wars! And Cyprus. Let's not even go there.

The difference in most of their common food names is "nationalistic branding". Something that you see in many adjacent "warring" countries which share a common cuisine. The choices are both boring and endless — India and Pakistan; Israel and Palestine; Eritrea and Ethiopia.

It gets depressing after a while.

The CC definitely belongs to the distinct minority of "Make food not war!" but it's a hard, not to mention, impossible sell to fanatics with no education and millennia of hatred.

But we will always have linguistic adjacency to remind us that you can theoretically separate ideas but, in practice, the same ol', same ol' geography dominates as it logically should.

Which brings us to tarhana or trahana. Pick your favorite one. The former being Turkish and the latter being Greek.

Tarhana, Trahana, let's call the whole thing off!

What is it?

It's an ancient mechanism of preserving both wheat and milk for the long winters. In an age of refrigeration and air-transported food, this is a fairly quaint notion so we appeal instead to its deliciousness.

The idea is simple. Take wheat flour, mix it with sour yogurt, pass the dough through a fine screen so it breaks up into tiny pieces and let it dry in the abundant Mediterranean sun.

The chemistry is complex. By introducing sour yogurt, you are lowering the pH to acidic levels. By drying it, you are reducing the moisture levels. This makes the environment inhospitable to most pathogens and you still preserving the wheat and milk proteins.

You cook it by just introducing it to some broth. The wheat thickens the broth and acidity introduced gives it a tangy umami flavor.

There is a separate product called "sweet trahana" which is the same idea except with milk rather than yogurt. It lacks the lactic tang and is much harder because of the need to remove moisture even further and so needs to cook a little longer.

The presence of both wheat flour and yogurt means it acts as a thickener typically in soups and stews.

You can pretty much thicken any soup which could use a sour lactic tang. Tomato soup is a classic. Less commonly is a mushroom soup referenced by Diane Kochilas presented below for your delectation.

The CC was informed that this was a "superior" mushroom-barley soup.

"Fair enough, it's the same concept just with superior food technology."

The mushrooms came from a Japanese market with some others brought by a Russian friend from the Russian markets all to make a Greek soup. Not exactly world peace and arguably closer to whirled peas but it's a step.

All raise your hands and shout out, Trahanosoupa me Manitaria!

Ingredients

4 cups mixed wild mushrooms (coarsely chopped)
2 garlic cloves (minced)
2 medium onions (sliced thin)
olive oil

1 cup trahana
6 cups water

salt
black pepper
lemon juice

1/3 cup grated kefalo-graviera cheese (substitute by feta)

Recipe

Heat the olive oil and sautée the garlic for a minute. Make sure it doesn't burn. Add  the onions and cook over medium heat until wilted for about 7 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook leisurely till for at least 10 minutes.

Add the trahana and stir for several minutes. Add the water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve hot with lemon juice and the cheese as topping.

Designer Milk

From the New York Daily News: Buying breast milk online.

Need breast milk? It's only a click away.

Online forums like OnlytheBreast.com and EatsonFeets.org allowing moms who make more breast milk than their nursing babies need to sell it.

At OnlytheBreast.com, which describes itself as "a community for moms to buy and sell natural breast milk," instructions are offered on how to ship, pump, freeze and store breast milk. Ads for buyers and sellers appear on the site.

"Super Mom," advertises frozen breast milk for $3 an ounce with a minimum of 16 ounces, and the cost of overnight shipping.

John Steinbeck, eat your heart out!