Cactus "Fries" Tacos

Cactii (nopales) are hell to clean. They have both thorns ("modified branches") and spines ("modified leaves"). Generally speaking, the thorns have been cut away before you even buy them but the spines are the size of an individual hair and extraordinarily sharp.

The CC got one stuck in his thumb when he picked up some paddles at the Mexican grocery store and there was hell to pay for three days until he finally managed to get it out.

Of course, this is a defense mechanism against omnivores like us who like to eat them.

Cleaning them is a slightly laborious process. You first have to cut away the spines on the edges so that you can even grasp it flat. Then, you have to scrape away each individual one with a sharp paring knife cutting against the direction of the spine. You need to remove not only the spine but the hard bumps as well. It's best done in the sink with occasional washings under running water.

The cactus as this point will ooze slimy juice which is its defense mechanism against getting injured. You need to wash this away.

You will need to carefully inspect the entire paddle with your fingers to make sure you haven't left any spines in there. You don't want these babies stuck in your throat!

Finally, it must be dried before you can cook it in the recipe below. (There are other ways e.g. boiling for which this is not necessary.)

Is this all worth it? You betcha!

They have a unique taste that's sort of like green beans but with a more tart flavor. They are absolutely terrific with eggs as well just like asparagus but with a sharper flavor.

Ingredients

(makes 8 tacos)

1 medium sized cactus
1/2 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup panko breadcrumbs

salt
ground cumin
chili powder

8 small tortillas
1 small onion (cut into thin rings)
lettuce strips
1/2 cup salsa roja
queso fresco (crumbled)

lime (cut into quarters)

Recipe

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Prepare a flat baking tray on which you assemble the cactus "fries".

Cut the cactus into long thin strips that are about 1/2" across and 2 1/2" long. Each tacos will be stuffed with 3-4 of these.

Assemble three bowls. One with the flour, one with the beaten egg and one with panko breadcrumbs. Coat a cactus piece with egg; dunk it in the flour; dunk it back in the egg; roll in the breadcrumbs and lay it out on the flat sheet. Repeat with the rest.

Bake for 12 minutes in the oven. Check at the 10 minute mark. You want the panko breadcrumbs to be golden brown. Pull out.

Meanwhile, each tortilla must be heated on a griddle (comal) and kept under a pair of paper towels (or kitchen cloths) to keep them moist and flexible.

Assemble the tacos. Each taco is topped with a few cactus fries, some onion, lettuce, a quick drizzle of the salsa roja and the queso fresco crumbled on top.

Make sure you squeeze a lime on it right before you eat it.  A dash or two of hot sauce is also a great addition.

R.I.P. Tarla Dalal

The CC just found out that Tarla Dalal passed away a few months ago.

A housewife who turned her skills at cooking into a food empire, her books were the original recipe books in modern-day Indian vegetarian cooking. She was no academic but she was a terrific home cook. Her focus was the vegetarian recipes of India and beyond. She changed the food habits of an entire generation of housewives.

"Every recipe is guaranteed to work!" was her catchphrase.

And they absolutely do.

Her recipes were scrupulously researched initially by her and then when she had "made it" by an army of assistants at a time when it was unusual to even think of such an idea. They are literally perfect. There are no mistakes which is a rare and wonderful achievement in any domain.

R.I.P.

Parsley, Potato & Parmesan Soup

The CC was confused. How come he saw fresh parsley along with the usual panoply of winter vegetables at the farmers' market?

Turns out that parsley is a biennial and has another component that is not generally well known — parsley root which as a winter vegetable is not very different from turnips, parsnips or potatoes.

This French-style soup which uses fresh parsley is just perfect for chasing away the winter blues.

Ingredients

1 large bunch of parsley
2 medium potatoes (peeled and chopped)
1 medium onion
5-6 cloves garlic

butter or olive oil (or a mixture)
4 cups broth

1 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

salt
black pepper

Recipe

First prepare an ice bath.

Wash the parsley discarding all thick roots. Leave the thinner ones on. In a large bowl, pour boiling water over the parsley and let it blanch for about a minute. Plunge the parsley into the ice bath. This helps preserve the vibrant green color otherwise you will end up with a dull green soup.

Heat the olive oil in a pan. Sautée the onions and the garlic for 6-8 minutes at a low heat. Fry the potatoes for at least 8 minutes till they are fraying around the edges and coated with the fat.

Add the stock, salt to taste, black pepper and bring to a boil. Simmer at a low heat for 25-30 minutes until the potatoes are soft. (It really depends on the size of the pieces.)

Skim the fat as it comes to the surface.

Add the parsley to the soup and blend really fine. Add the parmesan. Bring to a quick simmer again and serve.

You can pass the soup through a fine sieve if you want a really smooth version. A drizzle of crème fraîche works great for serving as would a crumbling of blue cheese.

Pomiane's Tarragon

The CC has mentioned Edouard de Pomiane before.

Whenever the CC reads all these articles about city-slickers waxing eloquent about gardens and farming, he is reminded of a wonderful paragraph from Cooking with Pomiane. The recipe is "New Potatoes with Tarragon".

I used to fancy myself as a botanist, but my illusions were shattered when I asked a charming young saleswoman for seeds of parsley, chervil and tarragon. "Tarragon does not produce a fertile seed," she replied. "If you want a plant, here you are. In three years it will die. Come back again and see me."

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.

The Indian Peas' Process

"What is it about Indians and peas?" a friend asked the CC recently, "Why are they so obsessed about them?"

A most worthy question and certainly one that requires more than an offhand answer and since its her birthday, the CC will answer at leisure.

("Does the CC ever answer not at leisure and without copious footnotes?" is the query from the peanut gallery which is a question he will ignore.)

Perhaps this should be a series? "What is it about Russians/Korean/Japanese and mushrooms?", etc. which follows roughly the same line of questioning and the same analogous answer as well.

The answer, slightly speculative as it might be, involves geography, growing seasons and plant biology.

Peas are ancient and have grown all along the Mediterranean and the near East since ancient times. Even in what is modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, we are talking at least 2500 B.C.E. or earlier.

Peas are annual plants. They produce a seed within the year and die.

Peas are a cool season crop. They can only germinate from late spring to early summer. In fact, last summer, the CC couldn't get fresh peas at all the farmers' market because the waves upon waves of heat destroyed all the pea crops.

India lies just north of the equator and has a short winter but an even shorter spring. Summer arrives with a vengeance right around April.

So the answer should be clear. You can only grow these for the shortest of growing seasons in the winter which is not as cold as the rest of the world. The window is barely a few months (Feb. to late Mar.) which explains its nature as "delicacy" not particularly different from the way that asparagus is considered a delicacy in Europe or North America.

In fact, the Mughal emperors used to grow them in Kashmir which has an extended growing season for peas because of its altitude. We have additional evidence from ingredients in rare royal dishes which are paired with peas like mushrooms. These are not any old mushrooms. They were morels (gucchi) from Kashmir. Morels are seasonal, rare and expensive and require foraging since they couldn't be cultivated easily.

(We are just beginning to understand the science to cultivate them right now!)

Also, if you look at it from the Emperor's perspective, you can't just chomp down a bunch of foraged stuff. You have to have an "official taster" to make sure you're not getting poisoned from mushrooms which means you need even more of them than just for the dish.

Almost every modern-day Indian dish that substitutes the common button mushroom comes from these rarefied dishes that served Emperors once upon a time!

In the modern world, all of this is not particularly germane because you can get ingredients shipped from anywhere in the world right down to your home. Not to mention frozen stuff which doesn't matter if you are going to purée the peas anyway.

However, cultural habits are reinforced by geography first and foremost and modern technology cannot make up for millennia of habit. (Have absolutely no argument for the fact that "habit" and "culture" are nothing more than pseudo-legitimatized bias in some shape or the other!)

So peas. And Indians. And pea-shelling, pea-eating, pea-loving Indians.

Of course, this wouldn't be complete without the CC providing a favored recipe. This one is a Gujarati classic that is both simple and lip-smackingly delicious.

Ingredients

2 cups fresh shelled peas
3 small tomatoes (chopped really fine)

1 tbsp. dhanajeeru (equal parts cumin + coriander, roasted, and ground fine)
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp amchur (dried green mango powder - NON-NEGOTIABLE!)
1 tsp chilly powder (or to taste - not so important)
pinch of asafoetida

1 tbsp. corn flour or chickpea flour

oil
salt

Recipe

Heat up the oil. Fry the asafoetida till it is fragrant. Add the rest of the spices and the tomatoes and fry till they are soft. Add the peas and some water and let it cook till done.

Sprinkle the flour all over and mix vigorously till the sauce is thickened.

Eat with rotis or parathas. The CC is biased. He prefers the latter.

This stores well. Easy to reheat too although the peas will not have the starchy crunch which is partly what makes the dish so irresistible.

The Polyglotism of a Chef

If you truly want to be a great chef, you are going to have to be really good at picking up languages and cookbooks in those languages.

This is both insanely difficult and yet not as hard as you think.

Arabic and Japanese are fairly difficult languages particularly for people trained in the Indo-European tradition. (The same goes in reverse. No chauvinism is either intended or even entertained.) And learning a language is hard no matter what since it takes time and energy both of which are in finite supply.

There's a silver lining though. Cooking is a fairly narrow and technical subject and it's easy to master narrow and technical matter in almost any language given a little aptitude, a ton of work, and the usual panoply of modern-day tools.

The payoff is stupendous beyond belief.

Let's first talk about the two adjectives stated above — narrow and technical.

Cooking is narrow because we do not need to understand the full massive vocabulary of a language that pertains to all the various kinds of situations we could ever possibly encounter in our lives. We only need to know the names of food items and instruments (nouns), how much of the food (cardinal or weight measurements), what things to do to the food (verbs) and how long to do it to them (time measurements).

This is a very narrow amount of vocabulary.

You are not being asked to master linguistic flourishes, idiomatic phrases, or cultural complexity just a very straightforward act of doing things to other things in so much size for so much length of time with prescribed patterns that are insanely repetitive. (Any good cook with a solid knowledge of the grammar of a culture is surely bored silly with reading a recipe book. You read the ingredients not the recipe! The CC can scan almost any recipe is less than ten seconds unless it is suitably complex which happens increasingly less often as time goes by).

Technical refers to the fact that the basics of cooking are (mostly) the same in any language. Just learn the verbs and a few oddball quirks of verbs — do they take direct objects or not, some dative and genitive cases, the conditional constructions ("if, when") — and you're pretty much there.

There are not a lot of verbs because there is not a whole lot you can do. About 30 verbs gets you 90% of the way there and surely you can manage to memorize all the forms in any language which should be around 125-ish (if that). Also, you are not being asked to conjugate the verbs in all their complexity just read them. The CC is pretty sure that he would be hard-pressed to conjugate "bake" in multiple languages but he damn sure can read the recipe which, as sure as sunshine, calls for some "baking". (Comprehension is not the same thing as fluency.)

Technical also refers to the fact that a recipe written in Japanese follows the absolute same rock-solid pattern as one written in Italian. The structure of the format is perfectly predictable. It follows a very strict pattern of logic — ingredients followed by process (with the rare exception of notes for complicated stuff or variants to be made.) In addition, the process always consists of verbs in the imperative mood. ("Do X. Take Y. Mix P with Q. Bake for N minutes.").

There is very little linguistic legerdemain. ("If only X had procured P from Q, and had Y not intervened then Z might have been able to bring A to B's office for a tête-à-tête").

Nope, never happens in a cookbook. Not in the recipe section anyway. That's strictly for the gossip column or the pseudo-literary bullshit that accompanies a cookbook.

Which brings us to the payoff.

The payoff is that you can read cookbooks that are vastly more complex than those that show up in translation in English, or that are historical in nature of which there will never be an English translation. The best cookbooks have always been written for natives and while it is increasingly true that these "best" cookbooks nearly always have an English translation, this is by no means a law of nature. It's a commercial decision and these things have a tendency to drift towards the capriciousness of both editors and the market.

The Internet additionally opens you up to recipes written in all the languages in the world. There are blogs on just about any culture but you will need to be able to read it at least roughly. (The automated translators are a little "iffy" even at this point.)

All of this depends naturally on your level of commitment to the culinary arts and to languages as a whole and there may be a natural tendency to think, "Why do it? The CC is there to translate." to which the CC only can say, "You have no idea of how little makes its way to the blog."

So push your culinary linguistic boundaries outwards and watch your culinary skills strengthen!

Spaghetti with Foriana Sauce

This is an interesting and obscure Italian recipe from the eponymous town of Foria on the island of Ischia near Naples. The CC has tried but failed to find any references for it in any of his cookbooks in either English or Italian.

It's a Lenten recipe so no meat (but seafood is fine.) Its Moorish and medieval origins should become obvious when you read it.

It's truly great tossed with spaghetti. Add a few cooked scallops or seafood of choice and watch the recipe shine.


Ingredients

1/2 cup walnuts
1/4 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup raisins
2 cloves garlic
6 anchovy fillets

1 tsp. dried oregano
pinch of red pepper flakes

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

parsley (to serve)

Recipe

Place the walnuts, pine nuts, garlic and anchovies in a food processor and pulse until it is ground into coarse pieces like granola. Do NOT grind it to a pulp. You want some texture left.

Heat up the olive oil until it shimmers. Add the above mixture with the raisins and cook for 3-4 minutes. Keep stirring. It has a tendency to stick and burn. Add some water if it cooks too fast. Do not add pasta water like most recipes since this mixture is already considerably salty.

Serve over spaghetti with seafood (if using), parsley and black pepper.

Caldo de camarónes secos (Dried Shrimp Soup)

One of the great achievements of traditional food technology is drying various fish and meat products. This calls for a longer post which the CC promises but a highlight is "dried shrimp".

It may not be immediately obvious but shrimp come in a variety of sizes from the size of your smallest fingernail to the size of your palm. The various cookbooks frequently call Mexican dried shrimp as the "best" but the CC has found zero evidence for this culinary chauvinism. Your best bet is the Chinese markets where these babies are literally dirt cheap. A few dollars keeps the CC truckin' for a whole year. Just keep them in the fridge if you buy them packaged. (The CC buys from the bins mostly.) It's the humidity that spoils them. They are already "dried". In a fridge, they will last a year or two. In a freezer, they will last five years or more!

This recipe originally started in Mexico as a "bar recipe" whose goal is to keep you on target and "keep on truckin'". It's also insanely delicious and very nutritious so it's jumped the fence and become a regular home recipe for kids.

Yes, kids, it's so delicious that a "bar recipe" served for free with beer and booze has become a "kids' recipe". Such is the wonder of life.

The "keep on truckin'" portion comes from the absurd umami that is embedded in this recipe. You want more, more, more. The hangover recovery part comes from the fact that it is very high in protein and it's a very light broth. So you are getting rehydrated and getting a solid boost of nutrients while you are it.

The two dried peppers that go into it are not spicy at all. They have this intense complex smoky flavor which is unmistakable. Substitutions are not going to work. The tomato and the shrimp do all the heavy lifting of the umami with the synergistic effect.

The CC has a friend who hates shrimp and yet when the CC served him this he claimed that this was the best thing the CC had ever fed him. Seriously, dude?!?

And so it goes with things that you don't know about!

Ingredients

Salsa Roja

2 guajillo peppers
1 ancho pepper
3 small tomatoes
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic (unpeeled)

1 tsp cumin seeds

olive oil (or lard)

Caldo

1 cup dried shrimp

1 small onion
6 cloves garlic (peeled)

6 cups water

1 tbsp. epazote

sea salt

Serving

2 tbsp. chopped cilantro
1 lime

Recipe

First make the salsa roja. Heat a dry skillet (comal). When hot, put the peppers on it and dry roast them till they are fragrant but not burnt. Remove. Open them up when cool and remove the seeds and the veins. Don't stress. We are going to purée these babies.

Add the unpeeled garlic and the onion to the dry skillet till they are brown in spots. Put the garlic in some aluminum foil and let it sit for a bit. Peel the skin off when they are cool.

Roast the cumin seeds.

If using fresh tomatoes, put on top of the skillet and dry roast till they are burnt in places and soft. Peel the skin. If using canned tomatoes (like the CC is right now in winter), skip this step.

Add everything for the salsa to the blender and blend to a very fine sauce. Pass through a fine sieve and set aside.

Heat the lard (or olive oil) in a pan. When shimmering and very hot, add the salsa and fry. Be careful. This has a tendency to give off a lot of splatter but this step is absolutely crucial to the taste. Stop when the salsa has cooked and no longer has a raw smell. Set aside.

In a separate pot, cook the dried shrimp, onion, garlic, and epazote with the water for about 20 minutes at a low simmer. The time depends on the size of the shrimp. No less than 15 and no more than 30.

There will be a lot of nasty froth that comes to the surface. Skim, baby, skim.

Blend the mixture really fine. An immersion blender works great here. Pass the mixture through a very fine sieve retaining the liquid and tossing the solids.

Combine the two liquids and bring to a rolling boil. The idea here is to emulsify whatever fat there is left in both liquids. It is a bar food after all but it's a tiny amount. Most of it has been skimmed away and if you wish, you can skim away more by heating a lower speed which will cause the fat and the broth to separate.

Serve hot with a topping of cilantro and a big squeeze of lime. The lime is non-negotiable. It's what brings the tangy soup to life at the last moment with that "hit me!" taste.

Saffron v/s Turmeric

The CC comes across endless references in medieval cookbooks for turmeric as a "substitute" for saffron.

They are nothing alike.

Saffron depends fundamentally on smell. You add it as the last or semi-last step to a recipe with the volatile liquids suspended in warm water or warm milk as it were.

Turmeric has a strongly metallic taste that is sui generis. You wouldn't mistake one for the other in a million years blindfolded in your sleep. It would be like conflating cats and cheese.

It's obvious why one would be substituted for the other. Turmeric is dirt-cheap. Saffron costs more than gold. Even today the CC sees these two being "substituted" and he scoffs.

For the record, saffron is the only spice even today that you need to get from a really reputable source. What you get in the routine markets is garbage. They are hustling you silly.

Saffron is so valuable that there are specialized merchants in Spain, Switzerland, and India — the three prime producers — whose only job is to supply unadulterated saffron. They are banners of quality and you can bet your goddamn economic ass that they charge a premium to do so.

Which is still superior to getting ripped off.

The CC has met plenty of people who think that saffron is not "worth all that" and it's "over-hyped". To which the CC can only respond, you've been ripped off all your life. How would you even know? It's absolutely worth all that from pasta to pastries.

Sad, isn't it?

Even in the age of the internet where everything is everywhere, you need reputation to get the good stuff.

Where is the arbitrage, O Nobel-Prize Winnin' Efficient Markets' Theorists of Univ. of Chicago?

Mexican Chili Linguistics

The art of Mexican cooking depends on understanding the chili landscape but you really need to know the various names. One of the problems is that the same chili has different names depending on whether it is dried or not.

This makes logical sense in a cuisine where the chili is so fundamental to the cuisine but it's a hurdle to people who are just learning it.

So the CC is just going to do a "brain dump" of all the names for various peppers.

Fresh	Dried
Poblano	Ancho†
Jalapeño	Chipotle
Mirasol	Guajillo
Pasilla	Negro
Puya (Pulla)	Puya

There's more but that will do for starters.

† Be warned that sometimes Ancho's are labeled as Pasilla's in Mexican markets. However, they are nothing alike. Pasilla's are long and thin and Ancho's large and fat. Think Laurel & Hardy (respectively) and you won't go wrong.

Sopa verde de elote (Green Corn Soup)

This is an insanely brilliant dish made of innumerous "green" components and it's the ideal thing to be eating in the depths of this bone-chilling winter that we are having here in New York.

This recipe is quite easy but do follow the instructions scrupulously. The tastes do not quite come together until the end so you will need to have some faith.

The source is Diana Kennedy whose research is fastidious and the recipes correspondingly mind-blowingly delicious.

The idea is "green, green, green". There are five green components in the recipe and they are all necessary to get the taste right. The corn is the supporting player because, well, corn and Mexico, right? Originator of the product and all that.

The real stars are the greens.

Ingredient

4 large tomatillos (or 10-12 small ones)

1 large onion (finely chopped)
2 cloves garlic (finely chopped)

4 cups corn kernels (frozen is fine)
2/3 cup green peas (frozen is fine)
6-8 sprigs cilantro
2 poblano chillies (prepped, read below)
3 large romaine lettuce leaves

5 cups chicken broth

butter
salt

fried tortilla strips

Recipe

Remove the papery skin of the tomatillos and cook the fruit in water till they are soft. Drain and set aside.

Meanwhile, prep the poblano's. Roast them directly over an open flame till they are scorched. Put them in a paper bag or just wrap in aluminum foil for 10 minutes. When they are soft, remove the blackened skin. Do not wash them. Dip your hand in water if you need to and rub off the skin. When skinned, cut open and remove the seeds and the veins from inside and chop into large pieces. Don't worry too much. They will get puréed.

Turn the tomatillos into a sauce in the blender and set aside in a bowl.

Put the corn, green peas, cilantro, poblano peppers, lettuce leaves, and 2 cups of broth into the blender and blend to a fine mixture. Pass this mixture through a medium food mill and set aside in a separate bowl.

Heat up the butter in a large pot. Add the onions and garlic and let it fry for at least 5 minutes. Add the tomatillo sauce and let it cook until the raw smell disappears. This step is crucial.

Add the second blended broth with salt to taste and let it cook for 5-6 minutes. This mixture has a tendency to stick to the bottom so make sure you keep scraping. Add the rest of the broth and let it cook for at least 20 minutes.

Serve with the fried tortilla strips on top.

Matar ka Nimona (Green Peas in Green Pea Curry Sauce)

This is a reasonably obscure dish from the Northern agricultural belt of India, and like all rural recipes, it is both simple and superb.

Even the name is outstanding. All those m's and n's caressing each other. The CC has been muttering (sic) the title to himself all day long sometimes a little bit sarcastically but mostly sweetly.

The recipe is made at a time when fresh green peas flood the rural markets which explains the dual purpose of the peas. You need to make the excess work somehow.

Let it be noted that this will not work with frozen peas. The curry portion will work fine but you need the starchy nature of fresh peas to make the other component work.

Lately the CC has been seeing fresh shelled peas from Georgia in the markets. He also sees them, of all places, in the Korean markets. So try and hunt around. You'd be surprised where they can be and you really don't want to miss out on this recipe.

Ingredients

3 cups fresh peas

2 cups cilantro leaves (yup!)
4 Thai green chillies
4 cloves garlic
1 piece of fresh turmeric (or 1/2 tbsp. ground)

1 tbsp. cumin seeds

water
salt

Recipe

Take 1 cup of the peas, the cilantro leaves, chillies, garlic, and turmeric and grind to a paste. A food processor makes quick work here.

Heat up some oil in a pan. When shimmering, add the cumin seeds. Let them color but not burn. Add the liquidized sauce from above. Be careful because it is wet and will splatter.

Let it fry until the "raw" smell has disappeared. Roughly 5-6 minutes. Add the remaining fresh peas and salt to taste until they are tender. Be careful not to overcook.

Serve with parathas or rice.

The Fetishization of Seasonal and Local

One of the great tragedies of the culinary world is that it is not only faddish but also completely ignorant of science, history, economics, and the mechanics of trade.

In an ideal world, we would all eat seasonal and local but it's not an ideal world. For starters, there are 7+ billion people in the world and they can't all eat locally. An increasing amount of the world's population lives in cities so it is literally impossible that everyone in the city eat locally. It's just a simple mathematical argument about the population versus the amount of arable space and the steepness of its value. (The value comes from the fact that the population provides steep "value" on the economic food chain.)

Simple economics argues against it. The crux of a modern city — and by modern we have to understand that this is at least 500+ years old — is upwardly-mobile cheap labor. The desire to have a better life propels the cheap labor into the cities in the first place. The idea that these people can eat "local" is risible beyond the extreme. If cheap labor propels cities then by definition, it's cheap food that propels the cheapness of the labor.

So cheap means invoking Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage. Source the produce from wherever labor is cheapest and that means Africa, Asia and South America.

Seasonal is another bugaboo.

Places that have absurdly short growing seasons (think: Japan, Korea, Russia, Poland) rely to an unprecedented degree on pickled salted food.

Before World War II, Japan had the highest rate of stomach cancer in the world. It was so high as to be a routine tear-jerker movie cliché most memorably exploited by Kurosawa in his masterpiece Ikiru (生きる). It was definitely due to a heavy reliance on salted, smoked, and nitrate- and nitrite-rich foods (cured meats), the heavy incidence of the bacterium H. Pylori which thrives in stomachs with heavy salt diets, heavy tobacco usage, and above all, the lack of fresh vegetables for all but the briefest of growing seasons.

The same happened in Korea, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe. The common factor is the "short growing season" which means a reliance on "pickled foods".

Compare with both China and India where in spite of the heavy smoking and an equally important pickling tradition, the vegetable-rich diet traditionally traveling along trade routes had stomach cancer incidences at de minimus levels.

This is not just speculation. We have evidence for this.

After World War II, when vegetables flooded the Japanese markets thanks to free trade, the rate of stomach cancer plummeted precipitously. (Even then today, it's still 4x the rate in the UK!)

Do we really want to go "seasonal" so that we can go back to these bad old days?

To rephrase, going non-local caused stomach cancer rates around the world to plummet. Is this a bad thing?

Seasonal and local are not bad things.

For one, the seasonal component gives you an extreme rush of excitement. There's an anticipation to looking forward to something pleasurable that won't come around for another six months. There's also the fact that seasonal actually means cheap. Whatever is plentiful is cheap by the simple laws of supply and demand.

Local is a good thing too.

You can talk to the farmer. You can actually ask for something that lies outside the norm and since you are there to pay for it, they will do it. (Try doing that at a supermarket!)

What's wrong is the fetish. The hide-bound rules that don't allow for five thousand years of trading history (think: spices!), and science (think: stomach cancer) and a certain flexibility of both thought and process. A certain give and take (trade pun intended!) in the approach to food and markets.

Why not have a rich understanding of the subject and the best of both worlds?

Avocados

Something about avocados in the markets sends the CC into a apoplectic rage.

The culprits are the little stickers that say "Ripe".

Are you fuckin' shittin' me? This is complete and utter horseshit!

If they were ripe, we'd know it so we don't need you to hustle us because your avocados suck. In fact, the CC has never found an avocado that needed less than 10 days worth of "ripening". More like 15 days.

They just sit on his counter radiating guilt about how fucked up the supermarket system actually is.

What is the problem?

Supermarkets assume that shoppers want "green" avocados because "green" is the color of "fresh" which in this case means totally unripe. A ripe avocado is almost black and melting and supermarkets want stuff that doesn't spoil but that's not going to work for the avocado.

So it sucks. And we put up. And rant endlessly.

Such is life.

Cod in Pistachio & Za'atar Crumbs

Cod is one of the most versatile fish out there. It's light and neutral so it takes on the flavor of whatever it is that you serve it with.

Sadly, for decades it's been overfished so it's gone from being one of the cheapest fish of all times to relatively expensive. Do try and get line-fished cod instead of the generic overfished crap. It really matter. Its flavor is so delicate and mellow that it will quite literally melt in your mouth.


Ingredients

2 fillets of cod

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 egg, beaten

1/4 cup ground pistachio nuts
4 tbsp. fresh bread crumbs
1 tbsp. za'atar
1 tsp. nigella seeds
salt

1/4 cup olive oil

Recipe

You will need three shallow plates — one with the flour; one with the beaten egg, and one with the mixture of the ground pistachios, bread crumbs, za'atar, nigella seeds and salt combined.

Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet.

Dredge the cod in the flour, followed by the egg mixture and finally roll in the bread+spice mixture.

Cook for about 2 minutes on each side until golden brown. This depends on the thickness of the fillet. The CC likes it barely cooked so that the interior is still moist.

Drain on paper towels and serve at once with a tart green salad.

Fusion

The CC has never been against fusion. How could he?

We are nothing but the sum total of all our influences and that is true about all cuisines.

Indian food, both classically and modern, is an outgrowth of Persian cooking and New World foods. Japanese curry owes itself to British traders and an American commodore. New Orleans cuisine is based on French and African models with innovations (shrimp!) pushed by Filipino workers. Brazilian food grows out of Portuguese and African models and is reinforced by the importation of Japanese agricultural workers — the largest Japanese-speaking population outside of Japan.

Spanish cooking is based on Arabic models. In fact, most of the words for food substances have Arabic origins — aceituna (olive), azafran (saffron), naranja (orange). The word "lemon" comes from the Spanish limón which in turn comes from the Arabic laymoon which in turns come from the Chinese limung (modern-day Chinese: níngméng - 柠檬.)

Chinese food owes itself to Persian models with the extraordinarily heavy influence of Buddhism from India. Japanese food is an import of classical Chinese models. Even the language is an import of Chinese (kanji) and Indian phonetic models (Sanskrit - hiragana and katakana.)

Americans brought beef to Japan and its influence owes itself to the British Empire which in turn owes itself, ironically, to classical Persian models. The idea that meat was the food of the "rulers" not the "ruled" is based in ancient Persian hierarchical ideas about cuisine.

In the native Americas, Mexican cooking was heavily influenced by the Spanish invasion. Filipino food is based on Spanish and Mexican food because it was administered by Spain through Mexico.

 

Ancient Greek and Egyptian cuisine grows out of Persian models and even ancient Roman cooking is unambiguously based on Greek and Egyptian models (thanks Cleopatra!)

The CC can go on forever.

If one wants to look at the truly ur-models then it would be the Babylonian and after that Persian models (wheat, barley) because that's where the crux of all political organization (and hence cooking) began.

So whither authenticity?

All food is ultimately fusion. It just matters how far you go back and look.

That's because humans have been trading with each other for millennia and good ideas have a way of germinating in other places and great ideas spread fast.

The traders were the original internet.

The Chinese traders taught the Indians how to steam circa the 10th century. The British brought curry powder to the Japanese and the French. The French brought classical technique to Haiti and New Orleans.

So anytime someone complains about "fusion", the CC just goes "Huh?!? What are you smokin'?"

For the record, even marijuana has Persian origins. Quelle surprise?

Simon Hopkinson's Amazing Parmesan Biscuits

This was completely outside the CC's comfort zone but if we don't try new things, what good are our paltry lives?

Simon Hopkinson's recipe is similar to a "shortbread" but it's not really. It's not as crumbly and has a lot more "chewy" conventional texture.

It's also absolutely smashing with champagne. Did the CC mention that he made them for New Year's?

Do follow the measurements exactly. In baking this matters a lot but this recipe is pretty forgiving.

The CC doubled the recipe and yet, three women, just three, went through the entire batch like a bunch of banshees. You have been warned. There will be no leftovers no matter how many you make.

Pictures? Surely you are joking!

Ingredients

(makes around 15 biscuits)

100 grams flour
100 grams butter
50 grams cheddar (finely shaved)
50 grams parmigiano-reggiano (finely shaved)

1 cup garlic chives (finely minced)

1 tbsp. fine salt
1 tbsp. Dijon mustard

1 egg

4 chili peppers (sliced at a bias into elliptical rounds)

1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano

Recipe

(The CC modified the recipe to add garlic chives. They rock but you can skip them.)

This recipe is easy to remember if you think 100-100-100.

100 grams of flour, 100 grams of butter and 100 grams of cheese combined.

Stick your mixing bowl in the freezer for an hour. Yes, this will make your life eminently easier later.

Chop the butter into tiny pieces. Add the flour, cheese, garlic chives, salt and mustard and start cutting it with a pastry cutter. You want to mix everything together but make sure that the butter doesn't melt.

Add freezing water by the tablespoon. Be really really careful. You want to make sure the dough is comes together but stays cold and that the butter stays in pieces not melts.

This can be done in a food processor and it does an awesome job. You will just need to trust the CC that the processor will need to run for a lot longer — think 6 minutes but the dough will come together so just let it run.

Wrap the dough in some plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Pull it out and put it between two sheets of parchment paper. (Aluminum foil works in a pinch.) Roll it out carefully to about 1/2" thickness.

If the dough heats up, stick it back in the fridge. (You see the pattern?)

Cut with some cookie cutters and place the biscuits on a heavily greased baking tray.

(You can reuse the dough as long as you chill it again before you roll it out. The CC had to do it thrice to use up all the dough to eliminate all wastage.)

Stick the baking tray in the fridge before you are ready to bake. You can do this even a day ahead of time. This is pretty fool-proof stuff.

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

Whip the egg. Pull the sheet out of the fridge. With a pastry brush, gently coat each biscuit with the egg wash and top with one chili pepper round each. Sprinkle the remaining parmigiano-reggiano over each biscuit.

Roast in the oven for about 10-15 minutes. Check at the 10-minute mark. You want the tops to be golden-brown. It sometimes take closer to 18 minutes depending on the thickness.

Pull out of the oven and let them sit for 5 minutes. They are still cooking. The CC knows you are tempted and heaven knows, the girls just wanted to grab them but do resist. The CC set a timer to cool off the maenads and yes, when the timer went off, guess what happened?

Mung Beans with Caramelized Onions & Nigella Seeds

This is a truly superb dish. It is apparently one of the most loved recipes at the Çırağan Palace in Istanbul and this version comes courtesy of Silvena Rowe.

It's a masterpiece of textural contrast so do follow all the steps as mentioned down to the last step.

The salad is on the bottom right. (Remaining recipes to follow.)


Ingredients

1/2 cup mung beans

2 small onions (sliced fine)
3 shallots (sliced fine)

1/4 cup olive oil (your regular)

3 tbsp olive oil (your finest)
6 tbsp. red wine vinegar
2 tbsp. finely chopped parsley
1 tsp Dijon mustard

sea salt
black pepper

8-10 sun-dried tomatoes (chopped)

1 tbsp. nigella seeds (toasted)

Recipe

Cook the mung beans for about 30 minutes until tender. Be careful not to overcook them. You want a little bit of crunch. Drain and set aside.

Toast the nigella seeds lightly in a skillet. Be careful since they will burn easily. Set aside.

Heat the regular olive oil in a large skillet over low heat. Add the onions and sautée for 20-25 minutes until they are soft and lightly golden. Do not let them caramelize. Add a tbsp. of water if they seem to be cooking too quickly.

(Note: the onions are cooked but the shallots are not! The textural game is important.)

Combine the fine olive oil, shallots, vinegar, parsley, mustard, sea salt and black pepper to make a fine vinaigrette.

Toss the vinaigrette with the mung beans and the sun-dried tomatoes. Top with caramelized onions and the toasted nigella seeds.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

New York, New York

The CC realizes that this is not useful for many readers but here's an absolutely smashing set of articles on where to buy groceries in the five boroughs of New York.

Chinese in NYC
Indian in NYC
Italian in NYC
Mexican in NYC
Thai in NYC

(Source: Serious Eats.)

Orecchiete with Brussel Sprouts, Anchovies, Preserved Lemons & Hazelnuts

It may be counter-intuitive but winter is the season for citrus fruits. Of course, they all come from warmer climes than New York.

The CC is always reminded to update his batch of preserved lemons because of all the great Meyer lemons that are to be found in the markets.

So it's also time to use up some of them with this truly great recipe. You get umami from three separate sources — the anchovies, preserved lemons and the parmigiano-reggiano.

Also, the lemons are just mellow enough so they don't have that aggressive lemony flavor and yet they still have the all the fragrant citrus notes. This makes the dish easy to pair with wine which is difficult in the presence of aggressively sour flavors.

Lemon, black pepper and rosemary are a magical combination. Lemon and parmigiano-reggiano is also a magical combination.

The citrusy, resinous and umami notes pair perfectly while the hazelnuts act as the crunchy textural counterpoint to the dish.


Ingredients

18 brussel sprouts (halved)

1 onion (sliced into thin rounds)
1 whole preserved lemon (pith removed, cut into thin strips)
2 anchovies
1/2 cup hazelnuts

1 tbsp. finely chopped rosemary

olive oil
salt
black pepper
parmigiano-reggiano

2 cups orecchiete

Recipe

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

Roast the hazelnuts for about 12 minutes. They have a tendency to burn so make sure you don't overdo it. Remove from the oven. Process in a food processor until they are broken and uneven but not crushed to a powder.

Toss the halved brussel sprouts into the oven. Roast for about 18-24 minutes until they are just slightly brown but not charred.

After this, you need to time these two steps together:

Cook the pasta until al dente. Roughly 12 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat up some olive oil. Toss in the onions and let them fry for about 6 minutes until languid. Add the anchovies and fry for a bit. Add the brussel sprouts, rosemary, salt and pepper and toss together. Add some pasta water to make a thin sauce.

When the pasta is done, toss everything including the preserved lemons together.

Top with the hazelnuts, parmigiano-reggiano, and more black pepper.

The Oldest Recipe Books

Some of the oldest recipes come from Babylonia ca. 1750 B.C.E., the time of Hammurabi. They are inscribed in Akkadian and are clearly meant for experienced chefs because they are not detailed. Entire steps are skipped. Addition of fat and/or water is assumed. No measurements or timings are given. They assume a common culinary expertise. The recipes are both elaborate and call for rare ingredients which implies that they were meant for the royal palace or the temple. This tablet includes recipes for 25 stews — 21 involving meat and 4 involving vegetables. This one has seven detailed recipes. The second recipe involves "small birds".

Remove the head and feet. Open the body and clean the birds, reserving the gizzards and the pluck. Split the gizzards and clean them. Next rinse the birds and flatten them. Prepare a pot and put birds, gizzards and pluck into it before placing it on the fire.

Put the pot back on the fire. Rinse out a pot with fresh water. Place beaten milk into it and place it on the fire. Take the pot (containing the birds) and drain it. Cut off the inedible parts, then salt the rest, and add them to the vessel with the milk, to which you must add some fat. Also add some rue, which has already been stripped and cleaned. When it has come to a boil, add minced leek, garlic, samidu and onion (but not too much onion).

Rinse crushed grain, then soften it in milk and add to it, as you kneed it, salt, samidu, leeks and garlic along with enough milk and oil so that a soft dough will result which you will expose to the heat of the fire for a moment. Then cut it into two pieces. Take a platter large enough to hold the birds. Place the prepared dough on the bottom of the plate. Be careful that it hangs over the rim of the platter only a little. Place it on top of the oven to cook it. On the dough which has already been seasoned, place the pieces of the birds as well as the gizzards and pluck. Cover it with the bread lid [which has meanwhile been baked] and send it to the table.

(Source: Yale Babylonian Collection.)

Tsukemono (漬物)

This is a world of discussion so a blog post can, at best, just be an introduction to the concept.

The word is widely translated as "pickle" but that is a bit misleading. Pickles, at least in the American concept, refer exclusively to vegetables that are preserved in either a brine or an vinegar bath. (Both of which are acidic in nature.)

Tsukemono would better be translated as "preserved vegetables" or as in the original, "fragrant vegetables". Pickling is encompassed as a side-category.

The world of "preserved vegetables" globally is a little broader in its conception of what it means. The Japanese concept encompasses extremes where things are "lightly pickled" for as little as a few hours to everything that requires pickling for a few months. It also encompasses a style where vegetables are lightly cooked and then steeped in a marinade for a few hours.

That is a very broad range indeed.

The idea is to produce versatile side-dishes as accompaniments to the meal which are complex in nature and yet have an intense flavor either intrinsically or one that is drawn out from the vegetable in question.

The nature of the "preservation" also means that these dishes will last for a few days in the absence of refrigeration which can be rotated by the combinatorial game.

You "preserve" whatever is available fresh in the markets always rotating the ideas and serving different combinations at different meals that way keeping the meal fresh while still not wasting anything and sticking to the seasonal concept.

O Grandma! (Or in this case o-baachan — お祖母ちゃん.)

Them bitches be clever. What else is there to say?

Modern technology has really enhanced the ease of making these pickles particularly with the concept of a "pickle press". It's basically a plastic container with a lid and a screw press which allows you to compress the vegetables below the water line — a key concept in pickling without which they would rapidly spoil via fungal decay.

Japanese-style pickles are classified by what you are pickling with. The choices are multitudinous:

1. Shiozuke (塩漬け) — pickled with salt
2. Misozuke (味噌漬け) — pickled with miso
3. Suzuke (酢漬け) — pickled with vinegar
4. Amasuzuke (甘酢漬け) — pickled with sugar and vinegar
5. Shoyuzuke (醤油漬け) — pickled with soy sauce

There are other serious pickling techniques like nukazuke (糠漬け) but those are much more akin to a discussion of serious sourdough techniques so the CC will skip them for the present because they require a level of commitment that is unlikely to be found among the current readership.

All of the above pickling is taking place in an acidic medium with the explicit (miso) or non-explicit (salt and/or vinegar) introduction of the lactobacillus family of bacteria with which we are deeply symbiotic. They are salt-tolerant and feed on the sugars present either explicitly or implicitly (vegetables) producing lactic acid which is deeply hostile to other microbes and particularly fungi. The result is, you guessed it, preservation.

The simplest pickles are the ones which only have salt. They are typically made with vegetables which will give off a large quantity of water, e.g. cucumbers. You salt the vegetable and compress it and as it gives off water, it both ferments and inundates itself below the water line. After that you pull it out and enjoy its concentrated flavor which has been modified by the bacteria. The solution is solidly rich in bacteria and you'd use it going forward to inoculate your next batch of "pickles".

The Japanese being Japanese, the concept of umami is never very far from the palate. The bacteria naturally produce intense umami flavors but they can be enhanced by the introduction of konbu or mushrooms or both. The result is lip-smackingly delicious.

The others all follow roughly the same principles. The combinations are traditional and the mixing and matching is largely a matter of style matched to the nature of the vegetable.

Hard vegetables (like burdock — ごぼ) are suited to the shoyuzuke style whereas watery vegetables like cucumber fit the simplest shiozuke style.

The CC loves making misozuke which can range from the simple to the hauntingly complex.

There's a world of exploration out here!

Za'atar

This is always a pain-in-the-ass to explain because it's one of those complete linguistic fuckups.

It refers to a specific herb but also to a specific spice mixture. Most of the time it's the latter not the former but it still requires a ton of explanation every single time.

These linguistic faux-pas are not entertaining.

This one is the mixture.

It's terrific baked as a bread topping or even just for dipping with fresh pita bread.

Ingredients

2 tbsp. dried oregano (preferably Mexican oregano)
2 tbsp. sesame seeds (lightly toasted)
1 tbsp. crushed sumac.
1 tbsp. dried marjoram

salt

Recipe

Crush in a mortar and pestle and mix together.

Porn-tastic!

The latest internet trend in South Korea seems to be "dinner porn".

Dinner Porn Is South Korea’s Latest Internet Trend.

Young people in South Korea have a new hobby: It's live-streaming themselves gorging on enormous, sumptuous dinner feasts. Kotaku reports it’s called mok-bang, which is a portmanteau of the Korean words for eating and broadcast, and young folks in South Korea are totally into it. They broadcast their meals (from bunker-looking settings) to thousands of viewers a night. It's a really attractive online performance opportunity for people that eat food, wear clothes most of the time, and don't want to have sex on camera. 

Mok-bang has bred chewing stars. One known as the Diva eats for approximately two hours each night, streaming her meal to thousands of viewers and consuming a huge amount of food, like 30 fried eggs, plus crab legs, or two medium pizzas. She estimates she spends between $3,000 and $6,000 a month on food, and that she's gained 20 pounds since she started mok-bang.

The Pleasure Principle

If you want to understand that most cuisine is not about sustenance but pleasure, you don't have to look further than "spices".

Spices, by their very definition, are basically useless when it comes to sustenance.

However, they have been craved since time immemorial for the singular reason that humans crave novelty. They want things that taste "interesting" and different.

Humans crave novelty.

That should be tattooed onto every single critic's forehead when they discuss painting, music, theater, film or food. Such a monumental failure of imagination in so many different domains that it boggles the mind.

The same-ol', same-ol' didn't work three millennia ago and it won't work now, and given that we have fairly stellar memories connected to our senses, we demand that novelty not only reproduce the best of the past but surpass it.

However not too much novelty.

Take someone who's only eaten American food into a Sichuan restaurant and you are going to have an epic meltdown. The rules are different, the standards of excellence are different, and the entire experience is completely and utterly different. They are simply not relatable in any meaningful way unless a copious amount of explanation is forwarded.

And yet Americans do learn how to love Sichuan food. In fact, many become connoisseurs and go on to being passionate about it even though the foods are not "adjacent".

(This also explains the great difficulty that many people have in understanding the great modernist enterprise in art — literature, music, painting, theater. It's adjacent ironically but not "adjacent enough".)

Cuisines may be far apart and you may have to learn the rules of a new game like an experienced tennis player encountering rugby for the first time but it can be learnt. Different rules, different forms of engagement, and different skills of expertise.

Even the most ardent pork lover (or Ulysses-fan!) is unlikely to fall in love with huǒ bào yāo huā — fire-exploded kidney flowers (火爆腰花) on the first shot but it can be learned which brings us to:

Pleasure is a learned concept.

There is not a child in the world that is born loving red wine, blue cheese or stinky tofu. These are all acquired responses.

A baby will eat exactly one kind of food — anything sweet. Even salty is a bit of a stretch but they will eat it if accompanied by sweet food. These are genetic responses. These were the two safest kinds of food available to humans back when we still foraged for food. Foods with these properties (sweet, salty) are guaranteed to be safe to eat and so we are programmed to like them.

However, we don't stick to that stuff because as pointed out, we crave novelty. In time, we come to appreciate tastes that are astringent, bitter, pungent, metallic, stinky and sour.

The CC has always been wary of people who talk about food like its "just about sustenance". (Hint: Never ever date these people.)

Cuisine is about pleasure and the way to pleasure is through the brain. We learn new things and we experiment based on the solid knowledge of the cooks of millennia past. We are absurdly privileged to live in a world where one can have Turkish for breakfast, French for lunch, and Japanese for dinner.

So step out there whether it's the kitchen or the world and get your own personal slice of the pleasure pie!

New Year's Party

It's that time of the year again and the CC is hosting his annual party again after a hiatus of a year.

Four cheeses from Bobolink Dairy
Baguette
♦
Chilli-topped Parmesan Biscuits
♦
Candied Walnuts with Rosemary and Lavender
Almond-stuffed Medjool Dates sautéed with Lavender & Sea-Salt
♥
Champagne

Happy New Year!

Tools

No discussion of the culinary sciences can be complete without mention of the role of tools.

Tools are the foundation of any well-organized kitchen, and similar to the pantry, they depend on your needs, desires and wallet.

The goal of any tool in the kitchen is to make the chef's life easier. (This is not the general definition of a "tool". For example, weight-lifting tools are there to make your muscles work harder not make things easier.)

What tools you need fundamentally depend on the three things stated already — what you cook, how ambitious of a chef you are, and how much you are willing to spend.

If you live in New York, you have a fourth constraint — the size of your kitchen and storage space.

None of these four are trivial problems.

What you cook changes as you age. It's just a function of learning new things. You think you know who you are and then you fall madly in love one more time. It's the permanent escalator of new things and with that comes the permanent escalation of what you want out of your kitchen.

If you think you are immune to this, why not take a moment to reflect on what you used to make versus what you make today? Nobody, let's repeat, nobody is immune.

Ambition is a easy target to mock. The CC scoffs at the days when he considered stuffed omelettes as "ambitious". And so it goes. We are "learning types'. We learn new things and we can effortlessly knock that off which moves us on to bigger and brighter desires.

Budgets belong to brute-force reality but never before in history has so much equipment been available for so little. It's just a function of technology and productivity. And it will get cheaper!

Space is the real constraint for most people. Ruthless practicality drags us down to the ground even as our florid fantasies take flight. Even then we are "innovative" types and we figure out new ways to squeeze out extra space out of our limited floor space. (Experienced cooks will be nodding their heads here while Johnny-come-lately's might end up scratching their's.)

Good tools are critical to the cooking experience. They make life simple by doing mundane tasks either faster or better. While it is possible to function without them, they are the critical lynchpin that makes things efficient or easy. They make it possible to make gourmet meals at the drop of a pin in the evening when you are tired.

Good tools are like your helpful friends. You know every quirk, every twist, every angle of their very being. You can handle them without even thinking.

Good tools fit effortlessly into your hands. It's the first sign of excellence when you upgrade a tool which is superior to one that you have already owned. You are not just upgrading the tool but upgrading your ambition as well.

The CC has already traumatized countless friends and relatives by exclaiming that their kitchen was "like going camping" so his insensitivity and ruthlessness are well-known and well-traversed territories. In fact, he just prefers to travel with his own tools because that's what experienced people do.

Moving on though.

There are no "ideal tools" and even more importantly no such thing as an "ideal kitchen".

After tons of descriptions of her "ideal kitchen", Elizabeth David confessed that her "real kitchen" fell short. Remember that this is a woman at the top of her profession who could build any kitchen she wanted and in spite of that didn't manage to.

The dream of the perfect tools and the perfect kitchen is a mesmerizing chimera that can never exist for the simple reason that it would require us to be perfectly omniscient about our ever-changing desires and perfectly unchanging against the reality of our ever-learning selves.

It would also require all future technology to come to a perfect standstill.

What's left then is the imperfect present with three constraints — knowledge, ambition and budget.

Japanese Meal

For the celebration of a special friend's birthday dinner.

Bottom left:

Sautéeed scallops in miso-glaze reduction.

Left placement:

Miso Soup.
Asari Gohan (あさりご飯).

Down the center plate:

Fresh wasabi (わさび).
Pickled cucumber.
Pickled jellyfish with hijiki, ginger & cucumber.
Pickled burdock (ごぼ).
Fresh seaweed salad.

Bottom right:

Scallop Sashimi.

Right placement:

Symmetric placement of left.

Kookoo Sabzi

This is not a difficult dish but it requires effort. The CC assumes that everyone understands the difference between the words "difficult" and "effort".

Ideally, this dish needs a buncha Jamie's in the house all shredding the greens to precise effect. In their collective absence, you'll just have to shred them yourselves (or get a personal Jamie to do it — you do have one, don't you?)

The goal is an almost insane amount of fragrant greens all held together by just the barest amount of egg. This is an "inversion" of the frittata which features eggs as the main ingredient. Here the eggs are just there to hold everything together and they are cooked to a dark brown. The greens, barberries and nuts are the stars not the eggs. We are clear on this concept, aren't we?

It's best served with a sweetish side salad — Green on Green — there's a hit album in here!


Ingredients

All the cup measurements are after the chopping. This means that, yes, there's almost an insane amount of greens but we were clear on that, right?

2 cups Italian parsley (finely chopped)
2 cups dill (finely chopped)
2 cups chives (finely chopped)
1 cup cilantro (finely chopped)
1 cup mint (finely chopped)

4 tbsp. dried fenugreek

1/2 cup.barberries (zereshk)
1/2 cup. walnuts (chopped)

2 tbsp. flour
2 eggs — keep an extra egg or two around.

saffron
milk

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Note: Most recipes online call for turmeric not saffron because the latter is very expensive. However, there is no substitute. Use the real thing. This is for the betterment of your soul.

(The recipe was traditionally served at Nowroz — the New Years' Day because of the obvious metaphor between greens and prosperity.)

Preheat the broiler.

Heat the milk gently. A microwave works great as long as you don't let the milk spill over. Dissolve the saffron in the milk.

Beat the eggs with the flour, saffron, milk, salt and pepper. Add all the greens.

The CC has found it practical to add an extra egg if the mixture looks too stiff. It's very hard to predict this given the variability in the moisture of the greens and the size of the eggs. The mixture should barely hold together.

In a skillet, heat up some oil at medium-high heat. Add the mixture to the pan and cover. Cook for about 12-16 minutes.

At this point you can either flip the omelette or just put it in the under the broiler like the CC does. The top will turn beautifully golden and green.

Let it sit for about 5 minutes. (Yes, this matters and if you don't know why then you really need to read this.)

Slice and serve.

The Flair Factor

Have you ever said to yourself, "That person over there is a great cook." without tasting a single morsel?

A great cook bears the unmistakable stamp of a balance between extreme fussiness and extreme flexibility. These are the absolute flying banner heralds of a confident and experienced cook.

No thyme at the market, no problem. We'll just toss in some sage leaves. Missing some mirin, no problem. We'll add some sugar and some saké.

No eggplants, non-negotiable! We'll switch to a different dish instead.

No casserole, no problem. We'll just roast in this pan over there. No mortar and pestle, no problem. We'll just crush it in a different way.

Thirteen ingredients and seventeen steps, non-negotiable! Just do them in the order and stop fidgeting, for cryin' out loud.

If this sounds familiar then you know somebody like that already.

It is this intense focus and yet seemingly effortless adaptability that makes cooking seem so difficult to those not initiated into the process.

What does "sautée for a short time" mean? What constitutes "short" as opposed to "long"?

Two or three eggs. When would you pick two as opposed to three?

Salt to taste. What happens if it's raw meat and you can't taste it?

None of this makes any sense to an amateur who has yet to understand the internal logic that makes it all tick. However, like all things it's based in the only thing that makes any sense — experience and an intellectually-considered experience at that.

Cooking requires an adaptability to a changing landscape. No two ingredients that you buy are going to be the same or even similar. Things change with the seasons and much more importantly, you never dip into the same pool twice as a person because your very being is changing as you evolve in your experience. You are learning as you go along.

This is not exclusive to cooking.

Experienced musicians behave the same way. So do engineers. So do costume designers for the theater. As do the very best military generals and the finest surgeons.

This is a general characteristic of excellence in any field that requires adaptability based on field conditions that are variable and changing.

There is only one way to get from here to there. As the saying goes, the way to Carnegie Hall is "Practice, practice, practice."

It's rooted in experience but what matters is intellectual richness. The more you push yourself outside your comfort zone and grab new experiences, the richer you are for it. Even if you have absolutely no interest in Japanese cuisine, understanding its principles will enrich the flair with which you make Italian food. That's because you bring a brand new set of skills to the table (sic).

Great cooks are nerdy, by definition. They are continuously reading books to learn what they don't know yet. Almost every single one reads books about food in bed.

And paranoid. They always think they have missed something even though they have most likely not.

And intellectually curious. They revisit an old favorite that they could make in their sleep but they analyze it as if they had never seen it before in their lives to bring their new experiences to bear on it.

Naturally the goal of it all, when all is considered and done, is to don your ascot and say to your guests in a nonchalant manner, "Oh, that's just something I threw together."

That would be the flair part.

Lamb Tagine with Apricots, Dates & Almonds (Mrouzia)

Let's face it, chez CC, we are crazy but not insane. There is a massive difference. We recognize the limits of our ambition.

This dish is a classic of Moroccan cooking and it is great in winter. It needs to be made in a tagine ideally. The lamb is organic, the almonds were peeled by hand, the dates are authentic. The pita, however, at the right comes from Astoria. As we said, we're crazy but not insane. We can't do everything.

This is a rich winter dish. It takes time, effort and excellence of ingredients. Ironically, it's not hard. You throw everything into the tagine and then the dish makes itself while you enjoy a soothing drink.

It's medieval-ness should be obvious. The combination of meat and nuts, sweet and savory in the same dish gives it away on the first reading.

Ingredients

1 lb lamb (cut into chunks)
1 large carrot (cut into large chunks)

1 onion (diced fine)
2 cloves garlic (minced)

1/3 tsp. dried ginger
1 stick cinnamon
2 tbsp. ras el hanout

1/3 cup blanched almonds
1/3 cup dates (pitted and quartered)
1/3 cup dried apricots

6 cups water

butter

pinch of saffron
salt
pepper

Recipe

In a tagine, heat up some butter and fry the onions and garlic. Add the lamb but fry it just for a minute. Add everything except the saffron and let cook at a low heat until tender (roughly 40 minutes.)

Add the saffron. Stir and serve.

Black Salt (Kala Namak)

There are many things in life that are acquired tastes.

Nobody was ever born liking beer (bitter because of the hops) or liking either red wine or tea (astringent and bitter because of the tannins.) Every culture has a characteristic item (or ten) that you are going to have to come to terms with if you really want to enjoy the food.

Japanese food has natto. Indian food has kala namak.

(Chinese has all the gristly bits but that's for a different post.)

Kala namak is just salt which contains a number of impurities including greigite (Fe₃S₄) and sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄.)

It was traditionally fired in a kiln with charcoal but no air and the reductive process created multiple sulfides which gave it the characteristic smell,. The greigite gives it the characteristic black/violet color (which changes to mauve when ground up.)

The CC cannot sugar-coat this part. It smells like rotten eggs or the sewer. We associate this smell with dirt and rottenness because of the hydrogen sulfide produced by the salt in the presence of air. (You may remember the smell of hydrogen sulfide from your chemistry class.)

However, a vast number of Indian recipes would simply be incomplete without this ingredient. It forms a crucial lynchpin in the sweet-savory-spicy-salty spectrum. The smell and sour taste is inimitable.

The CC has increasingly seen chefs use it in restaurants. Most notable was as a topping on a foie gras terrine. The smell was unmistakable and the salt cut through the fat perfectly as was intended.

Breakfast for Twelve

How do you make breakfast for a horde of hungry hungover guests? Especially if you happen to be hungover yourself?

The tricks are as simple as time. Everything needs to be simple except for the piping hot coffee which should be manageable even by the borderline criminally insane.

It even works for the non-hungry non-hungover times when you are just feeling a bit lazy. Quick pop in the oven and this stuff is ready before the animals start pawing at the breakfast table!


Cheesy "Shirred" Eggs with Tomato Paste

(Everything here is for one unit so you can just multiply by the number of servings. It scales effortlessly.)

Ingredients

1 oven-proof ramekin

1/4 dried-out bread slice
2 tbsp. tomato sauce

1/4 cup shaved blue-cheese
1/4 cup shaved parmigiano-reggiano

finely minced herbs (rosemary, oregano, sage)

2 eggs
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Everything in this recipe is about the assembly as would be logical for something that needs to scale.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the bread at the bottom of the ramekin. Top with the tomato sauce.

Mix the cheeses, herbs, eggs, salt and pepper. Whip till finely mixed. Top the ramekin with the mixture.

Put in the oven for 12-15 minutes. You will need to check at the 12-minute mark. The CC's oven tends to run a little cooler so it takes a little longer. Yours will be different by definition. So just check and you can adjust the last few minutes. The top should swell noticeably like a soufflé and be golden.

Smashed Chickpea Sandwich

The CC is not normally into celebrity chef-style recipes but this one is absolutely smashing.

It's from Tom Colicchio's 'wichcraft, and it's an absolute masterpiece in its simplicity, excellence and the fact that it can be made ahead of time.

The original is literally soaking in olive oil but you can go easy on that. However, this is the place to use your finest not the generic stuff. Incidentally, the filling works fine just by itself. It's something you can just eat from the container all day long.

Bookmark this one. The CC personally guarantees that it will rock your world!


Ingredients

2 cups cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup black olives (thinly sliced)
1 red onion (finely diced)
1/2 cup parsley (finely minced)

lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
juice from the same lemon

1/3 cup olive oil (your finest!)
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Smash the cooked chickpeas with a potato masher. You want a broken mixture not a puree.

Make a vinaigrette out of the olive oil and lemon. Mix everything together. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Colored Cauliflowers

Recently more and more of the colored cauliflowers have started showing up at the farmers' market so the CC started doing some research on them. They are genetically-modified cauliflowers.

The CC is not afraid of the genetic modification because it has been going on forever. The "organic granolas" put scare-quotes around the "genetic" part but it's part of our legacy. We've been doing this since the birth of agriculture. Cross-breeding to get sweeter varieties or more hardy ones or ones that are more resistant to various pests and fungi.

Carrots were not originally "orange". They were cultivated specifically to appeal to the Dutch House of Orange and in return they became the "Royal Vegetable". They were also markedly sweeter which explains why they became the dominant variety.


The story of the colored cauliflowers is as varied as their colors:

The orange cauliflower was a genetic mutant first found in Canada in 1970. It was crossbred using conventional cross-breeding techniques at Cornell University until it now finds its way into the mainstream. The orange comes from beta-carotene — the same compound that gives carrots its characteristic color and which is absolutely necessary for humans to produce Vitamin A.

The purple cauliflower was a similar mutant found in Denmark in the 1980's. Same idea of cross-breeding. The purple comes from anthocyanins (also found in raspberries, blueberries, grapes, red wine, olives.) They are water soluble so if you want to preserve the color, you will need to gently roast it not boil it or steam it. It has a very characteristic smell when you cut into it and it's a lot milder in flavor than the others.

The green one is a cross-breed between broccoli and cauliflower. There is also the Romanesco cauliflower but that's a different breed.

A classic recipe is presented for your benefit.

Pasta with Cauliflower, Anchovies, Raisins, Pine Nuts & Saffron

Ingredients

2 cups rigatoni (or penne.)

1 head cauliflower (separated into medium-sized florets)
1 large red onion (chopped)
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup raisins
6 anchovies (preferably salt-cured)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp saffron

olive oil

sea salt
black pepper

1/3 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

breadcrumbs


Recipe

Toast the breadcrumbs and set aside. Toast the pine nuts until golden. Be careful not to burn them. Set aside.

Heat an oven to 400°F and roast the cauliflower florets for 15 minutes.

Heat the olive oil at medium heat. When shimmering, add the onions and fry for a further 7-9 minutes. Add the tomato paste, and the anchovies and fry. The anchovies will "dissolve" as they fry. Add a cup of water, the raisins, sea salt, and black pepper, and let cook at low heat.

Meanwhile make the pasta until al dente. Drain.

The cauliflower mixture should be just slightly on the wet side. If dry, add some more water.

Toss in the saffron, cauliflowers and the pasta, and mix thoroughly.

Serve with the parmesan and roasted breadcrumbs on top with extra black pepper to taste.

The Pantry

The secret to success in the kitchen is to have a well-stocked pantry.

Pantries come in all sizes from dorm-sized entities to ones more resembling the running of a small-sized military operation so it is necessary to understand where you lie on this scale.

There are three variables at play — method, money and madness. Let's examine them in reverse order because that would be the methodical thing to do.

Philosophers through history have pointed out with tedious and wearisome regularity that madness is relative. What matters is the intensity of your cooking habit, the regularity of company showing up to partake, and the depths of your obsession. The CC is pretty clear that on a scale of 1 to 10, his dial goes all the way up to 11 (but that was obvious, right?)

Money is a subtle point and one not routinely discussed in polite company. You do not have to be rich to have a large pantry (but it helps.) What is more important that you have a sufficient amount that you can juggle a complex operation and keep renewing ingredients as they run out which they will. It helps if you live in New York or London because of the insanely well-stocked ethnic markets which are dirt-cheap but the Internet allows you to source far and wide with consummate ease at this point.

(On a historical digressive note, this is something that an upper-class Englishman could do with consummate ease pre-World War I — source top-quality ingredients from across the world — he used the telephone. The First World War destroyed the aristocracy and their elite tastes and the Depression and the Second World War laid utter waste to it. It's taken us 60 years to get back to where some were albeit with a much larger degree of democratization.)

Method, of course, is the magic that mediates between money and madness. Here tastes differ so you will have to define it for yourself. It matters what cuisines you routinely cook. The CC's tastes run to French, Italian, Indian, Japanese and Thai (in alphabetical order) with liberal elements of Greek, Mexican, Persian and Sichuan thrown into the mix but yours might differ.

De gustibus non est disputandum. (in this case, quite literally!)

The list conceals more than it reveals. Each of the first three (French, Italian, Indian) constitute of tons of regions with a variety of ingredients to juggle and this requires a level of complexity that is quite deceiving when it comes down to one sentence.

So you need to source your "stuff", stock it regularly, juggle it all correctly to make sure nothing gets wasted or destroyed and cook daily to enjoy it all!

Thanksgiving

Champagne with Pomegranates
♥ Bruschetta with Spicy Roasted Squash, Onion Jam & Blue Cheese ♣ Duck Confit with Spicy Pickled Raisins & Pomegranate Seeds
Frisée Salad
Duck-fat Roasted Potatoes with Rosemary
♦
Almond-stuffed Dates with Rosemary & fleur de sel
♠
Chocolate

Let's Bolt Out of Here

Have you ever had a lettuce and it was slightly bitter?

It's been "bolting".

No, the CC is not making this term up. It seems to be standard terminology in the horticultural world.

Bolting is the plants' attempt to produce seeds, flower and reproduce.

Once plants have bolted, there's no going back because it's just a fact that they just want to flower and reproduce whereas we want to eat them. They turn bitter because it's a first-line defense against predators including humans who most certainly are exactly that.

There's a general tendency of humans to buy larger produce. More bang for the unit buck and all that but you'd be better served to pick smaller varieties that haven't yet bolted out of town.

Plating Tricks

One of the more clever tricks that a talented home cook can learn from chefs is the idea of layering things on a plate beneath the main dish.

It's easy enough to sprinkle stuff on top but doing so beneath where it lies invisible involves a little bit of understanding. This is a technique that can only work for dishes that are more or less constructed in the French manner. It wouldn't work for Chinese cooking, for example, which has an entirely different aesthetic in terms of serving.

When we eat something, we inevitably press down (knives + forks) or we scrape (spoons). Either way you are literally touching and pressing down against the bottom of your plate. Compare with chopsticks where you lift away from the plate.

The idea then is that you can subtly enhance the flavor in ways that are entirely unobvious.

For example, you can put a dry powder at the bottom of a plate on which you serve a salad. The powder if suitably dry and crunchy will not only adhere to the greens as the fork presses down but hit the tongue first because of the way the salad is eaten. You will get a "hit" of a crunchy nature that constrasts with the salad.

A similar related idea is that of a gastrique served beneath meat and seafood dishes. It's a sweet-sour reduction that will adhere to the meat as you cut it. (Pressure on the fork; knife does the work.)

It's theatrical magic but entirely simple once you understand the trick that makes it tick. It's a pretty general concept only limited by your imagination. Two ideas are presented below for your delectation.

Almond Breadcrumbs

Ingredients

12 blanched almonds
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
salt

Recipe

Roast the almonds in the oven at 350°F for about 12 minutes. Make sure they don't burn. Chop fine.

Process the almonds, breadcrumbs and salt to a fine powder in a coffee grinder or a food processor.

Orange Gastrique

Ingredients

1 cup orange juice
2 tbsp. vinegar
salt

Recipe

Combine and reduce at medium high heat until thickened. Be careful that it doesn't burn.