Hungry Passport

A new home for Hungry Passport

2010-12-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

If you've come to this site looking for the Hungry Passport blog, you'll find it at its new home:

http://www.hungrypassport.com.

Please bookmark it.

See you at the new place, which still has
that new blog site smell!

Thanks!

In Defense of the Bacon-in-the-Chocolate Trend

2010-12-08T00:20:00.000-08:00

I’m seeing a backlash these days against the bacon-in-the-chocolate trend, but I think maybe it’s more of a backlash against food fads in general. Most fads are annoying and entirely disposable. They barely make a blip on the radar screen of Time. But trends that are worth their salt stand the test of time and transcend their trend status. That’s how classics are born.

Will bacon-in-the-chocolate stick around to become a classic? Who knows? Quiche is so 70s, pasta salad so 80s, stacked anything so 90s and bacon-in-the-chocolate so aught-years. But we still eat quiche and pasta salad. They're not such relics that we'll never eat them again, not that I'd call either of them classics.

But consider that anyone who has ever eaten pork in mole sauce in a Oaxacan restaurant has already discovered that pork and chocolate are natural friends. Like chicken—but with more flavor and better texture—pork truly shines in sweet applications, which is why you find it nestled under a layer of pineapple slices in Hawaii, topped with sweet and sour sauce in China and slathered with sweet or perhaps sweet-salty-hot-sour sauces most everywhere else.

But don’t eat bacon and chocolate together because it's The In Thing. Eat it because you like it. And if you don’t like it, find something you do like, and eat that instead. Maybe you'll start a trend.

I'll continue eating bacon with chocolate and pork with mole. And I'll carry on with my experiments to see what other concoctions I can devise to delight my taste buds. If the trends catch up with me, so be it.

Bacon Walnut Maple Fudge

This is not fudge in its strictest sense, but a liberation from the candy thermometer, one that yields tiny cubes of heaven in just a few easy steps.

First, a word about bacon: A good smoked bacon is what you want to use. Applewood smoked works well and is often the only smoky bacon you can find outside the South. (Watch out for "smoke-flavored bacon." That stuff is nasty.) Most regular grocery store bacon is unworthy of the poor hogs who gave their lives for its production. Use the best tasting bacon you can find for the best tasting fudge you can produce. If you don't live in the South, consider investing in a membership in one of the bacon of the month clubs.

16 oz. semi-sweet chocolate (or bittersweet or some combination of different chocolates—whatever makes you happy)
14 oz. sweetened, condensed milk (do not use fat-free—the consistency will be off)
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1 Tbsp. maple extract or maple flavoring (maple syrup won’t work)
1 c. walnuts, lightly toasted & coarsely chopped
6 slices of smoked bacon, cut into ¼-inch lardons, cooked well, drained & cooled
coarse sea salt, to taste

Lightly coat an 8- or 9-inch square pan or baking dish with non-stick spray and line with baking parchment or waxed paper.

Heat milk and chocolate in bain marie (or double boiler) over medium heat and stir to blend. Add extracts and stir to completely incorporate. Then stir in nuts and bacon.

Pour mixture into prepared pan and smooth to even thickness with a spatula. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt.

Let cool for a few minutes and then refrigerate, uncovered, until fudge is set, about 2 hours. Cut into desired size pieces. Store any remaining fudge uncovered, as sealing it causes moisture to melt the salt.

Enjoy a piece with a big ol' glass of milk. Or if you're just too sophisticated for that, ruby port will do nicely.

Giving Thanks for Duck Confit

2010-11-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

Some years Thanksgiving involves a big ol' celebration with loads of people, but this has been such a busy autumn for us, with too much out-of-towning, that Himself and I decided on a quiet meal at home alone this time. Since I'm not a traditionalist when it comes to Thanksgiving, I refuse to succumb to the pressure most everyone else feels to have turkey. Himself is just fine with this stance, so instead we celebrated with one of our favorite dishes, duck confit and fingerling potatoes roasted in duck fat. That not only satisfied the desire for something rich and tasty for Thanksgiving, but it also provided the month's self-assigned blog entry on a type of game or exotic meat.

Duck confit and duck fat--where miracles begin!

Rather than roast a whole duck, we opted to break into a cache of duck legs cooked and stored in their own fat, the traditional Gascon way of preserving meat. As with last month's pheasant, we didn't have to contend with buckshot, because we did our hunting in a local French import warehouse that opens its doors to the civilian population a few times a year, usually the weekend before a holiday or special occasion. There we loaded up on confit, cheeses, olives, olive oil and a few other treats. It's great getting to pick up a package of six duck legs for what we'd typically pay to order a modest portion in a restaurant. While the package of confit contained a good deal of fat, we grabbed a jar of duck fat, too, which should keep us in rich, tasty meals long after we've polished off the last of the duck legs.

Three duck legs on a bed of roasted potatoes: one for Himself, one for me & one to fight over!

Since the duck is cooked during the confit process, it was essentially ready to eat right out of the package--but so much better when we applied some serious heat to it in a ripping hot pan with the melted fat. This not only warmed the meat but gave it a nice, crispy skin to crunch into.

With all that fat and dark meat, we decided on a pair of accompanying dishes that would be healthy companions to the oh-my-gawd richness of the duck and potatoes. So we double-cooked some kale, first boiling it first and then giving it a light sauté with red onion and garlic, and sassing it up with red wine vinegar and some red pepper flakes.

And we tossed slices of oranges and roasted beets with slivers of onion and shallot, olive oil and red wine vinegar to make an amazing salad that just kept getting better and better--and more and more neon!--every time we pulled the leftovers out of the fridge. It was practically dessert, and that was a good thing, because we didn't actually plan a dessert for this meal.

I wish I could regale you with stories of a grand Thanksgiving dessert to cap the meal, but we were so full that we just didn't want one. Pumpkin pie? Frankly, it's never been a favorite around here. Pecan pie? Love it, but it just wasn't in the cards this time. So we went for a few drops each of The Good Stuff, which is both a lovely treat and a fine digestif: extra vecchio balsamico from our last trip to Italy. It's truly amazing how satisfying that can be, how the tang cleanses the mouth and the earthy sweetness satisfies the urge for a dessert finish to the meal.

So I'm thankful:
♦ for the bounty of the farmers' market that provided the seasonal beets, kale and potatoes.
♦ that we didn't feel we had to tie ourselves to tradition and cook someone else's version of the perfect Thanksgiving feast. The tradition we DID embrace this time was the Gascon tradition of preserving duck so that it can be quickly and easily prepared and enjoyed--and I'm thankful for that, too.
♦ for the luxury of the balsamico, which was a treat indeed; and
♦ for Himself, who understands and appreciates my enthusiasm for bucking traditions and doing things differently. This has enabled us to enjoy past Thanksgivings shared with friends as we celebrated the holiday with menus as varied as last year's Croatian feast and the previous year's spread of comfort foods from our home turf of Tennessee.

Later in the evening, too close to bedtime to eat another meal but far away from breakfast not to eat a little something, we settled on a simple dessert to cap off the day, vanilla ice cream with a drizzling of the balsamico. Then with nothing more on our minds at bedtime than mulling over the possibilities for how we wanted to prepare those remaining three duck legs, we purred ourselves to sleep. A nice cassoulet perhaps?...

C'mon and EAT MY BLOG!

2010-11-15T14:49:00.000-08:00

It's time to treat your sweet tooth while doing a good deed for the hungry of the Los Angeles area. Eat My Blog is holding its third bakesale, where more than 50 baking food bloggers will be ready to tempt you with more than 2,000 baked goodies.

These aren't your run-of-the mill bakesale offerings, but the creations of people who are serious about their sweets. Goodies this time will include smoked salt toffee, chocolate whoopie pies, coconut cranberry chews, bacon brownies with bourbon caramel sauce, curry macarons, bacon caramel popcorn and marshmallows in at least three flavors, candy cane, bubblegum and eggnog (I'm making those last two myself). So what if you're on a diet? These treats will make spectacular holiday gifts!

This time we'll even have homemade catnip cookies and doggie biscuits for the four-legged friends in your life. All items will be priced between $1 to $4. Visit us in front of Tender Greens at 8759 Melrose Boulevard in West Hollywood, Saturday, December 4 between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Bring a friend. In fact, bring as many friends as you can fit in your car.

Our previous two bakesales raised more than $8,000 for the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. Mark your calendar, bring your wallet and let's do it all again!

The Olive Harvest: I'm Mediterranean For a Day

2010-11-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

The California Institute of Technology, a.k.a. Caltech, has a lovely canopy of mature olive trees shading a central corridor of its tony, ivied campus. But only in the last few years have they made an effort to collect the olives that create a monounsaturated mess every autumn. Nowadays the school, which is better known for its affiliation with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories than for olive production, holds an annual harvest that is open both to students and staff and to the outside as well. Since I'd never picked olives before, I figured it was high time I gave it a try.

These are mission olives, which Franciscan monks from Spain planted at the missions they established up and down the Pacific coastline in the late 1700s.

The first thing I learned is that, despite their diminutive size, olives hurt like the dickens when they pop off the tree and hit you on the head, cheekbone or some other prominent part of your body!

Teams of volunteers tackled each tree, with one person climbing the ladder to comb the olives off the branches with what essentially looked like a leaf rake, while the others remained below to collect the fallen fruit. Check out these amazing ladders, with a single support post and rungs that taper from an extra wide stance to quite narrow at the top. (By the way, note the cannon in the background--it appears to be aimed squarely in the direction of Pasadena Community College, just a couple of blocks away. Coincidence...?)

Most of the olives raked from the trees landed on the burlap tarps, but quite a few bounced off our heads and either landed in the grass or skipped across the pavement. A number of volunteers brought their small children with them, little sprouts who chased the errant olives and flung them happily into the tarps and waiting buckets. It was a real Tom Sawyer kind of day--we had so much fun we kind of forgot we were working. Of course, I'm sure we'd view it quite differently if this was our job in and day out.

At noon we recessed to enjoy a lavish buffet of olive-based Mediterranean fare, including moussaka, hummus, tabbouleh, tapenade, gyros and kalamata bread. There were also large pans of assorted olives (I was wishing I'd brought a zipper bag with me!), an array of olive oils to sample and escargot cooked up on the spot and served to us on rounds of baguette. I should have photographed the layers as I piled them onto my plate. I wanted a taste of everything, and I got it! For the most part it was incredibly healthy stuff, and it was all quite good.

Lunchtime brought a little messy recreation as students with hands coated in olive oil engaged in a tug-o-war in the center of the sun-dappled grove. A woman bearing a large tin of olive oil gave each student's hands a liberal glug-glug-glug before the tugging commenced. The winning team (pictured) chanted "meat truck! meat truck! meat truck!" in between battles. Nothing against my vegetable-loving brethren, but I'm not surprised by who won. My guess is the victors got to pick which food truck was going to be visiting campus. The carnivores carried the day.

The event featured an olive-pressing demonstration, a job that seems pretty low-tech, considering that it was taking place on a campus where students train to work in space exploration, among other extraordinary engineering pursuits. This is a more modern version of the ancient screw press, not as quaint as the giant stone wheels you still find doing the job throughout the Mediterranean. It takes about 11 pounds of olives to yield a liter of oil, so rather than pressing all the olives this way, our harvest will be shipped to Santa Barbara for oil production. As for learning the technique of brining olives, our brining expert was sick that day, so this lesson will have to wait for next year's harvest.

Two down--a gazillion to go!

It was instructive learning through hands-on experience what autumn brings for those who live amongst the olive groves that cover the Mediterranean. Olive harvesting combines long hours of what is essentially tedious labor with a great social opportunity. When you pitch in with a group to do this job, you find that you have a lot of time to talk as you work. And you come to understand how a collective effort like this can be so central to the life of a community.

Caltech's students may be preparing themselves for the most high-tech jobs on this planet and possibly a few others, but I appreciate their cheerful embrace of one of the oldest and humblest chores on Earth.

To hear the story behind how Caltech students spearheaded this effort a few years ago, check it out on NPR. If you're interested in keeping up with the project--and participating next year--visit Caltech's olive harvest website for more information.

Sweet & Salty & Spicy

2010-10-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

It's funny how a feature of one cuisine can jump out at you and remind you of a cuisine on the far side of the world from that one. This happened when Himself and I noshed at Lotería, a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood this past weekend. To drink, he ordered a michelada de mango, a combination of beer with fruit juices. One sip and I was ordering my own.

michelada

This one was a mixture of Cerveza Sol with mango and lime juices. While the combo of beer and fruit juices was appealing, what really won me over was the rim, which was coated with a mixture of salt and crushed chili peppers. It reminded me of Thailand's prik kab kleua, a dry mix of salt, sugar and crushed hot chilis that you dip slices of fresh fruit into. Most every meal I've had in Thailand has ended with a platter of fresh fruit and a bowl of this sweet-salty-spicy mixture.

fresh watermelon, pineapple and papaya with a dish of prik kab kleua

prik kab kleua with star fruit

As you can see, the first mixture is much lighter than the one just above. No two batches will be exactly the same--it's all up to the individual taste of the person preparing it. And if the fruit isn't quite in season, a little extra sugar helps balance out the blend.

While the coating on the rim of the glass of michelada didn't contain sugar, the aim was essentially the same--to mix the sweetness of fruit with saltiness and spicy heat. It's refreshing, hydrating and cooling on a hot day. Even if it's not especially hot, it's still a winning combination.

Couscous Bang Bang!

2010-10-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

The recent couscous festival was a bang, with an abundance of wonderful North African food and music and a great positive vibe. But I've heard several people--people who weren't there--comment, "I like couscous, but why would you devote an entire festival to it?"

It's like this: What rice is to Asians and what corn is to Native Americans, couscous is to North Africans. It is such an integral part of the culture that it transcends being a mere ingredient in a dish. It's elemental--in fact, I've found that the words in several North African dialects for "couscous" are interchangeable with the word "food." It's THE food of the Maghreb, that is, a good portion of the Sahara and what's above it.

chicken and beef cheeks braised in tagines and served with couscous

We're not talking about that five-minute instant stuff you mix with boiling water. Authentically prepared couscous is steamed for three hours, over either broth or water; every 30 minutes it is fluffed and massaged with a bit of oil, and put back in to steam until 30 minutes later, when the process begins all over again. The result is couscous that is perfectly hydrated--light and fluffy, not soggy and leaden. And amazingly flavorful.

Couscous is good in either savory or sweet dishes, so you might have a bed of couscous soaked with the juices of braised lamb and a generous serving of lamb perched on top for dinner, followed by more couscous mixed with honey, spices, fresh fruit, rosewater--you name it--for dessert. It has great versatility.

Yeah, I know this photo is out of focus, but it expresses so well the character of authentic couscous, which looks like it could just fly right off your plate--it DOES, actually!

I assumed that couscous was a pasta, but it turns out that it's not. Rather, it's a grain, semolina wheat, that has been rolled by hand in what is quite a labor-intensive process. Couscous first showed up in 13th century Spanish and Syrian writings and is thought to have originated with the Berbers, North Africa's indigenous people. It didn't take long to spread from there, to become a staple of cuisines throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Couscous is high-gluten and low-moisture, so it keeps well in harsh environments, perfect for the desert.

Tagines are earthenware vessels used for cooking meat until it is succulent and juicy, perfect for topping a plate of couscous. Vegetables cook up nicely in them, too.

Couscous made a good point of departure for sampling more North African cuisine and exploring different styles of cooking. The rabbit with currants and pine nuts was cooked in tagines, while the lamb was smoked whole in a giant smoker. Traditionally it would have been spit roasted, but the sheer volume required for the festival necessitated stationing a large smoker in the parking lot. The point was to present slow cooked lamb, so I'd say mission accomplished!

Rabbit and lamb on corn tortillas (a concession to the Southwest!) with a generous dollop of harissa, a condiment made of pounded chili peppers.

Assembling a briq (by the way, while the expression goes, "Never trust a skinny chef," I frankly don't think I'd trust one without some serious tatts!)

Also on the menu was the briq, a thin crepe-like pastry of durum wheat filled with bites of food (shrimp in this case), a dollop of harissa and a raw egg...

...and folded into a tidy package before cooking. It is placed in the shallow side of a pan tilted over a fire with hot grease. You spoon the grease over the briq as it cooks so that it cooks quickly but without becoming soggy.

mmmm, briq!

Confession time: Between you and me, I adore couscous made the proper way, but I can't devote three hours of cooking every time I want some. So I'll have to get by on the quick stuff, until I can make it out to a Moroccan restaurant--or back to next year's couscous festival. I'll be there, and I'll be sure to be hungry when I get there.

Beyond 52 Cuisines: #53 Basque

2010-10-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

Hey-ho, told you we're not finished with these cuisines! The world is a huuuuuge place and its foods and flavors, practically unlimited.

This month we set our sights on the cuisine of the Basque country, the region of southwestern France and northwestern Spain that loves bullfighting, gourmet club and Basque autonomy. The least volatile of these three things to talk about is gourmet club, so we're in safe waters here. The Basque not only love to eat and drink, but they enjoy doing all the planning, gathering, cooking and cleaning together as well.

For our anniversary earlier this month, Himself and I decided to stay in and cook a feast, sort of our own private Basque gourmet club. I've been toying with the idea of visiting Harmony Farms in La Crescenta once a month to pick up some sort of wild game or exotic meat that I can't find in the local market, something I don't often cook--perhaps some meats I've yet to try cooking. This looked like a good time to begin that enterprise while indulging in the next cuisine. So we toddled on up to Harmony Farms to peruse our options. In addition to hormone-, pesticide- and radiation-free meats and soy products, they carry a dizzying array of meats that you don't find just anywhere. It's a great place to rummage and plot and scheme over your next special dinner menu.

We've fixed pheasant a few times before, always with the extra ingredient of buckshot. It's so nice not to have that component this time. Dinner should never be capable of setting off a metal detector!

The mélange of flavors in the Basque pheasant recipe I found in a book called Dressing and Cooking Wild Game blends the zing of green olives and capers with the rich sweetness of prunes and brown sugar. Sounds odd, but this combination works. I cut up the pheasant and gave it an all-day soak in a marinade of white wine, white wine vinegar, olive oil, brown sugar, prunes, green olives, capers, garlic, bay leaf and basil. This combination of flavors reminds me of what is known as "Old California" cuisine with its Spanish influences, in which a single dish might include olives, onion, raisins and oregano, giving the dish a happy intensity of aromatics, umami, saltiness, sourness and sweetness. Essentially, all parts of the tongue get something to excite them.

While pheasant is more or less the same size and shape as a chicken, cutting and eating it is more of a challenge, because pheasant is much leaner and more muscular. Its flesh clings more tenaciously to the bone, even after it has been cooked sufficiently. It was quite tasty, and our sofa lions all paraded in, trilling, leg-rubbing and kneecap smooching, eager to convince us they hadn't eaten in many days. There was plenty of pheasant for everyone, and the pusses didn't seem to mind the bits of caper and herbs clinging to their allotment.

The cuisine of the Basque territory contains a lot of potato dishes and features a dish called pipérade, a blend of cooked sweet peppers and tomatoes (by the way, the three primary ingredients in this dish show just how ingrained the foods of the Americas are in this region). The potatoes are baked in a pipérade of red and yellow bell peppers, shallots and lots of fresh herbs, which season the creamy fingerlings and give them a glorious aroma as well. It's a good idea to make this dish in a generous quantity so you can enjoy it for several days. Himself suggested using the leftover potatoes the next morning in a frittata. That would have been a grand idea if we hadn't gobbled them all up with total abandon. Next time we'll make more than we can eat in a single sitting.

We topped our salad of baby spinach greens with a creamy and intensely garlicky dressing and some chopped hard-cooked egg. I want to try some of the leftover dressing over cooked spinach sometime. It should be quite good. You can fine tune the amount of garlic you use--this recipe calls for both fresh garlic and garlic powder. But the Basque way is to use a heavy hand when adding garlic to the mix. I have no problem with that!

A favorite meal finisher is some fresh fruit with a local cheese, such as idiazabal. If I hadn't been too lazy to go to the cheese store, that's what we'd have had (and then there's the fact that to save my life I can't leave a fromagerie with only one cheese). While the Basques aren't huge on dessert, they do have a fondness for custard and custard-filled tarts. So for dessert we made Basque crème, a.k.a. natillas. It is essentially a cooked crème anglaise, made with generous use of cinnamon. The resulting crème is quite thick, and the instructions say to thin it out at service by stirring in more heavy crème. Considering how much heavy crème, along with eggs and sugar, is already in there, I choked. I just couldn't do it. Probably a good thing. Himself and I have enjoyed a spoonful each after meals the past couple of days. It's so rich that that's all we really want or need. Natillas is certainly made to savor, it's so rich and flavorful.

The nice thing about all these dishes is that they can be enjoyed as part of a regular meal. It's not like you have to announce that you're having a specially-planned Basque dinner to enjoy them.

Following is the recipe for Basque pheasant. If you can't lay your hands on a pheasant, chicken works just fine, too. You'll still get the distinctive blend of flavors that speak of this region:

Cut up one bird, arrange it in a single layer in a 13-by-9-inch baking dish, and pour over it the following marinade: In a medium-sized bowl stir together 3 Tbsp. brown sugar, 3 oz. white wine, 1/4 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup white wine vinegar. Then stir in 2 minced cloves of garlic, 1 bay leaf, 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley, 2 Tbsp. dried basil leaves, 1/2 cup pitted medium prunes and 1/2 cup pitted medium green olives. Pour this mixture over pheasant pieces and cover the dish with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight--or all day--turning the pieces a couple of times.

Preheat oven to 350°F, remove plastic wrap and bake bird uncovered until it is tender, turning once. Baking should take about one hour, depending on the size of the bird. Remove bird, olives and prunes to a serving dish and, if desired, spoon pan juices over it before serving.

Distinctive Weekend Cocktails

2010-10-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Himself, a.k.a. Hungry Passport's husband, a.k.a. Andrew Penn Romine is taking on a new challenge in his blog. Each Friday he plans to write about a different cocktail--not your run-o-the-mill stuff (and no, rum & Coke is NOT a cocktail. Neither is 7 & 7. Neither is anything made with jug mix--all of which are liquid versions of fast food). It's about hearkening back to the classics, the first entry being the cognac sazerac. I'll let him fill you in on the details. So please visit Ink Gorilla to find out what you should be mixing and drinking each weekend.

And if you're encouraged to start some serious cocktail mixing beyond each Friday's offering, I suggest you pick up a copy of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, by Ted Haigh, a.k.a. Dr. Cocktail. It's history in a glass, tasty tasty history.

Himself behind the bar

Cheers!

Report from the Deep Freeze: I HEART Bigos!

2010-09-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I pulled a container of bigos out of the freezer and moved it into the fridge so I could have it for lunch today. Now it's lunchtime, and I'm in heaven.

In case you don't recall, while reporting on Polish cuisine during week #49 of my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" adventure, I made a big pot of bigos filled with beef, Polish sausage, sauerkraut and mushrooms. It's addictive stuff, and I love it cold. I just put it into a pretty bowl today so it would photograph better than in the deli cup I froze it in--and out of which I was eating it while standing in the open refrigerator door when it occurred to me I should tap out a blog entry about it. If it weren't in the 90s today, I'd heat it and have it with some mashed potatoes. But it's good to know that Poland's classic "hunter stew" is not only edible straight out of the fridge, but PRIMO served cold.

And here's something I already knew but that was reinforced for me today: When you make a big batch of something with the intent of freezing part of it, and it's something you know tastes better a few days after it's made, then wait a few days after you make it before you freeze it. This way it will be at the peak of flavor when you're ready to eat it, whenever that might be.

I neglected to include a recipe in the Polish cuisine blog entry, so I'll do it now. I apologize for the oversight. While there are many ways to make bigos--and as a hunter's stew it accommodates most any sort of meat you want to chuck into it--what follows is a good basic way to make it.

Bigos

Soak 4 ounces of dried mushrooms in warm water for between 30 minutes and an hour, until they're completely hydrated. Squeeze water out of mushrooms and set them aside (strain any remaining grit from this mushroom broth and keep the broth to make soup another time).

While the mushrooms are hydrating, dice one large onion and set aside. Cut a pound of meat(s) of your choice into bite-sized pieces, along with two Polish sausages and 6 ounces of bacon.

Melt a tablespoon of lard (I used bacon drippings, but you can use canola or vegetable oil if you must) in a large, thick pot and brown the meat, sausage and bacon. Then add in the diced onion and cook until transparent. Add the mushrooms and a pound of strained sauerkraut to the pot and enough beef broth to cover it all. Sprinkle in some caraway seeds and a tiny bit of sugar. And a splash of red wine. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let simmer for about 30 minutes.

Taste to see if it might need a bit more salt (the kraut and sausages may give you as much as you want) and season with salt and black pepper as desired.

Serve hot, cold or room temperature.

The Imposter in the Garden

2010-09-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

The healthiest plant in my garden these days--and for quite some time now--is what is known as a curry plant. This frosty-green perennial is available for purchase at the gardening center alongside herbs like oregano, thyme, parsley, tarragon and sage. While, I've never known what to do with it, I've been happy to let it coexist with all the other herbs that regularly make their way into whatever I happen to be cooking.

While the aroma of the curry plant is vaguely similar to that of a generic curry of some sort, no curry seasoning blends actually contain this plant. Recipes for curry are innumerable, with each cook possessing the secrets to family favorites. Different spice blends lend themselves to particular dishes, whether based on chicken, fish, vegetables or tofu, and to different seasons as well. Some curry blends make you sweat and cool you off in summer, while others help keep you warm in winter. Most curries include some combination of cinnamon, coriander, cumin, nutmeg, fennel seed, cardamom, fenugreek, turmeric, saffron, tamarind and quite a number of other spices and flavorings. But no curry plant.

Yesterday I finally became curious enough to do a little research and find out what this plant really is and how to use it. I discovered that we have an imposter in our midst. It turns out that this plant has neither culinary nor medicinal qualities. Except for its use in potpourris and wreaths, it does nothing to merit the space it takes up in the garden. I realized that I've been had by a plant! How sad is that? I fumed about this at dinner.

"I'm going to rip that plant out of the ground and throw it into the dumpster tomorrow," I told Himself. "I feel like going out there with a flashlight and pulling it up right NOW!"

"Feeling just a bit vengeful, are we?" he chuckled.

So I picked a frond of the pretender and nibbled a bit of it. Not much flavor, really, just enough chlorophyll to let me know I was chewing on a plant. Then I slept on it (on my decision, not on the plant. Sheesh, you readers!). In spite of its dishonest ways, it is greenery, and it does smell nice. It's pretty, too and one of the few things thriving in my deserty backyard.

Oh, what the hell? For now, the imposter stays.

Home From the Greenbrier: A Retrospective

2010-09-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

How do I sum up the Greenbrier experience?

I've perused the writings of my fellow attendees of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier during the past few days. Their reflections are comprehensive, coherent and helpful, while I still don't know what to say. I'm not inclined to merely parrot their observations or roll out a series of photos of everything we ate, since the focus was on food writing and publishing, not simply on food. In fact, I was leery of paying too much attention to the food itself for fear I'd miss out on the meat (so to speak) of the Symposium.

Instead of blathering on about it, I'll let three photos speak for me:

The attention to detail was striking, all the way down to the chocolates on our tables in our meeting room. Notice how each one is arranged just so, with the wrappers placed facing outward? No detail was too small to escape their attention. On my bed were four pillows: a soft one for stomach sleepers, a medium one for back sleepers, a firm one for side sleepers and a feather pillow for me! I built a fort out of them, burrowed in each night and slept the sleep of the happily overwhelmed.

Speaking of happily overwhelmed, breakfast on the final morning featured this knock-your-socks-off presentation of pork, a chunky and succulent homemade sausage wrapped in a perfect latticework of bacon. The ungenerous, antisocial part of me wanted to snatch it away and sit in the corner alone and eat it all.

I didn't do that, you'll be happy to know. The company was too good and the conversation too rich, to do such a thing. I have more friends and professional associates than I had before I went, people whose talent, work and opinions I value. People I can turn to for advice, and for whom I'll gladly provide the same. We writers do not exist in a bubble. We need each other's insights, generously given. At the Symposium, I hit the mother lode.

self portrait

I love this painting of a drooling pig, hung just outside the entrance to the main dining room at the Greenbrier. It pretty much sums up the way I feel about my experience there, both personally and professionally--happy, but hungry for more.

Self Promotion for the Timid

2010-09-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Okay, guys and gals. I have a problem with self promotion, but this competition requires a little of that, as well as a finely-turned phrase. I promise not to use the three little words with you very often, but I'm going to do it now. And those three little words are:

VOTE FOR ME!

I submitted an essay in Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw challenge. Most of the points will be awarded for the writing itself, but one component is the support of those willing to go online and vote.

So please vote for me. And you can vote DAILY. I just can't vote for myself.

While you're at it, why don't you enter the challenge, too? It'll be fun. You might win. And if you do, I'll selflessly help you with the beastly chore of spending the loot.

An Honor and An Opportunity

2010-09-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've been awarded the Apicius Scholarship to attend the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier. This is a big deal, and I'm truly excited to be going--and receiving a scholarship to go!

According to the Symposium's website, the Apicius Scholarship is "awarded to a professional food writer whose prose rings with a clear voice and reflects the delicious joys of the table. In the spirit of Apicius, the first Roman to write cookbooks, the goal is to grant this award to that writer whose work will stand the test of time."

This profoundly gratifies and humbles me. I won for writing "Not Your Granny's Aspic," which appeared in the spring 2010 issue of Edible Memphis. As is often the case with my assignments, I had so much fun doing the work that I forgot it was supposed to be work! So this is icing on a really yummy cake.

The timing of the award is propitious, since I've just completed my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" blogging project and begun work on a book proposal based on it. The Symposium is the perfect place to carry my ideas.

I just wanted to share this news with you. Tomorrow I head to West Virginia to the Greenbrier, a stunning estate set in the Allegeny Mountains. I look forward to hobnobbing with other professional food writers and with publishers, editors and agents. Who knows what will happen? I feel like this is the next step up the ladder of my career as a food writer.

I Hide Things in Your Food

2010-09-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

...at least sometimes I do. And it's for your own good.

There are lots of ingredients out there that you'd never want to eat on their own, or with them simply perched on top of your food. These things get mixed in--ingredients like baking soda, raw eggs (usually), dried chili peppers and worchestershire sauce.

You wouldn't eat beef or chicken bouillon cubes on their own (unless you're a freak!). So why would anyone set a whole anchovy on top of a pizza and eat it just like that? It needs to be chopped finely and mixed into the sauce or distributed judiciously, with other ingredients layered to accompany it. I've met few people who like anchovies, but I think it's because they don't know to do with them. Anchovies are ingredients and thus to be used, not foods to be consumed whole, unless you're one of those rare people with a sodium deficiency.

I made pissaladière for dinner last night, the primary ingredients being caramelized onions, anchovies and kalamata olives on a flaky pastry, sort of a southern French version of pizza. (As you can see, I cheated and grated a bit of a basque cheese over it.) But the anchovies are minced and dotted throughout--they're an ingredient, not a topping. So rather than getting a mouth full of fishy saltiness (or salty fishiness), the anchovies become a subtle part of the flavor profile, one that helps make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It's all about balance.

The same goes for adding salt to something sweet. Ever wonder why recipes for cakes, pies and cookies call for a touch of salt? It helps balance flavors. Try baking two batches of cookies, one with amount of salt called for in the recipe and one omitting it. Do a taste test. You'll notice the difference, and the more well-rounded flavor will be in the batch containing a smidge of salt. You won't actually taste the salt. You'll just be aware that the flavor is better.

So if you come to my house and I feed you the best spaghetti sauce of your life, it will be because there are ingredients in it that you never thought to put in there yourself. They're probably ingredients you don't even think you like. You'll be surprised by how much you do like them--when they're used properly.

WHEW!

2010-09-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

52 Receipts in 52 Weeks!

If you happen to be counting, you'll know that I posted the 52nd cuisine of 52 yesterday. This pile of receipts, menus and business cards represents a boatload of research, eating, cooking, thinking and writing--and filing. It was a lot of work, but it was also a tremendous amount of fun. And I learned an awful lot about how people on this planet view food, prepare it and share it. In short, they do it with love.

So what now?

The Hungry Passport blog had a life before this particular project, and it will continue to have one afterward. But I'm not through with my exploration of the world's cuisines, either. I've only just started. Since there are certainly more than 52 out there, I'll keep exploring, but rather than one each week, I'll focus on one each month now while continuing to blog about other food and travel related subjects.

And after a year of delicious and intriguing research, I'm beginning to draw together my ideas for a book based on this tasty escapade. It's too early to say much now, but stay tuned for updates on the book and on the cuisines.

One thing I CAN tell you is that Himself and I have talked about this project a good deal during the past few days. We agree that those meals we recall with the most fondness--and felt were the best meals--were those we had with friends. Not surprisingly, shared experiences make for the most memorable times.

I hope reading these entries has encouraged you to seek out meals you've never had before and to find out how people cook and eat in other countries. And to try your hand at cooking some of their dishes yourself.

Have a great Labor Day weekend, and go eat something you've never had before, okay?!

Week #52 Vietnamese

2010-09-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

As Himself and I drag our weary bones across the finish line with cuisine #52, we know we made a good choice to conclude with. Vietnamese is the perfect way to finish, since the soothing broth in a bowl of pho and the fresh veggies in a cool spring roll are both just what our addled tums need to put us to rights.

We didn't make it to Little Saigon in Orange County, but Los Angeles has enough variety scattered throughout that we knew we could feast authentically without having to head for a specific enclave. So we went with our good friends Jeff and Judi to Lemongrass Vietnamese in Eagle Rock, that little jutting of northern Los Angeles that separates the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

This chemistry lab looking contraption is the set-up for making Ca Phe Sua Da, Vietnamese iced coffee. A vessel containing super strong coffee and hot water sits atop a glass with sweetened, condensed milk. When the coffee has dripped through onto the milk, the result looks rather like a black-n-tan. Then you stir well to dissolve the milk and blend it with the coffee, and then pour the mixture over a glass of ice. This stuff's rich, strong and highly addictive. In fact, we lost count of how many we'd had, at least until the bill showed up.

Here it is, all mixed up and ready to drink, alongside some Vietnamese lemonade, made with lime juice and lemongrass.

We started with an assortment of fresh spring rolls with a ginger dipping sauce. I've grown to love these fresh rolls so much that the fried ones seem too heavy now (not that I'd turn one down). Rice vermicelli, bean sprouts, lettuce, fresh mint leaves and cooked and chilled chicken, shrimp and pork rolled into cool rice wraps are refreshing and healthy. You can eat these all day long without worrying that you've damaged your diet. (After a full year of feasting on the cuisines of the world, it's apparent that we're not too worried about that, though.)

Himself went for the pho, because he's hard pressed to have anything else when he goes out for Vietnamese. (And just in case you didn't know, pho is pronounced fuh, with a short u, as in "What the fu...?!") He opted for fried tofu this time, but thin bite-sized pieces of raw beef make a bigger splash, so to speak, because the broth is so hot that when you drop in the beef, it cooks automatically, right in front of you. The beef broth (he couldn't do completely without the animal!) was delicately seasoned--that is, until Himself dumped in a spoonful of those rippin' hot chilis. Pho is one of the most nourishing soups around, and when you load it up with chilis like this, it's a great way to open up your head when you have a cold or a bout of sinus miseries--or to simply cool yourself down on a hot summer's day.

Accompanying a bowl of pho is a plate of fresh stuff: bean sprouts, Thai basil leaves, slices of fresh jalapeno pepper and wedges of lime for seasoning your soup to suit your personal taste. Call it the fine tuning nob on your meal.

Judi's com tom of charbroiled shrimp over steamed rice was served with a sweet dipping sauce, which played well with the smokiness of the seafood. The salad with ribbons of carrot and daikon radish gave it a fresh kick.

Jeff's bowl of vermicelli noodles topped with barbecued chicken included a couple of fried egg rolls (because some people just can't get enough rolled food, right Jeff?) and the same sweet dipping sauce. This reminded me a bit of having a bowl of soup without the broth. All the components were there.

I opted for banh mi, a Vietnamese sandwich. If that looks like French bread to you, that's because it is. Back when Vietnam was known as French Indochina, a good deal of culinary exchange took place. The French may be gone now, but the baguette remains. This one is loaded with charbroiled beef. Strings of carrot and daikon radish and sprigs of cilantro round out the flavors and lend a fresh crispiness to the crunchy bread and smoky beef. It came with a soy sauce-based dipping sauce, but that wasn't really necessary. The flavors and textures were rewarding without sogging up the bread.

Of course we saved room for dessert--this is the last scene of the last act! Chuoi chien, or banana dumplings, are bananas rolled in won tons wraps, deep fried and served in a creamy coconut sauce. This gives you an array of textures as well as flavors. I wouldn't mind having chuoi chien for breakfast sometime.

Reminiscent of those slushy, gelatinous desserts I had in Thailand, Che Ba Mau, or Three Color Dessert, is a glass of red beans, pandan gelatin and coconut milk with a scoop of ice on top. You stir it up and eat it sort of like a chunky slushy, an assortment of colors, flavors and textures bombarding your senses with every bite.

It's time for a nap and some reflection now. After 52 different cuisines in the past 52 weeks, Himself and I agree we're still eager for more. As the defeated often cry at the end of a sporting match, "It's not over!" Except that we're not the losers here...

Week #51 Yucatecan (Mexican)

2010-08-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

Mexico is a huge country with a wealth of culinary variety, and so far, I've only managed to explore the food of Oaxaca and Michoacan in this blog. To remedy that, I thought I'd best sample the eats of at least one more region before my 52 Cuisine series ends. So we're feasting on the delights of the Yucatan, the part of eastern Mexico that sticks out rather like a foot into the Caribbean. If you've ever done the obligatory college spring break jaunt to Cancun or the island of Cozumel, that's the territory we're talking about.

La Flor de Yucatan, in the shadow of downtown Los Angeles, is a friendly neighborhood bakery that happens to sell a vast array of savory eats as well pastries and wedding cakes. It's tiny, with no place to sit inside, and only a picnic table in back if you want to park it and dine on the spot. But that was just fine by Himself and me. The casual air made the experience much more personable, and one lady in line urged me to get an extra bottle of the Cristal Negra soda I'd picked up, saying it was very, very good and more economical to buy it that way. She was right--it was good, but I knew better than to buy two.

Here's our welcome, a fresh highly-potent habanero chili atop our container of relleno negro. Hmmm, an invitation or a warning? (It was certainly a warming!)

The relleno negro was a generous serving of beautifully seasoned broth with an abundance of shreds of pork. I don't quite get the "relleno" part, since nothing is stuffed. The "negro" or black has to do with the dark roasted peppers that make the broth black. Those roasted peppers added rich, smoky flavor but curiously little heat. This is great as a soup, but you can also fish out those large pieces of pork and eat them rolled up or sandwiched inside a fresh tortilla. Don't forget to sip the broth, though. It's too good to waste.

You can buy the roasted chilis in paste form, in blocks a little smaller than a deck of cards. Just break off a tiny piece, about a half teaspoonful, dissolve it in your marinade (lime juice is good), smear it on some chicken, pork or beef, you're set to bake or grill. There is a ton of flavor in this tiny package--as soon as I opened the wrapper, the potency of the chilis hit my nose and eyes, so use it judiciously!

Panuchos are crispy fried tacos loaded with shreds of charbroiled turkey and lots of fresh veggies, pickled onions and jalapenos. The panucho provides a full range of flavors in one handy little package. If you get the same item on a soft tortilla that has not been fried first, it's called a salbute.

The tacos contained cochinita pibil, which seems to be the Yucatan's most popular dish. It is pork that is marinated in citrus juice, which helps tenderize it, and annatto seed, which adds both a delicate flavor and an orange color. Then it's wrapped in a banana leaf and slow roasted. While its rather musical name is Mayan for "baby pig roasted underground," it's more commonly made of pork shoulder or loin these days.

Food Trivia Time: Know how some cheddar cheese is creamy white while some is bright orange? It's because the orange cheddar has been colored with annatto. Cows that graze in fresh pasturage produce milk with yellow or orange tinted milk fat. This has led producers of butter and cheese over the years to color pale milk products with either annatto seed (also known as achiote) or beta carotene. Since beta carotene can oxidize and turn food some unflattering colors, annatto is the preferred choice.

Here's a comparison of the two types of tortillas. The taco, on the left, has the usual double layer of thin soft tortillas, while the panucho on the right has the single thick tortilla that's made even thicker by frying. By the way, those pickled red onions seemed to find their way into almost everything we got, not that I'm complaining. (And if you're wondering why none of the tacos that have shown up in these blog entries have crispy tortilla shells, it's because those are a fairly recent invention that occurred right here in Los Angeles, not in Mexico. That story will have to wait for another day, though.)

Because of its location and the way it juts out into the Caribbean, the Yucatan has seen more of an influx of culture and food from Europe and the Middle East than the rest of Mexico has. It shows on the menu. Take kibbeh, for example. This Lebanese-influenced creation is sort of a large felafel, but this type has ground beef mixed in with the chickpea flour and fresh mint leaves. It is fried, split open and slathered with habanero spread and topped with, yes, more pickled red onions. I find this more flavorful and easier to swallow than your basic felafel, which is just too dense with bean protein to eat much of it. (There's nothing like running out of whatever you're drinking just as you've tried to swallow a mouthful of felafel to make you resort to snatching up someone else's beverage!)

We brought home a bag of sweets, including these handmade pastelitos filled with vanilla pudding and an assortment of fruits like guava and pineapple, and crusted with sugar. There's something so very satisfying about a handmade pastry. I'd rather have one of these than a box full of the mass produced stuff.

It turns out that the fresh habanero chili accompanying our lunch is a standard feature of meals in the Yucatan, which is one of the more southern reaches of Mexico. It's pretty warm there, and all the sweating that ensues from chomping on a habanero will certainly cool you down. I'll have to work my way up to that level of heat, though. Our friend Ted once ate a whole fresh habanero on a dare, and while he survived it, it forever changed him--and me, too. Every time I see one now, I think of him. So no, neither of us were brave enough to eat that fresh habanero. But next time? Only if they have at least a case of Cristal Negra on hand for us. A case for each of us!

Week #50 Honduran

2010-08-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

Having traveled to Honduras a few years ago, my friend Carolyn was eager to revisit its cuisine and relive her adventures in Central America. So I got together with her to sample some Honduran specialties at El Katracho in Sherman Oaks. She got a kick out of combing over the menu and recalling where she'd gone there and which foods were familiar to her.

Unordered but welcomed as a starter while we awaited our meal was a basket of catrachitas (oops! didn't get a photo), thick corn tortilla chips drizzled with a house made salsa and sprinkled with a bit of fresh queso. This is not your everyday chips and salsa--these chips are denser, and this salsa richer than what I've had before. We savored them rather than shoveling them in, as so often happens when you have a bottomless chip basket set before you in most places.

Carolyn ordered the El Katracho, the restaurant's self-named platter of three treats, all of which were served on dense corn tortillas, corn being a staple food of the Mayan culture that is this country's heritage (left to right): a taco frito, a tortilla filled with chicken, rolled and deep fried; a tortilla topped with beans (a combination of hunger and communication breakdown resulted in my not catching the name of this one); and an enchilada, loaded with layers of seasoned ground pork and chopped fresh vegetables and topped with a slice each of tomato and boiled egg. It's a little difficult in this photo to figure out where one item stops on the plate and the next one begins. Oh well, it was all a lovely, tasty mess. Finger licking IS required!

I got a big bowl of sopa de caracol--conch soup, one of the country's most popular dishes. In addition to delicate bits of conch--that's the meat from the critter that lives inside those lovely curved seashells you put up to your ear to try to hear the ocean--this rich soup made of conch broth and coconut milk is loaded with slices of chayote--those are the green pieces at the top of the bowl that look a bit like slices of apple; golden planks of cassava; and rounds of green plantain called guineo verde. All three of those vegetables are super-dense and rich, which means that yes, a seafood soup can fill you up, especially when it contains a generous measure of coconut milk, a staple of Honduran cooking. The green flecks floating in it are cilantro leaves. (Himself and I made a meal of this soup that night--I'd only managed a few sips of it before I gave up and asked for to-go containers.)

I also got a baleada, a soft, fluffy flour tortilla that can come filled with just about anything you can imagine. Mine was smeared with fried beans, homemade salsa and crema and filled with fried egg, avocado slices and a crumbling of fresh cheese. Baleadas are near and dear to the hearts of all Hondurans, and for good reason. The delicate texture of the tortilla and the ease with which all its tasty components come together in wonderfully smooth bites make this favorite practically drinkable! Next time I'm ordering a table full of them.

Barena is a Honduran beer that for all the world looks like champagne. It is a really pale gold, and while you can't tell from this photo, it's loaded with super-fine bubbles that look like those in sparkling wine. It's incredibly effervescent and really refreshing--great for helping deal with the overload of rich food.

As often happens, we were too stuffed to order dessert, so at home later, I tried making a super-simple Honduran sweet.

While I prefer mango raw and unadorned, for the sake of this blog entry I tried preparing it the Honduran way--thinly sliced, dusted with cinnamon, sprinkled with sugar, dotted with a bit of butter and baked at 400°F until lightly browned. I pulled it out of the oven at 20 minutes, because the edges were beginning to brown, and I didn't want it turning into fruit leather. This is a good way to use mangoes that aren't at peak season and therefore aren't as sweet as you'd like. But next time I'll follow through with the coconut milk theme and drizzle that, instead of heavy cream, over the baked fruit.

I figured the restaurant's name must have a story behind it, so I looked up "katracho," and boy, does it ever: A "catracho" is a Honduran. The expression comes from Nicaraguans mispronouncing the name of Honduran General Xatruch, who in the 1850s beat back the attempts of a North American adventurer bent on colonizing Central America and turning it into a collection of slave states. His defeat was and continues to be a huge source of pride for Honduras. Well done, amigos!

Week #49 Polish

2010-08-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

Lately Himself has been trying to eat less meat, which is nigh impossible, seeing as how he's my #1 date on these dining adventures. It's not too difficult if we're eating Asian, but Polish food is particularly heavy on meat of all kinds. As we made our way to Polka in Glendale, I wondered if the meat-and-cabbage stereotype was just that, or if there was more to this cuisine.

As expected, there was plenty of meat and cabbage on the menu. But Himself found a vegetarian plate that included pierogis, large flour dumplings filled with mashed potatoes and cheese and palushki, little white football-shaped noodles made of potato and flour. They reminded me a bit of really large spaetzle, but without the egg. There was also a generous serving of sautéed mushrooms, which provide a nice meatiness and heft to the meal. He didn't come away hungry from this meatless plate--but I'll confess, since he might not, that he did pinch a couple of bites of my beef.

I went for a trio of Polish standards, gulasz, slow-cooked beef; golabki, cabbage roll stuffed with ground beef and onion; and the same pierogis filled with potatoes and cheese. My plate included a couple of those little creamy smooth palushkis, too. Rounded out with vegetables and a bowl of tomato soup, this was a meal best eaten in preparation for a full day of work--or a really long nap.

Every time I have cabbage rolls I'm surprised all over again by how much I love them. As a child, I was okay with coleslaw, but I just didn't like cooked cabbage. My aged grand-auntie loved boiled cabbage and tried to instill in me a liking for it, but it was pretty awful stuff. The mere sight of those limp, sickly pale green leaves sent waves of revulsion rippling through me. I was happy to discover as an adult that if you roll up some tasty food inside a cabbage leaf, blanket it in a coating of tasty sauce and cook it, it can be quite, well...tasty! In Poland, cabbage is called "the king of vegetables." Considering its versatility and its ability to get people through a long, cold northern European winter, I'd say the title is well earned. It's a cold-weather-happy vegetable that can be further kept until the next harvest by pickling. That's where sauerkraut comes in.

Back home I made a whopping pot of bigos, a rich, meaty, mushroomy, krauty stew that I'm sure would have been even better if I'd slow cooked it on a cold, winter's day and luxuriated in the heat it provided for the house. Instead I faced August's triple-digit nightmare with the oven turned on. No matter. This was good stuff and worth the extra heat. I used beef, kielbasa and bacon, but from everything I've heard and read, the more types of meat you chuck into it, the better it is. And it's reputed to be its best after several reheatings. This recipe makes a generous batch, so it's easy to put this theory to the test. Himself and I will be eating on it for at least a week.

Bigos is made with sauerkraut, dried mushrooms and whatever meat is available from the hunt. In fact, the Poles call it "hunter stew," because it was carried along for sustenance during the hunt, and they'd chuck into it bits of meat from whatever they'd bagged each day. It's an all-purpose, popular meal that traditionally was made in a large quantity and kept in a wooden barrel. While it is especially popular during Lent and Christmas, it seems everyone eats bigos all the time. In fact, bigos is considered the national dish of Poland.

I'm including a photo of some pierogis from a demo of their production at the Polish Museum of America in Chicago, which has the largest concentration of Poles outside of Poland. These are so plump and lovely. We ate a lot of pierogis that day, some savory and some sweet. I'd never really thought about having sweet pierogis, but filled with lightly sweetened farmer's cheese and topped with nuts and dried fruits and drizzled with honey or a light syrup, pierogis are a good dessert as well as main course. It makes perfect sense.

Now, about that stereotype. Yes, Polish food is heavy on meat and cabbage, along with potatoes, mushrooms and milk products. These foods have been its staples for a very long time, and with good reason. Given the lack of outside influences between the end of World War II and the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989, this country has been a sort of time capsule of foods. While foods from the rest of the world--and fast foods--are available there now, they don't seem to factor into what is considered authentically Polish. Not yet, anyway.

Week #48 Guatemalan

2010-08-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

For our first foray into Guatemalan cuisine, Himself and I found a place with some inspiring history. Amalia's is one of those great storied restaurants that was named for the resourceful woman who opened it. Widowed with several children at the age of 24, Amalia made the best of a difficult situation by expanding her informal food production into a restaurant that became an anchor in its community. It's a lovely neighborhood gem located a couple of blocks from L.A. City College, a mid-city bungalow converted into a restaurant, with a spacious patio where the driveway and port cochere used to be. That's where the band was set up, too. They had live music when we were there for lunch. Good live music.

Himself's lunch looked back at us, as the sopa de camaron, or shrimp stew, arrived with a large prawn regarding us with a look of beady-eyed indifference. Just below the surface lurked about a half dozen jumbo-sized shrimp that were fresh, plump and juicy. The broth itself tasted of fresh seafood, with none of the staleness that usually accompanies seafood broth from a box or can.

I ordered a generous bowl o' pig parts in a rich tomato broth, a.k.a. revolcado--crunchy ear, delicate heart and earthy liver. I know this isn't for most of you, and quite frankly, it's not really for me either. But I felt the need to try something that is considered an ordinary, everyday dish in Guatemala, where they eat a lot of innards and odd bits we don't usually find on the menu in the United States. After I got past the first cartilaginous ear, chomping on the rest of them was really rather fun (I know my dear friend Mark will roll his eyes when he reads this, since he has "texture issues" concerning foods.). But once you take your time and get acquainted with an unfamiliar texture, the squeamishness can dissipate at least a little. The soup itself was quite good, really rich, roundly seasoned and mildly spicy. The pieces of heart had fat attached, which, because it was pork, was good. Still, it would be nice to experience the texture of the heart itself without the added padding. Well, I'm glad for the experience. And glad it's behind me now.

While this isn't the most inspiring picture, I'm including it for two reasons: One: I've never had refried beans made of black beans. These were really good, much richer in flavor and more satisfying than those made with pintos. Two: Behold the bits of veggie in the rice. They actually used fresh vegetables, cut up and cooked that day, not the uniform-peas-and-carrots-from-a-can. I appreciate little touches like this. Usually I don't eat the rice that accompanies such meals, because all too often it's flavorless and flecked with tired vegetables that taste like aluminum. But this rice was made with broth rather than water and loaded with fresh veggies. We picked all the seafood out of Himself's bowl, so we carried home the rest of the seafood broth and stirred in the leftover rice for a great lunch the next day.

I'd be hard pressed to call a tortilla voluptuous, but these were thick and pliant--made with lard, of course. They reminded me of the exterior of a pupusa. One was all I needed to satisfy. And that means more to carry home and enjoy later with a grating of cheese and a little tomatillo salsa.

We washed it all down with glasses of jamaica and horchata. You've seen pix of them on this blog before, but they're here again as a reminder that when you go out for Central or South American cuisine, you really should order a beverage that goes with it, not the default soft drink. It helps round out the authentic dining experience. Jamaica (pronounced hah-MY-kah, just in case you've never had it) is a sweetened drink made by boiling dried hibiscus blossoms (be sure to buy the ones specifically intended for consumption, otherwise you might end up with pesticide breath). And horchata is a lightly sweetened drink made from rice (it can also be made from almonds) and seasoned with cinnamon.

Dessert was wicked-good but put us both into a summer afternoon's coma shortly thereafter--and we shared this order! Rellenitos de platano are large fritters made of plantain with mole inside. They were incredibly rich without being overly sweet. Guatemala is a neighbor of Oaxaca, the region of Mexico that gave us mole. Turns out they have it in the country that is Mexico's "south of the border" too, which makes sense, since the entire Mesoamerican region is where the cocoa plant comes from.

No canned food. No canned music. The passion of people who love the cuisine of their home and are eager to share it. The opportunity to further explore the world's foods and see how the web of food and flavoring knits itself together around the globe. This is what I love about authentic restaurants. You just can't get this experience in a chain.

52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks: 47 down, 5 TO GO!

2010-08-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

Only five cuisines to go in my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" blogging exercise.

Wowzers! It's hard to believe I'm almost finished with this challenge I gave myself almost a full year ago.

I told Himself today as we drove to the next dining adventure--Polish--that I'm not sure whether to be glad or sad about that. On one hand, at times it has been quite a real push to get these blog entries done, a considerable investment of time, money and effort. On the other, it has been a blast--a great way to learn about food and different cuisines and a great way to spend time with my friends, and with Himself, of course.

This won't be the end of it, though, when I pen--so to speak--and post cuisine #52. I'm considering continuing to post one new cuisine a month, while I'm busy blogging about other food and travel related things. And yes, I expect there to be a book to write at the end of it. After all, I've just conducted a year's worth of research.

But that's for a later blog entry. After a good--but rather heavy--Polish meal, I desperately need a nap.

Week #47 Szechuan (Chinese)

2010-08-07T16:44:00.000-07:00

In the past few years I've grown so fond of the myriad flavors that make up Thai, Vietnamese and Korean cuisines that I've more or less back burnered Chinese food. But Szechuan has restored my interest.

Szechuan province, in southwestern China, is a land of bold flavors and a variety of chili pepper that will clear your sinuses and cool you down on the hottest of days. "One dish, one shape, hundreds of dishes, hundreds of tastes" they say there, referring to their passion for balancing flavors, aromas, textures and colors. I'd say they're speaking my language, metaphorically at least.

A number of people have told us that the most authentic representation of Szechuan in the Los Angeles area is the food at Chung King in Monterey Park. It seems every food blogger in town has written about this place, but with all those endorsements, Himself and I knew this was where we had to go for the goods.

The dominant color in this meal was RED, for all the peppers so liberally strewn over our dishes.

And for the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall right next to our table (next to the thermometer). AND for the color of my face when I'd finished my chili-laden meal (see the last pic). This was definitely a waterproof mascara meal!

Himself ordered the fish slice hot pot, which contained slabs of a succulent white fish with mushrooms, bamboo shoots and slices of a taro root gelatin called konjaku. A healthy alternative to wheat noodles, konjaku is gluten free and loaded with fiber. And like a follow-the-leader kid on the playground, it absorbs whatever flavors are around it. I ladled some of that zingy broth over my white rice--the first time. For seconds on the rice, I retreated to the plain stuff to soothe my burning mouth and tingling lips.

I ordered the fried chicken cubes with green onions and sesame seeds, and of course, a ton of chili peppers. The chicken had plenty of heat without my gobbling up any of those bright red beauties. The chicken and chilis just being neighbors on the plate was enough for me to get a heat that was strong but that never overpowered the flavors of the dish.

Not every Szechuan dish is hot, so if you're a little shy about plunging into the peppers, you have options. This dish of rice crust with pork slices came in a mild broth that coated the mouth, to cool and refresh. We ordered a pot of white rice, too, so that helped calm things down. Balance is key to enjoying the hot stuff. By the way, this dish was good on its own, so if you have timid taste buds, you also have options.

Our big discovery: the lip-numbing quality of Szechuan food does not come from those hot peppers. I always assumed that they were so hot that the sensory overload would finally drive your nerve endings to cry "uncle!" and numb out on you. But no, there's a completely different ingredient at work here: the Szechuan peppercorn, which is not actually a pepper or a chili at all. Szechuan peppercorns are aromatic and lemony--they come from a plant that's in the citrus family. But they hold a secret: this is where the lip numbing comes in--they contain a substance that causes a "general neurological confusion," to quote culinary science go-to guy Harold McGee. Beyond flavor, Szechuan peppercorns are added to help you deal with those fiery peppers by producing both numbness and a sort of sensory effervescence, kind of like when you drink a carbonated beverage while eating spicy food. (By the way, water is the last thing you want to drink while eating hot food, because it spreads the heat, rather than washing it away.) The outer husk is toasted, ground and added to dishes just before they're served.

With a face to match the pepper: devil's tongue, anyone?!

You actually do have some control over how much heat you get in a Szechuan meal. These hollowed out super-hot chilis are lavishly served over your order, and you control the amount of heat you consume by eating a few or a lot--or by picking out the meat and veggies and leaving the peppers behind. It's up to the individual diner. In spite of the heat, though, the flavors shine right through--ginger, garlic and Chinese five-spice, a blend of cinnamon, cloves, star anise, fennel seed and, ta-dah! Szechuan peppercorn.

My concern all along has been that the heat would completely wipe out the flavor and leave me a done-in pile of sweat, tears and pain. But I was wrong, and I'm champing at the bit for more. Szechuan rocks!

Week #46 Serbian

2010-08-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

If you've never been to Serbia, do you actually know where it is--unless you're one of those oddballs like me who has a map fetish? Even I had to double check and see exactly where it fits in with the other Balkan States. It's part of the former Yugoslavia, one of those countries that we vaguely know is over there somewhere east of Italy. Or is that Slovenia? Or Croatia? Or the generously syllabled Bosnia-Herzegovina?

As difficult as it is for someone who's never been to Serbia to tell you just where it is, it's equally difficult to pin down exactly what makes Serbian food Serbian. So I asked my pal Tanja to join me for dinner. As a first generation American from Serbia, she's the truth meter I usually lack on these expeditions.

I just had to include this photo of Tanja holding a pic of her dad, a bodybuilder who was the first Mr. Yugoslavia in 1968.
How cool is that?!

She suggested we go to Metro Cafe in Culver City. When I raised my eyebrows at the name and said it didn't sound terribly authentic, she assured me it had the goods. Then she rather sheepishly explained that Serbian food is more or less a pastiche of the cuisines of the neighboring countries, so there's a lot of Italian, Greek, Turkish and Hungarian on the menu. I assured her that that's fine, because food borders and political borders have little in common. Cuisine is geographically, climatically and culturally determined--no respecter of lines dictated by governments and drafted by mapmakers.

We did start off with a Serbian treat, because the first thing to hit our table was ajvar, known as "Serbian caviar." A spread of roasted red bell pepper, egg plant and chili peppers, it was richly textured, full flavored and mildly hot. Take a look at the spellings of these cousin words: ajvar and caviar. And neighboring Turkey's word for caviar is "havyar." See the etymological similarity? I imagine you could step into a kitchen next door and ask for one of these, and they'd know just what you were talking about. Well, that's enough of a foray into linguistic geekdom for one blog entry, but thanks for indulging me!

Next was a basic Greek salad. At least you didn't see it in my last blog entry! This lightly dressed pile of tomatoes, lettuce, onions, cucumbers and feta was a nice fresh intermission in between the rich flavors of the other dishes.

In spite of being completely landlocked, Serbia still manages to get its share of fresh seafood. These steamed mussels were dressed in a light sauce of tomato, garlic and parsley that made a nice soup for mopping up with that piece of charred bread on top.

My favorite dish was the pasulj, Serbian white bean soup. What made it a hit with me was that I detected the presence of smoked pork in it. You just can't go wrong with that. It was basic but hearty and nourishing, mildly seasoned, except for the garnish of cracked pepper. The door was propped open, with the ocean breezes whisking in, so even though it's August, there was a crispness to the air that made this soup even more welcome. Our server noted that the recipe comes from the chef's mum. Okay, in unison everybody say, "Awwww!!!"

The menu contains plenty of meat--they certainly don't shy away from it in veggie-happy LA. Our mutual friend, Vanessa, who is also of Serbian extraction, says the Serb table is all about meat, meat and more meat, "with the odd stew thrown in for digestive purposes." Well that's okay by me!

Chevapchichi is considered one of the national dishes of Serbia. These are beef sausages, but traditionally they were made of a combination of beef, pork and lamb. Still, these were really good, with a nice bit of char bestowed by the grill. They were served on a bed of sweet onions with some ajvar--which is an accompaniment as well as an appetizer--and fried potatoes that somehow managed to be more grease than potato. I don't mean this in a bad way. They were incredibly good!

Tanja shared a recipe for pasulj, the Serbian bean pot we'd had, from one of her family cookbooks. The funky measurements in it make me think it was converted from metrics to avoirdupois, which is what we use here in the U.S. (who uses .35 ounces of anything?) Between the odd measurements and some ingredients being listed with no measurements at all, I decided to do a little searching. I think I've managed to cobble together a recipe that is to the spirit of the original.

Homemade pasulj: I'll pick out the bay leaves and parsley stems before serving.

Serbian Bean Pot
("Pasulj")
Yields about 4 servings
Based on a recipe from Yugoslav Cookbook by Olga Novak Markovič (Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana, 1986)

12 oz. white beans
Approximately 3 pints water
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, finely chopped
parsley root (if you can’t find this, use a few parsley stems and chop the leaves for garnish)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
12 oz. smoked pork, cut into small bits if you use bacon
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
1 chili pepper (I used a Serrano), seeded, deveined and minced
salt and black pepper, to taste

Wash the beans well and soak overnight.

The next day, strain off the soaking water and add fresh cold water. Add to the bean pot all ingredients except salt and pepper, and simmer until beans and meat are tender.

***Remove the meat (if it’s a whole piece) and add a roux, made of 2 oz. fat (measured by volume) and 2 oz. flour (measured by weight). Simmer everything until thickened.

Season with salt and pepper when cooking is finished.

If you keep the pork whole, slice pieces of it and place one in each bowl and then ladle soup over it and garnish with chopped parsley.

***Now, about that roux: Some people panic as soon as they read a recipe and see they'll have to make a roux or even a liaison. So we're going to cheat. I'll teach you a little trick so you can get around it. Mind you, it will taste much better if you actually take the time and effort to make a roux, because the flavor and texture will both improve the final product. (And you have to promise me that someday you'll learn to make a proper roux, alrighty?) But for now, this is what we'll do: cook half of the beans in a separate pot and purée them before adding them to the main pot about a half hour before cooking is finished. The result will be a nice rich, thick potage.

Dessert is problematic. The Serbian dessert menu includes sweets that are emblematic of other countries: Greece's baklava; Hungary's dobos torte and Turkey's Turkish delight or ratluk, as they call it in Serbia.

Serbia has rice pudding too, but here they call it sutlijaš. And they top it with cinnamon and molasses, so I figured, why not? In the interest of portion control and not being a total glutton, I spooned the finished product into individual ramekins rather than one large bowl. And I stirred in the cinnamon while the rice cooked, so it would be well distributed. Himself and I test tasted two servings, one with molasses drizzled over it and the other with syrup. Hands down, the molasses was the winner in our household. But honey would be good, and I'm sure something rich like chestnut honey would be even better.

So, Serbian cuisine? As Tanja noted, when your homeland has been occupied by the Ottomans for a few hundred years and when it lies amongst an assortment of other countries with their varied cultures, it's easy to just absorb what's close at hand. But what Serbia has absorbed is, quite smartly, the good stuff. So if you find yourself wandering past a Serbian restaurant, stop in and have a bite. It will be good.

Week #45 Greek

2010-07-28T17:42:00.000-07:00

Just between you and me and the gatepost--as my grandma used to say--I'm getting a little weary of trying to sort out the differences between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines. So much of it is so similar that when I ask, "What's the difference between your stuffed grape leaves and those of the country next door?" the inevitable response is, "Ours are better."

I yearned to do something a little different this time, so I headed out for groceries, not to the generic corner market but to Papa Cristo's on Pico at Normandie in Mid-City Los Angeles. This beloved LA institution is a Greek grocery, restaurant and catering company that keeps the city's Greeks--and Greek food lovers--supplied with plenty of imported and authentically prepared food.

Here's my haul, which I used to make dinner, with plenty of items I can use for quite some time--a good olive oil, some seasonings to which only Papa Cristo himself knows the formula and a nice bag of Greek sage that's still on its woody stems. And masticha, which we'll get to in a little bit.

What I didn't want to do was make what shows up on every Greek menu--or what people typically think of when they ponder Greek food. So no hummus, no baba ganoush, no baklava.

Instead of feta, which is what usually comes to mind when you think of Greek cheese, I selected wedges of a couple of completely different cheeses to go with the rustic bread that's made on-site. The cheese in the center is kaseri, a sheep's milk cheese with a little goat's milk thrown in for good measure. It has an herbal quality to it that I suppose is the result of grazing livestock in a scrubby landscape filled with rosemary, thyme and oregano. Its slight chewiness reminds me a bit of provolone. The cheese in the lower right is kefalotiri, a tart, saltier and slightly drier cheese made from sheep's milk. Having been around since Byzantine times, this is a cheese with some history. By the way, its name comes from the Greek hat called a kefalo. Now whenever I see one those hats, my wacky mind's eye is sure to envision someone wearing a round of cheese on his head.

Okay, so the canned beans seem like a cheat, but they're Greek gigantes, the largest lima beans you'll ever find. One glance and I'd swear they were actually fava beans, but they taste like neither limas nor favas. They have a mild flavor and with a slightly dry texture to them--in spite of their tenure in the can of sauce--so the mildly spicy red sauce was a good addition. I cooked up some of the couscous-type sour frumenty Greek pasta. It's made of durum wheat and has a robust sourdough flavor. Then I started layering: I spooned the hot pasta and beans over a bed of chard and let it wilt, then drizzled the dish with the olive oil and a little red wine vinegar (not too much, since the pasta is naturally sour) and sprinkled on one of Papa Cristo's spice blends. Served with bread and olives, it was a satisfying main course. With it we had glasses of retsina. This Greek white wine is famously pine-tasting, crisp and dry, but full of flavor.

I love love love leeks. But right up there on the list with turnips and rutabagas, they must be one of the world's most under-appreciated vegetables. While the traditional Greek way to have them is simmered, drained and then drizzled with olive oil and vinegar, I decided to instead top these with avgholemono sauce made of eggs, lemon juice and some of the leek broth (chicken broth is more traditional). While the leeks were simmering I tossed in a branch of the Greek sage to zazz up their mild butteriness with a little woody-herbally flavor.

I also picked up a can of calamari, a.k.a. squid, since I can't find the fresh stuff at our much more generic local grocery stores. These tiny little guys were packed in brine and still raw, so I gave them two minutes in a pot of boiling water with a couple of lemon halves tossed in. I've never cooked squid, and what I found on the subject said to cook it either two minutes or 30 minutes, explaining that if you go past two minutes they become tough, and then it takes a good half hour to tender them up again. Two minutes was perfect--they were delicate and not at all rubbery, which is my usual complaint with calamari. I detest eating what feels to my mouth like a basket of deep-fried rubber bands!

I made up a bit of ladolemono to dip them in. This intensely lemony dressing is a popular accompaniment in Greece to all sorts of seafood. It's a great addition to your stash of quick fix-ups--just whisk together a couple of tablespoons of fresh lemon juice, a half tablespoon of Dijon mustard and a quarter cup of olive oil, and season it with salt and black pepper to taste. This sauce has some serious pucker power, so cheat if you need to, by adding just a smidge of sugar while you're whisking to make the sauce a little less aggressive.

Here's the body of one of the calamari. Larger ones can be stuffed with a mixture of something wonderful and then breaded and lightly fried. I'd say this size would be perfect for piping in a mixture, just like you would with a squash blossom. Just pull out that cartilaginous spine first (don't worry about the other bits inside--they're edible). I guess this is an experiment to reserve for another day.

The baklava in Papa Cristo's pastry case called long and loud, but I opted for these crumbly cookies laced with chopped nuts. I had them with some ouzo, which is the color of water when you pour it into the glass but turns milky when you add water to it. Ouzo is an aperitive, meaning you're supposed to have it before dinner, to get the digestive juices flowing in preparation for the meal. But I've jumbled up everything else in this meal, so why not have the aperitive at the end? It still aids digestion.

Leftovers: For lunch the following day, I varied things a bit and had the remaining ingredients as a cold salad: a bed of chard, then the pasta and beans, with the rest of the calamari cut up on top and a bit of the kefalotiri grated over it and drizzled with just a touch of the ladolemono. I didn't mind having this two days in a row. It's a good way to get a lot of flavor and variety in one dish--and to use up leftover bits that are too few to make much of a meal on. A handful of those huge beans, a couple of calamari and a few gratings of cheese, combined to provide all the protein I needed for one meal.

Snack time: People love their "spoon sweets" in Greece, and masticha is a favorite. Growing only on the southern part of the island of Chios, the evergreen mastica tree produces a pleasantly resinous tasting sap that is used to flavor this yummy paste. Get a spoonful of this white taffy-like substance and dip it into a glass of water to make a "lollipop" of it, called a "submarine." It's a great treat on a hot day. While masticha looks like it might be employed in some other way in the kitchen, this is the only way I've ever heard of anyone eating it. Hmmm, looks like an ingredient that's just begging to be experimented with, doesn't it?

For breakfast the following morning we toasted some of the leftover rustic bread and enjoyed it with the cheeses and some rose petal preserves. I was still swooning from the rosewater ice cream I'd had during my Persian adventure the previous week, so a rose petal strewn breakfast made me quite happy.

For future reference, rose petal preserves are quite liquidy and don't work well on rustic bread with its large crumb (that's baker talk for holes in the bread created during the rising process). It leaks through and you have to lick it off your plate. It's also difficult to photograph as it seeps through, so I'll just have to document it this way, with those luscious petals sliding off the spoon.

Yeah this is Greek-lite, I know. But it was fun poking around in the market, reading labels and becoming overwhelmed by the variety of food available. When you're dealing with a cuisine that is several thousand years in the making, your choices are practically unlimited.

Week #44 Persian

2010-07-25T17:01:00.001-07:00

"You know, we could eat a boatload of caviar and still be entirely faithful to this blog entry," I submitted to my dinner date, Chef Don, as we breezed west through Los Angeles toward the sunset. He cackled with glee.

Persian is one of only two cuisines on the planet, the other being Russian, that can claim caviar as an authentic part of its cuisine, because Iran and Russia are the only countries that border the Caspian Sea, where the caviar-laden sturgeon makes its home. All the rest of the world's fish eggs are just that--fish eggs. As the saying goes, "Location is everything!"

Enticing as that gorging-on-caviar idea was, practical considerations--namely money--deemed that we resist the neighborhood caviar bars. Instead we blew through Beverly Hills and stopped at Baran Restaurant, in that part of West LA known as Tehrangeles, for its concentration of Iranians, their businesses and most importantly to us, their restaurants.

Within moments a basket hit our table filled with uniformly cut pieces of nan-e lavash, unleavened bread as thin and easy to handle as a stack of playing cards. We smeared them with soft butter and rolled up pieces of sweet onion inside. They were refreshing yet substantial.

Next came an appetizer of tahdig, the wonderfully crusty rice that sticks to the bottom of the pot (check out my blog entry Do Not Soak This Pan to see my attempt at making some). It was smothered in two stews, one of lentils and the other of herbs and beef, which was so good I ordered a full entrée of the stuff. Tahdig is wonderful all by itself--a savory rice krispy treat for adults--but those stews were necessary: I'd been starving myself all day so I could savor more of this cuisine.

The herb-and-beef stew is called ghormeh sabzi, and it's considered the national dish of Iran. Made of beef, beans and assorted greens and herbs--whatever greenery is available in any particular region of Iran--it carries enormous flavor and is filling without being too heavy.

The boiled chicken, in the foreground (with ghormeh sabzi in the background) came with albalou polo, basmati rice flavored with sour cherries and saffron (picture below). Maybe chicken and sour cherries isn't the first combination you'd think of, but what a natural pairing. Just think about all the great dishes you've had combining chicken and lemon, or perhaps chicken and capers. As for the chicken, I couldn't pin down exactly what the flavorings were (and it looks more braised than boiled), but it was mildly hot and perfectly accented by the sweet and sour cherries.

albalou polo

Torshi is a dish of aged pickled vegetables, including carrots, eggplant and cauliflower with an array of herbs and plenty of salt. My tonsils are seizing up even as I type this--it's incredibly sour, and a tiny bit goes a long way. In fact, I brought most of it home with me. I plan to enjoy it for a really long time.

I think faloodeh is what angels eat for dessert. This sublime rosewater granita with vermicelli has been around for a looong time, since about 400 BCE. It's sweet and rich yet light. The rosewater makes it rich, the ice makes it light and the vermicelli gives it a bit of chewiness. Vermicelli may seem like a strange ingredient in ice cream, but I believe that's what helps keep it frozen longer. Without those frozen starchy bits, the ice crystals would quickly melt away.

Confession time: Dessert didn't end there. Don wasn't familiar with Mashti Malone's, a veritable palace of Persian ice cream in Hollywood, so I had to remedy that deficiency in his local food knowledge. I figured we'd stop by and pick up prepackaged containers to carry home and enjoy later. But nooo, before I knew what was happening he'd ordered a couple of scoops--pomegranate and saffron. I held my order to a single serving of herb snow, which is similar to faloodeh but contains those wonderful gelatinous basil seeds. It was all heavenly.

One of the nice things about faloodeh--about granita in general--is that it's a great frozen treat that doesn't require an ice cream maker to produce. Time to share the secret:

Faloodeh
Yield: 8 servings

2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups water
2 tbsp. rosewater (you should be able to find it in any Middle Eastern market)
2 oz. vermicelli
garnish options: lime wedges, sour cherries, chopped pistachios, fresh mint leaves

Stir together sugar and water in a medium saucepan and simmer over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat, stir in rose water and allow to cool to room temperature.
Place noodles in a glass or metal bowl and add just enough boiling water to cover them. Let stand for a few minutes, until the noodles are soft. Drain noodles, rinse under cold water and drain again; then cut noodles into one-inch lengths.
Stir noodles into rosewater mixture in a shallow dish and set it in the freezer.
After an hour, reach in and stir and break up the ice crystals with a fork. Repeat periodically over the next two or three hours, until you have a nice crystally sweet dessert.
Serve with the garnish of your choice.

POP!

2010-07-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

I love the sound of that little telltale POP! coming from the kitchen that lets me know my jellies and chutneys are properly insulated. Ooh! There it goes again! Three more and I'll know they're all ready for the pantry.

This is strawberry jam with balsamic reduction to give it richness and depth, and a little black pepper, just for the sass. It's better than anything I can find in the stores. I don't manage to make it every year, and when I don't, I'm always sorry. Not only is it good on a croissant, but I love it on a ham sandwich. Or all by itself, licked off a spoon when I'm standing in the open fridge door. The lemon chutney is good that way, too.

Maybe this isn't a strawberry's immortality, but it IS a lovely reminder of strawberry season much later on, when there's not a local berry to be had. This is something worth working up a sweat for and a sticky I don't mind cleaning, although I really shouldn't be mopping up the kitchen with my tongue.

Oops...did I type that out loud?!

Week #43 Argentinean

2010-07-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

Whenever I hear someone say, "I could really go for some Argentinean food," I figure he--and 99% of the time, it IS a he who says this--is jonesing for a serious dose of red meat. After all, the most prevalent and popular of Argentinean restaurants are churrascarias, those meat-on-a-stick places.

But my vegetarian buddy Pat and I opted for something different. We headed for Lala's in West Hollywood, where the menu was loaded with both meat and plenty of choices to satisfy the more vegetably inclined (yes, I know that's not a word, but sometimes you just have to make one up).

The first thing to hit the table is usually chimichurri, a great sauce for dipping your bread into or for drizzling over a steak or a serving of fish. The main ingredients are garlic, parsley, salt and pepper in olive oil. The choice of spices is at the discretion of the cook. It has a light, clean taste--but never hot--that tames the dense richness of all that steak. It's good over veggies, too.

Since somewhere around 60 percent of Argentina's population has at least a little Italian blood flowing through their veins, that country's influence on this cuisine is understandably pronounced. The Argentinean version of the frittata is the tortilla de papa, a potato cake held together with egg custard. This one is pretty basic, egg with potato and onion and a little chopped parsley over the top.

The provoleta is positively wicked. If not for a sprinkling of salsa, this would just be a skillet full of melted, crusty, chewy provolone, not that I'm complaining, mind you. You just have to focus on the salsa to convince yourself that what you're eating isn't flat out deadly! This is one of the most satisfying and decadent things I've had in a long time. I may have to return soon just for provoleta with a glass of wine--by myself, so I don't have to share (with apologies to Pat, Himself and anyone else who thought they might get to tag along).

Here's my entraña, the obligatory hunk o' beef, flanked by salad and rice. Sorry I'm not finding much to say on the subject, but it pretty much looks and tastes like Sunday lunch at most any restaurant in America--if I'd had it with mashed potatoes, which was an option. It was good, but there's nothing here that screams of a particular international cuisine. If I'd opted for the steak Milanesa, it would have been thinly sliced, breaded and fried, chicken fried steak style. Very familiar. Very American, Southern style.

Since I didn't make room for an appetizer or dessert, I decided to focus on those at home:

Some consider the official sauce of Argentina to be salsa golf, also known as salsa rosada, a combo of mayo and ketchup, plus other ingredients that vary depending on who you listen to. Like chimichurri, it's a good all-purpose sauce. I know, some of you probably think a dip made of mayo and ketchup is a little on the low-rent side, but "dijonnaise" works and this does, too. It's especially popular in Argentina as a dip for palm hearts. I tried that, along with asparagus spears, carrot sticks and broccoli florets. It was all good.

I even stirred in some chopped hard boiled egg and a few capers and made a yummy, though slightly pink, egg salad, a nice change from my usual.

Salsa rosada (I like that name better) is essentially one of those concoctions you mix things into until you like what you've got. The basic recipe I found called for twice as much mayo as ketchup, and then a bit of lime juice, Tabasco, salt and pepper. I added the tiniest bit of colatura (or garum or fish sauce, depending on which ethnic market you find it in). That realllly opened it up and enriched the flavor. A splash of caper juice instead of lime juice worked well, too. They sell it premade, in squeeze bottles like mustard, but as quick and easy as it is to whip up, and as easy as it is to make it exactly the way you like it, why settle for the store bought variety?

I've always thought fruit fools were the province of the English, but I keep running across recipes in Argentinean collections for mango fool. So that's what I made for dessert, fresh mango puréed with confectioner's sugar and lime juice, and some whipped heavy cream folded in (no, that tub of whipped topping from the grocery won't do--the cow is more trustworthy than the chemist in the milk fat versus partially-hydrogenated something-or-other debate). I spooned it into a glass with crumbled amaretti and slices of mango and topped it with toasted almonds. It gave me an idea--this purée would be a good replacement for the egg custard in tiramisu if you're making it for someone who can't eat eggs. Of course, there's still all of that heavy cream, so it's not a low-fat alternative, just an egg-free one.

While Pat had plenty of lunch without the meat, I remembered that my vegetarian friend Katie spent a few weeks in Argentina last year, so I gave her a call to find out how easy it was to do without meat in a country that, like the U.S., practically has a steak stitched onto its flag. Katie said the strong Italian influence meant there was plenty of pasta with tomato-based sauces to eat. She noted that Argentines are quite proud of their cheeses, so there was no shortage of protein. While Argentina produces some good wines, the national drink is maté, a type of tea that most people seem quite devoted to, so much so that Katie said the hiking trails were filled with people with a special apparatus strapped to their backs from which they sipped tea as they hiked. Curious!

I come away from this dining experience with the feeling that Argentinean cuisine is very much like our own. While there may be an overlay of other cuisines on our plate, America tends to be a strong meat-and-potatoes kinda place with a few regional variations, just like Argentina.

Mmm, Sweet Garlic Spears...

2010-07-13T13:29:00.001-07:00

I just returned from a weekend jaunt to Seattle, where every farmers' market--not just the biggie in Pike Place--is offering garlic spears. They're the pre-flowering tops of the elephant garlic plant, milder than regular garlic, and milder still when they've had the heat put to them. And they are completely wowsome.

These grilled babies were smoky and delicate. The heads have the sweetness of grilled onion but without the heat (down toward the root end is where the attitude picks up). In spite of their gentleness, later in the day I found myself with a righteous case of dragon breath, so be warned if you're so excited about finding garlic spears that you hog them all for yourself.

To my knowledge we don't get them here in Southern California, but if I'm wrong about this, please set me straight and tell me where to find them. I yearn to bring them home by the armload like flowers, and see how many different ways I can prepare them. I'm sure they'd be great sautéed, chopped up and added to potato salad, or sprinkled over a plate of chicken livers or stirred into vichyssoise--or any soup, for that matter. Or grilled and tucked into a sandwich or left raw and dipped into bleu cheese dressing and munched on like carrot sticks.

Dang! I'm getting hungry for something that requires plane travel. Time to leave the keyboard and look for something to take my mind off of garlic spears. Time to book another trip to Seattle.

Week #42 Indian

2010-07-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

You've heard me say this countless times about a lot of different countries, but I have to say it again:

India is so gi-normous that there's positively no way to do its cuisine justice in one puny little blog entry. They don't call it the subCONTINENT for nothing. Not only is it big, not to mention geographically, climatically and culturally diverse, but its strategic location has ensured that centuries of adventurers trekking between East and West have brought myriad ingredients, cooking techniques and traditions to blend with the local ones. The result is an amazing array of foods and flavors. In fact, I defy anyone to get bored eating Indian food, because there's always another region's food to explore. And another, and another...

But the thing that impresses me about this cuisine above all others is that as an avowed meat eater, I can have a vegetarian meal in an Indian restaurant and come away completely satisfied--that doesn't happen for me in any other type of vegetarian establishment. Rajdhani in Artesia's Little India lays out a vegetarian spread so rich, varied and flavorful that it actually makes me forget to miss the meat. Its cuisine is Northern Indian, an area with a strong tradition of vegetarianism.

I'd been to Rajdhani once before and knew to come hungry. They don't actually have a menu--service is Thali style, so you just sit down and servers come through and load your own personal platter, called a thali, which is filled with small bowls called katoris, with every kind of dahl, soup and stew you can imagine. This is the most lavish feast I've ever had laid before me. If you clean your plate, it doesn't stay empty very long. They just keep coming around and filling your katoris and doling out another piece of naan, another puri, and another and another, until you shoo them away in your state of oh-god-I'm-stuffed ecstasy. It's a lovely misery.

My thali, loaded with the vegetarian Gujarati cuisine favored by the Hindus of Gujarat, in northern India, includes chickpeas (channa); bhendi kari, (okra curry); dhal (lentil purée); sambar (lentil & veggie soup); puri, a hollow, puffy bread; papadam; naan and khaman dhokla. The "glass" I drank from was stainless, too.
It's amazing just how sharp a table filled with these stainless pieces looks.

Khaman dhokla is a leavened bread (most Indian breads are flat) made from chickpea flour and spices and topped with fresh cilantro and sautéed green chili peppers and mustard seed. It's highly addictive stuff!

The attention to detail is extraordinary. The kitchen must be enormous to accommodate all the pots required to cook this variety of dishes, but everything is seasoned to perfection and all seasoned differently. Just when you hit a super-hot something that threatens to reduce you to a pool of sweat, tears and regret, here comes the basmati rice and a glass of brisk lassi (a yogurt drink) to cool you down.

On the whole, Indian cuisine is pretty healthy fare, that is until you get to the desserts. Our trio of desserts (clockwise from the top): rosewater ice cream topped with basil seed (funny how those gelatinous seeds look like fish eggs, huh?). This stuff makes me swoon!; gulab jamun, fried dumplings made from a dough of flour, powdered milk and butter, and then soaked and served in syrup; and shrikhand, thickened yogurt with saffron and cardamom stirred in. A bite of each was all I needed to cap off an amazing meal.

These freshly fried papadam have tiny black flecks of onion seed, which give these chickpea wafers a kick. They're crackly-crispy and addictive, but since they're pure protein, you can't eat as many as you think you can!

I got carried away and had to hit a couple more Indian restaurants--and I'm contemplating going back for more once I've posted this blog entry.

At Flavor of India in Burbank (they also have a location in West Hollywood) I had lamb seekh with mint chutney on a bed of sweet onions. Remember that classic combo of lamb chops with mint jelly? Same idea here: This dense, rich lamb kabob has mint chutney for dipping, which helps lighten and brighten the richness of the meat.

Naan--hot, puffy and satisfying flat bread. It's soft on the inside and crispy on the outside.

A quartet of chutneys: tamarind chutney, sweet, tangy and fruity; mango chutney, essentially jam, I think; tomato chutney, tomato-sweet from those roasted tomatoes and slightly spicy; pumpkin chutney--I didn't really taste pumpkin, but it was good--and pleasantly warm.

Quickly, quickly I'm racing down to southern India (cuisine wise) for dosa, a large, crispy crêpe filled with paneer, an Indian cheese, and an array of veggies. It comes with various chutneys to dip it into--the green one is a mint chutney. I'm not sure what the orange one is--it was good but mild. Dosa is made from a combo of lentil and rice flours, so just the wrap itself is loaded with protein and carbs sufficient to get you through the day. Roll up some tofu, veggies, potatoes and onions or whatever you crave, and you essentially have India's answer to the burrito. With chutney instead of salsa. Dahl on the side instead of beans. And rice. Always rice--it's international!

I had this dosa for lunch at India Sweets and Spices in Los Feliz, although there are locations all over the LA area. They have a grocery attached, but I recommend eating before grocery shopping. That way you can focus on what you came to buy and not get too carried away trying to buy one of everything. I thought I had a pretty good grip on all those Indian flavorings beyond the usual range of spices, things like amchur, peepal and zattar (heh heh, how THAT for A-to-Z?!), but I found a huge section of herbs, seeds, roots and flavorings I'd never encountered before. I'll have to save them for another day, another cooking, eating and blogging adventure.

Over the years I've noticed that whenever I eat Indian food, I always come away wrapped in a happy state that lasts for a few hours. And that if I have Indian for lunch, I spend my afternoon not especially productively, but feeling great beneficence toward my coworkers and all others I encounter. What's in Indian food that causes this? I've never been able to find out, but I LIKE that feeling!

If Himself were leaning over my shoulder right now, he'd scold me for typing your eye off. Apologies. I hope you made it all the way through. And I hope you go out and get yourself some Indian food soon.

While I have your attention, though, here's a great recipe for fresh coriander chutney:

Dhania Chatni

Into a blender chuck 1 cup of firmly packed fresh cilantro leaves (cleaned & blotted dry); 6 spring onions, which you've cut into halves or thirds (cleaned & minus the root); 2 fresh green chilies of your choice (remove the stalks & seeds first); 1 clove of garlic; 1 teaspoon of salt; 2 teaspoons of sugar; 1 teaspoon of garam masala (which you can make yourself or pick up at the store); 1/3 cup of lemon juice; and 2 tablespoons of water. Whiz it all in the blender, pour it into a pretty bowl and chill before serving. Since cilantro is great with Mexican food, you can make this, omitting the garam masala, and use it as a dip or topping for tacos, beans or whatever you desire.

*And a big whopping P.S.: Please check out the blog--and book!--of my friend, adventuress Vanessa Able, who has just driven and blogged her way around India. Seriously!

Barbecue Spaghetti and a Pair of Explanations

2010-07-08T16:38:00.000-07:00

Here's my plate from a lunch I had back home in Memphis recently, where one of the local favorites is barbecue spaghetti. When I mentioned it on Facebook someone asked, "How is that possible?" For starters, note that there's no "d" on the end of "barbecue." The spaghetti itself isn't barbecued. Rather it's mixed with barbecued pork (because this is Memphis) and barbecue sauce. This rendition includes some tomato and onion, too.

Since barbecue is made in large quantities, putting together a batch of barbecue spaghetti is one way of varying the meal. Just as you'd serve turkey in myriad ways post-Thanksgiving, we require a little variety in barbecue's presentation, especially when that was one whopper of a hog on the spit.

Alternately, preparing barbecue spaghetti is a sneaky way of taking a little barbecue and making it go further. I know someone who always says, "Let me know how many people are coming so I'll know how much water to add to the soup." Call those noodles Barbecue Helper, then.

And let me know how many people are coming, so I'll know how much pasta to add to the barbecue.

Week #41 Korean

2010-07-01T23:09:00.000-07:00

The first time Himself and I ventured into a Korean restaurant, we accumulated 18 little plates on our table BEFORE our order arrived--and all we'd asked for was an appetizer and two entrées! So if you like to sample loads of different dishes, a Korean meal will surely please you on that score. And if you like your meal heavy on the garlic and pickles, you'll be positively thrilled.

For this latest trip I made a lunch date with Charles Rosenberg, who lives right smack in the middle of Koreatown. This is his home turf, but I managed to find a good spot he'd never heard of. Booyah! Mountain Cafe is open 24 hours a day and is one of those places the locals know and cherish. While most people are familiar with Korean barbecue, this place is all about the soup. Apparently it's THE go-to place for a restorative bowl of porridge at 3 a.m., when the parties are winding down and everyone has indulged a bit too much. I just can't do 3 a.m. the way I used to, so we went for lunch, a sane hour and a manageable crowd.

We started with an order of b(r)oiled ravioli. I'm typing it this way because the menu said "broiled," but our dumplings were quite obviously "boiled." No matter. Each one was like a tiny meal unto itself, with a little bit of ground beef, mixed vegetables and noodles tucked inside. Dipped in the kimchi juices, they made a good starter.

Banchan with our starter of b(r)oiled dumplings

These myriad sides, called banchan, remind me of all the sides called "salads" you get in an Israeli restaurant. Most banchan are some form of kimchi, a pickled vegetable of some sort (ours includes cabbage and Asian radish), although the bowl in the upper left hand corner contains chunks of sweet beef. This is actually a quite modest spread, as banchan go.

Pickling isn't really the most precise word here--kimchi is fermented, so while it has a sour quality, it's not aggressively tangy. Instead, there's an effervescence to it that refines and intensifies the flavor of each item. Entire books have been devoted to kimchi, and rightfully so. The types are practically endless and vary throughout the country and with the season. In fact, kimchi is considered the national food of Korea. I'm thinking maybe I should revisit this particular food soon and devote at least one blog entry specifically to it.

I ordered the seaweed soup with shrimp. It tastes, as you'd imagine, intensely of the sea. You either like it or you don't. It's a little on the bland side, but if you've just punished yourself with an evening of excess, it's probably a safer bet than an overload of spice and fat. I added a few spoons of steamed rice to give it more bulk. However, my spoon found itself straying repeatedly into Charles' bowl...

Charles ordered this spicy, beefy soup with bean sprouts, Asian radish, Chinese vermicelli and rice. The broth alone is enough to make you purr like a kitten. It's rich and spicy, with a velvety texture, the perfect wintertime food. Fortunately we're having a cooler than usual summer here in LA.

After lunch Charles introduced me to Koreatown's Galleria Market. This huge grocery stocks just about anything you could possibly need to create an authentic Korean feast, including a vast array of prepared foods, if you'd rather skip the cooking part and go straight to the eating part.

Ahh, kimchi as far as the eye can see! There's a pretty good chance that whatever you like pickled is available at this bar, not only vegetables but meats and seafood as well. No need to bury earthenware jars of food in your yard to, uh, mature, if you have this store in your neighborhood.

This 10w30-style arrangement reminds me of a store display of motor oil--in what looks like milk bottles, to really mix things up--but it's actually sake. At $2.95 a bottle, I'm betting this is not the premium stuff. We found it sitting next to the quick-grab items by the checkout, far, far from the proper wine and alcohol section. Wacky!

After discovering what freshly-made tofu was all about on my recent trip to Thailand, I was eager to take some of that lovely, whisper-soft stuff home with me. My introduction to fresh, hand-crafted tofu is as big a revelation as sampling my first proper baguette in Paris. I picked up several ingredients from the market and trotted right home to make myself a great pot of miso soup.

These chrysanthemum leaves are sweet, delicate and quick cooking. They add a welcome freshness--miso can be a very wintery tasting soup. They also provide a nice balance to a salad made with bitter greens. Their versatility guaranteed that I got several meals out of them. I'm eager to return to the market to sample their other greens, most of which I've never encountered in the usual grocery chains.

Lotus lace! These poached lotus root slices come bagged and ready to either crunch on or cook into a dish. They remind me in flavor and texture of a firmer jicama.

Brown rice ovalettes don't look like much, but cooked into broth they make a nice alternative way to enjoy rice-as-usual.

I used all those ingredients and made a big pot of soup with a miso base. Velvety and crunchy, sweet and salty, it was a nice Part II to my Korean food adventure.

By the way, a package of miso paste is a great thing to have on hand. It lasts forever and is your ace in the hole if you need something warm and nourishing and you only have a few odd bits of food to work with. Just dilute a spoonful of miso in some water on low heat and chuck into the pot whatever you have in the fridge. Well, it's not quite as haphazard as that, but I just want to make the point that it's not at all complicated to make a good pot of soup if you keep some miso in stock.

Pickled garlic and kimchi are two mainstays of Korean cuisine; I can't get too much of either one of them! I bought pint jars of these at my local farmers' market, where a Korean man vends a nice selection of homemade goodies. Now whenever I crave a blast of flavor, all I have to do is reach for them. I ramped up the flavor in my pot o' soup by pouring in a little of the kimchi juice.

It's fascinating to see how manners vary, depending on where you are. They seem so very arbitrary. Drinking from your bowl is permissible in a Korean restaurant. But blowing your nose at the table is considered rude, even thought it's running because of all those hot peppers you just ate! I guess the smart thing to do is always to keep an eye on those around you and act accordingly.

Week #40 Venetian

2010-06-22T22:51:00.001-07:00

At play in a Venetian mask maker's shop...

The Republic of Venice was its own sovereign entity for well over 1,000 years, during which it was THE gateway into Europe for spices and all manner of exotic foods from Asia. So this former city-state, along with the surrounding Veneto region, has a cuisine that certainly merits its own entry. In addition to all those ingredients that flowed in by the shipload, Venice also has strong culinary influences from eastern Europe, particularly Austria and the western Balkans.

Himself and I treated ourselves to a feast at Tre Venezie in Pasadena, a lovely restaurant that is owned and operated by a Venetian chef who is passionate about the cuisine of his homeland. We did a lot of sharing so that we could sample an array of dishes, beginning with an antipasto of seafood and polenta.

The pesce in saor to the left is branzino, served in a lightly sweet and slightly sour sauce. It's not as stout as ceviche, which is marinated in an acid (usually citrus), but the idea is the same--to preserve the fish. In this case the fish is cooked and served cold in a sweetened wine and vinegar reduction. The polenta ovals on the right are topped with baccala mantecato, mousse made of cod (yes yes, I remember that line about whipped fish in an early and very funny episode of Friends!). This solidly Venetian dish includes ingredients like currants and pine nuts that arrived on merchant ships from the Middle East.

Then we shared a couple of primi. The first, cjalsons, is a special dumpling that, depending on the season and what's available, could contain absolutely anything. Traditionally reserved for special occasions, it's an ancient dish from Carnia, a mountain village north of Venice. I must say having cjalsons WAS the special occasion! These delicate little pasta pouches contain ricotta, figs, chocolate and cinnamon, and are more of a dessert than a savory. Rich and enchanting and distractingly good. We were tempted to cancel the rest of our order and beg for a couple more plates of cjalsons.

The next primo was blecs al tacelenghe, that is noodles with beef cheeks braised in tazzelenghe wine, which we also ordered to go with the meal. Blecs are irregularly shaped noodles. These are made of barley, so they have some heft and texture to them. This dish and the wine are both native to the Veneto and also to Friuli and Giulia. In fact, the word "blec" is Slovenian for "piece of cloth," Slovenia being the nextdoor neighbor. The word "tazzelenghe" is Italian for "tongue cutting," on account of the wine's high level of acidity and tannins, but it's really not that strident. It was an excellent foil to the richness of the braise.

Then we shared a secondo of merluzzo nero, that is, black cod poached in a cappuccina sauce of onions, raisins, pine nuts and anchovies. While this is a traditional recipe from the Veneto and Trentino, which lies to the northwest of Venice, the cod is sitting on a bed of new potatoes, reminding us once again of all the directions those ships came from returning with new and wondrous foods (both potatoes and corn came from South America).

Showing the Austrian influence, our dessert was a strudel made with apples and pears, and seated in a pool of plum brandy from Bosnia Herzegovina, Venice's neighbor on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. I'm always impressed with strudel, since I know what's involved in making it. It took a dozen of us in culinary school to stretch that dough nice and thin across two work tables pushed together, and then to fill it and roll it. This was the best strudel I've had yet, with the brandy playing a nice supporting role and not overpowering the fruit. And it certainly looked neater than our student efforts!

Back at home I decided to make one of the region's signature dishes, risi e bisi, that is, risotto with peas. This part of Italy doesn't see as much pasta as you find elsewhere throughout the country. The region is low lying and amenable to rice production, so the preferred starch is risotto (and also corn, in the form of polenta). That's Parmigiano-Reggiano grated over the top. As the name attests, this cheese comes from Parma, just southwest of Venice. Other aged grating cheeses in Italy are called grana. While you may use canned green peas to make this dish, try to get your hands on some fresh ones. They make it so much better. (The recipe is at the bottom of this entry.)

If you've ever made risotto you'll notice that the method for making this dish differs slightly--while risotto is made by stirring the rice into hot butter (or olive oil or a combination of both) and then gradually stirring in the hot broth, with risi e bisi you add the rice to hot broth. If the final product is slightly soupy that's just fine, too, and very Venetian.

The classic dessert of Venice is tiramisu. While I've made it dozens of times, I'm including a photo not of my own, but rather one under construction during a stay in the Veneto, because of the intensity of the custard's color. This rich gold is in stark contrast to the pale yellow that you usually find in tiramisu made in the United States, where most eggs are mass produced and their tiny creators not provided with a suitably rich diet. These were absolutely stunning, and they made this dish truly eye popping (and tongue popping? Does that even make sense?!)

Here's Himself laying into those Italian egg yolks--you can get a little glimpse of what a brilliant orange they are.

All this talk of Venice is making me want to dust off one of my fav movies ever, one set in Venice, Pane i Tulipani, that is, Bread and Tulips. Time to pour myself a glass of wine and crank up the DVR to again watch Rosalba run away to Venezia. Arrivederci!

Risi e bisi (Risotto with Peas)
Yields about 4 to 6 servings

2 oz. pancetta, minced (or an equivalent amount of thick-sliced bacon)
1 lb. young, fresh peas (or frozen & thawed if they're not in season)
leaves of one bunch of fresh Italian parsley (that's the flat-leafed variety; it tastes better than the curly kind), chopped (I toss the stems into the hot stock for some extra flavor--just don't stir them into the rice.)
1 1/4 cups grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (if you opt for pecorino, scale back on the salt)
1 1/2 cups Arborio or another short-grain rice
3 Tbsp. unsalted butter
About 4 cups of hot beef stock or broth (keep it on stove top on very low heat)
1 onion, small dice
salt & freshly ground black pepper

Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a large sauce pan over medium heat and sauté the bacon, onion and parsley until the onion is translucent. Add the peas and stir until they're combined with the other ingredients. Add a cup of the hot stock, increase the heat to medium high and bring to a boil, stirring. Add two more cups of hot stock, bring to a boil and then stir in the rice. Reduce the heat and cook, stirring frequently until the rice is al dente (with just a slight resistance to the tooth, NOT chewy!). Add more stock if you need to.

Remove from the heat and stir in the last tablespoon of butter and a cup of the grated cheese. Use the rest of the cheese to garnish. Enjoy with a medium dry white wine.

Week #39 Moroccan

2010-06-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

One of the many reasons I would love to visit Morocco is to venture into a souq and see first hand the mountains of spices, to smell their heady aromas and luxuriate in the exotic atmosphere that my-oh-my certainly does look appealing on all those travel shows. It's just a step across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, so trekking to Morocco would certainly be doable next time Himself and I hightail it to the Continent.

For a preview of what we might expect to find on the table, our friends Pat and Aaron invited us to dinner at Sassi in Encino for a meal that was not only Moroccan but kosher as well. As is our custom, we ordered several items and ate family style. Their young daughter, Gabriella was game for it the adventure, a real trooper. No kid chow for THIS intrepid gal! That made the evening even better--who knew eight-year-olds like mushrooms?!

Morocco may be in North Africa, but its cuisine contains a hefty blend of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences. If you know those cuisines, there will be a familiarity as you delve into your meal, just with a heavy dose of spices.

We started with a platter of fried kuba, little semolina footballs filled with ground beef; pastels, triangular filo pockets filled with potato; falafel, fried balls of ground garbanzo beans; and Moroccan cigars, which I'd liken to a filo "stogie" filled with ground beef. And a dish of hummus to dredge them all through. You really have to approach these babies with caution, because they're so dense and filling you could easily stuff yourself before the entrées arrive. And they're so good that it's difficult to stop with just one of each. Why does fried food have to be so ridiculously satisfying?

The myriad little dishes of salads on the table reminded me of our Israeli meal. We had carrot salad and red and green cabbage salads. The fresh crispness of the salads with their lemony essence helped balance those heavy fried goodies we'd just gobbled up. The flat bread, khobz, is thicker and more substantial than other pita-type bread I've had before. It was a good all-purpose tool for dipping, dredging and sandwich building.

We also got an Israeli salad of cucumbers and tomatoes and an entire bowl of olives. These Moroccan olives are cooked in a peppery red sauce and served warm, which cuts their brininess and enhances their flavor. Oh yes, that's a whole baked chicken in the background, a tasty little guy smothered in mushrooms and love.

Variety was the order of the evening, as we opted to have some fish and lamb to go with our roasted chicken and all the rest (I wonder how you say "fixins" in Moroccan?). The super-fresh salmon is cooked in a spicy, garlicky tomato sauce. I could have forgone the rest of the meal to mop up all that pleasantly warm and happy sauce with the khobz.

The roasted lamb was served with a rice and lentil combo called majadra, making it a sort of North African pilaf. You'll have to forgive me, but at this point my full tum and empty brain conspired to make me forget exactly how this lamb tasted--besides good. I plan to return just for the lamb. Oh yeah, and all the rest as well...

A day or two later, once I'd emerged from the food coma, I was inspired to dust off the tagine Himself had given me for Christmas, and to use those lovely brined lemons that came with it. I made a chicken and olive tagine and served it with couscous, a semolina-based alternative to rice. Just as the first order of business with Cajun and Creole cooking is to make a roux, with Moroccan you start by making ras el hanout, a mélange of spices that can be as varied as the tastes and personalities of those who prepare it. However, it is usually some combination of spices including cinnamon, cardamom, clove, coriander, black pepper, cumin and turmeric. With the spices, olives, onions and brined lemons, not to mention the sweet currants and rich pine nuts in the couscous, this plate of food had an awful lot going for it. It came nearer than any dish I've ever had to satisfying the Thai requirement for sweet, salty, sour, bitter and hot in a single dish. Sublime!

One of the secret weapons of Moroccan cooking is brined lemon, which is pure salty, pickled magic. It's made by slitting and stuffing fresh lemons with salt and stashing them in a jar of brine and lemon juice for a few months, which makes them self-pickling. Do this and you elevate those lemons to new heights of culinary usefulness. What the process does is to intensify the lemon quality--not the tartness, as you might expect, but the sheer lemony flavor. It ferments, sort of like kimchi, so a richness develops that makes them a great flavoring agent. If you don't want all that salt, just wash it off.

To accompany the tagine I made a Moroccan orange salad, one of the easiest and yummiest things you can make, and great anytime, regardless of the menu. The genius of this salad is that it's quick, healthy and versatile.

Moroccan Orange Salad

Peel and segment two oranges and place them in a bowl. Remove the pits from four dates, cut them into eighths long ways and add them to the bowl. If you'd like, toss in a few oil-cured olives. Sprinkle over some ras-el hanout, about a half teaspoon, or if you don't have any, use an assortment of any spices that makes you happy--cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and/or my personal favorite, cardamom. Drizzle on a bit of good olive oil and toss. Top it with some chopped fresh mint. That's all there is to it. If you have a few minutes, let it sit on the counter so the flavors have time to cozy up to each other.

This will serve two people, and the recipe is easy to expand to feed more. I find that once I've had this salad with a meal, I don't go looking for dessert.

This weekend: Eat My Blog!

2010-06-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

If you live within the sound of my typing, please help us raise money to feed the hungry of Los Angeles by coming to the second Eat My Blog Bakesale.

Last fall, some two dozen bloggers baked up our best gourmet goodies and raised $3,000 for the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. We're at it again on Saturday, June 19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We'll be on the patio at Tender Greens at 8759 Santa Monia Blvd. in West Hollywood. 70+ bakers will be serving up more than 2,000 treats to sate your sweet tooth and do a good deed.

All items are priced between $1 and $4, so this is not a budget smasher. Thanks to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for donating beverages to help wash it all down.

What will you find there? I feel guilty just trying to pick out a few of the many wonderful treats my compadres are bringing. I'm making my usual, bacon walnut maple fudge, and also madelines, both lemon/lavender and chocolate spice. Others are bringing goodies including

mini flourless almond cakes with mascarpone & fresh fruit

coconut clouds

Egyptian basbousa cake

whoopie cakes

jelly candies, both strawberry mint and melon sage

triple-ginger meringues

assorted truffles and chocolates

strawberry rhubarb jam

che xoi nuac: mochi dumplings in ginger sauce

Bolivian sweet & salty empanadas

cream puffs

candied nuts

chocolate Guinness cupcakes with bacon-cream cheese frosting

red velvet cakes (if this won't get you there, nothing will!)

And remember, this is jut a very brief sampling.

Please, please, PLEASE come out and indulge yourself in the name of a worthwhile cause. Think about this: The Los Angeles Regional Foodbank says that every dollar it receives can actually supply $5 of food for the hungry. That means our last donation of $3,000 provided $15,000 worth of food! Imagine how much more we can give if everyone comes out for some goodies! Not to mention that the more people who buy our treats, the more we can spread those calories around, which means less time at the gym... (hey, ya gotta work those angles, right?!)

For more information visit http://eatmyblogla.wordpress.com/. You can also find us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/gastronomyblog#!/event.php?eid=121789961170815&ref=mf.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some baking to do.

Thanks, and bon appetit!

Week #38 Haitian

2010-05-31T13:31:00.000-07:00

The only thing most people hear about Haiti these days has to do with the recent earthquake. But this country's food is kinfolk of Southern American cuisine, most notably that of New Orleans. It's Creole, a blend of Caribbean with French, Spanish and African influences.

TiGeorge's in Echo Park is a mainstay of the neighborhood, and its offerings are as authentic as Haitian food can get. Himself and I went with a group from the Culinary Historians of Southern California for a good meal and a full measure of TiGeorge's hospitality. TiGeorge is an affable fellow who is proud of his country, his culture and his food, and it was a treat not only to eat there, but to talk to him and learn about his homeland and its cuisine.

I had a plate lunch that featured cabrit fricasee, or goat meat; Himself had the same basic plate lunch, but with chicken. The goat was wonderfully tender from its long, slow braise with green peppers, onions and an assortment of spices. Alongside were pikliz, a spicy, vinegary coleslaw, some battered and fried plantains and beans and rice, the national dish of Haiti. (More about the beans and rice later...)

Ti malis (named for a trickster voodoo spirit!) is a sauce of peppers, onion and garlic that packs some serious heat--although not enough to interfere with the flavor of the food. It was good on everything, with a citrus tang that helped tame the goat.

Normally I wouldn't bother including a photo of a cup of coffee, but this is a special case. The cup says Haitian brewed, but it's produced in Haiti as well. TiGeorge's family grows it on their plantation, and he roasts and sells it in his restaurant. In fact, the smell of coffee roasting in the giant roaster in the front room vies with the aroma of the great eats for your attention when you walk in. It makes a really good cuppa to finish. We carried a couple of pounds of freshly roasted coffee beans home, which TiGeorge packed especially for us.

Since beans and rice is pretty much the national dish of Haiti, this combo was a must to reproduce. Mine wasn't as good as TiGeorge's, but it was still really tasty. After soaking and cooking the beans, you then cook the rice in the bean pot, so the flavor from the juices cooks into the rice. The chicken is packed with flavor and is honey-sweet, spicy and citrusy.

This dessert pain patate, or sweet potato bread, is about the most un-sexy thing I've ever seen, but it tastes good enough to make up for its looks. It certainly would have photographed better with a little whipped cream, but since the recipe calls for butter, eggs and three types of milk--whole, evaporated and coconut--I finally had to put my foot down. But mostly what you taste is sweet potato, banana, raisins and an assortment of spices and flavorings. There's not a speck of flour in it, so its name is a misnomer. Regardless, I didn't think it was going to make it to dessert time--I thought we'd eat it all fresh and hot from the pan before the chicken came out of the oven.

After the most recent earthquake in January, TiGeorge's held several fund raisers and sent home money to help rebuild the country. But one night in February a fire broke out, and the restaurant had to close for repairs. It has been closed for several months now, but as soon as it reopens, we plan to return to support earthquake relief and enjoy more Creole cuisine, Caribbean style.

Separate Tables at the Fennel Blossom Cafe

2010-05-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

While checking over the fennel today I noticed two little customers perched close to each other, a honeybee and a ladybug.

I know what the bee is up to--snagging some nectar for the honey making chores. But what about the ladybug? Do insects ever hang out just for the beauty of a particular place and for the sheer enjoyment of being there? Was the ladybug indulging in a little aromatherapy? We once noticed our cat Prima snoozing face down in the rosemary, so I suppose it's possible.

Since I planted the fennel it's grown quite large, well over six feet high. But I haven't harvested much of the actual bulb yet. Strange, since I love fennel. It makes the best summer salad, thinly shaved into a bowl with equally thinly sliced red onion and tossed in a light vinaigrette. Chopped and stirred into a pot of pasta sauce, fresh fennel bulb makes it decidedly richer.

No, I've been too busy enjoying the rest of the plant, snipping the fronds to go into salads and for garnish. And harvesting the seed, which tastes so very fine. I was amazed the first time I brought in some of the seed and used it to cook. We all know that spices in the grocery have been sitting around for who-knows-how-long?, and that they usually aren't the best for the job. But the intensity of those fennel seeds was a wonder. I toasted some in a dry pan, ground them and tossed them into some vegetable beef soup, along with some of the fresh fennel. I could have charged myself for dinner that night! It was fine!

In just a few weeks those dainty little flowers will give way to a new batch of seed...

...which will doll up dishes both sweet and savory. These same seeds that give cookies personality will add richness to sausage. And appeal to tastes as different as those I envision of the honeybee and the ladybug.

Week #37 Peruvian

2010-05-24T00:20:00.000-07:00

Peru will not let me off easily. With its Pacific coastline and geography that includes rain forests, mountains and parched plains, not to mention an array of ethnic influences, Peruvian cuisine is no easier to define and categorize in the space of a single blog entry than any other country's has been.

Himself and I convened with a group of friends at Puro Sabor in Van Nuys to try the eats of this land on the Pacific coast of South America. We ordered a number of dishes and passed it all around the table, making for a fun and tasty but discombobulated event. As is the risk of gathering with friends for such enterprises, we were so busy talking that we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to what we were eating. So Himself and I made a return visit a few days later, during which we sampled more dishes and completely fell in love with Peruvian food.

The most apparent thing I noticed is that ceviche is the national dish of Peru, and they serve it there with camote, or sweet potato. I couldn't wrap my mind around that one, but as soon as I tried a bite of ceviche and sweet potato together, I was hooked. It's sweet-n-sour bliss. Most ceviche is cut into tiny cubes, so that it "cooks" in the acid more quickly. But this fish was cut into bite-sized pieces. I'm happy to report that it was super-fresh and cooked adequately, without being so heavily acidic as to make my mouth raw. It was served with an array of accoutrements, including onions, corn on the cob and boiled potato. And take a look at those loose corn kernels. Our server explained that they had been dried in the sun and then toasted in the oven. Their crunch was a nice foil for the smooth texture of the fish and potato.

You might not be able to see it well, but along the bottom edge of the photo, you can just make out the juice on the dish that is produced by the ceviche combination. In Peru they call it leche de tigre, or tiger's milk. Hot, salty, sweet, sour and attitudinous. Makes sense! On our return visit, Himself and I shared an order of ceviche de mariscos, which was loaded with shrimp, squid and octopus. This is the perfect way to prepare seafood that so easily overcooks. With calamari in particular, it's easy to end up with a plate of thick and chewy rubber bands. But that didn't happen--it was delicate and wonderful.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. For an appetizer, Himself ordered a papa rellena, a deep-fried ball of mashed potato stuffed with ground beef, raisins and olives. This may sound like a strange combination, but I recognize it as a culinary touch brought to the New World by Spanish explorers. Old California-style cuisine includes raisins and olives in the enchiladas. It's a great combo, believe it or not!

I began with a pork tamale, which I've had dozens of times, but this one was the best yet. It was made with just a hint of saffron mixed into the masa--another of those Spanish contributions. It was incredibly good. On the return visit we had the chicken tamale, which was equally pleasing.

Ocopa is so popular we had to wait until the return visit to score some. It is sliced boiled potato blanketed in a sauce made of peanuts, aji chilis and huacatay, a South American herb that's known by a variety of names including tagetes minuta, black mint, Mexican marigold and assorted other names including "Stinking Roger!" There's nothing stinky about it. It may look a little like wallpaper paste, but don't let that put you off--it's lightly sweet, lightly salty and altogether good. Since huacatay is difficult to find in North America, you can approximate its flavor with equal parts of basil, mint and cilantro.

Himself got bisteck a lo macho, that is, a thin steak topped with shrimp, octopus and squid. The idea is to get a little seafood and red meat in each bite. This is a sensible way to do the old surf-n-turf combo, since the steak is thin and lean, and the seafood isn't breaded and deep-fried. You get a lot of flavor without the heaviness.

Carapulcra is a stew of pork and dried potatoes, with peanuts, cinnamon and cloves. The addition of those spices shows that the Spaniards who visited brought with them ingredients they received from the Moors who settled in Spain and Portugal. The name translates as "the stew of hot stones," which comes from the appearance of the potatoes--they look like rocks after they've dried and broken apart.

Ralph just had to be different and order pasta, which turns out to be authentic, too. Italian influences are strong in Peru, as are Chinese and various African. This plate of linguini and shrimp is sautéed simply with tomato and onion and called tallarin saltado de camaron.

Chicha morada is a grapey-looking beverage made from a purple variety of corn that is used only for this purpose--it isn't eaten. Our server said that most places buy it premade, but they make their own here, and it's a labor-intensive job. They boil the dried purple corn for four hours and mix the extract with an assortment of juices, plus cinnamon and cloves. Served without ice, you get a slightly velvety texture that becomes watered down when it's served with ice. So if you find it on the menu, be sure to order it sin hielo, por favor.

Uncooked quinoa: It's tiny and doesn't look like it would amount to much, but it holds a surprise.

The next day I still had Peruvian food on the brain and wanted to make something, so I stirred up a pot of quinoa vegetable soup. For two servings, you put a little vegetable oil into a pot and sauté a carrot, a stalk of celery, half a green bell pepper and some onion, all finely diced, add in two ounces of dry quinoa and a couple of cloves of garlic minced, and continue to cook until you can smell the garlic. Then add a pint of water, two diced tomatoes, and a healthy handful of chopped green cabbage. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for ten minutes. Season to your liking with salt and black pepper. I was amazed by what happened in that short space of time. The quinoa unfurled and gave the soup some heft, and the veggies made a nice broth.

See all those tiny O's in there? That's the quinoa.

Himself and I had a bowl of this soup with a piece of garlic bread for dinner. We expected to be hungry by bedtime, but we weren't. And we weren't feeling ravenous when we got up the next morning.

In that tinker-with-it way I have--and that people migrating from place to place have of taking a new food and injecting something familiar--I'm tempted next time I make this soup to toss in a handful of beans or some chicken or beef. And to give it a hearty dash of Tabasco Sauce.

One of the beauties of foods is that it's open to endless interpretation and creativity. As long as we play with our food, how can we ever be bored?

Week #36 Anatolian/Turkish

2010-05-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

Himself and I have grown a bit weary of restaurants lately, so we decided to explore Turkish cuisine with a trip to the Anatolian Festival, which is held each spring in Orange County. It presented the perfect opportunity to immerse ourselves in the culture and enjoy not only the food but the dance, music, art and history of Turkey.

One striking feature of the festival was its inclusion of models of parts of several major cities, including Istanbul. Wandering through what looked rather like movie sets gave us a feel for what it's like to be there. Not as exciting as actually being in Turkey, but more helpful than simply looking at pictures in a book.

Himself's not really in Topkapi Palace, but it sort of looks like he is!

Our pal Charles Perry, who knows enough about Turkish food to write books on it (and he does), urged us to sample the ice cream first, before it sold out. Good advice--the dondurma stand had a line all day long. Dondurma is a curious stretchy ice cream that doesn't change shape when it melts. What gives it this texture and property is the addition of flour made from the orchid plant and mastic, a resin that causes it to hold its shape, regardless of temperature. He said that Baskin Robbins once tried to move into the Turkish market but failed, because the Turks found it odd and undesirable that American-style ice cream didn't hold its shape when it melted. I guess it all depends on what you're accustomed to, eh?

You can't really get the full effect of the ice cream's stretchiness in this photo. Unfortunately, the guy who mans the paddle and does the stretching was suffering a bit of carpal tunnel from all the hard work it takes to stir and pull the ice cream. I'd be surprised if anyone preparing food at this festival managed to make it through the weekend without some repetitive motion aches and pains--most of the food requires a lot of rolling, pulling and manipulation to make.

It was amazing to watch the women who rolled out the super-thin dough for the pastries called gözleme. It was a windy day, and they were rolling the dough so thinly that it billowed in the breeze like a hanky--but never tore! I wonder how many thousands of pieces of dough they rolled. I'm sure they were still rolling it in their sleep that night.

When it came to the gözleme, the woman in line in front of me advised me that the line and the wait were worth it, and that I should take whatever was finished first, regardless of the filling. This way it would be fresh and hot and I wouldn't miss out. Everything's good, she assured me.

She was right. Our gözleme was a pan-fried filo dough--thin but resilient--containing spinach and cheese. In back is the roll, sigara böregi (shaped like a cigar!) filled with feta cheese and green onions. Both were fresh and really tasty.

While a variety of fresh fruit juices flowed from a recreation of the Fountain of Ahmed III, I opted for the yogurt drink called ayran. I'm always amazed by how refreshing this stuff is. Tangy and slightly salty, it helps tame spicy food and is especially good on a hot day.

Cig köfte is raw ground beef hand squeezed with bulgur wheat, hot pepper and onion, rolled in a lettuce leaf and sprinkled with lemon juice. This is some great walking-around food and a nice change of pace from the breaded and fried foods. I wouldn't eat just any raw ground beef, mind you, but when it's prepared by someone who grinds his own and knows what to do with it, then I figure it's okay.

So we've eaten baklava dozens of times, but I have to include it, because according to Charlie, Turkey is the land that actually gave us baklava, so this country has the bragging rights. And he explained that good, well-made baklava should go "kshkkk!" when you bite into it, as each layer breaks cleanly between the teeth. If it's mushy, dense and overly syrupy, well, it's just not good baklava. Every one of these layers went "kshkkk!" when we bit into them, just like they were supposed to. It was simultaneously rich and light. How DO that do that?!

I stopped by a market in the bazaar stalls and picked up a box of Turkish delight to carry home. This comes from an Istanbul sweet shop called Haci Bekir. Recently I was looking through a touring booklet of the city from 1919, back when it was still called Constantinople, and Haci Bekir was one of the advertisers. I discovered that this shop has been in existence since 1777, and that in fact, these are the people who invented what became known as Turkish delight. I've had it quite often over the years, and while I like it, it's usually cloyingly sweet. But this was not--in fact, it's the best Turkish delight I've ever had, filled with pistachios and coated with a slightly grainy powdered sugar. By the way, it was called lokum until the 1800s, an Englishman with an appreciative sweet tooth began shipping it home in bulk under the label "Turkish delight."

We didn't stay long enough to see the whirling dervishes, but I have seen them before, and I find their meditative spinning positively mesmerizing. Maybe next year...

"Civilization Road," the path connecting the ticket booth to the entrance of the festival grounds was itself worth the price of admission. We strolled through a series of gateways representing the major eras in the development of Turkey and were greeted by people dressed in the clothing of each era, including the Ottomans, the Hittites, the Phrygians, the Byzantines and all the rest. I may have to start dressing like this. With a hat as tall as these I'm sure to be admitted to all the rides at Disneyland!

Some parting words...

If you'd like to get a glimpse of the festival, check it out at http://www.anatolianfestival.org/festival-2010.html and watch the introductory video.

Week #35 Russian

2010-05-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

In my search for international cuisines around Los Angeles, I look for mom-n-pop style restaurants, where I know I'll find authenticity and warmth. But as I focus my spotlight on Russian cuisine, I've made an interesting discovery: the mom-n-pops are difficult to find. In fact, it was explained to me that Russians tend to eat at home and that dining out is reserved for special occasions. And for a special occasion, you can expect to drop some major bucks.

Finally I discovered Kalinka, a Russian teahouse in Encino, that serves breakfast and lunch as well as dinner. Affordably. I also wanted to step back from the Armenian influence and focus more on those regions further north. Kalinka fit the bill on this score as well, so I popped in for lunch.

I started with Olivye Salad, a tremendously popular Russian-style potato salad that includes green peas, green beans, onions, pickles, hard-boiled eggs and sour cream. This refined version of potato salad was created by a chef by the name of Olivier who jealously guarded his secret recipe, even taking it to the grave with him. However, it seems enough people nosed around the kitchen while he was making it that it has been endlessly analyzed, copied and tweaked over the years. The dainty macédoine cut gives it a more refined look than your average potato salad filled with chunks of this and that in varying sizes. In fact, eating it made me want to drink something in a stemmed glass.

The beverage of the day was Kvas, which is sort of a near-beer kind of thing that doesn't belong in stemware. It tastes like a partially flat beer with almost no alcohol, about one percent. It is made through a fermentation process involving rye bread, and in addition to being a beverage, kvas is often used for cooking. I didn't care for it much, but I'm betting it's one of those things that if you drank it often, you'd develop a taste for it. And it's easy enough to make at home, so you can tweak it to suit your individual taste.

My entrée was blinchiki, a crepe that's filled with cooked ground meat (mine was chicken) and then fried. It was good, in a hearty, basic sort of way, but I wish I'd noticed that for a couple of dollars more I could have gotten it with sour cream and red caviar. The further you move from the equator, the more mildly your food is seasoned. I know this, but still I yearn for something zingier or at least a little more complex.

Since dining at home is the norm, I figured I'd best do the same. I crossed Ventura Boulevard and checked out Rasputin Market to see what I could discover. Hearty breads, meats and lots of pickled herring--lots of pickled everything, in fact.

I picked up a package of frozen pelmeni filled with potato and onion. They cook up just like any dumpling from any other country, whether it's freshly or frozen--boil and then sauté in butter. I've seen pelmeni referred to as Siberian ravioli, but this truly is one of those foods that you can find almost anywhere on the planet. Only the fillings and sauces change.

Deviled eggs seem to be popular throughout Russia, for I found several different regional recipes for them. Jajka Minsky, or Minsk-style eggs, are popular at Christmas and Easter in particular. Cream the yolks together with butter, mayo and heavy cream, and mix in chopped dill and parsley, along with paprika, salt and pepper--and some finely chopped egg whites, which I pressed through a mesh strainer for a super-fine texture. I piped them into the egg white halves, then topped them with a mixture of bread crumbs and grated Gruyere and an X of anchovies sliced long ways. They go into the oven for a few minutes, just to warm them up and toast the tops. Sheer decadence!

All of the "borscht belt" references I've heard over the years made me assume that borscht was strictly a kosher item. But then I found a Ukrainian borscht recipe that calls for pork sausage... porcht? I made an enormous pot of it and froze the bulk in pint-sized containers. It's really fine stuff, rich and flavorful:

Crumble a pound of sausage into a large skillet and cook, stirring until the pink is gone. Drain, blot and set aside. Bring two quarts of water to a boil in a really large pot (you'll be adding in a lot of food, and you'll need to be able to stir it), add four peeled and shredded beets and cook for about 20 minutes. Then add three peeled and shredded carrots and three medium baking potatoes, peeled and small diced, and cook until the potatoes are tender. Core and chop half a head of cabbage and add that in, along with an 8-oz. can of diced tomatoes, juice and all. While the pot regains its heat and starts to simmer again, put a tablespoon of vegetable oil into a medium skillet and sauté one medium onion, diced, until tender. Stir in a 6-oz. can of tomato paste and about a cup of water with the onion and mix well. Add this mixture to the pot, along with three minced cloves of garlic, and kill the heat. Let the pot stand for about five minutes--the ambient heat will cook the garlic. Add salt and black pepper to taste, and serve it up with a dollop of sour cream.

What would a Russian entry be without mentioning vodka? I found a recipe for honey vodka, which is popular in the Baltic States, particularly in Lithuania. It's akin to mead, except that it's far stronger than any honeyed wine, with more flavorings--this version has vanilla bean, nutmeg, lemon peel, cinnamon, cloves and honey. I've never been able to endure a medicinal hot toddy--and I've always preferred gin to vodka--but this I can certainly sip and enjoy. And after a hearty Russian meal, this makes a good combination dessert and digestiv. Or maybe one glass for dessert and another for digestiv.

And then we sleep!

Week #34 Dim Sum

2010-05-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

I'm convinced that "dim sum" is Chinese for "mealtime free-for-all." It would certainly seem that way, at least if you do it right. To have dim sum by yourself would be about as pointless as watching Rocky Horror Picture Show at home all alone. Some things are just made to be enjoyed in a group, and dim sum is one of them. The more people at the table the more fun it is, even if you do end up in a chopstick duel over the last dumpling.

They're all goners...tasty, tasty goners...

Frankly, it's difficult to discuss dim sum as a cuisine like you would other cuisines, because its primary distinguishing characteristic is that it's essentially communal small-plate dining, Chinese style. Dim sum originated as a snack in the tea houses of southern China several centuries ago, but it has since evolved into a full blown meal that comprises cooking styles from across this vast country.

Himself and I were among a party a dozen strong that went to East Gourmet Seafood Restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley to indulge in one of those free-for-alls. Our friends Bob and Grace, who treated us to Chinese hot pot back in the winter, organized this food fest. While Grace is nowhere near grannydom yet, she's already in serious training. This is important, because what's crucial is to find the best dim sum possible for the least amount of money. If you've selected such a place you'll know by the sheer numbers of Chinese grannies you find there. If you don't spot any--particularly if you're there on a Sunday morning--do a rapid U-turn and keep looking. Grace's radar is especially attuned to good seafood, so we were in capable hands for this feast.

This dish, with its abundance of really good lobster and a tiny, tiny price tag, is the main reason she suggested this particular restaurant. But I pushed the lobster aside in favor of the noodles. They were freshly made and divine, flavored with everything that's sitting atop them--noodles bathed in the essence of all that lobster. (Well, okay, I had a couple of bites of lobster, and yes, it was fine stuff, too.)

The eggplant was stuffed with seafood and topped with black beans, peppers, onions and sesame seeds. It's difficult to tell, but there are four servings here. This was a strong contender for "Best Dish of the Meal," even in the face of unfair competition from an obscene amount of lobster.

And this is fried tofu stuffed with seafood. Are we noticing a theme here? Well, yes, it is a seafood restaurant. I've never had both seafood and tofu in the same bite, but it works, it really does.

This small plate looks pretty modest, with a bite of a half-dozen different things. But when you eat it all, and then more comes out and you eat that, and then more comes out and you eat that...you realize at some point that you shouldn't have had that last go-round. But it was all so gooood... By the way, that rather ghostly looking little pink dumpling to the right was filled with the fattest, juiciest shrimp I've ever had. And the pork bun in the foreground would have made a good dessert, with its sweet barbecue sauce. Note those sad little green beans nestled in there, trying to make up for everything else we were eating. They were no match for all that deep-fried, saucy goodness.

This photo doesn't adequately display the onslaught, for as soon as a steamer or plate was emptied, it was quickly whisked away. But you can tell that by this point, we were all starting to slow down and sink deeper into our seats.

Bringing order out of chaos: SOMEBODY'S gotta do it! (I did finally eat those green beans, by the way.)

"Dim sum" more or less translates as "touch the heart," which originally had to do with the business of having a light snack to tide you over. But I prefer to think of the heart touching aspect of sitting down to eat with a group, with the conviviality, abundance and happy confusion involved in spinning the lazy susan and trying to grab a bite of something before it goes whizzing past. Of gloating over having scored that final piece. And of sharing a bite of it with someone else who was after it, too.

By the end of the meal Himself and I were almost in a coma, thick of head and slow of gait. As we staggered toward our car, we agreed: Too much dim sum will make you dim and then some. But in a good way. ;)

Week #33 Brazilian

2010-04-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

I still have about four months to go with this project, but in a way I feel like I've about come full circle. The blog entry last August that prompted this 52 Cuisines project covered a Brazilian meal Himself and I had in Oxnard, where we'd gone to escape the wildfires for a day. It got me pondering the similarities of dishes, cooking methods and customs around the world; it launched an adventure that has taken me across the globe without leaving LA County (at least not for the purposes of this exercise); and it introduced me to cuisines and cultures I only thought I knew about.

The centerpiece of that meal was moqueca, a seafood stew popular along the country's coastline, one that reminded me of quite similar seafood stews from other parts of the world, including caldeirada, which is what the Portuguese call their moqueca. But there's a lot more to Brazilian food than the coastline, for Brazil is a huge country, the largest in South America--and the fifth largest on the planet. We ventured to Tropicalia Brazilian Grill in Los Feliz to discover what lies inland.

First we paused to tip our hats to the sea with an order of ceviche. This combo of white fish and shrimp was "cooked" in lemon and lime juices and tamed with a splash of oil. It came on a bed of tortilla chips with pico di gallo and "Brazilian guacamole." I asked our server what made it specifically Brazilian, since it tasted like plain ol' guac to me. She admitted that the only thing Brazilian about it was the name, adding that that was true of the Brazilian tiramisu as well. That was going to be my next question, so she saved me having to ask.

Oh well, time to move beyond surf to turf. I ordered Bife Tropicalia, a marinated and grilled steak, served with black beans, rice, plantains, farofa and salsa campanha, which appears to be a house special. The thin steak was flavorful and moist all on its own and even better with a shmear of cilantro sauce. To the left of the steak in the photo is farofa, which is popular in the region of Minas Gerais. It's a sort of coarsely ground, toasted yucca flour. You sprinkle it over and mix it into your food to give it a little crunch and a pleasantly toasty flavor. In fact, everything I stirred it into and sprinkled it over tasted better with it than without it. It was a nice surprise.

I'll have to rummage about in the international food markets around town and try to find some yucca flour to experiment with--it's also known as manioc and cassava--gotta keep that in mind while reading labels. Different cooks all have their own ways of preparing it, involving different spices and cooking it in either butter or bacon fat. I'm sure it will be good in dishes other that specifically Brazilian ones, too. This is going to be some tasty experimentation.

Himself got half a chicken, grilled, topped with tomato malagueta and cilantro sauce. His meal was also served with farofa. The malagueta chiles used in the sauce give it a medium-hot kick, so that you get a pleasant amount of heat while tasting the sauce itself. When there's so much heat in a sauce that it obscures the flavor, it reaches into the "what's the point?" range of hot on my own personal Scoville meter. This malagueta sauce was just right. (I'm sure Goldilocks would approve.)

The one dish I'd been reading about that is regarded as the essence of the Brazilian table, feijoada, is served here only on Thursdays and Fridays, so I'll have to return for it. It's Brazilian by the way of Portugal...or would that be Portuguese by way of Brazil? Anyway, it's a bean stew containing both pork and beef, and the Portuguese brought it with them when they settled here.

Since none of the desserts on the menu were specifically Brazilian, I decided to try my hand at making a more authentic sweet. I selected creme de abacate--avocado cream--because it's simple and tasty, and because it does something most North Americans don't think about doing with an avocado. I've had avocado shakes at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant back home in Memphis, so I know avocado works beautifully in sweet as well as salty applications.

Into a blender or small food processor place the flesh of one large avocado, a tablespoon of fresh lime juice and a tablespoon of sugar, and give 'em a whirl, until you have a smooth, sweet pudding. Adjust to taste, adding more lime juice or sugar--or both--as you like. Chill it well before eating--the citrus prevents it from oxidizing, so don't worry about it turning dark while it sits in the fridge. Next time I think I'll try topping it with a bit of crème fraîche to cut the richness.

As with every cuisine I've sampled in the past few months, I know I've not even scratched the surface of this one. Brazil's population isn't just the locals with a few Portuguese thrown in. Wave upon wave of immigrants have brought to the mix influences from places as disparate as Italy, Poland, Lebanon and Japan. It will be fun to explore how these varied cultures have influenced Brazilian cuisine.

Week #32 Japanese

2010-04-23T03:14:00.000-07:00

An izakaya is the Japanese version of a tapas/pub grub kind of place, where people gather after work for a drink and a bite--or perhaps just a drink or two or three. So explained our friends, Jeff and Marilyn. They spent two weeks in Japan on their honeymoon and developed quite a fondness for this style of eating and drinking, and they wanted to introduce Himself and me to their favorite izakaya, Musha in Torrance. Seeing as Torrance is home to the US headquarters of two of the largest Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda, we knew we were in for an authentic experience.

Small plate dining is great, because you get to sample a lot of dishes without the risk of getting stuck with an entrée you don't like, always a hazard of forging into new culinary territory. Most of my experience with Japanese cuisine has been in the realm of sushi and sashimi, so it was nice to try something different.

We started off with maguro yukke, a dish of tuna sashimi, so I began on familiar territory. Accompanying it were ribbons of nori and daikon radish, sliced green onions and a quail egg yolk for drizzling over it all. The rice cakes alongside were a high-end version of what we liken to styrofoam packing peanuts. These actually had flavor and a puffed rice texture that didn't remind me of styrofoam.

When I start a meal with some good sashimi, I'm hard pressed to want anything cooked. But I changed my tune when I saw the words "pork belly." Buta kakuni is pork belly with potato, boiled egg and a bit of broth. This is one of those occasions when I wish I'd been there by myself. I yearned to snatch the bowl and slurp down that rich, porky broth.

A total surprise to me was the takotama, an omelette, which turned out to be my favorite item of the night (and that's really saying something, considering there was pork belly on the table). I've never had an omelette like this one, with chopped octopus, seaweed, red ginger and Tokyo leek, and topped with a couple of sauces I'm sure they'll never divulge the recipes for. It's the kind of dish that can make you fake a celebrity sighting so you can snag an extra bite while everyone's distracted. "Don't look now, but I think that's Brad Pitt!" Gobble-gobble-gobble... (Hint: Always begin with the words, "Don't look now..." and everyone will do an immediate head spin, which will buy you a few seconds in which to pinch the good stuff.)

Then our server brought out a tiny tabletop grill, and we cooked our own gyu hire ponzu: beef tenderloin with chopped scallion, ginger and wasabi and a ponzu dipping sauce. Want it raw, rare or cremated? Cooking tabletop brings new meaning to that old Burger King jingle, "Have it your way..."

I wish the picture without the flash would reproduce better here--the charcoal glowed with the orange, purple, pink and gold of a sunset and looked really cool in the low lighting.

We were curious about the black sesame ice cream, which was technically sold out, so they brought us the final scoop of the evening, along with a scoop of vanilla. That was fine by me--I just wanted to know what black sesame ice cream was all about. It had a subdued flavor--I could only detect the musky black sesame essence on the back end as the ice cream warmed and slid down my throat.

Now, I'm back at home and would like to make something very basic, in the spirit of izakaya. I've decided on musubu, which reveals how simple and yet satisfying a Japanese dish can be. For the Japanese, rice is essentially sandwich bread, so when you tuck a piece of fish inside and give it a bit of seasoning, you have a Japanese sandwich.

Musubu is bite sized, so you can make as many or as few bites as you want. It requires only three ingredients: rice, raw or smoked fish and goma sio or powdered seaweed. Cook some sticky rice and let it cool. Make bite-sized balls of it and into each rice ball press a piece of sashimi or smoked fish--I used smoked salmon. Then roll the ball of fish and rice in a sprinkling of goma sio for flavoring. I didn't have any, but furikake is similar, so I used that instead. Furikake is a mixture of seaweed flakes, toasted sesame seed and salt, with a tiny bit of sugar, soy sauce and green tea powder. Furikake is one of those seasonings that seems to be as ubiquitous in the Japanese kitchen as ketchup is in American one, sort of an all-purpose food enhancer.

After Himself and I nibbled our musubu as an appetizer, we headed out to our favorite sushi place for dinner. The izakaya was great fun, but we were ready for our old haunt and a nice array of sashimi. Ah, comfort food, Japanese style...

Week #31 Salvadorian

2010-04-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

If any food in inextricably bound to El Salvador, it's the pupusa. My pal Marina expounded on how much she loves pupusas until I finally gave in and teamed up with her for a trip to Mis Raices Salvadorian in Reseda to indulge in what is essentially the country's national food. The restaurant's name alone sings authenticity--it's Spanish for "My Salvadorian Roots."

Pupusas are essentially stuffed corn tortillas, but describing them this way downplays their specialness, sort of like saying the Mona Lisa is a picture of an Italian woman. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The fillings are great all on their own, but they're insinuated into a package of corn flour dough that has great flavor and texture. They remind me a bit of the Colombian arepas, which are made of masa and some of which have fresh cheese inside.

Marina ordered a duo of pupusas, one containing finely chopped zucchini and the other, pork, cheese and bean--this is a classic pupusa called revueltas. The pork is called chicharon, which in El Salvador refers to pork that has been cooked and pulverized, rather like rillettes in French cuisine (in Mexico chicharone refers to fried pork skin). Quesillo, a soft cheese common throughout Central America, is the queso of choice. Revueltas has that ham-n-cheese thing going for it, but I just can't imagine anyone in the States putting beans on a sandwich. And that's a pity--if they're well seasoned and smashed, they'll both enhance a sandwich and help glue it together.

Contrarian that I am, I decided to try something different, something from the day's specials, the flor de izote, that is, yucca blossom. The flowers were scrambled into eggs and tomatoes and served with rice and some really good beans. Everything on our table was pure comfort food.

I dug out one of the flors de izote, to see what they look like. Not satisfied with this, Marina asked our server if we could see what these flowers looked like before they were incorporated into a dish.

She returned with a plate bearing a couple of the blossoms. The flors de izote on their own reminded us of the inner artichoke leaves that you don't have to fight with, delicate of both texture and flavor, and mildly tart and astringent.

We both ordered cebada, a drink that is similar to a pink horchata. While horchata typically is made of either rice or almonds, cebada is made from barley and flavored and colored with crushed seeds of some sort, although our server didn't know what they were--and I've been unable to find out. No matter--it's tasty stuff, with the richer texture that makes these grain-based beverages so nourishing.

A few days later, this blog entry still isn't posted--and I have pupusas on the brain. So I told Himself to meet me at Pupuseria Del Valle in Burbank. One glance at the name, and there's no question as to their specialty. Himself agreed that these things are highly addictive. To the amusement of our server (I think she also cooked our meal, too), we ordered one of each of the seven types of pupusas offered on the menu: cheese; bean; revueltas again; zucchini again, although they call it Italian squash here; jalapeno; beef chorizo and cheese with loroco, another delicate flower. I can't name a favorite--they were all quite good. As for sampling any other foods, we just couldn't. We wanted to, but we succumbed to the lure of pupusas.

What can I say? This gringo was using a fork. Salvadorans eat these--curtido included--with their fingers.

Pupusas traditionally are served with curtido, a spicy pickled cabbage and carrot slaw that reminds me a bit of kimchi, and what I hesitate to call tomato sauce, because it's nothing like what we Westerners think of as tomato sauce. The red bottle in the photo was filled with a thin sauce made of tomatoes and peppers. A healthy pinch of curtido and an equally healthy squirt of the tomato sauce on any pupusa elevates it beyond its usual snack-of-the-gods status.

Embarrassingly--and unhelpfully to this blog--we both om-nom-nommed with the abandon of stray cats at a fish market and realized after the fact that we'd not singled out the loroco to inspect, as I had the izote during the earlier meal. Loroco is a similar tiny white flower that grows in Central America and that's often tucked inside a pupusa. I promise to go back soon and order a couple of loroco pupusas and pay attention next time!

I want to explore the wealth of other dishes I know Salvadorian cuisine offers, but as with tacos, pupusas are so particular and so beloved that I think it only fair to give them their own blog entry. The rest can wait for another day. Unless I once again succumb to the pupusas.

Week #30 Filipino

2010-04-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

Encapsulate the cuisine of the Philippines in one brief blog entry? Fat chance! A nation spread over more than 7,000 islands and comprising the influences of countries both near and far--both friendly and conquering--is not so easily characterized. One look at the menu of Manila Sunset on Vermont Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard reveals some of the myriad influences on the Filipino palate: lumpia and chopsuey are Chinese; adobo, lechón and menudo are Spanish; and bistek Tagalog reveals a blend of Spanish and local cooking styles. The native cuisine itself offers up plenty of pork specialties, including dinguan, a stew made of the organs and blood of the pig.

Himself and I wandered in on a Saturday, when the place was hopping with people who all seemed to know each other. As more and more came in, there were hellos and hugs and the pushing together of tables. We were the only Anglos there, so we felt we'd hit upon a good place to have a Filipino lunch and enjoy the swirl of the community around us.

I'd never heard of milkfish until this meal, but apparently it's quite popular in the Philippines--and throughout Southeast Asia--and on account of its remarkably bony structure, having it served de-boned is a huge deal. What arrived at the table was half a milkfish, grilled and served in its skin which had the consistency of soft leather.

Half of a Milkfish

...the left half!

tasty, tasty milkiness...

Milkfish is milky appearance but not texture. Still, it was moist in spite of looking rather dry, as much white fish does. While it had a delicate flavor, it stood up well to the grilling, as the char enhanced rather than masked its flavor. In fact, it's some of the best fish I've ever had.

Pork is popular on Filipino menus and always a winner with me, so I got the pork skewers.

mmm, pig-on-a-stick...

Like the fish, the pork bore a respectable amount of char. It was caramelized by the influence of fire and a lightly sweet marinade. We made our way through the meal with bite of pork--bite of fish--bite of pork--bite of fish...

The egg drop soup was good, but nothing surprising. It was made with rice noodles and slivers of mushroom. Not to disparage it at all, but I'm always hesitant to fill up on hot soup when I can smell an amazing entrée heading my way!

Our dessert, bibingkang galapong, is a Filipino favorite that came to the islands by way of Goa on the west coast India. It's a somewhat custardy sort of cake made from rice flour, and it was actually jiggly! Baked and served in a banana leaf, it was topped with a fresh cheese that made the dessert interestingly salty and sweet. The freshly grated coconut on the side helped lighten its richness.

To drink we had (on the left) sago and gulaman, a sweet, syrupy palm-based beverage with soba balls and cubes of an agar agar-based gelatin, and (on the right) cantaloupe juice that was loaded with shreds of fresh melon. It was pretty sweet, so I'm betting there was some simple syrup in there, too. I get a kick out of both eating and drinking my beverage, so these were hits with me.

I'll certainly be back for more milkfish. I even want to try the dinguan (okay, so you don't have to). With a menu filled with options for both meat lovers and vegetarians, it looks like I have a lot left to explore.

It's Songkran: Happy Thai New Year!

2010-04-11T19:09:00.001-07:00

This is the season of Thai New Year, or Songkran, and Himself and I went to festivals both this weekend and last, to soak up the atmosphere and enjoy some really good walking around food. As I said in a blog entry after my recent trip to Thailand, the Thai are big on snacks, so going to a Songkran festival means lots of opportunities for incredibly good munching.

Meat on a stick is wildly popular, just like it is at your average American festival and fair. We got (left to right) shrimp balls, Thai sausage, squid balls and chicken. These treats don't sit around under heat lamps for hours, growing funky as they wait for someone to buy them. They're fresh and hot when you get them--which sometimes means a little wait. But it's fun talking with others in line and finding out what they're ordering and what their favorites are. The Thai sausage is my favorite--and the rate at which it sells out tells me it must be everyone else's favorite, too.

Papaya salad is tricky stuff. After you've had enough hot food you think, "Mmm, papaya salad. That ought to cool off my burning mouth." And if you think that, you're wrong! Papaya salad will make you cry for your mama. It's really good, crisp and refreshing--made from unripe papaya--but it can be punishingly hot. Considering how hot and muggy it gets in Thailand (think New Orleans in August), it's all about natural air conditioning--eat hot food, sweat and cool off. That wedge of cabbage to the upper right helps you cope with the salad's heat.

We sampled plenty of sweets, too. The deep yellow you see in everything is made of egg yolk, a component of many Thai desserts (don't tell your doctor!).

These tiny pancakes are filled with a paste made of pandan leaves, green tea and coconut, then rolled.

The longest line we saw was not for snacks or papaya salad--although, believe it or not, papaya salad has quite a devoted following--but for crates of mangoes. Those smaller, gold ones that we call champagne mangoes here in the States--and pay dearly for--are one of the basic varieties of mangoes in Thailand, and the one Thais seem to miss most, hence the long, patient line.

It wasn't all about the food, though. We stopped by and visited our friends at the Thai Tourism Authority and made the ritual observance, pouring water over the Buddha to bring good luck and prosperity in the coming year.

They presented us with wrist garlands called puang malai. I got really spoiled receiving these garlands while in Thailand. They're lovely and fresh and incredibly fragrant, made of rose buds, jasmine, gardenias and crown flowers. So nice to have in the car, in your hotel room or hanging from your wrist.

The incense wafting from the temple and from various altars scattered about the festival reminded me of those boat trips up and down the Chao Phraya River which runs through the middle of Bangkok. While the river is quite wide, so abundant was the incense being burned in temples on either side--and so numerous were the temples--that we could smell it all the way out in the middle!

The beauty pageant brought out some of the loveliest women I've ever seen. I'd certainly hate to be a judge at this pageant--what an impossible job! The variety of dress and adornment was as dazzling as the women themselves. (Notice the Latin food market in the background--and Thai Town interlaces with Little Armenia, too. LA truly is an international city.)

Every time we see these performers at Thai celebrations around Los Angeles, their routines and costumery are increasingly outrageous--but a lot of fun. Check out those huge boots beneath the pink flounces! Trippy, really trippy!

Even more peculiar to me was the Thai woman in street clothes who hopped up on stage and sang "In Them Ol' Cotton Fields Back Home." Having come from the cotton fields of the South (while not specifically from Louisiana, as the song relates), I experienced quite a disconnect hearing it performed in this setting.

One reason I wanted to go to this second festival was because I found out there would be vendors selling Thai plants, and I've wanted a kaffir lime tree for a really long time.

Himself got the honor of toting the tree to the car. He was just a wee bit perturbed that I chose that moment to stop him in front of the temple for a picture. What?! Why wouldn't he want to pose whilst holding a tree?! More on kaffir lime later. Himself cautions me against making these blog entries too long. I just get carried away...!

Week #29 Sri Lankan

2010-04-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) is that tiny teardrop of an island that falls into the Indian Ocean from the eastern tip of India. It is a land of spices and curries, so if you like your food bland, best select a different holiday destination!

Himself and I visited Priyani Ceylon Fusion Oriental Cafe, just a stone's throw from UC Northridge. Our Sri Lankan host was proud of his cuisine and his cooking, and after he waxed poetic about the menu's offerings, we asked him to bring us what he thought we should have. He seemed quite pleased with our deference.

First he brought us a plate of appetizers or "short eats," all containing a filling of fish that was boldly seasoned but well balanced. On the left are pattis, which look for all the world to me like empanadas. In the middle are Chinese rolls (if only the fish sticks in school had been so good!) and to the upper right are cutlets. All were pleasantly spicy even without the homemade hot sauce--which pleased our tongues and cleared our sinuses.

"lump rice"

"Lump rice" isn't a very sexy name for a dish, but don't let that put you off. It's essentially an entire meal bundled up and cooked in a single banana leaf. Himself gently opened that steaming leaf to find eggplant curry, roast chicken, green banana curry, onion sambal and basmati rice nestled inside. I managed to swipe a few bites, but Himself guarded his meal jealously. I'll just have to go back and get my own next time. Everything in the leaf was tasty, but most surprising was the green banana curry. The dense, starchy consistency of the cubes of unripe banana had us puzzling for a few minutes. What kind of tuber is this? Or is it yucca? We finally went back to the menu and realized that the texture was so different from that of either ripe bananas and cooked plantains that we hadn't recognized it as banana. It's always puzzling when you encounter a familiar food that you can't recognize because of difference in culinary context.

Biryani

My biryani was made of basmati rice and loaded with cashews, raisins, currants and an array of spices. Buried inside this mound of rice were several pieces of roast chicken. (To my eyes it looks more like what I'd call "lump rice" than Andy's "leaf rice!") The biryani was topped with a roasted egg and served with a dense sweet eggplant curry on the side.

"roasted egg"

It seems a little odd for a dish to show up with a twice-cooked egg perched on top (boiled and then roasted), but I'm finding that this is actually a common accompaniment for biryani. I'm also discovering recipes that call for deep-frying boiled eggs and making a curry of them.

Watalappam

For dessert we shared a dish of watalappam, a custard flavored with an array of spices and a type of unrefined brown sugar called jaggery. It has a darker, more sophisticated taste from the jaggery and spices and plenty of richness from the eggs, cashews and coconut milk, so sharing a piece was smart.

Both entrees and the dessert are Muslim in origin, which might seem curious, considering that Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist and minority Hindu. But the history of civilization is the history of food, of food and food preparation methods being carried by immigrants, missionaries, merchants, armies and wanderers, so nothing should really surprise us when it comes to the culinary influences of one place on another.

Asian cooks know their spices like pianists know their keys. When a world of spices grows in your backyard, you don't have to shell out anywhere from $4 to the-sky's-the-limit for a single tiny bottle. So you can step out your back door, harvest freely and experiment to your heart's content to come up with the spice blend you like best. And every cook has his and her own favorite blend.

My friend and colleague Carol Selva Rajah shares one of her favorite Sri Lankan spice blends:
3 Tbsp. coriander seeds
1½ Tbsp. cumin seeds
1 Tbsp. fennel seeds
2 tsp. whole peppercorns
¼ tsp. fenugreek seeds
¼ tsp. cloves
¼ tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. cardamom
Dry roast the spices and grind in a small coffee grinder. Add chili powder and fresh curry leaves to flavor if needed.

Raw ingredients for a rich and heady spice blend: 12:00 cinnamon bark; 1:00 cardamom seed; 2:00 a bit of show-and-tell: smash these cardamom pods and you'll find those little black seeds inside; 3:00 cumin seed; 6:00 coriander seed; 7:00 black peppercorns; 9:00 fenugreek seed; 10:00 whole cloves; in the center, fennel seed which, incidentally, I got from my own garden right here in LA!

I toasted the coriander, fennel, cumin and cardamom seeds and then put everything in an electric coffee mill and gave it a good spin. I keep an extra mill on hand specifically for grinding spices--a metal one, as plastic absorbs the oils of the spices and imparts them on the next batch, even if you don't want that particular blend!

Coriander seed toasting in the pan: Use an uncoated pan and medium heat, and pay attention, so they don't burn! Let your nose be your guide.

This may look like a lot of work, and you may give in to the urge to cheat and go buy a jar of pre-made curry or jars of pre-ground spices to make a curry (and who knows how long those jars have been sitting on the grocery shelf?), but if you take the time, you'll be rewarded with the most amazing explosion of flavors. And you can make this in large batches to use for more than one dish. Just don't make too much at once. As soon as these seeds are ground, they immediately start to lose their zazz.

The finished spice blend: If only you had a scratch-n-sniff computer screen!

Throw a generous amount of one of these spice blends into a pot of simmering meat or vegetables, and the heat will open up the aromas and perfume your house with the most beautiful blend of fragrances imaginable. And of course, you'll have an amazing dinner, too.

Sri Lanka's wealth of spices lured many a ship from Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. With all those neatly organized rows of tins and bottles of spices in the baking section of the grocery store at our disposal, it's difficult to imagine expeditions being prompted by the allure of something as ordinary--to us, anyway--as pepper and cinnamon. But the more I learn about spices and cook with those amazing blends, the more I understand what the fuss was all about!

*Special thanks to Carol Selva Rajah for her knowledge and insights. If you want to learn more about cooking with the abundance of spices and flavorings from Asia, look for her book, Heavenly Fragrance.

Do Not Soak This Pan!

2010-03-31T14:56:00.000-07:00

....or you'll be throwing away the good stuff.

This is called tahdig, and it's about the most fun you'll have eating rice--sort of a rice crispy treat for grown-ups. In its purest form, tahdig is simply what is scraped out of the bottom of the rice pot. After you've dumped the cooked rice into a bowl, take a flexible spatula and work around the edges of what's stuck to the bottom of the pot, flip it over, sprinkle it with a little salt or any seasoning that makes you happy, and you have a great snack.

The flipside: crusty and crunchy and fun to eat.

Tahdig traditionally was reserved for guests in Iranian households. But it's so popular now that it's on the menu in many Persian restaurants as a regular feature, meaning there must be some way to make it in quantity, right? Appliance manufacturers picked up on tahdig's popularity and began producing rice cookers especially for making tahdig.

Tahdig: recooked with butter

While I've found dozens of recipes for making it--the Internet is loaded with them--I cheated and made some by melting butter in a skillet, pressing some cooked rice into the bottom and letting it recook on low heat until the moisture was evaporated and the rice browned. Then I sprinkled it with a little southwestern seasoning and munched out.

We should probably keep this between us, you know? If the snack food giants discover how satisfying this stuff is, they're sure to waste tons of rice in the process of making a sad facsimile that is loaded with salt and devoid of character. But if you happen to have a particularly great method for making it, will you please share it with the rest of us? Thanks!

Week #28 Himalayan

2010-03-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

"I'm sorry, we've run out of karma," is not exactly what you expect to hear someone say in a restaurant.

But Himself and I were at Tibet Nepal House in Old Town Pasadena, and the server was telling the people at the next table that one of the restaurant's Himalayan beers was out of stock.

No worries for us, because we were sipping Old Monk Super Beer and enjoying its smoky flavor. While our server called it a "heavy beer," it's what we in the States call malt liquor. Later I looked it up online to see what I could learn. The reviews were quite savage (one said it "smells like an old man's head." Yeesh! I'm glad I read this after I drank it!). I'm not a fan of malt liquor, but I suspect the problem was more a lack of context. Reviewers no doubt were picking up a bottle sitting on the back of a shelf in some specialty store--who knows how long it had been there?--carrying it home and tasting it without the benefit of the food it was created to accompany. Then there's the fact that this beer was produced in India and probably underwent repeated temperature changes en route to the States, which will ruin most any beverage or food. C'est la vie!, however you say that in Nepali.

Maasu Mo-Mo

We started our meal with maasu mo-mo, that is, steamed dumplings stuffed with lamb. With them came two sauces: a mint and cilantro sauce that was wonderfully fragrant, and a hot red sauce that contained some serious heat. Mo-mo is yet another example of those stuffed pasta-type items you find in cuisines all over the world. This Himalayan version is a popular between-meal snack.

Sekuwa

Himself ordered the "house specialized platter" of Himalayan sekuwa, or clay oven-roasted meat. The platter contained a nice assortment of shrimp, lamb and two types of chicken scattered over a bed of sweet onions. The meats were marinated in a mixture of yogurt and regional spices and flavorings, which includes turmeric, cumin, garam masala, black pepper, cilantro and garlic. The blend of these flavors along with the bite of the yogurt and the smoky char provided by the clay oven made this dish worth gorging on. I'm convinced sekuwa could make a carnivore of a vegan, but then who's to say that treating veggies or tofu to the same flavor fest wouldn't make them equally yummy? It would be worth a try, but I'm sticking with the meat all the same.

Annapurna Yak: Looks a bit like fajitas without the tortillas, eh?

When there's anything as out of the ordinary as yak on the menu, you know I'm bound to try it. From among several options I selected Annapurna yak: pan-fried yak meat with green and red bell peppers, onion, tomato and Himalayan spices. This dish looks pretty much like fajitas, right? Wrap some up in a piece of naan, and you might just believe that. But the seasonings are quite different and the meat isn't beef, it's yak. Having sampled yak cheese a couple of years ago, I expected the meat to be rather gamy and strongly flavored, but this was not the case. Know how people often say of a meat they're unfamiliar with that it "tastes like chicken?" Well, yak is very beef-like in texture and flavor, which is mild, unlike the yak cheese and butter, which are often described as "rancid."

Chyamtange Dhopzi

Instead of naan we opted for chyamtange dhopzi, a flat, leavened bread made of finely stone-ground whole-wheat flour and baked in a clay oven. Himself deemed it a cross between naan and pita. It's crispy outside and soft inside and made without salt. While it doesn't open quite as easily as a pita, still, you can separate the layers and load it with bites of food if you'd like. Or use it to sop up juices, to dunk into dips and to push bits of food onto your fork.

Sho Jhaa, or Tibetan buttered tea

Sho jhaa, a Himalayan specialty, is buttered tea, traditionally made with yak butter. Since that's not so readily available in the United States, mine was made with regular cow's milk butter. It was rich, slightly salty and not at all sweet. Authentic sho jhaa is described as being almost broth-like, so rich is its consistency. When a butter as durable as that made from yak milk is emulsified into really strong tea, a few cups of the resulting brew will fortify you for whatever lies ahead in the frozen expanses of what is called "The Roof of the World."

If you've read Three Cups of Tea, you may recall Greg Mortenson talking about the necessity of taking buttered tea in this region. While the flavor and texture are curious, I have a feeling it's one of those things that, if you drank it every day, you'd miss it after you left. There's something curiously welcoming about it. I thought I might try my hand at making buttered tea at home, that is until I found that it involves boiling tea leaves for several hours and then incorporating the butter into the tea using a churn! I'd imagine that Himalayan households keep fires burning fairly constantly, and so have tea always at the ready.

I decided instead to turn my focus to making daal bhaat, the national dish of Nepal. Essentially it is a lentil soup served over rice, quick and easy to make, tasty and nourishing. I'm including the recipe at the bottom of this blog entry. As you can see from this photo, mine turned out rather stew like, but you can always add more liquid if you like to make it soupier.

Daal Bhaat

Our server clued us in on a few differences between Tibetan and Nepalese cuisines, the main ones being that Tibetan food is milder, while Nepalese is quite spicy. Rice grows easily in Nepal, so its dishes are rice based, while Tibetan fare includes noodles, since Tibet has little arable land for rice production.

It was interesting to hear our server outlining the characteristics that distinguish Tibetan and Nepalese cooking. To most of us, those points might seem insignificant. But to him, they were not. We all have our points of national and state pride. If you're from one coast or the other in the United States, it would be easy for the distinctions of different states or at least regions in the "flyover states" to blur, but to those of us who actually hail from one of those states, the characteristics that distinguish us as Southerners, Midwesterners and the like are quite pronounced. Likewise, the Himalayas may be the world's most formidable mountains, but the valleys that finger into them each hold their own distinctive culinary traditions.

As for our foray into Himalayan cuisine, our karma was very good indeed.

Daal Bhaat (lentil soup with rice)

4-6 servings

¼ cup + 2 Tbsp. mixed lentils
2 tomatoes, cored and chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 Tbsp. butter
chili pepper, minced, to taste (no particular type, so go with your instincts and taste)
a handful of fresh cilantro leaves removed from stems
fresh garlic and fresh ginger, minced, to taste
garam masala, to taste (you can use a store-bought version, but try making your own—for every cook who makes it there is a different version of garam masala!)

Wash rice (basmati is best and most authentic) and let it stand in the water in which it will be cooked while you prepare the lentils.

Boil lentils in 5 cups of water. Once they are cooked, after about 20 minutes, turn off the heat, stir in the garam masala and ginger (I use 1 Tbsp. of each) and set aside. Do not drain.

Melt butter in a medium-sized skillet and sauté the onion, garlic and tomato. Stir this mixture into the lentils, along with the coriander.

Cook rice according to directions on the package. Salt daal to taste, spoon rice into soup bowls and ladle daal over the rice.

*Because the cilantro and ginger are stirred in after the cooking is finished, their freshness brightens the earthiness of the lentils and the dense flavor of the garam masala.

Based on a recipe available from http://www.himalayanlearning.org.

Throw a Party & Roll Your Own

2010-03-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered that I've accumulated quite a few photos of pasta making parties from the past year. Himself and I agree that those evenings were some of the best and most fun we've ever had. Anyone can make pasta alone, but making it in a group is such fun. All you need is a pasta rolling machine, a few appetizers, a handful of friends, some wine and a little music, and the party makes itself--and dinner! Let's face it--it just doesn't seem like work at all when you're with friends.

Pasta is one of those things that, the more you make it, the easier it is to do. And there's nothing quite as pleasurable as a bowl of the fresh stuff--you'll swear off boxed pasta, for sure. You can get a good, basic hand-crank pasta maker for $30 to $40, so it's not a budget breaker. I've seen the nonas in Italy turn out tons of pasta using only their rolling pins, but you'd probably lose a few people if you tried that. Plus, the hand-crank machine itself is kinda fun.

Andy's getting the hang of making dough from scratch.

Or IS he?

Ally masters the ins and outs of the pasta maker, no prob.

Heirloom tomato salad with fresh burrata on a toasted baguette is a good starter to nibble on while you wait for your turn with the crank. But anything--olives, bruschetta, whatever--is great.

Mark's quickly gotten the ravioli stuffing down to an art (this guy is a physicist, so I knew pasta making would be a snap for him).

Ally cuts the ravioli while a pot of boiling water awaits... Yeah, that's a six-quart Kitchen Aid mixer in the background, but I'm not interested in getting the pasta making attachment for it. The hand-crank model is more textural and more satisfying.

The ravioli shouldn't all be of uniform shape and size. If it is, it will look store bought, and you don't want anyone thinking that when you've done the work yourself. But the size should be consistent enough that it will all cook in the same amount of time--and fresh pasta takes only a couple of minutes in the boiling water.

Maybe black isn't the best color to wear when you're playing in the flour. By the time Missi and I finished, it looked like we'd been dusting for fingerprints. Of course, you can always look at your clothing and play a game called "Who touched me THERE?!"

Missi and Casey got a little competitive with their pasta making. I think she's trying to distract him while he's at work here...

Back in the fall Himself and I spent a weekend in Santa Barbara making pasta for a photo shoot for "Endless Pastabilities," a story I wrote for Edible Santa Barbara. We all had a blast turning out dough and pasta, scavenging in the garden for fresh ingredients and discussing the unlimited things you can do to create unique pasta dishes.

Lights! Camera! Action!

I'm such a spokesmodel for fresh pasta!

Fresh herbs pressed between two sheets of fresh pasta dough makes a lovely presentation.

While you can accomplish this alone, it's good to have an extra pair of hands near by when you're feeding the pasta through the press.

This dough with fresh herbs laminated into it is lovely stuff--tasty, too!

Everyone pitched in, including editor Krista and photographer Steve.

When all the work was done and all the photos taken, we sat down to a dinner of five different pastas, including pasta made with pistachio flour and dressed with cardamom, dried apricot and toasted pistachios; chestnut flour pasta dressed with jalapeno peppers, fresh mint leaves and cacao nibs; and regular pasta dough with fresh herbs pressed inside of it and tossed with some good olive oil and a bit of Parmigiano Reggiano.

If you've made the sauce and the ravioli filling in advance, then you can pour some wine and focus on taking turns making pasta. But please, please please...if you're going to have a pasta-making party, don't embarrass yourself by using store-bought sauce! If it's springtime, pasta primavera is in order--just grab what's in your garden or what you've picked up at the farmers' market. A basic pasta sauce of crushed tomatoes, garlic, a handful of fresh herbs, a few red pepper flakes and a couple finely minced anchovies, cooked for just a few minutes is bliss in a bowl (and for those of you who don't like anchovies, fear not--you won't taste them, you'll only get a richness of flavor that rounds out the other ingredients).

I invite you to stage your own pasta making party and send me your stories and photos. Hmm, is "invite" the appropriate word, or should I say "challenge?" If the pasta turns out disastrously, you can still have a good laugh about it and then order a pizza--that is, until I tell you why you MUST make your own!

Week #27 Swedish

2010-03-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for Scandinavian food in Los Angeles, good luck with that. Actually, we did find some, but you just don't "go out for Swedish" here like you can for Italian or Chinese, or even Ethiopian.

So dusting off the cookbooks was in order, in my case, Culinaria's collection of European specialties. Since Sweden is the land that gave us the smörgåsbord, I decided to make some dishes you'd typically find on one, or at least on an authentic one. None of this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spread on a long table like you tend to find in American feeding trough-style restaurants.

Ikea has a market of prepared Swedish foods, so we forged past all the amusingly named furniture to buy pickled herring, gherkins, cloudberry jam, crisp bread, cheese and a few other things to boost the authenticity level of our home-cooked meal. While we were there, Himself and I ate dinner in the restaurant. The Burbank Ikea is probably best known from those guerrilla movies that keep popping up on You Tube, so I wanted to be as discreet as possible about taking pix, just in case they thought we were some of Those People, and asked us to leave. (What would that say about you, being kicked out of Ikea, I wonder?)

Busted, heh heh! These are the very same meatballs, mashed potatoes, gravy and lingonberries you'll find in the photo on the Wikipedia page on Swedish cuisine! And all are available in the food market at Ikea, as well as in their cafeteria.

Yeah, Swedish meatballs are pretty clichéd, but you know what? This plate of food was quite satisfying. And I appreciate discovering that I actually like Swedish meatballs. I'd been under the impression that I didn't, because I'd been grossed out over the years by too many of those nasty things coated with a sickly sweet goo made of grape jelly or Odin-knows-what. Swedish meatballs are basically just smallish beef meatballs that are plainly seasoned and served with gravy. That's all there is to it. The potatoes contained bits of peel, which is always a good thing. The lingonberry jam reminded me a bit of cranberry jam, but it was sweeter and not quite so astringent. It was good, but I think I'll stick with my cranberries.

Anyway, back to the home cooking: Himself and I decided to put together a small smörgåsbord for ourselves:

"Sun's Eye": Himself said that if he didn't like this, he was going to rename it "Sauron's Eye." Fortunately, he liked it!

Okay, so this is one of the coolest looking things I've ever made: Solöga, "Sun's Eye." As the name suggests, you create an "eye" on a plate, one per person. There are no precise measurements--just use as much as you want. Himself and I shared this one, along with several other dishes in our mini-smörgåsbord.

To construct it, chop anchovy fillets and arrange them in a round in the middle of a plate. In concentric circles, build out rings of chopped onion (I rinsed the onion well before plating to remove its harsh edge), finely chopped fresh parsley, finely chopped pickled red beet and tiny cubes of boiled potato (I used waxy potatoes, which hold their shape better when cubed). Place a raw egg yolk (a very fresh one, please) in the center, atop the anchovies. Chill the dish before serving. (Here's the disclaimer: Don't serve raw egg to the very young, the very old, the pregnant or the immune system-compromised. If you're unsure whether you should trust eating raw eggs, look for those that have been irradiated.) I added a grinding of black pepper but no salt--the anchovies provided enough for the entire dish. This combination may seem pretty weird, but the dish was really, seriously good! We all but licked the plate clean and agreed that we'll definitely be having this again. Next time I want to trek to the fish market in downtown LA to get fresh anchovies. I'm sure they'll make my Solöga even more authentic.

Rödbetsallad

Alongside the Solöga we had a salad of pickled red beets, apples and gherkins with some sour cream and grated horseradish root mixed in. When the meal is heavy on seafood, it's nice to have tart foods to mitigate the fishiness.

Räksallad, along with pickled herring, cheese, rye bread & knäckebröd

The Räksallad or "shrimp salad" is actually a dish of cooked shrimp served cold with a dip that's heavy on sour cream, fresh dill and lemon juice. Once again, the tart helps rein in any excessive seafoodiness. Hm, is that a word?

A great snack: knäckebröd with cloudberry jam and an aquavit-laced cheese

Cloudberries look rather like large golden-orange raspberries, and they have incredibly large seeds. Still, they make a good jam and are worth all the tooth-picking that ensues. Morfars Brännvinsost is an aquavit-laced, semi-firm, aged cow's milk cheese. I couldn't actually taste the aquavit, but its light astringency was a good match for the sweet jam, and I appreciate the slight crunch of grana in it that you typically only find in much harder aged cheeses like Parmigiano reggiano and pecorino.

Knäckebröd, or crisp bread, was devised some 500 years ago as a way to preserve bread. When you live in a place with weather as inclement as it is in Scandinavia, you learn a thing or two about creating indestructible food--that's what all the pickled fish is about. Anyway, it is made of whole grains and does a fine job of, um, keeping the plumbing clean. And that's enough about that.

By the way, I learned that the smörgåsbord was originally a side table of appetizers. At some point it moved to the fore and became the meal itself. Smörgåsbord means "sandwich table" and the "gåsbord" part means "goose butter," so I guess we know what those first sandwiches were made of! (Incidentally, while the word "smörgåsbord" is Swedish, the concept of the long table filled with a variety of foods is by no means unique to that country. You'll find similar spreads around the world.)

Semla

Berolina is a Swedish bakery in Glendale that produces goodies from the homeland, along with an array of European breads and pastries. I popped in to sample a semla, a lightly sweet bread that reminds me in texture of brioche. You carve out the middle (it's used to garnish the one in this photo), fill it with marzipan and top it with a lightly sweet crème chantilly. The marzipan has plenty of sugar, making the less sweet bread and crème a good foil for the richness inside.

Speaking of marzipan, the Swedish seem to have a passion for it, becaue it pops up in a lot of desserts, like the Princess Cake.

Princess Cake

Princess Cake, as with the semla, consists of lightly sweet cake and crème chantilly, but this time, with the marzipan coating the outside. It's a good thing the marzipan is the only sweet element--any more sugar and these desserts would be too sweet. Some Princess Cake also contains crème patissiere. I'm sure that variety seriously pushes the boundaries of what a person could and should eat!

So maybe this wasn't a full meal in an authentically Swedish restaurant, but I think we got a pretty good idea of what the cuisine is like. Of course, if I ever get a chance to visit Sweden I'll certainly avail myself of everything there is to try, especially that aquavit...

At the Halfway Mark: Looking Backward and Looking Forward

2010-03-12T20:29:00.000-08:00

I posted Week #26 a couple of days ago, putting me squarely at the halfway mark in my "52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks" blogging project.

Am I weary yet of this goal I've set for myself? Nope! Am I running out of cuisines? Not by a long shot! Do I crave a good ol' American hamburger? Not really, but I did enjoy an Umami burger this week, so I've not completely forsaken the food of my native land.

But at the halfway point I'm beginning to think I should do more cooking in this exercise of eating my way around the globe without leaving Los Angeles County. Perhaps I can share a recipe or two along the way. So the second half of this blog project will feature a combination of cooking out, bringing in the prepared foods of (and perhaps from) those countries and dining in their restaurants. I may not be able to manage this every week, but for the second half of this project, I'm certainly going to try for a better balance of sampling food from other countries that is cooked by those for whom it is everyday fare and giving it a go myself.

In a day or two I'll begin with a peek into Scandinavian cuisine, and I'll be making a curious but photogenic dish called Solöga, "Sun's Eye."

Stay tuned!

Week #26 Taiwanese

2010-03-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

The cuisine of Taiwan borrows heavily from southern China and also from Japan, thanks to 50 years of occupation early last century. I'm still trying to figure out the differences, but at this point I don't see a lot. Still, I'm glad for the opportunity to feast on dumplings, which are incredibly popular in Taiwan.

Din Tai Fung Dumpling House in Arcadia is a veritable palace of dumplings (they have locations in Taiwan, too, but for now a drive into the next valley will have to do). We knew it had to be a good choice as soon as we walked up--the place was buzzing and full, with people waiting both inside and out. When we left it was still busy. To our surprise, some friends popped in and were seated at the table next to ours. "We're on the way to Palm Springs, but we just had to stop off for some dumplings!" they said. Instant party!

The restaurant has windows into the kitchen, so you can keep an eye on the progress of all the dough that's being made fresh by a battery of nimble fingered dumpling wranglers (say that three times real fast!). I had to shoot this photo through a covered glass, so the quality's not great. But you can see the guy in the foreground to the left rolling out lengths of dough and pinching it into pieces that his compadres behind him will roll out, fill with all sorts of meats and vegetables and crimp into the appropriate shapes. Everything is made by hand here, every precise fold on every delicate dumpling.

We went with our friends Andy and Mai, who are regulars here, and we let them navigate the menu for us.

We started with xiaolongbao or "soup dumplings," juicy dumplings filled with pork and crab and steamed. The operative word here is "juicy," because when you chomp down on them, they squirt broth into your mouth...and onto your shirt if you're not careful! If they've just arrived at the table it's best to nip a tiny hole in the dumpling and carefully slurp out the soup, so you don't burn yourself. But don't wait too long--when these delicate dumplings cool, they tend to stick to the parchment paper beneath them and can tear when you try to pick them up. And you don't want to lose a drop of that yummy broth.

These steamed half-moon dumplings are filled with well-seasoned chicken--flavorful with onion and ginger, but not hot. Each dumpling has a different shape, so if you're a regular here, you can look at a steamer basket of dumplings and know instantly what's inside them.

These steamed shrimp and pork shiaomai look like tiny volcanoes about to blow shrimp out the top! They're both tasty and fun, and the shape makes them easy to pick up, which is handy if you're a klutz with your chopsticks.

Does this dumpling look more like a large mushroom or a tiny chef's toque for Remy, the rat in Ratatouille?

The shrimp and pork wontons with spicy sauce were especially good. We ended up dunking the dumplings into the sauce as well. (The menu read "wanton with spicy sauce," but I'm not going to debate its morality!) Like the shiaomai, the pork and crab dumplings and a few other dishes on the menu, the wontons combined meat with seafood, something I'm finding quite often in Asian meals that doesn't seem to show up on Western menus.

Okay, so it's a dumpling house, but we were seduced by the homemade noodles as well...

Beef noodle soup is a popular fast food in Taiwan, and it made a great add-on to our dumpling feast. This bowl of noodles contains spicy roast beef and bok choy in a super-rich broth. In spite of its popularity, beef isn't consumed with much frequency in Taiwan, because the family oxen are valued for the chores they perform. It would be akin to eating your pickup truck, I guess.

Mmm, just saying "pork mincemeat sauce" makes me drool. This mixture included tiny cubes of firm tofu, which gave the sauce varied texture, while the edamame provided a fresh touch.

Just because it's not a green bean house that doesn't mean the dumpling house skimped on the sides. These green beans sautéed with garlic were seasoned to perfection. In fact, they made me lose sight of the dumplings for a few minutes.

Porkaboo! These pretty pillows are buns filled with pork meatballs and then steamed. Every fold of every dumpling and bun was perfection--a work of art.

Here's my lovely spread. The tiny dish between the soup bowl and teacup is filled with black vinegar and slivers of fresh ginger. Dipping the dumplings into it helps cut the richness and give them a little extra zing. Some people opt for soy sauce instead, but black vinegar provides a lot of flavor without the added sodium. Black vinegar isn't just about the sour--it's a full-flavored sauce all on its own, a grain-based vinegar that is aged similarly to balsamic. And you can always add a little soy and hot sauce to create your own custom blend.

There were also sweet dumplings for dessert, but by this point we were ready to roll out the door like beach balls. Maybe next time we'll get one less order of savory dumplings and save room for the sweet. And then maybe not. Once you get started it's so easy to say, "Just one more...oh, and that looks good, too..."