Results of the Experiment

Our un-biased tasters gave the meal a two thumbs up. One reviewer came to the table and said, "Is this all we are having for dinner?", expecting several dishes to be on the table. The very biased creator thought that scaling back on the lemon peel and increasing the fennel would inprove it. Also, a couple of grates of romano cheese wouldn't hurt either. More collards, I ony put a little in, it could have used a little more color. We had watercress, onion and carrot salads to go with the roll up.

Experiment

It’s four’clock and I’m pausing for my tea. No soccer or meetings this evening, so we are having a real family dinner. I’m experimenting, he, he…

I had half a Boston butt roast in the freezer, an assortment of veggies and a yen for bread. So this is what is in the works:

The Boston butt roast is in the pressure cooker turning into pork to shred, it is depressurizing at this point. Since my daughter is picking up finicky ideas from other kids, visible hunks of onion are out, so I put one into the food processor with some fresh carrot, six cloves of garlic and some frozen bits of collards that are taking up too much space in the freezer. I tossed in salt, black pepper, fennel that had been crushed in the mortar, lemon peel, a bit of thyme and a little of my not-so-secret flavor enhancer, Vietnamese fish sauce. The bread ingredients that I put in the bread machine an hour and a half ago will be ready soon. I’ll shred the pork, roll out the bread dough, and layer the pork and veggies on the bread dough, roll it up, glaze it with beaten egg and bake it.

I'll post the critical reviews of it later.

Stinky Cheese

Stinky Cheese
One of my flavor quirks is that I like stinky cheese. I like to be able to un-wrap cheese in the kitchen then turn my back and still be able to smell it. Whether it is blue, runny, ripe, etc., I love it. So, when I discovered that I am allergic to cow’s milk I was horrified—how was I going to eat my cheese? I am very thankful that sheep’s milk and goat’s milk cheeses are now readily available in the US, but very pricey and often very stinky.
I will not forget the day I walked up to the cheese counter in Whole Foods and told the attendant, “What do you have in stinky sheep and goat’s milk cheeses?” His eyes lit up, a Cheshire smile formed as he leaned down into the case to present the varieties of fragrant dainties he had to offer. He looked at me as if I was about to be initiated into a secret society and was about to test my mettle. He did not know that I had been a card carrying member of the Stinky Cheese Society for years, but you get more samples if you play the initiate. The samples were exquisite; it appeared that I had passed his initiation as he set aside my choices. The prices stretched skyward, but I chose two small slices to take home (one was coated with ash) and meditate over with fruit and nuts, because sometimes I just need to be alone with my cheese.
Sometimes I share. Yesterday, my wedding anniversary, my husband brought home something in just the right size and color, ½ lb of blue, Roquefort, to be exact. He also picked out a neutral beige slice of aged goat cheese buche to accessorize. The man knows how to shop in all the right places!! I pulled out the dried fruit and nuts and arranged them with the grapes he picked up on his way home and placed them on the table next to the candles. The goat cheese on dates with a pecan amalgamated into textures and flavors that produced sighs on two sides of the table. My daughter, sitting on the third side chose not to become a stinky cheese initiate, just yet. She may have spied a possessive glimmer in my eyes when I offered her some and decided not to take the risk. Tonight after we have put her to bed we will slice some pears and meditate together.

Fall Garden Beginnings

The first planting of green beans is about four inches high, the second planting just went in this afternoon. My daughter and I just planted a good sized section of carrots, since we eat tons of carrots and fresh juicy garden carrots are distant relations to the fibrous supermarket carrots. Collards, kale, gai lan, bai tsai,bok choy, mizuna, komatsuna, daikon, and rutabagas will be planted in two to three weeks when the temperatures start staying in the eighties instead of the nineties.

Huh???

Walk through any supermarket checkout line and read the covers of the magazines.

In a magazine with a triple layer chocolate cake with white chocolate and raspberry ganache and a very thick layer of dark chocolate frosting photographed so that you can almost taste it, is an article about how to lose thirty pounds by the holidays. Feel set up for failure? You are, they sell more magazines that way.

My nephew, a very perceptive 14 year old, who got the food obsession gene from both sides of the family, pointed out that inside the fancy cooking magazines there are advertisements for quick to prepare, highly processed foods that are the antithesis of gourmet cooking. They are products in which ingredients are bought by the shipping container load, with laboratory synthesized flavorings and then overcooked in processing. Confused? Me too.

Magazines about living a purer more connected life advertising food made in factories. Is highly processed organic food an oxymoron?


Things I that leave me scratching my head:
“Franken-chicken” nuggets, with beef flavoring. Have a burger if you want beef.

Drinks that look like window cleaner. Appetizing aren’t they?

Sports drinks? If you aren’t training for a triathlon or trying to be the state champion of your chosen sport, why drink beverages that taste like chemicals? (This is a heretical statement here in Gainesville, birthplace of the most famous sports drink!)

Powdered lemonade, real lemonade has three ingredients, and has the same preparation time. Why drink flat tasting stuff made with thirty unpronounceable mystery ingredients?

Artificial strawberry anything.

Tofu hot dogs, I guess I just have a problem with a food pretending to be another type of food. I like tofu, I like hot dogs (and, yes, I know what they are made of), but tofu hot dogs are just silly and for that matter nasty tasting.

Jumbo anything (except elephants, but they don’t qualify as food for any living culture, that I know of) More of mediocre to bad food is a bad thing, isn’t it? Particularly egregious: muffins bigger than softballs with a day’s worth of calories, monster calzones, just order an unsliced pizza with quadruple everything then fold it in half…I must mention that a restaurant in town has Japanese bento meals, American style, of course, and the bigger version of any of their platters is called a Hippo Meal, now that’s honesty!!

Fellow foodies, please add to my list of stuff that just doesn’t make sense, tastes nasty or is just silly. I don’t watch television, so my list is very limited.

Little Ceremonies

It's late afternoon, I've made myself a cup of mint tea and I'm thinking about the time when I realized that I am continuing a tradition, going back, ummmmm, a few years:
Why do you always have teeeeeeeeeeeeeah? My college roommate whined in her nasally Boston suburb accent with her nose and her little finger in the air.

I was puzzled, I was just having a snack. “What do you mean?” I replied, scrunching my brows together.

“Every day at four o’clock you stop everything, make a pot of tea and have cookies.” Pointing her nose farther into the air, “You’re so English.”
“You do it all in a certain order, you put the kettle on to boil, never use the microwave, you wait for the water from the faucet to get hot, you rinse out the pot, pour it out, put the tea into the pot, which is inches away from the kettle, place the cup on the table with a plate with two to three cookies on it with a sugar bowl and the pitcher of milk. You get something to read and arrange it all on the table. The water boils and you pour it into the pot and place it on the table. After a few minutes you pour yourself a cup. You sit, read and drink tea for about a half hour. Everyday it is the same. You have teeeeeeeeeeeeeeah.”

I thought was just getting a snack to hold me until dinner time and taking my first real break of the day. It was my meditative time. I never considered it as part of my heritage.

Reflecting on my time at home with my family, every afternoon when my mom was home she would take a bit of a breather with a cup of tea, once in a while with a cookie, before beginning to cook dinner.
When she was working at the hospital, I did exactly the same thing. I came home from my after school activities, made myself a cup of tea, rested a bit and then cooked dinner.

On Saturdays, it was more of an event, because my dad was home. We’d be doing some projects around the house and around four o’clock he’d seek everyone out and ask, “How about a cup of tea?” There would be an extra bounce in his step if someone had made a pie. He would put the water in the English electric teakettle (bought in England in the 1970's while on vacation), which he had run special major appliance wiring for because it was 220v. In about a minute, the water would be heated (thanks to the extra electricity), the cups, napkins, sugar and milk placed on the table, with the cookies or pie ready. In a few minutes an announcement passed through the house to come have our tea and something sweet. I don’t ever remember any of us raising our little fingers, though.

It was our transition from our busy afternoons to our evening time. The world could wait a few minutes until our cups were empty.

I realize now that a little ceremony, a cookie and some tea might be what my daughter, husband and I might need to help settle in for the evening.

Besides, it’s our heritage.

Noodling Around

A few days ago when some friends came over for dinner I decided to try making whole wheat noodles with the four kids old enough to help, ages 2 ½ to 7 years old. I made the dough (the weather was finally perfect and they were playing outside with the chickens, otherwise they would have helped make the dough), and called them to wash up and to help stretch each individual noodle by hand. They had contests to see who could stretch the longest noodles, hanging them on the backs of tea towel covered chairs for comparison. The longest appeared to be slightly over 2 feet long. The two year old had the technique, but not the patience for the task, so he made pretty lumpy noodles, but when he wasn’t looking we thinned them out a bit, so that they would cook evenly. The noodles were cooked and served in 4 cups of chicken broth with a teaspoon of Vietnamese fish sauce, chopped scallions and grated carrots. The kids, beaming, would hold up a noodle from the plate and say,” I made this one! I can tell because…” There were no leftovers.
Last night I made dumplings of my own sort. I started with the recipe for Kazakh noodles in Beyond the Great Wall, I tweaked the dry ingredients.
My goal was to increase the fiber content and to vary the wrappers nutritionally, and just to experiment with the besan flour for the heck of it. I have twice made the regular noodles with the whole wheat flour substitution and they came out well, so I decided to go the next step and try to make dumplings with it.
1 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
1/4 c besan flour (chickpea)
1 ¾ cups of white flour
1 t salt
2 eggs
¾ c water
Mix dry ingredients. Add eggs and water stir until it makes a dough. On a well floured surface. Divide into four balls; flatten each to a long narrow rectangle that is about ½ inch thick. Cover with plastic wrap, and then a towel. Let it rest for 30 minutes.
For me there was no rest, I made the filling.
For filling
10 oz ground turkey
2 slices of apple smoked deli ham, minced
¾ of a cup of leftover cooked carrots, mashed
1 leftover boiled egg, mashed
2T garlic chives from the garden, minced
1 clove of garlic, minced
Salt
Pepper

I cut the rectangles into eighths. My daughter rolled out the wrappers, while I made the sauce. I made a basic white sauce, but substituted 1c of chicken broth for 1 cup of milk, for seasoning my daughter added our favorite garlic/herb seasoning, 2 good shakes.
Then she stirred the sauce while I filled and sealed the wrappers. We boiled them until they floated in a saucepan filled with water and sauced them and added Romano cheese to our taste at the table.
When it was all placed on the table my daughter was resistant to put the sauce on the dumplings, but with encouragement and referral to a movie she once saw, where a rat combined flavors to create new and more complex flavors, she gave it a try. She hesitantly broke off a small piece and dunked it in a small puddle of sauce. Her eyes flew wide open and she dunked it a second time, and made what we call nummy noises. Success!!