From Word To Word

I have just had another request for my Bev Stroganov recipe, so rather than keep writing it for people individually, I thought I might just post it here where I can direct people as I have need.  This is one of those recipes that I first made when I still lived in my parents’ home and have been experimenting ever since.  I very rarely make it exactly the same twice, but the following is the gist of the dish.

Bev Stroganov

Make a paste with three tablespoons of ground mustard, three or more teaspoons of ground pepper, two teaspoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a little water.  The paste should be wet enough that it is smooth but dry enough not to be runny.  You can experiment with different varieties of mustard here, but I would recommend that you use preground mustard or use an electric grinder rather than a mortar and pestle for your whole mustard, just to be sure the mustard is ground finely enough to make a good paste.  Let this paste rest at room temperature.

Thinly slice four or five cups of yellow onions into rings.  Thinly slice a pound or so of mushrooms.  I use brown mushrooms most often, but I have used shitake and oyster mushrooms also, so experiment as you like.

Take a two or three pound fillet of beef.  Cut it first across the fillet into rounds that are about a quarter inch thick.  Then cut each round into quarter inch strips, this time cutting with the grain.  This process will make strips of beef that will be tender and easy to chew.  If you cut the stripe so that they go with the grain with both cuts, you will just get long bits of whole muscle that will be much less tender.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy skillet over very high heat.  Wait until the oil begins to haze over the pan.  Add the mushrooms and onions, then immediately reduce the heat to low.  Cook for twenty or thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until the vegetable have softened, then drain them through a sieve and set aside.

Heat two or three more tablespoons of oil in the skillet over high heat until the oil is hor but not smoking.  Add just enough meat to cover the bottom of the skillet and brown it, then transfer the meat to a bowl and set it aside.  Repeat this process until all the meat has been browned.  Stir in the mustard paste.  When it is well combined, stir in four cups of sour cream.  Cover the mixture and cook until the sauce is well heated.  Taste the mixture and add mustard, salt, and pepper as necessary.

Serve over egg noodles or, if you want to be a little more authentic, over thinly sliced and very crisp French fried potatoes.

My sister-in-law was over yesterday morning, and she commented on the dried orange zest that I was adding to a recipe, wanting to know where I had purchased it.  Now, it is certainly possible to buy dried orange peel at many bulk food stores, and I have done so myself, but this was zest that I had dried myself, something that shocked her a little.  She had always just tossed her orange peels, and the process of zesting and drying that much peel seemed onerous to her, which is fair.  Our conversation got me thinking, however, about the leavings of things that I used to throw away but now use regularly in my cooking, and I thought that I might list them here, first, to share something of my own kitchen practices, and second, to solicit ideas about any other leavings that I could be using in my cooking.

1.  I zest and dry the peels of any citrus that I will not be using immediately: orange, lemon, lime, even grapefruit when I have it in the house, which is infrequently.  I add these things to desserts and to curries and to stirfries, and I use them as toppings for things like puddings and custards and icecream, and I sometimes add them to some jams and preserves.

2.  I strip and dry the tops of carrots, which can be added to soups and stews to provide carrot flavour without actually using carrots.  They are also great in making soup stock.  You can even steam them with butter and lemon and eat them as a green vegetable, though my family does not exactly love this.

3.  I dry and grind stale bread into bread crumbs for breading meat and using as toppings on casseroles and whatnot.

4.  I save the leavings of certain vegetables for making soup stock: carrot and onion and celery, certainly, but also sweet peppers, garlic, broccoli, mushrooms, anything that is not too starchy.

What other leavings could I be using?

I was asked to bring a dessert to a potluck party tonight, a farewell gathering for friends  of ours who will soon be heading to Chile.  I decided to make one of childhood favourites, Oranje Cooke.  It is a recipe that our family learned in the Dutch church that we attended when I was a child, and the recipe in my book claims to be from the kitchen of Tina DeVries, a woman I vaguely remember, so I never questioned my family lore about the dish, though much of it now seems to me a little questionable.  We were always told that Oranje Cooke was Dutch for Orange Cake, which may well be true, but it raised the question of why the recipe does not actually have any oranges in it.  This was because, we were told, the name of the dish actually refers to the colour orange as a symbol of Holland’s royal family, which descends from Willem van Oranje, or William of Orange.  Again, this explanation seems plausible enough, only the icing that was put on this cake, every time I can remember eating it, whether it was made by my own family of one of the Dutch ladies from the church, was pink.  There was no explanation at all for this inconsistency.

So, today, as I got the recipe out of my book for perhaps the fiftieth time, and as I wondered about why there should be pink icing on an orange cake for the fiftieth time also, I decided to answer this question once and for all.  Unfortunately, the internet solved nothing.  I can find no results for Oranje Cooke recipes that look anything like mine, no results that are even without oranges.  A search for Dutch Spice Cake, which I think more accurately describes the dish, returns any number of recipes, some more or less like mine, but none very similar, and none that specify pink icing, or even orange icing for that matter.

All of this makes me feel much better about the fact that I have been alterring the recipe as long as I have been making it for myself.  Despite all the reasons that I was given as a child, I grate orange rind into it, and I make the icing orange as well.

Oranje Cooke

Mix together, in a very large bowl, a pound of shortening, four eggs, three cups of brown sugar, and a teasponn of vanilla.  Stir in a tablespoon of anise seed, two or three tablespoons of grated orange rind, and about two teaspoons each, more or less depending on your taste, of ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground allspice, ground cloves, and baking powder.  Stir in four cups of flour, which should produce a heavy, sticky dough.  Press the dough about half an inch thick into an edged cookie pan.  Bake it for ten minutes or so in a 450 degree oven.  Let it cool, then spread it it with orange (or pink) butter icing.  Cut it into squares, and enjoy.

Yesterday was a milestone in the long running battle I have been waging to find a satisfactory system for organizing my spices.  The history of this battle will probably not interest you, but I will share it anyway.

It begins with my realization, quite early in my cooking career, that the little bags or bottles in which spices are usually sold have almost no value as storage containers.  The bags are unsealed, continually falling over, inconvenient to handle, and difficult to sort through.  The little jars are sealable and stable, but they are too small for spoons and fingers, unstackable, and not easy to refill.

So, I invested in a number of plastic containers made for the purpose of holding spices.  They had a lid on each side: one for shaking and one for spoons.  They came in sets of twelve, and I bought two sets, so I had enough for what I wanted at the time.  I quickly realized, however, that these were too small for things like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg and had too small an opening for me to use my fingers, which is my preferred way of measuring.  There were soon also too few of them for my growing collection and I could not find any more of them.  There were other similar containers available, but they were unmatched, and I will confess that this disturbed the obsessive compulsive part of my personality to a completely unreasonable degree.

My next attempt, one that worked well enough for many years, was simply to use the little plastic containers from the bulk food stores where I was buying many of my spices anyway.  They had tops wide enough for even the biggest spoons and fingers.  They came in one cup, two cup, and four cup sizes.  They were stackable.  They were cheap.  There were also virtually infinite quantities of them, which was important as my collection approached a hundred spices and teas and other sundries.  I still had some reservations about them, however.  The seals were not great, so the spices tended to age too quickly, and they were not very strong, so the lids were always splitting and needing to be replaced.  Still, I had methods for dealing with any spices that really needed a strong seal, and the arrangement was quite functional.

This Christmas, however, my mother gave me several boxes of glass cannisters in two cup and four cup sizes.  The seals were very good.  The tops were a little narrower than the bulk store containers but still very functional.  I decided to make the shift.  Unfortunately, though she gave me more than a dozen of the large containers and several dozen of the small, these quantities did not even approach the needs of my collection.  So, I had her tell me where they had been purchased, and I called every outlet in the area, eventually finding a place that had enough stock for me to buy an entire  case of the larger canisters and three cases of the smaller ones.  I then spent the better part of yesterday afternoon transferring and labeling everything.  The results were much to my satisfaction.

The upper shelf has the four cup canisters, two deep and fifteen wide, and they hold the beans and nuts and dried fruit and whatnot.  The lower shelf has the two cup cannisters, three deep and two high and fifteen wide, and they hold the spices proper, loosely organized, with ground spices behind their whole counterparts and the less frequently used items well at the back.  The shelf to the side has my twenty odd teas and infusions.  There is even, in reserve, a whole case of the two cup cannisters in the basement, to account for breakage and additions to the collection. Everything is in its place, and there is a place for everything.

I am well pleased.

So, as I mentioned last month, there will be no Dinner and a Doc this Saturday.  Instead, it had been my plan to send my children off with one relative or another so that I could have my traditional Christmas baking day with my wife.  I was also going to set up the projector this year, so that we could watch movies together as we worked.  I initially proposed an Alfred Hitchcock marathon.  My wife demurred.  She counter-proposed a foodie-movie marathon.  I accepted, and I was intending to post a request for people to recommend their favourite foodie-movies.  Everything was planned.

Unfortunately, life, or the Christmas season rather, has intervened.  It seems that we will be hosting an annual gathering of friends this year, and this Saturday is really the only day that will work for it, and there are no other open Saturdays between now and when the Christmas baking will be needed, so the annual Christmas baking day has become something like an extended Christmas baking week, where we are making this and that whenever we find a few minutes.  It is not exactly what I had planned, or not at all in fact, but it has been something good even so.  It has allowed us to enjoy the baking at a slower pace and over a longer time, and it has also opened opportunities for friends to do some of the baking with us.  I was not tradition perhaps, but it did what the tradition was intended nevertheless.

Of course, this does not mean that those foodie-movies will not get watched someday, so feel free to recommend them anyway.

Also, for those who are wondering, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc:

January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

Learning requires failure.

In order to learn, it is necessary that we come to a place where we fail, where are be confronted by our failure, so that we will be forced to learn, before anything else, how to learn, because it is precisely when we fail that we are forced to go beyond ourselves to our teachers and our mentors and our peers and our resources and our technologies, and it is then that we can begin to learn.  If we are never allowed to fail, we will never learn how to learn.  Failure drives learning.  Learning requires failure.

Let me give you an example.  Something like twelve years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make pie pastry.  I had tried to make it more than once, and I had observed my mother making it any number of times, but none of my attempts had been terribly successful, and I wanted to learn to do it properly.  I found several recipes.  I compared them.  I tried them.  In every case, there was something not working quite right.  The results were edible, but the dough was never very workable.  The process was frustrating.  The product was unattractive.  I was failing.

So I decided to go to a master: my paternal grandmother, who made two pies every weekday for many years of her life.  She lives on Manitoulin Island, and the next time I was there I had her lead me through her process.  I did exactly what she did, side by side, every step of the way, and somehow hers worked and mine still failed.  The consistency of her dough was perfect.  She could flip it over, fold it into sixes, and cut designs in it, then unfold it onto the pie like a work of art.  The consistency of my dough was at first too dry and then, after a little water was added, too moist.  I could get it into the pans, and it tasted fine, but it was certainly nothing to take to the county fair.

I despaired, but I persisted, and I experimented with every recipe I could find: with shortening or with lard, with egg or without, a dash of vinegar or not, less water or more, one temperature or another.  I failed and I succeeded, to one degree or another, time after time, and I began to find something that worked for me, though it is not something that will likely work for you.  There was no single secret.  There was only trying one thing or another, watching one person or another, and practicing, much practicing, so that I can now fold my dough into sixes and cut designs in it, though I rarely bother.

This is not the end of things, however, because learning by failing never really ends.  The other day I saw a cherry pie with the thickest, most unbelievable double-crust, so I talked to the woman who had made it.  She explained how she cuts the top crust about an inch too wide, so that there is a healthy bit overhanging the whole of the pie.  Then she tucks the overhanging pastry under the edge of the bottom crust, so that the edge is now three layers thick, and she squeezes these layers together to form her crust.

Of course, I should hardly have to say by now that I needed to try this technique for myself.  I should also hardly have to say that I failed.  Tucking the top pastry under the bottom was a little more delicate than I thought, and my first attempt could only have been called, even with all possible sensitivity, misshapen.  The second was much better, and future attempts should only improve as I get practice.

This is how learning works.  It works through failure.

I have had a bunch of Spy apples sitting around for the last week or so.  They were meant to become pie filling, but the pumpkin pies went further than I thought they would, so the apples have remained, unneeded and unloved, on top of the refrigerator.  Something had to be done with them before they went bad, and that something, I decided this evening, was that I would make stewed apples, one of my favourite holiday recipes.  I know that it is not yet December and that I should still be resisting the onset of the commercially prolonged Christmas season, but it was an emergency, and this way you all get the benefit of a recipe that you can use when Christmas actually comes within reasonable celebrating proximity.

Stewed Apples

Melt half a pound or so of butter in a good sized stock pot.  Add the finely chopped peels of 8 or 10 clementines or the zest of 4 or 5 large oranges.  Add several sticks of cinnamon, several roughly cracked whole nutmegs, and two dozen or so each of whole cloves and whole allspice.  Saute this until the peel has had time to soften and the pot starts to smell amazing.

Add 8 or 10 pounds of cooking apples, peeled and sliced.  Cooking apples are those that resist falling apart when you cook them.  Northern Spys are a great choice because they have so much flavour.  Cortlands are good too because their flesh does not brown like most apples.  Ida Reds are another of my favourites.  Add enough brown sugar to sweeten the apples, but not enough to overwhelm them.  This will differ according to the tartness of the apples you are using.  Use your judgement, but err on the side of too little.  Simmer everything, stirring frequently, until the apples begin to soften.

Add two or three cups each of raisins and dried cranberries.  Keep simmering.  As the raisins and cranberries rehydrate, you will likely find that you need to add some fluid, again depending on the apples.  Apple cider is a safe choice, but rum works very well also.  You could also use orange juice, cranberry juice, or whiskey.  Feel free to experiment, but add the liquid gradually.  You want the mixture to be moist but not swimming.

When the apples have softened and the dried fruit has rehydrated, remove the pot from the heat.  Alternatively, you can also choose at this point to add a healthy dose of heavy cream and cook everything a little longer.  Either way is good.  You may eat it immediately after it is finished, but the flavours will only intensify if you leave it cooling on the stove overnight or let it rest even longer in the refrigerator.  It is great both cold and reheated, both as a breakfast or snack in itself and as a topping for cake or icecream.  I have never tried to can it properly, but it lasts quite a long time in jars in my refrigerator, and it tastes like Christmas whenever you happen to bring it out, even in November.

Tomatoes were not one of my garden’s successes this year, for the second year running.  I did manage to plant them away from the walnut trees this time around, and neither of my two remaining chimneys fell on them, which is a definite improvement over last year, but I started growing them from seed too late, and I had the seedlings in a place with too little light, so I had to plant them out before they were ready, and then everything was compounded by a summer of too little sun and and too little heat.  So, though I have a reasonable tomato harvest, almost a bushel, it is entirely green.

Now, I know that green tomatoes can be fried, and I have attempted this dish in the past, but it is only possible, for me at least, to eat so many fried green tomatoes.  I have also made green tomato chutney in past years, but not everyone seems to like this as much as I do.  So I have been doing some experimenting, and I thought I might share the results.

Green Tomato and Sour Cream Pasta Sauce
Slice a fair number of green tomatoes into slightly larger than bite sized chunks and dice two yellow onions.  Saute the tomatoes and the onions in olive oil.  Add a little sugar and keep cooking until the mixture begins to caramelize.  Add just enough white wine to deglaze the pan.  Add a handful of chopped fresh tarragon.  Add a healthy doze of freshly ground black pepper.

Reduce the pan to low and add enough sour cream to produce the consistency that you want.  I just used a tub of sour cream from the supermarket, but I would wager any money that homemade stuff would be far superior if you have the time to make it.  Add salt to taste.  Put over pasta.

The green tomatoes work really well in a recipe like this because they have the tomato flavour but do not melt like ripe tomatoes,  so they can be caramelized and still keep some structure to them.

Green Tomato Salsa
There are many recipes for green tomato salsa drifting about the internet, but none of them were what I wanted, so I combined and manipulated some of them to my own purposes.

Mince four cloves of garlic, two or three seeded jalapeno peppers, 2 yellow onions, six or eight green tomatoes, and a cup or so of fresh cilantro.  When I say mince, I mean mince.  It should not be chunky.  It should be just this side of puree.

Add a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, a dash of sugar, a dash of salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste.  Let it sit, at least for an hour or two, preferably overnight or even longer, so that the tomatoes can pickle.  If it seems a little dry as you are about to serve it, add a little more cider vinegar.

Between these two recipes I have used up a fair number of my green tomatoes, but if anyone wants to share a favourite recipe, I am sure that I will have the chance to try it eventually, if not this year, then the next time my garden cannot list tomatoes among its successes.

Okay, I may have just created the single best food I have ever eaten.  If you like blue cheese, you may want to start taking notes.

Take a chunk of blue cheese, any of the stronger varieties will do.  The more blue veining, the better.  Mix this with about an equal amount of cream cheese.  If at all possible, make this real cream cheese rather than the stuff you buy as a brick in the supermarket.  Stir in half and half cream until the cheese becomes smooth rather than chunky.  Set this aside.

Chop ten or twelve slices of bacon into bits.  Get it from a butcher, and make sure that it is thick meaty bacon.  Fry it until it is crispy, then remove it from the bacon fat.  Mince a half a bulb of garlic and saute it in a little of the bacon grease.   Chop a handful of fresh chives.  Add the bacon, garlic, and chives to the cheese micture.

Mix everything thoroughly.  Put it about an inch deep into ramekans or a cassarole dish.  Bake at 350 degrees until it gets nice and bubbly.  Eat it in whatever way you usually convey dip to your mouth.  If you do not love this, courier it to me.  I might even pay your postage.

Part of my fall ritual includes drying the herbs and spices that grow in my garden.  This year, for example, I have already dried wild carrot flowers and greens, lemon balm, camomile, purple clover, basil, oregano, chives, and I still have a fair amount to do, including rosemary, mint, and rosehips.  This past Saturday, as I was considering what still had to be done, I noticed the purple shiso, which grows wild in my garden and which I only just learned is edible this past summer.  I had heard that both the leaves and the seeds could be dried and kept as spices, and I was fairly confident that I could dry the leaves without much problem, I was not sure how to go about harvesting the seeds.  I had no idea when they were mature, no idea how they should be extracted from their husks, no idea whether they should be dried before or after they were extracted, no idea, in short, at all.

The internet told me nothing very useful, so I decided that some experimentation was in order.  I stripped the seed pods from a few stems and tried rubbing them between my palms to remove the husks.  This operation was somewhat less effective than I hoped.  The husks could eventually be removed, but the moisture made them cling to the seeds, and the seeds cling to each other.  I noticed, however, that the seeds from the pods at the very tip were white and soft, while those nearer the bottom were brown and harder and tasted quite strongly when bitten.  Whether or not these lower seeds were mature enough to be fertile, they were certainly mature enough for my purposes, so I cut the whole plant.  I stripped the leaves into one colander and the seed pods into another, rinsed them both, and left them to dry over night.  I then dried them as I dry everything else, turning my oven to its lowest heat, putting a large cookie pan on the lowest rack to block the direct heat from the element, placing the herbs in a second cookie sheet on a higher rack, and leaving the oven door ajar to allow the moisture to escape.

The leaves dried easily, as I expected they would.  Though they are larger than basil or mint leaves, they are of a similar thickness and texture, and they dry much the same.  The seeds also seemed to dry well, but they were still in their husks, and I was still faced with the question of whether I could extract them.  I rubbed a few between my palms again, and the husks broke up quite easily, but the seeds still clung together in their little clusters.  By rubbing more vigorously, I was able to separate the seeds, but I was left with a handful of chaff mixed with the seeds that I wanted.  I tried sifting this mixture through several sizes of colandar and sifter, but anything large enough to let the chaff through let the seeds through also.  I tried picking the seeds out of the chaf by hand, but gave this up as too tedious after a single seed.  In the end, I was reduced to putting the seeds and chaf together in a small mixing bowl and shaking it gently until the heavier seeds gathered on top of the lighter chaff.  I would then tap out the gathered seeds into a second bowl, repeating the process until I had removed as many of the seeds as my patience would allow.

There are probably more efficient ways to dry purple shiso seeds, and I would appreciate anyone who could offer advise on how to make the process simpler, but I am quite satisfied with the end product of my experiment. The seeds do seem well dried, and they have certainly retained their flavour.  Now I just need to learn how to cook with them.