From Word To Word

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.

It was my wife who introduced me to the genre of the food movie.  We were still in highschool, and the film she showed me was Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel.  I have now seen this film seven or eight times, and I am always moved by the final scene where the people of the village begin to recognize each other again as they eat the food Babette is serving them.  Before I had even begun to articulate the philosophical and theological importance of the table to me, I intuitively recognized something significant in this scene, and I would recommend the film without reservation to anyone who loves food and to anyone who loves a good and simple story.

Last night, my wife and I discovered a similar film in Ali Raffi’s The Fish Fall in Love.  It is set in Iran, and it relates the story of a woman who runs a restaurant in the house of her former fiance, who had disappeared many years earlier but has now returned.  Frightened that he will evict her from the house and from her means of providing for herself, she and the other women who work with her decide to cook for him as a way of convincing him to allow them to stay.  The film is beautifully simple.  The story does not try to say too much.  The acting is understated and intimate.  The music does not overwhelm, as it too often does now in Hollywood films.   The film is content, and rightly so, to be what it is.

The scenes that take place in the kitchen and around the table are accomplished beautifully.  There is a real sense of the unique combination of labour and community that characterizes the kitchen, and an attention to the interactions that take place around the table.  There are also several places where food is offered from one person to another, and these scenes are marked with a similar degree of significance.  In every case, the food takes on a symbolic role, a ritual role, becomes a carrier of meaning and value.  Because of this role, the food itself is also the subject of the film’s gaze on many occasions, as the camera follows the food from the market and the garden, to the cutting board and the simmering pot, and finally to the plate.  These images produce an almost physical pleasure in me.  They are beautiful aesthetically, and even more so, because they are also beautiful symbolically.

I am not sure how readily available the film is wherever you might happen to be, but it is well worth the effort to go and find it.

This is already my second post of the day, and there will likely be more, all food related. I normally try to spread these things around, but sometimes events impose themselves and leave me little choice. Today is such a day.

This morning, as I was preparing for our dinner tonight, something that I will likely post about later, I came across a list near the front of Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef. I was in the midst of scanning the tables of contents of several of my cookbooks, looking for ideas for colourful appetizers, which I will also likely post about later.  The list is entitled, “Suggested Basic List for Your Pantry”, and it instantly reminded me of the post that I wrote some time ago about the ingredients that are essential to my cooking. Granted, Jamie’s list is only for the pantry and does not include fresh vegetables, so it is very different from mine, but the idea is the same. These are the ingredients that he needs to have on hand, not for any recipe in particular, but just because they are the ingredients that he cannot do without.  They are the ingredients that reveal his personality as a cook.

So, I will post his list for you, and I will also highlight the ingredients on his list that I also happen to have in my own pantry at this moment, for my own entertainment if not for yours.

Suggested Basic List for Your Pantry

Mustards: Dijon, wholegrain, English
Oils: extra virgin olive, olive, sunflower
Vinegars: red wine, white wine, balsamic, rice wine
Flour: all-purpose, bread, cake, self-rising, cornmeal, durum semolina
Couscous
Baking powder, baking soda
Sugar: brown, white, confectioners’
Salt: sea, table, cooking
Dried pasta: spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle, penne, farfalle
Legumes: cranberry beans, cannellini beans, black-eyed peas, lima beans, yellow split peas, lentils, chickpeas
Canned tomatoes
Rice: basmati, Arborio, Carnaroli
Olives: black, green
Nuts: pine nuts, whole almonds, hazelnuts
Dried mushrooms: porcini
Sun-dried tomatoes
Chocolate: good-quality bittersweet
Unsweetened cocoa powder
Soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce
Anchovies in olive oil or salt
Capers: salted
Herbs and spices: Black peppercorns, dried chillies, nutmeg, cloves, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, caraway seeds

These kinds of lists interest me inordinately.

I often get requests to share recipes with people, but I can very seldom provide what people want. They expect precise ingredients and measurements, where I prefer to work in approximations. The difficulty is that the recipe book and the television cooking show have accustomed us to the idea that a dish must be reproducible time after time, that this kind of consistency is one of the signs of a good cook. Now, I should say that I do not entirely disagree with this assumption in certain situations. A professional kitchen, for example, needs to have this kind of consistency in order to be successful, and the ability to produce it is a skill that a good cook certainly requires. I would suggest, however, that most circumstances do not require a dish to be precisely the same time after time, and that a certain variety can also be a mark of a skillful cook, as a way of expressing creativity and personality.

So, though I will share the following recipe by popular demand, I am leaving it intentionally a little vague, not only because I did not actually measure anything as I was making it, but also because I hope you will find room in it to express your own culinary personality.

First, cube some potatoes, a little smaller than bite-sized, and boil them until just tender. A fork should go into them, but they should not be mushy. Drain them and run cold water over them to stop the cooking process. Reserve them for later.

Second, saute a chopped onion in butter until it sweats, and do use real butter if at all possible. Add a healthy amount of finely chopped garlic. Add some roughly cut red peppers. Add some roughly cut green, leafy vegetable: I used carrot leaves, but spinach or kale or something similar would work too. Add cubed ham, or you could use bacon as well, but make it something salty and smoked and flavourful, because boiled chicken breast is not going to cut it here. When everything is well cooked together, remove from the heat and add to the potatoes.

Third, make a bechamel sauce (melt butter; add flour and stir until it just begins to change colour; add milk, stirring constantly, until the sauce achieves the consistency that you want), but add a strong dose of mustard powder to the flour stage. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix the sauce into the potatoes.

Fourth, mix the potatoes well and put in a large shallow roasting pan. Grate a sharp cheddar cheese over the top, liberally. Cook at 350 degrees until the cheese looks good and bubbly. Eat it.

This will not win you any culinary awards, but it will make you friends and taste great and expand your waistline, all of which is more to the point.

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.