Keep it Lenticular

It’s really very cold in Boston. And I have a head cold. But despite these facts, I have invented a new lentil soup from french lentils (the tiny army green ones!) When cooking this soup I like to think about other things that are lentil shaped, such as: spaceships, lenses, whoopie pies, galaxies, symbols in a marching band…

So here is my recipe for spicy lentil soup! It depends on a delightful Ethiopian spice blend called Berbere, which, if you don’t have you can make yourself from the contents of your spice cupboard (see below for my version).

Claire’s Ethiopian French Spaceship Soup:

(serves 4)
Heat 1 liter water on stove with
3 vegetable bouillon cubes
When boiling, add:
1 cup French lentils (or more if you like!)
Simmer 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, chop up 3 carrots, 2 celery stalks, 1/2 a pepper (orange, red or yellow. NOT green)
Add to simmering lentils.
Next chop up:
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic.

Toss some olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan and fry the onions over medium heat until transluscent. Then add the garlic and peppers and 1 tablespoon berbere spice mixture and continue to cook until golden. You can even let some onions get a little crispy – it’ll taste delicious.
Test the lentils to see if they are done – they should smoosh easily under the back of a spoon.
When the lentils are done, add the onion/garlic/pepper mix and simmer for 2-3 more minutes. Serve in warm bowls w/ cracked pepper on top!

Berbere Spice Blend: The “What’s in my cupboard?” version

If you have whole versions of the below ingredients, all the better. Crush in a morter & pestle or mix in a bowl (if only using ground). For the lentil soup recipe above, just use 1 tablespoon from the mixture you’ve made! Don’t add this whole recipe to your soup!

To make a small jar’s worth, mix together:

1 tsp chili powder

1 tsp ginger

1/2 tsp green or black cumin

1/4 tsp cardamom

1/4 tsp hungarian paprika

1/4 tsp allspice

pinch of cinnamon and cloves

1 tsp salt (optional)

Pounding out Chai

To warm things up a little – “Feel’s like 5º today” said the internets – I started concocting my own little Masala chai. Technically “Masala” refers to a mixture of spices (i.e. Masala Curry), which is added to “chai” a sweetened milky tea.

In any case, we serve Chai tea lattés at my coffee shop, and they are quite popular among people needing a little siesta from the coffee. A chai latte has less caffeine than coffee, and even less than straight up tea, but provides a nice spicy kick on account of ginger, cardamom and cloves.

Thanks to good friends and family who know my current obsession with spices, I am now, post christmas, armed with all the necessary tools to pound and grate and transform the dried essences of the earth into spice mixtures such as Masala.

Today I was excited to delve into my collection of spices and get a little creative. My brother Colin gave me some funny licorice sticks (origin: Turkey) for christmas, which really just look like twigs he picked up in Brooklyn. But they made their way into the chai via a spice grater from my housemate Lucy, and then got pounded together via a genius granite mortar and pestle from Sarah. I hope this can count as my thank you note!
Toasting the seeds such as coriander, star anise, cardamom and peppercorns filled the kitchen with a smoky Narnia-sleigh-ride-like scent while outside the snow blew white twirls off the roofs of triple deckers. Toasting whole spices makes them easier to grind, but they should be carefully toasted in a small clean pan or in a toaster oven, shaken a few times, so they don’t burn.
To these I added a section of a ceylon cinnamon stick (soft and citrus-scented) a vanilla bean cut up into sections, 1/2 tsp of lemon peel and 1 tsp dried rose petals.  

 I HAD to get a flower in there somehow, and it wasn’t about to be saffron or violets. I also grated up about 1/8 cup of fresh ginger, which is currently drying in the oven on some parchment paper.

For tea I’ll use darjeeling but the best tea for Chai (so I’ve heard) is crappy british tea called CTC (crush-tear-curl) – the kind that is black and cheap and ubiquitous in England. who knew?

When the time comes, I will mix this crazy spice concoction with the tea and steep in a tea-pot for about five to ten minutes before adding a few big spoonfuls of honey and some hot milk. We’ll see how the experimental additions of licorice, coriander & rose petals turns out.

The kitchen smells so good right now – wish you were here!

I dreamt of violets

Winter. The sidewalks this first Monday of 2009 were glazed with a fantastic sugar-candy coating that was treacherous and translucent. By midday the city of Boston had sprinkled enough confectioner’s sugar over the glaze to make it less of a shuffling-contest and more – I don’t know – root beer flavored slush-puppy soup.

I’m trying to see the best in this season, but sometimes it’s just ridiculous around here. Which is why I want to reminisce about spring and tell you about this dream I had about violets.

Every spring in Oberlin, Ohio (where I went to college) there was a patch of violets that bloomed in the arboretam. “Patch” is an understatement – this was more of a rash – or let’s say, in my mother’s words “a veritable plethora” of violets. The first year I discovered them I just admired them, laid down next to them, (how often do you get to lay down next to a delightfully scented COLOR?!) and brought a few home to my messy room. The following spring, when I was in charge of lunch in my co-op (this is what we did at Oberlin. cooked and ate cooperatively, for better or for worse) I decided I needed to spruce up the salad. Remembering that edible flowers always make a salad something special, I crept out to the violet patch and picked a PAPER BAG full of violets. It was a small paper bag, and there were many many violets. I don’t believe I was violating a violet picking ban. They smelled wonderful. Serving the purple-strewn salad a few hours later, half of the co-oper’s seemed confused “what in the hell is this?” and picked them out, while the other half seemed charmed and dazzled. Or at the very least I was charmed and dazzled.

So in this dream I’m back in the arboretum in Oberlin (it’s winter) and there all these trees falling down around me – huge hardwoods teetering down and I have to dodge around them (interpret as you wish) – so I run up a hill in order to be up where the trees are falling FROM as opposed to ON and suddenly I’m greeted by an enormous expanse of purple – as though the whole ground has turned purple – and it is violets!

That was my dream. There was a part following about a catered wedding and topiary business but I won’t bore you with that. Instead, I’ll describe a delicious way to eat violets – a method not unlike what Mother Nature had in mind with all of Boston early this morning:

Crystallized Violeta

As many or as few wild violets as you wish

2 egg whites

super fine sugar

1 small clean brush, such as a watercolor brush

With your fingers or a pair of tweezers, pick up a single blossom and, with your brush dipped in a bit of egg white, gently brush the petals with the sticky egg white. Dust with superfine sugar and place on a piece of parchment paper or wax paper on a cookie sheet. Continue with the rest of the violets. Let dry in a warm, dry place for 24 to 28 hours. decorate cakes, cupcakes or just put on ice-cream.

please note: the violets seen here in the photo were not allowed proper drying time – which is essential for the crystallization effect. Thus you see some clumpy sugar-egg-white business, but still quite delicious I must say. This ice-cream treat was part of a wild-foods workshop at the Olney Friends school in Barnesville, Ohio.

Half the Rum Gone

I swear to you I won’t always write about alcohol. To prove it, I’ll spend this whole first paragraph talking about the other curiosities I cooked up for my recent blizzard-clad holiday jamboree. Toasted rosemary-brown sugar almonds (yes they call for corn syrup and no, my brother “didn’t” make a documentary about how corn syrup can kill you…), toasted butter and curry almonds, 4 layer peppermint chocolate cake with smashed candy canes on top, coffee cardamom ice cream, and pomegranate-rose-orange sorbet. I didn’t do anything to the olives except put them in a bowl. Same for the pretzels.

But the EGG NOG!! The egg nog.

In the past, I always felt like I should like it more than I did – gloppy. yellow. Wierdly viscous like a bowl full of monster phlegm. And then sprinkled with nutmeg? What is that? I didn’t really know until I attended a christmas party a few years ago and drank what tasted like clouds , clouds about to rain milk and honey and spices.

If you try anything new this cholosterol-clogged season (especially things that fall into the category of “just don’t think too hard about what’s in it”) try this. SERIOUSLY. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT. Take into consideration things like “Egg Safety” and what type of booze you have in the cupboard. While I used dark rum, brandy or bourbon would be just fine too. Serve in a large party-punch bowl sprinkled with candied orange peel.

Egg Nog (adapted from the Joy of Cooking)

serves 18

Ingredients:

12 egg yolks

1 pound confectioners sugar

2 cups dark rum

2 quarts heavy cream

8-12 egg whites

freshly grated nutmeg

candied orange peel

Beat the egg yolks in a mixer on high, slowly adding the confectioners sugar until the mixture reaches a pale yellow hue. Beating constantly, add the rum in a slow stream.

Cover and chill in the fridge to dispel the eggy taste (about 1 hour)

Add heavy cream and stir thouroughly. Joy suggests here adding another two cups of booze, but I had to draw the line. It already smelled so strong I could feel my eyelashes twitter. Hence, I used half of the alcohol called for. Totally fine. Joy also suggests another chilling stage at this point (3 hrs) which is fine if you have the time. We didn’t, so we chilled it for maybe an hour.

Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry, then lightly fold into the nog. Place bowl on table, shave nutmeg over top and adorn with slivers of candied orange peel.

Spirit of Juniper

Really, what is a person to do with so many juniper berries? Or should I say with so much juniper? Jumping junipers! I say.

I have collected juniper berries (not berries really, but the female seed-cone of the juniper bush) on multiple occasions. This last occasion was a real haul, and carried with it a few different incentives, as no sane person would dive into a prickly patch of juniper bushes just for the fun of it (excluding my very loyal father who accompanied me on my last gather, not ONCE asking me, “but what are you going to DO with these?’) Instead, we picked berries together and talked about trees.

The first reason for gathering these beautiful dark blue & green seeds was to make a ghost-bracelet for a friend of mine who was suffering from nightmares. I learned about ghost-bracelets from author Ellen Meloy, whom I find the need to quote ad nauseum, as her prose is some of the best I’ve found:

“The first time I heard a Navajo say the word gad, I thought it referred to a deity. Instead, it is the word for juniper…From juniper seeds Navajo mothers made their children bracelets of “ghost beads” to prevent bad dreams. The hard, fragrant berries bear one of the desert flora’s scarce display of turquoise. Fallen, they surround the juniper tree in a blue-green skirt.

Juniper trees are common in the American west (tall and gangly looking, not unlike cedars) but bushes are more common here in the East. On a hill in our Maine woods sits a large patch of juniper bushes (Juniper communis), low and spiky and covering a large area with their tealy-green coniferous foliage. My dad and I collected a small basket full, finding that if you sort of tickle the underside of the branch the berries fall into your hand, eliminating the pain inflicted by the stiff little needles. Stringing together a bracelet was easy, as the berries are hard and the size of small pearls. The fragrance they produce is piney and resinous, like lemons and tangerines, bright and bracing – not unlike the smell of a cold day. I think of them as etheral objects – indeed they even have a ghostly dust to them – a silvery tinge that is their waxy coating, beneath which the dark, ominous blue color shows through. The darkness of that blue reminds me of swimming off a pier and not knowing the depth or contents of the water below. Jellyfish? Mermen? In any case I hope the bracelet of gads did well by my friend.

The second use for juniper is more commonly known : GIN!

Juniper is the signature flavor in gin, and in fact the word “gin” comes from the dutch “jenever” meaning juniper. In researching the process for making gin with my faithful kitchen-cohort Samantha, we were surprised to learn that gin is indeed merely INFUSED VODKA (insofar as we could tell.) But I suppose the essential oils and phytochemicals from juniper can affect people just as any food or spice might, which would explain my mother’s aversion to gin but not to vodka.

Needless to say I love G & T’s as much as any human. yessir! And thus the infusion began…

Following some advice from a mixoligist on-line, we set out to combine the necessary aromatics to flavor our “moonshine”. Here’s what’s stewing in a bowl of 100-proof vodka right now on the kitchen table:

A quarter cup of gads: the tenderly harvested Maine ghost-beads, one cinnamon stick, twenty slightly crushed Indian tellicherry peppercorns, a pinch of saffron threads, a big old teaspoon of dried lemon peel, and the petals of one dried rose.

It smells like the scruffy piney woods went on a date with a glossy eyed botanical garden. E gads – gorgeous!

This mixture will stew for a week before we put it through cheesecloth and then the “still” – i.e. a brita filter. And the rest, I hope, is all divine cocktails and dark blue dreams…

It’s You and Me, Chicken

I don’t really feel like basting. More than anything I want to lay back and watch a movie – and not one that is an hour and a half long picture of the oven door opening and closing and juices spurting from a buttery dead bird. In fact, I’m not even hungry. I already ate some leftover barley soup and all the chocolate I could find in the house because I had such a long and horrible day at work and anyway I just smashed a red wine glass left on the windowsill from last night’s party while trying to close the window that had been open all day letting the rain puddle on the floor. Nonetheless, the chicken must be cooked. My housemate Sam and I had been to the store over the weekend and thought we should buy some meat – some big meat – so we could know our way around essential traditions of the home cook. And I had prepared moderately well for this roast-chicken dinner party – including reading all about roasting chicken in Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking and even laying out the roasting pan and carrots and onions on top of the stove. But I didn’t read the section on defrosting.

Biking home late from work last night I received the following text message from Sam, who had arrived home early to get started on dinner,

“Chicken frozen ass arctic. Bad style – need new chkn!!!

I had combined two methods of defrosting, which, as it happens, cancel each-other out; the water I’d submerged the chicken in had actually frozen around the chicken like snow-white’s crystal coffin. This is because I put it in the fridge, “Bad style.”

Sam had been home wrestling with the frozen poultry before calling her Mom Annie and then me, and all was desperate, hopeless misfortune. No crispy golden bird covered in herbs de provence and surrounded by a crown of melty onions, potatoes and carrots.

I stood in the meat section of the Jamaica Plain Stop & Shop, sweating, my bike helmet still buckled to my head wondering what meat to buy. I was filled with a determined hysteria to cook chicken, but also a sense of panicked suspicion – maybe we weren’t supposed to cook chicken after all? Maybe it was a sign from the universe? Then my friend called to say she might be early, is that okay?

Despite broken dreams and fears of damnation, the night was beautiful and we ate boneless breasts of chicken doused in pesto, a delectable roasted vegetable medley a la samantha, acorn squash spiced with Indian sugar, and salad with goat cheese and a dressing made with much garlic, though mild and perfect. To top it off, somehow Sam managed to secretly bake 3 dozen cookies that were ready just when dinner was done. The frozen bird huddled naked in the fridge, meandering out of its Shackletonian freeze, waiting for the right moment to be rubbed with olive oil and butter.

And there being only a small window in which to keep raw meat in the fridge, that moment came tonight, when no one was home except me to cook (and eat?) this damn bird. So I pulled out the giblets, rubbed it with herbs and chopped up some stuff and put it in the oven. And now the kitchen smells warm and good, and I am here at the kitchen table by myself with a jar of peanut butter, a glass of red wine and a bottle of olive oil. These are the things on the table. Also a spoon. And some weird looking apples. The chicken is making slight sizzling noises, about as loud as the clock ticking in the other room. The oven is regulating the heat – the gas turns on for a few seconds, like the sound of an airplane passing over head. Then everything is quiet again.

A Short History of Baking Powder

Today I came across my earliest baking memory. I was helping my mother bake a cake for her progressive dinner – hers being the last stop, dessert, in the progression. She had come across a recipe for one of Monet’s favorite cakes, a caked called vert vert because the batter is made with pistachios and the frosting dyed with spinach. The directions indicated that the batter was to be mixed in a pan over a low flame – a baking method I have never encountered! “Over a low flame, mix four eggs with the sugar until it has doubled in volume. Slowly add the flour, kirsch and pistachios. Pour into pan and bake for 30 minutes.”

Of course putting eggs over a flame has the potential to result in scrambled eggs. And it almost did. While whisking in the sugar I noticed thin white threads beginning to form in the pan. “Mom! Help!” I hollered, “add the flour! The eggs are scrambling!” I didn’t have time to notice whether or not the egg-sugar mixture had doubled in volume, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t, because our batter did not appear voluminous enough to fill a cake pan even after we added the flour and pistachios and kirsch.

Hence, baking powder. “I know this is cheating,” mom said in a near whisper, “But don’t you think we should add just a little ?” Neither of us wanted a repeat-experience of my fifteenth birthday cake, shaped in a heart, sans baking powder, as dense as granite.

“A teaspoon will do it.” my mom told me, and as I scooped a teaspoon of the white powder out of its jar I autimatically poured it into the palm of my left hand and began using the back of the teaspoon to crush the clumps. Then I opened my hand a little and tipped my palm like a plate, using the spoon to scrape the powder from the surface of my hand.

Suddenly the sensation of the spoon scraping against my palm made my mind leap backwards twenty years.  I don’t know if I was four or five, but it was around then; we were baking cookies, and my mother had me hold up my hand like a bowl, then poured in the teaspoon of powder, crushed it with the spoon and then had me open my tiny palm up so she could scrape the soft stuff into the flour. It was the first technique I ever learned, and to be honest I’ve been doing it ever since without thinking why – except that “lumps are bad” and biting into a lump of anything in a baked good is gross (unless it’s a lump of chocolate or fruit.)

Baking powder is a chemical leavening agent and needs to be distributed evenly throughout the other dry ingredients so that it’s “action” (creating carbon dioxide gas) is fully effective in making the cookies, biscuits or cake rise. Other leavening agents include yeast, beer, and yogurt (all biological) as well as baking soda & cream of tarter – the chemicals that when combined create baking powder. Mechanical leavening involves whipping eggwhites or creaming butter & sugar together so that tiny air bubbles form (“Beat until fluffy” as recipes say) but Monet’s cake didn’t seem to involve any of the above mentioned leaveners, neither biological, chemical nor mechanical. Perhaps the whipping of the eggs and sugar over a low flame was some kind of mechanical method of leavening, but it didn’t really work. Did Monet’s cake recipe pre-date the advent of chemical leaveners – the method most often used in baking cakes?

Technically Monet was alive (1840 – 1926) during the time when chemical leaveners were available. Certainly sodium bicarbonate or baking soda was used throughout the early 19th century, but Alfred Bird (1811 – 1878) is the man responsible for inventing our modern double acting baking powder. The double action involves two acid salts that create separate reactions – the first when the ingredients are exposed to liquid, then to heat. Alfred Bird first came up with a recipe for eggless custard, as his wife had an egg as well as a yeast allergy, so it would follow that his next invention was a leavening agent – one so common now we take it for granted. The mixture was later (and perhaps more profitably) developed by Eben Norton Horsford (1818 – 1893), who named his patented version after Count Rumford – one of the discoverers of the Law of Conservation of Energy -  a noted scientist hailing from Wobern, Mass. Rumford Baking powder is probably what you have on the shelf in your pantry: a popular product as it does not contain aluminium (a common acid salt used in chemical leaveners and detrimental to health.) As the Rumford product description reads:

“This property makes it somewhat faster acting than typical double-acting baking powders. You’ll still see a boost of leavening in the oven, but most of the reaction occurs in the mixing bowl. While this makes a more delicate crumb structure in the finished product, do not dawdle.”

So even though baking powder did exist during Monet’s lifetime, either it wasn’t easily available or it wasn’t the leavener of choice. Perhaps what made Monet’s cake rise was actually just… dawdling.  But for us there wasn’t time to summon the artist within and figure how to whip sugar into eggs over a hot stove and make a fluffy batter. Thank goodness for the chemicals on the shelf – not only did they make the cake rise, but they brought me back to baking cookies with mom circa 1987.