The Hungry Tiger

Lemons in context

I am in a slack, slack state following my exam. But today I made a lovely potato salad that included minced preserved lemon (skins only), and thought I ought to report on the results. It was a very good combination.

The thing about preserved lemons is that before you make them, you wonder: What would I use preserved lemons for? But then once you get started, you want to put them in everything. Anywhere that a little bit of mysterious lemoniness would be nice, preserved lemons are good.

Consider: tossed in a green salad, potato salad, or pasta salad; over asparagus; over broccoli; over spinach; in melted butter for dipping artichokes; in couscous; in a stew of whatever, along with olives; in Spanish rice; with baked or mashed winter squash; as a garnish for carrot soup; as part of a Mediterranean-style gratin; with lentil stew; with penne and fresh tomato sauce; as part of a Greek egg-and-lemon soup; in a olive-oil pasta sauce; minced to the point of puree and mixed with butter and herbs to make a spread for cucumber sandwiches... you can fill in many more possibilities once you get started.

Preserved lemons

There has been quite a lot of interest in the matter of my preserved lemons, and this afternoon I decided I needed a soothing study break activity, so I made a fresh batch and have chronicled the process for you. It's really very, very simple and foolproof; the hardest part is waiting for the lemons to finish preserving.

Eggplant stew with preserved lemons

Too tired to get the pictures off the camera right now, but tonight I made a really successful improvised Middle Easterny stew kind of thing by dicing an eggplant and popping it in the oven to roast while I sauteed onion in olive oil with some berbere. Eggplant, red peppers and two quarters of chopped preserved lemon into the pan, sauteed, added a bit of water, covered, let cook. Stirred in about a cup of leftover cooked beans, heated through. Eggplants cooked to collapsing unslimy perfection, peppers still with a bit of bite, lemon very lemony but with the preserved mysteriousness flavor along for the ride, mm. Wonderful spicy lemony savory vegetable-y goodness, fantastic with a crisp salad that included a bunch of crumbled fresh cheese.

Holy moly, the preserved lemons are great. I should probably start another jar right now, so that I have some when these are done. I should, in fact, start a couple of jars so that I can give a jar or two to people who would both deserve and enjoy them.

Onion preserves

This was a lazy, reading and cooking kind of weekend. Yesterday I made a big batch of onion "confit," basically a preserve of very slow cooked onions, resulting in a thick, jamlike essense of caramelized onion that makes a very nice condiment for many things. It cooks for a whole day, but the amount of hands-on attention required is fairly minimal. Six large white onions yielded just under a quart of confit. I started in the early afternoon, and took:

6 large onions, quartered and sliced
4 bay leaves
a teaspoon or two of dried thyme
ground black pepper


and sautéed them over a medium-low flame in about 3/4 cup, combined, of butter and olive oil, stirring occasionally.



After that had cooked for about twenty minutes and given up lots of juices, I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of some storebought vegetable demiglace I had around and simmered everything for about ten minutes more. Then the lid went on and everything went into the oven at 200 degrees to cook until the next day. After about six hours, I checked on it, found it distinctly soupy, and decided to uncover the pot partially. That worked fairly well -- I think next time I might even just leave the lid off the whole time. It was ready in time for a lateish breakfast, as seen above.

Tonight, we'll be having some more with runny cheese, crackers, and a salad. I could see this becoming a staple. Maybe someday I could be generous enough to make a couple of batches in a row and dole it out in properly canned pint helpings, as gifts for Very Good People who like their onions.

I'm also thinking that it would be really good with a crumbly cheese of some sort and pears, for some reason. I haven't had a nice pear in ages, and it's not really the season for them, but my brain is crying out, "Eat this with a pear!" so I may see what I can do.

Aftermath, and crispy onions

It's been a busy and domestic couple of days. Pictures of our lovely Xmas main dish and some very tasty, chewy, not-too-sweet chocolate almond macaroons to follow, as soon as I can find our blasted flash memory card reader.

In the meantime, I have learned a lovely method for making perfect crispy fried onions, good for use in many Middle Eastern dishes, casseroles, pilafs, legumes, or salads, from Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Greens and Grains, a present from my mother. In the book, it is part of a much more elaborate recipe, but the onions are so useful, such a fine condiment for so many things, that it deserves to be raised up on its own. The technique is simply this:

Choose a time when you'll be in the house all afternoon or evening; the active effort involved in making these is low, but you need to be around for a while. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Take two pounds (yes, that's rather a lot) of onions. Peel and cut into fine dice. Put into a large, oven-safe skillet with 1/3 cup olive oil, 2 teaspoons of water, and a teaspoon of salt. Cook, covered, over medium heat for 15 minutes. Remove the cover and transfer to the oven. Roast for about three hours, stirring every fifteen minutes or so. They will eventually turn a crisp, deep red-brown. Remove the pan from the oven and push the onions to one side of the pan. Tip the pan away from the onions, so that the oil drains away. Scoop out the onions and transfer to a plate lined with paper towels, to drain. They will crisp up even more as they cool. The oil, cooled, is very nice for salad dressing.

On peanuts, noodles, and roasted green things

S. has already written about his peanut noodles. He made a big batch of the sauce the other night -- delicious as usual. We didn't have any rice noodles, so we used udon instead, which worked beautifully. I'm becoming very fond of the simple dried udon I can get at the co-op; there's something so neat and tidy about the way it's bundled, and the length of the noodles is perfect with chopsticks. I've found that it really is important to rinse them in cold water after cooking (if you want hot noodles, you should plunge the cold rinsed noodles into boiling water for a minute, which is sort of a pain, but not much of one if you have a tea kettle): it rinses away the extra starch and gives them their characteristic slippery texture.

Anyway, now we have some leftover peanut sauce, which is a great treat. It's good over lots of different kinds of vegetables, particularly green beans and eggplant. It's also excellent, thinned, as a dipping sauce for lentil or other vegetable croquettes.

What I did tonight was to roast broccoli and green beans. There are very few vegetables, it seems, that do not benefit from being tossed in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted in a good hot oven. I was never particularly fond of broccoli as a kid, maybe because the usual ways of cooking it -- steaming or even stir-frying -- don't do it justice. But roasted in the oven it gets toasty and dense and very good. There's no need to stop while it's crunchy, because it won't get waterlogged or mushy, and this is a great boon, in my view. A fully-cooked vegetable is a lovely thing. Best of all, they're so easy to make that they hardly qualify as a recipe. Here's what you do:

ROASTED BROCCOLI AND GREEN BEANS

Preheat the oven to 425° F.

Cut up one bunch of broccoli. You can use just the florets, if you are feeling inclined that way, or peel the stems and cut them into chunks. Irregularly sized pieces are fine; the little ones will get crispy and the big ones will provide substance. Take a handful of green beans, or more, and snap off the stems.

Pour a tablespoon or two of olive oil into the bottom of a large baking pan. Tip in the vegetables and shake the pan until they're coated evenly. Sprinkle some nice salt over top and shake again.

Roast for twenty minutes to half an hour, giving the pan a shake every now and again. Serve hot or at room temperature, by themselves or with a sauce; the peanut sauce is very nice indeed, as I said, but so is a shake of sesame oil, or a vinaigrette, or lemony garlic butter, or a fried egg, or nothing at all.

The whitest of toasts, Welsh rabbit

The other night we were having something-or-other that really cried out for toast. But alas, there was no bread in the house, and dinner was almost ready. So S. ran out to the bodega down the block and brought home a loaf -- of Wonder Bread. It is a variety described as "buttermilk," though the effect of this buttermilk is a little difficult to discern. Maybe it's noticably different that normal, ordinary Wonder Bread, but it seems pretty plain to me. It's Wonder Bread, the Twinkie of breads, terrifying in its shelf-stability and squishy whiteness. But oh, it makes the dandiest toast.

I was perhaps unjustifiably shocked by how Platonically ideal wondertoast turns out to be. So evenly and crisply does it toast, so steamy and toasty is the smell that rises as it does, so perfectly and goldenly does it take the butter. I don't think I'm going to start buying it all the time, but I also won't have the slightest bit of trouble using it up.

And so we have been having toast aplenty. First we had it with a sort of classic British fry-up (vegetarian variation). Last night we had succotash with buttered toast fingers (delicious). And we've been having it most every morning with my new absolute favorite spread, Mackays spiced ginger preserve. It is a sort of marmelade of ginger, with lovely tender pieces scattered throughout. I am the sort of person who can eat alarming quantities of crystallized ginger at a sitting, and one of the most wonderful things I have ever eaten was a piece of stem ginger in syrup, which if you can get it is utterly divine alongside a savory breakfast, at least if you are the kind of person who likes it when the maple syrup gets among your sausages.

I own a much loved and battered copy of Jane and Michael Stern's Square Meals, which is a somewhat bewildering cross between campy food history, with deadpan recipes for things like the grape-juice infused "Kilauea Purple Passion Rice" mixed together with genuinely appealing nostalgia dishes like noodle kugel. Their section on "Toast and Cereal," which falls mainly into the latter category, suggests baking your own in a lidded pullman loaf pan (an item I have never encountered in real life) or using the classic Peppridge Farm Toasting White, which I'm sure is dandy too.

And when you've obtained your perfect toasting bread, and life is a bit much for you to bear, and you've tired of butter and jam and cinnamon sugar and even ginger preserves, you can have that most nursery of lunches, Welsh rarebit.

WELSH RAREBIT

For two people:
Four to six slices bread
Butter
8 oz. cheddar cheese
1/4 c. beer (flat is fine), or milk if you are feeling extra mild-mannered
1 t. prepared mustard
Pepper

Gently melt cheese and beer together, stirring, until smooth. Do not allow to boil. Stir in mustard and pepper. Meanwhile, toast and butter bread. Cut into triangles. Pour cheese over toast. Eat with knife and fork.

An unusual egg salad

For Amy, from my mother. This is a superlatively tasty egg salad. It is not quite like egg salads you are used to; it is drier, and more fine in texture. It is terrific on crispy toasted things.

THE ONLY EGG SALAD I LIKE

6 or 7 eggs
1 large or 2 small yellow onions, sliced thin
6-8 oz fresh mushrooms- pref. cremini, baby bellos, or other dark type, sliced
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Dill, preferably fresh
Mayo
Paprika, preferably hot hungarian (optional)

In frying pan with a generous double blurb of olive oil, slow cook onions until pale gold; add mushrooms a little later, timing so they will be ready at the same time as the onions.

Put onions, mushrooms and hard boiled eggs, cut up coarsely, in food processor. Pulse off and on, checking frequently, until combined and in small bits, but still fluffy, rather than pasty. (If you have no food processor, this can be instead chopped very finely in a mezzaluna or with a sharp knife -- it is very time consuming, but also very authentic, as this is how the old bubbies did it.) Scoop into bowl. Add several large spoons of mayo, and chopped dill and stir to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper. Smooth top of bowl and sprinkle with paprika. Chill.

Cocktails and nibbles

Last night we had a cocktail party of sorts. It was quite a success, and now I am too feeble to do much of anything, including my French exercises. But at least the apartment is magically not a hideous mess, thanks to the magic of making it very clean beforehand and having a dishwasher. Also, I was clever enough to devise a plan where we had an impressive spread of food, but nothing was at all difficult to make (and some of it was artfully purchased). I got it all made in about three hours, and memorized Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" while I was at it. Here was the menu:

Crostini
Tuscan white bean spread
Red pepper and onions, sauteed in olive oil
Eggplant agrodulce
Salad of tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella
Deviled eggs
Focaccia
Tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole
Crackers
Cheese
Wasabi peas

A relatively well-stocked bar for cocktails, with simple syrup and lemons and limes A pitcher of Pimms Cup
Wine
Beer
Juice

CROSTINI
Buy a loaf of crusty bread. Slice it. Toast lightly, just until the bread is dry and firm and slightly golden. Let cool on a rack, not on a plate (the steam will soften it back up, which you do not want). Scrub each slice with a clove of garlic, on both sides. Then keep them around until your guests arrive. Brush with olive oil and toast to a deep gold in a toaster oven or a 400° F. oven. Encourage your guests to spoon the other antipasti on top, to make bruschetta.

TUSCAN WHITE BEAN SPREAD
Drain a can of white beans, preferably organic. Reserve the liquid. Take three or four cloves of garlic and mince with a generous pinch of kosher salt or sea salt into a puree. Heat a bit of olive oil in a skillet and sauté the garlic for a minute, along with some thyme. Add the beans and cook over gentle heat, mashing them with the side of your wooden spoon or spatula. Add the bean liquid to bring it back to a creamy, spreadable consistency.

EGGPLANT AGRODULCE
Take two medium-small eggplants. Peel and slice into 1/2" half-circles. Toss these with olive oil and salt and pile in a baking dish. Scatter a few garlic cloves among them and cover. Bake at 400° F. for about 20 minutes. Uncover and stir. Continue baking until utterly collapsing, about 20 minutes more, stirring every 5 minutes or so. Remove from oven and sprinkle with balsamic vinegar and a bit of lemon juice. Add about a tablespoon of capers. Mix thoroughly and let cool.

FOCACCIA
1 teaspoon yeast, 1 1/4 c. warm water, 3 1/2 c. flour, 1 T. olive oil (plus extra for oiling the bowl while it rises and for brushing on top before baking), 1 T. salt, crispy fried onions folded in between first and second rise. First rise: one and a half hours; second rise: half an hour; third rise, after shaping and dimpling all over: forty-five minutes. Bake at 425° F until it's done.

DEVILED EGGS, TOMATO SALAD, PEPPERS AND ONIONS
Oh, I don't really need to tell you how to make any of that, do I?

PIMMS CUP
Fill pitcher one third of the way up with ice. Add sliced orange and cucumber (with peel on, please). One part Pimms No. 1 to a little over one part ginger ale. Several drops of Angustura bitters. When you pour a glass full, garnish with a slice of orange and a slice of cucumber from the pitcher.

Ickle ickle, little pickle

Last week we bought some sweet gherkins when what we really wanted was cornichons.*



In Spain, Graduate Student Girl and I ate heartily of cornichons. They are very fine with bread and cheese, especially when eaten outdoors by starving linguists. As illustrated below, we obtained a jar of exceptionally packaged pickled foods. In the shop, the jar appeared to be stuffed with four layers of stuff: cornichons on the bottom, then olives, then a layer of red peppers, then on top a nice row of cocktail onions. But when we opened the jar, we discovered that they were prethreaded on toothpicks: pickles-on-a-stick! We were charmed, and delighted both in waving them around and in laying them down alongside the cheese in a split baguette and then gently pulling out the stick, resulting in a tidy little row of condimentos. It tasted good, too.

Back to the present (or nearly), S. and I were sadly disappointed when it came time to eat our purchase -- I'm sure there are lots of people who really do enjoy a sweet gherkin on its own, and its sweetness might potentially put it in a camp with Branston pickle, which is of course more of a relish, as a suitable component of a ploughman's lunch. But we were put off. Sweet gherkins are really awfully sweet, and far too much with the dessert spices (cinnamon? cloves? allspice? that sort of thing) to seem quite right. I imagine that if I'd been brought up in the south, surrounded by things like watermelon rind pickle, I'd have a place in my palate for them, but I wasn't, and I don't. Oh well.



Anyway, we went and bought some cornichons, and some cocktail onions to boot, and had those with bread and cheese for lunch yesterday, and were much happier. But still this jar of gherkins remains. What to do with them? At last I realized that the little buggers are perfectly at home in a nice potato salad, provided they are cut up small enough. So I made a batch of what I think I will now call the Justly Famed Potato Salad -- you see I am very modest -- with some teeny cubes of gherkin added. It is a fine addition, and I recommend the variation. The only trouble is that at this rate we will have to eat potato salad for our lunches for some weeks on end, as it only took three eeny gherkins to provide plenty of gherkinbits for a whole batch, and the gherkins are legion. We'll see how it goes.



*Bonus cornichon-related link -- the "Cornichon loverZ clan". This one is far less enlightening, but more entertaining. It also, I must warn you, plays music. What's worse, it's French. Click at your own risk.

Spicy lentil sauce for pasta

Yesterday, rice and lentils. Today, pasta and lentils. Let's hear it for scraping through to the end of the fiscal year!

SPICY LENTIL SAUCE

Chop an onion and sauté it in some olive oil. As it begins to grow translucent, add some oregano and some cumin. Chop up some garlic and add that too. When it is all looking limp and cooked, toss in a handful of red lentils. Sauté for a little while, then add water to cover. Turn the heat down to low. Add salt (plenty) and cook until the lentils are falling apart, adding more water as needed. Add lots of freshly ground black pepper, maybe twenty turns of the mill, and a squirt or two of hot sauce.

Toss your (shaped, not long) pasta in it. If you are lucky enough to have some parmesean cheese around, grate it on top.

About pizza

Tonight I made pizza with an assortment of mushrooms from the farmer's market. The crust came out very well indeed. Part of that is that I am getting better at shaping the pizza quickly -- I've been doing a thing where I make a disk by draping the dough over my fists and stretching, but then rapidly transferring it to the pan and shaping it by making my hands into C shapes and moving over and around the dough with the sides of my hands, stretching just by moving them outward. Somehow this works well for me as a way of getting the dough evenly stretched out with a minimum of fuss and bother, while leaving a nice even thicker edge all around. The other thing that I think helped is that I moved the rack up to the very top of the oven, a strategy recommended by John Thorne for getting the hottest possible temperatures out of a home oven. The result was wonderfully crisp of crust but chewy and tender inside, even in the thinnest parts of the circle.

You will be able to tell from all this that I possess neither a pizza peel nor a stone -- I just shape the pizza right on a big steel baking sheet, well coated with olive oil. Clearly this strategy is utterly inauthentic, and I do sometimes feel like I ought to get a peel and some unglazed tiles and do it right. But then my shaping strategy would be hard to adapt to a peel, and my new top-of-the-oven technique would not work well with leaving the tiles permanently in the oven. Nor, come to think of it, would I have much confidence in my ability to transfer pizza from peel to stones in such a tight space. So goodbye, dull care, and also authenticity, I say.

The pizza dough recipe I have here is attributed in my notebook to Carol Field's The Italian Baker. But now I have my own copy of the book, and I don't see any recipe there that quite corresponds. So either it is from another book of hers, or it has been already poked and prodded and adjusted into shape by others who have gone before. It is very good. The quantities below make two sizeable thin pizzas, or one thickish one. For the two of us, or for us and one guest, I halve them.

GOOD PIZZA

1 1/2 c. warm water
2 t. dry yeast
1 1/2 t. sugar


Let these sit for 5-10 minutes.

Add 2 T. olive oil, 4 c. flour, and 1 1/2 t. salt. Mix well and knead very thoroughly. Clean your bowl and oil it lightly. Return dough to bowl, cover with a tea towel, and set in a warm, still place.

First rise: 1 hour or until doubled. Punch down.

Second rise: 20 minutes maximum.

Heat oven to 450° F. While it warms up, shape the pizza (or the first of your two pizzas, if that's what you're up to). Apply your sauce and other treats, but not cheese. Bake 10 minutes. Then add the cheese and any delicate toppings, like basil or other fresh leafy things. Return to oven and bake just until the cheese is bubbly.

Canning is a girl's best friend.

Lately I have been thinking way too much about canned foods and gallons of water and crank-powered radios and keeping at least three quarters of a tank of gas in the car and really it just makes me tired and sad. But dinner out of a jar can, at least, be cheering and restorative.

It helps to have jars full of things that are specially worthy. Last night's supper was homemade flatbread (okay, not from a jar), delicious roasted piquillo peppers, enormous and wonderful kalamata olives in shockingly good olive oil, and labneh.

Onion relish, chickpeas, an effort to catch up

I am a little behind in the things I want to write up here, I'm afraid. Just before I last went away, we had this very tasty chickpea meal. It would have been significantly better if I'd also made some fresh and flavorful flatbreads to wrap the chickpeas in; the storebought pitas were pretty blah. Next time I will try to start a little earlier, or at least buy some superior bread. I should look at the local(ish) Indian grocery for frozen naan, because I know I would often be very happy indeed to have them on hand.

The onion relish recipe that follows (only minimally adjusted from the New York Times article on sumac I linked to a little while ago) complements the chickpeas beautifully and sparked up the meal significantly. It's so easy, too, and would be great with any number of curries. It mellows and melds as it sits, and you could keep it in the refrigerator for days. However, it was also just dandy made about half an hour before dinner, and we ate the whole batch between the two of us.

CHICKPEAS, TART AND SPICY

1 cup boiled, cubed potatoes
1 can drained chickpeas
1 T. olive oil
1 t. cumin seeds
6 cloves garlic, minced into a paste
3/4 c. salsa out of a jar, medium or hot
1/2 t ground cumin
1/2 t amchoor, or juice of 1/2 lemon
3/4 c. water
1 t tomato paste

Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan over medium-high heat. Add the cumin seeds. After a few seconds, add the garlic and cook for about a minute, stirring constantly. Still stirring, add the salsa and cook another 2 minutes. Add the potatoes and chickpeas, the water, the ground cumin, and the amchoor. Turn heat to low and cover. Cook about 20 minutes, then remove cover, stir in tomato paste, and cook down to desired thickness.

ONION RELISH

1 red onion, minced
1 T ground sumac
2 t. olive oil
1 t salt


Mix. Let sit, stirring occasionally. Serve.

Crispy onion shreds

Lest I forget, I want to record my recent discoveries regarding crispy onion shreds. These are one of the most terrific condiments known to humankind -- deep brown (but not burnt!) crackling slivers of onion, the not-so-distant but greatly superior cousin of the "French fried onion rings" in a can that are the key ingredient in so many casseroles also starring cream-of-mushroom soup. This is not to say that I don't like those critters, in their place. But these onions turn plain dishes fancy, taste drop-dead wonderful, and are much easier to make than I feared. Because they involve frying, though, it is best to make them in quantity. Here's how I do it, with strategies pieced together from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, John Thorne's Pot on the Fire, and my own fevered brow.

3 medium onions, cut in half and sliced absolutely as thin as possible (thinner!)
olive oil to come up 1 1/2" in a wok or heavy pot


OPTIONAL, BUT NICE
1/2 t. turmeric and
2 t. salt dissolved in
2 T. water


The onions fry up more crisply if you can get rid of some of the moisture first. Madhur Jaffrey says that Iranian cooks spread their onions out on towels and let them dry out overnight; I don't have the patience, so I used a hair dryer (!) to get them dryish, instead. You can also toss them with salt, let them rest while they weep out some moisture and then roll them up in towels and squeeze to get rid of all the moisture you can. In that case, omit the salt from the turmeric water.

Set a sieve over a largeish bowl and lay out paper towels or coffee filters for draining the onions upon when the time comes.

Heat the oil over medium-high heat until it begins to shimmer. Tip in the onions and give them a stir. If you're using it, dip your fingers into the turmeric mixture and sprinkle over the onions, until you have used up most of the liquid. Stir some more. Don't be impatient; it will take a few minutes for the magic to happen, but when it does, it all goes quite quickly, so pay attention.

First they will wilt, then turn straw colored and limp, and then rapidly turn crisp and brown. When they are a reddish brown throughout, but nowhere black, turn off the heat and pour the contents of the pot into the sieve. You'll save the oniony oil for other purposes (DON'T, for the love of plumbing, pour it down the drain) -- you can use it once or twice more for frying onions, and anywhere else you would want onion flavor with your olive oil. From the sieve, spread the onions over the paper and let them drain for about 15 minutes. Once they have cooled, they should be very crispy. Store them in a tightly closed glass jar. They keep for several days, except that you will eat them first.

PS. I don't know why adding the turmeric liquid doesn't make the oil spatter horribly--maybe it's because the oil isn't too hot just then, because you've just added all the onions, or maybe because there's already extra water in the oil, being released from the onions? But it didn't spatter, at least for me.