More or less, it took two days to prepare Baba Ghannooj this week, though active time clocked at just under 30 minutes. We grilled out last night, and I roasted a plump eggplant in preparation for another meal. Today, I reached for the roasted eggplant (from the refrigerator) and blended it with my remaining baba ingredients. Here’s my basic baba recipe:
Two-Day Baba Ghannouj
1 large eggplant
2 tablespoons tahini
3 cloves garlic, diced
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
splash of extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
Rinse eggplant. Grill over medium heat 20 minutes, turning as necessary. Gently peel eggplant while still warm. We never turn down baba ghannouj, but I wanted to reserve the baba for another day, so I sealed the eggplant and refrigerated it for about 24 hours. Next day . . . I placed the baba in the blender with all of the ingredients and blended for two minutes. Results: two-day baba rates right up there with one-day fresh.
It’s so easy, and if you love the heat in the kitchen, you’ll love canning — it was over 80° in the tent this evening! I use a water-bath canner and stick with high-acid foods; tomatoes, apples, peppers, etc. It usually takes me all day, given my arrangements, but once I get into a rhythm, it goes pretty quick. Oh, I do have a longer processing time for high-altitude. So far, I’ve made some herb tomatoes and salsa, next I think I’ll make tomato sauce…oh, oh, and I’d love to try a chutney — I just like saying chutney. Plus, I can use the little 4 oz. jars instead of the larger pint jars. Sometimes it’s nice to have a smaller container, so you don’t overeat, a favorite pastime.
I was intimidated by canning, the word made me think if I fail, I may hurt or kill someone, but really, it’s not that scary. I’ve lost a few — cans, not people — and it’s pretty obvious when you’ve made a mistake, which can usually be corrected by reprocessing it within 24 hours, if not, you learned and hopefully won’t make the same mistake. Get yourself a good book; mine was a gift from our very dear friends, it answered my questions and is full of recipes. Wish I had been canning years ago!
The Impudent Oyster in Chatham is one of my favorite restaurants on the Cape for dining. It has been around for over 30 years and their Portuguese Mussels are one of my favorite dishes on the menu. They are simmered in a tomato sauce with onions, peppers and chorizo and are simply delicious. The dish inspired me to create my own version with the best seafood blend on Cape Cod. Start by soaking and cleaning a dozen cherrystone clams, 1 lb mussels, 1/2 lb of halibut, 6 sea scallops and a dozen shrimp. Set aside in a cool place. In a large dutch oven saute 2 cloves slivered garlic, 1/2 onion chopped and a pinch of hot pepper flakes in olive oil until soft. Add 1 chorizo link and 1/2 red bell pepper, chopped and saute for 2 minutes. Add 10 oz. can of chopped plum tomatoes. Stir in 1/2 cup of dry red wine and simmer for 1/2 hour until the sauce has reduced in half. Raise the heat to a high simmer and gently place the clams and mussels at the bottom of the pot and cover. Steam for 7 minutes and add the halibut. Cover and steam for another 7 minutes. When all the clams and mussels are open, nestle the scallops and shrimp in the simmering sauce for the final 3 minutes and lower heat. Serve stew in a deep bowl with crusty bread for dipping. Serves 3-4 seafood lovers.
The baking binder is done. And in all honesty after this post going to be split in two, it’s way too heavy. After spending the better part of two days weeding through recipes and lovingly giving them this home, you better believe I”m trying one of these babies tonight. This afternoon my Mom, sister and I are FINALLY going to go see Julie & Julia. So in the spirit of all things cooking and baking here is a little contest to have some fun with.
Here’s what you have to do: Guess how many pages are in my completed baking binder, shown above.
And to clarify one page= one sheet protector.
Leave a comment with your guess and next Sunday I will pick the winner, the one who guesses closest without going over wins! Want to know what you are playing for?
***************
Pie Every Day: Recipes and Slices of Life
by Pat Willard
This book changed my mind about pie. I have been a pie hater in the past.. Every book or article you read starts out scaring you to death on how difficult it is to make a good pie and I’m a pretty dang good baker if you ask me. So this little cookbook was a library find, then I sucked it up and bought a used library copy from Alibris. Just a note that I do purchase used books as a principle so your copy will be a used copy in very good condition.
Here is the Amazon.com review:
“The simple directions and soothing reassurance in Pie Every Day may single-handedly raise a pie revival. Pat Willard presents easy, convenient techniques. She praises the food processor as an aid to turning out piecrusts with ease. Clear instructions for everything, from the kind of flour to use, to easing the crust into the pan, make this seem truly possible. When time for baking is out of the question, Willard’s stories about her life and pie baking are amusing, calming, and uplifting. Reading this book can be as satisfying as sitting down with a slab of homemade pie and a good cup of coffee”.
This dish is a pain in the neck to make. But it is so, so, so good…
We had roast potatoes for a side – before I really started the lobsters, we prepped those and put them in the oven. Potatoes and herbs from the garden, seasoned with salt and pepper, and roasted in olive oil with a little chicken stock. Simple and easy but tasty.
Onto the lobsters.
We named them Bert and Ernie. Aren’t they adorable? (Not really. Lobsters are ugly. Thankfully, they are also delicious.)
Parsley, bay, thyme, carrots, onion, peppercorns, white wine, water. Should have celery but we were out.
The recipe directs you to boil some aromatics in water and white wine for 15 minutes, then boil the lobsters in that same mixture until they are done. The liquid you end up with after this process becomes the base for the sauce. It’s a really simple but brilliant idea, and if I ever need to make lobster stock for a sauce I will probably use this method again.
At this point it is approximately 95 degrees in our kitchen. I am holding the lid on the pot so they don’t escape – I expected the cooking of lobsters to be a bit more dramatic but it really wasn’t. They didn’t scream or thrash around or do anything else I would do if dropped in boiling (if delicious smelling) stock.
Fifteen minutes later. I sort of tried to feel bad for killing them. Clearly I am a monster because I totally didn’t.
The remaining prep is pretty boring – make the sauce, chop up the lobsters, combine them with mushrooms, assemble the dish. We don’t have any good tools for cracking lobster claws, so mostly ended up just smashing the shells and picking them apart. I expect we will be picking small bits of lobster shell from the far reaches of the kitchen for the rest of our lives.
Final assembly.
Final plating. It is kind of a beige dish but it’s really, really good. Very rich though, especially the sauce…
This was my first foray into cooking from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The recipe was really well-written and the techniques described really WORKED. This is huge – recipes are so often wrong or poorly describe techniques. Julia Child and Simone Beck really did publish a remarkable book.
That said, I’m never making lobster thermidor again. I will make other recipes from the book though – I can’t wait to try them, actually.
Bacon. It’s not something I keep stocked in my Frigidaire, but it is something that is hard to resist. It is the consummate ingredient when cooking. There’s never been a time I’ve eaten a dish including bacon that I didn’t enjoy. Not once have I ever said, “Oh yuck! Bacon”. More likely than not I say, “Bacon makes everything better”.
This kid takes a love of bacon to the extreme, but it totally cracked me up. Enjoy!
Because photographs and artwork lend insight into time periods that words might not (a picture is worth a thousand words, right?), it behooves those of us with a penchant for food history (and just plain prurient curiosity!) to examine visual renditions of the past. While reading old diaries, journals, and letters, I want to chide the authors, “Just take a picture!” or “Why didn’t you take a picture, so we can see what you really mean.”
But some people did take photographs, and like many of us, failed to write the details on the back, so in some ways we are no better off than we would be had we had no pictures at all.
The following photographs come from the The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960.
Rest houses at Lukudu
The East African equivalent of the dak bungalows of India. In A Household Book for Tropical Colonies (1939),* author E. G. Bradley proses the following for “Lunch on the Road”:
Meat or fish sandwiches; Salad sandwiches; Cold boiled chicken joints which have cooled in their own jelly; Cold mutton or pork chops; Little pies or sausage rolls; Fish, chicken, or potato salad in a glass jar, made the night before; Potatoes boiled in t heir jackets, eaten cold in slices in the fingers, with butter; A tin of asparagus, and a tin-opener [italics hers, indicating that people tend to be the same regardless of the times, and FORGET the can-opener! Yikes!], and a small jar of mayonnaise; Radishes and salt; Cold stuffed eggs; Cold stuffed tomatoes; A tin of fruit and a tin-opener. Spoons!
The vegetable garden
A house of British officials
E. G. Bradley says, in a way contradicting her advice for road food,
It need not be added that fresh food is much more healthful than tinned and should be used in preference when possible. In very hot climates even cooked meat will not keep. Small quantities of steak, mince, oxtail, tongue, chops, etc., are bought two or three times a week, with chicken or fish on other days. A diet chiefly of fish, egg and chicken dishes is more healthful and pleasant in the tropics when it can be achieved.
A typical kitchen
Kamante, Karen Blixen’s cook, wrote a chapter about cooking in his unique work, Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s tales from Out of Africa (collected by Peter Beard, 1975):
Many Europeans came to see my cooking. I had to cook a fish with egg at the top and no bones.Such could make them very happy. Once, there came very important people: the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Wales. I had to cook a very strange fish got from Mombasa. It is the crab one with mnay legs and arms. I had to boil it so as to take off the skin; then take off its meat and mix with a sauce and salad.
A lunch with Italian dignitaries
In her 1890 Colonial Household Guide,** Mrs. A. R. Barnes wrote of setting the table:
In preparing a table for any meal care must be taken to have different dishes placed as uniformly as possible, and no knives or forks so near the edge of the table as to be easily knocked off. Be careful to keep the table cloth clean and neatly folded up after use. …
Eating manioc at Lado
*Although this book came later than many of the photos in this essay, the sentiment remains true to the experience.
**Now in a reprinted edition, titled Where the Lion Roars: An 1890 African Colonial Cookery Book (2006). It deals with South Africa. Note that the new edition left out Mrs. Barnes’s comments on gardening.
