Belated biscotti

I’m still slogging through my backlog of pictures from the holidays.  Next up is Alida’s and my second annual biscotti bake-a-thon.  Just to be clear – this is separate from the cookie party.  Last year we made biscotti on a whim and then handed it out as Christmas presents, and this year my stepmother specifically requested them, so that was easy.

Hello, I am biscotti. You know you love me.

With the rise of the coffee shop, biscotti are venturing out of obscurity and into ubiquity.  When they pop up in bags at your local grocery chain, you know something has gone mainstream.  Before I go about making something from scratch, I often weigh whether or not it would be easier or tastier for me to buy it at a store, compel someone else to make it for me, or go to a restaurant.  I think that biscotti truly deserve to grace your kitchen, because of two main reasons: 1) they are easy and 2) I don’t like the gum-scratching shattery biscotti that are mass produced.  If I make them myself, I can underbake them slightly and enjoy a more sensuous cookie that still holds itself up to my caffe latte.

An open love letter to James Beard

I have a new lover.  And his name is James Beard.  Unfortunately, he is dead.

No, I am not a necrophiliac.  James Beard is my kitchen lover, the man who has spoken to my soul by cooking the American-style food I had feared I’d never find (outside spendy restaurants) then writing about it in a way I’ve always wanted to read and write.   He has such love for his food that it is almost a physical joy to page through his works, with just a slight aroma of pretension that only makes him endearing, because it stays within the bounds of good humor and a consistent invitation into his realm of delicious simplicity.

I had heard his name before, usually from the mouths of Top Chefs as they grappled for supremacy in the kitchen, toting up awards and culinary battle scars.  But I didn’t fully understand his impact on the American cooking scene until I committed a minor Christmas infraction by buying his book (on huge sale!), Beard on Food, while I was supposed to be shopping for others.  It’s a major no no in my family to buy yourself something once December has gotten underway.   I do not apologize.  For that day, my heart was won by this simple phrase:

“…green beans boiled until just bitey-tender…”

Spritzin it up

Anyone who knows me well knows that every Christmas, I go absolutely crazy for cookies.   For the last eight years I’ve hosted a party that has been dubbed Desa’s Slave Labor Cookie Party.  One year we made 1200 cookies in a day.  It was absolutely insane.  But painfully delicious – everyone ends up covered in powdered sugar with horrific stomachaches from too much raw cookie dough snitched off of fingers amidst preparation of literally hundreds of little dough balls.  For scale, see the pictures below.

This is the butter just for the Russian Teacakes. ONLY for the teacakes.

This would be four batches of peanut butter cookie dough.

In the end we usually make six or seven types, but my favorite has be to spritz cookies.  Spritz cookies are a little evil.  They are little butter cookies, about one or two bites, with a little lick of almond running through its delicate crumbliness.  Of course, the cheery Christmas spritz are also a pleasure to look at, and I’ve found that if I color them blue, nobody eats them and I get plenty to dunk in sugary milky tea.

Let’s talk pie crust…at epic length

I had prepped this post back before Thanksgiving, during my marathon of pie making: I ended up with 5 and a cake in the end. The cake was pretty fancy, and it’ll be up here eventually, but let’s start with what’s most important.  And that’s pie.

Most of my pies are rather straightforward.  I don’t muck about with fancy things – though that may change now that I got some pie cutters for Christmas – and I’m more preoccupied with how they taste than how they look.  I understand that you consume the dish first with your eyes, etc, etc, but you consume it last and most memorably with your tongue, teeth, and stomach.  So there.   But every once and awhile, even utilitarian I cave to the desire to make things look pretty.  The easiest way I know how to do that is a lattice crust pie.  That way, it looks like I labored intensely over the baked good of my love when really I flopped it together and went to watch some BBC murder mysteries with a gin and tonic.

A lattice crust is a must when you have vividly colored fruit.

So.  Here is a pictorial guide to pie crust!

Further vegan adventures with Victoria

My pictures are almost liberated from the camera that was simply too smart for my poor desktop.  Never again shall I shoot in RAW files.  Unless someone wants to buy me a state of the art computer for the sole reason of taking ridiculously giant photos of food…Yeah, not even I would do that.  JPEG, you are my partner in crime, for now.  What this means to you all is that in a few weeks, I will post a holiday baking bonanza while we take a stroll on the vegan side of life with one of my best friends, Victoria.

I enjoy cooking with Victoria not only because she’s great company in the kitchen, but because she’s willing to try pretty much anything to see if it will work, which comes in handy for her because she’s been vegan for over a year.  Therefore experimentation with the chemistry of cooking is useful in expanding her vegan-legal repetoire.  For me it’s more a mental exercise as I happily tear into red meat, but I definitely appreciate seeing the inventive ways Victoria works vegetables and the rather exotic vegan substitutes into her meals.

Usually she just cooks out of several good vegan cookbooks she owns, like Vegan Brunch and Veganomicon.  But sometimes there is just a recipe that is too good to not try to adapt, and one of those is Gypsy Goulash.  This is one of my favorite meals ever in wintertime (it’s so filling and heavy that it’s not incredibly appetizing in summer), but until last week, I only got to eat it every other year or so, when my roommate Gabrielle would throw her holiday party.  Usually the day before or after my cookie party (post to come later), we go to Zoo Lights and pile into her living room to be fed by her father, Andy, who is an excellent cook.  Then we loll on the couch in front of a holiday movie, too stuffed to move, imitating the nurse sharks we had gawked at hours earlier.

Unfortunately, Gypsy Goulash is cubed beef stewed in red wine and sour cream.  Victoria enjoyed a green salad and some steamed cauliflower while I gave myself over to a short period of gluttony.  Feeling guilty for my out and out food lust, she and I began to chat about how we would go about adapting the goulash and if we thought it would still be tasty.  Victoria suggested mushrooms instead of beef and soy yogurt instead of sour cream.  This sounded acceptable to me, even though I am not particularly pro-soy; I don’t like the powdery aftertaste.  But what to serve with it?  The traditional goulash is served with spaetzle, a kind of cross between a dumpling and an egg noodle – not vegan.  I served up some cauliflower to my own plate to feel a little more healthy and discovered that the goulash gravy actually went fabulously with it.  Our plan was born.  Everyone else at the party gave us the skeptical eyebrow and in the case of Gabrielle, stalwart insistence that to tamper with the goulash was to upset the course of nature, but Victoria and I charged ahead, subverting the establishment…And enjoying our overdramatization.

Leela Aunty’s Rajma

Summer before last I lucked into the trip of a lifetime.  My friend Rubai was going back to India to see her family, and I jokingly invited myself along, then the joke tumbled into reality (this seems to happen a lot, and I love it).   We ended up staying with various family  members or friends and visited Delhi, Mumbai, Amritsar, Khandala (by accident), Rishikesh, and other cities.  I met a ton of great people, learned a few words of Hindi, saw a million beautiful (and some scary) temples, got my picture taken by strangers, almost fell out of an auto rickshaw in a monsoon, sweated buckets, and generally had an unreal time. And of course, I ate lots, and lots, and lots of good food.

India Gate, in New Delhi.

I could easily write a book on the things I loved eating, and post pictures of some of them.  Unfortunately my vanity is going to prevent most of that, because it was summer in India and I was a beautiful, sticky shade of red for most of it.  I ate chicken tikka wrapped in the most tender flatbread I have ever witnessed; I would go back to India just to eat it once more.  They are called roomali roti, which captures some of the poetry that I love about Hindi.  Roomali is a handkerchief (a lady’s handkerchief) and this roti was like the embodiment of a fine square of silk that tears gently open at the touch of your teeth, except tastier.  Or the cold coffee in recycled glass bottles for fifty cents that chases the sweat from your brow for just a moment and allows you to breathe deep and plunge back into the market, amidst the samosa sellers and bunnies for sale.  Oh, and Indian goat.  You can’t find it here, so I won’t go into it, for fear of sending myself back into a funk.

We ate ear upon ear of corn, roasted. Then you rub it with a half lemon dipped in spicy salt. Oh man, so good.

But the best food in India came from no stall, no restaurant..  It came from the little, busy kitchen of Leela aunty, Rubai’s aunt we stayed with in Noida, a suburb of Delhi.  I could write three books about the wonder of her cooking.  She thought it was no big deal, but her cast off leftovers put to shame anything I spend a week planning and executing.  I could gain a hundred pounds if I were to live with her for a few months, but I would be an ecstatic blob.  Everything she touches has such savor…now I’m her-homesick.  Anyways.  Back to the point.

I got a few recipes off of Leela aunty, which was difficult, as she has cooked so well for so long that her recipes are all internalized.  So she handed over the cookbook that came with her pressure cooker – where she started many years ago.  Following please find the recipe for rajma, or kidney beans.  It’s a basic staple that I like to eat like I did so often: with chaval (rice) and Coke in a steel glass.  Unfortunately I have no steel glasses, so I often beg Meenakshi’s mother to make it for me at their house and then we watch a Bollywood and I pretend that I’m not a white girl from Washington, and that John Abraham will come save me from an arranged marriage.   Again, back to the point.

Rajma chaval!

Christmas time is here…

Well, my big plan was to post a how-to on pie crust after making 5 for Thanksgiving, but unfortunately I’ve been afflicted with a glitch on the memory card of the camera I was using.  Hopefully I can get that sorted out before Christmas.

But let’s turn away from digital mishaps and towards what’s really on all our minds: Holy crap I have to assemble Christmas presents.  Yes, there are still two or three weeks left, but I have finals, so if I don’t plan NOW, those presents around going to get shoved into a three day rush to assemble everything.

Second thing that pops into my mind: Holy crap I have no money.  Nobody does!  Because of the total systemic break down of our global economy, luxurious presents are one of the many casualties scattered in the wake of our scramble to keep our lives together.  And really, it’s not something to get too broken up about, because there are great, cheap(er) ways to check everyone off your list, from your friend’s friend who you don’t really remember their name but they’ll be showing up at that party to your neighbor who refuses to cut their lawn to people you actually want to give a gift to.

I’ve decided to give everyone booze.  Holidays make people drink anyways, so why not aid and abet?  By investing in some shockingly large bottles of alcohol (thanks to my mother’s trip to Nevada, where  the liquor taxes are MUCH lower than Washington’s) and some small jars scrounged from Goodwill, I have a gift that can be divvied up and spread around.

Ay, ¡qué buena pinta!

In return for the fabulous Sri Lankan Feast, Gabrielle and I invited Michelle and her sister Andrea over for dinner, as well as our friend Brianna (I say our friend, but really these are Gabrielle’s friends who I have slowly usurped).  I knew it would be difficult to compete, but I was also excited because Michelle and Andrea are meat eaters (Gabrielle and Brianna not so much), so I decided to make up what I’ve been wanting to eat myself: garbanzos.

Tasty face!

Sri Lankan Mega Feast!

I have eaten very little today, because I am still full from yesterday, the titular Sri Lankan Mega Feast.  I was not comfortably full until two full hours after having stopped eating.  It was that good.  This post is going to be long, because I couldn’t help but bug Michelle and her sister Andrea constantly for what exactly was going into my stomach.   But first, a short explanation of how I came about risking intestinal explosion…

My friend Michelle is one of the best cooks I know, especially at our tender age.  I can bake, but I bow down to actual savory cookery.  Her family is Sri Lankan, from Canada, living in the US, so it’s a mish mash (I enjoy hearing about their Thanksgiving meals), but it’s all delicious.  What’s even better is that her sister Andrea is just as good a cook.  And their mother is too; I got to eat fabulous things from the hands of all three yesterday, and I’m going to eat the leftovers for dinner tonight. At first it was just a big old happy get together at Michelle’s house, but it was extra special because she just got into her top choice of medical school!  Congratulations again, Michelle!

A list:

Eggplant curry (I don’t yet have the recipe, but I do have a promise from their mother that she’ll teach me)

Two types of chicken curry (also subject of a future cooking exchange)

Green beans, Sri Lankan style

The most fabulous daal ever.

Mango lassi

Falooda

In addition, I made a pie as my ticket of entry, and another guest made up a pumpkin and apple casserole that got ethnicized by the happy addition of coconut milk powder (the magic ingredient).  But enough of my chit chat.  To the recipes.

A little taste of Spain

I can’t claim to have invented it, nor really spent much time throwing it together, but this simple dish is one of the tastes I have most missed from my short time in Spain: bread, cheese, and membrillo.

Membrillo is something that I didn’t know quite what it was, but I knew I liked it, and that was enough.  What I knew then: it was some kind of thickened fruit paste that put me in the mind of the texture of high quality fruit leather if you stopped short of fully drying it out; it had the full flavor of a fruit concentrate and a slightly gritty texture that lent it enough interest to keep me from thinking I was eating baby food.  I had thought that maybe it was apricot, because the membrillo I got in Santiago de Compostela* was a kind of glowing amber, but the flavor was not quite right; I put it down to really good, Spanish apricots.