Dehydrated Grape Leaves

You might not know it, but I have long been harboring the fantasy of inventing an entirely new food. Every time I think I've come up with something, someone says, oh it's been done. I don't think this one has. The past few days I've been playing with the dehydrator. I love kale. Really. So I tried beet leaves. Lovely. But someone suggested sorrel. I don't have any but  do have grape leaves. Why not? Sour, olive oil, salt. Then a crunchy delicate snack or garnish. I WISH I could edit this but blogspot is REALLY MISBEHAVING and after three tries this is coming out uncooked. But you get the idea. Dehydrated grape leaves with a flavor like in cooked dolmas, but dry and crunchy. If someone steals this idea, I will come and get you. Unless it's already patented. Just my luck.

Trahanas

I'm pretty sure this is not the traditional way to make trahanas. Though they probably taste much the same. If you have patience, I would exhort you to try this. Take good Greek yoghurt. about a cup. Mix in bread flour and a few pinches of salt to make a stiff dough. Then go outside and roll out little nubbins, exactly as you would boogers, onto a dish towel. It takes a long time, but look how beautiful they are! Leave in the sun for at least a day or two. Boil up and just sprinkle on olive oil and salt. They have a light pleasant sourness, and are chewy. The traditional way is to make flat disks, dried in the sun, break them up and dry again, and then boil them, but these are so much prettier. Like little pine nuts I think.

Object Fetishism

The theme of this year's Oxford Symposium, held a few weeks ago, was Material Culture. It has gotten me thinking deeply about the tools in my kitchen, particularly those on which I absolutely depend. There are a few without which no kitchen could function: knives, spoons, spatulas, I'd add tongs. My grater too. None of these are trophy items. I don't own a single big very expensive knife, though I do have a lot of them. I think of them as tools, nothing more. But then I realized that my most prominent kitchen drawer, above the cutlery, holds these right up front. Why? One corkscrew would do perfectly fine. I actively use all 15 of these, and that's not counting the rabbit, and 6 or 7 other kinds of corskscrew I own but almost never use. So the question is why I fetishize these objects. I think it's because I can tell you exactly where each one came from. I have explicit memories associated with them. And of course my favorites have the most interesting stories. I emphatically don't collect them - especially since corkscrews haven't been allowed in carry on luggage for the past decade. But I'm still wondering why this particular object, apart from the fact that I use them every day? Are there objects any of you hold as dear, and if so, why?

The FIRST tomato recipes 1692-4

It is difficult to fathom the vast gulf separating home cooking from large scale food preparation. Every now and then I offer a lecture/demo/tasting that requires cooking on an extraordinary scale and I am always astonished and exhausted afterwards. The gig is downtown Stockfish, at the Cesar Chavez Library, tomorrow (Monday) at 6:30. DO come, it's free. I'm talking about Antonio Latini's Lo Scalco alla Moderna (1692-4) and cooking three recipes. One of which is among the first three recipes ever printed for tomatoes. It's a minestra alla molignane - or a kind of eggplant stew with squash, onions, tomatoes, spices and oil. That's about it. Oh and verjus. Normally I would sautee the eggplant and onions, add the tomatoes and parsley, etc. And let it cook for half an hour or so. It's sort of an intriguingly spiced ratatouille or version of caponata. But this version is 11 big eggplants, sauteed in 11 separate batches, then a pile of onions browned, then then a big bag of tomatoes and then zucchine cut up and it is now in oven for a few hours. It will be great at room temperature tomorrow, for a crowd estimated at about 50. But this took like 2 1/2 hours just in prep work. HOW do people cook in a restaurant?? I think everyone should try something on this scale just to appreciate the labor involved.

Smoked Chickums

When it gets really hot, and we're pushing about 106 here today, most people forgo cooking altogether, which I understand. But I still think cooking outside is a viable option. Not the last minute BBQ, but something close. If you spatch a chicken and just set it to smoke for a couple of hours, do it way ahead, it takes on a lovely hue. The seasoning is just salt, pepper and thyme. This is over oak. Then just chill it, and when dinner comes around you have something ready to go. Shred it, with a little lime and chili on a tortilla or good sturdy roll. Or a dribble of soy and sesame on top of cold noodles. This is good stuff.

Kurobuta, Berkshire Lomo?

I don't know why I found something labeled kurobuta in my local Italian grocery. Nor do I mind that it's actually a Berkshire pig, isn't it? I didn't ask who raised it, what its name was, whether it was massaged, fed beer, given daily trips to the park to play fetch or was lovingly kissed my a young girl named Missy. But I think he must have been. It is a loin but with some other part there, beyond the white stripe. All the better. The loin part as you can see is pink and soft and the other dark and chewy. Quite sweet with a pronounced bacterial sourness.  Here's how to do it: Take a thick 5 or 6 inch piece of loin and parts proximate. Spinkle happily with salt, distress with instacure #2, the slightest pinch. Then pepper, mustard seed, juniper crushed, whatever you like. Bay too. Put in a ziplock and seal and refrigerate for a week, turning every day. Then tie up and hang naked somewhere cool, breezy and 55 degrees for a month. Next to bastirma seems to have been fortuitious, because there is a faint aroma of fenugreek. Slicing proved tricky. The first cut is the deepest. So these pictured here were a bit thick. I put it on the manual slicer and they shredded a bit but are thin, light and aethereal. So glad I had my pal Kristine here by chance to eat it with me!

Pickled Black Walnut

If you live in Stockfish CA, you probably know the levee along the Calaveras River that runs through the University. I was riding my bike for an eye exam a few weeks ago and passed the stand of walnuts before you get to the I-5 underpass. Did you realize that one set is English, a.k.a. Persian Walnuts and the other Black Walnuts? I know you can pickle the former, but the latter? Well, here's a shot.

First I have to confess, if you look at my recipe for pickled walnuts in the Lost Arts, I think I left out something that might be important. I just poked them with holes and went right into the pickle. They were good, but I think the proper way to do it is to brine for a week, change the water and brine for another, then leave them out until they turn black (which is what you see here) and then go into the pickle. This one was half brine, half vinegar with extraneous spices and some sugar. It should be good. The only thing I'm wondering is if the shells inside will be edible. I passed a knife through, as you can see here, but certainly not as soft as regular walnuts. I also did a batch of those, and poked with pins. THIS time with rubber gloves on! I'll share the after photos in a couple of months, when the weather gets cooler.

UPDATE: The regular walnuts I did are perfect. In the black walnuts, the shells are a bit hard, but the rest is edible. Well, look at the English walnuts. They smell a bit like Coca Cola!  But very pleasantly salty, sour and savory. These would go perfectly with a hunk of cheddar and a pint of bitter.