cookrookery

Insert joke here

I interrupt my regular program of heavy meat-based dishes to bring you something more appropriate to the 100º weather outside my window. Much as I love lamb broths and spicy chicken wings and braised pork and so on, by evening my apartment is so disgustingly hot it’s as much as I can do to blanch a bean. So here is a delicious salad which is a whole meal in itself.

It’s supposedly Salade Niçoise, but I can tell you right now anyone from Nice would be disgusted with me for claiming that. Salade Niçoise is one of those dishes, like bouillabaisse, which no one will ever agree upon. But don’t feel bad – wikipedia defines ‘salad’ as a dish which a) may include vegetables, pasta, legumes, meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, sauces, dressings, noodles, gelatins, nuts, and croutons,  b) may be served hot or cold, c) may be served at any point during a meal. Thanks for narrowing that down, guys! In other words, salad is anything I say it is. So this is Salade Niçoise.

Dan’s Salade Niçoise

½ can of good quality tuna

2 eggs, hard-boiled and halved

A bunch of cherry tomatoes

A handful of tiny black olives (Niçoise, in other words)

2 Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled until just tender and sliced

A handful of green beans, blanched in boiling water but still crunchy

½ red pepper, sliced

½ yellow pepper, sliced

Dressing:

½ cup olive oil

1 crushed clove of garlic

4 anchovy fillets in oil

Sea salt and pepper (freshly ground)

Arrange the ingredients artfully on a plate. Chop the anchovy fillets and mix with the other dressing ingredients and drizzle on top.

A word about the tuna: I use Quinault Pride albacore tuna, because I can get it. It is loin-cut, preservative-free, caught and packed by Quinault Tribal Enterprises on the Taholah reservation in Washington, and it is good. Unfortunately, their website seems to be down, but if you live in Washington, you should be able to seek it out.

You might be surprised how many people have tried to answer this question. Did you know there’s a “Complete Idiot’s Guide” to cooking foods from the Bible? I didn’t, until I stumbled upon it in the cookery section of the library. I immediately opened it, seeking an answer to my personal interest, “what was Jesus’s favorite food?” I was disappointed. I did receive details about Jesus’s feast with the Pharisees, but nothing about what he thought of it, except that he didn’t get along with the Pharisees. Googling the question later produced a range of answers ranging from the profane to the hilarious, but no serious leads. Further investigation provided me with such books as Cooking with the Bible, Biblical Food, Feasts, and Lore, and Foods Jesus Ate and How to Grow Them, as well as the Idiot’s Guide. Yet none could answer the question.

I suppose the obvious answer is bread. Bread is the staff of life. When Jesus is kicking around the desert the Devil says something like “hey, if you’re really the Son of God, what about turning these rocks into bread?” Jesus must have thought pretty highly about bread if that was what the Devil thought he would most like to turn rocks into. And then of course there’s the Last Supper. And all those tortillas… but I still hold that the evidence does not speak as to whether Jesus loved bread above all other foods or was just good friends with it as a symbol.

Not a food.

Intrigued, I continued my research into the food preferences of Ascended Masters with the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, and had little more luck. Arguably, food is more important in Buddhist ritual than in Christianity. The Bible makes a big thing about food restrictions. I’ve nothing against this, and some of these restrictions I can get behind. Leviticus specifically prohibits the eating of ferrets, for example, a tradition that has been carried all the way to the present day (“warning – this food may contain traces of peanuts, shellfish, and ferrets”). Buddhists, however, like to make offerings of food, Buddhist monks collect alms in the forms of food, and so on. Often these offerings are oranges, as seen in many restaurant shrines. Does this mean Buddha’s favorite food was oranges? Or did Buddha, perceiving all as illusion, have no preferences by definition? It is said he died of food poisoning, though the food in question is up for debate. The Mahayana tradition has it that Buddha ate a poisonous mushroom, and thus died in the same manner as the Roman Emperors Claudius and Charles VI. However, the Theravada tradition say that Buddha died from eating bad pork. I think I’m going to compromise, and say Buddha’s favorite food was the truffle.

I had much more luck with the prophet Mohammed. We know without a doubt Mohammed’s favorite meal, because he says so in a number of hadith, including this one, concerning his beloved wife Aisha:

“The superiority of Aisha over other women is like the superiority of tharid to other meals.”

Tharid, also known as tashreeb or tahgrib, is a chicken stew served over torn up bread. The bread slowly absorbs the stew.

So at the end of all my research, I am left with an image of Jesus, the ascetic, saying “no, no, I’ll be fine with just bread.” And Buddha saying “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so” (okay, so that was Douglas Adams). And finally Mohammad: “Bring on the tharid!”

Tharid, Tashreeb, Taghrib

Serves 2

(adapted from Annia Ciezadlo, in her essay They Remember Home, about Iraqi refugees about to be settled in Texas, of all places)

Splash of vegetable oil

3 cloves garlic, smashed

2 small onions, roughly chopped

2 medium waxy potatoes, peeled and quartered

1 bay leaf

1 Tb curry powder

½ Tb ground turmeric

½ Tb kosher salt, plus more to taste

4 skinless chicken thighs

1 19-oz can chickpeas, drained

2 pieces flat bread, such as Iraqi al-tannour, naan, or pita

1 lemon, quartered

½ Tb dried sumac

Heat oil in a pot over medium heat. Add garlic, onions, potatoes, bay leaves, curry powder, turmeric, and salt. Cook, stirring and scraping bottom of pot occasionally, until onions and potatoes are golden, about 10 minutes. Add chicken and 1 ½ cups of water; stir to combine. Bring to the boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, until chicken is tender and cooked through, 20-25 minutes. Add chickpeas; cook for 5 minutes more. Taste the stew and season with more salt, to taste. Line 2 bowls with torn pieces of flat bread. Ladle stew over bread. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over each bowl and sprinkle with sumac.

As you see this recipe requires flatbread, which you can generally buy at any supermarket nowadays. I’m not a baker, but I am sick of the generic flatbread at my supermarket, so here’s a recipe for a flatbread you can make in a household oven. It does help to have a baking stone, or, in my case, the inverted cast-iron bottom of my tagine, which works just as well.

Iraqi Pita

(adapted from Maggie Glezer, A Blessing of Bread)

This pita is very large and has no central pocket, which makes it ideal for sopping up stews, but it becomes stale pretty quickly. This will make four large pitas – if you freeze the leftovers, they will keep a few days more and need only to be warmed up under the grill.

1 tsp dried yeast

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ cups warm water

1 tsp sugar

½ Tb salt

1 Tb vegetable oil

Mix the yeast with half the flour. Slowly pour in the water and mix until smooth. I am assured this goes a lot easier with a mixing machine. Let the slurry stand 10-20 minutes, until it has begun to ferment and bubbles are appearing.

Add the sugar, salt, and oil, and mix until everything is dissolved. Add the remaining flour and mix until the dough is very smooth, about five minutes. Or it would be five minutes, if I had a mixing machine. The dough should be extremely wet and soft, impossible to mix by hand. If it is at all firm, add water 2 Tb at a time until it is wet again.

Place the dough in a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise until it has doubled in bulk, about 1 ½ hours.

Heavily flour a baking pan. Turn the dough out, using plenty of dusting flour, onto a well-floured work surface. Trust me, you’ll need all the flour. Cut it into four equal pieces and round them, then roll them in more flour. Place the rounds back on the baking pan and wrap with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise another hour.

Second rising

While the dough rises, place your baking stone or upside-down cast iron pan in the oven under the broiler, and preheat the oven to 550º, or whatever the highest temperature it can manage is.

After an hour, turn off the oven and heat the broiler (the pitas need to bake from both sides, the iron below and the broiler above). On a lightly floured surface stretch out one of the chunks of dough until it’s about 1/8^th inch thick.

It's thin!

Place it on a baking sheet, and put the baking sheet on top of the heated iron or baking stone under the broiler. Bake it about 5 minutes, but be careful not to overbake, because it will burn in the space of a minute. Meanwhile, stretch out the next pita. Wrap the finished pita in a towel and put the next one in the oven.

I served this with a bulgur pilaf. As you can see, a feast worthy of a prophet.

Tharid, pita, and pilaf

Last year I had the privilege of visiting the fair land of Nicaragua, where I endured hellish bus trips on the worst roads on Earth, was caught in monsoons, harassed by soldiers who didn’t believe Australia is a country, flooded out of my bed, and got smacked in the face with a chicken. Good times. I also ate a bunch of things I’ve never eaten before, which is always good enough reason to go somewhere.

Gallo pinto and the works

Let’s start with breakfast.  Typically this was gallo pinto, which is the national dish of both Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I wonder if they have custody battles? Gallo pinto, which means ’speckled rooster’ for some untranslatable reason, is red beans and rice cooked separately and fried together. Of all the foods in Nicaragua, this is the one I miss most. Of course, anyone staying longer than two weeks in Nicaragua would probably laugh mockingly at that. It is eaten every day, and often all day. Here it was served with egg, tortilla, avocado, and cuajada, which wikipedia charmingly describes as an “almost cheese-like product.” Cuajada is compressed salty milk curds and tastes like an extreme version of feta.

Tajadas chips

The second most important food to mention is tajadas. These are thin slices of plantain, deep fried to make sweet chips. Any meal that doesn’t contain gallo pinto contains tajadas. Of course, most meals contain both. These chips are popular from Haiti to Peru and with good reason. Deep fried banana is tasty. This meal I ate after going swimming in a volcanic crater lake, heated by fumaroles, while frigatebirds wheeled overhead. Wouldn’t be dead for quids, would you? On the side is beef fried and served with raw onions and tomatoes, which brings us to our next key component of Nicaraguan cuisine: the fritanga.

Fritanga

A fritanga is a roadside stall with a heat source and sometimes a choice of menus, but not often. The main foods you will find at a fritanga are fried meat (beef or chicken), gallo pinto, and tajadas. Beef and chicken are the two main land animal proteins I found in Nicaragua, and I don’t think I ever saw them prepared any way other than severely fried. There was a market selling more exotic cuts, and I did see folks peddling armadillo and iguana, but these don’t seem to make it to restaurant menus. A pity.

Chicken is definitely a big deal in Nicaragua. And why not? They are cheap, plentiful, tasty, and like to travel by bus, which definitely makes them easier to handle than cows. I was somewhat surprised to only ever encounter one method of preparation, but perhaps that is due to the fritanga way of life. Stews take too long, and consume a lot of fuel. At one restaurant in the tiny town of Rio Blanco I ordered pollo al vino, expecting Central American coq au vin, and got fried chicken in ketchup. My wife Leslie ordered a different chicken dish and also recieved chicken in ketchup. It’s a good thing both chicken and ketchup taste good, but it gets a little depressing after a while.

One particularly special meal was prepared for us on the top of a mountain in the Reserva Natural Cerro Musun. After a sweaty day of hiking through the jungle, our guide Vicente prepared some limon dulces, sweet lemons:

Limon dulces (sweet lemons)

This was followed by a simple and very satisfying meal of beans, eggs, rice, and a corn tortilla make from corn ground before our eyes.

Corn tortilla

This was doubly impressive to me because all the cooking for the rangers and us three tourists was done on this heat source:

Eventually, we made it to the Caribbean, where the food really began to impress. First off, take a look at this picture of a young fisherman taking his catch home:

Is that a fish in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? Seafood is a big deal on the Caribbean coast, and why shouldn’t it be, when lobster in butter is so prevalent?

Mmm...lobster

And of course, there is the famous Caribbean stew known as rondon. Rondon is coconut and fish stew, indigenous to Nicaragua but also found in Costa Rica. The word ‘rondon’ is Creole English for ‘run down’ and either refers to the cooking technique (laying the fish on top of the vegetables while it steams so all the flavours run down) or the need to ‘run down’ any ingredients you can find. In any case, it’s more of a concept than a recipe, requiring only four things: fresh seafood of some kind, vegetables of some kind, coconut milk, and a pot to cook it in. I wish I could have tried it while I was in Nicaragua, but unfortunately the minimum order seems to be for twelve people and requires a day’s notice. To make up for this disappointment, I ate crab and conch stew instead.

Crab and conch soup

Conch is remarkable, but then so much shellfish is. It has a fine-grained mealy texture and that simultaneously revolting and delicious shellfish tang.

All in all, it is the seafood you should seek out should you visit Nicaragua.

Before...

There are definite advantages to living in a small country with the Pacific on one side and the Carribean on the other.

...and after!

Nothing to be afraid of.

To continue with my twin fascinations of charcuterie and seeing what kinds of preposterous havoc I can wreak in a tiny kitchenette, this week’s recipe is for home cured beef. I found this technique in Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast. People in America know of Fergus Henderson, if they know of him at all, because of Anthony Bourdain. Henderson is lord and master of St. John’s restaurant in London, made famous because Anthony just won’t stop raving about it. In particular, Anthony likes Henderson’s roasted veal marrow bones with sea salt. He even declared it his death-bed meal. But chunks of cooked marrow on toast are only a tiny part of the shenanigans Henderson gets up to. A typical sampling of the recipes in The Whole Beast will include delicacies such as:

Rolled Pig’s Spleen

Sorrel, Chicory and Crispy Pig’s Ear Salad

Duck Hearts on Toast

Lamb’s Brain Terrine

Crispy Pig Tails

Giblet Stew

I can’t even find a decent marrowbone in this part of the world, so I’m not likely to have any more luck with spleen or pig tails. Here’s something I can make, though, and something that is delicious but not too daring: home cured beef.

What exactly is curing? Curing is a complex process (chemically speaking) but basically consists of putting meat in a brine or packing it in salt. The salt draws the water out of the meat cells (and the cells of any nasty bacteria, killing them in the process) by osmosis. The sugar, apart from adding a pleasant taste, promotes the growth of nice bacteria (Lactobacillus) which out-compete the nasty bacteria and prevent their return by generating an acidic environment through lactic acid. So cured food, properly done, is both safe and good for you. Of course, nature being nature, things can go wrong. If this happens, your nose will alert you pretty quick, and all you have to do is start completely over from scratch.

Home Cured Beef

(adapted from Fergus Henderson)

¾ cup coarse sea salt

1 ½ cups sugar

6 sprigs rosemary

1 steak

Finely cracked black pepper

Mix the sugar and the salt together. Place 3 sprigs of rosemary in a plastic container and generously cover this with half the salt/sugar mix.

Lay the beef on this,

then cover with the rest of the mix (if you have not got enough of the salt and sugar mix, make up some more in the same 1:2 ratio). Nestle the rest of the rosemary into this.

Cover the container and leave it in the fridge for three days. At the end of that time, you will find that the salt and sugar has sucked all the moisture out of the meat. It’s amazing. The end result looks like a piece of leather in a melting snowbank.

Remove the cured beef from the now damp sugar and salt, rinse under cold running water, and dry with a clean cloth. When dry, take the pepper and rub the beef all over. Wrap in plastic wrap and keep in the fridge until you use it (this is not a long curing process and as a result the meat will not keep for more than a week and should be refrigerated).

The beef resembles jerky but has a quite different flavor, both refined and surprising. At first bite you think it’s jerky. Then the strong steak-like overtone hits. Finally you are left with the aftertaste of a fine coppa. Very nice with a lunch of crusty bread, blue cheese, olives, and perhaps some other preserved meats for comparison.