Cooking Debauchery

Summer Lentil Salad

I admit that I was a late adopter of lentils.

Even after I had adopted beans as healthy and good for you, I somehow missed lentils.  They just didn’t seem that excited relegated to a gray-green mass in soups and warming winter dishes.  They seemed doomed to spend their existence in nearly formless layers of sludge at the bottom of soup bowls, seen barely, if at all in the murky depths.

They always seemed to me support foods, something you add to increase the bulk of your dish.  Make it more filling.

I have never thought of lentils as the star of their own dish.  Until now.

Dip Duo

Submitted for Sweetnick's ARF/5-A-Day Tuesday Event.

I remember clearly the first time I tried to make salsa.

My best friend and I had stopped at our favorite Mexican place to pick up some steak quesadillas and had forgotten to get the little to go cups of salsa.  We were distraught, we were dismayed and we were creative.

Well I was creative.  She…at that point she was the only person I knew of who could burn water.  Because we were meeting a few friends at my parent’s restaurant we decided that we were going to make our own.

Though beyond tomatoes and jalapeno peppers we had NO idea what went into a salsa.

Cherry Vareniki

There are things that one misses from childhood.

Remembered flavors; favorite dishes.  For most of us, those flavors are reproducible.  They are our mother’s and grandmother’s recipes lovingly passed from generation to generation.

But for me, capturing the fleeting flavors of my childhood is not as easy.  I was 7 and a half when I left the Ukraine with my family.  Leaving behind the gregarious circle of the women who shaped my impressions of food and cooking.

These were the kind of women, like most of their generation that cooked well but did so by feel and taste.  And because back then communication was limited, my mother came with only the recipes that she cooked often.

And so my absolute childhood favorite was lost.

Hummus

There are two parts of my brain.  The passionate impulsive part and the scientific part.

The passionate part of my brain falls madly in love with recipes.  It courts them with great fervor, spending hours upon hours day dreaming about what the recipe would be like.  Writing its name plus mine in cute little hearts upon the back of my cook book covers.

In the mean time the scientific part of my brain wants to dissect a recipe.  It wants to turn the recipe around, unscrew the cover poke around the insides and rearrange the inner workings.  My scientific mind wants to know why a recipe works.  Why choose this combination of ingredients or that?  What does this flavor do with that?  What makes the recipe tick.

Either way, between these two halves of my brain, I can’t ever seem to make any recipe that I see until I have thoroughly dissected it.

Mushroom Pate

When I was little I was the kind of kid that was happiest taking things apart.

I wasn’t destructive per se, though that was the end result of what I did, I was simply curious to see how things worked.

So it surprises no one that my first memory of mushrooms involved me tearing them into little pieces in a vain effort to understand what it was that made them so good.

I must have been about 5 or 6 at the time.  And as per our usual pass time, my parents had taken the boat up the river to our favorite camp site.

Being experienced mushroom hunters, they had found a small amount of edible wild mushrooms and had placed them on a shelf to be made into dinner.

Unfortunately they did not account for my determined ingenuity in getting into trouble.

Jewelweed's Wild Mushroom Soup

It all started innocently enough.  It invariably does.  The inimitable winter soup maven posted a recipe for an incredible sounding wild mushroom soup.

I am not normally a soup person, but evenings have been getting chill.  Though the days may still linger in the high 80’s the night time temperatures drop quickly, especially with the coastal breeze.

Night creeps upon just a little sooner and something changes in the air.  There is a crispness to the air that beckons one to the warm glow of a kitchen perfumed with the long cooking scents of soup.

Cardamom Panna Cotta

(click to enlarge)

Or – a lesson in recipe creation.

Entry for The spice is right #1  - Ancient Spices

The moment Barbara announced her blogging event, I knew I wanted to participate and almost immediately I knew that I wanted to do something with cardamom.  I love cardamom, but it is not the easiest of spices to feature in a recipe.

In food, cardamom works best in concert with other spices.  It is a natural companion to cinnamon and ginger.  It loves peppers and is a frequent guest in curry powders of all sorts.

But I wanted something different.

I wanted a recipe that would feature the flavor of cardamom cleanly.

Cardamom, according to the spice encyclopedia, is the dried seeds and seed pods of a member of the ginger family.  Occurring wild in Indian, Guatemala, and Ceylon it is the third most expensive spice in the world behind saffron and vanilla.  Not cultivated until the 19th century, most of the worlds cardamom supply was harvested wild, primarily from the monsoon forests of the Western Ghants, known as the Cardamom Hills.  Enterprising British colonists developed Cardamom as a cash crop 200 years ago, but the usage of cardamom goes back far further than that.

Triple Orange Cake

It is a cake anecdote!  The kind of thing you see on a sitcom though somewhat more protracted.

I originally set out to make this cake two weeks ago then realized that I did not have the necessary ingredients. Namely tofu. Of the silken variety. Something I have not cooked with before. Of course I have cooked with tofu but only the extra-firm-chunky-marinate-it-for-days kind. It took me an hour to find.

I should have seen that as an omen.

Once I got it home, life kept me busy enough that I did not have the time to try the recipe till last weekend. On Saturday night, I finally boiled the two oranges and the single lemon the recipe required. But because I had not read that I needed to cool the fruit after boiling, I had to put it off until the next day.

Only to find that I did not have almonds. We always have almonds! We have hazel nuts, cashews, pecans, walnuts, and even pine nuts... but for some obscure reason the almonds that we ALWAYS have evaporated!