Upside-Down Pear

When I was a kid, pizza was a rare treat. My parents didn’t like to feed us junk food, and most nights we sat down to a feast of Balanced Meal, Heavy on Veggies. (Mom always had a salad on the table, and usually two or three cooked veggies in addition. Even now I feel a meal is somehow incomplete if only one vegetable is present.) I used to deliberately eat less than I wanted, knowing I was running the risk of my siblings consuming everything. It was a risk I was willing to take, because then, a few hours later, I could creep into the kitchen and filch cold pizza from the box.

Usually it was pepperoni left-over; if I was lucky, there would be a slice of black olive, or one of everything-but-anchovies. Sometimes I would take a slice and wrap it up and stick it in the back of the fridge, under the pickles, to put in my lunch the next day; more often I would eat my bounty out of hand, savoring the cool salt of it, the solid feel of the cheese and sauce, the way the crust had transformed from tender to chewy.

As an adult, I still tend to order an extra pizza - no longer running the risk of absent leftovers, but rather creating for myself the opportunity for joy.

I invented this one on a Sunday afternoon. I had a BBQ to go to, and nothing to bring except beer. Fortunately, my pantry and fridge stood ready to assist me, along with the pot of basil on the windowsill.

It’s a very on-the-fly recipe - not for people who are uncomfortable with spicing to taste, or with adjusting textures. (If you’ve successfully made hummus before, this should be a snap.) It is also one of those things that I constructed almost entirely in my head before making it - a pleasant pastime, highly recommended for lazy afternoons on the porch with a beer and a friend to bounce the ideas off of.

Curry bean dip

• 3 cloves garlic, smashed with the side of a knife
• 2 cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• salt, black pepper, red curry paste, Thai garlic chili sauce, lemon juice, tahini, honey, and cayenne pepper, all to taste.
• extra-virgin olive oil
• a bit of fresh basil, chopped

Unless you are a big fan of raw garlic, sweat the garlic in a little oil until translucent, or cook it over higher heat until the edges are a tad browned. This really requires that you know your garlic, so if you don’t…don’t.

In a food processor, combine beans, garlic, and all the seasonings. Go easy on the seasonings at first, because too much is hard to correct. I’d say start with a pinch of salt, a few good grinds of black pepper, 2 tsp. curry paste, 2 tsp garlic chili sauce, 1 tsp each of lemon juice, honey, and tahini, and 1/4 tsp of cayenne. Whir it all together, and slowly pour in extra-virgin olive oil until the texture is a little bit rougher than you want it to be at the end. Taste-test, and adjust the seasonings if you need to, and whir again, adding more olive oil if necessary to smooth out the texture.

I recommend making this dip less spicy than you think you want it; after three hours in the fridge, it was substantially more intense.

I wrote yesterday about garam masala, and my potentially out-of-hand addiction to it. These chocolate garam masala cookies taste a bit like Oreos, with a faint spiciness at the back of the flavor.

Based on a recipe from Gourmet, Feb. 2003

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/4 tsp garam masala
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
6 oz. chocolate chips (1/2 bag)

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, cocoa, garam masala, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl.

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, then beat in eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips. Add flour mixture and mix just until combined - do not overmix!

Drop tablespoons of dough onto ungreased baking sheets and bake about 12 minutes. Because they’re so dark, you will have to keep an eye on them - they will puff up a bit, and shouldn’t collapse under your finger if you open up the oven and touch them lightly. Cool on a rack.

One of the few spice blends that I buy instead of making myself is garam masala, a spice blend common in India and South Asia. There are about as many recipes for garam masala as there are people who make it, but most recipes include cardamom, cinnamon, fennel, coriander, and black pepper at a minimum; fenugreek, cloves, cumin, and nutmeg are also frequent players. I keep all of these ingredients around, so why not make my own? It’s no harder than the curry spices I blend, and I love making spice mixes: measuring, weighing each thing in my hand, crushing out the scents and dust of the spices with my mortar and pestle.

The real reason, I think, is that I go through garam masala so quickly that I’d be making a fresh batch every week, and there’s only so much time in my life. I use it not only in savory dishes such as curries and chili, but also in sweet ones; I often replace the half the cinnamon in dessert recipes with garam masala. It took me a while to start doing that, and you can’t do it with all commercial blends (the one sold in bulk by Whole Foods, for example, is far too heavy on the cumin for this use; the one from Penzey’s, on the other hand, is about perfect). The garam masala imparts a warmer, softer flavor than plain cinnamon.

Here is one of my favorite uses for garam masala:

Special Pancakes with Fruit and Whipped Cream
Pancake recipe (makes 10-12 medium pancakes):

Wet ingredients

• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

Dry ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp garam masala

Blend dry ingredients. Blend wet ingredients. Blend blended ingredients - it will be a bit lumpy, and that’s fine. Cook in butter as you would any pancakes.

Toppings

Fruit: Raspberries, sliced strawberries, blueberries.

Whipped cream: whipping cream & confectioner’s sugar. Whip cream with a whisk in a metal bowl, or in a mixer. Add confectioner’s sugar while whipping, to taste.

Other: dark brown sugar

Bringing it home

Make the pancakes, then top with fruit and whipped cream, and sprinkle with brown sugar.

I am one of those dreadful people who loves cabbage and will cook it up at the slightest provocation. Often, this provocation takes the form of a lovely head spotted at the store, nestled below the celery and carrots. A dark red cabbage is more likely to snag me as I walk by, but sometimes it is a soft green one. Once I’m caught, I weigh the beautiful thing in my hand. Good cabbages are heavy for their size, with crisp leaves; they are mostly water, and as they lose water they lose both heft and crispness.

Once I get my cabbage home, I rinse it off and take my knife to it. I slice it in half and put one half away in the fridge - cabbage is a tough veg and will keep in the crisper for quite some time. I core the other half and chop it up - small dice or shreds for cole slaw, large chunks for braising, thick strips for soup. I love it with dill, with caraway, with ginger, with raisins, with apple cider as the braising liquid, with carrots, with fennel seed, with paprika, with cayenne. I love how you can cook it just long enough that it’s soft and crunchy all at once, that it is both robust enough to stand up to flavors and gentle enough to meld with them.

Nocturn Cabbage
by Carl Sandburg

Cabbages catch at the moon.
It is late summer, no rain, the pack of the soil cracks open, it is hard summer.
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

This time around, Is My Blog Burning? called for grilling or barbequing - which was perfect for me, as we’ve recently acquired both a grill and the strength of will to use it.

See, last year, we bought a house. With the move from an apartment to a house came the ability to grill, and with the ability to grill came the ability to smoke up our entire neighborhood by using too many mesquite chips. Still, the beautiful puffs of white smoke drifting past the windows were lovely, as were the skewers of asparagus, the mushrooms and steaks brushed with jerk sauce, the delicately scorched onions. There’s something satisfying about cooking with the wind in your hair and the smoke in your eyes, the food sizzling below the grill lid.

My next grilling project (and recipe) is brined shrimp. I haven’t made this, but I had something very like it at a tapas bar in Baltimore. If anyone makes it before I do, please let me know how it works out!

Grilled Shrimp with Chilis

• 1 lb. shrimp, preferably U-12s, head on & unpeeled
• 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 serrano peppers, seeded and minced
• A good handful of parsley, chopped
• Olive oil

For the brine, I plan to use the brine recommended at What’s Cooking America.

Once the shrimp are brined, combine the garlic, peppers, parsley, and olive oil in a bowl and toss in the shrimp. Get the shrimp nice and coated, then either refrigerate them in the mixture for a bit or pop them on a nice hot grill. U-12s are large enough to put on the grill by themselves, but if you are using smaller shrimp you may want to skewer them.

The shrimp will probably take about 3 minutes per side to cook, and are done when they are a nice bright pink.

The food you find at a fairground or amusement park is not good for your body, but it does wonders for your inner child. Fried, crisp and soft and hot; spun-sugar, ice-cream sticky; bathed in cheese or shrouded in sugar. Corn dogs, brown and slathered with ketchup - fried Oreos, the cookies gone soft in the middle - piles of huge steak-cut fries drowning in a lake of hot cheese.

Children wander around sticky-mouthed, Icees or soft-serve clutched in their hands. The adults are neater, their hands cleaned, their mouths wiped, but their eyes give them away, drifting back to childhood. In their hearts, their mouths are sticky, too.

Last night, Nat and I went to the “Traditional German Beer Party” at the Carnegie Museum of Art. It was probably not actually a traditional German beer party, if there even is such a thing. What it was, though, was good: the museum has a display of German Expressionist prints, and they had their tour guides stationed in that gallery with tons of information on the artists and printmaking techniques and whatnot, and downstairs in the lobby they had food & beer from Penn Brewery.

Penn Brewery is a local craft brewing company, specializing in German-style beers, and especially in Munich-style beers. They had six beers available for tasting, and in addition, as museum members we got a “guided tasting” from the founder of the brewery. Some of the beers I had had before, but some were new to me; I am particularly fond of both Penn Gold (a Münchener Helles) and Penn Dark (a Münchener Dunkel). I also tried their Crew Lager, which is made with two-row barley, giving it a mild and pleasant taste, and stole a sip of Nat’s Kaiser Pils, which I hated violently. Hops and I have a mutual non-aggression treaty in the best of times, though, so if you are fond of IPAs or other hoppy beers, you may find the Kaiser most agreeable.

Where there is beer, there must be food, and Penn Brewery provided pretzels, cheese, meatballs, wurst and schnitzel and mustard and potato pancakes and whatnot - all very tasty, and I think all available at the brewery restaurant. All in all, it was a fantastic, fun evening. The museum staff said they never did events like this, so I hope it was successful enough that they’ll do more of them. I know I’d go.

In other news, Nat got threaded comments working, so actual discussion is now possible. Three cheers!

When I was around 13, I went to visit my friend Sue. She lived perhaps 45 minutes away, and was tall and loud and brash and British, with wild red hair and a wicked sense of humor. I adored her. We decided to cook dinner for her family - five people, all told, including myself. In the fridge, we found two Cornish game hens, some bacon, some scallions; in the pantry we found rice.

First, we cut the bacon into half-slices, and wrapped each half-slice around an inch of scallion. We arranged these on a tray and popped them in the oven. We washed the hens and butterflied them and put them in to roast; we made rice and giblet gravy. We nervously poked at the hens, hoping they were done, and burnt our fingers on the oven rack.

When we served dinner, we found that two Cornish hens are not nearly enough for five, so her parents got a half each to themselves, and the two remaining halves were divided among the three children. The scallions in bacon went well with the crisp skin of the hens; the giblet gravy was neither too peppery nor too salty, and if the rice was a bit bland and sticky, well, mixed with gravy you couldn’t really tell.

At the time, I was dreadfully embarrassed - not enough food! The horror!

But now, I think - we were 13, and we tried hard, and we turned out a tasty meal in under an hour. If Sue turned up at my doorstep tomorrow with two Cornish hens, we might be able to make a meal fit for a king, but I don’t know that we could truly replicate the accomplishment.

Back before I learned that Chilean sea bass is heavily overfished, I bought some lovely fillets to make for dinner. I decided to roast them with veggies. At the time, I lived in a run-down but large and comfortable apartment with an equally run-down gas stove. In a lot of ways, the kitchen in that apartment was dreadful - my current kitchen is much smaller, with, somehow, twice as much counter space - but I learned to cook with gas on that stove, and learned to live with Nat in that space, and so I’ll always feel a bit of affection for it. In addition to working with - against? - the whims of a cranky old oven, this was one of my first forays into cooking fish.

Fish was not a major component of my diet as a child; my mother made a mean baked sole with tomatoes, and a sizzling fried flounder, but as I wasn’t very fond of those fishes, or of anything that smelled fishy, I stuck to chicken or shrimp at times when I could have been expanding my palate. Then I started dating a boy from coastal Massachusetts, and he wasn’t having any of this not-eating-fish nonsense, and that was the end of that - I learned to eat all kinds of fish, not to mention calamari, crab, lobster, oysters…. And I learned to cook fish, fumbling my way along, relying heavily on The New Basics to get me through.

I rinsed my sea bass fillets and patted them dry, and then I roasted them with veggies in a glass baking dish I got from my mother; it has to be twenty years old, at least, because I burned my hand on it when I was little. While I admit a glass pan originally intended for lasagna is not the ideal roasting vehicle, when you’re just out of college you’ll take the antique thing and be glad of it. I still have it, I still use it, and if I manage not to drop it on the floor, I will probably shuffle it off to some innocent yet-to-be-spawned child in another twenty-five years.

The fish emerged soft and almost translucent, pear-and-ginger scented, perfect with couscous and a simple salad. We spooned the sauce over couscous; our salad was plain mixed greens with apple-balsamic vinegar/safflower oil/honey dressing.

If you, like me, have stopped eating Chilean sea bass, you could make this with a number of other fishes - red snapper, striped bass, even salmon.

Roasted fish with vegetables and ginger sauce

• 4-5 carrots, peeled
• 2 large d’Anjou pears, peeled and sliced thin
• 3-4 leeks, cleaned and quartered lengthwise
• thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped or grated
• 2 fish fillets
• olive oil
• apple-balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In the roasting pan, put carrots, pears, leeks, a little olive oil and a little apple-balsamic vinegar. Place fish on top, and add ginger, a little more oil, and a little more vinegar. Place, uncovered, in the oven. Halfway through, turn the fish and rough up the veggies; you can also put some of the veggies on top of the fish to keep it from browning.

With fish, the rule of thumb - devised by the Canadian Fisheries and Marine Service- is 10 minutes per inch of thickness, plus 5 minutes because this particular fish is in a bit of a sauce, but you will have to keep an eye on it. A digital thermometer may be useful.

Remove fish from oven and let stand ~5 minutes before serving.

My commute to work loops me through the northeastern part of the city of Pittburgh, and down through the Strip District. The Strip is a long, narrow section of the city, bounded by the Allegheny River on one side and the long ridge of Polish Hill on the other.

A few mornings a week, Nat and I stop to get coffee at La Prima and breakfast from Il Piccolo Forno. Il Piccolo Forno is an Italian bakery that also serves pasta lunches and pizza; in the mornings, they have huge, beautiful muffins set out in trays - flaky, sugary meles filled with apples or almond paste - mini strudels in tempting, jewel-like rows. I am not there for any of that. I am there for the cold pizza, thin and crisp and perfect, that sometimes sits on the counter. It looks rather forlorn next to the lovely pastries, but each small slice hides deep and delicate flavor beneath its humble skin.

When I am lucky, the pizza is topped with spicy green olives: briny and peppery and faintly bitter, their flavor setting off the cheese and sauce to such perfection that I wonder how I will survive the loss when the slice is gone.

I keep a well-stocked spice cabinet; I tend to spice on the fly, often without tasting, putting flavors together in my head and trusting in my eye and hand to make things come out correctly. It’s a dangerous enterprise, and not for the faint of heart - and not something to do with unfamiliar spices. Once, my mother-in-law had me spicing a beet salad for her, and stopped what she was doing when she saw me tip the hot Chinese pepper into my hand, press a fingertip into it, and taste it. She seemed surprised and pleased, and I wondered what maniacs she had encountered who would willy-nilly toss spices in without knowing the flavor of them.

I remember tasting that pepper, calculating the flavor of beets and onions, and asking for cumin: the heat from the pepper would not be enough to set off the sweetness of the vegetables, and it would sparkle so much better against the cumin. I remember eating that salad, cool and sweet, with a depth and consequence to it, and a brightness, like sunlight on the ocean. (It was, I think, my first pleasant experience with beets, which I had previously encountered in some dreadful borscht and in my paternal grandmother’s pickled eggs. It seems strange to me, now, that I knew enough of their flavor to spice them appropriately.)

At home, with my intimately-known and well-loved spices, I am not cautious. This has more successes than failures, fortunately for me - though the time I wasn’t paying attention and put ground cumin in the hot cocoa will haunt me forever.

I remove my jewelry: wedding band, thumb ring, bracelet from my grandmother. I wash my hands, carefully, with soap. The eggs I use are brown, and if I strike them just right against the cutting board, they split neatly in half, crisp brown yielding to soft white within, the yolk nestled in one side as if it knows what I am doing.

I don’t bother trying to strike them just right. I love to tip the egg into my hand and feel it slip against my palm. The white is hard to hold, and it slithers through my fingers into the bowl below, leaving behind the yolk: dark yellow, cool, self-contained. The yolks fascinate me; they remind me of oysters - also cool and self-contained, also full of potential.

I slide the yolks into their own bowl, careful not to break them, wanting to watch them push against each other, wanting them to spend their last naked moments as discrete things.

I’ve been meaning to start a food-specific blog for a long time. My current food writing is scattered over various Livejournals, a few Diaryland entries, some mailing lists, and in disorganized files on my hard drive, and I wanted to make it all available in one convenient location. Some of you who have been following my journal may see some repeats as I get organized, and I apologize. I hope there will be enough new material to keep you interested.

There is a Livejournal syndicated feed available: http://www.livejournal.com/users/upsidedownpear/

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