Mayonnaise Snobbery

I didn't realize that I was a mayonnaise snob until I moved to The Netherlands. In 1994, about a week into our three-year stint, my family and I went to a small grocery store in our new neighborhood to purchase cold cuts and condiments.

It was June, one of the hottest Junes on record. It was so hot, in fact, that Dutch cows started leaving grassy pastures and climbing into canals to cool off. It made the national news. What a sight! I had no intention of turning on a flame or oven at the house, so here we were, looking for something tasty to make into sandwiches.

Mise en place: mustard, oil, lemon, eggs, salt.

When I stepped into one of the grocery's aisles to look for mayonnaise, my jaw dropped. The entire aisle was jam-packed with every kind of mayonnaise and mayonnaise-like food imaginable...plus some. Knowing almost no Dutch at that point in time, there was no way I could read the ingredients lists, so I decided instead to simply choose the stuff that was neither the highest nor the lowest priced, and hope for the best.

[This babble continues....]

In Search of Chicken Tikka & Chicken Tikka Masala

Chicken Tikka Masala on Basmati Rice

I adore Indian food, but I know almost nothing about it. When I was a teenager, I learned how to make five Indian dishes from my mom, who got the recipes from a YWCA cooking class in Kuala Lumpur. The dishes were/are: Tandoori Chicken, Vegetable Samosas, Dal, Cucumber Raita and Chipatis. I also learned to make homemade paneer (cheese) from milk and lemon juice, though for many years, my success with that simple recipe was hit-or-miss.

My favorite Indian dishes--the ones I order over and over again at Indian and Pakistani restaurants in Seattle, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, however, completely eluded me in the kitchen. (Until recently.) Though the recipes I attempted sounded yummy on the page and looked seductive in the accompanying foodporn photo shot, my own final product was never as satisfying, never a smoothly textured, never as amazing as the restaurant versions. Not even close.
[This blog entry continues...]

Fun with Beta Vulgaris: Orange and Beet Salad & Easy Beet Raita

Beta vulgaris, cooked and sliced

A box filled with dirt-caked beets appeared in my kitchen one day not too long ago. Obviously, these dusty orbs did not come from a grocery store. They seemed to have leaped directly from their garden bed onto my kitchen counter without a thought of washing up before dinner. As it turned out, they came from White House Fruit Farm in Canfield, Ohio, courtesy of my upstairs housemates.

I eat beets very rarely. The truth is, I never think of them or seek them out. They usually come to me as these beets came to me: out of the clear blue sky. But whenever I do encounter them, I'm struck by their sweet, tender flesh and their wild, wild color.

[This babble continues...]

DIY Crème Fraiche

With the bounty of rabbits in my freezer, I’ve been researching tasty ways to serve them up. One preparation came immediately to mind, something I have not had in over 30 years, Lapin à la moutarde.

The number of variations on rabbit in mustard sauce are simply astounding. Some recipes call for white wine, but many do not. Others use boneless rabbit meat, while many recipes keep things rustic, using whole rabbit pieces, bone in. Some cooks use roux and cream to thicken the sauce, others count on sour cream or crème fraiche. A number of recipes don’t bother to thicken the sauce at all, preferring a lighter (and, no doubt, healthier) approach.

Only three components were in common to all the recipes I read, and they were: 1) rabbit, 2) mustard (universally of the Dijon variety, often grainy Dijon), and 3) some kind of dairy product.

[This babble continues....]

Summer's End Veggie Pie

Perhaps it's the dip in daytime temperatures or the shorter daylight hours, but the only foods I want to think about these days are the hearty comfort foods of fall and winter--stews and soups, casseroles and root vegetables. In the meantime, it’s still summer (technically), and the farm-stand bounty of northeastern Ohio continues to flow through my kitchen.

Piles of fresh veggies wait on my counters to be preserved or devoured, so last weekend I decided to split the difference between a celebration of fresh vegetables and the early introduction of winter fare by marrying ratatouille to a shepherd’s pie.

[This babble continues....]

Fashion for Foodies?

Which do you find more "fetching"?

Cloris Leachman striking a pose in cabbage?

or   Lady Gaga decked out in flank steak?

American haute couture is fascinating, isn't it?

Look what I found! Coke de Mexico!

 
I found these exotic gems at the Poland Giant Eagle: Coca Cola and Fanta made with actual cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Oddly, these bottles, labeled "Coke de Mexico," were not located in the soda and snacks aisle but towards the back of the store just before the dairy aisle (I was on the hunt for creme fraiche when I found them).

After I brought these five bottles home and took their picture, I started to wonder what Coke de Mexico was doing here in Ohio, so far from the border.  I've read about kosher Coke, which is produced for Jewish holidays, but I've never seen it around here. (Though, of course, not being a fan of soft drinks, I may have missed it.) In any event, I decided the next day to head back to Poland (Ohio) and stock up.

Two cases of any type of soda pop would normally last about 24 years in my house, but I just cracked open one of the Fantas (I'm sipping it now) and .... ooooooooo .... yummm!uuum!-y! I could get used to this stuff!

It's like being a kid again. This is exactly how orange soda is supposed to taste, like liquid sugar and a comic-book version of fruit flavoring riding together on a wave of cold, intensely bubbly water. Soda that prickles your tongue and sends bubbles up your nose: Pure magic!

Perserving On The Fly

Preserved on the fly: Pickled peppers & frozen veggies.

I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but I am old enough to have survived Reaganomics. In the 1980's, my husband worked in the library (and, later, the computer center) of a four-year college. He also served as organist and choir director for a local church. While I was never able to find a full-time position during the '80s, I did my part to bring income in to the household by taking on freelance work as an editor, writer, and book indexer. I also became a master of frugality, learning to make everything from scratch and fixing things rather than replacing them. I did  most of our home repairs, from wiring and plumbing to fence-building and upholstery. Nonetheless, every month we struggled to pay the mortgage of $350, which was almost half of all our combined income.

“The working poor” was the phrase bandied about by media pundits, but Bruce and I preferred to call ourselves “the trickled-on.” Most jobs were minimum wage or non-unionized, near-minimum wage jobs, even the ones requiring a college education. And minimum wage was frozen at $3.35/hr. throughout the 1980's, which meant that by 1989, the buying power of one hour of labor had decreased in value by almost $1 (in 1996 valuation; see  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html for the hard statistics). Bruce and I eventually had to let go of our dream of home ownership and move away.

Oh my! Too many peppers! What's a cook to do?!

[This blog entry continues.]

Rabbit & Andouille Gumbo

First off, let me be clear: I do not advocate the eating of pets. Domesticated pets are not food. In the area of what to eat, I follow the general rules of polite society as voiced by the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. She was the one, you remember, who explained to Alice that “it isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to."

Rabbits raised for meat are not acquaintances. They are well-care-for livestock until they're humanely-slaughtered deadstock that has been turned into “food” or “meat.” Livestock and their consumers in America are complete strangers to one another, usually. The same is true with rabbits raised for meat. Bunnies destined for the stewpot and hungry diners never meet in the (living) flesh, so to speak. Hence, no rules of propriety are broken.

By the time I get involved, the rabbit that will become my dinner is skinless, headless, footless, devoid of internal organs, and frozen. I buy chicken at the grocery store without ever seeing their beaks or tail feathers;  I buy rabbits from a local farmer without ever touching their fur, looking into their faces, or experiencing those prominent incisors.

As you can see, there is nothing about this rabbit that even vaguely resembles "Thumper" or that creature I met last Friday at the Canfield Fair. This is meat:
  

[This entry continues.]

Good Eats at The Canfield Fair

According to the Canfield Fair website, the fair is home to over 1,000 food stands. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Indeed, it is impressive, horrifically impressing.

Most of the food concessions are lumped into one giant maze-like grid--block upon city block--of vendors selling (almost) exactly same stuff. When you are wandering the maze in search of something to eat, the smell of fryer grease and burnt sugar wafts through the air, overpowering all other odors, including that of the nearby farm animals.

This year was the first time I'd ever attended the Canfield Fair, though I've lived in the area since 2002. It's not that I have anything against fairs; I simply hadn't gotten around to going before this year. I arrived Friday afternoon with the storm clouds, and throughout my three hours of wandering the grounds, clouds burst open from time to time, drenching everything. This was not a problem for me, however. As a former Seattleite, I happen to love walking in the rain.

[this blog entry continues]

Fresh Produce = Priceless

I took the day off work today to write and shop (and, if the weather holds, head out to the Canfield Fair to gawk at farm animals). The morning's shopping went well. Almost all the fresh produce I need for Rabbit & Andouille Gumbo is available locally this time of year.

The prices I paid were a bit high for bargain-hunters, but I was shopping early in the morning when the produce was still being unloaded from the truck. If you shop later in the day, you may not quite the same freshness as I did, but you are bound to find more bargains. Farm stands tend to drop their prices when the sun is high in the sky and they start thinking about reloading that truck and heading home.

From the Angiuli Farm produce stand on Market Street in Youngstown, Ohio, I purchased the following:

Squat red bell peppers = $ 3

[This blog entry continues.]

Getting Your Eggs from A Smaller Basket / Problems of Buying Direct

Two readers of my last post suggested that I include the address or a link to where I normally get my eggs. This, unfortunately, isn't possible. Alternatively, I decided to research local farms that sell free range chicken eggs directly to the public. But this, too, turned out to be research not easily done in the few days I had before my next blog deadline (today) arrived. Few family/local farms, it seems--at least here in the Eastern Ohio Western Pennsylvania area--have a website or a listing in the usual online farm directories, such as the Mahoning Valley Agricultural Guide or Eat Wild Ohio. Which makes sense, really. They're farmers, not web masters!

Though I strongly recommend buying your eggs and other farm products directly from the farmer, I am also deeply aware that this is not always an easy thing to do. Research takes time!

No farm will have all the products the average family needs. Farms usually specialize, which means that buying everything from its original source is probably impossible, especially if you also have to work for a living. Some farms--even small ones--may not tend to their animal humanely. Others may use pesticides or gene