A Spinach Pie out of Necessity

I read very little when it comes to cookbooks. In fact, aside from the cookbook my Bubbie (grandmother) gave me a few years back, I only look at pictures in cookbooks. I think this is mostly because I don't like following written directions. After reading (yes, I do read other things) an article in the the New York Times a few days ago about a cook book called Cookwise (Corriher), I decided to give that book a shot. This book piqued my interest because it was described as attempting to explain the purpose or techniques and ingredients in cooking --- think "Good Eats", but in book form.

The first section I started into was about the role of fat in making pie crust. With my new oven and its controllable temperature, I felt inspired to learn a little about baking and pie making. After reading that the key to pie crust is a 1:3 ratio of flour to fat, I decided that there were more reasons than just a lack of temperature control, not to bake pie! If I were to make a pie with a top and bottom crust, I would probably need a stick of butter, or lard (which I don't use) or Crisco. Oil, a slightly better fat, supposedly yields bad crust. So much for pie.

Well, maybe not. As I read on I had an epiphany. I realized a way to make pie crust with very minimal fat, while maintaining all of the desired properties. Or at least in theory... For the past two days I have been doing some initial experiments into my new crust making method. My first attempt did not employ the exact ingredients I theorized were necessary, and hence yielded an inferior crust. Today, I had some initial success. It will take a few more experiments before I know whether my method is actually worthwhile. As a control I will need to try to make a full fat crust and see if I can even make that successfully (if I can't do that, then my experiment is not too meaningful). In any case, at this point I am keeping my new crust technique under lock and key.





One of the positive side effects of making lots of pie crust is that I needed to make some pies. I've never made a pie before, and I don't have much as far as fruit in the apartment right now, so I decided to make a savory quiche type pie with spinach, onion, egg, feta and a little mozzarella. I baked the bottom crust blind (that is, I shaped it and put foil on it covered with dried beans for weight and cooked for 15 minutes). Meanwhile I sliced a large onion and sauted it with some pepper flakes and sage. When it started to caramelize I added a package of spinach and cooked this until a fair amount of its moisture had boiled off. This mixture when onto the cooked pie bottom. Onto this I sprinkled some small chunks of feta and mozzarella cheese, and then spread out two well beaten eggs. The top crust just sat on this (no precooking). This went into the oven at about 400 for about 20 (or until the top crust started to brown a little). It turned out pretty good and the crust, though not everything a crust should be, work well for this savory pie.

Master Chef NYU

Yay! I got accepted to compete in Master Chef NYU. The preliminary round for me is February 13. I am going to make Blintz's three ways: Traditional farmers cheese, savory mushroom and dark greens, and creamy sweet potato, caramelized onion and goat cheese. I have twenty minutes to prep and one hour to cook. I will need to have a few practice runs before the actual competition. That means that I will invite friends over and time myself at making this meal for them. Well, this is just an update and I don't have much more to say about it now, but I will post again when I have done my first practice run through. Also, if I pass the first round, I will need to design some new recipes, and may bounce ideas off people using the blog.

A new stove, and my winter diet

Upon returning from Texas I was greeted with the best present a man in his 20s can receive --- a new oven and range. It looked almost the same as my old one, however, this new GE (YAY!) stove is a million times better. Firstly, it has four working burners. Also the dials for the burners are clearly labeled and are not sticky. This means that I can smoothly control the intensity of the flame --- something which previously required great luck and hand strength. Perhaps the biggest change however is that the oven has actual temperature control. If I set it to 400, the gas will go until it gets to about 400, then it will turn off/on as necessary to maintain the right temperature. My previous oven had two temperature settings: On and as hot as ovenly possibly; and on without a flame, filling the room with gas. I appreciate the new settings available to me. Its also pretty and clean (for the moment).

Having a working oven is going to open up the whole new world of baking to me. This is slightly unfortunate because I really suck at baking. I am unable to carefully follow the directions, resulting in pretty bad products. Still, the moderate temperature oven was very convenient for making granola last night.

The other thing I wanted to address in this post is my winter diet (just what I'm eating, not my attempt to lose any weight). Yesterday I walked down to Chinatown to make my monthly (in fact is been about two months since my last trip) trip to purchase vegetables. I braved the 10 degree weather and wind and walked the mile or so with my hiking backpack tightly hung from my back. Just before my outside marketplace came into view a scary thought crossed my mind --- what if there was no market today? What if it was too cold, or if the vegis had all frozen? I resolved that if this was the case, I would buy a lot of frozen cabbage and make sauerkraut (or, as my aunt pointed out, I could use the frozen cabbage to make stuff cabbage). Upon actually reaching the marketplace, my worst fears turned out to be bested. Where there were usually ten stalls, there were only two; one of the stalls was essentially just oranges; and the one reasonable stall had a line of about a hundred people.

After just a few minutes in that line I had a realization: Why should I expect to be able to make the same purchases of fruits and vegis in the middle of January as I do in the other seasons? It is true that basically any fruit or vegetable is available year round (for the right price) but this doesn't mean that I should eat them year round. Eating foods which need to be grown in other continents due to the season is pretty wasteful (or at least I think it is). So I realized that in the winter I should try to eat more traditional winter food.

This realization actually had been percolating for a few days before surfacing. In fact, over the two days before my Chinatown trip, I had made a number of large purchases of winter food. At Trader Joes I purchased about ten pounds of dried fruit and twenty pounds of dried nuts. At the Associated market I bought about twenty five pounds of dried beans, plus a few pounds of oatmeal and some canned beets for what will be my first attempt at Borscht (stay tuned to a later post once I've done this). At the Indian store I bought some new bulgar and quinoa to complement my store house of rice and grains. At the MET market I bought a number of boxes of frozen kale (for soups).

My winter diet will mostly draw on those things which can be dried, canned, or frozen. In addition I'll use tubers and root vegetables. But I'm really going to shy away from foods which are not easily grown or stored during the winter. This is partially precipitated by the cost of these non-winter foods, but also due to my interest in exploring winter foods. Only recently have I begun making my own soup. I want to try to learn some new soups (probably from my mother). I want to work on baking, maybe make some nut/grain breads. I'm not sure how strictly I will be able to follow this diet. Luckily I seldom go shopping for single ingredients, so since I don't have any non-winter food in my apartment, I can't imagine I will make much with it. Maybe... I will even get into cooking with dried or salted fish... When in Chinatown I was very tempted to buy a large salted Mackerel. Perhaps this diet will open up new (cost/energy-effective) types of cuisine to me.

Any advice on winter meals?

If Rubashnik meat is kosher, why can't Jews hunt?

A warning for those faint of heart not to read on. However, if you are faint of heart and eat meat, I would encourage you to read on in any case.

I got back from Texas two days ago fully reminded of what I consider the biggest flaw with the laws of Kashrut (the kosher laws in Judaism). Jewish dietary law concerns itself to a very large extend with restrictions about what meat can be consumed and how it should be killed / prepared. The intent of many of these laws is to keep sacred the life and death of an animal. The process of killing an animal must be careful and under strict supervision to assure that the animal's death is according to ritual.

I wholly agree with the principle that an animal's life is sacred and that if it must be killed for food and clothing, then its death should be sacred as well. So in that way I agree with the laws of Kashrut. However two contractions in the kosher laws have become apparent to me recently: The horrible treatment of animals and humans by the Rubashnik's; and the fact that hunting is not kosher.

To first address the question of hunting, I must include some person experience. I have visited my girlfriend's family in Texas twice and both times I have had extensive discussions about hunting with her father, an avid hunter. He has not (save at family occasions) eaten bought food for the last thirty years (basically since returning from his air-force service overseas). He grew up in North Dakota hunting for food and has been doing it ever since. Every year he kills about two or three deer, as well as a few scores of birds, and an occasional wild hog. This constitutes all of the meat he eats. He is an excellent shot, and on the rare occasion that his bullet does not immediately kill the target animal, he tirelessly hunts down the dieing animal and finishes it off. An animal which has been wounded like that has meat which is rendered rather distasteful by stress hormones, yet he will still butcher and eat that animal because it is not fair to waste its meat.

I have a great deal of respect for this try of subsistence hunting. An animal which he kills lives its entire life free, roaming the hills near his ranch. Then, when fully grown, it is killed in a swift manner, and immediately butchered (see photo).

The meat is free from antibiotics and very low in fat. In fact, animals in the wild tend not to have any fat within the muscles (they have it between and around muscles) as opposed to farmed animals. On my most recent visit I was offered the opportunity to consume some of the hunted deer, as well as to go hunting. I declined both offers, though reluctantly, because of issues of Kashrut.

The argument often made in Judaism against hunting is that because the death of an animal is sacred, one should not take sport in killing it, such as with hunting. Furthermore, it is emphasized that the only hunters in the bible are characters such as Esau and Nimrod, both rather unsavory. From a technical stand point kosher hunting is impossible simply because you must kill an animal in a very particular manner (slit its throat), which can not be done with a wild animal such as a deer.

I can accept the historic prohibition against hunting, since I imagine that methods of hunting used to be much more brutal thousands of years ago. I do not imagine, though, that many people engaged in sport hunting at the time of Moses. In fact, aside from food and clothing, animals were widely used for sacrifice. So perhaps, like many other laws in Judaism, the laws about animal slaughter were to make sure that methods of killing were distinct from those of non-Jewish sacrifice.

Times change and guns get better. I have fired very few guns, but with the help of an excellently calibrated rifle and a high powered scope, I was able to hit the bulls-eye on a target 50 yards away a number of times.


Therefore, if I want to sanctify the life and death of an animal, how better to do that than to hunt it? Of course you must take great care in being extremely prepared in killing and butchering the animal (if you rupture the stomach of a deer while eviscerating it, the HCl in the stomach renders much of the meat unpalatable), plus you must make complete use of its meat and hide.

Its true that allowing Jews to hunt would not create the artificial separation between Jews and non-Jewish ways, and would do away with some of the ritual aspects to kosher killing. However, my second topic really makes you wonder if that is such a bad thing. About a year ago news broke about certain practices going on at the Pottsville Iowa factories of Aaron Rubashnik's eponymous line of meat produces. More has come out since then and as things stand, the major practices which have been exposed are: Inhumane (and in some cases unkosher) treatment of animals; illegal and abusive worker practices; and an overall high level of complacency by Jewish authorities in the Rubashnik practices.

To see some of the kosher practices just go to youtube.com and search for "agriprocessor slaughterhouse". Watching a few of the videos really makes you wonder whether there is anything at all to the claim that kosher killing, in practice, is about sanctifying the animal's life and death. These animals live in feedlots, are fed corn rather than grass (as they evolved to eat) and become grossly overweight to the point that they have difficulty moving freely. When it comes time for their slaughtering, they are brutally flipped upside down by a machine and then their throat is cut. The machine then lets their body roll out onto the ground into pools of blood from that animal as well as other previously slaughtered animals.

Many of the workers at the Agripro slaughterhouse were mistreated plus many workers were illegally working in the US and others were to young to legally work at a slaughterhouse. Lastly, all of the religious authorities responsible for oversight of this plant were blind to the practices which were going on within.

I will not get into the ethical issues which this case brings up (my uncle spoke about this a week ago to the Society for Jewish Ethics), however I really can not see any legitimacy left in the actual practical application of the Jew laws of Kashrut with respect to killing animals. How can you claim to sanctify an animal's life and death if you deprive it of its freedom, its natural nourishment, and then you kill it in an manner which anything less than the most humane method? Moreover, how can you trust an establishment to certify your meat as kosher, if is was so ready and willing to turn a blind eye to practices occurring at the Agripro plant?

It seems like hunting, and if that is not possible, free range slaughtering, is the only real way to observe the spirit of Kashrut. It is true that meat killed in this manner would be harder to come by and more expensive. However if you really want to sanctify an animal's life and death, you should probably just let it occur naturally --- that is, don't eat meat.

As I've been considering these ideas I have progressively cutback on my consumption of meat and poultry. I eat red meat about once every three months, and chicken or turkey maybe once every week or two. I am not ready to give up animal flesh entirely. Still, I would much prefer to be eating hunted meat on those occasions that I do consume it. I would know that the animal had a better life and death than the kosher steak I could otherwise buy.

Crockpot cooking redux

Unfortunately I was not writing this blog last spring during passover (the Jewish holiday where you can't eat bread or bread-like things), because if I was, I could have written a number of delicious recipes. Let me give an example. [Passover is 8 days]
Day 1 and 2: Was at Bubbie's (grandmother's) and had wonderful food made by many relatives.
Day 3: Bought a crockpot just for use on passover. Bought 2 pounds of chicken and some vegis. Chopped everything up and added water. Cooked for a few hours and ate. Taste was really good!
Day 4: Chicken running low. Added more. Ate it. Still pretty good.
Day 5: Replenished chicken and water supply again. This time added garlic. Starting to get a little sick of this.
Day 6: Briefly forgot I have been eating chicken soup for the past few day and enjoyed a wing... then remembered and stopped enjoying.
Day 7: Only two more days. Bought another pound. Added a potato or two. This sucks.
Day 8: Soup started to taste sour. I think I'll fast today.
Day 9: Done! Never eating chicken soup from the crockpot again.

I have, of course, used the crockpot other times, but never in such a concerted and concentrated manner as during passover. Yet, in the past few days I have almost rivaled that experience. I'm writing from sunny San Antonio, visiting my girlfriend. So far I've made two very large dishes in the crockpot, which has provided breakfast, lunch and dinner for the last few days.

The first dish was an adaptation of the Tuscan Bean Soup I posted about before. This time (under my mom's advice) I used a 15 bean bag of beans. The soup came out well, though the beans took way longer to cook than I expected. After the first 6 hours of cooking they were still tough (I had soaked them for a night as well). The next day though they had broken down very nicely, and made a good, thick soup.

The new dish (or at least the dish I have never posted about) was the stuffed cabbage that my girlfriend and I made last night and have been consuming today. The only experimenting I did with this dish was that instead of meat I used vegetarian imitation chuck meat, and for the rice I used risotto rice (short grained).



1 large head of cabbage
1 package of "meat" roughly a pound (can use real or soy)
1 cup of rice
2 eggs
1 can tomato paste
1 large can tomato puree
1 lemon
1 large onion
1 pepper (any color will do)
1 hot pepper
3 medium carrots
a little ground thyme or oregano, cinnamon, nutmeg, red pepper flakes and brown sugar
olive oil

In a medium sauce pan saute the onion until transparent over medium heat. Add in diced carrots and pepper, plus the finely chopped hot pepper. Throw in a few dashes of thyme or oregano. Cook for another five minutes. Add in the content of one can of tomato paste and mix thoroughly with the oil, until the oil turns red in color. Turn off heat.
Meanwhile, in a large pot boil about four inches of water. While this is happening, take a large cabbage and begin to remove layer one at a time. This can be tricky. Try to cut off some of the base of the cabbage and then work each leave off. If it rips, it alright, just try to keep at least one large section unripped. You should be able to remove about 15 leaves. Also, for eat in rolling, remove a little wedge at the base of each leaf (the thick white part). The left over cabbage can be chopped up and thrown into the crockpot with the sauce. When the water is boiled, put, two at a time, pieces of the cabbage into the water and cook until the leaf is pretty flexible for rolling. Remove and put in a bowl to cool (no need to ice them).
When all of the pieces are par boiled, the filling begins. The "meat" filling is made by mixing the "meat" with the rice and with two eggs until uniform. You can add a little salt and pepper too. Place a few spoonfuls of this filling and then a spoonful or two or the vegis onto a cabbage leaf. Fold the leaf around to make a roll. The rolls don't need to be very full since the rice will expand.
The rolls get packed into the crockpot. Already in the crockpot should be a little tomato puree mixed with some lemon juice and brown sugar. As you start a new layer of rolls, add in some more tomato, lemon, brown sugar and also cinnamon and nutmeg (not much of this). You can also sprinkle in any extra cabbage bits finely chopped. When all of the rolls are in the crockpot, add in the remaining tomato and lemon, plus enough water to cover most of the cabbage (it does not need to go over the top of the top layer). Set to cook for 8 hours on low heat and go to sleep.



About two rolls is enough for a meal, so this makes about 7 servings or so (or as I think of it, it makes enough for about 3 days of breakfast, lunch and dinner). The cabbage gets very soft, but nicely keeps the meaty mixture in place. The liquid remains and makes a nice thin, but flavorful sauce. Think of eating this in a bowl and then slurping up the leftover liquid.

Chinatown vs Wholefoods (hint: Chinatown wins)

Yesterday I helped a friend prepare dinner for a group of our friends. On the menu was a meal I've made and enjoyed before -- Chinese steamed fish, stirfry and rice [we also made some crunchy tofu]. My friend lives close to Chinatown, and my first impulse was to go to Chinatown to buy the fish and vegis. I haltered though. What if I bought the 1$ fish and someone got sick? At least if I shopped at Wholefoods and someone got sick from the fish I could confidently say that we got the stuff from a reputable source rather than from a slightly dirty Chinatown fish store. In the end we did go to Wholefoods and got two 1.5lb red snappers. The monger removed the fins and scales, plus the guts.

To my surprise, the monger did a fairly bad job at scrapping all of the scales off of the fish. Scales on cooked fish are a little better than trying to eat someone-else's fingernails. I would have thought that a place like Wholefoods would have taken better care at properly cleaning the fish they sell. Aside from that, the fish was very yummy and cooked up nicely.

Now compare this to Chinatown. In Chinatown a generic whole fish goes for 1$ a pound, whereas at Wholefoods it goes for 10$ a pound. In Chinatown there is a pretty large selection of whole fish, however some of them are not in the best of conditions. Still, if you know how to pick them, you can easily get a fish of comparable quality to a Wholefood fish. The general rule of thumb for picking a fish is
1. Mostly covered in ice.
2. Springy to the touch ---firm and not soft or hard.
3. Eyes not clouded over.
4. No fishy smell.
5. The gills should be pink or red, not slimy or dry.
So as long as you adhere to these rules, its easy to find a good fish in Chinatown. Once you select it, the monger will clean and gut it, and in my experience does a better job than the Wholefoods monger. Make sure to have a short distance to travel, or a container in which to keep the fish cold. When you get the fish home, you should plan on cooking with it within a few hours. Before cooking, wash and clean it, then pat it dry. Also, bare in mind that whole fish comes with a fair number of bones. So watch out while eating it.
For some reason I really like eating whole fish. Maybe its the same reason people like cooking over an outdoor fire --- its closer to the way we evolved to eat. Perhaps people who enjoyed eating whole fish and cooking food over fires thrived better and had more reproductive success. A fillet of fish will do the body well, but the fires of human nature are better nourished by fish on a stick cooked over an outdoor flame.

BBQ - New York Vegetarian Style

Tricked you! This is a post about BBQ Tofu. I have heard that New York City does not have particularly good BBQ on account of restrictions about smoking meat indoors. However, I am hardly cocky or presumptuous enough to claim that my BBQ Tofu outdoes the makeshift New York meat BBQ. Still, I enjoy it, I can eat it (kosher) and its cheap as can be, so why not?
This dish is, like many other I make, my own interpretation of things my mother made (and which at the time I did not enjoy) while I was growing up. Now I marvel at most of her creations.
There are three basic components to the meal: Tofu, homemade BBQ sauce, and bulgar. [Even my spell check suggests that bulgar is in fact vulgar. Its not, but for many years I enjoyed making that pronouncement.] The tofu should be firm to extra firm and should be sliced into thin (1/2" x 2" x 2") pieces and pressed between two cutting boards with some weight (a cast iron pan or some cans of beans) to drain excess water. Meanwhile in a large sauce pan prepare the BBQ sauce. The choice of ingredients that went into my sauce were as much out of intention as out of convenience (things I had in the fridge). I started by semi-caramelizing a really large onion, half of which was chopped fine and the other half sliced. Then I threw in like 1/3 cup of apple cider vinegar, a Tbs or two or soy sauce, between 1/2 cup and a full cup for apple sauce (I had left over from my Hanukkah party), 1/2 container of tomato paste and 1 container of tomato sauce. I also added in some carrots and hot pepper, but this is totally optional. I left this simmering for around 15 minutes until it cooked down a little and thickened up nicely.

At this point let me make a note for anyone who may try to replicate this recipe. I added the vinegar in first, to the hot pan, and the result was that some of it boiled off immediately into the air. The result of this was that for the next day or two the apartment smelled somewhat vinegary. This was good and bad. Bad because myself and my roommates did not particularly enjoy the smell. Good because I learned from one of my roommates about a Chinese dish made from vinegar which smells horrible but is really good. In any case, you may want to add the vinegar in a little later to avoid the extreme smell.

In a rectangular oven safe Pyrex lay a thin layer of the BBQ sauce then cover with the tofu, cut diagonally. Then over top spread the rest of the sauce to cover all of the tofu. Put into a hot oven (my oven has two settings: on and super hot, or on and filling the room with gas but without a flame) and cook for at least 20 minutes.

As that is cooking, boil some water and when hot pour into a bowl with a cup or two of bulgar. Depending on the size of the bulgar it takes different amounts of time to cook. For my medium grain bulgar, I let the water and bulgar sit covered for 15 minutes or so. When tender, pour out excess water (this can be a little tricky).

Serve the BBQ Tofu on top of a portion of bulgar.

99% Chocolate

I was just beginning an entry on BBQ Tofu (I'll write that entry in a moment) when I decided to break off a chunk of the 99% Cocoa Lindt bar my brother and sister-inn-law gave me a week ago during my visit to Albany. Talk about shock to the mouth. I haven't eaten much today, except a few strips of dried mango, so my mouth was totally unprepared for the bitterness of the chocolate. Even with a progression of 72% and then 85% cocoa chocolate, this stuff is strong. Still, once the initial shock subsided, I was surprised to discover that, after having eaten this stuff for the last week (I eat super small chunks) I'm starting to appreciate the flavor.
Part of me cringes at the idea of needing to learn to appreciate flavors hidden deep in food that a priori seems nasty. Still, it seems to be a socially popular pastime. For instance, people sit around talking about scotch -- which to the untrained mouth tastes (in my dads words) like turpentine. Or they talk about smoked fish, or strong beer... all of which at first attempt are generally nasty. To further illustrate this point (if there is one), I brought cheese to a friend's new years eve party last night. The cheese which elicited the most interest, both as far as discussion and eating, was the super stinky garlic/rosemary cheese which I brought (I'm pretty sure anyone who eat from this block of cheese, or even touched the rind did not receive a new years kiss --- unless from another stinky cheese eater).
Anyway, I don't want to ramble, but in conclusion, lets all get together and talk about 99% chocolate.