Kasha Varnishkes

For the last year or so I've been saving up chicken skin and fat in a bag in my freezer. I don't eat much chicken, so don't worry... its just a small ziplock bag. Today, as a celebration for the Jets winning their playoff game, I decided to use that skin/fat for one of the most classic, yet seldom made, Jewish foods --- Kasha Varnishkes.



The main idea with this dish is to complement the kind of dry, grainy nature of kasha (cooked until tender) with the firmness of bowtie noddles, and the softness of onions slowcooked in chicken fat.
In my version, I wanted to make the dish, which is often a side dish, into a whole meal. As such I decided to, near the end of the onion/chicken fat cooking, add some sliced chicken breast, and half a bag of frozen spinach.

The recipe / preparation is as follows:
-Boil a large pot of water and, when rolling, add some salt and a little over 1/2 pound of bowtie noddles. Cook until done, but not too soft and then drain.
-Meanwhile, boil 2 cups of water in a medium saucepan and when boiling add 1 cup of kasha and turn down to simmer. Also add a fair amount of salt to flavor the kasha. I cooked this for about 15 minutes, and near the end I actually added some of the liquid which the onion / chicken pot (see next part) had created.
-In a dutchoven (I used my meat castiron) render a cup or so of chicken fat / skin / odds and ends. This means just cook it until the fat liquefies. Then add in a bunch of onion. I used two large onions and this worked out well. You should probably start this cooking before the pasta and kasha since you want to let the onion caramelize and the chicken skin get crispy (mine didn't get as crispy as I would have liked). Near the end, add in some chopped chicken breast and then some thawed and drained frozen spinach. Cook until the chicken is done and the spinach has really mixed in with the onion. The spinach not only add nice color and nutrients, but also really soaks up the chicken and onion flavor well.
-When everything is good and cooked, add a fair amount of salt and pepper and then mix the three components together.
-Eat.

Like I said, the spinach is not conventional, however I think that it really adds to this dish. Sometimes kasha varnishkes can be a little dry -- however if you add a LOT of onion and spinach you'll avoid this problem.

OK, I'm going to go sneak another spoonful of this from the kitchen before putting it away.

Quick and easy fish

I've been working pretty hard on my math recently, so last night when I left my office at 10:30pm(yes... it was Sunday...) I needed something to distract me from mathematical thought. Cooking always does that well, but I was pretty tired. So I decided to go to the M2M (a local Asian convenience store) to get some sushi. The prepared spicy Tuna I like was sold out. After searching around a little I decided to pick up some sole (it cost 2$ for three nice fillets). I prepared the fish as simple as possible. I first ground some pepper and scattered a little salt onto the fish. Then I dredged it in a little cornmeal (flour would work too, but I figured I'd give this a chance) and added a little garlic powder for extra flavor. Then, I remembered back to my days of Ellington fancy dinners and recalled that people would sometimes serve fish pinenut encrusted... so I crushed some pinenuts with the side of my knife and diced them and added them as a crust.

I heated up my second favorite castiron and put a little butter on and quickly placed the fish in the melted butter. The fish took just a few minutes on each side and when done (I ate it with rice) was wonderful tasting. The pinenuts were not too strong but really went well with the fish's flavor. For just a little over 2$ and about 20 minutes of cooking and prep time you kind of need to wonder what is the point of getting this as a restaurant.

Sorry... now picture. I was too hungry to get my camera. Maybe next time.

Tamales

A few months ago I purchased a bag of Masa Harena --- not sure why though. This past week when Allison visited me I found a reason. Her first suggestion for what to cook with me was tamales. At first I was confused as to why she wanted to make a small red candy you buy in a box. However, after a little internet searching I remembered that they are, in fact, more than just candy.

We started to cook yesterday at about 5pm. The first step was to create a suitable vegetarian version of the Masa dough. Traditionally this is made with lard, but the local lard salesman was out of vegetable lard, so we needed to resort to a substitution of oil and a little butter. The recipes we looked at online suggested that it is best to use some chicken stock, but we wanted to use cheese in the filling (and my pots and pans are mostly dairy...) so we began looking for a suitable substitute. In the spirit of laziness, We didn't feel like going to the store to get vegetable stock, so after some poking around the cabinets we found a box of matzoh ball soup mix.

For the dough I used:
5 cups of Masa Harina
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp salt
A few dashes of paprika, garlic powder and black pepper
1/2 a package of dried (vegetarian) chicken soup mix
4 cups or so of water
a little under 1 cup or so of oil (I used olive, but any kind probably does)



Mix together the dried goods. Slowly add in the water, making sure to mix with all of the masa. When all of the water is added, add in the oil and work with a fork until everything is mixed. The dough (perhaps not the best name for it, since its nothing like bread dough) should be a little grainy and fluffy and certainly not soupy.

After making the dough we needed to purchase some corn husks. I suppose that you can just save corn husks from summer corn purchases... but I didn't have any so we went to a local mexican food store and got few packages. To soften the husks we boiled some water and poured it over them and let them sit and soak for a few minutes.



Meanwhile we prepared a bean filling by sauteing a head of garlic and a large onion and then adding in a can of beans. It turns out that we probably should have doubled this part of the recipe since we ran out of the beans after making about half of the tamales.



Besides beans, we purchased three types of cheese (Queso Fresco, Mozzarella and cheddar) and some Jalapenos and green peppers for filling. We sliced the peppers into thin strips and tried not to get too many seeds from the Jalapenos into the tamales.





To assemble a tamale, place the corn husk on a flat surface with the pointy part facing away from you. Take the dough and place a small handful on the left closest section of the husk. With you fingers spread out the dough until its pretty thin and covers all but the right one-third and furthest one-third (near the pointy part) of the husk.




Now place some cheese and some pepper and some beans on the left-middle part of the dough. Taking the left side of the husk in your hand roll tightly over the filling and bring the left edge of the husk down to meet the end of right end of the dough.



This part reminds me a lot of rolling sushi... Then fold the pointy part in (towards you) and finish rolling the tamale towards the right. Finally take the tamale in hand and pinch off the top, open section (adding a little more dough if needed) so that you get a nice point of dough.



We used a vegetable steamer insert and a large pan to steam the tamales. I suppose anything which creates hot steam would do the job. The tamales really need to cook for a while, though they can be piled up a fair amount. As always, when steaming make sure not to run out of water, or else you will loss your pan. The key here is to let the cook for a while... at least 40 minutes or so.



The dough shouldn't be wet at all when the tamales are done. You should be able to slice the tamale (after unwrapping it) with a fork and it should keep its shape.




Our tamales came out really well. I think the recipe yielded about 30 or so, so we ended up freezing a good portion. If you freeze them I've read that you are not supposed to defrost them. Rather just steam them from frozen, or you can probably microwave them until hot.

Cat food or me food?

Anyone who was cracked open a thing of canned salmon and asked this question is not alone. Driven by some invisible force (mixture of a desire for more protein and a culinary curiosity) about a week ago I decided it would be a good thing to make use of two of the cans of salmon I had purchased roughly a year ago during a canned salmon sale at my local cheapo market.

I've had a rough history with canned salmon. My original introduction to it was through salmon latkas which my Bubbie (grandmother) would serve during dairy meals when we visited. Despite how good anything was at one of these dairy meals, as a kid who loved to eat meat and looked forward to the meaty delights of my Bubbie's kitchen, I was always a little discontent. It took me a while to develop a taste for things fishy, so as a young kid I stayed away from the latkas and always assumed they were pretty gross. A few years ago, however, I was taking a bus back from Bubbie's to boston and she decided to pack me a lunch for the trip. In a roll (I think it was an onion roll) she put some salmon latka and dressed it up like a hamburger (for those who don't know what a salmon latka is, its essentially a burger made from canned salmon). To my utter surprise I really enjoyed this way of eating the salmon latka.

Still, in the time since I've realized a liking for canned salmon, I had been pretty scared to actually use it. I had one good experience making pasta with chunks of the canned fish and some creamy sauce... but generally the cans have been pushed further to the back of my cupboard, unused and unwanted.

My first thought, upon opening the two cans of salmon last week, was to make salmon latkas. I had on hand some carrot, pepper, onion and garlic. After dicing these up with some chopped frozen ginger (freezes really well) I sauted these vegetables for a few minutes so they wouldn't be too tough in the latkas (it was my plan to pan fry them and hence vegetables would not get cooked too well). The salmon went into a large bowl where I worked hard to mix it all together. I added in some salt and pepper (I could have done without the salt since the canned salmon was pretty salty to start with) and then added in the vegetables, after having let them cool for a little. To bind this together I added about two or three eggs and a good portion of chickpea flour (any type is fine... but I like the color this gives to things when fried). In the end I have a nice thick batter of fish and vegetables. Tasting it (which I probably should not have due to the egg) I realized it needed a little sweetness, so I added in a few squirts of honey.

A hot cast iron pan did a pretty good job of cooking up three midsized latkas which served as my dinner. I was not that happy though since pan frying tends to leave the insides a little mushy and requires lots of oil. At this point it was pretty late in the evening and I had a large bowl full of slightly fishy smelling batter sitting in the kitchen. Not wanted to spend the hour to fry up another 30 latkas, and not that happy with the results of such frying anyway, I did what anyone sick of cooking, yet with ingredients leftover, would do --- I made a kugel.

You ask what it means that I made a kugel? If it sounds impressive it is not. All I did was grease up a glass pan and pour all of my batter into it and then throw it in the oven for 45 minutes (for part covered with tin foil). After cooking the moisture which plagued my fried prototype latkas had cooked out and I was left with a nicely browned, and very mild (on the fishy scale) tasting kugel. The flour and egg helped it hold together nicely, and the honey give it an extra nice sweetness (after all it is the season of Rosh Hashana where we wish people a Happy and Sweet New Year). The great thing about a kugel is that once its made, you can cut it into individual sized pieces and freeze. In my experience, reheating in the microwave works really well for these single portions.

So, what is the lesson to be learned here? If you start making something and then get sick of it or disillusioned with it just turn it into a kugel.

Food and beer this summer

I did a fair amount of traveling over the summer and I'd like to briefly recount the highlights and lowlights of that which I ate.
Lets starts with a low. Berlin, a vegan restaurant called Cafe V -- after spending the entire day wandering through the city seeing the sites I was in dire need for a nice relaxing meal. I found my way to a nice restaurant my cousin had mentioned (a friend had told her about the place). I found a seat outside of the place and considered my menu options. It was nice to have so many options, especially after having been in Prague where my options were generally limited to one or two things on the menu. I settled on a tofu curry with zucchini. Despite sitting outdoors, I could not escape the annoying cigarette smoke which wafted towards me from the other few patrons outside. There were probably three people sitting outside, yet at any given moment at least one was smoking --- makes you wonder how they had time to eat. Besides gripping about the smoke, my other distraction while waiting for the food was the occurrences going on a little further up the block. I was convinced that there was going to be a mafia hit in the apartment building next to the restaurant. These really smarmy looking fellows kept going in and out, and going to the trunk and looking at some envelops and inside a duffel bag... But, thankfully, no hit occurred (to my knowledge).
These mob fantasies were abruptly interrupted by the arrival of my food. The dish looked very nice -- and the waitress also brought me a free order of garlic bread. Great! Well, maybe not. Upon tasting the sauce and tofu I immediately realized why I was compted the garlic bread. The tofu tasted, well, like tofu --- plain, unmarinaded, uncooked tofu. As far as the curry sauce, there are many varieties which exists but I'm pretty sure that turmeric and water does not constitute a curry sauce. The sauce was so thin and flavorless. The only redeeming elements of the meal were the zucchini and the garlic bread. But then again those are probably two of the easiest things to not mess up. As I was alone at the restaurant and had noone to gripe about it to I had a running inner monologue in which I berated the food and came up with craftier and craftier ways to insult the quality of the restaurant. Someone should really tell them that they suck --- but my German is... well... as bad as their tofu.

I had another bad food experience in Berlin, but enough bad. Despite not being able to eat much of the local fare, I had a pretty good culinary experience during my visit to Prague. First of all, I was happily surprised to discover that Prague has wild pears, apples, plums and even some figs.
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The wild fruit was not as impressive as in Berkeley where the plums are super ripe and incredibly ample, as are the figs. A moment more of bashing Berlin with respect to fruit -- the last day I was there I decided to go to Potsdam which is outside of the city and where there are gigantic palaces and parks. One of the palaces had a terraced garden leading up to it. At each level of the garden were about 20 recessed sections of the terrace wall and in each of these recessions were two fig trees. In totally there were roughly 200 fig trees. Between these recessions, the wall was covered with grapes. I was hungry for a fig was had some time to spare so I decided to look at each tree until I found a fig. To keep my mouth busy during the hunt I made sure to have a constant supply of grapes (nice and sour ones). After roughly an hour of looking I had inspected every fig tree and come to the conclusion that there were no rip figs in Berlin. Such a shame considering that in Prague I had eaten some wonderfully rip figs at the Wallenstein gardens.

Beyond found fruit, Prague offered some wonderful beer and also some pretty yummy preserved fish and cabbage. The beer was super cheap and I made sure to have at least one with lunch and one in the evening every day. Half a litter of the beer cost about $1.50. Not too bad. It was always cheaper to get beer with a meal than water (which is not free there and always comes in bottles owing to old pipes which evidently make the water undrinkable). I've been lucky enough to try a lot of good beer (most recent before Prague was in San Francisco which has excellent local brewing). I thought that the Czech beer was very refreshing and smooth and drinkable, but not as interesting as Belgian or even some local American beers.

Since most of the restaurant food was patently unkosher I didn't eat out much but rather went to the super market and purchased the following wonderfully cheap and tasty items: Crusty brown rolls, Edam cheese, preserved fish (salmon or trout or sardines), arugula, sweet red pepper, watermelon and chocolate. The deals were great for these items -- more than enough smoked fish to fill me up cost something like 40 cents, and the watermelon was cheap as cheap can be. I ended up eating these items for most of my days and enjoying every bite of it.

I did have a few nice restaurant visits. At one place I bought herring (for maybe $2's) and was brought a plate with a fist sized rolled up chunk of herring with shredded onion and three bread dumplings. The herring was really fishing and really good and I definitely smelled like fish for the rest of the day. Another nice "meal" I had was a plate full of red and white cabbage which had been dressed with a nice acidic dressing. I think I surprised the waiter by getting this side dish and then eating it all myself (other groups split one of these plates among many people).

There was a kosher restaurant which I did go to one night called King Solomon's. For, by Czech standard, a fortune ($30) I had a nice three course meal there which started with a slightly nicer version of hotdog soup (it had some kosher sausage and a tomato base) and focused on a braised turkey chunk served on a tomato, zucchini, onion ratatouille. The turkey was probably the best preparation of turkey I've ever had. It was incredibly flavorful and juicy and went really well with the ratatouille.

To sum up ---
Berlin = crappy food;
Prague = limited but good food;
Fish = ate too much;
Fruit = always makes a place better in my book;
Beer = good, especially when cheap.

Have I been fasting for the last two months????

No -- thankfully I have not been fasting, but I have been generally away from my kitchen and, more recently, have been overly involved with my math. Its hard to think of math and cooking as really being mutually exclusive, but they have been for me. The main reason is that when I'm working hard on math I go into my office at 9 or so, and then don't leave, generally, until 9 or 10 in the evening. The result of this is that I can't go shopping in the cheap stores I like to frequent, and also when I get home I'm super hungry and want something immediately. A sad state indeed, but it should improve as the school year begins again and I recover the semblance of a schedule.

Enough gripping though. This is a food blog not a complaining blog, and I write today to report on progress in the battle between math and food. I today, due to hunger, cheapness, a desire to cook, and a bag of eggplants from Chinatown, decided to do some morning cooking. As my parents were visiting this weekend I ended up wandering with them down to Chinatown. There is a very strong magnetic force between me and the outdoor markets along the Manhattan bridge, so once I was within a few blocks I couldn't fight the attraction. Having only seven dollars in my wallet I needed to be careful. After surveying the deals I bought 3lbs of leeche nuts for $3, 2 lbs of eggplant for $1, 10 plums for $1, 2 lbs of Chinese broccoli for $1 and an ample amount of garlic for my last dollar.

My morning task was to make use of all of the non-fruit ingredients, plus some leftover carrots from a previous Chinatown trip. The first project was to make eggplant parmigiana. This was inspired by a friend who mentioned that he had made this a few days ago and it had been really good. I was dealing with Chinese eggplants which are long and skinny, so I sliced them at a pretty sharp diagonal to yield large enough pieces. These went into a drainer with a lot of salt and dessicated for about an hour. More on this in a moment.

While the eggplant was loosing water weight I decided to make use of the Chinese broccoli and prepare a dish which is a mix between something my mom loves to make with any dark leafy green, and a dish which I had prepared for me when I was visiting with a professor in California earlier in the summer. The general idea is to cook the green with some garlic, ginger, raisin, hot pepper, and soy sauce until it is nice and tender. It works best to use a little oil and cook the non-greens for a minute and then to add the tougher, stems of the greens, and a few minutes later the leaves. The cooked out liquid and soy sauce makes a nice thin liquid. Along with the cooked greens I toasted some pine nuts and then grated some parmigiana cheese. These are for sprinkling over the greens. Finally, a great way to serve this is to cook some soba noodles and in a bowl put a base of the soba, then the greens, nuts and cheese and some of the liquid. This constituted the second dish I prepared this morning.

But back to the eggplant. Once enough water was drawn out I wanted to bread and fry the pieces. My technique here was lacking, but due to the power of cast iron it ended up alright. Ideally one would pat the pieces dry and then dredge in flour and then fry in a heavy skillet with some oil. I guess I forgot to pat dry, because the flour got pretty clumpy when I was handling it. None-the-less the breaded eggplant still managed to get nice and browned. All the meanwhile I had been preparing a simple tomato sauce from crushed garlic, diced onion and pepper (hot and green) and crushed tomatoes which simmer for 20 minutes of so. Part of the sauce went in the bottom of a large rectangular glass pan, then a portion of the eggplant, a portion of slice mozzarella, some more sauce, some more eggplant, some more mozzarella, some more sauce and finally some grated parmigiana. Sounds like a lot of layering, but I imagine it doesn't actually matter. I baked this for about 25 minutes, or how ever long it took me to clean up from all of the cooking. Turned out pretty good in the end.

The third dish, which has gotten lost in the narration, was a quinoa recipe suggested in the comments of an earlier post on quinoa. I've made it before and enjoyed it, and this time it turned out just as well. I'll leave it to the interested reader to track down the old post (hint: just search for quinoa on my blog).

In any case, I'm happy to say that I'm back in my apartment with my trusty cast iron, so there should be plenty to post about. Also, at some point I will need to give my culinary opinion about food I eat during my travels this summer. Preview: I ate a lot of dried and smoked fish when in Prague since everything else is meat.

Another roasted egg plant dip

I'm heading out of town for most of the month of July. One of my most difficult culinary tasks every time I leave the city for an extended period of time is to use up all of the perishable items which I happen to have accumulated in the fridge. I think of it as some version of balancing a checkbook, or perhaps like the game Rummikub (where I would often try to use all of my pieces in some sort of miraculous combination of moves --- often failing).

In any case, as my travel date approached I realized that I had an excess of yogurt -- much more than was necessary to finish of my latest batch of granola. Along with the yogurt, my fridge has recently been haunted with an eggplant in desperate need of cooking. The necessity to use these two items precipitated the following eggplant dip recipe (plus I had a lot of garlic which needed using too!).

As with my last eggplant escapade, I decided to roast it over the open flame. This time I covered the surface more completely with foil to help with cleanup. The roasting took about 10 minutes afterwhich I left it in a bowl for another 10 minutes, then sliced it in half and let it drain through a colander for a little while. During this draining I took three heads of garlic and, with boredom mounting, peeled every single clove (probably 50 or so in all). These went into a cast iron pan with ample olive oil and roasted until nice, brown and soft. By the point that these were done my eggplant was drained and I had transferred it to a large bowl and mashed it up. The garlic also got a good mashing. Enter the yogurt! I spooned maybe 5 large spoonfuls of yogurt into the mixture and then mashed it all together some more. To this I finally added some more oil, and a fair amount of salt, pepper, ground cumin, smoked paprika, chili powder, and a little tumeric. The taste was nice --- the eggplant and yogurt flavors started strong and then the spices gave an after flavor. However it lacked something in the middle, so I add to it a little balsamic vinegar and some honey and mustard. Now it was good.

So, last night I had this with some large pretzels. Right now I am envisioning myself eating it with some crispy cast iron toasted tortilla as well. Well... to tell the truth I'm mostly thinking about eating watermelon when I get home -- but this dip is good too.