Well, it’s getting about time to update this thing. To be completely honest, I was working myself sick and being ultra-productive before Misha got here so that I could spend some guilt-free time with him, and then after he came two weeks ago, we were so busy running around and having fun that I left all of my food photos and recipes to write commentary on and post, batch-style, after he left. He’s now back in Russia, which means that I get to share here some of the wonderful food we made in a small community kitchen in his hotel.
The first food (really, a drink) that sticks out in my mind was conjured up on a bicycle trip we took from Thun to Spiez, another small city on the Thunersee about 15 km from here. The trail went through the woods, and about five minutes after hitting gravel I heard a bicycle peeling out behind me and a happy exclamation of “Smotri! Kostyanika!” (“Look! Stone bramble berries!”) from Misha.
Now, I should tell you the thing about Russians: they go crazy about picking things out of the woods and eating them. Berries, mushrooms, stinging nettles (a recipe I really want to try), you name it. And to me, they all seem to be experts on what’s edible, and what just might contain lethal nerve toxins on certain days of its life cycle but not others.
And I agree with the philosophy: there’s probably nothing cooler than spending time in the woods, collecting things to bring home and then making delicious food out of them. It, like Linux (yeah, got that in there), is free, in both the senses of “free beer” and “free spirit”, and (unlike Linux) it’s a great opportunity to get out of your house and learn about the wonderful local wildlife around you. So I, of course, jumped all over these stone brambles when Misha mentioned them, despite the fact that I’d never seen one in my life, nor did I even know the English term for them (hello, Wikipedia). . . all I knew was that I trusted Misha’s judgment, they tasted okay off of the bush (and didn’t immediately kill me), and had huge pits in them.
When we got home with a liter of them in an inside-out plastic shopping bag (now I know why Russians always carry at least one), we started brainstorming, with the help of this website (in Russian).
Now, I’ll tell you the other thing about Russians: they love their kvas, and rightly so, in my opinion. It’s basically made by fermenting juice or rye bread with yeast for a few days and is served cold. It’s not boozy like beer, but it’s not sweet either. It’s genuinely refreshing when sold in the summer from big yellow barrels on street corners–but it’s doubly refreshing when you make it yourself out of berries you picked with your own hands, and drink it during a tough bike ride in the mountains on a hot summer day in Switzerland. Which, I can only assume, is why Misha immediately suggested making kvas out of our new stone bramble berries.
Here’s how it’s done.
Stone Bramble Berry Kvas
To make it vegan, use some other sweetener instead of the sugar (it’s mainly there for the yeast to eat, so choose something suitable).
4 cups stone bramble berries
1 cup granulated sugar
5-10 grams dry yeast
3 liters water
Take your berries, and crush them using either an inverted drinking glass:
or a Foley mill (why there was a Foley mill in our hotel’s community kitchen, yet not a decent spatula, I’ll never know):
Put the crushed berries and with their stones and pulp in a pan over medium heat, and boil them for five minutes.
Strain them using a cheesecloth (or a washcloth, either way)
in order to remove the seeds
Stir in the sugar, and then cool the mixture completely so it doesn’t kill the yeast. Stir in the yeast, pour into a bottle, and wait for two days. We kept ours on the bottom shelf of a closet, but I guess you could keep it anywhere warm but out of direct sunlight. Don’t close the lid entirely.
After those two days are up, you might see some sediment at the bottom. Pour the liquid into another bottle to avoid drinking the sediment–and then you’re done! Enjoy!
I haven’t really had much time to cook lately, since I changed jobs (and countries!) about a week and a half ago, and now that I’m in Thun, Switzerland, a small ancient city at the foot of the Bernese Alps, and working in a materials science research facility, I’m really busy all of a sudden. I’ve had to drastically cut back my hours in the kitchen, and so have been surviving on the delicious mountain bread that’s ubiquitous here and can be bought fresh, along with local cheese, chocolate, and birchermüesli. The range of fresh foods available here that I’m used to cooking with is much wider than that in Russia (herbs!), so I’m happy about that, but it’s a bitter irony that I don’t have the time to make the most it. And although I love my work, that aforementioned ironical situation, combined with a few other things, have left me positively bummed lately.
So I decided today, after having screwed up in the laundry room of my new building and locking my soapy clothes in a washing machine for three hours while my flatmate was asleep this morning and I was supposed to be at work, that what I needed was a good, homemade banana bread, just like my mom used to make. Mom worked full-time in addition to holding a position in local government the entire time we were growing up–and she could whip up this banana bread batter in about five minutes, then pop it in the oven and get back to whatever she was doing for an hour while it was baking. It’s excellent for very busy people, or very bummed-out people, and especially for people who are both.
This bread has never, ever failed me, even when I go into mathematician mode and become so inept at regular household things that I shouldn’t be allowed out of my bedroom. . . like this morning. Or like about three years ago, when I was living in an apartment with a nice little oven whose controls I didn’t understand in the slightest. In particular, for the first two months I was there I, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish between ‘broil’ and ‘bake’–and so it was a mystery why my banana bread would cook so fast on the top, and still be uncooked on the pan-side. Having had two bread pans, though, I had a solution: I’d tip the bread-in-progress upside-down into the other pan about halfway through baking, or when I sensed that the bread would burn if I didn’t. In retrospect, I’m surprised that this worked as well as it did (and it really did work well; the bread cooked in about 2/3 the time, and the top (well, either top, I guess) didn’t burn), but I’m also glad that I found my oven’s bake setting after a while–and I think that the whole thing is a testament to how flexible and wonderful this banana bread is.
The photo’s 100% awful, since I didn’t have time to take photos in daylight and so used the overhead lighting in our dining room. . . but the bread–believe me–is wonderful.
Banana Bread
The recipe is actually my grandmother’s, and it’s something I came to not directly, but by way of my mother. It’s also delicious with chopped walnuts added to it, and if you want to experiment with spices like nutmeg and cloves, that’d probably also taste good, but I prefer to make it simple and plain, and have a slice of it with vanilla ice cream or vanilla sauce. Cures all the household woes you’ll ever have, and travels to work very easily, serving the purpose of making your labmates very jealous.
To make it vegan, replace the sugar if you’re concerned about bone char, use margarine instead of butter, and use an extra banana and an extra teaspoon of baking powder to replace the egg.
3 bananas, can be overripe
1 cup butter or margarine, left on the counter to soften for a few minutes
1 egg
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
2 cups all-purpose baking flour
Peel and mash the bananas using a potato masher, and mash well with the butter and egg. Add the powder, soda, and salt, and mix thoroughly (my grandmother would probably sift all three of these in with the flour, but I’m too lazy). Add the sugar and mix thoroughly, then add the flour and mix thoroughly. Put the batter in a greased and floured bread pan, and bake in a 350F (175C) oven for about an hour, or until a knife stuck through the top comes out clean.
Since the first time I visited Russia, I’ve been blown away by what I’ve seen as the customary Russian notion of salad. In contast to the American version, which more often than not features large intact leaves of iceberg lettuce and a small selection of coarsely-chopped or whole peeled vegetables, a Russian salad as I’ve come to know it, traditionally features anything you can imagine, including herbs, eggs, meat, and vegetables–most often cucumbers, carrots, beets, tomatoes–chopped up finely and mixed thoroughly with mayonnaise or sour cream. Notice the lack of lettuce. One of my favorite ‘Russian’ salads is this one, although when I make it, I usually leave the vegetables more coarsely chopped than I’ve seen most Russians do. Either way, I consider it a perfect and simple summer salad.
Simple Summer Salad
To make it vegan, nix the mayonnaise and replace with oil and vinegar or your favorite other vegan dressing.
2 small cucumbers, washed and diced finely
4-5 medium tomatoes, washed and diced
500 g radishes, washed and sliced thinly
1 bunch dill, chopped along with the stems
2 bunches parsley, chopped along with the stems
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup, more or less to taste, of mayonnaise
Mix all of it in a bowl, with or without the mayonnaise, and serve!
Serves 2-4 people, depending on how hungry those people are.
I was in the mood to make broccoli soup last week. It’s tasty and healthy and wonderful in general. Here:
Cream of Broccoli Soup
This soup is very similar recipe to the Creamy Cauliflower Leaf and Potato Soup I made a while ago, and I think that a lot of different vegetables could work really well in this form–stuck on top of a soffrito of onions and garlic, boiled with potatoes, blended, and with milk or cream added.
To make it vegan, nix the butter, sugar, cheese rind, and sour cream garnish, check the wine label for animal-derived finings, and replace the cream with your favorite non-dairy milk.
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 teaspoon sugar
3 large cloves garlic, minced
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese
2 cups dry white wine
1 cup (more or less) vegetable stock
3 medium potatoes, peeled or scrubbed and diced
1 large carrot, peeled or scrubbed and diced
500 g broccoli, fresh or frozen
1 cup milk or heavy cream
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup parsley, chopped coarsely
1/4 cup sour cream
Melt the butter in the olive oil in a saucepan over low heat. Saute the onion with the sugar until caramelized. Add the garlic, and saute until fragrant. Add the cheese rind, wine, and stock, and stir over medium heat until simmering. Add the potatoes, carrot, and broccoli, and simmer 20-30 minutes or until potatoes can be crushed with a fork against the side of the saucepan. Liquefy the mixture with a stick blender, and stir in the milk or cream. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice, and garnish with parsley and sour cream.
I don’t know how it happened (or how it happens so often), but time yesterday kept quietly creeping by until 30 minutes before supper time, at which point I realized that I hadn’t even begun to think about what to make. Then, as usual, it immediately stopped creeping, got into the starting blocks, and took off like a shot.
Again as usual at times like those, my mind turned to pasta, but this time without the usual thoughts of homemade tomato sauce (after the pizza adventure last weekend, there’s none to be found in this kitchen). No: this time, I paid more attention to the bottle of milk in the refrigerator. I ran out to the corner vegetable kiosk and bought a yellow pepper, cherry tomatoes, and some fresh herbs, the things I’d need for pasta primavera with homemade besciamella. On the time-efficiency to boyfriend-satisfaction curve, this is one of the most successful suppers I’ve ever made, ranking right up there with drunken pasta.
The photo is, of course, from the morning after, when I was getting another batch for lunch ready from the leftover pasta, sauce, and vegetables. Unfortunately, there was no yellow pepper leftover, but I, as an ardent bell pepper-hater, think it looks just as appetizing without it.
Pasta primavera
Pasta primavera is traditionally made with no cream sauce except a soffritto of olive oil, onion, garlic, and Parmesan cheese at the beginning–and although I base it, as I do most things, on a soffritto of butter (or oil, if you like), onions, and garlic, I’ve chosen to use the besciamella instead of just Parmesan (and to add it at the end), because I love taking a relatively unhealthy dish and somehow making it even more unhealthy. Along the same lines, feel free to garnish with grated hard cheese, if it’ll make you happy.
To make it vegan, replace the butter with margarine or oil, replace the besciamella with your favorite not-cream sauce or just leave it out entirely, nix the sugar if you’re concerned about bone char, and check your wine to be sure it wasn’t filtered with animal-derived finings.
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp sugar
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 yellow pepper, chopped
250 g (frozen) broccoli, stems removed and chopped
1 cup dry white wine
500 g dry pasta, your choice of geometry, cooked until just tender
250 g fresh cherry tomatoes, washed and each chopped in half
1/2 c chives, chopped
1/4 c fresh dill, chopped
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
5-6 springs fresh thyme, with the leaves stripped from the stems
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
2-3 cups besciamella sauce
juice from 1/2 lemon
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
hot red pepper, to taste
Melt the butter over very low heat, and cook the onions with the sugar until translucent. Add the garlic and yellow pepper, and cook until fragrant. Add the broccoli, and cook until tender if you’re using fresh, or until thawed if you’re using frozen. Add the pasta, wine, cherry tomatoes, and spices, and cook until the liquid is gone. Add the remaining ingredients, give it a few healthy stirs until all’s combined, and serve hot with chilly white wine.
Besciamella
Besciamella is something like the French béchamel. Actually, it’s exactly like it. Wikipedia tells me that:
Auguste Escoffier’s recipe for béchamel consists of white roux, milk, optional veal, onions, thyme, butter, pepper, nutmeg, and salt.
Many chefs would now regard as authoritative the recipe of Auguste Escoffier presented in Saulnier’s Répertoire: “White roux moistened with milk, salt, onion stuck with clove, cook for 20 minutes”.
Well, I’ve never had the patience to make real roux in the oven, so I go with a butter-and-flour stovetop variant, and in the sauce, I hold the veal, onions, and thyme. There are no tricks here, just very low heat and frequent stirring and scraping.
1/4 cup butter
3 tbsp flour
500 mL milk
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
pinch pepper
1/4 cup grated hard cheese
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat, and add the flour. Stir until you get a thickish yellow paste, and add the milk very slowly. Stir until thickened (about ten minutes), and add the remaining ingredients.
One of the foods that Misha just can’t get enough of is pizza. He told me that as he was growing up in the Soviet Union, he couldn’t have imagined how good the combination of dough, tomatoes, cheese, and sausage in the right proportions could be until the late 1990′s, when he first experienced it himself.
We’ve since had plenty of practice at making pizza, which has improved drastically since the first time we made it together, when he spread ketchup, a can of mushrooms, and grated cheese on a homemade thin crust and called it a date. A romantic idea though it was, we would go on to do better. Much better.
The one thing that has stayed almost constant in our pizza adventures, though, is the thin homemade crust that Misha makes. I just can’t see how to make it better or easier: eggs, flour, water; knead, roll, top, bake, chow. Fabulous. Enjoy!
Pizza
There are a few things I usually do when topping a pizza. First, I usually spread a very thin layer of olive oil over the unbaked crust before adding any other toppings, which keeps the crust crispy and gives those cute little brown circles on the bottom when all’s done. Second, if I’m using a tomato sauce and not a white one, I usually go with a thin layer of tomato paste just over the olive oil, for flavor, and I use a homemade plain tomato sauce (yeah, recipe’s at the bottom) just over the tomato paste. Third, I put any dried herbs I’m using below the cheese so that they don’t burn in the oven.
The pizza is, of course, your canvas to paint with whatever toppings you fancy, and that’s what we all love about making pizza at home. Want to put eggs, pineapple, and Tabasco sauce on it? Nobody’s looking. My favorite above-the-cheese pizza toppings are fresh mushrooms sauteed with eggplant (well in advance, chop the eggplant, coat the pieces with salt, and drain in a colander to remove bitterness before cooking) and garlic and onions; chopped black olives; and generous amounts of raw garlic and as many fresh herbs as I can find, usually including oregano, basil, parsley, thyme, and rosemary. Of course, just before sticking it in the oven, I coat the top of the pizza with chives and grate some hard cheese on top. Misha loves sweet bell peppers, and although I usually have a very low tolerance for anything with sweet peppers, I also think that they’re not bad as a pizza topping, as long as they’ve been sauteed with onions and garlic. When I was a vegan, my personal heaven was eggless pizza crust topped with whatever fresh vegetables I could get my hands on, hold the cheese and with some peppery oil tossed on top.
2 eggs
2 cups flour
3-4 tbsp water
toppings!
Mound the flour on a clean table, and make a deep well in the center of the mound. Crack the eggs into the well, and mix gradually with the flour. Add water as needed, and mix and knead with your hands about ten minutes, or until the dough is elastic. Roll with a flat rolling pin or wine bottle to roughly 1/8 inch thick, and cut to fit a baking sheet. Or a pie plate, or an oven rack, whatever you’ve got. If what you’ve got is a pizza stone, then I’m jealous. Line your baking surface with parchment paper, put the crust on it, and top as you like. Bake in the oven at its highest temperature until the cheese bubbles and starts to turn brown.
After the pizza comes out of the oven, we cut it, grate fresh black pepper on top, and eat it accompanied by lots of wine and a good movie. This is, of course, the recommended serving technique (:
Tomato Sauce
Good tomato sauce, as I’ve found out, depends on the quality of ingredients and the time you put into preparing it. I tend to not use canned tomatoes, because I think fresh ones taste better, although it takes a while to skin (optional) and seed them. Seeding, by the way, isn’t something I consider optional, since seeds really do make the sauce taste bitter. To make seeding tomatoes easier, choose round, medium-sized tomatoes (not an heirloom variety), and after washing or skinning (to skin, cut an “X” in the top and bottom, blanche in boiling water until the skin splits, dunk in a cold bath, and peel the skin with your hands), cut the tomato in half through the middle. Use your fingers to dig out all of the gelatinous seed mass in each compartment.
Tomato sauce can be simmered for as long as you want, but absolutely cannot be boiled. I repeat: do not boil tomato sauce! This burns the natural sugars in the tomatoes, and as a result makes the sauce taste like burned sugar. Or carbon. Or both, since they’re partly the same thing.
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp butter
2 large onions, chopped
1 tsp granulated sugar
6-7 cloves garlic, minced finely
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 cups dry red wine
2 kg (4.5 pounds) fresh tomatoes, washed, seeded, and roughly chopped
Melt the butter in the olive oil over very low heat, add the onions and sugar, and cook until transparent. Add the garlic, and cook until fragrant (the onions should be caramelizing at this point). Add the tomato paste and wine, and stir until homogeneous. Add the tomatoes, and cook until they’ve broken down and separated from the skin (if you left the skin on), stirring intermittently. Use a stick blender to blend the entire sauce, and simmer for anywhere from 30 minutes to an entire weekend.
It feels like summer in Nizhniy Novgorod. The sunlight lasts from 4 a.m. until 10 p.m., the trees are thick with green leaves and the babushki have shed their shawls for brightly colored silk scarves.
Now is the perfect time for minestrone.
The photo is from the day after I made it, when the taste is even better and the soup even thicker. Enjoy!
Minestrone
There’s absolutely no set recipe for minestrone, and I don’t know if I’ve ever made it the same way twice, but most cooks would agree that there are a few key ingredients that distinguish a minestrone: tomatoes, pasta, beans, and vegetables of various kinds. Since I love cooking with onions and (lots of) garlic and always have some of each on the shelf, those are also essential in my minestrones, but the rest–most of the rest–and the way you combine the rest–is optional.
If you’re using different vegetables, add them at the same time as the cabbage and zucchini. Fresh herbs are always tastier than dried; if you’re using them fresh, use about three times as much as the dried ones I’ve called for, and add the basil and parsley at the very end, about five minutes before adding the lemon.
To make it vegan, nix the cheese rind, grated cheese, and butter, and choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings. And be careful to not chop your fingers into the soup, that’s def. not vegan (:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
3 medium onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced finely
1 cup dry red wine
3 tbsp tomato paste
1/4 head of cabbage, chopped
1 medium zucchini, cubed
1 can whole peeled tomatoes with liquid, roughly chopped with a table knife directly in the can
1 can chickpeas, rinsed
1 can red beans, rinsed
1 cup dry pasta, broken into small pieces
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese (I used Grana Padano)
1 carrot, grated
3 bay leaves
2 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp dried parsley
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh chives, chopped
hard cheese, grated
In a soup pot over low heat, melt the butter in the olive oil. Saute the onions until transparent, add the garlic, and continue to saute until fragrant, but not until the garlic has burned. Add the wine and scrape the browned garlic and onions from the bottom of the pot. Add the tomato paste and stir until homogeneous; add the cabbage, zucchini, tomatoes, and enough water to just cover the vegetables. Simmer until zucchini begins to soften. Add the chickpeas, beans, pasta, cheese rind, carrot, and spices, and simmer until the pasta is cooked. Add the lemon juice just before serving. Garnish with chives and grated cheese.
Like any good Russian, mine has a huge soft spot for fried cauliflower–so when we got back to the city from a two-week camping/kayaking trip, his mother had a giant head of cauliflower waiting for us to fry up as soon as we got our clothes into the wash. I made the fried cauliflower that day (simple: chop the cauliflower, coat pan in oil, fry until completely brown), and we ate it all very happily, but for some reason, I just didn’t want to throw away the leaves that I peeled off the cauliflower. Call me crazy. So I decided to make a creamy soup from them and just about everything else that remained in the fridge and on the shelf when we got back, and it turned out to be a nice tasty dinner accompanied by homemade hot flaky garlic rolls (yep, that recipe’s at the bottom too).
The soup is simple to make (and very cheap!), but the flavor of cauliflower is delicate, much more so than it would have been had we used the actual cauliflower–and the garlic and wine bring out this flavor pretty well, while the lemon gives it something light and fresh. In general it would have been nicer if the color had been more green, so I think that next time I’ll add something like spinach–but this wasn’t bad for a mix of what was on the shelf at the time!
Creamy Cauliflower Leaf and Potato Soup
The cauliflower leaves should be washed and chopped, with particular attention to the thick white stems in the middle, since they contain strings that can easily foil a cheap stick blender like mine (400 roubles at the market!). The stems alone taste a bit like cabbage, which they absolutely should, since cauliflower as a plant is classified as a crucifer, just as is cabbage. In fact, the Russian word for cauliflower translates directly to “white cabbage”! I discarded about half of the white stems since I’m not quite Russian enough to like too much cabbage in my soup, but if you don’t mind a more cabbagey taste, leave them in, just chop them finely enough so that the strings don’t do any damage.
The potatoes can be peeled or not, depending on your preference. I leave my potatoes washed and with the peels on whenever I can, not only because I think it’s more flavorful, but also because there are more nutrients in the peel, of which vegetarians need all they can get.
To make it vegan, replace the cream with twice as much soya milk (or with the same amount of soya creamer), nix the cheese, cheese rind, and butter, and choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings.
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
250 mL white wine
1 L vegetable stock
1 tsp salt
leaves from one head of cauliflower
5 large potatoes, chopped (peeling optional)
rind from one large wedge of parmesan cheese
1/2 c heavy cream
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 c chives
1/2 c grated hard cheese
Melt the butter in the olive oil over low heat, add the garlic, and saute until fragrant, around two minutes. Cover with the white wine and vegetable stock, and add the salt, cabbage, potatoes, and cheese rind. Keep the heat medium until the soup bubbles, then cover and simmer for 30-40 minutes, or until potatoes are soft. Remove the cheese rind, add the cream and parsley, and liquefy the mixture with a stick blender. Just before serving, add the lemon juice, and garnish with grated cheese and chives.
Flaky Garlic Rolls
If I’d had a better oven (the boy’s is a gas oven without a thermostat), I would have made these rolls crusty like they should have been with this kind of soup–only mine were starting to burn instead of bake, so I took them out while they were still flaky. They’re good either way.
To make them vegan, replace the butter with Earth Balance or your favorite margarine, and if you’re concerned about bone char filtering, nix the sugar altogether or replace it with the same amount of mashed potato flakes (it’s just to give the yeast something to eat while they’re becoming more active).
50 g active dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 c warm water
1/4 c olive oil
1/4 c butter
10 cloves garlic, chopped not too finely
dash of freshly ground pepper
4 c flour
2 t salt
Mix the yeast, sugar, and water in a large bowl, and let stand for about ten minutes. While you wait, melt the butter in the olive oil, and sautee the garlic until it’s fragrant. Remove the garlic from the liquid, and save both. At this point, the yeast mixture should be bubbly and spongy, so add the salt and mix well, and then add the flour, the reserved sauteed garlic, and half of the oil/butter/pepper mixture (reserve the rest to glaze the rolls before baking). You’ll probably need to ditch the spoon in order to get it mixed into a dough after adding the flour. After it’s mixed, knead the dough until it gets stiff, then coat the inside of a plastic bag with oil, put the ball of dough in, and set it in a bowl behind the refrigerator, or in another warm place to rise for an hour. After the first rise (the dough could be doubled in size, but it doesn’t have to be), knead again, and divide into nine small balls. Using a rolling pin, flatten each ball into a circle, roll up into the roll shape, and place onto a baking sheet. Brush the rolls with the remaining oil/butter mixture, dust some flour on the tops, and using scissors, put a slice across the top of each roll. Cover the entire baking sheet with oiled plastic wrap, then set in a warm place to rise for at least another hour, until the rolls have at least doubled in size. Bake in a 220C oven for fifteen minutes.
Anyone who’s known me at any point in my life knows that my greatest love has always been pasta. It’s dependable and familiar (topped with, for example, homemade tomato sauce and grated cheese), hot and intriguing (crushed red pepper and olive oil), the starting point for so many wonderful adventures, and, most lovely of all when it’s done right, simple and chic and bound to impress.
When I found this recipe, courtesy of Gina DePalma at Serious Eats, I was so impressed by the idea that I just couldn’t stop thinking about it–then after having made my first batch about two weeks ago, it got even more intense, and still now, after having eaten my fourth plate of it this week, I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night I made two batches, the first with linguine, that I sucked down at record speed, and the second with tri-color farfalle, the only other pasta I had on the shelf, to last today. It turns out that the pasta keeps okay overnight, although the garlic flavor, of course, gets stronger and hides the parsley and the delicious raw wine flavor that you get by adding that splash at the end.
Drunken Pasta
The wine that I used this time, as Gina advises, was a dry red that I wouldn’t hesitate to drink but that was still on the less expensive side–around 160 roubles, or about $4.70 at the current rates. I adapted the recipe just a tiny bit, cutting down the amount of cooking liquid so that I could get away with using just one 0.75 L bottle of wine (I’ve also made it with just a little less than half a bottle to use, and even that seemed to work fine), reducing the amount of olive oil, and garnshing with fresh chives.
To make it vegan nix the butter, don’t garnish with cheese, and take care to choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings.
0.75 L bottle of dry red wine, divided
0.75 L water
pinch of salt
1/2 kilogram thick pasta, like linguine
2 large or 4 small cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsp butter
4 tbsp olive oil
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1/4 c fresh chives, sliced (optional)
1/4 c Parmesan cheese, grated (optional–I used Grana Padano instead)
Combine all but 1/2 cup of the wine with all of the water and the pinch of salt, and bring to a boil. Add the pasta, and cook until al dente (taste-test it, and when it’s tender but still tough to the teeth, it’s done–barring that, the infamous “wall-dente” test works okay enough with noodley pastas). While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter and olive oil over low heat in a saute pan large enough to contain the pasta. Add the garlic, and stir from time to time. The garlic should come to a sizzle and be aromatic, but not browned, just as the pasta is getting done. Add the 1/2 cup of wine to the saute pan, along with a splash (about a half-cup) of the pasta liquid. Scrape up any burned garlic from the bottom of the pan and turn the heat to medium. When the liquid is simmering, drain the pasta and add it, along with all of the parsley, to the saute pan. Stir constantly until all of the liquid is absorbed. Garnish with chives and grated cheese, and serve hot.
Yield: two portions
Almost a year ago, I made what was absolutely the most difficult move of my life, away from a little city called Portsmouth, NH. Aside from the other reasons I loved Portsmouth with all of my soul, there was this one little Indian restaurant on the corner of Hanover and Fleet Street: Shalimar’s. If I loved Portsmouth with my entire soul, I loved Shalimar with every single taste bud in my body. I couldn’t get enough of their chana masala, but was never brave enough to try making my own. Why try to recreate perfection?
Why? Because–and this epiphany occurred only after I’d been a few months in Penza with a distinct lack of Indian food–that’s what cooking is about. And I missed the hell out of Shalimar’s. With my newfound inspiration, I set out to find the basic ingredients for chana masala, an Indian dish made with onions, tomatoes, chickpeas, and a load of spices.
I’ve never been able to find chickpeas in Penza, but lo and behold, I found some in Nizhniy for around $3 a can two weeks ago, and glady hauled five or six cans back to Penza with me. The task was then to round up the necessary spices and create a garam masala, which in the end even necessitated a trip to the pharmacy to bring home a bottle of coriander oil. Having rounded up all of the necessary ingredients that I could, and having snagged the recipe from an older post at Orangette, where Molly raves about the “finest chana masala to ever flirt with her lips,” I finally decided to try my hand at making some sort of chana-mashup of my own.
The results weren’t as wonderful as the chana masala at Shalimar’s, which is smoky and spicy and toe-curlingly wonderful, but this definitely helped tame my craving, and made me look forward to my return ‘Statesside in September, where I’ll definitely find time for a special trip to my favorite little city in America.
Chana Masala
I left a few key ingredients out of Orangette’s recipe, just because they were things I couldn’t find in either Penza or Nizhniy. Namely, fresh cilantro leaves, ground coriander, and cardamom pods. I substituted coriander oil and ground cardamom for the latter two respectively, and sort of improvised the garam masala, which I talk a little about below. I also added a pinch of saffron to the mix for taste and color. It turned out that since I had no idea what proportion of coriander oil would suffice to substitute ground coriander, I added far too much of it, and this ended up undoing any of the taste effect I thought the saffron would have–but despite that, the meal was generally pleasing. The next time I make it, I’ll add just a tiny drop of coriander oil, as I’ve called for in the recipe.
Many people serve this dish with fresh whole milk yogurt, and although I’m not principally opposed to that, Shalimar’s never did it–so it was, of course, the last thing that crossed my mind today. Chana masala is absolutely delicious served on basmati rice, but I happened to have none on the shelf, so I served it over plain millet, which was tasty and healthy.
To make it vegan, nix the butter.
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
2 large tomatoes, roughly chopped with skins and seeds left in
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, minced
1 fresh green chile, minced
2 15-ounce cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
Thin slice of butter
1 tsp cumin seeds
very small drop of coriander oil
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
pinch of saffron
1 tsp red pepper
salt to taste
In a large saucepan, melt the slice of butter over medium heat and add the onion. Stir frequently until the onion caramelizes, and add the garlic and chile. Stir constantly until fragrant, and add the cumin, garam masala, cardamom, and saffron. Sizzle for a few seconds, stirring constantly, and add the tomatoes, coriander oil, salt, and red pepper. If brown residue remained on the bottom of the pan, add a splash of water and scrape it up with your spoon or spatula as you stir the mixture. Cook until the tomatoes are soft, approximately 10 minutes, and remove from heat. Hit the mixture with a stick blender for a few seconds. Add the chickpeas and return to the heat. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down, cover, and simmer for 40 minutes.
To serve, stir in plain whole milk yogurt, if you like, or garnish with some lemon wedges and freshly chopped cilantro (I had only fresh chives in the fridge, so I used those instead).
Yield: About four servings
Garam Masala
Here’s what Wikipedia says about Garam Masala:
It is generally understood that the spices to be included in a garam masala will vary according to region, and personal choice. The basis of a North-West Indian garam masala usually comprises cloves, green and/or black/brown cardamom, cinnamon, cassia), and mace and/or nutmeg. Black pepper can be added if the mix is to be used immediately, but if kept, the fragrance will diminish, and may change in character. Also typical of the region is the use of black cumin (not white cumin) and caraway). The components of the mix are ground together, but not roasted.
Since I’ve got no spice grinder, I just used a spoon to crush the seeds against a firm surface (my dorm desk), and mixed the powders together in a plastic bag. This seemed to work okay for me, but if you’ve got a spice or coffee grinder, definitely use that instead.
1 tbsp cumin seeds
tbsp black pepper(corns)
1 1/2 tsp dry ginger
3/4 tsp cardamom
3/4 tsp cloves
3/4 tsp cinnamon
3-4 crushed bay leaves
Crush, grind, and mix together. Without the pepper this keeps indefinitely, but with the pepper, I’d only use it for a few days after I make it, since the pepper can change the flavors of the other ingredients with time.
