I believe that most of the cuisine of Europe, with the exception of a few regional specialties is the same. Having lived and tasted Europe, the main different between Italian, German, Russian, British, and French is the sauce. The exceptions to this rule seem to be at the edges; where weather and isolation tend to transmute the cuisine. But anyone raised in the core of Europe could travel anywhere else and recognize the food. There are of course a few things that cross the cultural boundary, not just of one culture but of cultures all over the world. Pancakes are one of those things. Pancakes are as ubiquitous as salt and come in more varieties. All of them delicious. Growing up my mother never had much time for making breakfast. When I was really little, she was a teacher. And once we moved to the United States, she worked far too many jobs. So a cooked breakfast was a rare treat. One of my favorites has always been Oladiya. Denser and thicker than an American pancake they cook up with the cutest little rolled edge, perfect for keeping in place a soft dollop or sour cream and a spoonful of raspberry jam. It is an easy recipe to play with, increasing or decreasing the sugar to make them suitable for a sweet or savory preparation. Changing out all or part of the flour to change the characteristics. And of course, they are easily dressed up with a little bit of fruit. In summer when the peaches are ripe and the plums bursting with juice, slicing one thinly and laying it on the raw dough before flipping produces the pretties Oladiya with softly caramelized fruit tops. The perfect way to start a breezy weekend morning. In winter a little cinnamon sugar tossed apple brings the warm scents of the holidays to breakfast. Not to say that traditional American pancake with their fluffy spongy centers that readily soak up darkly rich maple syrup are bad. They are still one of my favorite things to order at breakfast. But oladiya remind me of being little. Of spending mornings spreading my mother’s home made preserves over hot little cakes with my fingers and still ending up with sticky fingers and a sticky face. To me they are a fun finger food, meant to be topped then pick up from the underside so it bows like a little taco and eaten with gusto. Just a little different but oh so familiar. A pancake by another name. And just in time for Sunday Brunch! Oladiya 1 cup kefir (or 2/3 cup plain yogurt with 1/3 cup buttermilk) 1 -2 cups all purpose flour [1] ½ teaspoon baking soda 1 ½ tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 egg Slices of fruit (optional) Mix everything together. Start with 1 cup of flour and add enough to give the batter the consistency of yogurt. Smooth and creamy but not too thick. It should be thicker than pancake batter. Set aside for 15-30 minutes. Heat a not stick or well seasoned cast iron skillet. Brush with melted butter. Stir the batter well and drop two tablespoons full per pancake onto the skillet. Top with a piece or fruit if desired, the cook until the edges are browned. Flip and brown the other side. Remove to a warm plate. Serve with sour cream and jam.
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This can be done in many different ways! That's how I do it! What you'll need: 3 small containers of cool whip (or 4, the more, the lighter the color and the less pudding you'll taste)... This can be done so many different ways! That's how I do it! What you need: 3 small containers of cold whipping cream (or 4, the more, the lighter the color and the less flavored the pudding mix will be) 2 boxes of pistachio instant pudding mix 4 cans of pineapple bites 4 cans of tangerine Half a bag of small marshmallows. Each large bowl. Empty 2 boxes of pudding mix into bowl along with all cans of pineapple candy. DO NOT RELEASE. Mix everything together...whip cold until an even light green colour!Mix with the drained tangerines. Fold the mini marshmallows and refrigerate for a few hours to soften up the marshmallows! It's so good! You will love it!
I yearn for the creativity that springs bounty of fresh vegetables brings. The verdant, saturated colors of produces, bursting open after a long winter nap. I can already see it in the farmer’s market. Vivid green peapods, curling vines and herbs are beginning to creep in. They are almost here. My cooking creativity yawns with them, peeking one eye open then sleepily closing again. It waits for something to jolt it awake. And last week’s trip to the Grand Canyon may have just done the trick. It was enough for me to smell the change in the air. The scent of snow topped dusty rock against wood smoke. To hear the tales of the Native American’s for whom food was more than sustenance, but also medicine, culture and family. The flavors are not new. They are as old as the people of the land and as familiar. Corn and chiles. Beans and honey. Slow cooked, time honored recipes. It is an art, coaxing food from such inhospitable places. Where life clings so tenaciously to every pore and crevice in a cruel dessert. Harvesting even the most meager of natures boons to enhance and enrich nourishing stables. Perhaps I was a bit romantic, drunk on the rich landscape and enamored with my latest cookbook acquisition, Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations by Luis Ellen Frank. But it is difficult to simply dismiss the excitement that stirs in the back of my brain. The urge to play with these simple flavors. But it was not the book that brought me into my kitchen, not yet. I am still mulling it over. But rather, it was the though of a small part of my Grand Canyon breakfast. Butter with pine nuts and honey. It is an unexpectedly delectable combination. A little playful, a little sophisticated, and heavenly on toast. At the El Tovar dining room it was served with a delightful trio of pancakes, buckwheat, blue corn, and buttermilk; and topped with the most intensely colored prickly pear syrup. It was a haunting combination and one I couldn’t wait to recreate at home. There was something about the piney, hinting at acrid taste of pine nuts that seems to melt into the hint of sourness in honey. Together they join into a deep undercurrent of indescribable flavor. The kind that makes you want to take just one more bite. Just to see if you can pin it down. It is a voluptuous, decadent thing on whole wheat toast. I didn’t have a recipe; I tinkered and tasted my way to exactly what I wanted. Toasting the pine nut intensifies their flavor, bringing their oils to the surface and helping to spread their flavor through the butter. Even so this definitely benefits from sitting in the fridge overnight. And since it will last practically forever in the freezer it is easy to make up a big batch and sneak knifefuls for special… or even not so special breakfast. Pine Nut Honey Butter 2 sticks butter, softened 1/4 – 1/3 cup toasted pine nuts ¼ cup mild honey Grind or crush the pine nuts. The finer the pine nuts are ground the more oil they release and the better the flavor will be. Mix the honey and pine nuts into the softened butter until the butter is a light caramel color and thoroughly mixed. Allow to stand over night in the refrigerator or freeze for up to a year. Serve at room temperature for best flavor. Created for the “Hey waiter there’s a something in my… stew!” event hosted at Spittoon Extra. Except for certain holiday, lamb seems to be the ugly step child of America’s diets. And even when it is eaten a vast majority of recipes seem to want to cover up the natural flavor. Helpful recipe writers tell us that if you do X it will reduce lamb’s innate gaminess and makes it milder in flavor. These people are trying to make lamb taste like beef. And if that is what you want, then why not eat beef in the first place? Lamb’s unique flavor should be enjoyed for itself; eaten in foods that highlight its slight gaminess. Exactly like AB’s lamb and barley stew. I don’t get to enjoy lamb very often. Not only is it hard to find in American supermarkets, but my brother, a frequent eater at my table, does not like it. This means that I only get to cook it when I KNOW he won’t be joining us for dinner for a few days. It was just such an occasion that had me trudging through freezing cold winds (ok freezing cold for California) to my local Arabic market for the necessary ingredients. The lamb shoulder which AB suggests was hard frozen and looked far too fatty to use. They did however have wonderful, fresh looking lamb leg roasts. Well marbled they still had large enough hunks of lean meat to make them worthwhile. Having secured my 2.5 pounds of lamb (leaving a little room for trimming) I went after the next ingredient: barley grits. I don’t know where Alton shops…no…strike that, I know exactly where Alton shops, but even looking at my local equivalent of his Atlanta Whole Foods I could not find barley grits. Considering the short list of ingredients, the recipe was in trouble and it was too late to turn back. Google defines barley grits as roasted and ground barley similar to bulgar wheat used for Mediterranean dishes like Tabuleh. Which was helpful to some extent but I did not have the facilities to slowly air dry and crush a pound of barley. So I decided to improvise. I slow roasted my barley until it was a rich nut brown. Not a hard process, slightly time consuming but as I only had to stir occasionally as I ran around the kitchen it wasn’t all that labor intensive. The roasting took about an hour all told but yielded an incomparable nutty fragrance and a gorgeous dark grain. Wanting at least some of the original recipes look, I decided that I would pulse the barley in my food processor until it was a broken up a little. My food processor did not agree. It whirred and hoomed and did its food processor thing but except for a few scratches on the surface of the grains and some fine barley dust, it did exactly nothing to the barley grains. They came out as whole as they went in. Oh-OH! Right. Time for the big… er…little guns. What the food processor won’t handle the coffee grinder certainly will. About 10 pulses yielded exactly the texture I was looking for; coarsely chopped with a rough broken appearance and some fine sandy bits for a creamier texture. They were perfect in the stew. I was unhappy with the oatmeal consistency of the stew on Good Eats, where as my version came out almost risotto like in texture. Creamy and toothsome. It was exactly the perfect thing for a blustery cold day the smell breaking through event he worst of my cold stuffed nose. And the flavor was uncompromisingly lamby. The lamb permeated the barley, infusing it with rich, meaty accents leaving no question as to what the star of the show was. It was an earthy, hearty stew, satisfying, comforting and filling. The kind of stew that makes you want to curl up in a blanket and watch the rain outside. Besides my brother, it enjoyed great popularity with the rest of my family. So much so that, though I made a HUGE pot, there weren’t any leftovers for dinner the next day. I will definitely be making it again. Lamb and Barley Stew Adapted from Alton Brown 2 pounds lamb shoulder or leg, trimmed of fat and cut into bite-size pieces 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon olive oil, divided 2 medium carrots, grated [1] 1 cup barley, roasted and ground (or barley grits) [2] 4 cups chicken broth 4 ounces dried shitake or porcini mushrooms, soaked and chopped coarsely [3] 1 cup mushroom water (optional) 8–10 cloves garlic 2 teaspoons oregano, fresh or dried In a large bowl, sprinkle the lamb with salt, pepper and flour. Toss to coat. In a Dutch oven over medium-high heat, brown the lamb pieces on all sides, adding just enough olive oil to prevent the lamb from sticking. Do not crowd the pan. Brown a third of the lamb pieces at a time, remove to a bowl and continue with the rest. Once all of the pieces are browned and reserved off to the side, toss the grated carrots into the pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 4 minutes or until the carrots begin to brown. Add the mushrooms and continue to cook until they start to release their liquid. Add the meat and barley. Stir vigorously, to combine. Once the lamb and barley are uniformly mixed, slowly pour in the chicken broth and the mushroom water. Using a wooden spoon, scrape the bottom of the pot to loosen any of the browned bits. If you are using dried oregano, add all but ½ of a teaspoon now. Dried spices are best added early in the cooking process. Tuck the whole garlic cloves in between the meat. Bring the liquid to a boil and cover, reducing the heat to medium-low; just enough to keep the pot at a bare simmer. Simmer, stirring occasionally until the barley is cooked all the way through and the lamb is very tender, about an hour to an hour and a half. About 15 minutes before the stew is ready add the rest of the dried oregano or all of the fresh, if you are using fresh. Taste and adjust the salt and pepper. The garlic should be very soft. Smash the garlic into a paste and combine with the rest of the stew. Serve with a sprinkle of fresh parsley and a nice Greek Salad. [1] AB says to cut the carrots into circles. I am not a fan of cooked carrots but I think they bring a sweetness to this stew so I didn’t want to go without. Shredding the carrots and then putting them through the food processor until they were pulp made them disintegrate into the stew leaving their flavor behind. I prefer it that way. [2] I think that the roasted barley brought a lot of flavor to the stew over barley grits. To roast the barley, put the grains into a large frying pan over the lowest heat possible. Stir occasionally until the barley is a deep, rich brown. This takes about an hour but you only need to stir once every 10 minutes or so. Once it is roasted, allow it to cool completely. To get the broken effect, put a quarter cup into a coffee grinder and pulse 10 times. Repeat with the remaining grain. [3] I think mushrooms enhance the earthiness of this dish greatly. I prefer to use dried mushroom because they create mushroom water which can be used to flavor the stew. To reconstitute dried mushrooms, pour 2 cups of boiling water over the dried mushrooms. Cover with something that will keep the mushrooms below the water surface and allow to stand for an hour. Drain the mushrooms and squeeze out as much moisture as possible. Reserve the liquid, this is mushroom water and it is a wonderful flavor enhancer. |
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March 2023
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