truth. justice. garlic.

An Italian, a German and a Ukrainian walk into a farmer's market.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Well. I am resurrecting this blog because I have a recipe worth sharing (and because this blog has been on my mind)

Why? Well, because, sometimes to cope one buys an entire flat of like, 9 or so persimmons for 5$ because it is fall and they’re delicious and seasonal. However, when you are one person, 9 persimmons is a lot to eat. This roasted persimmon with cardamom recipe, which I adapted loosely from scalingbackblog (found via search engine), is awesome.

Heat your oven to 375

Slice 4 ripe-but-firm persimmons after washing them. I left the skin on because they’re edible + more fibre

Meanwhile, take about 2 tbsp of honey and mix it with a good splash of water (roughly equal? I made a honey syrup is what happened)

Add a tiny splash of vanilla extract and crack 8 or so cardamom pods, depositing the seeds (or add 1/4 tsp of ground cardamom)

Drizzle the spiced honey syrup over the persimmons

Roast about an hour, basting the persimmons with their juice and the syrup every 15 min or so

The persimmons are done when they’re slightly softened and a little caramel-y on the bottom (but not burnt)

Eat them on their own, sprinkle them with a little salt, and/or throw them on top of a good dollop of thick yogurt.

Delicious! Autumnal! A great way to use half a flat of persimmons, times being what they are!

[mariacallous]

I will excommunicate anyone who even thinks of using a green pepper. And this is not rank color prejudice - this is because a green pepper is simply an unripe pepper.

Nigella Lawson (via missbirdseyeof1950)

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

how the fuck did tradneets get the lentil post

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

if you would learn to eat lentils you would not have to flatter kings

an onion, chopped

at least half a bulb of garlic, mashed, more if you’re not a coward

other vegetables, chopped, e.g. tomatoes, carrots, celery, fennel...

a hot pepper, chopped very fine (optional if you’re a baby man)

a bag of lentils

cumin or baharat or something

black pepper

salt

Sauté the onion, garlic, and veg in some oil in a wide pot until soft.  Turn the heat to low, throw in the lentils and cover with water to maybe 1/2 inch above the solid ingredients.  Add spices to taste.  Simmer until the lentils are soft.  Eat while saying mean things about the tyrant of your choice.

[suzirya]

Salad of arugula and including wild foraged ingredients (wild bergamot, ground ivy, wild garlic, plantain, and dandelion) with red clover heads, ground ivy blossoms, blackberries, sunflower seeds and a lavender balsamic and olive oil dressing, along with a steak (pan sauce of butter, wild garlic, wild bergamot, fresh thyme, fresh tomato juice and rose wine) and tomato galette (Campari tomatoes, goat cheese and homemade yogurt, thyme, garlic powder, and kalamata olives in phyllo dough) - might be one of the best meals I’ve had and we’ll likely never recreate it exactly the same way again but GOSH foraging is excellent - and we did it on our walk around the neighbourhood. The steak sauce ended up hitting some interesting bbq flavours and we’re not entirely sure how, but suspect the wild bergamot which tastes like oregano and has some cool flavour compounds going on. I love my botanist wife.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

If you can’t find store bought garlic, garlic foraged from the side of the park path is fine (carefully avoiding any plants touching the poison ivy)

Follow the serious eats method for a steak and pan sauce and this recipe for the gallette and you’re solid.

[fetus2genius]

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Are you able to tell me, Mod Ultima, how to season a cast-iron skillet so an egg doesn’t stick?

Yes yes I am.

The internet will tell you one half-truth and one lie about cast iron: the half truth is that you should season it in the oven, and the lie is that you should use flaxseed oil.  You can season it in the oven if you really want to but it’s a waste of time.  You shouldn’t use flaxseed oil, which is just linseed oil, which is fine for a rifle stock but becomes brittle and flakes off when subjected to high heat in a pan.

So anyway when you put oil onto cast iron and heat it, the oil polymerizes and binds with the rough (at the molecular scale) surface of the iron.  Repeated application of oil+heat builds up a coat of polymers that are smooth enough that food has trouble grabbing hold.  You can try to hurry this along by putting the pan in the oven for a while with a coat of oil on it, but slow accumulation of irregular layers forms stronger bonds with the iron and happens naturally if you just cook in the pan and oil it after every use.

Put your cast iron vessel on the stove.

Pour maybe a half-tablespoon of olive or safflower oil into the pan and swirl it around with a paper towel.  The surface of your cast iron will now look black and shiny.

Turn on the stove to high.  Open a window.

Eventually, the oil will start smoking.  Turn the stove down a bit and keep an eye on the cast iron surface: it will turn from a uniform oily black to a sort of scaly mottled black-and-very-dark-grey.  Once the whole oiled surface has changed, turn the heat off and let the pan cool (I get the sense that most how-to-cast-iron guides on the internet were made by someone who never really watched their pan).

Cook high-fat, low-acid foods in the skillet until the patina really starts to set in, then go nuts.

That’s it.  If stuff gets stuck on, feel free to go at it with a scrubby, but don’t wash the damn thing with soap unless you really gotta.  Also the claim that you can’t cook tomatoes in raw cast iron is Italophobic bullshit: you bloody well can cook tomatoes in well-seasoned raw cast iron, I do it all the time and I have a pan you can make omelets in, but if it’s a new pan or if you don’t cook not-tomatoes in it regularly, stick to the enameled stuff.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Drawing on my Ukrainian heritage and making Bacon and Onion Buns today-

Make the recipe as is but feel free to omit the back bacon, as I had enough filling with half a pack of thick sliced bacon.

Also don’t add 2 tbsp of yeast, I did well enough with 2 tsp-1 tbsp.

The dough is sticky. I needed around 7 cups of flour to make it a soft dough. Go by eye and feel if you’re an experienced bread maker, if not, add flour and incorporate a cup at a time until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl and no longer sticks to the spoon as much.

I pinched off about 1/4-1/3 of a cup to make buns that are hand sized!

Feast.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Capon Stewed In Wine

There was a time when the English weren’t bad at food, back before Europeans gave up on spices.  Unfortunately I don’t remember which 16th century recipe this was originally redacted from, and it’s evolved in my house through a couple of different redactions and whatever spices we happened to have at the time (these are definitely not the spices as written), but if you more or less follow this, you’ll get something Elizabeth I would have recognized, although, since I have lost the original recipe, I cannot cite you a source for that.

I don’t have a photo at all because this photographs poorly.

a capon, dismembered, or 6ish pounds in chicken thighs

half a bottle of red wine

2 oranges, juiced and zested

1 tbsp finely grated ginger

1tbsp honey

chicken stock (I swear to God and each individual particular prophet if you use boxed stock I will haunt yo ass like Macduff)

2 lbs firm plums, pitted and quartered

½ lb sultana raisins

2 yellow onions, diced

½ bulb garlic, mashed

fresh rosemary

4 long pepper (pippali) spikes

12 black peppercorns

8 cloves

half a nutmeg, cracked, or a piece of mace

1 cinnamon stick

5 small allspice pods

2 green cardamom pods

¼ tsp whole coriander

6 juniper berries, or ¼ cup gin

beurre manié (Ultima what’s that fancy French word mean?)

salt to taste

Sauté the onion and garlic in oil in a Dutch oven.  Tie your dry spices up in a bit of muslin or a reusable teabag or something.  Deglaze the pot with a bit of stock, add the capon, a sprig of rosemary, the spice sachet (+ gin if you’re using that instead of juniper), honey, wine, orange juice and zest, ginger, then stock until the bird is fully submerged.  Raise to a boil and then turn down to simmer.  Once the stew has been simmering for an hour, add the plums and sultanas.  Once the plums are soft, remove the bird and plums with a slotted spoon and return the sauce to a boil.  Once the sauce is reduced by a third, taste it, salt and honey accordingly, then whisk in the beurre manié.  Serve over rice with slivered almonds as a garnish.

NOTE:  The spices are negotiable up to a point.  I would suggest keeping the juniper/gin, cloves, black pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon no matter what, but don’t kill yourself or colonize anybody trying to find long pepper or anything.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Христос народився! Not even close to a full spread but we do what we can (and share it with roommates)

Go make some borshch!

[starfoozle]

Right before Christmas I made soup for my oma that called for a few stalks of celery, which means that I returned home from my travels to confront almost an entire head of the remainder languishing sadly in my crisper drawer along with very few other ingredients. The obvious solution: Celery Apple Bacon Soup. You need:

+ 1 head of celery

+ 3 pieces of bacon

+ 1 onion

+ 4 cloves minced garlic

+ 1 apple

+ 1 potato

+ 2 cups milk or half and half (use what you have and adjust richness to taste)

+ 6 cups stock

+ 2 pinches dried thyme

+ salt and pepper to taste

+ optional but delicious toppings, depending on what’s in your fridge: finely chopped parsley, a drizzle of heavy cream or plain yogurt, a dash of smoked paprika, and a dash of Peychaud’s bitters (more on that at the end)

First, dice your bacon and throw it in a large pot on medium high heat for the fat to render. Add onions and garlic and cook until onions are beginning to turn translucent, then add diced apple and potato. Sautée for five minutes, deglaze with a splash of stock so nothing burns at the bottom, then add the whole chopped head of celery. Sautée for another five minutes, add the rest of the stock, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and cook until potato bits are tender. Add the two cups of milk or half and half, then use an immersion blender to purée the whole affair until smooth. Season with salt, pepper, and thyme to taste, let sit for at least another five minutes to cool to a decent serving temperature, and top with a little minced parsley, a drizzle of yogurt or more cream, a sprinkle of smoked paprika, and a dash of bitters. (The bitters seem like an odd choice, but Peychaud’s has a nice anise-y flavor that works wonderfully with all the other ingredients as an accent, and the bright pink color also helps cheer up a remarkably khaki-colored soup. If you have some fennel lying around you could add it along with the vegetables for a similar effect, and if you don’t like licorice-type flavors you can skip it entirely, but it does make this special!)

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

If you’re not hoarding chicken bones and vegetable scraps in a freezer bag what are you doing with your life.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

[stage whisper] you don’t need a pasta machine

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Struffoli

It’s time for the Last Roman to finally pull herself together and share a Family Tradition™ that does actually date to classical Rome, feat. my mother’s brand new kitchen and close encounters with boiling oil.

Struffoli are basically Neapolitan zlabiyeh (no one tell my grandmother I said that): tiny doughnuts in honey.  But the ancient Greeks invented zlabiyeh— χόνδρον τε καὶ ἐγκρίδας ἄλλα τε πέμματα καὶ μέλι χλωρόν— and spread it to the Levant and to Rome, so I’m on solid historical ground here.  Onward.

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons sugar

zest of 1 lemon

zest of 1 orange

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 oz. butter, room temperature

3 eggs

1 tablespoon wine

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

honey

lemon juice

confectioner’s sugar or sprinkles

a neutral-flavored oil (for frying)

Stir together the sugar, flour, zest, salt, and baking powder.  Dice the butter, then cut it into the flour mixture until it looks like coarse cornmeal.  Add the eggs, wine, and vanilla and mix vigorously until the dough forms into a sticky ball.  Refrigerate your dough.

Heat up your oil to around 350F to 400F.  My mother gets fussy about this but it doesn’t really matter that much.  As if the Romans used thermometers.

Once the oil is hot, the dough has chilled long enough.  Cut it into quarters to make it easier to handle.  Form your quarter into a hockey puck kinda shape and then stick the rest of that shit back in the fridge.

Roll it out to about a quarter of an inch thick.  Don’t stress about the shape.

Cut it into half-inch-ish strips.  I find a serrated knife helps.

Chop it up into half-inch-ish squares.  Kitchen shears are the best method here.

Flour your hands up real well and roll the squares into little marbles.

Fry them in batches for 2-ish minutes or until they’re just turning brown.

Repeat for the rest of the dough, and you’ll end up with a mountain of crunchy fried marbles that taste faintly of citrus.

In a saucepan, heat the honey and lemon juice until the sugar dissolves and the mixture boils.  I’m not going to tell you what the proportions should be, but if you want thinner sauce, use more lemon juice.  There is strong family disagreement about this.  My mother likes the sauce very sticky (a cup of honey to a tablespoon of lemon juice), and I like it more liquid (a cup of honey to a quarter cup of lemon juice), but I was halfway raised by my Lebanese neighbors and am not to be trusted.

Gently mix the struffoli and the honey sauce together in a large bowl and then pile them up in a big heap on a platter.  Sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar or with the sprinkle decoration of your choice.

Now go annex Gaul.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

Garlic With Garlic

I bought some kind of scapes (possibly garlic, possibly some closely-related Chinese allium that I’ve never heard of before) at the Asian store and I dithered about what to do with them for a few days and eventually came up with this, which is perhaps the most on-brand recipe that has yet been posted to this blog.

a fistful of scapes

a head of garlic, peeled

olive oil

salt

pepper

Preheat yo skillet.  Pour some olive oil into it and then saute the garlic cloves on high heat until they turn light brown and blistery.  Throw your scapes in, cover the skillet until they’ve wilted just a little bit, then continue to saute the scapes and garlic until the garlic is dark brown and the scapes are a teensy bit charred.  Salt and pepper and then go shovel a pile of garlic into your face.

[aglio-knoblauch-chasnik]

In today’s episode: shepherds pie!

You need:

Around 1 lb / 450 g ground beef

1/2 an onion

2 big cloves garlic at minimum

Two carrots

3 large white mushrooms

Two small handfuls of flour (maybe 1/4 cup?)

Milk

1/2 cube beef bouillon

Soya sauce or Worcestershire

Sage

Rosemary

Ground pepper

4 small potatoes or 3 medium, peeled

1 tbsp goats cheese or sour cream

Milk

1-2 tbsp butter

Ok so - pot of water on to boil.

Get that beef browning in a deep sided pan on medium, then reduce to low once it’s nicely browned on most sides and minced up (no clumps!). Chop your onion and carrot nice and small, and mince the garlic and mushroom. If your onion is done first, get it into the pan so it can soften and add flavour.

If you haven’t peeled and chopped your potatoes, do this. Add them into the boiling water and cook around 20 min or until soft.

Add your carrot, mushroom, garlic, and herbs. Keep that beef moving until it’s cooked; then sprinkle over the flour and mix it in. Add the bouillon and your umami sauce of choice, then slowly start to add milk and scrape up any fond you’ve made into what’s becoming your gravy. Let it thicken.

Put the meat and gravy into a glass baking dish. Oven on 350!

Mash your potatoes. Get milk, butter, and goats cheese in there. They should be creamy and slightly tangy; spread on top of the meat-gravy mixture.

Cook in the oven 15 min, then broil for the last 5 min on high so the top gets browned and slightly crispy!

Serve in bowls. Eat it to maintain your needed caloric load at this trying time of year.

[starfoozle]

On today’s episode of Cooking with El: pozole verde, or the best use for all that leftover turkey you’re probably very tired of by day three! This is a go-to post-thanksgiving stew that’s full of vegetables and a much-needed change in flavor profile. You can also substitute leftover rotisserie chicken any other time of the year. (There truly is nothing a little lime and cilantro won’t brighten up.)

You need:

stock from your turkey carcass, or chicken broth if you didn’t bother.

leftover turkey meat, shredded

2 cans of hominy (corn treated with an alkali solution to improve its nutritional profile – check the Mexican section of your local grocer, pozole isn’t pozole without it!)

about 10 tomatillos

1 onion

several cloves of garlic

1 bunch of cilantro

hot green chili peppers (I used hatch this time, fresh poblano or jalapeño are good, just adjust to taste)

2 limes plus another sliced into wedges for garnish

oregano

salt to taste

Garnish (do not skip!): avocado, radishes, sour cream, hot sauce, lime slices

Prepare your stock, then drain the canned hominy and add it to the pot, along with the shredded turkey meat. Throw the tomatillos, chili, oregano, garlic, half of your cilantro, and onion in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Add the salsa to the pot and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Garnish with thin-sliced radishes, diced avocado, more cilantro, sour cream, and hot sauce to taste. Enjoy some much-needed color back in your bowl!