tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15404026922677191822024-02-07T11:26:14.528-08:00Munching Through the ManuscriptThis is a blog about eating and reading: memorable manuscripts, unforgettable tastes, seasonal specialties, wines to go with it all, and the occasional musical interlude.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-2233844878157144072013-05-18T18:08:00.000-07:002013-05-18T18:08:37.799-07:00Face: Sherman Alexie’s Native American haibunIn his introduction to the translation by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu of Basho’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Back-Roads-Far-Towns-Oku-No-Hosomichi/dp/0880014679">Back Roads to Far Towns (oku-no-hosomichi)</a>, Robert Hass describes <em>haibun</em> as a prose poem combined with thematically-related haiku, and he offers Basho’s book as the defining example. The last in a series of five poetic diaries, the book describes a journey that Basho took through the mountains of northern Japan, lasting nine months and covering 1,500 miles. Hass argues that it was in this volume that Basho “refined and sharpened” the haibun form. (Today, the on-line journal <a href="http://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/">contemporary haibun online</a> is dedicated to English-language haibun based on Basho’s model.)<br />
<br />
<br /><br />
Sherman Alexie’s poetry collection <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Face-Sherman-Alexie/dp/1931236704">Face</a> includes a range of different types of poems, with several that may be viewed as particularly imaginative extensions of the haibun concept, but cast in a completely different form and cultural context. A specific example is the poem “Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers,” consisting of four prose poems, alternating with four sonnets. All of these components are thematically linked, and Alexie’s sonnets are organized like the Shakespearean model as three quatrains, with a concluding couplet, but his rhyme schemes are a novel mix of styles. Specifically, in their book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strong-Measures-Contemporary-American-Traditional/dp/0060414715/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368924567&sr=1-1&keywords=strong+measures+by+dacey+and+jauss">Strong Measures</a>, Phillip Dacey and David Jauss define the following sonnet types, based on their rhyme schemes:<br />
<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Shakespearean sonnet: abab cdcd efef gg<br />
<br />
Hybrid sonnet: abba cddc effe gg<br />
<br />
Couplet sonnet: aabb ccdd eeff gg<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
<br />
Alexie’s sonnets – both the sonnet components of this poem and other examples in his collection – mix these styles. For example, the first sonnet in “Tuxedo with Eagle Feathers” has the following rhyme scheme:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
abab cddc eeff gg<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
<br />
while the second mixes these styles differently, as:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
abba ccdd efef gg<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
<br />
Another poem from <em>Face</em> that pushes the haibun concept further is “Vilify,” a villanelle with 14 numbered footnotes. The villanelle itself is somewhat unusual in the length of its lines: the first has 23 syllables, more than twice as long as the traditional iambic pentameter’s 10 syllables. And while the use of footnotes in poems is not unprecedented, this is most commonly done in translations to provide cultural or historical context. For example, many of the translations in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/100-Tang-Poems-Zhang-Tingchen/dp/7500118104/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368924752&sr=1-3&keywords=100+tang+poems">100 Tang Poems</a>, a collection of Chinese poems written between roughly 640 and 900 AD, include brief footnotes for precisely this purpose. In Alexie’s poem, however, the footnotes become an essential ingredient: the 19 lines of the villanelle itself occupy just over a page, while the footnotes go on for nine more pages, including passages of dialogue and Alexie’s commentary on everything from the history of the villanelle form to a list of the twelve U.S. Presidents who owned slaves. These prose excursions are natural for Alexie, who has also published a number of prose volumes, including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Ranger-Tonto-Fistfight-Heaven/dp/0802141676/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368924955&sr=1-1&keywords=the+lone+ranger+and+tonto+fistfight+in+heaven">The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</a>. This is a collection of 22 short stories that you have to love for their titles alone, which include, in addition to one with the book’s title, one called “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” and another one simply titled “A Good Story.” (That said, the stories do live up to their titles.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
My favorite poem from <em>Face</em> is “Comedy Is Simply a Funny Way of Being Serious.” Here, Alexie pushes the “poem with footnotes” to new creative heights I never could have imagined before reading this example of the form. The poem itself consists of two seven-line monorhyme stanzas. In an era where free verse remains the dominant poetic style, monorhyme is unusual enough by itself: every line concludes with the same end rhyme. The poem’s footnotes are numbered and each one takes the form of a rhymed couplet. Most unusual of all, however, are the sub-footnotes: the numbered footnotes cite lettered sub-footnotes, and together these form a sonnet.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
For a very long time, poets have been advised to “study the masters,” and while this is excellent advice, it does raise the question “who are the masters?” In some specific cases, there are fairly clear answers: for haiku, one of the obvious masters is Basho. For example, in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Matsuo-Basho-Makoto-Ueda/dp/0870115537/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368925174&sr=1-1&keywords=makoto+ueda+matsuo+basho">Matsuo Basho</a>, Makoto Ueda argues that:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
“… if one poet is to be singled out as the greatest contributor to the development of haiku literature, there will be little question about the choice: it has to be Matsuo Basho.”<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
<br />
Similarly, since his name is attached to one of the standard sonnet forms, Shakespeare is a clear master of this form. Where it becomes much more difficult is the identification of contemporary masters. Based on a first – but careful – reading of <em>Face</em>, I believe I have found in Sherman Alexie a master worthy of study.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-26692637522828911232013-04-09T18:45:00.000-07:002013-04-09T18:45:17.358-07:00Repairing PoetryI recently finished reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Home-Repair-Manual-Practical/dp/0803259786/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365556717&sr=1-1&keywords=poetry+home+repair+manual+kooser">The Poetry Home Repair Manual</a>, a short little book (paperback, about 160 pages) by Ted Kooser, the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 through 2006. The book was published in 2005 and the biographical blurb also describes the author as a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and – reminiscent of Wallace Stevens – a retired insurance executive. The subtitle of the book is <em>Practical Advice for Beginning Poets</em>, and while I don’t consider myself a “beginning poet” exactly, there are certainly things I can do better, and Kooser’s book offers a number of useful suggestions and observations. In fact, the opening sentence of the book is:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Most of a poet’s education is self-education, and most of what you’ll learn you’ll teach yourself through reading and writing poems,”</blockquote>
but he goes on to note that “the craft of careful writing and meticulous revision <em>can</em> be taught,” and it is his pointers on some of these topics that I find valuable. <br />
<br />
The first chapter addresses a few key preliminaries (things like, “You’ll never be able to make a living writing poems,” on page 1, followed by “<em>We teach ourselves to write the kinds of poems we like to read</em>” – italics his – on page 9). These points are perhaps obvious enough on reflection, but they are also both important and all too easy to forget from time to time. More generally, Kooser’s philosophy of poetry is summarized in the following statement from the book’s introduction (on page xi):<br />
<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Poetry is communication and every word I’ve written here subscribes to that belief.”</blockquote>
<br /><br />
He reinforces this point of view with his second chapter, entitled “Writing for Others,” where his focus is on making poems comprehensible, emphasizing that if readers can’t understand anything in your poems, they are unlikely to read them. In fact, this view is somewhat controversial, and Kooser hints as much, also noting in the book’s introduction that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“If you’ve gotten the impression from teachers or from reading contemporary poetry that poets don’t need to write with a sense of somebody out there who might read what they’ve written, this book is not for you.”</blockquote>
<br /><br />
He expands on this point on page 2, arguing that “some poets go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging.” It is certainly true in many of the creative arts – and perhaps nowhere more so than in some types of modern music – that certain schools of thought place a very high value on abstraction. When I was much younger, I was greatly intrigued by the theory behind Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve tone technique of musical composition, particularly in some of it’s combinations with mathematical notions like group theory. Ultimately, though, however much I <em>wanted</em> to like the results, I never heard a piece of music built on these intellectually exciting ideas that actually sounded good to me. To some extent, this is a matter of taste, but even Schoenberg recognized that the more abstract the work, the more difficult the communication of ideas – in his case, musical ideas, but the same holds true for poetry where the term “communication” can be much more literal. In his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Style-Idea-Arnold-Schoenberg/dp/0806530952/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365557056&sr=1-2&keywords=style+and+idea+schoenberg">Style and Idea</a>, Schoenberg expresses the view that “to lay claim to one’s interest, a thing must be worth saying, and it must not yet have been said.” He immediately goes on to say that:<br />
<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Here is the greatest difficulty for any listener, even if he is musically educated: the way I construct my melodies, themes, and whole movements offers the present-day perceptive faculty a challenge that cannot yet be met at a first hearing.”</blockquote>
<br /><br />
This comment is the first thing Schoenberg says at the beginning of a section headed “Repetition,” where he argues, next, that repetition helps greatly in understanding music, and finally, that he himself went to considerable lengths to avoid ever repeating anything. Analogous observations may be made about poetry: classical, formal poetry (e.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets) exhibited considerable repetition, of various types: end-rhymes (the repetition of final consonants and their preceding vowel sounds at the ends of lines), meter (e.g., iambic pentameter, where each line consists of five repeated iambic feet), and in some cases repeated lines (e.g., in forms like the villanelle or the pantoum). As the practice of poetry has moved away from these forms, some of it has followed Schoenberg’s aesthetic direction, greatly reducing repetition and emphasizing abstraction. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Billy Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate before Ted Kooser, and he edited the anthology <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poetry-180-Turning-Back/dp/0812968875/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365557267&sr=1-1&keywords=poetry+180+billy+collins">Poetry 180</a> during his tenure. In the introduction to this book, Collins discusses an article he read in a high school student newspaper where the young editor offered the following assessment of modern poetry:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Whenever I read a modern poem, it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.”</blockquote>
<br /><br />
At least partially in response to this critique, Collins assembled an anthology of what he describes as “short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing.” The first poem in the collection is his own, entitled “Introduction to Poetry,” and the second is “Selecting a Reader,” a very funny thirteen-line poem by Ted Kooser. <br />
<br /><br />
The third chapter of Kooser’s book is “First Impressions,” where he suggests that “the titles and first lines of your poem represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader.” Building on this view, he urges particular care in selecting these elements, noting that:<br />
<br /><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Opening lines set up expectations and possibilities. For example, if a poem begins with three lines of strict iambic pentameter, a reader will be disconcerted if that forceful rhythm is abandoned in the fourth line. If you rhyme the first stanza of a poem, the reader will wonder why you didn’t rhyme the second and the third.”</blockquote>
<br /><br />
Subsequent chapters offer detailed advice on other aspects of writing poems, including examples that illustrate how the placement of accented syllables in a line can influence its pace, practical advice on rhyme, a brief discussion of the key differences between prose poems and more traditional lined verse, and a chapter on the differences in impact of metaphors and similes. Probably my favorite chapters are “Working with Detail” (Chapter 9) and “Controlling Effects through Careful Choices” (Chapter 10). In the chapter on detail, Kooser emphasizes “the value of unexpected, <em>unpredictable</em> detail,” noting that these are the details that lend the greatest realism to a description, precisely because they are unexpected. In Chapter 10, Kooser emphasizes the distinct roles and utilities of different parts of speech, noting for example, that carefully selected, specific and unexpected adjectives can be extremely effective in clarifying and enhancing nouns, while the use of adverbs can usually be avoided through careful verb choices. This chapter also emphasizes the impact of word placement – beginning, middle, or end of the line – repeating several simple examples with different placements of the same words to illustrate the sometimes considerable impact placement can have on tone, pacing, and comprehensibility.<br />
<br /><br />
All in all, I liked Ted Kooser’s little book quite a lot, and I plan to re-read it from time to time. That said, his book isn’t for everyone, as Kooser himself notes. His poetry tends to be narrative and concrete, and this style doesn’t appeal to everybody. If your taste runs more to the highly abstract – language poetry, for example – you might find something like the University of California's excellent four-volume series <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Poems-Millennium-Four-University-California/dp/0520273850/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365557531&sr=1-3&keywords=poetry+for+the+millenium">Poems for the Millennium</a> more to your liking. Even so, Kooser’s book contains a number of useful, practical nuggets of advice, suggestions that are particularly valuable for the beginning poet, but also worthy of consideration by “more seasoned” poets encumbered by larger piles of rejection letters.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-77427375664722166732012-07-12T17:49:00.000-07:002012-07-12T17:49:54.076-07:00What do you do with sea beans?A couple of years ago, while visiting friends and relatives in San Francisco, I first heard about sea beans. According to <a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Companion-Barrons-Cooking-Guide/dp/0764112589/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341689892&sr=1-3&keywords=the+food+lover%27s+companion">The Food Lover's Companion</a>, sea beans are also known as salicornia, sea pickle, glasswort, or marsh samphire, and according to Margaret Wittenberg’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Good-Food-rev-Ingredients/dp/1580087507/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341689967&sr=1-1&keywords=new+good+food">New Good Food</a>, they are collected fresh during the summer from salt marshes and tidal waters along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Fresh sea beans recently became available at our local Whole Foods Market, so after wondering about them for a long time, I finally got to taste them. Eaten raw by themselves or in a salad, sea beans are noticeably salty, with a slight fishiness; reading between the lines a bit in the “samphire” entry in <em>The Food Lover’s Companion,</em> it appears that both of these characteristics are enhanced on cooking: “When cooked, salicornia tends to taste quite salty and fishy.”<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, there is no entry for sea beans in my favorite flavor pairing book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Bible-Essential-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341690026&sr=1-1&keywords=the+flavor+bible">The Flavor Bible</a>, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, but because “salty and fishy” is a description that applies about equally well to anchovies, I looked at the anchovy pairings. Page and Dornenburg’s highest recommendations are for olive oil and garlic, with capers, Parmesan cheese, parsley, and pasta also strongly recommended, followed by red pepper flakes somewhat further down on their list. In fact, these are exactly the ingredients for the relatively simple recipe <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/dining/pasta-with-garlic-anchovy-capers-and-red-pepper-recipe.html">Midnight Pasta with Garlic, Anchovy, Capers and Red Pepper</a> offered by <em>The New York Times</em> a few months ago. In the recipe given here, I simply substituted the sea beans for the anchovies. Also, the <em>Times</em> recipe calls for ½ pound spaghetti, and I substituted about the same amount of conchiglie, a large elbow-shaped pasta.<br />
<br />
Page and Dornenburg’s top two anchovy-paired ingredients – olive oil and garlic – constitute the defining ingredients for the simple, classic Italian pasta sauce “aglio e olio.” Not surprisingly, then, the above recipe is not so different from that given in the <a href="http://www.dishesfrommykitchen.com/2011/03/normal-0-false-false-false.html">Dishesfrommykitchen</a> blog post for “Aglio e olio (with sea bean, asparagus and broccolini),” which also calls for olive oil, garlic, red chili flakes, Parmesan cheese and either parsley or basil. The primary difference between this dish and mine is that I didn’t include the other vegetables, allowing the sea bean flavor to come through more strongly. Since I love anchovies, this seemed like a good idea; if you don’t, you might prefer the original version with the other vegetables added, although I must say that while the saltiness of the sea beans was quite pronounced, I found that the seafood notes took a distinct back seat. In fact, my wife, who doesn't like anchovies, tasted the dish and rendered the verdict “not fishy.” On the whole, I found the dish really delicious.<br />
<br />
Just as their flavor pairing book didn’t mention sea beans, neither did Dornenburg and Page’s wine-pairing book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Drink-You-Eat-Definitive/dp/0821257188/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341690101&sr=1-1&keywords=what+to+eat+with+what+you+drink">What to Drink with What You Eat</a>. Again, substituting “anchovies” for “sea beans,” I was led to recommendations of a rose or dry sherry as the first choice, followed by Muscadet or Sauvignon Blanc. As I was pondering this question – I have a 2010 Basa Verdejo Rueda, a Spanish wine described as “like Sauvignon Blanc in a white tuxedo” – I also happened to go to a wine tasting at <a href="http://www.toastwines.com/">Toast</a>, one of my favorite local wine stores. There, I was introduced to <a href="http://www.winetime.ua/en/catalog/wine/vallformosa_docatalunya_lavina_blanco/">Vallformosa Lavina Blanco</a>, a deliciously crisp white wine that is highly recommended with seafood of all kinds. In the end, I had it with a glass of each. After careful consideration, I think the somewhat more acidic Rueda stood up to the saltiness of the sea beans and the red pepper flakes much better than the lighter Lavina Blanco did.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong>Conchiglie with sea beans, garlic, capers and red pepper</strong><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
½ pound conchiglie or other pasta<br />
<br />
3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil<br />
<br />
4 cloves of garlic, chopped<br />
<br />
1 small bunch (about 2 oz.) of sea beans, rinsed<br />
<br />
1 Tbs capers, rinsed and chopped<br />
<br />
½ tsp red pepper flakes<br />
<br />
2 Tbs. chopped fresh parsely<br />
<br />
Grated Parmesan cheese<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. Cook the pasta according to the package directions in salted water until al dente.<br />
<br />
2. While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook about a minute. Then, stir in the sea beans, capers, and red pepper flakes and sauté briefly (less than a minute). Remove from heat.<br />
<br />
3. Drain the pasta and return it to the pot. Stir in the sauce mixture, mix thoroughly, sprinkle on the parsely and top with grated Parmesan.<br />
<br />
4. Serve immediately with a Sauvignon Blanc or other seafood-friendly white wine.<br />
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-84509944210177068462012-02-12T06:40:00.000-08:002012-02-12T06:40:12.511-08:00A Most Entertaining EveningOn February 8, I attended an event at the <a href="http://www.marktwainhouse.org/">Mark Twain House</a> featuring Denis Horgan, a long-time columnist with the <em>Hartford Courant</em> who is now offering his thoughts on life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever we pursue <a href="http://denishorgan.com/">online</a>. He has also turned his hand to fiction, and the event at the Mark Twain House included a reception beforehand with wine and some very nice munchies, and a book signing afterwards (the museum gift shop conveniently had copies of his latest short story collection <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Denis+horgan+ninety+eight">Ninety-Eight Point Six...and Other Stories</a>). I bought a copy that night and haven’t finished reading it yet, but based on the short story he read excerpts from – “The English Aisle,” which I have since read myself – I think I will really like the collection. I had expected the evening to consist mostly of Denis reading from one or more of his works, and I was initially a bit disappointed that it wasn’t that way, but my disappointment quickly abated. Instead, he gave a fascinating talk about his life (he was, for example, born in a taxi in Boston during a Thanksgiving snowstorm) and his somewhat complicated path to becoming a writer, a path that life seemed intent on deflecting him from (for example, during his long newspaper career, those in charge kept wanting him to edit and manage, and it took some persuasion on his part to be allowed to continue writing columns).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Among many other things, Denis discussed the motivation for – and obstacles to – what was originally intended as a novel but ultimately became his recent short story collection (he gives a more detailed account of this in the Preface of <em>Ninety-Eight Point Six</em>). Several of these stories deal with different aspects of identity, and the motivation for them was a real-life identity theft. As is often the case, the truth is stranger than fiction here, because the young woman whose identity was stolen had an extremely difficult time convincing anyone to take the problem seriously: the person who had stolen her identity hadn’t done anything bad with it – she got a job, paid her bills and filed her income taxes (this prompted a letter from the IRS to the original owner of the identity about the two conflicting tax returns she had filed). The story reminded me of an incident from a novel (I believe it was Peter Mayle’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hotel-Pastis-Provence-Peter-Mayle/dp/0679751114">Hotel Pastis</a>, but I can’t find my copy just at the moment, so I’m not absolutely certain), where the protagonist’s significant other had had her credit card stolen, but he waited six months to report it because the thief was spending so much less than she was. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It is clear, both from the two stories of Horgan’s that I have read so far and from the things he talked about at the Mark Twain House, that his years in journalism have served him well, honing his eye for the details that convey so much about his characters. For example, in one of his stories, “The Sound of Shadows,” the main character (Patrick) is trying to straighten out his stolen identity after the IRS has called him about his duplicate tax filing (“Frankly, we don’t care who you are so long as you follow the rules, and the rules say one return from one person not two returns from one person or no returns from any person. Do you see that simple symmetry? It is elegant. Smooth. …”). One of the things he does is call the Social Security offices, where he is ultimately able to speak to an actual person, but it isn’t much help:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“No, you are just mistaken. Because it cannot happen, therefore it did not happen. That’s only logical, isn’t it? How can something happen that cannot happen? …”<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
This incident is particularly hilarious to me because my wife experienced almost exactly the same conversation when we lived in Switzerland, but in a very different context. We were guests of the university I was visiting, and they provided us with a superbly furnished apartment, one that included everything from bed linens (ironed and folded) to salt and pepper shakers. And a checklist. When the housing people stopped by to collect the checklist, my wife noted that the teaspoons didn’t match, as several of them were a different style from the others, with “SwissAir” stamped on the back. The housing guy was nearly speechless, able only to mumble over and over again, “This is not possible. It is not possible.” After a few moments, he was able to regain his composure enough to collect the offensively “impossible” SwissAir spoons, take them away, and replace them with a new, complete set of “possible” spoons.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As I said, I haven’t finished reading Denis Horgan’s collection of short stories yet, but the two samples I have read so far have left me howling with laughter in places, so I plan to finish it soon and will have more to say about it then.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-52335623786476185972011-11-13T18:19:00.000-08:002011-11-13T18:19:07.701-08:00Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good FoodI recently received a copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Good-Food-rev-Ingredients/dp/1580087507/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321216779&sr=1-1">New Good Food</a> by Margaret Wittenberg as a gift, a book that I have admired for some time now, thumbing through display copies when the chance presented itself. As she notes in the book’s introduction, the author is a vice president of Whole Foods Market, so it is not surprising that I discovered it at our local Whole Foods, or that the store carries many of the less common food items she discusses. She begins the book by describing herself as “an intuitive cook” who can visualize how different ingredients play together in terms of flavor, texture, and presentation. She goes on to say (on page ix):<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">“Although some of my knack is likely innate, much of it I developed through experience, by cooking, observing, listening, and reading.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The intent of her book is clear: to share this information with others, focusing on a wide range of ingredients that may be very traditional, but not all in the same culture. In just under 300 pages, this book is organized into 13 un-numbered chapters, with the following titles:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
• Fruits and Vegetables<br />
<br />
• Grains<br />
<br />
• Whole Grain and Specialty Flours<br />
<br />
• Breads<br />
<br />
• Pasta and Noodles<br />
<br />
• Beans, Peas, and Lentils<br />
<br />
• Nuts and Seeds<br />
<br />
• Culinary Oils<br />
<br />
• Meat, Poultry, and Eggs<br />
<br />
• Dairy Products<br />
<br />
• Seafood<br />
<br />
• Essential Seasonings<br />
<br />
• Sweeteners<br />
<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
Each chapter begins with some general discussion of the topic at hand (for example, the Grains chapter includes a discussion of how much whole grain to prepare: 1 cup of uncooked grain is said to typically feed 2 to 4 people) and most of the chapters conclude with an “Exploring” section that gives brief descriptions of a wide range of ingredient varieties. For example, the section on “Exploring Pasta and Noodles” covers both the familiar, like Italian-style dried pasta, and the more exotic, like pastas made from Jerusalem artichokes, quinoa, and spelt. These descriptions range from a couple of sentences to about half a page. One of the really intriguing short descriptions is that of lotus root soba, a Japanese noodle that is characterized as having “a delicious nutty flavor and aroma similar to that of freshly cooked lotus root.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One of the most interesting chapters is the penultimate one on “Essential Seasonings,” whose title left me expecting a discussion of spices. While the chapter does begin with four pages on salt, this is not followed by discussions of other “standard” flavoring ingredients like pepper, nutmeg, or tarragon, but instead goes into reasonably detailed treatments of miso, tamari and shoyu, umeboshi plums, and a variety of sea vegetables, including Irish moss, kombu, and sea beans. Besides describing these unusual edibles, the book gives brief but useful cooking instructions. To cook sea lettuce, for example, the book notes that “it’s best to combine it with other ingredients to minimize its slightly bitter taste.” Some of what I regard as more standard “seasoning ingredients” are discussed in the book, but mostly in the earlier chapter on “Fruits and Vegetables,” which devotes about a page and a half to fresh herbs and about four and a half pages to peppers, including tables describing both fresh and dried peppers.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In general, I like this book a lot, in part because of the range of unusual new (to me) foods it describes, including everything from lotus root (which I have seen but haven’t yet had the opportunity to taste) to edible flowers (nasturtiums are described as “sweet, mustardlike”), from teff (a gluten-free whole grain with extremely small seeds) to Tongues of Fire (an Italian bean, said to be a good addition to pasta dishes and soups), from birch syrup (really, from birch trees) to broccoflower (a cross between broccoli and cauliflower; I’m familiar with this one from when I lived in Switzerland: it’s delicious). Just reading through the descriptions makes me hungry and most curious. For example, the umeboshi plums I mentioned above are “made from sour, unripe fruits of the ume tree, which is native to China.” The description (on page 231) goes on to say that these fruits are closer to apricots than to plums (pluots, anyone?) and that their preparation is fairly intricate: they are pickled in sea salt for about a month, dried in the sun, other ingredients are added (dark red shiso leaves), they continue to soak, then they are finally aged in barrels for about a year. In addition, the brine from the plums is sold as umeboshi vinegar to be used as a condiment. Somehow, I have to find these things and try them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The one potential shortcoming of the book – and this isn’t really a fault of the book, but just part of the challenge of exploring new tastes – is that my favorite flavor pairing book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Bible-Essential-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321217308&sr=1-1">The Flavor Bible</a> by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg doesn’t have anything to say about a lot of the intriguing ingredients in <em>New Good Food.</em> In some cases, there are enough “near matches” that this isn’t a problem: while <em>The Flavor Bible</em> doesn’t have an entry for “broccoflower,” it does list both “broccoli” and “cauliflower,” so it shouldn’t be too difficult to look for compatible ingredients common to both lists and try them (for example, cheese is highly recommended for both, especially cheddar, Parmesan or goat cheese, as are unsalted butter, garlic, and lemon juice). The more challenging cases are things like sea beans and umeboshi plums, although a careful reading of both books does come to the rescue here. Specifically, in her chapter on “Essential Seasonings,” one reason that Wittenberg includes so many unexpected (to me, at least) “non-spice” flavorings is that she begins the chapter with a discussion of umami. This “fifth flavor” – in addition to the “standard four” many of us learned in school: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter – is commonly associated with things like mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, and cured ham. To this list, Wittenberg adds “sea vegetables, soy sauce, and miso,” and her chapter emphasizes “umami flavoring ingredients.” This provides the needed link to <em>The Flavor Bible</em>, which has an entry on “umami” (page 355), listing everything from anchovies to walnuts, including some of my favorite flavors of all time: aged Gruyere, clams, Asian fish sauce, lobster, oysters, pork, potatoes, sardines, meat-based sauces, dry-aged, grilled steaks, and truffles. (Now, I have definitely got to find some umeboshi plums to try …). <br />
<br />
Finally, it is important to note that, while the flavor pairings are less extensive than those given in <em>The Flavor Bible</em>, Wittenberg’s book does include recommended pairings in many of her descriptions. For example, in her description of the gluten-free grain Job’s Tears, Wittenberg recommends ginger, parsley, onions and chives as flavor enhancers. Similarly, it’s good to know that Jacob’s Cattle Beans make “the basis for a simple salad when combined with fresh herbs and a splash of olive oil.” Hmm,…how about rau ram (Vietnamese coriander), the fresh herb described on page 17 as having a “spicy taste and aroma similar to those of lemon and coriander”? <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It is clear that this is going to be a fun manuscript to munch my way through.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em></em>Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-849962578661919282011-10-16T10:30:00.000-07:002011-10-16T10:30:10.777-07:00Brazilian eggplant ratatouilleRecently, a local farm stand had Brazilian eggplants. These were a completely new discovery for me, so much so that I had absolutely no idea what they were when I first saw them. As the photograph below illustrates, they are a beautiful red vegetable, not much larger than an egg (at first, I thought they were some kind of pepper). Someone at the farm stand who was familiar with them told me that they were milder than regular eggplants, and they worked very well in ratatouille.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9f37-RxCvSWeXv469HeS0_jNUJZlmcvy5YWiwLvg5ZPoC2z-NySi-qbwHFicoSUiHDew8xijjDqyXlYHYfVEAmrI1CscST2A0xoOYX328zH1VHLQcNvVzW_A6x0PjnL27IX6w7uHKGHM/s1600/brazillianeggplantphoto+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" oda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9f37-RxCvSWeXv469HeS0_jNUJZlmcvy5YWiwLvg5ZPoC2z-NySi-qbwHFicoSUiHDew8xijjDqyXlYHYfVEAmrI1CscST2A0xoOYX328zH1VHLQcNvVzW_A6x0PjnL27IX6w7uHKGHM/s320/brazillianeggplantphoto+%25282%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
None of my hardcopy culinary references had anything to say about Brazilian eggplants, and a brief Internet search didn’t really turn up a lot, either, although one “near miss” actually worked out extremely well. This was the recipe for “eggplant and tomato salad” described in Rea Frey's blog <a href="http://www.chicagonow.com/clean-convenient-cuisine/2011/01/texas-de-brazil-chefs-recipe-for-eggplant-and-tomato-salad/">Clean Convenient Cuisine</a>. Her January 14, 2011 post describes the Brazilian-themed <em>Texas de Brazil</em> restaurant chain that grew out of a restaurant in Brazil, formed a U.S. partnership in Dallas, and now has a number of other U.S. locations, including one in Chicago. The post gives a recipe that calls for one large regular eggplant, but we prepared a variation using five Brazilian eggplants instead. We also added some shallots and modified the spices slighlty, replacing the regular paprika in the original recipe with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Szeged-Hot-Paprika-Powder-5oz/dp/B00126EDLI">Szeged Hungarian hot paprika</a>. I call the end result ratatouille here because it seems consistent with the definition of this classic French dish given in Sharon Tyler Herbst's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Companion-Barrons-Cooking-Guide/dp/0764112589/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318783916&sr=1-3">Food Lover's Companion</a>:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“A popular dish from the French region of Provence that combines eggplant, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, garlic and herbs – all simmered in olive oil.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
She also notes that “the vegetables can vary according to the cook,” and this recipe does that, basically omitting the zucchini and bell peppers. The result was delicious and provided an excellent accompaniment to a three-egg omelet made with Irish bacon, sautéed baby bok choy, and grated Fontina cheese. We served it with a Smoking Loon Chardonnay and it made a fabulous dinner.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
- 5 Brazilian eggplants (approximately one pound in total)<br />
<br />
- 1 15 ounce can whole tomatoes<br />
<br />
- 1 large shallot, chopped<br />
<br />
- 4 garlic cloves, chopped<br />
<br />
- 1/3 cup cilantro, chopped<br />
<br />
- 1 tablespoon Hungarian hot paprika<br />
<br />
- 1 tablespoon ground cumin<br />
<br />
- 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper<br />
<br />
- kosher salt and ground black pepper to taste<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
- Cut the Brazilian eggplants into cubes, about one inch, and let it rest in a colander for 30 minutes (this is a suggestion given in Rea Frey's post, from Evandro Caregnato, Culinary Director of <em>Texas de Brazil</em>, who notes that it improves the taste of the dish by eliminating some of the eggplant's bitter liquids).<br />
<br />
- Heat the olive oil in a large pan and cook the shallots until they are translucent. Then add the garlic and cook until it is soft.<br />
<br />
- Chop the whole tomatoes in large pieces and mix them, along with their liquid, into the pan with the shallots and garlic. Add the eggplant cubes, cilantro, Hungarian paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, ground black pepper and kosher salt.<br />
<br />
- Cover and simmer 20 to 30 minutes, until the eggplant is soft, checking periodically and adding water if necessary to keep the vegetables from burning.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-85753361266986019002011-08-26T09:09:00.000-07:002011-08-26T09:09:26.907-07:00Discovering callalooRecently, <em>callaloo</em> appeared at our local Whole Foods Market: a leafy green, similar in appearance to Swiss chard, the name alone seemed reason enough to try it. So, we bought a bunch, washed it, removed the thick stalks, tore the leaves into small pieces, and sautéed them in olive oil and garlic. Instantly, they became my wife’s favorite green of all time, and I would have to agree that they were about the best greens I have ever tasted.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Wanting to know more about this newly discovered culinary treasure, I turned first to my two favorite sources of information about unusual edibles. According to Sharon Tyler Herbst’s <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Companion-Barrons-Cooking-Guide/dp/0764112589?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Food Lover's Companion, The (Barron's Cooking Guide) 3rd Edition</a></span>, the term callaloo refers to either “the large, edible green leaves of the taro root,” or to “a Caribbean soup made with callaloo greens,” along with a bunch of other ingredients. She also notes that callaloo greens are “popular in the Caribbean islands cooked as one would prepare turnip or collard greens.” In <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Companion-Food-Alan-Davidson/dp/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Alan Davidson suggests that the term callaloo applies to a wider range of greens, including in addition to taro, the leaves of various species of malanga, amaranth, and pokeweed, among others.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Book-Caribbean-Cooking/dp/0785804692?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Complete Book of Caribbean Cooking</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0785804692" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz gives five different recipes for the soup, with three different spellings depending on where it originates: three different recipes for Le Calalou from Gaudaloupe, Martinique, and Haiti; one for Callau from St. Lucia; and finally one for Callaloo from Trinidad. All of these recipes call for their namesake green, along with about ten or so other ingredients, and they all sound delicious to me. Unfortunately, the one other ingredient that all five of these recipes have in common is okra, which my wife absolutely detests. So, it is unlikely that we will be trying the soup any time in the near future.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Because callaloo isn’t commonly available, Ortiz recommends Swiss chard, fresh spinach, or Chinese spinach as possible substitutes. Of course, if callaloo is available, we can reverse her recommendations and substitute callaloo for these other greens. This is essentially what we did the first time we cooked it, finding the sautéed callaloo described at the beginning of this post an excellent accompaniment to grilled salmon. Also, although she doesn’t mention callaloo, Aliza Green has a chapter on “Greens for Cooking” in her book, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Ingredients-Aliza-Green/dp/0762427477?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Starting with Ingredients</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0762427477" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, where she offers the following points of advice. First, she notes that greens are typically fairly strongly flavored, motivating two common cooking techniques: first, slow cooking is popular both to tenderize them and to mellow out their flavor, and second, they are often paired with garlic, hot peppers, vinegar, or smoked meats that stand up well and balance out their flavor. With callaloo, we found that garlic, salt and pepper worked extremely well, but I am salivating over the thought of adding red pepper flakes and/or a nice smoky bacon. Aliza Green also notes that when cooking with greens – including spinach, which she covers in a whole separate chapter of her book – “a lot goes but a little way:” these greens tend to cook down a lot, so it is important to start with what may look like a much larger bunch than you need. In their book, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Bible-Essential-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0316118400" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg don’t mention callaloo, either, but they do devote the better part of two pages to greens, both in general and specific types like collard greens and turnip greens. Their highest recommendations for pairing go to garlic, olive oil, and various kinds of cheese (especially grated Asiago, Jack, or Parmesan), but they also give bacon and other smoked meats consistently high marks.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Finally, when it comes to pairing greens with wine, Dornenburg and Page’s other book, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Drink-You-Eat-Definitive/dp/0821257188?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0821257188" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> consistently recommends in favor of white wines – especially Sauvignon Blanc – and against reds. Since they also recommend Sauvignon Blanc with garlic and seafood (especially poached or lightly grilled), that’s what we served the night we had our sautéed callaloo with grilled salmon. It made for one of those meals that linger pleasantly on the tastebuds but, sadly, don't leave anything behind to munch on later.<br />
<br />
Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-46147048780180663332011-07-23T11:24:00.000-07:002011-07-23T11:24:27.260-07:00Brunch in Brooklyn<span><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0764112589" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>Last weekend, my wife and I got a spur of the moment invitation from her daughter and son-in-law to join a group visiting one of her friends in Brooklyn. So, we drove over for brunch. It was a beautiful day and neither one of us had ever been there before, so it was kind of an adventure. <br />
<br />
Brunch was at the <a href="http://cloverclubny.com/">Clover Club</a> and it was well worth the excursion. Our friend from Brooklyn particularly recommended the potato cakes with truffle crème fraiche, and they were almost worth the drive by themselves. The Clover Club also featured a three bacon sampler, ideal for those who can't make up their mind or just want to try a bit of it all: the ensemble included maple, black pepper, and duck bacon. I think my favorite was the black pepper bacon, but I would happily have any or all of them again. My wife loves rhubarb and grows it in the back yard, so she got the ricotta pancakes with vanilla poached rhubarb and strawberry curd, which were as good as they sound. She also makes a really great lemon curd - our neighbor requests it regularly - but strawberry curd was an entirely new concept to me. A quick check of the curd entry in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Companion-Barrons-Cooking-Guide/dp/0764112589?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Food Lover's Companion, The (Barron's Cooking Guide) 3rd Edition</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0764112589" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /> reveals the usual suspects - lemon, lime and orange curd - but no strawberry</span>. (This expansion of the known curd universe does get me thinking, though: I bet kumquat curd would be fabulous.) I had the baked eggs with chorizo and manchego, which were also really delicious, but when the meals were delivered, I was accidentally given the baked eggs with truffles and leeks that one of the other members of our gathering had ordered. Good as mine was – and it was – I did find myself wishing I had ordered what was originally set in front of me: the truffle smell alone had me drooling all the way home afterwards, and it was enough for me to encourage my wife to put truffle salt on the French fries she made the following night to go with dinner. But probably the best dish of the day was the pork ‘n grits that one of the other members of our group ordered: it included cheddar grits, shallots, a sunnyside-up egg, and sourdough toast. All in all, it was a great day, described somewhat more eloquently by our friend Karen in her blog <a href="http://bikiniwaxchronicles.com/">The Bikini Wax Chronicles</a> (see the July 19th post).<br />
<br />
After brunch, we went across the street to <a href="http://stinkybklyn.com/">Stinky Bklyn</a>, a really fabulous little store that features a beer-of-the-month club, sweets and sandwiches, a tremendous assortment of cheeses (including some great stinky ones, of course), sausages of various descriptions, and a lot of other things. Their on-line shopping guide includes 67 cheeses, ranging from <em>abbaye de belloc</em>, a French sheep’s milk cheese, to <em>zamorano</em>, a sheep’s milk cheese from Spain (to avert the risk of allowing two points to determine a line here, I should note that they also have cheeses made from cow’s milk or goat’s milk, along with some combination-based varieties like the Italian <em>toma della rocca</em>, made from all three). The shopping guide also list somewhat more limited assortments of meats, chocolates, oils and vinegars, mustards, and pickles. To help understand the similarities and differences between the vast array of cheeses that shops like Stinky Bklyn carry, their website provides a simple breakdown into five basic types. I won’t try to repeat the whole thing here, but I offer the following tidbits to give an idea of both their classification scheme and their entertaining writing style:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Type 1 – “uncomplicated little fellows,” these are fairly young, soft cheeses like Brie, triple creams, and Robiolas<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Type 2 – aged longer (6 – 12 months), firmer cheeses like pecorino or manchego<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Type 3 – “complex recipe cheeses,” usually at least 1 year old, includes both Gouda and Gruyere<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Type 4 – “Stinky cheese! O the sublime washed rind.” This group includes things like Taleggio, and the description notes that “if it smells and has a bright orange crust, chances are you’ve got one of these guys”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Type 5 – blue cheeses like Roquefort and Stilton.<br />
<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
We loved roaming around in the Stinky Bklyn store and we could have easily spent hours there, rummaging among the goodies. But we had limited time, so in the end we only brought back two culinary treasures. The first one was Red Meck, a raw cow’s milk cheese from Mecklenberg, NY, with the following description on its label: “Gouda or gruyere? Why not both?”, which would seem to put it squarely into the Type 3 class defined above. However you classify it, the stuff is delicious and I wish we had bought more. Our other find was <em>biellese saucisson basque</em>, a superb salami, sliced very thinly, that leaves a most pleasant burning sensation at the back of the throat after you eat a slice. It reminds me a bit of the hottest salami I have ever had, a great find at the indoor market in Tampere, Finland when I was living there. It was imported from Italy, absolutely firey, and I have never been able to find it anywhere else. The Stinky Bklyn salami that we did find is great on sandwiches or in omelets, and again, it is clear in retrospect that we didn’t bring back enough. Sadly, neither of these particular delicacies is listed on their website.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I guess it means we will have to arrange another brunch.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-37030034679582123522011-06-25T19:48:00.000-07:002011-06-25T19:48:16.464-07:00Balti spiced chicken with fennel and forbidden riceIntrigued by the name and description, I recently bought a small jar of Balti Seasoning from Penzeys. According to Alan Davidson’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Companion-Food-Alan-Davidson/dp/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" />, the term “Balti” refers to both the native cuisine of Baltistan, a region in the far northeast of Pakistan, and a wok-style pan used extensively in the preparation of Balti cuisine. I bought a jar of the spice both because it was something new and different that I had never heard of before, and because it smelled delicious. A quick Internet search suggests that many people have been intrigued by the spice’s magnificent aroma, but – like me – didn’t really know what to do with it <a href="http://community.cookinglight.com/archive/index.php/t-93940.html">(see, for example, "Looking for recipes for Penzeys Balti Seasoning")</a>. One intriguing entry is that from Grace (“Unhelpful bile spewer”), who says, in part:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“I LOVE Indian food, and my absolute favorite dish is Matter Paneer (Peas and Cheese). When I smelled the Balti seasoning at Penzey’s, it smelled just like this dish to me so I had to buy it.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
She goes on to say that she can’t find a recipe for the dish that uses Balti Seasoning, and that she would really like any recipe that uses the spice. Like Grace, I don’t have a recipe, but my wife and I recently made one up that we thought turned out very well, so I have included it at the end of this post.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The seasoning mix itself is described on the <a href="http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeysbaltiseason.html">Penzeys</a> website, which lists the 18 ingredients that make up the blend. Among other things, this mix includes garlic and fennel, cumin and coriander, cardamom and clove, cilantro, star anise, and charnushka. I’m afraid I wasn’t familiar with this last ingredient, either, but Penzeys also sells this separately, and their catalog entry has this to say about it:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Tiny, black, smoky flavored seeds found atop Jewish rye bread in New York. Used in Armenia, Lebanon, Israel, and India. Also referred to as black caraway or kalonji, charnushka is used heavily in garam masala.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Since the Balti Seasoning mix includes both garlic and fennel – and we really like both of these ingredients – it seemed natural to include them in the chicken dish. We made it in a crock pot since we were both busy that day, and that allowed the flavors to blend together quite nicely. We served it with “forbidden rice,” the Chinese black rice that we had seen many times, but had never actually tried – it was a spectacular choice. In Ruth Reichel’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gourmet-Today-All-New-Recipes-Contemporary/dp/0618610189?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0618610189" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" />, she gives a recipe for “Black Rice with Scallions and Sweet Potatoes” (page 260), where she notes that, “The stunning color of this rice comes from the layers of black bran surrounding the white kernel.” <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
We also added one more “secret ingredient” to the dish: mushroom powder. This is something we were introduced to at the fabulous mushroom stand at the Saturday morning market in Oerlikon, Switzerland when we lived there. You never knew what you would find there. Our standard order was “<em>ein hundert gramm gemischte</em>” - about a quarter of a pound of assorted mushrooms - that might include every color of the rainbow and just about every strange shape you could think of. One day, the mushroom guy introduced us to mushroom powder, which we came to love as a flavoring ingredient. For a long time after we returned to the U.S., we couldn't find mushroom powder anywhere, until we took a culinary excursion to New York and discovered <a href="http://www.kalustyans.com/">Kalustyan's</a>. They carry an amazing range of edibles, including mushroom powder, which is available on-line (just follow the links from their main page to “Mushrooms” and look down the list for “Mushroom Blend Powder”). According to <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Mushroom-Identifying-Mushrooms-Photographic/dp/B004V5QNME?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Ultimate Mushroom Book A Complete Guide to Identifying, Picking and Using Mushrooms--A Photographic A-Z of Types and 100 Original Recipes</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B004V5QNME" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" />, by Peter Jordan and Steven Wheeler, mushroom powder is made from finely ground dried mushrooms that can be used in soups, stews, and curries, but should be used sparingly. We used a bit of it in the recipe below to bring out the flavor of the fresh mushrooms. To serve, w</span>e paired the dish with a Pinot Grigio, which Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page recommend in their book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Drink-You-Eat-Definitive/dp/0821257188?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0821257188" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /> with chicken (highly recommended), garlic, fennel, and tomatoes, all of which we had included in our recipe.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
2 chicken breasts (i.e., 4 halves)<br />
<br />
1 large fennel bulb<br />
<br />
1 large leek<br />
<br />
4 tomatoes, quartered<br />
<br />
1 cup forbidden (black) rice<br />
<br />
4 cups chicken stock (2 cups for the rice, 2 cups in the crockpot)<br />
<br />
½ pound fresh baby bella mushrooms, sliced<br />
<br />
3 cloves garlic, minced<br />
<br />
2 tablespoons butter<br />
<br />
2 tablespoons olive oil<br />
<br />
½ teaspoon Penzeys Balti Seasoning (¼ teaspoon to sauté chicken, ¼ teaspoon for the crockpot)<br />
<br />
¼ teaspoon mushroom powder ( 1/8 teaspoon to sauté chicken, 1/8 teaspoon for the crockpot)<br />
<br />
salt and pepper, to taste<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
1. Wash and pat dry the chicken breasts and sprinkle with salt, pepper, ¼ teaspoon Balti Seasoning, and 1/8 teaspoon mushroom powder. Sauté 3 minutes per side.<br />
<br />
2. Put the chicken breasts in the bottom of the crockpot. Roughly chop the fennel, wash and chop the leek, and add to the crockpot, along with the mushrooms and the tomatoes. Add 2 cups of chicken stock and the minced garlic. Sprinkle with the remaining ¼ teaspoon Balti Seasoning and the remaining 1/8 teaspoon mushroom powder, cover the crockpot and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, stirring the ingredients once or twice near the end of the cooking time.<br />
<br />
3. During the last 40 minutes of the cooking time, melt the butter in a sauce pan, add the rice and sauté for a few minutes. Add the remaining 2 cups of chicken stock, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-29254877859352924352011-05-28T11:15:00.000-07:002011-05-28T11:15:09.124-07:00The Art of Internal RhymeTraditional poetic forms like the sonnet are defined in part by a rhyme scheme that specifies a required sequence of <em>end rhymes</em>. For example, a Shakespearean sonnet is a 14-line poem in which the first 12 lines rhyme in alternating pairs and the last two lines rhyme with each other. Symbolically, we can write this rhyme scheme as:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>abab cdcd efef gg</blockquote><br />
Of course, there is a great deal more to a sonnet than this rhyme scheme, but without question, the characteristic pattern of end rhymes is one of the features that makes the sonnet easy to identify. The subject of this post is the more complicated – and often, more subtle – notion of <em>internal rhyme</em>.<br />
<br />
<br />
In its entry on the topic, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Princeton-Encyclopedia-Poetry-Poetics/dp/0691021236?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0691021236" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> notes that the terminology of internal rhyme is not standardized, so they describe two variations of each of two basic types. The first type involves a word at the end of a line, rhyming either with (a) one or more words in the same line, or (b) one or more words in another line, while the second type involves only internal words, again rhyming either with (a) other words on the same line, or (b) words in the middle of other lines. As this definition suggests, internal rhyme is an extremely flexible concept. In <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Book-Forms-Handbook-Poetics/dp/0874513812?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0874513812" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Lewis Turco discusses many different types of rhyme, and he uses the term <em>cross rhyme</em> to denote variation (b) of the first type of internal rhyme described above: the end of one line rhymes with a word in the middle of another line. He also uses the term <em>interlaced rhyme</em> to refer to variation (b) of the second type of internal rhyme defined above – i.e., words or syllables in the middle of one line rhyming with words or syllables in the middle of another line – and he uses the term <em>linked rhyme</em> to denote a rhyme between the end of one line and the beginning of the next, an idea illustrated below in connection with Dylan Thomas’ famous villanelle. For the purposes of discussion here, I will use the term “internal rhyme” to refer to any rhyme between an internal syllable or group of syllables, either with words or syllables at the end of the same line, or those in another line, most commonly at the end of that other line. Where I want to be explicit that the rhyme involves two different lines, I will use the term “cross rhyme.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In his book, Lewis Turco discusses about a dozen different poetic forms that include internal rhymes as part of their definition, generally involving cross rhymes. Most of these forms are either Welsh or Irish, and many of the resulting rhyme schemes are rather complicated. One of the simpler examples is the <em>awdl gywydd</em>, consisting of four seven-syllable lines organized as follows:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1 – x x x x x x a<br />
<br />
2 – x x (a) (a) (a) x b<br />
<br />
3 – x x x x x x c<br />
<br />
4 – x x (c) (c) (c) x b<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Here, each letter denotes a syllable and those marked x can be anything we like, but those marked a, b, or c represent rhymes. Also, the letters in parentheses in the second and fourth line mean that one of these syllables must exhibit the indicated rhyme. Specifically, “a” in the above scheme denotes the end rhyme for the first line, which must be a cross rhyme with the third, fourth, or fifth syllable of the second line. Similarly, the final syllable of the third line must be a cross rhyme with the third, fourth, or fifth syllable of the fourth line. As a specific illustration, I have composed the following <em>awdl gywydd:</em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The Bliss of Ignorance<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Who would remember that day<br />
<br />
when certainty fades, and youth<br />
<br />
slips so suddenly from us,<br />
<br />
a foretaste of dust’s black truth?</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Here, <em>day</em> at the end of line 1 rhymes with <em>fades</em>, the fifth syllable of line 2, while <em>youth</em> at the end of line 2 rhymes with <em>truth</em> at the end of line 4, and <em>us</em> at the end of line 3 rhymes with <em>dust’s,</em> the fifth syllable of line 4.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Another poetic form that incorporates internal rhyme in its definition is the Persian <em>ghazal.</em> Ironically enough, this is a form that Turco does not include in his book, but it is included in Dede Wilson’s collection <em>One Nightstand</em> that I discussed in a previous post (a really fabulous little book that I recommend highly – published in 2001 by and still available from <a href="http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/books.php">Main Street Rag</a>). This form consists of any number of couplets, with the following requirements: first, both lines of the first couplet and the second line of all succeeding couplets must end with the same word or phrase, known as the <em>radif,</em> and second, preceding each <em>radif</em> is an internal rhyme called the <em>qafia.</em> The following example provides an illustration:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote> Rejection Letter No. 12,768<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
“Dear contributor,” it read, “your poems do not meet our current needs.”<br />
<br />
I stared in disbelief: surely, my stuff exceeded <em><strong>any</strong></em> “current needs.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Refusing to weep or gnash my teeth, I threw it on the pile with the other<br />
<br />
letters alleging my failure to foresee a vast array of current needs.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Rereading their magazine later, I wondered why I had bothered:<br />
<br />
based on what they accepted, I couldn’t believe what met their current needs.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
A few days after that, when the sting had abated a bit,<br />
<br />
I sent another group of doodles: surely <em><strong>these</strong></em> would meet and exceed <em><strong>all</strong></em> current needs.<br />
<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
Here, “current needs” represents the <em>radif,</em> repeated at the end of both lines of the first couplet and at the second line of each succeeding couplet, while the <em>qafia</em> is the internal rhyme between <em>meet</em> in the first line, <em>exceeded</em> in the second, <em>foresee</em> at the end of the second couplet, <em>believe</em> at the end of the third, and <em>meet and exceed</em> at the end of the fourth. A more detailed discussion of the <em>ghazal</em> with additional examples is given by Agha Shahid Ali in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Exaltation-Forms-Contemporary-Celebrate-Diversity/dp/0472067257?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0472067257" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, which includes Ali’s chapter on the <em>ghazal,</em> together with discussions of an enormous range of other poetic topics, from sonnets and haiku to rap and fractals. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Standard advice given to poets, musicians, and other creative artists down through the centuries is to “study the masters.” As advice, this is difficult to argue with, but it does immediately raise a crucial question: who exactly <em>are</em> the masters we should be studying? The answer to this question can be the subject of considerable debate.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Some years ago, I attended a poetry workshop taught by a well-known contemporary poet. One of the other students asked a question and in the course of the discussion, mentioned Edgar Allen Poe. The instructor’s response was immediate and vehemently dismissive: “Poe?? He was a terrible poet!” While Poe may not be everyone’s cup of tea, if you are interested in internal rhyme, it is worth studying at least some of his poetry because he used the idea so extensively. This is clear from the opening line of “The Raven,” probably his most famous poem:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Poe’s use of rhyme is not subtle, either in his end-rhymes or in his internal rhymes, but it is precisely because his rhymes are not subtle that he represents a good place to begin in exploring the concept. In particular, the internal rhyme between “dreary” and “weary” is the most obvious illustration, but his repetition of the accented syllable “pon” in both “upon” and “pondered” may also be viewed as an internal rhyme. In addition, note that the effect of the alliteration in “weak and weary” is to further emphasize the internal rhyme in the line. The first two lines of the second stanza include both the internal rhyme between “remember” and “December” and a cross-rhyme with “ember” in the second line:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,<br />
<br />
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
All in all, a careful reading of “The Raven” reveals a lot of internal rhyme, both within and between lines.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
A more subtle master of internal rhyme was Dylan Thomas. His poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” is often cited as one of the best English-language villanelles ever written. What is perhaps less widely recognized is Thomas’ mastery of internal rhyme. For example, the opening stanza of his villanelle consists of the following three lines:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Do not go gentle into that good night,<br />
<br />
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;<br />
<br />
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Note the internal rhymes between “age,” “rave,” and “day” in the second line, which extends to a cross-rhyme with “Rage, rage” at the beginning of the third line (a nice illustration of the notion of linked rhyme discussed by Lewis Turco). Similarly, note the very clear internal rhyme between “dying” and “light” in the third line, together with more subtle slant rhymes in the first line, between “do,” “go,” and “good.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
An even more subtle example of Thomas’ mastery of internal rhyme is his poem, “The Conversation of Prayer”, which begins with the following five lines:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The conversation of <em><strong>prayers</strong></em> about to be <em><strong>said</strong></em><br />
<br />
By the child going to <em><strong>bed</strong></em> and the man on the <em><strong>stairs</strong></em><br />
<br />
Who climbs to his dying <em><strong>love</strong></em> in her high <em><strong>room</strong></em>,<br />
<br />
The one not caring to <em><strong>whom</strong></em> in his sleep he will <em><strong>move</strong></em><br />
<br />
And the other full of <em><strong>tears</strong></em> that she will be <strong><em>dead</em>,</strong></blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
This poem is described by Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell in their book <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Form-Modern-Poetry-Paperbacks/dp/0472065173?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: Second Edition (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0472065173" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, who point out its scheme of interlocking cross-rhymes. Taking their lead, I have highlighted the words involved in these cross-rhymes: <em>prayers</em> in the middle of line 1 rhymes with <em>stairs</em> at the end of line 2 and forms a slant rhyme with <em>tears</em> at the middle of line 5; <em>said</em> at the end of line 1 rhymes with <em>bed</em> in the middle of line 2 and <em>dead</em> at the end of line 5; <em>love</em> in the middle of line 3 is a slant rhyme with <em>move</em> at the end of line 4; and <em>room</em> at the end of line 3 rhymes with <em>whom</em> in the middle of line 4. In fact, Thomas maintains this interlocking cross-rhyme scheme through all four stanzas of the poem. <br />
<br />
<br />
One of the things I particularly like about internal rhyme is its extremely broad applicability. Not only is it inherent in the definition of intricate poetic forms like the <em>awdl gywydd</em> and the <em>ghazal</em> from very different cultures, but it can also be incorporated into other classical forms like the examples by Poe and Thomas discussed above, or even into free-verse poetry. Examples abound: as one, William Carlos Williams’ 1938 poem, “A Sort of a Song,” begins with the line, “Let the snake wait under,” which illustrates the subtlest of the four types of internal rhyme discussed in the <em>Princeton Encyclopedia’s</em> entry on the topic. In fact, internal rhyme can be very effectively used in prose poems, which aren’t even organized into lines. For example, in my post last year on <a href="http://goodeggseattle.blogspot.com/">Kate Lebo's</a> chapbook, <em>A Commonplace Book of Pie</em>, I cited the following quote from her “Lemon Meringue” poem to illustrate how alliteration, assonance, and consonance can be used effectively in a prose poem:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“It could be hollowed and hallowed and filled with soup and served in a bistro to people who do not smash pumpkins.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
Here, “hollowed” and “hallowed” form a slant rhyme strengthened by alliteration, followed fairly rapidly by the subsequent slant rhyme of “bistro” with “people,” strengthened by what may be regarded as a “slant alliteration” between “b” and “p”.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One of my favorite internal rhyme-based forms is the Welsh <em>clogyrnach,</em> described by Lewis Turco in <em>The New Book of Forms</em>. This type of poem can be defined in a couple of different ways: the simpler definition requires six lines with varying syllable counts (specifically, 8-8-5-5-3-3) and a specified arrangement of end rhymes. As Turco notes, an alternative version of this form combines the last two lines into a single six-syllable line, which I find more interesting because it is then based on cross rhymes, with the following scheme:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
1 – x x x x x x x a<br />
<br />
2 – x x x x x x x a<br />
<br />
3 – x x x x b<br />
<br />
4 – x x x x b<br />
<br />
5 – x x b x x a<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Like the quatern form discussed in Dede Wilson’s <em>One Nightstand</em>, I am particularly fond of the <em>clogyrnach</em> because I have actually been able to get one of them published. The following example appeared in 2007 in issue 21 of <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/rconte/home.html">Ibbetson Street</a>: <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote> Taps<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
We walk in silence down the road<br />
<br />
all together, but each alone.<br />
<br />
Borne with muffled drums<br />
<br />
and twenty-one guns,<br />
<br />
day is done. He is home.<br />
<br />
<br />
</blockquote>Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-43492116686792529282011-05-13T17:38:00.000-07:002011-05-13T17:38:48.325-07:00Yakitori chicken with fiddlehead ferns and rampsA number of years ago, I had an opportunity to go to Japan, where I was introduced to the delights of yakitori chicken. It was one of my last nights there, and my host and I spent about three hours sitting in a small place munching on various chicken parts prepared yakitori style and drinking really delicious, crisp Japanese beer. Sometime after that, my wife and I stumbled on a yakitori chicken kit in a kitchen store in Cape May, New Jersey, so when the weather starts to get warm enough for outdoor grilling to be fun, our thoughts turn fairly soon to yakitori chicken (in moments of desperation, we have brushed the snow off and grilled in the depths of winter, but that’s a rather different experience). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
One of the other directions our thoughts turn in spring is to what Earthy Delights <a href="http://www.earthy.com/">Earthy Delights</a> calls “the Grand Trio of Spring:” fiddlehead ferns, ramps, and morels. Our primary local purveyor of fresh spring delectables is Whole Foods Market, and they currently have two of these on offer: fiddlehead ferns and ramps. Since our recipe for yakitori chicken uses asparagus and spring onions, it was an obvious leap to combine two favorites, leading us to the recipe for yakitori chicken with fiddlehead ferns and ramps given at the end of this post. That is, since fiddlehead ferns are somewhat asparaguslike and ramps – or “baby leeks” or “wild leeks” as they are also sometimes called – are like a really strong spring onion, the substitutions are too intriguing not to try.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Besides chicken and our two vegetable substitutions, the primary ingredient in yakitori chicken is mirin, sometimes also called “rice wine,” although in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Companion-Food-Alan-Davidson/dp/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Alan Davidson begs to differ:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Mirin, sometimes incorrectly described as a `rice wine’, is a spirit-based liquid sweetener of Japan, used only for cooking and especially in marinades and glazes and simmered dishes.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
Davidson also notes that mirin was once difficult to obtain in western countries, leading some to propose a sweet sherry as a substitute, but he characterizes this suggestion with the parenthetical comment “not a good idea, better just to use a little sugar syrup.” Fortunately, mirin is now fairly readily available, both locally and on-line (Amazon’s Grocery and Gourmet Food department carries several different brands, including the <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eden-Foods-Mirin-Cooking-1x10-5/dp/B0019JRIN8?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Eden Foods Mirin Rice Cooking Wine ( 1x10.5 OZ)</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B0019JRIN8" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> that I used in preparing the recipe given here). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I have looked through a number of yakitori recipes, both in cookbooks and from the Internet, and the ingredients that seem to appear in all of them are chicken, mirin, soy sauce, sugar, and spring onions. From there, things seem to diverge quite a bit. For example, the yakitori recipe included in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Food-Asia-Journey-Lovers/dp/1741964199?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Food of Asia (Journey for Food Lovers)</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1741964199" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> calls for sake and kuzu starch rocks (a Japanese thickening agent), while the one given in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Asian-Cookbook-Nina-Solomon/dp/0804837570?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Complete Asian Cookbook</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0804837570" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> doesn’t include either of these ingredients but does include crushed garlic and fresh ginger, as does the yakitori chicken recipe on page 31 of James Peterson's <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-James-Peterson/dp/1580087892?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Cooking</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1580087892" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>. When I had yakitori chicken in Japan, it was served on skewers, which is how both Peterson and <em>The Food of Asia</em> advocate preparing it, but <em>The Complete Asian Cookbook</em> serves it over rice, which is how we typically have it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The original recipe that came with our yakitori grilling set uses chicken breasts, cut into 1 inch cubes, green onions, cut into 1 inch lengths, and asparagus, also cut into 1 inch lengths. In the recipe presented below, I have substituted ramps for the green onions (I cut them into somewhat smaller pieces because they are substantially stronger in flavor than green onions), and fiddlehead ferns for the asparagus (I don’t cut these up at all, beyond trimming off the ends as described in the recipe below). Our yakitori kit includes a grill pan which we use on our gas grill, but a workable alternative would be to prepare it in a wok.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
My favorite food and beverage pairing book, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Drink-You-Eat-Definitive/dp/0821257188?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0821257188" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> does not have an entry for yakitori chicken, but in their general entry on “Japanese cuisine,” the authors strongly recommend “beer, esp. Japanese and/or lager.” In addition to the fiddlehead ferns and ramps, our local Whole Foods Market also carries Hitachino Nest Beer Japanese Classic Ale, and that proved to go superbly well with the dish.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Finally, before giving the recipe, it is interesting to note that while neither of the Asian cookbooks mentioned above say anything about fiddlehead ferns, one of my other favorite Asian cookbooks, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culinaria-Southeast-Asia-Singapore-Indonesia/dp/0841603707?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Culinaria Southeast Asia: A Journey Through Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (Cooking)</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0841603707" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> gives a recipe for <em>Anyang pakis</em>, an Indonesian fiddlehead salad that pairs them with coconut, beansprouts, and shallots, together with a spice paste made from red chili peppers, ginger root, lemongrass, lime, sugar, and salt. It makes me wonder how that would be with ramps substituted for the shallots, but I digress. So now, for the recipe, which serves two:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
- 1 chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces<br />
<br />
- 1 small bunch of ramps, washed and trimmed and cut into ½ inch pieces<br />
<br />
- ½ pound fiddlehead ferns, prepared as described below<br />
<br />
- 1 ½ teaspoons peanut oil<br />
<br />
- 1 ½ teaspoons sesame seeds<br />
<br />
- ¼ cup soy sauce<br />
<br />
- 1 tablespoon sugar<br />
<br />
- 1 tablespoon mirin<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
1. Mix the peanut oil, sesame seeds, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin in a one quart sauce pan and bring to a boil. Cook until the liquid thickens (about 5 minutes) and let cool. Reserve a small amount of the sauce and marinate the chicken in the rest for at least an hour.<br />
<br />
2. While the chicken is marinating, prepare the fiddlehead ferns as follows. First, wash thoroughly in a colander and trim away the ends. Blanch the ferns in boiling water for three minutes. Remove and immerse in ice water to stop the cooking. When cool, remove them and set aside.<br />
<br />
3. Prepare enough rice for two people, starting it early enough that it is ready when the yakitori chicken is done.<br />
<br />
4. Put the chicken in a grill pan on a medium-hot grill (or in a wok) and cook for two minutes. Add the ramps and fiddlehead ferns and continue to cook for about another 6 minutes. Then, brush with the reserved yakitori sauce and cook for one more minute.<br />
<br />
5. Serve the yakitori chicken over rice, preferably with a nice Japanese beer.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-49262998214872848172011-04-24T12:26:00.000-07:002011-04-24T12:26:45.321-07:00Sampling an unacquirable tasteA recent episode of Food Network’s <em>Chopped</em> featured the most challenging baskets of mandatory ingredients I have ever seen: the appetizer course had to include goat brains, the entre course had to feature fish heads, and the dessert basket included durian. Twice in the past, I have sampled durian – once in Thailand and once in Malaysia – in vain attempts to understand its considerable popular appeal in Asia. It is a large, spiky fruit – a single durian can weigh five pounds or more – with a notoriously horrible smell. It’s been called much worse, but the following characterization of the durian’s odor given in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culinaria-Southeast-Asia-Singapore-Indonesia/dp/0841603707?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Culinaria Southeast Asia: A Journey Through Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (Cooking)</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0841603707" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> is distressingly accurate:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“The stench of the durian has been described as a mixture of onion, strong cheese, rotten eggs, and rotting meat, all soaked in turpentine!”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In his book, <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Are-You-Really-Going-That/dp/1400077168?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1400077168" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Rob Walsh describes his own attempt at eating durian. He was the guest of Thailand’s former deputy minister of finance, who was now in the business of raising a variety of durian called Golden Button, and Walsh’s hosts were encouraging him to eat up:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Before me on a plate are several soft, yellow sacs of durian, the sweetest, creamiest fruit I have ever tasted. I have already eaten one of the soft, custardy segments, but the smell of rotten eggs is so overwhelming, I suppress a gag reaction as I take another bite of the second.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ultimately, the stench proves too much for Walsh, and he can’t finish the second section of durian.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In my own case, it wasn’t so much the smell I couldn’t get past – horrible as that was – but rather the bizarre flavor. Many accounts describe durian as “sweet and custardy” – just as Walsh does – but others have also noted the presence of additional flavor components that I really dislike in my custard. In Alan Davidson’s entry on durian in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Companion-Food-Alan-Davidson/dp/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, he quotes the following account of durian’s flavor, published in 1869 by Alfred Russel Wallace in his book <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Malay-Archipelago-Alfred-Russel-Wallace/dp/9625936459?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Malay Archipelago </a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=9625936459" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“A rich butter-like custard highly flavored with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with it come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, brown-sherry, and other incongruities.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It was these “other incongruities” that I couldn’t get past: I found the flavor to be dominated by two strong components, each one fine by itself but really unpalatable in combination: the promised rich, creamy custard flavor, plus an extremely strong onion flavor. Wrap the whole experience in an odor so bad that the durian is commonly banned from public transportation and hotel rooms in Asia despite its enormous popularity there, and you have one of the world’s <em>truly</em> acquired tastes.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I know: I’ve tried to acquire even a little bit of the taste twice, but have failed utterly both times.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-57050911310644864892011-04-17T11:49:00.000-07:002011-04-17T11:49:48.878-07:00Ramps, morels, and the return of springBesides the promise of better weather, the three things I most look forward to with the coming of spring are ramps, morels, and fiddlehead ferns. This weekend, two of these three signs of spring – ramps and morels – both appeared at our local Whole Foods Market. Last year (May 6, 2010, "The Rise of the Lowly Ramp"), I did a post on ramps – also known as “wild leeks” – with a brief discussion of what they are like (think “very strong spring onion”), where to buy them (a good on-line source is <a href="http://www.earthy.com/">Earthy Delights</a>, which currently has both ramps and morels), and a brief discussion of ramp festivals. A quick Internet search on “ramp festivals” just now shows me that I am a bit late with my ramp post this year – sorry about that – because several of the large ramp festivals have already happened. But it’s not too late – the <a href="http://www.richwooders.com/ramp/ramps.htm">Richwooders</a> website provides a lot of background information about ramps, along with a long list of ramp festivals, which continue from now through the second half of May. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Last year, I gave a recipe for scrambled eggs with ramps, ham, and gruyere, and my most recent post was about scrambled eggs with octopus, so it should be pretty clear that I really like scrambled eggs. It will come as no surprise, then, that I conclude this post with a recipe for scrambled eggs with ramps, morels, gruyere, and smoked salmon. The recipe features the same key ingredients – eggs, ramps, and smoked salmon – as the recipe for <a href="http://www.earthydelightsblog.com/earthyblog/?p=1743">soft scrambled eggs with ramps and smoked salmon</a> currently featured on the Earthy Delights website. The main differences are, first, that their recipe is for a French soft scrambled egg that is prepared using a double boiler, and second, that their recipe does not include either morels or gruyere. They do, however, strongly recommend accompanying their eggs with two tablespoons of steelhead or salmon caviar, something that sounds like it should also go great with the recipe given below, although I must admit I haven’t tried it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In preparing the scrambled eggs described below, I only used one ramp because I didn’t want to overpower the other ingredients – these were small ramps and quite assertive in both flavor and odor – but I think I was too cautious, so the next time I make these eggs, I will increase the number of ramps to two, as I have suggested in the recipe below. As with the octopus omelet described last time, I served these eggs with a chunk of good bread and a nice white wine. (Specifically, an 80% chardonnay/20% torrontes blend from H.J. Fabre in Argentina.) Now, all I need is some fiddlehead ferns to go with it … maybe next week.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Scrambled eggs with ramps, morels, and smoked salmon<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
3 eggs<br />
<br />
2 baby ramps, both the white and green parts, chopped into small pieces<br />
<br />
1 to 2 oz. morels, cut into small pieces<br />
<br />
2 oz. smoked salmon<br />
<br />
¼ cup grated gruyere<br />
<br />
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil<br />
<br />
Fresh ground pepper<br />
<br />
Sea salt<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Wash and chop the ramps, rinse and chop the morels, and shred the smoked salmon into small pieces, removing the skin if present. Lightly beat the eggs with the sea salt and black pepper.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Next, heat the olive oil until it becomes fragrant. Add the ramps and sauté for about one minute. Add the eggs and stir. When the eggs begin to solidify, add the smoked salmon and the morels and continue stirring until they are almost done. Finally, add the gruyere and stir until it melts. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Serve and savor.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-20297326953255413312011-04-10T14:07:00.000-07:002011-04-10T14:07:32.519-07:00Octopus omeletsA number of years ago, my wife and I spent about a week in Portugal, staying in Porto. One of my two favorite memories from the trip was the Lello and Irmao Bookshop, without question the most spectacular bookstore I have ever seen. According to the entry for it in our guidebook, the shop was founded in 1869, and, architecturally, I would characterize it as a small merchantile cathedral. My words can’t begin to do it justice, but there is a very nice description of this local landmark by <a href="http://hubpages.com/hub/Lello-e-Irmao-the-Worlds-Third-Best-Bookstore">Elena</a>, whose photos take me right back inside.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
My other favorite memory of Porto was a dinner of roast octopus that was so good I had to go back to the same restaurant the next night just to have the meal again. Both times, we ate outside, overlooking the Douro River, just beyond the Ponte Luiz I, a magnificent iron bridge designed by one of Eiffel’s collaborators. Not health food, exactly, the octopus was drowned in butter and absolutely delicious, especially with a white port aperitif and a Portuguese sausage cooked on a little clay grill at our table with flaming brandy (we bought one of the clay dishes so we could make it ourselves at home; it’s a real conversation piece at parties). <br />
<br />
<br />
Since then, I have often wanted to try preparing octopus myself, but it has a somewhat challenging reputation. In his octopus entry in <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Companion-Food-Alan-Davidson/dp/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span>, Alan Davidson notes that, except in the Mediterranean countries and the Orient, the consumption of octopus has been inhibited by several factors, including its “alarming or repugnant appearance,” and “perhaps also by the unresolved difficulty of deciding what its plural form should be (a difficulty which must have caused at least some people who would otherwise have bought two to ask for only one.)” Amusing – and amazing – as I find this suggestion, I must admit succumbing for a long time to one of the other reasons Davidson lists for avoiding octopus: “the need (notorious but in fact not always applicable) to tenderize the flesh before cooking.” Recently, our local Whole Foods Market featured baby octopus and the person at the seafood counter assured me that baby octopus was quite tender, in agreement with Davidson’s comments:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“A baby octopus needs no special preparation, but can simply be deep fried or cooked briefly in boiling water.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The person who sold me four baby octopi (octopus? octopuses? Whatever.) suggested grilling them, which seems to be the most popular recommendation in the cookbooks I have that say anything at all about octopus. I took her advice and incorporated it into the octopus omelet recipe given below. (In fact, I was in too much of a hurry to make an actual omelet, so the dish is really more like “scrambled eggs with octopus and gruyere,” and while that doesn’t sound either as poetic or as appetizing as octopus omelete, the end result was delicious, if I do say so myself. If you want to do it right – as I plan to the next time I make the dish – the scrambled omelette described starting on page 129 of Julia Child’s <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Vol/dp/0375413405?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0375413405" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></span> has worked very well for omelets based on other, possibly less exotic, ingredients.) <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
As always, in preparing a dish that features an unusual ingredient (especially one where I have limited experience), I like to pair it with flavors that are known to go well with it. Unfortunately, this is somewhat challenging for octopus, because there don’t seem to be a lot of recommended octopus pairings. My favorite flavor pairing book, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s <span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Bible-Essential-Creativity-Imaginative/dp/0316118400?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0316118400" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px !important; padding-left: 0px !important; padding-right: 0px !important; padding-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /> </span>does have an entry on octopus, but it is shorter than many of their other entries, and there are no bold-faced or capitalized recommendations to indicate “great” or “classic” pairings. Still, the authors do recommend sea salt, which seems natural enough, black pepper, olive oil, and onions, all of which I decided to incorporate (they actually recommend red onions, but I used a cipollini onion instead because I really like them). The sea salt I used was <em>Sale Mediterraneo</em>, a delicious mixture of sea salt with spices that include rosemary, sage, oregano, bay leaves, thyme and garlic. (We came across a jar of this while perusing the variety of great goodies available at the <a href="http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com/">Ferry Terminal Market</a> in San Francisco during a visit there. A reasonable substitute would be a mixture of your favorite sea salt with an Italian seasoning mixture like <a href="http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeystuscan.html">Penzeys Tuscan Sunset</a>.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Octopus omelet, ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
½ pound baby octopus (about 4 octopi)<br />
<br />
½ cup aged Gruyere, grated<br />
<br />
3 eggs<br />
<br />
1 small cipollini onion<br />
<br />
1 Tbsp olive oil<br />
<br />
½ tsp black pepper<br />
<br />
½ tsp <em>Sale Mediterraneo </em>or other sea salt/Italian herb mixture<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
First, grill the baby octopus over a medium-hot grill, turning once, about 5 minutes per side. Allow octopus to cool and cut into small pieces.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Next, sauté the onion in the olive oil until translucent. Add the octopus, black pepper, and sea salt and sauté briefly, mixing well.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Beat the eggs with a fork and add to the mixture, stirring occasionally until the eggs begin to solidify. Add the cheese and continue to cook until done.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Serve with a good bread and a nice white wine. I had it with a Pinot Grigio and that worked nicely, but next time, I plan to try it with an <a href="http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/is-albarino-the-next-great-summer-wine">Albarino</a>, which I have found goes extremely well with seafood. Also, even though it is a bit of extra work, I highly recommend grilling the baby octopus before putting it into the omelet: the octopus picks up a nice smoky flavor that really enhances the dish.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-65857326640948780922011-03-06T10:30:00.000-08:002011-03-06T10:30:37.846-08:00Discovering the joys of membrilloI recently discovered the joys of Spanish <em>membrillo</em>, a sweet paste made from quince, sugar and lemon that I found in the cheese section of our local Whole Foods Market. Personally, I prefer to separate my savory courses from my sweet ones, but I recognize that this view is increasingly a minority one. My wife loves her <em>membrillo</em> with cheese, which is the classic pairing: Amazon sells a combination package of <em>membrillo</em> with <em>manchego</em> (see Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler at the end of this blog). Having discovered it, the thing that surprises me is how little discussed <em>membrillo</em> seems to be: I have not been able to find it mentioned in my cheese books, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003156DMK">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" /> – one of my favorite food dictionaries – only mentions it as part of an entry on quince preserves. Even worse, this mention is somewhat dismissive: “The coarser quince pastes, such as membrillo, are served in Spain with cheese.” <br />
<br />
Coarser or not, I find the stuff delicious.<br />
<br />
Consistent with its absence from the cheese books and food dictionaries, there is also no entry for <em>membrillo</em> in either of Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s terrific books, their flavor matching guide <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316118400?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0316118400">The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0316118400" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" /> or their drink pairing book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0821257188?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0821257188">What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0821257188" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" />. Again referring to the entries on quince, however, some extremely useful suggestions emerge. First, the <em>Flavor Bible’s</em> entry on quince strongly recommends pairing with cheese – especially goat cheese, <em>manchego</em>, or <em>ricotta</em> – and here quince paste is mentioned as being particularly good. The highest honors are accorded to pairings of quince with apples and pears, and both lemon and sugar are also given high ratings (the other two ingredients listed on the label of the <em>membrillo</em> package sitting in front of me now). Other recommended flavor pairings include both cranberries and hazelnuts, recommendations that are consistent with one of my favorite ways of having <em>membrillo:</em> slathered thickly on Lesley Stowe Raincoast Crisps cranberry and hazelnut crackers (also available from Amazon: see Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The <em>Flavor Bible</em> also lists several drink recommendations for quince, including “liqueurs, nut,” “whiskey,” “wine: red, sweet,” and – a stronger recommendation – “wine, white: e.g., Riesling.” Interestingly, the entry on “quinces” in <em>What to Drink with What You Eat</em> is much shorter and it doesn’t include most of these pairings, although it does have a sub-entry on “paste (e.g., served with cheese),” where late harvest wine is recommended. Following their suggestion on nut liqueurs, I have found that <em>membrillo</em> goes exceptionally well with the Italian walnut liqueur Nocello, and, although I haven’t yet tried it, I am certain the same would be true of the hazelnut liqueur Frangelico. An even more interesting pairing is with St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram, a Jamaican-inspired allspice liqueur (see the entry on the <a href="http://www.alpenz.com/portfolio.htm">Haus Alpenz</a> website for a description). As the label on the bottle notes, allspice is a berry whose flavor combines notes of clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg, all three of which are recommended pairings with quince in <em>The Flavor Bible</em>. A small glass of this liqueur with a couple of cranberry and hazelnut crackers, each generously spread with <em>membrillo</em>, is an excellent way to end any day.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-48097119069155756392011-02-25T17:16:00.000-08:002011-02-25T17:16:14.877-08:00Sunchoke Soup with Speck and Aji PeppersFood Network’s <i>Chopped</i> presents competing chefs with baskets of challenging ingredients and gives them a short time to invent and prepare an appetizer, an entre, or a dessert that features these ingredients. Recent episodes have presented contestants with everything from goat brains to durian, the Southeast Asian fruit delicacy with such a strong smell that it is typically banned from hotel rooms or public transportation. (I have tried durian twice, and I can attest to both its terrible odor and its really strange flavor - it combines notes of a sweet, creamy custard with strong onion overtones. Probably one of the world's ultimate “acquired tastes.”) One of the less challenging but still quite interesting ingredients that featured recently was speck, which the <em>Chopped</em> judges described as similar to a smoked pancetta. My wife and I learned about speck when we lived in Switzerland, where we frequently used it instead of bacon. It is much less common in the U.S., but it is available: to prepare the recipe presented below, we used La Quceria <em>Speck Americano</em>, available at our local Whole Foods Market. Not as heavily smoked as the typical Italian speck, it was still quite good and worked well in the dish. Alternatively, other, more traditional brands can be purchased on-line, and they should work nicely, too (see Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler for a couple of examples).<br />
<br />
<div></div>The sunchoke – or Jerusalem artichoke – is the root of a plant that belongs to the sunflower family. According to Alan Davidson’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003156DMK?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003156DMK">The Penguin Companion to Food</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B003156DMK" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" />, the name derives from <em>girasole</em>, the Italian word for the sunflower. The name “Jerusalem artichoke” was the combined result of mispronunciation of <em>girasole</em> with a note in 1603 by the explorer Samuel de Champlain who encountered it in Canada and described its taste as “like an artichoke.” Since the plant has no real connection with either Jerusalem or artichokes, marketing considerations subsequently led to the name “sunchoke.” Whatever you choose to call it, this root vegetable is available all year, but according to the entry for it in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567310427?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1567310427">Judy Gorman's Vegetable Cookbook</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1567310427" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" />, the peak season is from October through April. Smaller and sweeter than potatoes, they pair especially well with black pepper, lemon juice, and sea salt, according to my favorite source of such information, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316118400?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0316118400">The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0316118400" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" /> by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, who also recommend pairing with bacon, cumin and potatoes. The recipe given below for sunchoke soup uses most of these ingredients, with some minor substitutions (e.g., lime juice instead of lemon juice). It is adapted from one in Judy Gorman’s book (“Jerusalem artichoke soup” on page 172), with speck substituted for baked ham, and fresh Peruvian <em>aji</em> peppers added to give it a bit of a kick. <br />
<br />
<div></div>I used the <em>aji</em> peppers because they were featured during a limited-duration “pepper event” at our local Whole Foods Market. According to Barbara Karoff’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201550946?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0201550946">South American Cooking: Foods and Feasts from the New World</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0201550946" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0px;" width="1" />, the term “<em>aji</em>” refers generically to all Andean peppers, but in Peru, it refers to the <em>mirasol</em> pepper, which she describes as “fiery hot,” noting that – at least in 1989 when her book was published – these peppers are rarely available in the U.S. Tasting a slice of one raw, I found it similar to a raw jalapeno – slightly hotter, but nothing like the screaming heat of a habanero. Karoff recommends the <em>hontaka</em> as a reasonable substitute as they are often available in Latin or Asian markets, but jalapenos are probably an easier substitution. If you like hot food, the nice thing about this soup is that, like a really good wine, the balance of flavors changes during the course of each taste: here, you first taste the spinach, then the other ingredients come into play, and finally the heat from the chili kicks in at the end. We found that it went especially well with Olde Burnside Brewing Company’s Ten Penny Ale.<br />
<br />
<div></div>Sunchoke Soup with Speck and Aji Peppers<br />
<br />
<div></div>Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<div></div>6 cups chicken broth<br />
1 pound sunchokes, peeled and quartered<br />
1 medium russet potato, peeled and quartered<br />
1 3 oz. package speck, cut into small pieces<br />
2 tablespoons lime juice<br />
1/8 teaspoon ground cumin<br />
5 oz fresh baby spinach<br />
3 fresh aji peppers (or substitute 1 large jalapeno)<br />
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste<br />
½ cup whipping cream<br />
<br />
<div></div>Directions:<br />
<br />
<div></div><ol><li>Chop the peppers into thin rings. Combine the peppers, chicken broth, sunchokes, potatoes, and speck in a large saucepan. Cover and cook on low heat until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.</li>
<li>Transfer the mixture to a food processor and blend until smooth. Return to the saucepan and stir in the lime juice and cumin.</li>
<li>Chiffonade the baby spinach, add to the saucepan long enough to wilt, about five minutes. Season with salt and pepper, stir in the cream, and heat gently about five minutes longer. Ladle the soup into bowls and serve.</li>
</ol>Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-7438286764748908482011-02-13T12:01:00.000-08:002011-02-13T12:01:45.709-08:00Ukrainian Tractors, Strawberries, and GlueSeveral years ago, in a bookstore in Finland, I came across Marina Lewycka’s novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143036742?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0143036742">A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143036742" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />, which I devoured and absolutely loved. And it's clear that I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm: according to the information on the jacket of one of her later novels, it was translated into 30 languages, sold more than 750,000 copies, and was nominated for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel is basically the story of two long-feuding sisters who come together to deal with a family crisis precipitated by their aging father. The first paragraph of the novel sets the scene and gives a preliminary taste of Lewycka’s writing style:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The central character, Nadezhda, learns about this by phone. Two pages into the phone call from her father, the following snatch of interior monologue summarizes her reaction succinctly:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Did I hear that right? She sits on my father’s lap and he fondles her superior Botticellian breasts?”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Nadezhda is less than convinced by her father’s arguments that after he marries Valentina, the Botticellian love of his life, they will have wonderful evenings together, discussing art, literature and philosophy. (“He has already solicited her views on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, by the way, and she agrees with him in all respects.”) Ultimately, Nadezhda is reunited by the Valentina crisis with her sister Vera, with whom she has not spoken since their mother’s funeral. Lewycka has a marvelous way with descriptive little exchanges that paint vivid pictures of her characters. For example, here is Nadezhda's memory of meeting her sister just after the funeral:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote><br />
“… Vera looks me up and down critically.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
‘Yes, the peasant look. I see.’<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I am forty-seven years old and a university lecturer, but my sister’s voice reduces me instantly to a bogey-nosed four-year-old. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
‘Nothing wrong with peasants. Mother was a peasant,’ four-year-old retorts.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
‘Quite,’ says Big Sister. She lights a cigarette. The smoke curls upwards in elegant spirals.”<br />
<br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
One of the things that Lewycka does especially well is to construct hilarious dialog involving fractured English by non-native speakers. Don’t get me wrong: from my own struggles with other languages, I am acutely aware how much better some of Lewycka’s fractured English dialogs are than most of my own attempts to communicate in anything other than English. To construct dialogs like she does, Lewycka has to have both an excellent command of English and an appreciation of how non-native speakers struggle to be understood. For example, after Nadezhda’s father marries Valentine, she wants an elegant car. He is only able to afford one that looks good in his new wife’s eyes but barely runs at all. Naturally, it fails at an inopportune moment, leading to this exchange:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“Valentina turns on my father.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
‘You no good man. You plenty-money meanie. Promise money. Money sit in bank. Promise car. Crap car.”<br />
<em><br />
</em><br />
<br />
</blockquote><br />
This style of writing is similar to <em>skaz</em>, defined by <em>Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia</em> as, “a term in Russian prosody designating the recreation by a narrator of indigenous oral speech in cadence, rhythm, and diction.” The entry goes on to list Nikolay Gogol, Aleksey Remizov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Nikolay Leskov as masters of the technique. In the preface of his English translation of Zoshchenko’s delightful collection, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585676314?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1585676314">The Galosh</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1585676314" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />, Jeremy Hicks describes skaz as “the use of an unsophisticated but highly colourful language put into the mouths of characters who themselves typically tell the story.” That seems like a fairly accurate description of some of the funniest bits of dialog in Lewycka’s book. In fact, it reminds me of some of the dialog in the 2005 movie, <em>Everything Is Illuminated</em>, based on the 2002 novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the description of the “seeing-eye bitch Sammy Davis Junior, Junior,” the replacement for an earlier, departed dog named Sammy Davis Junior. As is the case in <em>Everything Is Illuminated</em>, the humor in Lewycka's book provides an entertaining conduit for an extremely serious basic story: in <em>Everything Is Illuminated</em>, this story is about a young Jewish man's search for the woman who saved his grandfather from extermination in the Ukraine during World War II, while Lewycka's novel shows how the turmoils of war, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath can affect the lives of two siblings so differently that they effectively grow up in separate worlds.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Lewycka has other novels, which I look forward to reading. One – <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143113550?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0143113550">Strawberry Fields</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143113550" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> – was given to me as a gift, and I have just started it. I haven’t read enough yet to have a clear picture of what this one is about, but I can already tell it is going to be another hilarious read encapsulating a serious, deeply thought-provking basic story. In the first chapter, one of the characters – a woman from Kiev named Irina – arrives in England, where she is met by Vulk:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“He was the type Mother would describe as a person of minimum culture, wearing a horrible black fake-leather jacket, like a comic-strip gangster – what a <em>koshmar!</em> – it creaked as he walked. All he needed was a gun.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
Immediately, Vulk relieves Irina of her passport and Seasonal Agriculture Worker papers, saying:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“I keep for you. Is many bed people in England. Can stealing from you.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
Vulk drives Irina to where she will be working, and she is hungry:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“He had some potato chips wrapped in a paper bundle on the passenger seat beside him, and every now and then he would plunge his left fist in, grab a handful of chips, and cram them into his mouth. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Not very refined. The chips smelled fantastic, though.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
After I finish <em>Strawberry Fields</em>, I plan to read Lewycka’s 2010 novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141047755?ie=UTF8&tag=munchthrouthe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0141047755">We are all made of glue</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=munchthrouthe-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0141047755" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />, at least in part for the same reason I picked up <em>A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian</em> in the first place: with a title so intriguing, how could you <em>not</em> read it?Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-10269272803057682172011-01-30T15:42:00.000-08:002011-01-30T15:42:37.253-08:00Dede Wilson’s Terrific Little Poetry HandbookNOTE: since this blog is about both food and literature, it is important to be clear which Dede Wilson is being discussed here: the author of the little book featured in this post is a North Carolina poet, and NOT the Dede Wilson from Amherst, Massachusetts, who is – among many other things – Contributing Editor to Bon Appetit magazine and the author of the food blog, <a href="http://dedewilson.blogspot.com/">For the Love of Food</a> .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I discovered Dede Wilson's poetry collection, <em>One Nightstand</em> (published in 2001 and available from the publisher, <a href="http://www.mainstreetrag.com/">Main Street Rag</a>) at one of the North Carolina Writer's Network (NCWN) conferences several years ago. This delightful little book consists of 36 poems followed by a 17 page poetry class, all wrapped up into an incredibly succinct poetry handbook. In fact, this is one of those “desert island books,” the kind you would take along if you could only take one suitcase full of books: there would be others in the bag as well, of course, but it would be a foolish act bordering on the criminal not to take this one. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I have always liked Lewis Turco’s handbook, <em>The New Book of Forms </em>(see the Poetry and Prose section of Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler at the end of this post), which lists a lot more forms than <em>One Nightstand</em> does, and it discusses some of them in much greater detail. For example, Wilson’s description of the sestina is two paragraphs occupying less than half a page, while Turco’s description is just over four pages and includes diagrams to help illustrate how this complicated poetic form is constructed. On the other hand, the great thing about Dede Wilson’s collection is that she illustrates each of the forms she discusses with one or more of her own poems. She gives a brief but surprisingly detailed discussion of the form chosen for each of her poems in the section at the back of the book, with a workable definition of the form, typically some comments on its history, and definitions (or pointers to definitions, included nearby) of important related terms. For example, to understand blank verse – most commonly consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter – it is important to understand what iambic pentameter is. Wilson gives a one page summary of blank verse, distinguishing it from free verse, while on the facing page, she defines both iambs and pentameter. To complete the picture, she also gives – in three pages – a historical overview of free verse covering everything from contemporary poets espousing or rejecting it to some degree or other, to Walt Whitman’s publication of <em>Leaves of Grass</em> in 1885 and back again. (According to the Benet <em>Reader's Encyclopedia</em> entry on Whitman, after <em>Leaves of Grass</em> became popular, Whitman was dismissed from his government position for having written an immoral book.) While most of Wilson’s poems are done in specific forms, she does include three free verse examples of her own (perhaps “two and a half” would be a better description: her poem “Undressing Billy Collins” is described as “free verse ending in a couplet”). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The forms that Wilson’s book covers range from extremely well known ones like the sonnet, the haiku, and even the limerick, to somewhat less well known examples like the triolet and the ghazal. She even includes two forms that you won't find in Turco's compendium: the <em>minute</em> and the <em>quatern.</em> The minute is a 60 syllable form invented by the American poet Verna Lee Linxwiler Hinegardner, who was poet laureate of the state of Arkansas until she was de-throned in 2003 (apparently, prior to Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s appointing Hinegardner’s successor, it had been traditional for the state’s poet laureate position to be a lifetime appointment. For a more complete discussion, see the website <a href="http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4188">HinegardnerLink</a>). This interesting poetic form consists of three stanzas, each four lines long with syllable counts 8, 4, 4, and 4, and a fixed rhyme scheme (aabb ccdd eeff). Wilson credits Cathy Smith Bowers – who has just been named poet laureate of North Carolina – with bringing “this virtually unknown form into focus” with the publication of her collection, <em>The Book of Minutes</em> consisting entirely of poems in this form (it is available from Amazon: see the Poetry and Poetics section of Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler at the bottom of this page). <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The quatern is another interesting poetic form, and Wilson’s book was my introduction to it, an introduction that was extremely beneficial, as I will explain presently. Like the much better known villanelle and pantoum forms – both defined and illustrated in Wilson’s book – the quatern is based on repeated lines and a fixed rhyme scheme. Specifically, the quatern consists of four, four-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza becomes the second line of the second stanza, the third of the third, and finally concludes the poem as the last line of the last stanza. The rhyme scheme for the first and third stanzas is abab, while that for the second and fourth stanzas is baba. The form was invented by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, the poet laureate of Florida from 1931 to 1975. My own particular fondness for the quatern form stems from the fact that it resulted in one of the few poems I have so far managed to get published. This one appeared in the 2009 issue of <a href="http://www.alehousepress.com/">Alehouse Press</a>:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">Rhapsody in People</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Purple people-eaters eating</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">people with purple potatoes</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">at the annual business meeting.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">First course: elbows and tomatoes,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">followed next by toes alfredo.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Purple people-eaters eating</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">are fussy creatures, dontchankow?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Special main course of the evening:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">a secret people seasoning</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">on cattlemen from Loredo,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">purple people-eaters eating</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">popular cowboy tornedos,</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">served in little Winnebegos</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">made for convenient re-heating</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">later in the busy week ahead, those</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">purple people-eaters eating.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div>Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-2239144530986038642011-01-11T18:45:00.000-08:002011-01-11T18:45:24.828-08:00Niki Segnit’s Flavour ThesaurusA few months ago, two of our British friends sent us a copy of <em>The Flavour Thesaurus</em> by Niki Segnit (thanks, Steve and Rebecca). Similar in some ways to Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s <em>The Flavor Bible</em>, the subtitle of Segnit’s book gives a good, concise description: pairings, recipes and ideas for the creative cook. Both of these books address the fundamental question of “which ingredients go well together?,” but the styles and approaches of the two books are quite different. Specifically, the food matching section of <em>The Flavor Bible</em> is organized alphabetically by ingredient, with each section listing good, great, and superb pairings with that ingredient, occasionally also giving pairings to avoid. While Page and Dornenburg give frequent quotes from eminent chefs about favorite pairings, the book doesn’t really give recipes. In contrast, <em>The Flavour Thesaurus</em> organizes ingredients into groups, discusses specific pairings and frequently includes brief recipes based on those pairings. In both cases, the authors’ intent is to encourage culinary creativity rather than a “cooking by the numbers”-type slavish adherence to fixed recipes.<br />
<br />
<em>The Flavour Thesaurus</em> characterizes 99 ingredients, putting them together into 16 flavor groupings, organized along the same lines as a color wheel (e.g., orange lies between red and yellow, green lies between blue and yellow, etc.). These flavor groupings have descriptive names much like the adjectives often applied to wines, names like “Floral Fruity,” “Earthy,” or “Brine and Salt.” Some of the ingredients listed in these groupings seem very natural, but others were quite surprising, at least to me. For example, the “Floral and Fruity” group included entries like raspberry, rose, and blueberry that seem "fruity and floral," but I was not expecting to see coriander seed or white chocolate included in this group. Nevertheless, it is clear that a great deal of thought went into these assignments, which are sometimes based on a chemical characterization of dominant flavor components. For example, cabbage is assigned to the “sulphurous” group in part because “dimethyl sulphide (DMS) is an important component in the flavour of cabbage.” Further, this observation forms the rationale for pairing cabbage with seafood, which is also noted to contain DMS. <br />
<br />
<br />
The pairings included in <em>The Flavour Thesaurus</em> are often quirky little vignettes, like the entry for cabbage and garlic on page 119:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“If, as Mark Twain has it in Pudd’nhead Wilson, ‘cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education,’ <em>cavolo nero</em> is a cabbage with a holiday home in Tuscany.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
This is as much of a definition as Niki Segnit gives for <em>cavolo nero</em>, which appears to be a very desirable species of cabbage (<em>The Food Lover’s Companion</em>, 3rd edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst, defines “<em>cavolo</em>” as “Italian for ‘cabbage’.”). Segnit does give a recipe for bruschetta using <em>cavolo nero</em>, concluding with the advice that “kale will do fine if you can’t get the fancy stuff.”<br />
<br />
<br />
Another interesting commentary appears in Segnit’s discussion of the pairing of capers with soft cheese, in the “mustardy” flavor grouping, where she recommends using French nonpareil capers, if possible. She goes on to say (page 103):<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>“They’re the really small ones that look like green peppercorns, and are highly regarded for their finer, radishy, oniony flavour. Spread the mix on crackers or rye bread and brace yourself for the little shocks of caper in each bite. The culinary equivalent of walking barefoot along a stony beach.”</blockquote><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In order to keep the book to a manageable length, it wasn’t possible to include everything, and some of the omissions are worth noting. For example, although “brine and salt” appears as one of the 16 flavor groupings, the ingredient “salt” does not appear in the book. Neither do black pepper or vinegar, or “the staple carbohydrates” aside from potatoes (e.g., neither rice nor pasta appear). These omissions stand in marked contrast to Page and Dornenburg’s <em>Flavor Bible</em>, which includes 10 sub-entries for different kinds of salt (ranging from “salt, fleur de sel” to “salt, vanilla”), along with a general entry on “saltiness,” 16 entries for various types of vinegar, four entries for different types of rice, and just over three pages devoted to pasta. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Overall, like Page and Dornenburg’s <em>Flavor Bible</em>, Niki Segnit’s <em>Flavour Thesaurus</em> is a really fascinating read, much like a visit to someplace new, with unexpected marvels tucked away everywhere you look. Although they are essentially devoted to the same subject – that of creative flavor pairings – the styles of these two books are quite different, and both are well worth reading. A word of advice about <em>The Flavour Thesaurus</em>, however: as the spelling of the title suggests, the book is written for a British audience, so some terms may leave American readers confused. As a specific example, in the “suphurous” section, between the entries for “cabbage” and “cauliflower” is a one-page entry for “swede.” It was clear from the discussion that the term referred to some sort of root vegetable, but neither my wife nor I had ever heard of it before. Fortunately, the <em>Food Lover’s Companion</em> had an entry that clarified things: “see rutabaga.”Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-5265633501288004142010-12-31T13:59:00.000-08:002010-12-31T13:59:32.169-08:00The Poisonous Mushroom Was DeliciousLike my wife, I first experienced mushrooms as little round, rubbery things that came in cans. Not surprisingly, neither one of us liked them very much, but she changed her mind about them after friends introduced her to the joys of hunting morels in the woods of Iowa. As I stumbled through childhood, I also came across mushrooms growing in the woods: appearing in all different shapes and sizes and colors, they were intriguing as hell, but you would never think of eating them. After all, mushrooms that you ate came in cans from the grocery store: they might taste bad and their horrible texture might make your skin crawl, but they wouldn’t really hurt you. The things that grew in the yard or in the woods or on trees were <em>toadstools</em> and they would kill you deader than a doornail. Everybody knew that.<br />
<br />
<br />
As I grew up, mushrooms got a lot better, partly due to my maturing taste buds I suppose, but also because they began to appear in supermarkets un-canned. And they began to appear in different shapes and sizes, a little like what you would see in the woods, only not nearly as interesting. Or as colorful: no bright oranges with white polka dots or anything like that. <em>Those</em> were <em>still</em> toadstools, would <em>still</em> kill you deader than a doornail, and everybody <em>still</em> knew that.<br />
<br />
Some years later, deeply immersed in adulthood and professional responsibilities, a Polish colleague invited me to dinner at his house. He was a charming host and he and his wife had prepared a delicious dinner that included sautéed mushrooms. I commented on how good everything was – especially the mushrooms – and his wife thanked me for the compliment but assured me that they came from the supermarket. It seems that my colleague had grown up collecting mushrooms in the woods of Poland and, like my wife and her morel-gathering friends, knew what he was doing. Nevertheless, at a previous dinner party, when the mushrooms had <em>not</em> come from the supermarket (he had collected them from the woods near his house), the evening ended abruptly when he happened to mention the fact. Everyone stopped eating and went home, not expecting to survive the night. Toadstools, after all.<br />
<br />
Several years after that, my wife and I had the opportunity to live in Switzerland. For just over four years, we struggled continuously with learning enough German to get around, along with all of the other local bits of knowledge we needed on a daily basis. Things like money (“Wait, is this coin 10 Rappen or 50?”), metric units (my wife once stunned a clerk in a shop by asking for “<em>ein hundert Kilogramm Kaese, bitte</em>,” wanting 100 grams of cheese – about a quarter of a pound – but requesting just over 250 pounds instead), and even time (“It says the train leaves at 14:27. What time is that, really?”). Still, it was a fabulous experience that changed our lives forever.<br />
<br />
While we lived in Switzerland, I worked in Zurich and our apartment was in Seebach, at the end of one of the tram lines. An intermediate stop between Seebach and Zurich was Oerlikon, which had a market every Saturday morning that became one of our favorite activities. Gradually, we learned what we liked – and what to ask for – in specialties ranging from mountain cheeses (“<em>Bergkaese</em>”) to sweet cider (“<em>Sussmost</em>”). One of the most interesting stands in the market was the one belonging to the mushroom guy, who had a wider variety of fresh mushrooms than either one of us had ever seen before. Good as they looked, though, we really didn’t know what to do with them, so for a long time we didn’t try any. Then one day the Oerlikon market came up in conversation with a friend, who mentioned that he particularly liked the mushroom guy. He would buy “<em>ein hundert Gramm, gemischt</em>” – about a quarter of a pound of assorted mushrooms – and use them to make an omelet. After that, we became regular customers.<br />
<br />
Sometimes, the mushroom guy would have really unusual species that we would try on their own. Over time, we tried small puff-balls, hen-of-the-woods, and something more exotic that looked vaguely brain-like. (He drew us a labeled picture, which I still have: the German name was <em>Krause Glucke</em>, which actually sounds more appealing than its English designation, which is “cauliflower fungus.” As Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music, though, it was better than it sounded.) The most unusual mushroom we ever tried from his stand was one called a <em>Riesenbovist,</em> known in English as the giant puffball. A large white sphere, bigger than a basketball, he sold it in slices, each about an inch thick. We bought one, breaded and fried it, and shared it for dinner.<br />
<br />
Our departure from Switzerland was something of an ordeal. My wife was scheduled to fly back to the U.S. on Swissair, our favorite airline, about a week before I was to go to Finland for a year as a visiting professor. We had always loved flying Swissair because they treated you so well, but shortly before her scheduled departure, Swissair plunged into a financial abyss that ended in their bankruptcy fairly soon afterwards. It began with an airport holding a Swissair plane for nonpayment of fees. Almost immediately, the airline grounded its fleet to prevent all of their planes from being seized. For a few days, nobody flew anywhere on Swissair. Eventually, flights resumed, but the schedule was highly erratic, with departures regularly cancelled at the last minute. We spent a week in limbo, staying with friends, until my wife was finally able to get on a plane to return to the U.S., the same day I left for Finland.<br />
<br />
The day I left Finland to come home for Christmas, the temperature was ten degrees below zero and the sun made its dusky, twilight appearance about 10:30 in the morning and was completely gone again by 2:30 in the afternoon. The following June, my wife came to visit me and we had dinner with some Finnish friends we had known from Zurich. Walking around Helsinki afterwards, we were trying to guess the time: we were tired and it felt late, but it was still bright daylight. Our friends looked at the sky and guessed the time fairly accurately: it was a few minutes before midnight. In the morning, it was bright daylight again by 3:00. <br />
<br />
The extreme seasonal variation in Finland seems to profoundly influence the foods that grow there. I have never seen root vegetables as large as those sold at the farm stands in Finland: carrots three feet long and about four inches in diameter at the top, and turnips half again that big. One of my favorite food discoveries from the far north was cloudberries, a small orange berry used to make desserts, jams, and a unique liqueur. In a way, cloudberries in Finland and other Nordic countries are like truffles in France and Italy: not everyone knows where to find them, and those who do, don’t say. One of the great ways to enjoy them is in cloudberry jam, which is frequently available in the U.S. at Ikea stores. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find the soft Finnish cheese that goes so well with cloudberry jam, making a spectacular breakfast, so I make a point of bringing that back with me whenever I return to Finland for a visit.<br />
<br />
One of my other favorite things during my year in Finland was an indoor market with stands carrying everything from the spiciest Italian sausage I have ever tasted to smoked reindeer and moose steaks. Once I discovered the market, I would go every Saturday morning and adapt my meal plans for the week as I shopped. It was there that I had the ultimate mushroom experience. My favorite vegetable stand had a collection of large, strange-looking, gnarly things unlike any mushrooms I had ever seen before. Naturally, I had to try one, but the woman who ran the stand looked concerned and was reluctant to sell it to me. She insisted that I wait for one of the other women with better English, who explained to me that there was a special procedure for cooking this mushroom. It was delicious, she assured me, but first I must boil it in a full pot of water, dump all of the water out, boil it a second time in another full pot of water – <em>clean</em> water, she emphasized, <em>not</em> the water I had used before – dump that second pan of water out, rinse off the mushroom in cold water, and then cook it in whatever way I wanted. She repeated these instructions twice and insisted that I repeat them back to her before she would sell me the mushroom.<br />
<br />
I followed her instructions when I prepared it for dinner that night, and it was indeed delicious. I didn’t discover until several years later, though, just what it was I had eaten. Growing up, I had seen pictures of morels, the deliciously wrinkly mushrooms my wife and her friends had gathered in the woods, and as an adult I had come to relish them as an occasional expensive treat. Also, I had heard that one of the good things about morels was that their appearance was so distinctive they were unlikely to be confused with other, poisonous mushrooms. In contrast, with more ordinary-looking white mushrooms, for example, you had to be much more careful since they could be confused with things like the Death Angel, so named for good reason. There is, however, a lethally toxic mushroom called the false morel (<em>Gyromitra esculenta</em>) that does look something like the morel. If you boil this mushroom twice, however, discarding the water and rinsing it, that process removes the poison and renders it safe to eat. The only place in the world where they sell them and people actually do eat them is Finland, where the seller is obligated to remind you about boiling them twice in fresh water before you put them in your mouth. <br />
<br />
All I can think about now is what my parents and teachers drilled into my head growing up: don’t eat those things you find growing in the woods. They’re toadstools and they will kill you, deader than a doornail. Everybody knows that.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-12547039158716888272010-09-28T17:07:00.000-07:002010-09-28T17:07:43.436-07:00Better Than It SoundsIn what has to be one of the best “left-handed compliments” in history, Mark Twain once described Wagner’s music as “better than it sounds.” The dish I describe here – pasta with vodka sauce and smoked salmon – may fall into the same category. I lived in Finland for about a year and one of the hotel restaurants in Tampere served a dish very much like the one given below, and I thought it was delicious. But then, I also thought the poisonous mushroom I had there was delicious, too (more about that next time). When I suggested the smoked salmon vodka sauce to my wife, she thought it sounded awful, so I prepared it one night when she was out. Collecting the ingredients for it generated a lot of questioning looks, so it seems clear that the combination is not something everybody would think of. Personally, I thought it was great when I had it in Finland, and I think the following recipe is not a bad approximation of the Finnish version, if I do say so myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Ingredients:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
• ½ lb. smoked salmon, skin removed<br />
<br />
• 1 largish cipollini onion, diced<br />
<br />
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped<br />
<br />
• 1 Tbs. capers<br />
<br />
• 1 26 oz. jar of vodka pasta sauce<br />
<br />
• 1 lb. fresh linguine<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Directions:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
1. Saute onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat until the onions are translucent.<br />
<br />
2. Flake smoked salmon into small pieces and stir into the garlic and onion mixture. Add the capers and sauté long enough to heat through.<br />
<br />
3. Add the vodka sauce, reduce heat, and simmer while preparing the pasta.<br />
<br />
4. Bring salted water to a boil, add the pasta, and cook until done <em>(al dente),</em> about three minutes.<br />
<br />
5. Serve pasta on a plate and top with the smoked salmon vodka sauce.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The first time I prepared this, I had it with a Rosenblum Cellars 2008 Viognier, recommended by my favorite local wine store. As an alternative, they also recommended serving it with a nice Scotch whiskey, consistent with the recommendation of “smoked fish” with Scotch given by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page in <em>What to Drink with What You Eat</em>. The second time I had the dish, I tried it with a 10 year old Wolfe’s Glen single grain Highland Scotch, and I must say it was very good. For me, though, good as it is, a little Scotch goes a long way, so on the whole I would have to say I prefer it with the wine.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-62870423070382081322010-09-21T17:50:00.000-07:002010-09-21T17:50:29.285-07:00Pairing Violet: Withstanding M.F.K. Fisher's "Perfumed Assault of the Blossoms"<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">A few weeks ago, I came across Crème de Violette, an Austrian violet-flavored liqueur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Intrigued, I just had to try it and, indeed, it tasted as interesting as it sounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The liquid has a beautiful violet color and the first sip is deliciously floral, quite distinctive and unique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After about two more sips, however, the adjective “assertive” began springing to mind: interesting as the flavor is, it needs to be paired with something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Unfortunately, my two favorite flavor pairing books are silent on the subject of violet: neither <em>The Flavor Bible</em> nor <em>What to Drink with What You Eat</em>, both by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, have anything to say about violet. They aren’t silent on floral flavors overall, just violets: they list lavender, rose, and zucchini blossoms, but no violet. One of my other favorite books, <em>The Food Lover’s Companion</em>, (3rd edition, by Sharon Tyler Herbst), has the following to say: “violets, crystallized: see crystallized flowers.” That entry refers you to one on “candied fruit, candied flowers,” which notes that “candied flowers are generally reserved for decorating desserts.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Alan Davidson’s <em>The Penguin Companion to Food</em> has a bit more to say, but even here, the results are not promising: he has two entries for “violet,” the first (with a drawing) defines it as “the French name for a sort of edible sea creature which does not have a current English name, although it may sometimes be referred to as a `sea squirt’.” His second entry gives a brief discussion of the flower, noting that, “In candied form they make good decorations for cakes, trifles, etc.” He does refer to M.F.K. Fisher’s “E for Exquisite” entry in her book, <em>An Alphabet for Gourmets</em>, where she describes what she once felt was the most exquisite dish she had ever heard of as “a satiny white endive with large heavily scented Parma violets scattered through it.” She goes on to note that, “It is a misfortune perhaps that not many months ago the salad was set before me in a bowl.” The salad disappointed her on a number of levels, but one particular failing was that “the dressing was light to the point of being innocuous, and it was unable to stand up under the perfumed assault of the blossoms.” Indeed, that is the challenge: the violet flavor is so assertive that it is important it be paired with another flavor that is strong enough to withstand the “perfumed assault of the blossoms.”</div><br />
Tom Stobart’s book, <em>Herbs Spices and Flavorings</em>, has a one-paragraph entry on violets that mentions their use in flavoring “creams, ices and liqueurs,” notes their use in crystallized flower decorations, and concludes by describing a salad that sounds similar to M.F.K. Fisher's, made with endive, celery, parsley, and olives. The one-page entry on “violets, sweet” in Carol Ann Rinzler’s <em>Herbs, Spices, and Condiments</em> also notes their use in salads and as candied flowers for decoration. Extensive rummaging through my collection of obscure cookbooks didn’t yield much more. Probably the most interesting find was in the chapter “Jellies, Marmalades, Preserves” from <em>The Picayune Creole Cook Book</em> (Dover Books, 2nd edition, 1971, reprint of the original 1901 edition), which gives a recipe for violet conserve, made from 2 ounces of freshly gathered violet petals and 1 ½ pounds of sugar.<br />
<br />
After much thought, the one pairing that did come to mind was the result of my trying, many years ago, some of the concoctions described in the 1971 book <em>Howard Johnson’s Presents Old Time Ice Cream Soda Fountain Recipes, Or, How to Make a Soda Fountain Pay</em>, published naturally enough, by the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain. One of the recipes that turned out to be delicious was the “violet lime rickey,” based on violet extract and fresh limes. That memory led me to try Crème de Violette with a key-lime pie I bought at Whole Foods. Alternating bites of the pie with sips of the liqueur made a fabulous dessert, just the sort of experience I had hoped for when I bought the liqueur.<br />
<br />
A quick Internet search turned up a couple of other possibilities. While I haven’t tried it yet, the following website gives what sounds like a marvelous recipe for “violet flavor panna cotta:”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://totchie.blogspot.com/2010/05/violet-flavor-panna-cotta.html">http://totchie.blogspot.com/2010/05/violet-flavor-panna-cotta.html</a><br />
<br />
<br />
The other idea was to pair my violet liqueur with chocolate, which I tried in two different ways. The first was to serve it with a really good chocolate ice cream from Four Seas on Cape Cod, in Centerville, Massachusetts. Their ice cream is rich and creamy, with plenty of flavor to withstand the “perfumed assault of the blossoms.” The second variation was based on a suggestion from one of the “chocolate and coffee people” at Whole Foods. I was looking over their assortment of flavored chocolate bars, struggling to select something with a flavor assertive enough to withstand but not so assertive as to cause serious warfare on my tastebuds, and my inner struggle was obvious enough that a woman stopped what she was doing to ask if I needed assistance. When I explained what I was after, she had two suggestions, both varieties of Taza Chocolate Mexicano: one supplemented with vanilla and the other with cinnamon. She thought the cinnamon version would probably stand up better to the violet and she was right: the vanilla version was good, but the hint of vanilla pretty well disappeared under the “assault of the blossoms.” The cinnamon, however, held its own marvelously: alternating bites of the chocolate with sips of the liqueur yielded a fabulous three-way combination of chocolate, cinnamon, and violet. With apologies to M.F.K. Fisher, I would have to rate this one truly “E for Exquisite.”Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-63945650950892843122010-08-08T13:25:00.000-07:002010-08-08T13:48:02.984-07:00The Pleasures of RetsinaAs I mentioned in a previous post, the Greek wine Retsina is something of an acquired taste. According to the discussion of it given in the Greece section of <em>Culinaria: European Specialties</em>, Volume 2, this wine is “by far the most popular” in Greece, accounting for more than 10 percent of the countries entire wine production. The defining characteristic of Retsina is the infusion of pine resin into the wine during fermentation, a practice that dates back to ancient times when wine amphoras were sealed with pitch to prevent spoilage. The resulting flavor is unmistakable, and according to the Retsina entry in <em>The New Frank Schoonmaker Encyclopedia of Wine</em> (Alexis Bespaloff revised edition, 1988), while “some consumers find its distinctive and pungent taste an excellent match with the rich, oil-based cuisine of Greece, others find its turpentinelike flavor too strange to enjoy.”<br /><br />I have had both experiences. My first taste of Retsina was many years ago in Greece, and I did indeed find “its turpentinelike flavor too strange to enjoy,” moving instead to other local specialties like Ouzo, the potent anise-flavored Greek national liqueur. On the other hand, a few years ago, friends brought us back both Retsina and Ouzo from their trip to Greece, and my wife and I both found the Retsina to be very good. The pine resin flavor was definitely present, but it was not overpowering as it had been the first time I tasted it. Contrasting the experiences, it occurs to me that the situation is somewhat analogous to the oakiness of Chardonnays, which can range from completely absent in wines aged in stainless steel, to very oaky in wines like my favorite Kendall Jackson Chardonnay. My wife’s liking for strong, possibly strange flavors is rather less than mine – she prefers her Chardonnays less oaked, for example – but she also liked the Retsina our friends brought back, so I suspect they brought us one of its “less pined” versions. (It’s also possible, of course, that my first sample was a “Retsina plonk” while the bottle our friends brought us was the Retsina equivalent of a Grand Cru.)<br /><br />According to the <em>Food Lover’s Companion</em>, Retsina is available in either white or rose versions, and “should be served very cold.” In their book, <em>What to Drink with What You Eat</em>, Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page include a short entry on Retsina, suggesting – not surprisingly – that it pairs well with Greek food, most especially with feta cheese, hummus, olives, spinach and spinach pie, and <em>taramosalata,</em> a creamy fish roe pate. I have never tasted either <em>taramasalata</em> or the rose version of Retsina, and since I have been unable to find any kind of Retsina locally, it may be some time before I have a chance to try the rose. On the other hand, <em>Culinaria</em> gives a recipe for <em>taramosalata</em>, so I may be able to try that somewhat sooner. The trouble there is that my wife is not keen on things with strongly fishy flavors, so she has somewhat less enthusiasm about trying the dish than I do. Still, the recipe is next to one for <em>saganaki</em>, a Greek fried cheese dish that we both love. If only we could find a nice bottle of rose Retsina …Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-53055637767414251912010-07-18T10:50:00.000-07:002010-07-18T11:49:08.147-07:00Honey-nut Lavender SundaesIce cream sundaes make a great dessert on hot summer days: they’re cold, refreshing, easy to make, and everyone has their own favorite recipe. Recently, I discovered a fabulous product at one of our local specialty food stores that makes a great sundae. It is Omak Gida brand Honey Nut (balli cerez) from Turkey, and it contains bee pollen, coconut, honey, and a mixture of nuts (specifically, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, pinenuts, peanuts, and almonds). If you live in the Hartford, Connecticut, area, this is available at Tangier (668 Farmington Ave., West Hartford, CT 06119-1810), a great store that carries a lot of really interesting products. It is also available on-line from Café Anatolia: their listing for “Balli Cerez (Honey Nut)” includes photographs of the jar, with a detailed close-up that shows the intricate arrangement of sliced nuts, layered in rows, that first caught my attention (<a href="http://www.cafeanatolia.com/Balli_Cerez_Honey_Nut_p/snack10.htm">http://www.cafeanatolia.com/Balli_Cerez_Honey_Nut_p/snack10.htm</a>).<br /><br />Putting a spoonful or two over vanilla ice cream makes a really excellent sundae (I used Trader Joe’s Super Premium French Vanilla), but there are a couple of ways you can make it even better. The first is to sprinkle on a little bit of dried lavender, an herb that has been popular in Mediterranean cuisine for centuries. The idea of adding it to the honey nut sundae was inspired by a perusal of Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s <em>The Flavor Bible</em>, a favorite book I have raved about before. Their entry on lavender lists both ice cream and honey among the pairings in bold capital letters, a designation reserved for the best flavor matches. They also list almonds, pistachios, and walnuts as good matches, and under their entry on “nuts – in general” (page 234), they give the following quote from Jerry Traunfeld with The Herbfarm in Woodinville, Washington:<br /><br /><blockquote>“Lavender works well with all sorts of nuts, including almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, and walnuts. The one nut it doesn’t work well with is chestnuts.”<br /></blockquote><br />An important caution is not to use too much: as Jill Norman notes in her book, <em>Herbs and Spices</em> (DK Publishing, 2002), “Lavender is very potent and must be used sparingly.” I sprinkled a few dried lavender flowers on our honey nut sundaes and the result was delicious. Norman notes that if you grind the flowers together with sugar, you get a stronger flavor since the process extracts the oil from the flowers, which is absorbed into the sugar.<br /><br />We obtained our lavender flowers from a friend (thanks, designwrite), which is the way chef Paul Gayler recommends obtaining them – i.e., in the wild or from your garden – in his book <em>Flavors</em> (Kyle Books, 2005). He also notes that if you purchase lavender flowers at a market, they have sometimes been treated with pesticides or fragrance enhancers since lavender is a popular ingredient in custom-made soaps; if you are not sure whether this is the case or not, Gayler recommends washing the flowers thoroughly before use. Lavender packaged especially for culinary uses is available from a number of different sources, including Penzeys Spices (<a href="http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeyslavender.html">http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeyslavender.html</a>) and Amazon (search their Grocery & Gourmet Food Department with the keyword "lavender"). In fact, Amazon offers lavender in a variety of different forms: as 8 oz. packages of culinary lavender, as lavender syrup, lavender sugar sparkles, lavender honey, lavender extract, and various lavender teas.<br /><br />The second variation on the honey nut sundae – with or without lavender – that can make it even better is to serve it with a nut-derived liqueur. One that goes especially well with a lavender honey-nut sundae is <em>Faretti</em>, described on the label as essentially a liquid biscotti whose “delicately layered taste … combines hints of nuts, citrus and fennel in a symphony of flavor.” That was the first accompaniment we tried, but the sundae went about equally well with <em>Nocello</em> walnut liqueur and the almond-based <em>Amaretto di Saronno</em>. Another good choice should be the hazelnut liqueur <em>Frangelico,</em> but we haven’t had a chance to try that combination yet. Finally, a really intriguing possibility is the pistachio liqueur <em>Dumante,</em> but our favorite supplier of spirits had just sold their last bottle when we went to inquire about it.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1540402692267719182.post-57080090335775929552010-07-10T15:50:00.000-07:002010-07-10T16:06:13.775-07:00Prose Poems and Mumbleberry PiesThis past Wednesday, my wife and I went to the reading and performance at the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry and Music Festival in Farmington, Connecticut. It was a hot evening at the end of a hot day and the musical group CONCORA started things off with a collection of “summer music,” broadly interpreted: toward the end, they did an operatic rendition of Donna Summers’ <em>Hot Stuff</em>. It was fascinatingly different, reminding me of the time I heard <em>Wooly Bully</em> sung in Greek.<br /><br />After the music, three featured poets read: the New York State Poet Laureate, Jean Valentine, and the first and second-place prize winners in the 2010 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize competition, Ginny Lowe Connors from West Hartford, Connecticut, and Kate Lebo from Seattle. Because it so directly relates to the theme of this blog – and because it is a delightful collection – this post is about Kate Lebo’s chapbook, <em>A Commonplace Book of Pie</em>. This short little book includes 10 prose poems about pie, a few relevant quotes (ranging from Jonathan Swift to Carl Sagan), four pie or piecrust recipes, and a small collection of questions and comments (e.g., “What is your favorite pie? Circle all that apply,” followed by 33 alphabetically ordered answers ranging from “apple” to “vanilla cream,” with some unusual entries in between, like avocado, Hoosier, and rhubarb custard). The author also maintains a food-related blog, Good Egg ( <a href="http://goodeggseattle.blogspot.com/">http://goodeggseattle.blogspot.com</a>), where she offers her thoughts on life, good cooking, and a lot more pie recipes (there’s even one for “mumbleberry pie”).<br /><br />The fact that her chapbook consists entirely of prose poems invites a brief discussion of the form: what exactly is a prose poem? As the name implies, it is essentially a very “prosey” poetic form, but to give a more satisfactory answer I need to digress briefly on the larger question of what exactly a poem is. Many of us were introduced to poetry in terms of traditional verse forms like the sonnet, which had a fairly precise definition: a sonnet was a 14 line form, with a specified rhythm (e.g., iambic pentameter), and a specified rhyme scheme (e.g., the end of the first line rhymed with the end of the third line, etc.). Then, at some point, many of us encountered the more vaguely defined world of “free verse” poetry: lines no longer had to rhyme, neither the number of lines nor the number of syllables per line were fixed, and indeed, most of the “rules” we came to think of as defining poetry were relaxed to the point that it became much harder to know exactly what a poem was. (This has even happened with sonnets: in William Barnstone’s <em>The Secret Reader</em> – a collection of 501 sonnets – he includes many that adhere to the traditional rules, but also a number that violate some rules while retaining others. A particularly interesting example is “Talking with Ink,” consisting of 14 lines with a classical rhyme scheme, but each line has only two syllables; another unusual example is “Gospel of Desire,” which also has 14 lines and adheres to a classical rhyme scheme, but with a regularly varying number of syllables per line.) A key feature that distinguishes both free verse and formal poetry from prose is that poetry is organized by lines. In their entry on “poetry,” the <em>Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics</em> (Princeton University Press, 1993) notes:<br /><br /> <blockquote>“What most readers understand as ‘poetry’ was, up until 1850, set in lines which were metrical, and even the several forms of <em>vers libre</em> and free verse produced since 1850 have been built largely on one or another concept of the line.”</blockquote><br /><br />The key feature of the prose poem is the abandonment of lines, typically resulting in text organized into one or a few paragraphs. In their entry on the prose poem, the <em>Princeton Encyclopedia</em> observes that:<br /><br /> <blockquote>“Its principal characteristics are those that would insure unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.”</blockquote><br /><br />The recent collection, <em>No Boundaries</em>, published by Tupelo Press in 2003, provides a nice illustration of the range of the prose poem’s structural and thematic possibilities. Edited by Ray Gonzales, the collection includes ten poems each from 24 contemporary American poets; among these contributors are Robert Bly and Russell Edson, both mentioned in the <em>Princeton Encyclopedia’s</em> entry on the prose poem, and Charles Simic, whose prose poem collection, <em>The World Doesn’t End,</em> was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Simic’s collection by itself provides an extremely illuminating and entertaining view of the possibilities inherent in the form, with examples ranging from a single sentence about “the Great God of Theory” to a short vignette about a grandfather’s wordless, jealous feud with Sigmund Freud over a pair of shoes in a store window. Probably my favorite one from the collection begins with the following sentence:<br /><br /> <blockquote>“Margaret was copying a recipe for ‘saints roasted with onions’ from an old cookbook.”</blockquote><br /><br />Each of Kate Lebo’s prose poems takes a specific type of pie for its title, and all meet the <em>Princeton Encyclopedia’s</em> “sustained intensity and compactness” criteria cited above: none is longer than two paragraphs, and each one presents a unique view of the selected pie and/or its fans, abounding with quirky tidbits and commentary. One of my favorites is the “Lemon Meringue” poem, which gives a highly dubious history of the pie involving nuns in Portland, Oregon and the boxer Muhammad Ali. Lebo also makes excellent use of traditional poetic aural devices like alliteration, assonance, and consonance, as in this sentence from “Pumpkin Pie:”<br /><br /> <blockquote>“It could be hollowed and hallowed and filled with soup and served in a bistro to people who do not smash pumpkins.”</blockquote><br /><br />Another great example, from “Apple Pie,” is the following sequence about apple seeds, “carried afar in the bellies of birds and bears and other four-legged, fruit-eating animals …”<br /><br />All in all, <em>A Commonplace Book of Pie</em> is a very enjoyable little literary snack. The only problem is that it has left me craving a Hoosier pie. More about that later.Ron Pearson (aka TheNoodleDoodler)http://www.blogger.com/profile/15693640298594791682noreply@blogger.com1