Balti spiced chicken with fennel and forbidden rice

Intrigued by the name and description, I recently bought a small jar of Balti Seasoning from Penzeys. According to Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food, 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 (see, for example, "Looking for recipes for Penzeys Balti Seasoning").  One intriguing entry is that from Grace (“Unhelpful bile spewer”), who says, in part:

“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.”

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.



The seasoning mix itself is described on the Penzeys 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:

“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.”

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 Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, 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.”



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 “ein hundert gramm gemischte” - 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 Kalustyan's.  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 The Ultimate Mushroom Book A Complete Guide to Identifying, Picking and Using Mushrooms--A Photographic A-Z of Types and 100 Original Recipes, 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, we paired the dish with a Pinot Grigio, which Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page recommend in their book, 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 with chicken (highly recommended), garlic, fennel, and tomatoes, all of which we had included in our recipe.



Ingredients:



2 chicken breasts (i.e., 4 halves)

1 large fennel bulb

1 large leek

4 tomatoes, quartered

1 cup forbidden (black) rice

4 cups chicken stock (2 cups for the rice, 2 cups in the crockpot)

½ pound fresh baby bella mushrooms, sliced

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

½ teaspoon Penzeys Balti Seasoning (¼ teaspoon to sauté chicken, ¼ teaspoon for the crockpot)

¼ teaspoon mushroom powder ( 1/8 teaspoon to sauté chicken, 1/8 teaspoon for the crockpot)

salt and pepper, to taste



Directions:



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.

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.

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.

The Art of Internal Rhyme

Traditional poetic forms like the sonnet are defined in part by a rhyme scheme that specifies a required sequence of end rhymes. 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:

abab cdcd efef gg

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 internal rhyme.


In its entry on the topic, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 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 The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Lewis Turco discusses many different types of rhyme, and he uses the term cross rhyme 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 interlaced rhyme 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 linked rhyme 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.”



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 awdl gywydd, consisting of four seven-syllable lines organized as follows:

1 – x x x x x x a

2 – x x (a) (a) (a) x b

3 – x x x x x x c

4 – x x (c) (c) (c) x b

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 awdl gywydd:

The Bliss of Ignorance



Who would remember that day

when certainty fades, and youth

slips so suddenly from us,

a foretaste of dust’s black truth?

Here, day at the end of line 1 rhymes with fades, the fifth syllable of line 2, while youth at the end of line 2 rhymes with truth at the end of line 4, and us at the end of line 3 rhymes with dust’s, the fifth syllable of line 4.



Another poetic form that incorporates internal rhyme in its definition is the Persian ghazal. Ironically enough, this is a form that Turco does not include in his book, but it is included in Dede Wilson’s collection One Nightstand that I discussed in a previous post (a really fabulous little book that I recommend highly – published in 2001 by and still available from Main Street Rag). 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 radif, and second, preceding each radif is an internal rhyme called the qafia. The following example provides an illustration:

                                Rejection Letter No. 12,768



“Dear contributor,” it read, “your poems do not meet our current needs.”

I stared in disbelief: surely, my stuff exceeded any “current needs.”



Refusing to weep or gnash my teeth, I threw it on the pile with the other

letters alleging my failure to foresee a vast array of current needs.



Rereading their magazine later, I wondered why I had bothered:

based on what they accepted, I couldn’t believe what met their current needs.



A few days after that, when the sting had abated a bit,

I sent another group of doodles: surely these would meet and exceed all current needs.

Here, “current needs” represents the radif, repeated at the end of both lines of the first couplet and at the second line of each succeeding couplet, while the qafia is the internal rhyme between meet in the first line, exceeded in the second, foresee at the end of the second couplet, believe at the end of the third, and meet and exceed at the end of the fourth. A more detailed discussion of the ghazal with additional examples is given by Agha Shahid Ali in An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, which includes Ali’s chapter on the ghazal, together with discussions of an enormous range of other poetic topics, from sonnets and haiku to rap and fractals.



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 are the masters we should be studying? The answer to this question can be the subject of considerable debate.



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:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,”

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:

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”

All in all, a careful reading of “The Raven” reveals a lot of internal rhyme, both within and between lines.



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:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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.”



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:

The conversation of prayers about to be said

By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs

Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,

The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move

And the other full of tears that she will be dead,

This poem is described by Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell in their book Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: Second Edition (Ann Arbor Paperbacks), who point out its scheme of interlocking cross-rhymes. Taking their lead, I have highlighted the words involved in these cross-rhymes: prayers in the middle of line 1 rhymes with stairs at the end of line 2 and forms a slant rhyme with tears at the middle of line 5; said at the end of line 1 rhymes with bed in the middle of line 2 and dead at the end of line 5; love in the middle of line 3 is a slant rhyme with move at the end of line 4; and room at the end of line 3 rhymes with whom in the middle of line 4. In fact, Thomas maintains this interlocking cross-rhyme scheme through all four stanzas of the poem.


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 awdl gywydd and the ghazal 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 Princeton Encyclopedia’s 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 Kate Lebo's chapbook, A Commonplace Book of Pie, 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:

“It could be hollowed and hallowed and filled with soup and served in a bistro to people who do not smash pumpkins.”

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”.



One of my favorite internal rhyme-based forms is the Welsh clogyrnach, described by Lewis Turco in The New Book of Forms. 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:

1 – x x x x x x x a

2 – x x x x x x x a

3 – x x x x b

4 – x x x x b

5 – x x b x x a

Like the quatern form discussed in Dede Wilson’s One Nightstand, I am particularly fond of the clogyrnach because I have actually been able to get one of them published. The following example appeared in 2007 in issue 21 of Ibbetson Street:

                Taps



We walk in silence down the road

all together, but each alone.

Borne with muffled drums

and twenty-one guns,

day is done. He is home.

Yakitori chicken with fiddlehead ferns and ramps

A 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).




One of the other directions our thoughts turn in spring is to what Earthy Delights Earthy Delights 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.



Besides chicken and our two vegetable substitutions, the primary ingredient in yakitori chicken is mirin, sometimes also called “rice wine,” although in The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson begs to differ:

“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.”

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 Eden Foods Mirin Rice Cooking Wine ( 1x10.5 OZ) that I used in preparing the recipe given here).



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 Food of Asia (Journey for Food Lovers) calls for sake and kuzu starch rocks (a Japanese thickening agent), while the one given in The Complete Asian Cookbook 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 Cooking. When I had yakitori chicken in Japan, it was served on skewers, which is how both Peterson and The Food of Asia advocate preparing it, but The Complete Asian Cookbook serves it over rice, which is how we typically have it.



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.



My favorite food and beverage pairing book, 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 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.



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, Culinaria Southeast Asia: A Journey Through Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (Cooking) gives a recipe for Anyang pakis, 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:



Ingredients:



- 1 chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces

- 1 small bunch of ramps, washed and trimmed and cut into ½ inch pieces

- ½ pound fiddlehead ferns, prepared as described below

- 1 ½ teaspoons peanut oil

- 1 ½ teaspoons sesame seeds

- ¼ cup soy sauce

- 1 tablespoon sugar

- 1 tablespoon mirin



Directions:



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.

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.

3. Prepare enough rice for two people, starting it early enough that it is ready when the yakitori chicken is done.

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.

5. Serve the yakitori chicken over rice, preferably with a nice Japanese beer.

Sampling an unacquirable taste

A recent episode of Food Network’s Chopped 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 Culinaria Southeast Asia: A Journey Through Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia (Cooking) is distressingly accurate:

“The stench of the durian has been described as a mixture of onion, strong cheese, rotten eggs, and rotting meat, all soaked in turpentine!”

In his book, Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker, 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:

“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.”

Ultimately, the stench proves too much for Walsh, and he can’t finish the second section of durian.



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 The Penguin Companion to Food, he quotes the following account of durian’s flavor, published in 1869 by Alfred Russel Wallace in his book Malay Archipelago :

“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.”

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 truly acquired tastes.



I know: I’ve tried to acquire even a little bit of the taste twice, but have failed utterly both times.

Ramps, morels, and the return of spring

Besides 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 Earthy Delights, 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 Richwooders 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.




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 soft scrambled eggs with ramps and smoked salmon 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.



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.



Scrambled eggs with ramps, morels, and smoked salmon



Ingredients:



3 eggs

2 baby ramps, both the white and green parts, chopped into small pieces

1 to 2 oz. morels, cut into small pieces

2 oz. smoked salmon

¼ cup grated gruyere

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Fresh ground pepper

Sea salt



Directions:



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.



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.



Serve and savor.

Octopus omelets

A 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 Elena, whose photos take me right back inside.



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).


Since then, I have often wanted to try preparing octopus myself, but it has a somewhat challenging reputation. In his octopus entry in The Penguin Companion to Food, 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:

“A baby octopus needs no special preparation, but can simply be deep fried or cooked briefly in boiling water.”

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 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 has worked very well for omelets based on other, possibly less exotic, ingredients.)



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  The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs 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 Sale Mediterraneo, 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 Ferry Terminal Market 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 Penzeys Tuscan Sunset.)



Octopus omelet, ingredients:



½ pound baby octopus (about 4 octopi)

½ cup aged Gruyere, grated

3 eggs

1 small cipollini onion

1 Tbsp olive oil

½ tsp black pepper

½ tsp Sale Mediterraneo or other sea salt/Italian herb mixture



Directions:



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.



Next, sauté the onion in the olive oil until translucent. Add the octopus, black pepper, and sea salt and sauté briefly, mixing well.



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.



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 Albarino, 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.

Discovering the joys of membrillo

I recently discovered the joys of Spanish membrillo, 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 membrillo with cheese, which is the classic pairing: Amazon sells a combination package of membrillo with manchego (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 membrillo seems to be: I have not been able to find it mentioned in my cheese books, and The Penguin Companion to Food – 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.”

Coarser or not, I find the stuff delicious.

Consistent with its absence from the cheese books and food dictionaries, there is also no entry for membrillo in either of Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s terrific books, their flavor matching guide The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs or their drink pairing book 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. Again referring to the entries on quince, however, some extremely useful suggestions emerge. First, the Flavor Bible’s entry on quince strongly recommends pairing with cheese – especially goat cheese, manchego, or ricotta – 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 membrillo 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 membrillo: slathered thickly on Lesley Stowe Raincoast Crisps cranberry and hazelnut crackers (also available from Amazon: see Favorite Goodies from the Noodle Doodler).



The Flavor Bible 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 What to Drink with What You Eat 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 membrillo 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 Haus Alpenz 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 The Flavor Bible. A small glass of this liqueur with a couple of cranberry and hazelnut crackers, each generously spread with membrillo, is an excellent way to end any day.