"The very Solomon among cake tasters!"

a charming scene from the beloved yorkshire country veterinary story All Creatures Great and Small.



Siegfried Farnon is an outspoken cake appreciator. In this scene his exquisite palate is put to the test unbeknownst to him.

our fig: the first year

In spring 2009 we bought a brown turkey fig tree to grow in a pot on our second-floor balcony.

In May, our small tree had been home on our porch for a month or two. One of our mothers was very sick, and the fig's progress became a fond topic during hospital visits.

By August the tree cast a distinctive silhouette. At night, owing to streetlights, the silhouette was cast on our neighbor's house.
August 2009: a fig on the verge of ripening.

citrus overload

Marmalade

vin de pamplemousse

This past winter, we subscribed to a winter farm share which sourced produce from all over the east coast. The share was very reasonably priced and kept us away from the dreaded supermarket all winter. Perhaps our favorite part of this weekly box was the tree-ripened organic citrus that appeared every week, 3-4 pieces at a time. Sometime in February we got an additional free box of fruit as reward for turning a friend on to the program. Suddenly we had more citrus than we could eat in a normal way. We gave away some of it, but eventually I was forced to research, then make, large quantities of marmalade.

Last week, our fruit bowl was overfilled with grapefruit, and I searched til I found a recipe for vin de pamplemousse in Chez Panisse Fruit. We're practically teetotalers here, but I thought it might be nice to offer a special aperitif to guests, as Marilla Cuthbert might offer raspberry cordial. So I made a hefty purchase of the requisite spirits (7 bottles in all!) and stirred it all up in a big jar. It will be another month until it's ready to sip.

Both of these efforts made only a small dent in our supply, and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed as all these oranges and grapefruit begin a steady march towards the compost. I would make more marmalade, but I am weary of using so much sugar; I'd make more vin de pamplemousse but I don't have another big jar and wine is expensive in those quantities. Besides, both of these are best when the fruit is not already so tired.

Dosa Review

Dosa are like crepes made from a fermented rice and dal batter instead of flour and eggs. They are cooked to a golden crispiness on an oiled griddle. Typically they are served with a thin stew called sambar, and coconut chutney. There are many variations. Often the dosa are filled with something: spiced potatoes, chutney, sometimes paneer, sometimes meat. But I'm not an expert. My first dosa was in Chicago at a south indian restaurant on Devon St. It was, I believe,   a mysore masala dosa, which has potato and something spicy inside. It was huge, impressive looking, but very hot for my palate at the time. It would be years before I considered dosa again. My current dosa fixation was born when I ordered the simplest dosa on the menu at Namaskar, a nearby indian restaurant. The Sada Dosa arrived loosely rolled, measuring perhaps 30" long, nearly overhanging the edge of the table! So crisp, so simple and satisfying, with a bowl of sambar and chutney; I thought of it for days and weeks afterward. Then a friend made masala dosa for us at her home. Homemade, these were just 9" in diameter, but we ate several in a sitting, hot off the tava. I could eat these every day! Then, on a saturday in February we drove 40 minutes to Dosa Temple in Ashland, MA. Yes, Dosa Temple. But our pilgrimage was not rewarded in the way I imagined: I had planned to order multiple dosas at the dosa temple! But Saturday, we now well know, is buffet time, and no menus were offered. We saw no choice but to be swept into the buffet line with everyone else, loading our plates with idlis (dosa's steamed, cake-like cousins, which deserve a separate post), vadas, manchurian gobi and other sticky-handled buffet offerings. Eventually a waiter came by and dropped two small, evenly golden dosa on our table. Complimentary dosa! But only two. We plan to return to Dosa Temple at an off-buffet time.

Inevitably, we made some dosa batter ourselves.  There is a good recipe in Wild Fermentation, but we also consulted Yamuna Devi's the Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. 

Here is our batter after several days of fermentation (aided and accelerated by placing the bowl above an electric space heater set on low):

Not perfect, our dosa-- the first one had the proper golden-ness, but was a bit thick; the last one was undercooked, not golden enough, and maybe too lacy! We'll have to try again.

In the meantime, these are one thing I am quite content to eat in restaurants, cooked to perfection on a 30" tava!

Bûche De Noël 2008

There were a few improvements to this year's yule log cake over last year's. Most notable were the candied orange peel shelf fungus and the pistachio lichen. The orange peels were cut into shelf-shapes before candying, and only the greenest pistachios were chosen for the lichen. I also re-interpreted the recipe and rolled the 11x17" genoise into a longer, slimmer log. 

Chole Bhatura

Chole is a spicy and filling bean stew (a chili, if you will!) I get a hankering for sometimes. Traditionally, I'm told, it is served with Bhatura, a tender fried bread that has yogurt and flour fermented together. Recently we went to the trouble to make the two for dinner. Deep-frying is always a bit of a project and usually seems like too much fuss, but there are times when you simply must. 

Once in the hot oil, the bhatura puff up like balloons and are startlingly bouyant in the oil.

Kala Chana Dal (small black chickpeas) soaking before pressure-cooking.

Co-incubation in the morning: the dal was brought to a boil then left to soak in the bottom pot, and now the flour and yogurt starter is warm and starting to act in the bowl set on top. Heat-retaining cast iron and stoneware vessels are essential for this. I could have wrapped the whole up in a blanket, too.

The yogurt-wheat starter fermented and rose slightly.

The chole, bhatura, some chutney and yogurt. A warming winter meal.

taffy

My great-grandmother Pineau pulling taffy.

Halloween, a favorite holiday of many people I know, does not inspire me as I sometimes feel it should. I have had my share of ridiculous costumes (once, I wore a large papier mache nose around... ) and now I have little patience for uncomfortable costumes or elaborate makeup or masks and generally limit myself to human characters I feel affinity for: for two years running, I went as Laura Ingalls Wilder (last year, happily, accompanied by my Almanzo, his manly hand forever covering my smaller, female one as we rode away in the annual Halloween Bike Ride) and the plan for this year was for us to go as Anne of Green Gables and Gilbert Blythe, and we would reinact the schoolhouse scene where Gilbert pulls Anne's braid (carrots!) and she smashes a slate over his head in return. We even reveiwed the PBS miniseries last week to study for these parts. But last night, when it came time to rummage through the closets for suitable clothing, we tried some things on, and then decided not to go. Why? Anne (with beautiful natural red locks) had a headache. I, who was to play Gilbert, was suddenly preoccupied with the notion of making old fashioned molasses taffy and was only too happy to do that instead of bundling up for a late-night bike ride.

For something like fifty years, my grandparents made popcorn balls for all the neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Their recipe was surely from the Joy of Cooking, or else one passed down from great-grandmother Pineau. Bound with a molasses flavored sugar syrup and wrapped in plastic sandwich baggies (perhaps once in waxed paper), this was a wholesome treat that I always looked forward to. You really had to gnaw on it.. I would always be sure to find one with more syrup...

And I had a distant memory of making actual pulled taffy --which is all syrup! My mother spoke of taffy often, and we made it just once, with greased up hands.
So last night, on Halloween, happy that I had all the ingredients (and even a marble slab!), we made taffy-- Anne and I, after a nap. The recipe, again, is in the Joy of Cooking. We pulled and pulled for half an hour or more, then snipped the rope with buttered shears. No trick-or-treaters called.