Author Archives: Shannon

Fruitcake Memories

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fruitcakeIt saddens me to think that fruitcake has fallen from such great heights. In medieval Europe, it was the epitome of luxury, chock full of the spices and nuts and dried fruit that could only be imported, for a hefty price, from the mystical Far East. A perfect birthday cake for Jesus, I guess. But in more recent days, it has become less a Christmas treat than a punch line. Here is a famous fruitcake joke: “The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year.” Johnny Carson said that on The Tonight Show, and it’s been downhill for fruitcake ever since.

I will admit that fruitcake, the actual foodstuff, has never made much of an impression on me. I don’t make fruitcake as a Christmas tradition and the few times I’ve eaten it during the holiday season have been less than memorable. But fruitcake as an idea…well, that’s a completely different story.

There are two beloved, imagined fruitcakes in my life. One is from the Truman Capote short story, “A Christmas Memory.” I force Jason to listen to me read this at least once every Christmas season, and out of kindness, he pretends that I’m going to make it to the end each time without crying. (I really am very good at doing the voice of Mr. Haha Jones, by the way). If you haven’t read the story, you should stop reading this right now and follow the link above and read the story already.

Less of a heartbreaker but no less dear to me is a memory that comes from Christmases more distantly past. Continue reading →

The “Harvest Equals Party” Puzzle

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wine queen

Have you met the Wine Queen?

The origin story of Thanksgiving is a little dubious, at least the most popular one that has a bunch of pilgrims and Indians sitting around eating turkey and smiling at each other. Better documented is the one that comes two centuries later, when Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor and abolitionist, campaigned for a harvest celebration and day of thanksgiving, with hopes that it would make the country feel more united. Abraham Lincoln obliged her, making it a national holiday in 1863.

But we Americans are hardly alone in our desire to celebrate the harvest. Can you name which country offers up the delicious days of thanksgiving described below? In some cases, the festivals are specific to a city or region, so extra stuffing for you if you can name any of those.

  1. During Chuseok, families travel to their family’s homeland and set up elaborate offerings of food called charye for their ancestors. They also sing, wrestle and eat freshly harvested rice and rice cakes.
  2. After the newly-pressed olive oil is blessed by a priest, everybody digs into a medieval-style feast at a local castle. (Seriously! A castle!)
  3. The Yam Festival (also called Homowo), at the end of the rainy season, is celebrated with singing, dancing, parades, offerings, and, obviously, yam-eating.
  4. At the annual Fruit Fair, people build elaborate arrangements of colorful fruits like rambutan and mangosteen and stage a parade with floats made out of fruits and vegetables.
  5. Locals celebrate Lugh, or the god of the sun, while making a potent potato-based whiskey called poitín.
  6. At a four-day festival celebrating the gods of sun and rain, people make a sweet dish called pongal out of rice, milk and jaggery (a form of palm sugar) and eat lentils to signify the year’s bounty.
  7. The harvest has always been a time when priests would bless the first grapes of the season, but more recently it has become a major province-wide carnival, with parades, fireworks and performances, not to mention the crowning of the Wine Queen.
  8. For Trung Thu, people celebrate the harvest moon but also their children (a different sort of fruit, I suppose). Children are told traditional fairy tales and given star lanterns and sweet treats like mooncakes.

Don’t click Continue or scroll down until you’re ready for the answers! Continue reading →

The De-fennel-stration of our Vegetable Drawer

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onion and fennel risottoOur CSA with Windflower Farm is totally awesome. For almost half the year, they load us up with delicious veggies, and they never skimp on the good stuff. Every once in a while, though, they throw us a curveball, like in one of our last shipments of the season, when they gave us a big ol’ bulb of fennel. Fennel looks kind of like a multi-snorkeled Snork and has a name that sounds like a scheming butler on Masterpiece Theater. Needless to say, the CSA fennel offering kicked around in our vegetable drawer for quite a while.

And then—eureka!—the NY Times cooking section laid a solution right in my lap with this recipe for Carmelized Onion and Fennel Risotto. When I started to make it, I realized that I didn’t even know what part of the fennel to slice, and I had to watch some YouTube videos to school myself. Basically, you just want the layered part of the bulb; you can make stock out of the rest of it, but it’s too tough to chew. That means that there was shockingly little fennel on my cutting board by the time I was finished hacking away at it. Would I even be able taste it in the finished dish?

Because it is in my nature to meddle with even the simplest recipes, I made a few changes to the NYT version. Continue reading →

Kung Pao Squash and Greens

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kung pao!At my first job after college, there was a woman named Cynthia (a.k.a. Cyn-Bad), who, upon being asked what Chinese food she wanted to order, would always say, “Kung PAO!” and do a series of high-energy karate kicks. I believe she went on to teach first graders.

But I was always a little jealous of Cyn-Bad’s order, because takeout Chinese places almost never have anything fixed in a kung pao style besides chicken or maaaybe shrimp, so it’s a no-go for vegetarians. That’s why I was so excited when our friend Jeff (who, now that I think about it, would probably admire Cyn-Bad’s wicked karate stylings) forwarded us a recipe for Kung Pao Sweet Potatoes. What?! A whole new world of Szechuan deliciousness opened up to me.

I changed the recipe up a bit to match what we had on hand, which included a whole load of squash. As frequent readers of this blog might already know, winter squashes are really not my favorite vegetables, so this was a serious test, but the spicy sauce and the crunch of the peanuts helped that squash pass with flying colors. No doubt about it: it’s a meal glorious enough for a palace guardian, not to mention Cyn-Bad.

Kung Pao Squash and Greens Continue reading →

That Smell: Crosswords and Cantonese Party Tricks

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hong kong

Hong Kong: Smells delicious!

Quick, give me an eight-letter English word that means “smells good.” If you instantaneously came up with “fragrant” or “aromatic,” then you’re probably very good at crossword puzzles. But if you didn’t, you shouldn’t feel bad, because English is relatively poor in smell words. Plenty of days probably pass without you using the word “fragrant,” but apparently, Cantonese-speaking people drop their equivalent word, heung, into conversation all the time (thus, Hong Kong, or “good-smelling harbor”) to say nothing of their negative smell words, which range from meaning “the ammoniacal smell of urine” to “the rancid smell of old grain.” Any way you cut it, there’s just no easy way to fit those into an English crossword.

If you’re wondering where I’m getting these little chestnuts, it’s my mom’s fault. She gave me the fascinating book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky, and now I’m at risk of becoming the person at a party who insists on telling everyone the Cantonese word for the smell of burnt hair. (It’s lou.)

Initially, the section on our lack of smell words frustrated me. English (arguably) has more words than any other language! How could we have overlooked smell words? And come on, Jurafsky, we have plenty of taste words, and it’s so hard to differentiate between taste and smell. And yet, I see his point; there aren’t many words devoted solely to smell the way there are words devoted solely to taste. That is, you can’t tell how sweet something is from its smell, or I’d probably be better at baking.

We’re not alone in this, by the way; most languages are poor in smell words. Continue reading →

Peter Piper and Me

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pickled peppers

Let’s just call this a peck, shall we?

Never had I stopped and considered exactly how much of something constituted a peck until I was out in the garden in the dark, wiping cold rain out of my eyes and trying to locate hot peppers with a flashlight.

This project had started, of course, with grander visions. I had gotten nostalgic about the giant jars of whole chili peppers swimming in vinegar that used to grace every table in Cambodia, and I had convinced Jason to stick a single hot pepper plant in the corner of our community garden plot. Then, Peter Piper-style visions dancing in my head, I waited. And waited. And waited. Our pepper plant grew to mammoth proportions but was an exceedingly late bloomer. Finally, just this month, it sprouted loads of peppers, though most of them remained green, probably because of the chilly weather.

pepper picking

Trick or Treeeeat!

But then again, the peppers in Cambodia had always been a wide variety of colors, and ours were, indeed, hot, as evidenced by the weird panting noises that Jason made after I fed him a little piece of a raw one, so I decided that maybe the greenness wasn’t that big of a deal, and I should proceed with the pickling as planned. But the clock was ticking; it had gotten awfully late in the season, so late that it’s dark by the time I get home from work, which is why, last night, I was arming myself with a flashlight and trying to convince myself that it would be kind of like trick or treating, before heading out to lurk around the muddy garden and probably creep out all of the neighbors.

Man, it sure seemed like I picked a lot of peppers, yea, perhaps even a peck of pickled peppers. A peck is a quarter of a bushel (or eight quarts, for those of you who don’t regularly buy things by the bushel). My crop ended up filling two tiny jam jars, so I may have come in a little shy of my target. But boy, do they look delicious.

Here’s how you can pickle some of your very own: Continue reading →

A Double Dose of Allium Soup

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IMG_1555Is there anything better than walking in your front door and being greeted by the scent of garlic and onion sautéing in a pan? For one, it smells delicious, and it also means that someone else is on top of dinner. Jason and I both took a turn at cooking up the ol’ alliums this week (the family that includes both garlic and onions), he with a healthful, cold-fighting garlic soup, and I with a not-so-healthful-but-seriously-super-delicious French onion soup.

Jason got the skinny on the garlic soup from his yoga teacher, who made it for her sick child. Garlic has long been a home remedy for warding off the sniffles, to say nothing of its reputation as a worthy adversary of arthritis, heart disease and some kinds of tumors. You could argue that garlic is not a miracle drug…or you could just eat some of this garlic soup and be happy. And you can trust me on this count: the garlic in it is well-cooked enough that you won’t leak garlic from your pores. I was sort of looking forward to getting a seat to myself on the subway afterward, but I smelled no more like a salami than usual. You can find the recipe at this very earnest website.

french onion soupHealthfulness is a noble ambition, but I had other things on my mind when I made my allium soup. Namely, the fact that the day I figured out that most French onion soup is made with beef broth was a very dismal day in my vegetarian life. Once, I was listening to an Australian woman rant about her travels in America. I was with her until she said, “My God, you put cheese on everything! I ordered soup and it came covered in cheese!” That’s the moment I discovered I had nothing more to say to this woman. If you can’t see the beauty in a heap of melted Gruyere, well, then…perhaps you better scoot on back to your former prison colony of a nation.

So when we got a couple big ol’ white onions in our farm share, I looked up a recipe and changed it a little for vegetarians. It involves making big Gruyere-coated croutons that you float on top. This might not be quite as impressive as blanketing the bowl like restaurants do, but it’s easier and it ensures that not a shred of cheese is wasted. Good for a cold? Maybe not, but it’s good for the soul.

Vegetarian French Onion Soup Continue reading →

Umami and the Apple in the Tomato Slayer’s Eye

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oscarmushroom

“Stop embarrassing yourself.”

We have made it through an entire tomato season having only woken up a handful of times to a mauled tomato on the living room floor. This is progress. I think the progress is mostly due to the habit we’ve developed of hiding our tomatoes like Easter eggs rather than any real rehabilitation on the part of Oscar (a.k.a. The Tomato Slayer). But progress nonetheless.

The other day, while Oscar was busy seducing the top of a soy sauce bottle, I hatched a new theory about his unnatural tomato love. Maybe he is so nuts about them because of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that English has hard time capturing in words. Most people say it corresponds to savory, the taste of meat and MSG and ketchup (and…tomatoes?!) A quick Google search had me feeling smug; there were multiple reports of carnivorous housecats attacking non-meat items that are rich in that umami taste, particularly mushrooms. Oscar has never shown a particular taste for mushrooms, even the ones that I grew on my windowsill, but he does have a discriminating palate, so I decided to rehydrate one of our fancy Chinese black mushrooms and run a little experiment. Perhaps I had finally plumbed the secrets of the Tomato Slayer’s inner workings.

But the response was… Continue reading →

A Pepper Reeducation

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blackbeansliders

Black bean sliders with chipotle mayo and all the fixins? Yes, please!

A confession, dear readers: I was recently brought face-to-face with my own alarming level of pepper ignorance. I don’t talk about it in mixed company, of course, and I try to give all peppers the respect they deserve, but I do harbor some latent anti-bell-pepper feelings. But that isn’t the half of it. A couple days ago, I realized that I didn’t know one of my pepper darlings (a model minority pepper, if you will) half as well as I thought I did.

And before you get all high and mighty, take this little test. Is the following statement true or false: the chipotle pepper is a variety of pepper (just like bell peppers, banana peppers, Thai chili peppers, etc.) If you said true, you are WRONG, my friend, as wrong as I was. Chipotle peppers are actually a preparation of pepper, not a varietal. They are jalapeño peppers that have been dried and smoked. I know! Crazy! Our little pal the jalapeño has been going incognito! And he’s been smoking his way into chipotle-dom ever since the reign of the Aztecs.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the mega-successful fast food chain, which is probably the reason most of us learned the word “chipotle” in the first place. I became acquainted with my first massive Chipotle burrito as an undergraduate, and if there is a time in your life when it seems like eating your weight in guacamole might just solve all your problems, then that is it.

chipotlemeco

Meco chipotles

But it wasn’t too long after that when I met the real chipotle and started buying the little cans of chipotles packed in adobo sauce (a marinade of tomatoes, vinegar, spices, etc). These are the easiest ones to score in America; they’re almost certainly in the canned food aisle of your local grocery store. It’s typically the smaller morita kind of chipotles that you find packed into the cans, rather than the larger, smokier, pricier, and more-coveted meco kind. But let’s be honest: meco chipotles look like cigar butts, and I probably wouldn’t quite know what to do with one even if I could find it easily. The canned kind, on the other hand, are super easy to use, and so, so good. If you haven’t yet tried them, here are three terrifically easy ways you can add the smoky kick of the chipotle to your own cooking. Continue reading →

Baking in a Blender

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Pie close-upO come, all ye baking inept, and I will show you the way, for its name is Buttermilk Pie and it will make you feel better about your poor pie-making skills.

Okay, so it’s no secret that I’m not really that great of a baker (see: my idea last year to “bake my way through the alphabet,” during which I gave up at about D when all the good stuff that started with Chocolate was behind me). So when my mother-in-law made us a delicious pie during a visit to Virginia a few weeks ago, I didn’t really harbor any illusions that I would be able to emulate it. Imagine my surprise then, when she sent us the recipe and it actually looked like something I could handle. It involves throwing a lot of things in a blender, and after a summer of making gazpacho and pesto, I am in tip-top blender-operating form. And that’s pretty much it! There’s Bisquick in the blended concoction, which forms a sort of crust, so you don’t even have to pretend that you made the crust yourself. I tried the recipe out last night, and it turned out so tasty that I might even try to engineer a smaller, tartlet version for the Sugar Sweets Festival that is coming up on October 25 (mark your calendars!)

buttermilk pieLet’s give credit where credit is due: the recipe comes from a friend and fellow teacher of my mother-in-law, but the almond kick-it-up-a-notch flourishes are all Katie Leahey. Leave it to teachers to set you on the right path, toward education and pie.

Bonnie Thompson’s Impossible Buttermilk Pie Continue reading →