Sammy's Dot

Every cuisine, I’ve come to believe, has some variation of bread folded around a filling: ban mi, panzerotti, calzones, sub sandwiches, po’ boys, felafel in pitas, the infinite variability of tacos and enchiladas, etc. etc. etc. (And if they didn’t start out with one, they invent one fast – I’ve got a real weakness for the naan wraps the Indian place in my university food court makes …) I consider dumplings – jiaozi, gyoza, momos, potstickers – to be a closely related category, and similarly, it’s a format found in the widely variant cuisines of many cultures. This month, the Daring Cooks went in for a variety of dumpling that took me back to my own roots, or at least some of them (kinda, sorta, more or less): we made pierogi.

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

Now, as I understand the migrations of my paternal grandmother’s family (the branch most associated with the pierogi-eating parts of the world), they were German Catholics who spent some time living in Russia, elected to move to Argentina to avoid joining the Tsar’s armies, went back to Germany, and thence to the Canadian prairies (where my grandmother was born), where they were surrounded by Ukrainians. So, while it’s not entirely clear to me whether pierogis are a traditional German food, at least my family lived in pierogi-eating parts of the world for a good long time.

However, just because we’ve got some history with the pierogi doesn’t mean I felt constrained to try to recreate the Russian- or Polish-style pierogi, though I did take some inspiration from there.

I started by making (small-ish) quantities of four different fillings, to give myself some direction as well as some variety. I do really love the mashed potato fillings and so I had to try that, but I added some garlic and black pepper to the fried onion, and skipped most of the cheese – instead of an entire cup of dry cottage cheese, I went with a few tablespoons of finely grated sharp cheddar. I also made a cabbage filling, but instead of sauerkraut I used the mustardy smothered cabbage recipe from Vegan Soul Kitchen. I also made a few pierogi using the sauteed jalapeno corn from the same book. Finally, thinking of the mushroom “caviar” I’ve made once to top buckwheat pancakes, I concocted a mushroom-and-shallot filling with a slug of red wine vinegar. We ultimately fried them in a bit of butter after boiling, and ate them with some good bacon, sour cream, and chives snipped from one of my plants. Along with a gigantic spinach salad to make me feel like the meal approximated some balance.

DC pierogi – filling collage by tariqata

The best of the four fillings, by far, were the potato-onion-cheese filling, and the cabbage; the mushrooms were tasty, but had a tendency to slide out of the pierogi shell, and the flavour of the (otherwise delicious) jalapeno corn was overwhelmed. So, when I was prevailed upon to join a friend’s freezer swap, I went with the potato and cabbage pierogis – and have since concluded that, delicious though they are, folding 150-odd pierogis is just about the most time-consuming job I can imagine. I’ll definitely be making pierogis again in the future – just not as a main meal for twelve. And next time, I’ll save the jalapeno corn for a meal where it can shine, and serve the mushrooms on top of the pierogis.

DC pierogi – f ried pierogies by tariqata

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(Note: I did take pictures. I even think they are good pictures. If only I could find my camera cable… Hopefully they’ll be up shortly!)

I like peanut butter cookies a lot, but that is (or was) about the extent of my experience in cooking with nut butters. Well, that and peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which are infinitely superior to PB&J and which I happily ate every day for breakfast and lunch when I was little. But I suppose one really can’t count either as “cooking”. This month, the Daring Cooks challenge was intended to break us all out of that rut: the goal was to prepare one or more recipes using a nut butter, ideally homemade.

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

Unfortunately, this month the usual sweltering Toronto summer descended – in spades. Day upon day of 30-plus highs, combined with the humidity that makes it feel more like 40, does not in any way inspire me to turn on the stove. Fortunately, our gracious hosts had suggested recipes for a lovely dip that was reminiscent of hummous – and yet at the same time, entirely different – which, with some vegetable crudités and grilled focaccia, made for a perfectly satisfying dinner, as well as a fantastically good cold rice noodle salad with a kicky cashew-butter based dressing. To round things out, with this week’s slightly lower temperatures I fulfilled an old ambition and put together my own interpretation of butter chicken (albeit using paneer), in a riff on the posted recipe for chicken in a curried tomato-almond sauce.

Thoughts upon completion? I’ve never made a habit of buying nut butters, as aside from the usual peanut butter they’re rather expensive, and so never cooked much with them. It’s really good to know now how easy it is to make them in small quantities at home – at least, it’ll be easy so long as my mini-chopper’s motor holds out – and I’ll certainly re-visit the salad and the dip. I played around with the flavourings in both, and more so with the dip, but the bones of both recipes were great. The makhani sauce needs some tweaking, and oh, how I wish I’d asked a former co-worker of mine for her recipe when I had the chance; I know she used cashews and no dairy, but the rest is a mystery. Too, to me it’s a winter dish; the name “butter chicken” doesn’t exactly imply “light”, which is what I want when all I can do is make like Sputnik and sprawl (poor kitty had a much harder time with the heat and humidity than we humans). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve come to a turning point in my cooking.

As a mostly vegetarian cook (cooking chicken or fish perhaps once or twice in a month), I don’t have to deal with squicky ingredients as a general rule. Although looking back many of the recipes I’ve featured here have involved chicken, my go-to non-Daring cooking is much, much more likely to be a variation of masur dal or chana masala. I usually work two or three rice and bean meals into my grocery lists – and I could go on for months without repeating myself. I like this style of cooking not just because it’s delicious, filling, and cheap, but because I’m a wimp. Dried chickpeas have no fat or bones or gristle or scales or shells to be trimmed away. So when the Daring Cooks came up with pâté for the June challenge, the gauntlet was really thrown down. I wasn’t inspired by the vegetarian tri-colour pâté (combining white beans, roasted red peppers, and pesto), and I was not at all sure that I could handle a liver pâté (nor was I sure that I could convince the fellow to eat it!), but the shrimp and trout pâté seemed challenging yet edible. And then someone mentioned that bánh mì are often made with pâté, and I knew how I was going to meet the challenge requirements.

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

I decided it was time to roll up my sleeves and prove that, grossed out or not, I could peel a shrimp just as easily as I could make bread – in this case, Vietnamese-style mini-baguettes, following a recipe from HomeBaking.

And if this month’s Daring Cooks challenge taught me anything at all, it’s that shrimp have way too many legs. And removing those legs is an icky process. But hey, I can do it. (I’m not going to go this far just yet though. Somebody else deal with the heads!) In the end, I didn’t love the trout and shrimp pâté, finding it simply too rich to want to eat more than a few bites even when worked into a sandwich, but I did a) learn how to peel a shrimp, b) flambé for the first time, and c) try a recipe for a broccoli and nut terrine and make crackers as well. So thanks are due to Valerie and Evelyne!

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But the return of the fella and our subsequent move into our new digs (over the course of many trips in a borrowed mini-van) kept me busy over the last month. So here, to make amends to any loyal readers and the dedicated spambots:

See you tomorrow, with something more substantial!

Continuing my newfound obsession with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and more specifically their book HomeBaking, I’ve been playing around with coarse semolina: an ingredient that I previously associated only with the porridge an old roommate of mine used to make. And while there’s nothing wrong with porridge, it’s hard to get as excited over a bowl of porridge as one might over a slice of a moist cake bursting with lemon.

My roommate, as I recall, didn’t bake, but I think if she’d tried this, she would have loved it. I love it so much that I’ve made it three times over the past month, though for different groups of people, and I’m looking forward to the next occasion I have to make it. I do bake the occasional multi-layered celebration cake – I’m working my way through Sky High! – but this simple cake is the kind of cake I like best.

That is, the kind of cake that you can eat with your hands as easily as you can eat it with a fork, and the kind of cake that needs nothing at all to make it more delicious.

Next time, I might add a cinnamon stick or a few crushed cardamom pods to the syrup that the cake is soaked with, or switch out the lemon for orange, or try mixing in some pistachios or walnuts or replace some of the semolina with ground almonds – there are so many possibilities, and every one of them delicious. But these changes would only be for the joy of experimenting with new flavours and textures.

That’s what I find most enjoyable about HomeBaking, and that’s one reason why I can’t wait to add it to my cookbook collection: I have always tried to be adventurous with the flavours and ingredients that I cook with, but I think my baking may have fallen into a rut. I can whip up a batch of biscuits or a pie crust from memory because I do it so often, but I don’t think that I ever made a syrup-soaked cake before this, though it’s a common thing to do in some parts of the world, just as I’d never thought to use coconut to add texture to banana bread.

It’s good to be reminded of the incredibly wide world of flavours and techniques, and Alford and Duguid do it so well.

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I am a big, big fan of enchiladas as a concept – spicy sauce, tasty filling, cheese, tortillas, what’s not to love? However, I can’t swear to the authenticity of any of the enchiladas I’ve ever made. One of my favourite recipes involves a mess of corn and roasted red peppers and spinach tossed together with cottage cheese, and a cheater’s sauce made of bottled salsa and cream. (In my defense, this combination is really delicious and really quick to put together. And I do make enchiladas with many other fillings, too.)

This month’s Daring Cooks challenge – stacked green chile and chicken enchiladas (though I’ve always called this a tortilla strata and saved the term “enchiladas” for tortillas rolled around the filling and baked) was an excellent opportunity to revisit the dish and strive for authenticity.

Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

I decided to finally take my grandmother up on her offer to let me borrow her tortilla press (I think it may be a permanent loan!) and make my own corn tortillas. My first attempt at this, a few years ago, was a miserable failure, but I was ready to try again. I visited the Perola Supermarket in Kensington for masa harina, fresh tomatillos, and poblano chilies. If anyone found Anaheim chilies in Toronto, I’d love to know where!

I also made a second batch for the fellow’s family, using chicken chorizo, potatoes, and mushrooms for the filling, with a spicy tomato-based sauce. I have no pictures, but I’ll have to sit down and figure out exactly what I put into it, because it was really good too.

I served both versions of the enchiladas with the Mexican red rice from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Seductions of Rice – at some point soon I’ll write that up as a post in itself, because it’s a book that deserves some dedicated attention.

Barbara and Bunnee, thanks for another wonderful challenge!

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I admit that not all university professors are created equal when it comes to grading. For sure, I’ve had a better experience in the (much tinier) Faculty of Environmental Studies at York than I ever did in the (gigantic) Psychology Department at the University of Toronto.

But I really, really don’t think that the answer to profs who don’t have time to grade students’ work effectively, or who just find it boring, is to outsource grading to India. This has nothing to do with the quality of work that the people hired by this company do; I have no doubt that it is high. But constructive commentary on a single paper is not enough to replace an effective professor or teaching assistant.

Last year, I got a B on my first essay for environmental politics. It hurt; I worked hard on that paper, and it was the only non-A I got last year. I determined to get an A on the second essay, and I did – but I know that part of the reason I was able to improve my work was that I didn’t just go by the comments my TA gave me on the first paper. I went back to her and talked to her about the outline for my second paper in light of those comments. And because she knew me, she knew the work that I had done in the past, and she knew what I was currently working on, she was able to offer helpful criticism before I submitted the paper.

And moreover, that was her job. That’s part of the academic apprenticeship of a teaching assistant position: learning how to gauge a student’s ability and progress and how to help that student improve. I know perfectly well that most full professors do not do their own grading, but I am also well-aware that they supervise their TAs, often quite closely, to help them and help their undergraduate students. It’s a hard job, I know. I spent more than two hours yesterday going over a friend’s application to grad school and giving him feedback on how to make it better. But I think I learned from doing that too. When I start graduate school next year, I want to have the opportunity to learn teach, not just to research; what good is my research if I can’t share what I learn?

This isn’t something that can or should be outsourced. It saddens me that any professor sees so little value in their role as a teacher.

My experience of traditional English puddings – which are not anything like the foods that I think of as puddings, starting with the fact that they’re traditionally steamed or boiled – is limited to the sticky toffee pudding my aunt made for Christmas Eve dinner this year, and the demonstration of Christmas pudding-making that I saw at Spadina House when I was a kid. Appropriately, that demonstration was in July.

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

This is only my third Daring Baker’s challenge, but there’s no doubt that so far, this is the one that’s required me to step the most beyond what’s familiar to me. Fortunately, although Esther recommended using suet to make the puddings more authentic, it wasn’t a requirement (my semi-vegetarian, health conscious family thanks her), and as it turns out, steaming a pudding isn’t hard. It merely takes some improvisation. Thanks to Audax, my mother’s crockpot immediately suggested itself as an excellent steaming apparatus, combined with a couple of pyrex bowls and a wadded up dishtowel. Getting the bowls out of the crockpot after the puddings were cooked was a scary process, but there were, happily, no disasters.

Since I had not had any idea that one could steam a pie – and certainly I had no idea that it would turn out deliciously – I knew I was going to do at least one version in a pastry crust. I opted for savoury, because we love lentil and vegetable pie with mushroom gravy in this house. Just to be different, though, since I wasn’t going to use suet, I used coconut oil instead of butter – with excellent results. And I had to do a sponge version too, because who doesn’t love cake? The only requirement I had for the sponge version was that it incorporate dulce de leche, which I’ve fallen in love with in a big way ever since a classmate brought some amazing coconut-crusted macaron-type cookies filled with it to our end-of-year potluck. After the coconut-banana bread I’d made the week before, combining the two was as natural as breathing.

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It’s hard to believe that, until a week or two ago, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid were flying completely beneath my radar, despite the fact that they live in Toronto and that Mangoes and Curry Leaves has been on my Indigo wishlist since forever. Apparently the book caught my eye, but the names of the authors never registered. I can be kind of oblivious sometimes.

Then I got the book out of the library, because I’m on a bit of a self-imposed book-buying diet, for reasons of cost and space. (This means that expensive and space-occupying cookbooks are right out, and I’m limiting myself to three or four used paperbacks per month. Which is about two to three days worth of reading material. Given the limitations of the local library’s science fiction section, I have a small problem.)

Then I went back to the library and borrowed as many of their other books as I could get my hands on.

Now I’m going to have to acquire all of the couple’s books, even if it takes me some time. And while I’m really enjoying Mangoes and Curry Leaves, as well as Seductions of Rice, and I’ve tried several recipes from each, HomeBaking is the one that’s moved to the top of my list. It’s the banana bread that did it, although I plan to share one more recipe from the book before I (sadly) let the library have it back. (I’m getting anxious for my next opportunity to splurge on cookbooks now, I must say.)

I’ve made quite a few banana bread recipes over the years (that being my favourite way to eat bananas), and Alford and Duguid’s recipe is, hands down, the best one I’ve ever eaten. It’s not the healthiest version, but one must face up to the fact, as I have, that while it’s called banana bread it is in fact a banana cake. “Healthy” is not a requirement. A perfect tight moist crumb packed with banana flavour is. This one delivers in a big way.

And seriously, how is it that I’ve never before encountered a banana bread recipe with shredded coconut? Because that addition is sheer genius. It adds texture and flavour without overpowering the banana-ness the way chocolate chips do, and without making the bread dry the way whole wheat flour or oatmeal might. The sprinkling of demerera sugar before baking is – rather literally – icing on the cake.

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