Posts Tagged ‘Wild Flavors’

28 Feb

Roasted Vegetable Harissa

Posted by wooddogs3 in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Anyone who enjoys the foods of northern Africa is familiar with harissa, the chile-based condiment that often accompanies the meal. It comes in innumerable variations, from a chile-hot thick “broth” ladled into soup or over couscous to a thick paste of chiles (either toasted or not,) vegetables (cooked or not,) seasonings, and oil.

This particular iteration is rather like a thick, textured mayonnaise with the emulsion based on roasted vegetables instead of egg. It‘s a variation on the recipe for Mo’s Harissa in Wild Flavors by Didi Emmons, but Ms. Emmons’s version just dries out the vegetables in a warm oven for a little while, while I like them actually roasted. 
For the hot element, I dip into a small canning jar kept in my refrigerator in which I keep one large or two small cans of chipotles in adobo that have been put through the blender with just enough olive oil to keep the blades turning. It adds a mildly smoky garlicky hot element that makes the harissa taste as if the vegetables were roasted over a wood fire. But you can also use a few toasted ground Guajillo chiles, or a couple of fresh jalapeño chiles roasted with the peppers, or even a heaping spoonful of Kashmiri chile flakes.

I make this in larger batches because we eat a lot of it and I give some away, but you can cut the recipe in half easily.

First, put a teaspoon of cumin seed and half a teaspoon of caraway seed in a small skillet and toast briefly over a medium flame just until the scent comes up. They shouldn’t darken more than a shade. Grind in a spice/coffee grinder or pound thoroughly in a mortar and pestle. Set aside.

Coarsely chop 3-4 cloves of garlic, and chop the stems of a bunch of cilantro. Save the leaves. Set aside.

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Then, start with your bell peppers. While making a run through a big box store I picked up a bag of six bell peppers, two each of red, orange, and yellow. You can use any combination of these colors that you want, and you can substitute a green bell pepper for one of the ripe ones if you want to. Wash the peppers, seed and core them, and cut them in chunks. Put them on a baking sheet. If you want to use fresh jalapeños for the hot element, seed and core one or two, cut in chunks, and add to the bell peppers. If you line the baking sheet with baking parchment, it will make your life easier later on. Roast at 325° for 30 minutes, then put the chopped garlic and chopped cilantro stems on the sheet too and continue roasting to your preferred degree of doneness, which for me is when they have a definitely roasted look as shown below. Keep the garlic by itself so that you can take it off the sheet if it’s browning too fast. Be sure not to let the garlic turn brown or burn.

Now put the roasted peppers, cilantro stems, and garlic in a food processor and process to a chunky paste. Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or a chopped quarter of a preserved lemon and a teaspoon of salt, more or less. Add your chipotle paste or toasted ground chiles if you didn’t use jalapeños. With the processor running, pour in very good olive oil in a slow stream until the texture is the way you want it. It’s hard to say how much oil you will use. Have at least a cup handy, and if you use less, no harm done. I aim for a smooth but textured gloppiness as shown in the top photo, but you could also make it in a blender instead of a food processor and blend it completely smooth if you wanted. Add the ground spices and taste for heat and salt. Adjust if needed. Scrape into a bowl and start putting it on stuff. 
I love cilantro leaves chopped over the top but don’t like the leaves blended into the harissa at all; it makes the texture odd and it doesn’t keep as long. But suit yourself.


I think this harissa has a particular affinity for eggs, and we recently made a quick meal of scrambled eggs and hot buttered basmati rice in a bowl with a lavish amount of harissa and chopped cilantro leaves. Delicious. I also like to make a spicy egg salad with hard-boiled eggs and harissa and pile it on a chunk of good baguette. 

Put a good spoonful alongside a greens borek or on top of horta. Or nearly anywhere else.

12 Apr

A Cookbook to Make You Think: The New Wildcrafted Cuisine

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

 

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Some cookbooks make you cook. The recipes are smart and well-crafted and will clearly work, and you want to run to the kitchen and get started.

Other cookbooks make you think. They are provocative and, at their best, subversive, and expand your possibilities even if you never cook a single recipe.

Today we have a thinking cookbook. When I first looked at this book a few weeks ago it seemed meant to be weird. In fact, it seemed at first to have a self-consciously outré quality that set my teeth on edge. An example: “lemonade” made, not with citrus, but with 2000 lemon ants, a citrusy-tasting ant found in Southern California, crushed and macerated. Surely juicing a lemon would be quicker and better, although the image of some earnest chef-wannabe counting out 2000 lemon ants is an interesting one that will be with me for a while. The author proposes that some fermentations to make vinegar need to get started from the fruit flies that they naturally attract because the little bugs carry something (Acetobacter presumably) that start the conversion to vinegar. Yech. As I see it, fruit flies are why humans invented cheesecloth, and nothing will convince me that they are better fermented than slurped straight-up just as they land in your wineglass, an ingestion that I avoid if at all possible. There are a series of recipes with “forest floor” seasonings composed of grass and leaves found under trees, and I can’t say that I have ever nibbled on a grass that I would consider potentially useful as a seasoning. There are a lot of recipes for lacto-ferments, and having lived through the last lacto-fermenting craze, I am not very enthusiastic about having another one. Lacto-fermented elderflower “beer” might sound elegant but is nowhere near as good as a well-made wine. The current obsession with local terroir in wine often involves mediocre grapes, inferior bottling practices, and determination to drink bad wine because it somehow tastes of the locale, and I thought that author/forager Baudar’s “primitive brews” would be much like that.

In short, I thought that I would pan this book and get on with other things. Instead, after owning it for a few weeks, I keep going back to it and thinking, and gradually realizing how wrong my first impression was. I have seldom encountered a book that makes me think as creatively about possibilities, and this is after reading, foraging, and cooking for decades. Now the lemon-ant lemonade seems, not tricksy and silly and literally intended, but an invitation to explore the possibilities around you in ways that you might never have thought of on your own. In effect, the recipe tells you “Don’t limit yourself. Think about every possibility.”  Bauder’s practice of letting his gaze light on something familiar and spending some time thinking about its culinary possibilities is infecting me with new pleasures and possibilities. Make wild greens kimchee out of whatever greens suit your fancy, and not only enjoy it as is but dehydrate it to use as a seasoning? Sure. Try cold-infusing the deliciously honey-scented goumi blossoms in my front yard to make a drink, as Baudar does with elder flowers and others? Not until my bushes get bigger, but then I will. Put a few of their blossoms on salads now? Of course. The trash Siberian elms that invade the Rio Grande bosque; have I ever thought about whether their scented cambium (inner bark) had any flavoring possibilities if roasted or smoked and infused? Not until I read this book. I like to make verjus from unripe grapes in the summer and enjoy its clean sourness anywhere that I might use lemon juice, but I’ve never thought of juicing other unripe fruits for the same purpose, and I’ll enjoy testing their range of flavors. I may well try roasting outdoors on a hot stone, or cooking something fast and delicate by arranging pine needles and herbs over the food in question and burning them. It has been a decade since I made flavored vinegars for shrubs, but now I will because this book has excited me all over again about the possibilities. And yes, I will certainly be trying “primitive brews” akin to his and experimenting with my local versions of his SoBeers, fizzy low-alcohol concoctions somewhere in between soda and beer. I’ll be tasting my own local grasses and herbs again to test their flavoring possibilities. I’ll be making vinegar-based and fermented hot sauces. I’ll try vinegars flavored with an assortment of my local seeds to grind into a mustard-like condiment. In short, I will view the familiar things around me, with uses that I think I already know, with new excitement and find new uses for them. Once over my initial dubiousness, I began to think that this is one of the most exciting cookbooks that I have read in a very long time. See where it leads you. Odds are that I will never cook a single recipe from it as written, because that isn’t the point.

I trust that it goes without saying (but here it is anyway): YOUR SAFETY IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY when foraging. Study, consult guidebooks, and know for certain what you are about to taste. This book is not a guidebook and will not teach you the safety of your own local plants and animals. Don’t wander around tasting things at random, like a feckless innocent in Not-Eden. That kind of thing gives foraging a bad name.

3 Apr

Wild or Cultivated? Both. Also Delicious.

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, front yard gardening, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , .

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As a general rule, I try not to review cookbooks until I have owned them for at least a year.  I buy them at retail, paying the same price that my readers will eventually pay, and then I read them, cook from them and think about them.   Many cookbooks that seemed very enticing when I first brought them home are relegated to distant shelves a year later.

This one still has a prominent place at my bedside, which is my favorite place for reading and thinking about food. Chef Emmons  writes about a year that she spent cooking from a wildly varied organic vegetable farm, Eva’s Farm.  This farm seems to be doing on a very large scale what I am trying to do on my property on a very small scale, i.e. there is a little bit of everything and no clear line between the cultivated plants and the wildlings.  Lambsquarters and nettles are given the same culinary consideration as spinach and chard, but there is no particular emphasis on their wildness; they’re just there.  This is absolutely as it should be, in my view. The difference between a cultivated plant and a weed is a rather slight one.

The recipes read as an ongoing series of seasonal improvisations on the level of “see it growing, cook it, eat it.”  They certainly work if you want to follow them closely, but in my view are better read as a vision of the garden through the eye of a cook, who might see infinite possibilities but can only cook one of them at a time. There is an emphasis on frugality but not an obsession with it. The use of herbs in lavish free-form ways is a delightful subtext. The sidebars are full of interesting thoughts about farming, cooking, and just being alive. The recipes include meat and dairy products and, in general, everything that might grow on a vegetable farm or be bartered for.

In brief, I love this book, use it, and recommend it. I put it aside this winter, but when the first greens showed above ground, it was back at my bedside. It looks a bit worn and has a food stain on the cover, which tends to distinguish the cookbooks that I read from the ones that I use.