Jars Across America

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Carol

I’ve just returned from a visit back home in Memphis. This time I had the luxury of being able to carry more or less what I wanted when I returned to California because we drove back. The trade-off was not being able to keep good pork products frozen for the several days we spent making our way across the country. That works best with air travel.

But this is about what I DID bring back. For some time now I’ve been eager to stock up on sorghum molasses. I can find molasses in California, but honestly, I wonder where that harsh-tasting stuff comes from (I suspect it’s from a motor oil reclamation facility somewhere on the fringes of the high desert). So I hit Easy Way in Memphis and bought four jars of locally produced sorghum molasses to carry back.

sorghum, the good stuff

Note the address. This sorghum comes from Sweet Lips Road in Finger, Tennessee. And that’s pronounced “Fanger,” in case you didn’t know. For me it just doesn’t get any more down home than this. Sorghum molasses is golden and sweet and rich but not overpowering. It tastes like West Tennessee in a jar and provides me with my very own Proustian experience. It’s divine on hot biscuits, but just between you and me, sometimes I open the jar when nobody’s looking and stick my fingers in and lick them off. Sweet lips AND sweet fangers!

This gave me the idea to collect canned, locally produced sweets along the way as we drove back. Before leaving Memphis I stopped off at the farmers’ market and picked up crabapple jelly, strawberry preserves (having just missed strawberry season) and “Christmas jam,” a combo of strawberries and cranberries (of course I’m assuming the producers have a good deal of their freezer space devoted to those non-local cranberries they’d have to stock up on during the holidays to be making Christmas jam come summertime).

oh the terroir of sweets in a jar…

In the Texas Panhandle I bought a couple of jams, apricot and jalapeño. I don’t expect the jalapeño jam will want to be on my toast, but I have plans to experiment with it and discover all the ways it can best showcase what it has to offer. Stirring a spoonful of apricot jam into a bowl of oatmeal and topping it with a handful of toasted walnuts is what I call five-second-gourmet-breakfast.

In New Mexico I picked up a tiny jar of saguaro honey, which comes from the blossoms of the saguaro cactus, the iconic cactus you see in the Roadrunner cartoons. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I swear I can taste the desert in it.

What’s so special about all this stuff?

It gives you a much better taste of a place than its equivalent from your local gigantomart. And really, that’s no equivalent. Most commercially produced honey is iffy stuff. Having been microfiltered to remove the pollen, it’s impossible to identify the honey’s origin, resulting in a product that could be from anywhere and that could have anything in it, including high fructose corn syrup and antibiotics. Sample a locally-produced honey and, as with wines and other locally produced edibles and drinkables, you’ll taste the place of origin.

As for jams, jellies and preserves, chances are that when you buy these lovely sweets produced in small batches by individuals rather than huge companies, you’ll no doubt taste more fruit than sugar. Perhaps they’ll be made with natural pectin rather than the store-bought stuff that makes the product stiff enough to hold up a spoon. They’ll probably be fresher, too, made recently and not stashed in a warehouse for distribution in the next decade.

strawberry preserves from my old stompin’ grounds

Buying locally made preserves and honey means you’ll be able to find things produced only in that area. Where else but the American Southwest are you likely to find saguaro honey? Someone in Memphis might make preserves from kiwi fruit and meyer lemons bought at the grocery, but it’s just not going to be as good as the jar of kiwi-meyer lemon preserves I recently bought at the North Hollywood Farmers’ Market in LA, made from locally grown fruit picked ripe and used right away (not picked green and shipped across the country).

While I don’t have the palate to distinguish between all the different honeys I’ve tried, my tongue absolutely can tell me when I’m tasting a honey that’s just that–pure honey with no corn syrup added. Sad thing is, so much of the fake stuff is sold these days that a lot of people can’t tell when they’re tasting the real thing. They might actually prefer the fake stuff because it’s all they recognize. Sadder still, such is the case with maple syrup.

While we didn’t have unlimited time and money for scouring the countryside between Memphis and Los Angeles for every homemade preserve and honey out there, it was fun to see what was available at each place we stopped for go-juice, eats and snooze. Rather than the usual t-shirts and assorted flotsam available at every souvenir stand (local themed but mostly made in China), I opted for a taste of the territory.  I’ll enjoy my sweet stash, and when it’s all gone, I can either fill the empties with stuff I’ve made or recycle them. No buyer’s remorse over spending $17.95 on a faux stuffed armadillo wearing a tiny t-shirt that says “I ♥ Texas.”

As for me, I ♥ the preserves I got in Texas.

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My Mother’s Kitchen Knife

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Carol

I’ve just returned from our family farm in Tennessee, where my brother and I sorted through our mother’s possessions and worked to find homes for them all. She’s in assisted living now and has neither the need for nor the mental capacity to use the things she once valued but no longer recognizes as her own.

THE knife

One item I simply had to keep was her kitchen knife. It has seen better days, for sure, but it’s one of those objects that most firmly connects me to the kitchen–and the mother–of my youth.

In some 60 years that knife cut up countless chickens and carved innumerable hunks of beef and pork raised on our farm into useable pieces. It wrought vegetables into sizes appropriate for canning and fruits into bits to fill the jam-making pot. When she asked for it, she wasn’t asking you to hand her A knife, she was asking you to hand her THE knife.

I don’t know who made this workhorse of a tool or where she bought it or when, but it is a simple boning knife. It has no identifiers but contains a carbon steel tang that runs its full length. Ridgy and slightly rusted in spots, the blade sits somewhat loosely in the unfinished wooden handle–I think she put it in the dishwasher in later years, which degraded the wood and loosened its grip on the tang. Still, it has a keener edge than some of the professional-quality blades in my knife block.

Most likely I’ll never use it, but I want to keep this knife all the same. I treasure it, for more than anything else in her house, it reminds me of my mother and of all her years of hard work on our farm. Sure, she taught high school, sewed my clothes until I was big enough to sew them for myself, grew, harvested and put up a garden, was a troop leader when I was a Brownie scout, taught Sunday School, painted uncountable landscapes and still lifes, and helped out on the farm as needed–the list of her activities is endless. But something about this knife defines her for me as nothing else, not even her paintings, can do.

Kitchen knives speak of authority. In my mother’s hand this knife could accomplish darn near anything, and it enabled her to accomplish darn near everything. She used it so much that sometimes it seemed an extension of her right arm and was so proficient with it that it was the only knife she ever needed.

Essentially an old kitchen tool that has outlived its usefulness, this knife is worth nothing, yet it is priceless. It is something I had to drive cross country with, since I couldn’t fly with it in my carry-on luggage, and checking it or mailing it would only tempt the fates to let it go missing forever. No amount of insurance on such a parcel could compensate for its value to me if it were lost.

The knife now rests with a dozen others in my wooden block here in Los Angeles. I think it rather puts all the others to shame–certainly it has seen more work than the lot of them combined ever will. When I crab about the trivial annoyances in my relatively easy life, I hope that its presence will remind me of the dignity and the rightness of hard work and of the grace my mother always displayed in doing it.

Perhaps this is the value of holding on to things that have outlasted their practical use–that they’ll become tokens of what we hope to emulate once their original users are gone. At least that’s what keeping my mother’s well-worn knife is doing for me.

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Garbanzo Beans: Old Friends/New Friends

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Carol

 

freshly-shelled garbanzo beans

When it comes to garbanzo beans, a.k.a. chickpeas, I’ve always been like your average city kid to milk. “It comes from the grocery,” the child is likely to respond when you ask, “Where does cow juice come from?” Even though I know garbanzo beans are grown somewhere, somehow, my experience with them has always required either a can opener or long soak.

Sad to say, the exposure most people in middle America have to garbanzo beans has been to find them raw on a salad bar, where they languish in abject dullness. Garbanzos are marvelously versatile, but basic northern European stock in America (that’s me!) has never really known what to do with them. It took people from other hemispheres and climates to tell us that they’re good in hummus, falafel, papadum and the like. They’re high in protein and fiber, low in cholesterol and fat, and a great choice if you’re trying to wean yourself off animal sources of protein.

I’m betting that most of us have never even seen fresh garbanzo beans. I hadn’t until recently, when I was browsing in a Mexican market in East Los Angeles. Casting a curious eye toward the mound of unfamiliar short, fat pods in the produce department, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, so I broke one open and taa-daa! There was a soft little green garbanzo inside. As is my custom when I make a discovery like this, I scooped some into a bag and brought them home to play with.

garbanzos & their pods

While they shell easily, you get only one or two beans per pod, so it takes awhile to amass an amount sufficient for a meal–as it turned out, I’d bought only enough for a snack. It’s best to buy a bunch and get together with friends or family to do your shelling, like we used to do when I was a kid back home with bushel baskets full of black-eyed peas. Shelling is best done socially, for the time passes quickly and the job gets done as you catch up on all the news and gossip. Many hands make light work, as the ol’ saying goes.

garbanzos, ready to munch

I simmered these fresh garbanzos in a little salted water for about 15 minutes, drained them, and then sautéed them in some olive oil and tossed them with a Mexican seasoning of lemon, garlic and cayenne. Of course you can use whatever seasoning you like. We munched them all away before there was time to plan anything else for them. But they’d have been good tossed over salad or pasta, or perhaps stirred into risotto at the end of the cooking.

Next time I lay my hands on some fresh garbanzos I want to try making a fresh green hummus of them, to really enjoy their freshness. In fact, the flavor of fresh garbanzos was a huge surprise to me. Dried and canned garbanzos have a subdued flavor, but when they’re fresh, you get more of their green-ness, if that makes any sense. I guess what I’m trying to convey is that you can taste their having once been attached to a living plant. That’s easy to miss when you’re eating them dried, and especially when you eat them from a can, when they tend to taste more like the can!

If you can lay your hands on some fresh garbanzos, by all means give them a try, and pick up enough to make Chef Gregory Clausen’s fresh garbanzo hummus.

Bonus trivia: The Arabic word for this bean is “hummus,” so when you order hummus, technically you’re just ordering garbanzo beans. That’s why menus in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern restaurants usually say hummus bi tahini, which is the addictive sesame-rich dip that pitas seem to find their way into so effortlessly.

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Sorbet For Your Psyche

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Carol

Recently I was invited to write a guest blog for the Inkpunks. Even though I’m a food writer, not a science fiction/fantasy writer, they must have decided that I’d have something of benefit to say to their readership. I sure hope so!

Anyway, I thought I’d share this blog entry with you as well…my thoughts on cleansing the creative palate.

Cheers!

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A Soufflé Is Just Breakfast With An Attitude

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Carol

Taa-daa!

As I put the finishing touches on my contribution to an upcoming fundraising auction—a soufflé cooking lesson and dinner, complete with a basket filled with gear for making soufflés—I’ve been jotting down some notes on the subject and decided to share them with you. Just in case you’ve never made a soufflé. Just in case you’re one of those people who have despaired of ever making a soufflé because…what? Because it might come crashing down like King Kong plummeting from atop the Empire State Building?

Let’s not be so dramatic. For starters, all the hype about falling soufflés is grossly overblown. You don’t have to tiptoe around the house, speaking in whispers and leaving doors open that you’d be slamming if not for the soufflé in the oven. (If a loud noise could destroy a soufflé, this one would have been a goner after our Prima Donna paraded into the kitchen and meowed long and loud in her robust Wagnerian manner.) What will destroy a soufflé in the making is cold air. That means don’t open the oven door for about 20 minutes after you put it in there–it needs this much time for the structure to set up. Simple, eh? You can even let it sit for an hour or two after you assemble it before baking. A soufflé accommodates you and your schedule, not the other way around.

So what if your soufflé does collapse? It won’t lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it. We’re talking about a pittance in ingredients that, even if they lose their lift, will still taste just fine. If you want to serve a soufflé at a dinner party then, yes, by all means practice a time or two beforehand. But pleeeze don’t let a pouffy bowlful of eggs, milk, butter and cheese intimidate you. Try thinking of a soufflé as an omelet with an ego.

In case you’re concerned about what’s at stake if your soufflé falls, I priced out a basic cheese soufflé (using measurements from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking), so you’ll see that the investment in this dish is minimal. These prices are based on a trip to the grocery closest to my house in the Los Angeles area, one that has neither the highest nor the lowest prices in my neighborhood:

5 large eggs                                     $1.04 (@ $2.50/1 doz. lg. eggs)

1 cup milk                                        .50 (@ .99/pint)

3 oz. cheese (Gruyere)                  $3.75 (@ $9.99/half pound)

3 Tbsp. + 1 tsp. butter (< 2 oz.)   .38 (@ $2.99/pound)

3 Tbsp. flour (appr. 1 oz.)             .06 (@ $1.99/2-pound bag)

1/2 tsp. salt                                      .01 (nominal charge)

1/8 tsp. black pepper                     .01 (nominal charge)

a pinch of nutmeg                          .01 (nominal charge)

The grand total for the ingredients in one cheese soufflé that serves four people is $5.74. If you and your significant otter stop in at Starbucks for a couple of lattes you’ll spend more than that. You’ve probably spent more on a magazine–or on the wrong shade of lipstick. (And if you still have your calculator out, a little quick math will show you that a $5.74 soufflé will feed four people for $1.44 each in ingredients. How’s that for economy?! La-di-da dish indeed…)

Like most things you learn to do, the soufflé gets easier to make the more you practice. And the better the results are (by the way, an oven thermometer will go a long way toward ensuring good results). And the freer you feel to experiment with it, so that you can develop your own signature soufflé.

Here’s the “before” photo, to give you an idea how much it rose. This soufflé has some extra ingredients that weighed it down a bit, which I think is the reason it came out looking a little like a space alien.

What if it turns out looking like the one at the top of this blog entry? It’s a little whomperjawed, I know. I selected this picture to assure you that even if it doesn’t turn out looking like it’s ready for its close up, Mr. DeMille, it’s still a fine, lovely thing. A tasty thing. A thing worth having with a little salad and a crisp white wine. A thing worth enjoying with a cloth napkin and a lighted candle. And with someone you like.

If you’re ready to give it a try, check out my pal Molly Wizenberg’s take on one of Julia’s cheese soufflé recipes.

And remember: even if it falls, it will still taste good. Maybe you can even have a competition amongst your friends, to see who can produce the ugliest soufflé. If you do, send me some pictures, okay?! I’ll put up an “ugly soufflé gallery” right here on my blog.

Deal?

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