Beyond 52 Cuisines: #53 Basque

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Carol

Hey-ho, I told you we’re not finished with these cuisines! The world is a huuuuuge place and its foods and flavors, practically unlimited.

This month we set our sights on the cuisine of the Basque country, the region of southwestern France and northwestern Spain that loves bullfighting, gourmet club and Basque autonomy. The least volatile of these three things to talk about is gourmet club, so we’re in safe waters here. The Basque not only love to eat and drink, but they enjoy doing all the planning, gathering, cooking and cleaning together as well.

For our anniversary earlier this month, Himself and I decided to stay in and cook a feast, sort of our own private Basque gourmet club. I’ve been toying with the idea of visiting Harmony Farms in La Crescenta once a month to pick up some sort of wild game or exotic meat that I can’t find in the local market, something I don’t often cook–perhaps some meats I’ve yet to try cooking. This looked like a good time to begin that enterprise while indulging in the next cuisine. So we toddled on up to Harmony Farms to peruse our options. In addition to hormone-, pesticide- and radiation-free meats and soy products, they carry a dizzying array of meats that you don’t find just anywhere. It’s a great place to rummage and plot and scheme over your next special dinner menu.

We’ve fixed pheasant a few times before, always with the extra ingredient of buckshot. It’s so nice not to have that component this time. Dinner should never be capable of setting off a metal detector!

The mélange of flavors in the Basque pheasant recipe I found in a book called Dressing and Cooking Wild Game blends the zing of green olives and capers with the rich sweetness of prunes and brown sugar. Sounds odd, but this combination works. I cut up the pheasant and gave it an all-day soak in a marinade of white wine, white wine vinegar, olive oil, brown sugar, prunes, green olives, capers, garlic, bay leaf and basil. This combination of flavors reminds me of what is known as “Old California” cuisine with its Spanish influences, in which a single dish might include olives, onion, raisins and oregano, giving the dish a happy intensity of aromatics, umami, saltiness, sourness and sweetness. Essentially, all parts of the tongue get something to excite them.

While pheasant is more or less the same size and shape as a chicken, cutting and eating it is more of a challenge, because pheasant is much leaner and more muscular. Its flesh clings more tenaciously to the bone, even after it has been cooked sufficiently. It was quite tasty, and our sofa lions all paraded in, trilling, leg-rubbing and kneecap smooching, eager to convince us they hadn’t eaten in many days. There was plenty of pheasant for everyone, and the pusses didn’t seem to mind the bits of caper and herbs clinging to their allotment.

The cuisine of the Basque territory contains a lot of potato dishes and features a dish called pipérade, a blend of cooked sweet peppers and tomatoes (by the way, the three primary ingredients in this dish show just how ingrained the foods of the Americas are in this region). The potatoes are baked in a pipérade of red and yellow bell peppers, shallots and lots of fresh herbs, which season the creamy fingerlings and give them a glorious aroma as well. It’s a good idea to make this dish in a generous quantity so you can enjoy it for several days. Himself suggested using the leftover potatoes the next morning in a frittata. That would have been a grand idea if we hadn’t gobbled them all up with total abandon. Next time we’ll make more than we can eat in a single sitting.

We topped our salad of baby spinach greens with a creamy and intensely garlicky dressing and some chopped hard-cooked egg. I want to try some of the leftover dressing over cooked spinach sometime. It should be quite good. You can fine tune the amount of garlic you use–this recipe calls for both fresh garlic and garlic powder. But the Basque way is to use a heavy hand when adding garlic to the mix. I have no problem with that!

A favorite meal finisher is some fresh fruit with a local cheese, such as idiazabal. If I hadn’t been too lazy to go to the cheese store, that’s what we’d have had (and then there’s the fact that to save my life I can’t leave a fromagerie with only one cheese). While the Basques aren’t huge on dessert, they do have a fondness for custard and custard-filled tarts. So for dessert we made Basque crème, a.k.a. natillas. It is essentially a cooked crème anglaise, made with generous use of cinnamon. The resulting crème is quite thick, and the instructions say to thin it out at service by stirring in more heavy crème. Considering how much heavy crème, along with eggs and sugar, is already in there, I choked. I just couldn’t do it. Probably a good thing. Himself and I have enjoyed a spoonful each after meals the past couple of days. It’s so rich that that’s all we really want or need. Natillas is certainly made to savor, it’s so rich and flavorful.

The nice thing about all these dishes is that they can be enjoyed as part of a regular meal. It’s not like you have to announce that you’re having a specially-planned Basque dinner to enjoy them.

Following is the recipe for Basque pheasant. If you can’t lay your hands on a pheasant, chicken works just fine, too. You’ll still get the distinctive blend of flavors that speak of this region:

Cut up one bird, arrange it in a single layer in a 13-by-9-inch baking dish, and pour over it the following marinade: In a medium-sized bowl stir together 3 Tbsp. brown sugar, 3 oz. white wine, 1/4 cup olive oil and 1/4 cup white wine vinegar. Then stir in 2 minced cloves of garlic, 1 bay leaf, 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley, 2 Tbsp. dried basil leaves, 1/2 cup pitted medium prunes and 1/2 cup pitted medium green olives. Pour this mixture over pheasant pieces and cover the dish with plastic wrap. Refrigerate overnight–or all day–turning the pieces a couple of times.

Preheat oven to 350°F, remove plastic wrap and bake bird uncovered until it is tender, turning once. Baking should take about one hour, depending on the size of the bird. Remove bird, olives and prunes to a serving dish and, if desired, spoon pan juices over it before serving.

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Distinctive Weekend Cocktails

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Carol

Himself, a.k.a. Hungry Passport’s husband, a.k.a. Andrew Penn Romine is taking on a new challenge in his blog. Each Friday he plans to write about a different cocktail–not your run-o-the-mill stuff (and no, rum & Coke is NOT a cocktail. Neither is 7 & 7. Neither is anything made with jug mix–all of which are liquid versions of fast food). It’s about hearkening back to the classics, the first entry being the cognac sazerac. I’ll let him fill you in on the details. So please visit Ink Gorilla to find out what you should be mixing and drinking each weekend.

And if you’re encouraged to start some serious cocktail mixing beyond each Friday’s offering, I suggest you pick up a copy of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, by Ted Haigh, a.k.a. Dr. Cocktail. It’s history in a glass, tasty tasty history.

Himself behind the bar
 
Cheers!
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Report from the Deep Freeze: I HEART Bigos!

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Carol

Yesterday I pulled a container of bigos out of the freezer and moved it into the fridge so I could have it for lunch today. Now it’s lunchtime, and I’m in heaven.

In case you don’t recall, while reporting on Polish cuisine during week #49 of my “52 Cuisines in 52 Weeks” adventure, I made a big pot of bigos filled with beef, Polish sausage, sauerkraut and mushrooms. It’s addictive stuff, and I love it cold. I just put it into a pretty bowl today so it would photograph better than in the deli cup I froze it in–and out of which I was eating it while standing in the open refrigerator door when it occurred to me I should tap out a blog entry about it. If it weren’t in the 90s today, I’d heat it and have it with some mashed potatoes. But it’s good to know that Poland’s classic “hunter stew” is not only edible straight out of the fridge, but PRIMO served cold.

And here’s something I already knew but that was reinforced for me today: When you make a big batch of something with the intent of freezing part of it, and it’s something you know tastes better a few days after it’s made, then wait a few days after you make it before you freeze it. This way it will be at the peak of flavor when you’re ready to eat it, whenever that might be.

I neglected to include a recipe in the Polish cuisine blog entry, so I’ll do it now. I apologize for the oversight. While there are many ways to make bigos–and as a hunter’s stew it accommodates most any sort of meat you want to chuck into it–what follows is a good basic way to make it.

Bigos

Soak 4 ounces of dried mushrooms in warm water for between 30 minutes and an hour, until they’re completely hydrated. Squeeze water out of mushrooms and set them aside (strain any remaining grit from this mushroom broth and keep the broth to make soup another time).

While the mushrooms are hydrating, dice one large onion and set aside. Cut a pound of meat(s) of your choice into bite-sized pieces, along with two Polish sausages and 6 ounces of bacon.

Melt a tablespoon of lard (I used bacon drippings, but you can use canola or vegetable oil if you must) in a large, thick pot and brown the meat, sausage and bacon. Then add in the diced onion and cook until transparent. Add the mushrooms and a pound of strained sauerkraut to the pot and enough beef broth to cover it all. Sprinkle in some caraway seeds and a tiny bit of sugar. And a splash of red wine. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let simmer for about 30 minutes.

Taste to see if it might need a bit more salt (the kraut and sausages may give you as much as you want) and season with salt and black pepper as desired.

Serve hot, cold or room temperature.

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The Imposter in the Garden

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Carol

The healthiest plant in my garden these days–and for quite some time now–is what is known as a curry plant. This frosty-green perennial is available for purchase at the gardening center alongside herbs like oregano, thyme, parsley, tarragon and sage. While, I’ve never known what to do with it, I’ve been happy to let it coexist with all the other herbs that regularly make their way into whatever I happen to be cooking.

 While the aroma of the curry plant is vaguely similar to that of a generic curry of some sort, no curry seasoning blends actually contain this plant. Recipes for curry are innumerable, with each cook possessing the secrets to family favorites. Different spice blends lend themselves to particular dishes, whether based on chicken, fish, vegetables or tofu, and to different seasons as well. Some curry blends make you sweat and cool you off in summer, while others help keep you warm in winter. Most curries include some combination of cinnamon, coriander, cumin, nutmeg, fennel seed, cardamom, fenugreek, turmeric, saffron, tamarind and quite a number of other spices and flavorings. But no curry plant.

Yesterday I finally became curious enough to do a little research and find out what this plant really is and how to use it. I discovered that we have an imposter in our midst. It turns out that this plant has neither culinary nor medicinal qualities. Except for its use in potpourris and wreaths, it does nothing to merit the space it takes up in the garden. I realized that I’ve been had by a plant! How sad is that? I fumed about this at dinner.

“I’m going to rip that plant out of the ground and throw it into the dumpster tomorrow,” I told Himself. “I feel like going out there with a flashlight and pulling it up right NOW!”

“Feeling just a bit vengeful, are we?” he chuckled.

So I picked a frond of the pretender and nibbled a bit of it. Not much flavor, really, just enough chlorophyll to let me know I was chewing on a plant. Then I slept on it (on my decision, not on the plant. Sheesh, you readers!). In spite of its dishonest ways, it is greenery, and it does smell nice. It’s pretty, too and one of the few things thriving in my deserty backyard.

Oh, what the hell? For now, the imposter stays.

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Home From the Greenbrier: A Retrospective

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Carol

 How do I sum up the Greenbrier experience?

I’ve perused the writings of my fellow attendees of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier during the past few days. Their reflections are comprehensive, coherent and helpful, while I still don’t know what to say. I’m not inclined to merely parrot their observations or roll out a series of photos of everything we ate, since the focus was on food writing and publishing, not simply on food. In fact, I was leery of paying too much attention to the food itself for fear I’d miss out on the meat (so to speak) of the Symposium.

Instead of blathering on about it, I’ll let three photos speak for me:

 The attention to detail was striking, all the way down to the chocolates on our tables in our meeting room. Notice how each one is arranged just so, with the wrappers placed facing outward? No detail was too small to escape their attention. On my bed were four pillows: a soft one for stomach sleepers, a medium one for back sleepers, a firm one for side sleepers and a feather pillow for me! I built a fort out of them, burrowed in each night and slept the sleep of the happily overwhelmed.

Speaking of happily overwhelmed, breakfast on the final morning featured this knock-your-socks-off presentation of pork, a chunky and succulent homemade sausage wrapped in a perfect latticework of bacon. The ungenerous, antisocial part of me wanted to snatch it away and sit in the corner alone and eat it all.

I didn’t do that, you’ll be happy to know. The company was too good and the conversation too rich, to do such a thing. I have more friends and professional associates than I had before I went, people whose talent, work and opinions I value. People I can turn to for advice, and for whom I’ll gladly provide the same. We writers do not exist in a bubble. We need each other’s insights, generously given. At the Symposium, I hit the mother lode.

self portrait

I love this painting of a drooling pig, hung just outside the entrance to the main dining room at the Greenbrier. It pretty much sums up the way I feel about my experience there, both personally and professionally–happy, but hungry for more.

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