Southern Unami

The culinary world identifies five basic flavors, salty, savory, sweet, sour and unami.  We generally understand the first four but the fifth is a little more difficult to explain....for some folks.  However if you enjoy Southern food, the unami experience begins with a green tomato.

The drought of 2012 has hit the midwest hard.  Farmers are plowing under dead and dying crops.  Backyard gardens struggle without decent rainfall.  Watering is fine but there are nutrients in rainwater you just can't get from your faucet.  A friend had to pull out some of his tomato plants due to disease to the foliage.  But what to do with the tiny, little green tomatoes?  Don't waste them, email the fried green tomato freak to COME AND GET'EM!!

Fried green tomatoes are simplicity.  Fill a plastic bag with equal parts flour and cornmeal.  Slice your  tomatoes roughly the same thickness so that they fry evenly.  Place the slices in the plastic bag with your flour/cornmeal mixture and shake so that your slices are evenly coated.  Heat oil in a cast iron skillet.  I use a mixture of bacon grease, canola oil and lard but you can use straight  canola or peanut oil.  Once the oil is hot, carefully add the tomato slices.

Fry until golden on  both sides and drain on a rack.  Salt and consume immediately.

I know the French have their fries but give me fried green tomatoes all day long.  It's that flavor explosion of not just salt but the combination of tomato's distinct hot summer flavor on the back of the tongue fried to crunchy tender goodness.

Meet your hot Southern bar snack.  Bet they'd taste oh so good with an icy cold barley pop.

Ten Pounds of Winning

Pretty much goes without saying.  From one of my favs, Charlie Podrebarac.

Williams Sonoma, where the chicken roosts

Not satisfied with kitchen gadgets and cookbooks, Williams Sonoma expands into the agrarian marketplace.  Cha-Ching!

Summer Heat

Well hello blog, how ya been.  What a summer I'm having, how about you?  Despite fighting the good fight, the company I have worked for quite a while is calling it quits.  Slowly co-workers faded away into new lives.  My last day came and with it new duties to occupy my time.  Applying for unemployment, trying to find affordable health insurance and of course, looking for a new job.  My home computer decided that it had also had enough and fired me also.  Oy.  So while I'm trying to figure what I want to do with the rest of my life, I keep myself busy with Projects.

I'm not quite ready to reveal what exactly this involves but I will say that here in the Midwest we've been experiencing triple digit heat and drought.  In late June.  My poor little garden is still kicking but it's definitely confused by the earlier than normal heat and humidity.  The peas were the first victim of mother nature.  I'm scared to think what August will bring.  It could be worse for me.  I have the good fortune to have two towering oak trees in my front yard that provide the most wonderful sunscreen for my house.  My HVAC system is eternally grateful.  So it hasn't been all doom and gloom.  Action Jackson got to go to work with me the last few weeks since I really didn't want to be the only person in the office and now he gets quite a bit of human time while I transition.  This is a good thing because we're going to attempt to pass a pre-certification test to be a Pets For Life team. I think we'll be good as long as no one is wearing a live squirrel necklace.

I can't say I've been cooking too much.  Attempting to do strenuous outside projects while it's 104 degrees does not lend itself to put too much energy or thought into dinner.  Mostly it involved tomato sandwiches on some wonderful whole grain bread and good mayo.  However I was lured out of my Project Zone by a new butcher in town. The Local Pig.  You know I'd have to check this out.  They supply fresh antibiotic, hormone and steroid free locally sourced meat.  Beef, pork, chicken, lamb, goat, duck and rabbit.  They make their own sausages, franks and chorizo.  And not just the typical brat-like sausages.  Curry and eggplant or Thai peanut.  There's pâté and foie gras.  There's bacon, eggs and stock.  (Be still my heart, duck stock)  There are in house tamales and Farm to Market Pretzel Rolls.  There's honey.  There's even dog bones.  So I made a little trip and spent a little money.  Because here's the other thing, I have some fantastic mustard that deserves some excellent tube meat to slather on.

I houes sit for some folks who travel to wonderful places.  Red Rocks Arizona, Ireland, Paris.  When asked if I wanted anything from Paris, I drew a blank.  I've been to Paris but I knew that these particular good people are chocolate fiends.  Asking for chocolate is just asking to get an empty french box.  But then I called on my go-to Answer Chef, Virginia Willis.  She's spent quite a bit of time in France.  A quick email and she provided the perfect answer.  "Maille mustard shop at place du Madeleine. They have a mustard keg, like  beer. Tell them to get that, not what's already jarred. It's amazing."  Oh hells yes.  I love mustard and good people that they are they went to the mustard shop and brought me back a jar of Moutarde en grains à l'Ancienne au Chardonnay.  So I grilled up some Local Pig beer bratwurst with cheddar and slathered on this wonderfully grainy and complex mustard.  And it was good.

The brat is full of beery flavor and the tang of melted cheddar.  The mustard seeds pop and crunch with hot spiciness.  Even though the mustard is French the combination calls to my long lost German heritage.

So there you have it.  Anyone out there with a job opening feel free to keep me in mind.  Girl's gotta eat.

Peas

Life at the Kitchen almost back to semi-normal.  Stay tuned,

Urban Adventures in Foraging

I have been enjoying the company of Action Jackson, Dog of Adventure at work for the past couple of weeks.  He's made himself quite at home.



This is a good thing.  It means we get to walk around our work neighborhood on our mid-morning and afternoon constitutionals.  We are always on the lookout for urban wildlife and luckily we've found the normal squirrels and birds and not the dreaded giant city rats.  But it was after just such an encounter with some raucous birds that led us to a more wonderful discovery - FREE FOOD!

As Jackson and I walked along this row of trees behind our building,  we were besieged by a variety of angry birds bursting from the trees.  Mouthy starlings,  chubby doves, hopping robins all chattering that we were messing with important bird business.  It wasn't until that we got up closer to this big tree that I understood what we had interrupted.

A bountiful bird buffet.  Berries.  But what kind?  I can usually identify bush or shrub fruit but tree berries are a bit out of my league.  We took a leaf as a example to help in our identification and toddled back to google image search tree berries.  Soon the answer presented itself - Mulberries.  And while it might look like a berry it's actually defined as a collective fruit but better yet, it's edible to humans.  I love finding free fruit.  Now all I have to do is pick them.

This seems like a straightforward procedure but what I discovered is that  picking mulberries is not as easy as it looks.  First there's their size.  Roughly the same shape and makeup as a blackberry but smaller with a sturdy stem to the tree.  That stem is a bit of an issue.  You see while some of the outer lobes of the fruit might be bursting with juicy ripeness, the stem might have other ideas.  So if you overly exert pressure on the fruit to dislodge the stem from the branch, you will either bruise the fruit by holding on too tightly or drop the fruit by not holding on tight enough.  Hence the white sheet and branch shaking method that brought a rain of mulberries down to earth.  All to a chorus of still angry birds, denied their spectacular mulberry dropping paint used with great efficiency to decorate nearby vehicular canvases.  Finally I felt I had gathered enough to make something.

Not to mention tattooing my hands with a deep purple stain in the process.  But what to make?  I was clueless.  I don't think I had enough for a pie, maybe just enough for a crumble or crisp.  I decided instead to give them away.  To offer them up to a local chef.  Not just any local chef but the man that put duck tongue tacos on his menu, Michael Smith.  

He and his wife Nancy have two restaurants in the Crossroads area of downtown Kansas City, his namesake, Michael Smith and Extra Virgin.  I love Extra Virgin for it's generous half prices tapas hours and it's outdoor seating area.  Hot, sweaty and fruit stained I offered up my fresh and incredibly local fruit to Chef Smith.  He didn't hesitate, suggesting that mulberry jam could be in the works.  He asked what price for the fruit and I said I didn't really want money, I wanted to see what he would do with the fruit.  He invited me to lunch but I was a mess and still had Jackson and at the moment wanted nothing more than to go home to shower.  I took a rain check on lunch.

What a lunch it was.  How about tuna cerviche tacos with taro root shells?  Yes please.

Poblano mac and cheese?  Heaven.  A tower of Chickpea fries. Smoky grilled broccollini and burrata?  My still stained hands happily sampled it all.

But the best (thank you waiter for suggesting it) was the braised pork cheeks with fava beans and lentils.  Crispy, savory pork goodness.  Well worth the couple of hours of angry birds and sticky digits.  What did Chef Smith end up making with the mulberries?  The lucky folks at an event at the Nelson Atkins Museum enjoyed the freshest possible mulberry sauce on duck and helped raise money for a good cause courtesy of Michael Smith and an urban fruit tree.

Baba au Rhum de la version la maison

Remember this?  The Whiskey Baba I enjoyed at a local restaurant?

Apparently the photo was so enticing that a friend on Facebook saw it and wanted a homemade version.  I hadn't planned on trying my hand at this but this friend and I experienced the other worldliness that was a network TV production.

He deserves a lot more than a simple recipe for Baba au Rhum after working on a program based on the premise that JFK was assassinated to cover up an alien invasion.  Hey it was the era of the X-Files and it's an adventure I'll never regret.  But what recipe to use?  At it's heart  Baba au Rhum  is a yeast cake dessert so finding a "good" recipe is important.  The recipe originating in France sent me on an email path to Virginia Willis.  Chef Willis is a graduate of Anne Willan's La Varenne Cooking School in Paris. Turns out that Virginia had to make Baba au Rhum as a final exam dish.  Yikes!  Of course she aced it.  However in my kitchen my humble efforts are not nearly as visually appealing or as tasty as Chef Willis's final exam but for friends like Michael, I did my best.

First you need a suitable molds for your little yeasties.  Like this.

These I do not have in my pantry.  However I did have this.

Which according to Chef Willis would work just fine as would a muffin pan or ramekins.  This is a two rise recipe if you are making these for an event, they actually work better if made on one day and served the next.

This my dough after massaging in the butter, rum and currants.

This is out of the oven and post rum bath.  In all honesty I let these go too long in the oven.  They should have more of a golden coloring instead of mahogany.  Lesson learned.

This is the traditional serving method with whipped cream and the rum sauce.  Despite my baking failures it still had a wonderful flavor and a creamy interior (thank you rum bath).  However I couldn't leave it at the traditional.  I decided to put my CSA rhubarb spin on it.

Instead of the rum sauce I drizzled that delicious rhubarb sauce that I used with the rice pudding liberally over my baba and chowed down.  Of course the rhubarb plays nicely with the whipped cream and even pairs up with the rum flavoring of the baba.  I don't know if this offering would have passed muster at La Varenne but I can assure you that aliens had nothing to do with the dish.  Bon Appetit Michael.

Rhubarb in the Bag

I am a lucky girrrl.  Some friends of mine are currently enjoying spring in Ireland and France. While they are gone they asked me to sit on their house.  This I do not mind for many reasons.  I get to watch Mad Men, not just for the vintage 60s suburban kitchens (can't wait for the 70s) but also for Joan's pencil necklace.  Jackson and I get to stalk the herd of wild rabbits that have wiped out the young eggplant seedlings in the backyard.  Sadly due to Jackson's incredible agility and prey drive, there is no off leash pursuit since the fences surrounding the yard barely slow down his fierce devotion to Kill the Wabbit.  But the best thing about house sitting (until the pool opens) is the weekly CSA.  So far I've enjoyed baby spinach, eggs, broccoli, lettuce, chard, asparagus, and basil.  This week included something I'd never cooked with before - rhubarb.

Rhubarb is not exotic or new but it's just one of those ingredients that never made an appearance in the cooking adventures of my youth.  So it was a bit of a surprise to see it in the bag of spring offerings.  Rhubarb seems to me to be one of those old fashioned vegetables.  I'm sure my grandmother would know what to do with these stalks.  I do remember seeing numerous recipes in old church spiral bound cookbooks, usually involving pies, crumbles and cobblers.  The most common use was to pair it up with the first spring fruit, strawberries.  The strawberry's sweetness balanced out the rhubarb's wincing tartness.  I just didn't have enough to make a pie.  Luckily for me my recent batch of library cookbooks included Wild Flavors by Didi Emmons and the recipe for Coconut Rice Pudding with Rhubarb.

Coconut Rice Pudding with Rhubarb

Makes 6 servings

Rice Pudding:

1/2 cup brown rice

1/2 cup white rice 

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon cardamom

Pinch salt

3 cups coconut milk (two 13-ounce cans will do)

2 - 3 cups soy milk, almond milk or half-and-half

Topping:

3 large stalks rhubarb (about 3/4 pound), thinly sliced

3 tablespoons sugar

1.  To make the pudding, combine the rice, sugar, cardamom, salt, 2 cups soy milk, almond milk, or half-and-half, and coconut milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Let the mixture come to a boil, then reduce the heat to very low, cover, and let cook until thick and the rice is tender, about 1 1/2 - 2 hours, stirring from time to time to keep the pudding from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan.  If it does stick to the saucepan, add more soy milk, almond milk, or half-and-half as needed.

2.  Transfer the pudding to a container with a lid and let it come to room temperature uncovered, then chill in the refrigerator, covered.

3.  Meanwhile, to make the topping, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and 1/4 cup water in a small saucepan over low heat.  Let the mixture come to a simmer, and let simmer until the rhubarb softens while still holding its shape, about 5 minutes.  Transfer the rhubarb to a container with a lid and let it come to room temperature uncovered, then chill in the refrigerator, covered.

4.  To serve, spoon the rice pudding into clear glasses, then spoon the rhubarb mixture over the rice pudding.  

A couple of notes to the recipe above.  I used everything I had on hand so, 1 cup of brown rice instead of mixing the two, two 14 ounce cans of lite coconut milk, and 2 cups of 2% milk instead of the soy milk.

Additionally I wandered far afield of the topping recipe.  I wanted more of a rhubarb sauce instead of a slightly cooked rhubarb topping.  So 2/3 cup of sugar instead of 3 tablespoons and cooked it until it broke down into a chunky sauce.

Wow!  The coconut rice pudding is luscious on it's own but adding the distinctive sweet and sour rhubarb sauce turns it into an exquisite dessert.  Not only that but this sauce would be great on oatmeal, yogurt, and ice cream.  So thank you CSA farmers, rhubarb rocks.

The Joys of Spring

Remember this book?

Back in October I celebrated the arrival of Virginia Willis' second book but I've been waiting until now to make one special recipe. Grilled Stuffed Soft Shell Crabs with Lemon Gemolata.  What exactly are soft shell crabs?

The Atlantic Blue Crab (Callinecties sapidus or beautiful swimmer) has a life span of roughly three years.  During those years the crab molts or sheds it's shell in order to grow.  Since it takes a few hours for the crab's shell to become hard again, crabmen of the Chesapeake Bay have developed numerous methods of finding and harvesting soft shell crabs.  Luckily for me there's a couple of sources for unfrozen soft shells that show up here in Kansas City in early May.  However if the fishmonger is not in (as happened to me at this particular store), you may end up cleaning them yourself like I had to do because the fishmonger's assistant was too grossed out to barely touch the un-moving crabs.

Not that it was a problem since cleaning is fairly simple but should only be done just before you plan on cooking your soft shells.  Cut off the flap on the underside of the crab (it's either shaped like the Washington Monument (for males) or the Capitol Dome (for females).  Next lift up the pointy flap of each side of the top shell.  Underneath you'll find the lungs which you need to snip off with scissors.  Finally you need to cut off the front edge of the crab, just behind the eyes.

Usually the simplest way to cook soft shell crabs is normally your best bet.  Most folks dust them with a flour mixture, fry them and them plop them between two slices of white bread for a quick sammie.  Virginia keeps it simple also by grilling them with just a bit of shrimp filling and a little zesty lemon gremolota

Ideally softshells should be cooked and eaten on the day they were captured to ensure that lovely sweet crab meat taste.To a confirmed omnivore and a lover of all things Chesapeake Bay, it's a beautiful thing.  But not everyone enjoys the concept of eating the entire crab no matter how it's cooked.  This does not bother me in the least.

Just leaves more crunchy legs for me.

The Rabbits are so jealous

We have pea blossoms.  You know what that means?

Soon we will have peas.  I see you little pea pod peaking out of there...

Baba au Whiskey Cake and The Rieger Hotel and Grill and Exchange

Just a little sampling of a dessert I've never had before, normally called a Baba au Rum Cake.  This version was  with whiskey and served at a wonderful little restaurant called the Rieger Hotel and Grill and Exchange.  This was after scarfing down one of the best Reubens' I've had in a very long time.  It may have been the corned beef tongue or it just may have been that they understand what makes a great Reuben, careful grilling and the right proportion of meat to bread and other ingredients.  As for this adult dessert?  While it was wonderful, it wasn't exactly my thing.  That's not to say it wasn't done well, it was.  Just didn't connect with my inner dessert freak.  However if you enjoy whiskey soaked cake with whipped cream and creme anglaise, come on down.  The Rieger would love to satisfy your culinary needs.  And the bonus?  The cookbook library in the back.  It's a good thing.

Cooking Close to Home

I have been to the library. This is a good thing. Well, not good for the Barnes and Nobles or the late Borders Books of the world because if there's one thing I know, I have absolutely no self control when it comes to an armful of pretty new books. My personal economy suffers much less from multiple trips to the library. Which is where I found this excellent cookbook.

I have to say that I've noticed lately that a lot of cookbooks currently coming out are hitting the "localvore movement" theme fairly hard. This book is no different. I don't really mind but coming from a background where one grandmother lived on a farm her whole life, where my parents have always had a big backyard garden, where I was taught early that young children make great pickers at the Pick Your Own farm stands (strawberries, yah, green beans, boo) all this talk is old hat. I do have to admit that I don't think my mother wants to go back to raising, killing, plucking and cleaning her own chickens. Fresh eggs are great but chickens are a lot of work.

Having said that, this is a wonderful cookbook with lots of seasonal recipes that appear to be loaded with flavor. If you like a fresh fruit and vegetable heavy diet, you will find a lot to like. Since we're still too early for spring produce, I thought I try the Roasted Two Beet Salad first.

This recipe uses two colors of beets, red and golden, two of each. You're going to roast your beets, unpeeled, rubbed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper in a 375 degree oven for 45 to 60 minutes. To test for tenderness piece with a knife, if there is resistance, continue roasting until the knife slides in smoothly. Let the beet cool enough to handle and then peel off the skin. If you don't want bloody red hands, try some food safe rubber gloves. (Personally I think it's more fun to chase neighborhood children with beet red hands but that's just me.)

So while your beets were roasting, you can whip up the dressing by mixing 1/2 cup red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon maple syrup (or honey), 1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic, 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme. Now the recipe calls for lemon thyme but I have not seen too much of that in the grocery stores or my garden which is why we're going with the regular thyme. You can whisk that all together or you can do like me and put it in a mason jar, screw on the lid and shake it up.

Once your beets are cooled, cut them into a julienne. Again a bit of a deviation from the recipe which calls for mixing the beets with 1/2 cup sliced red onion and the dressing. Keep the two colors of beets separate. If you mix everything together, the golden beets end up red anyway so add half the onions and dressing to each color beet, refrigerate for an hour and serve the beets together on the plate.

If you're already a beet fan, you will love this recipe. Most beet salads go down the cheese/nut route so it's refreshing to have a salad that concentrates on the flavors of the beets paired with the acidic flavor of the dressing and the flavor of the thyme. If you're not a beet fan (tasted like dirt! And really why don't more vegetables taste like dirt? Carrots I'm looking at you.) more than likely you won't enjoy this. You might taste it off of someone else's plate but I doubt you'd make it for yourself.

Some of the other recipes I'm looking forward to making from this cookbook are Hearty Root Vegetable Chowder, Quebec Tortiere, and Fresh Peaches with Mascarpone and Blackberry Coulis. Oh yeah. You can also check out their website, Cooking Close to Home for seasonal recipes or to buy the cookbook for yourself. I highly suggest this for the added bonus of it being a Maple heavy cookbook. Now if someone can help me find Maple Sugar I would appreciate it.

Garden Hopes and Dreams 2012

Keeping my fingers crossed that the mild winter does not mean a repeat of last summer's scorching heat.

I have big hopes for my tender pea tendrils. I loves me some fresh from the garden peas. My brother hates them. That boy just ain't right.

This is an incredibly hardy collard plant that I planted last year and just left alone during the winter. Low and behold, tasty (or really bitter, I'll find out) new leaves. BACK OFF RABBITS!!

This is my wonderful bay leaf plant. Needs to be repotted but I love the flavor of fresh bay leaf in my chicken stock.

And LOOK! My rosemary plant if blooming. So pretty. Please wish me gardening luck that everything survives and thrives. Because I'm hungry.