Quote of the Day

Reading Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan is making me very excited for my upcoming trip to AZ. The book also reminds me of my 9th grade Environmental Studies project on the many uses of agave (food, drink, needle and thread). It was my first taste of ethnobotany, opening my mind to the relationships between people and plants. And I got an A+! (Thanks, Ms. Coyle.)

From Gathering the Desert:

"Choose a moonlit night in the summer, and hike through the scattering of agaves in bloom. Hike past them, into the canyons of the Tortolitas where little caves lie hidden. Listen for the flutter of wings, watch for the bats, their shoulders cloaked in a coat of pollen, shining in the night like a poncho made of Precolumbian golden thread. Follow them back down to the scent of agave blossoms, where plants and animals again dance to an ancient American rhythm."

Tea and Food Turns 700

As the snow fell earlier this morning, I made this buckwheat pancake using MB's whole grain pancake recipe, though without the sugar and spice and with 1/3 the fat (still delicious). That's right, I minimized The Minimalist.

I was fortunate enough to have locally grown buckwheat flour from the last installment of our winter CSA, and the flecks of hull added a pleasant bit of chew to the otherwise fluffy and spongy pancakes. Gently folded-in, stiffly beaten egg whites truly are the secret weapon for lofty, whole grain pancakes.

As usual, I ended up making one enormous pancake as big as my face in addition to several smaller ones. Topped with steamed apples and savored alongside a mason jar of gunpowder green, this was a celebratory pancake. Because as soon as I click "publish post," Tea and Food will have reached its 700th post. And what better way to celebrate 700 posts on tea and food than with a little food and tea?

It all started as a pet project between myself and my good friend Dave, and by "it all started" I mean Dave started it. We were obsessively discussing everything we were eating and gabbing like a couple of (old, hairy) schoolgirls about the latest Bittman videos. We would even try out the same recipes together in real time over the phone, emailing photos as we went. Dave pointed out that we were basically food blogging without a food blog, so he created us a food blog. 700 posts later, here we are.

At the time I was a traveling sketch comic and Dave was a grad student. He is now a Doctor of Philosophy and teaches at an esteemed university, and I don't live out of a van anymore!

Which brings me to my second cause for celebration: my first article for Smithsonian, on Boston's farm to table renaissance, which you can see here. You can also check out the photo gallery for additional shots.

So congrats to everyone whose enthusiasm has propelled this blog forward over the years. Now go make yourself a pancake.

Quote of the Day

From Mark Bittman's post about why he's fasting to protest "Congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry." He writes:

"This isn’t about skepticism, however; it’s about ironies and outrages. In 2010, corporate profits grew at their fastest rate since 1950, and we set records in the number of Americans on food stamps. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all American households combined, the effective tax rate on the nation’s richest people has fallen by about half in the last 20 years, and General Electric paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes on profits of more than $14 billion. Meanwhile, roughly 45 million Americans spend a third of their posttax income on food — and still run out monthly — and one in four kids goes to bed hungry at least some of the time."

Rabbit Confit

On my weekend off while teaching Shakespeare in VT last summer, my cohorts and I tooled around the Northeast Kingdom sampling its many delicacies. Before reaching Parker Pie for lunch, we saw a roadside sign whose gravitational pull had turned the wheel of my car before my brain knew what was happening. I believe it said "custom meat processing," or something along those lines.

I left with a frozen rabbit and having gotten a tour of the walk-in fridges where moose and bear sometimes hang. I don't have the name of the place with me, but my dear friend Maria Gould wrote a profile of the processor in a recent issue of Meatpaper.

The bunny hibernated in my freezer for several months until I worked up the nerve to make a confit. I had made neither rabbit nor confit before, and I was a little skeptical. Why use a technique that requires tons of fat when I know I'd be perfectly happy with a much leaner, cheaper braise?



While breaking down the bunny I was confronted with its very animal-like animalness. This is was no chicken or cow whose friendly shape has been ingrained in my food psyche since childhood. This was no animal: this was a creature. It's shape made me think of my dog, and I don't want to eat my dog. We should always experience such reflection before chowing down on something that used to walk (or hop) this earth.



I slid the bunny parts into a warm bath of olive oil along with a sliced bulb of fennel, a handful of kumquats from a recent trip to FL, rosemary, garlic, and a heaping handful of juniper berries.

Several hours later, the rabbit, and everything else for that matter, was succulent and tender. I pulled the meat and put it back into the aromatic fat along with the spices, fruit and veggies until I could decide on what to do with my rich bounty.



Our preferred method -- largely due to expediency -- was to simply pour some of the confit over slices of slightly toasted homemade bread. We also ate it tossed with steamed potatoes, and I'm sure it would have been lovely over pasta, though we didn't get to that.

The juniper berries were musky and spicy, the kumquats sweet and tangy, the fennel fennely. Was it good? Of course it was good. Who, besides a vegetarian, vegan, rabbit, or olive, wouldn't enjoy gads of golden olive oil laced with butter soft bunny flesh?

But would I ever make it again? Nope. I respect the technique of preserving meat with fat, but I'd just as soon do a braise and put the leftovers in the freezer.

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Recipe Question: Do you miss them?

I much prefer the story of a dish to its nuts and bolts, and while I used to include more recipes, I would rather give you the gist of an idea and have you experiment with it than just follow my marching orders. That said, I want to know your preference. So shoot me a comment letting me know if you a) want me to keep including recipes b) like it this way or c) are a Russian spambot trying to redirect traffic to your scam.

3... 4... 1!

Yan can make mincing garlic and ginger look like a magic trick, and, as his theory goes, therefore... so can you! Though you may find yourself halving his enthusiasm.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Corn According to Onion

So Long, Dubious Friend

At long last, I'm bidding a bittersweet farewell to my trusty non-stick pan.

It's a sweet occasion because with the pan's passing, I'm stirred to remember all of the tractionless pancakes, slippery pasta dishes and unhindered tortillas we made in this baby. It's a bitter moment because I'm concerned that the gashes in the pan's fragile coating were starting to give us cancer.

When the non-stick coating finally wore through, my fears of being poisoned by this mysterious technology became too great, and I decided to cut my losses. So it's back to cast iron, until an omelet sticks, at which point I'll probably go crawlin' back to sweet, sweet perfluorooctanoic acid.

But hey, it's low-fat.

No-Knead Bread, Five Years Late

Cast your mind back to 2006. Al Gore informed America that the planet was getting warmer as jeans grew skinnier and the Chinese River Dolphin was declared extinct. And who can forget sitting on the edge of their seat as Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encycylical?

But the number one thing I heard in '06 was "You have to see Little Miss Sunshine!!!" I never did. The number two thing I heard was "you have to try Mark Bittman's no-knead bread!" I did, five years later.



First off, you were all wrong. It wasn't Mark Bittman's no-knead bread, it was Jim Lahey's, and Bittman made that clear. But as I recently learned, Lahey is as good of a baker as Bittman is a publicist. This bread really is the best that you can make at home.

However the title of "no-knead" is somewhat misleading. No, you don't have to knead it, but you do have to fold it a few times, flour a work surface, and handle the dough, and that's kind of like kneading. There are other bread recipes where you do none of those things -- I'll be sharing one soon -- and so the fact that this bread isn't kneaded per se is not its most distinctive quality. Someone else has probably pointed this out in the past five years, but as you can tell, I'm a little behind the Times.

Instead of Mark Bittman's No-Knead Bread, as this recipe has become commonly known, a more accurate title would be Jim Lahey's Slow Rise, Low Yeast, Preheated Dutch Oven Bread. Because the technique is what sets this bread apart, and that's what gives it its perfect moisture, crumb and crust. My only problem was that our old bacon-seasoned cast iron Dutch oven (originally Elise's grandmother's) filled the kitchen with smoke as it heated. Almost makes me want to buy an enamel one. But who needs another hefty kitchen implement when you've got open windows, a damp bandanna tied like a bank robber, and an inhaler?



We made the bread as part of our new Valentine's Day tradition of having a meal at home made from whatever ingredients we want instead of eating out on what many chefs consider the worst night of the year. (In the above photo you can see Elise dramatically whisking the tinfoil off of the broccoli rabe.) Also on the menu were local oysters and defrosted chicken liver-and-Maker's Mark pâté from Christmas. Like Sylvester Stallone's character in Demolition Man, it survived the freeze quite well. In addition to baking the loaf of JLSRLYPDOB, I enacted another Bittman-influenced culinary fantasy: oven fries with pimenton aioli.



Lahey/Bittman's loaf is now available in regular, whole grain, and speedy. If you haven't tried it yet, you definitely should. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an endearing hipster dramedy to watch.

Urban Syrup

See here for my piece in yesterday's Globe about a maple syrup project in Somerville, my old stompin' grounds:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/03/02/somerville_maple_syrup_project_teaches_valuable_lessons/

Da Hong Pao, or Big Red Robe

While in Florida my sister gave me a small bag of Da Hong Pao light roast oolong. It was a cloudless eighty degrees at the time of this transaction, but this morning here in Mass it's only four, or negative six if you go by the mysterious "feels like" scale.

My bedroom window looked like this.



The first thing I did was brew some Da Hong Pao.

My former roommate Mark once invited me to help him work his way through a mixed case of bottles of red as he tried to discover his favorite. They were all pretty good, but when he opened the Bordeaux, I thought "yes, that is red wine." It perfectly matched my preconceived notion of what red wine should taste like. (In contrast, my first taste of whiskey was a huge letdown. As a kid I concluded that it must taste like butterscotch based on the way adults talked about it, but when I tried it, it just tasted "like burning.")

This tea is to oolong what that Bordeaux was to wine: it tastes like what I think oolong should taste like. Roasted, toasted, slightly sweet and woodsy. Like licking a drop of caramel off of seasoned cordwood.

It has none of the complexity of peachy dan cong or the floral effervesence of my beloved tung ting, which could mean that it's a fake, but it's delicious either way, and for anyone unfamiliar with this kind of tea, this could be your oolong 101.

The name Big Red Robe is said to come from an incident in which a grateful emperor sent fine garments to protect bushes whose brew had healed him from an illness. I don't know if that actually happened, but I do know that when I drank the tea on this bitterly cold morning, I felt robed.

Thanks, sis.

More on Olives

After reading Ian's post on harvesting olives in Ramallah, my aunt-in-law Kathy wrote the following about picking them in her California backyard:

It really is fun harvesting them . . . we have two trees in our backyard and learned how to run our fingers down the branch and hear them ping into the bucket. We've been experimenting with brine curing. ( I couldn't bear to pour lye over them. :( ). Some of them are about ready to eat by now, yay. The almond trees are almost in full blossom and the beehives are all set up in the orchards. It's a different kind of snow . . .

Root Veggie Laden Fried Rice

I've been on a fried rice for breakfast kick, and I've been experimenting with how much vegetable matter one can add while still calling it fried rice. The answer: lots.

Two factors make this breakfast almost as easy as toast. The first is that I always have a big pot of rice around for the dog, whose food we cook (ground turkey, brown rice, sweet potatoes) due to his sensitive stomach. The second is the menagerie of wacky root vegetables constantly streaming in from my winter CSA.

I pour enough oil into a pan to barely create a film across its surface. I add the chopped up veggies, which vary, but often include carrot and various radishes: daikon, black, watermelon, and "mystery." Sometimes I'll add some sliced cabbage, but the point is versatility, and every vegetable I've tried thus far (celery, spinach, turnip, leeks) has worked.



When the veggies are just beginning to soften up -- I like them crunchy and sometimes don't even bother cooking them -- I add the rice and a splash of water to rehydrate it. Then I clear everything to the sides of the pan, add another wee bit of oil, turn up the heat and crack in an egg. Sometimes I quickly scramble it, sometimes I let it fry and then mix it in. Sometimes I don't use an egg. Again, versatility is the key ingredient.

Then I plop in a scoop of chili paste and a splash of soy sauce and mix it all up. I was using sesame oil too, until I ran out, and then I found that I didn't miss it.



Fried rice can be divine, especially if you use Mark Bittman/Jean-George's crispy ginger and garlic trick and get all fancy by packing it into a ramekin before plating it. But I think of this version as morning workhorse fried rice. It's quick, it's easy, and it helps me chip away at the root veggie stash.

Another benefit is less easy to describe, but I'll try. And that is the feeling I get from eating rice, chili paste and almost-raw root veggies first thing in the morning. If toast makes me feel like I'm dangling my feet off of a happy cloud, this makes me feel like I'm planted up to the shins in warm rich dirt. It's not a bad way to feel when kicking off the day.

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Recipe: Root Veggie Laden Fried Rice

about 1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice
about 3/4 cup finely chopped root veggies, such as carrots, radishes and turnips
1 egg
1/2 tbsp of chili paste
a dash of soy sauce
olive, canola or peanut oil, about 1 tbsp

1. Briefly saute the veggies on medium heat in a little of the oil, about three minutes.

2. Add the rice, add a splash of water, cover and cook for a few more minutes until the rice is moist and warm.

3. Clear a space in the center of the pan. Add a little more oil into the center of the pan, set heat to high, and crack in the egg. Once the white is cooked through, turn off the heat, add the chili paste and soy sauce and mix it all up.

4. If you want to get fancy, pack it into a ramekin or other mold and stamp it out onto your plate.

5. Have a grounded day.

What Is This Thing? A Question I Maybe Should Have Asked Before Swallowing.

While in Florida this past weekend, I ate the vegetable pictured above. Or rather I should say that I choked down two bites of it, grimacing, and then guilty threw the rest away. I have no idea what it is or why anyone would want to eat it.

It seemed to be some variety of bitter melon, though the ones I've had before were more smooth and less warty. Also I've only had bitter melon cooked, though the vendor my mom bought this vegetable from said that it could be eaten raw, like a cucumber. Right.

Its similarities to a cucumber ended after being an oblong green thing that technically you could bite into. Unlike a cucumber, I didn't want to chew or swallow this, let alone turn it into a cool, creamy soup or de-crusted sandwich filling. A broccoli rabe and garlic mustard-loving nontaster, I was surprised at my lack of tolerance, but my gag reflex spoke for me.

Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, though if you did shake it, the little green warts fell off, which did not make it any more alluring.

Maybe if, like the bitter melon I've eaten, this was cooked with complimentary seasonings and salty bits of animal flesh, it would have been more palatable. As is, it was part vegetable, part emetic.

So what on earth was it? A snozzcumber?

Kosher Game

See here for my recent post on kosher game meats for The Jew and the Carrot: http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/135438/

Salt, pepper, smoke

One day last fall I walked past a neighbor's house whose wood stove was filling the air with its toasty potpourri. The aroma always stops me in my tracks, prompting primal urges.

If I had to put words to the feeling it would be something along the lines of wanting to run down a woolly mammoth and sink my teeth into its flesh. Since I can't do that -- yet -- my brain goes to the next best thing: pimenton. When the smell of smoke hits my nostrils, the only cure for my primal longings is to indulge them by eating or drinking something that tastes like a fire.

That got me thinking about just how universal smoke is as an agent of flavor, appearing in everything from Scotch and tequila to nova and bacon. After speaking to some Boston area chefs, I wrote a story on smoky foods for the Globe, which ran yesterday and which you can see here:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2011/02/16/smoking_with_a_smoker_or_spices_of_whatever_food_warms_and_pleases_the_brain/

There's also a recipe for a roasted pepper and eggplant dip from the chef at Sabur, which is here.

If you've got something to say about smoky foods, do share.

Picking Olives

Over the weekend, just as I was about to head out for some cross-country skiing, I was shocked to get a call from halfway around the world. My good friend Ian is teaching English at a Quaker school in Ramallah, and he called to say hi. We quickly got down to the essentials: what he's eating.

Ian seems to be eating quite well, and he offered to send me something he wrote about participating in a recent olive harvest. He writes:

Today I went out to a village about forty five minutes or so away to help out with the olive harvest. It felt so good to get out of both the office and the city, and to be working with trees. We picked the olives by hand and let them drop down to tarps that were laid out below the trees.

Each tree usually has enough olives to fill a large burlap sack. I traveled from Ramallah with two friends, one American and one Palestinian, who have been instrumental in organizing the farmers market that just started three weeks ago in the big garden that surrounds my apartment house.

We joined six men in the orchard: two brothers (I think), the other four being one of their sons. The day was full of laughter and sunlight and good conversation (in a swirl of Arabic and English) and tea and Arab coffee and falafel and tahini and hummus and climbing trees to get to the higher boughs and the furthest olives. At the end of the day, we went back to the family's house and had a delicious meal of rice and chicken and string beans in a tomato soup-like dish, and bell peppers and some greens that were cooked up kind of like collards.

After dinner, we went with the family to a wedding party for a relative of theirs. The party was separated by gender, and so the party where I was ranged from shabab (young men) my age in jeans to jiddos (grandfathers) in khaffiyehs. The man who had driven the two women and I from Ramallah was one of the three men who make up the family council of elders for the largest extended family in the village, as well as being in charge of the Palestinian National Paralympic team. He told me all about the history of the village and the family.

The village is the seventh oldest in Palestine, and we saw a mosque that was seven hundred and fifty years old. Also the village is built upon the remains of an (even more) ancient village. I learned about one section of ruins now grown-over by olive trees. Nearby there were Roman and even pre-Roman ruins. On the way back to Ramallah I had a great conversation about politics and philosophy and writing and work and permaculture with my American friend, who lived and worked in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005.

Now I have a week long vacation starting after tomorrow for Eid Al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice - which happens after the Hajj - usually about seventy days after the end of Ramadan), and after I finish a couple more letters of recommendation for my students, I will get to have some good rest and relaxation, and I might go olive picking again next Friday.

Quote of the Day

I miss The Minimalist -- a lot -- but I also like the more systemic focus of Bittman's new opinion pieces. For instance:

"The alternative to sausage is not vegan sausage; it’s less sausage."

My God, This Pomegranate

What more is there to say?

Miso Plus Many

For a while I was posting about my theory of miso + 1, which states that you can make a satisfying soup by taking miso and adding only one additional ingredient, be it mussels, daikon, or nothing.

Well, sometimes you have to travel far to find your way back home. I've added dozens of ingredients (though one at a time) to various mugs and bowls of miso throughout the past few years, and I've come back to where I started. And that's a town called Miso Plus Many, population most people who like miso.

Don't get me wrong. I still dream of a world where hot water and miso paste is the default snack for millions of people. It's quick, it's cheap, it's healthy, it's almost stupid it's so doable. And yet I've come to believe that, when it comes to the ultimate miso, of course more is better.



This most recent miso was born from a dead chicken. I was bubbling a pot of stock from all my leftover bones and veggies scraps (note the sad carrots bottom right) and was about to make something else for dinner, when I realized I might was well base the meal around my vat of delicious, hot, fresh stock. I added miso paste to the stock as well as (tons of) chopped turnip greens, black rice noodles, a smidgen of cayenne, a drizzle of sesame oil.

It was thick, it was hot, it was rich, it was salty, it was addictive.

When the turnip greens ran out we made it again with spinach and celery (going with the use whatever you have theory). Also great. The nuttiness from the noodles and sesame gave the impression of peanuts, the starch from the noodles added body, and as chefs around the world have come to appreciate, fat and miso become fast friends. We hadn't skimmed the stock and so the particles of chicken fat and fermented soy beans linked up like a double helix of deliciousness, even though I hate how common the word "deliciousness" has become and would never use it if it weren't true.

So I'm back to miso plus many. If I miss miso plus one, I can always subtract.

Spearing Northerns

The Perennial Plate Episode 46: Spear Fishing! from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.