What I'm Cooking: A Weekend in Ithaca

Many of my posts are about adventures in ingredients and cooking. This post is not adventurous at all. 

 I've mentioned that I live in Ithaca, but visit Toronto frequently. I may not have made the frequency of these visits clear, but some already know that I'm usually in Ithaca for most weekdays and about one weekend per month. Most of the rest of the weekends I spend in Toronto, which is great for recharging, exploring and hanging out with friends there.

Weekends in Ithaca are scarce and have become special. They're an opportunity to see my friends here, which is great; but also a time for some quiet and not spending hours in the car. And I usually try to spend lots of my quiet time on cooking and food prep. This past weekend was no exception, so I thought I'd tell you about the things I made.

Saturday I had plans to watch football with friends and promised to bring dessert. I'd been craving ginger ice cream. When steeped with fresh ginger it has a wonderful burn that is tempered by the richness of the custard. I was definitely planning to make that.  Wegman's also taunted me with Meyer lemons that I couldn't resist, though. So I picked up a bag and made some sherbet as well. I took all of the ice cream to my friends, but saved some sherbet for myself.  Recipes for both of these came from David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, which I've said before is a fabulous ice cream book.

While the ice cream was steeping , I also threw together some peanut butter cookie dough. I like to have cookies on hand to take to work for dessert with lunch, and had another party on Saturday night to which I'd promised to bring baked goods.  I had actually never made peanut butter cookies, so this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I used the recipe from the Flour book; they're quite simple: cream butter and sugar for a long time, add eggs, add peanut butter, add flour. Rest dough. Bake. Tastiness.

I also have a habit of making foods for myself for lunch and dinner a week at a time. Most weeks lunch is just assembling ingredients for sandwiches. This week I had seen a recipe in Bon Appetit for a roasted carrot and beet salad with feta and parsley in a cumin/lemon vinaigrette. It sounded delicious, but the presentation was a little over the top for my tastes (it had everything nearly whole and artfully arranged on a platter). I wanted something I could eat out of tupperware with a plastic fork.  So I chopped everything a bit smaller prior to roasting. And I also added the beet greens to the roasting pan because it seemed a shame to throw them away. And had some walnuts so I tossed those in too. 

For the week's dinners, I made soup. This will come as a shock to some of you, as I have historically not been a soup eater. I still am not a broth-y soup fan, but love purees of various sorts. In this case, I made a fennel-leek soup; starting with a stock from fennel, leek greens and potatoes, combined with more fennel, sauteed with more leeks, carrots, potatoes, spinach, dill and lemon. I've been eating it with some nice bread and fennel fronds.

In addition to hanging out with friends and a great walk on Sunday afternoon, that was my weekend.

Making Tonic

21 grams of cinchona bark

Since I was 19 or so, my drink of choice has been the gin and tonic. This long-term love affair began with what I initially thought was a pretty horrible-tasting, room-temperature concoction (sorry, Tim…).  With that concoction, though, I joined my friends' summer tradition of sitting on the porch by the lake, enjoying a refreshing beverage (the taste grew on me), and then tossing our lime wedges into the woods in the hope that a lime tree might grow there next year (never mind that we were in northern Michigan…).

A few years later, I discovered that spending a bit more on gin yielded appreciably tastier results. Bombay Sapphire is my favorite, but I've done a fair bit of tasting. And I've also converted a few friends along the way (you know who you are…).

4 grams hawthorn berries

What about the tonic, though?  I mean, what is tonic?  Most people don't know. I didn't either. We all know it contains quinine, because that's usually printed on the bottle. What's quinine? I now know that it's an anti-malarial agent derived from the bark of the cinchona plant.  The word 'tonic' also connotes a primitive medicinal function that might be good for ailments, bad humors and such.

If you look at the ingredients on a bottle of mass-produced tonic, however, you'll see that it's really just sugar water with quinine and maybe some other flavors. More accurately, high-fructose corn syrup water. People (or at least I) tend to group tonic in a sort of benign category with club soda, but it really doesn't belong there.

12 grams dried bitter orange peel

That hasn't always been true, however, and recent years have seen the introduction of many micro-batch tonics that use more traditional recipes. I decided to make my own. I'd thought about this for a while, but the real inspiration came from Andrew Schloss's great homemade soda cookbook.

He points out in the book that the effort involved is nontrivial, but I was game for the challenge. First step was to track down a bunch of obscure ingredients (including cinchona bark), which required a bit of Googling. This led me to Herbie's Herbs in Toronto, a fascinating store full of things I never knew existed. Returning home, my kitchen table felt a bit like an apothecary. The ingredients I had are in the scattered photos.

18 grams blueberry leaves

These all got combined in a mini-chopper along with a cinnamon stick, a star anise and a few cloves to create a coarse powder (which may have actually been ground too fine). I then put the powder in tea baskets that I simmered in a pot of water, along with some salt and citric acid. After a bit of simmering, I added lemon grass, and zest plus juice from two limes and a lemon. This was then simmered for about an hour and added to some agave syrup.

8 grams sumac berries

Ok, lots of work. How does it taste? Well, how does it look would actually be a better first question. Unlike most tonic, mine isn't clear at all. It has the color of dark apple cider, and the consistency of a thick syrup. I suspect I could strain it with cheesecloth to remove some of this and might try that next time. The taste is extremely acidic, but delicious. I don't (yet) have a soda siphon, so I think I will add it to a bit of club soda along with gin to make a drink.  It's sufficiently citrus-y, though, that there definitely won't be a need for limes. I guess a tree isn't going to grow anyhow…  

2 grams cassia bark

Lemon Bars With Dill

School has started and I'm back from a bunch of travel . This means that weekly lunch with my junior faculty colleagues has resumed in full force. I'm telling you this because it also means I now have a weekly audience of guinea pigs for food experiments and cause to be in one place long enough to actually spend time making stuff for them. Pearwise entries should appear regularly again over the next few months.

This week I tried a couple things I've been meaning to do for a while. The first, and perhaps more interesting, was to combine lemon and dill in a dessert. They're a classic pairing, of course, but mostly served with things like salmon or crab cakes (try googling 'lemon dill' -- you'll get about 50 salmon recipes). A lemon dill sorbet could arguably make a nice palate cleanser, so why not try the same combination in a lemon bar?  Could be tasty.

The second was to try David Lebovitz's recipe for whole lemon bars. These are exactly what they sound like; you actually chop up a whole lemon -- peel, pith and all (minus the seeds) -- and spin it in the food processor with the other filling ingredients. I might have tried these without dill, but that would be dangerously close to a  repeat dessert, something that hasn't happened yet in the 2.5 or so years I've been baking for our lunches. Dill adds sufficient diversity.

To add the dill flavor, I made a dill sugar and used it in both the crust and the custard. This just involved chopping up some dill (maybe 1/8 cup?), and putting it in the food processor with about 1 cup of sugar. This turned it a delightful shade of green and it had a clear dill scent.

Then I just used that sugar in place of regular sugar in the recipe. As you can see, the result has a neat looking green color. The taste is very lemon-y, a bit bitter from including the pith, and there's a clear taste of dill on the finish. It's possibly too strong, but i'm not sure. We'll see what the others say…

Tomato Basil Frozen Yogurt

A couple weeks ago, I was preparing to leave for a 10-day trip, and realized that I had a couple extra tomatoes and yogurt in the fridge. I also had one of those supermarket basil plants growing in the window and I was pretty sure it would die while I was gone. What to do… why not frozen yogurt?

Well, one can actually think of a lot of reasons. "You could have made tomato sauce," said a colleague. True, but I just had two tomatoes. Not really enough for much sauce. There were other reasons not to do it too. Tomatoes aren't usually dessert. The idea sounds sort of odd. And it could all just wind up being a waste.

And yet it seemed like it might work. Basil ice cream is delicious. Pizza sauce is often sweetened with sugar. And tomatoes could easily play nicely with the tangy-ness of yogurt. So I tried it, and the results were surprisingly good. Rich with tomato, a hint of basil, and the tang of yogurt. Most of my colleagues (who are patient guinea pigs, but also not afraid to say what they don't like) liked it. One person didn't.

To make it, I started with a strawberry frozen yogurt recipe. I coarsely chopped two tomatoes and 8-10 basil leaves, and let those macerate with 1 cup of sugar for about 3 hours. The tomatoes released a lot of juice, so I cooked this down a bit until the juice thickened to the consistency of a light syrup (maybe 15-20 minutes?).

I then put the tomato mix into the blender with 1.5 cups plain full-fat yogurt, a little (1/4 tsp or so) salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and some lemon juice. After pureeing, the flavor was good but not very rich. I added a little bit of vanilla extract for richness and a couple pinches of citric acid powder to boost the lemon juice.

The result was rich (though I might cut the vanilla a bit next time) and tart at the same time, with the background of the basil. It was pretty interesting; kind of like a frozen and sweet gazpacho.

Ingredients:

2 big tomatoes

1 cup sugar

8-10 chopped basil leaves

1.5 cups plain yogurt

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp citric acid

1 tsp or so lemon juice

1/8 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Improvising: Mango Banana Bread

As many of you already know, I have a bit of a tradition of making dessert for a group of my colleagues that gets together for lunch each week. Most of the time this is a chance to explore and try new recipes, and it forces me to work my way through that to-do list of stuff I'm wanting to try. Other times it forces me to be creative or to improvise to come up with something that I can do easily and quickly. I actually really appreciate both types of constraint; this almost never feels like a burden.

This week was an example of the latter. I knew that I had to make something for Tuesday, but the time available meant that I needed to do something pretty simple. I've been working my way through Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook, and have been eyeing her banana bread recipe. I love banana bread because it's tasty and easy; and I pretty much always have bananas in both the refrigerator and the freezer.

In this case, though, I got home from the supermarket and realized I didn't have enough bananas. I did, however, have some leftover canned Indian mango puree. And her recipe calls for a little bit of sour cream, but I didn't want to buy a whole container of sour cream (which I don't really use for anything else) just for 2 tablespoons. I did, however, have some plain yogurt.

The recipe called for 1 1/3 cups of mashed bananas. I took the 2 bananas I had and mashed them in my large glass measuring cup, which worked out to about 2/3 of a cup or so. The bananas were still slightly firm, so they didn't mash perfectly, but well enough. I then poured mango puree into the bananas until I reached 1 1/3 cups. I figured the extra liquid from the mango might compensate for the firmness of the bananas. For the sour cream, I directly substituted yogurt. And I substituted ginger for cinnamon (in ground form). Otherwise I made it exactly as specified.

The result was very, very moist -- thanks to a generous amount of vegetable oil and probably in part to the extra moisture from the mango. While the kitchen smelled clearly of mango while it was baking, the taste was primarily banana. The mango possibly contributed some extra sweetness, though.

Special thanks to Lee Humphreys and Jeff Niederdeppe for this week's photo, taken immediately prior to consumption.

The Tastiness:Time Ratio

It goes without saying that nobody wants to spend time in the kitchen making food that's not delicious. We want to spend scarce cooking time making things that will be tasty for ourselves and others. It's also true, though, that effort and and tastiness don't always correlate. That is, it's often the case that making a more difficult or time-consuming recipe doesn't necessarily result in food that is tastier. Difficult recipes may be more rewarding, sophisticated, or any number of other things; but the food's not always going to be better.

I've always tried to have a few recipes that are particularly good investments; those that aren't very hard but result in a lot of tastiness. For me, key properties of these recipes include: ingredients that store well, so I'm likely to have them on hand already (no shopping), minimal prep (no more than a couple minutes chopping or dicing; no rolling out dough, etc.), and relatively short cooking time.

I wish sometimes that cookbooks would take this into account and give some indicator of time vs. tastiness.

Here are a couple of my favorite examples of very easy, very tasty recipes:

Key Lime Pie: A good key lime pie is always a great dessert, and they're easy as, well, pie to make. Make a crust out of graham crackers, sugar and cinnamon. Then put egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and key lime juice (bottled juice results in a delicious pie; freshly squeezed is better, but not hugely so) in the food processor. Pour in the crust. Bake until set. Uber-tastiness.

Eggs and Curry Leaves: For a quick and wonderful brunch dish, throw a bit of oil in a pan and saute some diced onion, 1 minced thai chili, a bit of ginger paste, and 5-8 curry leaves. Then add 3 or so eggs and cook until the eggs are done. Apart from the onion, all of this stuff can be kept in the fridge or freezer for a while. Again, uber tasty and super quick.

Other examples?

Homemade Pop-Tarts

Ok, I admit it. I used to love Pop-Tarts. Frosted cherry were my favorite flavor. I also really liked brown sugar/cinnamon, and the ones with vanilla creme and chocolate filling. They were one of the few things I would eat at lunch in elementary school (historical note: I refused to eat anything at all at school for all of first grade; I'm not sure why), so I think that's why my mom was willing to buy them. And, finding them tasty, I also ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast pretty regularly as an undergrad who lived in dorms for four years. I'm pretty sure I haven't had one since then.

That's why I was pretty excited by Joanne Chang's recipe (in her Flour bakery cookbook, which I adore for many other reasons too) for homemade Pop-Tarts. I love the idea of a fruit-filled pastry and there was an element of nostalgia that I suspected would resonate with others as well.

To be fair, the concept behind these (fruit, pastry) is similar but Chang's recipe is remarkably unlike the Pop-Tarts I somehow managed to enjoy as a child. Kellogg's describes its blueberry product as: "Nothing too fancy. Just a simple golden crust filled with the most amazing blueberry flavor you've ever known." They then list among the top ingredients two types of corn syrup (high and ordinary fructose), dextrose, and corn/soybean oils (with THBQ, whatever that might be) . The product contains less than 2% blueberries and/or blueberry flavor. Yum?

Chang's recipe, on the other hand, starts with making a pate brisee dough with a cup of butter, some flour, a couple egg yolks, milk and a little bit of sugar. What could possibly be bad there?

Making these wasn't difficult, per se, but I don't have a lot of experience with pastry dough. I've made pie crusts before, and I confess that I'm just not good at getting them to roll out in a nice shape. I'm getting better at this the more I play with them, but I'm still pretty awful at it. Chang somehow believed, however, that I'd be able to create two identically sized 11" x 14" rectangles; and that I'd just be able to easily lift up one of those rectangles and put it on top of the other (effectively assembling all of the individual Pop Tarts at once). Not so easy.

I'm pretty sure the weather and my table were working against me -- both were fairly warm, so the dough was _very_ soft. I improvised a bit. I made one approximate rectangle, cut it into 8 small rectangles and put some raspberry jam on top of each one. I then cut up the other rectangle and built the pop-tarts one by one. Lifting each one was tricky. In the future I might fill them on the cookie sheet instead. It took a lot of spatula work and a couple minor repairs.

In the end, the pastries weren't all perfectly shaped, but they did taste really good. They were delightfully flaky and rich, with the taste of good quality raspberry jam inside. And a simple sugary glaze on top. It was like being a kid, but with much better taste.

I'd like to play with these again in the future, maybe with some more interesting flavors. Perhaps some herb-infused citrus curds or spiced chocolate. Stay tuned!