Salads with Ferments: Seaweed Kraut, Brown Rice

Lots of people don’t like the straight shot of ferments just on their own.  Integrating them into salads is a great way to ensure the health benefit in your diet, with sour and salty flavours softened.  I made this wonderful salad yesterday, and thought to record it here.

• Brown Rice (leftover)
• Seaweed Kraut (white cabbage, dried kelp)
• chopped coriander leaf (cilantro)
• pumpkin seeds roasted in Garlic Turmeric Oil, inspired by delicious Burmese salads.

I’m not into recipes so much as approaches.  So in this there’s the template of grain plus ferment or pickle plus green or herb plus garnish.  The dressing is intrinsic really, the oily seeds and the brine of the ferment, but you could add other or additional. Possibilities are endless.

Have a look at similar approach to Root Vegetable Salads that include ferments.

Blackberry Apple Crumble: Not a Recipe

Would you call this performance a kind of Housewife Burlesque? I don’t know but I think she’s fabulous! Watch and tell us what you think.

“Everybody’s good at cooking something, I’m good at cooking Crumble.” Since May when Lorraine Bowen was on Britain’s Got Talent, my kids go around singing this song, so I sing it too now.  We all sing it–it’s catchy!

Here we have a large forage of end-of-September blackberries picked by husband and son.

And despite that it’s now October, there are still perhaps some bramble bushes fruiting in abundance.

Green Goddess Dip and Dressings: Fermenting Classics

After that success of a dip with the fermented gooseberries, I began to ponder party dips and the social and gustatory joys of standing, chatting and especially gesturing with crudités of carrot and celery decorated in blobs of creamy green.

I’d remembered the pleasure in the days of yore eating dips made from packets of dried onion soup mixed with sour cream, and others in a Green Goddess family in which herbs like parsley, dill, even tarragon, are mixed with garlic and chives and sour cream, and often mayonnaise or an egg yolk too (to emulsify), and perhaps anchovies, for a little secret umami.

And there saying hello on my kitchen counter were the herbs I began to ferment nearly two months ago according to traditions of Ukraine and France and most certainly other places as well.

So I made Green Goddess Dip with:

Torta di Erbe

From Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, I made Torta di Erbe, translated as “Green Tart,” which somehow tickled my funny-bone. It’s a Roman tart, she says, and also known as “Pizza Ebraica” (Jewish pizza).

Thanksgiving Pie

We had our family-and-friends Thanksgiving feast not on Thanksgiving this year, but last Saturday. Beautiful, and hard work, and I’m glad to have done it, because a holiday of gratitude is a tradition to honour. And yet, while as a foodie I get really excited by all the chatter in the blogosphere about The Meal, the lavishness, excess, and gluttony sit uncomfortably. There’s something disgusting about eating to overfulness, on a personal, physical level as well as the obvious political ramifications– and so many hungry in our communities, our countries, our globe. I think next year I will work harder for a food aesthetic that feels harvesty and celebratory yet simple, with an enough-ness to the gratitude.  Is “ample sufficiency” the phrase I’m seeking?

And there’s the history of this holiday, the violence, which I’ll leave alone for this moment– the kind of history that is on my mind, filled with sadism of the White Victor towards the natives, horrendous– doesn’t quite match the instagrammatic filters of sugar-glistening pastry and home-sweet-home nostalgia.  But had to say — I’m me LOL!

The pie I made for our feast:  a beautiful Apple and Salted-Caramel Pie from the new cookbook from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie people in Brooklyn–which recipe I found on the internet.  It came out really well even with my substitutions (pear scrap-vinegar instead of lemon juice), though quite wet and way too sweet for my taste — and I was reminded how if I can keep internalising intuitive approaches to baking as I have cooking, I’ll be a better and better baker.  In other words: I want to reduce my recipe reliance– in other words, to use recipes for ideas but not to need them, or rather, to be able to do without them.

So here I go trying to explain this, because I think it’s useful to articulate, and the next day. with the conscious intention to learn from doing, I actually made a better pie of my own invention, and I learned principles from it that I now can grow with.  I want to have this as a reference for the future.

To start with, I had extra dough, and I had found this, and it was indeed perfect “Perfect Pie Crust.”

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/perfect_pie_crust/

Though “perfect” (a concept I dislike) is as much about technique (very light handling) and letting the dough rest between mixture and rolling, as anything else.  Oh, freshness of butter maybe!

I used a combination of flours: local wholemeal (not strong) which I love for baking,  Gluten Free White Flour, Cheap White Flour, Expensive Organic White Spelt. I always mix flours, usually to a browner effect, often with almond meal, or chestnut flour, or maize, or buckwheat– and I’ve learned to feel free doing this.  You get used to feeling of moistness how much cold water you need to add — add very little, then add a little more.  And if it’s too wet by unfortunate miscalculation, you can roll out the dough with a little extra flour to compensate– and don’t stress– it will still be good enough.  Because you are liberated from the idea of Perfect with the idea Beautiful and Creative.  Eventually, your doughs will have the right fat/wet/dry balance just from experience.

(Here’s the link to advertise some wonderful, relatively local Welsh flour: http://www.talgarthmill.com/talgarth-mill-flour/   )

So the intention was to make an apple pie:I cut up apples, meaning, removed damaged skin, cored, all the ugly bits (am still working through boxes of windfalls that by now are really needing to be used)– and had a nice bowl of apples.  I added a happy tablespoon of cinnamon, a scant quarter cup of sugar,  and maybe two spoons of flour– of course could be ground almonds, or cornflour, or teeny tapioca pearls– but a thickener.  And I let it sit to see how much water would come out.  The extra flour mattered this time.  Wet is best if syrupy in pies.  How’s that for a dictum?

Then the brain wave came to add the leftover cranberry-orange sauce, sitting right in front of me in a glass jar I’d meant to put in the fridge.   This is the cranberry sauce I most like making– the one I learned through all my childhoods, Thanks Mom!, printed on that plastic bag packet– mix a pack of cranberries, two organic oranges, a quarter cup of sugar, for a tart, invigorating, raw “relish.”   So mixed it with the apples, rolled out the bottom layer of the dough, put the fruit in, and covered with a sloppy looking lattice, then rolled the last of the dough into hearts to decorate and disguise my lazy handiwork.

I felt proud of this pie because it was my own.  And not too sweet, slightly tart, slightly sour, a beautiful colour, and I gave it to a good friend who is having a challenging time– hoping she’d eat it for breakfast, because pie for breakfast is love.  The love is part of the non-recipe recipe.  I hope this all makes sense.

And there’s a dessert post, if a little convoluted, in advance of American Thanksgiving, for the friend of the friend who asked.