Fennel Wrap-up

On Saturday night, I sat down in the park up the street from me to write this entry. When I opened it up to post it this evening, I realized that I was about to give you two long philosophical rambles in a row. So, I chopped all that crap out, and cut straight to the stuff I needed to say about fennel.


Fennel Tea

It’s easy, and it’s delicious. Half-fill your tea infuser with fennel seeds, steep for ten minutes. (Lightly crush the seeds beforehand for a tea that is more potent, but also more bitter.) You get a light green tea that tastes, more or less, exactly how you’d expect it to taste – pleasantly licorice-flavored. (Remember, I don’t like licorice – one of the things that I like about fennel is that it’s got the same sharp taste, without the cloying sweetness.) It’s nice and sweet without needing sugar, and supposedly promotes the production of breast milk. Mmmm, mmmm! What’s not to like?

Fennel Bread

While I really, really enjoyed the delicious scent and slight twang to the taste buds that the fennel added, I’m not going to bother posting the recipe that I used. Because while it smelled wonderful, and tasted great, its density was approximately equal to a neutron star. Victoria and I were out of all-purpose flour, and so I substituted whole wheat. Apparently, you can’t just substitute whole wheat flour for bread flour. I never claimed to be a good baker.

Anyway, a tablespoon (or two) of whole fennel seeds in a loaf of bread is an amazing addition. I think it would also be great to sprinkle on top of the loaf, like rye seeds, or even to use on a bagel instead of sesame seeds or whatever.

Fennel Mushrooms

The fennel mushrooms were okay, not amazing. Unlike some of the other spices, the fennel flavor really seemed to conflict with the mushroom’s own flavor – it didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t blend in the same way that coriander did, for instance. The mushrooms themselves, however, are getting better and better – Victoria came up with the idea of using a wooden skewer to punch holes in them, and that seems to work perfectly.

Fennel Plant

I just wanted to show everyone a picture of my new fennel plant, Fenwick! It came in the mail last Thursday, and is still a little wilted from its trip. It's recovering nicely, though - Victoria is a good gardener.

Last Friday, the whole plant looked like the yellow, wilted part on the left side; it's been healing up nicely. The whole plant is edible; when it's mature, the leaf-tips will bear fruit - the seeds.

Right now, the plant is tiny. When it ages a bit, it will turn into this:

which is a fairly ugly piece of produce. The bulb at the bottom is kind of neat - it's all those stalks kind of wrapped together, in an odd way. Split it open and you can see it more clearly:

It's easy to see that the bulb is just different stalk-like structures, twined together.


Well, this has been a productive week, or almost week and a half, at this point. Fennel is a phenomenally interesting spice - rich and complex, with a sweetness and a twang to it. It's versatile, widely used, and yet something I knew absolutely nothing about. Which, again, is why I'm doing this.


Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll tell you why I hate your oregano so much.

Blog Update! Mushroom Report! All this and more!

First, a quick update on the blog - I didn't manage to get anything posted over the weekend, so there's another quick post below this one, with possibly a third to come this afternoon if I remember what it was supposed to be about.

Ideally, I will get two posts written about coriander tomorrow and start week four off on Tuesday. That's what we call "aspirational." If that doesn't happen, I'm not sure what I'm going to do - I will probably throw in some short filler posts, either cumin-related or Batman-related, and then start coriander the Monday after.

I have to admit, the pace I set for myself is more than a bit ambitious. I really like having a solid posting schedule, and being able to have something go up every weekday. However, it seems more than likely that I'll find that I simply can't keep up with it, and I'm going to wind up taking a week off every three or four weeks. I don't particularly like that idea. The big problem I'm running into is this - when I have the weekend free, I can sit down and write most of the week's articles. But when I don't - like last weekend, when I went to visit my parents, then I fall behind very, very quickly. Luckily, having a baby means I don't have much of a life, but still...

So with that on the table, I'll repeat something I said a while ago - I'd love for people to contribute. Now, you wouldn't just have the enjoyment of participating - you'd also be helping me keep the schedule going! Either way, I'm going to try to keep juggling the best I can, and when I need to, I'll take a few days to catch up.

Or play Civilization IV. You know how it is.


Victoria and I tried something different with the mushrooms this week. Now, ideally, every week the mushrooms would use precisely the same recipe, because of SCIENCE. But the problem that I've mentioned before - that the mushrooms come out watery - is a vexing one, so I'm tinkering a bit. The first question that needed answering was where the water actually was coming from. I know that sounds odd - but I had a hard time figuring out if the water was pooling in the mushroom cap, or if it was being squeezed out of the mushroom itself when I bit down into it.

We decided the way to test that would be to put holes in the mushroom caps. Mushrooms are so spongy, though, that any holes would have to be fairly substantial in order to actually let water through - if you just stuck a knife into one (as we did) the hole will essentially close itself back up. So we tried a bunch of different methods on different mushrooms, to see which would be the most effective. In addition to the knife-slit, we did three other things:

1. Used a syringe to punch holes in the mushroom. These holes were also small enough that they pretty much just closed up.

2. Put one big drain-hole in the middle of the mushroom cap. This worked well - the water was unquestionably pooling in the cap, probably squeezed out of the mushroom itself as well as the fillings. The big hole let the water drain out, but it also ruined the structural integrity of the mushroom cap. Nobody wants to eat a floppy mushroom.

3. Put five smaller holes in the cap. Bigger than the syringe holes, smaller than the drain-hole one. To be honest, I have no idea what Victoria used to actually make these holes. This was the best of both worlds - enough space for the water to drain out, but the smaller holes didn't really interfere with my ability to pick up the mushroom and shove it into my mushroom-hole.

Mushroom mushroom mushroom. Mushroom. Okay, that word has lost its meaning.

So, those are preliminary results - we'll keep tinkering. Still got forty-nine trials left; I'm sure we'll get it.

As for the cumin - it was great. The mushroom experiment is a little bland - that's by design - but cumin had the power to make this a worthwhile dish on its own.

One thing I've really noticed is that some things really bring out the piquancy of cumin, while others do a great job of dampening it. (Piquancy is the sense of "hotness" you get from food - I'm going to use piquancy because using the word "spiciness" is pretty confusing in the context of a blog about spices.) I was told recently that lemon juice, for instance, does a great job of cutting the piquancy. Something in the mushrooms or the spinach kept a lid on the hotness; we used a fairly hefty amount of cumin but Victoria was still able to eat them comfortably.


There's still a lot to learn about cumin, to be honest - but I feel like I've made some good headway. Time for some sleep.

Hummus-Fried Chicken and Mushrooms, Jeera Rice

Convergent evolution. Funny stuff.

I like to cook eggs. Eggs are among the first things I really learned to cook well, and I definitely did it the hard way. (Remind me to tell you the story of the first time I cooked eggs, sometime.) I spent years learning how to make a good omelet - cooking, figuring out what went wrong, refining, practicing the flip, adjusting the batter, adjusting the pan. And when I was done - when I felt like I could make a great omelet every single time, regardless of circumstances, available ingredients (within reason) or anything else, someone pointed something out to me that caught me by surprise.

What I had developed wasn't an omelet at all; it was almost exactly, in fact, like an Italian frittata. Which is, admittedly, just an Italian omelet - but comes out a lot more like a crustless quiche than like a French omelet. Seems like somewhere along the line, someone else had done the same thing that I had, and had refined and perfected until they got something that was not really what they were reaching for at all. Not to be bold, but I think it's a heck of a lot better, to be honest. Actually, that shouldn't be surprising. After all, what I was doing was refining the recipe so that it fit my taste better and better; of course I think the end result tastes awesome.

When I was in Israel, I was sitting around my tiny, tiny kitchen one day thinking about what I might want to eat for dinner. I had half a plate of hummus left, as well as some chicken breasts. Feeling adventurous, I coated the chicken in the leftover hummus (well-mixed with the paprika and olive oil by now - you DID read my last post, right?) and fried it up. It tasted great, and I wound up making it fairly often.

Cut forward a year or two. I'm in law school, and a local diner - Sam's Cafe, a wonderful little greasy spoon on Walnut Street in Champaign, IL - decides to start doing a Lebanese menu on Friday evenings. The owners are both Lebanese, and they've been feeling a bit homesick. As for me, I've been feeling a bit home-away-from-homesick, and since all the good food in Israel is either Lebanese or cooked by one of my aunts, a Lebanese diner sounded right on the money.

It was a small menu - they only had four or five dishes, which is understandable, considering that they were just starting to do the Lebanese thing; I wouldn't want to stock up to do middle eastern cooking in the middle west. In fact, that first evening, there were only about three group that showed up in the entire two hours my friends and I were there. (Gratifyingly, word of mouth spread - less than a month later, the place was packed on Friday evening. Six months after that, it was a normal evening crowd. So that worked out okay.) I ordered a chicken dish I vaguely remembered having before, called Shish Taouk. (To be perfectly honest, what I was really looking forward to was being able to take the hummus, fries, and whatever else I ordered as a main dish, wrap them all up together in a pita, and eat it that way.)

(Shawarma is pretty much the best food in the world. It's kind of like a Greek gyro, in the same way that a Kobe steak is kind of like a Big Mac. You can generally get them one of two ways - stuffed into the pocket of a pita, or in a laffa - a larger piece of flatbread without an empty space in the middle. I desperately miss it.

Seriously - this was something I would eat six or seven times a week in Israel. For four bucks, I could get a full meal - including a ton of vegetables - wrapped in an amazingly delicious piece of bread, and walk down the street eating it.

Man, my next blog should be "the year of eating nothing but shawarma.

I have no idea why it's been so difficult for me to actually talk about cumin this week. I mean, I really like it! It's a delicious spice! I think I made a strategic mistake in cooking hummus first - that mistake being that I forgot how totally nuts I am for middle eastern food.

DAMN I miss shawarma!)

...called Shish Taouk. I knew that I'd had it before, and that I had really liked it, but couldn't remember when. When it finally arrived, I bit into it... And tasted my hummus-fried chicken. Apparently, twice in my life now I've made up on my own, dishes that already have a long history.

The joke was on me, of course, because although they taste similar, Shish Taouk is actually nothing like the chicken dish that I make. They taste similar, and use many of the same flavors, but shish taouk is missing both hummus and tahini, two things that many people might consider fairly important to the whole hummus ambiance.

I have no idea what this story was supposed to be about.


So, anyway - I had some hummus. I had some chicken. I also had some mushrooms. I made some hummus-fried chicken, as well as some hummus-fried portobello.

HUMMUS-FRIED STUFF

Ingredients:

One pound of chicken breasts
Two good-sized portobello caps
One cup of hummus (Recipe in previous post)
One half teaspoon cumin
A pinch of salt and pepper
Lemon juice
Oil - olive or sesame

This is a really simple deal here. First, turn the hummus into a marinade. That involves making it slightly more acidic, and amping up the primary flavors a bit. So, mix in the extra cumin, salt, and pepper, and hit it with the lemon juice. How much? Damned if I know. I've been trying to be better about measuring things, but I totally forgot. Also, I was using squirt-bottle lemon juice rather than fresh lemon juice, so I just kept adding it until it was the consistency I wanted. To put it differently - keep adding lemon juice until the hummus loosens up a bit - you want to be able to smoothly spread it on the chicken, but it shouldn't be runny.

I cooked the chicken breasts whole, but you could also slice or cube the chicken. The mushrooms should be sliced think. Coat everything liberally in the hummus mixture, and let it sit for a half hour or more. (really, for as long as you have the forethought to have given yourself.) (Work through that sentence again, slowly - it'll make sense.) Warm up the oil and toss in the food. (You'll probably have to do it in two batches, if you made all the stuff I listed above.

You want the oil to be medium-high. You're playing a dangerous game here; you need to get it hot enough to turn the hummus into a crust, but if you let it get too hot, the hummus will burn, bind to itself and the pan, and pull right off when you go to remove your food. (Using tongs is a good idea.) If you're cooking chicken breasts, it may be a good idea at this point to go back in time and cube the chicken - it will definitely be easier to control the heat and not overcook things with cubes rather than whole breasts.

Your mileage may vary, depending on the thickness of your cut of chicken, but I find about five minutes, flip, then another five does the job. (You could also start in a frying pan, then switch to the oven - but you'll probably wind up with soggier chicken than you'd prefer.) The mushrooms get basically the exact same treatment, except less time per side - two minutes should do fine.

Serve over rice. In my case, I served it over the following:

JEERA RICE

This is an Indian rice recipe, using cumin seeds. You can find many different variations on it, all over the internet. It's an interesting variant on fried rice; instead of taking already cooked rice and frying it, you take rice that's about 3/4 cooked and fry it for a few minutes to add some flavor before finishing cooking it.

In one pot, start a cup of basmati rice goin'. When it's almost done - soft, but still hard in the middle - drain out the water. Get some oil (or ghee - and sorry if you don't know ghee, I don't know enough about it to explain) cookin', and toss in a small chopped onion. When it gets lonely, throw in two teaspoons of cumin seeds to keep it company. After about two minutes, your nose should be telling you that cumin is delicious - when this happens, dump the rice in and give the whole mixture a minute to get acquainted. Once you feel like the rice has gotten some oil, cumin, and onion all up in its business, rain on the party - a half cup of water, cover, and simmer till the rice is complete. Serve it with the hummus-fried chicken.


Yousef, at this point in the dinner, made a really smart point - you could do some really nice harmonies, with (let's say) coriander rice going under the heavily cumin'd chicken. As it is, the main flavors in the rice and the chicken went smoothly together, which is definitely one way to do things. There are others.


Tomorrow - I've been looking so long at these pictures of cumin that I almost believe that they're real. Also, a quick recipe, the weekly mushroom report, and black cumin.

(He was my favorite cooking-related superhero in the turbulent 70s.)

Turmeric Wrap

Actually, I'm not making a wrap - I'm drawing Week Turmeric to a close. I never did a generic “This is your turmeric” entry, so I’ll use this one as a place to share some things about turmeric that have been wandering around my head.


1: What is turmeric, anyway?

One thing I really need to do - and please feel free to send me suggestions - is come up with a standard list of background questions on each spice that I can go over. I'm not talking all the history stuff; I'm talking the practical things, like whether there are different forms you can get the spice in, and where you might have to go to get it. The kind of thing I did extensively for salt... and honestly, burned myself out a little bit on.

Luckily for me, turmeric is a bit boring in that regard. Turmeric is a rhizome - the horizontal underground stem of a plant which sending shoots upwards and roots downward. If you've ever seen whole ginger root, it's basically the same thing, except turmeric is less fractal and more orange.

Technically, turmeric does have different variations - but most of us will never have any use for anything except turmeric powder. There is also white turmeric, which is used in some parts of southeast Asia - but it doesn't taste as good, so it doesn't get used much. Then there's the raw turmeric root, which you can use just like you can use ginger root. The thing is - and I honestly haven't been able to figure out why - we don't. You can buy turmeric root online, but even big spice merchants don't really have much of it; there's just not much call for it. Poking around online, it honestly seems that nobody has the slightest clue what to do with it, except "use a microplane to grate it". IE, turn it into a powder. So, we use the powdered form, and that's about it.

Turmeric's nickname is "Indian saffron", and that gives you an idea of the high regard that people hold it in. After all, saffron is the most expensive spice in the world; an ounce of good saffron costs more than a share of Apple stock; three ounces of top-quality stuff are a good trade for an ounce of gold.

I'm not going to lie to you - I am probably not going to be doing a saffron week.


Turmeric also seems to be approximately as medicinal as water from the Holy Grail. It's been shown in studies to fight everything from acne to uveitis (inflammation of the eyes) with stops at joint pain, arthritis, about ninety forms of cancer, and even HIV. (Actually, alphabetically the farthest down I got was "viral infections", but honestly, it was cooler to write uveitis.)

Excuse me, I need to readjust my IV turmeric drip. That's better.


2: Science gets its due

How were the turmeric stuffed mushrooms? Really boring, actually; I wasn’t much of a fan. Turmeric is a deep bass note, the kind of thing that you don’t notice while it’s there, and might not even notice consciously when its gone. You just notice that something is missing, that the music doesn’t flow as well, that there’s nothing at the bottom for everything else to build upon. But at the same time, a foundation on its own isn’t that interesting. Nobody ever got up on stage with their bass guitar and started belting out tunes.

Well, I’m sure that tons of people have. But nobody ever got famous that way, is really what I mean. There aren’t a ton of famous bass solos in the history of rock.

That’s turmeric stuffed mushrooms – a guy sitting at a local bar on open mike night with his friggin’ bass. Sure, the verses really come across clearly, but when the chorus comes around, and the music is supposed to do something on its own, there’s just nothing. The turmeric really brought out the flavor of the other ingredients… but I was left asking, “yeah? What else?” Nothing sang.


I guess it didn’t really occur to me until this moment just how valuable an idea these mushrooms are. I mean, the purpose of this blog is to learn about the uses of various spices. I’ve been cooking with turmeric for a week, and it wasn’t until I started writing about why I was disappointed with the mushrooms that I realized that I had simply learned when to use turmeric, not why. But the why is in the paragraph above. Turmeric is a foundation; a rich, earthy bass note that can form a brilliant foundation for a medley of spices. On its own, it’s going to leave you somewhat hollow, but team it with the right support, and it’s absolutely brilliant.


3: I probably should have said this at the beginning of the week.

Turmeric gets on everything. The bad news is that it’s used a dye, as well as a spice, so it sticks around. One of my cutting boards has a yellowish cast to it now, as well as one of my plastic mixing bowls. The good news is that it’s a dye, yes, but it’s a fairly lousy dye. It’s not particularly lightfast, which means that it fades fairly easily when exposed to light. But, since my cutting boards don’t exactly spend a lot of time out in the sun, I’m not really counting on that effect.

The upshot of this all is be careful when cooking with turmeric. Mix in glass or ceramic vessels, and don’t leave something covered in turmeric on anything that can absorb the color for any length of time. At the same time, as fair as dyes go, it’s a fairly delicious dye. Those pictures of yellow rice that I had up the other day? Remember, that started out as ordinary white rice. The rich yellow color was all from the turmeric. I can definitely see using turmeric as a food coloring. So does the food industry; turmeric is a big part of what gives the yellow color to yellow mustard. If you're seeing a bright yellow color in food, chances are turmeric isn't far away.


4: Further experiments for the reader.

Not every song wants a squealy guitar. Not every song wants a fiddle or a trumpet, and songs that don’t want something that’s going to stand front and center like that are probably going to be ruined by its inclusion. But you know what? It’s really hard to ruin something by adding a bass line. And I think you could probably put turmeric in a bunch of fairly odd places without harming the flavor at all. Desserts, for instance.

I can actually see using turmeric as a coloring in something like cupcakes or frosting without it setting off any sensory alarm bells. The same is quite probably true about spongy cakes in general; if you want to give something a rich yellow color, you could probably do it with a bit of turmeric, and just let the flavor blend into the background.

I’m not, to be perfectly honest, a huge cake person; I’m much more of a pie guy. But Joe sent me a recipe for Sfouf, a middle eastern almond cake, that uses turmeric: http://mideastfood.about.com/od/dessertssweetspastries/r/sfoufrecipe.htm. I can see this really working well together - in this case, the turmeric enhancing the flavor of the almonds. Where I really think it would shine, though, would be in a super-sweet deserts like baklava, where the turmeric would add great color, but where the earthiness would also blend well with the main flavors of the dish.

Hmm. Turmeric in baklava sounds great. If anyone decides to try it, please email me to tell me how it works out.


As closes Turmeric, so opens Cumin. See you all on Monday!

Five salt dinner 3 - Stuffed Mushrooms

Oookay... So I was going to do salt-crusted red snapper next. Then I took the fish out of the bag to work on it. Then I shrieked like a little girl, and ran across the room to get away from the bag with the GIANT FISH EYE staring at me.

I am a city boy at heart. I do not want to be close to nature; I don't want to be part of the food cycle. I want my meat in fillets, steaks, or other forms that don't remind me at all of what they once were. What I do NOT want is a GIANT FISH (and by giant, I mean literally the smallest red snapper the market had) that is likely to start flopping around any second. (Despite being dead and gutted.)

Are you trying to tell me that thing doesn't freak you out at all?

I really wish I could describe how freaked out I am right now. I was barely able to get the fish back into the bag and into the fridge. I really, really hope Victoria is willing to deal with that thing.

You know what the funny thing is? I KNOW all this about myself - yet I bought a whole red snapper anyway.

Well, I'd better get working on something else, then...

Five salt dinner 3 - Salt-Crusted Red Snapper Stuffed Mushrooms

(Picking this entry up the next day - I just didn't have time to keep blogging and still get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour.)

As I said earlier, in the interest of science, I'm going to be making the following stuffed mushrooms every week - the only alteration being the spice I add for flavoring. It's a simple recipe, the point being to have something yummy, but which doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the spice. I had intended to make it exactly the same way every week - but honestly, at least in the beginning, I'm not going to be able to stop myself from tinkering. The mushrooms tend to come out a bit more watery than I would prefer. More on that later.

Also, I like to say mushrump a instead of mushroom. I do it enough that Victoria bought me a stuffed hedgehog and named him Mushrump. (What? It makes sense. His girlfriend is Pinecone, obviously.) Here is a picture of Mushrump - doesn't he make my baby look cute?

Seriously... I am shameless.

Right. Mushrooms.

Okay, so the parts:

 

Mushrooms, spinach, a baking pan, some salt, that's it. Well, since I'm cooking for eight this evening, and I've got plenty of mushrooms, I decided to spice things up a bit - I had an extra chorizo in the fridge, so I fried it up and threw it in the mix.

De-stem the mushrooms, and put them in the baking tray. Take the stems, and add an equal volume of spinach. Then, chop the hell out of them. My favorite tool for going nuts on stuff like this is a knife I found out last night is called a Mezza Luna - a curved knife with a handle on both ends. It's really good at mincing things, and it's really fun to use.

Cackling evilly is not a requirement when you use this thing, but every little bit helps.

After I chopped everything up, I decided I had too much stem, not enough spinach, so I threw in another half-handful or so. Half of this got enbowled at this point. I chucked the chorizo in the pile, kept chopping for a bit. Eventually, I wound up with this.

Now, as I said earlier,  the last few times the mushrooms have been a little too much... let's say juicy. Not bad - but a bit too much water in my mouth when I bite down. I've learned a bit about the cooking uses of salt, recently - and so I decided to sprinkle some kosher salt on the mushrooms, figuring that it would pull some of the water out of them.

 

In to the oven for seven minutes - and when I pulled them off, it was pretty clear that water had been pulled out - the salt on the bottom of the tray had been dissolved, then the water it dissolved in evaporated.

Perfect! Flipped 'em over, (to be honest, I don't know why I was cooking them face-down then flipping them... I'll try it the other way next time and see if anything different happens.) stuffed 'em with the mushroom and spinach mix, covered 'em with a little bit of cheese (a parmesan/asiago mix) and threw them back in for seven minutes.

Result:

They look better than they tasted. Not that they tasted bad - actually, they tasted really good - but to me, at least, that picture looks like some kind of Platonic ideal of stuffed mushrooms. I'm drooling looking at that picture.

They were definitely less watery than they were last time, but I think there's still room for improvement. Anyone have any suggestions?