Stuck in Amsterdam

As you may know, I traveled to Holland with my grandmother on April 9th for a major holocaust memorial where her survival story was the subject of a documentary, book and honor from the Queen. We are now stuck in Amsterdam because of the Volcano. European flight travel has been completely halted for days. Hopefully we will be home soon and I will see my family again. I have been a bit preoccupied with all of this to say the least, but have hundreds of pictures of life and food here and hope to get them up on the blog soon. please check in for more info soon and feel free to leave a comment below!
Tagan

Amsterdam - Organic Farmers' Market

I am in Holland for 1 week. There is a major holocaust memorial happening and the government has invited my Oma (my grandmother) to come. She is being acknowledged for the first time publically by the government as the only dutch survivor of Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. It has been a beautiful and intense 36 hours. Incredible to be sharing this event with my Oma and my sister. There is so much to tell, but that is all a long story for another time. I'm sort of delirious and foggy headed, but for the sake of a quick snippet of food life from today here we go:

 Kendra and Selma on the way to the plane. 

Arrived at 8am this morning. Spent a large chunk of time getting my Oma settled. I slept a few hours on the plane unlike my sister and grandmother, so while they were resting, I, (with my 11 pages of food notes I'd cut and pasted form various websites and blogs in-hand), headed off to my Saturday must see food destination: the organic farmers' market held, only on Saturday walking distance from our hotel.

The Noordermarkt 

Organic Farmers' Market

Amazing cheeses! 3 kinds of goat milk gouda, young, medium and aged. I got the aged, it was amazing, and also a raw milk cow gouda. so fresh and complex. there must have been 40 kinds of gouda there! Also see the tastings of various flavored fresh goat cheese. I can't get this text to move between each photo, so I'll quickly tell you about a few: the small dishes with spoons were tasting samples for various types of salt. A 10 foot table piled with so many kinds! I was blurry-eyed from no sleep so kind of stumbled by a table i otherwise would have lingered at. The messy fudge looking table was all raw super foods. It was beautiful to be in food life in another land. The European comfort with food is apparent in the way stands are set up, oysters to be shucked by passers by, salt to sample with slivers of cucumbers and so much more.

 
Please leave any comments below! Thanks!

Bee Bim Noodles - first outdoor meal of the spring

As the weather turns warm and we move our lives out doors, we look forward to more and more meals eaten at our weathered picnic table, our vegetable garden sprouting up a few feet away, kids playing in the sand pit, and sounds streaming over the fence from our neighbors yards.

Sunday night we had our first meal of the season outside. It was an impromptu dinner with my mother and stepfather joining us from next door, and many bits of food pulled together from the assortment of dishes I was preparing for the week. It turned out to be a more elaborate and special meal as it evolved, I suppose fitting for the first official picnic table dinner of the spring.

I love Bee Bim Bop the Korean meal that translates as "mixed up rice" because you surround a pile of rice with sautéed vegetables such as spinach, carrots, mung bean sprouts, marinated and browned meat and a fried egg sunny side up, top it with hot sauce or kim chee, and mix it all up. There is a great recipe for a traditional Bee Bim Bop in New Haven Cooks/Cocina New Haven, which was submitted by Yoon-Ock Kim the owner of the Oriental Pantry on Orange St in New Haven, CT.  Her marinade for the beef includes a crushed kiwi or asian pear which adds a delicious sweetness and complexity to the marinaded and helps the meat brown perfectly. She serves it up (with beef or tofu) in her shop for lunch or dinner. On occasion I make a traditional version of this dish, my kids love it, and we even have a kids book about it: Bee Bim Bop by Linda Sue Park  (which I discovered a few summers back at the story hour at the Eric Carle museum in Amherst MA, if you are ever around that area, the story time is great there, and the museum is nice for adults and kids.)

Sunday night's dinner was inspired by this traditional dish, but we skipped the fried egg and served the dish up with rice noodles and some additional vegetables I knew my kids would eat. We don't eat a lot of meat in our house, but when we do I try to purchase it from farmers or stores that are treating the animals well and not pumping them with hormones ad antibiotics. While it is not my ideal, I do buy some of the less expensive cuts of meat at Trader Joe's when it is labeled "animals never confined to feed lot, given all vegetarian feed, and not given antibiotics or growth hormones. " It is sometimes hard to decipher all these labels, if you want to know more about these terms check out the sustainable table issues page where you can get more info by clicking on the topics listed in the side bar.

The meat I used here was a shaved beef that I sliced into very thin pieces and marinated in a mixture of Soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, garlic and a pinch of sugar (just mix it till it tastes good to you). I didn't have any kiwi this week, and was going for a quick and simpler meal. I used some of this marinade for the tofu dish as well. The noodles are pad thai style rice noodles, we also had a stir fry of tofu and vegetables, sliced lettuce, blanched broccoli and cauliflower, and some carrot "ribbons' made using a vegetable peeler. The great thing about this dish is that the meat is so flavorful, that a very small amount of it flavors a whole bowl of food, which is good for your health and your bank account.

Seedling update

They are growing!!!
Marigold seedlings from seeds saved from the Edgewood school garden last fall. Great as a natural pesticide! Looks like the spinach seeds from last year are still alive and ready for planting directly into the ground. Got some organic yellow grape tomato seeds, and cucumber seeds to plant, and also some mammoth sunflowers to try out for this year. My son, a serious sunflower lover keeps running around saying " the sunflowers will be as tall as two papas!!!" lets hope!
If you want to start an organic home garden, check out your local nursery or garden center, lots of stores are now carrying organic or non GMO (non genetically modified) seeds. there are also many websites online where you can order seeds. You can also check your state cooperative extension program run through the state department of agriculture and usually hosted by a state university. They conduct soil testing and sometimes provide workshops for home gardeners. 
Local garden links:
Common Ground - open farm days, garden workshops and seedling sale
CT Northeast Organic Farming Association (CT NOFA) - gardening resources and workshops
New Haven Land Trust - community gardens
Master Gardeners program - gardening workshops and assistance

Chicken Stock - the basics

Having just emerged from the last bowl of matzo ball soup only a few days ago, I thought I would post this basic technique for making chicken stock. I know it might be better suited to a post in the fall when we are all gearing up for cold weather and flu season, but the real basic cooking techniques are timeless and always useful. 

You can use any piece of chicken to make stock, even just the bones with a few bits of meat on them are good. So, if you roasted a chicken or bought one already cooked, save the carcass or just bones from a leg or two and get ready to make you some stock! For you vegetarians out there ( I know I may have already lost you with the picture of picked-apart poultry and the use of the word carcass in the context of food) but you can make a great vegetable broth using this same technique, just leave out the chicken, and consider adding a few more veggies and maybe some herbs.

    

There are many ways to make chicken stock. If you are starting with raw chicken, you can brown the pieces first which will add color and flavor to your broth. You can also sauté your vegetables first on medium-low heat to concentrate their flavors and the richness of the stock. For this basic quick stock however, I just filled a large pot with the chicken bones, cold water, some chopped up onion, celery, carrots and parsnip (which gives chicken stock it's characteristic sweetness). You can also add bay leaf or thyme if you have them and garlic if you like it in your soup. If you want to get creative and spice things up a bit,  you could also add a few slices of ginger or lemon peel, and then when serving it, some cilantro, sesame oil and hot sauce like sriracha.

But, back to the basics. You can add any vegetables to the stock that you like, but it is best to reserve starchy vegetables such as potato and celery root, till you are actually making the finished soup because it will give you a cloudy and thickened broth. You might also want to stay away from vegetables from the cabbage family like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage which will add better flavor and nutrients if they are cooked briefly in the finished soup rather than the broth.

Basic Chicken (or Vegetable Stock)

1 large onion

4 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

2 parsnips, peeled and roughly chopped

Chicken (remains from a roasted chicken, or half of a chicken, or 1 or 2 legs or thighs raw)

Salt to taste

If using raw chicken pieces:

You may brown them in the pan, then remove them, add your vegetables, season with salt, sauté, and then add water, return chicken pieces to the pot, and simmer covered for about 1 hour.
     

If using the remains of an already cooked and eaten chicken:

Place the bones and the rest of the ingredients in a large stock pot, cover with cold water, add a few pinches of salt and simmer for 1 hour. 

To make vegetable stock:

Sauté all of your vegetables in a small amount of oil over medium heat. you can brown them if you like a darker broth, or just let them cook down a bit without browning. You may want to add an extra onion and possibly some garlic as well.  Season with salt and add any other herbs you like. Cover with cold water, and simmer for one hour or longer. Adjust seasoning as desired.

To finish:

Pour broth through a fine strainer set over a large bowl. Pick out any vegetables or meat you would like to keep and discard the rest. Chill the broth and skim any fat or "schmaltz" as they say in yiddish off the top. You can use this for other cooking or discard it.

Use this broth as a base for any soup you like. You can keep it in you refrigerator for a few days, or put it in the freezer to use another day.

Have you made soup stocks before? what ingredients do you add to yours?
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Cookbooks at the Farmers' Market Tomorrow

New Haven Cooks will be on sale tomorrow at the CitySeed Wooster Square Farmers' Market!

Saturday April 3rd from 10am-1pm. Chapel St. near Wooster Sq. Park.

The market will be filled with beautiful flowers, fresh vegetables, greens, eggs, milk, meat, cheese, honey, Easter cupcakes, grilled cheese, bread and so much more! I will be there selling cookbooks, so come on down and enjoy the market and pick up your copy!

To receive the great CitySeed newsletter with detailed information about what is available at the markets and other special events, click here.

New Haven Cooks/Cocina New Haven

is a beautiful and delicious bilingual community cookbook which celebrates the cultural richness of New Haven through food.  The book is packed with wonderful and intriguing recipes featuring fruits and vegetables. Over 100 people in our community donated time and talent to making this book such a successful collaboration!I spent the past year and a half working on this book and am thrilled that it is making it's way out into the world.

If you are not located near New Haven:

To purchase New Haven Cooks/Cocina New Haven online click here.

Copies of the Book are selling for $14.95 plus tax (total 15.85). All proceeds go to support CitySeed which is a non-profit organization.

In the late spring we will be distributing 5,000 copies of New Haven Cooks/Cocina New Haven to low income families through WIC and SNAP offices, Health Centers, Nutrition Classes and School based wellness activities.  Four recipes from the cookbook are being incorporated into the NH public school lunch program. The Cookbook and related projects were funded by a grant from the CT Department of Public Health.

Fennel Pollen & Passover

A few months ago my husband and I had a rare moment to go into NYC by ourselves, sans kids. My mother-in-law gave us tickets to see Fela, a fabulous Broadway show about Fela Kuti, one of our favorite musicians from Nigeria, and choreographed by Bill T. Jones who I also love! (Very worth the trip, check it out!) After the show we got together with one of our oldest friends Mel and her boyfriend Caesar, both of whom are acupuncturists and great NYC foodies. We ended up in the east village at The Red Head, a farmers' market driven southern cooking restaurant with some New Orleans influence. It was very good, and better than you'd imagine even the best southern influenced cooking could be, and I don't say things like that lightly. We got to talking about foods we love, only to learn that Caesar had been carrying his own salt around with him lately, to sprinkle on all kinds of things! After dinner we treked over to Porchetta, a small pork restaurant in alphabet city, where Caesar quickly purchased a little tin, and handed it to me as a gift. A fabulous gift! It was a great night, and did a lot to quench my thirst for NYC food and friends.

Since returning home, I have been sprinkling tiny bits of this fragrant fennel pollen laced salt on just about everything, fish, bagels, tofu, carrots, you name it. I love Fennel, and the deep but fresh aroma of the fennel pollen, mixed with sage and rosemary in this salt is just wonderful. We have fondly come to call it "Pig Salt", due to the pig on the tin (not very kosher, I know). If you want to experiment with fennel pollen, there are lots of resources online for it and you can shop around, but here is one site where you can purchase some.

For our passover seder last night hosted by my mother, I was given the task of making 2 cakes, the matzo balls and the fish. A recipe ripped from the NY Times was left on my counter a few days ago and then yesterday a large bag of Haddock she'd purchased. Check out the original recipe which included thinly sliced roasted lemons and olives, both of which I love. I hadn't really looked at the recipe much until I was ready to cook it, and hadn't noticed that it had fresh rosemary as well. Since my garden is still thawing, I didn't have any on hand, I thought my fennel pollen salt with rosemary would make a great substitution for the fresh rosemary and also the chili powder in the recipe.

I followed the recipe and started by roasting the fish with the lemons at 450, and then broiling them for  a minute to brown them, but they didn't really brown much. I would start by broiling them first, and then set the oven to 450 to finish them if needed. We served this up with roasted asparagus and green beans, as well as smashed fingerling potatoes with leeks. 

We had a very nice seder, which this year included the reading of the names of many of our family members who died during the Holocaust in Europe. We had old friends and new ones, family members ranging in age from 1-87, and of course, tons of great food. Below clockwise from the left: matzo ball soup, my mom's roasted chicken staying warm, a fabulous almond cardamom and lemon cake (no dairy, no gluten), and miriam's delicious salad with pea shoots, candied nuts, and some roasted beets my mom added on.

What did you cook or eat this week? 

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Memories & Chocolate Sweet Potato Cake

My passion for baking was sparked long before my passion for cooking. The culprit: large meringues spooned and piped onto parchment, drying out in our apartment oven overnight. They emerged from the oven early the in the morning like fluffy white clouds slipping from the pitch dark oven, glowing when touched by the morning sun. Seriously, for all it's poetic cheesiness, that is how I remember the moment that I was first dazzled by egg whites and sugar.

I don't think I was more than 5 years old, and  I'd probably been helping my mother bake for most of them. When I was born she started a quest to bake her way through a french pastry book recipe by recipe, Julie/Julia style, but decades earlier, (and minus the blog). Meringues soon became my specialty. I would sit on the counter beside the sturdy kitchen aid mixer with a cup of sugar and a spoon. As the egg whites whisked around the silver bowl I would slowly sprinkle in a spoonful of sugar, being careful to have it fall onto the whites and not be kicked back onto the sides of the bowl. I sat patiently waiting for 30 seconds before slowly adding another spoonful, again and again until the cup of sugar was empty and the egg whites were billowy and glossy.  Let me point out that I was not a patient child, more of a burst of energy and inspiration kind of kid, so you can imagine that completing this recipe and then waiting for the meringues to dry out for hours in the oven, sometimes overnight was an incredible feat. But I loved it, and it quickly became my job to make meringues for passover every year. I continue to be mesmerized by meringues, or any recipe containing whipped egg whites for that matter, to this day.

I know it is odd for such a description not to lead into a recipe for meringues, but I actually sat down to write a lead up to this fabulous chocolate sweet potato cake, also inspired by my mother, and also for passover. As I started to think about passover and baking and making a cake leavened by beaten egg whites as this one is, I was over come with the memory of meringues in my mother's kitchen. A wonderful illustration of the visceral, non-linear nature of food. Memories sparked by a scent of spice, the feel of butter or the texture of clouds.

 

I found this picture from last year where I actually topped the cakes with meringue.

Chocolate Sweet Potato Cake or Cup Cakes
The original recipe for this cake was called "mock chestnut torte" and can be found at Epicurious.com.

It is by Marcy Goldman from,

A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking

I have altered the recipe slightly, and the addition of nutmeg or other spice is entirely up to you.

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1/2 Cup brown sugar
2T white sugar
6 large eggs, separated
1 1/2 cups cooked and mashed sweet potatoes, fresh or canned - slightly warm is good
1 teaspoon vanilla
12 ounces good-quality dark chocolate, melted and still warm
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh nutmeg or cardamom

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. If making a cake, line a 9-inch springform pan with baking parchment. If making cupcakes, fill muffin tins with cupcake papers.
2. In a mixing bowl, cream the butter with the 1/2 cup brown sugar. Blend in the egg yolks, then the mashed sweet potatoes, vanilla and warm chocolate. if the chocolate and potatoes are cold, this mixture will be very hard, and difficult to fold in whites.
3. In another bowl, with clean beaters, whip the egg whites gently until they are a bit foamy. Then add in the salt and whip on a higher speed, slowly dusting in the two tablespoons of sugar to form stiff, glossy (but not dry) peaks. Fold one third of the egg whites into the sweet potato/chocolate mixture and work them in well to loosen the batter. Then, gently fold in the remaining egg whites, blending well but taking care not to deflate the mixture. 
4. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan or cupcake papers. Bake for about 40 minutes for the cake and 25 minutes for the cupcakes. The cake rises and looks dry, and slightly cracked on top when done. The middle should be soft but firm. Cool in the pan for 20 minutes, then remove to a wire rack. At this point, the cake can be frozen for up to a month.

Pictures of the cake from passover 2010, decorated by my 5 year-old, he was very proud!

The original recipe gives a chocolate ganache glaze, but I didn't think it needed more chocolate. My mother likes to melt chocolate and pour it over the top of the cake. I have been more inclined to leave it plain, or top it with a salted caramel buttercream or torched swiss meringue.

To make a simple meringue frosting:
2 eggwhites
1/2 cup sugar

Put the eggwhites and sugar in a heat proof mixing bowl set over a pot of simmering water. wisk constantly until sugar is disolved and whites are very warm to the touch. Remove the bowl from the water and using electric mixer whisk whites until cool, about 7-10 minutes. Pipe frosting onto cupcakes. To brown, use a hand torch, or set cakes under the oven broiler for 20 seconds or until edges of meringue are golden.

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