Pineapple Princess

I woke up with this song in my head this morning. I blame my brother for it, since he gave me a deluxe box set of  Annette Funicello compact discs.

Do enjoy. And happy Monday.

Dziekuje, King Stanislaw

I have this thing about history books– especially ones about food history, military history, and the misdoings of European royalty. If its got a lot of useless trivia packed into it, I will read it, digest it, and annoy my friends with the opening line, “Hey did you know…?”

And if what I’m reading includes all of the above, I am one happy nerd.

Thanks to my recent reading, its finally happened. I’ve met him– my new historical crush, Stanislaw Leszczynski. He might not have been the handsomest fellow in the world, but he had it going on: he lost the crown of Poland, became the French Duke of Lorraine by marrying off his daughter Maria to Louis XV (after losing Poland a second time), and, most likely by virtue of is own good nature and a heavy dose of pity from Frederick III, was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire. It doesn’t matter much that, by the 18th Century, The H.R.E. was neither holy, nor Roman. It wasn’t even much of an Empire, but a cluster of bickering Central European states. Still, it was a nice title.

But it really isn’t his laundry list of honors that impresses me. I’d still like him if he were merely an viscount or baron or margrave. It’s his penchant for popularizing and ascribing names to food that I like. Really, really popular food. King Stanislaw, it seems, was quite a gastronome, as both his painting and  his multiple chins might indicate.

According to my latest read, The Food Chronology by James Trager, Stanislaw started a craze in Paris for pigs’ feet, tripe, and most importantly, onion soup soon after his daughter became queen of France. According to legend, he was so taken with an onion soup he was served at an inn on his way to Paris that he visited the kitchen in his dressing gown and demanded the chef to show him how to make it. Et voilà, everyone was eating Soupe à l’Oignon.

It is also culinary lore that Stanislaw would drench kugelhupf with rum from the French West Indies to create Baba au Rhum. Though it is more than likely he did not name the dish “Baba au rhum“, three points of truth indicate his possible involvement in some ways– kugelhupf was a well-established dish in the regions of Alsace and Lorraine by the time Stanislaw took up residence, he loved alcohol, and the word “baba” is derived from the Polish word for “good woman” or grandmother. Think “babka.”

And finally (unless you want to get into the quiche Lorraine, which I do not), he’s got the madeleine– that tea cake enshrined by the famously self-obsessed shut-in, Marcel Proust. Not everyone will agree that Stanislaw was the man who named it. What is known is that the madeleine originated in the town of Commercy, in Lorraine, where Stanislaw was in residence. Some say he named it after a maid who served them him. Others say they had long been baked by the local nuns of St. Mary Magdelen convent.

Oh, there are lots of theories on the origin of madeleine, but I won’t bore you with them.

I think what I’m rather taken with is the fact that this man seems to have had his finger in a number of culinary pots. I am jealous that, because of his stature, he was able to influence the tastes of a country which was then becoming famous for its food– a country that wasn’t even his.

Of course in the 18th Century, anyone of note was aching to have their cooks invent dishes to be named for them. Think Sauce Richelieu or Sue Anne Nivens’ favorite, Veal Prince Orloff.

coming into common usage. There is no flourish these days. Everything is so bloody straightforward, a long string of words listing ingredients. Flank Steak wiAre people naming dishes today or has everything already been named? It often feels as though everything has. Apart from delis with a penchant for naming sandwiches after Borscht Belt comedians, I’m coming up blank. We just don’t see elegant dishes like Asparagus Britney Spears or Tournedos à la Brenda Fricker coming into common usage. There is no flourish these days. Everything is so bloody straightforward, a long string of words listing ingredients. Flank Steak with kohlrabi pudding, sunchoke fries, and anchovies. Or whatever. Are we so unsophisticated that we now have to have everything spelled out for us?

I mean really.

Give me the days when an old Polish king could wander into France, have a bit of cake and say, “Oh, let’s call this a madeleine.” Perhaps his French wasn’t good enough to say “I would very much like one of those delicious, buttery cakes with the faint whiff of lemon.” It doesn’t really matter. One says “madeleine” and one knows exactly what one is getting.

And to that I say, “Dziekuje, Stanislaw.” Thank you. You’ve given me an idea. I shall start naming everything I eat. Sadly, the best name I’ve come up with for anything lately is Chicken Statutory, which is an Americanized version of Chicken Cacciatore, but made with younger, fresher chicken.

I think it needs a little work.

Down and Dirty: Digging MyFarm.

When my friend Natalie asked me if I had any plans for Easter weekend, I was mildly embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t. I just hadn’t given it much thought this year.

“Well, you do now,” she said. “Want to help plant a farm?”

Plant a farm. I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. I welcomed the excuse to get outside and do something interesting, something for free. Something more than a little dirty.

It had been a while since I’ve weeded, hoed, or lugged 4 cubic yards of soil, but I was game for it. I just wasn’t sure what I was going to wear. I haven’t owned a pair of overalls since the 1980’s.

It seems Natalie has gotten herself involved with an organization called MyFarm-- an business that specializes in decentralized urban farming. It’s a Community Supported Agriculture organization with heavy emphasis on community. In fact, every herb and vegetable grown comes directly from community members’ backyards. Want to know where your mustard greens are really coming from? Well then, go ask your neighbor. With 71 MyFarms planted at the time of this posting, you are likely to know someone who’s got one.

When we arrived at the site, we were introduced around to the various MyFarm staff members and volunteers, one of whom came all the way from Santa Cruz to help.

Fortunately, there were a good many people volunteering for the day’s planting. With lots of farmhands, well, on hand, the work was swift and enjoyable. I was especially grateful for our numbers when it came time to move the small mountain of soil from a gigantic pile dumped in the driveway to the garden awaiting it in the back– through the garage, one bucket at a time. At times I pretended I as though I were an ant– a cog in a great earth-moving machine, but without the ability to lift 25 times my own body weight or smell things through antennae. Of course, in the unseasonable warm April weather, it sometimes felt as though a large bully were holding a magnifying glass over me, trying to set me on fire.

The next time you see me, please feel free to compliment me on my newly-found shoulder muscles and red, red neck.

I was rather stunned by how smoothly everything went. From start to finish, the garden was weeded, top-soiled, dug, irrigated, and planted in less than five hours.

We were a well organized, well-oiled, and well-hydrated team– the couple hosting the garden kept a blender of filtered water filled for us at all times. I was certain the water was placed in a blender because it was made of non-breakable materials, but I couldn’t look at it without thinking that whenever I took a sip, I was drinking a water smoothie.

It was a great day spent outside. I highly recommend it to anyone with a strong back and a good attitude.

And I don’t care that someone can’t spell Kohlrabi, I’m just glad someone is actually planting it. In an effort to add my own special skills to the endeavor, my pleas for matching font styles on the planting tags went unheeded.

Until the next time, that is.

How MyFarm Works:

MyFarm’s Vision(from the website):

At MyFarm it is our mission to make growing food and growing community one in the same. We believe in the power of the individual. But we believe true power comes from working together towards a better future for all.

We want to offer everyone in our community a chance to participate in achieving greater personal sustainability by installing local organic gardens, selling organic vegetables to neighbors and continually seeking ways for others to lend their ideas, their time and their hands to our growing organization.

Interested in hosting a farm?

Their complete list of services include:

• Initial garden set up and weekly follow up to keep your space growing.
• Organic techniques to grow nutrient rich vegetables.
• CSA style pickup a weekly box of very local edibles from a nearby neighbor.
• Permaculture techniques implemented to beautify in a
  sustainable way.
• Garden design consultations and networking with high quality suppliers.
• Local food feasts with chefs featuring foods from your backyard

Sign up today to host your own garden or volunteer your time– the kohlrabi and your neighbors will thank you.

Carrot Pudding

I’d never thought much of the carrot in terms of dessert food. Before you ask the obvious “But what about carrot cake?” question, yes, I know it exists. I just choose not to acknowledge it any longer, thanks to my volunteering to bake that particular dessert for a friend’s wedding several years ago. 150 people to feed and a Barbie-sized oven left me exhausted, but proud of the mission accomplished. I have since moved on. I don’t think I’d even uttered the word “carrot” in years.

And then I went to a potluck dinner at a home I once partly owned, hosted by a man I used to live with, and a dog who used to know me.

The theme of the dinner was Cal/Asian, which gave people a lot of wiggle room with savory dishes, but not so much with dessert. Whole roasted petrale soles, rice dishes, green onion pancakes, and a host of other items crowded the dining room table. Just off center, however, was a bowl of bright orange that caught my attention, as though I had just spotted Lucille Ball standing in the middle of some crowded Beijing shopping center smoking a Phillip Morris– a beautiful standout, if a little out of place amid the beige-y, earthen tones.

“I suppose I should have put that to the dessert buffet, but I didn’t want to move the booze.” was offered by a woman named Razili, who had brought the dish. In my brief assessment of her offering, I hadn’t thought that it was a dessert.

She explained that it was a carrot pudding, or Gajar ka Halwa– a specialty from Punjab, her family’s place of origin.

“We changed it a little,” she said. The milk, the cardamom, almonds for cashews.

It got me thinking about how, as Americans, we all inherit the dishes and traditions of our ancestors from their various distant origins. In my family for example, it’s the cannoli. Every holiday, silver trays of the confections were placed on the table for dessert– one studded with candied citron, the other with chocolate. While the older generations consumed the citron, the kids went for the chocolate. As the years passed and the older folks– some of them actual Italians– died off, so did the use of citron. The cannoli we make today are only with chocolate, to suit our Americanized tastes. They are still cannoli, just not ones my Sicilian great-grandmother would be likely to touch. They are still recognizable, but they bear the branding of adaptation, of assimilation.

I know my family isn’t alone in this morphing trend. It’s how we as a country traditionally have made anything “foreign” or “other” its own. Think pizza or nachos or just about anything Chinese. We take an idea from one place, adapt it to our own needs or desires (the blander version of something exotic perhaps, made with ingredients easily obtainable in our own markets), and the results are familiar, yet different.

That’s how I saw Gajar ka Halwa when it was described to me– strangely familiar (carrots and almonds), yet exotically different (dessert?). Of course, when it was being described, Razili never called it by its Punjabi name. “It’s carrot pudding.”

It was my favorite dish of the night. And, believe me, there were some great things on that table.

Carrot Pudding

Serves 4.

That’s what I’m calling it. The ingredients are hardly exotic, unless you think cardamom is fanciful. In that case, you most likely don’t have Central European, Indian, or Persian ancestors, to name a few.

It’s a remarkably easy dish to prepare (if you don’t mind a lot of stirring), inexpensive, and really, really delicious. I’ve changed Razili’s recipe slightly to suit my own tastes, but of course, that’s to be expected, given the sub-theme of today’s post.

Ingredients:

3 cups shredded carrot

2 cups whole milk

3 tablespoons of unsalted butter

1/3 cup of sugar

10 to 15 cardamom pods or a heavy pinch of ground cardamom powder

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Toasted sliced almonds for garnish. I candied mine.

Preparation:

1. Melt butter in the bottom of a wide pan over medium heat. More surface area= faster cooking time, I promise. Add carrots and stir occasionally until soft and thoroughly cooked. About 5 minutes.

2. At the same time, heat milk in a saucepan or microwave, if you’re that kind of person. I am, but mine broke and it’s low on my priority list to replace it. Add cardamom pods to milk. Bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and let the cardamom steep. Stir occasionally to prevent the milk from forming a skin.

3. Remove cardamom pods from the milk. Add milk to the cooked carrots. Stir constantly to prevent burning. Continue this form of exercise until the all the milk has absorbed/evaporated. The carrot mixture should be a little wet. About 10 -15 minutes. Add sugar and stir for another 3 minutes or so, just until the sugar has melted and absorbed. Turn off heat and stir in almond extract.

4. Place in serving bowl, top with almonds slices and serve warm. Of course, it’s still really good eaten cold out of the fridge at midnight as well.

Do what you will; it’s your tradition now.

Getting Smart: A Drink for Every Mood

Is there a drink for every occasion and mood? When one reaches for the bottle for any given reason, Deborah Pardes of Get Smart Radio wanted to know “which one?”

On April 1st, Pardes invited mixlogist Brian MacGregor of Jardinière and wine wiz Debbie Zachareas to discuss The Heart of Drinking: The Psychology of Mixology and Enology at Coffee Bar– a place where, appropriately, the beverages of choice are much less about caffeine and more about alcohol in the darker hours of the day.

Taped before a live audience, the episode promised to get to the bottom of the issue– and the bottle– with a little help from a live audience and the lively Get Smartypants Band. Pardes kept the show moving along with questions from the audience, a few corny jokes, and a topical song here and there. Sort of like Dinah Shore, but minus the cooking segments, Tennessee accent, and three-camera technology. Like Miss Shore, the tone of the show was as bubbly as a bottle of good champagne, but didn’t really get too deep into the Heart of Drinking. Instead, the show seemed more about Drinking with Heart than anything else, which seemed to suit the audience just fine.

As the show moved along, MacGregor and Zachareas discussed the appropriate wines and cocktails to accompany any number of moods and occasions as promised by the show’s title.

For weddings, births, and other celebrations of hope and newness, the obvious answer is champagne. The bubbles rise to the level of our spirits. Funerals? That’s another drink entirely, unless one is especially delighted by the deceased’s passing. Browner liquids, such as scotch or bourbon were deemed appropriately somber and comforting.

What do you drink when you are happy? Is it the same thing you drink when you’re sad or bored or trying to get laid? According to the audience, the answer was yes. To them, tequila was the answer to everything. Zachareas agreed, while MacGregor opted for a classic daquiri for a splash of sexiness. Sugar-rimmed beverages were listed, along with the obvious correlating jokes.

Near the end of the broadcast, or podblast as it was termed, the audience members were invited to take a quiz. Hands were raised, people were called upon to exhibit their listening comprehension skills, and prizes were won. I left the evening with a bag of white cheddar cheese-flavored Smartfood popcorn, one of Deborah Pardes’ compact discs and a bellyful of Belgian beer.

But I came away with a bit more than that. When I got home from the show, I was forced to examine my own drinking preferences: the Friday tradition of dry gin Martinis, the warmth-giving of winter-drunk Manhattans, the cooling summertime Vespers and crisp white wines, the solace of a neat rye whiskey, the edge-blurring world-weariness of a good Negroni. I have my drinks that I reach for, whatever my mood.

And now I am thinking about the weekend ahead. What do drink to send off a friend moving back to Paris for a few months? French 75’s? What to have after chasing three children for an afternoon? Something strong, I should think. And what does one drink with an old friend after a day’s urban hike? Something that screams San Francisco, perhaps. Something obscure. I haven’t yet decided. And I don’t have to.

I think I’ll just see where my mood takes me.