At last!

Hungry Souls' menu has been posted. Available muffins include Peach-Oat (with brown butter and vanilla), Mango-Cardamom and Whole Wheat Apple.
I will be accepting orders starting Oct. 2.

Peeling beets is cooking too

So, dear readers, remember how last week I mentioned a deadline? Well, that deadline ate my life. It kicked my butt. All the grand plans I had for the week, menu posting included, got entirely decimated. I am a deadline zombie. But the menu will get posted. Promise.

* * *

B. is the head of the entire נשים מבשלות program. She co-teaches a course on business management, but mostly her job is to urge us, cajole us and nudge us into opening a business. Sometimes, when I am not in the mood to be urged, cajoled or nudged, it can be annoying. But the honest truth is that without B. I would not be doing this. I would have given up ages ago. But B. has pestered me and pushed me. She won't let go. She won't let go because it's her job not to let go, and she won't let go because she absolutely and completely believes in me and my dream. I tend to think that B. has an unshakable faith in the ability of women to do what they set their minds to. But more than that, she believes in the importance of women doing the things the set their minds to.

B., ironically enough, is not a cook. She stops by the kitchen almost every day just to see what's going on and to make sure that things are moving smoothly, but she would much rather have someone cook for her, than do it herself. One week I was standing in front of a tub of beets, staining my hands red as I peeled them, B. popped her head into the kitchen. 

"Why is she peeling beets?" she asked, referring to me. "She should be cooking. She needs the practice." 

So, I reluctantly removed myself from beet duty and went to do something else. What it was I can't really recall, but I'm sure it was more cooking-y. I was sort of irked, but only afterward, when I was in the pool (doesn't everybody do their best thinking in the pool?), did I realize what I had wanted to respond to B.-peeling beets is cooking too. 

Prep work is an integral part of cooking. There's no way around it. Those beets need to get peeled one way or another. To be honest, I don't much mind it. (Except for washing lettuce. I hate washing lettuce.) I find the repetitiveness soothing. I like to touch my food, to feel its texture and weight. To get a sense of it. Part of cooking is learning your food. Part of cooking is prep. 

I have been wanting to tell you guys about this salad for forever, but was holding out till pomegranate season. Lo, and behold, pomegranate season is upon us now and so here it is- my absolutely favorite recipe from the oft cited Book of New Israeli Food, by Janna Gur.

Beetroot and Pomegranate Salad

Adapted from The Book of New Israeli Food by Janna Gur

As usual, notes: While pomegranate concentrate sounds like a very exotic ingredient, it can actually be found in almost any Israeli supermarket. It'll be near the ketchup and other sauces. Also, Gur calls for the beets to be boiled, but I vastly prefer my beets roasted. If you have a fear of roasted beets, by all means, boil the suckers.

3-4 medium beets

2 tbl pomegranate concentrate

2-3 tbl freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 (or to taste) dried chili peppers, crushed

coarse sea salt

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup cilantro, roughly chopped

1 cup pomegranate seeds

Preheat the oven to 375

1. Wrap each beet individually in its only little tightly-sealed packet of tin foil. Place in the oven and roast for 45 minutes to an hour, until the beets can be pierced easily with a knife (exact cooking times will vary). Remove beets and when they are cool enough to touch, hold each beet (one at a time) between your hands, and pull the tin foil down, scraping the peel as you go. The peel should slip right off. Let the beets cool completely and then cut into a small dice.

2. Mix the beets with the pomegranate concentrate, lemon juice, chili peppers and salt. Set aside for about 15 minutes. 

3. Add the cilantro and pomegranate seeds. Drizzle olive oil on top. Serve.

Bigger than my head

What you see above is not a distended watermelon; it is a pumpkin. It is the pumpkin that was bigger than my head. We conquered that pumpkin. It was actually a lot easier than it would seem. Pumpkins are surprisingly soft on the inside. How we came to acquire said gourd is no mystery either. The kitchen has suppliers. Sometimes they supply us with pumpkins bigger than my head. We made soup with it. The type of soup that goes over couscous. It's a good soup, made with summer squash, chickpeas, onions, cilantro and turmeric. But that soup is not the subject of this post.
There are a few other things in my life right now that feel bigger than my head and one of them is this: in a few days time there will be a new page on Hungry Souls entitled "Food For The Eating". On that page there will be a menu and some rules (no kicking, no biting, etc). The baked goods on that menu, which will include muffins, cookies, cakes and tarts will be for sale. The menu will change with the seasons, but the basic outline will remain (there will always be muffins).

I've been planning this for a while. After all, the point of my work in the kitchen is to prepare me for the world of culinary businessdom. And yet, (things one probably shouldn't admit in public), I don't feel at all prepared. It feels entirely bigger than my head; more than I can chew; water up to my neck. So this morning, after having spent most of my week ensconced in front of my computer working on an urgent translating project (deadlines!), I went into my kitchen and made Kim Boyce's Strawberry Barley Scones. I bruised butter into soft flour. I felt the smoothness of the rich dough between my hands. I moved slowly. I ate two scones with my coffee, hot and buttery, directly from the oven. I remembered why I love this and why I want to do this. So here it is, Hungry Souls' other page, Food For The Eating. Let me feed you.

Strawberry Barley Scones lightly adapted from Good to the Grain  by Kim Boyce

Here's the thing about Kim Boyce's wonderful book. Sometimes it is a pain in the butt, because sometimes you get it into your head that you really, really need to make Chocolate Chocolate Cookies, but you don't have any spelt flour in the house and you don't feel like dragging yourself all the way to the shuk to get some. Sometimes, you realize you have no idea what kamut flour is, nor have you ever seen teff flour despite the large Ethiopian population in Israel. Usually, in situations like that, I just say screw it, and make the recipe with whatever I have on hand. But not with Kim Boyce's recipes. When she says use barley flour, I use barley flour.  It just so happened that I had barley flour in the house since I have been playing around with barley-mango muffins, so I was able to make these scones. If you find yourself in a similar situation, that is to say with barley flour in the house, please do make these. They are spectacular.
One more thing (ok, two more things)- I find that Boyce's recipes often have too much salt. This may have to do with Israeli coarse salt versus American coarse salt. It just seems saltier. I've left the salt as written, but if you're in Israel you may want to cut it down significantly.  The second thing is that though these are Barley Strawberry Scones, I didn't use strawberry jam. But that's really neither here nor there.

Dry Mix:

1 cup plus 2 tbl barley flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Wet Mix:

4 oz (1 stick, 113.4 grams) cold, unsalted butter
1/2 cup buttermilk or yogurt
1 egg

Finish:
1/2 cup Strawberry Jam (or any other jam that suits your fancy)
1 tbl butter, melted
1 tbl sugar

1. Place rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 350. Rub a baking sheet with butter. Sift together dry ingredients
2. Cut the butter into 1/2 inch pieces and add them to the dry mixture, rubbing the butter between your fingers until it is in small bits (somewhere between grains of rice and small peas). Do this quickly so the butter doesn't soften too much
3. Whisk together the buttermilk/yogurt and egg and pour into dry mixture. Mix until barely combined.
4. Turn the dough onto a well floured surface, and fold it together a few times. Divide the dough into 2 pieces. With floured hands, pat each piece into a disk about 3/4 inch thick and 7 inches in diameter.
5. Cover one disk with jam and top with the other disk. Press down lightly. Brush the dough with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 8 wedges and carefully place them on the baking sheet.
6. Bake the scones for 22-26 minutes.
7. Eat warm with coffee (or tea, if that's your thing).

All by myself

I was standing out front by myself, doling out food during service, when it hit me. I wasn't the new girl anymore. It was my third round of service (there are generally 3 per day),  every single one of them had been done alone, and that didn't bother me in the slightest. When I first started in the kitchen I was slightly intimidated by service. There are a lot of people to feed in a small amount of time. Also there is the lunch lady. The lunch lady's job is to make sure everyone gets what she feels is the appropriate amount of food. My job is to make sure that everyone gets food. Sometimes we disagree on the definition of the appropriate amount of food. At the beginning I was positively afraid of her. She can be an imposing lady. For a while, I would try to hide behind C while doing service, just to avoid her biting commentary. But eventually I realized that the only way service was going to work for me was for me to grow a backbone and stand my ground. So I grew a little backbone and tried my hardest to stand my ground and the lunch lady and I have grown to respect each other. I daresay, we might even like each other. That's what happens when you're no longer the new girl. 

I have a complicated relationship with recipes and cookbooks. For me, the word of some cookbook writers like Hazan, Waters, or Lebowitz, for instance, is the gospel truth. I will not veer an iota from their recipe. If I don't have, or can't use a certain ingredient listed in their recipe; or, if I can't manage a technique, I won't make it. On the hand, there are other writers- Bittman, Oliver, Hesser, to name a few- where their recipes serve me more as guidelines than instructions. I liberally substitute ingredients and change things around. Maybe it's a generational thing; or a gender one; or a stylistic issue, but some writers I will tweak and others I will not.  My tweaking of a recipe is not a qualitative judgment. I value my Bittman cookbook just as much as I do my Hazan.  But these are things I have been thinking about lately. When do you change a recipe? How do you know when  to use your creativity and instincts in cooking, and when to lay those things aside and follow directions? When is a recipe so changed that it leaves the domain of the original writer and enters yours? For instance, the muffins I made today were based on a Kim Boyce recipe, but I left out the ginger, swapped in yogurt for sour cream, browned the butter and added vanilla. So is that recipe still Kim Boyce's, or mine? Will there be a time when I will pick up my copy of The Art of Simple Food and not follow a recipe as it is written? (And if I do, will Ms. Waters hunt me down?)

The following recipe for plum crumble, or Plumble, as it has affectionately come to be known, is the bastardization of a few recipes. Mostly it is part of my ongoing quest to find and create non-dairy dessert recipes that can be served with a meat meal in accordance with Kosher dietary laws. Baking without butter sucks. The fruit part of this crumble is based on a Martha Rose Shulman recipe printed in Cooking Light in 2004. The topping of that crumble calls for (among other things) butter and oats. It's a great crumble, but not for a meat meal. So taking my inspiration from an apple crumb cake my mother makes that calls for oil, but didn't have the recipe for on hand,  I used the bottom of Amanda Hesser's peach tart from Cooking for Mr. Latte (which also calls for oil) as the topping for my crumble- subbing some of the white flour for oat flour to replace the oats in the Shulman recipe. (Confusing, I know). So without further ado, Plumble.


Plumble
Liberally adapted from Cooking for Mr. Latte, by Amanda Hesser  and Martha Rose Shulman in Cooking Light July, 2004

Ok, actually there is more ado. Some notes. One- the topping is not very sweet, if you would like it sweeter, make it so. Two- the topping is kind of crumbly flaky. Three- the topping is sparse. Four-I would love to try this with olive oil, or coconut oil (if I could get my hands on some). Five-there is no five.

Preheat the oven to 375

The Topping:
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 oat flour
1 1/2 tsp white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbl soy milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil

 Sift together dry ingredients. Add the soy milk and vegetable oil, mix until crumbly.

The Fruit:
8-9 plums, sliced into about 16 cresents
1/4 cup sugar
3 tbl dry red wine
1 tsp vanilla (or a 4 inch vanilla bean, if you have one)
zest of one orange

Combine  ingredients in a bowl.

Assembly:

Place the fruit in a 8 inch baking dish. Scatter the topping in clumps over the fruit. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes, until the plums are bubbly and the topping is browned.


Also- New and exciting changes are coming to Hungry Souls soon. Stay tuned.

Inspiration (Late Summer)

Last one in makes the coffee

There is an unspoken rule in the kitchen, and that is, the last one in makes the coffee. If you're late that's the price you have to pay. You have to stand around waiting for the water to boil, trying to remember how each person likes their coffee, while the other women go about their tasks. In the grand scheme of things, this is not at all a harsh penalty for tardiness, but personally, I try to avoid it. Somehow, I always manage to get someone's coffee wrong- too weak, too strong, not enough milk, too much milk, etc. etc. I hate that.

Morning coffee usually happens about a half an hour to an hour after we've arrived. It's a nice little respite. By then on most days, huge pots of water have been put up to boil, one round of vegetables has been peeled and a tray or two of something has been counted out and is ready to go in the oven. Things haven't gotten chaotic yet. Occasionally, one of the women will bring in a baked good or some homemade jam and we'll have a snack with our coffee. Mostly though, it's just coffee and conversation.

The following recipe for cold-brew coffee is probably the best cold coffee you will ever have. I've been making it every week this summer and have not yet gotten tired of it. So, even if you don't drink coffee (crazy person) I urge you, make a batch of this. It will change your life. 

Cold Brew Coffee with Cinnamon and Cardamom 

Adapted from ErinH via Food52

Coffee Base:

2/3 cup coarsely ground coffee
3 cups water
1 teaspoon cinnamon
a couple of cardamom pods, lightly crushed with the flat of a knife
2-3 tablespoons dark brown sugar, depending on how sweet you like your coffee

Combine all ingredients in a jar, or tupperware. Cover, and refrigerate 8 hours, or overnight.
Line a fine-mesh strainer with two layers of paper towels. Set over a large bowl and strain the coffee into the bowl. You should have about 2 cups of coffee base Pour coffee into a jar, or if you're me, an empty orange juice bottle, for more convenient storage.

To Serve:
Fill a glass 1/2 to 3/4 of the way with coffee. Add milk. Drink. To quote ErinH- die of happiness.

Quiet Day in the Kitchen

Not all days in the kitchen are chaos and havoc and catering events. Some days are slow moving and languid. On those days we do a lot of sitting and drinking coffee. Occasionally one or two of us will reluctantly get up and do service.  The other will wipe down the counter- again- and then sit down again. We talk and linger and then leave early. Usually, a quiet day is the function of a number of things: a) the amount of prep done the day before. b) the amount of prep needed for the next day, and c) the other women you are working with. All these things need to fall in line. There has to have been enough prep done the day before that the food can be put up in a short amount of time; the amount/type of prep that needs to be done for the next day needs to be small and not work intensive, and most importantly, you need to be working with women who work well together. Sometimes the stars align and this happens.
What I like most about days like those is actually the moment we leave. The kitchen is spotless and still and hushed in the darkness. Peering in from the outside, I am filled with a strange and overpowering sense of satisfaction and pride. Something about the slowness of day has allowed me to savor it; to really let the experience sink into my bones. Then to door closes and clicks shut. The sunlight is very bright.

When I think of slow days, I think of braising. I've already mentioned the fact that I love to braise. I will braise the heck out of anything I can think of.  I love the way food is transformed through braising- how it slowly mellows and deepens and becomes something else entirely. I love that braising takes time. I love sitting in front of my computer, doing my work, knowing that something is simmering lazily on my stovetop.

Braised Chicken with Cilantro, Lemon and Figs

Adapted from Bon Apetit, Dec. 1996 via Epicurious

Figs are just coming into season here in Israel. There is a hedge of fig trees on my way to my local supermarket, and the smell alone is enough to make you go on a fig buying frenzy. The original recipe calls for dried figs, so if you don't have access to fresh figs, you can use those.

• 2 tablespoons all purpose flour
• 1 3 1/2- to 3 3/4-pound chicken, cut into 12 pieces

• 4 teaspoons olive oil
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 3 large garlic cloves, minced
•  1 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 8 figs, cut in half lengthwise

1. Place flour in large resealable plastic bag. Season flour with salt and pepper. Add chicken to bag; seal bag. Shake bag to coat chicken lightly with flour.

2. Heat 2 teaspoons oil in large heavy pot over medium-high heat. Working in batches, add chicken and sauté until brown on all sides, about 7 minutes per batch. Transfer chicken to plate. Add remaining 2 teaspoons oil to pot and reduce heat to medium. Add onions and garlic and sauté until golden and tender, about 10 minutes. Add in wine, simmer for a few minutes while scraping the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon. Stir in broth, 1/2 cup cilantro and lemon juice and bring to boil. Add figs and chicken with any accumulated juices to pot. Cover and simmer until chicken is tender, about 45 minutes. Alternatively, you could put this in a pre-heated oven at 325, also for 45 minutes.

3. Using slotted spoon, transfer chicken to bowl and cover with foil to keep warm. Boil juices in pot until thickened to sauce consistency, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Pour sauce over chicken. Sprinkle remaining 2 tablespoons cilantro over and serve.