Finally, Granola

Once upon a time, I worked in an office. It wasn't in an office building, mind you. It was on the top floor of a library, but it was still an office. It had three desks, no working printer anad no windows. Mostly I worked there alone. But occasionally, I would be joined by my colleague, with whom I would discuss geeky matters (the everlasting argument- 10 or 11? I'm an eleven girl myself),  or my boss, the only native Israeli I know who is obsessed with American football.  It was a friend of my boss,  popping his head in to say hi on a day when we were both there, who gave me the moniker. "Hey," he said "it's Tiki, the granola girl". It was then that I realized that at that moment I was indeed pouring granola into a cup of yogurt and that indeed, for the past week I had eaten granola and yogurt every single day. I lived up to my name.
But somewhere along the road, I stopped eating granola. I started working from home. I could eat any number of things for breakfast: toast with butter and honey; a fried egg; oatmeal. I needn't limit myself to things that were small and easily transportable. Plus, bought granola was getting expensive. And I was bored. So yogurt and granola fell on the wayside.  Then, about a month ago, a friend of mine messaged me on Facebook. She said, "let's make granola". Thinking of my nickname, I said, "ok".
I started perusing the great wide interwebs for ideas. One recipe in particular caught my eye. It was from one of my favorite food blogs, Not Derby Pie. There were two things that specifically grabbed my attention in Rivka's recipe. One was the tahini (or techina as we call it around here), the other was the candied ginger- two foods I unequivocally love. I figured it was a good place to start my forays into homemade granola.
Rivka says the granola will stay in an airtight container for a month. My first half-batch lasted two days. I ate it for breakfast-straight, without yogurt- and then again for snack and then again for lunch. I drew the line at dinner. So yes, the granola theoretically could stay for a month, but I dare you to try. You will not stop eating it.

Granola with Tahini and Honey
Adapted from Not Derby Pie
I made some changes to the recipe, of course, because I seem to be incapable of not tinkering. First off, Rivka's recipe calls for maple syrup. I used honey. Honey and tehini, if you have not tried the combination before is one of the world's most perfect things.  It is also quintessentially Israeli and given that I live in Israel I felt that I couldn't not use it in my granola.  In another change, I left out the seeds. Because, seeds.  Also, this: I don't really measure the nuts and dried fruit, nor do I stick to the ones listed when I make the granola. I add whatever I have about-raisins, dried cherries, apricots, dates, almonds, walnuts, etc- in whatever quantities look right to me. The batch pictured above had walnut, apricot, candied citrus peel and of course, candied ginger. Other batches have had other things. I'll give Rivka's amounts, but feel free to riff.

2 1/2 cups whole oats
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup tahini
1 tablespoon neutral oil (optional)
1 1/3 cups sliced of your nut (or nuts) of choice (almonds, walnuts, pecans etc)
2/3 cups dried fruit (dried cherries go quite nicely)
2 tablespoons chopped candied ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cloves

1.Put on some Florence and the Machine. You cannot make granola without Florence. Preheat the oven to 325 F.  Go into the bathroom to check on the state of your clogged sink. It is still clogged. Sigh in despair.

2. In a small bowl, mix together the tahini, honey, oil, salt, cinnamon and cloves. Manage to get honey all over the counter. Sigh. In a large bowl mix together the rest of the ingredients. Pour the honey-tehini mixture over the oats and mix with a fork until the oats start clumping and are slightly damp.

3. Spread in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes. Your house will begin to smell fantastic. So much so, that you will be eating a browned-butter chocolate chip cookie and think, I wish I was eating granola. Remove from oven, give it stir and bake for 10 minutes more. When it is cool and crisp transfer to an airtight container.

The granola will last, tightly sealed, for a month. (Ha!)

A house is not a home

What makes a home? In her great book Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's minister John Ames says we have no home in this world. He says it to the dying. A comfort, he thinks. He is alone in the night in an old house he's lived in his whole life eating a fried egg sandwich, listening to baseball and the house and the town and the night. Maybe that's a truth to him alone in the dark with fried egg sandwich. But when he is no longer alone, when that same old house has been filled with a wife and a child, the whole notion of home and history becomes furled out before the reader like the light across his Iowa prairie sky. It brimming over with this world, his home.
What makes a home? I would say that it is a place that is both your own and shared; a physical manifestation of the bonds of love, affection and respect by blood or by choice. I imagine old John Ames would agree. I didn't really have a home in Israel until I moved in with my sister. I had almost homes, but not home homes. And now? I wake up in the middle of the night. I listen to the almost silence- my cat snoring beside me; the pine tree ramming into the windows of the enclosed porch; a passing car. I close my eyes. I make an inventory of all the things that are mine in this apartment. Of all the apartments I've lived in in Israel, I love this one most. I love its brightness and quiet; its blue-framed windows and doorposts. On the one side it overlooks a garden and a day-care center, well-set back from the street. On the other, it is exposed, it's window opening on to a view of Jerusalem's hills and Hebrew University. And I have so many things that are mine.

I start in the living room and my books. There is my stately BDB (the 1959 edition, as it should be), my Tanakh, my Talmud. There are the books as my friend Zev once so eloquently put it, "I bought in college to make me look smart"-Plato, Augstine, my beloved Touqueville, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Emmet Larkin and others. Below them are the cookbooks, the ones I use less often. The other bookshelf holds other friends: poetry- Yeats and Collins and Amichai- and fiction-Robinson and other greats, of course, but also a lot of mystery-all of PD James- and fantasy. There is my fading green chair, where I spend most of my day. My couch, showing wear from living with a cat. Above it a window sill. A planter full of herbs. 

 In my bedroom, it is my dresser I love most. It's a new acquisition and its dark wood and elegance makes me feel so rooted. It is a piece of furniture intended to stay. There are prints on the walls-a framed Waterhouse. Yeats' The Lake Isle at Innisfree over my bed. It is my favorite poem; the print brought back from Ireland by a friend. My desk is a mess. It holds dictionaries and files- remnants from my academic life.

And then there is the kitchen with its big picture window that makes it a morning kitchen. There's not enough storage space in the kitchen, and yet it holds so much. My cookbooks, the ones I use time and time again are on the long shelf, running the length of the room. They share space with the oils and vinegar, the basket of odds and ends. The tea. There's my baby. My stand mixer. And my other baby. My cast iron skillet. My 6-inch Wusthoff lays in its plastic sheath above the spice drawer, desperately in need of sharpening. There are plates in the drawers. Pots in the cabinets. Lavender and mint on the windowsill.
An empty room.

All these things are mine. And somehow, they are less mine because they are not shared. Oh, they'll be shared again. The room won't remain empty. But with roommates, more often than not, you go from "so, where are you from?" straight to "who left dirty dishes in the sink?" Sometimes it works out well. Sometimes it doesn't. We'll just have to see.

For almost all their lives my grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt Rose, lived in the same neighborhood. They both married kind, extraordinarily gentle men who went in to business together. They raised their children together. Spent summers in the Catskills together. They spent many an afternoon playing epic, hyper-competitive games of Scrabble together. They talked. They sniped. The took care of each other. Now, my great-aunt has moved out the neighborhood to be closer to her children and grandchildren. But she and my grandmother still talk. They still snipe. And occasionally, they even get together for a game of Scrabble.

My sister and I are less competitive than my grandmother and her sister. We snipe less. Also, we don't play Scrabble. But I do hope that we end up like the two of them- sharing lives (if not Scrabble boards), marrying good men, raising kids until we are both old (not that my grandmother or great-aunt are old. Heaven forfend!). Sure, we're no longer roommates, but we're still sisters.

My Great-aunt Rose's Honey Cake

When I told my grandmother that I was using my great-aunt's recipe for honey cake, she immediately countered with a recipe for honey cookies. That's just the way they are, the two of them. And while, most of my traditional recipes come from my grandmother, this is one time I'm going to go with my great-aunt's. Every time I make this cake, (and by every time I mean Rosh Hashana) I think, why don't I make this more often? Why does it have to be a once-a-year sort of cake? It is not an overly complicated recipe, and it's one of my favorite cakes. It manages to be both light and incredibly moist all at once. It's not too sweet and gains character from the addition of coffee and orange zest. So why I only make it once a year? Who knows? Maybe this year is the year to change that. Just don't tell my grandmother.

6 eggs, seperated
1 1/2 cups sugar, divided
1 lb (16 oz) honey
1 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons vinegar
1 1/3 cup coffee, cooled
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
juice and zest of 1/2 orange

1. Preheat the oven to 325 F. In a large bowl mix together 6 egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, honey and coffee. Put the baking soda in a little bowl. Pour the vinegar over it. Let it bubble and foam. Add to egg yolk mixture. In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and orange zest. Starting and ending with the flour mixture, alternately add the flour and the orange juice to the egg-honey mixture. Set aside.

2. In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. With the beaters running, slowly add 1 cup sugar. Beat until thick and marshmallow-like. Carefully fold the egg-whites into the rest of the batter.

3. Evenly divide the batter into 2 un-greased 8 inch round pans. Rap the pans sharply on the counter-top to eliminate air bubbles. Bake for about an hour. The cakes are done when they spring-back lightly to the touch.

4. Remove the cakes from the oven. Turn the cakes upside down, and prop them up on evenly space cans to cool.* When cool, turn right-side up. The cakes will stay, well wrapped, for a good-while.

* An important note: if your cake pans have even the slightest bit of non-stick coating, DO NOT turn the cakes upside down. They will promptly fall out of their pans. Cool them right-side up on a wire wrack.

Frankly speaking

I am, frankly speaking, in a little bit of a rut. Over on Facebook, my friends are excitedly posting their Rosh Hashanah menus. Melissa Clark is writing about brisket in the NYTimes. Deb over at Smitten kitchen has a spectacular looking challah recipe up. And me, well I've got a Rosh Hashanah menu. It's hanging on my fridge. But it won't be going up on Facebook, and some of it has already been mentioned on this blog. My mom's stuffed fish. Braised chicken with figs. My great-aunt Rose's honey cake. I'm not making anything new. I'm not making anything elaborate. Just food.
Even in my non-holiday kitchen, I have been feeling less than inspired. Oh, I've got ideas and recipes planned and cookbooks bookmarked, but I just can't quite get there. Mostly I have been eating granola. Great granola. Granola that I promise will one day be a blog post. Maybe even next week. But that's really been the extent of my culinary adventures lately.
A few days ago, I decided it was time. Time to shake myself out of this funk. I pulled Plenty off the shelf. I gave a glance at my pantry. I made chickpea saute with Greek yogurt (except the yogurt wasn't Greek). It was good. And different.And  Not at all Middle Eastern, as one would expect a chickpea saute to be.The next day I made curried corn fritters topped with mango and lime for dinner. Today, I am trying my hand at a new chicken recipe I've had my eye on for a while. So while I'm not entirely out of my rut, maybe, just maybe Ottolenghi's chickpea saute has given me a little push back toward culinary vibrancy. And thinking about it a little more, it wouldn't be a bad dish for the Rosh Hashanah table. It's not sweet, as many Rosh Hashanah foods are, but it does contain chard, which is one of the traditional "signs" eaten on the New Year.

Happy Rosh Hashanah to all those who celebrate. May all your ruts be shallow.

Chickpea Saute with Greek Yogurt
From Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi

3/4 lb. Swiss chard
1/3 cup olive oil
4 medium carrots, diced
1 tsp. caraway seeds
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas (canned is fine)
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tablespoon chopped mint
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon lemon juice
salt
black pepper
1/2 cup Greek (or plain) yogurt
1 tablespoon olive oil

1. Separate the chard leaves from the stalks. In a pot of salted, boiling water, blanch the stalks. After 6 minutes, add the leaves. Continue cooking for 2 minutes. Drain and refresh with cold water. Squeeze out excess liquid. Roughly chop.

2. I a large saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the carrots and caraway seeds. Saute for 5 minutes or so. Add the chard and chickpeas and continue to cook for another 6 minutes. Then add the garlic, herbs, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Mix. Remove from heat and allow to cool down. Taste and adjust seasoning.

3. Mix the yogurt and olive oil and sprinkle with a bit of salt and pepper. Mound the vegetables onto a serving platter (or individual plates) spoon yogurt on top. Serve.

Change of plans

This post is late for a good number of reasons: work, life, work, etc. But there's another reason this post is late: I had a change of plans. I had intended to write about a perfectly lovely broad bean dip I had made last week (it had garlic, and olive oil and cumin, among other things. I even took photos)  but somehow the words wouldn't come. The state in which I made the dip, among the boxes and scattered newspaper and piles of books that was my sister's move, is not conducive to expression. Neither the dip, nor the subject seemed blog worthy.

NOT mangoes

Instead I want to talk about mangoes. Like the bean dip, this dish, such as it is, is something I made up on the fly, but in less chaotic circumstances. I had guests, mangoes, limes and pistachios in congruence. A fortuitous turn of events, what with lime season being about a week long. Mangoes and lime is obvious. Pistachios are less obvious, but I had them, so I used them and I glad for that because otherwise I wouldn't know what  a revelation pistachios and mangoes are. Who knew how well they complimented each other? And why didn't they tell me? So now I am preaching my knew-found revelation. Let there be pistachios with your mango! Let there be simplicity and ease and deliciousness! So say we all!

Mango with Lime and Pistachios

1 mango
juice of half a lime
coarse, flaky salt
the barest pinch of cayenne
a handful of  shelled pistachios

1. Chop the mango into a medium-small dice. Add the lime juice, a pinch of salt and the cayenne and mix. Allow to sit for moment or two. Add the pistachios and serve. Imagine you are someplace else entirely. Specifically, on a beach.With a book.

Too many goodbyes

There have been a lot of goodbyes in my life lately. My parents left on Sunday, as did my friend Shayna, who had been in Israel doing research for the past half a year or so. On Tuesday, another friend left the country, and slowly, slowly my network of "can I borrow a cup of sugar" friends are moving to neighborhoods farther out and less accessible for last minute sugar borrowing. But the biggest upcoming goodbye will happen next week when my sister, who has been my roommate for the past four years will up and move to Tel Aviv and this little home will be a different sort of home. That will be the hardest goodbye of them all.

But we live in a wondrous age; one in which my one-year old niece gurgles in recognition when she sees my face on Skype; one in which I can hold almost daily conversations with an old friend from college who just happens to live across an ocean; in which my mom can email me from a cab to let me know she and my father have landed safely; one in which I can message my friend Shayna, who has been my eating partner, my recipe supplier, my fellow watcher of Olympic swimming to tell her that I am making homemade ginger-ale and despite the fact that she is currently in New York, within a second I will get her reply: YUM.

Still, it has been hard and it will be hard and if you ask me how I'm dealing, I would like to say, well, I'm marshaling my courage, concentrating on what is in front of me and putting one foot in front of the other. In reality, I have been drinking ginger-ale. And beer. But mostly ginger-ale.


I was pointed toward this recipe from my friends Yosef and Yael, who thankfully, are not moving. Yael is great cook but is pretty reticent about it. It is usually Yosef who gets geekily enthused by food. So when it was Yael who told me that they'd been making their own ginger-ale and it was "awesome", as she put it, I knew that I just had to try it and I knew that I had to share that fact with Shayna, because she would inevitably say: YUM. This ginger-ale is sweet, but it's also loaded with ginger and packs a punch. It's also easy as pie to make- it's a essentially a simple syrup infused with a hellalota ginger, thyme and sage, mixed with seltzer and squeeze of lime, and that's it. And yes, it is awesome and it is yum and I will be drinking a whole lot more of it in the weeks to come.

Homemade Ginger-Ale
Adapted from Biggirlssmallkitchen

1 1/2 cups (or more, if you'd like) peeled, sliced ginger
5 sprigs fresh thyme
2 sage fresh sage leaves
1 cup sugar
2 cups water
1 quart seltzer
lime (lemon will do if limes are not available)

1. In a saucepan combine the ginger, herbs, sugar and water. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Turn off the heat and allow to cool. Discard the herbs and ginger.

2. Pour about 1/4 cup syrup into a water glass. Add 3/4 cup seltzer and a squeeze of lime. Stir and taste. Add more lime or more syrup, as needed. Drink. Share with friends or hoard it all for yourself.

Beep

Due circumstances beyond my control (read my folks are visiting) this week's blog post has been delayed. Thank you for your patience.

But also changed

I lost a poem this week. I wrote the poem, oh, maybe ten years ago and set it aside. This week, for various reasons, I went looking for it and could not find it. I searched through every scrap of paper and every flash drive I had saved from high school through college and beyond (and in the process discovered that I wrote a lot of bad poetry in high school and college. Though, I suppose if ever there is a time in your life when you should be writing bad poetry, high school and college is it). I could remember fragments of the poem. I could even remember the shape of it on the page, but I could not find the poem itself. So I was left with no choice but to try and reconstruct the poem from the little bits and pieces that remained in my memory. It was the poem redux but also changed.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of fiddling with old things out of necessity, as above, and also out of my own need to fiddle. For instance, I wasn't satisfied with how grainy and granita-like David Lebovitz's chocolate sorbet came out using only water and the lack of an ice cream maker method, but I wanted to keep it a non-dairy sorbet and not a sherbet. So I simply swapped one cup (the cup you don't boil, as coconut milk doesn't like be boiled) of the two cups of water with coconut milk. The resulting sorbet was perfect-rich and smooth, with a slight coconut undertone.

Likewise, I have started fiddling with my plumble recipe, not because it needed fixing, God no- it is pretty perfect the way it is- but because I have been making it a lot this summer and I was getting a little bored. I wanted to move beyond the holy trinity of plums, vanilla and wine. Perhaps this is sacrilege, but I've never been very good with dogma.
 I had been thinking a lot about plums, cinnamon and almond. Yotam Ottolenghi has a beautiful looking recipe in his Ottolenghi cookbook for plum muffins with marzipan in which he makes cinnamon-seasoned plum compote that is then folded in to a muffin batter that has been studded with marzipan. I haven't actually made the muffins, though I intend to eventually, but the flavors intrigued me. I decided to see if they would play nicely in plumble. So, hoping to mimic Ottolenghi's compote, I left the usual wine out of the fruit and added some cinnamon. The muffin recipe doesn't call for any vanilla, but I couldn't part with it, so I left it in too. For the topping, I went whole wheat flour for the simple reason that I had no white flour in the house. I also added some almond extract to the batter, hoping to gain some of that marzipan-like flavor. The resulting plumble was kinda great. Without the boldness wine, the cinnamon was allowed to shine and the combination of the whole wheat flour and almond gave it a sweetness with a mild almond grace note. It was a different, gentler version of plumble. Like the poem, it was plumble redux, but also changed.

Plumble Redux, but also changed
A note: a friend of mine recently told me that when making plumble, he swapped some of the vegetable oil for coconut oil, which made the topping more crisp-like. I think that sounds fantastic. So if any of y'all wanna play around with that, please do, and let me know how it turns out.

The Topping:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 oat flour
1 1/2 tsp white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp almond extract
2 tbl soy milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil

 Sift together dry ingredients. Add the soy milk, almond extract and vegetable oil. Mix until crumbly.

The Fruit:
8-9 plums, sliced into about 16 crescents
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla (or a 4 inch vanilla bean, if you have one)


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.