Sweet on Demand

Peach turnover filling

Friends marvel that I’m not bigger than I am. I’m not svelte but given the sheer amount of energy I devote to all things food (talking about it, making it, eating it) it is easy to understand why someone would assume I would need a crane to get me out of the house. While I’m always at my biggest size when I live in the Bay Area, a region that shares my food obsession and indulges me in it on all fronts, the thing that keeps me within reasonable limits has been my preference for salt to sugar. 

Savory over sweet is my general declaration, with very few exceptions. I’m a sucker for Rice Krispie treats (cooked by me in excessive amounts of butter) and things with flaky crusts. Left to my own devices I crave salt and spice, I find savory satisfying. And for those rare exceptions, I’ve trained myself not to keep those things on hand. When I shop, I skip those aisles. That way, if I decide to eat sweets I have to have a full on craving worthy of me getting in my car and driving to the store. It is an extra layer between me and the things that are great for my health or continuing to fit into the clothes I already own.

In the last few years I’ve fallen in love with cooking. 

buttered figs with vanilla salt

My time living abroad taught me that I could cook but not necessarily that I loved it. It was something that passed the time and allowed me to suspend occasional bouts of homesickness when I could eat things that were my comfort foods. With the passing months in foreign places I added new things to my culinary arsenal with varied success. Spätzle was a pretty huge disaster but Pajeon was added to my list of things I could produce in a pinch. I learned cakes and cinnamon rolls but none of those things typically call to me in the middle of the night. I love flaky dough and my time abroad was typically, although not exclusively, in sweltering places that didn’t lend themselves to making pie doughs (not to mention I often had to fashion boot-leg Dutch ovens to cook at all). 

But these days cooking is my meditation. Now I scour through websites and recipes call out to me. I save them and plan and shop to be able to make them. I have new ingredients and spices added to my arsenal incrementally and I am learning to use them outside of the specific recipe(s) they were purchased for. I’m getting good at improvising. 

This has led to a problem.

All of a sudden I don’t have to go to the grocery store to purchase the sweet treats that I crave. All of a sudden, everything I want is accessible through my generally stocked fridge. Butter? I have salted and unsalted by the pound in my freezer. Cocoa? I keep unsweetened powder in my pantry. Most everything else can be produced with flour (unbleached and whole wheat) and sugar (brown, white, and powdered). In a pinch I can make brownies or cookies or cake or…most recently, peach turnovers (ugly though they turned out).

This week my CSA box presented me with fresh figs. Unlike dill, which I had no concept of how to use and had only experienced in its dried form in a recipe gone wrong back in my high school days, figs I’d seen a little more of. My fondest memory was a giveaway at Central market years ago when someone handed me a wedge of fresh fig slathered with mascarpone cheese and a pistachio. It was the most decadent piece of simplicity I’d had. Something I remember almost 15 years later. But I wasn’t going to buy mascarpone just for that (although I do have pistachios on hand) and so what could I do with them?

Zee gave me fancy salts for my birthday earlier this year. Aleppo salt and sumac salt and truffle salt and…vanilla salt. I’d never heard of such a thing and so threw myself into reading up. How would I use vanilla salt? Baking of course.

But my brain got to working the other day, the figs beginning to overripe on my table. I cut them into even slices, revealing their jeweled inside, and placed them in a pan sizzling with a pat of butter. Then I sprinkled them each with a tiny pinch of vanilla salt. The sugars in the fig caramelized a little and I flipped them each over and a few minutes later, slid them and the buttery juice they produced onto a plate. 

There it was. A marvelous sweet treat with a subtle salty counterpoint that I made without leaving my house. With no added sugar and just a smattering of butter, there are worse things I could make.

Not the prettiest but pretty tasty for my first attempt at lemon lava cake

Last week it was lemon lava cake (a recipe I’d been eying for months and finally had folks over to try it out on…nothing like the satisfaction of making lemon curd in advance and then seeing the whole recipe fall into place) and the week before that it was oatmeal raisin cookies.

Last night fresh peaches, all summer smelling and perfect, were the object of my attention. I wanted so much to bite into them directly but recently I’ve realized I’m allergic to stone fruits and consuming them immediately sets my Eustachian tube to itching annoyingly. So I knew I’d have to cook them; in some ways, such a waste. Still, I had puff pastry in the freezer (left over from an experimental meal gone wrong a while back). I peeled and sliced them, their bright orange flesh taunting me, and then mixed them with brown and white sugar and a little bit of cinnamon and a pinch of that delightful vanilla salt. And then I wrapped them inexpertly into the puff pastry. They resembled presents wrapped by young and well-meaning children. 

The finished product wasn’t perfect by any stretch but it satisfied my sweet tooth without having to leave the comfort of my kitchen. And therein lies the problem…sweet things on demand is probably not the best thing to happen to me, even if they are delicious.

Tomatoes-a-Plenty

Flush with tomatoes. So flush with tomatoes I had them withering in the fridge. And, no surprise, Wednesday’s CSA box had more of the same. I’ve had cherry tomatoes and plum tomatoes, and heirloom ones. SO many that making tabbouleh and other salads just isn’t enough to stem the tide.

Last night, nestled over kisir (turkish tabbouleh), haloumi, and sautéed mushrooms I contemplated my fate. I had to figure out some way to consume 7,000 pounds of tomatoes (only a slight exaggeration) or resign myself to being part of the American masses that throws away a quarter of my food. It was well past 7pm but I had it in my mind to do something.

Call it impulse. Call it meditation. Call it a need to rest my mind in light of all the things that are happening in the world right now that cause me to rage out. Whatever you call it, it involved me humming to myself while I peeled tomatoes and one and a half heads of garlic simmered at low heat in a ½ cup of olive oil 

I peeled, and peeled. No blanching because it was hot and I’m impatient. Instead, I quartered each tomato and with a thin blade started at a corner and pulled down. 45 minutes later I had a full pot. I adapted this recipe from one that a friend sent me a while ago called the four hour tomato sauce. That one calls for half a cup of oil (which I find excessively oily), canned tomatoes instead of fresh, and the water from boiled mushrooms for an extra layer of flavor (I was out of mushrooms).

I made do. 

After simmering the garlic until it was brown and tender (like me!) i poured it into the boiling and dissolving tomatoes with a few pinches of my homemade rosemary salt, and a dollop of tomato paste (maybe a teaspoon). And then I just let it simmer. 

Initially the sauce was watery and I wondered if it would ever reduce. I put it on low heat and went about my evening (namely, baking brownies) and almost forget it was there until I washed my dishes and looked over. The sauce was thicker. More of a pinkish red than the vibrant crimson the canned tomatoes produce (my tomatoes varied in color form yellow to green to red) but it tasted divine.

Into the freezer it went, ready and waiting for me to make lasagna. Maybe next week.

Dunderi from scratch

I haven’t really been in the kitchen much since my vacation. I took a cooking class in Turkey, but that was only one day, and I’ve been sick and busy since I returned. 

Sickness lost me almost an entire CSA box. Too sick to put it away it mostly rotted while still packed tightly in brown paper bags and sitting in a patch of sunlight. Warm and closely bound, the beans molded the apricots spoiled.

I salvaged the basil, and made pesto (realizing for the first time that my food processor works better than the blender). The pizza that followed was ok, but nothing dazzling; something was off and I can only blame myself. So long removed from my kitchen I seem to have lost my touch: I added too much sugar to the crust, the pesto lacked bite, the zucchini lacked salt.

Sunday, sickness testing my body for a possible return, I didn’t manage to make ,anything more than taco soup (one can of black beans, one can of pinto beans, one can of corn, one can of diced or stewed tomatoes, one can of pumpkin, and taco seasoning- ground meat optional). 

I made tortillas (also slightly off) the night before and a kohlrabi and cabbage slaw. It should have been amazing, but mostly it was just ok.

Today was the day though. I found a recipe in Tasting Table before I left for Turkey. It tantalized me from the beginning…a pasta made almost entirely of cheese. This seemingly inverse of gnocchi…light and airy to gnocchi’s density. I’d never heard of this…dunderi…but oh how I wanted to.

Fleeing from the day’s stress, discarding my working demeanor, I took to measuring out ingredients.

I never used to measure everything out, like on the cooking shows, it always seemed so wasteful, extra things to wash. But my recent spate of cooking has taught me that order before cooking makes orderly cooking –mise en place makes sense. And so I pulled down ramekins, measured out flour, separated eggs, minced rosemary. 

Everything in the proper place, I began to mix according to the recipe. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever made a more ridiculously decadent dish that wasn’t a dessert. Two cups of ricotta cheese, one cup of parmesan, six egg yolks, and a little more than a cup of flour (a bit of kosher or sea salt). 

The recipe calls for nutmeg but I hate nutmeg as I hate few things and the idea of fresh fragrant rosemary called to me and so I minced it as fine as I could and sprinkled that in with the other ingredients. 

Rolling it out was a learning experience – one I’ll improve at next time, having learned what the dough does in a huge pot of boiling salted water. The little dumplings expand in the water, their edges, if not definitely rolled fluff out wildly like my hair. Holding their shape firmly or waving free in the boiling currents of the water, they float to the surface when they are ready to be fished out and drained. 

The final step is a half cup of butter melted and browned slowly on the stove top. Two teaspoons of lemon and a little zest and salt. Drop the hot dumplings in and coat. 

I fancied mine up a tad. I lightly pan-fried some eggplants, diced fresh heirloom tomatoes, sautéed some kohlrabi greens, and grated parmesan on top (as if the cup inside the pasta wasn’t enough).

Delicious.

The whole thing is light and airy, not particularly cheesy.