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A Food-Word Game
While you Pee-towners are slacking off on sleds, some of us reside in above-freezing environs and have to keep the blogroll a burnin’. Here is a parlor game that we’re calling “Exquisite Course” that’s sure to pass the time for anybody stuck in their kitchen, closet or car.
But wait…let’s back it up a second. You see, we at Hot Knives have been scheming for weeks over a concept of postmodern, deconstructionist high fallutin’ vegan fast food recipes we plan to unleash on the world shortly. Think Sprite, as a salad.
However, it dawned on us that we might be getting a twee bit ahead of ourselves. After all you can’t get to postmodernism without hitting a little surrealism, right? In this case we mean a saucy liberation of our unconscious minds through imagination, free food association and weird, guttural wordplay. This game is fun, sure, but it’s also a serious way to stumble upon dream-like dishes of sick proportions. So here’s how you play:
If you’ve played Exquisite Corpse before, you can probably already guess. We happened to try a couple rounds as two people (once bored in a car, once drunk at a bar) but it suits a threesome much better. Simply start at the beginning of the alphabet and have one person kick-off with the first ingredient that comes to mind (“all spice”). A second person adds either another ingredient (“apple”) or a preparation method (“roasted”) and a third player tosses out a larger dish-type (“hummus”) and voile you’ve got “all-spice apple hummus” or whatever. Now, many of them won’t be, well, realistic, but you can imagine how it both passes the time and pushes the proverbial envelope right? Here are two standout rounds that we got too frustrated or drunk to finish...
Round One
Avocado aspic jelly
Banana crisp cereal
Collard greens dolmas
Date-pear compote
Eggplant quiche
Fava beans w/fries in a barley wine and butter sauce
Gravied tomatoes
Hot pickled broccoli
Ice wine shallot vinaigrette
Japanese eggplant caviar
Kream of kale soup
Lemon-lime "Sprite" salad
Macaroni and morel casserole
Nicoise soup
Olive pineapple pilaf
Peanuts (fresh) in butter
Parsnip relish
Quinoa-mint spring rolls
Rice cream
Sake-bomb tempeh w/ coconut mash
Round Two
Ancho-Baratta cheese
Beet chevre
Champagne shoshito shots
Duvel eggplant steak
Endive frittata
Frisee BBQ onion rings
Gravy hummus
Harissa spanokapia
Juniper jelly compote
Kettle parsnip w/ vodka salt
YOUR TURN...
You know what is awesome? Duck. It is one of the best things about living in France. You can even get duck at the cafeteria, and it's still special and delicious, despite being in a cafeteria. So of course, when you get it at a real restaurant, it's pretty much heaven on a plate.
Tonight we had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Poitiers, La Serrurerie. Well, it's pretty much the only restaurant I've been to here that's not 4 euro kebab. Anyway, dinner tonight. It totally blew my mind. There were duck steaks with potatoes, pumpkin, chestnuts, and some sort of a brown, tangy sauce with crisped basil on top. Then for dessert I got vanilla ice cream, just because I wanted to see what vanilla ice cream was like in France, and let me tell you - even the vanilla ice cream is obscenely good. It was so strong and so smooth, like, like, I don't know, like what gold would taste like if it was ice cream and not metal. Then we got hot chocolate and mulled wine. It was funny because we were there with the program director people who were visiting from Oregon and they didn't understand the 4-hour dinner thing and got up to leave while we were still drinking our drinks. We were like, "What, it's only 10 o' clock!" There was also some nummy wine with the meal. I found out here that I do like wine after all. It is very good with dinner. For a start.
When I got home I was so happy about dinner that I danced around in my dorm room. We're going back to that restaurant next weekend for somebody's birthday. Hell yes.
The tomato originated in the Andes, was domesticated in Mexico, and was brought to Europe in the 16th century by the conquistadores (along with other vegetables it's hard to imagine doing without like beans, corn, squash, potatoes, and peppers). It belongs to the nightshade family, which also includes potato, bell pepper, tobacco and deadly nightshade. Because of its family links, many people thought that it was poisonous and refused to eat it (except for in Italy where it early caught hold), and in America some folks still refused to trust it until the turn of the 20th century. Today, though, they're second only to the potato in annual consumption in the US.
Botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a fruit is "the edible product of a plant or tree, consisting of the seed and its envelope, esp. the latter when it is of a juicy pulpy nature, as in the apple, orange, plum, etc."). In the late 19th century, a clever tomato importer realized that fruits were not subject to the same tariffs that vegetables were and tried to import tomatoes as "fruit." The ensuing case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, who ruled that, though a botanical fruit, the tomato is a culinary vegetable, because it is "usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meat, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits, generally as dessert." In other words, it's not sweet.
Here is my very favorite tomato recipe I discovered last year in Alice Water's wonderful cookbook Chez Panisse Vegetables. It's only worth making with fully-ripe garden tomatoes, especially heirloom varieties.
Chilled Tomato Soup4 lbs ripe tomatoes
2 Tb salt
1 small cucumber
2 stalks celery
3 shallots
White wine vinegarCut the tomatoes in quarters, put them in a bowl, add all the salt, and mix well. Peel and seed the cucumber, clean the celery, and peel the shallots. Cut them all into very fine dice. Put the shallots in a small bowl, add just enough of the vinegar to cover, and set aside.
After about half an hour the salt will have softened the tomatoes. Mash them with a wooden spoon and work them through a food mill to obtain a thick tomato juice. Add the shallots, celery, and cucumber. Season to taste with salt and vinegar. (Add balsamic vinegar if the tomatoes need a little sweetness.) Refrigerate over ice and serve well-chilled.
For a richer and spicier soup, add olive oil and mashed garlic to the tomato base and garnish with chopped bell peppers.
Reprinted with permission from Orange Bicycle
Reprinted with permission from Orange Bicycle
I've been tutoring a Cuban couple in English, and last night they made me a traditional Cuban dinner. I'd never really had Cuban food (except for once at Cañitas), and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. It was really simple but very delicious: black beans and rice, salad, yuca root (aka casava), chicken, and—a new food for me—malanga (also known as taro, or, in Japanese, satoimo). To be honest, malanga was fairly plain, but I really enjoyed getting to taste a whole new food.
If you think about it, most of us as adults can count on basically only eating things we are familiar with. One of the defining experiences of childhood must be how many foods and tastes are new, but I can't remember how that felt. And, growing up in California, I don't remember when I wasn't familiar with "exotic" foods like jicama, avocado (which I wish were still called the alligator pear) and kiwi. Still, it's easy enough to try a new dish or preparation, or even a new produced ingredient like wine, cheese, or sauce. But I really treasure the moments when you try an entirely new basic food flavor.
When I lived in Mexico in college, one of the first new fruits I tried was the delicious nispero, a little tart fruit with big smooth seeds. It took me years to figure out that the English name is loquat, and I actually haven't been able to find any until just a few weeks ago, during a visit to a California farmer's market. I also remember fondly the tuna fruit (when you see tuna flavored ice cream on the menu, don't be alarmed; if it were actually fish-flavored it would be called atun), which is a cactus fruit called the prickly pear, as well as the white-fleshed, creamy guanabana, otherwise known as a cherimoya. The epazote herb flavored bean dishes, and we often ate nopalitos cut from cactus paddles. Likewise, I enjoyed getting to know tomatillos and a delicious tea made from jamaica (hibiscus flowers). And of course there were all kinds of new chiles, like chilacas/pasillas, poblanos/anchos, serranos, and piquin, to name a few. We even ate raw raw sugarcane as a treat!
I know no one thinks of Germany as being a culinary paradise, but when I lived there I tried, and learned to love, belgian endive, celeriac (celery root), and the delicate quince fruit. I love all members of the crucifera family (broccoli, etc.) of vegetables, so of course I enjoyed kohlrabi, and likewise I loved a wild relative of the allium (garlic & onion) family which doesn't grow in the states called Bärlauch.
Traveling and fearless cooking projects have introduced me to Indian ingredients like ajowan, tamarind, and the challenging asafoetida (whose name shares a root with the word fetid); Southeast Asian delicacies like the tangy, mild, gingery galangal root, tangy kaffir lime leaf, and delicious, moist palm sugar; and Japanese treats like shiso leaf, the beautiful lotus root (renkon), burdock root (gobo), and fuyu persimmons, a smooth-fleshed, firm, sweet, delicious fruit that's very different than the sour, mushy persimmons we have here.
Of course, our wonderful farm share and the farmer's market have introduced a brave new world of produce to us as well, from fava beans to greens like sorrel, watercress, and mizuna. We've eaten fiddlehead ferns and all manner of wonderful wild mushrooms, not to mention a variety in kinds of mundane ingredients like apples, tomatoes, and potatoes that I never dreamed possible.
I'm sure I'll never run out of new foods to try, and a few that are high on my list now are cardoons, pawpaws, a now-rare native North American fruit I first heard about in Ohio on my cross-country trip, and the truffles I couldn't afford to try on my last trip to Italy.
What are new foods you've eaten? Did you like them?
Etichettando.com tells us how to find organic food and avoid GMO! But this is all UK-based, does this work in the US? The site says the PLU is used here. (Sarah, tell us the secrets of Whole Foods!)
