Passover wines

Best selection I’ve seen around around Boston was at Gordon’s Wines in Waltham, though the staff there was useless. Probably worth trying to go to a tasting, since they have one every year.

Winner: Tishbi Emerald Riesling 2009, purchased 2010: This is the Passover wine I want to have every year. Very drinkable for unsophisticated palates like mine, good on its own or with food. Semi-dry, fruity, no wood notes, not complex. Emerald Rieslings don’t have a very good rep, but this one startled me in a nice way.

Herzog Selection Vouvray 2006, purchased 2010: Good, but not as appealing as the Emerald Riesling.

Not impressed by the reds I found in 2010, which I think were a Yarden Mount Hermon Red (mostly cab and merlot) and a Dalton Canaan Red (cab, merlot, and shiraz). One of them, maybe the Yarden, was supposedly the owner’s favorite Passover red. Whichever it was, I definitely don’t share his taste.

I’ll try to remember to add notes to this post as time goes on. Comments and suggestions are certainly welcome.

Fiddleheads: fugu for vegetarians

From my friend Erika:

Fiddleheads must definitely be well cooked in order to detoxify them. Boil them for at least 5 minutes and discard the water. If you want to serve them "raw", boil them, then chill them and call them raw, or else face risking the reaction Bob had if you actually eat them without boiling first (some individuals are more susceptible to their toxin than others). Stir frying or light steaming is not enough to detoxify them. If they taste bitter, don't eat them!

Note that ostrich fern fiddleheads are the least toxic. Bracken ferns have toxins that are carcinogenic and mutagenic and well known to cause bladder cancer in cows, so if you're going to collect them yourself, you need to be able to recognize the species. We have about 30 common fern species around here and the guidebooks generally only show the mature plants, not the fiddlehead stage, so getting starting with fiddlehead collecting on your own can be tricky.

Fiddleheads should be eaten in moderation and in season, since they contain thiaminase, which breaks down B vitamins in the body and can lead to vitamin B deficiency. While raw fiddleheads have been shown to contain vitamins A and C, nutritional analyses are on RAW fiddleheads, but this is meaningless since you can't eat them raw. I haven't seen any data on nutritional analyses of fiddleheads that show whether or not any vitamins remain after cooking and throwing out the water. So, they're a treat if cooked thoroughly, but not a nutritional staple by any means.

(Another food you must boil well before eating to detoxify is shell/dried beans, especially cranberry beans and kidney beans. Never, never eat these raw from the garden, or you'll get very, very sick. They need to be boiled at a high temperature to disable the phytohaemaglutanin. That's why they're safe from rodents in storerooms. Boil, don't simmer, until soft.)

People used to boil the heck out of vegetables for a reason--not to make them gray and slimy, but to denature any toxins. Cultivated foods have had the toxins bred out and more nutrition bred in, so they are much safer to eat raw or only slightly cooked. With wild, uncultivated foods, you really need to know what you're dealing with because many contain toxins to prevent predation. As long as people were used to gathering some of their foods wild, they knew they had to be careful about really cooking them well. But in the last 30-40 years, wild gathering has been replaced with virtually exclusive cultivated eating. This has allowed more culinary experimentation and crispier tastes to develop. But it has also meant that people have forgotten, or not even learned, the wisdom of their elders when dealing with wild foods. My grandmother used to boil all her vegetables for a long, long time, and warned me never to eat raw beans. Of course, I didn't listen to her, and that's how we ended up with bean poisoning. Not once, but twice, because we couldn't imagine that undercooked beans could make us sick.

Hot cocoa, the way it used to be

Dear Big Train,

I've been a huge fan of your hot cocoa, which used to be made with sugar, milk, and cocoa. I was extremely disappointed when you changed the ingredients to add maltodextrin, salt, carrageenan, natural flavor, guar gum, and xantham gum. Adding those ingredients means that many people with food allergies, including my wife, can no longer drink your hot cocoa.

When your ingredients list was simpler, I served your hot cocoa to friends, gave boxes of it away, and praised your product to anyone who would listen. I no longer do that, and I wish I could. I hope you'll consider going back to the simpler recipe, and I hope you'll let me know if and when you do, so that I can go back to buying cases of your hot cocoa.

P.S. I'm posting this here because your e-mail addresses won't accept this e-mail, claiming that it's spam. I'm hoping you have a Google Alert set for Big Train.

P.P.S. Does anyone know of a hot cocoa mix that is still made with just sugar, milk, and cocoa powder? I really liked having a hot cocoa that didn't require keeping milk on hand.

This post is derived entirely from natural ingredients

FoodEssentials.com is a good start towards making it easier to shop when you have food allergies or food restrictions. SelectWisely.com makes laminated cards listing food allergies in multiple languages that you can take with you when you’re traveling. And Wikipedia still wins for clearest and most comprehensive explanations of ingredients like guar gum (which is kitniyot, in case you’re wondering).

This post is five days too late, or 352 days early

For those who feel overwhelmed by the obligations of preparing for Passover, a voice of reason. For those who do not attempt to rid their house of chametz before Passover, perhaps a different sort of voice. Rabbi Yitzchak Berkowitz explains why various aspects of Passover cleaning are important, and makes the task seem less overwhelming.

My idiosyncratic approach is to use Passover plates, but not Passover cookware or serving pieces or silverware. I follow the ingredient restrictions that are specific to Passover, from chametz through derivatives of kitniyot, but not the year-round rules of kashrut. (So a cheeseburger is fine for me, as long as it’s on matzah instead of on a roll. Corn syrup and soybean oil are right out, though.) And I try to ignore the box of Bisquick that somehow got left behind in the kitchen when we cleared out such things before Passover, because moving it is more likely to wind up with chametz in my food than leaving it in place. I’ve followed basically the same set of rules throughout my life, so it works for me. And even though my set of rules for myself is different from Rabbi Berkowitz’s set of rules, I think his reasoning works well applied to a different set of rules.

Salmon masala

Chop two large yellow onions, cook in oil until partly caramelized. At the start of cooking the onions, add salt, garam masala, black pepper, cayenne, garam masala, balti seasoning, cardamom, cumin, a few fennel seeds, nutmeg, and more garam masala. Lightly toast 1/2 cup cashews. When onions are transluscent, add 2 cloves minced garlic, cashews, and some more garam masala. (Our garam masala jar does not pour easily.)

Once onions are at the desired level of caramelization, add 1/2 cup each of plain yogurt and tomato sauce. If you use cream instead of yogurt, add lemon juice or a little vinegar for acidity. Stir together with the onions until heated and taste. You’ll probably decide you went too lightly on the spices and salt, so add more. If your tomato sauce is unsweetened, add a little honey. If you used too much cayenne, add yogurt and tomato sauce. When satisfied, take the sauce off the heat.

In a skillet, cook 1 pound skinned salmon fillet in oil with salt, garam masala, and dill. When almost done, bring sauce back to hot, stir in 1 large diced tomato, and remove from heat. If you got nice color on the salmon, put the salmon on a large platter and pour the sauce around it. If you started with (or ended with) small salmon pieces, mix the salmon into the sauce. Serve with rice and naan.

Better than U-Haul is not a standard

Valentine’s Day is tough for restaurants. The restaurant is probably full, and is frequently unable to accommodate hopeful patrons who don’t have reservations. In this environment, restaurants understandably don’t want to hold tables for people who don’t show up on time (for some reasonable value of on time).

So the Elephant Walk, where Lisa and I have celebrated every Valentine’s Day since our first date (which was on Valentine’s Day), has decided to call everyone with reservations for tonight and leave messages reminding us that we have a reservation and letting us know that our reservation will be cancelled if we are more than 15 minutes late. It doesn’t bode well that they couldn’t be bothered to include something like “We’re looking forward to seeing you this evening.” This would never have flown when Tony ran the show at the Elephant Walk, back in the long-ago days of phenomenal service. And it’s a good thing that our destination this evening wasn’t a surprise to one of us, since we do still have a quaint shared landline instead of individual cell phones.

When Life Gives You Vodka

Limoncello is a good next recipe, because it requires a lot of lemon peel but no lemon juice. Sort of the opposite of a lot a lemon recipes.

On our honeymoon, Michael and I were steered to a marvelous restaurant in Rockland. And over many visits to Primo, we always tried to sit at one of Bill's tables. We only saw Bill once or twice a year (and if it was twice, it was twice in one week), but he always remembered us. He made us feel welcome and special and in for the best meal ever. Even though he worked in a restaurant 4 hours away, he knew more about Boston restaurants than we did and always had gossip about the hottest new places.

Bill introduced me to limoncello, and this was the perfect drink for me. Intensely lemon. Not too sweet. Icy cold.

Melissa Kelly, the owner/chef, wrote a book about Mediterranean diets which included many recipes. One of them was Primo's recipe for limoncello. I made it a few years ago, but the thought of peeling dozens of lemons, as well as the cost of organic lemons, kept me from making it again.

Enter Jed's lemon tree!

It turns out that Meyer lemons are pretty easy to peel. So the first step of every recipe has become: peel the lemon and add the peel to the container in the freezer waiting for there to be enough to make limoncello.

Primo limoncello
1.25 cups lemon peel
2 cups vodka
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

In a saucepan, pour vodka over 1 cup lemon peel. (Freeze the rest of the peel.) Heat over low heat until just warm. Remove from heat and place in a sterile jar. Cover and store in a cool, dark place for 1 week.

After one week, combine sugar, water, and remaining lemon peel in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, cook until sugar is dissolved.

Strain the lemon peel out of the vodka. Strain the lemon out of the sugar syrup. Mix the vodka and syrup. Pour into a clean glass bottle. Store in the freezer.

Serve very cold. Perhaps in a glass that's also been in the freezer.

Call for recipes

Lemon recipes will continue soon with limoncello and lemon-flavored olive oil. Want to know how your favorite lemon recipe will turn out with Meyer lemons? Send us the recipe and we’ll try it out!

If you find yourself in the Santa Clara Valley with too many lemons and Lisa is not available to help, consider Village Harvest. Or just mail the lemons to us.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

Photo by Lisa

Before I knew anything about blogs, I spent a lot of time reading TableTalk at Salon. My favorite forums were the cooking discussions. That's where I first learned about Meyer lemons. People talked about them as if they were so far above and beyond a normal lemon as to be unbearable. I ran across a few items that claimed to be flavored with Meyer lemons, but the lemons proper never appear in my New England grocery stores.

So, when Jed said, quite casually, that his tree was a Meyer lemon tree, I pounced. And Meyer lemons are very nice indeed, with a headier scent than a grocery store lemon, a thinner skin, and juicier too.

The first thing I did was make lemonade. And lemonade is the the easiest and the hardest lemon recipe to write. Lemon juice, sugar or honey, water, ice: what could be simpler? But it's all about balancing the tartness of *this* lemon with just the amount of sweet your mouth is currently craving, so the "correct" proportions are fleeting.

Meyer Lemonade

1) Steal a lemon or two from Jed's tree.
2) Squeeze the juice into a tall glass.
3) Add A LOT of sugar or honey. Mix until dissolved.
4) Add cold water and ice to fill the glass.
5) Enjoy!

or...

1) Steal a lemon from Jed's tree. Maybe two if they are small. The big huge ones are extra juicy, but they might have soft spots, which maybe won't taste as good.
2) Slice the lemon(s) in half and squeeze the juice into a tall glass. If you hold the sliced side up when you squeeze, you can avoid getting seeds in your glass without using a strainer. Or use a strainer. Or plan to drink around the seeds.
3) Add about twice as much sugar or honey as you think you should. Stir the juice and sugar until the sugar dissolves. You can add a bit of hot water to help with this, but I find the acid in the lemon juice works pretty well on its own.
4) Add cold water to nearly fill the glass. Stir some more. Taste. Adjust the sweetness if necessary by adding more sugar or lemon. Once you've got a nice strong flavor, add ice or more water as desired.
5) Find a sunny spot to sit and sip. Maybe in Jed's back yard. Maybe on a deck in Cambria. Maybe staring out into your snowbound back yard. Enjoy.

Thornton’s

Thornton’s Fenway Grill burned last night. The lifespan of eateries around here feels really short—I’m more likely to be able to eat at a restaurant I remember from 30 years ago in New York than at a place I ate at a few years ago around here. Soleil Cafe, which was our other breakfast joint when they were open for breakfast. M&M Roast Beef, whose print menu I redesigned in 1995. Boingo, with their excellent chai and the sandwiches they imported from Malden. The place in Malden that made those sandwiches. Giovanni’s, where I went for lunch every Wednesday like shul. Sesame, the only Chinese restaurant in the US that’s ever replicated for me the battered shredded beef dish that I always order in England. And all the others, and now Thornton’s, which was always more about the cheerful company than the food.

Fruits of 2008

Honeycrisp cider by Carlson Farms. We stumbled onto one of only 36 jugs that Wilson Farms received last week. Sweet, light, and young. I seriously don’t want a regular apple cider after this one. Word from the owner is that they’re going to do another pressing next week. A good way to start the new year.

Golden kiwis from New Zealand. Apparently seasonal, these turned up at Whole Foods for a couple of weeks this past summer. The flesh has an identical texture to a regular kiwi, just different in color, but the flavor is tropical. The hairless skin wasn’t as entertaining as the usual kiwi skin, so I stuck to eating the inside.

Fresh-squeezed pineapple juice by Kennesaw. Starts out tasting like a perfect pineapple. If you leave it in the refrigerator for more than a couple of days after opening, the sugars ferment quite rapidly despite the light pasteurization. No complaints about that.

Lisa’s cranberry sauce. Lots of honey and orange peel turned this Thanksgiving obligation into a real treat.

To every room there is a purpose

Mark Bittman, writing in the New York Times about his 7' x 6' kitchen:

... when it comes to kitchens, size and equipment don’t count nearly as much as devotion, passion, common sense and, of course, experience.

So why do I want a bigger kitchen? Well, part of it is having enough room to put everything away. As with many 19th-century homes, ours has very little storage space. No coat closet by the front door, single tiny closets in the bedrooms, and a cobbled-together broom closet and pantry. We have nine linear feet of upper cabinets in the kitchen, and the majority of the shelves are out of comfortable reach. 

Part of it is having enough room for both of us to work at the same time without getting in each other’s way. That’s really a layout issue more than a size issue, but it’s easy to confuse those. I’m quite sure that Mark Bittman is not trying to cook alongside another person in his kitchen, nor is he trying to avoid cross-contamination because of food allergies.

Part of it is wanting more or larger appliances. I want to add laundry to the kitchen, since we don’t have a good way to add it to the second floor. It would be nice to replace our kitchen and basement refrigerators with a single larger refrigerator and a freezer. We don’t need a larger oven, but we could definitely use an extra burner or two somewhere in the kitchen since we often run out of burners when we’re hosting a crowd.

And part of it is wanting to have a comfortable space for other people to hang out in while we cook. Our kitchen is quite separated from the rest of the house, and there’s nowhere to add a passthrough or other conversational connection. I don’t think we need to go as far as the Edinburgh kitchen we used that included a sofa, but some sort of seating or standing room that isn’t in the working traffic corridor would be great.

Bittman’s point, of course, is that none of this is relevant to cooking well. He’s right. Cooking, by itself, doesn’t require storage or a good workflow or conversation. None of what I want to improve in our kitchen about cooking well. I already do that. What I want to improve in our kitchen is about living well.

Talking turkey

The dark meat on a turkey needs to get to 185º, but the white meat on a turkey only needs to get to 165º. The solution that we follow to avoid overcooking the white meat is an adaptation of advice from the Cook’s Illustrated folks: we cook the bird upside-down for 40 minutes at 400º first, then flip it and finish it at 325º. Total time for a 25-28 pound turkey is usually 3-3.5 hours.

We don’t put stuffing in the bird, just chopped vegetables, lemon, and orange. Dry rub a spice blend on the outside, and this year we added a bit of apple cider instead of butter when we needed to baste. This year I added a small pan of water next to the bird for the last 30 minutes to increase the steam level in the oven without having the bird sitting in liquid.

Flipping an enormous hot turkey is hard. (Not to be confused with whatever the kids are doing these days that they call “flipping a hot turkey.”) I find the best approach is just to use a pair of washable oven mitts and grab the bird directly from both ends. There’s a risk of the turkey’s breast skin tearing or being stuck to the roasting pan. The color on the skin usually looks absurdly uneven when you flip it, because the weight-compressed part that has been in contact with the roasting pan is much darker, but the color evens out by the time the bird is done.

This year’s turkey came from neighbors of Lisa’s parents, who raise a truly free-range bird. When we’re buying it locally, we go to Owen’s Poultry Farm in Needham, who raise their own eggs but get their 3000 Thanksgiving turkeys from another New England farm.

After stripping off the meat, the carcass and pan scrapings go into a stockpot with more vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, garlic, green pepper, whatever comes to hand. Fill the pot with water, and simmer slowly for 24-36 hours, adding more water as needed. Strain through a cheesecloth, then chill and scrape off the fat, and you’re left with a fabulous condensed stock. Add water and salt when reheating to taste.

Eureka

Lisa and I were delighted yesterday to find a games and puzzles store called Eureka Puzzles. The store is in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, and they have quite an impressive selection. It was difficult to choose only a few new toys.

After a blissful 90 minutes in the store, we had dinner at Rani Indian Bistro a couple of doors down from Eureka. Wow. It’s great to find an Indian restaurant that has some different dishes on the menu in addition to the standard choices. We tried the cardamom-spiced chicken and the salmon with omum seeds, two tandoori-roasted dishes, and both were excellent. And the gajjar ka halwa—a custard-like dessert made of carrots, milk, butter, cardamom, and nutmeg, garnished with chopped pistachios—had me merrily eating carrots. That’s an accomplishment.

Wholly irresponsible

Whole Foods sold some ground beef that made some people ill. Very ill. And on August 6, Whole Foods pulled all shipments of that ground beef, but didn’t tell the public what they knew. Apparently Whole Foods didn’t even tell their own stores what they knew. Until August 8, when the Massachusetts Department of Public Health started warning the public not to eat any ground beef that had been purchased from Whole Foods between June 2 and August 6.

The store management at our local Whole Foods deflected all questions to the regional headquarters, which isn’t answering the phone or returning calls. And as of this afternoon, they still aren’t posting notices in the meat department or at the entrances and exits.

A recall like this is no fun. A lot of people will throw away food that isn’t in the recall, a lot of people will avoid the Whole Foods meat cases entirely, a lot of people will have a lot of questions and complaints that have no answers yet. And a lot of people will no longer trust Whole Foods, because Whole Foods doesn’t care enough about the safety of their customers to take simple steps to inform them that, oh, by the way, the ground beef that Whole Foods sold you recently could land you in the hospital, as it’s already done to at least 5 other people.

I think Whole Foods has a choice to make: this can be a learning experience for Whole Foods so they don’t hide information from their customers next time, or this can be a learning experience for a whole lot of Whole Foods customers.

Lisa’s birthday salad

Salad: Equal parts chopped cucumber (I used an Armenian cucumber, seeds removed), avocado, and feta cheese. Drizzle on a little lemon oil. Add small amount of chopped tomato (I used yellow cherry tomatoes that we’re growing) and a little mint. Stir all together, bring close to room temperature (assuming the feta was refrigerated).

Dressing: Squeeze garlic scape in a garlic press to extract a flavored green liquid, add olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Presentation of dressing is best unmixed in a clear glass bowl, separate from the salad.

Whole Foods

Photo by Michael

Lisa and I walked over to the grand opening of our Whole Foods this morning, arriving a little bit before the speeches and bread-breaking. It is beautiful inside, and actually doesn’t look real yet because everything is so perfectly arranged. The meats section is only wrapped meats—no butcher counter—but they wrap the meat in the back of the store and can get you a custom quantity of something if you find the right person to ask. Everything else is pretty much ideal. The aisles are wide and well-lit, and the overall layout is not as confusing as many Whole Foods locations. There’s a huge prepared foods area, a florist who is really excited about her job and is happy to do custom work of simple bouquets up to weddings, a cheese counter where they are eager to serve samples, a small bakery section, and plenty of produce. Lisa and I shop the periphery of grocery stores far more than the interior aisles, and we are delighted with what we are seeing. And they gave us goodie bags as we left, which was certainly a nice reward for going over for the opening. After so much anticipation, and so many years of disappointments with Wild Oats, it is amazing to have this Whole Foods in our neighborhood. Walking distance from our house!


Bread-breaking, photo by Michael

By the way, non-press photography is not allowed inside Whole Foods. No, really. Especially when every person in local and regional management is walking around the store. As I explained about a dozen times over 45 minutes, [redacted] gave me permission. To their credit, every single person immediately said “Oh, it’s ok then!”


Wide aisles, photo by Michael


Fresh fish, photo by Michael


Fresh fruit, photo by Michael


Bakery, photo by Michael


Fresh flowers, photo by Michael

Pancakes for Passover

4 eggs
2 T honey
1 t vanilla
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
1/4 t cinnamon
1 banana
1 T yogurt or 1/2 cup uncreamed cottage cheese (dry curd)
1.5 cup almond flour (very finely ground blanched almonds)

Mix all ingredients together, adding almond flour last. Use a pan on low heat with plenty of butter to cook on each side until crispy at the edges. The pancakes may break apart when you flip them, so make them small enough for your spatula. These take a while to cook, because they’ll burn on medium heat, but the result is wheat-free pancakes that taste like regular pancakes.

Passover is a lot easier when part of your family has had to learn to cook without any grains or starches at all.

Last meal before Passover: comments

One week until Passover, and shopping becomes harder. I don’t want to throw out tons of bread and other chametz next Saturday, so I have to pay attention to how much I put in the grocery cart. But almost as important as planning the seder dinner is figuring out what to have for my last non-Passover meals.

This isn’t a familiar problem for everyone, I know. Some people don’t keep kosher for Passover. For others, dietary restrictions mean that it’s Passover the whole year. What about you?