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Maluns
cookingFood, restaurants and cookingHome life

Maluns

by Diane Duane December 15, 2020

It’s a country dish; a poor people’s dish; a farmer’s hasty breakfast or stopgap luncheon. And (to those who know about it) it instantly recalls the remote Alpine region where it was invented, and where it’s uniquely served and loved. Maluns is the iconic and indispensable potato-based comfort food of people from Canton Graubünden in Switzerland, and Graubündners will travel miles to eat it. 

This is one of my favorite Swiss-originated foods. I go out of my way to eat it whenever business takes me there—because it’s a pain in the butt to make, labor-intensive and time-consuming. But sometimes, when I get to feeling—not homesick: how can you be homesick for someplace that’s not home?—but feeling like I wish I could be in Switzerland, even virtually and just for an hour or two, I make maluns at home.

The dish has the Alps in its bones. It speaks, like so many of the local specialties, of a place where the local lifestyle was once very difficult: where you made the best of what you had when the snows set in hard, or spring was taking forever to arrive. It’s easy to imagine some pensive cook in a tiny chalet, a few centuries back, staring at the last few leftover boiled potatoes and a little flour, and a firkin of the local butter or the lard from the last pig they killed, and thinking, “Hmmmm…”

Coming as it does from a region where people needed to burn fat in the cold winters, this is no dish for the calorie-conscious. It’s heavy on the butter or lard, whichever you wind up using. (The recipe below uses herb butter, which is readily available in Switzerland and makes the dish a little more interesting).

Also, it takes forever to make maluns. Or at least it feels like forever while you’re standing there stirring the stuff. It’s like old-fashioned polenta: there’s no way to hurry it up. (And unlike polenta, it doesn’t seem likely that any enterprising Swiss convenience-food maker will come out with Quick Maluns any time soon. In fact, the concept feels vaguely illegal somehow.)

The method is simple. You grate the pre-boiled potatoes. (They have to be boiled a couple of days previously and allowed to cool: this causes some of the starches in the potatoes to start to convert to sugars, which helps the potatoes form up into the desired “crumbs.”) You stir the grated potatoes together with the flour and salt called for in the recipe. Then you melt the butter in a heavy iron frying pan, sprinkle in the potato mixture, and start stirring. And you keep at it for at least half an hour.

Over the course of that period, the potato mixture first turns into an unpromising-looking sludge. But then this starts to break up into little balls or crumbs. These start getting a beautiful toasty brown. Finally they start to get actively crunchy… which means they’re just about ready.

In a hotel or restaurant in Switzerland, maluns usually arrives from the kitchen with a bowl of sharp apple puree on the side. In some places, it arrives with a local bergkäse shaved or grated on top, or possibly just some Emmental. You dunk forkfuls of the maluns into the apple compote, and in between you take long cool drinks of whatever local white wine has been recommended. (There are people, usually from the older generation of maluns-eaters, who suggest that the only proper drink for this dish is milchkaffee, the heavily milked big-serving coffee beloved of the Alpine regions. Probably it would be disrespectful to start an argument with them on the subject.)

To make maluns for four people, you need:

  • 1 kilogram / 2.2 pounds potatoes, parboiled two days previously
  • 350 grams flour
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 100 grams herb butter / margarine / or just plain butter
  • More shavings of butter or margarine to finish

Peel the parboiled potatoes and grate them on the coarse side of the grater. Sprinkle over them the flour and salt, and stir together lightly.

Heat the butter and add the potato/flour mixture to the pan. While keeping the heat low and steady, stir almost constantly until the potatoes form large “crumbs” and are golden brown. Don’t overdo them! They’re meant to be only slightly crunchy on the outside, and tender on the inside.

When the maluns is done, shave butter over the top before serving. Serve with milchkaffee (half and half milk-and-coffee) or a cool white wine, with applesauce on the side—a sharp or tart one is best.

(This recipe was adapted from Bewährte Kochrezepte aus Graubünden [Tested Recipes from the Graubünden], a charity cookbook produced by the Chur chapter of the Swiss Women’s Institute.)

*The word maluns is distantly descended from the Latin micula / miculones: “little crumbs.” These terms were worn down from Latin into the modern Swiss Romansch word now used for this dish through a number of different forms — mig’luns / migluns, micluns, maleums. (See this Italian-language linguistic source for more info.) Maluns is also known as Bündner kartoffelribel in German, or by the dialect name Hoba.

December 15, 2020
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Spicy Apple Pie
Bakingcookingrecipes

From the Baking-While-You-Write Department: Spicy Apple Pie

by Diane Duane October 16, 2020

The following recipe was improvised on the fly on the evening of October 16, 2020, and unfolded on Twitter. I don’t allow my tweets to be unrolled (because the companies that do that make money off my labor without giving me any). But I’m happy to share the recipe, and the process, here in my own web space, with anyone who’s interested.

***

Status report, Baking-While-You-Write dep’t: These three Bramleys weigh 1100g (that biggest one is nearly half a kilo all by itself. I FEEL AN APPLE PIE COMING ON.

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Apples like these mean that half-measures will not be sufficient. Meaning: I GOT LARD OUT TO DEFROST. This is going to be one of those *serious pie crusts.* 🙂
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…Step one: apples sliced on the mandoline and put down in acidulated water while I make the pie crust and watch the evening news / aka “the How F*cked Are We Tonight Show”.
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Now: pie crust. 3:1 ratio, roughly: 1.5 c all purpose flour / 0.5 c lard: a tbs of butter to change up the materials chemistry a little (the butter adds a smidgen of steam to the equation): 4-5 tbs of water (with lemon juice) (and a bit more if necessary) to bring it together.
…I do this in the Cuisinart / Magimix. The only caution if you do this is to be careful not to overwork it. Add the liquid a tablespoon or so at a time between 15-30 sec pulses until the dough gathers. Then: 30-60 minutes to rest in the fridge.
…The other caution is to mind the sharp bits of the blade when washing it. 🙂 This is a new Cuisinart blade, and it just collected from me what we refer to around here as “steel fee”: i.e. every new sharp in the house seems to get each user once. (shrug) Just the way it goes.
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…So now I get to spend half an hour or so waiting for the dough to rest. This I will spend (a) wrestling with a new 3D set that’s already giving me grief and (b) watching this evening’s Star Trek episode, which of course, like all the rest of TOS, was Never Political. (snicker)
…So now I get to spend half an hour or so waiting for the dough to rest. This I will spend (a) wrestling with a new 3D set that’s already giving me grief and (b) watching this evening’s Star Trek episode, which of course, like all the rest of TOS, was Never Political. (snicker)
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…Right. So the apples are draining and it’s time to consider the spicery. Tonight this involves normal granulated/white sugar, demerara sugar (light brown), soft dark brown sugar, ground ginger, ground cinnamon and ground cloves: and in the mortar, blade mace…
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkeQTuGXEAE-ubS?format=jpg&name=medium
…and long pepper (Piper longum). Those get ground up and added to the others, along with about 1.5 T of cornstarch that will help the juices released during cooking stay more or less where they are. Finally, berry allspice (in the grinder up top, by itself) will go in too.
…So now to business with the crust. Dough separated 2/3 (for the bottom crust) to 1/3 (for the top). The pie dish is a prezzie from Katie, Séan and Ruadraigh McGrath (yes, *that* Katie McGrath: the family were our nearish neighbors when we were living on that side of Wicklow.)
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…Bottom crust in place. It is possible to get very scenic with the layering of the apples, but (a) these are indeed a bit on the old/fragile side and (b) I couldn’t be bothered right now. First layer in…
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…and first layer of seasoning.
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Layer 2.
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Butter and seasoning.
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Final layer.
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Butter and seasoning. …You will notice that I didn’t trim the crust. This is because I expect this pie to ooze like crazy (and there’s already a pan positioned in the preheating oven to catch the drips).
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That bottom crust gets folded in; the top crust will be pinched to it to seal.
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Et voilà. …Pierced for venting because this seems a sensible approach for any pie from which catastrophic collapse during baking is expected. (It’s fairly tall, and those apples really are a bit on the old side and are going to give up a lot of their water.)
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..Right. Timer should go shortly. Catastrophic collapse (why am I hearing this in Spock’s voice all of a sudden?) “–catastrophic collapse in four, three, two, one–” (SFX: SHAKE/RATTLE/HUM, camera SHAKE, crew LURCH from side to side and fall out of their chairs–)
And so: pie. (@scalzi) …Dripped as expected, but the oven remains clean. …I’ll wait half an hour or so to let it stabilize and then cut a slice.
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…The image of the Perfect Slice will appear in the morning, when the pie has had a chance to cool completely.
Thanks for having a look! 🙂
October 16, 2020
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Today's bread
BakingcookingFood

Weird bread

by Diane Duane April 9, 2020

Well, a little weird.

Ireland is on COVID-19 lockdown (and will be for the next couple/few weeks, it looks like), and our next grocery delivery isn’t until nearly the middle of next week, and there’s no telling whether there’ll be baking yeast in it. And yesterday we were down to our next-to-last packet of it. So I sighed and got ready to start employing stopgap measures. 

…And a quick note here: if you’re presently drawing breath to say “But I saw a post about how to make your own…” or “No one is ever really out of yeast, let me tell you how…!” — then please don’t, because there’s no need. I’ve been baking bread casually since my twenties and much more intensively over the last decade (Peter and I simply decided in unison that we’d had it with supermarket bread, and when we found the most dependable recipe imaginable, that was that). At one time or another I’ve built levains and starters from scratch, worked with sourdough starters more than a hundred years old, and have caught and cultured wild yeast on two continents. I’ve even written fiction about yeast, Thoth help me.

Anyway, right this minute—as a busy longtime-work-from-home small-businesswoman who is usually hip-deep in several universes at once while also doing website management—my preference for day-to-day baking is plain old active dry yeast of the Fleischmann’s, Red Star or SAF type. These have been genetically tailored for their work and suit my needs perfectly—being predictable, reliable, and in no need of coddling or extra attention. To be told “All you need to do is mix together some flour and water and let the natural yeasts…!”, etc etc, is for me (at the moment) too much like someone kindly offering to replace my missing Lotus Turbo Esprit with a Trabi. I will cope just fine, but I won’t sing paeans of praise about the alternative strategy. So let’s not go there, yeah? As KP says, “Please and thank you.”

Anyway. What was plain when I got the urge to bake yesterday afternoon was that I was going to have to throw together a preferment, because the thought of actually using up that last packet of yeast was giving me anxiety. Fortunately, when doing the last bake I’d used only 3/4 of the package of yeast, and had set aside the rest for this very purpose. So: 

(Stage 1) Find favorite handled soup cup. Spoon in a tablespoon or two of flour and that yeast, and stir it about well to get combined. Add about a quarter-teaspoon of sugar just to let the yeast know that, momentarily anyway, Life Is Unexpectedly Good. Add a quarter cup of water, or a little more if necessary, to make a thick paste. Then cover the cup (or other vessel) and put this whole business aside somewhere warmish for a couple of hours. (Note that no salt is involved in this procedure until making the actual bread dough, because the salt acts as an inhibitor and the last thing you want to do with the yeast at this point is get it feeling inhibited.)

(Stage 2) In a couple of hours there should be some bubbling going on. Stir the bubbles down, add half a cup of lukewarm water, enough flour to make another thick paste, and another quarter- to half-teaspoon of sugar, because keeping the yeasts extra happy/active at this point is smart. Mix it all up until it’s smooth and put the whole business aside for another couple of hours.

(Stage 3) Repeat the above routine one more time with about twice the ingredients, except for another half-teaspoon of sugar for the yeasts. Then off you go and spend another hour or so doing something else. If the bubbles aren’t pretty active in the bowl or cup or whatever when you get back, give it another hour. 

(Stage 4) And now we finally start actual breadmaking. Measure out about 200g of wholemeal/whole wheat bread flour and 400g of white bread flour. Stir in 10-12 g of salt (usually about a scant tablespoon). Add to this about 2/3 of the starter and about 350ml of water, and knead by hand or in a mixing bowl with a bread hook until it comes together and is smooth and silky-ish. 15 minutes or so by hand: in a mixer, six minutes on low speed and six minutes on high. Add more flour if necessary. Grease or oil a big bowl: put the dough in it and turn it so it’s evenly coated: cover it with plastic wrap and put it somewhere warm and comfy to rise. (I wrap mine up in a foam throw from Ikea. Works great.)

Because of the lowered raising capacity of this yeast—which is still getting up to speed—the rise takes significantly longer than usual. In this case it took something like four hours for the sponge to fill my raising bowl, which was fine, because I was binging The Rise of Phoenixes (while oblivious to the potential pun, don’t mind me, I catch on slow sometimes) and the plotting and backstabbing had seriously sped up from the previous ten episodes’ everybody-is-poisoning-everybody-else-with-slow-poisons-while-snarking-at-them arc.

At this point I hit pause long enough to punch the dough down… or actually, smoosh it down: it was very soft and sloppy. It was also larger than my normal loaf, because I’d had a put a fair amount of extra flour in to stabilize it. It became plain that (a) it was realistically too late to wait through a second rise and bake last night—which meant an overnight “cool rise” out on the sink in the boot room—and (b) if I put it in a regular loaf pan / tin to do that, it would overflow the thing in the middle of the night and make all kinds of mess. So I oiled a three-liter Les Cousances casserole, dumped the sponge in there, covered it with a tea towel, and left it to its own devices for the night. Then I went back to my binging, though not before adding more water and more flour to what was left of the preferment, and just a few pinches more of sugar, because so far at least the yeasts had been behaving Very Well and deserved a treat.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, here’s what the casserole looked like:

The risen bread splonge

So it was plain that it was now time to bake, yay! Oven up to 200C, then (when preheated) slid the casserole in and for good measure threw about 150ml of water into the roasting pan at the bottom, to make some steam. Timer set for 50 minutes, and off to do some email and other stuff.

When the timer went off, this is what we wound up with:

The finished loaf

It took another couple of hours for the loaf to cool and stabilize enough to slice safely. It’s a peculiar looking thing, but Peter came along and pronounced it one of the best bakes of this kind ever. (He’s fond of the pot-baking end of things: he’s quite good with the New York Times no-knead recipe.) Having had a couple of slices, I’m inclined to agree. Light: a delicate springy crumb, nice and open in the usual manner of slow-and-cool rises: definitely tasty. The crust’s a bit aggressive, but a night in a bread bag will sort that out.

…So that’s one way to do it. That said: I still want my damn active dry yeast. Meanwhile, the preferment is sitting in the office window, enjoying the warmth from the wood-burning stove, and it’s getting to be time to feed it a little again. (Because an online associate caused me to think of the torture-a-cinnamon-roll concept just now, and a yeast-raised cinnamon roll can be pretty good. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.)

…See, it’s even got a hat! 

The preferment and its hat

And for the moment, that’s all she wrote.

April 9, 2020
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Chicken with forty cloves of garlic
cookingFood, restaurants and cookingrecipes

Two Recipes for Chicken With Lots Of Cloves Of Garlic

by Diane Duane July 6, 2019

I had an ask-box message from AislinnSiofra on my Tumblr a while back pointing out that both Peter and I have sometimes mentioned making these dishes on our blogs, but never actually given the recipes. Time to remedy that omission.

Both these recipes come from Richard Olney’s fabulous classic cookbook Simple French Food, which I think everybody should have in their collection if they’re interested in cooking at all. It’s not just because Olney’s recipes are wonderful (and they really are). For me, it’s partly a stylistic issue. All through the book he throws away, casually, effortlessly, not so much recipes, but methods for turning out terrific dishes. More than that, though: this was the man who went to court to determine once and for all what part of a recipe was copyrightable, thereby doing all cookbook writers since a signal service. (Short version of the story: it’s not the ingredient list that’s copyrightable, but the description of what to do with the ingredients–the method, and the language of the method. Olney was really tired of his recipes being being ripped off, and with good reason, as his voice as a cookbook writer is unique. So he stood up and went to law over the issue, and all cookbook writers after him should be grateful.)

Anyway! The chicken. These recipes appear back to back on a single page of the Penguin paperback edition of Simple French Food, and though they both have lots of garlic in them, they are as different as night from day. One of them is what you expect of a Garlic-With-Forty-Cloves recipe on first hearing: something brash, rustic, rambunctious, and unapologetically in-your-face. The other is a far subtler business — the first chance most people ever get, I think, to experience garlic as a root vegetable, with its aggressiveness tamed but not entirely banished. Both recipes are really good. I encourage all readers of this post to try both and find out which they like better.

Here’s the first one, which in Olney is simply entitled:

Garlic Chicken / (Poules ‘aux 40 gousses d’Ail’)

Ingredients:

  • 1 chicken, cut up as for a sauté (or 4 legs, thighs and drumsticks, separated)
  • 4 heads firm garlic, broken into cloves, cleared of loose hulls, but unpeeled
  • 15cl / 0.25 pint olive oil [this is a UK pint: so, 5 fluid ounces for the US readership, or 150ml)
  • Salt, pepper
  • 1 tsp finely crumbled mixed dried herbs (thyme, oregano, savory)
  • 1 large bouquet garni: large branch celery, parsley and root (if available), bay leaf, leek greens, small branch lovage (if available)
  • Flour for dough

“Put everything except the bouquet into an earthenware casserole, turning around and over repeatedly with your hands to be certain of regularly dispersed seasoning and an even coating of oil. Force the bouquet into the centre, packing the chicken around and filling all interstices with garlic cloves.

“Prepare a dough of flour, water and a dribble of oil, roll it into a long cylindrical band on a floured board, moisten the ridge of the casserole, press the roll of paste into place, and press the lid on top. Cook in a 350F, 180C oven for 1 hour and 45 minutes and break the seal at the table.”

It couldn’t be simpler. Olney adds, “The garlic, squeezed from its hull and spread onto grilled crisp slices of rough country bread as one eats the chicken, will be appreciated by all who do not share the mental antigarlic quirk; if the bread can be grilled over hot coals, the light smoky flavor will be found to marry particularly well with the garlic puree. …For variety’s sake, turn, quarter and choke 3 or 4 tender young artichokes, coating them immediately in the recipe’s olive oil before mixing all the ingredients together.”

…I love the way he just adds that afterthought.

Now the other one:

Braised Chicken Legs with Lemon (Poulet au Citron)

“The lemon and garlic alliance,” Olney says, “is borrowed from French Catalan cooking. Were the dish prepared in that country, Banyuls, a fortified wine vinified in much the same way as Port, would replace the white wine in this recipe.

“To create tidy shapes that cook evenly and do not sprawl in the pan, cut the knob-ends from the drumsticks and, pulling the skin to one side so as not to cut into it, partially sever the joint between each thigh and drumstick, cutting through the tendons without separating the two pieces.

“Serve a plain, uncondimented pilaf or parboiled and steamed rice as an accompaniment.”

Ingredients:

  • 20 to 25 large, firm, crisp garlic cloves, peeled without crushing, parboiled for 5 minutes, and drained
  • 60cl / 1 pint veal or chicken stock
  • 4 chicken legs (thighs and drumsticks attached)
  • Salt, pepper
  • 50g / 1.5 ounces butter
  • 1 lemon, peeled (all white inner peel removed), thinly slices, seeds removed
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 15cl / 0.25 pint white wine

“Poach the parboiled garlic cloves for about 40 minutes in the stock, covered, kept at a slight simmer.

“Color the seasoned chicken legs in butter over medium heat (20-25 minutes) and transfer them to an oven casserole. Strain the stock to remove the garlic cloves, taking care not to damage them. Scatter the garlic over the chicken pieces, distribute the lemon slices, and put the casserole aside, covered, until the sauce is prepared.

“Remove any excess fat from the pan in which the chicken was browned (leaving just enough to absorb the flour), add the flour and cook, stirring, over low heat for a few moments. Deglaze with the white wine over high heat, stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon; add the stock, and pour into a small saucepan: this is important, the small surface permitting a more rapid and complete skimming and degreasing of the sauce while preventing, at the same time, an exaggerated reduction. Skim for about 15 minutes, removing any traces of loose fat from the surface with absorbent paper. Pour the sauce over the chicken and its garnish and cook, covered, in a 375F / 190C oven for 40 to 45 minutes. The lemon will have completely disappeared into the sauce; the garlic cloves should be absolutely intact with a consistency of melting purée; the sauce must be tasted to be believed.”

…He’s not kidding.  This dish is sublime. When you press one of these garlic cloves between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, it just kind of goes away in a little soft explosion of the mildest and subtlest imaginable garlic flavor.

Just one warning note about this dish, though. It will almost certainly give you the most aggressively garlicky farts you have ever experienced. (“Technicolor farts,” Peter calls them.) If you’re going to be in an enclosed space within eight hours or so with someone you want to torment, this is the recipe for you. …Otherwise, just make sure everyone in the area gets some, and you can all tease each other about the results when enough time after dinner has gone by.

Enjoy!

(PS: Apologies that we don’t seem to have any shots of either of these dishes in the digital image collection — I think what ones we had were caught in a disk crash some time back. We’re going to be cooking both of these next week so we can get new shots of them. Meanwhile, please bear with the stock photography…)

July 6, 2019
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Home screen of Meal-Master, a recipe in Paprika
cookingFoodrecipesSoftware

Journey’s End: Moving From Meal-Master To Paprika

by Diane Duane May 3, 2017

I collect recipes. Lots of them. I used to use the venerable Meal-Master software for this, but over time it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. As a result I’ve been looking for somewhere better to put those recipes… and now I’ve found it. Details follow.

I cook for pleasure, as well as necessity. When Peter and I got married, on merging our libraries we found that something like 20% of the books in both libraries were cookbooks. The living room bookshelves are full of them, despite numerous attempts to winnow them down over the last few years. The general rule has been, “If nobody’s touched the book in five years, send it to the library.”

Somehow we still have 300 cookbooks in the living room.

it will therefore probably come as a surprise to nobody that my recipe collecting has for a good while also extended into the digital realm. For many years I used Meal-Master, devised by Scott Welliver, which in the ancient days of DOS was the preeminent software for people who collected recipes. It was, by our present standard, clunky and idiosyncratic, but it worked (and had huge capacity…64,000 recipes+). And there were lots and lots of scattered treasure troves of recipes all over the web, in many languages, waiting to be found and saved.

Episoft Systems, Welliver’s (now apparently defunct) company responsible for the software, kept updating it for many years until finally, with version 8.05 (in 1999), the Meal-Master software was declared copyrighted freeware and turned loose into the wild. As operating systems and platforms changed, Meal-Master became less and less useful and / or usable, and a lot of people started looking for software that would accept imports from MM’s old-school database structure and leave the recipes looking at least something like they had to start with.

Until I got to the point where I stopped actively collecting Meal-Master-format recipes, I managed to gather about 40,000 of them (and I get a sense from having seen other Meal-Master enthusiasts’ posts that my collection was actually a little on the small side). A few years ago, it occurred to me that I really needed to get active about trying to find some software to export them to, before everything moved on so far that the import could no longer be done. So I exported all my stored recipes into a series of files in the MM export format (with the .MMF suffix) and started looking for a new recipe storage candidate.

The problem was that a lot of the software I found available at that point didn’t import the Meal-Master structure particularly well or flexibly.  Routinely, in the process of the import, something froze or crashed it — usually because of one or another of the workarounds that MM fans had constructed over time to get around some of the program’s more rigid features. As a result, the imports I attempted at that point were mostly disastrous, and in frustration I put the project aside for a while. I was still twitching, though, at the thought of all those recipes lying around in a format that did me no good anymore — Windows 7 flatly refused to run Meal Master, and while Windows XP ran it all right, XP was rapidly approaching its end-of-life. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to pull all those recipes together — many in foreign languages, many from online sources that were long gone — and the situation niggled at me constantly.

Recently, though, a change in local circumstances pushed the issue to the fore again. Peter and I had spent some time, over the last year or so, discussing the fact that our EuropeanCuisines.com food-hobbyist website hadn’t had a serious makeover in several years. Additionally, we’ve been considering a change in direction for the site:  more food blogging, and content pointed more toward those interested in doing something we have a fair amount of experience in — traveling to European destinations, renting small holiday places there, and cooking in them.

With that in mind, we were also looking at a complete restructure of our recipe section, with an eye to making it more structured and easy to find things in. Additionally, a whole lot of those 40,000 Meal-Master recipes of mine are European, and I wanted a way to restructure them for use on the EC.com website. Specifically I wanted a way to make them easy for people to download with a tap or click — and most especially, I wanted to make them easy for people to get at on mobile devices. After all, when you’re a tourist standing in the middle of a busy grocery in Munich or Bratislava or Oslo, you don’t want to have to be tearing your hair over the thought of that terrific recipe that you saw on whatever-that-website-was and not be able to get at it quickly, so that you can buy the ingredients, go to your holiday flat, and cook the damn thing.

So. With all this on my mind, last week I started searching again for something that would both import my Meal-Master recipes smoothly, and (eventually) work well in cooperation with the website. And what the hell? I found it. It’s Paprika.

(BTW, as a sometimes-food blogger I need to state here clearly for the record — and the usual legal reasons — that the only money to change hands here was me giving them my money. Not the other way around.)

Paprika has been around for a while, and that it took me this long to find it is probably just a function of my not having looked in the right places at the right times — or, alternately, that when I was looking most actively, I did not yet have my iPad. Which is where I found Paprika, in its app form. The software exists in both iOS and Android forms, and as a Windows desktop version. There is also a Mac version, which, not having a Mac, I haven’t tested (and there’s a Kindle Fire version too, which surprised me a bit). But the iOS version for the iPad is, not to put too fine a point on it, as slick as snot.

It is beautiful and glossy and well-set up, and does everything I could’ve hoped for and a great deal more. It is friendly to all the major online food and recipe sources; it’s compatible with a lot of the bigger food blogging sites, and also with the hRecipe microformat. (Which will matter when I start wrangling the converted recipes into the main EC.com website.) And best of all, from my point of view, one of the numerous recipe export format types it accepts is the .MMF file export type of Meal-Master.

When I saw this, my heart began to sing a little song — but I still needed to run some tests: I’d been disappointed too often before. I was willing enough, though, to venture €4.99 on the app for the iPad. And frankly that was one of the best just-shy-of-a-fivers I’ve ever laid down. Half an hour of working with the app told me that I wanted the desktop version of the program right now, whether it imported MMF recipes well or not.  I went immediately to their website and bought the Windows desktop version.

I should say here that one thing I attempted with the iOS version before purchasing the Windows desktop program didn’t work terribly well. I very much wanted to test the app’s import ability on a small .mmf file that I had handy. But once I’d  moved a copy of the .MMF file up into the Paprika app’s cloud, the app nonetheless seemed to have trouble seeing it. However, I was already so impressed by the way the app looked and handled that at that point I didn’t much care. I was more than willing to handle the Meal-Master imports from the desktop end. (Please note also that I’m not entirely certain that the failure to “see” the file in the cloud on the Pad didn’t have something to do with our famously dodgy rural / cellular broadband, which starts cutting up cranky when it rains, ffs. In Ireland this is not an advantage.)

As soon as I opened the Windows desktop version of the app, however, my hopes were raised again, as the import requirements looked extremely simple. It took about three mouse clicks and five minutes for Paprika to import a test .MMF file of 2000 recipes. They imported with all their categories intact — which had been one of my major concerns; tagging is everything in a recipe database — and perfectly formatted. None of them had any photos associated with them, obviously — Meal-Master had never been capable of anything of the kind — but Paprika will allow you to add images to recipes as you like. Having checked the imported recipes over in the big desktop machine, I sync’d them to Paprika’s cloud, and then sync’d the iPad to them. The sync went without any problems, and everything crossed over perfectly. (I have yet to do this for my HTC One as well, but I still have to get the Android version of the app for that. Later today perhaps.)

So I happily got to work on importing the rest of the recipes. It took me about an hour to pull in the 40,000-odd of them. At the end of the hour, I was left with a big, fat, beautiful-looking recipe collection that was ready for the next stage: reorganization. No surprise that it was going to need some of that, as some of the Meal-Master categories were a bit idiosyncratic, or just plain silly. And numerous categories needed to be spelled differently or rationalized for one preferred spelling (for example, I had recipes with about six different formats and spellings of the term “chile heads” for recipes that go back to the fabled Chile-Heads mailing list / newsgroup). Others needed to be eliminated entirely and their entries moved into other categories. But that was just going to be some organizational work that could be done in bits and pieces over time. At the end of that hour, I was one very happy cook.

One of the great strengths of Paprika is the way it syncs across devices. It’ll be a while yet before I sync my main collection up to the iPad and my phone, as I want to make sure that I’ve first thrown out any duplicates that may have crossed over, and finish the category reorganization. Then begins a slower project of curation, as one thing Peter and I want to do for our EuropeanCuisines.com visitors is make Paprika-friendly recipe collections available for easy download. That’s a project for future months, as we proceed with EC.com’s reorganization.

In the meantime, though, I can now with a light heart go about the house deleting the various installations of Meal-Master that had been tucked away in the guts of various of the machines, waiting for the day when I would finally find a way to make those squirreled-away recipes both available to other people and safe in a new format. My long search is finally over. (And now I’m also free to range around the web collecting more Meal-Master recipes, and making them both safe and available to others, before their format becomes lost entirely in the mists of time.)

So, to sum up: if you are a longtime Meal-Master user, or know one, I unreservedly commend Paprika to you as a way to go forward.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go kill some obsolete categories. 🙂

May 3, 2017
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Cheese straws from Mrs. De Salis's 1903 recipe
BakingcookingFoodHome life

The Cheese Straw Recipe

by Diane Duane December 28, 2016

In 2010 or thereabouts, a tiny little cookbook came to us via Peter’s Mum and immediately became a household favorite.

It was published in 1903 for what was the first generation of middle-to-upper class British housewives who couldn’t afford to hire kitchen staff, but still wanted to serve food suitable to a high-class household. These cooks were also beginning to come into possession of the first generation of true labor-saving devices — the initial gas and electric ranges, the first refrigerators — and were looking for recipes to take advantage of them. So along came Harriet DeSalis, and with this group of readers in mind, wrote Savouries A La Mode.

The cookbook was a huge hit — no surprise, when the recipes worked so well. Dipping into it, one finds recipes that make the mouth water and make the chronic cook (at least this one) itch to get into the kitchen and see how they turn out.  It became the first of a series that went on well into the early part of the 20th century and sold hundreds of thousands of copies over numerous editions.

They’re all in public domain now, those original editions of Savouries and its sequels, which is what moved me to scan that first book and make it available over here at EuropeanCuisines.com. But the other reason I scanned it was so I don’t have to hunt down the cookbook proper, when the urge strikes, but can just load the PDF onto the iPad and work from that in the kitchen.

The other evening I was feeling like having some kind of snack, and it occurred to me to pull out the DeSalis and see if we had the ingredients for anything that looked nice. Paging through it, I ran into the Cheese Straws recipe, and the bells went off and I salivated on cue.

Here’s the recipe.

“Take two ounces of flour, and mix with it a little salt and a cayenne-spoonful of red pepper. Then take three ounces of Parmesan cheese: grate it. Rub the cheese and two ounces of butter well into the flour, then mix all these ingredients, together with the yolk of an egg, into a smooth stiff paste. Roll the paste out into a strip one-eighth of an inch in thickness and five inches wide, which is to be the length of the cheese straws. Cut this strip into strips one-eighth of an inch wide, so that they will be five inches long and one-eighth of an inch in thickness. With the remainder of the paste, and with two round cutters, cut little rings of paste. Put the cheese straws and rings on a baking sheet and put them into a hot oven for ten minutes, the heat rising to 246 degrees. For serving, put the cheese straws through the ring like a bundle of sticks.”

So. My first thought: God that looks fiddly. But never mind. Also: Forget about the little rings, this isn’t going to be a dinner party. The second (okay, maybe the third) thought: We don’t have any Parmesan: only Cheddar.

…Like I’ve ever let that stop me. (An old allergy put me off Parmesan early, and these days, though no longer allergic, I avoid it.) So I went forward with the same amount of Cheddar, knowing that the mixture would be a little wetter due to the Cheddar’s extra moisture, and I’d need to compensate with slightly longer baking.

What I learned in the process of making these:

  • The whole thing can be done in the Cuisinart / Magimix, which simplifies matters considerably. I grated the cheese separately on a microplane grater, then buzzed the flour/cayenne mixture together using the steel blade in the small bowl of the Cuisinart; then dumped its contents into the big bowl, whizzed everything together with the cheese, added the two egg yolks and pulsed until the whole business gathered together. If you’re going this route, don’t overdo the pulsing, as you don’t want the mixture to toughen up.
  • 1 egg yolk wasn’t enough for our local flour to cohere: I wound up using two.
  • I’d never heard of a “cayenne spoon” until I saw this recipe. There are pictures of them at Google (click here), and you know what? They’re all too small for me. We like our cayenne around here. I put in a teaspoonful. (Peter noted that you could probably get away with using chili powder if you were of a sensitive disposition.)
  • 1/8 inch is indeed very fiddly. I wound up cutting my straws / sticks to more like 1/6 or sometimes 1/4 inch, and that worked out fine.
  • I put baking parchment under these to make sure they wouldn’t stick. It turns out to be a good idea, as melting butter bubbles out of them at the edges when they’re baking.
  • Ten minutes was way too long a baking time, and the oven temperature takes some fiddling with as well. I have no idea what Mrs. De S. means by “rising to…”. I wound up putting these in the oven at 170 C / 350F for about 5 to 7 minutes (as our oven retains heat during multiple bakes, so they needed less time as I went on). Your mileage will almost certainly vary. Experiment with a small batch to see how you get on.

…And that’s all there is to it. The straws were incredibly delicate and buttery due to the very short pastry — but the cheese is great in them and the cayenne gives them a terrific kick. The whole bake lasted through about twenty minutes of the first Hobbit movie. Peter tells me they work as well with beer as mine did with that red wine.

Try them and see how they work out for you. And mind your baking times, as the Secretary and I will disavow any knowledge of your actions if the sneaky little creatures burn to a crisp between one minute and the next. (Like my first batch did.) Do a small batch first and watch them like a hawk.

December 28, 2016
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BakingcookingItaly

I need a cake safe

by Diane Duane September 25, 2016

So on the way back from the interview (oh yeah, here’s the podcast link) at Dublin City FM the other day (hi Clare, hi Kitchen Table folks!) I stopped in at the local supermarket to pick up a few things and grabbed, along the way, some lemons. It was because this recipe had come up on my Facebook feed the day before, and it had started noodging at me because I hadn’t made a cake in ages.

So I made it, as much to give our vintage Bundt pan a workout as for any other reason. And wow, did this turn out well! Substantial without being too dense: a lovely firm crumb that is also beautifully moist. So while I’m copying the recipe here for my own purposes, I strongly suggest that you visit Carrie’s site at myrecipeconfessions.com and see what else she’s got there, as if this is anything to go by, the prognostications look good.

One note about this in passing, though. I’m not sure how to get to grips with her description of the cake’s lemon flavor as “mild”, as it’s no such thing unless you start eating the cake before it’s even fully cooled. (Guilty as charged. I was craving something sweet at that point, and it had smelled really good while baking.) The lemon fragrance and flavor intensify the longer you can force yourself to leave this cake alone.

Which is why I need a cake safe. 🙂 Peter and I have been muttering at each other for months that we need a cake carrier — you know the kind of thing, a Tupperware-or-similar business with a base that you sit a cake on and a plastic dome that goes on top and screws down a bit into flanges to close up, and a handle for carrying it. It’s a serious need, as we’re constantly baking things that we can’t finish ourselves (or that it would be bad for our waistlines to do that…) and then walking them down to the local pub to get the neighbors to eat them instead.

But for this cake you would need one where once you twisted that top down into place on the base, it would lock down and refuse to open for, say, twenty-four hours. Or forty-eight. And if you absolutely couldn’t bear being kept out of it before the expiration time, you would go into the app (of course there would be an app…) and be forced to pay yourself a non-insignificant amount of money to get the cake safe to open up early.

Just a thought. Who knows, in this Internet of Things we’re now living in, maybe someone’s invented such a thing already.

Meanwhile that damn cake is three-quarters gone, and the neighbors are never going to see any of it, and I’m going to have to make another…

Italian Lemon Pound Cake

(Who knows, it might actually be Italian…) A couple of notes: surprisingly, when I made this, we were out of buttermilk (not normal around here). I simply soured the milk with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, as there was plenty of that around. Also aolso: Regular salted butter works fine with this. Also also also (wik): I didn’t bother making the icing. I’ll try it the next time.

For the cake:

3 cups all-purpose  flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup of sour cream
4 tablespoons lemon juice
Zest of 2 lemons ( about 2 tbsps.)
1 teaspoon of vanilla

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees

1. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside. In another bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Mix in the sour cream, lemon juice, vanilla, and lemon zest.

2. Mix half of the flour mixture into the butter mixture. Mix in the buttermilk and then add in the remaining flour mixture. Mix just until the flour disappears. Pour the cake batter into a bundt pan that has been generously sprayed with baking spray.

3. Bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.  Remove the cake from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes. Turn the cake over on a cake platter. Spread half of the lemon glaze over the warm cake so that the glaze can soak into the cake. Let the cake cool completely and drizzle the remaining glaze over the cake.

Lemon Glaze

1/4 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cup powdered sugar
3 tablespoon lemon juice, at room temperature

Cream the butter and slowly add powdered sugar and lemon juice. Beat well until the glaze is a creamy smooth consistency.

September 25, 2016
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cookingFoodHome liferecipes

Peter’s Dhal

by Diane Duane September 13, 2016

A bunch of you were asking for his recipe for this: so here it is. Believe it or not, I didn’t know he could do this kind of thing when I married him. Hidden talents…!

The problem with informal food photography like this, of course, is that (like so many other one pot dishes of a peasant-y nature) it tends to just look kind of beige. (Or, as Himself Upstairs puts it, “Like savory mud.”) I couldn’t be bothered to go get parsley or whatever for it. Trust me: it was extremely good. Below, Peter frames it as a possible side dish, but we ate it happily as a main course, believe me.

(PS: sorry for the slightly blurry photo. I was more intent on getting the image’s subject inside me than on the focus…)

Peter says:

Improvised store-cupboard dhal, for when you can’t be bothered with a cookbook.

 

1 cup vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped fine

4-6 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 tbsp. each of ground cumin, ground coriander

½ tbsp. each of ground turmeric, ground chilli, ground black pepper

½ tbsp. each of mild curry powder, hot curry powder

1 tsp. salt

2 cups red lentils

½ cup green lentils

½ cup brown lentils

Boiling water

1 tbsp. lemon juice

 

Heat the oil, fry the onions & garlic until soft and glossy. Add all the spices. Fry for a few minutes. Add all the lentils*. Stir everything together. Add enough boiling water to cover by ½ an inch. Stir everything together, reduce heat, cover and simmer for about ½ an hour. Check occasionally. Add more water if required a bit at a time, then stir. (Don’t overdo it. Preferred texture is like stew, not soup.) Add lemon juice, stir, and serve with rice and/or flatbreads.

 

Makes a good side with shop-bought tandoori chicken.

 

*Alternately add lightly fried chicken or lamb cubes and 2 x cans of chopped tomatoes along with the lentils. Reduce water accordingly. Simmer for ¾ hour, serve when meat is cooked, and call it a dhansak. (It isn’t really. But it tastes good anyway.)

September 13, 2016
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Bakingcookingrecipes

The Return to the Brown-Edged Wafer

by Diane Duane August 15, 2016

I have a soft spot for this particular cookie (as this post from some years back should probably make plain). The other evening I got the yen to make some of these, and ran into a problem. We were out of potato flour.

On reflection it seems extremely strange that in Ireland it should be so hard to find potato flour. (And don’t get me started about onion powder. Garlic powder, no problem, there’s lots of it around here, but onion powder is unfindable. And why should that be?! No answers yet.) The only source for potato flour (for me, anyway) is one or the other of the two big Asian supermarkets up in central Dublin. But anyway, there I was wondering where that last package of potato flour had gone (answer:  this German dumpling recipe) and the cookies were not going to happen.

Except that then an idea occurred. We did have some rice flour, which I picked up a month or two back with an eye to testing out some gluten-free baking recipes. Might that do the trick? It was worth a try.

The recipe I normally use as the closest approach to the original Brown Edge Wafer that Nabisco used to make is this one from Cookie Madness, based on a recipe from the potato flour packaging. So i made the recipe as per instructions, with only one change: swapping in a cup of rice flour for the cup of potato flour.

It works perfectly. Not being able to do a side-by-side bake and not having anything to rely on for assessment but my own taste buds, I couldn’t detect any significant difference in flavor between the potato-flour and rice-flour versions. So if you too are out of potato flour, this is a different way to go.

Having the raw materials in sufficient supply also gave me a chance to do an experiment I’d been thinking about. The original Nabisco Brown Edge Wafers were quite thin (looking a lot like these Marjoram butter cookies at SheWearsManyHats.com). Ideally I wanted to get my cookies to come out more like these: more wafer-y.

The ball-rolling-and-flattening technique of the original recipe works well enough, but doesn’t produce that thin a cookie. (Also if the dough is too soft the flattening turns into a real chore: it gets stuck to whatever does the flattening, and various strategies attempted to defeat this — flouring or sugaring the glass used to do the flattening — have proven only occasionally successful.)

As I considered the cookie recipe, I started wondering whether it would be possible to treat these as a refrigerator cookie. I.e., make the cookie dough into rolls, chill it, and slice it. Maybe, I thought, if  sliced thin enough, the wafers would come out flatter when they spread.

So I made a second batch of the dough and took a run at this. It takes a bit of extra work. Some people might prefer this approach: it’s possible, I think, that freezing the rolls and cracking them out when you wanted cookies might work. (Sigh. Another experiment…)

The problem is that the dough, when initially ready to bake, is very light delicate. So the thing to do is refrigerate it for an hour or so before even attempting the roll-making part of the operation.

Having chilled it, I laid down some baking parchment and dropped some fat spoonfuls onto it in a line. These I rolled up fairly gently and put away to chill again.

IMAG0957

Once the three rolls made this way were good and cold, I took them out of the fridge and rolled them until they were genuinely round. Then I let them chill some more.

IMAG0958

When ready to bake, I put the first of them in the freezer for about twenty minutes while preheating the oven, and prepared the cookie sheet.

With the roll well firmed by its time in the freezer, I sliced (aiming for slices about 1/4 inch thick). The slices, as seems inevitable, flattened on the bottom side while being sliced. They could be pinched back into shape by hand once on the cookie sheet, but I didn’t bother: this whole operation was more a proof of concept than anything else.

slices

Result: The ones I baked this way did not flatten any further. They also kept a bit of the edge of the original slicing. So in terms of producing a more waferlike cookie, this approach doesn’t work. (Though once again the flavor was just fine.)

IMAG0961

This leaves me thinking that a more useful approach would be a more liquid dough/batter. Another egg in the mix, perhaps? Maybe even a little lemon juice? (I used lemon essence and lemon oil in the second batch instead of vanilla. This was a really good flavor, by the way.)

So this is something to think about for next time. Also: that marjoram butter cookie recipe: egg whites… Hmm.

(Also, per that afterthought: I just ran into this recipe, which calls for egg white rather than whole eggs. The amounts described would seem to kick the recipe’s liquid content up, so this is worth looking into. Another day, perhaps…)

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August 15, 2016
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cookingrecipes

From the Tumblr blogs: Peter Morwood’s Pork with Chiles and Chocolate

by Diane Duane July 1, 2014

…For those who may be interested: This is a Mexican recipe that Peter devised from one originally intended to use a whole pork roast. It’s really good. The last time he made it for a big crowd, George Takei was seen polishing out the near-empty casserole with a piece of bread to get at the last of the sauce. The illustrating photo was taken while Peter was making it in Vienna for a couple of opera singers of our acquaintance.

(BTW, re: the tarragon vinegar: If you’re in a place where you can’t buy it, you can make it. Get white wine vinegar, heat it to a simmer, stick tarragon into it, take it off heat, bottle it back up and leave it alone for a week or so. [Even dried tarragon will work if you’re desperate.] Re juniper berries: a good grocery will have them from one of the major providers [Schwarz in the UK, or McCormick/Schilling in the US]. But they are kinda regional. Health food stores or specialty ethnic groceries sometimes have them.)

From Peter’s notes:

Pork with Chilis and Chocolate

This is a casserole/hotpot/stew/whatever, and the quantity will be enough for 6 people. I usually allow ¼ kg/ ½ lb of lean meat per person. It was originally a pork roast with a basting sauce, but I couldn’t be having with all that. I’ve also adapted the recipe for meats other than pork: the only difference is the cooking time.

 

This adaptation is simple and fairly lazy. Cubed pork holds together well, and anyway I always overcook pork a little, so its simmering time is approx. 4 hours at a gentle simmer or low-set oven. Cooking time for other meat is proportionately shorter.

 

The finished product should be chunks of “fork-tender” meat in a rich, brick-red sauce; if you overdo it so everything comes apart (unlikely with pork and lamb, but possible with chicken or beef) you still have an incredible stew, an amazing thick soup, or the pasta sauce of the gods…

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

1.5kg/3lb lean meat of your choice, cut into 12mm/1/2 inch cubes.

120ml/4 fl oz/1/2 cup of your preferred frying oil.

 

SAUCE INGREDIENTS:

3 medium onions, finely chopped. (Or more, if you like onions.)

3-10 cloves of garlic, finely chopped. (This depends on how much you and your fellow eaters like garlic. I like lots, and it’s good for the cardiovascular system.)

1 teaspoon of crushed/ground coriander seed. (There is a small problem with this: the crushed seeds have little husks which lurk in the sauce and have the texture of wood-shavings. Ready-ground coriander does not. However, the freshly-crushed seeds have a better flavour. Your choice. Go ptui with a friend.)

6-10 juniper berries, crushed. (Same problem as with crushed coriander, but by now, who’s worried. Go ptui with a friend again.)

1 Kg/2lb tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped. (Or cheat, use 3 x 400g/8oz tins. The juice in which they’re packed will make the sauce a little more runny. It won’t affect the flavour, but don’t wear white when you’re eating this stuff…)

180ml/6 fl oz tarragon vinegar. (This is what gives it that distinctive flavour.)

240ml/8 fl.oz water. (Boring, but necessary, otherwise the vinegar will go for your throat.)

1 tablespoon chili powder, of your own preferred hotness. (BTW, this isn’t to a furiously hot dish, so moderate the quantity depending on how fiery your chili powder is. The basic “don’t mess with it” recipe should finish up warm, flavoursome and tangy, not incendiary. Incendiary is nice, but shouldn’t be your first introduction to the recipe. Use pure unblended chili/chilli powder; some brands are a chili-con-carne mix with cumin, oregano and garlic powder already added. Check the ingredients on the label.)

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. (Don’t overdo them; you can always add more at the table.)

6 oz unsweetened chocolate (Bakers’ or similar) or 8 oz of semisweet (Bournville or Lindt). This is the other good bit. Browns, season and thickens all in one; pity somebody has already used that line for Bisto, which is little more than salty coloured flour.)

 

METHOD:

 

Put a little oil in a casserole and sauté the cubed meat until all red/pink colour is gone, then remove and set aside.

 

In the same casserole, heat the rest of the oil and sauté the onions and garlic until soft and golden. Then add all the remaining sauce ingredients and simmer gently, partly covered, for 45 minutes. (Don’t cover completely or the tomatoes will become bitter.)

 

Add the meat, bring everything to a boil, then turn the heat right down to a very gentle simmer and cover tightly. We have Le Cousance enamelled cast ironware with “self-basting” buttons moulded inside the lid – vapour condenses on the lid and drips off these buttons back into the casserole; I think Le Creuset has something similar. Give about 3½ -4 hours for pork, 2½-3 hour for beef or lamb, 1½ -2 hours for chicken. At the first time given, start checking: when the meat is fork-tender, it’s done.

 

(This can also be cooked in an oven. Preheat the oven to 120C/250F, return the meat into a casserole, bring to the boil and cover tightly. In a fan oven, seal the casserole with foil or flour-and-water paste to prevent the forced air from drying things out. It can also be prepared in advance and placed in a timer-oven when leaving for work to be ready in the evening; if so, add an extra 20 minutes pre-heat time.)

 

The finished product will be a handsome deep terracotta red, so serve it (for a nice colour contrast) with sliced green beans and plain white rice, or 2/3-1/3 white rice and wild rice. Or try it with couscous. (It works!) Or polenta. Or even mashed potatoes (peel them, boil them, mash them and don’t add butter, cream, milk or anything else except a pinch of salt.) What you’re looking at here are methods of getting all of the sauce. For the same reason, have some crusty French bread on the table as well. It all saves on washing-up.

 

For drinks, some vin trés ordinaire. The sauce is heavily garlicked, onioned and vinegared, so don’t bother with anything too complex or expensive. Egri Bikhàver Bull’s Blood is good. Or a rough non-Classico Chianti, the sort that comes in a straw-covered fiasco. If you don’t like red, go for a potent dry white like Orvieto Secco, Muscadet Sevré et Mains, Gewürztraminer or Chardonnay (French rather than Californian, unless you like the taste of enough oak to build a table.) Rosé for some reason doesn’t work, at least not for me.

 

This isn’t haute cuisine. But it’s fun!

July 1, 2014
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Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)
BakingcookingEuropeFoodHome lifeIreland

In the holiday baking department: Braunekuchen / “Brown Biscuits”

by Diane Duane January 1, 2014
Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)

Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)

Sometimes you want something a little different from the usual run of Christmas cookies. These fit the bill nicely.

Germany has a long tradition of spice-based cookies / bikkies, the most famous probably being the ginger-and-cinnamon-based lebkuchen that first start turning up in recipe books in the 1500’s and have since proliferated all over that part of the world in staggering variety.  (A very basic lebkuchen dough, for example, is what’s usually used for the  construction of gingerbread houses.) And there are some times of year in central Europe when escaping from lebkuchen seems like an impossibility.

Yet there are cookies in the region that share the same general culinary DNA but diverge in interesting ways. These simple brown biscuits are one sort. There’s no ginger in them at all — which by itself is a touch unusual, gingerbread having so generally overrun the holiday-baking landscape — but their spice quotient is very high, and their aroma gets significantly stronger over time. Opening a tin of them even after just a day or so sealed up lets a cloud of sweet dark fragrance into the air, after which it’s impossible to walk away without eating two or three. Or more. If not quite a lot more.

This is not a same-day cookie: it requires a stay overnight on the kitchen counter, wrapped up, before it’ll be ready to roll out, cut out and bake. Also, due to its northern heritage — it comes from Scheswig-Holstein — this recipe calls for treacle (a.k.a  molasses), for depth of flavor, and lard, for additional body and crispness. (If you have trouble getting your hands on lard, you can substitute other solid fats like [UK] Stork or “white fat”, or [US] Crisco, or even butter: but lard works best.)

Ingredients and method under the cut.

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January 1, 2014
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BakingcookingEuropeFoodFood, restaurants and cookingHome life

In the holiday baking department: Speculatius / Speculaas

by Diane Duane December 28, 2013

Spec_Landscape_2_750px

If you’re in the Netherlands (I don’t say Holland, because you might be in the Netherlands without necessarily being in Holland) and you’ve ordered coffee after a meal or a snack, odds are strong that this is the cookie / biscuit that will come along with it. They seem to be everywhere over there.

For most of us who make it at home, this would be a cookie-cutter cookie, but on the Continent they’re likely to turn up in quite ordinary shapes — rectangles or squares — that are ornamented with designs that have been pressed into them with special Speculaas molds. (Very ornate and seriously huge Speculaas biscuits used to be given to children in the Netherlands on St. Nicholas’s Day [December 6th], but I don’t know if this is done any more.)

The flavor is something special. It sounds a little odd to describe a bikkie’s flavor as “fresh”, but this is, and the cardamom used in its spicing is what’s responsible. A lovely fragrance comes off a tin of these when you open it up, and the cinnamon and cloves that are also part of the recipe add a very holidayish scent. So this is nice to bake around this time of year for when you want something just a little different from the cookies you’ve probably been eating since the week before Christmas or thereabouts.

The only frustration about making these at home is when you go looking for a recipe on the Net. The best ones are all German, it seems, but they all seem to call for “spekulatiuswurz”, or “Speculatius seasoning,” which is a big help especially as it gives you no idea what’s in it. Fortunately there is a good scratch recipe in that bible for those interested in central European holiday baking, <em>Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and this recipe comes from there.

Ingredients and method under the cut.

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December 28, 2013
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40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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