Category:

Food, restaurants and cooking

Moving our food posts to a new home

by Diane Duane January 12, 2025

In retrospect this was probably one of those things that should have occurred to me (and to Peter) quite some time back.

Often enough, food comes up in some online conversation one or the other of us is having; and that one-or-another-of-us winds up writing down a recipe to post. The point at which this behavior (indulged over years, if not decades) starts becoming a problem is when you can no longer remember which platform or site you were on when you did that. His Tumblr, or mine? Here at Out Of Ambit? On Facebook, or over at Bluesky? Possibly even Twitter (though less and less, these days), or somewhere else?

Some weeks back the two of us were sitting around in the pub and discussing the significant changes in online life, just over the last few years… and this particular issue came up, almost as a postscript. I can’t remember which of us was the one to say, “it’s a pity we can’t have all our recipes in one place.” Nor can I remember which of us first said, “…Why can’t we?”

Off that realization, we spent a little while discussing the logistics of doing something about that. The business would be challenging, but not impossible; and if it would take a while, well, it’s not like we had any kind of deadline.

First, of course, a new website was going to be needed. But once we had that sorted out, many of the sites we’ve posted recipes to are sufficiently searchable, even with the naughty AI-based behavior of Google recently, for us to relocate our posted recipes without too much trouble. After that it’d just be a matter of cut-and-paste. Some of the importing would be a little fancier, in the case of videos that weren’t located on YouTube.

Then all that would be needed was to let people know where the recipes had been moved to…

And not just the people. The search engines have their own requirements. Google, in particular, gets excessively cranky if you duplicate content across your own sites. There are good reasons for this, and I’m not going to take issue with them… especially considering how many of our own original recipes (especially those at the now-retiring EuropeanCuisines.com) have been scraped over the years by bigger food sites, stripped of their attributions, and monetized without so much as a “thank you for your material”.

And speaking of EC.com: having a household recipe site is a convenient solution for a problem that had started to become obvious over there. Both of us have had various European-originated household recipes that, for various operational and structural reasons, weren’t easily slotted at the EC site. With a new household recipe site, that issue ceases to be one.

So this is an official notification for OOA readers: if you had a recipe or food post bookmarked over here, and try to visit it and wind up at a different site—there’s nothing nefarious going on. I made that happen.

The way a webmaster keeps Google from getting upset by having content duplicated across sites is to make sure that it only appears at one URL. But the other URL, the post’s old one (from which one’s removed the post’s original content), can for everyone’s convenience have attached to it what’s called “a 301 redirect“. This is a code that tells the website, “See this old URL? Any time someone tries to visit it, send them to this new URL instead.” And it also tells the search engines that the content has been permanently moved, and where it’s been moved to, so they can adjust their indexes accordingly. (I just added one of these redirects now. The flammkuchen recipe’s old OOA URL is here: click on it and you can see how the redirect behaves.)

Now, this relocation of posts is not going to happen all at once. This is a hobby endeavor; there’s too much actual work-based stuff going on over here for it to happen quickly. It’s essentially about the two of us being able to tear our hair less when online buddies ask “Where’s that pork-with-chilies-and-chocolate recipe of Peter’s?”, as we try to remember where the heck it is at the moment. And it’s about bringing some order out of an increasing state of chaos, to everybody’s benefit. (And frankly, at the moment, a little more order and a little less chaos—however small the venue in which it’s being encouraged—seems like a really good thing.)

The new site to which previously OOA-based recipes and food posts have begun relocating and redirecting is called The Mind Palate, at https://mind-palate.com. When devising a recipe, or thinking about somebody else’s), the two of us often speak of tasting it first using the “palate of the mind” to get a sense of whether it’d be worth making or eating to begin with. …And if the name is indeed a terrible Sherlock pun, well, that’s on me. 🙂

In any case, we both cordially invite you to come over and kick the tires as, post by post, we build the new site out.

Thanks for your interest!

January 12, 2025

Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Norwegian Butter Squares

by Diane Duane August 25, 2023

Just posting this recipe here so that it can be found a little more readily. A tip of the virtual hat to the source on Tumblr, @locusimperium.

The ones in the above image were baked in an all-crunchy-edges brownie pan, but these bake perfectly satisfactorily in the recommended 9×12 inch sheet pan. They’re just fine plain, though the addition of a little ground cinnamon and cloves works well too.

Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares

1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado / raw sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9×13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.

Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.

Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.

These tend not to hang around long, but if you think they might survive in your local environment for more than a couple of days, keep them in a cookie tin.

August 25, 2023

Baking Food, restaurants and cooking France

Quiche Lorraine

by Diane Duane December 12, 2021

Just storing this link (and recipe) here so I won’t lose track of them.

Do visit The Greedy Frog’s page on the subject and read the (correctly) cranky rant about how cheese does not belong in this.

December 12, 2021

Baking Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Parmesan Biscuit Recipes

by Diane Duane September 27, 2021

It’s looking like the Owl Springs Partnership site needs a reaming out (asst’d technical issues) so I’m relocating some stuff for safety’s sake.

Our Parmesan biscuit recipes have been there: posting them here for the interested. (This way if the URLs change over there, I can always just instruct the site to redirect them here.)

September 27, 2021

Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Two Wild Boar Recipes

by Diane Duane August 28, 2021

I’m putting these here so I don’t lose them (again. EYEROLL). They come out of a collection of nearly a hundred thousand Meal-Master format recipes that I accumulated/accreted over a couple of decades, from multilingual sources. Most of them I’m sure have been ported over into Paprika, which I’m using now for mass recipe storage. But every now and then something turns up that I’ve forgotten about… like these, which were squirreled away in a file simply named “BOARS.TXT.” (Remember when a file name before-the-period couldn’t be more than eight characters long? Remember? …Ah me.)

…The first one is interesting, if of no use to me at the Middle Kingdoms-recipes end of things due to the presence of chocolate. (The Kingdoms’ continent doesn’t have the bean growing anywhere, though it does exist elsewhere on their alternate Earth — thus making them of some interest to other non-Solar species, [as it has on other alternate Earths, such as ours…] once the word gets out. So it’s probably a good thing that the Kingdoms have a nascent space program*). One of Peter’s signature recipes, additionally, has an interesting take on pork and chocolate, so there’s a resonance to that. …But the second one is more to the point (in both that universe and this one), and has serious potential.

Anyway. The recipes: (which I’m not reformatting in any way: if by some wild chance you’re one of those stubborn people still using Meal-Master, you should be able to import these straight in.)

Wild Boar in Sweet and Sour Chocolate Sauce

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Wild Boar in Sweet & Sour Chocolate Sauce
Categories: Meats
Yield: 1 Servings

5 lb Wild boar or 5 lb. beef pot
Roast
2 Carrots
2 Stalks celery
2 Onions
1 Bottle (25.4 oz.) aged
Chianti Classico
1/4 c Extra-virgin olive oil
1 tb Juniper berries
2 Bay leaves
1 ts Black pepper
Salt
1 c Raisins
1/2 c Sugar
4 Cloves garlic, coarsely
Chopped
1/2 c Red wine vinegar
1/2 c Grated bitter chocolate
1 c Dried prunes
1 c Pine nuts
1 c Cream Sherry

Place meat in large baking dish. Coarsely chop 1 carrot, 1 stalk
celery, & 1 onion, & add to meat. Pour wine over meat & vegetables,
cover, & marinate 24 hours, turning occasionally. Drain meat,
reserving marinade. Pat meat dry with paper towels. Brown in olive
oil over high heat. Strain marinade, reserving wine & discarding
vegetables. Pour wine over meat. Chop remaining carrot, celery, &
onion & add to meat with juniper berries, 1 bay leaf, pepper, & salt
to taste. Cook over low heat 3 hours or until tender (1 1/2 to 2
hours for beef). Allow meat to cool in cooking liquid, skimming off
fat that forms on surface. Cut cooled meat into pieces, discarding
bone. Strain marinade & place liquid & meat back in pan. Soak raisins
in warm water until plumped. Drain. Caramelize sugar in pan with
garlic, remaining bay leaf, & 1 Tbls. water. Warm vinegar, then add
with chocolate to sauce & bring to boil. Boil 2 minutes. Add sauce to
mat with raisins, prunes, pine nuts, & cream Sherry. Cook 10 minutes.
Remove meat & keep warm. Continue cooking sauce until reduced to
desired thickness. Remove bay leaves. Slice meat & pour sauce over.
Note: Recipe may also be used for venison, rabbit, & aged beef.

MMMMM

Roast Wild Boar with Fig, Date and Walnut Stuffing

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Roast Wild Boar with Fig Date & Walnut Stuffing
Categories: Game, Meats
Yield: 10 Servings

Stephen Ceideburg

MMMMM--------------------------STUFFING-------------------------------
2 c Fresh black figs
1 c Fresh date
1 c Coarsely chopped, lightly
-roasted walnuts

MMMMM----------------------------MEAT---------------------------------
10 lb Boar hind**
1 tb Olive oil
Crushed thyme to taste
Salt to taste

MMMMM---------------------------SAUCE--------------------------------
2 c Port wine
1 c Zinfandel
1/2 c Sugar
1 c Chopped fresh or dried figs
1 tb Chopped shallots
2 c Demi-glace (reduced stock)
1 tb Unsalted butter
Salt to taste

Combine stuffing ingredients in a food processor and chop coarsely.
Set aside.

Remove the bone from the boar hind and meticulously clean tendons and
fat from inside the leg. Stuff with half the stuffing mixture and
neatly reform the leg to its original shape. Using butcher's twine,
truss the boar. Rub the surface of roast with a bit of olive oil;
season with thyme and salt. Place on a rack in a shallow roasting
pan. Roast in a 350 degree F. oven approx- imately I hour, or until
the internal temperature reaches 140 degree F.

Remove roast from oven and let rest 20 minutes before carving.

Sauce: Combine port, Zinfandel, sugar and figs in a heavy bottomed
saucepan. Cook over high heat until the mixture reaches the
consistency of a conserve. Puree in a blender, and strain through a
fine sieve. Set aside.

Combine shallots and a splash of port in a heavy-bottomed saucepan
and cook until almost dry. Add the fig-port syrup and demi-glace.
Cook until reduced by half. Season with salt and whisk in butter.

Carve roast and garnish each serving with a portion of the remaining
stuffing, a bit of sauce and, if desired, fresh black figs.

PER SERVING: 505 calories, 52 g protein, 34 g carbohydrate, 16 g fat
(4 g saturated), 173 mg cholesterol, 127 mg sodium, 4 g fiber.

From Rosemary Campiformio, St. Orres, Gualala

Heidi Haughy Cusik writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, 12/18/91.

Posted by Stephen Ceideburg

MMMMM

** That’s probably “hindquarter”, if we’re talking about ten pounds of meat.

***

…There’s also a recipe here that starts out as a marinade and winds up with cooking instructions as well. I include it here so I don’t have to worry about anything useful having been left in the legacy .txt file…

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Wild Boar
Categories: Meats
Yield: 6 Servings

1 cn Condensed consomme'
2 c Cider vinegar
8 c Red wine
1 1/2 ts Ground black pepper
2 tb Salt
2 Bay leaves
1 ts Crumbled thyme
2 Garlic cloves; chopped
8 Juniper berries
1 Piece wild boar meat
(about 5 pounds)
6 Carrots
Scraped and quartered
2 lg Onions; quartered
4 Celery stalks
Cut into 2-inch lengths
1 cn Condensed beef broth
1/3 c Currant jelly
1/2 c Flour; mixed with
3/4 c Water

Combine consomme', vinegar, wine, pepper, salt, bay leaves, thyme,
garlic, and juniper berries in a glass or enamel bowl. Place boar
meat into marinade. Let marinate for 2 days at room temperature.
Place meat and marinade in a large kettle. Cover and simmer for 2 to
2-1/2 hours or until meat is almost tender. Add carrots, onions,
celery. Cover and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20
minutes. Remove meat and vegetables and keep warm. Add beef broth,
currant jelly, and flour mixture to pan liquid. Stir until sauce
bubbles and thickens slightly. Let sauce cook at a boil until it
becomes the thickness of a good brown gravy. Pour hot gravy over
portions of sliced boar and vegetables. Serve with Chestnut Puree.

MMMMM

…So, en guete, y’all.

*…What do you mean, “what space program”? They have Dragons, don’t they?

August 28, 2021

Baking Food, restaurants and cooking Hobbyhorses and General Ranting

Two new bread pans: a report

by Diane Duane June 13, 2021

We’ve been using the standard garden-variety North American style of home bread-baking pan for a long time, but there comes a moment when you realize suddenly that you’ve been using the wrong tool to produce the effect you want, and you start looking around for something that’ll do the job better.

In particular, though high-risen loaves with domed tops are undeniably lovely, Peter and I found that about half the time the loaves we made in the standard bread pan were showing a preference (once they’d risen to the pan’s top) for, during the further rise, expanding sideways rather than upwards. With more highly hydrated doughs, this definitely turns into a problem. The loaf-in-process sags over the sides of the pan while it’s baking, and afterwards you wind up having to chop the sides off it so that slices will fit into the slots in the toaster… altogether a most unseemly business. So we started looking for taller-sided baking pans that would give the rising dough more support in the upwards direction.

The first thing we tried was a lidded baking pan/baking tin from a US maker now long associated with this type of bread pan: a “Pullman pan”, so called because it was the type of bread pan used in the kitchens of Pullman train cars. (The style turns out to be far older than its use on the railway, though. European bakers were producing so-called pain de mie, “bread made for its crumb” [rather than its crust], for at least two centuries previous. This was the preferred bread for premium sandwiches, canapes, croutons, and toast.)

At any rate, the pan we got from the US company was well made, heavy, and baked a good loaf. But it was both bigger than we needed—loaves made with it wound up needing to be cut in half to fit in our bread box—and also a bit fractious: sometimes difficult to shut, and also often difficult to open. This got frustrating. After a while we passed the USA pan to friends at a local pub/B&B, and went back to the “regular” loaf pans for the time being.

Recently, though, one or the other of us spotted the items below on Amazon. They’re available from numerous different retailers, leading me to believe that they’re being manufactured by one or two companies in China under different badges or marques for different retailers.

This style of pan is available in various sizes and materials, so we decided to get a couple of the smaller ones—essentially one-pound loaf pans—and see how they worked. They come in both steel and aluminum versions.

Here’s the steel one:

And here’s the aluminum one:

...So we sent for them, and along they came. We’ve been testing them for some days now, and briefly: they’re terrific.

As regards materials: the aluminum pan weighs 405g: the steel one weighs 624g. It’s going to take more testing, over more time, to determine which of them does a better crust on the bread (though again, since these are pain de mie pans, the crust isn’t really meant to be the main act).

These pans are both rated for a 450g loaf….though, again, it’s going to take some testing to see how much leeway there is in this rating. Some of the recipes we use produce denser loaves than the house recipe for Just Plain Old White Bread. That, though, is the recipe we’re using at the moment for testing purposes.

The thing to warn you about in advance, if you get these, is that right out of the box, the non-stick coating on these is SERIOUS BUSINESS. The pans will Zamboni around with alarming slidiness on any kitchen surface where you place them. You don’t dare pick them up without having a firm grip on both the pan and the lid, as (given the slightest opportunity) the lid will slide right off the pan and head for points unknown.

But frankly, as a baker who’s dealt in her time with more than enough annoyingly sticky pans that should have been nonsticky, this is kind of a refreshing change. I’m going to be interested to see how long this phase lasts and how durable the nonstick coating is.

The important thing, though, is how readily freshly baked bread comes out of these. And the answer is: very readily. Tip them over and the new-baked loaf just kind of falls out. Though the docs suggest that the pans should be greased (indeed, buttered…), it’s looking like there’s no need for that at all. It might prove necessary to grease them when you’re baking things that have a lot of sugar involved in them. I’m thinking about testing the household seed cake recipe in one of these shortly to see how it behaves.

Anyway, here are some pictures, so you can see how these compare, size-wise, to the normal-size bread pan: and how a loaf baked yesterday with the lid off looks. …A note about those three little holes you can see at the bottoms of the pans: those are apparently for air circulation. I have yet to see whether there’s a problem with doing a very wet batter bread in one of these, but I’ll test that soon and add notes on it here.

For those who might be interested in getting their hands on one of these: hope this helps!

(Above: the pans themselves, with the little spiracle-like air holes visible…)

Above: one of the pans compared to a typical non-lidded loaf pan.

And below: the result when we sliced open the latest non-lidded bake...

(PS—disclosure: we’re members of the Amazon Associates plan, so if you use one of the lnks above to buy one of these, we get a wee tiny commission. …But you probably knew that. Just saying…)

June 13, 2021

Food, restaurants and cooking recipes

Triple Vanilla Ice Cream(s)

by Diane Duane May 31, 2021

This recipe, in a number of variants, is a favorite around here. I’ve referred to it here and there online, but realized (when I went looking, per a request) that I’d never actually posted a full recipe. So here it is.

It’s based on the “sweet cream base #1” recipe from the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book (which we picked up when it first came out, and I’m really pleased to be able to tell you is still in print. There’s also a Kindle edition, which is a nice plus).

The recipe for this goes as follows:

2 cups / 475ml heavy or whipping cream
1 cup / 240ml milk
2 large eggs
3/4 cup / 170g sugar

Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the cream and milk and whisk to blend. (Makes one quart.)

If (as may be the case) you aren’t comfortable with using uncooked eggs, or just don’t want them in there at all, there is also Sweet Cream Base #2:

2 cups / 475ml heavy or whipping cream
2/3 cup / 160ml half and half
3/4 cup / 170g sugar

Pour the cream into a mixing bowl. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time; then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in the half and half and whisk until completely blended. Makes one quart.

Now, as for the three vanillas: Generally speaking, my idea, when I started doing this, was to use three vanillas from different regions, or at the very least, three vanillas made using different styles of preservation/processing… the general idea being that, if it all worked out, the flavor of the finished product would present a sort of spectrum of vanilla flavors instead of one flat background effect.

The three vanillas I routinely try to use tend to go this way:

(a) An alcoholic-based vanilla extract. I routinely use Nielson-Massey, though frankly there are a lot of far cheaper ones that will do as well, considering that a number of vanillas are involved in this procedure.

(b) A different form of vanilla, ideally of a different origin, and usually in a paste form. (I like this one, which we get from our local grocery.)

(c) At least one fresh vanilla bean. (Meaning, unprocessed except by the usual drying and curing that’s part of preparing the seed pod of the vanilla orchid.) (You can grow them, did you know? But apparently they require very specific conditions and are not easy to work with. See this article for details. There’s also a useful article here with a lot of basic background on vanilla and its harvesting and preparation. Yet another of those products that one tends to take for granted, while at the production end it’s amazingly labor-intensive…)

(d) And sometimes I might go for a fourth vanilla, if I had another form around.. such as, for example, a vanilla powder. Or: I make a pretty fair vanilla whiskey. Recipe: Slice open a vanilla pod. Scrape out the seeds in the usual manner. Chop up the pod. Put all of this in a little bottle — maybe about 100ml, tops — and add whiskey. […Generally I wouldn’t use too smokey a whiskey for this: mostly I use one of the more innocuous Irish whiskeys like Powers or Paddy’s.]) Leave this alone in a cupboard for at least a month or so. This is what mine looks like at the moment (and you should have seen how dark it was before I topped it up just now!). As you use it, you add more vanilla beans and top it up with more whiskey. (And there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with other alcohols. Vodka occurs immediately, or Polish pure spirit, as something that would more or less stay out of the way of the flavor of the vanilla. All the same, now I’m thinking about vanilla gin… Hmm.)

…Anyway. A reminder from the food chemistry department as regards alcohol in ice cream: if you add more than about a quarter cup of alcohol (60ml, give or take) to a given quart of ice cream mix, it will function as antifreeze and you’re likely to wind up with a very sweet and lovely slushie, but not much more. So don’t get carried away. Do your math as you put the vanillas together.

I have little experience with non-machine-based ice cream making, so if you have a recipe for a no-machine version that you like, just make a very plain one and add a couple or a few of your chosen vanillas to it. If you’ve got a machine, the procedure is simple: to your basic mixture, add the vanillas you prefer, whisk them in, and freeze as usual. If vanilla powder is one of your chosen ingredients, I’d mix about half of it into the initial mixture, and sprinkle in the rest of it close to the end of the freezing period, as the ice cream’s firming up. Over the next 48-72 hours in the freezer (assuming you like to leave your ice cream alone for a bit to let it develop its flavor), the dry vanilla’s flavor will intensify.

… And that’s it! Noting of course that adding fruit to this mixture (either in the ice cream, or on top) works really well.

Enjoy!

(Disclosure: We’re in the Amazon Associates program, so if you use the Amazon link(s) above and buy something with it, we get a wee tiny commission. Just so you know.)

May 31, 2021

Food, restaurants and cooking

Mijoter

by Diane Duane May 29, 2021

It’s just one of those words a cook really needs. Merci, la France…

Les petits plats qui mijotent au coin du feu is a phrase that is used like a word and it rarely fails to garnish a conversation about food. It would be unfair to accuse those who use it – albeit at times as a crutch – of leaning on a vain cliche, for they know it – or sense it – to be a magical formula: the incantational touchspring that unites a diverse people in a single reaction. It means “slow-cooking stews”, but it symbolizes “the good life” and somewhere, shadow-like, behind its words lies a half-remembered state of voluptuous, total well-being (”Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté”).

Le coin du feu is the hearth that, even for those who have never known it, recalls the security of the family united before it in warmth. But the magic word in the magical phrase is mijoter. It describes that condition of near suspension in which there is, nonetheless, a whispering movement, a tiny bubble rising here and there to break a stew’s still surface – and it means, at the same time, a slow ripening. The comfortable satisfaction felt upon lifting a lid and glancing at a stew’s surface – the sense that, merely because a liquid’s surface is sustained at precisely the right point of hardly perceptible movement, all is well, the stew’s progress out of one’s hands and its success assured – is familiar to all cooks.

–Richard Olney, Simple French Food: “Meats and Poultry: Stews (Ragoûts, Daubes, Sautés…)”

May 29, 2021

Baking Food, restaurants and cooking

David G. Arnold’s Lemon Drizzle Cake

by Diane Duane May 16, 2021

Because when composers start talking about cooking, it’s smart to listen. 🙂

This bake unfolded on the Twitter thread here:

https://bit.ly/DavidGArnoldsCake

1/2 Equal weight of eggs butter sugar flour . Melt butter and sugar together , whisk in the beaten eggs , whisk in flour once eggs incorporated, pour into greased baking tin . Bake for around 40 minutes 180-200 degrees . Blend Juice of two lemons and icing sugar into a syrup.

When cake has cooled , use cocktail stick to make loads of deep perforations on top of cake , pour over thick lemon syrup so it soaks into the holes but also covers cake with thin layer . It’ll cool to a lemony sugary crust . Eat whole thing in one go

Right… starting in on this now. 3 large eggs for me = 200g; so, 200g each of flour, butter, sugar.

…Ready for the oven. (The bottom of the springform has some baking parchment clamped into it to [I hope…] keep this pan from leaking…)

And there’s the cake. A little dark on the top and around the edges, but that’s just our oven (it runs hot, and any first bake is therefore experimental…). Don’t think I’m going to care after the icing hits it.

Now the icing. (For those interested: my baking only sporadically uses icing sugar, and if I buy it in, typically it turns into a brick in the box/bag before I get around to it. So instead I usually make my own in the coffee grinder. The grind is finer than storebought.)

…So. I’m short of cocktail sticks, but I do have skewers.

I’ll be adding this in stages, as I want the cake to soften up and become more absorptive as I go along.

Unfortunately I don’t have an image of the icing stage. Apologies. But: here’s the finished cake.

Oh, and here’s @DavidGArnold‘s lemon drizzle cake from yesterday. Extremely nice. Can see why someone might be tempted to eat it all at one go. 🙂

…I also made one in a loaf pan/tin: I need to find that pic. …Anyway, this is a fabulous recipe, and everybody should make it. Thank you, David!

May 16, 2021

books Drink Restaurants

The Martini Rant

by Diane Duane March 16, 2021

Everybody gets all hot under the collar about the composition and mixology details of James Bond’s (usually) favorite mixed drink. But one piece of Bondian lore about the drink that gets lost a lot of the time is the story of how Bond got (indirectly) schooled on how not to be cheated on his Martinis.

The source of the brief but memorable rant (in Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball) is the indefatigible Felix Leiter, whom we must assume went around the block in the CIA’s service any number of times before he ran into Bond. At one point or another he and Bond stop into a bar for some refreshment, and when the Martinis arrive, Leiter is so annoyed that he sends for the barman to remonstrate with him.

The Martinis arrived. Leiter took one look at them and told the waiter to send over the barman. When the barman came, looking resentful, Leiter said, “My friend, I asked for a Martini and not a soused olive.” He picked the olive out of the glass with the cocktail stick. The glass, that had been three-quarters full, was now half full. Leiter said mildly, “This was being done to me while the only drink you knew was milk. I’d learned the basic economics of your business by the time you’d graduated to Coca-Cola. One bottle of Gordon’s Gin contains sixteen true measures – double measures that is, the only ones I drink. Cut the gin with three ounces of water and that makes it up to twenty-two. Have a jigger glass with a big steal in the bottom and a bottle of those fat olives and you’ve got around twenty-eight measures. Bottle of gin here costs only two dollars retail, let’s say around a dollar sixty wholesale. You charge eighty cents for a Martini, one dollar sixty for two. Same price as a whole bottle of gin. And with your twenty-eight measures to the bottle, you’ve still got twenty-six left. That’s a clear profit on one bottle of gin of around twenty-one dollars. Give you a dollar for the olives and the drop of vermouth and you’ve still got twenty dollars in your pocket. Now, my friend, that’s too much profit…”

Fleming was famously careless with his research notes regarding food and drink (some authorities claim that, having sought out and been given what purported to be the perfect Martini recipe, he got it backwards when putting it in whichever book it appeared in…), but this sounds like something that either happened to Fleming in his own travels, or was something he heard about from some other source he trusted. The terse quality suggests a memory of unusual clarity. (Or notes correctly transcribed…)

Anyway, I keep misplacing this quote, so now it’s where I know I can find it…

March 16, 2021

cooking Food, restaurants and cooking Home 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. Maluns is also known as Bündner kartoffelribel in German, or by the dialect name Hoba.

December 15, 2020

Baking cooking recipes

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.

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.* 🙂

…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”.

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.

…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)

…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.)

…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…

…and first layer of seasoning.

Layer 2.

Butter and seasoning.

Final layer.

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).

That bottom crust gets folded in; the top crust will be pinched to it to seal.

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.)

..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.

…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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