A Carrot of Any Color

I planted carrots in February, in a bed containing a few rocks. Rocks matter in carrot cultivation, because if the root hits one as it's growing downward, it'll break into two or three parts rather than remain one solid carrot whole. So when I started pulling them up this weekend, I expected to find such shattered roots, some of them twisting around each other like carrot yoga.

What I didn't expect to find was one yellow carrot. The seeds I had planted (using seed tape, the only way to go with carrots), were standard orange, not a fancy multi-colored variety. Had a stray yellow seed found its way into the tape, or was this a genetic mutation, evolution in action in my planting bed?

The yellow carrot tasted a little milder than its orange brethren. But adding it to a shredded-carrot salad, I realized, would make a fine-looking dish. Marcella Hazan features such a salad in her book The Classic Italian Cookbook. It's so easy, I never bother to open the book and follow the recipe.

Peel and shred a couple of carrots. Add enough salt to bring out the flavor, some lemon juice, and more olive oil than lemon juice. Toss, taste, adjust, and serve.

Turnip Gratin Soup

The Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook failed me last night. I had turned to it when faced with a plethora of turnips, planted more because I had an available half-barrel and the timing was right than because I wanted a pile of turnips.

The cookbook includes a simple recipe of sliced turnips and potatoes baked in cream and chicken stock. I thought the dish would complete my dinner of grilled pork chops and a simple green salad, at the same time exhausting the turnip supply.

The problem is one of geometry. The recipe calls for slicing the roots a quarter-inch thick, then layering them in a baking dish. But because potatoes and turnips don't fit together like Tetris pieces, big gaps lie between them, so I had to double the amount of liquid to fill those gaps and cover the slices, which led to a soupy mess.

If I were to do it again, I'd slice the roots thinly so they'd form a nearly solid layer. But I'm not about to go out and buy more turnips.

The Leftover Challenge

Articles about Thanksgiving leftovers usually talk about turkey. But their focus is misguided, because cooked bird is easy to find uses for. The mild meat takes on almost any seasoning, and it can be repurposed into all kinds of dishes: enchiladas, salad, soup, mole, casserole (if you’re so inclined), hash, and pasta. And hardly anyone’s going to thumb their nose at a turkey sandwich.

Here’s the real challenge: cranberry relish (from Joy of Cooking: grind 1 pound of cranberries with 1 orange, add 2 cups of sugar and let it sit in the fridge for two days). Every year I make the cranberry relish, and for that reason, it always comes home with me. Because no one takes more than a tablespoon, I leave with nearly as much as I arrived with.

So this year, on that nothing-to-do Friday after Thanksgiving, I got to baking and created this recipe. It’s a sweet bread whose slices are dotted pink and orange. I’m guessing it will work with any leftover cranberry dish as long as it’s well sugared and has a texture of thick tomato sauce.

Mandy’s cranberry relish bread

2½ cups flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup salad oil
1½ cups cranberry relish
2 eggs

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a regular-sized loaf pan.

Sift the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl combine the oil, relish, and eggs until well blended. Add the relish mixture to the flour and stir until just combined.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let it sit until it’s completely cool before cutting.

The Trooper

During a summer of disappointing crops — mealy, tasteless tomatoes; sullen basil; green pomegranates; and squirrel-ravaged beans — there was one bright spot in my garden. My butternut plants yielded 11 lovely, large fruit. The vines spread all over the patio and invaded their neighboring planter boxes, but I let them misbehave as long as they produced.

For about a month now, I’ve been trying to use up the squash: roasting cubes along with a chicken, adding mashed squash to cornmeal mush, and giving one to our housecleaner, Francisca, who praised my calabazas bonitas and described the cinnamon-enhanced turnovers she makes from them.

But my favorite use for them is a squash cake found in The Victory Garden Cookbook, a lifesaver for gardener-cooks. The only difficult part of the recipe is peeling a squash, steaming and mashing it. If you used canned pumpkin, it’s the easiest cake on the planet.

Butternut Squash Cake

1 & 2/3 cup sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

1 & 3/4 cup mashed squash or one can pumpkin

2 cups flour (or whole-wheat pastry flour)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

a good grating of nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350° and grease a 13x8x2-inch pan. Mix the sugar and oil together; beat in eggs one at a time. Beat in squash until well mixed. Stir together the dry ingredients and add to the wet mixture. Pour into the pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out dry.

Cooking Peachy

Peach pie is one of those foods I just don’t get. Cooking peaches destroys their delicious, fruity essence, so why ruin a batch of the fresh fruit by turning it into a pie?

Still, I have found one recipe that will lead me to sacrifice a peach to the oven: Lee Bailey’s peach cake. While the heat eliminates the peaches’ perfume, the peach-batter interface that results is so good it’s a worthwhile trade. The recipe produces something closer to a pudding than a cake, and its crisp, peach juice–enhanced top is to die for.

I have found good peaches at many markets, but the most reliably excellent ones are sold at the Alemany Farmers Market. I will drive up to city and fight the traffic early Saturday morning just to buy peaches from Regier Farms of Dinuba. I often buy a flat — enough that I’m willing to donate a few to the cake.

Incidentally, this recipe comes from Lee Bailey’s Soup Meals, whose soup recipes are ho-hum while its dessert recipes are fantastic.

Peach Pudding Cake

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup softened butter

2 eggs

3 or 4 peaches, peeled and quartered

1 - 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

Heat the oven to 350°. Butter an 8- or 9-inch springform pan. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix the 3 tablespoons of sugar and the cinnamon and set aside.

Cream the butter and the rest of the sugar well, and add eggs one at a time. Slowly add the flour mixture until well mixed, and spread the batter in the pan. Top with the peaches and sprinkle with the lemon juice, then coat with the sugar-cinnamon mixture.

Bake about an hour, until the cake is a dark golden color. Serve warm. 

Too Cute

At the Redwood City farmers market last weekend I came across a bin full of tiny little purple-black eggplants, the variety that must have given the vegetable its name. I had no plans for cooking eggplant, but they were so adorable I couldn’t resist buying a bagful.

They sat around looking cute until the hot weather threatened to deflate them and I was forced to act. I found a promising recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook, a veritable encyclopedia of vegetable and bean recipes. The recipe was pickled eggplant in Sri Lankan style, and it specifically called for baby eggplant.

I was forced to change a few ingredients, as my local Asian supermarket was bizarrely bereft of lemongrass and I couldn’t bear to buy holy basil when I have five Italian basil plants going to seed in my backyard.

With these alterations it still made a fine accompaniment to a lunch of curried lentil stew. The cinnamon, according to my Sri Lankan brother-in-law, is an essential ingredient of Sri Lankan curries.

Pickled Eggplant in Sri Lankan Style

1 pound baby eggplants

salt

pepper

turmeric

oil for frying

1 cinnamon stick

small handful of basil leaves

half an onion, chopped fine

2 jalapeños, sliced

1 tablespoon ground brown mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons sugar  

2 garlic cloves, peeled and pressed

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh ginger

2 tablespoons vinegar

Slice the baby eggplants cross-wise and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and turmeric. Let them sit for half an hour, then pat them dry. Chop each slice into quarters.

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a large frying pan and sauté the eggplant until it’s reddish-brown. Remove from the pan and drain.

Add more oil if needed; sauté the cinnamon stick for a minute, then add onion, jalapeños, and basil leaves. Fry until the onion is translucent. Let cool.

Mix the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and add the eggplant and onion mix. Let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. Serve cold or at room temperature.

When Fruit Falls off the Tree, Make a Tart

Last night, while minding my own business in my own living room, a neighbor knocked on the door and handed me a shopping bag filled with Santa Rosa plums. I believe these plums, a consequence of his backyard tree, were in retaliation for all the cucumbers I foisted on him last summer.

But they were gorgeous, deep-purple plums, their skins almost bursting with juice. I set them on the kitchen counter, where the warmth of the evening lifted their fragrance, begging me to eat them or turn them into pastry.

So pastry they became. I have a list of pies and cakes that I must make every year when the appropriate fruit is ripe, and plums demand that I make plomukaka, or purple plum tart. This recipe, from Beatrice Ojakangas’s The Great Scandinavian Baking Book, is too easy. The butter for both the crust and the filling need not be hard-cold, but it should not be soft.

Dough

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter

1-1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons ice water

Filling

1 pound fresh plums, cut into quarters and pitted

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 425°. For the dough, combine the flour and sugar, then cut in the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles cornmeal. Quickly stir in the water and form into a ball. Roll out into a 12-inch circle and place the pastry inside a 10-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Turn the edges over so the rim is double thickness.

Arrange the plum quarters, skin side up, over the dough. Combine the remaining ingredients until well blended, but still crumb-like, and sprinkle over the plums. Bake for 20 or 25 minutes, until the crust is golden brown. Cool slightly; serve while it’s still warm. 

Your Fig Bar Is So Stale...

My sister Anna recently turned me on to the Facebook group Your Mom Is So Berkeley. It includes a multitude of hilarious posts about the singular experience of growing up in Berkeley during the 1960s and 1970s. Reading it I learned that my family wasn’t the only one that tossed out its television, bought used clothes at Value Village, and spent summer vacations camping in a VW bus.

A surprising number of the posts are about food. My fellow citizens complain about brownies made with carob (considered more healthful than chocolate), powdered milk (it was cheap, because you can’t really be a hippie if you have money), and a ban on grapes (in support of the United Farm Workers boycott).

The food posts are notable, because long before the Gourmet Ghetto sprang up on its north side, Berkeley had a thing about food. This first food revolution wasn’t about taste, though. We ate as we did for spiritual, political, and health reasons: Eating flesh resulted in bad karma. Raising cattle for meat contributed to world hunger. White bread made you sluggish.

The Berkeley Co-op—a worker- and shopper-owned grocery store that opened in 1939 and lasted until 1988—became a center of this movement. The cooperative wasn’t just a politically correct concept, it also stocked politically correct food. The grocery chain lowered itself to carry such items as sugary cereals, but it marked them with a red tag noting their high sugar, salt, or fat content. The Co-op offered bulk food, of course; my dad never failed to stop at the bin filled with whole-wheat fig bars, the only store-bought cookies readily available in our house. We always shopped at the Co-op, and always gave our member number (21821), but never in my memory received a dividend.

The early food revolution spawned a couple of highly successful cookbooks, Laurel’s Kitchen and Diet for a Small Planet. Both books, born in Berkeley in the 1970s, offered a full suite of vegetarian recipes. But they were also, or even more so, about the authors’ political and spiritual journeys. Each book dedicates as least as much ink to personal growth and preaching as it does to cooking.

We have moved past those hippie days, but the 1970s food revolution never quite died. It simply acquired a sense of taste. Chez Panisse, the pre-eminent Berkeley restaurant that arguably launched the Gourmet Ghetto, features organic, locally produced foods not only because they taste better, but because it’s good for the environment. My hometown is still eating its way to a better world.

All the Food of the World

In the Gold Country town of Jackson stands one of the world’s great used bookstores. Hein & Co. possesses an appropriately dusty smell, two portly cats who curl up on the furniture, and more than 650,000 volumes (including 11 copies of Moby Dick).

The second story is a maze of bookshelves — the store posts maps to help you find the various subjects, and numbers hanging from the ceiling let you know if you’ve found them. But it’s really not that difficult: you know you’re in the romance section when you encounter a pink-hued wall of paperback spines, the classics when the books are mostly cloth-bound. Anyway, getting lost in a bookstore is never a bad thing. 

Several years ago we stayed in Jackson during a ski trip. A walk along Main Street brought us to the bookstore, and a few hours later, not even realizing night had fallen, we stumbled out, having spent $150 on books — used books, mind you. A few of them were volumes in the Time-Life Foods of the World series, The Cooking of Italy and Middle Eastern Cooking. These were the start of my collection.

The series, published in the 1970s and now out of print, includes 18 volumes on international cuisines, nine on regional American cooking, and one on wines and liquor. When they were new, the books came in a boxed set: a hard-bound volume filled with photographs, recipes, and text on the nature and history of the cuisine, and a spiral-bound notebook containing only recipes.

The quality of the recipes varies, from well-tuned (gravlax, The Cooking of Scandinavia) to problematic (deep-fried shrimp, sweet potato and squash cakes, Pacific and Southeast Asian Cooking). But I didn’t buy them for the recipes, and I didn’t bother with the notebooks. The books provide a treasure of food history, which I use to inform my restaurant reviews.

After purchasing that first pair, I started noticing them in used bookstores around the Bay Area and began collecting. I carried a list with me and crossed them off as I found them. When I had gathered about half the set, I thought about ordering the rest online, but it felt like cheating; besides, scouring used bookstores was so much more fun. Some friends found a few of the series for me and in return received a meal made from the recipes.

Finally, I lacked only The Cooking of the British Isles and The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire of the international series, and these proved difficult to find. (For some reason I can’t possibly fathom, Scandinavia always seemed to be on sale.) My collection did not grow at all for a few years.

We returned to Jackson last weekend, ostensibly to ski, though we spent more time at Hein & Co. than in the snow. And there, at last, I found the final two volumes. Though I wasn’t focusing on the American series, I picked up nearly all of them, too. I now lack only the New England volume. But there’s no hurry: clambake season is several months away.