Season of Spices

During the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we joined friends for lunch in Menlo Park, and afterward, because we all had the time, they suggested visiting Penzeys to check out their larder.

Penzeys, a longtime mail-order spice purveyor, opened the shop on Santa Cruz Avenue two years ago, and I’ve been meaning to visit all this time. Had I made the trip sooner, I would have known years ago about black cardamom, no relation to real cardamom, which adds a smoky element to slow-cooked meats and curries across Asia.

I also would have known about ajwain or ajowan, a seed with a scent reminiscent of celery that’s used on Afghan bread. And I would have realized that bratwurst’s distinctive flavor comes from a mixture of nutmeg and mustard.

I learned these things because at the shop, unlike with the catalog, everything Penzeys sells is available for smelling. It was thus that I chose my favorite black peppercorns — Tellicherry — which have covered nearly everything on my plate since our visit.

Photo: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Temptation on a Cactus

I’ve often wanted to pluck off the fruit that grow on my neighbors’ cacti. There they are, right at arm’s length, just on the other side of the fence, looking so temptingly pink and plump. But those spines — and the fact that it would, of course, be theft — hold me back.

So when I found a basketfull at the Redwood City Farmers Market, I snatched one up. This one was pale green, about four inches long, and it managed to lodge several spines in my fingers despite my care in avoiding them.

I cut it in half, according to the seller’s instructions, and scooped out the flesh like an avocado. The fruit is dotted with seeds like grape pips, which were too many to spit out but went down easily enough.

The fruit was mild and lacking acid, much like a honeydew melon. Next time, I’ll buy more than one and make them into an agua fresca, adding water, ice, lime juice, and a little sugar: a thirst-quenching drink, just what you hope a cactus would yield. 

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. 

Diving for Pearls

A few weeks ago I stepped inside a grocery store in Santa Rosa’s Southern Asian neighborhood. Prowling around for something fun to take home, I spied a package of black tapioca pearls and purchased them.

These chewy little balls of tapioca (themselves made of cassava flour) are, of course, the essence of pearl tea. I like pearl tea, especially milk tea—iced black tea with milk—but it’s always served so sweet I don’t order it often. Now that I had access to the pearls, I figured I’d make my own pearl milk tea and sweeten it as I like.

I boiled the pearls according to the oddly translated directions on the package (“stir softly”) and concocted a glass of Earl Grey pearl milk tea. It tasted great, but after chasing the pearls around with a spoon, I realized the drink was missing a crucial ingredient. The fat straw that allows you to suck up the pearls — creating that thrilling POP when the pearl lands in your mouth — is  what makes the drink so fun. Scooping them out with a spoon just didn’t cut it. Now on the shopping list: fat straws. I have a whole bag of pearls to use up.

Homecoming

For decades, Nordic House, purveyor of many things Scandinavian, operated out of a crowded store on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. It stood in an impossible location adjacent to a freeway overpass but nowhere near an exit, and I invariably became lost trying to find the place.

So I was pleased to learn that the store was moving to San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. It’s much easier to find, and it’s closer to my folks’ house, which means I’m nearby more often. Then I received a coupon giving me 10 percent off my first purchase at the new store.

Nordic House makes much of its own goods, such as curry, sour cream, and regular pickled herring; rullepølse, a sort of pastrami made with lamb, pork, or beef; meatballs; cucumber salad; and potato sausage. It also carries blueberry soup mix, which I make double-strength and use as a syrup for waffles; Swedish brown beans; canned reindeer meat; lutefisk; fish paste in toothpaste tubes (though lately they’ve had a hard time importing the best of the bunch, smoked herring); all varieties of Scandinavian cheeses; lefse (Norwegian soft bread made with potatoes); flatbreads; lingonberries; cookies; and mjölkchoklad, fantastic milk chocolate from Sweden.

For us Scandinavians, even third-generation, it’s all to die for. I filled up my basket and forked over $70, even with the discount. Then I went out to my car to find I’d received a $40 parking ticket. The pickled herring (plain) was worth it.

Mission District Bakery Secret Revealed

Years ago, when we first moved to the north slope of Bernal Heights, near San Francisco’s Mission District, I started frequenting the panaderías on 24th Street. I tried a couple different bakeries and a variety of pastries, but as enticing as they looked in the window, invariably I found them stale, some to the point of needing a chisel.

I gave up on the panaderías, but one day after I had promised toddler Alex a treat, we passed a window showcasing rainbow sprinkle–covered cupcakes, and he had to have one. As I knew he wouldn’t much care about freshness—he would declare his cupcake delicious as long as it was brightly colored and sugary—inside we went. But this time, I realized the mistake I had made on previous visits.

Other customers were grabbing trays and tongs at the checkout counter and heading into the back of the store. We followed them and found ourselves in the bakery kitchen. There, workers were loading baking sheets directly from the oven onto carts, and customers were filling their trays with these freshly baked goodies. Fortunately, sprinkled cupcakes were on the day’s menu, so we grabbed one, plus a few sweet rolls, and brought our tray back to the checkout counter.

They were delicate and delicious, as to be expected from pastries that had just left the oven. The window pastries are for display only. Now I know. 

Heaven in a Can

When I was a kid, my dad had a kind of mental block about cat food. He could never remember to check whether he needed to buy it, so he always bought more just in case. It got to the point where there were cans and cans of cat food spilling out of a cabinet.

Coconut milk is my cat food. For the past couple of years, whenever I’ve come across a can of coconut milk, I’ve bought it. I happen to love coconut, so while there may not have been anyone at home yowling for lack of it, I feel there must always be at least one can in the house. Because my use of coconut milk had been fairly limited—amounting to little more than coconut ice cream and Thai curries—these cans multiplied until nearly an entire pantry shelf was devoted to coconut milk.

Then, one morning while making muffins, I found I didn’t have enough milk. Searching the pantry for a can of the evaporated variety, I noticed the coconut milk and decided to add some to the batter. It was just a small portion of the recipe, so I didn’t detect any difference in flavor, but it gave me some ideas.

I made a batch of pancakes with coconut milk, which came out rich and tropical-tasting. I poured some over day-old pound cake to moisten it and discovered it’s even better for this purpose than whipped cream or ice cream. I stirred some into cooked rice to add an instant Caribbean touch to dinner. I drowned chocolate chips in the milk and ate the classic combo with a spoon.

But the best use of all was in coconut lattes. Equal parts strong coffee and gently heated coconut milk, plus a touch of sugar, was heaven in a mug.

As for those cans for cat food, eventually my dad remembered he had purchased too much and stopped buying it altogether. So, of course, we ran out of cat food and had to hear about it from the cats for days. My resolve is to keep buying coconut milk—and continue using it up. 

The Bunny Butcher

A few years ago my husband got on a paella kick. In my Time-Life book The Cooking of Spain and Portugal, he read up on traditional paella, which is cooked over a fire. He start grilling it in an open Weber, and the result was an excellent dish enhanced by mesquite smoke and the cachet of outdoor cooking.

But grilling wasn’t enough. Mark decided if he was to make truly traditional paella, it would need to include rabbit. It was late summer and the San Mateo County Fair, whose grounds lie less than a mile from our house, was in full swing. As we wandered through the animal cages, we spotted some bunnies — “meat rabbits” their cages said. Raised by kids in the 4-H club, the rabbits were to be auctioned off at the end of the fair.

Aha! We would bid on some rabbits, have our traditional paella, and help out the 4-H Club all at once. We peered at the bunnies and picked out the tastiest-looking. Perhaps it should have surprised me that I could both appreciate their cuteness and imagine how good they’d be in a paella pan, but it didn’t.

I set out on the Saturday morning scheduled for the auction and signed in for a card with a number. After dozens of pigs (the auction was running late), it was time for rabbits. A pre-teen girl in the white pants and shirt and green necktie uniform of 4-H herded her three white bunnies on a bale of hay while the bidding started. The price quickly rose to $375 for the trio. Then a curly-haired boy of about 8 sold one rabbit for $300. These prices were more than I could afford, but the bunnies were grand champions, so I thought maybe I’d get a better deal with some of the lesser rabbits.

I looked around at the audience. The bunny bidders looked like grandparents, mostly, as well as local business owners looking for write-offs and some press. I started to doubt that any of these rabbits ever came close to a knife. I flipped through the auction program and read that while pigs, cows, chickens, and turkeys are sent to a butcher, the rabbits are “processed” by the kid who raised them. So if I bid on a rabbit for paella, that cute curly-haired boy would have to kill and skin his own bunny? This was starting to seem like a really bad idea.

The prices did drop, though the cheapest rabbit still went for $100. I was willing to pay a good price for the meat to help support 4-H, but there was no way I was going to ask a kid to kill a bunny he’d raised. Needless to say, I left the auction rabbit-less. Later we learned that meat rabbits are usually donated back to the youth exhibitor — that is, pardoned and kept as pets.

Non-kid-raised supermarket rabbits cost about $12 a pound, or $30 a carcass, which now strikes me as a great bargain.

Fresh from the Sea

I’d been stranded at home with an illness and holiday preparations, and the day after Christmas I was desperate to get out of the house, go somewhere that at least felt far away.

So my husband, son, and I headed to Half Moon Bay, where we had lunch and took a walk along the beach in the rain. At Princeton Harbor, a few fishermen were selling live Dungeness crabs off their boats, and we debated whether to buy a few for dinner. Though that would mean boiling and cleaning them ourselves, we figured we were at the crab source, so we might as well take advantage of it.

We picked a boat with a pelican perched on the bow and a sea dog complete with white beard. The crabs were crawling around the bottom of a tank with seawater running through it. Buying off the boat takes a while because the fisherman has to reach into the tank and grab a crab by the butt without getting pinched by its friends. We bought two crabs at $5 a pound, which is close to what local stores are selling them for already cooked, but the sea dog threw in an extra crab because it had lost its pincers.

They flailed around, poking holes in a trash bag as we headed back home over the hill. Then it was time for Alex, 13, to learn how to prepare the local crab: Bring one stockpot of water to boil, add crab, cook until red. Let cool, then dismantle. Crack and pick out the meat at the table.  

The crab was so sweet and fresh, so much better than precooked crab, we realized we’d walked off that pier with a great deal. We ate it simply dipped in butter or mayonnaise that first night. Because it was so fresh, we still enjoyed it the next day, as crab sandwiches for lunch, then crab cocktail with dinner.

We resolved to head to the coast as often as possible during crab season.

Buyer Beware Beef

Last night I made a classic beef stew of red wine, potato and carrots. It would have been a fine stew, a good stew, had the beef not been dreadful. This meat we’ve been choking down for about a year has the texture and flavor of cardboard—flat cardboard, not the corrugated kind, which might have been an improvement.

A few years ago, friends who live in the Central Valley knew a rancher who wanted to sell a steer. We bought a quarter of the carcass, negotiated among the other buyers which cuts we’d take, and brought it home. It wasn’t the meat you’d find in a steakhouse, but it made for decent steaks and good hamburgers. And the price was great.

Soon after we finished the freezer-full, the rancher asked if we’d be interested in buying another ungulate. We decided to go for a half steer this time. My husband, son and I set out for the valley with a car full of coolers, paid our $400 and returned home with a stand-alone freezer’s worth of steaks, ground beef, stew meat, roasts, ribs and soup bones.

Our first taste of the meat—T-bone steaks, grilled—left us woefully disappointed yet optimistic that other cuts would prove more satisfying. After all, the last animal had been edible. But after trying each cut, we gave up hope and dejectedly chewed our way through the rest of the sorry beast. Spices helped its lack of flavor, but nothing—not even long, slow stewing—improved the texture.

The steer was 19 months old, grass-fed and corn finished; the meat was aged two to three weeks. According to common wisdom of animal husbandry, the time of slaughter, feeding schedule and aging were correct. So what went wrong? When we asked the rancher, he wrote in a long, apologetic e-mail that perhaps the animal had been slaughtered too young, before the meat had a chance to become marbled with enough fat. He was aiming, he said, for meat that was lean (before it had marbled too much) yet still tender (because of its youth).

I asked Shannon Kelly of the California Beef Council what would render the meat of a young steer so unappetizing. She suggested that perhaps the animal could have benefited from more time on the corn lot. “The more corn they eat, the more intramuscular fat they have,” she explained, adding that more marbling makes the meat tender. In addition, poor packaging can cause freezing to draw out the moisture, she said.

We bought the half steer because we wanted to support a local rancher, and we loved the price. It was also great to have a freezer filled with months’ worth of dinners. For now though, we’re buying our beef at the store.