Cooking With Ideas

Faux French Fries

Ok, faux french fries are really baked french fries. So, there is an oxymoron in the title here. But, they are still swell and work almost as well as the real thing. The recipe comes from Dean Ornish, where they are called Jean-Marc's Oven "Fries" complete with scare quotes. Ornish says: "Life without french fries would be sad indeed. These golden "faux" fries will satisfy any cravings you have for the other kind" (p. 216, Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish). The nature of the other kind is, perhaps, hinted at by Ornish's subtitle: 150 Easy, Low Fat, High Flavor Recipes. I have been making these low fat "fries", on occasion, for a few years. They come close to being a comfort food.

Don't know who Ornish is? Well, for a while everyone I knew was using his cookbooks. He consulted with so-called gourmets, so that foodies could actually try to eat healthily. And healthy was defined in particular forms -- low fat being key. When I looked him up on the web, I discovered that he founded the Preventive Medicine Research Institute -- which focuses on more than food. In addition to nutrition, the focus includes stress management, exercise and social support (also described as connection). There are sites for his comprehensive lifestyle change research in Pennsylvania and West Virginia hospitals. ANd, his website includes both prevention and reversalfood-related guidelines;for details, click here.

And the "fries"--well, here's my mildly modified version of his recipe, which is pretty darn simple and virtually identical to various recipes for baked "fries":

1. Buy one or two baking (aka russett) potatoes.

2. Cut the potato in half, the long way, and then make slices about 1/4 inch wide. Each slice can then be sliced again tomake french-fry-shaped potatoes! Soak the fries in room temperature water until you are ready to bake them.(This both prevents browning and removes some starch, making for crunchier fries.)

3. Bake in an oven preheated to somewhere between 425 degrees and 475 degrees. (Ornish calls for 475, but I never quite remember and the recipe works for anywhere in between.) I follow Ornish's advice and put parchment paper on my baking sheets. I do NOT follow his advice to spray the pan with an oily product. I do not use coarse sea salt (tried it, didn't like it); I use either kosher salt or ordinary table salt. I salt both before and after baking. The baking takes circa 20 minutes; I bake for 12 minutes or so and then move the "fries" around a bit.

4. Eat them in front of the television watching a movie. If you need another vegetable in your diet, go for ketchup (aka catsup).

Dean Ornish
French fries
baked fries
low fat

COMING SOON TO THIS VERY BLOG

>
Yes, this is your usual "keep an eye out for" or "watch for" without the eyeball picture or the pink watch! What's coming soon?

(1) Faux fries and their delights

(2) Gnocchi and Fried Bologna

(3) An Interview with Nancy Irelan of Red Trail Ridge Winery

(4) A magazine called GEEZ

(5) And, of course, much much more!

I was tagged by Tracey at Rah Cha Chow for a MEME.

The rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

I'd never heard of a meme before, but this is fun and a good addition to my occasional "blog watch" entries. The challenge: I do this blog pseudo-anonymously. (Ok, all of those readers who know exactly who I am, and even those who just figured it out, well, let that go for now.) And, I hate what I see as a predominance of self-indulgent blogging out there. Like anyone really cares. (I know, I know -- this blog is self-indulgent too. But really, some are just too too.)

So, figuring out how to do the five facts truthfully (more or less) and not too intrusively or self-indulgently was definitely more difficult than trying to figure out who to list as my five in "tagged-you're-it." Hmmm. What is a fact anyway? And a virtual tag?

FIVE FACTS ABOUT BIBLIOCHEF:

1. I read a lot. Like that comes as a shock to those of you who read this blog often. And like that distinguishes me from loads of people all over the country and world. Like that makes me an intellectual. Nah. I do love reading though. I particularly like it when I am stressed and need to hide. I hide inside books. I read murder mysteries and academic tomes. I read on airplanes and in lines. I used to read walking my dog. I read murder mysteries constantly while taking my Ph.D. qualifying exams. I love reading almost as much as I love food. Or maybe even more. Recently while stuck in a B&B in a town I did not know well, I read a Reader's Digest Condensed Book published in 1983. (Not sure what those are? Yes, Wikipedia has an entry on everything; here's their entry on Reader's Digest Condensed Books. What does that say? Maybe food is simply another excuse for reading. Maybe this blog is just another excuse to. . . . Who knew?

2. I never really liked cooking until I moved to upstate New York and this is true even though I have an old artist sketch book filled with recipes from my college and graduate student days. (Don't we all?) It may have been desperation in the face of few restaurants that drove me truly into the kitchen. (Though in the little town I first lived in in upstate NY, there was barely a food store, let alone a full fledged grocery store -- Earlville.) It may have been living alone amongst strangers. It may have simply been aging. But, for me, the love of cooking comes in part with my time here, in upstate New York.

3. I secretly (ok, not so secretly) love frozen food. I am of that generation. I was raised on it. I am lazy. I just do. And, I secretly (ok, again not so secretly) like to make recipes from off the back of packages. I restrain myself lots -- but once in a while. . . .

4. My truly favorite desperate for comfort food is macaroni and cheese.

5. I once wrote a response to a group of authors writing autobiographical biblical criticism in a funky bible journal called Semeia entitled "Who Better to Indulge?" Yep, who knew? Already self-indulgent. The only question: which self? (Want to browse some articles from the journal? Click here. If you scroll down you can even find an article on food. . .

TAGGED-YOU'RE-IT:

1. Try meeting up with I Heart Orange at http://iheartorange.typepad.com/i_heart_orange/. Why? Because I say so.
2. Check out Finger Lakes Weekend Wino -- just because I love the site. Who wouldn't?
3. Dustin Cutler, though his is not a blog, because he has supported me all along and makes the best bread ever. Where? Normal bread. Again, not a blog, but you can leave comments and feedback. . .
4. York Staters is one of my favorite drop-by-occasionally-blogs. You should too.
5. The Food Museum blog -- in part because I love their stuff on religion -- but mainly because it reminds me that education can be sily, irreverent, fun, smart.
6. Dazed and Confused is smart enough to have the same theme (colors etc) as Cooking with Ideas. And she writes murder mysteries. So, a tag seems so so very very logical.

Why tag these six? Click and see. Each one will challenge you, make you think, push your appetite. Yep, each fits with my theme: Eat. Drink. Read. Think. And is, indeed, for the bibliochef in all of us. Why six, though, you ask? Because rules are madetobe broken.

meme
tag

Once in a while, there is a food which is transcendent. Not too often. And I confess that I am unsure here, whether I mean transcendent as an objective phenomenological remark or as a subjective state evoked in the eater and/or viewer and/or creator. But I am sure of one thing: Enstrom's Milk Chocolate Almond Toffee is swell. It is, in fact, more than swell. It comes in a lovely box, wrapped in soft tissue. It is neither too sticky nor too hard. It is not impossible-to-eat-because-I-am aging-and-my-teeth-are-not-what-they-once-were toffee. It is not too sweet either. Covered with a sort of gravelly and sandy smuch of almond dust, the toffee is about 1/2 inch thick, a beautiful carmelly brown color, and it melts in just the right fashion in one's mouth. Yep, transcendent. And even better when it is a gift, undeserved and shared with someone who also knows transcendent toffee when she eats it. We tried, really we did -- not to eat it all in one evening. It lasted for quite a while in fact. Because it is so good.

And then I went to the web. Turns out they make a Dark Chocolate Almond Toffee. And some other things as well. Who are they? A family business in Grand Junction, Colorado (with a Denver store). So: to the toffee giver, thanks. And to Enstrom Candies, Inc.: Wow.

Enstrom Candies, Inc.
grand junction colorado 81501
1-800-enstrom, 367-8766
www.enstrom.com

Eating India by Chitrita Banerji is a sort of travelogue. The author/narrator moves from place to place across the subcontinent of India and reports on her adventures, mostly culinary. In doing so, she emphasizes the variety -- the many areas of India with different weather, different histories, different eating traditions. She offers occasional words on religion and religious difference and the ways it inflects food -- and reports, for example, on the impact of the partition (aka the split between Pakistan and India) with Punjabis moving to urban areas in India and spreading (and/or creating) a sort of pan-indian Punjabi culinary trend. (Of course, Punjabi food is what most of "us" -- non Indians -- think of as Indian food. We do so -- in my view -- for a variety of historical and orientalist reasons.) Bannerji also writes of coasts and seafood traditions, of coconut-filled and coconut-less traditions, of the varied impact of colonialism in Goa and elsewhere appearing and reappearing in the form of pastries. The book is chatty -- and I confess I finished it some time ago without finishing this review. Why? For some reason I found the book less successful in sustaining my interest that Banerji's earlier book The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal, where the essays were more eclectic. The trope of journeying around India simply did not hold up here. (Nor did her longing for the foods she misses living in Massachusetts, though this does locate her withint he subgenre of transnational memoir in many ways.) Perhaps I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to find the nuances -- Eating India simply felt like "and then I went here and then there and I ate this and then that." While I liked the narrator and in fact hoped she was enjoying her journeys, I wasn't able to go with her just by reading along. Alas. Will I try more of her work? Probably. Do I recommend this particular one? Not really. So: no one is perfect. And this book is not my cup of tea.

For my earlier review of The Hour of the Goddess, click here.

For other, equally mixed, reviews of Eating India, click here. (Be sure to scroll down and read a few really longish ones.)

And for ExpressIndia, click here.

Over the past few weeks or more, I have had a few "experimental" moments in the kitchen. All this means, in my case is giving up some of my undue dependence on cookbooks. Here are brief reports on three such moments:

Pea Soup or Pea Puree? So, there I was, in front of the refrigerator. And there I was in front of the freezer. I wanted to create a nice meal, a bit more than just cooking, and there was not much there to use for a surprise spash of panache -- especially since it was (a) not my place and (b) I did not do the food shopping and . . . I had a blender, a microwave (and to be honest, downstairs, a gas stove, but hey, I was trying.) What could I do? Inspiration: a bag of frozen peas and a blender. Some almonds. Hmmm. Here's what I did:

1.Toss a few cups of frozen peas into a blender and run the darn thing til you produce a pea puree that is a consistency you like. Make it the consistency of soup even! What do use to thin it? I used a bit of milk. Not much. Just a bit. Hurrah.

2. Consider what spices are around and findable -- I used some cumin, and a bit of this and that.

3. Keep tasting.

4.Meanwhile, i melted some butter with a bit of cayenne and some brown sugar. Into this, I dropped some almonds. I immediately stopped heating the darn things. After they cooled and congealed, I chopped them. (And I ate a few.)

5. I warmed the pea soup (aka thinned, spiced pea puree) in the microwave and garnished with the chopped almonds. Voila! A success.

Carrot Soup or Carrot Puree? So, one of my flaws is if something works, I overdo it. I once owned 4 colors of the same parachute pants (think decades ago). I once made so much couscous I drove my main food audience into couscous aversion. So, once the pea experiment turned out well I tried a variant shortly thereafter with carrots. Great idea, but not quite right in the execution. And really, there is a limit to repetition. Here's what I did and a critique:

1. I finely chopped some ginger and put it into some very hot water in a blender (maybe 1/4 cup water and a tablespoon of ginger?) and let it sit for a while so the ginger-y tastiness would enter the water.

2. Then I stuck (ok, I chopped them a bit but not much) a bag of those organic baby carrots from a bag into the blender and blended away.

3. I served the carrots like a soup, with tiny cubes of goat cheese as garnish and a bit of jalapeno as well.

4. While this was ok, its main down side was texture. It just was a tad too chunky. And, it needed something to make it taste more like soup and less like carrot puree. More goat cheesewould have helped because its tartness helped mitigate the sweetness of the carrots. Still working on this one!

Trout Meuniere Goes Out to Play! Ok, I confess alll that is required to make this is to change what you add to the flour when you make trout meuniere. And all trout meuniere is is pan fried trout in butter; the trout is dredged in flour with salt and pepper. My modification: add loads of homemade curry powder to the flour. And then serve it with ginger-y potatoes. MMMMM. Click here for the recipe for the homemade curry powder, which comes from an old Cooking Light from which I often make lamb shank curry and tomato/onion/lime salad and raita and a version of mango chutney. (My copy is a messy mess. But still legible.) Who knew what that curry would do to transform trout.

So: my lesson learned. A little flexibility might help. Try an experiment. You never know.

I admit it. I am spoiled. I get lots of presents and many of them end up here, at Cooking with Ideas. One way or another, my blog habit is being supported. It's addictive, blogging. But the habit is not as bad as drugs, I guess. . . It is a version of buying books. Why oh why do I think buying $100 worth of books is spending less than $100 on clothes? Is it all because some things are tax deductible and others are not?

Anyway, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, by Laura Schenone was a gift. A surprise. I had never even heard the title (though I did review the author's earlier James Beard Award Winning book A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. For the Cooking with Ideas review, click here.) In the case of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken I devoured the book (ok, don't be so literal) quite soon after receiving it. I thought about all those lost bits of my own family recipe. I thought about ravioli presses I had seen and pasta machines at Church's hardware on Exchange Street. But at that point I did not have time to write about it. So, I am re-reading this "search for food and family" and writing about it as I go along.

The book is, I guess, part of a trend -- tracing one's own personal history through food rather than genealogical charts. For Schenone, the journey is as much about America as it is Italy; so it has its beginning with epigraphs from New Jersey native son Walt Whitman (not the bridge), Zora Neale Hurston, and Pellegrino Artusi. In this it is indeed a book that involves Hoboken -- it is as much about memory and story as it is about ravioli; thus the book opens with a "myth of origin" and with the sentence "Memory was her gift." Who is it who has this gift? The author's great grandmother, or was it her grandmother? Her ravioli and her stories become the rationale for explorations and cooking experiments, travel and story telling in New Jersey and Liguria. Meeting relatives anew and meeting strangers who become mentors and friends, Schenone goes in search of a way to "authenticate" -- find the real provenance for -- a family ravioli recipe. How is it made she asks -- with machine? with press? rolling out or not? With what is it filled? Raw meat or no meat? Spinach or other greens? In asking all these questions, Schenone discovers that authenticity is not all it's cracked up to be (somehow her route to this view seems more persuasive than many postmodern critiques of authenticity though how long it takes her to make this discovery is more than a little startling). In reading the book, I discovered a land I had never heard of -- Liguria -- and found in myself an urge to make my own home made pasta. I even want to try making something-other-than-store-bought ravioli. (I made some pasta a while ago in cooking school in Denver; now I just have to do it at home! And, maybe, my reading/cooking superego mutters I have to move beyond what I imagined as utterly home made-- machine made pasta -- to roll my own. Maybe.) Why? Not because I am on a journey to authenticity or to an Italian heritage but just because it tastes so darn good, it's a bit of a challenge (to read Schenone hand rolling counts as more than a bit of a challenge), and since I do not have to do so, it'd be fun. And all this might be an excuse to travel to Liguria, the smallest region of Italy and a coastal (and mountainous) one at that!

There's loads more to the book: the place of ravioli in Christmas holidays, the woes of trying to learn while pasta is sticking to everything in sight, the tales and tensions of families across generations including the not-always-thrilled reactions of Schenone's husband and children to her "obsession" with ravioli. Trips to cemeteries, to relatives last seen years ago at an elderly familial connection's funeral, to a friend's kitchen to try new recipes. Schenone meets women who make chesnut flour and men who kill pigs. She considers sausage making and the greens on the mountains of Liguria and how those are transmogrified by immigrant women into the choice of spinach. She considers how cream cheese (yes, Philadelphia brand) enters recipes for ravioli filling and Ligurian fresh cheese (very different and yet somehow similar) is lost in the translation. She explores the many voices of women -- and those of some men in her quest. And she thinks about tradition. Thus, Schenone reminds us that

Much of what the world loves as Italian food today is not "traditional" but modern invention. (p. 48)

By this, she means not just that Italian American food has only a distant relation to Italy but that the various regions of Europe which eventually become the nation-state of Italy come together only very recently in historical memory, that Italy is in fact both new and old. As she puts it:

It is an odd idea to imagine that immigrants had to leave home to eat the food of home. In this way, Italians around the world fueled an imagined culinary tradition. It was what life "should have been,". . . What should have been but was not. . . . (p. 49)

Poverty, for example, meant that many treasure traditions that came from an immigrant lineage which immigrated exactly because they were unable to participate in those traditions of eating in Italy;they were hungry and poor and this is, in large measure, what drove the diaspora. How ravioli traveled, was transformed, was invented and reinvented in all this is the tale she pursues. It moved, in sum, with the women and men who moved across oceans and time.

To make it today? Schenone offers pictures, lengthy descriptive directions and rcipes. She offers, as well, several pages of resources. Finally, she offers the suggestion, hidden in the 326 page book that one search out those who know how and get a lesson in both cooking, history and connection. Keep watching here. Oneday, I may, indeed, make ravioli.

Laura Schenone
ravioli
food memoir
Hoboken
Liguria
Italy
Italian food
Italian American

I read Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I have subscraibed for years. The issues always arrive months before the dates on their covers -- so I just finished the March/April 2008 volume. It has a lovely reproduction of a cover illustration from the Black Mask -- an earlier era pulp magazine. It has a murder mystery set in Istanbul complete with a reference to Topkapi Palace (a place I loved when I visited it). But, the reason I mention it here: A short story entitled "The Blue Plate Special" (which followed one called Such Rage for Honey by Cheryl Rogers, and honey clearly counts as food)l. BUt "The Blue Plate Special" by Brendan DuBois is why I am writing here. Somehow this little story about [spoiler alert] domestic violence and solutions to it -- involving retired CIA agents who own lovely diners made me wonder. Yes, the main female character is very very smart. But: Why, oh why, does this guy think the solution to domestic violence requires a former CIA agent to deign to take a battered woman seriously? Why oh why does the author create a narrative in which other women, including the female character's mother, seem unlikely to support her in dealing with the violent perpetrator?

On the other hand, two positives: the descriptions of food --mainly eggs cooked lovingly and attentively by the former CIA agent who owns the diner -- are swell. And, the perpetrator of domestic violence. Well, let's just say the blue plate special likely caught him by surprise. Imagine. A guy who takes responsibility for other guy's violence. Wow.

So: Ellery Queen and food-related mysteries -- all in the March/April 2008 issue.

Ellery Queen
Brendan DuBois
murder mystery
short story

I was Tagged -- and Now I am Tagging. . .

I was tagged by Tracey at Rah Cha Chow for a MEME.

The rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 5 facts about yourself
3. Tag 5 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

I'd never heard of a meme before, but this is fun and a good addition to my occasional "blog watch" entries. The challenge: I do this blog pseudo-anonymously. (Ok, all of those readers who know exactly who I am, and even those who just figured it out, well, let that go for now.) And, I hate what I see as a predominance of self-indulgent blogging out there. Like anyone really cares. (I know, I know -- this blog is self-indulgent too. But really, some are just too too.)

So, figuring out how to do the five facts truthfully (more or less) and not too intrusively or self-indulgently was definitely more difficult than trying to figure out who to list as my five in "tagged-you're-it." Hmmm. What is a fact anyway? And a virtual tag?

FIVE FACTS ABOUT BIBLIOCHEF:

1. I read a lot. Like that comes as a shock to those of you who read this blog often. And like that distinguishes me from loads of people all over the country and world. Like that makes me an intellectual. Nah. I do love reading though. I particularly like it when I am stressed and need to hide. I hide inside books. I read murder mysteries and academic tomes. I read on airplanes and in lines. I used to read walking my dog. I read murder mysteries constantly while taking my Ph.D. qualifying exams. I love reading almost as much as I love food. Or maybe even more. Recently while stuck in a B&B in a town I did not know well, I read a Reader's Digest Condensed Book published in 1983. (Not sure what those are? Yes, Wikipedia has an entry on everything; here's their entry on Reader's Digest Condensed Books. What does that say? Maybe food is simply another excuse for reading. Maybe this blog is just another excuse to. . . . Who knew?

2. I never really liked cooking until I moved to upstate New York and this is true even though I have an old artist sketch book filled with recipes from my college and graduate student days. (Don't we all?) It may have been desperation in the face of few restaurants that drove me truly into the kitchen. (Though in the little town I first lived in in upstate NY, there was barely a food store, let alone a full fledged grocery store -- Earlville.) It may have been living alone amongst strangers. It may have simply been aging. But, for me, the love of cooking comes in part with my time here, in upstate New York.

3. I secretly (ok, not so secretly) love frozen food. I am of that generation. I was raised on it. I am lazy. I just do. And, I secretly (ok, again not so secretly) like to make recipes from off the back of packages. I restrain myself lots -- but once in a while. . . .

4. My truly favorite desperate for comfort food is macaroni and cheese.

5. I once wrote a response to a group of authors writing autobiographical biblical criticism in a funky bible journal called Semeia entitled "Who Better to Indulge?" Yep, who knew? Already self-indulgent. The only question: which self? (Want to browse some articles from the journal? Click here. If you scroll down you can even find an article on food. . .

TAGGED-YOU'RE-IT:

1. Try meeting up with I Heart Orange at http://iheartorange.typepad.com/i_heart_orange/. Why? Because I say so.
2. Check out Finger Lakes Weekend Wino -- just because I love the site. Who wouldn't?
3. Dustin Cutler, though his is not a blog, because he has supported me all along and makes the best bread ever. Where? Normal bread. Again, not a blog, but you can leave comments and feedback. . .
4. York Staters is one of my favorite drop-by-occasionally-blogs. You should too.
5. The Food Museum blog -- in part because I love their stuff on religion -- but mainly because it reminds me that education can be sily, irreverent, fun, smart.
6. Dazed and Confused is smart enough to have the same theme (colors etc) as Cooking with Ideas. And she writes murder mysteries. So, a tag seems so so very very logical.

Why tag these six? Click and see. Each one will challenge you, make you think, push your appetite. Yep, each fits with my theme: Eat. Drink. Read. Think. And is, indeed, for the bibliochef in all of us. Why six, though, you ask? Because rules are madetobe broken.

meme
tag

Toffee. . . .

Once in a while, there is a food which is transcendent. Not too often. And I confess that I am unsure here, whether I mean transcendent as an objective phenomenological remark or as a subjective state evoked in the eater and/or viewer and/or creator. But I am sure of one thing: Enstrom's Milk Chocolate Almond Toffee is swell. It is, in fact, more than swell. It comes in a lovely box, wrapped in soft tissue. It is neither too sticky nor too hard. It is not impossible-to-eat-because-I-am aging-and-my-teeth-are-not-what-they-once-were toffee. It is not too sweet either. Covered with a sort of gravelly and sandy smuch of almond dust, the toffee is about 1/2 inch thick, a beautiful carmelly brown color, and it melts in just the right fashion in one's mouth. Yep, transcendent. And even better when it is a gift, undeserved and shared with someone who also knows transcendent toffee when she eats it. We tried, really we did -- not to eat it all in one evening. It lasted for quite a while in fact. Because it is so good.

And then I went to the web. Turns out they make a Dark Chocolate Almond Toffee. And some other things as well. Who are they? A family business in Grand Junction, Colorado (with a Denver store). So: to the toffee giver, thanks. And to Enstrom Candies, Inc.: Wow.

Enstrom Candies, Inc.
grand junction colorado 81501
1-800-enstrom, 367-8766
www.enstrom.com

Eating India

Eating India by Chitrita Banerji is a sort of travelogue. The author/narrator moves from place to place across the subcontinent of India and reports on her adventures, mostly culinary. In doing so, she emphasizes the variety -- the many areas of India with different weather, different histories, different eating traditions. She offers occasional words on religion and religious difference and the ways it inflects food -- and reports, for example, on the impact of the partition (aka the split between Pakistan and India) with Punjabis moving to urban areas in India and spreading (and/or creating) a sort of pan-indian Punjabi culinary trend. (Of course, Punjabi food is what most of "us" -- non Indians -- think of as Indian food. We do so -- in my view -- for a variety of historical and orientalist reasons.) Bannerji also writes of coasts and seafood traditions, of coconut-filled and coconut-less traditions, of the varied impact of colonialism in Goa and elsewhere appearing and reappearing in the form of pastries. The book is chatty -- and I confess I finished it some time ago without finishing this review. Why? For some reason I found the book less successful in sustaining my interest that Banerji's earlier book The Hour of the Goddess: Memories of Women, Food and Ritual in Bengal, where the essays were more eclectic. The trope of journeying around India simply did not hold up here. (Nor did her longing for the foods she misses living in Massachusetts, though this does locate her withint he subgenre of transnational memoir in many ways.) Perhaps I am not knowledgeable enough to be able to find the nuances -- Eating India simply felt like "and then I went here and then there and I ate this and then that." While I liked the narrator and in fact hoped she was enjoying her journeys, I wasn't able to go with her just by reading along. Alas. Will I try more of her work? Probably. Do I recommend this particular one? Not really. So: no one is perfect. And this book is not my cup of tea.

For my earlier review of The Hour of the Goddess, click here.

For other, equally mixed, reviews of Eating India, click here. (Be sure to scroll down and read a few really longish ones.)

And for ExpressIndia, click here.

Experimental Moments

Over the past few weeks or more, I have had a few "experimental" moments in the kitchen. All this means, in my case is giving up some of my undue dependence on cookbooks. Here are brief reports on three such moments:

Pea Soup or Pea Puree? So, there I was, in front of the refrigerator. And there I was in front of the freezer. I wanted to create a nice meal, a bit more than just cooking, and there was not much there to use for a surprise spash of panache -- especially since it was (a) not my place and (b) I did not do the food shopping and . . . I had a blender, a microwave (and to be honest, downstairs, a gas stove, but hey, I was trying.) What could I do? Inspiration: a bag of frozen peas and a blender. Some almonds. Hmmm. Here's what I did:

1.Toss a few cups of frozen peas into a blender and run the darn thing til you produce a pea puree that is a consistency you like. Make it the consistency of soup even! What do use to thin it? I used a bit of milk. Not much. Just a bit. Hurrah.

2. Consider what spices are around and findable -- I used some cumin, and a bit of this and that.

3. Keep tasting.

4.Meanwhile, i melted some butter with a bit of cayenne and some brown sugar. Into this, I dropped some almonds. I immediately stopped heating the darn things. After they cooled and congealed, I chopped them. (And I ate a few.)

5. I warmed the pea soup (aka thinned, spiced pea puree) in the microwave and garnished with the chopped almonds. Voila! A success.

Carrot Soup or Carrot Puree? So, one of my flaws is if something works, I overdo it. I once owned 4 colors of the same parachute pants (think decades ago). I once made so much couscous I drove my main food audience into couscous aversion. So, once the pea experiment turned out well I tried a variant shortly thereafter with carrots. Great idea, but not quite right in the execution. And really, there is a limit to repetition. Here's what I did and a critique:

1. I finely chopped some ginger and put it into some very hot water in a blender (maybe 1/4 cup water and a tablespoon of ginger?) and let it sit for a while so the ginger-y tastiness would enter the water.

2. Then I stuck (ok, I chopped them a bit but not much) a bag of those organic baby carrots from a bag into the blender and blended away.

3. I served the carrots like a soup, with tiny cubes of goat cheese as garnish and a bit of jalapeno as well.

4. While this was ok, its main down side was texture. It just was a tad too chunky. And, it needed something to make it taste more like soup and less like carrot puree. More goat cheesewould have helped because its tartness helped mitigate the sweetness of the carrots. Still working on this one!

Trout Meuniere Goes Out to Play! Ok, I confess alll that is required to make this is to change what you add to the flour when you make trout meuniere. And all trout meuniere is is pan fried trout in butter; the trout is dredged in flour with salt and pepper. My modification: add loads of homemade curry powder to the flour. And then serve it with ginger-y potatoes. MMMMM. Click here for the recipe for the homemade curry powder, which comes from an old Cooking Light from which I often make lamb shank curry and tomato/onion/lime salad and raita and a version of mango chutney. (My copy is a messy mess. But still legible.) Who knew what that curry would do to transform trout.

So: my lesson learned. A little flexibility might help. Try an experiment. You never know.

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken

I admit it. I am spoiled. I get lots of presents and many of them end up here, at Cooking with Ideas. One way or another, my blog habit is being supported. It's addictive, blogging. But the habit is not as bad as drugs, I guess. . . It is a version of buying books. Why oh why do I think buying $100 worth of books is spending less than $100 on clothes? Is it all because some things are tax deductible and others are not?

Anyway, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, by Laura Schenone was a gift. A surprise. I had never even heard the title (though I did review the author's earlier James Beard Award Winning book A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. For the Cooking with Ideas review, click here.) In the case of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken I devoured the book (ok, don't be so literal) quite soon after receiving it. I thought about all those lost bits of my own family recipe. I thought about ravioli presses I had seen and pasta machines at Church's hardware on Exchange Street. But at that point I did not have time to write about it. So, I am re-reading this "search for food and family" and writing about it as I go along.

The book is, I guess, part of a trend -- tracing one's own personal history through food rather than genealogical charts. For Schenone, the journey is as much about America as it is Italy; so it has its beginning with epigraphs from New Jersey native son Walt Whitman (not the bridge), Zora Neale Hurston, and Pellegrino Artusi. In this it is indeed a book that involves Hoboken -- it is as much about memory and story as it is about ravioli; thus the book opens with a "myth of origin" and with the sentence "Memory was her gift." Who is it who has this gift? The author's great grandmother, or was it her grandmother? Her ravioli and her stories become the rationale for explorations and cooking experiments, travel and story telling in New Jersey and Liguria. Meeting relatives anew and meeting strangers who become mentors and friends, Schenone goes in search of a way to "authenticate" -- find the real provenance for -- a family ravioli recipe. How is it made she asks -- with machine? with press? rolling out or not? With what is it filled? Raw meat or no meat? Spinach or other greens? In asking all these questions, Schenone discovers that authenticity is not all it's cracked up to be (somehow her route to this view seems more persuasive than many postmodern critiques of authenticity though how long it takes her to make this discovery is more than a little startling). In reading the book, I discovered a land I had never heard of -- Liguria -- and found in myself an urge to make my own home made pasta. I even want to try making something-other-than-store-bought ravioli. (I made some pasta a while ago in cooking school in Denver; now I just have to do it at home! And, maybe, my reading/cooking superego mutters I have to move beyond what I imagined as utterly home made-- machine made pasta -- to roll my own. Maybe.) Why? Not because I am on a journey to authenticity or to an Italian heritage but just because it tastes so darn good, it's a bit of a challenge (to read Schenone hand rolling counts as more than a bit of a challenge), and since I do not have to do so, it'd be fun. And all this might be an excuse to travel to Liguria, the smallest region of Italy and a coastal (and mountainous) one at that!

There's loads more to the book: the place of ravioli in Christmas holidays, the woes of trying to learn while pasta is sticking to everything in sight, the tales and tensions of families across generations including the not-always-thrilled reactions of Schenone's husband and children to her "obsession" with ravioli. Trips to cemeteries, to relatives last seen years ago at an elderly familial connection's funeral, to a friend's kitchen to try new recipes. Schenone meets women who make chesnut flour and men who kill pigs. She considers sausage making and the greens on the mountains of Liguria and how those are transmogrified by immigrant women into the choice of spinach. She considers how cream cheese (yes, Philadelphia brand) enters recipes for ravioli filling and Ligurian fresh cheese (very different and yet somehow similar) is lost in the translation. She explores the many voices of women -- and those of some men in her quest. And she thinks about tradition. Thus, Schenone reminds us that

Much of what the world loves as Italian food today is not "traditional" but modern invention. (p. 48)

By this, she means not just that Italian American food has only a distant relation to Italy but that the various regions of Europe which eventually become the nation-state of Italy come together only very recently in historical memory, that Italy is in fact both new and old. As she puts it:

It is an odd idea to imagine that immigrants had to leave home to eat the food of home. In this way, Italians around the world fueled an imagined culinary tradition. It was what life "should have been,". . . What should have been but was not. . . . (p. 49)

Poverty, for example, meant that many treasure traditions that came from an immigrant lineage which immigrated exactly because they were unable to participate in those traditions of eating in Italy;they were hungry and poor and this is, in large measure, what drove the diaspora. How ravioli traveled, was transformed, was invented and reinvented in all this is the tale she pursues. It moved, in sum, with the women and men who moved across oceans and time.

To make it today? Schenone offers pictures, lengthy descriptive directions and rcipes. She offers, as well, several pages of resources. Finally, she offers the suggestion, hidden in the 326 page book that one search out those who know how and get a lesson in both cooking, history and connection. Keep watching here. Oneday, I may, indeed, make ravioli.

Laura Schenone
ravioli
food memoir
Hoboken
Liguria
Italy
Italian food
Italian American

A Short Story to Die For

I read Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I have subscraibed for years. The issues always arrive months before the dates on their covers -- so I just finished the March/April 2008 volume. It has a lovely reproduction of a cover illustration from the Black Mask -- an earlier era pulp magazine. It has a murder mystery set in Istanbul complete with a reference to Topkapi Palace (a place I loved when I visited it). But, the reason I mention it here: A short story entitled "The Blue Plate Special" (which followed one called Such Rage for Honey by Cheryl Rogers, and honey clearly counts as food)l. BUt "The Blue Plate Special" by Brendan DuBois is why I am writing here. Somehow this little story about [spoiler alert] domestic violence and solutions to it -- involving retired CIA agents who own lovely diners made me wonder. Yes, the main female character is very very smart. But: Why, oh why, does this guy think the solution to domestic violence requires a former CIA agent to deign to take a battered woman seriously? Why oh why does the author create a narrative in which other women, including the female character's mother, seem unlikely to support her in dealing with the violent perpetrator?

On the other hand, two positives: the descriptions of food --mainly eggs cooked lovingly and attentively by the former CIA agent who owns the diner -- are swell. And, the perpetrator of domestic violence. Well, let's just say the blue plate special likely caught him by surprise. Imagine. A guy who takes responsibility for other guy's violence. Wow.

So: Ellery Queen and food-related mysteries -- all in the March/April 2008 issue.

Ellery Queen
Brendan DuBois
murder mystery
short story