Christmas pudding

Christmas Pudding (a.k.a. Plum Pudding, Figgy Pudding)

Note — This should be prepared a minimum of one whole day before serving, in order to let it set up and the flavours to meld properly. It can, however, be kept for six months or more, occasionally dosing with more alcohol until saturated (about 1 month).

12 oz figs, stemmed
12 oz raisins
12 oz prunes
6 oz dried apricots
1 large orange
1 small lemon
1 oz dark rum or molasses
1 c hot water
Cut all dried fruit to about raisin size and put in a large bowl. Zest and then juice the lemon and orange; reserve the zest. Pour orange juice, lemon juice, and rum over the dried fruit, then add hot water. Mix together and leave to macerate about an hour.

1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp white pepper
lemon and orange zest previously prepared
1 cup flour
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
Add spices to zest and mix very well, then add flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda and mix again.

1/4 cup butter, melted
3 eggs, beaten
16 oz nuts (slivered almonds and apricot kernels)
milk or soymilk as necessary
When the dried fruits have absorbed all the liquid, stir the butter and eggs into them, then the nuts. Mix this thoroughly with the dry ingredients, adding milk as necessary to get the batter to a consistency thinner than that of mashed potatoes but thicker than cake batter.

Moisten and flour a large dishcloth, then use it to line a mould (a 2-quart round glass bowl works well here). Pour the pudding batter into the cloth and tie it at the top with twine or a rubber band, allowing a little room for expansion. Place the mould on a rack at the bottom of a large stockpot, add enough water to come halfway up the sides of the mould, and bring to a boil. Steam the pudding for 4 hours or until a chopstick stuck into the middle comes out clean. Check pot occasionally to make sure the water does not run out.

When the pudding is cooked through, pull the mould out of the pot and set it out to cool. Once cool enough to touch, carefully peel the cloth off (the surface may stick a little). If serving within the next day or two, flip it flat side down onto a platter and pour about 2 oz dark rum over the top to soak in immediately, then cover it with foil and put away in a cupboard. Traditionally, it is warmed before serving, then flambéed at the table (using hot 151-proof rum) and served with hard sauce.

This pudding can keep for six months or more in a closed container at room temperature, if an ounce or so of rum is poured over it every week for the first month. This will result in an increasingly boozy pudding, which should be warmed up before flambéeing in order to vapourize and flame off more of the alcohol. Or not, if you prefer — I suppose it ultimately depends on your audience.

Biji croquettes

Minced: 1 carrot, 1 stick celery, 1 onion, 4 cloves garlic.
Fried with spices until onions were transparent.
Added: 2 c biji, 1/2 c rice flour (regular), some soy sauce.
Adjusted seasonings, then added 1 egg and mixed in thoroughly.
Rolled apricot-sized lumps of this mixture in more rice flour (seasoned with salt/pepper/garlic), compressed into patties, then shallow fried in high-temp oil (at medium heat) on both sides until brown.

Notes: Rice flour + egg make an even better binder for croquettes than wheat flour + egg. I don’t think these would work very well for grilling, but they work fine shallow fried — try pan fried next time to conserve oil?

Mussels, take 2

We decided to elaborate on the previous dish of mussels in white wine, to see what happened.

Didn’t have any shallots, so instead I used a tablespoon or two of scallion compound butter, plus three pressed cloves of garlic. When this started smelling, I added the zest from one tiny orange (probably 2.5″ diameter), added a glass of chardonnay, then dropped in a half-kilo of mussels and simmered as before.

Served this, once again, with the lemon-garlic pasta, except this time I added the juice from the same orange. Also, the only bread we had lying about was some green onion bread from 99 Ranch last Monday.

Verdict: Shallots are distinctly superior to garlic in this dish; the sweetness is helpful.  The orange zest was nice, but there was too much of it. The bread was a terrible match, didn’t go at all.  On the other hand, the touch of orange juice was a lovely addition to the lemon-garlic pasta.

Next time try this: Brown 2 garlic cloves in butter (for bitterness), add 1/2 c shallots, cook until soft. Add only a teaspoon of orange zest (plus maybe a little bit of minced fennel tops), then wine and mussels. When mussels are done, pull them out; temper the broth with a quarter-cup or so of the green-box soy milk, warm again, then strain into a bowl. (Ideally this bowl would already contain some chiffonaded arugula and basil, plus finely sliced fennel bulb.) Serve it with good Western bread and lemon-orange-garlic pasta.

Eeeeeurgh.

I just finished a rather yucky culinary task. Hope it turns out to have been worth it.

So it turns out that what I thought was chicken breast was actually an entire boneless turkey thigh, cut into a single sheet of meat with the skin still attached. Upon finding this out, I took the opportunity to make something resembling porchetta: I rolled the meat up with fennel tops, garlic, salt and pepper, wrapped it in the skin, tied it with twine, and marinated in salted red wine before baking in the marinade. It smells marvelous; I peeled the skin off and sliced it thin for sandwiches, since Daniel’s a big fan of turkey sandwiches. He says it’s tasty.

Byproducts:  All the skin (dyed excitingly purple on one side) and a bit of fatty tissue that didn’t cook out; pan juices consisting of boiled wine, drippings, and the fat that did cook out. I put the former in a lump in the container with the sliced meat and refrigerated it. The latter I poured off into a pan, where it turned into a weird meat-and-wine gelatin with a thick layer of congealed fat on top. These two sets of leftovers clearly demanded a plan.

Boiled wine and gelatinous meat juices, flavoured with fennel and garlic? Sounded like a start for a vaguely-medieval pasta sauce. I figured I should try mincing the cooked skin and fat really finely, so that when cooked with caramelized onions it would basically disappear into a puddle of oil with tiny crispy protein bits in it. Well, I just did that, and EWWWW. Seriously. Not only did my fingers get greasy and smell like meat, the stuff was of a totally nauseating texture — somewhere between wood-ear mushrooms and, I don’t know, boiled bacon or something.  And it was in these big rubbery sheets with extensive purple stains and a disconcerting fennel smell, and the whole thing just seemed like someone’s dinner from Unknown Kadath.

Anyhow. I’ll post about it later. I hope it turns out well.

ETA: It totally was. This was a phenomenally rich, sweet, medieval-tasting sauce — a proof that a tomato-less pasta sauce can be as gorgeous as a well-caramelized ragú.

I first soaked a handful of raisins in my own heavily-spiced dark rum and some hot water. I took the gross minced stuff aforementioned, added the fat from the top of the drippings, and melted it all in a saucepan until it was sizzling. Then I added one whole largish onion, sliced thinly, and a teaspoon or so of minced rosemary; mushed the raisins and three or four cloves of garlic through a garlic press and added them too; and cooked the whole mess until the onions were brownish.  I then added the fennel-flavoured wine jelly (which de-jelled immediately) and another teaspoon of minced rosemary, threw in probably a tablespoon each of white pepper powder and fresh-ground black pepper and a pinch of cinnamon, and added a dash of wine and a little butter to make a reasonable sauce consistency. Served this with penne rigate, which took up the sauce beautifully and let the little bits of caramelized onion get into their tubes, and a glass of the 2007 Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon.

Truly, a beautiful thing. I’m going to have to make a point of caramelizing onions with minced soaked raisins more often. Incredibly decadent-tasting, quite medieval in effect with all the sweetness and spices and no tomato or pepper.  The Cabernet, one of our faves, brought out the raisiny notes in the sauce just right. The slight funkiness of the meat fats (strongly-flavoured terrestrial meats always disturb me a tiny bit) was smoothed out by the sweet and sulfurous onion and the various spices. And all this from the parts of a marinated roasted boneless turkey thigh that one might reasonably discard… it was totally worth the gross fingers yesterday.

Then again, a culinary pleasure today is almost always worth an inconvenience yesterday. It’s one of those principles that keeps me going.

Braised cabbage with eggs

Totally winged this one, based only on a rough description of a similar cooking technique, but it was good. Serves 2.

1 smallish onion

1 tbsp schmaltz + 1 small handful gribenes (or 2 slices diced bacon; basically you want some animal fat and associated little bits of meat)

1 tbsp bland cooking oil

1/2 a medium head of green cabbage, in 1-cm-wide strips

3 sprigs fresh dill

2 c water (or broth, beer, or wine)

2 eggs

Cook down the bacon, or melt the schmaltz; add oil, then gribenes and onion, and stir. When the onion’s clear, add the cabbage and dill and stir in thoroughly, along with a bit of salt. When it all hits cooking temperature, add the liquid. Bring to a simmer, then make two little depressions in the stuff and crack the eggs into them, breaking the yolks. Grind black pepper over the top, cover, and let it simmer on low until the eggs are cooked, at which point everything else will be done too. Serve with bread for soaking up the juice, and a decent strongly-flavoured beer — Dunkelweizen, perhaps, though the doppelbock was pretty good too.

Possible variations: Cantonese-style with laap cheong, rice wine, and no dill, served over Chinese rice; or using butter instead of meat fat.

Mussels: a note

We bought a kilo of frozen New Zealand greenlip mussels ($7) over the weekend at Ai Hoa Market in L.A. Chinatown. The brand was Sanford Sustainable Seafood (http://live.isitesoftware.co.nz/sanford/).

Today I cooked half of them, very simply: I sauteed a half-cup or so of minced shallots in a tablespoon of butter, added a cup of white wine (Charles Shaw chardonnay) and the frozen mussels, and simmered them with the lid on until they were done. Then I served them with some Berbere bread from Elat Market.

We added some lemon-garlic spaghetti (with Sciabica olive oil, thanks Dad!) and a salad with lettuce, mung bean sprouts (aka Asian iceberg lettuce), a handful of salted fennel tops, and tangerine vinaigrette. Also a couple of glasses of the chardonnay that I’d opened.

Seriously, these were the best mussels either of us have ever had. Big and juicy, just a little chewy, very clean flavoured, with an incredibly rich, complex, almost mushroomy aroma and a lingering sweetness about them.  The broth was heavenly. I cannot overstate how good these mussels were — and I wasn’t even all that terribly hungry, as I’d already taken the edge off with the salad, so it wasn’t just that. I could eat so many of these. I’m noting it here so that I remember the brand and store.

Also, the Charles Shaw chardonnay put in a lackluster performance when we first tried it with pasta carbonara, but in this dinner it was excellent. It seems to suit seafood and citrus flavours very well.

Things to do with meat

The recent spate of neighbors moving out has left us with a great deal of scavenging to do. In addition, a dinner we did back in October at my parents’ place left me with a whole lot of chicken bits. This forced me to figure out what to do with various kinds of scrap meat. Here I am recording some of the things I tried.

From 4 dozen bone-and-skin-on chicken thighs which we skinned, deboned, and de-fatted:

• Femurs go for stock. Note: next time do not use cabbage, as it emitted a noxious fume some time about 12 hours after initial boiling. Experimented with cracking the bones to allow the marrow to perfuse the liquid; this has certainly done no harm, though it hasn’t been cooked long enough for the bones to soften up yet. Will clarify in the fridge and then freeze, as before.
• Fat and skin chopped fine with an onion, rendered, then strained, yielded about 3 cups of very nice schmaltz and 2 cups of gribenes. Salted these immediately, then refrigerated them to use as crunchy pseudo-bacon bits. Note: Running the skins through some kind of food processor or grinder rather than chopping would be a much, much easier and less unpleasant experience, as well as yielding more uniform gribenes.

From ~2 lbs lean pork steaks, looking a bit gray and sketchy when I moved it from the fridge to the freezer:

• Cubed the frozen pork into 3 cm chunks for carnitas; added cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, frozen roasted peppers (3 jalapenos and about 2 poblanos), a few bay leaves, trimmings of an onion, and 8 cloves of garlic that had started to sprout. Cooked in slow-cooker on high until the meat is very tender, then picked out the meat and fried it (with fat and broth skimmed from the cooking pan) in a pan until brown. Daniel says it’s very good and not at all sketchy-tasting; I didn’t try any, as the taste of pork does not make me happy except in very small quantities. The cubes are now freezing individually, to be added to beans and such for a touch of pork flavour. The leftover broth is cooling; I’ll strain and freeze it in the morning, maybe eventually use it as a base for making Mexican rice or something.  I would use a pressure cooker to really sterilize this meat, given the choice, but I don’t have one. (ETA: I did use it to make Mexican rice, and it was very good and not excessively porky.)

From about 1 lb ground pork, frozen:

• 1/2 mixed with 2 cups bulgur into sort-of kibbeh patties, but seasoned with shallot, sage, and thyme. This was reasonably good, but not stellar.
• A large batch of (modified) ragù alla napoletana is on the stove right now; I’m letting it sit overnight to let the flavours mingle, and tomorrow will freeze in 2-serving-size increments. I got some top-notch organic celery at the farmers market, which was part of the impetus. Besides 6 stalks of this, also 2 onions and 2 carrots and olive oil for the soffrito; a large can of whole tomatoes plus 8 rather unfortunate-looking fresh romas, 2 cans of tomato paste, a good bit of scraped nutmeg, pinch of oregano, 1 T butter, a half-cup or so of over-oxidized red wine, and a whole lot of fresh ground black pepper.

Still have a block of what looks like frozen chicken breasts; not sure what to do with that.

Incidentally, I should remember that fennel tops, sliced thinly (greens and stalks), salted, and refrigerated, make a lovely salad dressing combined with lemon juice and Sciabica olive oil. Not what I’d planned to do with them, but improvisation once again wins out.

Bioplastic as carbon sink

1) Petroleum-derived plastic is an extremely stable form of carbon; it has essentially no decomposers.

2) Biomass-derived “plastic” does decompose, but only at high energy decomposing conditions, i.e. very hot regions in an industrial-scale compost pile (60 C).

This suggests to me that a way to dispose of plastic waste and simultaneously sink carbon in a semi-permanent form is to fuse it, preferably post-consumer, into large masses for use as building material (possibly coated in concrete), similarly to how much building is done on land-fill.

For traditional, petroleum-derived plastic, this simply avoids the problem of having lots of bits of it floating around killing marine life and strangling trees and whatnot, as well as returning it to the earth whence it came. However, for biomass-derived “plastic”, it could possibly be carbon-negative. It seems to me that it would be unlikely to biodegrade if placed in big blobs covered in concrete on the continental shelf or what-have-you. Instead, it would be a fairly stable form of solid-state carbon storage.

How stable, I’m not sure. That is an interesting question.

(Edited a minute later to add: In any case, we certainly shouldn’t be incinerating petroleum plastic! That’s a terrible idea. It’s much better off in a landfill.)

Adventures in accidental inoculation

What is the microbial culture used to make Zhenjiang black vinegar?

This has suddenly become an even more interesting question, because I just made three jars of a really excellent green-tomato pickle, and I think the flavour can be largely credited to my thoughtless incorporation of Communist Space Bugs. Procedure follows.

Day 1.

2 pounds each:

• green tomatoes, cut into matchsticks (mostly Roma)
• finely sliced red onions
• shredded carrot

Combine with about 1/2 cup salt in a big pot, and let it sit for a few hours. Then pour off the surplus liquid and add 1 generous quart of white vinegar (5% acidity), 1 T ground coriander, 2 T whole black mustard seeds, and some more salt; then simmer until the onions have gone soft. Turn off the heat, mix in 1/4 cup Zhenjiang black vinegar, and set it out somewhere at room temperature to ferment.

Day 3: In the evening, put it in the fridge.

Day 8 [note: these days may be less important, could probably reduce to 1 or 2 as for cabbage soup]:

Take it out of the fridge and taste it. Add another cup or two of white vinegar, about 1 T of fresh coarsely-ground black pepper, and more salt as necessary. Jar by boiling-water method; this makes almost exactly 3 quarts.

Experimental cooking: champurrado brownies

Champurrado chile brownies.

Dry: about 1 cup fine-ground (yellow) cornmeal, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking soda.

Hot: 5-6 oz brick dark chocolate, 1/4 lb butter, inside of 1 vanilla bean, 1/3 cup combined pasilla and california chile powder (mill with a bit of sugar to get it finer), 2 tsp cinnamon. Melt first three together and then mix in the rest.

Wet: Mix the hot ingredients into the dry ingredients. Stir in 2 eggs, then about 1/2 cup milk or until it looks runny enough to be brownie batter. Pour into square greased pan; bake at 375 until done.

Impressions: Aroma is prety much perfect. Correct proportions, complex enough, and each flavor is important overall. Deep-flavoured chocolate is good here. May be slightly heavy on the cinnamon. Texture-wise, the lack of wheat flour makes it interestingly particulate, which is definitely good. It also disguises the remaining coarseness of the chile powder. Rather fluffy; it’s more like cornbread in texture than brownies. Daniel doesn’t mind but I think it’d be better if it were denser.

Notes for next time: Leave the baking powder out; the eggs should leaven it enough. Maybe decrease cornmeal slightly as well? Use slightly less cinnamon. If buying chocolate use Scharffenberger 70%. Try a different kind of cornmeal if convenient — red or blue might be tasty.