Spice Market

So often I feel as if I don't get much accomplished in the evenings. Not tonight. I arrived home feeling inspired to tackle a task I've been thinking about for a while now--reorganization of the spices, oils, vinegars, sauces, and other sundry items in our cabinets.

The inspiration was the result of a trip to Patel Brothers, an Indian grocery in Jackson Heights, Queens, near where I happened to be working this afternoon. After spending yesterday afternoon making a list of "Spices I Must Buy" while browsing through The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa (a much-loved cookbook by Marcus Samuelsson that I actually bought by mistake on Amazon.com last spring--darn that one-click ordering!), I couldn't pass up a trip to Patel Brothers when I was right in the neighborhood. I had to go elsewhere for the berbere, but they had just about everything else. Whole cloves, star anise, coriander seeds, crushed fenugreek seeds, cumin seeds, cinnamon sticks (For 1/4 the price of our local grocery! Hot apple cider anyone?), and much more. How could I help but be inspired to reorganize when I had such exciting acquisitions to accommodate?

Reorganizing the spices doesn't sound like much, but it took a fair bit of time and brought me an amazing peace of mind when all was arranged (and inventoried, of course, with a list of everything on each shelf taped to the inside of the cabinet door). Now I feel I can rightfully reward myself by relaxing on the couch for an hour and watching Law & Order.

Is This Becoming a Cooking Blog?

The other day I Googled "how to use egg yolks." I had 10 egg yolks in a bowl in the fridge, having used the whites the night before to make a no-wheat/no-soy/no-sugar/no-gluten party snack for a friend's birthday celebration (spicy potato pancakes--quite decent actually). I couldn't let all those yolks go to waste. Google did not let me down. The very first search result told me I could use 8 of those 10 yolks by making creme brulee. Coincidentally we were given a creme brulee set as a wedding gift (complete with blow torch and ramekins), and had yet to use it. Thus began an afternoon of kitchen firsts:

1. First vanilla bean.
2. First blow torch experience.
3. First flash of understanding that there is something truly wrong with our oven.

Who could have guessed that 4 tiny inches of vanilla bean could fill the apartment with such a heady aroma. I scraped out the seeds and simmered them in heavy cream, then mixed the cream into the whipped egg yolks (tempering it, so as to avoid making vanilla scrambled eggs). I filled the ramekins and into the oven they went for the suggested 35 minutes at 275 degrees. An hour later, it still looked more like soup than creme. I upped the temperature. Another 55 minutes at 350 degrees. STILL soupy. It was supposed to "jiggle slightly in the middle." I turned it up to 450 degrees. 40 minutes later I had the consistency I was looking for. What the heck? Clearly our oven is way off (the recipe could not possibly be that wrong). Well, that could certainly explain a number of past cooking problems. How can I figure out how hot it really gets in there? Oven thermometer? What would Alton do?

Moving on. After the 3 hours of baking came the fun part:

It actually worked! I might have gotten a little carried away and burned the first one, but I was pleased as punch when the spoon cracked the hardened sugar just the way it's supposed to. Sadly, I do not like creme brulee, so poor Ashkon had to eat all four of them.

The Mysterious World of Photoshop

PHOTOSHOP: Has ever the name of a computer program suggested more mystery and possibility? Perhaps, but not to me. As far as I'm concerned, Photoshop is the ultimate mystifying miracle-worker. Rumor has it you can use it to change colors, textures, effects, backgrounds, and even (gasp) remove a person from a photo altogether.

I've long wished to venture into the uncharted universe of Photoshop, but frankly it has been a little daunting. I open up the screen and am overwhelmed and utterly confused by the options I am presented with. Despeckle? Mezzotint? Craquelure? Are those ways of manipulating photographs? The terms sound like they belong in A Standard Book of Spells: Grade Four by Miranda Goshawk.

Fortunately, when the need to tinker with a photo is truly desperate, Ashkon comes to my aid. That was the case with the picture above, which I took a couple of weeks ago on a rainy day in New Haven, Connecticut. The colors of the house, the tree, the leaves, were so vibrant in real life, but I just could not capture that in my picture. I was so disappointed. My polarizing filter, which I now invariably use to block the glare and deepen the color of my photos, had fallen out of its frame the week prior and was unusable.

I knew there had to be a fix for a washed-out, should-have-been-polarized photo. And I knew Photoshop had to have it somewhere. Rather than meander around trying out different things, Ash suggested Googling something along the lines of "photoshop AND tutorial AND polarizing filter." Lo and behold, we came up with something. And thank goodness, because it was absolutely the least intuitive series of steps you could ever imagine. But it worked! Amazing!

Perhaps I went just a tad bit overboard. In real life the leaves were not approaching fluorescent, bright though they were. Sorry, couldn't help myself; it was just so thrilling to figure out how to do something in Photoshop. The question is, could I ever duplicate it without the tutorial? We're not there yet... Next project: to figure out how to remove pesky things like power lines.

Part Three: Banana Bread and "Gourmet" Sabzi

This is the last in my series of weekend cooking posts. I will have to move onto something different for my next few posts as I won't be cooking for a bit. Now I'm on a mission to clear the fridge of leftovers!

Monday was a Baha'i Holy Day, and fortuitously it was a work holiday as well. In celebration of the Holy Day a friend hosted brunch at her home. I baked a quick banana bread in the morning to take over. I have made banana bread a few time before and invariably it comes out of the oven looking lovely, but concealed in the middle is a little spot of doughy not-quite-done-ness that I can't get rid of. Why? I always thought it was because the bananas congregated in the middle, but this time I pureed the bananas into a banana soup, rather than just mashing them with a fork, so I know for a fact they were evenly distributed! If I leave it in the oven longer, the whole rest of the loaf dries out. This loaf was no exception. See below...

The outer slices deceptively look just right. But cut in a little further and look:
Is it my pan? (A non-stick 9-inch loaf pan.) Is it my oven? (A non-descript ancient clunker.) Is it the recipe? If anyone has thoughts, or better recipes to share, I am open to suggestions.

I had much greater success on Monday afternoon, which I spent making a famous Persian stew called qormeh sabzi (قرمه ‌سبزی ). Personally, I like to refer to it as gourmet sabzi, or "gourmet greens." It's an herb stew made with meat, dark red kidney beans, and lime. The name comes from the selection of green herbs that go into it--mountains of parsley, cilantro, chives, scallions, and fenugreek (I had to use dried for that last one). I snapped a photo mid-process of the herbs ready to go into the pot.

Sadly I did not have the presence of mind to photograph the finished product. By the time it was finished cooking (after 3 hours of slow simmering), we were so eager to eat that pictures were the last thing on our minds.

Part Two: Wontons

I came home on Friday evening in the mood to cook. I opened the fridge to find pork chops--lots of them. It rarely occurs to me to buy pork, so I don't know many ways of preparing it well. I opened up The Best Recipes in the World and looked up "pork" in the index. 30 seconds later, I had my answer--a Chinese pork and asparagus stir-fry with a starter course of pork wontons. The stir-fry, I have to be honest, was nothing special. The wontons, however, were fabulous, and they opened up new vistas of dumpling-making that I fully intend to explore.

I picked up the wonton wrappers from the supermarket. (Homemade wrappers? Not likely to see those in the near future.) I ground up one thick, lean pork chop in our trusty Braun blender/slicer/dicer, added some scallions here, some soy sauce there, a drop of sesame oil, ginger, garlic, and that was about it.

I folded the wontons up the way the pictures-only directions seemed to suggest, only to find out after having cooked and eaten them all, that I had interpreted the diagrams incorrectly. That is why Ashkon deciphers Ikea instructions in our house rather than me. Anyway, no harm done. After folding they got a quick pan fry, and then 5 more minutes in a covered skillet to steam them through. A little soy dipping sauce on the side, and you've got a tasty appetizer. They began disappearing before I even managed to take a photo to record this wonton milestone.