tilted skillet

wild rice dolmas with dried cherries, fresh herbs and pine nuts

Briny, lemony and pleasantly mushy all at once, dolmas are one of my favorite Middle Eastern treats. A staple on meze platters, dolmas are often found cozying up to hummus, tabbouleh and pita. They’re also available at well-stocked grocery stores in cans and jars, but I prefer dolmas that are freshly made and stocked in the prepared foods section. Fresh dolmas offer a pleasant textural resistance in the form of brined grape leaves, before yielding to a soft mix of short-grain white rice, lots of lemon juice, and herbs and spices. Currants and/or pine nuts are not unheard of, but a traditional dolma adheres to a reserved palette of green grape leaf and white rice. 

This past December, I came into a wealth of grape leaves. The morning after a lovely wedding in Los Gatos, I walked out of our hotel to a farmers market situated just across the street. While the produce and artisanal products were largely similar to what I see at farmers markets 40 miles north, I was surprised to see large glass jars filled with leafy green bundles and greenish brine. Delicately wrapped in kitchen twine, each of the three bundles held a good dozen or so meaty grape leaves. I purchased a jar along with some heirloom carrots and goat cheddar, and packed away my goods for the drive home.

I experimented with the first bundle of leaves, chopping them up and adding them to scrambles and grain salads. I even roasted some under a chicken with potatoes and carrots. I knew, though, that I’d have to leave a number of them alone in anticipation of trying my hand at dolmas. I’d been meaning to use up a jar of wild rice, so I figured I’d go way off the beaten path and add all sorts of irreverent ingredients: dried cherries, toasted pine nuts, and fresh mint and parsley.

Since all the wild rice I’ve ever seen is long-grain, I devised an interesting workaround to achieve the homogenously mushy texture I associate with dolmas. Before cooking the rice, I blitzed it in my blender (which has a dry blade container for grinding grains*). This yielded a mix of very fine (even a bit powdery) and short-grain wild rice pieces. When cooked, the texture of this wild rice ‘porridge’ mimics that of dolma rice, and the broken grains eagerly soak up the rest of the filling’s fresh flavors.

Of special mention is grape leaf preparation. You can buy grape leaves in the same aisle as jarred olives and pickles, or, if you’re lucky, at the farmers market. Since they’re preserved in salty brine, they can be salty like the sea. Taste them to decide your next steps: mildly-salty grape leaves may require nothing more than total restraint with the salt in their filling; salty grape leaves should be soaked in hot water for about half hour; and super-salty specimens may need a 15-20 minute simmer in a deep saucepan of water. Some people prefer to steam their dolmas after rolling, but I found this step unnecessary for my rendition as I prefer a little bite to my grape leaves.

Dolmas look like neat little Middle Eastern spring rolls. Ideally, their tightly sealed folds hug a perfect cylinder of filling. Ha! Some of my early dolmas resembled square parcels, and even once I got the hang of rolling down I relegated more than a few to the don’t-serve-to-dinner-guests camp thanks to zealous attempts at over-filling and subsequent gaping seams. Stick with it and you’ll end up with a stack of perfect little Middle Eastern spring roll lookalikes that are more than worth the effort.

*If you don’t have a dry blade container, I’d be hesitant to use the regular blender container. This can dull the blades in no time. Instead, try your food processor. No food processor? Cook the rice whole and then chop it up on a cutting board. It won’t be quite the same, but on the plus side you won’t destroy your blender!

DIY > buy(?): home-made ghee

Do-it-yourself (DIY) foods often save you a pretty penny and reduce the amount of packaging waste cluttering your trash and recycling bins. Take home-made ice cream, for example: I buy milk and cream in glass bottles that I return to the market, shovel sugar into my own containers from the bulk bins, and patronize a poultry farm that reuses the egg cartons I return after brushing away the errant feather or small clod of dirt. 

When put to the test of ‘DIY > buy(?)’, I’m not sure that home-made ghee passes with flying colors. I guess I should back up to talk a bit about ghee, an ingredient most of us globalized eaters have probably ingested whether we know it or not. Ghee, or clarified butter, is a traditional Indian cooking fat. Due to both cost and the misguided views of many nutrition professionals, vegetable oil has in recent times upstaged ghee as the cooking fat of choice in many Indian restaurants and homes. The process through which ghee is created removes the harder-to-digest milk solids from the butter, making it suitable for many people who are lactose-intolerant. 

Making ghee isn’t particularly labor-intensive, but it does take some time and a LOT of butter. You can scale the recipe up or down as you like, but as with many DIY foods, I like to make a big batch at once to save time. It takes about the same amount of time to make ghee from eight sticks of butter as it does from one, and you’d have to be pretty fat-phobic to have your ghee go rancid before you consume it all.

But back to the possibly questionable worth of home-made ghee: at Indian markets and specialty grocery stores, commercially-made ghee is available in jars. Jars that, of course, can be recycled or reused. When I make ghee, I generate substantially more waste: eight wrappers (compostable) and two color-printed paper boxes (recyclable) holding four sticks of butter each. After, I store my ghee in…a jar. I can’t speak to the resources and energy that go into making a jar versus paper wrappers and paper boxes, but when I make my ghee I can truthfully speak to just what goes into it: top-quality salted butter from cows that pasture in the lush rolling hills north of San Francisco.

It may sound overly romantic, but for me that’s an unabashedly big part of making something from scratch. You could buy a jar of ghee, predictably fall in love with its high smoke point, versatility and nutty scent, and continue to toss a jar into your grocery cart every few months. Instead, I encourage you to try making it yourself. It’s interesting to see the transformation something so simple and homogenous as butter undergoes, and incredibly rewarding when you pour that liquid gold into your recycled jar.

A couple grace notes before you go down the yellow butter road: Making ghee is a quiet process, and it is surprisingly easy to forget that you have something on the stove! Set a timer, even if you don’t think the ghee will be done by then. While commercial ghee can be stored at room temperature, I don’t completely trust my butter clarification skills and thus store mine in the fridge. In no way does this affect the flavor.

raw mint chocolate truffles

Last night I took a red eye to Boston. As an incorrigibly finicky sleeper, red eyes are generally my least favorite way to travel. Sometimes, though, the allure of an extra day spent with friends is reason enough to forsake a full night of sleep. After a busy day at work, I’d been feeling pretty good about my redeye decision as I tried valiantly to slip into a sleepy state in the boarding area. Taking relaxing deep breaths in and out at the gate was proving to be a good sleep-inducing strategy as I found myself swaying ever so slightly back and forth.

All my dreams of sweet dreams were shattered as an amped-up class of eight graders shepherded by precious few adult chaperones lined up behind me. I figured they were boarding for the next flight, not MINE. You know, jetting off to Fort Lauderdale for coed spring break? I tried to convince myself that there was no way they were Boston-bound, but deep down I knew that the odds, with Boston home to famous tea parties and other such events of historical significance, were against me and my sweet dreams. 

Resigned to a fate of temporary insomnia, I pulled out my secret weapons: an Ambien and a small container of mint-infused raw chocolaty date-seed truffles I’d made a few days before. With just a handful of ingredients and no cooking required, these truffles are a breeze to put together and function equally well as a snack, pre- or post-workout fuel, or dessert. Last night, I used them to chase an Ambien and drown my sleepy sorrows. With their pleasantly seedy crunch, (unrefined) dose of sugar and touch of mint and cocoa, these little balls lifted my spirits and perhaps even redeemed my faith in the possibility of a nap. 

I’d be lying if I said I slept like a stone with excited children whooping and hollering and occasionally kicking the back of my seat. I do know that I arrived with my sanity and some little balls of goodness to share with the friends for whom wasting a night of sleep is a no-brainer.  

caramelized beet and tangerine salad with hardboiled eggs, olives and almonds

A few weeks ago, my coworker and I visited one of our area accounts for a tasty lunch. Even while operating under the innocent guise of, well, doing our jobs by giving a couple presentations and answering customer questions, I managed to maintain my laser-like focus on the real question at hand: what’s for lunch? As we made our way down to the café, we stopped by the weekly farmers market held on campus for employees. As is typical of the produce available in the Bay Area this time of year, the bounty seemed caught in limbo between winter and spring. First-of-season strawberries and sugar snap peas were snatched up quickly by customers craving the fresh taste of spring, while boatloads of hearty greens and mud-caked root vegetables languished in the shadows.

As I jostled for position trying unsuccessfully to get my hands on a pint of organic strawberries, my coworker boldly chose what had to be the biggest beet I’ve seen in a very long time. You know, the type of vegetable that looks like a mutant GMO but probably was just left (forgotten?) in the ground all season. I promptly forgot about her beet as soon as we entered the promised land of the café, but later that week she showed up to the office with that honker in a Tupperware to add to her salad.

She told me that it had taken forever to roast the beet whole, and that she’d ended up leaving it in the cooling oven overnight to continue cooking. Just that morning she’d hurriedly peeled it under running water mere minutes before her bus arrived. I thought about how roasting a whole mutant beet is not unlike making ice cream from scratch: an exercise in delayed gratification. The big difference, though, is that with beets there is a faster – and in my opinion, better – way to get some satisfaction.

When I cook beets, especially large ones, I usually peel them before cooking and cut them into smallish slices or wedges. After a quick toss in some sort of cooking fat and a sprinkle of spices, into a hot oven they go for no more than 30-40 minutes. While cooking beets this way will turn your hands red, the stain isn’t permanent and in a pinch can also be rubbed off onto your cheeks for an au naturel blush. Truth! Beets roasted out of the skin take on the caramelized quality and crispy edges I crave, and are a perfect addition to hearty salads like the one pictured above. From time to time I cook beets in the skin, but by the time I get home from work I’m usually hoping to have them done by dinner, not by dessert or midnight snack. So, pick up a mutant beet before the farmers harvest all of winter’s forgotten fruit, and peel away!

homemade ice cream: salted peanut & chocolate grab bag

I’m going to start this, the first of likely many future posts on homemade ice cream, with a few words to the wise: making ice cream from scratch is an exercise in delayed gratification. There’s nothing like digging a spoon into a quart of ice cream made just the way you like it, but you have to really want it. While there’s no doubt homemade ice cream can make a mockery of the so-so frozen treats available at places like Coldstone and Baskin Robbins, I’d go so far as to say that whatever you make at home often tastes better than the fancy ice cream available at many shops in San Francisco. I like a scoop of [insert salted ice cream flavor here] from [insert Mission District ice cream shop here] as much as the next gal, but predictably I’d rather spend a few days waiting for my scoop than a few minutes and a few dollars at my local scoop shop.

First, ice cream made with a traditional custard base requires eight egg yolks. I’m not often willing to part with this many of my eggs at once unless I have a master plan for using the whites. Sometimes, even my best-laid plans to use egg whites go awry. But forge on! Once you have your carefully separated egg yolks, you combine them with some sugar and A LOT of dairy to make custard. Let’s not mince words here: by dairy, I mean heavy cream and whole milk. Introducing skim or reduced fat milk in to this equation is only a good idea for your waistline, and that’s not really why you’re making ice cream in the first place, right?

After the somewhat-tedious process of cooking the custard and chilling it thoroughly, you’re ready to pour that deliciousness into your ice cream-maker and pump it full of all sorts of fun additions. Adding mix-ins is probably the best part of making ice cream. For this batch, I added salted roasted peanuts and what I like to call ‘chocolate grab bag’ (translation: all of the odds and ends of chocolate bars, candies and whatnot cluttering my pantry). The finished product is ultra-creamy, with salty and sweet morsels in every giant spoonful.

So, get thee to the kitchen now! If you’re lucky, you’ll have ice cream in 48 hours…

of note

My babies are growing up: I've managed not to kill (knockonwood) these organic rainbow chard seedlings that I plan on transplanting into my 'garden'. And by garden, I mean a large plastic box that currently lacks soil.

I need to work on my tennis swing. That is a bruise on my SHIN. It is not a bruise on a TENNIS BALL. I also need to work on my tan.

The saddest angel food cake you ever did see...is this one. In my virgin attempt at this traditionally ethereal cake, the whole thing fell out of the inverted pan like a brick onto the counter. My heroic attempts to rescue it with a bench scraper served only to butcher what is supposed to be a smooth, golden exterior. Also of note: as you can see in the photo more than half of the cake has neatly disappeared. That's all I have to say about that.

(un)usual suspects: parsley root

Parsley is predictable. Ubiquitous. Sprinkled atop pretty much everything that isn’t sprinkled with basil or cilantro. During parsley season, which is year round if you shop at grocery stores but is seasonal on the farm, parsley’s subterranean other half may be harvested. Confused? So was I when one day, my CSA box included a bundle of spindly white roots attached to a bushy bunch of parsley. Given my recent self-poisoning experience with garlic chives-cum-tulips, I was a little hesitant to eat the roots but a little research revealed that they are, indeed, edible.  

As with most root vegetables, I figured roasting would be a good strategy. This is especially true for vegetables such as parsley roots, since a number of Google sources mentioned that their parsley flavor is stronger than that of parsley leaves. Parsley-forward, yes? A stint in the oven softens assertive or sharp flavors and adds a lovely touch of caramelization. Mixing the parsley roots with small, sweet carrots further mellows the former’s overt grassiness.

Because I wanted to enjoy the strong parsley flavors, I kept this recipe simple. Before roasting, the vegetables are tossed with a bit of olive oil, cumin, sea salt and pepper. After, lemon juice, fresh mint and red wine vinegar brighten the otherwise earthy-grassy flavors.

Unless you have access to a good farmers market or CSA, parsley roots may be hard to find. They are not to be confused with parsnips or salsify, although they can be dead ringers for both. If you can’t find parsley roots, try using salsify or even burdock root. The flavors will be different, but you’ll still end up with a side dish full of vibrant, contrasting flavors.

spicy turnip cakes

About five years ago, my mom was hooked on a country song (predictable) that just happened to strongly promote turnips and turnip greens (very surprising). Mom doesn’t really like turnips, and probably doesn’t think the greens are edible. While she begrudgingly tucks them into our traditional Christmas dish of personal-sized meat and vegetable pies, I bet she does so knowing that she won’t be able to distinguish them from the potatoes in the final product.

Mom had just learned how to use iTunes to download a song to her iPhone, and played the turnip song on repeat for what seemed like weeks. With the volume dialed all the way up, I’d hold the phone at ear level so we could hear the tinny rendition over the competing melodies of highway noise and air conditioning. We’d sing along with the country crooner, ‘thank God for good directions…and turnip greens’. Yikes.

Five years later, I’m very thankful for turnips and turnip greens. Turnips are a staple in my winter CSA box, and I’m always looking for new ways to capitalize on their slightly spicy, mustardy flavor. While roasting them in wedges is a quick way for me to demolish turnips a’plenty, I took a different route the other day and turned them in to Asian-inspired savory cakes that taste great with spicy peanut sauce and a sprinkling of scallions.