Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Blue Cayenne will be two years old in October. Over those (almost) two years, Marion Sutton has been one of Blue Cayenne’s (and my) most supportive friends. I met Marion in one of Nami Aoyagi’s amazing Digital Media Arts classes at The Huntington Beach Adult…
Which “vegetable” is actually a berry, has the highest nicotine content among all vegetables, and is 95% water? (Hint: Chinese ladies once used the dye extracted from this vegetable’s skin to polish their teeth to a then-fashionable gray hue.) It’s the eggplant. Who knew? (Don’t…
This is the easiest vanilla ice cream recipe ever.
You should make it now before you are priced out of the vanilla aisle!
During normal times, vanilla, approximately 80% of which is produced in the hardscrabble African island-nation of Madagascar, is the second most expensive spice in the world (saffron is first).
If you haven’t been paying attention, though, these aren’t normal times. Along with the myriad other crises du jour, we’re in the midst of a real vanilla crisis. The price of vanilla beans has skyrocketed in the last five years from $11 a pound in 2011 to $272 a pound this month–a result of the growing world demand for natural vanilla, the devastating Cyclone Enawo with its 130 mile-an-hour winds that destroyed as much 30% of Madagascar’s crop last year, and cut-throat international competition for Madagascar’s crop. Add political instability and unremitting poverty to the mix and it is understandable that desperate Malagasy farmers have been pushed to the edge–harvesting under-ripe beans for a quick sale and short circuiting the normal lengthy curing process to the detriment of vanilla bean quality. And then there are the vanilla thieves…
Grow your own? Not likely. Vanilla thrives mostly in the tropics. Even there, it takes three years for a vanilla plant to mature and produce a vanilla orchid flower. If that isn’t daunting enough, a vanilla bean pod is only produced on an orchid plant when the flower has been hand-pollinated (there is no proper bee pollinator on the island) and the vanilla flower is only open for one part of one day. Once pollinated, the flower produces a vanilla pod that takes eight to nine months to mature. Then, it takes another six months of the bean pods to properly cure. No instant gratification here.
Here are two photos of a vanilla plant–a Madagascar-grown plant and my plant. You can tell which plant is mine. There. Is. No. Flower.
Trust me. It isn’t that I haven’t given it the old Blue Cayenne college try. I have been diligently growing this vanilla orchid plant in my tiny backyard greenhouse for about five years. In those five years, I’ve had one tiny flower bud. One.
And oh did I pamper that little bud. I kept the vine in a protected corner of the greenhouse. I whispered honeyed words of encouragement to the sweet little bud. I watered it with Trader Joe’s best bottled water. To my delight, the little cream-colored bud swelled and I could see flower petals forming. My vanilla bud was living the good life and it seemed to thrive. (Woo-hoo!)
And then one dark morning my vanilla dream crashed. I found the unopened (and unpollinated) bud lying shriveled and lifeless on the floor of my greenhouse. Juliet had to cover her innocent little ears.
Here is a recipe for vanilla ice cream adapted from the New York Times’ 4200+ recipe collection. Whatever the expense, it is worth using quality vanilla in this recipe.
Here is a product recommendation, too. I am using Massey’s Madagascar Vanilla Paste for this ice cream and for many of the things I’m cooking right now. You can substitute it one for one for vanilla extract. It is pricey but sublime–full of tiny vanilla seeds. As a result, your ice cream will be flecked with vanilla beans, a visual enhancement that I’m convinced improves the enjoyment of your ice cream.
Here is a link to the vanilla paste offered on the Amazon site : Massey Vanilla Bean Paste at Amazon
The paste is also available at Sur La Table and through King Arthur Flour. At the moment, as your personal shopper, I can tell you that the best price is at Amazon–$18.99 for 4 oz.
I’ve found that my 4 oz. bottle has lasted me quite a while, but this vanilla ice cream recipe may be a costly game changer.
Yields 1 Quart
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For me, it’s Snickers bars, refried beans, candied corn, and vanilla ice cream. (No. I don’t eat them together.) We’re talking about comfort food today, or, as the dictionary defines it: ” food that is enjoyable to eat and makes the eater feel better emotionally.”…
For the love of plums… I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold –“This is just to say” by William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams…
Yesterday I had the good fortune to get together with old friends. We ate a lot, laughed a lot and caught up on each other’s lives. Juliet got a lot of attention, too. It was a very good day all around.
Today Juliet is sleeping off the ecstasy of four glorious hours of being passed around, petted and sweet-talked. Look at that peaceful little face. Not even the miscreant squirrel who taunts her from the back fence could ruin her day today. (I’m having a pretty good day, too.)
This salad was on my lunch menu. The recipe first appeared in Bon Appetit Magazine in 2005, so I have been serving it to guests for a very long time. When I want to serve something really special to treasured friends, this is my go-to recipe. The honey and thyme-roasted Bosc pears add a sweet-savory flavor to the salad and the fan of beautiful roasted pears on the salad plate makes the dish pop visually. Bathe the butter lettuce in the shallot-verjus dressing and you have a tart foil to the flavor of the honeyed pears. Then there are the hazelnuts… What’s not to love?
And, as a side benefit, your kitchen will smell wonderful as your roast the pears on a generous bed of fresh thyme.
Although you can substitute white grape juice in this recipe, the original recipe calls for verjus. Verjus?
Verjus is French for “green juice.” It is the unfermented juice of unripened wine grapes. Typically, verjus is made using the unripe grapes that are thinned from the vines prior to the main harvest. Waste not. Want not.
I bought my verjus from Amazon. Here is a link: Amazon Source for Verjus .
Verjus has a long history. The gourmets among the Roman elite used it in their cooking and it was widely used during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Here is an intriguing quote from Platina’s De honesta Voluptate, the first printed cookbook, written in 1465. The following is a translation of article 26 of that volume:
“26. ON VERJUICE
What they commonly call acresta, I would call omphacium, on the authority of Pliny, and acor [verjuice], on the authority of Macrobius, for omphax, as I have said, means a still-bitter grape; therefore, I would rather call oil from an unripe berry omphacium than acresta, which I do not quite see as being from omphax. [Macrobius] thus defines verjuice: vinegar is sharper than verjuice, whose force it is agreed is greater than acresta, which soothes I>, which soothes the burning of the stomach more mildly and does not emaciate or weaken the body as vinegar is apt to do. Verjuice is wonderfully good for an unsettled or upset stomach or thirsty liver, if you use it raw, for it is less helpful cooked. We use it easily and healthfully against poison and in seasoning foods.”
Me thinks Platina could have used a good copy editor (and maybe a gastroenterologist and a food taster for that part about the poison. Just sayin…)
Try this salad. Your guests will thank you and ask for the recipe.
Here is the link of the original recipe: Bon Appetit’s Honey-roasted pear and hazelnut salad
It is turn-on-the-air conditioner hot here in Huntington Beach. Even tiny Juliet who thrives on two long walks a day just stares at me in disgust when I pick up her leash. Here she is giving me some too-hot-to-walk side eye. It’s certainly not cooking…
Yotam Ottolenghi. <sigh> This Ottolenghi recipe was featured recently on the NY Times food site and it is wonderful. The crumb is light and the almond flour gives this little cake a delightful texture. This cake is so good, in fact, that it is almost…
Spiralizers. You’ve probably heard of them.
Toaster-sized spiralizer appliances take boring old potatoes, beets and zucchini–you know, the vegetables that come to you in the elegant shapes that Mother Nature intended– and turn them into noodles. (Forgive my snark.)
Nevertheless, I confess that I’m a cooking gadget collector and I do own a Paderno spiralizer. Like a lot of the other kitchen gadgets that have caught my eye (Does anyone else out there have onion goggles? I didn’t think so.), I haven’t used it much.
This summer, I decided that I would give the spiralizer a fair try after my neighbor raved about the healthy spiralized foods that her daughter, Randlyn, was turning out (and enjoying) in her kitchen.
Bon Appetit Magazine, by the way, did an interesting piece on spiralizers. The BA writer focused on the psychology of spiralizing vegetables arguing that changing the shape of the vegetables tricks our minds into eating more of those healthy foods. More zucchini. Fewer carbs.
And, there may be something to that argument. I remember one summer when my family, crammed into an unairconditioned VW bug and traveling 2000 grueling miles to visit relatives in rural Mississippi, stopped at a drive-in restaurant somewhere in the wilds of Eastern Texas where French fried potato spirals were served in parchment-lined red plastic trays. Your order came with a decanter of vinegar to sprinkle over your potatoes. I still remember the novelty of that presentation, and, here I am a gazillion years later comtemplating spiralizing potatoes. (Bon Appetit Magazine on spiralizers ).
So, I’m giving spiralizing the good old college try (CSULB 1968) this summer. Here is a recipe for a pretty (and delicious) Asian zucchini noodle salad. This salad has all sorts of textures going for it and the piquant sesame-oil-flavored dressing is wonderful.
You will find the link to the original recipe from which this recipe was adapted here: Simply Recipes’ Asian Zucchini Salad .
Thanks, Randlyn, for the nudge.
Yields 4 Servings
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The original recipe called for sprinkling salt over zucchini noodles to draw out some of the moisture in the zucchini. I liked the crunch of the zucchini noodles fresh out of the spiralizer and skipped that step.
This wonderful Julia Moskin recipe for Spicy Peanut Stew with Ginger and Tomato recently came across my desk and flooded my world with all kinds of happy memories. Talk about an endorphin rush! When my husband and I were traveling, we were fortunate to make…
