Food, Photography and Bons Mots
Quick! Hand me a jar of my neighbor Sarah’s etherial tangerine marmalade. I have two warm-from-the-oven loaves of sourdough bread sitting on my kitchen counter. Warm sourdough bread. Bitter-ish marmalade. It doesn’t get better than that. As you may know if you regularly read…
This healthy Middle Eastern soup is wonderful. It’s spicy–flavored with a robust harissa paste. It’s full of flavorful and protein-rich Rancho Gordo Marcella white beans. It’s filled with good-for-you greens. It’s just what you need to warm your soul–whether you are caught in…
I ate my first B’stilla years ago in Casablanca. I fell in love. (Cue the music: As time Goes By.)
We had travelled to Spain to visit Jim Shelton, a teacher friend who had moved to Alicante. Then, on a romantic whim, we booked a one-week junket to Morocco.
Casablanca. Marrakech. Rabat. Fes. Tangier. It was a magical itinerary for me–souqs, medinas, Rick’s Cafe. Casablanca had long been near the top of my bucket list.
Why Casablanca? Casablanca, of course!
The movie was a favorite–romance at its best, in my book. I’d seen Bogart’s Rick tell Bergman’s Ilsa “Here’s looking at you, kid” so many times by the time we finally made the trip that I could recite long passages of dialogue from memory. You have to picture me channeling Ilsa gazing into Rick’s eyes, listening to Sam play As Time Goes By, and steeling myself not (ever-never-ever) to get on that damned plane at the end of the movie.
But, back to real life… When our Air Moroc flight landed in Casablanca, we learned that the two of us were the whole tour when we were met in the dusty Mohammed V terminal by a man named Hasan wearing a fez. Hasan, an aging Moroccan soccer player, turned out to be our private driver-cum-tour guide.
And thank heaven for Hasan. His brio got us past a lot of hurdles on our trip. There was the night we were abruptly bumped from our hotel in Marrakech by the King’s entourage and the day I willfully (and, perhaps, naively) announced my plan to take a walk through the main souq in Tangier– by myself.
Hasan wasn’t having any of it and voiced strenuous objections to my husband, Dixon, who knew enough not to challenge my plan . (Dixon was a smart man.) I learned later that Hasan trailed me in his car and on foot all day as I wandered the exotic alleys of Tangier’s souq.
Yes. I was willful. Even then.
But, back to the B’stilla. We shared our first B’stilla in a small Casablanca restaurant with Hasan and his wife.
That first B’stilla was a culinary revelation for me. The idea of a savory phyllo-wrapped pie filled with scrambled eggs, onions, cilantro and nuts was great all by itself, but the genius idea of generously dusting the whole thing, warm from the oven, with powdered sugar blew me away.
Powdered sugar on a savory dish?
No. Couldn’t possibly work!
Or, to use a movie reference, I was, as Claude Rain’s wonderfully-played Vichy collaborator, Captain Renault, so famously said in the movie, “shocked, shocked.” (Here is the famous shocked, shocked clip for anyone who, like me, enjoys rewatching Casablanca again and again. I know I’m not alone. Some people have Star Wars. I have Casablanca. Anyone else with me on this?)
Shock aside, the powder sugar-covered B’stilla was excellent. Beyond excellent–it was mind-blowingly (is that a word?) wonderful!
I’ve bought several Middle Eastern-themed cookbooks in my cookbook-buying frenzy of 2017, but this recipe for B’stilla comes from a cookbook that I’ve long had on my bookshelves, Kitty Morse’s North Africa:the Vegetarian Table. I have previously written about Morse’s inspired recipes and posted her recipe for Harira soup–a staple around my house. You can find the recipe on Blue Cayenne here.
Try this exceptional B’stilla recipe…”Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow…but soon.” (Forgive me. I’m weak.No amount of personal discipline could keep me from working my all-time favorite bit of Casablanca dialogue into the last lines of this post: Maybe not today…)
Oh, and by the way, there was no Rick’s cafe in Casablanca when we visited (although one was opened in 2004). Bummer.
Here is my take on Kitty Morse’s wonderful recipe. Her cookbook is available on Amazon here.
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I’m late to the party. (What’s new? I know.) To be honest, I didn’t even know I liked soft polenta, but it is pretty wonderful, particularly mixed with generous amounts of butter and grated asiago (or parmesan) cheese. In this dish, the polenta is topped…
“When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.” –Rodney Dangerfield Close your eyes and this soup is absolutely delicious. Stare at it in your bowl…not so much. How do you write about (let alone photograph) a…
Here I sit on a blustery December day in Southern California enjoying a hot cup of my favorite Darjeeling tea and a slice of this spice cake. Sweet Juliet is curled up at my feet enjoying a quiet nap. Mmmm. Life is good.
I think you will enjoy this cake. I was drawn to bake it because the original recipe was one of Deborah Madison’s recipes and I’m a fan of her cooking. She is a James Beard Award-winning chef and is the author of some wonderful cookbooks: In My Kitchen, The Greens Cookbook, The Savory Way and others. Madison, pictured below, opened the famous San Francisco Bay Area Greens Restaurant in 1979 where she was one of the pioneers in the farm-to-table movement.
Even with Madison’s seal of approval, I was surprised just how really good this cake is. It has warm spicy flavors from cinnamon, cloves and allspice. It has a generous amount of dates, raisins and walnuts, and it is baked in a rich persimmon batter. It would be a great addition to a holiday breakfast table and would make a pretty wonderful hostess gift.
Persimmons, by the way, are thought to have originated in China where writers have sometimes used the fruit as a metaphor for life, writing that it is “tasteless and bitter when young, soft and sweet once mature.” Sounds good to me, soft and sweet baby boomer that I am.
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This recipe is adapted from a Deborah Madison recipe. Here is a link to Amazon where you can buy her book:
Local Flavors by Deborah Madison.
Here is a link to the original recipe from which this recipe was adapted: kitchn: Spiced Persimmon Tea Cake.
Raise your hands if you don’t like baked beans. Nobody? I thought so. This baked bean recipe has it all. It shines with the best beans you can buy but it is also great with plain Jane canned beans. (I used Rancho Gordo…
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – And Wilderness is Paradise enow.” –Omar Khayyam Omar Khayyam had it right. Bread elevates the soul. Studies…
‘Tis the season.
You can’t have Thanksgiving (or Friendsgiving–what a great idea!) without cranberry sauce and this cranberry sauce recipe is a stunner with a bit of a southwestern kick–chiles.
Cranberries are, of course, a part of America’s history. Reportedly, cranberries were served at the first Thanksgiving celebration although there is no proof that actually happened. Whether pilgrims actually ate cranberries or not at that first feast, cranberries were, without a doubt, a distinct part the early American food story. One of only a few native North American fruits, these bitter-sweet fruits were an important part of the native American diet, often served with venison.
Once cranberries caught on among the new arrivals in America, subsequent American settlers co-opted the fruit and turned it into the ubiquitous sauce that graces just about every Thanksgiving table–sometimes, sadly, as that ridged gelatinous mass that wiggles out of the can onto the serving plate.
This year, “just say no” –with apologies to Nancy Reagan– to that canned cranberry abomination and make this recipe or the one that I posted last year or anything other than the canned stuff. Anything! ( Not My Mother’s Cranberry Sauce)
Here is yet another cranberry sauce recipe from Blue Cayenne (Cranberry Sauce with Jalapeños).
It is not like you don’t have access to a lot of fresh cranberries to use in your Thanksgiving recipes. Americans consume about four hundred million pounds of cranberries each year with twenty percent of those cranberries being consumed during the Thanksgiving holiday. Today, about one thousand cranberry bogs provide the cranberries to meet the nation’s cranberry needs–a lot of those bogs being located in the Pacific Northwest. Competition is beginning to creep into the cranberry market, though, with imports entering the market from Canada and Chile.
For the most part, all American cranberries are wet harvested. This means the bogs are flooded with water and the cranberries that float to the top are scooped up and sold by cranberry farmers. How cool is that?
An interesting website, kitchenproject.com, has a lot of information about cranberries and takes a kind of grim (and funny–if you enjoy dark humor) view the fruit: “Cranberries are like the ex-wives of the fruit world. It’s love at first sight, and then wham ! They hit you with an almost violent, face-contorting blast of bitterness that changes the way you ever thought about it.”
Whoa! Someone at kitchenproject.com needs a hug.
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The chile pepper flavor in this dish is subtle as written. You can adjust the amount of chiles you use upwards if you want more heat.
Here is the link to the original Martha Rose Shulman recipe: Martha Rose Shulman’s Cranberry Sauce with Chiles
Want to really tell somebody off? Call them a polentoni (a big polenta). You read that right–a big polenta.That’s the nasty insult that southern Italians lob at northern Italians, or, at least, they did back in the day. Why’s that? It seems to have a…
