Eat your vegetables

There is grating sanctimony in the general intent that you must eat something because it is good for you. Taking this quite rigourously to heart, well-meaning yet hapless parents have urged scores of chilidren over millenia to tuck into things that they have no natural affinity for. Unfortunately, the things children do make a beeline for, like sugar and chips, are quite bad for them. This makes for the eternal tussle between harried parents and their stubborn progeny who firmly refuse to open their mouths when they see suspicious and unknown things on their plate. Most children must feel that there is an inescapable, unseen plot to ensure their gastronomical suffering. As a child, I know I often did.

Eating a thing just because it is good for you makes little sense to me, though it is a sentiment with which I’ve made peace with some difficulty. I’ve been taken in by needing to eat purely for health, forcing myself at one point to try to eat fish. It was an experiment that ended in disaster, as it was doomed to from the start. We refuse to eat lots of things as children, sometimes growing to like them as adults. Yet grown-up children all around tell me that they do not like something because they were force-fed it as children. I suspect this is only half true, as I had to admit after my tryst with “chicken of the sea”. The moment you step out into the world on your own, you take the reins of your life into your own hands. This includes what you will or won’t eat, and honestly, how long are you going to blame your palette on the actions of a well-meaning parent?

'Calvin & Hobbes' comic strip by Bill Watterson

There are also, on the other hand, scores of adults who will commit to the martyrdom of eating things that are good for them with an obsessive fervour. This, I have to admit, confounds me completely. In a world filled with a variety of food and countless modes of preparation, it is not at all difficult to find fruits, meat, seafood or vegetables that are not only good for you, but also taste good to you. Why persevere in punishing yourself by living by someone else’s rules? You can find exactly what works for you, is healthy for you and will keep you happy eating it through a lifetime. This doesn’t take a lot of time or effort on your part, just a little exploration. Think about that the next time you find yourself wishing you liked radish, because everyone is raving about it. You really don’t have to.

Stews or multiple-ingredient soups are great way to try something new if you really aren’t sure about it. They offer you a way to add a little bit of the new ingredient to a bunch of tried, tested and liked ingredients. A dish focused on a new element might end up wasted if you just don’t take to it. In the broad confines of a stew, however, you could either eat it or around it. Consider it a safe haven of newer things, one where they are a part of the whole, rather than the entire deal. This stew is one that lends itself well to this philosophy.

Stews are brilliant, whether you’re trying to feed a bunch of hungry friends or a small army. (I first tried this one when I organised a surprise birthday party for Amey last year, aided by our friends.) They can be made a day ahead. In fact, they are all the better for being made in advance since the different elements have time to lend their flavour notes to the ultimate symphony. The secondary ingredients are often interchangeable with others. They also the ultimate in comfort food. Nothing spells warm and cozy better than fragrant bowls filled with generous helpings of steaming stew. This particular one is high on the warming list, since it gets its base notes from two different chilli purées.

You will find that the stew certainly cannot be filed under ‘quick and easy weeknight recipes’, not unless you have all the prep work done up in advance. Starting from scratch, this will take you some time. You need to make the base chilli purées, then use them to make the plantain-chilli sauce that defines this meal. There are several vegetables that go into it, that have to be part roasted and part stir-fried. Then the whole thing comes together and boils for a bit before you can eat it. Is it worth it? Oh yes, most definitely. The chillies are more smoky than hot when you use them with discretion and they produce this unforgettable, original and lingering taste. The birthday boy couldn’t get enough of it. What else would look for in a surprise party meal?

New Mexican Border Stew
Adapted from Everyday Greens by Annie Somerville
Makes six servings

For the Plantain-Chilli sauce:
Ancho Chilli purée – 1 tbsp (see recipe below)
Chipotle purée – 1 tsp ( see below)
Plantain, very ripe – 1/2 pound, diced
Canned tomatoes – 28 oz can, coarsely chopped, reserve juice
Cumin seeds – 1 tsp
Dried Oregano – 1/2 tsp
Salt to taste
Water – 1 cup

- Boil the water. Add the plantain and lower the heat to a simmer.
- Add the remaining ingredients and cook for about 20 minutes.

For the stew:-
Butternut squash – 1 medium, cut into 1/2″ cubes
Yellow Onion – 1 large, chopped
Zucchini – 2 medium, cut in half lengthwise, then sliced on the bias into 1/2″ thick slices
Yellow or red Capsicum – 1, cut into thick strips, then squares
Hominy (canned) – 1/2 cup, rinsed
Garlic – 2-3 cloves, minced fine
Cumin seeds – 1 tsp
Dried Oregano – 1/2 tsp
Water – 1 cup
Lime juice – 1/2 lime
Cilantro -  3 tbsp, chopped
Olive Oil – 2 1/2 tsp
Chipotle purée – to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

- Preheat the oven to 400°F.
- Toss the squash with some salt and pepper, 1 tbsp oil and 1/2 tsp of garlic and spread in a single layer on a baking sheet in the oven. Roast for 10 minutes, then turn the pieces over and rast for another 10 minutes.
- Heat remaining oil in a pot with a heavy base, on medium high. Sauté the onions with a pinch of salt and pepper until they soften a bit.
- Add the reserved galic, cumin and oregano and mix.
- Add the pepper pieces along with some water and cook a few minutes.
- Pour in the hominy and the plantain-chilli sauce prepared earlier. Add the roasted butternut squash, zucchini and the remaining water. Season with salt and pepper.
- Lower the heat and cover the pot. Simmer the stew for about 20 minutes or so.
- Uncover and add the lime juice. Add more chipotle purée if you need a stronger chilli flavour.

Garnish with cilantro before serving.

Ancho-Chilli purée:-
Makes 1/2 cup

Ancho Chillies – 2, dried
Boiling water – 1 cup

- Toast the chillies on a skillet or pan (even on a flame) without burning, until they puff up a bit.
- Take off the stem on top and empty out the seeds inside the chilli.
- Put the chillies in a bowl and cover with boiling water to soften for 15-20 minutes.
- Whizz up the chillies in the food processor with a few tbsps of the soaking water to form a thickish paste.
- The purée will keep, covered and refrigerated, for about two weeks.

Chipotle Purée:-
Makes the same amount as the contents of the can

Chipotle chillies in Adobo sauce – 1 can

- Whizz the contents of the can in a food processor to form a smooth sauce.
Stores in the fridge for a long, long time. Cover the surface with a little oil before storing

Cook’s notes:-
The multitude of ingredients and steps involved here might give the most enthusiastic cook pause. However, the results make the work worthwhile. Besides, there are various ways to make your job a bit quicker. When I made this for the party, I used the cut butternut squash cubes available at Trader joe’s (refrigerated, not frozen) along with frozen ready cut pepper strips. It was one of many dishes I cooked that morning and I started from making the purées. (Ideally I would have preferred making it the day before but this risked Amey discovering it, thereby unravelling a very carefully laid birthday plot). The second time, I used a whole butternut squash. This jacked up the time required to cook this dish to almost double, with little difference in the final tasting. I’d say go for the precut veggies and make your life a bit easier. Unless you like wrestling with a squash. I didn’t think the effort was worth the outcome in this case.

You can also quite entirely change out the vegetables for others. I’ve used yellow corn instead of hominy once, threw in sweet potatoes instead of squash and carrots instead of zucchini. Carrots are actually dynamite in this stew. I used some leftover mushrooms that I had once. Keep the sauce about the same and you can get great results with several veggie combinations. Feel free to make up your own. You need soft textures contrasting with something that will lend a bit of crunch, and you’re set. The plantains used should ideally be the really ugly over-ripe ones. This gives a hint of sweetness to the sauce. If you can’t find ripe plantains, use what you find and add a touch of honey to the sauce.

The chipotle purée lasts forever, or at least a very long time. It’s quite fiery, so use it wisely depending on your tolerance. The ancho purée goes a couple of weeks. It is very mild, almost sweet and works great in just about anything so it is easy to use up. If you’re worried about storage, make the purée using only one ancho chilli. Both ancho chillies and the chipotle in adobo sauce are easily available in supermarkets (at least in the states that share a border with Mexico) or online. Both ingredients are great finds.

This recipe is sublime in winter, served with cornbread or couscous or over steamed rice. It makes cold fade away for a bit. Your health will be happy with all the fiber and anti-oxidants while your tastebuds will be having such a rocking party, they will thank you too.

A mousse by design

I have hopes for getting a few things done this year. There are aspirations to be travelling more, cooking more, writing more, learning more. I aim to get my architectural license before the year is through. I aspire to meet up with my friends more and call my mom more often. Well, I’ll have to watch that last one carefully. She might begin to suspect I’m terminally ill if I don’t ease her into it. Don’t want to ping her sonar for no reason. Nothing good has ever come of that.

Time has soared by quickly. We are already at the end of January.  The cold winter means no long walks on the beach, my primary place for random thought. Without them, thoughts have no focus or room. They crowd into my head and push everything else out. Amey has caught me staring into space more often than usual this month. Only two things have really kept my attention. Architecture and cooking.

Taken together, they aren’t quite all that diverse. Here’s how the charge sheet would look if you tried to compare.
☕ Both respond to basic human needs, cooking is to food what architecture is to shelter.
☕ Both aspire to do so much more than just fulfilling a need.
☕ Architecture is both an art and a science. So is cooking.
☕ Either one of them revels in experimentation, often with fantastic results.
☕ Both have a long history and have evolved in response to period and place (Up to a point in time. Both have felt the effects of globalization.)
☕ Never were there two art forms that, as a whole, focus on the person who creates them as much as on those for whom they are created.
☕ A good example of either will satisfy you to your very soul. You may not recognize it immediately but your day will be so much the better for it.

My friend once mentioned that he has never seen a more contented lot than architects. Before all the discontented architects out there pour scorn on me, allow me to explain what he meant. Architecture pales in comparison to the initial monetary compensation of investment bankers, or those in technological fields (the aforementioned friend’s profession) which should make for some rather unhappy people. It does, and those who are conflicted about this, leave. This is not a profession you stay in lightly. It is your life.

Given a choice, I would choose to stay. Because it is unbeatable, that feeling of toiling over something and then seeing it manifest in building materials. Of agonizing over details and seeing them become concrete. Of nurturing and imagining something on paper and then seeing it surpass your wildest dreams in its physical manifestation. The biggest joy comes from watching faces light up as they walk into this space your team and you created for them, and seeing them smile and relax just a little, giving you unspoken clues into the success of your venture. It is a magnificent culmination of doing what makes you happy.

I believe passionate chefs and cooks would understand this feeling. They can produce such similar results. That soup that turned out just like you imagined. That meringue that looked just perfect. The best part is that tingle that runs down your spine when someone sighs in appreciation over a dish you cooked up for them. While cooking can most certainly be satisfying for one, it affords new pleasures when undertaken for at least two.

I always enjoy cooking for a whole bunch of people. It gives me the opportunity to pore over cookbooks and agonize over planning the menu. Many cookbook writers suggest you have a trial run before you cook through a recipe for company. I, on the other hand, love cooking things for the first time when I’m expecting company. There is a do-or-die situation about it that charges the atmosphere. I always keep the pizza delivery guys’ number handy. Just in case.

One such new thing that I tried out recently when friends visited was this mousse. By that in itself, it was nothing unusual it had all the normal trappings of a mousse. But the flavouring of it was another story. This was a mousse that packed a serene, yet concentrated wallop of fragrant green cardamom, infused in smooth unctuous white chocolate. You serve it in twee little amounts as it is quite sweet, so a little goes a long way. It is strongly reminiscent of the East. To me, it immediately brought India to mind because the flavour is so distinctly that of kheer, our traditional rice pudding made from milk, rice and cardamom in its most basic form. Amey immediately christened it kh-ousse and pronounced it a huge favourite while my friends blissfully ate their way through their portions. So much all around happiness created by a dish that is very simple to make.

You apply some percussive maintenance to a few pods of green cardamom to persuade the plump green shells to relinquish their perfumed black seeds, then grind them fine with a mortar and pestle. Then you warm up some milk and introduce the green cardamom and a couple of bay leaves to it. Allow them to get acquainted for a few minutes while you melt some good quality white chocolate in a double boiler. Then you strain the milk into the melted chocolate. Beat some cream into soft peaks and beat a few egg whites into stiff peaks. Fold the chocolate mixture into the egg whites, followed by the cream, then pour into bowls which you then move to the chill chest to set. And that is how you get fluffy sweet goodness in a bowl. The best kind there is.

White Chocolate Cardamom Mousse
Adapted for measurements from Nigel Slater’s Real Food

Green Cardamom – 8 pods
Bay Leaves – 3
Milk – 1/2 cup
White Chocolate – 9 oz
Heavy cream – 1 1/4 cup
Egg whites – 3
Cocoa powder for dusting

- Warm the milk in a small saucepan.
- Extract the cardamom pods seeds from the pods and crush them to break them up. Add them to the warming milk along with the bay leaves.
- Bring the milk to a boil, then move off the heat.
- Separately, break the chocolate into small pieces and melt them in a bowl that is sitting over a bowl of boiling water.
- When the chocolate is melted, strain the spiced milk into it through a sieve
- Whip the cream just until it starts to form soft mounds.
- Beat the egg whites to until they form stiff peaks.
- Gently scoop in the chocolate mixture into the beaten eggs and slowly fold it in with a spatula.
- Then fold in the whipped cream as lightly as possible
- Pour into serving bowls and refrigerate until set, about 3 to 4 hours

Dust over some cocoa powder before serving.

Cook’s notes:
The dessert is served cold but the spice renders it intensely warming. It is enchanting, the combination of white chocolate and cardamom. The spice sings through the chocolate accompanied by subtle base notes of bay to create a fabulous dessert. Nigel Slater hit it out of the park with this one.
Note that the egg whites here are essentially raw. There are advisories and words of caution that accompany the use of raw eggs. If you worry about that kind of thing, make sure you use pasteurized eggs.
I toss the green cardamom shells into my sugar jar as my mom always did. It gently scents the sugar, pretty much akin to the way vanilla pods do for vanilla sugar. Cardamom-scented sugar makes great tea.
This extraordinary dessert definitely moves into my list of make-in-a-jiffy desserts. The prep work is minimal and it yields great results. Your guests will love it. Chances are strong that they have never tasted a mousse like it.

Smells like teen spirit

The new year has brought with it a need for cleaning. And organizing. A lot of organizing, coupled with the putting away of childish things. Well, not quite all things re-eally. That PS2 is going nowhere until it gets replaced with a PS3 someday. (Where else can you learn about Greek Mythology and hack Medusa to bits at the same time?). The problem with having a multitude of interests is that they have a way of taking over precious space and multiplying. Books seem to settle down onto available surfaces and proceed to invite their friends and relatives over to join them, then begin masquerading as surfaces themselves. Magazines try to outmatch them by throwing raucous parties that have them flopping all over everything. Guitars and cameras start showing signs of aspiring to world domination, upon the imminent conquest of our home. Then there is our music collection. We find there was a downside to being able to carry 10,000 songs in your pocket. You end up having 10,000 songs in your pocket. Finding anything in there takes a while. A possible upside? If you want your cooking of soup to be accompanied by a (fairly unhealthy to some) dose of Nirvana, you can easily do so without looking for CDs under those towering stacks of books.

Soup seems to be the obvious choice to counteract the excesses of the holiday season. The weekend that saw some fog-ridden grey days appeared to corroborate this. On the Ipod, Cobain rambled on about the friends he found in his head. Meanwhile, I moved some websites around on my screen and toppled some book towers over before I chanced upon a quaint recipe for garlic soup, requiring very little effort on my part and just as few ingredients. Entirely too prim a soup for Nirvana, but sometimes the most unlikely things work in pairing. As long as garlic has been around, there have been cultures that have been known to shun it. Fortunately, I wasn’t born into any of them. I’ve had an ongoing love affair with the stinking rose since I can remember. This is one of those vegetables that has a game-like quality about it, the kind that gets your attention as a child. How many cloves in this bulb? Are there any hidden ones? Can I get them all? Garlic is second only to shelling peas and pomegranate in the entertainment it can provide a kid with. As it did for me. It was a simpler time, before Space Invaders entered my life. And Nirvana.

Garlic is one of those ingredients that can play different parts in a dish. In this context, ‘less is more’ takes on a whole new meaning. A lot depends upon how it is cooked or how much of it is cooked together. Raw garlic really screams through a recipe and a little goes a long, long way. Cooked quickly with high heat, its pungency is accentuated and its garlicky flavour is amplified. Cook it slowly at low heat and your patience is rewarded with a sweet and fragrant garlic, completely unlike the raw one, so soft and buttery. In terms of quantity, one raw finely minced or crushed clove is likely to be more pungent and garlicky than the whole cooked cloves of an entire bulb. Think about that the next time you see garlic ice-cream on the menu. (It contains lots of slow-cooked garlic. Probably one of the sweetest ways to get your anti-oxidants.)

For this soup, you peel some cloves of garlic, then drop them into a vessel of gently heating oil or fat of your choice. There they remain for the next half hour or so, not browning, just softening away in the oil until they seem to be melding with it. With the addition of some stock and a little seasoning, the precedence of calm established by gently-cooking garlic continues to grow. The tranquility of the proceedings is shattered as you blend the ingredients together. It reaches a crescendo as you whisk in some egg. The dish then comes back to its serene beginnings as you gaze upon the most fragrant pale cream-brown liquid you ever saw, putting the prettiest cafe-au-lait to shame. The entire process took very little effort and time on my part, which was great. As the garlic cooked, it filled the apartment with the most hunger-inducing fragrance we had ever experienced. It took considerable effort to stop from standing over the cooking vessel with a spoon. Luckily, we were busy waging war on books and stuff.

At first glance, the recipe is so uncomplicated that you might easily pass it by in a book, as the more exciting ones catch your eye. What first caught my attention was the fact that garlic was receiving star billing here. It isn’t customarily the focus of a recipe. It lends its genius to other ingredients usually, allowing them to shine, complementing their brilliance. It is somewhat like a good rhythm section in a musical composition, holding everything together while the strings go blazing about. However, a good rhythm section doesn’t play second fiddle. It makes its presence felt. Just like Dave Grohl’s heavy-handed drumming made Nirvana’s sound what it was, propelling the genius of Cobain. But Grohl went on (post-Nirvana) to show that he was a gifted musician in his own right. He has outshined his Nirvana legacy to forge a strong individual identity. When garlic is the central performer, it is a bit like that. It dazzles, it scores and you don’t miss a thing. This soup shows the flair that garlic has all on its own, needing no other major player to carry it through. It is, in a word, brilliant.

Garlic Soup
Adapted from Beard on Food by James Beard via Saveur
Serves 3-4 as an appetizer and 2 as soup-for-dinner

Olive oil – 2 1/2 tbsp
Garlic – 16-18 cloves, peeled
Chicken stock – 4 cups
Egg yolks – 3
Nutmeg – a good pinch
Bacon fat – 1/2 tbsp (optional)
Salt & pepper to taste
Thick slices of bread, toasted

- With the knob turned between ‘medium’ and ‘low’, gently heat 2 tbsps of oil. Add the garlic to this and cook until softened considerably (could take from twenty minutes to a half hour).
- Pour in the chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper and grate in the nutmeg. Allow the mixture to come to a simmer and then heat for fifteen to twenty minutes.
- Blend the soup until it is smooth. Return to the heat.
- In a bowl, beat the egg yolks together. Add in the 1/2 tbsps of bacon fat and olive oil and whisk some more. Then slowly beat in about 1/4 cup of the heated soup mixture into the eggs, whisking continuously.
- Now, pour the egg yolk mixture into the garlic-chicken stock soup vessel, beating continuously. In a minute or two, the soup will thicken slightly. Continue to heat at a low temperature until cooked through.
- Pour the soup into a bowl and put in a toasted piece of bread on top. Serve immediately.

Cook’s notes:
The original recipe asked for chicken, goose or pork fat. Since the closest thing I had to any of these things was bacon, I crisped up some slices and used a bit of the dripped fat. You can make this completely devoid of animal fats and use only olive oil, or you could use a mixture of olive oil and butter. Any of it would work. Veggie stock is great for a vegetarian option (though not vegan). Make sure that the heat is low enough so that the garlic doesn’t brown. You are only looking for softened garlic here. If you are going to use the blender or food processor (instead of an immersion blender), make sure the mixture cools slightly before you do. Adding some of the garlic broth to the eggs tempers them and raises their temperatures, reducing the chance that they will curdle when introduced to the soup. Keep the heat low when you add the eggs into the soup for the same reason. This is a soup that must never be brought to a boil. You could serve it with some chopped parsley sprinkled over. Or a smidge of paprika if you so fancy. A bit of some good cheese next to it wouldn’t be the worst thing. But I think it is amazing alone, a terrific meal all in itself.

This is exactly the kind of thing you want to be eating on a cold day, gearing up to do battle with an apartment threatening to engulf you. Which, as I recall, is exactly where we came in…

Sunsets past

There was this book I had when I was four. Just like all my books at the time, I had inherited it from my elder sister. It was this beautiful cloth-covered hardbound volume called ‘365 stories‘ with ostensibly a story for every day of the year. (Apparently the authors pretended the extra leap year day didn’t count or that it could be be swept under the rug like so many cookie crumbs). There is a marked difference between my sister and I. She is marvellous at maintaining her things. Me? Not so much. At the time, I thought this was only because I was four and she was fourteen. But as it turns out, the only thing I got better at taking care of, was books. Practically everything else I had, including my haircuts, look like they have survived the ravages of war. But my sister, she had used socks and stockings that looked brand-new seven years later. (Granted, she had little use for stockings in tropical Indian climes, but you get the picture). Her books, toys, clothes had this amazingly unused air about them, as if she tenderly placed them in crystal cases and refused to even breathe on them. Fact is, she did use them, and often. She played with all her toys and most certainly wore all her clothes. But she treated with a tremendous amount of respect for someone so young.

I, on the other hand, drew a moustache on her wooden dog, glued a tail to her teddy bear and coloured outside the lines on all her preciously maintained fairy tale books. I’m not proud of it, but in my defense, I was four! I didn’t know better. Giving me access to all my sister’s stuff was probably not the best move my mom could have made. (She thought the second one would be just like the first. We all live and learn.) Keeping the books away from me didn’t help. All those beautifully preserved words had woven their spell. At one time I had been read to, but allegedly I had started grabbing books and doing it for myself very early on. Once positioned on this path, I could not be dislodged, much like a limpet on a favourite rock. I loved books. I eventually learned that you don’t colour on all books, and have several of my childhood books saved in fair condition to this day. But every book I had before this had already lost its shot at such posterity. Which, as I think about it, might be why my younger sister never took to books and reading quite like us older ones. (Would you want to look at the words on the pages when the gingerbread house next to them, tastefully decked out in virulent green and electric blue vied for your attention? I didn’t think so.)

Cue forward a couple of dozen years and the love of books has stuck. Nothing gets my blood running quite like discovering a new book store. So try and imagine, if you will, the sheer, unabashed, would-have-done-cartwheels-if-I’d-ever-learned-how-to-turn-cartwheels euphoria I experienced when I discovered a book store in San Francisco that is dedicated only to books on food and drink! It must be what Brendan Fraser’s character felt like when he met a girl who looked exactly like the girl he was secretly in love with for four years in Bedazzled. (Only this one gave him the time of day. It’s complicated.) Or something else that would make a person wildly happy. (Oh and that news-flash that I’m a nerd who finds odd comedies memorable? That’s airing about twenty-four years too late. Also, no dumping on Brendan Fraser. He made cave men cute and cool.)

I found out about Omnivore Books in an odd way. It was written on a post-it note that someone had left in a library book I borrowed. A quick search on Google led me to this charming bookstore. While the website wasn’t quite as informative as I would like it to be on the books there, it certainly whetted the appetite (easy pun alert! Yike!). In the last days of last year, I finally got the opportunity to go to this small little bookstore tucked away in a residential corner on Cesar Chavez. The lights in the store shone warmly on a rainy evening, beckoning you into the cozy, appealing space. This was once a butcher’s shop. You can still see the old spring balanced weighing scale (overhead by the cash register in the photo) that was retained when the space was converted. Books by current chef royalty like Ferran Adrià jostle for space with old 1930s and Victorian era cookbooks. The food writings of M.F.K Fisher are well-within reach of Nigel Slater. It is a veritable smorgasbord of words in the culinary way. The store cuts swaths across world cultures and time with discerning taste. I walked around it with this kid-in-a-candy-store look plastered across my face, having a hard time deciding what I wanted. I finally settled on three books, The New James Beard,  The Omelette Book and a 1962 edition of The Sunset Cookbook.

Few things reflect the culture of its time better than cookbooks. You look into these vintage tomes and catch a glimpse of what people ate or aspired to eat at home. Some are questionable (like jelly salads, what were they thinking? Blech!) but others are engaging, like Nut Rum bread. Ingredients like venison and goose seemed more mainstream once than they are today. The Sunset Cookbook endeavors to exemplify West North American cuisine of the time. There is a whole chapter on wine, which is to be expected in a book on Californian cuisine. There are helpful little hints like the one about putting a couple of drops of oil in an opened bottle destined for cooking. Not drinking! Then there is the stuff that makes you giggle. Like the section on Special Picnics. Planning a Champagne (?) or Cantonese (!) picnic? There are whole menus for such occasions, should you have been thinking of one. There are references to salad oil – Amey got uncharacteristically excited about this; it proved to be simply oil, olive or canola. There were also casual references to consommé, almost as if every cook had access to prodigious quantities of it back then.

The book is quaintly illustrated with child-like sketches and there is not one photograph in sight. Simply poring through these pages with 60s recipes is a joy in itself and certainly makes you reflect on the time it was written, a time of butter and venison roasts. It was the year of movies like Laurence of Arabia and Hatari, and of the death of Marilyn Monroe. This book was printed in Menlo Park at a time when Silicon Valley didn’t exist. The Flower Children were still a good five years away from San Francisco. They certainly must have been interesting times, on the brink of change as they were.

One of the things I found interesting was that this book has several remarkably simple and quick recipes, despite the fact that many women were still at home in this period, having more time to cook elaborate meals. While thumbing through the pages, I came to a recipe for an easy lemon chicken. Given the profusion of citrus we are seeing, I thought this was a good one to try this. Only I got pretty specific about the citrus, using the Meyer Lemon variety that is in season here in Northern California. The recipe is quick and simple and delivers what it promises, chicken with a bright lemon sauce. With a couple of modifications, it was a fabulous supper.

Meyer Lemon Chicken
Adapted from The Sunset Cookbook
Serves 2-3

Chicken breasts – 3
Meyer Lemons -2
AP Flour – 1/3 cup
Cayenne pepper – 1 tsp
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil – 2 tbsp
Honey – 2 tbsp
Chicken stock – 1 cup
Garlic – 6 cloves, peeled
Leek – 1/4 cup, diced
Carrot – 1/4 cup, diced
Celery – 1 stalk, diced
Mint – 2 sprigs
Parsley for garnish (optional)

- Heat the oven to 375ºF.
- Wash the chicken breasts and pat them dry. Cut each into 2 pieces lengthwise.
- Zest one lemon and juice it. Cut the second lemon into thin discs.
- Pour the lemon juice over the chicken and toss the chicken in it until coated.
- Put the flour in a large-ish ziploc bag along with the cayenne pepper. Season with salt and black pepper. Mix everything together.
- Put the chicken strips into the bag and shake the bag to coat the chicken with the flour mixture.
- Heat the oil in a non-stick pan. In this, brown the chicken on both sides.
- Arrange the chicken in a single layer in an oven-proof casserole. Sprinkle over lemon zest, followed by a dotting of the teaspoons of honey.
- Introduce the leek, carrot and celery in the gaps between the chicken pieces. Distribute the garlic cloves evenly in the spaces.
- Lay out the lemon discs over the chicken in rows, then place whole mint sprigs on the lemon rounds. Pour in chicken stock gently over everything.
- Tent the casserole with aluminum foil and bake in the oven for 45 minutes or until the chicken is tender.
Garnish with parsley (optional). Serve with couscous or some rice.

Cook’s notes:-
The chicken bathes in this broth of stock and veggies to go completely soft and tender. It hits the spot on a cold winter’s day. I took this basic concept from the book and embellished it a bit. I added the veggies and the garlic because it seemed a bit too basic. I also upped the amount of cayenne used. The original recipe asked for brown sugar, the lack of which made me switch to honey. There are sour, sweet and bitter flavours that the chicken gets infused with. It’s possible the faintly bitter flavour came in because it is hard to zest the notoriously thin skinned Meyer Lemon without getting some pith (at least it is hard for me). It all worked out quite alright in the end. Some of the flour from the chicken thickens the broth a little bit to form a nice sauce. A few crispy potatoes on the side would strike just the right note. And oh, move the lemon rings and mint sprig aside before eating or you might have some rather strong flavours to deal with.

I’m thrilled with this vintage addition to my collection of cookbooks. If you are in the San Francisco area and love to cook or read about food, check out Omnivore Books. It has some of the most wonderful culinary treasures you can find. (And no, they didn’t pay me to say this.) My sojourn there also got me looking at the old cookbooks I’d appropriated from my mum. I send out a fervent prayer of thanks that these didn’t end up in my hands when I was four.

Hasta la vista 2009

2009 is limping towards its ineluctable exit and very few people, I’m guessing, are going to be sorry to see it go. As years go in the psyche of the human collective, this one has been rather truculent and petty. To put it plainly, it mostly blew for most people. But you know what? While it wasn’t the best, there were parts of it I liked. Like the fact that this country swore in its first African-American president, the same year that I get to be a permanent resident of it. The part where I took six architectural exams in six months was pretty cool, especially when I passed them. The fact that all of my pass letters have a stamp on a top corner that says “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor” is spectacular. (I get my results from the Terminator y’all! Affirmative.)  Then there’s the part where Amey and I actually managed to stay on and benefit from a fitness regimen with results. That last bit while I did my favourite new thing this year, cooking all kinds of new stuff and starting this blog.

My little piece of the virtual world has been a fabulous place to be in. I’ve gotten to combine my love of writing with my love of cooking and experimentation. I’ve been able to enjoy new things and tackle some of the tougher ones and live to talk about it. It hasn’t been easy but the work has been its own reward. When I began, I thought that’s all it would be. But what’s been amazing is that I met some great new people and reconnected with some wonderful old friends. Combine this with the talented people I interact with on a daily basis in the real world, I’d say that I’m surrounded online and offline with some fabulous, fantastic people. Quite frankly, I can think of few things that are as exciting as doing something you love around people you like. I get to do this and share it with you. The readership to this blog has grown exponentially since I started in early 2009. For all the support and camaraderie, I am thankful to you, dear readers. At the close of the year, this calls for a celebration of some sort. With sweets for all. I wish there was a way I could send you real cake virtually. But they haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet. Also, I find myself without flour and sugar. Essential components to cake. Never fear though, in my home there are always options. I think you’ll find this one very welcome.

It’s a chocolate pot au crème. Don’t be fooled by the posh name. It’s nothing more than a kind of custard really, and one of the easiest desserts you can make in a pinch. If you have some eggs, milk, cream and chocolate, then you’re set really. Marie Antoinette might have been too, had she fed her subjects pot au crème, instead of babbling on about cake. They would have been on a heady high of its chocolate goodness while she made good her escape. Alas, it was not to be so for her. But I digress. This is an amazing melding of some simple ingredients. Rich, dark, creamy and intensely chocolate. Being in the throes of the holiday season as it were, you might be tempted to turn away from yet another sweet. That would be a mistake, especially if you are planning a New Years’ Eve party. The original recipe was for a Mexican Chocolate pot au crème. I couldn’t find any Mexican chocolate and didn’t have the patience to grind cinnamon sticks. So I winged it a fair amount, within reason. Lindt Intense Orange is filled with slivers of nuts and something a lot like nougat, all of which gets filtered away when you run the melted mixture through a sieve. This is a make-ahead dessert that takes very little time and effort on your part. The results are genius.

Orange-Chocolate Pot Au Crème
Adapted from Food & Wine (December 2009)
Makes 3-4 small servings or 2 large ones

Whole milk – 3/4 cups
Cream – 1/4 cup
Valrhona bittersweet chocolate – 3 oz, chopped
Lindt Intense Orange chocolate - 3 oz, chopped
Elderflower liqueur – 1 tbsp
Egg yolks – 3
Fleur de sel for sprinkling over

- Combine the milk and cream in a saucepan and heat to simmer over medium low heat.
- In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks together. Then slowly beat in about a 1/4 cup of the heated milk to temper.
- Introduce the egg yolk-milk mixture into the saucepan, whisking constantly until the mixture thickens slightly. This should take a couple of minutes.
- Add the chopped chocolate into the saucepan and move the vessel off the heat. Stir to melt all the chocolate. Add the elderflower liqueur.
- Strain the mixture through a sieve with a fine mesh, then pour the mixture into bowls of your choice.
- Cover the bowls with plastic wrap when the mixture cools a bit, then refrigerate for a minimum of five hours (to overnight).

Sprinkle with some fleur de sel before serving.

Cook’s notes:-
Make sure that you keep the heat on the entire operation quite low. A point right in between ‘Low’ and ‘Medium’ ought to do the trick. The egg yolks will curdle if the mixture is too hot. This is also why tempering them with some of the milk-cream mixture is important. This is possibly the only place where you could go wrong with this dessert. Everything else is pretty much foolproof. I’ve tried other chocolate cream pot recipes before. Some (like the one with soymilk listed in Everyday Greens) are easy and turn out quite good, but don’t hold up too well after the first day. This recipe had no such problems. I made it on Saturday and we shared the last bowl yesterday. It tasted every bit as soft and creamy as the first batch we tasted. The vegan Greens one I mention above had turned into a chocolate bar by day three. A huge let down when you are expecting to sink your spoon into your dessert.

There wasn’t any in the original recipe, but the alcohol I used here worked rather well. It was the first time I tried Elderflower liqueur. It’s wicked stuff, something you should definitely try if you haven’t before. It imparted some wonderful fruity notes to the crème. While we’re on that subject…I’m probably the only ignoramus around to find out so late, but shops that stock alcohol sell you little bottles or nips of liquor. Beats buying the entire bottle if like me, you don’t like to drink the stuff but love to use it in your cooking (most people don’t have this problem… just sayin’). Also it is a huge space saver, not to mention that those li’l bitty bottles are so darn cute (erm *cough, cough* sorry, didn’t mean to go uber-girly on you). I wouldn’t skip the straining step, especially if you are making this for company. It allows only the rich, cocoa unctuousness into the bowl. If you maintain the proportion to a fair degree, I’m sure you could try this with other dark chocolate-fruit flavours to get some delightful results. We sprinkled a bit of fleur de sel which brought out the chocolate flavours very well. It would be as delightful with whipped cream or vanilla gelato.

Hope you enjoy this dessert with our compliments. Thank you for all your wonderful emails and lovely comments, and for being part of our adventures and stories so far. Wishing you dear reader, a very happy and peaceful 2010!