I write a lot of fiction but sometimes I have to take my hat off to life. Click on http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/south/10010615198552/police-assault-prompted-by-too-many-pickles/
to see more about the woman who went beserk over pickles in her sandwich. She’s gonna be famous.
Moroccan Soup
SPICED LENTILS
INGREDIENTS
1 1/3 cups red lentils
2 1/2 cups vegetable broth
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 tablespoon coriander
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 onions
1 tablespoon butter
2 small tomatoes
PREPARATION
Put lentils and broth in pot. Add cayenne, coriander, cumin, ginger, pepper, salt, and turmeric. Soak for 4 hours. Lentils should be split. (Hey, if you want some to leave slowly, you could say, “Make like a lentil and split.”)
While the lentils soak, go outside and pull weeds. When you come back, dice your onions and tomatoes. After your lentils have been sufficiently soaked (and how often does that phrase come up in normal conversation?) add onion and butter to pan. Sauté the onions on medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until the onions are tender. (Love me tender, love me true.)
Put onions and tomatoes in pot. Bring soup to boil. Turn heat down to low and simmer for 30-to-60 minutes or until lentils are tender. Serve to adoring family or guests who are about to go Morocco mad.
TIDBITS
1) You know, if I had a time machine this tidbit would have already been written.
2) Or maybe I’d use my time machine to always go back to the moment all my clothes were clean. I’d never have to do laundry again.
3) I think I’d go back to the moment when that Viking, Haarald, was about to invent lutefisk and give him a crunchy-shell taco. The culinary world would have been better off.
4) Oh, and the rest of the too. Eating lutefisk was the main reason the Norsemen assaulted England and continental Europe for centuries. I mean who wouldn’t feel like killing and pillaging after eating lutefisk?
5) Fortunately, the Vikings eventually came into contact with Moroccans in Spain. While bad for the inhabitants who had to suffer through countless battles to-ing and fro-ing across their backyards, it was a positive boon to the rest of Europe.
6) For once the fierce Norsemen discovered the spices of Morocco, they could preserve their food. They didn’t have to soak their fish in lye, a poison, to preserve it. They could even make Berbere shish kabobs. This made them very happy.
7) And the raids of the Scandanavian beserkers ended. Well okay not right away, but they did tail off.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Algerian Soup
SHORBA BAIDA
(Chicken Soup)
INGREDIENTS
2 chicken breasts
1 medium onion
2 inch cinnamon stick
2 large tomatoes
10 ounce can chick peas
2 teaspoons olive oil
4 cups chicken broth
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 tablespoon basmati rice
1 tablespoon barley
2 large tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon coriander
1/2 tablespoon parsley flakes
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
SPECIAL UTENSIL
spice grinder
Dutch oven
PREPARATION
Cut chicken breasts into 1/2″ cubes. Mince the onion. Grind the cinnamon stick until you get powder. Dice the tomatoes. Drain the chick peas.
Use medium-high heat to sauté the chicken, onion, and cinnamon with olive oil in Dutch oven. Cook for 5-to-10 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently.
Add chick peas, chicken broth, lemon juice, rice, barley, tomatoes, chili powder, parsley, pepper, sat, and tumeric. Cover the Dutch oven and simmer on warm heat for about 1 hour or until rice and barley are soft.
This is great. People love it. Eat your share while you can.
TIDBITS
1) This heavenly soup is the reason the French conquered Algeria in 1830.
2) This heavenly soup is the reason Algeria threw out France in 1962. The Algerians didn’t want to share.
3) Did the Algerians get any culinary benefits from 132 years of Gallic occupation?
4) I hope so. A Vietnamese man once said the only benefit his countrymen derived from French colonial rule was the baguette.
5) Vietnamese culinary artists combined the baguettes with their way of preparing meat to produce the tasty and world-famous banh mi sandwiches.
6) America fought in Vietnam for the banh mi sandwiches. And so it goes.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Ethiopian Entree
INGREDIENTS
1/2 medium yellow onion
1 garlic clove
1/2 russet potato
3 baby carrots
1 1/4 cups water
3/4 cup orange lentils
2 1/4 teaspoons Berbere spice mix (See recipe for BERBERE SPICE MIX INGREDIENTS, if you can’t find the mix)
1 14.5 can diced tomatoes
PREPARATION
You will make your culinary life easy for yourself and everyone else within cussing distance if you soak your lentil beans before starting to cook. (It is a little known fiction that 37% of all aggressive dictators since 1738 ate unsoaked beans at one time or another.)
Anyway, there are two ways to soak your beans. The first way is the “quick soak” method. Soak lentils in 6-to-8 cups of water. Heat on high until water boils. Boil for 2 minutes. Turn off heat and cover for 1 hour. Drain and rinse. The second way is the “slow method.” Soak lentils in 6-to-8 cups of water for at least 6 hours. (This give you time to run marathons in record times with about an hour break in between.) Drain and rinse.
Peel and dice onion, garlic cloves, and potato. Dice baby carrots. Put water, lentils, onion, garlic, potatoes, baby carrots, bebere spice mix in soup pot. Cook over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes or until lentils soften. Stir periodically with increasing frequency as you reach the 20-minute mark.
Let me stress that the time necessary to soften lentils varies with the time it soaked beforehand and the temperature at which they are cooked. So it is quite a good idea and periodically monitor the softness of the lentils. (Too many business mergers have been stopped because one CEO made another CEO wait too long for unsoaked lentils to soften.)
Add diced tomatoes and heat at low-medium heat for another 15 minutes.
Serve in a bowl or over rice on a plate.
1) Cardamom, used to make the Berbere spice mix, costs about $60 a pound.
2) Many of today’s cars weigh about a ton and cost about $25,000.
3) The same car made from cardamom would run you about $120,000.
4) That’s before labor costs. Who knows how much it would cost to hire workers skilled enough to fashion cardamom into an internal combustion engine, tires, windows, steering wheels and all the fixin’s.
5) Saffron costs about $170 an ounce or about one-tenth the price of gold or four times the cost of silver.
6) Thank goodness, keeping up with the Joneses doesn’t mean owning a $5,600,000 saffron car.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Greek Entree
INGREDIENTS
100 grape leaves
4 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 medium onions
1 1/2 pounds ground turkey
3/4 cups uncooked rice
1 teaspoon parsley
1/2 tablespoon Prudhomme’s Poultry MagicTM spice
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon Mediterranean rice seasoning
1 1/4 cups water
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
SPECIAL HELP
Your kids, relatives, neighbors, and anyone else who comes within your gravitational field.
PREPARATION
Pick 100 grape leaves. Remove stems. This is a great task for the kids. If you don’t have grapes growing on the side of the hill in your front yard, they can be found at the Greek section of your supermarket.
Dice onion. Saute onion in butter until tender and golden. Pour mix into big bowl. Let it cool for at least five minutes. Your fingers will thank you. Add turkey, rice, parsley, poultry spice, coriander, pepper, rice seasoning, water, tomato sauce, and lemon juice. Whew. Mix thoroughly.
(Memorize the following phrases to sound like a great chef: heat over to 350 degrees, cook to golden brown, use a big pot, mix thoroughly, and stir occasionally.)
Put all the grape leaves in a big pot. (See? Sounds culinary, doesn’t it?) Cover the leaves with water. Cook on medium-high heat until all the leaves turn from a bright green to an olive green. This is called blanching.
Pour out all the water. (Try pouring it on that pan you used to fry eggs. That hot water will loosen the egg bits from the pan right quick.)
Put the leaves on a big plate. Take a leaf and put it on a board, or another plate, with the smooth, shiny side face down. Put about a teaspoon of your meat/rice/spice mix in the middle of the leaf. Fold the bottom of the leaf until it just covers the mix. Fold both sides in so they completely cover the mix. Roll up the leaf like a burrito or spring roll, making sure to keep the sides folded in. This step takes the longest.
Put a few leaves on the bottom of the pot. Put the first rolled up leaves, dolmathes, up against the sides of the pot. Put the next leaves against those leaves and so on. You need the dolmathes jammed together so they don’t unravel. Add layers as necessary.
Add water to pot until all dolmathes are covered. Place a lid that is slightly smaller than the pot on top of the dolmathes to further keep them from unraveling. Cook on low heat for 45 minutes.
You can speed up the process by cooking the rice while mixing the meat and spices together. In this case, reduce the cooking of the dolmathes to 30 minutes.
Don’t throw away the liquid that remains in the pot after you serve the dolmathes. It makes an excellent broth.
TIDBITS
1) Dolmathe is a great ScrabbleTM word.
2) I first made this dish years ago for my wife’s birthday. We are still married.
3) My family and I first ate dolmathes at a wonderful Greek restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
4) I went to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. The two Greek restaurants nearest to the school were across the street from each other.
5) The three stages of mathematics are: 1) numbers, 2) lower-case English letters, and 3) Greek letters. If there is a fourth stage, I don’t want to know it. My head would explode.
6) Socrates almost died in battle. If he had, all Western philosophical thought would have been completely altered. Cliff Notes would have put out one fewer booklet.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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