Pakhlava for Nowruz

Posted on by under Georgia, holidays, Iran, recipes, Russia, try this

Caucasus PakhlavaToday is the spring equinox, when day and night balance out after six months of more darkness than light. For peoples across Central and South Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, this is a major holiday—Nowruz, or Persian New Year. (“Nowruz,” or various spellings thereof, means “new day” in Persian.)  Preparations for the celebration traditionally begin with a massive spring cleaning, buying new clothes and flowers, and days of cooking. Families pay visits to their relatives and friends at home, and it’s important to welcome your guests with snacks—tea and coffee, dried fruits and nuts, cookies and pastries like baklava.

I like the idea of a new “New Year” beginning in the spring. It’s another chance to revisit those resolutions you might have made in January and never got around to fulfilling, a good time to clear away clutter and must, both literal and figurative.

While I never celebrated Nowruz while I was living in the Caucasus, I did eat plenty of baklava. It’s a requisite dish at weddings, birthdays, and other holiday feasts throughout the region. There were the long, skinny diamonds dripping with syrup at my host sister’s wedding in Georgia and tiny squares of cardamom-spiced baqlava at the corner bakery in Azerbaijan, both exquisite. But my favorite was the cookie-like pakhlava that Inna Grigoryan, an Armenian friend of mine in Krasnodar (Russia), baked for her son’s 13th birthday party.

Inna making pakhlava in her mother-in-law's kitchen

Inna making pakhlava in her mother-in-law’s kitchen

Instead of the countless paper-thin sheets of phyllo pastry that most Americans associate with the dessert, this recipe calls for just four layers of a simple sour cream dough, with a sweet paste of ground walnuts, sugar, and egg whites slathered generously between each one. It’s elegant yet entirely unostentatious, satisfyingly rich but not cloyingly sweet. I came across it again at a New Year’s meal at another friend’s home in North Ossetia, hundreds of miles away.

Inna made her pakhlava “by the eye,” as Russians say, not measuring anything precisely and working from an old family recipe long since committed to memory. I’ve done my best to recreate it in my own kitchen, but I’m still tinkering with it. (I think there might be too much dough for the filling.) Please let me know how it turns out if you try it!

Pakhlava
Makes 1 9×13 in. pan

Dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, chopped into ½-inch chunks
¾ cup sour cream
2 egg yolks

Filling:
2 ½ cups walnuts (or a mixture of walnuts and other nuts), toasted
1 cup sugar
3 egg whites

3 Tbsp. honey
1 egg yolk and 1 tsp. water, beaten together with a fork
¼ cup toasted hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios, walnuts or other nuts for topping

  1. To toast the nuts: Preheat the oven to 350 F. Spread the nuts in a single layer on a large baking sheet (or two if necessary). Toast them for 10 minutes in the oven. Allow them to cool. Set aside the ¼ cup of nuts you’ll be using to top the pakhlava—don’t chop them.
  2. In a food processor or food mill, grind 1½ cups of toasted nuts to a sand-like powder (not a paste!). Finely chop the remaining 1 cup of nuts. (This can also be accomplished by sealing the nuts inside a large Ziploc bag and running a rolling pin over them repeatedly.)
  3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, soda, and salt. Mix in the butter with a pastry cutter, two forks, or your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse sand.
  4. Lightly beat the egg yolks into the sour cream and fold into the flour mixture. Turn the dough onto a cool, well-floured surface and knead it just until a sticky dough comes together, about 30 seconds. Separate dough into four equal balls, place them on a buttered plate, cover, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
  5. Just before rolling out the dough, prepare the filling: beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until they become white and foamy, about 30-45 seconds. Stir in the walnuts and sugar. Set aside.
  6. When dough has chilled, butter and flour the bottom and sides of a 13×9-inch baking pan. On a cool, well-floured surface, roll one ball of dough into a 13×9-inch rectangle (or larger and cut it to fit) and place in the greased pan. Spread half of the walnut filling onto this layer, being careful to spread it all the way to the sides.
  7. Roll out the next ball and place on top of the walnut filling. Spread the honey on top of this layer. Roll out the third ball and spread the remaining walnut filling on top of it. Roll out the final ball and place on top. Brush the top layer thoroughly with beaten egg and milk mixture. Cover the pan and chill for at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
  8. Preheat the oven to 375 F. Cut the pakhlava diagonally at a steep angle into 2-inch-wide stripes, then cut them crosswise in the same manner to form diamond-shaped pieces. Press a toasted hazelnut, almond, pistachio, or walnut in the center of each piece.
  9. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake approximately 10 minutes longer, until top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool before removing from pan.

Kitchen Travels to Persia, with Chicken

Posted on by under cooking, recipes, shopping, try this

Food of LifeI received a Persian cookbook as a gift a couple of months ago (Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, by Najmieh Batmanglij) and haven’t stopped cooking from it since. I like the way these dishes make my kitchen smell—rich and garlicky and warm, with sweet and earthy spices. They have so much in common with the foods I loved in the Caucasus—delicate combinations of sweet and sour flavors, fruits stewing along with meats in savory dishes, recipes packed with nuts and fresh herbs. This is no surprise—the ancient trade routes brought ingredients and techniques from Central and South Asia west to Iran, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Turkey and back again, forming a culinary continuum that persists to this day.

This swath of Earth Is my gastronomic home. 90% of my most-used cookbooks (including Silk Road Cooking (also by Batmanglij), Plenty, Please to the Table, Classical Turkish Cooking) focus on cuisines in this group. I love tracing how the names for foods made subtle shifts as they made their way across it. For example, eggplant in Hindi is baingan or brinjal, in Farsi bademjan, in Georgian badrijani, in Russian baklazhan, in Turkish patlican, all the way to the (British) English aubergine.

While I already had most of the spices required to make Persian dishes in my pantry and could get most of the ingredients I needed at my local grocery store, there were a few gaps that necessitated a field trip to the Persian store in the ‘burbs. (Sure, I could have filled them online, but that wouldn’t be half the fun!) With a list of items I never knew existed (e.g. verjus (unripe grape juice), dried limes, grape molasses), my intrepid culinary adventure partner Wendy and I set out for Yekta Market, reputedly the best-stocked Persian store in the DC area.

Nuts and dried fruits at a market in Kyrgyzstan, part of the same culinary continuum

Nuts and dried fruits at a market in Kyrgyzstan, part of the same culinary continuum

It took a few U turns and more than a few curses at the GPS Digital Dolt, but we made it half an hour before close. I walked in and wanted everything: the hummocks of raw nuts—almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts. Heaping mounds of fresh herbs and bulging bags of dried ones: tarragon, mint, lovage, fenugreek. Pomegranate and sour cherry juice. Flatbreads other than pita. The most interesting jams: mulberry, fig, quince, walnut. Huge blocks of feta bathing in brine, waiting to be cut on the spot. Barrels of olives. Pickled turnips. Dried dates, figs, apricots, cherries, prunes, persimmons. The spidery script over everything. The same dusty clutter I remember from the Russian store in Minneapolis. People come here to taste home.

pomegranate seeds

Georgian pomegranate

We could have easily stayed another hour to peruse everything on the shelves, but the shop was closing and our stomachs growling. We went to the restaurant next door for dinner, where the star dish of our meal was fesenjan, chicken braised slowly in a thick stew of pomegranate, ground walnuts and spices until it falls off the bone. It was the kind of meal I was tempted to prolong by running my finger along the inside of the bowl when all the flatbread was gone and there were still traces of sauce leftover.

I managed to restrain myself at the restaurant, but made a similar dish from Batmanglij’s cookbook for a potluck dinner party with friends the next week. I’m not the only one who couldn’t get enough of it. I promised to share the recipe and haven’t yet, so here it is:

Pomegranate Khoresh with Chicken (Khoresh-e fesenjan ba jujeh)

From Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, by Najmieh Batmanglij
Makes 4 servings

½ lb. (2 cups) shelled walnuts
5 Tbsp. oil, butter, or ghee
2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced
2 lbs. chicken legs, cut up (I used a package of chicken thighs and didn’t bother cutting them up)
1lb. butternut squash, peeled and cut into 2-in. cubes
4 cups pure pomegranate juice
2 Tbsp. pomegranate molasses
1 tsp. sea salt
¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
¼ tsp. turmeric
½ tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. ground cardamom
¼ tsp. ground saffron dissolved in 1 Tbsp. rose water (I skipped this)
2 Tbsp. grape molasses or sugar (optional)

Garnish:
Arils of 1 fresh pomegranate
2 Tbsp. toasted walnuts

  1. To toast the walnuts: Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C). Spread the walnuts in a sheet pan and bake for 10 minutes. Set aside.
  2. In a Dutch oven, heat 3 Tbsp. oil over medium heat until very hot, and sauté the onions. Remove from pot with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add 2 Tbsp. oil and brown the chicken. Add the butternut squash and sauté for a few minutes.
  3. In a food processor, finely grind the sautéd onions with the toasted walnuts, add 1 cup pomegranate juice, the pomegranate molasses, salt, pepper, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, saffron-rose water (if using), and grape molasses or sugar,  and mix well to create a creamy paste.
  4. Add the creamy walnut paste and remaining pomegranate juice to the chicken in a Dutch oven, stirring gently. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 ½ hours, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon to prevent walnuts from burning.
  5. The khoresh should be sweet and sour and have the consistency of heavy cream. Adjust to taste by adding pomegranate molasses for sourness or grape molasses (or sugar) for sweetness. If the sauce is too thick, thin it with more pomegranate juice.
  6. Transfer the khoresh from the Dutch oven to a deep, ovenproof casserole. Cover and place in a warm oven until ready to serve with chelow (saffron-steamed rice). Just prior to serving, sprinkle with fresh pomegranate arils and walnuts.

Gingerbread, the Alternative Febreze

Posted on by under breakfast, recipes, try this

Like most us, I eat not only when I’m hungry, but also when I’m bored, when I’m sad or lonely or drunk, when I’m angry or anxious or feel like I deserve a reward. In almost all of these cases, what I want most is dark, dense, not-too-sweet cake. For that very reason, I almost never make such a cake. One must wear pants, after all, and I am not in a position to buy new ones every other month.

Still, there are times. I recently forgot about a bunch of black lentils I had left boiling away on the stove. All the water evaporated and they had burnt to a crisp by the time the biting stench reached my room. I started over with new lentils and managed to salvage the pot I’d been using, but no matter how many fans I turned on and how many windows I opened, I couldn’t get the bitter, charred smell out of the house. I had a friend coming over for dinner whom I didn’t want to repulse. Acrid lentil fumes begone: I would shoo them out, or at least mask them, with the warm and spicy aroma of fresh gingerbread, the ultimate snacking cake.

I found this recipe, which sounded exactly like what I was looking for–almost. I didn’t have the applesauce it called for, but I figured plain yogurt would do. I also didn’t have whole wheat flour but wanted the same dense, nutty quality it imparts, so I replaced it with a mixture of white and rye flour. I misread the recipe and thought it said only ¼ cup each molasses and maple syrup. That seemed like very little sweetener for a whole batch of muffins, so I dumped in some brown sugar. The other gingerbread recipes I had looked at all called for eggs, but this one didn’t—I cracked one in. I was in too much of a hurry to measure spices, so I tossed in a bit of this and a bit of that and hoped it would taste good.

When I pulled the muffins out of the oven twenty-odd minutes later, no trace of the lentil debacle remained. The muffins were a deep caramel brown, bounced back at the touch, and smelled like Christmas. Unfortunately it turned out that my guest doesn’t like ginger, but I devoured mine with fervor enough for two.

Gingerbread (for the Hungry, the Sad, and the Smelly)
Makes about 16 muffins or 1 8×8 pan

*Note: if you don’t have rye flour, you can use whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, or another whole-grain flour.

¼ cup molasses (not blackstrap)
¼ cup real maple syrup
½ cup plain yogurt
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup brown sugar, packed down
1 ½ cup rye flour
1 cup all-purpose white flour
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
2 tsp. ground ginger
2 tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. allspice
¼ tsp. cardamom
¼ tsp. nutmeg
1 cup hot water
1 tsp. powdered sugar for dusting, if desired

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin cups with paper liners or butter and flour an 8×8 in. baking dish.
  2. In a large bowl, combine the molasses, maple syrup, yogurt, butter, egg, and brown sugar. Mix until well blended.
  3. In another bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ones, stirring until just combined. Stir in the hot water. Pour into prepared muffin cups or pan.
  4. Bake 20-25 minutes for muffins or 35-50 minutes for cake, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Sift powdered sugar over the top if desired. (Jiggling the sugar through a fine-mesh sieve works well for this.) Allow to cool before serving.

Thanksgiving, Unbound: A Midwesterner Bucks Tradition

Posted on by under holidays, recipes

Thanksgiving 2012I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner this year, a small gathering with a few close friends. Plans were up in the air until a few days before, so I hadn’t thought much about what to make until it was time to go shopping.

Thanksgiving dinner with my family in Minnesota has always been strictly regulated by Midwestern, midcentury tradition: there must be turkey, sausage and sage stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and French fried onions, Jell-o fruit salad, cranberry sauce from the can, and Grandma’s homemade lefse and rolls. For dessert there is pie: pumpkin, apple, and Mom’s banana cream (three of those). Every dish has a champion, and without any of them, something just seems off.

Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the cranberry sauce jiggle as much as anyone else, and missing out on lefse and banana cream pie (with homemade custard, always) made me especially nostalgic. But as I began thinking about my own menu, it dawned on me that I was no longer bound by these rules. For the first time, I was free to bring my own Thanksgiving fantasy to the table.

The trouble is, it worked. Thanksgiving may never be the same again.

Photo: SimplyRecipes.com

Photo: SimplyRecipes.com

The first and easiest decision was nixing the turkey. It is an unwieldy bird that’s hard to prepare well and is almost no one’s favorite part of the meal. I opted for duck instead: over the phone, a chef friend guided me through the process of cutting up the bird, brining the breast and curing the legs in salt overnight in the fridge, then slow-roasting the legs in duck fat and searing the breast in a dry pan just before dinner.

Next, the stuffing. I’d always wanted to try a cornbread stuffing, and Martha’s with bacon and pecans hit the spot. Next time, I’d substitute lard for some of the butter and add a little additional stock or cream to moisten it, but I’ve been happily eating the leftovers for the past week. (The recipe makes enough for 8 people.) It was especially good with Joy the Baker’s cranberry sauce: I cut down the sugar a bit, skipped the orange zest, substituted vanilla extract for the vanilla bean, added a hint of powdered ginger, and simmered it with two cinnamon sticks.

Last year I remembered wishing for something green and crunchy on the Thanksgiving table, so I tossed together a bunch of raw kale and some briefly blanched, crisp-tender green beans, drizzled them with sesame seed oil, and mixed in a clove or two of minced garlic, kosher salt, and black pepper.

Photo: Smitten Kitchen

Photo: Smitten Kitchen

Instead of marshmallows, we topped our sweet potatoes with a “salad” of finely chopped celery, flat-leaf parsley, and goat cheese (among a few other things), based on a recipe from smitten Kitchen. The crunch of the vegetables and creaminess of the cheese set off the richness of the sweet potatoes elegantly. Next time I might add in hint of crushed red pepper flakes. These would make a unique passable appetizer, if you do that kind of thing on Thanksgiving.

A friend brought over a warm quinoa salad with butternut squash, dried cranberries, and pecans, based on a recipe from the New York Times. It calls for both regular and black\ quinoa, which she couldn’t find, so she substituted a box of “rainbow” quinoa instead. Most mentions of quinoa make me roll my eyes, not because I don’t like it but because the idea of a “hip” grain seems inherently absurd to me. (And here I don’t intend to imply that said friend chose to make it for its trend value.) In spite of myself, I will absolutely make this dish again. Out of everything on the table, this is what had me coming back for seconds.

Photo: Food and Wine

Photo: Food and Wine

She also made this recipe for roasted Brussels sprouts with pistachios and cipollini onions, which we gobbled up on the spot. It’s from a book entitled Crazy Sexy Kitchen, by a woman who adopted a plant-based diet after learning she had Stage 4 epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (yikes!) and has been fighting it publicly with exuberant, mouth-watering veganism.

For dessert, we settled on a pear and almond cream tart from Chef Elizabeth Prueitt of Tartine Bakery and Café in San Francisco. I wouldn’t change a thing here: it was exquisite.

I’m not sure where I’ll be for Thanksgiving next year, but watch out, traditionalists: I’m already planning the menu.

At Home in the Kitchen

Posted on by under breakfast, cooking, kitchens

My brother and I went home to visit our parents in Minnesota last weekend for their 40th wedding anniversary. We didn’t have much in the way of plans in place, but knew that we wanted to do two things for sure: cook and eat.

When I thought recently about how much our family life has come to revolve around food since I went off to college, it struck me as a bit of a surprise. I didn’t grow up in a “foodie” household. My mother, who did the lion’s share of the cooking, relied on tried and true recipes for heartland classics like ziti hotdish and beef stew. We rarely went out to eat and when we did, we generally went to the Indian restaurant in the strip mall or the Thai restaurant in a different strip mall (both of which, I might add, are excellent). When we went on a roadtrip to Washington, DC when I was 10, we packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a cooler in the back of the van and ate them for two days straight.

Photo: BecomingLola.blogspot.com

Yet looking back, I realize that our family rituals always centered around food, even if it wasn’t fancy or unusual. Evening mealtime together was something I could count on, like a stake anchoring the day. Sunday mornings I used to lie in bed pretending to be asleep until the last possible moment, hoping Mom and Dad would forget about me until it was too late to make it to church, but the smell of bacon or chocolate Malt-o-Meal eventually got me up every time. Every fall, when the Haralson apple trees in our front yard hung heavy with crisp, tart fruit, Dad would peel and chop them while Mom mixed up topping for apple crisp. We’d eat for dessert later that night while it was still warm, in shallow bowls puddled with cream.

There were the simple snacks we used to make, things I haven’t had in years and am old enough to be nostalgic for now: thick slices of tomato pulled fresh from the garden and sprinkled with sugar; graham crackers spread generously with chocolate frosting and eaten like a sandwich; the popcorn Dad popped in the Whirly-Pop on the stove every Wednesday and Thursday just before we sat down to watch Law and Order or ER.

Photo: Kristin Rosenau at PastryAffair.com

If we were connoisseurs of anything, it was bread. That was the one item my mother refused to buy at the grocery store, instead driving across town to the bakery that made boules and baguettes and babkas the way she liked them. I hardly buy bread anymore (The carbs! The freezer space! There’s no good bakeries nearby, and the good stuff at the farmers’ market doesn’t come sliced!), but as a family we used to go through several loaves of it each week. In the mornings, or as an afternoon snack, there was peanut butter toast, onto which Mom would slather butter underneath the peanut butter. (The peanut butter doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth this way, and contrary to what you might think, the taste of the butter still comes through.) Sometimes there was cinnamon toast (buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar), which is one of the most comforting foods I know. In the winter, when we came in from ice skating on the pond across the street, there was cocoa and toast, which is just what it sounds like, except the toast would be—surprise!—buttered, then cut vertically into four strips for dipping.

Little things have changed about meals at home over the years: there are fewer highly processed foods (almost none, in fact), more alcohol, and vegetables that never showed up before, like kale and chard. It’s often my brother and I who do the cooking these days when we’re at home. What hasn’t changed is the way the kitchen serves as the magnet that pulls us together, whether from different corners of the house or halfway across the country.