Category Archives: try this

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 recipes, cooking, try this, shopping

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.

Beet the Heat: Beet Ice Cream with Mascarpone, Orange Zest and Poppyseeds

Posted on by under cooking, recipes, try this

Photo: Saveur.com, Issue #140

I have long daydreamed about the delectable concoctions I would create if I had an ice cream maker, but had never actually used one until last weekend. A friend of mine happened to have one (“The beauty of wedding registries!”), so we made a date to try out one of the recipes from a book we’d both been salivating over, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer.

With flavors like Roasted Strawberry and Buttermilk, Rum with Toasted Coconut, and Plum Pudding, we could have chosen any recipe at random and been dazzled. We ended up settling on Beet Ice Cream with Mascarpone, Orange Zest, and Poppy Seeds: I couldn’t think of anyone else who would let beets near their ice cream, much less choose them over chocolate, and she wanted to prove her skeptic husband wrong.

Beets are so naturally sweet and such a gorgeous, rich color that I’m surprised we don’t see them in desserts more often. Other vegetables long ago became mainstays on dessert menus: sweet potatoes, rhubarb, carrots… (not to mention pumpkin and zucchini, which are technically fruits since they are born of flowers).

Britton Bauer’s ice creams all begin from essentially the same basic recipe (heavy cream, milk, corn starch, sugar, light corn syrup, kosher salt, and cream cheese), and then incorporate various other ingredients to create a multitude of unexpected flavors. In an article in Saveur last year (where I first learned about the book), Molly O’Neill explained the chemistry that makes Britton Bauer’s recipes work:

“Ice cream is basically a frozen emulsion, in which components that do not naturally meld—fat, water, and air—are encouraged to marry by adding such things as heat, proteins, sugars, and starches. The stronger the marriage, the more supple the ice cream will be. If water is not bound well with the other ingredients, it becomes nasty little ice shards that disrupt the smooth sensation on the tongue. Rather than using the traditional egg yolk to bind water and fat in the frozen emulsion, Bauer relies on the proteins in milk—casein and whey. She boils the liquid to reduce its water content, concentrating and denaturing the proteins, rendering them more likely to bind the water and fat. Bauer’s other tricks include adding cream cheese, which is high in casein proteins, and using thickeners, such as cornstarch, which absorb water and prevent crystallization, for added insurance. Her use of natural corn syrup in addition to granulated sugar is also key: Its glucose is not as sweet in flavor as sugar’s sucrose, and it binds with water, which helps prevent icing, too.”

Katie had put the metal bowl in which the churning magic happens in the freezer the night before, and I had roasted and pureed a couple of beets beforehand, so all that remained to do was throw together the sweet and creamy base, boil it with orange peel to infuse it with a light citrus flavor, stir in the beet puree, and press “On.’

We sipped our wine while the ice cream maker churned away, and 25 minutes later we stirred in the poppyseeds and dug into the pinkest, most exquisitely nuanced ice cream I’ve ever tasted. The tang of the orange undergirded the earthy sweetness of the beets, which complemented but didn’t overwhelm the nuttiness of the poppyseeds. I closed my eyes. I laughed. It was that good.

If I needed an excuse to indulge this daydream of mine, I just found it. Registry schmegistry!

Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.

On Writing Recipes and Learning to Ignore Them

Posted on by under cooking, recipes, try this

ImageI was recently looking back at a post I wrote a couple of years ago, in which I talked about the “piecemeals” I used to cobble together from the motley collection of ingredients I would bring home from the grocery store. As much as I love eating PB&J, grapefruit, and wine for dinner on occasion, I’ve made a concerted effort over the past several months to plan my meals in advance. I’ve been pleased with the results: faster shopping trips, less wasted food and money, and more exciting dishes.

Far from the onerous chore I once imagined, meal-planning turned out to be one of the highlights of my week. I look forward to the time I spend over coffee on Saturday or Sunday morning, poring over cookbooks and magazines to find inspiration for the week’s menu. Sometimes I follow recipes to the letter, but more often than not, I use them as a basic outline and fill in the details based on what’s in season, what I have on hand, or what I’m craving.

For me, that freedom to improvise, to riff on a theme in the kitchen, makes cooking both a creative outlet and a form of stress relief. It’s a skill I’ve been picking up slowly, through experiments with varying degrees of success, and is something I’ve wanted to share with others who might not yet feel comfortable striking out on their own at the stove.

The weekly recipe column I started writing last month for DCist online magazine is giving me the chance to influence, in some small way, how readers view food and cooking. “Season’s Eatings” highlights local, in-season ingredients available at DC-area farmers’ markets, especially those readers may rarely (if ever) find at the grocery store. My mission is threefold:

1)     Give readers a sense for locality and seasonality of food (what grows when in our region)

2)     Inspire people to taste more mindfully, more enthusiastically, more broadly. Indeed, to experience food through all five senses more fully.

3)     Help others learn to cook more intuitively, with less fear and more confidence in their own ability to create something delicious.

ImageI’ve been dreaming up dishes for years, but have never written them down before. The process is making me pay attention to details I’ve never given much mind to: is “sauté until asparagus is crisp-tender” descriptive enough? How fine is “finely chopped”? I do my best to strike a balance between precise direction (for cooks who need more guidance) and encouragement of experimentation and modification (for everyone, to reinforce the idea that the recipes are, by and large, suggestions to give the cook somewhere to begin). Nearly all of them end with some variation of “adjust seasonings to taste.” The essence of intuitive cooking lies there, in that line.

Much as I depend on it, I realize how baffling this command can seem for novice cooks. A friend told me recently that seeing it at the end of a recipe has always left her feeling lost. “To taste what?” she wonders. If you have never tried an ingredient or a dish before, how are you to know what it should taste like?

The short answer is, it should taste good. When you come to the end of a recipe and sample the result, you should like what you taste and want to eat more of it. In most cases, that’s a perfectly adequate measure of the success of a dish. Part of the beauty of trying new recipes lies precisely in not feeling pressure to adhere to some kind of external standard. When you’re cooking, you decide. Learn to trust your tastebuds.

You can train your palate by tasting carefully, with attention. Over time and many meals, you’ll learn to look at a recipe you’ve never seen before and know what ingredients will be essential and which can be left out or replaced with something else. You’ll begin to understand which ingredients must be kept in proportion and where amounts can be tweaked to suit your own fancies. You’ll discover what to add in order to balance or bring out certain flavors; for instance, salt adds depth or “backbone,” acid creates brightness or “punch,” sugar lends “roundness” and calms excessively bitter or sharp flavors, and fat gives a dish fullness or “heft” and helps create a silkier texture.

Reading lots of recipes also helps, as does watching cooking shows and, more than anything, peering over the shoulder of a knowledgeable cook and asking lots of questions. And if, having “let go of the handlebars,” so to speak, you end up ruining a dish beyond all recognition, you may even be grateful for the excuse to eat cereal and ice cream for dinner.