Dumas Celebrates Pork Month

Alexandre Dumas is best known for the Three Musketeers (at least 29 different film versions listed on IMDB, as one measure of its popularity) and The Count of Monte Cristo (at least 18 versions) but he also wrote a gigantic work called the "Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine." I just bought the little tiny abridged version, recently republished. It's not exactly a cookbook but he does give recipes, so in honor of Louise's Cookbook Game at Months of Edible Celebrations, I'm going to share a recipe in honor of Pork Month. That's what we do in this game: we pick a current MONTH, like Apple Month or in this case Pork Month, which is celebrated in October, and we find a recipe in a cookbook we like.

The recipe in the tiny version of the "Grand Dictionnaire" which is titled From Absinthe to Zest: An Alphabet for Food Lovers, doesn't just have any old entry for pork: it has "Young Wild Boar," which in French is "marcassin." The recipe is for "Quarter of wild boar with cherry sauce." You would surely want to make it, if you happened to have a "fresh tender quarter of a young wild boar." Dumas suggests that you start by dealing with the bone -- his description is detailed, on how to do this so that the bone protrudes properly from the meat. Then you put the meat in a litre of marinade, and let it macerate for two or three days, you cook it and baste it, drain it and "mask it with a thick layer of breadcrumbs (from black bread) which have been dried, pounded, sieved, mixed with a little sugar and cinnamon, and then dampened with some good red wine, but only enough to make them stick together." There are a few more instructions on cooking it, and finally putting "a paper frill around the protruding bone."

The Cherry Sauce for the meat is made separately, from dried, unpitted cherries, softened in water and then pounded in a mortar. Additional ingredients include red wine, cinnamon, cloves, salt, and lemon zest, all thickened with starch.

Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

"Pomegranate Soup" by Marsha Mehran

I just read the novel Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran. The book features descriptions of food and cooking, including one Persian recipe in each chapter. However, these descriptions are really the only feature of the novel that I find truly strong and enjoyable. The recipes for chicken with walnuts and pomegranates; various soups, yogurt drinks, and deep-fried pastries sound wonderful.

The premise of Pomegranate Soup is like a well-known recipe. Take an insular village somewhere in northern Europe (here, Ireland). Invent some quirky inhabitants (quite a few here). Bring in an immigrant or two to found a restaurant or cafe (here, three sisters from Iran and an elderly Italian widow who had already been the outsider in a village for 40 years or more). Introduce the villagers to exotic cooking. They like it (a bit too fast here). Create some jealousy, greed, adolescent pranks, rivalry, and love interest (maybe a little contrived). Yup, yup, yup, a kind of a melodrama.

The portrayal of the sisters and how they fled the revolution in Iran is interesting and plausible. The portrayal of the Irish villagers and the Italian widow is pretty plausible too, at least at first. The events of the story start out not too bad. But as things progress, the story goes out of control -- spoiler coming.

The ending, where all the evildoers and mischief makers see the light, repent, and swear to be good, doesn't do much for me at all. Also, throughout the book the descriptions are often a bit over-written, sometimes with rather odd word choices that overreach to try to make it more vivid. In sum, it's a rather weak novel with really good food writing.

It's School Lunch and Chili Month

October is School Lunch Month and also Chili Month. For me this is quite appropriate, because my first taste of chili was in the school cafeteria at Delmar Harvard Elementary School in University City, Missouri. This was exceptional: I normally brought a bag lunch consisting of a sandwich, an apple, and sometimes a treat like a cookie or a piece of candy. My mother made our lunches almost every day, so I can't remember how I was able to try the chili in the cafeteria instead of my sandwich. I'm sure it wasn't in the least hot, as no children in Missouri at that time would have been expected to eat spicy food. It was served in a heavy white china bowl with a little cellophane packet of crackers. I was always curious to try things that were different from what my mother made, and this was really different.

I did have chili once at home -- that was later, when I was in high school. My Aunt Florence brought us some of her home made chili. I remember her describing what she put in: ground beef, canned beans and tomatoes, bell peppers, chili powder, and probably a couple of other things. Compared to my mother's cooking it was exotic.

Later when I had a kitchen of my own, I found the very bland taste of Campbell's Chili Beef Soup to replicate my school-cafeteria memories. (I put the Andy Warhol soup can image in this blog post to reinforce that memory.) By that time, I was living in California and trying out the inexpensive and maybe even somewhat authentic California Mexican restaurants in Berkeley (which was not yet the gourmet paradise that it later became). The familiar school cafeteria flavor didn't seem exotic at all.

Then I got adventurous and began to make chili from recipes that I found one place or another, most likely starting with the recipe "Chilly-Night Chili" on page 16 of the I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. Instead of going right to the Campbell's Chili Beef can, it uses a can of tomato soup along with onion, beans, hamburger, and optional olives. Aunt Florence did it better, but pretty soon, so did I.

Here's a chili recipe that I posted a few years ago. This time I know where it came from, but it's not from a cookbook, it's from real people who at the time they gave me the recipe were really living in Texas. Alec, in fact is a native.

Ellen and Alec's "Texas Red" Chili
2 to 3 lb. lean beef cubes: trim off fat if necessary
2 chopped onions
3 cloves chopped garlic
Several fresh chopped chilies (such as jalapenos) or 1 can Old El Paso chopped chili peppers
1 to 4 tablespoons of chili spice (recipe follows — blend of spice is essential)
8 oz tomato sauce and 8 oz water
1 lb can of tomatoes, cut in pieces

Brown onion and garlic. Add fresh peppers (if using fresh). Remove from pan. Add beef and brown. Drain excess fat. Return meat to pan. (Add canned peppers.) Add spice, then tomato sauce, water, and tomatoes. Simmer several hours on top of stove or in 275 degree oven, until meat is soft.

One heresy is to add a can of corn, a can of black beans, and/or a can of red beans towards the end of cooking. I'm not enough of a heretic to make the beans or corn dominate the chili. That would be a different recipe.

Chili Spice Blend
In a mortar or spice grinder blend 1 crumbled bay leaf with 1 tablespoon of each of the following spices: Whole Cumin, Dried Oregano, Chili Powder. Optionally add 1 tablespoon each of onion flakes, parsley flakes, and dried basil. Add at least 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper, dried hot pepper, or hot pepper flakes.

Thanks again to Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations for inspiring me and so many others in new areas of food blogging this month. I celebrate all the huge number of chili recipes and variations that I've ever tried, and the rather pathetic memory of the school cafeteria.

Really Retro

I just read about a tasting menu at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that included American food representing several decades. It's arranged in chronological order from starters to desert. I'm unusually impressed by the right-on choices:

• 1940s -- chicken liver and bacon paté with brandied cherries, watercress and pecan raisin bread
• 1950s -- poached lobster and asparagus casserole with crispy potato, shaved truffle and American caviar
• 1960s -- steak Diane with fingerling potatoes, caramelized onion, wild mushrooms and Bloomsdale spinach
• 1970s -- "Brie fondue" (puff pastry baked Brie) with brioche, orange marmalade and balsamic
• 1980s -- "mud pie," a coffee sabayon with chocolate crust and dark chocolate ganache.

A random photo of a mud pie:

Louise's Cookbook Party Game

At Months of Edible Celebrations Louise is having a fun month, challenging her readers to post a recipe in honor of one of the special foods of the month. Among the commemorations she lists for October is Cranberry Month. Great idea -- I hope cranberries start to show up in the markets soon.

I love cranberries. I substitute either dried or fresh for walnuts in chocolate chip cookies or even in brownies (shown above). I have made cranberry cornmeal cake, cranberry bread, and above all, cranberry chutney. I make it early so it will be aged enough for Thanksgiving dinner, so my celebration has to be deferred -- later, I make ordinary cranberry sauce for those who like it more traditional.

Louise requested that we specify what event we made our recipe for. She also asked where I got the recipe: good question. I don't remember, I've been making it for years. I hope these details don't disqualify me from her game!

Here's the recipe -- which I've posted before.



Cranberry Chutney
Use a total of 2 packages of cranberries -- 6 cups
Combine the following in a large pan and boil until sugar dissolves:

1/2 cup cider vinegar        2 and 1/4 cups brown sugar
3/4 tsp. curry powder        1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves       1/4 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. cinnamon            1 and 1/2 cups water

Add and simmer 10 minutes:

1 apple, peeled, cored, chopped
2 lemons and 2 oranges, prepared as follows

Use the orange and lemon rind and the fruit -- pare rind with a vegetable peeler and chop or grate it. Discard the pith. Section and chop the fruit.

Add and boil 40 minutes:

1/2 cup golden raisins       1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
3 cups cranberries

Add 3 cups more, that is the rest of the cranberries. I fool around with this recipe a lot. Sometimes I just put everything together and cook until it looks thick and done. Sometimes I use candied ginger.

Store in jars in refrigerator. Age this chutney about a week before using. It keeps for several months in the refrigerator. It's good as a side dish for chicken, turkey, or duck, or as a filling for halves of acorn squash, or as a relish on a cheddar cheese sandwich -- among other uses.

"Being inauthentic is a fact of America"

In an article by an immigrant from Thailand with evolving views of Thai restaurants in America, I read this thought-provoking paragraph about the emotions created by differences between the food in those restaurants and the food from childhood in Thailand:

"It’s a hard reality to swallow, but I’ve learned to live with it, because being inauthentic is a fact of America. To become American means to have been, at some point, uprooted from an ancestral world and reinvented free-style. I sometimes find myself counting in Thai, but most of my thoughts now bubble out in English. I go back and forth between the Thai way of eating in tandem with fork and spoon and the American way of picking at foods with a lone fork. What love I have for fish sauce equally goes to butter. If I can feel neither wholly Thai nor wholly American, how can I ask the same of a bowl of duck green curry? Now, when I look at a Thai restaurant menu, I don’t fume and think in expletives as much. I just breathe in and out, and let the food be what it can be." -- Learning to Love Thai-American Food by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

No pumpkin problem

I've read that the floods in the Northeast are causing a pumpkin shortage. But there's good news! The shortage is local -- pumpkins grow in every state, and they travel well. Says the wonderful Consumer Reports blog The Consumerist --

"That means if New York is having a tough pumpkin season, that's okay, Michigan will come to the rescue! Or California, or Texas! Worst case scenario, you might have to pay a little bit more or not get that mega huge one you usually go for, but isn't a magnificently carved jack-o-lantern worth a dollar more and a size downgrade? Charlie Brown would say yes."

Challah

If you want to make good challah, I learned last night, you need to use good flour, good yeast, and water just the right temperature (not hot!). Recipes vary in proportions, method, and additions such as toppings and fillings. The finished loaf is brushed with egg which can be mixed with honey to make the crust sweet. Some people add chocolate chips, chopped apple, cinnamon-sugar, chopped onion, olives, and more either to the top or within the strands that are then braided.

Here are a few photos of some of the women who were also learning:

Forming strands of dough after first rise:

Shaped dough topped with apples:

My finished loaf, baked after I got home:

It's Just about the Food

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is a venerable event: I suspect it's the Gold Standard for food articles. Lazy me -- I haven't systematically read through the collected proceedings of these annual meetings where the best articles from each year since 1981 have been published. On a recent visit to the library, however, I checked out the 1998 volume, Food in the Arts. I was especially interested to read "Food in the Detective Novel" by Joan P. Alcock, and to learn how a professional food historian approaches the subject that I often return to.

"Food in the Detective Novel" begins with a quote from W.H.Auden's famous article on detective fiction, though in fact he says little about food. Alcock acknowledges that the most basic role of food in crime is "in relation to killing the victim," and the second place goes to "the contents of the stomach" for clues to the time of death. She continues:

"In recent years attention has been paid to the food eaten by the investigator, either as part of the story or to add background verisimilitude. This is evident in the historical whodunits, but it may also be a facet of the investigator. The number of cook/chef investigators is increasing." (p. 13)

After this introduction, the article continues with a survey in chronological order by the setting of the detective stories. Inspector Marcus Didius Falco in ancient Rome is her first example: readers hear of the value of peppercorns, the economics of the oil trade, and the lost herb silphium. She continues by tabulating the food references in detective stories set in the middle ages, such as Brother Cadfael "who is more concerned with growing herbs ... than with his stomach, for his herbs have healing powers." (p. 14) She continues with Renaissance-era detective fiction, such as the protocol and place settings for a feast in the work of Kate Sedley. Alcock points out:

"The feast is described in some detail but phrases such as 'I cannot remember at this distance of time more than a tithe of what was consumed that evening,' seem an attempt to avoid accurate description." (p. 15)

The article proceeds with a study of several series of detective novels set in the Mediterranean, including those of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Questura:

"Chilled wine is sipped slowly while savouring views over Venice.... Prosecco or Fragolino are aperitifs; Soave is served with chicken and artichokes; Dolcetto with pasta fagioli and cotoletta; brandy or grappa with coffee." (p. 17)

A summary of French detectives' food follows -- "If Madame Maigret has a vice, it is drinking her cup of Balthazar coffee, which she takes every morning." Then the classic English detective novel, "mainly by women writers... Food was of little account in their stories." She finds a few meals of interest in the stories of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and the less-famous Gladys Mitchell.

Alcock invents another category for the novels of Conan Doyle, Michael Innes, and Rex Stout: "The Abstemious and the Aesthete." I was surprised that she made no mention of Stout's Nero Wolfe novel Too Many Cooks, published 1938, where the subject is a meeting of 15 international master cooks. In it, Nero Wolfe gives a paper on American food; he consents to attend the meeting only because he wants to obtain a secret recipe.

And Alcock goes on to discuss women detectives, such as the work of Amanda Cross and others (somehow, Miss Marple isn't in this category, but in the Classic English category). She lists the foods eaten by each detective, without being distracted by other features of the tales. Only in her conclusion does she apply what I would think of as literary analysis:

"Other books than detective stories incorporate food, but it is obvious that the frisson between murder and food, between intellectual puzzle-solving and creating of dishes is eminently satisfying. ... The dinner party provides opportunities for endless twists in a murder plot, the murderer awaiting an opportunity, the victim calmly eating, unsuspecting of the final fate." (p. 29)

I wish she had been more explicit about how each author made use of the food details that she catalogued.

Today at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Daniel Spoerri's "Variations d'un Petit Dejuner, 1966" shows a conceptual breakfast; that is, a breakfast that someone has finished eating, and the cigarette they smoked during, or maybe after, the meal. Leftover foil jam pot; check. Coffee and milk pots; check. Used knife and butter wrapper; check. Open and presumably empty sugar packets; check. Cup stained with coffee; check. I suspect these are real crumbs and remnants, an artistic selection from a real hotel tray somewhere.

I've mentioned Spoerri before -- see this post about his work "Use Rembrandt as an Ironing Board," in which I explained why the image was Mona Lisa, not a Rembrandt, on the ironing board. I like him for his humor in both works.

"Cookbooks as Literature"

I just read a really good article about cookbook authors: "Soul Food: Cookbooks As Literature" by Maria Bustillos. Included for a detailed review: Alexandre Dumas for his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, Elizabeth David; Irma S. Rombauer, the original author of The Joy of Cooking; and Black Panther activist Bobby Seale for Barbeque'N with Bobby. She mentions others as she describes these favorites. She also singles out a few cookbook authors who provide a less interesting and appealing persona, notably Martha Stewart. Bustillos selects apt quotations and recipes to illustrate her descriptions of these authors, which makes this a very readable and enjoyable piece of writing.

In summing up her ideas on cookboos as literature, Bustillos writes: "Dumas, and Elizabeth David and Julia Child, Marcel Boulestin and Alice B. Toklas and Bobby Seale and so many others, have the eating of soup figured out and a good deal besides; as literary artists and beyond this, as artists of savoir faire, of life itself. Given that one must eat, how then to do it? Historians and philosophers as well as poets tend to come up short where advice on questions urgent and as homely as these is required."

Good Eats

Last night my book club met at my house to discuss Just Kids by Patti Smith. We found the book very appealing and fascinating, and discussed it non-stop, except for eating the refreshments that I made. One funny memory that she relates in her memoir was of meeting Allen Ginsberg. He appeared just as she realized that she didn't have enough money for her sandwich at the automat -- he bought her the sandwich and a cup of coffee and sat down with her. After a while he asked "Wait, are you a girl?" She's a girl.

"I thought you were a pretty boy," he explained.

"Do I have to pay you for the sandwich?" she asked.

"No, my mistake."

However, food wasn't really a theme of the book. Much of the time in her early life as a New York art scene wannabe, Patti Smith didn't have much to eat. She does often mention eating at the automat -- things like mac and cheese, or a sandwich on a poppy-seed roll. Not much inspiration for refreshments.

Smith mentions that when she and her lover Robert Mapplethorpe had a bit of money they would buy a bag of Mallomars. I decided that would be my one literary menu choice. When I went to the market, though, I found out that Mallomars are seasonal! The chocolate is too melty in summer. So I bought Canadian Whippets, which are similar.

In order to make this a scholarly post, I read the Wikipedia entry on Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats. And learned more than any sane person should know about Mallomars, Whippets, and similar confections from Israel, Denmark, England, and even the Phillipines as well as other places. Turns out Mallomars are really a New York thing: 70% are sold there. If you want to know more, you can read the article and the many places that it diligently links to.

A couple of people suggested that the might like recipes for the non-themed but seasonal food I made for the meeting. First, the healthy parts:


Not-quite caprese salad. Do you get tired of the classic combo: fresh mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, and vinaigrette? I've had it quite often this tomato season. I love it, but wanted some variety for my tomatoes, so I used a goat-cheese log and chopped dill and parsley, and a few black olives too.


Carrot salad, but not cloyingly sweet, rather savory. It's similar to a Moroccan-Jewish (and also Israeli) recipe. Simple: grated carrots and vinaigrette made from oil, lemon juice, rice vinegar, cumin, Spanish smoked paprika, ground coriander, a crushed garlic clove, and a parsley garnish. Around half a teaspoon of each ground spice for around 1/2 cup oil and around 1/4 cup combined lemon juice and vinegar.


Again I made peach-plum cake from the Polish cookbook. For the recipe see this post from last June. Nearby you can see a watermelon and pineapple fruit bowl and the Whippets.

And one more picture of current cooking ...

Tonight: steak on the grill with great grill marks. Thanks, Lenny.

Hunger

"Hunger is an unforgivable disease because it is the easiest one to cure. It is devastating to wake up in the morning and look east, west, south and north and see that there is nothing green that you can chew. During a drought everything goes yellow and dry. ...

"Hunger is dehumanizing. It gets to a level where you do not know how you will survive and you will do anything for a simple kernel of corn."

So writes Peter Kimeu in "Remembering a Hungry Childhood" an op-ed in today's New York Times. It's a powerful essay: almost unbearable to read. Such suffering is outside of my own experience and that of almost everyone I know well. Kimeu doesn't ask the reader to take responsibility for his past, but his last words are: "It is incumbent on all of us to band together and fight this very curable disease. No child on earth should ever have to sleep like that."

But what can we do? I feel totally helpless to make a response, as I don't see any reasonable charitable, governmental, or global political measures being offered that would effectively address hunger on a global scale.

Labor Day Picnic

South Lake, Michigan, Labor Day 2011 at Nat's house. Too cool to go out on the lake, but we saw two sandhill cranes walking on the beach -- actually the way they lifted their long legs simultaneously looked more like marching than like walking. We had a big picnic which everyone collaborated on. Appetizers from Greek Town; grilled vegetables, peaches, and chicken-sausage skewers; watermelon salad; caprese salad; fresh corn kernels; and dessert of blondies, plum cake, and rosemary shortbread. Did I forget anything? Wine, beer, coffee...

Sausage and chicken skewers with fresh herbs & peaches, ready to grill

Adam, Kaywin, and Lenny grilling.

Indoor cooks Adam and Nat ... missed a photo of Carol making the watermelon salad

Dinner is ready.

Blondies and plum cake.

Plum Chutney

Looking just like the plum chutney I have made in the past --

What did Inspector French eat?

Freeman Wills Crofts is the creator of Scotland Yard Inspector French, who appears in a number of novels. I heard of his novels in an article by W.H.Auden, published in Harpers in 1948: "The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict" It's a wonderful study of detective fiction, which presents Auden's ideas on the appeal of murder mysteries as well as analysis of their principal "five elements–-the milieu, the victim, the murderer, the suspects, the detectives."

Auden says "Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton)." I have read all of Sherlock Holmes, and sampled Father Brown. However, Crofts' Inspector French novels, published between 1920 and 1957, were entirely new to me. I was delighted at the possibility of discovering a new detective author, and quickly purchased Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy for my Kindle.

French is an extremely intense detective, and there are virtually no passages in the novel that don't directly advance the plot and help him solve the diabolical crime, which is initially so clever that it appears to be an accident. I completely agree with Auden that this is an author worth reading, though there are aspects of the work that are somewhat dated.

Of course as I read I was looking for the theme I always check in detective fiction: how does the author use food in his narrative? Unlike some of my favorites, Crofts offers no description of what Inspector French eats of of who cooks it for him. This is consistent with the intensity of the narrative. Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy has nothing more detailed than "after breakfast he stood in the hotel coffee room" (p. 72), or "starting out with a stick in his hand and a packet of sandwiches in his pocket" (p. 99), or "at the hotel he dined, and ... asked for a packet of sandwiches" (p. 157) True to the detective writers' commitment that no detail can be left without follow-up, when French takes sandwiches with him you usually hear about when he ate them: "In the small hours he ate his sandwiches, and then he had to fight an overwhelming desire for sleep." (p. 158)

I find it interesting that despite the seeming lack of interest in the details of what French ate, the author uses these meals and snacks just the way that other authors do: to punctuate the days of detecting and contribute to the reader's sense of time passing. Perhaps there is more expansive food description in later books, but that would represent a change in this intensity.

I found Auden's description of Inspector French especially interesting. Auden says:

"His class and culture are the natural ones for a Scotland Yard inspector. (The old Oxonian Inspector is insufferable.) His motive is love of duty. Holmes detects for his own sake and shows the maximum indifference to all feelings except a negative fear of his own. French detects for the sake of the innocent members of society, and is indifferent only to his own feelings and those of the murderer. ... He is exceptional only in his exceptional love of duty which makes him take exceptional pains; he does only what all could do as well if they had the same patient industry (his checking of alibis for tiny flaws which careless hurry had missed). He outwits the murderer, partly because the latter is not quite so painstaking as he, and partly because the murderer must act alone, while he has the help of all the innocent people in the world who are doing their duty (e.g., the post- men, railway clerks, milkmen, etc., who become, accidentally, witnesses to the truth)."

Note: to see all my posts on the topic, click on the label "Food in Detective Fiction" at the bottom of this post.

This Year's Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

I've made slow-roasted tomatoes for the last few years. After a trip to the Ann Arbor farmers' market, I did it again on Wednesday. Above, the ready-to-roast tomatoes.

I cut a huge number of tomatoes in half, garnished them with fresh herbs (this year: tarragon and sage), salted them lightly, drizzled them with olive oil, and roasted them in the oven at 200º for 12 hours. In the past I have also added garlic, but experience has taught me that it's better to add fresh garlic to the recipes where the tomatoes are used -- I'm not happy with the result of freezing it.

Here are the finished tomatoes. Due to poor planning, I had to take them out of the oven at around 4:30 AM. I was going to leave them in the oven until I got up in the morning but the electronic brain in my stove turns out to think you have messed up if you leave it on for more than 12 hours. "Beep... beep... your tomatoes are ready. Get up now!"

Two boxes of tomatoes went into the freezer by 5 AM. That evening, several tomatoes went into lasagna along with some left-over pesto and ricotta, more fresh herbs, and some other stuff. I forgot to take a photo before we ate the well-browned dish, but the photo above shows it ready to go in the oven. I also ate a couple of them on a sandwich this morning. MMMM.

Original recipe from The Perfect Pantry blog here.

Eggplant Curry with Garum Masala

Garum masala is such an interesting spice blend that I keep experimenting with it.

To the right, you can see the before and after photos. And this time, I even have a recipe, which I loosely adapted from here.

Eggplant with Garum Masala

1 medium eggplant sliced, salted, and brushed with oil
2 tablespoons whole cumin
½ large red onion, chopped
2 Tb finely chopped fresh ginger
4 tomatoes, chopped & salted
2 garlic cloves, minced
½ teaspoon red chili powder
1 teaspoon garam masala
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon ground coriander (or fresh chopped coriander as a garnish)
2 tablespoons Canola oil
Salt to taste

Bake the eggplant slices on a cookie sheet at 350º for around 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, saute the cumin seeds in a small amount of oil until brown – around 30 seconds to a minute. Add ginger and onion, and cook until onion begins to soften. Add tomatoes, and garlic; simmer for around 10 minutes. When eggplant slices are soft, add to tomato mixture and cook for 5 minutes. Add the other spices. Add salt, hot pepper, or fresh peppers to boost heat & saltiness to your taste (I wanted it mild, so no peppers). Simmer for a few minutes.

I served it at room temperature with lettuce leaves and Trader Joe's mango chutney.

Fruit Crisp with Garum Masala

Fruit season is here, and we've been eating peaches and plums at almost every meal. Tonight I made peach-plum crisp. I did not use very much topping, but I spiced it in an unusual and appealing way: with garum masala from my friend/relative Kappu in Toronto. She uses 20 spices in her blend. I don't know what most of them are, but it's delicious with fruit.

The left photo is before baking, the right one when it was ready to eat. You can probably see that the topping is made from uncooked rolled oats, brown sugar, butter, pecans, and the spice mixture. This was very juicy fruit, so we ate with spoons. No problem!

Birthday Cake

Alice, beginning to make frosting for her cake...

... and adding the moulded chocolate letters and decorations.

Miriam adding decorations to the cake she baked.

The cake table with 4 of the 5 cakes, including one of Tom's two roulade cakes, our friend Elaine's lemon-poppyseed cake, and Miriam and Alice's decorated cakes.

After the party: cakes almost entirely gone!