Åland: Åland Pancake

Åland is the Land of Bass. Literally – that's what it means in Finnish. The country is a group of 6,000 tiny islands in the Baltic Sea, about 20 miles off the coast of Sweden and home to about 25,000 people. The single recipe I found from the country involved no bass (thank heavens), and though it is called the Åland Pancake, it is really more of a custard.

I am not a custard kind of girl – actually, I hate custard - but oh do I love the Åland Pancake. The rice takes the edge off the eggs and makes it soft and sweet, as opposed to the usual gelatinous goo. You're supposed to eat it with plum jam, but I only had grape, which, as it turns out, goes very well indeed with Åland rice custard.

This recipe was published by the Åland Tourist Bureau, from Göran Ekstrand's Café Julius, which is apparently famous for it (though it's a traditional food on the island). I can see why – it's delicious. The original recipe made such a huge amount of food I'm sure it was meant for Ålandian banquets. I made a 1/6th batch, and that still turned out to be a very large custard.

1 egg
2.5 Tbsp sugar
2.5 Tbsp flour
1 cup rice, cooked and cooled
1/2 tsp cardamom
1/3 tsp salt
2/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Mix the eggs and the sugar. Add rice, flour, cardamom, salt, then the milk and mix thoroughly. Pour into a small casserole dish and bake 25 – 30 minutes, until the edges turn a light brown and the center is no longer gelatinous.

The article said that this is traditionally served with plum jam, but that the Café Julius serves it with raspberry jam and whipped cream. I ate it with grape preserves and was delighted.

Greece: Bouraui (Rice and Tomatoes and Garlic Oh Yes!)

There is no way I'm going to be able to cook my way around the world alphabetically. Next in line would be Akrotiri and though I have a great recipe for the tiny Cyprian country, I need an eggplant. My supermarket eggplants are straight from a Shakespearean tragedy. I can't bear to pay so much for such agony.

So for lack of an eggplant, I'll go where I please. Greece would ordinarily be #83 on my list, but today it's #3. I made bouraui for the first time: unbearable in its downright deliciousness. Oof!

I love a recipe that tastes like it looks. This one does: bright, flashy, flavorful. My initial reaction was "Ug! Look at all that oil!" But it was worth it. Don't skimp on the oil – it forms the base for all the wonderful, wonderful flavor.

The recipe said to serve it cold, but I ate it hot and loved it. Knowing how fantastic it tastes, I doubt I will ever be able to wait until it cools to eat it in the future.


Bouraui
Serves 4

1/2 cup rice
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp salt (I used 2)
1 Lbs tomatoes, peeled, seeded, sliced
3/4 cup olive oil
3 garlic cloves, chopped
Parsley, chopped
2 cups water

Put everything but the rice and water into a saucepan and bring to a boil for about 10 minutes, then add the water and rice. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium, cover, and cook 15 minutes, until the rice is done and water is all absorbed.

Simple Cookie to Kitchen Nightmare in 10 Arrogant Steps, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Eat the Frosting

Hubris (noun): Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance

About 2 minutes ago, I set down my saucepan of curdled chocolate icing, walked out of the kitchen, spent 1.5 minutes in the bathroom scrubbing my hands, fingernails, arms, elbows, shirt, face, pants, and hair – and sat down to my computer.

I've just realized that I missed some – now there's chocolate icing on my Delete key.

Like most kitchen nightmares, this one began with a Brilliant Idea. I have been baking cookies for my on-going bake sale. Today, I thought I would make cookies cut out in the letters MIT, since most of the people who live in my building go to MIT. Brilliant.

I had just the recipe, standard and simple:

3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 egg
1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Cream the butter, cream the sugar, add the egg, cream some more. Mix the dry stuff, add to wet, refrigerate 2 hours, preheat 350, parchment-lined baking sheets, roll dough into letters, bake 10 minutes – done. Simple.

Crisis 1: turns out in the oven the dough spreads like cholera. Instead of the crisp, neat MIT cookies I had shaped, I had blobs that vaguely resembled the Fantasia dancing hippos.

Ever the clever girl, I grabbed a knife and carved the still-soft cookie into the letters I wanted. Voila. Crisis averted – MIT cookies. Brilliant.


One stroke of brilliance demands another. These plain-jane cookies need some icing, thought I. Maybe one letter iced in chocolate, one in vanilla, and one left plain. A tri-color MIT cookie. Chocolate first:

1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1 Tbsp unsweetened coca powder
1 Tbsp water

Mix, mix, mix: icing. Painted the chocolate icing onto one letter from each and left to dry. Came back - cookies had simply absorbed icing, leaving disgusting chocolate residue on surface.


Ick.

Ok, don't panic, said I to myself. You're a clever girl, you can fix this. Time for some thicker icing. Perhaps the black-and-white frosting combo used for New York-Style Black and White Cookies of Seinfeld's "Look to the cookie!" fame. Brilliant.

1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
2 Tbsp light corn syrup
3 Tbsp water
2 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla

Melt the chocolate, boil the corn syrup and water, add the sugar, add vanilla, add half of vanilla mixture to chocolate mixture, mix, mix, mix: two icings.

Minor panic when used chocolate-covered spoon to stir vanilla icing by mistake, but managed to scoop out all the little bits of chocolate, so vanilla icing only turned a slight tan color.

Started painting cookies with vanilla icing. Very thick icing, as it turns out. Really had to smear it on. First cookie broke along the "M". Hmm. Second cookie broke along the "M". Not good. Too thick. Add some oil. Mix, mix, mix – knocked over open oil jar with mixing elbow, oil all over kitchen floor.

After cleaning up oil, both icings had solidified. Added a bit of oil (from jar, not from floor) to each, and - carefully replacing oil jar lid and setting back on shelf - mixed icings again. Ok. Painted third cookie. Broke along the "M." Icing hard again. Ridiculous. Time for something new.


After carefully washing hands with antibacterial soap and very hot water, I scooped up some of the icing with my fingers and physically molded it onto the cookies. The icing was so sticky, though, that it wouldn't spread and formed disgusting, gooey clumps all over me. (Icing stuck to me no problem, but not to cookies - paranormal culinary phenomenon that MIT engineers should be alerted to?).

Whatever – they're not going to look great, said I, but I'm going to finish them and sell them and raise much-needed money for autism research, which is whole point of making MIT cookies in first place.

Molded – globbed, really - the vanilla icing onto two cookies, getting more all over me than over the cookies - then unceremoniously ran out. A dozen more cookies, no more vanilla icing. There was no way I was going to dump another 3 cups of confectioner's sugar into these ridiculous cookies, so I moved on to chocolate, which had, again, solidified.

Oil, oil, oil, mix, mix, mix - curdled but functional chocolate icing. By this point, I have MIT-shaped cookies laid out on foil and wax paper on every available surface of my kitchen, and I've just realized that the oil hasn't actually come up off my floor so I've been tracking it around everywhere with my hiking boots. Whatever – am going to finish cookies.

Mold, mold, mold, break, break, break. The M part of MIT is simply not working - it breaks every time.

Come on, clever girl.

Ok, if I cut off the "M" part of the cookies, I'm actually left with a cookie shaped like the Greek symbol pi, which of course the MIT crowd would just go batty for. So I started amputating the soggy, broken limbs of the "M" in the cookies to create pi symbols. Except that the cookies, though soggy through the "M", are still crisp enough everywhere else to simply shatter into a billion bits when cut with a knife.

Bowl of chocolate icing in hand, I look around my kitchen to see that every surface is covered in shattered, soggy, icing-globbed bits of MIT-shaped cookies, and now it's dark out and I have been "baking" these for the last 5 hours, and, looking down, my chocolate icing has solidified again and there's oily boot tracks all over my kitchen floor.

Somewhere between despondent and giddy, I picked up a bit of a vanilla-globbed, amputated "M" and ate it. And it was really, really good.

Enough is enough - these are not cookies destined to raise that $10 for autism research - they're destined to be my dinner. I'll save the children tomorrow - tonight I'm coming down off my hubris-driven rampage of cleverness and eating some damn good cookies.

And I'm cleaning up tomorrow.

Afghanistan: Tamarind Potatoes & Khatai Cookies

Country #2 on my quest to cook my way around the world is Afghanistan.

They seem to like eggplant in Afghanistan. I too like eggplant, and was pleased to see that here is a country that values the delicious fruit. But since I couldn't find a cheerful-looking eggplant to fix up (or, indeed, an edible-looking eggplant - where have all the eggplants gone?), I settled on tamarind potatoes instead.


Tamarind and I have spared on several occasions. It usually wins. But this recipe was soft and delicious: potatoes covered in the strange, gingery tamarind-esh-ous sauce. It was a heavy dish, reminding me of potatoes in thick homemade gravy, except for the sharp, spicy kick it gave the back of my throat as I swallowed. Food should be active. I loved it.

In addition to eggplant, they like a good pistachio in Afghanistan – the dessert recipes I found looked nut-ily delicious (nut-a-licious?), and all made good use of the mighty pistachio. (Turns out the pistachio originated in the mountains of Afghanistan).

I baked a small batch of Khatai Cookies for dessert. Apparently, many countries have a Khatai cookie - I found an Indian recipe that was based on coconut, and another based on nutmeg. The Afghan Khatai cookie is cardamom with pistachio. For such a simple cookie, I couldn't believe the punch it packed. It's been added to my Favorite Cookies list. The dough is crumbly, thick, and oily, the cardamom and pistachios make an astonishing flavor, and the overall flavor is so rich that a small one was enough to finish off a meal beautifully.

Tamarind Potatoes
Makes about 4 servings


1 1/2 Tbsp tamarind paste, dissolved in 1 cup warm water
8 small potatoes, boiled and skinned
1/4 cup oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 tsp ginger, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp dried red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground caramom
1/2 tsp ground fennel
Salt to taste

Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion and cook until crisp and lightly browned, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Remove the onions and add the potatoes, browning well. Remove the potatoes and add the ginger and garlic. Cook for about 1 minute, then add the red pepper, turmeric, and 2 tablespoons of water (stand back for this bit).

Mix in the onions, potatoes, tamarind liquid, another cup of water, and the rest of the spices. Simmer until the sauce has thickened - about 15 minutes.

Khatai Cookies
Makes about 40 small (~1 inch) cookies

1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup corn oil
1 Tbsp crushed cardamom
1/2 - 1 cup shelled pistachios, crushed

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the flour, sugar, and cardamom. Mix in the corn oil.

Drop dough by teaspoon-full onto cookie sheet (I greased mine, but in the future I'll try parchment paper - the cookies are already so rich in oil).

Bake ~7 minutes, then remove, and use a spoon to gently press ground pistachios onto the tops of the hot cookies. Return to oven and make another 7 minutes, or until the edges are golden.

(The recipe I found recommended baking the cookies, then sprinkling them with pistachios, but I wanted them embedded.)

The Super-Killer Choc-A-Licious Fudgy Almond Brownies That No One Wanted

I simply do not believe it.

Two days ago, as part of my on-going bake sale, I put out a plate of the most killer, unfathomably delicious fudge brownies I have ever made. Really, this is high praise. They were soft, fudgy, and nutty, with a chocolate density that is surely illegal in many states. They were the best, and a steal at 50 cents a bar.

I sold 2.

Today, I put out a batch of fairly standard, crunchy chocolate chips. Sold all of them.

*Shakes head in befuddlement*

Anyway, here is the recipe for the super-killer choc-a-licious fudgy almond brownies that no one wanted (mostly from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake). Please, someone, somewhere, enjoy them.


Makes 24 squares

The Dough
1 1/2 sticks butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 egg yolks
1/3 cup unsweetened coca powder
1 1/2 cups flour

The Filling
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup chocolate chips
3 cups chopped almonds (or another nut)

The Drizzle of White Chocolate
1/4 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 tsp oil


Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with rack at the lowest level. Line a 13" x 9" x 2" pan with foil.

First, make the dough. Cream the butter and sugar until it is light and smooth, then beat in the yolks, one at a time, mixing between each to make the batter smooth. Mix the coca and flour, then mix them into the butter mixture gently. Press the dough into the bottom of the pan.

Next, make the filling. This requires a little work, but it's worth it. Mix the corn syrup and brown sugar together in a large sauce pan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, then add the butter and cream. Bring to a boil again, then lower the heat and simmer for about 2 minutes, stirring every so often. (After about 2 minutes, the syrup should be about 230 degrees on a candy thermometer. I didn't actually use one, though, and it worked out just fine.)

Remove from heat and stir in the chocolate until it is melted, then stir in the nuts.

Pour the syrup into the pan and smooth the top.

Bake for about 30 minutes. The filling should be bubbling when you pull it out of the oven. Allow to cool (for a very long time - really, it must be very cool). Then place a cookie sheet on top of the pan, flip it over, remove the pan, and pull off the foil. Using another cookie sheet, flip the bars over again so the nut side is up.

To make the white chocolate drizzle, melt the white chocolate chips and the oil in a bowl. (I just put them in the microwave, since my microwave and I have An Understanding, but you could use a double boiler.) Take a plastic bag and cut the tip off one of the ends. Scoop the melted chocolate into the bag, and squeeze out onto brownie top. (I'm just learning how to do this - I'm sure a pro could make these look much better)

Allow the white chocolate to cool. Cut into squares.

These are even better on the next day, so I recommend setting them aside - if you can.

Around the World in 243 Recipes

My sister is both a film critic and a professional Wit, so she picks up chance bits of dialogue from films and tosses them about at the most amusing moments.

For example, one of our favorite films is A Room With a View. At one point, the dear old dowagers the Miss Allenses decide to travel to Athens, and write of their plan to the good Reverend Mr. Bebe. Mr. Bebe says to his friend:

"Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it romance? Most certainly they will go on to Constantinople. They are taken in a snare that cannot fail. I really do believe that they will end by going round the world."

It is an innocent, sweet film that my sister and I love. So, of course, when I called my sister one afternoon to say I was very excited that I had found a new book on Indian cooking, she clucked her tongue at me, and said: "I really do believe that you will end by going round the world."

Once challenged, I could not refuse. So here is yet another goal laid on my growing To Cook list: to cook a recipe from every country in the world, all 243 of them. I suspect that it is going to take me several years, but that's all right - years, I've got. The irony in this is, of course, that the only foreign country I've been to is Mexico. But if I cannot end by going round the world, at least my tongue can.

I will begin at the beginning: with Abkhazia.

The Republic of Abkhazia is a mountainous, independent state inside of Georgia, on the north shore of the Black Sea. It is a beautiful country, with a mild climate, snow-capped mountains, and rich pine forests along its coasts. During the 1993 war with Georgia, which established Abkhazia as an independent state, almost 250,000 people (mostly ethnic Georgians) were either killed or displaced in what some consider a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Abkhazian cuisine is much like Georgian, since the region was politically part of Georgia for so long. In researching Georgian cuisine, I found a zestily written website (is "zestily" the adverb equivalent of "with zest"?): David Mchedlishvili's "About Georgia."

My vegetarian eyeballs skipped right over the numerous veals, beefs, livers, lambs, and roast suckling pigs that scamper across the Abkhazian table – and settled on some heavy, delicious-sounding vegetable dishes: kidney beans with plums, beets with cherry sauce, cabbage with walnuts, eggplant carved up in a dozen different ways, and mushrooms in cream.

The kidney bean dishes are lobios. Mchedlishvilli describes how small red and white kidney beans grow wild in Abkhazia and Georgia, and are sold without being sterilized. "Sometimes bugs hide in these beans," he writes. "It has not dampened the longevity of us Georgians one bit."

The kidney beans I used for my lobio dish came from a plastic bin at my local food co-op, so, frankly, probably do contain bugs. Authenticity is important when cooking your way around the world.

I found just about as many different recipes for lobio as there are people in Abkhazia (that would be about half a million): lobios flavored with lemon, coriander, walnuts, red hot peppers, cinnamon, cloves, ground marigolds, pomegranate juices, tarragon vinegar, tkemali sauce, plum jam, bay leaves, garlic, tamarind, or some combination of these.

I chose one with walnuts and lemon juice. It was essentially a very strong, heavy Abkhazian chili: soft, smooth beans covered with crunchy walnuts; the sweetness of the cloves and cinnamons balancing the heat of the onions and peppers. If I make this again, I'll cook the onion and garlic in a bit of oil or water first, to reduce the zap they pack. The walnuts were the best part – I would add more next time.

I also couldn't resist a recipe called Soko Arazhanit: mushrooms in cream (though I really didn't try to resist). I've never had a mushroom like this! It doesn't look at all exciting, but it is thick, smooth, and very rich. The cloves are the best – god, I love cloves. The dill and cream go together so deliciously, and the salt hits the back of your throat. I'll be making this again!


Walnut Lobios














Serves 6 to 8

1/2 pound of small kidney beans (~1.25 cups)
3/4 teaspoon of salt
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped (in the future, I would cook this in some water or oil first, to reduce the heat – it was just a bit too sharp when put in raw)
2 sprigs of cilantro
1 sprig of parsley
1/2 generous cup of shelled walnuts
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 small hot red pepper
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
Pinch of ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon of ground marigold
1/2 to 3/4 cup of pomegranate juice (I substituted lemon juice)

Soak the beans overnight covered with water (or if you are, like me, impatient, cover rinsed beans with 4 times their volume water, bring to a boil, then turn off the heat and let sit for an hour. Rinse them and carry on with the recipe. Or just use canned beans.)

Place the beans in a large pot and cover with fresh water. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Bring the water to a boil and simmer until the beans are tender, about 1 hour. Drain and stir in the chopped onion.

Grind the cilantro and parsley together with the walnuts, garlic and hot pepper. Add them to the beans.

Mix the cinnamon, cloves, marigold, and the remaining 1/4 teaspoon of salt into the bean mixture. Pour in enough pomegranate juice to moisten the beans, and mix well.

Allow the beans to cool to room temperature, then serve liberally garnished with pomegranate seeds.


Soko Arazhanit














Serves 4

1 tablespoon of butter
1 pound of mushrooms, trimmed and thickly sliced
1 1/2 cups of heavy cream
2 tsp parsley
2 tsp dill
5 whole black peppercorns
1 2-inch piece of cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
3 whole cloves
Season with a very small bit of salt

Melt butter in a saucepan and toss the mushrooms in it just long enough to coat them. Season lightly with salt and pepper to taste.

Heat the cream to boiling and pour over the mushrooms.

The author recommended tying the spices into a cheesecloth before adding them to the mushrooms, but I just tossed them in whole.

Cover and simmer the mixture for 15 to 25 minutes, or until the liquid is absorbed.

When the Refrigerator Warms . . .

My refrigerator has stopped refrigerating. I've packed the few available crevices with ice to try to save my food while the cold comes back, but in the meantime, I needed to use up some heavy cream that wasn't going to make it. So I made a cake.

It's the first cake I've made in years: devil's food with a coffee buttercream icing and chocolate streaking. I'm so proud of it that I'm posting pictures:

Sin! (The Good Kind)

I thought I had tasted sin, but oh goodness was I wrong.

For my on-going bake sale, I have been preparing all those cookies that are simply too caloric for me to make for myself. Today, I made Chris Gargone's Chocolate Chews, from Nick Malgieri's How to Bake. Mother of mercy.

Picture this, if you can: the chocolatiest, densest, most dizzyingly sugary chocolate fudge. With walnuts. And pecans. And white chocolate chips. Held together by a cracked, soft, brownie-like skin. A free-standing, fudge-a-licious brownie-cookie.

Heavens.

Malgieri calls them "rich." Ha. They are so wealthy they're gilded - a billionaire among beggars. I had one bite an hour ago and am still dizzy from the sugar kidney-punch.

Do not bake these unless you can serve them immediately to a crowd with a high sugar-tolerance.

Triple-Chocolate Fudge-a-licious Brownie-Cookies
(I made a few changes, since the original batch was going to make 60, and I naively wanted more chocolate - this makes about 15)

3 ounces semisweet chocolate (~1/3 cup chocolate chips)
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1/3 stick unsalted butter
1 egg
7 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped pecans


Preheat oven to 325 degrees (F). Line a baking sheet with foil.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler, then cool.

Whisk together the egg and sugar, then add to the chocolate with the vanilla.

Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt, then add to the chocolate mixture.

Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts.

Drop by the spoonful onto the sheet, and bake 12-15 minutes, until the surface cracks like a brownie.

Voyeur No More

Hello, I'm glad to be here. I've been a food blog voyeur for quite a while. But something happened this week that convinced me that it's time to stop spying and start sharing: this week, I participated in a bake sale.

The bake sale is strangely set up. It works like this: every day, I set a tray of baked goods in the lobby of the apartment building where I live, with a sign and a collecting jar. All the proceeds are donated to a charity for autism. All fine so far.

The first day, I put out a batch of coconut oatmeal cookies that I found on Nic's Bakingsheet blog (thank you, Nic – those are stellar), and a batch of my very best chocolate chip cookies. Sold all of them. "Great!" I thought, "They like it."

So the second day, I put out a batch of the buttermilk scones (also from Nic's blog), and a batch of the beautiful, delightful, delicious, wonderful-in-every-way coffee walnut scones that Heidi posted on her 101 Cookbooks blog last February. They weren't as beautiful as Heidi's, but they were lovely and delicious – surely the prettiest scones I've ever made.


Sold not a single one.

In disbelief, I carried my tray of unwanted, unloved, but still delectable scones back to my apartment. They just sat there, looking delicious, until I gave them all away.

"Maybe," I thought, "Everyone who was going to buy a cookie bought them the first day. I might have saturated the market."

Nevertheless, the third day, I put out a batch of my favorite oatmeal cookies. Sold them all.

Huh.

Yesterday, I put out a batch of my favorite almond biscotti. Sold none.

I think I see what's happening here. People buy cookies they know - chocolate chip, oatmeal, even oatmeal coconut – but not the novel new cookie they've never tried before, like a coffee walnut scone or almond biscotti. I've noticed the same phenomenon among my friends and family: raised eyebrows and startled "Huh"s when I bring an Indian-spiced turnip curry to a dinner.

As an amateur cook bent on trying everything at least once, this kind of conservative attitude toward food baffles me – and more: depresses me. I like a chocolate chip cookie as much as the next foodie – but I would rather try something new. Where have all the adventurers gone?

I love food. I love reading about it, planning it, fixing it, serving it, and eating it. But I want to share it too, and that's tough if everyone around me only wants chocolate chip and oatmeal. I'm not sure if that justifies yet another food blog, but, nonetheless, here it goes.