Category Archives: food and cooking

A favorite picnic food.

July 16, 2014food and cookingJane Brody, Middle Eastern, picnics, potatoesGretchenJoanna

As Jane Brody wrote about the original version of this recipe in her Good Food Book, Middle Easterners don’t really eat anything along the lines of our potato salad, but if they did, it might taste like this. Of course, she wrote that a long time ago, so for all we know, they may have adopted the tradition by now.

This dish is very convenient for picnics, because it contains no mayonnaise to worry about. Its creaminess comes from sour cream and yogurt, which along with the mint and vegetables make it refreshing for summer meals. The warm spices balance everything out. I’ve made only minor changes.

Middle Eastern Potato Salad

about 6 servings

Salad:
2 # small to medium red potatoes, skins on, steamed or boiled
5 green onions
2 T. minced fresh parsley
2 T. chopped fresh mint leaves
Paprika for garnish

Dressing:
2/3 c. sour cream
1/3 c. yogurt (or you can use all yogurt, or any proportion of the two ingredients.)
1 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. ground coriander
1/8 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

As soon as the potatoes are cool enough to handle, cut them into quarters or halves or 3/4-inch cubes. In a medium bowl, combine the dressing ingredients. Add the potatoes to the dressing and toss lightly to coat. Taste and add more salt or seasoning as desired. (At this point I often refrigerate the salad several hours or overnight.)

pot salad 09

Within an hour or two of serving, chop the mint, parsley and onion, and gently mix about half of it into the potatoes. Arrange the potatoes on a serving platter, sprinkle the rest of the vegetables o potato salad n top, and then sprinkle on some paprika if desired. Be sure to take the salad out of the refrigerator a little while before serving so that it is not too cold to taste all the flavors.

I usually make a triple batch, which amounts to a little more than a gallon of salad. If you make the smaller amount it may not be necessary to mix some greens into the potatoes; they could all go on top.

Thanks to Lorrie who asked her readers about their favorite picnic foods, because she reminded me that I’ve been wanting to share this recipe for a long time.

surprising lavender food

April 25, 2014food and cookingcats, rain, soupGretchenJoanna

As I was enjoying my quiet and contemplative day, it was in the back of my mind that at some point I would have to get practical and find something with which to make dinner. The sort of solitude I had been enjoying precluded any kind of shopping.

I was surprised to end up lav soup 4-14 with lavender soup.

This is how I did it:

Back in Butter Week, I made some yummy pasta with beans and cheese and greens, but it was too large a batch to use up before Lent, so I froze a quart of it. During Lent a purple cabbage came in my CSA box, and I have been trying to figure out what to do with it. Today I thought of making cabbage soup with sausage, but that would require me going to the store, so I looked in the freezer and discovered the pasta e fagoli, as I might call it if I were Italian. On the container I had written the suggestion “Make soup,” so I followed that plan and added some cheese sauce that I whipped up.

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As the concoction was simmering, I looked out at the rain falling into the swimming pool, and took a picture through the door of the miniature roses that look especially good from a distance, because you can’t see the black spot.

I didn’t anticipate that the rain would hold on and keep dripping all through dinner, meaning that soup was the perfect food to have. And lavender is very much one of those Easter egg colors so we had a Springtime experience as well. Our friend Cat ate some with Mr. Glad and me.

After we all had emptied our bowls of second helpings of the very comforting and tasty soup, Cat and I sort of visited through the glass door with a neighborhood cat who stopped by and stared at us. He had found a dry spot under my gardening bench. He doesn’t have too much to do with the rest of this post, but his eyes are also a pretty Easter egg color.

4-2014 bengal cat

RFC drinks in graces.

February 28, 2014books, food and cooking, quotesRobert Farrar Capon, wineGretchenJoanna

“It was St. Thomas, I think, who pointed out a long time ago that if God wanted to get rid of the universe, He would not have to do anything; He would have to stop doing something. Wine is — the fruit of the vine stands in act, outside of nothing — because it is His very present pleasure to have it so. The creative act is contemporary, intimate, and immediate to each part, parcel and period of the world.

“…The bloom of yeast lies upon the grapeskins year after year because He likes it; C6H12O6=2C2H5OH+CO2 is a dependable process because, every September, He says, That was nice; do it again.

“Let us pause and drink to that.”

Robert Farrar Capon knows well that there are people who will not drink to anything, because they are teetotalers. He’s writing this chapter on “Water in Excelsis,” in the book The Supper of the Lamb, about a God Who delights in his creation, and he is not sympathetic to what he sees as a mistaken attitude: “Only the ungrateful or the purblind can fail to see that sugar in the grape and yeast on the skins is a divine idea, not a human one.”

And as for what he calls The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s version of The Lord’s Supper, only about 100 years old and lacking completely what Holy Scripture and church tradition prescribe as the proper drink, he does not shrink back from engaging its adherents in argument, particularly the ones who think that the Greek word for wine in the Gospels meant something other than wine.

“The commentator cited, as I recall, grape juice for one meaning, and raisin paste for another. He inclined, ultimately, toward the latter.

“I suppose such people are blessed with reverent minds which prevent them from drawing irreverent conclusions. I myself, however, could never resist the temptation to read raisin paste for wine in the story of the Miracle of Cana.

“‘When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made raisin paste…he said unto the bridegroom, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good raisin paste, and when men have well drunk [eaten? — the text is no doubt corrupt], then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good raisin paste until now.”‘ Does it not whet your appetite for the critical opera omnia of such an author, where he will freely have at the length and breadth of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore Babylon is given the cup of the ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God?”

Capon has a different argument with secularists, and it is over their classifying wine as an alcoholic beverage, when the author knows it as a class in itself, far removed from the hard liquor that is often used to ill effect, and which he tells us is “for strong souls after great dinners.” Capon:

“With wine at hand, the good man concerns himself, not with getting drunk, but with drinking in all the natural delectabilities of wine: taste, color, bouquet; its manifold graces; the way it complements food and enhances conversation; and its sovereign power to turn evenings into occasions, to lift eating beyond nourishment to conviviality, and to bring the race, for a few hours at least, to that happy state where men are wise and women beautiful, and even one’s children begin to look promising.”

I admit I am inspired by RFC’s eager receptivity to God’s gifts. What little appreciation I’ve had for wine as a beverage has been slow in developing, and I let my husband be in charge of that aspect of our dining. But wine in the chalice of Holy Communion has always seemed to me the obvious choice in obedience to Christ’s teaching.

This chapter contains more and expanded theologizing about the secular and the sacred, using wine and the making of wine as a demonstration of the goodness and delight of God. I am still musing on much of this and hope to ramble on here again, sharing with you the infectious loves of Robert Farrar Capon.

Other posts in this series are:
RFC is the man we need.
RFC begins with the meat.
RFC considers blood and sacrifice.
RFC makes one of nature’s marvels.
RFC drinks in graces.

RFC for Butter Week

February 24, 2014books, church, food and cooking, quotesbaklava, butter, fasting, Robert Farrar CaponGretchenJoanna

Please don’t try Roger Farrar Capon’s baklava recipe. He describes it as “french-fried,” and yes, it does involved a large quantity of oil ! which I declare a horrid perversion of the spirit of baklava. This is the first thing I have found in The Supper of the Lamb that has so disappointed and surprised me. I guess no one can be perfect.

But the perfect baklava recipe does exist, simplicity itself for method; and for taste, the divine melding of flavors, of which that of Butter is central. It is the one used in my parish to make umpteen sheet pans of baklava every year for festivals and celebratory meals, and I will eventually make it at home and share the recipe here.

As I write, we Orthodox Christians are in the midst of what is sometimes called Butter Week, the week before Lent properly begins, and the last in which we eat dairy products (but start fasting from meat). The perfect time to tell about Capon’s attitude toward butter, which I am very sympathetic to. For example, at the end of a section on sauces he shares:

One last secret. There is almost no sauce that will not be improved by having a lump of butter whisked into it the moment before it is served. In addition to what it does for the flavor, it provides the sauce itself with a patina, a sheen which delights the eye even before the palate begins to judge. It is an embellishment not lightly to be forgone. Dishes should come to the table vested, robed. Don Giovanni is marvelous any way you can get to hear it. But given a choice between seeing it performed full dress, or on a bare stage with the cast in T shirts and sneakers, no rational man would hesitate. A great sauce deserves a great finish. Whatever you do, therefore, don’t omit the final grace — the loving pat of butter.

Those last words remind me of my grandmother, who showed this kind of love in her kitchen and to those she fed, including herself, and she lived healthily and on her own past the age of 100. I can still picture her standing by the stove and tucking fat pats of butter into the slits she had made in our baked potatoes just before taking them to the dining table.

Capon considers bread and butter, or cheese, to be basic ferial (everyday) food for those meals that one is keeping simple and light, for the sake of being able to enjoy real feasting less often. I’ll write more on that principle later. In contrast to bread and butter, we have what RFC calls “the epitome of baking”: pastry. He gives a lot of time and great detail to teaching us how to make puff pastry and Danish pastry, which must be made with butter, of course. I personally am not interested in this kind of cooking at my stage of life, and am happy to eat my butter in a hundred places other than pastry. Capon explains further that butter

…is not, in any except the merely technical sense of the word, grease. It melts at the temperature of the tongue, and consequently goes down as easily as cream. (You do not like to drink cream? I am sorry. Let us agree to disagree and get on with it.) Any man who cannot tell the difference between butter and margarine has callouses on the inside of his mouth…Butter is a substance in its own right, justified by its own delectability, not by its contributory services. It is a unique and solid sauce; it is apt to more dishes than anything in the world, and it is, like all the greatest sauces, worthy of being eaten plain.

Besides pastry, there are many recipes at the back of the book that feature this blessed food, including what look to be very nice cakes and cookies. I think all of us have plenty of that kind of recipe already, and if you don’t, just look on my own Recipes and Vague Instructions page on this blog. I wholeheartedly agree with RFC that butter “glorifies almost everything it touches.”