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Entries from July 31st, 2009

Rock the Casbah — Bastilla

July 31st, 2009 · 9 Comments · Entertaining, Main Dishes, Poultry, Recipes

Bastilla

There’s something wonderfully beguiling about Moroccan food. It has that tinge of the exotic with an Arabian nights, camels and belly dancers kind of feeling, but the ingredients are usually easily accessible and approachable. You don’t find things like dried fish flakes or chicken feet in Moroccan cooking (not that there’s anything wrong with these — they just usually necessitate an extra shopping trip.) It’s all the stuff of childhood food — cinnamon, carrots, pastry — used in new and surprising ways.

While I love me my couscous, merguez, tagine and harissa, my favorite Moroccan dish is bastilla (also B’steeya, pastilla, and any number of other arcane spellings). It’s a meat pie (originally made with pigeon, but you usually find a chicken version in the US) in a pastry crust sweetened with cinnamon and sugar. I first encountered Bastilla in Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour (a great beach book if you’ve never read it) and I was so intrigued by his mouthwatering description that I set out to make my own bastilla that week. At the time, I lived in a studio apartment in Manhattan with a stainless steel corner instead of a proper kitchen, and the bastilla recipe I found (from Claudia Roden’s wonderfully authentic book, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, which I had enthusiastically checked out from the New York Public Library) was so time consuming and complicated (though ultimately delicious) that I swore off making it ever again, and confined my bastilla eating to restaurants.

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Jammin’ — Plum Jam

July 28th, 2009 · 15 Comments · Condiments, Kitchen Management, Make Ahead, Summer



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I have a confession to make. I have not been entirely truthful with all of you. I have been cooking this summer, but not dinner, and not dessert. I have been making jam.

I understand jam making to be the latest trend among “hipsters” (google “hipster” and “canning” and you’ll see what I mean.) I never really thought of myself as a hipster, I mean, I’m certainly not a hippie because I don’t like hiking or Phish, and I can’t be a yuppie because it’s not 1987, so I turned to Urbandictionary.com to determine if I am, in fact, a hipster. A quick skim of the 138 definitions of hipster yields a person in their 20′s or 30′s (yes) who lives in Brooklyn (no), values “creativity, intelligence and witty banter” (yes), drinks a lot of Pabst Blue Ribbon (no), sports “high cultural tolerance and a slight tendency towards intellectual arrogance” (yes), is too ironic for their own good (maybe), and is cooler than cool (heck no).

I am still confused.

Prune Plums

What I am not confused about is this: making jam is a) fun b)easy and c) cool (which may be the hipster connection. I’m certainly not putting PBR into my jam). There’s something special about those little jars of homemade preserves, all lined up, ready to be eaten, or given away as gifts, or, if you have a packrat nature (like nobody I know, nosirree) to be stored in the pantry and gazed at lovingly. My husband makes fun of me, pointing out that I have an Ivy League education, am admitted to the Bar in two states, have a successful career and yet I am proud of making jam, something his great-grandmother did on a regular basis without much fuss. So sue me. I’m proud of my jam. I love my jam. I bid thee to go forth and make your own jam. You won’t be sorry.

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Summer Simplicity — Blackberry Galette

July 24th, 2009 · 15 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Recipes, Summer

Blackberry Galette 2

I’m not much of a summer cook. I like to cook the foods of cooler weather — spicy gingerbreads, hearty stews, root vegetables that stick to your ribs. Summer, at least in Los Angeles, is really to hot to do this type of cooking, and those foods are literally the last food on earth you feel like eating. It doesn’t help that in the summertime on Bacon and Tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob, which, while providing an entirely balanced diet (what? That’s what I’ve had for dinner for the past 4 nights in a row!), is not so much the stuff of food blogs.

The problem, of course, is that summertime is when my local farmer’s market offers its greatest bounty. I am confronted with weekly heaps of Gaviota strawberries, Blenheim apricots, Elephant Heart plums, and the biggest, fattest blackberries you’ve ever seen. And while I do LOVE fruit (and my love cannot hold a candle to that of my husband and my child) sometimes I am compelled to buy more fresh fruit than even our family can eat. And so I am forced to cook, even in the summer.

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