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Bless This House

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May 8, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

Bread, that this house may never know hunger. Salt, that life may always have flavor. And wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever.

I’m not sure how the tradition of bringing bread, salt, and wine as a housewarming gift got started among my highly transient cohort (I guess, like most people, we heard it one too many times during the annual Christmas screening of It’s a Wonderful Life). Regardless, two sets of wonderful Baltimore friends made moves at the end of April, so I cracked open Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice yesterday and got to work on a couple of challah loaves to celebrate these new homes.

Like all traditions, variations pop up. I just came across a version that substitutes a new broom for the wine, “to sweep your troubles or sorrows away,” which sounds both poetic and practical. Honestly, with friend’s like mine, I’d always thought we had added the wine part on ourselves (along with a nice cheese and a container of olives, of course).

Three Cubed: Better Than Cake

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April 27, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

The Book: Flavors of Hungary : Recipes and Memoirs by Charlotte Biro (1973)

As can be said for most April days here in Baltimore, it was dark, grey, and raining. Unwilling to leave my cozy kitchen for any purpose or ingredient not already pantry-side, I cracked open another cookbook in my stash that I had yet to actually use: Flavors of Hungry. The book, once part of a larger grandmotherly collection, had been passed on to me by a friend. She suspected that, going on as I do about my Hungarian roots and how my own grandmother never measured anything the same way twice, I might put it to good use.

Page 127 was an illustration, but page 128 was a recipe for what looked like a basic bread but contained both riced potatoes and cake flour. Rye flour was a suggested alternative to the potatoes so, having the latter but not the former, appropriate substitutions commenced.

As it turns out, the Hungarian aversion to measuring that my grandmother professed must be a universal. Water was to be added “as needed” and just how much potato was required (or how much rye flour was to be added, if that was the swap) was left to the cook’s own judgement. Assuming a certain skill level, the instructions only go so far: for example, you are to work the dough “until the texture is right” and you’re on your own as far as figuring out what that might be. This was probably more than obvious to most women in 1973, but it made me reflect on the requirements of recipes today.

Having a bit of bread-making experience in my hands, I felt pretty confident moving through the steps and ended up with a lovely round loaf with a thick, crisp crust. If I had it to do again, however, I would opt for the loaf pan version. The cake flour in this recipe, though only a small portion of the total, is what I suspect made the crumb so soft and just slightly glossy/chewy/stretchy. Unlike some homemade bread that can’t handle sandwich duty without crumbling to bits, this tasty rye could easily flex to withstand the weight of a turkey slice or the pull of a thick peanut butter even (gasp!) untoasted.

Spring, Edible Edition

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April 23, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

Despite the grey skies and the steady drizzle, I would not be stopped from eating spring even if I couldn’t exactly enjoy it yet. Once those bundles of just-picked Maryland asparagus and (not exactly local but close enough) North Carolina strawberries were spotted, all inclement weather was forgotten and the market scores were hauled home for a feast to celebrate the season.

Though I had been unable to really strategize as I dodged rain drops and chatted with my favorite vendors, once home with a bag of fresh veggies and eggs, a Portobello and Asparagus Quiche seemed the way to go. The bright bunch of asparagus was blanched and the tops nipped off before slicing up the rest. The spring onions and the portobello mushrooms were sauteed in a bit of oil and butter, tossed with thyme, mixed with salt and pepper, and left to cool on the back burner. And I went back to my standby savory pastry crust because I love how it puffs up around the edges of the plate.

After a freeze and a 15 minute pre-bake of the crust at 450F, I beat 5 eggs with a scant cup of whole milk and a half cup of roughly grated Parmesan (the only cheese in the house, though the combo proved to be quite tasty). Mixed in the cooled veggies and poured it all into the shell. Topped it off with the asparagus tips and popped it back into the oven, temp lowered to 325F. Mine took about 50 minutes to puff up and brown ever so slightly. It was delicious, and the sun even peeked out. Maybe it wanted a bite.

Though the strawberries could have been left well enough alone, I did have a stash of almond flour in the freezer and was making a pastry crust already, so whirling up a topping and popping it into the oven seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to finish this late afternoon lunch on a sweet note.

Anatomy of a Snack

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April 10, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

For the first time in a long while, I woke up this morning with no one expecting any kind of work out of me whatsoever. As a change of pace, I found a new book to read, announced to the cat that I was taking a vacation, poured some coffee, and plopped down on the couch.

All that relaxing eventually made me hungry, however, so I headed to the grocery for some fun, over-processed treat to fuel this day of slothfulness (as part of my vacation, I was keeping off the internet and out of the kitchen). Cruising down the aisles failed to produce anything tempting–plus, I realized halfway through my shopping adventure that it would be hard to eat and enjoy something made of things I could not pronounce while simultaneously reading a book about farming. I re-strategized, grabbed a couple potatoes, a jalapeño pepper, and a bunch of cilantro, and headed home to fry up the awesomest of hot afternoon snacks: Potato and Peanut Pawa.

This is a dish I rediscovered in World Food Cafe: Global Vegetarian Cooking (a too-short collection of amazing vegetarian recipes from exotic locales), but I first ate it in Nepal almost a decade ago. The woman I was living with would drop everything to whip up a batch for any late-afternoon guests who wandered in needing something substantial to nosh on. As far as timing went, this usually occurred while she was also in the middle of making dinner, and the fact that she would just reshuffle and squeeze in another pan on the two-burner stove amazed me. It also irked me somewhat, since these hungry stomachs interrupting things never seemed to belong to her friends but rather a group of dudes who came to have leisurely chats with her husband. I liked the snack a great deal, however, so I kept my opinions to myself and tried to help out.

The most interesting ingredient in this dish to me is the pawa, also called beaten or flattened rice. It doesn’t taste like much of anything on its own, but once fried up with the potatoes and peanuts, it sucks up the salt and oil flavors and becomes quite a tasty aspect to the mix while keeping the potatoes from clumping together.

Step-by-step photos and my variation on the recipe can be found here.

Three Cubed: B&O Fresh Fruit Shortcake

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March 27, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

The Book: Dining on the B&O: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age

(2009, though the collection gathers recipes from instructions published decades earlier)

And now for a bite of dessert.

Kate conceptualized this Three Cubed cooking project as a way to expand our horizons and blow our minds, and so far it seems to be working! By forcing our spatulas a bit and getting us to try a few of the recipes we usually just skip over, we’re bound to be making things we have already decided won’t work out well or don’t meet our usual tastes, so there is a kind of odd dissonance at play in the kitchen during these experiments.

I had already been having an arms-length affair with my copy of Dining on the B&O. As I read through the special notes on everything from the salad dressings to the service style, I enjoyed imagining the staff in their efforts to pull decent dining out of a small, rocking and rolling kitchen (long before the microwaved chemistry we call travel dining today)–perhaps for Cary Grant, with his Gibson and his beautiful blonde, dining a la train car.

That all said, I never felt motivated to actually cook anything from it.

So this is exactly where the Three Points Baltimore branch decided to kick this project off. The B&O cookbook isn’t long, so I had to back up to page 127, where I was sad to see not only a dessert (we are not a dessert-eating household–birthday cakes and chocolate cookies are often, criminally, left to go stale on our countertops) but also one that required shortcakes. Images of spending hours producing dozens of cakes that no one would ever eat stomped on my enthusiasm somewhat, but I was committed to giving it a go.

Crisco was purchased (lard, it is suggested, produces a better flavor and I was sorely tempted to go all out in the name of nostalgia, but just couldn’t do it in the end). Once the measuring was actually in process, however, I realized that I was only going to end up with four petite biscuits and that portion of the production would take only about 10 minutes to assemble and 15 minutes to bake off. Plus, consisting of just a bit of fat, milk, flour, salt, and baking powder, the biscuits would end up a rather all-purpose addition to my general culinary skills, such as they are. I ate one plain as soon as they were out of the oven and had to resist a strong urge to eat all the rest, flaky and warm and temptingly sans sweet fruit.

Having no peaches or strawberries at hand, but a whole container of freshly cubed champagne mangoes in the fridge, I confess that I cheated on the fruit portion of this assignment. I whipped up some cream, assembled according the careful “chef’s notes” instruction as far as portion size was concerned (“tab” diners vs. a la carte changed the amount/price), snapped a few pics and called the resulting tower tasty. The only thing sweeter would have been to look out the window and see the station lights of some unknown city promising fresh adventure up ahead.

Prelude to a Feast

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March 11, 2011 By In eat me, three points kitchen

Three Points Kitchen is hosting its first group dinner in D.C. this weekend, and the cooking has already begun! With hints of spring on the horizon and a Persian theme on the table, a few quick pickles have been mixed for the fridge, an elderberry short mead bottled, some yogurt and chutney made up, and a couple flat breads baked (I will try my best not to eat them before Sunday!).

I’ll put my knife down and pick my camera up throughout the weekend, and we’ll catalog the recipes when it’s all over. Meanwhile, an amuse-bouche to get things started. Here we go!