A Culinary Tour Around the World: Mongolia

How's this for a traditional St. Patrick's Day post: Mongolian Food!

Joan over at Foodalogue is winding down the Culinary Tour Around the World event to promote Bloggeraid and world hunger issues and the current stop on this examination of culture and food across the globe is Mongolia. Foodalogue has a great post with interesting Mongolian tidbits and I took inspiration from reading that and another website about traditional Mongolian recipes.

Mongolian cooking reflects a harsh climate of extremes; hot, dry desert conditions in the summer and fiercely cold and windy winters. Reading about traditional Mongolian recipes was really interesting, but a lot of the hearty and nourishing recipes featured hunks of meat dried in the rafters of one's yurt (borts), wheat noodles and other glutinous items. I thought about trying Eezgii, or Dried Mass of Cheese, but my adventures in cheesemaking were curtailed when I couldn't find my saddle bag, the traditional container for letting these cheese curds ripen. :]

For the Crispy Cook Mongolian cuisine proved a real challenge in trying to come up with a recipe to cook for my wheat-free, meat-free husband.

In the end, I decided to make a hot soup that would be Mongolian-esque, that is, in the spirit of the nomadic farmers and herdsmen that need a hot and hearty supper to stoke their internal furnaces during frigid, windy winter season. It was a spicy, slurpy soup that we will make again, though the noodles I used were so thick they required a crazy amount of boiling, so I would go with a fettuccine or egg noodle pasta next time.




Mongolian Hot Pot

8 oz. rice noodles (I used thick ovoid rice cakes I got at an ethnic market recently, but any stout rice noodle that won't flop out of your soup spoon and splash you while eating is great)

5-6 dried shiitake mushrooms

4 cups vegetable broth
1 (one inch) piece gingerroot, peeled and minced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 bunch scallions, sliced

1 bunch fresh spinach, sliced thinly (substitute 5 oz. frozen chopped spinach if you like)
2 cups cabbage, sliced thinly

4 Tbsp. soy sauce (be sure to check if gluten-free)

Chili Paste in Soybean Oil to taste


Cook rice noodles until al dente in boiling water. Drain and rinse with cold water. Set aside.

Soak dried mushrooms in warm water about 10 minutes, or until soft. Drain, reserving mushroom liquid for soup. Slice mushrooms and set aside.

Bring vegetable broth and reserved mushroom liquid in soup pot. Add ginger, garlic and scallions and simmer 15 minutes. Toss in spinach and cabbbage and cook another 15 minutes, or until vegetables are tender. Add noodles, soy sauce and chili paste and heat through.

Tofu cubes, cooked fish or shrimp, would also make good additions to the pot if you have them on hand.

Serves 4.

Joan will be publishing a roundup of Mongolian recipes tomorrow, so hop on over to Foodalogue to see what's cooking! And if you plan to submit a recipe for the Bloggeraid fundraising cookbook to benefit the UN World Food Programme, don't forget that the deadline of March 31, 20009 is coming up.

Culinary Trip Around the World: Poland

Joan at Foodalogue came up with the brilliant idea to plan A Culinary Tour Around the World event both to sample the world's cuisines and to promote BloggerAid, a new consortium of food bloggers united to raise awareness and funds for world hunger. Last time, I traveled with Joan to Norway, where unfortunately I was blinded by the whiteness of the food, but now we journey to Poland, my husband's paternal grandfather's home land. While Dan never sampled much Polish food at home as his family, like many other immigrant families at that time, wanted to be as Americanized as possible, we do know a few Polish phrases like "Dah me boozhie" (Give me a kiss) that his grandfather passed on.

I had some cabbage (kapusti) in the vegetable crisper and thought I'd try some sauteeing it up with mushrooms and dill seed for some Polish flavor. The recipe turned out to be a toothsome one and I paired it with some plain steamed rice for a simple dinner, as I had a fancy Polish cake to pull out for dessert.



Sauteed Cabbage a la Polska

1 half head of green cabbage, core removed and chopped coarsely
1/2 lb. mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
4 Tbsp. butter
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tsp. dill seed

Melt butter in large skillet. Add mushrooms and saute, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes. Add cabbage and saute, stirring, another 10-15 minutes, until softened, adding water if skillet becomes dry. Add dill seeds and season with salt and pepper to taste, and cook, covered, another 5 minutes to let cabbage steam up and become tender.

Serves 4 as a side dish.

Now, I had high hopes for my Polish dessert. I have a newly acquired cookbook, "Ultimate Cake" by Barbara Maher (NY: Dorling Kindersley, 1996), which, like the other DK publications, has clear photos and lots of them, to illustrate all different kinds of cakes and baking techniques. I was flipping through it and my caught on a Polish Coffee and Walnut Cake recipe which was virtually gluten-free, so I thought I would attempt making it, despite the fact that there were about a twenty different steps to its fabrication.

In the last book I read, Diana Abu-Jaber's "The Language of Baklava" (for the Cook the Books club), the author describes the great divide which separates cooks and bakers: "Cooks are dashing, improvisational, wayward, intuitive; bakers are measured, careful, rational, precise." I am a cook and when I tackle being a baker it takes great restraint in following instructions exactly, measuring precisely and not deviating on some cooking tangent. I was determined to make this complicated Polish treat without doing anything different other than subbing some gluten-free breadcrumbs for the tablespoon of bread crumbs called for in the recipe.

And so, with Ms. Maher's detailed cookbook instructions and lavish illustrations, I:

-Separated and whipped egg yolks and whites
-Prepared a Coffee Mousseline Buttercream Icing
-Made Simple Syrup and Coffee-Flavored Sugar Syrup
-Concocted Apricot Glaze
-Made Coffee Glace Icing
-Sliced a Cake into Layers

It took me the better part of two afternoons to do all these steps in my fabulous dessert and I enjoyed learning some new baking skills. However, this story ends badly at the very final step, when after brushing my split nut torte with apricot glaze and letting that dry, I attempted to "coax" my coffee glace icing over the top of my cake and down the sides. As much as I tried to coax this frosting over my cake, it kept bunching at the top and pulling at the glaze, which in turn, pulled at the top layer of crumbs from the cake. Granted, my cake was a little (alright, a lot) lumpier than the model cake in the cookbook photo, but this kept my Polish cake from becoming the gloriously beautiful dessert I had slaved for.

Nonetheless, my culinary Polska Palooza proved to be a hit with my family, as we all enjoyed the humble cabbage dish and ate my less-than-perfect cake, as it was still awesomely tasty.



I hope to join Joan on some of her other stops along her Culinary Tour of the World. Next up is Germany, which is another cuisine I'm not entirely familiar with, so I will have to go forth and research their traditions before attempting a Teutonic feast. One thing is for sure, I am not going to try any fancy cakes!

Culinary Tour Around the World: Norway

One of my BloggerAid buddies, Joan of Foodalogue, is helping to promote hunger awareness through a new event, A Culinary Tour Around the World. We are going to have a virtual tour of many different countries and their culinary traditions starting with Norway.

I had to do a little research on Norwegian cooking, as I tend to favor spicier fare, and found that there was, not surprisingly given Norway's extensive sea coast, a lot of emphasis on fish dishes.
There is also a heavy emphasis on white-colored food, perhaps in honor of the long, snowy winters. The teachings of my junior high school home economics teacher stressing color balance in meal planning kept haunting me as I leafed through the pages of my Time-Life Scandinavian Cookbook and I knew I just couldn't reproduce a white fish with white potatoes with perhaps a jazzy white cauliflower on the side to liven things up.

Luckily, the Internet has many websites devoted to Norwegian culture and I was tempted at last by a Cod Au Gratin recipe that sounded like it would pass muster with the Crispy Family. It was a white-dominant casserole, but I paired it with some steamed peas to break up that Whiter Shade of Pale.

While there was no cod at my supermarket fish counter, there was a sale on frozen Swai (pronounced "Swy") fillets, which are a farm-raised catfish from Vietnam and have a firm flesh and delicate taste. I tinkered with the original recipe a bit, adding gluten-free substitutions and adjusting things as the website recipe seems a bit jumbled at Norway-Hei. I left in the capers, which I love and the rest of my family loathes, and sure enough, they were detected and left on the side of everyone's plate.



The verdict: Basically, this is a variant of the old Tuna Noodle Casserole every Mom in America was required by law to make at least twice monthly during the 1960s-70s. Sub in a can of tuna for the Cod or Swai and mix those peas into the casserole, and it would be indistinguishable from that starchy standby. However, the kids ate it up and thought it was fun to learn a little about Norway. I pulled out the atlas, donned a Viking helmet from the dress-up chest and we had a little Norwegian flag planted in the middle of our dinner, so it was a festive family dinner. I did provide a couple of bottles of hot sauce on the table, including my favorite green hot sauce, Peewee's Green, to add some non-Nordic zing.

Here's the recipe for:

Norwegian Au Gratin Cod (or other Fish)

2 lbs. cooked cod or other firm, white fish like Swai, tilapia, haddock etc.

(I cooked my Swai in a buttered 9x13 glass baking dish which I later reused as my Au Gratin dish. I cooked thawed fillets, patted dry, at 350 degrees for 30 minutes and then after they cooled, mashed them up into small pieces. I saved the cooking juices for my fish broth.)

1 cup fish broth (I used pan juices from cooking the fish and hot water with a fish bouillon cube)
2 cups milk
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
4 Tbsp. butter
5 Tbsp. brown rice flour
2 Tbsp. snipped chives (from my freezer)
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. capers
Salt and pepper to taste
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 Tbsp. gluten-free bread crumbs
1 (12 oz.) bag gluten-free pasta (I used Bionaturae elbows)

Cook fish as per instructions above.

Meanwhile, cook and drain pasta until al dente. Set aside.

Make white sauce by heating skillet over medium heat and adding butter to melt. Whisk in rice flour, one Tbsp. at a time. Gradually add fish broth and bring just to a boil, while whisking constantly to avoid lumps. Whisk in milk gradually, again, bringing just to a boil, whisking constantly. Add cheese and let melt.

Remove from heat and add nutmeg, chives, salt and pepper to taste, capers and fish. Add eggs and blend together gently and pat into 9x13 glass baking dish. Top with bread crumbs.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, or until bubbly and lightly browned at edges.

Serves 8 hungry Vikings.

A big thank you to Joan at Foodalogue for hosting this fun event and for linking it to BloggerAid. There are exciting plans for our new group of bloggers united in raising funds and awareness of hunger issues in this New Year, including a cookbook and several other Internet events, so be sure to visit the BloggerAid website and consider joining us.

Next stop in our Culinary Tour: Poland!