Sustenance and Desire and HEAT for Cook the Books

The New Year brings another turn at hosting the bimonthly Cook the Books foodie book club, and for my book pick I turned to "Sustenance and Desire: A Food Lover's Anthology of Sensuality and Humor" edited by author/artist Bascove (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004). I have long admired Bascove's book jacket illustrations for Ellis Peters' splendid Brother Cadfael medieval mystery series (her jackets resemble stained glass windows) and the novels of the late Robertson Davies, and when I discovered that she also had literary talents, I sought out this volume.

The anthology contains 77 poems, prose excerpts and short pieces from a variety of authors, from Vladimir Nabokov remembering mushroom picking with his Russian mother to sassy poetry by Langston Hughes to an essay ruminating on cannibalism by Margaret Visser. Interspersed with all these literary gems are some sparkling paintings by Bascove.

For my Cook the Books inspiration, I chose the poem "Hot", by Craig Arnold, whom I sadly found out disappeared while hiking around a Japanese volcano in 2009 and is presumed dead. You can read a full version of Arnold's poem here (or in our chosen book), but in summary, it's a long conversation between two friends who haven't seen each other in a while and had originally bonded over a love of spicy food. When the narrator arrives at his friend's house, he finds that his passion for peppers and food with heat has consumed him. He has parched lips, a haunted look and a fridge full of condiments. Here's the final stanzas:

"He stops, expressing heat from every pore

of his full face, unable to give vent
   to any more, and sits, silent,

   a whole minute.—You understand?
Of course, I tell him. As he takes my hand

I can’t help but notice the strength his grip
   has lost, as he lifts it to his lip,

presses it for a second, the torn flesh
   as soft, as tenuous, as ash,

   not in the least harsh or rough,
wreck of a mouth, that couldn’t say enough."

Dan and I are aficionados of spicy food and we dearly love growing and cooking with hot peppers. We like to grow poblanos and Thai bird chiles and have even had good luck with jalapenos in our Zone 4 garden. But I do not aspire to become a fearsome chili-head that must eat heat with every meal. 

I pored over one of my newest cookbook additions, "Fire and Spice: 200 Hot and Spicy Recipes from the Far East", by Jacki Passmore (NY: Macmillan, 1996) and selected a recipe to try: Indonesian Sweet Corn and Chili Fritters. I had to tweak Passmore's recipe to make it gluten free, substituting buckwheat flour for the all-purpose flour specified in the recipe. The first batch of fritters were hard to flip, though they had a lighter and crispier texture. I added in some coconut flour to thicken things up and the rest of the fritters were easier to handle, but they did get thicker and more pancake-y. Those are the buckwheat-only fritters on the left. 

They were not all that spicy, despite having a fresh red chili pepper in the batter. I did serve them along with a batch of Dan's chunky roasted red pepper and hot spicy pepper relish that he likes to keep on hand in our many shelves of fridgey condiments (maybe we have more in common with the poem's subject than I thought) to up the Scoville units. 

Dan's recipe for his Chunky Pepper Relish is simple, involves a blow torch, and is something that he finds very relaxing. He starts with a couple of red bell peppers, which he prefers to roast with a blow torch while sitting at the kitchen table, listening to tunes. (I prefer to cut them in half, seed them and roast in the oven, but he likes the torch method. Perhaps because it amuses our daughters so endlessly). Then he chops it up, adds in a couple of teaspoons of fresh hot peppers, chopped, 2 cloves garlic, chopped, and a few teaspoons each of olive oil and apple cider vinegar. This gets stored in a glass canning jar and we use it for weeks afterwards.

There's still time to join in this round of Cook the Books. The deadline for reading our selected book, cooking up something inspired from your reading and then blogging it all up is Feb. 2, 2015, Groundhog Day. Not that a groundhog needs to be part of your recipe....

Animal, Vegetable, Jalapeno!

The current selection for this round of Cook the Books, the online foodie book club, is a wonderful non-fiction narrative, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, husband Steven L. Hopp, and daughters Camille and Lily. We will be reading this book until November 25, 2013, after which time bloggers may submit a post that outlines their thoughts about the book and a dish that they have cooked up which is inspired by its pages.

I am one of the co-hosts of Cook the Books, and I picked this title for us all to read as I really enjoyed it when it first came out in 2007. I have long been a Kingsolver fiction fan and some of the elements in this book, like the author's interest in small family farms and an appreciation of seasonal foods, were themes in her earlier novels, especially Prodigal Summer.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the tale of one year spent diligently adhering to a food philosophy that limited items on the Kingsolver-Hopp family table to ones that were raised, grown or foraged on their own or in their local community. This deliberate food experiment started after they moved from their long-time home in Arizona to an old family farmhouse in Kentucky. I really enjoyed reading and now re-reading their forays into intensive gardening, turkey raising, cheese-making and canning, as well as Hopp's sidebars about farming practices, nutrition and biological topics, as well as Camille's wonderful recipes. The prose also relates the family's "pain" when figuring out how to cut out non-local edible delights like coffee, chocolate (the horror!) and citrus, not to mention how to deal with monotonous eating during the larder-scarce month of March.

While I have had a vegetable garden for most of my adult life and enjoy canning, freezing and drying my harvest, I am not as devout a locavore or self-reliant grower as I'd like to be, so reading this book was good motivation to get back into some canning. We have had a warm autumn here in upstate New York and only just had a hard frost last night. I had been cutting up and freezing most of my bodacious 2013 pepper harvest through the past several months, but Kingsolver's book gave me the kick in the butt to can up some pepper relish.

I only had one jalapeno pepper plant, a gift from a gardener friend, but it really pumped out the hot peppers!  I just cleaned out my pepper plants from the garden this past week and took the opportunity to make some Jalapeno Relish with these pungent little beauties and the last of my garden tomatoes.

I mostly followed this recipe though I didn't have enough cilantro from the garden to make the 2/3 cup called for in the recipe so my jalapeno relish is redder rather than greener. I also made sure to bring the relish to a boil before packing into the hot jars (omitted from the recipe in the link), which is an essential step for home canning. I had enough jalapeno harvest from this one prolific plant for two half-pint jars and a little extra which I refrigerated and which we have "relished" on pasta and roasted potatoes. The relish has lots of flavor and a nice kick, too!

I also pulled in some of the other pepper harvest before our frost this past week and got a gift of some other peppers from a friend. The sweet peppers in this rainbow photo are on the left. The ones on the right are some fire-in-the-hole hot peppers that require gloved hands and a taste for heat: Hot Paprika (small squat red ones), Padrone (green poblano type), long red cayenne, yellow Lemondrop, and those green-to-orange Paper Dragons, which are ferociously hot like habaneros.

As noted above, the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle round for Cook the Books continues through November 25, 2013. Feel free to join our book club regulars by submitting a post of your own. Details back on the Cook the Books website.

The Butcher's Great Granddaughter Meets the Baker's Daughter

Guten tag! The current book selection for the awesome online foodie book club, Cook the Books, is Sarah McCoy's "The Baker's Daughter". I am a butcher's great grand-daughter, by the way, hence the title of this post, and I have a couple of his knives and the hand scars from using them to prove it. No candlestick makers in the family tree, though.

McCoy's novel takes place in Germany, during the waning years of World War II. The main heroine is Elsie Schmidt, a teenaged daughter in a hard-working family of bakers, who are in favor with a local Nazi soldier who is sweet on Elsie. While she doesn't return the ardor of his affections, she is aware of how important it is for her family to continue the relationship. She has an older sister, Hazel, who had an out-of-wedlock son with another soldier who was killed they could marry and before the baby was born. Hazel was enlisted in the Lebensborn program, a strange breeder program whose stated purpose was to produce healthy Aryan stock, but seems also to have served as a handy brothel for Nazi soldiers. Elsie shelters a runaway Jewish boy in her bedroom attic after he appears one night being hunted down by local militia.

These scenes from 1945 are interspersed with contemporary scenes in Texas, where Elsie has emigrated and is now an elderly woman. She has a German-style bakery on the Texas-Mexican border, and her back story is now sought by a dithering magazine journalist named Reba. Reba's boyfriend Riki is a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and there are some storyline parallels about ethnic intolerance during both time periods that are encompassed by the book.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and found Elsie's character and that of her paramour, Josef, very well-developed. Other characters felt like over-the-top caricatures, like the sadistic Nazi Major Gunther Kremer, or were just plain tiresome in their indecisiveness, like Reba. However, there is a wealth of detail in describing the scenes at the bakery and a poignant Kristallnacht scene, and I particularly enjoyed the author's skill in portraying the shifting relationship between Elsie and a cantakerous old bakery customer, Frau Rattelmuller.

This book was a satisfying read and there were lots of great Eastern European bakery items to contemplate (and a few recipes capping the end!). For Cook the Books, I was inspired to make a good rye bread, something which is a difficult challenge when one bakes for a celiac, as rye is one of those wheaty cousins that must be avoided. The taste and heft of a good rye bread slice (particularly when toasted) is hard to resist, so I perused my cookbooks and the Internet to find a good gluten-free rye bread recipe.

I found one at the blog Angela's Kitchen, and amazingly enough, I had all of the many required ingredients, save for anise seed. I substituted star anise instead, and the results were delicious. The bread has a complex and hearty flavor and the crumb was excellent. It was a lot of work, and required an arsenal of various flours, thickeners and gums to replace the traditional wheat and rye flours, so next time I would double the recipe and make two loaves.

A roundup of the Baker's Daughter posts will be held after tomorrow's posting deadline. Heather of Girlichef picked this savory title for our group to read and has secured the author herself, Sarah McCoy, to serve as Guest Judge to read through the submissions.

I'll be the host at the helm for the next two months at Cook the Books, where we will be reading Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle". Please feel free to join us in reading this great book and then blogging up your thoughts and a dish inspired from its pages. There's no requirements to join other than submitting your posts by the deadline of November 25, 2013.

A Sicilian-Inspired Dish for Inspector Montalbano

It is time for another round of Cook the Books, the fun foodie book club that I and three of my best blogger buddies take turns hosting. This time we read the first Inspector Montalbano mystery by author Andrea Camilleri, "The Shape of Water". Montalbano is a policeman with a lot of wisdom, heart, common sense, a wry sense of humor, and a love of food. Perfetto!

In our featured book, Montalbano looks for the truth behind the suspicious death of a local politico found in a car in a seedy and desolate part of the Sicilian town of Vigata. His Commissioner wants the details of the death hushed up and tells him that it is "wonderful..that someone in this fine province of our ours should decide to die a natural death and thereby set a good example. Don't you think? Another two or three deaths like Luparello's and we'll start catching up with the rest of Italy."

Montalbano doesn't buy it, and he unravels the rest of the mystery and helps out a few innocents along the way. The dialogue is great and the humorous asides cracked me up ("Ingrid apparently belonged to that category of woman who cannot resist the sight of a bathtub.") (Yes!)  The lover of all things literary and foodie will also find literary snacks strewn between the pages, from paper cones of calia e simenza (roasted chickpeas and pumpkin seeds) to expertly prepared boiled shrimp. Montalbano's housekeeper, Adelina, is the mother of some repeat offenders that our hero has apprehended himself, and leaves him homey dishes in the refrigerator.

I perused my cookbook collection and found a simple recipe for a Sicilian country dish called Pollo e Pomodori in Carol Field's mouthwatering cookbook "In Nonna's Kitchen" (NY: HarperCollins, 1997), which I highly recommend if you're one of those category of women who cannot resist a good cookbook that also contains a lot of stories and folklore. I added a few ingredients and subbed out some others, and this turned out to be a quite "blogworthy" dish, in the words of my dear husband. I served it up with a side of roasted potatoes with rosemary and garlic and I think Inspector Montalbano would have tucked into this too.

Pollo e Pomodori (Chicken with Spiced Tomato Sauce)

3 boneless chicken breast halves, cut into four smaller portions
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 red onion, peeled and diced
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 apple, peeled and diced
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 tsp. allspice

Heat olive oil in heavy frying pan. Add onions and saute until soft, about 5 minutes. Add chicken and brown, turning often, about 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, apple, salt and pepper and allspice. Stir, cover pan, and cook over low flame another 20 minutes, or until chicken is done.

The flavors really come together in a spicy tomato gravy that seemed very exotic, though this was an easy dish to make.

The deadline for this round of Cook the Books ends tomorrow. Please visit the Cook the Books blog to see what others have thought about our featured book and what they have cooked. I will present a roundup in a few days after the deadline.

Our next Cook the Books selection is the novel "The Color of Tea" by Hannah Tunnicliffe. Feel free to grab a copy of the book and blog up your thoughts (and cook up something inspired from its pages). Anyone can join in the fun.

No Heartburn with a Nostalgic Eighties Gourmet Veggie Pasta

Earlier this year America lost a wonderful writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron. I first encountered Ms. Ephron's writings through her collections of essays, like "Scribble, Scribble" and "Crazy Salad", books passed on to me by girlfriends whose passion for Ephron's humor and worldview became my own. 

When I subsequently read through "Heartburn", (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), her semi-autobiographical novel about chef Rachel Samstat, who loses her way during her second husband's adultery, I knew she would always be a part of my pantheon of favorite authors.

I was delighted when "Heartburn" became the featured selection of Cook the Books, a bimonthly foodie book club that I and three of my good blogger buddies co-host. Simona, of the blog, Briciole, is the host of this round of Cook the Books, and she has enlisted Laura Lippstone, a big Ephron fan and blogger at Planet Lippstone, to serve as guest judge of the posts that we all write featuring our book selection and the foods we cook up inspired by our reading. 

Dipping back into "Heartburn" was a nostalgic read: there was the nostalgia of seeing that great dust jacket art, the familiarity of sinking back into Ephron's words like having a cozy conversation with a great friend that one hasn't seen in a bunch of years, and nostalgia for the 1980s world that pervades its pages. Ephron describes Samstat's longing for the great produce sections of New York City supermarkets and gourmet shops that she left behind when she moved to Washington D.C. and that made me remember how arugula and twelve different kinds of peppers didn't used to be a common site at the average food store.

And then there was that passage that made me laugh out loud when I first read and reread it to my friends back in the early Eighties, and which I read and snorted through and reread to my husband now that we're in the 2000-teens.

"When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to THE NEW REPUBLIC, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn’t bald, who wasn’t fat, who wasn’t covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and a small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn’t. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral.” (p.83)

My homage dish to Heartburn is one that celebrates the dazzling bounty of what the grocery store produce aisle features most any time of the year (alright, the locavore in me is conflicted about how great that bounty is in terms of carbon footprints). I made this great pasta dish after sniping the recipe from my cousin-in-law Diane, a fabulous cook. I added some cubed winter squash, because I have an abundance and threw in some diced tomatoes, too, cause I had some hanging around, but otherwise it's Diane's fantastic recipe. It's delicious and I can assure you that it won't give you Heartburn:

Diane's Eighties Gourmet Pasta

1 small eggplant, peeled and diced small
1 small Delicata squash (or other winter squash), peeled, seeded and cubed (about 1 cup)
1 each red and yellow bell pepper, diced small
1 red onion, peeled and diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
3 plum tomatoes, medium chop
1/3 cup olive oil
1-1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper
1 lb. of your favorite small pasta shape (Diane uses orzo, I used GF rigatoni)

Pasta Dressing:

Juice of one lemon

1/3 cup olive oil
Kosher salt and pepper

4 scallions, minced (I used chives)
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted (I used walnuts)
3/4 cup feta, diced (not crumbled)
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, cut into julienne

Toss all of the vegetables in the first part above with garlic, 1/3 cup olive oil, salt and pepper on a cookie sheet. Coat thoroughly with oil and then roast in a 425 degree oven until browned, turning at least once with a spatula.

Cook pasta and drain. Toss with roasted vegetables. Mix dressing and pour over pasta and vegetables.

Gently toss in scallions, nuts, feta and basil. 

Serve at room temperature. Serves 6-8.

Diane says to try throwing in some cremini mushrooms, yellow and green squash or zucchini, if you want.

Simona will be rounding up all the delicious Hearburn blog posts back at the Cook the Books site after today's deadline, so be sure to stop by and see what everyone cooked up. And don't forget to join us in reading, cooking and blogging up our thoughts about "The Hunger Games", by Suzanne Collins, both book and film, for our next round of Cook the Books!

How to Make Gluten Free Crumpets

It's October in the genteel city of Charleston, South Carolina, and tea shop owner Theodosia Browning is not only busy with her regular business, but there's an important catering job to plan and carry out with aplomb: the city's annual candlelight historic homes tour. Unfortunately, while the blackberry scones were a hit with the partygoers, Theodosia's tea gets a bad reputation when one of the guests is found to have dropped dead over his cup and saucer.

That's the set up for the first book in author Laura Childs' Tea Shop Mystery series, Death by Darjeeling, and the current selection of the online foodie book club Cook the Books. I am hosting this round of Cook the Books and am collecting submissions until July 30, 2012, after which time our guest judge, author Laura Childs herself, will be picking a winner to receive the coveted Cook the Books winner's badge and a copy of her latest Tea Shop mystery (#13), Agony in the Leaves. Cook the Books participants read the featured book, blog about it, and then cook up something inspired by their reading. New participants are always welcome, so feel free to stop by Cook the Books to find out more about the fun.

This is the quintessential cozy mystery, full of atmosphere, a fairly bloodless crime, quirky characters and then there's the interesting tidbits about tea making, tea varieties and the mouthwatering Indigo Tea Shop tea time treats!

For my Death by Darjeeling entry, I was inspired to make up a basket of crumpets. Now, before last week I couldn't tell you the difference between a crumpet and a trumpet, but after a little tea-soaked research (several cuppas in hand while I pored through my cookbook collection and looked online) it appears that the crumpet originated as very holey griddle cake that morphed into something a bit grander and yeastier on Victorian tea tables. They have been described as the love child of a pancake and an English muffin, with the main point being that there must be many, many airy pockets in the crumpet either on the top side or within, when split, that must be slathered with butter, jam, honey or golden syrup.

I found a recipe for Gluten-Free crumpets in the 2006 edition of the Glens Falls Regional Celiac Support Group cookbook "Tried and True Recipes", and with a little adjustment here and there, I made a very satisfactory batch of these fluffy little tea accompaniments. Just look at those gorgeous little air pockets above! These crumpets were so good straight out of the oven, split and served up with softened butter and some homemade strawberry jam, but they were just as good the next day when we toasted them and used them for sandwich buns.


Gluten Free Crumpets

1 cup warm water
1 Tbsp. dry yeast
1 tsp. sugar

Vegetable shortening

1/2 cup chickpea flour (also known as besan)
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup tapioca starch
1 tsp. xanthan gum
1/2 tsp. salt
1-1/2 tsp. Egg Replacer (found at most health food stores)

1 Tbsp. sugar
2 tsp. poppyseed
1 egg, at room temperature, lightly beaten
3 Tbsp. melted butter
1/2 tsp. white vinegar

Mix warm water, yeast and 1 tsp. sugar together and let stand in warm place until foamy, about 5-10 minutes.

Grease 6 egg rings or English muffin rings (I bought egg rings with the handles above pretty cheaply at a restaurant supply store, but you could also make your own from carefully cutting and filing down the rough edges of some small, 3 inch diameter, tin cans, like the ones you buy tuna fish, pineapple rings or clams in). Place greased rings on a baking parchment-lined baking sheet.

Whisk together chickpea flour, cornstarch, tapioca starch, xanthan gum, salt and egg replacer until well blended. If your chickpea flour comes out of the bag in small clumps, make sure to run it through a sieve first to make sure the flours will blend smoothly).

In a large mixing bowl, blend together 1Tbsp. sugar, egg, melted butter, vinegar, poppyseed and yeast-water. Beat in 1/3 of the dry ingredients and beat until smooth. Add in another third and then blend and repeat until dough is silky. It will be a bit moist, but then when you divide it and pour it into the greased rings, they will contain the dough and give it its shape when it rises and bakes.

Cover dough in the rings with, what else, a tea towel, and let it rise in a warm place, until the batter doubles (30-45 minutes).

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Bake your crumpets for 18-20 minutes or until browned on top and crumpets have pulled away slightly from their metal girdles.

Makes 6 large crumpets. May be eaten hot or cold. Store in airtight container once cooled.

Having a spot of tea (lemon balm from the garden) with these crumpets on the side made for such a civilized afternoon break; almost as good as a Hobbit's Second Breakfast. And this project made for good excuse to break out some underutilized linens and doilies to make our tea break even more enjoyable.


One thing about crumpets. There appears to be some very naughty British slang usage for the term tea and crumpets, something Theodosia and Company would not likely approve of, so be forewarned, my fellow Americans, before you start spouting off about how much you are looking forward to eating these in bed or something else potentially embarrassing.

I hope you will join my booking and cooking friends in reading Death by Darjeeling (I've devoured books no. 2 and 3 in the series already and am savoring the thought of diving into no. 4 later this week) and joining us at Cook the Books. I will post the roundup of all the posts for this book selection shortly after the July 30 deadline over at the CTB website, so be sure to pop on by for a spot of tea and some good reading.

The United States of Radish Leaves, I Mean Arugula, for Cook the Books Club

It's Cook the Books time once again and for this round of the online foodie book club, our host Johanna of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food picked a great book: The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, by David Kamp. It's a very funny, well-researched look at how American cuisine came of age in the 20th century and he shares numerous anecdotes, foot notes and social history to show all the players that have influenced the American way of cooking, eating and dining out.

Kamp pays particular attention to the troika that are most well known for getting American food out of the canned, processed, instant, Jello-ed doldrums of the post World War II era: Julia Child, Craig Claiborne and James Beard, though there are many gossipy accounts of the minor players that had a hand in it too. I liked Kamp's descriptions of the kitchen hijinks at Chez Panisse, with doyenne Alice Waters lustily ripping through lovers and chefs with great rapidity and the story of Mexican food goddess Diana Kennedy tossing a young, creepily intense Rick Bayless out of her car after he stalked her down in Mexico and pestered her relentlessly with questions when she was having a bit of a crisis during the building of her home.

I really enjoyed reading through this book and it has earned a permanent place in my home library, where it will reread and consulted with a great deal of relish, I'm sure.

For the Cook the Books club, participants not only read and discuss the book selection, but then we get creative in the kitchen to come up with a dish that is inspired by our reading. I had hopes of picking some arugula from plants that went to seed last year, and picked a bunch to saute with olive oil and garlic and then incorporate in some sort of delicious pasta sauce. Fresh arugula is a wonderful, peppery green, but it is meltingly soft and delicious when cooked, a technique which I first tried in this terrific recipe by Mario Batali for an earlier round of Cook the Books.

I went out to the ol' Crispy Garden and picked a mess of arugula leaves. They tasted a little spicy, but they were much, much hairier than the arugula I remembered. I rinsed them off and spun them dry and they were much harder to get clean of dirt specks than the arugula I remembered. All those hairs kept trapping little dirt bits. I looked closer.

D'oh!  This wasn't arugula. These were volunteers from a red radish plant that went to seed and I let flourish in my autumn 2011 garden, thinking it would attract nice flying pollinators to my garden. Luckily, all was not lost, because I remembered reading somewhere that radish leaves were edible and actually made a good soup. I checked it out with my cookbooks and true enough, radish leaves are edible and so I cooked them up with a bit of garlic and olive oil and they were peppery, if not meltingly soft like the arugula. They had tougher stems and a more forthright peppery taste. Spring tonic and all.

This my contribution to this round of Cook the Books. I am delighted that Johanna was able to secure Mr. Kamp himself as our book club judge so you can check back at the CTB website to see the roundup and what our esteemed author thinks about our literary and culinary comments about his work at this link. 

Next round of Cook the Books will feature the first book in Laura Child's great Teashop mystery series, Death by Darjeeling, which will end on July 30th. Feel free to join in the fun by seeking out this book and then reading it and cooking up something inspired by it. Until then....

Adventures in Lickable Wallpaper with Roald Dahl and Charlie Bucket

It is time to Cook the Books once again with the best darn tootin' online foodie book club, and this time round we are reading that childhood classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. I have seen a couple of different illustrated versions of this book but I think Quentin Blake's artwork invokes the playful spirit of Dahl's words just right.

 I zipped through all of Dahl's juvenile novels as a youngster and freshly enjoying reading them aloud to my daughters when they were small. We all especially loved The Twits, his book about a thoroughly obnoxious, smelly man and wife who get their comeuppance from the children, monkeys and birds they torment.

It was a pleasure to dip in again with little Charlie Bucket and his sprightly Grandpa Joe as they explore the wonders of Willy Wonka's amazing Chocolate Factory with a bunch of rotten kids and their equally revolting parents. The kids represent several vices:  Augustus Gloop is a glutton, Mike Teavee embodies rudeness and lack of imagination (he watches TV all day long), Veruca Salt is the eptitome of the spoiled brat (and veruca means wart, I just found out, ha!) and Violet Beauregarde is pushy.  I would recommend this witty book to anyone looking for a wacky, slightly sardonic romp, old and young alike.

With Cook the Books, we read our selected book and then come up with some kind of dish inspired by our reading. The book is full of all kinds of fantastical sweets, but I was most taken with Wonka's description of his Lickable Wallpaper for Nurseries:

"Lovely stuff, lickable wallpaper!" cried Mr. Wonka, rushing past. "It has pictures of fruits on it - bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, and snozzberries..."

"Snozzberries?" said Mike Teavee.

 "Don't interrupt!" said Mr. Wonka. "The wallpaper has pictures of all these fruits printed on it, and when you lick the picture of a banana, it tastes of banana. When you lick a strawberry, it tastes of strawberry. And when you lick a snozzberry, it tastes just exactly like a snozzberry..."

"But what does a snozzberry taste like?"

"You're mumbling again," said Mr. Wonka. "Speak louder next time. On we go! Hurry up!" (pp.104-105 of my copy)

 I'm not sure what I think a snozzberry would taste like. I keep seeing an extra "h" in there and thinking "schnozz-berry" and that conjures up awful suggestions of nose boogers. So I wasn't going to go the snozzberry route.

However, I also possess another wonderful book, Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes (by Felicity Dahl and Josie Fison), which is a cookbook that brings to life many of the wild foods discussed in Dahl's oeuvre (with the bonus of featuring Quentin Blake as illustrator again). There is a beautiful rendition of lickable wallpaper there made with an apple-gelatin puree, which, after being rolled out and dried, is like a sticky sort of fruit leather that can be decorated with various fruits and edible garnishes.
 

Continuing on with my exploration of lickable wallpaper, I found a web link to a BBC show featuring chef Heston Blumenthal and his creation of a Chocolate Factory Feast in which celebrity guests got to lick up some tomato soup and prawn cocktail flavored wallpaper. That was getting more interesting to me, though I do have some hygienic concerns.

First, unless you tear off the sheets of this lickable wallpaper or have some sort of crazy conveyor belt to keep fresh spots of wallpaper available for new lickers, there will be sodden, bacteria-laden patches that someone else may inadvertently plant their lips on. I just keep thinking of petri dishes or flypaper.

Then I thought about licking wallpaper and then tearing off a strip to eat. I thought about those homemade flyers that have strips at the bottom with people's phone numbers to rip off, and then that got me thinking about making edible wallpaper using nori, those sheets of roasted seaweed that one uses to roll sushi. With some inspiration from these Internet recipes: here and here, I set off to experiment with some toasted nori as my lickable wallpaper base.

Nori is certainly handsome enough to hang as edible wallpaper on its own, but I thought about painting it with all sorts of condiments from the inexhaustible supply that festoons my larder and fridge and then toasting it to a crackling, CRISPY-edged goodness. I get these bags of Japanese seaweed snacks at Albany's Asian markets and they are so addictive. They come in Tom Yum, Tomato, Wasabi, Spicy Squid and Plain Salt flavors and I am hooked.

Surrounded by a counter full of sauces, seeds and spices, I set to work on my

Lickable Nori Wallpaper Snacks:

First, I preheated my oven to 250 degrees F. Then I painted, drizzled or sprinkled on my nori wallpaper adornments and baked each batch for ten minutes.

Experiment One: I mixed a little Thai green curry paste with soy sauce and painted that on two pieces of nori. One also got a sprinkle of sesame seeds.  Result: Too salty, though I was pleased to see that the sesame seeds adhered to the nori after baking.

Experiment Two: I beat up an egg white and brushed it on two pieces of nori. One was sprinkled with Five-Spice Powder and the other was dusted with Smoked Paprika. Verdict: Good adhesion of spices, both flavors good.

Experiment Three: Some leftover pesto spread on one sheet of nori. Some chili-garlic-black bean paste spread on the other. Verdict: Both tasted good, but they result in soggy nori centers.

Experiment Four: Drops of liquid smoke on one sheet of nori and splash of hot pepper sauce on another. Both spritzed with Dr. Bragg's Liquid Aminos (it's like soy sauce in a spray bottle, very handy). Verdict: Liquid Smoke nori is inedible. Hot pepper sauce version okay.



Experiment Five: Two sheets of nori brushed with egg white and sprinkled with sesame seeds. Quick shot of Dr. Bragg's to serve as fixative. Verdict: Best tasting and looking version. Not too salty, but pleasantly so.

Ultimately, this experiment with lickable, edible wallpaper proved that the simplest adornments proved the best. Just a simple spritz of Dr. Bragg's or a painting of beaten egg white and a sprinkling of sesame seeds made the CRISPIEST, tastiest toasted nori snacks, though for visual beauty, I must say I fancy the nori with chili, garlic, and black bean paste. And while I thought about making my family line up to the kitchen wall to chomp off a portion of these nori snacks, I ended up snipping them into strips with kitchen shears and offering them up a bit more elegantly.

Though I sped through a full ten-sheet pack of nori, this would be a splendid way to use up leftover nori sheets after a bout of sushi-making.

Our Cook the Books hostess for this round, Deb of Kahakai Kitchen, will be back after the March 26 deadline to post a roundup of all the great dishes. You still have time to join in the fun, or you could wait until the next round of Cook the Books when we will be reading "The United States of Arugula" by David Kamp.

Time to Cook the Books a la Grecque

The latest book pick for Cook the Books, the Internet foodie book club that my friends Johanna of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food and Deb of Kahakai Kitchen started three years ago, is Patricia Volonakis Davis'  Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece (NY: Harper Davis Publishers 2008).  With Cook the Books, we have read many kinds of foodie non-fiction, novels, children's literature and biographies, and traveled the world reading about different culinary traditions, but we have never examined the wonderful food culture of Greece, so I was excited when Johanna picked this book for our current CTB selection.

Davis tells the story of her courtship and marriage to a Greek immigrant and the cultural clashes between her first generation Italian-American family and his. Eventually, she and Gregori and their son Nick move to Greece and her descriptions of her new life there were the most interesting part of the book for me. I enjoyed the translations of various Greek words and expressions ("She can make a donkey die!" means someone is stubborn beyond words) and loved her prose about about Greek Orthodox rituals, the complex dance of the biscotti and coffee at Greek funerals, and comparisons of American and Greek attitudes towards children, stray dogs, and education.

Though the word "Food" is given preeminence in the title of this book, there is not so much discussion of Greek cuisine as there are descriptions of how Davis' marriage weakens and ultimately unravels. And this is not what I thought the book would be about, so unfortunately, I would find my thoughts drifting away through yet another recitation of a marital argument or fight with a passive-aggressive in-law. I flipped ahead through many pages seeking out the nuggets about Greek culture seen through an American's eyes or about the love-hate relationship that first generation immigrant families have with US pop culture and societal freedoms.

My favorite character in the book is Patricia's mother, a chain-smoking philosopher, whom she unfortunately becomes estranged from after too many Gregori incidents.  I absolutely loved Mama Nancy's theory of comparative religion. When young Patricia came home from Catholic school one day and asked how one knows that their religion is "the right one", Mom replies:

 "All religions are the "right" religion, if they're right for the person following them. They all teach basically the same things: to love one another, be the best people we can be, to never deliberately harm someone else."

When her daughter asks why there are different religions, Mom's educational metaphor comes back: "The best way I can describe it is that it's like decorating a house. Some have furniture that might seem strange to you, but the people who live there are happy with it." (p. 81)


After my reading, I was inspired to filch a Greek cookbook from our bookstore shelves, Perfect Greek (London: Parragon, 2006) and perused many a delicious recipe for various mezze, sweets and salads, but ultimately I settled on a recipe for a tomatoey Greek Fisherman's Soup which I adapted to be much more stew-like and which made for a wonderfully fragrant meal served over rice. I'm glad I made a big pot of rice, because this concoction had terrific juices and we sopped up every bit at dinner.

Here's a Fish Stew fit for a Harlot or Fisherman or whomever shows up at your table:


Greek Fisherman's Stew (adapted from Perfect Greek)

2 frozen fillets of tilapia, thawed and cut into chunks (they will flake off in the cooking)
1 lb. frozen shrimp, thawed and shelled

1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
4 stalks celery, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

3 Tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes and their juice
Peel of one orange
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
3 Tbsp. chopped Italian parsley
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
Hot cooked rice

Heat olive oil in large soup pot. Add onion, celery and garlic and cook, stirring often, until softened, about five minutes. Add fish and shrimp and cook, stirring often, another 5-7 minutes, until shrimp are pink

Add white wine and tomatoes and bring to a boil. Add orange peel (I used a tangerine and squeezed in the juice too), thyme, parsley and bay leaves. Cook another 15 minutes at a simmer until seafood is thoroughly cooked and the fish has flaked up and into your wonderful stew juices.  Season with salt and pepper and serve over hot cooked rice. The citrus in the sauce really picks up the sweetness of the fish and shrimp.

Makes 4 dinner servings.

Johanna, our resident Athenian Cook the Book hostess, will be posting a roundup of all the blog entries about Harlot's Sauce after tomorrow's deadline, so hop on over to Cook the Books later this week to see all the posts. Our featured author, Patricia Volonakis Davis, will also be serving as our guest judge to select a winner from the blog entries so that should be entertaining reading as well.

**Next up on the Cook the Books reading list is John and Matt Lewis Thorne's collection of food essays "Outlaw Cook".  It's a fantastic book and I invite you all to join us in reading the book and then blogging up your thoughts and any Outlaw-inspired recipes.

Cook the Books Review: An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof

As one terribly winter-weary North Country resident, I was glad to have an armchair sea voyage to warmer climes courtesy of Ann Vanderhoof in her book "An Embarrassment of Mangoes" (Doubleday Canada, 2003).  This fun book is the current selection of The Cook the Books Club , a bimonthly foodie book club and was chosen by my CTB cohort Deb of Kahakai Kitchen.

Vanderhoof's book is about the two-year sailing trip that she and her husband Steve made from their home in Toronto down through the Caribbean. Long distance sailing holds no appeal for my hobbity self, but I was glad to have this vicarious vacation in a dust jacket while foot upon foot of snow and other variants of frozen precipitation visited my home pretty much every couple of days these many long winter weeks. It was nice to imagine myself basking in sunshine, sipping a rum punch and bopping to soca, that combination of soul and calypso music that screams "party time!"

The author's prose is very descriptive and certainly lauds the wonders and beauty of cruising around the West Indies, but she doesn't gloss over poverty in the region or the down side of sailing.  I loved her passage about the day long chore of scrubbing, washing and repacking of foodstuffs when stashing new provisions to avoid bringing bugs on board. Vanderhoof was lucky to make friends with a Grenadian buddy, Dingis, who is a master in the kitchen and offered to teach her some of her cooking secrets.

I was entranced by the description of Dingis' lobster curry, so despite the very dear cost of the crustacean, I got one steamed at the fish counter of my supermarket and brought him home, scarlet and stiff, in a waterlogged paper bag.  I cracked the meat out and then stuffed the shells into a pot with some vegetable trimmings collected in my freezer stash and boiled it all up for a delicious lobster broth that was later cooked up into a lobster-scented rice.
.

The lobster rice served as my base for Dingis' Lobster Curry (recipe on page 127 of the book).  I was surprised that the lobster wasn't overwhelmed by all the seasonings in this dish; curry powder, peppers sweet and hot, garlic, onion, ketchup and vinegar.  The next time I would use poor man's lobster, i.e., chunks of monkfish, or maybe some large shrimp, because of the cost, but the sauce was really luscious.

A delicious Island dinner needed a toothsome ending, so I also made up some Mango Crisp (p. 133), which had a great zing from some chopped crystallized ginger.

There's still time to join in the fun at Cook the Books. Deb will be accepting entries from readers who like to head for the kitchen after reading a great book until Friday, March 25th. Be sure to stop back to CTB headquarters after the deadline to see the roundup of Embarrassing Mango posts and then to see which entry will be picked by our special guest judge, our esteemed author herself, Ann Vanderhoof!

Untangling my Chopsticks with Japanese Comfort Food in the New Year

Denizens of some lakeside and seaside communities like to dip into icy waters for a Polar Bear Plunge on New Year's Day, believing that it brings one good luck and fortune in the months ahead. For me, the alternative of a gentler dive into a great book about Japanese culture and cuisine has proven to be just the ticket for starting the New Year in our house.

After the delightful indulgences of the holiday season, I have been ready for some lighter, more delicate fare to balance things out and rereading Victoria Abbott Riccardi's "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto", (NY: Broadway Books, 2003) has been the perfect cup of (green) tea to start 2011 for the Crispy Cook.


This book is the current book selection for Cook the Books, the bimonthly foodie book club and I have the privilege of hosting the book discussion and roundup for this round, which ends January 28, 2011. We love to have new members join us in reading our selected book and then blogging and cooking up something inspired by our anointed book, so be sure to check the Cook the Books website for more details and to see the cool roundup of posts after our deadline.

I initially read this evocative book a couple of years ago for a Books About Food Reading Challenge, and here's my summary from that first reading:

"Untangling my Chopsticks" recounts the author's year spent in Kyoto, Japan, learning about the art of kaiseki. Kaiseki is the traditional and highly ritualized series of foods to accompany green tea ceremonies and involves a series of small dishes of exquisitely prepared and garnished foods.

Riccardi lands in Kyoto without much knowledge of Japanese culture or language, but is fortunate to have some friends of friends to stay with until she finds other lodging, enrolls in language classes and snags a coveted spot in a prestigious tea kaiseki school where there is an American ex-pat to help her navigate the new culinary and language challenges she faces.

The kaiseki banquets she studies sound exquisite; they evolved from Buddhist monastery traditions into highly formal social dining banquets in which tastings of thick and thin whipped green tea are interspersed with samples of the freshest, seasonal dishes, exquisitely garnished. She also provides interesting glimpses of Japanese home cooking and ordinary restaurant fare, and includes many recipes easily adapted to Western kitchens.

Though this book is but a glimpse into a highly complex Japanese culinary tradition, it was a mouthwatering introduction and I will be referring back to it when attempting my own forays into Japanese cooking."

I enjoyed my reread of Riccardi's book just as much, and found that I was bookmarking different pages the second time round. There is so much that is elegant and seasonal about this refined style of cuisine that I know I will be seeking out many times over.

I am a novice Japanese cook, so I thought I would start with the basics of preparing dashi, the kelp and bonito broth that is a mainstay in many Japanese dishes and then prepare a simple donburi, "Japan's quintessential comfort food", according to Riccardi. Donburi is a bowl of hot cooked rice topped with eggs and other proteins along with vegetables in a salty, sweet broth.


I made dashi according to Riccardi's recipe (page 48) which was very easy, once I had the correct ingredients: konbu, or dried giant kelp, brought just to the boiling point in a pot of water and then removed, and dried bonito flakes. I then used some of my dashi in a Shrimp and Egg Donburi and some as the stock for a slurpy bowl of rice noodles later that same week.

The donburi was a great dish for a wintry, overcast January day, with candles lit on the table and the woodstove crackling away. Our featured book notes that donburi restaurants pepper Japan and describes this dish thus:

"Scrumptious, healthy, and prepared in a flash, it redefined the meaning of fast food" (p. 21)

Certainly seems a better fast food alternative than a "special sauce" burger and fries on so many levels.


Shrimp and Egg Donburi (adapted from Riccardi's Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl recipe in "Untangling my Chopsticks")

4 cups hot cooked rice

1 cup dashi (I made homemade dashi which is super easy, but there are also canned and powdered dashi products available in Asian markets)

1/4 cup soy sauce (check to make sure this is wheat-free)
1-1/2 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. mirin (sweet rice wine)

4 eggs

1/2 lb. large shrimp, shelled and deveined (I used frozen shrimp)

3 Tbsp. snipped chives or scallions


Mix dashi, soy sauce, sugar and mirin in medium soup pot. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer two minutes.

Break eggs into mixing bowl. Untangle your chopsticks and use them to beat eggs until blended. Chopsticks work surprisingly well at this.

Add shrimp to simmering broth. Pour eggs over the shrimp and then sprinkle on the chives. Let simmer without stirring , until shrimp turn pink. Gently stir up shrimp and eggs and cook another 1-2 minutes, until shrimp are completely cooked.

Divide hot cooked rice into four medium bowls. Pour shrimp-egg mixture and broth over rice in each bowl.

Slurp away!

This dish really calls for those big porcelain Chinese ladle spoons which I didn't have, so you can slurp up a good portion of rice, broth and egg/shrimp chunks.

Serves Four.

I will be trying this again soon with tofu cubes and sliced raw fish. Truly great fast food!

As hostess of this round of Cook the Books I have already received some great submissions based on "Untangling my Chopsticks" and look forward to seeing what the rest of the batch looks like. Be sure to stop back at the Cook the Books website for the roundup after January 28.

A Turkey Post Without a Bird

Anik See's evocative collection of travel essays, "A Taste for Adventure: A Culinary Odyssey Around the World" is the present selection for the Cook the Books Club, the bimonthly online book club where participating foodies read, review and cook from the featured book. I am the current hostess for this round centered on See's wonderful book, and was delighted to recommend the book to others.

"A Taste for Adventure" is lyrically written about the author's slow bicycle journeys through a number of exotic destinations in Asia, South America and the Middle East. Often See was alone, but on several of her sojourns she was accompanied by her boyfriend Doug, and in most every destination, she and he were welcomed to feasts, personalized tours, loaded down with local delicacies and pulled into kitchens and bedrooms for respite.



I enjoyed reading and then rereading the many bookmarked passages in See's book as her writing so vividly gave me a chance to tour remote corners of Patagonia, Georgia, Armenia, Malaysia, Iran and Argentina and several other delicious-sounding, breathtaking countries. She has a gift for making this Western-centric reader appreciate the shift when arriving in a foreign land and making sense of things. Here's her arresting, philosophical take on Thailand:

"Southeast Asia has a way of redefining things. The common misconception is that it makes you appreciate the "privilege" of being born into a western country and its potential for affluence. In fact, what Southeast Asia does is reveal the excesses of the West, of how we westerners have lost sight of the importance of simpler things in the quest for money and "meaningful" careers (as opposed to a meaningful existence), the need for a house or two or three, a car or two or three, and material possessions. Southeast Asia has a way of forcing you to define what is absolutely necessary for your survival and uncover the happiness that lies within a possessionless existence" (pp. 50-51 in my softcover copy).

The challenge for my Cook the Books post ended up trying to narrow down the particular geographic locale that I would research further. I was partial to See's description of Georgia, and the "fierce pride", contradictions of romanticism and economic desperation, high spirits, romance and chivalry and chauvinism all entwined. See was wisely accompanied by Doug on this route, which begins as they wheel their bikes out of the customs checkpoint and are embraced, kissed and laden with apples, jam and vodka by a complete stranger. At every Georgian pitstop the pair are forcefully bestowed with eggplants, exuberant greetings, more vodka, joyful, hours-long impromptu feasts, tearful departures, homemade wine, watermelons, and many, many more glasses of homemade wine.

Ultimately, I decided to dip an exploratory cooking spoon into the cuisine of Turkey, described so tantalizingly in See's book as "multidimensional, coy and luring, steamy, seductive, like nothing I have ever tasted and certainly like nothing I had ever expected" (p 96). I found some excellent introductions to Turkish cuisine at this website and then visited quite a while over at Binnur's Turkish Cookbook, where I decided to try my hand at Guvecte Mantarli Pilav, a toothsome mushroom and rice pilaf topped with a snowy cap of cooked grated potato and egg yolks. The two starches might seem a bit much combined together, but this made a great main dish supper for our family, who tucked into it before I was able to snap the requisite food porn photo. Darn!



This was a great recipe, thank you Binnur! I made it with sliced baby portabella mushrooms and it was hearty and homey on a cold January evening. Even my dill-phobic daughters scarfed it up with gusto and I would recommend it to anyone interested in an introductory recipe to help explore Turkish cooking. It was an accessible-sounding casserole, sort of a riff on vegetarian shepherd's pie, but the spice and flavor combinations were just different enough to make it an exotic dish for our table.

Be sure to check back in at Cook the Books after our January 22 deadline to see the roundup of blog posts, book reviews and book-inspired recipes for our "Taste of Adventure". Until then...

Pastry-Wrapped Brie, Gluten-Free? Mais, Oui!

Francophilia reigns in our house. I took French lessons from junior high through my college years and revel in the sensuous sound of the French language whenever we visit Montreal or hear French Canadian visitors here in upstate New York. Dan and I honeymooned in Quebec City and my two daughters have picked French as their second language. Someday, I hope to cross the pond for an extended visit, but until then, armchair travels with books will have to suffice.

Peter Mayle's "French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew" is the current book pick for Cook the Books, the virtual book club for foodies, and like Mayle's other books about his adopted home, the writing captures his bemused impressions of the French landscape, the food, and the people. The Provence books capture life as an expat Englishman trying to adapt to a life where one's central priorities and the pace of life itself are quite different. And historic home renovations are not accomplished in a day, a month, a year, perhaps several years.



"French Lessons" is entirely about the French preoccupation with one's meals and the various food festivals that Mayle explores throughout France. We travel to many regions to celebrate frog legs, truffles, snails, spa cuisine, the sublime chickens of Bresse, Livarot cheese and other delights, and in my favorite chapter, "A Connoisseur's Marathon", are treated to the spectacle of the Marathon du Medoc, a long-distance road race in which 8,000 participants run 26 miles through the vineyards of Bordeaux. Only one quarter of the runners aspire to seriousness in the race (though the winner receives his/her weight in wine); the others are there to have fun, clad in crazy, cross-dressing costumes, and helping themselves to superior wines and gourmet snacks at civilized refreshment stations along the race course.

It is these kinds of vivid scenes, and Mayle's genial, self-deprecating sense of humor that made the book such an enjoyable read. Mayle describes his joy in reading a used book treasure that his wife bought him, "L'Escargot Comestible", in researching his upcoming snail festival sojourn:

"The text was scholarly in tone, and there were no unnecessary typographical flourishes. In other words, it was a serious piece of work, designed to inform students and breeders of the mollusk, rather than entertain snail diletantes like me. But serious work though it was, a Frenchman had written it. And so, inevitably, there was a recipe section".

I read "French Lessons" last month and it inspired me to attend two local food festivals in our area, Bennington's Garlic Festival and the Washington County Cheese Tour. After all that luscious cheese sampling, I wanted to try my hand at baking some pastry-wrapped Brie for a savory appetizer course for the mister and me one romantic day when both girls were out with their friends. Doing so when gluten is not your enemy is easy enough. Wrap one piece of store-bought Brie in some thawed store-bought puff pastry, heat it all up in the oven and then attack the gooey result with gusto. Alas, the gluten-free diner must approach this simple culinary project with the perusing of many wheatless pastry recipes and then attempt to cover their cheese without the whole crumbling, flopping over and sticking to rolling pins and countertops.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find a recipe online or in my arsenal of cookbooks for a gluten-free pastry-wrapped Brie. Clearly, there are unchartered waters here.

It was easy enough to find a luscious wedge of herb-infused Brie at the supermarket, but the pastry, which would have to be flaky when cooked and not outlandishly hard to maneuver around my cheese when raw, was a stumper. Eventually, I came upon this recipe on a cooking message board which seemed like a good launching point, though the pastry recipe was intended to house an appalling amalgam of kidney beans, maple syrup and raisins. I had a bag of white bean flour in my pantry and have made some garbanzo bean pie pastry in the past with success, so I set to it, with some tweaking here and there. Most notably, the pastry recipe called for 3/4 cup of cold water, which would have made an unworkable slurry rather than a good, workable crust, so that must be a misprint.

The experiment ended up a success (though the pumpkin pie I made with the remainder of my crust tasted a little too beany) and I would even have been proud to share a bite with Mayle himself. Here's how to make:

Baked Brie in a Savory Gluten-Free Pastry Crust

1 (1/2 lb.) wedge of Brie (I used President's double creme Herb Brie)

1-1/2 cups white bean flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 Tbsp. cornmeal
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt

6 Tbsp. shortening (I used Butter-Flavored Crisco)

1 egg, separated
1/4 cup cold water


Let Brie sit, unwrapped, at room temperature, while you make your pastry.

Mix together white bean flour, cornstarch, cornmeal, baking powder and salt in mixing bowl. Cut in shortening with pastry blender until it resembles coarse crumbs. Mix together egg white and water. Add enough water to pastry mix to make it a smooth, workable dough. You may not need to add all this liquid.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Maneuver pastry into a ball and then squash it down between two sheets of plastic wrap. Parchment paper will not do, as the dough will stick to it and cause inappropriate amounts of cursing in the kitchen.

Roll dough out to about 1/4 inch thickness in a roughly rectangular shape. Peel off top layer of plastic wrap and then play your wedge of Brie, top side down, over your pastry. Wrap your cheese in the pastry, pressing down the seams to make your pastry case as hole-free as possible.

(I found that this pastry was very workable, kind of like working with fondant or that old childhood standby, Play Doh. The heat from your hands makes the pastry seams come together very easily and the one advantage that this pastry has over regular wheat flour pastry, is that you can work it over and over without the dough becoming tough. Without the tough strands of gluten, you can keep handling your doughy mistakes over a long period of time. The dough smells very strongly of raw beans when raw, but it will change to a much pleasanter aroma when baked.)

Grease a glass pie pan with some extra shortening and then flop your pastry-wrapped cheese right-side up in your pan. Again, the dough is eminently pliable, so you can adorn it with fancy pastry scraps. I gave my Brie a pastry boutonniere for a little extra Gallic elegance.

Whisk up your remaining egg yolk and brush over the top of your pastry. You are now ready to bake your Brie!



Bake your production at 375 degrees F. for 15-20 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and melting Brie has popped the seams of its pastry shell.

Makes 4-6 appetizer servings.

We ate this for Second Breakfast on a rainy mid-morning, but I imagine that this luscious cheese experiment would be wonderful as a romantic meal paired with grapes, pears and a bottle of lusty red wine.

Note: This makes enough pastry to wrap 3 wedges of Brie. I used the remainder of my pastry to make a 9 inch pastry shell for a pumpkin pie (the crust edges burned so next time I would cover the rim with foil), but I would imagine one could freeze the remainder into pastry logs to freeze and roll out another day.



Please join in the fun when our current Cook the Books hostess, Jo of Food Junkie, Not Junk Food, rounds up the blog posts about "French Lessons" and the foods we cook up inspired by our reading. The deadline to do so is November 8th, and then it will be my turn to host this fun, bimonthly biblio-foodie fiesta. Anyone can participate in Cook the Books as long as they read the selected book and blog about it and some edible inspiration.