sazji

Well, this is an old thread but as soon as I saw it I had to run home and try it! The recipe seemed a bit fishy though; maybe it's my flour but it seemed like a lot of water. Also the resting time (30 minutes) seemd awfully short; I did a bit of research on the internet and other sites gave times ranging from 2 to 8 hours. I've helped make thrown yufka (phyllo) several times (but not the final throwing process mind you, they wouldn't let me near carefully-prepared dough!) and it seems a similar quality is required in the dough; that it stretch evenly without breaking. If the dough isn't right, it doesn't matter how good your technique is, it will just not work. Here there is a long vigorous (exhausting) kneading, followed by a couple of hours of rest, followed by an "elbowing" where they hit the dough forcefully with the elbow and forearm, without actually kneading it again, then it rests further, and is finally made into preliminary rounds that rest once more before it is finally opened by a throwing process. I tried it with a flour that included baklava as the uses, but there is a big distinction here between "home" baklava and börek and those made by the pros, and I know the flour the pros use is not readily available in grocery stores. Anyway, the dough seemed very soft and sticky; but I managed to keep it together with quick kneading. After 30 minutes and another kneading it wasn't nearly ready to stretch, so I let it sit another hour. Still resisting, so I did a really violent kneading, and then it came to a stage where it practically flowed. I managed to get a few pulls but the strands immediately reunited, even with oil. Trying it with flour gave a little better results but like Soup, I had them stretching unevenly and breaking, even when I let them stretch on their own accord and just "kept up" with them. (Or perhaps you have to keep ahead of it?) I did manage to get one bowl of passable if uneven noodles, that tasted like way overcooked ramen, so I'm going to try it again with a little less water and better flour.

Horrors! What would be the point? Actually in surfing the internet I've found many, many Korean recipes for kimchi that include some sugar. I've never used it when I make my own though. As for my favorites, napa cabbage and cubed radish top the list. I put some watercress in my last batch of radish kimchi, and also green garlic as it's just started to appear on the market, and it was very good. Here's a picture. My kitchen is unheated so in winter I just leave it on the counter till it's done. <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/kimchi.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a> By the way, I learned that a large number of the Koreans who fled to the Soviet Union after the Korean War were settled in Uzbekistan, and now kimchi has become a staple there among Uzbeks as well! I can't handle the squid one. To me it tastes sort of like a marine aquarium in need of cleaning smells. But my Korean friend Yujin was horrified that I didn't like it, and exclaimed "You don't like that one? But that's the best one!" I think she gave up hope on me then... Oh well, more for her! If it can be made from crabs, is it ever made from shrimp?

It's definitely taro; the brown flecks you mentioned are typical. It's also used a lot in Cyprus, where it's cooked like a potato, and never cut but rather chipped into wedges. It's also never washed after peeling because it gets slick. The roots get quite large; at a certain age they begin producing offsets (which is what you have).

I posted this picture earlier on the "What did you have for dessert" thread, but realized in retrospect that this was the place it truly belonged! It was a chocolate pudding cake, which actually tasted quite good. But the light was weird, and the brown dish probably didn't help at all. My first reaction to it was, "Oh, Tar Baby spit up on a brownie." <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-141S.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a>

It is an entire sheep's head, surrounded by the feet. The white piece sticking out is the nose cartilage, which I ate. It tasted like very crunchy lamb. Perhaps you'd like to see the first course: <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/serupepik.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a>

Shudder. I will try almost anything too, though balut, probably, is an exception. I tried natto at a party given by a Japanese-American professor years ago. There was wonderful food there, and there was a little container of natto and several pairs of chopsticks for sampling. I knew I was in trouble when I saw how it threaded out, but went for it anyway. It wasn't the smell or taste that were the problem, it was the way it immediately covered every surface of my mouth and wouldn't go away! We gave some to a Pakistani grad student...he got a look on his face that was priceless; he seemed almost hurt, as if a trusted friend had just cursed his mother. When he came to his senses, he ran to the bathroom and spent about 5 minutes washing his mouth out.

Here is one stand at one of the weekly markets in my neighborhood. Lots of interesting radishes. They are uniformly huge (imagine a red radish in the states that big...it would be wooden) and very sweet and tender, with the exception of the black radishes, which are hot as blazes, and hard-crunchy. They also "come back" on you for hours and hours afterwards. Evidently they mellow the longer you store them. They are a bit of a "forgotten" vegetable in many areas but are always around here. I use the big white ones to make kimchi, and have turned some Turkish friends onto it as well. The best to my taste are the ones with the pink insides; they are both beautiful and sweet/mild. The brown roots are Jerusalem artichokes. Also notice how long the leeks are! They hill them here, so that they stretch and you get lots more of the tender white part. Leeks are used a lot here, the most common way to prepare them is to simmer them with olive oil and a bit of rice and sometimes a little tomato and/or carrot; the dish is eaten cold with a squeeze of lemon over the top. <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/IMG_0528.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a> The next one is a type of gourd (probably a straight dipper gourd) that is brought from the area around Kastamonu. It's mostly used for stuffing, though I found you have to peel it because the outer skin is quite tough. I liked regular zucchini better. <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-074S.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a> The last is the most common type of winter squash sold here, known as "Adapazari." It looks a bit unearthly and can get quite large, but the taste is not much different from that of a hubbard. <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-072S.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a> I love the weekly markets; there is such a selection of really fresh, high-quality produce (not to mention other things, some of it really weird, like the little creatures below). They fill several city blocks each and are covered with tarps. I'm fortunate to have three different ones within walking distance of my house on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and another one on Tuesday perhaps 15 minutes away. <a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-008S.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a>

If they are fully ripe they should be sweet! But the season for blood oranges is later than others; i.e. when the regular navels and valencias are at peak ripeness the blood oranges are just coming along. They are mostly used for juicing but I made a really nice blood orange marmelade last week. It didn't come out red but a much darker orange than normal marmelade and has a distinctive flavor.

My favorite type was one that I have been unable to find since. It is of very simple construction, very sturdy, two flat arms hinged at one end, one with the "basket" and one with the press. What is nice about it is that the "cleaning tool" is on the back of the press side; after you press the garlic, you pull the handle around the other way and the raised nibs on the back of that arm of it press into the "basket" of the press from the outside and push the leftover bits of garlic out. Here I just use my mortar and pestle and a bit of salt; it does the trick just fine. The technique with the paring knife sounded interesting and I'd like to learn it, but I was a bit confused about the directions.

Oh CRAP, you just reminded me of the pot with about an inch of leftover beans sitting on the back of the counter that I forgot about....last week......

Greek does a little of this. The word for a live chicken is "kotta," but the thing on the plate is "kotopoulo. Beef is beef, just the adjectival form (vodhi > vodhino). A pig in modern Greek is a "gourouni," but the meat is "choirino," which is from the ancient Greek word "choiros" for pig. A lamb is "arni," and so is the meat. Turkish is very straightforward. Meat is "et." Koyun is a sheep, mutton is "koyun eti" (sheep its-meat). Domuz is pig, pork is "domuz eti." Etc. etc. The only exception is fish: Balik (minus the dot on the "i") is fish, but "balik eti" means "flab."

Argh...I was about to mention that too, but left it out because it wasn't (thankfully) a regular kitchen chore. The most recent place I moved into has this "mosaic" floor in the kitchen, and the last tenants had decided for some godly unknown reason to put indoor-outdoor carpeting down in the kitchen. And of course had then spelled everything possible on it. It was glued to the floor by a combination of some syrupy concoction that looked like a combination of molasses and cooking oil. The floor was literally black underneath, and took about five or six washings with a stiff brush and scouring powder before it got back to something like normal. The place before was almost as bad; they had put down linoleum flooring, on top of a previous linoleum flooring, on top of a yet-previous one, and below that was a layer of thin cardboard (?!). It was all glued together by ancient cooking grease. I'm sure the woman never once cleaned the kitchen. There were tile walls, and I spent an hour or two removing old congealed grease with a spackling spatula. The shelves, slightly depressed inside, old wall dishrack had about an eight of an inch of completely black grime, and the dust on the top (mixed with oil) was about a quarter of an inch thick. You couldn't even see out of the windows, they were so caked in grease; and nothing ever got them really transparent again. Which I was sort of grateful for when the drunk guy and his equally drunk girlfriend started making a practice of rooftop lovemaking on the house next door (yes, in Istanbul!). (The other apartments had been remodeled so that they no longer had a window there...they were lucky I was the one who saw them and not my very conservative landlord from the East...)

Ah damn, you beat me to it. I don't like cleaning ovens and refrigerators, and I also hate cleaning the plastic dishrack I have (I have to take it all apart and there is always a brown slick film growing on it...). But nothing compares to pulling the stove and/or refrigerator from their places and cleaning all the stuff that slips down there, mummified in dust and old sticky oil. Especially as my floors are "mosaic" (like tiles made of conglomerate, very hard to clean, most people do it with hydrochloric acid). Last time I found olives, a piece of dried up cauliflower, a carrot mummy, a spoon I'd been wondering what happened to, a couple packs of matches, a lighter I'd accused a smoker friend of pocketing (but didn't eat any crow there as he had pocketed at least two during that visit anyway), half an eggshell, lots of peppercorns that escaped during an ill-fated attempt to reload my pepper mill, and a mysterious yellow thing that was probably feta cheese at one time. When I was a kid, I was always bringing home frogs, salamanders, etc., and there were occasional escapes. Their mummies usually turned up eventually under a refrigerator...

One of our favorite "fancy" meals when I was a kid was boef fondue, where there was a pot of hot oil (kept heated by a can of sterno burning underneath) in the middle of the table, and everyone got a bowl full of cubed steak, which you'd put on a skewer and cook in the hot oil, and when it was done, dip in various sauces. I always used to eat a lot of it raw. I never got sick. Actually here, where cases of "the gurgles" as we affectionately call it, are fairly commonplace, it's usually badly-washed salad that's the culprit, though everyone suspects the meat. The only time I've gotten *really* sick, I mean the twisting-knife-in-the-side kind of food poisoning, was from a vegetarian dish. But I did have two friends get sick from (probably) a meat dish that had gone a bit off, and I don't *ever* want to be that sick in my life. (Still I have my doubts, as I ate the same dish and only got a bit of upset a few days later...my gut having grown accustomed to a lot...)

The way I always cooked sticky rice was to soak it in water overnight, then steam it in a bamboo steamer over boiling water. It won't be soggy that way. It will be chewy though.

I remember reading that acorns were the staple of the Native Americans in California, even those of the tan-oak which are high in tannins, were eaten. The procedure was to grind them, place them in holes in a sandy bank, and pour water through them to leach the tannins out. A friend who tried it said it was pretty blah. But then, a lot would depend on preparation. We use wheat as a staple, but it doesn't mean most of us would enjoy plain cream of wheat boiled in water with no accompaniment! Now I'm tempted to gather some different species here and try it. I agree that it is sad that so many native plants are forgotten in the US. Here and in Greece, many, many different types of wild fruits and especially greens, are a very common part of people's diets; you can find them in the markets as well. I'd imagine that one big reason for the lack of knowledge in the US is that the US is mostly a nation of immigrants who brought many of their old familiar foods with them, but most never even had a chance to learn from Native Americans. So many in the US have never even met one! Why should one not use acorns that have lost their caps? Since that is what happens when they get ripe, I'd think it wold simply mean that they are ripe?

What fun! How did you get the shape, did you bake it flat and carve it, or...?

Why was it black....honestly that's something I haven't really wanted to contemplate too much but I guess if you boil anything in an aluminum pot for long enough, it will turn black. We are talking hours. Perhaps there was some lemon or something in the water? It looked foul. More disturbing was watching him eat it.

I don't know if this exactly counts because they were meals that were offered to me, but not actually eaten. When I lived in Seattle, I lived once in a large house with several people. We had one housemate from Peru, who was a sweet guy, but produced some of the scariest meals I ever saw. He would make "chicha" of just about anything; some were drinkable (the one made from purple corn was actually quite good), the most disgusting was basically orange juice, mixed with lots of sugar, and left out to ferment till it was fizzy. It tasted like drinking penicillin. But the worst was a fish head soup. He got a bunch of fish heads from some Asian market, about a pound of them, and boiled them in a pot for a couple hours (to get all the flavor) until the brew was literally black. To this, he added lots of spinach, and finished it off with a handful of wheat germ. And not only did he eat it all, but offered it to all of us. No takers though.

Another hulking male... I've definitely had days like this... Geez, I wish men could have PMS too, it would give me an excuse for so many of my glutfests. Actually I'm convinced that males do have hormone peaks that cause food cravings; at least some of us. Why else would I wake up some mornings with a desire to start the day with the rest of the brownies I made the day before, and pretty much continue that way through the day? And wanting or not wanting chocolate is especially variable, but when I want it, it just keeps calling...

If you happen to have some land to garden, chard is easily one of the easiest, most forgiving of vegetables to grow. Here the common one has very large, flat leaves, not crinkled like the ones we mostly grow in the west, and very good for stuffing. If you want to grow some I could gladly pop some seeds into the mail for you. There is also a wild form that grows all over the place; I've even seen it popping up in median strips in the middle of the city.

When you poach the quinces, did you add the seeds to the poaching liquid? They are loaded with pectin, I'd think enough to make things gel quite well (maybe even more than you might want!)

Looks really beautiful. Considering it slumps, how do you keep the edge so even? I assume you are filling the shell with rice/beans/pie weights? I have a slumpy but delicious tart dough recipe that contains ground walnuts (I sometimes substitute hazelnuts), and the directions suggest letting it slump just a bit over the edge of the pan. I find it tends to "cut itself off" over the edge of the pan and drop in quickly-congealing blobs on the bottom of the oven (That's just Lurch getting his share, I figure,) and the result is a fairly even edge; but it's messy.

Did a quince tart this time, cooking the quinces almos completely tender before laying them into a baked tart shell with some ground hazelnuts in the dough. I topped it with the same sort of "custard" that goes into a breton apple tart (egg, sugar, flour, cream) but next time I'm going to do a flourless one to make it a bit lighter. It is still delicious though. Edited to say that the brownies look evil, Lorna, and I mean that in the best way of course. <a href="http://photobucket.com"><img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-155S.jpg" border="0" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket"></a>

Quince pie. I love quince and they are plentiful here; I'd read about mixing them with apples in pie but always wanted to try an all-quince pie. It was experimental...quinces take a lot more cooking than apples, so I tried doing a cooked filling, which I simmered for about 10 minutes, till they were getting tender. I added a few cloves and (really) a bay leaf to the filling, which was inspired by the fact that quince paste is generally packed in layers separated by bay leaves. However, after an hour of cooking, the fruit at the center still was not tender. I covered the pie with foil, and went another 20, and it seemed to have softened. The crust had overbrowned but I loved the color of the fruit. However the quince at the center was still tough... But around the edges it was delicious. I'm going to try it once more, and braise the fruit (as they do here for the traditional quince dessert) in a very small amount of syrup, minus any thickeners, till very nearly done. I have two quinces left so I may try a shallower tart.