sazji

What is a fluffernutter sandwich??

Yes, it's almost hard to imagine duck *without* star anise! The mother of a chinese friend of mine used to do take a pork roast - the very tender ones that are tied up in string mesh - and put about 3/4 cup of honey over it and let it sit overnight, then add an equal part of soy sauce, water to cover and one or two whole star anise. She'd then simmer it for hours till it was infused and falling-apart tender and the sauce had boiled down. This was very intensely flavored and we usually ate just small bits of it with rice along with a meal rather than as a main dish in and of itself.

Ah, I used to have a housemate who made that kind of stuff. The one that immediately comes to mind was an unidentifiable mass he was eating (out of the pot) once when I came home. "What the hell are you eating?" I asked. He looked down, looked back up and said "Canned kidney beans and tuna with some crackers mooshed up in it..." Made a mean chicken teriyaki though.

Mom tried all sorts of ways to get us to eat bread crusts. They were where all the nutrition was (as if we cared). Ditto for heels. She told us she and her brother used to fight over the heel of the bread. We said they were both nuts then. As for the starving children in Armenia, she had gotten slapped as a kid for saying "then send it to them," so she didn't try that one on us! And we didn't have spinach myths because I liked spinach and was always disappointed because there wasn never more of it (mom having only opened one can...) An American vegan woman told me the other day that meat stays in your stomach for two weeks before it can get digested and that's why it's bad for you. I started to say "wait a minute...things seem to go through me within 24 hours or less, but I was halfway through the sentence and she repeated, this time very firmly (with motherly authority), "Meat Stays In Your Stomach For Two Weeks Before You Can Digest It."

Okay...so here I sit, late night in a crowded internet cafe, after two days of eating way too many white beans (cooked with olive oil, onion, tomato and celery root and greens). I swear I've produced enough gas during the last two days to cook another pot. I felt quite safe however in letting the latest in a round of half-cubic-meter blasts out silently, because fortunately it's been all volume and negligible odor. Until now. There must have been some fateful alchemy happening in the last hour or so. The only adjective that comes to mind is, "rich." Luckily it's so full that the source is hard to pinpoint. Two people have blamed their friends, and I now heard my first combination of obscenities featuring the word "carrion"...

I have several comfort foods... one is baked potatoes, topped with sliced mushrooms sauteed in garlic butter and topped with plenty of grated parmesan (or parmesano reggiano if you got it). Another is a squash soup I make with winter squash, steamed and pureed, then thinned down with fresh-squeezed orange juice, a bit of hot pepper, and a splash of coconut milk. I don't want to sound too obseqious but I would second Ling's recommendation of apple pie, especially her recipe which is in recipe.gullet! (But I don't do the freezing part, you can't afford to wait that long!) As for alcohol - well, I've seen a bit too much of the destructive side of alcohol to use it for comfort, but I have a quince liqueur that is damn good splashed over a cube of ice...

I'd second that...and also try lime curd, or lemon-lime curd... I also made one with grapefruit that was pretty nice.

Would these be sweet or sour cherries? I imagine both would be very good, but morellos would give it a very different character.

Much yogurt here is made with milk that is not homogenized, so you get the really good and quite solid cream layer on top. Also, if it says "full milk" it means full milk, not 4% as it is in the US. One brand here, Tikvesli, is definitely full cow's milk, or at least has a much higher percentage of cream, as it's quite yellow, more expensive, and very rich, so much so that I almost can't really eat it alone. But I use it when I make Indian food calling for yogurt and cream, and omit the cream. Also, I've read (but am not sure about it) that much yogurt here is made with milk that has been reduced to about 2/3 its original volume, resulting in a thicker end product. Perhaps that's what accounts for the different texture of the cream layer as well, as that on the "creamline" yogurt I got once or twice at Trader Joe's was just greasy. There are three different bacteria that I'm aware of that show up in yogurt, and perhaps different strains within them as well, so what you use as a starter does make a big difference. I remember using plain Yoplait back in the US as a starter, and getting (surprise) yogurt with exactly that same very smooth texture. I think I need to do more research on this; I never make my own yogurt these days with so many different ones to choose from, but one of these days when I'm home all day and my wood stove (with a "keep warm" oven compartment) is burning, I'll get several different small containers of yogurt and inoculate small amounts from a single batch of milk to see how different the results will be. Not all yogurt here is extremely thick. What I've had in villages that women made themselves is much more like what my mom would make at home. One very famous yogurt in Istanbul is that from the little town of Kanlica on the Bosphorus. It's also not particularly thick, but it still has a good solid layer of cream on the top. It's mostly just a name any more, like so many things here, but an old-timer on the ferry told me that in the old days (meaning up till about the 50s), there were pastures behind Kanlica where the cows grazed on wild herbs; some particular plant they ate gave the yogurt an ever so slight pink coloring, as well as a distinct fragrance. There haven't been any fields behind Kanlica for a long time now... But if you take the ferry up and down the Bosphorus, they storm the boat at Kanlica with small overpriced containers of yogurt and powdered sugar, and everyone dutifully buys theirs, raving on about how wonderful it is. Goat's milk yogurt I only tried once, and the texture was all wrong for me, slick and shiny. I've heard people here say you "can't make yogurt from goat's milk," but that often simply means "we don't do it." Sheep's milk on the other hand, makes wonderful yogurt. It's almost impossible to find commercially in Turkey for some strange reason (though very common in the villages), but in Greece you can get it at almost any market. It's one of the things I make sure I eat at least once when I'm there. The sheep's milk yogurt from the town of Dorkas in Greece is especially renowned. One day someone had brought a big container of yogurt from there and offered it to me and some friends. One of the women was on a diet and declined, but then saw the container, and said "E...afou einai Dorkados...!" (Well...since it's from Dorkas...!) and lit into it. One yogurt that is also locally available but hard to find for sale is that from "manda" or buffalo milk. It's very rich and thick, and pure white. Most buffalo milk gets used for making milk sweets like muhallebi (plain milk pudding), keskül (almond pudding) and sütlaç (rice pudding, but very different from the western version), as well as kaymak, or clotted cream. (Which, incidentally, has 30% less butterfat than butter, which means you can eat 30% more of it...) If I have anything other than pure yogurt, it's with things I add myself. A little good honey, or some sour cherry preserves once and a while. But when I lived in Thessaloniki in N. Greece back in 1976, I used to do something that made my friends go "bleah" when they found out about it: there is a local pastry called a "Rox," which is basically walnut cake (karydhopitta) baked inside a round shell of phyllo, and then soaked in syrup in the usual way. I'd put the Rox in a bowl, invert a container of sheep's milk yogurt and... These days, I don't think I could eat even half a Rox unless it was with lots of unsweetened coffee but then, that was breakfast more often than not....

Well... I really need a new digital camera with light adjustment. I made the chocolate pudding cake from Lora Brody's "Basic Baking." It's a slightly more refined version of the common one that gets published every so often, with real chocolate and (more) butter in the batter instead of cocoa and margarine. It was a *wonderful* batter to eat raw actually, as I discovered when I licked the spatula... But this photo makes it look like Tar Baby spit up on a brownie. Sorry. <img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-141S.jpg" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket">

Well... I really need a new digital camera with light adjustment. I made the chocolate pudding cake from Lora Brody's "Basic Baking." It's a slightly more refined version of the common one that gets published every so often, with real chocolate and (more) butter in the batter instead of cocoa and margarine. It was a *wonderful* batter to eat raw actually, as I discovered when I licked the spatula... But this photo makes it look like Tar Baby spit up on a brownie. Sorry. <img src="http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b60/sazji/MVC-141S.jpg" alt="Image hosting by Photobucket">

Thanks for all the ideas! Treacle and golden syrup are not available (actually, I'm not even quite sure what they are myself, though I've heard of them...). Today I found a slightly more expensive grape molasses that was much thicker than what I've normally encountered. I can't even get corn syrup easily here though I imagine it must be available to bakers or confectioners and will ask. I generally buy it from Greece. It's much, much thicker than the American type, almost gluey but it has worked fine in pecan pies. I'm going to try a few small batches of different combinations and I'll post what works best.

There are so many wonderful recipes that use molasses; unfortunately it is unavailable here, at least that made from sugar, and the molasses here made from grapes, white mulberries or carob is generally much too thin and have entirely different flavors. (That said, the white mulberry molasses is delicious..but not what I'm looking for.) Recently in Greece I found a bottle of what was labeled "molasses," but it turned out to be almost blackstrap. What I'm wondering is, would adding some of that to a thick sugar syrup give me a reasonable substitute, or is the basic makeup of blackstrap different?

I remember going to a folk music/dance festival in Chicago; generally they put up visitors in local folks' houses. My host asked "are you hungry?" It had been a long trip and I was starving, and as it was someone I knew, I could tell him so. So, about 2 hours later, dinner's ready. Boiled carrots and celery (only just boiled, the carrots were still hard), over plain pasta that was also still hard in the center, almost crunchy. No cheese (he's vegan), no oil. As he is eating, he says "wow, it came out great, the pasta's exactly al dente!"

And there's my own personal favorite: "If God didn't mean for man to eat animals, how come he made 'em outta meat?"

Hehe not just me...my non-cooking friend now wants a lesson in pie-making. Granny Smith we can get though they are a bit expensive. No fujis in Turkey (or if they are brought to some chi-chi grocery in an upscale part of town they would be unaffordable anyway...). I just used pure Granny Smith and it was wonderful. All hail Ling, Queen of Caloria!

So there will be no actual replies from others at all, this is what I'm understanding. Correct?

Um....Ling's Caramel Apple Pie, again. But this time it turned out better, because I had flour (how's that for a concept) and I actually had [the equivalent of] shortening. All we can buy here is a saltless/flavorless margarine called Hüner that is "especially for pastries" but it's stil 30% water and makes "dumb" piecrusts. So finally it dawned on me to make clarified margarine. It made a very good piecrust.

Ha, I was just thinking the other day about some family friends who called Parmesan cheese Parmesian (Par-meez-i-an) cheese, and wondering where I could use that... Well, where, other than in Parmesia, where I hear it's still pretty popular..

I can safely say that my mother (who is half Greek but spent at least half her life in Iowa) has never, ever made green bean casserole. Of if she did, she never put it in front of us! But when I was in 8th grade, my father came home one day and announced that we would all be Lutherans, and for some reason my mother didn't object and I couldn't. There were lots of church potlucks, and this thing always was there. I always thought of it as a potluck dish because it was easy to throw together; it never occurred to me (until much later) that people actually made this to eat at home. The sight of the milk pouring over that blob of condensed mushroom soup is good enough reason not to for me.

The pods on mine are shorter and wider. I grow the purple one as it's more ornamental.

Here we use the word "Bakliyat" to refer to pulses. Interesting, I never thought about the relationship to the word "bakkal" (grocer).

We are in the middle of our first big snow of the year here (and perhaps the last, it doesn't happen much). It's been going on for 3 days, and the city is hardly functioning. So let's see... made "Ling's Caramel Apple Pie" (see recipe gullet), lentil soup, pinto bean salad, a batch of blood orange marmelade with whole pecans thrown in for fun. The pie was definitely the most fun.... Oh, and baked potatoes in the oven of my wood/coal burning stove. They are wonderful when cooked at about 500 degrees... Still feels like I'm missing something.... Tomorrow I'm making squash/orange soup, and who knows, I might make that pie again...the crust didn't quite come out the way I wanted that first time! (Edited because my fingers are frozen and I found typos...)

My mother takes them home to try to root them... Ah, I'm guilty on both counts! I used to go to asian grocery stores and come how with the strangest things I could find, and if it were a fruit or vegetable, or sometimes an herb, all the better. And very, very often, I would try and grow the seeds, sometimes with success. I had a huge "tree tomato" plant for a while, grown from seeds of one that appeared in the grocery store. (I'm still an obsessive seed collector actually.. just sent a bunch of seeds of a local huge gray squash to some people around the world so they could grow it...I have a big pile of seeds from really delicious jujubes I bought last fall, I'll try to grow a tree once the weather warms up. And I think I've killed two birds with one stone by planting what is probably the only specime of "Ken's Red" hardy kiwi in my garden here in Istanbul. When I worked at the UW Forestry Dept., there were people on both sides of the fence - the Dean's secretary was a notorious foodie as well, and our financial person was an Indian woman who was also a very good cook, so the three of us would get talking and sharing each other's creations, while others would look on blankly. (I remember a coworker seeing me eating a blood orange, which he thought was just too weird, and when I offered him a section, he said, "Uhh...no thanks," as if I'd offered him his first taste of balut. I mean, it's an orange for chrissake. (BTW just made a batch of blood orange marmelade, I recommend it...) My friends here definitely do think I'm nuts when I take pictures of food, either in a restaurant (especially) or when I go into a pastry shop and ask them if it's okay. The friends usually stand outside and pretend they don't know me. But I've yet to find a shopkeeper who isn't proud that someone stopped in off the street and wanted to photograph his kadayif!

How about...separate an egg, carefully passing the yolk back and forth between two eggshell halves, trying not to break it, as the white goes down the sink... and then remember that it was the white that you were after...