And, plop, there goes my identity...

This evening, after coming home from work I:

1 - Baked some oatmeal-whole wheat bread.

2 - Made chicken in peanut sauce from the Oprah Magazine Cookbook.

3 - And in the meantime, rendered my own chicken fat from the skins left over from #2.

Yup, I've officially become a wife. Judging by these foods, I can't quite tell if I'm a Middle America wife or a Crunchy Granola wife or a East European Jewish wife. Or some weird, chewy and fatty and fibrous combination of the three. But there it is. It's done. There's no hope for me now.

Does it help at all that I was listening to podcasts of Paul Fry discussing New Historicism and hermeneutics (from iTunes U) while doing all of this? I think I'll go enter a hermeneutic circle with the crispy chicken skin bits and ponder...

Saving the Soup; or, Creamy Bean Curry

A little while ago, possessed of a small package of mixed beans and desiring to improve their place in the world, I made the Tuscan Multi-Bean soup from The Daily Soup Cookbook, by Leslie Kaul and Bob Spiegel. It's a vegetarian soup, so it doesn't have the hearty flavour of meat stock. It does have celery, garlic, onion, rosemary, bay leaves, tomatoes, and a variety of beans, however, so I expected a bowl of beany bliss at the end of all the work. Alas, this was not the case. Maybe my tastebuds have been spoiled by the rich flavours of Indian and Middle Eastern food, but these beans were just banal.

Unfortunately, the recipe resulted in enormous amounts of the bland brew. I decided to freeze most of it, figuring it could be saved with some spicing some time in the future. This is a little like the attempts to freeze the bodies of incurably ill people in the hope that one day, in the future, there will be a medicine for what ails them. I had faith enough in progress to believe I would, one day, find a solution for these beans. Well, in progress, and in my masala dabba:

When their turn finally came, I turned to another book for inspiration, the tantalizing but somewhat overwhelming 660 Curries, by Raghavan Iyer. I knew I wanted to use yoghurt to make the beans into a creamy curry, and sure enough, Iyer has a recipe for Kidney Beans with a Cardamom-Yogurt Sauce. This I used as a starting point for technique. I also introduced garlic and ginger into the recipe, and used slightly different spices. And, of course, the beans themselves had already been cooked into a soup with the "Tuscan" spices and with tomatoes, so this curry wasn't going to look anything like Iyer's version.

First, I heated two tablespoons of ghee, and sauteed a finely chopped onion for a few minutes, along with 6-7 cardamom pods. I then added chopped ginger (about an inch), and chopped garlic (3-4 cloves -- I love garlic!). I added two teaspoons of turmeric, sauteed for a while, and then dropped in two cups or so of tart, Greek-style yoghurt. The next step was to cook the yoghurt for ten minutes or so to reduce it down to its curds. This was the most fascinating technique I learned from Iyer's recipe; I know to put yoghurt at the end of a curry and to keep it from curdling, but it had never occurred to me that you could boil down yoghurt into a tart sauce at the start of a curry.

After the yoghurt had cooked down for a while, I folded in several cups of bean soup. I spiced it with two small teaspoons of sea salt, two teaspoons garam masala, and a pinch of cayenne.

After cooking it for fifteen minutes more, I had a rich and intensely spiced bean curry, a dish worlds away from the blandness of Tuscan bean soup. It was perfect with some Dallas-bought injera.

The result may not look too different, but I assure you, this dish is worlds away from the original. This was the rebirth of the bean.

Medieval Romanian Cookery in translation: "Add in a foot of veal for inquiring"

One of the neat things about having a counter is that I can see how people reach this website. One reader, for example, searched for "medieval romanian cookbook" and, because I mentioned Nicholas Orme's Medieval Schools in a previous post, was offered this blog as a first-page result on Google.

This made me, of course, do the same search, which led me to a couple of websites, both associated with Society for Creative Anachronism activities. One offers some page scans from a 1997 edition of a seventeenth-century cookbook. (And yes, the seventeenth-century was still the Middle Ages in Romania. Long story.) The modern edition, by Ioana Constantinescu and Matei Cazacu, is titled, "O lume într-o carte de bucate: manuscris din epoca brâncovenească." For those of you who read Romanian, David D. Friedman offers a section on fish preparations here.

Cookbooks galore

When they said Dallas was great for shopping, I scoffed. I scorned. I'm not that kind of person, I thought, I'm, you know, deeper than that.

Of course, back then I didn't realise how great the shopping was, nor how much more fun it is to shop when you're driving around in a car. Nor did I quite understand that some of the shopping would involve.... books. I refer mainly to the spider's web that awaits me on the way home: Half Price Books. It has used books. It has remaindered books, often very good ones. (I just bought Nicholas Orme's Medieval Schools brand new for $20, for example.) It has a quirky little foreign language section, where I bought an Icelandic collection of medieval Chinese tales. And it has cookbooks. As if its low prices weren't enough, there is also a discount section where books cost either a buck or three. Moreover, being an educator will get you a discount card, and showing your public transit pass will get you an even bigger discount.

This is how I got each of these books for 85 cents plus tax:

I used to read my parents' copy of The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece, and Romewhen I was a teenager.

Here's to you, Sanda Marin

"Sanda Marin" was, as I was growing up, the ultimate reference work. By the time I was a teenager, our family's copy of this Romanian cookbook had traveled, with us, through three continents, and had reached an advanced stage of dilapidation. Since the answer to any cooking dilemma was, "look in Sanda Marin," I'm not surprised that the poor thing no longer has any covers.

A month or so ago, realising that I could make a greater number of Indian dishes than Romanian, I decided to try my hand at creating some of the dishes I love. I was never a fan of the heavy, fatty, go-out-into-the-field-and-work Romanian foods, but there are a few basic dishes that I could eat every day for the rest of my life. Like salata de vinete (roasted eggplant salad). And clatite (crepes). And salata de ardei copti (roasted red pepper salad). And papanasi (cheese donuts). And snitel (schnitzel).

Unfortunately, I wasn't at home, and although a growing number of Romanian recipes is available on the internet, I had no idea which ones to trust. Until I found that someone, bless their soul, had digitized Sanda Marin.

Gleefully, I downloaded the pdf (no frayed covers!). Imagine my surprise when faced with the vagaries of Romanian cookbooks... you get the right weights and measures for recipes, but are then told to "spice to taste." No clue on what the spices should be. Just spice it with what you like. The recipes are, in general, meant for people who already know the dishes, know how they want them to taste, and let's be honest here, probably know how to cook them already -- they just need a reminder. Sanda Marin reminds.

Well, I don't know how to cook all of these things, and for some of them, I don't even know how I want them to taste. But I do have a mother and two grandmothers who are reachable by telephone. So here goes.