Apron strings
Eat, you're too thin. Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic mother goddess.
"Who are you and what have you done with my mother?" she said.
I've been cooking a lot of great stuff from scratch lately. I just feel like it, okay. Got a problem with that?
Last night's dessert was this Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Instead of canned, I used a whole fresh pineapple cut in medium-thin chunks. The cake was rich and sweet and tangy and dense in a good way, and I highly recommend it.
Pineapples are in season through June and this is a really decadent (three sticks of butter) way to enjoy one of the world's healthiest foods.
For dinner last night, I made Grilled Chicken And Shrimp Kebabs With Lemon And Garlic and delegated their grilling to my husband, who left early this a.m. for Caracas. The lemony-ness was my favorite part.
I also made a Green Bean And Hazelnut Salad except that I forgot to buy hazelnuts so I substituted slivered almonds.
I liked it, except I would up the balsamic vinegar in the oil-vinegar ratio. Also, leave out the flax seed oil. I know it's good for you but frankly it tastes distinctive and disgusting. It's the vegetable version of cod liver oil. You wouldn't use that in a salad, would you?
On Friday night I made Pork Vindaloo using a recipe from a Cook's Illustrated "Soups & Stews" magazine which you will have to pay to view online: preview.
After trying a dozen-odd different spice blends, one thing became obvious: We needed sweet and sour flavors to help balance the heat and complex spices found in the classic dish. For chili flavor and heat, we combined sweet paprika and cayenne. To give the stew its traditional earthiness, we added cumin, cardamom, and cloves. Mustard seeds added pungency. Bay leaves and fresh cilantro added herbal flavors. Toasting the spices before adding them to the stew made them taste richer and fuller. We used chicken broth for the liquid, flavored with lots of onion, loads of minced garlic, diced tomatoes, red wine vinegar, and just a teaspoon of sugar.
If your mouth isn't watering, you are not human.
I learned from the scientific and erudite cooks at CI that vindaloo, with roots in the Goa region on India's western coast, is a blend of Indian and Portuguese ingredients and techniques. The word vindaloo comes from Portuguese vinho, for wine vinegar and alhos, garlic. Who knew?
The recipe calls for a 3 lb boneless Boston butt roast, or a picnic roast if you can't find that. The flavors are balanced between sweet, sour and spicy and the daughter with the more sensitive stomach had no problem with it. The cubed pork was fall-apart tender after two hours in the pot in the oven at low temp.
We ate it with white rice, which I am bored with. I wish I made naan instead.
To satisfy that flatbread urge, tonight I'm going to make focaccia and use some garden herbs, olives, onions and parmesan on top. For Mother's Day, it will be a matrilineal salute to my mother's mother's mother from Italy, Angelina. (Her mother's name was Olympia.)
In summer at the Jersey shore, Nana had garden tomatoes growing next to the house. She was very short, under five feet tall, and bosomy, and I remember her standing by a big pot of fragrant sauce she was reaching to stir on the stove, a gruff yet loving kitchen gnome.
Buon appetito.
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