Tag Archives: viking.English food

Cures for the Common February: Two New Recipes

18 Feb

As I was going through my artwork from the past six years to assemble my new portfolio, it became apparent that I create a disproportionate amount of art during the month of February. Last year, I had an art school application due in February, so naturally I finished up more drawings and designs that month than I usually would, but I think the main reason I draw so much in February year after year is to distract myself from how much I dislike the weather that month. It is a terrible, emo month, maybe even worse than November.

November sucks (and pardon my northern hemisphere/temperate climate-centrism here) because that’s when winter really hits. You can feel winter coming in October, but there are still leaves on the trees, the days are reasonably long, and it isn’t too cold just yet. But when November rolls around, it’s full-on winter: all grey skies, lifeless landscapes, and unpleasant wetness. But it is a month of adjustment; by December, I’m used to it. By February, however, I’m sick of it; it is the nadir of the year. February isn’t the darkest month of the year, and in most of the places I’ve lived, it isn’t the coldest and it isn’t the wettest, but it sure does feel like it (surprisingly, in London February is actually the least wet month on average). Even sunny Los Angeles is not immune to the climatological ills of February:

february
(Color altered for effect.)

So what to do to cope with February, Old Man Winter’s loathsome last hurrah? I offer three solutions:

  1. Draw anthropomorphic squirrels ad nauseam. Works for me!
  2. Celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. If you’re single, just take it as an excuse to drink Scotch and eat chocolate.
  3. Try your hand at baking. I don’t bake very often, but now that I’m unemployed and have easy access to a convection oven, I have no excuse not to. Baking is meditative, time-consuming, and fun, and it fills the kitchen with delightful smells and warm air. And did I mention that when you’ve finished, you get baked goods?

Here are a couple of easy recipes I made last week for a party. And I say they’re easy because even I, a complete novice to baking, made them without any trouble. The main inspiration behind them both was the always delightful Borough Market.

cookies

Red Currant, Pine Nut, and Cardamom Oatmeal Cookies

In the United States, currants are eaten rarely and almost exclusively dried. I don’t know why – it’s not like we can’t grow them there. In England, and I think in much of central Europe, both black and red currants are a favorite flavor in baked goods, candies, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages as well as savory dishes. The red ones are perky and sharp, with a cranberry-like sourness, while the black ones have a richer, plummy, pruney taste. This recipe would work well with both; red is what I found, so red is what I used.

I liked the way the fresh berries popped open in the oven; when they came out, the heat had turned them into little patches of sweet red goo. They still hung on to their tartness, which complemented the buttery pine nuts and spicy, aromatic cardamom nicely.

If you can’t get fresh currants, you can use chopped cranberries or cherries, or you can try it with dried currants. This is based on a recipe from Bon Apétit.

2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2/3 cup fresh currants
1/3 cup pine nuts, toasted
1 2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups (packed) dark brown sugar
2 cups oats

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
  2. Whisk eggs and vanilla in small bowl to blend. Stir in currants.
  3. Sift flour, baking soda, salt, and spices into medium bowl.
  4. Using an electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until fluffy. Add sugar and beat until smooth.
  5. Add currant and egg mixture and whisk to blend.
  6. Stir in flour mixture, then oats.
  7. Butter and flour baking sheets. Drop batter by spoonfuls onto sheets, spacing 1 1/2 inches apart. Using moistened fingertips, flatten cookies slightly.
  8. Bake one sheet at a time until cookies are golden brown, about 13 minutes. Cool on sheets.

Chestnut and Ginger Brownies with Kinako Frosting

Cravings for Japanese junk food, rediscovering one of my favorite blogs, and my inability to leave recipes alone led to this recipe. Laura has a Marie Claire cookbook with a good brownie recipe in it, but I knew I wanted to tweak it somehow – originally I was thinking mochi brownies with black beans and kinako frosting, but I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, and besides, we were out of mochi.

Enter Borough Market, where I happened to stumble upon a pack of prepared chestnuts. Later I spotted a bit of ginger chocolate at Sainsbury’s, and I had my new recipe (I’m rewriting it here with simply ginger and chocolate). The kinako frosting recipe is from Delicious Coma, which has always been my favorite Japanese food blog, and it’s becoming one of my favorite Los Angeles food blogs since the author moved there last year. The frosting is amazing, by the way.

150 grams butter
250 grams dark chocolate
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 tablespoon baking soda
1 cup prepared chestnuts or marrons glaces, chopped
1 tablespoon grated ginger
2 generous tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted

  1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
  2. Melt 150 grams of chocolate and butter together in a double boiler or in the microwave. Stir until smooth.
  3. Beat eggs and sugar together until mixture is pale and thick.
  4. Fold in chocolate mixture, followed by sifted flour and baking soda, ginger, chestnuts, and remaining chocolate, chopped.
  5. Butter an 8″x8″ square baking pan and pour in batter. Bake for 30 minutes or until brownies are set.
  6. Allow brownies to cool for at least 30 minutes, then spread evenly with kinako frosting and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Cut into squares and serve.

I don’t have a photo of the brownies, but please enjoy this picture of what I made for lunch on Valentine’s day instead:

valentines

Mmmmmmm.

It Rhymes with Adventure (Sort of) アドベンチャーと韻を踏む（みたい）

12 Oct

Before I came to England, I wrote that I hoped to see more than just London; I wanted to see the British countryside, I wanted to see outlying cities and sample their meibutsu. I am pleased to announce that in just three weeks, I have been to seven British counties outside London and passed through several more.

A week after I got here, I went with Laura to visit some of her friends in Exeter, which I believe is affectionately named after a small town in Wisconsin. Exeter is in the county of Devonshire, a name I knew from listening to Laura rave about the clotted cream produced there. To my American ears, the term “clotted cream” sounded disgusting when I first heard it, as my mind conjured images of curdled milk and clogged arteries.

The clogged arteries actually may not be that inappropriate an association, as clotted cream is very rich. But the flavor is divine: it tastes pretty much just like heavy cream, with a supple, almost custardy consistency. It is so good on scones with jam; accompanied by a pot of tea, it becomes the classic “cream tea,” a most decadent mid-afternoon snack that made me feel vaguely guilty in a Victorian sort of way.

We walked off the cream tea – or at least some of it – with a stroll along a pretty, bramble-flanked river in the town of Totnes. The British countryside, by the way, is beautiful. I didn’t get any good pictures of it because I saw it mostly through train and car windows, but trust me, it’s gorgeous. In Devonshire hills roll over and tuck under one another, covered with a patchwork of farmland hemmed in by rows of stately shrubs. The landscape is dotted with sheep and spotted with cows and in the sunset, the whole country glows with warm greens and reds.

A word about the cows: I have never seen so many cows. I suppose in Wisconsin, many of the dairy and beef farms are simply too off the beaten track for me to have ever seen the bulk of them (though I did see a bison farm once on the way up to Minneapolis – very cool). Still, it made me think, with Jamie Oliver and Michael Pollan in the back of my mind, that maybe in Britain industrial farming is far more widely frowned upon and practiced far less. By the way, Devon is renowned for dairy in general, and if you ever encounter any Devon Cheddar or Stilton I encourage you to purchase as much of it as you can carry.

For dinner, we went to a pub. I love pubs. I will write more about them later, but for the moment I’ll just say that their real ales, their classic food, and their old-timey architecture and decor are all quite beguiling to me. This particular pub, in the middle of nowhere as far as I could tell, had a homey, familial feel and some very winsome local ales. The strong, dark one was especially nice, particularly as a pair to my hearty, delicious steak and ale pie; the malty, caramelized beer fit the crunchy, crackery crust, the tender hunks of beef, and the light bitterness of the ale-based gravy like a key in a lock.

The next morning we awoke to a delicious breakfast of sausage and bacon sandwiches, and then we spent the bulk of our sunny day canoeing down a canal. Upon return I was introduced to British pizza. Some of it was a bit weird – I’m still not totally sold on crispy duck pizza – but it wasn’t quite Japanese-weird, and it was actually pretty damn good.

I had eaten well, but so far I still hadn’t tried one of the region’s most celebrated specialties: pasties. The pasty (which unfortunately rhymes with nasty, not tasty) is a simple thing, but an ingenious thing: meat and a bit of veg stuffed into a stodgy, bready shell and baked until hard, brown, and piping hot. I think pasties fulfill some very primal gustatory urge, which is why there are so many analogous foods all over the world. In England there seems to be some debate as to whether they originated in Devon or in bordering Cornwall, and in fact there is a CAMRA-like organization that certifies and registers pasties as authentically Cornish. The pasties I had were certified, and pretty good, but I must say they struck me as very bland. Even so, as I write this with a mild hangover from a night out in London, I think a pasty would really hit the spot right now. I imagine they would be especially lovely on cold, drizzly days, as well.

The trip to Devonshire was a glorious success, and I have to thank Anna, Andy, and Alex for having us. While I am a city boy at heart, it was delightful to spend a long weekend taking in the country air and the country cuisine.

First Impressions of British Food Culture 英国の食文化の第一印象

6 Oct

I have been in England for a few days now, and I love it so far. I have had some lovely food here, including a glorious selection of cheese with Marmite, a hearty lamb roast washed down with Adnam’s real ale, and some delicious home-cooked meals by Laura’s mum. I am quickly developing an infatuation with the parsnip, a potato-carrot hybrid root vegetable I’d only heard of in fairy tales.

While I have been eating quite well, the exploratory, exuberant, grossly unethical bon vivant lifestyle I enjoyed in Japan and the United States has briefly been put on hiatus, mostly due to the lack of income (and, surprisingly, the lack of time) that tends to ensue from unemployment. However, I caught a string of British cooking shows the other night that let me vicariously indulge in British food culture for a few hours. I must say I was thrilled. There seemed to be four main themes that dominated them: simplicity, rusticity, locality, and celebrity. It may be a silly comparison, but I couldn’t help but think of these themes as quite in line with trends and ideals that inform Japanese food culture.

The first show I watched was Jamie at Home, starring the UK’s favorite culinary cutie pie, Jamie Oliver. American foodies know Jamie as the sleepy-eyed, lazily charismatic host of The Naked Chef, a misleadingly titled, fairly short-lived, and very good show that aired on the Food Network some years ago. While Jamie’s slacker-savant image and vernacular recipes failed to find a loyal audience in the States, he has apparently become one of the most popular and influential celebrity chefs in the UK. Always a champion for simplicity and freshness, Jamie has become a patron saint of Slow Food, and he has recently led successful or semi-successful movements (televised, of course) against unhealthy school lunches and the factory farming of chickens. Jamie at Home is his latest TV manifesto, in which he cooks uncomplicated but damn tasty food with ingredients he grows in his own backyard garden. No, not garden; mini-farm is more like it. To accompany the show, Jamie’s got a book of the same name; it goes a bit beyond your average, garden-variety cookbook by providing actual gardening tips.

I think Jamie’s convictions, which are quite strong, are easy to swallow because they come bundled in disarming charm and sincerity. However, he’s gone a bit Gordon Ramsay with his latest series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, which features a more angry and profane Jamie on a Pay It Forward-style crusade against ludicrously unhealthy eating habits. Ministry of Food has a lot of faults – major faults, in my opinion – but nevertheless, it is an honest effort to encourage Britain to eat more healthy and natural food, just like all of Jamie’s shows.

Speaking of Gordon Ramsay, he is clearly England’s biggest culinary rock star. With an inspiring backstory, obvious talent, and a certain celebrity panache that falls somewhere between Emeril Lagasse and Russell Crowe, it’s no wonder Gordon’s fissured countenance is all over TV, not to mention billboards, book jackets, tabloids, and fine china. Americans know him as a heavily-bleeped, hot-headed slavedriver – the head chef of Hell’s Kitchen – but in England this is only part of his persona. He can also be a sympathetic, wise guardian angel figure or an affable man-about-town, hawking gin and schmoozing with the likes of Cat Deeley and Ricky Gervais. Oh, and he can be an exemplar of Slow Food, too: in one very special episode of The F Word, Gordon assisted with the slaughter of a pair of sheep he himself had raised. (“Shepherd’s pie is the last thing on my fucking mind right now,” remarked a disturbed Gordon as he looked on.) While Gordon doesn’t usually make his ethics as overt as Jamie does, I thought the sheep slaughter was a cool bit of consciousness-raising in the middle of an otherwise fairly vapid hour of entertainment – something I wish American celebrity chefs would do more often.

While Ramsay’s ordeal with the sheep was perhaps far more primal an experience than both he and his viewers are accustomed to, it may have been somewhat less disquieting to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Hugh’s latest show, River Cottage Road Trip, followed the chef across southern Scotland as he hunted and gathered meals for himself as well as thirty dinner guests. I had never heard of Hugh before, but I found his show really unique and exciting. In the course of the half-hour episode, Hugh hunted, gutted, and roasted a teal over an open campfire; then he plucked damsons off trees and made them into cheesecake and liquor; then he made and enjoyed a meal of haggis and oatcakes; and finally, he caught a bunch of trout (well, he tried to, anyway) and cooked them up over an open flame for thirty hungry diners at a festival.

It was a very cool show, one that celebrated regional eccentricity, seasonal ingredients, and unbridled Britishness. Two of the three main ingredients on the show were things I’ve never heard of (teal and damsons), and you’d probably be hard-pressed to find many people outside the UK who have heard of them. The show is somewhat vain and self-indulgent in the same way Michael Pollan’s “hunting and gathering” excursions in The Omnivore’s Dilemma are, but nonetheless, I was inspired by Hugh’s exuberance as he venerated the land, the food, and the people of Great Britain.

I understand that in the past decade or so, the UK has undergone a sort of quiet culinary revolution; the old jibe that English food is terrible is quickly passing from cliche to lie. Since I started writing this, two weeks have swiftly passed, and in that time I’ve been able to try a lot more British food and get a slightly better grasp on the culture behind it. So far, it seems that Jamie’s simplicity, Gordon’s celebrity, and Hugh’s zeal for local vagaries are all things that British cooks and diners seem to hold in esteem; homey, made-in-England foods like fish and chips and bangers and mash remain national favorites even in the age of curry, while brand-name products and famous local specialties like Cornish pasties seem to be almost as highly fetishized as they are in Japan (or maybe that’s just me).

It’s only been two weeks, but I can tell I’m going to enjoy eating my way through the British isles in the months and years to come.

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