Just Add Maple Syrup

Take this recipe and remove the cherries…and add whatever you feel like….smoked duck breast, feta, cream cheese, broccoli, sun dried tomatoes, spinach, ricotta, tofu…

It’s still cherry season. Inspired by Syrian food and having eaten devoured my way around the better part of the country last year it seemed the time to attempt a savory cherry sauce…

Despite most Parisian shops displaying evidence to the contrary it is possible to find them for less then 3 euro a kilo. Never having thought much about the potential of cherries, eating my way around Syria on holiday last year changed my mind.  The northern Syrian city of Aleppo boasts a specialty dish that has infiltrated every eating house in the country – lamb, either a kebab or perhaps meatballs, served with a hot, dark, thick cherry sauce that is delicious.

Spot the cherry sauce?

The countryside surrounding Aleppo is famous for a particular type of black cherry which is smaller and a little sour. They bloom in spring time and the fruit is plentiful. Hence the ubiquitous lamb with cherry sauce dish on every menu…
Sissi House, a relatively upmarket Aleppan restaurant in the old Christian quarter was my first taste of the cherry lamb experience. Al Khawali in Straight Street in Damascus was another. The more innovative and modern Naranj, and for me the best, (albeit upscale for Damascus) restaurant does a less traditional version of the Aleppan cherry kebab as well as an extensive menu of all kinds of Syrian traditional delights given just a touch of a modern makeover.  This restaurant has a retractable ceiling, a touch of Beruiti glamour and truly good food. Reservations essential and never dine before nine!

Saha – A chef’s journey through Lebanon and Syria - the cookbook previously discussed here - has a cherry sauce recipe. I made very much my own version of it the other night and impatiently devoured it cold with cheese the following day. Not exactly the most authentic of first attempts but a decent, versatile sauce nonetheless. Next time it will be duly served hot with spicy lamb. This is a great little compote to serve cold or hot.

Note: Another recipe can be found here on a great blog, recently discovered - Anissa’s – she has a great sophisticated and authentic cherry kebab and sauce recipe here.

Ingredients

1 kilo fresh cherries – pitted, not too ripe

250ml chicken or vegetable stock

1 teaspoon white pepper

1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon nut oil for frying

1 tablespoon butter

1 half teaspoon cinnamon

Optional – some Greek yogurt or crème fraiche for serving when serving hot

Making
Soak the pitted cherries for about an hour in enough water to cover them. Heat the nut oil with a little butter, add the diced garlic and fry until golden and soft. Add the cherries with their soaking water, the pomegranate molasses, and the white pepper. Simmer on a very low heat with about 250ml water or stock for about 45 minutes. Add half a teaspoon of cinnamon before bringing to the boil until most of the liquid burns off and you’re left with a thick dark sauce. It will be quite reduced. Take off the heat and either serve immediately hot with lamb cutlets or spicy lamb meatballs. Otherwise leave to cool and chill overnight to serve it with cheese.

What to do with a kilo of cherries?

A spicy cherry compote is one thing you could do (and I did)  but that’s for another day. As it is picnicking and cherry season, a little love for a traditional French grandmother cake is in order. Clafoutis is an old-school cake which comes from the Limousin region. It’s also very easy to put together.  I dare not play around with such things and so this recipe is straight (well, not exactly but…) from the latest edition of the ever trustworthy Cuisine et Vin magazine. The debate about whether or not to leave the pips in the cherries seemingly rages on in certain parts of France, probably where they haven’t much else to do. I left the pips in. Who has time to take them out unless it is truly called for?
Those in the know (and at the centre of the aforementioned debate) say leaving them in gives a better flavour. Who would I be to argue with this? However, you really need to watch your teeth. And that’s coming from a pip swallower…

Note: This recipe could be taken apart and its crepe-like batter used to make all kinds of sweet and/or savoury treats. Think broccoli, tomato, peach, smoked duck, ricotta, bacon, feta, roasted vegetables…

Also – did you know? When in the Auvergne region of France, the clafoutis is known as a Milliard and is often made with other kinds of fruit.

Ingredients

100gr sugar + 20gr for the pan

4 eggs

about 500gr dark coloured cherries (enough for a layer along the bottom of your pan)

Leave the nuts in. It’s tradition. Just warn your eaters first…

350ml (or 35 cl) milk

150 ml (or 15cl) pouring cream

75gr flour

(A little kirsch liquer is usually added too)

icing sugar for dusting afterwards

Making

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C, grease a baking tin. Don’t worry too much about the size or depth.

Beat the eggs into the sugar and add the flour little by little. Add the milk and cream and mix well.

Layer the cherries (leaving them whole if you wish) onto the tin and sprinkle the bottom of the pan with the leftover sugar. Pour the batter over the cherries gently hopefully leaving them in position. Bake for about 30-35 minutes until just golden on top. When done sprinkle with icing sugar and serve warm. Also good when chilled.

Paris. The tenth arrondissement – foodies beware….The rue Faubourg Saint Denis holds a few off-beat treasures.  From Julhes with their cheeses, exotic mustards, gourmet deli and never ending wine tastings to the coffee bean man just up the street  (Brulerie Lanni) and his giant roasting machine passing by the Passage Brady and the Kurdish sandwiches, you could spend hours here snacking and discovering.

On a recent wander hunting cardamom pods and other random pantry staples, I picked up some lemon grass powder in the Passage Brady.  A key ingredient of Thai, Malay, Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine this pale green grassy  powder has a long history and is potent, lemony, sweet and tart in your nose.

Here’s a basic flour-less chocolate cake with a playful side. Use agave instead of sugar for a more healthful cake and a different kind of sweetness.

The basil plant on the window-sill is inviting, demanding to be added to everything. I figure a solid chocolate cake can be played with, dark chocolate can always take a little flavouring. I recently had sesame chocolate and Darjeeling tea flavoured chocolate. Amazing. Especially the sesame. To be exploited in an upcoming dessert recipe – tea, dark chocolate and sesame…

Flourless chocolate cake with lemongrass and fresh basil

Ingredients

125 gr good quality dark chocolate
100 gr unsalted butter and some for greasing
half teaspoon salt
150 gr sugar – or 1 cup agave syrup
1 cup finely chopped fresh basil leaves
3 eggs50gr cocoa powder
1 generous  teaspoon of ground lemon grass powder (available in good spice stores or Asian good stores)

Making

Pre heat the oven to 180 c. Line and grease a cake tin. (about 8 inches – not too big or you’ll have a rather flat cake!)

Melt the chocolate and the butter over hot water stirring constantly until smooth. Add the salt and set aside.

Beat the diced basil into the sugar and add this to the chocolate mixture.  Add the eggs one at a time mixing constantly.  Then  fold in the cocoa powder slowly mixing until smooth. Stir in the teaspoon of lemon grass powder at the end.

Pour the batter into the tin and bake for about 20 minutes then turn out onto a rack to cool. Serve warm with a sprig of fresh basil.

In 1972, after coming to power via a coup the year before, Idi Amin decided to expel Asians  from Uganda and repossess their property.  Those lucky enough to have the right to get the necessary papers to go to England, after having come to Uganda under British imperial rule, ended up facing life as exotic strangers in a new country that perhaps did not live up to expectation. Already the fact that there was a sizable population of people of Indian heritage and origin living in Uganda hints at the potential complexities of the culinary history of the region.

We have entered the era of  the  foodoir – the  combination of memoirs and recipes, a term I only just spotted in the latest review of food books by The New York Times, is fast becoming a literary staple of sorts and there are any amount of them out there often the result of a successful blog or a wonderfully international childhood. They’re more often then not a good read as well as a source of quirky recipes and a little food history.

The Settler’s Cookbook was written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Born in Uganda in the fifties, the author refers many times in the book to her memories of the country as lush, green and “openly sensuous” bringing back to me my own memories of a brief visit to southern Uganda a few years ago for a weekend on a lake in a small eco-lodge where we were served “Irish potatoes” and roast chicken and the people were as open as the endless colourful flowers around us.  It reminds me too, why it is important to always be ready to go to the ends of the earth if only for the weekend. It’s always worth it, it feels like a lifetime and what you learn in that weekend will remain with you.

This book is much more then a foodoir; it’s a great snapshot of a woman’s life, her perceptions, her life as a Wahindi growing up in the sixties and seventies in Uganda, obliged to go and live in the UK in the seventies and the realities of being a young Asian in Thatcherite England. Interspersed with stories of her family, a candid account of her marriage, its breakdown and her career are her family recipes – often written in such a way as to make it clear as to what kind of mood one may be in when one would tackle a particular dish. the ingredients range from the curious to the exotic to the ordinary.  Each one seems to be the result of an incident be it international or familial and the anecdotes surrounding them are often inextricably linked to the food eaten at the time.

Many recipes reveal the influence of the British over their colonies and the resulting dishes that often led to a Victoria sponge enlivened with saffron and lime juice or the promise of a Cadbury’s chocolate bar after school. The insipid nature of British cooking fascinated many of those  who came into contact with it in Uganda and so these personalized recipes themselves reveal a lot about the imbalances of relationships between the nation that was still seen as imperial and superior, the Asian merchant class and the Ugandans themselves.

What I’m most curious about is getting my hands on a copy of St. Andrew’s Church Woman’s Guild. The Kenya Settlers’ Cookery Book and Household Guide (Nairobi, 1928). Mentioned in The Settler’s Cookbook as being of use during their home economics classes at school where the girls  learned how to cook British food that to them tasted like “milky newspaper”, there apparently was an intriguing back page of “useful Swahili phrases” such as how to say “You have stolen the sugar” and ” You are free every day from 2 to 4…” which is wonderfully revealing and I’m off now to search for more colonial cookbooks….

La Pièce Montée – our wedding cake, May 2009.

Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of a cheesecake…

A mix of local and French cheeses served not only as the traditional cake but also as a midnight feast for wedding guests whenever they took a a break from the dance floor not to mention snacks and supper for about three weeks after….

Following up on Sunday’s flat bread dough.…use it also to make a healthy pizza. Once you’ve made  your dough and are ready to roll, brush the edges of the rolled out dough with maple syrup or honey or agave syrup should you have some on hand.

Blanch some fresh broccoli in a little boiling water with some fresh coriander leaves and chopped garlic for a few minutes until cooked but crisp. Let it cool.

Sprinkle the dough liberally with chopped tomatoes, feta, the cooled broccoli and some zaatar and black pepper. Bake in a hot oven for about 15-20 minutes. Done.

Itching to make some kind of pizza, comforting bread or just a floury mess in the kitchen I decided to attack the flat bread recipe in one of my favourite armchair travel cookbooks. This book is a homage to the Lebanese cooking that is integral to the heritage of Greg Malouf, one of the authors. Well over three hundred pages of mezze, meats and sweets. Recipes but much more. A simply written account of a journey back home but also an exploration of Lebanese culture and cuisine as well as those of Syria. There is a real sense of a humbling personal experience and genuine love of the food of the region whether it’s because it evokes childhood dishes served up by aunts or grandmothers at home in Australia or his palpable awe at the prospect of visiting the homeland. But more then that, the recipes are authentic, easy to follow yet challenging, a joy to cook, aromatic, comforting and elegant and a reminder of all the other ingredients out there and ways of making food there are. I judge cookbooks often more by how entertaining they are to read then how useful they are in the kitchen. These recipes are given in a cultural context, with detailed descriptions of each region, different local producers and methods so the reader can take the time to understand where a dish came from, the regional influences and nuances that led to the appearance of a certain recipe on a given page and if nothing else it will transport you to a sunny street in Damascus or a busy Beirut street cafe in a matter of pages.

- Manoushi bread dough – recipe taken from Saha – A chef’s journey through Lebanon and Syria by Greg and Lucy Malouf, published in 2005.

This kind of cooking is the real slow food movement, short cuts not recommended. We’re often talking ingredients not found lying around the kitchen and methods that require a bit of elbow grease. But no matter. Part of the fun is seeking out those ingredients and seeing if you can knead and slice and smell your way into producing something like Aleppo style lamb with a cherry sauce or roasted quail in flat bread with a pistachio sauce. Even just a good home made hummus or moutabel.

I enjoy making bread, kneading far more then is necessary but enjoying the therapeutic process required to make that smooth soft seamless ball of dough from the chaos and mess that is flour, water and yeast.

This bread is essentially a basic pizza dough and is a basic snack food of Lebanon and Syria served either simply with a scattering of sumac ansd  zaatar or used as the base for a hearty sandwich. Sumac is a rusty reddish coloured berry that is dried and ground to make a spicy flavouring for soups, sauces or meat. It is also an ingredient of zaatar which is another condiment made with a mixture of thyme, salt and toasted  sesame seeds, a salty topping for the traditional Lebanese galettes or Manouch’e….use it instead of salt to brighten things up.

When the dough is ready divide it up into about twelve small pieces. Or as many as you’ll need. The dough you don’t use you can freeze or refrigerate.

Here is their recipe, keep the dough in the fridge overnight if you’re not ready to use it. Cover it well in plastic when putting in the fridge so it doesn’t absorb any strange flavours or yeasts. Once ready to use, tear off pieces of dough to make mini pizzas in a matter of minutes if you so feel like it…or maybe make one big ‘pizza’….as you wish.

Ingredients
355 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon dried yeast
a half teaspoon salt
a quarter teaspoon of sugar
6 or 7 fluid oz. of warm water
1 tablespoon of olive oil

Making
Mix the flour, yeast and salt. Add the olive oil. Dilute the sugar in the water. Add the water slowly and pull the mixture together until it forms a sticky dough. Don’t worry if it’s a mess and stringy and difficult. Just tip it out onto a floured board and start kneading. Push and fold adding flour or a little water depending on how sticky the dough is.
When you have a smooth tacky but not sticky ball of dough, smooth a little oil around it, cover it and put it in a warm place to rise for a couple of hours.
Then, when ready to use, have your oven pre-heated and roll out and press a small piece of dough with the idea of making a mini pizza, throw it around until it’s thin and stretchy but not too thin.
Spread it with a little olive oil, salt, sumac and zaatar or whatever you wish and bake for about 8 minutes preferably using a pizza stone.

What to do with a small bottle of sirop de poivre de Penja?

Good for glazing pineapple, chocolate cake or meat, this sugary syrup is made from filtered white Penja peppercorns. Penja peppercorns get their flavour  from the volcanic soils in which they are cultivated, in Penja,  Cameroon. These fragrant special white peppercorns are in a category of their own and are fast becoming a hot culinary property around the world.

Something told me a rich gooey chocolate cake could take some seasoning. These mini mi-cuits take minutes and could easily take on a dash of cinnamon, chili powder or other flavours

Melty, chocolatey, chewy, easy to make, mi-cuit mini cakes

I found this recipe at Epicurious – I felt a layer of the sweet and savoury sticky penja syrup would be perfect for these easy melty fudgey cakes that are perfect for any cook who “doesn’t do dessert”. Top them with goji berries to make you feel more virtuous…

Ingredients

4 ounces dark semisweet baking chocolate
4 tablespoons butter
1 large egg
1/3 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon flour

Making

Preheat the oven to 180°C

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a small saucepan.

Whisk the egg, sugar, and salt together until yellow and light. Fold in the melted chocolate batter. Mix in the flour until fully incorporated.

Lightly butter the cupcake tins. Pour the batter into the tins and bake for about about 12 minutes, just until the tops crack.

Remove the cakes from the oven. Using oven mitts, place aluminum foil on the top of the cupcake tins and seal on all sides. Turn over onto a flat surface and bang the bottom of the cupcake tins. Remove the cupcake tins to leave the cakes upside down on the aluminum foil. Carefully turn right side up and place on the plate.

Spoon some of the penja syrup over the top of each one and serve immediately with vanilla ice cream should you feel the urge. Here goji berries make a nice topping not to mention a great super food boost to an otherwise sinful dessert!

Mustard seeds and white pepper. Root vegetables, topinambour, parsnip, potato, pumpkin, carrot, white radish…..

For future reference and restaurant translations – topinambour is a Jerusalem artichoke. Who knew?

But here it’s the white pepper that deserves a little attention. Not much used it would seem perhaps because it is thought it is just the bland cousin of the black peppercorn. Not so. Check it out. White pepper is pungent to the point that it reminds some of cow manure. Sorry. But think about it. Nostalgia pushes me to keep it in the pantry. My paternal grandmother kept it on the kitchen table for every meal time it seemed. The white powder made me sneeze and reinforced my already strong addiction to mashed turnip and green cabbage, the staples she presented us with most times dusted with white pepper and mashed with butter.

They’re only vegetables, they’re banal, they’re rooty, they’re brute and earthy and don’t cost very much but behind their seemingly ordinary demeanor lies bowls of warming chunks spiked with just a few simple flavours some of which will have been lying around your kitchen forgotten.

Slowly braised vegetables in brown mustard seeds and white pepper

Ingredients

1 teaspoon brown mustard seeds
1 teaspoon white pepper, turmeric
1 stock cube preferably msg free and low in salt


Choose your vegetables - use  sweet potato, plain potato, pumpkin, cabbage, white radish, kale,red cabbage, onions, whatever you have. Chop into rough chunks. If using potato finely slice them so they can cook easily. You’ll need a wide deep pan if you have a lot of veg.
Making

First allow a little oil or butter to heat. I use nut oil with a little butter. Toast 1 teaspoon of brown mustard seeds and add a good half teaspoon of white pepper – seasoning your pan. Slowly add the vegetables in no particular order.  Keep the heat high for a couple of minutes and toss everything around letting them coat in the oily spices. Add a teaspoon of  turmeric to the mix.

If you have one on hand dissolve a stock cube in a little hot water – preferably one free of MSG and too much salt. Add this to the pan.
Let the veg absorb a little of the stock then add 2 cups of cold water. Bring to the boil then lower the heat and let simmer until much of the water has been absorbed. No need to boil the vegetables to death, keep a little bite, don’t let anything get mushy.

The result is a chunky veggie dish great as a side or alone and the white pepper really stands out…