Saffron Rice

When a stringy orange spice only comes in tiny baggies stored behind the register counter (except for customers who order an ounce at a time for sixty dollars), I naturally want to put it in everything I cook, or perhaps, like Cleopatra, bathe in it. Saffron is, after all, approximately as expensive as a certain other celebrated herb and probably claims the highest value density of anything I own. But why shouldn't it? It’s got to be magic: as the stamen of a certain crocus flower, it’s nothing but concentrated virility, the pigment for both prostitutes and monks.

So here is a recipe from W. Crawford’s cookbook, adapted by the fallibility of my memory:

Heat 1/2 c. milk gently. When hot, remove from the heat and add a pinch of saffron (rub it between your fingers to help it dissolve). You should pinch your saffron as tightly as you have to pinch your pennies, but keep in mind that largesse is sweet and stinge is singe; there’s no sense in ruining a fine thing by diluting it. Swish the saffron threads around so they get all coated and diffuse their pigments and sweet tang.

Heat a skillet with 1/4 c. ghee (or butter or other fat) and add 4 cinnamon sticks, a pinch of whole cloves, some cardamom, and a few peppercorns. Remove from the heat when the spices are fragrant. The recipe tells you to throw 2 c. rice, 2.5 c. water, 1 tsp. salt, and the saffron milk in a rice cooker and turn it on. You can also cook it the normal way (bring the water to a boil, add everything else, reduce heat, and simmer till done). Extra liquid is no problem, as saffron rice is pleasant when a little on the creamy side.

Sweet Potato Cakes

Last night I roasted three sweet potatoes in the toaster oven, the actual oven being nonfunctional. We didn’t get around to eating them (being happily distracted by things that took less time to get to the table; namely, thyme-y fried eggplant, spaghetti with eggs beaten in to make it creamy, and sausage ‘n’ onions). So this morning I peeled a large sweet potato, mashed it, beat in 4 eggs, 1/4 c. brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp salt, and 1/2 c. flour. I dolloped the batter into a medium-hot well-oiled skillet and fried the little cakes till dark-golden on each side. Tender, light, nutritious, lactose-free, and infinitely simple. Next time: raisins in the batter.

Less related to this morning’s pleasant activities, I’m frankly fed up to here with this whole sweet potato/yam nomenclature controversy. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not the only one: I had been operating under the assumption that the terms were synonymous in common North American usage, referring to a delectable orange tuber, though the “true yam” was a starchy staple food of western Africa. Then I had to make signs at work to discriminate between the white sweet potatoes and the orange ones -- and what do you know but the LESS sweet of the two should be granted the name “sweet potato”, while the vitamin-packed, dense, moist, and truly sweet sister should be called a “yam”?

The solution to this entire controversy, of course, is to eliminate cultivation of the white starchy thing, whatever it is, and eat the much more delicious orange sweet potato, which is tasty enough to take on many names.

Meyer Lemon Cheesecake

I was reaching deep into a pot of coarse, moist sea salt when I met my first Meyer lemon.  It was my job on a slow night to scrape out Meyer lemon interiors and finely mince the brined zest for a Meyer lemon sea-salt that got sprinkled on grilled asparagus.  The squeaky squealy slimy rinds were a pain to work with, and my knife skills were not so well-developed as they might have been -- rind-mincing, like mopping the floor, wasn't my favorite task (that, perhaps, was roasting eggplants. Or making horseradish creme fraiche.  Or wrapping the cheeses each night).  

Yesterday I found myself with several pounds of lovely Meyer lemons on my hands.  An old hybrid of mandarins and regular lemons, Meyers are incomparably sweet, creamy-shiny things redolent with meringue and custard possibilities.  What with the December chill, I've been hankering for some more fat on my bones -- and so it had to be cheesecake.  Yesterday I dumped two quarts of rich yogurt into a cheesecloth-lined colander set over a large bowl to start making fresh cheese for the cake, and whey for sipping.

To make the crust, brown 1/2 c. butter (slowly), while in another bowl you whisk together 1 c. almond meal, 3/4 c. white flour, 1 tsp. salt, and 1/3 c. sugar.  Drizzle in the browned butter, fluff well, and pat the crumbs into the bottom and partway up the sides of a springform pan. Bake at 350 degrees fahreinheit for 15 minutes, or until lightly browned.

Beat the well-drained cream cheese* til yet creamier, then gradually beat in 1 1/3 c. sugar, 4 eggs, one at a time, 1/3 c. cream, 1/2 c. sour cream, the lemon juice and zest, a small splash of vanilla, and 1 tsp salt.  

Bake at 350 till the edges have risen and just barely cracked but the center still jiggles.  Turn off the oven and leave there a bit longer, then chill for quite a few hours before you serve it.  It is one of the many merits of cheesecake that it improves with age.

*2 lbs of room-temperature commercial cream cheese will work as well.  Reduce the amount of sour cream and cream to something like 1/4 c. of each and the salt to 1/2 tsp.

Dutch Babies Blog

Paprika has rules.  Like, "Contain yourself, lass," and "Take that butter right back where you got it from," and "If I see one more layer of eggy-crispiness it's the time-out corner for you, young lady!"

I'm a good girl; I'm taking my Dutch Babies outside.  

To The Dutch Babies Blog!  (Because "god their delicious").

Papa's "Stewp"

My father has spent upwards of three decades working as a carpenter, and naturally abhors things like sixteenths of an inch and tablespoons (for which, he tells me, we can all blame Reagan). Here is his philosophy for ‘STEWP', where he sidesteps the politics of measurement by resorting to genuinely universal units.

Other stellar highlights of his culinary repertoire include grilled blue cheese sandwiches and I don't know how many hundreds of gallons of maple syrup, cooked off in a converted water trough out in the cow pasture.

He sent this my way back in October, but there's plenty of soup season ahead of us.

(Thanks, Papa!)

Persimmons

Tell me.  How come folks pay more for a quart of atrophied white-shouldered, moldy-assed, ungainly Californicating strawberries than a voluptuous hachiya persimmon?  Honestly! Strawberries in December give you that same queasy feeling as peaking at your presents under the tree (to employ an in-season metaphor).  They're like porn when the girl next door is home alone doing the Sunday crossword in her lingerie.

Because a ripe persimmon is a skinful of quivering pumpkin-apricot jelly.  It's translucent like amber, and'll give you googly eyes, and persists in dangling from denuded branches long into the winter, long after the leaves have fallen, and the snow, too.  The persimmon was meant to make the autumn not just bearable, but exquisite: a study in the beauty of orange on grey, of sweetness in the rain, and something that could be called patience but is far too delicious to be so didactic. For some reason, we can't wait till May for our strawberries, and insist on eating the botox-flavored, injection-molded pretend strawberries they assemble in sunnier regions and ship north on tractor-trailers in December.

Of course I love strawberries!  In May I frolic, I cavort, I gambol for my ruby-hearted strawberries.  I dance all night and fall in love and make shortcake.  Come December, though, I get wise and wrinkly and nibble (gobble, suck, slurp?) those sunny plump persimmons.  And puzzle over 9 across.

Really.  Tell me how they choke those strawberries down.