An easy, refreshing infusion (tisane)

Filtered boiled water over star anise, cloves, and unpeeled ginger.

This variation adds mace, the dark orange casing of nutmeg. Very pleasant taste and flavour, and you can always add a drop or two of honey.

SUBTLE BEDTIME HYDRATION

Fillable teabags, and an infuser with arms for resting on the cup rim.

Ginger infusions can sometimes be overpowering. Sometimes, as well, I really don’t fancy the slurry of ginger at the bottom of my cup, when using it in powder form. But this spice mix really does the trick. It worked nicely even when I used only coarsely chopped, just-defrosted ginger (roughly a two-inch piece) with one star anise and a handful of whole cloves. But next time I’ll mince the ginger, which will give a richer flavour. In any case, if I don’t want to be fishing spices out, I can just pop the ginger into a cloth drawstring tea bag, and the other items can go in the metal infuser pictured. This quantity is good for at least a few infusions: just make sure to use boiling water, and let steep for five minutes at a minimum.

All-purpose Vinaigrette

This ‘vinaigrette’ was made to season steamed carrots, but it’s lovely as a salad dressing, too.

Really it should be called a ‘mustardette’ or ‘oilette’ because there need be no vinegar as a separate ingredient. Ingredients can be altered somewhat: it’s more of a template than a prescription for a vinaigrette.

⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil

zest and juice of one lemon

3 Tbs fennel leaves or dill, chopped

1 Tbs prepared, coarse-grained Dijon-like mustard

1 tsp honey

1 tsp dry red wine or red wine vinegar, optional

salt to taste, start with ⅛ tsp

These amounts make a little more than can fill the 6-oz jar in the photo.





Yes, you can use baking potatoes for everything (and no, you don't need waxy ones for salads)

Warm salad with russet potatoes, crispy bacon, various herbs, shallots, garlic, bacon fat and olive oil, chopped green onion, vinegar, wine, mustard, and salt and pepper. Recipe is in Onion: The Essential Cook’s Guide by Brian Glover (2011).

I love recipes, wherever they come from — magazines, cookbooks, the Internet. And I like recipes that have a confidence in what they’re doing and why. But what I don’t enjoy so much is the way that we, the reader and home cook, are often shepherded towards certain beliefs and away from certain freedoms for no very good reason. Look no further, for an example of what I mean, than the way we are supposed to view potatoes.

Waxy potatoes are best for salads, we are endlessly told. Why? Do they taste better than baking potatoes? No, not really. But because they are waxy, they supposedly hold together better: they’re not so crumbly. So don’t make your potato salad — of whatever kind — with anything other than a waxy potato.

Well, guess what? I don’t mind waxy potatoes, but they’re not the zenith of potato, in my book. In fact, I find them less desirable than baking potatoes (whether russet or something similar) for the very reason that they are waxy instead of fluffy. And the fact is that I prefer my potatoes on the bready side of the spectrum: crumbly, porous, light, easy to mix with other ingredients. Whether I’m making seafood cakes or mash or jacket potatoes, I like a potato flesh that is airy rather than clay-like. There is no single recipe that I have ever tried that was truly better because the potatoes were of the waxy variety. It stands to reason, I think. If you could dry the clouds in the sky and preserve them, they’d be baked potatoes not waxy boiled ones.

I mention this because I made a warm potato salad this afternoon, from a recipe in a book about onions. It’s a very nice book, with a lot of appealing recipes I’m looking forward to trying. But it asked for waxy potatoes, and I knew straight away I was not going to do that. I prefer the taste, texture, and yes, the relative mouth-meltingness, of typical baking potatoes. I knew that they would hold up well in this salad, and they did (see photo of what was left, after hubby and I eagerly devoured the bulk of it). There was no problem of over-crumbliness: I simply turned the dressing, herbs, and shallot-garlic mix gently and slowly with a spatula, and everything remained intact. And you just can’t beat the flavour.

So the next time you are told to use waxy potatoes, and you either don’t have them or don’t fancy them, use your favourite varieties instead. They are almost guaranteed to give you an equally beautiful, and perhaps tastier, result.

Why I don't use a garlic crusher (much) any more

Top: Kuhn-Rikon garlic crusher. Bottom: Vintage mezzaluna blade and wood bowl, with freshly minced garlic.

For years I sought The Perfect Garlic Crusher, and I finally found it: the Kuhn-Rikon model shown in the photo. The swinging-out parts make it easy to insert the garlic, easy to scrape it from the holes, and easy to clean afterwards. The handles have the necessary heft, so you don’t have to bruise your hand in squeezing them. It’s a great piece of kit.

Of course, there will always be kitchen purists that disdain gadgets as unneeded: just put a knife and a board in front of them, and that’s all they’ll ever need. If your knives are always sharp and ideal for the task at hand, and you have a good block such as those made of Japanese paulownia wood, then I can see that. For instance, I don’t actually need a six-cherry cherry pitter, because I devised an excellent and fast procedure for getting the pits out while keeping the fruits whole (one summer when I made a few cherry pies). But the pitter does come in handy, especially if you literally just want to bang your fruit pies out. That said, a lot of gadgets are really about novelty and niftiness rather than lasting benefit. I would exempt garlic crushers from that category but I would also say that I don’t really need one. And that’s because I inherited a mezzaluna knife and the wooden bowl that goes with it.

What I like about the blade-bowl is threefold: the blade chops really finely, the bits don’t generally go jumping out of the bowl, and the blade is even easier to clean than the garlic crusher. (The mezzaluna also works really well with herbs. The trick with herbs is to bunch them together in the bowl with one hand and then punch at the bunch with the blade.) So, though it’s true that I’m not going to give away my crusher any time soon, I’m more likely these days just to reach for the blade and bowl.

Salad, Again!

I know. But I can’t get enough of it. This time I put the whole nasturtium flowers in, rather than pick apart the petals… and I snipped the tiny leaves to dot about, and added grated carrot, red onion, and chives for yet more pizzazz. A bit of cucumber for succulence and finely chopped celery for crunch, and there it is. Plus the usual fresh herb medley and red-leafed green lettuce. Fab. When it came time to serve, a lovely olive oil was drizzled over, with a sprinkling of sea salt and black pepper. That’s all the dressing I ever desire.

Salad Queen (again) of Summer

This salad is lovely with grilled meats. It’s chopped red lettuce on the bottom, with a thinly sliced and wedge-cut orange tomato, nasturtium leaves and petals, watercress, fresh herbs, cucumber, and finely chopped Cosmic Crisp apple and greenest celery mixed and spread over top. Lovely with a drizzle of olive oil and sprinkled sea salt and pepper.



You are the Salad Queen

For summer, add tiny pieces of orange to the salad to give it more succulence and a brighter tone among the dark greens. Navels are good, and the Cara Cara hybrid is an excellent choice: not too sweet, it seems perfectly at home in a savoury salad. For a change, very thin apple slices are also great for adding a mildly sweet tang — along with a slight crunch.

Once upon a time, I had no idea how to make a tasty salad. My carrots were cut so thick you could choke on them, my dressing was too vinegary (the thought of using olive oil by itself never occurred to me), and I didn’t understand how herbs could provide nuance, onion could give lift, and cucumbers could give succulence — without the sogginess of tomatoes (hint: if you want diced tomatoes, add them to your salad at the last minute). Not to mention celery, diced as finely as can be, for unobtrusive crunch and a lovely subtle flavour. I needed to go to Salad School — and come out of it as a Salad Queen.

I make salad a couple of times a week: big bowls that last for the next few days, so that whatever is on the menu, the veg part is a no-brainer. Grilled salmon with seasoned rice? Lovely — and we’ll have salad to round it off. Homemade chicken curry? Great! And the veg, with or without cooked broccoli, will be salad. So… what is this salad, anyway?

The salad in the photo is a typical one for me. It has red-leaf lettuce as a kind of basis, with baby rocket for additional nutrients and flavour. I also often include water cress, which is slightly peppery and delightful but does have a very short shelf life: buy it and use it as promptly as you can. The salad has the finely diced very green celery stalks, either bought or from my herb planter (the latter being leafier and easier to snip with scissors). It has herbs from the herb planter: basil (including the flowers), parsley, mint, and perhaps some chives. I like raw onion in any salad (all onion is good, but raw is especially nutritious), and red onion is my go-to. Finally, I often like some fresh-grated carrot: it’s a wonderful food but not everyone likes carrots, and yet it is so good and easy in a salad: just a delightful part of the mix. Drizzle some olive oil, add black pepper and salt to taste, and you have a wonderful powerful salad that goes with just about every dish!

Greek salad

There are no real rules about Greek salad, but there are key ingredients. My version has the following:

1 beefsteak tomato, or the equivalent in small tomatoes, coarsely chopped

red onion, a bit more than a quarter of a whole onion, somewhat finely chopped

about six Kalamata olives, chopped

half a small cucumber, chopped into large dice

Bulgarian, Israeli, or ‘sweet’ feta cheese, in chunks (set on top rather than mixed in, as this will break the cheese up too much)

finely snipped fresh basil leaves, about one to 1½ tablespoons

salt, pepper, and generous drizzle of cold-pressed olive oil

Note: If you really want lettuce as well, lettuce doesn’t spoil a Greek salad. Add your leaves and consider it more interesting!

The salad, just before the last-minute sprinkling of the sea salt and drizzling of the olive oil. Note, however, the abundance of fresh-ground black pepper!

My favourite workaday homemade bread loaf

White loaf, bread knife, and French bread board, with slats and tray to catch the crumbs.

I could have put this entry in ‘Soothe Bake’, but I don’t really think of this as ‘baking’ — all I do is bung a load of ingredients into the bread machine, and slice the resulting loaf afterwards. Although I do this recipe with the bread machine, since I own one, I could just as easily make this bread by hand — and so could you. The ingredients are wholesome, and you can vary them: I often like to use a proportion of rye flour in amongst the bread flour. I have also used whole wheat flour, in a ratio of say, 1 part whole wheat to 3 parts bread flour, but I find that whole wheat tends to be a ‘drag’ on the rise of the loaf (even with the addition of gluten). And I don’t like the taste as much, so I tend to keep the whole wheat component rather minimal.

Anyway, here is my usual white bread recipe (without the rye). If you don’t have bread flour, use all-purpose flour instead. Bread flour is ‘stronger’, i.e. it has more protein, but you can certainly bake bread with the other flour. I find that weighing is much quicker and easier than measuring out in cups, particularly since you can ‘tare’ (or reset) the digital scale to add other ingredients of different weights.

15 ounces (or 3 cups) of bread flour

2 ¼ tsp gluten powder (optional — but I find it helps with texture and lift)

2 ¼ tsp bread machine or quick-rise yeast

scant 2 tsps salt

1 Tablespoon raw honey

1 ounce / 2 Tablespoons butter (or olive oil, if you prefer)

half cup milk (I use 2%)

half cup filtered or spring water

Pour all the ingredients in the breach machine and set to the basic cycle (kneading, rising, and baking). Allow the bread to cool (it is still cooking after the end of the cycle), and then slice. I like to freeze my bread in freezer bags, a few slices per bag. Bread soon grows stale in the fridge, but it will keep well in the freezer. My preferred method is to let it defrost at room temperature, or if I am in a hurry, to pop it in the microwave for several seconds on low power. I fine that putting a too-cold slice in the toaster gives a hard, unpleasant result. Can’t have that!

Why Berries are Best

Ripe hand-picked blueberries and blackberries, Smoky Mountains © A. Payne

Blueberry bush with mainly unripe fruit, in June in the Smoky Mountains. © Amanda Payne

Strictly speaking, grapes are berries. But when we think of berries, we’re not usually thinking of grapes. And why is that? It’s partly because we think of berries as bright morsels plucked individually from bushes, and it’s partly because berries have a relative austerity compared with the modern eating grape. Berries can be tart or tangy even when fully ripe, while the red seedless grapes I tried recently were altogether too sweet for my liking. A couple of those, and I was already feeling that the sugar hit was going to be too much. Grapes weren’t always that way, of course, and there are plenty of less sweet grapes grown for wine — not to mention more traditional varieties, with thick skins you have to peel before you can eat their white, eyeball-like flesh.

But back to berries. If you’re going to have fruit, on a daily basis, berries are best because they pack the greatest nutritional punch per calories ingested, and most of them, like raspberries and blueberries, neither require sweetening nor deliver too much fructose in each bite. But then, I do like my berries on the tart side: not many people eat fresh blackcurrants and redcurrants without adding sugar, but I do, as I have a strong liking for sour. (Hot lemon drinks would be my favourite, if it weren’t for the damage to the enamel of one’s teeth!) And just as you can cultivate a sweet tooth, and want the sweetness of grapes more and more, so you can cultivate a taste for tang, and find that a little sweetness goes a long way.

Knowing Your Onions -- and Loving Them

White onions in a blue mesh bag. © Amanda Payne

‘They really know their onions’: it’s an old expression I’ve heard all my life, though I’ve never given it much thought. Really knowing your mushrooms, one would think, might make more sense, since knowing one’s mushrooms could be a matter of life or death. But when one thinks of it, there is a lot going on in the onion world — the world of alliums, if we want to use a little Latin. This plant family is a huge culinary gift to humans, containing garlic, leeks, chives, and onions used for salads and cooking. But we’ll talk about garlic and leeks another time. Let’s just focus on onions.

Green onions (also known as spring onions or scallions) are wonderful in: scrambled eggs, salads, or popped alongside a sandwich.

Red onions (oddly named, since they are very strikingly purple!) are great in omelettes and meat-based dishes, but I like them best finely chopped in a fresh green salad.

Sweet yellow onions (Vidalia) are good in curries and in sauces cooked slowly with other ingredients.

White onions are fantastic, cooked in butter on a medium heat with a lot of stirring, till they become golden and a bit browned. Wonderful in soups, pastas, stews. Or cut up raw and put in the cavity of a chicken before roasting.

Not only do onions do great things for the flavour of nearly any meal, but they are also nutritional powerhouses, with many therapeutic benefits. From this standpoint, cooked is good, less cooked is better, and raw is best. Also, as with citrus fruits, you get more nutritional benefit if you eat a variety of onions, rather than just one type. But any way you slice it, onions are irreplaceable!

White onions cooked with the method described above, in a large “stone-derived” nonstick aluminium pan.

COOKING WHITE ONIONS

Add your chopped onions to a pan with a lid, and toss in a tablespoon or two of water and a half teaspoon or more of olive oil, depending on how much onion you have. Let the onions steam on a medium-high heat with the lid on for a few minutes, then take the lid off so the liquid can evaporate. The aim is to soften the onions first, and then to brown them as they continue to cook. Keep stirring and watch that the onion doesn’t start burning: turn the heat down slightly if needed.

 

How to Boil Potatoes

It almost seems too simple to ask the question, How do you boil potatoes? But that’s because the real question is How do you avoid mushiness on the one hand or gumminess, on the other?

One large boiled potato in salted water

Well, the answer is in cooking your potatoes in large chunks. I generally cook Idaho or russets, since I prefer them for mashed potato. And if I don’t want a mash, but roasted chips (wedges) or a baked potato instead, these varieties are ideal. I first scrub the taters with a stiff veggie brush under a running tap. I then cut each potato in half, and then cut that down the middle again — so it ends up in quarters. Leaving the skin on, I put them all in a medium or large saucepan, depending on whether I’m cooking one or two. I add salt, about a teaspoon, and cover with water. Bringing the water to a rolling boil, I put a lid slightly askew on top, and reduce the heat to a medium-high setting (usually 7 on my induction hob). I set the timer for a minimum of 13 minutes, though 15 is usually not too much. When they are confirmed done with a knife poked into the middle of a chunk, I drained them and allow them to cool. The skin can then be peeled off quite easily (and I feed the skins to my dog!). They will already be peeling at the edges, usually, especially if they’re rather thick.

Potatoes cooked this way are perfect for mashing: neither gummy nor too soft. Regarding cooking time, my advice is err on the side of longer and softer rather than shorter (and harder). As long as you drain the potatoes more or less immediately, they won’t end up watery. But it’s not pleasant when you begin mashing only to find that you have some not-quite-done hard chunks in the mix. If you do find that, the best remedy is to take those pieces out and microwave them briefly until they match the softness of the rest. And another tip: even though you will have washed and scrubbed the potatoes before they went in, it’s a good idea to swish a bit of water and a paper towel around the pot, just to remove any grit or residue before replacing the cooked potatoes in the pot and doing the mash.

In Praise of Celery

Even two years ago, if you had told me that I would be seriously Up With Celery, I would have said what????

Celery, for me, was always a washed-out flabby stick the colour of the boring soap and the flavour of tortoise-feed. It was the sort of thing people of the 70s filled with Cheese Whiz and ate as diet food. Of all the vegetables, even more than radishes (which I haven’t bought or eaten in decades), it was unspeakable.

But I was wrong. Celery is wonderful.

What brought about this change? Well, it was a sneak attack. In the first place, I like a roast chicken fairly often, and I like to stuff the cavity before I cook. That means chopped onion, lemon wedges, rosemary or other herbs, salt and pepper… and celery. So, doing roasts more regularly, I bought celery.

Then I noticed that celery is actually very green when newly picked. I was so used to pale, hardly green and almost white celery, that this was something of a shock. And something in me knows that the greener it is — the brighter it is — the more likely a vegetable is to contain vital nutrients. Not to mention tasting better. So I started slicing celery stalks very finely to put in our near-daily salads. And I liked the crunch, the added texture the celery brings. I decided also that I do like the flavour. And now, I’m a big ambassador of all things celery.

Tips: 1. Do buy celery when it is so green it almost makes your eyes water to look at it. The celery should be very stiff. If not very green and not very stiff, don’t buy it. 2. You can eat the leaves, and they make a nice addition to salad, along with the stalks. 3. Celery is safe and good for dogs, bulking up their meals and increasing their fullness while adding negligible calories. 4. Celery, in my experience, keeps best when washed once you get it home, and then put in a suitable container (just cut the base off first). 5. Celery is a good ingredient in vegetable stock, or add it to the pot when making stock from a roast chicken. It is also an ingredient in my recipe for potato salad, here:

SOOTHE POTATO SALAD

3 baking potatoes, boiled and diced (see my advice for boiling potatoes)

2 boiled eggs (optional), cut up finely

minced fresh celery stalk

garlic clove, minced

chives, snipped 

prepared mustard, 1 teaspoon

mayonnaise (half a cup)

medium-fine sea salt, 1 tsp (or a bit less, if using fine)

black pepper, ½ tsp

paprika and/or piment d'espelette, ¼ tsp

sprinkling of snipped curly parsley on top

Mix the mustard into the mayonnaise before putting on salad, then combine the ingredients, turning gently with a large spoon.

How Much Egg?

A large egg needed — or any size will do?

I do so much cookbook reading, and so much recipe-writing myself, I’ve become something of a connoisseur of recipes. Most recipes are well written: indeed, they are unsung gems of prose — concise yet descriptive, pragmatic yet willing to embrace the telling metaphor, and logically organized. Postmodern college academics, with their flighty impenetrable jargon, need not apply. The primary goal of any recipe is to communicate.

That’s why the failings of recipes stand out so much. How about this one, for instance. ‘1 large egg lightly beaten with 1 teaspoon water, for egg wash’. Seems inoffensive. What’s wrong with it? 

Well, let’s start with the ‘large egg’. That’s the main problem with this particular direction. The egg is to be used to seal two lengths of pastry ten inches long and eight inches wide, all around their edges, and then it is to be used to glaze the top length all over, just before baking. It’s a job that a medium egg could easily do. Even a small egg could do it. I happened to use a large egg, as directed, since we typically stock large eggs in this household. And guess what? I had so much egg left over, I scrambled it in a frying pan to put in my dog’s dinner. 

So why did they specify a ‘large’ egg? I’ll tell you the likely reason. Most professional kitchens, in America anyway, use large as the standard size of an egg (out of the shell, it can weigh more or less than 2 ounces, but many of them weigh exactly 2, and that’s the weight that is usually assigned to them). So a recipe-writer might get tin the habit of writing ‘one large egg’. Another possibility is that the recipe wasn’t actually tested by the writer, but was handed on from a trusted source. This could lead to assumptions that aren’t justified. Perhaps the original recipe just mentioned ‘one beaten egg’. The recipe compiler might feel the need to be more specific, especially if all the other recipes in a collection mention the egg size. So out creeps the familiar word ‘large’.

‘Lightly beaten’. Why only lightly? If you beat lightly, you’ll get a less than perfect emulsion of albumen and yolk: you’ll get pools of yolk with white swimming around them. That is not ideal for a pastry wash (or glaze, as I prefer to call it). Egg white gives virtually no gloss: it’s the yolk that beefs up the shine. But yolk by itself would be too much of a good thing (though I would need to test this): yolk might burn more easily alone and anyway it would be far too difficult to spread with a brush. You need the runnier white — but well mixed with the yolk — to create the brushable ‘wash’. So the best thing is a fairly well beaten egg, which is to say, an egg whose white and yolk have been sufficiently blended. Beating lightly won’t necessarily achieve this.

Then there is the addition of water to the ‘lightly beaten’ egg. The fact is: you don’t really need it. Perhaps a drop or two of water is helpful in slightly thinning the beaten egg, to make it more spreadable. But a reasonably well beaten egg produces a perfectly adequately wash, and in my experience, the addition of water should be done very sparingly, if done at all. One must remember the Golden Rule that pastry and excess water are to be avoided at all costs!

Given the foregoing, and having baked the item in question, I would have written the instruction differently. I would have asked for ‘1 egg of any size, beaten’. So the baker with only medium or small eggs in the fridge or pantry would not have to wonder whether she or he could do the recipe. And a baker with a choice of eggs could choose the most economical one.