Food In The Fort

I had planned to try out a couple of new things this Christmas to post here on Food In The Fort. Unfortunately, I fell on the ice this morning and I’m in a good bit of pain and don’t feel like cooking. So here’s a recipe of a different sort. This originally appeared on my Posterous blog where I share what I’m reading, watching or listening to online and make half-assed observations.

Take two ounces of virgin’s wax (pure beeswax), two ounces of hog’s lard, half an ounce of spermaceti (sperm-whale wax), one ounce of oil of sweet-almonds, two drams of balsam of Peru, two drams of alkanet root cut small, six new raisins shred small, a little fine sugar, simmer them all together a little while; then strain it off into little pots. It is the finest lip salve in the world.

Via Lucy at The Lay Scientist, we have Hannah Glasse‘s recipe for lip balm. Hannah was sort of the Julia Child of her day and wrote the wildly influential The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (for which she received little compensation).

I enjoy looking through old recipes, including recipes for old folk remedies. The ingredients are often astonishing, such as the full two ounces of hog’s lard in Hannah’s recipe (gross!). This particular recipe intrigues me. It must have had an interesting scent. It was probably a pretty good lip balm too (assuming one didn’t have an allergic reaction to the Myroxylon balsamum (balsam of Peru). Certainly with all that wax and lard one’s lips must have been hermetically sealed against the elements. Indeed, one imagines it would have also made a damn fine window caulk.

Just one question… Wouldn’t “new raisins” just be grapes?

A few weeks ago, Kroger had a BOGO (buy one – get one free) offer on bay scallops. I love scallops (and most seafood) but they’re so expensive I usually can’t indulge so I seized the opportunity and bought two 12 oz. packets (apparently the mysterious grocery shrink ray has struck the seafood aisle now too and instead of getting a full pound of your fishy faves, it’s only 12 ounces).

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good idea of what I wanted to do with them. Searching for recipes didn’t turn up anything that really floated my boat and most recipes I could find on the net were for sea scallops. Sea scallops of course are much bigger than bay scallops so they lend themselves well to things like breading and frying but bay scallops usually just turn into very expensive and soggy balls of fishy goo if you do that to them. We’re very anti-fishy goo in this house. Thus there they’ve sat in the back of my freezer taunting me, “We’re damn expensive and delicious, and you’re still not eating us!”

Now, I’ve been doing of lot of rather meat intensive dishes of late (meat loaf, meat ball sandwiches, meat roast, vegetable meat soup…) so it seemed a good time to give my arteries a rest and maybe do something a bit lighter. And being really hungry I was also feeling quite impatient and, dare I say, reckless so I threw caution to the wind and thawed out the scallops deciding I’d just throw something together. Edible or not, it would get eaten. But my gamble paid off and handsomly, allowing you, dear reader, to benefit from my careless ways..

As with all my unrecipes, please don’t take measurements or even ingredients as gospel. I don’t really measure things most nights I”m cooking and whatever I list here are just approximations. Don’t want so much garlic? Cut it down. Want it fishier or richer? Add more scallops or butter. Substitute fake crab meat for the scallops and rigatoni for the pasta if you want, and add a little heavy cream to the sauce. Hell, make a yucky face and order a pizza if you want. It’s all good. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those healthy eating gimmicks that I always look askance at. You know, those little tricks like making fresh “ice cream” by throwing a couple of frozen bananas in your blender. You and I both know any resemblance to ice cream lies only in the mind of the diet guru trying to sell you their book. Sure it might be tasty, and it might even be palatable but it’s not what it promised to be and you only end up feeling cheated.

So when I saw this video showing how to substitute summer squash for fettuccine making the rounds of the food blogs a couple of weeks ago I thought this was just more of the same food fakery. But I needed something to make to bring with me to book club this past Tuesday so I decided to use Fort Wayne’s literati as guinea pigs. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer, I decided to share the pleasure of my required school reading with Leo by making him suffer through Freakonomics. Such a bad book. The problem is that it is so much fun when you’re reading it; but then if you stop and think about it… Anyway, turn about is fair play, so we followed this up with Joanne Chen’s The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats. Like Freakonomics, this book is breezy and enjoyably written but, happily, it lacks the chapters which cause me to go on rants about the author’s racism and deliberately deceptive use of statistics.

However, The Taste of Sweet does share a Freakonomical feature: both authors like to toss off assertions of dubious scientific accuracy. A case in point: when discussing the role of fiber in our diet, Chen quotes pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig who says that bacterial DNA found in stool samples of ancient humans proves that people used to eat about twenty to thirty times more fiber than we do today. This is given as evidence to support the idea that this is the ideal human diet, not just what those undoubtedly very regular people had available to eat.

Without a doubt, the chapter that both Leo and I found the most interesting was “The Real Taste of Strawberry” in which Chen describes how flavors change over time to adapt to current tastes. And she’s not just talking about artificial flavorings. Fruits and vegetables themselves are constantly being selected and manipulated in order to provide a more idealized taste: a more strawberry-flavored strawberry or sweeter sugar cane. As Chen notes, “Humans have been trying to have it their way with nature for a very long time,” and “Real flavors, in fact, aren’t any more consistent than fantasy ones.” And speaking of fantasies, apparently “healthy” tastes like raisins and spice, with a hint of creaminess, at least to food engineer Marie Wright who had embarked on a quest to create a “healthier” tasting oatmeal flavored cookie.

Overall, Leo and I enjoyed reading The Taste of Sweet, in spite of its problems. It’s readily apparent in the numerous interviews and history Chen cites that she has done her homework and the result is an easily digestible yet thought provoking book. However, Chen’s own conflicted relationship with sweet foods gives her analysis an unbalanced feel. Her celebration of the role of sweet foods in our culture is undercut by a generous helping of guilt. In this, Chen certainly parallels most Americans’ relationship with sweets. To paraphrase from her chapter “Guilty Pleasures,” we all have trust issues with delicious food and the more indulgent it seems, the more suspicious we think we should be.

Note: This review was co-authored with Leo.

I mentioned on the Cherry Clafouti recipe that I made for our book club’s dinner discussion of Sarah Vowell’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot that we met on Bastille Day (July 14th), thus the rustic French custard cake. Well, to tie in with the whole patriotic theme, Catherine made this red, white and blue jello that was absolutely the hit of the party. In fact, it’s safe to say that the jello, or rather the unmoulding of the jello, was the night’s entertainment. It stuck in the mould, so Catherine and our host Sophie tried running warm water over the mould, but to no avail. Then Sophie’s husband, the physicist, suggested strategically deforming the mould by squeezing on the edge. After much manipulation the bottom three layers disgorged themselves with a resounding plop!

I think it took another fifteen minutes for the final two layers to appear, but happily they all came out intact and more or less aligned with their recently liberated bretheren for Sophie and the rest of the guests to properly admire. Indeed, there was much ooh-ing and ah-ing over Catherine’s jiggly creation. It was quite the work of art. I’m sure Bill Cosby himself would have shed a tear at its sheer beauty.

While It’s hard to imagine the housewives of the ’50s and ’60s (when jello moulds were king) had this much fun, but it was worth the wait. And surprisingly delicious! The sour cream in the white layer made for a creamy, tangy counterpart to the sweet berry flavors. While I can’t see us making this very often, it was a thoroughly enjoyable creation. I know I have a lot more respect for gelatinous desserts after all this. Too bad we only have a crumby cell phone pic of the half-eaten jello to illustrate this recipe. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Bastille Day and our book club is meeting in a few minutes to talk over Sarah Vowell’s Partly Cloudy Patriot. Catherine made patriotic jello, so I think we’ve got the book covered, but how can we not celebrate Bastille Day in some way? So I decided to make Cherry Clafouti, a wonderful rustic French custard cake.

In the oven it will rise way up, and then collapse back in on itself. Some dubious websites I’ve read seem to think that French peasant moms used to entertain their kids by, apparently, parking them in front of the oven to watch the rise and fall of the clafouti. Either 19th C. French children were way too easily amused or there’s something fishy about this story I think.

It’s terribly easy to make, assuming you have a soux chef to pit all those damn cherries for you. Just be sure to avoid my mistake and buy tart, dark cherries. I swear I reached into the bin with the dark cherries but when I went to make this the bag was clearly labeled “sweet cherries”. Also, gauging by how my clafouti came out, if your cherries are extra juicy, you’re probably going to want to add an extra 1/4 cup or so of flour. You’re just going to have to eyeball it, but then that’s the joy of rustic peasant dishes… it’s hard to screw them up too much.

I’ll let you know how everybody liked the clafouti (I love saying that word) later, but right now it’s time to go be literary.

Updated: Well, the clafouti was a huge hit. There was barely a spoonful left. An even bigger hit though was Catherine’s patriotic jello, which I’ll get to posting in a little bit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rest assured, you’ll never catch Catherine or me separating eggs this way. Even if we’re making something complicated*, we’re firm believers in the KISS method. I’ve always been one to do the shell-to-shell toss method, and for all I know, Catherine simply plops the eggs in a bowl and then scoops out the yolks. It’s true that if you get yolk, which is mostly fat, into your egg whites then you’re not going to get those pretty Eiffel Tower-shaped peaks out of your meringue, but believe me, cooking isn’t this unforgiving. You don’t need to wear one of those white bunny suits and make all your meals in an isolation lab to have really good results.

I just about completed upgrading Food In The Fort from WordPress 2.6.2 to WordPress 2.7.1, along with any plugins that needed upgrading too. Why? Because that’s just the kind of crazy ass thing I do for fun. Oh, and I want to start taking Food In The Fort to the next level so it’s nice to be on the current codebase. WordPress 2.7.x is much improved over previous versions, and WordPress 2.8 is just around the corner. Of course, it meant saying goodbye to a couple of old favorite plugins (farewell Flexible Upload, we hardly knew ye) but I’m sure we’ll find adequate replacements. Anyhoo, there’s still some kinks to work out, mostly in CSS but I’m not going to fret over them too much because I thoroughly intend to build a new theme for FITF, sometime in the next year.

Catherine and I stumbled into this wonderful little non-academic book club. The premise is simple. Each month we all read the same book and then have a pot luck supper at one of the members’ homes to talk about it. Sort of like dinner theater, but for books.

Since this month’s selection was Dune, it was perfectly obvious to me that nothing but spice cake would do. However, as one might expect, Melange is incredibly hard to find locally. Luckily, I found this recipe from Maxie’s Supper Club at Chow and decided that fresh grated ginger, while less trippy than melange, would be an adequate substitute.

Maxie’s recipe did not disappoint! The flavor was rich, intense and the black pepper added just the right bit of bite. The freshly grated ginger was a delight not only for the taste buds, but also provided a springy, almost meaty, texture not unlike carrot cake. The result is a heady, earthy treat with a decidedly old-fashioned^* feel.

In short, this is pure comfort food. Perfect for enjoying a a cup of tea while enjoying your favorite book. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re in the mood for a meal fit for a king, er, I mean, President then you’ll want to be sure to grab the recipes [PDF] used for Obama’s Inaugural Luncheon from the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Perhaps one might think the luncheon recipes were ornate, decadent dishes drenched in heavy creams and sauces. Surprisingly, they’re really quite simple dishes with understated esthetic touches. So perhaps we don’t all have pheasant in our freezers, but I suppose one could substitute cornish game hens and be equally happy. Here’s what was on the menu at this afternoon’s luncheon:

• Seafood Stew
• Duck Breast with Cherry Chutney
• Herb Roasted Pheasant with Wild Rice Stuffing
• Molasses Whipped Sweet Potatoes
• Winter Vegetables
• Cinnamon Apple Sponge Cake

The Cinnamon Apple Sponge Cake looks as if it’s absolutely delish! I’ll try to convince Catherine that we should make it this weekend and if we do we’ll let you know how it came out. H/T Lifehacker.