Tag Archives: cardamom

Foodie Tuesday: Creamy & Dreamy

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Given my love for dairy, eggs, sauces and the like, it can come as no surprise to anyone that I’m an incorrigible fanatic about puddings, custards, soufflés and their numerous smooth, fluffy, and plush cousins. They are not by any means created equal, of course, and my desired version changes with the weather, the occasion and a whole lot of other variables, so I’m very happy to sample the dish-of-the-day any time I can. Still, I’m very glad to have the best of the best, whatever the treat: great ice cream beats good ice cream, don’t you know. I was reminded of how much impact the slightest differences can have, even when I’m enjoying something I like very well, when I had a cone of soft-serve ice cream the other day and it turned out to be surprisingly thin and lacking the usual dense and creamy mouth-feel of the best stuff. Didn’t stop me from eating an ice cream cone, mind you, only it wasn’t close to the best I’ve slurped.

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Ice milk isn’t my idea of true soft serve, but it can at least cool me and fill me up with a bit of good vanilla flavor . . .

Certain of those creamy, dreamy treats that tickle my fancy are pretty reliable even in the strictly mass-produced and store-bought kinds, once I find the brand or sort I fall most in love with eating. A nice, thick and lightly tart Greek style whole milk yogurt is hard to beat, particularly when I blend in some good cinnamon and strong local honey or perhaps a tot of dark maple syrup and a sprinkle of cardamom. Pure, smooth happiness. It’s a good facsimile, when sweetened a bit, for another grand favorite, pudding or custard that’s softer, not set up quite like the also-lovable flans and baked custards and burnt-creams.

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If yogurt’s made into a low-fat version by adding thickeners, it has neither the same texture *nor* the same lusciousness. Go fat or go home, that’s my motto!

Frankly, that’s where a good mousse, fool, whipped cream or smoothie might wiggle its way into my heart as well. I’ve heard for some time that coconut milk makes a reasonable facsimile for whipped cream when chilled and whipped, so I decided to give it a go today, though I didn’t exactly follow the protocols I’ve seen online either–another unsurprising bit of my kitchen personality if you’ve read any of my other Tuesday posts! To make my own version of Coconut Cardamom Pudding, I mixed about 1 cup of chilled coconut milk, a half cup or so of cream, a tablespoon of plain gelatin (could easily use agar for setting the custard, if you’re vegetarian) that I bloomed on top of the liquids, plus a teaspoon of vanilla, a pinch of salt, a couple of tablespoons of honey and a teaspoon of ground cardamom, and beat them all until creamy, poured the custard into little ramekins, and popped them into the fridge for testing tomorrow after supper. I can’t speak for the texture until then, but as for the taste, it’s quite mild and subtle but a friendly grouping of flavors that I think will be just as tasty even if it doesn’t quite set up to flan texture by dinnertime. Never know until I try, anyway! Which, as you well know, is a pretty fair summary of my attitude toward most things edible.

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Tomorrow will tell whether the coconut pudding experiment ‘stands firm’ custard style or gets altered one way or another next time, but it’s a spoon-able dainty today . . .

Drizzling just a bit more honey on top is rarely the wrong thing to do with a cloud-like dessert (here, garnished with a pinch of pink peppercorns to bump up the floral spice of the cardamom in the pudding). But I think I’d better stop talking about it now or I might not wait until tomorrow to see if the texture changes. The thought of any kind of yummy, airy, smooth and creamy dessert tends to have that sort of effect on me.

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Update: after refrigeration, the coconut concoction set up as a very light, very fluffy mousse. Just enough heft to sit on the spoon for as long as it took to take a quick photo! The texture remains faintly grainy with the coconut base, but overall mouth-feel is smooth, feather-light and slightly buttery [grins shamelessly], and the flavor is very delicate. So I ate two servings. [Grinning again.]

Foodie Tuesday: Sugar, Spice & Other Things Nice

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Garnishes, condiments, flavorings and all the trimmings, oh my!photoIf God–or the devil–is in the details, well, either one might very well explain why I’m so enamored of them that the main ingredient sometimes feels like an afterthought.photoYes, I suppose I would notice if everyone started serving me meals consisting solely of garnishes, condiments, et. al. Can’t promise I would, though. ‘Small plates’ and all that. As it happens, I pretty nearly could live on the frills alone. Wouldn’t choose to, but seriously, what’s not to love about heaps of chopped toasted nuts, a multitude of exotic spices, a grand assortment of syrups and sauces, shavings of fine cheese, curls of chocolate, meringues, leafy herbs enough to furnish a king’s garden, and pretty little haystacks of finely grated citrus zest?photoThe plain and homely, the grand and glamorous, the simple and the subtle: these are all made into memorable foods and unforgettable meals by the company in which they’re enjoyed and the ambience of the location and occasion. But they’re made further into a special sort of magic by the alchemy of wise and clever additions of cardamom or cumin, condensed tomato paste, a tot of brandy or rosewater, candied grapefruit peel, sweet pea shoots, fresh violets, sieved hard boiled egg yolk, or a judicious sprinkling of crisply fried shallot bits. Get me candied, brandied and dandied up and I’m a happy diner!photoYes, I’m simply nuts about all of the lovely trimmings. Now, what shall I fix tomorrow that calls for a bit of edible decor? Maybe something with metallic sugar glitter on top. (And yes, I have that in the cupboard, too. Did I mention I have this little obsession–?) Stay tuned.

Foodie Tuesday: Fat & Sassy

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In my unapologetically piggy way, I almost always manage to get a goodly amount of delicious fat into whatever food I’m fixing for any occasion. Yes, I do have the proverbial sweet tooth and oh boy do I crave my salt, and surely you’ve noticed that I rarely turn down practically any sort of food on offer at all. But there are some sneaky little biases that tend to recur so regularly that they might be considered trademarks of my taste no matter what dish or meal or bite is the treat of the moment, and tasty fat is one of those delights.

Doesn’t matter what’s the course of the meal or of the day, either one–fat is where it’s at.

Say, for a starter bite. Just putting some nice fatty dry salami together with pieces of dried apricots and chunks of dense, also fabulously fat, fried cheese makes an amazingly great treat that you might not even have to be as big an admirer of fat as I am to enjoy it all.photo

If that’s not fat enough for you (or if, like me, it’s simply not too much and therefore arguably not nearly enough), you can go about pumping up the main dish with some additional lipid-licious treasures. How about a sandwich with a nice thick slab of mozzarella or other mild, thick cheese and a whack of crispy bacon, glued together with a slathering of ginger jam and cradled between two slices of nut-butter based batter bread? All good, I assure you. Probably needed some good greasy chips to go with it, but the sandwich was perfectly serviceable on its own. Enough so that I’ll bet I could have enjoyed it with fruit or vegetables or some other ridiculously healthful and low-fat sides just the same.photo

That’d probably be an even better excuse to have a nice fat slice of sleekly fat dessert, no? Perhaps something like almond cream tart with chocolate sauce. Honestly, not a terrible way to alleviate the shortcomings of a meal that didn’t already have only strictly, gloriously fat ingredients beforehand. I like to keep my arteries well lubricated so my blood will flow nice and smoothly, you know.

Almond Cream Tart (an approximation of a recipe)

1/2 pound melted butter

1-1/3 cups sugar

4 large eggs

1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1-1/2 teaspoons water

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom

1-1/2 cups almond flour

Blend together thoroughly and divide the batter between two small, greased loaf pans and bake at 300 degrees until ‘sticky-finished’–very slightly underdone, or able to release a test toothpick fairly clean when it’s used to pierce the center of the loaf. Get the cakes out of the pans and let them cool enough to handle. While they’re cooling, line a Springform pan with plastic wrap.

Tear the cakes into large chunks. Distribute the cake pieces evenly in the Springform pan and press them down slightly. Moisten the cake with enough (1/4-1/2 cup of) heavy cream to help hold all of the pieces together. Smooth it out a little and sprinkle 1/2 cup sliced toasted almonds over the top of it. Press the almonds down, pull the plastic wrap over the top, and seal the tart into the pan. Then, into the fridge with it for a few hours or overnight, and when it’s well chilled it’s ready to glaze and serve.

To serve, plate up pretty pie wedges of tart for each diner. Microwave some more heavy cream (1/2 cup or so) together with some pieces of nice dark chocolate (I used Dove Promises) until you can stir them together into a nice smooth chocolate sauce and drizzle it over the top of the slices and take them all out to the table. Everybody stick your forks in and start making silly slurpy sounds. And don’t forget to wipe the luscious fatty residue off of chins, y’all. I may be greasing the skids to perdition, but isn’t it a lovely slide to take?photo

Foodie Tuesday: Getting a Menu Transplant

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Sticking to my ribs, yes, but maybe with the barbecue sauce twisted into a (Southern) peach chutney style to suit the Basmati rice alongside . . .

It’s not what it used to be, moving to a different place. The world is so much smaller than it once was! We talk via computer and cell phone as though we were sitting right next to each other–and sometimes when we’re sitting next to each other. Language and culture and history are all getting a good mash-up in this shrinking world where we live.

One genuinely wonderful aspect of this not-entirely-perfect scenario of homogenization is that we have access to so much that was once unreachable to everyone but the most extremely far-flung intrepid explorers and have commonalities that our ancestors could never have dreamed remotely possible. Not least of all, we can indulge in the joys of cuisines and ingredients from places we can’t even pronounce, let alone afford to visit.

Most of these regional, national, racial, cultural treasures, by virtue of being intermingled with and sampled by so many others to such a degree that sometimes it seems something learned from the Chinese by the Dutch traders and then passed along to their colonial outposts in the south seas, who in turn brought it along when they immigrated to North America, well, these ideas and arts and recipes have been so transformed along the way that they, like the initial message in the old game of Telephone, are utterly new inventions by the time the Chinese ever experience them again. And yet, in a happy twist, we who create and share the first iteration often fall in love with it and repeat and refine it until it becomes part of who we are, so it’s not wholly lost in the translation, either.

For someone who grew up in one part of the vast American patchwork of a country and experienced East Coast specialties, Southern cooking, Midwest traditions, and Southwest cuisine as being no less foreign in their ways to my Northwestern experience and palate, it’s always been a pleasurable study to try out the fabled deliciousness of Other Places. So while I’ve long loved Chinese and Dutch and Polynesian and Italian and German and Thai and Indian and North African foods of various kinds, it’s no less exotic and thrilling and delicious to sample the comestible culture of different regions of my own homeland.

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Fajitas today, quiche tomorrow . . .

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. . . but you only have to switch from a Coronita to a Trappist ale to suit the occasion, right?

Still, it’s been an entertaining and tasty part of the adventure of moving from Washington state to Texas that I’m experiencing Tex-Mex and Southern and cowboy cuisines in places of their origins and that’s mighty rich learning and dining, too. So I’m more than happy to indulge in all of those special items here anytime I can. But you know me, y’all: rarely do I go into the kitchen without bringing my own machinations and deviations to the party, so I am more than likely to emerge bearing platters and bowls filled not only with classic Texan foods but also with Texan foods as filtered through Washingtonian hands, perhaps with a hint of Chinese cookery here, Dutch baking there, Polynesia and Italy and Germany and Thailand and India and North Africa and all of my other palatable favorites making inroads and appearances whenever I see fit.

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A Texas-sized pork chop can also be cooked sous-vide, even if it’s getting classic Southern sides like bacon-sauteed sweet corn and coleslaw . . .

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. . . and if you want to shake things up a little in a more cosmopolitan way, you can always make the slaw a variant of Waldorf Salad while you’re at it by adding chopped apples and celery and sliced almonds . . .