Apropos of which I suppose I should mention them, no?

I’ll be at National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Atlanta next weekend.  I’m giving an as-yet-unwritten paper that you can read about here, if you’re so inclined.  It’s got a fabulous title so I’m sure I’ll come up with something delightful, and in any event I do have lots of things to say on the subject even if they’re currently not as organized as I’m sure they will be by Saturday morning.  I’ll also be hanging out some at the booth for my speakers’ agency, Soapbox Inc., so if you’ve ever wanted to meet me — or talk to me about booking a talk — and you’ll be at NWSA, go see if you can track me down.

On Friday night, the 11th, I’ll be doing a Big Big Love reading/signing at Charis Books in Atlanta, so if you’ll be around, c’mon out.  It’s free and I’m usually pretty funny, often intentionally.

In other news, I have been engaging in various autumnal rituals like getting the furnace replaced, rediscovering just how much I hate it when the cat not only crawls in underneath the covers but insists on snuggling up between my knees, and making sauerkraut.

I am a kraut fiend.  If I’m honest, I get kind of excited about almost any pickled or fermented vegetable, but sauerkraut has a special place in my heart.  And my stomach.  (I will happily eat an entire bowl of raw kraut fresh from the crock.  And not infrequently do.) We pulled the season’s first batch of kraut out of the crocks last week and are almost done yumming it up.  I put another three heads of cabbage into my crock on Saturday so that there will be kraut again in time for Thanksgiving or thereabouts.  Someday I will obtain one of the super-fancy-schmancy German fermenting crocks that has a little water channel that the lid sits in, thus allowing gas generated by fermentation to escape without letting air from the outside in.  But for now I do just fine with my little 3.5 gallon pickling crock (with matching drop-lid!) I commissioned from my friendly neighborhood pottery a couple of years ago.  It makes enough for my small household, although if I were smart, I’d get them to make me another one so I could stagger the batches and never run out of kraut.

A task, perhaps, for later.  After I’ve written this paper.  And done a few other things.

Oh and!  Two further tidbits of information:

Tidbit #1: There are still a handful of copies of Inappropriate Crush available via Etsy.  They’re all signed and numbered, there were only 75 copies in the edition.

Tidbit #2: If you’ve read Inappropriate Crush and would be up for writing a short (350 words or shorter) review of it that I could post on my soon-to-be-revamped website, I’d be delighted to feature it.  Send ‘em to cru...@hanneblank.com and be sure to include whatever name you want on it, and if you’ve got a website or something that you’d like me to link to, send me that URL, too.

                          

And some years we don’t.  A  couple years ago, I made a dim sum Thanksgiving, with lots of different kinds of dumplings and steamed things and fried things.  This year, I’ve decided to stick with New World foods, but still not a “traditional Thanksgiving.”  Instead, it’s a Central American one, with a Baltimorean twist.

Our main course will be carnitas.  Pork for the meat-eaters, seitan for the vegetarians.  Marinated in bitter orange juice, garlic, cinnamon, and a little cumin, chunks of pork are seared, then braised in their marinade — I toss in a bay leaf or two as well — until they’re caramelized on the outsides and soft and rich on the inside.  I recommend a pork shoulder roast for this.  Buy it whole, bone-in, and do the skinning, trimming, boning, and cutting into chunks yourself.  That way you get to keep the skin for stock (lots of collagen, makes a very rich nice addition to stock), and  the bones for either stock or for cooking along with the carnitas for whatever lucky carnivore wants to gnaw them.  Shoulder has enough fat to make the carnitas tasty, without having so much that they end up swimming in their own grease.

For seitan carnitas, the procedure is much the same: the seitan is seared in hot oil so that it will have a nice texture, then braised in a similar marinade until the marinade is all but evaporated and the seitan is deeply flavored and colored.  Start with “beef style” seitan, that usually works best.

We’re having beans, of course.  I’m cooking Salvadoran red beans, which are similar to a small-scale kidney bean (about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a red kidney bean).  Once they’re cooked, I’ll drain them, then flavor them with a sofrito of onion, garlic, a little celery, a little epazote.

There’ll be rice, and I’ll probably make some tortillas ’cause tortillas are easy and everyone loves a warm tortilla straight from the griddle.  I’ll have lime wedges and chili-garlic paste and chopped cilantro and chopped onion and guacamole on hand (it is no longer salsa season).   I have some carrot and radish curtido that I made earlier in the week.  A guest is bringing a squash dish, another guest is bringing pie. Someone’s bringing snacky-type relish-tray items, ’cause traditionally, we won’t have enough food if we haven’t got the little tidbits to fill in the cracks.

And there’s home-cured sauerkraut.  Yes, I said sauerkraut.  I didn’t realize until just a couple of years ago that apparently sauerkraut is an old-school Baltimorean thing at Thanksgiving, and many Baltimore households would sooner leave out the turkey than the kraut.  I have to say that for me, not being a fan of crab, actively disliking National Bohemian beer, and being only lukewarm about pit beef, Berger’s cookies, and Old Bay seasoning, this was one of very few Baltimore food traditions I encountered that I felt I could actually get behind.  (I also like “lake trout” — not from a lake, and not trout — sandwiches with hot sauce.  But only sometimes, and only from Sterling’s, in Remington.  They do it right.)

Also, since I make my own kraut on a regular basis at home, I figured I might as well.  In any event, sauerkraut isn’t so far from a traditional cabbage curtido.  I didn’t season this batch with garlic or caraway, just fermented it plain, so there you have it.  The current batch is just now getting to the point where it’s definitely tangy but not actively sour, so it’s about perfect for eating straight out of the crock.

I just realized I have some organic cranberries in the fridge, too.  Might could do something with those.  I know a kick-ass cranberry cake recipe.  Maybe that.

Low-stress.  And the house is going to smell fantastic after all those carnitas have been roasting away all day, too.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

                          

I am thinking about fall, my favorite season of the year, and how grateful I am that I will be spending all of October enjoying an Upper Midwestern autumn for the first time in way, way too long.  I’ll be cooking in a strange kitchen all month, too, which I confess is giving me a bit of pause–should I pack my own knives?  should I take more than one wok? what about a steamer? will there be a decent selection of bakeware?–but which I counter with the knowledge that I will be within striking distance of the Dane County Farmer’s Market and all the glories of Midwestern agriculture in the autumn, and oh yes you bet I am talking about apples and pears and squashes and greens.  (We get those here too.  But the fall fruits just aren’t as good here as they are further north.  It’s all about the chill hours.)  In short I think I’ll be okay.

I’ve been experimenting with eggplants.  They can be challenging to cook without much in the way of fat or oil, yet I much prefer their taste and texture with less oil.  So I have been taking whole small eggplants and cooking them in a very hot dry heavy skillet, turning them periodically until the skins blister and the insides collapse.  They are then ready to be turned into other things–baba ghanoush, among others–or simply eaten hot with lemon juice and a little parsley and a little drizzle of olive oil.  They can also be chunked up and stir-fried, or chunked up and dropped into a pan of sauteeing onions for use in a frittata, or I suppose chunked and plunked into pasta toppings of various sorts.  Having a container of eggplant chunks prepared thusly sitting in my fridge has certainly increased the number of ways I have considered eating eggplant, this week.  I think the best was taking a few handfuls of chunks of charred, soft eggplant (it gets soft but not too mushy inside) and stir-frying it in seriously hot oil, then adding a big dollop of homemade sweet chili garlic sauce and letting that make a little glaze on the eggplant.  Recommended.

I’m also thinking about yeast breads again, now that it’s cool enough that the thought of having an oven running inside the house doesn’t make me want to burst into tears.  I’m reading The Bread Builders, and reacquainting myself with Kiko Denzer’s work on building earth ovens, and beginning to think about whether and how I might build a wood-fired oven of my own at some point in the future.  For now I am contenting myself with bread baked in the normal old conventional oven, though.  I just wish it got a little hotter.  I can make fairly good bread in my oven, but I can’t make exceptional bread in my oven.  There just isn’t enough firepower.

And yet even now I have a bowl of a part-wheat, part-rye pre-ferment sitting on the counter doing its autolyse thing.  We’ll have fresh whole-grain bread for dinner, along with a half-dozen small sweet-looking just-coming-into-season artichokes.  It won’t be great bread, but it’ll still be plenty good.

                          

You need about a pound of chiles of your desired degree of hottitude.  Wash them, remove the stems, and chop them coarsely.  I often bung them in the food processor and whir them until they are mostly coarsely chopped with a few bigger and a few smaller bits.  It saves a lot of time.

Put your chopped chiles in a large bowl. Add about 2 Tablespoons kosher salt for a pound of chiles, and combine thoroughly.  Feel free to knead the salt and the chiles together if you like.  Pack salt and chiles into a clean glass jar or jars and put lids on them loosely.

Leave the chiles out on the counter at room temperature for about 2-4 days depending on how warm your kitchen is.  Less if it’s warmer, more if it’s cooler.  They’ll give off some liquid and you’ll see some little bubbles starting to form in the liquid.  Stir things around some with a chopstick, put the lid(s) back on (still loosely) and put your jar(s) in the fridge.  Every day or two, stir things around some more with a chopstick.  In about a week to ten days your chiles will be sufficiently transformed that you can start using them.

They will continue to improve over the space of a couple of months.  If you use them at a steady clip you’ll figure out eventually how much you have to make in your initial batch so that you will not run out until after they’ve had a chance to reach their peak.  What their peak is, of course, is subjective.

If things get fuzzy, remove the fuzzy bits and carry on.  If things start getting blue or grey, though, or it smells like a horrible dead thing that has died horribly, throw it away and start over.

And if you are even more adventurous than this, you can use Andrea Nguyen’s amazing recipe for homemade fermented Sriracha sauce.

                          

Some exquisitely pricey and uncomfortable dentistry was involved.

So was the death of one half of my ten year old pair of Yaktrax and my subsequent slipping and falling on Baltimore’s indifferently maintained sidewalks.

There was also the discovery that some of Baltimore’s Finest — by which I mean the large and industrious rats for which the town is justly infamous — had chewed a hole through the bottom of my hard plastic trash can, a discovery made by dint of removing the lid from what I thought was a sturdily lidded garbage can and having two sleek, well-fed, sturdy-looking rats look up at me as if I were the problem.

So I decided to make some Hunanese pickled cabbage.  Pickles and fermented foods, of whatever sort, give you something to look forward to.  There’s no instant gratification really, save the mild pleasures of doing a little work with your hands and the smells and textures of the food with which you’re working.  But putting together a batch of pickles or sauerkraut or what-have-you does provide one with the often underestimated pleasure of anticipation.  Anticipation is a cousin to hope, which is also relevant given the vagaries of pickling with naturally-occurring microbes.   And both are a fine counterbalance to a draining, dispiriting day.

I base my Hunanese pickled cabbage on the recipe Fuchsia Dunlop gives in Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, but I have my own preferences about seasonings and methodology that derive from my experience eating, and fermenting, other things.  (If you’re new to this sort of thing you may prefer to try her recipe over attempting my rather hand-wavy method.)

setup: crock, cabbage, vodka, seasonings, and salt

The mise-en-place is pretty simple.  Clockwise from the upper right are the pickling crock, the drop-lid to the pickling crock, some cheesecloth for containing the spices, pickled jalapenos, ginger, spices, garlic, salt, vodka, and cabbage.  I suppose the water-filtering pitcher you can just see in the right corner can represent the water that goes into the brine.

The crock is important, though it must be said you don’t have to have a purpose-built crock like I do (I commissioned mine from Wild Yam Pottery up the street).  You could use a big bowl and a plate, or a clean bucket and a Frisbee and some rocks for that matter, but after a while I decided a purpose-built vessel was a good idea. The biggest reason I commissioned one is so that I would have a suitable vessel of a suitable size for small-batch fermenting — it holds about three gallons — with a droplid that weighed enough to do what a droplid is supposed to do.

fermenting crock and droplid

You see how the lid looks like it’s just barely the right size for the crock?  Well, actually, it fits inside the crock.  Weighing in at about two pounds, the drop lid is heavy enough to keep whatever I’m fermenting weighted down beneath the level of the brine.  This keeps aerobic bacteria from colonizing the food and causing rot.  So long as the food is totally submerged, it will ferment but generally not rot. (Occasionally this does not hold true.  But mostly it does.)  Pretty cool, huh?

the droplid at the bottom of the crock

To make Hunanese pickled cabbage, you need a cabbage.  This one I picked up at the Asian supermarket because they were on sale, but you could use any kind of cabbage you like: green, red, savoy, flat head, cone head.  You could also use bok choy, or mustard greens.  Or you could pickle things by this method that weren’t cabbages or cabbage-relations at all, if you liked… carrots, beets, kohlrabi, turnips, etc.  I stuck with cabbage because I have Big Plans for a mess of pickled cabbage later on: one of my favorite simple homey stir-fries, which I will tell you about in a week or two, uses pickled cabbage as its primary vegetable. You also need some ginger, some garlic, and…

spice mixture for hunanese pickled cabbage

Spices. In the spice bowl, I put some star anise, some fennel seed, some green cardamom, some cinnamon bark, some whole coriander, and plenty of Sichuan pepper.  The “Hunanese” part suggests chiles as well as Sichuan pepper, so there are some dried Tientsin chiles in there, too.  For extra kick of a different sort, I also like to add some pickled jalapeno peppers, an element I borrowed directly from Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe.  (Pickling them all over again doesn’t do them any harm, you can eat them later along with the cabbage.)

Because you don’t want to have to pick out those tiny little bits of spice from the finished pickle, nor do you want to bite down on them while you eat, tie the dry spices up in a piece of cheesecloth.  This acts like a big teabag, letting flavors permeate the brine and the pickled vegetables without letting the spices go all over everywhere.

pickling spices tied into a piece of cheesecloth

Once this has been assembled, and you’ve prepped your ginger and garlic as you desire (I like to peel my ginger and chunk it up, some folks don’t bother peeling it but slice it into coins, my only caveat would be not to slice it too small so you can find it later on), chop up your cabbage into bite-sized pieces.  How big “bite-sized” might be is completely up to you.

Pack the cabbage into your crock, and tuck the spice bundle in on top.  Festoon with ginger and garlic and pickled peppers, then make your brine.  For this recipe, I use a brine that is 3/4 cup coarse sea salt to 16 cups water, plus 1 cup vodka — the addition of spirits to pickling brine is a Chinese thing, and I like the way it tastes, but you can leave it out if you don’t like it or don’t have it.

the crock is packed, the brine is ready

As you can see, the crock is awfully full here.  I normally don’t pack it quite so full, but such was the size of the cabbage.  It’s not a big problem since the brine will wilt the cabbage considerably by tomorrow morning (and further from there), so the crock will end up less full than it began.  Filling a crock all the way to the brim does make it tricky to move, though, so unless you’re going to leave your crock more or less where you filled it, I don’t recommend filling your crock quite so full as I have here.

Add your brine until your vegetables are covered, and place your drop lid on the vegetables so that all the solids are submerged.

just barely covered!

It’s a little hard to tell from this photo, but the droplid is just barely covered with brine, by perhaps a quarter of an inch.  This will, due to the wilting action of the salt on the vegetables I mentioned above, probably increase to two or three inches of brine above the droplid by tomorrow morning.

This is the point where you carefully maneuver your crock into whatever out-of-the-way, relatively cool spot you have chosen as pickle parking… and leave it be.  Check it each day to make sure all is as it should be, thoroughly submerged and all that good stuff, and skim off any scum that forms.  (You can also drape a clean dishtowel over the top of the crock to keep dust out if you like.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.)  But otherwise, the pickling process is now between the veggies and the  local airborne bacteria, and there’s not much to be done except clean up after yourself, and anticipate the goodies to come.

About which there will be more when there is more to say.