Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful winter pie and I’m sure you’ll find some time or other during the next month or two when trotting out a beautiful, tart-sweet, brightly-colored, vitamin-C-rich fruit pie will be precisely the right thing to do.  It hearkens to other pies I love, Shaker and Amish in origin, that use dried fruit when the fresh versions are so out of season as to be almost unimaginable.

To make it, you will need the following

• Pie crust sufficient for a double-crust  pie
• A 9  or 10 inch diameter pie dish
• 4 cups fresh cranberries, washed and picked over
• 2 1/2 cups dried tart cherries (lightly sweetened, which is typically how they’re sold, is fine)
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar (depending on your tastes, and whether your cherries are sweetened)
• juice of 3 medium oranges
• zest of 2 medium oranges
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 3 Tablespoons ginger liqueur, such as creme de gingembre or Domaine de Canton
• 1/2 cup King Arthur Flour Pie Filling Enhancer OR about 1/4 cup powdered arrowroot starch mixed with 1/4 cup sugar

1.  Preheat the oven to 350F Roll out one half of your pie crust and line the pie dish with it.  Blind bake the bottom crust 20-30 minutes, until well set and golden in places.

2. While the bottom crust is blind baking and then cooling, simmer the cranberries, dried cherries, orange juice, orange zest, liqueur, cinnamon, and sugar together in a large saucepan until some of the cranberries have burst and the cherries have begun to plump up and the whole is nice and hot.  Remove from heat and let cool somewhat before adding the Pie Filling Enhancer (or the DIY equivalent), and stir thoroughly to combine and distribute the thickener evenly throughout the mixture.

It will look a bit like this:

3. Pour the pie filling into the prepared pie crust.  Top with a second crust in whatever format floats your boat.  With pies like this one, I like using a cookie cutter to cut out little pie-crust shapes, then laying them on top of the filling.

4.  Bake at 350F for about an hour, or until the filling is thoroughly cooked and set and the top crust is nicely golden.  Cool well before cutting, as a too-hot cranberry behaves, in the mouth, in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of napalm.

                          

Pie is no exception.

This pie has a total of 10 ingredients.  11 if you count water, which traditionally doesn’t get counted in recipe-writing. Your pie could have even fewer, potentially, and still be glorious.

Pie crust should not scare you.  If you own a food processor it is so easy it’s almost embarrassing.  Even if you don’t own a food processor it’s not exactly juggling spent nuclear rods whilst rollerskating down the Filbert Steps.

Here is the ratio you need for a good basic sweet pie crust, sufficient for one 9 inch double-crust pie or 2 single-crust, with a little left over for baking in little strips as a snack.  Because snacks are important.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon table salt
• 2 Tablespoons sugar
• 16 Tablespoons unsalted butter (or vegan margarine), chopped into quarter-inch cubes
• 4 Tablespoons nonhydrogenated solid vegetable shortening

Have your fats ice cold and by ice, I mean put them in the freezer for 12-24 hours.  Having your flour be cold is also a good idea.  I store mine in the freezer.  The colder the ingredients the flakier and nicer your pie crust will turn out.

When you’re ready, make yourself up a big measuring cup or small bowl of ice water.  Pack it with ice cubes, then fill with water.  Stick a tablespoon measure in there so you have it ready when the time comes.

Place the dry ingredients in your food processor.  Pulse once or twice to combine.  Add the fats and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal.  Not sure what that means?  Well, if it looks like wet sand looks when you stir it up with your toes, that’s about right.

When you get to this point, pour this mixture into a large mixing bowl and grab a fork.  Sprinkle 7 Tablespoons of ice water over the top and begin to stir it in.  The mixture will clump, which is what you want.  You want to encourage the clumps to get bigger and to incorporate more and more of the flour/fat.  This takes some strength!  Some force!  This will not come together like iron filings clumping onto a magnet, you have to push and mash.  But do use a fork, because the heat of your hands can toughen the dough. Work quickly.  Pie crust making is a brusque and short process.  Don’t think you have to baby it.

Sprinkle on another tablespoon or two of water once you get to the point where no more will incorporate easily.  It should take no more than 10 T total (and may take somewhat less) to get all the dough to come together.

When it has come together and you have a nice big heavy dense mass of dough, turn the dough out onto a floured surface.  Cut it in half.  Pat each half into a disc about as wide as your hand from heel to fingertips.  Pat the edges so that there are no big cracks.   Work quickly and handle the dough as little as possible, because again, the heat of your hands can toughen the dough.  It doesn’t have to be pretty!  Wrap each one in plastic and put it in the fridge.  The cooling off time will let the flour absorb the water without creating gluten (which would toughen your pie crust).

So you have a pie crust.  Now, what to put in it?  This time of year in the northern hemisphere I strongly recommend some kind of apple situation.  Here’s what I put in the one pictured above.

Apples — I used Bramleys, which are an outstanding cooking apple.  Any good cooking apple will do.  Cooking apples are tart, dense, and hard, not the crisp sweet things people look for as eating (dessert) apples.  Some possible varieties: Pippin, Empire, Northern Spy, Pink Lady, Gravenstein, Hubbardston.  Some apples normally used as eating apples, like Granny Smith, will make a decent pie.  But others, such as Honeycrisps or Red Delicious, do not make a good pie at all.

I usually prep my apples for pie this way: quarter, core, and peel, then slice across the quarters the short way into thin slices (7-9 slices per quarter apple).  This lets them stack evenly in the pie, increasing the likelihood that your filling will be dense, which is both satisfying from an eating perspective and architecturally preferable to ones that run all over when you cut into the pie and have to be served with a spoon.

Dried tart cherries — entirely optional, but nice.  You could as easily toss in a few handfuls of whatever other dried fruit you liked, chopped into small bits if required.  Raisins are good, so are chopped unsulfured unsweetened dried apricots.  But you can also just have apples.

cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice — these are the classic seasonings for an apple pie.  Heavier on the cinnamon than the other two, and you’ll be using them in a powdered format.  Season to taste.  I’m also fond of Penzey’s premixed Apple Pie Spice, which is delicious and convenient.

a little sugar — if your apples are super tart, or you just like a sweeter pie, add a little sugar.  A few tablespoons, no more.  It doesn’t matter what kind of sugar you use.  White, brown, maple, whatever you have that you like.  But you don’t have to add any sugar at all if you don’t want it.  And sometimes you don’t.

Mix your prepped apples, dried fruit (if using), spice, and sugar in the same bowl you mixed your pie crust in.  Don’t wash it first, you want the remnants of flour and butter to get mixed in with the apples to help thicken the filling.  If you did wash it already, just toss in about 2 Tablespoons of flour when you mix the apples/spice/sugar, then dot the top of the fruit with a few small pats of butter before you put the top crust on the pie.

OK, so now what?

Now you roll out the pie crust.  Get your rolling pin out, and the pie plate you’ll be using.  You’ll need a big flat surface to roll on, and some flour to dust the surface with so the crust doesn’t stick.

Roll one half of the pie crust out so that it’s in a rough circle (this is not geometry class, don’t stress) that is about 3 inches bigger around than your pie crust.  It should be evenly thick.  If it tears, moosh the torn edges back together and pat them down gently.

Transferring the rolled crust to the pan can be tricky unless you know how.  I’ll tell you how.  Loosely and gently roll it up around your rolling pin, then lift the pin and the crust over the edge of the pie plate, then unroll and drape the crust across the pie plate.  Gently tuck it down into the pie plate so that the crust conforms to the shape of the plate.

Fill the pie!  With most fruit pies you want the fruit to stack pretty densely.  For apple pie, this means that most (not all, you needn’t get all obsessive about it) of the apple slices will lie on their flat sides.  I also believe in filling a pie fully, which for fruit pies means that they need to appear slightly over-filled when you put them in the oven because fruit cooks down.

Obviously, the amount of fruit will vary depending on the size of your pie plate and the size of your fruit pieces: larger pieces take up more room, smaller ones can be compacted into less space. For a 9-inch apple pie, though, I usually end up using 7 or 8 apples.  More if they’re tiny, fewer if they’re huge.

Pat the fruit gently into place to ensure that it is happy.

Roll out the top crust the same way as you did the bottom crust.  Place it over the top of the pie with the same rolling-pin transfer method.  With a paring knife, trim both bottom and top crusts to the same size, leaving yourself an inch or a little more of seam allowance — where the crusts touch at the side of the pie — all the way around.

Pinch those “seams” together and fold them up and in toward the center of the pie to make a rim of sealed pie crust.  You can get decorative if you like, with pinching little divots into it or whatever, but that’s totally optional.

The last steps, before you slide this bad boy into a preheated 350F oven, are two: steam slits and a cookie sheet.  Steam slits are the slits you cut in the top crust with a sharp knife to let some of the steam escape while the pie bakes.  Otherwise the top crust will end up soggy instead of flaky.  You can make these decorative or you can just stab the thing a few times and call it good.

A cookie sheet (preferably one with a rim all the way around — jelly roll pans are great for this if you own one) is what you put the pie plate on before you put the whole thing in the oven, so that in the not unlikely event that the pie oozes some juice out of the pie plate, it doesn’t end up on the floor of your oven.  It’s easier to wash a cookie sheet than it is to clean your oven.

Then you bake your pie.  How long?  Until the top crust is sweetly golden all over.  Not brown, just gold.  But definitely not pasty white.  The small amount of browning is crucial — the crust tastes better, the texture is better, and the additional cooking time it takes to get the pie nice and golden is a good way to make sure your fruit is thoroughly cooked.  Usually this takes about an hour, maybe a little more or less depending on your oven and whether you’re cooking anything else in the same oven at the same time.  You’re allowed to start peeking to see if doneness has been attained at around 45 minutes of baking time, but remember that every time you open the oven to peek, you let heat out and so it will actually take a little longer than you think.

If you do this a lot it becomes second nature and you can whip out a pie in barely more than 2 hours start to finish including the time it takes to make the crust and peel the apples.  And during that second hour, you can clean up the kitchen and still have time for a cup of tea and some quality time with a crossword puzzle.  Or Minecraft.  Or your cat.  However you roll.

p.s.  The leftover scraps of pie crust?  Collect them, moosh them into a ball, roll them out thin, cut into strips, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar,  and bake for about 15 minutes while the pie is baking.  When they are golden brown, pull them out and let them cool a little, then eat them with that cup of tea.

                          

Black beans are a little aggressive. As Garrett McCord put it, “not afraid to get in your face and call your mama ugly.”  They are salty, and pungent.  For some people, a little goes a very long way.

Most American-style Chinese restaurants make black bean sauces that really only deserve the name as a courtesy.  When you order them you will find, perhaps, if you are lucky, half a dozen itty-bitty black beans lounging in a mostly clear thick sauce made primarily — most likely — out of chicken or pork broth, a bit of garlic, some MSG, salt or soy sauce (salt in light-colored ones, soy in brown), and cornstarch to thicken.

The real deal is a lot chunkier and gunkier and a whole lot funkier. It is all about those black beans, in other words.  How much you use depends on how much you like the taste of black beans, of course.  At my house, black bean dishes can get pretty darn black.

You can find jars of prepared black bean sauces in Asian markets.  There are lots of brands, not all of them Chinese (Vietnamese and Korean cuisines also have versions I know reasonably well).  There are types that have garlic and types that have chiles, types that have ginger.  The irreducible basis for pretty much all of them is black beans and garlic.

But since all a jar of prepared black bean sauce really has to offer you is the convenience of having the various sauce elements preselected and mooshed up together — and this is pretty trivial to do at home — why not just make it yourself?  It’s tastier, fresher, and you can adjust the seasonings exactly as you like them.

Also, if you have the preserved black beans solo, it frees you up to do things with them other than sauce.  For instance, they can be scattered over a piece of fish, along with minced garlic or ginger, before you steam it, and as it cooks it will impart flavor to the fish as well as creating a tasty seasoned liquid in the steaming dish.

But back to black bean sauce.

Let’s get this out of the way first: there is no One True Black Bean Sauce.  China’s a big damn country, there are additional millions of diaspora Chinese all over the world, there are thousands of ways to use black beans.  All I can tell you here are the basics, and you will have to experiment to find out what you like.   I have, in my time, eaten and cooked black bean sauces that contained oyster sauce, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, dried shrimp, shrimp paste, garlic chives, chili oil, chili paste, fresh chiles, pickled chiles, dried chiles, onion, preserved plum, sugar, hoisin sauce, plum paste, and quite a few other things besides.  All were different and all were good.

What they all have in common is black beans, which you prepare thusly: measure out the amount of black beans you want.  For most dishes, that’s a couple tablespoons.  You’ll get the hang of it.  Put ‘em in a small dish and rinse them well.  Taste one.  If it’s still super-salty (and sometimes they are), soak them in water for 10-20 minutes, then drain, and taste it again.  They should be salty, but not so salty you can’t happily eat a whole one, because you probably will end up with some whole ones in the finished dish.

Roughly mash the black beans with the back of a spoon or, as I do, with your fingers.  I recommend the finger approach because every once in a while you’ll encounter a wee pebble or bit of mud in your black beans, and you can feel this and remove it if you use your fingers.   You don’t necessarily want (or need) a totally smooth puree.  Just break up the beans a bit so their funky goodness can come out to play.

The basic method for making a sauce out of this is as follows:

Having first cooked all your ingredients in your wok or pan to almost but not quite the desired level of doneness, you remove them from the pan.  Heat the pan.  Add oil.   (Always hot pan, then oil.  Hot oil, then food.)  When the oil is hot, add the mashed black beans plus an equal quantity by volume of minced or finely chopped fresh garlic plus whatever else you want up in there, for which I have some suggestions:

• about half as much by volume of minced fresh ginger
• a similar quantity of slivers of fresh chili of your choice
• a handful of dried chiles of your choice
• about as much hot chili oil as you think you can handle

Stir-fry this until it smells so good you can’t stand it any more (shouldn’t be more than a minute, if your heat is high enough), then throw the food back in.  Toss with the black beans and etc., add a skosh of soy sauce and/or oyster sauce, and a skosh of water or broth if you think it needs a little liquid to make it saucy enough for you.  Most Chinese home cooks don’t thicken sauces very often, but if you absolutely cannot bear not having a thickened glossy restaurant-style sauce, a splash of cold water in which some cornstarch or powdered arrowroot has been dissolved can be added to thicken it up.  Throw in a handful or two of chopped green onion, or cilantro, or both. Keep tossing with the food to distribute the flavors everywhere that you want them to go for a minute or two.  Then transfer into a serving dish and serve.

What’s good with black bean sauce?  Other assertive flavors are particularly nice.  I am a huge fan of black bean sauce with pretty much anything in the brassica family: brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, kale.  It’s also wonderful with thinly-sliced pork and chunky, wok-charred pieces of thin-walled frying peppers (green or red, doesn’t matter).

Alternately, it plays nicely with firm-fleshed fish, with shellfish — awesome with mussels and a metric ton of chopped green onion — and, interestingly, and only if you really like the taste of black beans, with very mildly flavored things like eggplant and tofu.

                          

And speaking of laundry, I realized as I began to deal with Mount Washmore today that while I’d listed a couple of sets of housekeeping principles, and two guides to the frequency with which I tend to think various kinds of housework should be done, in a few earlier posts, I hadn’t really touched on laundry except for a brief bit on stain removal.

So.  In the spirit of “Let me make it easier for you,” here are some First Principles of Having Laundry Day Go More Smoothly.

Sort by color. Clothes should be sorted before they are washed.  Dark colors with dark colors, medium colors with medium colors, light colors with light colors.  Generally whites can be washed along with light colors, but if you have enough whites that they can comprise their own load, it’s not a bad thing to do them separately.  And while you’re sorting by color…

Sort by fabric weight and delicacy. If you put very delicate fabrics, like chiffons or georgettes or even very lightweight linens, through the wash with very heavy rough fabrics, like denim or toweling, you may find that the delicate fabrics get damaged in the process.  Watch out for items with lace  as well, since lace can easily snag on rougher fabrics.

Sort out new items and wash them carefully. New clothes should be washed with extra care at least the first time or two.   If they are bright or dark in color they must be washed with items that are of a similar color, because the dye may very well bleed on the first few trips through the wash.  (Neglecting to do this is how one ends up with formerly white underwear that are now that unappealing shade of grey-pink.  Enough said.) Yes, this is all still true if you wash in cold water.  Ask me how I know.

Check your pockets. Unless you enjoy putting your cellular phone through the washing machine or picking endless tiny pieces of shredded facial tissue out of your laundry or trying to remove the stains left by a lip balm that went through the wash undetected until after it melted in the dryer, just take the minute or two it requires and check your damn pockets.

Zip your zippers, manage your drawstrings, remove extraneous bits. Because the pulling and tugging that garments undergo in the washing machine can wreak havoc on bits that can get tangled, caught, or pulled on, it is wise to zip up all zippers and tie drawstrings into a loose overhand knot (double them up first if necessary) before you wash them. In the same spirit, remove things like shoulder pads (if removable), belts, and so on from garments before you put them into the wash.

Read your care labels. If you are in any doubt about how a garment should be washed, read the care label.  That’s what it’s there for.  If your garment doesn’t have a care label, or if it is illegible, consult a good laundry reference like Mendelson’s Laundry.

Invest in a delicates bag. If you have a thing for hand-washing, by all means go to town and enjoy yourself.  If you don’t, however, a delicates bag is a godsend.  Use this for all water-washable things that can’t really take the punishment of a normal wash cycle on their own: lace, lingerie, knits, washable silk, etc.

Pre-treat stains as soon as possible. Even if you won’t be doing laundry right away, treating stains ASAP can make all the difference in terms of whether you have a chance of getting them out.  Do not wait until laundry day to treat stains.  Time is never on your side with stains.

Things to Never Put in the Dryer: Any item can be air-dried, but not all items can be tumble-dried.  There are some things you should never dry in a machine dryer both because of the exposure to heat and because of the effects of the friction and tumbling.

• Elastic and/or Spandex are not friends with the dryer.  Heat accelerates the deterioration of elastic and mechanical action accelerates the breaking of elasticated fibers.  So, when you have garments that are either a) made entirely out of elasticated or stretch fabric (like Spandex) or b) depend on functional elastic for their structural integrity (like brassieres), do yourself a favor and wash them in cold water and do not put them in the dryer, ever, full stop.
• Wool is another fiber not to put in the dryer.  Not only will heat shrink it, possibly even to the extent of felting a knitted or woven fabric, but even in pre-shrunk woolen items, the friction and heat accelerate pilling, which looks dreadful and is also bad for durability.
• Washable silk can sometimes be dried in a dryer, but you should check the label.
• Cotton that is not pre-shrunk must be dried with some care.  Air-dry if possible, or dry on low heat (or no heat) in a tumble dryer so that you don’t shrink the item.

Things Not To Wash In Machine Laundry:

• Hand-knitted and hand-crocheted items should not be washed or dried in the machine.  This includes high-quality lace and other very delicate trims.
• Silk, unless the care label explicitly says it’s machine washable.
• Leather, latex, rubber, and PVC.  There are some rubberized items that are exceptions to this rule.  The care labels will tell you explicitly.
• Items with beaded, sequined, or other small, hard, sewn-on trim items.  The mechanical action can easily rip these off.
• Items with buttons made of wood or bone, as water, heat, and detergents are not kind to them.

Wash Temperatures: Most washable things, most of the time, can be and should be washed in cold water.  It’s easier on the fibers and easier on the energy bill.  Most modern detergents are formulated to work well with cold water washing.

Hot water can be used to help sanitize very durable fabrics like bedsheets, bath towels, kitchen towels, and so on, if that is desired.   Be aware, though, that the hotter the water the more likely you are to damage or shrink fabrics… for the very same reasons that very hot water helps kill germs and other unwanted houseguests.

Promptness Counts: Promptly getting wet wash into the dryer (or onto the line, or however you’ll be drying your items) means that nothing will linger damply for long enough to grow mildew or any other fungal excitements.

Promptly getting dry wash out of the dryer or off the line (etc.), and either folding or hanging it promptly on a hanger means fewer wrinkles and no cats nesting in your nice clean laundry.

A Trick For Avoiding Wrinkles: Remove the clothes from the dryer (or off the line) when they are still just very slightly damp.  Hang them on plastic or wooden clothes hangers (avoid metal since it may rust or leave marks) and smooth any wrinkles out with your hands.  Let the items continue to dry in a place without any brisk breezes that might ruffle or flap the fabric.  Most things will dry up nice and smooth this way.  It is especially effective on trousers, which should be hung by their cuffs from a pants hanger, and on plain button-front shirts, which should be buttoned up to ensure that the plackets lie smooth and the garment hangs correctly.

                          

So I thought I would share.

Clean from top to bottom. Gravity works.  Take advantage of that fact by cleaning the stuff up high before you clean the stuff down below, so that any cruft you knock off of the high-up stuff will not fall onto a clean surface but rather onto one that is yet to be cleaned.  This means, for instance, dusting the bookshelves before you sweep the floor, and cleaning the back of the toilet tank and the top of the toilet seat before you clean the toilet.  That sort of thing.  Start at the top and work your way down.

Dry before wet. Dust and dirt that can be easily moved and removed when a surface is dry often turn into sludge when they are wet, as anyone who has ever tried to sweep a floor on which water has recently been dripped can tell you.  This is why you sweep a floor before you wash it. This means that even though it appears to violate the top-to-bottom principle, you want to sweep your bathroom floor before you scrub the sink and toilet, because of the risk of slopping water on the floor that would then interfere with your ability to sweep.

Sweep and dust frequently, wash infrequently. Water on floors and furnishings is really never ideal. Removing dirt by sweeping, dustmopping, or dusting is much easier on your belongings than using water and soap or other surfactants.  Incidentally, when I say “dusting” I do not mean using furniture polish or any of those dusting sprays or what-have-you.   Polishes have their place, but they’re not the same as just a plain old dusting with a clean soft cloth.  Old underpants and undershirts make excellent dustrags, and you can just keep washing and reusing them until they are irredeemable, so they’re very economical as well.

Scrub brush + rag + hands and knees is always better than a mop. This is one of those things you have to try before you really understand.  Mops do a great job of pushing dirt around and a lousy job of picking it up and getting rid of it.  If you want a floor to be really clean, you have to get down on your hands and knees and scrub that bad boy like you were washing dirty words out of its nasty little mouth with soap.  Scrub with hot soapy water and a stiff brush.  Then wipe up the residue with a clean soft rag that you’ve dampened in a bucket of clear water.  Rinse out the rag frequently, and change the water as soon as it gets cloudy.  If you do this once in a while — as infrequently as three or four times a year in low-traffic areas — you can get away with just sweeping and dust-mopping the rest of the time.

Single-purpose cleansers are almost never worth it. No, you do not need a special cleanser to get the soap scum off your shower walls.  No, you do not need a special can of spray-on ozone-killer to clean your kitchen sink (those scrubbing bubbles are an animated fiction anyway, don’t get your hopes up).  A small arsenal of things that will clean and disinfect multiple kinds of surfaces are a much better bet.  I recommend the following:

• a mild scouring powder like Bon Ami
• a mild liquid soap like Murphy’s Oil Soap
• a good window/glass cleaner like Windex
• a good disinfecting cleanser like Lysol
• a giant-sized box of baking soda (deodorizes, also a good mild scouring powder)
• a big bottle of white vinegar (can be used to wash down most things)
• and, for really stubborn stuff and for cleaning in the even of illness-related biohazards, a bottle of chlorine bleach.

I also am a big fan of melamine sponges, aka “magic erasers,” though they are a little wasteful.  These, plus some rags, a sponge or two, two buckets, a broom and dustpan, a dustmop, and the occasional scrap of paper toweling and you can clean your entire house.  Unless you have carpets.  In which case a vacuum sweeper is also good to have.

Deal with the trash as you go. Carry a trash bag with you as you clean your way through the house.  Put whatever you want to throw away into the bag.  And as you finish a room, empty its wastepaper basket or other rubbish bin into your bag as well.  Don’t leave landmines of “stuff I meant to throw away” behind you, it will only end in tears.

Save the tub/shower for last. If you’ve just cleaned your house, chances are you’re going to want a shower or bath yourself.  So save cleaning it for last.  It’s the very last thing you will do, right after you’ve finished taking your shower or bath.  Then not only will you be clean, but the whole house — including the tub/shower — will also be clean.

                          

The elderberry bushes I planted last year are now quite large and blooming profusely, so I decided it would be fun to try  my hand at  making my own elderflower liqueur.  I’m a big fan of St. Germain liqueur, which has a great deal of elderflower in it (along with various fruits), and have enjoyed elderflower cordial, the nonalcoholic infused sugar syrup, many times.  In the past I have had decent success at making various other types of infused liqueurs and brandied fruits– Meyer lemon limoncello, gingerbread rum, lemon-ginger cordial, brandied cherries and plums and peaches–so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

First, pick your elderflowers.  You want the heads that are fully bloomed, but that are not yet yellowed or withered-looking, since as they wilt they can take on an alarming aroma of cat piss.  You’ll want to carefully examine them and remove any tiny insects, of which there will be more than you expect because of course you aren’t going to use the blossoms from elderberry plants that have been sprayed with icky things like pesticides, right?  Right.  So you’ll be debugging, in the literal sense.  Be patient, since either you can get them out now or you can drink a bug-infused liqueur later.

Your Very Good Dog will help you be patient.  He likes to sunbathe while his monkeys do the work.

Then you strip off the blossoms, with as little of the green stems as possible, and shove them into sterilized jars.  Pack the jars nice and full, since you want plenty of plant matter available to infuse its oils into the alcohol you’ll add in a minute or two.

Fill the jars with clear, plain alcohol.  I did two jars, and filled one with grain alcohol and the other with cachaca, the Brazilian sugarcane liquor, to see which I like better.  I’ve made some very nice fruit infusions with cachaca in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works.  Grain alcohol, of course, brings no flavor of its own to the party, and is very high proof, so it affects botanical ingredients somewhat differently and you end up with a different flavor at the end.

I also added a small quantity, about 1/4 teaspoon, of citric acid to each half-pint jar.  I’ve found in the past that the acid helps retain whatever color gets infused, and also helps balance the flavor.  You don’t need much.

Put lids on your jars.  Put them in a cool, dark place to infuse.

And now we wait.  I’ll give these a few weeks to infuse, then strain the solids out and see what we’ve got.  After that, I’ll sweeten the infusion with simple syrup, or possibly do a second shorter infusion with some other, complementary ingredients — lemon zest, perhaps, or some kind of fruit.  We shall see!

                          

In Sicily, they haven’t always had much to eat.  But one thing they’ve always had a pretty steady supply of is sardines.  Another is garlic.   A third, mirabile dictu, is pasta.  A fourth is olive oil.  Put these things together, with whatever other interesting things you have lying around the place, and believe it or not, you have the sturdy skeleton of a very fine meal.

Many Americans I know have an essentially religious aversion to sardines.  They don’t like anchovies either, or herring, or mackerel, or other fishy-tasting, fishy-smelling, oily little delicious fish. Occasionally they’ve never even tasted any of them, but they’re sure they don’t like them anyway.

Well, too bad for the ‘fraidy-cats, because not only are all these small fish tremendously good for you (hello, vitamins A and D! nice to see you, omega oils!) but they are tasty and versatile and will make your belly, your pantry, your conscience, and your pocketbook all pretty darn happy.  Your pocketbook will be happy because they are cheap.  Your conscience will appreciate that these are reasonably plentiful fish, and easy to find in sustainably harvested versions.  Your pantry will be happy because sardines (and anchovies, and kippered herring, and many other things of this ilk) are available in high quality tinned versions, you can buy a half dozen tins when you’re feeling flush and then sock them away, just like you do with dried pasta, to use them at your leisure.

Buy sardines packed in oil for this.  (Buy anchovies packed in oil, and in glass, always.  It’s like a whole different fish from the tinned kind.)  I like the Portuguese Lusa brand sardines, or Vital Choice brand packed in extra virgin olive oil.

The method is pretty simple.  Put some pasta water on to boil.  While you’re waiting, chop some parsley.  How much?  Oh, a couple handfuls.  Maybe you’ll chop up a few ripe olives too, if you have them.

When the water’s ready, you cook yourself some pasta.  What kind?  What kind have you got?  Things like farfalle work well, but so does spaghetti.

While the pasta is cooking, saute up some sliced garlic, probably with a thinly sliced onion or two.  Throw in some shredded fennel if you have some, or shredded chard, or a couplefew handfuls of kale or what you’ve got in the way of greens with personality.  Don’t burn the garlic, capisce?  Just soften everything up, maybe get a little brown on the garlic.   Maybe you add a small glass of white wine, maybe you don’t.  (Depends on what you have, and whether the bottle’s already open.)  If you do, cook most but not all of the liquid off.  When you’re done cooking it, take it off the heat and set it aside.

Drain the oil off of two cans of nice sardines.  Break the sardines up into large chunks with a fork.  Don’t mash them, just chunk ‘em up a little.

When the pasta’s done, drain the pasta, toss with the sauteed garlic and other veg, then add the sardines and the parsley and toss gently.  If you want a real Siciliano feel to this, a handful of raisins (scoff if you like but the Sicilians know a thing or two about raisins that you might wanna learn), a handful or two toasted pine nuts, and a handful or two of coarse bread crumbs browned in olive oil.  Maybe a scattering of fennel seeds.

Or instead you can throw in a handful of capers, and some lemon zest, a little extra-virgin olive oil, and a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

Or a bit of Aleppo pepper and some spicy Greek oregano if you want to keep it real simple.

Toss gently.  Serve with a salad or some plain steamed or grilled dark greens.  Partners well also with egg, and asparagus, with ricotta salata, and with cucumber salads. Do not be afraid to drink red wine with this, if the spirit moves you.  Or perhaps a Sicilian insolia for a white (yes, there are white Sicilian wines).

Takes about as long as it does to boil the water and boil the pasta.

No fear.  And no excuses.

                          

Buy your chickpeas (and all your dried beans) from stores that have a sizeable clientele of folks who buy dried beans, so you don’t end up with ancient dust-shrouded tooth-breaky monsters that will never cook up tender no matter what you do.  Stores with big Latin American and Indian sections are good places to look.  Or just go to Latin American or Indian grocery stores.  I recommend Goya and La Fe for Latin American brands, and Swad for Indian.

So what’re you gonna do with your pound of chickpeas?  Seems like a lot of beans, I know.  But bear with me.

Well, first you’ll soak them.  Just dump ‘em in a big bowl and fill the bowl with water and set it somewhere out of the way overnight.  Cover it with a plate if you have cats.  Just trust me on this.

The next day, you’re gonna cook them.  The thing with dried beans is that you have to cook the beans before you cook the dish in which you’re going to use the beans.  Plan to do this at a time when you’re going to be home for most of the day.  For me, because I’m a writer and I work at home, this is pretty much any day.  You may be more limited in your scheduling.  Or, y’know, not, because you can cook chickpeas in a slow cooker too.

To cook the beans, drain off the soaking water and give the chickpeas a quick visual inspection.  Throw away any that look weird or discolored.  Also look out for little rocks, which sometimes make their way into dried beans bags.  Throw those away too.

Put your soaked beans in a big pot, and then add plenty of water.  You want to cover your beans to a depth of about 4 inches.  Put this on the heat and bring it to a simmer, then cover, leaving the cover with just a little vent space to help prevent boilover.  (If you cook in a slow cooker, you will not leave the cover ajar.)  Check them periodically.  Add some boiling water to the pot if the water level in the pot begins to get below the top of the beans. DO NOT ADD SALT or anything else.  Just plain old water.  Simmer the beans for as long as it takes for them to become pleasantly soft when you test one.  You should be able to mash the bean easily with the tines of a fork.  You should not cook the beans so long that they begin to fall apart in the cooking water although some of them may split a little.

When they’re done, drain them.

Then divide them into four parts.  Four small batches of four different things, a quarter pound of chickpeas in each, is enough things to give you some variety and not overwhelm you with the need to eat through a batch of something that will last you 3 weeks.

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Balela

While the chickpeas are still warm, you want to marinate one batch of them in a dressing that will later enable them to become a version of the Mediterranean salad called balela.  Make the dressing by whisking together:

1/3 cup olive oil

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed to a paste

1 Tablespoon za’atar (you can buy a good za’atar premixed from Penzey’s if you don’t want to make your own)

a three-fingered pinch of coarse salt (use less if you’re using finely ground salt)

a goodly amount of freshly ground black pepper

Pour this over your warm chickpeas and let them sit in it, covered, at room temperature, until you’re ready to make the rest of the salad.  There are no real rules about how this must be done, but it is traditional for balela to include some or all of the following ingredients:

chopped seeded cucumber

chopped parsley (use whatever kind you like best)

chopped fresh mint

chopped seeded ripe tomatoes (oil-packed dried tomatoes can also work)

minced raw onion

chopped seeded bell pepper, red or green

chopped romaine lettuce

You simply take what of these you like, and mix them up with the marinated chickpeas.  You adjust the seasoning to taste — maybe a little more lemon juice, a little more salt and pepper — and you eat.

What you don’t eat will keep several days if you don’t add lettuce (lettuce gets slimy if it sits after it’s dressed).

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Algerian Ginger Chickpeas

With the second quarter of your cooked chickpeas, you maybe want something to eat hot.  Easy-(chick)peasy.

Take your second batch of chickpeas and put them in a saucepan.  Add either a largish can or jar of diced peeled tomatoes, or else take a couple-few nice big fat juicy ripe tomatoes and grate them into the pan using the large holes of a box grater — this will more or less puree the tomatoes, while leaving you with the skin, which you can discard.  (You may never peel a tomato again now that you know this trick.)  Simmer this to thicken it up a little.

Mince a goodly amount of fresh peeled ginger root.  How much?  Well, depends on how much you like ginger, but I usually use a piece about the size of my thumb.  Mince a garlic clove or two as well.  Maybe a small chili pepper if you have one and you like them (or you can use dried chili flakes if you prefer).  Saute all these in a small frying pan in a little bit of olive oil until everything smells fantastic and the garlic has begun to brown but is certainly not charred or burnt.  Stir this into the chickpeas and tomatoes and let it all simmer a little while longer, maybe 10 minutes, then turn off the heat and let it stand for 20 minutes, uncovered.

My favorite way to eat this I learned from chef <a href=”http://www.chefzadi.com/2007/09/basic-chickpea-.html”>Farid Zadi</a>, whose blog introduced me to the idea of these ginger/tomato chickpeas, and that is to put some in a bowl and slide a fried egg on top.  It’s a fantastic breakfast.

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Chickpea Fritters

The third quarter of your cooked chickpeas you’ll make into some nice hearty little fritters.  You can eat these in a sandwich sort of format, like you would falafel, or you can eat them straight on a plate with some salad and maybe some plain yogurt with a little garlic and black pepper stirred in as a sauce.  Or you can dollop harissa on them and eat them that way.  Really up to you.  You can even make these into little “meatballs” if you like.

Mash the chickpeas with a fork until they make a slightly chunky paste.  Stir in a beaten egg if you are not vegan or otherwise disinclined to eggs.  Also mix in a moderate amount of minced raw onion, a minced/crushed garlic clove or two, maybe a little minced parsley if you have some.  Some salt does not go amiss, nor a small glugette (a teaspoon or two) of olive oil.  The texture should be stiff enough to form into patties or small balls.

Troubleshooting: If it is too loose and won’t hold a shape, add a small amount of one of the following: fine breadcrumbs/chickpea flour/wheat flour/cornstarch.  Add a tablespoon or so at a time, mix it in thoroughly, and give it a minute or two to absorb some liquid before adding any more.

You can spice these if the mood strikes you.  For an Indian vibe, garam masala works well here.  If you’d prefer a North African slant, try some ras el hanout (this page has a promising recipe for mixing your own if you want to try, or shop around for a pre-mixed version you like).  Or leave it relatively plain.

Form the mixture into patties or small balls and fry them at a moderate heat in a pan well-coated with olive oil.  You want to fry them until the exterior is golden brown and nicely crisp.  Flip them when it seems like that’d be a good idea.  I expect you could brush them with oil and bake them, too, but I’ve never done that so I don’t know specifics.  You can figure it out, you know how.

Eat these hot or at room temperature.  They’re not so nice cold, but they do reheat pretty well.

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Roasted Chickpeas

Roasted chickpeas are one of the darlings of the foodie blogosphere right now, and have been for a while, so instead of reinventing the wheel here I’ll simply leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Mark Bittman.  Don’t worry about precise quantities, just work with the concept.  Dry your chickpeas well, oil them, roast them, season them, eat them.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

So there you go.  Four reasonably healthy, definitely tasty, things you can make out of a pound of dried chickpeas.  You want bigger batches, cook 2 pounds of chickpeas.  Or only make one or two of these recipes out of your pound of chickpeas.  Up to you.

If you had to, you could use drained and well rinsed canned cooked chickpeas.  But then it wouldn’t cost less than $2 for the chickpeas any more.  Consult with your inner exchequer and your calendar and decide what makes the most sense for you.  I will say that for my money, the chickpeas you cook from dry always taste better and nuttier than the canned ones, which you may want to factor into your decisionmaking as well.

                          

As for a good utilitarian demiglace you can use a thousand ways?  Well, turns out that’s actually not much more than a premeditated act of condensation and all you need is broth, heat, and time.

The backbone of the classical French demiglace is ferociously concentrated broth or stock, which is what the term demiglace has come to mean in general kitchen use.  Traditionally this is made with about a bajillion pounds of beef or veal bones (or a mixture), which are first roasted to brown them and concentrate their flavors, then made into a nice rich stock.  The stock is filtered through a sieve to remove little particles.   To this stock, oftentimes, tomato paste is added.  Then it gets cooked down, with occasional skimming to remove the protein scum that will form on top, until it’s the consistency of maple syrup or possibly even honey (though I find you can rarely get the honey texture without thickening it somehow, e.g. with a roux).

Anyhow.  Point is, anyone can make a demiglace.  You do have to start with a really good stock or broth, preferably not salted since you’re going to be concentrating it.  Do be wary if you’re starting with ham stock, or the water from cooking a boiled ham, as it can get mighty salty.

It doesn’t have to be beef/veal, incidentally.  It can be any old kind of broth or stock, including vegetable broth.  I sometimes make an excellent vegan demiglace starting with a broth made of the soaking water from soaking dried mushrooms, sauteed fresh mushrooms, caramelized onions, a ton of garlic, and a metric ton of parsley and celery, in case you vegans are interested.

Start by chilling and then skimming the fat from your broth.  Then put it back on the heat.  If you are working with beef, veal, lamb, mushroom, or some combination of these, adding tomato paste is fine if you like it.  If you are working with chicken or pork of some sort, don’t.  (I’ve never made a fish or shellfish demiglace, but see no reason it couldn’t be attempted.)

Simmer the broth uncovered for as long as it takes to reduce it to a maple syrup consistency.  Skim the scum from the surface every couple of hours and discard it.  You don’t want to boil it too hard — a gentle simmer is best.  You can, in fact, do this in a slowcooker/crockpot on a high setting with the lid off, if you like.

Depending on the quantity of liquid you started out with this may take quite a while.  Plan it for a day when you plan to be hanging around the house anyway.

When it’s a nice maple-syrup consistency, you can decide to either simmer it down further to see if you can get it to a honey-like texture, or you can call it a day and ladle it into sterile containers and seal it and let it cool and then stow it either in the fridge or the freezer.

Use your demiglace for lots of things.  They’re nice for dressing vegetables, either cooked or in salads.  I love a spoon or two of beef or mushroom demiglace with a little olive oil and some sherry vinegar for a spinach salad, for instance.  You can use them to make sauces — the French repertoire has dozens of sauces that depend on demiglace.  You can use demiglace to flavor cooked grains, either dissolving it in the cooking water or tossing the grains with some demiglace after cooking.  It’s awesome stirred in at the end of making a risotto.  And of course you can reconstitute it into a broth or stock if you need to, or use it to enhance the flavor of an unintentionally anemic soup.

You can even thicken it with a roux, add a hit of sherry or Madiera, and have something tolerably close to the original old school mother sauce demiglace itself.

                          

The first secret of having lots of houseguests is: stock up on household linens.  You will require more bath towels, hand towels, washcloths, tablecloths, table napkins, and kitchen towels than you ever dreamed possible.

The second secret of having lots of houseguests is: learn an array of simple but flavorful unfussy foods that appeal to a wide range of palates and do not have any particularly challenging ingredients in terms of the most common allergens.

One of the dishes I whip out frequently for guests is blanched chilled vegetables of some sort or other with a Chinese-inspired, and rich yet mild, slightly sweet nut sauce.  It plays well to children as well as adults.  Typically I use almond butter as the base for the sauce, but any nut butter will work as long as it is unsweetened and of high quality.  If allergies to tree nuts are at issue, you can use tahini.  To make somewhere between two and three cups of sauce, I combine in a bowl

• about a cup of nut butter
• several cloves crushed raw fresh garlic (mince, then crush to a paste with a little salt using the side of a knife, or in a mortar)
• about a quarter cup of hoisin sauce
• a couple tablespoons of Asian sesame oil
• a tablespoon or so of regular soy sauce
• and then whisk in a cup or more of boiling water

until you get the consistency you like.  At times I will also add a jolt or two of citrus juice, either lemon or orange.

If you require a gluten-free version of this, use a GF tamari instead of soy sauce, and instead of commercial hoisin sauce, make your own small-quantity fresh hoisin sauce as follows: combine in a bowl

• 4T tamari
• 2 large dried prunes or apricots, soaked 20 minutes in hot water, then pureed
• 1 T honey or molasses
• 2-3 t cider vinegar, depending on how tart you like it and also whether you used prunes (not tart) or apricots (tart)
• 1-2 cloves crushed fresh raw garlic
• 2 t Asian sesame oil
• optional: hot chili sesame oil (to taste), finely ground black pepper (to taste)

Of course you can make your own hoisin sauce just because you want to, too.  I confess I usually just use the Lee Kum Kee kind that comes in the nice convenient squeezy bottle.  But it’s nice to know how to make it from scratch if you want to.

You can serve the nut sauce with veggies, but also tossed with noodles — this is the genus from which “sesame noodles” arise — or as a dipping sauce for other things.  I like it with grilled pork particularly.  It also plays nicely with lamb.

And speaking of lamb, if you are a meat-eater, you will want to know how to roast a leg of lamb as one of those tried and true, easy things you can pull out when you have guests.  I roasted a very large whole leg this weekend for dinner for 8, and we consumed virtually all of it, leaving just enough meat on the bones for me to make a good lamb stock out of later on.

People talk about roast leg of lamb as if it were some serious technical production.  It’s not.  It’s a lot like roasting a chicken, which, as you may recall if you’ve been reading for a while, is really very easy.  A leg of lamb is a somewhat bigger thing than a chicken, of course.  And it is shaped so that inevitably the thin bit will be well-done and the thick bit will not be.  This is okay, a medium-rare lamb is every bit as beautiful a thing as a well-done, and in fact some people think more so.

Here are my tips for roasting leg of lamb:

First, keep your leg of lamb on the bone. Bones help provide flavor and retain moisture.  Do not give in to the temptation of supposedly easier carving and have your butcher bone it out for you.  Be a grownup, buy it with the bone(s) still in it.

Second, remember that lamb, because it is young, does not generally need a long cooking time to be tender and flavorful.  It also doesn’t really need to be marinated, unless you want to do it for whatever flavor it may add.

Third, remember that cooking meat has two phases, the active cooking and then the resting, which actually finishes the cooking process as well as redistributing the juices throughout the meat.  Allow enough time to do both.

Fourth, do bear in mind that you’ll need a roasting pan that will fit the joint you want to roast.  And, for that matter, an oven big enough to hold it, with the oven racks arranged so everything will fit.

Fifth, if you don’t have a meat thermometer, go get one now.  Not later, now.  You cannot tell when the interior of a big joint of meat is done to the proper temperature by looking at it.  You need a thermometer with a long pointy probe so go get one, decent ones can be had for about $10.

All that said, you prep your leg by bringing it to room temperature and washing it.  I bring meats to room temperature by placing the meat, still wrapped, in a chest cooler (like you’d use for camping) closing it, and leaving it there for a little while.  This lets the temperature rise gradually without any real effect from drafts or external heat sources like sunny windows or busy ovens.  A chest cooler is also a good place to thaw large cuts that might not fit conveniently in the refrigerator, for similar reasons.

Wash down your room-temperature leg of lamb, rubbing it thoroughly with a couple of handfuls of coarse salt to remove any surface ook.  If there are bits you want to trim, do it now.  Pat it dry or let it drip-dry a little.

Preheat the oven to 425F and put the leg in your roasting pan.  Give it a nice rubdown with something delicious.  I typically rub down a lamb leg for roasting with a paste made of roughly 4 parts garlic to 4 parts olive oil to 2 parts coarse salt and 1 part rosemary.  You can omit the rosemary if you like but never the garlic.  You can also substitute other herbs you enjoy for the rosemary — Mongolians traditionally spice lamb with cumin and chiles, for instance.

Pop the leg into the oven and cook at 425 F for about 20 minutes, then drop the temperature to 350 F, and roast for another hour or more, depending on the size of the lamb.  What you’re aiming for is an internal temperature of 145F in the thickest part of the leg (be sure the probe isn’t touching the bone), which is the bottom end of the “medium rare” range for lamb.

The first reason to aim for the bottom of the “medium rare” range with lamb is this: the bits right at the bone will, indeed, be slightly lower in temperature still, so there will still be some truly rare meat on the bone for those who like it, while the majority of the meat will be medium-rare, which is widely considered the optimal doneness for lamb. (I like mine a little more well done, but I am a Philistine.)

The other reason is that the temperature of the interior of a piece of meat continues to rise a little bit after you take it away from the direct heat.  So if you take the lamb out of the oven at 145 F, the interior of that leg will actually coast a few degrees higher during resting as thermodynamics do their thing, which means that you will have cooked it to the middle of the “medium rare” range after all is said and done.

Rest the lamb for 15-20 minutes, then carve and serve and eat and be happy.  Leftovers are a delight and can be served in a billion ways (also convenient when you have houseguests) and of course the bones and odd scraps can be tossed into the stockpot and turned into delicious lamb stock for any variety of soup you care to create.

As an aside: because not everyone knows just how easy it really is to cook a leg of lamb, your houseguests will probably be impressed and honored that you are going to all that trouble for them.  Win-win!