Fearless Kitchen

Recipe: Failed Barley Fritters

Yet more fun with leftovers!  

One of the dishes I made for the big medieval German feast was Barley with Fennel.  Barley with Fennel is a tasty dish, one that is light and healthy and yet filling and delicious.  I loved the stuff.  The thing is, barley takes a long time to prepare.  It is also best made in dishes with glass lids, so the cook can tell when the barley is cooked.  I only have two such pots, so I knew I needed to make the stuff ahead of time.  I cooked and I cooked, and I brought the food, and someone (who's cooked on this scale far more frequently than I have) said, "No one is going to eat that much barley."  And he was right.  While everyone said that they liked the stuff, we had an awful lot left over.  Quite a bit of that leftover barley came home with me.  I knew I'd have to throw some of it away, because there just weren't enough people to eat as much barley as I had left over, but I wanted to minimize the waste.  On the first night I cooked - only two days after the big feast - I decided that I would try my hand at fritters.

I didn't have a recipe.  I'd seen lots of recipes before, but it was only two days after I'd been up for twelve hours straight in the kitchen.  I was physically exhausted, and I was mentally exhausted.  (Still am, in fact.)  The last thing, the absolute last thing, that I wanted to do was look at recipes.  I decided that I did not need any pesky recipes and I made one up.  I knew that fritters are fatty, so I used lots of oil and lots of butter and lots of cheese.  Unfortunately they just didn't work out, at least not as fritters.  They didn't hold together and I'm not entirely sure why.  I decided to just heat the whole parcel up that way and serve it as-is.  As fritters these were a failure.  As plain old barley they were a treat.  A fatty treat, but a filling treat that kept us all going for a while.  

The sage leaf garnish was an impulse.  I swear to you that the leaves were perfectly green until I set them on the barley.  Maybe it's a metaphor.  Whatever.  They imparted just enough sage flavor to the dish to please me, but kind of looked bad.  

Failed Barley Fritters (serves 8; approx. cost per serving not available)

4 cups cooked and cooled barley (leftover Barley with Fennel is best.)

2 cups grated pecorino

2 eggs, beaten

1 stick butter

8 tablespoons olive oil

2 sage leaves to garnish

Equipment:

• Large saute pan
• Large mixing bowl

1. Combine the barley, pecorino and eggs in the mixing bowl.  Mix very well.
2. Melt the butter in the olive oil, then increase the heat a bit.
3. Add the barley mixture to the pan. Stir-fry until heated through.
4. Transfer to the serving vessel.
5. Garnish with sage leaves and serve.

Recipe: Cabbage and Caraway

I know I mentioned yesterday that I had an obscene number of turnips left over from the big medieval German feast I made.  Well, turnips weren't the only leftover ingredient.  I had most of an entire 
jug of olive oil left - sent home without its cap, which made transport entertaining let me tell you.  I had some spices left over.  Also, there was cabbage.  Yes, my arch-nemesis, the evil wicked cabbage.  Fortunately only two heads of cabbage found their way home to me.  I don't know if kitchen staff took some home or if there were only two heads left over, but that's where we are.  I was able to use one head of cabbage for the very next Sunday dinner.  

I didn't do anything particularly exotic, and it seems like this was kind of similar to things I've posted on prior occasions.  This was a very popular dish, as indicated by the fact that there were no real leftovers, and it is very easy to make.  The key, as always when dealing with the dread cabbage, is to avoid overcooking if at all possible.  I add a lot of caraway because caraway is supposed to mitigate the stink of cabbage.  Your wok will look very full when you're cooking this - don't worry, it will cook down.  

Cabbage and Caraway (serves 8; approx. $0.21/serving)

1 head green cabbage, cored and thinly sliced

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 head garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

Kosher salt to taste

2 tablespoons caraway seeds

Equipment:

• Large wok

1. Heat the oil in the wok.
2. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about a minute.
3. Add the salt and the caraway.  Cook about 30 seconds.
4. Add the cabbage.  Stir fry until tender enough to eat - don't overcook.
5. Serve.

Recipe: Armored Turnips

Recipe Source: Depends on who you ask, but the version I used was Platina as translated and redacted by Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington and Sharon Butler in Pleyn Delit.  University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996 no. 38.

Does my citation above look a little odd to you?  Let me tell you a story.  Sometime during the Italian Renaissance - the renaissance that sparked the other Western European Renaissances, please let me point out - a book was written.  This book was by a well-regarded master cook, Master Martino of Como.  He had a friend, a gentleman by the name of Platina.  Platina was a bright man, a very bright man, and he knew an awful lot of people.  Unfortunately for Platina and those who cared about him, some of those people were the sort one would not care to admit knowing as a general rule.  He spent quite a bit of time in prison, as tends to be the case when one knows potential papal assassins.  He hadn't always been circumspect about publishing his own views on things, but when the regime in the Vatican changed over he realized that it might be prudent to write something a little less inflamatory.  He decided to write a cookbook, On Honest Indulgence and Good Health.  This sounds like a good idea, right?  The thing is, a lot of the recipes bore a very strong resemblance to recipes in a book published a little earlier than Platina's, The Art of Cooking by Martino of Como.  

Was it plagarism?  Did Platina just instinctively ape the words of his "good friend?"  I don't know that we'll ever be certain.  As near as my (admittedly scant) research can make out, there is no evidence that Como was at all bitter about the affair.  I guess that cookbook-writing was a lot less lucrative in those days, and Martino made his actual living from being a cook and not a writer.  And Platina did say that if one hires a chef he should be as like as possible to Martnio of Como, which probably did a lot more for Martino's bottom line than hiring lawyers and engaging in a copyright infringement suit would have.  And it's entirely possible that Martino came up with his recipes after discussing them with Platina!  At any rate, both books have recipes for Armored Turnips.  The Platina recipe is a little simpler.  

I probably don't really need to explain myself further - you know I make a lot of medieval food, generally for Sunday open house days, and so making a medieval turnip dish probably doesn't really stand out.  As I've mentioned before, I found myself with a severe excess of turnips after the big medieval German feast I cooked last month.  I'd already made fourteen quarts - yes, fourteen quarts - of pickle.  When I posted to Facebook in a fit of pickle, other people had some helpful suggestions as to other things I could do with my excess.  Some of them, like pelting my enemies with them, were differently helpful.  (Not only would it constitute assault, or vandalism, but then my enemies would have turnips and be fed instead of hungry and sad.)  Others, like this recipe, were better put to use.  It's really nothing more exciting than a turnip gratin, but it went over pretty well at dinner and got some of the turnips out of my kitchen.  I'll point out that my process probably differs a bit from the original redaction.

Armored Turnips (serves 8; approx. cost per serving not available)

2 pounds turnips - this was about two of the mega-turnips I had - peeled and sliced

12 ounces Gruyere cheese, thinly sliced

1/4 pound butter, melted

Pinch nutmeg

Kosher salt and black pepper to taste

Equipment:

• Saucepan
• Colander
• Baking dish

1. Preheat your oven to 350︒.  
2. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil. 
3. Add the turnip slices and par-cook about 3 - 5 minutes - you don't want to overcook them, since they'll get further cooking in the oven. 
4. Drain and immediately rinse thoroughly with cold water to stop the cooking.  
5. Arrange the turnips and the cheese in alternating rows in the baking dish.  
6. Sprinkle with the nutmeg, salt and pepper.
7. Pour the butter over the turnips mixture and bake until the cheese is melted and maybe a little browned, about 10 minutes.
8. Serve.

Recipe: Mackerel with Rhubarb and Pineapple

Recipe Source: Lennon, Biddy White and Georgina Campbell.  Irish Food & Cooking.  Anness Publishing, London, 2007 p. 128

Everyone has their hangups.  Some of us have more hangups than others.  Often these hangups come from some sort of traumatic experience.  I'm leery of any dairy product that has been out of refrigeration more than ten seconds, because I got hideously ill from milk my roommates left out overnight and then put back in the refrigerator.  This is a series of circumstances that will never happen in my presence again, but because I got so incredibly sick I find myself resorting to a level of caution that probably seems psychotic to the casual observer.  My husband has a similar hangup about leftover poultry.  He'll insist that beef that's been in the fridge for a week and a half is probably still fine, but chicken or turkey has to be consumed within 24 hours of being prepared.  This is because he ate leftover chicken that was probably past its prime back in college and got violently ill.  Another hangup he has centers around fish - he has a mortal terror of bones in the fish.  For this reason we've been kind of limited in the recipes I prepare from fish.  We've always used fillets only, and even then he gets a little twitchy.  I was going through this book looking desperately for inspiration and I did in fact find it.  I was so inspired by the original version of this recipe that I just had to have it, and if my husband didn't want to eat whole fish he could fix himself a bowl of pasta.  

I want to point out that, to his credit, he ate the mackerel without significant complaint.  He took some precautions about bones, but he ate it.  I'm very proud of him, and very grateful besides.  

Anyway, while I had every initial intention of following the recipe to the letter, that's not what happened.  I'd been busy working on Dumplings all day, and I was tired, and I was cranky, and I needed to move quite a lot of things out of the refrigerator.  While the recipe for the stuffing was in no way, shape or form onerous - I'm sure I'll do it someday, particularly in light of the excess of mackerel purchased (see below) - I just didn't have the energy.  I decided to toss some herbs and pineapple into the fish.  Yes, that's right.  Pineapple.  This takes the dish rather firmly outside the realm of traditional Irish cuisine, but I just didn't care.  I wanted to get the pineapple out of the fridge.  This meant that quite a few ingredients were left out and changed.  The tarragon in the sauce was exchanged for marjoram due to availability issues.  

In terms of the mackerel... well, I wrote down that I needed three mackerel, because the recipe called for a mackerel per person.  Er... I don't know if Irish mackerel are smaller than the ones we get here, but each one of the mackerel in the display case could have fed a family of four easily.  We froze the other two when we realized my mistake.  

Mackerel with Pineapple and Rhubarb (serves 3; approx. $5.76/serving)

1 whole mackerel, assuming you've got the same huge mackerel where you are.  Use your judgement.

1/2 pound pineapple chunks

Fresh thyme and marjoram to taste

Kosher salt and black pepper to taste

8 ounces rhubarb, cut into 1/2" lengths

1 ounce raw sugar

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram

Equipment:

• Broiler pan
• Saucepan

1. Try to get as many bones out of the mackerel as you can.  I am not very good at this and what remained of the mackerel looked more than a little like crumbled tissue paper, but you're probably better at this than I am.
2. Preheat your broiler.  
3. Sprinkle the insides of the fish with salt and pepper.  Scatter the pineapple and herbs (except that last 1 T marjoram) inside, then fold the fish back over so that the skin side is out.  
4. Place the fish on the broiler pan and broil 8 minutes.  
5. Turn the fish over and broil another 8 minutes.  
6. Meanwhile, combine the butter in the saucepan with the sugar and 1/3 cup water.  Cook over gentle heat until the rhubarb is tender.
7. When the fish is done, transfer to a serving platter.  Pour the sauce over the fish, sprinkle with the marjoram and serve hot.

Recipe: Daikon Namul

Recipe Source: Song, Young Jin.  The Korean Kitchen.  Anness Publishing, London, 2010 p. 144

We recently started up our Sunday open houses again.  This is good from the point of Fearless Kitchen - it gives me recipes to post even though I don't have much chance to cook during the week.  It is becoming very challenging, however, to come up with recipes that are interesting, seasonal, healthy and not prohibitively time-consuming.  It's not impossible to do, but it isn't always easy to do either.  I was feeling a little short on inspiration when I came across this recipe in a book I got for Christmas.  

It was delicious dish, one that fit my requirements perfectly.  It wasn't exactly an exciting dish, but it was nourishing and filling and not terribly expensive either.  It makes a great dish to serve at a picnic or on a lunch buffet.  

I didn't make a whole lot of changes to the recipe.  I increased the quantity obviously, since I was looking to feed quite a lot more people than the original required.  I didn't have any plain toasted sesame oil at all and I didn't have enough hot pepper sesame oil to accommodate the increased quantity, so I had to round out the oil with olive oil.  I will point out that this detracts from the authenticity of the dish, but frankly you do what you have to and in this case I had to use olive oil.  I also didn't increase the amount of chili by as much as I increased the rest of the quantities.  This was because I needed to feed some folks I didn't know that well, and when guests think you've set them on fire they tend to remember the experience without fondness.  Still, the dish was a perfectly adequate little side dish and I highly recommend it.  

Daikon Namul (serves 12; approx. $0.50/serving)

3 daikon, peeled and sliced into 2" matchsticks

1 generous leek, washed and finely sliced

1 tablespoon hot pepper sesame oil

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1 red jalapeno, very finely shredded

Equipment:

• Large saucepan
• Large bowl
• Colander
• Wok

1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil.
2. Add the daikon and blanch about 30 seconds.  Drain thoroughly; pat try with towels.
3. Combine the leek with the hot pepper sesame oil and the salt in the large bowl.  Toss well.
4. Heat the olive oil in the wok.
5. Add the daikon and saute about a minute.
6. Add the leek mixture.  Saute about another two minutes.
7. Add the chili, transfer to the serving vessel and serve.  

Recipe: Poached Tilapia on Turnip Greens

Last year our garden didn't do much of anything.  Before you start fretting about the coming apocalypse, please allow me to point out that it never did anything because we never put anything into the ground.  Life just got away from us last year.  Fortunately we are not and were not dependent on the fruit of our own soil, because we'd have been totally hosed.  This year, though, is different.  This year we've already got things in the ground.  We even totally got our act together early enough to put early season crops in.  We've never managed to do that before.  The broccoli raab didn't do so well, and we wound up pulling it out in favor of our overgrown indoor-sown tomatoes just a couple of days ago.  The turnips, though, flourished so well that they needed to be thinned out.  My husband fretted about that a bit.  "I don't suppose you can do anything with the turnip greens," he said mournfully.

Are you kidding me?  Of course I could do something with the greens.  So many baby turnip greens, just begging to be consumed... I washed them up and used them that same day.  I had already planned to serve fish, I just did something a little different with them.  This was a very easy dish to make, requiring almost no fuss or effort.  And I would like to point out that my two-year-old ate an entire fillet on her own, and half of her father's fish too.  It was a little different from my usual fare - very mild - but it was flavorful and just seemed very relaxing.

Poached Tilapia on Turnip Greens (serves 3; approx. $3.11/serving)

3 tilapia fillets

2 cups vegetable broth

2 tablespoons fresh thyme

Approx. 1 mixing bowl's worth of turnip greens

2 tablespoons olive oil

10 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

Equipment:

• Large, deep saute pan
• Large wok

1. Combine the broth and the thyme in the saute pan.  Bring to the barest simmer.
2. Add the fish and cook until halfway done.  Be careful not to let the broth come to a boil.
3. Turn the fish once during cooking and allow to cook the rest of the way.  Again, don't boil the broth.
4. Meanwhile, heat the oil in the wok.
5. Add the garlic slices.  Saute until just fragrant.
6. Add the turnip greens.  There should be enough water left from washing the greens that no additional water is necessary.  Increase the heat just a bit and saute until the leaves are a very bright green.  
7. Transfer the greens to your serving platter.  
8. Arrange the fish on top of the greens.  
9. Spoon a little of the broth over the fish - not too much, since you're not serving this as a soup.  
10. Serve.  

Recipe: Asparagus with Mustard Sauce

My kitchen is south facing and one side - the south side - is pretty much all glass.  On a warm day it's a lot like working in a sauna.  Turning on the oven is a misery even for me, and I don't generally get warm.  The thing is, when the weather is either cold or gray, the kitchen can be very chilly indeed.  The Spouse, who overheats easily, likes to keep the house just barely warm enough to avoid freezing the pipes.  When you're baking bread this poses a problem, because the bread will not rise if it is chilly.  In cool weather I usually don't bother baking bread unless I have another excuse to turn on the oven and therefore to make it warm enough for bread.  

This recipe dates back to a chilly day.  A chilly day in which I a) needed to heat up the kitchen, and b) had barely enough time to cook food for us.  (Bread is exhausting, at least it is when you're baking a ton of it.)  I wanted to serve a vegetable of some sort on general principles.  This recipe satisfied all requirements.  Really, it's incredibly easy.  All you do is drizzle the oil on, with the salt and pepper, let it do its thing and throw the sauce on at the end.  It's also very tasty.  All three of us really enjoyed it.

Asparagus with Mustard Sauce (serves 4; approx. $1.33/serving)

1 bunch asparagus, trimmed

2 tablespoons olive oil

Kosher salt and black pepper to taste

4 tablespoons spicy brown mustard

4 tablespoons cider vinegar

Equipment:

• Small bowl
• Whisk
• Baking sheet

1. Preheat your oven to 450°.  
2. Arrange your asparagus on the baking sheet.
3. Drizzle the oil over the asparagus and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Roll the asparagus around a little to spread the mixture to all sides.
4. Roast until done, 20 - 30 minutes depending on the thickness of your spears.
5. Just before removing the asparagus from the oven, whisk the mustard and vinegar together.
6. Arrange the asparagus on a serving platter and pour the sauce over it.  
7. Serve.

The German Feast, or In Case You've Wondered Where I've Been Part II

I know I've talked a lot here and there about the big medieval German feast I was planning.  The feast finally happened last Saturday and I'm slowly recovering.  Very, very slowly recovering.  I learned a lot on Saturday, and a lot of the lessons were frankly difficult.  I figured I'd share them with you here and spare you some pain, should a three-course dinner for 150 seem like a good idea to you.

1) Organization.  If you're going to pull something like this off, you need to be organized.  I honestly believed I was quite well organized, but I was clearly mistaken.  I had a battle plan, but like most plans it did not survive its first encounter with the enemy.  

          a) Stuff.  Cooking for such a huge crowd requires Stuff, and lots of it.  There are serving trays and serving bowls and platters and prep bowls and pots and pans.  I planned to use our local group's stock of Stuff.  Unfortunately my perception of what was in the Stuff did not match reality.  I knew I'd have to bring quite a lot of my own Stuff - pots and pans, bowls, knives, other equipment.  These things were all packed in bags.  Someone else unpacked my car - for which I'm very grateful - and I wasted a lot of time running to and fro, looking for things.  Should you decide to run a similar feast in which you need to bring your own Stuff, I strongly recommend clear plastic tubs that are clearly labeled - on the ends, so you can see them even when they're stacked up.  

          b) People.  Unless you have fifty refrigerators in your basement you cannot do all of the prep work at home.  It might not even be feasible for you to do so - some of your dishes might not be suited to advance cooking and reheating.  That's fine.  You will need Help.  Competent help is the most important thing when entertaining on this kind of scale.  This was difficult for me - I am Very Bad at asking for help.  Ask for help well ahead of time and ask for more help than you actually need.  Things come up.  Things happen.  People have lives, and that's okay.  A little redundancy is not a bad thing.

          c) Time.  You have none.  Rather, you don't have as much time as you think you have.  When you did your test feast you did it at home, in smaller quantities, with your own equipment which you know so well that you don't actually require thought.  When you do it on-site, you'll be using the group's pots and pans, which are not like yours.  You'll be using the site's stoves and ovens, which likewise are not what you're used to and may be truly awful.  Water to blanch spinach for 20 Genovese Tarts comes to a boil much more slowly than water to blanch spinach for 1 Genovese tart.  I was warned, and I thought I'd factored in more time, but apparently I did not.  

2) Space.  Maybe you'll be lucky and the only thing happening onsite is your event, and your event consists of nothing but your feast.  This was not the case with me.  The feast was only one activity of many.  There were constantly people running in and out of the kitchen, with excuses that mostly consisted of, "Oh, but I only need (x)."  Or "Oh, I'll just be a minute."  It got to the point where I literally offered to chop off the right hand of anyone who crossed the threshold who was not kitchen staff.  It is an issue of safety.  It is an issue of food safety, because these people don't know (or care) what's being done in the sinks, near the counter, anywhere.  Most food-borne illnesses only take a very minute exposure to become a problem.  It's also an issue of personal safety.  The people who are trying to bring a vat of boiling cabbage over to the sink are not expecting outsiders to be there - the kitchen staff knows what's going on and won't be barging in front of them.  If it takes two people to carry the vat of boiling water over to the sink, they probably can't stop in time to avoid burning someone who gets in the way.  It really, really puts a damper on what should be a fun if exhausting day for everyone.  My husband's suggestion was to have guards at the doors chasing people away next time.  If there ever is a next time, I'll think about it.  

3) Food.  I'll be the first to admit that I would rather have too much food on the table than take the risk that a guest could go hungry, and I'm always making a little extra on Sundays so I can send our guests home with some leftovers for the week.  Because I recognized that tendency in myself I actually sat down and created an Excel spreadsheet to figure out exactly how much of each ingredient for each dish I would need.  I still wound up with scads more food than we needed.  Some things I was able to send home with people, mostly finished things like the chicken dumplings and the turnips and onions.  Other things, like the 75 excess pounds of turnips, were more difficult to unload.  (On a side note, look for lots and lots and lots of turnip recipes in the near future.)  I think that I know where the miscalculation was.  When I tested the recipes I was testing to see if they made sense.  The dishes were served over two days, to two mostly separate groups.  I did not test them all together, to see if they would result in people feeling like they needed to be rolled down the hill toward the highway if they wanted to get home.  

4) Exhaustion.  I did not actually sit down between the time I got out of my car on site until I got back into the car to go home - twelve hours.  This is on top of running around prepping and shopping the previous week.  I'm not saying this to get sympathy, I'm telling you this to warn you that this is not a physically easy activity.  The woman who ran the lunch spread was doing her first lunch spread and she felt much the same way.  I had all sorts of plans for what I was going to do this week and they've all been abandoned in favor of sitting and aching.  (On a side note, if you've just finished a feast like this, do NOT get lost in the Blue Hills.  You will be in for a world of hurt. I'm just sayin'.)  

These are just a few thoughts that are kicking around in my head.  I wanted to make sure I got them on paper - er, into zeroes and ones? - before I completely forget.  If you think you might want to cook a feast like this, great.  Do it and have fun.  But please do learn from my mistakes.  

Recipe: Medieval African Beef and Okra Stew

Recipe Source: Based on research published by Tadeusz Lewicki in West African Food in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1974/2008.  Assistance was also found online here.  

I don't know about anyone else's experience, but we didn't learn much about Africa in school.  I'm talking about Africa south of the Sahara here, not North Africa.  We knew it existed, of course, but we just didn't learn much about it.  Maybe things have changed a bit since then, but really my experience was this: 

1) Humanity begins.  

2) Stuff no one knows about.

3) Colonialism and the slave trade.

That's it.  It was never explicitly stated, but the impression I got from my youthful textbooks was that whatever was going on between earliest humanity and the slave trade did not involve literacy.  And it was easy to accept that premise, because I really had very little incentive to change that idea.  I had very little connection to that part of the world, and it was easier and more fun to research other places.  I was curious about that whole second line item on the list, but not a whole lot of ideas on how to satisfy that curiosity.  I knew there had to be something out there.  Stories about slave rebellions in early colonial America suggested different ethnic groups had different effects on various uprisings, so someone knew something.  Being me, of course, the most important thing to me was the food.  What were my friends' ancestors eating in Africa when my own ancestors were apparently subsisting on turnips and bread?

Then I found this book while browsing at a gathering of medieval enthusiasts.  It's not an easy read.  The font frankly makes my eyes glaze over, which seems like an incredibly trivial distraction but really, it has the feel of reading something my kindergarten teacher mimeographed back before the dawn of time.  Some of the language used is also a little... dated... in places, which I will choose to assume is the result of translation issues.  Once I was able to force my eyes to stay on the page, though, I found the answer for which I'd been at least idly searching for years.  I knew Ibn Battuta had been to parts of Africa, but I hadn't realized just how many travelers from the Arab world made their way to West Africa.  Not only did they go there, but they wrote about what they found.  And five hundred years later, give or take, this Polish scholar sat down and compiled what these travelers had to say about the food they found there.  (More and more information is coming out, to include a trove of documents recently found in Mali.  I'm unfamiliar with them - I'm just starting to research this part of the world.  If you have more information and can point me in the right direction I'd love to know about it.)

It isn't the same as a cookbook, not by a long shot.  At no point, as near as I can tell, does someone say, "Take some of this, and some of that, and a bit of this thing over here, mix it all together, heat it up and you have food.  And you should serve it with that thing over there."  It is however a stating point.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided I was going to stop putting off experimenting with what I found in this book and actually do something with it.  I was looking at the staple starches.  The staple starch in our period, or at least the staple starch to which the most time is devoted in this volume, is sorghum.  I did I quick Internet search for sorghum recipes, knowing nothing about the stuff, and found the above referenced recipe.  From the looks of things in the book, the basic gist of how vegetables were served was in the form of a sauce, made with meat, served with the starch (pp. 57 - 8).  I looked at the Internet recipe, which comes from roughly the right part of the world.   In general, cattle were widespread in West Arica although it's impossible to say how often they were served as food.  (Was beef a special-occasion food, or was it more commonplace?) Onion was well known.  Hot chilies are a New World food and not appropriate for a medieval recipe.  However, in an attempt to maintain a certain level of heat, I used pepper and ginger, both of which were in use in this part of the world.  Okra, while not mentioned in the above book, is known to have been cultivated in West Africa - it came to the New World with the human cargo from that area - and we know that it was consumed as food as far back as Ancient Egypt.  Plus, I really really love it.  I wasn't able to get my hands on food grade shea butter or karite oil so I used olive oil.

I followed the Internet's instructions for the sorghum part of the meal pretty much exactly and I will tell you, I was unenthusiastic.  It was a bowl of gray.  I'm not criticizing the recipe and I'm not criticizing the use of sorghum; it was certainly used in period and that's fine.  It was not to my taste.  Can I point out that they make a sweetener from sorghum?  That's probably got a lot to do with it.  I tried to make it a little more palatable by treating it like polenta, but ultimately I just didn't care for it.  

As for the beef and okra part - wow.  That's all I can say.  I loved this dish.  How is it possible that we aren't eating this every day?  I'm not just tooting my own horn here.  Quite a few of my guests came up to me and said, "I hate okra but I love this dish."  Make this dish - not because it can be vaguely traced back to an exotic culture several centuries ago, but because it tastes good.  Very, very good.  I'm serving it again this weekend at a medieval history enthusiasts' event, although I'll serve it over millet.  I'm not going to include the instructions for the sorghum component, since they're perfectly explained in the original and I didn't enjoy them much.  Serve over whatever works for you.

Medieval African Beef and Okra Stew (serves 8 - 12; approx. cost per serving not available)

1 pound okra, sliced

1 pound beef, thinly sliced

Water

Kosher salt to taste

1 onion, chopped

2 T ginger paste

2 T black pepper

2 T olive oil (depending on the cut of beef you get, you may want more or less)

Equipment:

• Large Dutch oven or similar pot 

1. Combine the beef with 300 ml water and bring to a boil.  Add salt to taste - I'm trying to cut back for a variety of reasons, but use as much as you feel necessary.  
2. Skim the scum off the water.  Boil until the water is pretty much evaporated.  Yes, I know this seems counter-intuitive.  Just do it.  
3. Add the oil and saute briefly.  
4. Add the remaining ingredients along with 1 cup of water.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer.
5. Stir frequently bug gently until the sauce is very thick.  This is much faster than it sounds - okra's wacky like that.  
6. Serve hot over some kind of staple starch.  Millet is appropriate.  

In Case You've Wondered Where I've Been...

I haven't posted here for over a month.  I feel bad about that, I really do.  There are a lot of perfectly good reasons for that, all of which ultimately boil down to "overcommitted."  I have a child.  I have a dog.  Both of these are living, breathing creatures that require a lot of time and attention.  This is not an indictment of them, obviously.  I enjoy walking the dog, and I enjoy taking the offspring on little trips around town.  These things take time.  Also, the child is at an age where she cannot simply entertain herself in her playpen anymore.  She sees me sitting at the computer and assumes that my time is all free.  While I agree that she needs to learn to understand that sometimes grown-ups need to do things that don't involve kids, it's difficult to write an article or even a sentence when one needs to stop every three words to say, "Sorry, honey.  No book right now.  No really.  Put the book away.  Okay, time for a time-out."  For a while now I've borrowed space in my husband's office - maybe once every two weeks - to write up recipes and do things that cannot easily be done with a toddler sitting on one's shoulder insisting "I parrot!  Awk!"  

The thing is, that's not the only thing that's held me back.  For one thing, I haven't been home much, and when I have my husband's generally been traveling or so busy there's no point in cooking.  This is bad on a number of levels.  I've also been busy on a number of mostly food-related projects.  I've been cooking up a storm, but not with anything new to share with you.  My big medieval German feast was last week, and I'll post about that later.  There was a lot of prep work that went into that.  I made all the bread - some sixty loaves or more, if my notes are correct, and that takes time.  So do dumplings.  I am All Set with dumplings.  I said that after last year too, but this time I mean it.  No more dumplings.  And pie crusts.  By the time I get done with 12 - 18 loaves in a day, I do not want to cook.  I do not even want to look at my kitchen.  I realize that this is a horrible confession to make, but it's true.  I would rather eat take-out and suffer the consequences than wash one more dish.  

There is one more food-related adventure I've been on.  The local group that was so kind as to let me cook my medieval German feast has been facing a difficulty in finding sites that will let us cook in their kitchen.  Many of them require a manager with ServSafe certification to be on-site.  Our organization voted to sponsor some members to become certified, and I'm the first to complete the process.  My certificate arrived in the mail.  I was really skeptical when I set out on the path, but ultimately I'm really glad that I did it.  I learned some good techniques that don't require any additional investment in equipment that makes preparing food ahead of time easier and safer, and I've made a few changes in my kitchen cleaning processes.  They weren't so bad in the first place, it must be said, but if it doesn't require significant effort and it makes things a little safer why not change it?  I've also learned quite a lot about food-borne illness.  I honestly wonder how everyone on our annual August non-vacation doesn't just die in our Pennsylvania field.  

So yeah - I haven't been cooking as much as I should, and I've been wanting to cook even less.  The summer season is upon us though, and while my husband's schedule is unlikely to change we'll be entertaining on a more-or-less weekly basis.  Assuming that I can carve out a few hours to write, we should be back to our regularly scheduled fun and food games.