I’ve been on a shrimp jag the last couple of weeks. It began with Shrimp in Chipotle Sauce, or Camarones Enchipotlados, from Diana Kennedy’s cookbook The Art of Mexican Cooking. This dish of perfectly cooked shrimp in a slightly sweet tomato-based sauce with spicy, smoky, roasted flavors can be served as a main dish, hot with white rice, or as an appetizer, hot or cold. I like the idea of serving the shrimp cold, as an alternative to the popular appetizer of boiled and chilled shrimp with cocktail sauce. In my fantasy, Shrimp in Chipotle Sauce are served on a veranda, preferably overlooking the ocean, with a cold beverage to women dressed in light cotton sundresses and men in sear-sucker pants and crisp, cotton shirts. (Because it was snowing where I live day before yesterday, it is indeed a fantasy.)

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Ricotta cheese is used in Mexican cooking in various ways—to fill squash blossoms, empanadas, tacos, quesadillas, fried pockets made with corn tortilla dough, and to make faux “scrambled egg” dishes, like the two recipes, shown below, I made from The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy: Ricotta Scrambled in Tomato Sauce and Ricotta Scrambled Like Mexican Eggs. Like Crumbled Indian Cheese with Peas from Entice with Spice, the first DCCC pick, (more…)

Any fool can grow Swiss chard, I like to say. My gardening strategy is a process of elimination. I’ll give something one or two tries, and after that it’s off the list; I’ll let someone else, with greener thumbs than me, grow it. My goal is a garden of foolproof foods, and chief among them, come rain or shine, is Swiss chard. (Other foolproof greens are collards, kale, and mustard greens; but not spinach or watercress.)

Long before I started growing greens, (more…)

A lot of good cooking is derived from using up what’s at hand. In this case the recipe for Dried Beef Hash, or Aporreada de Huetamo, from The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy allowed me make use of some dried beef I had in the freezer (it’s always a good day when I actually remove something from our over-packed freezer instead of just adding to it) and, since this hash include eggs, some of the eggs that are being produced (more…)

You’ve never made homemade noodles before, and you forgot to pick up dried egg noodles at the store as a back-up. You’re intuitive about all things savory, and the cooking techniques associated with them—braising, sautéing, stewing, roasting, poaching. When it comes to baking and dough in general, you’re less certain. So in your nervousness, coupled with a tendency toward perfectionism (bad combination), you follow the noodle directions to the letter, leaving your commonsense at the kitchen door. After rolling out the dough until it is paper-thin, you roll it up into a scroll, cut it into ¼-inch sections, and then place the pinwheels on a cornmeal-dusted tray as directed, where they are to dry for at least one half-hour before boiling. Then, three hours later, when it’s close to dinner time, you begin to unroll the noodles. You discover that the dough has become quite comfortable as a wheel and doesn’t want to budge. With patience you get most of them unrolled, though you do end up with some broken or double lengths and a few wheels.

This is what I found myself doing one Saturday last month, just as our guests Melanie and Matt were to arrive. If only the cookbook author had said to unroll the pinwheels of dough before placing them on the tray to dry. But, after all, it’s impossible to account for the strengths and weaknesses of every home cook. And this is how you learn, I thought, and become familiar with and eventually intuitive about a new cooking terrain. (The whole episode reminded me, appropriately enough, of a book my mother used to read to me when I was small called The Noodle-head Epaminondas. It is about a boy who followed directions to the letter, but didn’t have commonsense to apply them to the right context.)

No matter. The egg noodles—hilopittes in Greek—and the rest of the dishes I made from the DCCC pick, The Food and Wine of Greece by Diane Kochilas, including several meze options and the main course, Braised Rabbit with Olives, were delicious and, even with the small hiccup with the noodles, came together effortlessly and quickly. And who cares if some noodles are shorter or thicker than others when you’re among friends? We served one of the best red wines I’ve had in a long time: a wonderfully dry and full-bodied yet smooth red wine from Nemea in the Peloponnese. While it’s not the wine the author recommends for the rabbit dish—she recommends a red from Náoussa, a region in Macedonia—it is the only Greek red wine that my local wine shop was able to procure. As an introduction to the wine of Greece, it made a very good impression, and we enjoyed it with the rabbit. Dessert was my boyfriend’s tarte tatin served à la mode Greek-style—with a dollop of thick Greek yogurt.

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When I asked Georgia Cone, a Greek-American and member of the Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club, which of the recipes in The Food and Wine of Greece she recommended I try, Soutzoukakia Smyrneika, or Meatballs, Smyrna Style, was at the top of the list. Now that I’ve made them, I can understand why this dish is so popular among Greeks, despite the generous use of cumin—a spice that is lesser used or, in many regions in Greece, nonexistent.

After mixing ground beef with fresh parsley, cumin, garlic, onion, salt and pepper, and two tenderizing acids—bread soaked in red wine and red wine vinegar—the meatballs are formed into small oval nuggets and set in the fridge to rest for an hour. They are lightly browned in olive oil and simmered for an hour or so in a rich, roux-thickened sauce made with fresh tomatoes, red wine, and a very small amount of sugar.

The resulting meatballs are very tender and flavorful, and the naturally sweet and tangy tomato sauce, enriched with beef drippings, is addictive.

Diane Kochilas, the author of The Food and Wine of Greece, suggests serving the meatballs with rice or mashed potatoes. Trolling around the Internet for more information about these delicious meatballs, I found a reference to serving the meatballs with french fries on Peter Minakis’s blog Kalofagas: Greek Food and Beyond. He writes, “Think of the sauce as sweet, aromatic Greek ketchup . . . yummy sauce to mop up with the fries.” (This isn’t far off. I found a recipe for Greek ketchup on Food.com that is thickened with a roux and includes beef broth.)

The combination of french fries and luxuriously thick tomato “gravy” got me to thinking. Why not create a Greek spin on poutine—the popular Québécois dish of french fries, beef or chicken gravy, and cheese curds—swapping out the curds for feta? The photograph below this invention: oven-roasted fries topped with Smyrna-style meatballs and tomato sauce, feta, and some fresh chopped parsley for color.

Whereas we enjoyed the meatballs served as a main course with mashed potatoes, and untraditionally as Greek poutine, our favorite way to eat them is the simplest: on their own as a meze offering with some good crusty bread to sop up the sauce. (Think of them as an alternative to the small Swedish meatballs popular as noshing or appetizer fare throughout America.)

You can find a recipe for Soutzoukakia Smyrneika on Diane Kochilas’s website.

Before cooking from The Food and Wine of Greece by Diane Kochilas, I had no idea how diverse the savory pitta options are in Greek cooking—pitta is the Greek word for “pie.” Like many Americans, I’ve eaten and enjoyed Spanakopitta, the popular Greek pie made with spinach (spanaki) and cheese and layers of super thin phyllo dough. But there are many more savory pies: lamb, zucchini and cornmeal, ground beef with a rich béchamel sauce, leeks, wild greens, artichokes, rabbit. During the several weeks the club has been cooking from The Food and Wine of Greece, I made Hirinopitta (Ground Pork Pie) (see photo), Kotopitta me Feta (Chicken and Feta Pie), and, for lunch with Lynne, Kolokithopitta (Savory Squash Pie), shown above. (A slightly different version of the recipe for the squash filling and pie dough can be found on Diane Kochilas’s website.)

Phyllo means “leaf” in Greek, describing the very thin sheets the dough is sometimes (more…)

Earlier this month the Randolph-area Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club had its first potluck: an assortment of 18 dishes and condiments from the Indian cookbook Entice with Spice by Shubhra Ramineni. 

After nearly two months of trying recipes from the book and sharing our experiences in the kitchen by email, we were finally all sitting down together around the same table. (Actually, the same two tables. To accommodate everyone and every dish, we pushed two tables together.) For several of us, the potluck was the first time we had met. 

The real surprise for me was the artisan cheese maker and general queen of all dairy products who walked through the door, Karen Bixler. My boyfriend and I had taken a raclette cheese class with Karen, organized by Rural Vermont. Though her name had appeared in the emails we’d sent back and forth, I hadn’t put the name and person together. Karen says that she makes homemade feta. How perfect is that for our next cookbook: The Food and Wine of Greece. 

With eight people cooking, and some making multiple dishes, the table was crowded with food. Before sitting down at the table, we enjoyed two appetizers standing around the kitchen island, as they came off the stove: Jhinga Kebab (Pepper Shrimp on a Stick) prepared by Sam and two types of Samosas—potato- and lamb-filled—served with Tamarind and Mint Chutneys prepared by Jenn. (more…)

Indian cookbook author Shubhra Ramineni lives in Texas, where okra is a popular vegetable and is available year-round. She says that Texans are always surprised to learn that okra is also a popular vegetable in Indian cooking.

Sauteed Okra with Onions and chapati

In the South, okra is prepared in a number of ways: fried, pickled, stewed. And it is a key ingredient in gumbo, where it adds flavor and serves as a thickener.

In New England, where I live, okra is nearly as exotic as fresh curry leaves. It is rare to find it fresh in grocery stores, and even frozen is a gamble. I have sometimes found it at farmers’ markets, but not often. (This is not so surprising because okra grows best in warm climates; it is a relative of cotton, after all.) And okra is highly perishable: once picked it should be used within about three days. So I can see why Northern grocers and farmers are not inclined to take a chance on breaking into the underserved okra market. It’s a catch-22. Northerners don’t often get the chance to experiment with it because it’s hard to find, and grocers and farmers, presumably, don’t want to take a chance with okra not selling because of a lack of interest. What we need is an okra education campaign!

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My friend Lynne is a librarian. She loves books; in fact, she used to sell them. That’s one reason her book displays at the library are so good. She enjoys participating in book clubs, and gave me some tips about running book club meetings when the Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club was still just an idea. I would love to have Lynne in DCCC, but the thing is, Lynne likes to eat better than she likes to cook. So I’ve decided that a lunch with Lynne, featuring the food of the current DCCC cookbook, is a great way for Lynne to participate, Lynne style.

Luckily Lynne has an open palate and welcomes food made with fiery chili peppers—just so it’s not too hot. A few weeks ago, I had Lynne over for a lunch from the cookbook Entice with Spice: Indian Scrambled Eggs (Anda Bhurji) and Flaky Wheat Bread (Sada Paratha). Actually I had an ulterior motive when deciding to attempt homemade paratha for our lunch.

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