Nuts

Olive Oil Poached Fish with Fragrant Salt

~ Bergamot Orange ~ 2 Comments

I just got back from Spring Break in Italy where I was inspired to restock my kitchen in Tunis with some specialty supplies.  First of all, the table at the agritourismo we stayed at had a bottle of chili oil every night and we got addicted to it,  wanting to pour a little on everything.   I bought the hottest chilies I could find at my market when I got home and got my own bottle started steeping.  This is such a simple thing that I had completely forgotten about making.  My friend, Lauren, just gave me this pretty Polish pottery stopper for my birthday so I made up a lovely bottle in minutes.  I wanted to keep most of those cute chilies whole so I just made slits in the ends so the oil could come into contact with the chili flesh and seeds. I filled the bottle to the top with our grassy, green olive oil.

Then, the PAM grocery store, outside Siena, had a tremendous selection of specialty salts.  I have about every salt I need now to cook through Mark Bitterman’s book, Salted, cover to cover.

I made up another salt mixture, based on a recipe from Saha, A Chef’s Journey Through Lebanon and Syria, by Greg and Lucy Malouf.  This is easy to put together and keeps for 6 months.  It is a nice quick cure for a piece of fish.

Fragrant Salt

  • 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds, ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds, ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon cardamom seeds, ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds, ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon nigella seeds, ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon sesame seeds, ground
  • 2 tablespoons sea salt

Put the ground spices, toasted sesame seeds and salt in a skillet and gently warm through so they merge into one fragrant powder.  Store in an airtight jar.

Olive Oil Poached Fish

adapted from Saha, by Greg and Lucy Malouf

Dust the fish all over with the Fragrant Salt and refrigerate for an hour to lightly “cure”.  Before cooking, rinse the fish and dry it thoroughly.

In a deep cast iron skillet or fish poacher, put a layer of sliced onions.  Place the fish on top, skin side up.  Pour in enough olive oil to barely cover onions and fish.  Put the pan on the stove and heat gently to 140 degree F.  Cook for 8 minutes then remove from the heat and let the fish sit in the oil for another 2 minutes.  You can easily skin the fish at this point, if desired.  Carefully lift the fish out of the oil and place it on paper towels to drain.

Make the Tarator.

Tarator

  • 1/2 cup walnuts or pistachios, toasted and finely chopped
  • 1 cup cilantro leaves, finely shredded
  • 1 small purple onion, very finely diced
  • 1 red finger-length chili, seeded and finely diced
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground sumac
  • Juice of 1 lemon
  • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients and pack onto the top of the poached fish before serving.

Cookies Till They Come

~ Bergamot Orange ~ Leave a comment
My boys are coming.  My boys are coming.  It’s Saturday morning and we were up late at our staff Christmas party last night, but I sprang out of bed with the call to prayer at sunrise.  We have that auditory time regulator here in Tunisia.  I love it.
I’m Tabitha Tittlemouse today.   Oh gosh, I love The Tale of Mrs.  Tittlemouse and her fastidiousness over every tiny detail, every tittle.  How about this line from the Wikipedia synopsis:  Mrs. Tittlemouse fears she “shall go distracted” as a result of the turmoil and takes refuge in the nut-cellar.  You know where to look for me if I need a little time out this week, though all that’s in our cellar is wine, no nuts.
There’s so much I want to do:  make up heavenly beds for jet-lagged boys to sink into, prep the basics of some midweek feasts so we can have friends over to enjoy the season and visit with the guys, and make cookies.   I think that this is going to be my nervous distraction for the next 24 hours, minus sleep, while I’m picturing them at every stage of their journey.
I can’t just pick any cookie recipe and pull it off, here.  I looked at Bon Appetit’s  31 days of cookies and  I can get many of those ingredients here, but often there is just one missing ingredient, like corn syrup, that makes me think they won’t come out right without it.  As with all things in Tunisia, it’s best to begin with what we’ve got.  There is actually a treasure trove of special ingredients available at the moment.  A local store had bulk-packaged quantities of the following this week:  hulled pistachios, shredded (unsweetened) coconut, dried apricots and hulled, toasted sesame seeds.  Added to that are some plump golden raisins and dried pears I bought in Nice and finally, some dried Montmorency cherries gifted to me by Shelly.  And I have ginger.  My friends and I are always so concerned  that we can’t get ginger here that we buy it in large amounts every time we see it.  It turns out that ginger has been available recently, both fresh and dried, like the stuff you see in the Chinese apothecary shops in China towns, and I now have all of the forms required to make a triple- ginger cookie, one of my very favorites.
Because I knew it would occupy the most oven time, I began with biscotti.  Cranberry/pistachio biscotti must be ubiquitous.  Recipes kept popping up all over.  My one unavailable ingredient in this recipe was almond extract and I do think it would have been a fine addition.

I dried the cranberries in my food dehydrator on Lummi Island when I was home in October.  They took an extremely long time to dry.  For about 24 hours, they were just hot, plump, berries not looking like they were getting any more shriveled.  So I started poking them and squeezing air out and finally some of them dried out and some didn’t so much.  I tossed them in a Ziploc anyway and brought them back here, keeping them in the freezer.  These are the end of them.
Once baked, sliced, and then oven dried, the pistachios in the cookies become deliciously nutty and the little bit of tart cranberry creates a bright accent.  I’m not even going to dip them in chocolate because I really like the vanilla/nut balance as it is.

 

Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti
Ingredients 
1/4 cup light olive oil 
3/4 cup white sugar 
2 teaspoons vanilla extract 
1/2 teaspoon almond extract 
2 eggs 
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 
1/4 teaspoon salt 
1 teaspoon baking powder 
1/2 cup dried cranberries 
1 1/2 cups pistachio nuts
Directions 
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). 
In a large bowl, mix together oil and sugar until well blended. Mix in the vanilla and almond extracts, then beat in 
the eggs. Combine flour, salt, and baking powder; gradually stir into egg mixture. Mix in cranberries and nuts by
hand. 
Divide dough in half. Form two logs (12×2 inches) on a cookie sheet that has been lined with parchment paper.
Dough may be sticky; wet hands with cool water to handle dough more easily. 
Bake for 35 minutes in the preheated oven, or until logs are light brown. Remove from oven, and set aside to cool 
for 10 minutes. Reduce oven heat to 275 degrees F (135 degrees C). 
Cut logs on diagonal into 3/4 inch thick slices. Lay on sides on parchment covered cookie sheet. Bake 
approximately 8 to 10 minutes, or until dry; cool.
So that’s the first cookie and I am planning on a line up of five in the next 24 hours.   I just gave the boys a wake up Skype call and they are officially underway.
I’ll keep posting as I bake (is this fun?).   You can bake along with me if you’re inclined.

Whole Orange Cake

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Thanksgiving is coming up this week, but we won’t be at home for Thanksgiving Day.  Having Thursday and the connecting Friday off from work creates an irresistible draw to do some regional traveling.  I’ll tell you later in the week where we will be.  Never-the-less, I feel like doing some festive cooking.
We are just on the cusp of orange season.  I won’t add them to the What’s in Season list yet because they’re still a tinge green and a tiny bit sour, comparatively, but the scent of oranges does conjure the holidays, in my mind.
I’ve been waiting a few weeks to try this whole orange cake.  It seems to be an Australian country wives’ recipe, but I had to do so much converting that this recipe is mine now.  If you want to check the original or if you prefer metric measurements, here is the link.  Otherwise, you should just trust me.  I am very much in the mood for a cake with the marmalade-like brightness this cake implies.  Ground almonds will temper that mood enough.  Then, it will be soaked in an orange rind and dessert wine syrup.
We stock our wine cellar at a winery not far from Hammamet called Domaine Atlas.  Pictured below is the actual Bredy wheelbarrow of wine cases we bought the last time we were there.  Mind you, we entertain a lot.  Each time we are there, we stick in a few bottles of their dessert wine which comes in clear,  unlabeled bottles. The Australian recipe calls for botrytis-style dessert wine.  Botrytisis really a controlled decomposition process which is why it is fondly referred to as “noble rot”.  I don’t know how noble our local product is, but it is suitable for sipping and cooking.

When I took this photograph, I had in mind one of those magazine set ups like oranges + almonds + dessert wine using actual plus signs, but I don’t know how to do all that so the key ingredients are  just all there mingling in a group.

Whole Orange & Almond Cake with Dessert Wine Syrup


Ingredients (serves 8)
3 large oranges 
Melted butter (to grease  pan)
5 eggs 
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
2 cups almond meal 
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder 
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups dessert wine
1 tsp. thyme, lavender buds, or Herbes de Provence (optional)
Double cream, to serve
Method
1. Place 2 oranges in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil over high heat. Drain. Return oranges to the pan and repeat process (this will reduce the bitterness of the peel). Return oranges to the pan once again and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, adding more water when necessary to keep oranges covered, for 1 hour or until oranges are very tender. Drain. Set aside for 2 hours or until cooled to room temperature.
2. Preheat oven to 325′ F. Brush a round 8 inch cake pan with melted butter to lightly grease. Line the base with parchment paper. Cut oranges into quarters. Remove the white cores and any seeds. Place in the bowl of a food processor and process until smooth.
3. Use an electric beater to whisk the eggs and 1 cup of the sugar in a large bowl until thick and pale. Stir in the orange puree. Add the almond meal, flour and baking powder, and stir until just combined. Pour into the prepared pan and use the back of a spoon to smooth the surface. Bake in preheated oven for 1 1/4 hours or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Set aside for 5 minutes to cool slightly.
4. Meanwhile, use a zester to remove the rind from the remaining orange.  Juice the orange and place in a medium saucepan along with the rind, wine, remaining sugar and herbs. Place over low heat and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes or until sugar dissolves. Increase heat to high and bring to a boil. Cook, without stirring, for 2-3 minutes or until syrup thickens slightly. Remove from heat.
5. Turn cake onto a wire rack over a baking tray. Spoon the hot syrup over the warm cake. Set aside for 30 minutes to cool. Cut cake into wedges and place on serving plates. Drizzle with any remaining syrup and serve with double cream, if desired.

Pumpkin Cashew Cheese Dip

~ Bergamot Orange ~ Leave a comment
          Remember that ginormous pumpkin I stuffed and baked last Sunday?   Wow, that was a lot of pumpkin.  After the dinner guests took their small slivers (My husband:  “No pumpkin for me, I’ll just have some stuffing.”) and I gave a huge hunk to our hostess, I still took this much home.

We ate the stuffing with a chicken dish on Monday and I cut, peeled, and refrigerated the rest of the pumpkin.  Then I got really busy and couldn’t cook much for a couple of nights.  Finally, on Thursday, I needed to bring an appetizer to my book club and found a recipe for something called cashew cheese.  This is actually a vegan recipe that contains absolutely no dairy and is foundationally built upon pumpkin.  Yea, that’s good for me.
I couldn’t find raw cashews in Tunis, but I had blanched almonds and gave those a try.  I don’t know what cashew cheese is meant to taste like, but this made an interesting pumpkin spice flavored dip, slightly sweet, with a little kicky heat from some cayenne.  Served with baguette slices brushed with olive oil and rosemary, slices of fresh apples, and some real cheese,  it was nice.  The almonds didn’t completely break down so my dip had some chopped nuts that needed further chewing,  It was fine.

This is REAL cheese my friend, Lauren, just brought from The Hague.
The first new lemon of the season.