The party goes on

January 1, 2012July 25, 2013 | Green Card Gardener

Taking red currants out of the freezer for Red Currant Meringue Pie on January 1 is one of the great pleasures of being a gardener. The moment when I poured the frozen pearl-like red currants out of the bag, all the hard work of getting them into that bag was forgotten, although last year was not a good season for currants. I had less than two pounds, which makes today’s pie even more precious. The recipe can be found in my cookbook Spoonfuls of Germany.

While I dread the long, cold winter on our mountaintop in northeast Pennsylvania, I do not wish to live in a place where gardening is possible year round. Each time I wash store-bought lettuce, I think how wonderful it will be to have our own tender greens again in the spring. I would not want to trade the physical and mental 5-month break from gardening, and my looking forward to the new gardening season, for a non-stop crop of lettuce.

Gardening is like a party, where the anticipation and the preparations are part of the fun. Deciding what to grow is like drawing up the guest list. Making a crop rotation plan is like determining the seating order; just like people, not all plants get along with each other. Selecting and ordering seeds is like planning the menu and going shopping. After all is set up and ready, waiting for the wondrous moment when the seedlings emerge is like waiting for the guests to arrive. When they do, all you can do is make sure they feel comfortable and stay as long as you want them to. Enjoying the harvest, fresh from the garden or months later in frozen or canned form, is an ongoing feast!

Butter bypass

December 18, 2011November 3, 2018 | Green Card Gardener

It’s not that I don’t like butter, on the contrary. I just don’t want to clog my arteries or those of the people for whom I care and cook by using butter when it is not absolutely necessary.

Butter is quintessential to many basic recipes, such as béchamel sauce, and my view is that if you don’t want to or cannot make them with butter it’s better to stay away and make something else than coming up with a weird concoction that is neither fish nor fowl.

That brings me to my long quest for a low-fat pie crust. I cringe when I see recipes that call for 1 stick, or even 1½ sticks butter – for nothing but the crust! Sure, pie crust needs to have the right consistency, flaky at best, but oftentimes it is a mere receptacle for the filling. So why would I dump 56 grams of saturated fat into that shell?

I have been trying out all types of alternatives for pie crust with butter, from using organic shortening, which has a certain aftertaste and is still high in fat, to yeasted pie crust, which only works for savory pies and should be eaten very fresh.

In German cuisine there is a crust made with Quark and vegetable oil (called Quark-Öl-Teig). It is low fat, very pliable and tastes still good after a day or two. Quark is unfortunately rarely available in the United States but I have found that Greek yogurt can be a very suitable substitute.

When I made this pie crust today, I marveled again about how easy it is to roll out (rolling out pie crust is definitely not one of my strengths). Another advantage: this crust can be rolled out right away, no chilling required like for piecrust with butter or shortening.

Unless I flip-flop about butter one day, from now on I will make pie crust this way.

Low-Fat Pie Crust with Greek Yogurt and Oil

For a 9-inch to 10-inch piecrust

1/3 cup (3 ounces / 80 g) 0% Greek yogurt), more as needed

2 tablespoons 2% milk

2 tablespoons oil (canola, sunflower, or any other oil with neutral flavor)

2 tablespoons sugar (omit in savory pies)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (omit in savory pies)

Pinch of salt

1 cup + 3 tablespoons (6 ounces / 165 g) flour (all-purpose, whole wheat flour, or whole grain spelt flour, or a 50:50 mix of whole grain and all-purpose flour)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Mix all ingredients in a bowl with a spoon until they form a ball. If the mixture is dry and crumbly, add more Greek yogurt, 1 tablespoon at a time.

2. Transfer to the countertop and knead with your hands until smooth.

3. Roll out on a lightly floured countertop, or between two sheets of wax paper. Grease pie pan and line with the piecrust. Fill and bake according to recipe.

One lonely head of cauliflower

December 11, 2011May 2, 2012 | Green Card Gardener

My first try with cauliflower yielded one (!) tiny head of cauliflower. I don’t know whether I planted the seedlings too late, did not fertilize or water them enough, or whether the extreme ups and downs of the weather this fall stunted their growth. Should I plant cauliflower again I will certainly have to educate myself better, which is perfectly all right, because gardening is lifelong learning.

Of course I had to do something special with that cauliflower. My favorite dish with cauliflower is a yogurt curry that I have often eaten at Curry in a Hurry, my favorite Indian eatery in New York City. I did not have a recipe so I experimented with the ingredients. The result came close to the original although the sauce curdled a bit (things to learn here, too…)

That lonely head of cauliflower was not the only harvest. I also picked the last radicchio and dug the last beets. My other trial crop this year, kale, is still standing. It is less finicky than cauliflower and thrives in cold weather, when the starch gets converted to glucose. That’s the only aspect of winter I look forward to right now – harvesting kale in the snow.

Yogurt Curry with Cauliflower

1 tablespoon corn oil

1 teaspoon black mustard seeds

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds

1/2 stick cinnamon

Pinch of asefoetida

1 large onion, finely sliced

1 large garlic clove, finely chopped

1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric

1 teaspoon salt

Pinch of cayenne

1 bay leaf

8 ounces cauliflower flowerets

1/2 cup low-fat plain yogurt

1/2 cup buttermilk

Freshly ground black pepper

1. Heat the oil in a heavy medium-size pot to the point of almost smoking. Add the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, asefoetida and cinnamon stick and fry until the mustard seeds pop, 1 to 2 minutes.

2. Add the onion, garlic, turmeric and bay leaf. Reduce the heat to medium and cook until the onions starts to soften. Add the cauliflower and 1 cup water. Mix well, cover, and cook for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the cauliflower is very tender and falling apart.

3. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the buttermilk and yogurt. Heat throughly but do not cook, stirring. Season with salt and pepper. Remove the cinnamon stick and the bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper. Serve hot with basmati rice.

Makes 2 main course servings

Brining olives, bringing back memories

November 26, 2011May 11, 2018 | Green Card Gardener

Pomegranates and olives are the two things that I associate the most with my Tunisian grandmother. Of course I cannot grow either in my Pennsylvania garden so when I saw fresh olives for sale the other day I could not resist buying some to try my hand on brining them.

Those olives brought back vivid memories of my grandmother. Most of them have to do with food, as I did not speak a word of Arabic as a child, and my grandmother did not know French. And, like most women of her generation, she was illiterate. She basically communicated with me through food. I remember her putting things on my plate, and when she realized I liked it, she nodded or chuckled, or both, and put more on my plate.

My grandmother’s cooking was as Mediterranean as they come – no dairy whatsoever. Before trips to Tunisia, I remember my mother buying gingersnaps for her at a spice store in downtown Frankfurt, a place where she usually never shopped. In the 1970s, gingersnaps were something very exotic for Germany, and certainly not cheap. I tried one and found it awful (today I love gingersnaps) but my mother told me that these were the only cookies my grandmother liked and was able to eat. It only occurred to me now that she had a milk allergy.

At my grandmother’s house in Ksar Hellal, a town in the Tunisian coastal area called the Sahel, the meals were taken in the large courtyard. We sat on straw mats, with the starry night sky as the ceiling. You could faintly hear voices and music from neighboring houses, and cooking smells wafting over, yet it felt ultimately private.

The middle of her courtyard had a small, rosette-shaped elevated garden with an orange tree, a pomegranate tree, and some turtles roaming around. My grandmother knew how much I loved pomegranates, so each time she came to visit us in Germany, usually in the winter, she brought me pomegranates from that tree.Olives, especially olive oil, was omnipresent in her cooking. The greenish oil was so thick that a spoon could stand in it. Like all her other provisions, she kept the olive oil in earthenware amphora, neatly lined up in the long narrow storage room. The olive oil came from the family’s olive groves and she used it for everything, from frying thick wedges of potatoes to her delicious hot pepper sauce, which was much milder than harissa, and which I never managed to fully recreate. She did not distinguish between light olive oil for cooking and the thick cold-pressed grade. I never use extra-virgin olive oil for cooking, I find its flavor too strong, but back then I did not mind. Then, of course, there is the price issue. Good extra-virgin olive oil is expensive. Early this summer I finally found a mail order source for Tunisian extra-virgin olive oil. I bought three liters thinking it would last us a whole year. We were out after a few months and I recently had to reorder.

My grandmother also made her own olive soap. I still have one of those irregularly shaped chunky bars, and I never thought of using it because it is one of the few objects that connect me to her. When I went to her house ten years after she died, I took as many photos as I could. The house was deserted and clearly falling apart. For a short while I hoped I would be able to save that gem, with its beautiful Moorish tiles, its wrought-iron windowpanes, and its sleeping alcoves with elaborate multi-colored woodwork frames. But renovating it was too big of a task for me at a time when I was just starting my career. Then, life took me elsewhere and, eventually, to the United States.

Brining olives takes time. Mine are still at the stage where I need to soak them in water and change it daily to remove the extreme bitterness. I hope it will work out and I will end up with tasty olives in a couple of months so I can post the recipe. (Update, January 2012: The cured olives failed, they were awfully bitter. I will rely on the pros for olives but it was fun to try).

In the meantime, all this thinking and reading about olives put me in such an olive mood that I concocted a quick salad with olives, using leftover chickpeas and sun-dried tomatoes from the garden. This is, like most salads in Arab and Middle Eastern cuisines, a compact affair, small and filling, like Tabouleh. Chickpea Salad with Green Olives