NANCAFE: relaunch edition

I was bone-crushingly tired today after staying up way too late cooking and chatting with L last night. On top of that I was expected at contiguous lectures, appointments and meetings for seven hours. This Bento sustained me well throughout the day. I packed up the last pieces of the no-knead bread along with a couple of slices of Spanish salami, some spinach-chipotle dip, cherry tomatoes with feta and a yogurt-raspberry-strawberry-granola parfait with honey.

As for L’s visit: the shakshuka was delicious but not quite in the way I’d hoped (especially since we forgot the parsley and the feta in all the giddiness) and we didn’t get around to making the peach galette, but L brought over the most delicious cherry jam and even better stories and our time together just flew by! Fortunately there’s still time for galette - I’m seeing L again on Saturday at a little going-away gathering/potluck and I plan to say my goodbyes with the last of the season’s peaches, a golden crust and lots of hugs.

Today my Ms. Bento contained linguine with tomatoes, fava beans and Italian sausage (can you tell that I bought a giant package of sausages?); arugula salad with grapefruit, goat cheese and spiced sunflower seeds; and strawberries and raspberries. This made a day spent studying Spanish syntax and Pericles’s Funeral Oration go by that much faster.

My dear friend L is visiting later today! It’s been nearly two years since L relocated to Germany and this is the first time I’ll be seeing her since last spring. We plan to cook until the windows in our little apartment get all steamy tonight. On the menu is a no-knead whole-wheat bread; a pot of shakshuka* - a new to me dish composed of poached eggs, cubed haloumi and spicy tomato sauce; and a peach galette with a honey-thyme glaze.

*Shakshuka has a rather intriguing story: variations of this dish are found all over the Maghreb and Middle East under a variety of monikers. Apparently the Israeli version is the result of the migration of the Libyan Jewish community and Shakshuka has since become popular breakfast fare over there. Similar, although perhaps unrelated, dishes also exist in other cuisines - most notably in Mexico, Italy and Spain

Nick and I recently got Mr. and Ms. Bentos. This is a rather uninspired photo to start the new chapter of this blog dedicated to our near-daily Bentos; unfortunately I was running too late this morning to whip out our trusty Canon point-and-shoot and had to contend with using my BlackBerry instead. Today’s lunch consisted of an arugula, radish and cherry tomato salad with goat cheese; farfalle with fennel, bull’s horn pepper, Italian sausage and fennel seeds; and strawberries sprinkled with a teensy bit of balsamic vinegar.

It’s hard to believe summer is over. This was a watershed summer for me: I finally quit my job, did nothing for three months except swim, run, play soccer, cook, garden, barbecue, read books in the park and enjoyed every minute of it. School’s starting in a few days and summer has officially drawn to a close but I just couldn’t let it go without a little piece of culinary tribute to remember it by.

Enter caramel-pear butter. What’s so summery about it, I hear you ask. The small, hard Bosc pears I used in the recipe were sourced during a Not Far From the Tree expedition. NFFTT is a fantastic Toronto-based not-for-profit organization that helps homeowners by picking fruit they are otherwise unable to pick with the help of staff and volunteers. The picked fruit is then divided into neat piles of one-thirds: a third goes to the homeowner, a third goes to a charity, and the last third is divided up amongst the staff and volunteers on-duty. NFFTT made my summer even more fantastic than it was shaping up to be, and it was because of them that one clear, sunny morning in August I found myself climbing a small pear tree in someone’s backyard in Roncesvalles. As if literally being on top of the world weren’t enough, I also came home with a hopping bounty of ten pounds of delicious pears that day.

As August wore on, we quickly realized that despite our (and our friends’ and neighbours’) best efforts, the pears were just not going to get eaten. So we searched the Internet, settled on a recipe from Epicurious, got out our paring knives and food mill, and started converting the now-slightly squishy and yellow pears to the rich, thick, deep amber pear butter. It took a good few hours despite a reduced quantity — three lbs of pear instead of the seven the recipe asks for — but the wait was so worth it. The resulting pear butter is a little caramelly and flavoured with a hint of nutmeg, has a slight grit and still smells faintly and divinely of the pears it came from. We’ve been stirring it into our morning yogurt; eating it layered over granola, yogurt, and berries as a chilled dessert after meals; and Nick has been itching to try it over some oatmeal pancakes. Or you could just do what I’ve been frequently doing: eat it straight out of the jar by the spoonful and wistfully remember the summer that was.

Caramel-Pear Butter (adapted from Epicurious.com)

1/4 cup apple juice

6 tbs fresh lemon juice

7 lbs of ripe Bartlett* pears

3 cups (packed) brown sugar

1 tsp ground nutmeg

3/4 tsp kosher salt

*We used Bosc pears

Combine apple juice and 4 tbs of the lemon juice in heavy-bottomed, large pot. Peel, core and cut pears, into 1/2 inch pieces. Add them to the pot and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until pears release enough juice for the mixture to come to a boil or roughly 16 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, stirring frequently until the mixture starts splattering around the 20-minute mark. Remove the pot from heat and press the mixture through a food mill into a large bowl. Return pear puree to pot, add 2 tbs of lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, and 3/4 tsp kosher salt. Bring to boil over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer uncovered until pear butter is thickened, stirring frequently to prevent scorching, about one hour.

Hello readers! I know, I know it’s been a while. But Nick and I have been busy, busy, busy during this time. We’ve been holed up in our cool and shady apartment, enjoying respite from the heat and harvest from our little garden and experimenting with all sorts of delicious dishes! The lovely rainbow chard you see above has been growing in a container all summer long. This particular beautiful, mottled pink-and-green bunch became an equally enticing omelet this morning with the addition of some spicy Calabrese sausage, onions, cherry tomatoes and brie. We ate it with a few slices of buttered caraway rye toast while drinking a pot of passionfruit tea and didn’t want our random summer weekday morning to come to an end!

This, however, is not a recipe post, but rather a sneak peek at what’s coming over the next few days: an intriguing caramel-pear butter recipe, with just a touch of nutmeg; a tofu kung-pao so hot that it tastes like a supernova; and a delicious three-course South Indian meal consisting of rice, zucchini and tomato sambar and bean daal poriyal. Stay tuned!

I’ll admit it - the idea behind chicken soup is great. Throw some left-over shredded chicken and mirepoix in a pot, let it simmer for a bit and at the end of an hour you’ve got yourself some hearty comfort food. However, I take issue with chicken soup’s iconic status as cure-all and nourishment-in-a-bowl. Maybe it’s the South Asian in me talking but when has bland and flavourless broth made with the most boring of ingredients ever done a thing to lift the mood?

That’s why this particular recipe for ajiaco, re-printed in Fine Cooking’s Comfort Food tome, caught my eye. The magazine billed it as Colombian chicken soup and consultation with Wikipedia told me that the Fine Cooking writers had got it nearly right. Ajiaco indeed appears to be a specialty of Bogota and surrounding regions in Colombia and is traditionally made with chicken, corn on the cob and few different varieties of potato (including indigenous papas criollas). However, Wiki also mentions that the papas criollas fall apart during the cooking process and turn ajiaco into a thick, dark yellow potato stew! Bummer!

But I persisted with the recipe anyway because I couldn’t get the thought of a creamy potato stew served with corn on the cob and avocado and topped with sour cream, capers and habanero chiles out of my head. And it was so worth the effort because ajiaco (or my version of it) is unbelievably delicious! It’s in turns smooth, tart, sweet, crunchy, spicy and yes, nourishing too. In short, there’s no chance in hell that chicken soup is ever getting a shot at my left-over roasted chicken, since I plan to be making ajiaco for the rest of my days.

Ajiaco (adapted from Fine Cooking)

For the stew:

1 lb. shredded cooked chicken

1/4 of large white onion, whole

1 leek (white and light green parts only), cut into 1-inch rings, and rinsed thoroughly

1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 ear fresh corn, quartered

1 rib of celery, cut into 1-inch pieces

1 carrot, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

1/3 lb. Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1/3 lb. Idaho potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

1/3 lb. small red potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

2 cloves garlic, peeled

3 tbs fresh cilantro leaves

1 chicken bouillon cubes

1/3 tbs salt; more to taste

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

For the aji: 

1 scallions (white and light green parts only)

1/2 medium tomato, peeled and seeded

1/3 small white onion, peeled

1 fresh Scotch bonnet or habanero chiles or 1 fresh hot red chiles

1 tbs fresh cilantro leaves

1 tbs white vinegar

Salt to taste

For the garnishes: 

1 ripe avocados, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1/3 cup sour cream or crème fraîche

2 tbs nonpareil or other small capers, rinsed and drained (if using large capers, chop them coarsely)

Few sprigs of fresh cilantro leaves

In a large stock pot, pour two cups of water. Add all the ingredients of the stew and bring everything to boil on high heat. Turn the heat down to medium, partially cover the pot and let it all simmer for 40 minutes. In a food processor, pulse all the ingredients of the aji and blend till they are finely minced. Once the stew is ready, top each serving with avocado, sour cream, cilantro, capers and aji.

Apologies for the paucity of posts. Cooking isn’t really in the cards for us during blistering days such as these, especially since our apartment is an unairconditioned inferno. Over the last couple of days of heat wave brutality, we’ve approached the problem of the inferno with what I like to think is striking ingenuity. Remedies have thus far included taping up all our windows with reflective security blankets and attaching the wrong side of a giant box fan to the bathroom window with jewelry wire so that it generates airflow throughout the apartment. With adventures like these (supplemented with generous period of time spent at frozen food aisles and public pools), who has time to cook, right?

This is a dish I had cooked up a few weeks earlier in a flash, inspired by Bittman’s excellent Summer Express article. Truly easy-peasy (no pun intended) and yet richly satisfying (that would be the anchovies), I thought it warranted an entry here, if for no reason other than to break the drought of posts.

Linguine with Anchovies and Petite Poix

Cook linguine until al dente and drain. Sweat a few slivers of garlic in the pan with some olive oil. Roughly chop up a few pieces of anchovies — they will disintegrate in the heat later anyhow — and add to the mix. Add the petite poix and cook until they are wrinkled but not mushy. Top with ribbons of mint, Italian basil and grated Permesan. Although not featured here, I think some toasted bread crumbs would ratchet up the Sicilian-ness of this slight and summery dish.

This recipe began its life just like so many others in the Nick and Nabila household: an impulse buy at the supermarket (halloumi), a late night burst of energy spurred on by untimely pangs of hunger and some serious Google-fu. I won’t lie — this tasty concoction sprung from the sure-to-be-lovely head of Liberty London Girl — but I think it’s worth being the first post on this blog anyway simply because it’s so damn delicious!

As always, the measurements are mere approximations and should be treated as such.

Mint-scented Avocado, Chickpea and Halloumi Salad with Lime

Four avocados (slightly firm to the touch), diced*

1/4 of a red onion, chopped

Olive oil

Juice of one lime

One eight-oz block of halloumi, thickly sliced and fried

2/3 cups of chickpeas, rinsed

3 sprigs of mint for chiffonade, plus some for garnish

Salt and pepper to taste

Wholewheat pita (to serve with)

Fry the halloumi slices in some olive oil on medium heat until both sides are brown. Once cooled, slice them into smaller, bite-size pieces. Mix the avocados, onion, chickpeas, mint, lime juice, halloumi pieces, salt and pepper together. The halloumi is quite salty, so you may want to undersalt the rest of the salad.

Serve inside or with some heated whole-wheat pitas.

*A note about the avocados: I’ve made this with both slightly firm and very ripe avocados on different occasions, and personally much prefer the slight yield of the firm ones to the all-encompassing creaminess of ripe avocados. Nick thinks differently and you may as well. Different strokes and all that.