A Cooking Life

Kumquat Marmalade

One of the dangers of becoming a proficient canner is that every time you run across unusual, or interesting, or just exemplary fruits or vegetables, you are bound to buy a (usually unreasonable) quantity and find a delicious way to pack them into jars for safe keeping. So it was a few weeks ago, when perfect little pints of kumquats turned up in a market nearby. 

For most of my life, my only exposure to kumquats was their annual appearance in my mother's Thanksgiving centerpiece. While we were assured that they were edible, peel and all, they were generally eaten only on a dare; in my experience, the bitterness of citrus peel holds little appeal for American children.

Last Thanksgiving, I bought a bagful of them for purely aesthetic reasons and fashioned my own centerpiece out of kumquats and pomegranates. One of my guests, an Argentinian woman, swooned over them and taught us all how to eat them properly: roll them between your fingers to release their juice, then bite into an end and suck out the insides and finish by eating the peel. Oddly, their sweetness is concentrated in the peel, which nicely offsets their assertive tartness. To my grown-up palate, kumquats are the ideal expression of citrus, with their perfect balance of sweet/tart/bitter/perfumed. When I found them this spring, it struck me that they would make a fine marmalade.

Chicken Salad with an Asian Bent

I'm trying to cook and eat lighter now that spring is here and I may be forced any day now to squeeze into a pair of shorts. This is a quick chicken salad I improvised the other evening. Its pedigree is distinctly southeast Asian, with ginger, lime, peanuts, cilantro, and fish sauce building its flavor profile. The salad is mostly composed of fresh vegetables, with no oil in the ‘dressing’, so the caloric impact is cheerfully low. It is, however, so addictively delicious that you may find yourself eating more than intended.

Recipe after the jump...

A Ragged Dal

Dal. It refers both to the wide variety of lentils, peas, and beans used in Indian cooking (also known as pulses), and to the seemingly endless array of dishes you can prepare with them. Cooked simply with spices and aromatics, served with rice or bread, dal is a staple of the Indian diet.

I'm hardly an expert on Indian cooking, but I imagine dal is a malleable genre, where a cook's creativity is given expression in his or her unique amalgam of ingredients. There must be regional variations, with different spicing based on local preference, different lentils or peas or combinations thereof driven by local harvests. I call my own a 'ragged' dal, pieced together from a few different recipes, with a combination of pulses driven by happenstance.

It's a simple enough thing to make, although it may feel fussy the first time through, and while it's nourishing, satisfying, and healthy – it's an excellent source of high-quality protein – it's also quite economical. I like to make a triple batch, as the leftovers reheat beautifully for a quick, easy lunch.

Leaps of Faith

I've been gardening in Vermont long enough to know exactly what sorts of tragedies and disasters can befall the process. Even the simplest of bad decisions (foolishly choosing the wrong tomato variety?) can run you into a ditch down the road. And even so, every spring I order up little packets full of promise, and while the snow still lays roundabout and the ground is yet frozen solid not far below the surface, I put seeds to dirt and count on the luscious bounty to come.

I pretend I don't know that 'summer' might just be an extended period of grey, cold, and rain, and that heat loving crops like tomatoes and peppers might simply stagnate in the cold wet dirt. I conjure that first warm, sweet tomato fresh from the vine, and I plan the jars of salsa I'll put up when the tomatoes and peppers threaten to overtake us. I forget about the pests that might mow down my pea shoots, and I dream of a bowl full of sweet, tender peas swimming in butter. I'm confident that this year I can thwart the cabbage worms, and I picture perfect tight green heads and resolve to finally make my own sauerkraut. I'm sure we won't have frost in August, and I imagine tucking into sweetly perfumed melons for September breakfasts.

Restoring Fruitcake’s Good Name

How did fruitcake come to be so reviled? Mention fruitcake to five people and four of them are sure to have something unkind to say about it, usually in the form of a cliché including the word ‘doorstop’ and the certainty that there is really only one single fruitcake in the world, endlessly regifted. Hahaha.

There is some funny fruitcake hate, for sure. Like this inflatable fruitcake, or this Edward Gorey illustration, or try Googling ‘fruitcake disposal’. But still. Most people can't really tell you why they hate fruitcake (and some may even confess that they've never actually tried it). Pressed, they are likely to finger the gross candied fruit and the hard, stale cake. I guess if that had been my experience of fruitcake, I'd probably hate it, too.