Carol Goodman Kaufman

a.k.a. Carolinda Goodman

Food

An New Old Chestnut

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In yet another tree experiment from this persistent, if not always successful gardener:

About fifteen years, one of our dinner guests brought us chestnuts he had harvested from his own trees. I roasted them the next day. They were absolute delicious. It turns out that they were Chinese chestnuts, immune to the blight that had killed off their American cousins over 100 years ago.

I immediately ordered a tree. It came, I planted it. Then I learned that it takes two to tango, so I ordered a second one. I measured out the forty feet between the two, as instructed.

The instructions also said that it could take three to four years to see results, but although the two trees grew, they did not produce a single chestnut. Year after year, I checked the branches but found nothing.

Until this year. One tree has a bunch of those spiky pods that signal a chestnut crop is on the way.

The second tree, however, had odd looking things growing on its branches. They were much smaller and not at all spiky. What was going on? I opened up my Picture This app and got a very big surprise.

The tree with the odd things wasn’t a chestnut at all. It was a saw tooth oak!

Huh? All these years later, I’m just now finding out that the nursery sent me the wrong tree?

So, my question: Without a second tree to pollinate the first, how did the chestnuts begin to grow? A couple of friends have suggested that there must be a chestnut tree somewhere close by. But there are none. We live far from our closest neighbors.

Will those spiky pods actually have nuts in them? We should know in about a month.

Stay tuned!

A Little Bit of Summer in February

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Late spring brings an enormous crop of rhubarb into my backyard. So much so that I end up giving a lot away and freezing the rest. After all, how much strawberry rhubarb pie or blueberry rhubarb crisp can one eat? (Actually, don’t answer that. My scale has told me exactly how much dessert I can eat.)

Anyway, my freezer has become quite full lately since I like to make big pots of soups and stews and then store the rest for day on which I may not feel like cooking. (“What??!!” J exclaims in horror, “You don’t want to cook??”)

Anyway, back to the rhubarb. I figured it was probably time to take out a quart bag and use it to make a rhubarb bread or cake. However, the recipes I have don’t actually accommodate defrosted rhubarb. Would there happen to be a recipe out there in the cosmos that might use pureed rhubarb?

Well, yes there is! So, I tried it. My little Ninja 16 ounce single serve cup did the job beautifully, rendering a quart bag of the defrosted veggie into just a bit more than a cup—almost precisely what I needed for the recipe.

And thus we had a rhubarb cake. Easy peasy.

A little bit of summer in the dead of winter!

Eating my Words

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I’m currently in the midst of cleaning for Passover and, while dusting off my cookbook shelves, I found a gift from my mother-in-law, a Julia Child cookbook inscribed to me. That started me thinking of the movie Julie and Julia, which then got me thinking that it’s time to start a new project. Because I’m often asked to review cookbooks, I have a LOT of them, but so many others that go untouched from year to year. So, I’m going to try to make one recipe picked at random from each book over the next several months. Let’s see how that goes. There’s quite a selection: Chinese, Spanish,Italian, Asian, African, Israeli, Persian, Lebanese, Syrian …

Gotta go. I’m getting hungry.

Back in the Saddle

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To prepare the seder plate for the recent Passover festival, I opened the fridge to retrieve the bottle of horseradish — red, as J prefers. Unfortunately, it had spoiled. There was no time to run to the supermarket and, frankly, I was too nervous to have done so in the current climate.

Of course I vented on Facebook. A couple of days after posting, our doorbell rang. Upon opening the front door, we found the dearest, sweetest Sara Jacobson standing ten feet away, having dropped a baggie of horseradish roots onto our front porch. We used one of them on the seder plate.

After Passover, I planted the root that we had used during the seder in the hope that we would have an annual supply of the root veggie. A previous attempt had rotted in the ground after too much rainfall.

But I had forgotten that the really big root was still in its bag in the back hall. Not wanting to waste it, I thought why not prepare our own horseradish? So, wearing my trusty swim goggles and gloves, I peeled and grated until I had a nice pile of white shreds. With a little salt and white vinegar, we were good to go.

The result? I should probably get a grater with smaller holes, as it was a bit too coarse. But, the flavor was exactly what one would expect — and want — to spread on a sandwich or over your gefilte fish or as an ingredient in cocktail sauce.

If you plan to do this, be forewarned: When you remove said goggles, the fumes will assault you in ways that make you think “riot squad.”

Ghee Whiz!

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I love Indian food, and when given the choice as to what kind of restaurant I’d like to visit, it is more often than not an Indian one — except with certain friends who shall remain nameless. They won’t go near the stuff.

I love the fact that there are so many vegetarian options. I love the music in the background. And most of all, I love the amazing flavors of the various dishes. Before the quarantine, J and I had even been making plans to travel to India next winter.

Needless to say, that probably won’t happen. Nor will visiting an Indian restaurant any time soon.

So, to Plan B. While trying to keep things interesting (in the kitchen) during this plague year and test as many recipes as possible for my cookbook-in-process, I decided to make carrot halwa. But even though my cabinets have many of the herbs and spices frequently used in Indian cuisine (e.g., ginger, garlic, turmeric, cardamom, even garam masala), I didn’t have ghee.

Frankly,  I’ve always been a little nervous about trying to make it, under the impression that it would be difficult to do. And the little jars of the stuff can fetch as much as $35 each. That was not going to be an option for this home cook.

But since we are at home and can’t get to our favorite restaurants, why not try making it myself? And guess what! It’s not hard at all. You just need patience. If for no other reason than the heavenly, buttery aroma that wafts through the house, I would recommend giving it a go. I used a bit on tuna steaks, and they were absolutely delicious.

Then, last night  (and the reason I actually started this little experiment, if you can remember that far back) I made the first of a series of recipes for carrot halwa. It was a fabulously flavorful pudding, and super easy to whip together with only a handful of ingredients.

Ghee whiz!

Fishing for Compliments

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My grandmother was a phenomenal cook and baker, of the Old Country style. From her lokshen to her strudel, everything she put on the table was divine. Witness my hip measurements. But, as many kids, it didn’t occur to me to ask many questions, much less to request her recipes. But when I turned 19 I finally had the presence of mind to ask Bubbie for them. Of course, they were all in her head so she would have to write them down for me.

Bubbie was a tough customer. She told me that if I could read and write Yiddish, her native language, she would write them down.

“But, Bubbie,” I whined. “I read, write, and speak Hebrew!” (Maybe I fibbed. In truth, my skill at the time was rudimentary at best.)

“Yiddish or nothing,” she replied.

Bubbie died two months later. Nobody got the recipes.

Fast forward to 2020. While doing research recently for an article on gefilte fish, I had to prepare some. I followed the traditional method of making a fish broth (with a fish head, no less — yuck.), chopping the flesh, and mixing it with various other ingredients. Frankly, it was simply a way to connect with my bubbie. If only she had written down her fabulous recipes. The recipe I did use, from a book auspiciously titled The Encyclopedia of Jewish Cooking, didn’t yield terrific results. Worse, the house reeked so badly that I had to bake a chocolate cake the next day to counter the malodorous fumes.

Having learned through research that the original stuffed fish recipes called for roasting or baking, I went to my friend Dr. Google and found a recipe for a semi-homemade gefilte fish using the frozen loaf you can find at your local grocery store. You don’t have to club the fish. You don’t have to clean the fish. You certainly won’t need to brew up a stinky broth with a fish’s head. No, you can simply follow this easy recipe and do as our ancestors did before the broth: They baked it!

This gefilte fish recipe, adapted from Jamie Geller, is so good that it doesn’t even need horseradish. It is, in fact, the best I have ever tasted.

Enjoy!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for drizzling

2 teaspoons paprika

2 teaspoons dried parsley

2 pinches ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 loaf frozen gefilte fish, paper removed, not thawed

3 large onions, sliced in rounds

3 garlic cloves, minced

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Pour the olive oil into the bottom of a loaf or small baking pan. Add the paprika, parsley, 1 pinch of the allspice, the salt, and pepper.

Roll the frozen loaf in the oil and spices to coat.

Remove the loaf from the pan, arrange the onion on the bottom of the pan, and place the loaf on top of the onion.

Sprinkle with the garlic and the remaining 1 pinch allspice. Finish with a drizzle of olive oil.

Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 2 hours.

Cool the gefilte fish completely, then refrigerate overnight.

Serve cold, sliced and topped with the onions.