A Gem in the Rough: Zapote Negro

I love markets. No matter where in the world you are, the local market is the best place to visit to get a feel for the people and their food. The food is fresh, grown local on family farms and orchards, and you can eat your way through the isles, unlike a commercial supermarket.
On my first full day in Puebla, Jonathan and his brother Jorge, needed to go to the market. It was a Sunday, so everyone was out shopping in their sunday best, the vendors' stalls were piled high with goods and merchants lined the streets selling toys and flowers.

The fruit stalls here in Mexico fascinate me because they offer the most ingredients that are unique to me. They are local, native fruits that are more fresh than any tropical fruit you can buy at your super market. Even the fruits that don't grow in this region travel a much shorter distance than they do to reach Kansas City. This allows fruits to ripen naturally and develop a more intense flavor.
I followed Jonathan as he weaved through the maze of narrow paths, contorting my body to fit between people. Passing through an intersecton of fruit isles, I saw a pile of previously unattainable fruit that I had been wanting to wrap my lips around since I saw Andrew Zimmern eat it on "Bizarre Foods." They were gems, actually more like gems in the rough, about the size of an orange, lumpy, and dark green with brown to black splotches: it was zapote negro! I wispered to Jonathan that I wanted to try one and before I knew it, he had asked the vendor for a piece. The vendor obliged by pulling one apart revealing the shiny black paste inside and handing half to me.
I rushed the fruit to my lips and tried to squeeze the black paste out, but the thin, leather like skin just shred to pieces. The fruit was a mess in my hand, so with as much grace as I could muster, I ate it off my hand. Like a todller with ice cream, it got on my nose, all the way around my lips, and all over my hand.
The pulp didn't have an odor, it tasted mildly sweet, sort of banana like with a hint of fruitiness you would expect from a black fruit. The texture though, really was just like chcocolate pudding as Andrew Zimmern said!

 I had to wonder about the first person to look at this and say "yumm" let's eat!

Jonathan bought a whole one to take home; the pastry chef in me began whirling with ideas about how I was going to use this fruit in a dessert. I refferenced my copy of "My sweet Mexico" by Fany Gerson and she has one recipe for Dulce de Zapote Negro or zapote negro pudding. Orange and zapote negro are a classic combination, add some rum and you have a fantastic pudding.

Fresh lime juice, fresh orange juice, rum, sugar, zapote negro are all of the ingrediants.

I tried using a spoon to get the pulp, but hands worked best.

Few foods with "black" in the name truely are, however, with zapote negro it is the perfect descriptor.

The finished pudding garnished with an orange segment and rum whipped cream.

Jonathan is modeling my pudding.



4 out of 4 Mexicans who ate this pudding agreed that it was delicious!



Enough Winter!

I have been home for two months now and I've had enough of this! Enough snow! Enough single digit temperatures! Enough sweaters and woolen socks! Good Bye! In true intinerant fashion, it is time to move on. I am flying south for the rest of winter, to Puebla, Mexico!

Hello Sun! Hello shorts! Hello beautiful Mexico! I have been away too long, I've missed you!
I will be spending three months, absorbing culture and sun. I don't have any solid plans or commitments, just plenty of opportunity. While I am there, I plan to learn Spanish and taste all of the many confections for which Puebla is well known. I am also very excited because I realized yesterday that I will be there for cinco de Mayo! The holiday which originates from The Battle of Puebla in 1862. (That totally slipped my mind when I was booking my flights.)

I am sure many of you have already considered my safety and I appreciate that. However, I assure everyone that Puebla is safe.  I am not new to international travel and I am confident that the biggest threat Puebla poses is another sun burn. There will be many adventures to share and I am ready for all of them!

Adios!

My Apologies to Dr. Johnson

This past week I got off the couch and went back to school. High school that is; I went to speak to the culinary classes at Liberty North High School. The teacher, Ms. Fowler, was the "home economics" teacher back in my day and recently made the switch to strictly culinary teacher. As a bored senior in high school, who already knew what they were going to do after graduating, I didn't see any purpose in my classes. So I invented one: pastry show pieces. I proposed that the school just let me spend my last semester making big sugar, chocolate, and cake show pieces like the ones featured on the Food Network Challenges. I had watched Jaques Torres' show on the Food Network for many years so I was cocky and sure of my abilities, when in reality I had little idea what was going on...

Never the less, I made showpieces; they were displayed in the library and front office. I made a jungle themed chocolate piece, a sunken treasure scene with coral and fish  out of cookies and quick breads, and an outer space piece featuring extra large suckers, pulled and blown sugar and hard candies. I was proud of them and I should have been, considering that the only training I had had was watching TV. However, Ms. Fowler recently told me that she found her pictures of my pieces and I groaned with embarrassment. (Nothing is as humbling as getting reminded of a first attempt and where you came from.)  

 When Ms. Fowler asked me to come talk to her classes and give a demo, she told me that they are currently talking about grains, seeds and root vegetables. So the perfect subject for me to talk about was flour. I put together a 10 slide slideshow describing the components of wheat, gluten and its development, and the different types of flour. I was very excited to talk about flour and I naively assumed the students would be as well. They weren't. I was not sure they paid attention, I wasn't sure they were awake, I wasn't even sure there were souls in those bodies...

 

I did manage to catch a few twinkling eyes when I started demonstrating the cake. I thought it would be fun to show them a Valentine's cake with lots of garnishes. I made Red Velvet Roulades with Cream Cheese Mousse, Rosewater Macarons, Modeling Chocolate Roses and Chocolate Plaques.



One students was very concerned that I kissed each chocolate plaque. It is red cocoa butter that I stamped on with a rubber stamp from Micheal's.



When I had spoken to half of the classes, I thought about how I could be more exciting so that the students might appear to care and my mind drifted back two months, when I was a student at the Culinary Institute of America. When I bothered to show up to my 8 AM Ethics and Leadership class at all, I sat in my chair with droopy eye lids, counting the seconds to the end of class. My apologies to Dr. Johnson who showed up every morning with a cheerful smile. He had a "can do" attitude and never seemed phased by his sleepy, lack luster audience. Now that I was in his shoes, pangs of guilt filled me for all the times I didn't care, didn't raise my hand, and didn't bother to show up. Dr. Johnson is a great professor, I was just too sleepy and too close to graduating to see it. 

In a moment of clarity, I realized that the student's blank faces weren't personal, it was the morning and it was school. The students wouldn't have been more interested if I had run into the room on fire, naked, juggling fresh fish. So I pushed through the lectures, trying to be interesting. When I had finished all of the classes, Ms. Fowler praised my speaking ability and said that I should consider teaching. High praise from a professional, however I'm not likely to take up a class soon.  To be a successful teacher, you need more than knowledge, you need the ability to draw energy from yourself at 8 AM. I had fun talking to the culinary classes, but more than two days in a row and I probably would have rather slapped a student with the fish for attention than juggle it. I'll leave the teaching to the professionals.

Achtung! Giant Mountain Eagles Have Been Spotted in the Area

In the spring of 2009, my Oma(grandma) and I went on her farewell tour of her homeland, the Alto Adige region of Italy or Südtirol as it is known to the people who live there. During and after the turmoil of war, Südtirol was claimed by many countries. In 1990, it was finally, once and for all declared a semi autonomus region of Italy. However, the people follow their Austrain heritage and speak German.

At the age of 89, Oma was probably healthier than me, but it was deffinately her last trip to Europe. Though, last year she went to Peru and climbed up Machu Picchu, crediting her Alpine mountain heritage.
Oma and I had many adventures and misadventures that trip, which amuse my friends for days when I share the stories. There are quite a few after traveling for almost two months through Italy and Germany with an 89 year old, nearly deaf, stubborn Oma without an itinerary.

After spending a week in Oma's birthplace: Meran, Italy, Oma and I travelled to the tiny Alpine village of Teisten, where her family moved when she was very young. I was excited to see the house her father had built and the castle on the next hill which I had heard so much about from Oma. I stepped out of the taxi in the driveway of Oma's house where her only two remaining spinster sisters live. Pia, now 80 and Miranda, now 79 have lived in that house their entire lives. They have never left Südtirol and only Pia has ever had a job, she is the bread winner. Miranda does the cooking,cleaning, gardening and wood chopping.

When I stepped out I was greeted heartily by both of Oma's sisters and a wall of chatter I could not understand. This was the first time I had expirienced this. In Meran I understood everything, my four years of high school German sprang back to life in an instant. This, whatever, they were speaking puzzeled me. I asked the cab driver if they were speaking German and he erupted with laughter. He explained that they were speaking in dialect. We stayed in Teisten for almost a month so I became very acustomed to their dialect but in that first hour I didn't understand a word.

Oma stood and chatted with her sisters while I looked around not able to understand what was being said. Eager to see the castle behind the house, I started marching to the back. Pia quickly came running after me and stopped me. She spoke very dramitcaly about a giant mountain Eagle, spreading her arms wide. Oma had told me at least a dozen times at that point about how giant, black mountain eales used to eat their chickens. Pia didn't want me to go back there because the eagle had already eaten several village children and she was afraid it might take me too. Immeadiately, I thought of an old Popeye cartoon I watched as a kid: "Popeye meets Sinbad the Sailor." Sinbad(Bluto) had a giant bird that he used to do his ill biding.

I stood there in disbelief with an eyebrow cocked trying to formulate the words in German for "I'm not scared of a giant eagle. I can fight it off." Luckily, before I opened my mouth and made a fool out of myself, Oma was at my side listening to Pia. I looked down at Oma as if to say "is she for real?!" and Oma said to me "isn't that great! they have a....a..... (she stumbled for the english word) peacock.
A PEACOCK?! I thought to myself... how the hell do two old ladies who hardly leave their tiny village have a pet peacock?!

Seeing that I didn't understand, Oma translated the story: they claim that it just showed up in the woods on the backside of their house as a young pult. They named it Hansi and hand raised it, but it is very shy because they think several village kids had tortured it. They didn't want me to go to the back of the house because I might scare it away and it might never come back. BOY, was I wrong!

I did go all around the house and climbed all over those hills and I never did get a good look at Hansi. Just a quick snap shot of him running away when he saw me. But the day that Oma and I hiked up the hills surronding Teisten, we heard his screach like caw ringing through the valley.

An Addict Will Get His Fix

Ordinarily, my desire for a garden spurred on by catalogs is a fleeting infatuation. I have no permanent residence to keep plants, no yard of my own to garden. Alas, the itinerant lifestyle I crave is also a burden. Nothing kills the excitement of a dream faster than a pinch from reality. However, because I am a gardening addict and suffer from a still unnamed disease that makes people desire to garden, I have found a way to satisfy my cravings. As any addict would. I invented a need for special vegetables that I must have that cannot be purchased at a grocery store. 

Every summer I cater a dinner party for my mother and 14 of her friends. She gives me free reign to make whatever I want. The first year I did a playful take on food from the fair; last year I designed an elaborate dinner brunch. I didn't think I would be home this summer to cater a dinner party, but that proved to be false. To celebrate, I am planing the most extravagant dinner party yet. I am planning an extravagant dinner in honor of "the chef of kings and the king of chefs" Marie Antonin Careme.

Careme was a child of the French revolution and elevated himself to cook for the likes of France's top diplomat to kings and Napoleon, the prince regent of England, Czar Alexander 1 of Russia and James Mayer Rothchild. An impressive resume, clearly someone who deserves to be honored with the freshest ingredients possible AND the most flavorful. Which ingredients are those: the ones Careme likely used himself.

For the dinner, I will be growing all french heirloom vegetables that date back to the 1800's and before. I thought that finding such vegetable seeds might prove to be an impossible feat. However, with the help of a local seed bank, Baker Creek, it was very easy to source everything I needed. (I found a few other [necessities] at a few other websites.)

On the menu will be:
Crapaudine Beet, it is believed to be the oldest cultivated beet
Jaune Obtuse du Doubs Carrot, a large yellow carrot
Parisienne Carrot, 1" orb carrot
Lunar White Carrot, a large white carrot with green shoulders
Geante Dore Ameliore Celery, a large stalked celery with few strings
Jaune Dickfleischige Cucumber, a yellow skinned variety when mature, but is eaten young.
Fin de Meaux Cucumber, a small cucumber used for cornichon pickles
Carentan Leek, an old European favorite leek
Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce, very old french heirloom with speckled red leaves
Brune D'hiver Lettuce, butterhead type lettuce
Charentais Melon, very old orange fleshed French favorite melon
Jaune Paille de Vertus Onion, European standard onion for hundreds of years
French Breakfast Radish, mild, very old French heirloom
Jaune D'or Ovale Radish, sicy, old French heirloom
White Wonder Watermelon, white watermelons were more available then than they are now
Harlequin French Marigold, yellow and red stripped heirloom marigold
Nicaise Pumpkin, small, flat ribbed red-orange skinned
Jaune et Vert patty-pan squash
Fin de Bagnol, heirloom haricot vert

I know it is a lot of vegetables, but these along with several heirloom tomatoes and a few hot peppers will be spilt between garden beds at my mom's house and a large garden plot at my dad's house. (Go big or go home)

Old Food Commercials Revisited

It is time for the Super Bowl again and that means great commercials. These are some of my favorite food commercials from all over the world.

Enjoy!