parsnips aplenty

Woke up this morning.  Talked to my parents.  Asked Dad, “What should I have for breakfast?”  Dad said, “Um… pomegranates, scones, garlic.”  I said, “Well, I could do the first two.”

Based on Crescent Dragonwagon’s biscuit recipe from Dairy Hollow Soup and Bread.  These are great.  Strong flavors pack a delightful punch.  Drown them in honey.  ‘Scuse my brevity - I’ve got to go eat more.  Mmmph.

Pomegranate Molasses and Sheep’s Cheese Biscuits
makes 16

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cold butter, cubed
1/4 cup grated fresh sheep’s milk cheese
1/4 cup pomegranate molasses
3/4 cup milk
sesame seeds
honey, for serving

Preheat to 425F.  Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together into a large bowl.  Add butter and cheese and incorporate into the dry mixture with your fingertips, a pastry cutter, or two forks, until the whole thing is a little coarser than coarse cornmeal and a little finer than peas.  Combine milk and pomegranate molasses and stir thoroughly; add about 2/3 cup of this mixture to the bowl and give it a few strokes with a fork.  If it’s still too dry, add remaining liquid.  This dough should barely hold together as you dump it out onto a floured work surface.  (And I do mean barely.  Proper biscuits require trust.)  Pat it together into a square and use a pizza cutter to slice it into 16 pieces.

Why aren’t we making nice round biscuits?, you may ask.  Because this method insures the least possible amount of dough handling.  If you want to use up all your biscuit dough and you make circular biscuits, you’re going to have to do another couple of rounds of kneading the dough - which makes for a very Not Perfect Biscuit.

Sprinkle the top with sesame seeds, load these onto a baking sheet, and pop ‘em in the oven for about 15 minutes.  Remove to a linen-lined basket and don’t be shy with that honey.

Hi all, just wanted to let you know that I’m turning this into Parsnips Occasional for the next few weeks as I head into the home stretch of packing and traveling.  I’ll update when and where I can, but don’t expect anything regular until August, which will be the first time I’m in the same place for more than a few days.  I’d post backlogged recipes, but they wouldn’t be very seasonal then, now would they?  Happy solstice and I’ll see you for sure as soon as I can.

With traveling boots and best wishes,
Lauren

This weekend I went to Rila Monastery, a UNESCO heritage site and a place that not only tops any must-see list in the Balkans but is held dearly in the Bulgarian national consciousness.  It was built by an order led by Ivan Rilski, a 10th-century hermit, and became a sanctuary for Bulgarian culture through 500 years of Ottoman rule that lasted until the late 19th century.  After having lived here for two years and somehow missing every opportunity to go visit the monastery with friends, I finally decided to just get on a bus and go down myself.  (I paired the visit with a narrow-gauge rail journey through the Rila and Rhodope Mountains, which made for an altogether excellent weekend.)

The monastery is beautiful, 20 kilometers from the nearest town, and well worth more time than I had to see it.  I was there for only a few hours, but plentiful hiking trails around the area and the ability to stay overnight in former monks’ cells could easily keep one occupied for a whole weekend.  There are a few souvenir stalls around, but the line is constant at the bakery, where you can buy fresh bread (I’m still munching on the remains of the loaf I picked up) and sheep’s milk yogurt, which I had never had before.  The yogurt is really tasty - it has more of a bite than cow or goat yogurt, but it’s not overwhelming, and everyone milling around the compound had a little container of the stuff that they were nursing.

On my way back home this morning, I wandered around the market at the bus station, still thinking about sheep’s milk and waiting for inspiration to strike, and it did as I saw some home-grown lettuce and local cherries for sale alongside bunches of red onions still on the stalk that I just couldn’t pass up.  I grabbed a cucumber and a couple of bunches of herbs, then ran into the shop and got some sheep’s milk cheese and honey, and came home ready to make something gorgeous.  

I’ve been making a real effort lately to use more fresh mint in my kitchen - I find that throwing some in halfway through cooking gives the most incredible flavor, and the way it brightens a salad just makes the day that much better.  So I made sure to add a handful to the dressing, and I am very excited about what will happen to the rest of the bunch I bought.  I think I’ll start by putting it in the pan with some roasting potatoes.  But today, salad.  A good balance, here, between sweet cherries, an earthy, full-bodied cheese, refreshing cucumbers, and a tangy, herby dressing.  This would be nice, too, with some roasted walnuts.

Green Salad with Sheep’s Cheese and Cherries

For each serving, rip up a few leaves of lettuce into bite-sized pieces and put on a plate.  Top with a few shavings of fresh sheep’s milk cheese, 4 or 5 halved pitted cherries, some very thinly sliced red onion, and cucumber.  (You can either seed and chop the cucumber, or you can make little noodles out of it: make ribbons with a vegetable peeler, stopping when you get to the seed bed, then stack the ribbons and slice them lengthwise into very thin strips.)  Top with a few spoonfuls of:

Minted Honey Vinaigrette

In a small jar combine about 1/4 cup red wine vinaigrette, a very-finely chopped clove of garlic, the zest and juice of a lemon, a finely-chopped sprig each of fresh parsley and fresh mint, and a tablespoon of honey.  Add salt and ground black pepper to taste and about 1/4 cup sunflower oil, close the jar, and shake it up.

Bulgarians are very proud of their food.  And with tomatoes this good, who wouldn’t be?  Bulgarian food, while not a crucial cuisine in the curriculum of international culinary arts, has some wonderfully simple dishes based on fresh, seasonal, often home-grown food, and there are many ingredients and dishes that I am so happy to have eaten.  Sirene, the feta-like cheese about which I frequently wax poetic, is an essential here, and red bell peppers are a way of life.  I’ve been asked often if XYZ exists in the U.S., and sometimes I have to stifle a laugh - yes, we have tomatoes - but many folks are astonished when I tell them that red bell peppers can reach $6 a pound.

There is one ingredient so vital to the Bulgarian kitchen that its Latin name references the importance it has here: yogurt, soured with the culture Lactobacillus bulgaricus, is so common that if you go to the shop and ask for milk, they’ll ask if you want fresh milk or sour milk, “sour milk” meaning yogurt.  Bulgarians have little problem substituting yogurt for milk in almost any recipe and put it in everything from soup to sauces.  I am lucky to have a dairy in my town that makes fantastic yogurt, and there is always a container or seven of it in my fridge.  I was never one of those that was afraid of plain yogurt before I came here, and would often stand in the kitchen at my parents’ house, eating spoonfuls of Cascade Fresh straight out of the jumbo tubs we bought it in, but I was a little fearful of yogurt cheese.  I saw some little balls of it on a buffet table once and thought they were mozzarella, so I popped a whole one in my mouth and bit down on what I soon assumed to be bocconcini gone bad.  Moments later, still trying not to grimace at the flavors lingering on my gums, I overheard someone say, “Aren’t these little yogurt cheese bites just wonderful?” but it was too late.  I was scarred.

But I have gained nothing in Peace Corps if not resiliency, so I decided not too long ago to strengthen my resolve and make what Bulgarians call “dry yogurt” - basically, yogurt with much of the liquid strained out.  This is, seriously, the easiest thing ever, and so smooth.  You can use this as a substitute for sour cream, whipped cream, cream cheese… you get it.  Creamy.

A ridiculously simple dessert that I like to make is to add cocoa powder, sugar, and a pinch of cinnamon to the yogurt before I strain it.  If you don’t dig chocolate, use something else - caramel, fresh or dried fruit, dulce de leche?  A wonderful base for any number of combinations.  Just make sure to use yogurt with no additives - if it says ‘gelatin’ anywhere on that package, just put it back on the shelf.  No one should be eating that garbage, anyway.

Dry Yogurt with Chocolate and Cinnamon
serves 1

12oz plain low-fat yogurt (I use 2%, but if you don’t see any 2%, get whole rather than fat-free)
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
sugar to taste
toasted walnuts, to garnish

OK now, focus. This is tremendously complicated.  Ready?  Ready.

Combine yogurt, cocoa powder, cinnamon, and sugar and stir well.  Pour into a cheesecloth-lined sieve set over a bowl.  Come back in three hours.  Spoon into a bowl.  Garnish with walnuts.

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I also just wanted to show you this picture I took of some bucatini that I put in baked spaghetti last week.  (Well, baked bucatini, I suppose.)  I’m not sure I understand the culinary advantage of having center holes so tiny, but hey, it makes for cool photos.

Bulgaria is the world’s largest producer of rose oil, and most (if not all?) of the country’s roses are grown across the wide belt of the Rosova Dolina, or Rose Valley.  Every year, on the first weekend of June, the cities of Kazanluk and Karlovo, which bookend the Rose Valley, hold their arms wide open for the Rose Festival, three days of singing, dancing, and a beauty contest.  I went to the festival last year in Kazanluk and while everyone was in the center of town enjoying the performances, a few friends and I walked out to the Rose Institute, on the edge of the city, to see if anything was happening out there.

To our surprise, absolutely nothing was happening Out There.  A couple of staff members were milling about, but there were no tours going on, no special signage, nothing.  The only clues that this was a weekend celebrating the efforts of the Institute were a couple of souvenir stalls at the front gates and a bunch of Japanese tourists that came in as we left.  We took advantage of the lack of personnel to peek around a bit.  We followed our noses to the distilling room, where large, puffing, steaming vats were connected to each other by various tubes and gizmos, and where one very frustrated worker was banging and clanging an uncooperative machine.  

Towards the front of the complex was a building housing a large lobby that served to educate visitors on the many kinds of herbs - not just roses - grown and studied by the Institute, including chamomile (лайка), lavender (лавандула), and many other plants whose names I couldn’t translate.  I noticed that they made chamomile oil, something I’d never seen before, but when I asked the lady working at the little sales kiosk in front of the building if she carried it, she said no.  I was sad but only momentarily as my eyes wandered up to see boxes of food-grade lavender for sale.  I bought two and brought them home to fill up a Ziploc bag, where they have sat, waiting patiently for my inspiration to strike them, ever since.

I have decided, finally, to put some in shortbread.  Not terribly original, but I don’t have an ice cream maker (I have been wanting to make lavender ice cream for as long as I can remember), and I have been feeling quite stuck as to what else I could do with them.  Maybe jam?

This was my first time making shortbread (shameful, I know), and I was a little bit nervous about rolling out a dough so crumbly, so I decided to just pat it into a pan.  As I was rummaging around for a cake tin, I saw my muffin pan and said “Oh-HO!”  And so these were born. These are not dainty tea cookies - these are flowery little butter bombs that will satisfy your sweet tooth but won’t leave you feeling like a brick. I really love the flavor added by the tea as well.  (In response to a question, Sleepytime is about half peppermint and half chammomile.  One teabag’s worth is half a tablespoon.)  They would be great, too, with some lemon zest added in - I think I’ll do that next time.  I used up the last quarter cup of whole wheat flour that I had hanging around, so these are a bit browner than they would be if you followed the recipe exactly as I wrote it, with only white flour.

Shortbread with Lavender and Sleepytime Tea
makes 6 muffin-sized cookies

1 stick (8 tablespoons, 125 grams) butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups cake flour or 1 cup all purpose flour and 1/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon dried lavender flowers
contents of 1 bag of Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime tea

Preheat to 350F and butter a 6-cup muffin tin.  In a bowl combine butter and sugar, then sift in flour and salt.  Mix until a dough forms, then add lavender and tea.  Knead dough a bit just to pull it together a little more, then divide mixture evenly into muffin tin.  Bake 30 minutes or until lightly browned on top.  Let cool at least 15 minutes before turning out.

New design!  I’ll be working out the kinks in the next few days.  Like the header picture?

Spring has definitely settled in here in the foothills of the Sredna Gora Mountains, and we can feel the first waves of summer building on the breeze.  Mornings are cool, but warming up every day, and I am turning on the radiators less and less frequently at night.  Markets are bursting into color - in the past few months we have gone from the browns and whites of winter vegetables, to the joyful greens of lettuces and mint, and now we’re starting to pull into the proud hues of summer fruits.  Strawberries are on their way out, but cherries have come in like mad this week, for about $2.50 per kilo, and soon we’ll see other stone fruits, too - peaches and nectarines will mark the height of summer, and they’ll share market tables with eggplants, zucchini, and the best tomatoes this side of the Mediterranean.

Another American, Beth, will come to replace me at the school here, and she came this week to check things out.  She admitted she wasn’t much in the kitchen, and so I tried to give her only basic introductions to cooking in Bulgaria, but I found myself talking at length about preparations and availability and my experiences with food here.  Living in a place where fresh food is cheap has taught me a tremendous amount about using what is around, and has given me plenty of opportunities to understand many differences between vegetables at different stages of their growth.  Sometimes it’s been frustrating - there’s not much difference paid between varieties of onion, for example, so sometimes you get sweet red onions, sometimes you get fiery white onions, and sometimes you get huge shallots - but the surprises that show up at the markets in Sofia more than make up for it.

Yesterday I took Beth to one of my favorite markets, and by far the biggest, Zhenski Pazar.  There are hundreds of stalls of food, most of it local or coming from Greece or Turkey, but there are also a few people scattered around the edges selling a small box of whatever it is they’ve grown in their gardens or foraged that week, mostly herbs or unusual greens.  We were walking through late in the day, around 4:30, and I stopped when I saw a bag of Jerusalem artichokes - also called sunchokes - on the ground in front of an old woman who was very eager to get rid of them. 

“Jerusalem artichokes!” she said.  “2 leva!”  (About $1.50.)
“2 leva per piece?” I asked, only slightly incredulously.
“No, honey, 2 leva per bagful.”

And before I could say golly gee whiz, she’d wrapped up about five pounds of these little rhizomes and put them in my arms.  I gave her 4 leva.  How much do these things cost at Whole Foods, anyway?

Beth left this morning to go finish out her homestay in the southwestern part of the country, and I gave her half of the bounty to give to her host family.  This still left me with almost a kilo of a food that remained a little intimidating - I’d only ever eaten it once, and that was just by itself, to see what it tasted like.  A few minutes of research told me that I can do almost anything with these that I can do with potatoes.  It’s a root vegetable, is all.  Roast it, toast it, mash it, eat it. 

We’ll start with a soup.  Way basic, so make sure all of your ingredients are good quality.  Lends itself to a plethora of variations - just make sure not to overpower the flavor of the artichokes, which is on the delicate side.  I meant to make a roux at the beginning with some chickpea flour, but I forgot - I bet that would add a great subtle earthy flavor, though.  This tastes like a fresher version of a cold potato soup.  Maybe I’ll call it “chokeychoisse”?

…maybe not.

Chilled Jerusalem Artichoke Soup
serves 4

1 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 tablespoon butter
white and light green parts of 3 scallions, chopped
1 pound (500 grams) Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed and cut in large dice
2-3 cups vegetable broth
ground black pepper to taste
up to 2 cups whole milk
salt to taste
toasted walnuts or sunflower seeds, to garnish

Heat oil and melt butter in a soup pot over medium heat.  Add scallions and cook until softened but not browned, 2-3 minutes.  Add Jerusalem artichokes and vegetable broth to cover; throw in a few grinds of black pepper.  Bring to a boil, then drop the heat and simmer just until the artichokes are cooked, 10-15 minutes.  Remove from heat and strain, keeping the broth.  Put artichokes in a blender with about half of the broth and a cup of milk.  Buzz it up and add more milk as necessary to reach your desired consistency.  Taste and season as necessary, then chill for at least a couple of hours.  Garnish with walnuts or sunflower seeds and the sliced green parts of the scallion you cut up for the soup.

Yes, I said this feeds four people - these little rhizomes are filling.  But if you’re making this as a main course, you should probably double the recipe.  This would be nice, too, with a bit of tomato thrown in at the end to give a rosy blush.  A drizzle of flavored oil, chive blossoms, carrot fritters on the side, use yogurt for half the milk… any other ideas?  Go crazy.

For more information on Jerusalem artichokes, which are also called sunchokes and which have absolutely nothing to do with the artichokes you may be thinking about, check out this article.

So I woke up on Friday morning to a terrifying realization: I am moving out of the country in six weeks.  I still have to call the shipping company!  Visit Rila Monastery!  Have a goodbye party at the school!  Make Tunisia hotel reservations!  LEAVE BULGARIA!  I’m about to enter a few scary, probably unemployed months in the U.S. and while there are things I will be happy to see/do/eat again, I am dreading a bit the return to the Real World, where my employment will not be based on contract, health care is a nightmare, and I have to find housing all on my own omigod.  Time to clear my head, time to take a walk.

I went up for a wander in the hills around the village and took a little bag with me to collect dandelion heads so I could make dandelion syrup, a recipe I saw on FX Cuisine that looked really interesting.  And cheap.  (Have to start cutting back - I’ll be paying insurance premiums soon!  And rent!  And…)  Apparently this is an old old recipe, and I admit I feel rather foolish for not having thought of it before.  You can put anything in a simple syrup - why not dandelion flowers?  So I collected a few handfuls, steeped them overnight, and now I’m drinking a beautiful sweet flowery ade that I only wish I had known of sooner.  And am maybe a little bit less stressed.

Dandelion Cordial

a few handfuls of dandelion heads
sugar
water
lemon juice

Remove green leaves from around flower heads - FX Cuisine suggested a knife for this, but I found it just as easy to twist them off.  Put them in a pot over high heat, with water and sugar, in equal amounts, to cover by an inch or two.  Bring to a boil, drop the heat down to low and simmer for 5 minutes, then turn off the heat and let steep overnight.  Add lemon juice (I’d say the juice of half a lemon should do for every two cups of water you used) and strain into a jar.  To serve, fill a glass halfway with the syrup, then top it off with sparkling or still water.

I’ll also proudly mention that I’ve been tagged for another award - the Arte Y Pico, from Elle’s New England Kitchen.  It says that folks who are tagged should pass on the tag, and I would love to, but I am reminded that many of the food blogs I read are the ones that are already super popular and don’t much need the boost.  So I’ll take it as a reminder that I need to pay more attention to blogs that don’t get 5000+ daily readers!  Thank you, Elle.

A few months ago I discovered the backlog of podcasts available from the NPR show The Splendid Table, and I’ve been listening to archived episodes like it’s my job, mostly while in the kitchen.  (How cute.)  One show from a couple of years ago had a call about lemon balm - the woman had a glut of it in her garden and didn’t know what to do with it.  Lynne suggested, among other things, adding it to salads.  I filed that little piece of information away, since I didn’t expect to see it around these parts, yet, lo and behold, as friend Jessica and I were taking a walk the other day and trying to identify plants, we found… lemon balm!  I added it to a white bean salad and it was lovely.  Bright, citrusy, green, just a bit wild.  I’m still rather a zombie today after Artmospheric, but I did make myself get a little exercise to go back up to that hill for some more of this slightly addictive herb to make the dish again; it’s a great can’t-be-arsed salad that’s as full-flavored as it is healthy.  I’m going to pull a grilled cheese and not really give a recipe.  This is a chop-and-toss deal: don’t think about it too hard.

The cheese is optional, if you want it vegan, and I think next time I may add some finely diced dried apricots.  (Edit: The apricots are excellent.)  I just ate some of this with a nice slab of dark bread, and I feel happy.

Either cook up a cup of dried white beans, or drain a 15 oz can of them into a bowl.  Add the zest and juice of a lemon or two, chop up the leaves of a few sprigs of parsley, mint, and lemon balm, and add some powdered garlic.  Crumble in some sirene or fresh goat cheese, add salt and pepper to taste, drizzle with olive oil and maybe a little vinegar, and top with some thinly sliced scallion.  Spring bliss is yours.

In other news, I’ve been tagged for my first award! 

Many thanks go to Diva at The Sugar Bar.  It’s nice to know that people are starting to pick up on this blog after I’ve only been at it for a couple of months.  I’m passing on the love to five folks whose blogs I always get a kick out of:

Zen at Chefs Gone Wild

Annie at Bonappegeek

Nupur at One Hot Stove

Marc at No Recipes

Jen at Eat Real Butter

It’s quite possible that all of yall have already gotten this award already.  If so, you deserve it again.

Finally, I am facing a Dilemma!  I’m torn right down the middle in the decision to move to either Minneapolis or Portland (OR) in late summer/early fall.  I’ve decided I want to try cooking for a living, and I want a cheap happy city to do it in.  So if you are reading this and have a pull towards one place or another, give a shout.  I’ve heard bunches of reasons for and against both places - give me bunches more.

This weekend, I went to the Artmospheric music and art festival, where I would have had a great time save the fact that there was inescapably loud pounding electronic music playing for 20 out of every 24 hours.  I was so happy to be out in the middle of nowhere, on a stunning mountain in my favorite region of Bulgaria, but I am flabbergasted at the amount of sleep I did not get.  I returned home last night, had a cup of tea, and slept for 10 hours.  I’m still a bit hazy, so I’m just going to give you this muffin recipe and say that I don’t know how I ever lived a satisfactory life before I made these last week.  Seriously.

Matcha Muffins with White Chocolate and Rose Petals
makes 12

2 cups flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-3 tablespoons matcha green tea powder
1 cup yogurt
1/4 cup oil
1 egg
petals of 10 dried rosebuds
3/4 cup white chocolate chunks

Preheat to 350F and butter a 12-cup muffin tin. In a large bowl sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and matcha powder. In a small bowl combine yogurt, oil, egg, and rosebuds. Let this sit for about 10 minutes to let the rose petals soften a bit, then pour wet into dry and mix until just barely combined. Fold in white chocolate and divide mixture evenly between muffin tin cups. Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean, being very careful not to overbake. Eat.