Roseanne Pereira

I’ve been getting a bit of practice on a few different cuts by assisting Eleanor Hoh, who gives wok cooking classes in South Florida. I julienne vegetables,
wash and cut up bok choy (I was excited to see that my cut-up bok choy looks just like how it is in Chinese takeout), and slice the thinnest slivers of ginger you can imagine. My favorite is the way she has me slice up scallions using an “Asian cut” instead of a French one. They end up long and thin.

Eleanor has a basic marinade of tamari, sherry, white pepper, and corn starch she uses for meat. Here, we’re about to stir fry ground turkey. We add oil to a hot wok, then sizzle up some garlic before adding the meat.

She’s been perfecting her stir fry technique and classes for years, so if you are interested in tips, you should check her out. It’s like she’s thought of every detail to get her “wok stars” cooking as soon as they get home from class, even down to pre-seasoning the woks she sells. (I’ve helped her do this; it’s not as easy breezy as it sounds.) Here’s a video of her pineapple fried rice recipe. Yum!

Filed under: Blog, Chefs, March 2nd, 2011
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Today was a good day. I got to visit a farm. This time it was Paradise Farms in Homestead, FL. We took a farm tour and ate a brunch made of all the goodies from the farm. In addition to being organic, owner Gabriele Marewski told us that the farm follows biodynamic principles. Paradise Farms is a supplier of baby greens, microgreens, and flowers to some of South Florida’s finest restaurants.

This is what I like about farms. They let you run around in the sun and eat things. Like flowers. We ate all sorts of flowers — not only peppery nasturtium like at Ballymaloe, but sunn hemp,

wild petunia,

arugula flowers (tastes like arugula),

and mizuna flowers. Who knew? Mizuna flowers taste like broccoli!

Also of note was a cotton candy tree that produces red berries that taste like cotton candy. A little willy wonka, right? Gabriele also showed us a room with a dehydrator that she obtained through what she dubbed, “decision-making by synchronicity”. A guy called her up when a nearby factory was closing down and wanted to sell her a dehydrator for a bargain price. Now Paradise Farms is in the process of dehydrating edible flowers (for possible sale at Whole Foods) and oyster mushrooms (their variety is 25% protein), so a dried one would be like a mushroomy-protein chip.

Okay, now take a look at these mimosas. Think they are sparkling wine and OJ, right?

Nope. It’s carambola juice. (TROPICAL FRUIT REFRESHER: Carambola = star fruit).

Someone sitting near me at my brunch table sipped the carambola juice, paused, and said, “This tastes like the sun.” Kind of poetic, right? I have to say though, there is a particular taste to carambola. It’s tart and can be refreshing, but there is also a tire-like aftertaste. I’m not kidding. There is something a little rubber about star fruit. I guess I would amend the statement to say carambola juice is refreshing, but with an aftertaste of sun-kissed tires. In the best possible way!! (Remember when I mentioned the plant that smells like gasoline — I welcome it all.)

The brunch included homemade yogurt (thick, slightly sour, creamy),

fresh strawberries and sliced oranges, honey from the farm, a salad of wild greens and flowers,

an egg strada made of local eggs (Gabriele is okay with using eggs, “as long as I know the chickens”) and this waxy spinach known as malabar spinach (When I was growing up my mother often made what I think of as a “swamp soup” because there was so much of this type of spinach in each bowl).

There were also condiments of homemade pesto and marinated, chopped up yellow heirloom tomatoes. For dessert, shortbread cookies made with pecans from Northern Florida, lemon zest, coarse sea salt, and a tiny bit of fresh-from-the-farm rosemary.

Another thing I like about farms is that you always see some incredible example of wild beauty. Like take a look at this…Gabriele called this simply, “mustard greens gone wild.”

Filed under: Blog, Foraging, February 27th, 2011
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I know I just wrote a post where a Zen monk seems to suggest we do one thing fully. However, I have been pleased by my own combining of favorite activities. This week, for instance, I made my own pasta (!) while listening to This American Life. Did anyone else catch the episode where Ira Glass and the team try to test out what they think is the original Coke formula? That’s not the episode I listened to while kneading my pasta dough, but it’s a good one. I hope TAL does more food-related stories.

I listened to this baby swap story. My eyes just welled up when the moms talk at the end! (One of mothers knew the babies were switched the day she brought a baby home from the hospital. The other didn’t find out until she was 69!)

I digress. What I’m trying to say is pasta making is enormously rewarding. If you love to eat fresh pasta, you should definitely try it. Definitely. It’s a teacher, this pasta.

Here are some photos: one of the final days of Ballymaloe where I was making my own tortellini (note the magical lighting…)

And voila: here is my pasta from yesterday’s lunch (just before dunking it into boiling salted water for a minute).

Gillian’s recipe (and by the way, looks like Gillian is teaching a pasta class this summer… wish I could go!) calls for a 1 oz. semolina flour to 10 oz. ‘00’ flour. I found both at a local Italian grocery store. It also includes a tiny bit (dessert spoon) of olive oil, a teaspoon of cold water, a pinch of salt, one egg and 3 egg yolks, (but you leave the extra egg whites in reserve to add if your dough can take more).

The basic gist of Gillian’s recipe is sieving your flour and salt in a bowl, then forming a well where you pour the lightly beaten eggs, oil, and water into. Then you mix it up into a firm dough and knead it. After it’s smooth, you let it sit (left mine for 30 minutes while I made sauce and got more involved with TAL), then you roll it out. I used a pasta machine, but obviously, the idea is with or without the pasta machine, to get it as thin as possible.

Another thing I love about pasta making is it is pretty forgiving. I mean, if you like eating pasta, your first attempts will be gobbled up just like the rest.

Also, here are my new friends — they are all British. I met them at the public library and they seemed to know a lot about food.

They’re Nigel Slater, Jane Grigson, and Elizabeth David. More on them later. I have to get to know them first, geez!

Elizabeth has a Tagliatelle al Mascarpone recipe I think I might try. For the sauce, you melt butter, add mascarpone and gently heat the mixture, making sure it doesn’t boil. Then you add the cooked tagliatelle and swirl it around in the sauce. You add a a few tablespoons of grated Parmesean and some roughly chopped walnuts. Sounds good, yes?

Filed under: Ballymaloe, Blog, February 24th, 2011
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Mark Bittman takes on McDonald’s oatmeal offerings today. He writes, “oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook. They can even be eaten raw…”

Immediately, I thought of (and plan on making tomorrow morning) some of the fresh muesli I tasted my first week at Ballymaloe. It’s so simple. You just take a few tablespoons of rolled oats and soak them in twice as much water for ten to fifteen minutes. (So, 3 tablespoons oats would require six tablespoons water). Then, you add some fruit — for example, mashed up raspberries or strawberries, or grated eating apple. You mix it all up with a smidge of honey (depending on how sweet your fruit is), and there’s breakfast.

At Ballymaloe, of course you would have to add fresh cream and brown sugar, but you get the idea.

Of course, oatmeal/porridge works, too.

Filed under: Ballymaloe, Blog, February 23rd, 2011
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Happy Presidents’ Day! On a recent flight I poured through the food issue of The New Yorker. So many great pieces, but what had me gasping was a piece by Laura Shapiro called “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Inedible Cuisine”. You know Eleanor, wife of FDR, delegate to the United Nations, helped create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Actually my senior year high school quote was from First Lady Roosevelt … “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

To my shock, one place Eleanor did not excel in was food! The New Yorker piece documents the absolutely horrifying meals served at the White House at the request of Eleanor. She hired a housekeeper named Henrietta Nesbitt, who, for the next twelve years, “turned out meals so gray, so drooping, so spectacularly inept that they became a Washington legend.”

Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the piece, taken from The Presidential Cookbook — a collection of White House recipes written by Mrs. Nesbitt…

“Sometimes we used pineapple cut in lengthwise sticks and rolled lightly in crushed peppermint candy as an opener for the meal.”

“Pear salad was a great favorite… For that we riced cream cheese, added a mite of heavy cream, chopped chives, candied ginger or nuts, and poured this over the pear halves on lettuce. We either used the green minted canned pears or colored the mayonnaise green.”

Aaaah!?!?!

I found this neat Our White House site of presidential menus and recipes. A few of the early presidents were said to have been fond of gooseberry fool including Thomas Jefferson. According to the Our White House link, Martha Jefferson Randolph (Thomas’s daughter) had this recipe: “Gooseberry Fool: Pick the stems and blossoms from two quarts of green gooseberries; put them in a stew pan, with their weight in loaf sugar, and a very little water—when sufficiently stewed, pass the pulp through a sieve; and when cold, add rich boiled custard till it is like thick cream; put it in a glass bowl, and lay frothed cream on the top.” Of course, you can substitute gooseberries with strawberries or blueberries, or if you are very lucky, black currants.

Filed under: Blog, Holidays, Musings, February 21st, 2011
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Just finished reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki — one of the people responsible for bringing Zen Buddhism to the U.S. A woman named Trudy Dixon worked to edit Suzuki-roshi’s talks in a way that captured the meaning of some of his perhaps puzzling statements. Rather than edit out repetition, for instance, sometimes the repetition of Suzuki-roshi’s words were important for their meaning. I was shocked to find that she worked on the project while very sick, and up until her death, at age 30, of breast cancer.

I bring up this book, not only because meditation is an interest of mine, but because of how it intersects with cooking and eating. I see mindfulness as important to how one experiences both.

Here’s what Suzuki-roshi says:
“To cook is not just to prepare food for someone or for yourself; it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook! That is also an expression of our sincerity, a part of our practice.”

“So we say, ‘When you eat, eat!’ You should eat what is there, you know. Sometimes you do not eat it. Even though you are eating, your mind is somewhere else. You do not know what you have in your mouth. As long as you can eat when you are eating, you are all right. Do not worry a bit. It means you are you yourself.”

This reminds me of the enormous experience of eating I had when I went on a six day silent meditation retreat. We had a strict schedule of waking early, walking and meditating, sitting and meditating, chores, and eating meals. It was as though I had never tasted anything as good as the vegan meals on this retreat. And I am no vegan. In fact, sometimes I think of vegan foods like characters of a new language I have not yet learned. (Brewer’s yeast?) But there I was eating with such full awareness that I tasted every single bite of salad or stewed prunes or whatever was in front of me.

As some Bay Area folks know, this book showcases some of the basis for the teaching practice at Tassajara – a Zen retreat center and also a place famous for its bread! Here’s more on The Tassajara Bread Book. Before heading to Ballymaloe, I also watched the documentary How to Cook Your Life, which follows the author of The Tassajara Bread Book, Zen practitioner Edward Espe Brown. I remember him being very hard to watch. Even though the Zen center settings were serene, and even though he was simply making bread, he seemed a pained person.

Here’s what Suzuki-roshi said about bread:
“Buddha wanted to find out how human beings develop this ideal character–how various sages in the past became sages. In order to find out how dough became perfect bread, he made it over and over again, until he became quite successful. That was his practice.

But we may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult, but it will not be difficult if you are full of strength and vitality. Anyway, we cannot keep still; we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant, and careful, and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully.”

Filed under: Blog, Musings, February 17th, 2011
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There’s a Ballymaloe-inspired dish sitting in my refrigerator right now. It’s Yogurt and Cardamom Cream, a replica of the dessert I made as part of my practical final at the cookery school. It’s also an easy way to learn about using gelatin (called gelatine in the UK).

For a serving of say, 4-5, here’s what you would do. You first remove the seeds from 4-5 green cardamoms and crush them. Then you take 1/2 cup milk, 1/4 cup castor (superfine) sugar, 1/2 cup cream, and the crushed cardamom and heat them in a saucepan, stirring until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is warm.

Separately, you take gelatin (either one leaf or one teaspoon powdered) and place it in a glass measuring cup (the kind with a handle that can hang from a saucepan). You cover the gelatin with a sprinkling of water, about 2-3 tablespoons and leave it sitting there for a few minutes. This is so the gelatin sponges. Meanwhile you simmer water in a saucepan, so that after the gelatin sponges, you can hang the measuring cup with the gelatin on the side of the pan. It’s okay if the bottom of the measuring cup touches the water. The idea is for the gelatin to get heated enough to become completely clear. (You don’t have to use a measuring cup; you could also use a bowl — just something that allows you to see when the gelatin becomes transparent).

Now here is the potentially tricky part. You have to mix just a little bit of the cardamom-infused milk into the gelatin. I stir like mad! Then, you pour this mixture into the rest of the cardamom-infused milk — and keep stirring. You don’t want anything to seize up!

In another bowl, you whisk 1 cup plain yogurt until it is smooth and creamy and then you stir it into the cardamom mixture.

You can pour your yogurt cardamom cream into any number of glasses or dishes. I prefer small glasses because this dessert can be addictive and you don’t want to overstuff someone on something so good. You can refrigerate these overnight, or at least for a few hours — and you can top it with your choice of lovely fruity mixtures. For instance, pomegranate seeds that have been sprinkled with a little rose blossom water, or sliced sugared strawberries, or in the case of my final exam — kumquat compote.

Above is a similar dessert to the yogurt cream called passion fruit mousse. For these recipes, of course you can consult the Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook.

One or two more words on gelatin: Growing up, we used agar-agar, bought from the local Asian grocery store, as a vegetarian substitute to traditional gelatin. It’s a flavourless substance made from various sea vegetables. Also, if you remember, at Ballymaloe we made a traditional carrageen moss pudding — using the seaweed picked from the seashore as the gelatinous substance in the dessert. This too can be topped with a variety of fruit compotes (whatever’s in season?) or else an Irish coffee sauce.

UPDATE: Just saw that Rory has a recipe for poached rhubarb up on his blog (yes, Rory has a new blog!). Poached rhubarb would work well with the carrageen moss pudding. Also, there’s an excruciatingly lovely photo of fresh rhubarb on his site.

**Special thanks to Liz Powers for supplying these dessert photos.**

Filed under: Ballymaloe, Blog, February 16th, 2011
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Happy Valentine’s Day! As I write this, I am listening to a Valentine’s Day CD. Yes, my amazing friend Molly sends these out every year with an original theme. This year’s CD is called “yummy” and the theme is … food! You guessed it; each song mentions food. Mika’s “Lollipop” is fun, but so far my favorite is, “I Eat Boys Like You for Breakfast” by Ida Maria. (The song starts, “I eat boys like you for breakfast. Where’s my salt and pepper now?)

The title reminds me of the title of this Valentine’s poem I recently read : I May After Leaving You Walk Away Quickly or Even Run by Matthea Harvey. Gotta love that syntax. (I guess I like my Valentine’s Day the way I like my desserts, not too super-sweet.)

As some of you may know, before heading to Ireland, I did a mini-internship at The Splendid Table. During this time, I read a bit about ramen and stumbled upon this Ramen Advice site, which gives, “Second-hand Wisdom from Momofuku Ando, the Inventor of Instant Noodles”.

I can’t resist excerpting the following advice post:

Dear Momofuku,
How do I know when I’m in love?
– Anonymous

Dear A,
When Momofuku Ando set out to invent instant ramen, he insisted that the final product meet the following five criteria: 1) tasty; 2) able to keep for a long time; 3) ready in 3 minutes or less; 4) economical; 5) safe and healthy. If you convert number 3 to “happens without much drama,” you can use the same five criteria to judge when you’re in love.

Also, while we are on the subject of twisted food…. While at Ballymaloe, we learned how to peel and segment oranges and grapefruit. You would slice off the top, then proceed to run your knife along the fruit skin deep enough to get past the white pith. You would basically go around the whole fruit, and if you were able to peel the entire fruit and end up with just one long twisty strip of peel, Darina suggested tossing the strip behind you. Then, you see what letter the peel forms on the ground and that is the letter of the first name of your next lover. Very useful information, eh? Try it — and let me know if it works!

Filed under: Blog, Musings, February 14th, 2011
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We all know Florida is full of citrus fruit, but I was at the store and thought I should show you some of the many root vegetables available over here as well. There’s malanga, which is similar to taro, and I’ve heard makes great chips when deep-fried.

There’s a variety of sweet potatoes (and some coconuts, of course) –

in particular, I grew up eating boniato. It has white flesh, but tastes sweet. Not quite like an orange sweet potato though, because it is drier and has a milder sweetness level. We loved eating these and they were always pretty cheap. Just consulted my handy ingredients book, which also mentions that the flesh of the boniato has a “pleasing fluffy texture” that bakes and mashes well. (We just used to microwave it — eek!)

Here’s a Michelle Bernstein recipe I may try… for a boniato mash.

Filed under: Blog, Musings, February 10th, 2011
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In an attempt to keep track of my stories, here is a quick Q&A I did with a personal chef in West Palm Beach, Chef Jeremy Hanlon. It’s such a treat to chat with chefs. What I admired most about Chef Hanlon was how he continually challenged his sense of taste. His diligence in the kitchen now affords him the freedom to make a living creating new dishes (using the best local ingredients) nearly every day.

As part of winning the Hot Chef Challenge in 2010 (a contest put on by the National Restaurant Association), he was flown to Chicago where he cooked alongside Chef Marcus Samuelsson — who also happened to have been one of the judges when Chef Hanlon appeared on the TV Food Network’s Chopped.

Hanlon’s Hot Chef Challenge winning dish was meant to showcase fresh ingredients as well as his take on future restaurant hot trends. It included achiote-accented cobia prepared “sous vide” with local oranges, fennel and scallion and served with toasted organic quinoa and fresh basil. He also made a neat-o flatbread for dessert topped with farm fresh ricotta, grilled pears, and blackberries macerated in acai berry juice – and then he added aged manchego! No joke.

If you are interested in creating your own dish to enter in this year’s contest, you can start by downloading and reading the NRA’s latest trends survey here.

Filed under: Blog, Chefs, February 10th, 2011
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