Birthday Bourguignon

And another month gone. With no post. Not that there hasn't been some cooking happening. There certainly HAS been eating going on, and so I shall try to redeem the neglectful silence with some highlights.

We start with a birthday dinner of Beef Bourguignon--Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon, to be precise. Yes, a food blog post about Julia Child and Beef Bourguignon...wasn't there a book or a movie or something recently...?

Anyway, for friend P.'s birthday, Chef E. and I hosted a French-inspired evening. Taking our cue from Julia's master recipe in The Way to Cook (a 'crowbar separation' from both Amy Adams and Mastering the Art of French Cooking)we meticulously patted man-portion kilos of cubed beef with paper towels and got to browning. A bottle of wine, Italian tinned tomatoes, some stock, and a few hours later we had stew, served with green beans with lemon dressing and toasted almonds.

As this was a celebration of E.'s birthday as well, an apple pie, as requested, was wrestled up, and there was dinner!

Our dessert was experimental to say the least, without Grandma's recipe for pie crust to hand, and dear friend A., who can't eat dairy. Soy butter to the rescue! I ended up with a super pliable dough that rolled out beautifully, and the roux for the stew was definitely none the worse for this lactose-free substitute.

Something old, something new, something tangy, something...slippery

One of my favourite things about Oxford is how international a community it is. My close-knit group of friends alone represent Africa, Australasia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. I clearly need to make a concerted effort with the lovely Central and South Americans around!

If our pot luck dinners had a representative chef it would more likely be Marcus Samuelsson than Julia Child or Gordon Ramsay.

Our friends enrich our lives every day, challenging us, helping us to see ourselves as we are, making us all better people. One of the best things, though, is gathering around a table of food cooked by friends or for friends and tucking in to something new and different and--whether you like the taste or not--made with much love.

What is also truly exciting and wonderful is receiving gifts of food from other parts of the world, offering the opportunity to taste something that I truly would never have been exposed to otherwise. When I returned to the UK from the December holiday I was graced with two such tokens!

N. was kind enough to bring back a hefty bag of FaFa Fruit Bar from Tehran, which is something like a giant sheet of fruit leather. Being something of a connoisseur of fruit leather from those early days of after-school snacks and last-minute pick-me-ups surrounding sports matches, I was overjoyed to be presented with such a bounty of it.

The paper closure to the enormous plastic bag containing the snack shows cartoon characters, each more happy about their respective apple, plum, apricot, red currant (I think), cherry and tamarind paste (unsure, here also...) than the other.

N. informed us that, just as one might find in the States, the product comes in a variety of flavours, but that the sour was the best. Even without having tasted the others, I would have to agree. The tar-coloured stuff tastes great! It's also oddly addictive. The sourness is not too intense, just enough so that I find myself tearing just one more bit off as I'm writing this.

The package also claims that it is 'A Bound Between Children & Fruits'. I cannot read or speak Farsi, and I can barely hold on to a second language, so I truly mean no disrespect when I say that I think this a highly amusing incidence that brings to mind images of siblings braiding lengths of fruit leather into ropes with which to tie each other up.

My second gift of food came from another friend, N., this one from Nanjing. The day after she arrived back from China she came into the kitchen sheepishly asking me if I liked duck. N. has witnessed many of my culinary exploits over this year, and has been the subject of much intense questioning and pestering by yours truly. Most of the time, I am the hovering nag asking about the origins of [insert Chinese cooking technique, vegetable, spice, sauce, herb here] while she's trying to relax and cook up something simple and scrumptious for dinner.

I said I loved duck, knowing that Nanjing is famous for its duck dishes. She then presented me with two shrink-wrapped, bright green packages the size of my palm. 'This is Duck?', I thought. There, on the package was a Sanrio Pekkle duck look-alike, sporting a bib and surrounded by flying chili peppers.


N. stood there while I gingerly tore away the top and a mini duck wing began to emerge, covered in a tough, slippery aspic the colour of weak tea. I have had few Andrew Zimmern/Anthony Bourdain moments in my life, but I was coming to the realisation that this might be one of them.

I took a brave, large bite into what looked like the most fleshy part. The gelatinous outer coating was, in fact, a tasty, highly salty combination of flavours that the package lists as its ingredients:
fresh duck's wings, table salt, soy sauce, onion, ginger, anise, pepper, chilioil, Colored ground pepper. The jury is still out on what 'Colored' ground pepper means, exactly, but I have to admit that the, if slightly sinewy, chewy, meat was good.

N. explained to me that her mom had stuffed the sleeves of her sweaters with the packets, all containing various duck parts and flavours; she sweetly offered me a heart packet, but I bashfully declined. So these are the Chinese equivalent to the Hershey's chocolate Kisses I used to find in my suitcase upon arrival, back in my college dorm room! She said that these were snacks that people in Nanjing eat when watching TV or just hanging out.

This packet also had an amusing phrase or two: 'The last English alphabet after production Date. Indicate production location.' It's like a CakeWreck moment of the Nanjing processed duck industry.

All of this is to say that these small tokens mean a lot. Mouthfuls of new, different things open our eyes, make us more aware of how others live and eat, and we are the better for having experienced them, just as we are better people for the friends and family around us. Next time I'm saying 'yes' to the heart!

Of Love and Pie

My mother loves to tell a story from my childhood—the ‘Julie’ story. One particular afternoon circa 1989 the house went quiet. Suspiciously quiet. She called up to the playroom to ask what I was doing, and a small voice responded ‘I’m watching Julie’. Julia Child, actually. Left to my 6-year-old devices and full range of PBS programming, Julia Child & Company and Dinner at Julia’s quickly became weekly staples. After all, when did Bob Ross or Mr. Rogers ever whack a chicken with a cleaver?

Beyond the playroom, however, food has always played a joyous, gluttonous, and thrilling part in my life and have no doubt it always will do so. The child of two foodies themselves, it was only a matter of time, an inevitable process of osmosis before it was I who insisted on doing the stirring, chopping, and sautéing dans la cuisine. Most familial disputes in our house tend to begin with 'what shall we have for dinner?' and proceed to sets of intent, determined eyes peering over the glossy covers of Gourmet, Bon Appétit, or stained and well-loved copies of The Silver Palate and Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking. Travel and recreation, I must admit, is also constantly tinged with foodie motivations. I have been known, on more than one occasion, to not only plan itineraries but to also send out travel advice e-mails to friends visiting Paris or Istanbul with intricate, detailed descriptions of mouthwatering three-course menus to be found in every corner of the city without a single thought to what might be discovered in the hours between meal times (which, for me, to be honest, is a relative concept to be governed more by geographic proximity to the next tantalizing prospect than military time).

There is also the comfort factor, which I didn't fully appreciate until I really got in to baking pies. As a birthday present one year, my aunt put together a recipe box containing handwritten recipe cards of hers and my grandmother's famous pie crust and (admittedly Midwestern) delicious fillings. I know you have been anticipating the arrival of this cliché from the appearance of the word 'comfort', but I don't think I'm alone in repeating, once more, that nothing is quite as holistically satisfying as taking in a slice of homemade pie. Baked goods, I learned, also worked wonders as peace offerings. Turmoil in the office or at home? Why, strawberry rhubarb to the rescue. The failed lemon blueberry scone attempt to save a withering relationship with an ex-boyfriend is all but seared into my mind, and I have to admit that I continue to self-soothe with baking (which friends tend to appreciate in any case).

Food, I have found, as you will have as well by this point, is also the one thing I can write about and talk about endlessly and inexhaustibly, often, I’m sure, to the detriment of a handful of very patient friends slowly going green with nauseated boredom. So, I hereby offer a solution! Every week I shall endeavour (or, for you all following this in the States, 'endeavor') to channel my food obsession into a bit of pith (commentary, the pithy stuff, the musings that the Oxford examiners have no want of) and pit (hopefully tearing myself away from the books long enough to try a weekly recipe or two, and, if successful, pass them along).

I do hope you'll follow along, and please feel free to leave comments about what inspires you, repulses you, or leaves you hungry for more!