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03/08/10 - Sefrina

Sefrina isn't the next town after Hilda. Sefrina is a Moroccan cholent, a great, easy to make Moroccan stew with a ridiculously long cooking time. We found out about it in Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Aside from the six hour cooking time, it is an easy dish to make. That's right, it cooks for six hours total, but your oven does all the heavy lifting. Everything gets wonderfully tender, and the eggs develop an amazing creamy texture as they hardboil.

We made this version with a 3lb 10oz pot roast from the Clark Family Farm. It had a nice big marrow bone which you can see floating there in the photo. The potatoes were from the Johnston Farm and the eggs from Westwind Farm, so this qualifies as a Port Angeles Farmers' Market dish. We also used dried chick peas, but they weren't from the Farmers' Market. You can make this dish with canned chick peas, but this is obviously not a dish you can throw together in a hurry, so why bother with time saving conveniences?

Our Moroccan stew

The eggs get tan and creamy.
 The recipe:
  1. The night before, soak a cup of dried chick peas in water overnight.
  2. Start boiling six cups of water in a tea kettle.
  3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
  4. Take a big casserole with a lid and dump in the chick peas.
  5. Add 3 or 4 pounds of beef cut into big chunks. Pot roast is great, but it is better if there is a bone or two.
  6. Add six potatoes.
  7. Gently tuck six raw eggs into the ingredients so far.
  8. Chop up four cloves of garlic and sprinkle them on top.
  9. Sprinkle with a few pinches of salt, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/4 teaspoon of saffron or turmeric.
  10. When the water comes to a boil, pour it on.
  11. Cover and put it in the oven for an hour.
  12. Lower the heat to 250°F and let it cook for another five hours.

Keywords: farmers' market, johnston farm, port angeles, food, recipes

11/06/09 - When French Women Cook We had been neglecting one of our favorite cookbooks, Madeleine Kamman's When French Women Cook: A Gastronomic Memoir . Some of this is because a lot of the dishes call for a full cup of heavy cream. For example, the pizza like dish to the right is the Alsation version of pissaladiere. That's 3 lbs of onions in the topping along with a half a stick of butter, a full cup of heavy cream, and two ounces of prunier d'agen to give it a little kick. Those are bacon bits on top. Needless to say, one slice went a long way.

Flammkuche

Noisette of Pork with Prunes
 The dish to the left is a bit lighter. It is from Touraine. We sliced up a seven pound pork loin from Heritage Foods into slices and seared them in butter. That part was simple. We soaked 30 or 40 prunes overnight in a bottle of red wine, then cooked that wine down, without the prunes, to a mere cup or two. Then, in the typical French manner, we made the sauce in the pan we used for cooking the pork so we got all the cooked meat flavor. We added a cup of heavy cream, then a cup or two of veal stock and the cup or two that was left of the prune wine. Then, we cooked that down to a cup or two. Nearly six cups of liquid were cooked down to perhaps one and a half. That's why they call it a reduction, and it was a wonderful reduction with the pork and prunes.

Keywords: food, recipes

10/31/09 - Something To Grouse About

Autumn is the time for game birds. For those of us who cannot be trusted with firearms, that means D'Artagnan, the specialty food provider founded by Arianne Daugin, the daughter of one of France's great chefs. This recipe calls for four grouses, or perhaps four grice, if that is what are available at your market. It also calls for a head or two of savoy cabbage, twelve rashers of the best, smokey bacon you can get, a tart apple, at half a stick of butter, dried thyme and/or marjoram, pepper and salt.

Grouses, or perhaps grice

Shredded savoy cabbage
 Clean the grouses, or grice. Save any good insaginnies. Clean the cabbage and save eight of the largest leaves for wrapping the grouses. Shred the rest of the cabbage using the slicing blade of a food processor. Cut up four rashers of bacon into 1/2" bits. Toss the shredded cabbage and bacon with a teaspoon or two of thyme, marjoram or both, and some salt and pepper. If there were any hearts or crops, chop them up and toss them in as well.

Cut up the apple into eight pieces. Put a piece of apple, a chunk of butter and as much of the cabbage mix as you can into each grouse. Put the remaining cabbage mix into a flat roasting pan. Put each grouse, breast side up, on a cabbage leaf. Drape two rashers of bacon over it and cover it with another cabbage leaf.

All ready to bake, except for the top cabbage leaves

Grice, or perhaps grouses, in the cabbage patch
Add perhaps a quarter inch of water to the baking pan and bake for about 45 minutes at 325F. Check the birds. They should be cooked through and getting tender. We raised the temperature to 350F at this point and gave them another 15 minutes. A lot depends on your oven.

When the birds are basically cooked, remove the upper cabbage leaves. Slide the bacon down to the sides of each bird so it doesn't burn. Raise the oven temperature to 450F and give the grice another 10 or 15 minutes. This should brown the birds nicely. They can be served straight from the oven along with the cabbage.

Ready to eat

Keywords: autumn, birds, recipes

10/27/09 - Moroccan Lamb Chez Kaleberg

We recently ordered some Romney Lamb from Heritage Foods, so we steamed up the shoulder and the shanks Moroccan style. This is one of our favorite lamb recipes from Paula Wolfert's Moroccan cookbook . You can see the Moroccan style steamer to the right. The lamb was a bit bulky for the steaming container.

It's a pretty simple dish if you have some kind of steamer handy, and some good lamb. Put some water, and, if you have them, some dried chick peas, in the lower part of the steamer and set it to boil.

Make a bed of parsley in the upper part of the steamer and put in a peeled onion or two. Take a half stick of butter, 1/2 tsp of saffron, a few pinches of salt and pepper and smush them together. Rub the lamb with the butter mixture and add it to the upper part of the steamer on the bed of parsley.

Our steamer, in action

Steamed lamb shanks and lamb, Moroccan style
 Put the steamer together and let the lamb steam for at least an hour and a half. (It may need a bit longer, but that's the usual cooking time.) Now and then check to make sure there is enough water in the lower part of the steamer. This is especially important if you added dried chick peas as they absorb a lot of liquid.

You can see the steamed lamb to the left. The meat should be so tender it is falling off the bone. The dried chick peas should be nicely cooked and swimming in delicious lamb soup.

Serve the lamb with a mixture of ground cumin and good salt. Break out the sea salt if you have it. It's also great with spicy horseradish.

Keywords: recipes

08/24/09 - Edamame, Soy Beans to Munch

We aren't sure of where we got the idea for this dish, but it is simplicity itself and a great crowd pleaser. Start with a 12 ounce bag of frozen edamame, soy beans. Make sure you get the shelled ones unless you really like shelling beans. Chop up 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and perhaps an inch of fresh ginger root. Heat a tablespoon or two of sesame oil in a frying pan or wok. You might as well set the stove at full blast for this. Dump in the beans. Toss them around. Let them cook through. Wait for a few of them to get a bit seared. Remove the pan from the stove. Toss in the garlic and ginger. Then splash in a few teaspoons of soy sauce, to taste.

That's it.

Keywords: recipes, luau

08/07/09 - Scalloped Oysters

While we haven't been in an R month for a while now, the local oysters are still in great shape. We made a big batch of scalloped oysters for a party and we were most impressed. The recipe was pretty simple, but it took a bit of baking time. This is a recipe for a big batch, you can scale it to suit.

INGREDIENTS

  • one BIG loaf of sourdough bread (or two smaller ones)
  • 4 10 ounce jars of oysters
  • a half gallon of the best milk you can get (we use milk from Dungeness Valley Creamery)
  • worcester sauce
  • a stick of butter

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Tear up the bread into crumbs and toast them in the oven on a metal tray. Keep a close watch so they don't burn.

2. Put half the oysters into the baking dish to form the bottom layer. Add a few shots of Worcester sauce.

3. Put half of the bread crumbs on top of the oysters to form another layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

4. Put the other half of the oysters into the dish to form a second oyster layer. Add a few more shots of Worcester sauce.

 5. Spread the rest of the bread crumbs across the top for the final layer.

6. Pour in enough milk to wet everything but the topmost bread crumbs of the top layer.

7. Dot the top with chunks of the butter.

8. Bake at 350F for about an hour. Add milk if it is getting dry too soon and to keep the top bread crumbs from burning.

Keywords: food, recipes

08/02/09 - Salmon Roe, The Kaleberg Way

One of our friends called us triumphantly with the news. He had caught, not one, but three salmon. We had to join him for dinner, so we did, and we had an excellent meal. One of the salmon had roe, a pair of red egg pods, but our friend wasn't sure of what to do with them, though he did a fine job with the rest of the fish. We, however, did.

Most people eat salted salmon eggs, which are processed much like caviar so that each egg is firm and separate, but coming from the East Coast, we were more familiar with shad roe, and salmon roe is quite similar. We pan fried the complete packets of roe in butter, then baked them to cook them through. The concoction in the photograph is the salmon roe on toasted whole wheat bread with lots of capers.

So, if you ever come across some good salmon roe and aren't sure how to serve it, just try them the Kaleberg way.

Salmon roe on toast, attractively plated; click to enlarge and see otherwise

Keywords: recipes

05/24/09 - Deep Fried Chick Peas With Wilted Greens

We promised people we'd put this recipe on our web site. (We grabbed it from Tom Douglas's cookbook, Big Dinners, if you want to check out some of his other great recipes.) This recipe is simple, but you'll have to do some deep frying. We use one of those electric deep fryers, but you can just use a deep pot. You want a deep pot so the oil doesn't spatter as much, and you can get enough oil into it to cover the chick peas when you fry them. You will also want a slotted spoon so you can get things out of the hot oil.

For the recipe, you will need:

  • a pint or so of olive oil
  • eight cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
  • two cans of chick peas - pour off the liquid in the can and dry them a bit with a paper towel for less spattering
  • salt and black pepper
  • about a pound of escarole, mixed greens, kale, lettuce, seaweed or such
Heat the olive oil to about 350F. An electric deep fryer will do this automatically. Alternatively, you can use a thermometer. If you don't have a thermometer, just keep an eye on the oil so that it doesn't start to smoke.

Deep fry the garlic slices for maybe 30 seconds, until they turn golden. This cooks the garlic and flavors the oil.

Deep fry the chick peas a handful at a time. Give them about two minutes. They'll turn golden brown and shrink. Remove them from the oil and let them cool on a paper towel. Keep deep frying batches until they're all deep fried.

Heat two or three tablespoons of the deep frying oil in a pan. Clean the greens and toss them all in. Toss them around a bit until they wilt. You want to cook them as little as you can, but the cooking time will depend on what you are cooking.

Serve the chick peas and garlic on top of the cooked greens. How's that?

This is another Kaleberg Photoshop hash. Once again, our photographer fell behind the ravening hordes, so we had to cut and paste to make it look like we still had a full dish.

Keywords: recipes

04/08/09 - Sweetmeats for Passover

We recently celebrated Passover, and given that Passover is a very old holiday, we decided to have some old fashioned sweetmeats for dessert. Sweetmeats are usually confections of dried fruit and nuts, and come in all varieties. We decided to try out a few and were very pleased with the results. They are easy to make and are much healthier than most modern candies.

We made four different treats:

  • Dates stuffed with almonds
  • Prunes stuffed with hazelnuts
  • Candied orange peel
  • Figs stuffed with candied orange peel
Don't be constrained by these recipes. It's easy to try variations using whatever dried fruits and nuts you have around.

Four sweet treats
Candied Orange Peel

Peel the outer skin off of an orange or two using a vegetable peeler. You don't want the pithy part, just the orange outer layer. Boil a pot of water and dump in the peel for about five or six minutes. In a pot, dissolve about a half cup of sugar in with a quarter cup (or less) of water. Bring it to a boil. Put in the orange peel. If you have a candy thermometer, you want to cook the peel to about 230F. If you don't have a thermometer, let it cook down until the liquid is thick syrup. Lay out a sheet of wax paper, cover it with a quarter cup of sugar. Remove the orange slices from the pot and spread them out on the sugar. Put some more sugar on top. When they are cool enough, toss them around in the sugar.

TIP: Save some of the orange sugar. It can be used to coat dried fruits for making other sweetmeats.
Figs Stuffed with Candied Orange Peel

We use calimyrna figs, not the darker mission figs, but you can probably use any kind of fig you want. Cut off the hard nib of the fig. Cut a slit in the fig. Stuff in some candied orange rind and squeeze shut. Roll the fig around in some of the extra orange sugar.
Dates Stuffed with Almonds
We use deglet noor dates, but you can use any dry date for this recipe. We use regular almonds, not blanched almonds, but you might try any almonds you want. Using the almond as a knife, slit the date and stuff the almond into it. Sprinkle a few grains of sea salt or other coarse salt onto them for a nice tang. That's it.
Prunes Stuffed with Hazelnuts

Unless you have a peculiary tough type of prune and need to use a knife, just shove a hazelnut or two into each prune. Sprinkle a few grains of sea salt or other coarse salt onto them for a nice tang.

Keywords: food, recipes


You can see the melted raclette in the middle. You can't see the scallions which means we should have added more.

02/03/09 - Deep Fried Tofu and Raclette We recently tried a rather improbable recipe for Fried Tofu Stuffed With Raclette Cheese. It was in Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook which we had bought, because we had enjoyed our meal at a Japanese pub in Honolulu, Izakaya Nonbei, some years back. The izakaya style of cooking tends to be informal and imaginative, but we had never seen any dishes made with cheese. Let's face it, Asia, unlike Europe, is not big on cheese. The recipe itself was easy. Just deep fry the tofu. Stuff it with scallions and raclette, then broil it until the cheese melts. The prunes were simple as well. Just dump them in a pot with red wine, a stick of cinnamon and simmer. The combination was incredible. Let's hear it for fried food and melted cheese, the glory of two continents combined in one great dish. The trick was to get a good, super-firm tofu. We went with the special 1950s stuff that was developed to take anything but a direct hit. We found that locally, but we had to get into Seattle for the raclette. It was worth it. To be honest, we've never had anything quite like this in any izakaya, but we'll be keeping our eyes, and mouths, open.

We deep fried the super-firm tofu in peanut oil. That's our Fry Baby in action. Then we cut a slit in the tofu, stuffed in the cheese and scallions and broiled them until the cheese melted.

Here are the simmered spiced prunes in red wine with cinnamon.

Keywords: food, recipes

01/23/09 - Haiga Rice, Uni and Monkfish Liver

It started with a sale on sea urchin roe at Catalina Offshore Products, and in the typical Kaleberg fashion it went on from there. To start with, we bought four trays of the sea urchin roe and an order of frozen steamed monkfish liver which is also known as ankimo, but this is getting ahead of things. It all really started with some haiga rice we had bought some time ago. That's the haiga rice being soaked in the picture to the right.

Haiga rice is a partially milled short grain rice, so it still has some of its husk or bran. This supposedly makes it a better rice for diabetics, and it also gives it a richer flavor and hearty texture. We followed the recipe from the Seattle Times which involved washing the rice, and then letting the wet rice sit for a half an hour before cooking it. It wasn't at all like brown rice. In fact, it was the best sushi rice we have tasted.


We'll get back to the haiga rice in a minute, but first a word about the ankimo. The monkfish liver we bought was steamed and frozen, but supposedly the product contained nothing besides the liver itself and some salt. It looked like a salami wrapped in plastic. We decided to serve it simply on home cooked potato chips which we had fried in goose fat. We tried a purple potato for a real starchy flavor and a sweet potato for a bit of sweetness.

Ankimo has a subtle flavor. There is a mild livery note, but it is a lot like foie gras and unctuous. We served thin slices of it on our potato chips, which were a perfect complement. The sweet potato chips were best, but the combination was rich and delicious, sort of a foie gras Napoleon. Maybe that is reaching a bit, it was a great combination and we ate most of the ankimo in one sitting.
We decided to eat the sea urchin roe raw, as sushi, rather than cooking it with butter, coriander, scallions, cayenne pepper and lemon. There are sea urchins right here off the coast of Port Angeles, and they are harvested commercially, but you'd be hard pressed to find them on sale locally.

They are sold packed in little wooden boxes like the one shown on the right. Each box has its own little lid so that the boxes can be stacked without the delicate eggs getting crushed.


We spread the haiga rice on sheets of nori, dried seaweed. We cut the big sheet into rectangles, perhaps two inches by four inches and put a few pieces of uni on each. Then, we poured on tad of soy sauce and that was it. Most of the goodness of sushi is in the good ingredients. That's some pickled ginger on the plate with one of our unrolled uni rolls.

Our experiment was successful, and we actually got to use that bag of haiga rice. We'll be watching the member specials at Catalina Offshore Products to see if we can come up with any new ideas. If you are interested at all, you can sign up as a member pretty easily. You don't have to be running a restaurant. Hmm, the mackerel filets look kind of interesting, and we've never tasted geoduck clams. There's still plenty of room at the Kaleberg frontier.

Keywords: recipes, fish

12/28/08 - Turkey With Three Sauces

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we had roast turkey for Christmas. Mind you, we've had a bit of a head start on celebrating the holiday, so we know that turkey is a traditional Christmas favorite. This year we made three different Mexican sauces, a red sauce, a green sauce and a brown sauce. That last one was a chocolate sauce. The red sauce was an old favorite, but the green sauce was a Kaleberg Labs project, and the clear winner in an excellent field. For recipes and more, check out Turkey With Three Sauces.

Keywords: food, recipes, christmas

12/15/08 - Smoked Steelhead

Did we mention that Tuna Dan has been selling steelhead, along with albacore tuna, at the Port Angeles Farmers' Market? We recently smoked up a fresh batch of steelhead in our kettle grill. Since we knew we were going to eat the whole thing with in a day or two, we didn't bother with the full dose of salt and smoke. We just rubbed three pounds of steelhead with a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of peppercorns (lightly crushed), two tablespoons of coriander seeds (lightly crushed) and four tablespoons of brown sugar and let them stand in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, we smoked them for maybe 45 minutes in a closed kettle grill.

The results? Did we mention that we've already eaten all three pounds of fish? Yeah, they were that good.

Keywords: farmers' market, port angeles, recipes

12/03/08 - Cardamom Cookies

We love cardamom. It is an underused spice, possibly because it can be tricky to spell. Good luck trying to find cardomam on Google. Our favorite use for this spice is in cardamom cookies, and we seem to have lost our old recipe, so we are using a relatively new one from Gourmet. If you want, you can go to Epicurious and look the recipe up yourself, but the one here has been tested at Kaleberg Kitchens, so we know it works.

Bake a batch of these cookies, with or without cookie molds. You might even want to make them a bit thick. These are wonderful shortbread cookies. Shortbread cookies are what Lorna Doones are supposed to be but aren't. Your whole house will be scented with butter and cardamom, and if you like the baking scent of cinnamon, you will be ecstatic with the scent of cardamom. They are perfect for Christmas baking which is when all these old fashioned spices come out of the back of the cupboard and into the oven where they belong.

They don't look like much, but they are delicious.

An open cardamom pod
 Orange Cardamom Cookies (basically the recipe from Gourmet 12/07)
  • 1 cup butter (2 sticks)
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 2 tbsp heavy cream
  • 2 tbsp orange zest (or more)
  • 1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 1/2 cups flour
Smoosh the butter until it is soft and workable. Add the sugar and smoosh it to the butter. Add the egg yolk and the heavy cream and work them into the butter which will get softer. Add the orange zest, cardamom and salt and continue smooshing. Finally, add the flour and work into a slightly crumbly dough.

Divide the dough into four parts and press them into flat rectangles. Let them rest in the refrigerator for 15 to 30 minutes or so. (We actually skip this step which is why our cookies aren't much to look at, but they taste just as good as better rested cookies.) Roll the cookie dough out to about 1/8 inch (or as much as 1/4 inch) on a floured work surface. If you have a speculatius cookie mold, you can use this, otherwise just cut the cookies into 2 inch by 3 inch squares and put them on a baking sheet. Bake for about 8-10 minutes at 350F. (We use a convection oven and special baking sheets, so we get quicker results.) Bake until the edges are brown.

Keywords: food, recipes

08/24/08 - Uni Toast

Every year, in late August, we have a seafood festival, and every year the star of our seafood festival is uni toast. Uni, sea urchin eggs, are usually eaten raw as sushi, but they are also delicious cooked. We get our uni from Catalina OP. It comes in little wooden pallettes each holding 80 grams of delicious orange yellow sea urchin eggs. They smell of the sea. Sauteed in butter, they have a deep, rich flavor. They might not look like much in these photographs, but we Kalebergs know that sea urchin roe is not just for sushi.

In the pan

On the plate with one of Jasper White's breadsticks
RECIPE
  • 320 grams (four flats) sea urchin roe
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 6-8 scallions, cut into little slices
  • 1/2 cup fresh coriander, chopped
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • lemon juice to taste (perhaps half a lemon)
Melt the butter in the pan over medium high heat. Add the sea urchin roe and cook for a minute or two. Add the scallions. Cook for another minute or two until they start to soften. Add the coriander. Turn off the heat. Adjust the seasoning with salt, pepper and lemon juice.

We recommend serving this dish with either good sourdough toast or Jasper White's breadsticks.

Keywords: food, recipes

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