The Furious Spinner

Okay, obviously I still haven't learned to take food photographs. It'll probably take a while. But these will give you some idea and hopefully you won't lose your appetite.

On our anniversary, Mario had to work, but I decided to cook us a nice dinner. It was a good opportunity for another Slow Thursday. I only eat nightshade once a month or less, and we miss spaghetti, so I wanted to try the "fideos with special chickpeas and saffron" recipe in the Pleasures of Slow Food by Corby Kummer. Since I don't eat gluten, I decided to use rice penne pasta instead of vermicelli. I also changed a few other things. I didn't use 1 ancho chile, which the recipe called for. I also didn't saute anything. As usual, all the ingredients I used are organic and sustainably grown and harvested, and I try to use local foods as much as possible.

I started with garbanzo beans. Two weeks ago, I soaked the chickpeas in water with a bit of lemon juice, overnight. The next morning I drained and then cooked them with a piece of kombu. When they were tender, I drained the beans. When they were cool, I took the skins off each chickpea. It took a while, doing this—it was quite meditative, actually. Then I put them in the freezer. The morning of our anniversary, when I was making the Rice Pasta, Chickpeas, Chocolate, and Saffron, I took the garbanzos out of the freezer. By the way, chickpeas have been cultivated for over 7,000 years. They were most likely first cultivated in Mesopotamia and then they migrated to the Mediterranean and beyond. Since they have been cultivated for so long, they apparently don't grow in the wild any more.



I next took a lovely large yellow onion and whizzed it in the Cuisinart. I could have chopped it, but I wanted some extra water because I was going to sweat them instead of frying them. The Cuisinart will do that if I let it spin for long enough. I chopped up one carrot. I put the carrot in with the onions in a pan and let them sweat together. I tossed in some sea salt, so that the onions and carrots wouldn't get too dehydrated in their little pan sauna. I minced up about six cloves of garlic and added those to the mix, along with a bay leaf, 1/2 vanilla bean, and saffron. I toasted coriander seeds and then ground them up and added them to the mix; I did the same with fennel. I threw in (fair trade) cocoa powder and some canned tomatoes and I stirred them all together. It was so gorgeous-looking! The color was a deep chocolate red. Quite exotic and unexpected looking. Despite how good it looked, I was skeptical that all these spices and herbs would meld together to create a delicious sauce. I’d wait and see.

Of course, I talked to all the ingredients of this dish as I made it. I praised them. I encouraged them. I sang to them. They were already magic; they just had to agree to get along. People used fennel for hundreds of years to make themselves stronger. Garlic was for healing and protection, same with onions—although onions had the benefit of keeping troublesome ghosts away, too. And coriander and tomatoes helped promote love (tomatoes were known as "love apples"). How appropriate for an anniversary dinner, eh? People have believed bay leaves were magical for thousands of years. The Romans thought it would protect them from lightning. The Delphic Oracle reputedly breathed in the fumes of bay leaves as she went into her prophetic trance. The Romans used laurel bay leaves in their kitchens as an invaluable spice. Europeans believed laurel could cures stomach and kidney problems. (Some of you may know of the custom of making a wish if you got the bay leaf in your bowl. That rarely happened in my family because I was taught to take the bay leaf out of the pot before I served the dish since bay leaves are slightly toxic—at least that’s what we were told.)

And then we come to vanilla, chocolate, and saffron. Books could be written on each of these plants. Books have been written. Now that I can smell again (most of the time) I will often open up my vanilla extract bottle or my spice jars of vanilla beans and saffron for a little aromatherapy. I wish I had the words to describe smells: I'm not sure if it's because my sense of smell is so new or because it is a difficult thing to explain. Vanilla has a sweet smell, but it's not a sickly sweet smell. And saffron. Hmmm. Can any of you describe it to me? Something outdoorsy about it. Like the smell of a meadow in a bottle. Not a flowery meadow. A grassy meadow.

Vanilla, along with saffron, is one of the most expensive spices on the planet. It is extremely labor intensive, which means the workers are often exploited. We buy Fair Trade organic vanilla extract. Vanilla is an orchid that originally grew in Mexico (or thereabouts); a particular Mexican bee pollinated the orchid. This lovely Melissa is now extinct because of pesticide use. (This theory is controversial. It may have been pollinated by hummingbirds, too.) All vanilla is now hand-pollinated—within a few hours of the flower blossoming. The pods must be picked just before they ripen and burst open. Vanilla is then cured for about six months—a very complicated curing process which involves the pods sweating in blankets. In Madagascar, the pods are tattooed after harvest by punching holes in their shells, creating initials or the emblem of the owner; this is to help prevent theft. I imagine any love potion would have to have some real vanilla in it, don’t you?

(By the way, don't use imitation vanilla. It's disgusting. Sometimes it's a sulfite waste byproduct or some other nasty chemical.)

Saffron is the dried stigmas of the saffron crocus. (They're locally called roses.) According to Jill Norman in Herbs and Spices, 80,000 roses are needed for five pounds of stigmas which become one pound of saffron. Can you imagine? Only a bit of saffron is needed when cooking, which is a good thing since saffron can be poisonous in large doses. To me, these reddish gold threads are incredibly beautiful. I can imagine them being used as thread in a magical cloak, a wedding veil, or a magic carpet. Anything would be possible wrapped up in saffron cloth, I am certain of that.



I’ve been trying to think how to sum up chocolate and cocoa. I can't do it! Too much pressure. So many stories and so much myth surrounds this particular food stuff. Food of the gods. Bitter, mystifying, and intense energy food for the elite for as long as anyone knows. Then the Spanish or some other European mixed it with sugar, and the rest is history. Thousands of slaves were used and abused to grow and harvest chocolate once it left the Americas. Even today, cocoa plantations do use slave labor, including child slave labor. It is important to only buy fair trade chocolate. One of the things I want to do this year is learn more about chocolate and chocolate making (for a couple of my books), so I'll write more about all that later. But I will say this: I think it's possible that Jack didn't trade his cow in for just any beans (not that ‘just any beans’ aren't incredible on their own), but I think it could have been cacao beans. What else?

Anyway, after I mixed in the chocolate, saffron, and vanilla, I added water to the vegetable sauce. I let it cook down for about thirty minutes. When the sauce was reduced by about a third, I took out the bay leaf and I opened up the vanilla pod and scraped it into the sauce. Then I put it all through a sieve. At this point, the sauce had the consistency of tomato juice. I took a sip of it. Oh my word! It had a smoky taste, very earthy, and tasty. It was like sipping a magic elixir. Like sipping an Earth potion. I had never tasted anything like it. I could have stood over the pot and drank it all up.

Instead, I added a bit of salt. I cut up about a pound of Swiss chard. I dropped all of that into a separate soup pot and turned on the heat. I added a bit of water to steam the chard.




Then I added the two cups of chickpeas and the vegetable broth. I brought it up to a boil and put in a box of rice penne. I let that simmer.



Then I made aioli. Aioli is a kind of garlic mayonnaise. I made it into a vegan aioli by not using any raw eggs. (Yes, I know, the horror, the horror.) I mushed six garlic cloves together with a bit of salt. I dry roasted a teaspoon of black mustard seed. I put that into the blender with the zest of one lemon, along with the juice of that lemon and 3/4 cup olive oil. When the pasta was cooked, I poured the aioli over it all and stirred.



When Mario got home, we ate this amazing dish. The aioli added a bit of tang to it. It feels quite grounding and healing to eat these slow meals. I feel as though I am weaving a spell (with saffron as my threads) with the ingredients, creating a bit of healing and nourishment. We both enjoyed it very much.

If I do it again, I'm going to add mushrooms, I think. If you eat gluten, go ahead and use angelhair pasta.

Ingredients

2 cups dried chickpeas, soaked and then cooked, or 3 1/2 cups cooked
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
6 garlic cloves, minced
1 bay leaf
1/2 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
1 tsp saffron threads
1 tsp ground coriander seeds
1 tsp ground fennel seed
1 T unsweetened cocoa powder
4 cups chopped canned tomatoes
8 cups water
12-16 ounces pasta
1 pound Swiss chard, stemmed and chopped
3/4 c to 1 c aioli

Aioli
Blend together 4 garlic cloves, salt to taste, 1 tsp mustard seeds, zest of one lemon, juice from one lemon, 3/4 cup oil

Labels: food, food photos, photos, recipes

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.