The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Southern California is specialty-citrus country, so you’d think that ordinary navel oranges would come bottom of the exotica scale. But these ones–an accidental find, I’m sure–smell distinctly like orange blossom, and the peel tastes like it too. They make an unusual and elegant marmalade in the microwave, and it only takes a few minutes.

Fruitcake and the Jews

I love French food logic. It makes me want to argue even when I actually agree. The “Le Monde” newspaper’s explanation that its Alsatian fruitcake isn’t really a pear cake but rather a Jewish Passover cake would make so much more sense if there weren’t in fact a whole pound of dried pears in the recipe. Come to think of it, the fact that Jews like fruitcake more than Christians do is just as confusing.

When life hands you sour cherries, pit them!

When my grandparents moved back out of New York City after retiring, my dad discovered an old Mott’s prune juice jug in a box in the garage. It was filled with a mysterious dark liquid with red lumpy stuff at the bottom. It turned out that forgetting the sour cherry vishniak he’d put up with vodka back in the 1950s was the best thing Grandpa could have done to it.

Stuffed Eggplants with Quince, A Vegetarian Odyssey

When I got “Aromas of Aleppo” for my birthday this week, the stuffed eggplant with quince was the first thing I had to try. It took two hours in the oven–not counting the time it took to make the tamarind concentrate earlier this week–but it worked beautifully the first time around, even with my vegetarian version, and it made a great addition to the Rosh Hashanah table. Next time, I’m going to use the microwave to cut the roasting time to a few minutes just for finishing, so my house doesn’t heat up in 90-degree weather.

The Birthday Project: New Year, New Food

Despite the unfamiliarity of some of the flavors in “Aromas of Aleppo”–allspice in meat dishes, tamarind-based sauces–this is the best kind of traditional Jewish home cooking, the kind that has your favorite great-aunts outdoing each other for Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and other big celebrations. And like all Jewish great-aunt dishes for the holidays, this dish of stuffed eggplants and quinces comes with two required homework items: the beef and rice stuffing, and tamarind concentrate. The stuffing is easy enough, even in my vegetarian lentil version. The tamarind concentrate? I decided to mechanize a little to see if I could speed it up.

Ice cream, enhanced

It’s been over 100 degrees here in Pasadena this week, so ice cream is practically a medical supply. I’ve been modifying my ice cream almost as long as I’ve been old enough to buy my own, for fun or out of boredom, but I’ve discovered not many other people mess around with the flavors they get at the store. You have to wonder why not, because most non-super premium ice cream in America is a little, or a lot, bland.

Political Pancakes, or, Why is Borders flogging so much lard?

Borders has just sent me an offer I can smell from here–four ultraconservative books-to-be at deep, deep discount for preorder. What does it say (reading the tea leaves here) when Newt Gingrich looks like the most coherent and readable (and properly-dressed) selection? My response–a lard-free and much more appetizing breakfast of pancakes. With patriotic red and blue berries.

Fruit Rescue Redux: Re-tanging the “Cutie” Tangerine

Cuties are little and orange and shiny and really easy to peel. Perfect, right? The trouble was, the Cuties had almost no taste. What they were really missing was the tang. Without that, they’re not tangerines. Or at least not ones worth eating. Microwave to the rescue!

Superfoods and Magic Beans

The premise of calling something a superfood is that if you eat this one special food, or at least shop your way down the list of 5, or 10, or whatever’s in the article, you’ll be so much healthier than someone who eats a regular food. What are superfoods supposed to be, exactly? Look at the captions for what’s so great about each featured food and you find a couple of consistent characteristics that should give you pause.

Getting Mead-ieval

I always thought that drinking mead would be an unpleasant experience, one involving big trash cans with burp valves, , and that the stuff would come out cloudy and greenish and a little too authentically medieval for enjoyment. It wasn’t until I stumbled on a bottle at the Trader Joe’s that I ever considered tasting it. Then, of course, I put it in the wine rack and forgot about it for an entire year…which, it turns out, is the right thing to do. Here my husband and I bumble into a mead tasting and I offer a few era-appropriate dessert suggestions, two of which can be microwaved.