Recipe for sweet pea hummous
January 26, 2008
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A vat of sweat pea hummous warms itself in the bleak winter sun just south of the Polar Circle
Recently, democratic presidential candidate hopeful Barack Obama was reported as saying, ‘Ooh Mama, lay yer hummous on me!’ I know, that’s just preaching to the converted. Gawd knows few things are more handy than a big ‘ol vat of hummous to combat an unexpected pang of hunger or the impromptu droppin’ by of guests. Countless are the times that the hummous snack course has evolved into a full-fledged dinner.
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Peas and soybeans thaw briefly in a warm bath
Recipes for traditional hummous with chick peas, tahina, garlic and lots of lemon juice are legion, but this recipe gets us the hell out the Middle East and Central Asia and home to where the ginger and kaffir lime leaf can release an ‘enlightened’ sensibility. Sweet pea hummous, which sounds so much better than ‘pea dip’, also works great as a ravioli filling for when the vegans show up. For the vegan version just substitute olive or peanut oil and a dash of sesame oil for the butter component.
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Sweet Pea Hummous
– fresh frozen organic peas
– (optional) frozen edamame soy beans (will give it more body than if you use just peas – depends what you’re going for)
– semi-salted butter (for the vegan friends, olive or peanut oil w/a dash of sesame oil)
– fresh ginger
– fresh garlic cloves
– fresh kaffir lime leaves
– japanese style brewed soy sauce
– (optional) fish sauce (just a few squirts)
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Just thaw, don’t cook
To thaw the frozen peas and soybeans, pour boiling water over them and wait a minute. The water should be cool and the beans cool to the touch. Do not cook the thing that must remain raw. Colour is a good indicator, bright beautiful green is good, brown is bad.
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The ingredients before blending, thawed peas and beans, butter, garlic, ginger, kaffir lime leaf, a few squirts of soy and fish sauce
Strain off the water, put the peas and soybeans in a food processor with the rest of the ingredients and blend away. If you feel you need to add some liquid because the hummous is too thick, try adding some of that cold green tea sitting in the teapot on the counter. Don’t over-blend the pea hummous or it will look like wasabi. This is a case when hetero is just way better than homo.
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Serve sweet pea hummous with crackers or bread or green or orange or white things
Covered in the fridge this hummous will keep a few days. Don’t refreeze the thing that was already frozen. Instead use the leftovers from an overly ambitious batch as a ravioli filling. You can also make a bright green pea soup by thinning the sweet pea hummous with dashi or coconut milk and creme fraiche. Carefully heat in a pot until it’s the proper temperature for soup but do not cook the soup that must remain green.
debra at 16:37 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
Speaking of pomegranate
January 16, 2008
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Last year I did my utmost to eat food that was grown and produced locally. But because Amsterdam is excruciatingly far north, more or less deep inside the Polar Circle, this meant that my diet didn’t have much in the way of citrus fruit, bananas or mangos. At first I didn’t think this would be a problem, and I embraced the task of becoming a local fruit adept, tasting the different varieties of apples, pears and berries, becoming good at telling them apart. But as soon as Autumn started to roll around, I had to admit that after a full year of locative eating, however many new fruit and vegetables varieties I had encountered, I had become really very bored with the local fruit which consists primarily of apples, pears and some berries.
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Or you can use pomegranate with raisins, saffron and red peppercorns in a tabouleh if you want to delocalise
My solution has been to ‘cheat’ and start eating not-so-local fruit. And aside from the occasional lemon or lime in my mojito, turns out the fruit that I longed for most, was surprisingly not tropical, but Mediterranean. I was craving pomegranates.
Here’s what I like to do most with a pomegranate:
Mix the grains of a large pomegranate with two tablespoons of lavender honey and a splash of rosewater. Serve in little bowls with tiny spoons and eat or pour over susme, a very thick and creamy yoghurt. The breakfast of champions!
debra at 10:05 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
Subjective Atlas of Palestine
and also of food
January 13, 2008
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Just another beautiful picture of Palestine by Majdi Hadid, used entirely without permission
Say ‘Palestine’ and the first thing that pops into your head probably isn’t an image of undulating hills speckled with date palm oases and creased with a babbling brook, or an image of lush olive orchards crowded with red poppies.
Say ‘atlas’ and you probably don’t think of recipes for chickpeas or herbaria whose wild flowers include tulips, capers, saffron and cashews.
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Chickpea typologies by Suleiman Mansour, used entirely without permission
It is an understatement to say that Palestine suffers from a lack of positive media representation. Even on Culiblog, the only entry about Palestine until now is a review of artist Khalil Rabah’s installation (the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind/Palestine before Palestine) and Osama Qashoo’s film, My Dear Olive Tree. Both works are supposedly about the culinary and cultural heritage that is the olive tree, but they also show violent destruction of property and cultural appropriation. Neither work leaves one with a positive sense of the country. This is what Annelys de Vet hopes to change through the Subjective Atlas of Palestine.
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Just another beautiful picture of Palestine by Majdi Hadid, used entirely without permission
In a workshop held at the the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah (April 2007), de Vet and thirty Palestinian artist/designers produced the materials for the atlas which consists of colourful spreads of Palestinian natural beauty, photo journals of daily life, herbaria that like all herbaria, make you want to go out and take a hike in the mountains to forage for herbs and berries and to search for that tiny little orchid. There are also revealing hand-drawn maps, overly-filled cultural agendas (mark your calendars with the Palestinian Mozart Festival) and an entire section on water pipes.
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A Palestinian herbarium, used entirely without permission
Of course I appreciate the food-related sections, and these are many, because food always features prominently when people want to describe the sense of place that is their home. Suleiman Mansour’s ‘Twelve ways to eat chickpeas’ shows that hummous is in fact an inadequate term to describe what you can do with tahini, lemon and the noble bean. There is a flag made out of bread and a slice of watermelon as the national flag. In fact food is more present in the atlas than football, although that might just be a reflection of the authors’ preferences than anything else.
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Good morning Palestine by Hosni Radwan, used entirely without permission
My favourite section is called Beautiful Palestine, nature photographs by Majdi Hadid that make you think of locations for romantic family picnics and walks in the hills, or of hot afternoons for olive harvesting. Reading the Subjective Atlas of Palestine, one feels it is about home, and certainly it is an hour’s perusal in which you will not think about war or occupation. More likely you’ll be triggered to remember lingering for a whiff of fresh sesame bread sold on the street, or of the social obligations associated with a cultural agenda filled with entirely too much Mozart. Palestine, it’s just as much alike and different from everywhere else, right? Could be that an admittedly subjective view is in fact the most accurate.
Maybe it’s the term ‘subjective’ that allows me to feel comfortable with the fact that there could never be any other kind of atlas for Palestine. But then I do start thinking about the war and the occupation and how could it ever make sense for there to be an Objective Atlas of Anywhere? My thoughts turn to dipping dates into hummous and why there is not one single mention of a pomegranate in all this subjectivity. It’s such a hopeful fruit, the pomegranate.
debra at 20:37 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
