I have learned about a new cooking ingredient called Red Palm Oil.  It is a super food AND the taste is really nice. I needed to use this in order to make a new soup from the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die called Efo Riro. Every recipe I could find says you had to have the palm oil AND dried shrimp or crawfish to make this dish so I found both (I picked the dried shrimp). This dish is a traditional Nigerian Spinach Stew.  It is made with lots of meat-in this case-beef, chicken legs and shrimp.  Each item is cooked with the Red Palm Oil and then mixed together with spices and spinach.  Do I think you should make Efo Riro?  Well, the red palm oil is an interesting oil.  It has two different cooking levels-not cooking at all or splattering red goblets all over the kitchen.  I feel as if this is another miss.  I threw out the rest of the red palm oil. 

I recently went to Mitsuwa Market in San Diego in search of many of the items on the 100,000 foods to eat before you die. One of the ingredients was Chinese Long Beans. While I had eaten these before, they were an ingredient that I had never prepared.  While I was preparing it, I took a call and the pork cooked for longer than needed so the soy sauce caramelized a bit. I loved that part most.  Go ahead and leave this one longer on the heat and take a call. It only improves the flavor.  There are also plenty of recipes for this where the long beans are dry cooked but I liked them just fine this way.  I served this over buckwheat noodles just because I had it but rice would be just fine. 

 

I am going to say this is not something I am eating again.  I have posted and do admit I have issues with certain textures-mostly those that are the same texture as snot-and this one falls into that category. It DOES have a great flavor so if snot is your thing, don’t let this one go.  It is, of course, one of the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die.  Making it is quite fun-sort of a science project.  You take 2 tablespoons of ground up Fenugreek seeds and then you pour six cups of boiling water on top and wait 24 hours.  After pouring off the extra water, I was left with about 1 cup of slimy goo (hence the snot description).  This goo is then blended with tomatoes and spices to form the dip to be eaten with bread.  I know I am selling it but after my obligatory bite, I couldn’t force myself to try another bite.  The 1000 Foods list have some amazing things and then they have some traditional things a person should try.  If you find yourself in Yemen (?) give it a try.  Otherwise, I say give it a pass. 

One of the highlights of my trip to Singapore with Elena and Ivan was having Kulfi for the first time at Muthus’s Fishhead Curry Restaurant. We picked the pistachio version, but all versions looked great. A kulfi is boiled milk coupled with spices and after hours of boiling, poured into a metal mold to chill. I am sure in India (where I didn’t know so didn’t have it) as well as in Singapore, it is shockingly cold in a warm country. There are many recipes on the web to make this at home and I will now look for it at every Indian restaurant life finds me.

Ivan and I went to a really interesting grocery store on Mira Mar road and I found a sought-after ingredient on my list of weird things to buy called Winter Melon.  Apparently, winter melon is a staple in winter melon soup.  As per the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die book, Winter Melon is a big deal in Chinese cooking. 

I bought my melons and went home to make my soup. The soup is pretty basic-broth, melon and then protein of your choice.  I liked the idea of shrimp/scallop dumplings which are nothing more than pureed shrimp/scallops dropped by teaspoons full into the boiling liquid.  So my entire family believed that this would be a far better soup if the Winter Melon was left out of the Winter Melon Soup.  There are things on the 1000 Foods list that I just don’t get.  My advice? Skip the Winter Melon because they taste like dirty socks.  

In several posts I have explained why having Scandanvian traditions is part of my heritage. While I am culturally German, my great-grandfather who was a pastor in the German Lutheran Church in Wisconsin fell out with his group and moved the family to the Swedish/Norwegian Luthern Church. We eat a variety of Scandinavian foods to include things like Swedish Meatballs.  This becomes even more interesting when I received my Ancesrry.com DNA results and found that I have a fair amount of Scandinavian blood running through my veins-not so surprising since my relatives lived in the northern part of Germany which was heavily populated by Vikings.  Fast forward to me trying to cook Swedish Meatballs from the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die. In this recipe dill, caraway and celery root are really dominant. The meatballs were ok, but not nearly as good as my mom’s recipe… 

I used bacon for another recipe and ended up with a bowl of bacon fat.  Seemed like a good time to try another of the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die which is bread fried in bacon grease.  So very simple and listed as one of the British foods to try, bacon fat DOES make toast taste better.  I fried some stale, left over French bread and threw and egg on top and it was amazing. Low cal, no. Delicious, yes.  In the future, you might rethink about tossing bacon fat and think about frying yourself up some toast. 

The 1000 Foods To Eat Before you Die book specifies that you have to try Matsutake Mushrooms.  Apparently they are the most expensive mushrooms on the planet and only grow in a few places-namely Japan and Oregon/Washington.  I found a great website to order fresh mushrooms from Oregon (Oregon Mushrooms) and my matsutake mushrooms arrived yesterday. They were huge and BEAUTIFUL.  If ever there was a beautiful mushroom, it would be these.   I baked them in parchment along with some aromatics and hoped for the best.    I didn’t like them. I know this goes back to my lack of interest in anything I find slimy and these mushrooms stay very firm and a bit slimy.  I took the entire mess and made a Hungarian mushroom soup.  In this, the mushrooms really shone.  They retained their earthiness which gave the soup a whole different texture than what I usually get with other mushrooms.  I think this one is a personal decision-if you like your mushrooms really firm-these might be your mushrooms.  For me, I take a pass. 

So one of the most enjoyable things I have done during COVID is buying mushroom logs and growing mushrooms.  While I know this might seem like a pretty minimal hobby, watching the mushrooms grow is v3ry, very satisfying…  They don’t grow for the longest time and then all of a sudden they begin to grow. From that point forward you can literally leave the room for 5 minutes and when you come back they are noticeably larger.  I have tried shiitake, brown oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms. While all are good, my favorite were the shitake.  Want to do something that is really satisfying? Order a mushroom log. 

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So I ate a new type of green called Puntrelle. This is, of course, a green listed in the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die and one I will plant next year.  It is a funny little plant that has little pieces that make up the whole (think of garlic cloves in a ball of garlic).  Each little piece must be very thinly sliced and then put in ice water for at least an hour.  With the icewater soak, each little slice curls up.  The slices are drained and the traditional dressing is made with garlic, anchovies, red wine vinegar, lemon juice and salt and pepper.  Finally, it is topped with parmesan.  This is a green that should gain greater use in the US as it is delicious!  Other really amazing greens? See below.

-The 14th Healthiest Greens for your Salad

-18 Types of Lettuce and the Best Way to Eat Each One

-These are the 7 Healthist Salad Greens that you can Eat

-Greens, Greens and More Greens

So one of the 1000 Things to Eat Before You Die is a general category called Crauti. This is the Italian version of eating sauerkraut.  As per the book, the part of Italian that bumps up against the Austrian Empire had some of what would be traditional German foods spill into Italian cooking. While crauti can be used many ways, I choose to make it one of the ways which is a split pea based soup to which sauerkraut and potatoes are added.  Thoughts?  Well, my thought is why bother but I do get that this is an interesting way of cultures coming together.  Other preparations also really seem more German than Italina like a bread dumpling, etc.  I guess unless you are a die-hard sauerkraut fan who can’t wait to find yet another recipe, I say give this one a pass. 

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!  I would like to talk about a yummy gift I received from Andrew-Elena’s friend who stayed at our house.  I think we all know the importance of potatoes to the Irish community and to celebrate that, these really yummy little sweet balls that look like potatoes but taste like cookie dough were created.  Seems perfectly logical that a coconut based cookie should be made to look like a potatoes.  Go Green. 

So Nesselrode Pie is something that became popular in the 19^th century in Germany and was eaten widely in the 1940s-1950s in New York. It is a Bavarian cream pie that has both chestnuts and dried fruits incorporated into the cream. This is then poured into a pie or tart shell.    Obviously, this is something from the 1000 Things to Eat Before You Die book.  Currently, there is only one place in the whole US that still makes it (that I can find) and that is in Petee’s Pie Company in  Brooklyn.  I asked my favorite pasty company, Bon Pastry, to make it for me and they did. Do I love it?  No. Was it good?  Sure.  The chestnut taste did add an interesting element to the cream filling. 

One of the 1000 things is Soursop which is a crazy-hard-to-find fruit unless you want to have it flown in on a  Tuesday from Jamaica.  I opted for cans of juice with which I then made a delicious cocktail called a Dangriga Fizz.  With lime, soursop juice, cardamon syrup and sparkling wine it is delicious. 

As part of the Feast of a 7 Fishes, I ordered Whiting in order to make one of the 1000 Foods to Eat Before You Die.  Ultimately, there were too many things on my list so I made it later.  This is an Italian preparation where the fish is lightly poached, covered in garlic slices, parsley and olive oil and eaten on bread.  This is not a bad dish, but I am not certain it meets my standard for making it again or even including it on the 1000 things list.  Want to buy whitefish?  Guess who has it?  Walmart.  Amazing.