Food for Political Discussions and Tight Budgets: Tunisian Tuna Frittata

I'm going to confess. I'm rather smitten. Although the state of being actively smitten has done nothing to arrest the amount of cooking in my kitchen - in fact, it has increased it - I find my blog has suffered a serious lack of attention. I considered this abdication from diligent writing and the cause thereof. The cause is known to my friends as Ck. A man who can interrupt Luscious Domestic blogging activity surely merits that mention before I launch into a telling of the Tunisian Tuna Frittata.

This fritatta seems especially timely given the significant upheaval happening in Tunisia in the last few weeks. Unlike the complexity of the political happenings there, this tuna frittata is not only brilliantly simple, it's divinely tasty and a clever way to make an economical one dish meal on a hectic weeknight. I had found this recipe in the New York Times some time ago and had been waiting to make it for some time.

I decided to make this dish for a very beloved friend and old acquaintance one wintry night not so long ago. Nathan is the sort of friend who possesses an unusual thoughtfulness and perception, which is an excellent asset in a friend on a regular basis, but is especially valuable when you require a minister of war. He also has fantastic taste in music and is a fairly adventurous sort. I was feeling rather tired after a day of driving my mouse, working for the fine people of British Columbia. Tunisian Tuna Frittata it had to be. 

Now don't get fussed when you see the ingredients below for things like harissa and caraway seeds. Harissa is a chili paste that's generally made from Piri Piri chili peppers or whatever chili pepper is on hand, blended with olive oil. It comes in wee little tins and is a standard element of North African cooking (places like Algeria and Tunisia but not so much in Morocco). It's not expensive at all and it's not particularly spicy. It's not nearly as hot as sambal olek but it is distinctive tasting. I would not recommend trying to replace it with whatever chili sauce you have on hand. I doubled the amount of harrisa specified in the recipe and found it quite pleasant.

Caraway is also quite distinctive in its flavour and shouldn't be replaced either. Caraway is also known as Persian cumin. Its seeds are decidedly black and lend a lovely anise-like flavour to foods. It's a key element in rye bread, it's found in a number of European foods (Akvavit and Havarti cheese are the most notable), and it's also used in this frittata. You can find caraway seeds and harrisa at Middle Eastern food shops. I found both these items at the Blair Mart on Pandora Street in Victoria.

I highly recommend grinding whole caraway seeds for this recipe. I'd also strongly suggest using tuna that's packed in light olive oil, not water. The tuna that's packed in water tends to dry out and its flavour is significantly diminished. Lastly, don't be shy about the salt and use good eggs. Good eggs make a significant difference in the final product. If you can get your hands on local farm eggs, do so!

We demolished a good part of the frittata before we abandoned it to nibble on the persimmon cake I whipped up prior to the business of frittata making. I'll definitely share the recipe for that cake with you in the next post. The leftovers - if there are any to be had - are very portable and make a great lunch. I tried eating it cold, and it suited me just fine. But then again, I like cold frittata. Do try this recipe. It's wonderful comfort food on a cold mid-winter night and a happy addition to your lunch box.

Ingredients

1/2 pound boiling potatoes, peeled and cut in small dice (about 1/2 inch)

3/4 pound carrots, peeled and cut in small dice (about 1/2 inch)

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 large garlic cloves, mashed with a pinch of salt in a mortar and pestle or finely chopped

2 teaspoons caraway seeds, ground

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

2 tablespoons harissa dissolved in 2 tablespoons water, or 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne (to taste)

1 6-ounce can of olive oil-packed light tuna (not albacore), drained and broken up with a fork

                                                                                      1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

                                                                                      8 large eggs

Method

 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Steam the potatoes and carrots above 1 inch of boiling water until tender, about 10 minutes.

2. Place the oil in a 2-quart baking dish or a 9-inch cast iron skillet. Rub the oil over the sides of the pan, and place in the oven. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Whisk in garlic, caraway, salt (about 1/2 teaspoon) and pepper to taste and harissa. Stir in the potatoes, carrots, tuna and parsley. Remove the baking dish from the oven, scrape the egg mixture into the hot baking dish and place in the oven.

3. Bake 30 to 35 minutes until lightly colored on the top and set. Allow to cool for 10 minutes or longer before serving. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yield: Serves six to eight.

Sunday Morning Granola

One morning, after taking advantage of the morning light to photograph "the twins" - the newly-filtered cherry liqueur and the orange peel liqueur, I realized it was time to start Sunday breakfast. I abandoned my plan to continue reading my copy of Ottolenghi's brilliant cookbook, and wandered into the kitchen.

The twins posing on Ottolenghi's cookbook.

We hadn't partied or entertained the night before, so a full on breakfast of eggs, hashbrowns, bacon seemed excessive. Oatmeal seemed like the stuff for work mornings and camping weekends. It had to be granola.

I'll be honest, I'm not too crazy about sprouting mung beans or any of the other hippy things I was surrounded with when growing up on the west coast of Canada. For the longest time, I lumped granola in with the rest of the foods I associated the word "hippy" with. To my uninitiated palate, these foods seemed flavourless, perhaps even joyless.

However, granola has quickly become mainstream in the last decade, with wee but fashionable boxes of the stuff demanding high prices. I will admit that my palate and appreciation for granola evolved in step with the mainstream trend. Many boxes of commercially available granola usually have some form of wheat or gluten in it. Between the allergies, being too lazy to walk to the store, and too cheap to dole out the dollars for a tiny bit of oats mixed with dried fruit, I decided to make my own.

The results? Oh hello, tasty, flavourful granola. Quick and easy to make, it's lovely (I'm told) with some milk. 

I used this lovely honey!

Sunday Morning Granola


2 cups regular oats
1/2 cup flake or dessicated coconut
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds (didn't have any, used up some trail mix)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup honey or maple/agave syrup
1/3 cup grapeseed oil (Or use something like canola. If you try olive oil, let me know!)

1. Combine all the dry ingredients and mix well.

2. Add in the wet ingredients and mix well. Spread in an even layer that's no thicker than one inch on a well-greased cookie sheet (I used a giant tray, but you can use two smaller sheets).

Granola before I baked it.

3. Bake in 350 degree oven until golden. After about seven minutes in the oven, take the tray out out, and flip the ingredients around using a spatula. Another seven minutes, move it about again. Let it be until it looks golden.

This granola stores well in an air-tight container for up to two weeks. Some people keep it longer. Mine never lasts that long!

Granola is a free-form creative exercise. Try adding things like minced candied ginger, any sort of dried fruit, or different sorts of flaked grains or flaxseed meal. It's a great way to also use up those bits and ends of trail mix that no one seems to want to finish.

Do you have a favourite granola recipe or item to add to granola?

Sri Lankan Christmas Cake

This year, I tried my hand at making Sri Lankan Christmas cake. My mother, the family keeper of all Christmas cake recipes of the past and present, was the obvious person to refer to for this exercise. After years of waiting, the time had come. I was presented with the recipe for rice flour Christmas cake this year. As I noted in my previous post, it was like getting knighted or something.

I tweaked the recipe in some ways. The first tweak came with the fruit and nuts. I let them sit in liqueur for nearly four weeks. Mom would usually let them sit for no more than five days. I added more liqueur as needed, starting with the traditional rum and brandy. As the weeks passed, the fruit would look thirsty from time to time so I moved on to things like calvados and homemade Italian cherry liqueur to keep them soused.

On the first night of December, the night of the Parisien leek soup, I decided it was time to make the cake. The cake, after all, has to age for at least three weeks before you can think of eating it. We industriously whipped butter with sugar, zested oranges and lemons, and mixed the drunken fruit into all of that.

We painstakingly lined cake tins with wax paper, trimming the edges and slitting the corners to ensure the most perfectly lined cake tin. They were popped into an oven with a bowl of water to keep things steamy and hydrated. We retired to the living room to watch a movie and shamelessly eat large amounts of almond roca and peanut brittle.

When the cake was nearly done, it was time to make the glaze for the top of the cake. Too late for regrets that I didn't artistically decorate the tops of my cakes with carefully cut maraschino cherries or slivered almonds like my mother would. I whipped out a jar of peach marmalade I made this summer, dumped its contents into a pot, added a wee bit of water and cornstarch and fired the stove up. Mum would have used apricot or raspberry jam. I was going to use boozed up peach marmalade. It bubbled and became translucent. I added in rum. Lots of it. The glaze was ready.

I used my pastry brush to glaze the cakes as soon as they came out of the oven. I loved the sweet sheen of the molten marmalade and the warm, heady smell of newly baked Christmas cake.

I left the little cakes out to cool overnight. The next morning, I wrapped the cakes as the oatmeal bubbled on the stove. Leaving their wax paper wraps intact, just as my mother has done a hundred times, I sheathed them in saran wrap, and then again in aluminium foil. I put them away on the shelves next to the rhubarb schnapps for a beauty sleep over the next three weeks.

Three weeks later, the cakes were ready. We sampled a bit a few days before Christmas and agreed the cake was worthy of sharing. On Christmas day, the cake had a place on the family plate of Sri Lankan Christmas sweets.

Happy holidays, dear readers. I wish you all a holiday filled with joy and a new year filled with love and good food. :)

Parisien Leek Soup for James

There's a lot of history behind this recipe. At the request of an old acquaintance, James, whose memory of this soup remained intact twenty years after I first made it, I unearthed this recipe from a small box of childhood keepsakes.

The soup was made for an elementary school French class potluck. My classmate,  James, sampled it and dropped a leek soup reference many years later when he saw my food blog. Gary, my first crush, was  also one of the people who sampled it. He ate three bowls of the soup and told me how much he loved it.  I made this soup with my class partner who was also my best friend. Ten years later, my soup-making partner-friend seduced the man (a little reductionist here) I was madly in love with for most of my twenties. But what do you know about these things or the future when you're a kid. You're not wise enough then to see visions of the future and other portents in the making of soup. 

Really, there's a lot to making serious soup. And this recipe, baby, it's got history. Love food with a twist.

When I examined the recipe, scrawled in my childish hand, I marvelled at its simplicity. There is no pureeing of the soup to create an easy to photograph, perfectly groomed soup that one adorns with walnuts or ash-cured chevre or artistic drizzles of olive oil. Inspired by James' request, I went to the market and bought some leeks, lovely with their groomed tips.

The soup is simple enough to make. I say this because the night I made it, all I had to do was chop up the leeks and potatoes, essentially chuck it all into the soup pot, and then get on with the making of the all important Xmas cake. My mother recently parted with some of the family secrets and bestowed upon me the family recipe for rice flour dark Xmas cake. In our family universe, it's like getting knighted or something.

Here's the historically dramatic, but drama free original leek soup recipe:

Parisien Leek Soup

3 - 4 leeks
3 potatoes (I used red because I didn't have russet and they worked fine)
4 cups of water (I used the leavings of some broccoli water from my experiment with Gordon Ramsey's broccoli soup. Paired this with chicken broth)
1/3 cup of uncooked rice
1 tablespoon of butter
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 teaspoon of salt
2 - 3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Method 

1. Trim the leeks, halve them and then slice thinly. Whichever way you decide to chop, just chop evenly. The original recipe says to throw the green bits away, but I always disobey and include them.

2. Heat your soup pot up and melt the butter over a low heat. Add the olive oil to minimize butter burn.

3. Cube the potatoes thinly. Don't do instant hashbrown thin. Chuck the leeks in the warmed up soup pot and saute them. When I made this twenty years ago, Viviane and I riffed on the original recipe and browned about half a pound of lean ground beef before we began to saute the leeks.

4. After the leeks have softened and look a bit transparent, add the potatoes and let them have a conversation with the leeks for 2 - 3 minutes. 

5. End the leek-potato conversation by adding the water/broth, salt and rice. Bring it up to a boil, then turn the heat down and let it gently bubble on your stove for about 25 - 30 minutes. The key to this is that you shouldn't let your potatoes fall apart. I found the stated requirement for liquid isn't quite enough. I added more liquid as it pleased me - mostly to maintain a state of soup liquidity that worked for me.

6. Near the end of cooking, add the parsley. If you don't have parsley, add tarragon. Just don't go too crazy. Test the soup for salt and doctor as needed. Serve it with French bread and milk. This soup is very simple but very tasty.

Argentinian Blueberry and Chocolate Slab Cake

I know many food bloggers are all about the local, the fresh and the 100 mile diet, but I thumb my nose at the environmentally friendly and sustainable practice of the 100 mile diet. And I mean it. I'm not about to give up my bourgeois tastes in a multiplicity of things that must come across the sea to get into my belly. The lovely Persian dates that Ciaran recently brought me are a scrumptious example of that.

If it came to it, I would be reasonable, buy as many gai lan and Indian eggplant seeds as possible, attempt to grow my own curry leaf tree, and adopt the 100 mile diet. For now, I will indulge in certain naughty excesses like buying Argentinian blueberries at the end of November when I'm actually on a mission to buy leeks for Parisien Leek Soup. Buying blueberries from Argentina is something of a joke on the west coast of Canada. We're massive seasonal producers of blueberries. You can buy them by the crate for practically nothing during the summer.

What does a Canadian Sri Lankan Tamil do with fresh blueberries at the tail end of fall that really feels like winter? She uses it to crown her morning bowl of oatmeal, paired with freshly grated nutmeg.

Or, she could stud a decadent chocolate slab cake with them. I found the cake on a food porn site and was so taken with the image, I felt the need to replicate but modify the cake so that I could eat it. The results were deliciousness on levels that bordered the profane.

I feel the need to include a warning or disclaimer with this cake recipe. Once you finish slathering on the icing and studding the cake with blueberries, you will find it difficult to stop even after eating two pieces of cake. We found it nearly impossible to step away from the cake. I suggest wrapping the cake and putting it in the refrigerator to halt excessive cake consumption. This cake is guaranteed to seduce any man or woman, and might even possibly save marriages.

Here's the modified recipe I adapted from Picnics by Australian Woman's Weekly.

1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup boiling water
2/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3 eggs
1 2/3 cups rice flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
3/4 cup Balkan style yoghurt
2/3 cup fresh blueberries

Chocolate Icing:
2/3 cup dark chocolate, chopped coarsely
1 3/4 tablespoons butter
1 cup icing sugar, sifted
1 1/2 tablespoons hot water

1. Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Grease 19cm x 30cm lamington pan; line with baking paper. Be sure to cut the corners of the paper on a diagonal so that the paper sits flat in the pan. Otherwise, your cake will have rippled corners.

2. Blend cocoa with the water in small bowl. Add the water a bit at a time to prevent lumps. Cool.

3. Beat butter and sugar in small bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Transfer mixture to a large bowl, stir in sifted flours and soda, and yoghurt in two batches; stir in cocoa mixture.

4. Spread mixture into pan. Bake about 30 minutes. Cool cake in pan 20 minutes before turning, top-side up, onto wire rack to cool. Don't remove the paper just yet.

5. Make chocolate icing: melt chocolate and butter in small saucepan, stirring, over low heat. Remove from heats; stir in sifted icing sugar and water until smooth.

6. Spread cold cake with icing, top with blueberries. Don't forget to take the paper off first. Cut cake into squares.

Serves 20.

The Epic Viewing of Carlos Part II - Luscious Brings Beetroot Poriyal

For the epic viewing of Carlos part two, we decided that we would bring a Tamil dinner over to Sharon and Thom's place. Ciaran and I did most of the cooking at my place before bringing the food over for the final polish. I decided to fry up some Madras style pappadum I brought back from Toronto. Pappadum in its raw form is a dried thin disc made from chickpea flour and spices. When fried, it expands into a crisp cracker. It is incredibly addictive nibbling food. I love breaking it up into my rice.

In favour of the gentle vegetarian, Ciaran, I decided on egg curry and beetroot poriyal. Egg curry? you say. Egg curry, I say. Yes. It doesn't sound like it should work, but in fact it does. It's one of the most marvellous vegetarian inventions in the Tamil culinary lexicon. Sharon took care of her pot of chai and the beets while I performed tricks with hot oil. I loved the luxury of cooking on S & T's fine gas stove.

Sharon's choice of Barefoot's Moscato wine went really well with the spicy beets and egg curry (Sharon and Thom agreed that the curry was "Hong Kong spicy"). Sharon and I share a love of sweet things. Moscato definitely tickles that sweet spot. The men opted for something less sweet. Sharon also helped break down my irrational distaste for brown rice by making some to accompany the curry.

Full of curry and the delicious bread pudding Sharon and Thom whipped up for dessert (I got a persimmon to myself in place of bread pudding), we flipped on the projector to watch the last half of Carlos. I'll confess that I was comfortable enough by the fireplace and philistine enough to doze through part of it. My culinary partners in crime were kind enough not to razz me about it.

When I attempted to come up with the specs for beetroot poriyal, I realized why I was struggling. There's a French term for this - au pif. It the context of cooking, it means cooking by the nose, or by sense. If you cook that way, writing down precise measurements is ... a challenge. Here goes.

Tamil Beetroot Poriyal

3 medium sized beets

3/4 teaspoon black mustard seeds

6 curry leaves

4 - 5 gundu molzuka chilis

1/3 cup dessicated coconut

1/2 teaspoon curry powder

1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder

1 tablespoon coriander powder

salt to taste (about 1/2 teaspoon)

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Method

1. Peel the beets and then grate them coarsely. If you have someone around with big muscled arms, I highly suggest recruiting them for this job. I know I did. Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed frying pan or pot.

2. When the oil is hot, add the mustard seeds, curry leaves, and chilies. Fry until the mustard seeds begin to pop. Add the grated beets immediately.

3. Add the curry powder, turmeric, coriander and a 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Stir well and add a quarter cup of water. Cover the pan and cook until the water is almost evaporated.

4. Add the coconut and some more water. Continue to cook the beets in this manner until they are tender. Taste and adjust for salt and spiciness as required. The beets should have a taste that's balanced between sweet and spicy.

Note: Gundu molzuka is Tamil for "fat chili." They are also known as mundu chilis. They are moderately pungent and much like their shape, impart a rounded heat to food. They are available at Indian grocery shops, but if you can't find them, any dried or fresh chili that's moderately hot will do.

Unreasonably Tasty Tapioca with Gula Melaka

I love tapioca. I love its coy starchy ways, the way it obligingly adopts flavours, and all the happy memories I associate with tapioca. It made bleak, rained out days bearable when sailing up the west coast, it is an unforgettable part of my childhood, and recently, it was the sweet end to hot pot night at Sharon and Thom's.

Tapioca is commercially sold in the form of pearls, just like its counterpart, sago. Sago comes from the pith of the sago palm stems and tapioca comes from the cassava root. They can be interchangeably used in many dishes that include this one.

The secret weapon that makes this dish? That black line art in the bowl is gula melaka. Tamils call it karruppatti. This sugar comes in dark blocks and is from the palm tree. Gula melaka has a dark caramel taste and a distinctive aroma. The threesome of tapioca/sago, coconut milk and gula melaka has its origins in Peranakan (Chinese-Malay) culinary genius. It's a beautiful thing.