I’m a bad to the bone, flower plucking, fruit stealing, mushroom picking, herb snatcher that simply cannot walk by food growing in the public space without tucking in and filling my basket. And I wish that more people were like me and that more public space was used to grow food. It changes the way you feel about a place when you can also find your food there.

Inspired by Saturday’s opening on the ramble, amble, saunter and stroll down at Marres in Maastricht, JB and I decided to test the notion on bike and headed out into the nearby nature with no particular plan in mind. Under the verdant canopy of the Amsterdamse Bos we encountered enormous patches of ramps, also known as wood leek, wild garlic, ail des bois and ail sauvage. The ramps were in bloom and I swear If I were a dog I would have rolled over on my back and done that doggy thing that dogs do in the grass.

The leaves were tender and garlicky all right, and the flowers were dripping with nectar (!) a combination of green onion and fragrant honey aroma. I love it when the ramp leaves and flowers have different flavours. It was a demure forage-fest, but I’m going back for more today. Tomorrow when the composer comes home, I thought it would be fun to welcome him by dining on a picnic of locally stolen food.

Partner in crime, JB nibbles a ramp while perched on a spongiform log

• Ramsons: Scientific Name: Allium ursinum
  Other names: Bear’s Garlic, Broadleaved Garlic, Buckrams, Ramson, Wild Garlic, Wood Garlic
  Family: Alliaceae

  West Virgina ramp-lovers’ website

  Google ramp page - with links to images

  Traditional ramp recipe and great photos of rampalicious food

  Recipes for ramp kimchi and ramp confit from No Recipes dot com

  Ramp Kimchi

  1/3 C Red Chili pepper powder
  1/3 C Myeolchi Aegjeot (Korean anchovy sauce)
  1/3 C onion juice
  1/4 C shredded daikon or carrots
  5 scallions chopped
  2 Tbs sesame seeds
  1 Tbs sugar
  1 Tbs corn syrup
  1 tsp ginger powder

  lots of ramps leaves separated and cleaned
  Mix all the ingredients except the ramps in a bowl to combine. If you can’t find the “Korean anchovy sauce”, you can substitute 3 Tbs Thai fish sauce + 1 Tbs soy sauce. If you want to make this vegan, just replace the fish sauce with soy sauce.

  Lay down a layer of ramp leaves then paint a layer of the spice mixture on top. Repeat until your out of ramps.

  Cover and refrigerate for about a week to fully pickle. These get better as they begin to ferment, so you can eat them for several weeks. When they start getting tart, this is the perfect time to turn it into Kimchi Jigae (kimchi stew).

  another excellent ramp recipe:

  Ramp Confit

  lots of whole ramps cleaned
  lots of EVOO (?????)
  fresh ground black pepper
  sea salt

  Pre-heat oven to 350°F/190°c.

  Lay the ramps in a baking dish sprinkling a bit of salt and pepper between each layer. Douse the whole thing with an ample amount of olive oil (you don’t want it swimming, but you want it to be covered in oil).

  Roast for 15-20 minutes or until the ramps are completely wilted and any liquid that has come out has evaporated.

  Eat on a crusty baguette, on a pizza or in a tart. These are also delicious blended into a vegetable soup (ramp and corn chowder anyone?).

  From NoRecipes.com - with 2 of my top 10 favourite ingredients… bacon and nuts. Bacon occupies the top 3 entries of my favourite foods list.

  Wonderful website about foraging for food

  King of stink website purports that ramps make you fart. I disagree with them but enjoyed their website.

  Eat yer ramps according the US Dept of Agriculture

  West Virginia’s dedicated ramp (and forest foraging) website. Cultural heritage abounds!

  Peggy Tolleson’s excellent cookbook, Wild Garlic, an interesting read!

Kruiskade Blossom Cocktail
- chrystanthemum tea drinks in tetrapak
- organic chysanthemum flowers
- sour cherry fruit leather cut into butterflies
- ice, or ice made from frozen chrysanthemum tea. Avoid dilution!
- OPTIONAL - a shot of plum wine

The night before: Make ice cubes out of chrysanthemum tea. Keep the chrysanthemum tea tetrapacks as cold as possible without freezing.

Mise en place: Cut the fruit leather into butterflies and stick a cherry butterfly onto each glass so that collectively it appears to be a swarm of butterflies.

Gently separate the chrystanthemum petals from the stem-thingie and place a few in each glass.

À la minute: Place the ice cubes into the glasses and pour the chrysanthemum tea over the lot. Serve immediately. You can add the optional shots of plum wine (or brandy) while serving. Without alcohol, this drink is perfect for children that are allowed to have sugar. In the Netherlands, this is still allowed.

• Links are to Dutch language pages unless otherwise specified.

  The Urban Game Show was an initiative of Freehouse/Skill City aka Vakmanstad.

  Here is an English synopsis of the project.

The marvelous Thirza and the marvelous Eric serve up the drinks.

One of this year’s Pesach innovations was a sephardic-style seder dinner which more or less cancelled out last year’s innovation, the Pesach Ultra-lite. Whatevs, now that we’ve made these recipes our own, we can teach ourselves to make light of them. It’s about liberation.

Links to standard meringue recipes below.

To our meringue mixture Marlein and I added a goodly amount of freshly ground cardamom and even more cinnamon. Heady and aromatic, you could probably burn the meringues as incense. Let’s check.

Whippity dippity do! Once out of the oven, the meringues were as spicy as peppermints.

When you can hold the upturned bowl above your head without losing the meringue, it’s beaten stiffly enough. Don’t torture yourself, employ a machine for this heavy work.

We used pastry bags to form the meringues into dots, hearts and doodley towers before popping them into the oven to dessicate.

At the seder we served the meringues with our own variation on an Egyptian Haroset, and a molten spoonful of rhubarb fried with cinnamon and currants to give our sweet teeth a break.

Debra and Marlein’s Sephardi-stylee haroset

- 1 part soft black dates, pitted (not joking about the ’soft’)
- 1 part figs, sliced thinly
- 1 part dried apricots, sliced thinly
- 1 part golden raisins

- lemon juice to taste
- orange zest to taste
- orange flower water to taste
- ground cinnamon, a goodly amount!

In a large bowl, mash the dates until you have a somewhat homogenous mixture. Stir in the figs, apricots and raisins. You can use a mixer with a dough hook if you think your arm will get tired. Alternately, you can cut through and fold the mixture with a plastic dough scraper.

Add the other ingredients to taste. Don’t be shy with the lemon juice. It will open up the other flavours. Marlein and I have been really into cinnamon lately, and we love the way that if you use a lot, it will give the food a fuller texture. Cinnamon is considered to have medicinal qualities which are beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that men should enjoy copious amounts of freshly ground cinnamon and Mum’s the word.

Meringue recipes and Jewy links:

A good, standard meringue recipe.
Note: to make meringues, all utensils must be completely grease-free. The egg-whites must contain no trace of yolk. You will also need to experiment with your own oven, until you can get it low enough. Your kitchen must be dry - don’t make soup and meringues at the same time.

A good instructional video of how to make meringues.

What is ‘pareve’?

Marlein Overakker of the internationally known Wandering Banquets marlein dot overakker at gmail dot com

What is kosher for Passover?
During Passover, there are additional restrictions on what foods may be eaten. Jewish law prohibits the consumption of leavened products, and furthermore any product made from the so-called “five species” of grain—conventionally viewed to be wheat, rye, barley, spelt, or oats[10]—which may have been inadvertently briefly moistened sometime after harvest, and thus begun the fermentation process which is key to leavening. The exception to this rule is matza, which has been ritually supervised from harvest to packaging to ensure that no leavening has occurred.
Ashkenazi Jews are further restricted, by custom, from eating rice, legumes, and corn (collectively called kitniyot) during Passover. Due to the prevalence of corn syrup in American processed foods, many common items are disallowed for Ashkenazic Jews during Passover. In particular, Coca-Cola produces and distributes “kosher for Passover” runs with its corn syrup-free recipe during Passover in the United States.
In order to prevent inadvertent consumption of leaven, observant Jews maintain an entirely separate set of dishes, cutlery, pots, pans, etc. for Passover, much as they maintain separate sets of kitchenware year-round for milk and for meat. Before Passover, the house is rigorously cleaned to eliminate any remnants of chametz, no matter how small. Some Jews even maintain a separate kitchen for use during Passover, though this is rare, since it is not economically practical for most.
Due to the high likelihood of chametz being found in food with even a small amount of processing, most commercial products require special Kosher for Passover certification. This is usually marked with a plain letter P on the label, or with the words “Kosher for Passover” or “May be used for Passover.

The Islamic dietary laws (Dhabiha Halaal) and the Jewish dietary laws (Kashrut) are both quite detailed, and contain both points of similarity and discord. They share a common root: a code of laws found in Leviticus and recapitulated in the Koran.

Similarities

Blood and swine are prohibited in kashrut and dhabiĥa halal.

Many animals permitted in kashrut are also dhabiĥa halal, such as bovines.

Kashrut and dhabiĥa halal guidelines both generally forbid the consumption of amphibian animals such as frogs. [According to kashrut, almost all insects are not kosher. The few kosher insects are specific types of locusts and grasshoppers which are seldom eaten today. It is also a consensus among Muslim scholars that most insects are forbidden except for locusts.

Kashrut states that kosher aquatic animals must have scales and fins. The most prevalent consensus among Muslim scholars is that in order to be dhabiĥa halal, the fish must have scales (nothing is said about fins). However, according to Jewish oral law all fish that have scales have fins, thus making all fish with scales kosher and thus the law being essentially the same dhabiĥa halal.

Differences

For a substance to be dhabiĥa halal, it must not contain alcohol of any kind. The strictness of this with regard to the presence of extremely small quantities of alcohol in cooked foods depends largely on individual commitment and interpretation. Except for grape wine and grape juice (which must be manufactured under Jewish supervision), Kashrut allows any sort of alcohol, as long as it has no non-kosher ingredients (including any unsupervised grape extracts).

The list of animals forbidden by kashrut is more restrictive, as kashrut requires that, to be kosher, mammals must chew cud as well as have cloven hooves. Dhabiĥa halal requires that an animal have cloven hooves as well. Thus, various animals such as the camel are permissible as per dhabiĥa halal, but not according to kashrut.

Unless prepared according to a special process, the hindquarters of cows, sheep, goats, and other ruminants are not generally considered kosher. Dhabiĥa halal contains no such restriction regarding the hindquarters.
Kashrut prohibits shellfish such as lobster, shrimp, clams, and oysters, while there is debate among Muslim scholars regarding the status of shellfish; however, most Muslims consider all seafood halal and do eat shellfish.

Although we had sworn to recreate Pesach Ultra-Lite, Superior Powers and my own stubborn determination to not sit on the floor like my ancestors in the desert, dictated that we drop everything and become a trans-regional trucking company. We had a truck all right, but also an unfathomable lack of skill at both navigation and map reading. After completing the main job, we found ourselves very far away from home indeed and then suddenly, as if in a dream, we ended up at a goat farm.

Newborn baby bokje, not enough meat on its bones, even according to Mama

Some weeks before, I had ordered a 6 kilo Pesach kid, so at the goat farm we went around picking up all the kids trying to find out what 6 kilos worth of goat felt like. Gawd knows this is how rumours get started. The exercise was both grim and funny, and then grim again.

In the nanny goat part of the barn, 2 kids had just been born, one was dead on arrival and the other was a very, very, tiny buck, a bit too tiny. The mama goat wasn’t entirely sure whether she should nurture the skinny bokje or step on its head. As the Polar winds of the Ice Saints blew through the barn, our thoughts were on the kid, alternately hoping and wondering whether it would hup, stand up and make a go at life.

And that was what was so odd. There we were hoping that this baby male would live, somehow ignoring the fact that basically all male animals are killed (culled) very young because they are simply useless in the context of the farm. Perfect for sacrifice, my Pesach kid is certainly a male.

2 kids: GIRLS!

• Pesach Ultra-Lite,

  Traditional Arameïc Passover song about a little kid

40% of all produce is wasted on the route from field to fork. The number is actually more like 60% and it’s easy to understand how the waste becomes heavier if we buy industrially produced food from far away places, highly packaged and marketed. Which is why I don’t do that. My approach to mitigating food waste is by buying less, (as if I ever had to bike to the store mid-week for some greens) and to prepare the leafy greens I get at the farmer’s market into something ’salad ready’ immediately.

For the moments when I still space out and don’t eat everything I buy, beware my Happy Hour! I’ve been developing recipes for forgotten vegetables which will also be used in a soon to open snack restaurant (currently in fetal position) run on the principle of hyper-use. Hyper use of facilities, hyper-use of restaurant expertise and available foodstuffs. The project is called Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking and I’ll be writing about it increasingly in the next few months.

Here is a vegan sushi recipe based upon the Japanese spinach ohitashi salad. It takes just a minute to make and it’s refreshing, beautiful and of course adaptable.

Turnip green and pumpkin Ohitashi-style sushi

- 1 bunch of less than perfect turnip greens (forgotten vegetable syndrome)
- 1 hand full of various sprouted seeds, leek works really well
- 1 spring onion
- 3 tbs. steamed pumpkin, cooled
- fleur de sel or seal salt, ground to a powder
- wasabi paste

Blanch the greens for but a few seconds, plunge with cold water. Try to keep the leaves going in the same direction, as anal as that my sound, it’s actually easier.

Wring out the greens enthusiastically.

Spread out the greens on your sushi mat and sprinkle with salt.

Place sprouts, wasabi paste and pumpkin on the matted green.

Delicately fold the matted greens over, to start the sushi roll. Use the mat to roll the sushi tightly. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze… in moderation.

Turn out the sushi onto a cutting board and slice carefully. Serve in or with a puddle of soy sauce, or sesame dressing.

The Kate Bush Party at Mediamatic this Friday evening promises give-us-a-twirl dress-up, lighters-in-the-air sing-a-long and a generous format screening of Quirine Racké and Helena Musken’s poignant art rockumentary Come Back Kate. The evening will also premiere the Imagining Kate cocktail, designed especially for the Ladies and the Mediamatic event. Hard to think of a better way to enjoy a Friday night, heterosexual men are welcome. Reserve now.

Imagining Kate cocktail innovation

Imagining Kate Cocktail Recipe (serves 1)

Freeze cocktail glasses. In a blender combine:

- 40 ml absinth (55-60% variety)
- 15 ml orgeade
- 1 egg white
- dash of violet liqueur
- 6 ice cubes
- vanilla grains (1/16th of one pod)

Blend ingredients until frothy. Rub the rim of the glass with female pheromone solution. Swirl blender before pouring to ensure that all of the vanilla grains are poured along with the foamy cocktail.

Taste testing the Imagining Kate cocktail. It has nice mouth feel, super sexy after-buzz, a light landing, and it leaves a pleasant mustache.

• The premier of the film Come Back Kate at the IDFA

  Come Back Kate, by Helena Muskens and Quirine Racké

The Composer called me a citrofiliac! And though he seems to appreciate my cooking, he thinks I should use less citrus. Whatevs, by the time he gets back from his massive stint in the Old Country it’ll be strawberry, soft fruit and rhubarb season. In lieu of citrussy freshness I’ll show him every corner of the berry and the barb.

01 - Use up the fruit at the bottom of the fruit bowl. If it’s not pretty enough to eat raw it’s surely perfect for making marmalade. This batch is made from blood oranges and tangerines with their funky stuff cut off.

02 - In an enamel pot, add a bunch of sugar, I use raw cane sugar. Fire it up, and then turn the fire down. You want it warm enough to release the juices but not so warm as to carmelise the sugar.

03 - Within minutes you’ll get this, a bubbling and aromatic citrus loveliness! Keep the fire low and the lid off. You know how I feel about stirring, don’t do it if you can help it. Marmalade making is more about paying attention to what’s going on with the materials than mindlessly flailing a spoon. Think of this as perma-cooking!

04 - Once the marmalade has cooked down a lot (this can take hours, just let it do what it does) turn off the flame and let it cool off. The marmalade is ready when you think the syrup is sufficiently thick. I like it almost candied and think the marmalade is most versatile in this form, as an ingredient in or atop other things.

05 - If you want the marmalade to be more ‘jammie’, add more sugar to the volume. You can see that I just want an excuse to eat candied tangerines, stare out the windows and think about l’Hameau. This marmalade goes great on hangop or susme (thick fatty Turkish yoghurt) but can also be used on the bottom of a crumb crust if you’re making a lemon tart. Or if you suffer citrofilial tendencies.

• How to make Dutch yoghurt hangop

  The culiblog collected hangop recipes

  Nice images of a not-so-traditional hangop installation

Last Sunday was the final day of Platform 21’s Cooking and Constructing exhibition, and amidst the fiery debate and seitan design workshop, no one expected that any true innovation would take place. But due to the emphasis on show and do, I had to rush through my normal procedure and the result was a surprisingly newer-better-faster, less pain-in-the-assier method for making seitan. Scratch the lengthy steaming process of my previous recipe (otherwise a great recipe) and opt for a 20 minute boil instead. This will produce a better texture and a 1 hour cooking process.

The fact that we can now make seitan in 1/4 of the time just reinforces my notion that most recipes we think of as being time-consuming, can be simplified enough to become something doable. Think of Richard Bertinet’s bread that is easy enough to just whip up whilst cooking dinner. Think of my homemade pasta 23 Layer Lasagne that is a magnificent hot mess of heaven. Recipes can be simplified, what an effing relief!

Instead of steaming the gluten dough for hours and hours, try tossing it into some boiling water for 20 minutes. The result is a puffier texture, making the deep-frying that follows, more effective. Boil the gluten in water for ~20 minutes, or until the gluten floats to the top. (The mage above is of deepfrying.)

Ivan burns his fingers on some deflated seitan.

• The new and improved culiblog way to make seitan. Don’t steam for 120 minutes, boil for 20, followed by a 5 minute deepfry, and proceed as usual. Seitan prepared this way takes around an hour, and you’ll only be busy with it for a fraction of this time.

  Culiblog’s 25 minute 23 Layer Lasagne recipe

  Richard Bertinet’s wonderful traditional French bread making technique explained in Dough.

Like the soybean, like bread, like fish, like wine, like salt, seitan is part of the utopian food group, foods laden with morality, infused with ritual, oozing with culture, drowning in history. Seitan is desperately in need of appropriation from its association with macrobiotics but on the positive side is bound to the discussion of the ethical implications of lab meat and the effect of industrialized food on our local/global economies and environment.

At last year’s Lab Meat debate and dinner at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, I expounded on why the creation of industrial meat substitutes is not sustainable and why Lab Meat proponents may be (inadvertently) greenwashing environmentally unfriendly tissue labs. Like a vegan appropriating the meaty recipes of pop-chef Anthony Bourdain, I offered several sustainable meat substitutes well-rooted in the whole foods firmament and explained how we all can make make lab meat with flour and water, in the lab that we commonly refer to as our kitchen.

This Sunday I’ll be in another lab meat debate, with a.o., esteemed scientific ethicist Cor van der Weele. The venue is Amsterdam’s Platform 21, on the final day of the Cooking and Constructing exhibition, at 16.00h. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to join in the preceding seitan workshop that I will be giving, write, call, or simplly show up on Sunday at 15:00h. There are still a few spaces open for participants.

1 cup gluten flour, 1 heaping tbs white flour

Recipe/technique for making Seitan (serves ±4)

1 cup gluten flour
1 heaping tbs unbleached white flour
(pinch of sea salt)
water
peanut oil

Seitan marinade

water
soy sauce
rice wine vinegar
juniper berries
dried shitake mushrooms
ginger
marmalade
bay leaves
garlic

01: Mix the flours with a fork until fluffed and drizzle with water, tablespoon by tablespoon. Stir this mixture sloppily and within seconds it will start to bind together. When it looks like a large piece of spent chewing gum, you’re ready to form it into loaves for steaming.

02: Steam the wheat meat loaves for at least 2 hrs over a fiercely boiling pot of water. Not unlike raw octopus meat, gluten needs to be processed before achieving good mouth feel.

03: All done steaming

04: Test the texture by cutting off the ends and popping them in your mouth for a test-chew. You don’t need to be an expert, if the gluten is fun to eat, it’s good, if chewing glute starts to feel like aerobic exercise, it’s bad. If too chewy, you can best just start over, as it has to do with the amount of white flour you added in the beginning; too little flour equals too chewy.

05: Deep fry the loaves for at least 5 minutes. Don’t protest and think you can skip this step, because it radically transforms the texture into something delicious, even for folks that don’t wear goat wool socks.

06: Put all of the ingredients of the marinade into a large pot on a medium flame, add the seitan and braise for up to 2 hours. Later you can store the seitan in the braising juices in the fridge.

07: When cooking with seitan, treat it as if it were tofu or tempeh. It’s already mostly ‘cooked’, so you just need to add it to whatever you like, fire up the flavours and get it warm.

Some folks liken seitan’s texture to duck meat. I think that these people have probably never eaten a properly prepared duck in their lives. Seitan can be really very good, but not in the same way that meat can be good. And this ultimately is the problem that I have with the notion of the meat substitute. Foods need to be enjoyed for what they are, for their inherent qualities, not for how well they exude an I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-bacon!-feeling.

Seitan can be truly sublime and delicious, but to my knowledge (which is to say, to Google and Wikipedia’s knowledge) I’m sure that no one has ever uttered the words, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-seitan!

Culiblog’s debunks myths about seitan and a homestyle guide to gluten harvesting

Hezbollah Tofu, a fab blog with an unfortunate name that aims to make proper vegan cuisine by appropriating recipes by pop-chef Anthony Bourdain

Last year’s Lab Meat debate and dinner at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht

From the original creator of Amsterdam’s Supperclub (the real one, not the other one), Chef Thor is now ready to debut his latest collection of bitterballs. The bitterbal is a ‘traditional’ Dutch drinking snack, a round, deep-fried croquette filled with molten lava. The national joke is that each time you eat a portion of bitterballs you will burn and blister your tongue. In terms of national jokes I do prefer masochistic snacks to ignorant politicians with absurd notions about national identity, although lately we seem to be multi-tasking pretty well.

Molten spinach gorgonzola lava

Chef Thor’s ‘love bites’ come in a collection of three different flavour combinations; spinach-gorgonzola, sweet teriyaki mango, and thai coconut curry with curry with peas. Voss has spent the past year developing the recipe in conjunction with Dutch bitterbal snack company, van Dobbe.

The unsurpassable Croqueta d’Amor, 7 flavours

Get ‘em all

• 
  Thorwald Voss’ Official Lovebite Site
  • Culiblog background on Chef Thor, I mean Chef Kroket

    What the Roving Gastronome has to say about bitterbal innovation