Food Heroine
Well, I think it’s time we had one. And we’ve had a lot of lovely recipes from Susan of Athens, and this one is perhaps particularly spectacular. Oh, all right, Susan from Athens. But Timon was such a jerk.
Dolmades
Susan from Athens
Well you asked for it and here it is. I’m not sure how many comments I’ll have to spread it over, but I thought I would put in a foreword here.
Nomenclature:
One dolmas or dolma (nominative and accusative respectively), many dolmades. If you want to make them small you talk about dolmadaki (singular) or dolmadakia. The -aki, means small.
And dolma comes from a Turkish word, I believe, meaning stuffed. You will find countless variations around the Mediterranean and by individual cooks. This recipe was from our cleaning lady when I was very young, Anna, who was a very good cook indeed. As this was the seventies, we were “progressive” and the recipe called for stock cubes. This is how we did it then and how we still do it in my family, even though we would rather be caught walking down main street in our skivvies before using stock cubes for anything else (especially soup). I can see you Robin, shaking your head and saying: No chemicals for me, thank you very much, so fear not, I have included variations, and one of the traditional ways of adding flavour with no chemicals, but I have to say I do it this way and it is delicious, and a rare dose of chemicals doesn’t shut down my system, but I understand perfectly if you are against them in all shapes and forms.
It’s true I’m against all chemicals all the time, pretty much, but there are some perfectly nice organic stock cubes available in these enlightened days. There are also two issues here: the chemical/crud issue and the taste/snob issue. I know people who would rather be drawn and quartered* than use stock cubes–and I’m sorry but I find it bizarre that you do feel this way, except for dolmades?? Is this a regional Greek version of the species-wide human genome for capriciousness? When I went all pure and holy and tiresome I either adapted my old recipes or got rid of them. In the case of stock cubes I’d already stopped using them because they tasted like rubbish. Then I went all pure etc and hadn’t used any stock cubes for years till I found these organic ones. But there are still people who would rather be drawn and quartered than try them because it’s also a snob issue.
Do you know the miso** cheat? A little miso dissolved in hot water (taste it for proportions) makes an excellent stock substitute. I think the dark ones work better although you can use one of the paler ones for chicken, but pale miso tastes less like chicken than dark tastes like non-specific red meat. Pale miso still makes good soup too–it makes excellent background to vegetable soup–but it tastes like pale miso soup rather than chicken soup. And since miso lives almost forever in the back of the refrigerator it’s a very useful basic flavour enhancer to have available–even more valuable to those of us who would rather die than use MSG for the excellent reason that we would die if we did. When I was in my really high pure period I had miso soup every night, and thought high, pure thoughts.***
But the basic truth, I feel, is that real stock is always the best. I’m spoilt; we eat a lot of chicken (we and the hellhounds eat a lot of chicken) and Peter just makes stock. In fact he gets all twitchy and anguished when we’ve got so much stock that he feels he has to throw a carcass out. I’ve upped my soup intake to avert this trauma. I’m so altruistic.
Dolmadakia
1 jar of vine leaves or
200-250 gr fresh vine leaves
2 eggs
1 lemon
Filling:
½ kilo minced beef
2 ½ handfuls of long or medium grain rice (soup rice) – uncooked
4 spring onions
a bunch of dill
1 stock cube
½ cup olive oil (or less)
2 stock cubes or approximately 2 cups of homemade stock (vegetable or chicken)
The rice we use is what Greeks refer to as soup rice or Carolina rice, and it is uncooked. You put it in a shallow bowl, rinse it to rid it of any starchy residue and remove any broken or bad grains. Sieve.
Mix the ingredients for the filling with enough olive oil so that it all mixes but isn’t swimming. Divide it roughly into four, so that you have a better grasp of how to distribute it equally between the leaves.
To prepare the leaves:
If they come from a jar:
Take a quarter of the vine leaves, unroll, and place into a bowl of water, separate, rinse, sieve them out and roll them out (repeat afterwards for the other three quarters separately when and if you need them).
If the are fresh:
Place the leaves in a large heat-proof bowl, and pour boiling water over them. Leave them in the water until they change colour to pale green.
The leaves turn pale green? Not the water? Because the only dolmades I’ve ever known have dark green leaves.
Mix them around so that they all get the benefit of this treatment. Then place in cold water, rinse, sieve and use.
How to set out the leaves:
Separate tough, coarse or shredded leaves, and use some to line a medium to large-sized pot.
Place each useable leaf in front of you face down, so that looks like the maple leaf on the Canadian flag, broad part towards you, and with the veins facing up. Place as many out as your workspace will allow. If the veins or stem are too tough, carefully cut them out using a pair of scissors.
If you think of the leaf as your hand, you will place a quantity of filling ranging from a teaspoon to a tablespoon and a half onto the palm. The quantity varies a lot due to a number of factors: a) The size of the leaf (tiny leaves should not be made to take too much, they simply won’t wrap properly and you want enough filling in a large leaf so that the recipient won’t eat leaf alone). b) The time you want to spend and your patience (superb housewives and cooks pride themselves on tiny dolmades, some as small as the tip of your finger, but these can take days to wrap, or are wrapped by family groups working in unison. You want to aim at a size that is reasonable: One heaped teaspoon of filling makes a lovely dolma in my opinion, but if you are running short of time, or your leaves are all enormous, a tablespoon or slightly more is doing well).
How to wrap each dolma:
Put the filling in the centre of the leaf. Leave at least 1 centimetre from the bottom portion of the leaf. Roll this portion over the top of the filling. Then fold over the two sides, so you have a rectangular shape, and continue rolling until you have a small sausage-like shape all neat and tidy (OK the first couple won’t be too neat or tidy but you will improve). Do all the leaves you have put out on your work surface.
Take your pot – remember you lined the bottom and a couple of centimetres up the sides with the large tough leaves? Now pick up each dolma carefully, and start placing them along the inner circumference of the pot. All the way around, packing them well put not too tightly, to form a ring. The next ring goes within this and so forth in concentric circles until the bottom of the pan is covered. (Think of it as packing a suitcase: you want your things to be well packed so they don’t come out all squashed, but if you leave too much space between them, they will be battered around).
Once you have one full surface, cover this with other large, hardish leaves that you wouldn’t want to eat. And keep on going up to three layers. Cover these with any leaves left over. Cover all of this with a heat-proof non-toxic plate. We always use old enamel pie plates, but heat-proof glass works very well indeed. This weighs the whole lot down and won’t let them float around and unravel while boiling.
Melt the 2 stock cubes in enough boiling water to just about cover the dolmades. Pour over the dolmades and cook for about one hour on a lowish light. Check often to ensure that it doesn’t dry out.
(Light? Heat?)
When they are done (test one to make sure the rice is cooked through), drain out the juice, which you retain in a pan to keep warm.
If you want to, you can eat them like this, but for a home cook, except if serving them at a buffet dinner, these must be accompanied by an avgolemono (egg and lemon) sauce.
You wouldn’t like to try to teach us how to say ‘avgolemono’, would you? I call it Greek Egg and Lemon Sauce, because I am a coward. I learnt it a million years ago from Craig Claibourne’s AN HERB AND SPICE COOKBOOK which cookbook I still love. He calls it avgolemono too, but he doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it.
To make the avgolemono:
Beat the egg whites to a soft meringue and add the yolks. Add the juice of one lemon drop by drop (yes, that slowly, otherwise it can curdle and you have to start over). Then slowly add two tablespoons of the juices from the dolmades. Pour all this into the pan with the remaining juices, stirring slowly. Do this either over a very low heat, or else having the juices very hot. Serve immediately. Over 5-6 dolmades and come back for more.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand this instruction.
If you don’t want to use stock cubes or other form of preserved stock:
For the filling, add some parsley or spearmint (you can do that anyway, but it changes the flavour), salt and pepper to taste, maybe a small amount of grated onion.
Use homemade vegetable or chicken stock, salted to taste. Or else, do it the old-fashioned way: In the pan, before laying down the first layer of leaves, line the pan with some chopped up herbs and vegetables (seeded tomatoes with the juices squeezed out, green peppers, the stalks from the dill you use in the filling and from parsley as well, chopped up onion and garlic, and then cover with the leaves. That way you make your stock as you go along, with the leaves acting as a separator and the pressure from the dolmades and the plate keep the rest from mixing but not from flavouring everything.
Meat or Vegetarian?
You can put in lamb, but it makes them very heavy and quite gamy tasting.
If you want to, you can omit the meat altogether (people always do during lent). Just up the number an amount of herbs, adding parsley or spearmint, more spring onion, maybe some plain red onion shredded or grated. You can also add grated courgette and aubergine (zucchini and eggplant), carrot and chopped red peppers. If you have your own courgette plants, instead of stuffing vine leaves, you can stuff courgette flowers, replacing the dill with mint. (Variations are endless from place to place and from cook to cook).
If they all are hard to get, you can stuff cabbage leaves, but first remove any hard “ribs” and scald them so they are blanched: Softer to handle and not squeaky. Here the size will have to be big and you will want 2-3 tbs stuffing minimum in each, but you follow the same technique.
Hot or cold?
We love them hot and rarely have any leftovers. However you can serve dolmadakia cold. If you are intending to serve them cold or for a dinner party, aim to make them smaller in size, so that they are literally bite-sized. You can squeeze a bit of lemon over them and/or serve with cold thick Greek yoghurt (flavoured with spices and/or herbs or not).
Thank you very much! This looks a lot more possible than I was expecting. I’ve actually done stuffed cabbage–not in a long time–and I made sushi for a while but that’s an art form, and I don’t need another blessed avocation. Although speaking of cabbage, I haven’t made this in a long time either, but I have a lovely cabbage strudel recipe somewhere. Hmmm. . . . .
* Possibly toward a nice stew
** I did nothing of the kind. I was listening to the David Lee Roth Van Halen. Or Led Zep. Or . . . no, I think I’ll stop there.
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miso
*** Here’s some scary news, if it’s accurate: the UK wastes up to 40% of the food it buys. America wastes a quarter to a half, depending on who you read. http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/09/24/food.leftovers/index.html#cnnSTCText
. . . although there’s quite a bit more out there about it, a lot of it confusing, but it’s obviously an ugly major problem. But . . . forty percent?!? Just . . . how can you waste FORTY PERCENT of the food (even possibly including other householdy type things) you buy?!
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Congratulations to Susan from Athens, and thank you for my favourite Greek food, dolmades. I’ve never seen them with pale green leaves tho, so I’m going to try this recipe this weekend :)
Oh wow. Stuffed grape leaves are one of my favorite foods. Thanks!
I LOVE dolmadakia! My mother-in-law is from Greece and she makes them in huge batches for holidays and always holds back a small container for me to take home. (I know, I’m a lucky gal!) My husband and I eat them cold the next morning… YUM!
I’ve been told that my job this spring is to collect the baby grape leaves from the wild vines in my backyard while they’re still tender. How can object? The more I collect, the more yummy goodness I get. :-)
Well done, Susan from Athens! I was taught (after a fashion) to make dolmades by my fifth grade teacher, a Mr. Gavalas, but I don’t think I’ve tried it in approximately a hundred years. This might be a worthwhile experiment.
Next, loukoumades? :)
Oh, please do experiment, but you won’t get loukoumades from me, I have always been a touch intimidated by the deep frying. I can tell you the two best places in Athens for loukoumades. With fresh honey and walnuts on top too ;-) But I may do halva at some point soon.
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Arrrr! :) That’s the thing I look forward to the most at the big Greek Orthodox Church festival here every year–probably because I too am too cowardly to do the deep frying thing on my own. They even sell a loukoumades mix (kind of like pancake batter, I assume) but I fear the hot oil–for good reason, knowing my propensity for personal injury.
I’ve never had homemade halvah, but it used to be my favorite passover treat. And coincidentally, Pesach starts tomorrow, I might have to go buy some! Thanks for the reminder. :)
My hubby uses a very similar recipe from a cookbook put together by a Greek Orthodox church in Fort Wayne; the ladies would sell these dolmades and other foods at their annual Greek festival. I think the recipe in the book calls for plain water rather than using stock cubes (bouillon?).
As to the waste of food: I see it with our church members. These are not wealthy people, yet if there’s leftover food they tend to throw a lot of it away instead of packing it for lunch the next day or something. My husband eats lunch from home (always leftovers) almost every day he goes to work at the church office. When I work at the school library, I pack my lunch from home as well. We do our best not to waste. But we see so much of it. One person my husband knew in college said that being able to throw away food was a sign that they were doing well enough financially. He thinks that is a horrible waste of resources and a wholly offensive outlook on life. We see a lot of waste when we go out to eat. I don’t know if there are many buffet restaurants in Great Britain. There are lots of them all over the US. When we go to those restaurants, we see people become profligate wasters of food. We tend to rarely go out, we prefer our own cooking, and we don’t like to witness so much waste.
Yes; I *love* leftovers, they’re one of the reasons to cook in the first place!! But I think that connects up with the fact that you’re cooking good food with good ingredients. Leftover ‘fast food’ is pretty grim. And yes, watching other people waste food is sad and depressing.
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Pour all this into the pan with the remaining juices, stirring slowly. Do this either over a very low heat, or else having the juices very hot. Serve immediately. Over 5-6 dolmades and come back for more.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand this instruction.
I think she means either add very hot juice to the sauce mix to make warm sauce, or heat on low and mix all together. Make more sense that way?
Glad you liked the recipe. Now for the explanations:
“The leaves turn pale green? Not the water? Because the only dolmades I’ve ever known have dark green leaves.”
This is the stage of blanching the raw fresh leaves. At the blanching stage, where you are preparing the leaves to roll, they will turn a paler colour. When you finish cooking them with the filling in the stock they will turn a dark green colour, as you expect.
‘Melt the 2 stock cubes in enough boiling water to just about cover the dolmades. Pour over the dolmades and cook for about one hour on a lowish light. Check often to ensure that it doesn’t dry out.’
“(Light? Heat?)”
Sorry, Greekism popping through. I meant heat. Greeks always refer to a hob as a fire (or light) because most of us are only a couple of generations away from cooking over a fire or a wood stove, so I’m afraid I just transposed. My bad. Comes from speaking too much Gringlish at home.
‘Do this either over a very low heat, or else having the juices very hot. Serve immediately. Over 5-6 dolmades and come back for more.’
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand this instruction.”
I meant put 5-6 dolmades on a plate, pour sauce all around, eat, mop up the sauce and ask for more. That’s what my mother used to say, when we asked for bigger portions. “Finish what’s on your plate, and come back for more”. Maybe it’s a very north of England expression.
“You wouldn’t like to try to teach us how to say ‘avgolemono’, would you?”
It’s simple for the Greeks but very hard for the English speaking. Beyond the fact that the word has more than two syllables (sorry for the dig ;) ) the g is a gamma and the g sound is a very soft g sound, somewhere between the g in goat and h in hare. All the vowels in Greek are short so “a” as in man, o as in “moral”, “e” as in “lemon”, and the accent of the word is on the “le” because the accent can never be any earlier than the third syllable before the end. So av-go-LE-mo-no. (If that helped)
As to stock, I’m not being a food snob here (I can be on the issue of ingredients, dark chocolate, fresh vegetables, etc. but that is an issue of quality control and taste) I enjoy fresh stock and make my own. I have my little variations according to what the stock will be for, but I find that it takes about ten minutes to get it going, and I skim it regularly while doing other things and preparing stuff, so it is worth making. You can have a good stock in an hour, a fantastic one in half an hour, and if you fancy just a quick court bouillon, you can even eat the vegetables with vinaigrette as a salad. We converted to home made stock when I was in my teens in order to avoid salt, as my father had high blood pressure and it was difficult in the beginning, because it was low-salt, but the taste is so much better.
I haven’t done the miso cheat. I love miso in Japanese soups so I will try it out in something else if I need it, thanks so much for the hint. I do hope that you make this, it is without a doubt my absolutely favourite food (and I love to eat, from all kinds of cuisines, so I am not an utter nationalistic food fascist) but this is comfort food. It is also one of the first savoury foods I learned to make. My mother always had us help with mixing cakes, but this food always needed more hands to wrap the dolmadakia, and we were cheap labour (who devoured the finished result).
As you can see, I am as unable to write a short comment as you are to write a short post…
As you can see, I am as unable to write a short comment as you are to write a short post…
********** And I heartily approve! Thank you!
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By the way, I agree with you, Timon was a super jerk.
I make my own chicken stock. I then boil it down to a intense dark syrup, which when cool turns to rubber.
(I start with about 5 – 7 kilos of chicken wing tips, which my chicken butcher gives me for free; several kilos of carrot, celery and leeks and I add whatever herbs and spices look good. Simmer fot at least 4 hours, until the wingtips disintegrate, then strain, defat, and boil down. I get 1 litre of “chicken rubber” after all this.)
Delicious. I keep it in the fridge and just boil it up once a week. Whenever I need a flavour boost I just gouge out a chunk and add it.
Audrey
I get the impression from the article that the 40% food waste includes supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores which are of course bound by sell-by dates (and quite right too). As an individual buying and storing food one can take a much more rational (or even risky) approach to the shelf life of food. I don’t believe that householders are the culprits here.
I’ve up to now been intimidated to comment, but this, I must say, is a great dolma recipe – in Turkey they refrain from using the Dill (this is how I say you can know the difference from greek and turkish food. Greeks use dill.) and my mum always uses chicken stock (and since she’s not turkish, but a slav, she does what they do, and strings bacon within the top layer of the already rolled up dolma. We call these ones with grape leaves or collards Yaprak Dolma or sarma, and serve it with yogurt (or garlic yogurt, mm yummy) and butter with paprika and a touch of tomato paste.
In northern Greece we call dolmades that are vegetarian (yalantzi dolmades) yaprakia precisely when we serve them cold with garlic yoghurt (which you get by straining yoghurt in a colander with cheese cloth for a couple of hours or more, then crushing a clove of garlic for each pint of yogurt (or a lot more if you love garlic) in salt and adding a bit of vinegar, mixing with the yoghurt and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Why add the olive oil? We’re Greek, we can’t help ourselves. Very little that is savoury and cold that doesn’t get some olive oil in it. And absolutely yum, yum. Mainland Greeks use the dill, and this is one recipe I love it in. On the islands it is barely there, if any is added. Instead they use a lot more flat-leaf parsley.
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Want! Want!!!! :) (I’ve even been known to eat yogurt occasionally.)
Susan – per your statement regarding the teensy dolmadakia, the turks make a sort of ravioli, we say manti. In the villages it’s a point of pride to make manti small as your pinky finger nail – but why?!!
we make them at my house like you would little tortelloni- a couple of pounds of beef, salt and pepper to taste (is it strange that we do the inadvisable thing of tasting the raw ground meat? At least we grind our own.) then fold into squares of very thin semolina dough. We boil this and serve with the garlic yogourt (we allow the yogourt to be looser, so it’s more of a sauce than the thick greek style yogourt.)
I’ve skipped a bit of the work when I’m really craving it, and used wonton skins – the result is not the same, the dough is too thick, but it’s an acceptible substitute if you don’t care to pull a yufka.
Delicious!
Hi, who are you? You’ve come through anonymous.
and because I’m not clever, and forgot to say, we don’t use the rice with the meat, bu we make a cold rice filled one that I do not like because I’m not a fan of the mixture (I had a bad experience with dates instead of raisins and to this day can’t have sweet pilaf.)
In my Greek-American childhood home,our phonetic term for egg-lemon broth was “Soup ah-voo-LEM-o-no.” In actual Greek, there are a few extra consonant sounds, but the basic word is the same. “ah-voo” is more like “ahv-ghhho” (the word for egg) if you’re feeling ambitious.
mmm, soup.
ah-voo” is more like “ahv-ghhho” (the word for egg) if you’re feeling ambitious.
************ !!!!!!!! :)
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You waste food with children. They ask for huge, eye-gratifying portions and take 3 bites and say it doesn’t taste right. Or they are willing, very occasionally to try something new and then they don’t like it. (It is generally kid-food which I would far rather not eat anyway, AND if you eat their leftovers you become vastly fat AND their favorite time to try and discard many many things is when they are developing a communicable virus.) On the other hand, the constant sample-reject-sample-reject-sample-eat quite a bit cycle seems to grow them at a great rate (vertically not circumferentially) which may be why U.S populations are taller than their parent gene-pool which was given 3 square and distasteful meals a day.
Please, where do you buy miso in this country? I haven’t actually quite dared try it yet – and threw out all my stock cubes the day I discovered Marigold vegetable bouillon. We don’t eat much meat, and although I do make chicken stock (like your Peter, I wouldn’t waste a chicken carcase!), it’s so rare that we have chicken that I can’t guarantee to have it in the freezer.
By the way, if you do have more than enough stock, it’s extra-delicious if you boil a fresh chicken carcase in it, thickens up the flavour….
Trust me, we have chicken stock that will hold whole FORESTS of spoons upright. You should be able to get miso at a health food shop. You do want to try to get the live kind, but if you’re just after a stock cube substitute the dry kind will do.
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And very nice too. Thank you, Food Heroine! :)
Given the generous quantities of good chicken stock obviously swirling around in your vicinity, Robin, would a recipe for Broccoli Risotto be of interest? One that uses a pint of so of said stock?
YES. :)
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Man, now I wish I hadn’t thrown my miso out. It had been in my fridge forever and I figured it would kill me if I used it. Nice to know another use for it. You say you used to make miso soup all the time. Can we have the recipe, please? My attempts have been awful and the packaged stuff is arguably even worse, though I love the stuff at restaurants.
Nope, not unkind at all! I’m just rather obliviously dense sometimes, and it honestly didn’t occur to me that the dark hellhound would be Darkness. =)
Anyway, the long-promised recipe for cookies made with oil! I’m typing it in as it was passed down to me from my mother’s family, with my own notes in brackets.
DROP COOKIES
400 degrees F
Bake 8-10 min
Ingredients:
2 eggs
2/3 cup oil [I like using a freshly-opened bottle]
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp grated lemon rind
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups sifted flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Beat eggs with fork until well blended. Stir in oil, vanilla, and lemon rind. Blend in sugar until mixture thickens. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt–add to egg mixture. (Dough will be soft) Drop by teaspoonful about 2″ apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Stamp each cookie flat with bottom of glass dipped in sugar. (Lightly oil glass, then dip in sugar)
[I've found that when I make the recipe, the dough is always too soft for flattening with a glass to be really effective. I just make them as drop cookies, and end up sprinkling some sanding sugar on top, for decorative purposes. They're less uniform, but just as tasty.]
3 dozen cookies–3″ in diameter
Brilliant. Thank you. Hope our oil-not-butter person is still reading: I haven’t seen her post in a while. What kind of oil? I tend to use sunflower when I want a nice mild oil without an aggressive taste of its own. (Mind you I’ve got some sweet olive oil pastry recipes somewhere.)
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Ack, I gave the recipe for the DROP COOKIES, and somehow, I totally screwed up and didn’t put my name on it. Please forgive me! =)
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of chicken stock, I’d like to point out that to get the sweetest tasting-stock imaginable, in a savory-sweet way–you have to do it by the Jewish grandmother method.
Which means cooking chicken quarters with pupicks and necks. It’s the last two ingredients that really make the stock, and honestly, the chicken soup too.
(Can you tell it’s Passover and I’m going to get to eat homemade chicken soup tomorrow and Sunday?) =)
I forgot to ask – Susan from Athens, Robin, anyone – are leaves from any grape vine OK to use in this? We have three vines (two white grape, one black) growing on the south-facing walls here and I wondered if it was OK to try using their leaves for this? There’s always far too much leaf and I’m forever cutting it back, so would have supplies to hand…
My first job was working as a hostess in a great Greek restaurant in Seattle, which left me with a love for Greek food that I, in turn, have done my best to pass along to family and friends. In fact, my partner and I do a Greek-themed buffet every year for Thanksgiving (without a shred of turkey, I’m afraid, as I loathe the taste) and I think Susan from Athen’s dolmades will definitely have to be spot-lighted next year!
Re miso, Firebyrd, if you are located in the States, South River Miso (www.southrivermiso.com) makes some of the best around. Organic, delicious, artisanly made — I’ve sampled most of their misos and they are truly wonderful. The Dandelion-Leek is *fabulous*. I even have a jar of their 3 yr barley miso (the last of a 27 lb. bulk buy we did with a bunch of friends) that is over ten yrs old and still tasty.
[wow, there are just some sentences it's just not right to type -- 10 yr old food really sounds nasty, but I assure you, it's not, it's not! :P ]
Re miso soup recipes, my sweetie has a lovely one which I’ll pry out of her when she gets home from work. The secret, if I remember correctly, is bonito flakes which you boil briefly to make a broth.
I’ve also made a simple but tasty miso broth by putting a spoonful of miso into not-quite-boiling water, which can be dressed up with some chopped green onions, a little chopped tofu, whatever is on hand. Miso is so very versatile (and so very good for you).
Yes, I was slightly mystified (also in a hurry, as usual) about request for a RECIPE for miso soup–that’s pretty much all I ever did, you put miso in hot water to *taste* and then add veg and tofu to taste. I tend to like squashed marinated tofu–I can post this some day–you press the tofu between a couple of cutting boards at an angle with a weight on top and then marinate it later so it soaks it up better without going to pieces. Cut in small cubes and fry gently–these will then keep a week or so in your fridge–and a few of these make your miso soup sing. :)
And about old food: think of miso as a kind of nonalcoholic fine wine or brandy or single-malt scotch. Aged is GOOD. :)
But please do post yours with bonito flakes.
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You can also add to your flavour and nutrients by washing a piece of kombu seaweed, tearing it up slightly and brining it almost to the boil and simmering for five minutes. Remove this, add bonito flakes (or bonito stock powder) and use this to make the miso soup. – Super yummy. Great late evening dinner on a cold night.
You’re thinking of what we call the grocer’s halva, which is thick and made with tahini and actually very good for you (high in iron and all sorts of other trace elements). We get that for Lent. Try it on a piece of unleavened bread (I know it sounds weird but it works), or else squeeze lemon on top or a dash of cinnamon or both, or eat with a slice of apple.
But there are at least 3 other kinds of halva, 1) semolina fried in butter with syrup poured on top and added almonds (much better than it sounds), 2) a nutty semolina cake with almonds, with syrup poured over it, 3) a nuttier stickier cake/pudding with lots of almonds and syrup poured over it. You can use the dough from (2) andn (3) to make cookies, avoiding any syrup, and you can also add extra almonds or even (wicked) chocolate chips or chunks (the latter is better). I’ll see what I can do.
You can use the leaves just fine, so long as it’s a grape vine (this may seem obvious but never underestimate the stupidity of some people: ivy is a vine as well, but I wouldn’t want to eat that) and they haven’t been sprayed with anything. Cut them off with a stalk and try to handle them as much as possible by the stalk. Aim for mostly young and tender leaves, but as you can see with the recipe a few older tougher leaves will be useful in covering the pan etc. You can also freeze these very well indeed. You make a tidy stack of them and just put them in the freezer. If you have a lot make a variety of stacks about an inch thick or weigh them. Once frozen you can seal them in a plastic bag, to last longer. Defrost and treat as in the recipe.