A meaningful contribution (part-two)

A little while ago, when the quarantine was in it's infancy and we were just becoming accustomed to the shrinking of our worlds, I wrote a post about my job being furloughed. At the time, this meant that my job was effectively on pause while the company I worked for weathered the difficult economic conditions we're facing currently and operated on a skeleton crew. I'm not sure how to gracefully transition into the next part of this story, so let's put it like this; do you ever pause a Netflix show you're bored of, thinking that you'll return to it later in the day despite knowing at the back of your mind that you never will? It turns out, that's pretty much what my employers had been doing with my job. As of tomorrow, I will have been made redundant.

I don't want to overplay this too much. Losing my job has the potential to seem dramatic, but it's not as if I had any non-financial attachments to this job, it was just something to get me through university and to whatever happened to come after that. The "question" of afterwards may have been answered in the form of dashed PhD hopes (coupled with the ensuing gloom) and a global pandemic, but at least it felt as if I had a safety net below me. It'd be wrong to say that this has put me in an immediately precarious position, but if I were questioning my purpose and the value of my actions before then it is safe to say that this has intensified as a result.

I heard about this on Thursday, and since then I've felt strangely untethered. It feels like I could drift anywhere after this has all ended. It sounds like it should be freeing, but it feels a little bit like a great oceanic trench has beneath the balcony of my flat; I can look down into it but I can't make out shapes nor shadows. So many people seem to be vaguely repeating the line that "things are going to change" when the pandemic is over, but I can't help but wonder whether anyone has stopped to apply that same sentiment to their personal lives. I haven't a clue what form the future will take, but I find it hard to imagine that it won't be somewhat from the shape it took back in February, and before.

So, what does one do when it appears that everything has been turned on it's head? Make upside down cake.

...okay, so that might have been a pretty tenuous segue, but there's something about the currently prevailing feeling of instability and chaos that pushes us to do things that are pleasant and enjoyable. I take a perverse amount of amusement from the moment an upside down cake gets inverted from my spring form pan, so upon seeing cherries in the Co-Op for 99p per punnet that is where my mind near immediately went.

There's also an observation that housemate-of-the-blog Rebecca made about fresh fruit that it just seems effortlessly luxurious. I'm pretty sure that she was talking about grapes at the time, the fruit made to be consumed from the hands of a toga-garbed muse on a marble klinai, but this same sense could be applied to anything. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with cherry flavoured beverages (which I was rarely allowed due to it's unnatural colour) but I had never tried a real version of the fruit simply because they were too expensive for my parents to justify buying; fresh fruit in general wasn't particularly common in our house. I did, however, go to school with a boy who usually had cherries in his lunchbox; I naturally assumed that he was descended from kings.

So, coming from a childhood that was both free from cherries and from baking, the idea of making an upside-down cherry cake seemed to be an ideal "I've-just-lost-my-job-let's-do-something-nice-and-fancy-but-not-actually-fancy" endeavour. Have you ever made a fruit upside down cake before? You absolutely have to; they are so fun. You start by layering the fruit on the bottom of the cake pan in whatever creative pattern you like (you'll see that I did a very standard pattern, but you are free to make a Dali-esque, cherry-based nightmare-scape if you so wish) before pouring over the cake batter. The inversion means that your fruit pattern will end up on the top of the cake. It's a very easy way to make something beautiful.

The cherries in question are both at the top of the cake, and incorporated within the batter. This can be a source of horror for some bakers (me included), but I found some super handy tips on this blog post about baking with fresh fruit by Maurine Dashney. You might want to a have a read of the full thing, but I've summarised the most relevant tips below:

• Use smaller pieces: the fruit should be light enough to stay suspended within the batter and not sink to the bottom.

• Use a sharp knife: the logic here is that blunt knives will burst more cell walls in the fruit, whereas a sharper knife will slice cleanly through and keep the juice within the fruit.

• Roll the fruit in flour before incorporating into the batter: this was an interesting tip! This will keep the juice contained and it will prevent the fruit from sinking.

Now, for the sake of transparency I think it's pretty imperative that I tell you that I undermined the above tips by forgetting to add the chopped cherries to the cake mix before I poured it over the cherries for the top of the cake. I also need to tell you that it was fine; I mixed them as well I could into the poured batter without disrupting the cherries underneath, and while they were concentrated very slightly towards the bottom of the cake, they all stayed in their position. Even so, do double check that you have added everything before pouring!

Upside-Down Cherry Cake

Preparation time: 35 minutes

Baking time: 50 minutes

Makes 8-10 slices

Ingredients

150g unsalted butter, cut into cubes and softened

115g caster sugar

1/2 tbsp of light brown sugar

300g fresh cherries

2 eggs + 1 egg yolk

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tbsp milk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

200g plain flour + 1/2 a tbsp

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp baking powder

Method

Pre-heat your oven to 180°C (or 160°C for fan powered ovens).

Grease and line an 8" round cake tin (a spring form pan is good for this but not essential by any means).

Take 140g of the cherries and halve them, making sure to remove the pit. Sprinkle the bottom of the pan evenly with the light brown sugar and arrange the cherries in an even, circular fashion. Cut the remaining 160g of cherries into small pieces. I generally do this by halving each cherry, and then cutting each half into nine pieces, slicing in a way that resembled an noughts and crosses grid (or tic-tac-toe depending on geography). Take care to use a sharp blade here and avoid crushing any of the cherries. Put the cherries in a bowl and add 1/2 a tbsp of plain flour, stirring into the fruit.

Add the butter and the caster sugar to a large mixing bowl and cream on a low setting with an electric mixer until it is pale and fully aerated. This should take around 5-7 minutes, or a little bit longer if you are doing this by hand. Add the eggs, and continue to beat on a low setting for a further 2 minutes. Change to a wooden spoon and stir in the vanilla extract, milk and lemon juice.

Sift in the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves and salt and fold into the batter until just combined. It is important that you fold gently here and do not over mix; this will ensure that the air you have whipped into the batter doesn't collapse.

Pour the batter carefully over the cherries in the cake tin and smooth out the top. Put the cake tin the oven and bake for 35 minutes at 180°C (or 160°C for fan powered ovens). After 35 minutes has elapsed, turn the heat up by 20°C and bake for a further 8 minutes. This will allow the edges of the cake to brown without overcooking the inside.

Remove from the oven and check the cake is cooked by inserting a clean knife. If the knife comes out clean, then the cake is done. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes before inverting on to a cooling rack and admiring your creation.

Notes & Adjustments

• Feel free to use whatever fruit you like or have to hand. Fleshier fruits or berries work best. You may wish to tailor the flavours in the cake to suit the fruit. I think that a light sprinkling of cinnamon, cloves and vanilla complements cherries, so you may wish to adjust this if changing the fruit. If you were using peaches, for example, I might be tempted to use light brown sugar instead of caster and substitute the cinnamon for ground ginger. But I won't be prescriptive, and I'll let you explore this with freedom!

• The cinnamon and cloves can be changed up if you'd prefer different spices. You could add more into the mixture as well if you like.

Taking and situating

It's been nine days, and I'm getting better at reminding myself that a cumulative total of zero people are keeping a count of how many days it's been since I've posted to this blog. As I alluded to in my last post, lockdown has been feeling pretty tough for me recently and the last thing anyone in such a position (of which, I'm sure there are many) should be doing is pushing their interests into the realm of drudgery. I'm not going to go into what I've been finding difficult specifically, as it is stuff that I imagine almost everyone is going through at the moment; further illustration is neither necessary nor interesting.

What have I been doing since you last heard from me? Well, I've been in the kitchen a fair bit. Thankfully my phase of cooking ennui seems to have passed, and I've mostly been doing a lot of cooking for pleasure/nourishment, as opposed to doing so for recipe development. Actually, I'm writing here about a dish which didn't originally spring from a recipe but one which I cooked, ate and immediately realised that I'd have to retroactively piece together ingredient quantities and instructions, and recreate it. I've also been fine-tuning my way many trials of a somewhat experimental recipe creation process. It might work out and you might hear about it here, or it might not quite hit the mark; I'll be okay with either (but I'm secretly keeping my fingers crossed the former!)

Enough about me, I'm going to take this occasion to do something uncharacteristic and reluctantly wade into drama. If anyone here keeps up with Alison Roman or her until-recent New York Times column, you'll probably know about the the sort-of row that has ensued over the past few weeks; I call it a "sort-of row" due to the fact that the most vociferous opinions have come from those not directly involved within it. For the TL;DR version, in an interview in The New Consumer, Roman took a critical aim at both Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo for what she perceives as the over-capitalisation of their brand image through their extensive product lines. This was interpreted by many as an attempt to censure two women of Asian descent simply for having careers.

While I think, at the very least, this is a worthwhile conversation to be having, this isn't the part of the story I particularly want to focus on. Focusing on "throwing shade" or dragging someone can only give a very surface-level appraisal of the situation, and besides, it's not as if Roman herself hasn't acknowledged how her own white privilege shaped her remarks. Beyond the incident itself, a conversation has arisen about the erasure of the ethnic origins of certain dishes and ingredients by white food writers. While much of this has crystallised around Roman herself and a supposed curry referred to as a "stew", she is far from the sole perpetrator. On the contrary, this is virtually endemic among food writers.

I find myself wondering about this given my proximity to the issue. I'm a white food writer who very often uses ingredients of cultural origin that isn't my own, therefore part of the demographic that should be paying attention to this conversation. I come to you with a recipe for a green lentil stew flavoured with ingredients common in Iranian cooking such as sumac and citrus; indeed, some might debate that it is a form of adasi, a Persian lentil stew, yet it does diverge from this blueprint quite considerably. Beyond acknowledging the Iranian origins of the food (or, where is the line between what we refer to as Iranian and Persian food?) should it then be tenuously linked to an already existing dish? This may seem like a heavy handed case of geo-semanticism, but the issue of white writers taking credit for innovation where it isn't due has been oft-repeated over the past 500 or so years.

I think there's an issue here with simplistic white-liberal cosmopolitanism. Taking a "no borders" approach to cooking sounds fantastic on the surface, but it has the convenient tendency of steamrolling over years of colonial-cultural acquisition. It means that anyone could essentially take a recipe for chana masala, refer to it as a "spiced chickpea soup" and go viral for it, as Roman's "stew"/"curry" did. As referenced by this tweet, the white writer then becomes the non-threatening "Trojan horse" for certain foods and ingredients that have been previously seen as too ethnic when presented by writers of colour. While I'm certainly not going viral by any stretch of the imagination, my recipes for two-pepper tofu, sweet & smoky pulled jackfruit and sriracha roasted cauliflower could be considered to be somewhat divorced from the cultural origins of their ingredients.

I think whenever a conversation like this arises, there are always voices that spring up to proclaim that we should just let food be food; kind of like the oft-repeated dinner table admonition of "why can't we just talk about something nice" (my mother is a nurse, so I used to hear this one a lot from my father). Having the ability to opt out of these conversations is one that comes with great privilege, and this is just one reason why I believe that the very least we can do is to not shut them down when they do occur. A meal on a plate is more than "just food" in the same way that a novel is so much more than it's constituent letters; it's embedded with history, a past that can speak of collective celebrations and trauma in the same breath. We'd do well to respect that.

Iranian Sumac & Lemon Lentil Stew

with Sweet Potato, and Dill & Cumin-Scented Yoghurt

Preparation time: 25 minutes

Cooking time: 45 minutes

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients

Lentil Stew

1 medium red onion, finely diced

1 medium carrot, coarsely grated

1 stalk of celery, finely diced

4 cloves of garlic, finely minced or crushed into a paste

1 tbsp of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped or crushed into a paste

1 tbsp olive oil

35ml of freshly squeezed lemon juice

250g of dried green lentils

600 ml of vegetable stock

350-400g of sweet potato, chopped into 2cm cubes

3 tsp of sumac

1/2 tsp of cumin

3/4 tbsp of white wine vinegar

Seeds from 2 cardamom pods, ground

1/4 tsp of black peppercorns, ground

1/2 tsp of dark soy sauce

1/2 tsp of salt

Topping

95g Greek yoghurt

1 tbsp fresh dill, coarsely chopped + extra for sprinkling

1/2 tsp of cumin

15ml freshly squeeze lemon juice

Red pepper flakes for sprinkling

1 slice of lemon for each person

Method

Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Make sure to taste the water; it should be about as salty as brine. Add the sweet potato and cook on a rolling boil for 4 minutes, draining and setting aside afterwards.

Heat 1 tsp of olive oil in a large saucepan or wok over a medium-low, before adding in the red onion, carrot and celery. Cook over a medium low heat for 10 minutes. During this time, the vegetables should soften and sweeten. Stir in the crushed garlic and parsley, sumac, cumin, black pepper, salt and cardamom and cook over a medium-low heat for a further 1 minute.

Pour over the vegetable stock, white wine vinegar and soy sauce, stir the mixture through and turn the pan up to a high heat. Wait until the mixture has come to boil, and turn down to a medium heat. Simmer for 25 minutes, or until the lentils have absorbed all but a small amount of the liquid. Make sure to taste the mixture while it is cooking, and adjust if needed. Stir the mixture through every few minutes to ensure that the liquid is evenly distributed among the lentils

While the lentils are cooking, prepare the topping. Add the yoghurt into a bowl with the cumin, lemon juice and dill and mix until combined.

After the lentils have been cooking for 25 minutes, stir the lemon juice through the mixture and take off of the heat. Distribute into bowls, spooning over yoghurt and sprinkling the dill and red pepper flakes into each bowl. Add one lemon segment into each bowl to squeeze extra citrus into the mix.

This can be served with rice, cous-cous or just as it is.

Notes & Adjustments

• A note on the eating: bring the yoghurt, dill and red pepper flakes to the table/sofa/floor with you. That way, you can re-apply as you go if needed.

• If you can find some nearby to you, feel free to substitute the Greek yoghurt for labneh. You may need to adjust the amount of lemon juice used if so, but trust your tastebuds with this!

• If you have brown or puy lentils in your store-cupboard then feel free to use them in the place of the green, however I would not recommend using red lentils.

• I tend to crush my garlic and herbs together in a pestle and mortar, but finely chopped works too!

• You can make this vegan by using a vegan yoghurt.

Occasional scaffolding may be required

Accuse us of being slow to the party, but we have been watching Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Well, technically we've been watching Salt, Fat, Acid, but we expect you to complete the quartet very soon. For those of you who aren't in the loop, the Netflix show is based around Samin Nosrat's seminal tome (which friend-of-the-blog Keith was so generous to send me as a lock-down gift recently) where she explores the four critical pillars of cooking that give their name to the book. Despite there being troves of wisdom to absorb, the show feels like you've taken the hand of a trusted friend who guides you through each inter-cultural exchange.

Samin's attitude towards food and it's preparation is one forged in curiosity. It's wonderment, and laughter and a genuine desire to learn. It turns out that food might just have a context, and so does the cooking process. Not just a context, but many different historical and personal strands that bring it to be what it is today, and continue it's evolution. Whether it's the cultivation of the Melipona honeybee in the Yucatan or the extraction of kelp salt in Nagoya, there is always an awareness of purpose which drives these processes and traditions.

While this is wonderful to sit and learn about inside of that specific bubble, it does make you reflect on your own purpose after the fact. This is easier for people who are brought up steeped in culinary traditions and practices (and this can be as low-key as baking with your parents) but, as I've discussed before, my earlier experiences with cooking were dictated by functionality. Trying to come up with some kind of overarching origin story that delivered me into the kitchen usually leaves me feeling as if I am on a continual process of stumbling through this entire experience.

This isn't usually a problem for me. I'm not particularly concerned with legacy, and having a so-called rich culinary heritage is a notion often tinged with affluence; something quite far removed from my first forays into cooking. However, if you have taken a look at my last blog post, you may have detected that I've been feeling a pretty adrift as of late. I begun lockdown as a sprinter, and now it feels like I'm flagging behind in the first half of a marathon. Trying to develop recipes to their completion has required what feels like a lot more energy on my part, and when the time comes for me to cook, the rigidity of such a structure feels like too much. So, if an identity crisis had been perching patiently on the branch of a nearby tree, at times I've felt like falling into the long grass and becoming carrion.

It's strange, because cooking has always been a constant for me. Even throughout depression, bereavement and a hectic academic burden, it felt like something positive I could focus my energy into rather than becoming tiresome. In general, I get overwhelmed by all manner of things; light, sound, people... somehow cooking escaped such an inglorious list. If anything, it was this that gave some sort of reason to the question of "why?", which makes it quite scary to lose momentum, even if it is just a temporary blip.

In the end, we don't need a reason to cook past that of hunger and desire. I've always loved the idea of having a story to tell and a platform to express that, but a want or a need will more than suffice. Watching the "Acid" episode of the aforementioned Netflix show was enough to spin out my desire for something acerbic, and it wasn't long before my heart settled on my favourite citrus fruit of them all; the lime. I'd also been thinking about cauliflower pretty frequently recently; it's one of my favourite vegetables, but I really do fear the great crumbling that seems implicit within it's preparation. I'm curious to know if anyone else avoids vegetables (or any other ingredients for that matter) that they love simply because of preparation anxiety?

So, cauliflower + lime juice, and some chilli for a rounded out warmth. Great! Now, what to go with it? I cook with beans a fair bit, but it's not something I've really written about on the blog. I think I have the notion that dried beans are wild and tempestuous, and therefore too unpredictable for me to write about with any kind of authority. Here, I'm breaking through that and pairing the black bean with a more common go-to ingredient (sweet potato), the shredded cauliflower leaf and the zest of the limes used for the cauliflower (I'm still atoning for my wasteful behaviour from the last post and maximising each ingredient) to impart yet more zest on to the plate.

I had many fears throughout the process that this would be too acidic to be pleasurable, and indeed the bean/sweet potato mixture does get fairly bitter, but I enjoyed it enough to post here nonetheless. Honestly, it was a bit of a struggle for me to get through the cooking process, not because it was particularly difficult but more so due to the fact that I wasn't sure if it would work out how I had hoped, and that I was feeling somewhat weary anyway. But it pulled through, despite the uncertainty. I hope this is positive reinforcement, but I guess I'm going to see how the next stabs at recipe development go.

Chilli & Lime Cauliflower with Black Beans and Sweet Potato

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Cooking time: 25 minutes

Serves: 3 people (with some leftover bean/sweet potato mix)

Ingredients

Cauliflower

1 large cauliflower (about 700-800g), cut into florets

Juice of 2 limes

2 tsp of mild chilli powder

1 tbsp of light soy sauce

1 tbsp of olive oil

1 tsp of granulated sugar

1/2 tsp of salt

Beans

250g dried black beans

1 medium sweet potato (about 200-300g), peeled and cut into 1cm cubes

Leaves from a large cauliflower, finely shredded

1/2 large red onion, finely chopped

4 cloves of garlic, crushed and minced

1 tbsp of ginger, peeled and minced

1/2 stalk of celery, finely chopped

1/2 tsp of dried chilli flakes

Zest of 2 limes

1/2 tsp of cayenne pepper

1 tsp of smoked paprika

1 tbsp of light soy sauce

50 ml of vegetable stock

1 tsp of granulated sugar

1 tsp of rice vinegar

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1/2 tsp of salt

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (for fan powered ovens) or 200°C (for gas) and grease a baking tray with olive oil.

Separate cauliflower leaves from the head and set aside. Add the florets into a large bowl, along with lime juice, chilli powder, soy sauce, sugar and salt. Carefully fold the lime mixture into the cauliflower, taking care not to break up the florets too much (however, it's not the end of the world if you do). Arrange the cauliflower on the baking tray, ensuring that the florets are spaced out properly and do not overlap with each other. Roast in the oven for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the vegetable oil in a wok or a large saucepan on a medium heat. When the oil has come to temperature, add the red onion and the celery and saute for 4 minutes, until softened somewhat. Add in the garlic, ginger and chilli flakes and saute for a further 1 minute.

Add the sweet potato and salt to the pan and turn up to a medium-high heat, incorporating the chunks into the mixture. Saute for 8 minutes, carefully stirring the mixture through until the sweet potato has softened somewhat. Add the cauliflower leaf, vegetable stock, soy sauce, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, sugar and rice vinegar and cook for a further 4 minutes.

Add in the beans and the lime zest and saute for a further 2 minutes before taking off of the heat. Spoon the bean mixture into bowls and top with the roasted cauliflower.

Notes & Adjustments

• I would strongly suggest using the cauliflower leaf here as it means that a perfectly usable part of the vegetable won't go to waste. If you haven't had it before it tastes quite similar to spring greens with a small hint of the creaminess of cauliflower. If you don't enjoy the taste or if you wanted to make the bean part of the dish without the cauliflower, then I would suggest substituting for shredded spring greens.

• I like the contrast in colour that comes with the use of black beans, but I don't see why you couldn't use another bean in it's place. I would, however, avoid larger beans for this recipe.

• Rice vinegar can be replaced by any other fruity and slightly sweet vinegar, such as red wine or apple cider vinegar. I use this because it's what I have around, and I know most people (me included) don't tend to keep a wide range of vinegars; it really depends on the kind of food you cook the most often (and if you make pickles, of course!).

• Before serving, it may be a good idea to taste the beans to ensure that you don't find them too bitter. On this note, make sure you don't accidentally grate any of the lime pith into the mixture like I did! If you do find it too bitter, you can try mixing an extra tsp of soy sauce after everything has finished cooking. I tried mixing some sesame oil and some mirin with the leftovers and this worked out pretty well!