Ninecooks

First stop: Senegal

Bonjour, and welcome to Senegal, World Cuisines Cooking Group style!

After our get-to-know-each-other cooking last Spring, we gathered this week for our first official group cooking adventure. On the menu, the cuisine of Senegal, a country whose food culture bears the strong influences of local tribal populations as well as the French, whose presence was strong until the mid 20th Century.

Our menu began with a West African peanut soup, made with sweet potatoes, carrots and peanut butter. (See the recipe at the end of this post.) After the vegetables simmered for 15 minutes or so, we pureed the soup base — an opportunity for some of our group members to have their first encounter with an immersion blender. Then the peanut butter, vegetable juice, and seasonings went in. We enjoyed our first course while the main dish finished cooking.

Poulet Yassa, a stewed chicken and rice dish often served to special guests, was our main course. It starts with 9 pounds of onions, peeled, sliced, and sauteéd. By the time we got those onions into the pot, we were all in tears! But the onions cooked, the chicken pieces got their start on the grill, and the rice boiled in another pot. At the end, we combined the three elements into a beautiful, garlicky stew.

Usually it would be the host's duty to pick the chicken off the bones (with the right hand only — the left hand is used for personal hygiene, and never for eating), and assemble the serving platter. Instead, we all worked together, picking the chicken and piling the meat atop the rice. Then we ladled onions from the pot onto the chicken. A beautiful presentation.

In traditional Senegalese fashion, we gathered around the large platter of Poulet Yassa and, with our right hands only, each scooped a small bit of chicken, onion and rice, forming it into a ball against the side of the platter. And that's how we ate, with our hands....well, at the beginning, until some people decided to use their forks. It was delicious. Perhaps a little more hot pepper next time, we all agreed. (We'll have to find our mutual heat tolerance as we continue to cook together. That's the fun of group cooking!) We also decided it would be a great dish for entertaining, because it benefits from overnight cooking and longer marination.

Just before sitting down to dinner, we chose our next culinary destination. We decided to let random selection guide our travels. I wrote 25 countries and regional cuisines on little pieces of paper. Lee did the honors, and our next stop is:

For homework, we all agreed to watch Dr. Zhivago again — no arm twisting was necessary! And I'll be working on a menu of Russian foods that can be made in less than three hours, using ingredients available to us, and that we might want to incorporate into our home cooking repertoires.

WEST AFRICAN PEANUT SOUP
Adapted from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Serves 8.

2 cups chopped onions
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp cayenne, or more to taste
1 tsp grated peeled fresh ginger root
1 cup chopped peeled carrots
4 cups chopped sweet potatoes
4 cups chicken stock
2 cups V8 juice
1 cup smooth peanut butter
1 Tbsp sugar or honey, if needed
1 cup chopped scallions or chives

Saute the onions in the oil until just translucent. Stir in the cayenne and fresh ginger. Add the carrots and sauté a few more minutes. Mix in the potatoes and stock or water, bring the soup to a boil, and then simmer for about 15 minutes, until the vegetables are tender. With an immersion blender, if you have one, purée the vegetables with the cooking liquid and tomato juice. Return the purée to a soup pot. Stir in the peanut butter until smooth. Taste the soup. Its sweetness will depend on the sweetness of the carrots and sweet potatoes. If it’s not there naturally, add just a tiny bit of sugar to enhance the other flavors. Reheat the soup gently, using a heat diffuser if needed to prevent scorching. Add more water, stock or tomato juice for a thinner soup. Serve topped with plenty of chopped scallions or chives.

Another opening, another show

Only one more day until the start of the Fall season for all Ninecooks cooking groups.

First up, the Family Cooking Group takes on pasta sauces. Then The #1 Cooking Group takes the cake — well, two cakes, actually. Next, our World Cuisines Cooking Group travels to Senegal for a taste of West African cooking. And the Wednesday Lunch Group travels to the local farmstand for a supply of butternut squash, the key ingredient in two potluck vegetarian stew dishes.

Two weeks prior to cooking day, each group receives a shopping list, parcelled out so everyone brings a share of the groceries. I've stocked the pantry with spices, flours, sugar and salt. The herb garden still promises plenty of fresh herbs, though the cold snap may do in the basil. The knives are sharp and the stove's got gas.

So, let's get cooking!

Where in the world?

The World Cuisines Cooking Group kicks off its Fall season — its first season of cooking together — in a couple of weeks, so it's time for me to organize a menu and send out a shopping list to each participant. Everyone brings part of the grocery list; in that way, we are all responsible to each other for the food we eat, and no one person has the burden of shopping for all of us.

Unique among Ninecooks groups, this group focuses on the cuisines and culture of a particular country or region in each cooking session, through recipes that utilize ingredients available locally or online (because if we can't get the ingredients, we're never going to add these recipes to our everyday cooking). So the decision about where to start doesn't revolve around technique or ingredient, but around culture. What, and how, will we cook together?

Now, I am not a procrastinator, but often I wait for patterns or signs from the universe ... which looks very much like procrastination to those who don't know me well! Laugh if you will, but yesterday I finally saw the pattern.

Clue #1: While shopping in antique-y Putnam, Connecticut, on Saturday, Ted and I stopped in the local bookstore, which carries an eclectic mix of old and new, toys and games, wrapping paper and crafts. I found two African cookbooks.

Clue #2: In the September 11 issue of The Nation, in an article titled "Slow Food Nation," Alice Waters writes: "The pleasures of the [family meal] are a social as well as a private good. At the table, we learn moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality; these are civic virtues."

Viola! as Julia Child would have said — a family meal, in celebration of our cooking family.

So, we're off to Senegal for Poulet Yassa, a chicken-and-rice dish traditionally served to honored guests, who eat with their hands from a communal bowl. We'll start with a simple West African peanut soup made with sweet potatoes, in honor of the season. We'll use spoons for that.

(Photo above of Poulet Yassa from www.seneportal.com)

Cookbooks from faraway places

In high school, I studied Latin. In college, I studied Latin, spurred on to semester after semester by one very adorable professor, whose name I've long since forgotten, though I do remember that he had long hair, and he taught his Latin classes in bare feet.

My parents and teachers advised me to learn French or Spanish. "Latin is a dead language," they warned. How was I to know that the ability to find a museum (or a rest room) in Latin America would be more important in the long term than the ability to translate the writings of Catullus?

Turns out they were right. Latin is a dead language, and I can prove it.

Not one single cookbook of the hundreds in my personal collection is written in Latin.

I have books in Hungarian, Turkish, Thai, Malay, Polish, Vietnamese, Italian — collected on my travels and brought back for me by traveling friends — and books in English from many Spanish-speaking countries I've visited, including Cuba, Mexico and Puerto Rico. One of my favorite travel souvenirs is a cookbook in English, published in the country I'm visiting. These books are difficult or impossible to buy outside the country, but often they represent the most authentic recipes and cooking techniques, and give invaluable insight into the home cooking of their culture.

Barbara, from the World Cuisines Cooking Group, recently returned from a visit to Buenos Aires with a book for my library. How Argentina Cooks, by Alberto Vazquez Prego, was published by Editorial El Ateneo in 2005. Apart from the fabulous empanadas on the cover, there's not a photograph in the book. It's part historical record, part teaching bible. I wish I knew how to read it in the original Spanish, because some of the translations are a bit confusing, and others are, frankly, amusing.

Here's my favorite bit from a section of the introduction called Advertencia (translated as "Forewarning", which, as you'll see, it most definitely is):

Culinary art thrives whenever freedom is given to personal touch as well as to inspired innovations. Modifications will always be at the core of renewal. Provided of course that, as in the case of a regional recipe book like this one, those lapses of genial creativity are duly channeled and trimmed so that the end result does not stand widely apart from what custom has declared as correctly proportioned.

Argentine cooking is by choice restrained in the use of the many spices and diverse condiments. Only those mentioned throughout this book are current, so that in order to keep the flavoring quality as set by local preferences use only those indicated, making allowances for personal taste which will always modify somewhat the indicated amounts by increasing, diminishing or omitting seasonings. In all cases proportions should be kept as indicated if the aim is to reproduce faithfully the ways of the Argentine kitchen. If not, then may your choice be an inspired one.

Forewarning: Improvise at your own risk!

We'll definitely sample some recipes from this cookbook during the coming year. I'm already working on a possible menu for the World Cuisines group. Noodle and garlic soup, asado (beef cooked over a fire), one or two types of chimichurri, and stuffed zapallitos (zucchini). The book starts with soup and ends with half a dozen recipes for yerba mate, a tea brewed from the dried, ground leaves of the Ilex paraguayensis (Paraguayan holly tree). We might have a wee bit of trouble finding the holly leaves at our local supermarket, though the tea is available online, so perhaps we'll just drink strong herbal tea instead.

I can't imagine we'll follow the recipes to the letter — that's not the Ninecooks way — but we'll have lots of fun breaking the rules.

Oh, bento

Ohayo gozaimasu! That means "good morning" in Japanese, and a good morning-after it is. Today is the morning after the evening of the first get-together of Ninecooks' World Cuisines Cooking Group.

After several months of planning, scheduling, and, yes, blogging, I finally gathered nine cooks (hmm, nine cooks.....a coincidence?) together in the kitchen for the first stop on our endless world tour. Unlike other groups that come to cook in my kitchen, this group approaches food by culture; other Ninecooks group cooking sessions are organized around a particular technique (knife skills, soup making) or ingredient (preserved lemons) or sometimes color. Inspired by celebrations and holidays, travels, family traditions and our own curiosity, this group will go wherever in the world the culinary road leads. Next stop, one of the African cuisines. After that....well, Barbara brought me a cookbook from her recent trip to Argentina, so it's ever-so-possible that Argentinian cooking will be on the menu.

Yesterday we went directly to Japan, for an evening of o-bento, a menu chosen for its diversity of ingredients (rice, dumplings, sushi, fish) and techniques (making the sushi rice, rolling norimaki, forming and cooking potstickers).   

Of course, in typical Ninecooks fashion, we had to get some parts of our menu underway right away. Kathie rinsed the Nishiki rice, Candy soaked the dried shiitake mushrooms, and we organized our ingredients.

It was a beautiful night, almost too nice to be in the kitchen, so while the rice was drying we decamped to the porch for introductions. Our group ranges in age from 40-something to 70-something, and includes artists, teachers, therapists, consultants, a retired pharmacist, and a writer. As we begin to cook together, we'll discover more about work, family, home, travels, favorite grocery store, books, movies, and how we feel about current events.

I shared a very abridged history of the bento, the single-serving takeout found everywhere from school lunches to commuter railway stations.

Back in the kitchen, everyone got to work. While the rice burbled away in the rice cooker, we minced and mixed the filling for our potsticker dumplings and formed them in the gyoza wrappers using a small plastic dumpling press. We marinated the salmon in a teriyaki sauce, made a ginger-y salad dressing for some sliced cucumbers, toasted black sesame seeds for garnish. After the rice had steamed, we mixed in a rice-vinegar dressing, doing half in a traditional Japanese sushi tub, and the other half in a wooden salad bowl. We stuck our potstickers to the pot, giving them a lovely crust on one side. We crisped the yakinori (sheets of pressed, dried seaweed) on the stovetop over a low gas flame, and then made vegetable-filled maki rolls. A selection of small pieces went into our bentos....but where did the extras go????

You guessed it....same place as the extra potstickers. After all, we needed to keep our strength up, for...more eating!

Everyone filled his or her own plastic bento box with potstickers, sushi, a piece of teriyaki salmon, and rice, in the general proportions we'd read about: 4 parts rice, 3 parts meat or fish, 2 parts vegetable, and 1 part bright pink pickled ginger. And, as they say in Japanese, voila!