Fearless Kitchen

Recipe: Cumin-Flavored Pastries (Nimki)

Recipe Source: Westrip, Joyce. Moghul Cooking. Serif Cookery, London, 2005 p. 38

I've already mentioned the event I catered during the August non-vacation this year. The theme was supposed to be the Silk Road, with cuisines and treats from cultures that were involved with the medieval silk trade. India was certainly part of the silk trade in those days, but I haven't found a good source for medieval Indian recipes. (If you have a good source, could you please pass it along? I'm not kidding.) The event was a cocktail party, meaning that the food needed to be things people could a) eat with their fingers and b) just kind of graze on while socializing and drinking. It also needed to be relatively "neat" food – food that people could eat without fear of dripping on some very expensive and elaborate costumes. I was flipping through the book cited above when I found this recipe, and I immediately said, "A-ha!"

What is it about this dish that so piqued my imagination? It's the cumin, of course. Cumin is one of my favorite flavors in the whole world. It's the spice I'm most likely to increase when using a recipe. I don't know why it's my favorite spice these days but it is and I simply cannot get enough of it. It's got a nice, pleasant flavor, warming and enticing. It was clearly perfect cocktail party food. I did have to make a few changes. Since this was an ostensibly medieval event (I couldn't get actual medieval sources for some of the recipes) I couldn't use chili powder. (Chiles existed in period, but not in India.) I also had to tweak my usual garam masala mix. One of the changes I made to that mix involved turmeric – I figured that it would give the finished product a pleasant color, which could be problematic given that a) I was not deep-frying the pastries and b) I was going to have to freeze them and bring them from Boston. I also used olive oil for the ghee to keep costs down and because that's what I keep on hand.

Personally, I was delighted with these little pastries. My husband and child were equally enthusiastic when I did the test run. I will say that these were at their absolute best fresh from the oil, but they survived being frozen and re-heated in the Big Green Egg very well indeed.

Nimki (Makes enough for about 6 people; approx. cost per serving not available)

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon black pepper

½ teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon ground coriander

¼ teaspoon ground turmeric

3 tablespoons olive oil

½ cup water

Vegetable oil for frying

Equipment:

• Mixing bowl
• Rolling pin
• Pizza cutter
• Large skillet
• Slotted spatula
• Plate
• Paper towels

1. Combine the flour with the spices and salt in the mixing bowl.
2. Add the oil and combine well.
3. Add the flour gradually and mix to form a firm dough.
4. Knead 10 – 15 minutes.
5. Allow to rest, covered, at least 30 minutes.
6. Roll out the dough very thin. Use the pizza cutter to cut out roughly diamond shapes. (Freehand cutting is not my strong suit, but that did not affect the flavor!)
7. Heat the vegetable oil in the skillet.
8. Working in batches, fry up the pastries. Do not overcrowd the pan. As the pastries become brown, evacuate them to a plate covered in paper towels with the slotted spatula to drain off the excess oil.
9. Serve.

Recipe: Pennsic Roast Vegetables

Meals at the annual "vacation" are a bit different from here at home. The site has an extensive food court, filled with local vendors. When I first started going to this place with my husband we ate at the food court every night, because we were on "vacation" and did not want to be hassled with food prep and cleanup. We also shared our campsite with some folks who had rather different ideas about hygiene than we did and wanted nothing to do with preparing food on the same table they insisted on using to change their babies' diapers.  ("It's no different from food waste," they insisted.  Cholera isn't spread by carrot peels, folks.) Then we moved to a different campsite. Our new campmates, good friends and grownups all, shared our feelings about camp hygiene (we're all in favor). I also developed some health issues and thought that cooking and eating in camp would mitigate those issues. Finally, we picked up our Big Green Egg and started bringing it to camp. Now we cook in camp most nights. It's a communal effort and no effort is more communal than this dish.

I feel a little funny writing this recipe down since the most I did the first time it was made was lug some of the vegetables to Pennsylvania. (I hadn't managed to use up all our farm share vegetables before leaving, so I brought them with me.) We were discussing what we wanted to do for dinner and I was feeling pretty strongly that I Did Not Want To Cook. I said, "I've got some vegetables. Some onions. Some beets." Someone else said, "I've got some carrots." Someone else said, "I've got some potatoes." Another person said, "I'm not busy right now, I'll chop." And peel and chop he did. We chucked some fresh herbs and garlic in since we had them on hand and we stuck them under some chickens we roasted in the Egg. The results were pretty amazing. Everyone loved it. Even I loved it, despite the prevalence of sweet vegetables. There were no leftovers.

The version you see here is not the version we ate in camp. The version you see here is one I made last Sunday for our open house. Both my husband and I were very eager to try the roasted root vegetables again. We made some changes. I added a rutabaga because I had it on hand; it was fairly elderly and I didn't think it would last much longer. I also added a cup of white wine. We were going to be using a longer roasting time for logistical reasons and we didn't want the vegetables to dry out. I think I liked the original version a bit better, but this was still plenty tasty.

Pennsic Roasted Vegetables (serves 12; approx. $0.72/serving)

Note: This recipe presupposes that you will be roasting chickens at the same time.

1 rutabaga, peeled and chopped

8 carrots, diced

2 pounds potatoes, diced

6 beets, roots only, peeled and diced

4 onions, chopped

7 garlic cloves, chopped

1 handful fresh sage, chopped

Kosher salt to taste

1 cup white wine

Equipment:

• Big Green Egg
• Roasting pan

1. Prepare your Egg for indirect cooking. We did a lower-heat cook than we usually would for chicken, roasting 2 chickens for this version.
2. Fill the roasting pan with your vegetables and toss to coat.
3. Add the wine.
4. Place the roasting pan where you would place the drip pan. Note: If you must do this indoors, you could probably get away with a very large steam tray and some racks set over the steam tray, but I have not tried this and cannot vouch for it.
5. Roast until the chickens are done. We roasted these for about 4 hours, give or take, for Sunday dinner. We roasted them for a much shorter time in camp.
6. Transfer the vegetables to a serving dish and serve.

Recipe: Fruit on a Stick

Every year I go on this "vacation." I'm using quotes because it barely qualifies as a vacation. It's not the sort of vacation most people my age seem to look forward to – lounging on the beach or by the pool while someone attractive brings you drinks. It's a medieval history enthusiasts' meeting and it involves camping in a cow field in western Pennsylvania with a good fifteen thousand of your closest friends. Being a bit of a hermit I often find this "vacation" to be fairly stressful. Anyway, this year I was encouraged to offer to cater one of the events at this meeting. I figured it would be more fun for me if I had some kind of active role to play in the festivities, instead of killing time for a week, and so I agreed. To my surprise and delight I got the job, and do you know what? It worked. I had a blast.

Anyway, the theme for this particular party was the Silk Road. I tried to have dishes from along the entire route. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find documentation for some of the regions included in the Silk Road. One of those areas was Central Asia. I have lots and lots of recipes from Central Asia, but none of them are really documentable to the medieval period. Ibn Battuta specifically mentions the wide variety of fruits available in one of the places he visited, and so I decided that I would go ahead and use fruit. I know raw foods weren't exactly looked on kindly in much of our period (and with good reason,) so I initially intended to grill these. When we tasted the assembled skewers, though, my whole team was in love with the raw version. We tried to grill one skewer and while it was tasty it wasn't quite the same. We served these raw and they were an absolute sensation.

It may seem a little silly to post a recipe like this. It really just boils down to, "Take some fruit. Put it on a stick. Sprinkle it with seasoning and eat." The reason I'm including it here is because several people actually came up to me and said, "I never would have thought to put cumin here," or "I wouldn't have thought to use salt in a sweet dish like this but it really worked." I figure it might be useful to someone.

The event I catered was a cocktail party kind of deal. This would also work great at a family barbeque or kids' party – the kids, if they're old enough, could have fun helping to make the skewers.

Fruit on a Stick (serves about 60; approx. cost per serving not available)

2 watermelon, peeled and cut into 1" cubes

20 plums, cut into cubes

20 peaches, cut into cubes

2 cantaloupe, cut into cubes

Ground cumin and kosher salt

Equipment:

• Roughly 200 bamboo skewers, soaked

1. Thread the pieces of fruit onto the skewers. We had a lot of watermelon left over so we just kind of added some skewers of just watermelon and that was fine.
2. Sprinkle with cumin and salt.
3. Serve.