Medieval Cookout: Chickpea and cabbage potage, wheat/barley flatbread, and pork steaks with a wine and garlic sauce.

I have a demo coming up and it will be my first exercise cooking in that sort of venue, so I wanted to give my setup a trial run. I am pretty pleased with how things worked out overall and only had to tweak them a little bit.

The potage was delicious, the powder fort and fried onions gave it a very rich and savory flavour. I mixed a couple of recipes from “The Forme of Cury”, one for chyches and the other for caboches in potage. The only thing I would have done differently is to grind ½ of the chickpeas up a little finer to thicken the broth. I also used vegetable oil, which I wouldn't recommend but I am trying to keep this stuff vegan for the faire. If this was for you and yours, throw in some butter/bacon fat/lard!

The flatbreads were pretty boss. The recipe is posted elsewhere, this time I rolled them a little thicker than usual and they we're great.

The pork steaks were sirloins and not fatty enough, I rolled the dice and lost. They were still pretty good, just not tender enough for me. The sauce had a delicious flavour and just needed to be thickened somehow, so I looked into period ways to accomplish that and found that making a rice flour roux made it spot on. I am NOT serving these at the demo, but since friends were coming over I though I would class things up with some meat haha. 

Chickpea and cabbage potage

Yield: 6 stand-alone dinner sized portions

Ingredients:

1 medium cabbage cut into ½ x ½ inch pieces

2 large onions finely diced

4 large cloves of garlic minced

4 carrots in ½ x ½ inch thin slices

1lb of dry chickpeas, soaked and pre-boiled until very tender

(Canned chickpeas simply don't taste as good, and that's a fact Jack!)

¼ C fat of your choice

(Bacon fat would be pretty prime)

1 heaping TBS powder fort

(Mine was 3 parts ginger, 1 part black pepper, ¼ part cinnamon, ¼ part cloves)

3 TBS minced parsley

Salt to taste

Method:

1. Heat up your fat to med/high and fry 2/3 of your garlic until golden.

2. Add your onions with some salt and fry until golden

3. Add your cabbage, carrots, and ½ your parsley with enough water to cover them and let it boil until the cabbage nice and tender.

4. While your cabbage is boiling, grind up ½ of your chickpeas into a fine paste, then add your whole chickpeas and let it boil for 5 minutes or so.

5. Finish it off by adding your chickpea paste, powder fort, remaining garlic and parsley.

6. Pull it off the heat and eat it!

Pork steaks with garlic wine sauce

Yield: As many pork chops as you buy

Ingredients:

Pork chops

(Whichever cut you like the best, I like them fatty.)

Salt, ginger powder and pepper to taste

1 C Sweet to medium bodied red wine

2 tsp Powder fort

2 TBS butter

2 cloves of garlic finely minced

¼ C almond flour

Sugar to taste (Depends on how sweet your wine is, I used 1 TBS)

salt to taste

1 tsp minced parsley

Method:

1. Season pork chops with salt, pepper, and ginger powder

2. Fry until cooked to your preference, I like mine sauteed at a med/high heat in some kind of fat until brown and removed while they're still a little pink inside so they finish cooking while resting.

3. Make the sauce: Fry garlic in butter until golden

4. Add almond flour and sautee until golden

5. Add wine and reduce heat and let simmer for 2 minutes

6. Add sugar, powder fort and parsley with salt to taste

7. Let it sit for a few minutes to thicken

8. Serve over pork, or any white meat of your choice.  

The updated thickened sauce

#medieval #pork #potage #cabbage #chickpeas #sauce

Medieval flat breads aka: "Griddle Cakes"

I'm getting ready for a demo at our local medieval faire, so I wanted to practice making some “griddle cakes” to pass out with the pottage I will be cooking. We make these breads on a griddle because in period most folks didn't have ovens at home, so they would have to either buy their bread or cook it on a griddle. 

This time I used 1 part home ground barley flour to 1 part whole wheat, though you can really use any flour you would like 1 to 1 with wheat flour to get a similar result. Often times griddle cakes are pretty dry, dense, and kind of crumbly so this time I used a high hydration dough to quench that standard and it worked out great!

Next time I want to try rye, but I was NOT about to pay $5 for one lb of the stuff at the grocery when I could get 1 lb of barley for $1.

Yield: 5, 9 inch flat breads

Ingredients:

¾ C whole wheat flour

¾ C barley flour

¼ C brown ale

½ C warm water

½ tsp salt

1 TBS butter

1 tsp yeast

1 tsp honey

Method:

1. Mix your warm water with honey and yeast, let it ride for a minute

2. Mix your dry ingredients up and work in the butter.

3. Pour your water mixture and your beer into the dry ingredients and knead for 5 minutes. It should be smooth and very soft.

4. Put your dough into a bowl and cover it with a damp towel, let it rest for 1 hour.

5. Pre-heat a griddle to med-high
6. Curt your dough into 5 pieces, roll them into balls then into flat rounds (see video below)
7. Cook it on each side until there are pretty little brown spots, but don't over cook it so it will stay nice and flexible. (Check the video out)

8. Eat them with some butter if you know what's good for you.   

Here's how I roll them out:

And the cooking process:

#bread #barley #wheat #griddle #medieval

Molokhia-ish (Meat, spinach and okra) stew

 Sometimes you have to roll with the punches and figure out what the spirit of a dish is. In this case I'm talking about Molokhia, one of my favorite foods in all the world. It's a soup made from a rich spiced broth with ground jute leaves and it's absolutely wonderful. A silky texture from the draw of the leaves and a wonderfully savory flavor from the spices, meat and veggies.

Now in this case I am not making that exactly, but rather using a cheapskate back-alley conversion for some leftover lamb saag I had (from the SCA feast we did over the weekend). I'll give you a more straight up recipe than I used, but the whole deal with cooking is making what you have work for you so keep that in mind, in food, in life, and in the rampant destruction of all who oppose you. The real secret here though is using ground okra and spinach to simulate the texture of the jute leaves so check it out.

Also feel free to use actual molokhia instead of spinach and okra!

Yield: 4 dinner sized servings

Ingredients:

Soup:

Meat 1 lb boneless, or 2 lbs bone in. (Chicken, lamb, beef, whatever)

12oz block of frozen spinach -thawed out

1 lb chopped okra

Water

1 TBS cumin powder

1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cardamom

1 Onion diced

Salt and Pepper to taste

¼ C chopped cilantro

Tempering:

¼ C olive oil, butter, or ghee

2 TBS coriander powder

4 cloves minced garlic

Condiment (It's not necessarily traditional but I love it with this):

1 tomato chopped

1 minced onion

½ Jalepeno chopped

1 lime juiced

pinch of salt

Method:

1. Heat a pot up with a little oil and sautee your onions with some salt, then add your meat and water to cover.
2. Bring to a boil the reduce to a simmer until the meat is VERY tender.
3. Remove the meat and set it aside, add your okra and spinach and return to a boil and then simmer until theyre VERY tender (at this point if you used bone in chicken, throw a little salt, pepper and cumin on there and broil it until the skin is crisp and brown)
4. Remove the veggies to a blender and blend coarsely until is all looking soupy, then return to pot on low
5. Heat up your ¼ oil, butter, or ghee in a very small pot to med-high (I used an old Turkish coffee pot to temper)
6. Add in your coriander for 10 seconds then minced garlic for 20 seconds, then add to the soup
7. Make your condiment: I ground up my “salsa” stuff in a food processor, but you can mix that up in whatever size and shape makes you happy.
8. Add salt and water to taste, then put in bowls with the meat on top, and add the condiment if you wish. Serve it with rice or good pita bread.

Today's version from the leftover saag

   

What I use for a tempering pot

#Egyptian #Spinach #Okra #Soup #Stew #Leftovers

Leftover curry parathas

Sooooo.... Since we eat Indian food most of the time (because I can't manage any other way to constantly eat delicious vegetables) we have leftovers pretty frequently. This can be a bummer because I actually HATE eating the leftovers of anything I've cooked (unless it's the rare time its some kind simple fatty food because then I'm down), so this is a good way to transform them into something everyone likes....... BREAD!

Yield: 4 roughly 10 inch parathas. 

Ingredients:

1 C leftover thick dal, mashed
(Spiced beans for you non-Indian food eating folks)

1 C Atta 
(whole wheat flour)

3 TBS water

1/2 tsp salt

Method:

1. Combine the ingredients and mix until you have a nice soft dough, feel free to add more water VERY slowly if you have to.

2. Knead it for a few minutes until its a smooth ball.

3. Let it sit for 10 minutes or more.

4. Preheat tawa or a frying pan to between med and med-high heat

5. Roll out the balls into tortillas size and shaped pieces.

6. Cook them on your pan for about 1 min on one side and 30 seconds on the other (or until done because cooking is utterly utterly various)

7. Throw each one on your grate over your burner, or right on your flame, and let it puff up (watch the video!)

8. Butter it up if you're feeling fancy

9. Eat it! We like them with yogurt and Indian pickle.

My take:

Started with leftover moong dal (cooked mung beans) from the feast this weekend.

1 cup of dal, 1 cup of atta, some salt, and about 3 TBS of water kneaded for about 4 minutes gave me a nice soft dough.

  Rolled it out by smashing a ball of dough into a disc then dipping the disc in flour and rolling it out.

Nice and thin.

Cooked it up.

The yield was 4 nice sized paratha that were soft and perfectly cooked. Keep in mind you can use ANYTHING ground up and mixed in the flour as a substitute for water you just have to add enough flour to accomodate for the moisture content, thick legumes like this work really well.

If you want the flavours to pop you have to over season your masala before you make the dough.

And if you want the bread to puff up, you have to have enough moisture in the dough (a very soft dough) so that the steam inside builds up and hits the already cooked outer layer of the bread. 

This was my lunch, the parathas with a dry mushroom curry and Hyderabadi pickle. 

#Indian #Bread #Beans #Dal #Leftovers