The Georgian recipe is simple, the bread fantastic! I found a recipe in Nigella Lawson's "Feast" cookbook for Hachapuri, a cheese-bread made with baking soda rather than yeast. The crust is chewy, and the filling is a blend of my home-made goat cheese and ricotta (from the market).Hachapuri is substantial - holds any filling - so I divided the dough into two loaves and filled them differently.
This Hachapuri is filled with cherry pie filling and huckleberries from my freezer. Once filled, I flipped one side over the other and crimped the edges shut.
This is Moroccan Chicken Tagine, simmering with plenty of Madras curry powder, fresh ginger root, sliced onions, garlic, and a blend of oregano, cayenne pepper, turmeric, paprika and cumin. It smells wonderful, has a strong flavor, and is delicious. Tiny Israeli couscous is part of the broth.
Naan is east Indian bread, very easy to make.
This last meal was Kheema Shahzada, also east Indian. Although it doesn't look great in this photo (primarily meat and cashews) it was simply wonderful. The trick to east Indian cooking is to make the curry (the gravy), cook the vegetables as indicated in the proper order, and roast-fry the spices before you add them (except for the Turmeric, which is always added at the end. It's impact doesn't sustain long-term cooking.)We've had some pretty cold, rainy weather lately....I'm sure all of you have heard about the flooding in Washington state. Interstate 5 is flooded south of Tacoma; Amtrac has been routing busses to Vancouver B.C. and Bellingham. If transportation lines remain blocked for more than a few days many imported goods will get stacked up at the Port of Tacoma, and ships leaving for Asia could risk leaving without their cargo. Container trains headed for Puget Sound ports in yards near Portland have to wait out the rain and floods.
I'm currently reading (among many other things), Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ~ A Year of Food Life". She asks, "Will North Americans ever have a food culture to call our own? Can we find or make up a set of rituals, recipes, ethics, and buying habits that will let us love our food and eat it too? Some signs point to "yes." Better food - more local, more healthy, more sensible - is a powerful new topic of the American conversation. It reaches from the epicurean quarters of Slow Food convivia to the matter-of-fact Surgeon General's Office; from Farm Aid concerts to school lunch programs. From the rural routes to the inner cities, we are staring at our plates and wondering where that's been. For the first time since our nation's food was ubiquitously local, the point of origin now matters again to some consumers. We're increasingly wary of an industry that puts stuff in our dinner we can't identify as animal, vegetable, mineral, or what."
Kingsolver also adds that the drift away from our agricultural roots is a consequence of migration from the land to the factory, then into a world of regulations and high yields, often with the government intervening to promote growing certain crops, like soybeans and corn. The government wrote rules on commodity subsidies, guaranteeing a supply of cheap corn which was used, among other things, to make high fruit corn syrup - the horrible sweetening used in so many sodas and fruit drinks.
70 percent of all our midwestern agricultural land has shifted gradually into single-crop corn or soybean farms, each one of them highly mechanized production system which are capable of producing 3,900 calories per U.S. citizen per day. That is twice what we need. Kingsolver writes, "And here is the shocking plot twist: as the farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day." That was the job of marketing specialists. Packages and portions got bigger, sugars and fats proliferated. Americans are now feeding a generation of children most of whom will be be afflicted with chronic health issues related to obesity.
Well, I can tell that Kingsolver is exploring the same issues that motivated me to grow my own food in the summertime. I want locally grown, from garden to table ... with no middlemen. Keep the costs down, the flavor up, and enjoy eating good flavorful food.
