Chapter 9 - Pickled Herring on Toast, Salmon Koulibiac, "Russian Salad," and Apparently Some Russians Drink Rum

Book:  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes:  Blue Hill Bay Pickled Herring
Trout Koulibiac
Russian Salad

Music:  A Russian Weekend - Various Artists

Pickled Herring on Dark Wheat Toasts

(I did not pickle my own herring)

I bought a jar of Blue Hill Bay Herring Fillets in Wine Marinade and I cut up some Dark Wheat bread and it was delicious.  Interestingly sweet and surprisingly tasty.  After the toast was gone, Samantha was eating it with a fork from the bowl, it was that good.

Salmon Koulibiac

Ingredients:

2 Salmon Fillets

2 Hard Boiled Eggs
1 cup of cooked long grain rice

2 Bunches Green Onion (sliced both white and green portions)

Large bunch of Fresh Dill

1 Lemon (zested and juiced)

Box of Puff Pastry

1 Egg (beaten for glaze)

If you are going out to see some friends at an open mic before dinner and don't want to eat at midnight, I suggest prepping your filling ahead of time.  Add half the dill to the water and steam the salmon for just about 4 minutes.  Don't listen to any web site that says you have to (over)steam your salmon for 10 minutes, it won't ruin it, it just won't be nearly as tasty.  Flake the salmon,  and mix everything together in a big bowl to await your return.  And don't, as I did, forget to boil the eggs, because that will spoil your whole plan for getting that prep work finished ahead of time.  If  you have a faithful kitchen friend named "biscuit Ben," ask him kindly to boil the eggs for you, then crumble them and add them to the mix.  When you are ready to bake, use one sheet of puff pastry for the bottom.  You are supposed to roll it out - I don't have a rolling pin and couldn't use my grandmother's "Vodka bottle as a rolling pin" substitute because my vodka bottle has chocolate drips all over it - so I just oiled a baking dish and threw the sheet in there and that worked fine.  Spread the salmon mixture evenly over the pastry, leaving room at the edges to seal it.  Assemble the top, pressing the edges together and brush with the beaten egg.  Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes until golden brown. 

A note about looking for fresh, skinless trout fillets in East Harlem.  Don't bother.  The original recipe called for trout, which I really wanted to try, but there is only one fish market in my neighborhood and no trout to be found and only salmon steaks with the skin on.  I ended up buying frozen fillets in individual sealed packages.  It was fine.

 "Russian Salad"

Ingredients:

2 cartons of grape tomatoes (because they are the only ones that are red right now)

3 cloves garlic

1/2 Vidalia onion

1/2 Cup sour cream

Salt pepper to taste

Slice tomatoes into chunks, press garlic, and chop onion finely. Add sour cream and salt and pepper. Mix well and chill. Let stand long enough for flavors to blend.  If you are not a big onion person, don't add the whole onion, it's really oniony.  But tasty and a nice, creamy accompaniment to our Koulibiac.

Some suggested variations to the Koulibiac:  Sam thought Feta would add nicely to the mix and I think some white sauce or alfredo-style sauce would complement it deliciously.  I think you could use the alfredo sauce especially if you used a regular pie crust, which would give you more of a pot-pie taste to it.  I imagine you could substitute any other sort of shredded meat as well, if you are not a fish lover.  Also, if you have any leftover filling when you are done, I think it would be great mixed up with mayo in pita bread.

About the book:  Apparently, the Russian aristocracy was even more "French" than I realized.  At one point, an awkward son of our social grasper wished to tell a story at a party and insisted on it being spoken in Russian, but he spoke haltingly "as a Frenchman might, who'd lived in Russia for a year."  I also read about the other son, Anatole, who was a "rake" about town and threw drunken card parties every night before visiting the brothels.  He had a friend who made a bet that he could climb out on the roof, drink an entire bottle of rum (not vodka!) without taking the bottle away from his lips and without holding on to anything for support.  He won his bet and he might be a quite charming addition to some of our more raucous, modern fraternity parties.

The set up of the story right now is that all the proper people are anti-Napoleon and have staying in their midst a "true" emigre from France.  Who seems to be staying there only until the Bourbon restoration comes out on top.  These folks have his and her coachmen to assist with capes and jackets, and twiddle their time away at parties praising the Czar and his family and cursing the revolutionaries.  A few "uncivilized" young persons advocate for Napoleon,  but so far they have been quickly muffled up by empty pleasantries and overzealous hostesses who speak too much French.  NB:  It is only to the revolutionaries that Pierre (a half-Italian illegitimate son) is know as Pyotr. 

About the music:  The nutcracker suite is not suggested eating music.  I believe all the comments were to the effect of "I feel as though I have to eat faster!"  We had to skip ahead to the Borodin in order to enjoy a relaxing tune with our meal.

Chapter 1 - Quick Sour Cream Chicken, Cauliflower Fried in Butter, Roasted Potatoes and Dill, and Napolean is Just Another Robespierre

Book:  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes:  Potatoes Roasted in Olive Oil, Dill, and Sea Salt
Cauliflower Fried in Butter
Quick Sour Cream Chicken

Music:  Tchaikovsky -Serenade in Strings

Potatoes Roasted in Olive Oil, Dill, and Sea Salt 

(The potatoes I just threw together.  I read some kind of Russian Recipe for Potatoes and Dill, but couldn't find anything too authentic on the internet that didn't involve soup or mushrooms. )

Ingredients:  
1 Bag Baby Red Potatoes
Olive Oil for Coating
Sea Salt for Sprinkling
Dill

Heat oven to broil.  Set a timer for 15 minutes.  This is most crucial.  Otherwise, you may forget about them or a student's parent might call and engage you in a frantic search for her son and you will end up with mostly burned potatoes which otherwise would have been perfectly crispy and delicious. The salvaged remains (from the bottom and edges) will prove this to you in a most disheartening way as you throw away the blackened bits.

Cauliflower Fried in Butter

Ingredients:  
One Head of Cauliflower (trimmed and separated into florets)
2 Tbsp Flour
Salt and Pepper to Taste
2 Tablespoons butter 


Steam the cauliflower until just tender.  Coat with flour seasoned with salt and pepper and pan fry in hot melted butter until brown and crispy on all sides. 

Before engaging in this, retreat from the frustration anything in your life might be causing, such as lost keys, check books, or students.  By no means should you go on a rant about said missing item when it is suddenly discovered to have been hanging out with his wayward friends, lying to his mother, and cutting your class.  Any of these actions may lead you to leave the cauliflower in the flour too long so that it gets caked rather than just coated and to subsequently, and in anger, throw it all into the pan before the butter is hot enough.  The result?  Soggy cauliflower that you have a sense would have been much tastier had you calmly dusted it with flour and salt, added a few tablespoons of olive oil to your butter, heated the pan properly, and browned it more quickly. 

"Quick" Chicken

Ingredients:  

1 ea average chicken (I just used 5 chicken thighs)
3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sour cream
2 ea eggs
salt
pepper

Fry the chicken in butter.  I took a cue from Julie and Julia and dried my meat to make it brown better.  Darned if that wasn't about the only thing that was easy to make happen.  Cover the pan and stew the chicken for 15 minutes. Open it and leave on very low heat. Beat eggs and stir in sour cream. Pour the sauce into the pan on low heat, stirring regularly, until the sauce thickens. 

Here's my take on this recipe:  It was like coating chicken in very moist, creamy scrambled eggs.  Scrambled because I might have still been ranting about a student instead of stirring, and eggy simply because the 2 eggs to 1 half cup of sour cream was just too much egg.  I suggest reducing to one egg and, if you like sour cream, increasing to 1 cup.  I would also get boneless, skinless chicken, since the nice crispy skin I had achieved was sort of boiled out of it by the sauce. 

NB:  When attempting to recover a failed chocolate vodka, you can try chilling it, and that will take some of the edge off the burn and the chocolate will not precipitate out.  You can also try adding ice to it and serving it with some cream, which takes the other edge.  However, in the end, the dulled blade still remains and you should buy better vodka.

All said and done, the meal did not taste bad, even the soggy cauliflower was suggestive of better days gone slightly to fat.  It was not so good as to put me off my desire to paper cut a certain teenager with his report card, but I did enjoy some for lunch leftovers today.

(My food photography may need some work - but look at that scrambled egg sauce...)

About the book - I have only read chapter 1.  The Russians in this chapter seem to see Napoleon as no better than another Robespierre profiteering on the chaos of France. They speak about the "hydra of revolution" which implies that he is simply one head of many, and all bent on destruction. His power; however, is perhaps the greater as he has set himself up above the people whereas at least Robespierre had remained party to the tribunals who eventually engineered his demise. The impression Tolstoy leaves us with from this speech is that there was no delineation between the revolution and Napoleon's upstart wars.

As for the 2 characters you meet in chapter 1, Anna is charmingly and pretentiously called "Annette" and litters her conversation with 3 generations of genteel French phrases.  What a cruel ironic blow it must have been to those raised to think of Paris as the center of culture, worthy of emulation, having to see their beloved mentors reduced to the rotten red (to borrow a phrase from Dickens) of the guillotine.  And Prince Vasili, "who like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed" should prove to be quite the standard, villainous, social grasper.   I think I'm going to enjoy reading this book. 


About the music:  Tchaikovsky, procured by Jay (thank you!), was playing all through the dinner cooking.  I don't know how to write about classical music, but it was lovely.

A last note about this project - one person, Eric, has already offered to forward me a recipe.  Thank you!  I would love to see them.  Scouring the internet is tiresome and not always authentic - I am going to make a bookstore trip soon for a Russian Cookbook, but in the meantime, if you know any foolproof (student-crisis proof?) recipes, please pass them on.

W&P: Chapter 1 - Recipe 1 - Chocolate Vodka

Book:  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Music:  The Counting Crows - This Desert Life
Recipe:  Chocolate Vodka

Chocolate Vodka

Ingredients:

1 Bottle Vodka

2 Bars Dark Chocolate - Shaved (I dumped my bars into a food processor - worked like a charm)

Heat a pan of water almost to boiling.  Place the vodka bottle in the water and add shaved chocolate until the vodka cannot absorb any more.

Easy?  Here's some good advice if you want to avoid my mistakes:

First - Don't buy cheap vodka.  Smirnoff burns.  I know what you're thinking, why waste expensive vodka by putting some shit in it?  Answer:  this is a sipping drink.   Nobody sips Smirnoff.  Well, nobody should.

Second - Use a funnel, but don't put it into the bottle while the bottle is heating.  This will heat your funnel, make your chocolate melt and clump,  and clog up the whole works.  Toothpicks are useless in solving this dilemma.

Third - Don't leave your food processor cup closer than 7 inches (any closer is reasonably safe for the cup, but not for the chocolate) to the warm pan.

Fourth - Don't attempt to make this drink when you have just had a one-sided argument with the voice mail left by your health insurance company, when the groceries for your Sci-Fi movie night have not been delivered on time, or when your guests are arriving, you have nothing to feed them, and you're up to your elbows in clumpy, half-melted chocolate trying to force it down the neck of a Smirnoff bottle with your bare hands.

My kitchen looked a bit like the dwelling place of monkeys with poo flung on the walls.  

Hindsight is 20/20 - Next time - I will pour the vodka into a double boiler (or rig one with a glass bowl - I don't have a real double boiler), upend the food processor bowl simply and efficiently over the vodka, stir it, cool it, then use the funnel to get the vodka back into the bottle. 

The sci-fi night crowd politely sipped ("I'm going to have to shoot this," said Jay [whose proposed pseudonym "Biscuit" I had to overrule]) their chocolate vodka, grimaced on the sly, and this (completely unconfirmed) advice was passed along to me, which I will now share with you:

On using Smirnoff in an emergency - running it twice through a Britta filter (so "they" say) will remove the offensive afterburn.

So much for the recipe; on to the book... I haven't started it yet.  I will be reading the first lines of it before bed tonight.  Preliminary thoughts?  It's long.  My students would say, "that looks thick, Miss!"

So much for the book;  now on to the music.  I have been promised, when I make my first real recipe, that there will be Russian music to accompany it.  I believe Tchaikovsky was mentioned.  For now, don't you just love the Counting Crows?

Riding on the Successful Shoulders of Giants

Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes) is a Western metaphor meaning "One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past"; a contemporary interpretation. However, the metaphor was first recorded in the twelfth century and attributed to Bernard of Chartres. It was famously uttered by seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants


I am copying another person's ideas - sort of. I am going to keep a blog (probably not every day) about reading literature and cooking. I am probably going to talk a lot about my friends and their crazy lives. I will definitely give out pseudonyms. I will include recipes and give credit to the places I find them. I will talk about characters and story lines and symbols and metaphors. I will talk about drinks and the dinner parties where there should be music, food, and entertaining discussion about literature and culture. I might ruin a few endings for anyone who hasn't read the book under discussion.

About me: I love to cook. Not for money, but for my friends. To me, the best part about cooking is when I am in the kitchen and I can hear my friends in my apartment eating appetizers, drinking, and talking about who-cares-what. I also like to read. I read all the time, and I read just about anything I can get my hands on. This lead me to purchase a Kindle 2, which in turn lead me to the second part of the inspiration for this blog. You see, lots of Kindle books are free. War and Peace is free. War and Peace is a book that I have never read, but have always intended to read. Seeing that it was free, I downloaded it onto my Kindle 2 about 2 months ago. I read a lot of other, shorter novels and one memoir since then. That memoir was Julie and Julia.

That's when I got this idea, as a joke, to read War and Peace, and teach myself how to cook Russian food. Friends were actually encouraging about the idea, even more so when I started telling everyone that the first recipe I found was for Chocolate Vodka.

Ashley: Can you make that this weekend?

Then I thought, why limit myself to just one cuisine and one novel (albeit a very long one). Why not read some Murakami and learn to make sushi? So, this is where I have landed myself.

If I were to write a disclaimer to Julie Powell for stealing her ideas, it might look something like this:

Dear Julie Powell,

Thanks.

Love,
k