Epilogue - Bacalhau a Gomes Sa, Asparagus com Molho de Echallote e Salsinha and Predictably, Your Treasure is Never Where You Think It Will Be

"People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”

Book:  The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Recipes:  The Brazilian Kitchen by Leticia Moreinos Shwartz

Bacalhau a Gomes Sa 

(Cod with Fingerling Potatoes and Onions)

3/4 pounds of fingerling potatoes, sliced into rounds and boiled until just tender
5 tbsp olive oil
2 large onions, thinly sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
3 large hard-boiled eggs, sliced into rounds
1/4 cup Kalamata olives, cut in half
1 lb fresh cod (I used 3 fillets)
3 tbsp fresh chives, chopped


Heat 2 tbsp of olive oil in a large skillet over medium low heat, add the onions, stirring frequently until they are tender, sweet, and translucent (you are not caramelizing these so watch them carefully), about 10 to 15 minutes.  

Preheat the oven to 350 and oil a baking dish.  Layer your onions, potatoes, and eggs in the bottom of the dish.  Place your cod fillets on top and sprinkle your olives over everything.  I don't care for olives, so substituted capers instead.  Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the whole dish and season with salt and pepper. Bake in the oven until it is just cooked, about 12-15 minutes.  Remove from the oven and serve with chives sprinkled on top. 

Apart from substituting capers for olives, there is one other change that I would make to this recipe:  I would cover the whole baking dish in aluminum foil.  The fish was delicious, and the mix of flavors was really intriguing, but the underside of the fish, which had the moisture from the onions, eggs, and potatoes, was far tastier than the top of the fish, which only got a light sprinkling of olive oil and came out a little dry.

Asparagus com Molho de Echallote e Salsinha

1 lb asparagus
3 tbsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 slice of bacon, finely chopped
2 small shallots, finely chopped
1 cup chicken stock
2 tbsp butter, cold, cut into pieces
Pepper to taste
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1/4 cup grated Parmesan

Add the salt and baking soda to a pot of water and bring to a boil.  Add the asparagus and cook until just tender.  Immediately transfer the asparagus to a cold water bath to stop the cooking.  Remove from the cold water and dry on paper towels.


Cook the bacon in a large frying pan over medium high heat until it is crispy, about 2 minutes.  Lower the heat and add the shallots, stirring frequently and being careful not to brown them, about 2 minutes.  Add the stock and reduce by half, about 5 minutes.

Lift the pan a few inches above the heat and shake it back and forth while adding the butter, a piece at a time.  The butter will melt and the shaking with help it become incorporated into the sauce.  Return the asparagus to the pan and reheat it, being careful not to cook it any further.  Add the parsley and Parmesan and serve immediately.  

 
Thank you kitchen helper Julie for being a recipe stickler!  I would have thrown all the ingredients together in a baking dish under the broiler.  I would also have used at least 3 slices of bacon (how can you eat just 1?).  And I would never have "shaken the pan a few inches above the heat" until Julie said, "let's just do what the recipe calls for..."  So we did.  And it was delicious.  Under the broiler, the flavors never would have merged together so well, and adding extra bacon would have made the recipe so salty as to be almost inedible.  As it was, it was a perfect complement to our cod dish and a lesson learned about being lazy.

About the book:

It's a fable.  A fairly simplistic, easy to understand fable.  Don't give up on your dreams.  Your treasure is out there if you are willing to test yourself to get it. Oh, and surprise, it's never where, or what you thought it would be, so don't overlook it out of carelessness or demean it because it's not what you thought you wanted.

The Alchemist is a sweet book.  It's a quick read and it's somewhat repetitive.  There are a great many lessons about the language of the world and alchemy being about something greater than turning lead into gold.  You will never succeed if that is all you are hoping alchemy will teach you.  It's about taking base things and making them better.  That's everyone's Personal Legend, ultimately; to be better, which ought to be obvious, because nobody willfully says, "I want to make my life worse."  Sadly there are those who do make their lives worse, seemingly willfully, but of course, they don't see it that way.

My questions about the book revolve around this:  If the Arab from the desert has the same dream, in reverse, as the boy has, doesn't that mean he should have found his treasure where the boy was digging by the Pyramids?  I guess he didn't follow his dream so the sands of the desert didn't conspire to help him.

My other question is more historical and theoretical.  The treasure that the boy finds is "the spoils of a conquest that the country had long ago forgotten, and that some conquistador had failed to tell his children about."  Does that mean it was some conquistador's failed Personal Legend?  Was it a successful Personal Legend for him but a failed one for some Brazilian Ameridian or Arawak tribal leader?  Shouldn't that Conquistador's ancestor have recovered that treasure as part of his Personal Legend?  Or better, the ancestors of the conquered tribesmen?  Perhaps there weren't any left.

There were Spanish conquistadors in Brazil, I looked it up.  Is that slim connection to Brazil all that's intended in this book; that a young man can profit off of the slaughter of indigenous peoples because it was written by "the hand that writes everything?"  Is that really the way Personal Legends are supposed to work?  Is that Coelho's idea of "making everything better through love?" 

Maybe if he'd found his flock of sheep there, I would have been more content.  I certainly didn't expect it to be real treasure because the boy had learned that he did not need gold and jewels to be rich, successful, or happy.   I'm not very satisfied with the ending of the book.

Book 12 - Chapter 1 - Lososina Tushonaya S Susom Iz Petrushki and Piere Saves Himself and a Little Girl

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Lososina Tushonaya S Susom Iz Petrushki

(Steamed Salmon in a Parsley [and Butter] Sauce

To steam the fish:

2 Large Salmon Fillets (cut into small portions)
7 tbsp butter (yes, you are reading that correctly)
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup pickeled gherkin brine
1 bunch parsley, finely chopped
1 bay leaf

For the sauce:

1 shallot, finely chopped
7 tbsp dry white wine
3/4 cup fish stock (reserved from steaming the fish)
2/3 cup butter (yes, more and yet more butter), cut into tbsp pieces
Salt and pepper (but you really don't need much salt if you are using salted butter)
1 bunch parsley, finely chopped

To steam the salmon, melt the butter, add the wine, brine, parsley, and bay leaf.  Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover and steam fish for just about 3 minutes.  Set aside and keep warm.

For the sauce, saute the shallots in the wine until the liquid has evaporated.  Add the reserved fish stock and boil until it reduces to half its volume.  Add the butter a piece at a time stirring constantly.  This seems to be some kind of Russian style hollandaise sauce.  Add the parsley and heat through, adding the fish back to the pan to warm it.  Serve with blissfully plain boiled potatoes.

This is a good recipe.  It's indescribably rich (as though it could be otherwise with all that butter!).  However,  two of the people eating it hate sweet pickles (Jay and I).  Here're the changes I would make:  1.  Cut down the butter slightly when cooking the fish.  2.  Cut the brine to 1/8 cup, unless you LOVE sweet gherkins, then you might actually want to finely chop a few and throw them in.  3.  Use a steamer basket to keep the fish out of the stock and prevent its being overcooked.  4.  Strain the fish sauce through a sieve to remove the brown parsley.  5.  Cut down the butter even further for the sauce and maybe add a little more wine.

All in all, everyone enjoyed it, but Yoga was compulsory today in order to feel secure in the right functioning of all arteries.

About the book:

Some people only discover what they are capable of when they are acting in the service of others.  Pierre Bezhukov discovers this in the last chapters of Book 11.  He is driven to do something for Moscow but realizes he hasn't the right temperament to make a good assassin. Instead, he finds himself wandering through flaming Moscow nearly delirious.  He rescues a young girl from the fires and then prevents a French soldier from violating a beautiful young woman.  He is arrested for his actions and taken into solitary confinement but he has yet to reveal his identity.  This might be the event of his life that makes him change from a purposeless nobleman into a man.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Piroshki, Yablonchna Babka, and A Few More Words About War

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Music:  War and Peace - Prokofiev

Piroshki

Russian Yeast Dough


1 1/2 oz dry yeast
1 cup milk
2 tsp sugar
Generous 1 lb flour (the internet claims this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 egg yolks
8 1/2 tbsp butter
1 pinch salt
Beaten egg for sealing and glazing


Dissolve the yeast into 7 tablespoons of lukewarm milk (this is most important, if the milk is cold it will clump up and probably damage the whole process).  Add the sugar, cover and leave for 15 minutes.  Stir half the flour into the yeast mixture with a wooden spoon to make a "pre-dough"; mine came out more or less dry after this.  Cover and leave in a warm place for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.  Beat the egg and butter until frothy, add salt and remaining milk and work into a smooth mass.  Add the remaining flour and knead on a floured surface until the dough no longer sticks.  


Once the dough is ready, you can roll it out until it's about 1/4 in thick and cut it into rounds using a glass cup.  I think I make mine a bit too thin...

For the fillings, the book has a super long list of things that people bake into piroshki.  I opted for the following 4, the "recipes" for which I more or less made up. I'm just going to list ingredients and leave the proportions up to your imagination.

Mushroom and Onion - Brown onions in butter then add mushrooms and cook until almost all the liquid is removed.   

Potato and Curd Cheese - for this I once again squeezed all the liquid out of the American cottage cheese and mixed it in roughly equal proportions with the mashed potatoes.  I added just a tiny bit of cream to make it a bit easier to manage.  An important note about the potato filled piroshki, they need to have some kind of holes poked into them, or decorative slashes added to their tops, otherwise all the yummy potato cheese filling explodes out of them. 

Sauerkraut and Onion - I browned onion in butter and added slightly more sauerkraut than onion. 

Ground Chicken - kitchen helper Jay browned onions, garlic and ground chicken in a frying pan and I ran it through the food processor.

Fill each round with about a tablespoon (or less) of filling, brush the edges with beaten egg and seal.  Brush the sealed piroshki with beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream and sauteed onions.  The dough will make about 60 piroshki.

This was the first batch; I forgot to brush them with egg, and they were a tiny bit over cooked (the original recipe said 20 minutes - I took these out after about 13 minutes) but they were very tasty - and you can see what I meant about the potato filling coming out.  The second batch came out beautifully and I was too busy eating to remember to take any pictures of it.

Another note about making piroshki, at first I was sealing them by hand, which I'm not very good at, then I remembered that years ago, I'd bought a dumpling press at a market in Chinatown.  That made my life much easier and made piroshki production a lot faster. I also suggest making the fillings ahead.  It's exhausting trying to do it all in one night - so exhausting that I shoved everything in the fridge and put it all together the next day.

Yablonchna Babka

 (Apple Bake)

1 1/3 lb apples, peeled, cored, and chopped into small pieces
Lemon juice
9 tbsp sugar
4 eggs separated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
Butter for greasing the pan
Confectioners' sugar and fresh apple slices for garnish (optional)


Preheat oven to 340 degrees and grease a small baking dish with butter  Coat the apples with a bit of lemon juice immediately to prevent browning.  Beat the sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream in a bowl until frothy.  Beat in the flour, cinnamon, and salt.  Hand mix in the apples.  Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the rest of the batter.  Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

This recipe has so much egg in it, it's almost a custard.  I didn't have any extra apples left for garnish and I don't like confectioners' sugar, so I just ate mine plain.  Rich and delicious.

About the book:
At one point in the novel, Pierre starts to feel as though he must "do something." So he goes off to watch the battle of Borodino.  Thinking he will be out of the way, he lands himself smack in the middle of the target for the heaviest French fire.  He nearly dies there, is almost captured by the French, almost kills his would-be captor, and isn't heard from by anybody for many days after.  He feels himself an utter coward for running away, remembering how earlier he had seen soldiers marching toward the battle exchanging witty banter with the wounded being carted back.  He wonders (as do I) how they can continue marching forward when they see the mirror image of their future selves in the wounded and dying.  Another of the many ways in which war makes no sense to me.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Cheese Dumplings, Galushki, Pampushki, and Tosltoy Waxes Melodramatic

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music:  Still Nothing New to Report

Cheese Dumplings

1 cup flour
2 tbsp butter
1/3 cup crumbled feta
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
4 tbsp cold water
Salt and pepper
A pan of salted water (or vegetable broth)


Cut the butter, feta, and dill into the flour using a pastry cutter.  Add water by the tbsp until you have a manageable dough.  Roll the dough into balls and simmer them for 20 minutes.  I used vegetable broth simply because the Galushki had to be boiled in broth and I got confused.  The dumplings tasted really good to me anyway, so I suggest it.   These dumplings can be served in soup but if you are serving them plain, I recommend drizzling with olive oil to keep them from becoming too sticky as they cool.
 

Galushki

2 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter
2 eggs beaten
2 cups vegetable stock
4 oz bacon cooked and crumbled


Cut the butter into the flour, mix in the eggs and knead into a smooth dough.  Wrap in plastic wrap and rest for 30 minutes.  Roll out the dough until it's 1/2 in thick, with your brand new rolling pin (compliments for which were given by no fewer than 2 people in the line at Bed Bath and Beyond - I guess it's a really good one.).  Don't roll it out to 1/4 in thick, realize that's too thin and start over.  Your dough will pick up too much flour, get dried out and, as it turns out, not cook properly.  Once you have it at an optimum 1/2 in on your first try, cut it into 3/4 in squares.  Leave these to dry on a floured towel for 30 minutes then drop them into your stock and simmer for 10 minutes.  Serve with olive oil and crumbled bacon.  If, as mine were, you have overrolled your dough, it will be tasty and bacony on the outside and dry in the middle.  The bacon might entice some of your guests to overlook this.  Others will steal the bacon from the Galushki and put it on their Cheese Dumplings, which is also tasty. 

Pampushki

1/2 lb potatoes peeled and shredded


2 2/3 cup mashed potatoes (don't add anything, just mash the potatoes plain)
1/2 tbsp salt
2 tbsp snipped chives
1/2 cup curd cheese
black pepper
Oil for deep frying


*This recipe uses a lot of cheese cloth*


I have not been able to find curd cheese anywhere.  Maybe if I went to Coney Island, but I haven't yet.  I looked it up online and discovered that it's close to American cottage cheese, only less watery and that you can get something similar by squeezing the liquid through a cheese cloth. I bought the largest tub of cottage cheese at the Pathmark and tried it.  By the end of the experiment, my sink looked like some kind of creamery nightmare scene, but I did have, resting in the cheese cloth, a much reduced but creamier looking cheese.
Mix this with the chives (or scallions if you can't find chives) and set aside.


Again, using your cheesecloth, squeeze out as much liquid as you can from the shredded potatoes.  It will be a lot more potato juice than you expect.  Mix the shredded potato with the mashed potato and salt and pepper. Taking small rounds of this dough flatten out a circle in your palm, fill it with some of the cheese mixture and wrap the potato around it so it forms a ball.  When you are done, don't leave them to await frying, they will eventually turn purple and look less appetizing.  Also, don't put them into the fridge to await frying, because they will be so cold, they will bring the temperature of your oil down and dissolve into mush in the pan (tasty, purplish mush, it must be admitted, but mush all the same).  Use enough oil to cover the dumplings completely (I didn't quite have enough) and heat your oil to well over 340 degrees and drop the balls in so that they do not touch each other (if this happens, it may also cause mush).  Fry them until they are golden brown (or golden purple, as the case may be), remove from the oil, drain them on a paper towel and enjoy.

These were the best snacks of my birthday night.  But nobody really got to try them because I've never cooked in oil before and had a slow learning curve.  The first batch was fried in oil that wasn't hot enough - super mush.  The next single, lonely pampushka was cooked in perfect oil, came out brilliantly and was divided between myself and my 2 kitchen helpers to great applause.  The next batch was too cold and lowered the oil temperature - tasty mush that everyone got to nibble on.  The third and final batch - photo documented here, was made the following night in super hot oil and was delicious, but purple.

And that wraps up the birthday blogs.

About the book:

Remember Natasha Rostova and her brief, splintered love for Anatole Kuragin while she was still engaged to Andrew Bolkonski?  At the battle of Borodino, Andrew was wounded almost to death and brought to the medical tent and who's on the bed next to him having a leg amputated?  Anatole Kuragin.  And how does Andrew react to seeing this man that he wished to duel to the death?  He forgives him in his heart on the eve of what he believes will be his own death.  And to whose house do they bring the wounded Andrew? Natasha Rostova's.  Oh, Tolstoy, couldn't you have resisted the melodrama?

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.