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A Bog Blog: Simple Cranberry Relish
As everyone who has eaten a Thanksgiving meal knows, the meal is traditionally full of a lot of orange and brown foods – mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, bread, stuffing, turkey. Don’t get me wrong, these foods are delicious, but you need the acidity and tartness of cranberry sauce – not to mention the bright red color – to balance out the other foods and make them really sing. Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce is like…well, it’s like Thanksgiving without stuffing or gravy or sweet potatoes or pie. Simply unimaginable.
Over the years I have tried many a cranberry sauce. I’ve experimented with ones where you cook down the cranberries to a gelatinous consistency, or where you add orange juice to make it sweet, or walnuts to make it crunchy. But nothing beats this most simple recipe. To even call this a recipe is, in some way, to cheat – it’s really a five-minute-throw-everything-in-the-food-processor-and-combine activity. Moreover, this is (I’m almost ashamed to admit) the recipe on the back of the Oceanspray bag of cranberries, albeit with much less sugar.
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The Very Best Thanksgiving Stuffing
I absolutely love Thanksgiving, probably because it’s only about eating delicious food with friends and family. Unfortunately, I’ve missed Thanksgiving for most of the past decade. Between living in Berlin and traveling to Geneva for conferences (I can’t complain about either), there haven’t been too many years that I’ve been in the US and able to cook. But that hasn’t stopped me from starting Thanksgiving 2.0, the Second Night of Thanksgiving, or Belated Thanksgiving as we call it – a night weeks after Thanksgiving when I invite friends over and cook an entire Thanksgiving meal.
This stuffing is key to my Thanksgiving dinner, whenever it takes place. I’ve been making variations of it since I was a teenager, but this is a more interesting version with more tartness to balance the sweetness of Thanksgiving food. This recipe can easily be doubled and should be if you are cooking for more than immediate family. But be warned that a double recipe makes enough stuffing for a small army.
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Hummus Two Ways
As 2020 comes to an end, I want to close out the year on an upbeat note. It’s been a difficult time for so many, and we are all eager to start the new year – one in which vaccines will be rolled out, the terrible orange man will no longer be in charge of the United States, and we can all (eventually) gather with friends and family once again. While this New Year’s will be unlike any other, I think we all owe it to ourselves to celebrate the hell out of the end of 2020.
This recipe – for hummus topped with caramelized onions and roasted garlic – is part of my New Year’s plan, which includes other fun finger foods: stuffed mushrooms, bacon-wrapped dates, and cheese and prosciutto. This recipe is for the famous hummus from the cookbook Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, the Israeli-Palestinian duo that have made ingredients like tahini mainstream for American and European cooks. This hummus is superb, less like the packaged hummus from a grocery store and more like the hummus from my favorite hummus restaurant in Berlin (Azzam, I hope you are still around when I get back to Germany) or the hummus you find in Palestine. Plus, for those of you who already make fresh hummus and follow recipes that involve carefully peeling the skin off of each chickpea, this recipe eliminates that hassle.
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Chilled Cucumber Soup
As August turns to September, I am trying to hold onto summer as much as possible. The pandemic summer has meant long walks and, more importantly, lots and lots of picnics. With picnics the new norm for social events, the type of food I want to eat has expanded. Pre-pandemic, I likely would not have given this recipe a second glance. But the pandemic has made me more adventurous. I have learned to love food processors, appreciate anchovies, and have rethought what portable picnic food includes. Perfect for a picnic or hot night, this recipe is creamy and a little bit spicy, while the corn adds a sweetness to it that matches the cucumber and dairy base. If you’ve spent the summer eating gazpacho and need a new cold soup for September picnics, try this.
This soup, with its yogurt base, is the perfect opportunity to discuss dairy production, including the less appetizing parts of it. (Warning: this post is a bit manure-heavy. Consider reading this at a time when you are not eating.) There are many problems related to dairy production: the low price paid for milk (which squeezes smaller farmers and leads to increased “efficiency,” i.e. larger factory farms), the cycle of breeding cows for dairy production, dairy farming’s environmental impacts, and the low wages paid to a primarily immigrant workforce. While I wish I had space to discuss all of these issues, this post focuses on the environmental impacts – specifically the production of greenhouse gases and the threat of contaminated groundwater from manure.
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Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad
Last summer, in what feels like an eternity ago, I visited a friend in London. We spent the days roaming the city, eating goat cheese and lox on baguette, and browsing through second-hand bookstores. In one of these bookstores, I spotted Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen. Although my next flight was on EasyJet (which has notoriously terrible limits on carry-on luggage), I knew I had to buy the memoir – and somehow fit it into my already overly-full backpack.
This summer I pulled out the memoir to reread it, and one recipe stuck out: a potato salad with herring and beets. I don’t know what drew me to this, since I was never a huge herring fan. But the recipe kept calling to the Eastern European Jew in me, so one day I grabbed some beets and decided to make it. And I’m so glad I did. This salad is perfect for a hot summer day: filling, yet summery, sweet and a little salty, with just the right amout of crunch. Every time it has been above 90 degrees this summer, I find myself craving this potato salad. For the herring skeptics out there, it’s really good without the herring. But if you eat fish, please try it with the herring. I don’t think that you’ll regret it.
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Roasted Asparagus with Pickled Lemon and Feta
I love asparagus. Green asparagus, white asparagus, even purple asparagus. I could easily eat it every week and never tire of it. I love it with my mother’s hollandaise sauce and with this easy buttery caper sauce. But my favorite way to eat it right now is with this pickled lemon and feta, a simple recipe from the Chicago restaurant Avec. It’s lemony, a little bit spicy and salty, but still allows the asparagus to come through.
Growing up in Chicago, I always knew that Michigan grew a lot of asparagus, but I didn’t realize just how much. Michigan is currently the largest producer in the US, producing as much as 23 million pounds each year. Being this close to Michigan means that our local grocery store and every farmer’s market sells fresh, Michigan asparagus – even though most of the asparagus sold in the US these days is actually imported from Peru and Mexico. (Between 2004 and 2014, the amount of asparagus grown in the US decreased dramatically – by one estimate, by 64 percent – in large part due to these cheaper imports.)
The asparagus season is winding down, but before it ends completely I wanted to grab this moment to talk about labor conditions in the asparagus industry. Although I just spent the past couple of months enjoying my local Michigan asparagus, I actually want to focus on asparagus grown in Germany, where eating white asparagus in the spring is a national pastime. I had never eaten white asparagus until I moved to Germany. But in Germany, every year in late spring, restaurants starts to list asparagus – Spargel – as the special. Markets and grocery stores sell it, and everyone gets really excited about Spargelzeit (asparagus time). I never learned to cook the white kind, but my wonderful roommate would cook it with prosciutto and potatoes – and it was always delicious!
