Purim 2023

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The Jewish holiday Purim begins this year (it’s 5783 according to the Jewish calendar) on Monday evening, March 6, and ends on the following Tuesday evening. Although the photos in this post were originally published a couple of years ago, some things never change. Tradition!

The story of Purim memorializes the time in ancient Jewish history when Haman, royal vizier to King Ahasuerus of Persia, had been plotting to exterminate all the Jews in the empire. His plan was thwarted by Mordecai and Queen Esther, his adopted daughter, and the deliverance is one of joyful celebration, steeped in traditional ceremonies and festivities. Among the many icons of the holiday, one of the most renowned is the hamantasch, literally “Haman’s pocket”.

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Hamantaschen are delicious triangular baked pastries conventionally filled with thick prune jam (lekvar) or ground poppy seeds (muhn), but these days creative cookery presents some serious competition. Happily, the always mind-blowing Breads Bakery, with five locations in Manhattan, covers the entire spectrum. On this plate, there’s sweet poppy seed, halva, chocolate, and apple along with a pair of savory challengers, purple haze and pizza. The former, covered in sesame and nigella seeds, holds sauerkraut – a little sweetish and worth a bite even if you don’t care for sauerkraut. The latter is filled with a blend of tomato paste, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, basil, garlic, and olive oil and tastes exactly like what you’d expect with that set of ingredients; try warming this one up. Fusion food for sure. This year’s specialties are apple, apricot, poppy, chocolate, and pizza.


Sometimes a change of focus helps to make a point – or six.
 
 

Fried Manti

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Daytime temperatures have been in the 50s and that means Spring is Here!

The hell it is.


But to be fair, we have had a few great days recently that turned out to be perfect for a Little Odessa ethnojunket. We prowled around fledgling markets and bakeries that are just starting out, and the redoubtable Tashkent Market is always coming up with different offerings like this Fried Manti with Beef (consumed on the boardwalk, of course).

There are a lot more novel flavors to experience on my “Exploring Eastern European Food in Little Odessa” ethnojunket including some tasty Turkish treats – more about those later. Check it out here!
 
 

It’s National Khachapuri Day in Georgia!

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(That’s Georgia, the former USSR country, not Georgia, the US state of course!)

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Khachapuri is a traditional Georgian bread filled with cheese and unequivocally one of the country’s greatest culinary hits; the name leaves no doubt as to the nature of the dish: khacha means cheese curds, puri means bread. As a matter of fact, it’s so universally beloved that the Gastronomic Association of Georgia created National Khachapuri Day, celebrated every February 27, to honor the dish as a symbol of the country’s gastronomic culture and to promote culinary tourism in Georgia.

Two of my favorites among at least a dozen types of khachapuri that I’ve encountered are adjaruli and megruli.


This is adjaruli, filled with tangy, salty sulguni cheese and imeruli, a fresh crumbly cheese which when melted together combine to make stretchy, cheesy nirvana; recipes vary, but it’s always delicious. It’s shaped like a kayak, the center of which is filled with the cheese mixture; a raw egg and a chunk of butter are added just as it’s removed from the oven. Stir the mixture: the egg cooks and combines with the butter and hot, melted cheese. Break off pieces of the bread and dip them into the cheese mixture. Now picture hot bread with melted buttery cheese that you eat with your hands, fresh out of the oven – what’s not to like?


Megruli is a little more self-contained: cheese bread filled with cheese and then topped with more cheese and baked. Did I mention cheese? Think Georgian stuffed pizza.

If you’ve never sampled these magnificent delicacies, you should definitely join one of my food tours through Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area, also known as Little Odessa, where we’ll taste at least one kind of khachapuri – maybe even achma, a kind of decadent, buttery, cheesy, lasagna-like (but sans tomato sauce), Georgian comfort food. Tempted? Click on Ethnojunkets at the top of any page on my website for more information; now that the COVID-19 crisis appears to be waning and seasonal temperatures are waxing, my tours will be starting up soon. Hope to see you then!

 
 

Sanguinaccio Dolce

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An equal opportunity celebrant, I’m always keen to learn about traditional foods that are associated with religious holidays. Lent, the forty day period that begins today with Ash Wednesday and ends just before Easter Sunday, is celebrated in southern Italy with an unusual delicacy called Sanguinaccio Dolce, a sweet (“dolce”) dessert pudding made with pig’s blood (“sangue”) although some bakeries around these parts opt for beef blood. (For the faint of heart <groan> bloodless versions can be found.)

Now don’t go running off: if you follow me you know that I wrote a piece for Edible Queens suggesting that durian pizza is the gateway drug for durian, the much maligned tropical fruit. I propose that sanguinaccio dolce fulfills the same role for food crafted with blood as an ingredient. Numerous cultures are at home with it – blood rice cakes in China, blood pancakes in Sweden, dinuguan in the Philippines, as well as sausages in Great Britain and Ireland, morcilla in Spanish speaking countries worldwide, boudin in France, and so many more in Northern and Eastern Europe. Pretty much everywhere actually. And you also know that I only recommend truly tasty food; I have never been one to embrace the sensationalism of “Look what gross thing I just ate!” No. This is genuinely delicious.

An expertly crafted version tastes like a rich, dense, dark chocolate pudding that carries notes of cinnamon and bits of candied orange peel, pine nuts and sliced almonds. There is no hint of minerally blood flavor. It’s often served with savoiardi, crisp ladyfingers, but a spoon will suffice. The pasticciotto sports a tender shortbread crust with a kiss of lemon and is filled with sanguinaccio. These two examples came from Morrone Pastry Shop at 2349 Arthur Ave in the Bronx a couple of years ago but it can be found at other hardcore Italian bakeries as well.

If, like me, you appreciate the concept of snout-to-tail cooking and decry food waste, you should look into this. But if you just want to sample the richest, most delicious Italian dark chocolate pudding you’ve ever tasted, you need to give this a chance. Unless of course you just don’t like chocolate pudding at all, in which case move along, nothing to eat here.

#bloodydelicious (couldn’t resist 😉)
 
 

C’est Mardi Gras!

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C’est Mardi Gras! Laissez les bons temps rouler! (Ou en anglais, it’s Fat Tuesday! Let the good times roll!) The “fat” descriptor signals the last chance to consume indulgent, rich, high-calorie foods before the spartan Lenten season begins on Ash Wednesday. Needless to say, New Orleans pulls out all the stops for its annual celebration with a virtual parade of Creole and Cajun culinary delights on display.

This is homemade Jambalaya, a rice dish that typically features spicy andouille sausage along with other meats or seafood. I’ve used chicken as the supporting player here, but in the past I’ve made it more traditionally with shrimp – that was back when you didn’t have to take out a mortgage to buy it. The Creole version contains tomatoes, the Cajun style that I’ve prepared here does not, but both incorporate a significant measure of spice. I start with a base of diced onions, celery, and bell peppers known as “the trinity” in Cajun cooking; it’s akin to mirepoix in French cuisine which consists of onions, celery, and carrots, or sofrito in other cultures where ingredients vary by geography – but whatever the provenance, it’s all about that base.


On the side, I made another popular Louisiana specialty, maque choux, a mélange of fresh corn, bell peppers, onions, celery, and tomatoes cooked up in bacon fat with more Cajun spices and a little cream at the end to ensure the proper degree of decadence.

Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday post will feature a Lenten delicacy (sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?) that’s bloody delicious! Stay tuned….
 
 

Open Heart Sugary – or, the Anatomy of a Valentine Cookie

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These are Red Currant Raspberry Linzer Cookies, first cousins of Austria’s Linzer Tart – traditionally, I do stars for Christmas and hearts for Valentine’s Day. This particular batch began months earlier with the acquisition of red currants and raspberries when they were in season followed by a little time spent prepping and cooking them up. It’s a lot easier than you’d expect and the filling keeps for quite a while in the fridge while you’re procrastinating doing the fussy part. If you’re not a fanatic, however, I can recommend Hero Red Currant Premium Fruit Spread; I’ve had pretty good luck with it – it just needs a bit of finessing via the addition of some red raspberry jam to achieve the degree of sweetness you’re after plus some straining.


The dough calls for flour, sugar, and butter, of course, plus finely ground blanched almonds, almond extract, and lemon zest. Start by baking equal numbers of fronts and backs.

Occasionally a front or back will fracture which then perforce spells doom for its perfectly intact intended mate, but sadly, I’ve never found an effective way to repair a broken heart. Sometimes, you just have to eat your losses. This is an example of how culinary art reflects life. But hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.


Look closely at the finished cookies in the first photo and you’ll see that the powdered sugar blankets only the outer section of the heart while the inner red lifeblood of this classic treat shines through unobstructed. Now, examine the above photo and follow along to see how I do it:

Bottom rows:
Starting with solid backs, use a plastic squeeze bottle to add preserves around the perimeter but not in the center. (Neatness doesn’t count.) Match tops to bottoms.

Top rows:
Let it snow, let it snow, etc. Note the unfilled but sugary centers. Next, squirt a blob of preserves into the cutout thereby hiding the powdered sugar.

Now, here’s the painstakingly obsessive step (why do I do these things?): then and only then, for each cookie, carefully use a toothpick to smooth out any less than perfect curves of the inner heart, et voilà! Your cookies will look like those in the first photo. Maybe better. (Why can’t they make Photoshop for food?)
 
 
When the cookies are complete and have been packed away, your workspace will look like this one, post-sugaring and pre-cleanup, an exercise in negative space.

And the beat goes on.
 
 

Hua Yi Jia

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I love a Chinese restaurant menu where the English names of the dishes are so obscure that I want to try them all. Now, I’m not referring to misspellings like balck for black or drued for dried. If I could write in Chinese a fraction as well as they write in English, I’d be thrilled. Respect.

I’m talking about dishes with names like Pot Edge or Meter Hour or Old Wine and Old Man. And when I scanned the Chinese characters on the menu in the first example (謝謝, Google Translate), it returned “Side of Pot” – not particularly enlightening. But that’s precisely why I need to go back.

So when we visited Hua Yi Jia (aka Huayijia) at 5616 7th Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, we selected three items that were intriguing in either name or content.

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Fried Eel with Lees

We’re assuming Fujianese cuisine is the order of the day because of the neighborhood and the presence of red wine lees in this dish. Wine lees are the sediment from fermenting and aging rice and red rice bran to make red glutinous wine, sort of the dregs. (But they’re not bitter dregs, Mr. Spock; they’re actually in-your-face umami brokers.) Look closely past that crispy coating on the pieces of fried eel and you’ll see the characteristic red color. Definitely tasty, but beware of tiny bones – it was worth taking a moment to establish an anatomically informed strategy for each piece.


Dried Mutton with Razor Clam

Served in a Japanese bowl, this soup was flavored with an abundance of rehydrated mutton and a paucity of razor clam. No matter, I’m sure it was the luck of the ladle and it was worth trying once.


Pot Edge

Of course we did. Turns out to be another Fujianese soup, so called because it’s made by pouring rice flour batter around the side of a wok to form a thin noodle which is then scraped into simmering broth enhanced with shredded greens.

Looking forward to my next visit!
 
 

Zheng Jin Ji

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Sometimes only an elaborate production with an extensive cast of dishes can appease your appetite – think dim sum. But there’s a lot to be said for a simple dialog on an uncluttered stage as well, if the players are exceptional.

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In the window of Zheng Jin Ji at 4915 8th Ave, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I spotted a photo starring these two sesame seed studded buns that was sufficiently compelling for me to venture inside. It’s a modest venue where Fuzhou snacks and soups are in the spotlight; I’m guessing they do more take-out business than sit-down.

On the left, a Pickled Pork Sesame Bun with Preserved Vegetables, a Guhuai Sesame Bamboo Shoot Bun on the right. They’re prepared in advance, deep fried to order, and they were an undisputed hit: spot-on seasoning, a study in contrasting textures, and definitely worth more than the price of admission ($5.50 for the pair).

So Bravo to the folks at Zheng Jin Ji for an enlightening performance that day. Take a bao!

(I know. I went a long way for that one.)
 
 

Banh Bot Loc

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These eye-catching tidbits are Vietnamese Bánh Bột Lọc Gói Lá Chuôi; like most Asian dumplings, they’re at home as an appetizer or a snack.

Filled with shrimp and pork belly, they’re prepared by steaming or boiling and they come in two variants: the filling for Bánh Bột Lọc Gói Lá Chuôi is covered in a translucent tapioca starch batter and wrapped in a banana leaf prior to steaming; Bánh Bột Lọc Tran calls for a firmer dough and doesn’t require a shrouding leaf. (Sort of like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they sampled the forbidden fruit. But I digress.)

Their texture is noteworthy: they’re chewy from the tapioca and crispy because the shrimp are still dressed in their shells – but don’t be put off by that: the shrimp are small so the shells are thin.


Revealing closeup.

This batch came from Bánh Mì Cô Út at 83 Elizabeth St in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
 
 

Ekmek Kataifi

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You’ll see it as Εκμέκ Καταΐφι in Greek circles and Ekmek Kadayıfı in Turkish.

The Greek version (shown here) starts with a layer of crispy baked shredded dough that’s saturated in sweet syrup then topped with rich, dense custard and crowned with kaymak (clotted cream) or whipped cream and a scattering of chopped nuts.

In Turkey, the base is bread pudding (ekmek means bread in Turkish) soaked in syrup and finished off with kaimak.

This irresistible indulgence came from Greek Bakaliko, 7615 5th Ave, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and yes, it’s one of the stops on my Flavors of Little Levant and Little Yemen ethnojunket.

You know you wanna.