Sorrel Sauce for Salmon- to ring in a New Year

Sorrel sauce, Banamak Recipes for New Year

I really meant to update this blog and post a million recipes (mostly cookies, sorry), but life and work got the best of me. I’m happy to say that I’m ready to share again. I was motivated by the invitation to contribute to a round up of NoRuz recipes (see link at the bottom of this post) by a great group of Persian Food bloggers. I hope you get a chance to read and comment on them all this week.

Last year, my mom and I were featured in an article on Persian New Year traditions in Edible Seattle.  We talked about some of our family food traditions and rituals. I was honored to have my kuku recipe included in the print edition.  The on-line edition does not seem to have the recipe available, but you can find it here.

Much like American Thanksgiving, the NoRuz menu is set in tradition. Fish, sabzi polo and kuku are essential components; the other items can change from year to year. For the fish course, many Iranians serve a smoked Lake Michigan whitefish or another firm fleshed white fish.  Growing up in Seattle in the 70s and 80s, smoked whitefish was hard to find. My mom served cod, snapper or sole filets as our fish course. Later, she served whole butterflied salmon as our family and circle of friends grew.  These days whitefish filets are easily found at Persian stores or Costco(!) in the weeks running up to New Year. 

I still serve salmon to my guests, usually a white king if we can get it. I’ve moved away from my old standby of baking the salmon with white wine, herbs and onions to making a simple green sorrel sauce that pairs beautifully with the salmon and the rest of the menu as well.

Garden sorrel, just starting to go gang busters, just like zuchinni

Sorrel is an amazing herb to have on hand.  I highly recommend coming over here and digging some up (kidding!) or buying a plant to have at home. It grows like a weed and tolerates being neglected. As for the taste, I love the way it peps up green salads and makes a lovely spring soup.

Sorrel sauce with salmon is a classic dish and there are a million recipes out there you can use.  I don’t use one in particular, but I do like to extend and temper the sharp and citrusy taste of the sorrel with a little spinach and peppery watercress, so that is my twist on the classics.

Holy Trinity - Left to Right - sorrel, watercress, baby spinach

Sorrel sauce for our New Year’s Salmon –serves 4 to 6

Notes: The New Year meal should come together pretty fast if you are an organized cook. The sauce will be much better if it is made at the last minute. I recommend setting up your mise with everything measured, minced, chiffonaded and ready to go before your guests arrive.  You can save a little more time by sautéing the shallots before hand and just warming them up before you start adding the greens.  If you can get your sous-chef to deal with getting guests to the table and all the tahdig out of the pot before you are done making the sauce, high five to both of you.

If you have picky eaters, I would serve the sauce on the side so they can try it first.  I also recommend adding the liquid to achieve your desired consistency. Some folks like to spoon the sauce and have it not slide off the filets, and others like a more liquid presentation.  You can puree the sauce, but really, you want to be sitting with your guests as soon as possible, so skip it.

1 bunch of sorrel, washed, dried and stems removed
½ bunch of watercress, washed, dried and stems removed
3 oz or ½ package of baby spinach, washed and dried
1 shallot, minced
3 T. unsalted butter
4-6 T heavy cream, half and half or crème fraiche
Salt and pepper to taste

Chiffonade (Chow's video link) sorrel, watercress and spinach, but keep them separate as they’ll be added individually. Set aside until needed.

Melt butter in a heavy skillet. When melted, add shallots and sauté until transparent.  Lower heat and add spinach, cook until just wilted, then add watercress and cook until it starts wilting. Lastly, add sorrel and cook until it wilts. The sorrel will turn a most unfortunate shade of olive while the spinach and watercress still look green, but it should taste pretty awesome. 

Remove the skillet from heat and stir in cream, half and half or crème fraiche slowly to reduce the chance of curdling and the sauce is at your desired consistency.  Season to taste.

Serve at once either on the side or spoon over fish filets.

Nooshe-jan

An InLinkz Link-up

Orange Almond Cake infused with cardamon - New Year's Keeps on

Torte, styled.

When we get invited to out to a friends’ for dinner, I am usually asked to bring dessert.  I don’t mind this as I love making desserts, but I am pretty much in pattern of creating seasonal fruit desserts with the occasional lapse into the chocolate box.   I stick to crisps, tarts and sometimes just macerated fruit with ice cream.  I am trying to change this around a bit and at the same time, trying to not go shopping for the one ingredient that is crucial to my dish and that can only be procured on alternate Wednesdays fifty miles from home. I am trying to simplify my life, not complicate things for the sake of cake.

For Persian New Year, I wanted to make something that was vaguely Persian, but was going to leave the cookies to my mother who I simply cannot compete with for taste and quality of her cookies.  I thought about doing something with rice flour and rose water, but then decided that that combination was too sweet and floral.  I wanted to use things that I had on hand – almonds, fruit, eggs and yogurt.  In my googling/epicuriousing/searching I found several great recipes for a Persian Orange Almond Cake that are derived from Claudia Roden’s 1968 cookbook, The New Book of Middle East Food.  In my years, I have never heard of such a cake.  I was all for trying to change things up and the recipe required no searching a store for an ingredient I didn’t have on hand already. Note: not everyone has unicorn horns in their pantry, but I do.

Unicorns need not fear.

The recipe is pretty simple, whole oranges are boiled twice to remove the bitterness. This is the same technique that jam makers suggest for extracting the bitter oils from citrus for marmalade.  The whole oranges are pureed in a food processor, and then added to an egg and sugar mixture.  All are incorporated with nut flour and a few more things and a beautiful rich moist torte is created.  The torte sits well on its own, but is even better with a side of crème fraiche ice cream or an orange blossom flavored strained Greek yoghurt.  We loved it so much; we ate it for breakfast the next day.  It does require a little preparation, as the oranges need to boiled twice, but I started the boiling the night before and that saved a little bit of time.

I am a big fan of the nut torte.  I am trying to limit my exposure to wheat, and nuts are something that seems to be easy to process and work wonderfully for some cakes and cookies. 

Folding in ingredients. Do not over mix.

Orange Almond Cake for a New Year feast – Adapted from Claudia Roden with great props given to Australia’s Taste.com

Serves 12 

This recipe calls for oranges to be boiled and then pureed. I used my Cuisinart, the original calls for mushing up the cooked oranges and pressing them through a sieve. The pureeing using modern machinery is much easier and adds way more fiber.  I did end up weighing the sugar and almond powder because they seem to vary if those ingredients settle. My oranges were medium sized and pretty juicy which means that my cake remained nice and moist.

Cake
2 medium sized oranges
300 g. almond meal
1 t baking powder
½ t cardamom
½ t cinnamon
3 eggs
¾ cup sugar (would use a little less 2/3 c. next time)

Cake Instructions:

Wash oranges and place in a sauce pan with enough water to cover the oranges.  Turn on stove and bring oranges to a boil and then turn to a simmer and let simmer for 20 minutes.  Remove pan from heat and drain water.  Add cold water and repeat process again.  Drain oranges and let cool. Note: This can be done the night before, just put the oranges in the fridge until you need them. They will be squishy and that is a good thing.

Preheat oven to 325 F. Grease a 9” springform pan with cooking spray or olive oil, cut parchment to fit the bottom, coat sides with almond flour.

Puree oranges in food processor until smooth. I didn’t bother to remove the pips as I had navel oranges, if you have seeds, you may want to go to the trouble of removing them first.

Place sugar and eggs in mixing bowl and beat with electric beater until pale yellow and thick.  Turn off mixer.  Add pureed oranges to the egg and sugar mixture. Combine almonds, baking powder, and spices together and fold into the orange/egg/sugar mixture.  Mix to combine, but do not over mix.  Pour into prepared springform pan and place in oven.  Cook for 40 minutes, check for doneness by using a wooden skewer, if it comes out clean, it is done. If not, cook for longer. Once the cake is done, remove from oven and let cool on cake rack. Remove from springform pan after 20 minutes.

Orange Glaze
Juice of one medium juice
Slivers of peel from one orange, zest would probably be fine
¼ c Sugar
1 t orange blossom water

Combine sugar, orange juice and zest in a heavy bottomed saucepan and cook until thick and syrupy.  Remove from heat and add orange blossom water and let cool. If it thickens further to the point of gloopiness, add a 1 T water to thin. Thinly brush glaze on cake and use remaining as a garnish on the side.

Orange Blossom Strained Yogurt  (can be made ahead of time):

1.5 cup Greek yogurt
¼ cup confectioner’s sugar (icing sugar)
1 t orange blossom water

Combine ingredients until blended.  Place mixture in a coffee filter and let sit in a sieve/strainer overnight in fridge until thickened.  Remove from coffee filter, place in container, in fridge and cover until use.

Serving Instructions:

At this point, you can serve the cooled cake with a lightly sweetened ricotta, the Greek yoghurt described above or a crème fraiche ice cream.  I think the cake is better after it has sat a day. If you are going to do that, wrap cake well in foil until you are ready to serve it.

Spring filled frittata - Kuku Sabzi for a new year

 A heart of barberries for you and yours.

Persian New Year continues for another few days, at least it does somewhere other than our house. I took down our Haft-sin yesterday. Other than a little garbanzo filled ajil and some gorgeous bouquets of flowers, it just looks like a typical March around here- sunny one moment and stormy the next. The dog is confused and I’m just trying to keep things together.

We hosted a few friends for Persian New Year dinner last Friday. The menu was simple – as Persian New Year is a traditional meal with green rice with herbs, salmon with two different rubs and the herbed frittata, kuku sabzi, served with more herbs and feta cheese and bread.  I added a carrot cardamom salad for color and a little variation from the endless onslaught of herbs that marks No Ruz dinner.

I am not adverse to the herbiness of No Ruz, in fact, I like it.  It is that idea that we will base a whole meal around an amazing array of greenery that is not easily procured in Seattle at this time of year.  I long for the dill, fresh parsley, chives and cilantro you can find in the California farmer’s markets.  It is a classic mismatch hypothesis – need for green stuff locally and lack of green stuff locally makes for frustrated shoppers.   Luckily, my mother was able to find fresh dill and other things to make dinner happen.

I would like to share with you a recipe for Kuku Sabzi, or the herbed frittata that my friend’s swoon over and I believe I have finally conquered.  The Kuku (frittata) can be made with a variety of vegetables, a little bit of meat, egg, spices and flour to bind it together. The egg is much less pronounced in the Persian kuku than in the Italian frittata, which is a boon if you have egg adverse folks in your midst. The kuku sabzi is really about bringing together a lot of the tastes of spring in one dish.  It is grassy, fresh, herby and oniony without being overpowering.  My mom’s recipe has changed a little bit from the time she first shared it with me and I honestly think it tastes better than ever.  The recipe does call for a few unusual ingredients that you may or may not be able to procure locally. One thing is the advieh, which is spice mix that consists cardamom, cloves, ginger, rose petals, cinnamon and cumin along with other things. I think quatres epices would work fine or you can skip it entirely and it would still be tasty. Barberries (zereshk) are the other thing that makes this dish a knock out. The other component is barberries which are both beautifully red and zingy and tart where you expect them to be sweet.  Others have suggested using dried cranberries as a substitute or if you have fresh cranberries languishing in your  freezer, thaw and use those. If you do this make sure you chop them and soak them in water to take out some of the sugar.  I just checked and both are available on Amazon or at the Sadaf site (purveyors of many Middle Eastern spices). The newest addition is the salad greens, my mom is convinced that they make a world of difference, lightening up the dish just a tad without affecting the flavor. I have to agree.

The secret ingredients are not so secret anymore.

The best thing about kuku is that it is delicious served hot or cold.  I like it the next day for breakfast.

The final product.

Kuku Sabzi –serves 8

The substitutions I called for should work just fine. It is a dish that is very forgiving, and begs for variations. If you have garlic scapes around, they should be fun to add. I literally added all the leftover herbs from Friday's dinner - tarragon, basil, mint to the mix and it tasted great.

2 ½  cups leeks, the green part (washed, chopped and cleaned)
1 cup cilantro (cleaned and stems removed)
1 ½ cups parsley (cleaned and stems removed)
½ cup chives or garlic chives (cleaned)
½ cup mixed herbs (really what you have lying about – I used fresh mint, dill, basil)
1 cup mixed salad greens (mesclun or lettuce, washed and torn into small pieces)
5-6 eggs (large)
¼ cup zereshk (if not available, use ¼ cup  chopped dried cranberries or ½ cup fresh chopped cranberries)
½ cup walnuts (chopped) – optional
2 T butter (softened)
1 T flour (I used rice flour)
½  t baking soda
1 t salt
Pepper to taste
½ t advieh or some sort of quatres epices

Preheat oven to 350F.  Butter a 8x8” dish or a small casserole (1.5 quart) baker. Place zereshk in boiling water and let sit for 5 minutes, drain off water and set zereshk aside. Put leeks in food processor and process until chopped, add parsley, cilantro, chives and mixed herbs until chopped fine.  Remove from processor bowl and place in 3 quart bowl.  Add 1 cup mixed greens, plumped up zereshk and walnuts and mix with hands to combine. Put flour, baking soda, salt, pepper and advieh into bowl and mix well.   

In a separate bowl, beat five eggs until blended. Add egg mixture to herbs and mix to combine. The mixture should not be too wet nor dry , if it seems too dry, beat another egg and add it to the herb mixture.  Turn mixture into greased casserole or dish and dot with remaining butter. Place in preheated oven and check after 20 minutes.  The kuku should spring back when done, you want it to be cooked thoroughly, but not over cooked.  Remove from heat, let cool and then cut into squares to serve.

Enjoy a few squares of Spring on me.

Awaken and make Nooneh Berenji -Rice cookies for No Ruz

Some of the mother's famous cookies. I will get to them all soon. Patience people.

The Equinox happens tonight; officially it is the start of the Persian New Year, but a tad too late in Seattle  for anything but a few phone calls and kisses around the family. Tomorrow night, I will be going to my parents for a dinner replete with all the traditional foods – the kuku sabzi, the sabzi polo and the smoked white fish with herbs (mahi bah sabzi). Yes, it’s all about herbs and green, a meal that Kermit the frog would love.  However, this is just the start,  the holiday continues with open houses galore – “Aid Deedany”, where you go visit your relatives, the older ones first out of respect, and then you move on to see your friends far and wide. In Iran, it is a two week process, here we try and do it in a few weekends.  Most of the visits are after dinner – usually tea, fruit, ajil and an array of cookies.  My parents are hard to pin down during these few weeks; they are out and about doing the rounds. Good for them. Spring is a great time to start emerging from the Seattle Slumber.  The Slumber is the time between November 5^th and March 20^th, when most of Seattle goes into seclusion to only come out for special occasions – winter beer releases, Husky basketball games or to piss me off in line at the airport.  Now is the time for all good people of Seattlandia to get out of your house and attempt to become one with your friends and neighbors, use this as a great excuse.  I miss you all, really.

My mom makes a nice array of cookies for the holiday (pictured above).  Persians are not big on chocolate, nor cheesecake or any strange concoction that we are likely to call dessert at the big table.  They are big into orange blossom, rose water, honey, cardamom, almonds and walnuts along with delicate fruit flavorings.  Some of their inspiration comes from the French with pate au choux and mille feuilles, but mostly are just plain Persian.

Cookies getting ready to hit the oven.

One of my favorites is “nooneh berenji” or rice flour cookies. These are amazingly delicate and powerful little cookies that melt in your mouth. You would have no idea that they are rice flour, they have a nice subtle rose water flavor with a little cardamom added for punch.  They do not travel well, but they are worth picking up at a Persian grocery store when you can find them. If you don’t have one around, try making them. A plus is that they are gluten free. Since I am not a fan of making things with ingredients that are not easily found within a reasonable roaming radius of home, these are pretty swell. It does require learning how to clarify butter, which is something I had never done before, but a New Year means learning new things, doesn’t it?

Fancy cookie press made my Mr. S.

Nooneh Berenji – Rice Cookies topped with poppy seeds
Makes 5 dozen

This recipe requires two things – one is learning how to clarify butter and the other is to have a wooden cookie stamp. If you don’t have one on hand, I would just roll cookies into a ball, make a tiny indentation and then press the poppy seeds into the indentation. My mom has a little collection of the cookie stamps, they are made from wood, a husband of a friend of hers likes to make them.  You can find glass and pottery ones at Amazon, Williams-Sonoma and some specialty cookware shops around your neck of the woods The trick is not to press down too hard, you want the cookies about ¼” thick after stamping.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups (3 sticks, ¾ lb.) unsalted butter
3 egg yolks
1 – 1 ¼ cup white rice flour (portion them as one cup with a ¼ cup measure in reserve)
1 cup confectioner’s (powdered sugar)
1/3 cup rosewater
½ t cardamom
1/4 cup blue poppy seeds

Melt butter over medium heat, let cool. Skim the foam from the top of the melted butter and then either carefully pour to avoid transferring the solids at the bottom to a clean container or sieve the rest of the melted butter through cheesecloth lined strainer.  If you are still unsure, please refer to David Lebovitz’s awesome tutorial on the subject.

Prep a baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat. Preheat oven to 325 F.

By hand or in a mixer, combine butter with egg yolks added one at a time. Really you are not creaming because the butter is not really in a solid form, but you do want them well combined.  Next add rose water to butter and egg mixture. Mix until combined. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients together, starting with one cup of rice flour and the confectioner’s sugar and cardamom.  Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix at a low speed until combined. If the dough seems sticky or wet, add additional rice flour by the tablespoonful until a little more manageable and easily handled without overworking the dough.  Remove dough from bowl and start making 3/4” ball from dough and test cookie press to make an imprint. If the imprint works without cracking the dough, then the dough is the perfect consistency. If there is too much flour, add a tablespoon of water, and if it is too sticky, add a little bit of rice flour.  

Once you are happy with the consistency you can start making cookies.  If you are at a good stopping point, wrap the dough up in saran wrap or a zip lock bag and place in fridge for up to two days.  Let come to room temperature before starting to make the cookies.

To make cookies - start rolling the dough into balls, place onto prepared baking sheet with 2” between each cookie and start stamping. Press or sprinkle 10-15 poppy seeds (is that a smidgen) in the center of each cookie.  Check around 8 to 10 minutes, depending on your oven, once they begin to get a little golden on the edges, take out and cool on a cookie sheet.  Once cooled,  store in a sealed container for up to two weeks.