The Portuguese Karen Florence

Shrimp Mozambique

One of my very dear friends, Karen Florence, is my dear friend for several reasons: she is supportive, fun to be with, and unique. She is also a gifted Executive Coach and the radio host of On Purpose With Karen Florence, and as a former coach myself, I appreciate that! We first met each other in school, while both of us were working towards our coaching certification.

She is also known and appreciated by me, and many others, for her cooking and, in particular, her signature meal. I can describe it with a few words, but it doesn't do justice to how good it is. It is succulent, addictive, and, perhaps most important of all: social food--the kind of food that is best appreciated when shared amongst friends.

My seventeen-year-old daughter asks me regularly, "When is Aunt Karen going to come here and make that meal for me?"

So, after all that build up, here it is: roasted shrimp in the shell, with cocktail sauce and the best french fries you ever tasted in your whole life, with a decadent blue cheese dipping sauce. I've had that shrimp and french fry meal while watching movies on TV, while drinking shots of tequila with Karen and Joy, and while just hanging out with her alone. It is, without a doubt, one of those comforting, satisfying and decadent guilty pleasures.

As you may know, I write for About.com on the topic of Portuguese cooking. In that capacity, I regularly try recipes here at home, with my daughter as the main guinea pig. Most of them turn out pretty well, and a few of them are dudds.

Sometimes I find that the very best recipes are those I don't think about too much. If I just cook with my gut, instead of my head, it tends to work better.

Friday night was just such a night. I was tired after a long week. My daughter was tired after a week of school and skating. I really just wanted to order out, or buy a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store but I knew I was almost at the end of the payment period for my column and really needed to write a couple of recipes. So I pushed through.

And, amazingly, without even thinking about it, I found myself producing the Portuguese equivalent of Karen's famous meal!

It turns out that Shrimp Mozambique (Camarão Moçambique) and Batatas Fritas (Portuguese Fried Potatoes), while naturally never as amazing as Karen's meal, is pretty darn good, and for the same reasons that her meal is so unilaterally adored.

The shrimp that I prepared are a bit spicy, whereas Karen's are not, other than the bite of the horseradish in the cocktail sauce. The potatoes are round slices, rather than shaped like french fries. There is no blue cheese sauce at all. BUT, both dishes are finger foods, just like hers, and you can't stop eating them. They were addictively good--if I do say so myself! And they are perfect for TV viewing and socializing with.

So, Karen--while I can never hope to compare my meal with your signature meal--I hope you will allow it to be the Portuguese Karen Florence meal.  It would be an honor.

Off to the Hunt!

Last weekend I attended a wine tasting class that was specifically about Portuguese wines, which is not an easy thing to find. Typically those classes tend to focus on a certain type of French wine, say, or a region of a country and its wines and, at any rate, Portuguese wines tend to be under the radar.

This one was held at Barcelona, a restaurant in West Hartford, CT, not too far from where I live. The instructor was Gretchen Thomas, the Wine and Spirits Director for the Barcelona Restaurant Group, and she did a fantastic job.

Amazingly, she even did a good job on pronunciation. I was prepared for the usual mispronunciation of the letter “J,” for example. Most people assume it is spoken the way it is in Spanish, where the J is turned into an H sound. In Portuguese it makes a “ZHH” sound.

Once I was in Blue Apron, which is a fancy charcuterie in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I used to live and they actually had the delicious São Jorge cheese. It’s from the island of the same name, which is one of the Azores and when I traveled there I had it several times. I said to the guy behind the counter, “Wow, I can’t believe you have this!”

“Oh, Yes, the São HOR-hay, “ he said. “It’s quite good.”

“Yes, I’ve had it in the Azores, but it’s pronounced São ZHORJE,” I said.

“Hor-hay,” he said back.

“In Portuguese they don’t pronounce the letter J like an H,” I insisted.

“How much of it would you like?” he asked, ending the conversation while simultaneously not acknowledging my expertise on the subject. I’d like to say I stopped going there, but I’m afraid I am completely unable to boycott good food sources.

It is conversations such as those that make me the fan of wine drinking that I am.

I am certainly no expert on Portuguese wines, myself, but I’ve probably had more of it than most people I know. I have been to Portugal many times and I have always had good wine for cheap. And when I say cheap, I mean CHEAP. Over there a good bottle of red from the Alentejo cooperativas could cost about $3.00.

I am also no expert as regards wine tasting in general. In fact I must here confess that I really don’t understand wine tasting (although I find the idea of it thrilling). For example, I watched our instructor in fascination as she talked about a certain wine, swished it around in her mouth and then spit it into a cup. This is something I never do with wine. I drink it.

I am able, also, to see the differences in wine viscosity, and even to vaguely understand what about the wine making process causes different thicknesses and colors. But darned if I can figure out what the heck difference it makes to me.

I am getting better at discerning the previously mysterious interpretations of wine flavors, though. Whereas before the notion that a wine might have undertones of blackberry or coffee bean, or (shudder) freshly cut grass was gibberish to me, I can now detect hints of other flavors. Just not freshly cut grass.

One of the most interesting aspects of the class was about Port wine (Vinho do Porto in Portuguese). Port has a very complex and fascinating history that is intertwined with the history of merchant shipping, European politics and culture. When I think of Port, I think of a bunch of Victorian men sitting around in the smoking room after dinner with cigars and sipping a glass of fine Port, whilst chatting about the day’s hunt.

I mirror that practice myself, down to the last detail. I sit in my living room, sipping a ruby red glass of Port. I just delete the cigar, since I don’t smoke and skip the part about discussing the hunt, since I don’t do that either.  Also I am the only one drinking, since my daughter is 17. In my case it’s more like just sipping the Port—period.

It was very cool to finally figure out the differences between all of the types of Port. Tawny, Ruby, Ten-Year, etc. were all labels that I did not previously understand. If you want to learn the differences too, just click here to read about it in my About.com article on the topic.

And how about that fox, eh?

Open Farm Day

Lola, the baby alpaca

The trouble is, I can't decide if I am a Laura Ingalls Wilder wanna-be (see my last post, Yes I Can), or a Farmer stalker.

Well, just to clarify I don't actually stalk farmers (or anyone for that matter). But I happen to have moved into a town with a lot of small farms in it and I find myself fascinated. Last weekend my town held its annual Open Farm Day, where many of the town's farms allow visitors and have various activities going on. Most of these farms aren't open on a regular basis, so I was really looking forward to it. (Hey, I can't afford to be that picky about my good times, here in the wilds of Northern Connecticut...)

I have no illusions about my ability to actually be a farmer. It's hard work, no doubt about it. I just finished reading a fantastic book, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, which I highly recommend. It is the true story account of a East Village journalist who interviews a young organic farmer, becomes completely fascinated by his life and ends up falling in love with him. They move together to upstate New York and start a very cool farm together.

What's so cool about their farm it is that they decide to sell their products only to year-long subscribers, and their goal is to grow/raise everything that their members need to eat, from soup to nuts (well maybe not nuts, and they don't actually sell soup, but you could make soup from all the stuff they sell).

This was one of those rare non-fiction books that reads like a novel. I couldn't put it down and I think it is because it actually mixes romance (and I mean the romance of agrarian living--not hearts and kisses romance) and high ideals with real-life grueling, back-breaking work--which is the truth about farming.

So, as I was saying before I digressed into a book review, I know I couldn't hack the farmer's life. I'd give up and go to Whole Foods, I have no doubt. But I am drawn to it for reasons I'm not entirely clear about. Certainly there is a desire to simplify and slow down, but I think it is more than that. Somewhere in me is the wish to create more, in all aspects of my life.

So I visited a bunch of the farms. One of my favorites was the alpaca farm, Schoolhouse Farm, down on East Street. I drive by it several times a week, and I always crane my neck to catch glimpses of the alpacas over the little hill by the side of the road. One time I saw one of them stretching itself just the way my dog stretches when she first wakes up. It was a perfect downward alpaca yoga position. Who knew?

On Open Farm Day the owners had a 3-month old alpaca named Lola on a harness and were walking her around. You could pet her, and one stroke made is completely clear why alpaca is one of the most expensive yarns you can buy. She was soft beyond description, and completely adorable.

I then made a quick pit stop at Lost Acres Apple Orchard, where you can buy very juicy peaches and pick your own apples (unfortunately they are not organic, but they told me they spray minimally). I make a mean peach crisp and a really good Portuguese dessert, Pêssagos Assados com Vinho Tinto (Peaches Roasted in Red Wine).

I also visited my favorite farm around here, The Garlic Farm, which I go to at least once a week for organic produce at their farm stand. This is where I buy the tomatoes I use for my Portuguese Tomato Sauce and the eggplants for ratatouille, among other things. The farmer, Gary, gave a tour and told us about losing entire fields due to rot from heavy rains.

I don't know if I have a metaphor in my own life for something like that--losing a whole field worth of potentially money-making produce. At least not on a regular basis. My car got driven into a tree last spring (not by me) and wasn't worth fixing. Maybe it's like that?

At any rate, since moving here I have so much more admiration for real farmers--ones that actually live and work on their farms and who care about making them successful.

Yes I Can

My first ever canned whole tomatoes

I’ve always thought that the process of canning--putting up food for the winter-- sounded romantic. Not romantic like a candlelit dinner, exactly, or watching a sunset with a handsome guy. But romantic as in I picture a log cabin and the smell of the fire while preparing fruits and vegetables from the garden for the long, blizzard-ridden winter ahead.

I do love log cabins, and I love the smell of a wood fire. In fact, now that I have a real fireplace, instead of just a beautiful but useless marble mantlepiece, I light a fire every night starting in the Fall. And I don’t even mind cleaning up the ashes or hauling in the wood.

But I don’t like the cold and I wouldn’t want to brave an entire winter full of swirling snow without a furnace or a nearby restaurant and grocery store. My Little House in the Prairie scenario has to have a way out.

However, I think there is something to be said for the middle ground and I do believe that we, or at least I, have learned to take our food for granted. I also think consumerism is rampant in our society and that we are burying ourselves in garbage—much of it plastic.

So I have been trying, little by little, to remind myself and my daughter where the food comes from and what is involved in getting it to our table. Moving to a farming town this last year has both inspired that and made it possible.

So putting up some of that food for the winter has naturally followed, at least in my farmer-wanna-be mind. My friend, Karen, who grew up on  a farm, has known how to can her whole life. Every year she grows a huge vegetable garden and when the tomatoes get ripe, she cans like nobodies business.

When she came up for a visit last weekend, I asked her to teach me how to do it. We went out to a local farm and bought a bushel of plum tomatoes and a case of mason jars at the local hardware store. The tomatoes weren’t organic, which I would have preferred, but plum tomatoes are best for canning  because of their low water contents and all I could find locally in organic were other varieties.

So I had to compromise—which I think is my whole point here anyway. I really enjoyed the experience of canning a dozen beautiful glass jars of whole tomatoes. I loved it enough to do some tomato sauce next, both the Italian kind and the spicier Portuguese tomato sauce, and I might even freeze some of the other amazing organic vegetables that grow here so that I can have them in the dead of winter. And I intend to at least move in the direction of growing some vegetables and making more things from scratch.

But I'm not getting rid of my furnace. So there.