The Lawless Kitchen

there are true old recipes from the netherlands i know and even like, but i would not want to go back to the time we only had to do it with home produces stuff. what would be even well before a century of 5 at least.

i like cooking very much, and like the experiment of the unknown too. i just go by the wisdom of my granny, just try it at least once, wouldn't it horrible if you didn't try to taste it and found out years later, you liked it very much. that would be spoiled years.

and i am certainly not against some fushion in the kitchen.  as good as my both grannies been in the kitchen, so bad was my mum. so to escape her cooking i always was sniffing out better sources.

and it is so much easier nowadays. the same dish has often many slightly different ways to make it, so it is easy to find one that does fit. it can take a while to get the right spices together, but i can always as it at the local turkish supermarket. they do other countries herbs, spices and vegetables too. it always feels a bit like a adventure when i can take my time to see what they have.

and the home produce in the netherlands is no longer a winter of cabbages and carrots and some onions with mostly potato.
and i can use most of these in other dishes too.

and how far in time do we have to go back, even potato's are outlandish, sweet peppers and all hot peppers i would certainly miss we had them very early on already in the sixties, and thinking of it, even silly plain white and black pepper are not even european of course. all dutch traditional dishes have lots of outlandish stuff in them. nutmeg, bay leafs, clove. we may once had some inlandish green herbal stuff, we also still use of course and salt.

even back to grey bread, because the good wheat does not grow well in my part of the world.

and coffee is not so inlandish too of course, or what to think of english tea, i know it is our fault you have to drink the hot stuff. still that will be of a lesser course to expect excuses for.

no, i tried a new dish last monday, with cauliflower, i already have a vegan/vegetarian recipe, that is great, but that only covers half a cauliflower. so i tried a recipe from libanon, even without the advised mix of herbs and spices it tasted great, it is called cauliflower pan cakes, it put some onion, lots of garlic, some red sweet pepper, some  mild hot peppers too, i still have a small amount of home grown jalapeno in the freezer. i also put some cooked and sliced potato's in it, and some pea's, i do like a bit of colour in our food. made just a pancake mix from eggs, self rising flour, cornstarch and a dash extra baking soda. and no milk but just tapwater. i used some piri piri mix in it. and it tasted great, so i sent my better half to the shops to get me some spices from libanon for next time. maybe i try them next time with some chopped smoked chicken in it. or with mushrooms.

it would not only be quite empty on our plates, it is always been from everywhere we could lay our hands on it. i think we did that never in a nice way, and we only changed that maybe to just a irresponsible and still not nice way.
i cannot even draw a line in the sand to how far we have to go back in times to call all we eat, drink or used was from home turfs. even the neanderthals imported flint and salt from everywhere.  and i like the idea of one shared world better.
we could do that in a better way, but to restrict it all to some line on a map, that hardly exist in reality, i mean if people had not put up a fence you could hardly see there was another territory starting off after it.

and going by the science the brits have to swim back to siberia, good luck doing that.

and as i do not have a border on my table, i think i go tonight for chinese chicken in black bean sauce wit sweet peppers.

it was time again this week to try something new. and it helped our little turkish supermarket had a lot of new herbs and spices mixes. i made already some dishes from the north african continent and the arabian world, but i often just got the mixes as a present. and both kitchens are not shy of using quite a lot, it is not just a dash of pepper, but more the kind of a heaped teaspoon, or as much as you do like.

so this week i started with a large bag of ras el hanout, it smelled great and there are 22 different herbs and spices in it, and i got it with the words, that is a pretty good one.
my better half remembered the smell from his working days in amsterdam. but it is always hard to tell in words what you smell of course.

so i gave it a bit of a try out, i first made some patties from chicken mince just to see how it tastes, and it was great, very different from curries and the south european mixes.

and i have an old family recipe, my gran once upon a time, that was in the sixties got from a moroccan expat that longed for his homefront. it became a old time favorite, sweet green peppers stuffed with minced meat, the original must have been lamb, but that was a bit fancy in our family, so we used mostly pork or a pork and rind mince. the stuffed pepper had to be filled with the seasoned but still raw minced meat and then slowly on a low fire for a few hours in a roux sauce. just butter , or oil with plain flour and stock.

in the many years after i put my own taste a bit more in it, we like our food a bit spicy, so indonesian sambal and some ketjap worked well too, later i used more a piri piri mix from portugal with extra mild cayenne flakes. it took me well into this century before i found out the origins of the recipe lay somewhere in morocco. and today it got the back to its origins i think.

i use nowadays mostly chicken mince and now i used 2 heaped teaspoons with the ras el hanout in it. and it was great.

i often look around on the internet, and have tried to make mixes from scratch, but it can be hard to get the right spices and herbs, in the correct form. the result is usually ending up with still not what you are looking for. so this is just a nice luxury way to experiment.

next time it will be tried in the humus. such a versatile product, very easy to make too. works great on a sandwich with some greens and raw veggies with it.  yeah, i know, my kitchen is a lawless place.

that ras el hanout worked great in humus too.

and certainly not wrong in my moroccan style filled sweet peppers, that will be a keeper for sure.

so today the other bag, harissa, even it is said on the world wide web as being used like we sometimes use ketchup, on the table,
i just scooped two full teaspoons in shashuka, fresh tomato's, some red sweet peppers, an onion some garlic, i had 3 i think. some handsfull of spring onion green, always nice to have a recipe that can do with them on our shopping day, they never fit in the fridge, now they do.

so that was mostly a simple chop chop, frying for a few minutes in a bit of sunflower oil, 2 full and that means heaped teaspoons of harissa, 2 a bit smaller teaspoons of chicken stock, 7 shakes of mild cayenne flakes, and a heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika powder. , stir a bit and my trick for great tomato sauces usually is a fierce hand on the bottle of ketchup. well that will be around 2 to 3 table spoons. or maybe even fourish. and some plain tapwater, we are lucky to have it without odd substances in it. and i let it simmer for a bit, just one 4 star sudoko.

and as it was my first try, i decided to go for spaghetti with it, mostly because i ca be pretty sure how long it has too cook.
because i still had to put raw eggs in a elegant hole in the sauce, the guidelines brought me nowhere, how to stir to get a hole and break an egg in it, so i used a small bowl to break them. i put 3 in. remembered what lid fitted on my 20 cm full iron baking pan, and indeed both been ready in the same time.

it tasted really spice, as we like it, even quite hot, but yeah i think that will be a keeper too.

i even think it can have also a future in a stromboli, that taste must go wonderful well with cheese, or on a flammkuche, what is a kind of thin pizzalike structure, that can have anything that tastes nice on it, just like pizza. except pineapple of course. i do agree with the italians on that. not because it is not italian as a fruit, they need just like us christoffel c. to find out they had these great tomato's on a piece of earth humans on this side of the world had long forgotten it was still there.

and that was really stupid, such a versatile thing, that is between the fruits and the veggies. ever tried them in what nowadays must be a real bad recipe, take a very fresh white slice of bread, put some real butter on it, certainly not all the surrogates, slice a ripen tomato in slices and put on it, and shake a bit of plain white sugar on it. not too often of course, but once in a while it is a real treat. there are maybe 30 reasons to say it is not healthy, but as always that is science that can change overnight.

no kingdom for a goose.

the best way to get done with a plague is finding out if you can eat it, remarkable how much more effort is there, when something is edible. well this started many years ago with a bird.

someone lightheaded left the geese out on the brink of the sixties, and from the eighties we know it was successful. more and more of the egyptian geese showed up everywhere, at first they not seen as a much of a problem, it was a bit loud, it uses trees and nest boxes meant for owls. and seems to be able to live everywhere, where is also a bit of field and water.

officially they are not true geese, but something of a in between ducks and real geese. they are not the most colourful birds you can get, but they have some so they do stand out enough.

they never arrived on their own wing or feet, so that means they are exotic animals, and that mean they are supposed to be eradicated, but the local hunters never made much effort.
so one day i asked some why, they are not worth the bullet spend, that was more a matter of speech, they would for waterfowl use shotgun pellets of course.
they are simply not edible.

and that became a dare in my mind. so there are two routes i could take, first look for a good chinese recipe, or use the one of my great grandmother.

but first things first, i had to get a goose, so i found a hunter who after a drink or two, was willing to get me one. and after another two drinks agreed on my terms.

it must be handed over as quickly after killing to me, and they had to just leave it to me to dress it. and i preferred a male egyptian goose, which is of course a gander.
i was not new to the job, it was some years ago i had dressed a goose, but from a young age i had learned how to deal with the success of the hunt.

it was quite a cold day, so i packed it in an old bit of cloth to take it home, my better half is very shy of meat in its original form until it is ready on the platter, but for unknown reasons would never eat meat that has a bone in it after you cook it. so it would still only be me.

and i had to dress it in our small city shed, so it was not noticed. so i decided i would simply take of the full skin and feathers in one go. but first things first, look how old it is, usually the beak and legs do tell a lot, and that was okay.
so i cleaned it out of unusable parts, like the head, the not fleshy legs and the innards. and hanged it for 24 hours on the ceiling. buried the waste in the compost bin.

i decided to use my great grandmothers recipe, what includes red port whine, and plums, whole onions peeled. some orange peel, whole tomatoes and half a pot of bitter marmalade. and the usual things like bay leaves, cloves and decided to change the black pepper for some very hot cayenne peppers. and a lot of garlic. something she certainly would have used if available in her lifetime. and of course half a pound of butter.

she would not have used whole tomatoes, but her daughter and by that my grandmother, has put that to the recipe and they tasted great. it was a recipe used for pheasants mostly, geese no longer been much in fashion, and it worked great in older turkeys too. or an older hare, it was a recipe that could handle game that could have a tendency to end up chewy.

i was told egyptian goose would be hard to chew, a bit tangy in taste. what they dod not told that it would shrink.

so i put the butter in a 8 liters cast iron pan, it would fit easily, they are not even very big birds when they are dressed. checked again if the meat was soft enough.

let the heated butter brown the outside, and put the onions and tomatoes with it. the dried plums and the spices and peel. and the first drizzle of port. every half hour you have to turn the bird to its other side, and put some port in and stir the bottom from all that sticks to it.
the liquid part must stay quite thick, and you put just a spoon of marmalade and a bit of port in it when it gets too sticky.
i never use salt and certainly not in game. if it tastes a bit too bland at the end i correct that with some chicken bouillon powder. and no water at all, water and salt are risky when there is a reputation to get too chewy.

after 2 hours the gander still was shrinking, after 3 hours i only had half the bird, so that means more plums, much more port. normally after 5 to 6 hours, the meat start to loose the bones, well it did not do that at all, it just kept shrinking, and i decided to harder methods and break the carcass into smaller bits. just put more plums and port in.
decide to leave it overnight, and just slowly heating it up again the next morning.

well even after a full liter of port, 30 plums, it felt simply woody. so i decided lets pick the meat from the bones, the sauce ends up as a great one anyway, so as a kind of ragu it still could work. the sauce did, but the meat never, i could not even cut it up in smaller pieces, it was just as cutting wood. the first bite tasted as bird meat, not very goosy, more old chicken with a bit of a muddy after taste. and it was impossible to chew it into something that could easily find its way into my stomach.

so even i had checked before if it was indeed ready to cook, it had enough fat content of its own, the meat was supple enough before i started, and it had its time well.
i do agree egyptian goose is not fit to eat when cooked on the stove.

i still used the sauce, i just portioned it and put it in the freezer to go as a sauce with pork roast. i just got all the bird out, put some spoons of the marmalade in the sauce.

this recipe has no real list of how much of each, just how much is needed on the eye and taste.

many years later others smoked the raw breast meat, that has shrunk a lot too, and was not a great experience, it was edible, at least you could chew on it, but it had not much of a likable taste, it was more the taste of smoked meat that did its best. not so much the bird.

real geese do taste very nice, it is not a much eaten animal, i have no idea why. it was in my younger years always a given to have a goose on the christmas table. wild goose usually with a version of the same recipe, bred ones with a less prominent tasting version, less plums, less orange peel and less marmalade, but with apples and more tomatoes in it.
or with cherries who been kept on alcohol.

my gran always had the connections, same with pheasants and ducks. i had some good connections too, a great one for all kinds of game, but more the larger kinds. and one for sea fishes. until it became known i was an officer of the law. so with hindsight, for my table it was not my best move. and some must have met some of the legal curses of course.

and it is quite a shame, geese are now a year round plague, the once that only come over for the wintertime, not much, but the offspring of all kinds that are set free or escaped are, many are even interbreeding with each other. officially there is no longer hunting on geese possible, it can be done for pest control, but that is usually just catch them with netting and gas them, so they are no longer fit consumption.

and even finding goose from a breeder is hard, that never took of here. the egyptian goose can still be possible, but i would not like it to put an order out for that one again.