Dancing with Myself

More Fun with Persimmons

I didn't grow up eating persimmons.  The only kind we had access to in lower East Texas were wild persimmons, and they're the bitter kind.  It was only a few years ago that someone convinced me to try Fuyuus.  I'm glad I did.  In a post a couple of years ago, I featured a salad made from Fuyuu persimmons and it has been one of my most popular of all posts.  Last week I came across another recipe for persismmon salad, and it is my pleasure to share it with you.  Now remember, Fuyuus are the round-bottomed, hard like apples variety of the fruit.

Fuyu persimmon salad with cumin-lime vinaigrette

This recipe for a gorgeous and spicy autumn salad made with the small, crisp Fuyu persimmons, fresh walnuts and sparkling pomegranate seeds first appeared Nov. 20, 2002.

Total time: 40 minutes
Servings: 8 servings

2 pounds Fuyu persimmons
Juice of 1 lime
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 serrano chile, seeded and minced
Salt
1 tablespoon walnut oil
1/4 cup pomegranate seeds (about 1/4 pomegranate)
3 tablespoons chopped walnuts, toasted
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

1. Cut off the tough green calyxes and slice each persimmon in 10 to 12 wedges.

2. In a small lidded jar, combine the lime juice, cumin, about half of the chile, a dash of salt and the walnut oil. Tightly cover and shake hard to mix well. Taste the dressing on a small piece of persimmon. There should be just enough chile to add a suggestion of heat. If you'd like it hotter, add more and shake again.

3. Combine the persimmons and the dressing in a work bowl and toss to coat well. Turn the salad out into a decorative bowl and sprinkle with the pomegranate seeds, walnuts and cilantro. Taste and add more salt or lime juice if necessary.

This recipe and photo are borrowed from the Los Angeles Times.  The accompanying article suggests the recipe has been around for a few years. 

Talk about Good!

I made duck and sausage gumbo for a reception my staff hosted today.  It totally rocked! 

I love duck.  I order it almost every time it's available to me on a menu.  I almost never cook it at home.  Why is that?  I'm not sure.  Too complicated?  Maybe.  Too much fat?  Probably.  Or maybe I'm just picky.  I only like the breast, the legs and thighs.  Nowadays you can buy just those parts.  How sweet is that?  So I decided to make duck and sausage gumbo for only the third or fourth time in 30 years of making gumbo. 

It took only three phone calls to find duck legs.  Whole Foods in Berkeley had them at $5.99 a lb.  What they were selling as legs was actually the leg and the thigh which was perfect.  They were packaged by the pair, so I bought four pair, which weighed just over four pounds. 

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This is what the meat off of eight legs and thighs looks like.

They also had andouille sausage, so I bought some of it as well.  Sausage adds quite a bit of spiciness to the gumbo.  Before adding it to the gumbo, I like to brown it separately in a skillet.  Like this:

But I've gotten ahead of myself.  The first thing to making a gumbo is to make "da roux."  Back twenty years or so ago, when my cousin Sue was still alive, I'd get everything ready to go, make myself a drink, get the roux started and then call her so she could talk me through to getting the roux dark enough. 

This is Sue Baby at about 7.  We'd laugh and tell stories remembered from growing up together.  I'd say "well, it's about done now," and she'd say "no, it ain't near ready.  Keep stirring that roux."  Sometimes it would take two drinks and as long as 45 minutes to get the roux dark enough for Sue-Baby--that's what I called her, my Sue-Baby.   

Is this roux dark enough sugah?

When it is right, you add the "holy trinity" of Louisiana cooking:  a mirepoix of onion, celery and bell pepper.  I always use half green and half red bell pepper--for the color.  It's prettier.  See for yourself.

Thank god I'm a better cook than a photographer.  Cook this mixture for about 5 to 10 minutes and then add to your stock which you'll have been heating in your soup pot.  For this recipe, after I boned the duck, I cooked the legs and skin and such in a good quality chicken stock, just to leach out any duck flavor that might be lingering in those bones and skin.  After straining that, I put it back on the fire and get it hot.  I used three quarts of stock for this soup.

Now it's gumbo.

This was one of the best gumbos I have ever made, and I've made a few pots of gumbo, I gar-aun-tee.  I sure wish this were scratch and sniff, but y'know if it were we'd get out of control in a minute. 

Oh, and I looked too damned cute.  Sometimes I just can't believe I was born in the first half of the last century.

I hope I feel this cute tomorrow.  I'm heading out after work looking for other Louisiana emigres with whom to share a drink, maybe a laugh or two, and memories of New Orleans.  You know it ain't there anymore, and what is there isn't what we remember. 

Happy Mardi Gras.

What's For Dinner?

Turkey Day is here again.  Besides turkey, what're you having?  I've accepted an invitation to have Thanksgiving Dinner with Leif and Susan in S.F.   Roommate Huntly accepted a dinner with some of his friends.  End of story, right?  Wrong.  Huntly feels we deserve to have left-over turkey at home, so he's decided to do a Thanksgiving dinner here on Friday.  That menu will be simple:  turkey, dressing, Brussel sprouts, and pumpkin cheesecake.  If it were being served on Thursday, we'd probably add a soup course, a fruit salad, and a green bean casserole just for luck.  Oh, and there'd be at least two and maybe three hors d'hoerves to "tide you over" till the turkey was ready. 

Growing up, Thanksgiving Dinner found the extended family at Grandma's house.  The kitchen was filled with stout women laughing, remembering holidays past, teaching the kids how to cook.  Mostly it was the girls who got stuck having to help, but I liked hanging with the women in the kitchen.  That's where all the bowls to lick were to be found.  The men were in the front room watching football games on tv, and the kids were either there or outside playing.  Liquor was absolutely forbidden in my grandmother's house, so the men had to go out to the cars for their snort. 

Dinner was never served much before about 3 or 4 o'clock.  We never sat around a well-dressed table with silver and china and crystal.  Our table would be completely covered with food.  There were so many of us that we ate whereever we could find a place to sit.  Kids usually out on the front porch.  Besides the turkey, there would likely be barbequed brisket, and fried chicken.  The dressing was cornbread.  There wasn't a recipe for making it, as much as there was a process.  Everyone was chopping, slilcing, mixing.  It was a collaborative effort, but it was my grandmother's right to mix the ingredients, usually with her hands.  I always think of it as Mama's dressing.  Being country people, the side dishes were likely to be from our own previous summer and fall garden.  There would be a huge bowl of crowder peas, snap beans cooked with new potatoes, sweet potato casserole, turnips cooked with their greens, mustard greens, and  of course, desserts.  Each woman contributed her best dessert.  My grandmother would make banana pudding, always in the same large yellow crock bowl.  My aunt Lela contributed lemon meringue and coconut pie, my cousin Sue brought the first tunnel of fudge cake I had ever tasted.  Mother often brought a German's chocolate cake.  There would also be pies made from sweet potatoes, pumpkin, mince meat, pecans, even buttermilk.  Bread was those awful store-bought yeast rolls, which are still the favorite of many even today.  All that good food and those lousy rolls, go figure.  The beverage of choice, of course, was sweetened ice tea. 

I still have a very large and extended family, only now they are seldom related to me by blood.  I have at least 6 other women whom I think of as my sisters.  I have a dozen close friends who have demonstrated to me over and over and over the true meaning of being brothers.  My cousins are made up of people whom I may see only occasionally, but each encounter is a delight.  When it comes to putting a group together for a Thanksgiving meal, there are truly rich pickings.  Over the years, I've developed quite a few of my own traditions.  I like to set a pretty table.   I like flowers on the table.  Unlike my grandmother, I drink, wine especially, and I like good wine drank from pretty glasses.  I also like to do toasts, speeches, poetry readings, spontaneous outbursts of singing.  Yeah, I like rowdy dinners, the kind that get loud because everyone's laughing.

I hope there's a lot of laughter at your family's gathering this Thursday.  There will be at mine.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Persimmon Yogurt Salad with Ginger, Red Onion and Mint

From The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen by Eric Gower.

1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
2 tablespoons red onion, minced
1 large Fuyu persimmon, sliced thin
3 tablespoons plain yogurt
2 tablespoons fresh mint, chopped
1 tablespoon soy sauce
fresh coarsely ground black pepper

Heat a small pot of water to boil. blanch the ginger and onion for about a minute, and drain. Combine all the other ingredients in a large bowl, add the ginger and onion, and gently mix. Keep well chilled.

Thank you, Eric. It's a terrific cookbook. I've bought it twice now.

Accepting Diversity

Time to 'fess up. Lately, I've been more tolerant of Moonies and Scientologists than I have been of my own cousins in Texas who are Republican identified and who think George W. Bush is an apostle sent by God himself to lead us from our present condition to salvation. I have a real hard time with that because I don't even think the fucker's a Christian. How do you deal with ignorance and remain loving? My extended family in Texas like me, they really do. I have indulged them over the past thirty years or so by giving them enough of me to like and love, yet keeping the part (my homosexuality) that made them uncomfortable out of sight, so to speak. I am no longer interested in indulging them. I want them to know just how intolerant I have become of their ignorance, their narrow-minded, homophobic, Baptist-laden shit. Why am I so angry at them?

Besides my family, I have friends in Texas to whom I have not spoken in over a year. I tell everyone who asks that I cannot talk to my friend without yelling at her, so I'd rather she think me rude for not speaking than to know me to be rude for screaming at her about how stupid I think she is. Obviously, I am taking this all much too seriously.

I'm more than willing to respect them for having a different opinion than I do, but I'm very disappointed at their low standards for leadership of their side. I don't give a rat's ass if you're liberal or conservative, but lying to people is a violation of the public trust. If they're not lying they're delusional. That does not make me feel any better.

Anyone got any advice on how to get along with idiots and bigots whom you love but whom you can't stand?