Fic: Recipes from Pegasus pt4
Title: Recipes from Pegasus
Rating: PG
Pairing: Subtle McShep and obvious Teyla/Lorne
Spoilers: All 5 seasons
Summary: After the stargate program was de-classified in 2010 and the initial furore died down, the book that captured the zeitgeist of the entire planet, tapping in to the almost insatiable curiosity for all things related to the Stargate Program, was Recipes from Pegasus. It was an accessible way for everyone to understand a little bit more about the people who had spent the last eight years living in an alien galaxy, fighting to keep Earth safe. It's author, Grace Mallory, the head chef of the Atlantis mission became a household name even though she appeared on a very few TV shows during the publicity tour. More importantly her stories about the daily lives of the people of Atlantis made them appear much more human than all the high octane TV specials did.
Note: this is an unformatted version (i.e. without colours and pictures)
Lunch
This chapter was going to be for appetizers when I originally envisioned it but we don't usually run to three course meals and I thought it made more sense to include the recipes we use more often than those that we wheel out when there's a special occasion. That's not to say that you couldn't use these recipes for a dinner party, especially the pâté, although some of them are rather filling. An appetizer of tuttle root soup might just put you into a food coma before you reach dessert.
Lunches are often just sandwiches, grabbed and taken back to peoples offices or labs. They're not supposed to because, for one thing, eating in the labs is generally considered unsafe. But more importantly I have to send some poor sap round to try to find the crockery or we'd have none left in the mess. Even with this collection service we still periodically have to have a city wide hunt for dirty dishes. If I bribe Sheppard (or threaten, depending on my mood) he usually organizes a couple of men to do the first sweep and they liberate most of the grubby plates and moldy dishes.
There's always a few though that we only get back when some unfortunate person reaches into a rarely used drawer or drops something and reaches under someone else's locker. Usually by that point the offending crockery is so unpleasant that we almost have to send in a hazmat team to retrieve it. I swear it's like having a city full of teenagers.
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Texas Tortilla Soup
This may seem like a complicated recipe for a soup but it's really, really good and not that complex once you get into it. And it makes a soup that works as a full meal, certainly for lunch, for all but the hungriest stomach, especially with a big hunk of bread.
We brought tomato seeds with us to Atlantis when we first came through the gate and we grew them in the botany labs because that's where plants were supposed to be grown. For a group of people who lived by thinking out of the box we were frighteningly conventional in how we thought about supplies in those early days.
Weirdly it was Sgt Markham who snapped us out of our conservative thinking. Sheppard caught him with a bag of compost, a watering can and a furtive look heading towards his room, and naturally assumed the worst. He didn't know what Markham was growing but assumed it was something he shouldn't have been. It turned out to be a couple of chili plants and a tomato vine, hardly the illicit plants Sheppard expected from Markham's demeanor.
When Sheppard laughed about it in the senior staff meeting the next morning it was as though a light bulb went on over Elizabeth's head. She knew the botanists wanted to spend more time and space on studying native plants but were being stymied by the vegetable crop. Letting the residents of the city grow their own plants, if they wanted to, was the answer to their prayers. After that most people had chilies or peppers growing on their window sills and those lucky enough to have gotten a balcony grew some of the best tasting tomatoes I've ever had.
It was in honor of Sgt Markham's unintentional genius that the botany department named the first tomato cultivar created in the Pegasus galaxy Marvelous Markham. I think he would have liked that.
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Ingredients - serves 6
8 plum tomatoes (Marvelous Markham, if it ever makes it back to Earth)
4 tbsp olive oil
1¼ cups diced onion
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, diced
2 tsp chili powder (American chili spices, not the powdered chili used in the UK or your head will blow off)
2 tsp ground cumin
4 cups chicken stock
1 dried ancho chili pepper
1 can (15oz/440g) peeled tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cooked, shredded chicken breasts
For garnish
1 avocado, peeled and sliced thinly
Tortilla chips or strips
1 plum tomato, diced
½ cup chopped fresh cilantro (coriander leaves)
1 cup shredded or crumbled Monterey Jack cheese
Sour cream
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350ºF/180ºC. Cut the plum tomatoes in half. Spread 1 tbsp of the olive oil on a baking sheet or pizza pan and arrange the tomatoes on top, skin side up. Drizzle the tomatoes with another 1 tbsp of the olive oil. Roast the tomatoes for 30 minutes, or until the skins wrinkle and the tomatoes are slightly brown around the edges.
Heat the remaining olive oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion, garlic and bell pepper and sauté about 5 minutes, until the vegetables become soft. Stir in the chili powder and cumin and cook for 1 minute. Add the stock, 1 cup of water, and the ancho chili. Bring to the boil over a medium heat, then cover, decrease the heat and simmer about 15 minutes, until the ancho chili softens.
Remove the chili from the soup and pull off and discard the stem. Cut the chili in half and discard the seeds, if desired (left in it'll make the soup hotter). Place the softened chili, the canned tomatoes with their juices and the roasted tomatoes in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Puree the chili-tomato mixture about 1 minute. Transfer the mixture to the soup and continue simmering, covered, about 1 hour.
Add salt and pepper to taste along with the cooked chicken and simmer for 5 minutes. Ladle the soup into medium bowls. Lean 3 to 4 slices of avocado against the edge of each bowl, partially sticking out of the soup. Arrange the tortilla chips or strips in a similar way. Sprinkle each bowl with a handful of diced tomatoes, some cilantro, and cheese. Top with a spoonful of sour cream. Serve immediately.
You can replace the standard ingredients with anything you have to hand. It works with no meat in it (and vegetable stock of course) for vegetarians and it's good with shrimp too. Despite having a whole chili in it, plus the chili powder, it's not really that hot. In fact most of the marines add hot sauce to it, but that's reflex brought on by years of MREs.
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Quick chicken liver pâté
In and effort to not be wasteful, cut off as we were, I always tried to make sure everything from any animal we caught or traded for, was used. The problem was that most people, including myself, aren't too fond of offal. The Athosians took a lot for bating their traps, we used some to feed the ferocious, but oh so tasty, fish we farmed in the pool just off the north pier, but I still determinedly froze a fair amount in the hope I'd find some use for them.
When SGA-1 stepped back through the gate after their trading mission to Noth they were followed by barrels rolled through the event horizon. The excitement, partly generated by the teams happy smiles, dissipated slightly when the barrels were opened and found to contain nothing but pickles. Sheppard's team's obvious happiness wasn't dented by this discovery and everyone who sampled the little gherkiny things later quickly came to the conclusion they were worth the soap we traded for them.
Anyway, these 'little pickly things', as McKay called them, with accompanying wiggling of his fingers in a Homer Simpson-esque manner, were the inspiration to use the frozen livers. The resulting pâté, served with crusty baguettes made by Sgt Stackhouse (who makes the best bread this side of Paris) and a heap of pickles was the most requested lunch in the mess for weeks.
In the recipe here I've replaced the mixture of livers from all the game birds we had with chicken liver and, as your local grocery store probably doesn't stock Kaitian schnapps, I've replaced that with brandy. All in all it's a very easy recipe that still impresses people who have only ever bought pâté from a shop.
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Ingredients - serves 8
1lb (500g) chicken livers
1 clove garlic, crushed
4oz (125g) butter, melted
2 sprigs thyme, leaves only
1 tbsp brandy
Salt and pepper
Instructions
Heat the over to 300°F/150°C
Whiz the raw livers with the garlic, 1oz (30g) of the butter, the thyme, the brandy, some salt and a good twist of freshly ground pepper, in a blender or food processor.
Spoon the mixture into a lightly buttered, small ovenproof dish, cover with foil, then put the dish in a roasting tin and pour boiling water into the tin to come about halfway up the dish.
Bake for 50 minutes, then remove the dish from its water bath and leave to cool.
Once cool, top with the remaining melted butter and leave to cool for a few minutes to set. This keeps in the fridge for up to 4 days.
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Arugula, watercress and spinach soup
I used to make this soup back on Earth as it's unbelievably simple, as rich or as low calorie as you want and very tasty. It almost adapted itself to many of the leafy vegetables we came across, grew or traded for in the Pegasus galaxy. The peppery flavor of the arugula (I grew up calling it rocket) is a perfect counterpoint to the nutmeg that's the only spice in the dish.
In fact it's nutmeg that has made a good many of our trades possible. In Medieval Europe people made vast fortunes trading exotic spices like nutmeg, pepper, cloves and cinnamon, and if we'd been interested in whatever local currency was on offer we could have done the same. I say we, because it was my stash of spices that I kept finding Colonel Sheppard raiding like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar and I was definitely taking a cut of the profits. And it was me who convinced Colonel Sumner that something to disguise the taste of dubious local produce was probably more important than the few extra boxes of P90 ammunition he wanted. Especially as the expedition included more scientists who could make their own bullets completely from scratch than was healthy to have in one room.
Once we reestablished contact with Earth, spices became our most widely traded items, outstripping even medical supplies. Carson tutted and shook his head in baffled disapproval when he was told, clearly thinking the inhabitants of the Pegasus galaxy were misguided fools who needed him to educate them. Not that I'm disparaging the medical profession but a week of specially cooked meals with no salt, pepper, herbs or spices and he was more than ready to admit he may have been over-hasty in forming his opinion.
If you can't get bags of mixed salad use spinach, watercress and arugula in a 1:1:3 ratio. You really need wild arugula rather than the ordinary salad variety because of it's really peppery flavor. It's easy to grow and will happily run wild in the garden if you give it a chance. I used to have it growing through the cracks in the concrete of the garden path of rented house I lived in in London. I could open the door and there was the best, most peppery rocket I've ever tasted growing like a weed.
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Ingredients - serves 4
5oz (140g) bag spinach, watercress and arugula salad (washed)
2½ oz (70g) bag wild arugula (washed)
1½ pints (700ml) water
1 vegetable stock cube
¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
5oz (150g) cream or crème fraiche
salt and pepper
thickening granules (optional)
Instructions
Put the spinach, arugula and watercress in a pan and cover with the water. Sprinkle in the stock cube, add the nutmeg and salt and pepper.
Bring to the boil and then simmer for about 5 minutes.
Allow to cool just a little and pour the whole lot into a blender (or use a hand held one in the pan) and blitz to a smooth liquid. Add the cream and whiz together briefly.
Reheat and add the thickening granules if you're using them. Warm it through, gently simmering if you're using a thinker.
You can use yogurt instead of cream but it will separate slightly when you heat it and it'll look slightly odd but it tastes great. You can use fat free yogurt and have a totally fat free soup, always a plus for us folks who have a tendency to store our inactivity on our hips. Or leave out the cream all together as it's still a tasty soup.
The Perfect Turkey Sandwich
Anyone who's ever met John Sheppard knows if there's a choice of sandwich he'll always choose turkey, in fact he'll always choose a sandwich in preference to most meals. I once watched him assemble a complex sandwich out of a plate of not-chicken Cacciatore, carefully separating the chicken from the bones and applying the optimum amount of sauce to moisten the bread but not soak it, all under the horrified gaze of his team. I think most of Teyla's worries came from the thought that it might give Ronon ideas about his own meal choices but the Satedan still seems content to just get his food into his mouth as quickly as possible.
This recipe, which isn't really a recipe, was the culmination of a rather heated argument in the mess between John and Rodney. We're all used to these 'discussions' and ignore them but one of my kitchen staff (newly disembarked from the Daedalus) took it upon himself to try to arbitrate the dispute as he was wiping down a nearby table. I came back to the kitchen after a meeting to find all of the kitchen staff, and the whole of the chow line, staring in morbid fascination at the corporal as he tried to settle the argument. Of course both Sheppard and McKay were looking at him like he was a crazy person because no one had ever tried to intervene in their, as they saw them, friendly chats.
After the pair left, McKay muttering about IQ tests for the military, the focus of the scientist's ire found the source of the argument discarded on the table when he moved in to clean it. It was a napkin with two opposing views for the perfect turkey sandwich in diagram form, one scrawled in Rodney's usual red sharpie and the other in Sheppard's neat blue script. The corporal, having not learned his lesson, had to be physically restrained from chasing after the two men with the napkin. I promised to keep it in case they came back for it and reassigned the man to washing pots because he clearly wasn't ready to interact with the natives.
Obviously John and Rodney never came back to claim the napkin and I don't think that was caused by the sudden onset of a virus that rendered us all amnesiacs. The napkin got slipped into one of my folders and when I was writing this book I found it again. I asked if I could include it and both John and Rodney agreed, even if it was with a little embarrassment, as long as they got their favorite meals for a week.
Getting real, unprocessed turkey breast onto the Daedalus manifest was almost as difficult as convincing a team of marines to raid the beaver-bear dams on Ixx to collect precious lanthilol honey for the Ixxian honey soup that Rodney wanted. The recipe for that isn't included in the this collection because Earth is blessed with the lack of semi-aquatic, almost-honey secreting, grizzly bears.
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Tuttle Root Soup
The fact that this soup became such a popular dish in the mess was a surprise to the select group of people who tasted the batch Teyla produced that first year in Atlantis. Teyla is many wonderful things, a great cook is not one of them. It wasn't until I heard two marines raving about the soup they'd had on the mainland that I began to suspect we'd not had the best of introductions to this Athosian staple.
In Teyla's defense tuttle roots are not the easiest vegetable to work with. In fact, they're the food that's reduced me to colorful language and throwing of wooden spoons on the most occasions. They're a lot like the smallest, flouriest potato you've ever cooked and they collapse almost on contact with hot water. This means it's all too easy to make something that's more like wallpaper paste than a tasty soup. They also stick to the pan if you don't watch them like a hawk and that first batch tasted like burned wallpaper paste. Sorry, Teyla.
The basic soup is served with a selection of garnishes that are added at the table. These garnishes change with the season and with the quality of that year's harvest. Traditionally there's a meat, a cheese and a bread on offer to the diners, with meat being the most commonly served, even if it's in tiny quantities. In the mess there was usually smoked bacon pieces (or Bacos for the veggies), grated cheese (something strong like cheddar or Parmesan) and croûtons or soup crackers. When I'm feeling nostalgic for the time I served in Germany I add frankfurters. Just pop them in the soup, sliced or whole, in the last heating phase to warm through.
To make this on Earth you need to find the flouriest potatoes you can. I use a variety called Mayan Gold which collapse nearly as much as tuttle root and have a lovely gold color that's reminiscent of the original. If you can find smoked garlic, instead of the plain stuff, then use that for a more authentic Athosian flavor, if you do, double the quantity as it has a milder taste.
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Ingredients - Serves 4 to 6
2 lbs (900g) very floury potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
3 celery stalks, with leaves, finely chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
1 chicken stock cube
1 bay leaf
½ tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp butter
2 cups milk
boiling water
Instructions
Sauté the onion, garlic and celery for 3 to 5 minutes in the oil in a large pot. Add the potatoes and pour in just enough boiling water to cover them.
Place bay leaf, salt, pepper and stock cube in pot and boil vegetables until tender. Stir the pot regularly as the potatoes might stick, especially if they're Mayan gold. Once they are tender, pour the whole lot into a blender or food processor, picking out the bay leaves before you blend to a smooth paste.
If the potatoes have stuck, all is not lost, but be careful not to scrape up the burned bits from the bottom of the pan. While the mixture is blending you can wash the pan to remove the burned on bits.
Thin the soup with milk to the required consistency. It should be thick and creamy but not so thick you can stand a spoon in it. Sorry, Teyla.
Transfer it all back to the pan and add the butter. Heat until warm, but do not boil.
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Radek's Bane (yellow split pea soup with spiced butter)
This soup, a vaguely Moroccan inspired recipe, is one I've been making for years and it's as popular on Atlantis as it was back on Earth. It's tasty, filling and ideal if the vast majority of your traded food is beans or peas. I will admit that in the first year it did, perhaps, get served too many times in the mess, although no one complained about being bored with the lack of variety. Just the after effects.
Obviously, there's a generally accepted notion that beans lead to gas, and I guess that's true. What's not widely acknowledged is that certain people are very adversely affected by some foods, producing prodigious quantities of, as Radek almost tearfully explained to me, gaseous emissions. Very noxious smelling gaseous emissions.
Radek isn't one of these people, he did however, work in a lab with someone who suffered badly. This person, who I will not name here, seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable (and there is no polite way to put this) to fart continuously as they worked.
In a large, open lab this is unpleasant but easily dealt with the Ancient air conditioning system. When it's in the confines of a transporter, it's down right rude, especially if the contents of the farts are deemed so foul by Atlantis that the transporter is quarantined as a threat to human health. Radek was only rescued when SGA-1 was recalled from a mission so Rodney and John could convince Atlantis that there was no danger.
You would think that the humiliation of being pulled, barely conscious, from a transporter, laid low by your own farts, would have had a sobering effect on the person and convince him to choose the bean free option at all meals. Not so. It was only Sheppard's threat of the brig that seemed to change his habits. I can only guess that his diet was better when he was serving on the Midway station because I think he may not have survived until the Daedalus picked up the stranded jumper if it hadn't.
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Ingredients - serves 4
10½oz (300g) yellow split peas, soaked in cold water overnight
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 large sprigs mint
good quality olive oil
Spiced Butter
2 spring onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp powdered chilli
Handful mint leaves, chopped
Handful coriander leaves, chopped
2oz (50g) butter
1tsp sea salt
Instructions
Drain the peas and cover in fresh water to about an inch over the top of the peas. Add the onion, mint and a slug of the oil. Bring to the boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for about 75 minutes. The split peas are cooked when you can crush them against the side of the pan. Cook for a little longer if necessary and add boiling water as needed to top up.
While the peas are cooking make the butter. Mash all the ingredients together then chill.
Remove two thirds of the peas and water and put in a blender. Blend until smooth then return to the pan and cook for a few minutes until it thickens.
Ladle the soup into bowls and stir a lump of spiced butter into each one. Serve with warm Arabic or naan bread.
Part 5