Speculaas & Okroshka
Chapter 1: Speculaas
I adore speculaas. I remember my Dutch grandmother giving my sisters and I giant speculaas cookies the size our collective heads when we were kids, and I have been on the hunt for a good speculaas recipe for quite some time. I've also been looking for speculaas molds (because they aren't really speculaas unless they're in the shape of something Dutchy), but I can't find any locally, not even in the Dutch specialty shops, and the few I've found online are astronomically expensive. So I've used regular cookie cutters in the past. It totally feels like cheating.
On a trip to the Okanagan last month, I mentioned my sad plight to my aunt, who not only told me she had my grandmother's original speculaas recipe, she even had my grandmother's original speculaas molds! I HAD NO IDEA MY GRANDMOTHER HAD SPECULAAS MOLDS! I was quite excited by this nugget of information, and asked my aunt to email me the recipe and joked that she should remember me in her will vis-a-vis the molds.
To make a long story short, my aunt gave me both the recipe AND the molds a few weeks later via another aunt. She said she never used them and since I seemed so keen on them, I could have them. They are absolutely marvelous . . . . hand carved and VERY detailed:
(There's a second small man-shaped mold just out of frame). They all come with holes in the back so you can hang them on your walls as decorative ornaments, which is very cool. I'm just giddy with glee about these. I'm all about family heirlooms, and since there aren't a lot of heirlooms in the family, it makes the ones that remain all the more special. And kitchenware/food related heirlooms are the best because 1) I love cooking and baking and 2) they're items you can use, as opposed to items you put on a shelf and look at. If I had a choice, I'd choose a kitchen full of hand-me-down equipment that was tested and true over a kitchen full of brand new, brand-name items. I like it when an object has a story. This is probably why I'm a history nerd at heart. And why I love Antiques Roadshow.
ANYWAY. My stay in Pender was dogged by a lot of rain, so one cruddy afternoon, my aunt and I made Speculaas using my grandmother's recipe and the molds. The recipe is perfect: just the right texture and taste (although next time I'm going to use more spices because I lika the spices!). Using the molds is another story. There must be a trick to it that we don't know because getting the cookies out of the molds is really difficult! There are so many tiny depressions that popping out the dough without losing the detail is nigh impossible. Also, the dough has to be really cold, because once it warms up even a little bit, you have no hope at all. Regardless, I attacked the process like the picky perfectionist I am (thereby extending a 30 minute task into over an hour) and I think the results -- for a first-time user -- aren't that bad:
And yes, they were tasty, and yes, they are looooong gone. If anyone out there wants the recipe, just mention so and I'll email it to you. One last thing, and this goes for any cut-out cookie, not just speculaas: how do you deal with the nut issue? This happened to me at Christmastime too . . . how do you cut out a cookie unmessily when it contains nuts that don't want to break off cleanly under a cutter?
Chapter 2: Okroshka
I had no idea what okroshka was until a few weeks ago. It's basically a vegetable & meat (and egg!) soup with a buttermilk base. Interesting! I found the recipe on one of my "10ish sites I surf when I'm bored an unmotivated at work" , chowtimes.com, which is a food/restaurant blog. I like it because it's very educational when it comes to Asian (especially Chinese) food, it has thorough reviews of restaurants around the city (and not just the fancy or well-known ones either), but most of all, its recipes are both inventive and easy to make. I came across this entry one afternoon and it looked really intriguing to me. Here was a Ukrainian dish I had never heard of, it sounded like it had good taste potential, plus I've been looking for some cold meal recipes I can make in the summer when its too hot to turn on the stove. So I printed it out and stuffed it away in my avalanche of unorganized recipe pile and kind of forgot about it.
Fast forward to last Monday. A co-worker of mine and I went out to the Memphis Blue BBQ House because we had been discussing barbecue and our recent cravings for MEATMEATMEAT, so it seemed like the logical place to go (plus it's only three blocks from where I live). We let our collective lack of breakfast and intense craving for MEATMEATMEAT cloud our judgements just a wee bit. We ordered a sampler platter -- the smallest platter on the menu, mind you! -- and when it came out, it was a bit of a shock. It contained a bit pile of pulled pork, long ribs, short ribs, sausage, brisket and chicken along with coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, french fries and cornbread. At first, we were all BONZAI! and I must say we did a pretty impressive job of attacking the platter until we were both sighing heavily and moving around like giant balloons at a Macy's Day Parade. My half of the leftovers had to have been a couple of pounds AT LEAST. I didn't have to eat a full meal for the next day and a half. On the evening of night two, I looked at my leftovers and got a little green in the gills at the thought of even starting to tackle the contents. And then I remembered the okroshka recipe. It called for cold chicken or cold sausage. And here I had both! So I went out and got the requisite ingredients and made it with the chicken and the sausage and every piece of pork I had left over.
Voila le result:
It should be a bit more white, but the broth was muddied a bit by all the barbecue sauce still on the meat (plus I added some smoked paprika to tie in that barbecue flavour to the rest of the soup, she said, as if she knew what she was doing). I was a little hesitant to try it because I've only ever used buttermilk in baking. I've never actually tasted it on its own. But I have to say the soup is really good! I'll definitely make more of it this summer, and probably without the meat, just to keep it even lighter.
And thus ends my longwinded international heritage cooking adventure!