BTW
- rosemary
- 13 minutes ago
- 10 min read
"BTW - by the way: used, for example in emails, when you are writing something that relates to the subject you are discussing, but is not the main point of the discussion" Cambridge Dictionary
It's also the name of an Indian food company that has fast food outlets, a catering service, and a whole range of snack foods, based in New Delhi. I'm not going to go into it in detail. Suffice to say that there are amazing people in the world who come from nowhere and build an empire. The man in question being SR Yadav who began with a street stall making tikki - BTW in India anyway, stands for Bittoo Tikki Wala. AI tells me that Bittoo is a name - maybe the nickname of the now CEO - tikki is the dish as shown in the picture and wala I think means a street seller. It's just a foodie hook for an oddments post. There is no main subject that I am discussing, unless - just a thought - that would refer to the topic of Rosemary's ramblings around food.
But before I leave BTW - I meant it as 'By the way', meaning here are a few things I have found here and there, that are worth a mention but not much more. Language has never evolved at such a rate it seems to me. We invent words on a daily basis - they estimate over 100 English words per week (an average of 14.7 per day). Some of them disappear as soon as they appear, some of them linger a bit longer. Some are very specialist jargon and then there's all those words, abbreviations and acronyms that make communicating on a phone so much faster. I look at our family's WhatsApp group - on David's phone - I'm not a member - and barely understand what the grandchildren are saying half the time. I find this all hugely exciting, fascinating and creative, whilst at the same time being completely overwhelmed by it all.
I guess it began with jargon. Every group, industry, area of knowledge has jargon which is generally incomprehensible to those outside of the group. I remember going to parties attended mostly by David's computer work colleagues where I would stand in a group at which a joke was being told to laughter all around and I had no idea what they were laughing at. It's inclusive and exclusive simultaneously.
So here goes with the weird, the wonderful, the must tries sometime, and the interesting. Little things from here and there - along the way, by it as well, like the street stalls that began BTW.
Zucchini leaves (and stems)
We know you can cook the zucchini flowers, and you can even buy them sometimes - well in markets perhaps. But did you know that you can cook everything?
"even the stalky top of a courgette is edible when fresh. It has a similar taste to the courgette, but with a subtle oystery-ness to it. The vine stem and leaves carry this same delicate flavour, and are delicious sauteed in olive oil and garlic, chopped into a stew or even used like tacos to wrap a filling." Tom Hunt
And Tom Hunt in The Guardian is where this came from but I decided to explore a little bit more and see if there was anything slightly more interesting and left of field, although I confess this is probably only going to be of interest if you grow your own zucchini because you won't find the leaves and the stems for sale anywhere.
Apparently they are very healthy - of course they are:
"Zucchini leaves contain high levels of calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, and vitamins A & C. Plus they are a great source of fiber too!" Urban Farm
As well as being tasty. Fundamentally you just use the young leaves - the big old ones can be bitter - and really then you treat them like any other green leaf - mostly shredding them and putting them in things where you would use other greens such as spinach and kale. And you can throw in the stems as well sometimes. Some people said you had to remove the 'prickly' bits on the stems of the leaves, and others said it made no difference. The stems in particular were a hit with a reddit commenter who said:
"I was surprised that the stems weren't just passable, but cravingly tasty." reddit
Or - with the leaves:
"they also dehydrate well and can be turned into a healthy green powder that you add to smoothies, drinks and dishes. ... The flavour is like a mild zucchini and really pleasant. Don't worry about taking a few leaves off a plant because it will survive and thrive. Just don't strip the plant of all its leaves at once." Living a Nordic Life
But I did find a couple of other things: Stuffed zucchini leaves - Urban Farm Foods - this is for the principle rather than the recipe itself because you can stuff them with whatever you like; and Zucchini stem pasta - Heirloom at Home - which is not really pasta but in which the guy used the stems from the big leaves, removed the fibres within like you do with celery or rhubarb, and then cut them into pieces to look like green rigatoni. It looked quite good - and infinitely variable as to what you added in as extras - he added bacon and actual charred zucchini.
Frasta
This is apparently a 'hot' thing, which I was amazed to find on the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival newsletter. We are talking deep-fried pasta. I think the people responsible have pop ups at various MFWF events. Well it's fast food on a food truck which pops up here and there. Their Facebook page says the next appearance is at Trust market Rippon Lea Estate on the 18th. But you seem to be able to get their products at any time on Uber Eats.
Why, why, why?
Tom Hunt again - this time using up the dregs of a tin of Golden Syrup to make a toffee sauce to pour over baked apples, explaining that:
"The invert sugars in golden syrup are the secret to achieving a silky-smooth toffee sauce, because sugar alone can recrystallise, leaving it grainy."
Which makes me think of a problem I had with Sunday's dessert - Toasted brioche with strawberries and hazelnut cream by NIgel Slater. He told me to boil some hazelnuts in a frying pan with some caster sugar and a bit of water until brown. It sounded logical, but the sugar refused to melt and just clumped together in crystals no matter how much extra water I added. Was it me? Or was it an example of what Tom Hunt said? If I ever do it again - because it was quite tasty and pretty easy - apart from those nuts - I'll try with Golden Syrup. Or honey - he says you can try honey instead - or glucose syrup.
As for his apples - use small ones. Putting them in a muffin tray is a pretty nifty idea as well.
Fusion - France and Korea from Kenji Morimoto in The Guardian. It's an odd conjunction isn't it, so I just had to see what it meant.
Well Mirepoix, named for the beautiful old town of Mirepoix near the Pyrenees, that we visited on one trip to France, is a base for many French stews, braises, soups and suchlike - a chopped mix of carrot, celery and onion, that is braised very slowly in butter until soft.
Kimchi as we probably all know by now is a Korean ferment - cabbage and various spices, which, to be honest I have yet to try but mean to some day soon. It's on my list of things to experiment with.
Mirepoix kimchi is those same ingredients, chopped and then blended in a food processor before the addition of salt, red miso, sugar and chilli flakes, The mixture is then pressed down in a jar and left to ferment for two weeks or so. This can then be used in many different ways - like mirepoix, but he gives us a taster with Vegetarian umami chilli. So if you are into fermenting - next year ferments are going to be big they say - go for it. On the left - French mirepoix, and on the right the chilli (the recipe is on the same page as the mirepoix kimchi):
Twelve grapes at midnight
I don't know where I came across this, and I'm also a bit late because we are talking about midnight on New Year's Eve.
Apparently in Spain (and now elsewhere in the Spanish speaking world) it is a tradition that on New Year's Eve, as the clock strikes midnight you eat a grape for each strike of the clock to bring good luck in the twelve months to come. Sounds like a much better way to celebrate to me than mere fireworks and a kiss from a stranger that you really don't want.
In Madrid they gather in the Puerta del Sol to celebrate. The custom apparently began in the late 1800s - so it's not some ancient tradition associated with the change of the year - and anyway what have grapes got to do with that time of year? Well apparently first of all - in those 1800s:
"it was common in high-class families to combine champagne with grapes at celebrations and parties."
But it wasn't really a big thing until 1909 when:
"In December of that year, some Alicantese vine growers spread this custom to encourage grape sales due to overproduction during an excellent harvest."
They spread it by donating barrels of grapes to the crowds gathering in the square. Now is that a unique way to start a tradition - a marketing exercise?
Add the rest of ...
Yet another example of reading recipes techniques - gone wrong in this case. And this is actually something I often do. My fault or the fault of the recipe?
On Sunday my family came to dinner. I made a stir fry that I had made before which entailed, marinating the meat, making a sauce mixture from things like soy sauce and rice wine vinegar - the details don't matter, adding vegetables to the fried meat, then the sauce. It's all very simple. However, having marinaded the meat and put it in the wok to fry, I turned to make the sauce only to find an instruction to 'add the rest of the soy sauce and' - well I can't remember what, but something else. However, I had already added all the soy sauce and whatever it was to the meat. I dont really think it made much difference to the final taste, but very annoying nevertheless.
Then a similar thing happened with the dessert. I had to caramelise some nuts, crush them, add them to a cream base and pile the strawberries on top. In this case I had not noticed - until too late - that I had to reserve some of the crushed nuts to sprinkle on top.
As it happens it was no big deal in either case, but I was really kicking myself. I had actually read both recipes a couple of times before beginning and again whilst actually cooking, and yet I failed to notice these things. I'd like to blame the recipe - why can't they list the ingredients I had mishandled separately? Most recipes these days list the ingredients in the order that they are used, so why can't they list the amount of soy sauce you need for the meat, before you get to the sauce ingredients, and then add the soy sauce you need for that? Too hard isn't it? And to be honest it probably wouldn't have made much difference, because the instructions were pretty clear. So my fault. Oops. But I bet I do it again.
Scrambled eggs and milk
Do you add milk to your eggs before beating/whisking them to make scrambled eggs? Well I do. My mother did and that's where I learnt to make them. It sounds like a good idea doesn't it - and cream even better? At the very least it means you get more scrambled eggs. But apparently it's actually a bad idea.
The Smitten Kitchen newsletter had a link to an article on The Takeout website called 11 common cooking 'tricks' that don't actually work and scrambled eggs and milk were the first one. Apparently:
"adding milk actually works against the eggs themselves. When milk is mixed in, it interferes with how egg proteins cook and set. So, instead of staying tender, the eggs separate more easily, causing them to burn and dry out. That's how you get those sad, rubbery curds that scream warming tray at a motel buffet, not Sunday brunch."
I do admit that sometimes when I have added too much milk, the eggs and the milk sort of separate out when you cook them. So no more milk for me.
It's worth a quick look to see what else you are doing wrong - testing how old eggs are to see if they have gone off?; leaving an avocado stone in the guacamole?; precooking sheets of lasagne? ... Oh dear again.
To end - a couple of recipes that caught my eye:
Well it looked pretty. It's not that hard, and there are lots of similar recipes out there. But it's the garlic butter - a whole head of roasted garlic in butter, blended with spinach, salt, pepper, chilli and then tossed with the angel hair - or spaghettini, spaghetti - whatever really. A tiny difference - the garlic, that makes all the difference. I'm going to try this soon.
This is from a Rick Stein book - Rick Stein's Food Stories which is one of those books waiting to be reviewed by me. It was a Readings bargain table book. I actually bookmarked a few recipes and this is just an example of the kind of thing you can expect. It would make an excellent first course, and is not really all that complicated, but pretty classy looking don't you think? Tattie scones, by the way - BTW - are a kind of potato cake - from Scotland I think, and I think I have written about them before.
THE FRIDGE no progress at all yesterday because I was fasting - to very little avail alas.
YEARS GONE BY
January 13
2025 - Blown away by kataifi
2024 - Nothing
2023 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Ducks, diaries, the moon
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