Did I mention unusual foods recently? Here’s something I bought today:

Salak, snake fruit

Mine looks a bit different than the googleable ones, I reckon it’s a different variety. It has both snake optics & haptics. Two almond-sized seeds inside are surrounded by a bit of flesh.

The flesh/stone ratio is similar to that of a lychee - so there’s not much for the price. In texture it’s like a mango, smells bubblegumy and is a bit acidic in taste. Nothing very fascinating, although I made them disappear too quickly to be very scientific, so maybe I missed something.

On the very day that Amazon sent out my cheapo (25€, a rock-bottom deal, if you ask me) 1Gb Sandisk Sansa m240, I came across a bling version of another 1Gb cheapo mp3 player trekstor i.Beat organix Gold, costing 800 as much. It’s like a blinged-out Pontiac Aztek. Rolls Royce it ain’t…

Unusual foods have a strange tendency to land in my shopping cart, so yesterday I bought Pluot of the sort Brontosaur Eggs:

Touted “The fruit of this summer”, these are strange-looking (my shot with flash doesn’t do them justice, they have sick pale-greenish tones) plum-apricot hybrids, grown by Royal in Spain. As usual, I looked things up in wikipedia, a click away from  this oddity. What does it mean that something is 1/3 plum? 1/4 - fine, 3/16 - OK, but 1/3? Why is it not a multiple of some power of 1/2? Taken that one would have to combine them for quite an eternity. They must have started early, I reckon.

An aside:
In ground school, we were asked to construct 60 degrees using compasses and a ruler. I proposed: “let’s bisect 90°, bisect the second of 45° angles, then the first of 22.5°s, then the second, then the first and so on - I told the teacher that I think we would get to 60 after some number of steps. I was really down, when I learnt that the actual solution was so trivial. It was many years later, that I reminded myself of this and realized that theoretically my solution was fine. With my mid-ground school knowledge I could have got myself to the notion of infinity, just that I stopped at “some number”

I make this dish a couple of times each year, during the chanterelle season. Although the original recipe called for porcini or slippery jacks, I never felt like trying it with anything other than chanterelles. From “Encyklopedia sztuki kulinarnej” tom 2 “Kuchnia Rosyjska”

400g fresh chanterelles
300g potatoes
1 onion
2-3 tomatos
olive oil
2 Tbsp butter
100ml creme fraiche
2 bay leaves
salt & pepper

• Wash the mushrooms, quater/halve/do nothing, depending on the size.
• Peel & dice tomatos, chop the onion.
• Preheat the oven to 230°C
• 1 Tbsp butter -> in the frying pan, add chanterelles, Cook for ca. 5 minutes, until more or less done.
• Add tomatos, bay leaves, creme fraiche, salt & pepper. We’ll mix this with potatoes later, consider it when salting - be very generous.
• Cover, cook for 15 minutes on low heat, stirring from time to time.
• In the meantime, slice the potatoes, fry them in olive oil until golden. Also fry chopped onion with 1 Tbsp of butter.
• Combine mushrooms, potatoes and onion in a baking dish. Bake for 15 minutes @ 230°C.

The thing is quite heavy on the stomach, better for you if it serves 4 ;-).

Do you know what an echo looks like?  According to my daughter - it’s like a Mercedes.

In the last two weeks or so, I was in a pesto fever. I have been trying out different pestos with different varieties of ingredients. It usually took at least two days to eat a single pesto batch, so it was a pesto-intensive time. I won’t give any proportions as it was all done on a whimsical basis.

The first one was supposed to be a more or less (I haven’t used parmesan) classical pesto genovese. Blend pine nuts with garlic, blend in basil & pecorino romano, adding olive oil slowly all the time, salt to taste. This first one was too garlicky, as a result I reduced two cloves to one clove. In the next attempt, I replaced pine nuts with walnuts, pecorino romano with siciliano (stronger taste & less salty), and basil with arugula. Tasted really nice with artichokes. This time the cheese was too dominant. So for the next batch I used young pecorino sardo, very delicate and not too salty. Now it took a bit more time: roast bell peppers, soak the sun-dried tomatoes in hot water, blend peeled almonds with garlic, add seeded & peeled peppers, tomatoes, add that fabulous pecorino, as before, adding olive oil slowly all the time. This one was really good taste-wise. The only problem was that as the ground almonds got warm on spaghetti, they started smelling like almond essence, which I hate. Frankly, I always thought that the almond essence must not be natural, as it’s smell is so much stronger than the smell of ground almonds. Well, it is natural! My pesto had that aroma… :-( So with a new almond lesson learnt, I set out today to make a mega-ueber-pesto. A pesto genovese, with macadamia instead of pine nuts, and with pecorino sardo (this time a more matured one, for a better kick). Well, what can I say, it was great. Just that now I cannot even look at pesto! I’m fed up!!! It will pass in a couple of weeks, I’m sure…