An Outing to Douga

            We really needed to get out of our routine this weekend, get into the countryside, feel some earth and rocks.  Douga was the perfect destination.  Theoretically less than 2 hours southwest of Tunis, Douga is a significant ancient archaeological site.  I say theoretically because we can never seem to find our way out of Tunis to the A-3 highway that leads straight to this ruin.  We even called two friends before leaving, one a life-long resident of Tunis, and both of them were sketchy about the directions.  So once again, we inched our way along the map, trying to decide if the phonetic Arabic names on signs might be the Engish spelled names on the map.  It was all good, however.  We had a tank full of gas and a wonderful picnic lunch and it didn’t exactly matter if we ever actually got there or not.

            Did you catch the “once again”?  Ya, this isn’t our first attempt at Douga.  We tried it a little over a year ago when our sons were visiting from the US.  We had the day off of school because of the Aid holiday and decided to make the daytrip to Douga.  It never crossed our minds that the site would be closed for the holiday, which it was, but after the many hours of backroad sidewinding it took us to get there, we weren’t leaving without at least a little peek.  The four of us scaled a sandstone hillside and had about 30 seconds of a view of the remarkably well-preserved theater when a guard blew a whistle at us and began chase.  We ran like middle-schoolers back down the hillside to our car and screeched away.  And that was our memory of Douga.  

            It’s a good thing we didn’t see the entirety of this site during that preliminary glimpse or we would have been too depressed.  This is a large ruin with many intriguing carvings, sculptures, and mosaics.  The most impressive part, however, are the soaring pillars framing the spectacular Tunisian farmlands.  All day, our breath was taken away by the rich soiled fields in various states of cultivation all over the countryside.  “The breadbasket of the Roman civilization” is not hyperbole.  Tunisia is blessed with ongoing plots of farmland and they know well how to sustain it and get perfect yields from it.   

            So it was a healing day.  We got reconnected with our host country, with the land that grows our healthy food, and enjoyed some warm fall sunshine.  After seven hours of driving… do the math… we were finally getting back into town when Kaye Syrah called to spontaneously invite us to a home cooked dinner.  Great life, right?

The Blessed Event

     We were rushing out our front gate Saturday morning when our gardener caught us and exclaimed, in his way, petite tortoise!  Whaaa??  Remember my posting Tortoise Ranch where I speculated what might come of our indigenous gramps tortoise meeting the cute, younger girl we introduced?  Well, babies have appeared.  We don't know exactly how many we have yet.  We think they have just emerged from their egg sacs, still bearing the evidence of their embryonic relationship to that nutritious capsule.

They are so tiny.

Allan can't stop poking through the mature aloa plant where they have made their habitat trying to assess how many we have.  So far, we have seen only two at any one time and we can't know yet if we're seeing the same two or different combinations.  I am hoping it is two.  Two sounds like a responsible number.  Allan is hoping for more like ten.  I'm not sure why.  So here they are:  our first tortoise family photo.

Don't they look happy?

Les Frites

            We recently discovered how to make a pretty good French fry.  It wasn’t an explicit goal.  I usually don’t go looking for ways to deep fry any foods, less because of the health detractions and more because they make a mess out of my pans and stove top.  But one Saturday, my husband wanted to try the beef from a different butcher at the market and I thought I would give our favorite steak au poivre a try.  Dorie Greenspan has a nice recipe in Around My French Table with the accompanying recipe for the requisite accompanying frites.  When I read it through, it sounded doable and the result was very satisfying.  Here’s how it goes:

1.     Wash potatoes and pat dry.  We leave the skins on, but if you peel them, wash and dry them at that point.

2.     Slice into French fry slices.  The thinner the slices, the crispier the French-fry.  If you like a more tender potato inside, make them thicker.

3.     Fry potatoes in peanut or canola oil at fairly high heat just until they are blanched, meaning softened on the inside, but not yet browned.  Keep batches small so as not to crowd the pan.  Drain on paper towels.  Save your oil.  Cool the blanched potatoes or even put them in the refrigerator to finish at a later time.

4.     Finally, fry the cooled potatoes again at high heat until browned to your liking. 

5.     Season with an excellent quality salt, like fleur de sel.  Since the salt will sit on top of the food, this is a time to use the best salt you can find.

Awakening the Appetite

            Nothing tastes particularly good.  Unmemorable food experiences from the past week blur in my mind with me numbly putting hand to mouth, chewing, swallowing, and walking away.  My two breakfast eggs were eaten, more like inserted into my mouth, while dressing for work.  They were followed by multi-vitamins, which tasted no different from the eggs. My blasé lunch salad was eaten on my feet while supervising children.  Salad eaten- back to work.  Dinner with Allan has consisted of a couple of elemental ingredients:  bread/ham or bread/eggs and when the bread ran out, and our shop was closed for the day, we were saved by some take away foods from our charcuterie. 

I can’t decide what to eat.  I think I’m partially suffering from decision fatigue, written about by my wise counsel Kaye Syrah.  With the start of school, my creative juices are just about tapped out by the time I get home.  Mostly though, I know that I’m lovesick.  Love is so surprisingly visceral and when our boys left for the US on Tuesday, back to university, the oxygen left our house and an actual physical ache overcame my body, like the way you feel for several days after you’ve had the flu:  tender, tired, no appetite. 

We went to the market this morning because we need food.  We got basics:  carrots, zucchini, onions.  The produce looked fine, but didn’t really give me any thoughts.  Then I tracked back to the fresh herb sellers I had passed at the entrance.  I stood for a moment and let the mint and dill and cilantro smells actually enter my senses and my memory.  

Then I knew what I wanted:  Ranch Dressing.  Yep.  But Ranch Dressing is a gateway food and it can lead to salad, and baked potatoes, and steak, and some Latin inspired foods, too.  Then I’m on an appetite path again and Allan and I will have a nice dinner tonight while we remember how we live when it’s just the two of us.

Fresh Herb Ranch Dressing

2 cup mayonnaise

1 cup crème fraiche

1tsp. minced fresh chives

1tsp. minced fresh parsley

1tsp. minced fresh dill

½ tsp. minced garlic

½ tsp. minced onion

¼ tsp. sea salt

¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Lemon juice to taste

Blend all ingredients in a sealable bowl.  Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.  Adjust ingredients as desired.  Halve all ingredients for a smaller batch.

More Fun with Canning Jars

            This was fun to do for a dinner party this weekend.  These are a couple of a dozen individual cheesecakes baked in various canning jars.   

They are real cheese cakes, containing not just cream cheese, but ½ pound of Neufchatel along with crème fraiche.  The topping is roasted nectarines with some lemon basil and thyme for an herby infusion. 

For those of us no longer living in graham cracker land, this brand of cookies made an acceptable substitute.

           You should take into account, if you make these, that you and your guests will be eating a storage container full of rich dessert, but most of the guests were able to make peace with it. 

I won’t even pretend to rewrite this recipe.  It is from the blog Chez Pim and she has nicely broken down the steps in the recipe to walk you through it.

Simply Onions

            This seasonal food lifestyle continues to point out the naïve spots in my thinking about food production.  I am fully prepared for greens, and citrus, and artichokes to come and go, but I guess I did always think that onions were perennial.  Well guess what?  There is also an onion season, when they are fantastic, and then there is an off-season when they are dodgy or completely unavailable.  Now is the season and they are firm and potent. 

            I am a little nutty about collecting canning jars right now.  I used precious suitcase space to bring some back from the US this summer and when I was in Florence last weekend and saw an amazing selection at a grocery store, I filled our insulated wine bags with empty jars instead of the wine I had been instructed to purchase.  Look how cute they are?  Just dream of what could be put away in the baby food and milk bottle sizes.  I do.

            Canning and preserving food is a hip topic in the food world these days.  Here’s an inspiring blog: Saving the Season, with a soon to be published book.  I read this and then think, yes, I’m going to the market right this minute and I’m going to spend the rest of the day processing whatever looks great.  But then we don’t actually need to stock up our pantry like we’re “preppers” and I might like to do one or two other things in a day besides canning food.    I think I’m more in line with the Italian style of when you are already cooking and you’ve got some extra, pop it into a jar or two to have again in the not too far off future. 

            Giorgio Locatelli recommends putting some of these onions in jars as a future flavor cache.  The directions are my paraphrase.

Balsamic Onions

1.     Peel a batch of tiny onions, leaving the stem intact.

2.     Combine equal parts sherry vinegar and white wine (begin with 250 ml of each and adjust if you need more to cover your onions). 

3.     Add onions and parboil until just tender.

4.     Strain onions from liquid, allow to cool at room temperature and remove the outer layer.

5.     In a heavy bottomed pan, large enough to hold the onions.  Add onions, sprinkle with enough brown sugar to get some on all of the onions and then gently toss over medium heat until the sugar melts, caramelizes slightly, and covers the onions.

6.     Add balsamic vinegar to cover the onions and simmer briefly.

7.     The onions are ready to eat at this point or you can put them in sterilized jars, making sure to cover all onions with vinegar.  Cap the jars with sealable lids and process in a water bath.  When jars have cooled, make sure the lid is fully sealed before putting them in on a dark shelf for storage.  If a jar isn’t sealed, either reprocess with a new lid or put in the refrigerator to eat within two weeks.    The flavor will improve with time, but eat within 6 months.