Lucid Food_ Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life - Louisa Shafia [41]
To serve, scatter a generous spoonful of the crunch topping over the kanten.
Agar-Agar: Seaweed for Dessert
Widely available in health food stores, agar-agar, also known as kanten or simply agar, is a seaweed that acts like gelatin. It is used throughout Southeast Asia to make candies, puddings, and other desserts. In Japan, it has recently been reinvented as a diet food because it contains no fat.
Gelatin, often used in sweets like cheesecake, ice cream, jams, and jellies, is made from cattle bones and hides—by-products of factory farms—that are treated with chemicals before the collagen within is extracted. It’s an energy-intensive procedure that conjures some unpleasant images. Making gel from seaweed, however, has a low environmen-tal impact. Cooking with agar-agar takes getting used to, but you’ll find that it’s adaptable to any flavor and fun to experiment with. Use 30 percent more agar-agar when working with an acidic ingredient like orange juice.
Poached Quince in Orange Blossom Water
Quince smells wonderful, like a pear with notes of citrus. But resist tasting the raw fruit—it is highly tannic until cooked through. Quince require a long cooking time to soften to the point of being edible, and a sharp knife is needed for slicing through their hard flesh, but their delicate flavor is worth the wait and the work. Quince grows in much of the United States—I’ve even picked some in Central Park—and they are sold at many markets throughout the winter. Serve this dessert on its own or with vanilla ice cream and the easy crunch topping from the Pear Kanten with Pecan Crunch.
Serves 4
¾ cups honey
⅓ cup orange blossom water
Salt
4 medium quince, peeled, quartered, and cored
4 teaspoons freshly squeezed lime juice
12 to 16 fresh mint leaves
Choose a medium-sized saucepan in which to poach the quince, and cut out a circle of parchment paper or wax paper to fit just inside the pan. Set aside the parchment paper.
Bring 4½ cups water, the honey, orange blossom water, and a dash of salt to a boil in the saucepan, stirring to dissolve the honey. Cut each quince quarter in half to form 2 wedges. Decrease the heat to a simmer. Add the quince to the simmering liquid, and place the parchment directly on top of the quince to cover. The paper should just barely touch the fruit. Simmer, gently stirring once every 30 minutes, until the quince is soft and cooked through, about 1½ hours. Test a wedge of fruit for doneness; it should be soft and free of its raw tannic taste.
To serve, place the quince in bowls with a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid. Add a teaspoon of lime juice and a few mint leaves to each bowl. Serve hot or cold.
spring
One way to make your meals environmentally friendly is perhaps the most obvious one of all: growing your own organic food! Aside from what it took to get the seeds into your hands, no fossil fuels are needed to get the food onto your table. What’s more, gardens or potted plants are perfect places to compost vegetable scraps, and you’ll set a good example for your neighbors when they see all of your beautiful produce. Spring is time for tending the garden, and in this chapter I’ll provide easy tips for growing food no matter how small your space. I’ll also discuss protecting plant diversity and wildlife through the planting of heirloom and native species.
Spring is a season of celebration for the fearless vegetable hunters who prize wild foods, as the earth comes to life with herbs, nuts, and fruits waiting to be plucked. Wild foraging seems exotic to us city dwellers who live far from nature, but it’s practiced by people all over the country, including many urbanites. There are delicious edible plants all around us; we need only learn to see them. In this chapter, you’ll learn about wild foods like sassafras, nettles, and morel mushrooms, along with simple ways to prepare them.
Gardening, Anywhere