Uchiki kuri squash

My new favorite squash, the uchiki kuri (also called red kuri), is a Japanese cultivar with a teardrop shape and a beautiful reddish-orange skin. Near as I can figure out, the name uchiki kuri translates as bashful chestnut. Awwww. Not sure why bashful, but I definitely get the chestnut part, because the squash has a nice, mild, nutty flavor.

Not having cooked with it before, I wasn't sure what to do about the skin. But I know from years of writing about phytochemicals that there were certainly some important antioxidants hanging around in that deeply colored shell. I compromised by just taking off some of the skin so it wouldn't be a total loss either way. The peeling exposed the beautiful juxtaposition of green and orange you see in the photo at left. There is a similar greenish tinge in the flesh that holds the seeds in the seed cavity.

Turns out that the skin is perfectly edible, or at least in the exemplar that I roasted. The seeds, on the other hand, were encased in what I imagine dragon skin to be like. I roasted some of them with the squash and they were inedible. I will try some more roasted all by themselves, but I'm not sure the game is worth the candle, as my mother used to say (though I never knew what game she was talking about that involved a candle...was it Colonial kids playing a nighttime game of hide-n-seek?).

In the course of researching the kuri squash, I stumbled across several gardening sites with heirloom squash seeds*. In addition to the uchiki kuri, you can also get seeds for a squash called the potimarron, described as the "famous winter squash from France." The potimarron is in fact the same squash (C. maxima) but by another name. In French, potimarron is a mash-up of the words for pumpkin (potiron) and chestnut (marron). Voilà, chestnut squash. But it's not bashful, cuz, you know, it's French.

*Try this website: Seed Savers Exchange.

Frustrating old recipes

Feeling in a old-timey kitchen mood, I decided to find an old-timey recipe for all of my home-dried apples.

I stumbled across one called March Pudding in an 1877 cookbook called Buckeye Cookery, and Practical Housekeeping. The book was conceived as a fund-raiser, with recipes submitted by local housewives in Marysville, Ohio. The book sold for about $1.75, and it raised $2,000 to build a parsonage for the First Congregational Church.

The March Pudding recipe came from a Miss Lizzie March, who (I discovered through a little genealogical sleuthing) was the 20-year-old daughter of the local Presbyterian minister, William Gilmore March.

Here is the recipe as it appeared in the cookbook.

It's astonishing to me that recipes with so little information actually got published back in the day. I guess the recipes were more like sketches than actual blueprints for cooking. Maybe all of the women of the 19th century were so accomplished as cooks that they didn't need annoying little details like How much liquid goes into this batter? What kind of pan does it cook in? How hot is the oven? How long do you bake it? And I defy anyone to follow the exact order of business as described in the recipe. It simply can't work.

However, I did my best to reinterpret the information given. I didn't change any of the quantities, but had to make a complete guess on the soaking liquid for the apples. Since it was called a pudding, I made the assumption that it belonged to a class of desserts that were sort of like plum pudding, so I baked it—with much expectation—in a shaped pudding mold*. The resulting dessert was more cake-y and less dense than plum pudding. And I could NOT get it to unmold, though it was perfectly tasty. I have temporarily given up (I mean really, how many molasses cakes is a person expected to have in the refrigerator?), but I may get back to this one day.

I'm putting this out there now in hopes that someone who stumbles across this says, why of course, Lizzie March said bake but she really meant steam. Or else she baked it in some other kind of container that made the dessert easier to unmold/serve.

* The steamed pudding mold shown above is from Creative Cookware. Search on Plum Pudding Mold; they sell 1.5-quart and 2-quart molds. They also sell nonstick molds.

The Plastiki Expedition

[I thought it was time to bring this post back to the surface--it was originally posted May 19, 2009--because the Plastiki has now completed its cross-Pacific journey from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. Their website continues in their efforts to increase awareness about the massive waste stream connected with plastic bottles.]

I've written about a Japanese fellow who built a canoe out of recycled wooden chopsticks and the American dude who made a Viking ship out of popsicle sticks, but this boat (artist rendering at left) really takes the cake. (See how I distracted you with a food reference so you wouldn't notice that this post is just about boats?)

From March through August 2010, David de Rothschild (a self-styled eco-warrior and, yes, that Rothschild family) and a crew sailed 8,000 nautical miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made of recycled plastic bottles (more than 12,000 of them).

Here's a part of their mission statement:

The Plastiki aims to draw attention to the rethinking of our everyday human fingerprints on the natural world and in turn capturing the world's imagination by telling a story; that of the pioneering and sustainable design process that created and built The Plastiki...

It is our aim to captivate, inspire and activate tomorrow's environmental thinkers and doers to take positive action for our Planet and to be smart with waste, ultimately we hope to inspire people to rethink waste as a valuable resource. One person's waste could be another person's treasure.

Check the voyage out on the Plastiki website or their Facebook page. Or follow @Plastiki on Twitter.

Purple carrot juice

Carrots used to be purple (read more about them here) and in the past bunch of years there has been a mini-trend to grow purple carrots again. The pigments that make the carrots' skin purple (the flesh is still orange) are a group of phytochemicals called anthocyanins. These self-same compounds are what make most berries deep red to purple, and are also (potentially) responsible for these fruits' health benefits. So if you add anthocyanins to the already extraordinarily healthful beta-carotene (the carrot's orange pigment), you have a pretty cool vegetable.

A number of juice brands—including Smart Juice, Bolthouse Farms, and Lakewood—are now using purple carrots to make carrot juice, as well as including purple carrots in other juice blends to boost their antioxidant power. Purple carrot juice has the natural sweetness of regular carrot juice with an undercurrent of berry flavor (from the anthocyanins).

Have you ever heard of a carica fruit?

The carica is a tropical fruit that grows in South America, principally in Chile. It is related to the papaya, which is why it is also called Golden Papaya, Mountain Papaya, or Chilean Papaya. The carica is also grown in Indonesia, though I'm sure they have their own word for it (carica certainly sounds like a romance language word).

As with many tropical fruits grown outside this country, strict import laws keep the fresh fruit from reaching our markets. But you can buy caricas that have been trimmed, seeded, and preserved in a very light sugar syrup. (Though they were available at Amazon for awhile, they seem to have disappeared. I'll keep looking for them. You might also find them in specialty stores that sell Southeast Asian foods.)

So what do caricas taste like? Closing my eyes and concentrating and trying not to get too complicated, I would say they taste like a cross between pineapple and pear. But to me the one distinguishing feature of caricas is their texture: They're chewy!











Here's what a carica shell liberated from its jar looks like. It's 3 to 3.5 inches long and about 1.5 inches wide at the opening (which I propped open with a toothpick because the fruits are flattened when they're packed in the jar). You could fit a generous 1/3 to 1/2 cup of something inside a carica shell. 

Beluga lentils

In the past couple of years, as research into the phytochemicals in food has really taken off, it has become clear that the foods with the deepest, darkest colors have more healthful compounds than their pale counterparts.

Enter the beluga lentil--a small, shiny black lentil named for its resemblance to caviar. Recent research at the Agricultural Research Service (the in-house research facility of the USDA) has discovered that beluga lentils' deep hue comes from natural pigments called anthocyanins. Anthocyanins, which are currently being studied for their health potential, are a group of compounds responsible for the reddish-purple color of certain foods, like raspberries, red cabbage and pomegranates.

The specific anthocyanin identified in beluga lentils bears the memorable name of delphinidin-3-O (2-O-beta-D-glucopyranosyl-alpha-L-arabinopyranoside). Quick, say that three times fast.

Science aside, beluga lentils are just neat to eat. They have all the other established benefits of legumes and are also quick-cooking because of their size. You may be able to find them at a gourmet store, or you can find them online at Indian Harvest (though they sell in bulk amounts) or Purcell Mountain Farms ($3.95 a pound).