Will YOU take the Buy Local Challenge?

It's the Buy Local Challenge, hon!

The last full week of July (is it THAT late in the summer already?) is the week that Maryland farms are challenging everyone to buy at least one local item from a farm this week. But moreover, the best way to meet the challenge is to eat local this week, as much as possible.

That doesn't mean you have to trek all the way out to a farm, though that's the most direct way to do it. You can go to a farmers' market or even a grocery store that sells local produce, dairy and meat. You can go crabbing, or eat at a restaurant that insissts on using locally grown ingredients. Or you can grow your own damn local produce. All these things meet the challenge in spirit, and are a great idea.

I've already met the challenge, and I hadn't even realized it, by buying locally grown corn from Anne Arundel County at Eddie's of Mount Vernon. What will you buy?

Lunch today

Very simple: chicken salad on lettuce leaves from lettuce I grew myself. The chicken salad is the lovely stuff from Graul's. Yes, it was because I ran out of bread. Now I don't think i can ever eat it with bread again.

Note about posting

Posting will be sparse over the next week or so, due to non-food things on my plate. I hope to resume soon with some posts about the delicious food I found in Rehoboth, my World Cup final meal, and the still-impending revisit to the Beltway Snacking series.

World Cup Buffet: Gazpacho (ESP - Spain)

Spain is closer than it's been to the World Cup than at any time since 1950, when they came in fourth. Saturday's game against also-never-been Paraguay was surprising in that Spain just didn't find their footing against a team everybody said would certainly lose. Both teams missed opportunities to score, but Spain finally did in the last ten minutes, with no help from what some said was an incompetent Guatemalan referee (that's one story of this World Cup: incompetent referees).

Country: Spain (IOC/FIFA Abbreviation: ESP)
Nickname of National team: La Furia Roja (Spanish, "The Red Fury")
Number of World Cups they have appeared in: 13
Highest finish: fourth place (1950)
Common foods: seafood (showcased in paella), ham, beans, migas, flan, eggs/omelettes, gazpacho
Number of Spanish restaurants in the Baltimore area: There are several tapas restaurants in and around Baltimore, so Spanish food isn't hard to find.
Number of Spanish restaurants in the Washington area: Same as with Baltimore.

Paella can be a time-consuming and expensive dish to prepare, and with the all the meat from the other buffet dishes - bobotie, German sausages and Uruguayan asado - something cold, refreshing and vegetarian would be a nice change. The solution is kind of obvious: gazpacho.

I have made gazpacho a few times before, whenever I am faced with a glut of tomatoes in the summer. The basic recipe for this cold soup is not difficult. Blend together in your food processor or blender the following: bread crumbs, fresh diced tomatoes with diced cucumbers, peppers (bell and/or hot depending on your taste), diced onion & garlic with tomato juice, red wine vinegar and olive oil, herbs such as basil and parsley, and salt, pepper and (again to taste) Tabasco sauce. Serve with a dash of olive oil and chopped onions and/or cucumbers. The amounts of ingredients will usually vary greatly depending on the recipe. Even the Food Network has dozens of gazpacho recipes, some that are very tomato heavy and others where the other vegetables overpower the tomato (yes, tomato is technically a fruit). Some people like a chunky gazpacho but I prefer mine extremely smooth.

Some recipes omit the bread crumbs altogether, which is not a big problem for me since I don't like the grainy texture the bread crumbs sometimes give. Still it seems there should be some crumbs in a traditional gazpacho recipe. So when I finally did make my own, using a recipe from Anne "with the random Cookie Monster voice" Burrell, I had to put in the requisite bread crumbs, from bread I made myself no less. Burrell mandates 8 slices of bread for 2 pounds of tomatoes. Burrell's recipe is good, but I actually cut back on some of the bread the second time I made this.


Most people probably would recommend against freezing gazpacho for a whole year, but I did just that. The texture is a little grainy but the tomato tang is still very strong and the freshly-thawed gazpacho feels quite good on a 104° day. Cilantro, cucumber, red onion and olive oil are all good garnishes for your gazpacho.

That is it for our World Cup Buffet. We have our semifinalist teams in place for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa: the Netherlands take on Uruguay and Germany take on Spain. The losers of each match face off for the title of third place finish, while the winners go on to the big finish on Sunday! And while I won't be preparing a buffet or anything, if you feel the need, you now have a menu.

World Cup Buffet: Weisswurst (GER - Germany)

Last week, Germany routed England in the quarterfinals with a crushing 4 - 1 victory, and followed that up with an even more crushing 4 - 0 victory against Argentina. This is Germany's 12th trip to the semifinals, and it should be no surprise with the way they play. Or with the way they eat - all that protein!

Country: Germany (IOC/FIFA Abbreviation: GER)
Nickname of National team: Die Mannschaft (German, "The Team")
Number of World Cups they have appeared in: 17
Highest finish: winners (1954, 1974, 1990)
Common foods: pork (often in sausage form), chicken, game meats, fish, potatoes, carrots, turnips as side dish, many breads, cakes and spaetzles.
Number of German restaurants in the Baltimore area: Haussner's is long gone, leaving the Eichenkranz as the only German restaurant in the area. There are several German markets in town, not to mention the Amish Markets in Cockeysville and Dundalk.
Number of German restaurants in the Washington area: several, including the Café Mozart, Old Europe and Café Berlin, and again, various German and Amish markets.

The German love for sausages of all kinds makes the wurst the best option for this World Cup dish. As noted on Wikipedia, there are more than 1,500 varieties of sausage in Germany. It is the quintessential German food. Fortunately for me, I had to look no further than my freezer for some Weisswurst (white sausage) I bought from Binkert's a little while back. Weisswurst - or moreover, Weißwurst - is a veal, pork, parsley and cardamom sausage specifically found in Bavaria, and until the advent of modern refrigeration and freezer technologies it was easily perishable. That is, you made them early in the morning and ate them by lunch. There is a specific way to prepare Weisswurst, as this video showed me sometime back:




See? Simple.

So to translate: boil a pot of water, then turn it off and drop in the Weisswurst until the skin bursts, about 8 to 10 minutes. Eat using your preferred method of the two mentinoed above, preferably with a genuine Bavarian pretzel, a Weissbier of some sort, and a traditional Bavarian sweet mustard such as Handelmeier's mustard. I had to make do with a pretzel from Auntie Anne's and some spicy mustard (yes, Bavarian sausage fans - blasphemy I know). It was too early in the day for me to drink anything harder than a soda. Perhaps the sausage was sitting in my fridge for too long, because after ten minutes of sitting water that was boiling when I turned it off, the skin had done little more than flake. Another 5 minutes and I just took it out of the water. I got a firm sausage with a distinctively veal smell (of course) and a mild and wonderful parsley flavor. And yes, I tried eating it both ways. And yes, I ate it without a fork each time. The side dishes may not have been authentically "Bavarian" but they still tasted good nonetheless.

Yes, I know I should have the authentic mustard and pretzel. I couldn't find it. Sue me.
Next time I will.

The final semifinalist in my World Cup Buffet menu gives us a nice respite from all the meat and bread I've been writing about. Bavarians, if not most Germans, probably would scratch their heads at the pairing of curried meatloaf, pancakes, asado beef and white veal sausages with a most popular Spanish soup that works well in 100+ degree heat. Can the Spanish team stand up to the Germans? Who knows? But perhaps gazpacho can stand up to, if not complement, a nice Weisswurst.

World Cup Buffet: Asado (URU - Uruguay)

Uruguay's nail-biting victory over Ghana brings them into the semifinals for the fifth time, and for the first time since 1970. After Argentina's and Paraguay's elimination, Uruguay stands as the only South American team left in what originally looked like it could have an all South American semifinal. Food-wise, it's all as well. The cuisines of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay are remarkably similar: Spanish, Italian and German with some indigenous and African influences here and there. So if Argentina and Paraguay couldn't make it to the semifinals, at least they are here in spirit, through Uruguay's food.

Country: Uruguay (IOC/FIFA Abbreviation: URU)
Nickname of National team: La Celeste (Spanish, "The Sky Blue")
Number of World Cups they have appeared in: 11
Highest finish: winners (1930, 1950)
Common foods: beef, beef and more beef, Italian foods (pasta, pizza), milanesas, alfajores (cookies made from corn meal and wheat flour), chorizo, chivitos (little sandwiches of ham, steak, cheese, mayo, tomatoes and lettuce)
Number of Uruguayan restaurants in the Baltimore area: ummm...
Number of Uruguayan restaurants in the Washington area: also, none, though there was one Uruguayan bakery in Queens, New York I found a while back on a trip. Back down here, the closest thing we have to what you'd find in Uruguay is the daily meat-fest at Brazilian restaurant chain Fogo de Chão.

Uruguay has so many different foods they claim as their own - milanesas (breaded foods, including the surprisingly named "suprema Maryland", which is a breaded chicken. You KNOW this is going to pop up as a recipe on this blog sometime in the not too distant future), chivitos (described above), and various Italian foods due to the fairly large waves of Italian immigrants into Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina - pasta is quite popular in Uruguay, as is pizza (Napoli style, of course) and ñoquis (gnocchi). But the most quintessentially Uruguayan (or Argentinian or Paraguayan) of all foods has to be the asado.

In South America, one side (or tira) of asado is a cut of the ribs, but crosswise, almost like a strip steak. Fortunately, the asado cut is one of the less expensive cuts of beef, and though fattier it is also more tender and flavorful. As the Asado Argentina website notes, "Although often translated as short ribs, asado de tira is also sold as long, somewhat thin, strips of ribs. Chuck ribs, flanken style(cross-cut)." Because it's July 4th weekend, anything even remotely resembling beef ribs was sold out, but I did a hand on a small portion of short ribs ($7.50 / lb at Wegman's). Can you believe they made it boneless? I wasn't looking for that. So I will have an oddly rib-free short rib, asado-style.

Goya has various adaso rubs: with or without pepper, with or without cumin, and so on. An asado in the Uruguayan/Paraguayan/Argentinian style needs to have oregano and garlic. I chose Goya's pepper asado rub, to add a little kick.

The last important thing about proper asado is the method of cooking: it should be done over wood (a la parrilla). Charcoal is an easy to find substitute, so I am using that. The location is my sister's Fourth of July picnic. The ingredients are simple, almost Sandra Lee-like in their simplicity: short ribs (again: boneless short ribs?), olive oil and Goya's asado seasoning.

Los ingredientes

I simply rolled the short ribs in olive oil and adobo seasoning, and then a family friend slapped them on the charcoal grill. After about an hour, they were still pretty raw - probably an effect of the charcoal grill not getting that hot. So I cheated and had him slap 'em on the gas grill that they were using for a few other things. Besides, it got enough of that charcoal-grilled taste to pass muster for me. About 20 minutes later, it was medium-rare and ready to go.

The asado is in the back

Everybody loved the adaso short ribs, which ended up juicy and fatty as expected, and with a nice garlic salt flavor. I couldn't really taste the oregano as much with Goya's brand as I would have liked, so in the future I will need to add a generous amount of dried oregano to the mix. But in general, I was extremely pleased.

Uruguay: Tierra de Carne

The menu for the first semifinal game is set. Now we move on to the other one, starting with the land of sausage: three-time World Cup champions Germany.

Because it's the Fourth of July

What does Steven Raichlen know about hamburgers? A lot, man, a lot. Happy Independence Day!

The Swedish Chef: Pöpcørn

The newest Muppet vid (H/T Nerdist, where I found this)

World Cup Buffet: Pannekoek mit Aple (NED - the Netherlands)

Long-time readers may remember that I visited Amsterdam a few years ago, to experience the multi-ethnic cuisine of Holland's largest city. I noticed delicious foods from Indonesia, Suriname, Italy, Ireland, India, Argentina - and a mixed boat itself of Dutch cuisine. While the hutspot in our hotel was, um, something to be desired, I had some good pancakes from a little restaurant in Den Haag, delectable stroopwaffels from the Albert Heijn supermarket, and more nasi goreng than ik kan schudden een stok bij.

Although I'm more familiar with Dutch cuisine than Brazilian, I can find another time to better familiarize myself with the foods of Brazil, after the Netherlands' shocking upset over a Brazilian team that came surprisingly unglued after the Dutch came back to tie up the game.

Country: The Netherlands (IOC/FIFA Abbreviation: NED)
Nickname of National team: De Oranje (Dutch, "The Orange")
Number of World Cups they have appeared in: 9
Highest finish: final game (1974, 1978)
Common foods: pancakes, lots of meat (particularly beef), cheeses out the wazoo, Indonesian and Surinamese offerings, vlaamse frites
Number of Dutch restaurants in the Baltimore area: 0 (the Dutch Kitchen in Cockeysville is Pennsylvania Dutch - that is, Amish/German - and not Dutch at all)
Number of Dutch restaurants in the Washington area: 0, but again, there are quite a few German and Penna. Dutch markets around, which are your best bet for finding Dutch foods.

Pancakes in the Netherlands are a bit different than the ones here in the US. Whereas we like 'em fluffy and thick, the Dutch prefer theirs larger and more crepe-like. And again, a pancake here is pretty much a sweet breakfast offering. In the Netherlands, pancakes can be served any way - sweet, savory, plain, chock full of lots of stuff - and at any time. For a typical pancake with syrup, the most similar to what we'd find in the US, the syrup is less sweet, thicker and darker than the high fructose crap we generally prefer here. I brought a box of pancake mix and a bottle of pancake syrup back with me from the Netherlands after I went. The mix is still in my fridge waiting to be used. The syrup is sitting in my pantry waiting for me to use the pancake mix. Or at least they were until Saturday, when I found out that a box mix actually stays pretty fresh if left unopened in the refrigerator for - yes - two years.

The instructions and ingredients on the side of the Albert Heijn brand box of pannenkoek mix were in Dutch. Sadly I could not remember enough Dutch to muddle through the recipe. Thankfully I had Google Translate on tap to give me a pretty accurate translation. The one befuddling thing was the liquid measurements, which were in deciliters. It seemed that 8 deciliters (roughly 3 1/3 cups) was a bit much, but it turned out to be just right for this box mix.

Just take the box mix, 2 eggs and half the milk, mix it together until smooth. Add the rest of the milk and continue to stir. Then take a knob of butter and melt it in a pan, and pour the batter in the pan, turning it until it covers the entire bottom. Cook a minute, and flip over the pancake when ready and cook for one more minute. Serve with syrup. I brought some Dutch-style syrup back with me, since ours is so sweet. The closest thing you should use to get the full-on Dutch experience would be molasses, but you can use many other things as well. I made one pancake with thin apple slices:


I just cooked it a little bit longer after flipping it. They also recommend, as translated from the side of the box: "...ham, salami, cheese or fruit, such as raisins, cherries, apple, banana or pineapples. Serve the pancakes with white and brown (caster) sugar, jam, syrup, honey, ice cream, butter or cream." Again, these are breakfast, lunch, brunch, dinner or dessert pancakes. Do what you will with them. I have enough batter that I might just freeze the rest to use for later. One 400 gram box makes about 6 large pancakes.


And so ends the first dish for our four World Cup semifinalists. The Netherlands will go on to face Uruguay next, and a typical Uruguayan meal will not exactly feature pancakes. And since the other South American teams were all knocked out, Uruguay's cuisine will have to represent.

World Cup Buffet: Bobotie (RSA - Republic of South Africa)

Over the next week I will be posting about recipes and foodstuffs from each of the semifinalist countries in 2010's South Africa World Cup, and - of course - the host country. We start in the host country of South Africa, which got eliminated in the first round. South Africa's cuisine is an eclectic mix of Dutch/Afrikaaner, English, Indian, Malay and of course the various indigenous South African cultures that make up about 90% of the population.

Since I don't have enough money or time to make all of these dishes, the best I can do is write about some of my experiences with them, and make others. With South Africa, we need look no further than that most famous South African "meatloaf" - bobotie.

Country: South Africa (IOC/FIFA Abbreviation: RSA)
Nickname of National team: Bafana Bafana (Zulu, "The Boys")
Number of World Cups they have appeared in: 3
Highest finish: eliminated in the first round
Common foods: beef, lamb, curry, dried sausages, mealie (maize meal), ostrich, seafood on the coasts; sadly, indigenous foods have declined over the last century.
Number of South African restaurants in the Baltimore area: 0
Number of South African restaurants in the Washington area: 0, though there is one in Charlottesville (Shebeen) and one way up in New York City (Braai)

Bobotie is best described as a curried meatloaf with an egg/custard topping baked on top. It likely has Malay origins but has easily been adopted by the population at large. From what I understand, every self-respecting South African housewife has her own tried and true bobotie family recipe. My friend Alan is a South African expatriate, and his mother also has a recipe. I didn't ask for it in time to write this post, but Alan & his mother might be amused to find out that I have tried to make bobotie before. And wouldn't you know, it didn't turn out too well for me.

There are many recipes for bobotie online. The one I used when I made it was one such online recipe. Another easy to follow one is on the Africhef.com website. Or you can use a South African cookbook. A typical recipe for bobotie includes the following, based on ingredients from a popular South African cookbook. (UPDATE - The book in question: Magdaleen Van Wyk's A Taste of South Africa, which is that rare cookbook that has a photo of just about every recipe from the book).

2 lbs minced meat (beef, lamb - make sure it's lean. Alan tells me the beef here is so much fattier than he ever saw growing up in South Africa. So find as low fat and as corn-free a ground beef as possible)
milk & slice white bread (to soak in the milk)
finely chopped onion
raisins and almonds
chutney and apricot jam
curry powder, turmeric and various chopped herbs
salt
oil
eggs (for binding and for the custard on top)
bay leaves

After soaking the bread in the milk (some recipes say to squeeze out the milk, others are very specific that you don't), mix it and all the other ingredients together except for the oil, one or two of the eggs (depending on the recipe), half a cup of the milk and the bay leaves. Bake at about 350° F (180° C) for 40 to 50 minutes, then mix the remaining ingredients well and pour on top, baking for an additional 10 minutes.

The recipe I used was not any of the ones from above. I probably should have used a shallower pan instead of my favorite loaf pan, because my bobotie came out too soft and wet, with more of a scrambled egg topping than a custard one. Again, I will need to try this out again. Maybe I'll ask Alan if he'd be willing to let me use his mother's recipe perhaps?