I spent $8 on exotic fungus.

It was my first visit to a farm market this year, and I was excited. It's still rather early in the growing season, and the full bounty won't be available for at least a month or two, but we did find some real gems at the Arlington Farmers' Market. We purchased ripe tomatoes, vines still attached; fresh honey wheat bread; and, for dinner, some burgers from an organic producer. (These special burgers were 60% beef, 40% hot Italian sausage.) And most exciting for me, some maitake mushrooms.

These lovely, frilly mushrooms, whose name in Japanese means "dancing mushroom," are also known as hen of the woods. They grow at the feet of oak trees and are indigenous to parts of Japan and North America. The vendor who sold these mushrooms in Arlington (didn't get her name, though she did mention that her workday starts at 2 a.m., when she begins to collect her mushrooms) also sold other varieties like button, crimini, shiitake, oyster, and pom poms (white, stemless mushrooms whose surface looks like it is covered with fine feathers).

Maitake have long been used in traditional Chinese and Japanese medicines, as an immune booster. Many claims have been made about the health benefits of maitake mushrooms, including the ability to control blood pressure, glucose, and insulin; and a healthy serving of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and amino acids. Some studies have even suggested maitake have properties that prevent cancer.

So I cooked up the mushrooms with pasta and asparagus. And while I may have felt healthier, the mushrooms tasted... like mushrooms. Well, a strong mushroom flavor. I would try them again, especially if I could purchase them at a decent price from a local purveyor. Probably not worth shelling out $30 per pound at Whole Foods, but the texture made a nice departure from my usual button mushrooms, and we could all use a little boost of niacin!

Pasta with Maitake Mushrooms and Camembert
www.yukigunimaitake.com

Ingredients
7 oz. Maitake Mushrooms
1 bunch asparagus, cut diagonally
4 oz. of Camembert cheese, cubed 1½
1b. of pasta
4 tbsp. of olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp of white wine
Salt and pepper to taste


Directions
Break maitake mushrooms into bite size pieces. Add 4 tablespoons of olive oil to wok at high heat. Add maitake mushrooms, asparagus, garlic and white wine to wok, stir fry. Add salt and pepper to taste. Boil pasta to desired texture. Add cheese and pasta to wok, stir fry and serve.

Serves 4

About this recipe:

• My favorite grocery store didn't have Camembert cheese, so I substituted Brie. Brie mimicks the semi-soft texture of Camembert, but doesn't have the same powerful, tangy aroma and flavor. The pasta tasted fine, but I think it was probably lacking something. I blame Safeway.
• Whatever you do, don't let the garlic cook too long - I left the chopped garlic cook for seconds too long, and it became incredibly bitter.

Images from www.freshmushrooms.us

Mmmmm... Flemish.

Picture it: Rockville. 2007. I had promised to make dinner for four, preferably using up some of the bottled beer that was taking up room in the fridge. I craved something warm and substantial - perhaps a stew of some kind? And I was still preoccupied with a recent dinner at Le Mannequin Pis, the very small and much beloved Belgian restaurant in Olney.

Solution: A carbonnade flamande, or Flemish/Belgian beef stew, aka Vlaamse stoofkarbonnaden.

Belgian dishes are often overshadowed by the cuisine of its neighbors, France and Germany. But cooking, and the concept of "the table," are essential elements of Belgian society. In "Belgie voor beginnelingen [Belgium for beginners]", their satirical introduction to Belgian culture, authors Peter Perceval and Bert Kruismans argue that "A Belgian speaks not with words, but with beers, steaks, and biscuits." Flemish beef stew is not as well-known as waterzooi (Dutch for "watery mess"), the quintessential Belgian stew of fish and vegetables. But beef stew is a terrific vehicle for Belgian beer, the country's true claim to fame. Belgian cuisine reflects French, German, and Dutch influences, and this stew is a perfect example of this confluence of cultures: it closely resembles a recipe for beef bourguignon, a French classic, but uses beer in place of wine, a distinctive German touch.

Flemish Beef Stew
Gourmet magazine, December 2004

Ingredients
2 lb beef chuck, cut into 1- to 1 1/2-inch cubes
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 lb onions (6 to 8 medium), chopped (7 cups)
3 Turkish or 1 1/2 California bay leaves
2 (12-oz) bottles pilsner-style beer such as Budweiser
6 tablespoons Dijon mustard
3 (1/2-inch-thick) slices country-style bread

Preparation
Pat beef dry and sprinkle with pepper and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Heat oil and butter in a wide 6- to 8-quart heavy pot over high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown beef in 2 to 3 batches (without crowding), turning over once, until dark brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a plate.

Add onions and remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt to pot and cook over high heat, stirring occasionally and scraping up brown bits from bottom of pot, until pale golden, about 5 minutes. Reduce heat to moderately low and cover pot, then cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are golden, about 10 minutes more.

Add beef along with any juices on plate, bay leaves, and beer and bring to a simmer.

Meanwhile, spread 1 tablespoon mustard on each side of bread slices, then place bread on top of stew. Simmer stew, covered, until beef is very tender, about 2 hours.

Just before serving, stir bread into stew, breaking it up with a spoon, until it is incorporated and stew is thickened. Season with salt.

Serves 6-8

Some notes on this recipe:

• The bread is a very interesting way to thicken the stew, but the bread crusts didn't break down as well as the softer interior of the bread slices. Next time I'll use more slices of bread, but trim off the crusts.
• In an attempt to go full-on Belgian, I served the stew with thin, crispy fries (frites or frieten). And everybody received a shot glass of mayonnaise to dip the fries.
• The stew needed a little bit more... zazz, so midway through the cooking process I stirred in some ground nutmeg and cloves. Both are used in traditional Belgian cooking, and the spice combination really enriched the final flavor.

Carbonade flamande image from www2.lifl.fr/issac2002/localinfo.html

"Best" is... so subjective.

"Dude! I found the best pizza place in L'viv!"

This is how my office-mate greeted me upon his return from Ukraine. He and his fellow travelers were experiencing a pizza jones of critical proportions and, after much searching, they diseovered the "best" pizza in town. From his description, it sounded much like a pizza I'd recently tasted, also while traveling in Eastern Europe - flavorless crust, coated with a sauce that tasted like pure tomato paste, with a dense, firm topping of mozzarella that was deep enough to bury a set of car keys.

Our experiences with disappointing pies reminded me that cooks really do struggle with pizza, outside of Italy and, increasingly, the U.S. Of course one can find sub-par pizzas here and in Italy, but your odds of being let down in... say, Bulgaria... are considerably higher. An informal survey of co-workers who have also traveled frequently has identified pizza sauce as the most frequent problem, followed by questionable toppings (for some reason, egg and corn seem quite popular) and lousy crust. Such a shame, since pizza, when well-prepared, can be glorious - flavors of oregano and thyme and tomato mingling with tangy cheese.

The ancient Greeks, Etruscans, and Persians served flatbreads that just begged for flavorful toppings. These flavored breads eventually evolved into pizza-like dishes like Turkish pides and Indian parathas. But pizza as we now think of it didn't develop until after the Europeans began their exploration of the Americas, where they found bright red fruits called "tomatoes." The explorer Cortez collected tomato seeds and brought them back to Europe, where suspicious diners proceeded to ignore the plants for almost two centuries. (The tomato is a distant relative of the poisonous plant nightshade, and for a time Europeans believed tomatoes to be toxic as well.) Finally the continent, beginning with Italian cooks, began to embrace the tomato. By the late 1700s, poor families in Naples regularly added tomato to their flatbread dishes... and a classic Italian dish was born. Travelers began to seek out the poor neighborhoods of Naples, specifically to dine on this local specialty, which initially was prepared in two ways: the Marinara (a favorite dish of returning fishermen) and the Margherita. Pizza Marinara is topped very simply, with a blend of tomatoes, oregano, garlic, olive oil, and basil. The familiar cheese was added to create Margherita pizza, named for Queen Margherita of Savoy, who favored pizzas topped with tomato, basil, and mozzarella, to honor the red/green/white Italian flag.

After eating my disastrous Russian tomato-paste pie, I desperately needed good pizza so I could obliterate that taste memory. Thank goodness my dearest had a hot pizza waiting when I got home - freshly delivered from Valentino's, home of the best New York-style pizza in Alexandria. But now that fresh tomatoes and basil are finally in season again, though, it's time to start making pizza at home. And I already have a couple of simple, fresh-tasting recipes in mind...

Pizza with Pesto, Fresh Tomatoes, and Mozzarella
Gourmet Magazine, August 1999

Ingredients
6 ounces grated fresh mozzarella (about 1 cup)
3 plum tomatoes
1 pound pizza dough (thawed if frozen)
all-purpose flour for dusting
3 tablespoons basil pesto
Special equipment:a large pizza stone (at least 14 inches across)
a baker's peel

Preparation
At least 1 hour before baking pizza, set stone on lowest rack of oven (if you have a gas stove, stone can go directly on oven floor) and preheat oven to 500°F.

Coarsely grate mozzarella and cut tomatoes crosswise into 1/8-inch-thick slices. On a floured surface with your hands pat out and stretch dough evenly into a 12-inch round, keeping hands flat. (Do not handle dough more than necessary. If dough is sticky, dust it lightly with flour.)
Dust baker's peel with flour and carefully transfer inch round. Jerk peel once or twice and, if dough is sticking, lift dough and sprinkle flour underneath it, reshaping dough if necessary. Spread pesto over dough leaving a 1-inch border and sprinkle with cheese. Arrange tomato slices over cheese and season with salt and pepper.

Line up far edge of peel with far edge of stone and tilt peel, jerking it gently to start pizza moving. Once edge of pizza touches stone, quickly pull back peel to completely transfer pizza to stone. Bake pizza until dough is crisp and brown, about 10 to 12 minutes, and transfer with peel to a cutting board.

Cut pizza into slices and serve immediately.

Some comments on this recipe:

• Store-bought pesto works just fine, but home-made pesto is a great way to use up some fresh basil (if your basil plants, like mine, tend to grow out of control).
• I've used Trader Joe's pizza dough with great success - makes a crispy yet doughy crust. I also tend not to bother with a baker's peel - just dust your dough prep surface with flour or cornstarch and lift the dough carefully.
• An alternative: omit the pesto. Brush the crust with olive oil, and add to toppings some arugula and prosciutto. The prosciutto adds heft and saltiness, and the peppery, savory arugula contains lots of healthy calcium and magnesium.

Fantastic

This is so great.

The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, pioneers in the field of international microcredit. Three decades ago, Yunus revolutionized the international economic aid movement by making small, low-interest loans to the desperately poor in his native Bangladesh. He then founded the Grameen Bank, which offers microcredit loans and economic opportunities, and has inspired the establishment of similar institutions around the world. Today, poor but entrepreneurial people from Mexico to India can apply for microloans to start or develop a small business, to better support their families and communities.

Around holiday gift time last year, I wrote about the microcredit industry, specifically the Grameen Bank. Most microcredit lenders are small non-profits or community banking institutions, and depend on charitable contributions. I know that I'll have at least one of these organizations on my end-of-year donation list. The post lists other microcredit organizations and resources for anyone who wants more information or is interested in making a contribution.

Bread... cheese... fruit... rapture

The September issue of Gourmet magazine was dedicated to "65 Years of Perfect Fall Recipes." Ruth Reichl, the esteemed food writer and Gourmet editor, revels in the remarkable variety of seasonal foods that reach their peak in autumn, and wanted to honor these seasonal treasures with their own write-ups. Columnist Laurie Colwin writes an ode to pears, Jane and Michael Stern (whose column "Roadfood" has appeared in the magazine for over a decade) discuss their fondness for chiles, and Louis Diat, the late author and Ritz-Carlton chef, penned a tribute to tomatoes. All in all, fourteen foods are given the celebrity treatment.

Two articles in particular caught my attention. Caroline Bates, who has written for Gourmet since 1958, waxed rhapsodic about pomegranates. Longtime readers know I have a weakness for pomegranates, so I understand perfectly what she wrote in 1979:

Holding a pomegranate in the palm of the hand, one can sense its antiquity. Like the olive and the fig, the pomegranate is rooted in the mists of early civilization and has been cultivated as food and celebrated in myth and poetry for thousands of years. The tough outer skin, burnished the color of burgundy, is rough and leathery like an old animal's hide. The hundreds of seed sacs inside, bursting with crimson juice and glistening like rubies, suggest the rich jeweled colors found in Persian carpets. Halve the pomegranate neatly and the seeds, clustered in chambers separated by a pale raglike membrane, sometimes form a perfect star, a motif found in some of the oldest forms of nature.

Seeds "glistening like rubies." That's exactly what right, and the comparison to a Persian carpet is especially apt: pomegranates feature prominently in Caucasian and Middle Eastern cooking. There's just something about pomegranates (the color? the flavor? the fact that you have to work so damn hard to get to the seeds?) that inspires wonder and admiration.

An even more enjoyable article, one which I put to use right away, was Richard L. Scheffel's ode to grapes. Scheffel wrote a series in the early 1960s about edible wild foods; one of these stories,"Under the Arbor," is exerpted in the magazine:

Grapes are the epitome of opulence. Any other fruit - apple, cherry, plum, or peach - must be gathered individually. With grapes, a single flick of the wrist will weight your palm with not one but a whole cluster of berries. Languidly you lounge and begin to pop them, one by one, into your mouth, savoring their juicy plumpness, their invigorating mixture of ultracivilized sweetness leavened by a wild tang. The vintage, the time of harvest, is, in truth, the time for each, as Keats wrote, to "burst Joy's grape against his palate."

"Languid." What a wonderful word! And what a perfect descriptor for the proper way to enjoy grapes: lounging on a chaise, propped up on one arm, the free hand dropping grapes into the mouth one by one.

Each article includes two or three recipes starring the featured ingredient. When I saw the recipe for Gorgonzola and Grape Pizza, I knew I had to make it as soon as I could. (Unfortunately I was leaving for a business trip as I read the article, so I had to wait almost two weeks to sate my curiosity.) This rather extraordinary recipe combines sweet red grapes, mixed in a wine syrup, with the tart tang of Gorgonzola cheese. The flavors combined perfectly. I also tried a very naughty experiment, taking a suggestion from AS: I deviated from the recipe and layered half of the pizza with caramelized shallots. Shallots are always delicious, though this pizza didn't really need the help. Seriously, one of the best things I've tasted in a long time.

Gorgonzola and Grape Pizza
Gourmet, September 2006

For dough
1 (1/4-oz) package active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup warm water (105-115°F)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon olive oil

For topping
1/3 cup Vin Santo
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 cups red seedless grapes (9 oz), halved lengthwise
5 oz Italian Fontina, rind discarded and cheese cut into 1/4-inch dice (1 cup)
2 oz Gorgonzola dolce, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

Special equipment: a pizza stone; parchment paper

Make dough:
Stir together yeast, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1/4 cup warm water in a cup and let stand until mixture appears creamy on surface, about 5 minutes. (If mixture doesn't appear creamy, discard and start over with new yeast.)

Whisk salt into 1 1/4 cups flour in a large bowl, then add yeast mixture, oil, and remaining 1/2 cup warm water and stir until smooth. Stir in enough flour (1/4 to 1/2 cup) for dough to begin to pull away from side of bowl. (This pizza dough will be slightly wetter than others you may have made.)

Knead dough on a floured work surface with floured hands, reflouring when dough becomes too sticky, but using as little flour as possible, until dough is smooth, soft, and elastic, about 8 minutes. Form dough into a ball and dust generously with flour. Put dough in a medium bowl and cover bowl with plastic wrap, then let dough rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/4 hours.

Shape dough and make topping:
At least 45 minutes before baking pizza, put pizza stone on oven rack in lower third of oven and preheat to 500°F.

Do not punch down dough. Gently dredge dough in a bowl of flour to coat, then transfer to a parchment-lined pizza peel or baking sheet (without sides). Lightly flour parchment (around dough). Pat out dough evenly with your fingers and stretch into a 13-inch round. (Do not handle dough more than necessary. If dough is sticky, dust it lightly with flour.)

Bring Vin Santo with sugar to a boil in a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring until sugar is dissolved, then boil, uncovered, until reduced to about 1 tablespoon, about 5 minutes. Add grapes to saucepan and stir gently to coat with syrup, then transfer to a bowl. Add cheeses and pepper to bowl, then stir to combine.

Assemble pizza:
Arrange topping on dough leaving a 1-inch border.

Slide pizza on parchment onto pizza stone. Bake pizza until dough is crisp and browned and cheese is golden and bubbling in spots, 14 to 16 minutes. Using peel or baking sheet, transfer pizza to a cutting board. Cool 5 minutes and remove parchment before slicing.

Cooks' note: Dough can rise slowly, covered and chilled, 1 day ahead. Bring to room temperature before shaping.

Makes 6 (first course) servings.

Some comments on the recipe:

• I have no patience for making dough, so I skipped that step and used Trader Joe's pre-made pizza dough, which worked perfectly. It took some patience to roll it out, but I'll definitely use it again.
• I couldn't find Vin Santo, which is a sweet wine, so I substituted Marsala.
• Be careful when cooking down the wine-sugar mixture. My first batch went from perfectly syrupy to horribly burned in less than 5 seconds (the time it took me to turn away and grab a spatula).
  

I usually hate "memes."

But I was inspired by the fantastic Melissa of The Traveler's Lunchbox. A couple of weeks ago she put out a call for her international cadre of readers to nominate five things that everyone should eat before we die. She had in turn been inspired by a BBC poll, the results of which were turned into a television show in 2004. That list was both too vague (fresh fish? sandwiches? pasta?) and too esoteric (guinea pig? alligator?) to be really useful, so Melissa's readers submitted their lists of "favorites." This is truly a global list; contributers living in Paris, Thailand, Japan, and elsewhere turned out lists of both local and universal treats. Though no person could ever sample everything (dozens of readers sent in their nominations), it may serve as inspiration to seek out new and unfamiliar dishes and ingredients.

I didn't participate in her first call for suggestions (what can I say? I was in Siberia with a lousy internet connection!), but here goes:

1. A key lime truffle from The Chocolate Moose in Pittsburgh
2. A Georgian supra - can't be separated into individual elements - it's the combination of food, wine, company, and culture that makes this event special
3. My grandmother's raspberry pie, made with fresh berries picked earlier in the day
4. Soup dumplings from Joe's Shanghai, in NYC's Chinatown - a lovely, aromatic, slurpy treat that is a whole lot of fun to eat
4.a. Char siu bao from the unnamed bakery across the street - dense dough surrounding a filling of sweet/smoky meat
5. A fresh, ripe Armenian tomato - somehow in terrible, rocky soil, Armenians manage to produce gorgeous, firm, brick-red tomatoes the size of a child's head. Juicy, flavorful, and deeply, deeply delicious.

Now I'm hungry. I wonder if Grandma has any spare berries that she needs to use up...