Spice (20 page)

9.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.

10.
Place the
sarikopite
on a heavy baking sheet and repeat the process with the rest of the phyllo and filling, making 8 pies.

11.
Brush the top of the pies with the butter-oil mixture and bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until golden and crisp. Serve hot with a little glass of ouzo for sipping.

Serrano Ham with Blood-Orange and Fennel Salad

Versions of this dish have been on the menu at Oleana for years now, a light antipasti that bursts with flavor.

Serrano ham is a flavorful Spanish cured ham, available at specialty cheese shops or gourmet food stores. You can also order it online at www.formaggiokitchen.com; Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of my favorite local shops. Sliced Serrano ham can be wrapped well in plastic and frozen. Prosciutto is a fine substitute but has a milder flavor. In any case, it is crucial that the ham is sliced thinly enough so that any fat left around the edges will melt in your mouth. Ask your butcher to slice the ham as thinly as lightweight paper.

Blood oranges are in season from mid-December to early February. They are wonderfully tart and give bright acidity to the peppered fennel and salty ham. After you’ve sectioned the oranges, it’s a treat to drink the juice. You can also freeze it to use in the C-licious Cocktail (page 37).

In November, this dish is wonderful with in-season persimmon instead of blood oranges. In the summer, I use peppery arugula mixed with the fennel. I like to season the fresh raw fennel with extra black pepper.

This antipasti is particularly delicious paired with a glass of delicate, dry Manzanilla sherry from Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

S
ERVES
6

2 bulbs fennel, stalks trimmed and tough outer layer removed

Salt to taste

Fresh black pepper to taste

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 blood oranges, sectioned (see page 72)

12 fennel seeds

1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

12 green olives, pitted

12 very thin slices Serrano ham

1.
Cut the fennel bulbs in half lengthwise and then in quarters. Remove the core by cutting it out at an angle. Slice the fennel as thinly as possible the long way and place in a medium mixing bowl.

2.
Season the fennel with salt and plenty of cracked black pepper. Stir in the olive oil.

3.
Toss in the orange sections, fennel seeds, parsley, and olives.

4.
Place two slices of ham on each plate, side by side. Spoon ¼ cup of the orange mixture on the center of each slice of ham. Spread the mixture out evenly over the ham so that when your guests take each bite, they taste a little of everything. You can also roll the ham up and serve it as finger food or an hors d’oeuvre.

Chicken Egg-Lemon Soup with Grano and Sumac

This variation of the classic Greek egg-lemon soup called
avgolemono
is for lemon fans. It’s one of my favorite soups; its smooth, velvety texture comforts me. See note on grano, page 88.

M
AKES
8
CUPS

1 cup grano, soaked in water overnight

8 cups rich chicken stock, preferably homemade

½ cup plus 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice (about 2 ¼ lemons)

4 egg yolks

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

½ teaspoon sumac

1.
In a medium saucepan, bring 8 cups of water to a boil over high heat. Drain the soaked grano and add it, little by little, to the boiling water. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer the grano for 30 to 40 minutes until it is soft. Drain.

2.
In a medium saucepan, bring the chicken broth to a boil and add half of the cooked grano (about 1 ¼ cups). Reduce the heat and simmer for about 10 minutes to concentrate the flavor of the broth and make the grano as tender as possible.

3.
Allow the soup to cool down to a warm temperature, and then purée it in a blender until it is very smooth and thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If the soup is very hot when you blend it, it may cause a suction in the blender and pop the top, so be careful to cool the soup.

4.
Pour the purée back into the soup pot and add the remaining grano. Bring it to a boil on medium heat and reduce the heat again to a simmer.

5.
Meanwhile, in a small mixing bowl, whisk together the lemon juice and egg yolks.

6.
Ladle a cup of the hot chicken soup into the yolk mixture, whisking vigorously. Repeat with another cup of hot soup. Add the egg-lemon mixture to the pot, still whisking.

7.
Bring the soup back to a simmer slowly, still on low heat, stirring constantly to prevent the egg yolks from curdling but allowing them to cook through and thicken the soup a little more.

8.
Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle each serving generously with sumac.

9.
If you have bits of shredded chicken from a homemade chicken stock, you can stir in a cup or two of shredded meat. The grano will keep absorbing liquid (semolina is known for this), so this soup may get a lot thicker when left in the fridge overnight. You can thin it out with more chicken stock.

GRANO

Grano
is whole durum wheat. I’ve become fond of grano since it was first introduced to me by Paula Wolfert, when she came to Boston in 1998 to cook with me after finishing her book,
The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean
. We created a meal from the recipes in her book, finishing with Turkish-inspired vanilla ice cream with grano and grape must, which is a molasses made from grapes. Grano, when cooked properly, plumps like little dumplings, and the dessert tastes like an amazingly creamy, caramely rice pudding.

As a culinary adviser to the Whole Grains Council, I’ve cooked with grano a lot lately in my quest to get more whole grains into America’s diet. I work with Sunnyland Mills’s Mike Orlando—who distributes grano, bulgur, and kamut all over the country—demonstrating to big companies such as Campbell’s Soup, Pepperidge Farm, and Disney World how delicious these grains are.

I hope you will enjoy the wonderful texture and flavor that grano gives this soup and find other uses for it as well. Grano freezes well, so cook a big batch of it and freeze some. Try stirring it into your yogurt and eating it for breakfast with some honey like they do in Sicily. Or sprinkle it over ice cream as Paula Wolfert does in her book, and add some fruit sauce.

You can find grano at Corti Brothers (see Resources, page 358). To read more about grano online and for a list of places to find it near you, go to www.sunnylandmills.com.

Shrimp Brik with Pistachio and Grapefruit Charmoula

Brik is a savory deep-fried turnover from Morocco or Tunisia. Mine taste like spring rolls, enhanced with Moroccan spice. Traditionally, brik is made with feuille de brik or brik pastry: paper-thin crepes that are very difficult to find. Phyllo dough is a fine substitution. If you prefer to bake the pastry instead of frying it, that will work with phyllo but not brik.

In Moroccan cooking, charmoula refers to a condiment for fish, but it can be either a dry spice rub or—as in this recipe—a relish made with onion or shallot, cilantro, and spices. I gave this charmoula a twist, celebrating the grapefruit, which is in season in late November.