Feasting Friday- Cure for the Common Cold

Your Polymath has a cold.

Thanks to thisoldhouse.com for the pic

Just your average everyday run-of-the-mill early Fall cold, probably brought on by weird weather changes.  And not a horrible debilitating cold, just a general fatigue-y, sore throat, a little achy kind of cold.  Not overly bronchial, nor sinus-y.  Bad enough to keep me from fun stuff like girl's lunches, birthday dinners out, and writing  But not so bad as to prevent me from catching up on my TiVo, running out to Target/Costco at odd hours to beat the crowds, and reading some fun things like Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain and finally starting The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- which is not, to be honest, grabbing my attention in the same feverish way as it seems to have gripped the rest of the world.  (Note to publishers....if it isn't 100% essential to the essence and purity of the story to retain orginal names from foreign translations, take the time to change them to something that doesn't take me right out of the story everytime I read them.  Really?  Blomkvist?  Eleventy-million times?)

As it is cold season, I thought I would share my personal list of go-to try to beat the cold tips and tricks.

1.  Chamomile tea with lemon and honey.  Lots of it.  The chamomile is good for the slight queasyness that can accompany colds, has some natural anti-inflammatory properties, and can help you rest.  The honey and lemon both soothe sore throats, and the honey helps to keep your blood sugar up since you are likely to have minimal appetite.  Plus they are yummy.  And the tea helps keep you hydrated.

thanks to kshore.com for pic

2.  Throat lozenges.  I like Hall's Defense with Vitamin C for mild sore throats, the regular Hall's for more powerful relief.

3.  Crystallized Candied Ginger.  These little nuggets covered in coarse sugar are sweet enough to cut through the lack of palate, spicy enough to help clear the nose a bit, and ginger is soothing to the tummy.  I get mine in the bulk section of Whole Foods or at the local Asian food market. 

crystallizedginger.net

4.  Hot baths and showers.  As hot as you can take them.  The steam is very comforting, and lets be honest, you are probably napping a lot and if you aren't diligent, you can start to get a little ripe.  If you have those tub soothers available, they don't hurt, ditto essential oils like rosemary and eucalyptus. 

5.  Chicken soup.  Doctors have actually done studies on the famous Jewish Penicillin, and found that it really does have healing properties.  I'm not a doctor, I just know that it is one of the few things I can actually eat happily. 

This is a recipe of Charming Suitor's.  He adapted it from a Charlie Trotter recipe.  It is the chickeniest of chicken soups, with beans for extra protein, and especially delicious if you have a loaf of crusty bread to dunk in it.

I made mine in the gorgeous new slow cooker that  Cuisinart sent me....meaning I could just bung everything in the cooker in the morning, and by dinner, we had the best soup ever.  If you do not have a slow cooker, you can just do it in the oven.

Charming Suitor Chicken Soup with Flageolets

8 c chicken broth (homemade is great, otherwise use one of the lower sodium natural style canned stocks)

1 chicken (about 3 lbs)
1/2 pkg fresh thyme tied with twine or put in a sachet
1/2 pkg fresh sage tied with twine or put in a sachet
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and whole
1 onion, diced
1 leek, cleaned and diced
4 carrots, peeled and sliced into ¼ inch rounds
1 T olive oil
1 c Flageolet or other white beans, soaked overnight or 2 cans cannelini beans drained and rinsed

S&P to taste

(If you don't have a slow cooker, preheat oven to 350.)

Sweat all veggies in oil over low heat in large Dutch oven covered for about 10 to fifteen minutes. If you have a slow cooker, transfer to the bowl, if not keep in Dutch oven.  Nestle sachets in veggies and place whole chicken on top. Add chicken stock and cover.  Either set slow cooker to high and let cook 6-8 hours, or place the Dutch oven in the oven 2 ½- 3 hours. Remove chicken from stock and remove skin and bones, returning meat to pan. Taste for salt and pepper.  Serve.

To be honest, yesterday I did not have an onion, so I doubled up on the leeks, and left out the garlic whcih can sometimes upset my tummy.  I do recommend stocking up on dried flageolets, their pale jade color is lovely and they get all creamy in the soup.  If you don't have time to soak them overnight, cover them with water and bring to a boil for 20 minutes, then drain and rinse and proceed with the rest of the recipe.  I like mine with a last minute squirt of fresh lemon, but Charming Suitor likes it without.  It is a bowl of ultimate cold-kicking delicious.  And freezes quite well.

Yours in Good (if sniffly) Taste,
The Polymath

Confessions of A Food Jew

When people ask me what I love most about being Jewish, the images flash before my eyes.

Succulent slices of slow cooked brisket, moist with rich tomato-y gravy. Latkes, crisp on the outside, melting in the middle, with applesauce and sour cream. Light as air matzo balls, floating in a pool of brilliantly golden chicken soup, dense sweet noodle kugel.

I mean, yes, of course I love being a part of a religion that allows so many different ways to worship, that holds such a long tradition of philanthropy and artistry, that has such interesting traditions and rituals. Even though I have never been particularly observant, I chose Brandeis (Jew U.) as an undergraduate in large part because the school represented the best of educational excellence and social activism. But getting all the Jewish holidays off didn’t hurt my feelings. While my matriculation there did wonders for my Yiddish vocabulary, it didn’t make me any less secular. For me, someone whose upbringing always felt a little bit Jew-ish, as opposed to really Jewish, food is where I have always felt most connected to my people and my history.

Don’t get me wrong, my family isn’t non-practicing, we just found our own style. We may not have belonged to a temple, but my sister and I were both bat mitzvahed, we just did it with a private tutor instead of Hebrew school, and with a borrowed torah at our weekend place instead of on a traditional bimah. And for mine, a Chinese buffet luncheon to follow. We share the major holidays with friends and family, choosing readings from books in the living room over synagogue services. Our Passover Seders may be brief, but they have deep meaning and we take them seriously, adding our own traditions over the years.

But always, the celebration centers on food. Apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, blintzes to break the Yom Kippur fast, tzimmes on Passover. I’m an accomplished home cook, and while my regular dinner parties are likely to be based in French or Italian peasant cooking, my Jew food is pretty spectacular, thanks to my paternal grandmother, Jonnie, who shared her knowledge, her recipes, her cookbooks, and her love through the holiday dishes she prepared.

Food, both the specifics of traditional recipes, and the generic feeling of gathering friends and family around the table, is always at it’s core a Jewish experience for me. Breaking of bread, or matzo where appropriate, sharing of stories, the sense of unity created around a dinner table, this is where I feel the most direct link to our shared past. I have always believed that when a people have been forced in their history to work hard at maintaining community, bringing people together for meals becomes an essential part of how you keep faith.

This blog is likely to be at least 50% about food, my relationship with food, my relationships with other people who love food…which is about the right percentage for any Member of the Tribe, a people known for spending most of any meal discussing in depth what the next meal should be.

There will be recipes. Lots of recipes. Most of these will be mine, or else accredited adaptations or borrowings. However, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, sometimes my recipes are things I’ve been making long enough that my addled pre-Altzheimers-almost-40-year-old mind thinks I made them up, when in fact it is entirely possible I have stolen them wholesale from an old friend or classic cookbook. This can happen because for eons now I have entered my culinary successes into my computer, keeping an extensive recipe folder. Helpful when one has subscribed to eight cooking mags for nearly two decades and often takes recipes from them. Often I riff on those, use them as a starting point, substituting things based on my personal taste or seasonal availability. If it works, it gets entered in the file. But I’ve never been good at adding notes to these, so I have no idea from whence they came or if I made enough changes to call them my own. On the one hand, this is great when I travel, because all my best dishes are in the laptop and if I am a guest in your home I can make you dinner (YAY!). However, until recently, I haven’t bothered to note whether the original recipe was mine or taken off of a website or pulled from the latest issue of Cooks Illustrated, which is not so good for posting on a public blog where one can be flogged for plagiarism.

SO…I will try and be diligent about only claiming credit for stuff I know I invented, and giving proper credit where it is due. But if you are here and spot your Great Aunt Ginny’s perfect Snickerdoodles and I don’t mention her…please shoot me a private e-mail and I will rectify ASAP. Please do NOT post a comment accusing me of grand theft recipe and implying that there is a special place in hell for me. I’ll just delete you.

Besides.

Jews don’t believe in hell. Especially Food Jews.

To start us off, one from the Jonnie Files:

Brisket

1 5 lb. beef brisket
2 t salt
¼ t pepper
2 yellow onions, sliced
4 ribs celery, sliced
1 c chili sauce (Heinz is good)
1 bottle beer (I like a pale ale, but use whatever you have on hand)
¼ c water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put water on the bottom of a heavy roasting pan. Season brisket with salt and pepper and lay on top of water. Spread onion and celery over the top of the meat, then distribute chili sauce evenly over the vegetables. Cook uncovered 90 minutes. Pour beer over meat, cover tightly with foil, and braise 45 minutes per pound of meat. Remove from gravy, defat liquid, and puree juices with vegetables. Put juice in container, and chill meat overnight in fridge. The next day slice meat across the grain and lay into baking dish. Cover with gravy, and put back in fridge. Reheat covered at 350 to serve. (1 hour to indefinitely!)