Vanessa Barrington

Mendocino Abalone Plus Recipes: Abalone Ceviche with Kumquats and Abalone Chowder with Bacon

I’m not a diver but I’m a cook so I feel fortunate to have been invited on a camping trip with a bunch of abalone divers. I’m always happy to let my imagination run wild in the camp kitchen. And even happier to be able to eat copious amounts of one of the last wild foods available to us.

After my chilly weekend at Van Damme State Park in Mendocino, I have a new appreciation for abalone and the divers who harvest it. Because you know what? It’s not that easy to catch abalone. You may think, “How hard can it be? It’s not like they run away or anything, right?” And though abalone can’t technically move fast enough to flee from divers, they do have other deterrents at the disposal. As does the Calfornia Department of Fish & Game. 

 

First of all, while there are seven of species of abalone in California, the only ones the divers are allowed to take are Red Abalone no smaller than seven inches in diameter. To preserve the population, licensed divers are allowed three abalone per day with a maximum of 24 per season. The season runs from April through November with a closure in July.

 

Regulations also prohibit the use of oxygen tanks, so would-be abalone divers have to be highly skilled.  Imagine diving down to a depth of 20-30 feet in freezing water, while holding your breath. Once you’re down there, you have to find the abalone, make sure they are the proper size and species and then move swiftly to pry them off the rock with a special tool. Tip them off to your presence and they seize onto the rock, making it impossible to remove them. One strike and you’re out. The seas can be rough, and visibility can be low, adding to the difficulty.

For these reasons it’s also dangerous. Emergency responders in Mendocino County rescue about 15 abalone divers each year. Nearly every year, somebody dies while diving for abalone. Last year’s death count was three.

 

Lets say you’re diving and you make it back to the surface with your abalone and head to the campsite to relax. First you have to pry the abalone out of their shells (this sounds nicer than saying you have to kill the live mollusks), and then you must trim out their goopy reproductive and digestive organs, as well as the black edges and the tough bits of the “foot.” Finally you have to pound the hell out of them or they’ll be too tough to eat. Then you can relax while someone else cooks them (if you’re lucky). In reality, most divers do cook. Usually they grill it, poach it, or slice, pound, bread, and pan-fry it. All are perfectly respectable ways to enjoy the sweet, oceany flesh.

On the third meal, something a little different was in order. I’ve made ceviche with abalone at home previously, but I wanted to do something a little different, so I brought along some kumquats to go with the usual ceviche flavors. The chowder was entirely unplanned. It was an incredibly cold weekend and, on one of our frigid hikes, Haven and I were fantasizing about chowder. We had potatoes in the cooler. We thought if only we had cream and bacon, we could make a fabulous abalone chowder. Luckily one of the other campers had both cream and bacon so our dream came true. 

Here are the recipes—proportions are estimated. We cook by feel in the campsite.

Abalone Ceviche with Kumquats

2 abalone, sliced thinly into strips

6-8 kumquats, sliced as thinly as possible

2-3 serrano chiles, finely diced (seeds removed or left in depending on how much heat you want)

1/2 bunch of cilantro, chopped

1/2 of a red onion, cut half, then thirds lengthwise and then thin, half-moon slices

Juice of 5-6 limes

Salt to taste

Toss all of the above in a bowl and let sit for at least 30 minutes or up to 24 hours.

 

Campsite Abalone Chowder

This was truly a camp collaboration incorporating the ideas of many. One of the beautiful things about this chowder was that we were able to use the tough abalone trimmings to make a super flavorful stock. If there had been celery, I definitely would have put some in both the chowder and the stock. I used leftover cooked bacon from breakfast for the chowder, but if you don’t have cooked bacon you could sauté it in its own fat, add the onion and skip the butter if you want (or pour off some of the bacon fat and still use butter for flavor)

Stock:

2 pounds abalone trimmings

1/2 of an onion, roughly chopped

1 slab bacon

Chowder:

1/2 stick butter

1/2 of an onion, diced

2 to 3 russet potatoes, peeled and diced

1 abalone, diced

4 to 5 pieces of cooked bacon, crumbled

Cream to taste (about a cup)

Salt and pepper to taste

Put the abalone trimmings, onion, and bacon in a pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and simmer slowly for 1 to 2 hours, strain. (can be made one day ahead and refrigerated).

In a soup pot, melt the butter, add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add the broth and bring to a boil. Add the potatoes and simmer until tender. (I added water to stretch it here because the broth was super flavorful) Add the abalone, bacon and cream and simmer until the abalone is tender, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

On Smuggling, Renaissance Men & Chile Baked Beans with Nopales and Queso Fresco

I found these beans back in January while wandering around the big market in Cuernavaca Mexico. Like almost all markets in Latin America, there’s so much to look at it was a little hard to take it all in. At one vendor’s stall I looked down and there, among the usual plastic woven bags filled to the brim with posole, beans, and chiles were these gorgeous, fat, purple beans. I had never seen them before.

I stopped and stared, waiting for the vendor to finish helping another customer. Interestingly, a solo male shopper somehow picked up on my excitement and in very slow, elementary Spanish patiently told me what they were called—Ayocote Beans. He then spelled the name for me slowly so I could write it in my notebook, and told me that these types of beans are commonly eaten with molé in the state of Morelos. I’ve cooked with Steve Sando’s Ayacotes, before but I’ve never seen the purple version.

Throughout this exchange, the vendor just watched us, smiling. I thanked the man profusely and marveled on what had just happened. In Mexico, the women in the household usually do the marketing and the cooking. Sometimes you’ll see entire families shopping together, but it is rare to see a man shopping for food alone, especially one so clearly passionate that he was willing to share his knowledge with an ignorant gringa. (Incidentally, some of the people I met in Cuernavaca call this place north of the border “Gringolandia”, but not unkindly) He was either a chef or a renaissance man.

I tucked these babies in my backpack, buried deeply in layers of dirty clothing and made it through customs. I only felt a little guilty for lying about not transporting “seeds or plants.” My plan if caught was to say, “Get Out! Beans are seeds? I had no idea!”

I hung onto these for a couple months until it was time to make a celebratory bean dish. I wanted to do them justice, but didn’t want to make molé. Plus I needed something vegetarian so I went on over to Heidi Swanson’s bean-friendly vegetarian blog, 101 Cookbooks, and found this recipe which I improvised from to create my own. Basically I kept the queso and pesto, ditched the breadcrumbs, added nopales, and switched out the tomato sauce for a straight chile sauce. You don’t have to smuggle exotic beans from Mexico. I think either recipe would be great with pretty much any bean—from pintos to cannellinis, to borlottis.

Chile Baked Beans with Nopales and Queso Fresco:

3 dried red New Mexico or Ancho Chiles

3 garlic cloves

1 pinch of Mexican oregano

1 pound of beans, cooked until tender with enough of their broth to be moist but not too soupy

2 nopales

Queso Fresco

Pesto:

1 bunch cilantro

2 garlic cloves

Juice of 1/2 of a lemon

Salt to taste

Olive oil

Destem and remove the seeds from the chiles. Toast the chiles in a hot dry cast iron pan or comal until fragrant but not smoking, about 20 seconds per side.

Remove them to a small bowl and pour boiling water over. Soak for 20 minutes.

  

Put the chiles, the 3 garlic cloves, the oregano, and a few pinches of salt in a food processor or blender, reserving the chile soaking water. Process until smooth, adding chile soaking water a little at a time until the puree is the consistency like that of thin batter.

Using the edge of a sharp knife, scrape the spines off the nopales. Slice them into thin strips and then dice them. Boil for 10 minutes in salted water until tender. Drain.

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and, in a large casserole dish, stir together the beans, the chile puree and the nopales. Sprinkle with queso fresco and then bake until brown and bubbly.

Meanwhile, make the pesto. Place the cilantro leaves and garlic in the bowl of a food processor. Process until finely chopped. Add the lemon juice and salt and then slowly add the olive oil in a thin stream until the mixture is smooth and emulsified. Drizzle over each individual serving of beans.

Mexico 3: The final days in Cuernavaca

My final week was filled with great eats and as many market trips as I could fit in between classes. I really didn't want to leave and need to figure out a way to go back and stay for an extended period of time.

On a coincidentally sad note, during that final week, I was reading Mountains upon Mountains, the book about Dr. Paul Farmer's work in Haiti. When I got to the airport the afternoon of Jan. 13th and saw the news about the earthquake, I was utterly stricken after reading in such detail the incredible harshness of everyday life for the majority of people in Haiti. At the same time, my grammar lessons at the school, Cetlalic were accompanied by lessons on the social, political and economic reality for the people in Mexico. Things aren't so easy there either.

As conduct my daily life here in the US, no matter how hard any day or situation might become, I try to remember how incredibly privledged I am to always have enough to eat, a roof over my head, and the means to be a "budget traveler" in countries less well off than ours. Enjoy this last installment of photos and I promise we'll be back to our regularly scheduled recipe posts soon!

The picture at the top of this post is a rosca de reyes and it's for the special celebration called "the feast of the three kings". (incidentally, my people celebrate Jan 6th as "Serbian Christmas) This is the day in Mexico that the children go crazy for--the day they wake up at 6 am to recieve their gifts! The traditional food is this cake and hot chocolate. 

Inside the cake are 4 or 5 little white plastic babies. The people who get the babies in their piece of cake have to have a party on February 2nd, for which they provide tamales and atole. Unfortunately, none of the parties were close enough for me to attend. Fortunately I didn't get a baby because I was in the middle of moving on February 2nd and it would have been hard to have a party!

the child unswaddled.

Oh yeah, it tasted good too.

All the bakeries have roscas displayed all day and the next and people everywhere are carrying big boxes of roscas home to eat. You've got to love a bakery called "the happy turtle"

tamarind pods in the market

chilis and cheerios

Maize, maize, maize!

Crazy potatoes!

Caldo de pollo eaten en casa. I can't get enough of this.

The best enchiladas ever. Chicken, queso, crema, red rice and fried plantains!

Facing down your meat. Sorry vegans and vegetarians. 

Another crazy market sighting.

The preferred way to eat corn on the street in Cuernavaca is cut off the cob, and spooned piping hot into a cup with mayonnaise, lime, chili, and cheese. Yum.

Super cool pro-Choice poster in the bathroom at a bar. I took this photo from the toilet!

Mexico 2: Taxco

When I was in Mexico in January, I stayed in Cuernavaca pretty much the whole time studying Spanish during the week. The weekends were mostly free for day trips and wandering around the city. One day I took a bus with another student and amiga to Taxco, a town in the mountains in the Northern part of the state of Guerrero. Taxco has been a silver mining area for many years and is known for its plethora of shops selling silver jewelry. Silver is fine, but in my opinion, there are many other reasons to go to Taxco.

 

It is stunningly beautiful, the people are friendly, there are very very old and interesting churches nestled among white-washed buildings with red tile roofs. artisans doing interesting work that I hadn't seen elsewhere in Mexico, and even some of the tourist restaurants serve tasty food. 

The sun was shining that day and it was warm and breezy. A welcome change from the chill that descended over Cuernavaca about 4 days into my stay. We wandered, took photos, ate, and had a dreamy day that I'll never forget. The market in Taxco is particularly interesting as it starts in the street across from the bus station and ascends up up and up into the clouds, winding around indoors and out and,like many markets in Mexico, is a completely wonderful and slightly overwhelming maze. 

 

Artisans
 

Bean and seed pod art.

Meat drying in the market

Laundry drying

Beloved Virgin de Guadalupe

Even the walls are pretty!

An interesting dish with tortilla strips, green sauce, a firm cheese, cilantro, and sesame seeds.

Great enfrioladas (tortillas stuffed with chicken in a bean sauce with crema and queso)

The Golden Hour in Taxco

Walking to the bus, nearly sunset. So sad to leave.

Comida and Markets in Cuernavaca Mexico

I'm finally getting around to posting some of my food photos from my trip to Cuernavaca. I lived with a family there for two weeks while I studied Spanish at a wonderful school called Cetlalic How's my Spanish now? Let's just say it's better but I'm more fluent in the food of Mexico than in the language.

The entire experience was amazing. The school has a unique method of teaching grammar in a cultural, political, and social context. The teachers are engaging and super smart. The family I lived with was warm and kind and Dona Mari welcomed me into her kitchen with open arms, let me help her and take photos and answered so many questions. She said she doesn't like to cook, but I don't believe her because it's not possible to make such wonderful food for a perfect stranger unless you like doing it.

The home was comfortable and the people in the city of Cuernavaca are inviting and helpful. Cuernavaca also has a wonderful market that is large, lively, and full of delicious things to eat. I think I'll go back. I have family and friends in Mexico now. So much better than being a tourist!

Here's the first installment of photos and captions. Enjoy!

 

A typical cena (around 3-4pm) after school. Soup, nopale salad, salsa, agua de jamaica, freshly made tortillas, some kind of meat (not pictured).

Freshly made gorditas in the market. Stuffed with beans, freshly fried and then topped with fiery green salsa, crema and delicious cheese. Craving these now!

Prepping the fruit for the punche, a fruit cocktail/punch to enjoy with the traditional New Years Eve Posole.

The punche on the stove cooking. Many fruits as well as fresh sugar cane and tamarind.

 

Tacos dorados to serve with the posole. Half are stuffed with potatoes and green chile and the other half with requeson (a type of cheese).

Here is the New Years meal. Posole blanco, (traditional accompaniments oregano, lime, chile, avocado) punche, tacos dorados, enjoyed at 11pm before fireworks. 

 

These are the fireworks. It's a structure with a bull in front carried by a runner. Fireworks fly off in every crazy direction and the people in the streets run with the bulls. It's nuts.

 

Another market photo

A really cool prehispanic cooking vessel in the excellent museum at the ruins at Xochicalco, an important site outside of Cuernavaca.

Gorgeous banana blossom on the tree at the school.

That's it for now. Look for another installment of Markets and Comida in Cuernavaca soon!

Hunger Challenge Day Seven

It’s a workday and the last day and the good thing about work days is that it’s much easier to control your situation and eating opportunities. The Hunger Challenge food isn’t that bad so it’s just a matter of not exposing yourself to temptations, which is much easier on a weekday.

Breakfast is egg, toast, melon

Lunch is a small portion of the emergency soup and one tortilla with butter

Dinner brings the last two of what I’ve come to think of as the “Evil Enchiladas”.

I can’t wait to go to bed and get up again to a new day. My clothes are noticeably looser, which isn’t an unwelcome occurrence.

In conclusion, I feel changed by the experience. Never before have I paid so much attention to my emotions around food. Normally I look forward to the adventure of every meal and I love to cook with inspiring ingredients. The challenge put a huge crimp in that. Though I often do eat exactly the kind of food I made for the challenge and I know I can eat healthfully and cheaply, the pure joy of dining was completely gone and there was no room for errors or bad enchilada sauce.

I also have a clear realization of how much planning and preparation goes into eating this way. Not to mention food knowledge, equipment, time, and cooking skills. Eating well on $4 a day requires a predictable, chaos free life, something I don’t think most people have. I also feel that it’s likely that the more you are struggling, the less predictable your life is. Without the time to cook and the joy attached to cooking, I can completely understand why people fall back on the $1 fast food meals. And we’re not even talking about the issue of healthy food access, which is a huge one.

I wish I had the answers that would give people in need the resources they need to cook for themselves. Perhaps it would be community kitchens, similar to the Food Bank’s pantries. Kitchens equipped with stoves and pans and knives where people could come and share resources and work together to cook the food that will feed their families.

For me, I’m glad I can now go back to my self-indulgent ways. I’m eating more slowly, mindfully, and appreciatively than ever before. The Hunger Challenge has made me grateful for every bite and I aim to stay that way.

Here are links to all the other Hunger Challenge Bloggers. Make sure you check out their experiences too!

Agréable Dégustation - New!
Been There Ate That - 2nd year!
Beets and Biscuits - New!
Blog Appetit - 2nd year!
BroadSnark - New!
Budget Bytes - New!
Cooking Rut - New!
Cooking with Amy - 2nd year!
Heat Eat Review - New!
Hoos on First - New!
I Do Not Think That They Will Sing To Me - New!
Indoor Camping - New!
Line Storgaard-Conley - New!
Maria Niles - 2nd year!
Michael Dimock - Roots of Change - New!
Midtown Mark's Hunger Challenge - New!
Muse in Vivo - New!
My Life in Food - New!
Petit Appetit - 2nd year!
Poor Girl Eats Well - New!
Some Dreams Come True - New!
Stellajade by Sarah W - New!
Steve Sando - New!
The Guerilla Gourmet - New!
The Inadvertent Gardener - 2nd year!

Hunger Challenge Day Six

Another weekend day. Uggh. I eat breakfast (oatmeal with half a peach). Then I spend the morning making jam from the figs my friend had brought over the day before.

For lunch I have 1 cabbage roll with a scoop of beans and a 1/2 a pear with peanut butter. I eat with family members, who are all enjoying restaurant leftovers. I feel mad at my food. I’m sick of cabbage rolls.

We decide to head to the MOMA to see the Richard Avedon exhibit. I’m terrified everyone will want to go out to eat afterwards. I don’t want to forgo the exhibit so I put the other half of my lunch pear in a small container with a scoop of peanut butter and I tuck it in my bag. The exhibit is stunning. It marks the first time I don’t think about food for a long stretch of time throughout the Hunger Challenge.

Mercifully, my companions decide that they will go home and cook just to spare me (and save money). I eat the pear and peanut butter on the BART platform on the way home and don’t offer anyone a bite.

For dinner I eat another scoop of beans and a quesadilla made from the leftover chicken, sweet potato and cheese bits (pictured above) from the enchiladas. My companions enjoy oven-fried chicken, arugula-beet salad, and roasted carrots and potatoes. They also have several cookies during the evening. I write Hunger Challenge posts to keep my mind (and hands) off the cookies.

I’m excited for Monday because it’s the last day of the challenge.

Hunger Challenge Day Four

Woke up headachy and tired. Was told that I flailed in my sleep again. Wow, this is kind of intense. I took the dog for a walk and held off eating breakfast to avoid the mid-morning hunger, which tends to be the worst for me.

Luckily this is a work at home day so I can make my emergency soup and my enchiladas. I won’t have to cook any more meals for the duration of the challenge, which is a bright spot because I’m not enjoying cooking.

Breakfast:
Oatmeal with brown sugar and milk; half of a peach

Lunch:
The rice porridge appears again and I have it with an over easy egg served on top of it. This is delicious. Truly my favorite meal yet. I could eat this every day.

In the afternoon I cooked my emergency soup. I took some of the chicken broth from poaching the chicken and added half of a sliced onion, a tiny handful of rice from my bulk bin purchase and then an even tinier handful of lentils from my cupboard. I decide that my monetary cushion allows this. (I could have easily bought them and why go to the store again?) I also add a cut-up carrot, which my cushion allows or it could have been given to me at a food pantry. Is this cheating? Then I put in the rest of the bok choy. Ahhh Greens! And cook until everything is tender. Add salt and pepper and taste and here’s my missing two meals.

I also make enchiladas. First I peel and cut the sweet potatoes into small dices. I toss them in oil and salt and roast them at 400 degrees until tender. I grate the rest of the cheese (goodbye cheese!) and then I fry the tortillas in oil. To assemble, I roll up a little shredded chicken, cheese, and sweet potatoes in 12 tortillas (3 meals for 2 people). I’m pleased that there is enough chicken, cheese, and sweet potatoes to have a quesadilla as a snack or small meal.

I open the enchilada sauce and the smell assaults me. I have a flashback to barfing in Kindergarten class. Not a good sign. Why didn’t I buy dried chiles and make my own? What was I thinking? It would have been cheaper too. I look at the ingredient list and see that sugar is in the number 2 position. I think, “at least it’s not high fructose corn syrup.”

Meanwhile I’m feeling very apprehensive. It’s Friday night and we’re heading over to a friend’s house to play card games. I know there will be food.

Dinner:
2 enchiladas (they don’t taste as bad as the sauce smelled but they are awfully sweet; pretty gross really) a scoop of beans cooked the day before. Everything was made better by cilantro once again.

So we went to the friend’s house and there was indeed food. Chips and homemade dips made lovingly with care for us. I decided it was too contrived not to eat them and kind of rude too. It wasn’t like a party. It was just four of us. I mean who in their right mind living on food stamps would go to a friend’s house and refuse to eat the free food? So I ate just a few chips and dips.

Halibut Ceviché and Mexican Corn

Last week it was brutally hot around here and all I could think about was the Mexican corn I had at the Eat Real Festival. See my post about the festival on EcoSalon.

I had some corn in the fridge that needed eating so I went out shopping for more food and inspiration. I walked into the fish store at Market Hall in Rockridge and I immediately thought, “Ceviché!” And there you have it: Mexican corn and ceviche on a hot night. Perfection.

For the Corn:
Boil, grill, or steam it. (I steamed because it was too hot to boil water and it’s both energy efficient and water saving, and I’d never light the grill just for corn)

Slather with thick, plain, Greek yogurt (for all those people that are freaked out by mayonnaise) Sprinkle with Mexican oregano, Aleppo pepper, and Parmesan cheese.

For the Ceviché:
3/4 pound halibut (I used two sea scallops for part of it, but you could use all halibut) cut into bite-sized pieces
Juice of 3 limes
Chopped cilantro to taste
One-half of an avocado, in bite-sized pieces
1 firm, tart plum, sliced thinly into wedges
One-half of a large jalapeno (or a whole small one) quartered, seeded, and diced
1 small shallot, sliced thinly
Salt
Pepper
Aleppo pepper to taste

Combine all the ingredients and refrigerate for about 45 minutes before serving.

Plums? you say? I don’t know where the plum idea came from. It just popped into my head. Too much Top Chef? Anyway, it worked, playing the same role as tomato would in ceviché. I freshly fried corn tortillas before serving and I’m telling you it was good. I have no idea why I don’t make ceviché more often.

For the Aleppo pepper in both recipes, you could substitute cayenne (be careful because it’s usually hotter) or some other mild, ground chile. I just really love Aleppo for its heat level and slight fruitiness.

The Street Food Craze: SF Street Food Festival and Eat Real and I'm in Eating Well Magazine!

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you probably know about the street food craze. Secretive food carts all over the city (mostly San Francisco) operate under the radar of authorities and post their whereabouts on twitter. This recession has sparked a reverence for scrappy, can-do, self-reliant individuals. As chefs were elevated to rock stars over the past decade, food cart operators are the new idols in the food world.

So now we have not one, but two festivals to honor the food of the street and the people who create it. The photos here are all from the San Francisco Street Food Festival last week. Put on by La Cocina, a business incubator for food concerns, it started as a way to help mostly immigrant women who had under-the-radar tamale selling businesses and the like go legit. La Cocina has been around for several years now doing great work and now there's a whole new generation of small-scale street food purveyors.

This week launches the Eat Real Fest in Oakland--similar vibe, more ambitious undertaking. Three days of activities including movies, dinners, a market area, as well as a slew of street cart and taco truck food. I'll be there at the Foraging & Canning Exchange on Friday doing a fermentation demo. I think it will be hard not to hang around the festival all weekend one way or another. Maybe I'll see you there.

In other news: If you pick up a copy of the current Eating Well Magazine (Sept-Oct issue) you'll find 6 great new recipes for beans by yours truly and an article by Steve Sando about sourcing heirlooms. It's nice to break into a food mag finally. Enjoy and let me know how you like it.

Enjoy the following street food pictures and Happy Eating!