Pan de Muertos

Pan de Muertos
Seattle Center vendor, $2

As befits a holiday commemorating the dead, Seattle Center's Dia de los Muertos celebration featured a range of fleeting pleasures, from sand paintings and dancing (below), to face paints and skeletal balloons, to sweet treats including calavera sugar skulls and sugar-dusted pan de muertos, or bread of the dead.

On altars built by school and civic groups (below center), pan de muertos of all sizes were laid out with other delicacies as an offering to visiting souls, but the bread is also eaten by the living as part of their holiday observance. Most pan de muertos is shaped in ways that hint at bones or skulls, or in the case of the bread above, three quick cuts and a twist turned a simple loaf into something quite suggestive of a dead body laid out for burial.

Tropical Banana Bread

Tropical Banana Bread

Consider the banana.

If you're living in North America or Western Europe, it's a safe bet that you have a bunch in your fruit basket. They're the most popular fruit in the the US, purchased and eaten more than even our native apple.

But ubiquitous as the banana is, it's an interloper, a triumph of commerce over nature. It's a fragile and highly perishable fruit that (with a few small-scale exceptions) grows in the tropics. Bananas only began to appear in the US and UK a little over a century ago, when refrigerated containers made import feasible; more recent innovations in banana husbandry and distribution read like something out of sci-fi. (For more on these modern miracles, check out this article from Saveur magazine.)

When World War Two severed supply lines between England and the tropics, some banana lovers sculpted simulacra out of boiled parsnips. To many children growing up under food rationing, a banana was as fantastical as a unicorn's horn. As a mid-war morale booster, the British government arranged to distribute a special consignment of bananas to young children around the country. Years later the writer Auberon Waugh, son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, remembered how banana day utterly failed to boost morale at his house:

'They were put on my father's plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously."

By the time I was growing up in the '70s, bananas were back. We ate them or didn't, but never paid them much mind until such time as they turned black and gathered around them small storm clouds of fruitflies. Then it was time to render them into banana bread, bricklike in both shape and specific gravity.

Although I've eaten my share of banana bread, I've only recently done so with much enthusiasm. Trolling for recipes on the website of health food manufacturer Navitas Naturals, I found a recipe that honors the banana's essential exoticism by matching it with coconut oil and palm sugar. It smells as if you haven't so much baked it as left it laying on the beach to work on its tan.

Banana Bread
(this recipe is based on the original by Julie Morris; I have adapted it to make up for the fact that I don't have a kitchen full of Navitas products, although I imagine it would be even more delicious with them.)

2T + 1/2c ground flaxseed
1/2c palm sugar or evaporated cane juice
1/2c melted coconut oil
1/3c water
1 1/2c whole wheat flour
1T baking powder
1T cinnamon or ground cardamon (optional)
1t baking soda
1t salt
2T maple syrup
1 1/4c mashed overripe banana
1/2c chopped walnuts

Mix 2T of flaxseed with the water and set aside for 5 minutes to thicken.

Combine the rest of the flaxseed with the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spice.

In another bowl, combine the melted coconut oil with the sugar, wet flax, and maple syrup, and mix well. (If your palm sugar is very hard, it may be easier to melt it over low heat as you melt the coconut oil). Fold in the mashed bananas and nuts and pour into a greased loaf pan.

Bake for 40-45 minutes at 350 until it passes the toothpick test (although since there are no eggs, you can safely undercook if, like me, you prefer your baked goods a little on the googly side).

Umai-do Grand Opening

Umai-do

If you're in the ID or the CD today, be sure to stop by and try some fresh manju at the grand opening of Umai-do, Seattle's newest purveyor of Japanese sweets. Want the backstory on the shop or owner, Art Oki? Check out my article, "The Japanese Snickerdoodle", published last year in Edible Seattle Magazine.

Umai-do
1825 S Jackson
206/325-7888
Wednesday - Saturday: 9am-6pm
Sunday: 9am-4pm

Molasses Cookie

Molasses Cookie
Penland Coffee House, $1.50

In the many years that I've been visiting the Penland School of Crafts, the Coffee House has had at a least a couple of locations, various menus, and an ever-evolving schedule--but I've always sought it out, especially on days when the regular meal service didn't stretch to dessert.

It says something about how busy I was during this most recent visit that I didn't manage to set foot in the Coffee House until my bags were packed and the Airport Shuttle was about to leave without me. The Coffee House is all grown up now, with a custom-built space in the corner of the dining hall, dedicated staff, and an extensive menu. But the bus was waiting so I grabbed something quick and sure-fire: a big, soft molasses cookie from a glass jar next to the register.

It didn't say so on the label, but these cookies have remarkable therapeutic properties. With my mouth full of tender crumbs and crunchy sugar crystals and my nose busily drinking in the molasses perfume, I managed for the first time to leave Penland without bursting into tears. I suspect the cookie also helped to settle my stomach during the sinuous descent from the campus to the base of the mountain.

Smoky Mountain Flan

Flan
Penland School of Crafts, free with tuition

I'm currently at Penland, a craft school tucked into the mountains of eastern North Carolina, attending a week-long educators' retreat. There's 100 of us here to teach and learn and we're free to drift from one well-equipped studio to another whenever we feel the urge, 24 hours a day.

Have you ever seen one of those competitions where someone gets two minutes to dash around a grocery store throwing whatever they can into a cart? That's me at craft camp. I start the day by attending a few demos, then do a little woodturning or waxwork or soldering, then there's a debate or discussion about teaching, and finally I wind down for the night by blowing glass or flameworking until 2 or 3am. Then I'm up at 7 to start over.

Each day it gets a little harder to wake up, but I have one alarm clock I can't fling across the room or smother with a pillow: my growling stomach.

Luckily, the kitchen has my back, churning out huge quantities of yummy fuel. Sometimes there's a meal theme, and sometimes there's even a theme dessert. I'd already piled my plate high with beans and guacamole when I became giddy at the sight of a huge flan at the end of the buffet, plump and glistening like a beached seal in a puddle of caramel sauce. It was as good as any I ever had in Mexico and I slurped it down at a picnic bench, watching dusk fall over the foggy nooks and crannies of the neighboring mountains.

And then I went back to work.

Keo Me Xung

Keo Me Xung
Coconut Tree Brand, $0.79

Another discovery from Seattle's pan-Asian Rising Produce grocery, keo me xung is a Vietnamese treat with no easy translation. The label suggests either "sesame cookies" as an English equivalent, or the French for "sesame confection" (confiserie aux sesames). Neither quite fits the bill.

The size and thickness of a large tortilla, keo me xung is a floppy sweet crepe made of whole toasted sesame, ground peanuts, and sugar. Tearing it into bite-sized strips reinforces a fleeting resemblance to sesame-studded gum, but the initial chewy resistance quickly disintegrates into a mouthful of barely-sweet glaze and pleasingly pebbly seeds.

Tamarind Candy Sweet

Tamarind Candy Sweet
Rising Produce, $0.69

"Whenever I hear the word chua, Vietnamese for "sour," I think of tamarind, the sticky brown fruit that grew in abundance on shading trees in my old schoolyard back in Saigon, and its intense sour-sweet memories inevitably cause my molars to vibrate and my mouth to water. I hear "sour" in English and I don't feel a thing."
--Andrew Lam
East Eats West

Even without the amplification of childhood memories, the mention of tamarind provokes in me an identical Pavlovian response. Indigenous to Africa, the tamarind tree has spread to just about every hospitably tropical climate, and the flavorful pulp cushioning the seeds inside its long, leathery pods makes star turns in a number of ethnic cuisines. Although its bipolar flavor is not dissimilar to dried apricot, tamarind pulp has a funky, fetid edge that adds exotic depth to everything from to pad thai to paletas to Worcestershire sauce.

A simple showcase for tamarind's charms, these Thai sweets are made from pulp, sugar, rice flour, and a bare pinch of salt. They're doughy-soft and crystal-crunchy--except when concealing a scrap of shell, which will cut you like a shank if you're not careful. Exotic and dangerous.

Switchel

Switchel

Nutrition-wise, one of the few things I have going for me is the fact that I don't much care for soft drinks. The most popular pops, in particular, leave me cold. Pepsi? Eh. Coke? I probably average one serving every two or three years.

When I do indulge in sweet, fizzy drinks, they tend to have a more old-fashioned bent. I enjoy root beer--with or without ice cream--and birch beer, when I stumble across it. I like ginger ale and love ginger beer, the hotter the better.

And it turns out that I'm a big fan of a drink even less likely that these to appear on grocery shelves or in a gas station cooler: switchel. Flavored with molasses, ginger, and vinegar, it's spicy, stomach-settling, and weirdly refreshing. And luckily, it's really easy to make.

Like so many soft drinks, switchel has historic and utilitarian roots. It first appeared in the 17th century in the Caribbean, where molasses was a plentiful by-product of the sugar refining industry. A couple of centuries later in America, switchel was a kind of proto-energy drink, providing electrolytes and hydration to sweaty laborers doing the hot, heavy work of making hay.

I based my own attempt on a recipe in Ellis Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, which was in turn adapted from Stephen Cresswell's Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop. I reduced the amount of sugar and chose not to dilute the syrup to drinking strength right away; the mix stores well in the fridge, so I just make it up as needed, adding a few tablespoons to a glass of cold soda water or a mug of hot water.

Switchel

1/2 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c molasses
2 inches grated fresh ginger
1/2 c water

Heat all of the ingredients until just boiling, then simmer for 10-15 minutes. Let cool and strain to remove the ginger. Store, refrigerated, in a jar. Dilute to taste with hot water, cold water, or seltzer.

Plum Jam

Plum Jam

On a neighborhood ramble earlier in the summer, I found a huge tree covered in the worst cherries I'd ever tasted. Their glowing garnet-colored skins were thick and crunchy, their pale amber flesh blandly sweet but with an odd tart edge. At home I did some half-hearted google searches ("worst cherry variety") but came up empty.

When I passed the tree again yesterday, it was covered in the biggest cherries I'd ever seen. And they were plums.

Thousands of them lurked under the coppery leaves in tight knots (it's a wonder I didn't mistake them for grapes). In under 10 minutes, I was headed home with more than four pounds in my bag.

Then I had to figure out what to do with them. Those tough skins--a deal-breaker on "cherries"--weren't much more palatable on plums. And the small pits clung so tenaciously to the fruit that any attempt to remove them just ended up pulping the whole thing.

And so I arrived at jam, the simplest way to tame a feral fruit. I washed my plums and set them to simmering in a huge saucepan until they eventually turned to aromatic maroon mush. I let the mush cool, dumped it into a colander and stirred and pressed until I was left with a saucepan full of juice and pulp, and a colander bristling with stems, skins, and pits. I stirred a minimal amount of sugar and a tiny bit of cinnamon into the juice, set it back on to simmer, and went on with my day.

A couple of hours later, jam appeared. Thick as primordial ooze, with all sorts of mysterious spicy-earthy-fruity flavors darting around under its sweet surface and a smell that reaches the far side of the room about .04 seconds after I take the lid off the jar. It would be a great addition to fancy dishes, both savory and sweet, and while I'd like to say I've exploited it fully I've actually been enjoying more straightforward hits: a spoonful on yogurt or in oatmeal, stirred into a glass of seltzer, or spread on buttered toast.

Flaugnarde

Blackberry Flaugnarde

Although cherries are my favorite filling for a rich, eggy clafouti, a good clafouti recipe can easily accommodate whatever fresh or frozen fruit you have one hand. Just adjust the flavorings (I prefer almond extract with cherries and vanilla with blackberries) and the name: "clafouti" is specific to the cherry-filled version, while the equally melodious flaugnarde applies to all other fruits.

Clafouti

Cherry Clafouti

For me, cooking is almost a never creative act. Instead of imagining as I chop and whip and stir, I remember, straining to recall and recreate a long-ago or faraway treat.

Case in point: about 10 years ago and approximately 7750 miles from where I now live, I had my socks knocked off by a cherry pastry from a nameless provincial bakeshop. I have since made about a half-dozen bad imitations, and--only recently--two good ones.

I was living in Australia when a couple of dear friends from college came to visit and we trekked out to the Blue Mountains to see the epic scenery. Passing through the small town of Katoomba on our way to a famous overlook we popped into a bakery on the main drag for a picnic lunch. For our dessert course we chose rubbery slabs of something the shop assistant called "cherry flan" (said with than long, flat Antipodean "a", not the American's tongue depressor "ah"). Although we ate the flan while looking out over one of the best-loved views in Australia, my memory of the landscape is a vague wisp compared to my 5-sense record of the fruity, chewy treat. Whenever my friends and I reminisce about that trip, we have a lot to talk about, but that flan always comes up, along with koalas, emus, and emu steaks. I think our friendship was strengthened by shared regret over not making it back to Katoomba until after the bakery had closed for the day.

Trying to find a recipe that would staunch my craving, I discovered that "cherry flan" is more commonly known as clafouti (or clafoutis). An antique dessert associated with the Limousin region of France, the classic clafouti includes intact cherries, the pits giving a rich almond flavor to the custard (since I've invested heavily in dental work this year, I opt for pitted cherries and almond extract).

Most of the recipes I've tried over the years were butter-logged duds, as heavy, oily, and appetizing as cherry-studded plasticine. Then I came across a recipe in Liana Krissof's Canning for A New Generation that calls for a minimum of butter and sugar, plus a touch of yogurt. After tinkering a little with the flavorings, I'm as close to Katoomba as I've come in ten years of trying.

Cherry Clafouti

adapted from Liana Krissof's Canning for A New Generation

1/4 c + 2 Tbs sugar
3 generous cups fresh or frozen pitted cherries (Bings work well)
1/2 c flour
pinch salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
1/4 c plain yogurt
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 c milk
1 Tbs butter, cut into bits

Butter a 10" pie pan and dust it with 1 tablespoon of sugar. Set out the cherries in a single layer in the prepared pan.

Sift together the flour, salt, cinnamon, and 1/4 c sugar. Whisk together the eggs, yogurt, and almond extract until smooth, then whisk in the milk. Combine the flour mixture and the egg mixture and whisk thoroughly. Pour into the pan. Scatter the butter over the top and then sprinkle with the last tablespoon of sugar. Bake 40-45 min at 375, until the top starts to brown.

Flan

Flan
Tiko Riko, $2.75

Many years ago I went to Mexico on vacation and ate flan every single day for a week. I was with my parents and a bunch of their friends and they rented an entire house on the hill overlooking the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende. Each morning over breakfast, we'd peruse the house menu and decide on what to order for dinner, inevitably finishing up with one flavor or another of flan from a long list of possibilities. Whatever the meal's main course, the cool, creamy, caramel-drenched custard was a fitting and memorable finale.

Tiko Riko is a relatively new strip mall restaurant in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood where you can eat hot-off-the-griddle pupusas doused in curtido and hot sauce, then fill whatever room you might have saved with housemade dessert, such as this smooth, eggy flan laced with Grand Marnier.

Tiko Riko
10410 Greenwood Ave N
Seattle, WA
206/784-0203

Keo Hot Dieu

Keo Hot Dieu
Coconut Tree Brand, $1.49/8

Keo Hot Dieu cashew nut cookies from Thailand are a pleasing combination of ingredients that I normally approach with caution: cashews (simultaneously unctuous and dusty, like freeze-dried astronaut butter), tapioca wafers (saliva-sucking discs of Sham-wow), and sugar glaze (a moment on the lips, a lifetime coating the roof of the mouth). Sandwiched into a sesame-sprinkled cookie, the three become far more than a sum of their parts. They're crisp but melting, nutty but sweet.

In Seattle, keo hot dieu are available from Rising Produce.

Hello, Cupcake

Mocha Cupcake
Hello, Cupcake, $2.55

Although cupcakes are redolent of childhood innocence, birthday parties, and bake sales, there's still something about them that can also be quite grown-up, feminine, and even flirtatious.

Tacoma's Hello, Cupcake bakery teases out the sultry side of this popular treat. Their small, moist and flavorful cakes are topped with sculptural heaps of frosting, like an abstract homage to a woman sashaying down the street in a swingy skirt. Most flavors are further accessorized with finishing touches; the mocha (above) is crowned with a chocolate coffee bean, the seasonal banana split (below, center) attracts attention with a sweep of chocolate syrup and a glossy maraschino cherry.

Hello, Cupcake also offers a event room and an enticing decorating party package: $10 per person for two cupcakes and two hours in which to pile them high with frosting, frills, and furbelows.

Shikhye

Shikye
Yakult

Shikye is a sweet Korean beverage made from cooked rice that is quickly fermented with malt water, then sweetened and flavored with ginger. This commercial version made by Yakult (tagline: "Nostalgia drink since 1993") is as sweet as syrup but oddly watery and clouded by bloated rice particles. It tastes almost like it would be a hit with hummingbirds.