A neighborhood aunty spills the beans after a few jasmine martinis; the steeping process is the key.

By Shobha Narayan   –   live mint

It was while sipping the Karuveppilai Martini at the Vivanta by Taj—Connemara in Chennai that I figured out how to seduce Aunty Stella into spilling her recipe secrets. Stella isn’t really my aunt; she is a neighbourhood aunty. Her real name is Seethalakshmi Ambujakshi.

You can understand why people in Jamaica, where her husband spent most of his career, decided to call her Stella-darlin’, with that lilting island trill.

Like many Indians who live in faraway lands, Aunty Stella cooked every time she was homesick. And what she specialized in was pickles. Shrimp pickles, mango pickles of various kinds, gooseberry, tomato, garlic, roots, tubers, you name it and Stella could pickle it. She would not share her recipes though. At 80, she was old school.

“You want my recipes? You got to pry it out of my cold dead hands,” she would say.

We—her extended family and friends—tried many things to get her to spill her secrets. Some enterprising nieces gave her a spice box with pre-measured amounts of spices to see how much she used while making a dish. Stella wisened up to their wily ways quickly and soon started travelling with her own spice box, keeping its contents locked. Getting Stella’s recipes became a running dare within the family; an unofficial bet, with the stakes growing higher each year.

This time, in Chennai, I decided that it was do or die. And what I decided to do was to get her drunk. Stella, a lifelong teetotaller, was going to drink several glasses ofkaruveppilai (curry leaf), mace and jasmine cocktails with Chettinad food at the Raintree restaurant. The curry leaves would mask the flavour of the liquor. She would think she was drinking a mocktail, as she usually did. Along the way, I would pump her for information.

I began smoothly—like the drink. I knew I had to throw her off the scent. So I discussed the scent of summer drinks. “I love a well-constructed cocktail,” I said, sipping my jasmine martini and feeling a little shaken but not necessarily stirred. “The problem is that I try to make cocktails healthy, which, you could argue, is an oxymoron. For example, I coat the rim of the glass with black salt because it is healthier than normal salt. This changes the taste of the margarita or Bloody Mary.”

Stella nodded, chewing on some spicy stew. Take a sip of your drink, I said encouragingly. It will balance the heat of the food.

“Why not use asafoetida instead of black salt? After all,heeng is the healthiest of spices,” she said.

I smiled to myself. This was going to be as easy as getting goop out of a baby.

Stella was getting involved with the recipe, almost in spite of herself. I would trick her into thinking that she was helping me construct a perfect cocktail. Through it, I would get her views on proportion, which, after all, is the secret to great food and drink, be it a pickle or a pina colada. With every glass, Stella would become more expansive. She would invite me to be her heir apparent in the pickling business. “Stella & Shoba: the Pickle Queens of South India”. I could almost see the signboard.

The waiter came to inquire if we wanted a refill. Stella began quizzing him on the flavour profiles of the drink. How did they get the jasmine smell in the drink? she asked. He said that they steeped Madurai jasmine flowers in sugar syrup till the flowers released their scent. The same applied to curry leaves. This then is the beauty of the summer cocktail. If you have good liquor, you can add pretty much anything to give it some pizzazz. And what Stella decided to add was heeng, arguably the Indian spice with the most pungent smell. Well, she demanded belligerently, if truffles are a delicacy in Italy and stinky cheese a delicacy in France, why not asafoetida in India?

As the evening progressed, my plan went beautifully. Stella leaned back and became languid. She giggled a lot and gazed at the full moon. She quizzed me about my children and told me about her grandchildren. And she told me that the secret of a great pickle was the steeping process. Just like the jasmine flowers were steeped in sugar syrup, good pickles required brine and space in the sun in order to release their flavours. Everything mattered. Old-fashioned pickle jars were the best because they distributed the heat from the outside evenly into all parts of the pickled vegetables or fruits. You had to shake the pickle jar every day in the beginning and every other day later on, just as champagne bottles were turned slowly: remuage, as the French say it. “In the end, it becomes like nectar,” said Stella. “A perfect combination of tastes exploding in your mouth.” Her eyes twinkled. “Just like the vodka in this jasmine martini that you are passing off to me as a mocktail.”

Turns out that Aunty Stella had learnt to imbibe liquor in her old age. She was partial to gin and tonic—“the quinine helps my knees,” she said—but she was cool with a martini too, either shaken or stirred.

As for the pickle recipes, she gave some to me. Pity I cannot reveal them here; or ever.

By Lynn Allison  –  Newsmax

We tend to think that the freshest foods are best. But now research has found that some of the most beneficial foods aren’t farm-to-table items but are actually fermented products loaded with probiotics.

Yogurt may be the best known of such foods, but many others — including pickles, miso, and sauerkraut — also provide living cultures that keep our digestive systems healthy and our immune systems strong.

Since the gut is the largest part of our immune system, it pays to eat healing foods and shun sugars and refined carbohydrates that cause damage.

“Scientists have found that trillions of microbacterial cells live in our intestinal flora,” Jeff Cox, author of “The Essential Book of Fermentation” tells Newsmax Health.

“They aren’t just passive hitchhikers who’ve found a warm place to live. They are intimately connected to our immune system. They are connected to our brain and guide our moods. They take an active part in digesting our food, reducing it to nutrients that can be absorbed through the intestinal walls.”

Cox explains that maintaining a healthy gut is necessary for life, much as microbes are necessary for soil to become a living organism that feeds the plants that grow in it.

“What makes a healthy intestinal flora or soil microbial community? The answer is actively decaying organic matter, the food we eat and the compost we put in the soil,” he says. “Fermented foods with active cultures of bacteria and yeast seed our gut with the very microbes we need for our intestinal flora to be functionally optimal.”

Dr. Ellen Kamhi, PhD., author of “The Natural Medicine Chest” explains that such foods are not some new health fad but have actually been around for centuries.

“Fermented foods have long been a mainstay of human food sources all around the world since ancient times,” she tells Newsmax Health. “Fermentation may have been used initially as a means of food preservation, since once fermented it lasts longer. But now it turns out that in addition to preservation, fermented foods are a panacea for healthy digestion due to the abundance of positive gut healthy probiotics and microbes.”

Written by Portland Tribune

The players and coaching staff are in place for the first season of Portland Pickles baseball. The major work now being done is to the home ballpark, Walker Stadium, in Lents Park.

Crews have completed extensive excavation work, demolished the condemned grandstand and press box and taken down the chain-link backstop.

A new backstop is under construction, and a new scoreboard and chair seats with backs are due to arrive soon.

The Pickles are one of six teams in the new Great West League, a summer college wood-bat league set to launch June 3.

Portland’s first home game will be on Friday, June 10. The Pickles will play 30 regular-season home games, all at night.

Other teams in the league are the Medford Rogues, Sacramento Stealth, Chico Heat, Lodi Crushers and Marysville Gold Sox.

Portland will open with three games at Medford and three at Chicago before its home-opening three-game series against Marysville.

By Alicia Jessop   –   FTW!

We are human beings, people. We are organic creatures. We live and one day we will die. Our time on this earth is short, and while I can appreciate a treat, this is disrespectful to our bodies. This is hubris. This is us laughing at the heavens, chortling at the bodies we have been blessed with and doing our best to destroy them.

Caramel sauce does not need to be on a hot dog. We are creating monstrosities. This the work of a modern day Dr. Frankenstein. This is unnatural. This isn’t right. We must stop ourselves. We are killing ourselves … and for what?

Our ancestors lived on meat and grain and vegetables alone. We have come so far, and our health has improved so much. Technology is racing forward at rates we’ve never before seen. And what do we do with it? We create a nightmare like this?! Yes, we made a hot dog with jalapeños and macaroni and caramel and popcorn, but did anyone stop to ask: Why?

We have to treat ourselves better. And I mean freaking CARAMEL SAUCE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? 

We deserve whatever becomes of us.

BY

CASEY ELSASS   –   Munchies

It was a sunny afternoon in early March and the kitchen of Broad Brook Grange in Guilford, Vermont was kinetic. Carole Mills, the secretary of the Grange, had been there since 9 AM with Don McLean and Marli Rabinowitz prepping the food and space for the evening’s festivities. Bowls of potato salad and coleslaw were set aside, platters of ham were waiting to be arranged, and Don’s maple-soaked baked beans had been simmering away for hours. At 3 PM, Elly Majonen burst through the doors carrying tray upon tray of freshly baked dinner rolls. Using a Pillsbury recipe from 1946—complete with her grandmother’s notes tucked neatly in the margins—Elly had spent the past few hours in a nearby church kitchen churning out 800 rolls (plus a tray of warm, yeasty cinnamon buns—a special treat for volunteers).

Everything was running smoothly, except for one glaring problem: the view outside was a dry, brown landscape that hadn’t seen precipitation—much less snow—in weeks. With just hours to go before the annual Sugar on Snow Supper, one of the star players was MIA.

At the peak of sugaring season (a quick few weeks in March, sometimes late February, rarely April) in small towns throughout New England, the community gathers in firehouses, church basements, and old meeting halls for a magical event called the Sugar on Snow Supper. After getting into a traditional New England buffet, it’s time for the main event: a plate of snow, a plain doughnut, a bowl of dill pickles, and a cup of steaming hot maple syrup. A pour of syrup over cold snow creates wonderfully sticky instant-taffy that can be rolled around a fork and eaten. And then, when your teeth are stuck together and your tongue is coated in sugar, a good bite on a pickle clears everything right up and you’re ready for round two.

It was the end of a disorienting winter, with more tropical weather than snow flurries, and the weather had been tough on maple syrup producers everywhere. Maple trees begin storing starch in their roots with the first freeze of autumn and it’s that starch, mixed with ground water from melting snow, that produces sweet maple sap in the spring. It takes an astonishing 40 gallons of sap boiled down to create just one gallon of maple syrup, so without the natural progression from bitter winter to the first hints of spring, the taps had been flowing inconsistently and Guilford was missing, as Marli Rabinowitz called it, “natural, organic snow, complete with pine needles!”

But if maple syrup is the blood of New England, then the Sugar on Snow Supper is its beating heart. And nothing—rain or shine or lack of snow—could stop the community from enjoying a centuries-old tradition because Guilford resident Richard Austin had been storing a pile of snow under a tarp in his backyard. After a large snowfall in January, he had scooped off the top layer and started building a four by eight-foot mound. Then, out of sheer willpower and a lot of luck, he kept the snow insulated under a tarp for six weeks, occasionally adding to it when a fresh layer fell. When Austin pulled up to the Grange in his truck and unloaded 13 garbage bags of beautiful white stuff, I felt like I was witnessing a tiny miracle.

The Guilford Sugar on Snow has three seatings—a tight turnover of 5 PM, 6 PM, and 7 PM—that each accommodate 85 diners. When I returned just before the final seating, the Grange was bathed in a warm glow and the old glass windows were spilling orbs of light and peels of laughter into the yard. Inside, I met Sylvia Morse, who has been attending Guilford’s Sugar on Snow for 85 years. Like a true Vermont woman, she goes to as many as three other Sugar on Snows around the state each year and even holds her own at home. Dick Clark has attended for all of his 74 years, except for a brief period when he was serving in Vietnam. For New Englanders, this is a true celebration of their favorite crop.

We settled into our seats at a long table as platter after platter of food quickly appeared: baskets of Elly’s dinner rolls, bowls of Don’s sweet and savory baked beans, packed plates of deviled eggs, piles of coleslaw and potato salad, a platter of sliced ham, and hot coffee. Our waitress, Mary, would periodically stop by to drop off more eggs, rolls, and coleslaw. She had run a tight doughnut-making operation on the Friday night before the supper—a seven-person assembly line, two pots of oil frying away, and 40 dozen doughnuts from scratch in two hours using an old recipe that’s been passed through the Grange for decades.

Then, as if on cue, a stream of volunteers marched out with packed bowls of cold snow and ceramic pitchers of steaming maple syrup. Mountains of Mary’s doughnuts and plates of pickle spears were right behind them. Sitting at that table and slowly tilting the pitcher over the snow took me back to another lifetime: visits to Parker’s Maple Barn in New Hampshire, streams of syrup and sleepy pancake breakfasts, making maple candy in the freshly fallen snow at recess, and attending events just like this one. Sugar on Snow is a moment to pause life and play with your food, to get your fingers stuck together and leave the maple drips in your beard, to laugh at old men greedily drowning their snow in syrup and women daintily rolling sticky ribbons of maple around their forks, to snack on a pickle when you feel like your teeth are going to fall out from the sweet and coyly say you couldn’t eat one more bite before reaching for the pitcher and another doughnut.

There’s one thing you have to understand about Sugar on Snow: no one knows how it began. There are folktales of an early New England settler accidentally spilling a drizzle of maple syrup from a boiling pot onto freshly fallen snow, which seems as close to the truth as anything. And it’s an easy line of reasoning to figure that smoked hams, sacks of potatoes, and fresh eggs were the winter sustenance of our ancestors. Doughnuts were probably a rare treat, fried in precious fat for special occasions like a celebration supper at the end of sugaring season. But how did a pickle get involved? Clark guessed that it was an attempt to fill out the table with one more thing from the cellar, a happy accident that worked. “It’s like a ritual,” Marli told me later. “New people come in and follow the set traditions. It’s what our grandparents had and it stretches back.” Just like all peculiar traditions, it goes so far into the past that it’s always been there.

Casey Elsass is the author of the newly released cookbook, Maple Syrup, published by Short Stack Editions. He is also the founder of Bushwick Kitchen, makers of Bees Knees Spicy Honey, Trees Knees Spicy Maple, and Weak Knees Gochujang Sriracha.