Why hello there! And welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one sadboi makes bad poi. I’m your melancholy Hawaiian-food murderer, Jon O’Guin. And no, I haven’t actually made poi. One of many failures in ya boi’s parade of miseries. Today, we’re going to cover a controversial salad, and the cookbook it came from. If you don’t want to hear about it, just take this link to the recipe. Everyone else, let’s go for a journey.

A Rough Start to New Rules

Just as a quick apology: I bet this post is going to be a little late, because oh, man, when it rains, it pours. I missed Wednesday’s post because I wasn’t feeling my best, and…I am somehow feeling WORSE right now. I don’t know what it is, but just out of the blue Thursday night I got a whopper of a headache and a sick feeling in my gut. I THINK it’s just a bit of a weird reaction to dinner (my meal was a little richer than my typical dinner has been of late, and had a sugary cocktail while I’ve been drinking less during the stay-at-home. (It turns out I really AM basically just a social drinker: if I’m not in a bar or hanging out with people, I just don’t feel like drinking.)

Which is not the same as saying I don’t potentially have a drinking problem, merely that it has clear and definite boundaries.

The point is that just as I started to buckle up to tackle this topic, I fell apart. My plan now is to get a couple hundred words down and call it an early night and hope I feel better in the morning. (Editor’s note: There was a brief window of worry (a slightly upset stomach and a brain caught in a weird half-asleep, half-awake confusion that briefly made Jon think he was having a stroke, but by noon he was feeling fine) SO, in the interest of that, let’s tackle The New Rules, a cookbook by Milk Street.

A cookbook that is relatively not very egg-driven.

Just to re-cover the basics about the publication and what it’s about: Milk Street is a production of Chris Kimball, founder of America’s Test Kitchen and former host of their TV show and editor of several of their publications, before he left the company in 2015, and started Milk Street, a company that has a very similar FORMAT to America’s Test Kitchen, but with a much greater focus on international cuisine, and trying to connect that food to you and your experiences. A central claim from one of their first cookbooks/magazines (I don’t recall which, as one downside to the program is that it’s been a tad ‘overproduced’, in the sense that, within 2 years they’d published 12 magazines, put out 13 episodes, and 2 cookbooks…which had a fair amount of overlap in the recipes. I’m sure that I have the same recipe written in 4 different texts in my house somewhere.) is that there’s really no such thing as “ethnic cuisine”. The same ideas and techniques can be used in Mexico, Milwaukee, Morocco, Munich, and Mumbai. (I was momentarily REALLY worried I couldn’t think of an Asian city starting with M. Like I felt there HAD to be some, but like I said, I’m not at my best, so I was kind of walking my way east and hoping I found something.)

Still, given my own culinary explorations, I’m a big fan of the various interesting tidbits they bring back, and I’ve covered several recipes from them on the site. (One of them, The Australasian Pulled Pork, was actually the focus of the LAST episode of their newest season, meaning I was a little ahead of the curve on that one. Also, I really liked that recipe, and with everyone stuck at home, maybe now’s a good time to revisit it…) ANYWAY, THE COOKBOOK.

This is a nice pic for the context of the NEXT paragraph, but it’s placed here, because I needed a picture.

“The New Rules” is a cookbook founded on, as the title implies, teaching you “the New Rules” a series of ideas you can incorporate into your cooking to improve/globalize it, with recipes serving as anchors for the idea. So like, one rule is “Beat Bitterness by Charring”, and refers to the idea of charring Cruciferous vegetables at high heat to remove some of their natural bitterness and get them subtly sweet, an idea they explore with Roasted Cabbage with a soy vinaigrette, sprinkled with sesame and cilantro or with Charred Broccoli in Japanese-style Sesame Sauce. (The former recipe comes from Australia, though with noted Asian influence, while the latter is…kind of obviously from Japan)  

Presumably. It is, after all, a Japanese “Style” sauce.

It’s a very well-made cookbook, leaning a little toward the “coffee table topper” range, where almost every recipe has a big beautiful picture, the text is, whenever possible, made to fit on the next page in a kind of nested pattern that puts the name up, big and bold. The kind of thing you have out on the coffee table to ‘inspire’ you rather than holding in the kitchen as you cook.

And that inspiration element is a big element of what I like about it. The idea of getting techniques that can be used in various situations, rather than just a single recipe, is what appeals to me. Also, they have several spreads throughout the book where they step away from even a specific rule or recipe to give a sort of focused dive into a specific topic, like ‘build a bolder pizza’, with a bunch of sauce or topping ideas for flatbread pizza, or “cook perfect eggs every time” which covers six different methods of coking eggs and how they recommend to do them. It’s a very informative book, and if you want slimmer/less expensive version of the same kind of idea, there’s also a soft-back “50 Recipes that will Change the way You Cook” that covers similar ideas.

All that aside, lets get to our relatively simple salad.

Keep Moroccan in the Free World

So, I don’t have a clean source for this, but, basically, for some reason, Morocco has a long-standing tradition of using carrots as the primary vegetable in salads…maybe. See, there are dozens of recipes for “Moroccan carrots”/”Moroccan Carrot Salad”, which are, generally, carrots (sometimes cooked, sometimes not), tossed in citrus and olive oil with olives, herbs, and spices…and I don’t know if the CARROTS are the important part in that question.

I assumed it was because like, Morocco didn’t have the climate to grow lettuce or other leafy greens, which…appears to be fairly right…but they also don’t have a lot of CARROT production in the country. But you know what they DO grow? Citrus, Olives, and spices. They’re in the top 20 producers around the world for oranges, tangerines, mandarins, etc, as well as olives and several herbs. So maybe they’re “Moroccan Carrots” because they’re carrrots with Moroccan flavors, rather than being like, carrot salad from Morocco.

And if it feels like I’m spending a LOT of time talking about stuff not connected with the dish, I am, because the dish is VERY simple. Like, you shred a pound of carrots (on the big holes, the book is clear, for scientific reasons. (Smaller grating will destroy their integrity and make them mushy, but you want them grated to release sweetness and aromatics)).

Honestly, it went faster than I thought. It was about 3 whole carrots.

Make a dressing, and toss in some accent pieces. If you just BOUGHT a bag of shredded carrots, it would be functionally as easy to make as a normal green salad. The only difference is the ingredients. Which ARE weird, but we’re going to take a bit fo time to unpack them. Starting with an ingredient I keep THINKING I’ve talked about more in these posts than I have: Pomegranate molasses!

A lovely bottle that only a fraction of people in America know about.

Pomegranate molasses is an ingredient I don’t get to use very often, but I love using when I can. It’s basically…Alright, this is going to be a weird arc, but stick with me: it’s super grenadine. See, here’s the thing a lot of people don’t know about Grenadine (the red liquid you find in bars): A, it’s non-alcoholic (it’s just there to add flavor and color. MANY people have tried to get drunk on grenadine and just gotten a sugar rush. Which is dumb, because adding Grenadine to soda is how you make a Shirley temple or Roy Rogers…drinks we serve to children. Did you think we were letting 4 year olds pound cocktails?) and B: it was originally made with just simple syrup and Pomegranate juice. (The original name for pomegranates in French is grenade. So “grenadine” is just “processed/reduced grenade”)

Nowadays, they use artificial flavors, and the profile is approximated with cheaper compounds (often blackcurrants) but originally, grenadine is just thickened, sweetened pomegranate juice.  Pomegranate molasses, on the other hand, is…thickened, sweetened, pomegranate juice. The difference is the TIME. Grenadine is mostly just thickened by mixing in the syrup, or slightly reducing the mixture. Pomegranate molasses gets reduced to like, a THIRD of its starting liquid. You go from 5 cups of liquid to 1.5. It’s thick, sticky, tart, and for some reason my bottles always taste vaguely burnt.  (Maybe it’s the way the sugars in it caramelize? I swear the first bottle I had didn’t taste like this, but every other one I’ve found does.)

Anyway, mix that with some lemon juice, and…actually, hold on, there’s ONE step in this that’s going to be a bit of a pain: see, this recipe needs toasted cumin seeds, and toasted pistachios. Everything ELSE is just mix and toss, but NO, the nuts and spices have to be DIFFICULT. Even more irritatingly, the cumin seeds should toast for like, 4 minutes on medium (or 1 minute on high), while the pistachios should go for…an unspecified amount of time (THIS recipe just asks for “shelled roasted pistachios, toasted and chopped”, so it gives NO guidance on how long to toast them, the only guide I found online WITH time cooked them in the shell, everywhere else just said “when they smell good and brown a little, they’re done.” ) But probably longer. I said “fuck that”, and just toasted them both at the same time over medium heat, on the grounds that if my nuts are toasty enough, people can suck them.  

I had SUCH a great set-up for a picture of the pistachios here, but apparently I didn’t take the picture until AFTER I took them out of the pan.
I hyped up my nuts and couldn’t deliver.

I also had to make a substitution in this recipe, as I could NOT…wait a second. YEP. Damn it, I knew that didn’t make sense. Sorry, I JUST found our ground Turmeric. I thought it was insane we’d run out, since I am the only member of the family who ever uses it. Well, we hadn’t, it had just been moved to the “foods Jon takes to Leavenworth because no one else needs them” box. So I THOUGHT we were out of turmeric, and I replaced it with ground ginger: turmeric can be hard to substitute, since it’s flavor is like a halfway point between ground ginger and cumin, or a little like spicy dirt. (I…don’t love the taste of turmeric) But it has a very intense yellow color. Sometimes ginger’s the right replacement, sometimes cumin, sometimes curry powder (though that’s really cheating, since American curry powder almost always INCLUDES turmeric)

Anyway, the point is you make a dressing of lemon juice, turmeric, salt, toasted cumin seeds, and tossing some dried apricots that you’ve thinly sliced in the sauce to soak up the flavors. Then you fold the dressing and apricots together with the carrots, and work in the rest of the accents: the pistachios, as well as some chopped mint, and green olives.

Seen here, looking kind of like a booger.

Originally, I was going to skip this, because I didn’t want to chop green olives, since I don’t really LIKE green olives, but I motivated myself to hunt some down and chop them up. And the whole thing came together into a salad I found pretty good.

Not amazingly good LOOKING, but pretty good.

What’s interesting is that Nate apparently HATED it. Like, “I enjoyed no part of it, I considered taking the leftovers and throwing them straight into the trash” level of disgust. I legitimately can’t give you better feedback into how or why, because that’s the response he gave me. I thought it was perfectly fine, even pretty good. It’s like a sweet-and-sour coleslaw. I don’t know. He doesn’t like green herbs in general, nor does he have much particular fondness for sour foods, so maybe it just played straight into his dislikes.

I’d recommend it, definitely, but his experience definitely puts a caveat on it that it may not be universally liked.

MONDAY: JON MAKES SOME CHEESY BREAD, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

WEDNESDAY: I’VE BEEN SICK AND TIRED FOR HALF THE WEEK. LET ME GET MY BREATH.

Recipe

Milk Street Moroccan Carrot Salad

Serves 4

Ingredients

                Dressing

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

Kosher salt and ground black pepper

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1/3 cup dried apricots, thinly sliced

1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds, toasted

                Salad

1 pound carrots, peeled and shredded

1/2 cup shelled roasted pistachios, toasted and chopped

3/4 cup pitted green olives, chopped

1/2 cup roughly chopped fresh mint, plus more to serve

Preparation

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, molasses, turmeric and ½ teaspoon salt. While whisking, slowly pour in the oil. Add the apricots and cumin, then let stand for 5 minutes to allow the apricots to soften.

2. Add the carrots and stir until evenly coated. Stir in the pistachios, olives and mint. Taste and season with salt and pepper, then transfer to a serving bowl. Sprinkle with additional mint.