Naked Almonds All Over the Room: A Night in Casablanca, Part I
I've been utilizing my newly-established South Bay Area resources to plan and execute this meal (prep has started a full 6 days before the big event.) Casablanca Market in Mountain View has not only provided the traditional tagine - the vessel in which I'll cook the main course - but also the expertise regarding cooking technique. Katia was more than helpful and she explained to me over the phone how I will use the clay pot to not only braise, but brown the lamb. I met a lovely woman at a local Italian gourmet market, AG Ferrari Foods in Sunnyvale, who shared with me a multitude of cheeses (including the revered barrata, served 3-ways), tastes of open wine and local food knowledge Friday night as I snacked on Italian treats at one of their sidewalk tables. Her husband owns a wine store in Santana Row at which I spent an equal amount of time (the next night) drinking more wine, snaking on more Italian antipasta and quizzing the staff on wine recommendations for the difficult-to-pair arrangement of dishes I'll be serving on Saturday. I left with two bottles, a discount and a smile :)
My dish selections are sourced from two fantastic cookbooks: Cooking at the Kasbah and The Food of Morocco. (Thank you, J, for the first one!) So you want a preview of the menu?
Wine #1: An Austrian native, Grüner Veltliner is a grape that is making its way into the glasses in wine bars and restaurants world-wide. The grape is capable of creating a complex, full-flavor white wine with not only citrus notes, but a balanced sampling of spice. This lends it to pair well with heavily-herbed and hard-to-pair meals. Impressively, in recent international blind-tastings, secretly-submitted Grüner Veltliner varietals have been mistaken for and ranked among Europe's top-ten chardonnays. It's a conniving little grape :D
Wine #2 (for the main course): Sourced from the Rhone region of France, Clot de L'oum's La Compagnie Des Papillons (translated: company of the butterflies) has shared characteristics of its three grapes: Carignan, Grenache and Syrah. Here's a "professional" wine description for you since I know basicially nothing about French wine: "With bittersweet cassis, wet stone, licorice, lead pencil, game, and alluring floral elements emerging on the nose (these wines perpetually need to “breathe”) it offers a plush, refined palate with no superficial sweetness but impressively layered with black fruits, minerals, herbs and meat. Infectiously juicy throughout, it nevertheless finishes in anything but simple fashion, with impressive salt, stone and graphite minerality, subtly sweet cassis and blackberry fruit, and deep meatiness." mmmm ... hope it works out :D
I've spent a few days now planning shopping lists and planning the prep/cooking timing. Yes, I was proud to already own every spice called for in the recipes (save one special one I'll use to marinate the lamb per Katia's recommendation) and thanks, Dad, I learned from your intensely brooded-over Xmas Eve schedules. Sunday night, I started one of the steps towards our dessert - the homemade almond paste.
So how do you blanch almonds, Google? Take those raw almonds to the hot tub ... they'll be easily coaxed out of their coats, jackets and dresses. (Ok, fine, that's not how Google told me to do it ... but it's surely how it seemed to play out.) Let me tell you, naked almonds are feisty!! In a pan 1/2-filled with boiling water, you "blanch" the almonds for about 30sec, then drain them. The skins separate from the nut and with a little pinch, they slide right out ... and onto the floor. Or they fly across the room and under the table. Or they *ping* into the bowl with such force that they bounce right back out and into the recyclables. Maybe I just need practice. :( Needlesstosay, 1.5lbs of almonds later, I had a bowl of pretty, naked almonds.
These newly-shorn, white beauties took a whirl in the food pro in batches until they were finely ground and were then mixed with a combination of butter, superfine sugar, a touch of almond extract, and the special ingredient, orange blossom water (a wonderfully floral and exotic ingredient I happened to already own thanks to a trip to a local Pakistani market.) The resulting paste is much less sweet than the almond paste you'll find in stores and the flavor is layered and delicate. Friday night, the paste will be colored bright green, balled and stuffed into pitted dates {drool} from the farmers market, then garnished with orange zest. There is some seriously delicious and decadent dessertage happening here!
Being that the process was unique to this meal - and the fact that I have three jars of them - I will be utilizing the preserved lemons 3 ways:
1) Marinated Olives: Castelvetrano olives will be marinated for two days with cilantro, preserved lemon, parsley, cumin, garlic and red chilli. Castelvetrano olives are new to me; the prettiest shade of [almost] spring green, they are medium-sized, round, firm and very mild. The guy at Whole Foods was more than welcome to let me try one and helped me cheat the system by giving me the juice to add after they weighed the container at the front counter (and provided a leak-free container so that I wouldn't leak while riding my bike home). They are really wonderful and are a nice change to the very-salty, mushy olives you can find anywhere.
2) Tomato and Preserved Lemon Salad: Fresh, skinned tomatoes are chopped and tossed with fresh herbs, a dash of paprika and thinly sliced preserved-lemon rind. Now, I'm only speaking from Googled descriptions and my imagination, but the pickled citrus should add an almost floral, intensely-lemony, caper-like saltiness. I'll use it sparingly.
3) Lamb Tagine with Peas and Lemons: You really can't ever go wrong with braised lamb. But dress it with farmers-market-fresh peas, assorted fresh herbs including mint, cilantro, parsley and lemon thyme, robust spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, coriander and garnish with a bright, citrus-y/saltiness? You just might have the main course that is served on special occasions in heaven ... we'll find out on Saturday.
Ok, that's enough for now - more will come after the meal is cooked and eaten.
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