Do any of your kitchen fantasies every come true?
Back when I was cooking macrobiotics, the elaborate recipes demanded a lot of time in the kitchen. While I was chopping and measuring I passed the time with fantasies of what it might be like to cook for some of the long list of celebrities who claim to follow the diet. Maybe, John and Yoko in their apartment on Park Avenue? (In my fantasies, John lives.) (Also, in my dreams, I wouldn't interact much with Yoko.) Thus I amused myself while cooking.
Practically Macrobiotic was recommended to me by a friend who is very serious about this diet. When I visit him in Los Angeles
he cooks for me. (Of course this fulfills another frequent fantasy of mine.) And he also turned me on to this cookbook.
In fact, my friend Phillip Irwin Cooper is so serious about macrobiotics he wrote a screenplay about his own family drama, which prominently features the diet. And then he actually made the movie (summer, 2013). Guess who he needed on the set? Someone who could prepare the food and make it look right for the camera.
So once upon a summertime
I actually did cook for the stars. (Illustrative photo at the bottom of this post.)
Now back to my kitchen. For this random cooking project I chose a recipe with a lot of moving parts: Pancakes with Vegetable B
échamel Sauce. According to Wikipedia,
Béchamel sauce also known as white sauce, is made with a roux of butter and flour cooked in milk. It is one of the mother sauces of French cuisine.
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| kuzu root |
But in macrobiotics, you can't use butter or white flour or milk. So this is a roux of what, exactly?
The
thickening agent is kuzu root. Which is another way of spelling kudzu.
That stuff that grows all over here in the south. I have pulled a lot of
it out of my own garden but I don't know what it would take to separate
the starch from the root fiber, which is apparently what some people do
as a business, and then they sell it at health food stores.
Instead of milk, the recipe calls for soy milk. And instead of butter? Nothing, actually. Sad but true. Unless you count the rice vinegar. But there are the veggies (carrots, bean sprouts, cabbage, scallions and parsley). And a pinch of salt. (recipe below).
The pancakes are a combo of whole wheat pastry flour, rice flour and corn meal along with more soy milk and kuzu. The absence of baking powder made me suspicious, and it's true they didn't rise at all but possibly the author wants more of a
crêpe.
There are probably easier ways to get this done than the way I did it, but somehow I got caught up in layering the pancakes and the sauce in real time -- meaning that as each pancake came off the griddle, I covered it in sauce while the next one was cooking. That's why in this action shot, my hand is a quick-moving blur.
Results: Here is the finished dish, layered and gorgeous.
Taste: Like so many macrobiotic dishes, we found it a bit bland. We added salt.
Texture: More satisfying than you might think. The pancakes were not light, they were actually a bit rubbery, but with the sauce and vegetables it gave us something to sink our teeth into (a very desirable property in macrobiotics.) My husband and I both took seconds and then thirds.
Would I make it again? If I do, I'll use a real crêpe recipe. But the sauce is a passable B
échamel, much less caloric than the real thing, so yes I'd do it again. Other recipes in the book look interesting so I hope to try a few of them. (FYI I tried the pancakes again on Saturday with an egg instead of kuzu, and they were still rubbery. But everybody ate them anyway, with syrup.)
Recipes:
Stars: Seated, Mariette Hartley, John Heard, Alison Elliott
Macrobiotic consultant: random chef, standing in back. Get those fantasies goin' y'all.
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| Counting For Thunder, currently in post production |
