Of bagels, beets, and beans

When I post about food exclusively, you can bet the weather is either too cold or too rainy for us to spend any time outside. Right now the temperature is below freezing, and I don't think it got up as high as +1ºC all day yesterday. In fact, a light snow fell for a good part of the afternoon. And this time of year it is too dark on my morning and afternoon walks with the dog to allow for photography.

Home-made bagels and Kraft Philadelphia cream cheese

Yesterday morning, Walt made bagels. Again, they were excellent. I don't know how he does it. I confirm it: I'm not a baker. I don't know how to work with flour. I can throw together a simple cake or a quick bread like cornbread, and I can make flour-thickened sauces, but when it comes to pastry, pie crusts, or yeast-leavened breads, je suis nul. Maybe it's because I've never needed to develop those skills, having a talented bread baker in the house.

Bagels rising on a baking sheet
before being boiled and then baked

Bagels — I want to make sure Susan and Simon see them, because they brought us the Philadelphia cream cheese from England that inspired Walt to make bagels again. We got some smoked salmon and smoked trout to have with them and the cream cheese.

Can you tell I'm really enjoying taking pictures using a tripod?

Did you know that Philadelphia cream cheese doesn't have any special connection to the city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania? Philadelphia was adopted as a brand name for cream cheese in 1880 because that city was associated with top-quality food products back then. The first cream cheese was made in New York State. Nowadays, it is what is known in France as a fromage industriel — it's made in a factory, not on a farm.

A sesame-seed bagel

There is a village called Philadelphia in New York, way up north of Watertown on the St. Lawrence River, but I don't know if that's relevant. The Dictionary of American Food and Drink byJohn F. Mariani (1983) says the first cream cheese in America was produced in Downsville, N.Y., on the northern edge of the Catskills and not too far from Binghamton.

Bagels, cream cheese, smoked trout, and smoked salmon

On New Year's Eve, we went to the outdoor market in Saint-Aignan to buy our holiday oysters. And we walked by one of the good vegetable stalls along the way. I noticed that there were raw beets on display, and I thought about making a grated raw redbeet salad. You can grate raw beets the same way you can grate raw carrots and they make a nice salad with vinegar and oil.

Trois betteraves crues

I also noticed that the raw beets cost only half what the cooked ones cost, at 2.00€ per kilo. I was going to pick up three round beets, and then Walt said we should get one of the betteraves longues, the sort of carrot-shaped ones. So we did.

Une betterave longue rôtie au four

I cooked that one, wrapped tightly in aluminum foil, in the little toaster oven yesterday morning. It took a while, but it came out really nice. You can cook raw beets in the microwave or in boiling water as well, but the oven-roasted ones have a richer flavor, I think.

The cooked beet, cut into pieces to make it cool faster

At the vegetable seller's, one of the customers ahead of me in line asked for a handful of mâche, which is called lamb's lettuce in English, I think. Wikipedia calls it corn salad, which is a name I was not familiar with. Mâche is a winter crop.

It had been a long time since we'd had a salad made with mâche, which is a specialty of the Nantes area down at the mouth of the Loire River. And mâche, like Belgian endive (endive), escarole (scarole), and curly endive (frisée), is a salad green that happens to be very good served with beetroot.

Salade de mâche aux betteraves

So after our smoked fish, bagels, and cream cheese, we had a big salade de mâche aux betteraves. Eating fish and salad was a nice break from our recent diet of beans (we are having lima bean soup for lunch today).

Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day brings you
good luck for the rest of the year.

By the way, after our lunch of giant lima beans with duck and sausages on New Year's Day, we also had a little bowl of black-eyed peas for supper, just for good luck in 2009. I bought the black-eyed peas at SuperU. They were in a jar, not a tin, and they were imported from Portugal. Delicious.