New Year, New Spices

From the BHC archives. Update your spices, bitches.

From the archives: 1/12/13

Let me say that it all started with a cookbook I didn’t get for Christmas.

To be fair, I didn’t even know I wanted this cookbook myself until I stumbled upon it in a Barnes & Noble recently while killing time waiting for the next showing of Les Misérables.

But dang. Such a cookbook like I never knew existed. Such a cookbook, I will probably just have to pop for myself, and why not? This cookbook of my desire, Flavors of Jerusalem, is by an Israeli chef (Yotam Ottolenghi) and a Palestinian chef (Sami Tamimi) who both grew up in Jerusalem, eating the kinds of foods that make me sigh. It waxes passionate about pretty much all my most favorite flavors and recipes, including a salad that, in my mind, anyway, is the taste of the Levant.

The humble tomato and cucumber salad. You’ll find it from Iran to Israel to Cyprus. It’s for lunch, dinner, and particularly breakfast. It’s simple but delicious, and ubiquitous, and involves chopping up a few vegetables, juicing half a lemon…and adding some sumac.

Now, for someone who professes utter lack of skill in the kitchen, I do have a pretty kickin’ assortment of spices. Some of that is from my love of Indian, Middle Eastern and Japanese cuisine, which means I have plenty of cumin, coriander, turmeric, za’atar, rosewater, bonito flakes, and toasted white sesame seeds in my pantry. Part of it is because when Bab’s died unexpectedly, I took home half of her kitchen, including all of her spices.

Old Spice.

But the years have clicked by. Babs has been gone almost 10 years already. I don’t have little kids anymore I have teenagers who are both taller than I am. (Ed note: Add another 10 years to these scenarios…sigh.)

…but I don’t have any sumac.

The common wisdom is that ground spices have a shelf life of about 8 months (that’s if they’re kept optimally, in a cool pantry away from light or heat), while whole versions might last a bit longer. Longer than that, the experts say, and what you’ve got is, essentially, lightly flavored dust.

I learned this the hard way. A neighbor generously offered her jar of sumac, but when I went to retrieve it today, I took one sniff and realized that it was way too past its use-by date to be of any use.

For you, my friend, spices you should probably not use.

I briefly contemplated driving 20 miles to the Persian market in Torrance, (nah), and then poked hopefully through my spice bin for some Za’atar, which maybe I could swap out with sumac…

My bag of Za’atar from 2006…

So yeah. I have a bin full of dust.

But I went ahead and made this salad anyway, and didn’t use any spice. It’ll be fresh tasting, just not Middle-Eastern tasting. Here’s the recipe, which I got off Smitten Kitchen (where else?), but is pretty universal, I’d imagine.

1 English cucumber, diced
2 Roma tomatoes, diced
half of one Spanish onion, diced
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 1/2 teaspoons sumac
salt and pepper to taste

Chop chop!

I’m also going to go through the old spice bin tomorrow and toss most of it and make a list of replacement spices (how uncharacteristically organized of me…). And I will include sumac on that list.

Refreshing!

Here’s to a spicier new year for us all!

Update: These days I’m a lot more obsessive about my spices, and I always have fresh sumac on hand, thanks to the good folks at Diaspora, a woman-founded company that sources spices direct from small farms in India. The farmers make better money, and consumers get fresh spices you won’t find in the stores, even the Indian ones. Check them out here.