baked beans

I previously promised that I would figure out baked beans. I did, this Thanksgiving, making one of our five easy sides. Over the next little while I will post all the Thanksgiving recipes (if PMC doesn't beat me to it).

• 1 lb dry beans (yellow eye or soldier or jacob's cattle or white navy; it is hard to find any bean variety outside of Maine and maritime Canada)
• 1/4 lb fat, salt pork or bacon or butter (yes, butter!)
• 1/2 cup molasses (nice sweet molasses you are willing to eat straight)

Par-boil the beans in unsalted (yes, this is important, I learned the hard way) water in an oven-proof pot for 20 to 30 min, until the skins start to peel when you breathe on the beans. Pour off and reserve the pot liquor (PMC's word). Mix into the beans the fat and molasses, and enough pot liquor to not-quite cover them. Bake them, covered, at 250 F for 4 to 6 hours, checking every hour for doneness, stirring, and adding pot liquor as necessary. Never let the liquid in the pot get to the top of the top layer of beans.

At the end, stir in salt and pepper to taste. If they seem dry to you, add a bit more water to thin them. The important thing, whether you like to eat them soupy or dry, is that they cook without too much liquid in the pot.

Experiment with different kinds of fat, maple syrup instead of molasses (or a mixture), with mustard, rum, onions, or whatever strikes your fancy. You won't go bankrupt in the process!

eggs baked in sauce

• build a thick, chunky sauce in an ovenproof frypan
• make a few holes in the sauce into which you crack some eggs
• season with salt, pepper and grated cheese
• bake in a hot oven until the eggs are set
• serve over hot, buttered toast

"Thick, chunky sauce"? This is a method of, technique for, approach to cooking eggs and not a recipe per se. I can bash out a sauce that fits the bill in 10 minutes, so this is on the table in 15, baby. Here's tonight's sauce:

• chop a large onion and cook in some olive oil until the edges start to brown
• add chopped spinach and allow to wilt
• add some minced garlic, stir a bit
• add a volume of chopped tomato about equal to everything that's already in the pan
• cook over medium heat for a few minutes to let some of that liquid fry off
• season with salt and pepper

You could go all arrabiata on those eggs' ass by skipping the spinach and adding some chili pepper flakes or any hot sauce on hand. Hash, anyone? That's onion, cooked potato and leftover corned beef (not really a sauce, but...yum). By the way, add some beets to that hash and you've got "flannel". Of course, there's always puttanesca. You get the idea.

pumpkin...stew

Hallowe'en has come and gone. The boys were matching Incredibles this year, thanks to ML's handiwork, and brought in a fine haul of candy. For almost a month now, the front of our home has been decorated with, among other things, a bale of hay, a large and nasty looking fake rat and many pumpkins. Before the snow gets here (probably next week!), I thought we might eat our way through some of the decorations. No amount of stewing would make the hay or the rat palatable, but one of the smaller pumpkins (seeded, peeled and cut in chunks) made a delicious and rather pretty stew with the addition of the following:

• two leeks (mostly white part) and one medium onion, thinly sliced and braised in butter
• red and white kidney beans (the latter had been cooked with sage)
• frozen corn
• salt, pepper, fennel seeds, turmeric and paprika (mostly for colour)
• water to just cover

I brought this to a simmer and left if for about an hour. This is excellent (and totally veg) as is, but some sauteed merguez sausage is a wonderful addition just before serving

(Everything but the pumpkin and the seasoning had been kicking around the upstairs freezer for some time. Yes, I had a surfeit of leeks earlier this fall and already had a lot of soup in the fridge, so leek and potato was not an option at the time. I braised them and froze for later.)

stew, wonderful (generic) stew

Our love affair with stew continues with this basic recipe. The starting point of any meat stew is, naturally, meat. Take your pick of beef, pork or lamb (or venison or raccoon or ...). Shoulder, neck and shank (foreleg) are the choice cuts for stewing (beef shoulder is called chuck, BTW). For every pound of meat, you want

• a tablespoon of fat
• an onion the size of your fist, chopped coarsely
• a minced clove of garlic
• a cup or two of veggies coarsely chopped or beans
• a cup of liquid
• a tablespoon of flour
• seasonings

The technique is straightforward. Brown the chunks of meat all over in the fat in a heavy, ovenproof pan (I use a Dutch oven). Add the onions and stir until softened. Add the garlic and cook just until you can smell it. Add the flour and stir. Add the liquid and bring to a boil while scraping the bottom of the pot. Cover and put in a 250 degree oven for 2-3 hours until meat falls apart when you prod it with a fork. Root veggies (carrots, parsnips, spuds) are added about an hour into cooking and anything else about 15 minutes before you take the stew out of the oven. Canned beans or chickpeas are also added around then. I like to use beans to stretch my stew when possible. Some traditional stews, however, like boeuf bourguignon, just wouldn't seem right with this addition.

Unless you're making enough for an army, it takes about 30 minutes to get the stew ready to go in the oven. At this point you could opt instead for a slowcooker. On the low setting, most stews take 8-12 hours in the "mijoteuse". There is less evaporative loss, so cut the liquid and flour in half.

Now for the infinite variations. For fat, bacon or salt pork are popular choices. Try out the fat over medium heat before adding the chunks of meat. Of course, these fats add a strong (delicious) flavour to the stew. Butter, duck fat or olive oil are other yummy options. The liquid is usually some combination of stock and wine, but beer, fruit and vegetable juices and, heck, even water also work. If you're making a beef or veal stew and have real veal stock on hand (or some demiglace), then this is the way to go. For seasonings, I usually start with 1/2 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of pepper per pound of meat.

With beef, I like thyme and bay. Sage and rosemary are good with lamb or pork and white kidney beans. Cumin, turmeric, cinnamon and cardamom (Persian seasonings) are great with lamb and chickpeas. Mustard, thyme and brandy soaked prunes are great (and traditionally French) with pork (finish the stew with heavy cream). A heaping tbsp of chopped fresh parsley is a nice finish to any stew.

I serve stew either with bread alone (whatever I can find that most closely approximates the Sullivan Street filone) or with boiled potatoes or buttered egg noodles. I prefer to serve "mush", like mashed potatoes or polenta, with things less saucy, like roast chicken or pot roast or braised lamb or veal shanks (osso bucco).

boeuf bourguignon

• 1 lb bacon, chopped coarsely
• 1.5 lb onion, chopped coarsely
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 lb cheap beef, cubed
• 0.5 lb cheap mushrooms, sliced and sautéed
• wine, salt, pepper, bay leaf, etc

Try out the bacon and sautée the onions and garlic in the fat in an oven-proof pot. Remove the onions and bacon and reserve, making room to brown the beef in the rendered fat. Once the beef is brown, put the onions and bacon back in, and cover with a 3:1 mix of wine and water. Add about 1 tsp salt, a few (I used 8) peppercorns, a bay leaf, and maybe thyme or marjoram. Leave in a 300 F oven for 2 hr or more. Add sautéed mushrooms and put back in the oven for another 0.5 hr. Salt to taste.

I served this with sautéed spinach and PMC's favorite, Sullivan Street filone. I love this. It might be even better if either (a) I marinated the beef overnight in the wine, or (b) I put in only enough wine to cover the beef, and left the onions and bacon out until the last hour or so (so as to make a thicker sauce). But I ain't complaining.

basic risotto

Weather's gettin' cold, so let's bust out the carbs, baby! Saucy rice is easy:

• Sweat some finely chopped onion or French shallots in butter.
• Add about two cups of short grain rice (Arborio or sushi rice are likely candidates) and stir to coat with butter
• Add a cup of weak chicken stock (2:1 water:concentrate) and a cup of white wine and simmer while stirring gently
• When liquid is absorbed, add more stock about a half cup at a time and continue stirring
• Repeat until rice is tender but still firm (al dente)
• Add more stock to adjust consistency, as the rice should spread easily on the plate (a gluey mound is bad). A total of about 6 cups of stock will go into the pot
• Season with good, finely grated parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, perhaps some fresh thyme and a splash of wine

Some favoured variations on this are wild mushroom risotto and roasted squash risotto. For the former, some of the stock is replaced with the soaking liquor (filtered to remove grit?) of a package of dried porcinis or morels, which are also added towards the end. A garnish of fresh wild mushrooms sauteed in butter is nice, if you can get them. The latter... add chunks of squash at the end. Duh. Sage is a nice seasoning to add to this one, with brown butter drizzled on top.

I recently tried parcooking my risotto for a dinner party, i.e. taking to 3/4 completion (after about 4-5 cups of liquid) earlier that day and then cooling it on a cookie sheet. That evening I dropped the cooled mixture into a few cups of simmering stock, brought everything back to a simmer, added the seasoning and was ready to serve on warmed plates in five minutes. Nice trick with a great result.

leftover risotto soup

I had some leftover risotto kicking around in the freezer from this summer and an old bag of red lentils that never seemed to get used and were "bothering me". So I

• sweat a large onion in some olive oil, added a bit of diced carrot and celery, the washed lentils (about 1.5 cups), some thyme, a pinch of dried ginger and around 6 cups very light chicken stock (1 can + 5 cans of water)
• brought this to a boil and simmered until the lentils were tender
• stirred in the risotto to make a nicely thicked soup
• adjusted seasoning with salt and pepper

Lentils and rice is, of course, a classic combination, but using the leftover risotto gave me all sorts of bonus complexity at no added cost in time. "But PMC," you say, "isn't risotto making a branch of rocket science? Doesn't make this dish unfit for this forum?" Not so, as I think you'll see here.

"ahead of time"

For ML's birthday supper on the weekend, I made the following for a party of six:

• creamy pumpkin soup with fresh apple garnish, accompanied with apple cider "ice wine"
• pan roasted duck breast (magret) with blueberry compote and green salad
• wild mushroom risotto
• fallen chocolate cake with raspberry coulis

This meal was, I have to say, fargin' awesome, not least of all because I didn't have the impression that I spent the entire dinner party in front of the stove. None of these menu items, taken individually, involves rocket science. Banging them out one after another for a group of six with minimal time away from the table, on the other hand, is facilitated by knowledge of at least model rocket science. The solution is, naturally, to do as much as you possibly can well before people start to arrive. Mise (rhymes with "knees") en place, they call it. In this post, I'd like to record elements of my "mise" for the birthday menu. Everything was done the morning of and took a few hours. It was very chill and enjoyable.

• make the soup, which then just needs to be reheated just prior to serving
• prep the apple garnish---firm apples like Granny Smith with hold peeled and cubed in "acidulated water", i.e. water with a lot of lemon juice, for many hours in the fridge
• sear the duck magret, which can then be held in the 'fridge until you pop it into a hot oven to finished cooking (I think parcooking is one of many fine restaurant's dirty little secrets. They want us to believe that everything is prepared "à la minute".)
• make the blueberry compote, which can be reheated while the duck is roasting
• clean and dry the greens for the salad
• make the vinaigrette for the salad
• sauté the wild mushroom topping for the risotto
• cook the risotto until it is about two thirds done then pour out onto a jelly roll pan and allow to cool---reheat with stock and another splash of wine to finish cooking the rice and get it creamy and top with the mushroom garnish. This idea is blasphemy for some, but the risotto was damn good and most restaurants work this way.
• make the coulis and hold in the fridge
• make the batter for the cake (which needs to be refridgerated anyway) and prep the muffin tin

With a good "mise", the rest is just timing, i.e. getting all these precooked or parcooked dishes on or in the heat in time to be ready when you are for the next course. Mise en place is also a key part of our yearly Thanksgiving dinner, but let's leave that for another post.

green tomato pickle

What to do with the several pounds of green beefsteak tomatoes lingering in the garden? They weren't about to ripen (we had our first frost last night), so I thought I'd give pickling a whirl. If food preservation is not an issue, pickling is certainly not rocket science. All I want is something that tastes good now.

In the proverbial nonreactive saucepan (I like enamel, personally), I put about a cup and a half of vinegar and a cup of sugar (half white, half brown), a heaping teaspoon of salt, some whole cloves and peppercorns and a whole clove of garlic. After bringing this to a boil, I added a few pounds of green tomatoes, an onion and a red pepper, all thinly sliced. Everything was simmered for around an hour until the tomatoes were translucent. In the 'fridge, this pickle would keep (I suspect) for many weeks, if not months.

Great with (what else) baked beans!

pasta in a mushroom cream sauce

The 'fuzz brought back 1 oz of dried porcini mushrooms from her last trip to Italy (that jet-setter). Today we turned them into a mushroom cream sauce that was easy, fast, and exceeded all our expectations. Our only regret is that we did not have some crusty Italian bread to soak up the remaining sauce; I was drinking it from my bowl at the end. This recipe only serves two hungry people.

• 1 oz dried porcini mushrooms
• garlic, olive oil, wine
• 1/2 cup cream or half-and-half
• few tbsp grated parmesan or equivalent
• pasta for two (not much!)
• fresh flat parsley, chopped a bit

Soak 1 oz dried porcinis in 1 cup boiling-hot water for 20 min. Sauté a clove or two of garlic, minced or pressed, in a few tbsp of olive oil. Add the porcinis (reserving the water they were in) and 1/2 cup of white wine. Keep at a low boil until the wine is fully evaporated. Add in the mushroom liquor—after straining it through a coffee filter to remove grit—and boil it down a bit too. Add cream and cheese and bring back to the boil. Salt (generously) to taste.

If you are clever, your pasta will be on the stove boiling, and just become done at this point; drain it and mix it in. Serve in shallow bowls with a mound of parsley on top, and crusty bread on the side.

country vichyssoise

I call this vichyssoise country because when you make it in the blender (even multiple passes), you still get a few tiny lumps. Also I use black pepper, not white, so it is not perfect in appearance. This recipe is based on an old edition of my bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Sauté a few sliced leeks (white part) and a sliced onion in a few tbsp of butter. When soft, add four peeled, sliced potatoes and four cups of dilute chicken broth. Simmer until tender. Blend until smooth; I usually pass the whole thing through the blender multiple times; the traditional thing is to force it through a sieve. You want it to be as smooth as possible. Salt and pepper the blended soup until it tastes good.

Chill. Add a cup of cream and wisk till perfectly blended. Serve cold (even ice cold) with chopped chives or green onions.

Vichyssoise is easy to make, but I can't quite figure out how to make it well. Maybe PMC can weigh in on this. The best I have ever had is in Le Café de Paris by the Casino in Monte Carlo. It was rich in taste but also very light in consistency. Perhaps the traditional method of forcing the soup through a fine sieve is better than blending it. That sounds dangerously like rocket science.

cold celery soup

This is a variation of PMC's soup algorithm, chilled for summer.

Sauté a thinly sliced medium onion in a few tbsp butter until the onion is soft and translucent. Add one whole bunch of celery, chopped and soaked (to remove sand and dirt), and enough diluted chicken broth (home-made or canned) to cover. Simmer for about 30 min. Blend until smooth in a blender, in a food processor, or in the pot with an immersion blender. Taste and adjust salt if necessary. Chill.

When cold, if you wish, mix in a small amount of cream or half-and-half for color and "body"; it's not necessary.

coq au vin

For all our southern-hemisphere readers, or the northern-hemisphere readers for whom it is a cold summer:

Sauté two sliced carrots, one chopped large onion, and one chopped clove of garlic in a few tbsp of butter and a few strips of bacon, chopped into pieces, in an oven-proof pot. Add chicken (in my case, tonight, four large thighs with skins; they are super-cheap and super-tasty). Sauté the chicken a bit too. Add a tbsp or two of flour (I am not sure this is necessary), a bay leaf, and maybe some marjoram and thyme, about 1 tsp salt, pepper, and (nearly) cover with cheap red wine (about 1.5 or 2 cups).

Let it cook in the oven at 250 F (120 C) for 1 hour, covered. Add 1/2 lb sliced mushrooms and cook for 15 more minutes, maybe on the stove-top. Skim some of the fat if you wish (I usually don't); add salt if necessary (it usually is). Serve in shallow bowls with bread, and maybe also roast or boiled potatoes, and maybe a salad to follow (if you have guests).

Coq au vin: who knew? It's not rocket science.

summer borscht

This recipe was reconstructed from the 'fuzz's memory, and various unreliable WWW recipes. We wanted a borscht that involved no meat, and that was light and refreshing for summer. Apparently it's not rocket science.

Cut tops from 6 or so beets, scrub clean, and simmer in 1.5 qts water until beets are starting to become fork-tender (maybe 1.25 hr). Remove beets from liquid and let them cool a bit.

Add to the beet water 1 bay leaf, 1 med onion cut up a bit, a quarter of the (washed, coarsely chopped) beet tops, 1 tbsp vinegar, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp peppercorns, (and maybe 1 tsp sugar or honey) and simmer till you have soup (maybe 1 hr). Strain the soup through a cloth to remove all solids. Add peeled, finely chopped beets back in. (Note how easily cooked beets peel themselves.) You won't necessarily want to add back in all the beets you cooked originally. Simmer a bit more. Near the end, adjust seasoning, and maybe add a bit of honey or sugar if necessary. Remove from heat and chill.

Serve the soup cold with sour cream, and chopped dill, cilantro, and parsley. For added fun, let your guests add their own shredded raw carrots, sliced, hard-boiled eggs, chopped radishes and cucumbers.

agua fresca

Blend 4 or 5 cups of watermelon chunks (no rind, but seeds are fine) along with a a cup (or less) of water until pulverized. Strain. Add 1/2 tsp (or less) of salt, maybe a tbsp or two of lime juice. Chill. Drink!

roast chicken with potatoes and gravy

I am starting to sound like a broken record here, with lots of chicken and lots of roast vegetables, but I can't help it. They're good, they're cheap, they're certainly not rocket science, and I'm hungry!

Ingredients:

• chicken
• potatoes
• lemon & onion (good but not necessary)
• salt, pepper, butter, & oil

Pre-heat the oven to 450 F. Rinse, pat dry, butter, salt, and pepper a chicken. Put the chicken in some kind of pan in the oven and, a few minutes later, turn the oven down to 350 F. No need to dress or truss! Cook for about 20—25 min per pound, or until a meat thermometer in the thigh reads 180 F (okay, maybe that's rocket science).

Put large, olive-oiled (or buttered or bacon-greased or chicken-fatted) chunks of potatoes into a separate pan in the oven for the last hour of roasting.

While the chicken is in the oven, boil the neck and a bit of onion in a cup or two of water to make weak broth in anticipation of gravy.

When the chicken is done, remove it to a platter and let it stand. Pour the pan juices into a glass and let them separate (clear fat rises to the top). Put a few tbsp of the fat back into the roasting pan and, in the pan on the stove, cook a few tbsp of flour into a brown "roux", stirring constantly. Slowly add in the broth, and maybe the liquid from the platter the chicken's in, and maybe the liquid below the fat in the glass, boiling it on the stove, stirring, and using it to "cook off" the burnt stuff from the bottom of the pan. This, with a tiny bit of lemon juice, vinegar, or wine, and salt to taste, makes beautiful gravy (and cleans the pan).

Carve the chicken and serve with the potatoes, gravy, and a green vegetable or salad. Also try mixing the potatoes with beets, parsnips, turnips, or carrots. Don't forget to save the bones and scraps and table scraps (yes, even the table scraps) for chicken broth, and put the extra skimmed fat in the fridge for roasting vegetables the next time.

chicken broth

Okay, this is a no-brainer, but since I made it last night and both the 'fuzz and I went ga-ga over it, I have to post it.

Whenever you cook chicken, keep the bones or necks or scraps or whatever in a bag in the freezer. Then, when bored, put it all into a pot, along with a hacked up onion and some celery (including leaves), and "sweat" it for a bit (PMC's terminology). Cover everything with water, add peppercorns and a bay leaf. Simmer for 45 mins or more. Strain and add salt bit-by-bit until it's delicious.

In principle, you can use this, diluted, in the many soup recipes on F,NRS. In practice, it tastes so damn good, you will just eat it all right away.

boule of country bread II

Bread flour and terra cotta tiles make all the difference. I used about 6 cups of Robin Hood "Best for Bread Homestyle White" bread flour and half a cup of stone ground organic rye from La Milanaise mill in Quebec to 2.3 cups of tap water. (This gives a percentage of water of about 70, normalized to the weight of the flour.) Of this, two cups of bread flour and one cup of water were used, with half a teaspoon of active dry yeast (Fleischman's), to make a "sponge" the night before. This, with the rest of the flour and water and 1 tbsp of sea salt, was used to make the final dough, which was almost pourable, but that apparently is what you're after with this kind of bread.

The first rise took about three hours. I did not punch down the down but rather gingerly scraped it out onto a floured board and gently formed a boule, a disconcertingly flaccid boule. The second rise of about 45 minutes was in a muslin lined colander. Meanwhile, I covered a large jelly roll pan with a double layer of unglazed terra cotta tiles and set it in the oven to preheat at 450 degrees F.

When I put the bread in to bake, I thought, "There's no way this big floppy pancake is going to bake into anything resembling a loaf of bread." But wow! Those big air bubbles I was so careful to preserve hit the heat of the tiles and the surrounding air and up, up, up. The bread tastes great too. Hooray!

cod puttanesca

Last night's supper was fish baked in sauce, but what a sauce!

• Sauté 4–5 cloves of garlic, minced, in about 5 tbsp of good olive oil until just turning golden.
• Add a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes packed in juice and bring to a simmer.
• While simmering, drain and rinse a small can of anchovies and fire those into the sauce. Then add about 20 pitted black olives (Kalamata, baby) and a heaping tbsp of capers. Add a pinch of crushed chiles or some harissa, sambal olek, etc.. Do not add any salt to this sauce.
• If your sauté pan isn't oven proof, pour the sauce into a baking dish. Lay fresh cod filets on sauce (we also had some ocean perch or "sebaste" in French, which is damn cheap and very good) and bake in a medium oven (around 350) for 10 minutes. Sprinke with fresh parsley and tuck in.

We ate this with basil mashed potatoes (russets + olive oil and butter + milk + fresh chopped basil + salt and pepper) and garlicky, lemony sautéed red Swiss chard. The sauce is potent, so I opened a fairly big wine, a 2002 Vacqueyras, to go with it.

The kids powered back the fish, so I'm afraid there were no left overs for bloggers seeking adoption in our household. On a related note, if "Kurt" could be persuaded to come east for a visit this summer, I would gladly make the trip as well to ply him with sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage in exchange for his insight on classroom management

boule of country bread

If there is one food true to the spirit of F,NRS, it is bread. Few ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. In fact, these all fall into the category of staples and so hardly even count as ingredients in the way it is meant here. But simple procedures? Well, yes and no. It comes down to technique and knowing what things should feel, look, sound and smell like at each stage of the process. For me, making a fruit pie is now a simple procedure, but I've made dozens of them in the past few years. I have a fairly good idea of the tolerances on the procedure, where I can cut corners and where I have to take my time and do it right to get a certain quality of finished product. That's a place I'd like to be in bread baking. Yesterday's effort—a boule of "pain de campagne" or rustic country bread—has a nicely crackled thick crust and good colour and is very moist but the crumb is way too tight and uniform. Also, the salt didn't distribute properly through the dough, so there are some quite salty bites in there.

The Best Recipe by the editors of Cook's Illustrated is my main reference, but my inspiration is a chapter in Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything. There are several loaves I'd like to reproduce: the NYC's Sullivan Street Bakery filone, the "pain aux céréales" from Eric Borderon's in Quebec City and his boule of "pain de campagne". This last loaf has a cracked, blistered deep honey-brown crust with a moist, chewy crumb full of air pockets large and small. I'll post updates from time to time.

sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage

I took the leap and made sourdough buckwheat pancakes for the family this morning, without a net. Frequent readers of F,NRS will recall that while my crew are all devoted pancake eaters, I feared this more agressive cousin would turn them off. Well, never underestimate kids who prefer roquefort to processed singles! Here's how John Thorne makes these in Serious Pig:

• At T minus 24 hours, make the sponge. Put 3 tbsp all-purpose flour, 3 tbsp buckwheat flour, 6 tbsp warm water and 1/4 tsp active dry yeast in a small bowl. Stir, cover with plastic wrap and leave on the counter.
• At T minus 12 hours, mix 3/4 cup all-purpose flour and 3/4 cup buckwheat flour in a larger bowl. Whisk in 3/2 cups of warm water followed by the sponge. Cover with plastic wrap and leave out overnight.
• At T minus 2 minutes, add 3/2 tbsp molasses, 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp salt to the batter, stir and let rest while heating up a griddle. Lightly grease the griddle (bacon drippings, anyone?) initially and between batches.
• Cook the sourdough buckwheats and serve with maple syrup and butter or molasses or sorghum or...

Thorne mentions sage breakfast sausage as a great foil for the grassy, earthy taste of these cakes. I have no idea where one would buy such a creature, so I made some, following Daniel Pinard's guidelines in Encore des pinardises: Recettes et propos culinaires:

• Mix a pound of lean ground pork with a generous tsp each of fine sea salt, chile pepper flakes and dried sage (or a tbsp of finely chopped fresh) and 1/4 cup of white wine.
• Form into patties (long, fairly flat ovals are nice).
• If you have the time, leave in the 'fridge for a few hours to let the flavours marry and the salt and wine work on the protein in the meat.
• Heat a frying pan over medium heat (no need to grease it) and fry up those sausages.

These aren't in casings, but who cares? I don't want to hang them for smoking or drying, which is the main purpose of such packaging; I want to devour them posthaste. By the way, pork, salt and wine in the same proportions plus:

• 1 tbsp each fennel seeds and chopped fresh parsley, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp chile pepper flakes gives you Sicilian sausage
• 2 cloves of garlic minced, 1 tbsp Hungarian paprika, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, a big pinch of ground cumin and one of ground coriander gives you chorizo (replace the pork with lamb and the coriander with ground cinnamon andcloves and you've got merguez)

(In the same chapter: Eat a raw oyster on the half shell, followed by a bite of warm homemade thyme sausage, then a bite of buttered bread and a big sip of white wine (preferably graves, otherwise muscadet, chablis or sancerre). Repeat twelve times in the company of good friends. Know then what it means to be happy. Raw oysters, you say? I guess this form of happiness will have to wait a few months, right friends?) What a wonderful brunch! The only thing missing was baked beans...

making a salad of wilted bitter greens

Spring is here and that means dandelion greens coming up...in our backyard. Picked a few handfuls of the youngest, tenderest leaves, washed them very thoroughly and made this salad inspired by the recipe for "frisee lardons" in Bourgain's Les Halles Cookbook, the chapter on dandelion greens in Serious Pig, and a recipe in Kasper's The Italian Country Table.

• Put clean, dry bitter greens in a bowl: dandelion, cress, curly endive ("frisee"), arugula, or the like. Allow a very generous handful per person (pp).
• Fry pieces of smokey bacon ("lardons") or pancetta in some olive oil until crisp, about 2 oz pp. Set aside the bacon and pour off (and save!) all but about 1 tbsp of bacon fat + olive oil pp.
• Add some minced garlic and a fair amount of thinly sliced French shallot or red onion to the pan and saute until softened. The shallot/onion plays an important role in this salad because it holds a lot of heat, which helps wilt the greens. The subtle sweetness also offsets the bitterness of the greens.
• Add about 1 tbsp red wine vinegar pp to the hot pan, stir and pour everything over the greens. Toss in the bacon and season with salt and pepper.

salad of wilted greens

Salad of wilted greens and bacon lardons with baby dandelion greens from our backyard

poached pears in wine... with chocolate

The clearance cart came through again, this time with a dozen ripe Bosc pears.

• Cut off the bottom so they'll stand up, peel and core with a melon baller/teaspoon/paring knife.
• In a nonreactive pan, place the pears in 2-3 cups of wine (I used white), 1 cup sugar, (a big strip of lemon zest, a few whole cloves, a cinnamon stick, orange juice,...) and add water to just cover the pears. Bring to a simmer and poach the fruit for about 20 minutes.
• Remove the fruit and allow to cool. Reduce the poaching liquid to a nice syrupy consistency (remember that it thickens as it cools). This takes a while.

Now, the pears are great at this point. Just eat them with that syrup. Or...

• Melt a few ounces of good chocolate.
• Stir in mascarpone cheese, some liqueur (Amaretto last night), a tiny pinch of salt and sugar to taste.
• Stuff the pears with this just before serving.

You could also make a ganache using heavy cream instead of the cheese or make it more "chocolate cheesecakey" by using cream cheese.

fish finger "fantasia" sandwich

J has been lowering the bar with this little number recently:

• fish fingers, baked according to package instructions
• cheese, preferably sharp cheddar
• bread, preferably wheat (J likes it untoasted, I am more of a toaster)
• generous amounts of mayo, preferably Kewpie
• lime pickle or mango pickle or marmite or other hot/spicy condiment

Assemble sandwich (J likes perfect planar symmetry, I like chaos and large-scale heterogeneity).

baked potatoes

Here's tonight's main course. Sure wasn't rocket science, but it sure was good!

Put large russets into the oven at 400 F for about an hour; check for doneness with a fork. Eat with butter, sour cream, grated cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil, or etc., and add a green vegetable (and maybe some leftovers) for balance.

soup with white beans and kale

The festival of beans continues. This is from the article on the "subsistence diet" in Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything and is credited to Daniel Boulod. I couldn't believe how good this was. Of course, I was famished and in need of comfort after supply teaching grade 1 gym (!) and grade 4 homeroom today. I had left a pound of white kidneys out to soak almost 24 hours earlier.

• cut up and fry off a few strips of bacon in a soup pot
• chop a large onion and sweat in the bacon and bacon fat
• add one or two cloves of garlic minced, stir, then add 8 cups of light chicken stock and the presoaked beans
• bring to a boil and simmer for about 45 minutes until the beans are tender
• add a pound of chopped kale or Swiss chard (ribs removed), S&P (and some nutmeg). cook for another 15 minutes

Serve topped with a cheese crouton (thin slice of good bread—O Sullivan Street filone, how I long for thee—spread with ricotta or fresh goat's milk cheese and sprinked with grated parmesan and pepper then broil). Very, very satisfying.

fish stew

I wanted to make bouillabaise the other day, but couldn't get my hands on the fish heads, racks and/or whitebait or other small fish to make the base, so I went with a sort of bouillabaise-inspired veggie potage with poached fish. It was pretty good—isn't everything when you slather on the aioli?—but didn't have the depth or (ahem) mouth-feel of the real thing.

• sweat chopped onion, celery and fennel bulb in olive oil
• add minced garlic and, after about a minute, canned chopped tomato
• add water to cover, bay leaf, a big piece of orange peel, (some saffron), S&P
• simmer for 30–40 minutes then adjust seasoning with S&P and lemon juice (Add a splash of Pernod, pastis, ouzo, sambucca,... you get the idea). Fish out the bay leaf and orange peel and then mash or blend the rest. Immersion blender, I love you. Adjust the body with more water. Everything up to this point could be done "before the show", even frozen.
• cook some big chunks of potato is this soup.
• 20 minutes before you want to eat and when the potatoes are almost tender, throw some big hunks of fish in to poach. I used cut up fillets of monkfish, cod and red snapper, allowing about 300 g per person. These fish are firm and mild flavoured; I wouldn't use salmon here, for instance, because it would fall apart and overpower the other flavours.

You eat this with slices of baguette brushed with olive oil and toasted in a hot oven and garlic mayonaise: mayo + about 1/8 tsp of garlic puree per tablespoon of mayo, (a few strands of saffron), S&P.

chili

Again inspired by Serious Pig, I tried a Texas-style meat-only chili, adapted from Thorne's simple recipe to:

• a 1.5 lb flank steak (I wanted to go even cheaper and nastier, but it's a long story) cut into smallish pieces
• about 2/3 lb bacon, cut into smallish pieces
• 1 large-ish onion
• 3 tbsp chili powder
• salt and hot pepper flakes?

I seared the meat and bacon until it was cooked all over the outside, and then some. I added the chili powder and onion and cooked it until the onions got translucent. I added some salt and a pinch of hot pepper flakes and enough water to cover it. I simmered it (covered) in a 250 F oven for a couple hours (the meat got super-tender). Then I roughed it up a bit (to make the meat fall apart) on the stove and reduced it down a bit (and added more salt to taste).

Delicious with cornbread and beer! Thorne suggests boiling beans separately and then mixing them when you serve. The chili is so rich, it can be the minority ingredient in your meal. When we eat leftovers we will use it as the filling for Sloppy Joes.

It warms you up, gives you indigestion, and makes you feel like you live in a Texas prison; I love it!

baked beans

I have long had a fantasy that I would be a bean baker. After PMC (bless him) gave me a copy of Thorne's Serious Pig, my fantasy had a chance of becoming a reality.

Of course, despite the fact that Thorne's recipe had only five ingredients and three steps, I felt that—in the spirit of F,NRS—I had to simplify. After all, Thorne recommends pre-soaking the beans, but then mentions that he finds no evidence that it helps. He also requires par-boiling, but he does it in the bean-soak water, and then uses that bean-soak/par-boil water in the bean pot, so I can't see any reason for doing it in advance of the main bake. Of course my objection is a theoretical one (you ain't throwing off the par-boiling water, so you ain't getting rid of anything, and if it is just boiling them, well they can just boil in the oven, dammit).

Well, I was wrong and a disaster ensued. Will post again when I get a recipe that works.

ants on a log

Ben recently taught me how to make this excellent snack and now he can teach you in this HUGE video clip (18M, but worth the wait for fans of Ben). You may want to test the waters with the compressed version. Raisins are to ants as celery is to a log, but what about the pb?

B: ... the peanut butter is like the thing who sticks, who's sticky in the tree.

G: The bark?

B: Y'know, the cire...the sear...the seal.

G: The seal?

B: No, it's... I don't know the word, but can I taste this one?...

Growing up in maple syrup country, he's probably talking about sève or sap, because I don't think he's ever heard of résine. Never let language get in the way of enjoying a snack.

oven-candied tomatoes

Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table is full of good, simple food like these tomatoes, which the author's source is quoted as calling "money in the bank" in mid-winter. The idea is to simulate the effect of several hours in a cooling bread oven on these babies. Ever go to a farmers' market and see those beautiful, ripe plum tomatoes and wish you had an excuse for picking up a bushel? Now you do.

• Cut the tomatoes in half if they're Italian Plum or into chunks about that size for other varieties.
• Place skin side down in a roasting pan, sprinkle with a bit of salt and drizzle good olive oil over the lot. Throw a few crushed whole garlic cloves and some bay leaves into the pan it you have them.
• Put pan in a 450 degree oven (what is with us and that temperature?!) and decrease the temperature by 50 degrees every half hour until you reach 200-250 and the tomatoes look a bit schrivelled and brown around the edges.
• Pour tomatoes, oil and all into a clean jar or whatever. Probably keeps in the fridge for a week or two, put you'll never have them around that long. They freeze very well (with the oil) and keep frozen for, oh, at least eight months.

These are delicious on pasta, with poached or grilled fish, grilled pork chops, fried polenta, on toast,... Recently I layered these, chunks of fresh goat's milk cheese and pitted, coarsely chopped kalamata olives and some dried oregano and pepper in a little ceramic pot and served it as a first course with crusty bread and roasted garlic (slice off the top of the bulb, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper, wrap in Al foil and roast at 375 for 1 hour). It was insane!!

salmon and vegetables

Salmon, which is a gloriously fatty fish, takes well to the same treatment as those chicken thighs in "chicken and vegetables".

• Rub salmon fillets with olive oil, lay in a sheet pan (roasting pan, big cast iron frypan or what have you) and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. I allow about 200 g of fish per person, but of course we really like our fish around here. Skin on or off, doesn't matter; this treatment does nothing for the skin (you need pan frying for that).
• Nestled in the pan are "the vegetables", ie. anything that will be cooked to your satisfaction in the same time as the fish. See below.
• Fire this into a blazing hot oven (say, 450) for about 15 minutes.
• Very good with a simple yoghurt sauce: good, thick plain yoghurt, salt, pepper and optionally some ground roasted cumin (this is extremely good) and lemon zest.

I pull the fish out when it's two-thirds done; residual heat does the rest in the five minutes it takes to get things on plates and get kids to the table. "Done" for me would probably be sent back by 1 in 3 customers in a restaurant, although these same people readily eat salmon raw in sushi. Human folly!

As for the vegetables, tonight we had oven-candied tomatoes I still had in the freezer from last summer, thinly sliced red onions and kalamata olives. The onions had time to get soft and a bit brown here and there. I learned to do salmon this way from The Naked Chef, where he used blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes, dry cured olives, torn tender herbs (like basil) and anchovy fillets.

Ideas to try...soon:

• sliced potato (1/8") and onion with some thyme
• zuccini and red pepper strips
• baby beets?

Huck Finn

On page two (2!) of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck expresses two of my feelings about food, one about its preparation and one about the urgency of its consumption:

When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them, — that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

chicken and vegetables

This one-step, one-pan, three-ingredient wonder is the only reason J and I survived the last two winters. Each time we made it, it got simpler till we got it down to this:

• chicken thighs (these are so much better than chicken breasts, and they are sold dirt-cheap, even if you buy the schmancy organic ones)
• potatoes, cut into pieces
• carrots or beets or parsnips or turnips or similar, or not
• olive oil, salt, garlic, thyme?

Mix everything in a metal pan so it is coated with olive oil (don't skimp on the oil). Salt the chicken (and rub with garlic and thyme if you are really feeling like going to town). Roast (in that metal pan) at 450 (or hotter; we usually do 500, but PMC thinks our oven is mis-calibrated) for 40 minutes or so, turning the veggies once or twice.

Oh hot, sweet, and crispy quasi-deep-fried, chicken-fat-flavored root vegetables!

If you want a diversified diet (huh?), add, partway through:

• brussel sprouts (which come out great but only need 25-30 minutes, not the full 40), or
• kale (which becomes crispy and slightly burned in about 15 minutes)

99 cent cauliflower

I sometimes wonder how supermarkets ever make any money on fresh produce. Maybe they don't. Maybe that whole department is a loss leader so people will come and buy breakfast cereals and Pop Tarts. In winter in Quebec, a cauliflower sells for about 3 bucks, but this week I picked one up for 99 cents because it had developed some brown spots (heavens!). The store can't just trim that stuff off because customers wonder just what unwholesome fungus must have been removed, but I can and did. The rest of it made this:

• Chop coarsely and sweat one large cooking onion in about 4 tbsp of butter
• Add chopped cauliflower and light chicken broth (I usually use Campbell's but with two cans of water to one of broth) to cover. Simmer until cauliflower is tender.
• Blend until smooth (an immersion or dipstick blender makes this very easy).
• Adjust body by adding milk. Season to taste (s&p and maybe some nutmeg).

You can stop here and still enjoy this soup; the kids like it this way. A lot of recipes call for this plus grated old cheddar. The tanginess of the cheese works. But just try this base plus chopped fresh coriander. It's unbelievably good. I make a lot of soups along the lines of this one. It's pretty algorithmic:

• potato and leek
• carrot (add minced ginger and garlic to the onions and some white wine to the stock; hold the milk; hold the nutmeg but add curry powder and lemon juice to seasonings)
• parsnip (schmancy option: puree a boiled beet and swirl in some of this for that marbling effect)
• potato and watercress/spinach (blanche cress—abundant unsalted boiling water for a couple of minutes followed by shocking in cold water and squeeze out—to reduce bitterness; cook potato in half stock, half milk then blend with cress)

lentils and spinach

There are about five dishes in my "repertoire" that date from the two years I spent as a vegetarian, a period which sadly coincided with my first trip to France (and ML's only one to date). When I think that I went out of my way to eat...Tibetan veggie! in Paris and that ML not only joined me but agreed to marry me a year later despite my obvious perversion, I see that the gods have truly smiled upon me. I've since rejoined the ranks of the omnivorous and made up for lost time in the Paris bistros, n'est-ce pas? When we tire of the blood pudding and great joints of mutton, like last Thursday night, I still like to make up a batch of L'n'S.

Slice a large cooking onion and fry in olive oil in a pot over medium-high heat until edges start to brown. Add a heaping cup of dry lentils (I like the small DuPuy kind), washed and picked over for stones. Add 2–3 cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer covered for 20–30 minutes until lentils are quite tender. Check once in a while and add water if needed. You want about 1/2 cup of "pot liquor" to remain when the lentils are fully cooked. Add about 10 oz. of chopped fresh spinach (not baby spinach), 1 tsp. ground cumin and 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt. Stir, cover and rest off heat for about 10 minutes. Taste and add more salt (1/4 tsp. at a time) until you think, "Damn! Lentils and spinach, where have you been all my life?" Eat with rice.

By the way, the kids love this. Did I mention this was lentils and spinach?

hot toddy

• any brown alcohol (bourbon, scotch, rum, maybe even cognac?)
• any sugar (white, brown, simple syrup, molasses, maple syrup)
• boiling water

Put a shot of the alcohol and a pony of the sugar into a teacup and fill with boiling water. Stir.

Add butter to the rum/brown-sugar one to make a hot buttered rum (yes, it is as nasty as it sounds). Add lemon to a whiskey one to make my favorite "cold remedy".

I can't find a hot toddy I don't like. Last night I "invented" the Yankee Toddy: maple syrup, Wild Turkey, and boiling water.

pancakes

ML was out of town this evening, so I scored major points with the boys by serving flapjacks for supper. ("Breakfast foods" in the evening are a hard sell with her, although we now agree that omlettes are good anytime.) Pancake mix is evil; commit this recipe to memory:

• 1 cup flour
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla if you've got it
• 1 tbsp melted butter

(Note the 1 cup—1 cup—1 egg symmetry.) Mix the dry. Add the wet and mix just until combined (the batter will be lumpy). Heat a pan* over medium heat until a drop of water beads and skates around a bit (maybe wipe the pan with some oil or bacon fat first). Spoon batter into pan and cook until bubbles form on top. Flip and finishing cooking: it springs back when poked and feels like an earlobe. This makes just enough for our two adults and two young kids. If you're having trouble memorizing the recipe, try making pancakes every week, sometimes more than once in a given week, for several years. Leaves a lasting impression.

From time to time, I embellish on this recipe. Tonight I added a couple tablespoons of wheat germ—good for the body—and a quarter cup of chocolate chips—good for the soul. Chopped dried fruit, frozen wild blueberries, chunks of apple and cinnamon, ground hazelnuts, you name it. Be a hero.

I once had sourdough pancakes and I like the idea of perpetuating that starter, but for now I just love the chemical levener. I also love buckwheat pancakes with molasses, but it would be a complete waste of time making them for this gang without a backup meal at the ready. The best thing would be to attend the "Festival de la Galette de Sarrasin" (Buckwheat pancake festival) held in Louiseville (a short drive from TR) every October and hope the group will suddenly discover the charms of buckwheat. Did you know that buckwheat was a grass, not a grain. Oh tay!

*I use a 12" (30cm) Farberware Millenium nonstick. Great heavy pan with a riveted, metal handle that cools quickly. If you're ordering one, also pick up a lid that fits (I've been using an inverted metal prep bowl).

beef stew

To test out the electric crock pot in the house we are renting, I did the following yesterday. This recipe was completely made-up from nothing.

• two large potatoes, chopped a bit
• three medium onions, chopped a bit
• a bag of mini carrots
• a few strips of thick bacon, cut into chunks
• a cheap and nasty beef shin with a bit of meat on it
• cheap red wine, salt, pepper, bay leaf

Put the beef (with bone) at the bottom of the crock pot, then the vegetables, and cover with a 50/50 wine/water mix. Add bay leaf and plenty of salt and pepper. Leave on "high" setting for 6 hours (ie, go to work, work, and come home). Serve.

The meat, potatoes, and carrots came out really well, particularly the meat, which came out like it does in Boeuf Bourguignon. However, the liquid comes out very thin, and I could not bring myself to add cornstarch (as many on-line recipes suggest). I think when I eat the leftovers, I might make a roux with the fat, and turn the liquid into a thin gravy. Will that work?

clam chowder

I tried to convert PMC's simple oral description of chowder into the most basic possible recipe.

• few strips bacon, cut into clam-sized bits
• few medium onions, chopped to the size of clams
• few large potatoes, cubed the size of clams
• two cans clams
• half-and-half cream
• salt, pepper, bay leaf

Fry the bacon low until much of the fat has been rendered. Add onions and cook until they are translucent. Add potatoes, clams and clam liquid, a bay leaf, enough water to barely cover everything, and enough salt and pepper to make the water taste "good". Simmer until the potatoes are just cooked. Add enough cream to make it creamy and let it sit for ages (a day, in my case). Re-heat, check salt level (salty is good), and serve. Don't let it boil once the cream has been added.

The result was a good, simple, sweet (from the onions, I guess) chowder. One note: I bought high-end canned clams.