oxtail stew

Fry some oxtail (I used half a pound) in butter, turning until it is brown all over. Add mirepoix (finely chopped onions, carrots, celery) and fry some more. Add some thin stock (I used leftover turkey stock from Thanksgiving) and wine and simmer the oxtail for two hours. Add coarsely chopped (chunks of) root vegetables (I used carrot, parsnip, turnip, potato), one heck of a lot of salt, pepper, and probably also thyme and bay leaf. Also add a roux made by browning a few tbsp of flour in a few tbsp of butter. (At this point I let it cool, put it in the fridge, and finished it the next day.) Give it one more hour of simmer until the root vegetables are tender, pull the meat from the bones, mix, and serve.

This came out very, very good with root vegetables in a rich gravy. I made it meat-as-garnish, with much more vegetable than meat, but that is a fully tunable knob. Apparently to make it more Caribbean, you should add tomato, cloves, allspice, and a chile pepper.

Chicken Tagine with chickpeas, apricots and almonds

I made this without a net and it was a hit with the fam' tonight.

• olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp coriander
• 6 deboned chicken thighs
• 3 cups cooked chick peas
• 1/2 c dried apricots, cut in large pieces
• 1 c raw almonds, chopped coarsely

Fry onion in olive oil until edges brown. Add garlic and cook until fragrant. Pour into tagine. Mix spices. Dredge chicken in spice mixture and fry briefly to toast spices and give chicken a bit of colour. Place chicken on onions. Add 1/2 cup water to pan, scrape pan and pour liquid over chicken. Add chickpeas and apricots to tagine. Cook about 2.5 hours at 300F. Fry almonds and pour over chicken and chickpeas.

I served it with cousous and a carrot and orange salad.

corned beef and cabbage

(The secret ingredient is pickling spice.)

winter vegetable stew

Try out cut-up bacon with olive oil. Soften onions, garlic, carrots, and celery, chopped coarsely. Add some wine (red or white), white beans, canned tomatoes, vegetable stock (or water I am sure would work), thyme, salt, and pepper. Simmer for half an hour. Meanwhile, blanch chard, drain, chop, and add for the last few minutes of simmering.

Serve with hard cheese and crusty bread. This stew looks beautiful at every stage of cooking and pleased the 'fuzz. Apologies to PMC that I didn't take a photo.

lasagne

I have repeatedly found, checked (by experiment), stopped believing, and then re-checked (by more experiments) the obvious and yet completely unknown fact that you don't have to pre-boil lasagne noodles before making a lasagne in the oven! Here's my dumb recipe, which sure ain't rocket science:

Fill an oven-proof pan with various layers. For this one, I did a bottom layer of chopped onions and carrots, olive oil and a tiny bit of crushed tomatoes, then a layer of raw, rigid noodles, then a layer of crushed tomato with some cheese, then noodles, then an enormous layer of raw baby spinach with some hard cheese, then noodles, then a layer of tomato and cheese, then a layer of noodles, and then a top layer of tomato, mozzarella, and hard cheese. It was mounded up in the pan like this:

After one hour in a 400 F (200 C) oven, it looked like this:

All noodles cooked. Adjustments for next time: Put more cheese in the layers; add garlic to the bottom layer; salt and pepper each layer. Remember: Pre-boiling is for suckers. And no, I didn't use the "pre-boiled" or "oven-ready" noodles either (those are fine though, I hate to admit).

"vegan" mashed parsnips

As our loyal reader knows, we love to mash vegetables here in the F,NRS NYC office. Recently, parsnips have come under the masher, to good effect. I only post it here because we mash these babies for Liz and Lisa, who eat kosher and therefore can't have milk or butter in the mash (if it is to be eaten with chicken, as it so often is), and Liz needs the recipe. These mashed are vegan so that we can all eat meat, if you know what I mean.

Before starting, if you want them garlicky, put many peeled cloves of garlic into a dish with many tablespoons of olive oil and put it into a low oven (say 300 F) to soften and sweeten. Then cut up—no need to peel, as far as I am concerned—parsnips, potatoes, and carrots into substantial chunks for boiling. I usually go something like four parsnips for every potato and carrot, but mix it up! Boil the parsnips for 30 minutes and the carrots and potatoes for 20. That is, you want the parsnips very done. Save some of the cooking water (remember, no milk will be permitted). Mash it all with the garlic and olive oil from the oven (or just plain olive oil if you don't want to go garlicky), insane amounts of salt and some pepper, and just enough cooking water (not much) to get them mushy.

These mashed parsnips are so sweet, you can't help asking: Parsnips, where have you been all my life?

Moroccan-style chicken stew

These days, in high rotation at home, and inspired by our friend Ness, I have been making this ultra-simple crowd pleaser: Heat up a dutch oven and put in as many pieces of chicken as people (double up if you are serving Marines). Once the chicken gets to releasing some fat, throw in about as much chunky chopped leeks, carrots, and celery (if you have it) you can stand to cut up, and anything else you like. Add one chopped preserved lemon for every five or six people, and about the same volume of salty olives (like Kalamatas for example, pitted if your crowd is liable to break teeth). Add a mixture of red wine and water (or just water if you are out of wine) to nearly cover, and obscene amounts of salt, some pepper and a bit of harissa (maybe half a teaspoon per four people), and simmer for enough time to give the chicken a total start-to-finish cooking time of 35 minutes. Don't over-cook!

Serve with couscous and extra harissa for the heat-lovers. You can extend this with chick peas if you are short of chicken or heating up leftovers. As you can imagine, it is even better the next day.

hot pot

The Tragintyres—who have adopted the customs of their home country the Netherlands—taught us this one this summer: Cut up a few potatoes and similar vegetables (tonight we used carrots and cauliflower, but you could use beets or turnips or parsnips or cabbage, of course) and boil them to tender. Meanwhile, saute bacon, then onions, and then finely chopped greens (we used kale that had been blanched). Mash the boiled vegetables with cream, butter, salt and pepper; then add the sauteed part and mix it up. Serve.

This is meat-as-garnish, kid-friendly, hearty, simple, and delicious.

mirepoix

A mirepoix is a mix of chopped vegetables used to build the foundational flavours of many dishes. In classic French cooking, the mirepoix consists of two parts cooking or yellow onions to one part each of carrot and celery. If that sounds like rocket science, if I wanted for example one cup of mirepoix, I would use half a cup of onion, a quarter cup of carrot and a quarter of celery.

Other cuisines have their own take on mirepoix. The function is always the same: build a solid base or backdrop of flavour against which to highlight the goodness of the main ingredients.

• Indian: the highly aromatic "wet masala" of onions, garlic and ginger
• Cajun/Creole: the "holy trinity" of onions, celery and green pepper

chicken pot pie

I don't know for sure, but a "pot pie" might be a pie in which the pot forms the bottom, but there is a top crust of pastry. For my fourth pie of the summer I tested this assumption by making a chicken stew, adding a pie crust pastry top, and then baking it until the top was crispy. It came out like chicken and dumplings but with crispy, flaky dumpling-like servings of pie crust!

For the stew, I put two chicken legs and some chopped green onions in a covered pot, cooked them hot for about 15 min, added water to half-cover and a lot of salt, simmered it for about 30 min, pulled the chicken off the bones, chopped the chicken, tossed the bones, added peas and carrots, stirred in flour to thicken it (yes, cheating, I should have made a roux and it would have been better), and simmered it for about 30 min more.

I put on the pastry top and threw it in a 375 F (200 C) oven for another 30 min.

chicken and dumplings

Today I put chicken, onions, carrots, and celery in a pot with salt and pepper and covered it all (not quite) with water. I simmered it for two hours (checking seasoning now and then). I finished by dropping on top large spoonfuls of my my biscuit dough, as suggested by PMC in the comments of that post. It took less than 10 min for the dumplings to cook, at which point we had chicken and dumplings!

pot roast

Now this is not rocket science:

• few tbsp fat (I used rendered bacon fat)
• few lbs beef (I used the cheapest chuck the 'fuzz could find)
• few onions, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, etc
• salt, pepper, water

Sauté one chopped onion and the beef in the fat, turning occasionally, until the beef is brown. Then salt and pepper it very generously, add some water (I used less than 1 cup), and put in a 300 F (150 C) oven. After 2 h add vegetables, maybe peeled and quartered. Cook for another 1.5 h for a total of 3.5 h. Drain and serve with sautéed greens or equivalent, with some of the pot liquor as a sauce. Serves at least two per lb of meat.

Some would have you thicken the sauce to a gravy; I bet PMC would! Next time I might use cubed salt pork as the fat.

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.

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)

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?