white bean and chard soup

I made a beautiful quarantine soup from the larder today: Burn merguez sausage in a pot so that it leaves nice brown sticky stuff on the pan. Substitute anything here; you could use other sausage or fake meat or a chicken thigh or a bone. Or go old-school vegan! (If you go vegan, get your brown from the mirepoix.) Remove the meat to a bowl.

Clean the pan by sautéeing diced onions, carrots, and celery (that is, mirepoix) in olive oil. Add white beans (either from a can or parboiled from dry for 40 minutes in water). Add water, salt, pepper, garlic, and maybe a mushroom-broth cube or something like that. Bring this all to a boil on the stove and then simmer it in the oven at 300 F (150 C) for 40 min.

At the end, add a bunch of finely chopped swiss chard (silver beet or equivalent; any lettuce will do), and the crispy sausage bits. Return to the oven for 15 min or until the lettuce is wilted. Serve with harissa for hotness.

I'm being unspecific about quantities here, but this truly isn't rocket science. The only thing that really matters is the ratio of salt to total mass.

steamed mussels in white wine

This one is in high rotation Chez Hogg: Burn some chopped onion, carrot, and celery in a few tbsb of butter. Add 8-ish ounces of white wine, bring to a boil. Add 2lb of ice-cold, rinsed mussels. Boil/steam until all the mussels are open and plump (and give them a few more minutes after that); should take less than 15 min.

Partition mussels into shallow bowls, and then finish the soup with (lots of) salt, pepper, parsley, and (optionally) cream. Pour soup over mussels in the shallow bowls. Top with a bit more parsley and finely chopped fresh onion or shallot.

Serves four with french fries or salad or eight as a first course for something. Can be expanded arbitrarily (as we learned on Christmas Eve this year). Also consider adding curry to the soup, or harissa.

pressure-cooker hoppin' john

For New Year's, I fried up a quarter pound of chopped bacon, one chopped carrot, one chopped onion, and some chopped celery in the pressure cooker and then added 1.5 cups of rice and 1.5 cups of black-eyed peas, 3 cups of leftover turkey broth, 4 cups of water, less than a tsp of harissa, lots of pepper, and 1 tbsp of salt. I cooked it at pressure for 24 min and then let it come down in pressure naturally. We ate it with spinach sautéed with onions, garlic, vinegar, and olive oil, and some bacon bits.

We ate it with hot sauce and celebratory champagne. The crowd of four was very happy; it would have served at least six lumberjacks. Next time I would switch to 2:1 ratio of beans to rice, drop the liquid by at least one cup, and reduce cooking time by a couple minutes.

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.

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