lentils and lamb and... pumpkin?

I sautéed a chopped half-onion, half-carrot, half-parsnip, and half-pepper along with a small lamb shank in lots of olive oil in my pressure cooker. I added half a cup of french green lentils, one cup water, and a tsp each of salt and cumin. Then, in a refrigerator-clearing move, I added the flesh from a small pumkin-like squash (the 'fuzz says its name starts with a "k").

I put the lid on and took the cooker to high pressure for 14 min and then let it cool down for 15 min. I opened the cooker, pulled the meat off the bone, chopped it, and stirred everything together into pumpkin-lamb dal. I added more salt, as usual. The 'fuzz made couscous to go with. Slightly sweet and very delicious!

lamb and beans, now with more prison

Following a suggestion of PMC, who (these days) is all about cooking below boiling and for a long time, I am attempting a remake of lamb and beans but with no par-boiling of the beans. This is all about one-step cooking. I put a lamb shank, a pound of dry white beans, a few glugs of olive oil, two split garlic cloves, some pepper, rosemary sprigs, thyme sprigs, and coarsely ground pepper into a bean pot. I more-than covered it all with water. I put it in a 200 F (90 C) oven. I am now going to wait 5 hours and see what I get! At or near the end I will have to add a lot of salt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?