cabbage and bacon

Cabbage burned (or browned) in butter (or any fat) is just downright delicious, especially in the winter! In what follows I use bacon but you can use butter or olive oil if you are vegetarian or vegan and it works well.

Try out 1/4 pound (or less) bacon, cut into tiny bits. Remove the crispy bacon to a bowl, but leave in the fat. Throw in a chopped onion and cook until soft. Add a half a cabbage, cut into small pieces. Stir it all up with lots of pepper and some salt and leave it there on medium heat until it starts to burn in the fat. Don't stir until it starts to really burn! Turn it once and let it start to burn again.

Now you have options: You can add cooked, drained pasta, a bit of cream, some grated parmesan cheese, and the bacon bits to make "cavolo pasta". You can add all of the above except the pasta to make a cabbage-as-pasta non-pasta dish. You can just mix in the bacon and serve it as a side with anything (like latkes or sausages). Another improvisation that worked well was apples, sautéed with the cabbage.

sweet and sour meatballs

As I was walking around the grocery store yesterday, a pound of ground veal whispered "meatballs" to me. I was thinking Swedish, but ended up making this, which was a huge hit with all: 1 lb ground beef 1 lb ground veal 1 cup bread crumbs 2 eggs 1.5 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper 1/2 cup very finely chopped onions I made small (1") meatballs of this mixture and browned them in a 12" pan (they all fit with a little jiggle room). In a large saucepan, I made the sweet-and-sour sauce with the following: 1 cup rice vinegar 3/4 cup brown sugar 2 tbsp ketchup 1 tbsp soy sauce Juice from 14 oz can of pineapple chunks 4 tsp corn starch in a slurry with 1/4 cup water I added the meatballs to this and kept it all simmering. Sauteed a green pepper and a red pepper in the frypan and added this and the pineapple chunks to the sauce. Served over white rice. This hits both the sweet and the sour buttons very hard.

caramelizing onions overnight

At Dstn's place, we put about 2 lb of sliced onions, 1/4 lb butter, and 1 tsp salt into an oven-proof pot. We heated it up on the stove enough to melt the butter, soften the onions a tiny bit, and make it possible to mix it all up. We then put it, covered, into a 200 F (90 C) oven for 10 hours. Bingo, caramelized onions! They went great with a Dutch cheese selected by the 'fuzz.

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 hash

corned beef and cabbage

(The secret ingredient is pickling spice.)

tuna pasta

Here's a crowd-pleaser in high rotation chez Hogg: While pasta (1/2 to 3/4 lb) is boiling, put together a few minced (or pressed) garlic cloves, one finely chopped shallot (or most of an onion or most of a leek), and a can of oil-packed tuna in some additional olive oil (enough for the pasta). Heat it up until it gets fragrant and then turn off the heat. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, chopped parsley, and chopped, oil-cured olives. Maybe also pine nuts, capers, lemon rind, be creative!. Mix cooked pasta with tuna mixture. Serves 3 1/2 (that is, less than 4) but it is easy to double.

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).

bean "gravy" for roast chicken

PMC, in his infinite wisdom, dumped two cans of white beans (we could have used dry beans boiled in water until tender), a few sprigs of rosemary, and some roasted garlic into the pan in which we were roasting two small chickens. This, in the last half-hour of roasting, turned into a bean gravy that went beautifully with the chicken and mashed potatoes. All the awesome of gravy, more food value than gravy, and none of the effort of gravy! (Note: We skimmed off no fat, so this was pretty damned rich!) Well done, PMC.