Sunday has more good songs about it than any other day of the week, but I still hate it. Today, for instance, I barely had time to squeeze in an attempt at Hoppin’ John between sleeping late and going to band practice. I have been reading a book called “The Carolina Rice Kitchen – the African Connection” by Karen Hess in order to study for a future recipe (Ms. Hess spells this word “reciept” to my perpetual consternation), and found the chapter on this particular foodstuff to be fascinating. Yesterday I managed to scam a hambone from work (the attached flesh became expensive sandwiches). The path ahead became clear, as though a veil of fog were lifted by the penetrating rays the summer sun rising over the Atlantic salt marsh, et cetera.
I started by immersing my ham bone in water, tossing in a few peppercorns and bay leaves, and setting it to simmer (it is still doing so as I type). Then I made breakfast for myself and Dee Dee. It’s a good thing she was around, as she guided me in cooking up some dried beans – I boiled them up in some shrimp stock left over from the other day (this obtained by sautéeing shrimp shells in peanut oil and simmering with cilantro stems). I tossed in a few pieces of salt pork and called it beans.
The next thing to knock out was a pile of collard greens. These went in the pot with three very sorry-looking long, hot, green peppers, seeded and chopped, a few cloves of garlic, and (yes) more salt pork. Cold water outweighed my remaining shrimp stock.
Impulsively I threw a few slabs of pork in the stockpot with the hambone, to render out some fat. Ms. Hess seemes to be of the opinion that Hoppin’ John rice ought to be greasy and I don’t disagree. I washed my rice and put it aside for the last step, but when the beans were thoroughly cooked far before Dee Dee promised they would be, it was time to spring into action. I did the job simply, boiling a pint of Carolina rice in a quart of fatty pork stock.
After wat seemed like hardly a few minutes watching the Puppy Bowl, my components were ready at last. Finishing the process was simple: I drained the beans and folded them into the rice, adding plenty of salt, pepper, cayenne, and ground ginger (A variation Ms. Hess says is a favorite of a particular Ghanaian dignitary). This was served in bowls alongside a heap of collards, accompanied by a bottle of hot sauce and an orange juice shandy.
Result: Delicious, fantastic in my opinion. Dee Dee as always said it wanted salt. Also yielded a bit of pot liquor, and a pot of stock which grows tastier as I type. The only real hangup is the no one could taste the generous shake of ginger I added. I wonder how much longer I will continue throwing spices away like this. Next time I should put fresh ginger in the rice. Better yet, I’m going to make this with lemongrass, too. HA.
leftovers = lotssss
Hola amigos. Today I managed to get to the Market Basket and buy a chicken. The idea was to recreate a recipe I followed out of the Darwin’s Comestibles soup cookbook about five and a half years ago. I recall that it was soup, and had bananas in it, and a lot of peppers and things. I found myself approaching the task a little bit sideways insomuch as I went grocery shopping first, and then went home and checked to see if there existed an analogous recipe on the internet. In approximately one minute of googling I found nothing and decided to make something up.
Actual soup would not be near ready for hours, so the first thing I did upon getting home (after tossing the groceries on the kitchen table and looking at funny internet pictures for a half hour) was to remove the chicken’s legs and wings and drop them right into a pan of hot peanut oil, followed by a stint in the broiler. While they fried I put the rest of the dirty bird in a foil roasting pan. Figuring that I would be adding most of the flavor later in the process, I didn’t tart it up too much: I tossed in about half a can of Blue Ribbon and several generous squirts of fish sauce, which which I basted the the chicken as it roasted and I enjoyed a tasty lunch of fried chicken and beer.
After what seemed like a long time (an hour and a half?) the chicken seemed done enough. I pulled it out, transferred it to a plate, and tossed it in the fridge. By this time I had chopped up a pineapple, a mango, and two plantains. I set these aside indefinitely.
After a little while the chicken had cooled of enough to handle, so I tore it apart with my bare hands with some relish. Into a stockpot went all the bones, a red onion, a few carrots, several celery stalks, bay leaves, peppercorns, and some crushed garlic cloves. I also tossed in some especially gristly birdflesh and most of the skin. How much meat and skin are you supposed to put in stock? I suspect it’s not much at all, but honestly it’s never fucked up my stock that badly. Unless it has and I don’t know it. I set this to simmer indefinitely.
While this was on I decided to get some rice on. Jasmine rice went in the cooker, along with all of the drippings out of the roasting pan (they were tasty), enough water to pad this out and copious amounts of star anise, cardamom, and cloves. This rice was very fragrant.
Soon it was time to talk turkey with chicken soup. I diced a yellow onion, four cloves of garlic, an orange pepper, and two of the handsome green fellows known to the Market Basket produce department as Long Hot Peppers. These I sweated in peanut oil and a generous dollop of lard.
When they looked like they were getting copacetic with each other, I added a thumb of ginger diced very small and one each dried ancho and chipotle peppers. I began spooning chicken stock (on the adjacent burner) atop these aromatics. The stock dripping off my ladle fell into the burner and sizzled.
Things sped up at this point. By turns I tossed in more stock, diced chicken, all the fruit, rice, and other important ingredients. Before I knew it, I had two full pots of bland soup and a little over a pint of leftover drained stock. I had to chop more pineapple than I expected, and I threw the rice, spices and all, into the broth, picking out the floating seeds afterward with a spoon. I found in the fridge about 4/5 of a chorizo sausage, sliced it thinly, and tossed it in. Why not?
After clearing out a few dirty dishes it was time to season the thing, which I accomplished by adding a good deal of cumin, cayenne, turmeric, red pepper flakes, and curry powder, followed by fish sauce and Sriracha augmented by some plain old kosher salt and pepper, several spoonsful of coconut oil, loads of cilantro and a few splashes of lemon juice. I forgot 
I had Kefir lime leaves in the freezer.
The result was what I’d call pretty good. It is sweet, fatty, chickeny, spicy, hot, and complex. My last step (another little trick I learned at Darwin’s) was to stick an immersion blender in the soup for a few seconds, pulverizing some of the solids for a cloudier, richer broth. I think it could be more peppery, though not necessarily in a hot way, yeah?
So I learned
1. Plantains are starchy. I bet you knew this already. They are not flavorful like the bananas in the recipe I was trying to copy. So I have little starchy chunks in this soup, which is ok, really. They make an interesting analogue to potatoes. The mango, by the way, seems to have vaporized entirely.
2. Yes, I am still capable of making a soup that is NOT thoroughly puréed and strained and NOT loaded with cream. Hooray.
3. I tried to be mindful of using ingredients in the way that they are most effective. For years I have boiled rice destined (to be fried or whatever) with loads of garlic and ginger and pepper flakes, noticing only last week or so that boiled rice does not carry these flavors terribly well. As a matter of fact the jury is still out on stock (or in this case, greasy beery pan drippings) in this regard. Rice DOES carry the flavors of anise and clove and cardamom quite well. This is part of my ongoing effort to cut out unnecessary steps and ineffective techniques, which I have not yet bothered to exert.
And that’s the story of chicken soup. If you are anywhere near Somerville, please come and eat some because I have A TON OF IT.
Filed under: cooking | Tags: boar, chili, ethnotourist misadventure, victory
This blog entry is the recipe for my winning entry in the 2008 Abbey Lounge Chili Cookoff, exactly as I already posted it elsewhere. Read on, fellow traveller.
matt-L – 11/10/08 – 9:52 am (207.180.187.80)
Recipe for Chili Of Friendly Companionship for the Healing Of All The Nations
Thursday:
Rub six pounds wild boar meat in:
Cocoa powder
Cumin
Cayenne
Red pepper flakes
Oregano
Cinnamon
Salt & Pepper
Put it back in the fridge.
Friday:
Brown rubbed boar in hot oil for a few minutes and set aside. In the same pot, sautée roughly chopped onions, celery, carrots, and garlic. When these are a little more brown/translucent, toss in some peppercorns, a bay leaf or two, and a bottle of beer – I used a 750 mL cask of St. Landelin la Divine, brewed at L’Abbaye de Crespin, Douai, France. Once the alcohol evaporates from the beer, replace the boar, add chicken stock and a little water to cover, and simmer, covered, until fairly tender, about three hours.
more to come
matt-L – 11/10/08 – 10:05 am (207.180.187.80)
FRIDAY CONT’D
First of all, duh, please add to above braising solution two each dried ancho and chilpotle peppers. Include the seeds, they are the funnest.
Okay, at about the three hour mark or so, pour a tablespoon or two of ghee in a large pot. Dice a white onion, a few shallots, a bell pepper, a few jalapenos and serranos, and a few more dried peppers, revived in warm water. Saute these in ghee. A little later add a few diced tomatoes and several handsful of dried cranberries and simmer.
While this is going on, strain the braising boar and vegetables, reserving the braising liquid. Carefully separate the meat from the vegetables; discard the vegetables, and pull apart the meat with your fingers. Listen to your sous chef, Leah, complain until you put the braising liquid in a jar and send it home with her instead of pouring it down the sink. She will be drinking it with bourbon before this recipe is over.
Anyhoo, at this point, the aromatics in the pot should be pretty well sweated, so go right ahead and drop the boar in there, along with three cans of white beans – Butter beans are preferred, but Great Northern Beans will do if you buy the wrong beans. After vigorous debate, add a jar of stewed tomatoes. Simmer this while drinking Drambouie and listening to music with friends.
matt-L – 11/10/08 – 10:06 am (207.180.187.80)
oh btw add about four cardamom pods to that braising liquid, BTW
matt-L – 11/10/08 – 10:12 am (207.180.187.80)
FRIDAY CONT’D
Simmer this until you get bored and have to go to bed.
SUNDAY
Pull chili out of the oven and place on the stove top. Crank the heat and stir constantly to avoid scorching. When chili begins to boil reduce heat and simmer gently. Finely chop about one bunch of sage and a few handsful of cilantro, one each fresh jalapeno and serrano pepper, and two brined jalapenos and stir in. Season with kosher salt, smoked sea salt, and horseradish. Serve over tortilla chips and garnish with sour cream and more chopped herbs.
matt-L – 11/10/08 – 10:14 am (207.180.187.80)
oh another thing in the braising liquid was a bunch of cilantro stems
oh and i forgot a few kefir lime leaves on friday
and some lime juice on sunday.
Soup was good, chocolate cake was farcical with a but. I thought about ten cloves of roast garlic would carry a full pot of Yukon Golds, shallots, celery and plenty of it, sage, a bit of macomber turnip and loads of cheap chardonnay, but I was wrong. In went both entire bulbs and several generous drizzles of garlicky oil, along with salt and pepper and sour cream, and (secret ingredient) a spoonful of Marmite. Garnish was smoked paprika (cheap thrills, again) because I forgot that I wanted to drizzle this soup with honey.
The result: This soup is plenty garlicky, also creamy and starchy. I like it, though my soups have been very profoundly samey recently: puréed things with a lot of cream and wine. I must break this habit and learn how to build a broth good enough to command my self-respect. Next time I have the urge to make soup, I will down a quality milkshake or two, and a box of Kraft mac and cheese, and a six pack of beer, thus temporarily slaking my persistent thirst for milkfat and booze 
. Served with crusty, warm baguette and homemade herbed butter, it was just the thing for a rainy December day.
Oh yeah, I also tried to make a chocolate cake, and it was pretty silly. Negotiating in good faith with Fate, I briefly glanced at the Test Kitchen recipe for sheet cake before leaving the house. I came back with a little under half the chocolate I would need (but, as it was Lindt 70%, I paid a little more than thrice what I should have), and no buttermilk. The plan: To substitute coconut milk for buttermilk, compensating for the loss in acidity by substituting 150% baking powder for baking soda (at the advice of a good friend and talented baker). I also threw in, on impulse, about three sizable dumps of ground cinnamon. I figured I’d wind up with a light, fluffy tropical choco-coco-fantasie, maybe served with some leftover peach sorbet, and the whole meal could be like a Polish cycling team and their chihuahua mascot at training camp in Bermuda, or something.
Ha ha, no. For one thing, the cake didn’t rise too good. One dinner guest asked me if it was flourless when in fact it had about a cup and a half of flour in it. Also, I guess I don’t know how to make frosting. Did you know that you’re supposed to whip cold butter? I didn’t, so I left about two sticks on the table to get nice and melty before I tossed them in with a heaping handful of grainy white sugar, confectioner’s sugar, several thoroughly impermeable lumps of brown sugar, some vanilla, the more congealed half-can of coconut milk, some vanilla and whatever else I could find that bore reasonable suspicion of comprising frosting.
The result was a suspension of full-sized sugar crystals in thin yellow oil. I cut in half the 13″x 9″ chocolate brick, grit (ha) my teeth, and began laying down the middle frosting layer. Immediately the sickly sweet slurry began oozing everywhere. I tried to pronounce a few choice swear words, but I found I was laughing too hard. So I slapped on the top layer and called it a job well done. My “cake” resembled an immensely overgrown mutant Ho Ho abandoned on a midsummer sidewalk, wallowing in its own rapidly putrefying effluvia, rolling its eyes and futilely wheezing at nonplussed passersby in its final agonizing hours. Soup, anyone?
This is the paragraph in which, if I get around to it, I will explain how Leah and Dee Dee miraculously saved my failed frosting using a double boiler, the freezer, and some Nutella, but really i wasn’t watching while it happened. From now on I will leave dessert to people who follow rules.
Diz said we have too many potatoes, and it is raining. Thus, soup. At present two bulbs of garlic are roasting in my oven under oil, filling the apartment with their fragrance (does this count as a confit?). This will yeild a great deal of soft, brown, mellow, nutty roast garlic and a healthy amount of garlic-infused oil, which I will save for something else, probably.
My plan is to soup it up (maybe not all that garlic) with Yukon Golds, plentiful celery, maybe a little turnip, and thyme. There will be no animals in this soup, because a few of my dinner guests prefer to keep the carnivore thing down to a dull roar (get it?). I have noticed that I have nearly a pound of pipette pasta and some cans of beans and about half a jicama and some tarragon and sage, so maybe I can cobble together a bean salad of some kind.
Garlic has a lot of faces, and can taste and act pretty differently depending on how you treat it. Raw garlic is a volatile ingredient: for one thing it makes your fingers tacky, and its aroma can linger for hours, and not just on your fingers but on your breath and beyond. Last year when I got the flu I spent a few days swallowing whole garlic cloves; my farts smelled positively atrocious, like rotting cabbage.
Judicious application of heat can soothe the savage rose. The aroma that rises from garlic and onions boiling in wine is an exorcism, and once the pungent demons are waved out the kitchen window what remains is a relatively tame, an essential supporting player in any soup, stew, or curry. Roasting (or is it confiting) garlic produces a sweet, nut-brown, oily clove soft enough to spread on a piece of bread.
And that’s my impersonation of a Cook’s Country writer. What’s been occupying my mind is specifically the way that eating garlic changes the way I taste sweet things. For years I would eat a massive slice of pizza from Little Stevie’s for lunch, liberally decorated with oregano, chili flakes, grated cheese, and garlic powder. Afterward, with the garlic lingering on my tongue, I would invariably crave a candy bar, and when I got one, it never tasted the same as it did when I hadn’t eaten garlic. It’s like the way cigarettes smell and taste entirely different after drinking coffee. So what I ought to do tonight, after thoroughly garlicking everybody, is serve them some chocolate. Do I have the stones to attempt to make ice cream again, or should I just buy some hershey bars and forget about it? or bake a cake or what? STAY TUNED
Filed under: cooking | Tags: curry, ethnotourist misadventure, goat, shopping
Last Tuesday I stayed home and wrote poems all day, until it was time to meet Jenn to give her back her house keys. I arrived at the appointed meeting place about ten minutes early, so I decided to keep walking and found myself at my local Halal butchers, where a small family bickered with the butcher as I waited in line. As soon as the ladies cleared out I asked the butcher for two pounds of goat meat. He walked into the refrigerator and pulled out a hunk of flesh and bone, which registered 1.99# on the scale. He handed it to the Latino dude seated before the towering bandsaw, who cut it into pieces about the size of golf balls. I picked up a few ingredients (including a large bag of jasmine rice), had a cup of coffee with Jenn, handed back her key, and proceeded home.
So I made a goat curry, I guess. I started by browning the goat meat. I had completely forgotten how bony and gristly goat flesh was, or at least whatever cuts I always find myself eating. Has anyone ever had a goat tenderloin? Goatste.ak? When I called Dee Dee to invite her to dinner, she said she was scared of eating a goat. Ha ha, I said, looking forward to scaring her further.
After building a nice meaty fond, I threw in all the ghee I had left, which was old and starting to smell a little funny, I suspect. Can ghee get old? The stuff I bought (at the Hindu-owned grocery across the street from the Halal place, insert joke) certainly looks less refined than the clari butter I used to make at work. In this I sautéed a whole mess of diced aromatics: white onions and shallots, several cloves of garlic, a whole big chunk of ginger, some bell pepper, and a few little Thai chilis. While staring at these sautéeing veggies it dawned on me that I should have exposed the spices in this dish to hot oil first, so I quickly threw in plenty of yellowy curry powder, paprika (at the recommendation of one of the ladies ahead of me in line at the butcher counter), cumin, cayenne, turmeric, and maybe a few other things.
So I let these sweat a while and tossed in my goat meat. This I covered in a whole can of coconut milk, and in response to Dee Dee’s fear of goat meat, I made sure to throw in a heaping sponful of duck fat, in order to make sure that everything was nice and gamey. (This is something that every restaurant chef I know does – people who request “low-fat” preparations of a menu dish are routinely treated to double helpings of butter, cream, bacon, et cetera, for instance).
So with about an hour and a half until dinner I set the stew to simmer. With about :20 left on the clock I turned on the rice cooker, which had in it jasmine rice, prosciutto stock (both the subject of a future post and an obligatory rebuke to orthodoxy), green raisins, cardamon pods, star anise, and a bay leaf or two. And maybe some butter or something. As Dee Dee walked in the door, I noticed I had tablespoon or two of cream left over from Friendsgiving, so in the pot it went along with salt and pepper and whatever else.
Result: Dee Dee said it was pretty good, albeit fatty and gristly, and I agree, with the exception of the fact that I think gnawing on lumps of goat fat is a lot of fun. Maybe it could have simmered for another three or four hours, as the meat was still a little gristly, but I think I hit a pretty decent balance in the curry. The rice was pretty damn great, and like neon yellow. I finished the last of the leftovers this morning, a week later, and it was still durned good. The only caveat is that I had to wait until no one was home to eat this, because there was a lot of picking up bony pieces of meat and tearing them apart with my teeth and fingers. Which some consider to be uncouth.
Filed under: cooking | Tags: dessert, fish, ice cream, lobster, mushrooms, pie, sorbet, vegetables
A bunch of people came over to my house on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for a potluck of sorts. Diz and I went shopping together in the AM and here is what I made:
1. Three whole mackerel. Or maybe they were trout. These I just dropped in the Pyrex with a bunch of white wine, green olives, plum tomatoes, butter, lemon, salt, and pepper. An unqualified success, people were daring each other to eat the eyeballs.
2. Mashed parsnips. Diz started these, but wasn’t feeling well, so I took over. She read in some book that parsnips are better steamed than boiled, and these seemed to come out fine, if a little fibrous. Mashed with the usual suspects – cream, butter, pepper, salt, and a large spoonful of horseradish. I put them in a bowl and sprinkled on a little smoked paprika (this is pandering). Not bad, but could have been a little less creamy and a little more bitter.
3. Mushroom and Lobster Pot Pies. I thought lobsters were supposed to be like free now, but a pint of lobster flesh cost us like twenty-three fucking dollars at Whole Paycheck. These were my first savory pies ever, and of course I didn’t bother to read a recipe or anything. So the lobster pie got lobster, green beans, thinly sliced Cubanelle peppers, and tarragon, if I recall correctly, and in the other was Oyster and Hedgehog mushrooms, boiled Macomber Turnip, herbed butter, and thyme. I am probably forgetting a few onions or something in these. The results were, to me, unsatisfactory – they were dry and underfilled. They were very popular though, with people all raving about them. Next time they’re getting like a whole can of Campbell’s each, because who likes dry pie? Thanks to Dee Dee for taking the time to make me pie crusts after I decided not to go through with these but didn’t tell her.
4. Pumpkin sorbet and cranberry ice cream. Sorbet contained a can of pumpkin purée, corn syrup, molasses, simple syrup, maple syrup, a splash of bourbon, and a few choice spices. This came out well, in my opinion. It froze up very nicely, and the canned purée gave it slightly dry and grainy texture that kept it from being too good. Very pumpkinny and somehow not to sweet, even though it was pretty much made of sugar. This dry, icy concoction would have gone VERY nicely with cranberry ice cream, but I completely fucked it up.
I have made several attempts at ice cream in the past few years, and they have all been failures. Even with a ice cream making appliance, I can not get them to set properly, and I am left with sugary, milky blocks of ice. For this one, I used a variation on the strawberry ice cream: macerated cranberries (sugar and lemon juice), milk, cream, cloves, cinnamon, maybe something else. One certain mistake was this: Only whole cloves live in my spice cabinet, and since this recipe was intended as a riff on cranberry sauce, cloves were a must. so I put them in Diz’s little food-chopper-hand-mixer attachment, and whizzerized them. Then, seeing all the partially chopped cloves, i decided to add some of my heavy cream and continue whizzerizing. This resulted in whipped cream with bits of cloves in it, which seemed pretty cool to me, so i repeated the process, this time blending in some of my macerated cranberries.
What wound up in the ice-cream-machine-bowl was basically a milky foam, which of course has a much lower thermal mass than milk without air bubbles, and for this reason stubbornly refused to freeze. A competent person would have infused the milk on the stove the night before and left it to cool overnight, and found a recipe with some egg yolks in it, as I was unambiguously instructed by a pastry chef a few years ago.
So I wound up plating only one frozen dessert, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of amateur shit, but everyone liked it. When it became clear that the ice cream was not going to be a success I had the presence of mind to put the bowl in the freezer for a while instead of throwing Diz’s ice cream maker through the wall. An hour or so later when it was dessert time, the contents had reached a sort of an ice-cream-soup consistency, and my guests managed to persuade me to spoon over their scoops of sorbet. And they loved it (well, it was tasty). The next morning the failed ice cream was a cold brick, which had to be dislodged from the bowl by running hot water over it for a half hour.
