Lambi au Riz

Aaaand we're back.

To be honest, it's too soon. My kitchen is still unbearably hot most days and South Florida is weeks from its first harvest of the season, but a new market (I'm not going to call it a farmer's market has there's no sign of farmers as yet) has opened up at UM literally steps from my office and there's just too much tempting there to not start cooking again.

Case in point, the seafood stand (whose name and proprietor I would have made note of if I had decided at the time that I was definitely going to be writing this up) had some fresh local conch and shrimp at quite a reasonable price. I've never cooked with conch before so I bought a pound.

I did a bit of research to find my options on what to do with it. Basically, they were fritters, ceviche, chowder and stew. I haven't been impressed the fritters I've tried--isolated rubbery bits in a big ball of dough--and I'm suspicious of the texture of notoriously tough conch in a ceviche. So it's down to chowder and stew which are the same thing give or take a couple cups of stock.

Oh, there's also grilled conch steaks, but I really wasn't up for that as the conch I bought was cleaned but not tenderized. I had the choice of banging on them with a hammer for a while or grinding them up in the food processor as most of the chowder and stew recipes called for. On most days I think I'd go with the hammering, but not today. I settled on chowder for a while, but eventually switched over to a stew. And, as you'll note from the title of this post, the dish mutated further.

The stew and chowder recipes generally start with either salt pork or bacon. The bacon struck me as a more readily available substitution so I was going to go with salt pork until I read the recipe from the Bacon Cookbook which made a convincing case for bacon's smokiness pairing well with the clam-like flavor of the conch. So three thick slices, cut into lardons, went into the pot along with a little cooking oil (I'm using a 50/50 olive/canola blend for this sort of thing these days), cooked slowly until crisp and then removed.

Then I added:
a knob of butter
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
2 small hot peppers (from the back of my refrigerator. Serranos I think.), minced
and a pinch of salt.

A stalk or two of celery should properly go in at this point too, but I haven't got any on hand and wouldn't miss it if it's gone.

I turned the heat down to medium low and sweated them for seven minutes to soften. Then I added a little more oil and two Tablespoons of flour and cooked for seven minutes more to make a roux. Given what I did to the recipe later, this step was probably wasted, but you've got other options so I'll leave it in here.

After the roux was nice and golden, in went:
1 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes, not drained
about the same amount of shrimp stock
2 teaspoons each dried oregano, basil, thyme and marjoram (I have three out of the four fresh at the moment so I considered going with a bouquet garni, but I think dried makes more sense for a stew)
1 pound ground conch (I thought I'd have less, as the recipes advised to trim off the tough orange bits, but the orange bits on mine didn't seem any tougher than the rest so there must be more that was already removed)
salt and pepper

I brought that to a boil, covered, turned the heat to low and simmered for 40 minutes.

At this point it was time to add a starch: small-diced potato according to most recipes with options of yam and yucca. But one recipe, at all-fish-seafood-recipes.com, suggested adding rice. That recipe is the only result Google finds for the phrase "lambi au riz" so maybe the author made it up himself. Lambi appears to be the name for the Haitian version of conch stew, though.

Anyway, I added a cup of rice (rinsed) and cooked for 20 minutes more.

Here's the result topped with parsley, scallion and the reserved bacon.


And, after a taste, I discover something I should have noticed rather earlier. I've just made a batch of conch jambalaya and a pretty darn tasty one at that. Actually, the flavor is somewhere between jambalaya and Manhattan clam chowder. It starts with a bright tomato/shrimp gravy, rich and buttery and rounded with herbs, and fades into a smokey brininess. There's a sweetness up front and a bit of bitterness in the aftertaste too. Not enough to be actively unpleasant, but enough to prompt the next bite.

The textures worked out really well too. The rice has a little firmness to it and the conch just a little chew. Lucked out there, getting the timing right. The flavors are going to be better tomorrow, but I'll bet the texture's all downhill from here.

Still, an auspicious return to the blog, I think for an experimental dish to turn out so well and so interesting. Coming up next (although quite how soon I'm not sure) is a different take on mamey ice cream and I'd like to try making fabada. Xixón Café sells fabada kits with the Spanish beans and pork products portioned out, but there's some disagreement in recipes as to what else goes in there and on the details of the cooking method so it's not quite as easy as that.

CSA week five - Braised callaloo

So, like I said yesterday, I set out this afternoon to follow Jennifer's advice and sauté the callaloo but upon closer examination I found the particular sort we've got is a bit too tough for a straight sauté so a braise was called for.

It's a pretty straightforward procedure but I figured I'd give it a post since I misled you in the last post. I started by browning some pre-desalinified salt cod and some ham in bacon fat in a dutch oven.



After a couple minutes I removed them, turned down the heat a bit, and added in my aromatics. I used a typical Caribbean combination of red pepper, hot peppers (sliced jalepeños instead of a pricked scotch bonnet), scallions, garlic and thyme, plus some Caribbean-style curry powder to try to cut through my cold.



I sweated them for a couple minutes and then added the callaloo leaves. Some recipes include the stems but they didn't strike me as particularly edible. Have any of you tried them? It only took a minute to wilt the leaves down. Then I added a cup of water (or you could use chicken stock of coconut milk), turned down the heat and covered the pot.

A lot of recipes call for up to forty minutes cooking time at this point, and if you're using dasheen that's probably a good idea. But for what we've got fifteen minutes was plenty. I added the salt cod and ham back in at around ten. A lot of those same recipes add okra at this point too. Fifteen minutes probably isn't enough for okra so I'd leave it out.

I served it all over a bowl of rice with a squeeze of lime and a dash of hot sauce to finish it off. Not bad at all and a lot less of a pain than the callaloo soup I made last time I had some. I don't think this sort of callaloo is so distinctive you're stuck using Caribbean accompaniments. This method is really a pretty generic mess of greens preparation so the flavors are adjustable any which way you'd like.

CSA week two - Callaloo

First up this week is callaloo. Looking around at recipes on-line I get the impression that callaloo is a very vague term that covers any soup or stew that has braised callaloo as it's main ingredient. I chose a Trinidadian variation I found on Recipezaar because it included Maggi seasoning cubes and golden ray cooking margarine. I'm not going to use either, but the fact that it kept those traditional Caribbean ingredients is a good sign. Also, it includes a bit of butternut squash substituting for west Indian pumpkin which seemed a nice bit of happenstance.

The first problem was adjusting the recipe for the amount of callaloo I've got. I'm not sure how to interpret the recipe's call for 15-20 dasheen leaves. (As best as I can tell, different types of greens are used in making callaloo on different islands around the Caribbean and whatever the locals use, they call callaloo. On Trinidad, they use dasheen which I'm hoping is what I've got.) I can't take that literally both because the leaves vary a great deal in size and because, even using the largest leaves, 15-20 won't make the 6 to 8 servings this recipe's supposed to make. After picking off all of the leaves I measured them out and I seem to have around 3 cups worth. Looking around at other recipes that measure out the leaves by volume and assuming standard serving sizes I need to cut down this recipe by three quarters. That gives me:

* 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil
* 1/4 medium onion
* 1 garlic cloves, minced
* 1/2 tablespoons chopped celery [which I skipped because I'm not buying a whole head of celery for that tiny amount]
* 1/16 cup fresh thyme [none handy so I used dried]
* 1/8 cup chopped chives
* 4 okra, sliced [which I skipped because stewed okra is icky]
* 1/8 cup chopped west Indian pumpkin (substitute butternut squash)
* 1 CSA half-share dasheen, washed and coarsely chopped
* 1/4 cup coconut milk
* 1/4 Maggi seasoning, cube plus [this is just bullion so I used stock]
* 1 cups water or chicken stock
* 1/2 live blue crab, cleaned and washed in lime juice (or 5-6 pieces salted beef or salted pigtail) [I didn't like the looks of the crabs I saw at the market so I bought a jar of pre-picked crab. Also, in the recipes I saw it looked like any smoked pork product would do. I cut up some smoked ham and used that too.]
* 1/4 whole scotch bonnet pepper (Congo pepper) [Caribbean cuisine uses the hottest possible pepper and prepares it in the wimpiest possible way. I presume that's because that's the only peppers they have to use. I split the difference by using half of a more reasonable Serrano pepper]
* 1/2 tablespoons golden ray cooking margarine [or butter]
* 1/4 teaspoon salt (if using Maggi cube taste first before adding salt or the soup will be too salty.)

1. Put salted pork [or beef or cod if you're using anything of the sort] pieces in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Drain off this water. Repeat this process to draw off the excess salt from the salted meat.

2. Heat the oil in a large pot and add the onion, garlic, celery and fresh herbs [and ham]. Sauté until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add okras, pumpkin and dasheen leaves and sauté for another minute or so. Add the coconut milk and stock or water, crab and hot pepper.

3. Keep an eye on that hot pepper use one that is not bruised. You DO NOT want that pepper to burst while cooking. The heat from the burst pepper will overpower the other flavours. [So why ask for trouble if you don't need to?]



4. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook uncovered for about 35 minutes.



5. Taste and add salt if needed.
6. Remove hot pepper and crab or meat, [Whoops! I should have left my chunks of ham large. It took me some time to pick all the little ham pieces out during this step.] and swizzle the callaloo, or put in a blender or you can use an immersion type blender, and beat until smooth. Return the crab or meat pieces to the soup. Add the cooking margarine or butter. Simmer for 5 more minutes. Stir well. [I used the blender]
7. Serve hot as a soup on it's own or as a side dish. [or over rice]

And the results are...OK. The texture is a creamy sauce about the same as palak paneer; Okra definitely would not have been a help. The flavor is rather mild, easily diluted by the rice or overwhelmed by the Pickapeppa hot sauce I used so I didn't want to thin it out into a proper soup even if I did screw it up to get it this thick (which I don't think I did). The ham doesn't stand out and there's a hint of the crab but the flavor is mostly just the callaloo. The differences from spinach are subtle. There's a slight pungency and a chard-like bitter aftertaste that's interesting, but not something I'd aim at deliberately. A pinch of sugar mixed in helps with that and a pinch of salt brightens the flavors up. No real heat despite the fact that I chopped up the pepper and put it back in the pot. Overall, it's not bad, but it's not great either. Next time I think I'll try a different variation--something with tomatoes maybe.