Fabada Asturiana

Fabada is a rustic Spanish bean and sausage stew. Pretty straightforward really, particularly if you invest in one of the ready-made fabada kits that Xixón Café sells at their meat counter. As you can see, they pack in the beans--fabas, a special Spanish variety not on the Publix shelves--a thick slice of Serrano ham, a couple links of chorizo and a link of morcilla de Burgos (a pork blood sausage with a lot of rice in the filling). There's a bit more to a proper fabada than that. They really ought to include the saffron and paprika, I think. Also, those beans about double in volume during an overnight soak so that sausage to bean ratio is a bit skimpy. I scrounged in my freezer and came up with a slice of ham hock and a couple more chorizo links--one Spanish, although a mass market brand, and the other of indeterminate South American ancestry. I really should improve my freezer labeling habits.

Anyway, after soaking the beans, I threw them into my slow cooker along with the Serrano ham, a few cloves of garlic, half an onion and half a green pepper. A lot of recipes didn't include these but you've got to have some vegetables. Those that did include them didn't agree on whether to chop and sauté them or just throw them in whole. I split the difference. I added a cup of stock and enough water to cover, about four more cups.

That simmered for a couple hours until the beans showed signs of tenderness. (An aside here: there was an article in the New York Times recently recounting a Mexican recipe that dispenses with soaking the beans and adds salt at the start and ends with tender beans after just two hours of simmering. It goes against all my experience but the author says it turned out fine. That author isn't Harold McGee so there's no explanation of why it turned out fine when we've all dealt with beans that have stubbornly refused to cook. Maybe I'll do some experiments myself.) Then I pricked the sausages with a fork so they wouldn't explode when cooking and added them to the pot along with good-sized scoops of sweet and smoked paprika and a pinch of saffron.

After another 45 minutes of cooking, the beans were tender and the sausages cooked through. I removed the sausages and ham and sliced them up. Some recipes don't simmer the sausages with the beans; instead they slice and fry them and add them at the last minute. That would add extra flavor to the meat while robbing it from the broth. I'd rather go the other way.

I had hoped more of the liquid would have boiled away at this point--fabada's supposed to be a thick stew, not soup--but it hadn't so I removed as much as I could and boiled it way down on he the stove top. I mashed the beans up a bit, as most recipes call for, returned the concentrated liquid and the meat, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper, topped with a little parsley and served.


Fabada is typically served with cidra and crusty bread, but I haven't got either today. For the cider I'm substituting a bottle of a spicy light ale and for the bread, a second bottle.

I've made my share of bean and sausage pots and this is certainly one of them. The variety of sausages is nice, I'll give it that. And the lack of heat in the spiciness is an interesting angle on the dish. It is quite tasty, but it's beans and sausages, of course it's tasty. Otherwise, fabada is rustic and hearty and perfect for the sort of cool evening Miami doesn't provide so often. I got pretty lucky to cook this just as the cool spell hit.

These beans have a pleasantly light and complex flavor. I wonder if the slow-cooker's low even simmer made a difference, or if it's the type of bean or if it's just that I've for once bought something other than whatever junk the supermarket has. I'll have to give those trendy heirloom beans a try and see if they can match this quality. I may have just ruined myself for the normal version of yet another staple. It gets inconvenient and expensive being a snob.

CSA week 15 - A couple things to do with chard

I had chard for both lunch and dinner today (Saturday that is. I'm setting this post to go up tomorrow while I'm at work. Best to pace these things out, don't you think?)

First off, I had some Portuguese chorizo I had bought for kale soup before I decided to go with an Italian recipe instead. I looked around for a Portuguese chard recipe, didn't find one, but found something close enough to adapt. This is chard and beans:


INGREDIENTS

1/2 Tablespoon olive oil
1 spring thyme
1 bay leaf
1/4 pound Spanish or Portuguese cured sausage
1/4 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
2 medium garlic cloves, finely chopped
smoked paprika to taste
1 (15-ounce) cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1/4 pound Swiss chard, mostly leaves, thinly sliced crosswise
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 1/2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh Italian parsley
salt and pepper
1/4 tablespoon white wine vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Heat oil in a medium pot with a tightly fitting lid over medium-high heat. When oil shimmers, add sausage and cook until crispy on both sides. (I didn't think of this until afterwards and added my sausage later. Crispy would have been better.) Remove sausage from pan.

2. Add onion, garlic and herbs to pan, season with freshly ground black pepper and smoked paprika. Stir to combine and turn heat down a little if the onion starts to brown too quickly. Cook until onion and garlic are soft and golden, about 4 minutes.

3. Reduce heat to medium low and add beans, chard, and broth. Bring to a simmer, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes. Remove lid and continue cooking until chard is tender and broth is thick, about 5 minutes more.

4. Remove from heat and stir in parsley, salt, vinegar and sausage. Remove bay leaf and thyme sprig and serve with toast.


Tasty, but not really a very chard-centric dish as most of the flavor comes from the sausage and the herbs and spices, but the chard's inclusion does elevate it over a basic bowl of beans and weenies.


And for dinner I made a chard pesto:

I found a few recipes for such a thing on-line and they all disagreed about the ratios of the ingredients so I just winged it. They did, however, agree, that you had to cook the chard first. I used mostly stems since I had used mostly leaves earlier. I think I ended up with somewhere between a third and a half pound total. I chopped them up, melted some butter in a pan and cooked the stems for five minutes and added the leaves for three minutes more.

Meanwhile, I toasted an ounce of pinenuts in another pan, and grated out a half cup or so of Parmesan cheese.

Those all went into the food processor along with a handful of parsley and a few splashes of olive oil. After processing I ended up with a tan paste so I don't think I got the ratios right. I thinned it out with a little water, added some salt and, upon consideration, a little basil and oregano. I thinned it out with some pasta water later, too.

Then I boiled up some pasta, fried the squash, ladled the pesto on top and there you go.

Not bad, but it mainly tasted of toasty pinenuts and a bit of cheese. The chard didn't stand up. Also, I don't know if a thick sauce is what it's supposed to look like. Pesto I've seen is usually thin with green flecks, but when I ended up with a base of pinenut butter. Maybe I should have used a lot more olive oil? It wasn't bad mind you, just nothing like the parsley pesto from week nine that I was hoping for.

Still plenty of chard left. I should make something that actually tastes like it next time.

Beefsteak fajitas with fresh tomato salsa

I mentioned a little while back that I had picked up some skirt steak for the first time. It has a reputation as nature's Steak-Um--flavorful, quick to cook, flat--but it was an impulse buy and I didn't have any particular recipes in mind. A bit of later research turned up that this is the traditional cut for fajitas and since I've got a fajita recipe I like (from Jim Fobel's book Big Flavors) easy enough for a summer kitchen that sounded like a plan.

What I particularly like about Fobel's recipe is how he marinates the meat. On the bottom of a flat container lay out thin slices of tomato, onion, jalapeno and garlic and some chopped cilantro. (Leave in the stems; cilantro and parsley stems are just as flavorful as the leaves. In fact you can use all stems here and save the leaves for other applications.) Down goes the meat and then another layer of vegetables on top. For the second layer I used my pickled jalapenos and added a little salt to release juices. Seal it up and refrigerate overnight. It infuses the beef with some nice flavors and tenderizes it a bit. I've also done this with chicken breasts pounded flat which works well, too.

The salsa is just:
1 large juice tomato, 1/2-inch dice
1/8 cup chopped cilantro
1 whole scallion, minced
1/2 jalapeno, fresh or pickled, minced
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper

Mix and let sit on the counter for an hour for the flavors to meld.

Fobel actually serves this as whole steaks dressed with the salsa but I always slice it up for fajitas. If you're going to do it as beefsteak ranchero, Fobel suggests matching it with corn tortillas, pinto beans, corn-on-the-cob and grilled scallions. If you're going with fajitas, you'll need flour tortillas and grilled onions and peppers.

Since I don't have a grill, I toss the onions and peppers in a high-smoke-point oil and a bit of salt and then throw them into a piping hot cast-iron skillet. Let them sit long enough to start to scorch, stir them up and let them sit again. Maybe a third time, maybe not, depending on if they've gotten tender yet.

But before you do that, take the beef out of the marinade, pick off all the bits of cilantro and onion that stuck on and pat it dry. Cut it up into bite-sized pieces (on your special beef cutting board of course). Thin slices against the grain is best but I went with a chunkier option. That was a mistake as the results were a little chewy. Sprinkle on a little salt as there wasn't any in the marinade and you're ready to add them to the cast iron pan when the vegetables are done. Less than a minute per side should do the trick but the exact timing depends on how thick your pieces are.

Serve in flour tortillas with the onions and peppers and a spoonful of salsa. A dollop of guacamole's not a bad idea either if you've got some handy. And that's a pretty tasty fajita right there. The best bit is how the juices from the beef and the liquid from the salsa mix into a flavorful sauce that coats each bite and leaks out of the bottom of the tortilla over your hand. That second part's not so good, but the first part makes up for it.

One issue I do have with this recipe is the waste of all those vegetables in the marinade. They're a little mushy from the night in the refrigerator but there ought to be some use for them. I decided to run them through the blender and then boiled the mix on the stove-top for a couple minutes as there is some raw beef bits still in there. The result isn't the most pleasant color but it's got lovely flavors of onion, pepper and cilantro in a tomato base. It could live to marinate another day or it could work as a dip for chips. It's a nice contrast with the more tomato-forward flavor of the fresh salsa. I'll have to see how it tastes after it's been chilled before I figure out what I want to do with it.

Turns out when it's cold it loses all its zip. So, along with the leftover fajita bits and some pickled carrots, both roughly chopped, some white beans that have been sitting in the fridge, pepper jack cheese and rest of the (no-longer so) fresh salsa, it's topping some nachos. Not bad, but Garden of Eatin' organic corn chips sure go soggy quick. I should have trusted to the agrobusiness complex to engineer a better chip. If there's anything they know, it's designing corn products.

Pantry-clearing chili

Long long ago I bought a chunk of tasajo--Cuban-style dried beef--intending to use it for a dish of oil down. I had no luck finding the breadfruit I needed for the recipe and I'm sick of looking at it so I researched alternate uses. Other than just snacking on it, as it is beef jerky essentially, most applications are stews, either simple or with a long list of what I assume are vegetables that I've never heard of.

The seasoning on those stews are the standard minimalistic Cuban set, but I"ve been thinking about chili since my southwestern hominy stew got out of control and turned into something not quite close enough to chili to satisfy (although it's fine if you're not holding it to that standard). I've still got some black beans and chilies left from that, plus a sack full of CSA onions starting to go past their prime. Add a can of tomatoes, the right spices and maybe some corn meal to thicken and that's chili. It's not the traditional bowl of red, but by using dried beef it's closer to cowboy chili than most recipes come. I've never tried that before so I was curious how it would go.

The first step is an overnight soak for the tasajo, the beans and the peppers (in individual bowls). That yellow on the beef is colored beef fat, part of the preservation process. I scraped off a good bit so the water could get through.

The peppers seemed to be done soaking in the morning so I poured their liquid onto the beans and put them in the fridge for later. The other two soaked until I got home from work.

At this point the tasajo was nicely rehydrated and hard to distinguish from an oversalted, slightly overcooked piece of fresh beef. I scraped off some more of the fat and chopped it up into pieces and inch or two on the side. I figured they'd either hold together at that bite-sized size or fall apart into strands as they cooked. I also added a pound of fresh beef (the "for stew" scraps you get at the supermarket). To make sure it would have a different texture than either of the dried beef possibilities I ran it through the food processor. During an episode of Good Eats on ground beef Alton Brown recommended ten pulses for burgers and seven for chili. When he actually did a chili episode he just cut the beef into cubes, but I wanted to try this. The results are a bit uneven, but I figured the big pieces would fall apart once the connective tissue melted during cooking.

I also chopped up two and a half onions (one red, the rest yellow), a few cloves of garlic, and a couple fresh small hot chilies.

And now to cook. I preheated the over to 300 degrees and heated some oil (and some of that yellow beef fat. Why waste it?) in a dutch oven. First order of business was to brown the ground beef in a few batches. Then I tossed in the dried beef just to melt off the rest of the fat. Both those out, I added a bit more oil and tossed in chili powder, cumin, ground chilies and some Mexican oregano. Once they got fragrant I added the vegetables, turned down the heat, and gave them a bit of a sweat until they softened. Once they were ready I returned the beef, added a 14 ounce can of chopped tomatoes in juice and my rehydrated peppers and into the oven it went for two hours.

The black beans I decided to cook separately for a couple reasons. First, you want to salt a stew early, but if you salt beans they take forever to get soft. Second, you need to simmer beans to cook them, but you want to keep a stew under a boil to keep the meat tender. So I cooked the beans on the countertop in the bean and chili soaking liquid with a bay leaf and some bits of hot Mexican carrots, onion and jalapenos I pickled last month. They never got hot enough to be great on their own, but they make a good ingredient. The beans took about an hour to cook and I added them to the stew when it had 45 minutes left to go.

At the same time I added a few handfuls of corn meal to thicken the dish. I didn't have any masa so I ran some polenta through the food processor (before I did the beef) to try to get a finer grind. It didn't really work.

Forty-five minutes later and the dish was done. The tasajo didn't fall apart so it's in chewy chunks. It's pretty much the dried-out texture you get if you actually boil a stew for a couple hours. Not jerky-esque at all. It's still a bit saltier than fresh beef, but palatably so. Hardly worth the bother unless it's the only meat you can get your hands on after you've at sea for a month.

I really like the texture of the fresh beef, though. It didn't fall apart like fully ground beef would in a stew so there's something there to chew on, but it's tender enough that you don't have to really work at it. I think that's the takeaway from this experiment: seven pulses in the food processor. I'll have to see how it works in a beef bourguignon when the weather cools off a bit.

I used too much polenta so the chili clotted right up. I'm trying to think of it as cornbread pre-crumbled in for your convenience. I had to thin it out with some chicken stock which I'm hoping the polenta doesn't suck up too.

As for the the flavors, it's pretty much kid's chili. Kind of sweet, from the corn and peppers I think, and only a little heat in the aftertaste. A bit of lime, a shot or two of hot sauce and a few garnishes perks it up, though. Not bad, but nothing special. I've been too timid with the peppers lately; next time I'm going to take my chances and toss a bunch in.

Southwestern black bean hominy stew

My original plan was to make a traditional pozole--a stew of just hominy, peppers and pork--but things got a bit out of hand.

Well, backing up a bit, the origin of this dish is the tiny ethnic food isle in the local Whole Foods. They've got a rack of various southwestern peppers and herbs packaged by a company called Los Chileros out of New Mexico. They also sell dried hominy. I had no idea there was such a thing. Hominy is made by soaking dried corn in lye- or lime-water and I figured once it was soaked it was soaked and I had only ever seen it in cans. So I was intrigued and determined to try it out.

I also had on hand some dried black beans and some fresh corn on the cob that seemed like good additions. And, since I wanted something fire roasted in there and don't have ready access to fire, a can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes seemed like a good addition.

All that plus the pork--I think I accidentally made chili. It's nothing like a real bowl of red, mind you, but chili is such a degraded term these days I think this is somewhere under that broad umbrella.

Anyway, it went like this (keeping in mind that I didn't actually measure anything at the time):

ingredients:
1 cup dried black beans
1 cup dried hominy
1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 cups finely chopped onion (I used red and white as I had those available)
1 cup finely chopped green bell pepper (only because I had no fresh hot peppers handy)
1 Tablespoon Mexican oregano
1 Tablespoon epazote (epazote supposedly reduces gas, but best to use the beano anyway)
1 Tablespoon ancho chili powder
1 Tablespoon ground cumin (whole cumin would have been nice but I seem to be out)
2 dried casabel chiles
2 dried chipotle chiles
1 lb pork roast (not stew pork as that does best when the stew never reaches a boil, but you've got to boil to cook the beans and hominy), chopped in 1 inch cubes
kernels cut from 1 small ear of corn, including the milk if you've got any. Mine didn't.
14 ounces crushed fire roasted tomatoes
1 cup chicken broth
vinegar hot pepper sauce

garnishes:
lime
white onion, finely sliced
green cabbage, finely sliced
tortillas

1. Soak beans and hominy separately overnight

2. Heat oil in dutch oven on medium heat. Add any whole spices you're using, cook until aromatic, add onions and peppers, sweat onion and pepper until soft but not browned. Stir in oregano, epazote, chili powder and cumin and cook until aromatic.

3. Add hominy, black beans and enough hominy soaking water to cover by 1 inch. Crumble, crush or chop peppers and add to pot. Simmer on low heat until hominy and beans are just getting tender, around 1 1/2 hours.

4. Add corn, tomatoes, enough chicken broth to thin out the stew to your preference and salt to taste. Simmer for another 1/2 hour.

5. At some point during that half hour add the pork. Exactly when depends on your cut of meat and how large the pieces are. Use your judgment. I added mine with the corn and tomatoes and it ended up a bit overdone. Ten minutes would have been sufficient.

6. Taste and adjust seasoning. I found mine a bit muddy so I added a vinegar based hot sauce, specifically Urban Chefs hotlicious pepper sauce which is a micro-brand out of Columbus, Ohio. Tabasco or Cholula would do fine, but Urban Chefs has a fruitier character that I like a lot.

7. Serve garnished with onion, cabbage, strips of tortilla and a squeeze of lime.


The end result is pretty good. Looking at it you expect chili pretty much, but the strong corn element in the broth (and the fact that it's actually soupy) is pretty distinctive and interestingly tasty. I like the variety of textures in the chewy hominy, creamy beans, firmly tender corn, not too overdone pork and crisp garnishes. Tasting the dish today, I found the tomato a little forward and the chiles a bit mild and dissociated from the other flavors. These sorts of stews always taste better and usually spicier the second day after the flavors had time to meld. It's actually tasting better every time I try it as it cools. I'll add a note tomorrow when I have a final result.

OK, it's tomorrow. I'm a little disappointed. The flavors did meld nicely but the broth turned into a chili-style sauce and the flavors all mellowed a bit so the end result is kind of undistinguished. I was hoping for something with more pizazz. Still, a couple shots of hot sauce and it's perfectly palatable.

I might try a different mix of peppers next time; I picked what I used fairly randomly. It's easy to find out how hot each pepper is, but its the other flavors they have that are important and that's much harder to learn so you just have to try them and see. Wow, I just found myself respecting Bobby Flay for a moment there. What an odd sensation.

CSA week five - bean ceviche and avocado fritters

The final dishes using week five's vegetables are a ceviche with the beans and the shrimp avocado fritters I mentioned earlier. Both were pretty good and both were instructive.

The ceviche was my usual tossing together of whatever I had handy--I really ought to follow an actual recipe one of these days and see if it makes any difference. In this case I had handy scallops, the Gold of Bacau beans and the standard corn, peppers, onion, cilantro, lemon and lime. I only noticed that the GofB bean pods were edible after I sat down to start shelling them. That would have been useful information for the newsletter. I also had the wrong sort of corn; I think something like hominy is more traditional. But the scallops were already marinating so there was no turning back. I tossed the beans into the citrus juice too and I think they got softened a little as they soaked. The end result was nice enough, particularly with plenty of habeñero hot sauce added. The real interesting thing, though, was how well the scallops and the beans paired. Next time I find beans in my share, I'm going to grill them with some sea scallops.

The fritters were quite simple: just chopped shrimp and avocado with some minced jalepeños in a beer batter. It was a little too simple, really, as it lacked a bit in interest. The cooked avocado was soft and creamy but not very flavorful. That just left the shrimp, tasty from a sugar and salt brining, and a nice firm texture, and a bit of heat from peppers in the batter. It needed one more flavor I think and one more texture. The only crunch came from the batter and that faded quickly after the fritters came out of the oil. My first thought was adding onion, but I bet asparagus would work really well, too. Or maybe changing the beer batter to a corn batter and making hush puppies.