Migas de pan con huevos

I'm always on a lookout for recipes using stale bread. No matter how good the bread I bake is (and recently it's been pretty darn good) I can only eat so much and I usually end up with at least a heel slowly petrifying beyond edibility. Recipes for day old bread aren't uncommon; four day old bread is harder to find a use for.

So, I was watching the first episode of travel/food TV series Spain: On the Road Again and saw a demo of a fried-rice-like dish called migas that used bread crumbs for the starch base. A little poking around on-line turned up a Tex-Mex version that uses torn up tortillas and a wide range of Spanish versions. The type I'm making is a Central-to-Northern Spanish variety.

There is some variation on how to prepare the bread crumbs, which I think stems from varying assumptions on what sort of bread you're starting with and how stale it is. Light and fresh loaves can just be chopped up and tossed into the pan, but older, denser loaves like the country loaf I baked last week need to sprinkled with water, tossed with salt and pepper, and left to soften for up to 12 hours. This week's high humidity has kept my leftover bread soft so I discarded the iffy bits, chopped up the rest, sprinkled it with a couple handfuls of water and left it to absorb for an hour. I didn't use a whole lot of water as the bread needs to absorb plenty of fat later on.

The version I saw on TV added only garlic and chorizo and garnished with roasted red peppers and green grapes. Other recipes I found add onion and peppers along with other types of Spanish cured pork to the fried bits and a fried or poached egg to the garnish. Luckily, I've been stocking up on good quality Spanish ingredients. I've got the right sort of chorizo, roasted red peppers and pimenton all imported from Spain and some good quality jamon serano of unknown origins. My olive oil is Italian but it'll have to do.

Traditionally, migas is cooked in a special pan that looks like a cross between a paella pan and a wok. Turns out I've got one. I've always called it a flat-bottom wok, but it's a migas pan. Who knew?

Also, traditionally, I'm pretty sure the cooking method is to fry up the mix-ins, add the bread crumbs, fry some more, garnish and serve. I'm going to use the slightly more complicated fried rice method so the mix-ins don't get over-cooked. This, like fried rice, and the risotto I made a couple days ago, is a toss-in-the-leftovers dish so I'm not fretting about exact how much of what I'm using.

I set my heat to medium high and first into the pan is plenty of olive oil (half extra-virgin, half plain-old so I get some flavor and a decent smoke point too), followed by the garlic, onions and peppers. A few minutes later when they're golden but not brown they come out.





Next in are the chorizo and jamon serano. If I had a Spanish-style bacon, I'd also add that. A couple minutes of frying renders out the fat and gets the meat crispy around the edges. Out they go.


And then the bread bits along with a spoonful of pimenton. I have about 2 1/2 cups of bread here. I found that my latest loaf cubed too tidily so I tossed in some bread crumbs I had saved from previous loaves too rough things up. You want the results to be crisp on the outside but chewy inside--not quite croutons. That took around seven minutes for me (although I kept cooking a little longer). When it looks about ready everything else goes back in and tossed to combine. Then out into a bowl. I drained a little remaining unabsorbed grease which I used to quickly fry an egg. The Spanish style is to heat a 1/4 inch of oil on pretty high heat so the egg white bubbles and crisps and a bit of basting cooks the yolk.

The egg and some chopped roasted red peppers go on top. My bread started pretty dark so the bread crumbs don't look quite right. If you're starting from white bread, you want a bright gold color from the absorbed olive oil with a reddish tinge from the pimenton.

I found the results to be flavorful but heavy and greasy. Better than it looks in the picture, though. One problem is that I overcooked the bread crumbs a bit. And I think a lighter white bread would have been a better starting point. I've made some really fabulous croutons from that sort of bread before so I know what this could have been. Here's what it's supposed to look like. Also, my vegetable ratio was too low. I can see real promise here, but today's version didn't fulfill it. I'll have to try again.

Shrimp risotto with peas and basil

It's been a long while since I've made risotto and I really don't know why. It's not nearly as hard as its reputation makes it out to be and it's a good way to use up whatever scraps of ingredients you've got lying around. I wonder if anyone's cataloged the various traditional toss-in-the-leftovers recipes in various cuisines. I'll have to take a look around.

In this particular case I found myself with a sudden overwhelming craving for shrimp risotto. Which is odd really as it's not something I've ever had before and the versions I've seen on cooking shows haven't been all that appealing. But if it made sense you wouldn't call it a craving. I do have risotto rice around; I guess it must be more than a year old since I know I haven't been using it. I've got a half pound of shrimp left in the freezer along with the fish/shrimp stock I made with the leftover bits from this recipe. And I figured it would go nicely with basil which I've got in the garden. I did a bit of research to see what else I might add and I came up with this:

ingredients:
1/2 cup arborio rice
1/2 cup white wine (I happen to have a dry Riesling on hand which, by chance, is a pretty good choice to match these flavors)
1 1/2 cups shrimp stock (or fish stock or clam juice or just water's probably fine)
1/2 pound shrimp, whatever size you like
1/2 cup peas (fresh English peas preferably. Freezer-burnt Publix peas will do in a pinch.)
1/2 cup finely shredded Pecorino Romano (don't substitute Parmesan. The more pungent flavor of an aged Romano works better here.)
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
3 cloves finely chopped garlic (and some shallots if you've got some)
1 small handful fresh basil (and I added some chives since the recent rain means I've got a lot of that too)
1 Tablespoon butter
2 Tablespoon olive oil
pinch of red pepper flakes


I really wanted to get the basil flavor well distributed through the risotto without it being overwhelmingly strong so I figured my best bet was to make a basil butter for toasting the rice. I roughly chopped the leaves (and the chives) and put them with the butter into my spice grinder. It didn't really work so well so I added a Tablespoon of olive oil and some coarse sea salt. That helped. So I ended up with something fairly smooth.

Next I defrosted the fish/shrimp stock in the microwave and kept heating it until it reached a simmer. Traditionally, you'd keep a pot of stock warm on the stove next to the pan with the rice but I didn't feel like dirtying another pot. When it looked about time to add more stock I ran the microwave for another minute to bring the stock up to temperature. Oh, and I also defrosted the peas.

To start the risotto proper, I heated a Tablespoon of olive oil in a medium saucepan and then sweated the onion and garlic with a bit of salt, pepper and the red pepper flakes. After three minutes I dumped in the basil butter and rice and toasted it for a couple minutes more.

Once the rice was going translucent and smelling a bit toasty I added the wine and turned down the heat to low. I let it simmer, stirring every few minutes, until the wine was almost entirely absorbed and then added a ladle of stock. Let that get absorbed, added another ladle. I think I went five ladles in all over maybe 25 minutes. Twice as much half as often would have done just as well, probably. I added the peas a bit too early. I should have waited for the last 10 minutes. Constant stirring isn't necessary, but hanging around the kitchen and keeping an eye on the pot is. Bring a book.

When the rice was just barely done--no longer chalky but not fully soft either--I added the cheese and the shrimp, took it off the heat, covered it and let it sit for three minutes. My medium shrimp were maybe just a touch underdone so you might put in the shrimp first, leave it on the heat for a minute or two and then finish it off with the cheese.

I served it with a garnish of a bit more basil chiffinaded and that was that. The recipe makes enough for two if you have a salad too. If you're going to double it, go light on the liquids to adjust for how rice absorbs. Risotto doesn't store at all well so only make as much as you're going to eat.

So how was it? Not bad at all. I usually have trouble getting the rice fully cooked, but by turning the heat really low this time it worked out well--soft but not mushy. The flavor is bright, a bit funky from the Romano with a light herbal overlay. All the components are subtly combined into a pleasing whole I found difficult to unpick even knowing what was in it. The peas are a bit overcooked but retain some distinctive flavor and still pop satisfyingly between the teeth. The only real weakness is the shrimp; I should have brined them. And, maybe, I should have fried them in the herb butter at start to mix the flavors in both components. Still, a very good first try for a shrimp risotto. Maybe next time I'll forgo the cheese and finish it off with lemon zest and cream. Plenty of options, really.

My first blogiversary

It was one year ago today I published my first blog post, although it would be another five days before I published anything much worth reading and a month or so before anyone started reading. This is post number 200 which comes out to somewhat over a post every other day. Huh. I hadn't realized I had written so much. Pretty good for a single-person hobby blog. The CSA helped a lot in forcing me out of my cooking ruts, giving me unusual ingredients to work with and lowering the bar on what's interesting enough to post about. The on-going ice cream experimentation helped too.

It looks like I've got seventy-some regular readers--another number much higher than I expected. If I'm understanding my stats right, most of you started reading a couple months ago; that's' around when Short Order, the New Times food blog put me in their blogroll so I'm guessing people are finding me through there. Thank you all for reading; I hope you're getting some entertainment out of watching me flail about in the kitchen. If you've tried any of my recipes myself--particularly if you improved on them--I'd like to hear about it. I'd also like to thank Kat from A Good Appetite and Trina from Miami Dish my only two regular commenters (of course they have food blogs of their own. The line between interested enough to comment and interested enough to blog is a very thin one.)

On the random passerby front my most popular posts are about hot Mexican carrots and frogmore stew, both with well over 200 unique views since I posted them in late May. I can't say I understand that at all. These are about the simplest recipes I've written about and both had dozens of variations on the Web before I posted. Somehow I'm the third Google hit for "Mexican hot pickled carrots". I've dropped off the radar for "frogmore stew" but I was on the first page for it during July.

Also popular is my rather harsh review of Abokado although it's dropped to Google's second page. Everyone else seems to like the place so I'm hoping they've improved. Fair's fair that my early review falls out of sight if so.

More happily, my post on Malaysian recipes using curry leaves is getting a good number of views and a few people are looking at the other curry-leaf-related posts. My hon tsai tai recipe got some play too (mainly in a couple of geographically localized spikes after other CSAs included it in their shares) . If I had known I would have done something more interesting with it. My tahu goreng post is an up-and-comer with 39 views and 5th place in Google after only a month. Only four people actually spent the time on the page to read it though.

Beyond the whole popularity contest deal, I'm pretty pleased with my series of ice cream posts. There are a lot of interesting and original recipes in there. I like my event reports too; I don't know if readers get anything out of them but they make me pay closer attention to and reflect on what I'm doing there and what I'm eating which makes me appreciate it more and gets me out of making much small talk with whoever's at my table. I think my quiche series where I try to come up with a good savory crumb crust is kind of interesting too. I've got an idea for the next step in that just as soon as I clear out some space in my freezer and free up some of my storage containers.

So what else is in the future? The new season of CSA is coming up which should give me a good bit of blog-fodder. I spoke to Margie from Bee Heaven Farm and she expressed an interest in having a message board for subscribers on her website; I looked into it but the software requires a more competent sysadmin than I can be. In lieu of that, I'd like to open my blog up to guest posters. I'd be particularly interested in hearing from folks who bake and/or grill since I don't do much of either and this blog could use regular correspondents to cover those areas. I'll mention this again if I get a mention in the newsletter and CSA folks start popping by to take a look.

I may wind down the ice cream thing as I'm running out of ideas for flavors that are both interesting and not too weird for my coworkers to eat. If I can find a better audience, I can see this going longer. I could see playing around with unusual pizza or stir fry variations, too. And I'm considering trying a recipe from each week's Top Chef episode once the new season starts. That could be fun. I definitely want to write up more local events and maybe write up some dinners out like I did on my Seattle trip. I don't know if I want to do proper reviews though. They're hard to do fairly when you're dining alone like I am. I'm open to other suggestions if you folks have any.

Otherwise, let me just thank you again for reading and say that I'm look forward to doing this for another year. Or getting tired of it and quitting. One or the other.

Edit: I have been reminded that I should mention that it was on the suggestion of a coworker, Sarah Cantrell, that I started this blog. I had started my experimental ice cream project a couple months earlier and would send out e-mails with some discussion of flavor of the week when I brought the results into work. Sarah suggested I share my thoughts with humanity at large. I had a number of objections to the idea, several of which, such as the huge-time-sink issue and the compulsion/obligation rather than actively fun activity problem, turn out to be quite valid. I think she'd like thanks; I'm not at all sure setting me on this path is anything I should be thankful for.

Advances in baking technology

I just want to write a quick update here on how my baking is going. I finally bought the 7 quart cast iron dutch oven I've been wanting to replace my clay cooker as my steam-containing sub-oven for bread baking.

For my first trial with it I decided to stay simple and familiar and did a basic rustic loaf:
2 3/4 cups bread flour
1/2 cup rye
1/4 cup whole wheat
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/4 cups water.

It came out a rather wet dough this time around, but I'm not sure if that's due to the rainy weather, loosely packed flour or if I accidentally shorted the flour by a quarter cup. It didn't matter all that much since I wasn't going to be handling it much by hand. And since wet doughs have been pretty standard for me it's not a bad idea to change that constant as I change the baking vessel. I found it substantially easier to work with when I reshaped it after the first rise. Maybe that's just because I was well dusted with flour, but maybe it helped that the flour had time to absorb some moisture and the protein strands had a chance to relax. I think I should start letting the dough rest between the first knead and shaping into a loaf like some recipes suggest.

I had hoped that I'd be able to make a round loaf now that I've got a round pot to bake in, but the dough folded in on itself a little as I dumped it out of the plastic bucket it rose in. I think the larger open space of the dutch oven was a help here. The dough would fill up the clay cooker so much of the sides were in contact with a hot surface which broke more bubbles upon first contact.

Getting the lid off was much easier now that I'm using a lid with a handle. And the bread was ready after only 30 minutes with the lid off, a good 5-10 minutes faster. That translates to a thinner, no-longer-verging-on-burnt crust so that's another plus.

The bread itself is dense and chewy with a fine grain. It's really good for sandwiches, but that's not really what I'm looking for. I think I'm going to let my next loaf rise longer to get that airy interior you sometimes see in really high-quality store-bought loaves.

I'm going to put my plans for butter rolls and pumpernickel loaves on hold for a bit so I can try out some variations of technique on this basic recipe. Once I've got a better handle on the baking basics I'll start playing around a bit more with recipes.

Casamance Stew

This is another recipe that I downloaded from a recipe archive before the Web existed. It's different from the pork and tomatillo stew I made earlier this week in a few interest ways, though. First, because of it's much more unusual name it managed to almost fully colonize it's namespace on the web; all but one "casamance stew" you'll find online is this recipe. Second, I was able to definitely track it back to its origin. This is a variation on a recipe from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook printed in the October 24, 1990 issue of the New York Times. And third, there is no indication that anyone other than I has ever actually cooked it. Not one review, not one comment and the biggest change anyone has made in the recipe is adding paragraph breaks. OK, that's not true; one guy suggests a parsley garnish.

A little research that I really should have done beforehand reveals that Casamance is a region on the south coast of Senegal and that this stew is actually a tinkered up version of poisson yassa. And while I'm sure the good folks in the Moosewood Collective meant well, the yassa recipes look a lot better and there's one change that really screws up this recipe. Let's see if you can see it without prompting.

Ingredients:

Marinade:
1/2 cup fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is clearly a substitute for Maggi seasoning so I used that instead. Click on the Senegalese tag for more info on Maggi seasoning.)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
2 or more jalapeno chiles, seeded, minced

Everything else:
1 1/2 pounds monkfish or other firm fish fillets (I used whiting. According to my notes on the recipe, I used sea bass the first time around.)
4 cups sliced onions
2 cups sweet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peanut oil,
1 chopped red bell pepper
salt to taste

1. Combine marinade ingredients (1st 7 items).

2. Rinse the fish well and cut into serving size pieces. Layer about half the onion slices in a glass baking dish. Pour some marinade over them. Then add fish and rest of onions, pour marinade over them. Cover and refrigerate overnight or all day.

3. When ready to cook, set the fish aside. Pour marinade off the onions and set aside. Cover cubed sweet potatoes with cool, salted water, bring to a boil then simmer until just barely tender.

4. Meanwhile, in heavy pan, gently saute onions in peanut oil for 15 minutes. Add red bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Combine onion, bell pepper with sweet potatoes and marinade and simmer 20 minutes.

5. While vegetables simmer, briefly broil or saute fish til lightly browned on both sides.

6. Add fish to simmering vegetables and continue to cook 15 minutes more. Salt to taste.

Serve in wide shallow bowls on steaming rice or millet.



Did you see the problem there? Someone changed the sensible hour marination to a full day. If you have much cooking experience you'll realize that a day in vinegar and lemon juice is going to do some serious pickling to that fish. And if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that's precisely why I cooked this. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that the recipe author knew something I didn't and what looked like a step that would ruin the dish would instead make it something unique and wonderful. I really should have known better.

The fish was badly overcooked chemically before any actual cooking that the recipe calls for. And even if it needed cooking, browning was clearly not going to happen as the fish was waterlogged from its lengthy soak. All the attempt achieved was prompting the fillets to break apart. The 15 minutes of extra cooking time was out of the question.

It's really a shame as, setting the fish's texture aside, the flavor combination is unusual, interesting and not bad at all. The tart sauce brightens up the savory onions and peppers and balances the sweetness of the sweet potato. My salvage attempt on the dish was to treat the fish like salt cod and break it up into chewy flakes. I found that the sauce gets caught up in the flakes so it's more of a hash than a stew at this point and each bite tastes mainly of fish and caramized onion moistened by the sauce. It really tones down the overwhelming vinegariness of the sauce and if the fish didn't taste like canned tuna it would be pretty good.

Doesn't mean I'm going to make it again, though. Next yassa I make is likely to be this one which looks to be different in some rather interesting ways.

Deep fried chickpeas and a general theory of bar snacks

I was watching Alton Brown's new series, Feasting on Waves, earlier this week and I found myself with a sudden urgent need for Caribbean snacks. Of course I don't have any of the proper ingredients in the house (and I'm surprised that they aren't more easily available here in Miami. Maybe just not in my neighborhood.) so I had to improvise. Luckily I had a couple of Caribbean spice blends handy and the knowledge that you deep-frying just about anything starchy will turn it into bar-food. I haven't found any legitimately trustworthy information on the processes, but the untrustworthy info says that both starch and fat slow your absorption of alcohol. The starch by absorbing the alcohol and releasing it slowly and the fat by physically blocking absorption. Probably nonsense.

Anyway, frying chick peas works on the french fry principle. The hot oil heats the water inside the food; the steam bursts out forcing apart the particles of food and making it light and fluffy. Meanwhile, the surface is browning and crisping under the oil's more direct assault. The nice thing about chick peas is that the outer skin sometimes detaches so you get a thin crispy shell with an air buffer beneath so it doesn't start reabsorbing remaining moisture from inside and getting soggy immediately the way french fries do. You already know you can do this with potatoes, yams, yucca and the like, but it also works with peanuts and other real nuts if you can find raw ones to do it with. I think the effect that puffs up krupuk, shrimp crackers, is different--just air escaping, not steam. I'm pretty sure there are Indian snacks that expand when you deep fry them too, but I'm not having any luck looking them up as I have no idea what they're called. Anyway, the trick is getting the temperature right so both the inside and outside are done at the same time. I do it by instinct at this point so I don't have any useful advice here other than to make sure whatever you're deep frying is good and dry before you start. I'll just say that deep fried chick peas are pretty tasty on their own and better when dusted with salt and whatever spices you're in the mood for. I used canned, as that's what I had. I'm curious how differently a dried and soaked chickpea would respond to deep frying. The firmer texture may make them explode like popcorn instead of just puffing up. I'm going to have to try that.

Pork and tomatillo stew

Most foodies, looking at that subject, will expect a recipe for chile verde. This certainly isn't a traditional version. It seems to have mutated through a chili-cooking competition, possibly in Brazil. Any chili recipe you find with "award-winning" in the description is bound to have a half dozen random ingredients added to the standard meat, chiles, onions and tomatoes. I've seen weirder additions than what's in here. I found this recipe in my files while looking for a more standard one that I was sure I had. From what's on the front of the sheet of paper it's written on the back of, it looks like I found it on-line around 1994. I've found it again on the Web but that doesn't really help. This site says it comes from a restaurant where Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet, used to waitress. This one says its from the L.A. Times. I suppose both could be true and I'm making some changes so it probably doesn't matter much. Here's my version:


Ingredients:
1 bottle dark beer
12 ounces orange juice
1 pound tomatillos, quartered
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 head garlic, peeled, crushed and roughly chopped
2 pounds pork butt, cut in 1/2 inch cubes

3 medium onions, sliced
2 jalapeño peppers, chopped
salt
pepper
1 teaspoon ancho chile powder
1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon cumin

4 10 oz cans Ro-tel tomatoes with peppers
1 14-ounce can black beans or same amount of soaked dried beans
1/4 cup corn meal (masa if you've got it)
1 bunch cilantro, chopped


lime
sour cream
avocado
flour tortillas and/or rice


1. In a dutch oven, bring beer and orange juice to a boil. Add tomatillos, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from heat but keep near the stove. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

2. Heat oil in a 12-inch cast iron pan on medium high heat. Add garlic and cook two minutes. Turn heat up to high and begin browning pork in batches. Remember to season the pork now or it'll be bland at the end. Remove each batch to the dutch oven. I had four batches and, as the pot warmed up I got progressively better browning, but the garlic got progressively closer to burning. I removed some garlic with each batch so I got a range of flavors and textures of both. Probably a better idea to just remove the garlic, turn the heat up, wait a minute or two and then start browning the pork.

3. Drain oil from pan if you want, but that's garlic-infused pork fat so I certainly didn't. Turn heat down to medium and add onions, peppers and seasonings. Cook until softened. Try to get some browning, but if you're using chili powder you won't be able to tell by looking. When ready, remove to dutch oven.

4. Drain two of the cans of tomatoes, but keep the liquid from the other two. Add tomatoes (and the juice from two cans) and half the cilantro to dutch oven. Stir and put in oven. Cook for two hours.

5. Add beans and corn meal. Because the heat is low the sauce won't have cooked down at all. Judge if you want to add any of the bean liquid. Cook for another half hour.
6. Theoretically that should finish the dish, but you'll notice that the sauce is quite thin and the vegetables haven't really broken down. So enough of this newfangled stew cooking methods and onto the stove for a half hour of uncovered high simmering (with occasional stirring).

That certainly helped the texture a good deal, thickening the sauce into more of a gravy. And generous extra helpings of spice and salt helped the flavor along. But despite all that, I still can't call this dish a winner. It's fine, but the tomat(ill)o to everything else ratio is just too high for a really good flavor balance. Maybe fresh tomatoes would have helped, but Ro-tel canned are a standard ingredient in many fine chilis so it wasn't an unheard of change to the recipe. Some reviews of other versions of this dish complained about the orange juice, but I thought it added some interesting notes. It could have asserted itself a bit more, really, as could have the beer. I may have just chosen poorly in that regard, though. But my previous chilis and southwestern stews have improved while sitting in the freezer so there's every chance this stew will too. And also on the plus side, it turns out that the low slow cooking in the oven immunizes meat from toughening up during boiling. That's good to know.

Next time, though, I've really got to get back to basics and make a proper chile verde with just pork, chiles, onions and tomatillos.