Thai beef and betel salad

Well past time to use my betel. It's two weeks old at this point and a little faded. A little late on the blog post too; sorry about that. Mussels were on sale at Whole Foods and you've got to bump them to the front of the queue.

This recipe is a take off of a betel leaf salad recipe I found on ImportFood.com with some elements from the ubiquitous ground-beef-wrapped-in-betel-leaves recipe added in, plus some adjustments to compensate for the tiny amount of betel I've got and some adjustments that just seemed like a good idea at the time. Pretty standard origin for me, really.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup betel leaves, shredded
1/2 cup carrot, shredded
1 small handful cilantro, well stemmed and roughly chopped
1-2 sprigs mint, chiffinaded (is chiffinade a verb?)
1 medium-hot chili, seeded and thinly sliced

1/4 pound tender beef, sliced into strips and cut into sensible lengths
marinated in fish sauce and lime juice with a little sugar and a little cilantro

2 Tablespoons roasted unsalted peanuts
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp
ground together or crushed in a mortar and pestle

2 teaspoons tamarind pulp dissolved in 5 teaspoons water
juice of 1/2 lime
1 Tablespoon palm sugar or any sugar with some molasses left in
1 Tablespoon light soy sauce

salt, sriracha

1. If your betel leaves, like mine, are a bit soggy from moisture expressed during storage, lightly toast them to dry them out. Only a few minutes or they'll start to crisp up. Hmm...betel chips; I've got to make a note of that.

2. Mix the betel leaves, carrot, cilantro, mint and chili in a large bowl.

3. Heat a cast iron pan over high heat, add a little oil and heat some more. Drain the marinade from the beef. Add the beef to the pan and cook, stirring but not stir frying, until cooked though and maybe a little browned. Remove to a bowl. Feel free to add them to the vegetables, actually.

4. Strain the tamarind mixture into a small bowl. You'll have to force it through the mesh and scrape it off the bottom of the sieve most likely. Add the lime juice, sugar and soy sauce. Don't measure, just mix them to your taste.

6. Mix together the beef, peanuts and shrimp with the vegetables. Add the dressing bit by bit just until the vegetables are coated. I used about half, myself. Add salt if necessary and maybe a little more lime or sugar until the flavors are balanced.


OK, let's give it a try. This is my first time using raw betel, and I've seen a fair number of complaints about its strong medicinal flavor, so I'm not sure how this is going to turn out.

Oh, this is very nice indeed.
The betel is the foreground flavor, but it's not overbearing. The sweetness of the carrots, emphasized by the tamarind, and the tangy tartness of the dressing blend with it for an pleasantly interesting whole. And there's just a bit of aroma from the herbs floating above the bolder flavors.

It could use a little more heat--I shouldn't have seeded the jalapeño I used--so I added just a little sriracha. That helps and adds just a touch of burn in the aftertaste which I like. Brought up the acid a little too which isn't a bad thing.

Each bite has a slightly different character; I particularly like it when the beef-betel-peanut combinatination of flavors comes out.

Texturally, it's mostly the crunch of the carrot and the chew of the beef. The herbs have wilted a little but there's still a little leafiness in there.

I think it helped that my betel's flavor was faded. If I were working with perfectly fresh leaves, I think I'd boost the carrot and add some shredded daikon to thin it out. That would help making this more than two small or one large serving, too. The original recipe I based this on actually has double the betel to carrot ratio. I can't see that working, at least for my palate. I'm curious to try a properly authentically prepared Thai dish using betel leaves. I think Robert from Possum Trot is the only one growing piper betel locally. I know he's unlikely to be reading this; anyone else know if he's supplying any local restaurants?

CSA week 16 - Beef (and some pork) barley soup

This isn't much of a recipe, but it's all I've made so it's what I've got to post about. The only thing that's really noteworthy here, if anything, is that I made the stock from scratch first.

This morning, I loaded up my slow cooker with a medium turnip, a couple carrots, a stalk and a half of celery, half an onion and a couple cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped; thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper; a meaty beef shank well browned on both sides and enough water to get everything floating (nine cups which really was too much) and set the slow cooker to low and headed off to work.

When I got home I discovered that the vegetables were still surprisingly firm and the meat wasn't falling apart the way it should have been. Also, the broth was pretty bland. So I turned the cooker up to high and gave it an hour. That seemed to help a lot. I fished out the now cooked-out vegetables and the shank.

The vegetable are for the compost heap (or would be if I had one. Can I just bury them near my plants?) and the beef went into the refrigerator to firm up. Ideally, I'd like to let the soup cool and skim the fat at this point, but dinner time is approaching and I don't feel like starting from scratch at this point. So instead, I chopped up fresh turnips, carrots, celery and onions and fresh stew meat (The chunks of beef in the freezer turned out to be pork, but close enough.) to add to the pot along with some sliced mushrooms and half a cup of barley. I also dumped in some soy and Worchestershire sauce and a Tablespoon or so of Spice House's Milwaukee Avenue spice blend. I figure anything that's supposed to be good on steaks and chops should work here too. And another hour of simmering.



That should do it. I broke up and returned the beef to the pot and dished out a bowl to refrigerate down from tongue-scorching temperatures so I could check the seasoning. Hmm...in desperate need of salt and a bit greasy (although I'd have to add richness some other way if it wasn't), but otherwise quite good. The broth is clearly not just generic beef broth; the vegetables and herbs have added a lot of depth to it. And it's great to have vegetables that are both firm to the bite and actually deliver significant amounts of distinctive flavor.

So, was that useful at all? Even vaguely interesting?

I'll have something moderately better in a day or two and then I'm off to Columbus to visit my sister and I'm not blogging the Seder dinner. I might find my way to Jeni Britton's ice cream shop, but I'm guessing I'm really the only one who'd be interested in that.

I still need someone to take next week's share off my hands. Just post a comment and it's yours.

Slow cooker short rib beef stew

Now that I've got a proper slow cooker, first on the agenda was a pork shoulder. But Millam's was all out. On the plus side, short ribs, the other classic slow-cooker meat, was half price. And it's remarkable just how quick thoughts of local, organic and such evaporate in the face of half price.

The standard recipe would be to do something sweet with a soy sauce and brown sugar glaze, but I've done that so I looked around for alternatives. I found three that looked interesting: a deviled short ribs recipe with a half cup of chili sauce, short ribs with onion gravy with 3 full cups of onions and savory braised short ribs that leaves out the sugar entirely. I'll probably go back and try the other two, but this time I settled on the third as a base.

The first modification I made was to add some vegetables. It seems kind of pointless to cook in a slow cooker and not get a whole meal out of it. I also changed the stock, boosted the flavorings and did a lot of modification after it came out of the cooker. It turned out not to be the big effort saver I was hoping for, but there were other good points to the method.

Ingredients:
3 1/2 pounds beef short ribs, cut into serving-sized pieces and trimmed of excess fat
1 Tablespoon cooking oil
1 medium-large turnip, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
several small or 2 large carrots cut into 2-inch lengths
1 cup full-bodied red wine
3/4 cup mushroom broth
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 small handful peppercorns
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tablespoon herbs de Provance
1 Tablespoon salt
--
1/4 pound cremini mushrooms, sliced
3 Tablespoons flour
1 large handful of parsley leaves, chopped
--
1/4 cup sour cream
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 1/2 Tablespoons prepared horseradish
1/8 teaspoon salt


1. Season ribs with a little salt. Heat oil in dutch oven over medium-high heat. Brown ribs in batches, 3-minutes per side, until well browned. Remove to slow-cooker pot.

2. Add vegetables to dutch oven and cooking, stirring frequently, until lightly caramelized and most of the yummy bits stuck to the bottom on the pan have been picked up. Remove to slow-cooker pot. Deglaze dutch oven with some of the wine. Pour into the slow-cooker pot.

3. Add everything else up to the salt to the pot, stir as best you can, set slow-cooker to low and cook all day.

4. When you're good and ready, open the slow cooker and fish out the vegetables to one bowl, the beef to another and strain the broth into a third. Place the first two into the refrigerator and the third into the freezer. Slice the mushrooms and mix the sour cream, mustard, horseradish and salt to make a horseradish sauce. Put that in the refrigerator too.

5. Take the meat out of the refrigerator when it's good and chilled. You'll find that the meat that was falling apart early is now fairly solid. Remove the bones from the ribs without breaking them up too much. Leave the bowl on the counter to warm up. Take out the vegetables too.

6. Take the broth out of the freezer. The fat should have solidified into a disk on top and a lot of the herbs should be trapped in it. Break up the fat and move it to a large cast iron pan. Measure out a half cup of the broth into a small container with a lid.

7. Heat the cast iron pan over medium heat until the fat is melted and sizzling. Add the mushrooms and a pinch more salt. The mushrooms should have lots of room. Cook without browning too much, stirring frequently and probably turning down the heat. Add the flour to the half cup of broth, put on the lid and shake until the flour is fully incorporated and then shake a little more. Let the flour hydrate as the mushrooms cook.

8. When you're happy with the mushrooms, add the broth, heat until warm but not hot then shake the flour mixture one more time and add to the pan. Stir well to incorporate and bring to a boil. Cook three more minutes until thickened. Add the meat, vegetables and parsley. Stir until everything is covered with the sauce and warmed through. Remove from heat.

Served topped with a small dollop of the horseradish sauce and a bit more parsley. Some sort of starch to soak up the sauce is a good idea too.



Like I said, a bit more trouble than I anticipated when I started, but definitely worth it. It's really good. The beef and vegetables retain a suprising amount of individual flavor and structural integrity despite the long cooking time. Chilling the beef before reheating it in the final preparation helped with that. I remember a Good Eats episode that explained just how that worked, but I don't recall any details.

The gravy is full of beef flavor developed during the long cooking time and a surprisingly strong mushroom flavor too considering how little is actually in there; it fragrant with herbs and has a tannin/pepper sting at the end. I was skeptical if the horseradish sauce would work with all the added flavors (although that part of the recipe is what caught my eye in the first place), but it's a great added touch with just enough bite to cut through the creaminess and heartiness of the stew, complimenting, but not drowning the main flavors (if used judiciously) and lightening up and giving a sophisticated touch to the whole.

I suppose this isn't really a very seasonable recipe. Somehow the sweet short rib recipes seem more summery. Why do you suppose that is?

CSA week mainly 18 - Fragrant beetroot and vegetable soup with spiced lamb kubbeh

This is a recipe from the cookbook Sephardic Flavors by Joyce Goldstein. It comes from the Jewish community that used to be in Cochin in south India. Now they're nearly all in Israel or New York City.

While poking through the other cookbooks my sister brought to Passover I found a surprisingly similar (if rather simpler) recipe for a beet soup with meat dumplings from Iraq called Kukkah Adom. A quick search online turns up that at least one family of the Cochin community emigrated from Iraq so this must come from that tradition.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 onion, finely chopped
6 garlic cloves
1 carrot, diced [or two of the small CSA ones]
1 zucchini, diced [the pieces of zucchini I froze defrosted a little mushy, but otherwise intact]
1/2 celery stick, diced
4-5 cardamom pods [I seem to be out of whole cardamom so I used the powder]
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
4 vacuum-packed beet root, finely diced and juice reserved
[I've never seen a vacuum-packed beet so I have no idea how big they are. I used the full 1 1/2 pounds of CSA beets which, in retrospect, was way too much. I presume the packed beets are pre-cooked, given how they're used in this recipe, so I simmered my raw beets for 20 minutes. The picture in the cookbook had rather large pieces of beet so I went with that. If you go for the fine dice, 10 minutes will probably do. Also, I substituted 1 cup of the boiling water for the packed beet juices.]
4 cups vegetable stock
[or 2 cups beet boiling water and 2 cups chicken stock]
14 oz can chopped tomatoes
3-4 Tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 bay leaves
1 Tablespoon sugar
salt and pepper
1-2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar, to serve

for kubbeh:
2 large pinches of saffron threads
1 Tablespoon hot water
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
9 oz lean minced or ground lamb
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/2 bunch fresh mint, chopped

1 cup plain flour (semolina better)
1-3 pinches salt
1/2 - 1 teaspoon turmeric
4-8 Tablespoons cold water

for ginger and cilantro paste:
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1-1 1/2 Tablespoons chopped fresh ginger
1/2 - 4 fresh mild chillies
1/2 large bunch fresh cilantro [stems included since you're going to puree everything]
2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
salt
extra virgin olive oil

1. To make paste, put garlic, ginger and chillies in food processor and process. Add rest, process to puree. Start with a little olive oil and add more with processing until you get a nice smooth texture. Set aside.


2. To make kubbeh filling, place saffron in hot water and leave to infuse. Heat oil in pan and fry onion until soft. Put onion and and saffron water in food processor. Blend. Add lamb, season and blend. Add vinegar and mint. Chill.




3. To make kubbeh dough, mix flour, salt and turmeric. Add water until it forms a slightly sticky but still workable dough. Let rest 20 minutes Knead for 5 minutes, wrap in plastic and let stand 30 minutes.




4. Divide dough into 10 - 15 pieces. Roll each into ball then roll into thin rounds. Place a spoonful of filling in each, dampen the edges, fold over or bundle up to seal. [I started by bundling up, but as I kept going along, I found myself doing more of an envelope fold and making flat square packets.] Set aside on a floured surface. [I made 12 pieces and found I had a third of the filling leftover. I'm not sure what went wrong there. Maybe my onion was too big? I made a dozen meatballs with the extra.]

5. To make soup, heat oil in pan, add onion and fry for 10 minutes until soft but not brown. Add half the garlic, the carrot, zucchini, celery, cardamom and curry. Cook 2-3 minutes.

6. Add three quarters of the diced beetroot, the stock, tomatoes, cilantro, bay leaves and sugar. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

7. Add remaining beetroot, juice and garlic. Season to taste and set aside.

8. To serve, reheat soup and poach dumplings in salted water for 4 minutes. For each bowl, add a dash of vinegar, two or three dumplings [or a dumplings and three meatballs] and a small spoonful of the paste.


OK, this is a strange combination of flavors and they're not immediately gelling into a whole.

The broth is sweet from all that beet water, but not cloying. There's a lot of savory and acid in there too. And heat floating in from the cilantro paste. You can taste the beets and tomatoes in it, both mellowed. The herbs and spices do make it fragrant so the name is accurate enough.

The twenty minutes of cooking wasn't enough to cook the character out of the vegetables. All of them, even the canned tomatoes, keep their individual flavors and textures. Well actually, the beets that cooked for the twenty minutes taste just like the broth now so putting some more in at the end makes sense.

I've tried different combinations of the ingredients and I've decided I like everything but the mint. Maybe if there was just a lot less of it. Mint's supposed to go with lamb and beets, but it's just jumping to the fore and clashing with everything. Or at least with the tomatoes. That definitely doesn't work at all. If you get a piece of kubbeh without much mint, it's not bad at all. It's actually not far off from Ashkenazi kreplach so maybe heavy meat dumplings are a universal of Jewish cooking. The soup itself, when you get used to it, is not a bad chunky vegetable soup with some interestingly unusual flavors, particularly with the cilantro paste added. Not something I'd seek out, to tell the truth, but if you're a vegetable soup fan, worth a try. Maybe it'll be better after a night in the refrigerator for the flavors to meld.

OK, it's tomorrow and I'm trying a bowl without the kubbeh. Just plain, without the cilantro paste, it's extra-sweet vegetable soup. No big deal. With the paste it's a lot more interesting with an odd, but not bad combination of flavors. Oh, I forgot to add the vinegar. ... Now that makes more sense. The tart balances out the sweetness into a more unified whole. It's actually good now.
Hold on again, I'm going to boil up a kubbeh. ... I'm still not sold on the mint, but the acid tones it down a bit so it kind of works. I'm still tempted to open up the kubbeh and extract the mint with tweezers, though.

I strongly considered switching out the mint for something I liked more, but I wanted to make such an unusual recipe as written. But having done that, I have no idea if it tastes anything close to what it's supposed to. And how many people on the planet could answer that? A few thousand? Maybe I should just please myself.

CSA week 13 - Sort-of-Spanish carrot top soup

I started with this recipe for Tuscan carrot top and rice soup, but made one change that led to another and another and eventually ended up over in Spain.

Ingredients
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
2 small carrots, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1/2 cup diced ham
1/2 cup diced Spanish chorizo
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
salt and pepper to taste

3 new potatoes, diced
1 can chickpeas, drained
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

6 cups chicken broth
1½ cups carrot tops, chopped

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-gauge soup pot. Saute the onion, carrots, celery, garlic, ham, chorizo bay leaf and thyme for 5 minutes over low medium until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the salt and pepper, potatoes, chickpeas and the thicker bits of the carrot stems. Cook for another 2 minutes. Pour in the broth, and bring to a boil.

2. Cook for 10 minutes or until the potatoes are almost tender. Add the carrot tops, mix well, and cook for 10 minutes more. I also added an egg to poach, but that's my thing so you should just roll your eyes and move on. You might want to include tomatoes, but I find the combination of them with the smoked paprika tastes muddy. A good idea with a different sort of paprika, though.

3. If you're not going to add an egg (and if you don't want to poach, a chopped hard-cooked egg would be nice) finish off with a bit more olive oil instead. And if you left out the meat earlier, you could blend some of the solids to thicken the broth, but I figure the pork products would gum up the works so I skipped that.

The result is a respectable if not extraordinarily distinguished bowl of soup. There are no jarring discordancies of flavor, but it's not one of those refined perfect combinations either. I found that as the carrot tops cooked to a pleasant texture, their distinctive flavor faded. It seeped out to give the broth a distinct carroty note, but there's enough else contributing that you won't call it carrot soup in a blind taste test. You would probably call it tasty, though, so good enough.

That's two in a row where I've buried the CSA ingredient under a bunch of other flavors. It'll be three when I do the kale-wrapped sticky rice. I'd best put that off until later in the week then and do the Mexican whatever or the tatsoi stir-fry next.

Red simmered pork - first iteration

About a month ago I failed quite spectacularly at slow cooking some pork in my crockpot. While the meat had shriveled up into hard little lumps and the vegetables melted to mush, the sauce had some promise. I said at the time "I'm thinking of straining out all of the overcooked solids, diluting it down and keeping it around as a marinade." And so I did.

Marination was my original plan today, but I remembered that the sauce wasn't far off from the red simmering sauce I've been wanting to try from the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook by Gloria Bley Miller. This more than just a simple stew; red simmering sauces can be used repeatedly. Miller writes: "Tradition tells us of such sauces, known as "Master Sauces" in China, which were kept going for two or three hundred years and, like a legacy, passed from one generation to the next." Tell me that isn't pretty cool.

The sauce started out with soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger and star anise watered down by half. I added some fresh garlic, ginger, red pepper flakes and rice wine to freshen it up. Then in went cubes of pork, around half a pound I think, and a sliced onion. I brought it to a boil and then down to a bare simmer with the lid on the pot.

After a half hour I added a chopped carrot, and after another half hour soaked and slivered cloud ear mushrooms and lilly buds. Another fifteen minutes later and I added bamboo shoots and cubes of tofu along with a dash of salt and a dash of sugar for the last fifteen minutes of simmering. I used a rather higher vegetable to meat ratio than is traditional, but that's how much leftover pork I had in the freezer and I did want a more balanced dish.


The cookbook promises that over time the sauce will develop into a rich gravy, but for now it's light and aromatic with ginger and star anise. The flavors are infused throughout, but the individual ingredients weren't stewed so long they lost their identities to the melange.

The pork is not falling apart, but it is very nicely tender. I was worried about that as you can't really tell how high a boil you've got in a covered pot. I must have successfully kept it low enough to do the trick. Possibly, it could be the cut of meat I used. I should label my freezer bags better. The vegetables were cooked well for the most part. I wouldn't have minded firmer carrots, though.

I didn't have much spare sauce to save as the sauce to stuff ratio I used was quite a bit under the recommendations in the cookbook, but I managed to put away a half cup to enrich the sauce next time I make it. I'll let you know how it develops. This is precisely the sort of thing you start a blog for; you want to tell somebody but who would possibly care? Now I just put it up here and never bore my friends and family with such matters again.

Mexican-style hot pickled carrots

It's been a good while since I've done any pickling so I decided to pick up some likely looking vegetables last time I was at Whole Foods. I ended up with some petite carrots, actually thin carrots cut into short lengths. At least they weren't claimed to be baby carrots which I suspect are the same thing just whittled down to round off the ends.

There are a few different ways to pickle carrots--dilled, sweet and hot primarily. The particular variety I'm making is the sort of hot carrot you'll find bowls of in the better sort of Mexican restaurant which means they're probably unheard of in Miami. Ideally, they should have a strong vinegar bite, be eye-wateringly hot but still have carrot as the foremost flavor. I became fond of them when I lived in San Diego I've been meaning to try making them on my own for some time. I'm hoping this will prompt me to actually cook more Mexican food as somehow I never quite get around to doing so.

I found a promising recipe here. Pickling in general is pretty straightforward and this recipe is no exception. Put vinegar and water in a pot along with spices and usually plenty of salt and/or sugar. (There was no salt in this recipe which is quite unusual. I added a couple Tablespoons as the carrots I sampled for texture were tasting a bit blah.) Bring to a boil, with the vegetables in if they, like carrots and cauliflower, need a little cooking or not if they, like cucumbers and tomatoes, don't. Once the texture is at the point you're looking for, dump the vegetables into a jar, cool and let sit in your refrigerator for a month. I was surprised to discover that soaking in a vinegar brine doesn't change vegetables' textures very much. If you don't get them right at the start they aren't going to improve. On the other hand, the flavor slowly and continually changes. I've sometimes found notable differences even from the fourth to the fifth week.

Beyond the salt, my only modifications were to cut down the amounts to fit in one of my pickling jars (actually ceramic coffee containers) and, as I was one jalapeño short, using a chipotle which should add a nice smoky touch to the final result. Remind me in a month to tell you how they turned out.
--
Nobody reminded me, but I noticed in my stats that people are finding this page and, more surprisingly, actually reading it so I thought I'd better give you some closure. It's a bit over a month later and basic flavor and texture of the carrots are right on what I was hoping for, including the hint of smoke, but they're not nearly hot enough. It is the right sort of heat, though, so the solution is just to add more jalapeños next time. This batch, because the flavor isn't overwhelming, will make a nice condiment for fajitas or the like. I've got a good easy recipe from Jim Fobel's Big Flavors cookbook; I'll add a link once I've made it and posted about it. Here it is, although I forgot to use the carrots when the time came.

--

It's now three months later and I just found the carrots in their pickle jar in the back of my refrigerator. Surprisingly, not only were they still perfectly fresh, they're finally really hot just the way I wanted them and they taste great. So that's the key: three months aging. Plan ahead!

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.

CSA week 14 - roast butterflied chicken over root vegetables

This is essentially a cross between a Good Eats roast chicken recipe and America's Test Kitchen's version. ATK's is unusual for them in that they haven't managed to overcomplicate it until it isn't worth the trouble to make. I've cooked my version twice and was thrilled with the results the first time and somewhat less so the second. I'll note the differences as I go along, but I don't know which ones made a real difference in the end result.

Step one is to get yourself a chicken. The first time I used a slightly-under-3-lbs. Greenwise chicken from Publix. The second time a slightly-over-3-lbs. regular chicken from Fresh Market. I was rather surprised that Publix (at least that particular one) had an organic-ish free-ish range option while Fresh Market didn't. Next time I'll try a full deluxe grass-fed free-range chicken wherever I can find one. Whole Foods maybe?

Step two is brining: 2 quarts water, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 to 1 cup salt depending on how fine grained it is. I could get my first chicken fully submerged, but not the second. I can't really see a mechanism for the slight surface exposure making a big difference, but second chicken was substantially blander and dryer. Maybe I should just have let the bigger chicken soak for longer than the suggested hour. (The short soak in a very salty brine is a ATK innovation I should point out.)

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 500 degrees F and roughly chop up the vegetables. I used potatoes, carrots and onions the first time and added some peppers the second. ATK's recipe uses just potatoes sliced and laid out. The chunky vegetables are from a similar Good Eats recipe. However Alton uses vegetables past their prime and only uses them to hold up the chicken and add flavor to the sauce that develops. I liked the results splitting the difference made. Roll the chopped vegetables in olive oil and salt and/or whatever seasoning you're using on the chicken. Take a Tablespoon of butter out to soften and mix it with your chicken seasoning.

When the chicken is done its soak bring it over to a cutting board and cut out the backbone with a pair of scissors. Cut off any extra fat too, but try not to split the skin anywhere; exposed meat dries out. I save the backbones and other various chicken bits for making stock, but this method produces far fewer scraps than cutting a chicken into serving pieces so the bits I have accumulated have been getting freezer burnt waiting for a stock-making quorum. I may have to dump the lot.

Once the backbone is out slice the meat away on both sides of the breastbone. Turn the chicken over and flatten it; the cuts you just made will make it much easier. Take a paper towel and pat the skin dry. Slip your fingers under the skin to loosen it. Once you've made some space take pieces of the seasoned butter you made earlier and rub them into the underside of the skin. You should be able to get it distributed around both the breast and thigh areas. If you want to be tidier you can spoon a bit of the butter under the skin and distribute it from above, but I don't think it's nearly as effective. Finally, massage generous amounts of olive oil into the chicken skin. If this step isn't embarrassing, you're not doing it right. I don't think I used enough of either spices or oil on my second chicken so be generous; remember that you're seasoning a whole three pounds of meat.

Splay the chicken out on top of the vegetables making sure the meat is all covered and any loose flaps of skin are laid out flat. The skin that's exposed gets golden brown, crispy and delicious while hidden skin stays flabby and unpleasant so make the effort. At this point in my second attempt I tossed the extra bits of fat I had cut off the chicken earlier into the baking dish but I think it was a mistake as my vegetables ended up nearly submerged and didn't get the caramelization that was the highlight of the dish the first time around. That's also probably a good reason to not use the pepper either. I liked how it turned out, but the moisture it lost cost flavor in the rest of the vegetables.

And that's about it. The chicken goes into the oven for 20 minutes. Turn the pan around and put it back for 20-25 more until the thickest part of the breast reaches 160 degrees F and it looks at least as good as this:

Nothing complicated really to chopping the chicken and serving it with the vegetables. You can separate the au jus from the fat and make some gravy, but if you did things right the chicken will be juicy enough to not need it. Save it for some other application. I'll probably add it to the stock I'll eventually make as a chicken flavor concentrate. Don't toss the fat either as it's very tasty and should be good for frying or salad dressing or some such.