CSA week one - Mchicha

I mentioned a while back, I think, that mchicha is the Swahili word for callaloo. It's also the name of this Tanzanian dish, but all of the versions I found called for spinach. I'm making a, small I'll grant you, logical leap that these are Westernized recipes substituting in spinach for amaranth. Cooking times quite unsuitable for spinach are good supporting evidence that of a late insertion or a clumsy translation. But those cooking times are too long for amaranth too so I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.

Whatever the case, I used the calalloo and it turned out just fine once I cut it in quarter to use the small bunch we got this week and tweaked the cooking times a bit.

Ingredients:
1 small bunch callaloo
1 1/2 Tablespoons natural smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup thin coconut milk
1 Tablespoon butter (or ghee if you've got it)
1 small tomato (I used four cherry tomatoes), peeled (unless you're using cherry tomatoes, then don't bother)
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon curry powder (a South Indian blend would be most traditional, but whatever you've got is worth a try)
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Trim the woody stems from the callaloo, separate the leaves, roughly chop the remaining stems and roughly tear the leaves. Wash everything somewhere along the way. I got about 1/2 pound after cleaning.

2. Mix the peanut butter and coconut milk. Set aside.

3. Heat the butter over medium heat in a medium frying pan or dutch oven. When it stops foaming add the onion, tomato, curry powder and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onion softens and the tomato breaks down, about 5 minutes.

4. Add the callaloo stems. Cook 5 minutes more.

5. Add the callaloo leaves. Cook 3 minutes more to wilt and begin cooking the leaves.

6. Add the peanut butter and coconut milk. Stir well and scrape the bottom of the pan. Cook 5 minutes more to blend the flavors adding water to keep the sauce saucy as necessary.

Serve with an approximation of ugali, a Tanzanian starch dish that is essentially an extra-thick polenta made with more finely ground corn meal.


It looks a mess, but I really like how this turned out. The flavors have blended together in a synergistic way I haven't seen in other African recipes using similar ingredients. There's an earthiness, but I'd be hard pressed to identify peanut butter; a spiciness but I couldn't say it was curry powder; there's a creaminess but no clear coconut. The amaranth, though, is unmistakable. It stands up to the strongly flavored sauce in a way spinach couldn't. I even like the pairing with the ugali, and polenta really isn't something I could have predicted to work with these flavors.

This may be the first fully successful sub-Saharan African dish I've made (although I don't think I've done any Ethiopian cooking. How could I have missed that? That's going right on my to-do list.) If you've still got your amaranth, give it try.

Banana ice cream with stuff in it

said stuff being a peanut butter/honey swirl and graham cracker brittle. A bit long to put all that in the title.

This is a new version of an ice cream I made back in February '08. And part of that recipe I took from Alton Brown:
Banana Ice Cream
3 medium ripe bananas, peeled (a little over 1 pound)
1/2 Tablespoon lemon juice
3/8 cup light corn syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Freeze and defrost the bananas. Mix everything in a blender, chill, churn, ripen and serve.

My innovation was adding habeñero peppers and an attempt at a peanut butter/honey swirl that ended up more as chewy chunks (albeit tasty ones). That turned out fine, but could have done with some improvement and since I was responding to a request for banana ice cream this week, it seemed a good time to look back and see what could be done with it.

First thing was adding some more texture. I was very happy with how the almond brittle worked in the lapsang ice cream I made a while back so I thought that approach would work well. There was already going to be nuts (well, legumes) from the peanut butter so I wanted to make a cookie brittle instead. Nilla Wafers were my first choice, but I had graham crackers in the house for another recipe I'm going to make sooner or later and they'll do fine. When you look up recipes for graham cracker brittle on-line, though, you find some weird cookies that soak the crackers in whole sticks of melted butter before pouring caramel over top. Not what I was looking for. Instead I just crushed up a half cup of crackers, cooked three ounces of sugar to hard crack stage, mixed them together, spread it out flat and, once it hardened, whacked it with my crab hammer into bitty pieces. There: brittle.

For the swirl, I saw honey roasted as an option in the grind-your-own-butter peanut bins at Whole Foods. Half the price of the plain peanuts for some reason so I tried that. It came out crunchy style which wasn't my intention, but was actually a plus as it eventually added some more textural interest to the ice cream. I mixed roughly equal amounts of the peanut butter and a wildflower honey and then, to make sure it would stay liquid, a good dose of vodka. It got gooey in a refrigerator test so in went more vodka and then too much vodka so I had to add more peanut butter and honey to get some flavor back into the mix. And some hot sauce too; what the heck. I wasn't entirely happy with the final result, but the texture seemed to hold up well as it chilled and the alcohol burn tends to fade at freezer temperatures so I figured I'd be OK.

So, once everything was good and cold, I churned up the ice cream mix and as I was scooping it out mixed in handfuls of the brittle and dollops of the swirl. After a night in the freezer, here it is:


I like the clarity of flavor the agave syrup gives the banana ice cream. It's not banana/honey (although that's a fine flavor combination); it doesn't have that industrial tinge corn syrup gives or the deep undertones of molasses; it's just banana. This really cements agave nectar's place in my pantry for the times that I need fructose, but don't want any of those other flavors. Thanks to that fructose, along with the bananas, the texture is nicely smooth and creamy. The bananas make it a bit goopy as it melts but given how much fat their substituting for, that's a minor quibble.

The peanut butter/honey swirl I screwed up a little as I tried to ensure it stayed liquid in the freezer. The vodka thinned out the flavors unevenly so the result tastes of peanut butter first, vodka second and then a little honey. The hot sauce was really completely unnecessary as there was already some burn from the vodka (although not a lot).

The graham cracker brittle is also a little off. The sugar cooked a little too dark and contributes a a touch more flavor to the combination than I wanted. The graham cracker is still easy to recognize but it's pairing with the caramelized sugar and not with the banana, peanut butter and honey that it was supposed to. And if you're not going to get those combinations you kind of lose the point of using graham crackers in the first place.

My last gripe is that I over-swirled the ice cream so you don't get the distinct layers I was hoping for. That said, the mixture is still sufficiently uneven that you get a different balance between banana and peanut butter in each spoonful which is a nice effect. And those flavors are pretty nice. Coming at this without knowing what I had in mind, this is a dandy ice cream and an improvement on last year's model I think.

CSA week 20 - Malted honey peanut butter balls two ways

I found this recipe on the thekitchen.com blog and there was some discussion in the comments of this being (or at least being a variation on) a traditional American recipe, but I've never seen it before and Googling doesn't turn it up anywhere else. Their recipe tweaks a recipe in from the 1976 More-with-Less Cookbook. I suppose that's enough time for it to filter out a little and the origin to be forgotten. You can see their version here. For my first version I tweaked the recipe a little more but still kept it simple.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup honey
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate

1. Toast coconut flakes (carefully as they go from raw to burnt very quickly) and break them up into small bits in a clean spice or coffee grinder.

2. Mix coconut bits with honey, peanut butter and malted milk powder until they form a slightly sticky, crumbly lump. I found that the full cup of powder didn't want to incorporate so I had to knead it in like getting all of flour into a wet dough.

3. Let rest a short while to hydrate, then pinch off pieces and roll into balls.

4. Melt white chocolate in microwave or in a double boiler. Dip each ball into the chocolate and set somewhere cool to firm up. If you store them in the refrigerator, let them warm up a bit before serving.

OK, maybe that's not quite as simple as the original mix-then-roll-into-balls, but the toasting and the white chocolate are good additions.

This was good, but messy at Miami room temperature as the balls slumped and expressed oil while the white chocolate melted. Also, I wasn't entirely happy with the grainy final texture. I was clear that while the malted milk was fully incorporated a lot of it was only mixed in and not dissolved.

I wondered what would happen if I melted the honey, peanut butter and white chocolate together and then mixed in the powders. Secondarily, I had just bought a bottle of amber agave nectar. I had only tried the light version before and I was wondering how this slightly more flavorful version would work in this recipe.

That makes the new recipe:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup agave nectar
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate
a few drops vanilla

1. Toast coconut flakes and grind them into a paste oozing coconut oil in a clean spice or coffee grinder. (Another change there to smooth out the texture.)

2. In small saucier, melt peanut butter, nectar, vanilla and chocolate and stir until homogeneous. Stir in coconut and malted milk powder and blend. When the powders have been fully incorporated, pour the mixture out into a small container to cool. The texture at this point was the gooey sticky napalm of melted marshmallow so may have been possible to whip in some air to adjust the texture as it cooled, but I just let it settle into a dense brick and sliced it up into rectangular cuboids. (That's the right term; don't blame me. Hyperrectangle or 3-D orthotope are close, but imply hollowness. That leaves out 'box', too.)


I took both into work and had a taste test. The results were close, but by a small margin everyone preferred the second version. The texture ended up somewhere between caramel and fudge, which is a good place for a candy to end up and sure you'll agree. I pressed the point that the crumblier candy and creamy chocolate coating made the first version much more interesting texturally, but good was preferred over interesting (much to my and every other experimental chef's disappointment).

They also liked the purer peanut flavor to the honey/peanut mix. The amber agave really wasn't much different from the light version. They both have the vacant mildly floral sweetness of honeysuckle easily overwhelmed by the stronger flavors at play here. I shouldn't have been surprised; it says "mild" right there on the bottle. The malt and coconut flavors are there too, but they're enriching the peanut, not standing up recognizably on their.


One of my colleagues who's from south India made the interesting observation that the second version's flavors and textures aren't far from some traditional candies from that region. That opens the possibilities of adding cardamom, pistachios, maybe rosewater. Lots of room for further experimentation here, but they're plenty tasty as is too.

CSA week ten - Thai green beans and scallops

This is the green bean dish I mentioned last Saturday with a sauce made of peanut butter and oyster sauce. A weird combination but not unique; I found a handful of other recipes using the two so I was prepared to believe that it wasn't a typo or a prank by some culinary lunatic. There were positive reviews from people claiming to have made the dish, but I've been misled by those before so I was still wary.

The original recipe was a side dish: just beans and sauce. It's a weeknight and I wanted a one pot meal so I added the scallops instead of making a second dish (as I had originally planned before I got lazy).

I didn't bother with making-of pictures since it's a such a simple and common preparation. Here's the recipe from its Recipezaar page, unillustrated but with my modifications noted:

"Thai-Style Green Beans Recipe #179660
This recipe in from the Summer 2006 edition of Cooking for 2. I made a couple of adjustments to the recipe. We really enjoyed it served as a side with Lemon Chicken and Sesame Rice.
by PaulaG

25 min | 15 min prep

SERVES 2

* 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
* 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
* 1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
* 1/8-1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
* 1 tablespoon shallot, minced
* 1 teaspoon ginger root, grated [whoops. I used more like a tablespoon. Which wasn't bad at all. You need a lot to stand up to the oyster sauce.]
* 1 teaspoon oil
* 1/2 lb green beans, trimmed
* cilantro, chopped
* dry roasted peanuts
[ * six small ocean scallops, brined, cleaned and quartered]

1. Combine the soy sauce, oyster sauce, peanut butter and crushed red pepper in a small bowl; set aside.

2. Rinse the beans and place in a microwave safe dish, cover and cook until crisp tender; approximately 3 to 5 minutes depending on the wattage of your microwave. [I steamed mine for around 7 minutes instead.]

3. Remove beans from microwave, rinse in cool water and allow to drain while preparing the sauce.

4. In a skillet or wok, heat the 1 teaspoon oil add the minced shallot and grated gingerroot.

5. Cook the shallot and ginger for 2 minutes [add scallops after 1 minute] and then add the soy sauce mixture; stirring until the peanut butter is melted and the sauce is smooth.

6. If using a natural peanut butter, it may be necessary to add a tablespoon or so of water to the pan to aid in making the sauce smooth and creamy.

7. Once the sauce is thoroughly combined, stir in beans and warm in sauce. [I cooked over a quite high heat so my sauce shrank to a paste pretty quickly. A big spoonful of water thinned it out allowing me to deglaze the pan. Then I let it reduce into a nice clingy sauce as the beans reheated and got it the heck out of the pan before it pasted up again.]

8. Prior to serving sprinkle with chopped cilantro and peanuts if desired. [You should desire this. Those are important elements of the dish's flavors and textures.]"

To end any suspense, let me start by saying that the dish turned out really well. The key, I think, is that this isn't really a peanut sauce.

Usually, when I make peanut sauces they're for satay, either the Thai version with fish sauce and coconut milk or the Indonesian version that uses sweet soy sauce. Both are uncooked dips in which the fresh peanut flavor is very much to the fore. (It can easily go too far. The trick is to switch out maybe a third of the peanuts or peanut butter for tahini. That's a bonus tip for you right there.)

Here, the peanut butter has melded with the soy and oyster sauces to create a rich meaty tangy flavor. It's not impossible to pick the components out, but there is something greater than the parts created here. Over this foundation float the light notes of ginger, shallot and cilantro pairing with the bright flavor of the still slightly crisp beans and the slightly chewy scallops (which were a pretty good addition. Brining them really makes their flavors pop, too.)

Even with the beans, the sauce is pretty intense stuff, but a bowl of white rice mellowed it out nicely. Best green bean dish I've made in a while. If you haven't used yours yet, this is definitely a good way to go.

Peanut butter caramel popcorn

Several years ago, before I got into making ice cream every couple of weeks, I used to make a lot of caramel corn. I'm talking about the good stuff that they sell for five bucks a handful in tourist traps, except better because I made it with plenty of real butter and without ridiculous novelty flavors for the rubes. It was praised by the editors of Food and Wine magazine. OK, one ex-editor, but still, he knew what he was talking about. It's also kind of a pain in the butt so I made this recipe instead.

Still, I've got a bit of expertise to bring to bear so I think my few tweaks managed to improve it.

Ingredients
enough popcorn kernels to make six to seven cups of popped popcorn. That's 1/4 to 1/2 cup depending on the variety and how fresh they are
1 cup roasted peanuts
Vegetable oil
2 large pinches salt
1/2 cup strongly flavored dark honey, like, say, avocado honey
1/3 cup not-quite-white sugar, demerara or the like
1/2 cup natural unsweetened peanut butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
4 or 5 shots of vinegar-based but fruity hot sauce, Tabasco's not really the best choice, but it'll do.

Prepare your largest mixing bowl. Heat a large heavy pan over medium heat and film the bottom with vegetable oil. Add a few kernels of the popcorn, then put a lid on the pan. Leave a small crack for steam to escape. When the popcorn starts popping, add the rest and shake vigorously to make sure the kernels pop evenly. When the popping slows, take the pan off the heat.

Pour the popcorn into the bowl to cool, being careful to leave any unpopped kernels in the pan. Coated with peanut butter caramel, the unpopped kernels are a serious tooth hazard.

Mix the honey, a pinch of salt and sugar in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn heat to low and let simmer for three minutes, then remove from the heat and add the peanut butter. Stir vigorously until all the peanut butter is melted, then mix in the vanilla and hot sauce.

Immediately pour the peanut butter caramel over the popcorn and stir with a long-handled wooden spoon until it's all coated. Once it's mixed, check for seasoning. Let cool a few minutes before moving it to a serving bowl. Let cool a bit longer before actually serving as it's better when it's congealed a little. The texture is better refrigerator, but the flavor is better at room temperature. You'll have to judge the best balance yourself.


My popcorn popped up rather less voluminously than I wanted so I ended up with a rather thick coat of goop around the kernels. That's a bit of a novelty for me as I'm using to thin coats of caramel that I can bake into crispness. That's not really an option with a peanut butter based sauce. This is more in the soft chewy rice crispy treat neighborhood. Not a bad thing if that's what you're aiming at.

The dark honey and hot sauce give a couple dimensions of full flavor missing from the original recipe which is not necessarily a good thing if you're just looking for simple honey peanut butter which I admit can be quite nice. Here the light peanut butter flavor fades into a rich honey with a few bitter notes rounding it out and leaves a lingering burn. Well, I like it.

I'll have to make my proper caramel corn recipe some time and post it up. Maybe I'll try a new variation with the bottle of agave nectar I bought. It's got to be useful for something.

Tahu goreng - fried tofu in peanut sauce

This is one of my favorite Javanese recipes. It's quick and easy to make and has a great distinctively Indonesian flavor.

You'll need:
1 pound medium to extra firm tofu. (You can get a lot of different textures from fried tofu depending on the firmness you start with and how long you fry it. I like mine a bit dried out and chewy but I think I'm in the minority. You definitely don't want the airy store bought pre-fried tofu. That's a different ingredient entirely and is good for different sorts of recipes.)
1/2 cup oil for shallow frying
1 large handful bean sprouts
1 clove garlic, sliced
1/2 green hot chili, sliced (something small and very hot is typical for Java)
1 teaspoon sugar
4 Tablespoons sweet soy sauce (a.k.a. kecap manis)
2 Tablespoons water
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 Tablespoons crunchy peanut butter
2 scallions, sliced thin
3 Tablespoons crispy fried onions


Those crispy fried onions are a traditional Javanese condiment that's pretty similar to a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish condiment that goes with chopped liver. I think that's fried in schmaltz instead of peanut oil. If my mom's reads this, maybe she'll clarify in the comments.

You'll need:
1 small onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 large pinch of salt
1/2 cup oil for shallow frying

1. Toss the onion with the salt and spread on a paper towel over a draining rack. Let sit for five minutes.

2. Meanwhile, Heat the oil in a medium pan (cast iron preferably) until the surface shimmers and a test piece of onion sizzles but doesn't burn. Turn heat to medium.

3. Roll up the paper towel and squeeze gently to get a bit more water out of the onions and to get some of the salt to stick to the paper towel.

4. Add the onion to the pan in a single layer. Cook, stirring frequently, for 5 to 7 minutes, until the onions are a golden brown.

5. Remove onions to a new paper towel spread over the rack. Let sit for 15 minutes. They'll darken a little and get crispier.

6. Save the oil for deep frying the tofu.


OK, now back to the main recipe.

1. Start some rice cooking. Short grain and kind of sticky would be appropriate. Sushi rice is a fair approximation if you don't rinse it.

2. Cut the tofu into inch-thick slices. Pat dry and maybe squeeze out some of the moisture. Heat oil the same way as for the onions and fry at least until light brown on both sides. I prefer to go a little longer, but it's up to you. Remove to a paper towel on a draining rack and set aside.

3. Put a medium pot of water on the boil.

4. In a mortar, crush the garlic, chili and sugar until enough juice has been released to dissolve the sugar. Add the soy sauce, water, lemon juice and peanut butter and stir until fairly smooth.

5. When the water has boiled add the bean sprouts. Wait until the water has returned to a boil, no more than 30 seconds. You just want a quick blanch. Remove bean sprouts.

6. Cut the tofu into cubes. Or don't if you don't want to.

7. For each serving, put the rice in a bowl, then the tofu, cover with the bean sprouts, spoon over the sauce and garnish with the scallions and onions. You can serve hot or at room temperature, but remember that room temperature in Java is around 85 degrees.

(both recipes are adapted from The Indonesian Kitchen by Copeland Marks and Mintari Soeharjo)


In each bite you can get soft rice, chewy tofu, crunchy bean sprouts and scallions and the crisp onions. The tofu gains a savory flavor from the frying, the sauce is sweet and earthy, the onions salty and the vegetables...um...herbaceous? Anyway, there's an enormous amount going on for such a simple dish. And if you don't care about that, it's just really tasty.

It occurs to me that this dish has kid-friendly flavors and is pretty easy to pack (rice, tofu and vegetables in one bowl, sauce in another and a small bag of onions). I'll bet it makes a mighty impressive elementary school lunch. (It probably makes an impressive work lunch too, but my coworkers have long ceased inquiring about all but the most aromatic of what I've brought in.) If any mothers want to try it, do please report back on how it goes.

Nutella and peanut butter ice cream (with pretzel bits)

I bought my first jar of Nutella in quite some time recently after realizing the bread I had bought for tuna salad/cucumber/squash sandwiches (sadly lost in the refrigerator debacle) needed to be re-purposed for room temperature applications.

As I mentioned a while back, I've decided that I need try unusual recipes from cookbooks for a while to pick up techniques and possibilities for my own purposes. Peanut butter ice cream was on my list as, like banana ice cream, the main flavoring also has thickening and structural roles. Putting that together with the half-a-jar of Nutella that usually sits neglected in my pantry after I get sick of Nutella sandwiches (or run out of appropriate bread), gave me the idea of a Nutella and peanut butter ice cream.

Google doesn't turn up any pre-existing recipes for such a thing, but there were plenty of peanut butter recipes to sort through. I didn't get far into that process before it occurred to me to search out Nutella ice cream recipes. I only found two and I was intrigued by this one which consists of a cup and a half of Nutella, a cup and a half of evaporated milk and that's it. The creator, Clotilde Dusoulier, found her first try too sweet and toned it down by using an all-natural organic knock off. I followed suit by switching out half the Nutella for natural, unsweetened peanut butter. Other than that I just added a dash of vanilla and a bit of salt and I was done.

I mixed in a large handful of pretzel nuggets (chopped in half) too, but they got a bit soggy so I can't recommend that. Maybe those really thin pretzel sticks would hold up better. Alternatively, you could mix in slices of frozen banana. I was tempted by that idea, but I want to find out what happens when I use all peanut butter and swap out the evaporated milk for coconut milk and I'm saving the banana for that. I'm torn over whether a dash of curry powder is going to make or break that recipe. Well, only one way to find out.

Hmm, I just did a quick search and discovered that you can buy commercially manufactured coconut curry ice cream (if you live in Luxembourg, anyway). At least theirs doesn't have any peanuts in it.

Anyway, back to the Nutella and peanut butter ice cream. It turned out like a dense rich premium ice cream. The fat in the Nutella and peanut butter must have compensated for the lack of it in the evaporated milk. It's somewhat healthier fats though. The flavors are Nutella and peanut butter, no surprises there, but nothing wrong there either. Some of my coworkers were quite excited about the idea of this ice cream; I wonder how they'll react to the reality. (The color balance in my picture of the final result went wonky and it ended up looking unappetizingly yellow. I'll try again tomorrow.)

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.