Borscht and deglazing lessons

Made borscht tonight and it turned out way, way better than the one I made around last year. My wife, who hated the one I did before, was very into this and she cleaned her bowl. The one I made previously was a kosher vegetarian one, whereas this one was Ukranian and neither kosher nor vegetarian (pork sausage and sour cream). I think the big difference is that I straight up pureed the beets though, which changes the whole experience completely.


If winter's got you in that weird russian mood I'm in, here's how you can make this. You'll need:

• 1 pound bratwurst, kielbasa, or other pork sausage, casing removed and chopped
• 2 quarts chicken stock
• 4 beets, peeled and chopped
• 4 red potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 red bell pepper, diced
• 2 carrots, diced
  
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
  
• 1 teaspoon salt
  
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 teaspoon sugar
  
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon hot paprika
• 1 bay leaf
• sour cream, for topping
  
• dill, dried or fresh, for topping
  

Start by browning off your meat in a big pot or dutch oven. Once its browned, remove to a dish and put away. You should have some gunk on the bottom of your pan, which you can then deglaze to remove from the bottom. Since I'm a nice guy, I even put in a video segment on how-to deglazing. It's one of the nicer ways to up your skill and the flavor of whatever you make:



Add your butter and get the heat to near-high. Pop cumin seeds, then add your aromatics (onion, bell pepper, carrot) and salt. Drop the heat to low and cover for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Uncover, add your beets, maybe a cup of your stock, and thyme, and continue simmering for another 20 minutes. From here, dump all that jazz into your food processor and spin it up. Beets are jerks and they're very hard and need to be destroyed without mercy, so we'll let the heat do half the work and the blades to the rest. Make a puree out of that crap.

Return the puree to the pot, add the rest of your stock, paprika, pepper, sugar, lemon juice, and bay leaf. Add your potatoes. Bring up the temp to a near-boil, and back off to a simmer. Cover, and cook down for another 20 minutes. (yes it takes forever but its worth it in the end) When that's done, taste and adjust your seasoning. Add your sausage back to the pot and give it all a good stir.

You're ready to serve. Now, if you're just famished go ahead and eat it, but borscht is tricky. It's supposedly best the day after, and you can either eat it hot, or some swear it's better cold. I really like it either way. No matter, dollop some sour cream into it and add dill at the end. If you're fully embracing the russian spirit, blare some Red Army Choir and throw back shots of vodka. That's optional.

Sodas going retro

I like an occasional soda now and then. It's a treat, as it should be. It's not a water substitute or anything you should be enjoying on a daily basis at all. That said, unless you're on the look-out for good small-batch sodas or maybe like to shop at latino grocery stores or ethnic markets like I do, you're usually going with something over-saturated with high fructose corn syrup instead of real sugar. While the health issues are pretty much the same with each, the corn syrup just doesn't taste right to me and never has.

So it's been sort of a nice change of pace to see a lot of companies starting to bottle throwbacks of American brands and put them on the market. Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr. Pepper have done it, and I'm happy with each of them more or less. The taste is less sticky-sweet and you actually catch the flavor of the drink behind it without feeling all disgusted after having some.

It's a great start, as I said. What I'd like to see now are the return of 12 ounce glass bottles in general markets. Yes, you can go to the aforementioned latino grocers and ethnic markets and get an imported real sugar Coca Cola, and I do that every now and then. It's a shame that it's sort of tucked away as a little secret, because glass retains the cold so much nicer than plastic. Further, I'm sorry, but you can taste a difference with plastic. It's just a little off.

So, keep putting out real sugar soda. Let's get em in glass now. Maybe after that, reduce the portion size. Y'all remember eight ounce bottles? I sure do.

Eatin' Po'

The biggest kvetch I get from folks (aside that I eat like a globe-trotting pinko) is that people think I spend a lot on certain things that they can't afford. Yes and no. I fully admit that sometimes it's awesome to grab that brass ring and spring for stuff like truffle oil, jamon iberico, roquefort, and other stuff that most folks don't fit into their grocery lists. But I also (increasingly so) try to go the other way, and eat cheaply. Finances have a way of doing that to you sometimes. Having a mortgage and a car payment sometimes means that when the weather is in the single digits for a month and your power bill rolls yahtzee on your ass, maybe you can't spread it on quite so thick.

Also my unique situation grants me access to seasonal vegetables that are delivered to my doorstep, but for certain things, I still have to schlep on down to the grocery store. Since I'm waaay out in the country, our closest store is still a good 20 minutes from me. Sometimes I just can't make the time, and it's good to save money and make do with what I've got on hand.

In the spirit of both frugality and laziness I put together a dish tonight consisting of four potatoes, a head of broccoli, a cup of yellow split lentils, two tablespoons of canola oil, a quart of water, salt, pepper, and some assorted south indian spices. Spices are becoming easier to buy in bulk, and so you can easily save a lot of money by doing so. Say you spend ten bucks on a bulk load of spices. You dole that out in increments of maybe a few cents per dish. The veggies I put in that dish probably set me back two dollars and the lentils maybe a quarter. The only other input I used is tamarind, which is getting easy to find in the ethnic aisle of most grocers, and a 12 ounce jar of it sets me back three bucks and lasts me nearly half a year. Two tablespoons or so go in the pot.



The result is a stew that feeds six people to the gills and costs maybe three dollars per iteration if that? Divide by six, and you're grubbing at 50 cents, and I guarantee this will fill you up and leave you happier about life than whatever's on a value menu. Thirty minutes is a round trip for me to the nearest fast food joint, or it's the time it takes for me to make this.

The biggest leap you've got to take is overhead at the beginning. If you're willing to put down a few bucks for the spices and stuff that will keep and last, you divvy up that cost big time as you keep making little meals.

Lent is three weeks away

If you don't know from my earlier posted foray last year, I'm some sort of weirdo protestant who's been observing Lent for about 15 years. I won't get into the why's and the how's other than I think it's a good thing to challenge yourself to go without for forty days. Last year I kept to a strictly ovo-lacto vegetarian diet for the duration of Lent. That was pretty easy, and the hardest thing for me to do without was anchovies of all things.

This time, it'll be harder. I'm going fully vegan.

No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no honey, no derivative stuff like gelatin, none of that stuff. I wouldn't undertake it if I didn't think it was possible, but I admit it's going to be a wild ride. Those who've known me for years know I used to be the pickiest of eaters and could barely be bribed to eat veggies on my plate. What a difference a few years make.

Fortunately, my friend Dino has added his metaphorical axe to my quest, so I'm sure that if I ever get pushed against my own personal dinner rush without any ideas left, I've got a lifeline. I doubt it'll be down to that wire, but who can say.

Part of me is also interested in this because I'm keen on veganism not for any moral or ethical reason, but because I see it as a kissing cousin of sorts to kosher and halal cuisine, which is to say that it can be a cuisine that defines itself, diversifies itself, and creates its own world based on its limits. People hear vegan and they think vacu-formed tofu "meat" and garbage like that, and I'd like to make a lot of honest food that's vegan and tastes delicious without putting on pretense.

So for now, I'll be having an extended farewell to the flesh.


Because while my chana masala is vegan, that nice little slice of naan next to it ain't. Bummer!

Happy 2010, belated

Hey y'all.

Glad you're still reading my blog. As of now we're less than a week into 2010 so I hope y'all had some of this:



Followed at some point by some of this:


(and if y'all don't know about greens & the new year, you gotta eat 'em to make sure you bring in the $$$ this year. serious business in the south btw)

I hope everyone had a great new year and a great Christmas / Channukah / Kwanzaa / Eid, etc. My new year's resolution is to pick up the pace that I once maintained here, and to keep this place updated with fresh new articles. Even if I can't cook or snap a picture, I'll do my best.

So how's 2010 been so far? Here's a pictorial review.


This monster entered my kitchen. A fantastic gift from mom and dad, this is the steam driver to John Henry's hammer. I still like to hand-knead, but man this helps immensely when I'm too busy to bother. I hear I can do other things with it besides making bread (ie, grinding meat, making pasta, churning butter from heavy cream to name a few) but I haven't been bothered to do any of those things...yet.


Sometimes, with work and arranging furniture or whatever mad whim we're on, I'm just too tired to cook. Bless the KitchenAid for making the act of baking sandwich loaf a trivial issue. If you've got that, it's second nature to make a sandwich in about five minutes. Nevermind that I'm eating a decidedly non-kosher sandwich with a Jewish beer. I atoned for this...


...with bagels like a true mensch should.


We rang in the new year with a dinner of alligator gumbo, paired with a local Alabama pinot grigio. The pinot wasn't the best local wine I've had so far. For that, y'all better go to Morgan Creek. They love their muscadines.


And I tried my hand at chicken wings for the first time. Never been a fan of buffalo wings, so the sauce is inspired from South African cooking, using periperi chili, and a lot of lemon juice, butter, honey, ginger, and garlic.

Anyways, hope this is a sign of things to come. Looking forward to keeping y'all updated on all sorts.

Hanger steak and why you should eat it.

1. It owns. Texture, appearance, all of it. It's just awesome. It's got little texturey stripes running across it, with the occasional stripe of fat. While fairly lean, the fat comes out nicely in it, so you aren't eating amorphous blobs of blubber in between bites. The whole thing seems to look fairly like a meat xylophone. The unique way the grains cleave lends this thing extremely well to things like a good Italian steak and arugula salad, and even a carne asada taco. It cut cut cuts into nice little strips.

2. It's a sensible portion. This is very important. Y'all are probably eating way, way more meat than is recommended in a portion. This leads to over-eating, valuing quantity over quality, props up immoral factory farming agro-empires, and also leads to you being broke when you chuck down ten bucks for a single massive slab of over-fattened, corn-fed, and antibiotics-injected Barry Bonds cow. Make a fist. Hold it in front of your face. This is roughly the size of a serving of meat. Fortunately, hanger steaks come in these nice little strips, which weigh in much more respectably than a sixteen-ounce beef stonehenge.

3. It is cheap. Let me break it down for you. We last made some steak au poivre using a pair of hanger steaks, giving enough food for two folks easily. The cost for the steaks? Five bucks, altogether. For the quality of cut, you can't find better value out there, especially since there's an entire cabal of picky boring people out there who can only pronounce sirloin, ribeye, and t-bone.

4. It's a cut made popular as the one that butchers would reserve for themselves when they took a carcass apart. If you need any better indicator that it's a good cut, that's a winner.

5. It's diaphragm. Eeeeeeewwwww!!! Impress/amaze/disgust your friends. Serve fava beans and chianti and go FTHFTHFTHP. It's not offal, but it's a good bridge between organs and meat, and I'm always a fan of whatever gateway drug gets people into eating livers, chitlins, sweetbreads, etc. They're awesome and nutritious, and not only do they taste great but you have fun eating them. Think about watching animal planet, and seeing lions on the serengeti take down a zebra. You think the lions go for the sirloin first? Hell no, they zip open that belly and get whatever is squishy. Connect with your inner predator today, and you might find new things you enjoy.

So I hope I've helped to sell you on your next red meat purchasing decision.

Thanksgiving.

Yep, it's overdue. Badly. I realize this, and am genuinely sorry. I've been a bad blogger and will endeavor to keep up with the Joneses, so I'll start by recounting my very first Thanksgiving in My New Home.

It began and ended with a turkey, and why not? It's a thanksgiving story.

I started getting notions of turkey day grandeur when I found out that Grow Alabama was taking reservations for buying free range turkeys from them. Now, I'm at least some part vestigial country boy, and the sort of guy who appreciates what wild turkey has and what butterball does not. So when I had a shot at a decent turkey, I latched on. I told the wife, and the rest of the family. We eventually conspired to do the big grub at our new house. Fun!

Hol' up! I have to work on they day before Thanksgiving, and worst off, I work pretty late, getting off at 8:00. To make it more scary, due to other-family issues, we penciled in the meal for lunch. At 1:30 PM. Aaaagh. I had very little time to belt out a lot of food. Fortunately, we all chipped in and made different things. Mom made cornbread, my late-grandmother's famous ugly chocolate cake, green bean casserole, and brought a few little nibbles. My sister made my late grandmother's turkey dressing (hint yankee people, this is southern for stuffing) and a tasty southwestern corn dip thing.

That left me with just a few things. Pumpkin pie with a ginger snap crust & maple whipped cream, french baguettes, mustard greens, country potatoes*, and of course, the turkey, full of yankee stuffing*.

The asterisks denote parts of the process that I nearly drop-kicked my carpetbagging wife from my back deck. She insisted on mashed potatoes with the skins on. Now, in my vernacular, these are country potatoes, lumpy and crudely mashed taters with hunks of skin, and they suck. I was mad that I was making crappy potatoes. I made her crappy potatoes, only to find out that she was wanting something entirely different. She wanted milled, creamed, silky mashed potatoes that are all that is good and just in the free world, only with the skins incorporated into them. I still think it's goofy and that you should just go ahead and peel them, but it was a lot better after a clarification. After we sussed out our creative difference, the potatoes tasted wonderful.

Next came yankee stuffing. She insisted we had to make stuffing, yankee style. Every time I've had this, it's been hot garbage, dry and cakey with too much breadcrumbs and celery and too little anything else. I was mad at the world until she gave me her mom's recipe, which had a cornbread base. Okay, it's only slightly heathen-ey, but cornbread is good grub, so that's fine. It actually tasted good, so I'll admit I'm wrong on that.

This is a segueway from the main gist of the story. You see, I had a turkey to emergency thaw, and a bazillion other things to make, and on the day before thanksgiving, the only thing I'd already taken care of was the pumpkin pie. I proceeded to don my cook's coat, load myself with enough caffeine and alcohol to make Johnny Cash sweat in church, and essentially turned into Tom Berringer in Platoon. Remember, "the machine breaks down, we break down."

I may not have machine-gunned Vietnamese civilians in a rice farming village, but I did the culinary equivalent of a few war crimes, all the while becoming an avatar of pure piss and vinegar. I cat-napped long enough to get angry at the world, woke up, stuffed the shit outta that turkey, and got it in the pan with just enough time (I calculated like Dr. Strangelove) to get a proper roast & rest in before people were ready to eat. Snipped rosemary, because rosemary owns in poultry, and that went in the mix. While the bird cooked, I thawed pre-made baguette dough and began to proof for baking, then turned to the punishment task of trimming greens for the pot. This brings me to an important rule, and one I cannot stress enough. Profanity is the best seasoning for food. My wife disagrees but she does not understand. Food does not taste as good unless you goad it, yell at is, and say things you'll regret later to it. My late grandmother was a Picasso of the art, and my childhood is a rose tinted paradise of waking up to grandma's house, smelling of bacon and sage sausage, and filled with the sounds of "SHIT HELL FIRE DAMN SON OF A BITCH!!" Nobody believes me, but I swear it wouldn't have been as good if she was nice in the kitchen.

I practiced the inherited art, albeit not with such grace or power as she had. Somehow, despite all opportunities I had to fall into the weeds and totally screw the pooch, I actually got my portions done, just about as the rest of the family came over. I was exhausted, feeling a residual angry beer run's effects, and kind of sweaty, wearing a dirty cook's coat, but it was done.

And it was all worth it. I felt such unreal sense of pride and togetherness bringing my family together at our table. Even now, it boggles my mind that my wife and I were able to pull it off. She helped to clean up after my messy self, and kept her head on straight when I was prone to hyperbole and drama. It's one of those great firsts that we get to enjoy as a new family coming together, and even though we were a trio of couples, we were all one big family. Fitting for a day of thanks, because when we finally gathered around the table, I had a moment to come down from all of the hype and to appreciate everything. Appreciate what I was raised with, what I was given, and what I have now. With all the sleep deprivation, craziness, and chaos, it was absolutely, overwhelmingly worth it, and I can't wait to do it again.

Waterblommetjiebredie

I recently had some company over at my new house for a crazy nerd gathering. One of my friends has traveled damn-near across the globe, but she's originally from South Africa, and we often talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is South African food. I've dabbled in a few things in the past, like old favorites Bobotie as well as my favorite drunk food Bunny Chow. We collaborated on a few of her favorites like Periperi Chicken too. Prior to her visit, I had been browsing over a South African cookbook I bought a while back, and thinking of anything hard to find over here that I could ask for.

The first was Elephant Biltong, which not surprisingly, is near-impossible to get. I did get Springbok Biltong, which was awesome though. It's similar to venison jerky, but imagine a little clove, allspice, or garam masala on it. No real reason for this other than sating a round of post-drinking munchies.

The second thing on my list was Waterblommetjies.



I like typing the word, I like saying the word. Afrikaans is a hilariously awesome language. It translates into "water flower" which is a polite way of saying that it's something that long ago some Voorstrekker (ie, Ted Nugent or Jeremiah Johnson or Bill Brasky) spotted growing in a stagnant ditch full of water and decided it would taste delicious with his freshly-killed Springbok. All it would take would be a little stewing, and it just so happens that the word for stew in Afrikaans is bredie. Hence, waterblommetjiebredie.



Stuff you'll want:

• 2 1/2 pounds of roasting meat (ideally, lamb, mutton, or game, but I used beef short ribs to great effect too.
• 2 pounds waxy potatoes (ie, don't go makin no damn mashed potatoes son), diced
• 1 giganto onion (or, 2-3 smaller ones), diced
• About 2 pounds of waterblommetjies (you can get em on Amazon if you can't hop on the dakadak to Pretoria)
• 1 granny smith apple, peeled and grated
• 1/2 cup of white wine
• 1/2 cup of water
• 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 bay leaves
  
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tsp nutmeg
• 2 tsp periperi (african bird's eye chili powder, again, Amazon) or cayenne pepper (at minimum you weenie. You want to add more, I know you do)
• 1 tsp black pepper

You'll want your dutch oven for this. Crank up the stovetop to about medium-high heat. While you're doing this, towel off your short ribs and rub them down with a bit of salt. Start to brown them on each side. All we want is the look and the smell really. They'll get cooked fully later.


Once each piece is browned all over, remove from heat.


In the juices left in the dutch oven, add your butter and then your onions & salt, and turn the heat down to low. Cover and sweat those for a good 20 minutes, then return your meat to the fray.



Add the water & wine. Put your lid on, preheat your oven to 350, slap it in there for 2 hours, and forget it exists till your time's up. Remove again to the stovetop. Your meat should be getting tender enough to come apart a bit, and you can shred it with your spatula or spoon as you go.



My picture of the stupid shredded apple survived, but not my picture of the waterblommetjies themselves. They look somewhere between swamp thing and a leopard, and smell like a wonderful cross between good olives and asparagus.


Thanks, Google image search! Mine looked pretty much like that, yeah!

Too bad I didn't get a snap, because after that, I tossed the apple, potato, and waterblommetjies into the melange.


To this hearty mash, I added my nutmeg, pepper, bay leaves, and periperi. I tasted it, and added more periperi still. When my particular heat affinity was reached, I simmered for another 30 minutes with the cover on, killed the heat, then tossed in my raw garlic at the end.


I topped the "stew" over another Afrikaner dish - funeral rice, which is basically a pot of rice fried into some butter, turmeric, cinnamon, onions, shredded carrot, and raisins.

What I love about South African food is that it's completely unsophisticated stuff that seems very familiar to any of us who have or had a grandmother who liked to cook. So much of it is old timey and homey, but it's also coupled with a few exotic flavors to remind you that you're eating something just a little different.

Skin

So, I've procrastinated this long enough. Time to roll up my sleeves and get back to blogging. Yes, I'm still in the long process of settling after the move. No, I'm not done yet. I'm having camera issues in the interim, so if I do get some snaps off, they will be of dubious quality, be warned. I just can't neglect this any more, and I love sharing the work I'm doing, even if I don't have pictures at hand.

My mom, dad, and sis came out to the house this weekend, which was a treat. I got to cook for everyone, and mom helped out as my sous-chef fry lady. We rocked out a never-ending stack of ruffle-cut kettle chips & fried okra fingers (with homemade remoulade, because I love making it). We also had a bit of black-eyed peas, which mom also helped with, and some trout I bought from Grow Alabama.

This is where the story is funny. See, I knew my trout was whole, and I figured it would be a snap to fillet it out. Well, not quite. I'm not at that level of awesome quite yet unfortunately. Instead of fillets though, I decided to stuff the trout with herbs, squash, and shallots and pouch steam them with some brown butter. There was just one catch - I underestimated my sister's aversion to icky fish skin! Now, if you don't like the stuff you can easily peel it away so that's not a problem. Still, it got me thinking.

We're living in a boneless, skinless dystopia, and in a world where people put bacon on all sorts of inappropriate dishes, how are people still hesitant about eating fish skin and chicken skin? It's connective tissue, salt, and fat. It comes together to not only form a deliciously crunchy layer on pan-seared and roasted dishes, but it also holds in moisture. People opt for skinless meat, realize they're often eating dry meat, and overcompensate with sauces and marinades. I would shrug it off if so many of them weren't looking down their nose at skin and the added fat in it, when their sauce is often loaded with the stuff.

This isn't in any way a slight to my sister. She thought what I thought the first time I was confronted by skin on a fish. (1) Ew gross and (2) How do I get it off. All I'm hoping for is that more people give skin a chance, and pack their bags to Flavor Country.

I'm still alive, take two

Hi guys, sorry it's been damn-near a month without any updates. Moving's complete and we're just in that never-ending task of unpacking and getting things just right. The good news is that I've got my dining room set put in and I'll be expecting my pots and pans rack soon.

I've been very busy with other things too. Having a lot of company over to enjoy Dragon Con, plus hosting a lot of hungry nerds at my new abode. Everybody seemed to love tacos de lengua and hommous. Today, a friend of mine from Hawaii but originally South Africa will be schooling me on Afrikaner cuisine. If you read my blog at all, you know that this is going to be awesome. Expect Peri Peri chicken, Waterblommejiebredie, Bunny Chow, and other things shortly.

Bye for now!