Winter share soup

On a whim the other day I picked up a copy of Soups and Stews by Cook’s Illustrated. Not the book, but the one-off magazine that’s on stands nowish. I’ve read most of these recipes before but I was going to be on the T for a while and needed something to read. Happily, there was at least one recipe I’d never seen before and I’m glad I picked it up.

Heart Vegetable Soup.

Normally, anything with that title is a tomato-based soup and my husband can’t stand tomatoes. This, however, was seemingly tailored for a big CSA winter share. I’ll reproduce it below, with my notes to follow.

from Cook’s Illustrated Winter 2010 Soups and Stews, page 26

2 T vegetable oil
3 large carrots, 3/4 inch dice
2 large parsnips, 3/4 inch dice
2 small onion, minced
6 medium cloves of garlic, pressed
2 q. chicken broth
2 medium russet potatoes, cubes 1 inch
2 t. thyme, minced
1 sprig rosemary
1 bay leaf
2 slices hearth white bread, toasted
1 can cannellini beans
1 10-oz package of baby lima beans or peas, frozen
2 cups of curly spinach, stemmed and chopped
balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper

1. In a Dutch oven, heat the oil and cook carrots, parsnips and onions until lightly browned. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds, then add the broth, potatoes, and herbs and bring to a boil. Reduce and simmer for 15 minutes.

2. Remove and discover the rosemary and bay. Remove 3 c. solids and 1 cup broth and add that, and the bread, to a food processor and buzz until smooth. Stir puree back in and add spinach, beans, and lima beans. Cook until spinach is tender, about 10 minutes. Add in a splash of vinegar, season, and serve.

My notes:

This is a really sweet soup. At least it’s been for me. I think that may be because the carrots are somewhere between enormous and bad sex-toy jokes, and they are sweet as candy. I added in some turnips, hoping they would tone down the sugar somewhat, but no joy. I will add more turnips next time. I’m also contemplating putting in one of the two celeriacs I still have.

I used kale from last share, starting to get a little limp, rather than spinach. The kale was fantastic.

I didn’t have any cannelini beans and I loathe lima beans like a root canal, so I didn’t add either. I didn’t miss the lima beans, but the cannelini beans would have been a welcome addition. All those carbs needed some protein.

So, as I watch my pile of root vegetables grow enormously, I gotta ask — what are you ladies doing with yours?

Planning for dinner for April 2011

The seed catalogs have arrived.

Like pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training (22 days, ladies and gentlemen), seed catalogs are an early harbinger of spring. Very early. The cold and the snow won’t leave Boston for months yet, but I’ve got a dining room table full of seed catalogs and I’m thinking about what I want to plant.

This is, I admit, a purely theoretical exercise. I have no land at all. I kill things growing in pots. I’ve been on waiting lists at my community gardens for years now. But I persist in imagining my garden.

It would be a basic jardin potager — a soup garden. Mostly I draw from The Kitchen Garden Seed catalog and Seeds of Change. I have long lists with cross-outs and notes on what I want to plant. I won’t bore you, I promise.

But I will mention one variatal that made me think. The Royal Chantenay Carrots “has wide, strong shoulders up to 2″. … It is a bright, deep orange, excellent for canning and freezing, stores well.” I marked that down as something I’d buy because I like carrots in my soups and stews all year.

Then I realized that if I was cooking out of a garden, I’d be planning, in January of 2010, for soups and stews that I plan to eat in… April of 2011. That’s a long lead-in time.

Then I started thinking about the fact that I mostly eat stews made of lamb in the winter. And that those lambs, which I would eat with those carrots, were conceived three months ago. They will be born in the next month or so.

In these days of convenience food, it’s hard for me to remember that most meals have at least a few months start-up time and some have more than a year.

Slow food … in stages

I made lamb stew with white beans the other day for dinner. Deconstructed.

Normally, I make stew in one pot — a nice long simmer in the dutch oven to fill the house with good smells and keep the kitchen toasty warm. But I had a screwy schedule earlier this week and wound up doing it in bits and pieces.

On my way out the door to preschool, I took five minutes to sear the lamb shank and then threw it into the slow cooker with blocks of chicken stock still frozen into yogurt-container cylinders. I add a bay leaf, set the whole thing on HIGH and dashed out the door.

As we were walking up the back stairs after preschool, May said, “Mommy! It smells good in here!” And indeed it did. I think that’s one of the main benefits of a slow cooker. You get to smell the food as you come home on a frosty day.

The lamb was fall-apart tender… but swimming in a vat of chicken stock. The stock was enriched with lamb fat, but it was still just stock.

I threw some beans into a pot with lots of salt and brought them to a boil, then lidded the whole thing and set my timer for 1 hour while I contemplated some body for the stew.

I diced a mire poix (2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrot — though I usually double the carrots) and sauted it in some of the lamb fat I skimmed off the broth. When the vegetables got aromatic and translucent, I added a tablespoon of tomato paste, a palmful of flour, and some garlic and cooked that until it smelled right — not very long at all, maybe a minute.

Gently lifting the meat out of the slow cooker — it was literally shredding under any touch — I poured off the enriched stock and gradually whisked it into the pan with my vegetables. The roux from the fat and flour made it luscious and thick. I added some thyme, pepper, and chopped parsley, and turned the heat off.

By this time, the timer had gone off and I dumped my beans out, rinsed the hell out of them, and put them back in the pot with fresh cold water, a bay leaf, and some parsley stems. (One of my best tricks, learned on some cooking show back when I was in college: always freeze your parsley stems. They add so much to stocks and stews.)

At that point, Life intruded and I wandered out of the kitchen.

Lunch on the hoof. By law_keven, from Flickr

Two hours later, my beans were done and my husband was walking in the door. I shredded the now-cool meat into tiny filaments with my fingers while the sauce reheated and had Christopher set the table. Then I dished out beans from one pot, a spoonful of sauce/gravy from another, and sprinkled some lamb (from another pot) over the top. The heat from the beans and the sauce reheated the lamb nicely.

There’s no real moral to this story. Part of me feels like I should have been a good Kitchen Witch and remembered to soak the beans over night and get up early enough to dice and saute the aromatics. Then I could ahve thrown the whole lot into the slow cooker and been done with it. That certainly would have dirtied fewer dishes.

But part of me says that being able to improvise around a real schedule is a much more useful skill.

pasta leftoveravera

Sometimes, when things in the fridge line up just right with inspiration, needing to “grab a quick lunch” with no meal-sized leftovers in the fridge doesn’t mean ordering delivery. We often have a lot of very small servings of meat or vegetables in the fridge which we save (rather than just eating a few more bites when that meal is served); thinking we can serve them to Kata, but then we wind up with more than we need, and usually those don’t look like a meal when I’m thinking of what we can have for lunch or dinner.

In my fridge I found:

half of the last sausage from the sausage-making project, which was supposed to get saved for Kata but got forgotten
a few bites of brisket that didn’t get eaten off Kata’s plate
a little bit of collard greens, same
A little bit of steamed broccoli that came back home in the lunchbox
A half a small baked butternut squash
some chunks of boiled carrot from the vegetable soup making
a bit of leftover chicken stock I defrosted for another use earlier this week

In the pantry, I grabbed a third of a box of pasta, and a few shallots, and from the fridge, some parmesan cheese.

I set the pasta boiling, and sauteed the shallots in oil. Tossed in the meat bites to make sure they got well heated since the sausage was getting old. Then tossed in the rest of the vegetables, salt and pepper. I added a little flour to thicken it and then some stock to make it into a sauce. Voila – pasta with vegetables and a bit of tasty protein!

frozen vegetable stock

I like to make vegetable stock when I have more vegetables than I know what to do with, or something that’s getting a little long in the tooth.
I usually make 3-5 quarts at a time – once in a while a little more or even a little less.

This is my first batch where I planned for some of the vegetable scraps came from the freezer – leek greens, parsley stems, and celery tops, primarily. I’ll definitely be continuing to save these things in the freezer so I don’t need to have the full mix of vegetables on hand! Add some parsnips that I had a few too many of (I didn’t realize that was even *possible*, last year!), and some carrots, brown in the bottom of the stockpot in some oil, and then add plenty of water to make the stock. I also added a leftover cooked butternut squash half we weren’t going to eat. Transfer to the freezer and make matzoh ball soup later, or add to stews and sauces.

Simple Vegetable Broth

• 5 carrots
• 3-4 parsnips
• celery greens
• leek tops
• parsley stems
• any other vegetable that’s getting tired or even already cooked
• 5 quarts of water
• salt
• 2 Tb oil

Brown the vegetables in the oil, letting them develop some good brown spots. Then add about 5 quarts of water and let simmer for 2 hours or so until it tastes good. Spoon broth into containers through a sieve, refrigerate, and freeze. You can reserve the parsnips and carrots to eat – they’ve given a lot of their flavor to the broth, but still have a bit and I presume a bit of nutritional value, so why throw them out?

charcuterie addiction

A few months ago, I got my first try at sausage making. Soon after, I borrowed Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie from the library, made salt cod from it, drooled some more over the recipes, renewed the library book, forgot to return it, paid the fine, and, concluding that the book really needed to stay on my bookshelf, went to pick up my own copy at Porter Square book.
As reported here earlier, the first recipe I tried after that was corned beef tongue. And then the book was out on the dining room table with its siren call of sausage recipes. To be specific, the emulsified sausages : meat suspended in fat with a uniform creamy texture, like a hot dog or bologna. And I’d been working on arranging to get a KitchenAid food grinder on permanent loan. So when it arrived, I went and bought veal stew meat, pork back fat, and casings, and decided to try the weisswurst recipe that introduces the section on emulsified sausages. (They get tricker from there.)

Weisswurst is a white sausage with lemon zest, mustard, mace, and parsley in the seasoning, all smooth inside with a juicy pop when you bite into it. It’s important to keep it really cold while you pass it through the grinder, back into the freezer, through the grinder again with ice and salt, and then mixed up with all the seasonings, just until it forms a smooth paste which you add milk to to stabilize the emulsion. It really does create the kind of texture you expect from something a factory processed the heck out of – only with the fresh taste of real ingredients and the satisfaction of having made that ourselves.

Speaking of ingredients you can trust, I’m still feeling a bit guilty for my first purchase of veal in at least 5 years… but thanks to this project I’ve learned that the next time, I don’t need to. There are farms that raise “pastured veal” or “rose veal” – calves butchered young enough to taste like veal, but allowed to roam on pasture instead of stuck in pens, and some of them are even in Massachusetts.

“My Bread” by Jim Lahey

For Christmas, my loving husband got me “My Bread” by Jim Lahey. For those of you who don’t  slavishly follow all the latest culinary trends, Mr. Lahey “invented” (rediscovered?) a method of making bread that’s swept the foodie world. It requires a long, slow rise, lots of water, a wee pinch of yeast, and baking inside a pre-heated cast-iron dutch oven. It creates a bread with a really lovely deep brown and crackling crisp crust, and a big webby interior.

Then Mark Bittman, the Minimalist columnist from The New York Times, discovered him and the food world went mad, mad, mad I say!

I’ve tried this particular method a couple of times, but always using the Cook’s Illustrated method, which involves a wee bit of kneading and beer, to oomph up the somewhat lackluster taste (according to their testers). So last night, I decided to try a batch following Mr. Lahey’s directions.

Now, I’ll include some photos but please know that, as a photographer, I’m a great cook. So bear with the less-than-food-porn shots, please.

2 1/4 c. flour, 3/4 wheat flour, 1 1/4 t. salt, 1/2 t yeast, 1 1/3 c. cool water.

The recipe is simple enough 2 1/4 c. of bread flour, 3/4 of whole wheat flour, 1 1/4 salt, 1/2 t yeast, 1 1/3 c. cool water. Now, normally I do this sort of thing by weight, but I got a new scale for Christmas, too, and haven’t quite read the directions yet.

Which is too bad, really, since I seem to have had way way too much flour for the water. Instead of making the loose, sticky dough in the pictures of the book, I had a clump of rock-hard dough with lots of dry flour around it. I splashed in some more water, mixed, and set it to rise.

But wait! Mr. Lahey says to let it rise at room temp., or 72 degrees. It’s January in New England! My kitchen ain’t no 72 degrees! I waffled and then went to bed without turning the heat down. Made the cat happy, at least.

It's alive!

Maybe I shouldn’t have, however. When I woke up, the dough we risen almost double already and I still had at least three hours to go until the 12 hour minimum was up. I lifted the plastic to let the bubble of CO2 out and prayed I didn’t overproof. Then, at 11 hours, with the kitchen smelling slightly boozey, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. The dough was very wet and sticky and I couldn’t quite manage to tuck it into the neat ball that Mr. Lahey did in his book. But I put it in a dutch oven with some parchment paper for the second rise. (The paper is not per instructions — Mr. Lahey suggests the much more picturesque linen tea towel. But I decided that  parchment paper could go in the oven! That would make transferring it to the preheated dutch oven much much easier.  Practical trumps pretty in my kitchen every day.)

I preheated my (other) cast iron dutch oven, baked for the required amount of time and got… a pretty good loaf. The crust wasn’t the shatteringly crisp crust I’ve had with the Cook’s Illustrated recipe — possibly because I pulled the loaf too soon. Cook’s tells me to use a Thermapen and pull it at 210. I like that much better than Mr. Lahey’s “chestnut but not burnt” directions, expeically since about half the pictures in the book look a little burnt to me.  And the interior was a bit dull… I’ll keep adding the beer.

The recipes are all, of necessity, very repetitious. It’s a method book, so the method doesn’t vary. He could have saved himself some pages by just making ingredient lists, though I can see why he didn’t. It’s a slim little volume as it is. But I’m dying to try the coconut chocolate bread and I am grateful to him for suggesting how to make long, skinny loaves. Though I was amused by his casual name dropping of the “familiar” Romertopf French Bread Baker. I don’t think I know anyone who owns one of those and I know some hard-core foodies.

The idea of using salt water from the ocean to cook with (from the Jones Beach Bread recipe) is both twee and intriguing. Which might be an excellent description of this whole book.

The pictures really are lovely. The kind of food porn that you buy hard-back cookbooks for. Very spare and rustic, with that artful dash of scattered flour to make it look casual. Much much better than my half-assed snapshots here. I thought about trying to recreate some shots to make into framed pictures for my kitchen.

The introduction is a long-winded paean to how cool Mr. Lahey is and how his wonderful life and wonderful self has created this wonderful method. Maybe I’m just not in the right mental place to read it — I’ve heard other say that they found it inspiring. But it seemed excessively self aggrandizing and loooooong.

Singing the hambone blues

A black cast-iron pot full of steaming split pea soup

There’s another ghost in my kitchen today. Her name is Olive.

I got the ham bone from my family’s New Year’s Day celebration. And that means just one thing: split pea soup. It’s one of Christopher top five favorite dishes, and May loves it, too.

My husband’s great grandmother, a Cannuk named Olive, was famed for her pea soup. It’s a recipe that makes smart and economical use of resources — you can feed an army for pennies if you make pea soup, you manage to eek every last atom of flavor out of that ham, and it keeps the house warm while you’re cooking.

It was a great winter food, by all accounts. The ingredients all stored well — dried peas, root vegetables, water, ham. Big bowls served with hot whole wheat bread (who had white flour back then?!) would form a complete protein. The fiber made it stick to your ribs — this was food for lumberjacks and trappers. And those scraps of ham from the bone made it taste good, while the long-simmered bone dissolved into collagen and made a water-based soup lip-smacking. And famously, peas porridge keeps well, getting better and better each day, up to nine-days old.

In my in-laws’ familial lore, pea soup has yet more thrifty implications. When he was a kid and things were tight, the family would go to his grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner — often a ham. Then the family got sent home with the leftovers: lots of ham and a ham bone for soup. It was a way for the grandkids to get fed, without being obvious charity. And it used up the ham bone.

Split pea soup is economical, efficient, traditional. It’s got history and vegetables in it. All the things I love about food.

All that said, I loathe pea soup.

Saying that out loud, I feel like a traitor to my cause and like Olive would whack me with her wooden spoon for admitting it. Olive was, by all accounts, an enthusiastic wielder of spoons, in the kitchen and out of it. Actually, according to family lore, she preferred to whack her kids (and foster kids) with the cast-iron skillet, instead of a spoon. I’m not sure that I would have liked Olive. My husband and his mother refer to her, with a slightly proud smile, as “a cast-iron bitch.”

The thing is, I think I understand Olive much better because I hate pea soup. In my mind, she hated it, too. She gagged on every thick, rich, healthy spoonful the way that I do. But, where I have the luxury of ordering up a pizza or tossing a bag of Trader Joe’s potstickers into the microwave, she didn’t have an option.

What’s more, I think she hated cooking.

Back in Olive’s day — the early part of the 20th century — women spent 7-9 hours a day cooking or preparing food. That’s as much time as they spent sleeping and left little room for anything else. It was grueling and backbreaking labor, often very hot and sticky. Anyone who has canned tomatoes in the broiling heat of August knows why women didn’t just embrace convenience foods — they lunged at them. Cooking was the basic bedrock of survival and it ate women’s lives.

I cook out of love. (Why else would I spend two days making a soup I can’t stand?) I cook from a high-minded idea that local and organic foods will make my family and my planet healthier. I cook as a spiritual meditation, a physical act of communing with nature and culture. Hell, I cook because I like to eat food that doesn’t suck.

But I don’t to cook to live. Nor am I stuck cooking because I’m a woman. I have options that Olive never dreamed of — I could go back to work and use that money to buy all our food at the Whole Food’s prepared food section, or order take-out, or eat Trader Joe’s every day. I could have married a man that likes to cook, or I could ask Christopher to cook once in a while. I’m not trapped in my kitchen by gender and circumstance, I’m there of my own free will. And that makes a lot of difference.

So, as I bustle around my kitchen this evening, stirring a cauldron of thick pea soup, I think of Olive and of all the women who cooked because they had to, not because they wanted to.

adventures in brining

Last weekend, I started brining my first corned beef – my first adventure in home-cured meats. Only since I haven’t had it since I was a kid, and since it was a chance to get a hunk of meat from Chestnut farms for just a dollar, I brined a tongue tip, and not a brisket.

I had in my mind a menu of corned beef slices, pickles, and celeriac salad as a fine new year’s day meal – though I’m not entirely sure whether there’s some tradition where preserved meat is a New Year’s thing, it seemed right. (As it happened, the 5 days of brining, plus getting it into the crockpot a bit late where it needed to simmer 3 or 4 hours until past dinnertime, and to cool before slicing anyway, made it a fine January 2nd meal instead…)

Meat cured with sodium nitrite really does turn pink! I’ll spare you the less-appetizing photos of the whole thing and its spotted bumpy skin. (The spots are blacker on the inside of the skin than the outside – who knew?)

Buche de Noel

I do a lot of Christmas cooking, but most of it isn’t very photogenic.  Here is the exception: my Buche de Noel.  It’s a roll cake, that’s cut, arranged, and frosted to look like a piece of a tree.  It’s also traditional to make mushrooms of meringue.  Yes, this is the sort of thing I think is fun.   The best thing about it is… well actually the best thing is how it tastes.  The recipe I like is chocolate and rum, and it’s one of the best things in the world.  But the second best thing about it is that you don’t need to know the first thing about cake decorating.  I don’t, and the picture above is my third one ever (I’ve made one each year since I started.)   The mushrooms need a little luck.

The shelf fungus isn’t traditional, but it makes me happy.

I was going to link to my cake and mushroom recipes, but I can’t find the cake one.  I did get it online, but I’ve no idea where.  Here’s the mushroom recipe I found when I realized I’d forgotten to make them the day before (I usually cook meringues overnight).  http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Meringue-Mushrooms/Detail.aspx

I need to work on the presentation a bit.  Confectioner’s sugar snow will help, but I also don’t like the plain white background.  I guess that’s my improvement for next near.

Here’s the cake recipe… if anyone reading this happens to recognize it, let me know.

For cake layer
6 oz fine-quality bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened), chopped
3 tablespoons water
6 large eggs, separated, at room temperature
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa powder

For filling and frosting
6 oz bittersweet chocolate
6 tbsp butter
2-4 tbsp heavy cream
1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1 cup heavy cream
2 tbsp rum

Preparation
Make cake layer: Preheat oven to 350°F. Oil a 15- by 10- by 1-inch shallow baking pan and line bottom lengthwise with a large piece of wax or parchment paper, letting paper hang over ends by 2 inches. Do not grease paper, or sides of pan.

Melt chocolate with water in a small heavy saucepan over very low heat, stirring. Cool to lukewarm.  A microwave works as well, but only on low settings.  Stir frequently.

Beat yolks, 1/3 cup sugar, and salt in a large bowl with an electric mixer until thick and pale, about 5 minutes in a standing mixer or about 8 minutes with a hand-held mixer. Fold in melted chocolate until blended. Beat whites with cleaned beaters until they just hold soft peaks. Gradually add remaining 1/3 cup sugar and beat until whites just hold stiff peaks. Fold one third of whites into melted-chocolate mixture to lighten, then fold in remaining whites gently but thoroughly.

Spread batter evenly in baking pan and bake in middle of oven until puffed and top is dry to the touch, 15 to 18 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack. Cover top with 2 layers of damp paper towels and let stand 5 minutes, then remove towels and cool completely. Loosen edges with a sharp knife.

Sift cocoa powder over top of cake layer and overlap 2 layers of wax paper lengthwise over cake. Place a baking sheet over paper and invert cake onto it, gently peeling off wax paper lining. (Don’t worry if cake layer breaks; it will hold together when rolled.)

Make filling: Melt chocolate with butter, stir until smooth. Add 2-4 tbsp of cream, slowly, stirring it in as you add it.  Milk will do in a pinch. Let cool to near room temperature. Beat 1 cup cream with confectioners sugar with cleaned beaters until it just holds stiff peaks. Beat in about half of the cooled chocolate mixture, and the rum. You might need to turn down the speed, too much beating curdles the cream.

Fill and roll cake: Spread filling evenly over cake. Put a long platter next to a long side of cake. Using wax paper as an aid, roll up cake jelly roll–style, beginning with a long side. Carefully transfer, seam side down, to platter, using wax paper to help slide cake. (Cake will crack but will still hold together.)

Cut cake diagonally to form a branch, if you’re being fancy about it. (Google Yule logrecipe, or Buche de Noel for details.)  Coat cake with remaining chocolate/butter/cream mixture, drag fork through it for bark texture. Cut off ends of cake, for neatness, and eat them.

Cooks’ notes:

• Cake may be rolled 1 day ahead and chilled in a cake keeper or loosely covered with plastic wrap.

• You can substitute the following for chocolate and rum: 2 tbsp Grand Marnier and 1 tsp orange zest, 2 tablespoons Cognac and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla; 2 tablespoons cocoa and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla; or 2 teaspoons instant-espresso powder or instant-coffee granules dissolved in 2 teaspoons water plus 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.  In most of these case, consider adding less confectioners sugar to the whipped cream, down to 3 tbsp.  I haven’t tried these yet. Oh, and the original wasn’t covered in chocolate either… I suspect that would overpower most of these combinations.

• This batter can also be baked in an unoiled 91/2-inch springform pan. Bake until cake is set but still moist in center, 35 to 40 minutes (cake will rise and then sink as it cools). Top with Grand Marnier whipped cream. I haven’t tried this yet either.