Seduction on the Stove

Here's what smells so damn good in the kitchen right now. It's the beginnings of sugo, or my great-grandmother's Abruzzese tomato sauce, which starts, as shown, with finely chopped salt pork and a bit of garlic browning in a pool of olive oil before beef and pork ribs get browned... before chopped onions, celery, bell pepper, parsley, celery leaf, basil all get mixed in and around.

The tomatoes come soon, but this part smells the most heavenly...

Tahoe Cassoulet

Ever since Ms. Kiwi showed up, I've had a hankering for trying my hand at big-"C" Cassoulet. You know, that daunting (for cook and consumer) French dish of, essentially, layers upon layers of fat 'n beans.

As you may or may not know, I am not one for following recipes, so after prowling around the Internet for a few minutes, I convinced myself that I'd make something up when we went to Tahoe. I'm not a skier or snowboarder, and I had a whole ham hock just waiting to roll in the hay with some beans and then feed a gaggle of hungry riders.

Here's what went down:

- Midnight, Thursday: Soak a lot of Navy beans.

- 11am, Friday: Rinse beans. Put them in Ms. Kiwi with ham hock, onion skins, garlic skins, celery and carrot butts, sprigs of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf. Heat slowly. Cut up into small bits a stale old hunk of baguette you have lying around. Stick it into the oven at a low temperature that sounds right, and peek in on it every now and then. When the bits are crunchy, take them out.

- 2pm: Extract everything from gorgeous stock. Reduce stock and carefully separate beans and delicious ham pieces from the other crap.

- 3pm: Render fat from some bacon. Brown some mild Italian sausage in it. Remove meat. Throw in whole buncha chopped onion, celery, carrot and let it brown around in the fat in the pan.

- 3:30pm: Add some spoonfuls of tomato paste. Add some more if you want. Brown around. Then dump in a can of diced tomatoes. Meanwhile, hack the end off a whole head of garlic, lop a tablespoon or two of butter on it and wrap in foil. Put in oven at a temperature between 250 and 400 for a while, until it starts smelling good and you check it and it is nicely browned and squishy. Then take it out and just let it sit by itself on the side.

- 4pm: Hurry and add beans! Then meat! Then reduced stock! Riders are coming back and want to go drink!

- 5pm: Go drink multiple pitchers of beer while your stewing pot of kind-of-fat and beans and vegetables slowly does its thing for a while.

- 8pm: Return to glorious stewy pot of kind-of-fat-but-not-really and beans and vegetables smelling to-die-for. Let riders ooh and ahh over glorious smell of your day-of-slaving. Squish smooshy bits of garlic out of wrappy bits into a pan with the melted butter sloshing all around its sides. Get this warm, then add your homemade breadcrumbs and a little flourish of a handful of parsley, and toast them up.

- 8:10pm: Bat the hungry riders away from Ms. Kiwi with a spatula. Dump buttery-garlicky breadcrumbs all over top of hot stewy beany mixture, and stick Ms. Kiwi into a hot oven somewhere around 400-450 degrees.

- 8:30pm: Carefully pull Ms. Kiwi out of oven and put on table in front of drooling riders. Serve them a gigantic ladle-full with plenty of breadcrumby bits on top, and let them help themselves to various dark and moody red wines.

- 9:30pm: Scrape Ms. Kiwi clean with spoons or tongues, follow up with ice cream cones if possible and a quick session in the jacuzzi.

If You Have Cream, and You Have Celery...

Shouldn't you be able to make cream of celery soup?? I figured, why not? Plus I was dead broke and had almost nothing else on hand.

I poked around the internet for about 30 seconds before deciding that lightly sweating about eight stalks of celery that I had left over along with some random old scallions (sort of like onions) and a bit of even more random carrot juice (kind of sort of like diced carrots, the third ingredient in a classic mirepoix) ought to be a good start before dumping in a bunch of homemade vegetable stock and a splash of cream while the whole thing whizzed in the blender.

There she is, the end result. All oddly yellow (damn carrot juice) and tasting queerly, a bit overwhelmingly, tangy-green celery-y. Next time, I shall consult a real recipe for this one. Something like the one listed in this tasty article in the LA Times.

Oh well. It cost me nothing, and the leftover pizza dough baked in my toaster oven and slathered with some Stilton was a nice and cheap accompaniment.

Walk the Wok

Sarah's wok recently took a walk over to my place for a bit of Saveur-inspired velveted chicken. Let's say it again: velveted chicken. Salut, succulence! Now I know the secret to the tenderest, most velvety (ya!) chicken possible in a stir-fry.

I will also admit that the sight of so much celery made me cringe a bit, anticipating excess watery, well... celery flavor. But the fresh, crisp texture remained intact and that aromatic green essence infused the dish just enough; combined with julienned leeks and ginger, the whole thing was entirely too easy to be so outrageously delectable, especially when it was paired with a warm, heady coconut-milk-saturated turmeric rice.

Oh! And to help clean out a bit of the fridge, leftover asparagus spears were chopped up and stuffed into wonton wrappers for some first-course dumps... obviously.

Scurry Lunch

After the scrumptious stir-fry on Sunday night, I had to get rid of the defrosted lobster stock I had in the fridge. Lobster stock = too precious to let go. So I scrounged around the fridge to see what other pretty little goodies were screaming to be consumed quickly, and I found carrots, two little Jerusalem artichokes, a heap of scallions and a lonely stalk of celery. Good enough for RICE! Boy would Dad be proud.

Instead, I transformed plain Jane rice into a quite nice little lobster risotto that became my scurried lunch in a hurry the next day in between giant piles of work. Gosh, risotto is the easiest thing in the world and so, so satisfying.

Comfort Food, Midwestern Style: Redux

2/16/10

The Creation:

Byerly's Wild Rice Soup

So, what's in the fridge (items listed newest/most recent additions to oldest):

ham steak
eggplant
mushrooms
fresh Mozzarella
1 slice guanciale
small hunk of Stilton
1/2 white onion
1/3 red onion
1/2 lemon
1/2 lime
Sugo (Mama's homemade, pork-based tomato sauce)
chicken stock
rabbit stock
3 stalks celery
frozen peas

Key ingredients consumed:
ham steak

celery

white onion

chicken stock

rabbit stock

Ingredients purchased:
carrots

wild rice

The creative process:
It's been snowing and sleeting for I think 24 hours straight. I needed a meal that consoled me, so I looked back to the Minnesota childhood and dug up an old favorite: Byerly's Wild Rice Soup. Let's just say there's a reason this is ultimate Midwestern comfort food, and it has to do with a stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream. The dash of sherry doesn't hurt, either.

The verdict:
I took it easy on the butter and subbed milk for cream, plus tossed in some celery (it had to go), and the results were fantabulous still. But now I have a crap-ton of leftover, cooked wild rice that I need to figure out what to do with...