Red beans & rice

What's good and cheap, has a complete set of amino acids... Rice and beans! Well, any grain plus a legume will work, so whole wheat bread and lentil soup would have done the trick, too.

What about red beans and rice? It's always tasted good when I've tried it, and it might be a fun thing to make. Let's see... should take about three hours, mostly unattended simmering at low heat on the stove.

So, off I went into cyberspace, in search of some ideas. Aha! Alton Brown has a recipe, so I can just stop right there. Yep, I've got the beans, herbs... check, check, check... pickled pork? What? It takes pickled pork? Three days to pickle? Three whole days? No! I said three hours, not three days! So, time to look under the hood and see what I can pull out yet have the dish still function.

Out went the pickled pork (so much for authenticity). I didn't have three days before dinner, but I did have bacon. There may have been some chicken in the freezer, but nothing resembling pickled pork, nohow, noway.

So, what makes pickled pork pickled? Vinegar, salt, spices... I have all that. Pork and three more days, well, that part will have to change. Bacon plus those spices and a few dashes of vinegar should be interesting, even if won't be as meaty as the pickled pork...

Three hour red beans & rice

Instant pickled bacon

ingredients

• Kosher salt
• Yellow mustard seeds
• Black pepper
• Bay leaves, fresh
• Garlic, minced
• Brown sugar
• Sriracha (or other) hot sauce
• Aleppo pepper flakes (or Cayenne)
• Bacon, chopped. Preferably uncured.
• Apple cider vinegar - enough to just cover the other ingredients

Mix all this stuff together in a bowl and let it sit while you prep the beans.

The beans

Ingredients

• Mirepoix (celery, onion, carrot, diced). This would be green bell peppers, celery, onion if it were summer and I was really being authentic. Since its' winter, I used French mirepoix instead.
• vegetable oil for sautéing
• Chopped/minced garlic
• bay leaf
• black pepper
• Aleppo chili flakes
• cumin
• black cumin (kala jeera) - just a bit since this can get bitter very quickly
• water
• red beans, picked over and cleaned of rocks, sticks, etc.
• dried thyme

Instructions

1. Sauté the mirepoix in the vegetable oil until it's translucent
2. Add the garlic
3. Add the bay leaf, black pepper, chili flakes, cumins and stir to mix well and heat.
4. Add the bacon mixture, vinegar and all. Just pour it in.
5. Add the beans
6. Pour in enough water to cover everything, but not too much. The idea is to have just enough water to completely cook the beans but not much more.
7. Add the dried thyme.
8. Bring almost to a boil on high heat, then reduce heat to simmer. 
9. After 90 minutes, check the beans. If they're almost done, start the rice.

The rice

Ingredients

• Rice, long grain preferred but short grain sticky holds together well (not authentic, though, but at this point it's already moved so far from authenticity that it's moot)
• Butter, unsalted
• Kosher salt, just a bit
• 2x more water than rice, boiling

Instructions

1. Melt some butter at low heat in a separate pot
2. When the butter has melted, add the rice and salt. Stir to coat, and keep stirring to keep from burning.
3. When the rice is a bit translucent, SLOWLY pour in the boiling water. It will steam sizzle and look pretty volcanic. If you were to add the water all at once, it would erupt. 
4. Reduce the heat to very low and simmer the rice about 20 minutes. 

Once the rice is done, check the beans. If you're using long grain rice,  gently fluff it up a bit with a fork before serving. The rice can sit, covered, a bit if the beans need more time.

When the beans are done, you can thicken the sauce by puréeing some beans in the broth with a blender, then add it back to the pot.

Just place some rice in a warmed plate, ladle some beans over it, garnish with cilantro (if you really don't care about being authentic) and enjoy.

This is a great meal for the Great Recession, since it's cheap even by Scrooge's standards, and filling enough so you won't wake up at 3:00 am craving a snack.

Chili

I'm not taking that class in regional American cooking. It's expensive - more than buying some cookbooks and learning on my own. Then, there's that part about certain regional American cuisines that I'd either never make or transform into something healthier and above all tastier. Chili, however, is not one of these things.

A great bowl of chili is a meal in itself. There's enough heat to wake things up without going so far as to inflict pain - but chili heat is an individual thing. One person's wonderbowl could be another's gut burning instrument of torture.

People really get passionate about the stuff, like they generally don't about, say, meatloaf. Here in California and the West, chili cookoffs are big events. People argue over which peppers to use, beans vs no beans, how herbal, should coffee and chocolate be ingredients, should the meat be ground or chopped... luckily there's no one definitive chili recipe.

I made white chili a few months ago, using fresh Hatch peppers from New Mexico. Now, in the midst of winter, it's time for the more traditional red version. I like meat and beans, several kinds of chili and quite a bit of herbs. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bit of celery and stop. Nothing else is necessary.

The peppers bring so much flavor and complexity that adding all kinds of secret ingredients would just be overkill. Sweet-hot, smoky, fruity... it's all there ready to be coaxed out.

So, here it is: my entry into the chili Hall of Fame. Or just a good bowl of red. The Hall of Fame can go elsewhere, since this started as simple cowboy food and all that highfalootin' nonsense just gets between a man and his food.


Ingredients

• Chili cascabel, dried (Not too many. Substitute ancho if you want things sweeter)
• Chili morita, dried (You could use chipotles, but these are better. Careful! Hot!)
• Chili Hatch, dried - New Mexico, hot.
• Chili Hatch, dried - New Mexico, mild

• Pinto beans

• Garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

• Salt
• Black pepper

• Roast cumin, roast coriander seeds
• Sage (fresh or dried)
• Oregano, dried (or Mexican oregano)
• Bay leaf, if you feel like it

• Onion, dice
• Celery, diced
• A strip or two of bacon, roasted in the broiler

• Flame-roasted tomato (canned).
• Beef chuck roast, diced and browned in the broiler. If you're going more cowboy and have a bigger budget, use buffalo meat and add a bit more sage.

Process

1. Soak the beans for a few hours. Some people soak overnight, but I can't really tell a difference.
2. Get the broiler hot in the oven.
3. Place the diced vegetables on a parchment-lined sheet pan and broil them until they start to brown a bit, even burn a bit on the edges. Reserve.
4. Place the meat on the sheet pan and broil until brown, turning to get lots of caramelization. Reserve.
5. Do the same with the bacon. Reserve.
6. Slice the chili pods so they don't hold air and place them in boiling water. After about 10 minutes of boiling, they should be soft. Take them out to cool - and don't throw away that chili water!
7. When everything is browned, place it in a pot and add cold water.
8. Drain off the water from the beans and add them to the pot.
9. Remove the veins and seeds from the chilis, place them in a blender and add some strained chili water - just enough so you can blend everything together. Save any excess chili water. This also works with an immersion blender and it's easier to clean up.
10. Add the puréed chilis to the pot.
11. Put the garlic in the blender, add some strained chili water and purée it. You can't have too much garlic - even a whole bulb is not too much.
12. Add the herbs and pepper, but not the salt.
13. Start with high heat to get the water hot, then reduce to a mere simmer.
14. Taste to see if you need more herbs. If it's too hot, well... oops. Too late now.  Chilis are supposed to be good for you, so enjoy the burn. The only thing you can do is rinse more beans and add them along with more water. You could also add meat - but at some point you'll have a huge amount of chili and if you're a wimp it might still be too hot. Next time, make meatloaf instead - or add the chilis a little at a time, tasting for heat in between. All chilis are different so this is the only safe method. You can also eliminate the hot New Mexico peppers in favor of milder varieties.
15. When the beans are just about cooked, add the salt. This supposedly gives you tenderer beans, but there's really no consensus on this at all.
16. Skim off any scum that forms on the surface of the water.
17. Keep simmering until the beans and meat are tender - probably about three hours. The goal is to use low heat to gently melt all that connective tissue in the meat, and get those proteins into the liquid where they'll do interesting things. 
18. Once everything is tender, adjust the salt to your taste and eat. 

Don't eat too much. Chili is never at its best the day it's cooked. If your intestinal system permits, have another bowl tomorrow. And the next day. By then, you'll start to know just how the cowboys felt.

White hot chili

Every time I've had white chili, it's been boring. Not much depth, no heat, not a lot of campfire. It's not something I see people making in the Wild West. Still, when I looked in my cupboard, there were some Cannellini beans. Normally the things are for cassoulet, haricot de mouton, fool... but this time for some reason white chili just popped into my head, and stayed.

This recipe does indeed have heat. My lips are burning (happily) as I type this. There are several ways to reduce the burn. You can buy medium or mild Hatch chilis instead of hot, or mix them with some other, less picante type of fresh pepper. Remember that the green chilis are what gives this soup its flavor, and leaving them out would leave it undeserving of its chili title.You could also remove all the seeds and white pithy stuff in the middle of the peppers - although that's difficult when the peppers are frozen.

Ingredients

• Smoked ham hocks
• Mesquite smoked Hatch peppers from last summer, kept in the freezer for just this moment. I left most of the seeds in for more heat.
• Toasted cumin, toasted coriander seeds, ground
• Garlic, lots of it.
• Fresh thyme
• Fresh oregano
• Mirepoix (onion, celery, carrot)
• Cannellini beans, soaked overnight
• Garnish: strips of Mexican string cheese or Mozzarella, or queso seco. Fried tortilla strips would work well, too - especially if they were blue corn and tomato, mixed.

Method

1. Sweat the mirepoix, then add a bit of chopped garlic.
2. Purée a lot of garlic (I used a bulb) in some water with some of the fresh herbs and pour it in the pot. Scrape the bottom to get any fond that might be sticking there. 
3. Add the ham hocks.
4. Add the pre-soaked beans and enough water to cover them plus a bit more. Keep checking the water level, and add hot water if needed. The goal is not to add too much water and dilute the flavor.
5. Add the cumin and coriander. I want these ingredients in early so that their flavor mellows a bit and helps season the beans. I was pretty generous with these guys, but things mellowed out once the pot cooked a while.
6. Add salt and Black pepper (White pepper if you're a French chef, but I like the taste of black better). Green pepper should work too. Some people say that if you add the salt before the beans are done, they'll be tough. Others say different. So, I added a bit of salt at the beginning, and adjust for taste before serving.
7. Simmer at low heat for 90 minutes. They may need another 30 minutes or so - keep checking the beans.
8. When everything is ready, take out some of the beans and water, add more fresh herbs and purée them all together. Add this back to the beans. If the broth is thin, you can purée more beans or just let it reduce at low heat, without boiling.

I'm just serving this with sourdough bread, heated to get it crispy. Simple enough.

It doesn't have the toasty, deep, earthy flavor of red chili - but the green chili does come through, along with the smoke and herbs. It's also lighter and shouldn't stain your tablecloth. It's not vegetarian, but if the bacon or ham hocks were omitted and more smoked chilis, herbs and garlic added, it could be.

The Cassoulet Chronicles

A chef at my school was the guest of honor at a local restaurant's Family Style Dinner. The main dish: Cassoulet.

This is a pot of beans from southern France. It always contains white beans. It probably contains pork. After that, it may have duck, goose, lamb, tomato and varying degrees of herbal seasonings. Bread crumbs with a bit of fat and cooking juice go on the top, that form a crust during baking. Cassoulet fanatics argue about the next point, but basically the crust should be broken up, mixed into the cooking liquids and allowed to re-form at least once. There are versions from Agen, Toulouse, Castelnaudry. All different, all authentic.

Our chef called it "French pork and beans". I'd seen the meats in various stages of preparation in the school kitchen. Confit de canard. Pork belly. It smelled incredible, yet I managed to resist grabbing a chunk and absconding with the evidence.

I was not sure I'd be able to attend the dinner, so I decided I'd try a piggy version of the dish myself. Instead of very expensive duck, I'd use slow cooked pork. The herbs would be the same: fresh thyme and laurel. There would be a bit of garlic, the beans and the bread crumbs with a bit of duck fat to make the crumbs interesting. Minimal and basic. No lamb, nothing expensive.

I've made my version of Cassoulet - something I prefer to call Haricot de mouton so as not to offend cassoulet purists. The main meat is lamb shanks, a bit of pork, garlic sausages, herbs, beans, etc. This time, I would not be able to fall back on the full flavored lamb to carry the dish. It would be a much more subtle beast.

As it turned out, I did attend the chef's dinner. The cassoulet was interesting. Less herbal than I expected, but with a nice porky note from all that pork belly. There were a few pieces of duck but they were cast in a supporting role under the porky lead. The beans were perfectly seasoned and cooked. Quite different than what I was used to, but a definite success nonetheless.

I'd already begun preparation for my cassoulet, so this was definitely my dish of the week. I'd already decided what I would do, so I knew the taste would be different than the chef's dinner.

I'll just say that it came out nice, not especially traditional, and that I ate too much both nights. So, without further ado, here's the recipe (my first in this blog, take note!)

Cassoulet de Carnitas

Yield: serves about 5-6 people - or reheats well for leftovers.

Ingredients

• 5 pound pork shoulder roast, bone in, cut into 3" - 4" pieces. Leave some meat on the bone.
• 7 cloves of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
• salt, pepper to taste
• 1-1/2 cup of Cannoli beans.  If you love beans, use two cups. If you're a gazillionaire, use French Tarbais beans. Make sure you check the price first, because I'm really not joking about the millionaire part.
• 5 sprigs of fresh thyme
• 3 bay leaves, fresh
• stale bread cut into 1/2" cubes
• about 2 tablespoons duck fat
• 1 strip of bacon
• about 1/4 cup of herbes de provence, dry
• Water to cover the beans twice. If the beans are 1" deep, add 2" water.
• About 1/2 cup of sherry

Procedure
1. Soak the beans overnight in salted water with the herbes de provence and half the garlic (you can use dried garlic and save the fresh stuff for later - if so, don't peel the garlic until the day you add it to the pot.

2. The next day, pour out the salted water through a strainer.

3. Place the beans in fresh water with the garlic, bacon, pork bone and herbs and cook without salting the water until they're just tender.

4. While the beans are cooking, tightly place the pork pieces in a pan with just enough water to cover and some salt and cook at low heat until the pork is falling apart tender and the water has evaporated. Pay close attention toward the end so that you don't burn the pieces. The goal is for them to fry gently in the rendered fat. If this looks familiar, it's the basic recipe for carnitas.

5. Turn the pork pieces to brown them in the fat, then drain off the fat. The pork, basically Mexican carnitas, can also be considered a confit of sorts, just the thing to throw into a nice cassoulet.

6. Transfer the pork and the beans to an oven proof dish and mix them well. Either remove the meat from the bone or just toss the whole piece in. Massage the bread crumbs in the duck fat and press them down onto the surface of the meat & bean mixture.

7. Bake at about 300° F until a crust forms, then break the crust. Check that there is still liquid. You may need to add water or stock to keep things juicy.

8. When a second crust forms, you can eat. No need to be fanatical about multiple crusts since this is a non-traditional recipe.

9. Serve with a nice Cahors (a Malbec from France), a Côtes du Rhône or other Burgundy style wine like a Portuguese Dão. The only other thing you might want is some hearty, crusty sourdough or levain style bread.