Garlic & Brandy Sausages

 

The best thing about making your own sausages is that you can do what you want, add what you want and create something that you either couldn't find or would cost you five times more than the ingredients.

These were the result of looking at pre-made sausages, checking the price and saying "wait!". About $4.00 worth of pork shoulder, some spices, some herbs (mostly from the garden) and a generous dash of brandy: something good, cheap and unique.

This is what went into them:

• Pork shoulder
• Salt
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fresh garlic, fine mince. Be generous.
• Fresh thyme, from the garden
• Fresh sage, also from the garden
• Dried oregano, harvested in the garden last summer and left to dry in the garage
• Pâté spices, also known as four spice: cinnamon, powdered ginger, nutmeg and cloves. Mixed at home because I don't like buying blends - buying individual spices lets you create your own blends as needed for greater flexiblity
• Urfa chili- a dark, almost coffee-like dried chili.
• Roasted cumin seeds, whole. Just a few, so every so often the flavor profile will change.
• Brandy (Cognac or Armagnac would work, too). This was cheaper.
• Dried milk powder - this is a kind of protein binder.
• Pork sausage casings, soaked and rinsed. Don't get the foolish type with plastic thingies inside the casings. Just simple casings packed in salt will do fine.

These could have had more pork fat added, but I decided to keep them lean.

Just grind everything up, fry a patty to taste, adjust the seasonings and stuff some hog casings with the forcemeat. 

Let them dry in the fridge for a day or so, then grill. Don't overcook or they'll be dry, since the extra fat was omitted.

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.

Bagels!

After an initial fiasco involving too much vital wheat gluten, I started over. Bagels, according to the formula given out in class, only need to proof for an hour after the dough is mixed. Then they're shaped, proofed another 30 minutes, boiled in alkaline water, topped and baked.

Much faster than artisanal bread, but would they be as good as the bagels I ate when I was little? Chewy, shiny, crusty things with a unique flavor unequaled by any mere bread. Things worth a special trip to Pasadena, worth enduring the interminable, endless time in the cosmetics department with my mother that would inevitably follow my bagel bribe.

So, I mixed water, salt, SAF yeast, a bit of vegetable oil. Kneaded well to develop the gluten, and placed the dough in a bowl to proof.

An hour later, time to boil some water with a fair amount of baking soda added and pre-heat the oven.

After proofing, the dough was spongy and seemed ready to go, so it got snipped into 3-1/2 ounce portions, rolled into long, spindly shapes and joined into rings with a deft three finger rolling technique.

Thirty minutes more proofing, then into the boiling water for a few minutes. In the water, the bagels puff up and develop a bit of a crustiness - all within a couple of minutes. They're still pale, a light tan off-white - not exactly appetizing, but they're starting to look like bagels.

Out of the water, drip dry, then onto a parchment lined sheet pan. Sprinkle with cumin seeds, sesame, salt, garlic... No poppy seeds. Put them on the list if I'm going to be serious about this bagel thing.

Toppings on, into the oven. I peeped through the door. The bagels began to take on a golden hue, darker, darker... Stop. In about twenty minutes, they were dark enough.

Out they came into the light of day to sit on a cooling rack. They smelled like bagels, but lacked the sheen of my childhood memories.

Now for the wait. The bagels would only develop their full flavor when completely cooled.

Finally they were cool enough (or almost) to taste. Picking one up, I noticed that it was much more springy than my dense childhood friends. I took a bite, worried that it would be more dinner roll than bagel. Not to worry. The necessary chewiness was not lacking. They weren't as chewy as my memories dictated, but they were a long way from being mere bagel-shaped dinner rolls. Not bad, even if they didn't zap me back to Stottlemeyer's Deli decades in the past.

In the future, I'll try a bit of vital wheat gluten mixed with bread flour to boost the chewiness, hopefully with that bit of malt that the formula called for but I don't have. I'm afraid that shiny, thick crust may have been due to the use of lye (sodium hydroxide) in the water instead of baking soda. Still, better not to burn holes in my skin just for a fistful of bagels, so I'll stick with the sodium bicarbonate for now.

If I can get the chewiness and flavor right, maybe I can time warp myself back to Stottlemeyer's Deli or Brookln Bagel Bakery, where I would eagerly scan the bins for my favorites: raisin, garlic, salt, sesame or all of the above. I also liked them plain, just the chewy dough and caramelized crust, pure bagel. So, for now I have some tasty rolls, too tender and soft to fully qualify as definitively bagels yet not altogether lacking in bagelness. A work in progress...

Stuffed cabbage (and a pepper)

Lately I've been looking at the question of how to use my new-found skills to create delicious yet cheap food. It must be cheaper than going to some fast food joint and eating Mystery Meat topped with Mystery Sauce mixed with Unusually Colored Vegetables.

Yesterday, it was eggs on a bed of kale. Yes, I'd if I must abandon junk food the alternative should be healthier.

Today, stuffed cabbage sounded good. The basic process goes like this:

1. Make some sausage meat from pork shoulder, red wine, cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, scallions and garlic. Add a bit of powdered milk for protein binding.
2. Blanch some cabbage leaves in boiling water, then shock them by dunking them in ice water.
3. Wrap the sausage meat in the leaves, tuck everything in neatly, and arrange in a baking dish.
4. Throw in a pasilla pepper, too. Stuff it and place in the dish with the cabbage.
5. Sprinkle with a bit of salt, then add some unsalted chicken stock to keep things moist.
6. Bake the stuffed leaves at 350° for about an hour.
7. Use the excess cabbage leaves, along with some stock and garlic to make some cabbage soup (soupe aux choux) while you're waiting for the leaves to be ready. Purée all this stuff to make it feel richer.

There were no tomatoes in this, because they're not in season and I like to work up dishes that are made from things that are fresh and good now, not dependent on canning technology to make them work.

This would probably be better with red bell peppers than the pasilla. It really doesn't need a pepper at all, but I needed to clean out the refrigerator.

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.

Banh Mi!

It was a long, hungry drive from Sacramento to L.A. Although it's great getting here early, it also means no In-N-Out stop for lunch, since they don't open until 10:30 am. Nobody would likely call glass of orange juice and a banana hearty fare for the road, healthy as it may be.

So, upon arrival I headed to Banh Mi My Tho in Alhambra for a very tasty grilled pork sandwich. In case you've never heard of them, banh mi are a Vietnamese-French hybrid sandwich: French baguette, Vietnamese grilled pork, fresh hot chili slices, cilantro, shredded carrots, green onions, cucumber, vinaigrette. They're a great deal - a sandwich maybe six inches long won't even cost you three bucks.

These guys make the sandwich to order while you wait in a crowded, tiny market-like space, surrounded by Asian language newspapers, a large refrigerator full of all kinds of drinks, packaged foods, a display case full of egg rolls and some kind of meatballs, and other people waiting for their orders.

There's nowhere to eat inside, although there is a bench outside, more for waiting than eating, I'd guess. So, away we went, a sack full of sandwiches in hand.

After starving half a day, I grabbed my sandwich at the first red light and took a bite. The baguette crunched, yielding to softer dough, then the chewier meat and fluffy veggies. I took another bite, as the banh mi's mix of sweet-sour and savory flavors filled my mouth. Hunger began to abate. Another bite - this time with a big hit of fresh chili flavor, then feel the burn. Then cilantro... A very interesting sandwich and a great way rescue myself from the clutches of road trip hunger.

In case you're in the area with some cash money (they don't do plastic) you can visit Banh Mi My Tho at 304 W Valley Blvd in Alhambra.

Potato-Kale soup for a cold fall night

We were supposed to make potato-leek soup in class, but came up dry (no leeks). So, I decided to make it at home. I went to the market, and guess what? November is not a good month to buy leeks. Nothing. Drier than Death Valley in August (not counting badwater and Salt Creek).

They did have kale, though. Nice green color, healthy, should make good soup. Same basic technique as with the leeks, so still good for practice.

Potato-Kale soup
ingredients
Small dice onions
Small dice Russet potatoes
Small dice celery
Kosher salt
Kale
Lemon juice
A dash of cream
Julienned carrots for garnish

process

1. Sweat the onions and celery in some oil
2. Add the potatoes and enough water to cover, and not much more
3. Simmer until the potatoes are tender
4. Rough chop the kale, push down over the potatoes, cover briefly to wilt.
5. Blend everything with an immersion blender. If you want the kale to have a bit of texture, go to the next step. Otherwise, you can cook it 10-15 minutes to soften it up, but I thought the texture was more interesting, and less cooking normally means more vitamins.
6. Add lemon juice to taste and just a dash of cream
7. Adjust salt, garnish with julienned carrots, serve.

 The carrots aren't just there for color. They're the missing ingredient from the mirepoix, left out because I wanted a vibrant green soup with no ground up orange bits. Set on top of the soup, they bring back the earthy carrot flavor missing from the mirepoix. They even add a few gratuitous vitamins.

This was the perfect soup for the coldest, rainiest night this fall. It's filling, so it could almost be a meal in itself, accompanied by a bit of bread.

Community garden salad

Clockwise from bottom: watermelon radishes, panzanella, Ronde de Nice squash

Cucumber & chocolate mint water, watermelon radish garnish

The community garden in Sutter Park is starting to produce. The recent hot weather really boosted a lot of crops, notably summer squashes. Our garden is on the verge of yielding some bonanza tomatoes: San Marzanos for sauces, Cherokee Purple for eating and orange cherries for whatever we feel like. Silk is showing on the corn, we have a Bell pepper just about ready for harvest, and we usually get a strawberry or two for a treat. The watermelons, beans and squash have a long way to go yet, but hopefully by then end of summer they'll all be producing.

After our usual Sunday weed and water, I walked around to see what everyone else is growing and how their plants are doing. The result: a conversation leading to a couple of Rondes de Nice squash, a watermelon radish, and another radish with "giant" in the name - long, red and a bit twisted. Combined with an organic cucumber and an heirloom tomato from yesterday's trip to the market, we had everything on hand for a great veggie/salad plate.

The first thing I thought of was a nice panzanella. This is an Italian salad made with croutons, tomatoes, olive oil and whatever else you want to throw in, if you're not being authentic. The gardener who gave me the Rondes de Nice stressed that they're creamier than zucchini (courgettes if we're being French), and to cook them separately to get familiar with their taste. I couldn't resist throwing the radishes in as a garnish, both for the main plate and the drink.

Recipe notes

Ingredients (for everything) 

• Stale bread, cut into 3/4"  to 1" cubes. I used a Chinese cleaver for this, since the bread knife was not liking this task.
• Chicken stock
• Fully ripe summer tomatoes, medium dice
• Cucumber, small dice for salad; julienne for water
• Onion, julienned
• Fresh basil, chiffonade
• Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO to foodies)
• Sea salt
• Pepper
• Rond de Nice squash, large dice (irregular)
• Chocolate mint, chiffonade
• Garlic, fine dice
• Fresh grated Parmesan cheese

 Process

Panzanella
Since it was part of a summer medley, the panzanella didn't get too involved. However, this can be a meal in itself if you add nice fresh cheese, capers, hard boiled eggs and make it bigger. It can have grilled meats, different herbs, whatever you think is appropriate - although I don't consider it a panzanella unless it has fresh, ultra-ripe tomatoes. You could also add anchovies, but in this case I'd hold the cheese. 

1.  Preheat oven broiler
2. Lightly fry the croutons in some oil. 
3. Splash in some chicken stock and add the garlic. This replaces the soaking and squeezing step from the more traditional recipe. Keep stirring so that the croutons don't stick, transfer them to a baking sheet and pop them in the broiler to crisp up a bit. Keep checking them and turn as needed so they don't burn. 
4. Set aside.
5. Assemble the panzanella just before serving time by tossing the tomatoes, cucumbers onions and basil with the croutons in a bowl. 
6. Pour in some strong, grassy EVOO. I skip the vinegar or lemon juice since I don't want it interfering with the acid from the tomatoes. 
7. Once it's plated, grate some Parmesan over the top.

Ronds de Nice
These were done subtly to let the delicate flavor of the squash come forth. 

• Sauté the squash, stirring/shaking constantly so they don't stick. 
• Add chicken stock and some of the julienned onions, salt and pepper.
• Cook uncovered until the liquid has mostly evaporated but things are still juicy.

Radishes
Actually, you don't do much with the radishes. The giant type was julienned and plated under the watermelon, which was sliced into thin rondelles then dusted with salt. The juice from the squash and panzanella will run through the julienned radishes, making them a lot more interesting than simple radishes sitting in a plate as an appetizer.

This was a really healthy lunch, certainly much healthier than some kind of spicy grilled meat just dripping with fat. My cholesterol probably thanks me for eating it. Only one drawback: I'm already hungry again.