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.

Dim sum for the Year of the Dragon

What better way to celebrate the coming of the Year of the Dragon than with a bit of dim sum? I didn't want to just head to New Canton or Capitol Tea House or that new place I drove by on Broadway, though. For one thing, it was already past lunch time, so dim sum options expired.

I also wanted real pot stickers, with thicker skins. The supermarket skins tend to be thinner, for steamed varieties. So, the skins are just a form of pasta, bascially... flour, water, egg, salt. Shouldn't be too difficult...

So I scaled out the ingredients, put them in the food processor fitted with a metal blade, pulsed a bit, added some water, pulsed again until a dough ball formed. Tested it with a finger. Enough water - or too much? Seemed a bit soft... we'll see. Into the refrigerator for an hour to rest.

The chicken was from scratch, too. The dark meat and tenders went into the filling. I reserved the breast meat for another day, since it would have been a waste to grind it up. Added cabbage, green onion (scallions), garlic, lots of fresh grated ginger, salt, cilantro. Placed the filling in the freezer to firm up while I rolled out the wrappers.

I cut a piece of dough, ran it through a pasta roller, folded, repeated, and kept going until it turned silky smooth. It worked!

After that, if I wanted square wrappers I could just cut them from a strip out of the pasta roller. If I wanted round, I'd smooth out the dough in the roller, then wad it into a ball and roll it into a round, using corn starch to keep it from sticking.

Stuff the wrappers, follow any pot sticker recipe and done!

The other thing in the  plate is a crispy rice ball. Same stuffing, roll in slightly undercooked sticky rice, finish in 400°F oven.

80 ingredients. Chemistry degree preferred.

Someone gave us some "bear claw coffee cake". Someone, I suspect, who does not know I'd rather not stick the output of several chemical factories in my face and call it food.

The package contained one gooey, sticky, and very puffy long roll liberally decorated with some kind of icing. It  was light, as it should be with both yeast and chemical leavening agents working to puff it up. It was also light in the flavor department, lacking that rich, buttery, flaky quality punctuated by a bit of almond crunch that people used to associate with bear claws.

I imagine that anyone buying these things is not too worried about flavor. Nor are they likely worried about toes.

Bear claws normally have toes. They're just cuts in the dough, but still. This thing had none. Not only was it chemical-laden, it was toeless, too.  Maybe adding "coffee cake" to the name eliminates the need for toes, but still. Couldn't they call it "almond coffee cake" and skip the ursine references altogether?

I'm starting to think that "coffee cake" is a synonym for "flavorless things dunked in coffee so you don't know they're flavorless." Therefore, anything with this term in its name is automatically suspect. But that's another topic. Back on subject!

A toeless bear claw! Imagine! Someone actually bought the thing. What were they thinking?

Wait. Many people must buy the things, or they wouldn't be there in the supermarket, arriving daily to sully the image of Danish pastries. No toes, little flavor, wrong texture, yet purchased no doubt by the thousands by people across the nation whose taste buds have gone on permanent holiday.

Really, though. What's with this toeless thing? This is America, dammit! We could put a man on the Moon, but we can't put toes in our bear claws? What has happened to our once-great nation? Can nobody find a cost-effective way of toeing bear claws in a factory?

Have we degenerated so much that we don't even know that bear claws have toes?  Has this puffy toeless tribute to chemically-dependent foodstuffs become the new bear claw norm? Have we become a nation of sheep, passively herded by multinational agro-corporations in whatever culinary direction they choose?

Does no supermarket shopper remember that these things were invented by chefs proud of their craft, who carefully crafted simple, natural ingredients into something truly worthy of eating?

Yet, some do remember. The craft of Danish pastry is still taught in cooking schools. My textbooks list eleven or thirteen ingredients for bear claws. Their formula uses laminated, or folded dough to create zillions of layers alternating butter and yeast-leavened flour. Well, maybe only about 512 layers, but still that's a lot. This is done by sealing a block of butter into the dough and then folding, folding, folding. Each fold creates more layers - the same technique used for croissants. The result is heaven. Puffy sheets of dough that practically float in the air, backed by a rich, buttery flavor. Real almonds, butter, sugar and egg for the filling.

Bear claws I would eat:
(yes, they would have "toes"!)

bread flour
sugar
instant dry yeast
salt
butter
eggs
milk
almonds (almond paste)
cake flour
apricot glaze

(optional: almond extract, vanilla extract)

These are the ingredients used in the industrial strength bear claw coffee cakes
These things had eighty ingredients, unless I missed a repeating ingredient that threw off the count.

Enriched bleached wheat flour
(wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid)

Water
Sugar
Palm oil
Almonds
Whole eggs
Yeast (how does the yeast survive in all this stuff?)
Soybean oil
Dextrose
Mono and diglycerides
Invert sugar
salt
canola oil
whey
wheat gluten

Enriched wheat flour
(niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid. Again.)

Corn flour
Guar gum
Artificial flavor
potassium sorbate
dried egg white
sodium steryl lactylate
natural flavor

Bleached enriched wheat flour
(niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid. Again.)

Calcium propionate

Leavening
(sodium aluminum phosphate, baking soda, aluminum sulfate, fumaric acid, monocalcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate)

Dried egg yolk

Calcium disodium EDTA

Annatto

Vitamin A palmitate
Sodium bicarbonate
Sodium acid pyrophosphate
calcium sulfate
polysorbate 60
Citric acid
Xanthan gum
Wheat starch
Silicon dioxide (A.K.A. sand)
Sorbitan monostearate
soy lecithin
Cornstarch
Dried whole egg (already got the yolk & white, so why not the whole thing this time?)
Modified food starch
Enzyme monocalcium phosphate
Ammonium sulfate
Azodicarbonamide (ADA)
Beta carotene
Datem
High fructose corn syrup (had to be in here somewhere, didn't it?)
Stearic acid
pectin

caramel color
(contains sufites, Water, Sodium benzoate, Citric acid) No actual caramel was used, apparently.

Nonfat milk powder
Vitamin E

Vegetable shortening
(palm, canola and/or soybean oil)

mono and diglycerides (can you ever have just one of these?)
polysorbate 60
TBHQ - preservative
agar
cellulose gum
ascorbic acid (good old vitamin C)
L-cysteine
natural and artificial flavor
sodium hexametaphosphate
sodium benzoate
propylene glycol (not to be confused with ethylene glycol)
mono and diesters of fatty acids with BHT as preservative (my favorite ingredient here, really sounds chemical, and there are preservatives for things that don't themselves sound very appealing!)
Calcium acetate.

Contains: Wheat, Milk, Soy, Egg, Almonds. (how did those things get in here?)