Corned Beef and Cabbage

I didn't do anything very fancy with this. I just boiled the corned beef, cooked the carrots and potatoes separately, and added the cabbage for the last 25 minutes--too long, but some people like soggy cabbage. It was flavorful and sort of homey and satisfying. I served horseradish and mustard with it. As usual, I mixed the horseradish with yogurt--it makes a perfect simple sauce.

I made Irish Soda Bread for the first time--I used the Joy of Cooking recipe--and we decided to have it for dessert because it was sweet. This version was a quick bread, sort of like banana bread with raisins instead of bananas. The traditional caraway seed made it interesting.

Pot Roast

I made pot roast in the crockpot again. It took maybe ten minutes of prep work. I browned a small chunk of beef, then put it in the crockpot with chopped carrots, onions, and mushrooms. I added salt, a bay leaf, and cheap wine and turned it on low for 20 hours. I served it with egg noodles.

Pot roast feels like wartime food, food for a recession, food for hard times. It also feels like food for winter; it's going to be 20 degrees here overnight. I did not move to the South for this.

I just finished a few big projects I had going, so I should be cooking and posting more. I'll have Thanksgiving plans up soon; we're going to try to shop for ingredients early this year instead of Wednesday evening.

We're going out for fancy Thai food tonight.

Thai Beef Rolls with Sweet Chile Sauce

Lawson made these grilled, Thai basil-wrapped meatballs last week. The chile sauce was very sweet -- tasted just like the Maggi sweet chile sauce I love to put on burgers, except with a fresher lime flavor. And the meatballs were perfect. He used more mint than the recipe calls for, and added some Thai basil to the meat mixture. I highly recommend the recipe.

We tried using some lemongrass stalks as skewers for a few of the meatballs, but there was no discernible flavor difference.

I made jasmine rice, and I invented a simple new okra recipe to deal with some slightly tougher pods: sauteed cumin, garlic, and a dried red chile, followed by sliced okra and enough water to keep things from sticking -- around 1/8 cup. I covered the whole thing and cooked it for 15-20 minutes. Touch of salt. Delicious.

Red Chile Plate II

Here's my own attempt at recreating Santos' red chile beef plate. Like you, I boiled the beef first, then cut it up and browned it -- so strange, but it works! I made the sauce from soaking whole dried red chiles, though. I brought them to a simmer, then soaked them for about two hours until they were nice and bright red, then blended them up with the strained broth from boiling the beef. Same seasonings as you, pretty much, though I added a bay leaf, a touch of red wine vinegar, and one small minced garlic clove.

It was tasty! We ate it with corn tortillas and a salad. Homemade tortillas would have been much better, and since the beef was so much work, it would have been worth it to take that extra step.

Red Chile Plate

I did try to replicate Santos' Red Chile Plate this week. I used the Gabilondo recipe, modified of course, and it was delicious. Santos' version was a much brighter, lighter red--perhaps they didn't brown the meat after boiling it, and I don't think they made a brown roux for the chile sauce. Anyway, we loved it. I used a piece of top round and the dish was not at all fatty.

We ate it with spelt tortillas, which are quite acceptable. I made spelt bread yesterday, too, and it was like real bread! instead of the cake-like gluten-free bread we've tried.

Red Chile with Beef

3/4 pound top round steak

1/2 cup red chile powder

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/4 cup flour

Salt

1 teaspoon dried oregano

Boil the beef in water to cover (seasoned with salt, pepper, and a few cloves of garlic) for about an hour or until tender. Drain and reserve the broth. Cut the meat into small cubes.

Mix the red chile powder with about 1/2 cup hot water and set aside.

Heat the olive oil and butter in a skillet and brown the beef cubes. Remove the meat to a plate.

Add the flour to the fat in the pan and stir until the roux is golden brown. Add the chile paste and continue to cook, then add about 1 cup or more of the reserved broth. Add salt and oregano and simmer about 10 minutes. Add the meat to the sauce, heat, and serve.

Pho

Recently I made pho. It was quite tasty, though far from perfect, and I had to serve it with cilantro and mint instead of Thai basil, as it's too early in the season for garden basil.

I really liked slicing the beef so thin and sparely, though. I loved its texture, barely cooked and so tender. What other dishes call for thinly sliced beef like that?

We're off to the beach tomorrow morning for a week. Packing up the kitchen supplies has, as usual, been the hardest part of getting ready. The house we stay in is well stocked with equipment, but who knows what kind of spices we're going to need? Lawson always brings star anise, cumin seeds, cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, and cardamom pods, but I just realized today that those are all large-ish things rather than powders or tiny seeds, so maybe he just picked them for portability. They're all hard to find at beach grocery stores, but so is, you know, turmeric. We bring dried chiles and fresh herbs, too, and fish sauce and shoyu and cornstarch. But sometimes we forget them, which is why our cupboard contains four boxes of cornstarch brought home from past beach trips.

More on pho in next Wednesday's Free Times.

Leftovers for Lunch

I love cold leftovers. So for lunch I ate cold collard greens and a sandwich made of a homemade wheat roll, cold flank steak, Dijon mustard, horseradish, lettuce, halved cherry tomatoes, and black pepper.

It's been a good week for food but a bad one for photos. I'll post soon about last night's amazing green fish curry with cucumbers.

Carne Asada

I loved steak as a kid. Pink, pink steak cut into tiny cubes. And chocolate mousse for dessert. No restaurant meal since has made such an impression on me.

Then I spent 13 years as a vegetarian.

When I first started eating meat again about four years ago, I tried all different kinds of beef, from grilled filet mignon to prime rib to pot roast, but it wasn't until I bought a flank steak and grilled it that I tasted anything like the steak of my childhood. I find that I prefer flank steak and top round London broil to the more tender, fancy cuts. And homemade carne asada may now be my favorite beef dish ever.

James Peyton's recipe is a little too complicated, but the idea is right. You marinate one to two pounds of flank steak in the fridge for 48 hours, then pat it dry and grill it over really high heat. The usual rules apply: tent it with foil for 10 minutes or so after it comes off the grill; slice it thinly across the grain; serve it with Mexican food the first night; eat it cold on sandwiches or plain with your hands for the next several days.

Here's a much simpler version of Peyton's marinade (and better -- his is complicated in weird ways, like using both red and white wine AND both red and white wine vinegar). Use a food processor.

6 cloves garlic
1/2 cup onion
1 tablespoon fresh oregano, or 1 teaspoon dried
5 fresh sage leaves, or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon dried or fresh thyme
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons chile powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 bay leaves, crumbled
1/2 cup red wine
3 tablespoons red wine or cider vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 cup tomato juice (or some other unseasoned canned tomato product. Well, not tomato paste, but something.)
1/3 cup olive oil

Yum.

Vietnamese Meatball Soup

This was the easiest soup. I love Mai Pham's Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, which I bought for Lawson a few years ago. Traditionally Lawson cooks the Asian foods around here and I handle the other continents, but lately I've been moving in on Asia as well (though my wok skills have a long, long way to go).

The book is fun because the recipes are so simple. And this recipe is fun because it's so dorky -- rather than the beautiful thinly sliced rare beef you expect from Vietnamese soup, it contains big dumb American-looking meatballs. Pham says it's like a Chinese version of pho, popular in Saigon's Chinatown. I just loved it. Here is my slight variation.

The meatballs:
- 1 pound or less ground beef, fairly lean
- 1 tablespoon chopped shallot or onion
- 1 tablespoon fish sauce
- And the recipe doesn't call for it, but next time I will add a very small amount of grated ginger, lime zest, and/or chopped cilantro. I thought the meatballs needed a little more seasoning on their own.

Mix, form meatballs, and set aside.

Noodle prep:
Prepare 8 to 12 oz rice noodles (soaking, boiling, both, whatever the package says) and set aside.

The broth:
- 1 quart beef broth. The recipe specifies storebought. I like those Pacific-brand cartons, and they always seem to be on sale at the natural foods store.
- 4 cups water
- 1.5 teaspoons five-spice powder
- a 2" chunk of ginger, peeled
- 2 tablespoons soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- fish sauce to taste

Combine and bring to a boil. Add meatballs and simmer about 10 minutes, until cooked through. Remove meatballs.

Final prep:
Place noodles in bowls along with:
- bean sprouts
- carrots, julienned
- romaine lettuce leaves
- chopped cilantro
- chopped green onions

Cover with broth and add meatballs. Serve with lime wedges, fish sauce, and sambal.

If it's not the dead of winter or you live in a magic greenhouse, also serve with Asian basil and chopped fresh Thai chiles.

Pot Roast for Breakfast

I've been on vacation eating other people's food.

This past weekend I was up in the mountains in North Carolina playing in the snow and watching movies and drinking beer. It was a wonderful but truly strange trip in that I did not cook. Okay, I made some rice for the pot roast the second night because nobody else wanted to be responsible (they said their rice turns out gummy), but other than that I cooked nothing. It was a very un-food-snobby trip.

Lawson and I had almost no time to pack, and we hadn't done any pre-trip planning with anyone else, but were assured there'd be plenty to eat, so we brought no food. That felt weird. But these aren't people who care about food all that much, so we didn't want to be too intense.

One friend brought potatoes, baby carrots, beef, and two crockpots and made pot roast on Saturday. It was super-basic (maybe even only seasoned with salt) but perfect after a day in the snow. I ate pot roast for breakfast the next morning, too. Pot roast goes well with good coffee, and Lawson's brother makes the best coffee (it was he who gave me a personally customized old air popper and taught me how to roast coffee in it).

That same friend made green beans using canned green beans and an artificial ham flavoring packet. The ingredients of the packet of artificial ham flavoring were MSG, salt, some preservatives, and artificial ham flavoring. Apparently artificial ham flavoring is an elemental culinary building block, a nutritional morpheme -- it's an ingredient of itself. I do not agree with my friend that the ham packet is healthier than using bacon grease.

On Sunday another friend made chili using canned beans, ground beef, jarred salsa, and tomato sauce. I ate two bowls. There were also cornbread muffins from a box.

At other times I ate Raisin Bran, bananas, tangerines, cheese dip from a jar, tortilla chips, popcorn, and chicken salad sandwiches with lettuce.

I enjoyed eating other people's food and being completely unresponsible for my own sustenance for a little while. But I missed cooking terribly. And it was strange eating such utilitarian food -- food composed of other prepared foods, like a casserole -- food with mysterious salts and preservatives and corn syrups -- food that came in bags and cans. Not that I don't eat those things at other times, but I felt immersed in them this weekend.

It's expensive eating that way. And it's so disconnected from both the source of food and from its preparation. So I'm back home and ready to make messes in the kitchen, to eat Brussels sprouts and eggs and pork fat and to read up on the big bag of spelt my friend the miller dropped off here last week and make some strange brown breads.

Fancy Quesadillas

A few weeks ago I made quesadillas filled with some odds and ends we needed to use up -- cilantro, arugula, roasted pork, monterey jack cheese, queso anejo, and whole wheat tortillas -- and was pleased to find that they tasted wonderful, much more than the sum of their parts. Arugula and cilantro together produce a whole new flavor. Since then we have also made them with thinly sliced lean beef, marinated in lime juice, oregano, and garlic and then sauteed. I think the pork was better, though -- more subtle.

We eat them with this habanero-carrot sauce Lawson makes (yeah, I know, it looks like nacho cheese). The carrots allow the sauce to have big habanero flavor without being inedibly spicy. It's a Belizean recipe. I have been known to eat it straight from the jar with a spoon.

Good Things in the Kitchen

I did some good things in the kitchen yesterday. I made a batch of pear chutney. I also browned a small, tough beef round steak along with carrots, onions, and celery, then simmered it all afternoon to make beef stock. I made the meat into dog food, and tonight I'm going to make French Onion Soup with the broth! I feel very self-congratulatory about this planning ahead.

Dad picked some beautiful greens for tonight's salad. Salad and soup will be enough, because we ate an Italian lunch in downtown Tucson while attending the Tucson Art Museum Art Fair. The restaurant was odd: they had a very limited menu, just ravioli, linguini, or rigatoni, but it was excellent, and the delicious wine was served in the most elegant tall glasses. The building was about as old as you'll find in the West, very thick old adobe.

Pot Roast with Beer and Onions over Noodles

This is pretty close to Julia Child's beer and onion pot roast recipe from Volume 1 of Mastering. I browned a big piece of lean, tough beef -- bottom round, I think -- in some oil. I then sauteed some carrots and several onions. Then I dumped it all into the crockpot with herbs (parsley, thyme, bay leaf, peppercorns). I made a small, light brown roux in the leftover drippings and added that to the crockpot. I deglazed the pan with a few bottles of Stella Artois (it's an annoying hipster pot roast, you see). Seven hours later, it was tasty. It was also extremely difficult to eat, what with noodles slithering back into the somewhat thin broth. If I'd had time, I would have reduced the broth for several more hours on the stove.

Chili

Because I was a vegetarian for so many years, chili is to me a bean-based dish, with meat only an incidental ingredient. I know this is blasphemy to those amateur chefs who enter chili cookoffs and seem to slice onions even more ineptly than I, if 8,671 Food Network chili cookoff specials are any evidence.

Chili should be a big, serious meal suitable for powering a person through a day of telemark skiing or ice climbing (or, in today's case, college football-watching). And for that it requires beans.

The glorious thing about chili is that just about any of the ingredients are optional or substitutable. It also requires only one pot, a big Dutch oven, though I often use a big skillet to brown meat and onions before dumping them into the Dutch oven.

Here is my infinitely variable recipe, based on your old vegetarian chili recipe:

Roast at 400 degrees any or all of the following:
- 2-3 carrots, sliced
- 1-2 bell peppers
- 1-9 fresh chiles of any sort -- today I am using a few green Anaheims (Big Jim), a few red Anaheims (cowhorn), and some poblanos (ancho mulato).

(Actually, I guess I roast the carrots first, then turn on the broiler to char the chiles.)

Peel and chop the roasted peppers and chiles.

If you don't have fresh chiles, put canned or frozen green chiles in the chili. You can also make a dried red chile-based chili -- soak and then puree dried red Anaheims. A person could even use red chili powder and some bell peppers.

Procure 1-2 pounds meat. Cheap beef stew meat of some sort is good -- just cube it. Ground beef is fine. Leftover shredded chicken is good. This is definitely the way to use up scary things you find in the freezer (squirrels?) If the meat is raw, begin by browning it, then removing it from the pot or pan.

Saute:
- 1-3 onions, diced

Put everything in the Dutch oven if it's not already there. Add any or all of the following:

- Beans. I usually use 2 cans each of black beans and pinto beans. Sometimes I soak dried beans for a day and use those. I think red kidney beans in chili are too big and sweet, but I know lots of people like them.
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1-2 large cans of tomatoes
- beer or red wine, cheap or fancy. (Note to readers: I happen to know that Kris, who is on vacation and thus can't protest, uses Old Milwaukee.)
- leftover coffee
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, or a small handful fresh, or whatever
- 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted and possibly ground
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon or more chile powder, the fresher and purer the better
- cider vinegar or lime juice if necessary to correct acidity
- sugar if necessary

Simmer very gently for 2-5 hours. I serve it with homemade cornbread (cornmeal only, no flour, and no sweetener, made in a cast-iron skillet).

A snack

Lest everyone think I eat only bacon-filled soups and homemade cookies, here is my post-gym snack: plain yogurt with almonds, dates, flax seed oil, and cinnamon. Check out the beautiful Japanese stoneware bowls I found at the Goodwill this weekend for 50 cents apiece.

For Christmas we gave Lawson's parents an Omaha Steaks gift certificate, so yesterday we had them over to eat the steaks. They requested ribeye, which was gristly but really tasty. Lawson had a New York strip instead, which had much less flavor. We had to keep the meal pretty traditional, so I made beets vinaigrette and that lemon custard souffle thing I love, and Lawson made wonderful roasted potatoes with rosemary, and sauteed spinach & mushrooms.

The best things I've made lately are: a) polenta using ground heirloom corn from the local mill one of my friends works at. Wow. And b) brussels sprouts braised in garlic butter. Finally I like brussels sprouts.

Cinnamon Beef Noodles

I've been working on a term paper, so I haven't been cooking for the last five days or so (or doing much of anything besides writing and thinking). But Lawson made his wonderful cinnamon-beef noodles. They are the perfect winter food -- lots of broth, slurpy noodles, thin slices of beef, spinach, and lots of spices. I keep meaning to give you his recipe...it's mostly from a Nina Simonds noodle book, but he makes it in the crock pot:

Saute very briefly (15-30 seconds):

6 green onions, coarsely chopped and smashed
6 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
4 big slices fresh ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons sambal
2 cinnamon sticks
a few star anise

Throw the sauteed spices in the crock pot along with:

8-9 cups water
1/2 cup shoyu
2 pounds beef (use fairly lean beef -- it should be a light broth, not greasy)

Cook for 5 to 12 hours in the crockpot or 1.5 hours on the stove. Just before serving, throw the spinach in for ten minutes, and make a batch of noodles -- any kind of Asian or egg noodles will do. Put noodles, meat, spinach, and broth in each bowl. It's best to only add as much spinach and make as many moodles as you plan to eat for that meal, as over time the spinach tends to get slimy and the noodles soak up all the broth.

Yum.

Beef stew and pie stewing

On Sunday I made my first pot roast. I browned the meat, then sauteed some small whole onions and chopped carrots, then deglazed the pan with a can of High Life and transferred everything to the crockpot. There I added some stock, fresh thyme, a bay leaf, salt and pepper, and sliced mushrooms. I let it cook on high (which in a crockpot is not very high) for about four hours. We had it with egg noodles. I ate it for lunch the next day, too.

Tonight, at long last, I will eat spinach. I almost squealed when I saw it back in the grocery store this week. I plan to saute massive amounts of it with a tiny bit of garlic and a small dried red chile, then sprinkle it with balsamic vinegar. I have lots of mushrooms, too (they were 2-for-1), so I think I'm going to make some kind of mushroom-y light cream sauce and put it on wheat toast.

Right now I'm worrying about Friday, when my office has its annual Thanksgiving party to which everyone must bring food. I signed up to bring pies. However, I have band practice the night before. Am I going to stay up until 4 in the morning making pies after practice? I don't even know what kind to make...surely someone will bring sweet potato and pecan; I adore lemon meringue but don't know how it will survive a day at the office; my Mom's French chocolate tart might not be Thanksgiving-y enough. I suppose this could all be easily remedied by a trip to the grocery store bakery, but yuck!