South American Cooking

I got this cookbook for Christmas from Nancy. First I read through it on a trip to the South Texas Coast, then I put it aside for a while. This weekend I got serious and made two wonderful dinners from it.

The first was Catalan fish. I used frozen albacore, a staple from Trader Joe's around here.

Season 1 pound mild fish fillets with lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Set aside.

Saute in 2 tablespoons olive oil:

1 medium onion, sliced

1 green pepper, sliced

1 red pepper, sliced

Stir about five minutes, then add 1 cup white wine and boil gently for 5 minutes. Add the fish, cover, and simmer 8 minutes or until just done.

Remove fish and set aside. Cool the sauce for a few minutes, then puree in blender until smooth. Return to pan and bring to simmer, then add 1 tablespoon capers and 12 Spanish olives. Put fish back in sauce and reheat gently.

The recipe calls for cornmeal dumplings, but I made cornbread instead.

Then tonight I made a chicken stew served with a quinoa pilaf. The stew had chiles, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and bell peppers, and parsley. The sauce was enriched at the end with frozen peas and bread crumbs! I also made a cilantro condiment similar to chimichurri sauce, and very much the same as we get at Indian restaurants.

What I liked so much about these meals was the relative absence of the ubiquitous dairy products, wheat, and citrus. It felt like pre-Mexican cooking, very separate from the European tradition.

We had an inexpensive wine from Chile with the chicken tonight.

Quick and Easy Dinners, Part 817

Recently we had grilled hot dogs on whole wheat buns, salad, and champagne.

I was testing holiday punch recipes for the Free Times, looking for something not too sweet or gross but still kind of fun, so we had some cheap but dry sparkling wine around. Turns out it goes exceptionally well with beef hot dogs.

Hey, I think I will resolve in 2008 to drink champagne more often. It's no more expensive than wine or semi-decent beer if you choose carefully and don't have sky-high standards, which I certainly don't. I'll let you know how it goes.

Pizza and Wine

Maybe I shouldn't be lifting the curtain on the glamour implied by close-up food photos against a lovely tile table, but here is a recent dinner we ate.

I have no idea what we were watching on TV. I do not know who that man is.

I make pizza often. When I make a batch of dough, I usually separate it into four pieces, each of which goes into an oiled 1-quart freezer bag. I freeze all the dough unless I'm going to cook it the very next day; freezing improves the flavor and texture so much that even a few days in the freezer is well worth it.

Making pizza dough the same day as I want to eat it is never worth it. New dough just doesn't taste good or behave properly.

If I take the dough out of the freezer in the morning before work, it's perfectly thawed on the counter by dinnertime. And at that point the dough is so soft and stretchy that I just gently remove it from the bag with oiled hands and pull it into shape.


Peter Reinhardt's recipe for New York style crust is about my favorite; this is it, except with the options removed:

5 cups bread flour
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
3 tablespoons olive oil
Almost 2 cups water

Mix, knead, and let rise for an hour or two, then divide into four balls and handle as above. Try never to roll out or punch down the dough -- let it rest if it ever gets tough. Bake at highest temperature possible on hottest surface possible. This makes four 10" pizzas.

Coq Au Crappy Vin(o)

It wasn't a resolution, exactly, but several months ago I decided I would a) drink more wine and less beer (beer makes me stay up too late), and b) pay no more than $7 a bottle for wine, and preferably much less. It's been entertaining -- I am not too picky and have found some decent $5 wines. Anyway, last weekend I bought two $4 wines that were on sale at the liquor store. One was fine; it was a California Merlot. The other, a Sangiovese, was extremely unpleasant. It put to rest any worries I had about having no wine standards. It was foul.

I decided to use the foul wine for cooking. This violates Julia Child's fundamental rule that one should never cook with wine one wouldn't drink, but I'm too cheap to pour wine down the drain unless it actually makes me gag. This was merely Really Bad.

I thought I'd make Coq au Vin, but I wasn't in the mood for subtle French flavors, so I decided to invent a version with red chiles. This is the second time I've made chicken stewed in red chile sauce, but the wine changes everything. It was really good.

I floured chicken breasts and thighs and browned them in olive oil in a dutch oven, then took them out again and sauteed some onions. I pureed 4 soaked red chiles with some roasted red peppers -- I don't think the peppers would always be necessary, but my latest ristra is HOT, so I have to use the chiles sparingly. With less picante chiles I'd use maybe 7-10. Then I put the puree and the chicken in the dutch oven along with the whole bottle of crappy wine, and I let it all simmer for an hour or so. I think I added a little oregano and cumin, but maybe not -- it was many days ago.

The crappy wine magically turned tasty, and the whole dish came out purple and spicy and wonderful. I served it with beets (roasted, tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and the juice of one tangerine -- so good), homemade whole wheat tortillas, and papaya.