Still Here: Asian Greens, Chinese Restaurant Style

Sorry, guys. I've been totally MIA lately, I know. It's not my fault! OK, well, it is my fault, but let's just move on.

On Christmas Day my friend Melanie and I observed the time honored Jewish tradition of Chinese food and a movie (Dim sum at Madarin Court on Mott Street and Up In The Air, if you're wondering). Mandarin Court is the place where I discovered how much I love baby bok choy--simply steamed and slathered with a bunch of oyster sauce. It's so good, and there's no reason you wouldn't be able to do it at home.

Sure enough, How To Cook Everything has a recipe for Asian Greens, Chinese Restaurant Style. It suggests using gai lan, but I opted for mustard greens (you can use any kind of Asian greens or broccoli, kale, collards, and the like). Basically you just separate the stems from the leaves, sautee the leaves in some neutral oil until the wilt, put them on a plat, sautee stems, add some water, and toss until the stems are tender. Then add the stems to the aforementioned plate, hit it with a bunch of oyster sauce, and you have pretty much the best preparation of greens possible, and also the easiest. It might not look like much, but it's damn tasty and really good for you.

Forget the Salad: Red Beans with Meat

"A pot of beans flavored with meat--sometimes just what you want." True. This recipe is not for the faint of heart--it includes both ham hocks and sausage. I was hoping it'd be like the beans at Margon, my favorite Cuban spot in NYC.

I didn't soak the beans, so they took forever (at least I think that's why they took so long). It works like this: you take the beans, cover them with cold water, bring to boil, reduce to simmer, and add the ham hock. I was using a trotter from Flying Pigs' Farms, purveyors of the finest pork I've ever had. It cost about four dollars, and was worth five times that in flavor. Easily.

While that simmers, brown the sausages all over in a skillet, pricking them to release fat. When they're nicely colored, and there's a good bit of grease in the pan, remove them and cut into small chunks (it's cool if they aren't totally cooked, they're going right back in a few minutes anyway). Sautee onions, garlic and red peppers in the sausage grease until soft, then remove, add the sausage back to the pan, cook it through until it's all nice and brown, then return the onion mixture back to the pan with thyme, bay leaves, allspice and tomato (I used canned, which worked great). Stand over the pot, trying not to eat all of this mixture with a spoon.

So now the meat in the beans should be pretty soft, and you can take it out and chop up the meat and return it to the beans if you like. When you do, also add in the sausage and veg mixture. From there, it's "anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on whether you soaked [the beans]." Apparently, though, it's more like 4 hours if you didn't soak the beans. Lesson learned, Bittman!

Enjoy with anything, really. I paired with Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Bacon, Roast Chicken with Cumin, Honey, and Orange, a salad we forgot to serve, and family friends.

Remember Thanksgiving? It Happened.

It was weeks ago already, and I've been totally missing in action ever since. Probably because I just came out of the resulting food coma. I know, I know, it's halfway to New Year's already, but I'm just now getting around to posting a wrap-up of the big day.

Ari, my cousin, made the turkey. He's been doing this for a few years now, and he's really good at it. Look at that turkey thigh! It's moist as can be. And I got a wing, which is always fun, because, you know, it's like a chicken wing, only HUGE.

I made the stuffing I talked about earlier, doctoring up some Whole Foods' brand stuffing mix with Dipaola turkey sausage (IT'S THE BEST) and a ton of fresh celery and onions. It was really good, just what I was hoping for.

I also made a bunch of roasted root veggies: blue potatoes, purple carrots, shallots, and jerusalem artichokes mixed with a ton of fresh rosemary and minced garlic, pimenton, salt and pepper. What could go wrong? Nothing, that's what.

There was also a lentil salad I brought along. It was really good--lentils cooked in vegetable stock, some chopped up carrots and shallots, lemon zest, sherry vinegar, mustard, olive oil, salt and pepper, mixed just til combined. This one's great to take to a party because it keeps really well, and it tastes even better if you make it a few days beforehand.

I also made an incredibly large--3+ gallons--batch of the Potato Leek Soup, a recipe that I've now made more times than I can count. How can just three ingredients come together to be so rich and satisfying? It's particularly good for tiding people over while various sides go in and out of the oven in preparation of the big feast.

So, that was Thanksgiving! Thanks to Aunt Susan and Uncle Jay for hosting everyone (I believe there were about 300 of us in total) and to everyone who brought or made some form of deliciousness, and especially to Mom for decorating the tables and making everything so pretty (that's her handiwork pictured above). I am truly thankful for such a large, loving family that I genuinely look forward to spending time with. And that's to say nothing of how thankful I am for all of you out there reading this. There's more on my list, but those two will have to do for now. Hope you all had a great holiday, and good luck with all the Christmas, Hannukah, New Years', and whatever else parties you all have coming up!

Soup Weather

"How to Improvise a Soup," p. 125, has five steps that tell you everything you need to know. It could be a whole book in itself, but it only takes one minute to read.

Earlier:
Quickest Chicken Stock
Better Chicken Stock
Vegetable Stock
Smoky Black Bean Soup
Pureed Pumpkin Soup
Potato Leek Soup
Miso Soup

Staple, Thanksgiving Edition: Vegetable Stock

When I said I'd bring four sides to Thanksgiving this year, it seemed like a good time to make the vegetable stock in How to Cook Everything. There's a bunch of vegetarians in the family, so I couldn't use chicken or pork stock where I usually would--cooking beans, finishing soups, moistening stuffing--so, vegetable stock.

It's pretty simple. What you see above is a whole mess of chopped up veggies--carrots, celery, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, parsley, some garlic--with some soy sauce and peppercorns. Throw them in a pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, reduce to very low simmer, and let cook for at least thirty minutes, more if possible. Bittman doesn't suggest a maximum time but if you've read Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking, you'll be completely terrified to simmer for anywhere more than an hour (though if you're like me, you probably don't remember the reason he gave). Also taking a queue from Ruhlman, I browned some of the veggies before adding the water for a deeper color and flavor.

Then you just strain, squeezing any excess water and flavor out of the veggies. The broth is delicious: savory with a touch of sweetness. It's very complex. The mushrooms even add a touch of meatiness, without imparting their distinctive--and, for people like my cousin Sara, dealbreaking--mushroomy flavor. You don't taste this and think "mushrooms." I can't wait to see how it works in the dishes I'm planning to make (the lentils, which I cooked beforehand in this stock, were good).

Round Two: Bread Stuffing, Tweaked

Okay, that didn't go so well. It's okay. That's why I made a stuffing ahead of time. Determined to make a phenomenal Thanksgiving stuffing, I dusted myself off and got back on the horse on Saturday, making a second stuffing. This one was for the purpose of getting the texture right--moist, but not mushy (the first one was like a plate of breadcrumbs, with turkey sausage).

Above is the stuffing before it went into the oven. I sauteed onions in equal parts oil and butter until soft, then added some herbs, the bread cubes (from Bread Alone, a hearty mix of whites and whole wheats) and a fair amount of stock and water until I had what I thought was the right consistency.

So this stuffing was markedly better. It was moist, though still not nearly as wet as I like it, and cooking it in my amazing new Staub dutch oven gave it an incredible crust on the bottom. But I still wasn't sure about this stuffing. Even with more moisture, it didn't taste like what I was used to, and to me, that's the most important thing with Thanksgiving stuffing. Below, the stuffing after it came out of the oven (the cast iron gave it an incredible crust).

What exactly am I used to? Pepperidge Farm's bag of stuffing, that's what. Resting somewhere on the legitimacy scale between Stove Top and from-scratch stuffing, it's real bread and a seasoning pack. And after reading this post on Serious Eats rounding up store bought stuffings, I feel reassured that I should stick with what I already know I like. I'm confident that the stuffing will still to be totally next level, because I'm taking the advice of the Serious Eats team and doctoring it up with the things I planned to put in my homemade stuffing (chief among them Dipaola Turkey Sausage from the Greenmarket, aka the best turkey sausage EVER). I'll let you know how it goes after the big day.

Can't Miss: Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

So, this is a combination that's very popular, but it's not a case of undue hype. Brussels sprouts really just go great with bacon. I'm not even saying that as part of the standing "everything tastes better with bacon" rule; brussels sprouts are a food that pair with the smoky stuff particularly well. Why ask why?



So, you're gonna chop up some bacon. Cook it until it's crisp and the fat is rendered. Meanwhile, as the bacon cooks, trim the bottoms off of your brussels sprouts, and either slice them or quarter them. This was new to me--I'd only ever left them whole or, at most, halved them to roast. Slicing breaks them down a bit, so you have more errant leaves floating around, which I liked. I'm sure it'd work fine if you halved them instead of slicing, but I liked doing it this way.

Okay, so now your bacon is crispy. Throw the sprouts in the pan with a splash of water, about a quarter of a cup, some salt and pepper, and toss them together and cover for about five minutes. Then uncover, let any remaining liquid cook off, and you're done. This dish is a wonder of comfort cooking and simplicity: not counting salt and pepper, you're looking at a whopping two ingredients. Shout out to Daniel Meyer, who tipped me to Flying Pigs Farms' shoulder bacon, which is what I used in this recipe. It's a little more meaty than regular belly bacon, and it worked incredibly well here.

It occurs to me here that I completely forgot to add the balsamic vinegar or lemon juice that the recipe calls for. Whoops! It was still delicious. I'll just have to make it again.