Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

Left over from our Easter feast, we had a great many grilled lamb chops as well as a good bit of sauce poivrade. It seemed obvious to me that the best way to make use of these leftovers was to make a classic lamb stew, termed a navarin in France. A navarin is a classic Easter dish all over France, typically made with shoulder and often containing turnips, navets, after which the dish likely took its name.

Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

The classic method sees raw lamb shoulder browned and removed from the pan. Into the pan go flour and tomato paste and then a sauce is made after these two items brown. The lamb goes back into the sauce and the whole goes into the oven to braise. When done, the vegetables are usually cooked separately, at least in higher caliber restaurants, and combined with the meat and sauce just at service.

The goal is to have an unctuous and richly flavored sauce napping tender lamb and perfectly cooked vegetables. The vegetables often vary according to the season, but carrots, potatoes, turnips, and onions are fairly standard. In the spring, a navarin printanier might also include asparagus, favas, or green peas.

Beautiful Plate of Stew Vegetables

This particular navarin that I made last evening had necessarily to be made differently, given that I was starting with cooked lamb and also because at home, I am not cooking each of my vegetables separately. Moreover, I was certainly not paring them into beautiful lozenge shapes as do the high end French restaurants. Sure, I can do it, but I'm not competing for Michelin stars here, just trying to get a delicious dinner on the table as efficiently as possible.

I started by prepping the plate of vegetables you see above. Because I intended to poach them all together in lamb stock until they were just done, I paid special attention to cutting them such that they would all cook and be done at the same time. I used potatoes, carrots, celery, and halved shallots. Were I making this at the restaurant, I would have used whole tiny potatoes, tiny baby carrots, whole spring onion bulbs, baby hakurei turnips, tournéed celery root, fava beans, a couple morels, and perhaps some fern fiddleheads, each cooked separately.

Next, I boned out the lamb chops and cut it into bite-sized chunks, then made a stock using the lamb bones, vegetable trimmings (and especially the shallot skins, which give brown color to the stock), a few parsley sprigs, and the leftover sauce poivrade (glace de viande, shallots, green peppercorns, and the reduced and strained red wine lamb marinade).

At dinner time, I strained the stock and returned it to the stove at a simmer in which to poach the vegetables. Once the vegetables were nearing doneness, I seasoned the stock, added the lamb cubes, and then proceeded to thicken the sauce with an addition of glace de viande and beurre manié. It is vital, when making a dish with cooked meat, to add it at the very end, such that it just heats through.

Beurre manié (literally "handled butter," meaning kneaded butter) is equal parts room temperature butter and flour kneaded into a paste. By coating the flour with fat, the flour does not lump when added to a hot sauce. It is one of the simplest ways to thicken a hot sauce on the fly and is a technique that every cook should know.

One of the principal tricks of making dishes with highly reduced and long-cooked stocks is achieving the perfect balance so that the sauce dances across the palate rather than lying there limp and listless. I spent a lot of time with my cooks in the restaurant walking them through the process. We would taste the sauce and most often it would start dead and flat. To counter this, I use two weapons, spice and acid, acid being the primary tool.

The tiniest little hint of bite in the sauce will help perk up the taste buds and to that end, ground white pepper is the saucier's friend. A tiny bit goes a very long way because ground white pepper is very piquant. I dusted the surface of my stew with a hint of white pepper and stirred it in.

Spice aside, what really contributes to a lively sauce is acidity. All the long cooking and resulting extraction of collagens creates a palate coating and dull sauce. A tiny bit of acid will fix this. I can remember tasting a dull sauce with my cooks, adding a few drops of good Sherry vinegar to the sauce, and retasting. Watching their eyes light up at the revelation of what acid can do for a sauce was a great reward.

In the case of my sauce last night, I was prepared with Sherry vinegar at hand, but because I made the stock with leftover sauce poivrade (made from most of a bottle of red wine, plus some of the green peppercorn brine, both wine and brine being acidic), my sauce was lively enough after adding the scant amount of white pepper.

Navarin d'agneau, what a great use of leftovers!

Snowy Day Soup

Two days ago we were going to have turkey-vegetable soup, but being in a bit of a celebratory mood, I changed my mind and decided to make pappardelle con ragù, saving the soup for yesterday. And I'm so glad I did. It started snowing mid-morning and did not let up until after dark. If ever there were a list of days for a bowl of warm and comforting soup, a snowy day would be close to the top of the list.

A Perfect Soup Day

As transplanted easterners, we were delighted to see the snow. Snow here on the valley floor is rare. Sure, the tens and tens of feet of snowpack in the Cascades and in the Coast Range is impressive, but on a year-in-year-out basis, we don't get snow down here at only 150 feet of elevation. In fact, on most days this January, I have been wearing short pants during our daily walks. This mild Mediterranean climate lets us grow figs and olives with near impunity and causes our rosemary to explode into large shrubs. But it causes some of us who grew up with snow to miss the winter season, especially the bright red cardinals silhouetted against the snow.

Turkey Vegetable Soup

Why is soup so comforting? I think it is instinctive in humans to make soup for warmth and comfort. Why else do we turn to soup naturally when we are unwell? I don't think the higher part of our brain is actually involved; it is my private hypothesis that humans have been making soup for eons and at some primal level, know instinctively that it is simultaneously warming, nourishing, comforting, and hydrating, all things we desire when we feel ill or in need of comfort.

Theories aside, I try to make soup frequently in the winter. This winter, my go-to soup is turkey-vegetable. I bought a case of turkey necks from the grocery store just after the holidays when the meat manager was delighted to move them out of his freezer and into my cart.

Making soup is a two-day process. The first day, I roast the turkey necks (and in this case, the detritus from a chicken carcass) to golden brown, then deglaze the roasting pan, and simmer all the roasted meats and bones for a few hours to extract all the goodness. Into the fridge the stockpot goes to set up so that I can remove all the fat from the top the next day.

Then I rewarm everything, pull the meat and bones out, pick all the meat, and add the meat and vegetables back to the stock. The soup cooks for 15-20 minutes just before we want to eat so that the vegetables retain their texture.

This soup contains tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, celery, kale, black-eyed peas, stelline pasta, rehydrated porcini mushrooms, and a swirl of pesto at the end.

Chicken Pot Pie

My wife is a little crazy and I love her for it. This week when I had poached a chicken, she nonchalantly and quite apropos of nothing (that I could ascertain; who knows what was buzzing around in her infinitely circular brain?) asked me to make a chicken pot pie, saying that she would really like that a lot. Why not? Anything for her.

So I poach all the vegetables, make the gravy, make the crust, bake the pies, and get them to the table. Just before we dig in, she says, "I've never had pot pie before." All the while, I assume that she has asked me to make her a pot pie because she had eaten one and found it delicious enough to want again.

Don't you think that she would have said to me, "I've never had a pot pie before and really want to try one! Would you make me a chicken pot pie?" Nut!

Chicken Pot Pie

Pie Vegetables

You can use any vegetables that you want for your pies. I had planned to use celery, leeks, carrots, and green beans. When I got home from the store, I found that someone (not naming names) had roasted all the green beans that I was going to use in the pies. So I substituted some broccoli florets.

I brought some salted water to a boil and gave each of the vegetables a quick parboil. I cooked each vegetable in sequence until it was crisp-soft and put it in ice water to stop the cooking. Meanwhile, I picked a bit of chicken off a carcass that I had poached the day before.

Pies Ready for Topping

I brought the chicken stock that I had made the day before to a roiling boil and thickened it with a corn starch slurry. I poured the thick gravy over the vegetables and chicken, then seasoned with salt, plenty of black pepper, and a mound of freshly chopped parsley.

In retrospect, I should have used a beurre manié (flour and butter mix) to thicken the gravy. I was trying to back off the calories by using corn starch, but the gravy broke down in the oven later, something that flour will not do. Even an old chef learns the hard way (to be fair to myself, in my restaurant career, I did not get any experience in low-fat, low-calorie cooking!).

Pies Ready for Oven

We don't have any special dishes for pot pie and I thought that it would be nice to make individual ones, so I repurposed a couple of cereal bowls. I topped each with pie crust (recipe below), trimmed the crust, crimped it into the rim of the bowls with the tines of a fork, slit the crusts for steam vents, and brushed the tops with egg wash. 

The pies want to be in a hot oven (425F) until the top crusts brown nicely. I want to say that these took 35-40 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock like a hawk.

Pie Crust Recipe

This is my tried and true all-butter super flaky pie crust. I would love to say that I learned it from my mother or her mother, inveterate pie bakers both, but that wouldn't be the truth. They were diehard Southerners and it was Crisco for their pie crust or nothing. I gave up on trans fats and hydrogenated shortening a very, very long time ago in favor of butter or (rarely) lard.

The following recipe will make a generous single pie crust (with generally enough left over to make a lattice top), depending on what size pie plate you are making. I measure my baking ingredients by weight in grams. If you do not have a scale, get one. It will be the single best thing you can do to improve your baking.

150 grams all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

140 grams cold butter, in small cubes

ice water as needed

Spin the flour and salt in the food processor for a second to mix it. Add the cold butter cubes and pulse. Pulse until the butter resembles really small peas in size. Add a couple tablespoons of water and pulse. Add water in dribbles and pulse in between. When the dough just starts to come together, bring it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a flat disc. Wrap it in film and refrigerate for an hour to cool it off. After this rest, it will be ready to use.

New Year's Black-Eyed Peas

It's an old tradition, at least in the South, that we eat black-eyed peas for good luck in the new year. I don't know what in the hell happened in 2020: I assure you that I ate my black-eyed peas. This year, I wanted to do a dish reminiscent of my time in New Orleans, a creole take on a black-eyed pea stew.

Creole Black-Eyed Peas

Ready to Cook

The dish is simply made. I decided to start with two pounds of dried black-eyed peas because I wanted leftovers for lunches. After draining and rinsing the soaked peas, I put them in the slow cooker with a chunk of smoked turkey neck, large can of diced tomatoes and juice, a lot of minced garlic (an entire bulb, minced), and a bunch of "trinity." My trinity comprised two poblanos, a bunch of green onions, a huge yellow onion, and three stalks of celery, all diced. I filled the slow cooker with water and put it on high for seven hours (and it was done in about 6:45).

Later in the day, I mixed up a batch of my Cajun spice mix, which I call Magic Dust. I would have put it in from the get go, but I was out. My spice mix contains thyme, salt, black pepper, white pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne pepper, basil, oregano, smoked paprika, mustard, and bay leaves. I grind the basil, oregano, mustard, thyme, and bay to order. My ratios have been determined by trial and error over forty years. I don't currently have any onion powder, so I went heavy on the granulated garlic. I added three heaping spoonsful of spice mix to the stew.

Once the beans were tender, I mashed a bunch of them against the side of the slow cooker with the back of a wooden spoon. This helps thicken the stew, otherwise, you end up with a sort of thin black-eyed pea soup, not what I was aiming at.

Although this stew contains a chunk of smoked turkey for flavor, it would make a fantastic vegetarian stew by omitting the meat. My Cajun spice mix has enough smoked paprika in it to give a smoky flavor without the smoked meat.

Soupe de Poisson

Soupe de poisson, bouillabaise, and cioppino are names for a class of tomato-based fish soups. In English, I call them generically fish stew, though they are clear broth-based soups rather than thicker stews. I love these soups, in part because I have great memories of eating them on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. In fact, I love them so much that I put this dish on my opening night menu at my restaurant.

In recent months, I have turned Ann on to this soup and she is so taken with it that she has requested it once a week. That's a little too frequent for me, but soupe de poisson has been a regular staple at our dinner table since the weather turned cold.

This is not a soup for fine fish; this soup is a means to use the lesser types of fish and shellfish. Locally, we get rockfish or Pacific cod. For shellfish, this soup works well with either shrimp or mussels.

Soupe de Poisson with Pacific Cod: Fish Stew

I don't have a fixed recipe in that each batch varies with what I have on hand, as it does in houses all over the Western world. What you need are aromatics (leek, onion, garlic, celery, green pepper, red pepper, fennel), tomatoes, some good stock (fish or chicken), saffron, some herbs (basil, parsley), and a bit of spice (red pepper flakes).

Another Version with Shrimp

Soupe de Poisson

The following recipe is more idea than recipe in that each time I make this delicious fish stew, it differs. I have given quantities below which at our house feed the two of us quite well with a bit leftover for the next day. Though the recipe is highly flexible, I would say that its charm derives from saffron and if you don't have saffron, you don't have this soup.

I have bastardized this soup: in France, you typically will not find peppers in your fish soup. I love them and this is my soup, so in they go. Your clue that the soup in France might contain peppers is that it will be named after another place: à la brésilienne or à l'espagnole, for example.

1 yellow onion, diced
1 leek, diced
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
1 poblano pepper, diced
1 red frying pepper, diced
2 stalks of celery, diced
1 sprig of lovage
1 large pinch saffron
1 restrained pinch of red pepper flakes
1 to 2 teaspoons of dried basil
1 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes in juice
1-1/2 quarts/liters of fish (or chicken) stock
1 pound inexpensive white fish, cut in bite-sized pieces 

The basic approach is to prep all the vegetables and cut the fish into bite-sized pieces. Then cook the mirepoix in olive oil along with a heavy pinch of saffron, a slight pinch of red pepper flakes, and a teaspoon or more of dried basil. When the onions and/or leeks are translucent, add the tomatoes and stock and cook for 20 minutes or so to give the flavors time to come together.

When you're ready to serve, season the broth and bring to a boil. Add the fish and turn off the heat. Serve as soon as the fish is cooked through.

This is the recipe that I would make assuming that I had all ingredients on hand. I often do not have red frying peppers on hand, except in August and September. I would never make this soup with green bell peppers: I do not like their flavor the first time or the second time. I always have poblanos in my refrigerator. Leeks I love in this soup, but they are scarce during the summer months.

While celery is a must, I don't expect you to make this dish using lovage, but I am addicted to its haunting celery-esque flavor. Lovage (livèche for mes amis français) is uncommon everywhere and alas, I will have no more until spring.

More common in the south of France is some form of licorice flavor. If I had a fennel bulb, I would add it. If I had some pastis on my bar, I would add a shot to the soup. Alas, we ran out of pastis in making fabulous cocktails called Le Rendezvous from barman extraordinaire Alain in Grand Case, St. Martin.

I prefer dried basil in this soup to fresh, though in the summer, I will toss a sprig or two of fresh basil in with the lovage in addition to the dried basil. Sometimes, I add a bit of fresh Italian parsley to the soup at the end when I add the fish.

The stock is critical. The collagen in the stock from the bones you used in making it give it a great mouthfeel and body that will make your soup stand out. I have recently had a lot of freshly made chicken stock on hand and I have used that with great result. As our diet transitions away from meat and more towards seafood, I will end up buying some fish bones at the market with which to make my stock.

As for fish, the best soups have a mixture of so-called trash fish which is all well and good when you are at a restaurant with access to a lot of fish and are feeding a lot of people. At home, however, one species of fish will suffice.

Pasta Fagioli

Pasta e Fagioli

"I had an open can of cannellini in the walk in."

Alex, what is "Why did you decide to make pasta fagioli tonight?" Saturday evening, for Sunday dinner, Ann asked me to surprise her because we were staying in and cooking, a decision taken directly from the weather forecast which predicted a wintry mix all day (but, typical of such forecasts, never came to be). From making another batch of minestrone last weekend, I had the bulk of a huge can of cannellini in the cooler that needed to be used.

While trying to decide what to make, I remember Ann telling me that I went the entirety of 2014 without making her a batch of pasta fagioli, (clearly, she forgets this batch), so I thought that I would  surprise her with one of our favorite comfort foods.

All the Ingredients Save White Wine and Cannellini

Each batch, and there are at least four batches documented here on this blog, is different. In this case, there was too much snow in the garden to go hunting for thyme and sage, so I was content with parsley and rosemary from the cooler. And no time or desire to go shopping for a box of ditalini, so we made do with orzo from the pantry. The mirepoix for this batch was onion, carrot, celery, and a fennel bulb. I always add fennel if I have it, but I usually don't have it. Pancetta is de rigueur, but sausage or bacon would do in a pinch. Lucky for us, I always have a slab or two of pancetta hanging in the cooler and another in the cure. And finally, I cooked the pasta directly in the beans. Ordinarily, I cook them separately. All this is by way of saying, it is a simple pot of beans and pasta and no matter how you make it, it will be delicious.