Cooking up a Birthday Dinner

Annie had yet another birthday to celebrate and because we had just days before gone out to pretty much the only restaurant we like for our anniversary, we decided to stay in and celebrate with a nice meal here at home, just the two of us and Rob and Dyce.

I was motivated to cook. Coming off a busy summer and a three-week trip to Iceland, I really had not cooked a decent meal in months. I am not talking day-to-day cooking which is generally a one-pan meal that takes 15 to 30 minutes to prep. Post-restaurant, a one-pan meal is about all I am inclined to make without some special reason. Ann's birthday provided just such a special reason to put some effort into planning and cooking.

Another Birthday in the Books
Celebrating with Diebolt-Vallois Brut Rosé

The menu was inspired by Ann's recent dental work that left her unable to chew on one side, requiring food that is soft in texture. I do not find restrictions like this a problem. On the contrary, boundaries, such as a vegetarian meal or soft foods as in this case, help me narrow the focus.

Left to my own devices, I could come up with way too many ideas, which is why at the restaurant, trips to the farmers market or walking through our pantry were most helpful in designing a menu for the night. They helped narrow the scope to ingredients that were immediately available. Though many cooks find "Chopped" types of competitions where they must use a specific set of ingredients to be too restrictive, I thrive on it.

For this birthday dinner, I imposed another restriction: the menu should involve as little à la minute, last-minute, cooking as possible so that I could spend time with our guests rather than at the stove. And like an idiot, I got so wrapped up in entertaining that I forgot to take pictures during dinner.

In creating the menu, the restriction to soft-textured foods screamed braised meat to me and what better to accompany braised meat than risotto? A soft dessert would be something like a pudding and do you know a simpler or better-loved pudding-like dish than crème brûlée?

For the starter course, a recent inventory of the pantry left me thinking about a bag of white beans, so a white bean soup would start the meal off. My initial thought was a white bean and rosemary cream with some kind of seafood garnish, something that would pair well with a white wine. And as the recent days were warm, I was thinking a room temperature soup with a cool garnish, a crab salad or something else that Ann could chew easily.

Naturally, a menu is also a reflection of the ingredients that are available at any given time. In this small city in the middle of nowhere, hours from any big city, I must design meals around the products that are available, rather than the products I wish were available. For example, there is no good source of seafood here in the high desert, nor is there acceptable rice for risotto. I order my rice from the internet.

Moreover, in my shopping, I knew I would never find ossobuco or lamb shank to braise; however, Costco sometimes has beef ribs. I got lucky and I bought one of their two packages of beef plate ribs. Plan C would have been to score a chuck roast and shred it into the risotto after braising. In the freezer section at the grocery, I also found serendipitously a package of frozen marrow bones while looking for stock bones.

A bonus, the marrow would finish the risotto with butter and cheese in the mantecare stage, the final stage when fat is stirred into the cooked rice to enrich it. After removing the marrow from the bones, I would contribute the marrow bones to the stock pot. The resulting stock would be the liquid in which I would braise the ribs. And then all the braising liquid would ultimately become a sauce for the ribs and risotto.

This menu naturally divided itself into two day's of work. The first day, I would make the stock, cook the white beans for the soup, and bake the crème brûlée, leaving the oven free the next day to braise the ribs. In addition to braising the ribs, the second day would see me finish the bean soup, design a garnish for the soup, and make the sauce for the beef after the ribs were cooked.

Ann thinks that this is a lot of work, but more than anything, it is a lot of small steps, steps that I scheduled around working in the office and taking walks. I do not look at cooking meals such as this as work.

Cooking Marrow Bones, Chuck, and Veg for Stock

Deglazing the Roasting Pan

To start the stock, I browned the ribs in a roasting pan to start creating a fond, brown bits, on the bottom of the pan. After they cooled, I refrigerated them to braise the next day. To the roasting pan, I added stock vegetables (onion, carrot, and celery), beef chuck, and the marrow bones. It took about 45 minutes in a very hot oven to roast and brown everything on all sides, with one or two turns.

After roasting the marrow bones, I scooped out the marrow and refrigerated it for finishing the risotto. Then all the bones, meat, and vegetables went into a stock pot with a couple of smashed cloves of garlic still skin-on, the peels and trimmings from the stock vegetables, a sprig of rosemary, a couple sprigs of thyme, a bunch of parsley stems, and the outer leaves from a leek.

And I threw in a wee bit of chef magic as well: a tablespoon of estratto di pomodoro (rich Sicilian tomato paste) and some dried porcini powder/bits from the bottom of the canister. Neither will be detectable in the final sauce but will add great umami. Deep flavor does not happen spontaneously; it is a thoughtful process of layering flavors.

When roasting vegetables and bones for stock, the idea is to cook them long enough not only to caramelize them, but to build up a good fond, the glaze of brown bits on the bottom of the roasting pan. After removing the roasted ingredients to the stock pot, I deglazed the roasting pan with water, scraping well to clean the bottom. All that caramelized goodness brings incredible flavor to the stock.

The dark and flavorful deglazing liquid went into the stock pot along with beef stock. Using a stock to make another stock is called a double stock; double stocks have additional depth of flavor over single stocks. In this case, for the first meal after the weather turned cold (snow on the mountains!), I wanted a dish that was deep and rich in flavor, ultra-comforting, and pairable with a Châteauneuf-du-Pape-style red wine. I chose an Italian blend that I find pairs comparably to CdP, a Valpolicella Classico Superiore. Valpolicella does not get a lot of love, but there are some great ones out there.

The stock simmered for most of the day before I strained it, reserved the chuck for another meal, and put the strained stock in the fridge to cool overnight to solidify the fat floating on top.

The next day, to start the braise, I cut some mirepoix (an onion, a large carrot, and stalk of celery) into medium dice. I sweated the vegetables with a stalk of rosemary and a couple of minced cloves of garlic in an enameled cast iron cocotte. Removing the rosemary, I added the gelled stock from which I had removed the congealed layer of fat. Arranging the ribs in the cocotte, I covered it and put it in a slow (275F) oven at noon, planning to serve the ribs around 1900.

Second Day: Adding Defatted Beef Stock to Sautéed Mirepoix

Beef Ribs Seared and Ready to Braise

Braised Ribs, Held Hot for Service

Not knowing how long the ribs would take to cook I checked them every half hour after three hours in the oven. They were perfect, soft and succulent, in four hours. I removed them to a half pan, covered the pan with film, and put it back in the oven to hot hold until dinner. The Keep Warm setting on my oven keeps them about 170F, above the temperature danger zone limit of 140F. The FDA Food Code changed this some years ago to 135, but I am an old school chef who learned 140.

I planned to keep the vegetables in the braising liquid as part of the final sauce, a rustic touch rather than a fine dining touch. Other options would be to strain them out or blend them in. After transferring the braising liquid to a sauce pan, I could see a half-inch or so of grease on top of the would-be sauce, so using a 2-ounce ladle, I carefully defatted the sauce.

Bringing the braising liquid to a simmer, I brought it down to the final volume of sauce that I wanted, carefully skimming any film and fat that rose to the surface. Once at the final volume, I decided that I wanted the sauce thicker. At this point, I could have thickened the sauce by blending in the vegetables, the cuisine minceur technique unabashedly stolen from Michel Guérard, (RIP chef) or using the traditional method, adding bits of beurre manié, equal parts of butter and flour kneaded together. I chose the latter.

On to the soup course which I planned to make with fagioli di Controne which Ann gave to me as a surprise. They are labeled no-soak and so I thought that would be a great time saver in making the soup base. These are a rare heirloom bean reportedly of thin skin and great flavor. I was excited to try them.

Fagioli di Controne, "No-Soak" My Ass

Beans, Sprig of Rosemary, Two Cloves Garlic, Ready to Cook

All I can say is that it is a good thing that I cooked the beans the day before, starting early in the morning. At seven hours in, they were still crunchy. Finally, they softened after eight hours and to get to the super soft stage that I wanted for a cream soup required nine hours and 15 minutes. Never again will I fall for the no soak baloney. That said, they do have thin skins and excellent flavor, but they are no easier to cook than any other dried bean.

The next day, I made the soup base by blending the beans to silky smooth in my big blender which does such an excellent job that I had no need to pass the beans through a chinois to make them silky. For service, I warmed the bean purée with a bit of heavy cream and adjusted the seasoning. Finding it a little flat, I added a couple of drops of Sherry vinegar to perk it up. The vinegar did its job admirably.

Lemon and Rosemary, Ready to Infuse into Cream

Back to the first day, after starting the stock and the beans cooking, I made the crème brûlée, choosing to flavor it with lemon and rosemary. To start, I brought two cups of 40% cream (the good stuff, compared to the garden variety 36%) to the scalding point with the zest of two lemons and a sprig of rosemary. After the cream cooled to the point where I could taste it, I added just enough sugar to barely sweeten it and make the flavorings sing. Adding a pinch of salt, I stirred to dissolve the sugar and the salt in the warm cream, then let the cream cool so that it would not curdle the egg yolks.

I strained the now lukewarm cream into a bowl containing 7 egg yolks (3 for each cup of cream, plus one for good luck, an admittedly rich custard base). After stirring well, I strained the custard yet again into a quart measure to remove any egg strands. In the absence of a sauce funnel which I would have used at the restaurant, a standard lipped measure let me pour the custard into the cups without dribbling all over the rims, a culinary faux pas.

I put the custard cups into a half pan before filling them, then to make a water bath, poured cold water in the half pan to come up to the level of the custard in the cups. Some people advocate using hot water but I think the product has better texture the slower it cooks, so I use cold water to retard the cooking.

Use the Torch to Pop Any Surface Bubbles

Before I bake any kind of custard, I run my torch lightly over the surface of the custard to pop any bubbles that may have formed during stirring or pouring. This is not necessary, but it will create a smooth finish rather than one pock-marked by bubbles that popped during baking. I put the custards into a moderate oven (350F) and checked them periodically. These took 35 minutes, all told.

To tell if the custards are done, grab one with tongs and give it a little shake. When the custards are set around the edges with only a quarter-sized spot in the center that is still loose, they are ready to come out of the oven. Remove from the water bath, dry them, wrap them individually with film, and refrigerate for service.

Moving on to the risotto: I discovered early in my planning that I did not have enough Arborio rice in the pantry for four servings, but too late to order some. Not to worry: Israeli couscous makes a fine fake risotto that people never fail to love. And unlike Arborio that I have to order in, I can buy Israeli couscous in bulk at my grocery. It is a pantry staple at our house.

Making the ersatz risotto milanese with Israeli couscous is identical to making the real thing, but just a little bit quicker, say 14-15 minutes versus 20. Start by sweating an onion and saffron in butter or olive oil, add the couscous and cook for a minute, then add chicken stock by dribbles, and cook until it is done, stirring and topping off the stock as necessary. When done, I stirred in a good bit of grated cheese, butter, and the bone marrow. Ann says she likes this better than with rice.

"Risotto Milanese"
Israeli Couscous with Bone Marrow

I needed to make a garnish for the soup. My original intent, when the weather was warm, was to serve a room temperature cream soup with a seafood salad for garnish. Then, the weather turned cold as it does this time of year, dictating a warm soup and warm garnish, turning my original idea on its head.

Fresh seafood of acceptable quality to a finicky chef is hard to find here and crab season closed in August, eliminating crab as a possibility. That left frozen seafood and I found some small white shrimp that would lend themselves to a salad. I had thought to chop them to help Ann chew them, but they were small enough to serve whole.

My working concept for the shrimp was inspired by the Italian white wine I had selected for the course, Roero Arneis. I would just barely cook them in olive oil, garlic, and a touch of tomato paste that would tint the oil red, to be drizzled on the soup for a contrasting garnish. However, during the course of the day, I kept coming back to the Sherry vinegar that I used to give the soup sufficient acid to perk it up, a Spanish touch and not an Italian one at all.

I hit on a warm salad dressing with Spanish flavors. Moments before serving, I cooked the shrimp in olive oil with a touch of pimentón de la Vera (smoked paprika) to give the oil the red color, then removed it from the pan. In went some shallots to just brown around the edges, then I splashed the pan with more Sherry vinegar to create a warm shallot-pimentón vinaigrette. I dressed the shrimp, so small that I really did not need to chop them as planned, with a bit of vinaigrette and used the remainder to drizzle on the soup for garnish.

Rob and Dyce Brought
André Clouet Un Jour de 1911 Champagne

While I was finishing the soup, we opened the bottle of André Clouet Un Jour de 1911 Champagne that Rob and Dyce brought. Made in a turn of the 20th century style, this wine is interesting, baked apples and yeast on the palate with a hint of oxidation. This is a much different wine than we usually drink and I enjoyed it because it was so different.

Shrimp and White Beans, Warm Shallot-Pimentón Vinaigrette
Served with Paitin Roero Arneis

Short Rib on Israeli Couscous "Risotto Milanese" with
Serego Alighieri Monte Piazzo Valpolicella Classico Superiore

Lemon-Rosemary Crème Brûlée

Happy Birthday to This Girl!

One Chicken, Three Meals

I've been wondering a lot recently about how to help people who don't have a lot of money make meals economically. What I see at the grocery store really causes me pause: almost all carts of groceries contain extremely expensive pre-prepared and probably not very nutritious foods, while very few carts actually contain items designed to be cooked into healthy meals.

I haven't really made any headway in figuring out how to help such people, but I thought I'd share how I put three dinners for two on the table for about $20. It all started with a single chicken, a 6-pound behemoth for which I paid $8.

Meal 1: Roasted Chicken and Roasted Asparagus

Roasted Chicken

This is as simple as dinner can get. I rubbed the entire chicken with olive oil and sprinkled it with salt and fresh thyme leaves. I put it on a sheet tray into the oven and cooked it until the thighs came up to 165 degrees in the thickest part, about 90 minutes in the oven at 375F.

When the chicken was done, I left it to stand on the stove while I put another sheet tray of asparagus drizzled with a little oil and salt into the oven. We ate the thighs, legs, and asparagus about 20 minutes later.

Additional cost for this meal $2.50: big bundle of asparagus: $2.50; fresh thyme, salt, olive oil: pennies

After dinner, I collected all the roasting juices from the chicken pan by adding a bit of hot water to it and then pouring it into a container. These juices were for soup later on. I sliced 3 nice slices off each breast and saved them for crunch wraps the next night. I also saved the bones from the legs and thighs as well as the chicken carcass for soup.

Meal 2: Chicken Tinga and Chipotle Refried Bean Crunch Wraps

Chicken Tinga and Chipotle Refried Bean Crunch Wraps

Using the leftover slices of chicken breast, I made crunch wraps with a layer each of chipotle refried beans, chicken breast in tinga sauce, and cheese.

To make the refried beans, I sweated an onion, finely diced, in oil until translucent. I put half the onion in the blender for the tinga sauce. To the remaining onion in the pan, I added two 14-ounce cans of drained and rinsed pinto beans. Then I added the tiniest pinch of Mexican oregano and one chipotle pepper, super finely minced. I added a touch of water to get things cooking and as everything cooked, I mashed the beans with the back of my wooden spoon. When the beans became tight, I turned of the heat.

To make the tinga sauce, I added to the onions in the blender a drained 14-ounce can of tomatoes, a chipotle, a pinch of Mexican oregano, and a pinch of salt. After blending this briefly using a couple of pulses of the blender, I added the sauce to a small pan on the stove where I heated it gently and reduced it to remove any excess water.

When I was ready to assemble the crunch wraps, I put the chicken breast slices in the warm sauce to reheat. Then I built the crunch wraps with a layer of beans, then the chicken slices, then a scant half cup of grated cheddar cheese. I mixed the leftover tinga sauce into the unused beans and had that for lunch the next day. See this post for the crunch wrap technique.

Additional cost for this meal $4.25: 2 cans pintos; $1.25, 1 can tomatoes: $1; tortillas: $0.50; onion $0.50; cheese: $1; 2 chipotles, Mexican oregano: pennies

These crunch wraps are actually massive and could stretch for two meals. After eating my entire one for dinner, I did not eat breakfast the next day, being still sated from dinner.

Meal 3: Chicken and Stars Soup

Chicken and Stars Soup

One of the primary reasons that I roast chickens is to have the carcass leftover for soup. I put into a soup pot the carcass, the leftover roasting juices, a couple sprigs of thyme, a quart of chicken stock, the ends of five carrots, the outer leaves of a leek (saved for soup from a meal earlier in the week), and the frilly leaves from a bunch of celery. After topping the carcass and vegetables with water, I put a low flame under it and went for a 90-minute walk.

When I came back, I turned the pot off and removed all the solids from the stock. After the chicken cooled, I picked all the meat from the bones (the remaining breast meat, the wings, and the oysters in the back) and saved it, pitching the bones and veggie scraps.

I cut one onion, four large carrots, and four stalks of celery into large pieces and put them in the stock and let them cook for an hour. When we were ready to eat, I brought the soup to a rolling boil and added a small 200g bag of pasta stars (estrellas, stelline) and the chicken meat and cooked the pasta for ten minutes.

Additional cost for this meal $5.25: chicken stock: $1.50; pasta: $0.75; onions, carrots, celery: $3

If I were on a budget, I would not have added the chicken stock, but soup is always better if you make a double stock from stock and bones rather than a single stock from water and bones. After two bowls of soup apiece, we had two additional bowls leftover for lunch.

Bottom Line

For these three meals for two, I spent right at $20. As a bonus, we had three lunches from the leftovers, all from a single chicken. I'm always thinking when I am shopping for groceries items that I can cook for one dinner and have leftovers to repurpose for another dinner.

Leek and Dill Mussels

Ann and I love mussels. Living in Central Oregon in the desert affords us no real opportunities for access to mussels, however. I took it upon myself to special order a bag of mussels at the store in hopes of surprising Ann.

The store notified me when they arrived and I hurried to get a 5-kilo (11-pound) sack of mussels from Puget Sound west of Tacoma. Sadly, I got no price break on the full bag and ended up paying a small fortune for them.

The mussels ended up being European mussels, no doubt farm-raised, very thin shelled and quite fragile, with extensive beards but otherwise clean, unevenly sized, almost all alive, and with tiny meats. I was disappointed and would not buy them again. Ann was happy just to have mussels and was less disappointed than I.

My disappointment comes from my experience with East Coast mussels. At my restaurant I started off serving farmed PEIs but their erratic quality and supply chain issues convinced me to switch to wild Cape Cod blues, the best mussels I've ever eaten. These Cape blues are now the gold standard by which I judge all mussels and these Puget Sound mussels sucked in comparison.

Quality issues aside, the following discussion about cleaning and preparation applies to mussels from any source. The goal is to clean the mussels of any foreign matter, to remove the so-called beards with which they attach themselves to surfaces, and to discard any broken or dead mussels.

Step One: Cover the Mussels in Water

The first thing that I do is to cover the mussels in fresh water. This will cause any live mussels to close their shells. Any mussel that floats is alive; in closing, they can trap enough air to float. You know that these mussels are good and you can start cleaning them.

Mussel with Beard

I've cleaned hundreds of thousands of mussels in my life and I believe that the best thing to use is a dishtowel, as unpopular as that may be at your house. [Hence why I buy bundles of bar mops from a restaurant supply house and discard them once I mess them up too badly.] Use the towel to get a grip on the slippery beard and pull it down towards the hinge, the pointy end of the mussel that is closest to the camera in the photo above. With a little tug, it should pull right out. Then using the towel, wipe any dirt off the mussel.

As you work your way through the mussels, you will run out of floaters. Just because mussels have sunk to the bottom of the bowl does not mean that they are bad or even dead. It may mean that they remained fully closed without any trapped air inside their shells or it may mean that they were a little slow to close on contact with the water and filled with water.

As you consider a mussel, if its shell is broken, discard it. If it is closed tightly, wiggle the shells a bit between your fingers to see if you can move the two shells apart. Sometimes the closed shells are full of mud and no mussel; these shells will separate fairly easily.

If a mussel is slightly open, you need to determine if it is alive. Give the two shells a gentle squeeze together. If the mussel is alive, this will trigger it to close. If it does not respond to this stimulus, throw it out.

Once the mussels are cleaned, they are ready for the pot. Cook them in a covered pot (or as we did at the restaurant, using two skillets, one inverted over the other as a makeshift lid). I generally start by sautéing a bit of onion, garlic, leek, or shallot in olive oil or butter.

Once that starts to smell good, I add the mussels to the pan making sure to leave head room for them to open their shells. Then I splash the wine with a small amount of cooking liquid, generally white wine. I have used and you could use just about any liquid including tomato juice, red wine, beer, broth, coconut milk, and so forth depending on how you want to sauce the mussels. You only need a little liquid because when the mussels open, they will release plenty of their own liquid.

Mussels Steaming in Sautéed Leeks and White Wine

In very short order, the mussels will open and the meats will go from translucent to solid color. At this point, I remove them to a service bowl discarding any mussels that failed to open.

At this point, I finish the sauce to pour over or enjoy on the side with the mussels. In this case, I added fresh dill to the mussel broth and whisked in some cold butter to lightly thicken the sauce. You really want to be careful with mussel broth not to reduce it no matter how great the temptation. Mussel liquid is highly briny and often tastes lightly of iodine, both flavors of the sea.

I once, as a young chef, had the bright idea to highly reduce the mussel liquid and use the resulting sauce to nap the cooked mussels, two mussel meats put into one half shell. Nice idea. But after a long time gently bringing the sauce to napping consistency, I tasted it to correct the seasoning. And I immediately spit the over salty, iodine-tasting mess in the trash. Don't be like young Ed. Learn from his lesson.

Butter and Dill for Finishing the Mussel Sauce

Steamed Mussels, Leek and Dill Broth on the Side

For me, the primary reason for cooking mussels is the resulting tasty broth. Sometimes I serve mussels in a bowl of broth; sometimes I put the broth on the side for dipping the mussel meats in. One of the joys of mussels is drinking all that great broth after you have eaten the mussels, or more hedonistically, using lots of great bread to sop up the broth. It irked me to no end to have customers at the restaurant not eat the broth after I spent all that time and effort in making it.

Leek and Mussel Soup

I'd never throw away any mussel broth and we had a lot left over after eating the mussel meats. The following evening, I put it in a soup pan, added a couple more leeks, and a splash of half and half. When the leeks were tender, I blended it to ultra-smooth and served it, still frothy from the blender, in coffee cups accompanied by slices of quesadilla for dipping.

Bottom line, I was terribly disappointed in the quality of these spendy mussels, but the two dinners from them made me very happy.

Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

I have always loved black-eyed peas. Not only are they part and parcel of my Southern heritage, but they are also delicious, easy to grow, and easy to shell. 

Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

Black-eyed peas are very different from beans even though the two are used in the same ways; they belong to two different botanical families. While beans are decidedly New World, field peas such as black-eyed peas come from the Old World, West Africa to be precise. All the types of field peas are lumped into the term cowpea (from their heritage as animal fodder).

I have eaten all manner of cowpeas under many names and in many colors and shapes, such as crowder peas, Sea Island red peas, black-eyed peas, cream peas, lady peas, and pink eye peas. Culinarily, they are interchangeable and for my taste, the fresh green versions are better than the dried versions. At least, they are very different in flavor profile. A green black-eyed pea will be very mild and quick cooking; dried black-eyes are deep and rich in flavor and need long cooking.

It being just after the first of the year, black-eyed peas have been on my mind. For us Southerners, a batch of black-eyed peas are required dining to bring good luck for the forthcoming year. For various reasons, I did not make my usual New Years' black-eyed peas, so I wanted to rectify that.

As I was walking the grocery store recently, the idea of a black-eyed pea and corn gumbo sprang into my mind unbidden and I stopped by the freezer aisle to score a couple bags of frozen green black-eyed peas and frozen sweet corn kernels. Both of these vegetables freeze well and are among the only frozen vegetables that I use (the odd bag of  pearl onions aside).

Last night was an opportune moment to make said gumbo and so I started as I do all my gumbos by making a roux. Not wanting to set off the smoke detectors in the house, I kept my roux to medium brown, about two-thirds of the way to being a black roux.

A gumbo roux is one part each of fat and flour, heated while stirring, until the flour browns to the shade that you require. The rule of thumb is that the lighter the protein (chicken, seafood) the darker the roux and the darker the meat (venison, pork) the lighter the roux. Back in 2008, I did a pictorial on making roux, if you want to see the process in action.

The next step in making a gumbo for me is to add the trinity (mirepoix, the Cajun holy trinity: onions, peppers, and celery) to the roux which stops the roux from browning further and starts to cook the vegetables. I used one and a half poblano peppers, two stalks of celery, one really large onion, one half a bunch of green onions, and about six cloves of garlic, minced.

After stirring the vegetables in, I added about a quarter cup of my home-grown Cajun spice mix and let it cook briefly before adding a quart of water. If I had a good vegetable stock, I would have used that instead of water. I turned the heat down and left the stew base to simmer for a half an hour at which point, I added two bags of frozen black-eyed peas and let them cook until they were tender, about twenty minutes. After the gumbo cooks for a while, the oil that you used in the roux will gather on top and you can ladle it away.

To finish the gumbo, I added the corn and then I seasoned and thickened it. In terms of thickening gumbo, there are two methods, one from African slaves and one from indigenous tribes. Now would be a good time to mention that gumbo derived from the Angolan word kingombo, meaning okra, The first means of thickening is to add sliced okra to the stew and let it cook in well. The okra will largely disintegrate and all its (frankly, nasty) mucilaginous interior will thicken the stew.

The second method, from the Choctaw tribes native to the Gulf South, is to stir in filé powder, ground sassafras leaves. Sassafras is a small shrub/tree native to the southeast, a shrub whose roots and bark make a nice tea and whose leaves lend a spicy herbal note to dishes, reminiscent to me in some ways of thyme.

I am not the world's biggest okra fan, having had to eat way too much of it as a child and worse, having had to pick it daily as a child. Cutting okra is an unpleasant experience. It grows in hot humid places such as Alabama where I spent my teenage years. And the head-high plants are horribly irritating to your exposed skin, especially when exacerbated by the inevitable sweat born of such a climate.

Although I could have bought sliced and frozen okra at the grocery store, where it is neatly stacked alongside the black-eyed peas, my aversion to it leads me to thicken my gumbos with filé powder whose flavor I prefer. My mother mostly used okra (duh, they had a freaking garden full of it) and sometimes she committed the culinary faux pas of using both okra and filé powder simultaneously, something that could result in your excommunication from the Southern fraternity in certain areas.

I will say that I do love fried okra, just not the boiled crap that my mother insisted I eat or go hungry. Going hungry was very tempting, I must say.

At the last moment, I stirred in a good bit of salt, filé powder, and the frozen corn. I turned off the heat and let the gumbo stand for five minutes to let the corn warm through. Sweet corn kernels need no cooking at all. And there you have it, a quick gumbo of black-eyed peas and corn.

Meatball Soup

Looking through the refrigerator on a cold March day, I spied a pound of ground turkey, two quarts of homemade chicken stock, and a bit each of baby spinach and arugula that was nearly shot. The cold weather definitely put me in a soup mood and for some reason, I thought to make the meatball soup that is commonly called Italian Wedding Soup here in the US.

Meatball Soup

This family of soups is not known by that name in Italy, however. It is often called zuppa di scarola (escarole soup, when made with escarole) or zuppa di verdure e polpettine (soup of greens and little meatballs). The English name comes from minestra maritata (married soup) from the marriage of the flavor of the greens and the meatballs, a happy union to be celebrated for sure! It's a great soup, but alas, has nothing to do with weddings.

I flavored my chicken stock with diced onions, leeks, celery, and carrots, poaching until just tender. Then I added the meatballs to the simmering stock for about 15 minutes. After poaching the meatballs in the soup, I added a little Mexican orzo-shaped pastina called semillas (seeds), the spinach, and arugula and let it simmer until the pasta was just done, another 8 or so minutes. All in all, this is a very quick and easy soup.

The Meatball Mix

The meatball mix could not be simpler, yet it is super flavorful, flavorful enough that Ann has asked me to make it over and over again as patties and as meatloaf. Many people would add grated cheese to their meatballs, but I was looking for a lower fat meatball, so I did not. To a pound of ground turkey, I added a bunch of finely chopped Italian parsley, four cloves of minced garlic, a teaspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of Kosher salt, a pinch of pepperoncini (dried pepper flakes), and a slug of white wine.

Poaching the Meatballs

Arroz con Pollo Soup

One of my favorite meals is arroz con pollo, the dish of baked chicken and rice. I made it frequently for staff meals at the restaurant and it is one of my go-to dishes when I want comfort. It's turned cold here in Oregon (heretofore, our winter has been extremely mild as is usual) and that's got me wanting both hot soup and comfort.

I was going to make a salad a couple nights ago, but the weather turned against that, as did Ann, who in rebelling against the salad idea said, "I want soup." In going through the refrigerator, I saw leftover chicken, chicken stock, and diced Anaheim chiles from our Super Bowl chicken chile tostadas.

I started craving arroz con pollo, but with only a few ounces of cooked chicken on hand, I wasn't equipped to make it. But in response to Ann's request, I could make a killer soup from the leftovers that would taste identical to arroz con pollo.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

Soffritto for Soup

I started by warming the leftover chicken, stock, and chiles with a can of tomatoes while I prepped the vegetables for the soffritto: a yellow onion, half a bunch of green onions, a bunch of cilantro, a yellow pepper, a poblano, and eight cloves of garlic. I sautéed all these veg with a big pinch of saffron until the onions started to go translucent. Into the stock pot they went to simmer for a half an hour. I seasoned the soup with salt and sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños) and then tossed in two big handfuls of rice to cook in the broth.

I would typically make this dish with achiote instead of saffron, but I don't have any achiote. Achiote was very common and cheap on the East Coast where a lot of our immigrants came from the Yucatán, the Caribbean, and other eastern locales where achiote is king. Out west, there doesn't appear to be the demand for achiote and I cannot find it anywhere, hence the saffron. I'm sure I can find it in Portland, but who wants to drive in from wine country and deal with that traffic?

This soup hit all the right notes: arroz con pollo flavor and soup comfort with just the right amount of sinus clearing spice. What a great soup!

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 Broth with Egg and Spinach

Ann has been asking me to make a chicken broth-based soup with egg in it for a few weeks now, but it has always been pushed aside for something else. I poached a chicken early this week with the express purpose of making broth for this soup and last night was the night for the soup. To the boiling chicken stock, I added one breast that I diced, two big handfuls of spinach leaves, and five beaten eggs. It was just what the doctor ordered yesterday, after a day of working out in the cold.

Chicken Broth with Egg and Spinach

Almost every culture has its version of chicken broth and egg soup, probably because it is so simple to make, so tasty, so easy to digest, and so comforting, something that mom might make for you when you are not feeling up to par. There are not too many dishes like that in the culinary world! Just off hand, I can think of Cantonese egg drop soup, Greek avgolemono, Italian stracciatella, and Bavarian/Tirolean Eierflockensuppe. Ann, being Italian on all sides of her family, was lucky enough to be fed stracciatella with acini di pepe and parmigiano when she wasn't well!

This soup was the third dish that I made from that very versatile poached chicken. A chicken can so easily feed a lot of people for very little cost, if you know how to stretch them. Consider that with this chicken I made chicken pot pies, chicken tacos, and this soup. This chicken is not done yet: I will roast the remaining bones and skin along with some turkey necks that I have in the freezer to make yet another big pot of turkey-vegetable soup this weekend. I'll have to do a post soon on chicken tacos and how to stretch six ounces of chicken with onions and black beans to feed two people very heartily.

Soupe à l'Oignon

When discussing our holidays back around Thanksgiving, Ann requested that I make her French onion soup, known as soupe à l'oignon in France, for Christmas Eve. I had already had this soup in mind, but not necessarily for Christmas Eve, because we have a 50-pound sack of onions in the pantry to use before they go bad. I don't think that she realized that to make a great batch of this soup is a fair amount of work.

It's a favorite soup of mine that never fails to remind me of all the times that my mother and I made it. When I was a boy, she would put me to work peeling and chopping the onions after which I would take turns keeping an eye on the caramelizing onions, helping to keep them from sticking and burning to the bottom of the pan.

Soupe à l'Oignon with Gratinéed Crouton

Although I have made onion soup in a single day, I decided to spread it into a three-day process, if for no other reason that to have the refrigerator to aid in removing the fat from the soup.

Day 1: Ready to Roast Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Roasted Beef Soup Bones

Day 1: Beef Cheek Meat Ready to Braise

French onion soup wants to be made with a great braising cut of beef. My favorites for braising are, in order: cheek meat, shin meat, and chuck. The cheeks are the most wonderful cut on the animal and we used to serve a lot at the restaurant. Customers would never order them by the name "cheeks" so I adopted a bit of subterfuge in calling them nuggets. We would braise them until tender, refrigerate them to solidify them, then roll them in panko.

At service, we would fry them until the panko was golden and top them with a sauce made from the braising liquid. They appeared on the menu as "crispy beef nuggets" and would sell out pretty instantly. So good were they that regulars, having tasted them once, would not make the mistake of passing them up the next time that they appeared on the menu.

I was thrilled to be able to find cheek meat in my grocery for my Christmas Eve onion soup.

Day 1: Deglazing Browned Beef Cheeks with Pinot Noir

On Day 1, I roasted about five pounds of beef soup bones (split knuckles) and at the same time, braised four pounds of beef cheek meat in Pinot Noir. I transferred the soup bones (less the rendered fat) and the braised cheek meat to a big soup pot and covered everything in water. The soup pot went into the fridge overnight. The water let all the fat rise above the bones and meat so that the following day, I could remove the solidified fat before starting in on the stock.

Day 2 saw me add some thyme branches to the defatted stock and put the stockpot on the stove to cook down for several hours. I removed and discarded the soup bones and thyme, then pulled out the cheek meat. After the cheek meat cooled, I shredded it and pulled out and discarded any remaining fat. The shredded meat went back into the stock and the stock pot went back in the refrigerator, once again for the liquid fat to solidify on top.

Day 3: Fifteen Pounds of Onions to Peel

Day 3: Sliced Onions Ready to Caramelize

Day 3: Caramelized Onions with a Little Flour

Day 3 saw me defat the stock once again and then start in on the onions. You can see that fifteen pounds of onions mounded up and over the top of my pot, then cooked down to about a quarter of a pot full. The caramelization process took several hours. I inverted a skillet over the pot at first to help steam the onions. Quickly, the pot filled about two thirds full of water.

At this point, I uncovered the pot and let it cook on fairly high heat to evaporate the water, stirring every few minutes. Gradually, the onions went from white to cream to yellow to lightly brown to golden brown. The more caramelized the onions became, the more often I had to stir.

Once the onions became fully caramelized and very dry, I stirred in three heaping spoonsful of flour and let that cook for a couple of minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with a quarter bottle of Champagne before adding the onions to the pot of hot beef stock.

The soup cooked for an additional ninety minutes before I seasoned and served it.

Christmas Eve: 2010 Pinot Noir to Celebrate

Onion soup is naturally sweet from all the concentrated sugars in the onions. All this sugar wants a fairly acidic wine to help cut through the richness. Champagne is a great pairing, but then, we live in a world-class Pinot Noir region, so it was Pinot Noir for us. This 10-year old wine has mellowed enough to work with the mellow long-cooked flavors of the soup, while still having a lot of acid to scour our tongues and make each spoon of soup a pleasure.

While there is nothing difficult about making onion soup, it is somewhat labor intensive. But for a special occasion for a special girl, it was totally worth the effort.

Split Pea Soup

It's a kind of miserable day here in Oregon just five days before Thanksgiving, a drippy, bone-chilling kind of day. It's not terribly cold, in the low 40s, but we are socked in by a fog that makes it gray and raw. It's a day on which I just cannot seem to get warm. In short, it's a perfect soup day. Good thing I have split pea soup on the menu for this evening.

Split Pea Soup in the Slow Cooker

Split pea soup is comfort food to a lot of the world. You'll find beloved versions by various names all over the northern hemisphere in the North America, Scandinavia, Europe, Russia, and probably a great more places as well. Its popularity no doubt stems from being cheap, delicious, and almost trivial to prepare.

Split pea soup is a very old dish, an ancient peasant food, well documented by Romans. If you think about the northern British dish pease porridge or pease pudding, the word pease dates back to Middle English, to the 15th or 16th century. As an aside, the word pea is a false singular back derived from the word pease, which was a mass noun with no singular. The dish is probably in our DNA now, being far, far older than that: read more here.

Pease porridge, a thick purée of yellow split peas cooked with ham (or salt pork), is clearly the progenitor of our American split pea and ham soup, a much thinner version made with green split peas. My version for a quick dinner is made without any meat at all. For company, I might include a ham hock and/or some country ham in the soup.

Moreover, no longer living in the country ham capital of the US (Virginia), I wouldn't even know where to find a good ham bone out here in Oregon. We always saved the bones from our Thanksgiving and Christmas hams with which to make a great pot or two of split pea soup. And in the days when we used to boil our country hams to cook them, we would save the ham stock to make split pea soup. But these days when Ann and I are eating meat only sporadically, we go without.

Although I love the soup now, it was not love at first sight. You must admit that the drab green lumpy soup is at first glance pretty off-putting. And off-putting I thought it in about 1970 when my mother first made the soup (she may have made it prior, but I had no memory of eating it prior). I would eat anything (and I still will) to the point where my siblings called me the human vacuum cleaner. But balk I did at olive green soup.

My mom did try every trick in her book to get me to taste it, for the entirety of an afternoon after school. In the end I relented, though I am not sure what persuaded me to try it other than simple hunger, and split peas have taken their rightful place on my list of favorite soups.

Split Pea Soup Recipe

As for a recipe, it is soup. That means nobody cares about exact amounts or an exact list of ingredients. This version was two pounds of green split peas, two medium onions, two large carrots, two stalks of celery, six cloves of garlic (minced), a bunch of silver thyme from out front (leaves plucked), two bay leaves, a couple teaspoons of Kosher salt, a big pinch of black pepper, and a gallon or so of water. In the crockpot on high for four hours and voilà!

For me, I crave the flavor of thyme in my split pea soup. It is missing something if I don't pick up a background hint of thyme. And so I always go out to the garden and bring some in for my batch of soup. I have many thyme plants in the yard, but my favorite with the best flavor is a variegated thyme called silver thyme.

Chile Verde con Pollo

Poblanos, the large dark green triangular and generally mild peppers originating from Puebla, Mexico, are my favorite peppers. One of my most favorite ways to eat them is mixed with tomatillos in the stew called chile verde, a hearty and delicious northern Mexican and New Mexican stew. Chile verde is the opposite of chile colorado, so-called "colored" chile made with dried red chiles. I love both, but my answer to the question "Red or green?" is almost always green.

Chile Verde con Pollo

While chile verde is typically made with pork, I also like it made with chicken thighs. In this version, I poached chicken thighs in water for three hours, then picked the meat from the bones and returned the meat to the chicken stock before adding the remaining ingredients and cooking for another hour.

Chile Verde Ingredients

To the chicken stock and chicken, I add chopped yellow onion, poblanos, green onions, cilantro, minced garlic, and tomatillos. Sometimes I roast the onions, poblanos, garlic, and tomatillos before making the stew. Sometimes not. Chile verde is a soup/stew of infinite variation, for example, sometimes I add hominy (posole) and call it posole verde.

In the summer when working with fresh tomatillos, I would husk them and put them on a sheet tray in the oven and roast them until the skins start to brown. In the off-months, I use canned tomatillos. Because so many packers add additional acid to the tomatillos as a preservative, I drain and rinse them to prevent the sauce from becoming too acidic. Then, I put the tomatillos back in the can, add water or stock, and blitz them with the immersion blender.  You do not have to do this. With sufficient cooking, they will fall apart on their own.

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.