Shepherd's Pie

If the British are known for one thing in their cooking, it's for being about as exciting as a toothache.  But if you like meat and potatoes, forget about going anywhere else, because these folks have this market cornered.  Bangers and mash, kippers and neeps (technically a turnip, but same deal), shepherd's pie, meat pasties - you name it, and folks from the mother land have taken a stab at it.  And by and large, they screwed it up.

That's right, I said it.  I entertain your rebuttal in the comments.  Despite this, I still like British food, because sometimes a man needs to just eat a bunch of meat, served in stew form, with naught but the most basic of flavors.  But in searching for a good Shepherd's Pie recipe, I came across some that I might feed to a dog, but none that I would feed to a diner who wants more than just 'people food'.  So I had to borrow from the French and add some flavor to the recipes, as well as adjust the preparation method to get the most out of the different ingredients.  I even tried to get fancy and pipe my potatoes on the top of the stew, but that didn't quite work out, as we shall see.

Shepherd's Pie is a simple recipe, consisting of a meat stew with a mashed potato crust.  To be proper, I actually made a "Cottage Pie", since shepherd's don't really raise beef but mutton or lamb, but nobody calls it that so I'll stick to my guns on this one.  The dish came about as a way to spread the usage of the potato as an edible staple for the poor in England - kind of like the American history of corn syrup (or, if you go back far enough, whiskey), but a little bit more wholesome.

The finished Shepherd's Pie, with one serving briefly removed and replaced before I remembered to take a picture

Shepherd's (actually, Cottage) Pie
from nowhere in particular, designed by me for a change

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, peeled and chopped
•  2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1.5 pound ground lamb or beef
• 1 cup beef or chicken broth (use good stuff if you can - I used homemade stock)
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh or dry rosemary (fresh is greatly preferred)
• 1 cup dry red wine
• 1 cup frozen peas
• salt and pepper, to taste

For the potatoes:

• 2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup milk (any fat content)
• Kosher salt to taste

 

Get your ingredients ready.  The list is fairly short.  If you have mashed potatoes left over from something else, the list becomes even shorter.

Grind your meat with a coarse blade.  You don't have a meat grinder?  Maybe your butcher will do it for you, if you flash a little skin.

These three ingredients represent the shortcomings of English food - aromatics, and complex flavors.  Garlic, rosemary, and red wine turn this from mess hall chow to something you could serve to a weary chef.  Or shepherd, I suppose.

Preheat oven to 375°F.

In a large sauté pan over high heat, heat the oil and brown the meat in 1-2 batches.  Season with salt and pepper during browning, and be sure to keep the heat high and not just boil the meat.  You want to see some brown bits, even if it means things sticking to the pan for a while.  Meanwhile, bring the potatoes to a boil in salted water. Cook until tender, about 20 minutes; drain.

To the pan with meat, add the onion and carrot, and cook until softened, 3-4 minutes.  Add garlic, and cook until moisture has been released from onions and carrots are beginning to soften, another 4 minutes.  Add the red wine and boil until liquid is mostly evaporated, 4-5 minutes.  Add the broth, tomato paste, and rosemary, and reduce the heat.  Simmer until the juices thicken, about 10 minutes, then add the peas.

Here's the mix, after reducing out the wine, browning the meat, and adding all of the vegetables and aromatics.

Mash the potatoes with the butter, milk, and salt, and set aside.  If you want to pipe them, prepare a piping bag after letting the potatoes cool slightly, and get a tip that will let you dispense a good bit of potato at once.  Or, use my cheap method:

Don't have a piping bag?  Use a zip-top.  Just put the potato in...

...twist the bag to squeeze the potato down to the corner, and then cut off the corner and pipe.  Focus on putting pressure on the bag from the top, with the part of your hand between your thumb and index finger.  Keep twisting the bag to keep air out of the piping section.

So close!  But I ran out at the end, and had to spread the potato on after all of the effort.  Next time I might put a real tip on the bag to get something that doesn't look like a bunch of uncooked breadsticks, or something worse.

Spread or pipe the potatoes over the meat mixture, then crosshatch the top with a fork.  Bake until golden, 30 to 35 minutes.

The 'pie', after dragging a fork to create a nice browning surface

The finished pie, not quite as browned as I would like, but every bit as delicious as a hearty French stew

Cantonese Chicken in Black Bean Sauce

Nothing says Valentine's Day like cheap Chinese food; you might as well make it at home instead of ordering in while you watch Dr. Who and complain to your friends about being single.  Any day playing with new ingredients is a good day.  And a day where my Chinese food tastes like it's been cooked by a guy who came here on a boat, doesn't speak English, and hasn't cleaned his wok in 3 years is an awesome day.  So this chicken cooked in a Cantonese-style black bean sauce was pretty much the high point of last week, and I wanted to share.

Chicken in Black Bean Sauce - a Cantonese mainstay.  This one is from a newer version, loaded with vegetables and a bit more flavor.  See notes at the end.

Unless you've lived under a rock for your whole life, you've probably heard of Shrimp in Lobster Sauce, and maybe even ribs or clams steamed in black bean sauce.  This method of cooking is prototypical of Cantonese cuisine, and has been called 'fish-cooked' because the black bean sauce is so commonly served with fish dishes.  But I wanted to start simple, with chicken, in a standard recipe I found in an old book on Chinese regional cuisines.  No substitutions, no tweaks, just the bare bones recipe.  And I wasn't disappointed.  Fermented black beans are the star of this dish, a salted bean sold in vacuum-packed bags at most Asian grocery stores.

The instructions are short and sweet, but the process is critical.  Make sure you have everything at the ready before you heat up your wok.  This is a quick dish, and can be ruined by overcooking.  And when it says rinse the fermented beans, do it - these beans don't mess around, and rinsing them turns an overly pungent, hyper-salted taste into a more mild, savoury kick that's unlike any other ingredient I've come across in Chinese cooking.

Black Bean Garlic Chicken (Cantonese "Fish-Cooked" Chicken in Black Bean Sauce)

by Martin Yan

• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp cornstarch
• 3/4 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 1/4 cup chicken stock or broth
• 2 tbsp Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp fermented black beans, rinsed, drained, and mashed
• 1/2 cup diced yellow onions
• 1 green onion (green part only), cut into 1" lengths
• 2 tsp minced ginger
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tsp dried chili flakes
• 1 tsp cornstarch, dissolved in 2 tsp water

Get your stuff together before you start.

Toss chicken in 1 tbsp soy sauce and cornstarch.  Let stand for 10 minutes.  Meanwhile, stir stock, rice wine, 2 tsp soy sauce, and sugar together in a small bowl.

Heat a wok over high heat.  Pour in oil and swirl to coat sides.  Add chicken and stir-fry until no longer pink, 2.5-3 minutes.

Stir-fry up those chicken bits.  And ignore that massive box of brownies on the counter - they're not for you.

Cook the chicken until it's mostly done, keeping in mind that it will cook another 3 minutes or so afterwards.  2-3 minutes here should do it.

Add the black beans, yellow onions, green onions, ginger, garlic, and chili flakes.  Stir-fry 1-2 minutes.  Pour in sauce and dissolved cornstarch and cook, stirring, until sauce boils and thickens, 30 seconds.  Serve immediately.

Stir-fry with the beans and aromatics after chicken is mostly cooked through

The sauce is a bit hazy, so I might use tapioca starch next time.  Trust me, it's better than the restaurant equivalent, unless you live near one of the few Chinatowns left with actual Chinese people in it.

Here's another take from a few months later, with red bell pepper added as well

Update (5/12/13): I have since made this dish a few more times, with bell peppers and a few more vegetables.  To cook the dish this way, first quickly stir-fry half of a bell pepper and whatever other vegetables you like in a bit of oil, then set aside.  Follow the recipe until just before adding the sauce.  Now add the vegetables back in, and pick up where the recipe left off.  If you're adding a quick-cooking green like bok choy or spinach, add that just before adding the sauce, and stir-fry for another 30 seconds before moving forward.

Pumpkin Soup with Cran-Apple Relish (Vegetarian)

I realize it's no longer the fall, but I really wanted some pumpkin soup this week.  And this is one of my favorites, in addition to the new pumpkin shrimp bisque I discovered last year.  It's very simple, and the garnish is awesome.  I'm pretty sure it would go well on other things too, but haven't figured out what just yet.  For a touch of class, drizzle some honey over the top - people will think you went to culinary school, even when you just took a bunch of things out of cans and stirred them together (I'm pretty sure this is what some pros do anyway).

Pumpkin soup!

Pumpkin Soup with Cran-Apple Relish

based on a Rachael Ray recipe

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 fresh bay leaf, or 2 dried
• 2 ribs celery with greens, finely chopped
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• Salt and pepper
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme, or 2 teaspoons dried thyme
• 2 teaspoons hot sauce (I used Frank's, or you could use Tabasco), or to taste
• 6 cups vegetable stock
• 1 (28-ounce) can cooked pumpkin puree
• 2 cups heavy cream (I use 1 cup heavy cream and 1 cup half-and-half)
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Relish:

• 1 crisp apple, such as McIntosh or Granny Smith, finely chopped
• 1/4 red onion, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/2 cup dried sweetened cranberries, chopped
• 1 teaspoon chili (or chile) powder
• 2 teaspoons honey
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Most of the ingredients, after starting the onion and celery.  This all comes together quickly.

Heat a medium soup pot over medium to medium high heat. Add the oil and melt the butter. Add bay, celery, and onion. Season the vegetables with salt and pepper. Cook 6 or 7 minutes, until tender. Add flour, thyme and hot sauce, to taste, then cook flour a minute. Whisk in stock and bring liquid to a bubble. Whisk in pumpkin in large spoonfuls to incorporate it into the broth. Simmer soup 10 minutes to thicken a bit then add in cream and nutmeg. Reduce heat to low.

Stir in the flour after cooking the vegetables, and you end up with something like a roux - this will thicken the soup

While soup cooks, assemble the relish: combine apple, onion, lemon juice, cranberries, chili powder, honey and cinnamon.  I used the same chile powder that I use in my beef chili - a mix of dried peppers without the other ingredients found in chili powder.  Didn't seem to make a huge difference, so use whatever you've got.  I used a low quality chili powder from a can once and it actually did ruin this, so be sure to use something decent, and don't go overboard.

This garnish is arguably the best part of the soup

Remove bay leaves from soup and pulse with a stick blender to puree the sauteed vegetables.  Adjust seasonings in soup and relish and serve soup in shallow bowls with a few spoonfuls of relish and a drizzle of honey.

Slow Cooker Beef Chili

If you've been following the posts, you might have noticed that I'm an avid fan of the pressure cooker.  Well, I recently inherited an old Crock Pot, and thought I would try out the slow cooker method for a change.  They're both very convenient tools - one lets you cook very quickly, and one lets you cook quite lazily.  However, even with the slow cooker's appeal of turning it on and leaving for the day, I had to do a lot of prep work to get the final product to come out to my liking.  You can't just throw everything in there raw and have it come out perfectly, after all.

So I made my standard chili recipe, which is an amalgam of different recipes loosely inspired by that of Dinosaur BBQ up in Syracuse, NY.  They have a cookbook I highly recommend, with tons of other good stuff.  I browned the meat, put everything in the slow cooker, and headed off to work.  And sure enough, when I came back at the end of the day, it was chili, and the house smelled fantastic.

Let me head a few of you off at the pass here - I recognize that putting beans in my chili makes it not officially 'competition ready' chili.  I further recognize that ingredients such as cinnamon and brown sugar may seem strange in a classical chili recipe.  But I also recognize that up where I am, this far away from Texas, I can call practically anything with beef, tomatoes, and chile peppers a bowl of chili, and nobody's going to hogtie and brand me.

It's chili!  Be excited.

Slow Cooker Beef Chili

From a variety of sources, assembled by me

• 2 tablespoons olive oil -- (up to 3 tbsp)
• 2 pounds boneless chuck or round -- cut in 1" cubes
• 2 tbsp garlic, minced
• 3 cups coarsely chopped onion
• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 1 dash crushed red pepper flakes
• Fresh chile peppers to taste (I used 2 serranos)
• 1 28 oz can tomatoes with juice, coarsely chopped, or 28 ounces plum tomatoes, peeled
• 1 tsp whole cumin seeds, ground
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 3 inch stick cinnamon, halved
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 1/2 tbsp chile powder*
• 1½ tbsp brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
• 1 cup beef broth
• 1-2 cups cooked red kidney beans (optional)
• 2 tablespoons finely ground yellow cornmeal or tomato paste (optional)
• 1 cup tightly packed, minced fresh cilantro
• grated cheddar cheese, as a garnish (optional)
• sour cream, as a garnish (optional)
• finely chopped onions, as a garnish (optional)

*What is chile powder?  How is it different from chili powder?  Well, "chile" is Spanish for pepper (capsicum, not what you grind up and pass with salt) - think bell peppers and habaneros and such.  "Chile powder", therefore, refers to ground up chiles, nothing more.  "Chili powder", on the other hand, is a pre-mixed spice blend typically containing, among other things, cayenne, salt, pepper, cumin, and, strangely enough, chile powder.  To make chile powder, gather up your favorite dried chiles and put them in a coffee grinder.  I recommend pasilla, guajillo, and ancho peppers, all of which can be found at Latin markets.

Trim meat of excess fat.  If you're using fresh tomatoes like me, slice a small 'x' in the top of each one and plunge into boiling water for 60 seconds, then immediately into ice water.  Then just peel the skins off!

To peel a tomato, slice an 'x' into the bottom of a tomato and boil for 1 minute...

...then immediately plunge into ice water.  See how the skins fall off?

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a heavy skillet (preferably cast iron).  Over medium-high heat, brown the meat in 2-3 batches.  Remove to a platter and set aside.  Do NOT attempt to brown all of the meat at once; I have re-enacted this mistake for your benefit, and include a photo showing you exactly why you shouldn't.

This would be an appropriate amount of meat to brown at once

This is too much meat.  Do you see all of that liquid boiling under the meat?  Guess what - you're now steaming your meat, not searing it.  Not to mention that all of that delicious meaty goodness is escaping from the meat rather than being 'sealed in', a misnomer but still the easiest way to explain what you want.

Adding more oil if necessary, saute the garlic, onions, green pepper, and hot pepper (if desired) for 3 minutes, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.  Add the browned meat and aromatics to the slow cooker and add the tomatoes and beef broth, pouring some of the liquid first in the sauté skillet to deglaze and get all the juicy bits off the bottom if separate pan was used in first step.  Stir in the spices and salt.  Put the chili on low, and cook for 6-8 hours.

Serrano peppers before mincing.  I use a spoon to remove the seeds and membrane, which is where the heat is concentrated.  Did you know you can take the membrane out of a habanero and it's mild enough to eat with ice cream?

Chile powder.  It's just chiles - no other spices.  You're thinking of chili powder.  Don't mix those up.

Vegetables being sauteed before adding to the slow cooker.  This is mostly to lift the browned meat bits off of the pan.

Once everything's already been mostly cooked, go ahead and finish it in the slow cooker for another 6-8 hours.  This old guy behaved like a champion - perfectly tender in 6 hours on low.

Test the beef for doneness.  If it is not sufficiently tender, crank the heat to high and cook for another 30-45 minutes.  When done, remove the bay leaves and cinnamon sticks.  Stir in the kidney beans (if desired) and cilantro.  If the chili is too thin, gradually whisk in the cornmeal or tomato paste until thickened.

You can garnish this however you like, but I like cheddar cheese, cilantro, sour cream, and raw onions.

Slow-cooked chili, garnished simply with cheese and onions

Spicy Black Bean Soup, or Beans: Nature's Digestive Nightmare

I'm not sure what it is about black bean soup, but my dad and I both seem to really enjoy it.  Maybe because we're Italian and it's a latin thing, or maybe because it's rich, fairly healthy, and not overly pungent.  A good black bean soup, to me, has a nice backbone of garlic and spices, but isn't overwhelming in any way.  It's served warm but not hot, and it's not pushy what you do with it - you can eat it as a dish or as a side.  It just exists to make you happy, which this recipe did for me.

I found a recipe for a basic black bean soup, but it called for canned beans.  And I wanted to start from scratch, using staples common to latin america that I knew I could keep for a while and pull out of storage at a moment's notice down the road.  So I made my version from dried beans, which requires some advance planning.  It also calls for cooking the beans with kombu, a form of kelp seen most commonly in recipes for dashi, which is the base for miso soup.  Kelp is one of the main culinary sources of glutamic acid (related to MSG, the condiment we all love to hate), and plays a strong part in the history of the word "umami", which many food lovers have been hearing a lot recently.  Cooking beans with the kombu will leach out some of the glutamines from the seaweed, and will give your vegetarian soup additional savoury notes without having to add chicken broth.

Now, as some of you may know, beans often pack a hidden surprise with them, in the form of awkward moments for you and your company a few hours after dining.  This is because beans contain a large amount of oligosaccharides, which are chains of roughly 2 to 10 simple sugars (such as glucose and fructose).  The human digestive track doesn't typically contain many (if any) anti-oligosaccharide enzymes, but the intestines do.  So guess what?  When those complex sugars find their way to the intestine, it's like Cinco De Mayo down there for your intestinal bacteria, and they just go to town.  And if you've ever made beer or bread before, you know that multiplying, festive bacteria create gas, and hopefully you can figure out what happens next.

Why We Should Keep Eating Beans

Fortunately for us, mankind recognized five things about beans a long time ago:

1. Beans are really healthy for you, containing high amounts of fiber, protein, complex carbohydrates, folate, and iron.  Along with lentils, they should be a staple in every vegetarian's diet, providing many of the necessary amino acid constituents that are otherwise hard to find in most vegetables.
2. If you eat a lot of beans, you can actually condition your body to break down their complex sugars.  It's a tough love campaign, but it will happen.
3. There are ways to cook beans that can remove a number of these complex sugars.  More on this shortly.
4. There are natural and man-made products to help with your crippling, post-bean gas.  These include products like Beano, and herbs that fall under the category of "carminatives", meaning prevent formation or they facilitate expulsion of gas.  This includes epazote, cumin, coriander, anise, and even pepper.  Side note - the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has decreed that "carminative" is his favorite word.  I'm not making this up.
5. Maybe it's worth it to just eat the beans and deal with the hand you are dealt afterwards.  Because, like my mom always said, "when life gives you lemons, just shut up and eat your damn lemons."

So How Should I Cook Beans so My Dog Will Stop Trying to Crawl Under the House After Dinner?

You may have heard a number of methods - soak them, soak them in distilled water, boil them for an hour, soak them AND pre-boil them, spin them in a bag over your head while throwing chicken bones on the floor and chanting, and so forth.  So I figured the best way to lay this one to bed was with actual, no-kidding data collected by Turkish researchers and published in the Pakistan Journal of Nutrition (where apparently this kind of thing is relevant).

In "The Effect of Soaking and Cooking on the Oligosaccharide Content of Sekera Dry Bean Variety (P. vulgaris, L) Grown in Turkey", by I. G. Sat and F. Keles, Pak. J. Nutrit. 1 (5): 206-208, 2002, many of the methods above are compared in terms of initial and final oligosaccharide content.  This included raw and soaking over a variety of lengths of time, cooking for different lengths, and cooking with or without a pressure cooker.  And here's the final breakdown, ranked from the most gas to the least:

Bean Gassiness Levels, Highest to Lowest

• Raw
• Cooked in boiling water (60 min)
• Pressurized cooking (121 C, 15psi) for 30 min
• Soaked in distilled water 12 hr and cooked in boiling water (60 min)
• Soaked in distilled water 18 hr and cooked in boiling water (60 min)
• Soaked in 0.5% NaHCO3 (baking soda) solution 12 hr and cooked in boiling water (60 min)
• Soaked in 0.5% NaHCO3 solution 18 hr and cooked in boiling water (60 min)
• Soaked in distilled water 12 hr and pressurized cooking (121 C, 15psi) for 30 min
• Soaked in distilled water 18 hr and pressurized cooking (121 C, 15psi) for 30 min
• Soaked in 0.5% NaHCO3 solution 12 hr and pressurized cooking (121 C, 15psi) for 30 min
• Soaked in 0.5% NaHCO3 solution 18 hr and pressurized cooking (121 C, 15psi) for 30 min

So clearly, the best solution to reduce the gas-causing sugar content is to do EVERYTHING, which I'm not prepared to do.  They go on to say that soaking in the alkali solution may destroy B vitamins, and propose using tap water as a good compromise.  So I'm prepared to use my pressure cooker after having soaked the beans for 12 hours, which I consider to be a fair compromise.  By the way, if any budding scientists read this and thought "how the heck can I boil something at 121 C?" since water boils at exactly 100 C, well, that's the magic of cooking under pressure!

That was a lot of science.  Let's go through a recipe and make it worth your while.

Spicy Black Bean Soup

This one's all me, baby - a Frankenstein recipe from many places

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups chopped red onion
• 1 4-ounce can diced mild green chilies
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped jalapeño chili with seeds
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 1-pound bag black beans, soaked overnight in cold water
• 1 4"x8" piece of kombu kelp (found at asian grocery stores)
• 2 cups canned low-salt vegetable broth
• ½ cup red wine
• 1 tomato, diced
• 1 lime
• 8 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• Sour cream
• Tortilla strips / chips, or corn tortillas and enough oil to fry them

If you're soaking your beans, put them in a large bowl of cold tap water.  Soak for 12-18 hours as directed by the Turkish folks above.  Then DRAIN this water - don't use it, or you're just going to end up with the same result as if you hadn't soaked them.

The soaked beans in the pressure cooker, along with the kombu for some extra flavor enhancement

Now place your beans and the kombu in a pressure cooker, bring to temperature, and cook for approximately 30 minutes.  The first few times you do this, err on the side of overcooked, but you can gradually reduce this if your beans start falling apart because they're overcooked.  You want them to have some bite, but not dissolve completely (unless you're into that sort of thing).

The beans after they've cooked for 30 minutes.  Check them to make sure they're cooked through; if not, boil for a few minutes

While beans are cooking, heat olive oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion, green chilies, garlic, jalapeño, and cumin. Sauté until onion is tender, about 5 minutes. Have this mixture at the ready. 

How could these ingredients possibly do you wrong?

Once beans are cooked through, remove the kombu, and add the mixture from the pan to the bean pot along with the broth, tomato, and wine. Bring soup to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low; cover and simmer (not under pressure) until the flavors blend, about 15 minutes. Puree 3 cups soup in batches in blender. Return puree to same pot. 

If you want to get really fancy, take some corn tortillas and cut them in strips, then fry them in a little canola oil for 30 seconds and drain on paper towels.  Use these as a garnish - they make a world of difference and add some class to your soup.

Fried corn tortillas, as a garnish

Add 6 tablespoons chopped cilantro to the soup, season to taste with salt and pepper, and squeeze in lime juice.  Ladle soup into bowls. Top with dollop of sour cream, tortilla strips, and remaining 2 tablespoons cilantro.

Black bean soup, sans gas-causing sugars, garnished as I saw fit