Blackberry Chutney over Pork Medallions

If you're lucky, where you live is berry season right now.  You're probably seeing them popping up in the grocery store on sale - $2.99 for a 6 ounce tub, trucked in from nobody knows where (aka Mexico).  But a better alternative is getting up to a farm to buy them right off the bushes, or even to pick your own.  We went up this weekend and bought 10 pounds, adding to our 10 pounds of blueberries and 5 pounds of black raspberries from an earlier trip.  You may think that this sounds like too many, but I assure you, it is not.  We now have blueberry jalapeno jelly, raspberry jam, blackberry preserves, blackberry muffins, enough frozen berries to make smoothies through the year, and this gem.

Worried for about 5 minutes that maybe we went overboard with the blackberries, we went looking for recipes.  Good old Martha Stewart came through in a pinch, bringing us an assortment of about 20 different recipes ranging from desserts through drinks, with one savory dinner option.  This dish, pork medallions with a blackberry chutney, caught my eye, since I am a huge fan of the sweet / savory pairing, as well as the meats / sweets pairing.  The recipe looked easy, and we even had a couple of shallots lying around, so it was calling to us.  And the result was fantastic - tart, sweet, and with mellow caramel undertones from the molasses and sauteed shallots, we loved the blackberry chutney so much that we're trying to figure out what else we can serve it with.  So I have chosen to rearrange the name of this dish to showcase the chutney, which was by far the star in tonight's dinner.  It came together quickly, and had a short ingredient list, although you really do want good fresh berries, so some of the ingredients can be a bit fussy.  Don't make any substitutions beyond that, and you'll do really well with this dish.

If you can find it, get a pork tenderloin.  Not loin, that's too big and tough.  Tenderloin will do you well, and will cut up and cook easily.  We couldn't get our hands on one tonight, and used pork sirloin instead, which I think is a great runner up.  Otherwise, we followed Martha's recipe verbatim, which I reprint here.

Just a small fraction of the local blackberries we picked ourselves this weekend

Oxtails Braised in Red Wine

When I was in college, my friend and I took a trip to Atlantic City for the evening.  We didn't have much of a plan, we just went there and figured we'd do some gambling and drinking, and then head back.  Before we went off to lose our shirts, we looked around for a decent restaurant, and found a Cuban place called Cuba Libre.  It's still there, by the way.  So we sit down to eat, and we each decide to order some kind of oxtail stew they have on special, figuring that it would be interesting.  I hadn't had oxtail before, and thought it might be a great place to check it out, having fondly remembered a number of other Cuban beef stews.  But it wasn't just interesting - it was delicious.  So much so that we cleaned our plates from this massive feast, which included not only a healthy quantity of meat but also rice, plantains, and a variety of other things that have since disappeared into a haze of pan drippings and caramelized vegetables.

We never gambled that night - we stumbled into the casino, half-drunk on meat, and played slots for 5 minutes before we decided to turn back.  On a whim, I put $40 on red at a roulette table which hit and, having recovered the cost of my dinner, realized that we had won that night, big time.

This recipe is the first of two oxtail dishes that I will make - this being the more simple, more American version, cooked down slowly with red wine and root vegetables, and a future recipe being the Cuban oxtail stew, or rabo encendido.  I just found this version on the New York Times recipe page and gave it a shot, replacing a non-latin variant on this recipe I made years back because this had more wine in it, and let's face it, that's going to make it much better.  Turned out to be a winner, although it doesn't hold a candle to our Cuban feast that night.

Every bit as delicious as a chuck roast or short rib stew, if not more so.

Chicken Riggies

Update 12/24/2018: after making this dish again from my own recipe, I have realized that I am now a bit smarter about the process. So I updated to remove a couple of unnecessary ingredients and fix the method to be better all around.

Since the dawn of homo sapiens, when we first stood tall, emerged from our caves, and embarked on the great human experiment, we have begun to seek the answers to the great questions in life.  "Why are we here?  Do we have a purpose in life?  And what, really, is a riggie?"

Well, at long last one of these questions can be answered.  A riggie, coming from the Italian word "rigatoni", which in turn translates as "tube of extreme deliciousness" in a language I have not yet heard of, is a dish coming from the Utica / Rome area of upstate New York.  Only there would you take a tomato cream sauce, not unlike a vodka tomato sauce, but instead add both sweet and hot peppers, as if you were about to slather this stuff onto a cheesesteak or a hotdog, before going ahead and throwing in a few select proteins to toss with your pasta as originally planned.  The first time I encountered this dish was in Lansing, NY at Rogue's Harbor brewing company, who serves this under a section of NY state specialties.  I wish I could personally extend my thanks to the great man or woman who, on what must have been a very cold, somewhat alcohol-fueled night, decided to turn an otherwise classy, rich dish into a slightly less classy yet unbelievably satisfying assault on the senses.  Sweet, tart, velvety, warm, and hearty - a perfect meal for pulling the kids out of the snow, sloshing into wooden bowls, and mowing through by a roaring fire while you warm your bones.

I tried this dish from a recipe I dug up online few years ago with limited success - things just didn't come together, and the flavors weren't right.  The sauce broke, it wasn't the right mouthfeel, and it just lacked that well-rounded flavor that I was expecting.  But now, after a few more years of cooking and recognizing some flaws in the original recipe, I believe I have tweaked it into something altogether better, maybe suitable for entering into "Riggiefest", which I swear I am not making up.

Chicken Riggies
from various sources, fused together by me

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp butter
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 8 tablespoons minced shallot (3 medium) or 1 small onion, minced
• 1.5 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breast meat
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 (4 ounce) jar sweet red peppers or cherry peppers, drained and julienned
• 3-4 ounce jar hot banana peppers or cherry peppers, drained
• 1/2 cup fresh tomato sauce
• 2 tbsp dry sherry
• 10 pepperoni
• 4 ounces heavy cream
• 8 ounces uncooked rigatoni pasta
• Grated parmesan (optional), for plating
• Minced parsley (optional), for plating

Prep your setup.  Get the shallots and garlic minced and together in a small bowl.  Go for shallots instead of onions - live the dream.  It does make a lot of difference.  Cube the chicken into bite-sized pieces, about 1" to a side.  Not so small that they won't hold up in what is essentially a stew, and not so large that you have huge hunks of flesh floating around in there.  Chop up your peppers, which should be equal parts sweet and hot (hence the bold to differentiate above).  You could use roasted red peppers, but I prefer sweet cherry peppers.  For the hot, what I originally had and still prefer most is hot banana pepper rings, although you could use hot cherry here and roasted red for the sweet.  Whatever suits your taste, but keep the ratios the same.

In a large cast iron saucepan, heat oil and melt butter over medium heat.  At same time, start boiling water for your rigatoni. Add the garlic and shallots to the pan and saute until soft, then add the chicken, season with salt and pepper to taste, and saute for 8 to 10 minutes, or until halfway cooked. Don't brown the meat, just keep stirring until it's no longer pink.

Add peppers and stir in tomato sauce, reduce heat to low and simmer about 10 minutes. Now start cooking your rigatoni.  Back in the main pan, add the sherry and simmer for another 10 minutes.

Add the pepperoni and the heavy cream, and cook for 5 minutes. Do not use anything lighter than 'light' whipping cream - no half-and-half, no whole milk mixed with cream, nothing like that.  If you try to add anything but actual cream, this sauce will break, forming little fat bubbles separated from a watery mess.  So don't think that you can come up with a low-fat substitute for this - I've already tried, plus I cut the fat down in the first step, which originally called for double the amount of oil and butter.

When the pasta is just barely al dente, if not slightly before, set aside about a cup of the cooking water, drain the pasta, and immediately toss it into the sauce. Toss this together to finish cooking the pasta for 1-2 minutes in the sauce, adding in a few tablespoons of the reserved rigatoni cooking water to thicken and help the sauce cling to the pasta. Feel free to add more of the water if the sauce is still too thick, but not so much that it will become loose again.

After adding the cornstarch, observe how thick this is.  This picture from an earlier attempt.

To serve, plate into bowls, possibly with shredded parmesan, and top with finely minced parsley.  I took mine plain.  Try to find something healthy as a side, like a salad or something green.

Low Country Shrimp Boil - Welcome to America

Coming from the Midwest, I had no idea what somebody meant the first time they said they were having a "low boil".  What does that mean?  So let me help my fellow northerners here - a low boil, or  is some kind of shellfish boiled in a heavily seasoned, creole-infused broth with potatoes, corn, and usually sausage.  Usually crab, crawfish, or shrimp are used, and this ends up being a meal and half when you sit down and roll up your sleeves to this feast.

I have decided that this dish, like chili and barbecue, is the epitome of American cooking - shellfish from the Gulf of Mexico, corn and potatoes indigenous to North America, sausages with Polish or French origins, and a spice blend created by a German Nazi refugee.  Apparently the shellfish boil is most common in the low country of Georgia and South Carolina, whose cuisines I absolutely love, but it has spread to New England and the Chesapeake area as well, where people refuse to call it a boil, and instead use the word "feast".  I could get behind this convention, but really don't care what it is, so long as you leave me alone and let me at those tasty shrimp already.  Let's dig in.

Low Country Shrimp Boil

• 1 large onion, sliced, skin on
• half head of garlic, smashed
• 1 tbsp salt
• 2 lemons, quartered
• 1/4 cup Old Bay seasoning
• 4 pounds shrimp, shell on, deveined
• 2 pounds andouille or kielbasa sausage, cut into 1-2" sections
• 3 pounds red potatoes, whole
• 6 ears corn, halved

This recipe is really, stupidly, incredibly easy.  All you need to do is cook things in the proper order, realizing that shrimp cook quickly.  First, gather your ingredients, and make sure they're all cut into serving sized pieces:

Bring to a boil about 1 gallon of water in a large pot with salt.  When boiling, add lemon, onion, and garlic.  Now add the Old Bay seasoning - you can use more or less, or split it up and add directly with the shrimp.

Get your boiling liquid ready to go, and follow the sequence for everything to be properly cooked and not overcooked

Add potatoes, and cook for about 10 minutes.  Add sausage, cook for 10 more minutes.  Add corn, and cook for 5 minutes.  Add the shrimp, stir to submerge, and cook for 3 minutes.  If you want, add the extra Old Bay when you pour in the shrimp.  Serve immediately with more Old Bay, hot sauce, and whatever dipping sauces you like.  Not that this needs any.

Add the shrimp with some more Old Bay if you like

Stir, cook until shrimp are pink and curled, and then serve immediately!

There's a restaurant near me that serves this tossed in a delicious garlic butter sauce, or a cajun sauce if you prefer, both of which are an excellent (though potentially blasphemous) addition.  I intend to figure both of those out, and add to this post in the future.  So stay tuned!

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