In Honor Of Julia: Boeuf Bourguignon

You know, I had forgotten how good French food is.

This is because once I got out of culinary school, I can count on one hand how many times I have made French dishes. Oh, yes, I use French technique every day that I enter the kitchen, either at home or in a restaurant, but as for actually making full-on French food–nah, I haven’t done that in years.

Until today.

See, I got all inspired by watching Julie & Julia–all of those porn-worthy shots of delicious looking food got to me and I just -had- to dig out my old dog-eared, butter-stained and battered copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and give some recipes a go.

And the first one just had to be Boeuf Bourguignon–not just because it is featured prominently in the film, but because it is one of my favorite French braises. And I hadn’t made it since my first year of culinary school. And I realized that when I was looking at a beautiful pot of it in a red Le Creuset French Oven just like the one that Zak’s Grandma handed down to me, and it was just a shame.

So I had to make it again–and I wanted to use Julia’s recipe and method–just to see how different it was from the version I learned in culinary school.

It was different; in culinary school, I remember tossing the meat with flour and then browning it in rendered bacon fat and olive oil. The meat was then removed, and onions and carrots were browned in the same oil, while scraping up bits of browned flour from the bottom of the pan.

Julia’s recipe calls for the meat to simply by dried with a paper towel and then put into the pan with the nearly bacon fat and oil and browned well on all sides. Then the meat is removed and set aside, and the onions and carrots are browned in the pan. Then the onions and carrots are removed, and the cooking fat is poured out of the pan. Back into the pan goes the beef, bacon lardons, onions, and carrots. At this time, the flour is sprinkled over the meat and it is tossed together so the meat is coated lightly with flour.

Then into the a 450 degree F. oven the pan goes for four minutes. After four minutes, you take the pan out, toss everything around again, and pop it back in for another four minutes and when it comes out, the meat has a kind of crusty crisp coating of browned flour and there are bits of browned flour goodness all over the onions and carrots. The oven got turned down to a nice moderate temperature–325 degrees F.

In to the pot goes the wine–I used Cabernet Sauvignon–a nice dry and robust one I had around–and beef stock or broth, some tomato paste, minced garlic (Julia crushes hers, but I like more garlic flavor, so mine got minced), thyme, a bay leaf and some salt and pepper. Everything got a nice stir, the liquid was brought to a simmer on the stovetop, then the lid was clapped on and into the oven it went, there to cook, pretty well unattended (I did check on it twice) for about three hours.

Now, I ask you–how hard is that, really?

And the technique of sprinkling the flour on -after- the meat is browned–I really like the texture it gave the beef, and I also like the fact that it made a nice thick, smooth sauce by the end of the cooking time with minimal effort from me.

So, for the first two hours that the beef cooked, I went into my sewing room and worked on a quilt. I didn’t need to be in the kitchen, hanging over the stove, waiting for the beef to do its thing. It was fine all on its own. That is the beauty of making a braised dish in an enameled cast iron pot in the oven–you don’t need to hover. It does all the work for you.

So, I waited for the last hour of the cooking time to make the brown braised pearl onions and butter sauteed mushrooms. I had forgotten how simply cooked both of these absolutely fabulous vegetables are, but simple doesn’t mean flavorless. Oh, no–these tasted amazingly good.

The onions are simple–you peel them–easily the most annoying step in the making of this dish. I do it the way I learned at my very first restaurant job–cut a tiny slice off the top and bottom of the onion, and then make a shallow slit from top to bottom that cuts through just the first layer of onion skin and flesh. Then peel that layer off and voila! You have a pretty, shiny pearly onion, all ready to get browned in butter and olive oil, then braised in a bit of wine and beef stock.

When they are done, they are even prettier than they were all shiny and new and white. They are brown and delectable; the liquid they are cooked in reduces to a thick, deeply colored and flavored glaze that coats those dear little alliums in a cloak of sweet, meaty goodness.

I made an extra couple of onions and it was a good thing–because once I tasted one, I had to give on to Brittney to try. But then, maybe if we hadn’ t tasted them in the first place, we would not have tortured ourselves to keep from eating the rest before everything else was done.

So, we contented ourselves with licking the thick syrupy bits of leftover glaze that clung to the sides and bottom of the saucepan.

The mushrooms are simplicity incarnate. You wash them, you dry them and you cut the bottom edge of the stem off. Then you either leave them whole or cut them into quarters–I decided to cut mine up–and you saute them in butter–in small quantities–never crowd your mushrooms in the pan or they will steam instead of saute–and that is it. I did mine in two batches and got the brownest lightly crisped on the edges mushrooms you could ever want.

Boiled potatoes are a traditional side for this dish, so I did whole small Carolas and French Fingerlings boiled in their jackets until done. Then, I drained them and popped them into a saute pan that had melted, bubbling butter in it, and sprinkled them with salt, pepper and minced fresh rosemary and tossed them around over high heat for about five minutes. The butter browned lightly and coated the potatoes in a delicious golden glaze that made them shimmer, flavored with those lovely deep green flecks of rosemary leaves. The rosemary really highlighted the natural nutty flavor and smooth texture of these little potatoes, while not interfering with the sauce from the beef.

Then, I just made a simple green salad with a honey-Dijon vinaigrette, and cut into a baguette, and strained the sauce from the beef–which had attended to itself so perfectly that I didn’t even have to reduce it any farther in order to get it to gently coat the back of a spoon.

And dinner was served.

Now, here are a few caveats–I did take a few shortcuts and made a few tiny changes to Julia’s recipe–mostly having to do with the bacon. I didn’t have bacon that hadn’t already been sliced, though I had some that had been quite thickly sliced, so I used that. And I didn’t blanch the bacon, because I saw no really good reason to do so.

And, when it came time to put the meat back into the pot before pouring the strained sauce over it–I had forgotten to pick the bacon out of the tangled mess of spent onion and carrot corpses and put it back in with the beef, so we ate it sans bacon. But, you know–it still tasted damned fine anyway, so I don’t feel all that bad about it.

And one more thing–here is a tip directly from me, not Julia, about what to do if your perfectly sublime sauce turns out to taste just a little flat. If adding salt and pepper to taste rounds it a bit, but not quite enough–give it a little dash of balsamic vinegar. No really–it will perk up any sauce or gravy that might be just a bit too rich to taste right–the taste will flatten out sometimes. The vinegar rounds it back out and gives it sparkle. I am talking just a little bit–not much–a half teaspoon to a teaspoon at most, and sometimes even less than that. Be sparing!

Looking back on tonight’s dinner, I’m not really sure how or why I forgot how good French food is–but I don’t intend to make that mistake again.

Now I just have to figure out which recipe to turn to next in Julia and Simone Beck’s magnum opus.

Boeuf Bourguignon
Ingredients:

6 ounces thickly sliced bacon cut into 1/2″ wide pieces down the length of the bacon slices
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 pounds fairly lean stewing beef, cut into 2″ cubes (I used half top round and half chuck, well trimmed of fat)
1 large peeled and sliced carrot
1 large sliced onion
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
3 cups of full-bodied red wine (I used Cabernet Sauvignon, as I noted earlier)
2-3 cups beef stock or broth
1 tablespoon tomato paste (I use the kind that comes in tubes like toothpaste–so convenient!)
2 large cloves garlic, minced (mine worked out to be about a tablespoon and a half after it was minced–big cloves of garlic!)
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1 bay leaf, crumbled
18 pearl onions, peeled
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup red wine (from the same bottle as the wine for the beef!)
1/2 cup beef stock or broth
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon oil
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, washed, dried and trimmed–if small, leave whole, if larger, quarter
salt and pepper to taste
a tiny amount of balsamic vinegar–if needed*
fresh thyme leaves and chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish

Method:

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees F.

Heat the first measure of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet over moderate heat. Cook the bacon until it is just starting to brown and is nicely brown, but is not crisp. Remove from skillet and set aside on a plate. Turn the heat up to high and let the oil and rendered bacon fat come nearly to the smoke point.

Dry the cubes of beef well on paper towels–remember if the meat is not dry, it will not make a nice browned crust. Brown it on all sides in the same skillet in which you cooked the bacon. Do it in batches if you have to–don’t crowd the pan or the meat will not brown as nicely.

When the beef is brown all around, remove it and set it aside on the plate with the bacon.

Dump the sliced onion and carrot into the same skillet and sprinkle with the salt and pepper, then cook, stirring, until the onions brown really well–they should be a reddish color, and the carrots are browned at the edges. Scoop the vegetables out with a wire skimmer and put them with the meat. Dump out the cooking oil.

Put the beef, bacon, onions and carrots into a heavy bottomed Dutch oven or deep casserole dish. Sprinkle the flour over everything and toss the meat especially to coat it well.

Pop it uncovered into the oven for exactly four minutes. Take it out and stir it well making sure to turn the meat, and put it back in for another four minutes.

Take it out and turn the oven temperature down to 325 degrees F.

Stir in the wine and enough stock or broth to make sure that the beef cubes are just barely covered. You can have wee bits and corners of the cubes poking out–but you don’t want huge swaths of meat uncovered–you don’t want it to dry out. Stir in the garlic, the tomato paste, the bay leaf and the thyme, then turn the heat on under the pot and bring the liquid to a nice easy simmer.

Clap the lid on the pot and into the oven it goes. Check it now and again to make sure it is simmering, not boiling and that the liquid level is not reducing too quickly. Otherwise, you can leave the pot pretty well undisturbed.

While the beef cooks, prepare the onions: Melt the butter and olive oil measures that come in the list right under the pearl onions in a skillet or wide saucepan. Add the onions, and cook, tossing and stirring and rolling the onions gently around until they are as evenly browned as you can manage–they won’t be perfect because these little rascals just roll back and forth and won’t keep enough to get an even tan.

When they are a nice golden color flecked with some pale white shimmer showing, pour in the wine and stock or broth and add the thyme.

Bring to a simmer over high heat, turn the heat down and cover the saucepan and cook, stirring as needed, until the onions are mostly tender. Remove the lid from the pot and cook, shaking and stirring until the liquid reduces down to nothing more than a shiny deep reddish brown glaze that clings mostly to the onions, but a bit to the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste to the onions, toss them once or twice more to distribute the salt and pepper, and set aside to be added to the beef at the last moment before service.

Once the onions are done–make the mushrooms.

Melt the last measure of butter with the last measure of olive oil in a saute pan. Put half of the mushrooms in the pan, and cook, stirring and tossing, until the mushrooms take on a deep golden hue with lightly crispy browned edges. Pour the cooked mushrooms into the same bowl as the onions and cook the second batch the same way. Set them aside with the pearl onions.

The beef is finished cooking when a fork with easily pierce it and just as easily slide out again. If the beef clings to the fork, even if the fork went in easily, the meat still need to cook some more. But when it is ready, remove the beef from the cooking pot and set it aside with the pearl onions and mushrooms. If you want to go fishing around for the pieces of bacon, by all means, do so, but I didn’t bother and the dish was still fantastic.

Then place a fine sieve over a saucepan and scoop the liquid and remaining solids out of the cooking pot into the sieve. Press the solids against the sieve to remove as much liquid from them as possible–the sauce is thick and will cling to the solids. What I did was ladle the contents of the pot one or two ladlesful at a time into the sieve, and then I was mash and stir the stuff in the sieve against it and let all of the sauce be pushed or drip out, then I would empty the solids from the sieve for the compost bucket, though if I still had dogs, I would have given the solids to them–they would have loved it. Then, I repeated until I had the pot emptied and the sauce all collected.

Then, scrub out your cooking pot, and dry it well. Put the beef, pearl onions and mushrooms into it.

Heat the sauce in the saucepan over medium heat until it simmers. If it is thick enough to lightly coat the back of a spoon, you are golden and have to do very little. If it is too thick, thin it out with a tiny bit of broth–if it is too thin, bring the sauce to a boil and reduce it to the proper thickness. If you defatted your beef and poured out the oil well, you will have very little to no excess fat in the sauce, but if you do, and some comes to the top as you simmer it, skim it off and discard it. You should end up with about two and a half cups of really delicious sauce. Taste your sauce and add salt and pepper as needed–and a tiny dash of balsamic vinegar if it is properly salted and peppered, but still tastes just a little bit flat.

When the sauce is the proper thickness, pour it over the meat and vegetables and give it a nice stir to coat everything, and then sprinkle with the fresh herbs and either keep it warm in its pot–this is why cast iron enameled pots are so great–or serve it right away, with a salad, some boiled potatoes and some good baguette to sop up the sauce.

Julie & Julia Gets People Into the Bookstores…And The Kitchen

Sometimes, I am just all late and wrong.

Last night is the first time my girls and I (my daughter Morganna, the 19 year old line cook, and her best friend Brittney, the 18 year old line cook) could get together and get away to see Nora Ephron’s film, Julie & Julia. Which means, since it opened on August 7th, that I am sure that everyone else in the country, especially food bloggers, have already seen it. (OK, not everyone else has seen it. My dear Aunt Judy hasn’t seen it yet, either–she is going later this week.)

Late and wrong as I am, I still want to write some of my thoughts on the film, because I think that one of the best things that films do is they bring people together to talk about them. (Yeah, I have a minor in film, along with one in history, one in biology and one in women’s studies. Yes, I am a super-geek who would go to college the rest of her life if she could get away with it.)

Unsurprisingly, I really liked the movie, and I love the way that the script was structured, flipping back and forth between Julie Powell’s life as sourced from her blog and later her book, Julie & Julia, and Julia Child’s as remembered in her memoir, My Life In France.

Viewed as a purely structural device, bouncing back and forth between the two women’s lives and marking parallels between them brings a beautiful symmetry to the narrative, and builds a sense of anticipation as the stories unfold. The actors were all superb, and each of them brought an authentic sense of their characters’ humanity and reality to the screen. Even the supporting actors, particularly Linda Edmond who portrayed Simone Beck, were spot-on, their performances sparkling, fresh and genuine. They all brought a strong humanity to the characters which made them very appealing to the viewer, even when the characters’ personalities were not ones which would normally appeal to the viewer.

Here is where I tread in dangerous waters as a food blogger. It seems that any criticism of Julie Powell as a writer or as a person portrayed in this film or in her memoir, especially when written or uttered by a food blogger, is viewed as a sign of jealousy or personal attacks by herself and her fans. This is a shame, because the fact is, Julie Powell put herself out there in public view–she wrote her blog and wrote her book in a way which she can easily be viewed as narcissistic and shallow by readers–so if there are some who look at her work and declare their honest opinion of it, it doesn’t mean that they are attacking her personally. It means that they read her words and her own portrayal of herself and had an opinion about them–an opinion which may not be positive.

And that is okay. As a food blogger and a chef, I have taken plenty of flak for things I have written, and have gotten personal attacks which may or may not have been warranted. It comes with the territory of writing for the public. If you write strong opinions on issues, you are going to step on some toes, and you are going to hear about it from readers. And yeah, some of them are going to get personal, because frankly, some people take what you write personally, (even if it isn’t personal) and respond in kind.

It is just something that you should expect.

And really, if you write about yourself, as in a blog or memoir, you as the author are the one who is making it personal. And the fact is–not everyone who reads about someone is going to like them as a person. It is just how it is. Not everyone is equally loved by the rest of the world, because different people get along with different personalities, period. End of sentence, paragraph and story.

So, knowing this, I am just going to say the bad thing that food bloggers have to be very politic and not say: I did not care for either Julie Powell’s blog, nor especially, her book.

There. I said it.

And if readers want to see it as sour grapes or jealousy, so be it, but the truth is, I found Julie’s writing to be very shallow and her story to not be all that compelling. Her idea of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a stroke of genius, and as a blog subject it was perfect. It still stands as one of the best thematic hooks in the history of food blogging. I bow to Powell when it comes to the narrow focus and time limitation on her blog, especially since I have never been able to narrow down what I want to write about in my own blog. (I am just too damned interested in too damned many topics to impose limitations on Tigers & Strawberries.)

It is just the execution that I found lacking–I just didn’t like her writing style.

And that is fine. I don’t have to. Lots of people love the way she writes and what she writes about and I am happy for them and for Powell.

Now that I have said the dangerous thing, I can get on with what I wanted to say about the film. Amy Adams’ portrayal and the script make Julie Powell a much more interesting and sympathetic character than Powell does herself in her own writings, and that is a good thing. However, her story is just not as compelling or interesting as the story of Julia Child in postwar Paris, and that is the film’s greatest flaw. The two tales, while superficially similar, are not that analogous, and while presenting them equally in the structure of the film provides a sense of symmetry, the overall effect is not symmetrical.

Even though I liked Amy Adam’s portrayal, I found myself growing impatient during the segments that showed Powell’s struggles to complete her self-appointed mission. I wanted to go back to France, or Germany or Norway–wherever Julia and Paul had been stationed, and see what was happening there, because it was just more interesting to me. Like many reviewers, I feel that it was a shame that My Life in France wasn’t given its own film treatment, because it is just that more fascinating to the viewer.

(Let me add that one of the most interesting sociological contrasts between 2002 Queens and 1950’s Paris was the amount of cigarette smoking that was going on in the 50’s. Everyone smoked. Everywhere. In restaurants, in restrooms, at home–everywhere. And, while I am at it, I must applaud Nora Ephron’s eye for detail–the costumes, hairstyles, make-up, props, sets and street shots of Paris were period-perfect and really drew the viewer into that world.)

But, flawed as it was, in truth Julie & Julia has had one great effect on me: it made me want to crack open my ages old copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, get in my kitchen and whip up some Boeuf Bourguignon, a dish I haven’t made since culinary school.

And it seems that I am not the only one who wants to revisit the classic tome: The New York Times reports that for the first time since it first came out, Mastering is once more at the top of the best-seller list, as it rides on the coattails of the movie that it partially inspired. Nearly fifty years after its publication, it is once again flying off of the shelves (along with everything else in print by Julia Child, including her memoir, as well as Julie Powell’s book) and hopefully into kitchens across the country.

Many readers, however, seem to be stunned by the amount of fat involved in these recipes, and many are adapting them to lower the fat content, while hopefully retaining the flavor. One reader quoted in the Times article who made what she called “beef fauxguignon”–great name, by the way–admitted to using a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of burgundy wine and a can of cream of French onion soup seems to have missed the point in lowering the calories–cream of mushroom soup is anything but low-calorie. When she said, “Yes, Julia Child rolled over in her grave when I opened the cream of mushroom soup, I’m pretty sure of that. But you know what? That’s our world.” I had to laugh. The truth is, the opening a can of this and a can of that and popping some wine in the pot isn’t just our world–it was the world of 1950’s American cooking that Julia Child set out to change in the 1960’s too.

The irony is delicious.

But, when all is said and done, I think that we cannot dismiss the fact of Julia Child’s lasting impact on the eating habits and cooking abilities of Americans, nor can we downplay the effect that this film will have upon a new generation of American cooks.

By getting people who were only tangentially aware of Julia Child as a pop-culture icon out of the theatre and into the bookstore and then, hopefully, their kitchens, we also cannot dismiss the fact that by writing her blog, and then her book, and by selling the film rights to that book, Julie Powell helped remind America of why we loved Julia Child in the first place.

Meatless Monday: Three Sisters Succotash

Succotash is one of those dishes that sounds like a joke. You know, like when Sylvester says, “Thsufferin’ thsuccotasth.” It just doesn’t sound like anything that anyone would really eat.

But yes, people do eat it and it is very good.

But where did it get that outlandish name?

It isn’t outlandish at all–I mean really, we European descendant’s languages are the ones that are outlandish to this continent if you look at it from a historical perspective. Succotash, which is a Native American dish, came from the Narragansett word, “msíckquatash,” which means, “boiled corn.” But it doesn’t denote just boiled corn–it is corn and lima beans, another native food, boiled together. (Often boiled together in a tightly woven basket–one that is so finely wrought that it could hold water. Of course, because baskets cannot survive the direct heat of the fire, the food was cooked by heating clean stones in a fire until they were red-hot. Then, using tongs, the stones were lifted and dropped in the basket which was filled with water, corn and beans. When the stones cooled too much to heat the water, they were fished out and new ones were dropped in. Ingenious, yes?)

The original dish was seasoned with sea salt, and fat rendered from a bear or beaver, but after the Europeans came and brought pigs to the New World, Native Americans began using salt pork or bacon to season the dish. I have seen versions of the recipe that use wild onions and ramps to season the vegetables as well. When settlers took up cooking it, bacon or salt pork were almost universally used in the pot, often with some onions.

Later, during the Depression, when succotash went from being a historical traditional dish at Thanksgiving to being a staple food (because it was a meatless or mostly meatless dish made of inexpensive ingredients that were filling, tasty and nutritious) bell peppers and tomatoes were often added to the recipe.

My Grandma made succotash all the time, as did my Mom and I like it, but I think that was because they both cooked it with a generous dollup of bacon drippings in it. Bacon makes anything good. I am convinced that you could put it on nearly anything and turn it into a revelation, that is, if you are not inclined toward vegetarianism, are Muslim or a Jew who keeps kosher. Then, bacon isn’t so much of an attraction, but to the rest of us–it is nearly irresistible.

But, if I am going to present a vegetarian version of succotash and I want it to still be full flavored as if it were cooked with bacon–I don’t want it to be a pale, pallid, boring combination of beans and corn.

So, this version, which is sauteed in olive oil and simmered in vegetable stock, is flavored with deeply caramelized onions, garlic, sweet and hot peppers, cumin and smoked Spanish paprika.

I also added baby pattypan squash–the third in the triumvirate of staple foods among the agriculturally based northeastern Native Americans which were poetically called, “The Three Sisters.” Corn, squash and climbing beans were planted together in small plots close to villages in forest clearings; the corn rose tall like great green columns, with beans twining up their stalks, while the squash vines sprawled on the ground, shading the roots of both the beans and corn and also shading the soil enough that weed seeds could not germinate. The roots of the bean plants, furthermore, fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil–a nutrient which corn takes up from the soil in abundance. This interdependent system of agriculture is now called companion planting.

Not only do the Three Sisters benefit from being grown together, I think they benefit from being cooked together. If you do it right and don’t just boil everything to mush without any other flavoring. All three vegetables are sweet, but with different aromas and textures, so they work together perfectly.

Now we come to the drawback of succotash–shelling the lima beans.

You can cheat and use frozen limas, but I prefer the flavor of locally grown fresh limas. But, that means I need to shell the critters, and after years of shelling bushel after bushel of them at Grandma’s farm so she could freeze them–well, let’s just say my thumbs are still traumatized.

See, lima bean pods are really, really tough and leathery. You can’t just pop off the ends and peel back the string and have the pod pop open the way it will do with green beans. Oh, no, that would be too simple. The way we used to shell them when I was a kid was the adults would use a penknife to cut the end off the pod and then pull the string down. Then, their thumbs would scrape the beans into baskets and pots to be blanched and packed into plastic bags and sealed before being stacked in the freezer.

Until I was about eight or nine, I was only allowed to tear the bean pods off of the uprooted plants that lay in the center of our circle. These I would toss into the laps of the adults which were spread with dishtowels, where piles of pods had already been deposited. At each adult’s feet were baskets and pots to hold the beans. When those filled, I carried them and emptied the pretty pale green and creamy white beans into the huge speckled black enamel pot next to Grandma’s rocking chair.

Then, I would take the empty pods and load them and the uprooted and denuded plants into a bushel basket which I would drag to the cow pasture and empty there so the cows could eat their fill of the fresh green goodness. When we had hogs, I would take a basket’s worth to them, too, and chickens got an armload of the plants–chickens really love the taste of legumes like clover, bean plants and pea shoots.

When I was either eight or nine–I can’t remember which–I was allowed to use my brand new pocketknife to actually shell beans like everyone else while a younger cousin got my old job.

I liked the old job better. Even using a knife, the lima bean pods eventually caused blisters to rise on your thumb and made your joints ache. When Mom, Uncle John and Grandpa complained about how bad lima beans are, they were not bloody well kidding–they are beans that really make you work to obtain the delicious calories they contain!

Now, the truth is, shelling enough lima beans for dinner isn’t bad. They don’t raise blisters until you have done about a half bushel or so. And now that I have grown up and have really strong hands, I have come up with a new method of opening lima pods that doesn’t include a knife. I guess this would only work with really strong hands–try it and see if it works for you.

Hold the lima bean pod like I am in the photo above, on edge, and press down with your thumb really hard on the top edge. Usually, it will pop open at the top and you can pry the pod open the rest of the way and scrape the beans out with pretty minimal effort and no real danger of stabbing yourself in the thumb with a small, sharp knife. (Yeah, I did that when I was a kid.)

Kat helped me scrape the beans from the pods, and when we were done, she carried the pot of pods to the kitchen and down the front steps where we tossed them into the woods for the deer to eat.

I do wish we had cows, goats and chickens to eat them instead, but the City of Athens frowns the keeping of livestock in city limits.

But I can dream, can’t I?

Anyway, here is my way of making succotash–and it isn’t long suffering at all.

You can eat it as is with a batch of cornbread and a salad for dinner, or you can use it to fill enchiladas or tamales.

Three Sisters Succotash
Ingredients:

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup finely diced onions
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons fresh, minced garlic
2 tablespoons finely diced sweet bell pepper (red is best, but orange or yellow are good, too.)
minced fresh chili (optional)
1 cup thinly sliced baby summer squash (the younger squashes have less water and more flavor)
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper flakes (optional)
1 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
2-3 cobs of either fresh or leftover grilled corn on the cob, kernels cut off
2 1/2 cups fresh, shelled lima beans
1-2 cups vegetable stock or broth
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro leaves
2 tablespoons finely diced sweet bell pepper for garnish (it is really pretty if you can use different colors)

Method:

Heat the olive oil in a saute pan for about thirty seconds. Add the onion and sprinkle them with salt. Cook, stirring, until the onions are a nice dark golden color. Add the garlic, bell pepper and chili (if you are using it) and cook for another couple of minutes, until everything is fragrant.

Add the squash slices and cook, stirring, until the squash takes on some golden color. Add the spices–cumin, Aleppo pepper and paprika, and the corn, and cook, stirring for another minute or two.

Add the beans and cook, stirring for a minute, just to get some of the caramelized flavor into the beans.

Then, add the vegetable stock or broth and turn down the heat. Cover and simmer until the beans are as tender as you want them–I like them fully tender for this dish. When they are done, open the lid and boil off most of the liquid, leaving only the caramelized goodness of the vegetables, all of which will have taken on a golden brownish hue.

Add salt and pepper to taste and stir in the cilantro leaves and the fresh, uncooked bell pepper.

Serve immediately.

How Many Berries Can You Stuff Into A Batch Of Muffins?

It’s like the Zen question–”What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

How many berries can you cram into a batch of muffins before they turn into either a gloppy mess or they fall apart entirely?

I ask these questions, not only because I they are interesting exercises in kitchen science, but because I really like very fruity muffins. This is not a new preference with me–I am the famed creator of “Purple Muffins” which everyone, even avowed muffin-haters (how can you hate a muffin–I mean really?) have liked. The creation of Purple Muffins was an accident–I had an overabundance of wild blackberries one day and put them into a batch of muffins along with some other berries I had bought at the Farmer’s Market and discovered as I stirred the fruit into the batter that wild blackberries are extremely fragile. They break apart at the slightest provocation and spread their inky-purple colored selves all through whatever they are being stirred into.

Which, in this case was muffin batter. And thus, the batter was tinted a vivid hue of reddish violet, a color which surprisingly stayed brilliant all through the baking process. It was a little weird biting into bright purple baked goods, but they really tasted divine, so I guessed it was all fine.

Of course, all of my friends living in Athens thought purple muffins were the coolest thing ever, because not only were they psychedelically colored, they tasted great. So, for every pot luck and summer party, I was begged to make purple muffins. I even baked them for the psychic fairs we held at our book store (yes, Zak and I used to host psychic fairs–we both read Tarot cards, too) and they were always a hit with the metaphysically inclined folk who patronized our shop. (Purple, being the color of aura that indicated a spiritual nature, according to folks who are into such things, is a very popular color among the crystalline company we used to keep, so naturally, anything purple, even muffins, is bound to be if not advanced spiritually, then at least cool and interesting.)

So, I bought a bunch of blackberries, strawberries and raspberries again this weekend at the market and Zak saw them and said, pleadingly, “Make Purple Muffins, please?”

I cannot refuse him when he tips his head like that and gives me the puppy-dog eyes.

So. that is what I set out to do.

But I didn’t want to make either the original Purple Muffin recipe, as I didn’t really want to go digging around for the recipe.

You see, the original recipe is only recorded in one of my journals of those long-ago Athens years when we read Tarot cards and were asked odd questions at the grocery store when we shopped there after midnight such as, “Can you get me any of the works of Paracelsus?” This query from the checkout clerk was answered by. Zak who unblinkingly replied, “Would you be wanting the two volume Waite translation of his hermetic and alchemical writings or the Turner translation of The Archidoxes of Magic?” I mentioned that I wasn’t certain that either of them were still in print, but that we would do what we could to find them. These sorts of conversations only seem to happen in Athens, very often late at night at Krogers. I am sure there is some sort of metaphysical meaning to this. Perhaps the Athens Krogers is located on a ley line or some such.

(I wonder if Paracelsus, alchemist that he was, ever experimented to see how much fruit could be put into muffins without turning them into inedible goo? I somehow doubt it, but it is fun to think about it.)

But, I digress.

Nor did I want to do the ersatz Purple Muffin recipe, which I posted here about four years ago under the title Summer Berry Muffins. There is nothing wrong with that recipe–it is just that they don’t tend to turn out very purple.

So, I decided to experiment.

I wanted to see how many fresh berries I could stir into muffin batter before the mixture refused to bake into anything resembling a muffin. I wanted muffins that were more fruit than muffin, with the batter basically just there to hold the berries together. Why?

Because I felt like it, and because it is a fun exercise. And, because there was a high chance for failure, it being a baking recipe that I was going to muck around with in a rather extreme way. Fruit is juicy, and that can radically change the balance of liquid to solid in a baked good and can thus turn something good into something that will not bake up properly at all.

And, I decided to get Kat in on the action, because if I was going to make a mess of myself and my kitchen, I might as well get the kid all sloppy, too. And in truth, we all ended up in the kitchen, with Zak even taking a turn stirring the berries into the batter roughly in order to get as much purple juice as possible to stain the dough.

It turns out that you can get quite a lot of fruit into a muffin while still having it stick together and bake up into muffins. You have to be careful not to cover them tightly after they are cool, because sugar is hygroscopic, meaning that it will cause baked goods to readily take in moisture from the atmosphere and retain it. (This is part of what sugar does in baked goods besides make them sweet–it also acts as a means to keep them from drying out.) When you have sugar from the batter, as well as the added sugar and native juice from the fruit, if you tightly wrap or cover your baked item, it will get soggy.

I have found that you can keep these Purple Muffins, Version 2.1 unwrapped and on your counter for at least two days with impunity. You might be able to keep them longer, but I wouldn’t know about that, because they didn’t last two days at my house before being consumed with great glee and gusto by Kat, Zak, Brittney, Dan and myself.

One more thing–in the interest of making these muffins a little bit healthier, I did a couple of things. First, instead of sour cream, I used 2% Greek yogurt. It worked fine. I also substituted most of the all-purpose flour with King Arthur’s white whole wheat flour. This also worked fine–there is no discernible difference between muffins made completely with all-purpose flour and those blended with white whole wheat.

I guess that once you have all of that fruit in there, it doesn’t matter if you use healthier flour–it still all tastes good. Well, that and white whole wheat flour has a very mild flavor.

Of course, I ruined the healthier profile of some of the muffins by adding a layer of streusel topping–that delectable mixture of butter, sugar and flour that makes crispy, crumbly, buttery crumbs on the top of baked goods. I did this at the behest of Kat who loves “crumbs” as she calls it. Next time, I will substitute some rolled oats for some of the flour so I won’t feel so bad about adding more sugar and butter to the muffins than is absolutely necessary.

Purple Muffins. Version 2.1
Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup raw or white sugar (raw tastes better)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons finely shredded lemon zest
1 large egg
4 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
1 cup (use a fluid measuring cup) Greek yogurt
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups fresh mixed berries, picked over, rinsed and dried (I used blueberries, quartered strawberries, raspberries and blackberries)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon rolled oats (or you can use 2 tablespoons of the flour and leave out the oats)
2 tablespoons cold butter

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, spices, and lemon zest in a large bowl.

In a smaller mixing bowl, whisk egg until thick and uniformly yellow. Whisk in butter, and continue beating until completely combined.

Add yogurt, milk, and vanilla to the smaller bowl and whisk into the egg and butter mixture until everything is happily combined.

Dump wet ingredients into the dry ingredient bowl and mix well. Add your berries and mix very well, hopefully crushing some of the berries enough that they stain your batter purple. If they don’t, you can’t rightly call the resulting muffins Purple Muffins, now can you? So beat those suckers in there and make that dough Technicolor. You know you want to.

With your hands, combine the remaining four ingredients by kneading it all together until it becomes a clumpy, crumbly mixture.

Either spray your muffin tins with baking spray or line with paper muffin cups. Or use silicone muffin cups on a baking sheet like I do. Using a large ice cream scoop (the kind with the ratchety thing that scrapes the scoop out of of the scooper), or a spoon, portion out the dough, which will be thick and heavy, into the muffin cups. If you don’t have an ice cream scoop, run out and get one for this recipe–this is the best and easiest way to portion out muffin dough without making a godawful mess.

Sprinkle the tops with a bit of the streusel stuff, then pop your muffins in the oven.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, then turn the pans back to front in order to get them to brown evenly. Bake for another 10-15 minutes, for total of 20-30 minutes. (If you have a convection oven as I do, the baking time will be closer to 20 minutes. For a regular oven, it will be more like 25-30 minutes.)

Remove from oven and cool for a couple of minutes in the pan, then remove from the pan and allow to cool on a rack. These are good warm, but even better after they cool completely–then, they are irresistible, as the flavors have really melded together and the berries are no longer molten nuggets of hot death for your tongue.

Makes 12-14 muffins, depending on how large your muffins are. (If you have little loaf pans like I do and only 12 muffin cups, you can put the leftover dough into a loaf pan and make a wee Purple Berry Bread, but remember–that bread will take longer to bake than the muffins. The mini loaf I baked took about thirty-five to forty minutes total to bake.

Local (And Slow) All the Way: Rabbit And Horticultural Bean Stew

Every ingredient to this particular dish was local: the beans, the onions, garlic, carrots, celery, leeks, mushrooms, rosemary, thyme, sage and oh, yeah, the rabbit.

Oh, wait a minute: the white wine isn’t from Athens, but it is from Ohio, and the salt–well, it is from the ocean, which is not local to Ohio.

At least, not yet. Maybe after the polar ice caps melt. Then we Ohioans might have some ocean-front property, but I doubt it even then. Oceans have been thin on the ground here for a long while–at least since the Devonian Period, if I am remembering my geology correctly.

So, no local sea salt for little old me.

Back to the dish at hand.

It all starts with the making of rabbit stock.

Which is about the same as making chicken stock, really. You just need rabbit carcasses and bones and bits, some leeks, a carrot or two, a garlic clove, a couple of stalks of celery, a splash of white wine and some herbs. And some salt, and a few peppercorns. Oh, and a secret ingredient. (A dried shiitake mushroom–also known in Asian markets as Chinese black mushrooms. More on that later.)

And lots of pure, cold water. Always start your stocks with cold water–it helps dissolve the gelatin in the bones which makes for a thicker, richer stock that when chilled, will turn into a gel. Melted, a gelled stock has a velvety feel on the tongue that is qualitatively different than the watery feel of canned broths. You just have to feel and taste it for yourself–it is hard to describe the difference.

How To Make Rabbit Stock:

On to rabbit stock–it is just as easy as making any other stock.

I used bones from two rabbits which had most of the meat cut from them to make rabbit stew meat, but one could use full carcasses for this just as easily. Or do like I do with chicken stock and use a whole carcass and then a bunch of bones. Just remember, the more bones you have, the richer your stock will be.

Basically, follow my instructions on how to make chicken stock for making rabbit stock, while noting the differences I mention here.

The biggest difference is that I put garlic in my rabbit stock, when I do not use it in my chicken stock. Why is that? Because I think that garlic really compliments the meat of domestic rabbit perfectly, and one little clove of garlic never ruined anything. Well, maybe it might have ruined a batch of beer or a bowl of cereal, but that is probably about it. I might not chuck that garlic clove into the pot if I was going to use the rabbit stock for some delicate soup or whatnot, but since this was going to be the base of a really hearty and garlicky stew, I didn’t see why I should leave out the garlic.

The second difference is that I leave out onions and just use leeks in my rabbit stock. Why is that? Well, I guess it is because I like the leek flavor better in the rabbit stock. You can use onion if you want–I won’t fuss at you about it.

The third difference is my secret ingredient–that single solitary dried shiitake mushroom.

Why is it there?

To add a layer of depth to the stock–an extra umami kick, if you will.

Besides, you will find that rabbit meat and mushrooms are a classic combination if you peruse European cookbooks for recipes involving leporids and fungi.

Those are the largest differences in the ingredients and making of rabbit stock. I also tend not to simmer the stock as long as I do chicken stock–the bones of domestic rabbits are smaller and more delicate than those of chickens and they seem to give up their goodness much more easily. I tend to simmer my rabbit stock for only about four to six hours as opposed to the marathon six to twelve hours for chicken stock.

Otherwise, the rules are all the same:

Rinse off your carcasses and bones, then put them in a pot with your herbs and vegetables.

Add cold water to cover the ingredients by at least three inches or so. Cold water. Starting with hot water will not speed the process up and you will end up with a cloudy stock that doesn’t have as much dissolved gelatin from the bones in it. So just put the cold water in the pot in the first place and take the time to let it come to a simmer naturally.

Put the pot on the heat and turn it up to high. Watch the pot and when it comes to a boil, immediately turn it down so that is simmers gently and steadily. Do not let it boil again. Ever. (In fact, when it comes to rabbit meat–don’t ever boil it–it toughens it up too much. Always cook rabbit with gentle heat, at a simmer if there is liquid involved.)

Skim the scum that comes to the top during the first part of the cooking. And instead of using a spoon like you see in the photos of the chicken stock post–the link is above so you cannot miss it–use one of these neato keen super fine meshed skimmer thingies you can find at most Asian grocery stores. Just slip that bad boy under the scum, lift and voila–the skank is gone! Rinse it under running water and go skank skimming again. It is so much easier than the spoon method and it is fun, too. And you end up with clearer stock when you are done!

Add about a cup of dry white wine. (I like Riesling with rabbit.)

And–when your stock is done, strain out all the solid bits. If you used a whole carcass, the meat has probably fallen off the bones, but if not, pull off what is left on the bones and set it aside. Discard the bones and the vegetables, but keep the meat.

Salt to taste.

If you are not going to use the stock immediately, cool it quickly and thoroughly and put it into containers in your fridge or your freezer depending on when you foresee using it. It can keep about a week in the fridge, for months in the freezer, just like chicken stock.

Now, if you are going to use the stock immediately to make the stew that this post is actually about, then leave it in the pot and go on with your recipe.

Now, while that stock is simmering, you can do all the stuff you need to do to get the rest of the ingredients ready. You can thaw out any of your boneless rabbit stew meat you might have to use in the stew, shell the beans and cut up the carrots, celery, leeks, onions, garlic, mushrooms and herbs.

Shelling horticultural beans goes faster if you have help, but I find it quite relaxing even if I am by myself. Besides, what’s the hurry? You have to simmer the stock for at least four hours, so why rush on everything else? This is not a quick recipe–but that is okay. Sometimes some of us like slow food, food that takes a long, leisurely route from the kitchen to the table.

Once you have the preparations done–the stock made and any meat from the bones set aside, the beans shelled, the vegetables sliced and the boneless rabbit stew meat–it all comes together quickly enough, and then just goes on the back of the stove to simmer pretty well on its own. Just like stock–this stew doesn’t need your undivided attention–just make sure it is simmering and not boiling, and nothing is sticking to the bottom, and you are golden–no worries.

So yeah, this all-local recipe is slow-going–I did make it on a lazy Sunday after all, with lots of help from a nearly-three-year-old who had great fun assisting me–but it is all good. Not only is it easy to put together, it is fun, and the resulting flavor makes everything worthwhile.

It is by turns rich and complex in flavor, and yet simple and pure. I don’t know how else to describe it. Rabbit has such a clear, pure flavor, and the beans are earthy, and that darkness is accented by the deep flavor of the shiitake. But then the vegetables–the carrots, celery and caramelized onions–add delicious sweetness to the mixture while the sharp scents of the herbs float over everything.

It is really quite an amazing dish–very warming, very satisfying and surprisingly light for all that it is a stew. (I think it seems light because rabbit is nearly fat free.)

And, even if the recipe’s length makes it seem like it must be hard–it isn’t. It is just a good old European-style peasant food, as dreamed up in a kitchen full of the local Appalachian summer bounty. Think of it as Peasant-Hillbilly Fusion. (Might this be a new trend?)

Rabbit and Horticultural Bean Stew
Ingredients:

3 tablespoons olive oil or bacon drippings
1 cup thinly sliced onion
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups thinly sliced leeks–white and light green bits only
3 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
1 cup thinly sliced celery
1 cup thinly sliced carrots
1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh shiitake mushrooms
1 pound boneless rabbit meat
1 tablespoon each fresh minced rosemary leaves, fresh thyme leaves and minced fresh sage leaves
1 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
1 cup dry white wine
1 1/2-2 quarts of rabbit stock (or chicken stock, if you must–or water, if you haven’t anything else)
1 1/2 pounds freshly shelled horticultural beans
the meat from the rabbit stock, if you have any
1 bay leaf
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons minced fresh herbs–I used rosemary, thyme, sage and flat-leaf parsley–for garnish

Method:

Heat the oil or drippings in the bottom of a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium high heat.

Add the onions and sprinkle with a teaspoon of salt and cook, stirring, until the onions turn golden. Add the leeks, garlic, celery, carrots and mushrooms, and cook, stirring until the onions are a deep golden brown and the other vegetables have been tinged with brown and everything is smelling wonderful.

Add the boneless rabbit meat, and cook, stirring, until it browns lightly.

Sprinkle in the first measures of fresh herbs and the Spanish paprika. Pour in the wine and deglaze the bottom of the pot, then allow the alcohol to simmer out of the wine.

Add the rabbit stock or whatever other liquid you are using, and stir in the beans. Add the meat from the rabbit stock, if you had any. Throw in the bay leaf.

Bring to a brisk simmer, then turn down the heat to a gentle simmer, cover the pot and cook until the beans and rabbit are both tender.

If the stew liquid isn’t thick enough to your taste, take out about a half cup of beans and mash them thoroughly. Stir them back into the stew and voila–instant thickener! No extra added fat or starch. Beans are like magic that way.

Season to taste with salt and pepper, and garnish with the fresh herbs just before serving.