Curried Vegetarian Gumbo

This preparation, like the following two, debunks myths of “authenticity.”  Peruvian chef, Ricardo Zarate remarks on the question of “authentic” Peruvian food.  He crafts this beautiful metaphor: “When people ask me what is Peruvian food, I have the hardest time to explain.  I say to them, ‘Peruvian food is a pot that has been simmering for five hundred years.’  The first ingredients were the Incas and the Spaniards.  Then we added Africa and Morocco to the pot.  Next is Italian, with a little German and French.  Then a lot of Chinese.  The last ingredient is Japanese.  And the pot is still simmering.”

I call this dish “curried” because of the ginger, spices, and coconut milk and I call it a “gumbo” because of the roux and the okra.  The beautiful color comes from the turmeric and coconut milk and the velvety texture comes from the roux and the okra.  So, to ask if the dish is “authentic” makes no sense at all.  This is true across all arts in all cultures.

And it’s “vegetarian” for obvious reasons.  The vegetables that filled my big Le Creuset #28 with 6.7 liters of curried gumbo cost approximately $2.00 from the sale rack at Puglia’s (that’s ginger from our freezer in the tinfoil).  Chop them up, cook spices in roux, cook veggies in roux, add coconut milk and crushed tomatoes, simmer until cooked, serve it over rice and enjoy the magic the okra works on your palate.

 

 

 

Beef Gumbo

I’m calling this one “beef gumbo” for three reasons.  One, the vegetables are cooked in a roux.  Two, it’s served with rice separately (as opposed to cooked with rice like a jambalaya or the curried ginger porkchops above).  And, three, it features that singular, vegetal powder made from dried and ground sassafras leaf, filé.  That, with some help from the cayenne, imparts a lovely kick to this “gumbo” and helps the roux to form a velvety sauce.  But most people would call it beef stew.  Sear the beef in some oil for texture and remove.  Add a stick of butter to the fat and charred bits that remain in the pot and about an equal part flour.  I simmered and stirred the roux for a scant ten minutes which is an affront to Cajun and Creole cooks everywhere who would have spent much, much more time with it.  Soften the mirepoix in the roux and stir in the garlic and seasonings toward the end.  Add your preferred (or available) liquids—this time I used beef broth, the “purge” from the thawed beef, and beer.  Finally, in go the potatoes (this is the exception that proves the rule in gumbo and makes the dish closely related to beef stew) and a few bay leaves.  Simmer until soft and luxuriant and serve with rice.

Asian-Cajun Fusion

 

This is what has become a typical COVID-19, one-skillet (or wok) meal.  The ingredients are simple and ones, with the possible exceptions of fresh broccoli and ginger, you’re likely to have on hand.  The broccoli isn’t necessary (you could use almost any canned or frozen vegetable) and you could use dried ginger, but it’s the freshness of these small miracles that put this dish over the top.

The bacon calls for a note.  This is Nueske’s Pepper Coated Bacon and you don’t have it in your fridge or freezer.  And you don’t need it.  But, if you do use it, or any Nueske’s smoked meats, remember that a little bit of the stuff goes a long way.  The salty-smokiness of these scant four slices envelops the dish and embraces your palate with unctuousness and depth.  Any bacon will do, just not as magnificently.

Crisp up the bacon and remove.  Leave all the fat in the skillet and add the rest of the ingredients (adding the chopped garlic and ginger only once the onion is translucent and the broccoli has started to brown a little).  Stir in seasonings at the end.  For curries, I always use “the Cs” that I can find in the larder—coriander, cumin, cloves, cayenne, cardamom, cinnamon, etc.  Or just use a curry spice mix.  THE SPICE HOUSE Indian spice mixes are excellent.

Remove everything, keeping as much fat in as possible, add more fat (I used butter and oil), and start your roux by whisking in flour.  This is where the “Cajun” part comes in.  If we were making a gumbo, for instance, we would take this roux all the way to a deep mahogany such that it becomes the star of the show.  But here it’s just a nod in that direction.

Add stock (or water or beer) slowly while whisking until you get your desired consistency remembering that you’ll be adding some peanut butter if you want.  It’s a nice touch that gives the sauce an “Asian-ness.”  Then, it’s everybody into the pool.  Get it hot, dump it over some rice, hit it with some cilantro and chopped peanuts and Sambal, pour a glass, and hunker down.

Curried Ginger Pork Chops With “Spanish Rice”

This plate, just unctuous enough, is no-fail, simple deliciousness with Midwestern memories. Here it’s made a bit less simple with garlic taking on a starring role and Asian seasonings.

Salt and pepper chops and sear in a little oil for texture, remove.

You could also dust them lightly with flour for even more texture and complexity of flavor.  When you sear meat that will eventually end up in a sauce this will also help as a thickener, a sort of built-in roux.

Add ginger, garlic, onion, chilies, cumin, paprika, turmeric, salt, pepper and, once softened, add rice.

 

Sauté until rice turns translucent to give it a toasty flavor. Always do this with rice when cooked in this way.

Stir in crushed tomatoes and stock or water or beer.

 

Put chops back in, bring to simmer, put in oven at 300 for about 45-50 minutes.

You will NOT regret this . . .

Spring 2020 Kickoff: Over the Open Fire

April 19^th marked the beginning of “cook pit” season, the season when this sturdy rebar turns from cold to scorching hot and the cast iron pot steams with beef chili or stew, chicken curry or with dumplings or fried, whole birds, or anything else you don’t want to cook inside or can’t resist to cook outside.  Like the charcoal grill, the pit is an emblem of spring, a harbinger of good things to come and hours-long commitments to cooking.

This 12-inch, tri-leg Dutch Oven produced a bubbling, eight quarts of smoky chili to kick off the season.  It’ll last us three weeks.

It starts with about a pound of seasoned top round steak cut into bite-sized pieces and fried in a bit of oil for texture.

 

 

 

Then in goes the rest: ground beef, onion, pepper, garlic (in roughly equal parts), and more seasoning.

Don’t skimp on the garlic. I’m serious about “equal parts.”

And then the liquid: crushed tomatoes, beer, stock and/or water all mixed with a generous scoop of cocoa.

Let simmer for as long as you can wait and then add the beans toward the end.

Much better for breakfast than cereal.

Serve with cheese and sour cream (and cilantro to make it look fancy) straight up or over pasta, rice, tortilla chips or Fritos.

The Grapes of Past

For wine tasting notes, updated daily, click here

Habanero

I buy them by the pound, but never get through them all.

¡No hay que entender la essencia de la comida; si tienes hambre, necesitas solamente comer!

There are all kinds of silly verbs and nouns that reflect the relatively new obsession with capsaicin. “Eat the heat,” “feel the burn,” “chili-head,” “heat-eater,” and so forth, pepper the discourse of hotness. Bottled hot sauces have names like “Tongue Torch,” “Shotgun Sauce,” “Colon Cleanser,” and of course “Insanity Sauce” (an example of the ridiculous and uninteresting and gimmicky idea to put pepper extract—pure fire, no flavor—into a bottle).

I guess I’ve been a “chili-head” since long before this marketing blitz, even as a kid but I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because my father fancied himself a heat-eater. On his annual pilgrimages to Wisconsin he would load large coolers with bratwurst, cheese curds, good mustards, horseradish, and hot sauce—things you couldn’t find in the late seventies and early eighties in Arkansas where he lived.

Visiting from Wisconsin over the summers, I would join my dad in dousing hot sauce on just about everything and eating jalapenos. It was one of the great pleasures of my young life. Looking back on it all, though, I realize that we weren’t really “eating the heat.” The sort of hot sauces my dad liked were essentially small bottles of liquid salt. The whole jalapenos were pickled, transformed and dumbed down in one or maybe two-gallon jars—as Socrates might say, a sort of sham art of eating the heat. To my mind, the best way to truly eat the heat comes by way of the habanero.

This pepper offers a sensation that matches the warm, orange glow of its color. Compared to the sharp, harsh, often crude impact of bottled hot sauces these days the fresh habanero embraces and comforts, especially when cooked. It starts off gently, unobtrusively, and then builds to a warm glow that starts from the center of the body and gradually and kindly moves outwards. The floral notes of the habanero remind us that it’s not really about the heat after all. It’s about, as Jim Harrison would say, the experience. Sometimes this experience includes adventures later on, especially when this chili is combined with lots of garlic (a similarly intoxicating experience), but everything will be OK.

So, put away the bottles of salt, the pickled peppers, and really eat the heat.

Finish the Damn Pasta

E!  This one is especially for you.  First, revisit the post below.  Second, try this:

IF (for whatever reason) you’re short on garlic or wish to avoid it, omit some or all of it. Saute shrimp and leftover roasted veggies at the same time in butter and/or olive oil just until shrimp begins to show color.  Add pasta and cheese (I use Parmigiano Reggiano for its saltiness and nuttiness).  Cook and toss until cheese and pasta are heated through but make it as “toasty” as you like.  This plate takes about four minutes.

Spaghetti with Shrimp and Garlic

Sometimes figuring out what to do for a late, last-minute Saturday dinner when nothing comes to mind because you don’t seem to have anything that hangs together can be daunting, like pushing a boulder uphill or keeping up with The New Yorker. But these situations yield success by virtue of necessity. Foraging in the fridge and freezer revealed little more than some leftover pasta (spaghetti, I cooked way too much on Thursday) and a few frozen shrimp. It’s all you need if you have a few other things on hand. Try this:

Peel a couple of heads of garlic (heads, not cloves) and put them into some olive oil. Sauté just until they begin to turn golden-brown (never overcook garlic). Toss in some shrimp and sauté just until they begin to show a little color (never overcook seafood of any kind). Finally, put in some leftover pasta and cheese (any hard cheese) and toss around until toasty.

This turned out to be a serendipitous answer to revelator John Thorpe’s charge that most of us don’t think about frying pasta in fat

What Mario Batali calls “the undisputed king of cheeses.”  Of course, these are fighting words . . .

with some cheese as being akin to simply making a grill cheese sandwich, or simply spreading butter on bread. Fundamentally, they’re all the same goddamn thing. Saturday’s dinner proved it, only it was better than a grilled cheese or buttered bread. The Parmigiano-Reggiano imparts a nutty taste to the whole thing while the olive oil has been infused with the garlic. The former envelops your head and the latter smacks you in the mouth.

Of course, if you had basil, you would hit this hard.

Culinary Shit List (part III): Kosher, Vegetarian, Vegan, and Other Misguided Pursuits

A friend from out of state visited us in New Jersey. Having recently returned from Greece, we were still infatuated with the food there and decided to make dolmas and spanakopita with garlic roasted potatoes (although we didn’t consume any of these foods in Greece). Concerned about boiling the baby in the mother’s milk, I wondered if my observant friend could have my homemade tzatziki with dinner. “No problem,” he announced, I’ll just eat the spanakopita with tzatziki first, and then eat the dolmas. Reminded at this moment of these food rules I couldn’t decide if I found this response to be absurd or hilarious. One thing I knew for sure is that I regarded rules like this with contempt. Then things went bad. Upon observing that my egg-lemon sauce contained both butter and chicken stock my friend explained that it would be “for you all to enjoy, not me.” To me, this was unforgivable, a transgression I couldn’t overlook and one that still haunts me today. Egg-lemon sauce in my world has one job—singular and precious—and that’s to be ladled over dolmas (OK, and grilled salmon and asparagus). That any soul, in any world, isn’t allowed to drench dolmas in that nearly golden sauce is criminal. No, it goes beyond criminality and into transcendentalism. For me, it poses a fundamental question: is being Kosher really worth it in this world or any other? And I’m not even going into the obvious fact that the pig is the single greatest animal to eat, at least in this world. Maybe I’ll understand it one day. But I doubt it. If pigs rule the afterworld, I will be at peace in purgatory.

And there are other problems. While Bill Buford observes that vegetarians actually think more about meat and where it comes from than do carnivores (whom tend to think about meat as “an element in a meal . . . [e.g.] ‘what I want tonight is a cheeseburger!’”), there is still confusion lurking just under the veg surface. Kel and I went to have drinks and avocados with friends. We had vodka and they drank wine and beer. Two of them had just returned from Montreal. We were excited to ask them the typical questions. How was the train ride? How was the bed and breakfast? How was the exchange rate? Was it expensive? We asked about those kinds of things. But we were saving the most important and exciting question for last. “Talk about the food,” I requested dramatically. Five seconds into their answer, and I remember it like it was yesterday, they disclosed that they had recently “become” vegetarian. Almost reflexively I checked out of the conversation and worried that my disdain would be too obvious and rude as they went on about the “vegetarian Japanese restaurant” that they enjoyed and the other, meatless products they consumed. Vegetarian Japanese? Aren’t the Japanese best known for their seafood, beef, and pork? Their response had suddenly become stultifying, my frustration at this point tangible. What better way to make a food story uninteresting than by eliminating the eating of animals from it? I can’t really think of one.

Now, in fairness, vegetarians are generally kind, well-meaning people. And the arguments for vegetarianism—on health, on wellness, on ecology, on economy, on morality, and probably on hundreds of other things—are legion. But, from a foodie perspective, vegetarianism profoundly limits what and how we think about food and the richness of the ways we can talk about it. And obviously the practice limits the ways we can enjoy food tastes and textures. And vegetarianism, as we know it in the Western world anyway, is more often than not caught up in a sort of bourgeois fantasy. Rather than a style of eating by virtue of necessity—poverty—being vegetarian in the West usually requires an elevated socio-economic status. Vegetarian foods, for the typical professional urbanite anyway, come from high-end, specialty outlets (even by Western standards). Most people in the world would never, ever, even think about shopping at a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s. And most people in the world cherish meat because of its preciousness and its singular and sublime, spiritual and physical, connection to the cycle of life. Let me paraphrase Anthony Bourdain; most of the people in the world are vegetarian, and they ain’t happy about it.

Finally, vegetarianism in its most fanatical form is called “veganism.” This fantastical human invention is a very small step away from not eating at all. I recognize that this is a realm of theory and practice that exists in another dimension entirely—familiar to only a tiny fraction of a percentile of people on earth—and one that I’ll never understand. But I also recognize that there must be a reason that no civilization (that I’ve ever heard of) has ever survived by eating like this. Like vegetarianism often is, this orientation to food is the product of a bourgeois condition that fails to see the moral repugnancy of turning your nose up at any food. I disdain veganism for the same reason I disdain eating competitions. Both show an utter disrespect for food and hungry people. Animals and their byproducts are our most cherished and important friends because we eat them. And the idea that “true” vegans refuse to eat honey, for example, because it’s made by bees? I rest my case and will stop ranting . . . for now.