Lentil Soup

I have fond memories of eating lentils with rice on a couple of week-long Boy Scout hikes across the Isthmus of Panama. There's not much that's more restorative to body and spirit after a day of a long slog, much of it in thigh-deep water, up and over the Continental Divide, particularly when paired with a good bit of Tabasco Sauce. We changed it out for red or black beans from night to night to vary the menu, but that was the typical fare - good, hearty campesino fare, augmented on at least a couple of nights with some wild turkey. (The bird, not the whiskey - remember, we were Boy Scouts.)

Lentils make great soup, too. This is an adaptation of something I found in the latest Joy of Cooking. I started out by making a simple stock from the bone out of a pork roast that I'd used for something else, and two quarts of water:

I know, that picture isn't very exciting. Trust me, though; good things are going on inside that pressure cooker. Meanwhile, I prepped everything else, starting with picking over the lentils.

It used to be the case that you'd always find a rock or two in a package of dried beans or lentils. Nowadays, not so much - I think they've gotten pretty good about cleaning them in processing.

We still have to wash them, of course. I like this Japanese rice-washing bowl for that. Note the slots in the pour spout - those allow us to wash and drain the lentils (or rice, etc.) in the same vessel. 

And here are most of the rest of the raw ingredients: carrots, celery, garlic, onion, bacon, tomatoes, and thyme. 

You don't have to have a Belgian-style wit with some orange wedges squeezed into it on hand, but it helps. (Note to beer snobs: yes, I know Blue Moon is brewed by Coors.)

Chop up all the vegetables and the bacon:

Meanwhile, the pork bone has been in the pressure cooker for nearly an hour, and that's long enough. Here's the finished stock:

And the bone by itself. After it cools, I'll cut all the remaining meat off that bone and chop it up for the soup. No, the dogs don't get the bone - that thing's had all of its substance pretty well boiled out, and is too brittle for them to chew on.

Getting back to the vegetables, we sweat them in a bit of olive oil. We don't want them to get brown; just tender. 

Note that I'm using the pressure cooker even though I'm not going to cook this under pressure. Why dirty another pan?

Here's the rest of the ingredients: some leftover boiled potato and some Andouille sausage I had in the freezer. I'll dice the potatoes and slice up the sausage - so, no, this isn't a vegetarian dish.

Here's what we want the vegetables to look like:

Add the lentils, tomatoes, and thyme:

... and the stock. Bring it to a gentle boil and stir occasionally. 

After about an hour, it'll look like this:

Add in the potato and sausage, and the pork from the bone, and adjust the seasoning. This needed some salt and pepper, but I didn't want to salt it before it was done because of the bacon.

And here it is in a cup. I actually ended up thinning this out a bit more with some chicken stock. Damn fine eating on a cool day with some saltine crackers and a bit of Sriracha sauce.

Haitian Chicken

This is a dish I learned from my dad years ago. I love to make it during the colder months of the year, which is kind of interesting given that Haiti is pretty much never very cold. As in, at all.

Anyway, the mise en place: chicken pieces, celery, onion, green pepper, garlic, limes, butter, tomatoes (I almost always use canned), tomato paste, chicken stock (I'll make some up from chicken base this time), soy sauce, sugar, and salt.

First, squeeze the limes and marinate the chicken in the juice with a bit of salt for a while.

Then chop up the vegetables....

And sear the chicken pieces in the butter and a little oil. You might have to do this in batches (I typically do).

Note the crusty bits on the bottom of the pot. Those are magic.

Remove the chicken and keep it warm, and allow the pot to cool down a bit while you make yourself a nice cocktail.

That's a Cape Cod, of course - pictured just before the lime was squeezed into it and a nice stir stick added for effect. (It's not for me. I don't really care for cranberry juice. It was requested by Susan, and who am I to deny her anything?)

Now we'll cook the vegetables down a bit in the remaining butter and oil, with the rendered chicken fat. When they're about done, we'll add the tomato paste.

Stir in the chicken stock, tomatoes, soy sauce, and sugar, and add the chicken back to the pot. Give it all a good stir and bring it up to a gentle simmer.

Cover the pot and let the chicken simmer gently for about an hour. Or maybe three.

Yes, I know this photo isn't that interesting. Sorry, but that's what it looks like.

After it's simmered for a while, remove the cover, increase the heat a bit, and let the liquid gently boil down a bit. This is what you're looking for:

Note how the meat has pulled back from the bone a bit and the broth has taken on a slightly richer color.

Here it is plated,over rice. You'll want to have some Tabasco sauce on the side with this.

Enjoy!

Red Chili

There are probably more recipes for chili con carne out there than there are chiliheads. I have a couple myself, and if I'm representative, that means the number of recipes exceeds the number of chiliheads by a factor of two. There are also any number of theories about the history of the dish, whether it's proper or not to include beans or tomatoes, etc. etc. and of course there's also quite a lot of fighting over these theories.

Personally, I subscribe to the 19-Century San Antonio school where it comes to history, and I add the beans and the tomatoes. Other than that, I don't tend to worry too much about it - unless someone brings up the idea of cinnamon or spaghetti, in which case I start looking for rope. (Cincinnati chili is not chili, and that's more than enough said about that.)

Also: this is red chili (hence the title) and of course there's green chili out there too, and it's a wonderful dish it its own right. I personally don't meddle with it, though, since my housemate has her own recipe and method that's perfectly wonderful, and I just leave that to her.

Anyway, here's the mise en place:

Yes, I did say there'd be beans. I will use pinto beans, kidney beans, or black beans, depending on my mood. This time it's pintos.

What you're not seeing is meat. I use about two pounds per batch; in this case beef and pork, and I'm trying something different - searing it on the grill rather than in the kettle.

By the way, the searing-on-the-grill method worked quite well. I recommend it, and will probably do it that way from now on.

And here it is after the sear, along with the spices measured out. What I don't show is the onion chopped and the garlic minced, but I'm sure you've figured that out already.

That's a teaspoon each of cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, and black pepper; a teaspoon and a half each of ground cumin and oregano, and six tablespoons of chili powder.

Yes, six tablespoons. That's a quarter-cup plus two tablespoons.

I use Penzey's medium-hot.

Six tablespoons.

Anyway.

For this iteration of the dish I used half smoked paprika and half Hungarian sweet. I thought it turned out pretty good - I like smoked foods to a point, but anything other than red meat I try to keep to a minimum as I think the smoke can really overpower the other flavor notes. I won't eat smoked cheese at all, for example.

But I digress. Here's the start of the main sequence of preparation, sweating the onion and garlic in a bit of peanut oil:

Then we add the tomatoes. Note that I use canned tomatoes (and a small can of tomato sauce). Fresh tomatoes are great, but there's certainly nothing wrong with canned, particularly in a dish like this.

Then the beer, and the spices. Yes, that's still six tablespoons of chili powder.

After cooking and stirring for a few minutes, It should look like this:

Then of course the guest of honor: the meat. You can use any kind of red meat, in any proportions, but I tend to stick with beef or beef and pork.

After simmering for a couple of hours, it'll look like this:

For the second stage, we open a can of beans and prepare a slurry of a couple of tablespoons of flour and enough water to make it flow. (Note beer for scale.) The canonical recipe (if there is one, which there isn't) calls for masa harina instead of plain flour, but I don't tend to keep that on hand.

By the way, I really like these European-style can openers. They're a little harder to use, but they take the top of the can off much cleaner - you can even reuse the can lid to store any leftover ingredients in the refrigerator.

And not only that, but there's no sharp edge left on the can at all:

Anyway, after simmering the beans and the flour slurry in the chili for about fifteen minutes, we're ready to plate. I take mine over white rice (another point of bitter contention amongst chiliheads) with some finely-chopped white onion on top.

You can also try grated cheese, green onion, jalapeños, whatever you like. I'm not going to kick about it, unless you start talking about cinnamon or pasta.

Sausage and Peppers on the Grill

This is something I saw on the web: the idea is that instead of grilling sausages directly on the grill, you steam them in a foil pan with some liquid (or liquid-bearing vegetables) first. This allows you to get the sausages cooked reasonably through, and get some smoke flavor into them, before searing them - and it means less chance of burning the skins of the sausages or leaving the centers undercooked.

The method is supposed to be good for all manner of sausage dishes, but, again, we're making sausage and peppers. We'll start with some Italian sausage, an onion, a bell pepper, and a large clove of garlic. The fettuccine, parmesan cheese, butter, and cream you see here are for Fettuccine Alfredo, something I pretty much always have with sausage and peppers.

Oh, the high-dollar olive oil you see here was just for the picture. I switched it out for some cheaper stuff for the actual process - we really don't need the good stuff for this dish.

And yeah, I know that I could have chosen some much better sausage from a specialty-foods store. Just didn't have time for that.

(Note vodka cocktail for scale.)

We'll also soak some hickory chips in water for the smoker box:

Slice the onion and pepper and add it to an aluminum-foil pan. Mince the garlic and sprinkle it on the top:

Arrange the sausages on the top. I'd forgotten tomatoes in my mise en place, so I sliced up some homegrown ones and added them after the sausages.

 Drizzle with a little olive oil, and place the pan on the cooler side of a preheated grill. Cover and relax for a bit with the vodka cocktail.

After a while the vegetables will start to cook. As they do, they'll give off some liquid, which the sausages will steam in. Here they're about half done:

After a little while longer the sausages will start to get brown and crisp, and the vegetables will be done all the way through and start to caramelize a bit.

That's when it's time to move the sausages off to the grill and sear them a bit. Note that we also pile the vegetables up on the cooler side of the grill to prevent them from burning:

This right here is what you're looking for - the sausages are seared and even cracked a bit, but they certainly haven't been overworked.

The sausages go back in the pan with the vegetables, and taken into the house to wait in a warm oven while we make the fettuccine.

All set - the fettuccine is just boiled al dente, and tossed with butter and parmesan to taste along with a little pepper and parsley. The cream is added only if we need to loosen the sauce up a bit.

And here it is plated. This was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. I think I'll use this method from now on.