When I was younger, comfort food took on many forms.
Being half Trinidadian, if my mom was cooking it often meant some sort of roti and curry preparation to warm our hearts and bellies. After my parents split and my dad took over the cooking for our household, it was a Sunday roast chicken redolent with paprika, garlic, onion and pepper with a side of fluffy stuffing. Once I was considered old enough to cook on my own, my foods of choice were often plain, bland and white, including tall glasses of cold milk, hot buttered rice and large piles of creamy mashed potatoes – clearly my love of starchy white carbs was cultivated at a young age.
These days comfort food in our household usually means homemade macaroni and cheese (prepared with creme fraiche, parmagiano, manchego and chevre instead of nuclear cheese food), baked panko crusted sriracha nuggets or my aunt’s Christmas morning poached chicken salad that the Everyman fell in love with while we were there for the holidays. While the spirit of the dishes remains the same, the ingredients and methods have certainly gone more upmarket to account for our more refined tastes and preferences than what we would have settled for as kids.
The one comfort food genre that I’ve never really dabbled much in was Southern food. I like cornbread, fried chicken, BBQ and all the other stereotypical fare as much as the next person, but I generally don’t make much of it at home. But between this article about Hank’s new Southern dinner menu and the return of more wintry weather recently, I was suddenly craving something heartier and more rib-sticking than normal. Over the years I’ve enjoyed all of the components of the dish I made last night separately, but I never bothered to put them all together as one before. It’s far from authentic Southern or Caribbean fare but dang, it does taste good.
To begin I soaked half a pound of red beans overnight, then simmered them in several inches of water until they were mostly tender. In the meantime, I sautéed several links of a homemade spicy poblano sausage I had in the freezer with some chopped celery, onion, thyme, cumin and cayenne until the whole upper level of our house was nose-tinglingly fragrant. Once the sausage and veggies were well browned, I added a handful of frozen stock cubes and scraped the bottom of the pan with a spoon. At this point I put on water to boil for a pot of brown rice. Draining the beans in a colander, I added them back to their pan with the remaining sausage/veggie/broth mixture as well as a few fresh bay leaves, then covered and simmered again. In the interim I mixed up a cornbread batter and slid it into a preheated blackened frying pan. Once the cornbread was mostly cooked through I grated a large dusting of peppered pecorino on top of it and returned it to the oven to brown. When everything was ready I served the sausage and bean mixture atop a mountain of brown rice with a wedge of crispy cornbread on the side.
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Tags: beans, Cooking, cornbread, Hank's, Recipes, Restaurants, rice, sausage, Scott Vivian
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After much deliberation (and a healthy dose of procrastination), I’ve finally selected and plotted my intentions for the 2010 garden.
It might seem awfully early to some, but seeds must be ordered, delivered and started before a springtime sowing in late May can be accomplished.
This year will be interesting for a number of reasons.
Primarily because I’m going to be trying to grow a couple crowns of asparagus for the first time, but I’m also attempting rare French strawberries from seed, as well as leeks, garlic and chard.
As you can see from my crude 10,000 foot drawing, there are lots of different veggies being installed, as well as a small bee garden that I hope will attract a healthy amount of polinators to our rooftop sanctuary. We had a bit of a problem with the lack of bees last year, though I’m not sure if it was due to colony collapse or the overall shitty weather, but it can’t hurt to encourage them with a pretty flower garden.
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Tags: asparagus, beans, beets, carrots, chard, Clover Roads Organic Farms, Gardening, garlic, herbs, Heritage Harvest Seed, leeks, lettuce, Lists, peas, peppers, Purveyors, Richter's, Salt Spring Seeds, shallots, tomatoes, Urban Harvest, Vesey's, West Coast Seeds
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I’m quickly becoming the undisputed barbecue queen in our household.
A few weeks ago while grilling some spice-rubbed chicken for dinner, the Everyman commented that it would be nice if we had a traditional southern accoutrement like baked beans to enjoy with our meal (I know, how nice of him to suggest I do more work when I was already making dinner, right?)
At any rate, this week I started thinking that baked beans actually sounded like a half decent idea, so I started scouring the tower of cookbooks for a base recipe to work off of. Being that my track record with cooking beans is pretty awful, I wanted something that would take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation, but also make the process relatively easy.
This is where Beth Hensperger came to the rescue, with her enlightening tome, Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker. I don’t often use my slow cooker, but it does come in handy for things like slow braises, jams, and the occasional pot of tostadas. Skimming over the recipe, I was even more psyched that it was something I could throw together before work and find ready when I got home (or so I thought). I set a bowl of dried beans to soak overnight and went on to bed, while visions of baked beans danced in my head.
The next morning I assembled all the necessary ingredients in the slow cooker and headed out for the day. The recipe calls for an ingenious hour and a half boiling on high with a sprinkle of baking soda; supposedly to dismantle the gaseous compounds in the beans. It sounded like malarkey to me, but I was game to try anything. Once the baking soda boil is done, the beans are rinsed and drained and put back into the cooker with the remainder of the flavourings and set on low for 12 hours. The intent is for the liquid to reduce to a syrupy paste during that time, but when I came home it was still exceptionally watery. At that point I transferred the lot to my Dutch oven and set it to simmer on medium high for an hour.
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Tags: beans, Beth Hensperger, Books, Cooking, New Projects, Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker, pork, pork belly, Recipes
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