Heart healthy dried cherries liven up roast pork tenderloin

Dried tart cherries and rosemary add flavor—and health benefits—to roast pork tenderloin. Recipe below.

Talk about perfect timing. My friend Carolyn, who works in science communications, is always sending me interesting articles and links. Last Thursday morning, she sent me something about the health benefits of tart cherries. On Friday afternoon, Marion and I left for a weekend in Michigan, the largest producer of cherries in the United States. Before we’d even packed up the car for the trip, I knew I’d be seeking out dried red tart Michigan cherries at their source and cooking with them for this week’s post. Continue reading “Heart healthy dried cherries liven up roast pork tenderloin” →

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, hunger and coming to terms with meatloaf

Blue cheese and Italian sausage add depth and richness to this ketchup-free meatloaf. Recipe—and ways you can help fight hunger—below.

Today is Blog Action Day. Marc over at the always eclectic, always intriguing Creative Spark first alerted me to this international event in which bloggers were asked to write about poverty from the perspective of their individual blogs.

Writing about food as I do, poverty and hunger seemed like a natural subject to tackle: A staggering 800 million people around the world go to bed hungry every night, one of the most devastating effects of poverty. But then I remembered an article I read in the New York Times last year that led me down a more nuanced path. In “The Class-Consciousness Raiser,” Paul Tough profiles Ruby Payne, a woman who was raised middle class, married into poverty and then, through her husband’s work for the Chicago Board of Trade, found herself socializing with wealthy people. These wildly varied experiences taught her that each group has its own views of life, its own “hidden rules.”

Codifying these rules into a series of books and lectures, Ms. Payne has created a career for herself an educational consultant. She works with school boards, administrators and teachers who work with students living in poverty, helping them better understand their students. She also shows them how to help these students understand the “hidden rules” of the middle class and lift themselves out of poverty.

So what does this have to do with food? One passage in the article stuck with me, describing how each group thinks about food and discusses it: “The key question about food in poverty: Did you have enough? In the middle class: Did you like it? In wealth: Was it presented well?” As a food blogger, I concern myself primarily with the second and third questions, as we all do. The growing fascination with food in our culture has democratized presentation, making it something we all think about. Growing up, though, the first question mattered most in my house.

I never really thought of us as poor when I was growing up in St. Louis. We lived in a neighborhood surrounded by people just like us, after all, so I had no basis for comparison. Grown-ups worked hard, usually in low-paying, low-skilled jobs. Paychecks stretched for a whole week only if you were careful. That’s just how life was.

And food was respected. Not in the way chefs and food writers, myself included, talk about respecting food, preparing it simply with careful technique and a few perfect ingredients. It was respected in a much more elemental sense. For parents, making sure there was enough food on the table for your family was a matter of pride. And as a kid, you could take as much as you wanted, but if you put it on your plate, you ate it. Food mattered too much to be wasted.

I don’t mean to paint too grim a picture here. There were plenty of picnics and birthday cakes and heaping platters of fried chicken and laughter around the dinner table. There were occasional dinners out too. There was always enough food to eat, and we always had a roof over our heads. We weren’t desperately poor—we were really more working class, sliding in and out of being what is now called the working poor.

There were occasional desperate times, though. Once when my father was out of work, we ate biscuits and gravy three meals a day for a long stretch. You might think this would have put me off biscuits and gravy. Actually, though, I love them and still seek them out in restaurants—especially if we’re traveling in the South—even though I know they won’t live up to my childhood memories of this dish.

I can’t say the same for meatloaf. I know that for practically everyone but me, meatloaf is one of those ultimate comfort foods. For many, it evokes memories of childhood, family and home. Interestingly, for our Brooklyn friend Ronnie Ann, meatloaf conjures up the exotic. Her father was a butcher, so the family routinely dined on beautiful steaks and lamb chops, not ground meat. When she finally tasted meatloaf—in her high school cafeteria, no less—it was a revelation.

But for me growing up, meatloaf just tasted like poor food. Drier than the more honest [and more fun, especially to a kid] hamburger. It didn’t help that my mom dispensed with making bread crumbs and just tore up slices of white bread to mix in with the ground beef; with each little bite of unincorporated bread, you could taste the family food budget being stretched before payday. And I hold this same meatloaf personally responsible for my lifelong low opinion of ketchup. Especially as an ingredient in a recipe—it falls in that same “oh, never mind” category as margarine or miniature marshmallows, as far as I’m concerned. Continue reading “Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, hunger and coming to terms with meatloaf” →

Chinese Egg Noodles with Beef and Hot Bean Sauce: One that didn’t get away

Lemongrass, ginger, whole bean sauce, chili paste and Asian eggplant are all part of Chinese Egg Noodles with Beef and Hot Bean Sauce, the Asian comfort food equivalent of spaghetti with meat sauce. Recipe below.

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, MY SISTER GAVE ME a copy of Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients as a birthday present. Somehow, I just never got around to looking at it. It sat among our cookbooks, looking inviting and new, and for some reason I never thought to take it up. Maybe, although I am not a devotee of high-design coffee table cookbooks, I had been put off by the drab layout and black-and-white photography. It was one of those inexplicable lapses. Continue reading “Chinese Egg Noodles with Beef and Hot Bean Sauce: One that didn’t get away” →

Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully

Slow marinating [in a mix of coriander, cumin, cinnamon, fresh ginger and garlic] and quick grilling make flavorful flank steak moist, tender and even bigger flavored. Recipe below.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” When actor Robert Mitchum so beautifully uttered those words in a TV commercial voiceover, backed by Aaron Copland’s always stirring “Rodeo,” this is the kind of meal he was talking about.

As much as I talk about the blank canvas a chicken breast presents cooks or the underlying sweetness of a pork chop, there is something so satisfyingly rich and meaty about a good piece of beef well prepared.

And beef doesn’t get much more flavorful or meaty than flank steak. Also called London Broil or Jiffy Steak, this lean, flat cut is particularly known for its robust beefy flavor. With the right cooking and serving, it can be tender and moist too. Flank steak lends itself beautifully to marinating and then quickly grilling, broiling or pan searing. Don’t overcook it, though—that’s a sure way to make it chewy and tough.

I think it’s this reputation for potential toughness that unfairly puts a number of cooks off this delicious cut of meat, me included. Not anymore. Turns out there’s no voodoo to cooking juicy, tender flank steak—just two simple steps. I’ve already given you the first above: Don’t overcook it. Medium rare is perfect.

The second step is just as simple: Carve it across the grain after you cook it. According to Ask The Meat Man, it’s the only steak containing an entire large muscle. And unlike most other steaks, which butchers slice across the muscle fibers, flank steak fibers run the full length of the steak. You can see the fibers running across the tops of the slices in the photo above. So when you’re ready to serve the cooked steak, slice it into thin strips, cutting across the grain. Most sources suggest angling the knife blade at 45 degrees.

I can’t even remember now what suddenly put flank steak on my radar, but the more I read, the more I found recipes recommending marinating it, usually in some kind of spice rub. Not only does marinating it add to the already robust taste, it helps tenderize it. Some recipes call for a mere hour of marinating, but most said longer. This shouldn’t be a deal breaker; it just means you can’t do flank steak spur of the moment.

As usual, my spice rub marinade was the result of combining a couple of different recipes and then tinkering with them. In a somewhat unusual move for me, I resisted adding cayenne pepper or any other heat sources I frequently turn to. The spice rub mix smelled promising; my only concern was the meat itself. I needn’t have worried. The result was a delicious, complex complement to the rich beef flavor without any fire—and steak that was wonderfully tender. Continue reading “Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully” →

Taste of New Mexico: Carne Adovada

Marinated overnight and then slow cooked until falling apart tender, Carne Adovada melds the flavors of New Mexico Red Chiles, cumin, oregano and garlic in this traditional New Mexican pork dish. Recipe below.

New Mexico loves its chile peppers. There is simply no way you can overstate this fact. According to a fascinating article by Bonny Wolf at NPR’s Kitchen Window, New Mexico is the largest producer of chiles in the United States. And as Ms. Wolf sees it, there’s more to the state’s fascination than mere agricultural pride:

…In New Mexico, chiles are more than a crop. They’re a culture, a way of life. It is unimaginable to New Mexicans that people eat food untouched by their state’s chile.

There’s even an official state question: Red or green?

And if you can’t decide if you want red chile or green chile, you may answer, “Christmas,” and you’ll get some of both.

Interestingly, red or green, it’s the same New Mexico chile [also known as the California or Anaheim chile], just at different stages of development, either picked green or allowed to ripen into red on the vine. It’s what happens to the chiles afterward that makes the difference in the sauces’ flavors. Again, Ms. Wolf: “Green chiles are roasted, peeled, seeded and either used right away or frozen. Dried red chiles are ground into powder or strung into the lovely, deep-red ristras — strings in Spanish — you see hanging in many New Mexican homes. Northerners usually hang ristras for decoration while New Mexican cooks use the pods throughout the year to season food. Because the climate is so dry, there’s no fear of mold.”

On our recent trip to New Mexico, we rarely went a meal without being asked the official state question. And there wasn’t a wrong answer—both were delicious. We got our first sampling of both at Duran’s Central Pharmacy in Albuquerque; you actually walk through the pharmacy to get to an unassuming restaurant that serves up great New Mexican fare at very reasonable prices. We encountered excellent examples of red and green chiles in a number of restaurants: Little Anita’s, also in Albuquerque, and Maria’s, a friendly, rambling, down-to-earth place in Santa Fe recommended to me by Toni over at Daily Bread Journal, to name a couple.

We had plenty of delicious non-New Mexican food too. Crêpes at La Crêpe Michel in Albuquerque’s Old Town, transcendent burgers in the beautiful patio at Apple Tree in Taos, inventive tapas at La Boca in Santa Fe… And on our last night in New Mexico, craving something like we’d find at home in Chicago, we headed over to the neighborhood around the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and ended up in a Korean BBQ joint. Just what we were looking for.

But my favorite New Mexican dish, hands down, was Carne Adovada. A traditional New Mexican dish, it is meat—most often pork—slow cooked in adobo sauce. We had it at the rightfully popular Tomasita’s in Santa Fe. Housed in a 1904 red brick station house adjacent to the Santa Fe train station, Tomasita’s has been a fixture since long before the railyards became the Railyard District, an up and coming neighborhood of hip shops and restaurants [and a welcome relief from the tourist hothouse that the heart of Santa Fe can be].

From the first bite, I knew I would have to try to make carne adovada. It was falling apart tender and coated in an almost velvety red chile sauce, not buried under it as many New Mexican dishes seemed to be. And it had a wonderful blend of flavors with just the right amount of heat. This hearty dish can be served with flour tortillas, in taco shells or with rice and beans, as I did here.

There are about as many takes on carne adovada as there are cooks. They range from fairly complex [like one from Kate in the Kitchen that has you make your own adobo sauce from dried chiles] to overly simple. One version from a Santa Fe cooking school, of all places, dispensed with the marinating and only cooked it for an hour! Even I could tell that was a recipe for an underflavored, chewy disaster.

In the end, I settled on a recipe somewhere in the middle complexitywise and doctored the heck out of the spice levels. Then when it came out of the oven and the sauce was a watery, bland mess that wasn’t sticking to the blondish chunks of tender meat, I did more doctoring, with the ever supportive Marion at my side. Here’s how that played out, by the way. First I looked at the way too liquid sauce. Not good. Then I tasted it. Even less good. Then I called for back-up. Marion suggested we transfer the meat to a bowl and work on the sauce, adding more spices and boiling it to reduce it. A good start tastewise, but still far from the velvety coating sauce we remembered from Tomasita’s. I’m sure I had a deer-in-the-headlights look at this point, until Marion uttered three magic words: “Make a roux.” I did. It worked. In the recipe below, I’m going to write it as if it’s how I’d planned to cook it all along. And how I will cook it the next time I make it. Continue reading “Taste of New Mexico: Carne Adovada” →

Black-eyed pea salsa, big-flavored steaks

Black-eyed pea salsa with chili powder, fresh tomatoes and bell pepper—a perfect complement for curry-marinated steaks—can also liven up grilled fish or chicken breasts. Recipes below.

We’ve just returned from a wonderful visit to the mountains of northern New Mexico—Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos and Los Alamos. For next week’s post, I plan to try to cook one of our favorite traditional New Mexican dishes we had there. This week, though, things are a little too hectic for the cooking of anything interesting. So I’m revisiting something from the Blue Kitchen archives. And while it has nothing to do with New Mexican cuisine, it’s got a lively, big flavor that reminds me of some of the great meals we had on our trip.

I love red meat. Growing up, though, ground was about the only kind of beef I knew, aside from the occasional stringy pot roast—burgers, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, more meatloaf… I wasn’t introduced to the wonders of steak until I was in college, and then it was at one of those cafeteria-style joints called BEST STEAK HOUSE [or something equally overpromising] where you watch hairy-armed men tossing steaks on permanently charred grills with flames shooting up all around as the fat sizzled off. A steak dinner with baked potato and iceberg lettuce salad set you back maybe four or five bucks, and it was love at first gristly bite.

I have since graduated to better cuts of meat—and from medium-well to medium to medium-rare to rare. But the pure primal satisfaction that is steak remains undeniable.

Although one of my favorite ways to prepare steak is what I call my French bistro steak, seared in butter and the pan deglazed with red wine, the black-eyed pea salsa and curry marinade make these steaks another big favorite at our house.

Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the South [like the okra in my Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo]. According to About.com, the black-eyed pea “is thought to have originated in North Africa, where it has been eaten for centuries. It may have been introduced into India as long as 3,000 years ago, and was also a staple of Greek and Roman diets. The peas were probably introduced to the New World by Spanish explorers and African slaves, and have become a common food in the southern United States, where they are available dried, fresh, canned, and frozen.”

Even though the salsa for this dish is named for black-eyed peas, there are lots of flavors at play here. When you first start cooking the green pepper and chili powder, the aroma will be less than encouraging. Don’t worry, though—when the other ingredients are added, it all comes together fabulously. And when it gets together with the steaks with their peppery curry marinade, the results are amazing. Continue reading “Black-eyed pea salsa, big-flavored steaks” →

Grilled sausages by the book, er, magazine

The juices of Italian sausages flavor red bell peppers and onions when they’re all cooked together on the grill. Recipes below.

I said last week that I like cookbooks with lots of photos. Let me amplify that statement: I like cookbooks with lots of color photos. Printed on slick paper to bring out every nuance—flecks of herbs, the sheen of cooking juices on a roast, the trail of a bead of condensation on a chilled wine glass. So imagine how less than interested I was in a cooking magazine that features line drawings and black and white photos on non-glossy paper.

I know, I know. Cook’s Illustrated is one of the best cooking publications out there. They’re America’s Test Kitchen—it says so right there on the cover. They don’t just cook something a time or two and call it close enough for government work. They cook it again and again and again—I’ve heard “a hundred times or more” bandied about—until they get it exactly right. Food bloggers everywhere rave about it.

But there’s just something so Highlights for Children earnest about its look to me that I’ve never been able to get past. Visually, it’s the sensible shoes of food magazines for me, singularly uninviting.

Still, when our neighbors Tom and Michael raved about it over dinner recently, I thought it was high time I got over myself and check it out. What I found, of course, was a wonderful new [to me, at least] resource. Picking up the current edition shown here, in addition to a recipe for Better Grilled Sausages with Onions and a couple of variations on the theme that led to my own variation above, I found secrets for great grilled chicken, tips for keeping produce fresher longer, an exhaustive comparison of silicone spatulas, a baker’s dozen of quick tips and a whole lot more. All packed into 52 pages refreshingly bereft of restaurant reviews, travel articles and other distractions that crowd the pages of more and more supposed cooking magazines. Also bereft of advertising. Since that’s what I do for a living, I was somewhat ambivalent about that.

But what I really liked about my first issue of Cook’s Illustrated is that they don’t only tell you how to cook something, they tell you why certain steps and techniques work. And for that matter, why some don’t. So you don’t just learn to cook a dish, you learn techniques and tips you can use elsewhere.

Of course even though the title for this post says by the book, I had to tamper with the recipe. No big changes, mainly just treating the red bell pepper differently to integrate it more into the dish. If you want to see the thoroughly tested version of the recipe, pick up the magazine. Continue reading “Grilled sausages by the book, er, magazine” →

To grill or not to grill: Rosemary Pork Chops

Grilled asparagus and grilled zucchini make perfect sides for grilled pork chops marinated in red wine, rosemary and garlic. Recipes below.

I don’t grill a lot. I’ve already given my reasons for being less than enthusiastic about this form of cooking that borders on obsession for many home cooks, both here [in which I sang the praises of a good pan and a hot stove] and here [where I did haul out the grill and produced some juicy, tender Hoisin Chicken].

But as warm weather approaches each year, I have moments of viewing my lack of interest in grilling as a culinary personality defect, a flaw to be corrected. So this past weekend, the grill came out and I produced not just one dish, but three. For the main course, I made Pork Chops with Rosemary. These chops can also be made with the aforementioned good pan and hot stove; see Kitchen Notes. For sides, I made Grilled Asparagus and Grilled Zucchini.

The weather was less than promising as I started prepping in the kitchen, yet another reason I’m not overly excited about grilling. My track record in this regard is not what you’d call stellar. In fact, if you’re ever experiencing severe drought where you live, invite me over to cook out. The bluest of skies will cloud up and produce a deluge just about the time I start firing up the charcoal. Miraculously, though, on this most unsettled of weekends with storms popping up everywhere and a tornado ripping through the far southern suburbs, it rained before and after I cooked, but not a drop fell during. Continue reading “To grill or not to grill: Rosemary Pork Chops” →

Spring, schming—It might as well be chili dogs

The lack of reliably warm weather this spring calls for comfort food, and Turkey Chili Dogs don’t just hit the spot—they obliterate it. Recipe below.

This week’s post was supposed to be a light chicken sandwich celebrating the flavors of spring. I’d already created it in my head, and just thinking of it now, I can actually taste it.

But spring is being especially coy this year. We should be flinging windows open, airing out the apartment and waking to birds singing. Instead, we awoke this weekend to a cold rain being blown hard against the windows. The temperature was in the 40s and not predicted to do a lot better than the low 50s, and besides the rain, there was a wind advisory.

I had to absolutely will myself out of the warm bed to get my day started. Clearly, some light sandwich celebrating spring was not going to happen. Comfort food was called for. And to my way of thinking, there are few foods more comforting than a chili dog on a raw day.

We’ve sung the praises of chili here before. And we’ve presented various takes on it—my three-bean chili, Marion’s amazing chili and even a white chili. Whatever your regional preferences—beans, no beans, meat, no meat—chili is just plain good.

Hot dogs are less universally understood. Growing up in St. Louis, hot dogs were what you got at the ball game or something you threw on the barbecue grill for the kids when the grown-ups were having burgers. So I was somewhat mystified when I moved to Chicago the first time [this is our second tour of duty here, as I like to put it] and there seemed to be a hot dog stand every other block or so [outrageous real estate prices have diminished the number of hot dog places severely, but Chicagoans can still find plenty of places to get a great dog].

Then I had one. The word revelation springs to mind. As Doug of Hot Doug’s says, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘encased meats,’ my friend.” Unless you live in Chicago or New York, you may not get this level of fervor for the seemingly lowly hot dog. And even if you do get them, you’ll get all kinds of takes on what makes the perfect dog, some of them regional. Here is how NPR’s Daniel Pinkwater, born in Chicago but now living in exile in upstate New York, describes a Chicago dog:

“First, it’s on a poppy-seed bun which is doughy and substantial, but not heavy. The bun is lightly steamed at the point of serving.

“The hot dog is all beef, spicier than the New York variety. It is steamed and has a natural casing. It snaps when you bite into it, and squirts hot deliciousness. A variant is the Polish sausage which the gods ate on Olympus.
This is what goes on it:
• Yellow mustard
• Bright green pickle relish
• Chopped onion
• A kosher pickle spear
• Two slices of tomato
• Two tiny but devastating peppers
• And all-important, celery salt

“All of this is fitted together with fiendish cleverness enabling the eater to get most of it in his mouth, and only a little on his shirt. If there are fries, they are hand cut, skinny and glorious.”

Chili + Dog: The whole equals waaaay more than the sum of its parts. Okay, we’ve established that these foods are wonderful in their own right. I’d heard that chili dogs were even better, but it took Marion to introduce me to their delights. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, as I recall, and we suddenly found ourselves in the lovely semi-deserted darkness of the original John Barleycorn, a long, rambling bar and restaurant on Lincoln Avenue. I had a burger in mind, but Marion started exclaiming when she found chili dogs on the menu. I was skeptical, but even back then, I’d learned to trust her taste buds.

So we each ordered one. Honestly, it fell a little bit short of amazing. But it showed me amazing could be had. As with almost every chili dog you’ll find in a bar, restaurant or hot dog stand, there wasn’t enough chili. Here’s how you can tell: If you can pick up the chili dog and eat it without utensils, there’s not enough chili. Hell, if you can see the hot dog or much of the bun, there’s not enough chili. We bury them. In fact, for the photo above, I kind of skimped on the chili just so you could see the dog and bun.

But the wonder of the combined flavors was undeniable. Our first impulse was to order more there and tell them not to be so shy with the chili. But then we had a better idea. We hightailed it out of the bar, headed for the grocery store and then went home and cooked up the first of many chili dog orgies. Continue reading “Spring, schming—It might as well be chili dogs” →

Straddling seasons: Pot roast and fresh asparagus

Cooking for the calendar, this weekend saw some beautifully skinny fresh asparagus, simply prepared. Cooking for the actual weather, though, called for a hearty pot roast. Recipes below.

Before we get to the food, a quick little digression about blogging.When I started Blue Kitchen a year and change ago, I knew it would be a way to indulge my passions for food, photography and writing. I also knew it would make me think more about food and cooking, ultimately making me a better cook. What I didn’t know is what a wonderful international network of warm, sharing friends and fellow bloggers I’d be plugging into.

This kind of welcoming environment isn’t necessarily unique to food blogging, but it seems to be more prevalent here than elsewhere. Interestingly, according to a food blogger who specializes in restaurant reviews, it’s mainly found among bloggers who write about making food, not critiquing it. My friend Ronnie writes two blogs, the wonderfully eclectic Out Of My Head and the advice-filled Work Coach. She also reads a wide range of blogs and says she hasn’t found this kind of community anywhere else.

The latest example of this comes from Lydia over at The Perfect Pantry. She was just given the E for Excellent Award—by four different bloggers, no less. She then took a turn, passing the award along to five other blogs. Including this one. Thanks so much, Lydia! I learn something new every time I read your blog, so it means a lot that you thought of me.

And now my turn. The easiest thing would be to award it to everyone in my blogroll. They’re all wonderful sources of information and great reads to boot. But I’ll try to narrow it down to five. And I’m sticking with food blogs, just because [we food bloggers are a clannish lot]. Just as Lydia was in her choices, I’m every bit as swayed by entertaining writing as I am by good food. Maybe even more so. These bloggers deliver, post after post. Every one of them has made me think—and made me a better cook in the process:

Ann, at A Chicken in Every Granny Cart; Christina, at A Thinking Stomach; Jennifer, at Last Night’s Dinner; Patricia, at Technicolor Kitchen and Toni, at Daily Bread Journal.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Here in Chicago, the calendar says spring [yeah, it says that everywhere north of the Equator, I know]. The thermometer takes a different view, often dipping below freezing. In fact, the tulips you see here were an impulse purchase, something to remind us that it is indeed spring. So when we were planning one of those Sunday dinners we don’t do enough of, I decided to split the difference. For the calendar, I made fresh asparagus, suddenly plentiful and affordable again. And for the chilly weather, I made a satisfying pot roast, complete with chunky vegetables. Let’s start with that.

I’ve been on an oven braising kick lately. Soon the weather will heat up and I won’t want to do the same to the kitchen. But for now, it’s a great way to let tough cuts of meat like chuck roast get all nice and tender without drying out. You’ll find more about the technique here. My other pot roast recipe in the archives is a more exotic take on this humble, hearty meal, made with Biryani Curry Paste and pan roasted on the stovetop. I call it Terry’s Mysterious Pot Roast. You can use the stovetop technique for the more traditional recipe below, but honestly, oven braising will keep it more moist. Continue reading “Straddling seasons: Pot roast and fresh asparagus” →