Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes

Paprika-rich Spanish chorizo teams up with globe-trotting beans in this Warm Butter Bean Salad with Chorizo and Tomatoes. Recipe below.

Anything that prompts me to call my Aunt Veta down in southern Mississippi is a good thing. She is my favorite and most colorful of all my aunts—and I have been blessed in that department. She and my Uncle James raised a family and then proceeded to raise two grandkids until Uncle James passed away several years ago. Then Aunt Veta finished the job on her own. She is stubbornly positive and optimistic, even when the going gets rough—and if she can’t find something good to say about you, you are a sorry individual indeed.

What prompted my call the other day was this dish. Specifically, the butter bean part of it. Based on a dish served as a starter at London Moorish/Spanish restaurant Moro [covered in the May issue of Food & Wine], it also features Spanish chorizo—but more about that later.

Butter beans? Lima beans? The one thing everyone agrees on concerning these beans is that they originated in South America. Explorers and slavers of the early 1500’s carried them to the farthest parts of the earth—Europe, Africa, the East Indies, India, the Philippines. Depending on who’s telling the story, they’ve been cultivated since either 4,000 B.C. or 6,000 B.C. There are two distinct varieties: The baby lima—an actual variety, not just a lima bean harvested early—and the larger, plumper Fordhook. According to most sources, the names lima and butter are interchangeable, with butter beans simply being the popular name for them in the southern United States. But other sources say that southerners insist that the lima bean and the butter bean are two different beans altogether.

It was time to call Aunt Veta. “They’re as different as black-eyed peas and English peas,” she proclaimed. “James and me, we never much cared for lima beans. So James would always plant speckled butter beans.” [When mottled with purple they’re called calico or speckled butter beans—great, more names.] But Uncle James would harvest the beans early, when the pods were light green, so the beans would be white. Still, when Aunt Veta cooked them, they would turn the cooking liquid to what she called a “blue liquor.”

Whatever the name/size/color, these full-flavored, slightly kidney-shaped beans contain high quality protein, phosphorus, potassium and iron. They’re also rich in the best sort of fiber, soluble fiber, which helps to eliminate cholesterol from the body.

Spanish Chorizo. Last week I wrote about Spain’s love of all things pork and mentioned this dense, paprika-powered sausage. Chorizo is made from coarsely chopped fatty pork and seasoned with mild Spanish paprika, salt and garlic. That’s pretty much it. Spicier versions will also include small dried hot chiles. In Portugal, they make a similar sausage called chouriço. Both are completely different from the ground pork Mexican chorizo.

As an indication of how much paprika is used in making chorizo, when you sauté the fully cooked sausage, the rendered fat is deep red-orange and will color anything else you cook with it. I like cooking up some chorizo and maybe an onion and some red bell pepper, then scrambling some eggs with it—they take on a nice, orangish tinge. They are also quite delicious.

So is this dish. I adapted the recipe to use as a side instead of a starter. Either way you use it, it’s as impressive as it is easy to make. Continue reading “Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes” →

Iberia meets Italia—for dinner

Pork Chops with Paprika and Fennel Seeds combine favorite flavors of Spain and Italy. Recipe below.

My friend Stan went to Spain last year. After he got back, the first thing I asked him about was the food, of course. He said that most restaurants offered pork, pork and more pork. Stan is Jewish, so he would notice this sort of thing.

To be fair, he did find other things to eat in Spain [and as he admitted to me later, did finally succumb to the delights of pig meat in his travels]. But Spanish cuisine does embrace meat in general and pork in particular, in all its forms, both fresh and cured. The small, dense Spanish chorizo sausages, a completely different, um, animal from the Mexican variety, are wonderfully intense. I know I’ll feature them in at least one upcoming post.

And to flavor all this meaty goodness? Paprika, of course. Paprika [or pimentón, as it’s known in Spain] is one of the essential ingredients of Spanish cuisine. It is made from ground aromatic sweet red peppers and ranges in flavor from mild to hot and in color from bright orange-red to blood red. Originally from the Americas, most commercial paprika now comes from Spain, South America, California and Hungary.

The Italians are no slouches in the consumption of pork either. And for them, one spice of choice for combining with it is fennel seeds. If you doubt this for a moment, just wait ’til the fennel seeds hit the hot skillet—you will smell the essence of Italian pork sausage. Fennel seeds have been compared to anise, but while they do have a big flavor, it’s not as pronounced in its licorice flavor as anise.

In this recipe, paprika and fennel come together to deliver a nice, subtle complexity in a quick, easy-to-make main course. Continue reading “Iberia meets Italia—for dinner” →

A little hot but very cool. Like summer.

Hot giardiniera gives this summery Spicy Chicken Salad a little heat and big flavor. It’s great on sandwiches or on its own. Recipe below.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word summer? Okay, then what’s the next thing? Well then, the thing after that? No, the thing after… oh, never mind. The correct answer is chicken salad. Continue reading “A little hot but very cool. Like summer.” →

Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks

Black-eyed Pea Salsa with chili powder teams up beautifully with Curried Steaks. Recipe below.

A couple of quick notes. First, for those of you who don’t eat red meat, this black-eyed pea salsa also livens up grilled fish or chicken breasts. Also, I’m doing two posts today, so be sure to scroll down for the second one.

The other day I realized that, as much as I love red meat, you wouldn’t know it to look at this blog. In fact, in the seven months Blue Kitchen has been open, I’ve talked about it exactly once, unless you count the two chili recipes that use ground beef. That is just plain wrong.

Growing up, 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, I’m starting with this recipe because when I came across it in my files recently, I immediately wanted the black-eyed pea salsa.

Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the south [like last week’s okra]. Even though this salsa is named for them, 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 peas and big-flavored steaks” →

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

Easy-to-make Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo is flavorful, hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from hot pepper sauce. Recipe below.

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain—Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera—that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted. Continue reading ““Hot soup, comin’ through!”” →

Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

The Dill Dijon Sauce on this Seared Salmon Fillet tastes rich, calorific and sinful, but is in fact 100% fat free. Recipe below.

dill_salmon — Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

SUSAN OVER AT FOOD BLOGGA RECENTLY WAXED ELOQUENT AND PASSIONATE about reviving the tradition of Sunday dinners. Of course, the Sunday dinners of her childhood memories took hours to prepare, with “every Italian-American woman with any pride starting the ‘gravy’ (East coast Italian-American for tomato sauce) at breakfast to be ready for 2:00 Sunday dinner.” Continue reading “Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce” →

Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered

This Endive Salad with Blue Cheese and Walnuts always reminds me of one of my favorite little New York bistros. Recipe below.

SOMETIMES A RESTAURANT JUST CLICKS WITH YOU. The food, the setting, the staff—even the moment it’s part of. Lucien, in Manhattan’s East Village, is just such a place for us. The moment it fit so neatly into the first time we ate there was the first time Marion and I managed to get to New York together. Marion had spent lots of time there, and I had made a number of three-day solo forays in search of art, jazz and booze [all plentiful there, by the way]. But we only got around to getting there together when I won a trip for two on Taco Bell’s website a few years ago. Seriously. Continue reading “Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered” →

Small kitchens, big solutions

Chicken and Rice in a Pot, a quick one-pot dish adapted from the Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Recipe below.

Update: See Other Notes below for a timely food blog find.

In at least one previous post, I’ve mentioned New Yorkers’ collective penchant for ordering delivery instead of cooking, and my Brooklyn buddy Ronnie has backed me up on this. One huge reason is the tiny kitchens in most New York apartments. Real estate is expensive in New York. Really expensive. And usually, kitchen space is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of square footage.

For New Yorkers determined to cook at home—or for space-challenged cooks anywhere—there are solutions. Smaller sized appliances, for instance, that pack all the features of their bigger brethren, just in a smaller footprint. Forget hot plates and dorm fridges—these are high-end appliances made by the likes of Jenn-Air and Viking. It’s possible to drop a grand or two [or more] on an undercounter fridge, as an example. But for creative cooks, solutions to small kitchens come in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Which brings me to Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen’s Smallest Coolest Kitchen Contest. Last year, parent site Apartment Therapy held its first annual Smallest Coolest Apartment contest and showcased some wonderful apartments whose residents packed maximum living and versatility into minimal square footage. This year, they’ve rolled it out across all their sites: The Apartment, The Kitchen, Home Tech [home office or audio visual] and The Nursery. Site co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and his wife Sara Kate live with their baby, born in November 2006, in a 265-square foot apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, so they know whereof they speak.

When you live in an apartment, smart use of space is an ongoing challenge, no matter how big or small your place is. So checking out last year’s entries and their solutions that ranged from brilliant to creative to sometimes a little bizarre became a daily obsession. Besides, let’s be honest—seeing other people’s apartments is just plain voyeuristic fun. Now that there’s a kitchen-focused category, I may need a 12-step program once it’s over.

There’s still time to enter, by the way. The deadline is April 16. So if you’ve got a small kitchen, apartment, nursery or home office you’d like to show off, go to the site for details.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on organizing and working in a small kitchen, it’s Justin Spring. For more than a dozen years now, he has cooked in a kitchen that is just 45 square feet. And he grew up cooking weekends, vacations and summers on the 36-foot family sailboat, where the kitchen consisted of a camp stove, ice chest and bucket. Spring has written an appropriately diminutive book on small kitchens with a ridiculously oversized title: The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World—Your Own.

Unlike most kitchen books whose ideas are guaranteed to make your wallet bleed, Itty Bitty is refreshingly all about editing and purging, making pots and utensils do double duty and making space work efficiently. Besides lots of solid advice on equipping, organizing, cleaning, cooking in and entertaining from a small kitchen, you’ll find plenty of encouragement and inspiration, all in a friendly, fun, quick read.

You’ll also find recipes. A hundred of them, to be exact, all of which can be accomplished with no more than two burners and a toaster oven, if necessary. And while you won’t find haute cuisine, you’ll find some decent, doable eats. The recipes all feature what Spring calls “the combined imperatives of (1) being breathtakingly simple and (2) being interesting enough to merit the trouble of cooking.” The quick one-pot dish above is my adaptation of one from Spring’s teeny kitchen. The recipe follows. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →

Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa

Mango salsa with a touch of chili powder brings bold taste to salmon fillets with a hint of cayenne pepper. Recipe below.

The kitchen is open. Again. Sort of. Our new apartment is still filled with boxes and chaos, but we’re making headway. I was on the phone with a friend the other day and said, “It still looks like a bomb went off in here, but a much smaller bomb.” Marion added, “And a bomb that folded a little laundry.” I’ve decided that we either have to move more often, so we don’t acquire too much stuff, or else never move at all.

But I’ve actually managed to cook a few meals now. It feels good to be back in the kitchen—even a kitchen where I can’t find anything yet and the stove and fridge are in completely different places from where my brain says they should be. It’s almost like cooking in a parallel universe—pans and utensils seem reassuringly familiar, but everything is slightly out of whack, slightly off kilter. Cue ominous background music.

The good news is the new stove is vented, a first for me. I’ve been itching to try it out since the first time I saw it; I figured pan seared salmon would be the acid test. I had learned from Helen over at Beyond Salmon that one reason my Salmon Tarragon on a Bed of Vegetables didn’t stink up the place with my unvented stove was that I was using a cooking method involving liquid, steaming it. She also said that pan searing does cause the house to smell, particularly with fatty fish. Enter the salmon.

The mango salsa is a variation on one I’ve been making for a while. Fruit alone—the mango and strawberries, in this case—would be too sweet for the fish. The addition of green onion tops [you could also use chives] gives it a fresh wildness and just a bit of a bite, making it play nicely with something savory—the salmon, for instance, or grilled chops or chicken. You could also use minced shallot, but I think this would cause a definite onion taste to take over, rather than just the lively green flavor of green onions or chives.

Adding the chili powder gives the salsa just the tiniest bit of heat, but it really ramps up the taste. Similarly, the cayenne pepper only adds a hint of heat to the salmon; don’t expect a fiery Thai dish intensity with this meal. Continue reading “Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa” →

A Little Something on the Side: Tuscan Beans

Rosemary and mirepoix, a sautéed mix of onion, carrots and celery, are at the heart of rustic, delicious Tuscan beans. Two recipes below.

As much as possible, I try to be a “waste not, want not” kind of guy. So, having some nice rosemary left over from my last week’s Rosemary Apricots post done for Weekend Herb Blogging, I thought I’d make this simple, delicious side dish. Also being a “two birds, one stone” kind of guy, I decided to post this one on Weekend Herb Blogging too. This week, it’s hosted by the newly married Anna over at Morsels and Musings [best wishes, Anna!]. Continue reading “A Little Something on the Side: Tuscan Beans” →