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” →

In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks

Sesame oil, soy sauce and sherry give a subtle Asian taste to Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks. Recipe below.

The vent above our stove in the new kitchen has us cooking more seafood these days. And that has me looking for more recipes and ideas. Last week, I saw beautiful tuna steaks at the store. So I nabbed a couple with no real game plan, knowing I’d figure out something to do with them once I got them home. We have tons of cookbooks—well, actually more like pounds, but anyway lots—but I turned first to the binders.

The binders started out as a binder, one of those blue cloth-covered ones with maybe one-inch rings. And for a long time, that was plenty. Occasionally, we would clip a recipe from the newspaper or photocopy something from a library cookbook, and into the binder it went.

Then came epicurious.com. Does everyone go as nuts as I did when first stumbling on this site? From my first visit, I was hooked. There were recipes, thousands of them. There was the advanced search feature that let you specify cuisine, course, key ingredients, cooking technique… There were even dictionaries—one for food and one for wine, for crying out loud.

I visited every day, sometimes several times a day, checking out the Recipe of the Day [an evil feature designed to keep you coming back for more] or just doing random searches based on any ingredient or food substance that popped into my fevered brain. And like crack or eBay or any other addiction, it interfered with my work. Well, maybe a little. Not that it mattered—my creative director at the time was a fellow foodie, so as long as I shared my findings with him, all was good.

Perhaps most telling, though, I printed out vast quantities of recipes. Scads of them. Reams of them. The single blue binder was replaced by two, these with three-inch rings and dividers with tabs. This seemed like an ambitious step at first, even foolish. But soon these were swollen and ready to call for reinforcements.

And then the obsession stopped, as quickly as it had begun. Oh, I still love epicurious.com—I have a permanent link to it in my blogroll. But now I use it responsibly. I log on, find the recipe [or more often, a basic technique based on a few recipes], then get out.

And the binders are still around. They continue to grow, but at a much slower pace now. So when I came home with the tuna steaks last week [remember how this rant started?], I flipped through the seafood section of one of them and adapted this recipe from one I found there. It originally appeared in Bon Appetit, sent into the Too Busy to Cook column, one of my favorite sections of the magazine. Because as much as we love to cook, we’re all often too busy, aren’t we? Continue reading “In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks” →

Direct from the source: Brazilian Rice and Beans

Brazilian Rice and Beans, a daily staple on dinner tables throughout the country, is cooked up by Brazilian guest blogger Patricia. Recipe below.

As comedian Steven Wright says, “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” And the Internet keeps making it smaller every day. It’s shrunk my world in many ways—and made it a more interesting place at the same time. For example, I’m in touch more now than I have been in ages with a high school friend, Helmut, even though he moved back to Germany several years ago. I know a blues-playing barrister in Bakewell, England. Through Marion’s work for a Francophile website, we’ve made numerous friends [including our Brooklyn buddy Ronnie and San Francisco-based mystery writer Cara Black] and have stayed in the fabulous Paris apartment of the site’s founder.

And now I’ve met Brazilian food blogger Patricia Scarpin. Well, met her online anyway—the Internet has also redefined meeting and knowing people. Patricia produces two versions of her blog Technicolor Kitchen—one in English and one in Portuguese.

She responded to my last week’s post on chili and mentioned a popular basic Brazilian rice and beans dish. After a couple of email exchanges, it sounded like a great dish to post here—and a chance to take Blue Kitchen global. Patricia not only supplied the recipe, she sent me photos too! So I’ll turn the kitchen over to Patricia now, then come back at the end and tell you what little modifications I made when I tried it in the test kitchen—well, in the kitchen. Continue reading “Direct from the source: Brazilian Rice and Beans” →

Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?

Indian biryani curry paste gives an exotic twist to classic American pot roast. Recipe below.

It’s funny the things that stick in your brain. I routinely forget to pick up the dry cleaning or that we’re out of cottage cheese or that I was supposed to get the oil changed. But I still remember the day we talked about food in my grade school French class with Mademoiselle [okay, I forget her name too—something French, since she really was from France].

She, being from France and probably wondering exactly how she’d ended up teaching a bunch of squirmy American eleven-year-olds in St. Louis, Missouri, began to wax nostalgic about French food. We, being squirmy American eleven-year-olds from St. Louis, Missouri, were horrified. Sauces were involved. Shallots. Innards. Finally, one of the girls in the class cracked, saying something insightful, like, “Ewwwww.”

Mlle. [Je-ne-sais-quoi] rolled her eyes and said, “Ah, yes. For Americans, everything must taste like fried chicken.”

Despite the fact that, unlike all my other teachers, she was actually young and pretty and spoke with that wonderful accent, I was offended. What the hell was wrong with fried chicken? Being eleven, hell had entered my vocabulary, albeit under my breath unless I was around trusted fellow hell sayers like Carl Halford and Mike Prokopf.

Besides, didn’t we Americans have pizza? Okay, I had never tried it, but my brother Mike had eaten it at Little Charlie’s house and pronounced it good. And didn’t we have chop suey? This ersatz Chinese delicacy hadn’t yet been widely outed as an American invention, so it counted. Okay, I hadn’t personally tried that either—Mike and I always ordered hamburgers when our parents forced us to go to some sketchy Chinese dive downtown.

But that was then, this is now. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?” →