Made for each other: Sweet onions, savory chops

Red wine, apricot preserves and curry lend a sweet touch to savory chops. Recipe below.

What is it about pork that plays so nicely with sweet flavors? Marion made some wonderful lemon ricotta pancakes with sautéed apples for breakfast Sunday [yes, I photographed them—they will be a post one of these days]. Tasting the apples, which had been sautéed in butter with some sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice, I said they would also be great with something savory. Marion immediately said, “Pig meat!”

Pork has a natural sweetness that lends itself beautifully to sweet/savory combinations. It also has a richness to it—even with today’s leaner pork production methods—which is a perfect foil to sweet additions.

In the past, I’ve sweetened pork with pears for Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Pears and Onions. And I’ve combined it with dried plums to make Pork Chops with Port Sauce. The sweetness in this week’s dish comes from sweet red onion, sautéed and mixed with apricot preserves. You don’t actually caramelize the onion, which would bring out its sweetness more completely, but would also take anywhere from 20 minutes to more than an hour depending on whose recipe you believe. But even sautéing the onion until tender, less than 10 minutes even, begins to caramelize the natural sugar in the onion, and adding an apricot preserves mixture at the end further ups the sweetness quotient.

The sweetness of this dish is subtle, not the overpoweringly cloying taste of sweet and sour pork, for instance. I can’t take a dish like that seriously—don’t feel as if I’m eating a meal so much as eating a dessert with meat in it. The apricots disappear into the onions, adding their sugar without their signature flavor.

The curry powder also brings a bit of complex sweetness to the party, along with a nice depth—and possibly a little heat, depending on the curry powder you use. I used Hot Curry Powder from The Spice House, which added a decided kick. Curry powder, by the way, is a British invention dating back to their colonial rule of India. Indian cooks often make their own curry blends from the wealth of spices readily available to them. Pre-mixed curry powder was an easy way for Brits to take some of the wonderful flavors they’d found back home to England with them.

For sides, you can go a few directions. You can stick with the curry theme and look for Indian or Indian-inspired dishes, such as the cumin-spiked Coconut Rice Pilaf I cooked as for Biryani Chicken Breasts.

You can also take the pan-Asian route. While curries began in India and are most associated with Indian cuisine, their use has spread throughout much of Asia—and indeed the world.

Or you can let these chops take center stage, serving them with simple sides like mashed potatoes and steamed green beans or a salad, for instance. That way, the chops become the focus of the meal, instead of competing against other big, exotic flavors. What I like about this approach is that dinner isn’t suddenly about an Indian, pan-Asian or other global dining adventure; it’s about borrowing from various cultures and cuisines to put a delicious, memorable meal on the table. Continue reading “Made for each other: Sweet onions, savory chops” →

Dangerously good: Linguine Non Carbonara

Linguine Non Carbonara, a delicious, non-traditional take on pasta carbonara. Recipe below.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a post about a dish that wasn’t just more than the sum of its simple parts—it blew right past them. This one does the same thing in spades. How can something so insanely delicious not even use any spices, unless you count salt and pepper?

The dish in question is Marion’s decidedly non-traditional take on pasta carbonara. It’s dangerously good on a couple of levels. First, it is highly addictive. From the first time Marion made it for dinner guests years ago, it became a go to meal when we had people over—even people who had already had it, at their insistence [in the form of a polite request, of course].

It’s also dangerous because it’s, well, dangerous. No poisonous fish parts in it [am I alone in thinking that is about the dumbest culinary choice ever?], but it’s an artery-clogging party for your mouth. Marion dispenses with the heavy cream found in most American takes on carbonara [but interestingly, not used in the traditional carbonaras of central Italy]. But you start with a pound of bacon, okay? You cook things in bacon grease. And you add eggs and cheese. This is why we only have it once a year or so now. It’s also why, when we do, we enjoy every last tiny morsel of it. All right. You’ve been warned. Time to let Marion take over the kitchen.

The way this recipe entered our household has passed into the mists of time. I think that maybe it might have been something I found in a magazine, possibly, could be around 1980—that makes some sort of sense, although so do several other interpretations of what passes for my memory of this. It called itself Spaghetti Carbonara and it contained many of the elements that I still use to cook this dish. By the time I figured out that this dish is not even slightly a true carbonara—for one thing, it’s got vegetables in it—it was too late for us. We call it carbonara, just as we have dubbed every one of our daughters’ dates The Boy and call Schumann’s compositions ballet dancin’ music [Terry’s note—this term dates back to a comment by a little first grader during my teaching days, not any philistinian tendencies on our parts]. It’s our lingo, and we’re sticking to it.

Bacon takes the lead in Linguine Non Carbonara, but it isn’t the neighborhood bully. If you wish, you can use wonderful applewood-smoked bacon from organically grown pigs, each of whom has a real name, but one of the nice things about this recipe is its pragmatism: the most average grocery-store bacon still lets you create a super dish. The only real caveat I have is: use a good olive oil, decent zucchini, peppers, and shallots and a good Parmesan cheese that you grate directly into the dish at the last step.

Yes, there are veggies aplenty in this carbonara. You know—vegetables, salutary, nutritious, radiating their sunny health benefits throughout your being. Well, don’t let the jolly presence of vegetables fool you. Any lurking health elements they may possess are eradicated by the lavish use of the bacon, and the sautéing, and then the great lashings of egg and cheese. All you have left is extreme deliciousness.

Linguine Non Carbonara is best accompanied by a big California chardonnay. On Sunday, we had this with a Girard from the Russian River area, which stood up to the pasta very nicely indeed. Continue reading “Dangerously good: Linguine Non Carbonara” →

Potatoes and garlic. What’s not to like?

Garlic is the star, but it doesn’t overpower these creamy mashed potatoes. Recipe below.

When I opened Blue Kitchen almost a year ago, I intended to have a recurring feature called A Little Something on the Side. It was supposed to be “all about the dishes that play the supporting role to the star of the plate—and on occasion, steal the scene.” I said as much in my first something-on-the-side post, Marion’s kasha, which she makes every Thanksgiving and as many other times a year as we remember how wonderful it is when we’re planning dinner.

I’ve posted a few sides since then, but somehow, main course ideas keep taking over. They just seem more postworthy, I guess. But you need something to go with them to make a meal, don’t you? So I’m rededicating myself to posting the occasional side on a more regular basis. Sometimes fancy or at least a little exotic, sometimes humble and hardworking, like today’s.

To up their postworthiness [in my eyes, at least], I’ve enlisted my friend Matt’s help in creating a special graphic for A Little Something on the Side. Maybe that will encourage me to do more of these. Thanks, Matt!

The potato—still #1. For all the low-carb, no-carb hysteria still occasionally gripping the media, potatoes are the most popular vegetable in America. Regarding the whole carbohydrates issue, without launching into a dietary diatribe, you need carbohydrates to live. Period. According to the Dietary Reference Intakes Report issued by the Institute of Medicine in 2002, “the minimum amount of carbohydrate that children and adults need for proper brain function is 130 grams a day.” So wise up. Have some mashed potatoes.

And since you’re having them, make them Yukon Gold. Yukon Gold potatoes are a relatively recent phenomenon in North America, but yellow-fleshed potatoes are common in Europe and South America. They’re the norm, in fact. The Yukon Golds we know and love [enough to pay more for] are the result of years of work by a Canadian research team. They’re a cross between a North American white potato and a wild South American yellow-fleshed variety [we all know that potatoes originated in South America, right?].

The result is an all-purpose potato with a naturally buttery flavor. In texture, it falls between the Idaho or russet [a potato with high starch content, great for baking, frying or mashing] and waxy or red potatoes [low starch, high moisture potatoes that stay firm when boiled and stay moist when roasted]. So while Yukon Golds don’t bake as well as russets do, they do just about everything else just fine.

Including making fluffy, delicious mashed potatoes. Buttery, rich and golden. I make them a lot of different ways, but my favorite is with plenty of garlic. There are probably as many ways to make garlic mashed potatoes as there are cooks. A quick search on epicurious.com turned up 198 recipes. Some called for roasting entire heads of garlic before adding them to the potatoes; some called for sautéing garlic in oil, then adding it to the cooked potatoes. And with some, like mine, you add raw garlic to the water while the potatoes are cooking, letting it impart its oils and flavors to the potatoes—and its wonderful fragrance to the kitchen.

Garlic amounts called for varied wildly too. One recipe called for sautéing a single sliced clove of garlic in oil, then discarding the garlic and adding only the flavored oil to two pounds of cooked potatoes. That one fell firmly into the “why bother” camp for me. At the opposite end of the spectrum, our friend Joan advocates three large cloves of garlic per potato. I haven’t had the nerve to try that one yet.

So without further ado, let me throw one more garlic mashed potatoes recipe on the heap. Continue reading “Potatoes and garlic. What’s not to like?” →

Elegantly rustic: Chicken with white beans

Simply prepared Chicken Breasts with White Beans would be at home on a French farm table or in a cozy neighborhood bistro. Recipe below.

Before I start this week’s post, I want to ask a quick favor. I know most of you are just here for the food. I respect that—that’s what Blue Kitchen is really about, after all. But we lost a dear old friend this week, someone I think you should know. Please read about him in WTF? Random food for thought. Okay, here we go.

My first thought with my first bite of this dish was that something this simple shouldn’t taste this good. I don’t mean easy to make, though it was that too. I mean simple ingredients—chicken, bacon, onion, carrots, garlic, some beans, a little wine, a little broth, some dried thyme—nothing exotic, nothing trendy or pricey or precious. All combined in a simple, straightforward way.

But it was good. Restaurant good. Not a rock star chef restaurant where a simple dish like this would be deconstructed and reconstructed into a well-meaning homage to the original, flashy and exciting but somehow off the mark. No, you’d find this dish in a little corner bistro that similarly combined a handful of simple ingredients—a good kitchen, a friendly, hip [but not hipster] staff and a handful of tables in a comfortable room—to produce a place you come back to again and again.

I called this dish elegantly rustic. It’s not so much its visual presentation. To be sure, it’s a handsome, hearty looking meal, something that will stir anticipation when it’s set before you. But it doesn’t lend itself to artful, architectural platings. In fact, to do so would be to do it a disservice. No, this is a meal whose roots are found on a rough wooden table in some French farmhouse. Or in a Tuscan one, perhaps.

Its rustic elegance comes instead from the way the simple ingredients come together to create something that is at once so comfortably familiar—like something you’ve eaten all your life, even if it’s the first time you’re tasting it—and surprisingly elegant in its subtle undertones. The thyme and the wine elevate the delicious, but big-flavored bacon, garlic and onion with a nice, refined finish.

I could smell the flavors layering and evolving as I cooked. You start by frying bacon—off to a good start, right? The original recipe only called for a teaspoon of thyme. I upped it by half and sprinkled about half of it on the chicken before browning it in the bacon fat. I did this partly to give the browned chicken flesh nice flecks of herbs and partly to impart a little more flavor to the blank canvas that is a skinless chicken breast. The immediate result of adding thyme earlier, though, was to shift the smells emanating from the kitchen from Waffle House to storefront bistro. As each new ingredient hit the hot pan, the aroma added a new layer.

Okay, enough rhapsodizing. Here’s the recipe. Continue reading “Elegantly rustic: Chicken with white beans” →

Bacon, marmalade and pumpernickel. Seriously.

The strangely delicious Bacon & Marmalade Sandwich on Pumpernickel Toast. Recipe of sorts below.

Bacon & Marmalade Sandwich on Pumpernickel Toast

Today’s post actually contains two recipes. Well, not so much recipes as ways to celebrate bacon. Bacon is the über meat in my book. I mean, I love a good steak, a juicy seared chop, a nice pot roast… [okay, so I guess I’m saying I love meat], but there’s just something about bacon. If the aroma of a chicken roasting in the oven is intoxicating [and it is], the smell of frying bacon is crack. Continue reading “Bacon, marmalade and pumpernickel. Seriously.” →

The last salsa cruda of summer

Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta makes a fresh light meal or an impressive side. Recipe below.

A quick note before I get started: Check out Kitchen Notes at the bottom to see how Marion adapted her delicious Plum Cake with pears as the prune plums disappeared from store shelves for the season. But read this post first—no dessert ’til you’ve finished.

We didn’t have a garden this year. What with our move and everything, it just didn’t happen. So for the first time in years, we didn’t have tomatoes and basil and rosemary and a host of other goodies straight from our yard.

But at the farmers markets, the produce stands, even the grocery stores, you can see the season changing. Some summer staples are disappearing, and those that remain just don’t seem the same. The peaches that I reveled in for the first time in years are now sometimes being a little more iffy. And tomatoes, though still plentiful, aren’t the deep, robust red found just a week or so ago.

If you’re lucky enough to be harvesting your own tomatoes and basil—or if, like us, you do all your harvesting retail—here’s a quick, delicious way to make use of some of summer’s remaining bounty.

Both Italian and Mexican cooks lay claim to the term salsa cruda, with very different meanings. For both, salsa cruda means uncooked sauce. But Mexican salsa cruda is, well, an uncooked salsa—salsa verde is one example. [Oh, and by the way: Show of hands, who doesn’t know that salsa has replaced ketchup as the number one condiment in America? That says something cool about the American palate, I think!]

For Italians, salsa cruda is truly an uncooked sauce, most often to be served over pasta. The only thing you cook is the pasta itself. When you toss it with the salsa, the pasta cools down a little and the salsa heats up a little, creating a light late summer/early autumn meal. A month or so ago, I posted one of my favorite Italian salsa crudas, Pasta Shells with Italian Tuna and Artichokes. This one is even simpler.

Tomatoes are the star of this dish, and straight from the garden is best, of course. I didn’t even think of tomatoes as more than an ingredient in sauces or ketchup until I tasted one Marion had grown in our backyard in St. Louis. Suddenly, I understood what the big deal was.

Store-bought tomatoes are getting better, though. More varieties, better quality—I even saw heirloom tomatoes on a recent Whole Foods visit. Our go to tomatoes at the store these days [not counting grape or cherry tomatoes] are tomatoes on the vine—sold, as the name implies, still attached to the vine. I have to admit, the first time I saw this, I assumed it was just another marketing ploy to separate foodies from their money: Tomatoes sold on the vine command a considerably higher price than their plucked brethren.

But it turns out the vine really does make a difference. It continues to supply nutrients to the fruit, even after harvesting, naturally ripening them and producing firmer, juicier, better tasting, more nutritious tomatoes. How much the actual stem adds to the party isn’t fully understood, but that’s only part of the story. They tend to be better varieties to begin with, and receive gentler handling in harvesting and shipping to keep them attached.

Handle with care. Here are a couple of quick tips on keeping tomatoes and getting the most flavor out of them. First, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never refrigerate tomatoes. As in never. That is the quickest way known to man to rob them of flavor. Also never, never, etcetera place them upside down, resting on their “shoulders”—the raised, well, shoulders around where the stem attaches. All that pressure concentrated on those small points is a perfect way to bruise them and promote rotting. Place them right side up, on their bottoms.

Whatever tomatoes you use—homegrown or store-bought of any variety, including plum tomatoes—this simple, flavorful treatment makes for a light meal on its own or a fabulous side that will vie for attention with a seared chop or other main course. Continue reading “The last salsa cruda of summer” →

A few simple ingredients take center stage

White Bean Soup with Sausage and Chard is a simple, satisfying country soup. that comes together quickly. Recipe below.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about soup. Last week, beans. So this week, naturally enough, it’s bean soup.

This particular soup came out of a failed attempt at a promising sounding recipe that just didn’t deliver. I’ve talked in the past about my overflowing, unkempt binders of recipes. As often happens, I was flipping through them looking for one recipe when I found another, for Tomato Bean Soup with Pasta. I love cannellini beans and I thought they would have more of a starring role in this soup. But the recipe turned out to be too busy, with too many ingredients all vying for attention—the white beans that caught my interest originally and tomatoes and pasta and either Swiss chard or kale. In the end, the results were only okay, with no one flavor asserting itself.

Still, the idea of a soup like this one should have been was intriguing enough that it started me searching for others. As usual, I found a couple/few recipes that all gave me ideas for what I ended up creating.

The original recipe called for either Swiss chard or kale. Both are cruciferous vegetables, meaning they contain cancer-fighting antioxidants. They also contain healthy doses of of vitamins A and C as well as iron. Chard is a member of the beet family. Its flavor has been described as spinachlike—mild and earthy.

Kale is a mild-tasting member of the cabbage family. It has been called the archetypal winter green because it prefers cold climates—it will survive even if left in the ground all winter—and its flavor is actually enhanced by a winter frost. Both chard and kale have a slightly bitter undertone that adds depth to their flavors.

Marion has also used escarole in soups for that same slightly bitter touch. Any of these greens—as well as spinach—would work well in this soup, I think. Continue reading “A few simple ingredients take center stage” →

Lightening up, speeding up a New Orleans classic

A lightened version of a New Orleans classic, Red Beans & Rice. Recipe below.

Last week I talked about cold soup. This week I do a 180, with hearty, spicy red beans and rice. A couple of weeks ago, we had a cold, gray spell in Chicago that gave me a hankering for some. I started with two recipes—one way too simple, the other a little too busy sounding—and created my own. But you don’t have to wait for cold weather to make it—anyone from Louisiana will tell you that any day is a good day for red beans and rice.

A traditional dish throughout southern Louisiana—and particularly linked to New Orleans—red beans and rice was actually born out of two traditions. Many families couldn’t afford to buy meat for their meals every day, but a ham dinner was a Sunday tradition. And that meant there would be a ham bone left over for Monday.

Mondays were also the traditional day for doing laundry—this was back before automatic washing machines and two-income families. So as load after load of wash was done, either by hand or in old-fashioned wringer washers [my grandmother actually still used one of the later models when I was a kid and hung her wash out to dry in the backyard], it was easy to have a big pot of beans with that ham bone simmering on the stove for hours, with just an occasional stir as you passed through the kitchen. And that made red beans and rice the perfect traditional Monday night dinner all across southern Louisiana.

Besides being amazingly flavorful with all those Cajun or Creole seasonings, this dish was practical. Beans served with rice was a great source of protein when people couldn’t afford to eat a lot of meat. And a big pot of beans could feed a big family cheaply. It was reasonably low in fat too, depending on how much actual meat had survived the Sunday dinner.

The way this dish has evolved, though, it’s anything but low in fat. Some recipes still call for a ham bone—or more often, ham hocks [which epicurious.com describes as “the lower portion of a hog’s hind leg, made up of meat, fat, bone, gristle and connective tissue,” usually cured or smoked or both]. But now it also almost invariably includes some kind of smoked sausage—classically, andouille or else kielbasa or some other smoked sausage. Read “fat bomb.”

I’ve lightened up this New Orleans classic considerably, without sacrificing flavor or stick-to-your-ribs heartiness. First, I use a lighter sausage with less fat. It’s still not exactly Weight Watchers, though—if you check the nutrition chart, you’ll see even the light versions contain an impressive amount of fat. And for that reason, I use half the amount of sausage a similar recipe calls for and substitute chicken breast or turkey cutlets.

I’ve sped it up too, with the help of canned beans. It still takes a little over an hour to pull together, but most of that time is just letting it simmer to blend all the flavors together. In other words, maybe time to cycle through one load of laundry if you’re feeling in a traditional mood. Continue reading “Lightening up, speeding up a New Orleans classic” →

Chilled soup and a cool borrowed memory: Watercress Vichyssoise

Creamy and unexpectedly chilled, watercress vichyssoise makes a cool first course for the last hot days of summer—or paired with a crusty bread, a satisfying light lunch. Recipe below.

HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED? Summer is almost gone, and we haven’t gotten around to making any cold soups. No gazpacho. None of Marion’s delicious attempts at recreating the cold cucumber bisque we used to get at Café Balaban in St. Louis—she never matches our fading memories of it [it’s been years since we’ve had it or they’ve even served it], but she always creates something summery and fresh. So when I saw a simple, authentic sounding recipe for vichyssoise over at Katie’s Thyme for Cooking, I had to give it a try. Continue reading “Chilled soup and a cool borrowed memory: Watercress Vichyssoise” →

The taste of summer memories: Italian Prune Plum Cake

Prune plums are briefly in season, right now, time to make this luscious plum cake. Recipe below.

I REMEMBER THE WARM MONTHS OF MY CHILDHOOD as a procession of seasonal fruits—first the small soft fruits, strawberries, and raspberries, both also indelibly linked in my mind to various Detroit backyards where my father always kept an assortment of fruit trees and berry bushes, lovingly tended in even the most urban settings. Every fruit was ripe for such a fleeting time, and we were all keenly aware of that little vanishing moment. When the fruits we loved fell ripe, we all went to work, picking, cleaning, canning, and the children of course holding up their end by happily eating. Continue reading “The taste of summer memories: Italian Prune Plum Cake” →