Shrimp & Grits

Whenever I make it back to the South, I try to fit in a meal of shrimp and grits (either at Hyman's Seafood in Charleston or The Blue Marlin in Columbia, SC.) Grits (ground hominy) are typically a breakfast food, but combined with shrimp, sausage, and gravy, they make the starchy base of a filling, sumptuous dinner. The texture of the shrimp combined with the smokiness of kielbasa, a touch of spice, the slight tang of vinegar, and unctuous cream-thickened grits is an unbeatable ensemble.

Finding grits in the UK is a feat although possible. I usually bring back a 5lb bag of quick grits--better than instant and less time-consuming that regular stone-ground grits. I got the notion to keep up the Southern cooking trend this evening and try to recreate the experience. It didn't take as much time as I thought it would. It can be easily divided into three parts: sauce, shrimp and sausage, and grits.

Ingredients:

The sauce:

• 3 Tbsp. green hot pepper sauce (I used a combination of Jamaican hot sauce and mild Tabasco with a dash of onion relish for the vinegar and sweetness)
• 3 Tbsp. dry white wine
• 1 shallot, chopped
• 1 1/2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tsp. rice vinegar
• 1/2 c. whipping cream

The shrimp and sausage:

• 1/8 c. olive oil
• 8 oz. Polish kielbasa, sliced
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1/4 c. onion, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 250g shrimp (king prawns will suffice)
• 3 plum tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tsp. Jamaican spice mix (or Old Bay or equivalent)
• a dash of cayenne pepper

The grits:

• 1 c. quick grits (if you use other kinds, you'll need to change the liquid ratio)
• 1 1/2 c. water
• 1 c. whole milk
• 1/2 c. single cream
• a pat of butter

Method:

1. Combine the pepper sauce, wine, shallot, lemon juice and vinegar and boil in a saucepan over medium heat until reduced (around 8-10 minutes.) Stir in the cream. Then place this to the side.
2. For the shrimp/sausage combo, eat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic, bell pepper, onion, and sausage and sauté until the veggies are tender. Then add in the shrimp, spices, and tomatoes and cook until the shrimp are done. Season with salt and pepper. (This whole step takes less than 15 minutes.)
3. For the grits, bring the milk, cream, and water to a boil in a sauce pan. Whisk in the grits, turn down the heat to a simmer and stir occasionally (some make stick to the bottom of the pot). Quick grits will take about 5 minutes. Check the consistency and stir in a bit of milk or cream if their too thick. If you've whisked in the grits properly, you should have no problems with lumps--just a smooth rich porridge. Add in your butter and the end a a few pinches of salt to taste. 
4. Plate up the grits, top them with the shrimp and sausage and then drizzle on some of your spicy cream sauce. Serve hot, immediately. 

Beef Empanadas

Cookbooks are a weakness. It's something about their utility that allows me to loosen my resolve and buy them even though there are millions of recipes and instructions available online. My latest purchase had already been vetted by some friends with great results: it's Michel Roux's Pastry: Savoury and Sweet. Unlike his cookbook on sauces, this volume tells you how to make the dishes to accompany his various kinds of pastry. The first attempt was beef empanadas (or empanadillas, as they are known in Spain). Definitely worth the effort...

Feijoada (Brazilian Black Bean Stew)

As chance would have it, we have a Brazilian Café here that has a fantastic lunch-time dish: Feijoada (fay-uh-WAD-uh). It is, by my estimation, a Portuguese cassoulet. The starchy base is made with black beans and onions with a protein-y richness from ham hock, lardons, and sausage. I've slow-cooked mine all day, and the results are spot-on. Here's how I did it.

Ingredients:

• 500g black beans
• 2 onions, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 150g Keilbasa sausage, sliced
• 1 smoked gammon knuckle (ham hock)
• 250g bacon lardons, diced
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil

1. Soak the black beans overnight. 
2. In a large Dutch oven, sauté the onions in half of the vegetable oil until translucent. Add in the garlic and stir for another 2 minutes. Next, pour in the drained black beans and cover with water. Bring to the boil and let simmer for 2 hours.
3. In a separate pot, cover the smoked ham hock with water, bring to the boil and let simmer for 2 hours. 
4. Reserve the broth from the simmering ham hock. At this point the meat should almost be falling off the bone. Place meat in a foil-lined pan along with the sausage and diced bacon lardons. 
5. Here the key step: put all the meat under the broiler and keep a close eye on it, stirring it around. You want the meat to get crispy on the edges. 
6. At this point, your beans should be fully cooked and the starch from them should have thickened the broth. Add in the char-grilled meats and top up the liquid in the pot using some of the broth reserved from the simmer ham hock. Add some freshly ground pepper to taste. Simmer an additional 20-30 minutes. 
7. Serve warm over rice or fufu.

Sauce Espagnole and Beef Stew

Sauce Espagnole. Also known as "brown sauce," it is a strong-flavored, rich, dark sauce that serves as the basis for a true demi-glace, as well as often being used in classic French recipes like Beef Bourguignon. It can be made vegetarian through the simple removal of the lardons or bacon and substituting the beef stock with vegetable.
As always, La Rousse:

Espagnole Sauce: A brown sauce, which is used as a basis for a large number of derivative brown sauces, such as Robert, genevoise, bordelaise, Bercy, Madeira, and Périgueux. It is made with a brown stock to which a brown roux and a mirepoix are added, followed by a tomato purée. Cooking takes several hours and the sauce needs to be skimmed, stirred, and strained.

So, first things first, the Mirepoix:


Mirepoix Ingredients:
1 part celery, diced
2 parts onion, diced
1 part carrot, diced
1/2 part (by volume) streaky bacon or lardons

Method
1. Melt just enough butter in the pan to thinly coat the bottom.
2. Let the onion and carrots sweat briefly, then add celery and lardons.
3. Cover and cook on medium for about 20 minutes.

You will not use much of this mixture for the Espagnole, so set all but about half a cup aside to store in the freezer. Mirepoix, once made, comes in handy in all sorts of stocks and soups!
The next step is to make a brown roux:



Like a blonde roux, the recipe includes using equal parts butter and flour (by weight), melting, and letting the flour toast. However, unlike the blonde, you allow the process to carry on until the mixture has formed a deep, chestnut color. For our Espagnole, we used 25 grams of both butter and flour, which works out to 2 tablespoons butter and 1/4 cup flour.

Mix the roux with 1/2 a cup mirepoix, and then combine with 1 cup chopped mushrooms and a can of chopped tomatoes. Add 1 liter of beef stock, along with thyme, chervil, and parsley, and simmer uncovered for 4 hours.


After cooking, skim the sauce and strain through a cheesecloth to get all the veggies out. Even though they'd had--as my high school bio teacher would say--"the snot and vitamins cooked out of them", I was sad throwing all those good vegetables away. Of course, the sauce was flavorful and completely saturated with the taste of carrots, celery, onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, and bacon (!), we decided to make a stew that could reincorporate them in some way.

First, we browned a pound of cheap beef with simple herbs:

And then stewed it with the sauce, in the oven, covered, for about 4 hours at 250˚ F. Three or so hours in, we added some diced butternut squash and reincorporated the veggies from before, along with about 1/2 a cup of reduced red wine and the juice of half a lemon. This made for the most hearty, deepest-flavored stew I'd ever had, and it tasted delicious on couscous (though I couldn't fault anyone who wanted to cook up some simple dumplings or egg pasta to accompany it instead). I don't have any photos of the stew, though, because all stew is incredibly unphotogenic.

It was wonderful.

Ham Hock and Lima Beans

This dish has no pretensions to beauty. It doesn't go out to parties. It won't be seen in restaurants. It wouldn't even invite friends over. But what it lacks in appearance and social skills it makes up for in warmth and down-home goodness. For me, fewer sensations epitomize the feeling of home like the smell of a slowly cooking pot of ham hock and lima beans. If one did have to dress this up for presentation, I'd like to think of it as the poor Southerner's cassoulet:

Ingredients:

1 smoked ham hock (smoked gammon knuckle if you are in the UK)
1 lb of butter beans*
1 small onion, diced and lightly sautéed
2 bay leaves

1. Soak the dried lima beans overnight.
2. Simmer the gammon knuckle on low heat for about 2 hours.
3. Remove the ham bone from the broth and separate the meat from the fat and bone. Discard the latter.
4. Add the limas, onions and bay leave to the pot and cook gently for 30-45 minutes.
5. Return the meat to the pot and cook with the beans for an additional 15 minutes--this allows the flavours 'to marry.'
6. Pepper to taste and serve hot. Reheats well.

*A note on butter beans versus lima beans: 'In the Southern United States the Sieva type are traditionally called butter beans, also otherwise known as the Dixie or Henderson type. In that area, lima beans and butter beans are seen as two distinct types of beans.' [Wiki]

Summer Vegetable Pasta

Ok, ladies and gentlemen. I know what asparagus does to some of you, and I have the same problem. But I love it, and wouldn't give it up for the world.

This pasta is simple, so I won't adorn this post with a lot of photos, either.

Ingredients
3 cloves of garlic
1 red onion
Bunch of asparagus, bases cut off and cut into thirds.
1 bell pepper
3 or 4 tomatoes
Basil
Olive Oil
Sweet/Bell Pepper
Salt
Hard, Salty Italian Cheese (I usually use Parmesan, but for some reason the only Parm at the store today was $7.00 for a tiny piece. FroGro had some Pepato that was just as delicious and half the price of their Parmesan).
Pasta (I used orechiette)

Method
1. Mince garlic and chop onion, sautee until cooked but not brown.
2. Precook the asparagus for about 1:30 minute in the microwave, then add to the pan with the onion and garlic.
3. Start boiling water for pasta, and cut the bell pepper into bite-sized pieces.
4. Add the pepper to the pan, chop the tomatoes and basil.
5. Add olive oil if necessary.
6. When water is boiling, add pasta and cook. Orechietti take about 10 minutes.
7. After pasta has cooked, drain and add a bit of olive oil to keep pasta from sticking.
8. Turn down temperature in the frying pan and add tomatoes and basil, salt and pepper. Cook just slightly, for about three minutes.
9. Plate the pasta, then the sauce, and grate the cheese on top of it.

Marinated Caprese

For lunch today I made a variation on a Caprese Salad that normally consists of Mozzarella, Basil, Tomato, and Olive Oil arranged artfully on a plate in a sort of card-flipping-trick fashion.

This one, however, is a more eclectic version that Ben showed me how to make last summer; he in turn learned it from an old Italian grandma he lived with for a few months one summer. I love it, and not just because it has balsamic vinegar and onions which intensify the flavor, but because it keeps well for a number of days (in the fridge), and if you're very careful, the olive oil and vinegar and salt leech out liquid from the tomatoes and gain fragrance from the basil and onion, making a wonderful salad dressing that you can use after the cheese and tomatoes themselves are gone! For a packrat like me, the idea that part of a meal I make on Saturday could live until next Saturday makes me squeal with glee.

You'll need:

Plenty of fresh basil
Two small balls of mozzarella
Four or Five tomatoes, depending on size
One red onion
Balsamic Vinegar
Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper

The directions are simple. Cut everything up into similar-sized pieces (mixed food, like macaroni salads and stir-fries, are supposed to be more aesthetically pleasing when the ingredients have some sort of internal coherence or something. I don't know if this is really true, but it makes it a lot easier to eat, and that's what I like about it), drizzle on a good glog of olive oil and a helping of balsamic.

I know, I know. The "tender flavor" of mozzarella is supposed to be coddled and cared for rather than covered with loads of pepper and vinegar. "Bah!" I say! In this recipe, the delicateness doesn't so much disappear as it does put on a beautiful ball gown and go out dancing. In loads and loads of delicious Juice. Mmmm...

Green Bean Vinaigrette Salad

300 ml Red Wine Vinegar
50 ml Olive Oil
1 Large Red Onion
1 Bunch Shallots
1 lb Green Beans
Salt
Pepper

1. With skin still on the onion, wrap it in tin foil and bake at 450˚ for one hour.
2. While onion is baking, reduce vinegar to 150 ml.
3. Bring a pot of water to boil, and blanch cleaned and de-stemmed green beans for five to six minutes.
4. Add olive oil to reduced vinegar.
5. Chop shallots into small rings and add them to the vinegar-oil mixture.
6. Remove onion from oven. While still warm, peel and cut into large chunks. Place onion in vinegar and oil.
7. Let sit in fridge to cool for a while. When cool, add green beans.
8. Salt and pepper to taste. Chill overnight for the best flavor!