Venison Goulash with Handmade Whole Wheat Noodles

We recently traded some of our canned goods with a neighbor for a load of venison killed on a farm in downstate Virginia. Most of the package consisted of two entire rump sections of the animal. I spent the better part of an afternoon removing silver skin and cutting stew meat.

Most of that went into the freezer for another day but I was anxious to try it. As anyone who's tasted venison can tell you (my wife would be happy to share a few thoughts on the subject) venison is extremely lean. That can be a good thing if you are trying to cut down on fat. But it does leave the meat dry. It needs to be well sauced.

I went looking for a different sort of venison stew recipe and adapted a "goulash" or "Gulgas di Capriolo" published by Mario Batali. Mario and I share a taste for rustic treatments. Besides the usual herbs and aromatics, this one calls for cinnamon and cloves. A generous scoop of sour cream is stirred into the pot at the last minute.

To accompany the meat my daughter and I rolled out some wide, whole-wheat noodles. My wife thought the meat was still a bit dry and not up to the beef chuck she loves so much. (Keep in mind, she's preoccupied with her concern over prions in the venison.) Well, there's no arguing with the fact that venison is lean. But the noodles did lap up the sauce very nicely. Wash it down with your favorite bottle of red wine.

For the goulash:

2 pounds venison shoulder, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 carrot, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 ribs celery, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 onion, cut into 1/2-inch dice
cheesecloth
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 sprig fresh thyme
3 sage leaves
3 cloves garlic
3 peppercorns
3 juniper berries
2/3 bottle dry red wine
1/4 cup lard
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 ounces speck or thick bacon, cut into 1/4-inch dice
3/4 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley
Grated Montasio or Romano cheese, for garnish

In a bowl, mix venison, carrot, celery and onion. Make a spice sachet by tying in cheesecloth the rosemary, thyme, sage, garlic, peppercorns and juniper berries. Bury the spice sachet in the meat and cover everything with the red wine. Place bowl in the refrigerator, covered, for 24 hours.

When meat has fully marinated, remove each piece from the liquid and dry thoroughly with paper towels. Season meat generously with salt and pepper, reserving the marinade. Melt the lard in a heavy skillet over moderately high heat and brown the venison pieces in batches, setting the venison aside on a plate.

While pot is still hot, brown the speck or bacon. Reduce heat and add flour. Stir to incorporate all the fat and cook a minute or two. Pour the marinade and all its contents into the pot. Bring to a boil and stir in cinnamon and cloves. Scrape any brown bits off the bottom of the pot. Cook a minute or two until the liquid has thickened, then add the meat. Reduce heat to low setting, cover and simmer until the meat is completely tender, about 1 1/2 hours.

Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the sour cream just before serving.

For the noodles:

Mix 1 cup all-purpose flour and 1 cup whole wheat flour in a mound on a clean work surface. Make a well in the mound and add two eggs. Break up the eggs with a fork and gradually incorporate the flour into the eggs, working around the edges of the well. When the eggs and flour have mixed, push the dough into a rough ball and knead for several minutes. The dough may be a bit tough, owing to the whole wheat flour. You may have to press it hard into the work surface with the heel of your hand.

When the dough is holding together, divide the ball into quarters. Take one quarter portion dough and roll it through your pasta machine at the lowest setting at least a dozen times to continue the kneading process. Begin increasing the setting of the rollers up to number 6 or 7, depending on your desired thickness. You should have a fairly long piece of pasta. Cut it into three or four lengths and dust each with all-purpose flour. Roll up each piece into a cigar shape and, using a very sharp knife, cut into 1-inch pieces. Each piece will unroll into a noodle. Place these on a baking sheet while you continue to roll out and cut the other portions of dough.

When the noodles are done, drop them into a big pot of boiling, salted water. They will cook in about two minutes. You should have enough for at least six portions. Use tongs to divide the pasta into warm bowls. Spoon goulash with plenty of sauce over the noodles. Garnish with grated cheese and parsley.

Top photo by Leila Bruske

Oh, Deer

Having our friend Larry over for dinner is always an occasion to put on the Ritz. Lar's an accomplished cook himself, with tastes refined by years of travel. He's one friend we can count on to help us eat our venison stew with an understanding eye.

Lar also happens to be a fellow martini drinker and a man with an adventurous pallet. Cocktails, therefore, called for our best gin, stuffed olives and a big spread from our pickle collection. We put out pickled okra and spicy Cajun dills, bread and butter pickles and our famous sweet pickled green tomatoes. One of Lar's favorites was the fresh goat cheese from Boyds, Maryland, with our green apple and tomato chutney. As much as possible, we tried to use what we already had on hand. I turned an opened jar of marinated artichoke hearts into a quick-processed spread with Parmesan cheese.

Dinner began with a garden salad with freshly picked beets from the garden, a Spanish blue cheese and honey-mustard vinaigrette. We poured a fine Argentinian Viogner wine with that.

Our main course, the venison stew, was hardly the kind of hands-off meal I usually prefer. My favorite foods are those that cook themselves. This dish, by contrast, was quite a production.

In a previous post, I described marinating and browning the venison over coals on our deck. That went into the fridge. Meanwhile, I cooked and skinned a load of cipollini onions. I then browned them in a hot skilled. Then I dug up some carrots and roasted those in the oven. A composed dish was coming into focus, with the venison, onions and carrots sitting atop an underlayer of potato-turnip mash and sauteed greens from the beets that went into the salad. I already had creamed turnips in the freezer, so it was simply a matter of cooking some potatoes out of the garden and running them through the ricer. Some grated Parmesan cheese added another layer of flavor to the mash.

The finished dish, served in a large bistro-size bowl, is pictured above. The sauce consisted of nearly two bottles of red wine (used in the marinade) and four cups of beef stock (use veal stock if you have it) all reduced on the stove to less than two cups. With it we served a succession of French reds: a Verget du Sud and 2006 Cote du Rhone purchased by me for very little at Whole Foods, and a wonderful 2005 Corbieres, Chateau de Vaugelas, that Larry generously brought.

We hardly needed dessert, but we ate it anyway: our own homemade yogurt with fresh Mission figs and a drizzle of the local honey we bought at the pickle festival in New York.

We were all thoroughly stuffed. Oh, and the venison stew was well worth all the effort.

Neighbors Sharing Venison

Having a front-yard kitchen garden brings us into contact with all kinds of admirers. People stop on the sidewalk to talk about the garden they remember from their grandmother. Or about their own garden. Drivers stopped at the traffic signal on the corner shout encouragement and questions out their car windows. "What you got growing there?"

One day an elderly gentleman from down the street stopped to chat about the Angus cattle he grows on a farm in Virginia and his troubles making any money from them. I suggested he might make a small fortune selling the meat in the local farmers markets. The man's nephew came around to collect some of our tomatoes. A few weeks later he brought a big venison roast as a gift.

This was some beautiful meat, about five pounds I'd guess. I cut it into big stewing pieces, trimmed away the silver skin and set to browning it. I've gotten so much grief from my wife about frying meat in the kitchen--(our pathetic Jenn-Air fan doesn't help much--the grease ends up all over the walls)--I decided to move my braising operation outside to the charcoal grill.

Here you see the meat browning in one of my favorite Le Creuset enameled pots directly over charcoal. Who knew?

The meat was marinated two days with lots of red onion, sliced carrots, celery, a head of garlic sliced in half, a big fistful of thyme sprigs, parsley, and nearly two bottles of red wine--all squished together in two freezer bags. After the long marinade, the meat was well-drained and even squeezed dry in paper towels. I used a lot of paper towels. Season the meat aggressively with coarse salt and freshly-ground black pepper. After browning, the meat is again drained on paper towels.

Perhaps I should not have been so surprised how well everything cooked in a pot set over hot coals. There was a generous layer of brown bits left at the bottom of the pot. After draining the marinade and picking out all the herbs, the remaining vegetables go into the pot to deglaze. Stir in about 1/4 cup flour and cook a few minutes more.

Finally, pour the reserved marinade liquid over the vegetables and press the meat into the liquid.

Cover the pot and simmer for two hours, or until the meat is perfectly tender. The dying coals make a cozy cooking environment for my enameled pot.

"See, look at all the grease spots," says my wife when I invite her onto the deck to see what I've been doing. Indeed, there are flecks of grease everywhere, just the thing she'd been complaining about in our kitchen. "Maybe what we need is a gas grill with a burner," she suggests. Maybe. But now I like making stew over hot coals.

I'm so pleased with myself, I have to sit down and enjoy a glass of wine and a little cheese. There's a nice breeze blowing on the decks. That's something you don't get in the kitchen either.

Sweet Potato Leaves

Every once in a while you learn something about the plant kingdom that makes you stop and think, I need to grow that.

So it was with sweet potato leaves, or when I learned that sweet potato leaves are edible. At the time, I did nothing about it. But on a recent visit to One Straw Farm in Baltimore County, owner Joan Norman mentioned that she had been selling sweet potato leaves in the farmers market. She said she had heard about them at an agriculture conference from a man from Africa.

Suddenly I was not only glad I had planted sweet potatoes, but made a priority of finding some way of working the leaves onto our dinner table. The occasion finally arrived last week when I struggled to find something green in the garden to put in our newest most favorite dish, curried okra. We're still harvesting okra on an almost daily basis and this stew with coconut milk, tomatoes and potatoes (basically, anything we can forage from the garden) proved to be a perfect place to use some of the Tuscan kale we were growing.

Well, the kale is gone, but it turns out sweet potato leaves work even better . They have a mild but dense flavor that reminds me a little of purslane. They stand up very well to cooking, maintaining their dark green color and a pleasantly easy texture. As a bonus, the leaves are a good source of vitamins A and C. And like purslane, they can be eaten raw.

Being a vine, the sweet potato plant produces a prodigious amount of leaves in addition to the tasty tuber we'll be harvesting later. At one time I was cursing our sweet potatoes for escaping their bed and traveling all over the yard where I needed to mow. They've climbed up, over and around the tomato cages. Now I'm cheering them on. I say, give us all the leaves you want.

If you are making the okra stew I posted about recently, just add a heaping cup (or two) or sweet potato leaves cut into a chiffonade instead of the kale originally called for. And if you planted sweet potatoes, be happy knowing that you have an almost endless supply of nutritious leaves.

More Okra

If the only kind of okra you know is what you see in the supermarket, it may be you've never been inspired to eat it. What passes for okra in the store is typically awful looking. Even in our local Whole Foods the okra looks to be weeks old--all shriveled and covered with brown blotches. I don't know how the produce manager can sleep at night.

Okra should be firm and bright green (there is also a burgundy okra) without any blemishes. This is the kind of okra we are harvesting in our garden right now. The pods seem to grow overnight--we can hardly keep up.

There are so many things to like about okra it's hard to know where to start. The plant is related to the hibiscus. It makes beautiful flowers on thick, upright stalks. But it also has a strange, almost prehistoric aspect to it. The pods grow long and pointy (they're called "lady fingers" in parts of Asia) with distinctive ridges. Inside the pods, the seeds are perfectly round and eventually large and black like buckshot. The leaves are very large and elaborately notched. As the plant grows, pods form in the crooks between branches and main stem. Pick a pod and the plant keeps growing taller, forming more branches and more pods.

Some people don't like okra because it has a mucilaginous quality, or slime. My okra doesn't seem to be particularly slimy. But even if it were, you'd hardly notice because my favorite way of cooking it is a sort of stew with Caribbean origins: sauteed onion and green bell pepper, okra, corn off the cob and diced tomato. I've been making huge quantities of it lately and assumed readers were tired of hearing about it. So this morning I went through my cookbook collection looking for an alternate preparation.

You may have surmised by now that I am a pretty lazy cook. Slow would be another way to put it. I prefer foods that don't require a lot of fuss and tend to cook themselves. It just so happens that these kinds of foods--cooking slowly all by themselves in a pot on the stove or in the oven--also tend to develop great flavor.

Okra is well suited to this kind of cooking. You'll find it in all sorts of soups and stews. I spent the better part of the morning conducting a survey of okra recipes from my cookbook library. The first thing you notice is how many of the world's best-known authors completely avoid the subject of okra. James Peterson, in "Vegetables," describes an interesting okra salad with soy and sesame seeds, and a miso soup with okra and shiitake mushrooms. (You need to blanch the okra before dressing it as a salad.) "Joy of Cooking" and "Fannie Farmer Cookbook" give classic recipes for okra stews, and of course okra gumbos are standard.

But you really need to dig into the ethnic cookbooks to discover the full range of okra uses. Paula Wolfort describes some delicious sounding lamb stews and tagines with okra. In one treatment, the okra pods are stitched together like a necklace so they can be easily removed at the appropriate moment to cook down the remaining stew ingredients. Jessica Harris delivers numerous recipes for okra stews and soups in her various Caribbean and Creole cookbooks. I noticed the use of greens, such as callaloo, root vegetables, curries and even coconut milk in some of these recipes. They reminded me of an Indian dish I made a while back where the okra was first fried, then tossed with yogurt and chickpea flour and toasted spices.

Still, of the dozens of recipes I looked at, nothing struck me as being exactly the dish I was searching for. Finally it dawned on me that I just might have to make up my own dish, using the ingredients right outside my front door. I had more okra to pick, potatoes already dug during a recent weeding adventure and two Tuscan kale plants that have been badly neglected. As I sliced onion and chopped garlic, a dish gradually came into focus.

Here is my version of stewed okra curry with tomatoes and coconut milk.

1 pound white or red boiling potatoes, cut into bite-size pieces

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, diced medium

2 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 teaspoon coarse salt

1 14-oz can diced tomatoes (or substitute fresh tomatoes)

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

large fistful kale leaves, washed, separated from stems and cut into chiffonade

1 pound okra pods, trimmed and cut on an angle into 1/2-inch pieces

1 cup coconut milk

1 teaspoon curry powder

Cook the potatoes until just tender in a large saucepan filled with salted water. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a heavy pot or Dutch oven and cook the onion and garlic, seasoned with salt, gently until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Add tomatoes with their juices, red pepper, kale, okra and the cooked potatoes, drained. Stir in coconut milk and curry powder. Bring pot to a simmer, cover and cook until okra and kale are tender, about 30 minutes. Adjust seasoning and serve, either as a side dish or over brown rice.

As an option, you can garnish the stew with chopped fresh tomatoes. For a more classic curry, you could also add toasted spices such as cumin and mustard seed. Since we keep coconut milk and curry powder in the pantry there was no need to go shopping at all. I deduct a couple of points for getting two pots dirty. Otherwise, this okra dish fits perfectly into our gardening scheme. It's a winner.

Dark Days: Chicken And Sweet Potato Tagine

Each year around this time I give our farmer friend Mike a call to order potato sets and onion sets for planting. This year I was surprised to hear Mike offer to deliver the goods (we usually drive the 30 miles to the farm). And he had other tantalizing items for us to consider. How about some eggs? Butter? A nice, big roasting chicken?

Mike's a small-scale farmer. He's always looking to sell something. And we are happy to purchase food fresh off the farm. This time of year, his produce is still in the seedling stage, lined up in rows in the greenhouse waiting to be transof planted. There's not much for Mike to sell except chickens and eggs.

The chicken far exceeded our expectations--size-wise, at least. I did not put it on the scale, but it was nearly twice the size of the roasters we typically see at the grocery, somewhere near 7 pounds, I would guess. This one came frozen. I defrosted it, originally intending to make it our first spit-roasted bird of the year. But the dinner party we'd arranged around the spit-roasting fell through and temperatures were in the 40s. I switched gears and found this recipe for a chicken tagine in an old issue of Food & Wine magazine.

Tagine is a traditional North African dish cooked in a ceramic pot with a distinctive conical lid. Tagines are robust, one-pot stews where meat and vegetables cook for a long time together with strong spices such as cumin, cinnamon, paprika until everything is buttery soft. I don't own a tagine, but the results I get from my enameled-iron Le Crueset pan are adequate for our tastes.

I especially like this tagine--or magazine version of a tagine--because the vegetable that cooks along with the chicken is sweet potato, which is arriving in quantity lately in our CSA box. Sweet potato and chicken, it turns out, go quite well together, especially when you season them with plenty of cinnamon and ginger as in this dish.

There's nothing complicated about this. First heat about 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil in the bottom of a heavy pot and brown a whole chicken cut into pieces. Separate the legs from the thighs. Divide the breast into quarters. Season the pieces well with salt and black pepper. You'll probably need to do the browing in two batches.

Set the chicken aside and pour a whole onion, cut into medium dice, into the pot. Season with 1 teaspoon coarse salt, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1 teaspoon ground ginger. Stir, scraping up any brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Cook until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes, then put the chicken back in the pot layering the pieces as necessary.

Cover the chicken with a 1-pound sweet potato, peeled and cut into fairly thin slices. Toss 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped, over the sweet potatoes and on top of that 1 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained. Season with salt and pepper. Add 1 cup chicken stock to the pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cover tightly. Cook until the sweet potato is tender and the chicken cooked through, about 50 minutes.

To serve family-style, lift the sweet potato-tomato-garlic layer off the chicken and pile at one end of a platter. Arrange the chicken pieces to cover the rest of the platter. Garnish the platter with chopped parsley and sliced lemon and serve with a big bowl of couscous, or, in our case, a winter tabbouleh of sorts made of bulgar with lots of parsley, mint, endive, radicchio, dried cranberries.

Suddenly, you have a lovely, almost-spring feast. The pasture-raised chicken will blow your hair back. The flavor is exquisitely fresh and intensely chicken. Not gamy, mind you, but meatier and more distinctly chicken than what you are used to from store-bought birds. The local sweet potatoes could not have been a more perfect partner. Each bite called for another spoonful of the delicious pot liquor, spiked with onions and cinnamon and ginger.

Dark Days: Poor Man's Chicken Stew

I find myself constructing these winter meals in my head days in advance.

Where will the calories come from? I ask myself. What can I do that doesn't repeat what I did last week? Which of my two farmer's market options to employ?

Obviously, I have too much time on my hands. But soon after joining this challenge I realized how little planning I had done for the winter. Go back a hundred years or two and that would have been my preoccupation in July, August, September: planting then preserving enough various foods to get me through the dark days.

Alas, it is so hard to extricate one's self from the convenience-oriented mindset. Kicking blueberries flown in from Chile in the middle of December turns out to be not such a hard thing after all. But then make a list of all your other favorite fresh foods--lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, leeks, potatoes, apples, chicken--and see how well you do without those. That's precisely the point of this Dark Days challenge, to start poking around for local sources of all these staples. You learn very quickly that the sources are few and far between and that the available ingredients soon start to repeat themselves.

We are fortunate to have two farmer's markets still going strong. How strong for how long is the question. This week I opted for a package of two very large chicken quarters from Eco-Friendly Foods in Virginia. They are regulars at the Dupont Circle market on Sundays here in the District of Columbia.

I had in mind turning the chicken into a simple, rustic stew--the kind of stew some of our immigrant Salvadorn neighbors might recognize--using potatoes that we are still harvesting from our garden, in this case big Peruvian purple potatoes. This stew is a bit of a train wreck, because I also used the better part of a sweeet potato from the farmers market as well some cranberry beans from the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa. I mail-ordered the beans in spring intending to plant them, but they germinated none too well and from the size of the package I finally decided that these beans were meant for eating, not replicating.

I soaked them overnight and cooked them with some Henderson smoked bacon.

To make the stew, divide the chicken quarters into legs and thighs and brown them well with extra-virgin olive oil over high heat in a heavy pot. Remove them to the side, and add an onion, cut into medium dice, to the pot along with a couple of carrots, peeled and cut on an angle. Let the onion brown a little, stirring the vegetables to deglaze the pot, then reduce the heat, season with salt and black pepper and add two or three cloves of garlic, thinly sliced and continue cooking until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes.

Return the chicken to the pot, add 2 cups chicken broth and several sprigs thyme tied in a bundle. Cover and bring to a boil, then place in a 250-degree oven. Bake for about two hours, then add potatoes and sweet potatoes, about 2 cups worth cut into 1-inch pieces, along with a cup or two of beans that have been previously cooked but are still firm. You could also add some crisped bacon at this point if you like.

Bake the stew another hour, or until the potatoes are perfectly tender, the chicken is falling off the bone and the pot is redolent of garlic and thyme. Serve with a mess of hearty greens and a sturdy red wine.

Dark Days: My $28 Pork Butt

Don't get me wrong. I am all behind locally produced foods. In fact, in a perfect world, I think all foods would be grown within walking distance--more or less--of where they're consumed. That would mean a huge shift in the way affluent Americans approach agriculture and food production. Maybe we wouldn't eat so much meat. Maybe we'd all be raising chickens in our back yards.


Still, I am a skeptic by nature. And one of the things I find a little irritating is the knee-jerk hysteria of some foodies to any critical examination of how our local food system currently operates. A few stories questioning the carbon footprint of local foods have popped up in the mainstream media lately and from the reaction on the food blogs you'd think war had broken out.


As far as I can tell, the system we have for getting local foods to consumers is incredibly inefficient. You could start with all those trucks driving long distances with relatively small loads of food to our urban farmers markets, only to drive away again a few hours later having sold maybe half their goods. Wouldn't it be so much easier--so much less costly--for everyone involved if there were some kind of co-op that were open every day of the week, and where vendors and shoppers could all congregate indoors?


I think so.


Another thing I find disturbing is all the plastic at the farmers market. Plastic bags to tote naturally-grown fruits and vegetables. Every single piece of pasture-raised meat individually wrapped in plastic. How eco-friendly is that?


So I just don't see why everyone gets up in arms when the mainstream media bothers to point these things out. Sure, local farming is way better than industrial agriculture. Agreed. But hopefully we can do better.


Which brings me to my pork butt. I don't care what anyone says: shopping at the farmers market--hereabouts, anyway--is expensive. Too expensive for the average Joe. In fact, what we are seeing here in the District of Columbia is farmers markets geared toward lower-income shoppers going out of business. You simply cannot do your grocery shopping at the farmers market. Too expensive.


Last week at the Arlington farmers market I picked up this pork shoulder roast, aka pork butt. It cost me nearly $29, or $6.95 a pound. I felt my you-know-what constrict when the vendor told me it was a bone-in roast. For $6.95 a pound? I wanted to say. But I bit my tongue.


After I got the roast home, I decided to break it down. How much of this pork butt was actually edible? How much per pound was I paying for the meat portion I intended to turn into a stew?


Well, on the left in the picture above you see the fat cap and rind that I removed from the roast, along with the bones. I put them on the scale: 1 pound, 15 ounces. Next I weighed the meat: 2 pounds, 3 ounces. In other words, 46 percent of my pork butt was bones, fat cap and rind. The meat, meanwhile--or edible portion--works out to 80 cents an ounce, or nearly $13 a pound.


I ask you, when was the last time you paid $13 a pound for pork shoulder, a cut butchers typically turn into sausage?

But here's the real kicker: Boneless Niman Ranch pork shoulder sells at our neighborhood Whole Foods for $3.49 a pound. In other words, trekking to the farmers market for locally produced pork butt on a frigid Saturday morning costs me four times as much as buying already trimmed, humanely-raised pork in the comfort of a tricked-out grocery. Is there anyone besides me crazy enough to do that?


Not to say this meat is not worth $13 a pound. Lord knows, our local farmer has taken great care in raising this pig. The animal lived out his days and met his end in a humane fashion, no doubt. And we want to support our local farmers. My point, simply, is how many consumers can actually afford this? Do we really foresee a day when this product will become mainstream?


Currently, local foods account for about 2 percent of all U.S. food purchases. I sometimes wonder at which price inflection the other 98 percent will move into the local column.


But enough of my rant. What I did with the meat portion of my pork butt was cut it into large chunks, season them aggressively with coarse salt and pepper and brown them in extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a very hot Dutch oven. Do this in batches. Remove the meat and replace it with an onion, cut into medium dice and seasoned with salt. Lower the heat and stir the onion to deglaze the bottom of the pot. Then add two carrots, also cut into medium dice, and four garlic cloves, sliced fine. Continue cooking and when the onions have softened, add about 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar.


Place the meat back in the pot and add about 1 1/2 bottles of stout, dark beer. I was happy to find a Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout at the local Whole Foods. My wife and I served Brooklyn Lager at our wedding many moons ago, so we have a soft spot for that brewery. The left-over half-bottle, of course, is for the cook to drink while she is contemplating her next step.



Bring the pot back to a boil. Then cover it and put it in a 250-degree oven for three hours. Meanwhile, cut up some other root vegetables, such as celery root, parsnips, potatoes. We had all that on hand already, plus some baby corn on the cob left over from a cocktail buffet. When the three hours are up, stir all these vegetables into the pot and put it back in the oven for another hour.


When everything is tender and aromatic, strain the solids out of the stew. Ladle some of the dark juice into a bowl and mix in 2 teaspoons corn starch. Bring the pot to a boil on the stove top and stir in the corn starch mix. Stir until thickened, just a minute or two, then mix all the solids back into the pot. Serve hot in shallow bowls.

What I served with the stew was a braised Savoy cabbage we bought last weekend at the farmers market. Chop the cabbage into pieces, then cook in a pot of boiling water seasoned with salt and cider vinegar. Strain the cabbage into a bowl and season with extra-virgin olive oil, more cider vinegar, salt and ground pepper. Stir in plenty of chopped parsley and chives from the garden.

I think you'll agree, whatever the price, this is a killer stew.

Cooking With Pig: Act III--Finalemento!

In her "Master Cook" column in the February 2007 issue of Food & Wine, Paula Wolfert calls this last step in a recipe for Provencal pork stew the "garnish." I have no idea why the editors decided to place this label on what essentially is the separate sauteeing of mushrooms, which are then added to the stew or daube and cooked again in the oven. Even in the French nomenclature, garniture does not seem an apt description for this process. Or maybe "garnish" is traditional to Provencale daube making. If so, it would have been nice to know.

In any case, it is now time to pull your daube out of the refrigerator. When you remove the lid, you will undoubtedly see a layer of creamy to golden looking fat. Use a tablespoon to remove as much of this fat as possible. This is a great advantage of cooking stews and braises in advance: the fat congeals in the refrigerator, making for easy removal before you serve it. Now lets set the pot of daube to the side, turn the oven up to 250 degrees and focus on the mushrooms. For this, the final step, you will need:

3 Tbs extra-virgin olive oil

1 1/2 pounds mixed mushrooms, such as cremini, oyster, French horn, shitake

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

4 garlic cloves, minced

1/3 cup finely chopped parsley

1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

In a large skillet over moderately high heat, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil until it begins to smoke. Add the mushrooms, reduce heat and season with salt and pepper. Cover and cook over moderate heat until the mushrooms are tender. If there is liquid at the bottom of the skillet, remove lid and continue cooking until liquid has cooked off. Add remaining oil and garlic and cook until fragrant, about 3 minutes. Stir in parsley.

Mix the cooked mushrooms into the daube. Place pot in the oven uncovered and cook 1 1/2 hours, or until the meat is very tender. Remove from the oven and stir in the vinegar.

Your daube is now ready to serve. But, if you're like me, your dinner party is still a day or two away. So back into the fridge the pot goes, to be reheated again at a later date. Not to worry, it will only get better with all the re-heatings.

Cooking With Pig: Act II

Say hello to a Berkshire pig, one of many heritage breeds people are seeking out for that old-fashioned fattiness and flavor that is typically missing from the average supermarket pork. In case you've been asleep for the last 35 years, pork has become a commodity product, raised literally cheek-by-jowl on huge, stinking factory farms and bred to be lean, lean, lean because of our misplaced abhorrence of fat (we should be more worried about the calories we consume in that chicken-pasta salad, people). I've mentioned Niman Ranch pork, sold at Whole Foods, at least a zillion times already. In the Washington, D.C. area, also check out Eco-Friendly Foods at http://www.ecofriendlyfoods.com/, or your local farmer's market. More and more local farmers are offering naturally-raised pork, beef, lamb, etc. (Suggested reading: The Ominivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.)

If you do decide on Niman Ranch pork, you can throw your meat clerk for a loop by asking for the name and contact information of the farmer who raised it. This was suggested to me by the founder of the Niman Ranch pork cooperative and although I had to work my request up the chain of command at my local Whole Foods, and although it took the meat manager a few hours to track down the information, I indeed got an e-mail address for a farmer in Nebraska and I did send off a note. The return e-mail I received from the farmer and his family (complete with family photo) was so gracious and thankful, it almost brought a few of us to tears. So do try it.

And that brings us to today's mission: Step II of our three-day Provencale pork stew or daube, courtesy of Paula Wolfert in the February 2007 edition of Food & Wine.

If you've been following along, now would be the time to remove the bowl or pot of pork that has been marinating in the refrigerator since sometime yesterday. Today we're going to be browning the meat and putting the stew in the oven for the first of two cookings.

What I do at this point is place a large baking sheet on the kitchen counter and cover it with paper towels. Uncover the marinated pork. Most of the bright pink color will have changed to a dull tan. Use a pair of tongs to lift the pieces of pork out of the liquid. (Save the bouquet garni and the marinating liquid, but discard the spice bundle). Shake the liquid off the pork pieces and place them on the paper towels. Use more paper towels to blot the meat dry. You want them good and dry before you brown them. Now, season them aggressively with kosher salt and ground pepper. To proceed, you will need:

1 1/2 ounces dried porcini mushrooms, soaked in a bowl of hot water until soft

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

2 1/2 tablespoons brandy

1 large onion, thinly sliced

1 large carrot, cut into 1/2-inch dice

4 ounces fresh pork skin with a thin layer of fat, cut into 2-by-1/2-inch strips (optional)

1 head of garlic, separated into cloves but not peeled

10 crushed juniper berries

salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

parchment paper

In a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven over high heat, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil until it starts to smoke. Reduce heat to medium-high. In batches, brown the pork pieces all over, then set on paper towels to drain. (This would be the point where my wife has a meltdown, pleading, "Do you have to cook like this? Can't you see you're getting grease all over everything?") Look extremely contrite and promise to clean up. Then return all of the pork to the pot and over moderate heat sprinkle meat with flour. Stir until flour is completely dissolved. Pour brandy over meat and use a long match or lighter to ignite the brandy. Shake the pot occasionally until the flames die out.

Remove the pork to a plate. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil to the pot and, over moderate heat, add the onion and carrot. Season with salt and cook, stirring occasionally to incorporate the brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pot, until onion is soft and lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Lift porcini mushrooms from the soaking liquid and chop roughly, reserving the liquid. Add mushrooms to pot and cook another 3 minutes, stirring.

Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees.

Remove pot from heat. Use a slotted spoon to remove onion, carrot and mushrooms. Reserve. If using pork skin, cover the bottom of the pot, fat-side down. Spoon 1/3 of the pork, 1/3 of the vegetable mixture, 1/3 of the garlic clove over the pork skin. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle a few juniper berries. Repeat this layering process 2 more times, until all of the ingredients are used up. If not using pork skin, forget the layers: just mix the pork and other ingredients in the pot.

Pour the reserved marinating liquid and the reserved mushroom soaking liquid into the daube. Tuck the reserved bouquet garni into the meat. If necessary, add enough water to just barely cover the meat. Place a round of parchment paper over the meat. Over moderately high heat, bring the daube to a boil. Cover the pot and place it in the oven. Bake for 2 1/2 hours. Remove pot from oven and allow to cool. Discard parchment paper and bouquet garni. Refrigerate daube in its pot overnight.

Tomorrow, we remove the fat from our daube, add sauteed mushrooms and cook one more time...Are you hungry yet?

Cooking With Pig: Act I

No, this is not a picture of an earthenware bong, but rather a daubieres, which is French for a strange, pot-bellied cooking vessel with a narrow top primarily used for cooking certain stews known in the Provencal lingo as daubes. That would make this one of several items that I did not possess for this particular pork stew recipe. Nonetheless, I had been saving this recipe from the February 2007 issue of Food & Wine because it was written by Paula Wolfert and because it celebrates one of our favorite animals. In fact, this recipe, which came to Wolfert via food writer Barbara Wilde, who lives in Provence, sat next to my computer keyboard for the longest time, occasionally migrating down to the kitchen table and back with the stack of other paperwork that needs sorting through from time to time, just waiting for that moment when I had nothing better to do for a couple of days and the weather called for a nice, comfy stew.

Yes, you heard right: a couple of days. Or maybe even three or four. If you know anything about Paula Wolfort, you know that she is all about authenticity. There are no shortcuts in Paula Wolfort's vocabulary. So if it is possible to consume the better part of three or four days making a stew, you can bet Paula Wolfort is all over it. That is why we reserve an honored place on our bookshelves here at The Slow Cook for titles such as The Cooking of Southwest France and The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. These are books that transport you to kitchens where people truly care about methods and ingredients and flavors. To hell with the time involved. Paula Wolfert's idea of a weight loss plan is the 30 million steps it takes to get from the butcher's to the finished stew. So be prepared to stumble over ingredients, cooking utensils, methods with which you are completely unfamiliar. Be prepared to adjust, make substitutions, use your own judgment. For instance, do not spend half a day driving to every gourmet shop in town looking for lavender flowers in February.

Lavender flowers would be just one of the ingredients that put my inadequacies as a gardener/cook on full display. Just down the street from our house is a huge lavender bush--it must be five feet around--that we pass every day on our walk to school. If memory serves, it was in bloom around November, and we were constantly running our hands through the blossoms as we passed by to pick up some of the aroma. We smelled like we'd been mugged by a bar of lavender soap. If I had been thinking at all, I would have gathered a peck of those blossoms, dried them out and stored them in the freezer. They were free for the taking. But of course I didn't, and now for the second time in as many week's I've run across a recipe calling for lavender flowers.

Another trouble item would be winter savory. I'll be damned if there is any winter savory in any of the spice racks I've searched, or among the fresh herbs for sale at Whole Foods. I tried growing summer savory in my garden this past year without much success. If I were anywhere near the gardener I claim to be, I now realize I would have some winter savory growing somewhere, or I would have grown it and stashed it away for just such an occasion. Again, out of luck. My solution to the lavender blossom/winter savory dilemma was to tie some herbes de provence in the spice bundle that Wolfert calls for.

A daubiere: Again, I plead guilty. I do not own a daubiere. I wonder if Wolfert does. She owns just about every other piece of exotic cookware, but she did not linger long on the daubiere. Fortunately, you are allowed to substitute a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven, of which I have plenty.

Wild boar: The orginal recipe that Wolfert describes calls for wild boar. And according to the piece in Food & Wine, she did try boar from a couple of sources. If your local grocery doesn't carry boar, and you can't wait for FedEx to bring you some, by all means use the best pork shoulder you can find, such as the Niman Ranch pork from Whole Foods.

Pork skin: The original recipe calls for sheets of pork skin, with not too much fat on it, cut into strips. These are used to layer the ingredients inside the stew pot. Sorry, I did not have any pork skin handy.

And that brings me to a few nits I'd like to pick with this recipe, which falls in the "Master Cook" column. I don't know if the fault lies with Wolfert, or if her editor's eyes simply glazed over around Step 359, but I did find these irritating, especially considering the many hours I've spent answering silly questions from editors and recipe testers over the years.

For instance, whatever is supposed to happen to all that pork skin? The instructions clearly call for strips of skin to be placed inside the stew pot to create layers of ingredients. But the subject of skins never comes up again. Do we eat them? Pull them out and admire them? Turn them into a lamp shade?

Why reduce? You are supposed to mix a leftover marinade liquid and the liquid leftover from soaking some dried mushrooms in a pot on the stove and reduce it "to about 2 cups." Then you drain this into the stew pot, and add water to cover the meat. Why bother reducing the original liquid only to add water?

Why "garnish"? After the stew has cooked the first time, you are instructed to sautee a large quantity of mushrooms, garlic and parsley as a "garnish." But then the cooked mushrooms are stirred into the pot, and the pot returned to the oven. So how does this constitute a "garnish?"

Which wine? In the introduction to the recipe, Wolfert states very clearly that she marinates the pork in white wine. Two days later, and after you've followed all 3,000 steps, you arrive at this startling paragraph, the very last paragraph in the article:

"Although this Provencal stew is made with white wine, it's so hearty that a red will make a better match. Conveniently, the rustic and substantial wines of Provence, where Barbara Wilde lives, have a rich fruit bolstered by a firm tannic structure, making them an ideal choice."

Serves me right for not listening to my wife, who never tires of reminding me that I should always--always!--read recipes through to the end (and maybe back again) before I start cooking. But really, don't you think this kind of information should go near the top, when you're making your shopping list?

I am calling this Pig in Three Acts because the recipe conveniently breaks down into three stages, performed over three days. The first, or Act I, consists of marinating your beast.

3 pounds boneless pork shoulder, cut into 2 1/2-inch pieces

1 bottle red or white Provencal wine

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

1 medium carrot, cut into thick slices

Bouquet garni: 6 sprigs each of parsley, thyme and winter savory, plus 2 bay leaves and 1 leafy celery top, tied together with twine.

Spice bundle: 1/2 teaspoon lavender flowers, 12 crushed peppercons and 10 crushed juniper berries, tied in cheesecloth (this is where I placed 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence to substitute for my lack of winter savory and lavender flowers).

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Put the pork into a large, non-reactive bowl or pot. Add wine, onion carrot, bouquet garni, spice bundle and olive oil. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Continued tomorrow...

The Accidental Coq au Vin

I did not begin the week intending to make a coq au vin. But as so often happens, things kept pointing me in that direction. First, it was our turn to receive the chicken from the farm subscription we share with my sister and her husband. So there sat the bird the last several days, chilling in a bowl in our refrigerator, demanding some kind of attention. Then I noticed my wife, for no particular reason, had purchased some cipollini onions at the grocery store. ("I just thought they looked good," she shrugged). Then there was the half-used slab of bacon, not particularly well wrapped, just laying there in the fridge on top of some jars of Thai curry and such. Before you can say "Le Creuset" I was pulling one of my favorite books off the shelf in search of an "authentic" coq au vin recipe.

Why do I use quotes around the word authentic? The word seems to have come under a cloud. Or is it that we just question the true origins of everything these days, as if good food can't merely be good on its own terms, it must also have a certifiable pedigree? The fights are endless. For instance, how can a tomato pizza really be authentically Italian, when the Italians didn't even have tomatoes until they were brought from the Americas in the 16th Century? So I suppose you could question whether a French coq au vin is truly "authentic" if you consider the possibility that the original chicken came from, say, Armenia, and was first cooked in wine there. So, to be more precise, I guess I should say I was looking for a method of cooking coq au vin as we know it, namely, from somewhere where the cooking of coq au vin is not merely sport, not something people do occasionally to get their picture on the cover of a food magazine, but serious business going back a long, long time. That's why I reached for my copy of Mourjou.

If you love cooking in the fashion of people who really care about what they eat, who obsess over the freshness of the products they cook with, who cook in a manner that has been passed down for generations--if you care, in other words, about preparing food to be enjoyed for its fullness of flavor and in its own good time, then this is a book you should own. The complete title is, Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village, and it was written by a Brit expatriot named Peter Graham, who, besides writing books, also directs small films and writes about travel and art and psychoanalysis and a number of other things that make his life seem perfectly pleasant and sane. At some point more than 20 years ago he picked up and moved to this tiny village, Mourjou, in the province of Auvergne in south-central France, a sometimes mysterious place where lush valleys co-exist with dormant volcanoes, where a verdant landscape dotted with small herds of lazy cattle is cross-hatched with deep canyons and snaggle-toothed mountain peaks. There are also small villages such as Mourjou where ancient customs are still kept, where neigbhors nose around each other's kitchen gardens and where family recipes are guarded like state secrets. In particular, I treasure books like Graham's because books like Mourjou just aren't being written much anymore. Remember? We're all too busy to read well-written prose about food. We're just here for the recipes, or so they say...

Anyway, I thought Mourjou might be a good place to look for a coq au vin recipe and--Bingo!--I was right. In fact, Mr. Graham writes a nice little takeout on the means and methods of coq au vin, including an amusing explanation for why, throughout the text, he chooses to use the French word--coq--rather than the literal English translation. "I use the word coq because it is a way of avoiding the problem, in English, of the word 'cock', "Graham explains paranthetically. So I will follow Mr. Graham's lead.

The first issue to be surmounted, as usual, is which version of coq au vin to adopt. This is no less a problem for Mr. Graham. "Coq au vin is a dish, like potee, which is found in slightly differing versions all over France," he writes. (There we go again, the authenticity thing.) "There is even a slender tome called Coq au Vin, which contains sixty-one slightly differing recipes for the dish." Several regions of France lay claim to the "original" coq au vin. And even in the province of Auverge, there are disputes over which ingredients should go into a proper coq au vin and how it should be cooked. "Should it include the fowl's blood as well as wine? Should the lardons be smoked or unsmoked? Should the sauce be thickened with beurre manie and/or the mashed-up liver?" There are even questions about whether the bird should first be marinated in wine and--perhaps the most troubling question of all--must the fowl in question be an actual coq (meaning an older male), or can we use--perish the thought--a plain old ordinary chicken?

Graham doesn't say, exactly, how he resolves these dilemmas. He really ducks the question entirely (no pun intended). Perhaps he is guarding someone else's family's recipe secret. He does acknowledge some trouble finding an actual coq, even in his adopted village. He sometimes succedes by visiting a local farm. The wine, he says, should be "a dark earthy wine made on the hills overlooking Clermon-Ferrand." Then, after describing how the farmer's wife, Nicole, must be persuaded to charge for her time plucking and preparing the bird, Graham simply launches into a recipe. I just have to assume that Graham has resolved all the aforementioned issues to his personal satisfaction. So his is the recipe I've followed, more or less. Note: This dish needs to marinate 24 hours before cooking, and is even better if you give it another day to rest in the refrigerator after it has been cooked. You do the math.

Serves 6 persons

Graham calls for a coq "at least two years old." But if you can't find one of those, he will allow "a very large free-range chicken of the highest quality," about 4 1/2 pounds.

2 ounces lard, or, in my case, the grease from several slices of fried bacon (I didn't want to buy a whole tub of lard).

15 pickling onions (I used about a dozen cipollini onions of various sizes)

3 1/2 ounces salt pork, diced large

6 ounces button mushroom (I substituted cremini mushrooms)

For the marinade:

1 bottle dark, full-bodied red wine (I used a French Syrah from the Camargue area near Nimes)

bouquet garni: two sprigs thyme, 2 sprigs flat-leaf parsley, 2 sprigs winter savory (I omitted the savory--couldn't find any), 1 bay leaf

2 carrots, quartered

2 large cloves garlic

large pinch salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

As in most braises of this type, the meat is first marinated, then dried and browned in oil before all of the ingredients are assembled in the pot and placed in the oven.

Cut the coq (or chicken) into pieces: legs, thighs, breasts. Cut the breasts in half. Remove as much fat as possible and remove the skin from the breasts and thighs. Place the pieces of bird in a non-reactive bowl or pot, pour the marinade over it. Cover and refrigerate 24 hours.

The next day: Preheat oven to 250 degrees

Drain the poultry well, blotting any leftover moisture with paper towels. Save the marinade with its solids. Meanwhile, in a heavy pot, heat the lard (or bacon grease) over moderately high heat. Brown the poultry pieces well on all sides, in batches if necessary. Remove and set aside. Place the salt pork and onions in the hot grease, turning occasionally until the onions are golden. (If using cipollinis, they must be blanched in boiling water first, the skins removed.)

Remove the pot from the stove. Pack the poultry pieces, onions, salt pork and mushrooms into the pot. Pour the marinade with its solids into the pot. Place pot in oven and cook 2 1/2 hours, or until chicken is very tender but not falling off the bone. (Note: Graham calls for 2 hours cooking in a 350 oven, but I think 250 degrees is amore appropriate braising temperature to avoid overcooking.)

Allow the pot to cool. Remove all the poultry, onions and mushrooms and place on a baking sheet, separating and discarding the carrots, herbs and other solids from the marinade. Strain the cooking liquid into a separate container (you could use a grease separator at this point to remove most of the grease). Cover the cooked coq au vin and refrigerate it and the cooking liquid overnight.

The following day, skim fat off the surface of the cooking liquid. To serve: Reheat coq au vin in 250-degree oven. While this is reheating, chop the fowl's liver finely, removing any gristle. Just before serving, drain the cooking liquid through a strainer into a blender and blend it with the liver until smooth. Place the liquid in a small pot over medium-high heat on the stove and cook until somewhat thickened. Pour the hot liquid over the coq au vin as it is going to the table.