Tuesday, April 2, 2008

Chicken Congee with Chinese Vegetables

This recipe has slowly evolved from "Shanghai Chicken Rice Gruel" in Kenneth Lo's Chinese Regional Cooking (Pantheon, 1979). What drew me to it was the fact that a whole chicken was poached in the rice gruel, then removed and the meat served separately, something that is often done worldwide when meat is cooked in broth. Gradually, I went my own way with this dish, which means that it is not, in the pure sense, a congee at all, and all the better for it.

In the first photo, you see the kickoff ingredients, namely those that go into the congee itself: rice, garlic, ginger, minced bird pepper, chopped onions, and half a chicken. The first half of this chicken has already gone into a congee, and took with it all its giblets, so this one will be that much lacking. If I had them, the contents of the little sack—always a crapshoot, but ideally the heart, gizzard, liver, and neck—would be on display here, too, all but the neck chopped fine.

A note about the rice, which you can see in the glass bowl on the left. (The glass behind it holds ginger ale, plus the trimmings from the ginger root, which give it an admirable intensity.) Most of the rice (7 ounces) is Tamaki Gold, a high-quality short-grain rice which I prefer for congee, since it doesn’t totally dissolve, even after hours of cooking, and thus bestows the gruel with some welcome texture. To this I’ve added an additional ounce of brown Kalijira rice from Bangladesh, which is a lovely mix of variously colored tiny grains. I thought it would add a bit of extra color and flavor, but it completely vanishes during the cooking process. What I should do is cook it separately and mix it in at the very end, or perhaps switch entirely to Tamaki "haiga" rice, a short-grain rice where the coating is milled from the grains but the germ left intact. Another day.

Here is a picture of the congee, about to be covered and left to simmer for two hours. The liquid is two quarts of water, seasoned with 2 teaspoons of salt and a tablespoon of Chinese light soy sauce (Pearl Bridge). The greens are two pieces of what our Asian grocery termed “Chinese mustard greens” — I’m cooking a little sample here to see how aggressively flavored it is and how long I’ll need to cook it, when it’s time to do the vegetables. When I fish it out, after having taken its photograph, it turns out to be delicious and needing of a bit of cooking time. Note taken. As for the gruel, the trick is to keep it a bare simmer. Now I’m off to turn the chicken over (just once) and then take a nap....

Saturday, November 25, 2007

Barley, Beef, and Mushroom Stew

Saturday morning is heavy cleaning time, and every week I rotate through the apartment, so that each room can get a special scouring. Today tackled the kitchen, and since I was going to be in it all morning, I thought I'd cook something at the same time, something with barley. Until recently, I hadn't done much with barley for several years. However, I have a box of "orzo" pasta on my snack shelf waiting for the day I feel inspired to make a kind of Italian fried rice with it. I've always thought of orzo as pasta mimicking arborio rice, so it came as surprise when I found out that "orzo" actually means "barley" in Italian.

Why learning this fact should make me want to start cooking with barley is a bit of a puzzle. Perhaps a tiny nudge was all it took to make me think, "Hey! Barley!" and go out and get a sack of the stuff at the local organic grocery. In any case, that's what I did. I don't know much about barley, apart from the fact that the brewing kind doesn't make the best eating kind. I assume what I scooped out of the plastic bin was the latter sort, but it definitely wasn't pearl (or husked) barley. This was the healthy, natural, takes-forever-and-ever-to-cook kind of barley.

There was a note to this effect on the plastic bin at the store, which promised that if I had the foresight to soak the grain overnight, it would take a mere 30 minutes of cooking. Cue hysterical laughter—oh, you joker, you. I'll reveal the actual cooking time further on; the point here is that the overnight soaking is a very good idea if you plan to eat the barley as anything other than a midnight snack.

So, before breakfast, I set the stuff simmering in lightly salted water with a large bay leaf, and nipped over to the Stop & Shop for some mushrooms, some beef bones, and whatever else might seem worthy of this culinary effort. Because of Thanksgiving (or the usual supermarket perversity), there weren't any loose portabella caps available, so I had to buy what they call "baby bellas." Despite what they say, I don't really believe that these are immature portabellas at all, but rather what might be more accurately called crimini mushrooms, which aren't as full flavored as the big fellows. So, anyway, I bought two package, some trimmed beef rib bones, a yellow turnip (rutabaga) the size of a grapefruit, three big carrots, and two sticks of celery. Everything else I needed I had at home.

The moment I got back I turned the oven on to 250°F. Then I seasoned the bones with salt and finely ground New Mexican chile, put them in a baking pan, and slipped them into the oven. Then I made some coffee and scrambled some eggs, and geared myself up for the seasonal task of washing the kitchen windows, inside and out.

An hour or so after the bones went in, the meat clinging to them (a nice amount of that, actually) was medium done and still juicy, and some of the fat had been rendered. I trimmed the meat off, cut it into bite-size pieces, and set it aside. The browned bones went into the barley pot.

At this point, around 11:30, I decided I had better get the vegetables roasting. My approach to this sort of stew is to cook everything separately to just the doneness I want and then mix it all together and let the flavors mingle a bit for a bit before serving it up. This is an especially good idea when you're not really sure when one of those ingredients will actually be ready—in this instance, the barley. At this point it was barely edible… sort of like eating chopped gristle.

Now I took an hour break to start the cleaning. When I returned to the food, I started by turning up the oven to 350°F, then heating two tablespoons of olive oil in a Calphalon Dutch oven, a regular workhorse in this kitchen. I wanted to sauté the mushrooms first, because I was worried that they wouldn't have much presence, and browning them would help with that. So, too, would the half tablespoon of Chinese mushroom-flavored soy sauce I added to the oil. Rather than slicing the mushrooms, I broke them apart with my fingers. This gives their surface a rough texture, which isn't all that noticeable when you eat them (and certainly not in a stew!) but means that they don't sop up the oil like so many little sponges. I had enough to fill the bottom of the pot, and as they sweated their liquid I regularly poured this in with the barley. This added more flavor to it and meant that the mushrooms really were sautéed and not just stewed.

While the mushrooms cooked, I peeled and cut up the turnip, then scraped and cut up the carrot. (By "scrape" I mean that I turned the knife so that it was perpendicular to the carrot and pushed it down the vegetable's sides. This gets rid of the dried outer layer but doesn't remove nearly as much as a peeler would.) The celery stalks and (a single large) onion were prepped in the usual way, reserving the celery leaves for later. Finally, I minced a large clove of garlic.

When the mushrooms were toasty brown, I turned them onto a plate, added another tablespoon of oil to what remained, sprinkled in a teaspoon of kosher salt, and added the vegetables, stirring them up so that they were all coated with the olive oil. Then the Calphalon went uncovered into the oven. I tasted the barley for doneness—it was coming along, tasting now like boiling hot Gummy Bears.

Back to the cleaning, this time I tackling the windows. I was pretty much free to work on them full time, as long as I remembered to stir the vegetables every 10 minutes or so. They took about 45 minutes to reach the point where both the carrot and turnip pieces were tender. I set the Dutch oven over a low flame on the range, fished the bones out of the barley pot, and poured everything else in with the roasted vegetables. The barley was now almost tender! After only four hours of constant simmering!

Here, if I had been planning to feed a football team, I could have turned all this into beef and mushroom barley soup, since the grains were now mucilaginous enough to thicken the contents of a stockpot. In fact, I had to add two cups of water so that we would have stew, not sludge. At the same time I stirred in the reserved meat and mushrooms, as well as a good amount of Italian parsley minced with the celery leaves. The windows were sparkling and the kitchen clean—including everything I had used to make the meal apart from the pot that held the stew. It was time to eat.

Afterthoughts. Matt and I both enjoyed this stew a lot, but we both decided it wasn't great. Despite what I said above, it turned out that I had forgotten the garlic, and that was a minus right there. Also, there was the issue of the portabellas, and one other thing. I had wanted meaty soup bones, and when I found none, I should have asked the butcher for some. They would have had less meat on them, but the the bones would have produced more flavor—which was really the point.

There's probably some other aromatic or spice or herb that could have helped, too, and I'll be thinking about what it could be (mustard seeds? thyme? a few anchovies? a dollop of Bovril?) But the dish was promising enough to deserve such thought, and I'm sure the next time, or the time after, I'll get it right.

Thursday, November 23, 2007 ~ Thanksgiving

Spaghetti with Meatballs

Traditionally, Matt and I get Chinese takeout for Thanksgiving, a holiday I actively dislike. Despite its name, Thanksgiving is really the Family Holiday. Even Christmas pales beside it: that day's focus is on giving and receiving even more than togetherness. Strangely though, being alone on Christmas is to be almost hauntingly empty; you feel like a ghost. But being alone on Thanksgiving is rather wonderful, like not attending a party that you didn't want to go to and where no one will realize you're not there. At Thanksgiving, you gather with your family and stuff yourself with food as if it were love—or the next best thing —then stagger back to your regular life, oversatiated and wrung out. Christmas, however, creates expectations that are never met, so you leave hungry and depressed, with an armload of things you didn't want and can't imagine why anyone would think you did.

I know most people don't feel this way, including Matt, but there it is. So, for me to make spaghetti with meatballs represents a considerable mellowing. What happened was that Matt was waxing nostalgic about her mother's cooking (which was, not self-assuredly, almost reluctantly, quite good), and it came to me that a "family" meal rich in associations but without any evocative connection to the holiday would, in fact, make a fine Thanksgiving dinner. Even so, to keep the affair at arm's length, I decided to use Bruce Aidell's turkey and chicken meatballs, straight from the supermarket packaged-meats case, and Seeds of Change tomato and basil sauce.

Everything turned out well, and it was satisfying making a meal that was at once urfamily and yet unconnected with the holiday. I felt as though I was with family, but, happily, not with my own family. Bruce’s meatballs were not really meatball meatballs. They were not juicy; they were not made from beef or pork; there were no bread crumbs or milk or egg. They were, not surprisingly, too lean, too chewy — in sum, they lacked the meatball’s essential soft heart. If I ever do this again I'll have to make my own. The sauce, though, was just what a good spaghetti sauce should be. I did gussy it up with sautéed onion and green and yellow bell pepper, some minced salt capers and green and black olives, garlic, a splash of Zin, a dash of hot sauce, and some minced parsley. But no cheese: we have several chunks of Parmesan in the fridge, but I've taken against tossing it with spaghetti unless that's the whole point.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Pasta with fennel, and some leeks, turkey, and wine

Our Stop & Shop had fennel (often wrongly labeled "anise") on sale, and I bought a couple bulbs a few days ago to base a weekday supper on. These meals are almost always one-dish affairs, and last night I began to match up some other ingredients: leeks (they had also looked good), and celery (now that I had fennel and leeks, I was being drawn to something where texture was nudging texture, and green was being laid on green).

Still, I didn't feel I had a dish yet, just a tasty-seeming combination of vegetables. It was time to pick a starch. Because I was thinking about texture, I decided to go with pasta, a short one (gemelli), instead of rice or potatoes. Now we had slippery and chewy (the pasta), slippery and luscious (fennel), slippery and slightly crunchy (celery), and just plain slippery (the leeks).

This could have stayed a strictly vegetarian dish, but these vegetables are mostly fibrous packages of water, so I thought about a meat. It would have to be a meat that didn't throw its weight around, because I wanted the fennel to be the star. Turkey came to mind, dark meat from the thigh or leg. Fennel and turkey: I could taste the two together, and they tasted good.

Since leeks and celery are both aromatics, I didn't think the dish needed any herbs, apart from some fresh parsley, which I had on hand and couldn't hurt. But I did want something that would add some savor, a subtle bit of tang, so I decided to add a thick slice of lemon to the vegetables while they were cooking, and otherwise see what thoughts came up while I was doing the prep.

So, on the cutting board: two fennel bulbs, two leeks, three celery stalks, a clove of garlic, some parsley, and two turkey legs. Fennel bulb, cooked just right, is succulent and delicately flavored. However, the stalks that shoot up out of it — looking not unlike celery — are tough and anise-y. A lot of cookbooks say to use the fennel fronds, which look like dill, as a pot herb. I'm big on waste not, want not, but I draw the line at these. Frankly, they're garbage.

The stalks The stalks, though, are in the gray zone. Ideally, they should be tossed out, too. But they make up a bit too much of the total purchase, so I struggle with them. They're tough and they take forever to cook, unlike the bulb, which is tender enough to eat raw. This time around I cut the stalks into 2-inch lengths, and slice these into strips. These get stuffed into a ziplock bag and are tossed into the microwave for 12 minutes of radiation treatment at full power. They come out tender and edible. There are a lot of things in the vegetable world like this—mushroom stalks, for instance. You wouldn't ever choose them but you get stuck with them, so you do your best to teach them to sit up and beg.

Some people wash cut up leeks in cold water because of the dirt that can get into them, but I find this leaches out a lot of flavor. So, just wash them whole, trim off the root end, then cut off the green tops. The white tubular part I cut in half lengthwise and flip through the layers looking for silt. Usually there isn't any, but if I come across it I just rinse that out. Then I cut the two halves into 1-inch lengths and there you are. I strip away the though dark green parts from the tops until I get down to the lighter-colored, tender core, and treat that the same way. The green tops are more likely to be silty, but it's easy to rinse the dirt away. That takes care of the leeks. The celery I just chop up into bite-size pieces.

I pour about two tablespoons of olive oil into our Calphalon Dutch oven, along with a teaspoon of kosher salt, and set the flame under the pot to medium low. When I can smell the hot oil, I add the chopped up vegetables, minus the fennel stems, which are already done to a turn. Here's a photo of everything, including the lemon slice. Only the garlic and the parsley have been left behind.

Once this impromptu stock is simmering, it's time to cook the gemelli, the cooking water for which has already come to a boil. That takes about 20 minutes, and the idea is that it will be al dente just as the pieces of fennel bulb become succulent and the leeks turn meltingly tender (the celery should still have a touch of crispness).

Twenty minutes gives me plenty of time to cook the turkey. I take down our Joyce Chen nonstick 12-inch Peking pan, my sauté pan of choice, add another tablespoon of olive oil to it, along with a half teaspoon of kosher salt, and heat this over a medium flame. The meat is waiting in a little bowl and I toss this with the minced clove of garlic and a pinch of Urfa Isot (Turkish hot pepper flakes—they are dark purple, hot, with a smoky, slightly fruity taste, substitute any hot pepper), and sauté the meat in the hot oil until it is cooked through, but still tender and juicy, which takes about ten minutes. I turn it out onto a plate.

At this point all that's left to do is to combine everything: first, the strained stock (the bones are set aside for a midnight snack), then the parsley, then the drained gemelli, and finally the turkey meat. Everything is stirred together and left on very low heat for the flavors to have a chance to meld and for me to clean up the kitchen. Here's a shot of the finished dish.

Matt has just come home from work to the unfamiliar aromas of a new dish. She isn't allowed to peek, but she is a demon at identifying cooking smells, so she knows we're having the fennel. But when she's ready to eat, I still manage to surprise her, and we're both pleased with the dish. The turkey and fennel do make a fine pair, nothing is overcooked, everything is nicely moist, and the textures play off each other in just the way I had hoped. True, the fennel stalk bits are flabby, but that is so much of an improvement over their being tough that we forgive them—this time.