Annie's New York Eats

Lamb and Beans Revisited

Adams Fairacre Farm is a mini-chain of three farm stores, one each in Beacon, Poughkeepsie, and my own city of Kingston.

I've told you about Adams before this. The Bakery is so-so. You'll never find higher prices on national brands of packaged goods. The Deli is strictly Boar's Head and the prepared food has been known to upset tender stomachs.

And now we come to the produce. Ten or twelve varieties of apples from September through June. Amazing, ever-ripe stone fruit in the summer, strawberries as long as they're good. The tomatoes are a little less than spectacular, but the selection of potatoes is outrageous (because yes, a simple country kitchen has the need of Russets AND Yukon Golds, no matter what you might think.) Onions out the wazoo. Carrots at all sizes from teensy baby to Shwarzneggerian. Fresh herbs at, unbelievably, all seasons. Three different kinds of broccoli...leeks and parsnips for soups...bulk packages of dressed garlic and shallots...

The Dairy, Fish and Cheese sections are mighty, too, and the Wierd Packaged Goods contain the sort of things I used to find in Bloomingdales' Food Hall when all the best gourmet treats came bottled from France. Horseradish oil? Well, do you think I won't use it? Hand-milled polenta? Smoked paprika? Heaven!

We're now well into the winter, so the Meat Department interests me strangely; there are stews, soups and braises to be made, and smoked flavorings to starchy dishes, and protein-based sauces for stolid winter vegetables. 

For the most part, these things are inexpensive; even if, like smoked bacon and German-style prosciutto (cured with juniper berries), they are luxury-priced, you only need a small amount of them to prepare a dish which will last several days.

And Adams has the very best homemade sausages: "value" priced Italian pork, sweet or hot, as well as chicken, turkey, and duck sausages, and fancy pork sausages (my favorite, a thin tube made with cheese and garlic) for the wicked, rich smack of which my kosher brother would envy me, if he could but taste this.

The Kingston store is well-stocked, but it's the Poughkeepsie location that keeps you guessing. P-kop is a cosmopolitan town, with a large Hispanic population, people of African ancestry from the Caribbean, the UK, and the American South, Japanese and Chinese and Thai and Taiwanese and Filipino people, gourmets just graduated from the Culinary, hardworking graduate students from Adelphi, partying froshes and scholarly upperclassmen from Vassar, farmers and the sons and daughters of farmers who know what good food and good cooking are. Everyone's got their own foodways, and everyone wants to save a dollar here and there.

So you will find fresh pigs' feet in the meat case here, and whole pig heads, in the springtime.

They have something called the Flintstone Steak, which is a whole rib of beef (about three feet long) with its massive lollipop of tender, marbled meat at the end.

You can find half a young lamb's head in this case, eye and half-tongue and all, looking angelic in a frozen way, and a whole beef femur over there, perfect for your dog's Christmas present, or your own if you like marrow bones.

There are ground meats: four or five grades of beef, plus lamb, veal, pork ground coarse for chili and packaged with a suggestive jalapeno pepper, or ground fine for a gossamer-light meatloaf.

Ruby-red lamb rimmed in creamy fat has an entire case for its own, and in this area lamb is valued for its wool-giving properties, too valuable to slaughter; nevertheless, the lamb is local and it is fine. (A bit too fine at $7.99 a pound for boneless stew meat.)

The meat case at Adams Fairacre has allowed me to do a good deal of comparative rib preparation.

I don't like pork ribs--never did; it's not a kosher thing--but lamb rib chops have been my favorite entree since shortly after I completed my first full set of teeth.

Of course the chops are unaffordable now, but a rack of lamb ribs--just the ribs, with their accompanying meat and fat--goes for $2.09 a pound, and lamb bones are light. A rack of eight ribs is dinner for me and Tracy and a rib left over for lunch the next day. I cut them apart quite easily, marinate them with lemon juice and olive oil, then dry and grill them in my cast-iron grill pan; they render cups of fat but are crisp, meaty and delicious if done right.

Beef ribs are even better, with garlic and soy sauce in the marinade; less fatty, chewier.

This week I bought a breast of veal; the same idea at an even lower price. How will it turn out? At $1.59 per pound, I can afford to experiment.

After a meat-shopping binge last week, I tried Emeril's Lamb and White Bean Casserole again, but this time rang even more changes on it. Now it's a big ole pot o' beans with veggies and a silky lamb sauce, appropriate for walking three miles to work in snowshoes...or exploring the great world in a chilly meat case in Poughkeepsie.

Lamby Beans

(Somewhat inspired by Emeril Lagasse)

1 pound dried Great Northern beans, rinsed well and picked over
2 tablespoons bacon fat or olive oil
3 pounds lamb "neck bones" or "bone-in stew meat"
2 teaspoons garlic salt (Lowry's for preference)
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 cup chopped yellow onions

2 cups chopped shallot
1 cup chopped celery

4 cups "baby" carrots or cleaned and sliced carrots
Leaves from 1 sprig Rosemary
15 fat garlic cloves, smashed with the blad of a heavy knife but fairly intact  
8 cups excellent, homemade vegetable stock OR water
 

Combine the beans and 8 cups cold water in a large saucepan or soup pot and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and remove from the heat. Let sit for 1 hour. Drain the beans in a colander and discard the soaking liquid. Set the beans aside.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Meanwhile, heat the bacon fat or olive oil in a large (8 quarts or more) Dutch oven. Season the lamb with the garlic salt and pepper and cook the lamb in batches until very brown on all sides. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the lamb to a bowl and set aside. Add the onions, shallots, celery, carrots, Rosemary and cook, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan, until the vegetables are soft, 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 2 minutes. Add the stock or water and return the meat to the pot. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook for 30 minutes.

Add the beans to the pot and continue cooking until the beans are tender but not mushy, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. The cooking liquid should be slightly thickened, just enough to coat the beans and lamb. (If the sauce seems too thin, remove the meat and beans with a slotted spoon and cook until the liquid has reduced and is slightly thickened. Alternatively, if the cooking liquid has reduced too much, add a bit of water.)

Remove the bones from the beans. If you like, you can scrape off bits of meat to add to the beans, but it's not necessary. And even if you really love bones, these are rather nasty: full of cartilege and sloppily butchered, with sharp edges. (You might even have bits of bone in your beans, so warn guests). Best to thank them for their flavoring help, and then bid them farewell.

The beans keep, refrigerated,, or up to three days.

Paula Deen's Apple Strudel: A Rebuttal

When my brother emailed that he and his lady, not to mention the two lads (aged 2 and 3) and various outliers from Long Island requested that I contribute an apple pie and a few quarts of ice cream to Thanksgiving, I immediately started to edit the request in my mind.

Pie is, to my mind, risky. Commercial pies can be great, but the better they are the more money they cost, and I didn't have a lot to spend. As to home-made pies, the fact is that I'm not a baker. It takes a special talent and, while I may develop it some day, I haven't yet.

Then there are the two variables in any fruit pie: the filling and the crust. The filling hits or misses on the sweet/tart/firm/watery properties of the fruit, and fresh fruit are not predictable. The crust, on the other hand, can be controlled--if you are a good baker and you have either an infallible pie crust sense, or an infallible recipe.

Maybe it all comes down to the fact that, if my braised beef shank is sticking to the casserole or my lamb ribs are getting grey instead of golden brown, I know what to do about it; knowledge, experience and sense tell me to take it off the fire, or turn up the flame, or add more liquid, or start all over again if I need to. But I've got no senses like that for baking, and that's why, wisely I think, I stay away from the stuff.

Still. My brother asked me specially for a dessert. The rest of the meal would be taken care of by my sister-in-law, her sister and their mother, welterweight cooks all. What to do?

Relief came in the form of this recipe by Paula Deen from the Food Network website.

Apple Strudel:
1/4 cup bourbon or apple juice
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 to 3 Granny Smith apples (about 1 pound), peeled, cored, halved, and thinly sliced
1/2 lemon, juiced
1 tablespoon lemon zest, finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, plus more for sprinkling
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup crushed shortbread cookies
1/4 cup chopped pecans
2 tablespoons butter, cut into pieces
5 sheets phyllo dough from 1 pound package of frozen dough
2 tablespoons butter, melted, for brushing phyllo sheets, plus more if needed
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Confectioner's sugar
Caramel sauce, purchased

Glaze:
2 cups confectioner's sugar
3 1/2 tablespoons milk 

For the Strudel:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a small bowl, pour the bourbon or apple juice over the raisins and microwave on high for 45 seconds. Let sit for 15 minutes.

Combine the raisins, apples, lemon juice, lemon zest, cinnamon, brown sugar, cookie crumbs, pecans, and butter in a large bowl.

Remove the phyllo dough from the box, unfold, and cover with a damp towel. Place 1 sheet of phyllo on the work surface and brush lightly with melted butter. Repeat with the remaining sheets, brushing each with melted butter, stacking when done, being sure to keep the unbuttered phyllo covered.

Place the apple mixture on the nearest third of the phyllo stack, being sure to leave a 2-inch border. Gently lift the bottom edge of the phyllo stack to cover the filling and fold the side edges over. Continue to roll the stack away from you until the filling is completely sealed in and the seam is on the bottom. Transfer to the prepared baking sheet. Brush the top with melted butter and sprinkle with granulated sugar.

Bake for 30 minutes, until golden brown. Pour over the glaze and sprinkle with cinnamon and confectioners' sugar. Pass warm caramel sauce, to drizzle over the strudel.

For the Glaze:
Mix ingredients thoroughly.

*Cook's Note: If too thick add a little bit of milk. If too thin add a little bit of confectioners' sugar.

This is  Annie again. the fact is, the filling turned out marvelously--rich, buttery, sweet but not insipid. It helps if you cut the applies into thin chunks, not thin slices, and mix all the dry ingredients first, then add the apples and finally the butter. Inexpressibly delicious, with the firm, tart Granny Smiths a perfect counterpoint to the fancy richness of the trimmings.

But that phylllo dough...brother, beware. It's a thin, damp membrane which shatters when you look at it (I mean when it's still unbaked). If it actually does come through the bakig process, it's as appetizing as a brown paper bag.

So now I've got tons of this filling and nothing to fill. The good news is I also have three days until T-give, and enough money left to buy one of those little boxes of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry.

I can still do good things. Tune in later and we'll find out what, exactly.

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

Tracy's lunch. Not an ad for arts and crafts supplies.

My daughter Tracy is in my house with me for 24 hours every week, give or take a movie that runs late or a longer-than-usual trip to the mall. She is moderately mentally retarded and she lives in a group home during the week, with another 24 hours at her father's house.

When Tracy was younger, I used to take her out to almost every meal. I was younger too, and I had more money, and I wanted to make every minute of our time together "special," because I felt guilty that she wasn't living at my house.

(FYI, she moved into the group home when she was 11 and age-appropriate to learn about communal living, which is probably the way she will always live, semi-independently but within a community. She'll also work, hang out, have friends and maybe even a life partner if she wants one. It's not a sad story).

We'd go to Friendly's for breakfast, Ruby Tuesday's for lunch, Red Lobster for dinner. We'd look at each other over the table. She drank an awful lot of fat-free chocolate milk, which, in restaurants like these, is the vin ordinaire for youngsters.

Then I went back to school and had a lot less money, and we had to eat and hang out at home.

Tracy was much, much happier. I hadn't realized that she wanted to be with me more than she wanted constant treats. Big duh, you might say, but when I was a kid I rarely wanted to be around my parents, and I blessed the silence when they were gone.

I made her breakfast, usually scrambled eggs (living in a group home means you get a lot of cold cereal). For lunch, we gradually dragged ourselves away from the food court (since we were no longer spending full days at the mall) and concentrated on salads and soups (Tracy is not big on sandwiches).

Dinners always had a pasta feature, because she loves pasta, but I learned to make dishes in which the starch was just an element, not the whole reason for being.

I also ramped down my own expectations of cooking. No longer did I gaze at Gourmet and Sauveur and wonder why my every meal did not have fifteen ingredients.

I figured out how best to do the things Tracy and I liked. It took a lot of work, but Tracy was aways happy to eat the remains of the experiments. (Except for one time when my spaghettini carbonate became all too carbonized. She has never let me forget that.)

Today when I pick Tracy up on Saturday afternoon she says, "Are we having a snack tonight??" Because she had already had her dinner.

"Yes," I say. "Chicken noodle soup."

"From the soup we made last week?"

"Yes."

She makes a nigh-pitched noise which I associate with Too Happy for Words. "And then breakfast tomorrow?"

"Yes. Scrambled eggs with cheese."

"And lunch."

"Something light. Salad with shrimps.?"

"Good! And...chicken parmigiana for dinner?"

"I need to buy breadcrumbs. Okay."

"Okay!"

She's my sous-chef, although she can't handle knives or be near heat. She does a lot of garbage and clean-up work. And loading the dishwasher.

It's not magic. She's a kid and she's got a cast-iron palate and an eight-speed metabolism. She has a few roadblocks to fine dining--she dislikes any kind of protein except shrimp and hot dogs, she will pick pasta and sauce on any menu with which she's presented, she refuses to accept any salad dressing which does not have blue cheese in it. But that's not bad for seventeen. It's a little weird that she doesn't like chocolate.

Last week when I picked her up she said, "You know what I want, Mom?"

"What?"

"Nothing much. Just breakfast, lunch and dinner!"

Tracy's Scrambled Eggs

2 small hen's eggs or 1 duck's egg

1/2 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tbsp grated grana podana cheese

Place butter in small cold frying pan and set over high heat.

Beat up eggs or egg in a rimmed soup plate or small bowl.

When butter foams, you'd better be ready to throw the eggs into the pan and beat them. This will only take about thirty seconds because the pan is so hot. When eggs are still loose, take pan off heat and keeps scrambling. Then put the eggs back in the bowl and shake cheese over them. Mix well.

Salt to taste. Don't bother to bring them to the table; Tracy's probably standing right there, waiting to take them from you.

Correcting a Recipe: Watercress Vichysoisse

I love cold soup, principally because of three early experiences.

1) I am 14 and visiting at the home of my friend Maggie Topkis, who lives a hyper-glamorous Manhattan life with her mother in a huge West Side apartment. Maggie's Mom serves us gazpacho, which I find too wonderful to be believed; salad you can eat with a spoon? Salad without huge chunks of iceberg lettuce that will flip on the fork and splatter dressing across the table? BRILLIANT! Mrs. Topkis says it is nothing, really; just salad in  blender. Maggie is bored with it; she prefers my mother's homemade Ukrainian Meat Borscht. I am hooked.

2) I am 16 and visiting at the Great Neck home of my first boyfriend, Rich G. His mother offers me "a nice glass of cold soup". I'm pretty much of a moron--I think it must be gazpacho. Does any other cold soup exist? Mrs. G pours out a yellow-green liquid, garnishes it with a scoop of sour cream and some chopped scallions. Always eat what your boyfriend's mom puts in front of you (although Rich himself is making gagging noises). It's cold, thin, savory, with a mellow secondary taste from the pillowy sour cream. Mmmm. It's called Schav. My best friend La Skolnique informs me that it's an old Jewish delicacy, she has been eating it for years, and her mother makes it better than anyone. On inspection, Mrs. Skolnique does a bang-up job. Which is good, because Rich and I break up before I can get his Mom's recipe.

3) I am 18 and working my first office job "in town" at 49th and Madison. I've got plenty of dough ($2.75/hr, which is minimum wage that year) but I don't know anyplace to have lunch. Everything looks either too greasy or too expensive. Some good fate leads me into La Potagerie, on 5th avenue between 47th and 48th. It's Jacques Pepin's brilliant idea for a cheap, elegant, filling lunch in midtown: a small cafeteria with round tables on terra-cotta floors, serving big bowls of soup with a complimentary croissant, one pat of butter, an apple and a drink. $3.50 pour tout...and today's soup is Vichyssoise, cold cream of potato soup subtly flavored with leeks and chives, which I have read about but never eaten. I take one creamy, savory spoonful...add a bite of crispy/buttery croissant...and am both blissed out and permanently addicted. From this moment on, any menu bearing the words "vichyssoise" is fascinating to me.

Later I learned to make all three of these soups myself...or rather, I learned to make versions of these soups, tweaked to please my own tastes.

As I grew up gazpacho began to seem too watery and too simplistic; I also disliked tomatoes unless they were ripe, peak-of-season Beefsteak or heirlooms. My recipe for gazpacho became a simple mix of V8 juice, beef broth and cubed English cucumbers. Mixed all the ingredients and let them sit in the refrigerator for two to three hours...the cukes will get to taste and crunch like new pickles. It's delicious, but way too high in sodium...consumed in my house as a four-ounce aperitif on the night of a very light dinner.

Schav? I have been laughed out of upstate grocery stores for even asking about this. It's an ugly soup, as noted before. It's a soup of poverty, made in the old country with water from the well and sorrel from the pasture, and a hard-boiled egg for body. Sour cream, maybe, if you have some around that's just gone sour. In my kitchen, it's put together at the last minute like a swanky cocktail: two parts chilled chicken broth (Swanson's Low Salt for choice), one part cooked-down sorrel (kept frozen in the freezer), and Greek yogurt, that handy stand-in for sour cream, to taste. Not more than 1/4 cup sorrel per person, mind, because sorrel goes straight to the kidneys and can do some harm there.

And my old love, vichyssoise? It's rarely seen now; savvy diners, especially in Manhattan, love the cooling properties of cold soup on the overheated, overstressed soul, but they hate the cream and potatoes involved. Therefore, one sees cucumber vichyssoise and carrot vichyssoise and even an odd and disheartening mushroom vichyssoise, and many of them are no good at all. I adopted the following recipe for Watercress Vichyssoise as my household favorite--but it, too, had problems.

The recipe is from Gourmet's June 2004 issue.

Ingredients

1 small boiling potato (1/4 lb), peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cups (16 fl oz) low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
4 cups coarsely chopped watercress (1 large bunch)

Preparation

Simmer potato, onion, broth, and cream, uncovered, in a 3- to 4-quart heavy saucepan until vegetables are soft, about 10 minutes. Stir in watercress and cook mixture, uncovered, over moderately low heat 3 minutes more.

Purée soup in 2 batches in a blender until very smooth, about 45 seconds per batch (use caution when blending hot liquids). Force soup through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing hard on solids and then discarding them. Season with salt and pepper and let soup stand, uncovered, until cool, 45 minutes, then chill, covered, 1 1/2 hours.

This is Annie again...perfectly nice soup, wot? The addition of peppery watercress turns this soup from smooth and suave to banteringly romantic. It's not Robert Taylor, it's William Powell. you don't even really have to put the soup through a strainer; the watercress stems puree nicely and you won't be bothered by them in the finished product.

And yet. The big problem here is that I am only one person; my daughter and my young roommate do not care for this soup, so I can't just make a batch and have all of us finish it at once. What I would like to do is to keep it in my refrigerator for three or four days and have a small glassful before meals or as a light lunch. This doesn't work because the soup, only as thick as a light cream sauce when first made, gradually thickens as the potato breaks down and becomes starchier and starchier. By the fourth day, it's just green glop and the texture muffles the flavor.

What to do? I gave it a lot of thought. Then I came up with this revised recipe.

Watercress Vichysoisse, the non-gloppy way

Ingredients

1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cups (16 fl oz) low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 cups coarsely chopped watercress (1 large bunch)

1/2 cup rich whole milk, such as Ronnybrook

up to 1 cup 2% Greek yogurt

Preparation

Simmer onion, broth, and cream, uncovered, in a 3- to 4-quart heavy saucepan until vegetable is soft, about 10 minutes. Stir in watercress and cook mixture, uncovered, over moderately low heat 3 minutes more.

Purée soup in 2 batches in a blender until very smooth, about 45 seconds per batch (use caution when blending hot liquids). Season with salt and pepper and let soup stand, uncovered, until cool, 45 minutes.

In a cold metal or glass bowl, mix milk and 1/2 yogurt together until smooth. Then stir milk mixture into soup.

Taste for flavor and texture. Add more yogurt if needed. The soup should be smooth, thick, but readily pourable.

Stores nicely for 3 or four days in refrigerator.

Next Iron Chef: Salmon Roe and What, Now?

As if we will never have done with The Next Iron Chef...and no, we won't, because I really like this show and it makes a lot of good points about food, cooking, being a chef and the zeitgeist as reflected in the way we eat now...I came up with a purely fictional recipe after watching last night's premier.

"Fictional" means in this case that I have not prepared it, or eaten anything like it, or seen it prepared, or even heard about it through an unsubstantiated rumor on Grub Street. I just thought it up, and here's how.

Contestant Traci des Jardins, a noted chef/restaurateur and a winner on an earlier Iron Chef challenge (I mean, this lady knows her stuff) was given the assignment of creating a dessert with a non-sweet component--in this case, salmon roe.

Salmon roe, atop greek yogurt, atop watercress vichysoisse

But Chef des Jardins used it only as a kind of garnish, not really an ingredient of the dish she created. By Iron Chef standards, a good dish is one in which the key ingredient is fully integrated and its flavor is not masked. Even--maybe most of all--when that ingredient does not seem to be a good match for the purpose of the dish.

Therefore, Chef d.J. was booted from "The Next Iron Chef"--to the amazement of herself, her competitor/colleagues, and the rest of the foodie universe.

And yet her loss was justified. She simply didn't do what the challenge required.

Now, I am not a chef. I eat voraciously and adventurously and I read a lot about food, but most of the food I eat is prepared by me at home because I think I will like it, it has good left-over potential, it's fairly inexpensive, and the ingredients are locally available--I don't mean I'm a locavore, I just don't send away for things.

Still, I thought up the recipe below.

There might be several good reasons why this recipe wouldn't work. For example, would the acidic pomegranate juice "cook" the salmon roe, like an escabeche? Even I know that cooking caviar, with either heat or acid, is far less kind than just throwing it out.

Or would it just taste like a creamy, fruity dessert in which a fish had decided to do its reproductive business?

I haven't even tried to make this recipe, because I can't afford the somewhat expensive ingredients right now.

So heaven knows that I am not promoting my food prep and judgment skills over those of Traci des Jardins. Nor do I know what purpose this recipe would serve, outside of making the judges oust Michael Symons instead (the famous and expert Cleveland chef was the other competitor who came close to losing last night's challenge). (Bacon-flavored ice cream, if you must know).

But pomegranate seeds are tiny sacs of intensely flavored (sweet/sour/tangy) liquid. And salmon roe are tiny (about the same size, in fact) sacs of intensely flavored (savory/salty/rich) liquid. And creme fraiche is creamy and gentling to sharp tastes, and is used as an accompaniment to both sweet and savory dishes. So here goes.

The Salmon and the Pomegranate

A non-existent Middle Eastern Fable in recipe form

Ingredients

A quarter-cup of pomegranate seeds                                     Pom seeds

A half-tablespoon of salmon roe

A tablespoon of creme fraiche

Preparation

In a very small bowl, perhaps a 1/2 cup prep bowl or a custard cup, layer the creme fraiche at the bottom.

Add pomegranate seeds on top, hiding the creme fraiche.

Sprinkle salmon roe on top of that. You won't be able to hide the pomegranate seeds, but don't mix them.

Serves one adventuresome (and somewhat wealthy) Iron Chef wannabe.

Chicken Soup with Feet

(I don't know if they'd want to take the blame for it, but this recipe started out as The 2nd Avenue Deli's Chicken in the Pot.)

INGREDIENTS

4-5 lbs mixed chicken parts, such as feet, backs, wings, necks

1 whole chicken, 3-4 lbs, the older and cheaper the better

2 tablespoons coarse salt, such as sea salt

6-8 large, even overgrown carrots, trimmed but not peeled

3 parsnips, the same

2 large or 3-4 small leeks, trimmed at base, cleaned, and cut in half; use only white and light green parts

6-8 dark-green outer stalks of celery; again, best if a bit old

2 medium yellow onions, cut in quarters but not all the way through. DO NOT PEEL BROWN SKIN! We're actually going to use it

Special Equipment: a large stock pot (5 gallons or more); wide-mouth quart or half-gallon mason jars with two-piece lids

YIELD

1 to 1.5 gallons

PROCEDURE

Place the chicken parts and the whole chicken in stock pot. Add water to cover and then two inches over. add salt.

Bring to a boil and thereafter cook at fast simmer for 45 minutes.

Remove whole chicken (a large strainer is good for "netting" it out of the pot) and place in bowl or large rimmed dish to cool. Cover with a damp paper towel if there are flies or curious pets (or men) in your kitchen.

When the chicken is cool you will have to find someone as good as my Tracy to strip the skin off the meat and the meat off the bone. We always make chicken salad with this...but you can chop the chicken meat and put it back in the soup, or whatever you like.

Add all vegetables to pot. Include brown onionskin. Don't worry, we'll be straining this. And at this point, your soup should look like this:

Cook for 90 minutes uncovered. Do not add more water--but if you are working on an unfamiliar stove, do check to see how the water level is going. If water does not cover chicken and vegetables, cover pot and reduce heat to medium simmer.

Now taste the soup. It should taste bland at first--nothing more than salty water--but then something hits you at the back of your tongue. Richness? Body? Whatever you'd call it, it convinces you that this is not hot water in which chicken and veg have been boiled, but more.

It is in fact now a kind of chicken stock (although true stock is made from bones and vegetable peelings). Give it another 30 minutes and taste again.

Maybe your soup at 90 minutes will taste like full-bodied soup. Does it also have a pale golden yellow color? Good--that means it's almost done. And, by the way, it won't be clear at any point. It's a good cloudy soup. That cloudiness denotes Soul.

Anyway, go on cooking (medium to high simmer) until the soup reaches this point. How long it will take depends on the chicken, the vegetables, your pot and, most of all, the stove.

Finally, strain the soup. You can start by pouring everything into a pasta pot with a colander insert, or a real colander set over a very large bowl. You may have to fish out the chicken parts and the vegetables with your trusty strainer. Whatever. At one point or another you will be standing before a pot of soup with small bits of stuff in it.

You may have to do this in batches, but strain the soup one more time, because the chicken feet have been so throughly cooked and overcooked that a toe or so is probably buried in the depths of the soup.

With a large ladle (and, best possible case, working in the sink), fill each glass jar with soup. Leave on your kitchen counter until glass is cool enough to handle and then refrigerate bottles.

If you are the kind of person who skims fat off the surface of cold soup, I see no reason to stop you from doing that.

If you have used chicken feet, you will find that the soup, when completely cooled, is a loose gel in the jars. This only proves what a good cook you are. But if you could not find any chicken feet, that's all right. Your soup will be elegant and liquid.

Pour into a plastic container with a tightly-fitting top and freeze some of the soup if you like. It keeps, frozen for at least a month. In the refrigerator, keep sniffing the soup whenever you warm it up. It should be good for at least a week, but we are dealing with all-fresh, all-natural ingredients, so you'll want to be careful.

Emeril's Lamb and White Bean Casserole

Here's the recipe referred to in How to Pick a Recipe. I reprinted it from the Food Network site where it appeares courtesy of Emeril Lagasse.

1 pound dried Great Northern beans, rinsed well and picked over
2 tablespoons bacon fat or olive oil
3 pounds boneless lamb stew meat, cut into 2-inch cubes
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
3 cups chopped yellow onions
1 cup chopped celery
10 sprigs fresh thyme, tied with kitchen twine
3 bay leaves
2 teaspoons Essence, recipe follows
1/4 cup minced garlic
1 cup peeled whole tomatoes, coarsely chopped (canned is fine)
8 cups chicken stock, or canned low-sodium chicken broth
1/3 cup chopped green onions
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
1 cup dried bread crumbs
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Combine the beans and 8 cups cold water in a large saucepan or soup pot and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and remove from the heat. Let sit for 1 hour. Drain the beans in a colander and discard the soaking liquid. Set the beans aside.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Meanwhile, heat the bacon fat in a large Dutch oven. Season the lamb with the salt and pepper and cook the lamb in batches until very brown on all sides, 8 to 10 minutes per batch. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the lamb to a bowl and set aside. Add the onions, celery, thyme, bay leaves, and Essence and cook, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan, until the vegetables are soft, 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes and chicken stock and return the meat to the pot. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook for 30 minutes.

Add the beans to the pot...

This is the way it looked after I added the beans

...and continue cooking until the beans are tender but not mushy, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. The cooking liquid should be slightly thickened, just enough to coat the beans and lamb. (If the sauce seems too thin, remove the meat and beans with a slotted spoon and cook until the liquid has reduced and is slightly thickened. Alternatively, if the cooking liquid has reduced too much, add a bit of water.) Add the green onions and parsley, taste, and season if necessary with additional salt and pepper.

Transfer the bean mixture to a 9 by 13-inch casserole and top with the bread crumbs and Parmesan. Drizzle the top with the olive oil and bake, uncovered, until the casserole is golden brown on top and bubbly around the edges, about 30 minutes. Serve warm.

Emeril's ESSENCE Creole Seasoning (also referred to as Bayou Blast):
2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried thyme Combine all ingredients thoroughly.

Yield: 2/3 cup

Recipe from "New New Orleans Cooking", by Emeril Lagasse and Jessie Tirsch, published by William and Morrow, 1993.

Recipe Summary Difficulty: Medium Prep Time: 20 minutes Inactive Prep Time: 1 hour Cook Time: 2 hours 30 minutes Yield: 8 to 10 servings User Rating:

Episode#: EM2A54
Copyright © 2006 Television Food Network, G.P., All Rights Reserved

Hi Guys--it's me, Annie, with comments. I didn't use the Essence, the thyme or the bay leaves and about 2/3 of my beans were Great Northern while 1/3 were baby lima beans. the llmas were a little tougher after all was said and done, so when I do this again it will be all Great Northerns.

In addition, although Em calls for boneless lamb stew meat, I went with half bone-in. Boneless is darned expensive and not always available, while lamb neckbone is half the price and easily available in any supermarket. (My local Hannaford's treats lamb like a variety cut, but that's another problem.)

It is true that boneless lamb will provide you with a smooth eating experience during which you will not have to take anything out of your mouth and place it under the edge of your plate, but necckbone (which actually means meat with bone, not just bone itself) will provide more fat for better browning, plus "crispy bits" which will make the finished casserole tastier, more texturally interesting, and richer-tasting. In addition, the bones and their connecive tissue will give the finished product a more unctuous, smoother taste.

Also, if you are using a cast-iron dutch oven (absolutely the best way to go with this recipe), heat it slowly (over medium, let's say) for ten minutes and then start adding ingredients. The meat will sear and brown much faster. 

Heirloom Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella Salad

Serves one with crusty bread for lunch; two on baby arugula as a salad course

Ingredients

1 cup drained fresh mozzarella in any bite-sized form

2 "Fuzzy Yellow" (also known as "Peach") or other low-acid heirloom tomato

1/2 tblsp large crystal sea salt (I tsp if using small crystal)

1 tblsp Reasonable Salad Dressing

Method

Place mozzarella in serving bowl and then in refrigerator.

Slice tomatoes as thinly as possible, then place in strainer over a bowl. Add salt to tomatoes and stir in strainer. Cover with a damp paper towl and leave at room temperature for 1/2 hour.

When tomatoes have had a chance to strain thoroughly, mix with mozzarella in serving bowl. Add dressing and mix throughly. Serve.

(Note that you are a fool if you throw away the tomato water which, although salty, should be poured into a shot glass and tossed down like an aperitif.)

Dick, Paula, Obesity and Food

Dick Cavett, maybe the most intelligent talk show host ever, has had a blog in the New York Times since February of this year. This is the first line of Mr. Cavett's last blog entry:

It was only a few years ago that I first noticed an obese person in a
commercial. Then there were more. Now, like obesity itself, it has gotten
out of hand.

(to read the rest of it, click here)

The writer goes to on to say that he is afraid the viewing public will see obese people in the media, and will feel that it's all right to be obese.

(We would hate to find out what Cavett thinks about the inclusion of disabled persons, people with Down Syndrome, those who are much taller or much shorter than the average, or even flat-chested women.)

Cavett is promulgating a popular idea: that, since obesity is an epidemic in the United States, and since its causes remain difficult to identify, it has become the prophylactic duty of society to criminalize obesity.

We at Annie's know that not every obese person can control his or her weight by eating less. Further, there is no proof that the exclusion of obese people from the media will actually curb the obesity epidemic. We think this point of view is a crock, and we think Dick Cavett must be losing his mind.

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On the other hand, there's Paula Deen.

Miz Paula, a restaurant chef who has become a popular figure on Food TV, is famous for cooking southern-style food, heavy on all the ingredients which would tend to make a person obese.

Granted, Southern cooking leans pretty hard on lard, pork, pork fat, sugar and cream, but is this noble cultural tradition truly supported by deep-fried lasagna?

Not to mention enormous amounts of butter, far beyond what a good cook would need for flavoring, texture, or emulsifying (since we also watch Alton Brown, we have some idea of the chemical uses to which ingredients are put).

The heaviest sort of southern cooking was based upon the needs of an agrarian society in which almost everyone was out in the fields. Miz Paula's food is heavy and fatty for no reason other than to thumb her nose at the health-conscious and brag that "real people" eat what tastes good.

And, not to put all the blame on Paula Deen, there are plenty of media messages which push us towards food as reward, lack of food as punishment, food as class (or lack of class), food as personality, food as forgiveness...with all the things that food has become for us Americans, it's no wonder that many people overeat. We're not addicted to eating as much as we are to easy emotion.

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We at Annie's don't put double-thick mayo on our salads (which Paula might, if she ate salads that didn't have macaroni in them) and we don't spray them with four calories worth of imitation vinegar with beta-carotene (which Mr. Cavett might want us to do, because we are quite obese ourself). We make what we consider to be

Reasonable Salad Dressing

5 ft cloves of garlic

1/2 cup of extra-virgin olive oil

1/8 cup of low-sodium soy sauce, plus more to taste

Place all ingredients in the plastic cup that comes with an immersion mixer--or in any tall-sided plastic container. Insert immersion mixer and then turn on high. Mix dressing (the garlic will be pureed) until it is the consistency of thick mayonnaise.

Taste. A little lemon juice will cut the richness without adding to the saltiness. Do not add more garlic; if the dressing tastes faint to you, you probably have bad garlic (or a very heavy cold).

Spoon conservatively into salad. One teaspoon would be enough for 1 1/2 cups of mixed greens, which we consider one portion.

Fresh mozzarella cheese, a few chopped dried tomatoes, drained canned tuna or cooked white meat chicken would all be good ingredients to make this salad into a meal.