vegetable soup

I tore my back up shoveling snow yesterday, which is making eating this soup somewhat difficult, which in turn is making me realize two things: (a) how important our backs are, and (b) we don't sit up straight when we eat soup; we lean over the bowl so that (i) we can get the aroma of the steamy broth as close to our faces and noses as possible, and (ii) so we don't spill soup all over the tablecloth as we guide the spoon through the hazardous nothingness between the bowl of soup and our mouths.  Today I am using another technique: with my left hand under the bowl, I elevate the bowl to my face, leaving my right hand free to put the spoon into my mouth.  Now, vegetable soup...let's talk about it...

I decided that I don't want to talk about vegetable soup—I want to eat it—instead I want to talk about soup bowls.  The soup bowl above was made by a potter who lives and works in NYC named Judy Jackson.  She's in her 70s, and perhaps it takes 70 years to learn what she has learned about soup bowls: they should be big.  I don't want a dinky soup bowl that forces me to go back for seconds and thirds and fourths.  For me, soup is a meal and that's how I like it.  Heavily buttered bread and a big bowl of soup.  Doesn't that sound right?  Well, apparently not because big soup bowls are way more uncommon than they should be.  I'm a soup guy, so I'm particularly irritated about the small soup bowl situation, dictatorship, really, it's really a small soup bowl dictatorship.  

turkey carcass, turkey stock

Thanksgiving, a turkey carcass got thrust at me, thrust at me in a plastic shopping bag.  I slunk home and shoved it in my fridge.  The first thing you need to ask yourself is: do I have a big enough pot?  Turkeys are big birds.  There was room enough in the cavity of mine for a Nerf football.  The second thing you need to ask yourself (and here you need to be very honest with yourself) is: how squeamish am I?  There was a lot of meat clinging to my carcass and getting at it would have been too laborious, rather, was too laborious until I buckled down and really dug in.  You cannot pussy-foot around a turkey carcass.  Clean a large area of your counter and plop that sucker down.  Tear it apart with your hands.  Your hands and one fork are the only tools you need to clean and dismember a turkey carcass.  

    
Once you've got that sucker sufficiently cleaned, i.e. picked through, go ahead and ram it into the biggest pot you have.  You'll notice that I didn't clean every last bit of meat off the carcass.  I could have, and that would have been good, but I could also have vacuumed the floor with a straw that I'd shoved a cotton ball into for a filter.  Very tedious.  Not all that necessary.  Anyway, once your turkey carcass is cleaned, it's easy to make the stock.  Just add some celery-carrot-onion (plus water) to the carcass, bring to a boil and reduce on a simmer.  When mine was done cooking, I put it out on the porch to cool.  The very best thing about winter is cooling stocks on the porch.  Turkey soup tomorrow.  Essence of rutabaga. 

a week of soups, rain, sadness

I am sinking into a depression of soups.  I am writing in bed.  Me, who denies couches, who time and time again has asserted that he only needs wooden chairs, who has no use for reclining, is prone in bed, writing about soup, finding little in life but soup to be cheerful about.  It's been one of those rainy, cold fall days.  I brought an umbrella to school today, but I left it in my car.  Who needs an umbrella when there is no soup around?  Normally, on Thursdays, I spend a couple hours in an Amherst coffee shop, but today I drove home between the class I take and the class I teach to eat another bowl of chili.

You can't really see anything in this picture, and I knew that would happen, and normally I would have selected another bowl, one that would look more full, be more full, so that the soup would photograph well, so that you, the reader, could see the glory of the soup and its chunks, but today I did not care.  I didn't vote either.  I watched youtube in bed and attempted to eat soup in bed, but as soon as I put my body down on the bed, the divot my body created toppled the soup onto my sheets.  That, too, I knew would happen.  I am not bothering these days to take the precautions I know I should.  Next soup:

Another bowl of chili, but this one without meat, a kind of pseudo chili because I added some dark roux to it, dark roux made with beef fat, flour and paprika.  And a broth of beef stock (oxtail) and tomato sauce frozen from the abundance of tomatoes I turned into sauce when my garden was banging them out faster than Mexican sweat laborers bang out crappy chessboards.  Next soup:

This is the butternut, carrot, and potato soup that I spilled on my bed on election night.  When I made this soup, well, I went to so much trouble to get an ultra smooth texture.  I passed everything through the chinois, the ultra fine French sieve, and it was ooh-la-la velvety perfection to which I added some half 'n half.  Then I set the soup to what I thought was a simmer and went back to bed to watch youtube.  Ten minutes later, boiling soup: the boil caused the milk solids to turn into little curdles, ruining the fine texture.  Now it had little cheese balls in it, another thing I knew would happen but which I took no precaution against.  Blah.  Tomorrow is split pea.  I'm not kidding.  

beef and barley on a productive day

I moved my office into the garage one week ago, and I have been out here night and day, busily assembling my second collection of poetry, working title, 50%.  It's cold in the morning and cold again at night, but today, when lunch rolled around, I was fortunate enough to slip inside for some leftover beef 'n barley soup.  I heated it up and slurped it down.  That was around three in the afternoon.  It's now one minute before seven and I'm out the (garage) door to drop off a collage at 14 Walnut, a house in the neighborhood where, on October 23rd, a group art show will take place.  I don't know any of the other people participating in the show—I barely even know the hostess—but it's hard to turn down an invitation to a party.  Anyway, I've been adding roux to all my soups lately.  It makes them delicious and fatty.  Perfect for cold nights in the garage, slogging away at my second book of poems. 

 

Butternut Soup for lunch on a sunny day

This weekend a reader told me that I should make the blog more personal.  This was at a rehearsal dinner in Spaghetti Freddy's.  The food went very well with the free booze. I was bashing the avocado and getting big responses from the people at my table, but I was not able to convince anybody that the avocado is just green texture.  Not even the feedback lady.  Anyway, today is much better than yesterday.  The sun is out.  It's streaming through my mini blinds.  I graded all my outlines before lunch.  Now I'm waiting for this very bowl of soup to cool before digging in.  This morning I ate two slices of toast: one with peanut butter, one with the grape conserve from an earlier blog.  Have a grape day.  

  
 

Bow Ties with Broccoli Raab and Beans

This is a pretty simple recipe, and it's easy to make if you have some cooked beans on hand.  It takes about twenty minutes, and you can do all the prep while your pasta cooks.  I know it doesn't look like much, but neither does the Empire State Building when you view it from Illinois. 

 

Heat up the beans with some of their cooking juice.  Meanwhile, slice some red onion as thinly as you can, and prep your broccoli raab.  Note: if you don't have broccoli raab, you can use any other leafy green vegetable.  Turnip greens might be nice.  In any case, slice your greens and heat up some olive oil in a pan.  HOT.  Get the oil hot.  Toss in your greens and wilt them, then hit 'em with the thinly sliced red onion, salt and pepper.  Next is your sauce:

Remove the beans from their cooking liquid and to the liquid add at least an equal quantity (if not more) of butter and a dash or two of smoked paprika.  (You can use chili powder or plain old paprika if that's what you've got.  It doesn't matter.)  Basically, you want to make a buttery, beany sauce for you pasta.  

Bang, you pasta is cooked.  Drain it; toss it with some olive oil; then hit it with the beans and the greens.  You might find that some Sriracha (hot sauce) or lemon juice is a nice addition; you know, just something acidic to cut through the richness of the beans and the bitterness of the greens.  Finally, if don't like pasta and beans, you can make pasta and peas, that is, if you happen to have fresh peas in the garden.

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Bowtie Pasta With Broccoli
 

Stuff in Liquid: Sausage and bean soup

Stuff-on-Stuff, Stuff-in-Stuff, Stuff-in-Liquid, Stuff-between-Stuff.  These are the terms I came up with to impress a girl.  Very impressive, no?  But I'm serious: when I came up with this "Stuff-on-Stuff" business, I was looking for a broad way to talk about food, to categorize all foods.  Stuff-on-Stuff includes foods like nachos and open-faced sandwiches, whereas Stuff-in-Liquid is the soups.  This particular soup is a rendition of a soup my dad makes.  He called me the other day for culinary advice--i.e. he just wanted to say hello--and I told him that his sausage and bean soup sounded good.  It sounded good.  Then I hung up and thought that I could do it better.  Bear with me...

The other day, while watching a documentary about the making of Under the Volcano, I realized something quite important.  Between takes, Geoffrey (played by Albert Finney) was talking to the director, John Huston, and smoking a cigarette.  They were shooting the lunch scene.  Off-camera, all the actors were smoking a lot, so much so that their dinner jackets, i.e. their costumes, must have smelled like cigarette smoke.  But when I watched the movie, I could not smell cigarette smoke.  Aroma is one thing that film cannot capture.  The same is true here.  You might get the sense of how this soup smelled, but you cannot actually smell it.  Nor, my friends, can you taste it.     

Without the noodles, the soup looks more elegant.  It's also less filling.  The original idea was to make some chicken tortellini, but I skipped that option for a couple reasons I won't get into now, but mainly they were that it would have been too labor intensive and I was hungry.  The point is, well, I have no point anymore.  This sausage and bean soup is really easy to make.  My dad uses boxed chicken stock, which I don't recommend but which you can do, and canned beans, which I also don't recommend.  In any case, this is what I did:


INGREDIENTS

1 bunch kale
2 big links of spicy Italian sausage (you can use mild)
2 jalapenos
2 quarts chicken stock
egg noodles (or other noodle, elbow mac?) 
carrots (to preference)
beans (to preference)

PROCESS

Bang some oil into your biggest soup pot and brown your sausages on medium-low or low heat.  Cook them until their done or nearly done, then pull them out and put them aside.  Now your cooking oil (to which you can definitely add some bacon grease if you have some handy; I did) should have some sausage fat flavor.

Dump your carrots and jalapeno into the oil and sautee them for a bit.  You don't want to overcook them; cook them just until they get a little color, then dump in your chicken stock, bring to a boil, and simmer.

Meanwhile you should be cooking your noodles, cutting your sausages into pieces, blanching or steaming your kale (you can cook your kale in the soup but it will turn the broth dark if you do), and cooking (or opening your can of) beans.  Basically, once the carrots are perfectly done, you add the rest of the ingredients and simmer a bit longer.  If your sausages have squirted some fats and juices into their bowl, be sure to dump that stuff back into the soup.  Finally, season with salt.

This is a very delicious and easy soup and, like good foods, it leaves you feeling satisfied but not over-full. 

Black Bean Soup

This is what you do:

Soak and cook your black beans.

Saute carrot, onion, crushed chipotles and other spices in bacon fat.

Add some of your black beans and chicken stock (reserve some black beans)

When everything is really soft, cool it, put it into a blender, and puree it.

Pass the puree through a chinois until it is of an ultimate smoothness.

Then, finally, put a ham hock into a pot and dump the puree in.

Bring this to a boil, then simmer it for a good long while.

You might add some tomato sauce if you want to round out or sweeten the broth...

At the very end, add the remaining black beans and some of the bean cooking water.

Season the soup and bring it to temperature.

Serve with sour cream, chopped cilantro, lime juice, and cheese toasty.

Corn Chowder and Yoruba Drums

I'm headed to Philly.  Until I come back, here's a loud video with some loud drums for all you video and drum fans out there.  C U Soon!

The Best Chili Ever

Chili is so contentious. Or rather, people get so contentious about chili. You either make the best chili or you know where to get the best chili. Therefore, it logically follows that, by the definition of "the best," everyone who either (a) claims to make the best chili or (b) names some other place or person as the source of the best chili is, by logical necessity, DEAD WRONG because I make the best chili. I will explain why.


That is not the best photograph of the best chili, but it will serve our purpose. Our purpose is for you, the reader, to learn how to make your own version of the best chili ever.

To start, you absolutely must make a very good beef stock. I use oxtail bones, and I make sure to select pieces of oxtail that have a huge amount of pure, white fat around the bone part. I trim this fat, put it into a sauce pot, and melt it in "a low oven," i.e. at 200 degrees or lower. This is called "rendering the fat." By rendering the fat you turn it into a usable cooking fat. First, the fat melts, then it cools and solidifies, and finally, it goes back into the bottom of your chili pot (we'll get to that part later). Meanwhile, back to the oxtail bones.

Make a stock with your oxtail bones and your mire poix (2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrot). When the stock is fully cooked, strain out the mushy vegetables, pull out the bones and reserve them for later. At this point your stock will probably be a light color, like the color of a lager, and since you'll be wanting to make the best chili ever, you should reduce your stock until it is much darker, not as dark as a stout, but more like the color of a good ale. (This process, including the fat rendering, will make your kitchen smell outrageously awesome.)

bernard clayton's Complete Book of Soups and Stews (some good chili talk here)

So, now that you've got your rendered, chilled fat and your heavily reduced oxtail stock, the next thing you'll be wanting to do is this: get your chili ingredients in place:

ingredients for the best chili ever:

killer oxtail stock and rendered fat
a good pile of kidney beans, cooked to perfection*

*note* you must start with dry beans; canned beans have inferior texture and flavor; see my post, Beans, beans, beans for help with that

a 15 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes
a medium onion and some garlic
assorted, dried chilies (dried chipotles are really nice)
spices & herbs (cumin and/or toasted cumin, maybe some crushed coriander, chili powder as necessary, dried oregano, bay leaf)

optional: red wine or beer

***YOU WILL NOTICE THAT THERE IS NO ACTUAL MEAT IN THE BEST CHILI EVER, ONLY AWESOME MEAT FLAVOR***

And this is how you do it:

Put your rendered fat into the bottom of your pot (along with some olive oil if you didn't get a good quantity of fat) and heat your pot to something like medium heat. Toss in your diced onions and cook them until they get some nice color. (Here, burning them a bit is not a problem; in fact, it will lend some smoke to the flavor.) Then add your dried herbs and spices until they become aromatic. (Cooking dried spices in oil or fat helps to release and spread their flavors.) Then add your garlic until it becomes aromatic, about 30 seconds. Then, bang in your can of whole peeled tomatoes---oh, be sure to get good tomatoes---deglaze the pot as necessary, bring to a boil, toss in your various dried chilies + bay leaf, reduce and simmer. (Your tomatoes will break apart own their own, but you can help that process along with a fork.)

At this point you will have a dark, thick, spicy tomato broth. Keep this cooking until all the flavors have developed and melded. Then add some of your dark oxtail stock. This will produce a less dark, less thick, spicy, beefy tomato broth, and that's the foundation for an awesome chili.

OK, let's say that you've got your foundation to the exact color, thickness and flavor that you desire. The next thing you'll want to do is add your beans. Here, I cannot overemphasize how important it is to use a ton of beans. You want this chili to be 70% beans. (Hence, the importance of really nice beans). Right. Now you can go ahead and dump in your beans AND some of that gorgeous and flavorful, dark and ruddy bean cooking water. Once this is done, simmer the pot for a bit, salt and pepper gradually to taste, and then simmer a bit longer.

If you have done everything right, you should have some really nice chili.

Vegetable Soup

You know when you've got tons of stuff in your fridge, taking up space, maybe even threatening to "go off," well, when that happens it's time to make vegetable soup like Grandma used to make. See, Grandma always said, "waste not, want not, it all goes in the pot."

LIKE GRANDMA USED TO MAKE

complicated lentil soup

How much is Philadelphia? When is jar? How long have you been wearing log cabin?

These are some of the things I've been hearing lately, and I don't understand them. I hover above a pot of soup and I hear things like, "where is hot?" and "why is Cleveland?" and I wonder about my neighbors, about what goes on in their weirdo minds. The walls are so thin. It's not that hard to hear them.

Last night was Halloween, in case you didn't know. This is some complicated lentil soup I made. We'll call it "compy lents" or something like that. It doesn't look complicated, which is why it IS complicated. Looks can be deceiving. Where is koko?


OK, enough of that. Here's what's involved:

I started with beef stock. I used a bone, probably from the shin, a good, fatty bone and some mire poix, i.e. 2 part onion, one part carrot, one part celery. I made the stock, chilled it, and then skimmed the congealed fat off the top and reserved the fat. Then I strained the stock and reduced it a bit more.

Welcome back congealed fat. Now it is your turn to be dumped into bottom of my biggest soup pot. Hello small dice or brunoise of carrot. i.e. lightly caramelize carrot in pure beef fat (pbf).

Once caramelization has begun to occur, it is time for powdered spice dumping time: into the fatty mixture (which I extended with some EVOO) go the garam marsala (tiny bit) and madras curry powder. Out comes wooden spoon to keep stuff moving around (to avoid burning spice). Then, once the fatty mixture and the spices have had some time to get accquainted, several big dollops of tomato paste, and yes, the old cooker-roo of the paste until it's rust-a-rooni-o. Got it?

Then the strained stock, then the lentils. Then boil the hell out of it and add more liquid as the liquid evaps. (Are you getting this?) If you want to cook the lentils until they fall apart, go for it. It'd be good. I didn't. Then, at the very end, season with salt, and squeeze lemon juice into the soup. How much? Use your tongue to figure that out. It comes pre-equipped with taste buds. Oh, btw people, if you aren't using your tongue to figure out how to cook, what's wrong with you?

Anyway, that's pretty much the complicated lentil soup. I was going for this Indian soup some cook invented for an important British dude, and I pretty much got it on the nose (not the soup), but I have no idea what the soup's called, only it's taste. Thanks, tongue. When is Massachusetts?

fine corn soup

One might call this "cream of corn soup" or "smoky corn soup" or "corn and bacon soup" or any number of other things, and all of them would be somewhat correct, but none of them speak fully enough about what this soup really is...

sophisticated 1. worldly-wise; not naive; sophisticated travelers. 2. appealing to cultivated tastes: sophisticated music. 3. complex, intricate: a sophisticated electronic control system. 4. deceptive; misleading. 5. (and this is the important one) a huge pain in the ass, but worth it

this is what the soup looks like about midway through the process

You should only make this soup in the summer when the sweet corn is massively ripe. What follows is an excerpt from a letter I wrote about this soup last night:

Tonight I am making corn soup, a sophisticated/fussy one:

ten ears of corn, kernels cut off, cooked in chicken stock (I boiled the chicken yesterday), pureed, passed through a chinois

cobs: make more corn stock with the bare cobs; combine with above (one can alternately roast the cobs first)

In a big pot brown onion with hunks of bacon, various dried and/or fresh peppers, black peppercorns, whole coriander

deglaze the pot with some reserved chicken stock, then add corn liquid

bring to a boil, simmer and reduce (until desired consistency is reached)

pass everything through the chinois again, pass into another pot (lots of pot jockeying here)

finally infuse with heavy cream, thicken a tad more

serve and garnish with one cilantro leaf...

I make this soup once a summer, twice tops! It takes many hours for a couple quarts of soup...

Anyway, there it is, my secret corn soup recipe. It's nice to add shredded chicken to it or shrimp or both


One last thing, when you are reducing your soup and it starts to smell like an amazingly fresh corn tortilla due to the crust on the sides of the pot, you will know you're onto something.

Good eating.

Marcovaldo potato soup

an excerpt from Calvino's collection of stories about the bumbling, dreamy, poor Marcovaldo:

The joys of that round and flat vessel, or lunch-box, known as the "pietanziera," consist first of all in its having a screw-on top. The action of unscrewing the cover already makes your mouth water, especially if you don't yet know what is inside, because, for example, it's your wife who prepares the vessel for you every morning. Once the box is uncovered, you see your food packed there: salami and lentils, or hard-boiled eggs and beets, or else polenta and codfish, all neatly arranged with that circumference as the continents and oceans are set on the maps of the globe; and even if the food is scant it gives the effect of being substantial and compact. The cover, once it has been removed, serves as a plate, and so you can begin to divide the contents.

Well, I never ate potato soup of out a lunch-box, nor any weenies out of a thermos, thank heavens for that, but nonetheless I cannot deny feeling a certain empathy for poor Marcovaldo well up inside me when I plow my way through endless leftover bowls of potato soup. This cream of potato (and cheese) soup congeals completely under refrigeration, and it is only by the action of reheating it with some additional cream that it returns to life, again and again.

Oxtail and Kidney bean soup

This is not chili, but it looks like chili. I am not Phil Donahue, and I don't look like him. This is a logical construction. This is a bouquet of zinnias. What else can I say before I am forced into this pot?

Right, oxtail and kidney bean soup. The process is very involved. Kidney beans soaked and cooked, begin by cutting the huge hunks of opaque, white fat off the oxtail pieces. Then render the fat in the oven (200 degrees) until it turns into a clear liquid. Then put the pot of fat onto the stove and add an equal volume of flour (and some paprika), and cook the fat in the flour on low heat until the mixture becomes the color of chocolate. Whisk continuously. It will smell amazing!

In the little pot is the amazing smelling roux of rendered oxtail fat, flour, and paprika. In the bigger pot is the broth made from the trimmed oxtail pieces, aromatic vegetables, a pincage of tomato paste, some dry red wine, secret spices, and water. It has already been put through a fine sieve.

And this is the mixture of roux and broth. All that remains at this point is a bouquet of thyme and the kidney beans. It also helps to have some bowls and silver spoons. Bon voyage.

Split pea soup

I mean, whoa! Look at that soup! That soup is this green! This green is greener than the green in England AND New England combined, greener than the putting greens on the moon. Etc. It's really that green. Fortunately, too, it's easy to do. Easier than Earth girls, easier than toilets that flush themselves, easier than having SERVANTS! To make this green, this is what you need:

Split peas, vegetable stock, water, ham hock (optional), salt and pepper. These dolls can make this soup, and dolls have no BRAINS! Let's just hope they don't get their price tags dirty.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that the collie could probably make this green soup. Basically, if you cannot make this soup, you should be practicing your bark.

So, you maybe want to pick through your split peas for any nasty ones or for little stones. Done and done. Then maybe you want to give them a rinse in a colander or something, though it's not necessary.

Then you want to chuck your split peas into a big pot and add your vegetable stock, enough to cover and cover again. Just use a lot.

Then, if using the hock, hawk the hock in the pot, bring to a boil, and continue cooking the peas hard. Or, rather, cooking them soft. They're already hard. Basically, you just cook them vigorously until they turn into mush. If you are cooking them really hard, especially if you are using a thin-walled, cheap pot, you will want to stir them pretty frequently because the peas, being so sugary and gunky, tend to burn on the bottom of the pot. Some burn is actually nice if you scrape it up and blend it into the soup. It adds a smoky element, which some people find desirable, but who knows about dolls or collies. Finally, you will also probably need to continually add water. It takes quite a while to break down the peas, and quite a bit of water boils off during the process.

That's basically it. You just cook the crap out of them and they taste marvelous. If you want a really smooth soup, you can put it in your food processor or even in your blender! Wow! Amazing. Peas. Jono

Lentil Soup

This lentil soup was so boss! I ate it with some toasted baguette from Bread Euphoria. Bread Euphoria makes good bread, but it's all sour. I find that somewhat annoying. Anyway, the boss lentil soup. Put your listening hats on.

Start with a really fatty hunk of oxtail. Trim the excess fat from the bone, a golf ball amount. Put the fat into a sauce pan and add some olive oil, a marble of oil. Pop the fat into a 200 degree oven and forget about it for a couple hours. Meanwhile, simmer the bone and mire poix (2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, 1 part celery) in water for the same amount of time. When both are done, stock and fat, chill them. In the morning, skim and strain the stock.

Those are some envelopes I decorated and hung on my dining room wall. They have nothing to do with soup.

So your next order of business is to actually make your soup. Scoop your solidified beef fat into a big soup pot over medium, medium-high heat. Add your small dice of equal parts carrot and onion. (I crushed some coriander seeds and one matchbook chili, and added them at the same time.) Saute this stuff for a few minutes. Then add your minced garlic (however many cloves you like) and cook until the garlic aroma is obvious (about 30 seconds). Now plop in two big dollops of tomato paste and cook all of this until the paste begins to look rusty. Have you picked through your lentils yet? Good. Shovel in, oh, around three cups of dry lentils. Get a wooden spoon and mix everything up. Keep cooking this mixture until the lentils start to get a little toasty. Your nose should recognize the change in smell. When it does, add your beef stock. If there is not enough stock to completely cover your lentils and then some, add some water. If you have some fresh thyme, throw in some sprigs, bring the whole thing to a boil, and simmer on low heat, uncovered, for about an hour (or until everything is fully cooked). If you need to add water, do so. If you want to incrementally salt your soup while it cooks, do so. I find that helps, but you can always salt at the end.

That's it. Eat your soup.

Oxtail Stew

Well, I looked and looked through The Complete Book of Soups and Stews by Bernard Clayton Jr., a food head with whom I shared a neighborhood when I lived in Bloomington, IN, but I could not find a stew equivalent to this one. My memory told me that this recipe might be somewhat similar to Shchi, a hearty tomato and cabbage soup (page 260), but no andouille sausage, nor any Vermont slab bacon, nor any oxtail inhabit that Russian bowl, so I had to settle on "oxtail stew." What a boring name, but what's in a name?

Well, I don't know, and I'm not totally sure what's in this oxtail stew, but I think it goes something like this:

I started with a rich, oxtail broth. For a similar recipe, see my older post, Tortellini in Blood.

I excluded the vino, but not because I don't love vino. I simply didn't have any vino on hand when I sacked my refrigerator (5:00 PM, December 11, 2008 BC). However, I did have a link of andouille sausage prepared by the butcher at the River Valley Market; and I did have a slab of boutique bacon, offered to me by an amazing, Vermont hog; and I did have several russet potatoes, dug up by radical, Hadley farm hands; and I did have a glorious head of Massachusetts cabbage; not to mention the aforementioned oxtail broth. All things in place, I whacked my big, enameled cast iron pot onto the stove and put my imagination into gear.

Because oxtail is so fatty and gelatinous, the stew ended up with a velveteen mouth feel and succour. This is how I began, post-broth creation:

On the lowest flame my stove could hold (damn thing goes out), I cooked a golf-ball size hunk of bacon to render the fat. Once I'd rendered enough fat, I plunked the sausage into the pot and cooked it, oh, about 3/4ths of the way; meanwhile, I was also cooking three, large dice spuds very gently in salted water.

Next, when the sausage was mostly done, I removed the bacon and sausage, and put them aside. To the rendered fat I added an equivalent volume of flour, along with a dash of chipotle powder and a couple dashes of paprika, to make a paprika roux. Once the roux was fully cooked, I added my quart of burgundy oxtail broth; brought the pot to a boil; plopped in two or three whole, peeled tomatoes; plunked the oxtail bits, the bacon, and the sausage back in; and set my rag tag stew creature to a simmer until the sausage was fully cooked.

Next, I removed the sausage and the oxtail, chopped the sausage and picked the meat off the oxtail bones and put those things aside.

Finally, my rag tag stew creature simmering, I roughly shredded my cabbage, dumped it into the pot, and lidded it. When the cabbage had fully wilted, I returned everything to the pot, introduced the potatoes, and did a final seasoning: salt, salt, pepper.

Not the most elegant recipe writing on the planet (you should check out Bernard Clayton for that), but that's pretty much what I did. The rag tag stew creature got served with open-faced cheese sandwiches, and was followed by two chocolate mints, one for me and one for my guest.

Ciao

Carrot and potato soup, cream of

"Another orange soup, dad? We just had orange soup!" Oh, kids, quit bitching. You're driving me up the wall. Although there is truth in the saying, "you also eat with your eyes," mostly you eat with your mouth and you taste with your tongue, so zip it. So what if this carrot and potato soup looks like the butternut squash soup! They taste nothing alike. This one is fall-down rich, with serious beef amperage and an invisible paprika roux underpinning, so shut up and put your bibs on.

Actually, you can see that I was a little concerned about the orange-orange confusion: hence, the cheesy leek croutons and the heavy hand on the cracked black pepper. Sure, some people who aren't actually blind, just totally unobservant, might not notice the difference, but to that I say, bollocks! Anyway, I suppose I should get down to business.

On second thought, I am not in the mood to enumerate one of those tedious creatures we call recipes. Not one lick. Instead, you will have to satisfy yourself with a no-bull ingredients list.

Shit load carrots, some potatoes, beef stock:

Cook thoroughly until super soft and put into a food processor or blender.

Put that mess through a fine sieve. All of it. (Mr. Fancy pants used his chinois again for this one.) Put aside.

Put butter and olive oil into a pot, heat up, toss in some flour (approximate volume of the butter oil volume), dash paprika...

Cook this until the flour is not raw, then hit it with some water (little) and heavy cream (more).

Whisk this shit up. Get it all gurgly and amazing. Bang the carrot puree from earlier into the pot. Pull it all together, bring to a boil, simmer, bang bang bang. That's your soup.

Parting words: I sweated my crouton leeks in the pot before I made the roux, so my paprika roux was cooked in leek oil. Yes sir, that is how you do it.

Bye

Butternut Squash, "Sweet Bean" Soup

Butternut squash is either like an Olympic gymnast or a kind, sugar mama. I am not sure which one is true. For obvious reasons, I lean toward the sugar mama. Let me explain.

Butternut squash is sweet. Sugar is sweet. The connection is simple. Butternut squash, "Sweet Bean" soup, on the other hand, is not a dessert soup, not at all. It is spicy and rich, and it pairs well with crusty, cheesy breads. The process is simple. If you have vegetable stock, good for you, you must be rich. Anyway, here's what I do:

I get myself one big squash, one with a lot of neck and a little bell (I feel like I've said that before), and I remove the skin. Then I dice the squash, toss it into a pot with enough stock to cover and then some, and boil the daylights out of it. If you don't have a food processor, boil it even longer until the squash is smooth as a gymnast's bottom. Sorry.


In another pot I brown a cube of ham or bacon in butter, along with one or two sage leaves, and two small, hot peppers. Once those things get into a good, aromatic ruckus, I dump the pureed squash onto them, give it a couple aggressive stirs, and thin it down to my preferred thickness with water. Also, I run outside and snip a big sprig of thyme, including the woody parts. With an indelicate or delicate hand, I plink the thyme on top. Bingo, keep simmering very low.

Finally, I hump in my white beans, season with salt and pepper to taste, simmer just a wee bit longer to warm the beans, and serve with a cheese toasty and an heirloom apple.