Tag: beans

Spain–He Is Risen!

Now that I’m Greek Orthodox, I’m not supposed to say this, but today is Easter. And you’d think that would be a day of rest in Spain, right? I mean, teams of 40 men have been carrying immensely heavy statues through the streets nearly all day, every day for a week. There was a special 100th-anniversary-of-something procession yesterday with all of the statues. Today everyone kicks back and eats, right?

Yeah, no. Three more groups are parading today, starting at noon. Como se dice ‘overkill’?

But to be fair, even last night I was still stunned by a procession. We caught one coming up a hill, without much of a crowd around. There’s this great super-slow Doppler effect with the band, which follows behind the statue. So the music’s getting louder and louder, but if you’re around a bend you can’t really see anything. And then the music is bouncing off the walls of the buildings super-loud just as the statue, surrounded by candles, emerges from the side street.

And then, as the statue goes by, and you’re boggling at how heavy it is, the band finally emerges and it is even LOUDER. And the bass drums go by last.

I saw this effect for the first time a few nights ago, with a statue of Christ hauling the cross, surrounded by centurions with huge feathers in their helmets. When the statue emerged from the side street, with the band blaring, all we saw first was the feathers. By the time the whole statue was visible, I expected Jesus and the soldiers to be doing a big kick line routine.

On the research front, things have gotten a little easier. We’ve figured out the route to break out of our little procession island, and know better to avoid bars right on the routes, because they’re mobbed and are basically pulling tapas out of their asses. “Beer coasters? Toss ’em in the fryer! Forty more people just showed up!”

Yesterday was a good day for research–I checked a fair amount of stuff of my list, and it even felt a little easy and like I was ahead of the game.

Then I looked at my watch, and I realized I’d been walking, with Beverly tagging along behind, for ten hours straight.

We started out after our churros and chocolate–the logical thing to eat when it’s 44 degrees out. But apparently the rest of the city thought so too. I have never seen bars so frenzied, even at night. The place where we did finally get our ch-and-ch fix–an excellent rec from AV–looked like a war zone inside, with empty chocolate cups four deep and two high stacked all along the bar. So we sat outside, which was for the best, since we were wearing every layer of clothing we packed (six each), and it would’ve been too difficult to adjust to a heated room.

The chocolate was thick as pudding, and the churros actually had a little ridgy texture, which I have seen only up in northern Spain–down south here, they’re usually they’re just smooth round tubes. And they were so perfectly fried and light they were almost empty inside. We shared a table with an older Spanish couple, the only people we saw all day who were as bundled up as we were.

Later, I admit, we did stop for a fairly nice lunch. Lovely baby beans with ham, and some nice fancy mushrooms. A real live green salad. And some too-creative-sounding veal with cardamom that turned out to be good. Finished with a little dab of orange wine that the waiter, who looked like Peter Dinklage, gave me for free, because apparently it was available only by the bottle. Crazy.

And later we took a 15-minute break in a bar that went from funky-neighborhoody to totally skeevy in the time it took for the foam to settle on our beers. While I was looking in the kitchen and noticing that when the sign said “food cooked with love,” they really meant “food cooked with cigarette butts and dirty wads of paper towels,” the older regulars at the bar were replaced by strung-out hippies, one of whom was doing the junkie lean into his beer. The review I was writing in my head was quickly discarded, and I pushed my octopus tapa around, feeling bad that it had died in vain. We fled up the street and took solace in a church with a very strange collection of artifacts, none labeled.

Which reminds me–earlier in the day, we saw an honest-to-God shrunken head in another museum! Why that museum is not listed in the guidebook I cannot for the life of me imagine. I can’t wait to rectify that oversight, and type the words “shrunken head” in the manuscript! First I will have to figure out what the whole point of the museum is, though–the guided tour was in Spanish, and while I thought I understood what the guy was saying most of the time, when I strung it all together at the end for Beverly, I realized it made no sense at all.

I’m sure a million other funny things have happened, but they’ve all been beaten out of my head by those bass drums. Monday is going to be quiet, right?

Climbing Mt. Cassoulet, Part 2: Up and Over the Hill

Ungh. That’s my realization, at my doctor’s office last week, that I weigh a good 10 pounds more than I thought I did. And I feel like I gained it all this month, during my self-imposed Cassoulet Season. (Thank god it was freezing here. I think I would’ve thrown up if I’d had to go through this process in July.)

So here’s how I got at least 5 of those pounds.

First, I made some duck confit. I followed Paula Wolfert’s edict of 22g of salt per pound of meat, but either I did my math wrong or that is just really a ton of salt. I didn’t add all that I’d measured, and it still turned out very salty.

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I also–get this–confited the whole duck, instead of just the legs. It’s true what they say about the breast meat not getting so fabulous a texture, but hey, it’s all going to the same place anyway–by which I mean, to a pot in a slow oven with some beans and garlic for hours. Who’s gonna know?

Then I made some sausage.

Crazy! you’re saying.

It wasn’t that bad. First of all, it was days after the confit, so I didn’t get kitchen-grease overload. And they were patties. And no meat grinder was involved. I basically used Julia Child as inspiration to just make patties, and was heartened to read Paula Wolfert’s encouraging words re: the use of a food processor. So my little sausage patties didn’t have the fluffiest texture, but they tasted great. Amazing what a slug of brandy will do for some pork, and I subbed pancetta for straight fat, per Wolfert, and added more garlic than either called for.

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Then…then I rested for a few days.

Then I soaked some beans. I had a pound of gigantes, the Greek-style giant lima beans, which I was mildly concerned might not “read” as classic cassoulet. Like I fucking know, but I didn’t want to make a batch of this stuff, and then have it be so far off the mark as to be unrecognizable. But small beans are boring. Big beans are awesome!

Unfortunately, I only had a pound. But I had half a pound of great northerns, left over from the first effort. I threw those in a separate pot. This was handy, actually, because I got to try a couple of different approaches to simmering the beans.

Results (no pics, you’ll have to trust me): whole onions are fine, pork skin is good and cloves stuck in the onion are fun to do and help clear out years-old spice inventory, but may or may not make a difference.

For the meat, I did mostly lamb, with a smidge of pork left from the sausage-making. I put this in its own garlic-onion-carrot-tomato-wine-stock stew for about an hour.

Then I layered everything together. The unappealing orange stuff is the lamb stew. Trust me–it tasted good. Oh, I remember why: I put about 1/3 of a pound of pancetta in too.

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Oh, I forgot: on the bottom of the pot, I put in the pieces of pork skin, kind of as a buffer. Some recipes tell you to cut the skin into teensy little pieces, but I just knew I didn’t want one of those gelatinous gobs slithering down my throat. I left ’em big so I could taste just to be sure of my prejudices, and then pull it all out easily.

On top, I grated some nutmeg. Who the hell knows if this makes any difference, but it made me feel cook-y. And, as Nicole pointed out last night, it always feels like a small victory when you can put the Microplane away without having sliced up your knuckles.

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I poured in a lot of bean stock and let the baby bake a couple of hours. Slid it in the “walk-in”–aka the uninsulated pantry–for the night. Pulled it out two hours before dinner and stuck it in a cold oven set to 300, after adding another cup or so of bean liquid.

About 20 minutes before dinner, I sprinkled on some bread crumbs, mixed with some chopped-up parsley. (The vegetables–I cling to them like a mirage), and then scooped up some of the fat layer to drizzle over them.

They crisped up beautifully at the end:

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I was a little nervous digging into it, especially for the texture. The beans had cooked more quickly than I thought they would, and were verging on too soft when I layered them into the pot. I had also been very liberal with the bean stock, to counteract previous efforts, where the beans had just glommed up in a wad. And I wasn’t sure if my little sausage patties would actually hold together.

Aside from the confirmed nastiness of the pork skin, it turned out pretty well. The key thing was the textural variety, I think. Although the beans were a wee bit squishy, they hadn’t gotten totally gummy yet, and the less-than-standard sausage texture was actually a plus–it gave you a little something to properly chew on. And the bread crumbs rocked. I should’ve had a second batch to lay over the bottom half of the batch!

I wish I could say I felt elated at this point, like I’ve reached a major life goal. But I just feel sluggish. I can’t imagine why.

Anyway…want the recipe? This one, at least, you’ll have to buy the cookbook for. Good thing it’s not coming out till October–I wouldn’t want anyone to hurt themselves by cooking this in the summer.

Climbing Mt. Cassoulet, Part 1: The Complaining

Fucking hell. Last week of the cookbook work (or it had better be…), and I had to squeeze in another cassoulet.

Cassoulet–just saying it kind of makes my lips turn up in a snarl.

See, French food kind of pisses me off. Everyone talks about how oooh-fabulous and delicious it is, but, duh–what doesn’t taste fabulous when you cook it with 8 pounds of butter and a pint of meat stock, oh, and some wine? I read a recipe for braised celery in my copy of La Bonne Cuisine, and it involved simmering celery for, like, 4 hours in a pound of butter. I love butter, but c’mon. Give the celery a fighting chance!

Anyway, this is all to say I have always thought cassoulet was not all that. Because, uh, it’s beans and meat. What makes it superior to any other cuisine’s meat-and-beans combo? Nothin’ but the accent and the Gallic attitude with which it is preciously delivered to your table.

This led to a dilemma re: the cookbook, as Tamara wanted to include a cassoulet recipe. It was not a project I could really get behind, but we drew up a rough recipe based on the couple of times we’ve done it for SND-related things. We made it, and it was just as I remembered: a big mass of meat flavor, and nothing more. Palate-dulling.

After that, I took it upon myself to learn more about cassoulet. Maybe I just hadn’t had any really good stuff? I made a list of restaurants in NYC to visit, and I even checked out cheap fares to Toulouse. I checked Julia Child and Paula Wolfert out of the library. I didn’t go to Toulouse, but I did take a 12-hour trip to Boston, to sample some vouched-for quality cassoulet.

Dang, I ate some nasty shit. I will call foul on Les Halles, because I swear to god I tasted a maple-flavored breakfast link in my bowl. But maybe it was just the residual sugar from the Van de Kamp’s canned beans it was swimming in. I don’t know much, but I do know cassoulet should not be sweet.

I ate some experimental versions of cassoulet at some less-vaunted outlets. People, adding collard greens will not make this thing “healthy,” K?

I ate a pretty decent cassoulet at a random bistro in the upper 30s on the east side–one of those places that you wonder how it stays in business.

And the Boston cassoulet–very good, though my palate was a bit clogged with duck fat by then.

And I got to go to a party at Saveur, where I was served a fucking fantastic cassoulet–just hours after I’d read the recipe in the January issue, and wondered if something cooked for such a relatively short time and with such a minimum of fuss could be really good. It was–and bread crumbs, that’s where it’s at.

So I finally synthesized all this into my own pot of pork and beans.

Which I’ll tell you all about in the next post, rather than bog you down here.

Spoiler alert: Today I ate some leftover cassoulet for lunch, voluntarily.