Beans and Greens

This is not the Italian dish of escarole and cannellini beans. I was met by a big mountain of collard greens at the store, so I bought a couple of bunches and threw them into a pot with a smoked ham hock and navy beans. It was a delicious changeup from the usual white bean soup. The Instant Pot made this go pretty quickly, no presoaking of beans required.

1/2 onion thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, smashed
1 smoked ham hock

1 lb dry navy beans, rinsed
2 bunches collard greens, thick stalks removed, leaves chopped into pieces

salt, pepper, cayenne to taste

2 Tbsp cider vinegar

Put the onion, garlic, ham hock, and beans into the Instant Pot and cover with about 2 inches of water. Pressure cook on high for 45 minutes and naturally release the pressure for 10 minutes before fully releasing. Add in the chopped greens and the rest of the ingredients to taste, and pressure cook for another 15 minutes. Natural release 10 minutes if you can wait. Taste for seasoning and dig in!

Could you use other beans? Sure thing, just make sure to adjust your cooking time. Dry cannellini beans take more like 75 minutes to fully cook, and need a bit more water to stay submerged, otherwise you have some hard uncooked beans rising above the rest.

Pork tacos

This has become my go-to stewed pork filling for tacos, but today's edition took it to another extreme of fat and flavor. I've been reading about and seeing shows about quesabirria tacos, and that was the inspiration behind the special edition taco below.

For the filling:

2 Tbsp vegetable oil
3 lbs. pork country style ribs or shoulder/butt, cut into 2" chunks
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Half of a yellow onion, thinly sliced
5-6 whole cloves of garlic
A few sprigs of fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp Mexican oregano

1 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground cumin
Enough water or chicken stock to mostly cover the pork (2-3 cups)
More salt to taste

Generously salt and pepper the pork chunks. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot until nearly smoking. Add about half the pork in a single layer - do not crowd, and brown nicely on all sides, turning every 2-4 minutes. Remove browned pieces and add remaining pork to pan and repeat. Add sliced onion and garlic and stir occasionally until onion begins to soften. 

Add remaining browned pork and accumulated juices back to the pan. Add the water or stock to just about cover the pork, and stir up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add thyme, bay leaves, oregano, coriander and cumin. Partially cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 90-120 minutes, tasting for salt about halfway through. Pork should fall apart easily when pulled with two forks. 

Remove the pork from the broth and set aside. Shred as much as you need for tacos.

Allow the broth to stand until the fat has floated to the surface. Skim and save the fat in another bowl (more on this later). 

For the regular tacos:

Shredded pork from above

Corn tortillas, fried lightly in vegetable to toughen them up and hold together
Shredded mozzarella or other cheese of your choice
Pickled onions (recipe here) and/or Diced onion and cilantro
Salsa of your choice

Assemble and eat!

For the ultimate pork taco (needs a better name... quesacarnita? quesapuercomamamia?)

Reserved fat from the stew
Shredded pork from above
Corn tortillas
Shredded mozzarella
Diced onion and cilantro
Small cups of reserved broth from the stew, heated up

This is where it gets to be like quesabirria. Heat up a large skillet over medium-high. Add 1/2 tsp drops of fat to the pan and place tortillas on top, spinning and spreading them around to coat the bottoms well. Sprinkle the entire tortilla with cheese. Spread some shredded pork over half, then fold the tortilla over the pork to make a taco. Press gently to flatten. Carefully flip and fry on both sides until crisp. Remove from the pan and get ready to dig in. Sprinkle on some onion and cilantro, dip the taco into the hot broth, and chow down. Squeeze a little lime juice on for extra goodness. Crazy good.

I'll post pictures next time - these disappeared faster than I could snap them with my camera.

Sauerkraut update

 Since the sauerkraut brine tasted really, really salty, I added about 1/2 cup of clean filtered water and stirred the whole mass together before weighing it down again with a stone mortar. Maybe all it needed was more time, but I was getting impatient. By day six, activity had definitely picked up, and it started to taste a little tangy. I decided to put the kraut into the fridge on day 8, when it was pleasantly sour, still crunchy and green. It could probably have used another day or two to be honest, but oh well. 

The Sauerkraut played a starring role in a recent Reuben loaf. I had two balls of mystery dough in the freezer which (thankfully) turned out to be pizza dough. I had a corned beef round that I pressure cooked and sliced thin, then layered this on top of the rolled out dough with Sauerkraut, thousand-island-ketchup-and-mayo, and shredded Swiss cheese (I had Gruyere). The dough was slashed along the toppings and folded over the top to create a basket-like loaf, and after rising for about 15 minutes, it was baked at 400 for about 25 minutes. That was a little slice of my childhood right there.

Sauerkraut!

If you haven't already read Michael Pollan's Cooked, or at least watched the Netflix series of the same name, give it a go. In addition to diving deep into the methods we use to cook and preserve our food, it gives some really practical recipes that put those ideas to work. Last Thanksgiving I began baking his whole wheat sourdough loaf on almost a weekly basis. It is absolutely killer. This week I'm making sauerkraut, an even easier ferment which is nothing more than cabbage and salt, using the bacteria that already exist on the leaves of the cabbage. 

The experiment started with a 1.6 lb head of cabbage that I finely shredded and then massaged with 1 tablespoon of salt. All the brine in the picture was expressed by the cabbage - no water added. After three days, with the mass pressed down by my handy mortar, I had my first taste - and it tastes salty, not "salted." There's also not much activity in the brine, maybe a handful of small bubbles, but there's really no smell, and the cabbage is still crunch and taste, well, like cabbage. If things don't improve on day 4, I'm going to try and salvage it by diluting the brine with some fresh water. 

Monday morning taste bud assault

It's Monday morning, breakfast time. I'm in my office at work, wiping my watering eyes and runny nose trying to compose emails. There's an inferno in my mouth, moving its way down to my belly, and my taste buds are firing on all cylinders. Extremes from all sides. I'm eating an intensely spicy, tangy chana masala rolled up in fluffy flour tortillas with paper thin slices of onion and mango pickle. Wowzas! The current state of my tongue makes my instant coffee taste like chocolate. And that's a good thing.

Bread pudding

Bread pudding

6 slices of bread
2 T butter
1/2 c raisins
4 eggs
2 c milk
3/4 c sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla

350 degrees 45 mins

Chengdu Chicken

This is a spicy, saucy, tangy and sweet chicken dish that I came across on the net after looking for Chengdu spicy chicken. This one has a healthy dose of Sichuan peppercorns and a little crunch from the celery. You'll probably want to open a couple of windows to let the pungent smoke clear when the chilies hit the pan.

From grouprecipes.com with variations.

Chengdu Gai Yuk

1.5 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken, cut into thin bite-size slices (I prefer thighs)
1 Tbsp cornstarch 
1 T shaoxing cooking wine (or dry Sherry and a dash of salt) 

1 Tbsp minced ginger
4 dried chili peppers, minced (more if you want more heat)
4 garlic cloves, minced
4 scallions, white parts finely sliced, greens in small pieces (save greens for garnish) 

4 stalks of celery, minced
1 large tomato or 1/2 can diced tomatoes, drained

Sauce:
2 T chili bean paste (toban djan)
2 T soy sauce
1/2 T black vinegar (I used balsamic)
1/2 tsp sugar
1 T sesame oil
1 tsp salt

1 tsp ground toasted Sichuan peppercorn plus more for serving

Marinate the chicken in the coenstarch and wine for 1/2 hour. Prep the rest of the ingredients in the meantime.

Stir fry the chicken in a hot wok with 2 T of vegetable oil until it turns white. Scoop out the chicken and set it aside. Heat the wok over very high heat and add another 1 T of oil, swirling it around to coat the pan. Add the ginger, chilies, garlic, and scallion whites. Stir fry for half a minute or so, then add the tomato and celery and toss it for a couple of minutes over continued very high heat. Add the chicken, mix well, then add the sauce. Cook for another minute, then sprinkle with the Sichuan peppercorn and scallion greens and serve with steamed white rice.