Beef Borscht

My Grandfather, Earl Epp, on my Mom's side was born Mennonite. He always said his father, Gerhardt, was kicked out of the church for smoking. It seems far more likely that my Grandfather shunned that life and rebelled against it for the rest of his life.

It always seemed though that it was tugging below the surface. He would speak of his Russian, Danish, German ancestry when it suited him. Turns out all may have been right.

He grew up speaking low German in America. He did not speak English until he was 9. At his funeral, his siblings, born in America, spoke to each other in low German. I would like to add that I am 6'5" and some of them were taller than me in their seventies.

My Gramma speaks of being the only Lutheran family in a Mennonite town. Her only friend there was Hulda. When I met her as a kid my Gramma confided that she felt uncomfortable saying "gee" in front of her (in her 60s) because as far as Hulda was concerned, it was swearing.

When I ran across a recipe for beef borscht in Saveur Cooks Authentic American, attributed  to Mennonites in Kansas, I thought, I bet I have been eating Mennonite food all my life in one form or another (we spent the summers with my Grandparents as kids). Here's my chance to taste a different recipe picked up in farming along the Volga River in Russia on their long road to escape religious persecution.

Beef Borscht

1 tablespoon butter
1 pound beef chuck cut into 1" pieces
2 yellow onions peeled and chopped
1 small green cabbage shredded
8 cups beef stock (I made my own, more on that another time)
1 28 ounce can whole tomatoes with juice
2 tablespoons finely chopped dill (I left this out as I had none)
1 1/4 pounds red bliss potatoes peeled and diced (I used Russet Burbanks as that's what I had)
salt and pepper

Heat butter in soup pot over high heat.

Add beef and brown, transfer to a bowl and set aside.

Reduce heat to medium, add onions and cook, stirring often until onions begin to soften (or as I would say, begin to brown)

Add the cabbage and cook, stirring occasionally, until it begins to wilt.

Add stock and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat.

Reduce heat to medium-low and return beef to pot.

Add tomatoes with juice and dill and cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.

Add potatoes and cook until tender, about thirty minutes.

Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

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Mesquite and Weber and Christopher Kimball

These are my two old workhorse Weber Kettles. One was willed to me by a roommate when we parted ways and one was left by the previous tenants at the old office building.

The Weber Kettle is my favorite vehicle to impart flavor to ingredients that can be cooked quickly; chicken, fish, expensive cuts of meat (high on the hog), veggies, flat breads etc. My two favorites are marinated skirt steak and asparagus.

My favorite charcoal to use to impart that flavor is big chunks of mesquite. They burn unevenly, they crackle and snap and spark and they smell like something good is about to happen. Oh, and they're cheap.

My favorite method is to get the coals good and hot (using a hair dryer if I'm in a hurry and the coals aren't), toss on the cooking grate, scrape if necessary, toss on the items to be cooked, cover and approximate a good time to flip the ingredients.

At that time, remove the lid, flip the ingredients, replace the lid and finish cooking.

Over the years I have, frequently it seems, read/seen in the various Christopher Kimball concerns (Cooks Illustrated {which I love}, America's Test Kitchen and the Test Kitchen cookbooks) that mesquite does not impart a great flavor, that covering the kettle with the lid makes the flavor too strong? acrid?

What I do remember is that the solution is to cover just the food that is being cooked with an upturned foil baking pan so that the smoke can get out the sides.

I saw this method in action by Don Scheer at our company Iron Chef chicken competition. He did chicken with grilled peaches. It tasted great and indeed won but I honestly think it would have been just as good with the lid on and the smoky snap of mesquite. (Snappy smoke?)

The point I would like to make is this; there are lots of ways to make food taste good. If you have an inquisitive mind and the time, try a couple of methods and nail down the way that you feel tastes best. You're the cook.

If you want very serviceable and foolproof recipes for all kinds of foods, please by all means, start with Christopher Kimball. They have done a lot of the work for you. Their spaghetti carbonara is in my regular repetoir, their pad thai is fantastic and their product reviews and tips can save you time, money and heart break.

However, mesquite, good, lid on, good.

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Stuffed Tomatoes

This was a slight repurposing of the stuff tomato recipe from Saveur Cooks Authentic American. These are little individual tomato salads stuffed with arborio rice and black beans.

The recipe recommends arborio as it stays creamy at cold temperatures. The recipe also specified Lima beans as do a few recipes in this book. It sort of feels like they based the book on about 6 stories from the early days of the magazine. (Not that that's a bad thing, I love the Saveur cookbooks!)

The recipe specified arugula but I had herb salad greens so I used those. They used lemons, I used limes. If I had gone all the way and used cilantro instead of parsley we would be eating southwest style mini tomato salads.

Stuffed Tomatoes

6 large beefsteak type tomatoes or in my case 8 romas
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup cooked arborio rice
1 handful mixed greens, chopped
1/4 cup chopped chives
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 tablespoon olive oil
the juice of 2 key limes
salt & pepper

Plunge the tomatos into a big pot of boiling water and remove after 30 seconds.

This next instruction is cute, "slip off the skins". I have peeled enough tomatoes this way to know that I will have better luck if I make an X at the bottom of the tomato with a paring knife, which I did. Also, even with the short blanching time, my tomatoes were so small (thin walled) they pretty much cooked which left them not exactly salad cups. Next time round I will simply pare the raw tomatoes and sacrifice the little bit of flesh I would lose.

Cut off the top 1/4 of the tomatoes and reserve. Scoop out the seeds and core of the tomatoes and reserve. Salt the tomatoes well and set upside down to drain their exuded juices.

Chop up the reserved tomato flesh.

Mix together the reserved tomato flesh, beans, rice, greens, parsley and chives. Drizzle with oil and lime juice. Season to your taste with salt and pepper.

Set tomatoes cut side up. (This was impossible for my soggy tomatoes so I stuffed them and leaned them against the sides of the Le Creuset 3-1/2-Quart French Oven I was serving them in. (There are definitely less expensive ways to serve a salad.)

Et Voila! Little mini tomato salads.

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Grilled Vegetables

Whenever I grill, I try to take the time to hunt through the fridge for appropriate veggies to toss on before or after I cook the meat. These are great as a side with the meal or really great the next day on some crusty bread.

I prepared the following ingredients in the following manner;

yellow hots, whole
bell pepper, big slices
zucchini, 1/4" lengthwise slices
onions, thick slices so they stay together for the most part
tomatoes, big slices so they don't completely disintegrate

I toss them in a big bowl with a little olive oil, salt, pepper and some dried herbs. I grilled these for around 12 minutes turning 3 times after the meat had come off the grill (marinated flank steak, by the way).

Other appropriate veggies would be; any kind of capsicum, portabella (or other large) mushrooms, eggplant, any kind of summer squash.

Fall veggies like sweet potatoes, winter squash, potatoes and other corms/roots could be done sliced thinly as well but would require more time on the cooler side of the grill to finish cooking.

I remove the veggies from the grill and toss them in the bowl that had the residual olive oil and seasonings.

These are delicious hot or at room temperature.

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Fever Dreams and Curry Paste

And I have the flu or something. So we had leftovers last night and I have nothing fancy to show for myself.

I did drink some of this;

Normally I drink red wine on weekdays to maintain my girlish figure and also for the vitamins and fiber. However, with the fever dreams and the shakes, good old fashioned medicine seemed like the ticket, and it was.

Also, I cooked up some of this;

Sauteed vegetables simmered in the leftover curry paste from my Musaman Beef Curry. Then I ate it on rice. Very healing. In case you did not know, rice is the commodity grain that digests in your small intestine. Good, right?

Next week; Por-eef, it's got the bite of beef with the smoky texture of pork. Also, I think I'll finally get around to the method of making bread out of that dough.

Now I am going to lay down.

Have a great weekend evvabody! Bye bye!

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Blackberry Calzone

Previously I have referenced a daddy dough recipe for many bread-type applications most notably pizza. If you fold the pizza in half before cooking, you end up with a calzone. What follows is a blackberry dessert calzone that I improvised last night.

Blackberry Calzone

2 one pound hunks of daddy bread dough alternately you could use the same amount of pre-made pizza dough such as Trader Joe's
2 cups blackberries (or a mix of the berries that are available or on sale)
3 tablespoons or so sugar divided and as needed
1 or 2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons butter, melted
corn meal

Macerate berries with about 2 tablespoons of the sugar (depending on how sweet your berries are. Taste one) and the cornstarch .

I let them sit until the powdery appearance is overtaken by the exuded juices.

Preheat oven to as hot as it will go (mine gets to about 550 degrees F) with your pizza stone or an upturned cookie sheet inside.

Shape your dough into 2 equal discs and roll out thinly using flour as needed to keep from sticking.

Place half of the berries on each calzone skin.

Fold over half of the skin and roll/pinch together the edges.

Place on a well corn mealed pizza peel. Brush with butter, sprinkle with a bit more of the sugar and poke a few holes in the top for the steam to escape.

Slide onto the pizza stone/cookie sheet and start checking for doneness after 5 minutes. I was looking for nicely browned and definitely cooked dough. I ended up checking it every minute for an additional 5 minutes. This does not equal 10 minutes though as I was letting all the heat out of the oven once a minute. However I am not about to give a direction of let the heat out of the oven every minute for 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and allow to cool some before devouring in one sitting because of how surprisingly delicious it is.

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Kitchen Notes 1/12/11

Green Onions and Vinegar

I was able to find one reference to this on the web. Someone's neighbor? Grandmother? would serve freshly pulled green onions in vinegar as a snack.

My Mom would put out a bouquet of green onions in a glass of cider vinegar with other appetizers (shrimp dip, Triscuits with cream cheese and smoked oysters) when we were having company or at holiday meals. My brother and I carry on this tradition but I admit we are the only ones eating them.

Baked Potatoes

Half of the trick to delicious baked potatoes is the pre-cooking prep. The other half is the pre-eating prep.

I rub my potatoes with olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, poke with a fork or knife (I really have no idea if that matters as when I forget, the potatoes do not explode. But just imagine if they did!) and bake at 400 degrees F for an hour.

At the other end of the hour I slit them lengthwise and press the ends together. I then cut up the exposed flesh some and add a sprinkle of kosher salt and a pat of butter.

Trust me, there is something about this that makes a difference.

End of Week Soup

At the end of the week I generally end up with a few vegetables, aromatic and otherwise, left in the fridge before we do our shopping on Saturday.

I deal with them, and clean out the fridge by preparing a soup before we go. This is my method;

Chop up the aromatics; peppers, onions, carrots, celery, garlic in any combination. I also do the mushrooms in this step as well.

All of the other veggies, greens, summer squash, cabbagey things, turnips and such, get shopped up and put in a another bowl. Soft herbs and tomatoes would go in this bowl as well.

Bring a tablespoon of fat or oil to shimmering over high heat in a big soup pot.

Add your aromatics and a bit of salt and pepper and cook, stirring frequently until they begin to brown. If I want to add spices, I add them at the end of this step and allow them to cook for a few seconds.

Add water to about halfway up the side of the pot. I generally add a some bouillon, a can of tomatoes, a couple of bay leaves, some kind of acidy thing like the juice of last weeks limes or some vinegar or Tabasco and salt and pepper to taste at this point.

After the water comes to a boil I add the other vegetables an return to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium low and simmer for as long as you like. This is a good point to add any soup-friendly leftovers like beans, pasta, rice, chicken, etc. Again I taste for salt and pepper.

This soup is always different and I admit I am sad at the end of the week if I don't have some leftover produce. I certainly rarely have to throw any away.

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