Chili à la Cindy Lou

Getting a little head start on our winter repertoire, I decided to try this chili recipe from Steve Sando's new book, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide. I don't have any plans to grow beans, but we're such fans of Sando's beans and his earlier cookbook, I wanted to have this one for its recipes and comments on the various kinds of beans.

My usual chili recipe is for Cincinnati-style chili from Epicurious. That is mostly about putting a good mix of spices in with the ground beef and adding a can or two of beans. This recipe, of course, starts with the beans, in this case, Good Mother Stallard beans. I soaked and cooked a pound of these with a mirepoix. When they were soft, I sautéed the ground beef with some more onion and garlic and added it into the beans with 2 cans of diced tomatoes (I took that to mean 28 oz. but it was pretty tomato-y), 1/4 c. cider vinegar, 2 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 Tbl. each of cumin, Mexican oregano, New Mexico chile powder, and brown sugar, 1 Tbl. paprika and 1 tsp. salt. Cook all that for "several hours" -- in this case 3-1/2 -- and you've got yourself a pretty good pot of chili. Can't beat those beans.

Grilled potatoes

Batali's recipe for grilled potatoes caught my eye and it seemed like a simple recipe for a weekday. Equally simple was Sara Jenkins' recipe for grilled skirt steak with cucumber and avocado garnish, so it had the makings of a great weekday meal.

With the potatoes, you essentially end up with a warm potato salad. You parboil the Yukon gold (or other waxy) potatoes in salted water -- he says for 6 minutes but his potatoes were smaller than mine so I let them go longer, maybe a bit too long. You cut each potato into 3 or 4 thick slices and toss the slices in a mix of olive oil, celery seed and sliced scallions (which I forgot to buy so used shallots). Then you thread them, horizontally, onto skewers, about 5 per skewer. You grill them for 15 min., he says, though my time was a little shorter because of the longer parboiling, and get a nice crust on them. Then, you remove the potato slices from the skewers and toss them again in a mix of oil, Chianti (or other red wine) vinegar, and Dijon mustard. Delicious!

After I took off the potato skewers, I put on the skirt steak, seared it on one side for 2 min., turned it, sprinkled salt and pepper on the cooked side, and grilled the other side for another 2 min., removed the steak from the grill, turned and sprinkled salt and pepper on the unseasoned side and let it rest 5 min. before slicing it. A mix of diced avocado, cucumber (peeled, halved, scraped clean and sliced into half moons), basil, oil and lemon juice goes on top of each serving of meat.

We had a very nice, and very cheap, Spanish red wine to accompany.

Spit-roasted duck

I bought Mario Batali's Italian Grill after a friend asked for a grilling cookbook that also discussed wine pairings. I ended up recommending this one and liked the description so much I got one for myself. I haven't used it too often, but after trying out his Spit-Roasted Duck with orange and rosemary and the Butternut Squash with vin cotto to accompany, I will be using it a lot more.

The two dishes had a similar treatment. The duck was covered with a glaze made from simmering 1/2 c. orange marmalade, 1/2 c. orange juice, 3 Tbl. balsamic vinegar, 4 minced garlic cloves and 2 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary for five minutes. Batali makes a big point of pricking the duck skin all over, especially in the thighs, for a total of at least 50 times. This of course permits the fat to escape in the roasting process and makes the skin very crispy.

Well, it was delicious. Duck is always such a treat and the meal seemed very special. The squash gets sliced into 1/4-inch slices and marinated in a mixture of 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. red wine vinegar, 3 Tbl. honey, 1 Tbl. chopped fresh rosemary and 4 minced garlic cloves for 2 hours.

Once I took the duck off the spit and let it rest, I drained the squash and grilled it over the same fire. Truly delicious sweet, nutty taste. I would slice them a little thicker next time because the thicker pieces seemed to let more of the squash flavor come through.

The spit-roasting attachment to the Weber grill has proven to be a great investment. It's not that I use it so often, but it's nice to be able to follow a recipe like this without any workarounds.

I steamed some wild rice as a second side. Rebecca Wood, in her cookbook The Splendid Grain, makes a big deal about getting the organic wild rice that is hand-harvested by native Americans in Minnesota as opposed to the commercially grown California version. Too late. The wild rice I had from Rancho Gordo proudly proclaims itself to be California wild rice. Wood has a helpful table for estimating the amount of water and cooking time needed for different types of wild rice and a nice variation on the basic recipe that involves sauteeing chopped onion and celery with the rice in butter and oil before adding the boiling water to cook it.

Grilled top round, Cuban style

The "Basque" chicken wings from The Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby tasted so good the other day, I decided to try another recipe and this was also a hit.

You just take a nice, thick slab of top round, otherwise known as London broil, salt and pepper and grill it to medium rare. You cut the nicely seared meat into cubes and mix in a bowl chopped red onion, red pepper, green pepper, slice radishes, minced garlic, olive oil, tabasco sauce, chopped parsley and cilantro, ground cumin, chili powder and fresh-squeezed lime juice. Not the tenderest cut of meat even after a hot grilling, but flavorful and nicely set off by the vegetables.

Also used their recipe for black beans to accompany, which they cook with lots of onion and most of the same flavoring as the steak salad. They also recommend fried plantains and rice as sides, but that's way too much for us for a weekday, so we stuck with corn tortillas from the Latino market.

Pork

I got a 7-lb Boston butt from the Virginia farm that raises forest-fed pigs ("Babes in the Woods"). I'd been wanting to try pulled pork in the Big Green Egg since I got it, but the 10+ hours of cooking it was a daunting prospect. So Labor Day became the big day to try it.

As always, I used my barbecue bible, the Jamisons' book, using their rub of paprika, pepper and other ingredients and their mop of vinegar, leftover rub and more pepper. I applied the rub the night before and another coating in the morning when I took the butt out of the fridge. I lit the fire at 7 and got the pork in at 8 at about 220 degrees. I mopped it every 45 to 60 minutes and in the afternoon inserted my newly acquired digital thermometer probe into the meat. It was at about 120 degrees and needed to go to 180 according to Jamisons. Other recipes had put the internal temperature at 160 to 180, so I was willing to accept the lower end of the range. The new probe, for what it's worth, registered the "oven" temperature about 20 degrees lower than the Egg's own thermometer. I pulled it out at 6:30 at 160 degrees and wrapped it in foil for half an hour.

The pork was delicious and was a big hit with the family members who came over for the holiday, but it was different than I anticipated. I thought I would have a tender, fibrous, gray pork that would shred at a touch to turn into those piles of pulled pork we had on our road trip last summer. I had prepared the vinegar sauce to go on this pulled pork. What became evident as I sliced through the crust to the pink meat underneath was, as Henry said, "I don't think this is the shredding kind of pork." It was in fact, as Henry also observed, much more like ham, though with more of a smokey, porky flavor than you usually get with ham. It was very tender and pretty moist, but firm and I carved thin slices for the platter. The vinegar sauce was still delicious on it.

Clearly there's some things I don't understand about barbecuing. Was this more of a picnic cut, so that I got smoked pork shoulder, rather than a real butt with the marbling that would yield the shreddy texture I anticipated? Are these forest-fed pigs, which have great flavor, simply too muscular to get that kind of marbling? (There was plenty of fat, but as a slab along one side of the cut.) Is the Egg simply not going to yield the kind of result that a real smoker would?

Don't get me wrong -- it was a great meal and a very successful recipe. But I would like to have a better idea of what I'm doing. Everybody brought great sides and Andrea did her delicious corn sticks. I also grilled some wings (about three dozen) and sopped them in a "Basque" sauce from Thrill of the Grill (this was very good and will prompt me to try more recipes from there) and in Frank's Louisiana sauce, said to be the sauce of the original Buffalo wings.

Locavore flavors

We're getting the hang of being locavores. Went to the farm stand on Beech just off East-West Highway for peaches, plums and heirloom tomatoes, picked up some green beans at the Silver Spring market, and a Boston butt from a Virginia farm that has forest-fed pigs.

Used the tomatoes and beans for a couple of simple recipes from the oft-cited Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins (can't wait for her next book). Her subtitle talks about "recipes and flavor secrets" and it is all about the flavor. I cut the tomatoes into eighths, sprinkled a little salt on them and let them sit for 5 min., then crumbled feta cheese (the Greek kind, not locavore) and sprinkled chopped cilantro over them before drizzling with sherry vinegar and olive oil. Her point is that as good as tomatoes taste with basil, they also taste great with other herbs and that certainly was true in this case.

The beans were simmered for half an hour in a tomato sauce made by sauteeing diced onion and minced garlic in 2 Tbl olive oil, then adding a small can of tomatoes (she says through a food mill, I just pulsed a few times on my mini-processor), simmered together for 10 min before adding the beans. This gets chopped parsley at the end.

The two simple dishes were a great accompaniment to fried chicken with some end of the season rose wine. Terrific.

Tagine bis

Alas, careful as I was, my first tagine cracked and then broke in circumstances I won't go into. I've decided that Tunisian clay pots probably work well in Tunisia, simmering away over some embers, but they are too anxiety-ridden for cooking on gas stoves.

So Tagine bis is a hardened clay artifact from Emile Henry. Even though they do specify it has to be heated up slowly, it seems a good deal more robust than the first one, though the color is not as pretty.

I inaugurated it with another one of Ghillie Basan's recipes, this one a simple chicken with artichokes and green grapes. Chicken breasts are cut into thick slices and marinated for a couple of hours in olive oil, garlic and turmeric (great color!), then cooked with lots of onion for just 15 min. before adding artichoke hearts, another 5 min. cooking, then add grapes and lots of cilantro. Even better the second day with flatbread (in this case, naan from Whole Foods).