Beans, beans, they're good for your heart...

I do love me some good beans.  Especially when you put bacon and avocado on top, and eat them with jalapeno cheddar cornbread.  

 The cornbread was easy - buy a tub of cornmeal, follow the instructions on the side, but add in some jalapenos, diced up finely, and grate a bunch of cheddar on top.  I halved the recipe, and it made enough to fit my heart-shaped pan.  Perfect!  I didn't have fresh jalapenos, but I did have pickled ones, and that was pretty delicious - I recommend it.  They came in a can, from Shaws.  I'm sure you can find them at other stores.

The beans were easy, too.  I forgot to soak them this morning, so did a quick soak when I got home - bring to a boil, then turn off and let them sit for an hour.  Drain off the soaking liquid, then add more water, salt, a beef bone (or a pork rib, or a chicken leg, or really any piece of animal with bone and tendons attached to create delicious flavor), a bay leaf, a quartered onion, and 3-4 smashed garlic cloves.  Simmer for 45min, until they're soft.  I think they're best if you let them cool in their cooking water, because then the skins won't break.  

As the beans were cooking, I chopped up two pieces of bacon (mmmm, bacon), rendered it for a while, then threw in half a poblano and another clove of garlic.  That got tossed on top of the beans, plus some avocado chunks, cilantro leaves, and some squeezes of fresh lime juice.  Yes, beans can be delicious!  They really needed a taco instead of corn bread, but hey, corn bread is easier.

The dark green stuff is crispy kale.

Baba ghanoush

Take one eggplant.  Halve lengthwise.  Pour a little olive oil onto a baking sheet, and put the eggplants cut-side down onto the baking sheet.  Bake at 400F for 20-30min, until the skin is wrinkly and starting to burn.  Scoop the goopy innards into a food processor.  Mix with ~1/4C tahini, the juice of a lemon, ~1tsp kosher salt, and a clove of garlic.

Dump into a bowl, top with some parsley or basil or cilantro, paprika, pomegranate seeds, or pine nuts (optional).  Eat with carrots, pita chips, tortilla chips, bread, or a spoon...

Definitely got a good Ed rating from this one.  The hands-on time is less than five minutes, and I think that includes washing the food processor.  Next time you're wanting a dip of some sort, I recommend this one.  Smoky, tangy, vibrant, and delicious.

Pork spinach meatballs

I was wandering through Shaws, looking for things to inspire me to cook dinner, and found myself in the meat aisle, looking for deals.  Often you can find cheap deals on meat there, and while I find that pretty darn sketchy, I figure as long as you cook the manager's special stuff that night, you'll probably be fine.  I lucked out twice - thanks to those sketchy manager's special deals, I got a pound of ground pork for $1.10, and four beef bones for $0.60.  Cook that stuff til it's good and dead, eep.  What is wrong with our agricultural system that meat can be that cheap?

Anyway, the ground pork put me in mind of the meatball subs we'd had at the end of a long adventure race in Canada last fall; one of the flavor options had been something about pork, and then I got the idea that I wanted to put spinach in my meatballs.  So, a head of garlic and a pound of frozen spinach later, I was ready to go.

First things first: flavor.  Toasted spices are where it's at.  I think just about anything that imparts flavor is a good start, but I went with fennel seeds, cumin, mustard seeds, and red pepper flakes.

Salt, spices, meat, one egg, one small yellow beet (grated), 10oz of frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed, a few cloves of garlic, some bread crumbs... 

Smoosh it all together, with a utensil or your hands.

Make balls.  Heat oven to 350F.

Bake for 15min on an ungreased pan, then flip and bake another 10min.  Eat, or freeze.

Actual quantities: 

1lb ground pork 80% lean

10oz frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

4 cloves garlic

1 yellow beet, peeled and grated (raw)

1/4C bread crumbs

2 tsp kosher salt (you could get away with 1tsp, if you're scared of sodium)

2 tsp fennel seeds

2 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tsp mustard seeds

Toast spices in a dry pan.  Grind.  Put everything in a bowl, mix together, make balls, bake for 25min.

Roasted duck breast

I love duck.  I think I always have - I have memories of eating duck even as a little kid, and enjoying it. So when Tiffany came by Boston and we had a dinner date at home, I was pretty sold when I saw the duck breast in Savenor's.  I believe that the trick to perfect duck is that you need to render out most of the fat from under the skin, first, so that you can actually eat the skin, and it's delicious and crispy.  The meat is pretty damn good even if you don't eat the skin, but crispy duck skin without any of the gross fat is my idea of heaven.  *drool*

But first things first - we needed appetizers.  And that's where Formaggio's comes in.  The fact that we only walked out of these with one hunk of goat cheese, some sopressata, rabbit pate, and sourdough bread showed amazing self restraint, on the part of all of us.  The three of us managed to eat nearly this entire board of deliciousness before dinner, and still have room for dinner - that's what Eating Buddies are about, I guess!  The sopressata wrapped around a pear slice with a bit of hard aged gouda was pretty awesome, fyi.

We also had some pickles - carrots, turnips, garlic, ginger, and spicy kohlrabi.

The eating buddy thing - Tiffany, Ed, Chris and I were eating buddies in highschool.  I don't even know what this means, except that we really liked to eat good food.  Some things don't change...

Back to the duck.  First I salted the meat and skin.  Then (not pictured), I scored the skin in a cross-hatch pattern, with a very sharp knife.  You want to cut through nearly all the fat, but not into the meat. That lets the fat render out better.

Next comes the rendering part.  In a cast iron skillet, I put the duck skin-side down on low heat, and left it there for the next hour.  Meanwhile, we devoured cheese, meat, and fruit.  mmmmm.

Also, we had an interesting foamy rhubarb rosemary cocktail.  Not my favorite, but an interesting drink.

Anyway, after the fat has rendered almost completely out (you may have to pour it off a few times - save that fat, it's delicious for cooking potatoes), you can think about cooking the meat.  I hit the oven at 350F, and toasted up some spices: cumin, cardamom, sumac, pepper, and fennel seeds, in a dry pan.  Grind those up, add a pinch of salt, then rub both the meat and skin with generous amounts of toasted ground spices.  Flip the duck over so that it's now meat-side down, and transfer to the oven for ~10min.  15min yields medium cooked duck, which is overdone in my opinion.  

Take it out, let it rest for 5min or so, then cut across the grain into slices.  Serve on top of something that'll soak up any juices.  In this case, we had a moroccan flavored salad of orzo, tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, parsley, cilantro, and pomegranate seeds.  

This was delicious.  I really want to go cook a duck breast now.  The spices don't matter, because most of the flavor comes from that perfect, crispy, drool-inducing skin.  mmmm.

Roasted cabbage pear salad

What do you do with the other 3/4 of your head of cabbage? An excellent question, because all the best recipes for cabbage have cabbage playing a very small part. For good reason. But I had to use up the rest of the cabbage before it was too late (can't waste food!), and stumbled across this recipe. Good idea! I actually *like* roasted cabbage, so this was bound to be a success.

Naturally, I didn't follow the recipe exactly, but made up a dressing of dijon mustard, lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper, and tossed the roasted cabbage and pear chunks in that. Also, toasted walnuts win me over every time. So it ended up being a pretty quick thing to make, and I'll totally make it again. 1 pear, half a cabbage, ~1/4C chopped walnuts, and some shredded hard cheese. Yum! And it even got an ok Ed rating, which is pretty good considering we're talking about a dish consisting primarily of cabbage.

Cabbage apple slaw in a maple dressing

When you buy a head of cabbage, there is a lot to it.  Enough that after chopping off about a quarter of it, you're left wondering what the heck you're supposed to do with the rest of it.  I considered this, because I've made that before and it was delicious, but my cabbage was green, not purple, and I didn't really feel like cooked cabbage, anyway.  I decided on a cabbage salad/slaw thing, mostly because recently I had one of those delicious Vietnamese salads in Chinatown where it's raw cabbage and carrots and cucumber and herbs and a yummy dressing, and the cabbage is actually quite edible.  We also had some sour cream in the fridge, and I was thinking that maybe I could turn that into a dressing of note.  The end result included apples, basil, cilantro, toasted walnuts, and a handful of raw grated beets on top, tossed in a creamy, sweet and sour dressing.  It was really good!  Yet another way to make cabbage edible!



Cabbage apple slaw
1/2 head of cabbage, thinly sliced
1 apple, cut into matchsticks
a small handful of basil leaves, chiffonaded
a handful of cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped
a handful of walnuts, chopped and toasted
1/2 beet, peeled and grated

Dressing
Sour cream
Maple syrup
Sherry vinegar
Olive oil
Worcestershire sauce
Sesame oil
Salt
Dijon mustard

For the dressing, put all those ingredients on a table.  The dressing wants to be ~1/3 sour cream, 1/4 vinegar, 5/12s everything else (did I just complicate things? Yes I did.  Go with 1/3, 1/3, 1/3).  I mix all the flavors before adding oil, and I found I didn't need much oil to cut the vinegar-y-ness.  Taste along the way.  Adjust as you like.

For the salad, mix everything except the beets into a big bowl.  Toss with plenty of kosher salt and then the dressing, and let sit for a bit so the cabbage can soften.  When you're ready to serve, put a pile of slaw, and top with a small handful of grated beets.  They're deliciously sweet and earthy tasting, and make the salad look much more appealing because of the color.  If you add them too soon, though, everything just turns light pink, and reminds me of 1950s jello salads.

Also, this got a totally satisfactory Ed-rating.  It was good!