Some days, everything goes right: the sun is shining, you can ride your bike around town carefree after a winter full of slow ice-patch vigilance, you’ve just eaten a fine lunch and there’s nothing in particular to do that afternoon. You roll into your favorite butcher shop — just to say hello — and suddenly your day gets even better because staring out from behind the butcher’s glass is a shining, garnet mound of fresh blood sausage.

Last Saturday was just such a day for Martha and me; our ride to Clancey’s Meat and Fish was rewarded with several links of blood sausage. Kristin and crew make it fresh a few times a year but it only stays in the display case briefly before it is frozen — blood sausage is not especially shelf stable. The good news is even if you missed it fresh last weekend, Clancey’s probably has all the frozen blood sausage your heart desires.

Desires, but for what? I certainly couldn’t reach back into my personal culinary heritage; my parents never cooked the stuff — in fact I’m quite sure that my dad will read this post with a mixture of horror and disgust. The Spanish, on the other hand, are great lovers of morcilla; it is a mainstay of at least a couple of hearty stews (fabada asturiana and cocido madrileño) and also finds its way into various tapas and pintxos.

I took the inspiration for this dish from the latter of the stews, the venerable cocido. (I was actually leaning toward fabada, but can you believe the Wedge doesn’t carry fabes asturianas?) Inspiration is all I took, though — I wasn’t interested in buying the many required meats or serving each pot ingredient as a separate course. So before any Madrileños arrive decrying my affront to their cultural patrimony, let me be clear: this not an authentic cocido madrileño. It is, however, a great way to highlight the flavor of blood sausage and a nice stew for a cold winter night, of which I am sure there are only a few left this year.

Cocido

• 1# dried chickpeas
• 1 ham hock
• 2 bay leaves
• Chicken stock
• 1 T olive oil
• ½ onion plus 2 chopped medium onions
• 1 celery stalk, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• ½# blood sausage
• ¼ cup parsley, minced
• Salt and pepper

Soak the chickpeas overnight, or quick soak by placing in a pot with heavily salted water, bringing to a boil and then turning off the heat, covering, and allowing to sit for one hour.

After the beans are soaked, drain and rinse them. Place in a stockpot and add the ham hock, bay leaves and half onion. Add chicken stock and water to cover generously — you will want plenty of broth. Bring to a boil and then simmer until beans are almost completely soft. Drain chickpeas, reserving cooking liquid, and remove ham hock. Discard the bay leaves and onion.

When ham hock is cool enough to handle, remove meat from  bones, fat and gristle. Shred the meat and reserve; discard the rest.

In a large pot or dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions and celery and cook, stirring now and then, until the vegetables soften and start to brown. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add cooked chickpeas, reserved ham, and enough reserved cooking liquid to just cover the beans. If you don’t have enough cooking liquid, add water or chicken stock. Bring to a simmer. Lightly — lovingly — nestle the sausages on top of the stew and simmer gently, partially covered, until the sausage is warmed through and the beans are as soft as you like — maybe 20 minutes.

To serve, remove the sausage links from the pot and slice. Return the sausage slices to the stew along with the parsley and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in shallow bowls with plenty of crusty bread on the side to soak up the broth.

There are plenty of fast foods that you can make better at home: this burger will beat anything that ever crawled out from under any golden arches, or, if Taco Bell is your thing, you can easily beat the experience at home by cooking up a bowl of oatmeal and throwing it in a tortilla. But there are some foods that are better never attempted at home; foods that benefit from economies of scale such that cooking them at home makes no sense.

Kushari is one of those foods. In Cairo, you don’t have to walk far to find a kushari stand, but the complexity of the operation — and these places only serve the one dish — is a clue to its unsuitability for adaptation at home. After indicating just how much kushari you’re interested in eating you can watch your bowl head down the line where it is filled from several pots, one man to a pot: rice, noodles, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and tomato sauce.

Yes, this is really a dish with both rice and pasta, lentils and chickpeas. It’s a starch-lover’s dream, packed with affordable calories — which partially explains its popularity in Egypt. Preparing these ingredients to all be ready simultaneously is something the many employees of the kushari joint have down to a science. Doing it at home, unless you have a ready brigade of helpers and extra stove space, is a challenge. And for the humble result , you are better off just hitting up the local kushari place.

Unfortunately, outside of Egypt such restaurants are rare. (I did once locate kushari in Minneapolis, a special at the Lyndale Grill and Grocery.) So for those of you with a craving that can’t be satisfied and some patience, here’s what I did: my stove has four burners; I used three of them (the fourth being taken up by a pot of old frying oil that I am too lazy to clean). On one, I started a pot of rice. At 30 minutes, this is one of the longest cooking items. In a pan on another burner, I started caramelizing some onions. In a large pot on the third burner, I brought water and lentils to a boil.

After 20 minutes, the lentils were toothsome and ready to come out. But don’t drain them! You need that hot lentil water! I used a mesh strainer to fish out as many lentils as possible from the water and placed them in a covered bowl to stay warm. After bringing the water back to a boil, I added in broken vermicelli.

In the meantime, the onions had become suitably browned. Transferring them to a small bowl, I quickly wiped out the skillet and began heating olive oil, garlic and red pepper flakes until they were fragrant. To this, I added a can of tomato puree (actually a can of pureed diced tomatoes, but buying them pre-pureed would have been easier) and let the tomato sauce simmer. Soon, the vermicelli was within a minute of being done so I added a can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed, to the cooking pasta in order to warm them. If you wanted to make this dish more complicated, you could start with dried chickpeas.

The assembly of kushari proceeds in layers: a base of rice, topped with pasta and chickpeas, topped with lentils, garnished with fried onions and finally covered in tomato sauce. Whenever I ate this in Egypt it was served with a thin, vinegary hot sauce which I simulated at home by blending a little sriracha into a lot of rice vinegar.

Cookbooks have a life cycle: when a book is new, it’s exciting, it might get cover to cover, torn bits of paper sprouting up like so many shoots in the spring marking promising recipes. Then comes experimentation: making each of those recipes, seeing which work and which don’t. And finally — tragically — the third age of cookbookdom; sad years spent languishing on the shelf, ignored but for the one or two recipes that keep the book from being sent off to the big cookbook library in the sky.

Some cookbooks can avoid this fate — maybe a copy of the Joy of Cooking that gets referenced for everything (I prefer Cook’s Illustrated’s New Best Recipe) — but most are destined to become so much shelf decoration.

Take Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India by Maya Kaimal MacMillan. When I received this book as a gift, I was into Indian food in a big way. The book was a perfect gateway into the cuisine: easy, apparently authentic recipes that produced great food. In the first months I had this book I cooked widely from it, even preparing the multi-course dinner menus suggested in the back. We had such good times, Curried Favors and I. But, eventually, my enthusiasm for Indian food was crowded out by other cuisines and Curried Favors joined the other disgraced books of yesteryear on the shelf, pulled down only when I had a craving for that one recipe; in this case cholé — a curry of chickpeas and tomatoes.

Cholé is a household favorite for Martha and me, made so many times we don’t really need to look at the recipe anymore. But for whatever reason last week I got the urge to double check the recipe — maybe just to be sure I had the spice mixture right. What page was cholé on? The paper scrap bookmark had long since fallen out. To the index! C… ch.. hey, cabbage! In all my excitement for the familiar flavors of cholé I hadn’t forgotten that we had half a cabbage sitting in the crisper drawer, on its way to being thrown out, rotten in two weeks unless fate intervened.

And as fate would have it I found myself turning not to Cholé on page 93 but to Cabbage Thoren on page 73. Scanning the list of ingredients — coconut, a green chile, garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne, turmeric, salt, mustard seeds, dried red peppers, bay leaves, rice, the aforementioned cabbage — we had everything on hand: it was meant to be.

I had never made Cabbage Thoren before that night — in spite of having the recipe in my possession more than eight years — and it’s a shame, because it was very good. And it got me thinking, maybe it’s time to start exploring Curried Favors again. Paging through to the elaborate suggested menus at the back, I started to plan another Indian feast.

This month is replete with bloggers’ suggestions for food resolutions. Here’s mine: find a cookbook you own that you have more or less forgotten, dust it off, and see what new things it has in store.

Followers of my previous blogging efforts might remember a summary of food I was eating in Egypt and a particularly appetizing picture of the Egyptian delicacy known as kushari. To refresh your memory:

I haven’t had kushari since I was in Egypt, which was in the summer of 2006. It is not something I have ever tried to make at home since it involves making rice and pasta and lentils and chickpeas and tomato sauce and fried onions and is nowhere near good enough to justify the effort. Plus, in Egypt, a bucketful could be had for about 50 american cents.  So imagine my joy when I walked into the Lyndale Grill & Grocery for a gyro but saw on the specials board “koushary”. Here it is, hot out of the microwave:

This was an especially felicitous discovery since I was working through a daunting hangover all day and there’s nothing better for it. Here’s a detail shot so you can see all the delicious ingredients:

So, how does Minneapolis kushari compare with the real thing? You can see that the only pasta here is rigatoni, whereas in the Egyptian version there were two kinds of vermicelli and something like ditalini. The smaller pasta shapes give the kushari a more cohesive texture. Also, one of my favorite things about kushari in Egypt was the vinegary hot sauces that came on the side and could be applied liberally. The tomato sauce on the Minneapolis kushari was very good and nicely spicy so hot sauce wasn’t strictly necessary but it would have been nice. On the other hand, the use of yellow (probably too much to call it saffron rice) instead of the plain white used in Egypt added flavor to a dish that is so heavy on starch that it leans to the bland side. Eating kushari out of a foam tray rather than a plastic bucket was not really the same, and a metal fork was no improvement over a plastic spoon but, such are the trials one must endure. In any case, kushari is not something to be analyzed, it is something to be shoveled down the hatch.

I like the hummus recipe in Cook’s Illustrated’s The New Best Recipe. It is simple; a drained can of chickpeas, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a quarter cup each of olive oil, tahini and water, a teaspoon of salt and a dash of cayenne and a clove or two of garlic all go in the food processor—thirty seconds later you have creamy hummus.

Given that I was perfectly happy with this recipe I naturally had to try a new technique. Sure, the food processor hummus was creamy after being chopped up at high speed for a while, but couldn’t I make it creamier by eliminating those pesky bean skins, leaving nothing but velvety cotyledon? But how to get rid of the skins, short of shucking each bean by hand? A ricer! It works for potatoes, right? Plus, no need to cleanup all those food processor parts!  And so I popped open a can of chickpeas and in short order had this mess on my hands:

The first thing I discovered on this fool’s journey is that human beings of normal strength cannot rice a whole can of chickpeas at once. After removing half the beans I was able to make some progress: slow, maddeningly slow, progress. I could get about one good squeeze out of the beans before the device would seize up, forcing me to scrape my meager bean squeezings off the sides and then redistribute the mash within the ricer so that I could repeat the whole process thirty seconds later. After the third or fourth time doing this I knew it was not worth it. But I’m no quitter either. After probably 20 minutes I had extracted all the bean I was going to.

A lot of work to be sure, but worth it for skinless, really creamy hummus, right? I stirred in the rest of the ingredients and gave the hummus a taste. This was the grainiest hummus I have ever tasted. Beating it with a whisk (whipping it into shape?) helped a bit but my feeble human hands could not give the hummus the airiness that the machine can achieve. Incidentally, a ricer clogged with bean refuse is much harder to clean than a food processor.

Lesson from all this: when something is working you should leave well enough alone.  At least until I get my hands on a food mill…