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.
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a small crowd, I have complete control over the meal. This satisfies the control-freak in me, and also allows a bit of flexibility about how I cook the bird.
The bird in question arrived from Clancey’s Meats & Fish last Monday. I was wide-grinningly excited when our turkey — which had never seen the inside of a freezer — showed up under Martha’s arm; I immediately set about dismembering it. Originally, my plan was to cook the bird whole, in search of that classic Norman Rockwell moment. But after reading Kenji Lopez Alt’s enlightening “Turkey Stuffed Turkey” article I could not resist taking my turkey apart. It just makes so much sense: the legs and the breasts are two different kinds of meat that demand different treatments — they are done at different temperatures — and, best of all, if you cut the legs and breasts off, you have the whole carcass to make turkey stock in advance, to be held at the ready for all your stuffing/dressing and gravy needs.
After dismantling the turkey, I salted the legs and thighs and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, they were ready to confit in a crockpot with plenty of olive oil, bay leaves, thyme, orange zest, peppercorns and juniper berries. Before removing the breasts, I carefully took the majority of the turkey’s skin off in one piece — I think Hannibal Lecter would have been proud. The breasts and skin were reserved for Thanksgiving day. Meanwhile, I roasted the rest of the carcass and boiled it down into stock. The copious amount of bones made available by cutting the turkey apart meant that I got a thick, gelatinous stock.
For reference, a ten pound free range turkey produces about 2 ½# of white meat. I felt like a mad scientist rolling the two breasts together and wrapping them in their own skin per Lopez Alt’s instructions. The technique worked out really well; the meat cooked very evenly and the skin even managed to adhere to the meat, no Activa required. Go figure.
My quest to use all parts of the turkey resulted in the surprise best dish of the evening, a turkey liver pâté. After soaking the turkey’s liver in milk for two hours to leech out some supposed metallic flavors, I sauteed it in butter along with some shallots. This I ground to a paste in my food processor along with thyme, turkey meat left over from the stock, salt, lots of black pepper, some juniper berries and a bit of heavy cream. After baking this mixture in a water-bath in a 300°F oven for an hour I cooled it and refrigerated it overnight. The result was amazing. I have been dabbling in terrines, pâtés and other potted meats for well over a year now. The results, while always pretty good — how can you go wrong with potted meat? — were always missing something, or featuring too much. Either I have learned enough or the stars were just aligning right for this Thanksgiving: the pâté was creamy, rich, slightly gamy and very peppery. Great with mustard, pickled green beans and olives. Not how I’ve usually started off Thanksgiving, but possibly a new tradition!
One can hardly have Thanksgiving appetizers without Thanksgiving cocktails. Martha found the recipe we used on Apartment Therapy: 1½ oz rye whiskey (Wild Turkey, of course), ½ oz triple sec (substituted for clear curaçao), 2 oz apple cider, 1 tsp simple syrup and a couple of cranberries for garnish. Changing every “oz” to “cup” we successfully octupled the recipe with enough for everyone to enjoy two.
As for the rest of the meal, it was more or less what you would expect. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans with lemon, roasted parnsips, carrots and brussels sprouts, roasted turkey breast and turkey leg confit and plenty of gravy to cover it all.
In some ways Thanksgiving is a stupid meal: nobody can make all these dishes perfectly at the same time. We’d be better off focusing on just a couple and having a really great meal. But it’s Thanksgiving, it happens only once a year, and frankly, nobody expects it to be perfect. That’s why there’s gravy.
Turkey liver pâté
Cranberry relish
Green beans with lemon and garlic
Gravy: the great equalizer
Turkey breast over roast vegetables
Turkey leg confit - tastes more turkeyey than plain turkey
Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis on Lake St. & Chicago. Ave.
FREE entrance (vendors accepting cash or check only, though, so come prepared!)
Do It Green! Minnesota’s Green Gifts Fair takes place this Saturday, conveniently before the crazed post-Thanksgiving shopping. Organizers envision the event as an introduction to green giving and low impact ideas to celebrate the holidays with over 70 vendors to explore. Shoppers are encouraged to bring their own bags and coffee mugs. If you plan to eat at Midtown while you shop, consider bringing silverware and a reusable napkin as well. Those who bike, bus, or carpool will receive a free gift at the event. More information doitgreen.org.
Lake Street and 22nd Ave S near the Light Rail in Minneapolis
Meat, vegetables, apples, bread, chocolates, and canned goods will all be available. Weather permitting there may be crafts as well. Real Bread bread will be available by advanced order: contact Brett at brettlaidlaw (at) eckmeier (dot) com for options. Hilltop Pastures will be at the market as well. According to the market website, they have a waiting list for turkeys, but they’ll be dropping off orders and selling other products on Wednesday. Thanks to midtownfarmersmarket.org for the details!
No exclamation points were harmed in the writing of this post!
I am ready to eat Colombian food again. That was not the case when Martha and I got back from Colombia in mid July. On the flight home, somewhere over the Caribbean, I became violently ill and Martha was in the same state by the evening. Although our flu lasted less than 24 hours, eating anything made me nauseous for about a week, and thanks to the magic of taste aversions even the thought of an arepa made my stomach churn. But by last Friday I was over that and ready to reexperience Colombia through food. Where better to start than chicharrón?
If your mouth isn’t watering already, perhaps a quick translation is in order: deep-fried pork belly. That is the very fattiest part of the pig cooked in even more fat until crispy. In terms of eating pig, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Making chicharrón requires pork belly, which is not easy to find. To make things more difficult, chicharrón is made with bone-in pork belly. That is the belly with part of the ribs still attached (for a quick visual aide, run your fingers down your sides — mmm, delicious). Martha’s Aunt Stella, my mentor in all things Colombian, mentioned that they have never found this cut available in the US.
Obviously, they never went to Clancey’s. It required a special order and a wait of a couple of weeks, but last Thursday Kristin Tombers of Clancey’s was on the phone saying the pork belly was in.
Given all the fun I have breaking down chickens, I was looking forward to throwing this substantial hunk of pig on my counter and hacking away. Luckily, Kristin of Clancey’s is wiser than I and advised against taking the pork belly home in one piece. She didn’t think I was going to get very far without a cleaver and a bone-saw, but was kind enough to fire up her electric saw and cut the belly into more manageable pieces: 1″ wide by about 4″ long, and 2″ deep (that last measurement depends entirely on our friend the pig).
When Martha got home from Clancey’s with this big, white paper wrapped package it was better than Christmas and my Birthday combined; I could not wait to open it up.
The mound of white pork fat and pink pork flesh did not disappoint.
As excited as I was I had to exercise a little self-control: 8 pounds of pork belly was a good thing, but probably too much of a good thing. I kept four pounds in the fridge and split the other four pounds into three portions for freezing, frozen treats for another day.
Four pounds of pork belly is still a lot to deal with, but chicharrón requires very little prep. It was already sawed up for me by the butcher; I just added bone-deep cuts at 1″ intervals through the belly meat on every piece that still had a bone attached (some pieces had become boneless from the cutting process). I learned to do this in Colombia: the justification had something to do with — I think — preventing the meat from buckling or bending. I don’t really understand why that would matter, but cutting the pork in this way does create a number of extra edges — edges that will become crispy when deep-fried. Other than that no additional prep is needed; the meat will get salted after it leaves the oil.
Speaking of the oil, I poured an inch of vegetable oil into a couple of cold pots (if you had a really big pot, or not very much pork belly, you could do it in one). Before turning on the heat, I added the pieces of pork with bones bone-side down. The bone-in pieces have to cook the longest since bones don’t conduct heat as efficiently as flesh. After adding in the pork belly the skillet was pretty packed and my inch of oil was mostly covering the pork. I turned the heat on high and let the oil come to temperature.
Within a few minutes, a mouth-watering crackling sound was issuing from the stove and the apartment was filled with the warm smells of gently cooking pork fat. I added the boneless pieces around the time that I heard the first crackles. Someone with a powerful stove might need to reduce the heat at some point to avoid an oil fire, but since my stove is weak and pathetic I left it on high the whole time. It took 20 minutes for the pork to be crispy dark brown, and some pieces were done before others — just remove them as they look ready to a paper-towel lined tray and hit them with a shower of salt. And resist the temptation to eat the whole pile without advising your guests that dinner is ready (I couldn’t resist a few samples; had to make sure it was good!)
What can you possibly serve with chicharrón that won’t seem inadequate next to this pile of fried glory? That’s a tough question to answer, but here are the typical Colombian sides that I made:
Tostones/Tostadas/Tacadas/Fried Plantains. These deserve a post of their own: peeled green plantains (ours were actually a little too ripe — the skin was starting to yellow) are cut horizontally into 1 inch pieces. Fry these pieces in hot oil until they start to brown in spots — if you have a pot of pork-fat infused oil from frying chicharrón to use for frying, all the better. Drain the fried plantain chunks on paper towels. Then, take each chunk and place it on a cutting board. Using another cutting board or, even better, a culinary rock, smash the fried plantain piece until reasonably flat and circular — about ½” thick. With plantain pieces flattened, add them back to the oil and fry till golden. Drain and salt and serve immediately.
Ají. No tostón would be complete without some ají to put on top. Ají is actually just the word in Colombia for hot peppers (chiles) but it also refers to a whole range of sauces that are used on everything from meats to arepas to empanadas to, well, tostones. I made Stella’s version: I took half of a white onion and roughly chopped it,and then put it in a bowl with about a quarter cup of white vinegar. Apparently, the vinegar takes some of the bite out of the onion. To this mix, I added two expertly selected (by Martha) Haas avocados (in Colombia we always used much larger, green-skinned avocados) also roughly chopped, a half cup of chopped cilantro, a few dashes of Tabasco (it’s not ají without something spicy) and enough salt to be able to taste everything. The vinegar in the ají is vital in this meal for cutting through the fat that coats your mouth from the chicharrón. Beer is also very helpful in this regard. Two beers more so.
Frisoles/Frijoles/Beans. The national bean of Colombia is the cargamanto, a large red bean with white flecks; maybe the same as cranberry beans. Since I don’t have a convenient source for either kind of beans, I used red kidney beans. At least the color would be right! For the beans I followed my usual procedure: I soaked a pound of beans overnight (yeah, yeah, you don’t have to soak beans; I still think soaking reduces cooking time and on a 90 degree day any minute without the stove on is golden), then boiled them for two hours with a ham hock and an onion, split in half. To finish the beans, I cooked three minced cloves of garlic in oil until fragrant then added the cooked beans, their liquid, and the shredded ham from the hock and let them cook until they were nice and thick.
Rice. Nothing special here, just regular white rice. It seems like we ate white rice with every large meal in Colombia — it just wasn’t a complete meal without a bowl of rice on the table.
Avocados. A couple more avocados cut into slices are a great garnish for the beans.
And so it was that after a month of food aversion I dove back into the cuisine of Colombia. If you are trying to remember the merits of Colombian food, you could hardly find a better place to start than crispy, fatty chicharrón. It’s like pork candy! This opens up new possibilities to me; there are a lot of Colombian dishes I want to try to replicate, some of them not involving deep fried pork fat. But, then again, three packages of pork belly sitting in my freezer say I’m making chicharrón again.
Last week, Martha came home with exciting stories and delicious bresaola from a butcher shop she found in Linden Hills: Clancey’s Meats and Fish. I had read about the shop on the Heavy Table, but had yet to go. Intrigued, I wanted to check it out. On Saturday after the farmers’ market we biked there. My plan was to buy some fatty pork for carnitas to go with the tomatillos, corn and tomatoes we got from the market, but when I got there there was some goat staring me in the eye, calling my name. Apart from the fact that they actually have goat, the best part about Clancey’s is that from the cuts offered in their cases, it’s clear that they’ve butchered whole animals themselves. The goat’s various parts were all in evidence and arranged together. Think of the supermarket butcher: 50 ribeyes from 50 cows. Although I have never made goat before, as soon as I saw this leg roast all my thoughts of pork went out the window.
The staff of Clancey’s suggested that I cook the goat as I would lamb, although better to braise it than to roast it medium-rare, which is my lamb-preference. I couldn’t really shake my carnitas idea, so goat carnitas it was. I was kind of surprised that Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cookingcontained not a single recipe for goat since I assumed for some reason that goat was popular in Mexico. None of my other cookbooks were much help either, so I decided to wing it. I rubbed the roast down in a vaguely Mexican way (cumin, oregano, chile powder, black pepper, salt) and seared it. In went orange juice, lime juice, garlic and onions and then the pot into a 250° oven for a long, slow cook.
Of course, these goat carnitas were going to require some delicious fixins, and luckily the farmers’ market was able to provide. I used the most beautiful tomatillos of my life to make a salsa verde (with cilantro, garlic, onion and some lime juice). Martha used the first sweet corn and tomatoes of the season with cilantro, lime juice and green onions to make a corn salsa.
After three hours in the oven, the goat was tender but not falling apart. I pulled it to shreds with two forks. At this point I became a little concerned as I was hit with a smell that can only be described as “goaty.” Tasting the meat was reassuring; it was a bit like lamb and a bit like beef, with a deep flavor and very tender texture. I tossed it with a little of the salsa verde for color.
Maybe a taco is not the best way to appreciate the flavor of goat, but it’s not a bad way to eat goat. In fact, the acid of the salsas and sour cream cut through some of the meat’s earthiness. By the end of my third taco, my eyes were craving a fourth and my stomach was saying “no!” As usual, the eyes won out.
