A beer’s name doesn’t necessarily tell you what you should pair it with: a porter might not complement a porterhouse, and just because it’s a Kwak doesn’t mean you should eat it with duck. But happily, sometimes names make things easy; take India Pale Ales, which in the first word of their name make as good as a suggestion as you could hope for. Drink me with Indian food!

The affinity of Indian food as we know it in the West and India Pale Ales is no mistake — the beer and the cuisine grew up together. IPAs, distinctive above all for their extreme hoppiness, were first popularized among Britons working in India in the days of the British East India Company and the Raj, at least partially because the extra hops helped the beer survive shipment halfway across the world.

Indian food as most of us know it — the kind you get in Indian restaurants everywhere from London to your local strip mall — is also a product of the British presence in India, as Britons and their local cooks adapted Indian culinary traditions to suit the British palate — particularly the British taste for meat. You can bet that as these Brits and Indians worked to develop this new cuisine, they made sure it paired well with the beer that was most widely available — that is, India Pale Ale.

Popular though they may have been in India in the 18th century, I think it’s safe to say that IPAs are even bigger today — it seems like craft breweries are leaping over each other to bring out the next big IPA, and to see how many more hops they can cram in. The selection of IPAs in a decent liquor store can be pretty overwhelming. Looking for something a little bit different, I picked up a six pack of Summit’s latest addition to their Unchained series: an India Style Rye Ale — an IPA with rye thrown into the mix (an IRA if you will).

Summit’s IRA pours with very little head and is quite dark in color, reminding me of a brown ale. As the beer hits the tongue, the brown ale description continues to be apt: the first flavor note is a very strong roasted, caramel flavor. After that initial impression, the beer takes a turn into more traditional IPA territory; that is to say the hops hit and hit hard. I thought I detected a slight grassiness in the flavor from the rye, though that might well be the power of suggestion (a power that should not be underestimated in beer rating and pairing!). Although the beer poured with very little head, it had great carbonation, with little spritzy bubbles that danced across the tongue. Overall, this is an enjoyable, well balanced beer, provided you like hops. And if you’re drinking India Ales, that seems a safe assumption.

With India Style Ale in hand, all that was needed was some India Style Food. As a centerpiece for our meal, we turned to that mainstay of the Indian buffet: chicken tikka. Starting with a recipe from Bon Appétit (a practice I don’t normally recommend) I marinated a cut up whole chicken in yogurt, cilantro, salt, garam masala, and garlic. After an hour in this yogurt bath, I roasted the chicken pieces for about 40 minutes at 500ºF, until the meat was cooked through and the skin was starting to blacken. Following through on Bon Appétit’s full menu, Martha roasted carrots with oil, salt and cumin seeds, and I made raita and white rice. All these elements combine to make a fulfilling Indian food experience: moist and roasted-tasting meats and vegetables accented by warm and citrusy spices that fill the mouth, all cooled and brightened by the yogurt and cucumber in the raita. Comforting and enlivening at the same time, it’s the kind of food that could help you feel at home in a place a few thousand miles away from home.

Food like that, or a cold beer. Better yet – the two of them together. I had a hard time trying to explain intellectually why the India Style Rye Ale and the Chicken Tikka worked so well together; each seemed to tame and complete the other. Maybe it was the acid in the yogurt cutting through the hops’ bitterness, or maybe the fact that the big flavors of the beer were a match for the big spice flavors in the chicken. Perhaps the beer’s roasted malts found their soulmate in blackened chicken skin. None of these elements really suffice in explaining what made this combination so satisfying. Ultimately, their affinity may owe to their shared history; a few gulps and bites might be enough to express the perfection of 200 years of codevelopment, but they are probably not enough to understand it. I’d better do this again.

Although there are plenty of delicious steaks, pork chops and sausages routinely on offer at Clancey’s Meats & Fish, it’s the more exotic offerings that keep me going back. For example: the time I got my goat. More recently, I was greeted by the sight of fresh — not frozen — rabbits, curled up in their individual plastic bags asking me to take them home. Having recently been daydreaming through my various Spanish cookbooks, rabbit had me thinking one thing: paella. It doesn’t hurt that Clancey’s also sells a kick-ass fresh chorizo.

I usually think of paella as a summer dish (perhaps because I’ve only been to Spain in the summer) but it is a great meal for the fall as well. You can’t get fresh peas or red peppers, but carrots and parsnips can lend a moderate, earthy sweetness to the dish, and brussels sprouts can provide the necessary green. Fall is also the time when a hunter can easily come home with a brace of fresh rabbits.

While the vegetables used in paella can be flexible — indeed, they should be modified to match the season, what makes the paella a paella for me is the flavors of saffron and paprika (Valencians and anyone else are free to dispute this). These spices combine to give the dish deep, floral warmth, complemented nicely by generous squeezes of lemon juice. It can be a challenge to extract a lot of flavor out of saffron, which is all the more of a shame given how expensive it is. For this paella, I tested a technique I saw practiced by an old master of paella on the infuriating yet strangely captivating PBS series Spain: On the Road Again: rather than soaking crumbled strands of saffron before adding them to the broth, I ground them together with salt. This gave the rice a noticeable saffron flavor and brilliant yellow color.

Paella for Fall

• 2 cups small brussels sprouts
• Olive oil
• 1 rabbit, cut into pieces and seasoned with salt and pepper
• 1/2# fresh chorizo, cut into chunks
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 parsnips, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 2 cups short-grain rice
• pinch of saffron
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 2 tsp sweet paprika
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 quarts chicken stock or water or a combination
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 1 lemon, cut into wedges

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add brussels sprouts. Boil 5 minutes and then transfer sprouts to ice water. Drain and set aside. (You could also cook the brussels sprouts in the broth with the rice and the rest of the ingredients but overcooked brussels sprouts are bad news so do so at your own risk).

Place sea salt and saffron in a spice grinder and grind until pulverized.

Bring the stock/water to a bare simmer in a pot.

Cover the bottom of a paella pan or other large pan in a layer of olive oil and heat over medium high heat. Add rabbit pieces and fry until golden on all sides. Remove from pan and set aside. Brown chorizo pieces and set aside.

Working over medium heat, add diced vegetables. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft and starting to brown. Add the rice and stir to coat grains with oil. Clear an area in the center of the pan and add olive oil. Add the salt-saffron mixture, the paprika and the garlic. Cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir everything in the pan together. Add most of the simmering stock and the reserved meats and bring to boil. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until stock is absorbed. Try the rice; if it still feels underdone, add more stock and keep stirring.

As the last of the stock is absorbed, toasty aromas will start to emanate from the bottom of the pan. Don’t be alarmed! If you’ve kept your heat moderate enough, the rice isn’t burning; it’s reaching a crispy dark brown. This layer of cooked rice on the bottom — the socarrat — is the best part of the paella; it’s really worth turning off your burning rice radar in order to allow it to develop.

When you’ve got as much socarrat as you think you can stand, turn off the heat and stir in the reserved brussels sprouts. Jam the sprig of rosemary in the center of the rice and cover. Let stand ten minutes.

You can serve the paella by placing it in the middle of the table, handing everyone a spoon and telling everyone to dig in, but side plates and forks and knives can be helpful for managing those intransigent pieces of rabbit. How ever you serve it, make sure to squeeze plenty of fresh lemon juice over top.

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.

March greeted us in the New York Times with a series of recipes for what to do with cube steak. I found the article inspiring. Cheap?! 3-recipes-in-one!? WOW! Tom, on the other hand, responded, “Do you know what cube steak is? Why yes, sort-of, I did. For I had read about it in the article! Tenderized portions of the cow that may not otherwise be so appetizing are made into cube steak, aptly named after the cube-shaped metal hammers that pound said beef into submission.

I found what was to be OUR cube steak the day after reading the article at our local Rainbow grocer or, as we like to call it (after the in-store brand), Roundy’s. And! It was on sale. When I proudly proclaimed that I’d purchased 2 pounds of beef for $6, Tom replied again unmoved, “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with that?” I settled on one of the three recipes, this one for Bistec de Palomilla. I’ll let you be the judge:

The lime was definitely the best part after a day spent marinating in the fridge. As for the cube steak itself? I’m not sure I’d revisit it. Unlike other readers, I don’t have fond childhood memories of the stuff, and at my command it ended up a bit tough when it reached the table. The rice? Excellent!

I forgot to mention (as Sue pointed out in her comment), that Reisenthel baskets make great gifts. More than just gifts, they make great gift baskets. For example, here’s a photo from Tom’s birthday present from a couple of years ago.

If you look closely at the contents, you’ll notice this basket is how Tom came to know harissa. 1.5 years later, we’re still going strong on this jar.

The gift focused around Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. In the section on “Flavorings, Aromatics, Condiments, and Oils,” Roden discusses and defines many ingredients that are key to Middle Eastern cooking but perhaps not typical in the average US kitchen:

Harissa. This very hot chili-pepper past flavored with garlic and spices is much used in North African cooking. It can be bought ready-made in tubes and cans but it will not have the special perfume of the homemade variety. To make your own, see page 464.

I pulled items from this list and filled the basket with them, knowing that a lack of hard-to-find ingredients might inhibit Tom’s creativity when looking through the book for inspiration.

If you’re purchasing a new cookbook for a friend, consider throwing in some key ingredients when you give the gift. I remember the hunt for all of these items being a lot of fun, especially once I discovered a gold mine in Yasmeen’s Mediterranean Foods in Saginaw, Michigan. They don’t appear to have a website, but you can reach them by phone at (989) 791-3082 or visit their location at 3545 Bay Rd in Saginaw, MI if you’re in the area. If nothing else, pick up a bag of dried limes and make yourself a pot of Chai Hamidh, as Roden says, “made by breaking open dried limes [with a hammer] and pouring bowling water over them” (p. 483).

Also in the basket: Bodum’s Assam tea press, a mint plant, roseflower water, dried limes, orange flower water, pomegranate syrup, Mustapha’s Moroccan Harissa and Olives, Gilway Demerara Sugar Cubes, Urban Accents rice, and several large containers of spices including sumac and whole fenugreek and nigella seeds.

I’m not Catholic, nor did I grow up Catholic, but ever since I started working for the Catholic Church I’ve noticed oddchanges in my behavior. Like saying “God Bless you” to people in contexts not involving sneezing. Also as a result of work, I am well aware that yesterday was the first friday of Lent; that means no meat. So in observance of Catholic laws of abstinence, I decided to make some fish. Thai-curried cod, to be exact.

Anybody who knows me probably finds this odd for two reasons; the first addressed above in reference to my not being Catholic. But the second, more substantial cause for surprise and amazement is that for most of my life, in addition to avoiding eggs, I have refused to let the flesh of fish pass through my lips (with a few exceptions). As of a year or two ago I decided it was time to grow up and start eating our friends from the sea and stream. Not having eaten much fish, though, I still don’t have much of a taste for it, so it’s rare that I get the urge to make it. And when I do get the urge I am at a disadvantage from inexperience cooking fish. Poorly cooked fish does not breed desire to eat fish.

The most important factor in my enjoyment of fish is not overcooking it. Overcooked beef is a waste but not the end of the world, overcooked chicken gets dry but can still be eaten, but overcooked fish is disgusting. Once it starts to get on the medium side of medium rare the mealy texture is unbearable and all those bad fish flavors of my childhood nightmares start to come out. Too raw is not a problem, in fact, nigirizushi is probably my favorite way to eat fish. So when I am making fish I am vigilant with my paring knife, looking for the point when the flesh just begins to lose its translucent sheen. Notice the level of opacity of the bite on the left, and the overall texture, on the right.

The cod was very mild so this dish was mostly about the curry, which was very good, if a little rich since it was mostly coconut milk; I woke up the next morning feeling a little polluted. That might also have had to do with the (copious amounts of) Michigan wine this was beautifully paired with: Good Harbor Fishtown White.

Since this is a “recipe” post, here’s a recipe:

• 1/2# cod filet
• flour
• oil
• salt
• pepper
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 t ginger, minced
• 2 t red curry paste
• 1/2 t brown sugar
• 1 c coconut milk
• 1 1/2 T lime juice
• 2 t fish sauce
• 3 T water
• 2 t minced cilantro

Heat some oil in a saucepan until it shimmers. Take off heat and add garlic, ginger, curry paste and sugar and stir till fragrant. Add coconut milk, lime juice, fish sauce and water then bring to a boil. Reduce to one cup. Off heat stir in cilantro and season with salt and pepper, then lid to keep warm.

Divide the cod filets into a couple of pieces of equal thickness. Salt and pepper the pieces, then coat with flour. Heat oil in a non-stick skillet until shimmering, then add the cod. Cook without touching it for 2-3 minutes, then flip. Cook for about 1-2 minutes more, making sure to check carefully after the first minute for the moment when the fish is perfectly cooked.

Cod on plate. Sauce on cod. Rice on side.

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.