Tag Archive for 'stew'

Winter Bean Peasant Stew

Published
by
marc
on November 9, 2008
in Duck, European, Pork, Poultry, Soups & Stews, Veal and Winter
. 9 Comments

It was cold and rainy in Manhattan yesterday and after a day spent wandering around the Chocolate Show and the Asian Contemporary Art Fair, I wanted something warm and fulfilling that wouldn’t take a lot of effort to make. Thoughts of Cassoulet and Feijoada both popped into my head but those aren’t the kind of things you start making at 5pm if you want to eat it before breakfast the next morning.

I picked up a ham hock, some Italian sausage and lacinato kale on the way home with some vague idea of an intensely flavorful stew I wanted to make. I had some duck stock in the fridge and a tub of demi glace that I figured I’d use to give it that extra oomph of a long-braised dish.

While I’m not sure of the exact origins of the term “peasant stew”, almost every country has a version and it typically involves adding random cuts of cheap meat to a pot with a starch (beans, potatoes, etc) and cooking it for a long time. While my addition of demi glace does make it a little fancier, it’s still a humble dish at heart and the best part is that it doesn’t require much effort. This whole thing came together with the use of a pot, a cutting board, a plate, a knife and a wooden spoon and after about 2 hours of unattended time on the stove, the meat was falling off the hock and it was ready to eat.

Whole Foods had some spring onions that looked like they were just plucked from the earth, so I roasted a few and placed them on top of the stew for a little color. As it turns out, they were incredibly sweet and flavourful, so it ended up complimenting the rich flavours of the stew nicely. As a whole the dish was lighter than Cassoulet or Feijoada but it had a similar intensity of flavour. The veggies and herbs helped offset the heaviness of the meat and overall the dish was surprisingly well balanced. With a hunk of multi-grain bread, it made for a great warming meal that’s now going on my winter rotation.

What’s your favourite stew for cold weather?
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No Recipes vol. 2

Published
by
marc
on October 27, 2008
in No Recipes
. 13 Comments

For this week’s No Recipes roundup, I have for you 2 classic Japanese dishes along with 2 pseudo-Indian ones. If you’re wondering what the deal with all the dashi inclusive dishes is, I had an audition for The Next Food Network Star today and needed to bring my signature dish pre-plated and I also had to do an on-camera 5 minute demo. I decided to do the demo on making home made dashi, so I’ve been playing with different variations all week.

As the Angry Asian Man points out, there’s really a dearth of yellow folk on The Food Network, so hopefully season 5 marks an end to that;-)

If I have time this week, I’ll post my first video blog (a practice run of the demo I caught on tape).

This week’s No Recipes isn’t completely devoid of instructions because I’ve posted about this dish before. This is one of my all-time favorite dishes, so I make it relatively frequently (much to my cardiologists chagrin). The pork belly braises in dashi for several hours in a low temperature oven which renders out a lot of the fat and releases a ton of collagen that makes the meat just melt in your mouth. I used this for the “plated dish” part of my audition today.

Here’s another winter Japanese dish called Nabe (which literally means pot). It’s basically a Japanese hotpot (aka steamboat) dish that you cook at the table. It’s a broth made from dashi with light soy sauce and mirin that you cook lots of veggies, some tofu, pork and mushrooms in. You can really put just about any combo of meat, seafood (I really like crab) and veggies in this one and it’s about the easiest thing in the world to make. It makes for a hearty warming meal yet it’s relatively light and healthy. You could easily make this vegetarian by omitting the pork and using a dashi made with kombu and mushrooms.

I took the liberty of topping this one with an onsen tamago (or slow cooked egg). If you’ve never had one before it’s a transformational experience because it’s not like any egg you’ve ever had before. I’m planning on posting a recipe for it later this week, so hang tight.


I’m a total novice when it comes to cooking Indian food, but I had some cauliflower and butternut squash in the fridge, so I made this veggie “tikka masala”. I use the term loosely because while it did have tomato and cream in it, I went a bit light on the cream so the tomatoes came through a bit too much.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this before, but I absolutely hate wasting stuff. I had some pizza dough left over from a few days back and it occurred to me that it might make good naan if cooked it on the stove in my cast iron skillet. This was the result.

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Oyster and Fava Bean Stew

Published
by
marc
on October 5, 2008
in Seafood and Soups & Stews
. 16 Comments

I’ve once again fallen delinquent in my posting. It’s not so much that I haven’t been cooking as much as the fact that I’ve been cooking without recipes, or more precisely that I’ve been cooking and not documenting the recipes. Part of it has been because it takes more time to measure out and document stuff, and part of it has been because the things I’ve been making (mostly Japanese) involve ingredients that most people probably don’t have lying around. I know that there’s nothing worse than seeing something that looks good and then realizing you’ll need to plunk down $50 in “exotic” ingredients to make it, or worse yet, that the ingredients aren’t even available in your area.

So I’ll leave it up to you. Leave a comment if you think I should blog about dishes that I make even if it means it doesn’t come with an exact recipe. I’ll post photos, maybe even talk about what went into it, but there won’t be any proportions or recipe to speak of. If enough people want it I’ll bring it;-)

Today’s recipe came together from random items in the fridge and some oysters I picked up today. It has a lot more vegetables than a traditional oyster stew, but I like the variety of texture and the sweetness the veggies impart. If you want it to be more about the oysters, you could omit the butternut squash and strain the stew before you add the roux.

I also used soymilk because that’s what was in the fridge (and it was surprisingly creamy), but if you feel like this is sacrilege, by all means, swap out the soy milk for real milk. If you wanna go for the full coronary, you could even add a bit of cream at the end.

This would also work well with some diced fennel in the moir poix, or with a splash of Pernod at the end. You could also add other seafood, like clams, shrimp or fish if you wanted to. I was also thinking that it would make a great filling for a pot pie, but you’d probably have to refrigerate the filling and put the oysters into the pie raw before going into the oven to prevent them from overcooking.

This one’s getting entered in the Marx Foods contest for the month. If you have a great oyster recipe, enter for a chance to win 4 dozen oysters (and tell them who sent you ;-).
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North African stewed veggies

Published
by
marc
on August 28, 2008
in Mediterranaen, Soups & Stews, Summer, Vegan, Vegetable and Vegetarian
. 13 Comments

Continuing along with the uncreative titles, here’s a veggie stew I put together using an abundance of fresh produce from the farmer’s market. It’s as simple as chopping stuff up and throwing it in a pot with some seasonings, but it does make for a wonderfully savoury meal despite the lack of meat.

Most of the umami comes from the onions and tomatoes so make sure you get the onions a bit caramelized and you use nice vine ripened tomatoes. I’ve always been too lazy to scrape out the seeds of tomatoes (plus it seems like such a waste), but for those like me, you’ve actually been doing the right thing. It turns out that most of the glutamates (yes, the natural cousin to monosodium glutamate… aka MSG), hangs out in the jelly that surrounds the seeds. By scraping out the seeds, you’re actually scraping out a lot of the flavour.

I served this with some red and yellow Quinoa for some extra protein, but it would also work great with some cous cous or flat bread. One of the great things about this is that you can really use just about any veggie. Squash, okra, green beans, carrots, or pumpkin would all work with the tomatoes and onions.
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Summer Veggie Stew

Published
by
marc
on June 28, 2008
in Soups & Stews, Vegan, Vegetable and Vegetarian
. 7 Comments

I almost hate calling this a stew because it doesn’t really do it justice. There’s no liquid added, so any sauce that develops comes out of the veggies, melding together and caramelizing in the pan to make a wonderfully hardy “stew”.

Its great on pasta, but I think it’s even better scooped up with soft flatbreads like a pita or naan.

For this batch I used some incredibly tender young summer squash along with sweet grape tomatoes, spring onions and fresh peas, but you could really use just about any mix of just-picked farmers market produce. For the seasoning I went with a home made Herbes de Provence mixture of fresh rosemary, lavender, sage and bay leaves, but it’s also great with sumac, lemon rind, and harissa.

While I included measurements below, they’re just guidelines. The idea here is to get the fewest pans, plates and utensils dirty, so do what feels right, taste it then adjust the seasonings until you’re happy.
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