Mayhem, the Musical!

Beans are not a fruit.

It is officially the end of Mayhem. Taneasha is almost home, and I’ve almost remembered to get stuff for dinners each day this week. Srsly, I eat way too much cereal.

I’ve got one more recipe from my time in the south, and it’s a true southern dish that starts with "the trinity". Now, of course with anything this quintessentially part of a cuisine, there will the various and assorted variations on ingredients, methods, and opinions on how to make it properly.

I think with a dish like this, there will also always be variations based on the ingredients at hand. I mean, this is not some kind of haute cuisine concoction that requires specifically harvested delicacies that only grow in one part of the world. This is budget food at its finest. Most recipes I’ve seen also call for a small amount of precooked meat added at the end. That there is called using up the leftovers folks. Basically it’s a vegetable protein and carb that were advertised as healthy in afterschool public service announcements.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKYNWFBkW8

(nope, I don't know how to make html tags to insert a video, deal with it)

The Schoolhouse Rock Gang were right! It’s damn tasty.

And cheap. And freezable. And infinitely variable.

(As usual, since I cook for one 90% of the year, the recipe I have written down is for as small a batch as possible. I‘ve found that  it’s much easier to double a recipe than to cut one in half. What you see us make is a quadruple batch!)

Red Beans and Rice

What you need

• ½ lb small red kidney beans, washed
• 6 oz pork sausage, diced (or, leftover ham, as you'll see)
• 4 C water or stock
• 1 med onion, chopped fine
• 1 stalk celery, chopped fine
• 1 bell pepper, chopped fine
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• ½ tsp cayenne pepper
• ½ tsp thyme, dried, or a bunch of fresh from the garden (what? me measure?)
• ¼ tsp salt
• black pepper, pinch
• curly parsley, fresh

What you gotta do

Do not soak beans.  That’s right, I said “do not.” I realize that some people are having hairy conniption fits right now but I’ve never understood this whole bean soaking thing. I mean, you’re going to cook them anyway. Besides, soaking beans requires way too much forethought. They take hours to cook as it is, which is more planning than I put into most meals (see reference to cereal, above). To soak them would require that I know a whole day ahead of time that I’m going to want beans for dinner.

Really the rest of the procedure can be summed up in the following sentence:  Put everything but the parsley in the pot and cook it all until the beans are done.

But I have a bunch of pictures and I figure you should have something to read in between them.

So, you start by chopping stuff. And checking through the beans to make sure everything in the package really was beans.

You put the beans in the pot and add the liquid.

We used 8 cups of chicken broth and 8 cups of water (quadruple batch remember) and... the Easter ham bone. Water alone will make a tasty batch of beans, but if you can get your hands on a ham bone… holy crap, these were some freaking awesome beans.

Put the bone in the pot and chop more stuff.

A nice glass of iced tea (or just tea as they apparently call it in the South where no one drinks "tea," or hot tea as they call tea) is handy to have during all the strenuous chopping.

Add the herbs and keep chopping. There really are benefits to cooking for only one person.

Add the spices and stir it all up.

You see that lovely deep burgundy bean colour? You’d totally lose that if you soaked them first.  Now, instead of throwing away that colour, it’s going to end up in your food and give the resulting broth a rich beany colour.

So really, all you have to do now is put it on the stove and walk away.

If you check after 45 minutes or so you’ll see that the beans are already starting to give up their colour.

After an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours, they’ve definitely changed colour.

After a few hours any meat left on that bone will be either in the pot already or perfectly willing to come off it.

And there was so much meat left on the ham bone that we decided to save the sausage for the next day and just use the ham. Look at us stretch the family food budget. ;)

So while I was picking the meat off the bones

which, for some reason, I find strangely soothing and will offer to do after every holiday dinner, Recipe Guy was mashing a few cups of beans and putting them back in the pot. Mashed beans are a fabulous way to thicken any gravy.

We added the ham back in,

chucked the bone, and added a little more salt. It’s really best to start this dish with as little salt as possible and correct at the end.

A scoop of rice, a scoop of beans, a handful of parsley and a dash of hot sauce. Or, if you’re me, 8 dashes of hot sauce.

And if you find a crawdad (aka land shrimp) hanging around on the property, make sure you cook them before you try to eat them.

They fight back.

Man, the amount of wild (aka free) food down there is just awesome for the family food budget. What’s your favourite budget meal?

Mayhem is Almost Over! Bread Pudding Part II

Yes, I know Taneasha posted Bread Pudding on Friday, but this isn’t the same thing at all. Bread pudding is one of those infinitely flexible dishes, like my biscuits or Taneasha’s baked potato. You can do just about anything with them.

Case in point: She cleaned out her fancy baking ingredient cupboard, and I dug wild things out of the dirt.

Recipe Guy and I got a ton of wild onions when we went digging in the yard, and that was just from one bunch. There were bunches all over the place. Until Mowing Man drove the John Deere into the front pasture, that is. Dammit. There goes the free food. Technically, it’s still there, but it’s no longer likely to reproduce and it’s a lot harder to spot. I mean, something that looks like this:

Kinda hard to miss.

When it’s hacked down to ground level? Not so much. Oh well, there were still berries in the back of the house and at the base of the power pole out front. Not to mention the herb garden. Herb gardens are lovely, fragrant, perennial and self-seeding. Very handy and very low maintenance if you’re looking for something to pretty up the front yard.  

And of course, you always have fresh herbs on hand. Like the dill we used in this recipe.  (No, there’s no dill in the pic above, the dill is on the other side and I don’t seem to have a pic of that side. You’ll just have to trust me that it’s there.)

Savoury Bread Pudding

What You Need:

• 1 large bunch of spinach
• 2-3 slices of cooked bacon
• 1 shallot or a few wild onions
• 1 tbsp bacon fat, butter, or olive oil
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
• 4 eggs (or equivalent)
• 1 c cream
• 3 c bread, chopped or torn into chunks
• 1 c grated cheese

What You Gotta Do:

You’ll want your spinach clean and ready to go before you heat the pan. The best way to get rid of any remaining dirt on the spinach is to put it in a sink full of cold water. The leaves will float, the dirt will sink. Plus, if your spinach is starting to look a little old and limp, a few ice cubes and a teaspoon of vinegar added to the water will perk it up nicely.

Once you’ve rinsed and dried your spinach leaves, stack a few of them on top of each other

and roll them up.

This works best if you put the biggest ones on the bottom. Now that you’ve got a nice little spinach burrito, slice it. Lovely shredded leaves. This technique works for any leafy green, from tender basil to mature romaine.

Dice the onions (or shallot, if you don’t happen to have wild onions in your yard) and the bacon, and drop them into a pan over medium heat. We started the pan with a tbps or so of bacon fat in it, but you could easily replace that with butter or olive oil.

It’ll take a few minutes for the onions to soften and the bacon to start sizzling again. Add the spinach and dill to the pan.

Cook until it's nice and wilted.

Assembling the pudding can be done any way you’d like.

Mix the bread, veggies and cheese all together; keep them separate, in layers;  any way you’d like… We mixed the bread and veg.

Any kind of bread will work for a pudding. A dense whole grain rye, a crusty baguette, or as we used, the soft centre bits pulled out of a giant loaf that we turned into a mufalletta sammich. Each will give the pudding a slightly different flavour and texture, and each is perfect for a savoury bread pudding.

Whisk together the eggs and cream.

The ingredient list says 4 eggs, but I had some egg whites in a container, so I used 3 eggs and the whites. Any combination will work, as long as you have the volume of about 4 eggs.

The custard for this pudding is pretty much exactly like the custard you’d use for a sweet bread pudding, only difference is in the seasoning. Taneasha used sweet vanilla, I added some nice hot cayenne.

Sugar and Spice, that’s what this is all about. ;)

Put half of the bread and veg mixture in the very well buttered small casserole dish and start sprinkling on the cheese.

Until it looks kinda like this:

Then the other half of the bread and veg mixture.

Now pour on the spicey custard (really, I’m so used to heat in my food that the tiny dash of cayenne wasn’t even discernable to me, but others noticed it, so I’m calling it spicey). The custard will soak into the bread, but you should have enough custard that it completely saturates the bread and squishes out if you poke it.

And then top with the rest of the cheese.

After it bakes in a 350 degree oven for about 50-60 minutes, a piece of spaghetti stuck in the middle will come out nearly clean (spaghetti’s longer than a toothpick and lets you actually test the centre) and the pudding will be golden brown and nicely puffed up.

The puff will soften as it cools, but it shouldn’t fall too much. If you’re planning on serving this to guests, I recommend doing it warm, fresh out of the oven while it’s still impressive and fluffy. It goes perfectly for dinner with a green salad, or as the centrepiece of a casual brunch.

For us, it was a handy little lunch that used up the almost wilted spinach.

It’s also the perfect thing to eat by the forkful right out of the fridge as you’re trying to decide what to have for a snack.

What do you eat straight from the container as you stand with the fridge door open?