Braising

The Sunday Braise

~ Bergamot Orange ~ 1 Comment

BraiseWe’ve got some busy days coming up.  First of all, our architects are returning this week and you know what they will be bringing?  Site renderings!  They came twice last fall and interviewed every possible stake-holder in the school about what they would like to see in our new school building.  They’ve done aerial views and studied the engineering challenges of the site.  Now, it’s time to get our first look at the baby.  It’s going to be pretty thrilling, but it will entail a bunch more meetings.

Second, Allan and I are starting proper French class.  We’ve worked here and there on our own tutorials these past years, but we’ve always meant to get something consistent on the calendar.  Tuesdays after school, now, we will be in an actual class with some other colleagues (accountability…), a textbook, and homework.  Gulp.

Then, Allan has started co-coaching the soccer team which keeps him at practice until 5:00 PM.

This is all just by Wednesday, and I knew that if we wanted to eat proper food this week, I  had to get it not only planned ahead, but actually cooked, today.  Even before reading Michael Pollan’s book Cooked last spring, in which he dedicates an entire section to his Sunday braises, I had hit on that pattern, too.  The practically hands-free cooking, that allows you to get a few other things ready for the week, is reason enough to put a braise in the oven, but its beauty is multi-faceted.  First, you can make it using any meat (or none), plus any vegetables (or none), plus any liquid.  I generally don’t put beans in, but today I had some freshly-shelled fava beans, so I cooked them together.

The sequence is always the same.  You brown the meat, remove it and cook the vegetables until they are softened, then put is all back together and add some liquid:  water, stock, wine.  Cover it tightly and cook it for several hours on low, low heat, just so little heat bubbles are surfacing, slowly.  For the last half hour or longer if you choose, remove the lid and allow the liquid to reduce and the ingredients to caramelize.  You can eat the braise immediately or cool it and put it in the refrigerator.  The dish actually improves in flavor by 1 to 3 days in the refrigerator before serving, and you can reheat it all or just in servings.

A braise is a perfect way to use up vegetables and other flavor enhancements at the end of a week.  And now my tragic confession:  I was sorting through the fridge, making decisions about cooking components, when I came across my bottle of lemon olive oil that was basically finished.  Acting efficiently, I filled the bottle with warm water to soften all of the remaining lemon pulp and the chilled oil and ran it down my garbage disposal.  Not until I was building the braise did I regret that I hadn’t put all of that flavor into my pot.  The lemon pulp would have completely dissolved into the sauce and been absorbed by the meat and fava beans.  I won’t make that mistake again.  From now on, the bottom of the bottle goes into the braise.

Chicken and Fava Bean Braise

Ingredients

  • 8 chicken thighs or other pieces
  • Rosemary salt
  • Freshly ground pepper
  • Hot paprika
  • 6 Tbsp. olive oil
  • 3 leeks, chopped
  • 2 shallots, chopped
  • 3 large cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 2 carrots, chopped
  • 1 fennel bulb, chopped
  • 2 mild green peppers, chopped
  • 2 cups parsley, chopped
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 3 cups fresh fava beans, shelled
  • 2 cups chicken stock
  • 1 cup white wine
  • 1/2 cup of lemon olive oil pulp (optional)
  • Fennel fronds
  • Cured black olives
  • Grated lemon rind

 Rub chicken pieces with salt, pepper, and paprika.  Heat oil in heavy-bottom, Dutch oven and brown chicken on all sides.  Remove chicken from pan.  Add leeks, shallots, fennel, and garlic.  Cook until vegetables are beginning to soften.  Add peppers, parsley, bay leaves,  and fava beans.  Soften slightly.  Place chicken on top of beans and vegetables.  Add chicken stock, white wine, and lemon olive oil pulp, if using.  Cook at 300 degrees for 2 hours, monitoring frequently for liquid level.  Add more if needed.  Remove lid, increase heat to 350 degrees.  Cook until liquid is reduced and ingredients have caramelized. Serve immediately, or cool and chill in the refrigerator for 1-3 days.   Garnish with fennel fronds,  olives, and lemon zest, if using.

Getting off Auto

~ Bergamot Orange ~ 2 Comments

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I want to take photos.  I am so weary and mortified by the silly representations of things and life I have posted on the internet.  I have gotten by with some close up trickery, but I don’t know what the heck I’m doing.  I took the plunge last summer and bought a true DSLR with a couple of lenses.  Having not had lenses before, I read research and then bought what I thought would be great for me:  an 85mm macro lens and a wide-angle zoom, something I have wanted for years for taking shots of my carpets and room interiors.  It turns out that I have lenses for two extremes now:  super close and super wide.  My son says it’s like I am trying to dig a hole and I have a teaspoon and a backhoe.  Surely, my next camera purchase will be a mid-range telephoto lens.

But lenses aren’t my biggest challenge.  Using the settings on my camera is.  I had an introduction to settings last fall through a technology class I was taking and now, some colleagues at school have formed a little club.  We meet once a month, bringing a photo to share along a certain theme or technique.  The first meeting in January, I brought a photo I had taken in Vienna in November.  It was nice and showed a good use of the “proportion of thirds”.  But at the end of the meeting, a fellow photographer tossed down the gauntlet, “Let’s always post our camera setting when we show our photos.”  I was outed.  I was still just shooting my new fancy camera on Auto.

Second meeting, the theme was “love”.  I figured out how to adjust my shutter speed and aperture and I did spend a couple of hours one Sunday afternoon photographing a still life of Tunisian food products I had gleaned from the countryside and the markets that weekend:  things I love.  I tried every aperture setting and a few different shutter speeds and in the end, I just had a picture of some food sitting on my kitchen counter.  I complained to my son, “I did all of this adjusting and I still didn’t get an amazing photo.”

He challenged, “Well, what were you trying to use the settings to do?”

I didn’t exactly know, and there was the problem.  It was getting late and I needed to email my photo to the organizer so she could make a slide show for the next day.  I said, “I just won’t go to the meeting.  I’ll wait until I know what I’m doing and can take a better photo.”

Again, my son, who has been a vocal performance major for the past three years said, “Yep, that’s what singers think, too.  They think they will just continue working on their own in a practice room and only come out when they are good enough.  It’s intimidating to go in front of your peers when you know you’re not very good, but you grow a lot by showing what you can do and also by studying their work.”

So I went to the meeting and I cringed when my photo came up, but I made a new vow to work at this.  It’s not just going to come easily to me, but I want the skill.  I am mortified, at the moment, because I can clearly see the difference between what I want and what I take, but hopefully, that vision will help take me toward a better photo.

This made me think about teaching children.  Sometimes I get frustrated with kids who won’t put aside trying to cover up their reading and writing deficiencies.  It looks obvious to me that a learner must just jump in and start practicing the skills at whatever level he or she is at.  That is the way to make progress.  But kids don’t automatically know that or believe you when you tell them that.  And as I relived this week, it is embarrassing to put your deficiencies out in front of peers.  It is good to have re-experienced this.  I hope I can keep that empathy with my struggling learners.

I am going to post photos here, frequently.  And I am going to post my settings as an act of accountability, until I find it so pretentious that I can’t do it anymore.  (All of these pictures were at a shutter speed of about 200 and aperture of 2.5-2.8).

I have been brining this week and when I think of brining, I picture a 20 lb. turkey in a 5-gallon bucket set out in a cold garage a few days before Thanksgiving.  It was a small revelation to me that I could brine a smaller cut of meat, such as a lamb shoulder, in a pot that can nicely fit in my refrigerator.  It took nothing to mix some salt and sugar with water, plop in my piece of meat, and leave it for a couple of days.

Simple Brine

1/4 cup sugar, 3/4 cup kosher or course sea salt to 10 cups water

 

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This is the second of the fantastical broccoli found at the market this week.  Now and then, we get this purple-tinged variety and I try to find a use worthy of its beauty.

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Here is how I used both the brined lamb shoulder and the broccoli.  Bon Appetit did an article, in the February issue,  on the Saltimporten Canteen in Malmo, Sweden.  The intent of this sliding-metal-door-fronted restaurant is to bring up the simple qualities of excellent ingredients, without much culinary trickery.  That is something I need reminding of in both food and photographs.  I would love to enjoy this Lamb and Broccoli Stew on a cold Saturday, sitting outdoors at long wooden tables with fun people.