Hearty Bean Soup

This soup recipe started as something my son's second grade class made while studying cooking and nutrition.  Each kid was sent home with a jar of beans and spices and some simple instructions, and the parents were to work with the child to prepare a soup using those ingredients and instructions, plus a few other staple ingredients noted in the instructions. 

That recipe made a simple but tasty bean soup.  I liked it quite a bit, and over the years I've revisited the recipe many times, customizing it to my taste over that period of time.   I made it again recently, for the first time in a few years, and after a bit more customization reflecting what I've learned about cooking over time, I'm even happier with it now than ever before.
First you make a simple beef broth by boiling a meaty soup bone (and, optionally, some marrow bones), skimming off the gunk that collects at the top, spooning off the fat and straining the broth before returning it to a stock pot with whatever bits of meat you can salvage from the bone.  That's pretty much all that was done in the original recipe, but the beef flavor was rather lacking in that version.  That's not too surprising, since it takes a fair bit of beef to make a hearty, beefy stock just by boiling meat and bones.  Over the years, I've punched up the meaty flavor by adding some soup base and this time - reflecting one of the standard Cook's Illustrated techniques - combining a bit of chicken stock with the beef stock.  

When I first read about this, I was suspicious, but the CI people are spot-on... combining the chicken stock (or broth) with the beef stock amps up the meaty flavor without making it taste like chicken soup. 

From there, one tosses in a few cups of beans, split peas and lentils, some seasonings and some sauteed vegetables, lets it all simmer for a couple hours, and voila!  You've got a tasty bean, beef and vegetable soup.   By cooking it long enough for the split peas to have mostly broken down and the lentils to have started doing so, you end up with a hearty soup with a thick broth.  It serves up great with a crusty bread, which comes in handy for sopping up the broth. 

Hearty Bean Soup

yield = 8-10 servings

1          1 1/2-2 pound meaty beef soup bone
2 1/2    pounds beef marrow bones (optional)
13        cups water
3          cups chicken stock (or broth)
10        teaspoons beef soup base
            (if you are using marrow bones, you need
             only 8 teaspoons soup base)
1 1/4    cups pinto beans
1          cup lentils (brown, or other variety)
1          cup split peas
1/2       cup great northern or navy beans
1/2       cup reed kidney beans
2          teaspoons dried parsley flakes
1 1/2    teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1 1/2    teaspoon table salt
1 1/2    teaspoon dried dill weed
1          teaspoon celery seed
1          teaspoon dried sage
1          teaspoon dried thyme
1/4       teaspoon crushed red pepper
2          tablespoons vegetable oil
1          cup finely chopped carrot
1          cup finely chopped celery
1          cup finely chopped onion
5          teaspoons minced garlic
1          15-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained

Beef soup bone and marrow bones.

Add the soup bone, marrow bones (if using) and water to a large stock pot.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer and allow to simmer one hour, skimming the foam occasionally.  Remove the soup and marrow bones.  Pull the meat away from the bone, removing gristle and excess fat, and discard all of the bones.  Let the broth cool a bit, skim off fat, then strain the broth and return it to the stock pot,  Return the shredded meat to the pot.  Add the chicken stock and soup base and start to reheat.

Pour the beans, split peas and lentils into a collander to rinse and pick over (it isn't that unusual to find small bits of gravel in bags of dried beans).  Add the beans, peas and lentils to the stock pot along with the parsley flakes, pepper, salt, dill, celery seed, sage, thyme and crushed red pepper.  Heat to a simmer.

Meanwhile, heat the vegetable oil in a saute pan over medium-high heat.  When the oil is hot, add the carrot, celery and onion and cook until the onion is clear and all the vegetables are softened (5-6 minutes).  Add the garlic, cook one minute, then stir the contents of the skillet into the stock pot along with the tomatoes.

Simmer partially-covered for 2 - 2 1/2 hours, stirring occasionally.  Taste, adjust seasonings as desired and serve with a crusty bread. 

Super-Flaky Morning Buns

Over the three-day New Year's weekend, I made breakfast each morning.  On Friday morning I made Cook's Illustrated's Best Blueberry Muffins, which were absolutely fabulous.   On Saturday - New Year's Day - I started the day out with Pear Fritters with Lemon and Ginger, taken from the most recent issue of Fine Cooking.  Those were also pretty darn good.   Could I go three for three?

I'd seen the recipe for Super-Flaky Morning Buns in the most recent issue of Cook's Country, and had thought they looked and sounded pretty good... a flaky breakfast roll flavored with cinnamon, sugar and orange.  They looked like a lot of work, but I figured if they turned out as nice as the ones in the pictures, it would be worth it, so I gave it a try.

I actually had to do a lot of the work on Saturday night.  That's when I made the dough, which uses the America's Test Kitchen routine of layering folding chunks of chilled butter into the dough, rolling it out, folding and rerolling it a few times in order to create thin layers of butter within the dough.  This technique worked well for making wonderfully flaky buttermilk biscuits, so it seemed a reasonable thing to try here.

Assembling the buns involved rolling out the dough, freezing it for a bit to keep the butter chilled, rolling it out soeme more, spreading a cinnamon-sugar filling over the surface of the dough, then rolling it up into a cyllinder and cutting that into individual buns, which were placed in a muffin tin and then refrigerated for at least 4 hours.   I got them ready a bit before bedtime and left them in the fridge overnight.

The next morning, the buns went through a routine of rising in a warm oven before being baked for about 45 total minutes.  At the end of that time, they were done.  

Mine unfortunately didn't look as nice as the ones pictured in the magazine.  Or, rather, a couple of them looked sort of close, but some others looked nothing like that at all.   The most striking thing about the pan of buns is that they didn't look anything approaching uniform.  Some were big and puffy, having overflowed the muffin tin, whereas others were squat and stunted-looking, not having risen at all.

They were nice and flaky, though, and the flavor was pretty good.   Not really good enough to justify all the time put into them, though.  Juli and I both agreed on that.  

I'm perfectly willing to blame the motley and misshapen appearance of some of the buns on me having messed up some aspect of the technique involved in rolling them out and slicing them for the muffin tin, but from what I can tell, everything else went well enough.  Thus, I'm inclined to think that while this recipe makes pretty good buns, they're nothing great.  My rating probably isn't helped any by the fact that I'd already made the incredibly-good blueberry muffins only a couple days earlier, and that they'd been truly great while taking a lot less time and effort. 

In any case, I don't plan to make these again.  Not bad, but not good enough to justify the amount of time and effort.

Tangerine Beef, v. 1.0

For awhile now, I've been working on a stir-fry recipe involving beef and tangerines.  Recently, I finally got around to trying out the preliminary version of the recipe.   The results were encouraging, but I've clearly got a bit more work to do on this recipe.

The basic idea for this recipe is pretty straight-forward:  Marinate thinly-sliced beef in tangerine zest and juice and some other seasonings, stir-fry some vegetables, then the beef, and finally toss everything together along with some tangerine slices for garnish.   Pretty straightforward, really.  With those basics in mind, I tossed around some ideas as to how to take those basic concepts and translate them into a recipe for a memorable and tasty dish.

The results from my trial run with this recipe were not bad, but not excellent, either.  The overall flavor was quite pleasant, but some of the flavors were a bit muted,  The fruity flavor was most notable, but the beef flavor in particular was quite subdued.  This probably has something to do with the fact that most of the thinly-sliced bits of flank stake more or less disintegrated while in the marinade.   The marinate so softened the beef that it fell apart as soon as it was added to the skillet.  This clearly wouldn't do.

I learned several things from this trial run.  The primary lessons are as follows:

1.  Next time, I need to add soy sauce.   I made a conscious decision to leave out the soy sauce, building the dish instead around the more subtle flavors of oyster sauce, sesame oil and just a bit of five-spice powder.   That was definitely a mistake.  The sweetness wasn't balanced by enough of a savory element.  Beyond that, soy sauce is full of glutamates (amino acids that intensify our sense of taste), making it one among the most potent flavor enhancers there is.  Next time I'll use a bit of soy sauce in the marinade.

Tangerine juice:  Potent flavor,
but it dissolved the beef!

2.  The marinade was two acidic.  I used the juice from two tangerines in the marinade, which came to about 1/2 cup.  I also sliced the beef very, very thinly.  The combination of the acid in the juice with the very thin slices of beef resulted in most of the beef slices falling apart.  The result:  rather than featuring pieces of flavorful beef, it tasted like vegetables with some hamburger mixed in.  This muted the beef flavor too much.  Next time I'll need to either reduce the amount of tangerine juice (to probably 1/4 cup) or cut the beef just a bit thicker... or maybe both.  I'll use more tangerine zest to preserve the fruity flavor.

3.  Next time, I should go a little bolder with the seasonings.  I wanted the dish to have a prominent citrus flavor, so I went light with the seasonings, so as to not overwhelm the tangerine.  This resulted in some of the spices - especially the black pepper and five-spice powder - being so faint an accent that they barely registered. 

4.  Skin the tangerine segments, and add them in the serving dish, not the skillet.  At the end of the cooking, I stirred one fruit worth of tangerine fragments.  I had peeled the tangerine before segmenting it, but I didn't peel the individual segments.  As a result, the tangerine pieces tasted a bit bitter, due to the bits of pith left behind by peeling.  Cooking enhanced that bitterness to an unpleasant degree.  Next time, I'll skin the individual pieces of tangerine and use them to top the stir-fry, as a garnish, rather than cooking or stirring them in, which would probably result in most of the fruit pieces falling apart. 

 So, what is printed below should be regarded as a work in progress.  It's still pretty good, but it could be a lot better.  I've started work on version 2.0, and will report back after I've given that version a test-run, but in the meantime, maybe some of our readers would be interested in giving it a try as-is and providing some feedback or suggestions.

Tangerine Beef

yield = 4 servings

3       tangerines
2       teaspoons minced garlic, divided
1       tablespoon oyster sauce
1       teaspoon honey
1       teaspoon Asian (dark) sesame oil
1       teaspoon grated, fresh ginger
1/4    teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder
1/3    teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1/4    teaspoon + 1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 pound beef flank steak, thinly sliced across the grain
2       tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
8       ounces crimini or button mushrooms, thinly sliced
12     ounces snow peas, trimmed
4       green onions, thinly-sliced, white and green parts separated

Use a vegetable peeler or zester to remove the peel from one tangerine in thin strips.  Squeeze the juice from two tangerines.   Put the tangerine zest and juice in a zipper-lock bag.  Add one teaspoon garlic, oyster sauce, honey, sesame oil, ginger, five-spice powder, black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon salt and the sliced beef.  Seal the bag, shake the ingredients to mix thoroughly and let stand 30 minutes.  Peel and segment the remaining tangerine.

In a large skillet, heat one tablespoon oil over medium heat.  Add mushrooms, remaining teaspoon of garlic an 1/8 teaspoon salt.  Cook about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, then add the snow peas and the white parts of the green onion and stir-fry another 3 minutes or so, until the snow peas are tender-crisp.  Transfer to a bowl or plate.

Add the remaining oil to the skillet and heat on medium-high until shimmering.  Add the beef and marinade.  Cook until the meat is no longer pink (about 4 minutes), then stir in the mushroom mixture and the green parts of the green onion.  Cook about a minute, then stir in the tangerine segments and cook until the green onions are wilted (about 1 more minute).  Serve over rice.

Cooking Tip:  Thin-Slicing Meat and Poultry

For stir-fries, Asian soups and so forth, you often want to cut meat and poultry into very thin slices, or even slivers, in the case of some soups.  This can be difficult, especially with softer cuts.  The best solution I've found:  either cut the meat or poultry while it is still partially frozen, or if you are working with fully-thawed or unfrozen meat or poultry, put it in the freezer for a half-hour or so, then slice it.  Frozen meat is more firm, which makes it a lot easier to thin-slice it.

In this particular recipe, the thinness of the beef slices worked against me, as the overly-acidic marinate completely broke down the thin slices of beef, but in general, this technique works like a charm.

Best Blueberry Muffins

On New Year's Eve, I got up early and tossed together a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast.  Talk about starting the day right... these were easily the best blueberry muffins either Juli or I'd ever had!

I made these muffins using the recipe for Best Blueberry Muffins from the May/June 2009 issue of Cook's Illustrated.  That recipe was written up by a woman who had once owned her own bakery, and who, after coming to the Test Kitchen, had decided to try to make a recipe for blueberry muffins as good as the ones she made in her bakery with fresh-picked, wild blueberries, but made at home and with store-bought blueberries.  I never tasted her bakery muffins, but I'll take her word that these are every bit as good, because I honestly can't imagine a blueberry muffin being better than the ones I made using her recipe.

These muffins tasted wonderful.... sweet, with rich blueberry flavor in every bite.  They were moist on the outside but almost crisp on the outside, and the lemon-sugar topping literally was crisp and crunchy.

The key to these muffins is that in addition to stirring whole blueberries into the dough, the recipe has you cook a cup of blueberries in a saucepan with a bit of sugar, cooking them down to make a sort of jam.   After pouring the batter into the muffin tins, you then stir a bit of the jam into each batch of dough.  Cooking down the blueberries into jam intensifies their flavor, and stirring the jam into the muffins before baking them results in that flavor permeating virtually the entire muffin.  The extra burst of flavor you get when you bite into one of the whole blueberries baked into the muffin pushes these muffins - and the recipe - over the top and into the realm of awesome culinary achievements.

I really can't say often enough or strongly enough how wonderful these muffins are.  All I can do is note that these have instantly earned a place among my go-to recipes, and encourage you to seek out a copy of the recipe and try them out for yourself.

Note:
As with all Cook's Illustrated recipes, the recipe for Best Blueberry Muffins is available at www.cooksillustrated.com with either a paid membership or a free, temporary membership to the website.

Potato Chowder and Easy Garlic Bread for a Blustery Day

It's gotten suddenly cold and blustery here in our little Iowa town, and that means comfort food is on the menu.  This is a pretty easy soup to put together, and if you have leftover ham from a holiday dinner, you can use some of it here.  Despite the milk, cream, and cheese, the soup heats up reasonably well even from a frozen state.  This is one of my son's favorite soups. 




Ian's Favorite Potato Chowder

1/4 cup butter
1 small onion, diced fine
8 cups diced potatoes
1 49-ounce can chicken broth
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
2 cups milk
2 cups half-and-half cream
4 cups grated cheddar cheese
2 cups diced ham
1 15-ounce can corn
1 15-ounce can creamed corn

1.  Melt 1/4 cup of butter in a large skillet.  Saute onions until cooked through.

2.  In a Dutch oven, boil potatoes in the chicken broth, adding cooked onions.

3.  When the potatoes are cooked, make a white sauce:  melt 1/2 cup of butter in the large skillet.  Blend in flour, salt, and pepper.  Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until smooth and starting to bubble.  Remove from heat, stir in milk and half-and-half.  Heat to boiling, stirring constantly.  Boil and stir for one minute.  Add the white sauce to the cooked potato mixture in the Dutch oven.

4.  Add the remaining ingredients and cook until cheese melts and all ingredients are heated through.

Cheater's Garlic Bread- this is so easy, it's not really even a recipe!  Buy a loaf of good Italian or French bread at the grocery.  Split in half, and spread generously with softened butter.  Sprinkle with a good quality garlic powder and dried parsley.  Close the two halves back together and wrap with foil.  Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, or until butter has melted.  Voila!  Garlic bread!  And you don't have to pay twice as much for the already-wrapped-in-foil loaves from the store!

Homemade Fruitcake

I've never been a fan of fruitcake.  Truth told, I've always actively disliked the stuff.  Every version I've ever had - from the mini-loaves Hostess inflicts on the public every Christmas through upscale mail-order versions - has been downright dreadful.  Gummy, flavorless chunks of dried fruit encased in leaden, chewy bread... no thanks.  The stuff seems better utilized as a doorstop or paperweight than a food. 

That said, I was surprised to find myself intrigued by a fruitcake recipe from a recent (Dec/Jan 2010/2011) issue of Fine Cooking.  The ingredient list actually sounded pretty good.   Real dried fruit, boiled and soaked in rum, sounded a whole lot better than the candied cherries one often encounters in fruitcake, and the batter promised to cook into a moist confection featuring cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and other warm spices, plus two of my favorite flavors:  Ginger and cardamom.  I already had some dark rum that sees frequent use in Caribbean barbecue sauces, so I checked out the selection of dried fruit in my pantry, went shopping for a couple more types of dried fruit and gave the recipe a try.

First thing I should note:  this fruitcake does not come together quickly.  One minces up the fruitcake and boils it, along with some orange zest, in rum, then lets it soak (refrigerated) in the rum for between 24 and 72 hours.  Then one makes up the batter, incorporates the soaked fruit, cooks it on low heat for 1 1/2 hours, brushes it with more rum, then wraps it up in plastic and foil and stows it away for a minimum of 48 hours before serving. 

In my case, the fruit got the full 72-hour soak, give or take a couple hours, and it rested in the wrappings for six full days before we finally gave it a try on New Year's Eve. 

This fruitcake is quite moist, and the fruit pieces are quite pleasant - flavorful and fairly tender for dried fruit, as opposed to the dried-out-gumdrop quality I've encountered in fruitcake before.  It smells really nice, and the bold, warm spices do stand out.  That said, we weren't big fans.  Juli and I found the fruitcake's flavor to be too boozy, by far. 

I don't drink, though Juli does.  I enjoy using alcohol in cooking, though, and I'm particularly fond of rum, but this one has way, way too much of it.  In addition to the rum soaked into the fruit and cooked into the cake, the fruitcake is also basted with rum after it's taken out of the oven.  We both found this amount of rum more cloying than pleasant.  Juli also thought the crystallized ginger was a bit too strong, though that didn't bother me.

Our not liking it doesn't mean some other people might not appreciate, it, though, so I sliced up half of the loaf and took it to work.   Several of my coworkers tried it, though some were dubious, relating the same sorts of experiences I've had with fruitcake in the past.  A few of them didn't like it, with their reactions being more or less in line with mine and Juli's.  One responded with the faintest of praise, "Well, it's edible.  For fruitcake, that's pretty good."   

However, most of those who gave it a try rather liked it, and several praised it.   So, it just goes to show that in food as with just about everything else, things not to some people's taste may be a big hit with some other people.   Clearly the time, effort and quality ingredients I put into the fruitcake paid off for several of my coworkers.

In summary, I don't think this is a bad recipe.  It produces a fruitcake vastly better than any I'd ever tasted.  It's simply not the sort of thing we like.  It's not our thing, but if you're wondering what a moist homemade fruitcake with a strong rum flavor would taste like, this might be perfect for you.

Chicken Piccata + Asparagus with Lemon-Cream Sauce

Flipping through The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook I received as an Xmas present, I quickly found a recipe I wanted to make:  Chicken Piccata.  Browned chicken cutlets covered with a savory lemon sauce... Who could pass that up?  Now I just had to decide what else to serve with it.

Having been pleased with the Asparagus with Garlic Cream Sauce I made recently, I decided to make up something similar to go with the Chicken Piccata.  After considering options, I decided to make lemon the common ingredient between the two dishes, adding both lemon zest and a bit of lemon juice to the cream.

I decided to also cook up some egg noodles, toss them with butter and a bit of chopped, fresh parsley and serve the chicken up atop the noodles.

The Chicken Piccata didn't brown up quite as nicely as I'd have wished, for reasons unclear to me.   This meant I had to cook it a couple extra minutes to get significant browning, and that resulted in the cutlets being less tender than should have been the case.   The flavor was exceptional, though, due to the sauce's mix of butter, lemon, sweet shallots and capers.   If all the recipes in this book are anywhere as good as this one, I'm going to love this cookbook.

The Asparagus with Lemon-Cream Sauce was also quite good, with the sweetness of the cream balancing out the sour of the lemon.  I think I'm going to have to come up with some different sorts of sauce to go with asparagus, because the cream sauces work out so well, I'm at risk of getting in a rut of making endless variants. 

The egg noodles went along very well with the chicken, and rounded out the dinner nicely.

Asparagus with Garlic Cream Sauce

yield = 3 servings

1       tablespoon unsalted butter
1       bunch of asparagus, trimmed
1/2    teaspoon minced garlic
1/2    cup heavy cream
1       tablespoon lemon zest
         salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat.   Add the asparagus in a single layer and fry, turning frequently with tongs, until the asparagus spears are soft and have a few darkened spots.  Transfer asparagus to a serving plate. 

Add the garlic and fry, stirring often, 1 minute.  Add the cream and lemon zest.   Stir frequently, until the sauce has reduced and thickened slightly, then stir in the lemon juice and cook another minute or so.  Pour over asparagus and serve.