Soul Food

There are so many choices out there, as many choices as there are people on this earth as far as what is considered soul food.

To me it's a meal that makes me feel warm inside, comforted, loved, appreciated. Not necessarily something I've cooked myself since it usually feels a lot better if it's from someone else. And it's usually something that I've eaten before since eating it again brings back memories.

For my husband, one of the meals I make that he considers soul food is a beef stew that simmers in the oven for a couple of hours with the smells permeating the apartment and I'm sure several other apartments above and next to us.

Angel's Beef Stew

1/2 kilo of lean beef cut thin. I pick mine up at the Vietnamese market since I know the meat is lean since it's from the front leg.
3 large carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/2 in. chunks
2 large stalks of celery, chopped into 1/2 in. chunks
2 large onions, peeled and cut into 1 in. chunks
1 head of garlic, peeled & roughly crushed with the flat side of my knife
3 tbsp extra light olive oil
5 large potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 in. chunks
3/4 liter of beef broth, low sodium brand
1 large tomato, seeded & cut into chunks (optional)
100 ml of tomato sauce or ketchup if all else fails
generous pinches of fresh ground pepper, kosher salt
generous pinches of dried oregano, thyme
1 tbsp of sweet paprika sprinkled over the potatoes
1 cup of brown flour *

In a large pot that can go from stovetop to oven over high heat; put the onion, garlic and celery. Stir and cook for a few minutes or until the oil disappears. In small amounts so the vegetables can caramelize, add some beef stock to keep everything from burning. Bring the heat down to med/high and continue to stir until the onions begin to be transparent. Add pepper, salt & herbs.

Add 1/3 cup of beefstock and start putting in your meat that's been dredged in the brown flour to the pot. Stir occasionally to keep things cooking evenly. Once the meat is done, should only take a couple of minutes. Add the carrots, the rest of the beefstock, tomato sauce and potatoes which have been dredged in leftover brown flour. If your pot doesn't seal well, put a sheet of aluminum foil over the pot and cover with the lid. This should create a tighter fit.

Put in a 375*F oven for 90 minutes. At the one hour mark, take stew out of the oven, stir it up to make sure that the vegetables all get equal time in the sauce. Put it back in for another 30 minutes. At the end of the 90 minutes, if the sauce is too thin, take the foil off and put the stew pot back in the oven with no lid for 15 minutes. This will thicken the sauce.

This makes enough stew for 2 hungry people over a 2 day period. It tastes even better reheated! Bon appetit

Brown Flour recipe
You will need:
a cast iron frying pan
your oven set on broil
1 cup of plain white flour

Put the flour in the cast iron frying pan, spread it out evenly and put it on the bottom rack of your oven with the broiler on. Keep an eye on it since the flour will begin to brown. Take it out every few minutes and stir up the flour so the browned parts mix in, level it off again and return to broiler. Keep doing this until the flour gets a rich tan/brown color after it's been mixed. Don't walk away from making brown flour or you will end up with black flour which is not very tasty.
The resulting brown flour can be used for thickening sauces and dredging meats instead of using the commercial preparations which are loaded with salt.

Ode to Pork, Oh Heavenly Food!

Yes Pork!

Who can present it more eloquently than Anthony Bourdain. The new season of No Reservations is set to begin in January and both my husband and I are drooling with anticipation of the new gustatory discoveries and challenges to his digestive system that Mr. Bourdain will exhibit for his never say die viewers.

A small taste of what is to come is in Mr. Bourdain's blog. Sri Lanka is dangled above our heads, still unreachable, tempting, just barely uncovered, just enough to whet our appetite for something new, something unusual. His wit and satire at times is poignant, makes you think, bitter sweet. Memories flash through of times gone by, foods never to be eaten again. Yet, there are new taste adventures out there to be experienced through the magic of television.

10 years ago, if someone had told me I'd develop an appreciation for foods thanks to Mr. Bourdain, I would have said "who? and huh?" It's been a long trip, filled with awe at times, longing at others, but always working towards the goal of discovery. Mr. Bourdain introduced me to Durian fruit, Pho, Curries, Sushi and many other dishes that this backwaters farm raised girl had never heard of. But it also made me realise that the foods we did consume on the farm were excellent.

The scenes relating to the joys of pork brought back fond memories of the fall slaughter, saving the blood for boudin, hands squishing the coagulating blood while mixing in the ingredients. Raw minced pork snagged from the growing pile of sausage on the table, quickly gobbled down while hearing mother yelling about worms and not caring. Why? Because it was that good.

Then the porcine head would be brought in from the shed, hosed off, tough hairs singed away with a blow torch, bits still clinging here and there. The tongue quickly removed and the rest of the head broken down into manageable pieces, and put into a large pot of boiling water with spices, onions, herbs, pepper, salt and boiled for hours until the meat fell off the bones. Then drained, left to cool down for a bit before removing all the meat to make 'fromage de tête de cochon' and serving the brains smeared on thick slices of fresh baked bread with lots of butter and salt. This would be quickly downed by the men before heading out to the barn to do the evening chores.

In the house, our work wasn't done yet. We ladled the meat from the head through a meat grinder to further reduce it, filled jars with the resulting mixture and poured a thin layer of the boiled down juices from the pot over to seal it. Then we'd carry those jars down to the basement to a cold room for later use during the winter. The sausage went to a neighbor with a smoke house. The rest of the meat was cut up into chops, the fesse de porc would also go to the smokehouse to come back as jambon, as did the belly and the fatback for bacon. Whatever was left after that would get turned into minced meat for freezing and later used for tourtière for Christmas and New Year's dinner.

When the men returned from chores, we'd all sit down to a supper of boiled potatoes and boudin. We didn't bother with casings, the boudin was cooked in pans in the old woodstove and cut up into serving pieces. Biting into a piece of pan boudin was like biting into a bit of heaven. It was creamy, sweet with onions and just felt so good going down.

This is the kind of food you can't buy. This is the kind of food you live. So thank you Mr. Bourdain for all that you do.