Today, I'm home with a cold. I wanted some comforting, nourishing soup, so this is what I made.

Butternut Apple Bisque

1 butternut, peeled, seeded, and cubed
1 large cooking apple, peeled, cored, and quartered
4 cups strong chicken stock
3 small yellow onions, minced
Fresh rosemary, about 12 leaves, finely minced
2T butter
2T sherry
1 cup whole milk
Salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste

Sauté the onion and rosemary in butter, then deglaze the pan with the sherry. Simmer the butternut in the stock until nearly soft, then add the apple and onion mixture. Simmer until the butternut and onions are very soft, about ten minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup. Add the milk, about a teaspoon of salt, a generous grind of pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg to start, mix well, then season to taste.

Pork and Beans

A five-pound pork shoulder roast, oven-braised all day with barbecue seasonings and navy beans until the large chunks of pork fall apart, tender, and the beans are firm yet creamy through to the center.

This is a classic American dish, rendered unrecognizable by the commercial products that have replaced it for more than a generation.

Pork and beans, beans and wienies, and similar dishes can all trace their roots back to cassoulet, a French peasant dish of white beans, slowly stewed with mixed meats that vary but often include pork shoulder, garlic sausage, and duck confit. It's rich, hearty food, and this American descendant is no exception.

One thing you know for sure about the pork and beans you buy in a can: it never has enough pork. This recipe has got a ton of pork in it. Delicious, melt in your mouth pork shoulder.

Pork and Beans

Ingredients
5 lbs pork butt or shoulder, cut into rough 3" cubes
2 cups of dry navy beans, rinsed well and soaked overnight in a quart of water and a teaspoon of salt
8 cups meat stock (I used 6 cups chicken and 2 cups beef)
6 or more cloves of garlic, chopped
2 yellow onions, chopped
2 apples, cored and chopped
1/2 cup molasses
A bay leaf
1/4 cup tomato paste
1T paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp dry mustard
2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper

Season the pork with the paprika, oregano, mustard, salt, and pepper.

Put all of the ingredients into a roasting pan and bake at 300 degrees, stirring every half hour, until the beans are thoroughly cooked. If the mixture seems too dry for the beans to absorb liquid, add more stock. It takes several hours for the beans to be done; at that point, the pork should already be falling-apart tender, and the onions and apples will have completely disintegrated.

Serves two men for a week.

The Basics: How to Cook Brown Rice

This is the most basic recipe I can imagine: rice and water. So why is it so hard to find a simple, foolproof recipe for the most basic things? Even Bittman, my go-to guy, is cagey about it. Either, he can't make it simple enough—is butter necessary?—or he won't commit to how much water it takes. And that's in his big yellow book. Complicated, show off recipes abound on the internet. Finding someone who will show you how to chop collard greens and steam them, that is an internet gem. Here, I will tell you how to make brown rice.




The coveted rice pot is the saucepan on the back right burner, behind the pasta pot (which I use to steam vegetables), and catty-corner from my favorite iron skillet. Take a bow, beauties: these are the hardest working cookware in my kitchen.

Brown rice is the staple without equal in the hippie universe. It is the basis of a macrobiotic diet, and was adopted with fervor by vegetarian and omnivore hippies alike in the seventies. Think Laurel's Kitchen, and the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks. Hippie cuisine has matured over time, and can get as fancy as you like: one of my favorite restaurants is the vegan macrobiotic Zen Palate in NYC. But it's a favorite because I don't cook that highbrow at home. Many of our meals start with about a cup of brown rice.

I have been making my rice like this for several years. I nearly always use the same pot, because it is the right size—a one-quart saucepan—and because it has a matching, properly fitting lid. Many of my pots have suffered concussive injuries, rendering them incapable of holding a lid in a tight fit. In other cases, pots are the right size, but have a vented lid, either the kind that looks like it's sneering, or the kind that are holes in the top that cannot be closed; in the case of the latter, this is also sometimes the result of taking a beating. The kitchen is the most dangerous room in the home, for cookware. I guard this saucepan for its rice making prowess, and if it were to die, I'd have to replace it. I have my oatmeal pot, but it has a sneering lid, so it takes longer to cook rice in.

When you are selecting your own perfect rice pot, choose one that is relatively light. This is not the job for your Dutch oven. About one to two quart capacity, max, with a good, unvented lid.

Some people slavishly rinse their grains before cooking them. When it comes to washing dried beans and lentils and dried grains and similar items, I'm concerned with anything that will affect flavor or texture, and wash accordingly. If it looks clean, not dirty or dusty, that's good enough for me. Other dry bulk goods need a good scrubbing: for example bulghur, which retains odors, and navy beans (usually dirty) and quinoa, which needs to be especially harshly dealt with before cooking, or the naturally occurring saponins will make it taste like soap. I rinse rice in a sieve before I start, but it won't affect the cooking instructions if you do.

Plain Brown Rice

About 6 servings

Ingredients:
2 cups organic brown basmati rice
3 ¼ cups water

Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the rice, lower the heat, and put the lid back on. Cook undisturbed on very low heat for 40 minutes. Turn off the heat, and leave the lid on. Wait 5 minutes, minimum, to fluff with a fork and serve. Yields 7 cups.

Hard core soft drinks

So there's slow food, and then there's sloooooow food. The thing about slow food is, it takes time. Usually we're just talking clock time, as with a meatloaf. Right now I'm baking a "Yes, We're Out of Onions" meatloaf. I can tell you how it is in about an hour. Sometimes slow food stretches out into calendar time. The ambitious menus planned for holiday and party spreads require scheduling at least some of the food prep and cooking for days before the event.

Lately I'm getting into brewing soft drinks, which stretches into the weeks in prep time. Last week I invited a few select friends for a root beer float party. Rain kept some away, so we were an especially small and cozy group, sipping the frothy heads off homemade root beer poured over scoops of homemade vanilla bean ice cream.

Root beer takes a week, ice cream about an hour and a half. The root beer recipe is from my co-op's newsletter. Coincidentally, I am on the cover of this issue.

Root Beer

Source: River Valley Market newsletter, July 2009

Makes 4 liters. Note: Fermented with yeast—may have slight alcohol content.

INGREDIENTS:

1/4 oz dried sassafras root bark
1/4 oz dried birch bark
1/4 oz dried sarsaparilla root
1/8 oz dried licorice root
1" piece unpeeled thinly sliced fresh ginger
1 split vanilla bean
4 qts filtered water
2 cups molasses
1/8 tsp active dry yeast

DIRECTIONS:

1. Place the herbs in a medium pot with 2 qts filtered water; bring to boil. Remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 2 hrs.
   
2. Strain root-infused liquid through cheesecloth-lined sieve into a very clean plastic container. Discard solids.
   
3. Add 2 qts filtered water, stir well, and let cool to 75 degrees.
   
4. Wash four 1-liter plastic soda bottles with hot, soapy water. Rinse well and air-dry. (I bought new half-liter brown plastic bottles from the friendly neighborhood brewing supply company to use for my soft drink projects.)
   
5. Stir molasses and yeast into root-infused liquid; cover and set aside to let ferment for 15 minutes.
   
6. Using a funnel, pour into bottles, filling to within 2" of top but no higher. Screw lids on tightly; ferment at room temperature for 12 hrs. Chill 2-5 days. After 2 days, root beer will taste strongly of molasses; 5 days will yield a milder beverage.
   
7. When ready to drink, open bottles very slowly, easing caps open little by little, to let any excess gas escape gradually.
   
8. Serve over ice or with vanilla ice cream.
   

The foam from the root beer is sometimes of the delayed sort. The first bottle I opened and drank, I'd been sipping for at least a minute when it suddenly began gushing. I recommend you pour the beer into a glass for drinking. For root beer floats, put two or three scoops of vanilla bean ice cream into a glass, then slowly pour root beer over it. The combination of this particular root beer with vanilla ice cream is creamy and delicious.

The beer is mildly alcoholic, is slightly thicker than a commercial root beer, with a stronger molasses flavor. There is less of the spearmint flavor I usually associate with root beer. It tastes a little like a porter. I think the next time I make this, I will try using more of the first three ingredients, which smell to varying degrees like spearmint. That said, I'm pretty fond of this batch and have been drinking the rest of it steadily. I am saving one to trade with a friend later this week. She's made hard lemonade.

Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 pint heavy cream
1 vanilla bean

Makes about 5 cups.

DIRECTIONS:

1. Beat the egg in a large bowl until it begins to froth.
   
2. Scrape the seeds from the inside of the vanilla bean, and add them with the sugar to the egg. Beat until the sugar dissolves.
   
3. Add the milk and cream and beat until well mixed.
   
4. Freeze ice cream in an ice cream maker, according to your product's manual.
   

My next brewing project is under way: ginger beer. I'm following the recipe in Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, which calls for creating a ginger "bug," then brewing and fermenting for three weeks. I still have two weeks to go before I can say how it turns out.

Green eggs and ham: part of this complete breakfast

I just noticed that the colors in this breakfast are those traditionally used in Mardi Gras decoration: yellow, green, and purple. Also topical because Dr. Seuss' birthday is tomorrow.

This is the kind of breakfast I make for myself on a weekday, when I've got the whole morning to get ready for work, I'm full of energy, and don't have any chores waiting for me. Every morning, I share a pot of coffee with Kevin, and we both have fruit smoothies. Weekdays, he leaves for work with a container of oatmeal or some peanut butter toast to eat at mid-morning, and I'll often have the same, instead of or in addition to a couple of scrambled eggs. Not long ago, I put some herb butter in my morning scramble, and was so amused to have made green eggs that I bought some ham so I could make Green Eggs and Ham. I like them, Sam-I-Am.

The herb butter is a simple blend of equal parts parsley and cilantro, with a little garlic, salt, and pepper. Use two cups of fresh herbs like these, or a lot less of more potent herbs like rosemary, fresh citrus zest, or anything dried, with two cups of butter, blended in the food processor. If it's not moving smoothly in the food processor, add a little olive oil until it does. It keeps beautifully in the fridge, for more than a month, and goes on all kinds of things: plain rice or steamed vegetables, on chicken or fish, in eggs.

When my bananas get ripe, I peel the whole bunch and freeze them, for use in smoothies and baking. I use vanilla soymilk because we get it cheap in shelf-stable quart packages. Do not follow my poor environmental example on this. Use any kind of milk, but if it's unsweetened soymilk, add a teaspoon or more of sweetener, like maple syrup.

Smoothie

Serves 2

2 bananas, frozen
11 strawberries, hulled and frozen
½ cup frozen blueberries
1 cup yogurt
Cold milk to measure (about 2 cups)

Put the fruit and yogurt into a 5 cup capacity blender. Pour milk to the 16 oz line on the blender. Blend on the highest setting until the particles of blueberries are the size of coarsely ground pepper. Serve right away.

Green Eggs and Ham

Serves 2

4 eggs
2 oz diced ham
2 T herb butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat an iron skillet on high. Add the diced ham and toss while the skillet heats.
Beat the eggs with a little salt and pepper. When the skillet is hot, add the eggs, then the herb butter. Toss the eggs with the ham and herb butter gently until they are firm.

Stock

Having a large and varied collection of homemade stocks in my freezer makes me feel warm and contented. It goes in sauces, soup, chili, and stews. When I want extra flavor, I use it in place of water for braising or steaming, reheating foods, and to cook beans or grains. It goes in risotto, in prodigious amounts. I can never have too much stock on hand. Someday when I learn to can, I will can my stock instead of freezing it. For now, I have a freezer full of quart Ziplock bags, labeled with a black Sharpie as to their contents and birthdate.

Stock is how to upgrade the water in a recipe. It's the way to get more beef flavor into beef stew than you get from the amount of beef in the recipe. It is the way to make chicken soup with twice the cold-killing power of chicken. In vegetarian dishes, roasted vegetable stock provides a powerhouse of umami, that meaty, rich, and satisfying fifth flavor, after salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Stock is what bouillon wishes it could be.

I made a pot of chicken stock recently, not because I am low on chicken stock, but because I am rich in bones. Most of the chicken we eat, I buy whole and rotisserie or oven roast. If the whole chicken comes with a neck or any other organ meats, I save them. After carving off the breast meat, legs, and wings of a roasted chicken, I freeze the rest of the carcass, with the raw neck and organs, in a gallon Ziplock bag. When I have a quantity of chicken bits, and time to make it, I do. On a day such as this, when I'm off from work and have some cooking to do, I'll make a big batch of stock and stick around the house while it simmers, keeping it stirred and not boiling too hard. Maintaining a gentle simmer the whole time, not boiling, gives the stock a lighter, more delicate color and flavor, while rapid boiling can bring out bitter flavors.

When I have a quantity of some other kind of bones or scrap meat, I'll make a batch of stock. When I roasted a whole duck recently, I made some stock the same night, rather than wait for another duck to fall into my lap, and the last time I bought a pound of unpeeled shrimp for pad Thai, I did the same thing. Shrimp stock is the easiest: just shells and a little salt. For poultry, and meat stocks, I add bay leaf, sometimes a little thyme, lots of parsley, an onion, a couple carrots, and some celery or celeriac. Use the same for a fish stock, and keep white, mild fish bit for stock together, and stronger fish like salmon separate from both the milder fish and each other.

Livers are the only organs I don't put in stock, because they have a very strong, unstocklike flavor. I save these separately, and when I have a pint or more, I make a batch of chopped liver. I hear they're tasty wrapped in bacon and broiled, too. I might actually try this with duck bacon for Passover.

Roasted vegetable stock is made of a mixture that includes carrots, celery, potatoes, onions, mushrooms, and any other vegetables you want to use. You don't want to use a lot of cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, and their relatives—because they make the stock strongly cabbage-y. Likewise, any very strong flavors, like sea vegetables, should be used sparingly. I don't include garlic in the recipe here; you can add it, it's best roasted, and keep the amounts small, as it can be an overpowering flavor. You can always add garlic and other strong flavors to the recipes you're using the stock in, but you can't take them out.

The vegetables I listed above are the ones I always use, and the rest depends on the season. I have made summer stock with eggplants and zucchini, winter stock with turnips and parsnips. Both kinds come out a rich brown from the caramelized vegetables. Wash them thoroughly, but don't bother to peel them, and only trim bad parts, not stems or dry parts, like outer layers of onions. Roast the vegetables, then use them to make stock with the fresh herbs and seasonings. You can add dried mushrooms to the stock, as well as the strained water in which you reconstitute the mushrooms.

The amounts of meaty bits and vegetable and water will always vary somewhat from batch to batch. As long as you use sensible ratios of meat and vegetables, herbs, and water, what you make will be better than water. Usually, I get as much stock out as I put in water, cup for cup.

All-Purpose Stock Recipe

The recipe may be doubled or halved. Make sure you have a big enough pot.

3-5 lbs of meaty bones: raw and/or previously cooked meat, bone, and connective tissue; or
a similar quantity of fish parts (heads, fins, tails, bones, skin) or scraps from shrimp (shells, legs, heads); or
a similar quantity of raw vegetables (see discussion above, particularly for shrimp and vegetable stock variations)

1-2 cups fresh parsley
2 roughly chopped, unpeeled yellow onions
2 ribs of celery or equivalent amount of celeriac
3-5 carrots
1 bay leaf (optional)
Few sprigs fresh thyme, oregano or marjoram (especially in meat stocks), or dill (in chicken or fish) (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Water to cover (about 2 quarts)

For vegetable stocks, follow these steps:

1. Chop all of the vegetables including onion, celery, and carrots, into pieces of similar size. Toss the pieces in a large roasting pan with ¼ cup olive oil, 1 tsp salt, and ½ tsp pepper. Roast at 400 degrees F, tossing the vegetables every ten minutes, until deeply browned on most sides, about 40 minutes or longer, depending on how crowded the pan is and how small the vegetable pieces are.
   
   
2. Remove the vegetables from the pan. Set the pan on the stove top and turn the burners on low. Pour a cup of wine into the pan—red or white is fine, the drier, the better— and gently scrape the carmelized bits off the bottom of the pan. Let the wine bubble for a few minutes and get all the good stuff, off the bottom and sides of the pan, dissolved into the wine. Turn off the heat and set this aside.
   

If you're using raw meaty bits, you may choose to roast them in much the same manner as the vegetables, above, including deglazing the pan.

1. Put all of the ingredients in a very large stock pot, including liquid from deglazing the roasting pan, and water used to reconstitute dried mushrooms (if you use this, strain it well for sand before adding to the stock pot). The ingredients should not fill the pot more than about three-quarters of the way.
   
   
2. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a very gentle simmer. Simmer the stock for as little as 30-45 minutes for very delicate matter like shrimp scraps and mild fish, a couple of hours for vegetable stock, or longer for meat, until flesh falls from bones and marrow cooks out of large bones. Do not overcook. Do not serve the boiled meat dressed as a salad or in soup, either: it's tasteless.
   
   
3. Strain the stock through a colander into as many bowls as it takes, pressing down on the vegetables to release the liquid. Throw away the strained matter.
   
   
4. Rinse the stock pot thoroughly. Strain the stock through a sieve, from the bowls back into the stock pot. Stir and taste for salt and pepper, adjusting the seasonings as desired.
   
   
5. Let the stock cool thoroughly. You can remove excess fat from the top of cooled or (much easier) refrigerated stock, though this is not usually necessary. Stock will keep for several days in the refrigerator, or more than a year in the freezer. Fat will keep for a month in the fridge, more than a year in the freezer.
   

Tip: Store stock in the quantities you typically use. I store it in quarts for stews and risottos, and in cups for when I just need a little to braise or make a sauce.

Adventures in meat: eye round roast (beef)

I sent Kevin to a local farmer's meat market, with some vague instructions to get some meat. He got there a little late, so the supply was somewhat picked over, but he did get a nice big sirloin and some pork chops. He also brought me an eye round roast, which I've been playing with.

Eye round is not a great cut of meat. I've heard one customer talk enthusiastically about how tender this cut is, but this is a very relative statement to make. The "round," which is from the rear end, is not a tender piece of beef. Most round gets ground for burger. You can buy a bottom round roast or sometimes top round steaks, but you don't really want to roast or grill these: they are far too tough. Mark Bittman, in How to Cook Everything, is fairly dismissive of the round in general, and advises home cooks to stick with the classic steaks: the ribeye, the strip, the sirloin and tenderloin.

I hadn't yet consulted Bittman when I began making plans for the eye round. I thawed the roast and unwrapped it last night. The meat was very deeply red, almost purple, with very white fat. This is a good sign. I've come to expect this kind of color from grass-fed meat. The roast was also pretty lean, but not exceptionally so for this cut. Eye round is very lean.

I whacked off what I judged to be about a pound of the roast. A typical eye round is about five pounds. I sliced the pound into thin strips and marinated the beef in a mixture of tamari, sesame oil, and some sliced green onions. While the beef marinated, I peeled and sliced a turnip and a parsnip, and cut up two portobello mushrooms. I stir-fried the beef in some oil, garlic, and ginger, removed it, added the vegetables, added some mung bean sprouts left over from pad Thai earlier this week, and the rest of the bunch of green onions. It was fantastic.

Definitely, definitely marinate and thinly slice your eye round. It is not tender, but it is tasty. My plan for the next chunk of this roast is to marinate it for fajitas.

Beef Stir-Fry with Winter Vegetables

1 lb eye round beef (or other stir-fry beef), sliced into ½"-square strips, 3-4" long
½ cup tamari or soy sauce
¼ cup sesame oil
7-8 green onions, sliced into ¼" rounds
1 small turnip, sliced into ¼" sticks
1 large parsnip, sliced into ¼" sticks
2 portobello mushrooms, sliced into ½" pieces
2 cups mung bean sprouts
2 T garlic, minced
1 T ginger, minced
2 T canola oil

Marinate the strips of beef in a mixture of the tamari, sesame oil, and half the green onions for 30-60 minutes.

Heat a wok or heavy-bottomed pot on a high flame. Add the canola oil. When it is hot, add the garlic and ginger, then the beef. Stir-fry for a few minutes, until the beef is browned on all sides. Remove the beef to a bowl.

Add the turnip, parsnip, and mushrooms to the wok. Stir fry for several minutes until a piece of root vegetable is slightly soft on the outside, but still has a little bit of bite.

Return the beef to the wok and add the mung bean sprouts and the remaining green onion slices. Adjust tamari, or add salt and pepper to taste. Serve over rice.