Bigos!

The Christmas holiday season truly is one of my favorite times of the year. I enjoy the chance to pause and reflect with friends and family. I enjoy giving gifts and repeating traditions (some silly) year after year. And perhaps most of all, I enjoy the food. And of all the food I enjoy, bigos is my favorite.

Bigos is - as I understand it - the general term for Polish Hunters Stew. I learned about it and learned to love it from Meg shortly after I first met her. Her family has roots in Poland and through a combination of family lore and modern tradition, Meg started making this wonderful dish during the Holidays. These days, as Meg is a vegetarian, the bigos is part of a holiday hiatus where tradition trumps health concerns and we indulge in several meat dishes.

As I understand it, the specific recipe for bigos is mostly dependent on what the hunters bring home. Ours is adapted from an adaptation of a recipe The Best of Polish Cooking and includes pork, kielbasa, bacon, lots of cabbage and sauerkraut, mushrooms, red wine and ... you get the idea. You cook the main ingredients down for several hours before it gets finished with a sort of tomato and mushroom roux. The recipe calls for it then to be chilled overnight and reheated adding fresh red wine before serving. It also says it peaks around the third day!

 
Meg asked me today when we had this year's bigos - reheated for lunch - how this batch compared to previous years. The bigos had just been reheated for the second time; I replied it was the best ever!

Spicy Beans with Coconut Milk

Last night we made one of the easiest and most delicious good for you meals you can imagine: a spicy mix of beans, tomatoes, coconut milk over rice. Its an incredibly easy dish to make, is very good for you and provides considerable spice and tang. 

As with most delicious things you start by sautéing chopped onion, then adding garlic and then the key: red Thai curry. This is where the heat comes from so tune this part carefully. We backed off of the recipe slightly using about 1½ tablespoons of curry paste instead of the full 2 the recipe calls for. Then in goes canned beans, tomatoes, coconut milk. Along with this goes lime zest and lime juice and this is the tang that adds to the excitement.

Bring all this to a boil and let it simmer while you make the rice. When the rice is done you are ready to go. This is not only simple but has a great flow to it.

By the way, we thought the 1½ tablespoons of curry paste was pretty close to perfect. Definitely quite spicy but not overpowering.

Buvez: We tried a new Dogfishhead Imperial IPA which was wonderful.

Scallops with Chipotle-Orange Sauce.

Cooking on Friday nights can be tough. After a long work week, cooking a nice dinner can be a nice distraction but can also be ... just a little more than I feel like doing. With this in mind, and leveraging a sale on scallops at the Co-Op, we made one of our favorite easy dishes last night: Scallops with Chipotle-Orange Sauce.

Its a simple recipe where you brown the scallops with a little salt and paprika, then set them aside and reduce a sauce of orange juice and chipotles in adobo. Oh yes, there is a bit of butter thrown in as well which never hurts. When Meg first found this recipe we wondered how the scallops would stand up to the chipotles and indeed this is a tricky balance.

I've made it a couple times before and it has always hinted at excellence but I've always missed the mark in some way. The first effort was good but the sauce was not quite right (I rarely have the fortitude to properly reduce a sauce), the second effort too hot (chipotles in adobo need to be used carefully) so I was trying to actually refine and improve my efforts. 

I didn't perfect it but I did improve. First I got the heat right - for the canned Goya chipotles we get, a full tablespoon will definitely overwhelm the scallops so I cut back a bit. I also got the sauce reduction right, maintaining a high enough heat that the sauce thickened up nicely. 

Sadly I failed at the one thing that I pride myself on getting right: I overcooked the scallops. Not drastically but noticeably. I cooked at the right temperature to get the browned bits for the sauce but 3 minutes per side is way too much at that heat level. I'll back off a bit next time.

We served them with crispy green beans and rice and dinner was delicious.

A footnote: I was reading through a trial copy of Cook's Country that arrived in the mail a couple weeks ago and noticed a short reader comment about being unable to make good sauces in non-stick pans. If you're making a sauce that relies on the browned bits from, in this case scallops, you just don't get the same kind of browning when using a non-stick pan. So for this recipe, I used our simple stainless steel frying pan and both the browning and the sauce came out great, with good flavor from the scallops.

Buvez: Maybe in the future I'll just include this if we don't pair our dinner with the Big-A IPA from Smuttynose Brewery. Actually this Imperial IPA is a perfect match for the spicy sea taste of this dish.

Kali Dal Makhani and Chana Masala

Today, we made a couple of our favorite vegetarian Indian dishes. It's a good time of year for these because we're between big food holidays but craving comfort food. We made Creamy Black Gram Dal (Kali Dal Makhani) and Chana Masala. I found the dal recipe on the internet a few years ago and printed it but there's no information about its origin on the page. The chana masala recipe was given to us by our good friend (and fantastic cook!) Kavita.

We tackled the dal first. Last night, we soaked two cups of whole black urad, or matpe beans, and about a quarter cup of dried kidney beans. After lunch today, we washed and drained the beans and put them on the stove with water, turmeric, chili powder, salt, onions, garlic, fresh ginger and whole red chilies. The recipe calls for using a pressure cooker but we don't have one, so we cooked this concoction for about five hours. When the gram/ bean mixture was pretty soft, we added yoghurt, a bit of half and half, and chopped green chilies and simmered for awhile longer. Meanwhile, we started the "tarka". One of our favorite Indian cookbooks is Madhur Jaffrey's "An Invitation to Indian Cooking". In it, she describes how to "give a tarka" to a dish. Our recipe called it "tempering". We heated ghee in a pan until it was very hot and then added cumin seeds until they "splutter". Next, we added asafoetida, more chopped onion, red and green chilies, garlic, fresh ginger, and chopped tomato. After this cooked for a bit, we added it to the pot of gram/beans and let it simmer for about 15 or 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, about an hour before the dal was done, we started the chana masala. I was a hero and chopped four onions (after chopping four for the dal). I'm not a very fast chopper and our knives need to be sharpened so this takes much longer than it should. Tyler prepared the garlic and ginger paste and chopped two green chilies. Then, he browned the onions in ghee, making sure that they were fully cooked, or, as Kavita warned us, the dish would taste of raw onion. Next came the ginger garlic paste, tomato and green chilies. After the mixture cooked for awhile longer, we added two cans of garbanzo beans and chana masala spices (we bought a box of this at our local Indian market). We cooked the mixture thoroughly, added water, and then brought it to a boil. We reduced the heat, added salt, ghee and a bit of lemon juice. The house smelled incredible.

So, we made a batch of basmati rice and had a feast! Kali Dal Makhani, Chana Masala (garnished with cilantro) and rice.