Stews for the colder months

[bixaorellana]

Tod, that sounds fantastic. I particularly like the detail of the orange peel. No butter beans here, but I like favas cooked with tomatoes and you suggest tomatoes in the stew, so .....

Imec, that anchovy hint will nag at me until I have a chance to try it!

LaGatta (& everyone) please always check the Links to Any Port Recipes stickied at the top of The Galley board. All recipes, no matter where posted, are supposed to be recorded in it. And please ~~ PM me with any boo-boos or omissions you all find there.

[tod2]

I know ths isn't a stew but it does concern Anchovies: take an entire tin/bottle and push into little holes cut into a leg of lamb alternating with garlic or rosemary. Don't only do the top - do the 'underside' as well. Roast as usual.

[Deleted]

Now that is a spectacular idea! I have always inserted garlic shards into my leg of lamb (I found that a liberal sprinkling of herbes de provence on the olive oil slathered beast took care of the herbal needs.). But wow, anchovies inserted into the lamb sound perfect, for the salt value as well as for the intense flavour.

I must try this soon!

[betsie]

I'll definitely be trying an anchovy or two in my next beef stew. It makes perfect sense: anchovies in a vegetarian pasta dish don't taste fishy but just lift the flavour and give it bite and richness.

[lagatta]

Betsie, the Maghrebi butcher I went to didn't have goat today, so I did buy a lamb neck, which he chopped into very accurate cubes. I'm making a sort-of-tagine, but not using any of the recipes I have from the Ethnic Paris Cookbook (referenced on our board) and another book I have on Jewish cookery from that part of the world (though unlike in Eastern Europe, there is very little difference between the cooking of the historic Jewish minority and the majority, Muslim in this case). I'm adding leeks - guess this will be Maghrebi-Welsh fusion?

There isn't a large Turkish community here, unlike Germany and the Netherlands. There are a couple of Turkish groceries, but it is a small group as compared with the huge contingents from Lebanon and elsewhere in the Levant, and the North African countries.

[Deleted]

This is what my oxtail looks like before I start boiling it. Most of the nearby butchers have a price of 9.90€ for 2 kg, which is what I ask for. They start throwing both big and small pieces in a bag, which usually winds up weighing about 2.5 kg which I tell them is fine.

[lagatta]

That strikes me as very cheap, in particular for Paris.

I browned and braised the lamb neck pieces, also browned celery and a large onion, added that along with some saffron, bay leaves and other aromatic but not hot spices and herbs. I did bone the neck pieces (it can be fun to gnaw at them but not everyone likes that, and I'd just as soon cook the bones some more) and added pre-sautéed leeks. I drained off the stock in which the lamb and veg had cooked, made only with a bit of cheap white wine and some lemon juice. This stock is now in a glass canning jar as the excess fat rises to the top. It has a sumptuous flavour. But in terms of visual presentation it is rather blah. I have some finely-chopped flatleaf parsley to add at the end, but need something to brighten it up.

[tod2]

Lagatta - Here in South Africa we always cook the lamb neck on the bone. The neck pieces are cut into discs. After long slow cooking the meat automatically falls off and if preferred the bones can then be removed (but we like sucking the marrow out of the little hole!).
Now there is a very good reason why lamb bones should always be left with the meat. They are the basis of flavouring to the stew. As a matter of fact when a good lamb curry is made, a seperate quantity of broken (sawed) pieces of knuckle bones should be added to the meat portion. The marrow from these bones is what makes the dish extra special.

[tod2]

Kerouac - I was curious about the price per Kg. and compared it to our African prices:

Woolworths: 8.50Euro per Kg
Spar: 7.39
Shoprite 6.34

That is at premium butcheries inside the supermarket.
At a Halaal butchery in the casbah area of my city I was quoted 6.34euros per kg.

[betsie]

We put marrow bones in Dutch pea soup, which is a heavy main course soup, so a kind of stew.

Properly made, it's delicious, though it has a horrible name: "snert", which makes me think of something disgusting.

[lagatta]

Of course I cooked the lamb necks on the bone - that is the whole point of choosing that cut! I meant I boned the neck pieces afterwards, not before cooking. The bones are what makes the wonderful stock. I simply separated the meat from the bones after long slow cooking.

I'm simply wondering what other element I could add because the stew LOOKS boring. There is a little bit of saffron but not enough to turn everything saffrony-toned. I'm thinking of some brighter vegetable. I made a chicken stew to which I added cut up squash and was a bit averse to using that again, but it is seasonal after all now (here, obviously not in austral countries) and I do like it. There will be fresh parsley and perhaps some other herb added just before serving (perhaps coriander/cilantro - not everyone likes that so I wouldn't put it in before).

Yes, snert is very good on a cold nasty rainy blustery day, but the name is disgusting to non-Dutchies.

[Don Cuevas]

A journalist recently wrote to me asking for Mexican recipes. I had to turn her down. Here's an example of why I seldom write recipes.*

Yesterday, I made a "cocido" or, perhaps more precisely, a "sopa de milpa". Except that it contained bits of boiled beef.

The main stock, about 3 quarts, was derived from cooking alubias blancas grandes with onion, garlic and bay leaf. There was also about a quart of rich homemade beefstock. The vegetables were carrots, celery, onion, garlic, slices of native "Criollo" corn on the cob, cabbage, calabacita (courgettes), the alubias, nopalitos and homemade salsa verde de tomatillos. Parsley was a late addition, but cilantro might have been preferable.

Various vegs were added at appropriate times, plus the already cooked meat leftover from the beef stock making.

The end result was hearty and wholesome. Lots of vegs, some animal protein and a minimum amount of fat.

We each had a large bowl of it and were satisfied. Three containers of about a liter were frozen.

*Now, to write a recipe for this soup might require writing separate recipes for the beef stock, the alubias, and the salsa verde. All the details regarding the various stages of adding vegs would have to be spelled out. This hearty soup had the advantage of having simple seasoning. If I had chosen another soup, such as the highly seasoned Mole de Olla, it would have been more complicated.

[betsie]

Swedes are good in some stews, with a nice orange colour.

[lagatta]

Yes, but they are very hard and should be added earlier on. Moreover, they are one of those storage vegetables we have all winter long - I'm not so inclined to eat them in September.

[Deleted]

Sept 25, 2010 13:13:22 GMT @betsie said:

Swedes are good in some stews, with a nice orange colour.

Never heard of swedes. Vegetable?


T. bought all the ingredients today for the Zinfandel of Beef mentioned earlier on...but,got a call from work so...it looks like hopefully tomorrow he'll make it. I hope so, had my heart set on it.

[lagatta]

Swedes are also called (yellow) turnips and rutabagas. Very regional.

I bought some cilantro and am chopping some of it up fine to add if no cilantro-haters partake of the tagine-ish lamb neck stew. Argentine friend would like a higher meat ratio in any event.

[tod2]

Casimira - In Scotland swedes (because they belong to the turnip family - are called 'neeps' (turn-neeps). When mashed together with potato (tatties),onion, pepper,salt & butter, the dish is called Clapshot.

[betsie]

Hi Tod. My mouth is watering after reading your post!

I come from the North-East, where we call swedes turnips. The small white ones we call swedes. In the South of the UK the names are the other way around.
I absolutely love mashed turnips (the big orange ones) with butter and pepper. We have turnips in Holland that look exactly like British turnips, but they are tasteless. I even carry British turnips back to Holland with me when I've been visiting the UK.

[lagatta]

I can't figure out why neeps/turnips/swedes/rutabagas would be insipid in the Netherlands. A lot of the veg such as tomatoes can be fairly tasteless because it is grown in greenhouses. But the kale (boerenkool) is good, and it is also a cold-weather vegetable grown in the open air. I have had some tasty vegetables in Amsterdam, but I bought them at the organic market, Noordermarkt. www.21stcenturyamsterdam.com/jordaan/noordermarkt-organic-farmers-market.html And wonderful bread - usually I find Dutch bread extremely disappointing.

Certainly not tasteless here.

[tod2]

Betsie - I am going to put the recipe for Clapshot in The Galley. But first where does this name 'Clapshot' come from?
Well, nobody is too sure, but it might come from and old Orkney word 'klepp', for a dollop of mash.

And what about the name swede itself?
The Swedish nation called the plant rutabaga, which roughly translated means 'red bag'. The English began to call this root vegetable 'swedes' for obvious reasons, but in Scotland they became known as 'neeps'.

[betsie]

They're grown outside in Holland, I've even tried growing them myself in the garden. I bought seeds called English turnips, the turnips tasted like all Dutch turnips.

They must use a different variety in the UK, lovely sweet, tender turnips. Ours are not sweet, have no flavour and tend to be woody, even when harvested young.

[bixaorellana]

Ahhh ~~ all has been revealed!

I read the Clapshot thread in The Galley before reading this, and didn't understand the reference to "Dutch turnips".

Accordingly, I looked it up. Although I remained in the dark about the terminology, I was pleased to find that the Dutch eat turnip greens. What fine people they are!

A friend of mine here grew horseradish. Although he lives at high altitude north of town, where there is sometimes a touch of frost at night, he said that the horseradish was completely insipid. At the time we thought it was because it didn't get cold enough, but maybe it's the soil.

Is it possible that the soil in Holland -- which would be alluvial and rich, correct? -- is too good for growing certain root vegetables?

[tod2]

betsie, the book I'm reading at the moment is called 'The Land That Thyme Forgot' by William Black and in it he says the 'neeps' aka turnips, must be the root Brassica napus sp. rapifera, which is known as the swede, the neep, the turnip or even the rutabaga, (depending on your own roots!)

Maybe this Latin name may help you when getting more seeds - Bixaorellana gave me this link and I am waiting for bean seeds to arrive anyday now! rareseeds.com/cart/catalog/Rutabagas-84-1.html

[betsie]

Thanks. Tod, I'll check it out.

Bix, that is what I was wondering a while back, it could well be something in the soil.

We have different soils in different areas: a lot of clay (good for potatoes) and here in the north peat.

[betsie]

Sept 26, 2010 15:20:12 GMT tod2 said:

betsie, the book I'm reading at the moment is called 'The Land That Thyme Forgot' by William Black and in it he says the 'neeps' aka turnips, must be the root Brassica napus sp. rapifera, which is known as the swede, the neep, the turnip or even the rutabaga, (depending on your own roots!)

Maybe this Latin name may help you when getting more seeds - Bixaorellana gave me this link and I am waiting for bean seeds to arrive anyday now! rareseeds.com/cart/catalog/Rutabagas-84-1.html

Checked the seed name out: What they call English turnips (koolraap in Dutch) is Brassica napus L. var. napobrassica (L.) Rchb. So I guess there are several varieties, as there are with most veg.

[betsie]

Just had beef stew with anchovies for dinner. Very good indeed it was too.

[lagatta]

Sounds lovely. I'm putting the finishing touches on my lamb-neck stew right now. I did go for squash (a different variety than used in the chicken stew). They are so beautiful this time of year. After re-cooking the bones, the stock is a rich jelly. It has turned a bit chilly here, I almost would have worn leather gloves while riding my bicycle today. It has been warm here since April, after no real winter by our standards (unusually, winter was harsher in the Netherlands this past year than in Montréal) and I hope this chill isn't a portent of worse to come.

bixa, by what you've written I'm assuming that horseradish does do well as far south (from here) as NOLA. I always associate it with cold climates; the "heat" in Eastern European foodstuffs.

[bixaorellana]

LaGatta, I never tried to grow horseradish in New Orleans. It's a popular condiment there, but I don't remember seeing it available fresh.

All this talk of winter squash!     That is one thing I really miss. The most common big squash here, chilacayote, is either candied, turned into a sticky compote, or made into a drink. The center of it is similar to spaghetti squash.

One year a supermarket chain here with headquarters in the northern part of the country offered gourds and yellow pumpkins as Halloween decorations. I don't think they sold a single one. When I saw the display, though, I pounced upon a butternut squash as a pearl beyond price.

[lagatta]

I don't like spaghetti squash very much. I know it is eaten by gluten and carb-avoiders. I don't mind it, but find it rather tasteless.

Well, I hope you can find some more Norteña squash this year. I see that gourd/squash cultivation began in "Mesoamerica" (Mexico and South America), but obviously some varieties could have been developed from there by peoples elsewhere in the Americas.

The tagineish stew is very nice; the buttercup squash cubes do add the bit of natural sweetness I needed to carry my spices. I added cardamom and a bit of ras al hanout, also a dollop of Sambal Djeroek I bought in Amsterdam "Pittige saus met een frisse citroen smaak / spicy sauce with a frech lemon taste / würzige Sauce mit einem frischen Zitronengeschmack / Sauce épicée avec un goût de citron frais" and finely-chopped cilantro/fresh coriander leaves. The cilantro hater wouldn't like all the vegetables in this anyway; I'd have to grill a steak for her. It doesn't look pallid any more, it looks very pretty. This is the kind of stew with considerably more vegetable than meat, unlike betsie's which is more of a braised meat dish perhaps to be served with veg on the side.

[hwinpp]

Repost your last oxtail soup pics, Jack. I drooled over the keyboard last time I saw them.