Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Comfort Soups

Each September as school begins, the boys bring home new things. Alas, they keep sneaking in viruses & boorish bacteria.

So, for the last month, I've been battling these creative, ever-mutating mico-demons & my only culinary interest has been SOUPS, the more comforting the better. And the Grandmother of all comfort soups is Chicken.

My mom makes canja; her secret is dark meat, particularly chicken legs. I was a terribly picky eater, and her chicken soup is one of the (very) few things I have eaten consistently since I was a child. And pretty much every time I come for a visit, she has chicken soup cooking for me.

Simply, comfort foods are foods your mom made to make you happy & foods you wished your mom had made to make you happy. Many are savory, i.e., brothy because water, salt, and that slight starchiness appeal to our primal nutrition needs.

Traditionally, the secret to canja, Portuguese chicken soup, is lemon peel & mint. Lemons belong in every medicine cabinet, aka, refrigerator. (Another key Portuguese comfort item is lemon tea, made to cure vast numbers of discomforts & illnesses.)

My Go-To cook book for all things Portuguese is "The Food of Portugal" by Jean Anderson. She has the classics: Green Soup, caldo verde, made with potato puree, chorico & collard or turnip greens; canja; vegetable; stone or empty-the-fridge & panty soup; fish stew/chowders; dry bread-rich acordas; & gazpacho.

Another go-to book is Jaime Oliver's Jaime's Dinners. The "Naked Chef" has a nice consomme, which I modified by adding a chunk of ginger during simmering. It's a great book that includes "Five Minute Wonders" & Sarnies (Sandwiches in American)-- which is my kind of cooking, particularly when colds & flu get me down & getting out of bed is work enough. He has lots of English-isms, like fish & chips & mushy peas. The former sounds great. The later, not so much. He also has a recipe for "Scrumptious Spanish Chickpea & Chorizo Soup." Anybody who uses chorizo, spicy paprika-red sausage, knows about flavor.

My friend Mira also hooked me up with a great site, which has soups from all over & creative ones, such as crema de guacamole, as well as "a good soup for the sick," a "miraculously delicious soup" made w/ beans, water, garlic, shallots, chiles. Medicinal classics.

"Total active prep time was under five minutes, the rest is just waiting and anticipating." FIVE MINUTES! OK, it would probably take me 15 minutes, given my current skill level, but I'll be trying that one soon.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Making Refogado—Portugal's Basic Sauce

Recently, my mom made a refogado -- THE sauce/paste that forms the basis of most Portuguese cooking. Typically, you cook onions in olive oil for 10 minutes, then add garlic & cook for 10 more minutes, then add tomatoes & cook for an additional 10 minutes -- all over LOW heat. However, about 10-15 minutes BEFORE cooking the onions, my mom had started the tomato part of the sauce in a separate pot. And she cooked the onions as well as the tomatoes in olive oil AND butter. You don't need much fat because the onion "sweats" & releases its own liquid.

After the onions had cooked for approximately 10 minutes, my mom added chopped garlic to the onion pot. After approximately 15 minutes of cooking onions (& 30 mins of cooking tomatoes), she combined the tomatoes & onions/garlic into one dish. Spices added were piri pir (hot sauce) & colorau, which is similar to Hungarian paprika, another Portuguese staple. Then she added the shrimp, which only takes a few minutes to cook, but my mom let it sit in the pot for 10-20 minutes to soak in the sauce. At the end of cooking, she added chopped parsley, fresh from the garden.

I tried to make the more traditional version: 10 minutes onions (low heat, covered pan to let the onions sweat out their liquid to create a thin sauce); 10 minutes garlic; 10 minutes chopped tomatoes from my mom’s garden. I peeled & seeded the tomatoes, but my mom doesn’t bother. If you cut the tomato finely, it shouldn’t matter, but if you use big chunks of unpeeled tomato, the skin falls off into sauce.

To de-peel & un-seed, I boiled water & dropped in tomatoes--with top stem & pithy part cut out--for one minute & then grabbed the skin off in blocks. I cut tomatoes in half & scooped liquidy part into a small sieve over a cup.

You could discard the tomato liquid, but I wanted to save it to put back into the water in which I boiled tomatoes & use that to later make a soup. Portuguese country people of my mom’s generation are super frugal & upteen frugal habits sunk it. I cringe at the word “discard” in recipes & try to use EVERYthing, which, by the way, is a great creativity exercise. Take the vegetables from the stock I made for my previous blog. I was supposed to discard them, but I couldn’t do it. I later pureed the onion & celery & that was basis of a creamy spicy garbanzo soup.

Back to refogado. I used the refogado base to create a shrimp pasta sauce. I added a 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes w/ liquid, heated to boil, then simmered for “a while.” I added frozen, cooked shrimp—on the theory it would heat in sauce & not become tough, but shrimp released lots of water into the sauce & messed up the consistency. Condensation in action. Ooops. The sauce wasn’t adhering to the linguine. So I took out the shrimp & dumped sauce into a blender, pureed it, & re-heated in sauce pan. Voila, mistake de-mistaked. So, umm, defrost frozen shrimp first & drain the water. Perhaps pat dry shrimp too. That way shrimp can absorb sauce liquid instead of diluting it.

Here's a section from my mom's garden. Tomatoes grow upside-down in flowered planter. Frugality in action: my dad re-used the frame of an old glass table to serve as a trellis for growing vines/stalks.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Stocking Up

Portion control, not ingredient castration, is the key to happiness & good health.

Buying stock from specialty shops is crazy expensive, so I figured: why not make it? Chicken stock is too much trouble & having to endure the smell of fish for hours is a deal breaker, so Vegetable Stock wins.

Reading around, I concluded: cooks in one hour & save time by not peeling or cutting veggies. So I took a large pot & added 3 large carrots, 2 onions, 3 garlic bulbs, several celery stalks (5?), peppercorns, and a bay leaf. The bay leaf, louro, was THE most essential herb my parents used. I can’t imagine my mother cooking w/o it; it’s great for stews & soups & any other long-simmering food.

So, I washed the veggies, discarded the bottoms & tops & threw (unpeeled) veggies into the pot. Some Internet posters say you can add the tender inner stalk-less leaves of the celery, but ALL WARNED: DON’T ADD the tough leaves at the top of the celery stalks because they’ll turn the stock bitter.

I added water to the pot, and cooked for about an hour; after the water came to a boil, I turned heat down to low, but kept it covered. One hour later, I put a colander into a smaller pot, and poured the stock into it. That way all the solids would be retained (to be discarded), and only the liquid would be saved.

Since I had the water boiling w/ veggies, I thought: why not cook the chicken breasts in the fridge that were on the edge of spoiling?. I put breasts in stock for 20 mins (?) or so. OK, I’m totally guessing; I forgot to hit the start button on timer. Alas, I overcooked the chicken.

In the future, I’m going to check chicken pieces after 10 minutes, then 15 mins, etc. & take them out when they’re ALMOST cooked, but not fully cooked, so that I can cut them up & use them as an ingredient in another meal. That way the chicken still has a few minutes of “cooking life” left, and will be fully cooked, but not overcooked, for re-incarnation, say, as an ingredient in a chicken quesadilla or jambalaya, etc.

I know, I know. What about e coli & salmonella, etc.? Given germ-freakiness, I’d been prone to overcooking chicken, but I’ve decided to mend my ways. Overcooked chicken tastes terrible & I’d rather go vegetarian than eat any more linoleum chicken. I rarely order chicken when I eat out. Unless you’re at a multi-star restaurant, you can expect the chicken to be overcooked.

Also, I’m flummoxed by the American obsession w/ chicken breast. OK, it’s lower in fat, but that’s another way of saying: breasts are tougher & less juicy. Rule of thumb: Natural fat = yummy. Portion control, not ingredient castration, is the key to happiness & good health. I prefer chicken thighs, i.e., dark meat, which has enough fat to compensate for my under-zealousness. I happened to have breasts because they were on sale. You get what you pay for.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Why I Write

Friends & I saw Eat, Pray, Love last weekend & bantered while eating Italian food about what was our “Word.” In the movie, an Italian friend of the protagonist said that each person & each country has a word that best describes character. For America, Julia volunteered “ambition” & her word turned out to be “we go” (or something like that) which in Italian is simply one word.

I said my word was, “Whatever.” My friends laughed, but they seemed to think I was being somewhat negative about myself. But I meant Whatever positively, meaning that I try to be open to experience & take on whatever comes my way & make the best of it. That’s the goal anyway.

My husband quips that I’m a fatalist; I let life happen to me. True, the Portuguese, of which I am true blood, have a tradition of fatalism; the liner notes to any Fado CD will tell you that (but more on my Portuguese-ness & cultural fixed ideas in future blogs).

I’ve had type A go-getters & self-described optimists label me as pessimistic or passive. But I’ve also seen many of those same people turn into angry whiny jerks in situations where they don’t get their way & passive-aggressively refuse to adapt to the agendas or wishes of others. While ambition & focus is desirable professionally, such drivenness can also make people bad at life & bad at relationships. Take workaholics. I suspect the high divorce rate is partially due to unwillingness on the part of one or both parties to “let go” of their desire to hyper-control their lives & compromise &/or take turns being adaptable to the goals of the other.

Whateverness can be highly active. It’s a creative approach to life, reveling in the possibilities of even the smallest interactions, activities & objects. Even the stupid things I’ve done or the bad experiences that I have to endure can be used as raw materials for new (better) ways of living life. Or at least I can write about it. I have a masters in fine arts-creative nonfiction & wouldn’t it be great if I could put some of my over-thinking to good use?

So I present the “whatever” mindset as Virtue (w/o, I hope, being preachy). HOWEVER, ALL THIS PHILOSOPHIZING IS JUST BACKGROUND & THE SUBSTANCE OF THE BLOG IS MY ATTEMPTS TO TEACH MYSELF TO COOK USING RECIPES AS MERELY GUIDELINES & OFTEN JUST PLAYING w/ INGREDIENTS TO CREATE GOOD FOOD. I’ve been described as an intuitive cook & (this time) the label fits ;)

I plan to get my father to cook w/ me & write about it. He cooks Portuguese food & taught himself to cook Italian by working his way up from dishwasher to sous chef at an Italian Restaurant. Sometimes, I’ll link longer essays to the blog that deal with cultural & emotional issues related to cooking. I’m also hoping friends will cook one of their favorite foods w/ me & let me write about the experience.

Ideally, I’ll generate recipes AFTER I cook, and post some of them. My goals are to:

1) Create simple, EASIER & FASTER-than-TAKEOUT food (I joked to friends that I might name the blog: The Half-Assed Cook)

2) Pass on principles that allow a cook to play effectively w/ food, so that the vast majority of what you cook comes out damn good.

3) Turn cooking into leisure, so that even when a “recipe” takes time & effort, it’s fun or generates flow, in that, you get so wrapped up in what you’re doing at the moment, you forget you’re working, i.e., time flies.

So in short, this blog is my exploration of a Whatever approach to life, and it starts w/ my attempts to teach myself to cook by playing with food & connecting with the cooks in my life, in the hopes of becoming THE Whatever Cook ;)

Yesterday, I made chorizo-flavored vegetable stock & cooked potatoes & chicken breasts w/in & used that to make Mariscada for dinner, using Fresh Direct pre-packaged “cook’s helper” seafood package. I also made Greek Chicken & Potato Salad for lunch, using one cooked chicken breast & some of the potatoes. (Vegetable stock is SOOO MUCH easier to make than chicken stock & gives major taste bang). Today I used the stock & leftover chicken to make Chicken Orzo Soup. My next post will be about that.