Maiden Voyage

Tasty, richly flavorful and inexpensive, lamb shanks deliver a lot of punch for the money. They do take a long time to cook, however, and back in my working days, I usually only had them in restaurants where someone else was taking the time to make them tender and delicious.

Now that I'm retired, I have made them several times - time is no longer the scarce commodity. And, now that I have my wonderful new Dutch oven, I can even brown the shanks and braise them in the same pot - no loss of flavor and only one pot to clean up!

Here's the maiden voyage of my cast iron wonder - lamb shanks with pinto beans. The meat was so tender as to make chewing virtually unnecessary and the beans had made very good friends with the other veggies I added to the pot. And the goozle! OMG, the goozle! My kingdom for some good bread to sop up this goozle!

I think you can tell I like my new Dutch oven. Here's the recipe for this little taste of heaven, should you already have a Dutch oven. You could do this in a crock pot, too, but be sure to transfer all the browned stuff from the browning pan into the crock pot or you'll miss all kinds of flavor.

Brown Braised Lamb Shanks with Pinto Beans. Serves four hearty eaters.

4 large shallots, halved through the stem end
6 small boiling onions, halved through the stem end
4 cloves garlic, sliced
2 lamb shanks
4 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
2 bay leaves
2 big pinches of Herbes de Provence
1 big pinch lavender
1 quart beef stock or a mixture of beef stock and a stout red wine
1/2 lb. dried pinto beans (I had these on hand but any dried beans would do) 1/4 lb would be plenty if you don't want leftovers.
Olive oil sufficient for browning the shanks

In the morning, wash and cover with 2" of water the beans. Leave them to soak for at least two hours.

After lunch, slowly bring the Dutch oven up to temperature and brown the lamb shanks in olive oil in the bottom of the Dutch oven, giving them a good sear to caramelize the juices and give the shanks an appealing shade of brown. Remove the shanks to a plate. Add the onions and shallots, cut side down, and brown them in the same pot. Sprinkle the garlic slices over the other alliums and cook for a few minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, topping them with the shanks, pouring over any accumulated juices from the plate and bringing to a boil before covering and placing in a slow (250-300 degree) oven. No need to preheat the oven.

The shanks will cook for about four hours or so. If you're a fussy cook like me, you might want to turn the shanks once or twice during the cooking, but it's not essential.

We found this to be plenty for two meals for us, plus leftover beans for the freezer and to make soup with. If you don't want leftovers, reduce the amount of beans by half or more, and reduce the amount of broth by a like amount, as well.

What Happened?

Here's a mystery for you - what happened to my beans?

I loaded up the crock pot with all kinds of lovely ingredients such as pinto beans, chopped tomatoes (a good canned brand), onions, garlic, beef broth and jalapeño sauce, set the temperature to low and left it to bubble away all day.

I expected to have these beans as part of a dinner using the last of Chilebrown's tamales, which I had thawed that day.

These are the very same pinto beans I used successfully to make refritos about a week ago but this time they wouldn't cook. After simmering all day, the beans were nearly as hard and mealy as when I put them in. So, I improvised a substitute for dinner and left the beans to simmer all night long figuring they just needed more time.

Well, they got plenty of time - all night and all the next day and still they were mealy, not softly yielding as one would expect. I kept tasting and adding liquid, hoping to resurrect them, but no dice! I finally threw them out. I hate wasting food but they were truly inedible.

So, what happened to my beans? Maybe someone out there can give me a lesson in cooking beans in a crock pot?

Pork and Beans and Beans

Take Two on the Pot Pork.

I cooked up a pot of Full Belly beans à la Jamie Oliver from his book Jamie at Home (how's that for name dropping on the bean and recipe sources? I'm becoming such a food snob) and piled them into a bowl with some pork, some goozle and some green beans.

Man, it was good!

Jamie Oliver's Humble Home-Cooked Beans

11 ounces dried cranberry or cannellini beans, soaked in cold water for at least 12 hours
3 cloves garlic, unpeeled
a few sprigs of fresh thyme (got them out of my garden)
a sprig of fresh rosemary (ditto)
3 bay leaves
1 stick celery, trimmed
1 small potato, peeled and halved
2 cherry tomatoes
extra virgin olive oil
red wine vinegar
a few sprigs of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
4 slices of sourdough bread (he serves his beans on toast)

Drain the soaked beans and rinse with lots of cold water. Put them in a deep pot with everything except the oil, vinegar, parsley and bread, and cover them with cold water. Put on heat and bring slowly to a boil; cover with a lid and simmer very gently for 45 minutes or until beans are soft. (Here, I added the goozle left in the bottom of crock pot when I made the Pot Pork recipe and then just enough water to cover the beans - good move!)

Drain beans in a colander, reserving enough of the cooking liquid to cover them halfway up when put back into the pot (I saved all the cooking liquid - kept the rest for some other future meal and filled the bean pot as Jamie recommends). Remove the garlic, tomatoes, celery, potato and herb stems from the beans; discard celery and herb stems. Squeeze out the garlic and tomatoes from their skins onto a plate with the potato and mash together with a fork, then stir them back into the beans. Season well with salt and pepper, pour in three good glugs of olive oil and a few splashes of vinegar.

Steam some fresh green beans. In a wide soup or pasta bowl, ladle in a nice helping of dried beans and liquid, top with Pot Pork and surround with fresh beans. Dig in. Oh, baby!

Fava-ulous Salad?

Never having tried fava beans before, when the Mad Meat Genius gave me a big bag of them over a cup of Catahoula coffee, I went searching on the interwebs for recipe. The one I found for which I had all the ingredients on hand was a salad of fresh favas dressed with creme fraiche, lemon zest, fresh mint, salt and pepper.

Although we enjoyed the fresh taste of the favas, which remind me of edamame once they are liberated from their waxy skins, we rather thought the dressing was heavy and overpowered the green freshness of the tender beans. The lemon I had on hand was a Meyer, so perhaps the zest was too sweet, even though I added the lemon's worth of juice to the dressing, too, not called for in the recipe. Even the gorgeous bright kelly green of the favas was paled by the leaden dressing.

All in all, while this salad was okay, we felt that something lighter would have showcased the favas better. Stand by for the next experiment!

Has-Beans

As I mentioned in an earlier post, a single pound of beans can just about wipe out world hunger - and when there are only two in the household, they last a long, long time.

We loved the hearty beans but I have to admit that I may have cooked a teensy bit too much. By the time we were nearing the bottom of the pot, we were more or less beaned out for the foreseeable future.

Another oops I made was to purchase a local smoked Cornish game hen, supposedly ready to eat. It was so hideously salty and almost slimy in texture as to be inedible and, believe me, not many foods fall into that category around here; we are the kind of people who stretch the Five Second Rule, despite the state of our kitchen floor.

I bundled the hen into a baggie and fridged it although, frankly, it was so salty I doubt if it could have spoiled, hoping to be inspired with some way to use it in subsequent meals.

The inspiration came a day later when I thought of dilution as the solution to all that sodium pollution. I decided to try making soup stock from it and leaving out all salt from the broth. I covered the hen with water, threw in an onion and some celery and simmered it until the meat was firm (and no longer glutenicky {new word}), boned it and returned the bones to the broth for a longer simmer with the veggies. When strained, the stock was richly yellow, full of flavor and only lightly salty. Returning the meat to the broth along with some diced carrot, onion and green beans, I remembered the last two cups of beans that had been simmered with the ham shank, so I threw them in as well to simmer with the veggies and smoky chopped hen.

The resulting soup is rich with flavor layers, one of the loveliest soups I have made, enough for lunch today and some nice leftovers for the freezer. We made piggy slurping noises, enjoying the last of those has-beans.

Egg Roll

I seem to be on a roll with egg dishes these days, notably eggs plopped on top of things.

Having made this huge pot of beans (did you know that a single pound of beans will feed a small army?) while My Beloved was away on business, I wanted him to taste them on his first night home. He's not a huge beans-and-franks fan and the beans already had ham in them, anyway, so I was at somewhat of a loss as to how to dress up the dish.

Inspiration! What about a pair of poached eggs with golden, runny centers atop all that brownish-red goodness? It had worked like a charm with the butternut hash, so why not?

He inhaled it. He scraped up the last lingering slurp of sauce. He looked around for more.

I'm on a roll, an egg roll.

I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends

Sometimes, things just happen at exactly the right time. Serendipity. First, my butcher explained that ham shank would be better than ham hock with my beans - she said her Irish family always used the shank and who am I to argue with a fellow Irishwoman? Especially when she is wielding a large knife.

Then, while I was simmering a big pot of Rancho Gordo cranberry beans with said ham shank, water, tomato sauce and some chopped, softened onions, I happened to read Peter's post about the penitential meal he was making for his little family, having pigged out on Za-zagna (I love Milo's name for it!) the day before.

As always, Peter was tossing in a dash of this and a dollop of that (he likes layered flavors) to his beans so I decided to follow suit with mine. Having no idea what shichimi is and being too lazy to look it up, I only added balsamic vinegar and a little maple syrup to mine. I left out his soy sauce suggestion as my ham shank was already adding plenty of salt.

More simmering and tasting as they got softer and softer, and finally they were ready. The ham had fallen completely off the bones in chunks and the marrow had dissolved into the sauce. The color was a rich browny-red and the flavors wafting up were literally mouth-watering. While perhaps not as complex as Peter's beans, they were deeply satisfying and homey with a little kick in the pants from the vinegar to keep them from being boring.

I'll be back to thank the butcher this week and herewith go my thanks to Peter - I got high on these beans - with a little help from my friends.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Garden

Since I began urban farming, I have become intimately acquainted with poops.

Cookiecrumb advised me that chicken poop would grow great veggies and Moonbear had some as a by-product of her egg-laying chickens, so I was in business, so to speak. However, I learned that the chicken poop I retrieved from Moonbear's idyllic back yard is too new, too "hot" to put straight onto the garden, being this year's "issue." So, I have started a compost pile with the contents of the big bag the hens contributed, some soil and vermiculite knocked out of pots of flowers I have saved, and the yard waste from my latest biomass reduction foray into the garden.

That's fun, but it didn't solve the need for some kind of fertilizer for the growing things so I took Dagny's advice to visit Annie's Annuals in search of plant food. They were closed on the Monday I chose to go so, undeterred, I went to my favorite haunt, Pastime Hardware in El Cerrito and, lo and behold, they had poop, but theirs was bat poop, nicely aged and attractively packaged with assurances as to its potency and organic nature.

It has taken, so far, four adult college graduates to get this tiny garden going and I'm pretty sure I'd save money by simply buying ripe tomatoes when they come in season but what a great bonding experience for four diverse bloggers and what an education I have received in the nutritive value of poops!

Pork and Beans

If I ate leftovers like this every day, I might actually enjoy it when My Beloved is away on a business trip. A happy accident occurred when I decided to combine the last scoop of baked beans with the last few slices of a barbecued pork tenderloin that we enjoyed a few days before.

I don't think I have ever eaten Mrs. Ferguson's baked beans with anything besides hot dogs in all the years I've been eating them! Just goes to show you that you're never too old to learn. The smoky flavor of the pork that My Beloved had grilled outside on the slow side of the barbecue until it was only very slightly pink really, really enhanced the sweet-tart of the beans with onions and citrus peel - even without the salty layer that frankfurters add, this combination was much, much better. Pork and beans with a kick! Almost compensation for missing that man.

Doctored Beans

One of the pleasures of writing about whatever we're eating for dinner is that it often brings back memories from long ago to enjoy - or not, depending on the memory.

Because my birthday falls in February, I was not allowed to begin kindergarten even though my mother believed I was ready - or perhaps she was just eager to get that last kid out the door so she could have some peace and quiet! In any case, three of the mothers in our neighborhood felt the same way so they signed up for a Calvert School course and decided to home school their budding geniuses. They took turns preparing and presenting the lessons and some of my earliest memories are of my mother painstakingly printing out letters for me to copy.

By far, my favorite classmate was Sandy Ferguson; I can't even remember the name of the other kid in the class. Sandy was my best friend even before we started school together; we played well and never quarreled, something of a rarity with me and my friends. Very simply, I loved him.

Then, one day we were playing a very interesting game of doctor when Mrs. Ferguson discovered us. As I recall, I had Sandy stretched out on the ironing board and was about to take his temperature rectally when I looked up into Mrs. Ferguson's horrified face.

Although I was sent home immediately with a flea in my ear, Mrs. Ferguson did forgive me once she got over the shock and even gave us her recipe for baked beans, which I still make today. I don't always follow the recipe exactly; I leave out the brown sugar and go light on the maple syrup and, if I don't have apples in the house, I sometimes resort to unsweetened apple butter. The onions and oranges, however, are key ingredients, not to be messed with.

Mrs. Ferguson's Baked Beans

4 #2 jars of B & M Baked Beans (#2 jars ae 1 lb. 3oz. jars)
1 large Bermuda onion, sliced
1 large unpeeled orange, sliced (I used tangerines this time and they worked fine)
1 large unpeeled apple, sliced (or use unsweetened apple butter)
1 cup brown sugar (I omit this altogether)
20 whole cloves
1 cup (real) maple syrup

Grease the baking pot with the salt pork from the can of beans, line with a layer of onion rings, orange and apple slices, 1 jar of beans, 1/4 of the brown sugar, cloves, and syrup. Repeat until bean pot is almost full with alternating layers. Cover and bake 8-10 hours at 200 degrees.

Needless to say, I don't make this amount for just the two of us and I don't bake it for that long. Two or three hours at 300 degrees is fine. I serve this with tube steak and that wonderful Boston brown bread that comes in a can, thinly sliced and spread with cream cheese. I don't know if that's traditional, but it's how it was always done in my family.

I wonder where Sandy Ferguson is today and I wonder if Mrs. Ferguson chuckles over the memory as I do.

Beanie Babies

It has been more than twenty years since I studied botany as an eager adult student, staring in awe down a microscope at chloroplasts circulating mysteriously inside plant cells, but the word jumped immediately to mind as soon as I saw them.

Cotyledons.

Those first, two fleshy leaves that plants push above the soil when they germinate, cotyledons have extra energy stored in them to give the plants a boost until they can produce leaves and, then, miraculously, food for themselves and for virtually everything else on Earth.

My bean plants have sprouted.

There are six little clusters of plants in a row in my garden, all destined to become Blue Lake green beans, if I remember to water them between now and bean production. As Robert Fulghum famously reminded us years ago, it's a wonder every time it happens.

They're In There!

Taking a leaf, literally and figuratively, from Michael Pollan's latest essay in the New York Times, I decided that I have time now that I'm retired to plant a small garden. My steep hillside lot doesn't lend itself to much in the way of agriculture but I cleared a space in the flower garden, worked up the soil and planted near the drip watering pipe greenie beanies, lettuce, Swiss chard and zucchini. I wanted a cherry tomato plant or two as well, but when I read the seed packet it said I should have started them indoors six weeks ago so I may just rely on the farmers' markets for those.

I keep running outside to check if my seedlings are up. I'm like a little kid on a long car trip - "Are we there yet?"

I guess they need more than two days to sprout.

Stoup

Too chunky to be soup and too juicy to be stew, this is what I made from the lamb scraps left over from "Frenching" a rack of lamb.

After gleaning all the good meat from the scraps, I browned the lamb in a pot 'til it was well caramelized, then added chopped green garlic, mild Maui onion and fresh thyme from the garden, cooking until the garlic and onion were soft. Added a cup of homemade chicken stock and stewed it for a little while, then dropped in the Full Belly Farm cranberry beans that I had soaked overnight and boiled for about half an hour. During the last five minutes I added about a cup of frozen peas and pearl onions, simmering just until the peas were done but still brightly green. A final seasoning with salt and pepper before ladling it into stoup bowls.