Stuffing

This post probably won't be useful for another eleven months, but I think it's worth getting the recipe down now. Besides, stuffing is good. For the last few years my stuffing has had cornbread and mushrooms as a base. Usually I put in pine nuts, but they're expensive right now, plus I dread the pine nut syndrome. Everything in this recipe is flexible. I think the most important thing is to start with the stuffing inside the bird and then take it out and bake it for a while to make the top crisp up, but I made a vegetarian one by cooking it outside the turkey and moistening it with some mushroomy water, and it was good too.

• some stale cornbread
• two large onions, or one onion and a leek, chopped
• two or three stalks of celery, chopped
• 1/2 pound wild mushrooms, chopped (chanterelles and hedgehogs are good)
• a handful of dried porcini
• lots of chopped parsley
• 1/2 stick of butter
• salt, pepper

Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl and pour over just enough boiling water to cover them. After they've rehydrated a bit, reserve the water and chop the mushrooms. If the fresh mushrooms are chanterelles or another mushroom that holds a lot of water, put them in a dry pan over medium heat with a little bit of salt for a few minutes, until they give off most of their liquid. Remove from heat and set aside the mushroom liquid in the pan.

Put the butter in a very large skillet over medium-low heat and cook the onion and celery for about 15 minutes, adding some salt and pepper. Add the fresh and the dried mushrooms and cook for a while longer. Add the mushroom liquid, and cook a few minutes more. Add cornbread by roughly crumbling it up over the pan until you're happy with the amount. Remove from the heat, and add the parsley. Let this cool and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to cook your turkey (or any other bird you feel like stuffing).

Put the stuffing into the bird, not packing it in tightly or filling up the cavity completely. It's fine if only half the stuffing fits. Roast the turkey. When it's close to done, take the stuffing out of the turkey (a big metal spoon works well for this) and put it in a casserole dish with the rest of the stuffing, stirring to mix up the turkefied and unturkefied parts. Put this back in the oven until the top is starting to turn brown and get crispy, maybe 30-45 minutes. It's fine to do this after the turkey is finished.

Chicken with Spices and Sweet Potatoes

I thought of this right before I fell asleep one night last week. I'd say it was of divine origin, but actually I got the idea from Bill Buford's book Heat, which talks about a pre-Columbian Italian recipe of meat cooked with sweet red wine, orange zest, and spices. Here I've taken this and adulterated it with some post-1492 tomatoes and sweet potatoes. The recipe is slow, but it's really simple. Brown the chicken, braise the chicken, and then when you're close to done, add some sweet potatoes and carrots.

• 2 chicken legs, split into drumsticks and thighs
• 1 large onion, chopped
• half a 28oz can of tomatoes (or a smaller can), crushed
• zest of an orange
• 1 carrot, roughly chopped
• 2 sweet potatoes, preferably the white kind, in 1-inch chunks
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 1 star anise
• 3 cloves
• 1 tsp. coriander
• 1 heaping tsp. honey
• 3 tbs. olive oil
• salt, pepper

Sprinkle the chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a large pot or dutch oven, heat up 2 tbs. oil over medium-high heat, and brown the chicken on both sides. When you're done with this, remove the chicken, turn the heat down and cook the onions for about ten minutes with another tablespoon of olive oil, stirring occasionally. Add the chicken back to the pot along with the orange zest, spices, tomato, wine, and some salt. Bring the heat back up to get this simmering, and then put a lid slightly ajar on top of the pot and turn the heat to low. (If you're using a dutch oven, you might try cooking this in the oven at maybe 300 or 325 degrees.) Cook for an hour, adding more wine if it needs it (though it probably won't). Add the honey, carrots, and sweet potatoes, and cook until these are tender, another 20-30 minutes. If the dish is still liquidy, remove the lid and turn the heat up to dry it up a bit. Serve with bread.

Spareribs

I'm moving to Seattle next year, where I will be attending the University of Washington in pursuit of a Ph.D. in mathematics. So, goodbye to túró, goose fat, and lard, and hello to oysters, salmon, and goat. But I'm still in Hungary now, and a year's worth of sparerib experiments have finally led me to this recipe.

Most recipes I've seen for cooking ribs in the oven tell you to cook it for about two hours at 300 degrees. I hoped that by lowering the temperature, I could make ribs that were more like barbecue. The result may not be smoky, but it is tender. This recipe makes enough for seven or eight people, and it takes about 6 hours.

• 4 pounds spareribs

Dry rub:

• 1 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 tbs. brown sugar
• 1 tbs. paprika
• 1 tsp. cumin
• 1 tsp. black pepper

Glaze:

• 3/4 cup black currant jelly
• 4 tsps. mustard
• 1 tbs. vinegar
• 1 tbs. ketchup

One day before you plan to cook the ribs, mix up all the ingredients for the dry rub and rub it all over the meat. Let it sit in the refrigerator overnight.

Cook the meat for five hours in a 225 degree oven. (200 degrees would probably be better, but 225 is the lowest that my oven can maintain, besides room temperature. If you do lower the temperature, cook it a little bit longer.)

After five hours, mix up the glaze and put it on the meat. Cook another 20 minutes. Turn on the broiler (or if you don't have one, like me, just turn the oven up all the way) and cook until he glaze begins to bubble. You should be paranoid about not burning it. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes before you cut the ribs apart. Eat with your hands.

Other flavors of jam work fine too, especially apricot. The ribs are also good with no glaze at all.

Duck with Dates

I've known how to cook duck breasts for a long time--oddly, it was one of the first things I learned how to cook--but I only recently learned to cook duck legs. You can also make this with duck breasts: just fry them, slice them up, and add them to the sauce at the very end. The sauce is also good with pork chops. This is for two people.

• 1/4 cup chopped, pitted dried dates (measure them by packing them lightly into a measuring cup after they're chopped--for me, it was eight dates)
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tbs. dry red wine
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 duck legs
• salt, pepper

Soak the dates in the wine and put this aside. Sprinkle the legs with salt and pepper and put them skin down on a skillet over medium heat. Once they start sizzling, turn the heat down all the way and cover the skillet. Leave them like this for an hour. Check them from time to time to make sure nothing is burning. If you check and see a lot of liquid other than the melted duck fat, take the cover off for a while to let it evaporate (this has only ever happened to me once). After an hour, flip the duck over and cook for another 45 minutes, covered. Then, remove the cover and flip the duck over one more time, and turn up the heat a tiny bit. Cook for five or ten minutes to crisp up the skin, making sure you don't burn it. Remove the duck.

Pour off most of the duck fat--there will be a huge amount in the pan, and it's worth saving. Cook the onions over medium heat in this pan, stirring once in a while, and adding salt and pepper. After about ten minutes, when they're soft, add the dates and wine and turn the heat up all the way. Scrape as much as you can off the bottom of the pan and let the wine reduce until the sauce doesn't taste too winey anymore. Serve with the duck.

The times for cooking the duck are really flexible; at least, I've never overcooked duck legs, and I've cooked them for a lot longer than I said to.

Brined Pork Chops

When I was in high school I read the dining section of the New York Times every Wednesday and was always up to date on what was fashionable among the gourmet crowd. This was odd knowledge to have, because my cooking repertoire was limited to scrambled eggs and a pasta sauce made of parsley and garlic. Back then, the new craze was brining, and every week there was an article about the virtues of meat soaked in salt water. Eventually there was even a brining backlash, as people complained about the texture it gave the meat. I never persuaded my parents to brine anything, so I had to remain neutral in the great debate, until now. And so, my verdict: brining pork chops makes them tender and tasty. I got my basic brining technique from Bruce Aidell's Complete Book of Pork. He suggests many different brines, but the only essential thing is the proportion of salt and water and the temperature, which controls the rate the salt is absorbed. That's why he tells you to add ice cubes to the brine to bring it down to refrigerator temperature. This recipe is for two people and only takes fifteen minutes besides the brining.

• 1 3/4 cups water
• 2 tbs. kosher salt, or slightly less normal salt
• 2 tbs. brown sugar
• 1 tsp. cinnamon, or a cinnamon stick
• 5 cloves
• 1/2 cup ice cubes
• 2 pork chops
• pepper
• minced fresh rosemary or crumbled dried rosemary
• 1 tbs. olive oil or lard

Mix the water, salt, and sugar in some sort of container that will fit two pork chops. (I used a pie plate. Other options are a big bowl or a zip-loc bag.) Stir until the salt and sugar have dissolved and add the ice cubes, cloves, and cinnamon. Put the pork chops into the container. They should be submerged, or at least nearly so. Put this in the refrigerator for 2-6 hours, depending on the thickness of the chops. Bruce Aidell recommends that you brine 1/2 to 3/4 inch chops for 2 hours, 3/4 to 1 inch chops for 3 hours, and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inch chops for 4-6 hours. I would brine conservatively, since my pork chops are often teetering on the edge of oversaltiness.

Take the pork chops out of the brine and pat them dry. Rub them with pepper and rosemary (but no salt!). Heat the oil in a pan over medium-high heat until the oil has just started to smoke. Cook the chops for two or three minutes a side; they should be lightly browned at this point. If the chops are thin--3/4 of an inch or less--then they're probably done. If they're thicker, turn the heat down to medium and cover the pan. Even very thick chops will probably be done in another three or four minutes. They should be 140-145 degrees and should be pink in the middle. Serve with applesauce.

Cuts of Pork in Hungarian

This won't be the most interesting post, but I hope that like this list of fishes in Hungarian and English, it will be useful.

• hosszú karaj
  blade-end loin (the part of the loin closest to the shoulder).
• rövid karaj
  rib-end loin (the back end of the loin).
• szűzpecsenye
  tenderloin
• tarja
  Boston butt (the top of the shoulder)
• lapocka
  picnic shoulder (the top of the front leg)
• oldalás
  ribs
• comb
  fresh ham (the back leg)
• csülök
  hocks (the bottom of the legs)
• tokaszalonna
  pork belly from the front of the pig
• dagadó
  pork belly from the rear of the pig
• farok
  tail

Refreshing Chicken Stew

This stew is simple enough that it doesn't really need a recipe, but there's nothing wrong with that, is there? It's bright and refreshing stew, the opposite of the delicious but sour cream laden stew I enjoyed the other day at Kulacs, which is Gyöngyös's answer to Kádár. (I have no idea what benefit they get out of their website.) This recipe is for two servings and takes about an hour and a half, most of which is just the chicken cooking.

• 4 chicken drumsticks
• a foot-long piece of leek
• 1-2 carrots
• 1-2 parsnips
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1/2 cup white wine
• salt and pepper

Heat up half the oil in a pot over medium-high heat. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. When the oil is hot, add the chicken and brown it, and then put it aside.

Cut the leek in half the long way, and then cut these halves into 1/2 inch slices. Add the rest of the oil to the pot, set the heat to medium-low, and add the leeks, plus some salt. While they cook, stir them occasionally and chop the carrots and parsnips into 1/2 inch cubes, adding them to the pot as you cut them. Put the chicken back in the pot. Add the wine, turn the heat up, and cover. When it comes to a boil, turn the heat down and put the cover partially off and maintain a simmer. (In his article about heat, Harold McGee says never to cover your pots completely when you stew meat!) Cook till the the chicken is done, adding more wine if you need to. An instant-read thermometer should say 165 when the chicken is ready. Season with pepper, and more salt if necessary.

I served this with barley, and maybe I'll say more about that eventually. I used drumsticks because they looked the nicest at the butcher. I'm sure thighs would be fine.

Chicken with Corn and Lemon

My new place of residence is Gyöngyös, Hungary, about an hour away from Budapest. I'm the only native speaker out of eight English teachers at Berze Nagy János Gimnázium. I teach 24 classes a week, including one group of ninth graders who I see everyday. They have two students who don't know any English, plus a few who have already taken it for five years. The teaching has been okay so far--more details to come in later posts.

Gyöngyös completely lives up to my hopes for its culinary resources. Four days a week, farmers come in and sell their fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, and mushrooms at prices that are cheap even for Hungary. Butchershops are plentiful, and a lot of them sell what my dictionary claims is mutton. This is unusual in Hungary, where sheep are usually used here for cheese and wool and not eaten. There are also several butchers who only sell poultry (chicken, turkey, duck, and goose). Parmesan cheese is tough to come by, and the selection of olive oil is limited, but at least I can have goose fat again.

Chicken with Corn and Lemon

• A chicken breast (i.e., two fillets)
• Kernels from one leftover ear of corn
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/2 tbs. or so of butter
• olive oil, salt, pepper

Heat olive oil on medium-high in a large skillet. Dry the chicken breasts and put salt and pepper on them. When the oil is hot, add the chicken to the pan and cook it till it's just done (10 minutes or so), turning the heat down if necessary. When the chicken is done, move it aside. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let the pan cool. Add the butter, corn, and a bit of salt and cook, stirring, until the corn darkens. Pour a tiny bit of water--one or two tablespoons--into the pan, turn the heat up, and stir to deglaze the pan. When most of this water has evaporated, turn off the heat, add the lemon juice and some more pepper. You can also add the chicken back into the pan if it's cooled off too much. Serve the chicken with the corn sauce.

This was really good. More butter would probably improve it. I also think it would work fine with raw corn kernels.

Chicken with Breadcrumbs and Parsley

A year ago, I took the Putnam (a six-hour math contest) and during the break ate dinner at Cynthia and Angela's, who enforced a strict no-Putnam-discussion rule. Joel and I almost got kicked out before the meal started for our Putnam-discussion-discussion (we were trying to figure out the exact parameters of what we were allowed to say), but in the end we were allowed to eat dinner, which was chicken. Now, it is the Putnam break again, and I am eating chicken again. Can I make it through this blog post without discussing the Putnam? (No. Joel: what do you think so far? I liked #2 and I got it completely (or so I think). #1 seemed straightforward but I didn't actually compute the integral. I was on the way to getting #4 but then I ran out of time.)

Today's chicken is leftover from yesterday's dinner, which I'll describe now. This serves two and should take about an hour to make. You could make it quicker by using boneless chicken breasts and not making the breadcrumbs yourself (or replacing them with flour or cornmeal).

• 1 bone-in chicken breast
• 1 clove of garlic
• parsley--more than you think, but I don't know how much--maybe 1/4 cup packed or so?
• breadcrumbs, made from 4-5 slices of bread
• olive oil (lots)
• salt, pepper

Make breadcrumbs by putting bread in a 325 degree oven until it's very dry and then breaking it up. I don't have a food-processor so I put it into a ziplock bag and crushed it. It's tedious, but not that bad. Cut up the garlic and parsley very fine and mix them up with the breadcrumbs. (If you're using a food processor, you could just throw these in with the bread to be chopped.)

Take your chicken and make two fillets from it. I followed Mark Bittman's advice, which is to cut as close to the bone as possible, starting on the outside and ending on the inside. (By outside, I mean the side away from what must be the chicken's sternum.) It's a very good idea to make stock from this, because then you have an excuse for why you're leaving so much meat on the bones.

While you're doing all of that, heat a pan over medium-high heat until it's very hot and then add a good amount of olive oil (probably the more, the better). When the oil is very hot, dredge each piece of chicken in some other olive oil, salt them, dredge them in the breadcrumb mixture, and put them in the pan. (Do them one after another, not at the same time, so that the pan stays hot.) Add pepper to each side as you cook. When the outside is nicely browned on both sides (two minutes a side or so), turn the heat down to about medium and keep on cooking. Cook the chicken till it's done all the way through, probably another 2-4 minutes a side (but check often). If your fillets are very thick, consider transferring everything to the oven at 400 degrees after the chicken is browned. (I did this out of desperation, and it worked pretty well.)

Mark Bittman says that to do a good job of browning, you have to get the pan very hot before adding fat, and then get the fat very hot before adding meat. Is there really any reason to wait for the pan to get hot before adding oil? I usually just add oil to the pan when I first turn the stove on and let it heat up.

On the second half of the Putnam, I did the first two problems and didn't even work on anything past that. Joel?

Chicken, Onions, Peppers

This is barely even a recipe. But I didn't have that much time, and I made some stock out of the scraps.

• 1 chicken leg (or some other part)
  
• 1 small onion
  
• 1 red pepper
  
• fish sauce
  
• 1 lime
  
• salt, pepper
  
• oil (canola, peanut, or other)
  

Heat a big skillet (it should be really big) with enough oil to cover it over medium-high. When it's very hot, throw on sliced onions and peppers with some salt. After about a minute, throw on the chicken, removed from the bone and cut up into little pieces. When everything is done, add enough fish sauce (1-2 tbs?), half a lime's juice, lots of pepper, and salt if necessary. Serve with rice.

First semester in Budapest my roommate and I used to make something like this (but with walnuts and hoisin sauce instead of fish sauce and lime). It out better this time (especially the vegetables--really flavorful) since I was just cooking it for myself and the pan was less crowded. With more than one person, even using a giant skillet, I'd do the vegetables and chicken one after the other and then combine at the end before seasoning.

Duck and Potatoes

Hungarian duck is really good, and only a few of them have avian flu. Duck breasts with their skin are available from the market near Blaha Lujza Tér. (Last semester I only ever saw duck breasts without their skin.) This was yesterday's dinner, with Mike, Patrick, Rosanna, and Tomoko:

• 1 duck breast in Hungarian, or 2 in English (in Hungarian, a duck breast means both sides of one duck)
• 1 onion
• one clove garlic
• about 1 and 1/4 cups red wine
• potatoes
• salt and pepper

Cut the potatoes into 3/8 inch slices. Cut into the duck's skin, making a crosshatch pattern, with your lines about 1/4 inch apart. Cut as deep into the fat as you can without reaching the meat. Salt and pepper both sides of the duck.

Heat up a skillet over medium-high heat. When it's hot, put the duck on skin side down. Cook for about eight minutes. As the fat renders, pour into another pan to fry potatoes in. (If you end up with too much fat, pour it somewhere else and hold on to it.)

Fry the potatoes over medium-low heat in batches, flipping them once, and taking them out when they are cooked through. Put them onto a paper towel, and put a paper towel over them. When the potatoes have all been through this, cook them in batches again, this time over high heat, letting them crisp. (This will finish after the duck, but not too much after the sauce is done.)

Flip the duck after the eight minutes have passed. Cook about five minutes, or until the duck is almost done. Move it to a warm oven, holding onto the pan.

Make sure you have a tablespoon or two of rendered duck fat in the pan you were just frying the duck in. Add the chopped onion, and after a little bit the garlic. Cook until the onions are soft. Pour in the wine, turn the heat up to high, and let it reduce, scraping off as much of the pan stickings so they get in the sauce. (If you happen to have demi-glace or other stock, add some too.) Cut up the duck into slices. When the sauce tastes like sauce and not wine, add salt and pepper as needed and put the duck back into the pan to warm it up. Serve.

Pork with Parsnips

Mark Bittman gives a recipe for pork braised with turnips in the Minimalist Cooks at Home. I made it once, substituting Hungarian fekete rétek (black radishes), which happen to taste exactly like turnips. It was good; I wanted to make it again, but my roommate Joel had discovered that he didn't like turnips, or at least black radishes in the guise of turnips. We stood in front of school pondering what to make for dinner. Suddenly, we thought of parsnips. (Which one of us actually came up with this? I'm not sure, but it was probably Joel.) We were joyful, and we spent our walk to Kaiser's trying to come up with other alliterative dishes.

And so, here is our adapted version of the recipe:

• 1 and 1/2 pounds of boneless pork shoulder (tárja in Hungarian)
• 1 tbs. canola or sunflower oil
• 1 tbs. goose fat or oil
• 1 and 1/2 pounds of parsnips (or however much you want)
• 1 and 1/4 cups white wine
• parsley, salt, and pepper

Cut up the meat and trim the fat and connective tissue. This takes me more than twenty minutes, but is worth it. You should be able to do it faster if you're better at it, and if you have a sharper knife.

Brown the meat in the oil and goose fat, giving the meat five minutes at very high heat, plus some more time with a bit less heat. Grind some pepper over it. Cook it until it's well browned, maybe ten minutes in all. While you're doing that, cut the parsnips up into big chunks; there's no need whatsoever to peel them. Throw them on and cook them for a few minutes when the pork is browned.

Add the wine, salt, and half of the parsley. Cover and turn down the heat to maintain a light simmer. Stir every ten minutes, and cook for at least thirty minutes.

When you can easily pierce the parsnips with a fork, it's done. If you have too much sauce (unlikely), uncover and let it reduce. Add pepper and more salt if necessary, and the parsley.

The goose fat is completely unnecessary, but good. I don't like using butter in this, though. (Hungarian pork already tastes like butter.) The parsley is actually very important. I think thyme would be good too. I also might try putting in some cabbage next time.

Pork

Hungarian pork tastes better and is more tender than American pork. Everybody always says that American pork has gotten much worse because it's now bred so lean. This is true: the National Pork Producers Council brags about it in Nutrition: Pork Is Vital to a Healthy Diet. People also say that American pork is bad because you have to overcook it to prevent trichinosis. This is false: there are almost no cases of trichinosis anymore (Trichinosis Fact Sheet).

Yesterday Tomoko and Rosanna came over for dinner. I cooked pork chops. This is how I cooked the pork:

• 4 pork chops
• ginger
• two (or so) tbs. olive oil
• half an onion
• white wine
• parsley

Salt and pepper the pork chops and fry them in a really hot pan with some diced ginger. Put them in warm oven when they're done. Take the pan you just used for the pork chop, heat up the oil (which shouldn't take any time), and fry the onions for a few minutes with a bit of salt and some more ginger, until they've lost their bite but still have a bit of crunch. Add the parsley (maybe about a quarter cup, loosely packed) and let it cook for about thirty seconds. Then, add in a cup (maybe more) of white wine and let it reduce. When it doesn't taste like wine anymore (five to ten minutes), add pepper and, if necessary, more salt to the sauce. If your pork chops got cold because you couldn't figure out how to light the oven (this might not be a problem for you), throw the pork chops back into the pan with the sauce until they heat up again. Put some more parsley on top.

And the cabbage, which is so easy it doesn't need an ingredient list:

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil up in a big pan and throw on the cabbage, salt, pepper, and a little bit of white wine (less than a quarter cup). Cook this at whatever temperature is convenient. (If you feel like stirring a lot, then use a high temperature.) When it's ready (not very long--should still be crunchy), turn up the heat all the way and stir more often for a minute. Next time I'll try adding some garlic.

1/5 to Present

• Pasta with meat sauce (no ground beef). I made this the other day; it's good and easy, though it takes at least an hour. Take a piece of beef or veal on the bone (shank is best, but I used short ribs) and brown it in olive oil in a pot. Then, make tomato sauce in that pot in the usual way, cooking some garlic, onions, carrots, and tomatoes, and stirring occasionally. After about an hour, take out the meat, cut it up, throw out the bones, and put it back in the sauce. I'd give details, but I don't want to plagiarize the wonderful Mark Bittman, whose only fault is that he doesn't like ketchup.
• Fusion Crepes on the Bowery near Grand St. The pancake is French; the fillings are not. I had a Nippon Ajo (formerly known as Nippon Deska--the proprietor told me that someone who actually knew Japanese corrected him), which is mushrooms, tofu, seaweed, Japanese barbeque sauce, mayo, and bonito flakes. It was weird enough that I didn't like it till the third bite or so. After that it was delicious. Get it without mayo, though. See also the Gothamist's review.
• Lard. Jeffrey Steingarten, who has no faults, says that lard is better for you than Crisco and no worse for you than butter. I demand apologies from everyone who laughed at me for saying that. (I probably shouldn't demand apologies yet, since Mr. Steingarten gives no source for this fact.) I will experiment with lard in Hungary.