Lentils with Sausage

I was waiting on line at the butcher when the woman in front of me asked about the different kinds of sausage hanging in the back. She left with with a few kilos of garlic sausage. (It's rare that I see someone walk out of the butcher with fewer than two kilos of meat.) I decided to copy her and took home a link myself.

The sausage was dry but much softer than the typical cured sausage. I ate some on bread. It was dully bland; its fat took over my mouth, but without any strong flavor but a bit of smokiness. Giovanna commented that it wasn't her favorite sausage, and I wondered if it would be better cooked. We put this experiment into action. The cooked sausage made a crunchy, intense morsel. The sausage was so much better, and the difference in flavor so reminiscent of the difference between raw and cooked meat, that now I'm not sure if that sausage was intended to be eaten raw.

I adapted this from a Mark Bittman recipe by replacing its bacon with this sausage and decreasing the proportion of lentils. (Sorry to be so Mark-dependent. When I come back home, I promise to broaden my horizons a bit.) I'm not sure what to replace the sausage with if you're outside of Hungary. It should be the softest, fattiest cured sausage you can find. This makes enough for about three people, or two people with lots of leftovers. It takes 45 minutes to an hour, not counting lentil soaking time.

• 1 cup lentils
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 12 dkg fokhagymás páraszti kolbász or other sausage
• 1 large onion, or 2 smaller ones
• 1 carrot
• 1 parsnip
• 2 cloves garlic
• less than 1 tbs. olive oil
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 tsp. vinegar
• salt and pepper

Put the lentils, stock, the bay leaf, and some salt in a small pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for two minutes and turn it off. Let the lentils soak, and refrigerate if necessary. Or skip this step.

Chop the onion, carrot, and parsnip. Cut the sausage into 1/2 inch chunks; they should be really small since the sausage is so powerful. In a medium pot, put the oil over medium heat and fry the sausage pieces, shaking them around only after they've crisped on one side. Put the sausage aside, turn the heat down slightly, and fry the vegetables in the fat that remains in the pan. Add some salt to them. After five minutes, add the lentils and stock, cover, bring to a boil, and turn the heat down to maintain a simmer. The lentils should be done in about thirty minutes, though I'm not very good at estimating lentil-cooking times. Add some more stock or water if necessary. When the lentils are soft, add the lemon juice or the vinegar. Mark Bittman suggested red wine vinegar. I didn't have any, so I used white wine vinegar and unthinkingly added about a tablespoon of it, which wasn't good but didn't ruin the dish. I figure lemon juice would be good too.

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.

Salmon with Escarole

Despite the soy sauce and sesame oil, this tasted thoroughly European. Maybe it was all the olive oil I used. (It sounds like those flavors should clash, and if I had thought about it before I started, I would have done something different, but I'm glad that I didn't.) This only took 30 or 40 minutes, and it serves one. It could be scaled up as much as you'd like without any trouble.

• 1 salmon fillet
• escarole--use twice as much as you think you'd like
• 4 cloves garlic (yes, for one serving)
• 2 tbs. soy sauce
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• Olive oil
• salt, pepper

Mince the garlic and sautee it in olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat for a few minutes. (How much olive oil? Since I spent my formative years eating the escarole at Sam's (238 Court St., Brooklyn, NY), which is equal parts oil and escarole, I don't think it's possible to use too much.) Wash the escarole; don't bother to dry it. Add it to the skillet along with the soy sauce. Turn the heat to medium-low, cover the skillet, and stir every few minutes.

Heat up a pan that can be put in the oven with olive oil for a few minutes, and turn on the broiler. Dry the salmon. Season it with salt and pepper (not too much salt, but lots of pepper). When the oil is quite hot, put the fish in the pan skin side up. After two minutes, move it under the broiler--it should be about four inches away. It should be done in 2-5 minutes. While it's broiling, uncover the escarole and turn the heat up. When the salmon is done, take it out of the oven. Add the sesame oil and some pepper to the greens and put them on a plate. Put the fish on top. Pour the liquid from the skillet with the greens on top of the fish and serve.

I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about cooking salmon. The idea (stolen from Mark Bittman, of course) is to make the skin crisp. It worked, but as my salmon fillet still had scales, it didn't do me much good.

Godly Treats

A few weeks ago I found myself walking through Hamden, and I passed a bakery called Godly Treats. As I am tolerant of all religions that provide me food, I went in, where a very nice woman greeted me and told me I could have a free taste of anything I wanted. I went home with a bean pie ("Have you ever had one before?" they asked me) and the belief that the place was run by the Nation of Islam. Nope! It's run by the United Nation of Islam, a group "which is a separate and non related entity than the similar sounding 'Nation of Islam.'" I can't make too much fun of them because their bean pie was really good. It was like a pumpkin pie made with mashed up navy beans instead of pumpkin. In fact, I'm sure I could have passed it off as pumpkin pie. If I'm ever in Kansas City, I'll go to their restaurant, Your Diner, "A Place For Us To Develop Ideas And Enjoy Wholesome And Delicious Food In An Environment Of Righteousness."

Yes, this is a weird organization.

Honey and Caraway

It's not often that I taste something while it's cooking and it's bad. It's not that I have some extraordinary skill; it's just hard to cook good ingredients and make them bad. It was worrisome, then, to taste cabbage in the process of cooking and have it be as bad as it was. (It was actually a lot like the cabbage I cooked in Hungary, which Joel tried and wisely refused to eat.)

Since I don't usually write about my failures, you've probably guessed that it was good in the end. And yes, after I added more salt, honey, and mustard, it was delicious. So don't be discouraged if it's a bland, watery mess when you first taste it. Honey fills in most of the gaps, and mustard fills in the rest. This makes 4-6 servings and takes about an hour.

• 1 medium head red cabbage
• 1 onion
• 1 tbs. caraway seeds
• 1 lemon
• 3-4 tbs. honey
• mustard to taste (1-2 tbs., I think)
• butter or oil or both
• salt, pepper

Dice the onion and fry over medium-low heat in the butter or oil with some salt in a big pot. As it cooks, cut up the cabbage. When it's soft, after five minutes or so, add the caraway seeds and stir. After another minute, add the cabbage, some salt, and a little bit of water (less than 1/4 cup), and cover the pot. Stir occasionally, and add more water as necessary if the pot dries out. When the cabbage has started to soften, add the juice from the lemon. Add the honey a little bit at a time and stop when the balance is right. (My measurements are all approximate--next time I'll try to make them more exact.) Cook until the cabbage is soft, which takes a long time. When it's ready, add the mustard and taste. You'll probably want to add a bit more honey, since the sweetness goes nicely with the mustard. Mix in some pepper and serve.

Squash Ravioli

I would have blogged about this much sooner, but I was still too emotional about it to risk it. I didn't want to ruin a perfect thing by talking about it. But I've come to accept that I have nowhere to go but down, and now I can talk about the squash ravioli that were the pinnacle of my culinary existence. Yes, they were good. Oh, and Giovanna did all the work in making them. I just, umm, supervised. Many thanks to Mark Bittman. This serves four and takes forever.

The filling:

• 1 medium-sized butternut squash
• 2 eggs
• nutmeg (a lot)
• salt, pepper
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Cut the squash into inch-thick slices, remove the seeds, and cut off the peel. Put a bit of olive oil on a baking pan and put the slices on this, and put a bit of olive oil on top. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the squash. Bake until soft (30-45 minutes) in a 400 degree oven. Put the slices in a bowl and mash. When the squash has cooled a bit, mix in all the other ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning.

The dough:

• 2 1/2 cups flour, about
• 1 tsp. salt
• 4 eggs

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl and crack an egg in. Beat the egg and mix it up, and repeat with the other eggs. The mixture should seem much too dry, but pick it up and knead it a bit. If it's still too dry, add water a tiny bit at a time, but it shouldn't need it. Roll the dough out as thin as you can into a giant strip---this will take a while---and cut it in half. Put the filling onto the first half in little mounds, spaced properly apart. (How far apart? One ravioli-distance, I guess.) Brush or drizzle water in the spaces between the filling; this will make the dough stick. Take the top sheet, put it on top, and press it against the bottom sheet where it comes together (i.e., press between the mounds of filling). Cut out individual ravioli. Do all of this on a lightly floured surface to keep things from sticking, and don't pile ravioli on top of each other. (You could probably get away with it if you dust flour on, but why go to that trouble?) Pour them into a big pot of boiling, salted water and cook till done (six minutes, maybe), giving it a gentle stir every now and then. While you're doing that, make the sauce:

• olive oil
• fresh sage, minced
• garlic (I didn't use this, but I think it would be good)
• salt

Heat the olive oil on medium-low. Add the sage, garlic, and a little bit of salt. Don't burn the sage.