do you know what it means

When it's made right, red beans and rice is one of the most satisfying meals there is.  It was also the first meal I made in New Orleans ... in a microwave, with boxed mix and canned alligator.

It came out better this time.

One of the things my meatless Lent did for me was give me a more developed sense of which dishes really need meat.  It's not always as clear-cut as you think.  You can make a perfectly reasonable vegetarian meal with red beans on top of rice ... but it's just not Louisiana red beans and rice.  The meat, even if you don't use much of it, makes too great a difference.

Traditionally you make this on Monday with the leftover ham bone from Sunday.  But I think ham hocks actually work better than a ham bone, because of the skin and the amount of gelatin they contribute -- that's what you can't replicate without meat.  That's what you need here.

I smoked my own ham hocks for this.  That helped.  Really they're not even ham hocks, in that they're not cured -- I just put pigs' feet in the stovetop smoker for the afternoon, and when they were smoked, I simmered them in a pot of water for a few hours, until the skin went from leathery to tender to totally falling apart.

At that point, you strain the pork out of the stock and put it aside to cool a bit.  Saute onion and a little celery in some pork fat in your bean pot, and add the stock, a bay leaf, a little sriracha, and enough Tony Chachere's seasoning mix to salt the beans, and bring to a boil; add red beans (I used Rancho Gordo's sangre de toro, which are perfect for this), cover, and boil for five minutes.  Toss in a 275 degree oven for an hour and a half or so.  After cooking, let sit, covered, for an hour or more.

Meanwhile pick the bones out of the pigs' feet -- there are lots of little ones -- and mince the meat and skin.  Add it back to the beans whenever -- while they cook, after they've cooked, any time is good.

Adjust seasonings once the beans are cooked.  Serve over rice with some Tabasco sauce.  Ideally you'd have some pickled onions here, but I didn't have any.

the papa tomato said

Jax Brewery is a place in the French Quarter, near and I assume named for Jackson Square.  It was originally, obviously, where they made Jax beer, but by the time I moved to New Orleans, it was a touristy shopping center.  Upstairs is the Bayou Country store, as touristy as you can imagine, with alligator skulls on the wall, and talking Cajuns-in-your-pocket, and all sorts of knick-knack tchotchke crap.  But they also made the best pralines I've had, and had one of those big Walls Of Hot Sauce, with a rotating assortment of sauces you could sample on pieces of popcorn.  We used to go in pretty often and try whatever the new samples were.

One of the things we bought as a result of sampling it was this stuff called Banana Ketchup.  Banana ketchup is actually a fairly common Filipino sauce, but this brand wasn't Filipino, I forget where it was from.  It didn't taste very banana-ey, but when you think about it, Heinz doesn't taste very tomatoey.  The banana ketchup was great with chicken -- sort of similar to, but not mistakeable for, barbecue sauce.

Ketchup has become synonymous with tomato ketchup, though walnut ketchup and mushroom ketchup were originally much more common, and predate the tomato version by a century or so.  I suspect the visual appeal, the umami notes, and the timing of the popularity of hamburgers and hot dogs have something to do with tomato ketchup's ascent in North America, but I'm no food historian, that's just a roundabout guess.  I'm not sure you could come up with a formal definition of ketchup that would include all the non-tomato variants while excluding all those things that don't call themselves ketchup, but food tends to be that way.  The main thing is, when you hear "such-and-such ketchup," I think what you expect, and what you ought to expect, is a viscous homogeneous sauce with a little vinegar tang and a little spice.  (You don't think of tomato ketchup as having any spices because you think of it as ketchup-flavored, but the little bit of spicing they add is key.)

This was all on my mind today when I made macaroni and cheese.  Apparently Canadians often put ketchup on theirs.  I'm not Canadian, but I am pretty far north.  I usually put hot sauce on my mac and cheese.

Four-cheese macaroni: bechamel sauce (with a little cornstarch and dry mustard), cooked penne (Trader Joe's "pennette"), Gruyere, aged Gouda, Pecorino Romano, cheese curds; baked with breadcrumbs on top.

Three-pepper ketchup: pickled cherry peppers, roasted piquillo peppers, Hungarian paprikash paste, boiled celery root, a little Spanish smoked paprika, a little allspice, a little thyme; pureed, strained, and squirted out of a sriracha bottle.

they asked me how I knew

I have, and love, a Cameron Stovetop Smoker.  This isn't a piece of equipment you'll often find praised, because what it isn't is a substitute for a proper outdoor smoker (or an indoor smoker with its own ventilation).  If you want to make real barbecue -- a big hunk of pork or beef, or a chicken or turkey, smoked until it develops a smoke ring -- this is not the way.

However.

Many people, like me, can't use a "real" smoker without considerable inconvenience (there are a couple places in my condominium development where I could use one, none of them near my kitchen) and don't have the means to install a professional indoor smoker.  What's more, even a basic and not terribly great outdoor smoker is an expensive piece of equipment.

The stovetop smoker cost me $30.  It comes with enough wood chips that most people will never use them up, and if you do, refills are cheap.

The way it works is you put it on your stove, put fine wood chips inside, put the tray over those, add your food, and close it up.  The wood chips smolder, and after about twenty minutes begin smoking your food.  The smoke alarm will not go off.  Trust me, mine goes off during oven cleanings sometimes, while searing steaks, and so on, and the smoker has never once set it off.  That's an improvement on the way I used to smoke things.

Essentially, your food is cooking in a small, somewhat moist, low-temperature oven.  That's why it won't work for everything.  This isn't an ideal cooking method for everything, and it's a pretty slow cooking method.

That's also the strength.

It's excellent for fish (I don't think I've tried shellfish yet).  I love using it for smoked meatloaf.  It's great for cooking potatoes in the smoker and then mashing them to make smoked mashed potatoes -- though the potatoes take 2 to 3 hours to cook, rather than the 20-30 minutes if you simmered them.

But some things benefit from a slow cooking time.  I'm able to smoke butter -- I just put it in a small pie plate and put the pie plate in the smoker tray -- because it can sit in the smoke for a long time before coming anywhere near to burning.  Fresh mozzarella will take on some smoke flavor by the time it starts to melt.  

And grits ...

Grits apparently benefit tremendously from a slow cooking time.  Not only does the combination of smoke and salt give them a bacon-like appeal, but cooking slowly -- these took three and a half hours, maybe four -- makes them silky and luxurious without being mushy.  Ridiculously good.

I cooked 3/4 cup grits in 3 cups of water in the smoker, with just a little homemade celery salt for seasoning (I make crazy good celery salt, it's a weird thing to take pride in).  Once they were cooked, I added a pat of smoked butter, a little crushed red pepper, and a generous shredding of Pecorino Romano cheese.

The greens, well -- nothing goes better with grits than greens.  These are turnip greens, collards, and Swiss chard, simmered for about four hours in plain water with two bay leaves.  I then adjusted the pot liquor with a little demiglace (super-concentrated pork stock), Texas Pete hot sauce, that homemade celery salt again, homemade smoked turnip salt, and a dash of Worcestershire.

Bliss.

where the skies are so blue

I have some long posts I haven't finished, and consequently I keep failing to make the shorter more manageable posts that I could be making, so sorry for not informing you of the chaurice and patatas bravas with paprika mayonnaise, which have now been et and were not submitted to the camera, but I will circle back round to patatas bravas when I make them with clams.

Meanwhile, pimento cheese.  This is pretty much my favorite thing.  I'm so devoted to pimento cheese that I grow pimiento peppers so that, for as long as they last, I can make extra-awesome-terrific pimento cheese, before having to go back to the jarred peppers.

Those are the pimientos from my garden, roasted and peeled, in the Zip-Loc bag.  The summer was bad enough that I only got enough peppers for one batch of pimento cheese.

Roasted red bell peppers are not a substitute for pimientos.  Pimientos have a bad reputation because of their association with so much crappy processed food, but just because crappy processed pimento cheese exists doesn't mean pimento cheese must be crappy or processed, nor that it is authentically so.

There are a wide variety of peppers sold as pimientos, but as far as I'm aware, they're all members of the capsicum annuum family -- the same pepper family as bell peppers and Italian sweet peppers, Hungarian wax peppers, cayenne, jalapenos, and New Mexico chiles, as well as the various peppers ground to make paprika.  If I had fresh paprika peppers, that'd be the best substitute for pimientos, and in fact I'm not sure it's a substitute at all -- the pimientos I've grown remind me of the fresh paprikas I've bought, as well as of Italian sweet peppers and sweet cherry peppers.

Pimento cheese -- yes, you may notice I spell the word for the pepper differently depending on whether I am referring to the pepper itself or the cheese made from it -- is a spread made from pimiento peppers, Cheddar cheese, moderate levels of seasonings, and enough mayonnaise to make it spreadable.  Butter is a good addition, but if you use butter, it helps to bring the cheese up to room temperature before spreading it.

Ideally, you should make your own mayonnaise.  However, this is one of the only things I use mayonnaise for, and it only takes a few tablespoons, which is significantly less than the smallest reasonable amount of mayonnaise you can make (because it's made with eggs, and you would have to use less than one egg to make that little mayonnaise).  

You can make your pimento cheese "chunky," by shredding the cheese and mashing everything up with a fork, or smooth, by using a Cuisinart.  I use the Cuisinart but don't scrape the sides of the bowl, so that it's not completely smooth.  After shredding the cheese, I add it, the peppers, a couple pickled ramps (substitute pickled garlic, a little diced onion, or nothing), and sometimes a little bit of butter, and then while the Cuisinart is running, I'll add:

* A bit of hot sauce (Louisiana hot sauce, Texas Pete, Tabasco, or sriracha).  You can just give it a little zing, or you can make it real damn spicy.

* A bit of prepared or dry mustard (Zatarain's Creole Mustard is the best choice if you're using prepared mustard)

* Sometimes a bit of Old Bay or black pepper

* And then add mayonnaise, a little bit at a time, until the texture is right.  It will be softer in the Cuisinart than in the refrigerator, so make it slightly softer than you want if you want it to be spreadable while cold.

But what you want to end up with, see, is a fusion of Cheddar cheese and peppers with a little seasoning that highlights both.

What's it good on?  Sandwiches, ideally.  Hamburgers.  Hot dogs.  Biscuits.  Celery sticks.  Scrambled eggs.  Tomatoes.  Bacon.  Grits.

oh captain my captain

It's dim, rainy, and chilly today, and country captain seemed like the perfect remedy.

Country captain is the curry of the South, a dish that owes its origins to the spice ports of the Low Country.  I've always seen it made with tomatoes or a tomato sauce, though I don't think that's universal.  For me, though, it's chicken on the bone, browned in a pan and then braised in a sauce of tomato, curry powder, onions, and raisins.  Everything else is optional.

Lately, for curry powder I've been using the Vadouvan blend from the Spice House.  You're probably a big fan of Penzey's for your mail order spice needs.  I totally understand.  I love Penzey's, and their curry powders, especially the rogan josh, are among their selling points.  I placed an order to the Spice House instead -- run by the brother of the owner of Penzey's, if I have that right -- because they had cassia buds and Penzey's didn't, and I've stuck with the Spice House since.  Their white truffle salt is a welcome addition to my kitchen, and the chili con carne seasoning is excellent.

So the sauce is garden tomatoes, pureed and strained and cooked until thick, with onions, a few cayenne peppers from my yard, Vadouvan curry powder, golden raisins, and a couple additions -- chopped sweetened dried hibiscus flowers, and chopped fresh apricots.  The tomato-raisin combination has always made country captain a sort of sweet/sour dish for me, so the additions add to that.  Some fresh peas and scallions would have been a good addition; I didn't have any.

Trader Joe's, where I got the hibiscus, is a good source for dried fruit.  Because of their "discontinue everything that isn't a bestseller" business model, anything you see today may not be there tomorrow, but they always have SOME kind of dried fruit (they did not have any more of the hibiscus last time I was there), often things you won't find other places -- dried orange slices, freeze-dried rambutan (terrific), dried dragonfruit, etc.