Traveling Crock Pot, Third Edition

I am honored, as ever, to have the illustrious Becky Issenman photograph my food!

I literally didn't remember to take a single picture of the finished products so if you'd like to see any of these recipes realized, check out Mrs. Becky's shots.

Menu

White bean soup with sage and prosciutto
(Not as much fat comes off prosciutto as the pancetta recommended in the recipe.  I prefer a flaky crisp on top of my soup and thus, prosciutto.  If you do as well, find some extra lard or butter to sweat your onions and garlic in.)

Bouef Bourginon
amended from food.com


Bouef bourginon is famed for being an enormous, time-consuming dish.  This is not untrue.  But you can take the heart of the dish and reduce it to be more amenable to the average cook who does not wish this dish to be the centre of their universe for five or seven hours.

I will show you my version listed below.  Keep in mind that these measurements are flexible--this has been adjusted to my taste but frankly, there are so many flavors that are so powerful here, you can fake it pretty well with any approximation of the recipe.  You can see this sentiment in the ingredient list itself--I want you to chunk and smash vegetables.  This is not a science.

That being said, while the ingredients are not exact, the method is.  Please read carefully--some professional tips I've learned to take this dish from good to great follow.

Serves 6 

specialty tools: cheesecloth (optional, but very useful)

3 oz thick-cut bacon
1 1/2 lbs stewing beef, trimmed of excess fat and cut into cubes
1/2 large onion, chunked
1 large carrot, chunked
3 cloves garlic, smashed
2 bay leaves
several large sprigs thyme
several large sprigs parsley
3 Tbsp all-purpose flour, divided
1/2 Tbsp tomato paste
2 1/2 cups red wine, divided
2 1/2 cups beef stock, divided
1/2 pound cremini mushrooms, quartered
2 Tbsp butter
 9 small carrots, preferably a selection of colors, with healthy green tops.
salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Cook off the bacon.  Once cooked, remove from pan and retain rendered fat in pan.  Note: Lardons are original in this recipe; I find thick-cut more accessible.  Thin-cut won't stand up to the dish.

Pat the beef dry.  This is that critical step so many of us learned from Mrs. Child.  Wet meat will take a hundred years to sear at which point, you will have cooked it through and that's not what we want here.  We want to get a nice, sealing crust on the meat.  So get the pan smoking-hot and drop in your cubes.  Sear until good and brown (this involves not touching them) and flip.  You may need to add more oil to the pan as you cook.  The meat should not be crowded and batches will be necessary. 

Achievement Unlocked: The Perfect Sear

Set all seared meat aside.  Place the chunked vegetables in the same pan and give them a light caramelizing as well.  Place vegetables and garlic into a bowl.  Toss with 1 Tbsp of the flour.  Add garlic, bay and herbs and toss lightly.

You will have what professionals call sucs in the bottom of your pan.  The brown, crispy flavor-wonders left behind by your meat and veggies.  Put the pan back on the heat and warm.  Pour in half a cup of the red wine and the tomato paste.  Stir with a gentle tool (I prefer a wooden spatula I have), scraping the pan gently to release the sucs and mix the tomato paste into the wine.  When you aren't feeling any more resistance or you can see the sucs have released into the wine, you've officially deglazed a pan.  Take it off the heat.

Achievement Unlocked: Deglazing a Pan

Place the beef in the dutch oven.  See the juices remaining on the plate?  Pour those into the deglazed pan.  That's 100% flavor you don't want to lose.  Toss the beef with the remaining 2 Tbsp flour and season with salt and pepper and place in oven for 3-4 minutes.  Toss the meat to turn, return to oven for another 3-4 minutes.  Turn the oven down to 325.

Crumble the cooked bacon and sprinkle it over the beef.  Take your cheesecloth and lay it over the meat.  Layer the vegetables and herbs over top.  The cheesecloth will allow all flavors to permeate and mix and, in a few hours, it will also allow you to lift the vegetables cleanly off the meat.  No picking thyme and parsley mush off your meat!  (Hat off to Bouchon for this tip.)

Cover meat and vegetables with wine sauce from your pan, remaining wine and 2 cups of the stock.  Throw on the lid.  Cook for at least 3 hours, more if you need the time.

Twenty minutes before you pull the dish out of the oven, prep the carrots.  Peel them and slice them lengthwise, leaving half an inch of green at the top of the carrot.  (Scrape around the top of the carrot with the edge of a knife to ensure no dirt is clinging to the place where the greens meet the carrot.)  Have two clean pans out.  In one large pan, sautee the mushrooms on high heat with butter, browning as you go.  In the second pan, place the carrots with the remaining 1/2 cup of stock.  Bring to a low simmer and braise until bright and crunchy-tender.

When you pop the bourginon out of the oven, pull the vegetables and herbs out.  They will be virtual mush--they were just there to flavor so you can green bin 'em now.  Skim meat and other residue out of sauce and into a clean cup.  Let the liquid sit long enough fat rises--defat the liquid and pour the remaining sauce into a saucepan.  Give it a strong simmer for 10 minutes or long enough to reduce slightly.

To serve, place meat, mushrooms and sauce in a bowl.  Top with three carrot halves of varying colors. Throw bread on the side of the plate for sopping up this ruby goodness.

If you're somehow blessed with leftovers, this stew only gets better as it sits.  Combine all ingredients and refrigerate.



Green Leaf Salad with Parmesan Crisp and mustard-garlic-parmesan dressing

There is really nothing to this salad.  Go wash some red lettuce, grate half a cup of parmesan and juice a lemon.

Now arrange the lettuce on the plate.

Pile the parmesan in a hot frying pan and use the back of a spoon to smooth out into the size of a circle you're happy with for your crisp.  Let it melt until the cheese is bubbling and sunk into a fine lattice.  Using a very thin tool, flip the parmesan and let it get golden on the other side.  When complete, transfer to salad or save.  Crisps are physically delicate but will keep well.  I made four crisps plus a little for the dressing with this half cup.

For dressing, mix together a teaspoon of mustard (a crunchy mustard is ideal in my opinion), very finely minced garlic (this is a dressing--don't cheat on your mince-work or you'll regret it) and half a tablespoon of parmesan.  Mix with a touch of salt, plenty of black pepper, lemon juice and olive oil.  Season to taste and let sit as long as possible before the salad is served to let the flavors meld.

Blue Cheese Walnut Bread
(Heed warnings in the comments section about the different rising times, particularly if you're not familiar with non-machine bread making.)

Cheesecake with Caramelized Apples and Salted Caramel Sauce

The cheesecake is a version of the one already on this website but sans chocolate and with a vanilla bean stirred into the milk and sour cream I warmed together for extra volume due to the lack of chocolate.  The crust was graham as here but I added cinnamon and cardamom.

Caramelized apples may be made by peeling and slicing an apple.  Toss the apples in sugar and cinnamon, ensuring thorough coating of the sugar.  Melt butter in a frying pan and when it is very hot, place apples evenly through pan.  After 2-3 minutes, flip apple.  Try to get a nice brown coating on either side; this is the sugar caramelizing and will give wonderful texture.

The caramel sauce recipe linked here has a great step-by-step guide and pictures.  Just remember melting sugar is hotter than boiling water so DO NOT under any circumstances touch it until cooled.  I did not add salt to my initial product but finished the plate with fleur de sel.

Apolopeas and Ham for Radio Silence

Now, I didn't figure this was going to be the active-est of blogs, but I didn't expect myself to tumble into THIS kind of silence. Oopie.

As penance, I hand you probably my favorite soup, during one of your last chances to make those really long-cook winter meals.

I give you, my Split Pea and Ham Soup.

Or as it is now known, my Apolopeas and Ham Soup.

My husband does not share my adoration for beans and lentils and peas, and I won't tell you what he thinks they look like cooked, so this recipe is for me alone. This means that I have made an enormous vat of soup all for myself. Luckily, soup always freezes. Now, I've never made split pea soup until now as most every recipe I've come across requests that I use a ham hock for flavor and meat. I had yet to ever see something in the grocery store which called itself a ham hock and therefore I never made it, feeling that boiling a hunk of cooked, smoked ham would be somehow inadequate.

(Though, now having made pea/bean soup with both a ham hock and a hunk of cooked ham, I can tell you that the hock does lend a certain smoky flavor and the shredded, unprocessed meat gives the soup a far more traditional mouth feel. A rustic feel, you might say. I think it’s lovely, but the more processed, pre-cooked hams are not awful by a long shot.)

So I pined after the perfect split-pea concoction from a can for years, never finding it, and wishing, strangely, that Tim Horton's would just sell me theirs. (I'm a salt junkie; I'm sorry.)

A few days after we moved to our new home in Toronto, I went visiting the Culinarium. Amongst their gorgeous products (and produce), I saw, in the bottom right corner of a freezer, a triangular shape wrapped in butcher's paper labeled 'ham hock'. I knew, immediately, what I had to do.



Now, I need to explain to you that I bought this enormous hunk of meat without thinking about any recipe. When I got it home and realized I'd purchased a 3 1/2 pound hock and that it was too big to even fully fit in my soup pot, I was a little daunted. That said, I managed, and I will tell you just how so based on my experience. But I might recommend you look at getting a bigger pot or a smaller piece of meat. As it is, I have a bunch of leftover meat and four cups of beautiful, rich ham stock.

So, without further ado...

Split Pea Soup with Ham

Now, you are being warned--this is one of those recipes that I did not measure as I went. I am guesstimating the amounts I think I used here. If something looks wrong to you, adjust as necessary.

This is a half-day recipe for sure, if not longer, depending on your belly's noise levels. It is, however, a half-day recipe that doesn't need a lot of tending, so you can probably do as I did and get on with household chores in the mean time.

3 1/2 lbs ham hock
2 cups split green peas
3 smallish carrots
1/2 large onion
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp unsalted butter
3 bay leaves
splash of liquid smoke
ham stock
water
salt and pepper to taste

In the morning, start your stock. My hock stood up out of the pot by a few inches so I filled it with as much water as I dared and got it bubbling. Top off the water every couple of hours if necessary to get as much of the hock submerged as possible. Eventually, the meat at the bottom softens and you can push the whole thing down a little more (I never quite got the whole thing in, however). Let it simmer away, skimming occasionally, for approximately three hours or more. Remove hock from the stock and let it cool. Pour out the liquid into a separate container and reserve.

When the hock has cooled enough to handle, pull off and dice up 1 1/4 cups of meat. Reserve the rest of the meat for another use.

Dice the carrots, onion and garlic. Sautee in the butter for five minutes to soften. Please note I specify unsalted butter. The ham is already plenty salty. You probably don’t really need to add to it, and this is coming from a salt addict. Dump the rinsed split peas into the pot, the meat, the bay leaves and the smoke.

Pour in four and a half cups of stock and four cups of water. Stir everything up, cracking pepper over the whole lot. Resist adding salt until near the end so you can get an idea of how much the stock has flavored things. Bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer for approximately an hour or more, or until the peas have cooked and disintegrated to your desired consistency (I prefer the whole thing to be very soft and not highly textured, so I cook it for a long time).

This soup will thicken again as it cools; add water back in as necessary.

And, as always, the really awful picture to go with it.
















(Do you like my staging? How I didn't even think to try to get this oozing green mash out of the messy pot?)