meat – Page 2 – The Kitchen Illiterate

3rd Annual Cold Weather Chili Party

I love chili party time. It’s the only thing that makes the encroaching cold weather bearable. (It’s 25 degrees outside right now, folks, and I’m not liking it one bit.) In fact, I suspect this, my last East Coast winter, is going to be particularly difficult, and thus am contemplating a mid-winter chili party, a kind of third and a half annual (huh?) in March, just to make the rest of the cold times bearable.

(Just to give you a sense of how terrible my memory is, I thought that last year’s chili party was held in October…but it was actually in January. I think I block most memories of winter and pretend that any good events from those months really occurred in less treacherous times. That is just my theory.)

Regardless of how cold it is, or what month it is, or any of that unimportant stuff, making chili is one of my favorite wintertime things to do. I have a standard recipe I’ve been making for probably about six or seven years, and it’s pretty close to what my mom made throughout my childhood. But I strayed this year, my friends, I strayed. I made chili without any beans for the first time in my life. And I liked it.
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Grandpa’s Seven Layer Dinner

Alright, no hatin’ people. I know that picture up there looks like a bowl of mush, but I am here to urge you to look past the mush to the delicious, comforting treat that is Seven Layer Dinner.

My brother got married last weekend (yay! Andy and Lisa! yay!), and some wonderful person gave them a slow cooker. When they opened it, my brother immediately exclaimed, “Yeah! Seven Layer Dinner,” and I remembered my Grandpa’s Seven Layer Dinner for the first time in years. Seven Layer Dinner is quintessentially Midwestern and perfect for cold, yucky days when you need something warm and comforting at the end of a long day. After we got back to Boston, I immediately emailed the grandparents for the recipe.
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Lackluster Short Ribs Become Delicious Spaghetti

I am all about finding new lives for leftovers, so I have to admit I’m a big fan of the new Bon Appetit column, Family Style. Every month they feature one meal, and a creative idea for the leftovers. They’re always simple and not too time consuming, and October’s especially caught my eye: Braised Short Ribs. It’s starting to feel like slow cooker time, and I’d never made short ribs, so I had to try it. But even from the beginning, their suggestion to use the leftovers for spaghetti sauce sounded even better than the braised short ribs themselves. And it was.

Sadly, my first attempt at short ribs just wasn’t that spectacular, and I blame it on the fact that I didn’t want to run across the street for a bottle of wine at 8 in the morning. Yet again, the inability to buy a bottle of wine in most grocery stores in Massachusetts thwarted dinner. I forgot to make a stop at the wine store after grocery shopping, and when I started putting it all together in the morning, I had to substitute water in the recipe. And that was a bad substitution. I suspect the wine would have added more flavor, and perhaps helped eliminate some of the greasiness that resulted.
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I’m in love with steak burritos.

I’m very firmly against this whole idea that Labor Day somehow signals the end of summer and, more importantly, the end of grilling season. So last weekend, we decided to throw a “Summer’s Not Over Yet” barbecue, to keep the love of the grill alive. Of course, the weather was totally crap: over 90% humidity and rain, rain, rain. But we were not to be daunted. We fired up that grill anyway, and everyone huddled on the back porch and sweated.

I decided to forgo the typical burgers and potato salad route in favor of a Santa Maria-style barbecue. Or rather, a Boston-style Santa Maria-style barbecue, seeing as how some of the staples of the central California coast are unavailable on this side of things, including tri-tip steak and pinquito beans. I have on several occasions expressed my love for the tri-tip, but in my 20-some years of living in California, I’ve never really heard of this traditional Santa Maria barbecue, and I’d certainly never heard of pinquito beans. In the last few weeks, however, I started reading about this California tradition seemingly everywhere, and I knew I had to pay homage, even if my homage was a bit flawed.
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A Combs Family Favorite: Tamale Pie, or 1960s Southwest Style

These days there is no shortage of places to find new recipes. On the interwebs alone you’ve got food blogs, recipe forums, and an endless array of culinary websites like epicurious and Eating Well. Food magazines seem to multiply every time I go to the newstand, and new cookbooks are published almost daily, not just from the big name publishing houses but by individuals using print-on-demand services like lulu.com to sell their own culinary expertise. All of this recipe abundance makes me think about my tattered blue folder stuffed with scraps of paper and print outs and index cards. It makes me think of the way people acquired recipes in the decades before cheap printing and the internet: from other people.

I suppose you could say that finding a recipe on a blog is still getting it from another person, and it’s true that the food blogging community is tight-knit. I feel like I know the writers whose blogs I read regularly, just by reading their words and seeing pictures of their kitchens and exchanging the occasional email or comment. There is a big element of the personal in food blogs, and of friendliness, but it’s still not quite the same as tasting someone’s spinach cheese bites at a party and telling them you simply have to have the recipe, or yet again pulling out the stained index card on which your Grandma wrote her Russian Tea Cake recipe.
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Tri Tip, Asparagus, and Roasted Potatoes a la Patrick

After taking over his kitchen on Thursday night, I stepped out of the way and let Patrick cook dinner for my family and a few of our friends on Saturday. And I am glad I did. He grilled up some beautiful Tri Tip steak, roasted potatoes, and put together a unique asparagus dish with roasted red peppers and slivered almonds. All of it was spectacular. And I’ve been bugging him for the recipe, which he briefly relayed to me over dinner, but have heard nothing. So I’m going to have to attempt to recreate it from memory. Perhaps if I’m lucky he will post any corrections in the comments (hint, hint to the brother).

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Slow Cooked Al Pastor-style Pork

This summer is passing much too quickly for my taste. I can’t believe my birthday has come and gone, and even worse, that it’s taken me over a week to blog about this year’s pork spectacle. I’m not sure when or how I decided that my birthday was an ideal occasion for very large, fatty pieces of pork to be slow cooked in various ways, but that seems to be the new tradition, and I’m already plotting next year’s preparation of the other white meat.

But I am getting ahead of myself. This year I got it into my head that I wanted to make al pastor. I’m not quite sure why. In fact, I had never had al pastor. When I was a kid in San Diego, I was a pretty firm believer that carne asada burritos were the only respectable way to go. And al pastor is meant to be cooked on a vertical rotisserie. It’s not like I have one of those sitting around. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about al pastor for weeks, and it seemed as though I would really have no choice for the birthday feast: al pastor it would have to be.

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The way a carne asada is meant to be

Carne Asada Burrito from Filiberto’s

Originally uploaded by kinzo808

Alright, it might not look that appealing to you, but when I saw this picture I was instantly filled with longing for home, and for carne asada burritos the way they’re meant to be eaten. Leave out that stinkin’ rice. Lettuce? Bah, that’s for rabbits. A truly delicious carne asada burrito has nothing but meat, guac, and salsa. And I am so, so homesick for delicious, San Diego-style Mexican food.

It is Totally the Year of the Pot Roast

Pot Roast

One of my favorite food bloggers, The Pioneer Woman a. k. a. Ree, declared 2008 as the year of the pot roast, inspiring me to try my hand at one mid-western culinary stand-by I had yet to tackle. Mr. X could hardly believe that the simple perfection of a pot roast had never graced my kitchen, and to be honest, I could hardly believe it either. (And to be doubly honest, it still hasn’t; I made this at his house.) It’s not that I’ve never had pot roast before. I mean, I was born in South Dakota. But my mom wasn’t really one for cooking up huge chunks of meat, so it certainly wasn’t a staple dinner of my childhood. And I’m not really one for the huge chunks of meat, either. It never occurred to me to buy a huge beef shoulder or whatever it was I bought and throw it in a pot. Trust me, it will occur to me in the future. Often.

The beauty of the pot roast is twofold: It takes about three hours of oven time to properly cook a huge chunk of meat, enough time for your kitchen (or entire apartment, if you live in the city) to become warm and delicious smelling. This is splendid during cold, cold winters. And because you’re pretty much just leaving it in the oven for those three hours, the amount of effort you actually put into what amounts to a substantial pile of food is minimal. I like minimal. Oh wait, and there’s a third beauty: A pot roast doresn’t require a ton of expensive ingredients. I like inexpensive.

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Unexpected deliciousness, in casserole form

Yellow Cauliflower

Last week felt like the beginning of casserole season in Boston: Cool, crisp days, leaves falling from trees, and sweaters unearthed from boxes in the back of the closet. My favorite time of year. And what happens? Suddenly, the temperatures shoot back up into the 80s, and turning the oven on starts to sound like less of a good idea. What is up, Boston? Why do you toy with my emotions? Why do you confuse my wardrobe, not to mention by immune system?

No matter. Last week I got in not just one but TWO casseroles, in that brief and glorious 50 degree period. The sad thing I’ve realized about casseroles is that they really don’t photograph well, as evidenced above. That odd monochromatic agglomeration of vegetables belies how absolutely and unexpectedly wonderful it was. I think I can honestly say that was one of the weirdest casseroles I’ve ever made. In fact, I had little faith, as I was tossing the cauliflower and beef together in cheese sauce, that it was even going to be edible. But lo, when I pulled it out of the oven it was a vision of cheesy, crusty, crunchy vegetable goodness. I was shocked. Happily and gluttonously shocked. I’m going to have to be very careful about these kinds of casseroles unless I can figure out how to work gym-going back into my schedule.

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