I Believe in the Bean

12 Oct 2010 4 Comments

by scolgin in Recipes, Video Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

If you’ve read much of this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of beans.

I like all kinds of beans — soupy black beans with garlicky, citrussy Cuban food (that’s the next post, so stay tuned), earthy borlotti beans from Italy (see two posts back), big meaty faba Asturiana beans from Spain, delicate and floral flageolets from France, fermented Chinese black beans, edamame, Mexican pinto beans…

Today I’m writing — or actually talking — about cannellini beans. In the following video, I’ve cooked a pot of these versatile beans, and prepared them four different ways… so you get an idea of how easy they are to make, and how many different things you can do with them. Of these four preparations, I’ve created two in an Italian style, one Spanish and one French. All take no more than a few minutes to make, once you’ve actually cooked the beans. You can even cook a big batch of beans and keep them in the fridge for a week or so, and make different bean dishes on different nights. Enjoy!

Me & Mr. Bean

06 Oct 2010 2 Comments

by scolgin in Cooking Tips, Recipes, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories), Video Tags: , , , , ,

“When young professionals and the socially hip raise chickens in their backyards, newspapers do articles with slideshows. When us Mexicans do it? People call code enforcement.” — Gustavo Arellano

So it must be for the resourceful peasants of Italy when they see their leftover bean soups appearing on the menus of fashionable trattoria in New York and Los Angeles. Something born of necessity and created from leftovers in Tuscany became something craved by starlets after their yoga class in Santa Monica.

Ask a hundred Italians how to make it, and you’ll get a hundred different recipes. And they’ll all be equally good. I’ve had countless variations of this soup in Italy, and in the states. I’ve made countless variations — some with bread, some with carrots and meatballs, meatless variations for vegetarians, and so on. Here’s a simple recipe that’s sure to please your guests. If you don’t eat meat or if you’re having yoga students over, leave out the pancetta. It won’t be quite as good. But that’s the burden you’ll have to carry…

*  *  *

Sopa de Fagioli
Serves 4 -6

1 quart chicken stock
1 cup borlotti beans (or cannellini or red kidney beans)
A few slices of pancetta or bacon, chopped up
1 onion
1 cup roughly chopped cavolo nero (Tuscan kale)
1 sprig rosemary
1/2 cup small pasta (orrechiete, macaroni, etc.)
1/4 cup olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
salt & pepper to taste

Soak the borlotti beans over night. Then cook covered in water over medium heat for about an hour to an hour and a half, or until tender (add more water if needed). Simmer until most of the water is gone, and turn off heat.

Cook the pancetta in half the olive oil (1/8 cup) in a small pan over medium heat until it is well cooked, but not crisp. Add chopped onion and rosemary and cook for a couple minutes until onion is golden. Remove rosemary. Add onion/pancetta mixture to the chicken stock, along with the kale and the beans. Add remainder of olive oil, and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Add dried pasta, cover, and cook over medium low for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with salt to taste.

To plate, ladle a good scoop or two of the soup into a bowl, drizzle with more olive oil and top with a twist of freshly ground black pepper. You could also add a sprinkle of crushed red pepper to give it a little heat, or sprinkle some parmesan over the top for an additional layer of flavor. Enjoy!

And here’s a fun kids outtake:

Deep in the Heart of Texas

29 Sep 2010 1 Comment

by scolgin in Recipes, Sensational Salads, Video Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

We were beginning to enjoy the cool fall weather. And then it hit. In Southern California, we call it the Santa Anas. You might know it as Indian Summer. Put simply, it got @#$%ing hot!!! 110 in the shade.

Life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. The perfect opportunity for a last barbecue or two. So the other night, we called some friends over and did Texas-style. Stood out on the deck with my tongs like a cowboy. Hollered at the chickens and the kids, spit into a tin. Perhaps it’s still warm where you are, and you’ll want to try it too. Put on some Patsy Cline and call the cowboys in…

More knowledgeable people than I could speak more articulately on the regional differences in barbecue. In Texas, I know they love their beef, and they like chilies. I know you’ll love this steak with salty-sweet chili rub. To go with it, I made cheese grits and an iceberg wedge salad with bleu cheese dressing and pancetta — neither strictly Texan, but pretty good foils to the flavorful steak. We drank one of our big jammy family zinfandels — there’s no better varietal with barbecue. Of course, beer, a nice mint julep or even a zesty margarita would’ve paired well. This Texas dinner will serve 4, amply.

*   *   *

Cowboy-Style Grilled Steak

2 lbs good steak on the bone (rib-eye, preferably; but porterhouse is good too)
2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp pimenton (Spanish smoked sweet paprika) or regular paprika
1 tsp ground chipotle pepper
1 tsp ground pasilla or other mild red chili

Take steaks out of the fridge about one hour before you grill. In the meantime, combine other ingredients to make a rub. About 10 minutes before grilling, sprinkle steaks evenly with rub. Gently massage the rub into the meat.

Heat your BBQ as high as it will go — mine gets up around 600 degrees. Cook your steaks 3 or 4 minutes on each side, depending on thickness, until cook medium or medium rare to your preference. Remove, cover with foil, and let sit for 10 minutes. Then use a very sharp knife to cut across the grain into 1/2 inch thick slices. Spread a few slices on each person’s plate, and serve with cheese grits.

Cheese Grits
(Note: I highly recommend buying some Anson Mills grits from the link on this blog. They’re about the best grits on earth. While you’re there, pick up some dried polenta, including the fabulous rustic polenta integrale. Make your shipping costs worthwhile!)

1 cup dried grits
water
1/2 cup grated cheddar
1/4 cup grated pecorino romano or asagio
1 tbsp butter
salt & pepper to taste

Heat about 2 cups of water in a pot to a simmering boil, and add dried grits. Reduce heat to medium low and cook, stirring and adding more water frequently, for up to an hour. Grits should be tender and not at all crunchy. Add salt and pepper to taste, then stir in cheeses. Stir in butter last, and then cover and let sit for five minutes. Scoop some onto each of four plates, and surround with a fan of the steak slices.

Iceberg Wedge Salad

1 head iceberg lettuce
1/2 cup crumbled bleu cheese (roquefort, gorgonzola, etc.)
1/4 cup milk
1 tbsp mayonnaise
4 strips pancetta (or bacon), cooked to crisp
salt & pepper

Remove the core from the lettuce, and cut into quarter wedges. Mix the bleu cheese, milk and mayo vigorously together until it forms a thick dressing (some chunks of bleu cheese should remain). Drizzle some dressing over each of the wedges, then drizzle with a little olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste, and lay a cooked strip of pancetta on top of each. Serve.

The Boy & the Fig

27 Sep 2010 12 Comments

by scolgin in Cooking Tips, Video Tags: , , , ,

People, I find, either love figs or hate them. Mostly it’s less about the food than the tree. If you love figs and you have a fig tree, you are thrilled every late summer when the branches are nearly exploding with ripe fruit. If you hate figs, you despair as the ground of your garden or driveway are littered with gooey, sticky, fly-covered fruit. Others have fig trees and are merely agnostic about them. “Oh, yeah… it’s a nice tree. But we never eat the figs. No idea what to do with them.”

Eat them, my friends, eat them.

My friends with fig trees are never surprised when they invite us over in the late summer and find me clinging simian-like amidst the high branches of a tree or scaling a wall. Some of them look at me skeptically and ask what on earth I’m going to do with the fruits — fig haters, they. Here’s what I teach them:

There’s something sexy and carnal about figs. The way they hang ripely. The way they burst open and reveal their ruby insides. Even the leaves bring to mind Renaissance paintings of Adam & Eve in the garden, body parts barely covered by fig leaves, succumbing to the allure of temptation. But I digress…

I dreamed of having my own fig tree. Last week, we had a surveyor out. We’d always thought our property extended beyond the fence but weren’t sure. I was walking the additional half acre or so we’d picked up in the process with him, and he pointed to a tree. “Well, that’s a strange looking tree!” I looked over, and there hidden among the oaks, a beautiful tall fig tree, reaching its limbs to clear the canopy. Right on the far corner of my own property! So maybe next summer, if you’re lucky, you won’t find me lurking in your yard and scaling your wall…

Teach Your Children Well

25 Sep 2010 9 Comments

by scolgin in Observations, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories), Video Tags: , ,

This is a post for parents. And for those who are childlike at heart. Because it is in approaching food with a childlike joy and wonder that your cooking will be transformed. And your eating.

Of course, any parent will tell you that children don’t always approach food with a childlike joy. When my son, Flynn, was young. I used to make him baby risottos. They were so good and he loved them so much that we thought of starting a baby food company. But then something happened. He switched. He was suspicious of everything I made. “Dad, there’s a dot in my food!” he would squeal in terror, and the simplest dishes would be derailed by a speck of pepper or a stray trace of parsley.

I was crestfallen.

A chef. And my first-born son would eat nothing but chicken nuggets.

The question, of course, was how to ever get him eating interesting food again. The answer was simple, if not exactly quick. Introduce him to the joy of growing, shopping, cooking and eating. And get him involved. Are your kids involved? Are YOU involved??

I expanded the garden, and gave Flynn his own tomato and corn plants. I got chickens, and put him in charge of egg collection (he now has an egg business selling them in the neighborhood — need any really GOOD eggs? Call Flynn…) My sister got him his own cookbook for his birthday — what a gift! Sometimes I find him sitting on the couch on a Saturday afternoon reading his cookbook. Sometimes he and I watch the cooking shows on PBS on Saturday afternoon. Sometimes we make what we’ve seen.

And I began to request his help in the kitchen. I would let him chop things — supervised, of course — with my really cool, sharp chef’s knife. (Chef’s knives are enticingly exciting to kids, especially boys.) I let him stir sauces. I let him toss the pizza dough in the air. And anytime he wanted a bite of something, I gave it to him.

While he’s still not eating EVERYTHING, there are few things he won’t try. And he’s had the experience enough times of enjoying something wonderful he didn’t want to try, that he believes me when I say, “No, seriously… you’re gonna LOVE this!” Plus, he learned to love the experience of sourcing our food. We go on food adventures. To Little Tokyo to get imagawayaki hot off the grill. To the cheese shop in Beverly Hills. To East L.A. to get handmade tortillas.

Flynn wants to go to France to try the stinky cheeses there. I heard him telling a friend in his taekwondo class the other day about the shabu shabu we were having for dinner that evening. “No,” he explained, his hands gesticulating animatedly, “you cook it right on the table!”

Have you made food an adventure for your children? First, of course, you must make it an adventure for yourself. I guess that’s really what this blog is all about. We’re all kids at heart. Life should always be approached with bright-eyed wonder, as an adventure. And in life, food is one of the greatest adventures of all.

Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries