Figuring Out Fennel

Fennel bulb intrigues me and I love it in salads and roasted, but ideas for how to combine its nutty licorice-ness in a cooked savory dish have alluded me. Two fennel bulbs and a chuck roast in my fridge inspired me to do a little searching on the web. A beef stew with fennel gremolata stood out, but I could see I would have to make a few changes to suit my cooking style and what I had on hand. Since I was going to be zesting an orange for the stew, I knew that I would have to make my son's favorite salad, a combination of arugula, fennel, and orange that we enjoy with Dungeness crab on special occasions.

In reviewing the recipe for the stew, I knew immediately that I would not use red pepper, both because it's out of season and because I wanted to emphasize the flavor of the root vegetables. While I have canned tomatoes in my pantry, that much tomato did not go with what I had in mind either, though it seemed that a bit of my lactofermented ketchup, with its cloves and celery seeds, would complement the dish and thicken the braising liquid somewhat. If you don't make your own ketchup, use plain tomato paste. Most commercial ketchups will add too much sweetness.

I only used four ¾-inch strips of orange zest--about half of the zest from one medium size blood orange--but that was enough to give the dish a rich orange flavor that worked well with the beef, fennel, and root vegetables. I used a vegetable peeler to remove just the orange zest, leaving behind the bitter white pith. I left the remaining strips of zest on a rack to dry. I keep the dry strips in a jar to add to dishes like this one when I don't have oranges on hand.

As I mentioned in my post about Beouf Bourguignon, when braising in my sauteuse pan, I have to keep a close eye on things as the liquid tends to dissipate thanks to the pan's large surface area. I cooked some potatoes to go with the meal and added some cooking liquid to the braise. You could do the same, or add more broth. If you're using a Dutch oven, you probably won't have this problem. Got picky eaters who don't like cooked root vegetables? Remove all the meat from the finished dish, purée the vegetables with a immersion blender, then return the meat to the deceivingly delicious gravy.

Braised Beef with Orange, Fennel  and Root Vegetables

Serves 6-8

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

2 tablespoons tallow

2½ to 3 pounds chuck roast,  cut into ¾-inch chunks

1 large onion, sliced

1 large fennel bulb, sliced

1 carrot, diagonally sliced

2 medium beets, sliced 

1 parsnip, diagonally sliced

3-4 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 tablespoon finely minced ginger

2 tablespoons lactofermented ketchup or tomato paste

1 teaspoon fennel seed

1 teaspoon dry thyme or several sprigs fresh

1 pint beef broth, more if needed

4 ¾-inch wide strips strips of zest peeled from one blood orange, reserve rest of orange for salad

Preheat oven to 400ºF. Melt tallow over medium high heat in a Dutch oven or sauteuse. Mix salt and pepper together in a small bowl, then sprinkle half of it generously over cubes of beef. Brown beef in on all sides, then remove from pan. Saute onion, fennel, carrot and parsnip in the same pan, adding some more tallow if necessary. When the vegetables are soft, add the garlic, ketchup, fennel seed, and thyme, cook for 2 minutes then add the broth and orange zest. Return meat to pan, cover, and bring to broth to a boil. Move pan to oven and cook until meat is tender, about 1½ to 2 hours. 

Arugula, Blood Orange, and Fennel Salad
Serves 4
 

juice from 1 Meyer lemon or other small lemon

1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

3 tablespoons sesame seed oil

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon miso (optional)

salt and pepper

1 small fennel bulb

1 blood orange

1 pound arugula

Combine lemon juice, rice wine vinegar, oils, and miso in a jar, cover, and shake vigorously. Taste and add salt and pepper. Set dressing aside. Cut the fennel bulb in half lengthwise, through the root. Remove the core. Holding the stem end of the bulb half, thinly slice the fennel on a mandolin or with a very sharp knife. Repeat with other half. Place slices in a bowl. Section the orange, holding it over the bowl of fennel to capture the juices while you work and dropping freed orange sections in bowl. Toss the orange and fennel together--the citric acid from the orange will keep the fennel from browning. Just before serving, toss fennel, orange, and arugula with about half of the dressing, reserve the rest for another day.    

Portland Area Home Food Production Resources

Two people ask for local gardening/food production resources last weekend...must be all the fine weather. Here are my faves. Please comment with yours!

Books About Growing Food Here
Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon
Maritime Northwest Garden Guide: Planning Calendar for Year-Round Organic Gardening by Carl Elliot and Rob Peterson

Local Organizations
Growing Gardens
Portland Permaculture Guild
Home Orchard Society
Oregon Tilth: Organic Gardening Classes
OSU Extension, Gardening
Trackers PDX

Email Lists
PDX Goats
PDX Backyard Chickens

Web Sites and Blogs
Throwback at Trapper Creek
(Nita farms and blogs out in the gorge)
Portland Nursery has a ton of gardening brochures here . I find their vegetable calendar is especially helpful.
Rainy Side Gardeners
Raising Rabbits in the Pacific Northwest
Rabbit Revolution

Local Businesses
Naomi's Organic Farm Supply
Urban Farm Store
Pistils Nursery
Portland Nursery

New Twist on Potato, Leek & Asparagus Soup

Potato-leek soup has been with me for a long time. Most famously it was the base for an asparagus-potato-leek soup I made for President Jimmy Carter years ago, when I worked as a bookseller and he came to our store to sign a book of poetry. Back then I followed a recipe from Perla Meyer's Art of Seasonal Cooking, but nowadays I let my pantry (by which I mean, all my food storage areas: my pantry, freezer, fridge, and even my garden--I'm "storing" potatoes there now) guide me instead. I discovered a quart of spring 2009 asparagus lingering in the freezer this weekend and with the hints of spring 2010 popping up all over the place (why, Hello, Hyacinths!), I thought that would be a good addition. Annabel wanted a cheese soup, so grated cheddar went in too. (She even agreed that potatoes, as long as they were pureed, would be okay, which is a big step for a girl who has hardly let potato in any form pass her lips in three years.)

The twist? We're out of chicken broth. And vegetable stock. There's a jar or two of beef broth in the pantry, but I've always thought that beef is too rich for this soup, which has a light spring air about it, especially with the asparagus. I have been saving up chicken backs and veggie scraps in the freezer for my upcoming Stocks, Soups, and Stews class and not made any stocks for my own use lately. What to do? A friend recently asked on Facebook what she could do with the abundant whey she had leftover from making cheese. Someone suggested soup and, fortunately, I have lots of whey too. So, into the pot that went as well. I was concerned that it would add an excessively tangy flavor, but not at all. If you have "way too much whey" on hand, here's a way to use some up...otherwise, chicken broth or vegetable stock will be just fine.

2 tablespoons butter
2 large leeks, white and pale green parts sliced
2 pounds potatoes (I used German butterballs from our garden), chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 cups whey (or chicken broth or vegetable stock)
1 pound frozen asparagus
1 generous cup grated cheddar cheese
salt, pepper
creme fraiche, sour cream (optional)
bacon bits (optional)

Melt butter in a soup pot over medium high heat. Sauté the sliced leeks in butter until soft. Add the potatoes and garlic, then add enough whey to cover everything. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes or until potatoes are soft enough to mash with a fork. Add the asparagus and cook for a couple minutes, long enough to barely soften the asparagus. Remove pot from heat and purée with an immersion blender or in batches in a blender or food processor. Return the puréed soup to the pot and add the cheese. When the cheese is melted, add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with a dollop of cream fraiche or sour cream and a sprinkling of bacon bits.

When Life Hands You Liver...

Recently, I took a package of what I thought was pork sausage out of my deep freeze and put it in the fridge to thaw. Imagine my horror when I opened the package to find pork liver when I was supposed to make pizza for dinner that night. Yuck, right? Well, I found a pound of actual sausage, thawed it in the microwave, and my son's birthday dinner was saved. This package of liver sat in the fridge a couple days while I contemplated what to do with it. No way we were going to eat frank liver, especially pork liver, which even some liver-lovers can't abide. Liverwurst seemed like a good choice, but the recipes I found online called for ingredients I didn't have on hand or didn't want to use in an experiment that could go horribly wrong. So, in my usual idiom, I improvised. According to several of the recipes I found, you're supposed to let the cooked liverwurst age for a couple days, allowing the flavors to meld. Well, I baked this yesterday afternoon and it's half gone. Guess they liked it?

I grind most of my spices fresh--it really does make a difference. I have a dedicated pepper grinder that I use for small amounts and a coffee grinder for times when I need to grind larger amount or larger spices that won't go through the pepper grinder. Allspice is one of those. To grate nutmeg, I use my Microplane grater, one of my most used kitchen hand tools.

Braunschweiger (Liverwurst)
Makes one small loaf

1 pound pork liver
1 pork heart
1 pound unseasoned pork sausage
1 medium onion, chopped
2-3 teaspoons sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cloves, freshly ground
½ teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
¼ teaspoon allspice, freshly ground
¼ teaspoon nutmeg, freshly ground

Preheat oven to 300º F. If you are use a food processor for grinding, cut the liver and heart into cubes and freeze for 30 minutes, so that they will not turn to mush during processing.

Sauté the onion in a little pork fat or butter until it is soft. Sprinkle with the spices to warm them. Process the onion mixture, liver, and heart until you have a smooth purée, then add the sausage until just blended. Fry a spoonful of the purée over medium heat until cooked through to taste for seasoning. Adjust if necessary, but note that flavors will be less intense after the finished paté is cooled. I felt mine tasted to salty when it was fresh out of the oven, but once cooled it did not taste overly salted.

Pack the purée into a loaf pan and cover tightly with foil. Put the dish in a pan with an inch or two of boiling water and bake at 300º F until meat is cooked but not browned (meat thermometer should read 160-165º F), about 2 hours.

Remove baking dish from the pan of water and let paté cool in the dish. Refrigerate 1 to 2 days before using, if you can.

Deck Family Farm Meat Buying Club Intructions

The beef, pork, and poultry are raised by them, the lamb and goat by other local farmers near Junction City, Oregon, just west of Eugene. All animals are raised on pasture. The Decks follow the intensive rotational grazing method on their farm to maintain and increase the fertility of their soil and use no synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, hormones or antibiotics. Their retail meat is butchered at Dayton Meats, which does not "wash" the meat in citric or lactic acid (this is done to most meat you buy at the store, even at New Seasons). I think the Decks must need to update their web site, because it says that they are "looking for a nitrate-free cure," but Christine Deck told me recently that Dayton does indeed do a nitrate-free cure.

Buying club orders are 20% off the retail price. You can order boxes as well, but they are same price as listed on the Deck web site. If there is enough interest in the ground beef, we can get the wholesale price of $4.99/pound. (The organic ground beef comes from culled dairy cows, who have received small amounts of grain during milking. The regular ground beef is from 100% grassfed cattle.)

Delivery is free. The Decks prefer payment by check at the time of delivery, though if you would like to pay by credit card, we can make arrangements for that. The meat will arrive frozen and there will be a two-hour pick-up window. Delivery is expected before noon. Pick up will be at my home, 13228 NE Eugene Street, a few blocks north of 132nd & Halsey.

Place your order by Wednesday, February 10. Please follow these instructions to order:

1. Use the ordering page on the Deck's web site to calculate your order estimate (do not actually place your order thru their site),
2. Subtract 20% off the retail cuts you want to order (boxes and wholesale ground beef are not subject to the 20% discount),
3. Indicate what you would like in this form.

I also organize a food buying club, with a monthly Azure Standard drop, plus we do bulk orders of produce during the growing season, bulk meat purchases (mostly from the Decks, but some other local farms as well), and starting this year, hosting a CSA pick up site. You can join the buying club by signing up for the Yahoo group we use.

Boeuf Bourguignon à Chez Musser

I mentioned on Facebook how divine my house smelled last night while I was cooking Beouf Bourguignon and got some recipe requests. I looked online for a recipe similar to my version of the classic French beef stew, but they were all so much more complicated than necessary, so I am feeling bound to type up mine. This peasant dish, raised to haute cuisine by Antoine Carême, then brought to American home cooks 40 years ago by Julia Child is now experiencing a resurgence of interest thanks to last year's film Julie and Julia. (I can't help but wonder why the upstart's name is first in the title?)

The recipe, as described in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, appears complicated, but really, this is home food and none of the techniques involved are beyond the scope of a home cook. Preparing the meat and sauce is simplicity. You get the onions and mushrooms ready while the meat is cooking. I do find peeling the two dozen pearl onions tedious and if I don't have them on hand or don't want to deal with them, I just saute a sliced onion along with the carrots and add them to the meat. That said, the browned whole pearl onions bring a welcome contrasting sweetness to the dish that is worth the effort, so do try it that way at least once. Sadly, no one in my family but me likes mushrooms, so I have to cordon mine in a corner of the sauteuse pan I use for braising, then scoop them into a little serving bowl for myself before putting the rest of the meat and sauce in another serving bowl.

You may notice there is no bacon, fat back, lardons, or any other form of smokey pork fat goodness in my recipe. I'm all for it much of the time and we even go so far as to cure and smoke our own bacon, but I feel the act of soaking, which Julia recommends to remove the saltiness, just negates the whole purpose of using a cured fat. When I've just used bacon fat, I have found the dish gets too salty and the smokiness doesn't add to the dish. So, I use tallow, which is rendered beef fat. If you don't have any tallow, clarified butter or ghee would work. You can DIY, of course. Or, you can completely ignore me and go for the pork fat. C'est la vie.

I also find flouring the meat unnecessary and knowing that so many are trying to avoid gluten and grains, I can assure you that you are missing nothing. I quit doing that ages ago, when I started using the sauteuse pan, which, because of its large surface area, readily thickens the sauce without the addition of flour. If you are using at Dutch oven and find that your sauce isn't thick enough in the end, you can always thicken with a beurre manie or potato starch if you eschew gluten (to avoid lumps, first whisk a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid with a couple teaspoons of starch, then add the mixture to the sauce).

I served last night's beouf bourguignon with homemade crème fraîche. O. M. G. Really, just plan a day or so ahead and do it. Your taste buds, if they could, would bow down and say, "Bless you!" Sour cream, quark, or even yogurt would be fine. I believe Julia says to serve this with boiled potatoes, though it is also quite good with roasted or mashed potatoes, buttered egg noodles...oh anything to catch that sauce! And don't forget a side of halved Brussels sprouts, boiled for a few minutes, then browned in bacon fat. Nom-nom-nom, says the lady who doesn't like Brussels sprouts.

Someone asked if using grass-fed beef made a difference in the cooking time. I simply cook this until the meat is tender, not according to any specific time. Do keep an eye on things during what you expect to be the last hour or so, especially if you use a sauteuse, rather than a Dutch oven. The sauce can go from perfectly thick to not-so-perfectly dry rather quickly if you are not paying attention. I simply add more broth or even the rinse water from the jar of tomato sauce if more liquid is needed toward the end.

3 pounds lean stewing beef, cut into 2-inch cubes
Salt and pepper
2-4 tablespoons tallow
1 carrot, diced
2 cloves mashed garlic
2 cups red wine, young and full-bodied (Pinot Noir or Burgundy is usually recommended, though I often use an inexpensive Bordeaux)
2 to 3 cups beef stock
1 pint tomato sauce
leaves from 4 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
18 to 24 pearl onions
1 pound cremini mushrooms, quartered
4 tablespoons butter, divided

Preheat oven to 325F. Sprinkle salt and pepper all over the cubed meat. Melt tallow over medium high heat in a large saute pan or sauteuse. Add seasoned meat to the pan in a single layer, browning in batches if your pan is not large enough to accomodate all the meat at once without crowding. Remove the browned meat to a bowl. Saute the carrots in the pan for several minutes, until they are browned. Add the garlic and saute for 60 seconds. Put the browned carrots and garlic with the meat, return the pan to the heat and immediately add the wine. Using a flat wooden spatula, deglaze the pan, scraping the browned bits off the bottom of the pan. Add the stock, tomato sauce, thyme leaves, bay leaf, meat, and carrots to the pan. Bring to a simmer on the stove. Cover the pan and cook in the oven for 3 to 4 hours, or until you can easily pull the meat apart with a fork. Add the onions and mushrooms and cook for another 2o minutes. If you feel the sauce is not thick enough, remove the meat and vegetables from the sauce. Put the cooking pan on a medium-high burner, then thicken with a potato starch or beurre manie (typically, one uses flour to thicken at the start of cooking and a root starch for thickening at the end of cooking, but in a pinch, the flour-butter mix works). Return meat and vegetables to the pan and gently stir, coating everything in sauce.

In the meantime, prepare the onions and mushrooms. To peel the onions, boil them for 1 minute, then drain. Cut off the ends, the slip off the skins. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a saute pan over medium high heat. Brown the onions in the pan for 10 minutes, remove and set aside. Return saute pan back to burner. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and saute the mushrooms for about 8-10 minutes. If you, like me, must keep the mushrooms out of the finished dish, as they begin to brown sprinkle salt on the mushrooms and add a splash of red wine to the saute pan and cook for 1 more minute. Feel free to add some more butter, too. You deserve it. Set the mushrooms aside with the onions.

When the meat is tender, gently stir in the onions and mushrooms, then serve. Bon Appétit!

Taking Stock, Making Stock

Happy New Year! After months of preserving followed by weeks of holiday baking, travel, and celebrations, I am relieved to spend some time in January quietly taking stock of the previous year and making plans for the new. I've been thinking in particular of the new food-related skills I acquired in 2009 and the people who helped me learn something new, either in person or through their books and blogs. Here is my list of Kitchen-Inspiration Books, Blogs, and People of 2009.

• Helen Witty and her book Fancy Pantry taught me to make gravlax for our New Year's Day open house and inspired me all year, from spring's Ginger-Rhubarb Chutney and summer's Countrystyle Chile Sauce to Cranberry Cordial in the fall and now, Candied Kumquats!
• Joining The Nourished Kitchen's Pantry Challenge in December 2008 pushed me to keep better records of how much I spend on food, showing me how much I save by cooking only with what I have on hand and giving focus to my 2009 food preservation efforts.
• Michael Ruhlman. Oh, let me count the ways he has inspired me. My husband and I learned to cure bacon and ham from his Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. I keep Ratio: The Simple Codes behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking on the top of my cookbook stack as it provides a springboard for experiments in everything from muffins to pickles. His blog fires me up. He is as passionate as I am about empowering everyday people in their kitchens, though he's far more articulate and has his wife Donna taking extraordinary, mouth-watering food photos!
• Two other writers that really get my gears turning, Hank Shaw at Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook and Langdon Cook at Fat of the Land. Thanks to them, I've become more confident cooking with wild foods this year.
• Tips from Diane Morgan's Online Cooking School and Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen (plus what I already knew and practiced from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking) helped me make even better pastry with less effort.
• Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods taught me to pressure can tuna without fear and we here at Chez Musser love the results.
• I can't count how many times I've wanted a simple recipe for something, gone to Simply Recipes, and found just what I needed. Recently, I began to think Elise must be psychic, such as when I went looking for a good roasted Brussels sprouts recipe to find she posted about Roasted Brussels Sprouts the very same day.
• I have to admit, fusion food is not normally my thing and I even feel a little intimidated when I visit White on Rice Couple. This couple—meat-and-potatoes Oregon rancher boy meets bold and fiery Vietnamese girl—have such a bright, beautiful, SoCal thing going on. I can't help but feel my frumpy, sodden PNW self does not belong there, but they make me feel welcome despite my sensible shoes and I've been learning so much about flavor from them. I especially ♥ their Tomato with Ginger "Ah...you so Asian!" Jam and Ultimate Umami Burgers.
• My friends Sierra and Teri at Grain-Free Foodies have shown me delicious ways to cook and bake without wheat and other grains. They make "going without" look and taste so good!
• And finally, my friend Melisa of Magpie Eats, who taught me cook my new favorite comfort dish, uppma with cranberry chutney. In listening to her rhapsodize about her favorite foods, I've gained a greater appreciation of bold seasonings and unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and her sweet tomato chutney? I drool a bit just thinking about it.

In December, Melisa gave me a copy of Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and in reading it I became aware of how much great food writing I have missed out on with my focus on cooking technique. This year, I want to read more Colwin, plus some of the other grand dames of food lit: Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Judith Jones, and Ruth Reichl. I'm looking forward to exploring the more sentimental side of cooking. I also want to continue explore grain-free cooking, dive more deeply into Indian cookery, and keep dipping my toes into those fusion food waters.

What about you? What did you learn about food and cooking in 2009? Who inspired you? What do you want to learn in 2010?

My Winter 2010 Schedule is up. Highlights include Winter Canning this Saturday; Chocolate Loves Fruit January 30; Stocks, Soups, and Stews February 19; and One Chicken, Many Meals February 20. If my schedule doesn't fit yours, contact me to arrange for a private lesson or a class at your home, office, school, etc. I can customize classes to meet your needs and location.