Category — Recipes

Yes, you read that right.  Franks and Beans is a staple of American cuisine, something that everyone remembers having as a kid, and for most of us, a bygone memory of childhood.  As adults, we aren’t really enthusiastic about revisiting these kinds of pre-adolescent culinary recipes, because in retrospect they weren’t really much to write home about.

Out of a can, baked beans tend to be a mushy mess of legumic hell, not getting much better when paired with a few cut up hot dogs.  Made from scratch, though, with a few ingredients that most of us probably already have in our pantry and refrigerators, and Franks and Beans becomes our Recession Meal this week.

Beans are inexpensive no matter how you look at them, being about a dollar or less for a pound of dried beans, or about the same price for canned.  Everything else in this recipe is something that you probably already have on hand.  As for preparation, there are actually three ways to pull this one off, but one of them involves specialty cookware in the form of a pressure cooker, which I highly recommend for time savings.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide how you want to approach this, and include directions for all alternatives.  You may find that you like Franks and Beans made one way more than another, but I would presume that since each method uses the same ingredients, the end result should not vary much in taste.

Franks and Beans – a Recession Meal Recipe from The Best Food Blog Ever

1 lb white beans (Cannelini or Great Northern), dried, or use canned (rinse both under running water) [89 cents]

1 onion, chopped [5 lbs for $2.99]

2 cloves garlic, chopped [1 head for 75 cents]

Some bacon, about two or three slices, chopped [$4 per lb, thereabouts]

1/2 Cup ketchup [on hand, or about a dollar for the cheap stuff]

1/2 Cup maple syrup [on hand, or about $3 per bottle]

2 Tbs mustard [on hand, or about a dollar for the cheap stuff]

2 Tbs brown sugar [on hand, or about $2 to $3 for a box]

Hot dogs, cut up [$3 a pack, thereabouts]

If you are using dried beans: Put the beans in water to cover in the morning before leaving for work so that they soak all day.  Prepare according to the directions on the bag (which probably involves boiling them for about an hour or so).

Option 1: You can do the quick-soak method in a pressure cooker – put the entire pound of beans into a pressure cooker with 6 cups of water.  Seal the cooker, bring to a boil over high heat, and pressure-cook for five minutes.  Quick-release the pressure, drain the beans.

Option 2: Just open up a can or two of beans and rinse them under running water.  The final texture of the dish will probably be softer, so consider yourself warned.

Put the bacon into a saucepan (large enough to hold all of the beans when you add them) or pressure cooker over medium heat and stir it up.  Let all of that wonderful pork fat render out of the bacon, about five minutes or so, and then use a slotted spoon to scoop the bacon bits out onto a paper towel.  Leave the bacon fat in the pan.

Throw your chopped onion into the bacon fat and give it a good stir.  Let that run for about five or ten minutes, until the onion is nicely browned and your kitchen smells like IHOP.  During this step, if you were using dried beans, have six cups of water ready to go.

After the onions are soft and browned at the edges, toss in your chopped garlic and stir vigorously to keep it from burning (if garlic burns, in this or any other dish, you should immediately shut off all of your burners and order a pizza.  Srsly.)  After 30 seconds of garlic-stirring, add all of the beans.

If you are using dried beans, add 6 cups of water, bring to a boil, and simmer the contents of the pot until the beans are tender, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Option 1: If you are making this in a pressure cooker, add the 6 cups of water, cover and seal, bring to pressure and cook for 10 minutes.  Quick-release the pressure and continue to the next step.

Option 2: If you are using canned beans, just add the drained beans and a little bit of water, like a cup, to keep it all from burning.  The beans are already tender out of the can, so you can skip ahead to what I call the EXTREMELY TASTY PART of this recipe.

If you are using dried beans, once they are tender, drain the contents of the pot using a colander and dump it all back into the pot.

Here’s the EXTREMELY TASTY PART of the recipe.  Add the rest of the ingredients, that being the ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, and maple syrup, to the beans and mix well.  Throw in the chopped bacon and the hot dogs.  Bring it all to a simmer and cook for about five to ten minutes, making sure to stir it often so that the beans on the bottom don’t stick and burn.

You’re ready to go.  If there are no kids or picky eaters around, you can hit the pot with a shot of whiskey and stir it in.  It makes it better, trust me.

Homemade Franks and Beans is nothing like what you remember from your childhood.  The flavors are brighter, the textures are more defined, and you may find yourself becoming a fan all over again.  As an added bonus to this Recession Meal, this recipe makes a ton of Franks and Beans, so it can actually serve as two or three dinners, or multiple lunches, as the case may be.

Given the ongoing collapse of the American financial system this week, I’m starting a new series named Recession Meals here at the Best Food Blog Ever.  I’m even going to tag the recipes with ‘recession’ so that you can find them easily.  The goal of Recession Meals is to get food on the table without spending a lot of money – which should be an everyday goal anyway in the absence of a bad economy, but which is a virtual necessity now.

I try to do a major supermarket shopping trip once every other week.  Sometimes, though, this means that we run out of meat a few days before I’d want to go to the supermarket again.  I could break down and just go to the store, but it’s an interesting challenge to stick to my grocery schedule and try to stick it out for a couple of days.  I think the financial experts call this ‘budgeting’.

Take a look at any of your supermarket receipts and you’ll find that meat is the most expensive item on your list.  If you reduce your reliance on meat and focus on replacing it with beans, tofu, or some other protein, you can make a serious impact on your food bill and possibly discover new things about yourself, like the fact that you like beans.

I saw this soup for sale in my supermarket’s Sunday flyer and figured I had the stuff to make it myself.  It is a very filling, autumn-perfect meal that is very inexpensive because the bulk of it is composed of beans – lentils and a can of chickpeas that I found in the cupboard.  You could literally make this recipe with water instead of chicken stock and it would be just as good.  I had some frozen sausages, so I sliced a couple and put them in, but they are completely optional.

Moving to soups and beans is great for your personal economy, because they are cheap nutrition and the ingredients can be used for multiple meals.  For the Recession Meals, I am including information about the costs of each ingredient.  These are based on my local prices, so your mileage may vary.

Lentil and Chickpea Soup with Indian Spices

Olive oil [about 3 bucks for a small bottle]

8 cups of water [free!] or chicken stock [about $3 for a large can]

Rinse the lentils and set aside.

In a large pot (remember, you are adding 8 cups of water here, and also remember Archimedes’ Principle), heat about 2 Tbs of olive oil until shiny, add the garlic and stir until golden.  Add the chopped onions and stir to combine.

Once the onions have softened and browned a bit, add the carrots and celery.   Food science – since celery is mostly water, if you add it at the same time as the onions, the onions will never brown since the water given off by the celery will steam everything up.

Saute the vegetables over medium heat for about ten minutes.  Add the lentils and chickpeas and stir to coat with oil (add a little more oil if need be).

Pour 8 cups of water or stock into the pot and bring to a boil.  Lower the heat to a gentle boil and go do something else for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, add the garam masala (or your choice of spices), stir, taste for salt (it will probably need 1 to 2 tsp), and cover the pot.  Continue to cook for another 25 minutes.

Use a fork and fish out some lentils and check for tenderness.  When the lentils are tender, the soup is ready to serve.

I have had this one bag of fermented Chinese black beans for, literally, years.  And when I say years, I really do mean years – I probably picked this up a few years after we got married, where it stayed in the cupboard above the stove in our little apartment, and when it came time to move to this house, it came with us in the box marked “Kitchen”.

Hey, they’re fermented.  Fermented means forever.

Chinese black beans are near and dear to my heart.  I grew up smelling my Dad’s stir fried black bean dishes, and to this day I still can’t find a restaurant that makes it like he did.  Those recipes died with him, not that there was ever much to go on since he never wrote anything down.  Stir fried black bean dishes are also what I consider to be the most authentic of Chinese cuisine, because the smell of fermented black beans is welcoming to those who grew up with them and an acquired taste for those who did not.  True ethnic food should make people nervous.

You may have noticed that, even after all these years, I still have about half of the bag of black beans left.  This is due to the fact that each stir fry only needs a couple of tablespoons of black beans, so it’s going to take me a very long time to exhaust my $1.19 worth of Chinese goodness.

The most common dish that I make with these black beans is a classic Stir Fried Chicken in Black Bean Sauce.

1 lb chicken breast, cut into stir fry size pieces, seasoned with salt and pepper

Big Ol’ Mound of Garlic, chopped (like, at least three cloves, if not more)

About 2 Tbs of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

2 Tbs of fermented Chinese black beans, rinsed, chopped fine

Vegetable Oil

1 cup chicken stock

1 Tbs cornstarch

To be served over rice

First off, make a pot of rice.  So far, so good.

Heat a wok, or a frying pan if you don’t have a wok, over high heat until a drop of water from your finger immediately sizzles and boils away.  Add about 2 tablespoons of oil to the inner wall of the wok, in a circular fashion, letting the oil drip down to the center.

Mix the chopped garlic, ginger, and black beans together and drop all of it into the pan.  Stir fry briefly, about 30 seconds, and keep the garlic moving so that it doesn’t burn.

Add the chicken, spreading it out, and let the chicken cook for about a minute, so that it browns on one side.  Using a wooden spoon or spatula, stir fry the chicken until it is nearly done, about three or four minutes depending on the size of the cuts.

Mix the cornstarch into the chicken stock until blended, then pour the mixture into the wok over the chicken and stir to combine.  Bring the mix to a simmer and let that cook for a few minutes.  The cornstarch will thicken the sauce as it simmers.

Tip the contents of the wok into a serving dish and serve over rice.  If you’ve got some sort of green, like spinach or, even better, bok choy, it would be a nice addition to the wok after you’ve put the chicken in.

I’ve never made a souffle before.  What I knew about souffles was what everyone knows about souffles – that you have to tiptoe around the kitchen and make as little noise as possible, lest you cause the delicate, puffy concoction in the oven to collapse.  I think it’s this one notion that keeps more people from trying their hand at making one.

Well, it was the end of August, and the supermarket had this immense island of corn, going for something ridiculously cheap.  I had wanted to incorporate summer corn into the menu for the engagement party, but I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to approach it.

I picked up eight ears of corn and pored through my library.  I found this recipe for corn souffle back in issue #13 of Saveur (and found online here).  I tried to scale the proportions of the ingredients to make a souffle that would fit into a larger dish, but, as it turns out, when it comes to whipping egg whites, you can’t just multiply ingredients to come up with a bigger portion.  I had enough souffle batter to fill one large dish and two smaller ones.

After popping everything in the oven, I was curious about this whole souffle thing, so I turned on the oven light to see how they were coming along.  The tops of each souffle were rising steadily, and quite impressively, and the melted gruyere was forming a nice, brown crust.  And, to dispel the myth, we made no attempt to maintain a quiet environment in the kitchen during this time – people were coming in and out, dishes were being washed, and other recipes were being prepared.  Yes, they will deflate once you poke a serving spoon into them, so if you’re going for presentation, you may want to hold off and serve at the table.

In the end, the souffles were amazing.  The larger of the souffle dishes turned out a little underdone, but the smaller ones were perfect.  As a whole, the dish was a perfect way to highlight the freshness of local summer corn, and definitely something I am eager to repeat next summer.  Until then, I’m looking for more souffle recipes – they’re cheap and easy (like all egg dishes) and can be varied to suit what’s available.

A couple of weeks ago, we staged a engagement dinner party in honor of our friends Ray and Melissa of Bathtub Brewery.  Since that time, my procrastination in getting anything written about that evening has let Steph of brew.cook.pair.joy beat me to the punch, thus giving me the freedom to explore some of the dishes that we served that night in greater detail.

One of the courses that we served was a Crabmeat Ravioli with Saffron Cream Sauce.  I had a hankering to do a handmade pasta, but the timing of my preparation made me wary of spending the afternoon cutting noodles.  As I had never made ravioli before, I decided to try my hand at a single large ravioli per person, encasing some sort of seafood filling and served in a cream sauce.  Since it’s still summer, I wanted the pasta course to be lighter – if this were happening two months from now, I’d be all over the unctuous meaty fillings.

Using the same pasta dough recipe as with the previous engagement dinner party, I rolled out the dough, progressively reducing the width of the rollers until I had reached the second-to-last thinnest setting.  In retrospect, next time I’ll take it all the way to the last setting – I like very thin ravioli, and these tended to be on the doughy, thickish side.

For the filling, I flipped through a number of sources, finally settling on a recipe for a simple crabmeat filling with carrots and tomatoes, which took all of fifteen minutes to whip together, but which then had to cool in the fridge for a while before I went about filling the ravioli.

The timesaving feature of ravioli is that you can basically just roll a sheet of pasta and use a knife to cut four-inch squares, and by that point you’re halfway done with assembly.  Using a pastry brush, I brushed the edges of each pasta square with some beaten egg, mounded some filling in the center, and then carefully laid a matching square over it, using a fork to crimp the edges to ensure a tight seal.  I placed the ravioli in the refrigerator to hold them until dinner, although another lesson learned – they dried out a bit, which may have contributed to their doughy, brittle nature in the final dish.  Next time, I may experiment with slipping them directly into boiling water after assembly, and holding them in a cooked state.

The saffron cream sauce was a quick, last-minute preparation.  I sauteed some chopped shallot in butter, added some white wine, allowing the wine to boil down, then poured in some heavy cream.  Add a pinch of saffron, bring to a boil, and reduce by half.  The ravioli were put into a large pot of boiling water for about a minute and a half, and the dish was ready to be assembled and served.

I’m not including a recipe with this entry, because there are many improvements that I can make with this dish, both in ingredients and technique, and I am reluctant to post recipes unless I can guarantee consistent results.

A good meatball begins as a tried-and-true recipe, either passed down through family lore, or traded with a neighbor, or copied out of a cookbook, catalog, website, or magazine.  It gets made, to exacting proportions, over and over, until the dish fits comfortably like a worn pair of jeans and your body and mind go on autopilot when you’re in the kitchen.

We had a fairly solid plan for breakfast on the morning following the Big Pig Gig.  Since we only had a couple of overnight guests, we figured we would whip up some crepes on Sunday morning, something quick and easy that doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Then, Drink-O happened.  Plus we went to bed at 3:30am.  And I forgot to make the crepe batter ahead of time, and in the morning I discovered that a crucial element for the batter, milk, was nowhere to be found in the fridge.  We also felt like a truck hit us.

So, crepes never happened on Sunday, and we ended up at a Bob Evans on Sunday afternoon, which is the best place to grab a meal of breakfast food after a night of BBQ and booze-fueled debauchery.  After a couple of days, when everything was cleaned up and put away and the house returned to normal, I picked up some milk and went about implementing my crepe plan, two days late and for dinner instead of breakfast.

Hardware-wise, it’s nice to have a crepe pan.  It’s not absolutely essential, and if you don’t have one you can always use a non-stick saute pan.  I’m very idiosynchratic about my crepe-making process – I always use my same crepe pan, and I have to always use my wooden spoon that measures out exactly the 1/4 cup of batter that I need for each crepe.  But, at minimum, you need a nonstick pan, a ladle or other means of providing a consistent measure of batter, a nonstick spatula, and a nonstick pair of tongs.

The batter recipe that I use is from the site Chocolate and Zucchini, and you can get the recipe there by clicking on the link.  You’ll find most crepe recipes don’t vary much in their ingredients – flour, eggs, water, milk – as long as you end up with a thin batter, you should do just fine.

Like my other favorite quick meal, omelettes, crepes are more about technique than anything else.  You need to get your fillings in order before you start cooking, so chop whatever needs chopping (in this case, smoked salmon and chives) and have them close at hand.  Open up your container of creme fraiche (sour cream is a good substitute) and put two spoons in there (one to scoop, one to push off the creme fraiche onto the crepe).

Now comes the fun part.  Take your pan and set it over high heat, and put a drop or two of water in the center of the pan.  Take some butter out, and get a pat of butter ready (for each crepe, about half a tablespoon, maybe even less, depending on the size of your pan).  When your water droplets sizzle and boil away, the pan’s hot and ready – put your butter in, and use your spatula to spread a thin layer of butter across the pan’s surface.

Using your left hand, hold the pan above the stove at a 45 degree angle (handle pointed down towards you – and if you’re left-handed, reverse whatever I’m saying here).  With your right hand, equip your ladle, and ladle about 1/4 cup of crepe batter into the pan, keeping the ladle at the same position while swirling the pan to allow the batter to coat the surface and form a circle.  Don’t worry if your circle isn’t perfect, it’ll be hidden when you fold it.  Set the pan back down on the burner and cook the crepe for about 30 seconds until the top is dry and the edges begin to curl.

Equip your spatula, and shimmy it underneath the crepe, lift it, and flip it over to cook the other side.  After you flip, start laying your filling ingredients in one quadrant of the circle (not a full half, since you’ll be folding this).  By the time you’re finished, it’s time to flip and fold – use your tongs to grab the edge of the crepe, drag it over the filling, and fold again to form a little wedge.  Shove this off onto a plate and start on the next crepe, adding more butter to the pan and letting it melt completely before ladling more batter.

Repeat as necessary.  You’ll find that you have more than enough batter, so it can keep for a day or two in your refrigerator.  We like to make a batch of dessert crepes, using things like Nutella, peanut butter, marshmallows, and/or bananas and chocolate.  Really, anything you can get your hands on would work just fine.  There are no crepe police.

The road to the Big Pig Gig is paved with test recipes.  This past weekend, we stayed in and beta-tested three of the recipes that we were planning on serving next week.  One is an appetizer, one’s a side, and one’s a dessert.  All three turned out amazingly well and are a go for starring roles at the Big Pig Gig.

The unofficial theme for this year (at least in my head) is True South, and, as such, there’s more of a Southern bent to the menu than in previous years.  One true Southern staple, and a delicacy that I had a lot of while in South Carolina, is pimento cheese.  The people who I’ve spoken with around these parts all have expressed some degree of unfamiliarity with pimento cheese, so maybe it deserves a little explanation here.

Pimento cheese is a concoction of cheddar and cream cheese, mixed with pimentos and a pinch of this, a dash of that.  If I had to classify it, it’s kind of a spread of sorts, although it is very common for people to make pimento cheese sandwiches as a quick and cheap lunch.  Every family in the South has a particular recipe for pimento cheese, but often times people will just skip tradition and buy it from the grocery store.  Having had some homemade stuff down in South Carolina last week, I can tell you there’s no beating a pimento cheese made with dedication and personal pride.

Which brings me to the pimento cheese recipe that made the cut.  I came across this recipe in the book Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill, which I picked up at an outlet store for eight bucks, but is well worth every penny even at full price.  Having flipped from cover to cover, I love this book so much I’m putting it into the sidebar for this site.

I won’t give away Mr. Stitt’s recipe here, but I can tell you that it does stick to the common pimento cheese template of cheddar and cream cheese, and is amazingly quick to whip up in a food processor in all of five minutes and provides a damn fine classic example of pimento cheese.  We’ll be serving it alongside a stack of saltines and Ritz crackers – the first batch is nearly gone, and it’s only been two days.

Act Two was a brand new recipe for cornbread.  I’ve been a creature of habit for years now, having found a recipe for cornbread and sticking with it every year for the barbecue.  That was true until we went to Charleston, and ate at the Hominy Grill, where they served a cornbread that was so light and airy, I would have given my right arm for the recipe.  As it turns out, I just needed to buy their cookbook for $12, and whoop, there it is.  By Grapthar’s Hammer, what a savings.

So, about this cornbread – my previous cornbread recipe, that which held the title of “my” cornbread for going on about five years now, was made from stone ground cornmeal, was fairly thick and dense, and had about two cob’s worth of corn kernels mixed into every batch of batter.  I thought I would never leave it.  The Hominy Grill cornbread, though, was a revelation – presented as a wedge, it was unlike any other cornbread I had ever tasted, almost cakelike in its crumb, collapsing easily into an almost creamy texture, but still retaining that Southern quality of not being too sweet.

I was hopeful that I would be able to replicate the same qualities that we had so enjoyed in the restaurant.  I found that the key to the lightness was a greater amount of baking powder than I had seen in a cornbread recipe prior – when wet, the batter was almost foamy as I poured it into the pan.  Some 30 minutes later, after taking it out of the oven, I had a sense that I had gotten it right.  After letting it cool a bit, and cutting into it, we knew that we had found our new cornbread recipe.  We whipped up an impromptu dish of honey butter and attacked the thing like it had insulted our mamas.

The last test recipe was for buttermilk pie, another dish that we had tried at the Hominy Grill and another recipe that was included in the small booklet that we had bought from the restaurant.  Made from a simple batter of buttermilk, eggs, sugar, and a little bit of lemon juice, the pie presents a light ending to what presumably will be a very heavy meal of barbecued pork (and chili, and mac and cheese, and cornbread, and red rice…) for most people attending our bash.  The recipe was easy to follow, and turned out tasting exactly like the version that was served to us in the restaurant.  So, we have our dessert, or at least our contribution to dessert, along with whatever anyone else decides to bring.

Oh yes, that, and a little something called Jack Daniels Chocolate Ice Cream.  More on that later.

Here’s something you may not know about me – I don’t like to cook when it’s just for myself.

So, when my wife was out of town for two nights this week, I needed to come up with a way of feeding myself that didn’t involve too much effort, since I was already disinclined to be in the kitchen anyway.  On the first night, I stopped at the supermarket and picked up a hoagie for dinner, and a small chicken.  I ate the hoagie the first night, and the second night I made this dish.

When I was growing up, my mom used to always refer to this as “Chicken in Water” which is pretty much what it is.  It’s more technique-based than ingredient-based, but the charm of this preparation is that it requires almost no effort beyond boiling water, and results in absolutely foolproof, perfectly cooked chicken.  The key is to let the chicken steep in the hot stock long enough so that the heat penetrates the bird throughout, bringing the temperature up so that the meat is fully cooked.

Chinese White Cooked Chicken

1 small chicken, rinsed
A pot of water, enough to fully submerge the chicken
Ginger
Garlic
Chinese rice wine (optional, but good if you have it)
Salt

Bring the pot of water to a boil.  While you’re waiting for the water, slice a knob of ginger into four or five pieces, and smash three or four cloves of garlic, and add both of these to the water along with a cup or so of rice wine.

When the water is at a full boil, add a splash of salt (as you would for pasta, about that much).

Carefully lower the chicken fully into the boiling water, making sure the water fills the cavity of the bird, and bring the water back to a gentle, bubbling boil.

For small chickens, let this cook for about 10 to 15 minutes.  Put a lid on the pot, and turn off the heat.

That’s it.  Now all you have to do is let the chicken sit in the water for at least an hour, and it will be fully cooked.  You can even let it sit longer and it won’t dry out.  Plus, you’ll end up with a nice pot of chicken stock that you can use for soup later on.

To serve
Use a pair of tongs and fish the chicken out and onto a platter.  Remove and discard the skin, and use forks to pull the meat from the bones.  A good pairing is to serve this over buttered rice topped with a little bit of soy sauce or sesame oil, and scallions or chives.