Santa brought me a new toy!

Christmas has come and gone, and I was able to check a few things off my running wish list. Something I've been after for a while now is a enameled cast-iron casserole pot. I've often been found in Williams-Sonoma ogling the Le Creuset dishes, shedding a tear or two at their price tag. I love cooking, but at over $200 each, they're a little out of my reach, even if they do come in pretty colours, like aubergine or egg yolk yellow. Sigh. My inner Julia Child weeps.

Luckily, there are knock-offs that are much more affordable, and I now have one in my possession. With the ability to go from stove top to oven, it's a versatile addition to my cookware collection.

I have in my possession a cookbook called Bowl Food. Living in a small apartment, I have long since sacrificed my dining table to my sewing machine, and I tend to eat all my meals either standing up in the kitchen or on the sofa. As the title suggests, Bowl Food contains recipes for soups, stews, curries, salads, any saucy dish that can be eaten, in my case, with minimal mess while curled up on the couch. Many of the dishes contained in its pages required the use of a dutch oven, and now I could partake! One of these coveted dishes was a chicken casserole, which I have since made several times, with some interesting variations. The original recipe is as follows:

1/4 cup olive oil
2 lbs. boneless chicken thighs halved, then quartered
1 onion, finely chopped
1 leek, cleaned and sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed
3/4 lb. mushrooms, sliced
1/2 tsp dried tarragon
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
3/4 cup cream
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

Preheat oven to 350 F. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in your dutch oven over medium heat and cook the chicken in batches for 6-7 minutes each, until golden brown. Remove chicken from dish and set aside.

Add remaining oil and cook onion, leek and garlic over medium heat for 5 minutes or until soft, and most of the liquid has evaporated. Add the tarragon, chicken stock, cream, lemon juice, and mustard, bring to a boil, and cook or 2 minutes. Return chicken to dish, add salt and pepper to taste and cover.

Place casserole in the oven and cook for 1 hour until the sauces has reduced and thickened.

Initial issues with this recipe: Adding cream and lemon juice at the same time. Really? Don't most cookbooks advise against that? When I made this, I added the dairy first, cooked it for a bit, then added the lemon juice close to the end once the proteins in the milk had cooked a bit.

That said, I obviously didn't add cream, I used my usual go-to dairy, 3% goat milk. The first time I made it, I followed the recipe to the letter. The next time, I had no chicken, so I used pork, and added some white wine instead of lemon juice. The next time, I didn't have chicken or mushrooms. I substituted pork again, and added cubed potatoes and sweet potatoes. Every time, it was amazing, but by far, the pork-wine combo was my favourite.

I mean, you can't go wrong with pork and wine.

Another mountain climbed! Vegans need not apply.

I have made it my mission for the summer to become a meat cooking expert. While I've always been adept at making side dishes, meat, especially larger cuts like roasts, have always intimidated and intrigued me. They're notoriously easy for novices to ruin, and yet there's this caveman appeal, this prehistoric urge for humans to cook meat over fire. Reason #32 why I don't understand vegans. They see a drawing of a cave-family in their fur skirts cooking a side of gazelle over a fire and they see a massacre. I see a family dinner.

It's not really fair to make fun of vegans. They don't have the strength to fight back.

Last week, I'm proud to say I cooked a whole chicken for the first time, and what a success that was. It's not that hard to make something taste good when you have butter and garlic at your disposal. To prepare my chicken, I trimmed away the excess fat, ripped the guts out, and gently began pulling the skin away from the flesh. I really got my hands in there, all along both sides of the body of my bird, creating a tasty pocket to hold butter, which I melted and added a few cloves of garlic, some lemon zest, and some dry tarragon. Baked for an hour at 350 in a covered roasting pan, then took off the lid and stuck it under the broiler to crisp up the skin. AND there were enough drippings to make gravy! Which I ate on toast.

OK, chicken down. Easy. So I decided to seek out a notoriously difficult to cook cut of meat.

Brisket.

If cooked wrong, fatty, tough and stringy. If cooked slowly, melt in your mouth beef candy. Never having cooked brisket before, I did the sensible thing and Googled a recipe. Now because brisket has so much fat and connective tissue in it, it needs to be cooked slowly for the fat to melt into the meat, which softens it. I've had it slow cooked on the grill, which was to die for. Unfortunately, it takes about 6 hours to cook on low indirect heat. I opted for the braising method which takes a mere 2 hours. Until recently, I had no idea what braising was. It's a method of oven cooking where the cut of meat is immersed partially in liquid and tightly covered to preserve the meat's tenderness. The recipes I encountered in the google-sphere ranged from boring (just broth) to the insane (ketchup, onion soup mix and cola). I opted to wing mine.

For a 2 pound brisket:
1 cup broth (I had vegetable broth)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp salt (I'm fancy, so I used smoked sea salt)
1 tsp ground pepper
1/2 tsp dry rosemary
1/2 tsp cumin
maple syrup
(I didn't measure, but my estimate would be 1 1/2-2 oz, yes I measure in shots)
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp paprika
3 cloves of garlic, crushed

I'm guessing on most of those measurements. I rarely measure, I add stuff, I taste, etc. I added everything to a small sauce pan and simmered until the concoction reduced to about 3/4 of the original volume.

Brisket has a thick layer of fat on one side, so to prep, I cut into the fat diagonally in both directions, which will help the fat render into the meat. I rubbed the meat with a mixture of sea salt, brown sugar, pepper and dry rosemary, which I ground with my mortar and pestle. Really crust that mixture on both sides of the roast. I also opted to sear the meat before I put it in the oven, in a large frying pan on high heat. Just under a minute on each side, until the fatty side gets a bit crispy looking. Then pop that sucker in a roasting pan, fatty side up, pour in the braising liquid, which should come up about halfway on the side of the roast, cover and stick it in a 275 degree oven for 2 hours.

After 2 hours, I removed my roast from the oven, poured the braising liquid back into a saucepan over medium heat to reduce it some more. And I put the roast back in the oven under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp up that fat. Oh and I coated it with more maple syrup. Serve with the reduced braising liquid for dipping.

Warning! Even slow cooking won't render away all the fat. Do not operate any heavy machinery after a brisket. This is a very heavy meal, and as a result I will be eating salads for the next few days.

The first Saucy Dish...

I figure I should start off my journey into the blogosphere with something simple, my most basic of recipes. The recipe I give to the people I meet who love food but are completely helpless in the kitchen. Sigh. Always disappointing to meet one of those. For me, food is such an integral part of life; not only are you never alone during the greatest moments of your life, but chances are, someone at least brought some dip. If you love food, I think learning how to make it yourself, and taking the time to do so is more of a means of survival than a luxury.

I must digress...

Here it is, the easiest yet most impressive pasta sauce recipe:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1-2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large pinch dried basil
1 can baby clams
1 can diced tomatoes

In a large skillet over medium-high heat, add oil and basil. Swirl around for a few seconds until you start to really smell the basil. Add can of baby clams and garlic. Simmer for a few minutes until the liquid from the clams reduces about halfway. Add the tomatoes. Turn down to medium-low and simmer until it reaches the desired consistency (about 10-20 minutes). Serve with pasta such as rotini (I use rice pasta).

So easy. So good. Please don't burn it and blame me.