Mayhem, the Musical!

Beans are not a fruit.

It is officially the end of Mayhem. Taneasha is almost home, and I’ve almost remembered to get stuff for dinners each day this week. Srsly, I eat way too much cereal.

I’ve got one more recipe from my time in the south, and it’s a true southern dish that starts with "the trinity". Now, of course with anything this quintessentially part of a cuisine, there will the various and assorted variations on ingredients, methods, and opinions on how to make it properly.

I think with a dish like this, there will also always be variations based on the ingredients at hand. I mean, this is not some kind of haute cuisine concoction that requires specifically harvested delicacies that only grow in one part of the world. This is budget food at its finest. Most recipes I’ve seen also call for a small amount of precooked meat added at the end. That there is called using up the leftovers folks. Basically it’s a vegetable protein and carb that were advertised as healthy in afterschool public service announcements.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKYNWFBkW8

(nope, I don't know how to make html tags to insert a video, deal with it)

The Schoolhouse Rock Gang were right! It’s damn tasty.

And cheap. And freezable. And infinitely variable.

(As usual, since I cook for one 90% of the year, the recipe I have written down is for as small a batch as possible. I‘ve found that  it’s much easier to double a recipe than to cut one in half. What you see us make is a quadruple batch!)

Red Beans and Rice

What you need

• ½ lb small red kidney beans, washed
• 6 oz pork sausage, diced (or, leftover ham, as you'll see)
• 4 C water or stock
• 1 med onion, chopped fine
• 1 stalk celery, chopped fine
• 1 bell pepper, chopped fine
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• ½ tsp cayenne pepper
• ½ tsp thyme, dried, or a bunch of fresh from the garden (what? me measure?)
• ¼ tsp salt
• black pepper, pinch
• curly parsley, fresh

What you gotta do

Do not soak beans.  That’s right, I said “do not.” I realize that some people are having hairy conniption fits right now but I’ve never understood this whole bean soaking thing. I mean, you’re going to cook them anyway. Besides, soaking beans requires way too much forethought. They take hours to cook as it is, which is more planning than I put into most meals (see reference to cereal, above). To soak them would require that I know a whole day ahead of time that I’m going to want beans for dinner.

Really the rest of the procedure can be summed up in the following sentence:  Put everything but the parsley in the pot and cook it all until the beans are done.

But I have a bunch of pictures and I figure you should have something to read in between them.

So, you start by chopping stuff. And checking through the beans to make sure everything in the package really was beans.

You put the beans in the pot and add the liquid.

We used 8 cups of chicken broth and 8 cups of water (quadruple batch remember) and... the Easter ham bone. Water alone will make a tasty batch of beans, but if you can get your hands on a ham bone… holy crap, these were some freaking awesome beans.

Put the bone in the pot and chop more stuff.

A nice glass of iced tea (or just tea as they apparently call it in the South where no one drinks "tea," or hot tea as they call tea) is handy to have during all the strenuous chopping.

Add the herbs and keep chopping. There really are benefits to cooking for only one person.

Add the spices and stir it all up.

You see that lovely deep burgundy bean colour? You’d totally lose that if you soaked them first.  Now, instead of throwing away that colour, it’s going to end up in your food and give the resulting broth a rich beany colour.

So really, all you have to do now is put it on the stove and walk away.

If you check after 45 minutes or so you’ll see that the beans are already starting to give up their colour.

After an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours, they’ve definitely changed colour.

After a few hours any meat left on that bone will be either in the pot already or perfectly willing to come off it.

And there was so much meat left on the ham bone that we decided to save the sausage for the next day and just use the ham. Look at us stretch the family food budget. ;)

So while I was picking the meat off the bones

which, for some reason, I find strangely soothing and will offer to do after every holiday dinner, Recipe Guy was mashing a few cups of beans and putting them back in the pot. Mashed beans are a fabulous way to thicken any gravy.

We added the ham back in,

chucked the bone, and added a little more salt. It’s really best to start this dish with as little salt as possible and correct at the end.

A scoop of rice, a scoop of beans, a handful of parsley and a dash of hot sauce. Or, if you’re me, 8 dashes of hot sauce.

And if you find a crawdad (aka land shrimp) hanging around on the property, make sure you cook them before you try to eat them.

They fight back.

Man, the amount of wild (aka free) food down there is just awesome for the family food budget. What’s your favourite budget meal?

Where the fuck is my autosave??? - The Mayhem strikes again!

I was nearing the end of writing this post (at 3 am I might add) when an internet disconnect and modem reset totally fucked me. Squarespace claims to have autosave, but I'm not seeing my post anywhere. Fuckers. Now, instead of a fun post about how Recipe Guy and I realized tonight that we both list mint chocolate chip ice cream as our favourites, you get a toad.

...

...

Okay fine, ice cream.

His parents have been clearing out the lake house recently and brought back two ice cream makers. Two. And a Corningware percolator (holy fuck they make awesome coffee).

But it was the realization that we both love mint chocolate chip ice cream that prompted us to weed out a bunch of the mint from the garden and start making ice cream at 10 at night.

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

What You Need:

• 3 cups fresh mint leaves, packed
• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6 egg yolks
• 4 oz dark bittersweet chocolate

What You Gotta Do:

Haul up a bunch of mint. Lots of it. Three cups is quite a bit of mint. Fortunately, it's a freaking weed and makes for excellent ground cover. It was getting a little too friendly with the basil though.

Let the mint float around in a sinkful of water (the dirt will sink to the bottom), and pull all the leaves from the stems.

If you compost the stems etc. you're likely to end up with another mint garden, so you might want to just chuck what you don't want into the garbage.

Combine the 3 cups of mint leaves with 1 cup of cream (other one comes into play later), and the cup of milk in a medium sized pan, over medium low heat. Three cups is a lot of leaves.

That pan is tilted and I'm pressing the mint back. Don't worry, like most green leafy things, it'll shrink considerably once it's heated.

And heat is all you want to do. Just until it's nice and steamy. You do NOT want to boil this.

Once it's steaming, turn the heat off, cover it, and run to the store to get a whole bunch of ice. Ice cream, on a whim, late at night, does not always start with all required ingredients in the house.

After 30 minutes of steeping, you are going to have a lovely pale green milk-cream mixture.

Reheat the milk-cream to steaming, and then let it steep again, but for only 15 minutes the second time. By then, all the leaves will be darkened and softened.

Now that you've infused your milk-cream with the lovely minty flavour and colour, you'll need to strain out the leaves.

If you press it all through the sieve you'll end up with the full two cups of fluid, and only a scant cup of mashed leaves.

Return the milk-cream to the pot, and add the sugar and salt.

Put the milk-cream-sugar on the medium low burner and warm it until just steaming again. That should be all you need to get the sugar completely dissolved. Once again: do NOT boil it.

If you didn't have to drive to a corner store in rural Texas while the mint was doing its first steep, you could have done this step then. But we did, so we just turned the heat off while we separated all six eggs. Six. We will be having egg white omelets for breakfast tomorrow.

To separate your eggs, break the shell as evenly in half as you can,

and then gently pour the yolk from side to side as you let the white fall into a container below.

If you accidentally break a yolk, you can just drop it in with the whites and your omelet will be slightly less white.

Gently beat your yolks a bit, and put the whites in the fridge (freezer? are these things freezable??) for tomorrow.

Okay, back to the heat. We're almost done cooking. Soon we can start freezing. But first, to finish the custard. You don't want to go dumping raw yolk into hot green milk-cream. You'll end up with scrambled eggs (samIam). What you need to do is "temper" the yolks. A few spoonfuls of the warm green milk-cream mixed into the yolks

will warm them enough that you can pour them into the pan, still on medium low.

Once they're in you need to stir. And stir and stir. It'll only take of few moments of stirring and genlty scraping the bottom of the pan with the wooden spoon before it starts to thicken. It should not only coat the back of the spoon, but it shouldn't fill in the space if you run your finger through it either. The pic is unfortunately fuzzy, but I think you'll be able to see what I mean.

Okay, now that the custard is cooked, we need to start cooling it.

Remember that other cup of cream? It's going in now, nice and cold. And, if we put the bowl that it's in into a bigger bowl with icewater in it...

your custard will cool even faster.

Pour the warm steamy custard through the sieve into the cold cream.

You'll have to add a bit of ice to the ice bath to keep the cooling going. You could also put the custard in the fridge for an hour or two, but this way only takes about 10 minutes.

While that's cooling, get the ice cream maker ready. We opted for the super retro, real wood, barrel model.

The rock salt will lower the melting point of the ice and instead of having the tin at 0 to -4 degree Celsius, you'll be able to get it to the -10 to -15 degree Celsius range. At least, when I did the ice-salt experiment in junior high, that's how cold we got it. The rest of the world uses Celsius, you'll figure it out eventually. ;)

 Pour the cooled custard into the tin. Doesn't look like much now, but the volume will increase as it crystalizes.

Set it into the maker and start layering in the ice and salt.

Once you've got it all filled and chilling, and managed to get the motor set into place, head outside to the porch. Apparently making ice cream on the porch is a bit of a Southern tradition. Plus, holy crap the thing was freaking loud. We feared not only for our hearing but also for our lives. Rural Texas, late at night, making one hell of a screaming fucking racket. If the neighbours come out, they just might come out shooting!

The other things that were out... junebugs. Dumbest fucking insects ever. Not only do they think that flying directly at people's faces is a good idea, they also are unable to flip themselves over if they land on their backs.

Their continued existence is some kind of evolutionary wonder.

After about 15 minutes of horrible wailing, the motor on the ice cream maker gave out. *cue crickets*

Fortunately, there were two ice cream makers around. The second one wasn't quite the same size so Recipe Guy had to hold it in place as it ran.

This meant that refilling the barrel with ice and salt became my job.

That dumb fuck got a very cold bath. Seriously, what kind of creature dives into a box of salt? Why are these things not extinct??

The new engine was much quieter, and faster, and after a rousing game of "smack the dumb bug out of the air" we had smooth, creamy, minty ICE CREAM!!!

Scrape the velvety goodness out of the tin and into a container. Top it with the chocolate that you shaved and grated earlier (you did do that, didn't you?).

Gently fold the chocolate into the ice cream, and spread it out into the container.

Right now, it'll have the consistency of a very soft soft-serve. You're going to have to put it in the freezer for a while and let it harden a bit.

To keep ourselves occupied, we headed out to the barn. The horseys were all tucked in for the night, but the light was still on. Attracting the dumbfuck bugs. And ...

toads!!

Cute chubby little toads. And guess what cute chubby little toads love to eat?? Finally, we see reason for the continued existence of junebugs. Dumb fuck bugs. Awesome toads.

So, after a while of chasing toads, smacking bugs, and saying goodnight to the horseys, we headed back in to have our nearly-set ice cream.

It was still pretty soft, just starting to harden around the edges, and yeah, another half hour would have been ideal, but dammit, we wanted ICE CREAM!!

Mint chocolate chip is our favourite... what's yours?