Tuesday - March 19, 2013

Cross Cultural Beans

Ok, here is something I can handle. Simple filling food that tastes great and costs very little.

My wife makes this simple soup. It’s an Italian thing, a zuppa Toscanna, which means sausage and kale soup. It’s pretty good, goes together fast, and is not expensive. She makes hers really basic, without potatoes, without cream, and without bell peppers. It’s not much more than chicken broth with greens and sausages and a clove or two of garlic. Dead easy to make.

We’re in the early stages of cleaning out my MIL’s house now that we’re past the mourning. We brought home all her unopened food. Part of that haul was a whole collection of dried beans. Bags and bags worth. Kidney beans, white beans, navy beans, lentils. And red lentils. On the bag of red lentils is a simple recipe for lentils and rice, which is really easy to make and tastes pretty darn good. Seriously cheap eats, yet filling and wholesome. It has a vaguely Indian or Hispanic taste, and the level of spice is pretty mild.

Our grocery store sells the Premio brand of Chorizo sausages. These are not the chorizos your abuela used to make, rough cut and zippy. No, these are the special Foreign Foods For Frightened White People variety, smoothly ground and with just a hint of spice. But they do make a nice change from the typical Italian style sausages, and they cost the same. Which is not much. $2.39 for a pack of 8 I think.

We like Indian food. One of the greatest things to get in the Indian restaurants is this expensive little pot of highly seasoned buttery bean mush called Dahl Makhani. OMG, it’s soooo good. You dip a bit of the naan bread in it, and yum. Heaven! So rich, so aromatic, but not hot. It’s made from red lentils and lots of curry spices. Lots. And cream. We were out of cream last night.

So you see where this is going. We combined all three recipes, and cooked the soup down to a stew-like consistency. Added lots more spice, a bit of butter. And the result comes out like dahl, only with meat and greens added in. It’s a meal all by itself that feeds 6 or more for $7 or less. It also makes one helluva good side dish.

Take 6 or 7 chorizos and fry them up gently until they’re nearly done. Cut them into 3/8” slices, then quarter each slice.
Carefully clean a bunch of kale. Kale is a very textured green, so it needs lots of washing to get all the soil out. Split each leaf down the middle, and then chop them across the leaf into 1/2” wide slices. Kale does not shrivel up much when you boil it, so don’t make the pieces too large.
Make the Lentils and Rice recipe above, but use all chicken broth instead of the chicken broth and water mix called for. Or just toss in another 2 bullion cubes like I did.
Instead of a single 1lb bag of lentils, use 2. Use 2 baseball sized yellow onions as well. Add a Drew-generous grind of black pepper.
Put in twice as much fresh ginger, about 1 1/2” ground from a 1” thick piece. Put in four times as much cumin. We used the MIL’s curry powders, which were a bit old and of the yellow non-hot variety that are mostly tumeric. So put in a good 3-4 spoonsful. If you’re a curry junky you probably have some Garam Masala somewhere in your kitchen. A spoon or two of that wouldn’t hurt a bit.
Add the kale and the chorizos.
Cut about an inch from a stick of butter and put that in as well. A little more won’t hurt, but you don’t want too much. 1 1/2 inches at most.
I put in half a dozen shakes from the jar of pizza pepper flakes. We like hot and this gives it just a tiny bit of heat; 2 shakes would be fine for other folks. Real Indian ground Sanaam dried red peppers would work just as well.

Put the whole thing in a good sized pot and boil it, then on for a medium simmer for about half an hour. It’s done when the lentils get soft, but don’t cook it so long that they disintegrate. A lot of the liquid evaporates off; you want it to come out like stew, only a bit runny. Not liquid like soup. Don’t cook it so dry that it becomes paste.

And there you go. Toscanna Makhani, Mexican style. Three cultures in one pot of beans. And nobody will leave the table hungry, even if you use only 4 sausages. This is hearty, solid food. Dial back the spice amounts if you are averse, but the amounts called for in the lentils and rice recipe result in merely the barest hint of flavor. You want more, lots more, and no-name yellow curry powder is some really mild stuff. Don’t fear it. If you really must go mild, use less fresh ginger. That takes away most of the snap. Not that this dish has much snap IMO. But it has some. Use less cumin powder if you fresh grind your own; her cumin was of unknown age in a jar from the dollar store. My cumin, fresh whole seeds from Penzey’s, is at least 4 times stronger. The bullion cubes were not the low salt variety. My wife is a bit of a halophobe (doesn’t like salt) so there is no other added salt. You can always add some to yours at the table if you want.

A bowl of this, leftover from last night, and the one small remaining bit of the corned beef from St. Paddy’s Day is my lunch today. Yum.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/19/2013 at 09:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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