Nourish Me

healing, nourishing

Friday morning: changed the cooking plans - parsley pesto, almond and pecorino crackers - according to the news that Peter's shin injury was not, as we'd hoped, trifling. Somehow the infection, now being hit with strong antibiotics, has sent him into the deepest of blue moods, knocked his ordinarily unshakeable confidence askew and if I am to speak truthfully, I find it troubling. Fishing around in the cold depths of the freezer for poultry bones, deposited there after a recent spate of roasted chicken dinners and one rather wonderful self-congratulatory weekend of duck confit, I do what seems to come naturally when one of us - and it has to be said, usually me - is down: start on a large pot of stock, or bone broth as I keep seeing it referred to, a name I find myself quite liking. Some to be sipped by the window at lunch, relieved to know that at least the leg is okay, the rest to be used, as one does, throughout the weekend for mood-enhancing, medicinal cooking.

A pot of broth to play with counts as one of life's little joys. Healing, nourishing. Satisfyingly frugal.

Braised vegetables surely must count as another of life's little joys. It was Nadine Abensur who alerted me to braising as a method most suited to them. Baby carrots and fennel are two vegetables I almost always end up thinking of being favourites of mine because of the way she taught me to cook them; simmered gently in liquid, then finished off over a higher flame, to glaze and catch their edges. Larousse describes braising as a method of,

cooking food in a closed vessel with very little liquid at a low temperature and for a long time

I usually add more liquid and simmer, on the stovetop at least, at a slightly higher pace, but that's experience talking, and the older I get the more I believe that cooking well is all about developing intuition (and not thinking too hard - this part is vital). With a pot of bone broth and a cardboard box of beautiful winter vegetables to use, I braised wedges of fennel and thickly peeled celeriac for Friday night, with wide diagonal slices of leek and celery, a little de-sprouted garlic, a splosh each of mirin, apple cider vinegar and olive oil and enough broth to sit a little over halfway up the sides of the vegetables. Simmered 'til almost soft, lid off, and simmered again until most of the liquid evaporated. Haloumi, crisped in a cast iron pan on the woodstove, and lemon wedges on the side. Eaten at our dining table. Pale green and healing. Would have been gorgeous with vegetable stock, of course it would have been, but those bones and their gelatinous richness lifted it all somewhere higher.   

Leftovers got stuffed into baked potatoes with a scrap of sour cream for Saturday. A salad of celery (Tod Davies loves a celery salad as, now, do I) and shredded red cabbage, with whey-pickled (oh, alright, lacto-fermented) ginger, tossed in the basic dressing Kathryn came up with for The Clever Cook. That dressing. So, so good. 

The healing continues. 

 

caldo verde

Look, I feel a bit silly posting a photograph taken with my cracked and battered phone, feel as though it's a bit of cheat, but this bowl of soup managed to a) use an armload of the kale that seems to be all I've been able to grow this year and b) taste much better (so much better) than the sum of its humble parts that I want to say something about both it and the book it came from immediately. As a testament to just how compelling Tod Davies' writing is and, amazingly, how damned fine her Caldo Verde is, I am, as I sit typing, still in dirt-encrusted gear from the farm so committed am I to this bloody marvellous idea. I really need a shower, but the soup is too good to wait.

Basically, you chop an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic. You peel 4 or 5 potatoes - an all purpose veering-toward-waxy spud like desiree is good as it will retain some shape in the final gorgeous broth - and, along with a couple of generous spoonfuls of olive oil, bung the lot into a saucepan, cover generously with water and boil, then simmer at a lively pace, all together, occasionally giving the potatoes a bit of squish with a big spoon as you walk by. How long? Really, I cannot say. Long enough to have some perfectly tender chunks of potato left, but so that, mostly, what you have is a silken, pale-and-interesting potato broth. Add salt. Add pepper. Take a walk into the garden and nab an armload of kale. Destalk, slice, and dump into saucepan. Up the heat and boil, hard, for 3 minutes. Ladle into shallow bowls, dress with more olive oil and, because the cabbage and potato combination struck me as being Irish Peasant not just Portugese Peasant, I added a large (a-hem) spoonful of sour cream and, just 'cos Spain is next door, a dusting of smoked paprika which, if you'll forgive me Tod, made it even richer.  

I'm only a couple of chapters in, but Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered is shaping up to be a brilliant follow up to what's become one of my very favourite books about food, ever.

     

polenta, but easier

Good Polenta is one of those dishes any food-obsessive worth their weight should be slave to: a roiling, boiling, bubbling cauldron of canary yellow goodness that takes at least 30 minutes of your time, to say nothing of the repetitive strain injury constant stirring delivers. If it doesn't hurt, how can it be Good? I will admit that, in my twenties, and egged on by the elitism of the glossy food magazines I devoured at the time, I duly did just that. Then I read Tod Davies' joyful, life-affirming little book Jam Today. It's a book I've often thought about when in this now, as of last month, eight-years-young blog space, yet I've not raved enough about it - correcting that, right now. 

Look. Davies got this from no less than the illustrious Paula Wolfert, a woman who'd have you making your own couscous (oy), and if Wolfert thinks a shortcut is worthwhile here, it bloody well is. Let the oven do the work, and make your house smell irresistible at the same time. It's polenta, but easier. Genius! So simple it's hardly a recipe:

Take 1 cup of polenta and mix it, in a baking dish, with 5 cups of water/stock. Add some salt. Add a slice of butter/a generous spoonful of olive oil. Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake, at 180 C (375 F), for 1 hour. Foil lid off, check if the texture's what you want, adding more liquid if you want a looser mix, lid back and bake for a further 10 minutes if that's the case. Otherwise, you are good to go at the 1 hour mark. 

It's what you do next that makes it Tod Davies' own brand of genius and, most pleasingly, makes it a stunning vehicle for leftovers. While hot from the oven, and working quickly (but calmly) to avoid it setting, scrape about half of the polenta onto a plate. Add whatever you like* to the polenta in the baking dish, then scrape the plated polenta back on top, dribble over some oil or melted butter and bake for a further 20 mins or so.   

*literally, whatever you like. Keep it vaguely in the region of origin is my thinking, so nothing too geographically weird, if you get my drift. I recently made it with a combo of garlicky braised turnips and their luscious greens, along with some leftover tomato-y chickpea-y thingo, and goat cheese. Yet another blank canvas idea - the only kind of recipe one really needs these days.

    

Cooking for the dog

By suggesting that cooking for your dog is an act akin to cooking for your human loved ones in her cracking Jam Today, Tod Davies tricked me into finally reading M. F. K. Fisher. Davies excellent idea comes from Fisher's How to Cook A Wolf, in a chapter titled How To Stay Alive. Highly enjoyable reading.

After all, I thought, we eat well - very well. Why shouldn't Poppy? Fisher calls her dog-friendly concoction Sludge and it is, she says, as good for people in hard times as it is for dogs in good. I've taken to calling it Slop rather than Sludge for the onomatopoeic plop a few spoonfuls make as they hit her bowl, but Poppy adores it regardless and I get to feel like a proper dog mother as she licks the bowl clean. Marvellous all 'round.

What I like about the idea is that it is just that; an idea, not a recipe, one I can file away in my head.   

There’s a cheerful economy to this that pleases me no end; leftovers are an important part of the deal, especially when you put your mind to getting creative, and I've found that looking out for cheap cuts of organic meat is enjoyable in a slightly creepy way. The above batch featured ginger, parsley stalks, beetroot and carrot, millet for the grain component and almost-out-of-date organic lamb. Cooked slowly in the quiet of a wet Melbourne afternoon, this combination has been her favourite yet. 

Start by browning 1 lb of chopped meat in a bit of oil in a heavy, lidded casserole-type of dish. Chop 1 lb of dog-friendly vegetables* and add them next. Tip in 1/3 lb of brown rice (or millet, quinoa, barley - she's loving barley right now) stir well and pour in just enough water to cover. I add a bit of smoked trout skin and a crumble of seaweed because Davies makes an excellent case for the inclusion of both. Bring it all to a boil, reduce the heat, then cover and simmer until the rice is cooked. Long and slow, to be sure.

Keeps, refrigerated, for a few days. Please note that this is not a complete dog food, not by any means, so keep feeding your dog good quality dried biscuits and bones, all the usual things. Think on this as a kind of bonus. Which it most certainly is.   

*NO alliums (onions, garlic, leeks...), legumes, or deadly nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant) - seriously, NO alliums, okay? - but anything else is fair game. Broccoli, daikon, radishes, carrots, celery are all good and even better if you save trimmings during the course of the week.