Posted by Robin Bellinger, June 16, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Last month there was a great thread here about “What do you bring to eat at your desk for lunch?” As interesting as the responses were, I was chagrined to discover near-universal condemnation of people who enjoy tuna salad in the air they share with their co-workers. Whoops! I definitely ate lots of tuna salad at my office job; but then, my colleagues weren’t exactly scared to stink up the place, so I guess I felt it was my right as much as theirs. The woman in the next cubicle used to microwave incredibly pungent curries around 3 p.m., and a woman in a nearby office would attempt to eliminate the odor with room perfume, leaving me in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out Jo Malone vs. cumin death match. Another woman spent hours preparing elaborate feasts in the teeny area meant for adding milk and sugar to your coffee. I guess my tuna fish didn’t seem so obtrusive to me, but now I wonder if people were retching as they passed my desk.
If it weren’t for the scary mercury thing, I would probably eat canned tuna for lunch five days a week. I actually love the way it smells, whether it’s mixed up with mayonnaise and packed onto bread (yum) or gussied up with olive oil, beans, and herbs. Here is Marcella Hazan’s recipe for beans and tuna salad. It’s good, but I usually don’t use a recipe when I want this for lunch; I just combine a can of tuna (oil-packed, or add olive oil to the finished salad), a can of white beans or chickpeas, a tablespoon of nonpareil capers (I like capers, so adjust accordingly), some black pepper, and a dash of red wine vinegar. If I am feeling fancy, maybe some parsley or minced red onion. That makes enough for two lunches, no bread needed. And now that it’s nice outside, you can go eat it on a bench, doing unto the curry lady of your office as you wish she would do unto you.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, June 13, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I just had a revelation last night about something most of you may have already known. Sometimes one little thing can completely change the way you make something as classic as refried beans—and that one thing for me was pork fat. Accept no substitutes (unless, of course, you are a vegetarian). That fat can be freshly rendered lard, bacon grease, or sautéed salt pork—but pork it must be. It rounds out this dish giving it meaty flavor without requiring much meat to do so.
This is sort of a mishmash of a few recipes I found in Saveur, Cooks Illustrated, and Chowhound. They all had little quirks, but the essential process is the same. Cook pinto beans in pork fat. Some added water, while others used chicken stock. Some started with canned beans, other mandated starting with dried. I actually had the foresight to cook my own dried beans this time, but the canned kind will definitely work, too. Basically what I learned is that it’s a personal preference, and additional ingredients can be added as needed. The below recipe mentioned is how I garnish a big bowl of refried beans.
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Posted by Blake Royer, May 29, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Some of my favorite bowls of pasta in New York come from a restaurant called Franny's, even though they're more famous for their pizzas. All of the pastas have a wonderful simplicity and this marvelous richness that eludes me. Last week they served a Bucatini alla Gricia with Fava Beans that I was eager to recreate at home—but I had no idea how to make it taste quite so transcendent.
Incidentally, Franny's just released a newsletter with a recipe for linguine with ramps. We've already covered that territory on Dinner Tonight, so I replaced the ramps with fava beans while retaining the curious cooking technique that may be the secret to the pasta's deliciousness: the barely undercooked bucatini goes into the skillet with whatever vegetables you have going, then a knob of butter is added with a little of the pasta cooking water. Swirled with tongs, the noodles continue to cook and give off starch, which marries with the butter to create a rich sauce. I finished it off the heat with a handful of Pecorino cheese for a very satisfying bowl of pasta.
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Posted by Blake Royer, May 20, 2008 at 4:30 PM
The most important thing to remember when making this recipe is low, gentle, barely flickering heat. This is not a "hot" bean salad, it's a warm one, and delicate heat preserves the flavor of its ingredients. Quality herbs and olive oil also make a difference—but that low temperature at which the flavors open up without losing their most subtle qualities makes all the difference. Whenever I make it, I never let the flame get above a gentle simmer, allowing the oil, garlic, and green herbs to infuse with each other and become absorbed by the beans.
Otherwise, it couldn't be much gloriously simpler, which is often the case with the recipes of Viana La Place, who offers this recipe in her book Verdura: Vegetables Italian Style. It also tends to be the humble star of the meal, even next to grilled lamb chops or skirt steak or a fillet of salmon—all of which it pairs marvelously with. The addition of oil-cured olives is optional; sometimes I replace them with cooked shrimp to make the recipe into a one-dish meal.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 7, 2008 at 2:15 PM
As a devoted user of How To Cook Everything
, I’m always interested in bloggers’ strong opinions about Mark Bittman. I haven’t run into any anti-Bittman animus in a while, but every once in a while someone really lets him have it. HTCE and the Minimalist have at times led me astray with recipes that were disappointingly bland or didn’t quite work, but successes have far outnumbered failures.
This week I tried his curried rice noodles in hopes that they would make a good sack lunch. I’m afraid, however, that this is the kind of recipe that makes people turn against Bittman. The noodles were completely bland because the curry powder never really got integrated, and now I have a pot completely encrusted with cooked-on noodles. I probably should have used a bigger (10 quart?) pot and gotten it hotter, but I’m not going to try again to find out; the one thing I demand of his recipes is that they be idiot proof. In the meantime, for your lunch I propose one of my old Bittman favorites, red beans and rice.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, January 30, 2008 at 4:30 PM
Alright. It's my belief that you can't have a football party—and especially not a Super Bowl party—without a seven-layer bean dip. This dip doesn't mess around, so use extra-thick tortilla chips or Fritos for dipping.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, January 28, 2008 at 4:15 PM
That cheeky title could come from no one else but Jamie Oliver—too bad he buried the recipe. His new cookbook, Cook with Jamie, is stocked full of great looking recipes, a few of which we’ve already tried for this column. But he hides this dish underneath a steak, giving it second billing to the attention hogging beef. I’d like to change that. Sure, I did cook up a steak, but this little bean dish is worthy of its own post.
Most of the creaminess comes from the crème fraîche, which I was able to pick up at my local cheese monger. It really does help, but it isn’t the only integral part. The real secret to dish would be the leeks and wine. The sweet tang of the leeks balances out the creaminess of the rest of the dish, while the wine adds a whole layer of depth. It all makes the dish less heavy and more balanced. This also happens to be the first bean dish the fiancée has actually enjoyed. I’d like to thank Mister Oliver for that one.
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Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 15, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's upcoming Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
This weekend, Sunday Night Soups returns to its NFC East comfort zone. The Redskins head north on 95 and take exit 16W to the Meadowlands, where they will find the Giants waiting for them.
You can get many different kinds of soup in both D.C. and New York, the nominal homes of these franchises, which are in fact located in Landover, Maryland, and East Rutherford, New Jersey, respectively. Neither Landover nor East Rutherford has its own signature soup, and we did the Maryland crab thing last week.
One thing that does distinguish this matchup is a heavy University of Miami flavor. Players on both sides will be wearing patches or decals in honor of former Miami Hurricane Sean Taylor, the Redskins safety who was murdered last month in his home. The Redskins feature the inimitable Clinton Portis, as well as Santana Moss, both coming straight outta Coral Gables.
For the boys in blue, Miami product Jeremy Shockey is a tight end-cum-nightlife impresario, not to mention punter Jeff Feagles. More important, it's that ever-growing period known as "the holidays," where work, friends, and family conspire to pump you full of food in a way that might make you wonder if they plan to make a terrine out of your liver. Thus something with more nutritional merit than those Scotch eggs you scarfed at the last holiday party (wait—that was me) and a Floribbean flavor seems in order. Thus, black bean soup.
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