Cassoulet to cry for!

I remember (even if somewhat hazily and distorted) when I was a teenager and became big enough to drink adult disapproved beverages whenever said adults weren't looking, that in those blissful times pretty much anything would do. I mean, if the party was well on it's way but the supplied fuel was running out, there were simply far more important issues than being fussy. If only there was an open 24/7 shop within a crawling distance an expedition would be assembled (usually consisting of a group of growling creatures tied together like a bundled hay to keep them vertical-ish), the last financial resources would be scraped out of the bottom of the pockets very tight indeed (how could any of us fit in those stupid jeans?) and after some sympathetic cheering from a balcony or window the human centipede would sway away and then back bringing a hefty serving of whatever was cheapest.

Youth... Never bloody again!

But then things begin to change. People grow up (or at least get older), mature (some like good wine, some like bad cheddar) and generally there's a fine chance that they start develop something of a taste. It's not something we can direct in any way, it's not anything we can influence, it is more like a gravity, that makes a cloud of dust start to revolve slowly and get closer and closer together until it forms something more substantial. And that's what happens to us as well. From the bottomless abyss of 'whatevah'-ness when it comes to drinking, suddenly we realize we've got preferences. That we prefer full-bodied red to any other and white is a no-go altogether. That whisky is better than brandy. Or other way round. That Żywiec is the best continental lager ever. And so on... Now. What all this have to do with cooking? Very little in fact, but elaborate entry always makes for interesting reading, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway, not all is lost as there is actually a tiny line of thought in this gibberish capable of taking us to cooking. Just as that stormy youth takes us all over the place without any direction, sense or purpose so are our beginner's steps in the kitchen. We try whatever comes our way just because it's new, because there's no context to it and in all our inexperience we simply have no idea what we like and what we wouldn't. It takes years and a few culinary trips around the world in 80 dishes to start appreciate some ingredients more than others, develop a particular liking for some flavours and feel more comfortable with Mediterranean cuisine than Chinese or any other way round. We grow up and mature in our preferences and without realising become specialists in some areas. Me, personally, I've just had a look back at my cook-record and can see clearly one thing - I'm a stew man! (An official, caped outfit and modus operandi yet to be confirmed...) There's simply nothing better than a generous helping of food that seems to outstretch its arms and cuddle you. A good stew is like a hot bath after taking the bus from town in December. It's like a soft and woolly blanket when you can hear outside your window how the gale and rain try to kill everything that's vertical. It's like a smile, like a goose-feather pillow, like hearing 'well done, young man' when you're five, like a knee-long jumper, like anything else in this world that gives you that warm and guilt-free sense of happiness. Is good for you because it makes you feel good and that's all you need to know.

So... if you ever wondered how to get there, here's a recipe that's just as good as Willy Wonka's golden ticket. We're going to need a couple of things and preferably a few hours for all the goodness to creep in. The dish is based on a traditional French cassoulet but with some adjustments for that little touch of originality. We'll need:

- pork (pork belly, Polish boczek, pork ribs, pork tenderloin etc., see details below)
- large onion
- white wine
- a couple of tomatoes
- tinned beans (of choice, but I recommend butter beans or any other large beans)
- red pepper (optional)
- some mushrooms (optional)
- seasoning and herbs (salt, pepper, marjoram, rosemary, bay leaves, allspice)

The choice of meat is crucial as it's going to influence the flavour of the whole dish but at the same time is fully open to personal preferences. I strongly recommend the pork belly/ribs/boczek trinity but if you prefer leaner option there's always tenderloin, shoulder or leg. Avoid loin though (traditional pork chops) as it's likely to end up very dry and there wouldn't be that much flavour to give to the stew. The cooking might take some time, but it's absolutely dead simple. Start traditionally with chopped onion and fry it with a little bit of mild olive oil (not the extra virgin one!). It'd be best if you had a casserole dish or at least a heavy bottom cooking pan so you can just carry on adding things into the same pot. When onions start getting transparent and soft add the rest of the vegetables and cook under cover for about 20 minutes until everything starts to mix together. Then add your meat (in full pieces, we'll be cutting it once it's cooked. Remember to keep the skin on the belly pork as well!), wine and herbs. Do not add salt as you might not need it at all in the end. Cover the pot, reduce fire to minimum and go and read War and Peace. You won't have to come back to the kitchen until she dies in the end.

...several chapters later...

When the smell makes your stomach try to jump out you're permitted to go and have a look. If the meat is cooked, take it out and cool it down on a side. You can loose the skin from the belly pork now and get rid of the bones from the ribs. They've given your stew all their flavours by now and are free to go. The rest of the meat cut in sizeable bits and return to the stew. Time to prepare boczek. You can find it in supermarkets but if not, use pancetta. Boczek is simply a belly pork that's cured and smoked and once you've tried it once you'll never stop salivating over it. Ever.

Ever.

The best way to handle it for this recipe is to chop or dice it very finely (you'll only need a couple of handfuls) and pre-fry in a frying pan until it's crispy. Add to the stew with all the fat that melted out. The boczek is very salty itself so that's why you need to be very careful about adding any so wait with that until you're ready to serve. At this point add also the beans and carry on cooking until your neighbours come knocking on your door with spoons and soup bowls ready. Let them have some only if they've always been very nice to you. But very nice. I mean, proper, very nice. And if they ever ask you for a recipe, tell them, that it was revealed to you by an very old French lady from just outside Toulouse on her deathbed and that a terrible curse would fall upon your head if you'd ever reveal her secret to anyone. They'll fall for it, promise.

Fabadas

Right! Here is a dish I did for the first time last night. I humbly served it up to this blogs founder and his good lady wife. It was met with approval: what greater accolade do I need! It is my attempt at a traditional Asturian (Northern Spanish Region) dish which I gorged myself on a few years ago.

We went to Asturias for a summer holiday and stayed at a lovely B n B right on the coast. On the first night we ate in the B n B's restaurant, ordering Fabadas for two as we had read that this was a particularly typical dish. We were presented with a large bowl of very rich, hearty stew of pork, large beans, chorizo, etc. that left us little room for pudding. Over the week we were all but adopted by the lovely family who ran the place. They normally catered for Spanish tourists, so we stuck out a bit, but I speak fluent Spanish so we made inroads fast. On the last night we decided to order Fabadas again as our farewell meal. Our now doting hosts shortly brought to the table - with some pride - an enormous tureen filled to the brim with the same gorgeous fare as on our first night. In some confusion I explained we'd only ordered for two to which we were given the smiling response 'Yes, no problem: eat!' Well, suffice to say we did our best, but we probably tried a bit too hard to avoid seeming ungrateful. We did eat most of it: we did not sleep well! What wouldn't I have done for a mint tea that night?!
Nevertheless, I cherish the memory of this wonderful dish and was pleasantly surprised by how close to the original flavour this concoction comes.

Ingredients (for 4)

1lb and a half / 700g of pork belly
1/4lb / 250g of lardons
3 inch length of chorizo diced into medium-sized lumps
2 or 3 inch slice of black Pudding chopped into medium-sized lumps
Tin of butter beans
Tin of flageolet beans
2 Onions roughly chopped
4 or 5 cloves of garlic chopped chopped into two or three pieces
White wine
1/2 to one teaspoons of smoked paprika
A few saffron strands
Salt and pepper
3 bay leaves
Handful of Rosemary
Handful of Thyme
Handful of Parsley

Method

Heat a little olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan and fry off the garlic and onion until soft. Meanwhile drain and thoroughly rinse the beans, leaving them aside in the sieve. Stick the slab of pork belly, the chorizo and the lardons in the pan and cover 3/4 of the ingredients with freshly boiled water and a very generous slosh of white wine. Bring to the boil and then drop the heat to a simmer. Add the saffron, paprika, bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, and salt and pepper and leave to cook, covered, for 1 and 1/2 hours.
Give it all a good stir and add the beans and the black pudding. Top up the liquid with another generous slug of wine and continue to simmer uncovered for another 1/2 an hour or so. You want to end up with enough liquid that you are ladling a thick stew-like broth into your bowls, so guage the liquid and the amount to reduce it by accordingly. Before serving, remove the pork belly and tear or cut the meat  and bone into more manageable chunks so that everyone gets a look-in. 
Serve in bowls with some nice bread and a sprinkle of parsley over the top.

Tips

This is one of those dishes that will taste even better if you cook it the day before, allowing the flavours to steep; but then you've got the problem of resisting that gorgeous rich aroma....
Fabadas is so named because of the large beans used in the stew, called fabes. So, if you can find fabes use them instead of the butter and flageolet beans.
Black pudding doesn't exist in Spain. They have their own blood sausage called morcilla. I think that morcilla tastes much better, so again use this if you can lay your hands on it.
Equally, get the very best, smoky chorizo you can find. It is the chorizo, along with the paprika, that imparts much of the richness and smokiness that characterises the dish; so don't skrimp!
If you're going really authentic, lardons are the English equivalent of 'tocino' (bacon cut 'the wrong way' so that you get a lot of fat); but tocino does taste a bit richer in my opinion.
I didn't bother but chucking in a ham bone with some meat still hanging off it would work very well and can be found in a traditional fabadas stew.
This last tip is just a hunch that I will try some time, but cider is another famous product of the Asturias region. I reckon that replacing the wine with cider would be very effective indeed. If anyone out there tries it this way, please let me know!

Drink

I would either go for cider, due to the Asturias factor. Asturian cider is available from Booths in the UK! It's a sparkling version so you don't need to worry about the messy pouring technique: it is traditionally poured into the glass from a great height in order to oxygenate it (it really does make a difference; I tried it both ways). Otherwise I would recommend one of Sheppy's bottled dry ciders or Dunkerton's Black Fox, the latter having a lovely smoky flavour of its own.

For wine I would go for a medium-heavy red such as Marques de Riscal Rioja or the Chilean Cousino Macul Merlot. If you want to bring out the earthier tones of the dish go for a French Bourgogne Pinot Noir (not New World as it's a completely different animal). If you want something tighter to offset the fattiness then how about a Cabernet-Franc? Not so easy to find, but it could make a good partner.

Finally, on the line of the fattiness in the dish, you do have the option of a white sparkler. Cava is obviously a serious consideration, but champagne would be a decadent and unconventional accompaniment. For somewhere in between, try the New Zealand Pelorus - the vintage Chardonnay-Pinot Noir (silver label) rather than the non-vintage Chardonnay. 

Whistle while you work!

Album 'Ciudad de las Ideas' by Vicente Amigo
Anything by Paco di Lucia, Al di Meola, and John McClaughlin (amazing!)
Album 'Al Amanecer' by Jose Merce
Concierto de Aranjuez. Either the Narciso Yepes or Paco di Lucia versions.

The traditional music of Asturias is a sort of Celtic folk, but I would go for the above any day!

desperate pork in oriental disguise

Things started to get desperate when I decided to do something more of an extraordinary without planning an appropriate shopping first. So there I was with:

• - one tenderloin of pork
  
• - handful of small mushrooms
  
• - cherry tomatoes
  
• - two carrots
  
• - red onion
  
• - asparagus
  

The whole original idea was pretty much about tossing it all into a wok, adding some rice and cooking until bored. And that’s why I went desperate.

This called for some desperate measures.

First, I’ve decided to marinade my pork a little bit in something that turned out to be a slightly Frankenstein-ish all-oriental sauce. I’ve added:

• - honey
  
• - mustard (the best one is from IKEA food shop!)
  
• - sweet chilli sauce
  
• - tiny bit of Heinz ketchup
  
• - soy sauce
  
• - a bit of Vegeta seasoning
  
• - a bit of Maggi
  
• - a bit of Morrisons’ thai wok oil
  
• - a bit of Morrisons’ sechuan wok oil
  
• - ...and maybe some things I can’t remember anymore
  

Anyway, the ingredients for this marinade were absolutely incidental (happened to be passing by when I was frantically roaming round the kitchen in hopeless search for inspiration) and should only be treated as guidance. After all it’s just one of those dishes that happen to happen out of nowhere and which we can never do again because we couldn’t be bothered to write down what we’ve had used in a first place. So here it is, a first timer. 

So, as for preparation, nothing easier than that. First, cut the meat into very thin slices or little stripes and mix well with the marinade, then set aside. Pretend you’ve lost interest, act inconspicuous, let it rest in pieces. It’ll fry happier.

Now chop the onion into recognisable bits, half- or just slice carrot(s), quarter the mushrooms and chop asparagus (say into 3-4 cm bits). Into the wok the whole lot, with a little bit of added water and under a cover. On a rather little fire. Start preparing (or prepare it earlier altogether) your rice. Time to go back to the pork (the longer it marinades the better but there’s no need to go over the top either :) All it needs is to be put in a little bit of flour and deep (or half deep) fried in some nice oil i.e. grape seed or sunflower. Avoid the nasty regular vegetable oil, the one which can be used after cooking for fuelling diesel engines. It may be a wonderful way of recycling but somehow does not wet my appetite much. 

Oh, and it gives you cancer as well.

Once fried, drain the meat on a paper kitchen towel and go back to you rice and veg. When they cooked but still crunchy add halved cherry tomatoes (plum as good, or just normal ones chopped) and cook for another 3-5 min and then stir in the rice. Keep on low fire until sure that everything is well mixed and hot, turn the heat off and add the pork (which should be covered in a nice, crunchy batter). Mix and serve. I’ve added as well a handful of wild rocket leaves and some fresh coriander but that’s (as everything else in this dish) is purely optional. Just remember not to cook your greens and fresh herbs since in heat they lose flavour faster than Gordon Ramsay patience.

At which point I must warn you – it’s not a looker, but then again it’s quick, not expensive, dead simple and quite not bad after all :)

(I mean the dish, not Gordon...)

Bon apetito!