Beef Barley Soup

Sorry if I've been absent the past couple days. I've been locked away finishing off the first-ever goat book. Which is done. Done. Done. Let me write it again. Done. I pressed "send" this afternoon. And now the wait. Because it won't be out until March of 2011--or thereabouts. Books take time. They move in glacial epochs.

Which is one of the reasons why I'm all about these ribs tonight. Beef ribs, the slow-moving of all the beef cuts. They need a long time over the heat--and add up to big comfort food.

And economical meals, too. Because people pay top dollar for the quick-cookers like strip steaks. But the long-cookers, the pieces like these ribs that I adore? They're less expensive.

People don't know what they're missing. Let's get to it.

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Perfect Meatballs

I've got a confession. A pretty rank one. Pull up a chair, get a cup of coffee.

First, a picture.

A skillet full of browning, herb-laced meatballs. Pretty good, eh? OK, so now the truth. Ready? I don't like ground meat.

OK, don't leave me. I did my best to prepare you. There's more. I could probably go the rest of my life and not eat another hamburger. (See, it gets worse.)

Growing up, we called it "loose meat." As in "loose meat sandwiches." (AKA, Sloppy Joes.) Call me crazy, but I don't like loose meat rolling around my plate. It's unbecoming. Plus, you have to go through about a thousand sessions of expensive therapy for every time your mother ever asked you as a teenager, "Mark, are you willing to try some loose meat tonight?"

That said, Bruce has changed me over the years. (Darn you, marriage.) I've actually gotten to the point where I like meatloaf. And--get this--crave meatballs. Beg for them, in fact. I'm still not over the burger thing, but I'm working on it. Nonetheless, when we were writing COOKING KNOW-HOW, the chapter on meatballs was hands-down my favorite. I loved the whole technique, the way you could make this crazy, global range, from Turkish kofta to buttery Danish frikadeller, from down-home Italian meatballs to Romanian chiftele (made with mashed potatoes and lots of garlic).

So I begged for meatballs the other night. And here's what I got:

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Pot Roast With Root Vegetables

Who knew foods could be so culturally, even ethnically, charged? When I was growing up, we called beef chuck roast pot roast. It was shoved in the oven with potatoes and carrots while we were at church. Bruce, on the other hand, called beef brisket pot roast. It was long-stewed for a holiday meal with tomatoes and onions. As a Texan, I didn't even know you could stew a brisket. I assumed it came off the cow already smoked.

Thus, Bruce and I endured years of rank confusion, a constant back-and-forth of inter-faith insanity. Like this:

"Do you want pot roast for dinner?"

"What kind of pot roast?"

"Brisket."

"Oh."

"Why?"

"Because when you said pot roast, I though you meant. . . ."

We finally brought peace to the home by naming that stewed brisket Jewish pot roast. So much is solved by adjectives. 

So in that spirit, I suppose we should call this recipe Christian pot roast.

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Vietnamese-Inspired Beef Shanks On The Grill

If ever there was a recipe that begged for an apology, this is it: a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, forget-the-quick-and-easy feat.

Most of the time, Bruce is on a pretty short leash. I'm always the one playing the food prude:"But it's got to have fewer ingredients (or steps or necessary techniques) for anyone to make it."

Until our HAM book, that is. There, he was given free rein--and some of the recipes are wild, crazy and wonderful, his creativity on full display. (However, I'll admit that I stuck a sidebar on some of them called "Slash The Ingredient List," all about how to do the same thing with fewer items.)

Well, here's one of his more fanciful creations and the kind of food he lavishes on me and our weekend guests: a grill/braise recipe with Vietnamese flavors that takes on all comers.

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Two-Step, No-Fuss Brisket

You know how I can't stand the words quick, easy, or simple in food writing. They're knee-jerks at best, a way to deflect criticism. Did you read Michael Pollan's piece in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, "Out Of The Kitchen, Onto The Couch"? You should--although it'll depress the heck out of you. Basically, he claims that within fifty years, people will see cooking as quaint as they do canning now: a weird throwback to an earlier age when everyone had more time.

Indeed, supermarkets are piling up more and more prepared and packaged foods. Remember just a few years ago when Pollan's advice was to shop the market's perimeter for the food that was somehow real? It seems almost silly these days. Walk in and the perimeter has been taken over with prepared foods, bakeries, deli cases, and racks of rotisserie chickens. I read a recent report that the fresh produce/vegetable sections were often the loss leaders in supermarkets--but that they were kept in place because people liked to walk through them to remind them of real food, to feel as if they were in a place that served real food, despite buying the canned, processed, preserved, and presliced stuff.

Sigh.

So when it comes to talking about sweating hunks of meat that most people don't cook anymore, we food writers can get a little apologetic. Or defensive. Thus, simple, quick, and easy.

But if you want a brisket this weekend, I don't know a--cough--simpler, quicker, or easier way to do it.

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Sausage Meatloaf

Ah, the comforts of home. Meatloaf and roasted veggies.

Except I used to hate it. Not the veggies. Always loved them, even as a child. But the meatloaf. Growing up, we called ground beef "loose meat." As in "loose meat sandwiches." (Aka, sloppy joes.) And I didn't really like loose meat. Something about its texture.

Bruce? The hamburger king. He could eat burgers every day. When I met him, he was enduring a particularly horrid bout of IBS and lived on plain, sautéed ground beef with baked potatoes. Period. What's more, he didn't think of his diet as deprivation.

Isn't it funny how we change over long-term relationships? The inviolable becomes the possible. OK, we'll forgo deeper questions right now--such as how I've sort of come to tolerate musicals after being around Bruce for years. But in this case, I've actually gotten to the point where I like loose meat. (OK, not sloppy joes. But time will tell.)

Bruce made a meatloaf last night that was a lovely mixture of ground sausage and ground beef. The sausage was some our own pig, the one raised for us by our CSA. The ground beef? Once again, from the grass-fed beef farm over in Salisbury, The Whippoorwill Farm. Bruce and I have reached the point where we almost won't eat meat unless we've shaken the hand of the person who's raised the animal. But that's another story for another day.

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Grilled Skirt Steaks

I've been thinking a lot about an e e cummings poem lately: #65 from his 1950 collection XAIPE. (Don't even ask me how to pronounce that.)

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Braised Pot Roast With Carrots And Artichokes

And so the main course for our dinner party. If you know me, you know it was a braise. A big hunk of meat that's been at a low simmer for hours, yielding a soft, luscious chunk on the plate, surrounded by vegetables and sauce. I ask you: what could be better?

Again, Bruce followed the technique in COOKING KNOW-HOW. I sound like a broken record. But we're pulling that book out all the time and playing with the techniques it lays out. We both love how much freedom we get to make a different dish every time. We've written a lot of cookbooks. And yes, we use our own recipes. But we've never used a cookbook like this one. And we wrote it! How odd.

So here goes.

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Grilled Hanger Steaks

A hanger steak is my all-time favorite cut of beef: more heft than a filet mignon, a little more chew than a strip steak, but not as fatty as a chuck roast or a brisket. In fact, I think of it as a cross between a strip steak and a chuck roast--and way more flavorful than either. I'd never fuss it up: just grill the hanger and offer some veggies on the side.

OK, a warning. There are pictures of butchering ahead.

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Mexican Sweet and Sour Short Ribs

One of the things I love about Bruce's kitchen creativity is his ability to combine culinary traditions, genres, and flavors in new but still accessible ways. One look at the cake chapter in THE ULTIMATE COOK BOOK should convince anyone. Lemon Meringue Cake? Two vanilla genoise layers with a lemon curd filling and a meringue on top for icing. Crazy fun, definitely outside the box, and darn good.

To be honest, I love culinary innovation, but (ah, here's the rub) within limits, albeit whimsical ones. Suffice it to say that I'm not one for molecular gastronomy. For God's sake, can't I just eat dinner without having to be shocked and awed at every bite? If the food at our table overwhelms the conversation among us and our friends, then there's just no point.

This past weekend, we hosted a small dinner party and Bruce concocted a new, whimsical, but also somehow familiar short rib braise based on the technique in COOKING KNOW-HOW, a braise that was so very comforting as we all waited the big East Coast Nor'easter about to blow in. (18 inches of snow at our house. Sheesh!)

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