Chicken Soup, Thai-Style

It's that time of year in New England. We want to hunker down, stay in, have a big bowl of soup, and go to bed early. We're in wool most days and we're shoveling out as often as not.

Still, there's something gorgeous about this time of year. The beech and birch trees, like bare white or gray poles, extend to the robin's egg sky. The crystal white snow is never dirty in the country, like that city slush of grime and God knows what, but instead is a pure canvas, brilliant and eye-popping. Even the chill is a morning pick-up. My first deep breath when I let the dog out is the moment I know I'm really awake. It's better than coffee!

Here's a six-serving soup I made for Bruce on a recent cold evening. Leftovers were terrific the next day! It's not an authentic Thai preparation but a good, old-fashioned, American soup, renovated with Thai flavors. It's one of the many soups in COOKING KNOW-HOW. It's sure to become a winter favorite at your house.

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Red-Cooking Ham

We're dancing around here. Seriously. Dancing. And we're white boys. We don't dance. Without biting our upper lips. But we're doing it anyway because our book, HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER, got nominated for a James Beard award! Holy cow. Or pig. Or something.

We cannot believe it. We were nominated for one of the most prestigious awards in the country for a book that is at the heart and soul of who we are: Bruce's crazy-good recipes and my rather fractured take on the narrative that is our lives.

To celebrate, I thought I'd put up one of Bruce's favorite recipes: a red-cooking ham. It's a traditional Chinese braise, named for the fact that soy sauce takes on a red cast when long stewed--this time with a fresh ham, a gorgeous, decadent pork-out for the table. I had intended to blog this recipe in the weeks ahead; but with the nomination today I thought, oh, what the heck. Let's all get us a big taste of our favorite back-side. So without further ado. . . .

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Indonesian-Style Goat Curry

It's official. The goat book is out there and on sale. Early by a couple of weeks. It's available right here. (Bit of a shocking photo, eh?)

If you liked the ham tome, you'll love GOAT: MEAT, MILK, CHEESE. Let me give you the first sentence: "I lied while wearing make-up."

What? It doesn't sound like a cookbook? Oh, but it is: quick guide to butchering, the physics and chemistry of cheese-making, and over 100 of Bruce's killer recipes. Plus some rather salacious stories. One involves a poster of Farah Fawcett Majors. And yes, it's still a cookbook.

To celebrate, I'm going to drop an original recipe here, one Bruce created just for all of us who hang around this blog. This one's not in the book--call it a "blog exclusive": a hot and sour and spicy curry, just a little sweet, modeled less on Thai wet curries than on the savory ones found in Singapore and Indonesia. So let's get to it.

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Pork Butt Braised in Milk and Spices

If you don't know this Italian classic, it's high time you got acquainted. It's sumptuous: the pork sweet and tender as it slowly cooks in the milk.

Milk? Sure enough. Milk is one of the few protein structures on our planet that will not coagulate over heat. Put a piece of chicken on the grill and the proteins begin to coagulate into those layers of "done meat." Same goes for the proteins (a. k. a. glutens) in bread.

But not those in milk. That's because the basic milk protein, casein, is negatively charged. The molecules can't get near each other--unless you add an acid and cause the calcium ringlet that holds the casein strands together to come undone so that the proteins float free and get diluted in the surrounding water, thereby losing their group strength. Voilà, very loose curds. Or unless you add cultures that give the casein a negative-ion hair cut. Voilà, much stronger curds--also called "cheese making."

But without all that fandango, you can boil milk down to almost nothing and it won't coagulate--except for that milk skin on pudding, a skin that's actually a layer, not of coagulation, but of casein drying out. But with enough pork fat in the mix, you don't have to worry about that skin. And you've got the best braised pork imaginable.

Figure on serving four if it's all you've got, six if it's part of a coursed sit-down. OK, so let's get to it.

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Spanish-Style Leg of Goat

As you may know, Bruce and I are about to see the first-ever, all-goat cookbook published in April. Want to know more? Click here.

And don't just think goat meat--although it is the world's most consumed meat. Think cheese. And milk.

We've written a book devoted to the entire goaty world. More about the science and travails of making goat cheese than you can imagine. And more recipes for goat cheese-laced dishes, too. More about the molecular structure of goat milk than you could want to know. And lots of recipes that use goat milk and yogurt. (Chocolate frozen goat yogurt!) Interviews with Bill Niman, with some of the best goat cheese makers in the country. And lots of hysterical stories about two guys in the country, trying to come to terms with goats. Let's just say it involves some rather bizarre moments of load-bearing Farrah Fawcett Major posters on walls and Bruce's first time with a nipple. Need I really say more?

I've been dropping some hints about the book here--and I thought I'd take today to share on of my favorite recipes: a leg of goat roasted over a bed of tomatoes, chickpeas, and sherry.

It's Bruce's whimsical reinterpretation, sort of Spain meets Safeway. I hope you'll like it as much as I have (on countless occasions in the past year). And if you don't want to use goat, consider this one with a leg of lamb, particular for the holidays ahead.

Figure on its serving six with some starchy sides. Goat cheese-laced mashed potatoes, anyone? Let's get to it.

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Moroccan-Inspired Bean Soup

Dante was right. The center of hell has no fire. It's a lake of ice.

I don't know how it is where you are; but here in New England, we've descended into the deep freeze. It's cold. Really cold. We haven't made it above freezing in a couple of weeks.

Which is fine for Christmas and New Year's. Sort of makes the season. And Dreydl seems very happy, chasing his tire in the snow. But I've got my fingers crossed that come the second of January, we'll be in the mid-70s. I washed my bathing suit this morning. Or was I being too hopeful?

With the chill, we've been having great comfort food--like this bean soup I concocted the other night while Bruce was out teaching knitting. I used the template for Bean Soup in COOKING KNOW-HOW. If you haven't heard me say so about a zillion times already, that's the book that won the best-in-the-world award at the Paris Book Show. Quite the little tome we wrote--which you can find here.

The spice mixture I used is a rather classic Moroccan blend. But my soup was inspired by Moroccan flavors. As you'll see, there's a significant deviation. Significant.

So let's get to it. You'll make six to eight servings worth.

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Slow Cooker Split Pea Soup

The world is starting to look like this. At least in my backyard. I'm sure it's spring somewhere. A land called Oz, I think. But from my deck, this is how I see things: in red and oranges. Chilly, too. A front blew in this afternoon. Going down near freezing tonight. Almost time to start my garden clean-up for the year. (And no, that's not brown grass on the ground. Those are leaves. Gobzillions of them. And look how many are yet to fall. There's a price to be paid for living on a very rural set of acres in New England. Besides the snow, I mean.)

About this time of year, Bruce drags out the slow cooker and starts making wonderful, real-food meals on the counter. In the food business, these sorts of meals are called "dump-and-stirs." And they're sometimes disparaged for reasons that escape me--because if I can toss everything in a slow cooker, put the lid on, go off to my work, and come back to a hearty, real-food dinner, I can't imagine anything wrong with the whole thing.

By the way, if you've never had split peas from a slow cooker, you're in for a treat. They don't turn soft and paste-like. They stay almost whole, tender but with a little tooth. It's a revelation, to be honest--more texture with just as much flavor.

This soup is made in a 6-quart slow cooker--and you'll get at least eight servings out of it. That's a lot of food for not much effort. And not much money, to boot.

So here goes. . . .

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Oxtails Bourguignon

Now that's a pot of luscious real food. When I was a little kid, I loved oxtail soup, a hearty German dish that uses a rather low-class cut from the beast: the tail, the little sections of vertebrae that are stocked with chuck-like meat, lots of collagen, and some pretty good opportunities for gnawing.

In other words, heaven. And as with all forms of paradise, a struggle. Bliss is a journey--and not always easy.

Over the last year, Bruce and I have wrestled with some of the ethics of eating meat. After I went on an L. A. NPR show to talk about the ham book (here), I was besieged by some rather militant vegans who insisted that I come to terms with the ethics of being, well, not a carnivore, but an omnivore.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried to explain our ever-evolving position, they wouldn't listen. I hope you might. Bruce and I have come to a few conclusions over the past year.

1. We (almost exclusively) eat meat from local suppliers at farmers' markets and farms. Unfortunately, this guideline falls apart when we go into heavy recipe-testing mode. There's no way we can crank out fifteen pork recipes for a magazine only buying what our friends have on their farm.

2. I only eat meat once a day, and not always then. Bruce isn't with me on this one, but I've come to the conclusion that I feel better and am more alert if I have fewer meat moments in my day. This is a personal decision. I have NO scientific basis for knowing that I feel better. But I believe it. And believing makes it so.

3. If we're going to eat meat, we're going to eat all of an animal. This one's a little harder for most people. But we've come to the decision that it's ethically wrong to kill an animal just to eat the tenderloin and certain prime cuts. No, we need to eat as much of the animal as possible. Because for us, if we don't, a life has been wasted for silly excess. 

And so oxtails. AKA, sheer delight. One of my favorite things. Here's the recipe:

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Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 2

Let's be quick about this. No blather about holiday neuroses. Sometimes, food's the thing. Real food at that. The big task for this recipe is done. Now for the finish.

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Chinese-Style Braised/Roasted Leg of Lamb, Part 1

What is it about holiday meals? Why are they so often the last resort of the hackneyed, the familiar, the tried-and-true?

Is it because of Great Aunt June's harping on politics? (What is it with her and Grover Cleveland? Did they have a thing back in the day?)

Is it because someone's bound to bring up something uncomfortable? ("Dear, I remember fondly those lovely daffodils that I gave you last year and that you managed to kill.")

Or are we just so jangled in this modern world, so made-nuts by bloviating pundits and know-nothing wags, by bail-outs and world-wide collapses, by wars compounded on more wars, that we finally succumb to the ordinary, if only to (as Annie Dillard once wrote) "stick a nickle's worth of sense into our days"?

Whatever the cause, I'm here with a cure. For the Easter doldrums. (Other things will have to wait.) This Chinese-style leg of lamb will turn the table on its head and offer something new among the staid traditions: the pastel hats and foofy dresses.

Or you can fix this wonder anytime and be glad of it.

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