[Sca-cooks] Winter comfort food...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 4, 2005, at 9:25 AM, <kingstaste at mindspring.com>  
<kingstaste at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Well, it being cold and rainy here in Atlanta, we decided on soup  
> last night
> as well. Per Santa's request, it contained no beans or cabbage ;)
> I ended up going with something loosely based on a Greek or Italian  
> wedding
> soup.  (I found a recipe on-line that is something similar -
> http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1848,157168-233206,00.html ,  
> although I just
> looked that up, I did not follow any recipe).
>
> I started with 2 quarts of homemade turkey stock and added another  
> quart of
> water.  To this I added a little over one cup of medium grain  
> organic brown
> rice and 2 large cloves of minced organic garlic.  I diced up some  
> Bell and
> Evans chicken breast meat and added it to the pot.  I let this  
> simmer a
> while as I prepared the other ingredients.  I made a chiffonade of  
> spinach
> (organic spinach from my CSA), and finely diced an organic fennel  
> bulb that
> I found on the discount rack at Sevananda (my local food co-op).  I  
> also
> chopped some fennel fronds.  I juiced 4 organic lemons and set all  
> of this
> aside while my girlfriend and I sat and chatted and drank a nice  
> Australian
> Merlot :)

Yes, but was it organic ;-) ?

I'm intrigued by this because you seem to have combined two or more  
recognizable but different soup traditions, most noticeably  
stracciatella (which sometimes has spinach but always seems to have  
eggs, presumably for their wedding/fertility symbolism), and  
avgolemno. Not having tried it, I'm not sure how well it would work,  
but we now have some evidence that it does ;-).

Some time before our first snowfall of the year last night, I made a  
curry from odds and ends in the freezer, this time following the  
southern Chinese model (in which the sauce is flavored with curry,  
and tends to be thinner and lighter, almost a soup, instead of  
cooking meat in curry paste until the juices thin it all to a saucy  
masala consistency). This was the home-style model, as well, and not  
the stir-fried restaurant travesty you sometimes encounter with  
onions and peppers (and, God forbid, sometimes carrots) in a gluey,  
curry-powder-flavored sauce.

It's actually deceptively simple: I browned several whole garlic  
cloves and ginger slices in hot peanut oil in a Dutch oven until they  
were _almost_ burned,  then added about 2 pounds each of oxtail and  
cubed beef chuck (this is great with stewing lamb, too), browned  
them, then reduced the heat, added about three cups of water and  
about 1/2 cup of oyster sauce, and about three Tbs of rather generic  
(presumably Madras) curry powder my lady wife had picked up in an  
odd, unlabelled plastic tub (the curry was actually added before the  
liquids and stirred into the meat and sizzled up a bit until  
fragrant), and this was all covered and simmered for an hour or so.  
During this time I soaked about a dozen black mushrooms (these  
resemble shiitakes, but are darker in color and have a lot more  
flavor) until reconstituted, and added them to the pot.

After some 1 1/2 to 2 hours further, I added for or five russet  
potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks, stirred them in, and let it all  
simmer on very low heat until the potatoes were done. My spouse has  
this bread-and-potato fixation, possibly from growing up in a culture  
for whom the staples are rice and noodles.

The oyster sauce is rarely used in that quantity (normally it's a Tbs  
or two), but it provides a sweet-and-salty character that goes well  
with the curry powder (Madras tends to be a little sweet anyway), as  
well as providing a bit of thickening for the sauce. Between that and  
the gelatin in the oxtails it needed nothing else.

Served with plainish bok toy quickly sauteed in ginger and (this  
time) shallot-infused oil with salt and white pepper, and steamed  
white rice, with clementines for dessert, plus a mango-and-trigo  
shake for da kid. I stole some of the latter...

Adamantius





"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04