The Daring Kitchen April 2010 Challenge: Brunswick Stew and the Blues!

Something about a cold rainy day that just says "stew", but in April?!?!? April is flowers and spring time and warm weather, right?!?

Not always! The San Francisco Bay Area was doused with a wet, windy, cold, rainy winter storm a couple of weeks ago which was perfect weather for making a hearty, healthy stew. So off I went to buy the ingredients for the April Daring Cooks Challenge "Brunswick Stew":

The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club.

I chose to do the long version:

Recipe One, the Long Way-
From “The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners” by Matt Lee and Ted Lee

Serves about 12

1/4 lb / 113.88 grams / 4 oz slab bacon, rough diced
2 Serrano, Thai or other dried red chiles, stems trimmed, sliced, seeded, flattened
1lb / 455.52 grams / 16oz rabbit, quartered, skinned
1 4-5lb / 1822.08- 2277.6 grams / 64-80oz chicken, quartered, skinned, and most of the fat removed
1 Tablespoon / 14.235 grams / ½ oz sea salt for seasoning, plus extra to taste
2-3 quarts / 8-12 cups / 64.607-96.9oz Sunday Chicken Broth (recipe below)
2 Bay leaves
2 large celery stalks
2lbs / 911.04 grams / 32oz Yukon Gold potatoes, or other waxy type potatoes, peeled, rough diced
1 ½ cups / 344.88 grams / 12.114oz carrots (about 5 small carrots), chopped
3 ½ / 804.72 grams / 28.266oz cups onion (about 4 medium onions) chopped
2 cups / 459.84 grams / 16.152oz fresh corn kernels, cut from the cob (about 4 ears)
3 cups / 689.76 grams / 24.228oz butterbeans, preferably fresh (1 ¼ lbs) or defrosted frozen
1 35oz can / 996.45 grams / 4 cups whole, peeled tomatoes, drained
¼ cup / 57.48 grams / 2.019 oz red wine vinegar
Juice of 2 lemons
Tabasco sauce to taste

Directions-

Recipe 1-

1-In the largest stockpot you have, which is hopefully larger than the 5 qt ones I have, preferably a 10-12 qt or even a Dutch Oven if you’re lucky enough to have one, fry the bacon over medium-high heat until it just starts to crisp. Transfer to a large bowl, and set aside. Reserve most of the bacon fat in your pan, and with the pan on the burner, add in the chiles. Toast the chiles until they just start to smell good, or make your nose tingle, about a minute tops. Remove to bowl with the bacon.

2- Season liberally both sides of the rabbit and chicken pieces with sea salt and pepper. Place the rabbit pieces in the pot and sear off all sides possible. You just want to brown them, not cook them completely. Remove to bowl with bacon and chiles, add more bacon fat if needed, or olive oil, or other oil of your choice, then add in chicken pieces, again, browning all sides nicely. Remember not to crowd your pieces, especially if you have a narrow bottomed pot. Put the chicken in the bowl with the bacon, chiles and rabbit. Set it aside.

3- Add 2 cups of your chicken broth or stock, if you prefer, to the pan and basically deglaze the4 pan, making sure to get all the goodness cooked onto the bottom. The stock will become a nice rich dark color and start smelling good. Bring it up to a boil and let it boil away until reduced by at least half. Add your remaining stock, the bay leaves, celery, potatoes, chicken, rabbit, bacon, chiles and any liquid that may have gathered at the bottom of the bowl they were resting in. Bring the pot back up to a low boil/high simmer, over medium/high heat. Reduce heat to low and cover, remember to stir every 15 minutes, give or take, to thoroughly meld the flavors. Simmer, on low, for approximately 1 ½ hours. Supposedly, the stock may become a yellow tinge with pieces of chicken or rabbit floating up, the celery will be very limp, as will the chiles. Taste the stock, according to the recipe, it “should taste like the best chicken soup you’ve ever had”.

4- With a pair of tongs, remove the chicken and rabbit pieces to a colander over the bowl you used earlier. Be careful, as by this time, the meats will be very tender and may start falling apart. Remove the bay leaf, celery, chiles, bacon and discard.5 After you’ve allowed the meat to cool enough to handle, carefully remove all the meat from the bones, shredding it as you go. Return the meat to the pot, throwing away the bones. Add in your carrots, and stir gently, allowing it to come back to a slow simmer. Simmer gently, uncovered, for at least 25 minutes, or until the carrots have started to soften.

5- Add in your onion, butterbeans, corn and tomatoes. As you add the tomatoes, crush them up, be careful not to pull a me, and squirt juice straight up into the air, requiring cleaning of the entire stove. Simmer for another 30 minutes, stirring every so often until the stew has reduced slightly, and onions, corn and butterbeans are tender. Remove from heat and add in vinegar, lemon juice, stir to blend in well. Season to taste with sea salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce if desired.

6 You can either serve immediately or refrigerate for 24 hours, which makes the flavors meld more and makes the overall stew even better. Serve hot, either on its own, or with a side of corn bread, over steamed white rice, with any braised greens as a side.

Big Meats

Now I know that I could probably find rabbit somewhere in the Bay Area, and most certainly veal of course. However I do not have any specialty meat counters near my home and since it was a wet, windy, cold storm I did not want to venture away from home too far. So I decided on smoked bacon, chicken, and country style pork ribs for my meats.

Onions Onions La La La

Wow! What A TON of onions this recipe calls for! Yikes! I was scared of all those raw onions going in towards the end, so instead I put in 3 of the onions with the celery and left just the one onion towards the end to add with the beans.

The Potato Issue

The potatoes I bought were gold, but no Yukons, so I wasn't sure they would stand up to the long cooking time. I also left those to the end to put in with the beans. They turned out perfect.

Rootn' Tootn' BEANS!

Not being able to find butterbeans in the store I settled for a dry bag of generic "white beans" and followed the prep instructions on the bag before adding them to the stew. Let me tell ya, between the beans and the onions in this stew, there was some pretty entertaining tootn' goin' on in my house that night after dinner!

Other additions

I added a couple of turnips and about a pound of sliced mushrooms. I used Wolfgang Puck's chicken stock and dried Bay Leaves. I left the bacon in the stew for added flavor, and also added a bit more lemon and red wine vinegar since we all here at my house love these two flavors.

Ohhhhh Baby Have I Got The BLUES!

Cooking this stew was a blast! I turned up the Blues on the iPod and even got my man to help shred the chicken and pork while we sang and shook our hips to the likes of Keb' Mo', Bo Diddly, Eric Clapton and other Blues greats.

No More Chicken Soup

The stew turned out great, but we felt we had to add a lot of red wine vinegar and hot sauce to give it some flavor. Not that these were complaints, mind you, anything that combines red wine vinegar, hot sauce, onions and lemons is great in our book!

SO MUCH STEW!

This recipe yelded a HUGE amount of stew! For next day leftovers I took a recomendation from the blogger "Audax Artifex" (http://audaxartifex.blogspot.com/)

and made a cottage pie with smashed roasted yams. I smashed them with heavy whipping cream and added a bit of nutmeg. The sweet to offset the tang of the stew was perfect!

Mucho compliment-o's were had!

In the future I think that instead of making plain old chicken soup, I will make this instead, or a version of it anyway. I'll decrease the number of onions and beans for sure to save us from having to experience the "muchas gassious" again!

The Daring Kitchen March 2010 Challenge

Risotto

I had never made risotto before unless it came out of a box. At first it seemed daunting, but that may have been more a reflection of how overwhelmed I have been feeling about work. I printed out the recipe and after a quick read through and a heavy sigh I put it aside.

Then one night a couple of weeks later it was a very unseasonably warm and spring like. Suddenly the "seasonal affective disorder" type symptoms lifted like a cloud and we honey and I looked at each other and said "Let's grill a STEAK on the smoker!" (Honey's been loving the ole' fashioned meat smoker he got for Christmas). Suddenly my mind stopped - hey, what about RISOTTO with that steak?!? I sifted through piles and found my printed out copy and rushed to the store.

Because near my house is only a basic, basic grocery store I was unable to find proper risotto rice but instead bought a Calrose Brown medium grain rice. In my freezer was some chicken stock from a smoked chicken we had a few weeks ago (I tell ya, honey's gettin into the smokn' thing!), and also some Chanterelle mushrooms that I had partially cooked a couple of months ago when the season started.

When re-reading the directions I thought, hey this doesn't seem too complicated at all! But I underestimated the time and realized too late that the risotto was going to take longer than it would take for the steak to cook. Ever cool honey told me "don't panic" and turned the temp down on the smoker to low cook those steaks while my rice absorbed the stock.

In the end we had a pretty darn good mushroom risotto to go with some pretty darn tasting steaks! Once again, a great team of Kitchy Vicky and Smokn' Scott!

The Daring Kitchen January 2010 Challenge

What a great first challenge for me! I did a chicken satay with peanut sauce. I ended up being so busy over the New Years that I couldn't make it for my gluten free friend so I ended up making it tonight for my husband and his 20 year old son. I was originally going to also do tofu along with the chicken, but these guys "don't do tofu" (harrumph), so I'll save that for another night.
In order to be able to make enough to feed 2 big men for dinner I bought a big package of chicken thighs and then skinned and boned them myself. I reserved half of the chicken for the sticks and cut those into the strips. After I got the chicken strips marinating for the challenge, I made a 2nd batch of the marinade and poured it over the remaining whole thighs. I had to make one substitution when to my horror I realized I had forgotten to buy an onion but luckily I had a couple of scallions. I did not put in the cumin based on previous comments. I marinated for 2.5 hours. The only mishap was when some of the sticks burned on the grill! I doubled the peanut sauce and barely simmered it on very low heat for about an hour. I served the chicken with coconut rice. There were A LOT of complements (yeah!) and the only complaint was that the peanut sauce wasn't "peanuty" enough, well that was from my husband who absolutely loves peanut sauce, his son who's never had peanut sauce before thought it was great and the right balance of flavors. This was great and I'll definitely make it again.

Innocent little recipie....or is it??

Soup, I wanted soup. Warm, bothy, noodly soup with just the right balance of vegetables vs crustaceans. I Googled and found several recipes from which I pulled what I liked out of each one and made it my own - this is my normal M.O. and why I spend so long on my laptop planning weekly dinners. But I can't seem to be satisfied with just simple, slam dunk recipes much as I try.
But I digress....
The recipe that I took the most from is on the blog site Dishing Up Delights: "Rice Noodle Soup with Shrimp" http://dishingupdelights.blogspot.com/2009/02/rice-noodle-soup-with-shrimp.html. And what I noticed on the sidebar of this blog was something I had not noticed before anywhere else "Proud Member of the Daring Kitchen". Curious, I clicked. Now I feel I've found a whole new world, looking around and thinking "WHAT is THIS?" with a wide smile and twinkling eyes. I've been thinking about starting a blog for about a year now, and this was the spark I needed to get it started. I've signed up for the Daring Cooks challenge, started this blog, and started following other blog sites. Where will this all lead?? I hope to new challenges, new recipes, new skills and mostly new fun!
Oh, and that soup I made? I tripled the recipe and added hand picked crab (my hand that is, it's in season now!), large prawns, and dried shitake mushrooms in their own broth. It was unanamously delicious as voted by my hubby and his 20 yr old son. But I have to say it was the sesame oil that made this dish delish! They both used chili infused sesame oil to give their bowls of soup heat, and I used the regular oil. Will make this again!