Cooking Simple

Cooking simple…honest food…layering flavors…those are the words that I live by when I cook. I like to take good, flavorful ingredients, and try to create something using as few ingredients as possible. I think that’s why I like French cooking so much…tuck into a well-executed Boef Daube someday, and take in the exquisite flavors; then realize that they are created with just a few ingredients. Red wine, bouquet garni, some excellent bacon, and a relatively inexpensive beef roast. Cook it all correctly, serve over some hot egg noodles, and you have Provence in a bowl. Add some olives as a garnish if you will, but the basic flavor is complex and delectable. Sop up the fantastic juices with a hunk of crusty French baguette, and a sip of good red wine…heaven!

I’ve never really understood the chefs who try to create unbelievably complex food, using as many weird and unobtainable (to the home cook) ingredients as possible. I have a cookbook that features recipes by noted chefs, and there is one recipe for a smoked salmon napoleon that is fussy in the extreme. I’ll bet it tastes pretty good, but where the heck am I going to find pickled papaya, or the time to make it? Or spend the time and money just to make the herbal oils and herbal juices that are required? The dish has at least 40 ingredients and just about as many steps…this seems like total overkill to me, or maybe “showing off” (and growing up in Minnesota, bragging or showing off was either a federal crime or heinous sin, maybe both!). I’m sure a professional chef has all sorts of low-paid minions that can assist putting this thing together, but my admiration goes to the chef who takes easily obtained ingredients and creates magic with them. Like the French….

Oh sure, sometimes I like to get a little nutty and combine a lot of ingredients, like when I am experimenting with creating the perfect cassoulet (wait…that’s French, too, isn’t it? We seem to have a trend here…). But by and large, I like to start with a few ingredients, lovingly sauté, brown, or braise them, and slowly coax as much flavor as I can out of a cheap cut of meat, an onion or two, some garlic, and maybe some tomatoes. I am a big believer in slow food…you can take almost anything, and as long as you don’t try and cook it in 10 minutes, you can slowly extract the maximum flavor from each ingredient. It may take three hours, but it’s almost always worth it.

Take tonight for example….my wife and I have started a weekend tradition. She goes to the store and gets whatever suits her fancy…a red pepper here, a pork roast there, some onions over here. In our version of “Iron Chef,” I have to take what she has brought home, and using whatever we have on hand in the pantry and the refrigerator, cook something edible (and hopefully delicious). So today, this is what I did…I grabbed a boneless pork roast from the fridge, and sliced off the large hunk of fat covering the bottom. Knowing that pork fat is the best fat in the world, I threw the fat into my beloved La Crueset dutch oven (thanks Mom for this awesome pot!!) and slowly rendered it. I cut the pork into 1” cubes, and browned it in the pork fat, with salt and ground pepper (being careful to brown in batches, and not steam the pork into yucky greyness…one of the best cooking tips I’ve ever come across…never let your meat touch if you’re trying to brown it). After the pork was nicely browned and removed, I had a great fond built up on the bottom of my pot. I added 3 diced onions, 2 diced peppers, and 5 minced garlic cloves. I slowly cooked those for about 20 minutes, deglazed the pot with juices coming out of the onions and peppers, and continued to slowly saute until the fond had built back up and I had nice caramelized onions and soft peppers. I put the pork cubes back in, and dumped in 3 cans of petite diced tomatoes and a can of chicken broth (yes, I know I should be making my own chicken stock, but I’m just too damn lazy).

Anyway, that is simmering away as we speak. After a couple of hours of simmering, I’m going to remove the pork and shred it in my Cuisinart with the plastic blade, and then combine the shredded pork with the remaining tomato sauce, some cooked farfalle pasta, a bunch of Parmesan cheese, and bake it in the oven until the Parmesan is nicely browned. I’ve also got some home-made bread rising…I figured if I could invent a pork something-or-other, I could also try and make some bread on the fly. So I took 4 cups of King Arthur bread flour, 1.5 teaspoons of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and a packet of rapid-rise yeast, and combined it in my Cuisinart. I put my water on hot, put about 2 tablespoons (I say “about” ‘cause I just eye-balled it) of extra-virgin olive oil (Colavita…the best deal in olive oil I can find) into a Pyrex measuring cup, and then added 1.75 cups of hot water to the oil. I started my Cuisinart, and slowly poured in the hot water, until I got a ball to form, and the dough appeared like it might come apart if I kept adding liquid (I had about a ¼ cup of liquid left that I didn’t add to the dough). Anyway, I let that knead for about 30 seconds, stopped the machine, then took the dough, put it onto the flour-dusted counter, and covered it with a bowl. In a little bit, I’m going to heat my baking stone to 500 degrees for 30 minutes, shape my dough into two baguette-sized loaves, and bake them on the hot stone.

Hopefully, it will all work out in the end. I’ll post tomorrow on the final results.