Louisiana style red beans and rice

Living (currently) as a southern boy transplanted to the midwest, one thing that I see constantly done wrong here is red beans and rice. Most people around here have no clue what real, Louisiana style red beans and rice is like. When I first moved to Saint Louis almost five years ago I was really stoked about all the vegetarian and vegan options there are for eating out. (Many of the local veggies here bitch, which I marvel at; Saint Louis is likely the most underrated vegan friendly city in the country -- and I've been to the supposed vegan meccas of Portland and San Francisco.) So imagine my horror when I order "red beans and rice"as a vegan selection on a local bar's menu and get basically whole kidney beans with a thin soupy broth served over rice.

First of all red beans and rice are NOT made with kidney beans. Understand that. True red beans and rice use the small red beans. Furthermore, the finished product is not simply whole beans in a broth, but creamy and thick, and not soupy at all.

Ingredients:

• One pound (regular 16 oz. package) of small red beans
• 4 stalks celery, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 head of garlic (yes, a whole head), minced
• 4 decent sized sprigs rosemary, finely chopped
• 5 bayleaves
• 1/2 tablespoon red pepper flakes
• One regular (32 oz.) carton of vegetable broth
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Salt

The first thing you do is soak your beans overnight in plenty of water. The alternative to this is the quick soak method. The quick soak method is basically boiling the ever living shit out of dry beans for a few minutes, then taking them off the heat and letting them sit for an hour. It works, but I recommend an overnight soak, as the beans end up a better, more evenly cooked finished product.

After your beans are soaked the next step is to cook them. Throw out the soaking water and replace it with until the beans are well covered with water. Boil them for an hour with your bayleaves. After they are done drain them set them to the side.

Saute your onions, bell pepper, and celery on high heat until the onions start to caramelize. Turn your heat down to medium and add the garlic and the red pepper flakes. (If you think you are bad ass you can add a whole tablespoon, but any more than that and I think the heat starts to take away from the flavor of the red beans.) Stir this for a few minutes making sure it doesn't burn, then add half of your veggie broth.

Bring everything up to a vigorous boil and add half of your rosemary. Let it boil for a three or so minutes, then add your drained, cooked red beans (with the bayleaves) and the rest of your veggie broth. Bring it up to a boil then turn the heat down a little to medium-high. You want a good simmer going on here -- you don't want a full boil but you also don't want a light simmer either. These need to cook about an hour and a half. You need to be sure to stir regularly to make sure the beans don't stick to the bottom and burn. You will also need to add some water a couple of times (a cup or so at a time) as it cooks down. About 45 minutes or so into this process add the rest of the rosemary. Also, take a little taste and add salt accordingly.

Another thing that I like to do toward the end, but is optional, is to take a potato masher and mash the beans up a bit. This gets them a little creamier, which I like.

Serve over rice. Choose your own beans to rice ratio. You can add some hot sauce if you want. Also, this is one of those dishes that's better the next day, so don't eat it all up immediately.

Side dish: roasted cauliflower

I'm a true food nerd. Often times I have a recipe in my head that I just have to try out. These ideas for dished just pop into my head form time to time. A couple of months ago I had dinner with some friends who made a simple and delicious roasted cauliflower dish that was styled on Indian cuisine. They just took various spices and coated cauliflower florets with and roasted it. Cauliflower already has a pretty good natural taste to it in my opinion, and the spice combination did a decent job of complimenting this natural flavor.

Ever since then, and after tweaking and "perfecting"* my marinade, I've been thinking of how to take the great interaction that exists between chili powder and brown sugar and add it to other dishes. For some reasons combining those two ingredients seems to give rise to a new flavor that is better than the sum of their parts. So I decided that instead of using Indian spices I would experiment and alter my marinade to work as a spice mixture with which to roast cauliflower.

So here's what I did -- and it was good.

Ingredients:

• One head of cauliflower
• 1/2 cup of soy sauce
• 1/8 cup white vinegar
• 2.5 tablespoons of chili powder
• 3 tablespoons of brown sugar

Chop the head of cauliflower into florets and set it aside. Add all the other ingredients in a mixing bowl and stir well until well mixed. Add the florets a few at a time and stir into the spice mixture, making sure each piece is coated, after which you will add it to a roasting pan or casserole dish. Keep doing this until all the cauliflower is covered. Put it in preheated oven at 425F uncovered for 10 minutes. Then take it out and stir it, and put it back in for another 10 minutes.

That should do it. If you don't think there is enough of the spice mixture (some cauliflower heads are bigger than others) then add more of each ingredient. This dish goes really well with my meatloaf. I had it the other night.

Guacamole -- K.I.S.S.

I had a bit of a get-together yesterday. I'm not allowed to drink alone any more, so I have to invite people over when I want to get drunk. And while I was at it I figured I should set things on fire in my backyard have a barbecue. Anyway, this isn't another grilling post. I just got a request for the recipe for my guacamole, which by my own admission is pretty damn good. Avocados were on sale at Whole Paycheck for a buck each, so I grabbed seven and decided to make a nice big bowl. I'm going to keep this recipe smaller though.

The trick to making good guacamole is, in my opinion, keeping it pretty simple. You don't need to add a lot of ingredients. This goes along with my general opinion on cooking and food prep in general, which is that you want to use as few ingredients as possible when making anything. This is a constant topic of debate between me and my friend Anna, which is fine. She's a sweet girl and completely entitled to her wrong-ass opinion.

Ingredients:

• 2 avocados
• 1/2 medium red onion, diced
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 6 grape tomatoes, quartered
• 1 small lime wedge
• 1/4 teaspoon of salt

Mix this up however you see fit. If your avocados are not that ripe then you can put the lime juice and the tomatoes in first, as the acidity will break the avocados down a bit. Also, this is one of the things I like to just mix using my (usually washed) hands; you can squish it around pretty good and mix it fairly easily.

You can of course, as with pretty much anything else I put on this blog, adjust this as you see fit. If you have regular or roma or cherry tomatoes those will work. You can add a little cayenne pepper if you want a kick, or cilantro if you want to make it disgusting. (Sorry, I know this sounds insane to some people, but I do not like cilantro -- I think it tastes like soap.)

Setting shit on fire, portabellas, and the ultimate marinade

The weather is starting to get somewhat warm, so that means going outside and setting shit on fire -- a practice otherwise frowned upon in our society -- is perfectly acceptable under the auspices of "grilling." Now we all know that grilling is really just an excuse to satiate our barbaric pyromaniac tendencies. I don't care what those silly hippie ass raw foodists say; it's natural baby! The human race has been burning the ever living shit out anything and everything that's even halfway edible for thousands of years now, and I do mean anything and everything.

Yes, this is me. Yes, I was drunk. Yes, this is really fucking stupid.

Well since we are playing with fire, and doing so under the auspices of cooking, I figure we might as well want to do a halfway decent job while we're at it. There are several awesome things to cook on the grill. Hippie dogs are good; my favorite variety is the Yves'. Corn in the husk is great, though I suggest you soak them in water first (and add a little Tony Chachere's seasoning while eating). There are other obvious things like seitan, burgers, various veggies, etc. My favorite thing to grill though by far are portabella mushrooms.

I'm talking about those big boys they sell that look like small umbrellas. If you are gonna buy these then I suggest that you buy them in bulk. You can get really good deals at farmer's markets. You will be amazed how cheaply you can get some.

The great thing about portabellas is that they are great for marinating and grilling. They are very porous and taste amazing after being grilled. I developed a marinade especially for grilling portabellas that I'm pretty damn proud of, and can be used for all kinds of things, grilling or not. Anyway, here are the ingredients:

• One cup soy sauce
• One cup veggie broth
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 5 tablespoons brown sugar
• 3-4 tablespoons chili powder
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

Add this all together and that's it. I suggest you allow at least and hour to marinate the mushrooms in a plastic bag or whatever you want to use; I like to use large plastic bags as I can freeze and reused the marinade. This stuff also goes well with squash (marinated), seitan (brushed on while on the grill), and even brussel sprouts (though you need to marinate for a while), and will certainly work with lots of stuff I have not even thought of yet.

Good luck and enjoy this excuse to go outside and burn things!

"Meat"loaf, thoughts, excuses, and whatnot

I told myself when I created this blog that I would never let it go this long without an entry. And of course I did. Oh well. I've been dealing with a lot of family and other personal stuff lately. My redneck grandmother just passed away, and I have been doing what I can for my redneck family to give them all the white trash support they needed.

Anyway, I thought I should post a recipe for meatless meatloaf and give a few thoughts on making it. Faux meatloaf is something I have been trying to perfect for a while now. I could always manage to make it taste pretty good, but I could never really get the consistency right. It was always too crumbly, falling apart whenever I tried to cut it with my fork. I got a couple of more ideas to try out after having a really great fake meatloaf at a vegetarian restaurant here in Saint Louis. It tasted great, and didn't fall apart when eating it. I asked our server how it was made and he said with just a handful of ingredients.

I think the problem with my meatloaf before was that I was simply putting too many ingredients in it. I was basically trying to copy real meatloaf recipes, and they would add lots of stuff like ketchup or barbecue sauce, which would loosen the consistency, which was easily made up for by adding eggs. Egg substitute, in my experience, simply doesn't work all that well. So first I simply stopped adding anything to the mixture that would make the final product too loose.

The other end of the consistency issue is to find something better to bind it, and I think I found a pretty good solution to this. Instead of adding regular bread crumbs I used crumbs made from a bagel in a food processor. Bagels are sticky enough that the crumbs do an excellent job of holding the mixture together.

Finally, one thing i was doing with my "meat"loaf was simply making it too high. You don't want to loaf to be more than two inches thick. This makes it much easier to cut.

Okay here is a recipe that should make you a pretty good vegan meatloaf:

Ingredients:

• 16 oz of fake meat (I used Match, but Gimmie Lean, Boca Crumbles or even TVP should work fine)
• Half a medium onion, diced
• Several (4 or 5) cloves of garlic, minced
• Bagel crumbs from one bagel (made in a blender or food processor)
• One tablespoon (several sprigs) of finely clopped fresh rosemary
• Olive oil
• Liquid smoke
• Ketchup or barbecue sauce (for the glaze)

Process:

Saute the onions in a pan, adding the garlic after they start to caramelize. Set aside and mix together all the ingredients except for the ketchup for the glaze. Form into two elongated loaves, about six inches long, two inches wide, and one and a half or so high. Form a shallow channel down the middle going the length of each loaf. Add your glaze, spreading generously on the top and on the sides of the loaves.

Cover with foil and bake in a greased making dish or cast iron skillet at 425F for an hour. Take out and remove the foil and add more ketchup glaze, and put back in the oven for another 15 minutes and that's it.

I really like the flavor of rosemary in this dish. I'm a fan of rosemary anyway (it's probably my favorite herb), but it goes especially good in this dish. This "meat"loaf goes very well with salad, mashed potatoes, rice, or pretty much anything nice and starchy.

Barbecue sauce from scratch

I love a good barbecue sauce. I like a good traditional Kansas City style sauce -- that's a sweet tomato based sauce that most commercial sauces are based on. I've made my own years ago, and it turned out okay, but not good enough that i would want to try to recreate it. Plus I didn't totally even remember what I did, so I started over, and created a recipe of my own based on bits and pieces of informations from various recipes.

One thing I noticed is that most recipes called for ketchup. Now I love ketchup, and I an almost religious admirer of Heinz ketchup, but I wanted a more made from scratch thing here. I take pride in my cooking, and making barbecue sauce that's little more than suped-up ketchup isn't really my style.

So, based on all this I'm going to give the following recipe. This will make a a sweet and tomatoey sauce.

Ingredients:

• One large can of crushed tomatoes
• Half of a small red onion, finely chopped
• Five to seven cloves of garlic, finely minced
• White vinegar -- 1/3 cup
• Liquid smoke -- 1/2 teaspoon (a cap full)
• Soy sauce -- 1/4 cup
• Brown sugar -- 1/3 cup
• Regular yellow mustard -- 1 teaspoon
• Crushed red pepper -- 1 teaspoon for a mild sauce (up to a couple of tablespoons if you are bad ass)
• Arrowroot powder -- make a slurry of several tablespoons.

Process:

Heat up some olive oil in a sauce pan on medium-high heat, and add the onions. Cook a couple of minutes until translucent, then put your heat down to medium and ass the red pepper flakes and the garlic.

After a couple of minutes (watch your garlic -- don't let it burn) add the vinegar, soy sauce, and the liquid smoke and turn the heat back up to med-high. When it gets boiling pour in the tomatoes, brown sugar, and mustard.

Stir all this together well and let it simmer (turn back down to med-low) for about 40 minutes, stirring every few minutes so it doesn't stick.

After it's cooked for about 40 minutes stir in your arrowroot slurry a bit at a time. It should thicken as it heats up. Allow it to simmer another minute or two -- it should be noticeably thicker.

At this point you have a pretty decent sauce, but it will be a bit chunky. Ladle the sauce out of the pan into a blender, and blend the mixture well. Let cool, and refrigerate.

Eggplant red Thai curry

So I decided that I was going to try to make red curry for the first time ever last night. I think the heartiness and bad-for-you high calorie and fat content of this dish makes it sufficiently redneck enough. Now for some reason I have always had a bit of trouble making Asian foods more than any other, and my downstairs smoke detector always goes off whenever I try. (I think my smoke detector is racist.)

Often when I decide I’m going to make something for the first time I will browse around other recipes online and try to formulate my own recipe. From there I can usually create a good recipe that I think will work best. That’s what I did here, lurking around various sites, making mental and sometimes actual notes on what to do, until finally I developed what seemed like a process that would work. And it did – quite well actually.

Most red curry recipes out there are for chicken curry, though a lot is for tofu. While I like the tofu curries that I have had when I go out to eat (St. Louis has really good Thai restaurants by the way), I don’t particularly like cooking with tofu at home. I don’t hate it or anything, but it’s a bit of a process to get it drained and marinated and all (which I do by freezing then thawing and squeezing). I decided that I was going to use eggplant, as eggplant is pretty hearty, and will often work well in lieu of meat. I ended up going to the cool little ethnic food market here in town (Jay’s International) to get the necessary ingredients. They had these cool little cans of red curry paste which were perfect.

Anyway, the curry turned out really well, enough to where I feel pretty confident giving this recipe out for mass consumption:

Ingredients:

• Two Chinese eggplants (or one regular eggplant), diced into largish chunks
• One medium-small red onion, sliced
• One green bell pepper, sliced
• Five cloves of garlic, minced
• 8 oz or so of sliced button mushrooms
• Several tablespoons of red curry paste (exact amount may vary)
• A light oil (I used Canola)
• One (normal sized) can of light coconut milk
• Three tablespoons of soy sauce

Note: I don’t like dicing the onions and peppers for this dish like I would a soup or a chili. For a curry I think it’s good to leave the pieces a little longer. Most pieces were around an inch long.

Cooking:

Get a wok (or a large pan of some sort) and heat up several tablespoons of oil (enough oil to coat the bottom well) using medium-high heat. Throw in the eggplant, pepper and onions at the same time, and stir fry until the eggplant starts to get saturated and the onions begin to get translucent. Then turn the heat down to medium and add the garlic and the mushrooms, and keep stir frying until the mushrooms are saturated.

Then add your curry paste. I should note here that not all curry pastes are created equal, so you might need to use more of some types than of others. Most of the time you will use between three and six tablespoons, but if you like it hotter and more flavorful then feel free to go crazy. Stir in your curry paste well, then add the coconut milk and the soy sauce.

Turn the heat down to medium-low and let it simmer for a few minutes. Also, you might want to take a taste to see if it needs anything (most likely either curry paste or soy sauce). Serve this over your favorite rice (I like white jasmine rice) and eat. Yum. This was pretty good.