Dignify Our Feast

To the left we see yet more Pieter Bruegel, Peasant Wedding. Which is lovely and cheerful and the people look like they were having nearly as much fun as my family was last night. The title is drawn from one of my favorite poems by Ben Johnson, "Inviting a Friend to Supper." I love feeding people. I love entertaining. Its heartfelt invitation hits me where I live, every single time. Which is funny as it was probably tossed off as a courtly trifle.

I'm home, which is to say that when I was doing dishes at eleven this morning the sun had just barely topped the southern mountains. (At this latitude in the winter, the sun rises in the south and sets in the south, and any other directional formulation is wishful thinking.) Last night we celebrated my brother's birthday. A delayed feast, he waited until I could be home to share it (or possibly cook it).

The menu featured a bone-in beef rib roast (if I could remember the proper name for it, I would tell you), mashed sweet potatoes (which have been discussed here ere now), Yorkshire pudding, gravy, and a big green salad to balance the enormity of our indulgences.

I have some philosophical opinions on salad-- namely a good salad should include a balance of sweet and savory, with some protein in it to give heft. I am inexplicably anti-creamy salad dressings. Last night's salad was butter crunch lettuce, apple, pecans, onions, and extra sharp cheddar with a port-pear vinaigrette. (One nice thing about cooking in my parents kitchen instead of my own: a better class of provender. A second nice thing: my parents have a dishwasher.)

I went for simplicity in the beef. I allowed it to sit out for a couple of hours, warming up to something resembling room temperature. I rubbed the seven pound monster with a bit of butter, and sprinkled it with an herb mixture -- the Tongass Blend from Summit Spice and Tea. I preheated to oven as high as it would go -- in this case 500 degrees. I placed the carcass on a rack in the smallest practicable roast pan (in order to minimize burning the drippings beyond use), and popped it in to the oven. I immediately turned the temp down to 350 and allowed it to cook unmolested until it achieved an internal temp of 150. (Some members of the family, including the birthday boy, inexplicably prefer their beef cooked past medium rare.) This took somewhere in the 2 and a half hour neighborhood.

On retrieving the gigantic hunk of beef from the oven, I made Yorkshire pudding, which I had never made before. I strongly suspect that I shall make it again. AND I shall share my recipe with you. While the pudding was baking I made a small vat of beef gravy.

Yorkshire Pudding

1 heaping cup flour. (All purpose is probably the canonical choice, but I used a finely milled whole grain product that they sell at Costco, which if I recall correctly somewhere contains the words "super grain". It functions more or less or exactly like all purpose white flour, but has a richer nuttier taste and is theoretically better for us. I am clutching at any straws of nutritional respectability in the meal I am describing.)

1/4 tsp. salt

1 cup milk

3 eggs

1/4 cup rendered beef fat (or other liquid fat, preferably with a high smoke point)

Combine the flour, salt, milk, and eggs in a blender or food processor, or a large bowl. Beat until smooth. Stick in the fridge for an hour to chill.

Preheat the oven to 350. (Assuming that you aren't cooking a roast of unusual size in it)

Pour your liquid fat of choice into a 9 in pie plate, or some other suitable receptacle. Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes. It needs to be really hot. Some recipes say smoking. I did not let it go that long on this outing. Next time...

Carefully pour the batter into the hot grease. It may spatter. Bake for 15-25 minutes,until puffed majestically and golden brown. Use it to sop up gravy. There should be lashings of gravy.

I suspect that in days ahead, I may just make up the pudding and some gravy (using stock) and skip the roast entirely.

Back in the Kitchen, Pt. 2

More Pieter Bruegel for you. "The Fall of Icarus" immortalized by W.H. Auden in "Musee des Beaux Arts" (in case an oil painting needed to be any more immortal). I only include it because it is probably my favorite of Bruegel's paintings. I love the skewed perspective which warps the landscape, and the distinctly un-Flemish mountains shining in the distance. It's an exercise in artifice which is grounded by the ploughman stolidly ignoring the mythological boy disappearing into the sea.
Onward to food. Beans and rice with cheese and tortillas are comfort food for me (I am told by other friends that this is not a universal condition, but for me it works), this casserole is a particularly brainless way to cook them. Especially when one is so tired that she can't remember that she needs sour cream before she puts the casserole in the oven.

I am in fact presenting the version of Bean and Rice Casserole that I made tonight. This is not it's cheapest incarnation, but for tonight it was very nice. The quantity made will make four or five meals for me, especially if I round things out with salad or fruit. If you feed other people it won't go as far, but you'll have more fun.

Bean and Rice Casserole

Ingredients

1 15.5 oz can of S&W Santa Fe Recipe Beans
3/4 cup water or chicken broth
3 boneless skinless chicken thighs chopped up into bite size chunks (mine came straight out of my freezer -- frozen chicken thighs are very useful things to have on hand, and you can use them in the recipe still frozen but it does add about half an hour to the cooking time).
1 large tomato, or a double handful of grape tomatoes, chopped up
eight or so corn tortillas chopped up
A bunch of cheese, (a generous half cup or more, grated or chopped) your choice on what kind (I used cheddar and pepper jack this time)
1/2 cup brown rice

Procedure

Preheat oven to 350.

In a heavy 2.5 qt casserole dish with a lid (I use a souffle dish, actually) combine almost everything. Reserve a third or so of the cheese. Use the water or chicken stock to rinse the last bit of sauce out of the bean can. Stir everything together.

Bake covered at 350 for 45 minutes. Uncover and top with the remaining cheese, and bake uncovered for another fifteen minutes or until the cheese is appealingly toasty, and the rice and chicken are cooked. Allow to stand for at least five minutes, definitely until it is no longer boiling.

Serve with sour cream, salsa, or whatever else you would ordinarily stick in a burrito. It keeps well too.

Back in the Kitchen, Pt. 1

I waved good bye to my parents this afternoon, and then went back to banging my head on a design problem which had nothing to do with food for several hours. I won, sort of. Mostly I wondered what in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's psyche caused him to choose to impale fish on trees in a picture allegorically representing anger. (I know enough about Bruegel to know that there is a reason, and also that possibly no one knows what it is.)

Coming home in the dark, I noticed that Christmas decorations are already going up on the main drag near my apartment. Worn out and missing my family, I needed to spend an hour sitting in my comfy chair catching up on blogs and being passive. Finally my body quietly let me know that I was going to be hungry someday. (It was a really good weekend, I think I mentioned that previously, but it bears repeating. So good that I am utterly wrung out.)

I had planned on posting a Bean and Rice casserole recipe this week, so that's what I decided to make for dinner. It isn't the fastest recipe in my repertoire, but it is simple. It's based on one of the perennial favorites at the PLU cafeteria: Chili Frito casserole. Working against me: I am really tired. Strange things happen to my cooking when I'm tired. I forget ingredients. My sense of proportion gets unreliable. Just now I realized that I had forgotten a key ingredient, and when I added the chopped up corn tortillas discovered that my cooking time calculations were off by probably half an hour. See what I mean?

At this point I think I will wait until my dinner comes out of the oven for me to decide whether I will give you all the version I normally make, or the half asleep version which lacks sour cream, but makes up for the lack in tomato-ousity. Stand by for developments -- the smells are very promising.