Moroccan Lentil Stew with Naan

Last week I pulled what I thought was a ham bone out of my freezer, intending to make ham n' beans with cornbread.  Turns out it was a lamb bone, so I made Moroccan lentil stew and naan (a Middle Eastern flatbread) instead.  I always save bones.  They make the most fantastic stocks, far tastier (and more nutritious) than anything you can get in the store.  Plus, when is the last time you saw canned lamb broth at the super market?  Also, I swear some day I'll get a fancy camera that takes gorgeous pictures.

For the stew, you first need to get your bone simmering for the broth.  I like to put mine on first thing in the morning, so it has most of the day to simmer.  The longer it cooks, the better it tastes, plus, you'll get more vitamins and minerals out of it.  Just plop your bone into your pot (I'm using my cast iron dutch over here) and cover it with water.  Add some salt, and you can add a bay leaf and some beef boullion if you'd like, but they're not absolutely necessary.  Lamb is a strong flavor so the lamb bone can stand pretty well on its own.  You can also add in a splash of vinegar (I use raw apple cider vinegar) to help leech more minerals out of the bone.  Bring it to a boil, skim off the foam, turn the heat down, cover, and simmer. 

Isn't it beautiful?  And the chef gets to pick the meat off the bone in my house.

For the rest of the stew you'll need-

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2-3 diced carrots
Some fresh grated ginger (about a one inch cube) or 1/2 tsp of ground
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can chickpeas, drained
1 cup of lentils, rinsed and sorted (red lentils are fabulous, but green work just fine, that's what I used here)
1 tsp garam masala (and indian spice mixture, if you don't have any, just add a little extra of the other spices, and add in 1/2 tsp of cinnamon)
1/2 tsp ground cayenne pepper
1 1/2 tsp cardamom
1/2 tsp ground cumin
salt and pepper to taste.

Remove the bone.  If you'd like, you can saute the veggies in some olive oil before adding them to the pot, but you don't have to.  I just dump it all in, bring to a boil, lower the heat, cover, and simmer until the veggies are tender.  I love lentils.  Besides tasting amazing and being good for you, they don't need a lengthy soaking process.  Just sort, rinse, and add to the pot!

Completely delicious.  Comfort food is comfort food, whether it's American or Indian, and what's more filling and comforting than a big bowl of stew and bread?

Now for the naan.  Like so many foods, that means many things to many different people.  Naan is traditionally baked, but the recipe I use is grilled/pan fried. 

1 packet yeast (or 2 1/4 tsp if you're using jarred yeast, as I do)
1tbsp sugar
1 cup hot water
3 tbsp milk
1 egg, beaten
2 tsps salt
4 1/2 cups of flour
optional- 2 cloves of minced garlic

Add the yeast and sugar to the hot water.  Let it stand for 10 minutes (make sure you put it in a largish container, you're proofing it and it should double in size).  In a large bowl, combine the four, milk, egg, salt.  Add in the yeast and water mixture and the garlic if you want to add it, and knead until it's nice and smooth (again, I use my KitchenAid mixer with the kneading attachment- loooooove it!)  Form it into a ball, drizzle with olive oil (about a tbsp) and roll your yeast ball around in the oil.  Cover the bowl and put it in a warm, draft free place. I like to turn my oven on low for just a few minutes and then turn it off before putting the dough in, gives it a nice, warm environment.  After the  dough has doubled (about an hour) punch it down to deflate, knead it a bit, and then form it in to balls about the size of an egg.  Put them on a pan, cover and let them rise again.

Let them rise for about half an hour, then start rolling them out on a floured surface.  You want them nice and thin so they get the distinctive bubbles naan usually has.

An indoor griddle or grill would be best for these, but I managed to squeeze them into my cast-iron skillet.  Cook them a few minutes on each side.  Brush with some melted butter or ghee (clarified butter often used in Indian cooking).  Delicious.

 If you manage to keep your family from devouring it, wrap them in aluminum foil to keep them warm and flexible until you're ready to serve them.  If it's going to be awhile, you might want to also pop them into a slightly warm oven.

Biscuits and Gravy

Growing up, my father sometimes made biscuits and gravy.  He used canned biscuits, which I personally think are kind of gross.  Once you've had homemade, it's just hard to choke them down.  He would also make the gravy by frying the sausage and then coating it in flour.  This is simple, but I've found it yields very inconsistent gravy.  I prefer to use a roux.  Roux sounds fancy, but it's very simple- just a mixture of equal parts fat (usually butter) and flour, used to thicken sauces.  But if you want to impress people, you can add in that it's the base of the three "mother sauces" used in French cooking.

Let's start with the biscuits.

Buttermilk Biscuits

You'll need-
2 cups flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup fat (I prefer lard or butter, but you can use shortening)
3/4 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 450F.  Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.  Cut in the fat- a pastry cutter is the easiest way, but if you don't have one, just mash it up with a potato masher and the rub the rest in with your fingers.  Do this until it looks like this-

Stir in the milk.  The dough will be soft and sticky, but it should still be workable.  Knead on a lightly floured surface (or with a kneading attachment on your KitchenAid mixer like I do).  Roll it out until it's about 1/2 inch thick.

Cut in to rounds with either a 2 in round cutter, or the bottom of a glass.  If you want the sides a bit crusty, put them an inch apart on the baking sheet; if you want them soft, have them touching.  Bake for 10-12 minutes.

I have 4 biscuit crazed children, so I usually double the recipe.  Now for the good stuff- the sausage gravy.  Mmmm.

Start by frying a pound of sausage in a cast iron skillet or dutch oven.

When it's cooked through, remove it from the pan and set aside.  There's hardly any fat, so don't worry about draining it.  Now to make the fancy roux.  Over medium heat, melt 1/4 cup of butter or lard and then whisk in 1/4 cup of flour.  It should look like this-

Next, you're going to SLOWLY whisk in 2 cups of milk.  Do it slow so it has a nice, smooth consistency.  Once it's all whisked it, keep stirring it over medium heat until it's nice and thick.  Don't add in any salt yet; the sausage is salty, so if you try to seasoning the gravy now, it's very easy to over salt it.  Once you have the gravy the consistency you want it, add the sausage back in and then salt and pepper to taste.  Serve it over the biscuits and it's pretty much heaven.

Perfect Pot Roast and Gravy

Like many people, I used to do pot roast in a slow cooker.  Unfortunately, it always yielded rather mediocre results.  Determined to find a better way, I stumbled upon this recipe.  They roast is wonderful, but their idea of "gravy" and mine don't jive, so I change it up at the end.  Follow this recipe exactly.  Don't add veggies to the roast.  Don't add salt to it.  Don't change a darn thing!  Trust me.

Preheat your oven to 350.  In a cast iron dutch oven, heat 1 tbsp of olive oil.  When it's nice and hot, sear your 3-4 pound chuck roast for 4 minutes on each side.  Don't touch it.  Don't poke at it, don't wiggle it around.  Just put it in for 4 minutes, flip it, and do another 4 minutes.

While it's searing, slice one medium onion and chop 2 cloves of garlic.  When the meat is done searing, remove it, and cook the onions and garlic in the juices for a few minutes.  Turn off the burner.  Add in about a tsp of salt, some fresh ground pepper, and a bay leaf.  Put the seared roast on top and place another bay leaf on top of the roast, cover it with the lid, and bake it in the oven for 30 minutes.  Turn the oven down to 300 and cook for another hour to hour and a half, depending on how done you want it.  When it's done, remove the roast and let it rest on a cutting board for 10-15 minutes.  DO NOT CUT INTO IT.  Unless you like dry meat.  If you don't let the juices redistribute before slicing in to, all the love juice will seep out and your roast will suck.  On to the gravy.

You'll be left with lovely onions and garlic swimming in some beautiful beef broth.  Put the dutch oven on a burner over medium heat.  Whisk in 1/4 cup of flour until it's all incorporated.  Add in a bit of milk.  How much just depends on how thick you like your gravy.  I like mine fairly thick, so I just use a few tablespoons.  Season with salt and pepper and keep whisking it over medium heat until it's the consistency you want.  You can add some Worcestershire if you like.  Sometimes I do.

Slice up the meat.  Mmmmm, meat.

Serve with buttermilk mashed potatoes and drown it in gravy.  Don't worry fret about the lack of veggies on the plate; I had a salad with this, I swear.

Chicken and dumplings

Nothing quite says down home cooking like chicken and dumplings, does it?  Of course, depending on who you ask and where you're at geographically, "chicken and dumplings" can mean a lot of things.  Round, pillowy dumplings?  Or flat noodle-like dumplings?  Are there veggies and cream?  Or just plain broth?  There are as many chicken and dumpling recipes as there are grandmas in the world, and whatever you grew up on is what you love best.  My own grandmother made chicken and noodles, which are my fondest memory of holidays at her house.  Sadly, she passed away before I was old enough to have the sense to get the recipe from her, and I've never been able to find a recipe that replicates what she made.  I do know that she'd make up her dough and roll it out into paper-thin sheets, which she would cut into perfect noodles that she would let air dry on newspaper overnight (waking once at night to flip the noodles over).  I remember the chicken and noodles were very yellow and slightly thick, just right for pouring over her mashed potatoes and gravy.   If I could wish for any food, that would be it!

As for me, chicken and dumplings in my house is broth, chicken, and thick, flat dumplings.  That's it!  I do sometimes make the round dumplings, but I save those for chicken stew.

I cook the chicken and make the broth at the same time (fancy, right?)

To a stock pot, add your whole chicken, and onion, a couple stalks of celery, a carrot or two (I'm really precise with my measurements, huh?), salt, pepper, and a bay leave.  Add enough water to cover it all.  Bring it to a boil, skim off the yucky chicken foam that forms on the top, and cover it and let it simmer.  The longer, the better, as far as I'm concerned!  I put mine on in the morning and let it simmer most of the day.

After it's cooked through, remove the chicken to a strainer to drain and cool off.  Remove the veggies and bay leaf from the broth and then run a small hand strainer through the broth if you want to remove any little bits.  I leave the broth simmering so no gross germy things grow while my chicken is cool off.  Once the chicken is cool enough to work with, remove the skin and pull of the meat.  You can either shred or chop the meat, it's up to you.  One thing I will say is SAVE THE BONES.  You can save them to make bone broth to can or freeze for other meals.  It's worth it.  If you're not going to do it within a few days, put the bones in a freezer bag and do it later.  Dump the chicken in and bring the broth back up to a gentle simmer.

On to the dumplings.  This also doubles as a noodle recipe, so if you're feeling up to it, feel free to do that.  You'll need-

2-4 eggs (I usually use 4, but I've also used 2 or 3 when I've gotten to this point only to realize I'm nearly out of eggs, and they come out just fine)
2+ tbsp of water (start with 2 tbsp, and add more water if needed)
3 cups of flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda (you can omit the banking soda and salt if you're using self-rising flour)

Mix up the flour, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl with a whisk (or sift it if you'd like, I'm just lazy).  Make a little well in the center of the flour.  In a separate bowl, whisk up the eggs and 2 tbsp water.  Add them to the flour and start mixing (again, I'm lazy, so I usually use my Kitchen Aid stand mixer).  This is a stiff dough, but you'll need to add enough water to make it workable and to keep it from gunking up your hands.  Once the consistency is right, you lay it out on a floured surface (if you stuck with a small kitchen, and thus, teeny tiny workspace like me, divide the dough in half and do it in two batches).  Roll it out until it's as thin as you can get it (I usually give up around 1/2 inch) and then use a pizza cutter to cut it into diamonds.  Like this-

Drop them into your gently simmering broth that's now full of chicken, then put a lid on it and walk away for 20 minutes.  Don't peek.  Steam helps get you nice soft dumplings instead of falling apart or yielding horrid little cement things.  You'll be rewarded with this-

Salt and pepper as you like and dig in.

How I Learned to Cook

When I got married at the ripe age of 18, I had not a clue how to cook.  If it wasn't pre-made, or didn't have 3 simple steps to follow on the back of a cardboard box ("Just add hamburger!") I was hopelessly lost.  It's not surprising; although both of my grandmother's were excellent cooks, my mother was a miserable failure when it came to the kitchen.  There were a few things she could make well, like meat loaf (of all things), but most of what we ate was pre-made, highly processed, or from a can.  I didn't realize until I was an adult that I actually did like things like peaches and asparagus, because I had only ever had them canned.  (If you've never had canned asparagus, just trust me- it's absolutely disgusting).

Lucky for me, my new sister-in-law bought me a copy of Betty Crocker's New Cookbook for Christmas the first or second year we were married.  I love this cook book and always recommend it to fledgling cooks, because it isn't just recipes.  It does teach you the basics of cooking; how to chop, dice, and julienne, how to avoid giving your family food poisoning through cross-contamination, basic cooking charts for all varieties of meats and and veggies, and so on. I used my old edition until it was literally falling apart, and after several dropped hints, received the 10th edition a couple of Christmases ago from my mother.  Thanks, mom!

Although my foray into cooking originally began out of sheer necessity- a young family starting out simply doesn't have the money to eat all processed and pre-prepared foods- it really did turn into a passion over time.  I enjoy cooking, and moreover, I enjoy feeding people!  My heart is in the down home, midwest cooking that my grandmothers prepared when I was a kid.  Buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy, pot roasts, chicken and dumplings, bread pudding; while I might make the occasional coq au vin, nothing says dinner to me like meat and carbs! 

I also cook with real food in mind- I almost always use homemade chicken broths that are full of vitamins and minerals and gelatin, real butter, lard from local pastured hogs, farm eggs from chickens who nap in the sunshine and scratch in the dirt; these things matter! They're more nutritious, they taste better, and they connect you to the local community in ways processed junk like margarine never will.

I hope this gives you a taste of what this blog will be! Cheers!