Zia Mia's ragù (1)

Another week under a blanket of light snow. Yesterday was so cold that I was thinking of preparing pasta al ragù. No diluted tomato or vegetable sauce, but a very concentrated affair of meat. A dish mirroring my present state of mind: no thin indifferent measures, but solid passionate strength.

I have posted one recipe before here: from someone who used to prepare this for me. Before she became a foodblogger, Oleandri commented with two alternative recipes of ragù by one of my aunts, recipes which she happened to know about. I give full prominence to these versions here.

Zia Mia's ragù (1)

olive oil
1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
2-3 peperoncini (optional; I used 2)
2 bay leaf
nutmeg
1-2 carrots
1 green celery stalk
pancetta or bacon (I used 2 slices of pancetta)
150 g minced meat, half pork, half beef
My own addition: 300 g steak meat, freshly ground at home
1 big can of tomatoes
vegetable stock
2 cm (2/3 inch) of water
salt, pepper

Fry pancetta, celery, onion, peperoncini, and carrots with bay leaves in olive oil for a few minutes.

Add the rest of the meat, and fry over medium heat until dry, until the liquid has evaporated.

Add the can of tomatoes, stock, water, and season with nutmeg, salt and pepper.

Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and let simmer at least 30 minutes. One and a half hour gives a perfect concentrated result.

Notes:
Because you add peperoncini early on, this is spicy.
I used 1 cup of white wine instead of stock.
Be careful with salt - this was salty to me, perhaps on account of the pancetta. Add salt only at the very end.

Serve with intensity.

Beef stock, I ought to fire you!

Actually, it's Bienstock, I ought to fire you, a line by Sweet Sue in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Nothing more than a silly association to hide that this is a month in which cooking is desperately vying for my prime concern.

Bouillon soup: the beef broth with vegetables all-in-one and eaten mostly on weekends, with different vegetables, and a lean piece of beef cooked along, nick-named bouilli (cooked): beef from a shine bone, but used boneless. The type of meat that even after having cooked so long looks somewhat grey, but is amazingly tasty and tender. Great to eat cold with mustard. Here's one from memory (a rarity in these pages). A lot of hassle to prepare, having to cut so many veggies, but the first spoonful of Taste makes this worth your while.

Vegetable Beef Soup ("Bouillon")

Serves many

1 piece of soup meat (beef), "bouilli"
1 entire green celery
2-3 leek
2 small turnips
1 kohlrabi
1 onion
1-2 garlic cloves
(optional and no item in my youth: 1 sweet potato)
2 bay leaves
a few cloves
1 tablespoon thyme
pepper, salt

Brown the pieces of beef briefly in the oven or fry them briefly in a pan, or skip this step.

Put the beef in a big cooking pot filled with water, and let this come to a boil. Remove white foam.

Cut all the veggies in desires shapes, and add them with the herbs to the soup.

Let this soup simmer for 1,5-2 hrs.

Remove the bay leaf.

Now here was my trick the next day: I had this soup with slices of avocado and a dollop of home-made tomato sauce, and a bit of celery leaf on top. Yummy!

A Festive Meal

Dessert's no sweat for my sister, especially since four little helpers have been baking and helping themselves to servings during the preparations for our festive meal on Christmas Eve (for a photo essay, see next post). This is what we had:

Champagne;
My Broccoli-Pakshoi soup;
My brother-in-law's cold fish terrine with mushroom, in a chives & joghurt dressing;
Stuffed turkey with small potatoes, green beans and snow peas, Belgian endives, pears with cranberry compote (see previous post);
My sister's opulent home-made dessert plate with among others vanilla cream filled puff pastries.

A Favorite: Radicchio

I can't quite call it an old favorite, this radicchio, because I never ever had or saw it as a child, although it is akin to our Belgian endive. But it is an old favorite in these pages, and I've made a whole rice risotto with radicchio last Sunday which two impromptu guests enjoyed.

I have two pre-Xmas dinners lined up in the coming weeks where I'll don the apron and serve dinner to friends, one for four, the other for seven people. Contrary to previous years, I haven't had time to plan ahead and prepare, let alone try out. I'm breezily happy I have time to shop for produce. Stick to simplicity, G. advised.

For the hors d'oeuvres or appetizers, I may as well resort to favorites that I can prepare in advance: why not a risotto like this one. Back in 2006, I followed the recipe at Lucullian Delights, Ilva's famous blog from rural Tuscany that got me started with blogging and which I still follow. My old take can be found here.

Coq au vin

I'm back!

My mother who hardly cooks and has never liked it, had one culinary dish up her sleeve that stands out in the olden days: coq au vin. Totally uncustomarily, she spent hours on this delicacy. Meanwhile my dad took us kids out, and we'd return to the great smells of the Sunday meal. While my mom is still trying to extract this recipe from her files, I've already found a recipe in De keuken van ons moeder - The kitchen by our mom cookbook, by an 80-year old mom called Mieke Noels.

Coq au vin

Serves 6

100 g smoked bacon
100 g salted bacon in strips
fresh silver onions
butter
olive oil
3 kg chicken breasts and legs (with carcass and skin)
black pepper and salt
nut meg
1/2 glass of cognac
about 3/4 liter red wine
6 dl chicken stock
3 bay leaves
3 sprigs of thyme
corn starch (dissolved in water)
250 small white mushrooms
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon sirop de Liège (regional specialty, a dark brown jelly from apples and pears, in color and sweetness comparable to molasses)

Note: the book has a tip from Mieke about this syrup.

Fry the bacon in a large pan with the onions, butter and olive oil. Remove from pan, and put the chicken in to brown the pieces on all sides. Season with pepper, salt, nutmeg.

Add the cognac and flambé the chicken. Wait until the flame has been extinguished, and cool with wine and chicken stock until the chicken is almost immersed. Add the bacon and the onions, bay leaf and thyme. Let this simmer for about an hour on low heat, covered. The surface is only allowed to barely ripple. The chicken is ready when the meat drops from the carcass. Bind with the dissolved corn starch.

Fry the mushrooms in garlic with parsley in butter, and add to the coq au vin. Finish the coq au vin with sirop de Liège. Adjust the seasoning.

Serve with salad, baguette, fresh Belgian fries or croquettes and if possible baked apple.

Note: I skipped the flambéing part. In lieu of the much coveted small silver onions, I had to resort to using regular onion.