Love through the stomach... » Onion

Making sausage

Valerie — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:32:36 +0000

Frying up some home-made sausages.

I decided I needed to try to make my own sausages. My wonderful, wonderful butcher has some great sausages, but really, I wanted to give it a try. To add my own flavors, make my own combinations. It was one of those things I felt the need to try at least once.

Add seasoning before grinding, to make it easier to mix all flavors after grinding

Like many of the foods I feel the need to make, this – yet again – proved to be well worth the little bit of extra work.

The sausage casings needs to be washed before use

It doesn’t mean that I stop buy sausages from my butcher. But it does mean that along with the sausages, I might buy some random, cheaper cuts of meat and some pork intestines as well.

Grind the meat at a setting you like. Do you want chunky sausage, or really fine?

Making sausages is fun. It really is. It’s easy too and the finished product is tasty. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Mix and knead the ground meat to make sure all the flavors are well-distributed

Now the pictures you see here and the recipe that follows are a simple pork sausage with some French herbs. But as with most home-made foods, the key is to use your own imagination. To make combinations you think might be tasty. Have fun with it. I sure did!

The sausage stuffer.

There are a few things to take into consideration when making sausages.

You place the entire length of casing over the stuffer, then pull it off as you fill.

First: Make sure that you have a way to get the meat into the casing. A sausage stuffer attachment for a stand mixer is awesome, but any type of funnel should work.

Pull the casing off the stuffer as it's being filled.

Second: Any good butcher makes some of his own sausages. He’ll be able to sell you some casings.

Keep filling the casing into one giant sausage.

Third: Fat equals flavor and moisture. Completely lean sausage will taste terrible, so don’t shy away from fat.

Twist the casing to create individual sausage links.

Pork sausages with french herbs

Author: Valerie

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients

about 350 grams of lean pork
about 150 grams of fatty pork (pork belly)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
a generous amount of herbes de provence
salt and pepper to taste
1 pork intestine (or other type of sausage casing)

Instructions

Cut the pork in 1 inch cubes, dice the onion and cut up the garlic, place all in a bowl with a generous amount of herbes de provence and salt and pepper to taste.
Grind the meat together the herbs in a meat grinder. Knead the ground meat to make sure all seasoning and meats are well combined. Add onions and garlic before or after grinding, depending on whether you like larger pieces of onion in there or not.
Wash the sausage casing and place it on a sausage stuffer. Tie a knot on the end of the casing.
Push the meat mixture down the sausage stuffer while moving the casing along with the meat stuffing to create one long sausage.
Once all the meat is inside the casing, twist the sausage at your preferred length to make individual sausage links, then cut off the excess sausage casing.
Cook the sausage like you would do with a store-bought sausage. You can also freeze them.

Notes

You can vary endlessly with the types of seasoning and filling you use. Just make sure you do use a generous amount of fatty meat, so the sausage doesn’t dry out when you cook it.

A bowl of home-made sausage links.

Onion soup

Valerie — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:18:24 +0000

It looks like I’ve neglected this blog lately. Nothing is less true though. I looked at it at least daily, only to find out that I still couldn’t upload anything. Fortunately last night, as I got cranky about it and was researching other webhosts, Laurens found a way to fix it. Gotta love having your own IT-helpdesk at home!

While I couldn’t post I did cook, and wen’t out to dinner, and did things in the garden. This summer has been exceptionally crappy though, so my usual summer meals have not been all that present, unfortunately.

On one particularly crappy-weahtered late afternoon I decided I wanted soup. And not a nice, cold, summery soup either. I wanted full bodied, warm wintery soup, or at least fall soup if such a thing exists. Not having had onion soup for quite a while I decided to go for that.

Onion soup is one of those marvelous things in life which you can make as easy and as complicated as you want. You can spend hours upon hours caramellizing onions before adding broth or you could throw raw onions in said broth and if you heat it long enough, they’ll soften after all.

My prefferred method is something in between. I don’t fully caramellize the onions, but I do cook them for quite a while until they’re nice and soft and glassy before I add broth. Seasoning whise I can go many ways as well, but this particular time I’d just received that beautiful bag of herbes de provence so that was an obious choice. Depending on my mood I like to add some red or white wine, or some balsamic vinegar. This was a vinegarry day.

The soup cooked for quite a little while and smelled up the entire house. Once dinner time came around I cut up some baguette and grated some cheese and added both atop the soup in my le creuset ramekins. Under the broiler they went, for a couple of minutes, and voila, perfect soup for a cold, dreary ~~winter~~ summer evening.

Onion soup

Recipe Type: soup

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 15 mins

Total time: 1 hour 30 mins

Serves: 4-8

Ingredients

5 medium/large onions
butter and olive oil
herbes de provence
2 liters of beef broth
black pepper
a splash of balsamic vinegar
garlic, salt, bread and cheese optional

Instructions

Peel and half the onions, slice thinly, mince garlic.
Add butter and oil to a large pan, enough to generously cover the bottom. Cook onions until they’re nice and very glassy and some of them have browned a bit. Add the garlic and herbes de provence to taste and cook for another few minutes.
Add the broth all at once and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Add a little splash of balsamic vinegar (taste after little splashes, as it can become too sweet) and add fresh cracked black pepper to taste. If your broth wasn’t salty enough, you can add some salt.
Let the soup simmer for at least 30 minutes, then ladle into oven proof soup bowl or ramekins, put a piece of bread and grated cheese on top and broil until the cheese is melted and a little browned.

Notes

The amount of people this soup serves depends on whether you want it as a starter or a main. As a starter you could beed up to 8 people, as a main, 4 is the limit.

Red risotto

Valerie — Tue, 10 May 2011 19:49:05 +0000

Risotto. I love the stuff. Creamy, lovely, perfectly al dente rice flavored with parmigiano cheese and whatever else you like. Not too heavy, not too many big ingredients – in texture as well as taste.

My favorite risotto has to be the yellow one, Risotto alla Milanese, but then again, that is the classic risotto if ever there was one.

Coming home one day, after work, it was hot and I hadn’t bothered stopping by the grocery store. I had to just make dinner with what was in my cupboards. The arborio rice was screaming at me. Loud I might add.

I thought about it for a second and decided that the pepper I’d picked from my plant the other day would have to go in. I also had red onions. Red onions and red chili pepper as an additive, red risotto.

The risotto was tasty, very tasty. A little on the sharp side (that chili was hotter than I thought it’d be after cooking it in olive oil for a couple of minutes) but still creamy and full of flavor. I used a beef stock from a cube, some dried Italian herbs, I grated some fresh parmigiano and added a little notch of butter before serving. Yummm!

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Red risotto

Cook time: 20 mins

Ingredients

risotto rice (arborio preferred)
beef broth
red onion
red chili pepper (medium heat)
dried Italian herbs
grated parmigiano
a notch of butter
olive oil

Instructions

Finely chop the red onion and the pepper (1/2 onion and 1 small pepper per 2 servings). Drizzle some olive oil in a small pan and cook the onions until they’re glassy, then add the pepper and the rice. Stir regularly.
When the rice is glassy, start adding the broth, a ladle at a time. Once the broth has been absorbed by the rice, you add a next ladle full. After about 3 or 4 ladles full of broth, add Italian herbs to taste. Keep adding broth until the absorbtion starts to slow down. From that moment start tasting.
As soon as the grains of rice are cooked al dente,take the pan off the heat and add a good amount of parmigiano and a notch of butter. Stir and serve immediately.

Notes

Take a good handful of risotto rice per person and adjust all the other amounts to the amount of risotto you’re making. Risotto is served as a (small) first course.

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Easy coq au vin

Valerie — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:28:59 +0000

Despite the fact that in the last 2 days the temperatures here have spiked up and I can’t think of anything but spring or summer dishes, I didn’t want to hold out on my coq au vin. I made this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot about the pictures, so I didn’t write about it.

Coq au vin, to me, is fall or winter food. It’s warm color and taste pulls you through the dreary cold evenings. So if you’re in the same climate as me, you might want to hold out on making this for a while. There are more climates in the world though. And some people don’t have such strong feelings about what kinds of food to eat in what weather.

There are tons of different recipes or methods for making coq au vin. The common denominator is red wine. Oh, and poultry. Officially rooster, but most people just use chicken. After all, it tastes like chicken, right?!

I actually use different ways of preparing coq au vin. Depending on what I have in my fridge I’ll make it differently. In this instance, I had 4 small chicken thighs, which are perfect to make coq au vin.

If you have chicken and a bottle of red wine (one that you are willing to drink as well!) you’re good to go. You’ll probably have stuff around your fridge or pantry to make it great. Here’s this version.

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Coq au vin (recipe for 2)

4 small chicken thighs , loose skin removed

oil, butter and/or lard for browning

bacon bits

onion

garlic

mushrooms

a bay leaf

some juniper berries

pepper and salt (I use pink himalayan salt)

1 to 1 1/2 cup of red wine

chicken broth

flour for dredging and binding

Chop your onion and mince your garlic. Melt enough butter/lard to coat a Dutch oven or other deep, heavy bottomed, lidded pan, drizzle in a little olive oil as well. Start cooking the bacon bits in the pan. Dredge the chicken legs with a little bit of flour and salt.

Fry the onion and garlic until it’s starting to look glassy, but not brown, then add the chicken. Turn frequently until the skin starts to brown a bit.

Add the mushrooms and cook them for a minute or two, they may get a little brown too (I use whole mushrooms, but you can chop them if you prefer) but not too much. Then pour in the red wine to partly cover the chicken. It doesn’t need to be fully covered, but if you’re not at least half way up the chicken, you need more wine. Add some juniper berries, some freshly ground black pepper and a bay leaf to the pan and let it simmer for a couple of minutes until the wine starts to reduce a slight bit. Add chicken broth to barely cover the chicken. You’ll be flipping the chicken once in a while so it’s okay if it’s not fully covered in liquid.

Put the lid on the pan and let it all simmer for about 20 minutes. Turn the chicken over and give it another 10 minutes, then remove the lid so the liquid can thicken a bit more and give it another 10 minutes.

Put some flour into a cup, add some of the cooking liquid and whisk until you get a flour paste. continue adding liquid until the flour mixture becomes a pourable consistency. Pour it into the pan, stir and let it all simmer for about 10 more minutes to bind and thicken the sauce. Note: Don’t start this process with too much flour, you can’t take it out anymore. If you want to thicken the sauce more, just let it simmer longer or repeat the flour thing a second time. Thickening is easy and gives/keeps your flavor. Thinning it our will have you lose a lot of the flavor. That’s sad!

Once the sauce is the desired consistency, serve your coq au vin with some mashed potatoes and green beans, or just in a deep dish with some crusty bread, or over sauerkraut mash. The possibilities are endless, and tasty!

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Lightly smoked chicken

Valerie — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:39:41 +0000

Dutch people have told me that the way I grill is all wrong. There’s no charcoal in my grill, my food is properly cooked and has a nice color. So I must be doing something wrong, right?

The way the Dutch grill, or barbecue, is by lighting charcoal under a rack and roasting several kinds of meat over that. The result is burnt meat with a raw interior. You eat outside with sides of salads and bread and sauces, preferably embellished with ants and sand.

Now that the weather is getting nicer, I’m grilling more than I did. It’s just more comfortable to stand outside now. We still eat inside though, from actual china with silverware (no paper and plastic) as around dinnertime it’s starting to get chilly outside. And because we prefer not to eat ants. It’s strange, I know. But that’s just who we are.

Last weekend I decided to finally smoke something on that big fancy grill of mine. I’d bought some hickory chips and found a suitable aluminum bowl. I soaked the chips and placed them in the bowl, directly over the flames of my grill. I placed a lightly seasoned piece of chicken breast on the other side of the grill, so it wouldn’t cook quickly and close up to the smoke. I closed the lid, kept my eye on the temperature once in a while and just let it go.

Since my grill is in essence a grill and not a full-on smoker, it doesn’t render an overly smokey product. Especially since it took a little longer than I had estimated. So about 10 minutes before I wanted to eat dinner, I moved the chicken closer to the fire. Still not on top, but close enough to get some extra heat and seal the deal.

The result was a lightly smoked chicken breast flavored with a hint of mixed seasoning, and a subtle smokey flavor. It was moist and wonderful. No blackened raw product, but tender moist fully cooked white meat with a slightly tanned exterior.

I served the chicken with a nice fresh spring salad. Tomato, red pepper, red onion, lots of cilantro and some pink sea salt and olive oil scooped over some young leaf lettuce.

We ate at a nice set table. Our food wasn’t hazardous to our health, not raw, nor black, and not embellished with ants and sand. We loved the subtle taste of our chicken and the strong and powerful taste of our fresh spring vegetables.

So please, charbecuers of the world, tell me, what exactly did I do wrong?