Some time ago, a couple years ago in fact, I posted a family recipe for a dish I grew up with called Patychky, or Meat Sticks. Over the past couple weeks, there have been quite a number of searches for this recipe, so I thought I would feature it again.
To my vegetarian and vegan friends...best just to not look...
Part 1
Part 2
Dinner at the Anchovy's
It's been a while since I've had a sour dough monster growing around the house, but yesterday Spicecat gave me some of hers, so I hatched a plan...make sour dough bread, make a little pot roast. Enjoy hot pot roast sandwiches on warm just out of the oven sour dough.
Spicecat also passed on the suggestion that I bake the bread in a dutch oven, something I've never done before. The idea is that you preheat the dutch oven then drop in the dough, and keep it covered for the first 20 minutes of baking. The dutch oven maintains steam and that makes for really excellent crust. Most recipes that suggest this are of the "no knead' variety, which suggest a very wet dough and rising times of 18+ hours. I can be a patient man, but I didn't want to wait 18+ hours for my sandwiches. So I'll fess up; I kneaded my dough.
The result was a fantastic loaf with a crunchy crust and nice open crumb. And did I mention tasty?
For the pot roast, I recalled this morning I had half a cross-rib roast in the freezer, so I took it out early to thaw in the fridge. I browned the sides, and deglazed the pan with beer. I added a chopped up onion and a carrot, and some salt and pepper and a splash of Worchestershire sauce, then poured in the rest of the beer and a splash of stock and let it simmer for 3.5 hours.
I enjoyed dinner with a cold beer.
Dinner at the Anchovy's
Yesterday was both my birthday and Tuffy's dad's birthday, so tonight we had the family over to celebrate. Tuffy wanted me to make a turkey dinner, and since the snow didn't materialize, I decided to cook it on the bbq. We served it with roast veggies and roast potatoes and a barley/tofu dish Tuffy concocted.
You need:
...5 inches of the best kielbassa you can find (I'm betting it's amazing with Portuguese sausage too!)
...1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (you can make part of that whole wheat if you like)
...1 tablespoon baking powder
...2 tablespoons sugar
...1/2 teaspoon sea salt
...1 - 1 1/4 cup grated cheddar
...1/3 cup grated parmigiano
...1 cup milk
...1 egg beaten
...1/4 cup olive oil
...hot chile flakes or cayenne powder if you like it hot
...an oven preheated to 400f
...a loaf pan, greased (you can make these as muffins as well if you like)
Mix wet ingredients in a bowl.
Mix dry ingredients + cheddar + sausage in another bowl.
Combine the wet and dry ingredients and stir it all around.
Add mixture to loaf pan (or muffin tins)
Add parmigiano on top
Bake for 20-28 minutes for loaf or 15-20 minutes for muffins.
To start with, baking this will fill your house with the most wonderful smells.
When it's ready, remove from loaf pan and cool on a rack. You won't be able to let it fully cool, because you will feel compelled to try some while it's warm.
Tuffy P. made a loaf tonight!
Try making these as muffins to serve with soup on a cold and dreary November day.
From time to time we make a big pot of veggie chilli. It goes like this:
Add a splash of good olive oil to a heavy bottom pot, put the heat on medium, and add onions, shallots and garlic. Leeks are good in it too if you like. Let it all cook together while you chop up some other stuff.
Inspect the fridge for veggies. Each batch is different depending on what I find in the fridge. Let's see, I have some cauliflour here, some big old carrots, a zucchini, a red pepper, oh and look, I have a celery root. Chop it up the way you like it.
Add the carrots, then add in a generous amount of ancho chile powder, some salt and pepper, some cayenne or dried red chiles (go as insanely hot as you like but remember the heat increases on the second day quite a bit), and a little cumin powder or seeds. The cumin adds a little sumpin-sumpin to the chilli that makes it just so.
Add a tin of diced tomatoes and a tin of red kidney beans. This is about the only dish I cook which includes any canned veggies, and I think they work just fine. If Tuffy P isn't looking, you can add a splash of beer. Then mix it all up and judge the thickness of the chilli. I usually add maybe three cups of water. Add in fresh herbs like thyme and basil or even fresh oragano. Be generous with these.
Let it all simmer together for a while with the lid on. Stir now and then. No hurry. In fact, this chilli is even better second day.
When I decide it's ready, I sometimes add some corn right at the end.
I like it with fresh French bread and a cold beer.
When I was a kid, mom's meatloaf was my favourite comfort food. It is delicious, but not exactly low fat. I have her recipe, but it isn't something I make very often these days. This weekend I decided to try to make it on the bbq.
Here's how I went about it...
1. Get the charcoal going on the bbq (I have no idea what this is like on a gas grill because I don't use one). You need to have a bbq with a cover to make this recipe.
2. In a bowl, add some ground beef and an equal amount of ground pork. Add your favourite bbq rub (I have a constantly changing batch of bbq in the cupboard at all times). Add a handful of breadcrumbs. Add two eggs.
3. Mix it all together.
4. Form the loaf (or loaves....I made an extra one for the 87 yr old fellow who lives next door to me...I thought he'd enjoy it for dinner and for sandwiches next day) in aluminum foil pans. I made one in a doubled up tin foil pie plate and the other one, for my neighbour, in a rectangular aluminum foil loaf pan.
5. Cut some slices of bacon in half and lay them on top of the loaves.
6. Put the pans in the bbq using indirect heat. I use a green egg bbq which makes this easy, but on any charcoal bbq, you can bank the charcoal up on one side and put the pans on the other, and get good results.
7. Cover the bbq, bring the heat up to about 375f and go work in the garden for a while.
8. After half an hour, open a cold beer, take a break from the garden, and have a look at the loaves. Enjoy the beer, then get back to work in the garden.
9. After an hour and a quarter, brush your favourite bbq sauce on top. You now have time to quickly go back to the kitchen to make up a nice salad.
10. Feel the love.
It seems to me that many cultures have a so-called peasant food that involves rice and whatever is in the fridge, made in one pot. There is paella, pelau, rizotto, fried rice, and my favourite, jambalaya, which I made for dinner today.
history of jambalaya
There are a number of ways to go about making jambalaya. Here's how I learned to do it.
Start with a heavy pot or dutch oven. I add some olive oil, then saute up "the trinity", which is chopped up bell pepper, onions and celery. Tonight, I chopped in a couple fresh cayenne chiles. Add salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, cayenne, and thyme. Add some sausage. I use andouille if I can get it, or if not, any smoked sausage is great. Add long-grained rice and stir, coating the rice with oil. Add some stock, about 2 1/2 times more broth than rice. If you're using a dutch oven or cast iron pot, you can cover it and cook in the oven or else cook covered on the stovetop. In either case, cook slowly until the rice is close to done. Add a handful of shrimp, and when the shrimp and the rice are done, you're good to go. Alternatively, you can cook covered at a low heat on the stove.
Cajun jambalaya doesn't use tomatoes. Creole jambalaya does. Either way, it's delicious. You can make it as spicy as you like. When I visited Cajun country last year, I was surprised that the food wasn't nearly as spicy as I had expected.
I'd better apologize for this one in advance...
and of course, Andy Kaufman's version
...and finally, CJ Chenier
With our recent move, I've missed one or two installments of Dinner at the Anchovy's. Today's edition is inspired by my old friend East Texas Red. While helping us move, he noticed that the people who owned this house before us left behind a gas grill. Knowing that we use charcoal, he suggested that now we have a choice - to cook with gas or charcoal.
Today's topic: grilling and BBQ
I grill and BBQ using charcoal. I don't have anything against gas grills exactly. They're convenient, and, um, they're convenient. OK I admit it. I'm a charcoal snob. I cook with propane when I'm camping using a Coleman stove. I'm sure gas grills do an admirable job though, and I just haven't seen the light.
Most people I know use the words grill and bbq interchangeably. I guess up here in Toronto we don't have the same kind of slow-cooking bbq tradition we see all over the southern US. To me, bbq means hot-smoking meat at a low temperature for a long time. I use a Big Green Egg, which works well for both smoking and grilling. The egg is derived from an ancient Japanese clay cooker called a "kamado". It's made from ceramics and it looks like an egg. I like it because it has an excellent two damper system that enables me to maintain an even cooking temperature at any temperature. When I'm done, I shut off the dampers and the fire goes out, preserving the remaining charcoal for next time.
For BBQ, I like short ribs, brisket, pulled pork, and back ribs. This is an all day affair. I start in the morning, and slow-cook all day, occasionally mopping the food with a mixture of stuff that usually involves beer. There really are no short-cuts.
I grill more often then I bbq, mostly because it takes a lot less time. With the egg, I grill with the lid closed, and it does an excellent job on various meats, chicken, fish and veggies. The other day, we tossed a few cobs of sweet corn on the grill. Very nice. Sometimes I add a chunk of hickory or other hardwood to the charcoal for a smokier flavour. When we had our crab-apple trees trimmed in the backyard a few days ago, I saved quite a number of limbs to dry and use for the bbq. Apple is a very nice wood for this.
I have a container in the kitchen containing an ever-changing rub. This contains ancho chiles, smoked paprika, salt, pepper, ground garlic, a little cumin, a little sugar and anything else that strikes my fancy. As the container empties, I refill. Each batch is a little different from the last. I use the rub on meats prior to either grilling or bbq. Sometimes I mix some of the rub with apple juice or beer to make a mop, which I use during cooking.
From time to time, we'll bake bread or pizza outdoors on the grill. I use indirect heat and I lay the pizza or bread on a pizza stone, and bake at about 400f. I think you can do this on any grill, as long as you can create indirect heat. You don't want to burn the bottom of your bread while the rest of the loaf remains uncooked.
Do you do a lot of cooking outdoors? How do you go about it. Gas or charcoal? (I know a lot of people swear by gas, and I don't mind you setting me straight). What's your favourite food to cook outdoors? Do you have a rub or mop recipe you'd like to share?
Last week's topic was grilled cheese. Today we move on to pizza. How many of you make pizza at home? I don't mean throwing some topping on some kind of shell unit you bought in the freezer section of the grocery store. I'm always surprised to discover how few people I know don't make their own pizza dough, or do any bread-making at all. It isn't difficult and it doesn't take all that much time, and it's full of love (sorry folks, there is no love in a bread machine).
Now it's confession time. I'm not very good at throwing pizza dough. It's true. I roll out my pizza dough. There, I've said it. Here's some championship dough-throwers:
I like to add some corn meal to my dough. I add about one cup corn meal for every four cups of bread flour. I say about because I don't measure anything when I make pizza. I prefer bread flour to all-purpose. For the dough, I use water, yeast, a little sugar, a little salt, some olive oil and flour and that's it. I don't use a mixer; I enjoy doing it by hand.
I'm not going to go through the steps here. There are a billion descriptions on line. When I knead dough, I feel like I'm in touch with bakers throughout the centuries. It's a similar feeling I get when I paint. I feel like I'm there with the first painters, in a cave, suffering from indigestion from eating too much raw mammoth.
Pizza likes: a crunch to the crust; crushed red chiles; leeks; plenty of cheese; really good mushrooms
Pizza dislikes: a soggy crust; too much of everything; sauce that's too sweet
What about pizza related items like the panzarotto and the calzone? Do they even really qualify as pizza? There are pizza joints in Toronto that deep-fry giant panzarotti, filled with cheese and slices of ham. Yes, deep-fry. It is a little known fact that humans over the age of consent can't actually digest these items. Take it from me, and don't even try.
What's your favourite pizza style? Thin crust? Thick crust? Deep-dish Chicago style?
Our pal Stagg has taken us a couple times to a fantastic deep-dish joint on the north side of Chicago. Hey Stagg, what's that place called? I remember you telling us that the fellow who owned it died not so long ago. Is it still happening, and is the place still filled with all those lamps? Another time, we had deep dish at Checkers, and ordered so much more than we could eat that we passed out left-overs to every panhandler who approached us on the street. Funny the things you remember. Elvis Stojko was on TV in the pub, winning some big figure-skating event. I remember Tuffy saying, "He's from Richmond Hill"
My final question: if you have leftover pizza for breakfast, is it better cold or heated up in a toaster oven?
Yes, it's our new Monday evening feature here at Mister Anchovy's, Dinner at the Anchovy's. Contrary to popular belief, every day is not gourmet day at Anchovy World Headquarters. Today, we explore that comfort food of comfort foods, the grilled cheese sandwich.
I prefer mine on French stick because I like the texture as it toasts up. For the same reason, I'd never make a grilled cheese using multi-grain bread or any bread with little floaty-crunchies in it. No way. I prefer real cheese to processed cheese food, although I realize that there are some grilled cheese afficianados out there who say the cheese has to be factory cheese, more like cheeze. Some people might even prefer Velveeta. Sometimes I enjoy mixing two or even three cheeses, but I like my main event cheese to be medium cheddar.
I like to add, on top of the cheese, thin slices of fresh from the garden tomatoes, sprinkled with black pepper and some crushed red chiles. Purists in the crowd may scorn me for this I know, but home-grown tomatoes rock. I know some people like to add meat products to their grilled cheese, but then really becomes a grilled sandwich with cheese rather than a grilled cheese proper, don't you think?
I only butter the outside of the bread, never the inside. My tool of choice for the grilling is a George Forman grill. I bet when former boxing great Mr. Forman was in his lab developing his lean mean grilling machine, he was thinking of burgers or chicken breasts or tuna steaks. I bet he didn't even realize he was making the perfect grilled cheese machine. I think it's perfect because it makes the nice lines in the bread and the pressure of the top on the sandwich pushes the grill into the bread and helps melt the cheese just the way I like it.
I don't think a grilled cheese requires a side of anything. After all, it's perfect on it's own. That said, I have been known to toss a handful of olives (spicy green or crinkly black) to my plate. And for a beverage? I like ginger beer with my grilled cheese sandwich. Perfect.
Are there any grilled cheese freaks out there today? How do you make yours?
I plan to do a regular food post Monday evenings. If you're interested in participating, send a recipe or a food-related story, video, pictures, whatever you like. If I like it, I'll post it with a link back to your blog (if you're a blogger).
