Experience with Oxtails

Oxtails are one of those cuts that really need a lot of patience. The meat is very tough because it gets a lot of use (watch cattle - they swish their tails all the time) and there is tons of connective tissue holding it all together. That means you will be cooking them for a long, long time.

I tried cooking them in my slow cooker, which I guess would work if you cooked them long enough. I tried about 8 hours. Definitely NOT long enough. Next time, I'll try overnight and through the day.

Why bother with oxtails? They taste so very good, especially when given the Chinese treatment. I adore star anise which is kind of odd since I hate licorice. Some things are unknowable. :-)

Chinese Braised Oxtails

Start with about 1 ½ pounds of oxtails. This is enough to feed 6 if you don't expect to get a lot of meat. The oxtails give up their collagen, making for a very rich broth. So high in collagen, in fact, that the sauce gels when it is chilled. This is good stuff and makes are a delicious sauce.

Place the oxtails in a dutch oven. Add 5 whole star anise pods, 1 4" stick of cinnamon, about a dozen whole black peppercorns, 3 Tablespoons dark or black soy sauce (these are thicker and have some molasses or sugar added), and 2 Tablespoons of sugar. Stir in enough water to nearly cover the oxtails. Heat over medium heat until it starts to boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer, covering partially. Cook for a very long time, like 4 hours until tender. You can't really overcook them. Check the water level and add additional water if most of it cooks off.

You can serve the oxtails whole but I like to remove most of the meat so that it becomes part of the sauce. This is a rather time-consuming process, however. First, take all the oxtails out of the sauce and allow them to cool on a sheet pan until you can handle them.  Pick as much of the meat off the bones as you can and add it back to the sauce. While the oxtails are cooling, strain out the star anise, peppercorns, and cinnamon, then crank up the heat on the sauce. You can reduce it as much as you like, until is quite syrupy (again, have patience). When it starts to get thick, reduce the heat so that it doesn't burn. Adjust the salt after you have reduced it. Add the bones back too because if you love oxtails, you'll want to suck all the goodness off of them. And the sauce adds lots of extra goodness.

The meat and sauce only improve if you chill it all and then reheat it. Great served over noodles.

"Rice with Things"

I'm a big fan of Mark Bittman. I have 6 of his cookbooks, all solid. I'm sure part of what I like about him is his unabashedly New York attitude (I'm a native New Yorker). He's not a purist when it comes to food, another thing I appreciate. And, he's willing to break with tradition even if the purists are out there, just waiting to tut-tut about him monkeying with a classic. A classic like Paella.

Paella is the traditional rice, chicken and seafood dish of Valencia. My daughter enjoyed true Paella last summer when she visited Valencia and said it was very good. Lucky kid. I have never had the true Paella so I don't know what I'm missing. But, I do know that chicken and seafood cooked with short grain rice in rich broth is good stuff.

I live over 1000 miles from the closest ocean/sea. The odds of me recreating an authentic Paella are pretty slim anyway. Not only is the sea very far away, but cooking short grain rice just right this way at 5400 feet is tricky. You need to tweak the liquid amount and time in Bittman's (or any other) Paella recipe. If you are making this at altitude, plan to add at least ½-1 cup more liquid and you'll need to cook it for an extra 10 minutes, I found. If you are adding seafood, which can easily overcook, don't add it until 20 minutes in. To get the crust without burning (yes, mine burned just a bit, but still quite edible), you will need to reduce the heat because you will be cooking it longer. Bittman's recipe says "if you smell it burning..." I didn't smell it burning but I can guarantee it will burn if you cook it on medium-high for 30 minutes!

You can find the recipe on the New York Times site along with an helpful article by Bittman. If you want to see how impassioned people can get about him tinkering with a classic, check out the comments!

I could have used chicken broth, but I had a bunch of shrimp shells in the freezer, just asking to be made into stock. Makes a great shellfish stock that is perfect for rice with things. Here's the recipe, from Bobby Flay's  Boy Meets Grill. It's very easy and you can stick it in the freezer, ready for the next time you want to be transported to Valencia. :-)

Shrimp Stock
(4 to 5 cups)

Slow Cooker Lamb Shanks with Figs and Shallots

Lamb shanks served with sweet potato pancakes, mostly because they were leftover from the night before

It's still slow cooker weather here in Colorado. We got a foot of snow on Tuesday and next Tuesday is shaping up to be more of the same. Time to break out the lamb shanks! Regular readers will remember my post on Scotch Broth and my cache of lamb in the freezer. This is a richly flavored dish that is so, so easy, thanks to the slow cooker.

Slow Cooker Lamb Shanks with Figs and Shallots
(serves 4)

Oatmeal Rye Irish Soda Bread with Herbs

Pulled this recipe from my local paper. Not sure where they got it from since there is no attribution on the recipe. Wherever it came from: kudos! It's delicious and for a great bonus, it's 100% whole grain. I made it for St. Patty's Day to go with the corned beef and cabbage, but this is so good, you want to make it year round. I know I will.

Oatmeal Rye Irish Soda Bread with Fresh Herbs and Walnuts
(serves 12)

Passover is Almost Here

I know the vast majority of you out there are not Jewish and therefore don't care about Passover as a holiday. But, believe me, there is some really good food served on Passover. I'm going to try to get recipes out for a number of my all-time favorite Passover recipes real soon. For now, you'll have to be satisfied with my menu and a link to my Southwestern Matzoh Ball Soup which I posted a couple of Passover's ago.

Passover Dinner 2013

• Spinach-Matzoh Pie, a recipe from my mother-in-law. It's a Sephardic dish.
• Southwestern Matzoh Ball Soup, recipe originally from rec.food.cooking.
• Barry Wine's Stringed Beef Brisket served with a Spicy Roasted Tomato Sauce, from Joan Nathan's The Jewish Holiday Kitchen)
• Matzah "Salad,"  The Jewish Holiday Kitchen
• Moroccan Coconut-Sabra Torte, The Jewish Holiday Kitchen served with a spiced blood orange sorbet from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book by Bruce Weinstein

That's what I'm making. Some of my guests are bringing side dishes. I still have to pick out a charoset recipe. I've made a few and I'm still searching for the perfect one.

Fresh Bread

It's hard to beat bread baked at home. After fancy cakes, home baked bread and rolls usually get the most oooh's and ahh's from my guests. People don't bake bread at home anymore (my friend John, the uber-baker and vineyard owner,  and Jenny of La Poeme, excepted) so if you go to the trouble of baking your own bread, your guests really appreciate it.

For years, I had a bread machine and I regularly made bread at home. The motor croaked a couple of years ago and I have gotten out of the habit of making bread at home. I'm trying to fix that. I still take the lazy way out by using my big KitchenAid mixer. If you want to make it by hand, all power to ya!

The loaf pictured above is a recipe from Pie in the Sky by Susan Purdy, a high altitude baking book, which I mentioned in my recent post of cream cheese brownies. Though it has adjustments for higher altitudes, all the way up to 10,000 ft (if you happen to live in Silverton, CO), this is not just for high-altitude bakers because all the recipes are adjusted for sea level and up. So, if you live in NJ, it's still a great book. I heartily recommend it.

Grassy Creak Multi-grain Bread for 5000 ft above sea level
(makes one large boule)

Scotch Broth

Not the prettiest soup, but it does stick to your ribs

I have a whole lamb in my freezer. No, not the whole carcass, but a whole lot of cuts of lamb. It was about 50 lbs. of cut lamb with some cuts that you don't usually find in the supermarket or even your local butcher. Things like lamb breast and neck slices. There isn't a lot of meat on neck slices but they are full of rich flavor. Time to make some soup!

There isn't a lot of meat in this. This is how those thrifty Scots stretched a little bit of meat. As I said, I used neck slices, but a meaty lamb bone from a leg of lamb roast would work great too. Just make sure there is some meat left on it to throw into the soup. It's full of vegetables and it gets its heft from a bit of barley and some yellow split peas. Great for a wet, chilly day. They have a lot of those in Scotland, I'm told.

Scotch Broth
(serves 8-10)