Red beans with bbq pork, corn tortilla chips

Earlier two pork ribs were baked in homemade bbq sauce, the second one was eaten as leftover and its remnant trimmings and its bone with bits adhered to it were cooked with pressure along with onion and dry beans, a handful of currants and honey. The pork bone and fat trimmings would usually be discarded but this time they flavored a pile of beans excellently. When I realize how much I've wasted over decades it makes me ashamed. 

The tortillas are made with masa harina shaped into golfball size balls and smashed with tortilla press. They're fried a few seconds both sides in a dry pan and then shallow fried in vegetable oil. Both beans and tortillas are very good. 

Win.

White beans with plantain, mango salsa, hamburger

Plantains are uncooperative with removing their peel. The peel tends to blend right into its starchy banana center. Parboiling for a few minutes, say two minutes, breaks down the tissue that connects peel to center and the peel comes right off.

Basil because I had to nip some off as it's bolting. It could have been cilantro or mint. Those two other things are also growing outside.

Mango salsa is chopping up favorite things and tossing them together. This was chilled and it did not damage the tomato.

* mango

* English cucumber supposedly no seeds but the center removed anyway. No watery center allowed.

* tomato, same thing, no gushy insides allowed. All that wet stuff scooped out and discarded.

* green onion in place of regular white onion.

* serrano chile diced finely

* lime squeezed all over with a magnificent stainless steel lime squisher, and boy, does it ever squish limes. No more plastic breaking in your hands. And when you squish as much lime as we do, well, the thing becomes an investment. 

This is the best lunch ever. No hamburger bun taking up room in your tummy, just the good stuff and the elements complement each other quite well. 

"That will be $25.00 please."

"Ha! A bargain, Sir, and my compliments to the chef." 

Chile rellenos, Spanish rice, white beans with Swiss chard

I never saw a guest clear their plate so thoroughly and so quickly. This is unusual. I notice that Joe does not eat that much. 

"I can see you didn't like that so I won't bother offering more."  

Joe laughed.  

"Well, you didn't lick your plate." 

The only thing on Joe's plate were smears and the stem of a poblano chile, and I am only halfway done with mine.

I must record, Joe kept remarking how fantastic this meal is. He told me about top restaurants in Phoenix, how he bought two sets of two tickets for well-known restaurants, how they all have great views but not one of them, not one, has food good as this. Joe is a bullshitter, yes, an unusually successful salesman by trade, yes, but it did sound perfect, and he did clear his plate surprisingly. And I feel the same way.  

The combination on the plate is tremendous each element so homely so humble, the result so tremendously satisfying. The usual beans would be black beans but here I am using my own white beans with Swiss chard that has a pork chop in it and smoke included with a touch of sweet/sour. The beans are a meal by themselves and in combination with anything tastes even better. I had a bowl of these beans with a large spoonful of sour cream and I was in heaven. 

The sour cream also moderates the lingering heat of the red chile sauce. 

It is a small chicken breast and that is sliced laterally for two undersized chicken scallopini. The scallopini are fried in butter with salt/pepper, keeping everything simple. 

The poblanos are roasted to deep flavor, left to sweat it off by themselves in a bowl covered with a plate and then peeled. And the chicken is cooked. Cheese is sliced. Once the elements are arranged it goes very quickly so the plates must be ready with the reheated rice and reheated beans with Swiss chard, right there at the pan where these rellanos are fried.

Rellanos are strange things to bread up and fry.

Because there is no being tidy about it. Three bowls. 1) Seasoned flour 2) scrambled eggs 3) panko bread crumbs

That is all usual, the unusual part is handling these conical shaped peppers sliced open without bothering with toothpicks that only make things worse 

A small chicken scallopini is wrapped with the floppy roasted green chile and with a slice of cheese inserted as a booklet. The loose green booklet is pressed into the flour and coated. This allows the egg to adhere.

The dusted green chile pepper booklet is lifted into the whipped egg and coated completely. Now it is really a mess. The egg allows bread crumbs to adhere. 

In this manner, a coating is built up with a crunchy breadcrumb outer layer. You still have bowls with some egg remaining and still some more bread crumbs remaining.

A pan is heated with butter that has bubbled, fizzed out and turned nutty brown.

"Oh, you just move the whole thing over."

Joe is watching on the other side of the dividing wall. He was surprised to see the wood-block cart moved next to the stove so that the mess of bowls with flour, scrambled egg, breadcrumb and messily coated chile-chicken-cheese booklets are right next to the hot pan.

The plates with rice and beans are on the counter on the other side of the pan, so, everything is close together.

The intention is use all the egg and all the bread crumbs. The rest of it is added in the pan while it is cooking, so, very fast. A bit of back and forth between the bowls of both whipped egg and bread crumbs, added to the pan in pools, then the coated chile relleno, then pour more egg over it, allow it to pool and roll it around as it is frying until the chile is coated and toasted all around. 

It's fun to fry but a little different from other things. It's not exactly a stuffed chile within a crunchy conical pancake, but close. It is a way to think about how to cook the thing. 

And it is wonderful if not a bit of a fried mess. The depth of the roasted chile flavor cannot be overstated and this combination delivers two doses of it in both green and red forms. The red sauce has a very deep flavor on its own, one taste from your fingertip says so. The two together, deep red sauce, deep roasted poblano, with cheese melted in there are all awe-inspiring flavor combinations, so powerfully reminiscent of some lost ancient home and hearth that the chicken becomes nearly incidental, but of course it is not, it is the thing at the center of the glorified wrapping. 

Bacon and eggs with beans and Swiss chard

Bacon from nearby Tony's Market is very very good (two verys to emphasize how very good it is). Hickory smoked or something like that. 

The bacon is in the beans too in place of smoked ham hock. All the fat from frying the bacon is left in the pot. I used a pressure pot to cook dry beans and that is a little bit tricky. The timing depends both on the type of bean and the size. Anasazi beans will cook much more quickly than pinto beans or red kidney beans and small beans like these little white ones and small black beans cook faster. It takes a bit of trial and error. The error is shown by blown out beans. They explode inside the pot when the pressure is too high. High is 15 LBS pressure and half high is 7 LBS pressure. Best to cook at half pressure and underestimate cooking time. That way you can release the pressure and open the pot to check, and determine by that how much more time is required.  You can release pressure quickly by spraying the whole pot with water, top, sides, bottom everything. The pressure indicator sucks back down inside almost immediately allowing  you to open it right up and check on doneness. Then back on the heat to half pressure to finish now that you have a clear idea how much time is required for your specific bean. 

I did not do that this time. I thought I had the time down already, as a result these beans are overly soft but I like them anyway.

There is no acid in the cooking liquid. Acid makes beans form a hardened surface that does not allow them to cook to even softness, but there are a lot of regular spices. Bay leaf, cumin, coriander. I forget all I put in there, probably chile flakes. Onion and garlic. 

Then taste-tested. At the end I decided they need sugar. And that makes a huge difference. It takes the beans from blah to delightful. They are! These beans are delightful due to the sugar added at the end. 

Swiss chard is cooked in the bean liquid separately. Another pressure session without the beans. This time I decided to cook the stems as well. I just chopped the Swiss chard crosswise across the stem, never minding about removing the stem as usual. And I am glad I did that. I will do it that way for now on. I like the stems for variety.

I over-pressurecooked the chard as well. It nearly disappeared to mush. But, Man is it good. When I perfect this technique I will be bean and chard unstoppable. I like it with everything. I recommend it. I recommend pressure-cooked beans with sugar added and Swiss chard cut with stems included. The whole thing is fantastic.

Then when the egg yolk blends with the beans it adds depth, umami, that is quite extraordinary. A tortilla, toast, hashed brown potato or rice, what have you, would round out the the whole thing  as a restaurant presentation. As it is, this is a wonderfully fast breakfast whipped up quickly due to the beans being leftover and merely reheated. Done in the microwave right on the plate heats the plate too and that keeps the whole thing heated throughout the meal to the very last molecule. I licked my plate like a dog, because I don't care, I am a dog. 

Beans with pork, rice with blueberries, gyros, eggs in butter, breakfast

Shhhh, es tarde. Todos estan duermo. 

Pork neck bones, white beans

Noticed these pork neck bones in the grocery store freezer, the freezer that holds the weird things, odds and ends, tongues, intestines, hooves, tails, and the like, and bought them on a dare.

What the heck.

After roasting for Maillard, the pressure pot makes a thing like this a breeze even with hard dry beans.

The time it takes to turn hard dry beans soft is the same time it takes to tenderize this meat and melt the connective tissue so that tender pieces literally fall right off the bone. Fall off with the merest push. 

And it tastes so fine and so rich, I added nothing to the beans, by way of experiment. At the table, only salt and it is still filled out, excellent and satisfying as a complete meal.

This package of neck bones got me caught up in conversation when I showed them to a lady in line at checkout. I remarked on her kale and she blew me off so I showed her this package to indicate she's not rid of me that easily. I told her I had no idea what they are, intended for beans, that my own mum didn't make beans, and nothing of the sort like this so it's all a big experiment from my point of view, but I sure do like beans, come to find out, when filled out with ingredients like these, I discovered on my own since not living at home. 

And that got her started on soul food. So that she would not stop.

Her soul food is different from mine, we call our soul food "comfort food," the items made on the cheap with castoff ingredients by inexperienced mums with small children who have limited palates anyway. I kept thinking our conversation was finished and she kept returning to it even as she paid and rolled away still wishing me luck with my soul food.

Cannellini beans

It tastes like it has meat in it but it does not. It is only beans, water, bay leaf, white pepper, salt and that is all. Plus butter to serve. It has none of the things that are usually put with it to impart favorite flavors or body, no onion as usual, no garlic, no herbs, and it comes out simply amazing in its own sauce.

This is the last of a small batch ↑ that is so good, so satisfying, It must be made again immediately, so it is ↓ with slight changes this time.

pressure pot, complete overkill, but so what, it makes fast work of dry beans

water ↑

rendered fat from cooking bacon ↓

mustard seeds, white pepper ↓

Now that this is done and gone and the new batch is just now finished, I will fill another bowl and set right to it, the aroma is that irresistible. 

Bread and beans with tomato

Dry black beans included with dry cannellini beans on impulse for black dots.  

Chicken, sausage, beans, spinach

Cannellini beans cooked with bay leaves and bacon. Chicken thigh cooked earlier and frozen. Bratwurst sausage.

[spinach raw vs cooked]

cooked.

[spinach raw vs cooked why?]

cooked, because I said so.

[spinach raw vs cooked why? elaborate]

short answer cooking releases calcium bound to oxalates making minerals available. 

[spinach raw vs cooked why? long answer]

request denied.

Tortillas, beans

The tortillas have lard and butter plus a little baking powder. 

The beans are black eye peas. Dried. Pressure cooked with herbs and spices. Tinned diced tomato added after the beans cooked. 

Mexicana cheese, Italian hard cheese, American cheese. 

Beans, rice, tomato sauce, potato, corn tortillas

Leftovers. I've been having a lot of this here and there on spaghetti and with polenta. 

After feasting on these things originally they sit in there so forlornly and I pass on them because I'm in the mood for something else and because these are so ugly and I forget how delicious I made them originally and how tremendous they are together. 

A bag of masa harina marketed for tamales, the same thing as this, contained disconcerting black dots. It reminded me of tiny insects. I think maybe they were. I threw out the bag. 

Any ol' kind of cheese, not particularly great. 

Beans with eggs

I am disappointed in these beans. I thought I had it nailed by adding tomato paste to leftover beans but they are still insufficiently hearty.

The ham hock veritably dissolved under pressure and left behind very little meat. It seems watery.

It has a lot of bay, some garlic, black pepper, and clove, and now egg and butter, and still it seems too diluted. 

A chef might say insufficient umami.  

Conclusion: do not cook these beans in water.

I think I'll just return to basics, mirepoix, butter, wine. And that was a weird ham hock, so maybe that's it. It was smokey and sticky and better than the bacon was, it's just not as hearty as I wanted. 

But it's delicious. Am I being too picky? I wanted ideal beans, and it's not.

Back to the drawing board as it were.  

Molasses!

Beans and beef