Rootcrops part whateveritis, OXTAILS!

Woooooo, GOBAMA! <-- first major offtopic veer ever to make it on here, please recognize.

Okay, Oxtails:
Oxtails used to be cheap trash meat but it's another thing like happened with black beans: the food of the lumpen has been taken on by the elite and rendered all expensive when it shouldn't be. Ain't it always the way?

Anyway, they make a stand-up borscht! Turns out.

I was recently told not to eat them by an anonymous commenter named blang gatang or something to whom I say, "Nothing doing, Flang Orang Atang, I am eating oxtails."

All they are is the tail of the cow; it's like eating necks or something. Who among us has not eaten a neck or two? Calm down about OX TAILS, people.

You simmer them in your stock for a while and take them out before they're too cooked to death. Pick all the meat off the bone. Discard the bone, reserve the meat.

A bunch of stuff is supposed to go in borscht, but basically you'll do fine with onions and beets. I didn't have any cabbage, so I put in a head of cauliflower (weird-seeming but actually pretty innocuous) and a broccoli stalk. No way was I putting in the flowerettes: I knew that would bitterify it pretty bad. It did not turn out too bitter.

The recipe calls for one pound of shredded beets, so I shredded a pound of beets, but the thing is, why do you want obliterated beets? The whole thing is that they're so satisfying to bite into. So at the last minute I diced another pound and put them in--late enough, you know, so they wouldn't be cooked to docility.

I used the recipe from Nothing Beets Borscht! a book of slavic cookery techniques that has like three to five borscht recipes in it. I don't know why I bothered because I ignored most of the instructions. I probably shouldn't even call what I made "borscht," since it doesn't have sausage in it. Okay, so I'll call it boosch. I was going to call it "Boosh," but that's probably copyright infringement (google Frisky Dingo® + Boosh®). Anyway, I'm not going to tell you how to make borscht or boosch because it's just soup, God! But basically the basic technique with the OXTAIL! YUM! is to take the shredded cowtailmeat out of the fridge and fry it up in a lot of butter and garlic and onion and salt and add it at the last minute. Deglaze the butterfried OXTAIL pan with some of the borscht or boosch or bosch broth and add the deglazins.

Durn. I mean "deglazins" to look like "squeezins," as in "corn squeezins," a term I stole from the Simpsons. But "deglazins" doesn't look right, it looks all hifalutin. If I put in an apostrophe, it looks like a possessive, not a dropped G. I hate our language. Only Obama can use it inoffensively. He is the only one allowed to talk or write in our language from now o

Focus on root crops, Part III, not wasting beets

Not wasting beets is really hard. Beets are so hard to process.

I made garlick-ey greens out of the stocks and tops and threw them in the fridge in a glass bowl with a plate on top. I finished eating the last of these today. (Greens by themselves often seem too virtuous to deal with: if you scramble them into a lot of butter and eggs they may turn into something you actually want to eat.)

The last bunch of beets I had, the ones that didn't go into the root crop medley, those I broke down and boiled. I have some kind of ancient aversion to boiling: my belief, which may be apocryphal, is that all the goodness goes into the water, which you then throw down the drain. But beets are damn impossible, so I boiled them.

The boiled beets were really good! The skins came off in like two seconds, I cut them into wedges and threw vinegar on top and dill and ate them and they were just fine.

This latest bunch is becoming a problem. They keep a long time, but they don't keep: FOREVER. They're still in the fridge because my plan was to make borscht, but to do that I have to break out the oxtails I'm going to use for stock and I have to get into a whole thing. Meanwhile the tomatoes I bought at the market to go into the borscht are about three times as many tomatoes as I needed and they're going soft. Kitchen panic. Kitchen paniiiiic.

Root Crop Medley

Did I already post about this before? how do people remember what they already posted about before? Well, I must not have because I've only been doing this since the summer and there weren't root crops when I began it.

Root Crop Medley:

get a lot of roots, including:

carrots
beets
parsnips
sweet potato

Cut them into slices. Put the slices in a bowl and pour olive oil over them. Toss. Oil a cookie sheet. (There can't be too much oil, basically.) Put the oiled root slices on the oiled cookie sheet. Roast at 500 'til they're soft. Cut into 1/2-inch cubes. Cut some blue cheese into similarly sized cubes. Mince basil or dill or both. Mix together. Store.

Use instead of croutons on salad, in co. with balsamic vinegar. Or not: the jury is still out on this Q. because root crop medley is really sweet and so is balsamic. It might be a sweet overload.

It freezes well, but don't do what I did and freeze a whole truck-sized bucket because what's the point of that, you have to defrost the whole entire thing and what, you're going to re-freeze in individual portions? Don't be a daft monkey: freeze your root crop medley in small, single-day portions.

My medley always has too many sweet potatoes in it. Beets can also overload it; you want to be a bit sparing or they'll dye the whole thing fuchsia and it won't look like amazing confetti. Carrots? A-OK. Parsnips? PARSNIPS ARE GREAT! WHY DON'T PEOPLE EAT THESE THINGS ANYMORE? THEY ARE GREAT!

Focus on... root crops! Part ONE.

Over the holiday break we featured: The Carrot.

The carrot is orange. Which is a bonus.

With the carrot I paired fresh turmeric, which showed up in the market. Turmeric is also orange. O, how it is orange. It made my lovely little blue-and-white apron orange forever. Now it is an Apron of the Gator Nation. (Titletown, woo.)

More on aprons to follow in a later post.

Turmeric doesn't have much taste to it. But they say it has the antioxidants or what have you. You got to figure anything that brightly colored has to be doing something, good or bad. So I sliced it up with the carrots and threw it in a pan with some butter and oil and baked it. I put other stuff in there that was orange, namely kumquats. It made an interesting, marmeladey side dish.

Then later I baked up a bunch of carrots without the additions and pureed them and made pumpkin pie out of carrots. You know how people will try to pass off sweet potato pie as pumpkin pie and it is forever the saddest thing? Well, that has happened in our family the past couple of Christmases to everyone's great sorrow, so I decided to take action to ensure it will never happen again by passing off carrot pie as pumpkin pie. I think I have dealt the death blow to the yam pie gambit.

RESOLVED:
Carrot pie? Not a substitute for pumpkin pie.

OTOH?
Carrot pie: weirdly not bad!

It's surprising. Neither carrot nor sweet potato makes a bad pie. Nevertheless, if they are handled like pumpkin, both carrot and sweet potato make a disappointing pie.

So some out-of-box thinking needs to obtain. A wholly new and separate pie modality for orange, pasty things that aren't pumpkin must be developed. One possible solution might be citrus.

Spaghetti Sauce, Part the last.

Then when you have your stewed tomatoes and your tomato paste, you take a few Italian sausages with the fennel seasoning, you know? And you de-case them and hurl them in your big sauce pot with onions and cook gently 'til the onions are defanged and the sausage nibs are browned. Add garlic and cook 'til the garlic is right... for you. Add all the usual seasoning: more fennel seeds (which you can whirl in the coffee grinder in order to render more potent), oregano, marjoram, basil and yadda whatever. Then you mix the three stages together. Or before you do that, if there's more than one way that garlic is right... for you, you can add more garlic toward the end. Like say you like the taste of cooked to hell garlic, the taste of gently cooked garlic, and the taste of basically raw garlic. You would make sure all these garlic modalities make it into your sauce.

Then you gently simmer and stir your three stages 'til the flavors have an opportunity to "meld." Scrape the results into some storage receptacles and put those into the refrigerator to allow their contents to continue melding.

Make lasagna and so on out of this. Lasagna is really the easiest thing in the world. One you don't need noodles, two, even if you're still carbified, you know you don't have to cook the noodles, right? You don't. Just put the dry noodles in the glass pan with the various sloppy stuff and when they come out of the oven, they'll be cooked. But you don't need to eff wid no noodles in the first place: they are a waste of your life.