I don't know about any of you, but I am just about holiday-ed out as I always am this time of year. Despite my reputation as a diehard foodie and a tireless home cook, I do get tired after the holidays. With my friend Nancy we do a lot of entertaining at the holidays and we spare no effort, but after curing all that gravlax, the dozens and dozens of cut-out Christmas cookies which we always seem to wait too long to start, the birds and the ham and the finger foods and and Nancy's Nana's ambrosia recipe (hint: lots of different kinds of dried fruits, sticks of cinnamon and copious amounts of white rum make it special and it's delicious spooned over ice cream!) and, and, and, by early January I am ready to take it easy in the kitchen for a while.
Nancy and I were blessed last Sunday to be invited to a New Year's open house at the home of a mutual friend who is a neighbor of mine down on the St. George peninsula. It was so nice for both of us that neither had to cook or host, and we reveled in the deliciously baked salmon (done just au point and the cabbage salad with dried cranberries (I am a total slave to red cabbage) and a seemingly endless supply of embarrassingly pricey white Burgundy and sparkling wines both American, Italian and German, plus countless other delicious things including the largest ham I've seen in a while which was produced locally. It was a great send-off to the holidays and an opportunity to talk community with my neighbors and friends (I swear the entire town was there at the party) and get an update on the new library building (which will also be a community centre and get this: heated with geothermal heating, so it's pretty green, too!) and trade the kind of gossip that small towns tend to generate when someone opens their home and pretty much invites the entire town and several surrounding.
Ah, how glorious! Now as I write this on Saturday afternoon I have some great cooking smells in my cozy kitchen back here in Portland. They're the smell of post-holiday cooking, and I'm not going to equivocate here: a lot of it involves some cut corners. After the fold, I'll talk about the method to my madness when it comes to making good use of leftovers after the tree comes down or the menorah has been put away, we've seen the new year in and are ready to just collapse...
We used to have a tradition down at the Lutheran church I served in the Greater Boston area for many years. Now any of you who have had any truck with Scandinavian Lutherans know that those ladies (and quite a few of the gentlemen--my friend Russ Olsen's homemade pickled herring melts in your mouth like butter) are some serious cooks, and the folks in this particular congregation never passed up an excuse to have a church supper and I don't think I ever missed one and I surely was never disappointed. I mean these folks gave our little Grange down the peninsula here in Maine a run for their money, and I rarely miss a Grange supper either when I'm up there. One of the traditions of that congregation was to have a chili supper on Epiphany Sunday and afterwards have a "burning of the greens", an enormous bonfire from all the Christmas trees brought in from members of the church. That was time for me to haul out my "famous" Chocolate Chili recipe that the choir was always talking about as they often asked me to make it for our social gatherings. You'll be surprised at how easy it is.
Commonmass' Chocolate Chili
2 lbs. good ground beef, not more than 85% lean (you're going to drain it, so don't worry, but it has more flavor than leaner grinds. This recipe works with ground turkey, too).
Two small strong yellow onions, diced.
Four cloves of garlic, minced
Three tablespoons of chili powder
Two tablespoons of ground cumin
One small can tomato sauce plus one can of water
Salt and pepper and cayenne to taste (I like it hot!)
1 level tablespoon of cocoa powder
1 can of chopped HOT green chilis
1 can, drained, pinto or kidney beans (Texans will argue with me on this, but I like beans in my chili and my ex from Fort Worth does, too).
Masa (Mexican-style finely ground corn meal for making tortillas)
Brown the ground beef with the onions and drain. Place back in the pot and sautee it with the garlic for a couple of minutes, then add spices and salt, tomato sauce, water and allow to simmer for about 20 minutes on low heat. Add chocolate, chilis and allow to cook for a few more minutes. At about the 30 minute mark, add the beans if using. Thicken with a little masa that has been mixed with water.
This chili is quick, the chocolate brings depth to the dish, and the one year I didn't make it for the Epiphany dinner, boy did I hear about it. I finally got the message and brought a pot to a choir rehearsal to make amends.
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Now, I always make a ham or a smoked shoulder at Christmas, even if it doesn't end up featuring as the roast at a holiday dinner. I have an ulterior motive: leftovers. Being the liturgical geek that I am, green split pea soup (bubbling away as I type) is perfect for the season of Epiphany as the liturgical color of the season is green. It's also a great and easy way to have a few hearty meals without much effort. I'll be eating this for a week and never get tired of it. Here's how I do it and you'll be shocked: I'm going to do some of that corner-cutting!
Save your ham-bone (you can use ham hocks too but since this is a post-Christmas dish many of us will likely to have one around at this time of year) and a little extra ham to cut up in the soup. Get a package of green split peas (or the yellow ones that the Quebecquois prefer) and sort them and rinse them. Place them in a large kettle with the ham-bone and then add some mirepoix (chopped onion, celery and carrot). Here's where I cut corners today: tired of wielding the chef's knife, I purchased a mirepoix already diced at the market. If you want to chop up your own I would say two stalks of celery, two medium carrots and one large strong onion should do it. Crush and chop two good-sized cloves of garlic, add about a teaspoon of dried thyme or a couple of sprigs of fresh, salt and pepper to taste, and six cups of chicken stock or some stock and some water but six cups of liquid (you may need to top it up as it cooks) anyway. Let this simmer for a couple of hours and correct seasonings. Remove ham-bone and clean off any good meat and return that to the kettle with some of the ham you reserved, cut into chunks. Heat through and serve. I love this soup and it's not only easy, but you're using every scrap of your leftover ham which makes it economical, not to mention tasty. If you have it, you can add just a dash of truffle-infused olive oil at the end. It sounds like an expensive proposition, but you can almost always find it for a good price at places like TJ Maxx. I live on this soup in early January. With a crusty roll homemade or from a good baker and a very simple salad, lightly dressed, you've got a great weekend dinner and you barely had to break a sweat and while tasty, it's probably less rich than what you've been eating for the last several weeks!
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Now, here's something else I do with that leftover ham. Hungarian palacsinta, a kind of crepe, filled with ham and Emmenthaler cheese with a white sauce with wine over the top. These take some time to make, the crepes, but I do it in the week between Christmas and New Years and freeze them. If you make them ahead, you can slap together a really nice luncheon or light dinner. A crisp white wine and the simplest of green or cucumber salads make this a meal, and a pretty traditional Hungarian one at that. Festive, simple, using your leftovers: what could be better?
For the batter:
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
6 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
6 tablespoons melted butter
about 1 1/2 cups soda water
3 tablespoons cooking oil
Mix the flour and salt together and then work in the eggs, one at a time. It's going to get pretty stiff, but then add the milk a little at a time, beating all the while. Beat in melted butter. This batter now needs to be refrigerated overnight.
Just before you cook this, add the soda water to thin out and leaven the batter--it should be the consistency of light cream. Heat the oil in a crepe pan and cook crepes, you want these to be thin, so move the batter around in the pan to create an even coating of batter. These will cook very quickly. If you make them ahead, you can freeze them though they will keep for a couple of days wrapped in foil on your counter.
When you have your palacsinta made take a piece of your leftover ham and a couple of thin slices of Emmenthaler cheese and wrap up (more traditionally, you can stack them like a torte in a springform pan but I find that just too much work after the holidays) and place in a casserole dish. They'll need to be heated through, about 20 minutes in a moderate oven.
While they're heating through, take a couple of tablespoons of butter and flour and make a roux, adding salt and pepper to taste. Add some milk and/or half-and-half and about a half a cup of white wine (I like this sauce boozy enough to know it's got wine in it--it's totally elegant) until you have the right consistency. When the crepes are done, spoon some over and put some on the table on the side, people love this simple white sauce. Serve with a salad and a crisp white wine.
NOTE: you can add a tablespoon of sugar to that batter to make sweet palacsinta that you can serve as a dessert with a little apricot jam mixed with the very potent apricot brandy Barack Palinka (pronounced BO-rohtsk PA-linkeh). Fold them in triangles, dust them with powdered sugar, and you've got a really traditional Hungarian dessert. In Hungary and Austria, these delicious thin pancakes are always eaten with a spoon, never a knife and fork. As my favorite Hungarian cookbook author Susan Derecskey says, "if you can't cook Palacsinta and Galyushka, you can't cook Hungarian". (Galyuska are little wheat noodle-dumplings, very much like German "Spaetzle" and always served with Poerkoelt, a hearty stew which most Americans confuse with Guylas. Both involve copious amounts of good, Hungarian paprika, the only kind you should ever buy. Keep both sweet and hot in your pantry, you'll use it for way more than just Hungarian cooking).
I could go on and on about how I deal with my leftovers, but I used every last bit of them and believe it or not, I LOSE weight in January. I love Christmas and New Year's Day, and I love the cooking, but I am always relieved when January rolls around and I'm having my split pea soup, chili and all sorts of other fun things with leftovers.
So, to the community: what are you doing with your leftovers? What's for dinner at your house? The floor is open. Let's get down to the business of being the serious foodies we are. I promise to steal every one of your recipes.