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What Is Casing Used For Cooking Meat For Cooking Food Recipes - Yahoo Recipe Search
Food.comThis beautiful layered pie combines all my favourite Christmas flavours - chestnuts, cranberries, dried apricots, chicken, pork sausagemeat and bacon - all encased in a crispy and crumbly pastry case; it is a firm favourite in our house EVERY year! Not only that, but this pie is actually better if made ahead of time - it can be eaten warm or cold and is excellent for buffets and light suppers. It also freezes very well, once cooked. The filling is very similar to an English Pork Pie, a fruity stuffing mixture layered with chicken fillets. Although it is essentially a pie for the winter festive season - I see no reason why it cannot be made all year around - I often make it to take on picnics in the spring and summer. You can adjust the filling to suit your own tastes and requirements, but I think that the chicken, bacon, apricots, cranberries and chestnuts are essential for the delicious and unique flavour this pie has! N.B. Please try to use high meat content sausages or sausagemeat - it makes all the difference to the taste, plus cheaper sausages have lots of fat and bread added! Where the name came from - an old Nursery Rhyme: "Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating his Christmas Pie - he put in his thumb and pulled out a plumb, and said what a good boy am I"!!! I JUST had to name it after him, even though there are NO plumbs in this pie! (The original recipe was in a 2005 BBC Good Food magazine; this is my much amended version of that original recipe.)Food and WineWhen I was little, I thought I could pass for white. If you know me, you know this is hilarious—because I look just like my mom, who is 100% Korean. (My dad, by the way, is a very warm, funny white guy.) Growing up in small towns in Mississippi in the 1970s, I just wanted to believe I was like most of my other friends: decidedly all-American. I would commit lies of omission all the time, neglecting to share that I had an Asian mom who often perfumed our house with the funky smells of kimchi, dried anchovies, and simmering seaweed soups. Instead, I boasted of her chicken-fried steak and gravy.But that all changed in middle school, when, at a sleepover I hosted, I gained the confidence to share my mom’s japchae with my friends. This dish—a classic Korean recipe featuring slippery glass noodles tossed with meat and vegetables—was my absolute favorite growing up (still is!). I always loved the chewy texture of the noodles, the interplay of nutty sesame oil and savory soy sauce, the hint of sweetness, and the garlicky wilted spinach. My mom had made a large batch, and there were leftovers in the fridge. They weren’t intended for my sleepover friends, because of course I didn’t want to serve them Korean food. But then I did. In the middle of the night, between movies and fueled by a mean case of the munchies, I gathered up the courage to introduce my friends to japchae.“Eww, that looks like worms,” one friend said upon the unveiling. Deep breath, Ann, you know this is damn good food. After some gentle coaxing, once the intoxicating aromas of sesame and garlic registered with the hungry girls, one of them took a bite, and then another. They loved it! Even cold straight from the fridge! We took turns pinching a clump of noodles between our fingers, leaning our heads way back for dramatic effect, and then dropping the deliciousness in. We gobbled up every single bit.That was a turning point for me. Little by little, I began to embrace the Korean side of my identity, mostly through food—because food, for so many of us, is an immediate gateway to our culture. I often cook Korean dishes for my family so that my children, now in their early teens, can feel some connection to their Korean roots. And you know what? Japchae is their favorite. When we eat it, I tell them how my mom used to make it for me when I was a kid. I tell them about how, when I went to Korea and made japchae in a cooking class, the instructor told me that it’s important to honor each element with its own seasoning and cooking method, to fully bring out its best and to preserve its color. I tell them that the dish was once considered royal cuisine but has now become more commonplace. In this way, food serves as a means for us to connect to our deeper heritage, helping us understand the depths of who we are. And for me, I know more now than ever who I am—not fully white, not fully Asian, but something beautifully in between.Food and WineI chased the flavor of a proper Tuscan ribollita for 17 years until I ate the genuine article again, finally, at Leonti, chef-owner Adam Leonti’s swanky new Italian restaurant in New York City. Leonti’s deeply savory version of the Tuscan bread and bean porridge was even better than the one I remember from a small hillside restaurant in Siena, Italy, so many years ago. (And that ribollita, which I ate on my first visit to Italy, was so perfect and nourishing that it made me forget for an hour that I was wearing my girlfriend’s puffy sweater because the airline had lost my luggage.) Leonti learned how to make ribollita from a restaurateur from Lunigiana, a three-hour drive northwest of Siena, paying close attention to the porridge’s humble elements: grassy-green, peppery olive oil; earthy, rustic bread; small, thin-skinned white beans; and most importantly, sofrito, the finely chopped, slow-cooked mixture of carrots, onions, and celery that gives ribollita its extraordinary flavor.At Leonti, sofrito is the foundation of ragù, and of the hot broth served to guests upon arrival—and it’s such a crucial ingredient that his cooks make about 75 quarts of it a week. Leonti used to laboriously chop his sofrito with a knife by using a rocking motion. “Then I watched Eat Drink Man Woman, and the best part is the beginning, with the Chinese chef chopping with big cleavers,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s the move!’”So, Leonti bought some large cleavers in Chinatown and a wood butcher block and set up a sofrito station in the kitchen, where today his cooks rhythmically chop and break down the whole vegetables into rubble using the same kind of chopping technique I saw a barbecue cook use at Skylight Inn BBQ in Ayden, North Carolina, to break down the meat of whole smoked hogs into a fine mince. The size of the mince matters—the smaller the better—Leonti says, because you’re multiplying the surface area of the vegetables by a thousand-fold. More surface area to caramelize in the pan equals more flavor.When I made Leonti’s ribollita at home in my Birmingham, Alabama, kitchen, I tried the double-cleaver technique but quickly switched to an efficient, two-handledmezzaluna after too many stray bits of onion, carrot, and celery fell to the kitchen floor. I followed his advice and sweated the vegetables in olive oil in a Dutch oven, slowly cooking the mixture, stirring almost as often with a wooden spoon as you would with a roux. After 30 or so minutes, I turned up the heat until I heard that rapid sizzle, signaling that the sofrito was beginning to caramelize, creating a massive amount of flavor. When you build flavor from the bottom of the pot like this, the flavors continue to transform, concentrating even further when you add then reduce aromatic liquids— in Leonti’s case, adding crushed tomatoes and white wine, which cook down to a tomato-wine-sofrito jam full of umami. That flavor base then gets rehydrated with water, then cooks down again with the kale, potatoes, and bread—the latter adds tangy flavor and disintegrates into the soup to add texture. Finally, cooked beans—both whole and pureed—go in, thickening and tightening the soup into a porridge.Leonti serves many of his courses in gold-rimmed Richard Ginori china to frame his food in the Tuscan context. His food is big city fine dining meets cucina povera, the Italian cooking tradition born of necessity that elevates humble ingredients into dishes fit for a king. I asked him about the restaurant’s tightrope walk between high and low. “What is luxury? Luxury to a few is foie gras or truffles,” he says. “But the ultimate luxury is time and space. Those are the two most expensive things on the planet. Ribollita is such an expense of time. It’s the ultimate luxury.”Especially when you’ve spent 17 years searching for a proper recipe. —Hunter LewisCook’s note: Decent bread and canned beans work fine here, but if you shop for the best rustic loaf baked with freshly milled flour you can find, and cook your beans in extra sofrito a day ahead—especially white beans sold byRancho Gordo—your ribollita will go from good to great.
