Auld Lang Syne

New Year's Eve always make me feel a bit melancholy.  Forced fun and mandatory kissing have never been my idea of a good time.  And let's face it, trotting out Dick Clark every year is just sad.  Once the hoopla of Christmas is over, it's like one long funeral dirge to bury the old year.  This year is no different, although instead of thinking about lost opportunities and lost friends, I've been thinking a lot about lost traditions. 

My mom is Italian and my dad is Southern.  Growing up, New Year's Eve was marked with an age-old dish from the Adriatic Coast: fried fish smothered in anchovy sauce.  In the old country it was likely the Church's way of supporting the local fish industry, and it stuck.

Then, on New Year's Day we'd be greeted by the smell of black-eyed peas simmering over a ham hock.  Your luck in the New Year was measured by how many of the slimy spotted beans you'd be willing to eat.  Not eating any was a pact with Bad Luck, and thus, not an option.  I could usually coax one down my throat.

When I married, my husband--normally more than happy to snarf down anything I put in front of him-- could never get his palate around the anchovy sauce, and I pretty much quit eating back-eyed peas the year I turned 18.  My children don't have these traditions, and for some reason--that saddens me.   Call it middle age or just misplaced nostalgia, but this year I'm ringing in the New Year with fried fish, anchovy sauce and black-eyed peas.  Auld Lang Syne, my friends, auld lang syne.

Fried Fish

1.  Purchase about 2 lbs of a mild, but firm white fish, like haddock or flounder, scaled and filleted.  Avoid tilapia, it's too fragile for this recipe.

2.  In a small bowl mix about 2 cups of Italian bread crumbs and 2 Tbs dried parsley.

3.  In a small pie plate or fluted dish, vigorously beat 2 eggs until the whites and yolks are fully blended.

4.  Heat about 1/4 inch of olive oil in a large frying pan until just smoking.

5.  Dredge a fish fillet with the egg wash, then dredge it through the breadcrumbs so that it is fully coated on both sides, and then dredge it through the egg wash one more time.  Fry it until golden brown.  Repeat with every piece of fish until you're done.  You may need to mix up more egg wash and breadcrumbs.

Anchovy Sauce

1.  On low heat in a large sauce pan, mix together the following:  Two 27-ounce cans of tomato puree or crushed whole tomatoes, 2 large cloves of garlic--mashed, 1 Tbs dried parsley, 1 can of flat anchovies, with the oil, 1/4 tsp dried red pepper flakes, 1/2 Tbs capers--chopped, 1/2 cup chopped kalamata olives (optional), salt and pepper to taste.    Simmer for about 2 hours until thick.  Add a can of tomato paste about half-way through if necessary.

2.  Serve over the fried fish and a generous helping of rotini pasta.

Black-eyed Peas

1.  Rinse and clean one pound of dried black-eyed peas.  Drain.

2.  Chop and saute over medium heat one small onion until soft and translucent--about 10 minutes.

3.  Add the now-cleaned beans to a large sauce pan, and cover with water--about 4 cups.  Add the cooked onion and one ham hock.

4.  Simmer over medium-low heat until tender.  Drain any excess water.  Remove the hammock and add any bits of meat to the beans.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Remark on how much better these taste since when you were a kid.

5.  Have a very Happy New Year.

Bloody Borscht

I've figured out why the Russians lost the Cold War. It wasn't the influence of Western culture or military spending during the Reagan administration. The Russians lost the Cold War because of borscht. The national soup of the Motherland is one mother to make. A country can only do so well economically when a disproportionate share of its labor force is spent making soup. Historians may ultimately disagree, but I'm sticking to my theory.   There's a reason that there's a McDonald's on Red Square and it isn't because Big Macs taste so good. The Bolsheviks were done in by borscht.


Borscht 
An adaptation of a recipe by Ann Simon.

1.  Cover a one and a half pot roast, bone in, with water.  Believe it or not, it's tough to find a pot roast these days with the bone in.  I wound up paying 67cents a pound for two beef bones.  It was more than a little annoying to pay $2.50 for a couple of bones that the butcher was going to throw in the trash, but hey, it's the capitalist way.

2.  Add about 1 Tbsp each of the finely chopped stems of cilantro and dill.  This step takes FOREVER because you have pull off the leaves and THEN chop the stems.  Those stems are tiny.  It takes A LOT of stems to get to a Tablespoon.  Save the leaves to garnish when serving--assuming you get that far.

3.  Let the beef and stems simmer on medium heat for about one and half hours, and every 10 minutes or so, skim off the fatty foam. 

4.  Saute in a separate pan about 1/2 cup each of a small dice of carrots, celery, and onion.   Set aside.

5.  Slice really thin one small cabbage or half of a big cabbage.  I recognize that "big" and "small" are relative terms.  "Big" would be the size of Boris Yeltzin's head;  "small" would be about the size of Vladimer Putin's.  

Big Head of Cabbage

Small Head of Cabbage

6.  Meanwhile, boil about 2 pounds of beets in yet another pot.  Boil for 20 minutes until tender.  If, like me, you are running out of space on your stove top, you can also roast the beets for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees, or until tender.    Let them cool.

7.  You forgot to keep skimming the broth, didn't you?  





Bloody, bloody borscht

 8.  When the beets have cooled, peel them.  This is a messy job.  Wear rubber gloves or you'll wander around with more beet blood on your hands than Joseph Stalin had human blood on his.

9.  Grate the beets.  Actually, go buy or borrow or steal a food processor and use that instead.

10.   Check the pot roast and the broth.  Taste the broth to ensure that it is sufficiently "beefy."  If not, add a bouillon cube.  This is also known as cheating.

11. Remove the pot roast from the broth and add the sauteed onions, carrots, and celery.

12.  Simmer for 10 minutes and add the sliced cabbage.

13.  Simmer for 5 minutes more and add the grated beets. 

14.  Peel and dice one potato;  add to the mix.  Are you starting to feel like this recipe is the culinary equivalent of War and Peace?

15.  Add one red or green pepper, thinly sliced.  Simmer some more.

16.  By this time, the beef has likely cooled so that you can cut it into small pieces; add the cut-up beef.

17.  Add 3 sliced tomatoes and the juice of one lemon to preserve that better dead-than-red color.  Cook another 15 minutes.

18.  Add two cloves of minced garlic and 2 tsp of horseradish..

19.  Serve--finally--with a dollop of sour cream and the dill and cilantro leaves for garnish.

20.  If you are Russian, look up from the task and realize that the Cold War is over.

Braised Bambi

My father and my oldest brother like to hunt.  Every year they trek out into the Great Beyond together and manage to take out a dear, elk, or some hapless wild hog.  I'm really not the least bit jealous.  I tried the whole hunting thing back in my teens in an attempt for some father-daughter bonding.  All I really got out of it was a bruise from my elbow to my shoulder when I mistakenly grabbed my dad's 12-gauge shotgun instead of my 20-gauge.   Damn thing blasted me 20 feet out of the duck blind and onto to my rear-end in the middle of a Texan swamp.  My father still busts out laughing at the memory.  No thank you.   At heart I'm a city girl.   The closest I get to the great outdoors is living on a fairly wooded lot in the middle of suburbia.

Which is why it is a total surprise to me that I like wild game.   I may turn my nose up at getting out in the brush to hunt, but I'm the first one looking for hand-outs when there's a 12-point buck to be divvied up.  And even though I am a miserable hunter, my father dotes on me, so I'm usually the first beneficiary of his largess.  After each of his expeditions, there's usually a cooler of the kill waiting for me--conveniently already skinned, trimmed, and shrink-wrapped in plastic as though I picked it up at the Wegman's butcher shop.  My dad knows his girl.  This year I scored elk and a hind quarter roast of deer.   The elk was easy--rubbed it with garlic and threw it on the grill; deer is always more of a challenge.   If it isn't properly prepared, it can be tough, chewy, and, well,  taste like deer.  It's sort of an irony, but the fun part of wild game is getting it to taste like beef--unless you happen to be making squirrel, and then the challenge is getting squirrel to taste like chicken.  It will if you bake it slowly in cream of mushroom soup.  I recognize, of course, that no one will read ever read this blog again if I feature a recipe on squirrel, so instead, let me serve up some venison. 

Braised Venison
Adapted from a recipe by Bruce Reeder

1.  Get yourself a 4-5 pound venison roast.  I'm not sure how you do this if you don't hunt yourself or have a friend or family member that does.  You could start hanging out at shooting ranges or get yourself a job behind the gun counter at Walmart.  Join the NRA?  Become a Republican?  There are ways.

2.  Generously rub the roast with olive oil, and salt and pepper.  Lightly coat with flour.

3.  Generously coat the bottom of a large saute pan with olive oil, about 2 Tbs, and a similar amount of butter--one large pat. 

4.  When the butter begins to foam, pan sear the roast on all sides--about 3-4 minutes per side until lightly brown.

5.  In a crock pot, add the following:  one envelop dried onion soup mix, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 can beef consomme.  Stop and think for a second how much sodium is in each of these items.  Put your salt shaker back in the cupboard.

6.  Add: 2 large onions, coarsely chopped; 4 carrots, peeled and diced; 2 stalks of celery, chopped; 1 cup burgundy wine; 1 Tbsp rosemary.

7.  Stir and mix well.  Add the seared roast.

8.  Turn the crock pot on to "low" and go do something else for about 8-10 hours.   You can hike, rake leaves, stack wood, go to the mall, or do a ton of laundry.  When you are done you can come home and find that Bambi literally falls off the bone and is floating in a thick hearty broth, that yeah, pretty much tastes like beef.  Thanks, Dad.