Short rib, carrot, and tomato stew

I love short ribs. Lately, I've been obsessed with cooking them sous vide. The texture is totally different than what you get when you cook them any other way. But sous vide short ribs cook for a looong time. The recipe I use cooks for 72 hours.

Although I love that style of short ribs, change is good. So is speed. Thus, the decision to wrangle the ribs in my Instant Pot, using the pressure cooker function. Or, more accurately, I used one of the pre-sets to make it even easier.

The result was ... well, comfort food. The meat was tender, the carrots were perfect, the sauce was tasty, and it was just what I wanted.

Speaking of sauce, serve this with something to take advantage of that sauce. Crusty bread for sopping it up would be nice. Or simple boiled or mashed potatoes. Just don't waste it.

Short Rib, Carrot, and Tomato Stew

2 pounds beef short ribs

1 14.5-ounce can petite diced tomatoes

1/2 can (just eyeball it) water. Or measure about 3/4 cup, if you tossed the can.

1 onion, diced

1 teaspoon oregano

1/2 teaspoon salt (or your favorite seasoned salt) or to taste

1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper, or to taste

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (optional)

1 pound carrots, peeled and cut into chunks (I like carrots a lot. Use as many as you like)

Put the short ribs, tomatoes, water, onion, oregano, salt, and pepper into the Instant Pot. Put the cover on, make sure the knob is set to sealing and not venting, and press the "meat/stew" button. Make sure it's set for 50 minutes.

When the time is up, turn the pot off and let the pressure reduce for 15 minutes. When the time is up, turn the knob to vent any remaining pressure. Taste the sauce for seasoning and add salt and/or pepper as desired. If the sauce needs a little brightness, add the red wine vinegar. 

Add the carrots and put the lid on the pot again, with the knob set for sealing. Set the cooker for manual, high pressure, and 6 minutes to cook the carrots. When the time is up, turn the cooker off and wait 10 minutes before releasing pressure.

You can serve this immediately, but I prefer cooling meats like this and reheating before serving. If you refrigerate it, it's easy to peel off the fat from the stew. If you serve immediately, you might want to skim off some of the excess fat before serving.

I received the Instant Pot through 37 Cooks for a post on our group blog. I am not obligated to keep posting about it. I'm just having fun.

Mashed Carrot and Rutabaga (Swede)

I wonder when rutabaga will become the next superfood. Right now, it's pretty obscure, right along with its friends, parsnip and celery root. But I like rutabaga ... a lot. I don't buy it often, maybe because it's tucked in an odd corner at the grocery store.

When I found a recipe for "carrot and swede" in the book Root to Leaf written by Steven Satterfield, I figured I'd give it a try, The focuses on seasonal cooking, and rutabaga (also known as swede) and carrots make a lot of sense at this time of year.

I reviewed it here, if you're interested in more details about the book.

As far as the recipe, it's pretty simple, and makes a bright, colorful side dish for pretty much any meal. If you're looking for something more vegetable-y than potatoes, this could be a good choice,

Rutabagas have a sharp flavor - similar to cabbage - so it might be a little too strong for some folks. In this recipe, the sweetness of the carrots helps to balance the flavor. If you need to tone the flavor down even more, this could be mixed with mashed potatoes.

Really, though, I was very happy with this as-is.

Carrots and Swede
Adapted from Root to Leaf by Steven Satterfield

2 medium rutabagas, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
4 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 to 2 teaspoons salt (or to taste)

Add the rutabaga and carrots to a heavy-bottomed pot. Add water to cover by about 2 inches. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook until the rutabaga and carrots are both very tender.

Keep in mind that you're going to be mashing them, so crisp-tender isn't going to cut it. Figure about 30 minutes, and adjust the timing as needed.

Drain the vegetables in a colander and let them continue draining for at least 5 minutes. Rutabaga can be watery, so you need to get all the water drained, or your puree can be a little soggy.

Return the vegetables to the pot. Add the butter, nutmeg, pepper, and half of the salt. Mash well. I wanted a smooth puree, so I used a stick blender, but if you're energetic and the vegetables were cooked well enough, you can mash by hand.

Taste for seasoning, and adjust as needed. If the puree is seeping water, heat it gently and stir until the water evaporates.

Serve hot.

Maple Butter Carrots from The Soup Club Cookbook

When I got The Soup Club Cookbook for review, I was pretty sure I'd be making a few soups right away. It's winter. Soup is on the table a lot.

But then I got distracted by the other recipes. I've got a zucchini lasagna recipe bookmarked for later, and there were some salad dressings calling my name. I love salad.

But then I realized I needed a vegetable for dinner. I had carrots in the refrigerator and there was a carrot recipe. So I figured I'd give it a shot.

This is the sort of recipe that, after you've made it once, you can simply eyeball the quantities and adjust to taste. It may, in fact, be too simple to warrant a recipe at all ... except that it might not be something you'd think of making unless you first saw a recipe.

The great thing about this recipe is that it's simple enough for an everyday family dinner, but you could also make it for a party or event. And the ingredients are things you might have on hand. That's always a huge plus. You can whip it together on a whim. Which, really, is what I did.

Whim ... whip it up. Done.

The recipe in the book was for 3 pounds of carrots, but I cut it back to one pound, which was really simple math. When you're deciding how much to make, consider that the carrots shrink a lot during roasting, so the volume will be much less than what you start with.

On the other hand, the carrots are sweet and rich, so you might not eat as many as if they were simply boiled.

For more about the book, check out my review on Munching on Books.

Maple Butter Carrots
Adapted from The Soup Club Cookbook 
by Courtney Allison, Tina Carr, Caroline Laskow, and Julie Peacock

3 pounds carrots, sliced into 3/4-inch disks
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon large-flake sea salt

Heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Combine the carrots with the olive oil in a large ovenproof pan - it's great if you can get them in one layer, or at least not in a big pile.

Bake, stirring every 10 minutes, until the carrots are tender and caramelized, about 40 minutes.

Bring the pan out of the oven and put it on the stovetop over low heat. Add the butter and maple syrup and stir until they begin to foam.

Continue cooking and stirring until the maple butter sauce has thickened slightly and a spatula dragged across the bottom of the pan leaves a trail.

Remove the pan from the heat and sprinkle the carrots with the salt.

Serve hot.

I received this book from the publisher at no cost to me.

Candied Carrots

When I started paging through the book Food, Family and Traditions: Hungarian Kosher Family Recipes and Remembrances, I was first struck by how familiar many of the recipes were. 

Our family was neither Hungarian nor Jewish, but if your roots are in part of the world, there are a whole lot of similarities when it come to home-style dishes.

My first instinct was to make one of those familiar dishes. Maybe stuffed cabbage, or mushroom barley soup, or borsht. But then I spotted the recipe for candied carrots.

Now, the funny thing is that I often heard people talking about candied carrots when I was growing up. They'd be talking about a celebration menu, or a dinner party, and candied carrots would be on the list. Maybe they were in magazines or on TV, too.

But they were never, ever, ever on my plate. People talked about them. But apparently no one ever served them to me.

So I figured that now was as good a time as any to delve into the world of sweet vegetables. I figured that I could go back for the more familiar later. There's plenty of time for that.

The first thing I found out was that these take a looooong time to make. And the second thing is that the carrots shrink a lot. I started with a pound of carrots and ended up with a little bowl full. But that's fine. They were sweet enough that you probably wouldn't pile them on your plate, anyway.

Have you ever had candied carrots? What do YOU think of them?

Candied Carrots

Recipe from Food, Family, Tradition: Hungarian Kosher Family Recipes and Remembrances by Lynn Kirsche Shapiro. 

Cherry Press LLC; August 2014; $35.00/Hardcover; ISBN: 978-0-9898479-0-2

1 tablespoon oil

1 pound carrots, peeled and thinly sliced horizontally

1/2 cup sugar

2 teaspoons flour
1 cup water

Pinch salt

Place oil in a 2-quart saucepan. Add the carrots and the sugar. Cover and cook on 
very low heat, stirring frequently, until the liquid reduces, approximately 1 hour.

Meanwhile, in a small separate bowl, stir flour into ¼ into cup of the water, mixing until smooth. Add the remaining water, stirring to mix.

Add flour-water mixture slowly to cooked carrots, stirring; add salt. Increase heat and bring to a boil. Decrease heat to low, stirring gently so as not to break carrots, and cook until sauce thickens. Remove from heat.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher.

Now I'm cooking carrots with sous vide - sooooo good!

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm kind of like a kid in a candy store with this Sous Vide machine from Anova Culinary. I've been experimenting with all sorts of things. I saw a post about how great carrots are when they're cooked sous vide, how they're so much more ... carrot-y.

So I figured I'd give it a try. I found a discussion of sous vide vegetables that said that vegetables became tender at 183 degrees, and the idea was that they'd be done in an hour.

Well, okay then. I sealed some carrots in a bag, put them in a pot with the water temperature set for 185 degrees (for extra cooking insurance) and at about 45 minutes, I noticed that my bag had puffed up with a lot of air. It was ballooning like crazy.

Hmm. And the carrots weren't even thinking about becoming tender. Nope, no way. I opened the bag and resealed and plopped them back into the water. And ... it got to the point where I REALLY needed them to be done so I gave up and microwaved them to finish.

I don't know what went wrong with those carrots, but an hour wasn't nearly enough time to get them tender. And they weren't huge, old gnarly giant mutant carrots. They weren't teeny ones, either. But they were normal not-huge carrots.

I tried again, this time raising the heat to 190 degrees and planning on cooking them a lot longer. Turns out, six hours got me what I wanted - the carrots were tender all the way through. They were still firm rather than mushy, but they weren't crisp or crunchy.

And ... the bag didn't fill with air this time. Or at least it didn't turn into a giant balloon. At one point it did seem puffy, but then it shrunk back down again. It never got to the point (or at least I didn't see it) when it got so air-filled that the bag was bobbing on the surface of the water. I don't know if it had to do with the temperature I cooked at this time, or if my previous batch of carrots was weird.

If you're a fan of the tender-crisp carrot that's cooked on the outside but still raw in the middle, of course you want to adjust your cooking time. But me, I like my carrots cooked all the way through, or all the way raw. That tender-crisp thing just doesn't do it for me.

Meanwhile, I had gotten some macadamia nut oil from a company called Emile Noel, and this seemed like a fine use for the product. Macadamia nut oil isn't generally used for cooking - it's more for drizzling on warm vegetables or for salads or for drizzling onto vegetables. But I figured that since the heat was relatively low, this could be a good use.

And I figured the flavor would be a good pairing, as well.

These carrots had the deep flavor that you get from roasting, but without shrinking or drying out. I really loved them this way.

Sous Vide Carrots with Macadamia Nut Oil

1 pound carrots, peeled and trimmed
2 tablespoons macadamia nut oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar

Put the all the ingredients into a vacuum-seal bag and seal according to manufacturer's instructions.

Cook, using sous vide at 190 degrees for 6 hours.

Serve warm, drizzled with extra macadamia nut oil, if desired.

These were perfect as is, but I could see cooking these in advance - for a party or holiday - and then warming them by roasting them briefly or heating them in a pan with a bit of butter. I left the carrots whole, but there's no reason you couldn't slice them.

Amy Klein's Carrot Cake

I posted the "sad" post about Amy, but I think she deserves a different sort of tribute as well, so I found a recipe that Amy had shared online along with some of her photos.

The recipe below is for the cake itself, which she said was very moist. I'm not sure what frosting she used, but the cake was decorated with marzipan carrots and candied carrot curls.

And it looks like edible glitter as well. Isn't it pretty?

I don't think she shared recipes for the candied carrots - I'm pretty sure it was something she found online, since she said she'd never made them before. Here's one version from Cupcake Project, and there are others to choose from. Just make sure you search for candied carrot curls, or you'll get recipes for a side dish instead of a garnish.

You're on your own for the marzipan.

I don't know where she got the carrot cake recipe from - I did a search online and I couldn't find anywhere that it had been published, so perhaps it was a family recipe.

Amy Klein's Carrot Cake

For the cake: 
9 oz flour
1 oz baking powder (I cheat; it's about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 tsp) never had a problem
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
4 1/2 oz coconut
5 eggs
9 oz brown sugar
6 1/2 oz veg oil
1 lb 2 oz grated carrots
4 1/2 oz raisins

For the frosting:
4 1/2 oz cream cheese
13 oz powdered sugar
9 oz butter, softened
capful of vanilla extract

To make the cake:
Mix together flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and coconut (helps to keep the coconut separated). Set aside.

Mix together eggs, sugar, and oil till fluffy and add dry ingredients til just incorporated. Add carrots and raisins. Mix lightly.

Grease and flour your pans. It helps to put down parchment first. No sticking that way. Bake at 350F for 35-40 minutes. When done, let cool in pans. I usually stick a knife around the edges just to make sure it doesn't stick. When cool, frost.

To make the frosting:
Beat all ingredients until pale and fluffy.

"Look What I Found at the Farmer's Market" Soup

Cool weather makes me think of soup as a starter instead of relying on the usual summer salad. Soups can be hearty and filling, but when they're vegetable-based, they don't carry a calorie load. I'm not going so far as calling this diet food, but it's a lot lighter than a bowl of chili.

My farmer's market haul included onions, carrots, potatoes, corn, and cauliflower. Not a traditional soup, maybe, but they worked well together. The curry powder added a bit of interest, as well.

I've given the amount of vegetables I used for this soup, but you can certainly adjust it any way you want. Mine was heavy on the cauliflower because I had a lot, and I like it. Broccoli would be good - and a different color.

The curry powder was a spur of the moment decision. I was considering dill, but changed my mind while I was chopping vegetables. That's the great thing about soup. It's infinitely adjustable.

Fall Farmer's Market Soup

olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 large carrots, diced
4 medium red potatoes, peeled and diced
1/2 of a medium cauliflower, chopped
4 ears of fresh corn
salt, pepper, and curry powder, to taste
1 quart milk

Heat the olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot, and add the onion; cook until the onions begin to soften. Add salt, pepper and curry powder. Add carrots and potatoes and cook another minute or two.

Add water just to cover the vegetables and cook on medium-high until the carrot are almost cooked, adding water as needed and stirring often to keep the vegetables from scorching.

Add the cauliflower and milk; reduce the heat to medium, and continue cooking until all the vegetables are nearly cooked. Cut the corn off the cob and add it to the soup. "Milk" the cobs to get the last bits of good corn flavor out, and add that as well. Continue cooking until everything is cooked through.

Taste and adjust seasoning. If you prefer a thicker, creamier soup, you can blend some or all of it in a blender, or use a stick blender. For mine, I used the stick blender, but left lots of chunks for more texture.

Spiralized Vegetable Nests with Mushroom Eggs

Sometimes I get an idea stuck in my head until I have to try it.

In this case, it was all about making nests out of carrots and putting in mushrooms to represent the eggs. The more I thought about it, the more complicated it became.

First, I added on green beans as the grassy base for the nests. Then, instead of just carrots, I also used zucchini for a little color contrast.

And the vegetables weren't merely shredded, I used a spiral vegetable slicer that essentially turns innocent vegetables into long strands, like spaghetti.

And of course, this wasn't salad, so all of this had to be cooked. Of course. And whole green beans, carrots, zucchini and mushrooms all cook at different rates and the mushrooms were cooked with a different method. It was vegetable madness, I tell you.

And then I served it on a leaf-shaped green platter. Interesting presentation, except that the green beans are almost the same color as the platter.

At least I restrained myself from Frenching the green beans.

Because that really would have been a crazy thing to do.

Old-Fashioned Carrot Cake

I love carrot cake for so many reasons. It's not too sweet, it's moist, it's filling, and it's not terribly bad for you.

However, this carrot cake did not want to pose for photos that would work well in the newspaper where this recipe originally appeared.

Not only is newsprint not a great medium for detailed photos, but I never know if the pictures will be in color or black and white. And I don't know what size the photos will be, or how they will be cropped, so I'm never sure how much detail will show up.

And carrot cake is decidedly brown. Flecks of orange appear, but it's still a lot of brown. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that in the newspaper it would probably look like meatloaf. Which is tasty and all, but not when you're writing about carrot cake.

When I made a second cake using more whole wheat flour and darker sugars, the cake turned out a deep brown. It was pretty, and the powdered sugar design on top was decorative, but the slices looked like chocolate cake.

So trust me when I say that the photos here are both carrot cakes made from this recipe, and they were both absolutely delicious. Not only did I serve it to friends and family, but I also served to strangers at Cayenne Kitchen, where I was doing a demo of a Microplane box grater and cut-proof glove.

Here's the column:

Food, History, Food

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to know I have lots of cookbooks. On a lazy day, I might browse through those books for hours, just for fun.

I also like books about food. Which comes in handy when someone asks a question about an odd ingredient and I explain the history of it. Yeah, I’m a food geek.

So I had to pick up “An Edible History of Humanity” by Tom Standage. It an interesting twist on world history, discussing the role that different foods played in shaping humans and their world – and at the same time, how humans changed the food.

What Standage makes clear from the very beginning of the book is that humans starting shaping crops even before they had any idea they were doing so. Early humans modified corn in the Americas so much that in a short time the new plants couldn’t survive in the wild. Humans were required for it to grow. In other parts of the world, rice and wheat were undergoing the same changes.

Later, food traveled from continent to continent, shaping politics while politics shaped food. Through wars and shifts in political power, food played some interesting roles.

What this book shows, over and over again, is that with each change in food technology, some things get better while others get worse. Early farmers grew crops they needed, but were tied to the land and couldn’t travel as far to hunt.

Recently, chemical fertilizers seemed like an answer to feeding the world’s population, but overuse of the fertilizers caused other problems. Now, farmers are looking to other methods to keep us well-fed and healthy.

While Standage’s book wasn’t particularly tasty – no recipes to be found – it is food for thought. And when I think about food, I have to cook. Since we’re talking about historical food, an old-fashioned recipe seems appropriate.

Old-Fashioned Carrot Cake
As an homage to somebody’s grandmother, this recipe relies on ingredients and equipment that grandma would recognize.

Terrible photo; great carrot cake.

1 1/2 cups vegetable oil4 eggs
1 cup white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups grated carrots

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease and flour a Bundt (or similar) pan or use that newfangled baking spray, if you’re feeling modern.

Mix the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt together and set aside.

Beat the oil and eggs until they are light. An electric mixer would be handy for this, but feel free to use a whisk or an egg beater. Beat in the sugar a little at a time.

Gently add the dry ingredients to the wet, then fold in the carrots.

Pour the batter into the pan and bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Notes: 
Cream cheese icing is traditional on carrot cake, but this is tasty plain. A decorative dusting of powdered sugar is nice.

Grate the carrots any way you choose. Coarser carrots will be more visible. Or grate in zucchini or apples to make up for the fact that you only have 2 cups of grated carrots and you don’t want to go shopping.

You can substitute white flour or white whole wheat flour, if you prefer.