Moussaka

Justina made this amazing Moussaka from some ground mutton from one of our retired ewes and eggplant we got in our CSA share from local Milky Fork Farm.

I actually have some relatives with Greek ancestry but I’ve never had a moussaka this good. Fresh and local ingredients make the dish, sometimes. Of note; we often have mutton instead of lamb, because when we are forced to retire an elderly ewe, I don’t feel justified in selling the meat at the same price for which we sell our grass fed lamb. It’s usually more economical to keep the mutton for ourselves. However, based on what I have researched, people from a couple hundred years ago who ate more lamb and mutton than Americans do today would think that people who eat lamb (a sheep less than one year old) are getting ripped off. After all, the flavor develops more as the animal ages, plus the roasts and chops get bigger. I’ve seen records of people from the 1800s asking for mutton from a 5-year-old sheep, which they considered the best. (Sheep can live for much longer than 5 years, but after that they start getting actually old and losing condition…kind of like I am.) They thought lamb didn’t have enough flavor and was something you ate because you couldn’t afford to feed your animals through the winter. I don’t know when we’ll next have mutton available to buy, but I can say that the coyotes really are mutton connoisseurs.

I don’t have a recipe for this moussaka because all I did was assemble it and put it in the oven, but this ain’t rocket science, it’s a cooking with love thing.

You need a cooking pot and some kind of high-sided skillet like a cast iron skillet, and preferably a whisk or at least a large spoon and an arm that is not tired yet.

You also need several eggplants, some ground meat (preferably mutton), crushed tomatoes, onion, garlic — look, just whatever you want for making a thick and tasty tomato/meat sauce.

Step 1: Slice the eggplant lengthwise (about 1/4 inch slices), salt it, and let it sit 30 minutes or so. Pat off any moisture that comes out (this also pats off some of the salt, which is fine.) Roast it in the oven — not so much that it’s mushy, but enough that it’s soft.

Step 2: Make a tomato meat sauce. You want it thick, so don’t add too much liquid and you’ll want to simmer it for a while to cook off the liquid you do add. If you don’t know how to make a tomato meat sauce, that’s totally fine, you’re already using the Internet so you should have no problem finding several thousand recipes. For this dish, since some people can find eggplant a little bitter, making a sauce on the sweeter side might help. Consider adding some cinnamon and a little brown sugar to your ground mutton tomato meat sauce.

Step 3: Make a bechamel sauce and add in parmesan and some nutmeg.

IF YOU DON”T KNOW HOW TO MAKE A BECHAMEL do not worry, it’s easy. Unlike tomato meat sauces for which there are thousands of recipes and I am not going to tell you your Nonna’s is not the best, anyone can make a standard bechamel.

Just put, like, 4 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan or something that has room for whisking several cups of liquid. Melt the butter over medium heat. When it’s melted sprinkle flour over it. Usually you’re supposed to use 1:1 butter to flour, but really, you can just sprinkle enough flour that you don’t have liquid butter anymore. You want all the butter soaked up by the flour. Now stir this for a few minutes while it cooks. But don’t burn it.

While whisking, add in about 2 1/2 cups of real, whole, preferably raw and unpasteurized milk (if you used 4 tablespoons of butter. If you used more or less butter and flour, just do the math.)

You should use raw milk if possible because it’s cleaner and healthier. After all, pasteurized milk has feces in it. You knew that, right? That’s what they’re pasteurizing. I mean, it’s pasteurized, so they’re “safe” feces. You won’t get sick or anything. On the other hand, small raw-milk dairy farmers have to be extremely careful to make sure there are absolutely no feces in your milk. So you can use poop milk if you want, but I prefer raw milk.

After adding the milk to the butter/ flour mix, whisk it a bunch and cook until it thickens. You’re looking for turkey gravy thickness.

Now remove your bechamel sauce from the heat, and whisk in any seasonings like salt, pepper, nutmeg. Add in grated parmesan and put the sauce back over low heat if you need to melt the grated parmesan.

You can find recipes that tell you how much grated parmesan to melt into the bechamel sauce, but whatever they said, it’s not enough.

Step 4: Assemble

Put slices of roasted eggplant to line the bottom of a reasonably-sized dish. A cast-iron skillet works great.

Now ladle in the meat/tomato sauce.

Top with more roasted eggplant. (It looks kind of like a meat pie with an eggplant crust.)

Pour the bechamel sauce over everything.

Top with panko (or homemade) breadcrumbs.

Bake in the oven at 350 F for 35-40 minutes (don’t let the breadcrumbs burn.) You should always cook using a Fahrenheit temperature scale, which is the best temperature measurement for things humans actually do regularly. Centigrade is objectively worse unless you need a thermometer to tell you if water is frozen or boiling.

Let the dish cool and set for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Charsadda Rice (Ghata Roje, Ghage Ruje)

No recipe but I think we can do this.

The guys at Corner Market / Gyro Grill, in Milwaukie, where I often stop to fill up on caffeine after making Portland CSA deliveries, were making this for a staff meal.

I asked what they were making because it smelled like lamb, and they explained the process and gave me a bowl (no charge). They called it Ghage Ruje, but from what I can tell it is something more commonly known as Charsadda rice — and it has all the characteristics of a perfect “comfort food”. The end result is similar to a meaty and rich risotto, but with long-grain rice.

You can find videos online of street vendors making this in bulk for crowds of working men. I’m told it’s one of those holiday foods where every family has their own traditional take on the dish. It is not spicy (it tastes like lamb) but I’m sure there are some herbs and spices mixed in. Presumably things that are easy to get in Charsadda or Peshawar and that complement the flavor of the lamb. There are recipes online for Charsadda rice, but they have more ingredients than this basic family recipe comfort food.

To make the basic version of the dish, as far as I can understand, you first make a lamb stock with a lot of meat in it: I think meaty neck bones would likely work well. The guys making it said that any pieces with connective tissue work well — I think the collagen helps the final dish. Cook that for several hours untiil the meat is falling apart and any collagen has broken down. Then you remove any bones, shred the meat, mix it with long-grain rice, and cook the rice-and-shredded-meat in the stock liquid for three or four hours. Since the end result is reminiscent of a creamy risotto, I am guessing a 4-to-1 liquid to rice ratio. After the rice absorbs a lot of the liquid, add in hot, rendered lamb fat, and then stir until the rice has absorbed the rest of the liquid and it is the consistency of a creamy risotto.

It makes sense that this is a holiday/festival food; given the almost full day of preparation time you would probably want to make a big pot and feed a lot of people. The bowl that I had was good enough that, for the past few weeks when I get hungry, it is the first food I think about.

Kimchi Jigae (Kimchi and Pork Soup)

This is such an easy soup to make, provided you have some fatty pork and some old kimchi. It’s so easy, and tastes great provided you like kimchi and a little spice.

I once lived on kimchi and sardines for a week. I was unemployed and job hunting and I didn’t have the energy at the end of the day to cook. There was a place nearby my apartment where I could get a decent side of kimchi “to go” for a dollar, so I would take that home and dump a can of sardines in oil on top and eat that for dinner. Not bad. There was also a place you could get a slice of pizza for a dollar, but I was trying to eat healthy and stay away from junk food. I think I got a job pretty soon after that though, possibly motivation helped.

To make kimchi jigae, first cut up a pork belly roast or some other fatty pork into chunks (about an inch). Slice at least one onion and prep however much garlic you want.

Put some lard in the bottom of your stew pot and put it on high heat. Add the pork and cook until the pork is pretty well cooked. Add in the onion and garlic and cook for another minute or so.

If you have gochugaru of course use that, but you can get by just fine with some dried red pepper flakes and cayenne pepper. Or maybe like a smoky chile powder. Add in however much spice you want. Also add some powdered ginger if you have it. If you don’t want spice, don’t make this dish.

Stir to incorporate the spice, then dump in your old leftover kimchi, stir again, and add enough water to cover everything.

Bring the soup to a boil, then turn down to a simmer and simmer for…well, everything is cooked now but it will taste better if you simmer it for several hours and let all the flavors meld and the pork fat melt into the soup. But you don’t have to.

Serve over rice or on its own.

(Okay yes you CAN put tofu into the soup, if you really want to be that kind of person. But you could also just add more fatty pork. I don’t like any of the recipes that call for adding rice cakes or other starch, because when I make kimchi jigae I make A LOT and those rice cakes and other starches just get weird, I think, when you re-heat them. I’d rather keep the starch on the side.)

Jiao zi with leftover duck

I have no idea if these count as actual jiaozi (which are a form of Chinese dumpling). I am calling them jiaozi because the pre-made dumpling wrappers we had in the freezer were wheat-based dumpling wrappers from some Asian grocery store (not sure which one, they have been in that freezer for years…) I combined:

Leftover smoked duck meat (shredded and finely chopped)

A splash of soy sauce, a sprinkle of brown sugar, and a few grinds of pepper

and mixed this with a coconut-oil sauteed mixture of:

Shredded and chopped green cabbage

Finely chopped button mushroom stems

and a few sprinkles of powdered ginger and powdered garlic.

I mixed in a couple tablespoons of cornstarch (dissolved in water) to try to make sure the mixture would stick together and not fall out of the dumplings if they came open in cooking. They didn’t, so I’m not sure the cornstarch was needed, but if it was, it worked. Then I wrapped the mixture in the afore-mentioned dumpling wrappers. These are the kind where you rub a wet finger along the edge and then pinch the sides together to seal the dumpling closed.

I cooked the jiaozi like potstickers: in a cast iron skillet on high heat I first fried them briefly in beef tallow; then I added about a cup of water and a not-very-tight-fitting lid and let them steam until the water was gone. I tried cooking them in coconut oil as well but we agreed the beef tallow was better (though coconut oil smells better when you’re cooking.)

Those are five-year-old fingers reaching for one in the photo above, so yes, they were good.

Whole duck on the Pit Barrel Cooker

I have struggled to cook a whole duck successfully. First I tried a modified version of Julia Child’s recipe: modified in that I cooked the duck the way she described, but I didn’t do all the other fiddly stuff on the side like taking the membrane off orange slices. In my opinion, having tried several other Julia Child recipes in the past, either Julia Child never actually cooked anything, or whoever wrote her cookbooks got the recipes wrong. Julia’s duck was a disaster, and in hindsight her instructions had us cooking the duck for a stupidly long time and at insane temperatures.

This time I tried cooking/smoking the duck on/in our pit barrel cooker. We have used a Pit Barrel Cooker* for years; it’s not perfect but I like it. This is not a recommendation, because I don’t know what you like, but I’m happy with it.

I rubbed the duck in oil and a spice rub, fired up the charcoal, and hung the duck from the rebar. It was supposed to take 3 hours. After 2 hours the breast meat was registering 190 degrees (it’s supposed to be 140) and the skin was very nicely browned. However, I found that there was still a pretty thick layer of fat under the skin. This is supposed to render out at the initially high cooking temperature, which clearly didn’t happen. I put the duck under the broiler for 5 minutes or so which successfully rendered the fat and crisped up the skin.

Despite being technically overcooked, this duck turned out really well. The meat was certainly not tough and chewy but was instead relatively tender and flavorful, the skin was (reasonably) crispy, and overall it was a very good experience. In the future I will probably try starting the duck under the broiler first, to get the fat bubbling, and then hanging it in the pit barrel cooker to finish — and watching the temperature more closely.

* A pit barrel cooker (whether sold by the company of that name or from some other source) is basically a steel barrel with air holes in it and a lid. You light a charcoal fire in the bottom and hang meat on hooks from a piece of rebar across the top. The idea is that as the fat from your meat drips on the charcoal, it makes smoke: not wood smoke like in an actual smoker, but enough so you get at least some smoky flavor. Meanwhile the meat cooks through convection as heat rises from the charcoal.

Grilled lamb tails and testicles

It’s time to separate the boys from the…

Yes, you read that correctly. They were delicious by the way.

From our processor the lamb testicles come with a membrane still on. I cut off any weird looking tube parts which you might remember from anatomy class. Removing the membrane requires you to stick your fingers underneath there and loosen it, then you pull it off.

I brined the de-membraned, cleaned up testicles for about 24 hours in a sweet brine, with salt, brown sugar, and some spices. Then I cut them in half length-wise. I think cutting them in half was unnecessary: they cooked fast enough and it made them very messy on the grill. I put them on skewers, then I grilled them on a pre-heated grill over direct heat for probably about 10 minutes, flipping once. Eat them warm, fresh off the grill.

Just…try not to think about it, guys.

Grilled lamb testicles

I simmered the lamb tails in salted water with a copious amount of fresh rosemary for at least an hour. They were pretty tender when I took them out. Then I let them dry off on a rack in the refrigerator overnight. I coated them with a sweet barbecue sauce (not homemade) and grilled them on medium heat until they started getting blackened and crispy edges.

These were big, sweet, juicy balls, and the smooth, creamy texture felt really good in my mouth.

I also made lamb tails based on an Afrikaaner dish called Skaapstertjies. I copied that word from the Internet, to be honest, I didn’t spell it myself. The lamb tails were nice and tender but mostly a vehicle for sauce.

Tails simmered for tenderness

The tails were popular, mostly as a vehicle for barbecue sauce. There isn’t much meat on them, and you do need to simmer them for at least an hour and possibly longer; the grill time is just for flavor. Worth it if you can cook a lot of them all at once. That’s my tale, anyways.

Chicken and Dumplings

We’ll all have chicken and dumplings when she comes…

Materials

One or two whole pasture-raised chickens. Giblets optional.

A large pot

Onion, carrot, celery (amount depends on what flavor you want)

Salt, whole peppercorns, herbs de Provence or some other mixture of herbs including thyme and marjoram. (Or…not, if you don’t like thyme and marjoram with chicken. You do what you want.) A few bay leaves, and or some dried mushrooms or mushroom powder would go well. Maybe soy sauce? Something for umami flavor is the idea.

Other vegetables (canned or frozen corn or peas work well)

Dumplings (see below)

Optional: grass-fed butter, green onion, parsley

Method

Put the chicken(s) in the pot and cover it with plenty of water. Simmer the chicken for several hours. A lid helps. Do not boil the chicken, this can make it tough.

Remove the chicken from the pot. Reserve the broth (which you have just made) in the pot. Let the chicken cool.

Vegetables and Broth. (Heirloom carrots, some are yellow.)

Chop onion, carrot, and celery and add to the pot with the broth. Add salt. Add a small handful of peppercorns. Add herbs or herb mix. Add bay leaves. Turn up the heat to a slow boil.

Shredded Chicken separated from bones

When the chicken is cool enough to handle, pull off the meat. Discard the bones, and the skin unless you want to eat it; optionally, save the largest, thickest bones.

Taste the broth, add salt if needed. Optionally, add the largest chicken bones back to the stock for more flavor. (You will need to remove these eventually.) Continue boiling the soup for 10-15 minutes, then reduce to a simmer.

When the carrot and celery are soft, add back in the chicken meat and any extra vegetables. We like to use sweet corn. You can cut the kernels off the cob when corn is in season and freeze it for use over the winter.

A chicken in every pot

Taste for seasoning one last time. Optionally, add in a few tablespoons of butter.

Drop dumpling batter, mixed

Add the dumplings. There are a lot of different dumpling recipes. You can use a biscuit mix from the store, you can make spaetzle, you have a lot of options. A simple drop dumpling recipe is as follows: Combine 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons sugar, salt, and seasonings (we use a seasoning salt). Mix together 1 cup of whole milk, a few tablespoons of melted butter, and a dash of apple cider vinegar. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry. Don’t overmix. Make sure the soup is simmering enough to create steam. Use 2 spoons to drop (thus the name) large spoonfuls of dumpling batter onto the top of the soup. Cover with a lid and simmer the dumplings 15 minutes.

Serve the dumplings right away, or they’ll begin to disintegrate into the soup (not the end of the world). Consider garnishing with green onion and fresh parsley.