lima beans my (mom’s) style

I’ve earlier promised a lima beans recipe, mainly because the succotash-style preparation I tasted a while ago didn’t really convince me. To me, lima beans bear little discussion about what to do with them. What you need is:

Lima beans, shelled. They don’t need to be super young, but must not have turned too light grey-green with leathery skins – why? Because even if you peel the skins off (I don’t), overly mature limas tend to be mealy and taxing for the digestion. Avoid food that’s unpleasant to eat, is the idea.

bbq blues

We spent one of our finest days of the fall of 2010 in Roanoke, Va. A first obligatory stop is, of course, the Virginia Museum of Transportation, especially because of its impressive collection of vintage trains from the great days of American railroading. Part of the collection is stashed away safe and dry under a roof, and some of the steam monsters are even climbable uponable by ways of installed stairs and mini-porches.

Other items of interest are baking in the open sun, somewhat sadly left to rust away in wind and weather.

 

To climb about in an old GG1 electric locomotive from the Pennsylvania railroad may be exciting…

but it makes hungry too, and so we eventually leave the museum to find our way into downtown Roanoke in search of some real, true and authentick Southern food:

The Blues BBC Co, as we can read on their website, “was started in 2004 with $20,000, a truck and a dream. Two brothers, Patrick and Chris, decided to give the people of Frederick, MD “Real BBQ!” Most of the BBQ found in Maryland was less than average and mostly over-cooked. Dried-out beef and pork could be found at almost any BBQ Restaurant. Good BBQ needs to be smoked over wood. Great BBQ needs to be smoked over a wood blend for the perfect amount of time, at the perfect temperature-and lived! That’s what we strive to do.” Apart from their Restaurant in Roanoke, The Blues BBC Co can indeed be found in a truck in Frederick, Md., and they are planning to open in Carroll Creek, Md. and Jacksonville, Fl.

After reading the menu outside, we enter a dark, pub-style establishment and are greeted by bellowing music and a waitress with a hi-guys-what-can-I-do-for-you-today type of professional smile. A quick look around the yet empty place makes us decide to settle outside; a choice we do not regret, because the weather is brilliant and we are able to catch most of the afternoon sun.

Kelley, a prolific BBQ producer and connoisseur in his own right, suggests the dry-rubbed Pulled Pork; the rest is an eclectic mix of everybody’s choices, with hush puppies to start, and fries, collard greens (“Grandma style” with ham hocks and bacon) and creamed succotash (Lima beans and corn in cream sauce, actually) as sides.

word of an indian melody

Finally a new restaurant review; it’s been almost a year. One reason for the delay, of course, is the Generic English Pub. It always begins with that I want an ale, and then I end up eating fish and chips. I like fish and chips, but I won’t write reviews about it. But now I went into a real restaurant. Here is what I found.

After an evening rehearsal at St. Mike’s in central Southampton, a snack was in order and, more by chance than by design, my colleague and I stumbled upon and into Indian Melody, a new vegetarian/vegan restaurant on High Street (see another bunch of reviews here).

The menu is impressively long and slightly intimidatingly outlandish. After asking for a few more details, we found our way to two light dishes, a mixed spiced rice bowl with some freshly made condiments and a touch of fresh cilantro, and a crisp sort of large pancake with a deliciously juicy fresh cheese and vegetable filling. I’m bad at names, forgive me.

3 quick chicken roast tactics

Saturday. I’m writing music, using my pencil. I’m copying extensive cues from one part of a concerto for two keyboard instruments by J.S. Bach into photo copies of the second part, in preparation of a rehearsal on Monday, where I will be the only keyboardist present, and where I will have to fill the gaps left by the absent other soloist.

This act of severe retro-geekiness – writing Bach with a pencil – costs a lot of time; time I cannot spend on cooking (one may wonder where I get the time to write this blog entry). In anticipation of all this, I bought a whole organic fresh chicken (these things are possible in Southampton. I’m still amazed). Preparing a Chicken roast goes fast, and you don’t have to stand and chop and stir all the time. But even here, most of the talk is about how to fill the gaps, or rather, the chickeny hollows.

red cabbage and chestnuts

To explain why I ended up combining chestnuts (Wikipedia wants me to call them sweet chestnuts or marrons with 2 “r” or, in American, Spanish chestnuts; all in order to avoid confusing them with lesser, inedible kinds) and red cabbage, I will first introduce my childhood red cabbages. At home, red cabbage contained a few cloves, perhaps bay leaves, allspice, in fancy moments some apples, and some smoked pork of the bacony kind. I sort-of liked red cabbage but it was certainly not my ultimate favorite.

At the age of four, I learned to be careful with food away from home: The kitchen of the Weberhof on the island Juist (at the time best described as a seaside vacation kindergarten, where I was supposed to have fun while my parents went on an old-instrument museum trip), bluntly introduced me to the culinary side of homesickness (my present addiction to home-cooking may still be a late compensation for the loneliness of those four weeks).

Regarding North-German red cabbage, there was every reason for my reluctance:

parcel experiments with savoy cabbage

Somewhere in my archives there is a recipe with Savoy cabbage and salmon. I am sneakily not giving the link. Otherwise people would never have to leaf through my accumulated postings which would be sad.

I keep being interested in the possibilities of savoy cabbage –  it should be a marvelous vegetable, the queen of leaf cabbages. We might, for example, attempt to braise the cut-up cabbage in white wine and give it a creamy lift at the end. We’ll likely end up with a soggy and squishy heap that tastes quite nice but looks like what, when I was little, the farmers gave to the pig. Alternatively, we might try out some kitchen-wiz oven treatment with shredded savoy and minced lamb, which could result in dried-out, brown and bitter strands between the sizzling fragments of meat.

oven time II

And since we were using the oven anyway, Robin developed this Hot Salad:

You need zucchini, tomato, onion, all sliced very thinly;
crumbly goat cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil and oregano.

In a small open oven dish, layer the ingredients as follows:

zucchini-onion-salt-tomato-goat cheese-olive oil.
Repeat.
Sprinkle with pepper and oregano.

Bake in the pre-heated oven at 200C-392F until done, c. 20 minutes.

A salad, you ask? Yes!

oven time I

As usual, Swedish January brings us an inch closer to madness. So now we have this new fad: do everything in the oven. It becomes nice and warm in the kitchen in the process.

The whole thing started with Robin coming back from Virginia with a new oven-roasted cabbage chunks idea. There it’s an element of lean cooking (I hear) but over here, Robin chopped half a red cabbage in large big chunks, put them in a cast-iron pan with a lid (one of these nice ones with internal goosebumps to auto-baste the roast)

all veggie 4-star stew

One thing not to compromise when you work without meat is yumminess. What ingredients have Yum? Well, tomatoes do, olive oil, braised onions – that sort of stuff. So here’s an autumny veggie stew based on these ingredients:

endearing initiative

I wasn’t even planning to write again about Swedish vegetable freshness, but this is just too sweet.

I trust that my writings have made the big supermarket in the next village, the Bolle, world famous. It is actually a good shop, reasonably spacious, well-equipped and with a cheerful leadership that attracts cheerful employees. They also have a healthy approach to keeping the shop – as a whole – fresh and attractive.

The latest initiative was to spruce up the steamy vegetable vault with large color posters showing super-size photographs of veggies of various kinds. These are lined up along the ceiling above the goods themselves in an attractive recurring pattern. They must be intended to form an appetizing barrier when we, in despair, lift our gaze once again to the skies because we stumbled upon a bunch of bashed-up tomatoes, a mound of Jivaro cabbages, chestnut-brown celery stalks or some green moldy organic lemons.