Cilantro Lime Rice and Beans

There's not a whole lot more to add to this post, once one reads the title. The recipe showed up on my  Facebook feed, posted by a friend. I remembered it on Friday when we were looking for an easy meal for dinner. Serendipitously, we had part of a lime, as well as some cilantro left over from a meal we prepared earlier in the week. Since the only other ingredients listed (besides rice and beans, of course) were water, salt, and olive oil we were good to go. I used the basil flavored olive oil we found at Fieldstone Farm Market (a great grocery store we recently discovered in Marion, MA). 

The recipe can be found here. I used my indispensable cast-iron skillet for this one-pot meal.

Pi Day Pie

Mmm...Good pie!

We were quite pleased with ourselves last Sunday for remembering that Pi Day (3.14) was coming up, and so we got out our Teeny's Tour of Pie cookbook, from which we selected the decadent Bourbon Bacon Pecan Pie. James was in charge of making the crust, cooking the bacon, and whipping the cream for the topping; Pam was in charge of making the filling and baking.

Ingredients for this one include:

6 T butter at room temperature

1 c. packed light brown sugar

2 eggs (the recipe says 3, but I discovered that when a recipe calls for three I can use two to good effect)

1/2 t. salt

1 t. vanilla extract

3/4 c. dark corn syrup

2 T. bourbon

3 cooked slices of bacon (the recipe says four, but we only had three so that's how many we used)

8 oz. chopped pecans

Whole wheat crust (recipe follows)

James steps in here to describe his pre-dinner efforts...

Before starting the crust, I cooked three thick slices of bacon, cutting them into small pieces as they cooked. I let them cook over low heat until crisp and then let them drain on paper towels.

This was a simple, basic crust. I did kitchen math on Teeny's Whole Wheat Crust recipe, because it is for a double crust and we would have no need of a top crust or second pie very soon. (Maybe next year we'll do a quiche and a pie on the same day.

The inclusion of a bit of whole wheat allowed us to pretend this dessert was a bit less decadent than it actually was. After cleaning and thoroughly drying the counter top on our Gilligan (kitchen island), I sprinkled a bit of white flour on it. Then I combined 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour, 1 tsp salt,  and 1 Tbsp sugar. I then cut in 3/8 cup (3/4 of a stick) unsalted. butter and 1/8 cup (2 Tbsp) shortening.

I sometimes use two knives for this, but I have had success lately with a pastry cutter, pausing periodically to clear the gaps between its blades. Once I had that elusive crumbly texture, I kneaded in cold water and cold vodka, just a bit of each at a time, totalling only 2T of vodka and 4T of water. I rolled the dough into a ball, and then flattened it to a thick disk.

I then used a stone rolling pin to roll the disk out until it was a bit wider than the pie pan. I pressed it into the pan and put it in the fridge while I made dinner. After we ate, it had been chilling for well over an hour, making it ready for Pam' part.

Back to Pamela ...

The butter and brown sugar were mixed together and then the eggs were added (one at a time - stirring after each one) then the salt, vanilla, corn syrup and bourbon. Most of the chopped pecans went in, along with the bacon, but enough pecans were saved to put a layer into the bottom of the pie crust. Once these were placed, the rest of the filling was poured into the crust, and the pie was baked at 350 for 50 minutes. It then set and cooled for another 50 minutes. 

The bacon and the more-than-usual amount of pecans cut down on the sweetness of what can be an overly sweet pie.

James again ... for the first time ever, I used a small mixing bowl and small whisk to make the whipped cream. As we say, rather than a mixer with a mixing attachment, we use a whisk with a rower attachment. Coastal rowing has given me some forearms! I combined about 1/3 cup whipping cream, 1 Tbsp confectioner's sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla and whipped until peaky. We put this on each slice, and I also splashed some bourbon on top of mine.

We had this for dessert following a simple dinner of fried rice. We did not want to overdo things!

 

Invalid Cooking

Look at the title of this post again; there are two ways to pronounce it. We mean both: cooking that is not valid (in-VAL-id) and cooking for those who are incapacitated (the archaic IN-vul-id). From our point of view, both apply to a food item we learned about this weekend: beef tea.

Let that steep in: beef tea. 

It is, unfortunately, just what it sounds like and it is a real thing, though not at Casa Hayes-Boh.

Palm Leaf badge from
How Girls Can Help
Their Country

We heard about it on The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel (s4e8) on the same weekend that I was preparing a lecture on unorthodox teas and on the same weekend that Pam read about beef tea in a fascinating article about retired Girl Scout badges.

A badge from the early twentieth century was for invalid cooking -- that is, the preparation of foods that would be easy to eat or restorative of health, for those unable to eat regular foods.

I am reminded of a hospital stay when I was ten years old, in which I rejected a nice plate of spaghetti and had nothing but creamed soups and Jello for the rest of a week. I am glad beef tea was out of favor by then!

People in the tea industry use "orthodox tea" to distinguish the products of Camelia sinensis from the tinctures of other plants, such as yerba maté and herbal teas. All of the candidates I knew about before this weekend are extracted from plants. I am very pleased to have learned of this seriously unorthodox exception.

When thinking about the term beef tea, both of us immediately thought it was just a funny way of saying broth, but this is not the case. As detailed in the Beef Tea recipe on epicurious, beef it cooked and then seeped and filtered. The beef itself is discarded just as tea leaves would be, and the bones are not present at all. As its presence on epicurious suggests, this is having a bit of a comeback. 

Perhaps it is not surprising that there are some particularly British ways of doing this, including a paste or fluid called Bovril and beef heart tea.