Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing well. I’m still around, just haven’t been posting. I visited this site the other day and noticed that the most recent recipe was for a ButcherBox promotion back around Thanksgiving, and and it kind of bothered me. So I thought I would post a new recipe to at least push that one down a bit in the stream.
I developed this recipe when writing The Heritage Cookbook, but I ended up with too many recipes from the Caribbean, and so it didn’t make the final cut. But it’s still a simple, delicious recipe, with some subtle tropical notes that bring sunshine to your plate. There’s a lot of flexibility here; if you cannot find breadfruit or callaloo locally, I’ve included some more conventional substitutes.
I recommend eating this dish with your hands. It’s worth it.
This is always my favorite time of the year to be in the kitchen. Not only do we get to start focusing on soups and stews to break that oncoming winter chill, but it’s roasting season.
Every year my friends at ButcherBox run a one-day promotion where they offer a free turkey plus $10 off any new signups with their program. The turkey is 10-14lbs, all-natural, and animal welfare certified — and will ship right to your home in time for Thanksgiving.
We’ve been using ButcherBox for several years now. They ship monthly curated boxes of 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage breed pork, and wild-caught seafood. You can customize the box for specific types of meat (like an all-beef box), or even customize which cuts you want to receive. Each box ranges from 9-14 lbs, which is enough to feed my family of four for at least a week (but often more). I like the program because we can decide whether to be surprised with new cuts of meat that challenge us to come up with new creations, or fall back on our favorite cuts — all conveniently shipped to our door. They’ve also recently expanded their wild-caught seafood selection, which now includes Alaskan sockeye salmon, Alaskan cod, sea scallops, haddock, and cold-cracked Maine lobster.
Click here to sign up, and be sure to enter the code “TURKEY10” to get an additional $10 off. The turkey deal will be available until November 15th, but the $10 off code will only work today (November 6th).
Today I’m sharing a simple grilled meat recipe, something that really hits the spot on a summer evening. Its preparation is deceptively simple: just rub it all over with lemon juice, give it a fair bit of salt, and grill it until cooked through. Nyama Choma’s charm comes from its down-to-basics approach, letting you complement the pure meat flavor with a spicy and tangy Kachumbari Salad (also pictured: Sukuma Wiki.
Hi everyone. It’s been a bit since I posted a recipe. Someone wrote me the other day and asked whether I had a Chicken Tagine recipe. I did (and do), and it reminded me that I have many tasty recipes that didn’t make the final cut into The Heritage Cookbook. So instead of letting them waste away in some random Google Doc, I’ll try my best to post a recipe here and there.
Things are fine. Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I thought that all this telework and social distancing would give me an opportunity to return to my more prolific days here on the blog, but I’ve found that since I’m sitting in front of a computer so much doing work-related tasks, I haven’t been interested in returning to my computer in the evenings. So perhaps once things eventually normalize I will get back to my old blogging routine, but for now, let’s just enjoy some Chicken Tagine and figure all that other stuff out later.
Memorial Day is right around the corner. It’s often considered the first grilling weekend of the season across the United States, although it might feel a bit different this year without friends coming over. Either way, this recipe is tasty enough that it will hopefully compensate for the lack of Memorial Day parties we’ll all be attending in 2020.
While Tandoori Chicken recipes are found in my first two books, this beloved dish is making its blog debut today. It gets its name from the traditional clay oven found in South Asia, known as a tandoor in Hindi/Urdu. This dish as we know it today was likely developed in the 19th century, but evidence of similar grilled poultry dishes can be traced back to the Harappan Civilization, which existed in the Indus River Valley over 5,000 years ago. Given that most of these spices are native to the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, it’s no stretch to believe that these flavors have existed for thousands of years.
For this recipe, we’re going to go as economical as possible – we’ll break down a whole chicken and grill its individual parts. If that doesn’t seem to be up your alley, no worries, you can use any combination of chicken parts on their own (more details below the recipe). Bear in mind that bone-in chicken imparts the most flavor, and you’ll want to remove the skin so that you can get as much flavor into the meat as possible.
You probably don’t have any reindeer sitting around at your house (unless you do – hello, Canadians and Scandinavians, thanks for visiting my site!). Luckily, this simple recipe can also be used with venison if you or a loved one had an eventful hunting trip this year, or even with bison or beef steaks if you didn’t have a good hunting trip.
This dish hails from Finland, but is enjoyed in Sweden, Norway and Russia as well. What I like about this recipe is that it makes no assumptions – the key to this delicious meal is slicing it thinly, seasoning it sparingly, and nudging it gently towards tenderness with a combination of light braising and some crisping at the end. The whole process takes about two hours from start to finish, but it’s totally worth it.
Nearly seven years ago, I developed my recipe for Sukuma Wiki, a Kenyan braised collard greens and ground beef recipe, and it’s been a favorite ever since. I put it in my first book, The Ancestral Table, and it’s often the dish I point to in the book when someone asks where they should start cooking. It takes about 30 minutes to prepare, and uses very affordable ingredients — and tastes great, too.
When writing The Heritage Cookbook, I knew that I wanted to include this dish to represent Eastern African cookery, but wanted to go back to the drawing board in terms of honoring the traditional preparation of this dish. What I came up with is a flavor provide very similar to my original recipe, but meat-free, and with nice meaty hunks of tomatoes to replicate those missing chunks of ground beef. Red onion also mellowed out the dish some compared to a white or yellow onion, which helped to balance everything just right.
Does butter really make everything better? I think so. Julia Child also once said, “With enough butter, anything is good.” This week’s recipe proves her right.
Often, I will buy a small head of cabbage at the grocery store, with no concrete plans for it. They’re just so dang cheap, and they keep in the vegetable bin for a long time. Typically I will just sauté the cabbage in some butter, seasoned plainly with salt and pepper (a splash of apple cider vinegar also adds a bit of depth). But when I’m feeling very fancy, I’ll throw in some complementary flavors, like in this recipe, which includes radish and woodsy mushrooms. The trick is to pull the cabbage from the heat right as it starts to soften, or maybe a bit before — it’s always better to be undercooked than overcooked.
When most people think of cured pork, they think of the two champions of the cured-pork world: bacon and ham. But the Cajun dish Tasso (sometimes referred to as Tasso Ham) beats these two famous counterparts in another way — you can’t beat its affordability and ease. Because Tasso is made with shoulder or loin, it’s much cheaper to prepare than bacon (pork belly) or ham (pork leg), because the former is much more expensive, and the latter is hard to find in its unprocessed state.
This is a two-step process: first, you cure the pork to remove its moisture and to impart its characteristic pink hue. Next, you smoke it at a low heat (under 180F if possible). The process is a little involved, but the end product is super versatile; I use it in my gumbo, jambalaya, or any dish that calls for bacon or salt pork.
You’ll want to cut the shoulder into smaller pieces — my rule of thumb is that each piece should be the size of a baseball. This gives you more surface area to work with, so that you can imbue it with all of that cajuny goodness.
This dish is from Liguria, the coastal region in northwest Italy. This area is known for its abundant pine nuts, which make an appearance in this dish (fun fact: pesto, which relies heavily on pine nuts, is also from this region). Liguria also borders with the eastern side of France, and this dish shares French culinary staple — namely slow-braised meat in a wine sauce.
Cooking with rabbit can be intimidating to Westerners, but it’s actually quite simple. Just think of it like an oddly-shaped chicken, that’s made with all white meat. The hardest part is finding a whole rabbit, which you can often find at specialty butchers or Asian markets. They’re also available online, and my friends at US Wellness Meats regularly carry whole rabbits — just throw it in your box the next time you get an order of their incredible 75% lean grass-fed ground beef.
The Domestic Man 