Food « (y)our food choices™

Wonderful flavors of orange, rosemary, and red wine are perfect for a weeknight Valentine's day dish.

With so many new kitchen gadgets coming onto the market these days, it’s easy to understand why home cooks feel overwhelmed by the expanding kitchen toolbox on offer from our favorite retailers. We thought it would be nice to take a step back in time by returning to a classic, trusted device we’ve come to love – the pressure cooker. As we write “trusted,” our thoughts turn to our mothers and their fears of exploding lids, shattered glass and hot molten food blown all over ceilings and walls. Some love these things, some hate them, and some don’t know what the hell we’re talking about. Read on, we’ll explain.

Pressure cookers are stove top pans with locking lids on them that use steam and pressure to cook food very, very quickly. Think of it as a sort of precursor to the microwave that hisses but doesn’t emit electromagnetic waves (or reheat coffee). There are so many great uses for the pressure cooker it’s a wonder why there aren’t more of them in U.S. households. But when we bring up the joys of the pressure cooker to our moms, we can see shrieks of terror in their eyes. Modern pressure cookers are infinitely safer than those our grandmothers used to put up preserves. With built-in safety features that prevent explosions even under the most negligent use, these cookers provide the perfect solution to the home cook who wants to prepare slow food quickly. Slow cookers, used for long braising of roasts and all-day simmering of stews, certainly have their time and place in the kitchen, but when you want to cook a stew or beans extra fast there’s only one device that will get the job done and it isn’t your microwave oven.

If you’re in the mood for a hardy yet elegant dish for Valentine’s day, without all the stress, may we suggest that you try epicurious.com’s Lamb and Shitake Mushroom Stew in the pressure cooker. The wonderful thing about this recipe is that you can substitute almost any meat for the lamb (our latest version made use of wild elk). You can use button or portabella mushrooms in place of the shitake if you don’t like the shitake’s slippery texture. It’s even better made a day or two ahead and reheated, served over buttered noodles, orzo, polenta, rice, or simply in a bowl with a nice piece of baguette on the side to sop up the delicious sauce. So there’s no need to stress over what to cook on Monday night’s romantic dinner if you’ve planned ahead, just reheat and serve.

Pressure cookers are safe and easy to use. They’re also energy efficient. So put away any fear of catastrophe inherited from the cooks in your family and invest in a tool you’ll love the very first time you put it to use. You can spend a little or a lot on a good pressure cooker. Our suggestion is to start modestly. Our pressure cooker was a gift, but we suspect it wasn’t a bank breaker. We don’t need a lot of bells and whistles on a pressure cooker – quick pressure release, low pressure settings, etc. We’ve experimented with ours and know how to get the best out of it. With a little time, you’ll get there too.

This Lamb and Shitake Stew recipe makes use of some of our favorite flavors – red wine, rosemary, orange and salty Kalamata olive. Use grass-fed beef if you can’t find good lamb. You’ll still be pleased by the results. In the pressure cooker, all those great flavors come together in minutes. Enjoy!

Pressure Cooked Meat and Mushroom Stew (aka Lamb and Shitake Stew)
Can be doubled and frozen for a quick dinner later in the month

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 lb. lamb shoulder meat or chops, beef, elk or pork roast cut into 3/4-inch cubes
6 ounces fresh mushrooms, shitake (stemmed), button, or portabella mushroom cut into 1/2-inch pieces,
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2 3×1/2-inch strips orange peel (orange part only)
2 large garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary
1 14 1/2-ounce can diced tomatoes in juice
1 cup Chianti, Sangiovese, or other fruity red wine
10 Kalamata olives or other brine-cured black olives, pitted, halved

Heat oil in a pressure cooker pot over high heat. Sprinkle lamb, or whatever meat you are using, with salt and pepper. Add the meat to pot; sauté until light brown, about 5 minutes, you may need to do this in two steps to avoid overcrowding the pan. Add the next 5 ingredients; sauté until onion is golden, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes with juices and wine; bring to boil. Put the lid on top of the pressure cooker and reduce heat to medium-low for about 10-15 minutes. Remove from heat, release the pressure and stir, checking to make sure that the stew does not burn on the bottom of the pan. If the sauce is still too thin then put the lid back on, bring back to pressure and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add olives to stew and season with salt and pepper. (Can be made a day or two ahead. Cool slightly. Refrigerate uncovered until cold, then cover and keep refrigerated. Rewarm over medium heat, adding water by tablespoonfuls to thin sauce if desired.) Serve with orzo, buttered noodles, or rice as the base for the stew.

[A little 1962 trivia: On January 21, 1962, snow fell in San Francisco and accumulated 3 inches!]

Steak Bercy

We were gifted a delightful little Chamberlain Calendar of French Cooking, dated 1962, and decided to cook all 54 of its recipes this year. If you’re unfamiliar with the mother/daughter duo of Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, you’ve missed some of the finest food writing in a generation. They published a mountain of recipe books as well as calendars, diaries and annuals that covered a wide range of cookery including American, French and Italian. The recipes deserve our attention and we’ll be sharing them with you in the weeks and months to come. We’re a few recipes behind, but will soon be catching up in the following weeks. Think, Julie and Julia only a bit more simplistic and with a more realistic timetable.

The first recipe in the 1962 calendar made good use of a package of beautiful deer steaks and introduced us to an old (but new to us) classic – sauce Bercy. Now, sauce Bercy is a white wine sauce and one that might accompany either fish or steak. There are variations depending on the meat to be embellished, but the base recipe is essentially the same – a reduction of white wine flavored with shallot and finished with butter and fresh parsley. When serving sauce Bercy with fish, you add a little fish stock to the wine before reducing it. In the case of the Chamberlain ladies’ simplified version of sauce Bercy, the wine and shallots are reduced before you add lemon juice and butter off the heat. The sauce is strained and then finished with a seasoning of salt and pepper and a couple of tablespoons of fresh, finely chopped parsley. Spooned over simply grilled steak that has been cooked rare, this sauce combines with the natural juices of the meat to make one incredibly tasty dish.

Homemade potato chips

For dinner, we served the venison steak Bercy with a side of beautifully baked potato “chips” that we sliced paper-thin on a mandolin and then layered with fresh parsley leaves between them and a drizzle of olive oil. With just a sprinkle of salt, these simple yet elegant potatoes were the perfect accompaniment to the tangy Bercy sauce.

Preparing the poached eggs and sauce

We grilled more steaks than two guys should eat and with more than a half a bottle of white wine in the fridge leftover we decided to do a little experimenting by poaching eggs in white wine. For brunch the following day, using the same technique as our eggs poached in Champagne, we cooked the eggs first, removed them and added shallots to the remaining white wine then quickly reduced the liquid and followed the rest of the sauce Bercy recipe. The combination of rare deer steak with creamy egg yolks was a wonderful treat. Why can’t restaurants in San Francisco be more creative with their Eggs Benedict? We suggest that if you do try this wonderful sauce and steak you grill up a couple extra ones for brunch the next day. Steak and eggs has never tasted so good.

Steak and eggs

Steak Bercy
[Adapted from The Chamberlain Calendar of French Cooking, For Engagements, 1962]

1 big steak of your choice (enough for 2 people)
1 cup dry white wine
¼ cup shallots, finely minced
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, finely minced
Juice of ½ lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

Grill the steak according to taste, which the Chamberlain’s hope is rare.

To prepare the sauce, simmer shallots and wine until the mixture is reduced to about 1/3 cup. Off heat, stir in butter and lemon juice. Strain the sauce and season with salt and pepper. Stir in parsley. Reheat but don’t let it come to a boil.

Once steak is cooked, place it on a hot platter and pour sauce Bercy over. Slice steak and plate, spooning the mixture of juices and sauce over the individual servings.