Hey good lookin', what's cookin'?

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It seems to me that marrowfat peas are also found in Caribbean shops.

That was my thinking too.  After the first round of fruitless searching, I told my wife "I'm just going to go to the Carribean grocer in Kensington and I'll probably get my choice of four sizes and three brands".  But NOPE.  And the guy in the venerable "House of Spices" didn't even know what they were.

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Sounds kinda good and kinda gross at once.

YES!  Hence my fascination.  When food really shouldn't work, but people love it anyway, I get curious.

Best example around our house:  the first time I grilled some lamb and served it up with mint jelly.  My wife thought I was out of my tree, but now the mint jelly is mandatory.  Shouldn't work, but works.

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I came across a special on shrimp, so I'm doing them up in lime and coconut sauce tonight, with rice and stir fried gai lan.

I would eat so much shrimp if Mrs. M. liked them the way I do, but if I put them in (say) a chow mein, she'll usually eat one to humour me, then give me all of hers.

But we do love gai lan.  The first many times I bought it I just sauteed it in a bit of butter (like I do with a lot of vegetables) but we always found it bitter (and we both LIKE bitter).  Then I figured out that if you boil it (like I do with almost no vegetables) and dress it afterward then it's not bitter at all.

Strangely, even in Chinatown it's as much as double the price of a lot of other Asian greens (e.g. bok choi, choi sum, pak choi, etc.).

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I said to buy gai lan, but it turns out the blond guy picked up yu choi.

What is it about the help these days?

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but I'd tone down the shrimp paste in the sauce next time.

Hehe.  I get the necessity of shrimp paste for lots of things, but why does it have to be so much like wet cat food?

Sounds almost like a "cure".

I do a similar thing to salmon, before cooking.  I pack it in kosher salt, brown sugar and pepper for at least two hours before smoking or pan searing.  Google "brine a chicken" to see the same thing but with water.  It really does work, and it really doesn't result in too much salt.

Yesterday I was at my local Metro, picking up some chicken thighs for dinner, and I had about $10 in my pocket so I thought I may as well grab up anything else we're out of, so long as it all rang up under ten.  I grabbed a couple of cans of baked beans -- one of a very few things we ever buy in a can, and something we wanted recently but didn't have.  Then I spotted some holiday-themed Oreo cookies that I thought might make my wife smile, so I put the beans back.  And on the way home, it occurred to me that it's been ages since I've made baked beans, so why not do that?

So I'm giving this recipe a whirl.  Seems uncluttered, and doesn't call for any bullshit like a can of tomato soup, or sriracha sauce, or whatever.

So I soaked up some Great Northerns with a bit of baking soda -- I'm curious to see if that helps -- and then gave them a brief boil in the pressure cooker just to be on the safe side.

For the pork, I'd thought of buying a wee piece of salt pork from Metro, but for the morsel you get it's not cheap, and more importantly they don't always have it, so I went a bit further afield to one of the Portuguese butchers, and sure enough I got a glorious hunk of smoked (but whole) bacon for a couple of bucks -- enough to do this and also the next two things that call for salt pork or fatback or similar.  So I guess I'll find out how it all worked out in about seven hours or so.  For once I didn't really deviate too far from the recipe, besides scaling it down some.  I even bought actual Dijon!

I also went with Great Northern beans, rather than the more common Navy or haricot.  They're a bit harder to find (e.g. Metro doesn't carry them) but when I'm in a Loblaws or an affiliate they've always got them.  If you like white beans to cook to a nice creamy tenderness while still staying mostly whole, they beat the other two hands down.  I can't emphasize this enough... WAY better.

Any trouble sourcing the salt pork?

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They are useful for people working either outside or at home, as many dishes can go for hours on slow without needing attention.

I read a suggestion the other day that they were developed, at least in part, to facilitate the making of Cholent for the Shabbat meal.  Lots of good non-kosher uses as well!  :)

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Curried goat is on my recipe list this week.

Ah, goat.  For when lamb just isn't gamey enough anymore.

The first time I ever ate goat was also the first time I ever ate Indian food (including my first time eating basmati rice, which I naively believed was a recipe rather than a type of rice!).  A friend and her mom took me to an Indian buffet on Gerrard, circa 1987, and it opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Later, when we'd moved to Toronto and I was going to school, there was a wee little hole-in-the-wall Carribean joint around the corner called "Coconut Grove".  We used to swing by for a super cheap lunch, oftentimes just a big takeout container of rice and peas for a dollar.  The magic happened when they'd ask if you wanted some gravy on your rice, and you could pick from the sauce on any of the curries that they had simmering away for rotis and such.  I always chose goat, and more than once I noticed the nice young woman behind the counter fishing around in the gravy to make sure I got one or two little scraps of meat. 

When I finally felt like my kitchen skills were up to the challenge of making goat curry at home, I asked a Trinidadian co-worker for any advice, and she basically told me I couldn't go wrong unless I didn't use the correct type and brand of curry powder -- Chief.  Two days later she brought me a pouch, and she was right.  First kick at the can and it was exactly right.

It comes in a yellow cellophane pack, like this:

[IMG]http://i67.tinypic.com/29kyomf.jpg[/IMG]

Add it to something and the result is West Indian Curried Something.

The brand actually makes a curry powder specifically for duck and goat, but I've yet to try that one.  My No-Frills carries a whole bunch of different Chief products, though who knows how easy it would or wouldn't be to find outside of areas with a Carribean population.  I tried once making my own WI curry powder from scratch, but it didn't even come close.

A little more on that first goat curry.  Maybe it wasn't "exactly right", though the flavour certainly was.

If I recall correctly I'd picked up the goat at Dominion (before it became Metro) -- a 1kg bag, frozen, for ten bucks.  If you've never bought frozen goat, it's basically just cut (with a bandsaw) into fairly random chunks, complete with bone.  Big bones, little bones, tiny wee sharp bones... you get it all.  And it's typically just cooked on the bone, and you figure the bones out while you eat.

This was kind of new to me.  I guess we all start learning to cook by watching our parents cook (Mom, probably, but Dad for me, since he did all the cooking).  And I don't think my Dad ever cooked stewed meat on the bone.  In fact he would buy that crappy, fatless, supermarket stew beef that looks like large pink rocks.  He'd throw some onions and carrots and potatoes and garlic and the beef into a pot, add water, and cook it until the beef was done, but the gravy on his stew was really just salted water -- no colour, since he didn't brown the beef, and no texture since he didn't add any thickeners and there were no bones.  One of my first food epiphanies was learning to brown that meat!

So I'd browned my goat meat and added onions and garlic, the curry powder, then some water and started cooking, low and slow, with some carrots and potatoes cut up to add closer to the end.  Things were going great until Mrs. Magoo got a phone call from one of her sisters, in some kind of crisis, and they got to talking.  Meanwhile, my curry was simmering away.  They chatted and chatted and chatted, and at a certain point I noticed that the gravy on my goat was magnificent.  Thick, but not too thick, aromatic and velvety and shiny.  But they were still talking, and talking and talking.  Long story short, by the time they were done talking, the gravy had broken.  It still tasted right, but once it separated, no amount of stirring would bring it back together.

Still, though, my take-away from it was that bones are awesome.  The gelatin and collagen in them (and the other connective tissue) thickens a sauce naturally, and in a way that cornstarch or a roux just can't.  When I make a beef stew now, I usually use either a shank (with the bone(s) thrown in just for the gravy) or sometimes beef rib, again with the bones.

I actually have a cookbook called Bones.  I think i'mma have to take it off the shelf and give it a read again.  It's the right time of year for it.

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Yes, I should borrow that

Do.

And look for her other cookbooks as well:  "Fat" and "Odd Bits".  I have them all, and they're all amazing.  Shameless and decadent, right and wrong at the same time.

Seems she has a new book:  "Bitter".  I may have to have a chat with Santa about that one.

Funny addendum to the whole floaters/marrowfat peas thing.  After all the legwork I had to put in just to find some unsplit green peas, I was at my local Metro today and they had a big bag of whole dried yellow peas for a buck and a half!  Naturally, I snapped one up.  I don't think I'll end up using it for floaters, since I sometimes like to obey the rules, but that floater soup makes me want more whole pea soup, so soon enough I think I'll be cooking up a pot.  Maybe I'll use the last piece of my bacon hunk, or maybe I'll just use a couple of strips of regular breakfast bacon.

Pro tip:  next time bacon you like is on sale, grab up a package and remove each strip individually and roll it up into a tight little roll.  Put your little bacon rolls in a resealable plastic bag (putting each one at a ninety degree angle to its neighbours, so they don't stick) and freeze the bag.  Then, when a recipe calls for a a little bit of bacon (e.g. bacon and lentil soup, stuffed mushrooms, collard greens) you can pull out one or two of the little rolls, and you don't have to thaw a whole pound.

Just a sidebar post, apropos of nothing.

When I was a kid, in Sarnia, my bestie was a dude my age named Chris.  He was the youngest of a family of Slovaks (by his reckoning), with two older sisters and two older brothers.  His dad worked his ass off to pay bills, and his mom worked her ass off to feed seven.

But his house was the first time I ever had perogi -- and when Mrs. Chris made them, she covered the whole dining room table with them.  Some potato, some cheese and some prune.  And when she made cabbage rolls, I don't even know what kind of pot she made them in, because there was enough for 20.  But she's totally my "high water mark" for anything Eastern European that I try.  I wouldn't know how to tell her that I sometimes buy the dollar-fitty bags of frozen perogie at No Frills.