Adapt & Overcome, A Culinary Adventure

American society seems to admire originality, variety, and all things unique and individual.  But we surround ourselves with unrelenting sameness, especially when it comes to food.  Here in the Mahoning Valley, in the northeastern corner of Ohio, grocery stores are in a rut.  While the decorations change with every Hallmark holiday, the produce, poultry, seafood, and meats are UN-apologetically the same old, same old all year round.  

I find it depressing.  So depressing, in fact, that I basically gave up grocery shopping and cooking for myself about three years ago.  When you find yourself ordering boxed and canned meals from Amazon, you know you've really given up, and that's where I was just a few months ago, hobbling together a diet from convenience foods, Chinese carryout, and pre-sliced cheese. 

I recently joined the Lake-to-River food co-op, however, with a determination to get back into the fight for fresh food, real food, preferably locally-grown.  And that's where I found, on their website, a most extraordinary thing, a type of meat I've never seen or eaten:  beef cheeks!  So, naturally, I ordered some.

What Are Beef Cheeks?

Beef cheeks are thick, dense facial muscles.  They are a VERY tough meat, with lots of sinew and almost no fat.  Some sources on the Internet will tell you that beef cheeks are "tender," but they are talking about the meat's texture AFTER a long, slow, wet cooking.

As with all meats that are tough--tongue, hocks, brisket-- beef cheeks, I knew, would benefit from a method of cooking called braising.  


Braising is when you slow boil something in liquid for an extended period of time.  You can do it in the oven, on the stovetop, or in a slow cooker.  Armed with this information, I started thinking about what flavors I wanted.

Adapting A Recipe

The first beef cheek recipes to turn up on my Google search reminded me that tough meats used to be the dinner fare of the lower classes worldwide, showing up as stews or as stewed-then-grilled tidbits. 

I was tempted, for a few days, to use the beef cheeks to make a taco filling. I made beef tongue tacos a few years ago, and they were stunningly tasty (and lean!).  But in the end, I decided to turn to my memories of a Chinese beef brisket stew from '70s. 

I must have tracked down and read several dozen Chinese beef stew recipes before I settled on one to use as a basic model.  The one I chose is called "Cantonese Style Braised Beef Stew 炆牛腩 "  at one of my favorite Chinese recipe websites, Yi Reservation:   

Using Yi's recipe as a base, I made some alterations:  

• Replaced the 2 lbs. of beef brisket with 1 lb. of beef cheeks
• Replaced the Hou Chou sauce with Hoisin Sauce plus 4 cloves of garlic (in additional to the hoisin and garlic already in the recipe)
• Omitted the rock sugar because, hey, all that hoisin is bound to make things plenty sweet.
• Instead of "cooking wine," added a splash of dry white wine.
• Omitted "spice" (5-spice powder)
• Instead of 1 bay leaf, I used 4 bays leaves because other Chinese beef stew recipes I read that day used anywhere from 3 to 6 bay leaves, which I thought sounded interesting.

I also went to the grocery store to get vegetables for the stew.  Originally, I was thinking that greens would be good, or maybe baby carrots and green beans.  But when I was walking through the produce section, an amazing sight beheld my eyes:  daikon radishes!!  I ended up choosing one large daikon radish and a small bag of fresh green beans.

Mel's Recipe for Cantonese-style Beef Cheek Stew

After the adjustments, this is what my list of ingredients looked like: 

• 2 or 3 T cooking oil
• 1 lb. beef cheeks, cut into small pieces
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 7 clove garlic, minced
• 3 slices ginger, skin on 
• 1 T oyster sauce
• 2 T hoisin sauce
• 1/4 cup chardonney 
• 1 T low-sodium soy sauce
• 1 T dark soy sauce
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 T dried orange peel
• 1 star anise
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 large daikon radish, washed and cut into bite-sized chunks
• 8 oz. fresh greens beans, trimmed and cut in half
• chopped scallions for garnish

Beef cheek meat is TOUGH!  I had a hellava time cutting it up.  At first, I didn't have enough control with my regular, super-sharp butcher knife to get through the sinew; the knife kept slipping off.  I had to use two implements of destruction:  my short, Santoku-style knife and a pair of poultry sheers.  As I was cutting, I realized that this dense meat is probably going to be extremely delicious because of all the tendons, and it would take hours to become tender, but it would be well worth the effort and the wait.

The white is sinew, not fat.  This is some of the leanest meat I've ever seen!

Cutting beef cheeks into bite-sized chunks takes a lot of physical effort.

Method

In a dutch oven, saute the onion in the oil until it is translucent, then add the cut-up meat and saute until lightly cooked on all sides.  


Add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry for another few minutes. 

Add the liquids, then aromatics (orange peel, star anise, and bay leaves), bring to a boil, lower the heat to very low, put on the lid, and allow it to cook for two or three hours, until the meat is tender. 


Check on the stew periodically to make sure the liquid doesn't boil away.  If necessary, add water.

Add the daikon radish pieces and green beans and continue slow cooking for another hour.  


Remove and discard the bay leaves and the chunks of ginger root.

Success!

I served the stew over steamed basmati rice.

The diakon radish is an awesome vegetable.  It's a sturdy root, like a carrot or turnip or potato, but with an extremely mild radish flavor.  It went well with the sauce and meat, as did the green beans. The meat was downright sumptuous, very 'meaty' in flavor, tender, but with no obvious animal fat, so it wasn't 'heavy' tasting.  And the sauce was amazeballs.  

I had my doubts that a combination of 4 or 5 bottled sauces plus an overload of bay leaves and some orange peel was magic, but . . . 


Hey!  It is!

White Bean Soup w/ Lamb Andouille & Dandelion Greens

In an effort to get back into the habit of cooking for myself, I joined the Lake-to-River Food Coop in Youngstown, Ohio in March.  My thought was that maybe if I could add some adventure to the shopping portion of cooking, maybe I could lure my inner chef back out into the kitchen.

For my first online order, I let whimsy be the guide.  I bought a half peck of apples, some smoked cheddar cheese, local eggs, a loaf of bakery bread, salsa, kim chee, and a pound of andouille sausage made of lamb.  I had to wait four days to collect my order from the storefront on the north side of town, so I had time to imagine all the meals I might make with something as exotic as lamb sausage.  In the end, I settled on a fairly simple peasant dish and cold weather favorite with a Southern twist:  White Bean Soup with Lamb Andouille.

 

I went to my regular grocery for an onion, some celery (ended up with a whole head of celery, most of which will probably go to waste), a bell pepper, and some collard greens. The greens turned out to be, like the celery, a problem of quantity, because the only collards on sale were in monstrous pre-packaged bags bigger than three human heads combined. Collard greens do cook down, but not that much!  Scanning the produce shelves, I spotted dandelion greens in a manageable bundle, so I grabbed those as a substitute.

When I got the andouille sausage home on Thursday, I was shocked.  It was raw meat, ground and spiced.  It was not smoked sausage, like the andouille I'm used to.  I took a small piece of it, flattened it, and baked it for about twenty minutes so that I could taste it for spices and to see how much fat there was.

 

It turned out to be rather lean for a sausage.  It was a medium spiciness, nicely garlic-y, but it had way too much salt in it.  Because of the taste test, and because I would be using canned beans, I decided not to add any salt at all to pot until after the soup was done.  And I’m glad I did, because no additional salt was needed.

To make this soup, brown together in a large frying pan:

1 lb. lamb andouille sausage
1 diced onion
1 diced green bell pepper
2 stalks of celery, diced
5 cloves of minced garlic

When the vegetables are soft and the meat is brown, put the mixture into a slow cooker and add:

1 big pinch of dried thyme leaves
2 cans (15.8 oz each) navy beans, rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes (14.5 oz)
1 bunch of dandelion greens, chopped, including stems

Add enough water to make a "soup" consistency.

Set the slow cooker to low and forget it for three to four hours.

I enjoyed cooking, the aroma therapy, and even the taste of it for the first few days.  Over four days, I ate the soup for five meals.

Late in the week, I had another bowl, but there was still lots of soup left, so I ended up freezing it.  But, to be honest, I am not looking forward to eating it again . . . my taste buds are done with lamb andouille for the foreseeable future.

As for the rest of my Lake-to-River purchases:

The loaf of bread turned out to be huge.  I mean: HUGE!  It was very white and very soft and fluffy, not at all crusty or chewy like what I was expecting from a “European” style bread.  It was also sweet--so sweet, in fact, that I took to eating it a slice at a time, toasted, with butter, for an occasional dessert.  Even so, after a week and a half, when the loaf started to mold, I had barely eaten half the loaf.

The smoked cheddar is lovely.  I am still working on it.  I will likely be reordering it in the future.

The salsa is HOT!  I love it.  Still working on it.

The kim chee is not very hot, but it is very tangy, satisfying my love for sour and pickled things.  I eat it as a side with rice.  This is another item I will likely order again in the future.

Half a peck, by the way, is 17 apples.  If I’d known that, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.  I tried very, very hard and managed to eat 15 of them. They were tasty, though they became a torment by the second week: Oh, goddess! I’d better eat another apple before they all rot!  I kept thinking.  I even chopped an apple up for my dog, Roma, which promptly she spit out on the floor and walked away from.  She’s not a fan of fruit.  Most dogs aren’t, though I have owned several dogs who liked apples.

Overall, I’d say the apples were very good, but, as with the bread and the celery and the pot of white bean soup, I felt bullied by the quantity.  I am just not an apple-a-day, or anything every day, kind of gal.

Yes, I am aware that I could have made a pie out of the excess apples, but then I would have had a whole pie to contend with!  Pie every day for a week OR defrosted slices of pie whenever I want until freezer burn forces me to toss them in the trash anyway.  I've come to hate frozen food with a passion, even my own frozen food.

Large quantities is my main issue right now as a solo shopper and diner.  What I need is to be able to buy food in sane quantities so that I can eat fresh without wasting food.  In Holland, I could easily purchase ingredients for one person at a time, because they don't (or didn’t) package everything based on a family of four or six, like they do here in America.

In Holland, when I lived there in the '90s, you could even buy half a loaf of bread at the bakery.  Why can’t we do that here?

Have Knife, Will Babble to Relaunch Next Month

Hot sauce covers a multitude of frozen-meal and fast-food sins.  I keep a stash of these bad boys in my desk at work at all times!

My food situation has worsened since I last posted on this site five years ago.  More local grocery stores have closed.  Specialty groceries have gone out of business.  The lack of variety in fresh produce and the dearth of Asian and other ethnic food ingredients in the Mahoning Valley continues to make cooking fresh, international cuisine a challenge.  While we do have ways to buy directly from farmers, I have found that CSAs and many meat-buying programs require a lump sum of cash in order to participate.  I've done it a few times, but coming up with $300 or $600 in a single lump is, frankly, an issue.  Add to that the problem of being a single eater in a food system centered on packaging in bulk, and you have all my excuses gathered in one paragraph for giving up the challenge.

Most of my meals now are pre-packaged, commercial, and frozen, as are most of my lunches.  But  I'm miserable.  Buffalo wings have their limits. As does pizza and overcooked pasta with universal  red sauce.  Besides, I NEED fresh vegetables, even if I am forced to buy enough for a dozen servings at a time!

So . . . Next month, I will relaunch this site with a slightly different mission.  I will, once again, stage my own private resistance to the corporate food complex.  I will talk about living in one of America's biggest food deserts and work on solutions.  I will research new fresh food sources that are closer to home. And I will try new strategies to avoid waste.  I'll also review cookbooks, research topics in food history, and . . . 

Hey!  I might even cook!