cook pot stories

Happy New Year! I know I'm almost two weeks late with the wish, but it's still kindly meant, so please accept it in the spirit intended. The New Year is a (somewhat arbitrary) time to look at our lives, evaluate and decide what we want to work on in the coming year. For example, I want to post in this blog more often. It's a time full of cultural tradition too, from the ball dropping in Times Square to fireworks to more personal traditions. In my family, I was allowed to stay up to midnight, watch Guy Lombardo and eat smoked oysters. A big treat, really. This year I decided to see in the new year with a broader cultural tradition, enacted late because I rarely pull these things off on time. I made Hoppin' John. This is a southern dish (though I was introduced to it by a Rhode Islander) made of black-eyed peas and ham hocks. It's said if you eat Hoppin' John and corn bread on New Year's Day you'll be prosperous throughout the year - eat poor on New Y...

I've been blog-a-phobic lately, so haven't been posting here or on my other blog. While I could speculate endlessly about why (the blues? creative block? finger cramps?) I won't bother and will instead tell you that I made a crock pot full of ox-tail stew for dinner tonight. It strikes me as funny that many cuts of meat that used to be offal are now trendy. I used to pay maybe $1.50/lb at most for ox-tail, now I'm excited if I find it for $3.50. I did, indeed, find a sale, so took those wonderful, fatty, collagenous pieces of meat along with carrots, onion, shallots, garlic (lots and lots of garlic), celery, wine and assorted spices and let the crock pot do its thing. By the time I came home, after 8+ hours of cooking, the house smelled wonderful. I skimmed at least a half cup of fat off the stew, adjusted the spices (mostly it needed more salt and pepper, the oregano, marjoram and bay were enough, though I also added some balsamic vinegar to cut the richness a bit), le...