Cholent

I've noticed men prepare very distinct foods, foods that inspire the most macho of men to don an apron and a grim expression, pick up a fire extinguisher, and sally forth.  In the US, these dude foods include things like vats of chili and barbeque, mainly hearty meat dishes.  Very similar to these particular foods is cholent, a dish that is confined primarily to the eastern European Jewish communities.  

Men make cholent.  This doesn't mean women don't (this woman certainly does...).  But what I mean is everyone's father/boyfriend/husband/brother knows how to make it, and they have their own special additions.  The particular variant I grew up eating is pared down to basics, easy to throw together and even easier to cook.  

Cholent is all beans and meat, with the most expensive ingredient being the meat.  Bare bones of what you need for four people (4 people!  4 of them!  If you live by yourself, you'll be drowning in cholent if you don't at least halve your recipe!) is 2 cups of dried beans, 1 cup of dried barley, and 3 pounds of meat.  The meat should be decently marbled; if it's too lean you'll be chewing on shoe leather, but if it's too marbled you'll be drowning in grease.  Generic stew beef is perfectly acceptable.  Just make sure you cut it in chunks.  For flavor, you'll need 1 whole onion, a bunch of paprika, a couple bay leaves, dried ginger (optional), salt, and pepper.  The only caveat is that because the beans need a good soaking, you have to start 2 days before you want to eat it.  

Before I get to the recipe, I want to talk about beans.  You can use pretty much any dried bean mixture you want.  I'm particularly partial to 1 cup (at least) of dried large lima beans, and then a cup of whatever else, usually kidney or pinto or navy beans.  I've never used black eyes peas (don't use lentils), but pretty much anything is fair game.  

So, let's say your beans and barley are sitting in the pantry, the meat is cut in chunks in the fridge, and you want cholent on Friday night.  That means on Wednesday night before you go to sleep, you measure your 2 cups of beans into a really large bowl (they swell up like you wouldn't believe), pour in water until the level is twice what it was with just dried beans, leave it on your counter, and go to sleep.  The next morning, transfer them to the fridge before you leave for work/school.  

When you come home on Thursday, get out your crock pot.  Drain the beans, and dump them into the pot. Measure one cup of barley, and dump that in too.  Cut an onion in half from stalk to root end, slice it up, and throw it in.  Toss in ~2 bay leaves, a very generous amount of paprika (the sweet kind is what I'd use here), on the scale of tablespoons... probably ~2-3.  For the dried ginger, I'd do ~2 teaspoons.  Grind a generous amount of pepper in, and sprinkle some salt in, too.  Salt and pepper can be adjusted post-cooking to taste.  Heat up a pan, and brown your meat chunks.  Dump them into the crock pot.  Now fill the crock pot with water until the water level is 1-1.5 inches above the beans and meat.  At this point, I like to take a large spoon and attempt to mix everything so it's more evenly distributed.  Sometimes it works, sometimes I just end up smushing the beans and barley around.  It doesn't matter either way.  Cover the crock pot, turn it on low, and go to sleep.  

When you wake up in the morning on Friday, check the water level in your pot.  If it's dropped below the surface of the beans, etc., add more.  When you come home, you'll have dinner all set.  Usually cholent needs more salt.  Only once in 25 years of me being alive has it almost had too much.  Oh, a caveat about cholent; you will think you want more.  You will be like "Hey, I'm not full!  I want another bowl!" and then all of a sudden, "Oh sweet merciful lord I cannot move from this table.... unngnghghghghghghngnnghgnghghghhh... there is a lead shotput in my belly."  Be careful.  Also, this goes extremely well with vodka toasts.  You can do 4-5 shots with a meal of cholent and feel as sober as an observant Mormon.  Cholent will keep you full practically forever.  It's hot, thick, rich, and the beans get gloriously creamy and the meat falls apart.  

Dude food, comfort food, Jewish soul food, whatever.  It's an awesome winter dish.  

MEAT.

I never write about meat.  Mainly, it's because meat is becoming prohibitively expensive, and eating it all the time isn't as healthy for you as eating plant products.  But as a career anemic (at least until menopause; hooray for having the tide come in for a full 7 days), I feel justified in occasionally giving in to the craving for rare juicy bovine.

This is the easiest thing to do to meat: rinse it off, pat it dry, liberally cover it with oregano and ground pepper and salt (use more salt if it's not kosher), and then you cook it.  Here's the deal about apartment meat cooking; you will never duplicate the succulent visceral deliciosity of a charcoal seared chunk of cow.  It's best to just accept this and move on, like I have.  

Another nice thing is the cheapest cuts of meat (London broil, flank steak) are also the leanest.  This means you'll get super meatiness, but you have to be very careful or else it'll turn out like shoe leather.  For London broil (or a thick sirloin, probably also applies to a NY strip steak too), get the broiler crunk.  Take your heaviest oven-proof pan - cast iron is the best - and get it smoking hot on the stove.  How hot, you ask?  Hot enough so that if you touch a corner of raw meat to it, it sizzles loudly IMMEDIATELY.  When it's at this stage, lower your salt-pepper-oregano seasoned meat into it.  Let it sizzle like mad until it's browned.   Flip and repeat.   (There, you've just gotten as close as possible to searing meat in the house.) When both sides are browned, take the pan and put it in the broiler, and let it cook.  

Here's how you can tell if it's done.  Take tongs or a spatula and poke the meat (don't make holes).

- If it's the squishiness of your cheek, it's rare.  Very rare.

- If it's as squishy as the cartilage at the tip of your nose, it's medium rare.

- If it's as squishy as the meaty spot at your temple, it's medium.

- If it's as firm as your forehead, you've got some well done meat.

This isn't an exact science.  It takes practice.  I've had to thin-slice plenty of shoe-leather London broil into sandwiches, but that's not exactly bad-tasting even if it does take some jaw work... nothing some mayo, mustard, tomato, lettuce, cuke, and onion can't solve... :)

If you're cooking flank steak, skip the browning part.  This cut is too thin to warrant that, and if you cook it past medium, you'll get meat chewing gum more often that not.  I've had some flank steaks that accidentally stayed tender past medium, but it's not worth the gamble.  

So, no matter what kind of meat you're cooking, once it comes out of the oven, you should let it rest which allows the juices to reabsorb into the meat.  This way, when you cut it, it doesn't lose the juiciness all over the cutting board.  I'd take it out of the oven, eat your salad, and by the time you've finished, it'll have rested long enough to be cut yet still be warm.  

And that's what I ate for dinner.  Salad, flank steak, and some steamed broccoli.  Some of the broccoli was from TJ's, but a bunch of it was from my mom's garden.  The apartment smells like a fart because of it.  It tastes awesome, much more like broccoli, but the smell is kind of funky...  but damn, I love it.  

Also from my mom's garden... purple cayenne peppers.  Yeah.  This from the woman with really low tolerance to hot foods.  She decided to grow them "for their variegated foliage, and the purple peppers."  So she planted like 6 plants.  What was she thinking?  Because my mom doesn't just let veggies sit on the plant.  She picks them, ends up with buckets full of whatever produce it is, and then presses them on everyone, and she makes me feel guilty when I can't eat anymore because when I don't eat it, it goes to waste, and she spent all this time in the garden, sweating in the sun, watering and weeding, fighting off deer and woodchucks, and I can't even eat any more of this?

If I met the deer or woodchuck who could eat one of those blasted peppers, I would shake his/her paw/hoof.  Because DAMN.  Those are some HOT peppers.  Danny and I accepted four.  We used 3/4 of one in two kinds of salsa.  When we were trying to figure out how much to use, we tried to get the other to try the pepper to see how hot it was.  I really like hot food, so I took one sliced the long way in half, and touched the very tip of it to my tongue.  The tingling burning sensation was almost immediate.  The heat was insane!  

If we get any more, I'll give away the ones we don't use in lab.  One nice thing about science is you meet people of so many nationalities, you're bound to find someone from, say, the south of India.  Or you meet some weirdo who's all macho about capsaicin.  Well, whatever.  I'm just happy because I won't have to feel guilty about these peppers... they do have a cool name... "black pearl," I think.  Like pirates.  Totally sweet.