Currently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens
My next book goes hand-in-hand with fall and winter. All About Braising was made for long, cold evenings, when your body craves slow-cooked comfort food. I love to make these kind of dishes, where you do a little prep work at the beginning, but the majority of the time, the dish bubbles away either on the stovetop or in the oven, unattended.
According to Stevens, braising is basically putting food into a heavy pot with a little bit of liquid, covering the pot and gently simmering everything until it is tender. By cooking food in a covered pot, all the liquid that the food releases is trapped, so it mingles with the braising liquid, creating a flavorful sauce. In addition, by cooking the food slowly and gently, you can use tougher, cheaper cuts of meat that tend to turn dry and stringy when cooked in other ways (think pot roast).
This is another book I’ve had for some time, but hardly ever used (probably because there are no baking recipes in it). The one and only recipe I’ve made from it is this green cabbage dish. I don’t have a picture because I forgot to charge my camera battery. So just imagine a pile of light green cabbage wedges, lightly charred and draped with soft onions and dotted with chunks of carrots. Yes, this dish is as good as it sounds.
You start by coring and cutting a green cabbage into eight wedges. The cabbage is arranged, in a single layer, in a 13″x9″ dish. Over the top of the cabbage, you scatter a sliced onion and a carrot cut into rounds (I usually use 3-4 carrots, because those are my favorite part of this dish). The whole dish is drizzled with olive oil and chicken stock and seasoned with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. You cover the dish with tinfoil and braise the vegetables in the oven for two hours. At the end of the braising time, you remove the tinfoil and cook the dish for another 15-20 minutes, just until the vegetables start to brown.
This dish is good warm or at room temperature and is even better the second day.
In Utah, where I grew up, asparagus grows wild alongside most country roads. It was a weekly ritual for our family to take a walk and collect asparagus, so I ate it pretty much all spring and early summer. When I started cooking with Bryan, one of the first things he told me he didn’t like to eat was asparagus. I was okay with that, because it meant that there’d be more for me to eat. Then I made the mistake of roasting it, and now I have to share it with him.