Ingredient Spotlight – Page 25 – Experiments in my New World Kitchen and Garden

Food + Wine Magazine’s Maple-Glazed Beans

I get asked a lot about baked beans, but being a native Californian, I’m more helpful with things like Drunken Beans or refrieds. The January issue of Food + Wine magazine has a wonderful dish that takes the best of the baked bean tradition and matches it with some great heirlooms, and mentions Rancho Gordo as well. I can tell you what I’m doing this weekend…

Maple-Glazed Beans
from Food + Wine Magazine, January 2008

Ingredients

* 1 pound yellow eye or navy beans, soaked overnight and drained
* 2 cloves
* 1 small onion, sliced 1/2 inch thick
* 2 bay leaves
* 1/2 pound meaty bacon, fat side scored
* 1/2 cup pure maple syrup
* 3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
* 2 teaspoons dry mustard
* 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon ketchup
* 2 teaspoons kosher salt
* 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 325°. In a large pot, cover the beans with 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, skimming occasionally, until the skins peel back when you blow on them, about 1 hour. Reserve 4 cups of the cooking liquid and drain the beans.
2. Transfer the beans to a 10-by-13-inch baking dish. Stick the cloves in a slice of onion; nestle the onion slices, bay leaves and bacon, fat side up, among the beans.
3. In a bowl, whisk 2 cups of the reserved cooking liquid with the maple syrup, Worcestershire, dry mustard, 1/4 cup of the ketchup and 1 teaspoon of the salt; pour over the beans and bake for 3 hours.
4. Stir the remaining 1 teaspoon of salt into 1 cup of the cooking liquid; pour over the beans and bake for 1 1/2 hours longer.
5. Whisk the remaining cooking liquid and ketchup with the Dijon mustard and pour over the beans. Bake for 1 1/2 hours longer, until the beans are richly browned. Let stand for 15 minutes. Discard the cloves and bay leaves, and serve.

Recipe by Marcia Kiesel
From 100 Tastes to Try in ‘08
This recipe originally appeared in January, 2008.

Prickly Pear (Tunas) Harvest

It’s that time of year when the prickly pears are swollen and ripe and begging to be picked. I feel a but pretentious calling them tunas when we have the name prickly pear in English, but I don’t care for prickly pear. My life is full of many of these little dramas.

I singed the outsides of the pears with a flame, cut them in half and then scooped out the insides into a copper pot. The spent skins went to the chickens.

I cooked them for about an hour and then put them through a food mill before cooking them for another 2 hours. The reduction it makes is glorious and sweet. It tastes familiar and tropical and yet it’s like nothing else. I made popsicles for the kids and a tequila drink for me.

At the farmers market, I bought one of those dreamy St Benoit plain yogurts and mixed in some of the prickly pear reduction. Sometimes you just get inspired and reach great heights.

I love the taste, the sustainability aspect and of course the fact that they’re indigenous, but apparently new research shows that you can actually lower your cholesterol by eating a prickly pear. I don’t think we should think of them as exotic much longer.

Xoconostle

On this last trip south, I became a little obsessed with the sour prickly pear called xoconostle. They’re mostly used for sauces but I had them candied and even in a syrup.

They look almost exactly like a prickly pear, or tuna, until you cut them open.

I was collecting seeds, thinking it might be a gas to grow them here in Napa. Unlike a tuna, the seeds are conveniently all in one handy spot.

This silly little strainer has traveled with all over the world with me. You never know when you’ll come across something worth saving. After scooping out the pits, I rinsed them and strained them and finally let them dry overnight. Then they’re simply scooped into kraft paper coin envelopes (that also travel with me on every trip) and the rest is history.

I used to germinate and start them myself but I’ve discovered I’m too inconsistent and now my plan is to take them to my friend Rose of Morningsun Herb Farm and let her do what she does best.

Black Calypso Beans are Back

I’m happy to announce the return of Black Calypso beans to Rancho Gordo. We haven’t had them in well over a year, maybe longer, and it’s a shame we ran out because it’s one of the most unusual beans we grow.

Also known as Orca, or Yin and Yang, this bean keeps it’s markings when cooked and has a subtle potato flavor. My favorite preparation is to take a piece of bacon, cook and then remove. Saute some onion and garlic in the remaining bacon fat and then add it to the soaked beans. Cook the beans and then right before serving, crumble the bacon on top, maybe with some chopped, fresh sage.

I’ll be in Mexico this weekend but Joan will be at the farmers market with these and all the usual suspects. Of course you can order them online, as well.

In other bean news: We are not in the “danger zone” yet with Good Mother Stallards but we won’t finish the season. They’ve just been too popular. We are out of Marrows. And don’t forget the garbanzo beans.

Epazote

Every year I regret I that I haven’t planted epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) to sell at the farmers market. It’s easy to grow and people tend to ask about it. Somehow I’m always too busy and it’s such an easy thing to grow, even in a pot, that I don’t understand why people don’t just grow it themselves. Or hunt for it.

I was walking to a favorite taco shack with my kids. The short cut is along the railroad tracks and as we were walking, I spied my favorite weed- epazote!

The tops were starting to bolt but there were lots of leaves. As I looked around, it was all over the place. I tasted a leaf and the wild, naturalized epazote has a much better, stronger flavor than the cultivated type you occasionally find at the greengrocers. The flavor is something like mint and gasoline but it’s really good. I like it as part of a quesadilla but most people know it as an herb that is said to cut the flatulence caused by beans. A sprig or two in the post during the last 10 minutes or so is traditional. I don’t know if it works but I like the taste.

Nico will try anything on a dare (moments later he "mooned" the passing Wine Train) but even he had trouble with the plain epazote and ended up spitting it out. Better to save it for the beans.

Dried epazote is available but I think it’s pretty worthless.

Chiilaca Chiles in Action

Previously I wrote about chilacas and now Catalan Farms (my neighbors at the Ferry Plaza Farmer Market) have a big harvest of them. You can also find them in Latino grocery stores, especially those that cater to folks from the state of Michoacan.

I took mine last night and made this ugly but delicious dish:

In a saute pan, I fried two rashers of Fatted Calf bacon and then removed them when they were crisp and drained them on paper toweling. Excess fat was then removed but let’s not get nuts about it. In the remaining bacon fat, I fried onion, garlic, chopped chilaca chiles that had been roasted and peeled and some corn kernels. I removed it all from heat and then added some grated cotija cheese.

If there were leftovers, this would have been a fine filling for an omelet. There were no leftovers, however.