bacon – 1 strip
1 onion
1 big carrot
1 big rib celery
2-ish pounds beef chuck
1 smallish cabbage
2 big beets
vinegar
salt and pepper

This makes a big, meaty pot of soup, so adjust the quantities to suit your tastes. Preheat your oven to 275 F. Dice up a strip of bacon and start sauteeing that in an oven-safe pot or casserole. Add the diced onion, celery, and carrot. Once those are soft, add the beef – I went with small cubes but big ones would make it more stew-like. Once the beef has browned a bit add the chopped cabbage and grated beets. Add enough water to almost cover the stuff in the pot and bring it all to a boil. Cover and place in the oven. Cook until the beef is tender, about 2 hours. Season as you like – I usually add some salt, pepper, and vinegar.

Set your oven to 400 F. Soften up some vegetables in a skillet with butter. Add some sausage. Whisk up enough eggs and creme fraiche (or cream) to cover the vegetables and sausage. Grate cheese on top and put it in the oven. It’s done when it’s fluffy and golden brown. If you let it rest a couple of minutes it’ll release from the pan nicely.

Ingredients: beef short ribs, onion, carrot, celery, red wine, rub spices, salt.

Short ribs are great grilled, but they’ve got some connective tissue that really wants to be braised. So, why not do both? First, your ribs should be big and chunky. If you’ve got thin-sliced ribs you should probably just grill them.

Start by getting your grill set up for indirect cooking. On my Weber, that means getting a smallish batch of coals going in the charcoal chimney and dumping those off to one side of the grill when they’re red-hot. If there’s greasy residue in your grill wait until that burns off – otherwise you’ll end up with a gross layer of black stuff on your meat.

Put some rub on your ribs. I like a mixture of salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, coriander, and allspice plus some fresh thyme or rosemary. Once the grill is hot and clean place the ribs on the side opposite the coals. Put the lid on. Turn them over after 10 or 15 minutes. Close the vent on the grill a bit if it’s too hot – you don’t want the ribs to cook too quickly. Check on the ribs every 15 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, heat up your oven to about 275F. Get out a braising dish the ribs will fit in. Pretty much any non-reactive (glass, enamel, stainless steel) dish or pot with a lid will work for braising. I like to throw some chopped onion, carrot, and celery in the bottom of the pot and soften that up a bit in some bacon drippings. This also gets the braising pot nice and hot for the ribs.

The ribs could be ready to braise after 30 minutes, but I like to let them go about an hour for more smoky flavor. When you’re ready, move them to the braising pot and pour some red wine in with them. Use enough wine to come about halfway up the ribs – not enough to cover them up completely. Bring the pot to a boil then cover and place in the oven. Check for tenderness after an hour, but it usually takes about 2 to achieve that desirable “falling off the bone” texture.

They’re good immediately, and even better reheated the next day. If you chill them you can easily separate out the layer of fat and harvest the gelatinous stuff for an excellent sauce.

Just like last year, I put together the boil spices based on the recipe from the Good Eats crawfish episode. This year I made two batches of spices – one less spicy and one with the standard amount of cayenne. I think the amount in the recipe is just right, but taste buds vary. The quantity of spices in the recipe is for one 40 quart boil, so I multiplied everything by 4 so we’d have enough for a couple of boils each in our 30 quart pots.

Instead of the corn in the recipe, we cooked a bunch of vegetables – brussels sprouts, asparagus, and broccoli. Having learned our lesson last year, we threw the potatoes in first then added the vegetables with the crawfish. The vegetables still end up well done, but not quite as boiled to death.

We got a turkey a whole week before Thanksgiving for some reason, so I brined and roasted it as practice for doing it again at a friend’s house next week. It turns out even a 15 pound turkey has quite a bit of meat on it, so I’ve been making turkey dishes all week.

Turkey soup is really easy to make if you can manage to make some turkey stock after carving the bird. To make stock, just simmer the carcass in water a while. You can add things like peppercorns, allspice, onion, celery, carrot, etc. if you want to and are not completely burned out on cooking. I cool the stock a while then strain it into something for the fridge. You can remove the fat from the top the next day.

For the soup, soften some vegetables like onions, celery, cabbage, and so on in butter over medium-low heat. Add some chunks of turkey and some stock and simmer a little while. I serve it with grated cheese and homemade Worcestershire sauce.

We usually just buy packaged parmesan crisps, but that feels lazy because they’re so easy to make. I don’t think the homemade crisps come out any cheaper than the packaged ones though, so I only recommend making your own if you can’t find the packaged ones. The packaged ones also seem to work better for actual dip delivery, but if that’s your goal pork rinds work way better.

Set your oven to 350 F. A higher temperature will work fine, but will be less forgiving of inattention – a good way to test your smoke detector. You will need a non-stick baking surface, such as a silicone baking mat. Grate a bunch of parmesan-type cheese or use pre-grated. Make little piles of about a tablespoon each of grated cheese, leaving room between them for meltage. Bake at least 10 minutes then start paying attention. They should be completely melted and bubbly. For maximum crispiness bake until they turn golden brown…but don’t let them burn! It’s easiest to move them to a cooling rack if you let them cool in the pan a little bit first. Try not to burn your mouth or eat them all at once.

I have most of a bottle of tequila in the cupboard, probably left over from making margaritas a long time ago. Clearly it’s not getting consumed as a beverage, so I decided to try some in a marinade for chicken. It’s excellent mixed with lime juice, salt, pepper, hot sauce, oregano, and cumin. Let the chicken marinate for as long as you can, up to overnight. I’m not sure what it really does, but the chicken seems to take on a nicer golden brown color, and maybe there’s a little of that desert-cactus flavor from the tequila. I first tried it with wings, but it’s great on all bird parts.

I love braised beef short ribs, but in the middle of summer I hate using the oven. It’s not as if it makes the house a lot warmer, but it sure feels like it. So, I grilled these lovely specimens after rubbing them down with some creole seasoning. They did end up a little tough, but that was easily overcome by slicing them thinly.

The cool thing about the Garret Park market is that it goes on until 1pm, so lazy folks like us can make it there before it closes – we like the Kensington market too, but rarely make it there because it ends at noon.

Ingredients:

• dry beans, such as great northern or navy
• onion, carrot, maybe celery
• leftover cooked sausage

Economic apocalypse means it’s a good time to cook some beans! First soak the dry beans overnight, maybe with a little lemon juice added to the water. Discard the soaking liquid and rinse the beans a bit. Put them in a pot, cover with water, and simmer until they’re tender and maybe a little overdone – I think that’s when the oozy bean soupy stuff happens. When they’re nearly done, dice up the onion, carrot, and celery and soften in oil, butter, or (ideally) the pan you cooked bacon in that morning. Dice up the leftover sausage and add that to the beans with the softened vegetables. Simmer a while then enjoy!