Better than it sounds

  

  
I can't even remember why I tried this in the first place. Was I thinking of nicoise salad? Craving protein? Down to the last things in the fridge? Beats the hell outta me. Usually I'm not too excited about sandwiches in cold weather, at least, not ones that do not feature melted cheese, but this is an exception.

1 can of tuna in olive oil
1 smallish carrot
6 or 7 olives
1 teaspoon fermented black bean sauce

Drain most of the oil out of the tuna, chop the olives, shred the carrot, and mix everything together. You know, just make tuna salad with it. It's not fancy or anything.

 On the other hand, I do think it's special. The oil-packed fish is the big thing, of course. I've made this with TJ's brand fish, which is pretty darned good, and I've done it with this fancy(ish) brand I got at Fred Meyer that has a gold label and some Italian stuff written on it which costs a dollar more per can and is good enough to eat plain with a fork. TJ's is plenty good enough for this, but I sure did enjoy the 'italian tonno'. In either case, tuna in oil has got more tuna flavor without being offensively fishy. The texture is better too. Tuna in water can have a slightly fiberous mouthfeel, which needs to be amelioreated by heavy doses of mayonaise. Mayo also helps with the typical blah-ness of ordinary canned tuna.  But if you're going to do that, why not just have fish that tastes like fish? It'll have the same fat content, or less, than all that mayo, and less cholesterol, if you're worried about things like that. I loves me some mayonaise, but it is a condiment, not a primary food item.

Olives and black bean sauce is not an intuitive combination, but it should be. They are both fermented and brined. You would think that one or the other would be good enough, but no, both is actually better. I'm afraid I have no geeky theories about what is in each ingredient that makes the two together better than either alone; you'll have to take my word for it. Use good olives. I start with rather boring kalamatas and punch up the brine with a little more salt, vinegar and some herbs, usually rosemary and a bay leaf.

The carrot is not insignificant either. There is a lot of salt in the rest of the ingredients, the sweetness from the carrot really balances things out. It also adds crunch, which is very important. No matter how good your tuna is, it's still canned tuna and needs a veggie to go with, even beyond lettuce. I think that must be the main purpose of celery in traditional tuna salad recipes.

No cheap bread! Disappointing bread will be the downfall of any sandwich, be the innards never no good!

The possibilities of peas

  

  
I first made this with chick peas. I still like it with chick peas, but I recently started using blackeyed peas for a bunch of different things. They taste more interesting than most other types of beans, also, a) I don't use up a whole can of refried beans before they go bad and b) a can of most any type of beans costs about a buck, while a pound of dried peas costs about 75 cents. I can make as many or as few as I need, and I find they don't seem to need as long a cooking time as other dried beans- probably because they're very small, but probably also because I do pre-soak them. This used to bother me- it seemed like fiddly sort of thing to do. But then I realized that leaving them in a tupperware of water in the fridge over night, or the next night, and frequently the night after that until I decide that yes, today is the day I want them actually realizes a net reduction of fiddle. There are a couple things I've found that are good to do before you put them on the stove:

1. Shake them up and then rinse them well. Gets rid of more indigestible carbohydrates. Makes you more polite to your companions later.
2. Season them! Duh right? Not really. Cooking the seasonings in rather than cooking then seasoning makes a huge difference.

If I know I want to make refried beans with them, I put in salt, a bay leaf, pepper, cumin and a good shake each of onion and garlic powder. Yes, fresh is good, but this is refritos, people. You're just going to cook the bajeebus out of 'em, so it don't make a difference. Less fiddle! If I don't know what I'm going to do with them, I just add salt and a bay leaf. That's what I have in the picture here.

Along with the blackeyed peas, I have a tomato, some lentils (I like the kind called 'green french lentils' because they seem to hold their shape well), some kalamata olives, a few fresh mint leaves and some cumin, ground coriander seed, and a dash each of olive oil and the olive brine. I usually like to put in a yellow bell pepper for color, and if you want more green stuff, the recipe originally called for flat leaf parsley rather than mint, but I didn't have those things today. As I said, the first version of this had chickpeas in it, which make the salad taste nuttier. Blackeyed peas have a grassier taste which is rather nice with the coriander and mint.

But what else do I do with them? In the winter of course, I cook them with bacon. They are pretty tasty as an ingredient in other salads, and sometimes I get lazy and rather than bother to smash them into refried beans, I just sprinkle them on my nachos before they go under the broiler. I have a recipe for black bean and sweet corn fritters, which I want to use with blackeyed peas. They're good with migas, too.

Incidentally, does anybody know where I can get some pigeon peas?

An Old Chicken Recipe

This is good if you like sweet-and-salty things. I make a lot of snarky comments about the deli I used to work at when I was in my 20's, and indeed they were in the vanguard of Ann Arbor foodie hipsteremia, but they had some good recipes. They called this "venetian" chicken, but what a chicken ever had to do with Venice more than any other place I can't tell you.

Venetian Chicken

Chicken. I used some frozen thigh meat, which is cheap, but this would actually be better with skin-on birds. The skin browns better.

Marinate the chicken. If it's frozen, put on some salt, pepper & olive oil, and let it thaw in the fridge for a few days. The night before you want to cook it, mix equal parts cider & sherry vinegar with a teaspoon of dried marjoram and a couple cloves of crushed garlic and coat the meat with it.

The next day, assemble some prunes, yellow dried figs, and mixed olives. Do get some half decent olives, but try not to have them be the kind that have a lot of herbs and things on them, it'll throw off the flavor of the dish. Don't be tempted to get dry cured olives either, they're way too salty!

Pour off most of the marinade and put the chicken in a baking pan. Cut the prunes & figs in half and throw them in along with the olives. The amounts are up to you. I used about 8 or 10 each of the fruits, and about 1/2 a container of TJ's mixed greek olives, the ones from the refrigerator case. Just the olives, not the brine. Try to get about half the fruit and olives under the meat and half on top.

Bake covered at 350 for about 30 minutes if, like mine, there's no skin on your bird. You can leave the cover off if it's skin-on, since the meat won't dehydrate as much. After the first 30 min, uncover the dish and bake another 15 minutes. For my 3 thighs, that was enough to get the chicken actually cooked, but there was still a lot of liquid in the pan. So I pulled it out and poured the drippings into a saucepan and set it on medium-hot to reduce into a glaze. Then I cranked the oven heat to 500, got all the fruit piled on top of the meat, sprinkled a light dusting of white sugar over the dish and browned it for another 10 minutes or so. Once there were little crispy looking spots on the olives and figs, I dumped the glaze back on the chicken and said the hell with it. If you get to the point where your birds are cooked and you don't feel that there is too much juice in the pan, just skip the part about making a reduction. I do wish I'd had some parsley to go with this, I'm having that midwinter craving for green crunchy bitter things.

When I worked at the deli, I made this with whole birds. The procedure is roughly the same, but you need to loosely stuff the cavity with some of the fruit, and adjust the cooking time to account for the thickness of a whole carcass. It makes a neato looking presentation, especially if you put some rosemary branches under it  when you serve it, but having the chicken cut up already both speeds cooking and gets the meat more evenly seasoned. I bet it would be fun to do with cornish hens!