Ramble On

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Pork 'n' Beans Upgrade


There are two inspirations for this post. The first is one of the other Harrisonburg blogs - "a bowl of good" - link below. And the second is the fact that there is a Whole Foods supermarket an easy three block walk from my office in Arlington.
On Thursday, with no conference call to get back to, I went for a sandwich and picked up a copy of Outside magazine to peruse during lunch. I found a review of small plate - tapas style - restaurants in ski country. Also on that page was a set of recipes - "comfort food for the coldest part of the year."

I should note at this point, as a consultant, a lot of my work centers on using tools. The knife and fork are included. In fact, some business trips to great restaurant towns, like Seattle and Chicago, are known as "knife and forkers" to my teams, rather than "pitches" or "conferences."

Here's the sausage and beans recipe from Outside; while I did try to get all the ingredients from Whole Foods I had to make some substitutions (like the canned beans I drained and soaked in the stock for an hour - they didn't have dried beans!)...the results weren't bad, but I'll continue to modify until I have it right.

Put 1 lb. soft canneloni beans into 3 qts. pork stock. Add 2 garlic cloves, fennel seeds, carrots, onion, and canned tomatoes. Simmer two hours. Brown 1.5 lbs. of sausage, add to the beans. Add sage leaves, and simmer until thickened.

Well, that wasn't much to go on, as most of the ingredients weren't quantified. So, in addition to making substitues (2 15 oz cans of canneloni beans since they didn't have dried beans (did I mention it?), 1.5 quarts of chicken stock (free range organic mind you), pork with rosemary and garlic sausage (fresh made in the store, but nothing like what you get from "Two Fat Butchers" in Front Royal), and in this house nothing gets cooked without wine or beer (8 oz. of Smithwicks this time).


The photos accompanying show the results...and Mary said it was tasty. The secret was the fresh sage leaves from her pantry garden. That's pretty much what counts.

Here's a link to the "a bowl of good" blog - it's weekly, and I look forward to seeing it each Friday.

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