comfort food

Tis the season for staying home, bundling up and making comfort food. Around here that means stews and roasts and casseroles. We've been trying to expand our cooking repertoire with new recipes from Epicurious.com. They have a nice range of recipes, from simple to elaborate, the search function works pretty well, and the reader review feature is wonderful. People post what they liked, what they didn't like, and how they modified the recipe to make it work better.

Last Sunday when Georg came home from his trip, I made pork shoulder braised in apple cider. Which turned out pretty amazing, if I do say so, and was really easy to do. The cider only came in gallons, and I only needed a cup and a half, so I used good unfiltered juice instead. It turned out great. The onions cooked down in the apple juice to make a wonderful sweet sauce. Why do pork and apples go so well together?

The pork shoulder was way more than we could eat in one night, so the next day Georg used some of it in a soup with kale and chickpeas. It was supposed to be made with chorizo, so he added some poblanos (from our garden! Georg had roasted and frozen the last of them back in November) to spice it up. Yum! We don't make soup very often, but every time we do, I think we should more often.

A couple days later I used up the rest of the pork shoulder in a highly modified version of this traditional Dutch stew. It was supposed to be potatoes, kale and kielbasa. We used cauliflower, broccoli raab (which is botanically unrelated to broccoli, did you know that? I just read it) and the leftover pork shoulder. I fried the pork with some mushrooms for a good long time, to give it a little texture. It turned out pretty good. But then again, with all that cheese how could it not?

That Dutch recipe put me in the mood for kielbasa, so last night we made a simplified cassoulet. I've never made real cassoulet, but according to Julia Child it's a long, complicated business. This one was much simpler, only took a couple of hours. We made it with kielbasa, chicken and white beans. And it was good.