Leftovers Love: Brisket and Black Beans Over Farfalle With Avocado

Oftentimes, the thought of reheating an unfinished restaurant meal at home is only slightly more appetizing the thought of than regurgitating the part you did finish. Sloshing around in its to-go container, your perfectly plated entrée invariably gets caught in a landslide of crap and is no longer enticing. But I’m a believer in extricating the protein from said landslide and giving it a new life as a supporting player in a whole new dish.

This simple meal is effectively just a pseudo-Mexican spin on pork and beans, but I think it’s worth chronicling because it’s a good illustration of two of our core BGC philosophies: (1) There’s always a good meal waiting in your kitchen if you keep the right staples on hand, and (2) There’s always something interesting to do with leftovers. Also, it was really quite delicious. And it cost just $1 in new ingredients—for the bunch of cilantro, which I actually used only a fraction of, so it was more like 25 cents of new ingredients. As per (2) above, it behooves you to always keep on hand onions, garlic, pasta, and tomatoes in fresh or canned form.

First I sautéed some sliced red onion over medium-low heat in butter and a bit of olive oil. Then I tossed/mixed in a bunch of minced garlic, followed by some quartered grape tomatoes and a rinsed/drained can of black beans. While this cooked for a few minutes, I took a brick of brisket left over from a recent excellent dinner at Watty & Meg and shredded it into strips.

Rice and Beans: The Second-to-Last Refuge of the Broke and Hungry

Gentle reader, on most levels, I am obviously not a food snob, as you have probably guessed from posts like this and this. But there are two meals at the bottom of the I’m-starving-and-broke totem pole that typically, I simply refuse to stoop to.

Now, as everyone knows, the last refuge of the broke and hungry is ramen noodles. (Which have actually turned into a Brooklyn foodie trend lately, making them also perhaps the last refuge of Brooklyn foodies, who have apparently run out of lowbrow foods like fried chicken and tacos to turn into trends...but I digress.) Eating ramen noodles, like carrying your toiletries into the shower in a caddy, is something you should not have to put up with after graduating from college. In fact, I didn’t even eat ramen noodles in college! And I’m certainly not going to start now.

So, you’ve probably guessed this from the post title already, but the second-to-last refuge of the broke and hungry—somewhat more acceptable after college, especially for vegetarians—is rice and beans. I know this is supposed to be the nutritionally perfect meal and all, but I don’t know, I’m always just like, waat-waah at the thought of it, the texture and color and flavor are all so monotone.

But on this occasion, I was inspired to make them because I had a leftover boneless pork chop and a half that had gotten overly dried out in the grill pan a few nights prior, and thought that they might be salvaged by cooking in liquid with beans. Also I had a can of black beans, onions, garlic, and half a pint of grape tomatoes that were getting a bit wrinkly. Also I was hungry and broke. And I achieved my goal of cooking a meal that required the purchase of absolutely no new ingredients!

7 Layers of Kevin Bacon Dip

I’ve already expressed how much I enjoy the Super Bowl from a food perspective despite my utter apathy about football. But this year, with the big rematch between the Pats and the Giants, I have a real reason to actually get excited about the game itself…yes, MADONNA is performing!!! (Hehehe, I can’t wait to hear what Alyce has to say about that one… No, but seriously, I'm pretty excited about Madonna.)

For this year’s Super Bowl party at Fredna’s place (that would be Rob’s Aunt Edna and Uncle Fred, who are kind of like the Brangelina of Super Bowl parties), I’m planning to bring a mash-up between seven-layer dip and the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, and make a contest out of it—since it's a day for betting, after all.

The game plan (see what I did there?): I printed up sheets with a multiple-choice quiz, and everyone who ponies up $1 fills out a sheet matching the layers of the dip to the movies they represent. Either one person will get the most answers correct, or we do a random drawing from the entries tied for most correct (even if that number is zero). Surely this will be a fun gaming alternative for people who don’t care/know enough to bet on the actual football game. Download the quiz to play at your own Super Bowl party!

Here are the dip layers (in top-down order, 1-7), which, in a nod to the original “degrees” game, symbolize six of his movies, plus a bonus layer honoring Kevin himself. Can you match up which layer symbolizes which movie?

Quiz answers and explanations, as well as dip assembly instructions, after the jump.

7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Dip (layers in top-down order)
1. Bacon
2. Spicy cheese
3. Corn
4. Sour cream
5. Ground beef
6. Salsa
7. Navy beans

And, emphatically not in order, since that is the whole point, the movies those layers represent:

a. Footloose
b. Diner
c. Friday the 13th
d. Kevin himself (seriously, if you don’t get this one…)
e. A Few Good Men
f. Wild Things
g. Apollo 13

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Answers, in top-down order:

Cassoulet, Brooklyn-Style

Yesterday I was perusing the meat aisle of my local Met Foods trying to come up with a dinner idea that wasn’t just a straight-up meat-vegetable-starch plate, when I suddenly came upon packages of confit duck legs. While a nuanced discussion of gentrification in Brooklyn neighborhoods is outside the scope of this post, I will just say that the presence of duck confit there was about as surprising as discovering that the G train was running normally on a weekend.

At $6 a leg, I realized, I could not afford the confit. However, the idea of using it in a cassoulet had already taken shape in my mind, and I decided to try my own spin on that one-pot meal using turkey drumsticks, which were packaged at the Met for about $2 for two.

As usual with my cooking, this makes no pretense to be faithful to the classic dish, in this case a French-countryside-y bean stew with a mélange of rich meats. I looked up cassoulet in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking when I got home, and her rendition is a five-page, three-day affair for 10-12 people involving “pork loin, shoulder of mutton or lamb, and sausage,” with suggested variants such as duck, goose, confit goose, veal shank, and partridge—all compiled under the unassuming recipe title “Cassoulet: French baked beans.” (Sorry to get all “Kitty and Julia” on you, but she is the authority on French cuisine.)

Along with the turkey drumsticks, my cheapo version uses the packaged horseshoe-shaped supermarket kielbasa, plus two Goya cans of butter beans—large white beans whose starch gives the sauce an almost creamy texture. It does take upwards of two hours, so you may want to prepare it on a Sunday; this is one of those dishes that might be even better reheated. The below proportions would easily serve four for dinner, but I made it for two with plans for leftovers.

Super Bowl Munchie: Red Bean Dip

No, I didn't make this, nor are we affiliated with those who did. It's just awesome. Insane ultimate Super Bowl dip recipe by Holy Taco; get the how-to here.

My co-blogger Alyce and I are most definitely kindred spirits. But since we human beings are all unique, just like everybody else, even the B-est FFs are bound to have certain points of divergence on tastes. Ours, in a word? Football.

See, Alyce believes the point of football is to enjoy the thrill of the game (I assume, anyway ... I never asked, because I get bored as soon as the F-word is uttered). She totally represents for the knowledgeable, engaged, passionate-to-the-point-of-cuckoo female fans (this article seriously pissed her off), and I admire her for it.

However, I have a very different take on the point of football. For me, gentle reader, it means enduring a long winter of Sunday afternoons of endless, tedious Spandex-clad scrums (how the Jets game the other week trumped Mariska’s Birthday Marathon of SVU in The Rob’s priority system is beyond me) in order to reach the second greatest eating day of the year, after Thanksgiving: the Super Bowl.

Ahhh, the ’Merickan glory that is the classic Super Bowl spread: Pigs in blankets. Buffalo wings. Kielbasa. Nachos. Pizza. Spinach-artichoke dip. Seven-layer dip. Sundry other dips. Requisite accompanying chips. And beer...so, so much beer. The $25,000 Pyramid category here could just as easily be “Things That Make Kitty Happy.”

Anyhoo. This particular bean dip is super-easy, and makes a large quantity on the cheap (it's easily multiplied for a crowd). And it's actually relatively non-fat-laden, at least as far as Super Bowl foods (or, again, things that make Kitty happy) go.

Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans

I once attended this awesome lecture class at the Natural Gourmet cooking school, taught by Annemarie Colbin, whom I admire very much for proving that it’s possible to believe in holistic health and nutrition without being pretentious or preachy. To wit: At one point she said something like, “I just know there’s something medicinal about bacon. I haven’t figured it out yet, but it’s just so delicious, there has to be!”

That quip came to my mind while making Red Chard with Bacon and Cannellini Beans (above left), since if you operate with the assumption that bacon is indeed somehow medicinal, this would be, like, the healthiest dish ever. You could, of course, omit the bacon and just use olive oil to sauté your veggies, but bacon is a great complement to bitter greens and really just brings all these flavors together.

(Also, you could use kale instead of chard, though I might discard the stems and use solely the leaves, and also cook it about 10 minutes longer. But I love red chard [above right], because it cooks into such a pretty pink color.)