It was rainy tonight, and I was trying to think of something to do with the four zucchinis I’d bought (because that was the smallest quantity available). And I decided I wanted it melty with ground beef and a brown sauce that wasn’t tomatoes.
On the left of the plate is a bunch of vegetables, especially zucchini, cooked with ground beef. On the right is brown rice.
I picked a couple peppers and some green onion from my porch.
So I started with the (small-medium) zucchini and sliced it lengthwise and then cut it into fine slices. And I tossed that into the pan with some olive oil. And I pulled out a quarter pound of ground beef from the freezer and lay that on top to thaw.
Then I pulled out a couple mini sweet peppers and a partial onion from my refrigerator, gave them a medium dice, and threw them in around the beef (which now was ready to be flipped to the other side while stirring everything around.
So that was my base. To that, I decided to add a generous drizzle of oyster sauce and some cooking wine. And then I finely cut up the peppers from my garden: a spicy purple one and a firm jalapeño. By now, the beef was fully broken up into small pieces and nearly cooked through.
So I still was puttering and decided to add some garlic and ginger. And I sliced the scallions.
Then I remembered to think about my starch. And I think it probably should have gone with noodles, but it was a little late to start them now. And I had a quart of cooked brown rice prepped already.
So I pulled about about a quarter cup of rice and warmed it in the microwave for a minute and threw the sliced scallions into the skillet.
On the side, I’m eating some daikon and carrots that I quick pickled in seasoned rice wine vinegar.
It is so good! And very satisfying. Would make again.
Close up of the finished dish with a nest of cooked shredded kale and a soft poached/steamed egg in the middle of that nest
I’ve already written up this recipe a couple of times, but I wanted to update it. Here’s the post where I cite the original Roman recipes that inspired this meal.
Diced purple onions in a skillet
Start with finely chopping up a few slices of purple onion and sauteing them in a little olive oil.
A pile of shredded kale with a bottle of sweet red wine and a bottle of Red Boat fish sauce in the background
Let’s talk about ingredients
Kale – I like growing Red Russian Kale because it has a flatter leaf that is easier than most varieties to check for bugs as it is growing, but also a softer texture that cooks up nicely when harvested. This recipe will work with any variety of kale.
Wine – This should be a red wine, and I prefer a sweeter variety. Honestly, I love the kosher Manischewitz concord grape or blackberry flavors both for drinking and cooking with. But I also keep a bottle in my refrigerator of boiled down and concentrated red wine from any time I have a leftover partial bottle, and that would also work well here. Whatever you’ve got.
Fish sauce – I am pretty sure the ancient Romans used at least two different kinds of fish sauce. There’s the garum, which is very light colored and quite polite. That’s the table fish sauce for adjusting flavor after cooking. And then there’s the liquamen, which is almost ubiquitous in these recipes and seems to function for adding salt. So I look for the funkiest and saltiest fish sauces available. I’ve had good luck with the Squid Brand and Red Boat. Use the salty one with kale!
[if you want to avoid fish sauce, then you can switch to a powdered bouillon (maybe half a cube or less), soup base, or Maggi cube]
Skillet with some onions and kale
Okay, so your onions are getting caramelized around the edges and a little brown. Your patience will be rewarded. Now you can fill your pan with shredded kale (this is about 5 or 6 large leaves) and you can throw in other green herbs (parsley, cilantro, dandelion greens, scallion greens, dill, mint, random foraged edible things) if you want, but I usually just go with kale because if I’m growing it in my garden, then I already have too much of it to get through.
Cook the kale until it just brightens. If you want, you can add a teaspoon or two of water to help it move around, but it should be pretty dry right now. Because as soon as it’s a little cooked, v you’re going to add a teaspoon of fish sauce and a teaspoon of red wine and that with sizzle and steam everything up.
Mix everything together well and then tuck everything toward the middle of the pan with a little divot in the middle to make a nice nest.
Then crack an egg into the middle of the nest, grind some black pepper on top, and cover the pan and let the egg poach in that steam to cook.
A skillet with a silly hat of an aluminum takeout container as a lid.
I’m just a few minutes (it’s okay to peek) the egg will set. The yolk will turn from yellow to a pinkish color and the white might jiggle but it will all be white. If you want the white harder, you can go a little longer, but you risk your yolk solidifying and not being as runny. It’s your egg, so make it the way you like.
The finished dish!
I like to eat this with a bagel and cream cheese. And with a spoon. Enjoy!
I mean, it has all the makings of a good casserole. It just needs some egg noodles and a casserole dish. But I guess making it for just me it’s more in the “skillet” category.
Plated final dish with a saucy mix of cabbage and minced beef
So I had roughly diced and boiled a head of cabbage, and I still had about a pint of leftovers from that.
I also had half a can of diced tomatoes left from making shakshuka. Ground beef was what I’d thawed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but when I the a pound of ground beef, I usually split it into quarters and use one loose for that day’s meal, and I make the other three quarters into hamburger patties and refreeze them.
So this was my starting point, and then I went to see what other people online were doing with these ingredients – and the results were almost universally soup. I was not feeling like soup. So this is winging it.
I started off browning the meat with some onions and diced serrano peppers, and then I minced and added three cloves of garlic.
There’s some “tagine spice” in my cabinet that a friend brought me back from France. It smells more like a sweet curry powder than a ras el hanout, so it feels weird using it in either context. But this seemed like a great reason to use up a tablespoon or so. And then I added about a tablespoon of flour and stirred everything well until all of the flour was sticking to the meat and had cooked a bit.
And then I added liquids – the leftover canned tomatoes, some nut milk, and I decided to count the cabbage as kinda liquid, too. After stirring everything thoroughly, I made sure everything came to a boil to cook the starches. And then I stirred it again and let it simmer until most of the water had evaporated and the sauce was very thick. I did have a moment of my ancestors (well, my mother) telling me that this dish needed a dash of Worcestershire sauce, but I don’t have any, so ancestral advice was ignored. But if you’re inspired by this, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some.
Re: nut milk – I had impulse bought some pistachio milk (unsweetened!) because I’d never seen it before, and Even though it’s delicious and fancy, it’s always a struggle getting through that much of any kind of milk before it goes bad. So I was delighted I found an excuse to use it, too!
I love having greens for breakfast, and I’m glad any morning I have the time to cook and fresh greens in the fridge.
This was actually almost dinner, but I’d gotten everything cut up and then decided I was too tired to actually eat it – so everything was prepped and ready in the morning.
Oh, and I have a rant about poached eggs. You know how they’re pretty difficult for many cooks, with the whites all turning whispy and unruly? And you know how some authors are tempted to try to sell you gadgets that promise to make everything simpler? And other authors just whip up delicious poachedegg dishes?
Well, that’s making things too hard and getting all of your dishes dirty. Just make food with a little liquid to it, crack the egg into the food, and then cover it so that the egg poaches in steam and/or the liquid in your dish. Not only is this easier, requires fewer dishes, and gorgeous, but also the end result is more delicious because your egg whites get to absorb the flavor of your dish.
I clean out and keep those takeaway containers made out of foil for this, but you can use any kind of bowl or lid (that is high enough not to touch the egg while it’s steaming), if you don’t compulsively reuse containers or if you’re worried about cooking with aluminum.
Kale for Breakfast with a Poached Egg on Top
I melted 2 teaspoons of butter into the bottom of my skillet and tossed in a sliced (young enough that it hadn’t developed a bulb) vidalia onion, a cubed red bell pepper, and the flesh (only) of 1 habanero pepper, having been sliced into tiny slivers.
While that sauteed, I washed 4 young curly kale leaves. I just shook them dry, leaving a decent amount of moisture still in the leaves as I cut the leaf off of the tough rib and then sliced the pile of leaves across into short ribbons.
I got my egg ready.
Once the cooking vegetables were decently wilted, I added the kale and stirred it all up just until the kale turned bright.
But on tasting it, I realized I needed a bit more saltiness, so I went back to my Roman kale recipe for methodology and tipped in 1 teaspoon each of fish sauce and sweet red wine.
A quick stir to distribute the liquids, and I piled the greens into a nest.
Cracking the egg into the center, I covered the egg nest of greens with another container.
And it took about as long to poach as it took me to toast a frozen bagel.
You can peek under the lid – you are looking for no visible liquid white and an amazing rosy blush to the top of the yolk (which you don’t get from regular poaching).
Okay, so if you’ll remember from the last soup, I had leftover the liquid drained from a can of tomatoes.
Well, at that enchilada dinner, one of the participants made a pot of rice (with a seasoning packet) and heated up some kidney beans. Her rice came out perfectly, and I took home what leftovers there were.
And reheated them. All classy-like. But I’m telling you about it anyway because I’m proud of having essentially made dinner for free.
Leftover Beans & Rice
First, I wanted to soften the beans a bit more, so I put them in a small pot with just enough tomato liquid to cover, and cooked that for five or so minutes.
And then I went to look around for other flavors to jazz things up.
Oh, yeah, I have a jar of pipian, so I melted about half a teaspoon into the liquid.
And I have some Lime Cilantro salad dressing, which is more like a pesto than a salad dressing, from a local restaurant – so I added a dollop of that, too.
And then I added the rice.
And as everything came to temperature, I crumbled some dried oregano in it as well.
End result – delicious and filling dinner
I also still had about a third of the roasted butternut squash lingering in my fridge. What was I going to do?
So, again, I went poking for inspiration in the other bits and bobs in there. Aha! I had a small container of coconut chutney from take out dosas a friend had brought to my house. I can play with those flavors.
I added some asafoetida and a fairly large amount of garam masala – somewhere around a rounded teaspoon. Oh, and 3 cloves of roasted garlic because it was there.
Once everything was aromatic, I added the butternut squash. I also put a Tablespoon of mustard seeds in a dry skillet to heat.
And about a quarter cup of finely shredded, unsweetened coconut.
Like the previous soup, this one also needed some kick, so I added some cayenne pepper. And some black pepper. And a little bit of cilantro. And adding about a teaspoon of brown sugar really made it sing.
Then I thinned the soup out with some vegetable stock.
Once the mustard seeds started to pop, stirred them into the soup as well.
