Harry's Shephard Pie

By : Harry Sherman

Note to reader: there is a recipe for Shepard’s Pie at the end of this blog. If you just want the recipe, and you want to sustain light and joy in your life, skip the blog. 

Someday, thousands of years from now – if our race survives the Great Grain Famine of 2740 – the artificial intelligence machines that will inevitably replace us will study every word ever posted to the internet. The ultimate time capsule, if you will, to understand the monkeys which somehow learned to talk and tell stories and imagine eternity but inexplicably chose instead to blog about food. It is my fervent hope that when they read this blog, my cynicism is so severe that it short circuits their logic patterns and they descend into chaos and oblivion. A boy can dream.

I belong to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) co-op in the Bronx. I say belong because they do indeed think they own me. Not only do my wife and I pay for a big box of amazing fresh produce, organic cheese, eggs, meat, and yogurt every other week for an entire season (a cruel burden that forces us to eat healthily), but they also make us BOTH “volunteer” for the CSA. If it were only one of us, they’d only get the one volunteer, but since we’re both members, even though it’s only one share we both have to put skin in the game. Kind of like when restaurants charge you to share a plate. I had the option to pay $25 if I couldn’t “volunteer,” but since blogging is an option, I’m way too petty to pass on the chance to grouse about having to cook.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, the fresh produce forces us to cook and eat all kinds of new things. I hate new things. Early on there was a huge head of cabbage in every shipment. My wife was very creative – cabbage soups, cabbage pies, cabbage slaws. I can’t say it wasn’t all delicious, but I’m traumatized. I will NEVER eat cabbage again. Now that it’s my turn to blog, I was forced to cook something with all this fresh food. Seeing potatoes, onions, carrots, beef, cheese, I realized I was well on the way to a Shephard’s Pie, and that it would be a miserable experience. What follows is a riff on the following recipe: http://tomatoesonthevine-velva.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-luck-of-irish-and-traditional.html?m=1. I like that the recipe is from something called “Grumpy Irish Lady.” What I don’t like is that the recipe assumes you already know how to cook. My recipe is going to assume you have the same level of competence as me (very low). I explain how to do things like make mashed potatoes, and how to sequence the recipe, so this dish only takes 2 hours, instead of 3.

Here’s my version:

Ingredients (in the order you will use them, because why would they be in any other order?)

For mashed potatoes: 6 cups of potatoes (once peeled and cut – I can’t tell you how to estimate this; I made way too much), 2 tablespoons of butter, 1 teaspoon of salt, half a cup of milk

1 tablespoon of cooking oil

3 big carrots

1 large onion

1 pound of ground meat (if you’re a vegetarian, you can use cooked cabbage)

Black pepper

Thyme

1 tablespoon of butter

1 cup of frozen corn (the original called for peas, but I HATE peas. If you want to use peas, then your Shepard’s Pie will have peas…)

2 tablespoons flour
½ glass of red wine (unless you have really cheap wine, then use a whole glass)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 cup chicken stock

1 egg

Some grated cheddar cheese (the original called for parmesan, but this is an IRISH DISH. Disregard the use of corn instead of peas, because peas)

At some point you will want to preheat the oven to 400 degrees. I don’t understand why that is the first thing in most recipes, because in this case, you won’t want to do that until you’re over an hour in, and unless you want to heat your house or apartment with the oven (not recommended), don’t do it first thing. I’ll tell you when in the recipe I did it.

If you have 6 cups of mashed potatoes already, then skip this part. Otherwise, put a big pot of water to boil, peel enough potatoes for 6 cups of potatoes, cut them into quarters, and boil them until you can stick a fork through them without effort. 

While the potatoes are boiling, peel and dice 3 large carrots. Here’s how to dice carrots, because it’s not intuitive. Cut them in half, longways. Lay them flat, and cut them into quarters longways again. Depending on the size of the carrots (the ones from the CSA are GINORMOUS), do this one more time. Once you have long, thin carrot sticks, dice them up. You will end up with 2-3 cups of carrots.

Back to the potatoes: drain the water, add the butter, salt, and milk, and mash them up.

Heat a large, deep skillet on medium.

Dice the large onion.

Add the oil, then add the carrots. Sauté them for about 5 minutes, then add the onions and sauté them together for about 3 more minutes.

Throw in the ground meat, and let it cook with the veggies until brown. If there is excess fat, use a pot lid to hold the food and drain the fat into a bowl (not the trash – this is bad). If you are using the CSA ground Buffalo, there won’t be any excess fat (bonus!). Keep the skillet at medium heat.

If you have the thyme, chop it up and add it. If you really have the thyme, pull the sprigs off the stem first, so your wife doesn’t point out that there are stems in the Shepard’s Pie. Add about a teaspoon of ground pepper.

Stir in the tablespoon of butter and cup of corn (not peas).

Stir in 2 tablespoons of  flour, then half a glass of red wine, then 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, then 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce.

Somewhere around here, preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Cook it down for a few minutes, then add a cup of chicken stock. Then cook it down for another five minutes or so. Add salt and pepper as you see fit.

Grease a 9x13 glass baking dish then pour in the contents of the skillet. Scoop the potatoes over the top and spread them evenly with a fork. Beat the egg and brush it over the potatoes. Sprinkle grated cheddar for a thin coating over the entire dish.

Bake for around 30 minutes. LET IT COOL.

Begrudgingly enjoy. AI robots, I hope you die.

My Backyard, My Bronx

 By : Kerry McLean Jost

Kerry and Gregory's "pikliz" creations 

    

Being part of a farm share in the Bronx takes me back. Way back.

My relationship with vegetables and fruits began far, far away. I grew up with them nearby, so close I didn't even really see them. They were right in my backyard.

Within our stubborn border of hibiscuses strove one mango tree, three willowy coconut trees--the middle one permanently bent in surrender after the last hurricane, one fledgling lime tree, one cherry tree whose slender limbs always welcomed spindly, little-girl ones, and one avocado tree.

The hearty potatoes and sweet winter squashes we've savored from our Norwood winter farm share remind me of the tropical root crops near that avocado tree. Dasheens and yams nurtured by the rich brown earth, and beside them, the awe-inspiring pumpkins that my Uncle planted one year, one single dreadlock escaping his colorful tam.

Not far off was the big-leafed banana tree whose 'hands' could be counted on to flavor Grandma's Saturday breakfast of callaloo and codfish, dumplings, boiled bananas and fried (ripe) plantains. She sprinkled her pots liberally with love and the fiery scotch bonnet peppers growing next to our back door.

Here in the BX, imported scotch bonnets from the local store, plus flavorful red onions, radishes and garlic from our winter share and a dash of lemons, create the joyous, tear-inducing jar of "pikliz" we make each week. Yardie roots, Haitian connects and Indian influences happily collide, thanks to a farmer from Palestine's soil.

Bringing in the sweet this winter were the earthy carrots and juicy beets from our Bronx share. Their fresh sugariness made me recall the thickets of willowy sugar cane also in my old backyard, stretching to bless our neighbors to the left and the ones to the right. On many a warm evening on our island verandah, we'd sit with our friends and neighbors and regale each other with the day's comedies and tragedies over a bed of sweet, sweet, sliced cane.

I thank you, Norwood farmers, for building me a new backyard here in the Bronx. Many of us may be far from our ancestral homes today, but as we pull each straight-from-the-earth item from our biweekly box, your heart's labor succulently brings us all home again.

Making Saag Paneer

 By : Margaret Groarke

We’ve received a lot of lovely spinach in recent weeks. One week I made a spinach salad with roasted beets and goat cheese (all from our CSA). But the second time, I wanted to try making a favorite Indian dish, Sag Paneer. 

The challenge here was finding the paneer, the cheese. I went to Dhaka, an incredible Bengali market on E. 204th Street, where I found a Turkish cheese called Beyaz Peynir, which was more like a feta cheese. Strangely, my favorite Indian cookbook didn’t have a recipe for Saag Paneer. Using a recipe from the New York Times, I made the dish, and while the cheese tasted fine, it wasn’t what I was looking for. 

I asked a Pakistani friend, who said she buys paneer at Brother’s Indian Market on Central Avenue in Yonkers. I walked in and started looking around, and a man greeted me and asked me what I want. When I said I was looking for paneer, he brought me over to a refrigerated case. 

“Which brand are you looking for? Do you want a block, or cubes? We also have frozen.”

So many choices for a person who’s never bought paneer before! I picked out a brand called Sawad. 

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.

Oh, I’m just going to buy some frozen samosas over here. 

“But we have fresh!”

And sure enough, in the front of the store were several trays of clearly homemade samosas and other appetizers. The samosas were only 99 cents each, and they were delicious filled with potatoes and peas and slightly spicy. 

Saag Paneer is super-easy to make. Cleaning and chopping the spinach is the most time-consuming part, and that doesn’t take long. Kay Chun at the Times suggests chopping the spinach in batches in a food processor, but you can also chop it with a knife. It doesn’t need to be super finely chopped. Remember that spinach cooks down a lot – 8 cups of packed spinach made just enough for our family of three. 

Cut the cheese into cubes and fry it in a little oil on a pan. It will brown slightly as it fries; turn the cubes over so it gets brown on 2 or 3 sides. Then put the cubes of cheese on a plate. 

Then, in the same pan, saute some onion, chopped (one medium onion should be good), minced ginger (a one inch piece), and 4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped. Add salt and pepper. Cook it over medium heat, so that you can let it get slowly slightly brown. The Times recipe was a little underflavored for my taste – I would try using 2 teaspoons of coriander, 1 teaspoon of cumin, and ½ teaspoon of garam masala. Stir to mix the spices with the vegetables, and to allow the spices to cook. Add water if necessary to keep it from burning. 

Next add the spinach, and a half cup of water, stirring it to mix the spinach with the vegetable spice mix, and to let all of it cook. When the spinach seems well cooked, turn the heat down low or off, add back in the paneer, and a ½ cup or so of yogurt or heavy cream, and stir it gently. 

Serve with rice. If you go to Brother’s, you can buy some naan or chapati or other bread to go with it. Enjoy!