Home-made merguez sausages

A while back, my friend CHM told me that he noticed that my fall-back position is cooking when I've run out of other subjects to blog about. He's right, I guess — when we don't have visitors and aren't out touring around, cooking occupies most of my time. Walt and I do nearly everything from scratch, using local products from the open-air markets as well as basic products we buy at the supermarket.

This time of year, we're even more likely to be busy in the kitchen because the garden is starting to produce plenty of vegetables that need to be cooked and either consumed or, if not, preserved for the winter by freezing or canning. Collard greens, for example — with those the other day, because there were so many at one time, I took the path of least resistance and just packed them into plastic bags and put them in the freezer. It would have taken another whole day of work to put them up in jars and process them so that I could keep them in the pantry all winter.

We shaped the ground lamb mixture into sausages and put
a skewer through each one before grilling them outdoors.

Yesterday Walt made home-made merguez sausages. Merquez (pronounced [mehr-GHEHZ]) are sausages from North Africa (Algeria, Morocco) made with ground lamb. Normally, there's no pork in them, but you can add a little ground beef to the mixture. Merguez are made with a lot of spice, which you can vary. Here's the mixture Walt used:

Home-made merguez sausages

500 grams (18 oz.) ground lamb
1 Tbsp. harissa paste (or other chili pepper)
1 garlic clove, pressed or finely minced
2 Tbsp. ground fennel seed
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. paprika
1 egg
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
2 Tbsp. dry breadcrumbs (if needed)

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. If the mixture seems to dry, add a tablespoon or two of water to it. If it seems too wet, add a tablespoon or two of dry breadcrumbs. Use cayenne pepper, for example, if you can't get North African harissa paste, and make the merguez mixture as spicy as you like.

Form the ground lamb mixture into meatballs or sausages. One good way to cook them is to put them on wooden skewers on a rack in the oven or on a barbecue grill until they're done.

Shredded summer squash "stewed" in olive oil
with onion and tomato sauce

To go with the merguez, we made a variation on the Julia Child shredded squash preparation that I described a couple of days ago. To make this one, coarsely shred two or three whole fresh squash, skin and all — it's easy and quick using the food processor. Put the shredded squash in a colander or strainer, sprinkle a teaspoon or two of salt over it, mix the salt in, and let the squash exude water for 30 minutes.

Shredded squash with tomato sauce

Rinse the shredded squash and dump it into a clean kitchen towel. Squeeze out the remaining water over the sink (you could also use a potato ricer to press the water out). Then finely slice a medium onion, a couple of shallots, or a couple of cloves of garlic. "Stew" the shredded squash flesh and the onion or garlic in olive oil on medium heat in a frying pan for about 10 minutes. Add about four big tablespoons of tomato sauce, some salt and pepper, and keep cooking it until the tomato sauce is mostly absorbed and starts to thicken. Serve hot.

Along with the lamb sausage and squash, we had a little
steamed couscous, a North African pasta.

One more word about merguez. As I said, they are spicy North African sausages that are made of lamb, mutton, or even beef. The next time we make them, we will add more hot pepper — maybe flakes, maybe ground cayenne pepper — and we'll also add some ground cumin to the mixture. The mixture above is good, but cumin will enhance it, and so will the extra chili pepper for our tastes. Merguez sausages are often served with couscous along with a spicy tomato-based broth with vegetables and chickpeas, and they are also very popular in France for summertime grilling.

It's not easy cooking greens

This a blog post just for my records and archives. Blogs are good for that purpose — you can look back over the years, day by day, and compare the weather, the vegetable garden, the state of the hedge and yard, and the fruit harvest to the current situation.

For example, we thought our sweet corn plants had been stunted by the dry weather earlier this summer. But Walt looked back at a late July 2010 post and saw that this year's plants are at least as tall, if not taller, than last year's plants were on about the same date.

Washing the greens in a big plastic tub

So I finished harvesting and cooking my collard greens yesterday. It's actually a lot of trouble, but I think I'll come to believe it was worth it when I find nice packages of greens in the freezer over the course of the winter.

Cooking the greens in white wine with duck fat and hot red pepper
flakes gives good flavor to the leaves and to the cooking liquid.

Recent rains had caused powdery mildew to start growing on the collard leaves. That meant I lost quite a bit of the crop, and the leaves I did harvest I had to wash very carefully in several changes of water. It all amounted to two full days of work. Walt helped me strip the leafy parts off the tough central ribs of the bigger leaves.

Collards cooked and packed in a terrine
to cool overnight in the refrigerator

Once I got the collard greens washed and trimmed, I cooked them for two to three hours, tasting them every 30 minutes or so to see if they were getting tender. I just occurred to me that I might have done well to cook them in the pressure cooker — it would have taken less time.

Greens served at the table...

This morning, I just finished packing the greens into zip-top plastic bags for the freezer. I ended up with about nine quarts. Each bag weighs about 400 grams, so that means the total harvest came in at 3.6 kilograms, cooked. That's eight pounds, avoirdupois. That's a funny English word, isn't it? It's obviously a French term, but for some reason we leave the D off poids (which means "weight").

...made yesterday's lunch.

Collard greens are good with pork or poultry (duck springs to mind) and with steamed potatoes. I'm having second thoughts about doing a second planting for a fall crop. I think I'll just wait for spring to roll around again before I plant more. We'll be busy enough this fall harvesting the rest of the garden.

Honey-glazed wings and shredded squash

Walt cooked a small batch of chicken wings yesterday. He was inspired by a recipe that our American friend K., who lives a couple of miles down the road from us, found in the Guardian newspaper (a British daily). It was in an article written by a man named Nigel Slater.

I thought these wings were excellent. You could cook drumsticks or thighs the same way. It's funny, though, that Slater calls them "thyme and garlic" wings, because the dominant flavors are definitely honey and lemon. I think it's the lemon zest that makes them especially flavorful.

Here's my version of the recipe:

Lemony honey-glazed chicken wings

4 Tbsp. honey
2 large cloves garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1 large lemon, zested and juiced
2 Tbsp. fresh thyme leaves (or 1 Tbsp. dried thyme)
2 or 3 pinches hot red pepper flakes (or hot sauce to taste)
2 to 2½ lbs. chicken wings

Strip the leaves and flowers off the thyme sprigs, if using fresh thyme (or use dried thyme). Put it into the bowl of a food processor (or use a stick blender) with the peeled garlic cloves, along with a generous grind of black pepper, the honey, the hot red pepper flakes or sauce, the grated lemon zest, and the lemon juice. Process or blend for a few seconds to make a sauce and marinate the chicken pieces in it for several hours (if you have time).

Pre-heat the oven to 375ºF/190ºC. Arrange the wings on a baking sheet so that they are not touching and salt them. Bake them for 40 minutes, turning them over two or three times as they cook, basting them each time with the remaining marinade. The honey will caramelize and give the chicken a nice golden color.

Serve hot or warm. Squeeze lemon juice over the wings at the table if you want to, and of course eat them with your fingers.

Honey-glazed wings with grated zucchini
"stewed" in butter and cream

To go with the wings, Walt made a Julia Child recipe (from the book The Way to Cook) using grated summer squash (round green squash in this case). To make it, coarsely shred two or three whole fresh squash, skin and all — it's easy and quick using the food processor. Put the shredded squash in a colander or strainer, sprinkle a teaspoon or two of salt over it, mix the salt in, and let the squash exude water for 30 minutes.

Rinse the shredded squash and dump it into a clean kitchen towel. Squeeze out the remaining water over the sink. Then finely slice a medium onion, a couple of shallots, or a couple of cloves of garlic. "Stew" the shredded squash flesh and the onion or garlic in butter on medium heat in a frying pan for about 10 minutes. Add a tablespoon or two of cream, some salt and pepper, and keep cooking it until the cream is mostly absorbed and starts to thicken. Serve hot.

What's happening in the garden

You might have noticed that I put up a new banner photo yesterday. It's a picture of the vegetable garden that I took yesterday morning. Here's the picture that I took on July 6, for comparison:

July 6, 2011

And here's the banner picture in a larger size, with labels showing what is planted where:

July 31, 2011
As usual, you can click the pictures to see them at full size.

So what's the plan for today? After picking all those pears day before yesterday, now I'm going to harvest the collard patch. Here's what it looks like:

The collards on July 31, 2011

Ever since I planted them last March, I've said that I would harvest the collard greens in August and do a new planting. I'm hoping for a fall crop.

Today, I'll pull out all the plants, clean and sort the leaves to keep the good ones and compost the raggedy ones, and then cook all the greens that are worth cooking. After they're cooked, I can decide whether to freeze them or put them up in jars. It's going to take me most of the day to get it done.