We have some beets (the not-very-red kind; maybe they’re even “yellow”) that have been in the fridge for a while, and almost a whole big head of purple cabbage.

I beetled off to Epicurious, who seemed to have nothing but recipes for Borscht.

Nothing against Borscht; Debbie makes it from time to time, and it’s tasty and hearty.  But I wanted something different.

Enter "Beet and Cabbage Soup", a Mexican recipe (of all things) featuring jalapeno, lime juice, and tortilla chips at the end.

Here’s the mess o’ vegetables saute-ing at the beginning (the beets are the golden colored chunks).

And here’s the soup at the end, with tortilla chips and a dollop of (low fat) sour cream.

Tasty, but, you know what?  It kinda tasted like Borscht with lime juice and tortilla chips and a hint of jalapeno.  And the mauve color didn’t help bring it to life for me.

I’m on something of a braising roll lately.  And since I’m not that keen on eating the things you really should braise – tough fatty cuts of beef, lamb, or pork – I end up wanting to braise chicken.

(Which Josh H. tells me is really stupid to do, since chicken is a tender meat and doesn’t need much braising unless you’re cooking a 40-year-old rooster or some such.  He’s right of course, but the urge to braise goes on.)

A few years ago I got a picture book called “The Best of ‘Fine Cooking’ 101 Tips”.  Debbie wanted to throw it out when we purged books this winter.  She sneered at it: “Most of those things I already know.”  But the point was that I didn’t know them, I love tips, guidelines, and, most generally, advice, so I rescued the book from the purge box, put it in the bathroom, and have been leafing over it for some months with pleasure and instruction.

Well, it has a recipe for “Braised Chicken Legs with White Wine, Bacon, Cipolline Onions, and Mushrooms” (shown below, from their website), and I resolved to make it this weekend while Debbie was away wrapping up family affairs in California.

Some minor-league problems.  No cipolline onions (which I looked up on the web, e.g. here), although the main thing about them seemed to be “flat and sweet”.  I got some white “boiling onions” instead, because the supermarket I hit on the way home didn’t even have sweet onions.

I was worried there wouldn’t be any cremini mushrooms either, but those they had.

Other than that, it went really smoothly and tasted pretty good.

The origins of this project?  I’ve had a yen for a while to “braise” something.  There’s of course a bunch of foodie propaganda in the magazines and online about braising in the winter, and the dishes look really good.  So I’ve been getting more or more exciting about braising.

(On, one more thing: the foods you normally braise – tough fatty red meat – kind of grosses me out, even if braised.  I was mildly disposed to avoid those kinds of braises, although Debbie has done a pretty good job time and again with braised boneless short ribs.)

So, the usual drill: epicurious with search terms taken from my fridge, so “braising” and “root vegetables”.  What turned up was Chicken and Vegetables Braised in Peanut Sauce, with the additional lure (for me) that it’s an African dish or a dish of African origins, so reminds me of Mara.

Here’s how it looks in the Gourmet magazine presentation.

Well, I’ve also had a yen – also generated by foodie reading – to learn how to cut up a whole chicken, so, rather than getting 5 lbs of chicken parts I got a 5-lb chicken and started to cut it up.

Not as easy as I thought: a raw chicken is slippery and floppy.  It’s hard to find the joints.  I did get it, though.  Four breast pieces (two breast halves cut in two), two thighs, two drumsticks.  I neglected to cut off the wings, which turned out to be a big mistake since they interfered with browning, cooking, and eating.  Ah well: next time I’ll know better.

Here’s my version (I used brown rice (not shown) instead of white).  Not too shabby-looking compared to the prototype, although my chicken is not as well browned (due to size of pieces and presence of wings).

Not all that tasty, though.  It basically tastes like a very mild peanut-butter sauce, which is kind of eh.

I’ll try it another time, I think.  I’ll also try other braises.  Onward and upward.

Thank goodness for Harry, since I had no material this week.  His latest production is a… Decumani:

My wife and I were visiting Naples this fall. We had just finished a tour of the city’s Duomo, and were poking around the Via dei Tribunali, near the Via San Gregorio Armeno, in the Decumano Maggiore section of the city. The San Gregorio Armeno is famous for the craftsmen that still carve shepherds and other figures for the traditional Neapolitan nativity scenes, a tradition that dates back some 400 years. It was lunch time and by happenstance we found ourselves in the  Antica Pizzeria "i Decumani". While there were introduced by our table neighbors to the restaurant’s signature dish “i Decumani.” Looking more like a pizza “ring” rather than a pizza “pie” we were intrigued and ordered one.

It was delicious, and unlike any pizza we had ever tasted. The ring was “stuffed” with eggplant, olives, and mozzarella cheese. And then it was covered with slices of prosciutto, and arugula leaves.

Being somewhat of a pizza chef myself (we have a wood burning pizza oven at our house) I started to deconstruct the dish with the objective of recreating the treat once we arrived back in the States. It appeared that once the pizza dough was formed into a “pie”, the center portion was cut to make flaps that were then folded back over the fillings and the outer crust, thereby forming a ring.

I tried this technique after we arrived back home with pretty good results, as you can see from the pictures.

Very fortunate to be joined this week by my partner and much-more-serious cook Harry, who made a “timpano” for Christmas, as he will explain:

The timpano (Calabrian dialect) or timballo was made famous by the movie Big Night. If you saw the movie, you know the timpano is a feast for the eyes. On Christmas Day 2010 we set out to see if it tastes as good as it looks. Producing a timpano is not hard, but it is labor intensive. Many of the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time, with simple assembly on the day it is to be cooked. The only tricky part is rolling out (what was for our timpano a 30” in diameter round of) pasta dough. Ours was a three person effort with my wife preparing most of the ingredients, and my son and I rolling out the dough and performing final assembly. Think of the timpano as a luxurious, decadent lasagna-pasta dough encasing layers of pasta, tomato sauce, salami, provolone and pecorino cheeses, hard boiled eggs, and meat balls. Then baked in an oven heated to a temperature of about 120°F.

We were not disappointed, the finished product was perfect in appearance and taste.