Stuffed Manicotti and Marinara Sauce

Beef & Cheese Manicotti
adapted from Everyday Italian by Giada De Laurentiis

*warning: this takes a while. The good news is you can do it as a make-ahead recipe or make & freeze individual-sized portions for lunches or whatever.


1 lb ground beef
1 medium onion, finely chopped
15 oz ricotta cheese
2 cups shredded mozarella cheese
1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
6-8 oz chevre (goats cheese) - (optional)
2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley
3-4 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
salt
pepper
olive oil
12-14 large pieces manicotti (one package)
2 cups homemade marinara sauce. (no exceptions!)
1 tablespoon butter

1) Make a double batch of the marinara sauce (see below), and save what you won't need in the freezer. This is best done at least a day ahead of time.

2) Put several quarts of water on to boil with a bit of salt. Dice your onion. Heat a 12-inch skillet on medium-high heat and add the onion and ground beef and a bit of salt and pepper. Cook about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. While it cooks, get a big mixing bowl and add your minced/pressed garlic, half the mozarella, half the parmesan, all the goat's cheese if using, the parsley, and a bit of salt and pepper. Mix it up. Turn your oven on to 350.

3) When the onion is translucent and all the beef is browned, remove the meat from heat and let cool a bit, then add to to the cheese mixture and mix well. When your water is boiling, add half the manicotti and cook for 6 minutes, no more, then fish them out with a slotted spoon and put them on a plate to cool a bit, then add the other half of the manicotti and reset your timer for 6 minutes.

4) In a 9 x 13 baking dish, drizzle 1-2 Tbs of olive oil. Add ~3/4 cup of the marinara sauce to the bottom and set aside. Fill the first manicotti with the meat & cheese mix. If you're very talented you might do this while keeping the manicotti intact; I find it's a lot easier to open up a seam, fill it up, and then close it again and set it in the baking dish seam-side down. When your timer beeps take the other manicotti out and set aside to cool. When they can be handled, fill them with the rest of your filling and add them to the dish.

5) Spoon the rest of the marinara sauce on top of the manicotti. Add the rest of the mozarella & parmesan cheese to the top and dot with bits of butter. If you're preparing this ahead of time, throw it in the fridge (for no more than a day).

6) Bake the manicotti uncovered for about 30-35 minutes or until all the cheese is melted and starting to brown you can't stand to wait any longer. Let cool just long enough so it doesn't burn your mouth, and devour.

Marinara Sauce
from Everyday Italian by Giada De Laurentiis

* I recommend doubling this, in which case you will need a largish stockpot to fit it all

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 small onions, finely chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 celery stalks, finely chopped
2 carrots, peeled & finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, plus more to taste
2 32-oz cans crushed tomatoes
2 dried bay leaves

In a large pot, heat the olive oil over a medium-high flame. Add the onions and garlic and saute until the onions are translucent; about 10 minutes. Add the celery, carrots, and salt and pepper and saute until all vegetables are soft, about 10 minutes. Add the tomatoes and bay leaves and simmer uncovered until the sauce thickens, about 1 hour. Remove and discard the bay leaves. Season the sauce with more salt and pepper to taste.

T'beet, or not T'beet; that is the question.

Years ago, when I had time to read lots of cooking blogs, I came across a recipe unlike any I'd seen before. Going back and finding the original entry, I discover this was now more than 4 years ago - every once in a while I'd think about making this, but I never got around to it. This week I bought a chicken with the express purpose of trying it, and MAN was it good. If it sounds good to you, don't wait 4 years like I did before making it. All the ingredients are easy to get, and its a fairly simple recipe, though it does take some planning and a bit of specialized hardware. Some background:

This is T'beet, the traditional Sabbath lunch of Iraqi Jews. Jews are forbidden by religious law from kindling or extinguishing a flame on Saturday, the Jewish day of rest. Accordingly, any meal to be eaten hot on the Sabbath must be set on a fire before sundown the night before. The Jews of Europe have accomodated this imperative with cholent: a slow-cooked stew of meat, beans, and vegetables, which I find utterly revolting. My ancestors relied instead on the middle-eastern staple of rice in composing their Sabbath lunch: a stuffed chicken stewed in tomato sauce and spices and baked into a cake of aromatic basmati rice. After twelve or more hours of cooking, the rice forms a hard, delicious crust on the outside, while the rice surrounding the chicken becomes irresistably tender and absorbs all the flavors in the pot. A rice stuffing within the chicken is the most intense of all: it is heavily spiced and absorbs all the juices of the chicken as it cooks.

As you can see in the above image of T'beet deconstructed, you can have your rice three ways. The rice to the left of the chicken has hardened into a crunchy, nutty shell. At top right, you can see the pillowy rice that surrounds the chicken. At bottom right is the intensely flavored rice from the stuffing. Incidentally, a chicken cooked in this manner emerges from the oven tender enough to cut with a spoon.

Here follows my adaptation:

Recipe: T'beet
Total time to make: about 15 hours. Feeds at least 6.

Ingredients

* 1 whole chicken
* 4 tbsp olive oil
* 1 small-med onion, diced
* 1 plum tomato, diced
* 1 29-oz. can crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce
* Iraqi Jewish five-spice powder, or Dave's Experimental Mexican 5-Spice Powder (see below)
* water
* salt and pepper
* 4 cups basmati rice

Iraqi-Jewish Five Spice Powder:
*2 tsp each of ground cardamom, ground cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and turmeric

Dave's Experimental Mexican 5-Spice (untried, but I think it'd be good)
* 2 tsp each of cumin, chili powder or ground chipotle, coriander, garlic powder, and cinnamon. Plus you'll want some jalapenos, black beans, and corn to add to the rice.

Hardware:
* 5 1/2 Quart Nonstick Oven-Safe or Enameled Dutch Oven
* Medium mixing bowl or plastic ziploc to make the 5-spice in
* Tongs for turning chicken during browning
* Big plate, bigger than the top of your Dutch Oven
* Wooden or non-stick-safe spatula, not flimsy

0) Invite some guests over for lunch on the weekend, unless you need lots of leftovers or have a large family. Do this Thursday.

1) The night before you want to eat this, start by making the 5-spice powder of your choosing. Make a stuffing for the chicken from the diced onion and tomato, 3/4 cup of the rice, 3 tsp of the 5-spice, 1/2 tsp salt, and ~2 Tbsp of the tomato sauce. If your chicken came with giblets, you can dice and include the heart and gizzard (not the liver). Mix in a bowl or ziploc bag and refrigerate.

2) Adjust oven rack to lower shelf. Preheat oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 125 Celsius. Rinse the chicken inside and out and pat dry with a paper towel. Salt and pepper the outside of the chicken generously. Place the dutch oven over medium-high heat on the stove and heat the olive oil until it shimmers. Add the chicken, breast side up, and brown on each side until golden brown, rotating with tongs every 3-4 minutes. When all sides have been browned, remove the dutch oven from heat and stuff the chicken loosely with the stuffing. It's OK if there's leftover, no need to cram it all in.

3) Put the chicken back in the dutch oven, breast side down, and return to heat. Add the rest of the tomato sauce, and add water to about 3 inches below the top of the pot. Add the rest of the 5-spice and bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

4) Add the remaining rice and any leftover stuffing to the pot, pouring around the sides of the chicken so it doesn't pile up on top. If making the apocryphal Mexican variation, reduce the rice by a cup and add a can of corn, a can of black beans, and some chopped jalapenos and cilantro. Stir in the rice gently to even it out. Place the cover on the dutch oven and put it in the oven. Bake for about 14 hours or so, timing it so it'll be ready as lunch the next day.

5) Bask in the glorious baking aromas all night. In the morning, be sure to go out of your house for some reason for a few minutes so you can smell it all again when you come back in. When it's ready, pull the T'beet out of the oven and rest it on the stovetop for about 10 minutes with the cover removed. Put your big plate over top of it and invert T'beet onto the plate. With luck, most of it, including the delicious outside crusty rice, will go smoothly onto your plate. If not, use your wooden scraper or spatula to get the rest. You may want a second plate on the dinner table anyway for people to put bones on, so for now you can put the rice left in the pot there. Hopefully it looks kinda like this:



6) Serve to your family and guests. You will be able to cut the chicken with a serving spoon. Make sure everyone gets some chicken, and each of the three types of rice: exterior crust, middle rice, and stuffing rice from inside the chicken. Devour.

Pass the Parsley

This got brought up in comments about the "What's on my Plate" tree, and Maren didn't know what it was. It's time you all knew. Brace yourselves.

First: a little history. In 11th grade Gabe Soll and I were partners on a civil-war era novella for our AmHist class. He did most of the work, I mostly proofread. One of the other groups got a failing grade when it was discovered that they had essentially rewritten the film "The Posse". I digress. Anyway, I borrowed Gabe's copy of Penn & Teller's How to Play with Your Food, and I never gave it back. Gabe, if you're reading, I'm sorry. Also, why are you reading, we haven't spoken in years - I heard from Chuck Moscato that you were a balding lawyer. Call me.

What the rest of you need to know is that the book in question is chock full of fun things to do with comestibles. That's right. Everything from "How to transport David Letterman's Watch into the Belly of a Fish" to "Stabbing a Fork in your Eye" (ask Kari about that one sometime - I did it at the Potomac Mills Food Court and she totally freaked). One of the tamer entries is "The Parsley Game." I quote:

"The parsley game is very simple: when Parsley, that useless biennial bastard nephew of the carrot family, is served on your plate as a garnish, you sneak it onto the plate of one of your dinner partners without being seen by the recipient. It's as easy as that, but, like chess, the possibilities are endless... The first few times you play the game, you'll win, but then your pals will catch on that you're playing and it will get harder... After a while, no one will turn around for anything."

So there you have it. Palm your parsley early, when nobody's thinking about it yet, and be ready at a moment's notice to get it onto the plate of anyone who looks away or goes for a drink refill.

Where do Wendy's dehydrated chives fit in?

Today's lunch topic.