So much of what we think we know of Haiti is bad – from the massive human suffering and destruction caused by January’s earthquake, to decades of political and social unrest, to blood-curdling tales of voodoo curses and zombies – that one might be forgiven for wondering how the inhabitants of such a benighted country make it through the day. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s often the case that where there is the greatest suffering, there is also the most joyous celebration – think the wildly over the top bedazzled costumes and deafening samba baterias coming out of the most ravaged Rio slum at Carneval – and so it is in Haiti, and nothing says celebration to a Haitian like griyot.

Grillot/griyo/griyot/griot (pronounced gree-oh) and its accompaniments of sauce ti malice (sos ti malice) and rice and beans constitute one of Haiti’s handful of national dishes, and no Haitian party can be considered a real knees-up without it. This is particularly so on January 1, Haiti’s National Day, recalling the country’s 1804 declaration of independence from France and its arrival on the international scene as the first independent nation in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as the world’s first black republic, and from whence it took the lead among non-English speaking nations of the western hemisphere in promulgating ideas of liberty and equality. This early split from the colonial power and the country’s several subsequent lapses in to chaos have allowed Haitian culture and cuisine to preserve its African heritage and develop in its own distinct way, largely undiluted by external influences. Ways of which we were almost completely ignorant until we ate our first meal at Kombit – a Haitian restaurant we were lucky enough to have in our neighborhood

We quickly became regulars at Kombit, the sheer novelty of having a Haitian eatery close by (not to mention the raft of delicious and completely unknown dishes) took a long while to wear off. Possibly due to the fact that we were consistently among the few non-Haitian diners, or perhaps because we always asked stupid questions about their food, owners Pascale and Marie began to recognize us, and, eventually, took rather a shine to us two inquisitive but entirely ignorant enthusiasts. Each time we visited they would patiently and smilingly respond to our inane inquiries without ever really revealing much about how the dishes we were enjoying griyot, sauce ti malice or their unbelievably special rice and beans, were made.

Ever since that first experience some six or more years ago, we’ve wanted to try to home-make griyot, and after recently getting our hands on one of two Haitian cook books in print in the United States, we reserved most of a weekend and set to work. The weekend reservation was necessary because – like many flavorful and traditional dishes, preparation ahead of time and patience are necessary – griyot is, as you’ll see if you scroll down, one of several dishes that are dependent on each other, and, if you’re not Haitian and, therefore likely to have some of these staples already hanging around, you have make them in a certain order.

Starting with the griyot – a very rustic and filling dish of marinaded, then braised, then fried pork chunks – you must be prepared to wait at least 24 hours after starting the preparation to eat it, but it is well worth the wait. The texture of it, crispy on the outside and soft inside, combined with the myriad tropical flavors filling your mouth, is quite something in itself, but when paired with its natural partner of rice and beans, it transcends its rusticity to become a truly world-class dish. In complete honesty, Haitian rice and beans are, by a margin, the best I have ever eaten. Smoky, savory and satisfying, these rice and beans are so freaking good that you would be perfectly happy to have a plate, by itself, for dinner. Every night.

We wrote way back in the spring about the Burmese national dish, Own-o Kow Swear, and noted that condiments played a crucial role in that country’s cooking. So it is in Haiti, except that there are far fewer condiments, and the few they have, are used with the same regularity as ketchup in America or olive oil in Greece. Rather handily, both of the two principal Haitian condiments, piklis and sos ti malice, work magnificently with griyot, though since the former is a fiery concoction of scotch bonnet peppers, allspice and vinegar, one should demonstrate restraint in its use in order to avoid the obvious pitfalls.

It sounds anything but appetizing, but sos ti malice – a reddish-brown, thinnish gravy, scattered with a few bits of onion and pepper – is served by the bowlful at Kombit, and we almost always have to order extra it is so good. They serve it with all sorts of dishes, but it is most appropriate with griyot because (although Pascale and Marie never revealed this to us) both the marinade and cooking juices from the griyot are used in its preparation, giving it an incredible complexity and satisfying savoriness.

Please don’t be intimidated by the length of preparation time, the seemingly exotic ingredients or the long list of recipes below. All are very easy to make, the ingredients are fairly easy to find even in an average supermarket, and most of the time you can put your feet up or do something else entirely. Out of the 24 hour (36 hour for piklis) preparation time, you’ll probably be only actively cooking for around 3 hours at the absolute most.

So, for your next celebration meal, consider making griyot and its associated dishes. They really are almost indescribably good and after eating them you’ll certainly be thinking about Haiti in a whole new light.

Before we head off to England (and a five day side-trip to Northern France) to visit the across-the-pond family, we wanted to leave you with a different option for your Christmas Day meal.  Some families love making hard-core meals for Christmas Day dinner – meals that take hours to cook and include many courses or many side dishes.  If that is your type of meal, then you may want to save this recipe for another time (perhaps when you’re hung over on New Year’s Day?).   This dish is so flavorful and so freaking easy to make.  You know what makes it even better? It’s a cost-effective.  So chat with your butcher, make it easier and just ask him/her to butterfly that pork for you, grab a huge mug of egg nog or mulled wine, throw on some Johnny Mathis and spend some time doing what real Americans will be doing – hanging out with Ralphie.

MERRY CHRISTMAS/HAPPY HANUKKAH/HAPPY KWANZAA EVERYONE! Thank you for supporting us, commenting on posts and actually reading our words.  It means more than you know!  Have a delicious 2010!

They (we) call it a Sunday Gravy because it really suits a Sunday best.  The long simmering, the wine drinking, the letting-it-sit-on-the-stove-till-the-family-arrives kind of gravy.  Thanks to the Sopranos, people all over the world have heard of Sunday Gravy. Some scratch their heads in wonder as to why some call it sauce and others call it gravy.  It’s a hotly debated topic but, in essence, this “stew” of veal necks, sausage, pork ribs, bracciole, pigs feet, etc. should always be called a gravy over a sauce. It requires long and slow cooking and is flavored by the meat, hence it is technically a gravy. Friend of the blog, Joe, at Italyville has a wonderful post on this debate and I’d recommend all who are still confused to check it out.

To make the debate even more annoying, the Italian Americans in this country have kind of created this confusion about gravy vs. sauce.  For many Italians in this country, whether you call this type of meal a sauce or a gravy is decided by the family you come from and even the area of the country you live in.  For my Italian family, a gravy seems to be ANYTHING that contains tomato sauce.  Come to think of it, my family calls anything you put on top of meat or macaroni as “gravy”.  But, rule of thumb is if you are in Italy and you ask for gravy, you’re going to get a sauce that contains meat (ragu).  Check out Joe’s link for a perfect example of this from the Sopranos.

Sunday gravy can be made with a variety of meats and as long as you have a decent variety, you can not mess this up.  Our Sunday Gravy included pigs feet, bracciole, pork necks, veal shoulder, and sweet and hot sausage.  Other traditional additions include pork ribs, beef ribs, pork chops, some even put meatballs in theirs.  It’s kind of a “what can you get your hands on” kind of meal.  With that said, I would like to recommend that you do not skip two key ingredients in order to get optimal flavor – pigs feet and the pork necks.  I know, guys, some of you may be squeamish about this but the flavor, OH THE FLAVOR, you get by simmering these delicious bits of offal.  If you feel uncomfortable serving them with the rest of your meat, well throw them out after they flavor your gravy.  But, personally, I believe these two bits of pig really make the gravy.

So put on your ‘fat pants’, throw on some Sinatra, pour yourself a big glass of chiant’ (Chianti to all you non-Northeastern US Italians) and give yourself a good four to five hours to watch the porky love grow in your pot.

SUNDAY GRAVY (serves a sh!tload of people – at least 6 hungry men)

Ingredients:

• 2 pigs feet (about 1 1/2 to 2 lbs)
• 1 pound bracciole (about a 8 inch long piece)
• 2 pounds veal, beef or pork neck bones
• 1 pound veal shoulder (in chops form or cut into 3 inch pieces)
• 1 veal shank (bone-in)
• 1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage
• 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage
• 1 large onion
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 28 ounce can of tomatos (preferably San Marzano – I prefer pureed over whole)
• some water
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

What to do:

1. Season meat with salt and pepper and, with a bit of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot (dutch over, preferably), brown all sides of each piece of meat.  Remove and set aside on a plate.
2. After all the meat is browned, add the onions and use the meat fat already in the pan to cook till soft (about 6-8 minutes), adding more olive oil if necessary. Add garlic and stir, cook for about a minute.
3. Add the wine and deglaze, scraping up the bits of goodness that have accumulated on the bottom of the pan.  Allow to reduce for a few minutes until it has reduced by about half.
4. Add tomatoes and one can of water (use the tomato can). Stir.
5. Add back the meat except the sausage and bracciole (which won’t be added until the last hour).  Bring to a simmer, cover and allow to cook for five hours.  Yes, kids, that’s five hours.  Ever once in a while stir.
6. At hour number four, add back the sausage and bracciole and allow to simmer for one more hour.
7. Taste and season with salt and pepper and add some hot pepper if you’d like.  Remove all the meat and serve separately from the gravy. Cut the sausage into 2 inch pieces.  Serve some of the gravy over pasta and enjoy.

Jeffrey Steingarten famously declares in It Must Have Been Something I Ate that every time he is bored, he roasts a chicken. Calculating that he gets bored approximately once a week, this translates into 52 roast chickens a year and more than one thousand since he began as food critic at Vogue. That’s a lot of chicken, but it’s also a lot of practice in the art of roasting. Now, Steingarten goes on to say that roasting a chicken in the oven is little more than baking it, and that real roasting can only be done on a spit over a flame, which is perhaps true, but in the absence of a spit and fire, I think oven-roasting (baking) can produce a perfectly delicious roast chicken, and would refer you to the recent post “How to Spatchcock a Chicken” for a quick step-by-step.

Indeed, to my mind, (and to disagree with Mr. Steingarten, for once) there is one distinct advantage to oven-roasting vs. spit-roasting, namely, drippings, and drippings, like the crumbles in the corner of a bag of chips (crisps), are where the flavor is at. These drippings, you see, can be made into one of the most sublime of all cooking by-products, the gravy.

So, after washing and patting dry my bird, I stuffed its cavity with carrots, celery, onions, garlic, thyme, and lemon, before giving it a good rub all over with olive oil and a healthy sprinkling of salt. I then placed said bird in a dutch oven (le creuset) and leaving the lid off, put it in a 420F oven for forty minutes. After forty minutes, and with the bird looking perfectly golden and crispy, I turned the heat down to more placid 350F and let it roast for another hour before removing it and letting it rest a while out of the oven.

Before carving it, I removed the bird from the pot and took out the stuffing from the cavity, then drained all the juices out of the cavity into the pot where they mixed with roasting juices. Adding the cavity stuffing to the juices, along with about a pint of tap water, I turned up the heat and scraped the burnt bits off the bottom of the pan. I let the liquid reduce by about a third, stirring occasionally and crushing some of the vegetables a bit with my wooden spoon.

Nicely brown and beautifully redolent of chicken, thyme, lemon and the sweetness of roasted carrots, I strained the gravy and then pushed the solids through a sieve to add some body and flavor back in to it. Seasoning only slightly with salt and fresh pepper, I was proud to have made an absolutely fantastic, honest-to-goodness chicken gravy without recourse to stock, bouillon cubes or thickeners like corn starch. It was a moment in which I realized that just by following my instincts I had recreated the kind of gravy you’d commonly find at a good English restaurant or pub, or indeed, a good country French restaurant.

It was really quite an ordinary dinner – roast chicken, dauphinoise potatoes and a warm asparagus salad with fennel and celery tops, but with this gravy it became extraordinary — exactly the kind of restorative elixir that my body needed. “They” say that chicken soup contains something that makes you better when you’re sick, and I am sure that this chicken gravy had some of that goodness in it too. It was freshly made, flavorful and, well, chicken-y in a way that only chicken can really taste like chicken, and it made me feel wholesome without resorting to wheat germ, lentils and colonic irrigation.

Another interesting by-product of this dinner was a rather toothsome recipe for a potato and fennel gratin that I’m also inordinately proud of, perhaps because I didn’t work from a recipe, perhaps because I’m an asshole. Anyway, here’s how to do it:

Potato & Fennel Gratin
Ingredients

• 2 large or 3 medium waxy potatoes (yukon gold are best here) peeled, but left whole
• 1 large fennel bulb with tops trimmed and reserved for fennel salad
• 1/2 to 2/3 cup milk
• 2-3oz low moisture mozzarella, sliced thinly
• salt & pepper to taste

Recipe

• Preheat oven to 350F.
• Using a mandolin on the middle thickness setting, slice your potatoes and fennel.
• Lay out potatoes overlapping one another by about 3/4 slice (see photo below) in a layer in a baking dish.
• Then do the same thing with your fennel slices. This second layer will probably not be as neat as the first one, but that doesn’t really matter.
• Pour the milk over the vegetables but make sure milk does not cover them. Depending on the size of your dish, you may need a bit more or a bit less milk, but it should only come up to the bottom of the upper-most layer of vegetables.
• Season with salt and pepper.

• Cover dish with foil and place in oven for about half an hour.
• After this time, remove from oven and lay your mozzarella slices on top. Do not add too much cheese – be a little sparing.
• Return to oven and allow to bake for another twenty minutes or so, until cheese begins to puff and brown.
• Remove and allow to cool a bit before serving (cutting is easier when vegetables and cheese have firmed up a little).
• Serve with roast chicken on a Sunday night and calm the weekly apprehension at your impending return to work.

Check out these other posts you may enjoy:

• BRAISED PORK CHOPS WITH LIME AND OLIVES
• ENSALADA DE CABRALES (Thin Sliced Apple and Cabrales Cheese Salad w/ Vinaigrette)
• AUTHENTIC THIN-CRUST PIZZA
• BLACK, RED OR PINTO BEANS WITH CHORIZO AND CUMIN
• VEAL KIDNEYS WITH MUSHROOMS AND COGNAC
• CREAMY LEMON PASTA
• LIDIA’S LAMB CHOPS (Lamb Chops with A Mustard Anchovy Sauce)

Now, of course, it’s not true. The British do not, as far as I know, eat toads, though, if frogs are edible, and taste a bit like chicken, then I might be prepared to try toads, if sauteed with a little garlic and parsley. However, the British do eat toad in the hole – a delicious, simple and filling dish that is one of my father’s perennial favorites. I, like my father, love this dish too and had been threatening to make it for my wife for months until recently, when the weather got cold enough to warrant a meal with sausages, eggs, flour, milk and gravy, I finally got around to it.

It went down very well, I’m glad to report, and it’s an easy, inexpensive and relatively quick meal to make on a weekday night. You should try it whether you like amphibians or not.

Toad in the Hole with Fresh Mushy Peas (serves 4)

For the batter:

• 1 1/2 cups plain flour, sifted
• 2 whole eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk

Crack eggs and whisk yolks and whites together. Add to flour and mix into a paste before adding milk and whisking until smooth. Set aside, or refrigerate, until ready to use.

For the “Toad”:

• 8 sausage links (about 1 1/2 – 2 lbs), separated
• 1 onion, sliced thinly
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped finely
• 1 pint hot water
• 2 tbsp Bisto (or use some beef stock and thicken w/ cornstarch)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper

Recipe for main dish:

Preheat oven to 425F. Heat skillet to medium-high and add oil. Brown sausages on all sides, then remove them. Lower heat to medium and add onions. Saute them until soft. Add garlic and pinch of salt. Combine water and bisto powder. Continue to saute for four or five mins, until onions are becoming translucent, before adding gravy mixture. Reduce heat to low and allow liquid to reduce by about a third.

Grease a 12inch baking dish with oil and place sausages in it. Pour the batter mixture around the sausages and slap it all in the oven for about 20 minutes or until batter is risen and golden-brown. Serve in portions of two sausages and pour onion gravy on top. Goes great with the peas but sauteed cabbage, collard greens, kale or broccoli rabe are also good accompaniments. Enjoy!

For the peas:

• 1 lb frozen peas
• 1/4 stick unsalted butter
• A dash of light or heavy cream (about 1-2 tablespoons)
• 1/2 cup water

Simmer the peas in the water for about 12 minutes until soft. Add the butter, cream, salt and pepper and then smash the peas, but make sure to leave them with plenty of texture. Serve on the side of the toad-in-the-hole.

CHECK OUT SOME OF THESE OTHER POSTS:

• HUNGARIAN GOULASH
• LEMONGRASS BEEF SHORTRIBS
• Pulling Pints: Not Small Beer
• A Bloody Delicious Time in England – A Recap
• JAMAICAN JERK CHICKEN
• PERFECT BROCCOLI DI RAPE WITH SWEET SAUSAGE

VEAL SAUSAGES WITH HERBED POLENTA AND ROASTED BEETS (Serves 2)

• 4 Veal Sausage Links
• 2 Large Beets, cut into 2” half-moons
• 1/2 cup polenta
• hot chicken stock for the polenta
• chopped parsley and sage

For the gravy:

• 1/4 cup red wine
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1/2 onion, finely sliced
• 1/2 habanero, finely chopped (optional)
• 2 teaspoons of BISTO (or 1 beef stock cube)
• 2 cups of boiling water
• Salt and Pepper to taste (for polenta and gravy)

What to do:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Peel the beets, cut them into half-moon shapes and toss with olive oil and salt/pepper. Put on baking sheet and roast for 25 minutes.
2. In a medium-hot pan, brown your sausages on both sides. When they are browned on both sides, remove from pan and keep on side.
3. Add some olive oil (1 Tbsp.) to the same pan sausages browned in. Add sliced onions and allow to soften. When onions are translucent, add garlic and (optional) hot pepper. Allow to saute for a minute or two.
4. Add red wine and deglaze the pan, picking up any bits on the bottom.
5. Mix BISTO (or stock cube) and boiling water thoroughly. Add this to the pan. Bring to a boil. Simmer liquid until reduced by half.
6. While gravy is reducing, start your polenta. In a separate pan, combine polenta with 1 cup of hot chicken stock by first putting stock in pan and then slowly pouring polenta in it (STIR all the while… it will feel like you don’t have enough hands to do this, but just do your best!). Add a pinch of salt. Continue to stir vigorously with a wooden spoon, adding more chicken stock while doing so. You don’t want the polenta to be dry, but also do not let it get soupy (unless, of course that’s how you like polenta). You want it to be smooth and not runny. Keep stirring with a wooden spoon while on medium – low/medium heat for about 15-20 minutes. At the end, taste for necessary salt and smoothness. Throw in your herbs and some (optional) parmagiano cheese.
7. Take beets out of oven and allow to cool for a few minutes.
8. Add the sausages back to the pan. Allow to simmer for 3-4 additional minutes.
9. Plate your dish – start with a layer of polenta, two sausages per plate nestled into the polenta, topped with some gravy (get some onions in there!) and finish with a few roasted beets. Enjoy!

CHECK OUT SOME OF THESE OTHER POSTS YOU MAY ENJOY:

• HUNGARIAN GOULASH
• JAMAICAN JERK CHICKEN
• WINE-BRAISED LAMB SHANKS WITH ROSEMARY AND THYME IN PRESSURE COOKER
• ORECCHIETTE WITH SAUSAGE AND KALE
• TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE (Sausages Nested in Batter)