Pot au Feu is essentially a beautiful, tender pot-roast that is served in a clear, beef broth studded with vegetables.
If the mainland's caldo verde is an uptown kale soup, then this Azorean version is definitely its downtown cousin. It's a more rugged dish. This is my mom's recipe, which she's been making for almost 50 years. What I like about it, and what my mother always insists on, is that it has a sizable amount of chouriço -- not the miserly single slice of caldo verde.
The combination of salmon, broccoli, and red potatoes makes for a wonderful meal. But how to cook them all on one pan without any one component coming out overcooked or undercooked was a puzzle we needed to solve. Our first step was to look at the roasting time for each. Since the potatoes required the most time in the oven and the salmon required the least, we started by roasting the potatoes and broccoli together for the first half of the cooking time and then swapped in the salmon for the broccoli halfway through roasting. Cooking in stages prevents overcrowding the pan, ensuring even cooking. A vibrant sauce of chopped chives, whole-grain mustard, lemon juice, olive oil, and honey completes this one-pan meal. To ensure that all three components emerge from the oven well browned and cooked just right, we roast the potatoes the entire time on the baking sheet (they take the longest) but remove the broccoli before placing the salmon fillets on the sheet.
My mother made this type of stew from the carcass of a raw chicken and its gizzards; I use pancetta instead of gizzards for additional flavor and chicken legs, which stay moist during the cooking. Jardiniere means “gardener” in French, and the vegetables change according to what is in season or in my garden. The stew is easy to put together, and it gets better every time you reheat it.
This quick and easy vegan entrée is economical and crowd-pleasing. Seek out garam masala (Indian spice blend) without salt, and prep the other ingredients while the potatoes roast.
Pambazos
What chicken soup is to us, pea soup is to the Dutch -- an everlasting standby and cure-all.
This salad is sure to be a showstopper at any picnic and is not impossible to make.