Welcome to Food Friends, a podcast inspiring home cooks to try new dishes in the kitchen by sharing trusted recipes, tips, and friendship. Hi, I'm Sonia. And I'm Keri. We met in Los Angeles over 15 years ago as personal chefs and haven't stopped talking about food since. We're so glad you're here. Hi, Sonia. Hi, Keri. Sonia, we're both wearing green sweaters today. I love it. Sonia, I'm dying to know what was your best bite of the week. Okay, it's an oldie but a goodie. I think sometimes, you know, there's these recipes that you just love and then you don't make for an entire year. And for me this week, that was pizza beans. Oh, wow. I'm so jealous. That's one of my favorite meals. Isn't it just the best? As soon as I kind of had the thought of like, why don't I make pizza beans tonight? I was like, why have I not been making pizza beans all year? It delivers exactly what it sounds like. It's a pizza-y version of beans, which is both light in some ways and rich in some ways. And full of vegetables. And also it combines two of our favorite foods, right? Pizza and beans. Absolutely. I've made pizza beans so many times at this point that I don't follow the recipe anymore. But the original recipe is from Smitten Kitchen. And if you follow it exactly as written, it's going to be excellent. But if you just want to take the concept of it, that also works. So I had those big fat white beans, you know, they're called like gigante. Yeah. And I had some in my pantry that I want to use. I love them. They're so meaty and tender. I just like a giant bean basically. So you cooked your beans from dried then? So I'd cook them off just with water, bay leaf and an onion. And I had these cooked beans already. I knew I was going to do something with them. At first I was like, do I want to make a soup or do I want to make a marinated bean and then I was like oh I want to make pizza beans you could totally get cans of butter beans or cans of cannellini beans or even chickpeas I think work for pizza beans actually pretty much almost any bean works for pizza beans there are versions of pizza beans that you can make with black beans too it's really a blank canvas in the original smitten kitchen recipe she uses giant white beans that's what she said so I guess this is the same thing yeah so and once your beans are cooked this comes together pretty quickly and you can go the route of making your tomato sauce from scratch you can get a jar of rayos or your favorite tomato sauce and do that i took an onion i cut it i sliced it thin i sauteed it with a load of garlic i added some tomato paste and crushed tomatoes and then i added i think oregano or a few other herbs i can't even remember because honestly i wasn't following recipe i was just sort of like oh what do i have a little bit of crushed red pepper flake is nice and tomato sauce and then you add your beans to that and then the thing that makes it pizza beans is you top it with a bunch of shredded cheese and then also with buttery toasted panko breadcrumbs one of our favorite additions to anything so i made the sauce i added the cooked beans to it i put the cheese on top i covered my baking dish i had it in one of those dutch ovens you don't have to have a dutch oven you could do a cast iron skillet you could do a casserole dish but i covered it which you could do with a lid or with foil put that in the oven and at the end for the last 10 minutes i uncovered it so the cheese could get kind of browned and I also topped it with the panko at that time so it could get browned because I didn't want it to burn or get soggy so that's why I waited a little bit I can't remember what she tells in the original recipe but this worked great and then yeah I let it brown in the oven that was dinner oh the other thing I added to the beans when they were all saucy and cooking in the pan is I added in a handful of greens I think I just had some kale on hand chard would work here whatever greens you have because I like adding something green to almost anything I doing but especially since this was like the complete meal this was the dish What I love is we share a love of this dish but I came to it completely different from you And I didn't know that the Smitten Kitchen version existed until we talked about this. And I really came to this recipe through a recipe called tomato rice with cheddar. That's where I also learned how much you always put cheddar cheese on your pizza because it adds that salty pop to it. I started making this recipe and really using it to clean out my produce drawer. This was a place where I first started adding cilantro stems, parsley stems, because it all kind of gets into this tomatoey sauce. This original recipe, you actually use old rice, but I started adding beans to it. So I would call it pizza, rice, and beans. And then you put all this cheddar on top or any cheese that you like on top. I don't usually do the panko breadcrumbs. I usually make this saucy base, add the beans add rice if I'm going to add rice top it with cheese and then stick it under the broiler that's also really smart my oven doesn't have a broiler funny enough I don't know it's a gas oven without a broiler just is wow I think it's a revelation I didn't know that yeah well since I moved but I do have a toaster oven that has a broiler function so if I desperately need to boil something I use the toast it's like one of those larger toaster ovens right but you're right this mint kitchen recipe doesn't have panko on top I think this is the point of like how we make things our own and where we get our inspiration from and i know that i made her recipe exactly as written the first time i made it so obviously i loved it but i do think that panko on top it's almost like when you have that on top of mac and cheese when you have a bread crumb crust it adds something to the cheesiness a little extra dimension even though the cheese gets a little crispy too but then it's like extra extra crispy which i just really think is a nice contrast to those very soft tender beans which you want i mean in her recipe she also serves pizza beans with garlic bread, toasted garlic bread to scoop into the beans. I do think it's fun to have toasty bread along with this. But actually that night, we didn't have bread. We just had the panko crispy topping. The riffing of this recipe is so brilliant because there are times when we definitely will have a little bit of bread on the side of ours. But if I add rice to it, so it's like pizza, rice and beans, then it's really a lot more like a casserole. I always sort of laugh at how much, I mean, my family is small. There's only three of us and how three of us can really put down like a pan of this because it's kind of everything that you want. It's a one pot meal. It's rice, beans, a starch, a protein, a lot of vegetables, a cheesy element. I mean, what more could you want? Yeah, I love that your version includes rice. I think that's really great. And I love that there's all these different ways to play around with it. And having a muteless bean meal, but that feels decadent is I just think a nice weeknight addition. And also one last thing, you can make this ahead of time because I made enough that we could have a couple dinners out of this and it reheats beautifully. I have done the same thing. And it's actually a great dish to take if you go camping. You can reheat it. You can make it all ahead of time. I mean, your cheese doesn't really get crispy on top because it's harder to do that on a campfire. but it's such a comforting meal. Yes. Well, Carrie, what was your best bite of the week? Well, Sonia, I made the sausage ragu from our pasta episode that we talked about recently. This is a recipe I've made before, but that was not my best bite of the week. I went to the butcher to buy the sausage for the ragu. My butcher started telling me about this dish that he likes to make called scrapple. Do you know what scrapple is? Do not tell me you made scrapple. Okay. I don't know if we are defining Scrapple the same way. So I will say my butcher sort of talked me through how he likes to make Scrapple, which was basically he was saying to me, as a butcher, we save all the connective tissue It was from beef When you have a beef tenderloin or something you sort of have that long sometimes they call it the silver skin And he was like I save those I take them home I cut them into small pieces I saute them with some garlic and other flavors. And then I just cook them for three hours, two or three hours. In a pan, in a pot? Yeah, you basically braise it. So I thought when he was talking about scrapple. I just thought like, oh, he's just calling it scrapple. Maybe there's a recipe online. I went online and scrapple is almost like a pate. There is a version of scrapple where you take this meat and you mix it with some flour and you put it in a loaf pan and then you slice it and fry it. I've always thought of it as organ meat meatloaf. And traditionally, the way I've seen it is it's usually or it's not usually, I don't know, maybe apparently there's many kinds of scrapple, that is pork scraps and that you add flour or cornmeal or something kind of bring it together yeah and then you put it in a loaf pan and then you slice it and griddle it and they have it yes in some like diners and restaurants right where did you learn about scrapple because can I tell you yes from the food network and I want to say Guy Fieri to be honest it's it's almost undoubtedly from diners drive-ins and dives because scrapple is not a northwestern dish It's not something common here. I think when I looked it up online, it's a very sort of Midwestern, Pennsylvania Dutch kind of dish. Yes. Pennsylvania Dutch is how I know it too. And I've never seen it on a menu here, but I've seen it on TV. I am interested in these kinds of things because I think sometimes they get a bad rap when you're saying organ meat or trimmings. But that's some of the most incredible food and innovation that's ever happened is people taking scraps and making them into something incredible. What I really loved about this was one, when I learned how to cook, I learned a lot of how to cook from the Food Network. And one of the things that I would always hear Amarillo Lagasse and the Too Hot Tamales, Mary Sue Millican and Susan Feniger say is get to know your butcher. And I have gotten to know my butcher. When I was a personal chef, I worked on the west side, I had a butcher on the west side, I really liked and I learned a lot from talking to those guys. And now I live more in the mid city area. And so there's a couple of really great old school butchers that are right walking distance from my house. So I went to pick up sausage, and he and I just got to talking. I said, he goes, well, I really like to cook. And I said, well, what do you like to cook? And that's when he described this dish to me. It's basically like a braised meat sauce. When I made it, it really took me some time. I used a pair of scissors to cut all that connective tissue up. It was hard. He just gave you a bunch of beef scraps that he would have taken home. He sold you that. He didn't. He gave it to you as a gift. He gave it to me as a gift. He goes, he said to me, he goes, this is a one-time deal. But he went to the back and he pulled out this frozen bag of basically silver skin chains. And I just cut them up into little pieces, sauteed them in, you know, my le croce. And you could do that in any kind of dish that you can braise in. And I added a little bit of garlic, a little bit of tomato sauce, a little bit of wine, and let it go for three hours. It turned into this insanely rich meat sauce that was full of collagen. That was one of the things that said to me is he said, my wife really loves this. He said, it's really rich and it's really rich in that collagen. On TV, they have those loaves and they slice them and they griddle them. But what you're describing is a meat sauce. So it's not a patty or something that you griddle. So then what did you do with the meat sauce? Well, then I served it with mashed potatoes. Oh, cool. So like a braised meat. Yeah, like a braised meat. If you made short ribs or brisket or something, it was much more like a bolognese, but it was delicious and rich and a little garlicky. Did you add tomato or was it more like onion carrot celery What are the aromatics you used The only aromatic I used was garlic I used a little squeeze of tomato paste because I had some in my fridge We had a bottle of red wine that we hadn finished It was sitting on the counter And I just put a little shot of that in there Oh and I used a little bit of beef froth. I had like one of those, I keep a container of beef froth in my pantry for moments like this. That sounds really good. And what a treat. There's so much to take away from this. I do think if you have the opportunity to get to know your butcher, even if your butcher is just at your grocery store. It doesn't even have to be a butcher shop. I think the place you're talking about was the Sente Foods, which is just a grocery store. And I used to shop there because of you as well at the butcher counter because they were so friendly. So it really could just be your local grocery store. But just asking questions can birth these amazing ideas. It's a whole different idea of Scrapple than either of us would have ever thought. Well, and I had never heard of Scrapple. And I just thought... You hadn't heard of the other kind either. I had never heard of Scrapple. And I also thought he was basically kind of making a funny name for what is essentially scraps. And until I looked on the internet, I had no idea that a dish like Scrapple existed. I wonder if it is his funny name for this dish. Like I wonder because it isn't the Scrapple that you find online. So maybe this just is what this butcher calls this dish. This is just what he calls it. And I did shop a lot at Vicente Foods on the west side. This is actually one of my local Marconda's meats, which is at Third and Fairfax, the farmer's market near my house. This is a guy I've been buying meat from for years. There just are sometimes those moments between two home cooks where he was like, the thing I make for my wife is this grapple dish. And I thought, that sounds perfect. I will say it was a lot of prep. The cutting of the scrapple. Yeah, the thing of it was a lot of work, but it was one of those ways of really using all the parts of the animal and actually in a very delicious way. It sounds really good. I just love this whole story. It's so unexpected. It's very unexpected. And I'm curious if any listeners have this version of Scrapple because that would be fascinating to hear about. Yeah. So yeah, drop us a line. You can DM us on Instagram at foodfriendspod. You can also easily find us on Substack and comment. it's foodfriends.foodfriendspodcast.substack.com. Well, until next time. Till next time. Bye. Bye. Do you ever find yourself talking back to the podcast or sitting on a recipe you're dying to share with us? Or do you have a cooking question you wish you could actually get answered in real time right away? If you ever wished you could join the conversation instead of just listening, this is for you. We're excited to announce our new monthly hang. Around the Table with Food Friends live Q&A. Once a month, we'll gather live on Zoom for an interactive version of the podcast, a space to connect with fellow home cooks, ask both of us your burning food questions, and talk through the real hurdles that come up in everyday kitchens. You'll leave with new ideas for what to cook next, more confidence choosing recipes that actually work, and the reassurance that you're not figuring it out all alone. This is about more than recipes. 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