So that pork belly from the market? Well it came in roughly 1lb. hunks (skin on, bless them) so I figured I’d try a couple of different cures in the interest of advancing human knowledge in the cutting edge field of Bacon Science™. One got a pretty traditional cure, but with coffee and chili powder, and the other got a goodly slather with a paste made from yellow miso, yuzu miso, mashed ume plum, yuzu…
Category: Awesomeness
Sort of a strange thing to make when the weather is finally season-appropriate, but for some reason I had a hankering for a freezer full of wobbly pig reduction. So I betook me to Fleisher’s and hit Josh up for whatever lower portions of pig legs he had lying around. The recipe calls for Madeira, but I used a simple white so it would be more neutral in flavor. And the aromatics all came from…
The garden is really hitting its stride now, offering a wider array of perfect options for organizing a dish around. The beets have been getting me excited, not least because they go with so many different flavors. They’re also beautiful. John’s birthday party offered me an excuse to monkey around with some of the different directions a beet can go, and try to combine them in an interesting way. Inspired by the bite of foie…
In Palazzo Spada, near where I lived in Rome, there’s a cute little Architectural folly by Borromini called La Prospettiva: a corridor built in forced perspective to appear much longer than it is, that opens onto a garden with a statue in it. There’s a nice moment that happens as soon as you enter, when you see that the ceiling slants down, and the floor slopes up, and you realize that the whole thing is about…
The bones from the boar ribs- simmered for a couple of hours with an onion, carrot, and parsley- turned into a nimble yet hefty (think Chris Farley) stock which we have been putting to good use in the ensuing days. In this case the smoky, umamilicious elixir was the happy medium in which some udon found themselves, accompanied by burdock simmered with dried shiitake, blanched kale (I usually do it in the noodle water pre-noodle)…
John and I arranged a wine tasting for my next article, and we used the occasion to have a dinner party. I’m not going to write about the wines we tasted, partly because it was for the article and partly because after we did the tasting- during which we dutifully spat- we drank our way through a positively stunning lineup of juice (of which we did not spit out even a little bit.) John made…
Is there anything in this world that makes a better breakfast on a chilly spring morning than fingerling potatoes sautéed with home-cured guanciale, wilted fresh-picked garlic mustard, ramp pesto-crepinette gravy reheated with lamb pho to thin it back to liquid, and a couple of fresh local eggs on top, baked until set, and garnished with parsley from the garden?
Sometime last week, before the heat wave, we had one of those perfect spring days that just makes one all giddy, what with all the fecundity and the burgeoning and the blooming and the sweet breezes and such. There was still a chill in the shade, though, so something roasty seemed appropriate, and firing up the grill to celebrate the season seemed pretty mandatory. I spatchcocked a good chicken and gave it a rub of…
I’m so heinously behind on posting- there’s just too much other work in the studio and garden (I’m redoing the herb garden right now, to make it extra elegant and much lower maintenance) and I can’t seem to deal with the computer a whole lot. But, since I did recently write the Reuben thing for TNS, here’s a follow-up that shows the final destination of that glorious, smoky hunk o’ cow after some parts were…
Back in high school they used to make cheese steaks every couple of weeks. And since I was a growing boy, and had not yet stopped eating meat (that happened the summer after graduation) I loved me some of them. In fact, senior year I set what was then a school record- as far as I know, it may still stand- by eating 7 of them in one 25 minute lunch period. I’m not proud…