This is not normally how I eat, but man is it enjoyable every now and then to tuck into an immaculately cooked hunk of grass-fed sirloin. A nearby market has begun carrying beef from a farm across the river, about 20 miles away, which is actually run by a vegetarian who cares so deeply for animals that she raises ones that carnivores can eat in good conscience. With the family out for the evening, I indulged.
Recently I was invited by the Charleston Wine and Food festival to participate in their Lambs and Clams contest. There will be four monthly entries, each featuring a splendid ingredient, and the winner gets a trip for two to the festival, which looks like an awfully good time. You can see all the other contestants at the link, and fans of a certain charcuterie contest will recognize more than a few of them. It’s like we’re getting the band back together.
The lamb came from Border Springs Farm, which provides superb pastured meat to restaurants up and down the coast. When the leg arrived—plump and lovely, I might add—I was excited to open it up and get started. The problem was the head full of ideas that were driving me insane; I could not for the life of me decide between them. I paced, stared at the meat, paced some more, and couldn’t settle on anything. At one point, I just wanted to stuff it with rosemary and garlic, rub some spices on it, and throw it on the grill for a bit, since it’s hard to beat that treatment for a whole leg. But realistically, for a family of three that was going to yield a massive amount of meat that we’d spend a week getting slowly sick of. And I wanted to do this gorgeous meat justice, especially given that it had been shipped from afar.
Ultimately, the notion that there were just three of us ended up being the solution. I decided to take the leg apart and do a bunch of things to it, each resulting in a manageable quantity that we could eat as they were ready over the course of a few days of normal life. Because I am a crazy person, however, I kind of jammed it all into this weekend, so it became kind of an epic endeavor.
Last summer my garden was ravaged by woodchucks. I patched holes in the fence, used chicken wire and cinder blocks to fortify weak spots, and worked my way around the perimeter to made it varmint-proof. It didn’t work. Somehow, they were getting in. By midsummer, the tomatoes and winter squash and other plants were so big and dense that I couldn’t see where the fucking things were escaping when I’d spot them out my office window, jump into my shorts (What. I generally find pants to be an unnecessary encumbrance when writing during the warmer months) and sprint outside to try to see their escape route, which, logic dictated, would also be their entrance. They’re such prey, with commensurately sharp paranoia-fueled hearing and peripheral vision, that they would bolt at the sound of the front door opening. It drove me mad. We got no broccoli, kale, collards, cabbage, carrots, fennel, radicchio, endive, or parsnips last year, except for a few stunted roots since they only eat the greens. Then the hurricane took the willow tree down, and there went all the peppers and eggplants and half the tomatoes. It was ever so bucolic.
The burger is an archetypal American food, and it’s even more prominent in the warmer months. In my ongoing and intermittent series of from-scratch sandwich adventures, here’s a very good burger made entirely from scratch (though, as Milo pointed out, we did not in fact raise the cow).
I make a lot of kimchi. I ferment other pickles–kosher dill pickles, giardinera, sauerkraut, green tea, and more–but kimchi is far and away my favorite. Other people love it, too; at a dinner party a while back I gave two friends each a pint to take home and they ate it all with forks right out of the jars as we talked. I do not pretend for a second to have any cultural attachment to this food, and I know that there are countless recipes and techniques for it. But I thought I’d share my method, since it’s easy and very good.
As regular readers know, I’m a fan of from-scratch standards (often sandwiches, for some reason) as an ideal format for drilling down into the essence of food while following it up the supply chain as far as possible. It helps me understand cooking better. More often than not it also tastes really fucking good, so there’s also that. In this instance, to celebrate the ninth anniversary of our fun summer wedding (we had the legal one the previous December while my Mother was still alive), I prepared what was by any measure a simple meal. But it technically took seven months to make it.
I dislike Tim Burton’s movies pretty intensely; his cheesy goth aesthetic reminds me too much of people I went to college with and his wanton mutilation of classic children’s stories is arrogant and disrespectful to artists much greater than he. (The suckiness of the rewrites doesn’t help). Nonetheless, this cake is pretty cool. If more cakes were scary and too awesome to eat, the Internet would be a better place.
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this recent preparation reminded me how good and useful the combination is for so many applications. Equal weights of butter and white miso (or any other kind; I just like the smoothness for mixing) at room temperature, slathered on the substrate of your choice and then roasted, will yield a gratinesque carapace of maillarded umamitude that has to be tasted to be believed. This example is mahi-mahi, but…
We were in Vermont for a few days over Spring Break, during which time we visited Taylor Farm, as we always do when we’re up there. In addition to their excellent Gouda–their aged is my favorite–they also sell raw milk, and sometimes cream. For whatever reason, Milo got it into his head that he was going to make butter, so he did. I guided him through the process, but the work was all his doing. I’m all about better living though child labor.
It’s been very hard to keep this a secret, so I am thrilled to finally announce that my first book will be published this summer. I’ll have lots more details in the near future, but for the time being I simply want to say how gratifying it is that years of research and hard work have paid off. I especially can’t wait to recount how one very late, very drunken night at Per Se led…