So for this month’s pâté and terrine project, I vacillated back and forth between a few ideas and then decided to make all of them. I had invited over a bunch of food writer/blogger types, so I figured quantity and variety would both be desirable. I emailed Northwind Farm and placed an order for a duck, a rabbit, and a pork butt, and picked them up at the weekly market here in town. Over the course of a couple of days, I turned the three things into three different pâtés, using a couple of tricks I’ve learned in my couple of years of terrine making, and which really do improve the results dramatically.
Category: Awesomeness
We just got back from Vermont, so while I edit photographs and figure out what to write about here’s a little taste of a luxurious benefit to having no power and thus no espresso machine for days after Irene.
So this month’s binding project got me thinking about the head terrine I made with Rich a couple of years ago, and how I wanted to try it again with my new knowledge and aim it at a specific goal: bánh mì entirely from scratch. It’s one of the great sandwiches of the world, and since it’s a bastard offspring of French colonialism with many established variants, it’s ideally suited to remixing and tinkering. Ironically, it was my new level of comfort with baking bread that actually spurred me to choose this project; head cheese by itself is not something I would make just to have around since it takes a fair amount of work to yield something that to me is less sensually delightful than a good pâté. But in combination with crusty bread, roast pork, mayo, and pickles, it attains greatness. And since I had all those things on hand–all lovingly homemade–I knew these were going to be winners.
The chorizo from last month is finally ready for eating as is. I’ve used a couple for cooking while they were still soft in the middle, but now they’re firm all the way through. I celebrated by making the sort of lunch that I would happily eat every day, and which neatly encapsulates my motivation for spending all the time that I do making all this food from scratch: pleasure.
About ten years ago, we were in France with Christine’s family staying at a place near Uzès. One evening we went to dinner at l’Amphitryon, which had been recommended by someone. A perfect evening, with excellent service by the very friendly chef-owner, left two lasting memories: a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage made by a very small producer who I don’t remember, and a small dish of baby octopus and asparagus. It was a perfect, elegant synthesis of field and sea, where neither dominated and the subtle sweetnesses of both main ingredients twined around each other seamlessly. I told him as much, and he smiled and nodded and was pleased that I understood his work. The warmth of his spirit really came out in his food.
For some reason, that dish was in my head yesterday morning, and as a result day three of the seafood extravaganza turned out to be the best. In part that was because we had some dear friends come by and share it with us. We hadn’t seen them in ages, so I took a little time to make it as well as I had imagined it over the course of the morning. Usually when I can see a dish clearly before I begin cooking, I can be pretty sure it will come out well. And this one snapped into focus quickly on the walk back up the hill in the sun, carrying a bag of unforseen inspiration: when Milo and I walked down there this morning to buy coffee beans, the local store actually had both sea beans and morels, so I got excited and bought a handful of each.
I made the big sausage stuffing dinner tonight, but I don’t quite have it in me to write about it right now. I’ll get to it on the morrow when I have a bit more energy. Meantime, here’s something we made yesterday, using entirely homemade ingredients, for a truly special and yet incredibly everyday treat.
It’s funny how sometimes we randomly reach the critical mass needed to push us headlong into a new endeavor. Recently I was talking to some friends about their homemade bagels, and then I saw this post on a reader’s blog and it suddenly hit me that making bagels is just making rolls with some toroidal geometry and boiling thrown in. And the presence in the fridge of homemade lox and cream cheese provided all the impetus I could possibly have asked for to shove me face-first into the wonderful world of bagel making.
This month’s task was grinding sausage, which was exciting because the post announcing that fact came out just after I had ground and stuffed a bunch of sausage, and some salami meant for aging as well. The fresh sausage has made for some wonderful meals, but it was the salami that I was really excited about.
Enough time has elapsed since the beginning of my beautiful friendship with the local raw milk source for me to finally show the evolution of one of my more impressively successful DIY endeavors: Camembert. It could have aged a bit longer to reach its peak, but we had a special guest on Friday night and I needed to break it out to complete the meal (with homemade bread, of course).
One of the things I like about winter (apart from the fact that it’s over) is the limitations that it imposes on those of us who try to eat local food. I find that constraints spur creativity, whether in the studio or the kitchen. No matter how narrow the spectrum, it still contains infinity. And being forced to dig deep and pay attention to subtle differences can make a huge impact on the result.