Category: Standards

July 6, 2011

If I Was Crying… It Was For Freedom

Back from Chicago, this evening I revelled in a bunch of fat, beautiful roots from the garden. New potatoes, chioggia beets, carrots of many colors, and turnips, plus foraged black trumpet mushrooms, peas, herbs, wine, vinegar, and salt. I ate it straight out of the pan, standing over the stove, so you will get no picture. But it tasted very good, and I am happy to be home, even if I miss my family who stayed behind for another week. While there, we had some good food, so this post will recap the 4th cookout and a couple of fine bottles we enjoyed at some friends’ house. Because you all care so much about my vacation, and you’re right to.

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June 27, 2011

The Best Pizza Under One Roof

My normal baking routine is to make dough in the evening and then let it rise overnight for baking in the morning. The wild starter likes a long ferment, and gets even better after a day or two in the fridge after the first rise (if I’ve planned ahead, which is not always the case). But sometimes one needs of the baked goods in a narrower time frame, and it is for that very reason that I always also have a bag of dried yeast on hand.

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June 16, 2011

Amusement Pork

The boy has been clamoring for ribs lately, but we were foiled in our attempt to procure them for him last week. This week, however, found the goddess Costa smiling upon us, so today I took a mid-afternoon break to get a slab and a half cosy in the oven so they’d be falling-apart by the time the dinner bell sounded.

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June 15, 2011

I’ll Give You Something To Fry About

So that paella? Was but foreplay for this, my original idea. I’ve been basing dinner on strategically deployed leftovers for so long now, I’ve started to think backwards. See, I took a small square camembert from a recent batch and cold-smoked it back when we did the photo shoot for the DIY article. I figured that if I was going to fire up the actual cold smoker, then it would behoove me to use it to good and photogenic effect. So I popped the camembert in there to bask in the fragrant smoke of cherry chips and some grape vines I had pruned.

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May 8, 2011

Nature Is A Mother, Too

Mothers’ day gets a little easier each year, though I still don’t enjoy being reminded so overtly that I don’t have one any more. But my wife is a Mother, and her Mom has been in town visiting, and we’ve been having some high spring glory in the weather department, so today was pretty nice.

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April 18, 2011

Arm In Arm Down Bourbon Street

There’s a good fish market that’s just far enough away that I don’t make it there very often. When I do, though, I always try to hit their freezer section to allow for more future meals than the fresh cases can provide. On my last trip, I got the unagi we had the other night, and I also bought a package of frozen crawfish. This was right around the time I was curing the shoulder for the tasso ham, so you can probably guess what I had in mind: jambalaya.

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April 14, 2011

Kraftsmanship

This month’s Charcutepalooza project was hot-smoking, which is something I’ve done a fair amount of since buying my trusty smoker back in 2001 when we moved to the Brooklyn place with a deck. It has gotten a lot of loving use since then, helping ducks, chickens, pork bellies, briskets and many other things attain shiny umber patinas and diabolically delicious depths of flavor. As with so many other culinary urges, the seeds for smoking were planted long ago by since departed family. My Grandfather had a smoker, and his smoked chickens were truly things of beauty. Being an engineer–and one who built furnaces at that–he had long, complicated theories about how to control the smoking environment to achieve the best-tasting results: his favorite formula was that the humidity should increase over time in inverse proportion to the temperature inside the chamber.

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April 7, 2011

Lamburguesas

Our buddy Rich runs Elephant, one of the best restaurants in the Hudson Valley, down the road in Kingston. If you live at all nearby and haven’t been yet, go. One of our favorites there, which is mercifully always on the menu, is his plate of three little lamb sliders. The strong flavor of lamb makes a superlative burger, and the small size of a slider somehow seems to concentrate it further. I don’t eat his often enough, and I don’t make them at home often enough. Now I confess at the outset that I did not bake fluffy little rolls for these. But that really didn’t diminish the pleasure of eating them one bit.

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April 6, 2011

Good Shit

This is what arrived today, along with the beaming sun and a nice cool breeze to keep the sweat from getting out of control. I got half the garden planted; almost all the early stuff is in. The rest will wait for the warm-weather crops, so I can concentrate on various fruit beds and getting the asparagus in. I’m exhausted. And, just so you don’t think that every meal here is something lavishly extravagant, behold:

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March 16, 2011

Gnocchin’ On Heaven’s Door

I am so much happier than I was a few days ago. Yesterday’s enthusiastic digging and planting filled me with the thrill of food season. From this point on, there’s going to be something worth eating within steps of my door every day. To start, it’s all the roots that slumbered underground in the garden all winter that I can now ravage lasciviously to serve my gustatory whims. And soon enough, ramps, nettles, and garlic mustard are going to make the mistake of sticking their necks out far enough for me to cut them off. The herb garden is already stirring.

Today I had one of those crystal clear hankerings around mid-afternoon that I have learned well not to ignore if I want my dinner to be good. To wit: red potatoes in the pantry, and still a jar of tomato purée from last summer. And guanciale, ever guanciale, in the fridge. I have to get more jowls and cure a couple more so there’s no danger whatsoever of running out.

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