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February 6, 2012

Better Late Than Never

With the show up and the opening last night done and dusted, I can now return with something like regularity to this food blogging thing.

Oh, sorry, “Internet Content Providing in the Culinary Sector.” Silly me. I get paid by the word, after all.

So the other night I was working, and the clock was ticking, and when it came time to make dinner I realized there was hiding to nothing on hand in the easy or even intermediate dinner categories. It has been a busy week. But then, as is so often the case, the freezer swooped in to the rescue, except in this case what it provided was not the sort of thing that one would normally associate with a quick save: two and a half pounds of local, grass-fed chuck of a size, shape, color, and frozen hardness most closely resembling a brick.

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January 23, 2012

What We Talk About When We Talk About Food

There’s been an ocean of indignant digital ink spilled already about Paula Deen’s disgraceful deal flogging diabetes drugs after making herself sick eating the ghastly “food” she has become very wealthy advocating for years. As I mentioned on the Twitter, it’s like having unprotected sex with lots of junkies and hookers and then scoring a fat endorsement deal for STD meds. I’m not going to spend any more time on it, since it’s boring as well as depressing. But it did get me thinking, since it happened around same time I was reading about a few other equally distasteful subjects, all the while thinking about what it is that I want for this blog in the future.

I have always hated advertisements; back in the days when we had TV I was lightning fast with the mute button. I think they look tacky and ugly on websites, too, and the more they move around or occlude what I’m looking at the quicker I leave the site. I’m clearly not anybody’s target audience: I believe that voting with our eyeballs (and wallets) is as important as voting in elections these days, and I find commercials to be ugly. So while I ponder and slowly lurch towards several possible futures as a food writer, I can offer a few examples of what I absolutely do not want this happy second career to become.

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January 10, 2012

Pockets Full Of Meat

The other night I remembered the venison our neighbor had given us just before Christmas. He’s a bow hunter, and did well this year, so we got two nice bundles of meat. I defrosted one of them, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: gyros.

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January 8, 2012

Like Salt, Only Better

There are dozens of posts out there about preserved lemons, so to avoid redundancy I thought I’d take the idea one step further and share an idea I had a while back. Preserved lemons are an item that my pantry is never without. They’re easy to make and keep forever, and their bright, unmistakeable flavor is essential to a variety of dishes, particularly Moroccan. What I love about them is that to the nose, they smell candied; it’s impossible to tell that it’s salt that has concentrated their flavors rather than sugar. That sweet, lemony aroma permeates any dish they’re added to, but when the lemons are gone the salt that worked its osmotic magic on them has accrued a great deal of interest in the process. This may already be a thing, but I haven’t heard of it before: preserved lemon salt.

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January 4, 2012

Les Jeux Sont Faits

Thanks to the votes of many of you, I won the charcutepalooza contest. To be honest, it was really only at the very end, as I was compiling my posts in the email to Cathy and Kim, that I realized how badly I wanted to win. Since I’m neck-deep in CAD hell right now, I’ll keep it short: thanks for your support, and your readership. Regular blogging should resume shortly. Happy, happy 2012 to all.

December 30, 2011

A Year-End Appeal

Just a quick post to beseech you all to head over to Food52 and vote for my entry in the Charcutepalooza finals. I’m amazed and humbled to be one of the two finalists, and since the prize is a week in France learning butchery and charcuterie, it’s hard not to be anxious about the outcome. Be sure to scroll down a bit; there’s a contest at the top of the page that’s charcuterie-themed but closed…

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December 29, 2011

It’s Not What You Look Like When You’re Doing What You’re Doing, It’s What You’re Doing When You’re Doing What You Look Like You’re Doing

Instead of fulfilling my patriotic obligation by whipping myself into a shopping frenzy worthy of Todd Palin in the Sudafed aisle of the Anchorage Piggly Wiggly, I have instead been a near shut-in, toiling away on this infernal device making CAD drawings in advance of an upcoming show. It has been fun, in its way, since the steep learning curve offers plenty of satisfaction; increasing fluency is its own reward. The resulting drawings are even more exciting, and I can’t wait to get the hundreds of little pieces milled so I can paint them and put them together. It’s been a while since I learned to do something new at this level, and it feels good.

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December 1, 2011

I Always Take A Meat Sandwich With Me

For this month’s curing challenge, I took some of the knowledge I gained from making chorizo and fennel salami a couple of months ago and applied it to a more ambitious quantity and variety of salumi. Properly equipped, better skilled, and inspired to try a couple of unorthodox flavors, I ended up with about 20 pounds of five different types.

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December 1, 2011

Are You Going To Finish That?

This month in Chronogram I take a look at a diner in Hudson that happens to be the first Animal Welfare Approved restaurant in the country. It’s an excellent model for making rigorously sourced food available to just about anyone. Photo by Jennifer May

November 29, 2011

Gratitude Is The Attitude

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, centering as it does around food. I usually take a day or three off leading up to it and cook my ass off, often making ten or so courses for whoever comes to visit. It’s my chance to stretch out and try some ideas that require special ingredients or techniques, and to make the best food I possibly can, in sequential courses, using my own ceramics, and try to nail all the details and timing for each dish. It’s also a holiday that’s relatively free of crass commercialism–although that appears to be crumbling in the face of earlier and earlier riot-inducing sales–but these things are easily avoided by not having TV and choosing not to shop in the days that follow the big meal. I think it should be about the food and the company, period. The timing also neatly coincided with the last Charcutepalooza challenge, which was more of a dare: show off, using any and everything we’ve done so far.

So I did. Eight courses, each of which contained some quantity of homemade charcuterie.

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