After making the terrines, I still had half the pork butt left over. And since it was Sunday and all, and the days have cooled noticeably lately, turning on the oven to roast it up seemed like a perfect idea.
cookblog Posts
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.
Right before Irene hit I went into the garden and preemptively picked all the ripe and semi-ripe tomatoes and peppers, figuring that the winds might bring down the trellises and damage the fragile fruit. It turned out to be prescient, since though the paste tomato trellis is still standing, the other one took the brunt of the tree’s impact and there’s not much left but a few bright cherry tomatoes visible through a tangle of busted-up vines. On the plus side, I had a big pile of beautiful nightshades just begging to be transformed into one of my late-summer specialties: smoked salsa.
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.
I’m writing this on my phone, so I’ll keep it brief. The September Chronogram is out, and within it is the story of my visit to Highland Deer Farm. I’m a big fan of their meats and look forward to getting some mouflon, emu, and ostrich this fall.
The power is back on after three days, which is most welcome, and there are plenty more houses all over the area who still have a while to wait; I drove around some yesterday and it’s a huge mess, with trees hanging off of lines on street after street. I had to drive under several just to get to the pottery. It’s hard to find a bridge or culvert that wasn’t overtopped with rushing water; there’s dirt and gravel across the roads in many places and brown mud four feet high in the bushes in others. Our little taste of the storm’s power was this, which happened at about 7:00 Sunday morning:
Before I get carried away with whatever the hell I’m going to write about, you should all head over to Diana’s to read my guest post about my Grandmother’s best of all time pie crust and make it for yourselves. It’s fast, easy, and is guaranteed to kick the ass of whatever recipe you’re using now.
So what am I going to write about? Well, I was going to write about something from a while ago because it tasted good and the pictures are pretty, but instead I’ll cover tonight’s dinner while it’s still fresh in my mind. It also tasted good and you can let me know if you think the pictures are sufficiently attractive.
A quick update for anybody who was interested in my spruce post: I left a bunch of the intact tips in a bowl, figuring that they’d dry out on their own and then I’d grind them to powder. But after months, they still retained a springy resistance to breaking up into fine dust, even under the stern ministrations of the surikogi. So recently, since I had some things going in the sous vide machine, which I normally cap with a cookie sheet for heat retention, I stripped the needles off the stems and sprinkled them on the hot metal as I had done with the first batch that ground up nice and fine. Within an hour or so, these too had become brittle and powdered easily, so I dumped them all in the suribachi and Milo and I took turns turning them into powder for the spice jar.
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.