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.
We were away for the weekend, blowing what was shaping up to be a pretty good posting streak, but the 25th high school reunion would not be denied. It’s always fun to go back to Massachusetts, and in this case seeing a wider variety of old friends than usual was an added bonus. Bringing the family made for an even better time; everyone got to see what a fuckup I didn’t turn out to be (probably a surprise) and my lovely wife made some new friends. Having said that, though, a few days of adequate but not homemade food meant that by the time we got home, I was seriously ready for some homegrown fare.
This meal was sort of random, in that what we had hoped to eat wasn’t available, but happily it continued with the Korean-Spanish theme of the soup in the last post. I feel strongly that Korean food will be the next big culinary craze in this country, since it’s meat-centric, spicy, often grilled, and highly adaptable: perfectly suited for American eaters. It’s as accessible as Mexican and as varied as Japanese or Indian. Those trucks in LA are the leading edge of some major taste-changing.
So in anticipation of today’s big stuff-a-thon, yesterday I ground a couple kinds of sausage meant to hang and cure into salami. But of course all of that pungent meat, fragrant with garlic and spices and the like, was impossible to resist once it came time to shake the magic dinner 8-ball.
Making the rounds in the garden, lately I’ve been thinning little heads of things like frisée, escarole, pan di zucchero, and radicchio so their brethren can expand to full size. I like to manage my thinning as attentively as I can; keeping track of the progress of various greens allows for using them at all the points of their growth cycle, from tiny sprouts to big fat heads and everything in between. Left too long, they get too crowded, but done right means more food from each bed. The work of the last few days has been to remove the last of the too-close small heads so the rest can grow up unimpeded. And since it was escarole’s turn, that led inevitably to this soup.
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.
Last week I read about peony jelly, and coming as it did on the heels of my lilac ice cream, I was excited to give peonies a shot. Our peony grows right next to one of the lilacs that I ravaged to make the ice cream, so given the lamentably short period of lilacular splendor it’s nice to know that other flowers can be used for similarly elegant culinary purposes. I’m not quite mentally ready to make jelly, though–it’s more of a mid/late summer thing in my mind–and since the lilacs all crapped out before I got to make crème brûlée with them I figured that peonies would work pretty nicely in their place.
When I was in the Bay Area last weekend, I had one free evening that wasn’t taken up hanging out with my cousin and his lovely family and their friends (one of whom is a famous metal drummer with a movie star wife). I spent that evening with Derrick and his lovely wife Melissa, which included a special cameo from Sean without his no doubt lovely husband. I knew the eating was going to be good not only because they quite obviously know their food but because they both separately suggested that we meet at the same place: Contigo, an excellent tapas place in Noe valley.
Following up on the DIY article, I thought I’d show a specific example of the extra refinement that a sous-vide rig can bring to your regular old standards.
I was going to sit on this for a bit and include it in a later post for the Charcutepalooza stuffing project, but since the Very Serious Media have allowed themselves to be punk’d for like the nineteenth time by Andrew Breitbart and are now running ball-to-ball wall-to-wall Weinergate coverage, now seemed like an opportune time to wade in, sausage in hand, with a phallic-themed post.