Porkalicious!

Running Food: Coconut-Almond Bars

2009-10-18T11:00:00.003-04:00

Adapted from The Bakery in New Paltz, New York. This is a great pre- or post-run snack. It's also a good snack for when you want to kill your hunger totally dead - it's so dense that it fills you up immediately. We cut them, baggie them, and keep them in the freezer - they're great cold. We tried taking them on bike rides a couple of times but they were a bit crumbly after being jostled around for a couple of hours.

Combine:

two cups rolled oats (we've also done this w/ steel cut and that was fine too)

one cup unsweetened coconut chunks or flakes

1/2 cup chopped dates (or raisins)

1/2 cup raw almonds

1/2 cup sesame seeds

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup cashews

Mix:

1 1/2 cups natural peanut butter

1 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

Microwave the PB mix for one minute. Combine with the dry ingredients. On a greased baking sheet, spread mixture into a 1"-high rectangle. Cut into bars and freeze, or, if you prefer, bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, cool, and cut.

Dates = quick carbs

Honey = quick carbs

Nuts = healthy fats; sustained energy

Oats = reduces cholesterol and offsets the risk of upper-respiratory infections (common in runners)

Summer Quickies

2009-09-18T17:59:00.008-04:00

I have a big super-post coming up about the By George Washington-To-Washington Great American Road Trip I went on in August, but there is a little pile of stuff that will grow into a big mound soon if I don't get it out of the way.

Summertime and the Eating is Good

First things first.

Look what fell off a truck the other day!

$50 worth of assorted canned tomatoes, a mere six weeks before chili season kicks off.

I Am Loved. I don't mean that in a creepy "spiritual" sense, but seriously, what luck.

More Funny Plums

I posted a picture of some lemon plums I bought at the farmer's market a couple months ago.

Last time I went the same guy had these:

I didn't get a name for them, but they were good, with sweet flesh and really tart skin. I know that's the basic makeup of a plum, but something about the wrapping on these things was sharper than the darker purple plums I'm used to. I can't say I search out plums, but I've been enjoying these odd varieties.

The Enlightenment of John Thorne

Okay, I've written about Thorne and his book Serious Pig a lot. Thorne writes about Maine a lot, and talks about the blueberries like they hold nirvana in the bottom of the bucket. He's been right about most everything else, who am I to question him on this one?

Axel & Lou in Maine. Nothing special, just a camping trip. They always dress like that.

So while I'm there I drive by four or five blueberry stands on the side of the road before I finally give in and pull over. I bought the big one, of course, and munched delicious blueberries the rest of the way to Penobbmikdaosrpuijwkedchiuo, or whatever that place was called. It was long.

Pemaquid Point. Sorry. It wasn't that long, but I still couldn't remember it all weekend.

The blueberries were perfect, of course, smaller than the ones you buy in the store but with nearly double the flavor intensity. I ate most of my first purchase by the time I got to the hotel.

The place we were staying was beautiful, a bed and breakfast with a view of the lighthouse, a high end restaurant and a bar on premises and plenty of paths for late night beach walks.

Being a full service type of joint, the wedding took place outside and then we came in for drinks and dinner. I had a stuffed lobster that was characteristically small for the self-conscious class of the restaurant, but damn good. It was on a perfectly made risotto with steamed vegetables. Somehow I got a picture of my name card and glass of scotch, but not the lobster. Probably for the best, that's one of those times when your date looks at you like you're insane when the camera comes out.

The next night we ate at the bar, a decidedly un-stuffy place with a five item menu written in chalk near the entrance.

Who could resist?

I got the flat bread with onions, duck fat and prosciutto and then, for good measure, the salmon BLT. I knew that flat bread would go quick once the other drinkers got a look at it.

This was some serious bar food. The sandwich was good grilled bread with an herb mayonnaise, lox, bacon, tomato, small chunks of red bell pepper and fresh mixed greens. I live in the land of the specialty sandwich and this salmon BLT was holding it's own.

As for the pizza, well, I'm not the guy to be rating that dish. I'm biased. Everybody thinks their kid can sing. This is a dish invented for people like me. I loved it, but so did everybody else, so I think I can reliably report that it was excellent.

Okay, back to the blueberries. Just after I got back to New York, I got an email from Jordan, an old friend from Kansas who's a pretty great cook herself, very much in the home-cooking, learned-it-from-my-granny vein that I ride most of the time.

Hey,
I've been rediscovering "reading for pleasure" now that school is done. You won't be surprised that the cookbook section of the public library has been a frequent hangout spot. My current read is "The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper." Decent book, probably not worth a purchase. Anyway, towards the end I stumbled on a recipe for sugared raspberries, apparently taken from "The Gift of Southern Cooking" by Edna Lewis. Lewis, it says, is "a granddaughter of slaves, raised on a farm in Freetown" with a talent for preserving fruit "which keeps its taste fresh because there is no cooking involved." (I'm getting to the point, I swear). Here's the recipe:

2 cups (about 1 pound) fresh raspberries (or strawberries or blackberries)
2 cups sugar

Put berries in a bowl, cover with sugar. Mash the shit out of everything until "they are liquefied and no trace of whole berries is left." Transfer to a jar and refrigerate for at least 2 days. Will keep for up to a year.

It really is just fruit and sugar, and I find it strange too. However, the fancy pants NPR cooking bunch SWOON over these in the book. Maybe you will too.

So I tried it with the blueberries. I did one with the full compliment of sugar and one with half the sugar. They're both good, it's blueberries and sugar after all, but they don't set up into the normal jam consistency. I've never noticed a diminishing of flavor from cooking jams, so I'm not convinced of the 'problem' this recipe is trying to correct.

I've been putting the sauce in oatmeal. It's delicious. And I made these with Weezy:

We called it The Lumberjill: Maine blueberry cupcakes, filled with blueberry sauce and topped with crystal sugar. The sauce cooked into the bread and solidified into a little blueberry nugget in the middle of the cupcake that was sweet and tart and obviously naturally flavored, which is rare in a blueberry treat.

Doing what Mark Bittman says Part II

Mark Bittman is my friend.

Not in a drinking buddy kind of way, more like I'll buy a magazine if it has an article by him in it. For instance - Runner's World, October 2009 has an article called 'The Good Food Diet' where they interview Bittman about his running habit and he suggests a bunch of eating guidelines for training, weight loss, blahblahblah.

I think the first time I heard of Bittman was when my mom bought me and my sisters copies of How To Cook Everything, a general, wide ranging cookbook that he wrote. He also writes for the New York Times, in the food section on Wednesday. I'm borderline obsessive about the Times crossword and Wednesday is a day I usually finish, so I see the Times food section every week.

My brilliant sister Rachel found an article of Bittman's from the Times online, 101 Simple Salads for the Season, she did a short posting from it a couple weeks ago. I actually saved the hard copy from that week, and combined with the article from Runner's World, I'm heading into marathon training with a salad menu for the ages.

Bittman says he's training for this year's New York City marathon in the article. He spends most of his time espousing an entire eating regimen that is focused on plants and lean meats but gives you plenty of wiggle room to eat whatever crap you want, in moderation. It's very sane and very reasonable and how people who run marathons tend to act. The only surprise is that I've turned into one of those people.

USDA data shows most people get about 70 percent of their calories from that heavy side of the see-saw, and only about 30 percent from plants - and almost everyone in nutritional science believes the numbers should be reversed.
Plants, of course, means vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts. What do these things have in common? One, the don't have ingredients, they are ingredients. Two, they might be shelled, or peeled, or trimmed, but they're essentially unprocessed. Three, for the most part, they have few calories.

And then he goes on to talk about the science of all of it and the CO2 that is created by factory meat farms, and a bunch of other shit people already know and choose to ignore. That's the thing about Bittman, platitudes aside, the guy can cook.

First I made #60.

#60 - Sear tuna, or use good canned tuna. Chop it up and mix with chopped apples, halved seedless grapes, chopped red onion, olive oil, a bit of cumin and black pepper.

My version goes: do all that, grate some Romano on top. This is a good salad, I'd like it better with chicken instead of tuna, but it's the cumin and black pepper that make it stand out.

#41 - Halve avocados and scoop out some but not all of their flesh. Roughly chop and toss with black beans, queso fresco, cilantro, chopped tomatillos and lime juice. Serve in the meaty avocado shells.

That all sounded good, but there was another entry catching my eye just down the page that I thought might send this delicious guacamole salad over the top.

#44 - Make a crisp grilled cheese sandwich with good bread and not too much good cheese. Let it cool, then cut into croutons. Put them on anything, but especially tomato and basil salad. This you will do forever.

This you will do forever. From now on I'm ending every recipe with that sentence.

I added slices of fresh chilies and salt, but otherwise left it alone. Good god.

And, last but not least, some kind of spinach-chicken-apple thing I made and forgot about and then found a picture of on my camera.

Bet it was good!

Our Little Baby's All Growns Up!

2009-09-07T14:55:00.008-04:00

Where does this one even start? How do you describe a transcendent moment in life, those rare times when you climb up from a long held plateau of comfort, stretch your arms and legs into new positions, pump new blood into your brain and see the stars from a fresh position on the planet? How many times do you get to lose your virginity?

First of all, let's hear it for summer. Not to sound like a commercial for Labor Day, but there is a lot to be said for beer and barbecue by the water.

I did a lot of traveling this summer, had a lot of good times, but in August, in the Thousand Islands section of Canada, on the bank of the St. Lawrence river, under a partly cloudy sky, I became a Man.

Michael Hull is dead. Long live Michael Hull.

Barbecued Suckling Pig

I was going to Canada on a working vacation with Shiloh and Melissa, a Cinematographer and Producer I work with a lot. We were going to interview the owner of this completely bad ass catamaran. This boat has twin helicopter turbine engines. It sounds like it's going to SPACE!

He's making adjustments to the boat this year and plans to get it over 200 mph next summer. For now he's having to live with topping out at around 190 mph. Like I said, completely bad ass.

The cook at his day job

But vacation was the thrust of this working vacation and we spent most of our time riding jet skis, playing horse shoes, drinking single malt scotch and starting fires. That's what the boys did. There seemed to be a lot of knitting on the girl's end.

ANYWAY, Melissa went out of her way to find me a little present in the form of a whole pig because she's a sweetheart and a genius. A working woman's philanthropist and a fledgling dream-maker. My best friend the day she called and said she found me a pig.

Melissa's dog Nala, a fan of my barbecue if there ever was one

I've been talking about this, the Holy Grail of barbecue, for years, but I never had the chance to try my hand. It was always in the back of my mind, knowing that in some weird way I was training for the day. Learning how to control heat from live fire, learning how different sections of the animal react to slow heat, figuring out how to tell when the meat is done by touch, without having to cut into it and release juice too early.

I enjoy cooking nearly anything. I enjoy cutting up an apple to go with cheese and wine. I'm not that hard to please, but this pig had the feel of an event. The night before we cooked him the women decided to give the pig a name they didn't like so they could build up a little animosity toward him before I put a big metal spike in his ass. I think they decided on Omar. When was the last time you named an apple?

The place we would be buying the pig, Rick's Butcher Shop in Brockville, Ontario, deals with guys like me all the time. They have kind of a first-timer's package where they rent you an electric spit barbecue on wheels with a trailer hitch and the whole nine. The guy loaned me a big cutting board and gave me an apron and we were on our way.

Did I mention he cut the head and feet off for ease of use?

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The house we were staying in is on an island, which means getting this wheel-mounted barbecue contraption to the island first. Which meant hiring a boat, because the boats we had were driving boats, not grill hauling boats.

Welcome to my world

Once we got to the island we realized there was no way this thing was getting up the thin path to the yard, so we chained it to the dock and ran an extension cord. You know, some real man shit.

And then I busted out the cookbook, the brilliant Pork & Sons by Stéphane Reynaud, a gift from an equally brilliant girl that I ignored for a long time. The book, not the girl. Now that I've opened it up, it's been nothing short of inspirational and was the first place I went when I found out for sure that this pig thing was going down.

The recipe is short, I'll reprint it here in it's entirety.

Barbecued Suckling Pig

PREPARATION TIME: 45 MINUTES
COOKING TIME: 3 HOURS

SERVES 12

1 suckling pig, 5 to 6 weeks old
10 shallots, chopped
10 garlic cloves, chopped
2 1/3 cups chopped smoked bacon
7 ounces country-style white bread, soaked in heavy cream
generous 1/3 cup Dijon mustard
3 eggs
1 bunch of fresh parsley, chopped
20 fresh sage leaves, chopped
scant 1 cup olive oil

FOR THE BASTING LIQUID

4 cups white wine
2 1/4 cups olive oil
scant 1/4 cup Dijon mustard

Ask your butcher to prepare the pig and save the liver and heart for you.

Place all the remaining ingredients with the liver and heart in a bowl, and mix together well. Spoon this stuffing into the pig and sew up the cavity with trussing thread. Tie the feet underneath the pig with wire and cover the ears with foil to prevent them from burning.

Whisk together all the ingredients for the basting liquid in a bowl. Place the pig on a spit over the barbecue and cook, basting frequently, for 3 hours.

Page 278

Okay, sounds pretty simple, but there are a lot of details that are left out. For one thing, the best suggestion I got from the guy running the butcher shop was to separate my coals to the ends of the grill because the shoulder and hips of the pig would need more heat than the empty middle. Made perfect sense, but I never would have come up with that on my own.

I got the fire going and mixed up the stuffing. I couldn't find shallots so I used red onion instead, and I used raisin bread instead of white. It looked good.

I had high hopes for the stuffing, it seemed like this could become my new go-to stuffing recipe, whole pig or no. With the fire building, I stuffed the pig and sewed him up. I suppose if you own a butcher shop in the mountains of France, you're prepared to sew up a pig with trussing thread. I was not.

The pig's skin is really thick, even a young pig like the one I had. I ended up using a 3" nail that I bent in the middle with the thread tied just under the slim head of the nail. I also had to use pliers so I could push and pull this chunk of metal where I wanted it to go. It got done, but I suggest having a tandem pig-sewing team at your disposal if you can.

With the stomach sewed, I tightened the bolts on one side of the spit. They cut the head off at the shop, saying that made it much easier to use the spit because you didn't have to shove it through the skull. There was also a big loose hole where the pig's anus used to be. They asked me if I wanted the head cut off. They didn't ask if I wanted the asshole cut out. Writing it like that, I can see why.

The stainless steel spit slid through effortlessly, and I tightened the bolts on the spikes at the other end. Let's do this.

Omar, after about an hour

One side got charred while we figured out the spit motor

I started basting him immediately. I tried not to baste more than every half-hour, but really I wanted to stare at it and basting was the best excuse. It smelled amazing almost immediately.

The charred side annoyed the hell out of me initially, but once he got going my attitude changed. The other side was crisping up nicely but didn't seem to be in any danger of charring. The burn happened in the first few minutes, so there was no way the meat was overdone under it, which meant that we would have two types of skin to chew on when this project was done. It was an experiment, right? This was my first one, cut me some slack.

Omar's top butt

Omar's bottom butt

My spike wasn't set very well in the back end and after a couple hours he was cooked enough to flop around a little with each revolution. I kept waiting for him to fall off of the spit but it never happened. He just kept getting softer, caramelizing on the outside in the smoke, breaking down into shreds on the inside.

The book suggested 3 hours on the spit, but the book said a 5-6 week old pig. The butcher shop suggested a 25 pounder for my adventure and it never occurred to me to ask how old a 25 lb pig is. At the three hour mark, my pig seemed like he was cooked through, but he had a little more work to do. We started early enough to buy some time, so I headed in to make corn on the cob and my spicy summer slaw.

Omar at 5 hours, soft side

Omar at 5 hours, hard side

The charred side of the pig had split wide open after five hours, the stuffing had dripped out enough bacon oil to make a stinky puddle in the bottom of the grill and the back end was about to melt off of the spit. Betty made an impromptu barbecue sauce and I got the thick gloves off the dock.

Omar, resting

Shiloh, basting

After letting Omar catch his breath, I started in with a knife and cut through both tenderloins and the spine with no effort. I didn't even mean to. I was just poking at it and cut through bone with a little flick of the wrist. I put the knife down and pulled it apart with my fingers.

Omar, butchered

And now I understand why the true traditionalists don't serve ribs at their barbecue restaurants. I always thought it was a silly regional thing, like tomato based sauce or mustard based sauce, but it's about more than that.

Believe it or not, there are smart people who think about things like when and why people started cooking their food. The two best guesses those smart people have go something like this:

1. After naturally occurring fires subsided, people ate animals that got caught in the fire and were cooked. They were attracted to something about the cooked meat, possibly the flavor or texture. And, of course, they were easy to catch. Presumably the marinade was terrible, but it had to be a lot easier to eat than raw meat and a lot better tasting than rotten meat.

2. People hung their meat over a controlled fire at night as a means of deterring other animals from eating their hard won food. When they woke up in the morning they had delicious smoked ham hanging in the tree. Or smoked otter or saber toothed tiger or whatever.

Both theories also rest to some degree on man's natural proclivity for things that don't kill us. Cooking meat is a much healthier way to consume it, especially when you're eating whatever game you can catch with stone tools.

Even undercooked meat is substantially better for you because it is the outside of the cut, the part exposed to the most bacteria, that gets done. One thing I like about science is that the simplest idea usually wins. If you smell a piece of rotting flesh and a piece of barbecued flesh, it isn't that hard to figure out which is more appetizing. We have been eating cooked food for at least 50,000 years now and have most likely evolved the pleasure centers that react to the smell of roasting meat and vegetables. But, like sex and language, these were probably instincts related to survival before they were a source of joy. This was all pre-barbecue sauce, so. They had a long way to go.

Today, realistically speaking, spit roasting a suckling pig over an open flame is probably as close to a pre-historical cooking experience as you're going to get. It is meat eating in it's most basic form, even with an electric spit and a bottomless cooler of imports. The barbecue purists that don't serve ribs know that when you cook the whole pig, pulled pork is all you get. The ribs were so tender the meat jumped off the bones like a tourist stretching her legs after a long bus ride. The bones broke in half with a little squeeze.

Everything shredded in my fingers, both hams and both tenderloins. The front end fell apart on the cutting board while I was working on the bottom, leaving soft bones sticking out all over the place. It was delicious.

Mike tasting, clearly blitzed on smoked pork

Omar, plated

I can be easily tempted into hyperbole, but this was what I like to call a Grand Canyon experience. I saw pictures of the Grand Canyon my entire life on everything from postcards to t-shirts to billboards, but it is impossible to describe the grandeur of the place to anyone who hasn't been there. You can't properly photograph the Grand Canyon.

No matter how many times I read about cooking a whole pig, I never quite grasped what an undertaking it was. I didn't make it any easier by deciding to do it on a tiny island, but regardless of your locale, this is a project. All I can say is that it's worth every penny and every minute. That, and have some helpers.

The only thing I was disappointed in was the stuffing. I don't know if I did something wrong, but it was a sloppy, disgusting mess when we were done. I put it in a bowl and tried to serve it, but even the most adventurous eaters at the table passed. I ate some of it on fresh bread, but it was so soaked through with bacon grease and juice from the pig that it left an unpleasant residue in my mouth. I can even live with that if it tasted good, but it was bland on top of being greasy.

I don't know. The theory was floated that the stuffing isn't meant to be eaten, that it's just there to keep the hollow cavity in the pig's midsection moist. Everything else in this book has been clever, inventive and delicious, it doesn't make sense to me that they would stuff the pig and not figure out a way to eat the stuffing. There are multiple recipes in the book for ears and snouts. If they can figure out how to eat that crap, why wouldn't they eat the stuffing? I still haven't figured it out.

Omar on a stick

After dinner we started a fire and put Omar's head on the end of the spit to keep us company. Everybody drank to the pig and I declared that he had recieved a king's finish.

Omar is dead. Long live Omar.

A big 25 lb thank you to Melissa for working out the logistics of this thing, Shiloh for thinking of it in the first place, and the Farrs & Lumps for being willing to go a bit crazy with me every now and then.

Chowda, Rhode Island Style

2009-08-29T18:38:00.042-04:00

This story starts in Rhode Island. I don't have many stories that start in Rhode Island, so I'm kind of savoring it. I may say Rhode Island 25 or 30 more times before this posting is done.

I was in Rhode Island for work first, shooting a commercial for the Marine Corps. Most of the spot was done in South Carolina, but we did one day in New England. As is known to happen in New England, we were working just down from what looked like a brilliant clam chowder place, Aunt Carrie's. I didn't have time to stop in while we were there, but I looked up Rhode Island in the Road Food book when I got home, and guess what I found?

Aunt Carrie's

Aunt Carrie's, at Point Judith on the ocean, has been a summertime destination since the 1920s. It remains one of the few places in Rhode Island that still lists a full shore dinner on its menu. It starts with chowder: your choice of white, red, or Rhode Island-style, which is clear and bacon-flavored. That's accompanied by crusty gold balls of deep-fried clam-flavored dough called calm cakes as well as steamers with broth and butter for dipping.

Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 63

Okay, between that little opener and the raved about Indian Pudding at the end, I was sold. Luckily I was back to Rhode Island a couple weeks later, including a stop in Narragansett at Aunt Carrie's.

Grey Chowder & Lobster Pizza

As with many good New York stories, this one starts at Grand Central Station. I know I said it started in Rhode Island, but that was more aesthetically true than literally true.

In fact, let's have a digression. There's a lot of crappy food in Grand Central, but when I was looking for something to snack on while riding the Metro North to meet My Friend With A Car, I found the Grand Central deli. I don't know what they actually call it, but that's what it is - a super fancy deli squeezed into what looks like an entrance hallway.

I can't say I know the history of the Grand Central deli, but the first time I ate lox and cream cheese was from whatever version of a deli they had when I was 18. I was riding to Boston with my uncle Tom and he bought bagels with lox, cream cheese and onions before we got on the train.

The place they've got now is brilliant, probably 100 yards long, crammed on both sides with display counters of fancy shit. It's expensive, but hey, if you want cheap move to Nebraska and eat spam. How often are you in Grand Central? I live here and it's maybe once a year. How could you resist?

Cheese!

Fancy Cheese!

Meat for your cheese!

Cured peppers, fat slices of tomato and fresh mozz

I'll take one of everything

For all my talk, I chose simply. Coffee and a danish. I hadn't been awake long, and besides, there was all that chowder coming.

First stop of the day, the famous Aunt Carrie's

I had to get one of everything, of course, especially the Rhode Island-style 'grey' chowder. The corn was good and sweet, the shrimp roll was awful. Breaded, frozen shrimp that had been over cooked in french fry grease and scooped onto a dry roll was not doing it.

BUT, that wasn't what we were there for. The clam cakes were great, very dense hush puppies with whole clams in them. I didn't taste much clam in the dough, but there were enough pieces in each one to get the point across.

I had the clear chowder, which didn't actually taste like bacon at all. It didn't taste much like clam either, it had more of a salty potato flavor than anything else. I had some of my lunch mate's chowder, she got the white, and it was perfect. Something about the creaminess of the milk cut through the salt, leaving room for the clam flavor to come out. Neither of us tried the red, but those two small cups were enough to convince me that, like chili is better off with beans, chowder and milk are natural, if not completely necessary, compliments.

The other big surprise of Aunt Carrie's was Indian Pudding, a tasty dish that is similar to sweet potato pie, but with a lot less sugar. It seems to be a mashed and probably baked sweet potato dish, spiced more or less like pumpkin pie.

Wait. According to Wikipedia, there's no sweet potato in it:

Indian pudding
Indian pudding is a more elaborate form of corn hasty pudding. It consists of milk, corn, and molasses, (or, alternatively, maple syrup and honey, and sometimes sugar), spices (nearly always including cinnamon and ground ginger), butter, and usually raisins and nuts, baked in a slow oven for several hours. It is a traditional New England dessert.

From Wikipedia entry for Hasty Pudding

Tasted like sweet potato to me, but I barreled through it pretty quick, it could have been the spices that I associate with sweet potato and not the base itself. Either way, it was good.

When we got to where we were going, it was beautiful.

Beach

Gull

Lighthouse

Surfers

And then it was time for dinner.

We didn't have a plan for dinner, but we were in Newport by that point. Newport is a neat little town with a bunch of small houses that overlook the ocean. There was a wharf area with a large seafood market, an area where personal boats were docked, multiple ice cream and taffy stands and a bunch of restaurants.

We chose the Rhode Island Quahog Company, but fresh seafood was the lick at every eating establishment on the strip. We ate at one of the fancier places, but there were lobster specials advertised up and down the strip, 2 for 1 beers and all the steamers you could handle.

I ate enough steamers dipped in butter to make a meal, but it was the only appetizer size they had. Oh well!

The steamers were good. They tasted like the ocean, a sense you can only get when you're at the coast. Like vegetables lose the hint of dirt after 24 hours off the vine, these clams must have been dug that morning.

But like I said, lobster was the thing. We started with a stuffed lobster that came with the claws intact and the tail shell filled with a minced lobster and crab meat stuffing that was buttery and delicious.

The large pieces of claw meat were a good offset to the stuffing and kept the whole thing solidly in 'lobster dinner' territory. But a good stuffed lobster is something most decent coastal restaurants can get right.

What I was excited about was the lobster pizza. Seriously.

Baked cracker crust pie with a layer of white sauce, topped by chunks of fresh lobster meat, sauteed mushrooms and chopped scallions with a coating of melted mozzarella. There were herbs in the sauce, but I don't recall what they were.

This was one of the best pizzas I've ever eaten. The crust was just right, the sauce was great and the chunks of lobster big enough to remind you of why you came to Rhode Island in the first place. We were on the deck, the sun was setting by this point and the air was starting to get thick with ocean water. I had a cold stout to compliment the pie. It was the perfect set up for that meal.

Fully satiated on lobster and beer, it was about time to start heading back to the city. My friend's Father is a big fan of Rhode Island and used to bring her and her siblings to this area when they were kids. When he found out we were in Newport he gave her a laundry list of stuff to bring back, including a gallon of local chowder and a couple pounds of steamers. So we had a little shopping to do before we could get on the highway.

I got coffee and taffy. And an awesome magnet.

Kansas: A State Of Excitement

Someone's clearly been lying to them.

All in all, the trip to Rhode Island was a huge success. Our work got done at a very leisurely pace, great local seafood was had by all and I marked off another entry in the Road Food book.

Nicely done.

Any Excuse To Use Cinnamon

2009-08-29T16:46:00.005-04:00

The good news is, I have a friend. I know a guy, so to speak.

Actually, it's not a guy, it's a girl, and I know lots of girls, but now I know one who has a backyard. It's more of a deck really, but that's beside the point. I know a girl, who has a back deck, big by New York standards, and it's open air. AND it's on 12th St, a half-block from The Strand and about 5 blocks from my place.

Needless to say, I started talking barbecue as soon as I saw the deck for the first time. Sarah's a brilliant girl and world traveler, but I'm not intimidated. By her own admission, she can't barbecue worth a shit, so she has a deck to offer and I have a service to provide. We were fast friends.

Thing is, as Andre 3000 says, 'you can plan a pretty picnic but you can't predict the weeeaaather!' It started raining the night before our cookout, and didn't stop until two days later. SUCK!

Which leaves me stuck with all this meat.

Meat Sauce

Calling this simply 'meat sauce' might be an understatement. I could come up with something more detailed, but there's so much going on it would have to be a nine word name that includes at least the words ribs, sausage, cinnamon, wine, herb and tomato. It's too much. Cook it, make some pasta. Call it purple polka dot bikini.

The idea for making a sauce came from Martin Scorcese's documentary about his parents, Italian American. You'd recognize his mom from Goodfellas, she plays Joe Pesce's mother who loans him a knife to cut the 'deer' from the front grill of his car.

At one point in the doc, she's making a classic New York Italian meat sauce. Scorcese gives the recipe in the credits, like a proper '70's auteur.

The Sauce:
Singe an onion & a pinch of garlic in oil.
Throw in a piece of veal, a piece of beef, some pork sausage & a lamb neck bone.
Add a basil leaf.
When the meat is brown, take it out & put it on a plate.
Put in a can of tomato paste & some water.
Press a can of packed whole tomatoes through a blender & pour it in.
Let it boil.
Add salt, pepper & a pinch of sugar.
Let it cook for a while.
Throw the meat back in.
Cook for 1 hour.
Now make the meatballs.
Put a slice of bread, without crust, 2 eggs, & a drop of milk, into a bowl of ground veal & beef.
Add salt, pepper, some cheese & a few spoons of sauce.
Mix it with your hands.
Roll them up, throw them in.
Let it cook for another hour.

This is a pretty standard recipe, time tested and hard to get wrong. I was watching the movie at work the night before our rained out barbecue, so it was on my mind when I was looking at the pile of fresh meat I had in the fridge the next day.

The recipe I used is my version of the classic, the main difference being spicing. I add cinnamon, an idea I picked up from a rib sauce recipe that has long since been lost. Also, I never have spare veal or a leftover lamb neck bone laying around, so my meat selection is always determined by whatever looks good at the store that day.

On this day it was ribs and sausage.

Ingredients

2 tbl olive oil
2 lbs beef ribs
2 lbs sausage
1 cup red wine
1 28 oz can of stewed tomatoes
1 small can tomato paste (optional)
1 medium red onion
5 cloves garlic
5 basil leaves
Salt & Pepper to taste

Rub for the ribs

2 tbl salt
1 tbl pepper
1 tbl cinnamon
1 tbl brown sugar
1 tbl ground chilies or chili powder
1 tsp ground nutmeg

Mix the rub ingredients in a bowl and rub it on all sides of the ribs.

Rubbed Ribs

Put the olive oil in the bottom of a deep pan and heat it over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add as many ribs as you can fit on the floor of the pan. You want to brown all four sides of the ribs, so piling them won't work.

Brown the sausage too.

Flip the ribs until they're brown on all four sides. Tongs are great for this job.

As the ribs and sausage brown, take them out of the oil and drain them on paper towels. Chop them into large pieces. They'll look delicious, like this:

While the meat is browning, chop the onion and garlic. When all of the meat is out of the oil, add the onion and garlic and saute until they're starting to go soft. Add the wine and scrape any crusty bits off the bottom of the pan. Bring the wine to a boil and add the chunks of meat back in, simmering until the wine reduces a bit, about 10 minutes.

Chop the canned tomatoes, reserving the juice from the can. Add the chopped tomatoes and juice to the meat, along with the tomato paste, if you want it. The wine can be too strong for some people, the paste goes a long way toward cutting the acidic taste of the grapes. If you don't plan to add the paste, you should plan on cooking the sauce for a little longer, in order to help it thicken.

Depending on how you like your sauce, some recipes would double the amount of tomatoes and wine and chop the meat into much smaller pieces. The meat is the star of this dish for me, the sauce is a compliment to big chunks of ribs and sausage. A classic meat sauce is more about the sauce with the meat as a filler/flavoring agent. The difference, really, is one can of tomatoes.

With the tomatoes in, add the basil leaves and stir it up. Taste the sauce now and add salt and pepper if you want. I usually also add more cinnamon and dried chilies, some people may prefer to add sugar. This is where you make it your own.

At this point you're pretty much done. Lower the heat and let it bubble slowly for 60-90 minutes while you go tease the dog with leftover bits of rib.

Nala, you want some rib?

That's a yes.

Sit Nala. Good girl!

While the sauce gets acquainted with itself, toast some garlic bread and chop a salad. The salad for this meal was spinach, toasted pecans, sliced pears and goat cheese with a blueberry/pomegranate dressing. A little sweet, but it was a good balance to the hearty, savory sauce.

Oh! Make some pasta, something with big holes.

Shiloh got screwed last time I made beef ribs, and Shiloh really likes beef ribs. This time I made sure he got seconds.

Thanks Martin Scorcese's Mom, great idea.

Recipes I'll Never Cook #2

2009-08-24T22:57:00.002-04:00

This recipe speaks for itself. Found in The Complete American-Jewish Cookbook, 1971 edition. The person who lived in Mike's apartment before him left this behind when they moved out. Perhaps because they tried this recipe and came away disappointed.

Quick Mock Welsh Rabbit

Measure 3/4 cup grated American cheese in a cup. Pour boiling water over it to fill cup. Let stand for 10 minutes in a warm place. Drain water off carefully. Pour the remaining creamy mass over hot toast. Season and serve at once.

Mmm, creamy mass...

This page also features the non-quick, non-mock Welsh Rabbit, which is just white sauce with mustard and cheese, also poured over hot toast. The real prize there is the variations, including English Monkey - in which you use stale breadcrumbs instead of flour in the white sauce. Yum! We won't even discuss the Rum tum tiddy variation.

Bacon candy (candied bacon follow-up)

2009-08-24T22:43:00.002-04:00

In December, Mike (Soup's On) posted about how to make candied bacon. December seems like a more natural time of year to make something like candied bacon, but I was invited to a breakfast-themed dinner party in August, not December, and I cannot be blamed for this calendar accident. Kate Flaim commented on the candied bacon post and suggested trying it with maple syrup. I never ignore suggestions involving maple syrup. I own a maple syrup cookbook, after all.

Since I like just the flavor of maple syrup and just the flavor of bacon, I decided not to go complicating things by using any other ingredient at all in my test batch of bacon candy. Instead, I just fried up a pile of bacon (Superartist-style: throw entire package in hot pan in a mangled heap; stir around, unheaping and reheaping carelessly until it reaches desired crispness), removed the bacon temporarily to a paper towel, and drained off I'd say 95% of the grease. Left some blackened bits and a bit of grease in the bottom. Then I added the bacon back to the pan - and here you could either cut or smash it into little bits for easier candy later, or leave the pieces somewhat whole for a more impressive (crazy) presentation. I spread it somewhat evenly around the pan and poured in a whole bottle of maple syrup, brought that to a low boil and then put the lid on the pan and let it cook merrily away, filling my kitchen with the sweet scent. I wish I could be precise about how long I cooked it, but I don't know - I just waited until it looked like it had reduced by maybe 1/3 to 1/2. Then I poured the whole mixture into a greased cookie roll pan (any pan with edges will do), and popped it into the freezer to set. I recommend keeping it in the freezer until about 15 minutes before you are ready to serve it; the water content of crisp, maple-soaked bacon isn't high and it will defrost to the right temp very quickly. The next day I broke the big, dark golden sheet in half, threw each half into a freezer bag and took it to the party. We busted it up with a hammer and sat around eating the bacony maple bits with huge grins on our faces.

Doing what Mark Bittman says

2009-08-24T22:21:00.004-04:00

It's the last week of August, and three weeks before Mike (you know him as Soup's On!) and Jen and I fiiiiiinally rock The Nation's Triathlon after what feels like the longest training season ever. That means it is the time for salad - taking advantage of the local produce, and leaving plenty of room in the calorie bank for these crazy oatmeal-honey-raisin-cashew-peanut butter "natural power bars" we've been eating after workouts (and after dinner, and whenever one of us opens the freezer and sees them sitting in there being delicious). But anyway, back to the salads. In July, Mark Bittman of the New York Times published a lovely article of 101 Simple Salads for the Season. You should click on the link just to admire the pretty salad pictures, if nothing else. I'm so taken with this article. It's all arranged by types - vegan or easily veganable, seafood salads, noodle salads. Nothing complicated but a lot of things that make you say "Why didn't I think of that?" (:Grilled cheese sandwich made into croutons.) So this week four out of our five dinners are coming straight from this article, and three of my work lunches as well. Tonight I made # 60: "Ditto on the tuna [referencing # 59: sear tuna or use good canned tuna]. Mix with chopped apples, halved seedless grapes, chopped red onion, olive oil, a bit of cumin and black pepper." What a lovely, refreshing, easy dinner. I cooked blackfin tuna all the way through because we were a bit uncertain about the source and didn't feel comfortable eating it raw, and it was still great that way. For lunch tomorrow, I'm taking taboulleh - the usual parsley, tomatoes, mint, olive oil and lemon juice - but with chickpeas I just pulsed a few times in the food processor instead of bulgur. Up later this week: apple and fennel salad with "mustardy vinaigrette" (#16), quinoa taboulleh for lunch (#94), sweet, fruity quinoa over greens (#95), and a corn, avocado and tomato seafood salad (#68). He suggests crab meat for the last one and I'm sure that would be better than the random white fish we have in the freezer, but I still think it will work.

Staten Island Hot Dog Magic

2009-07-30T17:28:00.006-04:00

It's Saturday at midnight and I'm at work, woo-hoo!

Luckily they don't expect me to do much at this hour but listen to punk rock radio stations on the internet and type on the food blog. Nice of them, huh?

What did people do before the internet? Read, I guess? Listen to Ramones covers on a tape deck?

Hot Dogs Kick Ass

Potato chips also kick ass, but I never would have thought to combine the two. Leave that to super-genius Mike Caruso, owner of The Gourmet Dog in Staten Island.

One of the best things about Staten Island is riding the ferry. Besides the view, the best thing about the Staten Island ferry is that The Gourmet Dog is right across the street.

I'd never been there, but I was working with Caruso on Monday. He was waiting for us at the dog shop when we got off the boat. Not realizing how close he was, Shiloh and I ended up in a bar right around the corner, eating so-so ceviche and drinking lukewarm beer.

The so-so ceviche I ordered because I didn't realize there was a hot dog shop right around the corner

The Gourmet Dog has all kinds of offerings: chili, hot wings, fries, baked beans, mini-burgers, spumoni & Italian ices, paninis, pretzels, coleslaw. This is the kind of place that considers a knish a side dish.

And it all looked good, but it's not called The Gourmet Dog for nothing.

The Gourmet Dog, with the first good thing I ate that day: The World Famous Crunchy Dog

The World Famous Crunchy Dog

A split grilled dog prepared in our secret sauce, encrusted with potatoe chips served in you classic bun $2.50

from the menu (verbatim)

I'm the kind of dick that notices the typos, but you could call it a Lipz und Asswholes Dawg wit a phat toasted peeece of bred, these dogs were great. A rose by any other name, right?

The bun was butter toasted and the dog was perfect, taut skin, popping with salty hot dog juice. They refused to reveal the secret of the secret sauce, it was good whatever it was.

But The World Famous Crunchy Dog is all about the chip/dog combo, a meal so good and simple a kindergartner could come up with it. Like playing in sand and 'why can't we all just get along', some things intrinsically make sense. This is one of them. I had mine with a little mustard and a lot of 'oh yeahs' and 'that's goods'.

Then we went and worked all day. Not that hard, but hard enough to be hungry when we were done. Which brings us back to point #2 about the Staten Island ferry, as listed above: The Gourmet Dog is right across the street.

Shiloh loved the chili-cheese dog so much he had two more of them that night. Experimenter that I am, I went with two newbies: The Hawaii 5.0 and The Reuben, another brilliant idea from the super-genius.

The Hawaii 5.0

Grilled dog with teriyaki sauce, turkey bacon, pineapples, and chives, served on our fresh baked panini bread $2.50

The Reuben

A grilled dog wrapped with pastrami, topped with sauerkraut, rye bread crumbs, and finished with melted swiss cheese $2.50

My other favorite dog spot is Crif Dogs, they have a dog called The Tsunami that is similar to The Hawaii 5.0, but I'd never heard of anything like The Reuben. Again, I had mine with spicy mustard.

The Reuben sandwich is one of my favorite things about eating in New York. There are diners here that can't cook many things right, but even most of them do a decent pastrami on rye. Caruso's pastrami is laid on the grill and the Swiss cheese melted over it before it goes on the toasted bun, the perfect dog goes next and then sauerkraut is laid on top.

I enjoyed the Hawaii 5.0, but the Reuben was one of the best hot dogs I've ever had. What a weird, brilliant idea. The dog itself is all beef and grilled to perfection as they say, and the add-ons came out of nowhere. I was prepared for a hot dog, but got a great Reuben with it.

That counts as a success in my book.

Belly But Not Bacon Pt 2

2009-07-30T17:21:00.006-04:00

This is the second dish I made out of Pork & Sons, the brilliant book by Stephane Reynaud that was bought for me by the beautiful and talented Ms. E.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've owned this book for over a year but never made anything from it because it made me nervous. It's a little too serious of a book, written by people who are connected to the history of butchering and preserving meat in a way I'm not. It's visually amazing, and the hard cover is slightly padded, giving the book the feel of a picnic table with a nice table cloth on it. I don't know why any of this matters, but the book intimidated me.

This is the second recipe I've made from the book, and both of them went just fine. Just like a part of me always knew they would.

Plain and Simple Rillons

Look at that title, who could be intimidated by a recipe that starts with the words 'plain and simple'?

Of course, since I'm not a French pig farmer I'd never heard of rillons. Clearly I'm not the only one - they included a definition at the bottom of the page:

Rillons are pieces of pork belly that have been cooked slowly in fat (caramelized) in a covered pot. They are often served at breakfast, or as a side dish or with fruit.

So let me get this straight - take pork belly, already a fatty cut of meat, and cook it, in fat.

Why not?

Pork belly, spiced and cooking in LARD

It's really not bad, if you can get past the reasonable mental block you've built up about cooking things in lard.

The recipe, as with most in this book, is very easy. This is the whole thing.

Plain and simple rillons

Marinating time: 24 hours
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 2 1/4 hours

SERVES 4

2 1/4 pounds fresh pork belly
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 teaspoon Quatre-épices (see recipe below)
2 cups fresh lard
3 tablespoons sugar

Cut the meat into 2-inch cubes. Place them in a bowl, add the salt and spice, mix well, and let marinate in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

Melt the lard in a large pan. Add the pork and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, until lightly browned all over. Lower the heat and simmer gently for about 2 hours, until tender. Stir in the sugar and cook, stirring frequently, until the meat is caramelized.

The rillons can be eaten hot or cold.

From Pork & Sons, page 170

Okay, not so bad. Turns out the Quatre-épices is easy too.

Quatre-épices usually includes four or five spices, but here's a blend that includes all five. The recipe is a suggestion only: these proportions are typical but the spice blend can be varied to suit one's own palate. Put all of the following in a spice mill or blender and process until evenly ground. Store in a cool, dark place: 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup) white peppercorns, 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg; 1/2 teaspoon (about 12) whole cloves; 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon; 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger.

First of all, I would put that in almost anything. To think that this spice combination is a suggestion in a pork book makes my little heart flutter.

I marinated the meat and cooked it slow, just like the book said. I thought this dish would be similar to the confit, but the difference in spices and the difference between cooking in lard and cooking in wine were more significant than I originally thought.

The rillons cooking, mostly done

When they were finished I fished out a few pieces and ate them with peaches, like they suggested.

Rillons and peaches

Later we had some with strawberries -

Also tasty

I don't know, I'm not sure how to describe the rillons. They're good and meaty. Like the confit, I immediately noticed how different it was to be eating chunks of belly meat that were mouthful-sized instead of sliced thin like bacon. The rillons aren't as soft as the meat in the confit, but a couple of small chunks goes a long way. They're actually very good served alongside fresh fruit, a little dry/salty with wet/sweet combo that fits my snacking fetish to a T.

Cold rillons in, that's right, an inch deep puddle of lard

The picture in the book shows a few rillons in a basket, obviously cold. And here's the thing - a couple of them are clearly still coated with a little of the lard. What am I supposed to do, it's not like I won't give it a shot.

Final verdict is that a bit of lard on a cold rillon adds a little lubrication, not to mention some flavor. Fuck it right? Considering my attitude toward drinking, drugs, driving fast, biking in Manhattan, and dating, what's a little lard?

Pass the rillons.

Belly But Not Bacon

2009-07-30T01:16:00.004-04:00

A while back I was dating a beautiful genius who went by the name Ms. E. One of the many brilliant things she did was buy me a book called Pork & Sons by Stephane Reynaud.

This is a stunning book with inventive photography and traditional French recipes that I would never conceive of on my own. The author is a third generation butcher and chef who starts the book by describing his first time participating in the butchering of a whole pig at age 7, comparing it to his most recent breakdown, 40 years later. The only difference is the fermenting of the juice that fills his cup on the two days.

In addition to the recipes and photos, the book is also sprinkled with drawings of pigs doing all kinds of human-like activities, from riding a bike and skiing, to having sex and eating delicious pork. It all adds to the charm of the book.

The thing is, this book intimidated the hell out of me. I don't know why, it seems like the perfect gift for a fussy home chef such as myself. But I didn't touch it. I would bring it down and open it up every now and then, but I just never could talk myself into tackling one of the recipes.

Well, enough pussy-footing.

Ribs & Spiced Pork Belly Confit

I bought 8 lbs of fresh pork belly recently, for no reason other than finding myself near the pork store with a mostly empty backpack. Usually the plan would be to cure up a nice hunk of bacon, but for some reason I wanted to try something different this time.

8 lbs of fresh belly, ribs on

The first thing I did was cut off the ribs and cover them in an improvised rub of salt, pepper, dried chilies, coffee, nutmeg and Mexican oregano.

This hunk of meat went in the fridge to rest until the belly was ready for the oven. The ribs were a side issue that day. I had them, I was going to do something with them, but the focus was the confit.

Recipe page featuring a pig with a bucket

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward, so I'll reprint it here in it's entirety.

Spiced Pork Belly Confit

Preparation Time: 20 Minutes
Cooking Time: 2 1/4 Hours

SERVES 6

6 pieces of fresh pork belly, each weighing about 1/2 pound
4 cups white wine
1 tablespoon glace de veau
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon saffron threads
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons brown sugar
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 cup sweet butter
6 large potatoes, cut into thin rounds

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Head a griddle pan, add the pieces of pork, and cook over medium heat, turning occasionally, until golden brown all over. Add the white wine and stir, scraping up any sediment from the base of the pan, then transfer the mixture to an ovenproof dish.

Bring 4 cups water to a boil in a pan. Stir in the glace de veau, paprika, curry powder, saffron, ginger, cumin, sugar, and garlic and pour into the dish. Place in the oven and cook, basting and turning the meat frequently, for about 2 hours, until almost all the liquid has evaporated and the pork is very tender. If necessary, add more water during cooking.

Melt the butter in a nonstick pan and add the potato rounds arranged in the form of rosettes. Cook over high heat, turning once, until the rosettes are golden brown.

Place a slice of pork and a potato rosette on each of six plates and serve immediately.

From Pork & Sons, pg 246

Now, I always thought the meat and fat were broken down into smaller pieces in a conft, like it was more of a meat and fat jelly than a way of preparing large pieces. But this recipe seemed pretty simple, and there would definitely be wine leftover if I got two bottles.

The only thing I had trouble with was the glace de veau, a reduced veal stock that is a regular feature of French cooking. I didn't have any and couldn't find any that was convenient, so I used pork stock instead. It didn't seem to ruin the dish.

Pork belly in spiced stock, with the first empty wine bottle

When the belly was ready to go, I threw it in the oven, along with the ribs out of the fridge. 2 1/2 hours later it looked like this.

What can I say, it was great. The kitchen smelled like a comfort food factory.

The meat itself was very tender, and because it wasn't cured and sliced, there were big chunks of meat to grab a hold of. There were also long slices of fat that I didn't eat much of, but getting at whole mouthfuls of belly meat was a new experience. I also discovered that there is a layer between the fat and meat that can only be described as meaty fat. It has the color of fat, but it's stringy like meat. It's soft like fat, but not nearly as greasy. It's odd, and I've never seen it in bacon, where the meat/fat delineation is very clear.

All in all, the confit was a success. I've already made another dish from this book, and have 4 more picked out to try as time allows.

Thanks, Ms. E. Pork & Sons kicks ass.

Oh! And the ribs were great. I put some barbecue sauce on them for the last half-hour and jumped in with both feet shortly after they came out of the oven.

Nicely done.

Recipes I'll Never Cook

2009-07-29T03:54:00.003-04:00

I don't know if this will be a repeating thing to write up or not, but sometimes I run into recipes that I know there is zero chance I'll ever cook. I found one recently, walking around the city at 3 in the morning. I walked by a pile of books that someone had thrown out and couldn't help but check them out. And there she was, wet from the light rain that had been falling, Microwave Meats Step-by-Step.

What a weird book, what a weird concept. I carried it with me for a while but finally jumped on the train so I could have some light. This book is amazing, offering up tips for how to nuke the most expensive cuts of meat into brittle balls of gristle.

Most people plan their menus and their food budget around meat. Preparing meat is the cook's most important task, and one of the benefits of a microwave oven. Microwaved meat not only cooks faster, but generally shrinks less and retains more juices than conventionally cooked. Microwaving brings out the full flavor of fresh, quality meat.
Microwave Meat Step-by-Step, page 5

Needless to say, I'm skeptical.

But the greatest thing about this book isn't the gravitas it takes to say all this shit about a microwave with a straight face, it's the combinations they come up with. I've got a lot of old cookbooks with a lot of recipes that Rachel Ray won't be trying to pass off on anyone anytime soon, but some of the pages in this book read like Dada constructions, like the authors were so bored with the available ingredients they were throwing random crap into a casserole dish and going for it.

Exhibit A, one recipe I'll never cook.

Ham, Cheese & Asparagus Loaf!!!

Featuring (drum roll please): ground beef, boiled ham, mozzarella cheese and asparagus! Asparagus?

I would write out the recipe, but it sounds tastier in their fancy old stylee font. Click the photo above for a full size version that you can marvel over yourself. Thank god there's a picture, lest we miss out on the trippy visual.

Blueberry Muffin French Toast

2009-07-25T02:56:00.006-04:00

Necessity is the mother of invention and so on and so forth. Then there are those times that laziness becomes the father of something completely different. Innovation? That may be stretching it, but these muffins were great.

Blueberry Muffin French Toast

Picture this - a half-dozen left over Jiffy blueberry & raspberry muffins from a batch I made to compliment something I can't remember cooking. I had one box of blueberry, one box of raspberry, mixed them together and voilà! Muffins that are good as long as they're hot.

Leave them on the counter for a couple of days, however, and they're stale. Meanwhile, I have three eggs left over from a bake day with Weezy, a swallow of milk that didn't make it into the coffee I was drinking and part of a stick of butter. And some Pick-a-peppa sauce, but that's irrelevant.

Suggestions?

Three neglected muffins, suffering from rigor mortis.

The solution - blueberry/raspberry muffin french toast. Genius, pure genius. And one hell of a way to finally bring a little equality to the whole muffin top/muffin butt debate. All parts are equal when dipped in eggs and fried in butter.

Ingredients

6 leftover muffins, cut in half horizontally
2 eggs
1/2 cup of milk
Cinnamon to taste
Butter for frying

This is as basic a french toast recipe as I can come up with. For regular french toast, do the same process only with stale white bread, cinammon raisin bread or croissants. The bread doesn't have to be be stale, but where we call the dish French Toast, the actual French call it pain perdu, lost bread. It does soak up more of the egg mixture if the bread is drying out, so the pieces are a bit egg-ier and more substantial. And you bring bread back from the brink, it's a win-win. The fact that I used blueberry muffins should give you some idea of the flexibility of the recipe.

First melt a bit of butter in a skillet over medium heat. Combine the eggs, milk and cinnamon in a bowl and mix well.

When the skillet or griddle is heated, dip one piece of muffin or bread into the egg mixture and turn it over a couple of times, making sure it's saturated. Move it from the bowl to the skillet and let it sit until it starts to cook through, 2 to 3 minutes. Repeat the process until you're out of bread.

When a piece has started to cook through, flip it over and let it cook for 2 to 3 minutes on the other side. This is usually sufficient to cook a piece completely, but you should judge it for yourself, depending on the heat of the stove and your preference for harder or softer eggs.

The final french toasted muffin halves, topped off with a leftover homemade chocolate sauce from some stuffed cupcakes I made with Weezy and a side of scrambled eggs. This isn't the kind of thing I could eat very often, but it made for a decadent 'nothing left in this house to eat' meal.

Quickies

2009-07-24T23:35:00.003-04:00

These are some brief but notable items, and a quick recipe for a sharp cabbage dish.

I love the summer. Things have been nice in New York this year too, hardly a day over 85°. I've been to the beach a few times, spent a few late nights wandering through empty neighborhoods, and done a shit-ton of farmer's market shopping.

Besides my standard end-of-jogging stop at the Union Square market, I've been having good luck at stands in Long Island, New Jersey and upstate New York on day trips. Peaches, millions of peaches, peaches for me! I think that's how that stupid song went.

I was riding my bike back from Brooklyn over the Manhattan bridge a few weeks ago and found out that the Chinese set up tables at the base of the bridge on the Manhattan side and sell all of your standard vegetables at about 1/4 the price of the Union Square market. They don't have any of the artisnal stuff, but the basic vegetables are great. They also have a bunch of Chinese fruits and vegetables that I don't know what to do with, but I'll get to it all at some point.

Recent farmer's market haul and a cup with a smiley face. One of my favorite stands had two tables full of Kirby cucumbers that day, so I have pickles galore right now. Besides green garlic, there's also my favorite thing-I-never-knew-about: garlic scapes. They're young garlic shoots as far as I can tell and they're addicting. They're fresh like a scallion but they have a strong, sharp garlic taste with more layers than the bulb.

These are lemon plums, same market, later in the week. I'd never heard of lemon plums, but they had a sign that claimed they were sweet and juicy, so. They were bright yellow all the way through and very good. They were a little bit mellower than a red plum, but not much different.

I ate a couple of them whole and then cut the rest up and had them with blueberry yogurt.

THIS IS THE MY FAVORITE SANDWICH EVER.

Fried pork chunks, fried onions and fried plantains. I saw it in the menu, I almost didn't believe it. It's got a little spicy dressing, I added some hot sauce and a little homemade salsa.

I'm going to start doing write-ups of New York restaurants soon. I'm not sure why I haven't done that before, I write about all the barbecue I eat when I leave the city. To begin with, I'm going to write about the restaurants I usually order from, topped off by a visit to the location.

The place that makes this sandwich is on 8th Avenue, Cafe Havana. They have a killer Cuban sandwich, that's what I heard about the place before I went, it's the only thing I ever order.

Until I saw this completely unreasonable mix of madness. I'm big on mixing the savory and sweet, and I'll take onions with damn near anything. The marinated pork and soft, near-candied plantains are two things I never would have put together. I didn't grow up eating plantains, so I think of them as a dessert. The only problem with the sandwich is the bread. The same thin pocket works for a Cuban because it's filled with flat items and is finished in a sandwich press. In this beast the bread doesn't have anything to grab a hold of. The pork and plantain pieces are too big. I ate it with a fork and slipped into a nice woozy trance state when my arteries spontaneously clogged en masse and blocked the cycling of blood to my brain. I immediately ordered another one when I woke up six hours later.

No-Mayo Spicy Summer Slaw

This is another version of the farmer's market picture, but look at the black roots in the lower left, by the cup. Black radishes. Never heard of such a thing.

I love radishes, I used to eat them with my grandpa on my mom's side. He liked red radishes, raw horseradish, prepared horseradish. But I don't remember him eating black radishes.

This booth also had heads of red and green cabbage, so I figured a slaw was in order. I got one of each, a bunch of red onions, a bunch of carrots and two red bell peppers. I needed prepared horseradish for one of the pickle batches I was doing anyway, it wasn't too complicated from there.

The black radishes were good, not as hot as a red radish and a little softer to chew. I can never figure out how to cook a radish, and the same goes for black radishes. But they were great in this slaw, adding to the substance and flavor without overwhelming anything.

Ingredients

Salad

3 medium black radishes
substitute one bunch of red radishes if you aren't blocks from a radish nerds root stand
1/2 head green cabbage
1/2 head red cabbage
1 large red bell pepper
2 medium red onions
4 carrots

Dressing

1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup grainy prepared mustard
2 tbl prepared horseradish
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
2 tsp crushed dried chilies
Salt & pepper to taste

Grate the radishes and carrots in a food processor and cut the cabbage halves into quarters, then cut them into shreds. Quarter the onions and slice them thin, then cut the pepper into small chunks. Mix the vegetables in a large bowl.

To make the dressing, combine everything in a clean jar and shake it up. Pour it over the salad and mix. Delicious, spicy slaw, with flavors strong enough to stand up to the cabbage base without having to soak it in mayonnaise.

Semper Fi, MF'er!!!

2009-07-24T23:14:00.014-04:00

Oh the places you'll go. I took a job on a Marines commercial recently, agreeing to drive a truck full of camera gear to Parris Island, South Carolina, work for a week in a swamp, then turn around and drive the truck to Providence, Rhode Island. The job turned out to be 12 days surrounded by very sincere southern Christians, even more sincere young Marines and people who have chosen to live in Los Angeles. I got in trouble on the first day for wearing a shirt with George Bush sucking blood from the neck of the Statue of Liberty. Isn't that what the Marines are supposed to be there for, to protect my right to wear that shirt? Obviously, that argument got no traction.

Politics aside, you know I brought Road Food, right? An indispensable book written by Jane & Michael Stern, who write the column of the same name for Gourmet magazine, I have the 7th edition. It's not like it's hard to find good local food when you're traveling, but this book has never steered me wrong. Plus, having the book handy helps you avoid emergency breaks at a rest stop Hardees because you're convinced you can't make it any farther on an empty stomach. I find that the assurance of a solid barbecue joint down the road makes those hungry miles pass by a lot quicker.

I tried to provide links to websites when the restaurants have them, but every place listed in this posting is near I-95. If you're traveling on that highway and want to stop at any of these restaurants, you should be able to get directions from the highway if you call 411 and get the number for the establishment. I had to call most of them to make sure my GPS wasn't going to send me under any short bridges in the truck and they were all very helpful. Except for that one lady, who shall remain nameless, that gave us the wrong instructions THREE SEPARATE TIMES. It was like she was throwing darts at a list of possibilities.

Road Food by ~~Jane &~~ Michael Hull

Of course, after saying all of that, the first place isn't in the book.

The trip started with a great omen: the best burger I've had on either coast, by a long shot.

The White Mana Diner, literally the first American Diner in what we now consider the Classic style, anywhere in the world. This is the building that premiered at the 1939 New York World's Fair as the "Diner of the Future", now relocated to New Jersey, the current Diner Capital of the Known Universe. In fact, there are even more diners in New Jersey than in this paragraph!

The White Mana Diner, holding it down

They had another bad-ass old school sign at the entrance to the parking lot that was advertising 10 burgers for $10. Something about the building, the old lettering on the signs and the bizarre offer of 10 burgers all at once drew me in. What's weird is that the place is in Jersey City but I never knew about it. I lived in JC for five years, and while this is the kind of place that you need a car to get to, and I never had a car, it still seems odd that I'd never even heard of it.

The place was deserted when we walked in, quiet, especially compared to the din of Highway 1 & 9 right outside. The cook was a short man with a dark mustache, sitting in his greasy apron reading the Daily News. It smelled delicious.

We ordered the 10 cheeseburgers with two fries and two cokes to go. I went outside to take some pictures and wait. I didn't want to get my hopes up that these would be the flat, greasy, unappointed burgers that I grew up on, but if they were, I didn't want to watch them being built. I just wanted to bust open the bag and be faced with the amazing problem of figuring out what to do with five cheeseburgers.

There were three places within a ten minute bike ride of the house I grew up in that sold similar burgers and fries to the same people year after year. One place had chili and onion rings, the others didn't, two of the places had seats, one was strictly takeout, but they all relied on thin patties, thin grilled buns and tiny pieces of grilled onion for 80% of their business. Cheese, crinkle fries and root beer dominated what was left of the kitchen, the only way fast food was ever meant to be served.

The closest burger most places have is a slider, but the burgers in Wichita were twice that size at least and never had the anemic, plastic quality that usually defines slider meat. The burgers in New York are goofy, dramatic constructions that invariably come on a massive roll. The burgers in LA all have lettuce, tomato and Thousand Island dressing on them, three things that were never meant to be mixed with the sizzle of a greasy burger grill. You run into interesting burgers on occasion, like pizza and sex, it's good even when it's not that great. But the way they did it on 13th Street felt like the way it was supposed to be done.

Well, that's how they're doing it at the White Mana. My truck partner walked out of the place already holding the bottom of the bag so it didn't rip out from the grease. The burgers were perfect, a little smaller than the Wichita burgers, but I had FIVE OF THEM. I ate three while driving a 16' box truck through rush hour traffic from Jersey City to Secaucus, New Jersey, a narrow, winding, pothole strewn hell road that I barely paid attention to. I killed the other two within five minutes of hitting the parking lot at our last pick up, and we were on the road. They were long gone before I realized I didn't get a picture. Ah, the Bigfoot of burgers, the White Mana Diner.

Okay, to the book! The first Road Food sanctioned stop was Philip's Continental Lounge in Richmond, Virginia. In a funky little brick building on a block of bars, restaurants and shops, Phil's is a good example of the Stern's interest in local ambiance. It has that comfortable feel of a good college bar, but they have onion rings and homemade limeade.

A favorite haunt of students at the University of Richmond for seventy years, Phil's is famous for outsize sandwiches ranging from grilled cheese to Reubens and Reuben variants. The turkey club is tall and ravishing and the hamburgers, while not at all fancy, are diner delights, especially when topped with cheese and accompanied by an order of brittle-crusted beer-batter onion rings or French fries. Crunchy pickle wedges come alongside.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 198

I'm sold.

I would get drunk here.

They must be doing something right.

We walked in and there's a long bar, checkerboard tile on the floor and the smell of a place that serves beer. They were talking up the turkey club pretty good, saying it was the 'best turkey club you'll ever put in your mouth'. I'm still not sure what else you'd do with a turkey club, but I figured I'd take them at their word.

I don't know if I'd call it 'tall and ravishing', but it was the best turkey club I've ever put in my mouth. It's hard to see in the picture, but each layer was so thin and soft that the whole thing melted into your mouth at once. With most turkey clubs you're eating it in sections, some turkey here, bacon there, a bit of lettuce that falls onto the plate. This sandwich was built out of small bits to meld into one experience. Look at the layers of lettuce and ham - present but not obtrusive. I realize I've gone off the sandwich superlative deep end, but this was a truly great sandwich.

I also had the onion rings, crispy, fat, homemade, and the limeade, tart, bright, also homemade. Worth every minute I spent playing video game bowling while we waited for our food.

My truck partner got the cheese steak and fries. He seemed happy, but he didn't talk much for the first 1,000 miles, so I could have misread his reaction. It smelled good.

Of course, barbecue is the prize when you leave New York. It used to be barbecue and proper Mexican, but there have been so many good taco joints open in Manhattan in the last three years that now I get my fill. There's even a taco truck that sets up two avenues from my house, excellent tacos and tortas, and they have horchata. I walked by it a couple of times before stopping, but the line is always made up of Mexican immigrants, so. Not that hard to figure out.

New York has gotten it's fair share of barbecue restaurants over the last few years too, but I haven't been to one yet that compares to the gems scattered across the South. Barbecue in New York mostly means ribs but they never have that smoke flavor that comes from spending hours in an old outdoor smoker. And the sauces aren't much to write home about. And the sides are usually awful, pasty imitations.

In New York, eat the Greek and the sushi. In South Carolina, stop at Maurice's.

Maurice's is a local chain that I'd never heard of. The book didn't have anything of note in the direction we were heading for quite a stretch, but this place was sitting right off the highway, near a handful of gas stations, a big box store and some fast food septic tanks. They had numerous signs that said 'Best Ribs In Town'. I'm willing to call that bluff.

This is a fine, fine sauce.

Pretty standard Southern barbecue menu, focused on the pulled pork, your choice of tomato or mustard based sauces. They had a few oddities like pig faces, but I chose to keep it simple and order the biggest thing they had: the Big Pig.

#1 - Big Pig®
Maurice’s Favorite Dinner!
Half a pound of pit-cooked BBQ Pork, 2 large tender BBQ Ribs, Carolina Hash over rice, homemade cole slaw, hushpuppies and dinner roll.
From the menu

The Carolina Hash was very good, using bits of shredded pork that were as soft as mashed potatoes. I'm always a fan of hush puppies, the slaw was a little sweet for me but served it's purpose and the pork was moist. Hell of a score for what was supposed to be a gas-n-go stop.

The Big Pig - we call him Mike

Don't forget the ribs that came with it.

I asked the cute blond girl behind the cash register some questions that were better suited for kitchen help and, in return, got a very charming story about the Black guy that tattooed her mother with a Confederate flag and some kind of 'South Will Rise Again' slogan. She seemed genuinely surprised that such a thing could happen. For some reason this story was her response to finding out we were from New York. Free association is awesome.

We were hurrying to get to the training base at Parris Island, so that was all the eating we had time for. The week in South Carolina was hot and insanely humid, but the catering was actually very good. My favorite thing about catering in the South is that they always, without exception, have a cooler of tea and a cooler of lemonade at the end of the serving tables, offering a ubiquitous lunch time drink: the Arnold Palmer.

At the end of the week, we packed the gear back in the truck and headed for Providence, Rhode Island. Of course there was barbecue on the way back up, in the form of Dixie Bones, another Road Food sanctioned stop.

Dixie Bones was pretty fantastic. It's in the DC metro area, I'm not sure what the distance is from the city. It's right off of I-95, so it isn't hard to find.

Cooked at least a dozen hours over smoking hickory logs, the meat is velvet soft, served in sandwiches heaped on a platter with such side dishes as Laura's favorite macaroni salad, French fries, baked beans, limp greens, and a terrific item known as muddy spuds. That last item is chopped-up baked potato dressed with barbecue sauce.

Dixie Bones offers three kinds of Carolina-style sauce (tomato-sweet/vinegar-tangy), the hottest of which is not incendiary. In addition to boneless pork, there are ribs sold by the rack and half-rack, pork sausage, beef brisket, pulled chicken breast, and fried catfish fillets.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 195

I'll take one of everything, wrap half of it for the road.

In fact, this is what I got, fat boy combo numero uno for all I know. I wasn't impressed with the sides - the beans were straight out of a can from what I could tell, and the muddy spuds were limp and uninteresting. Potatoes and barbecue sauce are not each other's best compliment.

But the meat was spot on. I always enjoy a smoked sausage when they're on the menu and the Dixie Bones sausage was damn good, just spicy enough to keep my attention without causing drama for the next 10 hours I was in a little cube. The ribs came dry and a little crunchy on the outside, but soft and greasy in the middle. They were great.

And, it has to be said, the people working at Dixie Bones were very nice, very welcoming. We stumbled in wet from the rain and funky from the truck and the lady at the door damn near hugged us on the way in. That has to be worth something.

One thing they do in New England that nobody I knew in Kansas even considered is eat seafood for breakfast. I'd heard of bagels & lox, but never understood what all the hoopla was about. I've seen many variations on the seafood for breakfast theme now that I've lived here for most of my adult life and it makes a little more sense. Seafood in Wichita when I was growing up meant fried catfish from the river or tiny frozen shrimp that had been breaded and fried until they were crispy all the way through. Not very inspiring and definitely not breakfast material.

I still can't get over a feeling of nausea when people mention the vile tuna melt, so my compromise with traditional New York eating goes like this: I'll continue to sample seafood for breakfast as long as I never have to see or touch another tuna melt. I get along well with most foods that seem indigenous to this town, your Reubens, knishes, pizzas and falafels. But the tuna melt is not my friend. Tuna from a can should be served cold, if at all, end of story. I had to make hundreds of these things in my days working in kitchens, and most of them had melted American cheese on them! Oof. Yuck.

All of this is prelude to how I ended up with the crab omelet at Kitchen Little on the way back to New York from Rhode Island. I didn't plan to engage my compromise that morning, but I did, and it was a good decision.

This is Kitchen Little from the outside. It has, in fact, a very little kitchen.

This is the back seating area at Kitchen Little, with sturdy picnic tables in a gravel yard next to a huge lake. A lake. Eating breakfast, drinking coffee, in the morning, next to a lake. I could do this everyday.

Look at the specials that day. Kielbasa, chorizo patties, avocado tomato or Portuguese OR lobster Benedict, Fresh Apple Cornmeal Pancakes!

But, let's not get carried away. Go to the book.

Because this little eating hut has exactly twenty-three indoor seats, including a handful at a counter with a view of the closet-size kitchen, plus a handful of picnic tables ona deck out back, you must expect to wait almost any day, especially on weekends. If the weather is pleasant, the delay can be delightful. There are a couple of wood-slat benches out front under a tall pole topped with the U.S. flag, and the steel-blue water lapping up against the grassy shore just beyond the cafe is hypnotic.

"AM Eggstasy" is the house motto, and the omelets are stupendous, as is the Mystic Melt, which is eggs scrambled with crabmeat and cream cheese served with raisin toast on the side. There are Benedicts, heart-healthy egg-white omelets, and sizzled-crisp corned beef hash. If you don't come for breakfast, there is a whole menu of fried clams (strips or whole bellies), a beautiful hot buttered lobster roll, and a half-pound hamburger, plus excellent clam chowder. It is southern New England style chowder - creamless, steel-gray, and briny - a great winter warm-up meal.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 12

I got the Mystic Melt. I think it was the raisin toast that sold me.

I used to have plates just like that. It looks like I cooked this.

Anyway, it doesn't look like much, and you can't see the crab or the cream cheese in the picture, but this was the best seafood for breakfast experience I've had yet. The eggs were cooked soft and the cream cheese was mostly melted, so the whole thing would surrender as soon as you got it in your mouth. The sweetness of the crab and the cream cheese went great with the raisin toast, the coffee was strong and hot. This was a fantastic breakfast and another perfect example of the ambient factor that the Sterns appreciate so much.

And, we didn't have to wait.

I'm driving from Washington the state to Washington the DC in a few weeks, definitely bringing the book along. I managed to catch three of their recommendations on this trip and they lived up to their usual standards. Thanks again, Sterns!

Bacon Super Post Part 4: Bacon Takedown!

2009-04-11T16:32:00.006-04:00

I'm pretty sure I would go to a tent revival if it was advertised by a picture of a sword-swinging, bikini-clad super-chick riding a war pig. As it happened, it wasn't a tent revival but a bacon cooking contest. Not just a bacon contest, a bacon contest at a beer garden in Brooklyn. Describe a better Sunday afternoon, I dare you.

This whole thing is run by Matt Timms, local super-genius who is also the brains behind the Chili Takedown and the Mac N Cheese Takedown, both worthy sister events to the Bacon Takedown. This guy throws one hell of a party.

There was actually a line happening here, with the bacon dishes along the wall to the left and the eaters slowly winding around the room. As much of a line as you can muster among 300 people who're drinking giant German beers.

There were 30 dishes up for grabs, some of them more interesting than others. A few people served home-cured bacon as their entry, but most people used store bought bacon in some sort of recipe. My pictures are shitty, I was trying to hurry down the line while holding a plate with a growing pile of delicacies. It was much, much more important that I not spill anything than that I get good pictures. So I don't have photos of every dish, but there's enough here to get the idea.

This is the dish I voted for, bacon tomato soup. It was a bright, tasty soup with just enough bacon flavor. He served it in small cups with a crouton, a piece of bacon and a bit of scallion in the bottom. I enjoyed most of the dishes that day, but this one stood out. My argument was that it's even harder to re-define a classic than to find a new fusion that works, a principle that I'm still willing to ride on. While many of the other contestants went out of their way to mix bacon with something unexpected, the bacon-tomato soup seemed natural.

Clearly I wasn't the only person who thought so - the tomato soup was second-runner up amongst the judges.

This was the dish that got the vote of my Takedown companion, the lovely Amber. A cheesy-bacon drop biscuit, the Notorious P.I.G. was a respectable vote, and one she was pretty emphatic about. It would have been great with my cup of soup, if I had that kind of patience. Note the awesome Pig-As-Biggie Smalls drawing under the biscuits, a recreation of a famous photo of one of rap's all-time greats. These hipsters are hilarious.

There was also a Bappleberry muffin, bite sized things that were a combination of bacon, apple and cranberry. I didn't get a picture of them. They were okay, but my issue with them was similar to my issue with these: all that bread overwhelming the tasty bacon.

This was probably my personal second place, and the winner of the judge's contest, 'Electric Bacon'. If you click on the picture you can read the guy's sign, a full explanation of the process he went through to make the bacon. First of all, he was one of very few people who cured their own, a move I appreciate. Second, not only did he salt-cure and then smoke the bacon, he added a little maple to round out the salt, dried the meat in a low oven overnight and THEN added a szechuan butter that gave the whole thing a spicy kick. A for effort, and for taste, but with table after table of flavor combinations that I'm not likely to think of myself, I was left a little wanting with just one small slice to eat. I can see how he won the judge's contest though - focus on the centerpiece of the day, up the ante, dispense with frivolity. Good for Electric Bacon dude.

This was one of two bacon-tamale entries that day. I wasn't very impressed with either of them. A tamale is a complicated thing, it's about the dough to an large extent, and these were kind of lifeless. I grew up next door to a master tamale chef though, I haven't bumped into very many people who can top Arnaldo's mom. Adding a little bacon to it doesn't make up for limp masa.

This was a very moist cake with honey, peanut butter and bacon and was absolutely freakin' delicious. I think this one was my personal second-place, sweet and soft with a perfect combination of flavors. The bride and groom bacon people were a nice touch, as was the big pasta pot he apparently cooked the cake in. I still can't figure out how he put the whole thing together in that pot, but a lot of people are smarter than me. He must be one of them.

There were a few other deserts, including a forgettable brownie made with bacon oil, a bacon cupcake that was cuter than it was inventive, and a bacon, apple & caramel cookie that sounds a lot better than it was. It was a good cookie, but there wasn't near enough bacon flavor, and with a name like bacon, apple & caramel cookie, you're really expecting a mind-blower.

These were bacon mini-burgers, served up by a hot chick in an apron with a 50's updo. Besides offering every concievable June Cleaver fantasy, her burgers were very good. They were moist, with bits of bacon mixed into the hamburger meat. Quite good, but not original enough for the competition. There was a similar bacon-sloppy joe mix served on small bits of crusty bread that was also very good, but also not the kind of thing that leaves you wondering how anyone could be smart/stoned enough to think of it.

This is one of two bacon ice cream offerings, both were excellent. I've learned a lot about what is and isn't acceptable in ice cream from this town. The first time I had an olive oil gelatto was a mind expanding event. A few years ago I would have made awful noises at the prospect of eating ice cream with avocado in it, but not now. Thank god for growing out of your pre-concieved notions.

And last but not least, it's a terrible picture but this little cup won the grand prize, the Audience award - Bacon Bourbon ice cream. A deserving winner, plus the guy who made it was about the nicest person you could imagine. He did himself a few favors by handing out cups of his ice cream to people waiting in line - hit 'em early, when they're still anticipating. Not to say that his dish didn't deserve to win on it's own, but a little strategy never hurts.

Below is the recipe for his ice cream, lifted from the blog Not Eating Out in NY.

Mike O’Neill’s Bacon Bourbon Ice Cream

1/2 lb bacon, sliced 1/4″ thick
1 cup brown sugar plus more to coat bacon
3 tablespoons butter
2 3/4 cups half and half
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
1/4 cup “good” Bourbon (Mike used Knob Creek)

Lay the bacon strips on a baking sheet lined with tin foil. Sprinkle enough brown sugar to cover each strip. Bake for 5-7 minutes at 350 degrees until the sugar starts to melt, about 5-7 minutes. Flip bacon slices and drag through the fat/sugar. Sprinkle with more brown sugar and bake for another 7-10 minutes until crisp. Place bacon on a wire rack until cool and chill completely in refrigerator.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, melt the butter over low heat. Add 1 1/2 cups of the half-and-half, 1 cup brown sugar and salt and just bring to a boil. Whisk egg yolks in a separate bowl and add a spoonful of the hot half-and-half mixture while whisking to temper. Repeat process a few more times. Add the egg yolk mixture to the half-and-half mixture in the pot and stir thoroughly. Add the Bourbon, and continue cooking until mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, stirring constantly. Strain into 1 1/4 cups of cold half-and-half. Whisk thoroughly, cover and chill in the refrigerator at least 6-8 hours (or overnight).

Chop the bacon strips into small pieces. Churn into ice cream following your ice cream maker’s direction, and add the bacon in the last minute of churning. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and freeze a few hours before serving.

God it was good. I left drunk, full of bacon delicacies and quite happy. Thank you Matt Timms, Bacon Takedown super-genius.

Bacon Super Post Part 3: Gas Station Bacon

2009-04-11T16:15:00.005-04:00

Bacon is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy -

Benjamin Franklin

never said that

But I digress.

Things to love about the South:

1. For the most part, you know where they stand. They tell you with their T-shirts.
2. The weather is great, if you can avoid August.
3. They have restaurants like Biscuit World, Whataburger and Waffle House EVERYWHERE.
4. A steadfast devotion to pork that is awe-inspiring, from bacon to barbecue.

Example:

I'm driving through Virginia on a balmy March day, belly full of biscuits and sausage gravy, when we pull off the highway at a truck stop. We got lucky, finding a cluttered little independent spot that is still holding it's ground, and still offering local delicacies that the manager of the antiseptic BP up the road could never get his regional boss to sign off on. Then I spotted it, on a table that was being picked over by a keg of a man in a shirt that said 'I Hunt And I Vote': Felt's Genuine Southampton Country Cured Bacon, a solid slab of salted pork belly, skin on, wrapped in a yard of butcher paper and stuffed in a canvas bag.

Might as well have already had my name on it.

Weezy with my bacon bag once I got it safely North of the Mason-Dixon.

I asked the lady behind the counter a number of questions, starting with what I thought was the most obvious - is there really bacon in this bag? The look on her face told me that was apparently the dumbest available question, but she answered nicely anyway.

She then went on to tell me that she buys Felt's brand bacon all the time and suggested I boil it in a little water first to leach out some of the salt. I took this as a good sign, because it's the first thing I suggest to people when I give away a batch of my home cured belly. Second she suggested I add a little vegetable oil to the pan before I cook it. Deep frying my bacon in a second type of oil seemed like overkill, but she warned that I wouldn't be able to cut the slices very thin. The higher smoking point of the cooking oil vs. the bacon oil would cut down on the foggy kitchen that comes with the time it takes to cook thick slabs of this stuff. Sage advice, it turned out.

Old School Stylee, Skin On!

Cutting bacon takes concentration

And a serrated knife

This is professional grade stuff, not for burgers and not for the weak of heart. The first thing I did was put a few half-slices in boiling water, taking them out at different times to figure out the right salt level. It was good to eat, but too fatty to have much at one sitting.

It was too much to use as a side, so I tried it in a few dishes as a garnish, including a salad nicoise and a green bean dish with onions and mustard seeds. Both good, but the chunks of bacon fat were unpleasant in the middle of otherwise crunchy, green dishes. The meat was too salty, even boiled. The nicoise didn't need any more salt and it stole some of the thunder from the mustard in the green beans.

For the solution, I went to the man who introduced me to the term lardon, John Thorne. Sure enough, beginning of the book Serious Pig, a number of recipes for beans that pretty much all include the use of salt pork. His plans usually call for slow cooking the beans for hours in a hot hole in the ground while you go off into the woods and chop trees for a living, giving the pork fat plenty of time to melt down and become part of the dish. Eureka.

Thorne's bean fetish is based on how they do it in Maine, a place where people apparently argue about types of beans the way my friends do whiskeys. That's part of his slow cook bean hole thing - these recipes originated with loggers who would put the beans on in the morning to eat for dinner when they got back to camp. Suits me.

I was also reminded of why I like Thorne so much while re-reading the bean section. He goes into long sociological explorations around recipes, placing them in a context that makes the whole thing feel very personal. And goddamn he's a good writer.

The recipe we came up with, after much trial and error, is well within spitting distance of most other tolerably sweetened versions.
This, however, doesn't really tell the story. Here is a dish where the smallest changes can reflect much tasting...and thinking. Sometimes the perceived wisdom is correct, and sometimes, correct or not, the demands of your palate insist you override that wisdom. One abiding truth regarding Maine baked beans is that a taste for them separates those who eat them from the out-of-staters whose disdain for the dish is evidenced by their lack of interest in putting in the necessary work to get it right. If you want a sure formula, open a can.

Serious Pig, pgs 37-38

Ooh!

I'm quite the fan of baked beans, but I usually think of them as a place to put the rib scraps, so in my mind they're sweet and meaty, the way they're served at barbecue restaurants. What Thorne is talking about is a much different dish. He's making a BEAN dish, focused accents to the flavor of the bean rather than concocting a sugary sauce to cover it.

This is Thorne's recipe, I'll mention my few changes after. He writes these recipes so carefully, it's like he's dressing his last child for kindergarten. Seems like it would be rude to paraphrase.

Down East Baked Beans
(SERVES 4 TO 6)

1 pound (2 cups) Maine yellow-eye beans
(acceptable substitutes: Great Northern or white navy beans)
1/4 pound salt pork
1/2 cup dark, full-flavored molasses
2 tablespoons dark rum
1 teaspoon mustard powder
Salt and pepper to taste

Pick over and presoak the beans as directed. The next day, put the beans and what remains of their soaking liquid into a large pot, adding more water if necessary to ensure that the beans are covered. Bring this to a simmer and, after 15 minutes, check every 5 minutes until a sharp breath will split the skin of a bean. Then drain the beans and return the cooking liquid to the pot. Keep this at a low simmer while preparing the beans for baking. (Maine cooks traditionally discard both the soaking liquid and the parboiling liquid, adding fresh boiling water to the bean pot. We have come to believe that this serves no real purpose while wasting some good bean flavor.)
Preheat the oven to 225°F. Cut the salt pork into bite-sized pieces and pour boiling water over to cover well. Drain after several minutes, discarding the liquid. Mix the salt-pork pieces into the prepared beans and pour them together into a 2-quart bean pot. Stir in the molasses and rum. Dissolve the mustard powder in a bit of water and mix this in well. Add seasoning to taste - starting with about 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Pour over just enough of the simmering bean liquid to be visible through the beans. Cover the pot and put it in the oven. Bake the beans for 5 hours, tasting occasionally, noting texture and seasoning and adding more of the remaining bean liquid - or else water - as necessary. When the beans are soft and succulent, stir them well, uncover, and bake 1/2 hour more to thicken the liquid into sauce.
Serve with coleslaw and brown bread.

These are some serious beans. I love them, and they're not complicated to make. They sound fussy, with the five hour cooking time, but once they're baking they pretty much take care of themselves.

Beans being prepped

Gas station bacon 'trying out'

Bacon with the garlic and onions cooking down in the fat

The prepared beans soaking up a little bacon goodness before adding the water and putting them in the oven. Apparently I cooked apples for some reason the same night. That's not a surprise.

There are a few things I do different. I don't presoak or parboil the beans. I put them on to boil and start checking them every 15 minutes after 1 hour. They're usually ready to go by 2 hours.

The reason I do it this way is because Thorne's method imparts a little too much bean flavor for my taste. I like to catch the accents and keeping all of those starches overwhelms the spices.

I also add onions and garlic and go at least double with the rum and the bacon. And I've been known to replace the mustard with cinnamon every now and then.

I had made this dish a few times before I stumbled on the gas station bacon, but this salty, fatty slab of belly evolved my beans tenfold. The salt pork that he calls for is basically un-sliced bacon, so I had just the stuff I needed. This dish is right for it, because over 5 hours in the oven the fat melted completely and became part of the sauce, leaving little chunks of meat that were the perfect chewy compliment to the soft beans.

Yum. Makes me want a rainy day so I have an excuse to run the oven all day.

Bacon Super Post Part 2: Bacon Vinaigrette

2009-04-06T04:55:00.002-04:00

Necessity is the mother of invention, that's the only explanation for how this little gem fell into my lap. Like the Bacon Explosion it was crafted to compliment, it seemed like something I've always eaten, a kitschy kind of thing you break out once a year, like your mom's fondue pot.

But in fact bacon salad dressing came about because I ran out of olive oil. The one thing I wasn't short on that night was bacon grease, and really, is there ever going to be a more appropriate time?

Bacon Vinaigrette

I didn't make much in the way of sides to go with the Bacon Explosion, some bread and a salad. It was a typical salad, lots of spinach and rough chopped veggies, but I didn't have any salad dressing to speak of. This usually isn't a problem, I love an improvised dressing, but without olive oil my options were limited.

In this case, limited to the delicious.

Ingredients

1 cup of bacon oil
3/4 cup of balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup of diced red onion
2 cloves of garlic, diced
2 tsp white pepper
2 tsp sugar

Put it all in a clean jar and shake until the oil emulsifies, or combines with the vinegar. Apply liberally to salad.

Dressings are easy to make, just shake all the shit up in a jar until it combines. Working with bacon grease is a little tricky though.

First, you don't need any salt, there's plenty in the oil. Second, the dressing is really only good for one use - it has to stay at room temperature and starts to lose it's appeal by the next day.

I went with strong, savory flavors and more vinegar than you would typically use in a dressing, to help balance out the heavy flavor of the grease.

My guests looked a little overwhelmed when I told them about the dressing, but I think my enthusiasm took the day. Everyone agreed, the bacon vinaigrette was better than they expected, and the perfect compliment to the explosion.

Bacon Super Post Part 1: Bacon Explosion!!!!

2009-03-25T02:01:00.004-04:00

There are moments in life when it appears that the universe has a grand plan and that it loves me. Times when the stars align. When you wake up 1 minute before the alarm. When girls give you their number before you ask. When a bird lays eggs on your windowsill. When everywhere you turn, bacon falls from the sky.

The last couple of months have been filled to the brim with salted pork belly, and I've got so many pictures I'm starting to lose track. So here we go, a bacon super post, featuring an explosion, a take down, pounds and pounds of 'trying out', road trip bacon and the ultimate bean pot slice. Feel the warmth? That's the extra layer of fat settling in. I love being well-marbled!

Bacon Explosion

The Bacon Explosion, besides having the coolest name since Hulk Hogan, was the foodie star of Super Bowl Sunday this year. Everybody's got their Super Bowl standards, but in the last few years every fat guy in America has gotten barbecue books for xmas. Which makes Super Bowl Sunday a kind of second-Thanksgiving, an excuse to cook extravagant meals and have enough people over to polish them off.

This year the Bacon Explosion was everywhere, the Dude With A Goatee must-have. Two guys from Kansas came up with the idea, and in short order it made appearances on television shows and websites all over the world. They even put it in the New York Times, a version of culinary slumming that paper rarely resorts to.

I thought it was a fun idea, but I read it for what it was: hype. These guys have a competition barbecue team and a buddy who does internet marketing for a living. Creating the most over the top bacon item and getting their picture in the paper looks good for all of them. Plus, it's regular 'ol package bacon rolled up with sausage. It just seemed so...predictable. I've never heard a song by 'lil Wayne and Justin Timberlake, but I bet I know what it would sound like.

But amongst my friends, I'm known as The Bacon Guy, Mr. Porkalicious. I get tchotchkys of all kinds, all with pigs on them. People buy me bacon flavored chocolate and gum and toothpicks and soda and potato chips. And people sent me the bacon explosion recipe, videos about it, photos of it, articles, interviews. I was inundated with bacon explosion until I accepted the inevitable and planned a dinner party.

Ingredients

2 lbs of bacon
2 lbs of sausage
Barbecue Rub
Barbecue Sauce

1 bunch scallions, chopped
10 cloves garlic, chopped
Worcestershire sauce

The official recipe doesn't call for Worcestershire, scallions or garlic, but mine does. I used 2 lbs of Thick Cut Boars Head bacon, with 1 lb of sweet Italian sausage and 1 lb of spicy Italian, both from a local butcher. I didn't have a pre-mix barbecue rub around, so I made up a quick mix of salt, pepper, dried chilies, brown sugar and dried parsley. For sauce, I used a jar of spicy sauce from Zabar's that had been sitting unopened on the shelf for months.

The first step was actually a lot of fun. It was early enough in the day that no one was there yet, so I've got music and an apron on, and the next thing I know I'm weaving a bacon lattice and singing along. The sun was shining. Talk about truly happy.

Before I get all wrapped up in the memories, put 1 lb of bacon on the stove and start crisping it up. Pay enough attention to it to make sure it doesn't burn, but you're going to chop it once it's done, so it doesn't need to look nice.

Somehow I didn't get a picture of my bacon weave, probably a little too caught up in the moment. But it's easy- lay six strips of bacon next to each other. Take the other six in the package and weave them into the first six in a tight lattice, like the crust of a pie, but with no space between the slices.

When your weave is done, sprinkle a nice layer of BBQ seasoning over it. And go stir the bacon that's on the stove. Make sure to eat a little piece, because you can't help it anyway, so why try?

I took my sausages out of their skins and mixed them in a bowl first, so my spicy and sweet were evenly distributed. Put the sausage ball in the middle of the bacon weave and spread it to all edges, making sure your sausage ends up in one layer, about an inch thick, across the bacon spread. By now your stove bacon should be done, remove it from the pan and rough chop it into bite-sized pieces. Eat a few more.

Spread your cooked bacon on the sausage, creating a third layer. Add your chopped scallions and garlic as the next layer, sprinkle some Worcestershire over the whole thing and then a layer of BBQ sauce.

Okay, I admit, at this point I was nearly giddy. I still wasn't sure that the flavor was going to be anything new, but the nuts and bolts of constructing this thing was so much fun I didn't care.

The next step was easier than I expected. For some reason I thought it was going to be hard to separate the first bacon layer from the sausage layer. There's enough pig fat between to the two to lube an engine. Separating them was not an issue.

What you're doing is kind of back-rolling the sausage layer into a spiral shape like a jelly roll. It's a great idea, and part of what makes this such a brilliant recipe. Rather than being 2 inches of pork fat and nitrates with a little, saucy center, the crunch of the fried bacon and the freshness of the onions and garlic are spread throughout the roll, making their stand in every bite. This is what keeps it from being a bacon-wrapped sausage ball, or something Burger King would come up with. This is what kept it from being predictable.

Once you've back-rolled the sausage, seal the ends and any holes that have appeared in the roll. Now roll it forward in the bacon blanket, surrounding the sausage on all sides with the weave. Once it's rolled, sprinkle another layer of BBQ rub on all sides.

It's actually really easy. This is one of those recipes that takes as much time to photograph and write up as it does to make. It just looks so pretty you'd think it was complicated.

The originators of the recipe are BBQ guys, their recipe calls for smoking the explosion over a constant stream of hickory smoke. Sounds great, but ready access to a smoker is one of the sacrifices I make to live in Manhattan. I have a smoker in Jersey City, but I couldn't get to it that day. On balance, it's worth it.

So mine was going in the oven. Because the smoker fellas refuse to accept that anyone would cook their baby in a kitchen, there isn't really a settled method for roasting it. I decided to use their smoking time and temperature, 225° for 1 hour/inch, or about 2 1/2 hours. Looking later, I realized this was the Times' suggestion as well.

I couldn't smoke the explosion, but the Worcestershire added a touch of the smoke flavor. I also used a method that I got from a recipe for ribs in Cook's Illustrated, placing a pan with Lapsang Souchong tea leaves in the oven. The tea has this weird, smoky flavor. I can't drink it, but it's better for adding smoke flavor to an oven dish than any other method I know of.

Ten minutes under the broiler finished it off and gave it a little crisp at the end. They recommend another coating of BBQ sauce to finish, but it looked so good I didn't want to mess with it. It was obviously juicy and I wasn't convinced that another layer of sauce had anything to offer.

That's it, slice and serve.

Jesus it was good. Bacon in the oven for 2 1/2 hours would render out it's fat and be a dried, crusty mess. 2 lbs of sausage, however, 2 lbs of sausage has got the stomach to handle that kind of oven time. What you get is bacon that renders out and starts to take on sausage grease. Bacon, re-hydrated and roasted with sausage grease. The sauce and rub give it kick and a different kind of moistness that is nice, if mostly for variety, but the melding of the sausage and bacon flavors was something I had never tasted.

I definitely recommend the onions and garlic, they added a lot to the texture, to the way the whole thing tasted and felt in the mouth. The sausage and bacon are all solidly structured after that kind of exposure to heat, but there's so much fat involved that they have a pretty uniform consistency. The scallions and garlic still had a freshness to them and a little bit of pop.

The explosion went over really well. I freakin' loved it and had to threaten a fork in the hand to a couple people so I could save a slice for a friend that had to work that night. There were, oddly enough, a handful of extremely healthy eaters that showed up that night, lovely girls with fresh skin and bouncy hair who wear clothes that you could conceivably work out in, all the time. Even they liked it.

I started out thinking this recipe was just kind of cheesy. Something dumb with an overblown name so they could get on Guy's Big Bite or whatever. But, like Malcolm Gladwell books and Beyoncé songs, some pop culture is so finely crafted it seems like you've never not known about the rule of 10,000 hours or the words to Bugaboo. Of course I like the Bacon Explosion, it's a classic, my grandpa used to make it when I was a kid. Didn't he?

PS - a bird really did lay eggs on my windowsill.

Crazy.

Muscle Food

2008-12-28T20:44:00.005-05:00

I didn't post on the cooking blog for quite a while, primarily because I wasn't cooking anything interesting. I mean, I was eating, and it was good, but it was mostly salads. How much can you really say about how to make a salad?

I did make 20 different dressings, I suppose I could do a post on salad dressing. But other than that, the posts would be 'put spinach in a bowl, rough chop whatever vegetables are left in the Farmer's Market bags, mix.' See? Not that interesting.

I didn't go as far as Rachel, with her month of raw eating, but I did manage to cut out all forms of sugar, all wheat, anything fried and even most fruit juice. I barely even drank beer, for god's sake. This meant I couldn't eat at very many of the places I like, but it was all for a purpose.

I ran a biathlon in October, the first athletic competition of any kind in my life. It was in Central Park and consisted of a 2 mile run, a 12 mile bike ride and then another 2 mile run, which I did in 1 hour 28 minutes. I actually did pretty damned good considering, coming in 20th out of 79 in my category (fat tire) and in the middle of the pack of 400.

All of the crazy eating, training and massive amounts of water drinking paid off: I'm down 40lbs from my three-cobbler-a-week peak of 210 lbs and feel great. A photo comparison:

Grizzly Mike

Apparently it made me really happy. Don't ask me. I love Rachel in this picture, she was very encouraging in the process, besides being the original inspiration. She looks proud of me, she did all morning.

I was even in good shape the first couple days after the biathlon, without being sore or overly tired at all. I never thought I could do something like this, so I was glad to have finished at all, let alone without having a heart attack immediately after.

So the biathlon was Oct 4, my birthday was Nov 5. Wanna know what I did between those dates, after months and months of strict eating? Got a guess? I'll give you a hint: think whiskey and cheese steaks.

What I figured out is that you can eat 3,000 calories a day if you're willing to go run around a little. So, ultimately, working out is not only very settling to my over-amped brain, but it plays into my eating fetish. I can excuse almost anything, as long as I can go to the gym the next day. Deal.

At this point we're looking at three major races next year: a half-marathon in May, the Nations Triathlon in DC in September and the Disney Marathon in Florida next January. I'm getting myself a four-tier wedding cake to eat in Jan '10.

In the meantime, I'll be back to plates of meat and veggies. Life could be worse.

With the exception of the last picture, which is delicious corned beef, the meat's pretty much all marinated and broiled, with the vegetables steaming in my Chinese bamboo steamers or spiced and baked. I like onions and peppers with nearly anything, and apparently I went through a string bean phase. Who knows?

I've been focused on weight training for the last month and eating whatever I want. I'll be back on the diet after a crazy month of traveling in January and will hopefully feel a little more inspired by the food this time. Either way, a big posting on marinades and salad dressings wouldn't be the worst thing. We'll see.

Thanksgiving Super-Blog Part 6 - The Coda

2008-12-13T14:49:00.002-05:00

Alright, last Thanksgiving post from '08.

This one should be short and sweet, and I don't have any pictures. Looking over the last five posts is making me feel a little indulgent. Not guilty, exactly, more like somebody who suddenly realizes they've been talking about their dog for ten straight minutes. Like I need to tone it down a bit.

Did homemade cranberry sauce really make me that happy? The thing is, I think it did.

Of course, two days of planning and shopping followed by 28 hours of 'Cooking With Naps' gives you a kind of drunk, lightheaded feeling anyway. Then you add pulls off the tequila that goes in the turkey, glasses of the wine that's actually for the mushrooms, the imported beer and bong hits that seem to come in the pockets of every visitor, and you realize this is not a holiday for the weak. Measuring a teaspoon becomes hopeless so you only use spices you can trust. And just when you think you've reached the bottom of your concentration barrel, hungry people start showing up with more liquor and their big I-Slept-In-Today smiles.

And, as is always the case, everything works out for the best.

Leftover Heaven

One last recipe from this year's Times suggestions. Shiloh actually made this one a couple days after Thanksgiving, adjusting the recipe into a dish that made a lot more sense than the way they presented it.

The recipe in the paper is for a potato, salmon and spinach patty, but it's Thanksgiving. Everybody who has left over mashed potatoes is also going to have left over turkey and vegetables. How did they not connect those dots?

So, here is Shiloh's recipe for Potato-Turkey Patties, adjusted from Melissa Clark's Potato-Salmon Patties on page D9 of the Times Dining In section, November 19.

Ingredients

1 cup of cooked stock vegetables - carrots, celery, onion - chopped
2 cups mashed potatoes, chilled
1 cup of shredded turkey
2 1/2 cups bread crumbs
4 large eggs
2 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp black pepper
3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1. Combine vegetables, potatoes, turkey, 1 cup bread crumbs, 2 eggs, salt and pepper in a bowl and mix well.

2. Place remaining bread crumbs in a wide, shallow bowl. Beat the other 2 eggs and put them in a separate bowl, with the flour in a third bowl.

3. Form the mixture into patties, no more than 1 inch thick. Dip each one into the flour, then the egg, then the bread crumbs. The paper suggests you chill them in the fridge on a baking sheet for 30 minutes to 4 hours. I'm skeptical that this is as important as learning how to handle food in hot grease, but it certainly won't hurt anything.

4. When you're ready to eat, put 1/4 inch of olive or vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-high heat and cook the patties in batches for about 3 minutes per side, turning once. Transfer to a paper-towel covered plate and let them drain.

5. Serve hot with leftover cranberry sauce or gravy.

These were really something else, Shiloh woke me up out of a post-Thanksgiving stupor on the couch to try one. As soon as I came to I could smell the hot oil, the frying potatoes, Thanksgiving At The Drive-In. Jesus. It was like passing out in Monte Carlo and waking up in Vegas. The whole mashed potato-turkey combo is one I like anyway, I can usually be found with a scoop of potato or stuffing on top of each bite of turkey. So that's an easy sell.

What makes these is the frying aspect. Nothing gets fried on Thanksgiving at my place, and I don't think I've ever had fried turkey of any kind. Somehow I've managed to miss the mythical Deep Fried Turkey that I hear about every year, so this was my first little taste of the heat and crunch of fried foods combined with the warm, soft flavor and texture of turkey.

Other than that, it's a fried mashed potato ball, an absolute no-brainer home run on my gastronomical line-up. I'm sold.

Thanksgiving Super-Blog Part 5

2008-12-08T18:06:00.003-05:00

Okay, we're nearing the end of the Thanksgiving Super-Blog. The deserts were a little more wide-ranging and awesome than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised, not because I was expecting anything bad, I just hadn't thought much about it until I realized I needed to open up the wall-mount table because of all the pie tins that were piling up.

Besides all the Weezy deliciousness, Rebekah brought three pies: a chocolate cream, a lemon meringue, and a custard. In keeping with this year's Thanksgiving blog stylee, I had the chef write up her own entry.

I like her recipes, they're very, very Rebekah. Efficient, funny, and with just enough go-with-the-flow.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fantastic Rebekah:

Ah, pies!
I pretty much just go with the ol' Joy of Cooking recipes for everything except the cream or meringue topping, for which I go with my mom's method of guess-work and frequent taste-testing. The Joy of Cooking thinks you only need three egg whites to make meringue topping for an entire pie. I disagree.

Anyway, here goes:

Chocolate Cream Pie
You're supposed to use a double-boiler for this--the first time I used this recipe I did not, in fact, know what the hell a double-boiler was. My brother Neil advised me that a mixing bowl floating on top of a big saucepan with boiling water works just fine. He was right.
So, in the mixing bowl floating atop the boiling water, combine 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of flour, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
Add, stir, and cook over (not in) the boiling water: 2 cups of milk and 2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
Remove the mixture from the heat.
Separate 3 eggs, beat the yolks and set aside the whites
Pour half of the hot mixture into the egg yolks
Stir until smooth
Add the mixture with the eggs to the half of the hot mixture you left behind in the "double-boiler"
Cook until thick
Remove from heat and add: 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 teaspoons of vanilla
Cool slightly before putting it into the crust

For the cream topping:
put a bunch of heavy whipping cream in a mixing bowl
while beating the cream, add a bunch of sugar, about half a cup at a time and a little bit of vanilla about a teaspoon at a time until it tastes good
stop beating before it turns to butter
spread it on top of the pie and shave some of that unsweetened chocolate over the top to make it pretty

Lemon Meringue Pie
Sift 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 6 tablespoons of cornstarch, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt into a 2- or 3-quart saucepan
Gradually blend in 1/2 cup of cold water and 1/2 cup of fresh lemon juice (usually about 3 medium-sized lemons if you're using a citrus juicer)
Separate 3 eggs, beat the yolks, set the whites aside
Add to the saucepan: the beaten egg yolks and 2 tablespoons of butter
Stirring constantly, add 1 1/2 cups of boiling water
Bring the mixture to a full boil (still stirring gently)
As the mixture begins to thicken, reduce the heat and allow to simmer for 1 minute
Remove from heat and add 1 teaspoon of grated lemon peel

For the meringue:
beat up your three leftover egg whites (plus, in my case, the three leftover egg whites from the chocolate pie) and add a bunch of sugar and a little bit of vanilla. When it tastes good and the meringue stands up when you fluff it with the beater, it's ready to be put on top of the pie. When you put it on top of the pie you gotta make sure the meringue is touching the crust all the way around or it will contract in the oven and you will have a little island of meringue in the middle of the pie. Use a plastic spatula to make the meringue all pretty and stick that sucker in the oven for a few minutes.

Custard Pie
pre-heat oven to 450 degrees
partially bake your pie shell --about 7-10 mins at 450
while the pie shell is partially baking, make your custard filling:
beat 3 eggs (the recipe says you could also use 6 egg yolks instead of 3 whole eggs, but I usually go with three whole eggs because what the hell am I gonna do with 6 extra egg whites?)
Add: 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 2 cups of milk (I sometimes do more like 1 3/4 cups of milk and a quarter cup of heavy cream, though), and one teaspoon of vanilla
when it's partially baked, reduce the oven heat to 325, slide the rack halfway out and pour your custard into the crust
sprinkle some nutmeg on the top to make it pretty
bake the pie at 325 for about 30 minutes or until it's firm (in my oven it usually takes closer to 40 which means that last minutes usually brings at least 2 freak-out moments where I think I've totally screwed the whole thing up and also I tend to wish I had a little less partially baked the crust beforehand as it tends to get a little on the crispy side there at the end)

Oh I forgot to mention, lemon meringue pie is a staple of my childhood holiday dinners. My mom is awesome with some lemon meringue. And for some reason-if anyone ever knew what reason it has long since been forgotten-but for some reason my middle brother Nick has always called lemon meringue pie "spiderman pie." which is what we still call it at home. I kinda think they'd sell a bunch more of it if they called it spiderman pie officially. Marketing.

I'm not much on cream or meringue pies, but the goddamn custard was soooo goooood, it was creamy and perfect. I managed to swipe pieces of the chocolate and lemon pies before they were gone, both were very good. As with most homemade dishes, the flavors were way more pronounced than anything in a Shoney's.

And look at that thing! It's Beautiful! My problem with all three of the types of pies Rebekah made is usually texture, but her pies had a good, solid feel, something physical to wrap the tongue around. I found a little pocket of my leg to put some in.

That's it, that's all the Thanksgiving recipes that are making the list. And here I am with my plate and my goofy blond hair.

The hair is gone now, so are the leftovers. But most of these recipes are going to be making repeat appearances. Before too long I may have a custard pie with cranberry sauce and candied bacon as toppings. Porka-freaking-licious!!!!!!!

The Greatest Thing Since They Invented Girls

2008-12-06T20:03:00.003-05:00

Okay, this was the centerpiece of Thanksgiving and one of the best things to ever happen to me.

The piece in the paper was short, so I'll reprint the whole thing. From page D2 of the Dining section of The New York Times, November 19.

Make it at Home: Candied Bacon With Whipped Cream

Honeyed, sugared bacon is not a new thing. But for dessert? Park your doubts and your diet at the door of the new Hog Pit.

When this pioneer in the meatpacking district lost its lease, the owners wasted no time in relocating to 37B West 26th Street. They also added Magda Lech's crisply shimmering bacon with a whipped cream dip to the menu. A basket of the bacon is $6.95.

The bacon was served at private parties in the old place at 22 Ninth Avenue (13th Street), which will remain open until Dec 23.

To make it at home, fry a pound of bacon until crisp. Drain and cool. In a clean skillet, melt one cup sugar and three tablespoons honey in two tablespoons water; cook on medium-high until bubbles subside and syrup turns light amber.

Turn heat to very low and add bacon, turning strips with tongs. Place strips on oiled baking sheet or parchment paper until cool, then serve with whipped cream or, better still (but too fancy for the Hog Pit), crème fraîche.

You can also buy the bacon to go: (212) 213-4871.

The look on Mac's face when I said I had candied bacon was worth every penny I spent on dinner this year. It was happy, hopeful. I couldn't wait until after dinner, so the candied bacon actually started as an appetizer, when everybody was hungry.

This shit is so delicious. The candy is crispy and very sweet, the bacon under it is, you know, bacon. And I'll come right out and say it, the fatty part of the bacon infused oil into the candy overnight, leaving those parts with a chewy-greasy-sweet thing that was one of the best combinations I've ever had in my mouth. The kind of thing your brain evolved so it could create and appreciate.

The one change I'm going to make is to add Maple-ine to the candy recipe so we'll have Maple Candied Bacon. And I'll probably whip up a batch of home cured bacon to candy. So we'll have Home Cured Maple Candied Bacon. I may just kill myself over a plate of it, my life's highest achievement realized at the tender age of 32.

Thanksgiving Super-Blog Part 4

2008-12-06T18:03:00.004-05:00

B Weezy the Brilliant has been a big part of my last two Thanksgivings. She's around and brilliant the rest of the year, of course, but the Weezy Signal gets flashed a lot in the end of November. She played a big role as cook and host during Interstate Thanksgiving in '06, and last year she both cooked and sat at the hospital with me while they sewed my thumb back on.

She got some kind of rush out of watching. Whatever, I needed HELP, I'm glad she could be entertained.

So this year I insisted she write up a couple of the dishes. B is from proper Midwestern stock and can't be topped when it comes to the All American fare that Thanksgiving requires. She's so good at some of this stuff, I don't even attempt it anymore. All three of these dishes are on the 'better left to B' list.

Homemade Thanksgiving Stuffing

In her own words:

Homemade Stuffing

(All measurements are approximate)
2 loaves white sandwich bread
3/4 c. chopped celery
3/4 c. chopped white onion
6 eggs
1 t. salt
1 t. pepper
1 T. Poultry seasoning (no salt, sage stylee)
1/4 c. butter
4 cans turkey or chicken broth

Preheat oven to 350. Toast bread and tear into 1/2 inch pieces, place in large bowl. Put chopped onion and celery in a microwave safe bowl and cook until translucent. Add butter to hot veggies and stir until butter melts. Dump veggie mixture into bowl with bread pieces and add eggs, salt, pepper and poultry seasoning. Pour in 2 cans of broth and mix together. Keep adding broth until you end up with a texture similar to raw meatloaf (moist, no visible liquid, but if you squished it in your fist it would wring a little liquid out like a sponge). Once mixed, press into a greased 9 x 13 glass pan and cover with foil. Bake for 45 minutes, remove foil and bake for additional 15 minutes to brown the top.

This dish is one of those family traditions only made by my momma, because her sisters have tried and failed more than once. It runs the gamut: too dry, too runny, won't stay together, won't come out of the pan. This is a recipe for bread glue, if made correctly it should be able to be sliced and come out of the pan like a piece of cake literally. This recipe will not allow you to short-cut it. Packaged bread crumbs won't work, if you don't precook your veggies they will be crunchy, omit the eggs and it will fall apart. This dish is a simple labor of love, not hard just a long process (my job as a kid, was the official toast tear-er). When you're done though, you will never want Stove Top again. If made with veggie stock this dish is vegetarian friendly. Next time I may experiment with different breads (as long as they are the squishy sandwich type). You could also change the entire flavor by utilizing a different liquid and seasoning combo, vanilla nutmeg bread pudding, throw a little cooked sausage in and you have breakfast, some chickpeas veggie stock garlic Mediterranean delight. Sky's the limit people.

Listen to that! With the flick of a wrist it's a recipe for 'vanilla nutmeg bread pudding'. You need a Weezy in your life, trust me.

This is the stuffing. I can't really say much about it. Look at it. It was dense, moist, a little spicy, with veggie bits. It was everything you want stuffing to be. I had two servings.

Weezy's Magic Pecan Pie

If there's one thing B's known for, it's her pecan pie. She parcels it out like fine art, with only a few pie baking sessions a year, so when pecan pie time comes around the phone calls go out. My friend Shiloh is especially crazy for them. He asks for one every time he sees B.

Pecan Pie

1 c. sugar
1 c. dark syrup
1 T. flour
1/2 c. butter
1/4 t. salt
1 t. vanilla extract
3 eggs
1-1/4 c. pecan halves unsalted

Preheat oven to 425. Combine sugar, syrup, flour, butter and salt in a sauce pan and heat to a boil. Remove pan from heat and let mixture cool. Slowly add the beaten eggs and vanilla, whisking into the pan mixture. Once it is all incorporated stir in the pecans. Pour mixture into an unbaked pie shell and bake at 425 for 10 minutes and then turn oven temp down to 325 and bake for another 45-55 minutes. Pie is done when the crust is golden brown and the pie has risen around the outside edges.

My best advice for a successful pecan pie is apprenticeship. There is a lot of "boil it until it looks like this" and "it's not cool enough to add the eggs just yet" and "pull it out of the oven when it looks like this". Pecan pie to me is one of those things that is better to pass down than to make for the first time. My sister and I had seen my Granny and Momma make these pies our whole lives, but the first time she and I attempted them on our own we set her oven on fire from an over filled pie. So anyone who wants to be my soux on pie day, feel free. Shiloh will be more than happy to "clean up" any leftovers. It has also been dabbled to omit pecans for cashews (use salted, it needs it) and creating mini handheld pies in muffin tins (don't add nuts to caramel mixture, put nuts in the mini pie shells then cover with the filling). Best observation from Mr. Hull, "Hey, nuts float!"

They do, and it's weird. We had pie day a couple days ago, it was neat. I have a bunch of hand-sized pecan and cashew pies in my kitchen now. People look at them like they don't believe what they're seeing.

I'm not that crazy about pecans, so I never jumped at the pecan pie. But after making them, I can see what a nice little caramel pie it is under the bitter nuts, and I'm intrigued. I think I'm going to make one with crushed roasted hazelnuts. We'll see.

In the meantime, these things are flying out of my apartment. I'm thinking I oughta charge a fee.

Your Mom's Pumpkin Pie Recipe

THIS is my Thanksgiving pie. I could eat one myself, in two sittings at most.

Pumpkin Pie

2 eggs
1 - 15oz. can of Pumpkin
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ginger
1/4 t. cloves
1 - 12 oz. can Evaporated milk

Preheat oven to 425. Mix together all ingredients thoroughly and pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes and then turn oven temp down to 350 and bake for another 45 minutes. Pie is done when crust is golden brown and filling has a firm jello consistency (jiggle the pan). Let cool to room temperature than refrigerate.

When I brought over these pies to Mr. Hull's house I told him it was his mother's recipe. After which he got excited and nostalgic, and who wouldn't, after all what's Thanksgiving without a piece of your mom's pumpkin pie. The truth is, this recipe is every body's mother's pumpkin pie. Classic as it is, and only made annually, this is the recipe on the back of every pumpkin can label and most evaporated milk labels as well. There is something to be said for tradition . . . yummy tradition. My only beef is that I think it could be a little spicier. Societal flavors have changed a little since this country's puritan roots, and I think we could stand a little more flavor from our pumpkin pies. Next time I think I will make those measuring spoons a little more rounded and throw in a 1/4 t. of nutmeg. Worst case scenario . . . the pie is richer, the pieces get smaller and there is more pie for everyone.

I couldn't agree more on the subject of nutmeg, and I would throw allspice on the list too.

I did get all confused and flushed when she said it was my mom's recipe, but on reflection I remembered watching Mom read the label. I may have gotten my fascination with the cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice combo from my spice-loving Mother, who definitely would have altered the printed suggestions. Either way, it's a flawless slice of holiday family love and it makes me warm inside.

I don't have a picture the pumpkin pie itself, but you can see it in the middle of the table in this picture.

The fold-out table of dessert madness featuring pecan, pumpkin, chocolate, lemon meringue and a couple things I don't remember eating but almost certainly did.

See my slice of pumpkin? Mmmmmmmm...

Thanksgiving Super-Blog Part 3

2008-12-06T01:25:00.004-05:00

Jason made it very clear from the first time we talked about Thanksgiving this year that he was going to make one of the turkeys. He and Brenda both got free turkeys from their respective grocery stores this year, a 16 pounder and an 18 pounder, so there was plenty of turkey making to go around.

I was thinking as much about the stock I wanted to make later as the big meal itself, so I wanted a mostly intact carcass. As such, I butchered one bird by removing the legs, wings and breasts but keeping everything else whole. I cut the breasts down into 2" squares and cooked the choice pieces according to the Puerco Pibil recipe that is one of my all-time favorites. It was spicy and tart, the mildly flavored turkey meat absorbing the orange juice in the marinade especially well.

I don't know if I'd suggest anyone make a turkey this way though. Cooking a turkey is a rare event and it deserves more attention than a recipe I'm willing to throw on the cheapest cut of pork. I did it that way for two reasons: it's easy, so I could move onto other things, and as a counterpoint to the traditional turkey Jason had planned. So there, if you're cooking two turkeys at once for some reason, pibil one of them. Otherwise, go with Jason's plan.

Jason Bailey's Turkey Revolution

Because Jason Bailey has officially figured out the WORLD'S EASIEST TURKEY RECIPE. This is a revolution in cooking big birds, and it's gone by right under my nose because I'm too goddamn snobby and Amish to ever consider something like Reynold's Oven Bags (Turkey Size).

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, Jason came over and made a brine for the bird. We pulled off the plastic, put the organs and neck bone into my stock bag and washed him off. Then Jason made the brine. Here's the recipe as he emailed it to me.

TURKEY BRINE
12-14 lb turkey
1 cup kosher salt or sea salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 quarts water
Combine water, salt, sugar, and any other desired spices to 6 quart pot over high heat until dissolved.
Let return to room temperature.
Pour over thawed turkey in clean bucket.
Refrigerate in bucket for 12-18 hours.
Cook turkey in oven turkey bag as directed.

A third grader could have written this recipe. Love it. We used a few whole allspice and cloves as our 'other desired spices'. And that was it. I spent the next two hours butchering the other turkey and chopping up onions and peppers for it, while Jason's bird relaxed in the fridge making fun of me.

The next day I followed the instructions of the back of the box for the oven bag.

They are: heat oven, dust bag with flour, insert turkey, cut steam holes, cook for 2 1/2 hours.

2 1/2 HOURS! That's nothing!

And it worked! I was amazed! I carried around an exclamation point sign!

The bird was delicious, crispy on top but soft and juicy all the way through. The bag also stored all of the juices in it, so I had more than enough pan business for a gravy. I can't say enough about how good this bird was, especially for how easy the process was. A brine is a good idea for a 16 lb piece of meat, and this one complimented the bird well, keeping it juicy without overwhelming the flavor of the turkey at all. I can't tell you if the allspice and clove made it through, I was too busy shoveling forkfuls of potato and cranberry sauce to notice.

Amber with the one leg that survived whole. Amber likes roasted meat. I like girls that make faces about roasted meat.