Month: March 2010

March 31, 2010

Chicken thighs kind of make me sad. Whole legs, I love; they’re big, and classically proportioned, and can be arranged all artfully akimbo on a plate, but thighs by themselves just sort of shrink into unappealing little lumps that are very hard to make beautiful without shredding all of the meat off to make something entirely other. And that has often been a problem, since the closest store only carries (organic, semi-local) thighs. Until now. Today I figured out that if I just treat them like wings, they work just fine; subsumed in sauce they become part of a whole, rather than the featured protein. So this evening, presented with two frozen four-packs of said thighs, I attempted to combine my parallel desires for hot wings and escabeche into one low monthly payment.

To begin, I rolled the thighs in seasoned flour. Not doing this means that the skin pretty much entirely gets stuck to the pan (we are a Teflon™-free household) and further ruins what little aesthetic charm the meat possesses to begin with. I added salt, pepper, herbs, cumin, and smoked paprika to the flour. After they were a goodly brown all over, I added a head’s worth of cauliflower florets to brown as well, and a bit more flour to roux-ify the oil in the skillet. Then I poured in a mixture of tomato paste, sherry, pork stock, balsamic, sherry, and cider vinegars along with a handful of minced garlic and herbs, covered the pan, and let it all simmer low for a while.

March 28, 2010

Today I taught the first of what I hope is many cooking classes in our lovely new kitchen; we covered tsukemono, fermented pickles (kraut and kimchi) and vinegar pickles (in this case, beets because they’re ostensibly in season). It was a great group, and I think everyone had the subject demystified to the point where they can now comfortably, confidently do it at home. After they left, I got busy with some other culinary projects before the family returned (they went to a movie). Ten pounds of local pork belly had spent two weeks absorbing my super-secret miso-based cure and were ready for the smoker, so I fired it up and brought them up to an internal temp of 150˚F over the course of about two hours. Milo and I vacuum-sealed them all and put them into the freezer.

March 26, 2010

Ahi

We ordered a luscious fuchsia yellowfin steak for our weekly fish delivery, and I tried to make a dinner that did justice to the beauty of the flesh of this fish. With sashimi-grade gorgeousness, especially a big hunk like this, my normal policy is to break it apart and do different things with it to avoid plate fatigue. Even melt-in-your-mouth fish or Wagyu beef can get lose its heavenly edge after five or six bites,…

March 25, 2010

So here’s a story of another (mostly) meatless meal, and how it ended up being part of three different dinners and a couple of lunches as well. To begin, early this week I made a stock from the chicken carcass and T-bone bones left from two recent meals (both posted already). Once made, I used some of it to make a very simple puréed kabocha squash soup using some steamed squash from the night before.…

March 24, 2010

I know that it looks like we eat a lot of meat around here, but it’s misleading. Very often I just make pasta or some sort of curried vegetable thing or some variation on rice and beans. But they’re not very innovative and/or photogenic, or they’re something that I’ve covered before, so I don’t write about them. The next few weeks are going to be pretty hectic, so it’s likely that posts will be on…

March 22, 2010

This here salad is made entirely from things that survived the winter and are now roaring back. Some stuff–I’m talking to you, Asian cabbage–is just bolting and bitter, but the mizuna, pan di zucchero, and radicchio are lovely. There’s a bit of chervil, too, and parsley, and I cut all the tatsoi too since it was thinking about flowering. Now I love a good bowl of greens; there’s nothing quite so soul-polishing as a perfect…

March 21, 2010

Pursuant to the grueling research that attends yet another article, I’ve gotten hip to numerous first-rate local sources for the very best meat one could hope to eat. Or, in the case of people with actual hearts and souls, the only sort of meat one would agree to eat: from animals raised humanely and fed things like grass and/or kitchen scraps and which live the best possible life evolution and domestication have combined to construct…

March 20, 2010

I ordered a chest freezer, which hasn’t come yet, but in anticipation I made six liters of trotter stock (it’s like Fergus Henderson’s Trotter Gear, but I separate the meat and strain the liquid. I also don’t use Madeira). It’s such a jiggly joy to have on hand, and I always freeze most of it in ice cube trays for convenience; even one cube adds superlative lip-smackery to anything from simple sautéed greens on up.…

March 18, 2010

Meh

I have a bunch of posts to get to, but I hurt my back making bread–yep, disregard everything I said about it before, it’s DANGEROUS and should be avoided at all costs–and then managed to get a flu-ish thing at the same time, so it’s been a pretty lame week. Today I felt halfway normal. Last night I did make dinner, and it turned out remarkably well, probably because I wanted so badly for it…

March 15, 2010

How’s THAT for a snappy title? I know, I know. Some days, the inspirado just rushes through me like a Prius doing 80 with somebody’s Grandmother inside, frantically and fruitlessly stomping on the brake pedal. I’m just happy to share the wealth. It’s been raining for days now, which is a good thing, and all the better for not being snow. We’ve had some serious wind, too, but thus far our power has stayed on.…