So the other week, trying to find high-end provisions for the fancy dinner, on a whim I turned into this place on an ugly stretch of an ugly main road because the sign says caviar and I figured they might also have truffles. Bingo. Now the truffles were not fresh, but in a jar, but they sure did the job. And in addition, they had the elk, foie gras, and a bunch of other stuff…
Category: Beef
The garden gave us more bounty today, in the form of celery root, collards, and cabbage. I shredded the greens and cooked them low with a bit of salt pork, and cooked the celery root with a broccoli stalk and the last of the parsnip-burdock mixture in the fridge. Once soft, I puréed it all together with a pat of butter and a drop each of white truffle oil and Mexican vanilla extract. I had…
Oxtail stew. At Chris & Sirkka’s house, with such a rich variety of roots and leaves from their garden that I won’t bother to list it, all pressure cooked with wine for 45 minutes and served over polenta with fresh raw milk stirred in at the end (yes, from the same cow we get ours from.) We drank a 2003 Jaboulet Vaqueyras and a 2005 Langhe Nebbiolo by La Spinetta. Life is good, even in…
This was originally going to be my birthday dinner, but I postponed it until Christine was back: a hanger steak (NOT a hangar steak, unless you cook airline food) cooked sous-vide at 135˚ for 75 minutes and got a quick sear in the iron pan to brown the outside. Polenta, endive-umeboshi mash, and a reduction sauce of fresh raw cream from Pepper (pop locavore quiz: do you know the name of the cow(s) you get…
If Christine were here, I would have made this into sushi, but containing hurricane Milo while preparing dinner requires some compromise. I did get a chance to play with my new (used) water bath, which is all that matters. Trimmed grass-fed organic ribeye cooked sous-vide at 130˚ for a bit over an hour, then seared in a skillet to get a nice brown on the top and bottom. Sliced thin over Thai black rice with…
Fans of Patton Oswalt (he was the voice of Ratatouille, you know) might recognize the title for this post. Today, because I’m the daddy, and it was an impeccable crystalline warm fall day- with all those fleeting perfections of smell and light and feeling that fill one at once with both pure distilled joy of life and sad dread at its evanescence- a meal to celebrate the exact intersection of those two emotions. At Daniel‘s…
Rick and Julie are visiting for a couple of days, so after last night’s birthday party at Liz’s house- a pot luck in the grand tradition of our tribe- tonight was a more refined 3-course meal designed to highlight some great wine. First, a zucchini-shiso soup with minced serrano chiles for garnish paired with a 1989 Moulin Touchais Coteaux du Layon which had a rich sweetness that matched quite nicely with the creamy, slightly spicy…
Jody, Anna, and Isabel joined us for the weekend, and a party started to coalesce around Monday afternoon, so we kept it simple for their first night. A 28-day dry aged top sirloin from Fleisher’s was the centerpiece- this is one of the great steaks of the world, with intense flavor and the perfect balance of tenderness and chewy character; normally we don’t eat much beef, preferring the more flavorful lamb and duck or pork,…
Given a pound of ground beef the options are limited only by what else is in the kitchen. Having a garden means being able to make a million dinners on any given day. One of my go-to dishes is a Bolognese pasta- especially on a day like today, which I spent cutting an entire sheet of MDF into ornate shapes with a jigsaw- so I modified the usual recipe to include nothing but our own…
But this time back home, after thorough provisioning at Sahadi and in Chinatown; we’re set for exotic staples and condiments for quite a while. Chris, Sirkka, and Nissa came, so I had defrosted some short ribs, and combed through the garden for baby vegetables; this bowl is honestly one of the greatest things I’ve seen in quite a while. I blanched everything separately to perfect al dente tenderness, and rubbed the skin off beets and…