A little tweaking and some quality ingredients can take what looks like a pretty ho-hum standard and make it a whole lot more interesting. Case in point: meatloaf and ketchup. The meatloaf was just plain old boring ground turkey, but I used a good-sized spoonful of freshly ground magic spice blend (see here) and the remains of the duck breast from a couple of posts ago minced fine to add extra flavor and richness. I…
Category: Poultry
This was one of those one-off, never to be duplicated sort of dinners, based as it was on leftovers and randomness. Now that I think of it, though, isn’t that true for all of our efforts? So this meal had universal significance, and spoke to the very core of the Human Condition. Also, it had meatballs in it. I took some ground turkey and seasoned it with garlic, spices, and herbs (minced fennel fronds featured…
We’re really into quail these days, especially fried after a soak in buttermilk. But since I hate to do much of anything the same way twice, this time around I tinkered with a few things, and came up with an excellent idea for a fancier future version, using a quasi-legal ingredient that I just stumbled upon. They soaked in buttermilk, just like always, and had a dredge in seasoned flour before frying. I made a…
For the last two Thanksgivings I have thrown down 11-course extravaganzas (links here and here; menu for second link here) which took days to make and hours to eat. This time around, we were to have the meal in Vermont, and I just couldn’t deal with having to bring lots of components and more than a few tools, gadgets, and plates to do it there. So I just did a straight-up all-on-the-plate at once dinner,…
The wife is afflicted with a seasonally induced craving for cranberry sauce, and she’s been buying bags of berries on a regular basis. Yesterday, she made a big pot of sauce, and then asked me “what do we have in the freezer that goes with cranberry sauce?” The answer: “Quail.” In this way was dinner determined. I had various pieces of a goose undergoing various operations in fridge, stove, and oven, so I figured I’d…
Mired in a microbial morass, sleep-deprived, and with a heartless wife abandoning me for some girl time out at a restaurant with friends, I scoured the cupboards for something quick, easy, and kid-friendly to make for dinner. There was ground turkey in the fridge, and I was just going to make a stir-fry with that and some kale with kimchi and egg when I spotted a little jar of Poubelle Blanche‘s homemade Thai eggplant chutney.…
My plans for our new year’s eve dinner proved to be more lavish than our appetites, so I reined it in after two courses. I went out to grab some provisions, though it was snowing pretty hard, and came back with some good salmon, three little Cornish hens, and a little rack of six lamb chops. I had visions of super-luxe yet homey three-course dinner (plus dessert) dancing in my head as I deftly avoided…
The New Yorker came today, and in it is a profile of Grant Achatz, molecular gastronomy wunderkind and chef at Alinea in Chicago, and his work and dramatic struggle with tongue cancer. Christine and her Mom go to the city tomorrow, so I wanted to make something a little fancy to send them off. And there were some nice new ingredients that she bought; when somebody else does the shopping there can often be unexpected…
I woke up feeling like garbage; the cold had migrated to me. Fortunately, I had gotten enough done ahead of time so that I was able to go back to sleep for three hours and felt much better. I got the smoker going, and put in four chickens. After an hour, the chickens repaired to a 200˚ oven while 5 slabs of well-rubbed spare ribs took their place on the grill. I kept the fire…
So herewith the tardy Valentine’s dinner: I tried to combine decadent pleasure with some of the things already in the fridge to make good use of some of the nicer leftovers. The first course was kind of a riff on peanut butter and jelly; seared foie gras trimmed into heart shapes on raisin toast with homemade grape jelly and some of the peanut soup underneath, garnished with Indonesian long pepper. We had a glass of…