I placed an order for a pork belly (half, really) and it weighed in at 11 pounds. It’s hard to tell in the picture, but it’s at least two inches thick- more in places. I cut it into two large pieces that would just fit in the two biggest vessels I could stack in the fridge, and rubbed it well with miso, ume paste, maple syrup, and a bunch of spices. There it sits, slowly…
Category: Technique
So this isn’t about the excellent shellfish-kielbasa stew in Vermont. I’ll get to it later, though I don’t actually have a picture of it. Maybe some fall foliage instead for atmosphere. This is about a wife coming down with something, and the lack of anything easy to prepare in the house. A quick trip later, we were the happy owners of some lovely short ribs. And since we have a pressure cooker, shreddy, falling-off-the-bone-ness was…
We went to Vermont last weekend, and there was some good eatin’- most interesting was a shellfish stew with local kielbasa that I’ll describe in the next post. This afternoon I got busy trying to turn the last of the season’s tomatoes- bought at the farmers’ market yesterday because ours are done, and now dead from frost- into a couple of kinds of salsa to compensate for the complete lack of home-canned tomato sauce this…
The party will be on Saturday, but today was the actual day. So I planned a simple meal of his favorites, and yet which also allowed me to refine my favorite variations on a couple of standards. He loves lasagna (he used to call it “Za-zagna” when he was little, and the name stuck). Since I’m still tinkering with my version, I gave it another whirl that took full advantage of the season’s bounty. The…
Q: What’s better than 40,000 filthy hippies in the Nevada desert? A: A raspberry mocha custard tart with a red wine glaze. Don’t believe me? Check this out: Now, if you haven’t yet, please go here, find “Cookblog,” (currently at #3) and bestow upon me some hats. Allow me to suggest five as a nice round number. Your appreciation will make a difference, and I thank you for it. As I said, the family went…
Sort of a strange thing to make when the weather is finally season-appropriate, but for some reason I had a hankering for a freezer full of wobbly pig reduction. So I betook me to Fleisher’s and hit Josh up for whatever lower portions of pig legs he had lying around. The recipe calls for Madeira, but I used a simple white so it would be more neutral in flavor. And the aromatics all came from…
Last week, while I was making some new plates at the ceramics studio the owner showed me some of the amazing variety of mushrooms that are growing on her property. I am very, very far from qualified to ID fungi, but black trumpets are an easy spot and she has a couple of big, fat patches growing on the sites of long-ago cut hardwood stumps. In exchange for my eye, and for a follow-up email…
During the winter, I stumbled upon an amazing combination of flavors for a lasagna: veal and dashi. I wrote about it here. This time around it was different, but took advantage of another exotic broth to create a standard-looking dish that had a surprising depth and complexity of flavor. In this instance, I used the last quart of barbecued pork broth from the freezer plus a healthy dollop of our basil/sorrel/nasturtium pesto to make the…
Christine’s Mom arrived this evening for the week, and I spent some of the day trying to get ahead of the Thanksgiving to-do list. I made barbecue sauce, blended it with 1% agar, and froze it so tomorrow it can go in the fridge to begin clarifying via syneresis (this is a method whereby a liquid is gravity-strained through a protein mesh in the fridge, thus making it clear but keeping all of the flavor;…
There was much food, drink, and merriment- we had two couples come stay with us for the weekend as we all attended Debi and John’s wedding. The weather was perfect, perfect, perfect, and everything unfolded at a tranquil pace that made for lots of refined hedonism and good time with good people. Only one of the four- Andrew– was with us for dinner on Friday, after a not-so-successful mushroom-hunting walk; it’s been really dry here…