The stock I used to make the pink soup (from the last post) was a mixture of roasted and stewed chicken bones plus raw T-bones and trimmings from two local, grass-fed steaks. Sometimes a big, juicy steak-on-a-plate is just what you need, while other times something a bit more refined is called for. In the latter case, I like to trim the meat off the bone, and then trim away anything that does not make…
cookblog Posts
We’re very slowly getting to the place where more than greens are regular parts of the daily grazing–where what I bring in from the garden is sufficiently varied in color and texture that I can make almost anything I can think of entirely from our own produce. With the new expansion, this should be even better next year, but for now we’re off to a good start. This is what came in the other day:…
I’ve been kind of on a gelling kick lately, due to the combined influences of hot weather and a clamorous child with a vivid culinary imagination. When made using judicious restraint with the proportion of gelatin and fresh, mostly local ingredients, the result is a world away from the ghastly neon cubes and quivering, striated, molded “salads” that have stigmatized the genre so thoroughly.
This all began with a High School friend posting on Facebook that she was smoking a pork butt as a precursor to making pulled pork for dinner. “Hmmm,” I said, “I have some pulled pork in the freezer, already smoked, braised, de-fatted, and pulled–ready to go, in other words.” So I defroze it, and made corn muffins, using the very same local coarse polenta that I used to dredge the quail. This polenta is going places; I had the chance to chat wth Don, who mills it, yesterday at the farmers’ market, and he told me some exciting news that is going to bode well for this region and the farmers thereof.
I love quail. Especially the semi-boneless variety, since my fine-detail butchering skills wouldn’t do anywhere near this good a job without mangling a whole lot of cute little birds. And they defrost really fast in a bowl of tepid water, making a four-pack an excellent choice to grab from the freezer on an evening when time is fleeting. Once mostly thawed, I put the quail in a container full of goat whey to which I…
The weather lately has been amazing–hot, sunny, and alternating between oppressively humid and perfect. Last night we finally got the rain we’ve been needing, making this year so far the polar opposite of last “summer.” Besides the vegetable garden, which is doing well, I’ve been doing some simple landscaping with fruit-bearing plants to establish low-maintenance, high-yield beds that will provide us with lots of food in years to come. The marginal strips around the edges of our almost acre are pretty scruffy, and inhabited by some pretty scrappy and tenacious weeds. Previous attempts to dig them out and plant have failed, except with big things like lilacs or aggressive things like day lilies. So this time around, for fruit and flower beds alike, I’m just sheet-mulching.
The blackberries going in.
So herewith day three of our ocean-derived sustenance. It’s telling–and extremely wonderful–that the scallops we received on Wednesday, cooked tonight, were sweeter and fresher tasting than anything we’ve ever bought from a store. Anybody who reads this and happens to live in the Hudson Valley would be well-advised to seek out the Fishmonger and get themselves the royal hookup. It honest and for true does not get much better than this unless you’re a deep-sea angler. I cut these circles out of square wonton wrappers with a jar and a knife because I couldn’t find my biscuit cutter.
With a pornucopia of freshest seafood in the fridge, dinner this evening was pretty easy. That’s not to say that I didn’t make an unholy mess of the kitchen, of course, because that is the manner in which I roll. But the actual food was pretty easy. To start, because the family was deep into “My Side of the Mountain” (my absolute favorite book when I was about 7 or 8), a couple of quick salmon hand rolls for the cook.
I had a pretty interesting meeting and interview today with the subject of my next article, and Jen (who was driving) kindly agreed to make a detour on the way home so we could pick up my fish order. It’s great that the fish is back, and we took excellent advantage of its return: wild salmon, scallops, and–most interestingly, because of a long hiatus–shrimp. We haven’t bought shrimp for a long time, because they’re mostly farmed in horribly destructive ways or wild-caught in horribly destructive ways. These, from Laughing Bird in Belize, are raised in inland ponds with filtered seawater and vegetarian feed. The company has received approval from the World Wildlife Fund.
What do you do when “burgers” is the request for dinner and there’s no ground beef in the house? Visit the chest freezer, for starters, to grab a bag of local, grass-fed stew beef. Then, because it’s so lean, a goodly portion of homemade prosciutto fat, and because a custom grind clamors to be bespoke, a handful of herbs (lime thyme, chives, oregano) and a clove of garlic. The result (plus a pinch of salt…