Seduction on the Stove

Here's what smells so damn good in the kitchen right now. It's the beginnings of sugo, or my great-grandmother's Abruzzese tomato sauce, which starts, as shown, with finely chopped salt pork and a bit of garlic browning in a pool of olive oil before beef and pork ribs get browned... before chopped onions, celery, bell pepper, parsley, celery leaf, basil all get mixed in and around.

The tomatoes come soon, but this part smells the most heavenly...

Still Life: Tacos

Last night I made a lemon pepper-crusted pork tenderloin with smashed new potatoes and mint as well as a roasted kale salad. Tonight, the pork was sliced thinly and heated quickly with a touch of stock and tangerine juice and smoked paprika, then covered in radishes, cilantro, onions and homemade guacamole. We also couldn't help but grate a bit of Irish cheddar over the whole mess. Tacos! One of my favorite meals. Witness the still life we were loathe to clean up after stuffing ourselves.

Tahoe Cassoulet

Ever since Ms. Kiwi showed up, I've had a hankering for trying my hand at big-"C" Cassoulet. You know, that daunting (for cook and consumer) French dish of, essentially, layers upon layers of fat 'n beans.

As you may or may not know, I am not one for following recipes, so after prowling around the Internet for a few minutes, I convinced myself that I'd make something up when we went to Tahoe. I'm not a skier or snowboarder, and I had a whole ham hock just waiting to roll in the hay with some beans and then feed a gaggle of hungry riders.

Here's what went down:

- Midnight, Thursday: Soak a lot of Navy beans.

- 11am, Friday: Rinse beans. Put them in Ms. Kiwi with ham hock, onion skins, garlic skins, celery and carrot butts, sprigs of rosemary, thyme, bay leaf. Heat slowly. Cut up into small bits a stale old hunk of baguette you have lying around. Stick it into the oven at a low temperature that sounds right, and peek in on it every now and then. When the bits are crunchy, take them out.

- 2pm: Extract everything from gorgeous stock. Reduce stock and carefully separate beans and delicious ham pieces from the other crap.

- 3pm: Render fat from some bacon. Brown some mild Italian sausage in it. Remove meat. Throw in whole buncha chopped onion, celery, carrot and let it brown around in the fat in the pan.

- 3:30pm: Add some spoonfuls of tomato paste. Add some more if you want. Brown around. Then dump in a can of diced tomatoes. Meanwhile, hack the end off a whole head of garlic, lop a tablespoon or two of butter on it and wrap in foil. Put in oven at a temperature between 250 and 400 for a while, until it starts smelling good and you check it and it is nicely browned and squishy. Then take it out and just let it sit by itself on the side.

- 4pm: Hurry and add beans! Then meat! Then reduced stock! Riders are coming back and want to go drink!

- 5pm: Go drink multiple pitchers of beer while your stewing pot of kind-of-fat and beans and vegetables slowly does its thing for a while.

- 8pm: Return to glorious stewy pot of kind-of-fat-but-not-really and beans and vegetables smelling to-die-for. Let riders ooh and ahh over glorious smell of your day-of-slaving. Squish smooshy bits of garlic out of wrappy bits into a pan with the melted butter sloshing all around its sides. Get this warm, then add your homemade breadcrumbs and a little flourish of a handful of parsley, and toast them up.

- 8:10pm: Bat the hungry riders away from Ms. Kiwi with a spatula. Dump buttery-garlicky breadcrumbs all over top of hot stewy beany mixture, and stick Ms. Kiwi into a hot oven somewhere around 400-450 degrees.

- 8:30pm: Carefully pull Ms. Kiwi out of oven and put on table in front of drooling riders. Serve them a gigantic ladle-full with plenty of breadcrumby bits on top, and let them help themselves to various dark and moody red wines.

- 9:30pm: Scrape Ms. Kiwi clean with spoons or tongues, follow up with ice cream cones if possible and a quick session in the jacuzzi.

For Meg: Homemade Tortillas and Rockstar Fajitas

I knew that chicken breast leftover in my freezer would come in handy! Fear not, flavor fiends: This was a Meat Hook chicken breast, bone-in, skin-on, full-flavor holiness. And I had onion in the fridge and a hankering for technicolor peppers (now in season at a farmer's market near you)--no better excuse for fajitas.

 

But then came the huge gamechanger: homemade flour tortillas. 

Yes, that. Yes, you wish they were in your mouth right now.

I also tried to pretend to drink some of that scrubby horchata, so that I'd look really authentic. And I grilled some of the most sugary delicious corn on the cob from the farmer's market, too.

Here's to Megan: My fingers smell like fajitas!!

Homemade Peach Salsa

Same day as the olive bread rat-like nibbling, I bought all the makings for homemade salsa, taking inspiration from last weekend in North Fork when we made our own with fresh peaches.

I had leftover cilantro and onion on hand, then I got a peach, three different tomatoes, a jalapeno and a tomatillo to throw in. I chopped everything up in the Crush tasting room and then sat down with a bag of chips and my afternoon's work.

Quite simply, the best salsa I've ever had.

Like Fast Food, But Not

The other day, while searching for what to do with last weekend's leftover pork chops and avocado, I came across this delectable discovery and couldn't stop fantasizing over it.

We finally made them last night (with fresh pork, fear not!), and there was just enough of everything for one messy leftover spicy pork burger tonight, totally disheveled even as it was with sloppy grilled jalapeno and onion and tomatillo, cilantro, mushy creamy avocado and generous shmears of stinky munster on one side of the challah bun and homemade chipotle mayonnaise on the other.

Incidentally--or not so incidentally--the chipotle mayonnaise was naughty on the duck fat fries, too.

Then I took some leftover grilled corn and shaved it off into a salad with leftover onion, cilantro, a tiny bit of lemon juice I'd saved, some fresh black pepper and a kick of Sriracha.

For dessert, Oloroso-and-orange-zest-spiked homemade rice pudding! A virginal attempt, and a damn good one if I do say so myself.

The 22.5LB Wild Striped Bass: Part II

Here's the second meal from our friend, now affectionately known as Albert, the giant striped bass. I will admit to having turned up my nose to fish tacos almost all my life, but this was a game changer. Honestly, the fish wasn't remotely fishy or stinky, even when it got dredged in flour and some seasoning and then lightly fried. Fried fish! Under my own roof! Well, I never...

Then we splashed copious amounts of fresh lemon juice on the succulent little fish bits, and lots of lime on the avocado and cilantro and salted, julienned radishes and chopped onion (very, very conveniently, I had all of these on hand except for the avocado--in fact, having all these ingredients was my impetus for actually giving fried fish a go). Rounding out the lovely little color spectrum was a deep blue-gray tortilla and a chilly, pale pink Chinon rosé.

 

Crepe Monster

What do you do with leftover chicken, onion, mushrooms and Gruyere? Make a fat crepe! Alton says to let the batter sit, but who has time for that? I don't. But I do have buckwheat on hand. So I used that, too.

Then I made a maple-and-blackberry confit to stuff inside the leftover batter, which I sweetened up with sugar for my dessert. Haaaavava.

Tacos Without the Truck

I love me a taco. I love tacos sometimes more than I love pizza. And I love pizza a lot.

After living in Los Angeles for seven years, I got this taste for great tacos--preferably from trucks, preferably extra-greasy and absolutely smothered with cilantro and onions that came out of a plastic jug on the truck's side shelf. I can't find tacos like that here, so I have to make my own.

My refrigerator had a half a piece of steak leftover from the Farewell Winter meal, and I had a half a lime, some onion and fresh baby spinach in there, so all I had to buy was corn tortillas and cilantro... oh, and avocado, because I love those so much I could possibly live on them.

Pee Foods Key Foods has Chinantla tortillas which are made just literally down the street from me in Brooklyn, so I felt like a happy locavore buying them, and they're blue corn! These are pretty tasty when slightly charred over an open flame, but they're really tasty fried up in some vegetable oil until they're half-crisp, half-chewy-floppy.

I seasoned the steak with a bit of paprika, cumin, chili powder, cayenne and salt, sliced it really thinly so plenty of flavor coated each bite, and then really quickly heated it up in sauté pan.

All of the green ingredients and the onions were splashed with lime juice and some salt and black pepper before they were piled over the steak.

Add beer; the end.

Soup for the 'Itis

Somebody won ham and white bean soup because he was diagnosed with Bronchitis. A promise is a promise, so last weekend I soaked a bunch of the white beans I had on hand and used up the last of my Easter ham. As a bonus, I got to put to rest the last of my kale that I thought I'd never see the end of!

Plenty of stock on hand from Monsieur Poulet and a bit of yellow onion completed this ultra-simple but ultra-ultra-satisfying one pot meal. I highly recommend this with a warm, crusty baguette for cleaning your bowl. And if you're sans 'itis, a dark ale...

Steak Take Two

The Creation: 

Steak sandwich with caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms, served alongside spicy greens and shoestring fries with the delectable, one and only Manhattan Special Espresso Coffee Soda

The sirloin was, obviously, too good to let a morsel go to waste, so I used my handy, aforementioned Lil Beni to ultra-thinly slice the steak onto a toasted baguette graced with (also Beni-fied) onions that I slowly caramelized and some buttery mushrooms.

I also had quite a bit of writing to do after dinner, so as good as a fatty beer would have been with this, I opted instead for pure caffeine in the form of a Manhattan Special. Mm, mmm, yessir.

And! I gave the mustard seed oil my first go-around! Wowwee. That business is *spicy* like, I don't know... like some serious mustard seeds were in there or something. Gee whiz. Serious mustard. Which gave the greens a pungent kick that would be really nice if you really loved spicy mustard. I, however, do not. So with each healthy bite I tried to cover the flavor with a bigger bite of marrow-butter-juiced steak sandwich. Good thing that steak was so, so, so good.

My next new ingredient on the agenda: the harissa. I bought some green chorizo (literally green-colored due to the abundance of cilantro, parsley and jalapeno in it!) after my Sourdough Bread-Making Class at The Brooklyn Kitchen tonight, and I plan to serve the pan-sauteed chorizo with the harissa! Stay tuned...

Comfort Food, Midwestern Style: Redux

2/16/10

The Creation:

Byerly's Wild Rice Soup

So, what's in the fridge (items listed newest/most recent additions to oldest):

ham steak
eggplant
mushrooms
fresh Mozzarella
1 slice guanciale
small hunk of Stilton
1/2 white onion
1/3 red onion
1/2 lemon
1/2 lime
Sugo (Mama's homemade, pork-based tomato sauce)
chicken stock
rabbit stock
3 stalks celery
frozen peas

Key ingredients consumed:
ham steak

celery

white onion

chicken stock

rabbit stock

Ingredients purchased:
carrots

wild rice

The creative process:
It's been snowing and sleeting for I think 24 hours straight. I needed a meal that consoled me, so I looked back to the Minnesota childhood and dug up an old favorite: Byerly's Wild Rice Soup. Let's just say there's a reason this is ultimate Midwestern comfort food, and it has to do with a stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream. The dash of sherry doesn't hurt, either.

The verdict:
I took it easy on the butter and subbed milk for cream, plus tossed in some celery (it had to go), and the results were fantabulous still. But now I have a crap-ton of leftover, cooked wild rice that I need to figure out what to do with...