Porkalicious!

Going Off The Rails

2011-12-22T12:06:00.002-05:00

We come to times in our life when it seems appropriate to ask what responsibility we have to others. Certainly I follow the example of those around me, am I also leading by my example? Is it a good idea to recommend actions that may not, strictly speaking, be beneficial?

Let Your Mouth Be Your Guide

Had a guest recently who has one of those hot-burning metabolisms that leaves her hungry after midnight pretty much every night. This night was no exception, but I was entirely unprepared for her appetite. I had a nice slab of house cured bacon and a bag of blueberry waffle mix, it was going to have to do.

She was perfectly happy with the idea of bacon and waffles, she even helped out by running the waffle iron while I sliced the bacon.

So all of this is fairly normal behavior in my house at 2am. I cooked up the bacon in my best cast iron skillet.

One of the great things about home curing bacon is the consistency and tenderness of the meat when it's done. The meat is always soft and a little salty, the fat is never chewy. It also renders out more liquid fat than packaged bacon, leaving you with a nice layer of salty-sweet oil in the bottom of the skillet.

Now this is where things started getting weird. I was starting to plate everything, making room so I could throw a couple eggs in the pan to top off our very late dinner. But there was too much of that delicious grease in the bottom of the pan to fry eggs in, they'd end up a sloppy mess. I like bacon oil, but not greasy eggs. As I was reaching for a paper towel to soak up some of the extra, I had what may turn out to be my best idea of 2011: why not drop the waffles in there?

What you see here is the perfect waffle, sweet bread, cooked through in the waffle iron and then crisped in a cast iron skillet. They were soft in the middle, with crunchy edges all around that snapped back when you bit down, even under a layer of organic maple syrup.

This is the final plate, which she wouldn't let me take the time to photograph well before digging in. This is a cell phone picture with no lights. She also wouldn't let me photograph the eyes rolling back in her head or the way her nose turned up so she could snort while she killed this plate of food like it was her last meal.

Is it weird to say I thought it was hot? Maybe it was just the fried waffles talking.

Restaurant Review #1 : Coppelia

2011-12-08T02:02:00.001-05:00

I've been wanting to write restaurant reviews for a long time, I certainly read enough of them. There's an art to a truly great review, I'm not sure I'm up to snuff in this department, which may be why I haven't jumped off the pier yet. The scared man dies bored, right?

Fourth Meal Indeed

I live after midnight. I get up in the morning because that's when the phone starts ringing, but all of my best ideas happen when the world has finally quieted down enough that I can hear them. After those 2 am bursts of creativity, after your brain has sopped up every bit of blood sugar in the bowl, it's nice to have the world's best nacho plate right around the corner.

Coppelia, by Dave Sanders for The New York Times, Sept. 28, 2011

Coppelia is a 24 hour nuevo Cuban restaurant that is literally around the corner from my apartment. That fact is key in this conversation, because there was a day when I was sure Employees Only would rule my after hours pig outs until either they closed or Al Gore drowned New York in melted icebergs.

Then one night it's raining, and there's no cabs, and the lady folk have sore feet and wet hair, and they really don't care where we eat. We're standing under the awning anyway, and there are mussels with garlic and bacon on the menu, if you need any more signs.

It started slow, my defection up Hudson St, away from the mind altering bone marrow poppers at EO. There are restaurant reviewers who've never been to New York that will bemoan the graveyard that 14th St is for dinner, how they almost tripped over the tombstones of hey-ya-tried slop houses blocking the sidewalk. These people have clearly never been to Dirty Bird.

For dinner it seems lazy to eat in your own neighborhood, the kind of thing you reserve for sick days and brunch, two occasions when laziness is the point. But the middle of the night is a dangerous hour, not a time for pretense. I've been here long enough to know what happens in cabs after the bar, better to walk, meet sketchy on your own two feet.

Things I Love About Coppelia (In Order)

1. Mejillones

Negra Modelo steamed mussels with peppers, garlic, bacon, and cilantro

I order this dish every time I go there. They come out in a bowl with thumbnail sized bits of bacon and thin slices of garlic all over the place. I dip the spicy fries that come on the side in the broth until they're gone, then inevitably end up tipping the bowl to my lips like I'm having a Roman conqueror wet dream.

2. Nachos

House fried flour tortilla chips with Chihuaha cheese, black beans, peppers, and chopped beef short ribs

I also order this dish every time I go. I usually share it, but people have been stabbed with a fork for getting greedy. The chips are hot, the meat is soft, there's not too much cheese, nothing is neon colored or gooey. Aces.

3. Fish Tacos

Crispy fried flounder with chipotle cole slaw and guacamole

Fresh where it needs to be, fried where it doesn't, the one thing wrong with this dish is that you only get two in an order.

4. Mac & Chicharron

Traditional mac & cheese with nice thick bites of bacon

The mac & cheese is nothing to be ashamed of, but the addition of a the bacon adds grease to keep the noodles soft and meat to give the dish a little texture. How come my granny never thought of that?

5. Cachao

There is usually loud Cuban music in every nook and cranny, which is just the stimulation you need at that hour to get you through your second entree.

You also wouldn't do yourself wrong by ordering the Cuban sandwich, the oxtail empanada, the arepas, the mazorca, or, believe it or not, the fettucini.

The deserts aren't sending anybody's kid to college, and I've never seen a properly cooked steak on anyone's table, least of all my own. The Korean tacos should be struck from this Earth with no mercy, I nearly white them out on the menu every time I look at them.

Anything involving cheese or slow cooking is good for the squeamish, and none of the dishes are too spicy.

Epilogue

This is my first restaurant review, it's a little nerve wracking. I think I'm supposed to use words like mise en place and terrior, I know I'm supposed to talk about the wine list. But that's not what Coppelia is to me, it's a place to wind down with the people you hang out with in the middle of the night.

Your real friends. The ones who know you best.

The ones you can drink the mussel broth in front of.

My Epitaph

2011-12-04T15:55:00.001-05:00

If all goes as planned, this is how I die -

Fugu Is Delicious

A health official said, "The chef served a liver, knowing that it is toxic, even if it was a request from the customer. It should warrant punitive actions."

Did you hear that? "Even if it was a request from the customer" - might as well carve that into my tombstone now.

Sour Patch Kids Sorbet

2011-10-10T17:03:00.001-04:00

Holy Hopping Hank.

Can a person live on sorbet? I may guinea pig myself for the experiment, if I can come up with a justification poetic enough.

My pal Shiloh is about to enter year 35 of his ice cream addiction, and he's been on a serious run with sour patch kids lately. I bought the ice cream maker attachment for my stand-up mixer mostly so I could make original mixes for him. Shiloh loves custom anything, even ice cream.

You put the container in the freezer for 24 hours, which chills the walls of the bowl. Then you pour the ingredients in and turn the mixer on. As it hits the chilled walls of the bowl, the ingredients freeze. You can see the stirring mechanism in this photo, it has thin plastic edges that scrape the chilled cream back into the mix and spread the liquid ingredients against the walls of the bowl to freeze until it all reaches a thick, icy consistency. It works reasonably well, as long as it's not hotter than balls in the kitchen when you start.

I've had some success making ice cream, the fresh peach/caramel drizzle/bacon bit ice cream I made with very ripe end-of-summer peaches was a revelation unto itself. I haven't written up any ice cream recipes because there's something missing from my process. It's been good, but not quite right. Once I figure out what it is, I'll put up some pictures and such, in the meantime I'm just going to have to keep eating the experiments. Shucks.

What did work out great on the first try was the sorbet. I was trying to think of a way to incorporate the tart, gummy Sour Patch Kids candy into an ice cream until I realized a fruit based sorbet would be a lot easier match than a cream base. To keep up with the sour/sweet flavor of the kids, I went with a raspberry/mango sorbet. Holy Hopping Hank.

This is it, with a few of the candies on top and a butter cookie stabbed in the side, sitting in the immortal basil plant on my fire escape.

Ingredients

3 cups raspberries
2 cups mango, chopped
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 cups Simple Syrup
1 cup of Sour Patch Kids, chopped

You can buy Simple Syrup at most grocery stores, but it's easy to make. Put 2 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water in a pan and boil them for a few minutes until they're combined, stirring occasionally. Pour the finished product into a bowl and place that bowl into a larger bowl full of ice to help cool and set the syrup. It makes about three cups. You want to refrigerate it before making the sorbet, it needs to be completely chilled the sorbet will never stand up.

Okay, to the recipe. Put the fruit and water into a food processor or blender and let it dance with the chopping blade until it's a sauce. The original recipe calls for running the result through a sieve to remove the seeds and any leftover pulp, but the bits are tiny, I just left them all in.

Put the fruit sauce and simple syrup in the fridge overnight so they chill thoroughly.

Next day, put the fruit sauce and the 1 1/2 cups of simple syrup into the freezer bowl and turn it on low for 5-10 minutes, checking occasionally for consistency until it arrives where you like it. Throw in the candy in the last minute or so and let it get tossed around a bit. Nice and ease. Throw the finished sorbet in the freezer for a couple hours so it can finish setting up and then try to find it in your heart to share it with somebody and not eat the whole batch in the first ten minutes you have it.

The sorbet turned out perfect, it's equal parts sweet and tart, the fruit tastes very fresh. The mangoes could have been riper, in this case they cut the raspberries but didn't really stand out as a flavor note of their own. I think better mangoes could improve it a bit, but they served their purpose still, sweetening the pot without killing the bite altogether.

I'm thinking lemon sorbet next, the recipe might as well say "make lemonade, pour it in the mixer", how could that possibly go wrong?

Where My Vegans At?!

2011-10-10T17:03:00.000-04:00

Finally, a cruelty free meat source! It can't taste worse than a Boca Burger, can it?

http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/japanese-scientists-creates-meat-out-of-feces/

Stuff I Apparently Ate

2011-09-23T22:27:00.000-04:00

I was looking for something on my phone today and realized that I take a lot more pictures than I post.

Apparently I ate all this stuff, but I remember some of it better than others. If I had to guess, I'd blame it on the infamous 'itis, AKA Food Coma Defcon 5. Some people never make it off the couch.

This was apple tart on phyllo dough, a noble concept that didn't really work. We ate it anyway, let's not get crazy.

Last time Kirsten was in town she told me she'd never had a lobster. This was untenable.

Cupcakes by Melissa, from the store around the corner from my apartment. They're really good and really small, so make sure other people are around, because you will eat the whole box. Trust me.

Dinner? I see capers, olives, cashews, smoked salt cod and raw onion rings. Not that strange as a pile of ingredients, but this is on the desk in my office, which likely means I was eating it and not cooking with it. Suspect, highly suspect.

Looks like a bowl of smoked shrimp and the once great Eva, RIP. I can't imagine how much she wanted to rip into that bowl. Well, I kind of can.

I'd never tried these Sanditas until I saw them at the farmer's market this summer. They were odd, like little sour cucumbers.

The same stand was selling these lemon cucumbers, also good. Not as sweet or obvious in flavor as the big green ones we're used to, but they were a nice diversion. I wouldn't expect them to get wildly popular anytime soon.

Sausage pizza, looks like a whole bit of garlic on there. Predictable.

French toasted something. I'll French toast anything.

This looks like a roast chicken with herbs and chiles. I wish I had one now.

Spinach pies are delicious.

Meatloaf?

No Soup For You!

It's good stuff, but dramatically overpriced.

Who's idea was it to put a 24-hour donut shop next door to my neighborhood bar?

I can't count how many times I've been to Katz's in the last couple years, it's always a good idea.

Fresh herbs, mmm.....

Last but not least, because I actually remember this one -

Italian sausage with mustard and peppers in a warm potato roll, and Shiloh's 5-Star Slap Ya Momma greens. I need to have a roommate or I start to go crazy in the house. I do not need to have a roommate with a chile fetish and a deft hand in the kitchen, but it sure doesn't hurt.

Captain One-Pot, Leader Of The Lazy Brigade

2011-09-12T18:24:00.000-04:00

It all started so simply, as most things do.

I had a lovely bag of kumatoes, which is harder to get than you might suspect. They're quite good, basically a tomato but with a little more chlorophyll flavor, it tastes a little more like the dirt it grew in than your standard store bought. They say there's more glucose in kumatoes than tomatoes, but they don't taste sweeter to me.

They're also rare, which is by design - the developer of the fruit wants to keep a grip on supply.

But, of course, I got a guy. Or rather, I got a hot blond with a substantial plot in Jersey and a handful of leftover seeds. The latest delivery came with a dozen kumatoes, three long red Anaheim chili peppers, a clutch of fresh basil and a small pouch of fresh mozzarella, for good measure.

The plan was to cook everything down into a simple sauce and have it over a little plain spaghetti, nice and easy.

The Best Laid Plans Of Mice And Cooks...

What I ended up with was a bit more complicated, but not much.

Ingredients

8-10 medium kumatoes (or tomatoes)
2 small red onions or 4 shallots
3 sprigs scallion
1-3 fresh red chili peppers
4-6 cloves garlic
4 lamb chops
2 small beef filets
1 cup orzo (dry measure)
1/4 cup olive oil
Water, as needed
Herbs, chili power, and salt & pepper to taste

Heat the oil over a medium fire in a decent size pot. Dice the onion, scallions, and chilies, and throw them in the hot oil.

While the onions soften up, mince the garlic and dice the kumatoes. Try to cut up the kumatoes on a plate or cutting board with a ditch to catch the juice, it's best to toss all of the liquid and seeds into the sauce if you can. When the onions are sweating and starting to brown, put the garlic and kumatoes into the oil. Stir everything up and add a little salt.

Give the kumatoes a good charring in the oil and then turn the heat down to low. Add a little water, maybe 1/3 of a cup and let it all mingle. I also threw in about a tablespoon of dried marjoram, so it had a chance to open up a little.

It was at this point that things started to get interesting. One thing I like about living with Shiloh is that he loves the ol' "kick it up a notch" theory of dining. He started smelling the simple sauce I was making and came in grabbing the wooden spoon. Within a couple minutes he decided that

A) he would be getting in on this meal, and
B) it was going to need some meat

This had suddenly become a big deal, so despite his irrational fear of grocery stores and laundry-mats, Shiloh headed for our local Westside Market, where he bought four lamb chops and two small beef fillets. I refuse to question the motivation of a man who's handing me free lamb chops.

So the new plan...

Add another 1/2 cup or so of water and put the meat in the pot. Cover and cook on low for an hour or so.

I checked in on the meat every 15 minutes, adding water as necessary. When it was clearly starting to crumble, I removed the meat to a cutting board, added another 1/2 cup of water and turned the heat back up to high. When it was going strong, I added the orzo and gave the whole thing a stir.

The pasta takes a few minutes to cook, so I spent that time shredding the meat and sucking the fat off of every last bit of the lamb bones. Mmmmm, that is good every time.

Give the orzo a stir every few minutes until it takes on the consistency you prefer, stir it a few times with the lid off so it can dry out a little, and put a big pile of it on a plate.

The shredded meat goes on top of the orzo pile, then a bit of shaved Romano and the shredded fresh basil. I served it with a healthy shot of pepper, the fresh mozzarella sliced on the side and bare spinach leaves. I used quite a bit of a powdered chili mix that I made and use in almost everything, between that and the fat that had soaked into the orzo, the spinach was a nice fresh bite to balance out the plate a little.

Thankfully, the food was better than the photograph. A tasty, improvised one-pot wonder.

Late Work Snack

2011-09-03T12:59:00.000-04:00

I got called into work at 9:45am yesterday, which did not get me out of completing my 4pm-12am shift that was already scheduled. Nor did it finish the work I was supposed to do before going to work, which had to get done when I got home.

I used the word work too many times in those two sentences.

So of course I needed a little 1am boost. After 10 days in the UK, some fruit was just the thing.

Granny Smith apple, Thomcord grapes, nectarine, peach, 2 kiwis, roasted red pepper, smoked gouda, this crazy blueberry/vanilla chevre, toasted 7 grain, and a proper French press.

Put tangy cheese on crusty bread, pile a couple of pieces of the sweet fruit on top of that, gogogo.

Welcome home.

French Beans are good, and how about that sauce!?!

2011-04-04T12:34:00.000-04:00

Had an impromptu 1 am visitor the other night, and she showed up hungry. This appears to be her default status. I didn't have much around, but it was too late and cold to go outside, so I pulled a rabbit out of a hat and made a fine stew. Or something like that.

Chef's Special Green Beans

I had some house cured sausage in the freezer, so I pulled that out to thaw, and some fresh French beans that a friend at work brought for me. Everything else was odds and ends, a couple garlic cloves, an orange, a handful of raw almonds, and bam. Pork and Beans, Hull Hostel style.

Saucy!

Ingredients

1 lb fresh French, green, or other string bean
1/2 lb sausage, bacon, pancetta or other salty, delicious pork product
1/2 cup raw almonds
4 whole cloves of garlic, peeled

For the sauce

4 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon hot sauce, a sriracha or habañero sauce works perfect
1/2 teaspoon mustard seed
1/2 teaspoon coriander seed
salt and pepper to taste

Bring a medium sized pot of water to boil. Wash the beans and pick the stems off. Add a pinch of salt to the water and toss in the beans to blanch.

Start browning the sausage in a large skillet over medium heat. Stir occasionally to keep from charring.

The beans should be in the water for 8-10 minutes total. About 5 minutes in, toss the almonds into the boiling water and let them soften up a bit too. The meat should be browning just about the time the beans are ready to come out of the water. If the meat isn't ready yet, pour the beans and almonds into a colander and let them sit and dry out a bit.

When the meat is browned, take it out of the pan, but make sure to leave any pan juices in the skillet. Add the olive oil to the pan and let it warm up over medium heat.

While the olive oil heats up, add the garlic cloves, mustard seed, coriander seed, and salt and pepper to the pan. The garlic should start to brown on the sides and the spices will open up nicely in the heat.

When the olive oil is hot and the garlic is singing to you, add the beans and almonds to the skillet. They'll still be wet and not completely cooked, so they'll make a terrible racket when they go in. Give them a toss or a stir so everything gets a little oil on it.

Let the beans sauté over medium heat for 2-4 minutes. You want to freshen up the outside of the beans, but you don't want to fry or overcook them. Pluck a couple off the top and try them out, it's pretty obvious when they're just right.

Turn the heat down to low and put the meat back in. Give everything a stir, and add the vinegar, maple syrup and hot sauce. Toss it all a little and let it sit over low heat for a couple more minutes, until the sauce has had a chance to heat up.

I put an orange on the plate with the beans, it was a great little side dish. My uncle Tom makes a salad of onion, orange, and olive with a dressing based in balsamic. It seems like an odd combination the first time you look at it, but it's a pretty standard Mediterranean method, and it's good every time.

Salty/Spicy/Sweet/Beaney/Nutty/Orangey goodness in the wee hours of the dawning day. The Hull Hostel kitchen never closes.

Korean Fried Chicken

2011-03-08T14:02:00.005-05:00

I had a Sunday off recently, it was cold and raining outside, and there was a fresh bottle of single malt. This is the kind of situation that leads to good things in the kitchen.

It was time to dig into the Recipe folder in my computer, where all the torn out pieces of paper and ingredient lists get scanned to live on after the paper copies have died. I used to have them all in a shoe box, just a big mess of newspaper clips and notes on napkins from different restaurants. This method is more reliable, cleaner, and plays Ike & Tina Turner songs when I ask it to, and that's why Bill Gates is a billionaire.

In the end I chose five recipes, including a little bon chon for the entree. As often happens at Cafe Hull, my roommate Shiloh made a suggestion (fried chicken) and I took it from there. The chicken recipe is in this post, recipes for Fatty 'Cue Brussels sprouts, squash and roasted apple soup, and an apple/pear phyllo crisp follow. Those were the side dishes, I also made a honey cornbread that was good but could be improved on, it's not quite ready for prime time.

Rainy Day Super Dinner, Part 1

Fried chicken is one of those perfect foods that is possible to get right in a bunch of different ways. My grandmother usually cut up a whole chicken and dredged the pieces in lightly spiced flour before frying in vegetable oil. It was good stuff, and you can alter the basic recipe hundreds of ways. I usually add something spicy like ground chilies or cayenne powder, more salt and pepper than I remember being in hers, and whatever leftover herbs I have going dry on the table.

There is also the buttermilk/egg/melted butter theory of a liquid pre-dredging. Then there's the double or triple dredge, where you dip the piece of chicken in your chosen liquid, then in the flour, then back in the liquid and so on until a thick crust builds up around the meat. The concept is solid, but it can be overdone, especially if you don't spice and mix the dredging flour properly.

I buy the chicken whole and cut it into pieces myself, and usually carve out the breast meat and cut it into strips. The strips serve a few purposes. For one, people are used to them and people like eating things they recognize. For another, the whole breast is the thickest single cut of meat, so you're more likely to burn the crust and under cook the meat.

Some cooks say the breast doesn't have any flavor, so the strips give you lots of spicy fried breading to taste if you have to eat the cut. I disagree. It's not as chicken flavored as dark meat, but it's got it's own thing happening, a very clean flavor based in tasty meat juice, like broth made tangible. I'm not buying boneless-skinless breast meat alone unless I'm replacing tofu in a dish that looks great except for the tofu. But I don't shy away from the two biggest parts of the carcass.

The other technique that I have been known to do is to bake the chicken before frying it. This isn't a common method, but it's good for people who don't own a restaurant grade deep fryer with the basket attachment and a 5 lb block of vegetable lard. To get the reeaallll crispy outside on the chicken, you need to have the oil heated to above the 400 degree range, but that will get you the burned outside and raw inside I mentioned earlier, especially if the chicken starts out cold. When you cook the meat first, you're frying for the crust rather than to cook the meat, so you can cook it to your crispiness standard and assume the whole kit and kiboodle is ready.

I don't pre-cook the chicken every time, but it's nice on occasion. Not only does it allow you to get a firmer crisp, but it changes the texture of the meat as well, makes it a little softer and more pliant. I've also had good luck frying the small bits of shredded chicken and vegetables left after you boil them down for a stock.

I usually put those bits in a pot pie, but one night I was short of flour for the crusts, so I mixed about two parts flour with one part cornmeal, spiced it up and dumped it over the pile of bite size chicken and vegetables. I tossed everything in the flour and started frying it in small batches in seasoned frying oil that lives in a jar on my pantry shelf.

This I will do forever. I call it 'chicken fried pot pie' and it will be an appetizer on the menu of the restaurant Kansas that I will open someday, faraway from the actual Kansas, where it will seem like a fairytale land. The meat has a brilliant soft consistency from boiling, and the fact that everything is bite sized makes the proportion of fried crust to actual food very, very high. Oh, sweet clogged arteries, how delicious thou art.

All that is relevant, but it's really preamble to this recipe for Yangnyeom Dak, or Korean Fried Chicken, from the New York Times Dining Section, October 6, 2009.

(If you click the photo, it will bring up a large version that is easy to read)

Asian fried chicken recipes tend to use corn starch either put directly on the chicken or as part of the dredging mix, this one is no different. Another common technique is to create a spicy/sweet sauce that you can slather on when it's done. General Tso's and Orange chicken are the most common applications of the concept in throwaway American Chinese joints, but they don't do it justice at all.

Properly made, the chicken is extra crispy from the cornstarch, and the sauce is a compliment to the dish, a light top note, if you will, rather than a syrupy, congealing mess that ruins the fried goodness of the meat. It remains crunchy, like good fried chicken, instead of soggy like crappy fast food.

This recipe is a good example of the basic technique. It turned out great, so great I didn't get a picture.

Fatty 'Cue Brussels Sprouts

2011-03-08T13:58:00.004-05:00

All Hail the Fatty Empire!

Not exactly a family, at least not biologically, just this side of a circus troupe, the fine people at Fatty Crab and Fatty 'Cue have been cranking out some serious meals the last couple years.

Everything is "Asian Inspired", which isn't always a good sign. But the Fatty folks, they use the Asian umbrella as a good excuse to employ pretty much every flavor available on the planet in one way or another. The places are small and a pain in the ass to eat at because everybody in New York wants to eat there, but the Crew, as they call themselves, are a lot of fun and the food is equally crazy and delicious.

The Fattys have gotten in on the newest NY restaurant craze, the Pop-Up. Pop-up restaurants are usually opened by already successful folks in off-track locations that only have short term leases available. This gives the owners no real impetus to build a restaurant that can have long term success, so they let the chefs go nuts.

Fatty Johnson's is not only a pop-up by reliable people, it's in my neighborhood. I can't recommend anything, because they change the food and drink menu everyday. What I can say is that it's my favorite place to eat in NY right now, everything I've had there has been fantastic, and it's remarkably friendly. The best part is that they bring in different bartenders everyday and let them create a new drink menu, so the liquor flows in that joint. It's got a real 'what are you going to do, fire me?' vibe that I get along with very well.

Also, Fatty Johnson's isn't yet the media darling that Crab and 'Cue are, so you can usually wander in and at least get a drink. If you find yourself anywhere near Carmine street, get on it.

Rainy Sunday Super Meal, Pt 2

One thing I haven't had at any of the Fatty establishments is the Brussels sprouts, but when their recipe showed up in the Times last November, I figured it was worth a try.

It says 'adapted from Fatty 'Cue', I'm not sure what that means. This dish is also a little low on the Asian ingredients, but you can tell by looking at it that it has a proper pedigree. Bacon, maple syrup, and Thai bird chilies are a lovely marriage, using them to liven up some sprouts can't possibly go wrong.

Mine didn't turn out this goddamn beautiful, but here's a picture from the Times website -

You're telling me you wouldn't eat that?! I would!

I only knew Brussels sprouts from You Can't Do That On Television as a kid, so I assumed they tasted like armpit, because that's what the TV told me. I'm fond of them as an adult, they taste like cabbage, but less aggressive. Additionally, because they're somewhat bland, all the recipes drown them in something else, usually something flavorful like bacon, maple syrup and Thai bird chilies. Win-win!

This is a brilliant way to treat Brussels sprouts. The dish is sweet, earthy, meaty, and spicy all at the same time, and somehow the coriander doesn't get entirely buried. Because the additions get cut up, the sprouts themselves don't get overwhelmed, which is the problem with most recipes for these ugly little buggers.

Highly recommend the recipe, or the restaurants. All Hail the Fatty Empire!

Apple Pear Phyllo Crisp (To The Rescue)

2011-03-08T13:37:00.006-05:00

I've been playing with frozen phyllo a lot lately. Not sure why. I think it coincided with the whole 'making my own butter' movement. I need phyllo for a specific dish in January and was able to use homemade butter on it, for some reason that left a fuzzy place in my belly. I've had a roll of frozen phyllo in the fridge since.

Rainy Sunday Dinner, Pt 3

Of course my big rainy day mish-mosh super dinner had to have a soup. I was squash and sweet potato crazy last Fall, but I've been giving the gourds and roots a break since the soup at the Ghost Roast made me realize there are parts of Squash Soup Town that I've never been to. Put me off altogether, it was like realizing you'll never make the NBA and giving up on 21 forever. Seriously, that was some good soup.

This recipe was published on November 3, 2009, in the New York Times, dining section, presumably. I followed the directions closely, it's pretty basic. I wanted to try this one because I've never used roasted apples in squash soup and I wanted to see if it made a noticable difference.

The short answer is that it did. The squash is already pretty sweet, and I usually add yams to the soup, so it has another layer. The apples do the same thing, add another note to the soup, but it's a fruity, bright note instead of the earthy, root flavor of the sweet potatoes. They both work well with the standard Fall spices.

I wouldn't say I prefer one to the other, but the squash/yam soup can be easily re-mixed using sauteed onions and curry instead of cinammon & nutmeg, I'm not sure the apple would adapt as well to the change.

TART!

This recipe was published in Martha Stewart Living last October. I don't recall what chain of events led to me reading Martha Stewart Living, but clearly something caught my eye. Now that I think about it, I probably ripped this recipe out of a magazine in a waiting room somewhere. Ah, so. Hope none of their future visitors saw it in the Table of Contents and felt deprived.

Again, I did it pretty much how they wrote it, this time, other than using sliced almonds instead of pecans, because I like them better and already had some.

I had a little more dough than they called for, so mine was a bit heftier, and I added apple/pear slices to the middle of the crisp itself, not just the top. The main issue most people seem to have with phyllo is that it tears, but phyllo works in layers, so you have an automatic means of covering your mistake.

I've had good luck with phyllo so far, it hasn't given me too much trouble. It's a pain in the ass to brush butter onto every layer, but put on some Funkadelic or your boy Rick James and shake your ass a little while you do it...you'll be done in no time! All in all we're talking 10, maybe 20 minutes, well worth the massive crisp you have when all is said and done.

That's my crisp on the left, with the honey/corn bread on the right. The dark spots on top are where I piled torn bits of the dough in haphazard piles on top as a visual experiment that failed. It looked great when I did it, but where individual layers of the dough were separated from the whole, they cooked fast. Which would have been obvious, if I'd spent any time thinking about it. I was singing out loud and tossing cinammon everywhere by that point, considering the relative char point of phyllo wasn't at the top of the list.

Turned out great, crispy on top and around the edges, buttery and giving in the middle. I had it for breakfast for the next two days, it was brilliant with coffee. I would definitely make this recipe again. Thanks, whoever writes Martha Stewart's recipes!

Homemade Pizza by the 2 Michaels

2011-02-06T12:53:00.010-05:00

A friend of mine back home, Michael Carmody, is a sage, musician, owner of Wichita's finest donut spot, and all around good guy. He was really inspiring in my wayward youth, a genuine supporter of peace and love, and the first person to open an arty coffee shop in Wichita in a generation at least. I was 15, it was called The Juggernaut, they had a little stage, I thought Carmody invented the concept.

So on and so forth, now his central role in my life is as one of the actually interesting people to know on Facebook. Oh that more people had his taste in music videos.

A couple weeks back he posted a video of himself, making pizza at home. Here it is -

This is a great recipe video, friendly and simple with a nice groovy track in the background.

I watched his video, thought what I always think when I see people cooking - "I eat that" - and didn't give it much thought. When I woke up the next day, the only thing I could think about was homemade pizza. I had the day off, more or less, so there was time. Still, I shook it off for about a half-hour, but in the end, my morning coffee was over pizza dough recipes instead of a crossword.

My pizza process is a bit more involved than Carmody's, but not much. Grinding a little meat, browning some onions, easy stuff.

First Things First

The pizza dough is the thing that has to sit the longest, so I started with that. I used the Basic Pizza Dough recipe from page 258 of How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

Basic Pizza Dough
Makes 1 large or 2 or more small pizzas

Time: At least 1 hour, largely unattended

You can knead this dough with a mixer (use the dough hook), or by hand, but I like the food processor best. The pizzas can be grilled or baked in an oven - the hotter the better (commercial pizza ovens are usually about 700ºF). This is the simplest, most basic pizza (and bread) dough you can make. Olive oil makes a smoother, more flavorful dough and a slightly cracklier crust - but you can omit it if you like - just add a little more water to the dough if you do.

1 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast
3 cups (about 14 ounces) all-purpose or bread flour, plus more as needed
2 teaspoons coarse kosher or sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 to 1 1/4 cups water
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon olive oil

1. Combine the yeast, flour, and 2 teaspoons salt in the container of a food processor. Turn the machine on and add 1 cup water and the 2 tablespoons of oil through the feed tube.

2. Process for about 30 seconds, adding more water, a little at a time, until the mixture forms a ball and is slightly sticky to the touch. If it is dry, add another tablespoon or two of water and process for another 10 seconds. (In the unlikely even that the mixture is too sticky, add flour, a tablespoon at a time.)

3. Turn the dough onto a floured work surface and knead by hand a few seconds to form a smooth, round dough ball. Grease a bowl with the remaining olive oil, and place the dough in it. Cover with plastic wrap or a damp cloth and let rise in warm, draft-free area until the dough doubles in size, 1 to 2 hours. You can cut this rising time short if you are in a hurry, or you can let the dough rise more slowly, in the refrigerator, for up to 6 or 8 hours.

There are further instructions for adding herbs, garlic, or even meat to your dough, but these are the vitals. I did use olive oil in mine, a nice olive oil that came with two chunks of goat cheese in it. The cheese is great, but it comes packed in good olive oil with rosemary sprigs and pink peppercorns, it's really flavorful. I used to make pizza on rosemary focaccia, so I like a little herb in my bread. The cheesy, herby, peppered oil made for fantastic pizza dough.

While the dough was rising, I started with toppings.

I knew I wanted a sausage pizza, and I had a little smoked pork neck, as well as a small smoked pork shoulder in the fridge.

I bought a little fresh pork tenderloin and a couple of fresh veal chops at the store.

They didn't have much in the way of normal sausage bits at Westside Market that day, so I went with what was there.

I did a full post on sausage making a couple years back, but I can recount the short version here. I have an old hand grinder that belonged to my Grandma Hull, it's great for small batches, like anything a person would do at home. Unfortunately I was missing both a small piece and the patience to look for it, so I did everything with the grating blade of my food processor. Worked just fine.

Basically, cut the meats up into small bits and grind them. I used the fresh pork and veal, plus about 1/2 as much ground smoked neck and shoulder. Grind it all into a bowl, mix well with about 1 tsp salt per pound of meat and spices to taste, ta-da. I used Penzey's sausage spice mix, a packaged mix that my lovely Mother got me. Penzey is a very reliable spice source, and the sausage mix didn't disappoint.

Next was making a little pizza sauce. Like the sausage, I did a post with a complete marinara recipe a couple years ago. Basically, dice a medium onion and 5 or 6 garlic cloves. Brown the onions in a couple tablespoons of olive oil for a few minutes, then add the garlic. When everything starts to smell sweet, add a pinch of salt and whatever spices you like. I usually do a couple green herbs like oregano or marjoram, and a little ground dried chile. Let the herbs rehydrate in the oil for about a minute and add two large cans of stewed tomatoes, pureed, crushed, or diced. I like one can of crushed, one of diced, that way the tomato gets a chance to assert itself down the road. Heat the tomatoes through and you're good.

I had a few other ingredients in mind, but the building blocks were complete. I have a very well-seasoned pizza stone that I stole from a girlfriend years ago by hiding it in a laundry basket when she was moving out. Thanks babe!

Heat your oven to at least 400ºF, hotter if it's able. My turn-of-the-last-century stove has no reliable heat monitor, but I mostly cook by sight and smell anyway, so. I turn it to HOT and call it good.

So, dough is done, sauce is done, oven is heating. Cut whatever other toppings you're going to use into bite sized pieces and start spreading.

Pull off a chunk of dough, and roll it into a ball. Throw some flour on a flat surface and spread the ball out a little. Bittman recommends letting the dough rounds sit for a few minutes, saying it relaxes the dough and makes it easier to spread. I found that to be a good suggestion.

First, spread the relaxed dough from the middle out to the edges of your pizza pan.

Second, spread sauce to taste on the dough.

Third, spread ingredients.

Fourth, spread cheese on top of the ingredients. I used a pre-shredded "Italian" mix, a spiced provolone, and a very heady Romano.

My first pie had the homemade sausage, onion, cremini mushrooms, and capers. Oh, yessss.

For the second pie, I did thin slices of the smoked pork shoulder and neck, fresh basil, scallions, fresh garlic slivers, and marinated olives. You can see my pan o' sauce in this pic.

These pics are before the cheese went on or the pie was cooked.

The third pizza was veggie, with creminis, fresh basil, red, yellow, and orange bell peppers, sliced poblano peppers, and onion.

The Bittman pizza recipe calls for 8-12 minutes at 500ºF, I did 12-15 minutes at around 425ºF. It's pretty obvious when they're done, they look all crispy, like a pizza should. You've seen it, you'll be able to recognize it.

Beer was served. A good time was had by all. I won't even get into the superlatives that spouted from my otherwise reasonable dinner guests, but suffice it to say no one was disappointed.

Knead some flour and water, heat up some tomatoes, pile on some cheese. No wonder it's become a universal meal.

Thank you, brother Carmody, for another great idea.

Herbed Olive Oil

2011-02-06T12:50:00.002-05:00

I use olive oil all the time, and I like a fresh herb. How hard can it be?

I was actually inspired to do this little trick by a nice oil-packed goat cheese that I've been into lately. You get two small logs, just bigger than the diameter of a quarter, a little more than an inch tall, in a plastic container filled with olive oil, rosemary, and pink peppercorns. The cheese is great, but the herbed, slightly cheese-flavored oil that you're left with is way over the top.

I've been dipping bread in it and eating the oil straight with exceptional results, but last week I used the cheesy herbed olive oil in homemade pizza crust (more on that in a future post, soon I promise). This was a revelation. It was immediately clear that no tasteful person in a civilized society should go without herbed olive oil. Seriously, it was that good. I bought two bottles of good oil and a few clutches of fresh herbs the next day.

And now I have this.

One bottle is rosemary and thyme, one is sage and tarragon, the short jar is all four herbs with four peeled garlic cloves and two dried chiles.

These bottles were left in my apartment by previous tennants, I would guess, oh, ten years ago at least? I never could throw them away, now I finally have a justification.

Instructions, you ask?

Get a fancy ass bottle. Get some olive oil. Get some herbs.

Put the herbs in the bottle. Fill it up with oil. Find a shelf in your kitchen that gets direct morning sunlight and take a picture of how retro/modern awesome you are.

I used these herb combinations because they're the ones I like, you can mix and match any combination that works for you. The little jar is a pure experiment in over-the-top giddiness, like throwing a tool shed on top of the Empire State Building, just because there's room.

What I do know is that I frequently use olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, and dried chiles in varying amounts and all kinds of dishes, they can't be that bad together.

I haven't used any of them yet, but after only one day marinating, the oils already smell delicious. Now where did I put that pizza stone?

Something Else I Cooked That Night

And, just because there's no recipe and I did it at the same time, here's a picture of dinner -

Mike-oe's Chicken and Waffles

Made fried chicken breast strips, a nice cremini and onion gravy, then piled them both on a crispy golden waffle. We also had a maple syrup option, but the gravy was my favorite. I'm not even a fan of the phrase "mushroom gravy", it brings to mind the phrase "cream of mushroom", which is the culinary equal of "dirt soup" or "old sneaker pie", in my opinion. But the reliable ol' Westside Market has had a real nice run of creminis lately, a gravy out of homemade butter and creamline milk was slightly less than heart healthy, but well worth every blessed drop of cholesterol.

Roast Chicken and Other Stories

2011-02-04T13:56:00.004-05:00

I have a friend who's a snob.

Says things like "if the coffee was ground 2 days ago, it's flavor is waning". I'm a closet snob, straining against my working class apron strings, so embarrassed of the price of the cheese I buy that I throw away the receipt on the way home from the store. I take the price tag off of dinner party wine bottles, not because of how cheap they are, but because people routinely set mine aside for a 'special occasion', when I brought it because I wanted to drink it.

I admire the open air, soap box snob, tossing their longish hair in the wind and crying "artisanal or death".

My friend deserves to be a snob though, he's earned it. This is a guy who gets off-the-menu desserts in the kitchen of 11 Madison Park, and hangs out with Woody Allen. He's tasted the finer things, he knows from champagne and caviar.

So when he suggested a cookbook in December, it was intriguing. Available for $5 at the Borders bookstore in the high-end mall at Columbus Circle, natch.

THE MOST USEFUL COOKBOOK OF ALL TIME - now that's a blurb!

It's a weird book, organized by ingredient rather than the typical "appetizer-soup-salad-entree-bread-dessert". Even the ingredient list is odd, it goes from simple items like spinach, tomatoes, olive oil, chocolate and eggs, to brains, endive, grouse, rabbit, sweetbreads, and tripe.

There are 40 headings, each one gets a handful of recipes. There's no uniformity here either, relatively easy-to-find crab gets two recipes, while the nearly extinct cod has 5. Cream and custard get 7 recipes each. Who needs 7 custard recipes?

But in the best traditions of snobs, early scientists, and dictators with drafting pens, Hopkinson's personality rules the day. His unique organization gets lost in the warmly personal writing, where every instruction could end with an "or so". Once you get into his head, the book makes perfect sense.

From the introduction -

The title of this book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, was chosen simply because it had a friendly ring to it, and I hope that it sounds inviting and uncomplicated...I would like to think that this collection of recipes will appeal to all who like to cook; those who gain immense pleasure from being in their kitchens with good produce around them purchased from favorite sources - markets, butchers and fishmongers, grocers and greengrocers, delicatessens and wine shops. I would also like to imagine that everybody could become a good cook and have a healthy interest in the bountiful ingredients that are available in such quantity on our doorsteps.

See, you can be a snob too. And be friendly about it!

I decided it only made sense to try the roast chicken recipe first. From page 28 -

ROAST CHICKEN

1/2 cup good butter, at room temperature
4 lb free-range chicken
salt and pepper
1 lemon
several sprigs of thyme or tarragon, or a mixture of the two
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed

Preheat the oven to 450ºF. Smear the butter with your hands all over the bird. Put the chicken in a roasting pan that will accommodate it with room to spare. Season liberally with salt and pepper and squeeze over the juice of the lemon. Put the herbs and garlic inside the cavity, together with the squeezed-out lemon halves - this will add a fragrant lemony flavor to the finished dish.

Roast the chicken in the oven for 10-15 minutes. Baste, then turn the oven temperature down to 375ºF and roast for a further 30-45 minutes with occasional basting. The bird should be golden brown all over with a crisp skin and have buttery, lemony juices of a nut-brown color in the bottom of the pan.

Turn off the oven, leaving the door ajar, and leave the chicken to rest for at least 15 minutes before carving. This enables the flesh to relax gently, retaining the juices in the meat and ensuring easy, trouble free carving and a moist bird.

Carve the bird to suit yourself. I like to do it in the roasting pan. I see no point in making a gravy in that old-fashioned way with the roasting fat, flour, and vegetable cooking water. With this roasting method, what you end up with in the pan is an amalgamation of butter, lemon juice, and chicken juices. That's all. It is a perfect homogenization of fats and liquids. All it needs is a light whisk or a stir, and you have the most wonderful "gravy" imaginable. If you wish to add extra flavor, you can scoop the garlic and herbs out of the chicken cavity, stir them into the gravy, and heat through; strain before serving.

Another idea, popular with the Italians, is sometimes known as "wet-roasting." Pour some white wine or a little chicken stock, or both, or even just water around the bottom of the pan at the beginning of cooking. This will produce more of a sauce and can be enriched further to produce altogether different results. For example, you can add chopped tomatoes, diced bacon, cream, endless different herbs, mushrooms, spring vegetables, spice - particularly saffron and ginger - or anything else that you fancy.

For me, the simple roast bird is the best, but it is useful to know how much further you can go when roasting a chicken.

A remarkable recipe for a number of reasons. First, the actual cooking is done by the second paragraph. He gives a quick lesson on the importance of letting meat rest, revolutionizes your gravy technique, and then gives a dozen variations on the theme, in one short page. Simple, friendly, and you know it's delicious.

I went with the basic recipe, using homemade butter, and house cured Moroccan lemons because I didn't have any fresh.

The one thing I did different was add carrots, potatoes, scallions, red bell and poblano peppers to the pan after the chicken. I didn't use any extra liquid, there was plenty from the lemons, the butter and the chicken itself to cook the vegetables, and enough to baste by tipping it to the corner.

This is a flawless roast chicken recipe.

I pulled out a fork and dug into a hind-quarter, just planning to taste one bite and save the rest for later. I ate the whole quarter, standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone. I hate listening to people chew into a phone and am usually very conscientious about doing it myself, but I went into a chicken fog and dropped out of the conversation altogether.

Hopkinson was a rockstar chef in the late 80's to mid-90's, until he had a breakdown while head chef at a swanky London joint called Bibendum. Roast Chicken and Other Stories had just come out, but was still 10 years from winning the Waitrose Food Illustrated designation of Most Useful Cookbook Ever. Hopkinson says he walked out of the kitchen half-way through a New Years Eve service, sat down to eat for the rest of the night, and quit the restaurant business.

Now, two books and one major award later, he's a professional snob-at-large. But, like my friend, he's the good kind of snob, the kind that will have a beer with you.

Provided it's a really good beer.

Super Awesome Food Blog (That Isn't Mine)

2011-02-03T23:55:00.002-05:00

This guy Daniel Klein started a blog called The Perennial Plate, and it's pretty great.

Klein has some serious cooking credentials, even though he's still in his 20's. The upside of youth is being willing and able to do something like this blog.

Klein's idea is to live in Minnesota for a year and do multiple video posts. From the ABOUT page on the website -

Taking place over a calendar year in Minneapolis, Minnesota as well as the surrounding food source destinations, Daniel takes the viewer on a journey to appreciate and understand where good food comes from and how to enjoy it. Recipes, politics, long winters, urban gardens, ice fishing, blood, hunting and guts... all line the path to the perennial plate.

The videos are straight forward, no frills things, but the recipes are not. The most challenging thing about what he does involves either massive amounts of snow or butchering wild animals, but in proper culinary fashion he's serious about presentation. The dishes look so good it's easy to forget you're looking at medallions of road kill deer.

I like Klein, he's earnest but soft-spoken, serious but not judgmental. On the other hand, he doesn't treat the Minnesotans like Wise Medicine Man Sages of the North, they're people who don't mind killing dinner, but aren't defined by it the way Klein is.

He just got linked up with the folks over at Huffington Post somehow. Their food section is usually forgettable, maybe this will be a new direction for them.

Moment that sold me? When he went ice fishing, with spears, caught a pike, and found a whole guppy in it's belly during cleaning. I really thought he was going to cook up the little fish too, but apparently digestive juice fish sauce isn't even on Klein's menu.

Best Recipe & Photo of 2010

2011-02-02T13:43:00.003-05:00

I wrote up Boozy Fruit a few days ago, but hadn't gotten this picture developed yet. Turns out the best recipe of 2010 also got to be the focus of my best picture last year.

Convenient, and delicious!

Shot on a Lomography Super Sampler camera and Fuji 35mm 400 speed film.

Seriously, Get Yourself A Dairy

2011-01-27T23:50:00.003-05:00

Not as in buy a dairy farm, but look around, find somebody near you who's doing the work, and frequent them. I consider myself lucky, I've got Ronnybrook.

Ronnybrook Chocolate Creamline On 4 Ft of NYC Fuck You Snow

At this point, all my dairy dollars go to Ronnybrook. It helps that the fancy grocery store near my house offers their fine products, but I was buying it from the Ronnybrook Milk Bar at Chelsea Market before they picked it up at the Westside Market.

The chocolate creamline in the picture might as well be a milkshake for as thick and sweet as it is. It's so goddamn good, I can't properly describe it, but what stands out is the really good chocolate flavor. Their ice cream is great too, and comes with a texture that is closer to homemade than most of the others around.

I mostly use their milk in coffee, and I keep a couple of their yogurts in the fridge for quick snacks. It's just a little more robust of a flavor than other milk stuffs, a little more layered and complete. It may sound stupid, but I'm telling you, find yourself a dairy and pour a couple of shots of milk. If you can get proper milk from grass fed cows, served fresh in glass, you'll notice the difference.

All told I spend about $10/week on milk/yogurt/ice cream, and probably another $10 on cheese.

Might as well do it right.

Flava's Fried Chicken

2011-01-24T11:21:00.004-05:00

I don't know how many pasty white 12 year-olds were into Public Enemy, but I was one of them. It took me a while to grasp the full ramifications of what Chuck D was talking about, but I got Flava Flav immediately.

I still have a soft spot for Flav, and now he's opening a fried chicken chain!

Flava's Fried Chicken

Apparently he's got a book coming out too. Wait for it, he'll be running for office any day now.

911 is a joke!

Really? Mike Doesn't Make His Own Ketchup?

2011-01-21T01:36:00.005-05:00

My friend Talkeye was amazed to find a bottle of Heinz in the refrigerator door recently, which seemed ridiculous at first. In light of this recipe, I'm starting to think I've earned the reputation.

Making Butter With My Magic Electric Churn

My brilliant Mother got me a Kitchen Aid mixer for xmas!

And my brilliant Sister got me this book.

The book is cool, but I have to make more of the recipes before reviewing it in any detail. The one thing I have made is butter, and it is gooooooood. It's easy, and kind of amazing to watch too, you just pour cream into the mixer and let it go.

She starts with 2 1/2 quarts of unpasteurized heavy cream at room temperature. She suggests leaving the cream at 46 degrees to ripen for up to 48 hours, I haven't figured out how to achieve that exact temp, so I haven't tried it.

She also says that using pasteurized cream is okay, but I tried both, and the unpasteurized definitely makes a more flavorful butter.

This recipe leaves you with about 2 1/4 pounds of butter and 1 quart of buttermilk, which she suggests should last you about a week. I've had my last batch in the fridge for two weeks now and haven't used half of it, so apparently we have different butter needs.

Unsalted Butter
Forgotten Skills of Cooking, by Darina Allen - pp 214-215

2 1/2 quarts unpasteurized or pasteurized heavy cream at room temperature
2 tsp pickling salt (optional)

Pair of butter bats or hands

Soak the wooden butter bats or hands in iced water for about 30 minutes so they do not stick to the butter.

Pour the heavy cream into a cold, sterilized mixing bowl. If it's homogenized, it will still whip, but not as well. If you're using raw cream and want a more traditional taste, leave it to ripen in a cool place, where the temperature is about 46 degrees, for up to 48 hours.

Beat the cream at medium speed in a food mixer until it is thick. First it will be softly whipped, then stiffly whipped.

Continue until the whipped cream collapses and separates into butterfat globules. The buttermilk will separate from the butter and slosh around the bowl.

Tip the mixture into a cold, spotlessly clean sieve and drain well. The butter remains in the sieve while the buttermilk drains into a bowl. The buttermilk can be used to make soda bread or as a thirst-quenching drink (it will not taste sour). Put the butter back into a clean bowl and beat for another 30 seconds to 1 minute to expel more buttermilk. Remove and drain as before.

Fill the bowl containing the butter with very cold water. Use the butter bats or your clean hands to knead the butter to force out as much buttermilk as possible. This is important, as any buttermilk left in the butter will sour and the butter will spoil quickly. If you handle the butter too much with warm hands, it will liquefy.

Drain the water, and wash twice more, until the water is completely clear.

Weigh the butter into 4oz, 8oz, or 1lb slabs. Pat into shape with the wet butter hands or bats. Make sure the butter hands or bats have been soaked in ice-cold water for at least 30 minutes before using to stop the butter sticking to the ridges. Wrap in parchment or waxed paper and keep chilled in a fridge. The butter also freezes well.

Variations

SALTED BUTTER

If you wish to add salt, you will need 1/4 teaspoon of pickling salt for every 4oz of butter. Before shaping the butter, spread it out in a thin layer and sprinkle evenly with dairy salt. Mix thoroughly using the butter pats, then weight into slabs as before.

SPREADABLE BUTTER

I much prefer unadulterated butter, rather than butters with additives that change the texture. So if you want to be able to spread butter easily, simply leave it out of the fridge for a few hours in a covered container.

Well, then!

I didn't do the whole water wash step, I just lumped it all together in the bowl and squeezed until buttermilk stopped coming out, then put it in a Tupperware dish and called it good. I also didn't use butter bats, or soak my hands in ice water for a half-hour before I started.

As you can see in process picture two above, I put a funnel in an old milk bottle, laced it with cheesecloth and poured the "butterfat globules" into the funnel. The cheesecloth made a great draining tool too, twisting it to squeeze out the buttermilk worked perfectly.

And there you have it, pour, mix, squeeze, done. I don't use much butter, when I do it's almost always in a recipe. So I've never thought buying low-fat, mostly vegetable oil spread was necessary for my health, heart or otherwise. Never say never, but butter has just reached the bottom of my grocery list, somewhere between canned beets and, um, frozen fake crab meat. Heavy cream, on the other hand, may have found a new market.

The first thing I did with my new butter was French toast an *adultified* apple/pear/winter spice bread that had gone stale, using buttermilk and eggs, then cook the slices in my fresh butter and serve with maple syrup and hot coffee.

Ooo-wee.

The Best Recipe of 2010

2011-01-21T01:34:00.004-05:00

I made a lot of great stuff in 2010, but I think I have to give the gold medal to Melissa Clark from the New York Times for recipe of the year.

Clark wrote this article in September about boozy fruit. She's a regular writer for the Dining section of the Times, and has very reliable taste. Her recipes have more flair than Bittman's, and her writing implies more of the fun in cooking than the rest of the section, so I'm a fan.

She hit a grand slam with this boozy fruit thing. The article starts off by mentioning her preoccupation with preserving some of the mountains of fresh fruit at the farmer's market in late summer. But of course, canning jams and jellies is a huge pain in the ass. Boozy fruit is not. According to Clark, "Apart from freezing, it is about the simplest preserving method there is".

The only problem with boozy fruit is that it takes a while for the ingredients to truly mix, so you make this beautiful, inviting jar of fruity liquor and then just stare at it for three months. I had to hide it all on the back of a shelf and forget about it.

Woah!

I made the traditional rumtopf, with summer berries, peaches, and plums, the same thing with vodka, Clark's pomegranate preserve using vodka instead of gin, and the brandied plums with cinnamon and vanilla.

Here are the recipes, as they appear in the original article.

Rumtopf
Time: 20 minutes, plus 2 hours to sit and at least 3 weeks to macerate.

1 pint mixed berries (like raspberries, blackberries or strawberries)
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 bottle dark rum (1 liter), more as needed
1 pound peaches and nectaries, washed, pitted (pits preserved) and sliced 1/2-inch thick
1 pound mixed plums, washed, pitted and sliced 1/2-inch thick

1. Place berries in a large jar. Gently toss with 1 cup sugar. Let sit for 2 hours, then top with 1/3 of the rum. Do not stir.

2. Cover berries with peaches and nectarines. Top with 3/4 cup sugar and another 1/3 of the rum. Do not stir.

3. Add plums. Top with remaining sugar and cover with rest of rum, leaving room for 1 inch of liquid on top. Do not stir.

4. Loosely wrap preserved peach and nectarine pits in a thick towel. Use a hammer or kitchen mallet to crack the pits and extract the kernels. Crush the kernels gently and add to the vessel.

5. Cover and let sit in a dark, cool place (but not the refrigerator) for at least 3 weeks and preferably 12. If the fruit floats to the top, turn the jar upside down so all the fruit falls to the bottom (you may have to do this several times over the weeks).

Yield: About 2 quarts.

I did not crush the peach pits, but I don't remember why. Seems like the kind of thing I'd do.

I did end up with more fruit and vodka than the recipes called for, so I made the same concoction with vodka instead of rum, with great success. I think the next time I make these recipes I'll cut the sugar by up to half, the end result can be a little syrupy for my taste. But the flavors are really bright, and this shit is so much fun to break out in a crowd. I haven't served boozy fruit to a single person who's heard of it, and they all seem a little pissed, like I've been personally keeping a secret from them.

Brandied Plums With Cinnamon and Vanilla
Time: 10 minutes, plus at least 6 weeks to macerate.

1 pound small plums
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups brandy
2-inch cinnamon stick
1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise

1. Wash plums and prick them all over with a needle. Place them in a 1-quart jar with a tight lid and stir in the sugar. Pour in brandy, covering plums by at least an inch. Add cinnamon and vanilla, cover and shake a few times.

2. Let jar sit in a dark, cool place (but not the refrigerator) for at least 6 weeks and preferably 3 months. If the fruit floats to the top, turn the jar over.

Yield: 1 quart.

This is my favorite of the four varieties I made. I like brandy anyway, and plums, and cinnamon, not to mention vanilla. The difference in the final product between the liquor and the fruit is really pronounced in this brandy, with the liquid ending up sweet and fruity, because the fruit absorbed all of the spirits.

The liquor remains alcoholic, of course, but whatever it is that makes you take a deep breath after a shot, that stuff all soaks into the plums. They have a hint of gasoline when you first bust the jar open, and they widen the eyes of anyone who eats one. That said, they're addictive, like sour candies or those dried wasabi peas, and they're smoothed out by a shot of the brandy so well it seems planned.

This is my print out from the Times website of the gin recipe. I don't like gin, so I made it with vodka, but by this point in the evening there had been way too much sampling to deal with pomegranates. The mess preserved on this 8 1/2 x 11 in sheet of paper suggests that I shouldn't have been trying to seed those things half in the bag, but fuck it. I didn't cut myself, c'est la vie.

My plan was to wait until christmas and break out the jars, not really as gifts, just to serve to guests. But by Thanksgiving, I had taken to "testing" them out, in the name of chef/science duties, of course. It was clear that they were too good to keep from people any longer.

After a proper American super-feast, I had an apartment full of people who weren't quite sure what hit them. But we hadn't had dessert yet, and I hadn't even hinted at the boozy fruit.

We had options - pumpkin pie, pecan pie or espresso fudge reefer brownies, all homemade, with either vanilla or mint-chocolate chip ice cream from Ronnybrook dairy upstate.

What wasn't optional was boozy fruit on top, and a shot on the side. A little powdered sugar sprinkle over the bowl and minds were officially blown. By the time we had all sampled and re-sampled each variation, everyone was very pleasantly bombed.

I didn't try her concord grape/brandy version, in retrospect I wish I would have. I bought most of my fruit from the farm stand at Union Square, and let it sit on the table for a few days to get nice and ripe. Otherwise, it was just as Clark said, easy.

For style, creativity, flavor, and the all-around good time nature of the thing, I think boozy fruit is my 2010 All-Star. Thank you, Melissa Clark, for countering Bittman's eat your spinach ethos with a little drink your brandy. I know it's the paper of record and everything, but not everything has to come with a goddamn salad.

Hull Family Chefs Soldier On

2011-01-03T05:15:00.003-05:00

I got an email from my brilliant sister Kirsten tonight, detailing a soup she made of her own volition and ingenuity. It sounds a bit dishevelled to me, but people tend to look at me like I'm speaking Latin when I describe most of my dishes, so who knows. What sounds complicated on paper is often simply delicious when it's on a spoon.

This is the complete, unedited text of her email. I'm taking her word for it, not only is she smart and well-bred, she works in the prepared foods section of Whole Foods. You could do a hell of a lot worse for lunch.

The Most Amazing Thing I Have Ever Made Or Will Probably Ever Make Again
I just made the most wonderful butternut squash soup. This is what I did.

I peeled, deseeded and cubed a 3lb butternut squash.
I tossed this squash in cinnamon, ground pepper, and ground ginger with a bit of cayenne pepper, curry powder and rosemary and a hint of seasoning salt.
I put this squash in a pan rubbed with olive oil. I added half a large
sweet onion and a few whole cloves of garlic.
I baked at 400 for 15 minutes.
I added one cup strong brewed English breakfast tea.
I baked another 30 minutes.
I transferred vegetables to a stock pot with 2 cans (15 oz each)
veggie stock.
I added a handful dried cranberries.
I let boil till mushy.
I pureed, reserving some stock and chunks of onion.
I put it all back in the pan and added some frozen corn.
I brought it back up to temp.

It was the most amazing soup ever.

I don't know, after reading it again, I think she's on solid ground. I was thrown off by the mixing of cayenne, curry and rosemary the first time I read it, but that's not really too crazy. A little heat and a little green softener added to the curry could develop it really nicely.

My sister the genius, act surprised if you can.

I'm Thankful For Friends, Family & Bourbon!

2010-12-06T23:53:00.005-05:00

Ahh, Thanksgiving. Foodie New Year. The opening of the hearty Winter cooking season, when you can stop making salads and say you're being seasonal. Love it.

I like to invite a bunch of people over so I can make them fat and drunk. 2010 was true to form.

I Am Also Thankful For Pork

As it happened, the Kansistanis had two Thanksgiving celebrations this year, one of them anchored at the Bailey's, one of them at my place. Jason had to work in the afternoon and evening, so they had people over for a lunch time, turkey based event.

I had to work from 8 - 4, so I missed the early meal. Mac asked me to make him a ham, since the lovely Weezy doesn't traffic in ham. They had a free one sitting in the freezer for months, who am I to deny a request?

The lovely and talented Amy Hughey took picture of a lot of the dishes that night, so what pictures I have came from her. What I don't have is any recipes. I'm going to try to explain it all anyway. I made this shit up once, I can make it up again.

Ham

Marinated, basted & broiled. Mmmm....

Ingredients

One fresh pig shoulder or butt

Marinade

1 cup red wine
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/3 cup brown sugar
8 allspice
12 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp ground nutmeg
2 tbl salt
2 tbl ground black pepper

I had a 6 lb butt, you can adjust the marinade recipe according to the piece of meat you're working with.

Slice the meat into serving size pieces. Grind the whole spices and mix the marinade in a large plastic bag or casserole dish. Add the meat and make sure it's well covered. I let it sit overnight in the fridge, 6-8 hours is enough time.

I put them in the oven at 250° for three hours in the marinade, then broiled them for a few minutes until the edges got crispy. Because it was already cut and marinaded, it didn't take long to cook, I was slow basting for tenderness. If you don't have all day, put it in at 350° for 60-90 minutes.

Boom. Ham.

Since I was already doing ham instead of turkey, I decided to pork out the whole meal. To no one's surprise.

I don't watch much food on television, but my roommate Anton loves it. I was having a refrigerated-pizza-at-4AM moment a few weeks ago, and ended up watching one of the contestant chef shows. I tried to find the guy's name online, but no luck. I did recreate his best recipe though.

Herbed Goat Cheese Stuffed Cherries, Skewered W/ Bacon

We're way past cherry season, but I don't care. Grow them in Guatemala if you have to, I love cherries.

Ingredients

Creamy herbed goat cheese
Fresh cherries
Bacon

Bamboo Skewers

Chop the bacon into small pieces and put it in a skillet over medium heat. Cook it to preferred crispness.

While that's happening, you can pit the cherries. This is kind of a pain in the ass, so try to have helpers around when you do it (thank you MJ!). Cut the top off the cherry and pit it. If you have a pit pusher thing it's easy. I do not.

When the cherry is pitted, stuff it with goat cheese. Put the top back on if you want, and stick it through with a bamboo skewer, topping the whole thing off with a piece of bacon. Like I said, kind of a pain in the ass to make, but consuming them is pure joy. It's creamy, salty, sweet in equal measure, all at once, and it comes on a stick. Total success.

Also in that photo are the marinated olives that Weezy brought. They were spicy and delicious.

Hams #3 & 4

Asparagus W/ Vidalia Onions & Serrano Ham
Dates, Figs & Oranges W/ Blue Cheese & Prosciutto

Look Out.

Let's start with the asparagus.

Ingredients

One bunch of asparagus
1/4 lb sliced Serrano ham
1 medium Vidalia onion

1/2 cup of the marinade recipe used for the ham

Bring water to boil in a pot big enough to fit your asparagus. Wash the asparagus and cut about an inch off the bottoms of the stalks. Par-boil the vegetables in the water for 3-5 minutes.

Slice the onion into thin ribbons. Take the asparagus out of the boiling water and rinse it with cold water so you can handle it. Now, if you want, you can take each asparagus stalk, pair it with a bit of onion and wrap them in a little ham. Or, you can randomly mix everything in a baking dish, depending on how you want to serve it. I wrapped everything because I had time to kill, but it's by no mean necessary.

When the vegetables and meat are in a baking dish, pour the marinade over it, cover the dish and put it in the oven. I had it in at 300° for about an hour, just long enough to let the marinade start to caramelize. That temperature and time were also convenient to everything else I was cooking, the time would need to be adjusted if the oven weren't full of other things and being opened every few minutes.

Also in this photo is the run-away hit of the night, blue cheese stuffed dates wrapped in prosciutto. The meat constricts when you cook it and completely covers the date, so nobody seemed to understand what they were getting into. But they're bite sized and kind of funny looking, so everybody took one. Finally, it was like a wave of 'what is this', as each person got seated and looked for something simple to start with.

Ingredients

1/2 cup blue cheese
2 dozen pitted dates
2 dozen dried figs
4 small oranges
1/4 lb thin sliced prosciutto

This is real easy, just slice the fruit, stuff with the cheese and wrap with the meat. I cut the tops off of the oranges to stuff them, and added a leftover slice of Vidalia onion for good measure. I threw everything into the 300° oven uncovered for about 20 minutes, just long enough to let the meat tighten up. Because you don't actually have to cook anything, this dish is easy to work around whatever else is going on. But don't miss the oven time, the crispiness of the ham and the heat in the fruit makes a big difference.

I made mashed potatoes, because Mac said he wouldn't show up if there weren't mashed potatoes.

Mashed Potatoes W/ Leftover Bits

Mine had shallots, scallions and garlic sauteed in butter, with the leftover bacon bits from the cherries. Make yours with whatever leftover crap is sitting on the cutting board, works every time.

And last but not least...what's an American gathering without Macaroni & Cheese?

The Ugliest Mac & Cheese EVER

It tasted better than it looked.

I don't know if a recipe is appropriate for this mac & cheese. It was the last thing on my mind all day, and it looks the part. I boiled two bags of fat noodles, added two whipped eggs, a pound of shredded NY cheddar, 1/2 cup of whole milk, salt, pepper, celery seed & bread crumbs. I think that was it. Baked it until it looked done.

I don't know, the cheese was good and ultimately it tasted like the cheese, but if I was making a proper recipe for Mac & Cheese, I would have done a number of things differently. Either way, it did the job.

Things I Didn't Make But Did Eat

Weezy make a spinach salad with bacon bits and cranberries

Weezy also made a lovely sweet stuffing with cornbread and cranberries. It was designed to compliment the sweetness of the ham, a stroke of pure genius.

Weezy also made these little spicy chickpea phyllo popper things. I don't know how to describe them really, but they were crunch on the outside and spicy in the middle and gonegonegone shortly after dinner started.

Amy Hughey made these marinated onions that got randomly distributed, and eaten with leftovers for the next few days.

And somebody made mashed yams with walnuts. They were very good, I wish I could give credit where it's due, but I was a little scattered by the time the sweet potatoes came out.

So that was dinner, more or less. There are a couple of other side dishes that didn't get photographed, but this is the bulk of it. Yum.

Coming up, dessert. Wherein we discuss a recipe that has been three months in the making, the public unveiling of Boozy Fruit. It will change you.

Fresh Crab Surprise Lunch

2010-11-23T16:54:00.004-05:00

I was on my third of four (or five?) trips to the grocery store to prep for Thanksgiving, laundry in the dryer, musing on what to have for lunch in the midst of my busy day, when all of a sudden I was looking down on a bushel basket of live crabs!

Can't Get That Shit At Wal-Mart

The grocery store at the end of my block is pretty great. They don't have a lot in the way of canned or boxed goods, but I don't buy a lot of that stuff anyway. What they do have is a much bigger produce section than most NYC groceries, an average meat counter, great deli options, a freaking huge cheese selection, and a very choosy, top shelf dairy section.

AND, today, they had a basket of LIVE CRABS!

I kicked it a little to watch them jump, but it was obviously a basket of argumentative crabs waiting for somebody to put a knife in their dumb little heads. I asked the guy behind the seafood counter if they had some kind of bag to put them in and he offered to steam my whole lot for an extra dollar.

Yes sir, yes you may.

I got 1 Dozen Steamed Crabs that were kicking it 20 minutes before, unwrapped on my table for $9.99. Went home and had a bunch of them with a lovely cream soda, chopped straight down the middle and pulled apart with my fingers. It was a bone suckin' fest that would make Thorne proud.

NYC Mice (Not A Recipe!)

2010-11-22T13:44:00.004-05:00

The people who lived in my apartment before me didn't clean for, oh, I'd guess, five years? I've spent three years and dozens of bottles of cleaners putting a suit and tie on the place, but every now and then a reminder of the old tenants pokes it's head out.

In New York, Even The Mice Like Mustard

Found this in the back of a rarely used drawer today. I don't know how it's escaped detection for so long, sexy as it is.

Will Eating Local SAVE THE PLANET?

2010-11-22T10:29:00.002-05:00

I wish you could italicize titles, I wouldn't want anyone to think I believe we have to save the planet. It was doing fine before us, and I guarantee we'll die before this rock quits sprouting edible green things.

But of course, we've built a lot of trucks and isolated a lot of poisons so we can test them out on the ocean's fish population. It would be just as ridiculous to suggest that we don't affect our ecosystem, and our quality of life, by mucking up the air we breath and the dirt we eat.

Eat Local is a big catchphrase in the foodie universe, because the ingredients are fresher, and because the reduced travel time is supposed to be good for Mother Earth.

Stephen Budiansky has a blog called Liberal Curmudgeon, and he gets into the details of energy used for moving food around in this Op-Ed for the New York Times, Math Lessons For Locavores.

Budiansky is an real-deal journalist, not one of us blogger-come-lately's. He's also not a shill for the Ag industry. And while he's a self-labeled Liberal, he has a sharp eye for bullshit and isn't tolerating flowery language on behalf of any cause.

A quote:

"...it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley."

His point is that it takes a lot more energy to grow and store food where it doesn't belong than it does to move it from where it can mature naturally.

What no one can argue is that fresh food deteriorates. Getting produce from the same lady at the same Farmer's Market is great, it gives you a confidence about what you're buying and a nice conversation while you're doing it. But that doesn't necessarily mean those Long Island cumquats aren't belching up plenty smog on their way to your table.

Thanksgiving Menu & Open Invite

2010-11-19T17:05:00.004-05:00

Due to offset working schedules, there will be two Thanksgiving celebrations for the New York Kansastanis this year. There will be a lunchtime celebration at the Bailey/Dryden abode, and a dinner event at the Hull Hostel.

As my evening guests will have already dined on fine turkey, and as the Welch clan already own a bone-in shank ham, my dishes will center on pork. Not, I repeat, NOT a problem.

The lovely and talented Brenda Welch is sharing cooking duties, she's making a sweet stuffing, Brussels sprouts and pecan pie. She's making other dishes too, but my head was swimming with visions of bacon cherries while we were talking it out, so I don't remember all of them. As long as she's bringing the famous Weezy Mini Pecan Pies, I don't think there will be a riot.

To follow: my half of the menu, with prep and drink notes.

Because Thanksgiving Is Foodie New Year

I got ham duty this year, so I'm going to include a few variations on the salted hog theme.

First is the bone-in shank ham from the Welchies. I'm going to marinate the cut in thick, organic honey with olive oil and balsamic, then stud it with cinnamon sticks and clove before baking. I'm thinking of pulling it out of the oven a half-hour early, slicing it, basting the slices in reserved marinade and broiling it to finish. Much easier to serve that way than letting people manhandle chunks out of the whole ham.

Mashed potatoes are a given. Cut and boil potatoes the night before, add milk and reheat before mashing day-of. Probably saute scallions and chives in fresh butter to add before mashing.

Pumpkin soup with Fall spices, sprinkled with fried shallots and toasted pumpkin seeds. I can make this a couple days ahead of time to let the soup get used to itself, and heat for a quick first course while I'm finishing off who-knows-what.

Prosciutto wrapped figs are a Thanksgiving favorite around my place. May do them with dates this year, but how often do you get to eat blue cheese stuffed figs?

In keeping with the figs, I'm going to reverse engineer a recipe that I saw on one of the goofy Iron Chef shows. Herbed goat cheese stuffed into pitted fresh cherries, skewered through the side and finished with a thick piece of home cured bacon.

Asparagus and thin slices of Vidalia onion wrapped in Serrano ham and baked.

Fresh cranberry sauce, natch.

Pumpkin pie with Fall spices.

And finally, vanilla bean ice cream topped with boozy fruit. I haven't done a post on boozy fruit yet, but I've had jars of berries, plums & peaches from the end of summer soaking in rum, vodka, or brandy since September. It was supposed to be for Christmas, but that shit is getting busted out on Thursday, guarantee it. Finish dinner with a bowl of rum soaked raspberries & a shot of raspberry infused rum? Who wouldn't?

Shiloh is already beefing for a pibil-ed turkey breast. I was planning on leaving the turkey in the quite capable hands of Señor Bailey and hope somebody smuggled me out a bit, but I'm a sucker for special requests. That may yet happen.

For drinks, I'm thinking Pumpkin Ale for everybody when they get there, a heavy bodied red wine with dinner and cinnamon/vanilla bean/plum infused sweetened brandy in a warm snifter for a finish.

Dinner is served, if you're reading this you're invited.

Ghost Roast & Shiloh's Downfall

2010-11-15T12:38:00.004-05:00

Let's Hear It For Sane Americans

Went to the Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington, DC with my buddy Jason Bailey -

That's the front of the stage and the back of Jason.

My brilliant sister Rachel & brilliant sis-in-law Jen live in DC, so the whole thing was a little too easy to miss. When they found out we would be in town for Halloween weekend, Rachel reserved seats at fancy-pants DC haunt Poste for their annual Ghost Roast. They call themselves a Moderne Brasserie, which is French for We Roast Meat. I'm in.

The dinner menu.

Poste does special roasting parties with a variety of animals, but the chef's favorite is baby goat. Dinner was three courses and each one had a drink pairing. They announced before dinner that the drinks would be moved around so we didn't get over-pumpkined in the first course, but otherwise the menu was accurate.

The goat was great, very tender with small charred bits so you don't forget there was fire involved. The meat is beefy, but the fat carries that unmistakable goat flavor. The slow roasting gives the fat a chance to melt back into the meat, and the carver of the finished beast did everyone a favor by not over trimming.

Creamy polenta with a crusty parmesan top, charred Brussels sprouts and a delicious pumpkin ale, all served family style (so you could take as much as you want!).

Dessert was a plum bake with fall spices and a crumb top, served with The Linus - flor de cana 7 year old rum, heirloom pumpkin puree, Bacardi coco rum, and a dash of milk. Holy crap that was a good drink. The plum bake was good too, but it needed ice cream and more cinnamon. Then again, if we're being honest, I say that about everything.

The hit of the night though, at least for me, was the soup. Heirloom pumpkin soup, perfectly spiced, served over a thin layer of red onion marmalade on the bottom of the bowl, with a triangle of duck confit that has been baked in phyllo, and toasted pumpkin seeds scattered on top. The confit had cooked into the first couple layers of dough, but the outside of the wrap was crispy. I forgot about the marmalade until I cut off a bit of the confit with my spoon and scraped the bottom of the bowl along the way. I noticed the flavor of it immediately, and decided I needed to add a jellied bowl bottom to my soup repertoire. Obviously.

I need more confit, more phyllo, and a lot more red onion marmalade in my life.

Thank you Rachel and Jen for a good rally weekend and an inspiring Ghost Roast.

Shiloh's Downfall

Okay, I'm down to eat pretty much anything.

But this concoction? Above my pay grade.

Moroccan preserved lemons & grapefruits, sweet pickle slice w\ juice, and an olive with a dash of spiced packing oil from the olive container. This guy could put sour mango chutney on his breakfast toast!

What Scientists Don't Know

2010-11-11T00:28:00.002-05:00

What scientists don't know is good eating -

New Lizard Species Found At Vietnamese Restaurant

This is my favorite part:

"Unfortunately, the owner wound up getting drunk, and grilled them all up for his patrons... so when we got there, there was nothing left."

Leiolepis Ngovantrii is an all female lizard species that can reproduce by cloning. They live in sand dunes in one section of southern Vietnam, American scientists hired local kids to trap a bunch of them when the restaurant owner decided the customer was always right.

Anthony Bourdain is crazy about Vietnamese cooking, apparently he should take a geneticist and somebody who knows Latin on his next visit.

Prosciutto/Moulignon Lasagna

2010-10-24T17:43:00.003-04:00

I have a couple of traits that help this cooking thing work out for me, including good visualization ability. I can enjoy eating almost anything, but then, I'm pretty good at knowing what a dish is going to taste like by looking at the recipe.

Enter ham & eggplant lasagna, made with roasted moulignon and a gruyere-heavy white sauce. Seemed like a good idea, but you know, so did that ticket to ride the Titanic. Too soon?

They Can't All Be Gems

The recipe popped up on a website that I'd never been to before, posted by KelseyTheNaptimeChef, a home cook and mother who apparently cooks while her child sleeps. She said the original recipe called for roasted portobello mushrooms instead of eggplant, but I don't think it would make much difference.

This is the recipe in her words, from the website.

For the Sauce:

* 4 cups whole milk
* 14 ounces chicken broth
* 8 tablespoons unsalted butter
* 2/3 cups flour
* 2 cups gruyere, shredded
* 1/2 cup parmesan, grated
* 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
* Kosher Salt and Pepper to taste

For the Filling & Assembly:

* 2 pounds eggplant, cubed
* 1 cup prosciutto, chopped
* 1 small onion, chopped
* 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped
* 1 pound lasagna noodes (I use No-Boil noodles)
* 1/2 cup parmesan, grated
* Olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 400. Add cubed eggplant (1 inch cubes) to a bowl and toss with 2 T. olive oil. Line a sheet pan with aluminum foil and spread eggplant on it in one even layer. Roast for about 30 minutes, turning eggplant halfway to ensure even browning. Remove from oven and allow to cool. Reduce oven temperature to 350.
2. In a skillet heat 2 T. olive oil and saute prosciutto until crispy. Then add onion and rosemary, stir until onion is tender and translucent. Be sure to watch the skillet and stir the mixture so nothing burns! Once onion is tender turn off the heat and set the pan aside.
3. For the Sauce: Boil milk and broth over medium heat. Once it is boiling turn off heat and set aside. Working quickly, in a separate pan melt 8 T. butter. Whisk in the
flour and stir to make a roux. Once flour is incorporated, whisk in the hot milk
and broth mixture, bring it to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer and stir for 5 minutes to let the sauce thicken. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the cheeses and nutmeg. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. Grease a 13x9 baking dish and spread 1 cup of sauce on the bottom. Arrange the lasagna noodles snugly over the layer of sauce, it is ok if they are slightly overlapping. On top of the noodles layer another cup of sauce. Then top it with half of the roasted
eggplant, and half of the prosciutto. Top with a second layer of noodles and repeat layers.
5. After the second layer is complete, top with a third layer of lasagna noodles. Pour any remaining sauce over the top and sprinkle 1/2 c. parmesan cheese over the sauce. Bake for about 45-50 minutes, or until golden and bubbly. This can be prepared ahead of time and baked later in the day.

First thing I did was double the meat order, using half prosciutto and half Serano ham. I made the mistake of using no-boil noodles, which have worked for me in the past, but they aren't the move with this sauce.

This sauce has a lot of problems actually, besides not being sauce-y enough to make the no-boil noodles work. You're basically melting gruyere in milk, flavor-wise there isn't much else to it. Which doesn't sound so bad, but actually it's kind of blah. Eggplant is a subtle flavor and the small bits of meat don't pack much of a punch. You're left with a salty, kind of cheesy stack of grainy noodles and over-done moulignon.

I think the sauce could work as a compliment to a dish that it isn't the star of, or as a kind of dipping sauce, but it isn't strong enough to be the featured moment in dinner. The meat is wildly expensive, but it gets buried and left behind, leaving salt to be it's main contribution. The eggplant is cheap and easy to prepare, but it's only so much filling in the end, drowning in the so-so sauce until it's a pointless, mushy mess.

The couple of other people who have tried the lasagna say they like it, but they're probably just being nice so I'll feed them again in the future. I've had good luck with odd lasagna preparations, but I don't think this one is going to get another run.

The Chinese Will Live Forever

2010-10-22T01:55:00.002-04:00

You know why? Because they can eat like this -

Chinese Live Hairy Crab Vending Machine

My question is - how do you cook it? Are you supposed to squish it's head and eat it raw? I'm confused, and, I have to sadmit*, intrigued. If I had a guy there to show me how, I'd probably pay $5 and eat the damn thing.

I would definitely pay $5 to have this video translated. I only understood one word - banana.

*Sadmit is an entirely made-up word for a slightly embarrassing moment of honesty

Curried Sweet Potato/Carrot Soup

2010-10-20T00:15:00.003-04:00

New York has a pretty drastic drop in temperature between Summer and Fall, and it always seems to happen in one day. Suddenly, it's like September 23rd, and it's 60 degrees, and EVERYBODY'S got on a goddamn scarf.

I don't much like the cold, but it does open up the kitchen for use. My building is 100 years old this year, so we have what you call selective air conditioning. The kitchen never seems to get selected, which makes it hard to cook for most of the summer. I inevitably make chili on Scarf Day.

Cold days make me want coffee, soup, and alcohol, in that order. My chili is served in a bowl but doesn't resemble soup in any other way, so it usually means some form of chicken/veggie/noodle in a slow cooked broth, or root vegetables boiled down and hit with an immersion blender to get a classic canned tomato consistency.

Know Your Roots

Root veggies are Winter's best friend, and they're just sweet enough to keep me entertained when proper fruits get puny and sour. This soup is the easiest dish you can make at home, it's literally peal and boil. I don't count 'blend', because the blender's doing all the work.

Ingredients

4 quarts chicken stock (use vegetable stock or water for a Vegan version)

2-3 lbs yams

2-3 lbs carrots

1 medium onion

4 celery ribs

5 tbl curry powder (or to taste)

Salt & Pepper to taste

I like to use chicken stock, made by boiling a whole chicken in as much water as my big pot can hold for 45 minutes or so. There is another step you can do with the boiled chicken meat that I'll describe later. For now, if you want to use fresh chicken stock, buy a small roaster chicken, unwrap it, and boil it in a pot of water until you can stick a knife through it. Remove the chicken and bones and let them cool, but leave the stock simmering.

While the chicken is cooking, peel your yams and cut them into chunks. I like to put the sweet potatoes in first, so they have some time to work while you're peeling and cutting up the carrots. Big pieces are fine, they're all going to boil and then get blended, so don't wear yourself out making perfect 1" cubes.

Put the carrots in the stock with the yams, then do the same with the onion and celery. Get it up to a nice boil and let it alone for about an hour. Less time will usually do, just test a couple of the bigger pieces of sweet potato. Once you can crush one with a fork, you're good.

While the vegetables boil, I like to slice up a nice red bell pepper, a yellow bell, maybe a long Italian or Poblano, a couple of jalapeños, and a handful of scallions. Give them a coating of olive oil and toss them under the broiler in a metal pan. Keep an eye on them though, the difference between perfectly crispy edges and burning peppers is about a minute if you don't stir them up.

If you boiled down the chicken, separate the meat from the skin and bones. I like to shred the meat, spice it with something that compliments the soup and throw it under the broiler too. For this soup, I spiced the chicken with cinnamon and nutmeg to compliment the sweet of the yams and set off the curry. The broiler will give you some black edges on the chicken, which is nice, but it does dry out the meat, so it's not a good idea to broil shredded chicken unless you plan to put it in soup.

Quick side note - use a metal pan under a broiler. I've broken two glass casserole dishes that way. It might be that I have crappy old dishes, but I think it's the method.

Okay, so your peppers and chicken are getting sweaty, and your vegetables are done. There should still be plenty of liquid left in the pot, add water if there isn't. Also add the curry powder and salt & pepper at this point. I use a lot of curry, the amount listed in the ingredients is a conservative guess. It also depends on how fresh your spices are, whether or not they have a heat element, etc. To Taste is the important part of that instruction.

I have to carry my pot of boiling soup to a table by a plug-in to blend it, but leave it on the stove if you can. A regular stand up blender or food processor will work fine for this part of the process, but if you have to pour this shit from one pot to a blender and back into a different pot, let it cool first.

With the immersion blender, I leave everything in the cooking pot and try not to splash it on myself. Blend to the texture of classic canned tomato soup, and taste for spice.

This photo is a couple days later, after the chicken had run out. I think this one has a bit of shredded Havarti cheese, wasabi peas and dried parsley. But it's the same principal, put it all in a bowl and try to use your spoon like a civilized person.

No Sleep 'Til Wichita

2010-10-16T01:37:00.005-04:00

Got back from Wichita this week, just in time to miss the early birth of my new niece Athene Zela Armstrong!

AZA!

There was some drama with the birth, but everyone is doing great now. To paraphrase my cousin Ram, by all reports, the child has the proper number of appendages. It was great to see everybody, especially giant pregnant Carrie, who was dealing with her pregnancy in a very dignified and mature manner. I expected her to be bitchy, but that wasn't the case at all!

Didn't eat anything revolutionary while I was home, but I did hit a few of the old favorites. Went to the Beacon for breakfast, chicken fried steak with two eggs over easy, hash browns and toast. Delish. Had barbecue, of course, from Julius Ribcage and Hog Wild. There's a lot of good meat to be had in Wichita, and they're both doing a respectable job. Lot of ribs. Mmmm.

Also went to Doc's Steak House, a place that hasn't changed even the drapes in my 33 years. Once upon a time, Wichita had goofball drinking laws that kept restaurants from serving what they called 'Liquor By The Drink'. That meant you had to pay a membership fee to a restaurant, AND bring your own bottle, which they would gladly charge to serve back to you. This matters because Doc's Steak House is blocks away from the house I grew up in and my dad was a 'member' of Doc's You Bring The Bottle, We Got The Ice Club, so we usually went to Doc's when we went out to eat.

I remember the place very clearly, but I don't think I've been there three times as an adult. I had the bacon-wrapped filet, medium-rare. It was a good cut of meat, cooked correctly. I don't have near as much respect for the garlic salad as I used to though. Imagine a bag of shredded lettuce mixed with a jar of diced garlic and a little mayo. It's kept them in business since the '50s, but it was awfully garlic juice-y. Jarred, kind of sour and old garlic juice-y. It seems like a relic from a time when garlic was a novelty in Kansas, but it wasn't doing much for me now.

Also went to Connie's, classic Mexican joint. Food was good, as always, but the salsa in that place is worth venturing the Great Northern Construction Marathon that is 21st & Broadway. They also do the deep fried flour tortilla taco shells, one of the absolute greatest reasons to boil oil.

My uncle Tom cooked one night, that usually turns out well. He made chicken cacciatore, bread salad, melon & prosciutto, a black bean & red cabbage dish, green beans, and these tasty little shrimp that were mostly unadorned. I didn't see how they were cooked, my guess is olive oil & garlic in a pan with a sprinkling of fresh herb after. They were really good, and when I peered over the rim of the bowl and saw just a few left, I went in. No shame, no leaving the last one for someone else.

Had Shiner Smokehaus beer with Tom's dinner. I hadn't heard of it before we saw it in the liquor store. They smoke the grains over mesquite before making the beer. Proper meat eating Americans that live within 3 states of Texas have all been trained to pick the flavor of burned mesquite out of any consumable product, and it is front and center to this rauchbier.

All of the reviews I've seen of it say the smoke flavor isn't strong enough, I thought it was right on the edge of too much. It was definitely more smoke flavored than beer flavored. It was alright. Beer is a specific flavor, you drink it for that reason. It might have been the food I was eating it with, but I wanted a little more bier and a little less rauch.

We also had Sam Adams Cream Stout, another beer that didn't match the food at all. It was a damn good beer though, one tablespoon of brown sugar away from being a traditional Cream Soda.

Also went to the venerable Jack's North High Carryout, but so far we're still calling it New Jack's. Kind of a New Coke thing going on. Basic story is that a 25 year-old had his Grandma buy it for him at auction so he could run a burger joint. Great idea, get a little youth and enthusiasm in there, but most importantly, he said he was keeping the same distributors. Young man showing a little respect to the fresh, perfect burger box, a Wichita tradition serving a Wichita burger.

He hasn't even had the place six months and things have changed. The patties were shaped and tasted like they'd been frozen, and they were thicker than traditional Jack's, so he's obviously changed his meat order, if not his supplier. Which is a tragedy, but it's greatly compounded by the new fries. Instead of the crinkle fry that was a Jack's standard at least since my childhood, he's gone with an undercooked, fresh potato fry with the goddamn peel on.

It has been scientifically proven that the crinkle fry is the ultimate American French Fry, the fresh, peel on variety is the Belgian original. Great for the Belgians, but Americans did what Americans do, we took the concept and made it more. The crinkle gives more surface area and crisps up better in the fryer, leaving an airy, soft pillow of cooked potato in the middle of a crunchy, grease-leavened exterior. AND it gives you GROOVES for KETCHUP. These dense, soggy Belgian fries may be a bit cheaper than frozen crinkles, but they're no comparison and kind of sacrilegious in an institution like Jack's.

I wish him luck, but these aren't little mistakes from being a new owner. Jack's is fresh, thin patty hamburgers and crinkle fries, everything else is window dressing. Changing those two things changes the whole place, it doesn't matter if you keep the building and sign.

I ended up going to Bionic Burger for a proper Wichita burger - thin patty, cheese, grilled onions, pickles and mustard. No lettuce, no tomato, and definitely no Thousand Island dressing. This is greasy meat and greasy onions distilled and wrapped in paper so you know just how greasy it is, and it is a Wichita trademark.

The one thing that was impossible to escape on this trip was the absolute lack of vegetable options at every restaurant we went to. If you don't consider potato a vegetable, I didn't eat a single one until dinner at Tom's. Baked beans are good, but by day three I was dying for an orange. I was also sticking to the culinary low-brow, the traditional land of fried okra and such. I'm sure there's a lovely goat cheese and spinach salad with a fresh vinaigrette available somewhere, but there seem to be whole neighborhoods that have stopped bothering with anything green.

I don't think it's really changed, I think I just started noticing. If they're going to relentlessly serve you potatoes, at least they have the decency and good sense to crinkle and/or hash brown them.

He's Got That PMA, He's Got That Attitude

2010-10-09T02:30:00.004-04:00

My friend Tony sent me this blog posting months ago and it got buried, but this is a crazy piece of food writing.

Roger Ebert has been a proud and important voice in the film world for decades, but a few years ago he lost most of the working parts of his throat and lower face to cancer and hasn't been able to speak or eat since.

Nil By Mouth - Roger Ebert

Ebert was always a writer, but he's become incredibly prolific since he lost most of his other means of communication. He's got a blog and Twitter account that let him talk directly to interested people, and he doesn't hold much back.

Great meals fade in reflection, everything else gains. You know why? Because it's only food. This shit we put in us, it keeps us going. It's only food.

Al Pacino, Glengarry Glen Ross

Seems only right to quote a great film in a posting about Ebert. Food memories are like anything else, they exist in as much as you are interested in them. Great meals don't fade in reflection for me, if anything, they gain luster when the memory of the bill and bad music have stopped interrupting. Taking food seriously is an absurd art in some ways, you spend hours building what takes minutes to destroy, by people who usually can't appreciate the subtlety of your flavor combinations anyway. Snarky italics all mine.

There are no souvenirs of a great meal, photos don't do it justice. It's only material for a few minutes. But that also doesn't leave anything around to fuck up the memory. You can shape it to your own ends, and eventually the most banal dirty water dog becomes a thing of true beauty because you were eating it on your first visit to Central Park.

Clearly, meals don't fade in reflection for Ebert either. His tastes are simple and recognizable, but also crystal clear. He can describe that first sip from a cold can of Coke in an inspiring voice that I wouldn't be able to compete with, even though I know I've had one more recently.

Good luck Roger, and thanks for letting people take pictures of your face, it's really freaky and should be on as many magazine covers as possible.

Oh yeah, Ebert also just published a cookbook. If the world's not confusing enough for you.

Ebert's Rice Cooker Affair

It's apparently an entire cookbook about making complete one-pot dishes in a rice cooker.

I love foreign reporting in English -

The irony lies in the fact that the author of the book himself cannot eat anymore.

Thank you Thaindian News for summing it all up.

Coffee Without A Cup

2010-10-05T00:50:00.003-04:00

First things first - I like coffee. A lot.

And I like it like I like my whiskey and wine: strong. To be fair, I'm pretty big on overwhelming flavors of all sorts, but a weak coffee is like a bowl of melted ice cream, more trouble than it's worth.

I've been working up a million dollar recipe for Coffee Bacon, but until I have a proper lab to test it in, I've been using a Kenya Estate blend to flavor all kinds of things. It's a great little coffee, very bold, in coffee marketing terms. You can smell this stuff cooking at the other end of the apartment.

Make Mine A Quad

The first quickie here is a little brownie cake I made for an IT guy at work. He had been breaking my balls about bringing in brownies, suggesting that I'd get more hours if I brought treats. Never mind that he's not the one who makes the schedule, he was sure that was the path to great riches.

So I made him brownies.

Espresso Fudge Brownies w/ Peanut Butter-White Chocolate Topping, Summer Berries & Confectioner's Sugar

This little recipe is like a master class in polishing a resume. As fancy a name as that may be, I was short on time that day. I grabbed a boxed fudge brownie at the store, used two shots of espresso instead of the called for 1/4 cup of water, and baked it in a pie pan so it was round. The peanut butter-white chocolate topping were chips that got sprinkled on before the brownie hit the oven.

When the brownies were done, I put two berries on each one and sprinkled them with powdered sugar out of a $1 mesh-top canister from the local bakery store. Couldn't have been easier, but when you show up with Espresso Fudge Brownies w/ Summer Berries & Confectioner's Sugar, people act like you invented the wheel.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the brownies. People were coming up to me for the next hour saying "You really made these?", that's usually a good sign. Can't say it's gotten me any more days though.

Who Says Coffee's Only For Breakfast?

Not me.

My business partner & pal Shiloh is a good person to cook for, one of my favorites, because he eats everything I cook with a smile. He gets inspired too, and will record a show or tear out a recipe that he wants me to make, but then doesn't complain when I add a bunch of extra steps or spices or just generally maul it into a shape I prefer.

And sometimes, and these are my favorite days, he'll show up with two grocery bags full of random ingredients and some preparation technique or other odd request. Last time he had steak, pork chops, vegetables and a taste for something pan seared.

Sure, why not?

Beef w/ Cinnamon-Coffee-Chile Crust & Maple Syrup Marinade

Pork Chop Stuffed w/ Rosemary, Mint Flowers, Moroccan Preserved Lemons & Aged Parmesan

Rosemary Mashed Potatoes, Steamed Veggies & Sauteed Summer Squash

That was a good meal, now that I'm looking at the picture again.

Steamed veggies are easy - wash, chop and set over boiling water in a Chinese bamboo steamer.

Mashed potatoes are easy, sauteed summer squash means slicing the squash into chips and cooking them in a pan with olive oil to coat, and salt & pepper to taste.

The pork chop sounds fancy and complicated, but of course it's not. I did three jars of Moroccan preserved lemons in July, so I had them around, as well as a nice clutch of mint stalks with the flowers from a greenmarket stop a few days before. The rosemary and parmesan I got at the store for a different dish.

My point is that this is what I had around to stuff the pork chop with, you can use any spice/herb combination you enjoy and the method will work.

First, carefully cut a hole into the side of your pork chop, leaving plenty of meat on both sides. Use a very sharp pointed knife so you get a clean cut, but be careful. If you lay your hand flat on the pork chop, you may veer up with the knife and stab yourself. Better to apply pressure to the bone with your fingertips and push slowly into the meat. If you go slow, you can keep control over the knife and not give yourself a lopsided stigmata in the name of dinner. Nothing fucks up a party like somebody needing to go to the hospital.

Once you have a nice hole in the pork chop, stuff it, then sprinkle some of whatever you stuff it with on top. Done. Nice. If you use cheese, use something dry and aged, otherwise you end up with a puddle of cheese grease in the middle of your pork chop, and it takes a special kind of demented to enjoy that.

I put the pork chops in a casserole dish and covered them with foil before throwing them in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes. I finished them in the broiler so they got nice and crispy on top, since the pan seared crust was one of Shiloh's original requests.

Pork Chops - cut, stuff, bake for 40, broil for 5. The preserved lemons and fresh mint flowers were a weird and delicious compliment, the crusty cheese on top contrasted nicely with the juicy pork. And we still had Breakfast Steak to go.

The steak was pretty simple too. I marinated it while I was stuffing the pork chops, as one full cut. The marinade was olive oil and maple syrup. I feel like I added a spice of some sort too, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

But that wasn't the exciting part. When the pork chops were safely in the oven, I put a pan over high heat on the stove and started crusting the steak.

First I made a dry rub out of the Kenya Estate coffee ground to a powdery espresso grind, Saigon Cinnamon and ground chilies for heat. I would guess 3 parts each of coffee & cinnamon to one part chile powder.

I pulled the steak out of the marinade and rolled it over in the dry rub, crusting it on all sides, and dropped it into the hot skillet for 2-3 minutes on each side. I didn't want to cook the steak all the way through, but I did want to set the dry rub and get a start on the Shiloh crust.

Everything worked like a charm, few minutes on each side and then it went into the broiler for about another five minutes on each side. After the mandatory 10 minute rest on the cutting board, the steak was sliced and sampled. Crunchy on the outside and a warm pink on the inside, it was, I have to say, freakin' perfect.

I took to calling it Breakfast Steak, because it had the crunchy bite of over cooked bacon, the coffee crust and a hint of maple syrup from the marinade.

You might call steak & a pork chop in one meal decadent, and I might answer with 'Exactly'. Fork me some more of that decadent breakfast steak, huh?

Hell Can't Be As Hot As This Kitchen

2010-10-03T00:23:00.003-04:00

I get a lot of shit from my veggie and/or semi-religious non-pork eating friends about being obsessed with delicious, delicious, greasy, delicious swine, but I've got nothing on this guy...

The Only Pork Cookbook In Israel

Israel has mostly banned the farming and sale of pork since the 1950's, so of course there's a black market. You think prosciutto is expensive at the grocery store? Imagine buying it in an alley out of a guy's trench coat at cocaine prices. How much for one slice?

None of the recipes sounded like the kind of thing I'd risk getting arrested for, but I think I'm going to start calling it 'The White Steak' around my kitchen. That's a damn catchy title, sounds like John Lennon making you dinner.

Porkalicious Gets Brief

2010-10-01T12:14:00.004-04:00

So my good buddy Jason Bailey, who tries to be supportive, pointed out that people who update their blog once per season should get a Twitter feed. That way, people who like to read your blog but don't work on your geologic time scale can follow your feed and get a notice when you update.

Thanks, brother Bailey, that's a great idea.

http://twitter.com/porkalicious

Follow Porkalicious on Twitter, that way you don't have to guess at my muse. She's tricky.

Recipes I'll Never Cook #3

2010-09-30T13:40:00.004-04:00

Mmmmm.....Pineapple Upside Down Ham Loaf and Traditional Ham Loaf....cooked in a Microwave!!!

Any chance I can get an iceberg lettuce & mayonnaise salad with that?!?!?!

My People

2010-09-26T13:20:00.004-04:00

Got an email from my brilliant Mother today, with pictures of a spice rack my Dad built in their kitchen.

This is a great example of a few Hull traits - namely custom projects related to food. We aren't that hard to figure out.

I could use about 10 of these in my NY kitchen.

UPDATE -

Got an email from my uncle Tom a couple days after these pictures went up, with a photo of his new spice rack. Tom has done a lot of work on his home in Wichita, Ks over the last couple years, and this rack is a good example of the work. Lots of convenient storage in formerly unused spots.

One more thing about this photo - look at how many spices there are. Now that's a proper cook. As Tom pointed out in the email, there are a few empty spots, but he's got a few spices he hasn't put in there yet.

I'll be in Wichita in a couple weeks, eating something from that shelf.

Hot Pepper of Love

2010-09-26T12:34:00.002-04:00

There was a great article in the Times about why people like hot peppers -

A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies

This is my favorite part:

Other mammals have not joined the party. "There is not a single animal that likes hot pepper," Dor. Rozin said. Or as Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist, puts it, "Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans - language, rationality, culture and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tobasco sauce."

Bloom has a book called "How Pleasure Works" that I haven't read, but that's a great quote.

Chilies Are Non-Negotiable

2010-09-05T14:09:00.011-04:00

I was at the Union Square green market the other day, and one of my favorite booths had a crazy selection of fresh chilies. I bought three bags, about 60 peppers, 16 different types, if memory serves.

A few years ago I made a video of this annual adventure, the drying of the chilies. It's an easy process, especially considering how sharp and fresh the home ground powders are. I like to separate them into Mild Green, Mild Red, Medium, Hot and CRAZY, as well as doing mixes. I also do mixes similar to the generic Chili Powder that is in every grocery store, using various chilies with side flavors including cumin, cinnamon, black pepper, and nutmeg.

I like to use a variety of peppers for different flavor layers, and of course it's always good to have something around for the macho guys that think they can handle the heat after downing a couple jalapeno poppers at Applebees. I use this stuff for all kinds of dishes, especially when it's cold outside. Chili, obviously, but also sprinkled on meat and veggies as a spice, as part of a dry rub (especially on steak and ribs), and in pretty much every marinade I make.

Chilies For Life

The basics of prepping the chilies are easy:

Buy a variety of chilies, including a range of heat

Make sure you take pics of the chilies and label them so you don't accidentally put a dried Scotch Bonnet in your Mild pile and choke your sensitive-tongued guests

Wash and cover in a light coating of olive oil

Place on a baking sheet and put them in an oven at 350 for ten minutes

Flip chilies and roast for another ten minutes

Put chilies in paper bags, about 10 per bag, and roll the top so they sit in their own steam

Peel, tie a string in a high place and wrap it around the stems so the chilies hang

10 days later they're dry, take them down, grind in a coffee grinder to powder

Mix to taste

WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER EVERY CONTACT WITH THE CHILIES

Again, LABEL CLEARLY, using temperature ratings, or I guarantee someone will put a bunch of chile powder in a bowl of soup thinking it's the grocery store style and then you've got people crying in your living room. Also, seriously, wash your hands, twice, with the hottest water you can stand and dish soap. The chile oil stays on your hands much longer than you think it does, which is why you should use dish soap or something with oil cutting properties. Or don't, and rub your eyes a couple hours later. You'll never forget again.

So, if I already made a movie about making chile powder and posted it on the blog, why am I writing about it again? Because I want to show off my labeling pictures, or rather, I want to show off the fresh chile selection at the green market. My cell phone pictures taken at the end of a six-mile run aren't the cool part, but these are a good example of simple label photos, and if you take them on the spot you can't get the names and temp levels wrong. Bonus!

I've heard of brown habaneros before, but I've never heard of Chocolate Habanero. Not sure if these are just re-labeled brown habaneros, also not sure if I have the tongue calluses necessary to pick the chocolate note out of one of the hottest peppers on Earth. Looking forward to trying them out, you know I had to get some.

Hungry? 'Cause I Know This Place...

2010-09-03T10:29:00.003-04:00

So there's this girl. Don't most good stories start out that way?

So there's this girl, and she's kind of great, and I'm kind of getting sweet on her. Thing is, she's from the Bronx, so she never does any of the shit that makes NY cool, including eat. I mean, she eats, of course, and I hear she makes a mean arroz con habichuelas, but she doesn't do the kind of eating that you can only do in New York.

Which led me to make a list of all the places she should go, or, all the places I should take her, as the case may be. Ended up being a pretty inspiring list, if I do say so myself. There are a couple of places I haven't been to yet, a bunch I have, and a few I've been going to for most of my ten years here. Just looking at it makes me hungry.

Here's the list, minus all of the corny jokes and obvious come-ons that go with this sort of thing.

Ladies Like Ice Cream

This list has turned into something of a beast. I started out dashing down a few neighborhood favorites, but the next thing you know it was becoming a comprehensive list of must do's and want to's. Shit can't ever be simple, not when it comes to dinner.

Crif Dogs

The most delicious hot dog ever, almost all of them are wrapped in bacon and deep fried. A bizarre and brilliant thing to do, make sure to have two of them and share some tater tots. They also have good root beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pac-Man games.

Banh Mi

Odd that the Vietnamese come to Deli-Town and make the best sandwich around, but it's true. My favorite place is on 2nd Ave., but it isn't listed in the linked article and they don't have a website. These places are also very good.

Cafe Habana

The spot at Prince & Elizabeth is always packed, but they have little benches out front if you have to wait. What's even better is the take-out version right next door! The thing to get here is the corn...the other menu options are good, but I could eat three ears of the corn and be very, very happy. Or I could eat a corn while I wait, then have two more corns and a beer when I get a table.

Rice To Riches

This place is right around the corner from Habana, so if you've got room to spare, it's the perfect dessert. My personal favorites are the Cherry Mascarpone and the Cinnamon Raisin (I'm a total gutter slut whore for anything cinnamon-raisin), but they're always coming up with new things. This shit is not like any other rice pudding you've ever had, it's rich and thick and crazy. Get a water.

Porchetta

Porchetta only sells one thing: it's namesake dish, a crispy roasted pork with herbs and spices. They have some sides and soups and things, but the whole place is based on the roasted pork and they're doing very well. Which should tell you something about the pork.

Tulcingo Del Valle

The best Mexican food in NY. I've never had anything here I didn't like, and I have a full on crush on the lady who runs the place. The restaurant, the food and her all remind me of growing up in a Mexican neighborhood. This lady's food tastes like 1st grade, I don't know how else to say it. I'd think I was just being all nostalgic and dumb, but she's got 50+ reviews online talking about how authentic and perfect the food is, so I'm trusting my gut.

Daisy May's

The only good barbecue I've had in NY. It's still not touching stuff I could get you in many places of the Midwest/South, but I'd rather bitch about the BBQ in NY than live in fucking Kansas City. The sides are okay, but the meat and sweet tea are the thing.

Tanti Baci

This is the Italian place I keep talking about. Different entrees every day, same funny little fat lady running it for years. Now all I see working there are gay guys and Latinos, but the food's just as good, so I assume the funny fat lady taught some of the city's thousands of talented Ecuadorians how to make her recipes. Whatever it is, this is the best Italian food I've had. There, I said it, gauntlet LAID DOWN. If you can come up with a better gnocchi & bolognese I will wash your car every weekend for a month!

Wogie's

Best cheese steak sandwich in NY. They also have fantastic waffle fries, and it's right around the corner from my apartment. I definitely ate way too much Wogie's my first year in the neighborhood, but hey. I like cheese steaks, whaddayawant?

Joe's Shaghai

This place specializes in what's called 'soup dumplings'. They're odd little things, but goddamn good. I haven't been to the Midtown location, I like the Chinatown a lot. I'm either the only white guy, or I brought the other palefaces with me. It's always packed and everybody's hollering in Chinese. Food's good, atmosphere's crazy...just my type of place.

Momofuku Milk Bar

I haven't been to Momfuku, but it's supposed to be the SHIT. The thing that gets my attention is the cereal milk ice cream that is supposed to taste like Captain Crunch, Fruity Pebbles, etc. I hear wonderful things. This guy also owns a place called Ma Peche that I haven't been to, but it's supposed to be one of the best places in the city. They do an entree called Beef Seven Ways that is their specialty, and is supposedly worth every single penny of the $85/person asking price.

Minetta Tavern

This place doesn't look like anything special, but it's a 30 day wait for a reservation. No less an authority than Anthony Bourdain says they have the best cheeseburger on the face of the planet, and it better be, the fucking thing costs $26. I haven't been to Minetta, but I currently have a reservation for 4 on Sunday, Sept 19 at 9:30. Got a seat with your name on it.

Katz's Deli

NY classic, Katz's is the ultimate deli experience. The house-made pastrami and corned beef are the gold standard, hell even their tongue is worth a taste. Problem: the whole world knows Katz's is the place, so it's impossibly busy. Solution: drinks in the Lower East Side until around 1 am, THEN go to Katz's where you will get immeditate service and have room to stretch out.

Viceroy

This is one of my neighborhood favorites. It's a great place to take out-of-towners, because it's gay and upscale enough to seem really nice, but the food is easy to decipher and not terribly expensive. Highly recommend the fried green tomato sandwich.

Le Halles

1. Best brunch in the city
2. Best bacon I've ever had in my entire life
3. I went there for my birthday last year, if that tells you anything
4. If you like meat, which I know you do, this is the ultimate restaurant

Otto

They call this place a pizzeria, but it's not. I don't know what to call it, but I spent $200 feeding me and my ex on her bday one year, so it's clearly not a slice joint. I've never had anything there that I didn't love, but the Olive Oil gelato is possibly the most surprisingly delicious thing I've ever had.

Jean Georges

Okay, this is one I haven't had, but this guy is literally one of the four or five most famous chefs in the world and he's offering a $26 prix fixe lunch. This is unheard of and completely ridiculous and I need an excuse (and a date) to go ASAP. I just found out about the lunch offer (his place can easily cost $200/person for dinner) and it's seriously absurd that you can eat Jean Georges for such a low dollar figure.

This list could go on for quite a while, but these are the real stand-outs. There's also all kinds of places that a person should go to, but don't exactly qualify for the list, including Blue Coffee and Grimaldi's Pizza in Brooklyn, The Grey Dog in Chelsea, and Sylvia's soul food spot in Harlem, and there are a number of really GREAT artisnal ice cream places, especially in the East Village. Also La Nacional for paella, the taco truck on 8th Ave & 14th St and my place for 3 of the best soups in creation.

Sacrilege! Porkalicious Goes Veg!!!

2010-08-21T14:38:00.003-04:00

Okay, I haven't been talking about this much, so I don't exactly have my thoughts together on the subject, but this is, in fact, day 11 of a planned 30 day vegetarian stint. So far, so good, but I haven't had the moment where I realize the error of my openly carnivorous ways. I think most people are philosophical vegetarians before they commit to cutting meat completely out of their diet, and that is one crucial step I don't see happening. This process has been great for focusing in on why.

Well, We'd Have To Be Talking About One Charming Muthafuckin' Pig

The last couple years have involved a lot of watershed moments for me philosophically, almost exclusively in the direction of accepting the natural way of things as they are rather than as I think they should be. We are here, not better or worse than any stone, field of grass, or bird that is undeniably equally here. We exist as one entity, we are born and die and become born again as some other expression of the molecules of the universe. Flowers don't ask why they grow or what happens to them when winter comes and neither do I. What I do is breathe. And eat osso buco whenever it's on the menu.

It remains my feeling that animals are materials for our betterment, like trees and rain, and that becoming bacon is a very noble outcome for a humble pig. Would it be better if we let the pig rot in the ground and be eaten by maggots? Of course not. There is a completely different conversation to be had about factory farms and the way animals are treated as a commodity and expected to fit easily on a shelf. No one can defend the modern means of production in any terms other than pure supply and demand. But I would argue against farms with 10,000 hogs and a series of shit lagoons for plenty of good reasons that don't have anything to do with the animal's feelings. From their effect on the community and environment they live in, to the texture and taste of the meat, separating an animal from it's natural living conditions is bad for it's life on the farm and it's afterlife on the plate. I'm not a supporter of putting bleach in a chicken's eye just to see if it will hurt, but any animal that is allowed to live and is then killed in a humane fashion is serving it's natural function by being marinated and oven roasted at 250 for 3 hours. Serve with basmati.

And, of course, if pigs had thumbs and barbecue grills, they'd eat us. It's the way the world works and I'm in no mood to question it.

How I function within all of this is something I question though. I am a reflexive meat eater, you could put prosciutto-wrapped rat on the menu and I'd at least consider it. And so, as happens when you're friendly with media types, I ended up in a friend's very popular lifestyle blog as 'meat eater man'.

The Vegetarian Wedding Planner

Derek is a close friend, but as a yoga teacher, international music DJ and strict vegetarian, his moment to moment existence doesn't have much in common with mine. What we do share is a hungry brain and when we get together the conversation runs immediately to the Big Topics, where we have no problem ordering from the same menu. Derek has been a good gatekeeper for me lately, introducing me to a lot of ideas and thinkers that have dramatically influenced how I look at myself and my life. In many ways, he has helped me find a sense of calm and connectedness that I can't properly thank him for.

He put a post on Facebook when the New York Times interviewed his fiance for an article on what to serve guests at the wedding of two vegetarians. They're serving a vegetarian menu, and apparently this decision has gotten them all kinds of grief. I don't see why, there isn't one person on the face of this planet that can't make it through a meal without eating meat. It's their wedding, if they want me to wear purple and eat Mogwai biscuits and dance the Hula, I'm in. What's interesting is the implied judgment in the semantics of the thing.

Not serving meat at a wedding is talked about by all vegetarians as offering a 'teachable moment' about their 'lifestyle choice'. The idea of teaching me something about a lifestyle choice indicates that I'm uninformed on the virtues of vegetables and grains, but that isn't the issue. What I don't understand is how vegetarianism is assumed to be a greater or better philosophy choice.

The main reason I'm not a vegetarian isn't because we have evolved to be omnivores, it's because of a larger philosophy of life, that of simple experience. There are a few horrific experiences I would rather not have, things like surviving burns over 90% of my body or the presidency of Dick Cheney, but for the most part, if it's out there I want to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it and taste it. Not being willing to go to Spain and eat Iberico ham is a terrible waste of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cooking practice, not to mention a radically impractical way to eat in most places of the world. The ocean is there, why wouldn't you get in it? The ham is cured, why wouldn't you eat it?

I said something to this effect on Derek's Facebook post, something about why him coming to my wedding and eating a delicious pulled pork sandwich wouldn't count as a 'teachable moment' about my 'lifestyle choice'. I didn't get a satisfactory answer to this semantic question. I have no desire to talk Derek into serving meat, he's a vegetarian and should serve whatever he wants at his wedding without having to hear my opinion. But please, let's not make a meal into an ethics class, let's talk about football or the bridesmaids instead. To do otherwise assumes my choices aren't based on thought, and that's rude.

Having made this argument, it occurred to me that being vegetarian is one thing I've never experienced. I'm not buying the philosophical arguments for it, but there are a lot of people who argue that you shouldn't eat meat for health reasons. These same people use the same arguments against drugs, liquor and deviant sex, so they obviously can't be trusted, but the least I can do is find out for myself. So I'm not eating meat for a month.

Like I said, so far, so good. I have had two bites of meat in the last week and a half, both of them from meals my sister Rachel ordered while she was in town last weekend. One was a crab and corn dish at one of my favorite restaurants, the other was a burger from Shake Shack. I ordered pasta and a salad at the first place and the veggie sandwich at Shake Shack, which is a large mushroom, filled with cheese, breaded and deep fried. Delicious, but surely not what anyone thinks of as healthy vegetarian eating.

Otherwise it's been almost all salads and fruit. August has to be the easiest month of the year to be vegetarian, the farmer's market at Union Square is overflowing with fresh produce four days a week. With their selection of heirloom tomatoes, a dozen types of apples, fresh peaches and bi-color corn, a person could stuff themselves into a food coma without even touching dairy. I've known plenty of 'cheese pizza vegetarians', people who crow about not eating meat but subsist on a diet of french fries, white pie and cheez doodles, I know that isn't the way to run this experiment and right now I don't have to.

What I've found is that being vegetarian is just kind of annoying. I ordered a perfectly good spinach salad from a Greek place near my house called Nisos and had to ask them to leave off the crispy pancetta. The salad was great without the pork, but why would anyone do such a thing? It just seems silly. That's all I've got. No great revelations, no dramatic struggle or light-headed scare on an escalator, just me on the phone asking a woman to leave perfectly good pancetta off of my salad.

Driving to experience as wide a range of moments as one life can hold does not mean you should go back for seconds on things that don't work for you. I used to like going to punk shows and punching people in the head. I also got punched in the head a lot, and obviously it didn't bother me or I wouldn't have kept going back. Now, I don't so much desire that experience, nor do I have a point to make to dumb skinheads. No problem.

It seems like vegetarianism is going to work out the same way. It's a rather benign evil, I have to give it that. What I like about it is seeing how quickly the mind adapts. The whole pancetta on my salad thing happened a week ago, I doubt I would think twice about leaving it off today. Meat just doesn't seem that important anymore. If I can cut out something I practice literally every day without repercussions, what other habitual practices can I cut out without harm? What can I decide to do everyday instead? If the only limits my brain and body have are the ones I decide to give them, why have I chosen the limits I live with? Can I choose new limits everyday, like choosing my t-shirt? Outside of thinking, breathing, sleeping and drinking water, I don't really have to do anything everyday and looking at it that way makes day to day life easier, more fun and much more inspiring than believing that I won't be me without a cheeseburger and a beer.

Am I a better person for choosing to not eat meat? No. Do I feel better? Not particularly different one way or the other. But I am glad that I can make a decision, follow through on it and study my mind along the way for lessons that can be applied to other desires and habits I regularly indulge.

Now if I could just talk Derek into a bite of a Crif Dog.

American Roadtrip

2010-01-01T13:35:00.023-05:00

Nothing better than putting 5,000 miles on a car and 10 lbs on your love handles by eating your way across this Great Fat Lined Nation Of Ours. I did it in the fall of 2006 with the Musica Fresca tour, did close to the same in 2007 and 8, most often in 20 foot trucks. I think I went a little over 5,000 miles last summer in what I called the By George Washington To Washington Great American Road Trip. Long title, but it was a long drive, I thought it deserved something epic.

USA! USA! USA! SAUSAGE GRAV-AY!

The original plan for this trip was to drive my sister Kirsten from my parent's place in Vancouver, WA to her new home in Fort Collins, CO, where she's a freshman in college. But before we got going, a deal was struck between Kirsten and my other sister Rachel that entailed me driving Kirsten's car to Rachel and her wife Jen in Washington, DC.

Shortly after that I decided to drive the car to my friend Lou's wedding in Maine first, THEN take it to Rachel. So the plan was Vancouver, WA to Fort Collins, CO, to visit family in Wichita, KS, home to New York, NY for couple days, then to Some Place Lovely, ME, then Washington, DC to drop the car.

But before any of that madness, we started in Portland with a couple whiskey samplers and brilliant biscuits and gravy at Francis Xavier's, my parent's favorite breakfast place. I've written about eating in Portland before, you'd be hard pressed to do better.

We had a copy of Road Food by Jane and Michael Stern, of course. We tried to plot it out as clearly as we could, but there wasn't a lot of time for multi-hour detours to chase special sandwiches. What you end up with is hitting places that seem to not be trying too hard, the kind of joints where neighbors know what to expect, day in and day out, and probably don't fret too much over things like 'seasonal' or 'local'. This isn't always the case, and sometimes you can walk into a small plank-board box that's serving an honest-to-god 'Catch Of The Day', but a proper American can usually spot a good burger shack from across the street.

Being proper Americans, we started with Nell's-N-Out Steakburgers in La Grande, OR, a place anyone would roll the dice on. WIN!!

And now, I present to you - the Crunch Dog. I don't remember if that's what they called it, but this is a corn dog, covered in corn flakes before frying! Which suggests that they're fresh dipped, 'cause how else would the flakes stick? The hot dog was big and fat and pretty bland, but this thing was a winner for sure.

This is the Blue Banana in Wallowa, OR, by far the most decorated little coffee place on the trip. I took this picture because the coffee was great and the barista was cute and the art was funny, but I mostly took it because this places exists ALL OVER the Great American West.

You see these places in urban areas like Seattle and Portland, but at this point the concept has made it's way to every hamlet between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Every single one of them is no bigger than a one-car garage, has rich, thick, heavy smelling delicious coffee, and is staffed by a cute, smiling 16-20 year old woman. And because this is in places like Washington and Idaho and Wyoming, every single one of these girls has bright eyes, and is really nice and polite and seriously makes you happy to be out of bed and in the world.

New York could use a few of them, but we would just make them mean.

Next stop - taco truck. I don't even remember if either of us was hungry, but I know we both ate.

This young lady was not the hardest working member of the taco truck staff, but she was by far the most enthusiastic.

We had Mexican tacos, soft corn tortillas with shredded pork, hot sauce, cilantro, a couple radish slices, the whole 9. And a tamarind Jaritos, natch.

We were camping.

There were mountains.

Breakfast took shape at Butch Cassidy's Restaurant and Saloon in Montpelier, ID.

Wait a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself. Butch Cassidy's let you know what was going on before you got near a table, starting with the vending machine in the parking lot.

That's right, bait, tackle and ice cold pop, from the same machine. Seriously, tubs of worms, hooks, lures, bobbers, weights. And ice cold pop.

Then there was the sign at the front door.

This picture was taken in the summer of 2009, so five years after the fact, Butch Cassidy's Restaurant and Saloon still wants you to know they're pissed that you can only smoke and eat in one part of the building now, as opposed to, everywhere, I guess. Something tells me you can still come in packing.

I had the 'Country Benedict', the only possible way to make Eggs Benedict heavier or worse for your heart. Open face biscuit, two sausage patties, scrambled egg on each, covered in sausage gravy and with a side of proper hash browns, none of those bullshit home fries they have in New York. Plenty of pepper and three cups of coffee later, I was ready for the road.

Lunch that day was the impossibly cool Frostop. I feel like there has to be a hipster in BK somewhere with one of these on top of his building.

From what I can tell, Frostop used to be a major fast food chain, but now it looks like Sonic's white trash cousin. Not just for the 'Drive-In' aspect of it either, look at the menu.

Not sure what a FishWich is or how the Salmon is prepared, but this was my favorite part -

Frostop was mostly memorable for the sign, and that's never good.

The next day we went to Yellowstone National Park.

Much safer as a burger.

That night we ate steaks, because that's what you do in Montana.

Nothing that standout about the place or any of the sides, but goddamn that was a good steak. Fresh, cooked the way I ordered it, it wasn't hard to tell that these thick cuts of meat are their bread and butter, the grill guy is turning out at least 50 of these things a night, even in a crappy hotel restaurant. You can keep the frozen/boiled/buttered Veggie Mix though.

Breakfast the next morning, Kirsten ordered a pancake, as she is wont to do. She ordered a pancake, what she got was this.

We took to calling it a pan-crepe, but it still needed some kind of Super Hero adjective to go with it. Thin, doughy and delicious, this is a revolution in pancakes. Stop making those 1/2 inch thick jobbers, spread it out, let it cook, and when it's cooled a bit, spread it over your kid's face and let them breath in the aroma of a home cooked, hot breakfast. They'll never forget face pancakes, the way I still crack hardboiled eggs on my forehead, just like my Grandma, who was really only doing it to amuse me. Worked like a charm.

That day, we made it to Ft. Collins, where college kids to the wackiest things.

Hula Crossing. Hilarious.

We stopped at a place for lunch that was decidedly College Sports Bar, but seemed to have a library theme, and was more upscale than most of the frat joints around the school I went to. Exhibit A: instead of PBR in a can, they had a selection of house brews and a tasting platter.

They were all damn good, but the Oatmeal Stout was my favorite, a wholly predictable outcome.

What was kind of amazing was that the beer wasn't the best thing in the building. That title went to the chicken-pesto pizza.

It was definitely a thick, doughy Midwest crust, but it was crispy on the bottom and soft in the middle. The chicken wasn't dried out, the pesto was right and the cheese seemed like it may not have been living in a plastic bag for two years. Pizza is easy to get right, but not many people do. Even fewer manage to do it with pesto and chicken.

We spent the day getting Kirsten set up in her very first dorm room, and then I got back on the road, headed to Wichita.

The next day I managed the first stop at a restaurant from the Road Food book, Al's Chickenette in Hays, KS. It's a good place to start my Road Food comments on this trip, because as great as Al's Chickenette is, the Sterns have given Kansas short shrift in the version of the book I have. But later for the complaints, it's chicken time.

Of course, the thing to eat is chicken, fried. You can buy it by the quarter
or half bird, tenders or nuggets, a breat fillet or a giblet dinner of livers
and/or gizzards. This is not fast-food chicken. It will take a while for your
order to cook, which is one reason it is so good. As your teeth crack through the
chicken's crunchy skin, wafts of aromatic steam erupt into the air. It is
delicious plain, but the way Al's customers know to eat it is to take a squeeze
bottle of honey and drizzle some across the crisp skin (as well as on the
excellent French fries). The honey's sweetness sings mellifluous harmony with
the chicken's salty crust.
pp 444-445

As advertised. The chicken was just right, and the place screams Kansas from the rafters. It was a nice welcome back to my home state after a long absence, and a good reminder of why we carry the book. It's a good book, with good ideas.

But Wichita is nowhere in it. There are a lot of good eats in Wichita, KS, especially in the cheeseburger department, but there is also a big Vietnamese community that do it right, a proper Amish restaurant in a proper Amish barn just outside of town, enough honest Mexican to feed a bandito army, lots of excellent barbecue and almost all of it is one-off, locally owned and staunchly original. I've been to almost 40 of the restaurants in the Road Food book, so I think I know what they like. Jane and Michael Stern, if you haven't been to Wichita, let me make some suggestions.

Recommendation #1 - The Donut Whole. This is a donut shop cum art gallery owned by local gadfly Michael Carmody, musician, writer, thinker and now excellent donut maker. Carmody has been keeping Wichita funky for years, and was a personal influence on me, with his music and general spreading of ideas and good cheer. From the Juggernaut coffee shop, to SEEN magazine and The Sluggos, Carmody has been a great, if not always profitable, exemplar of DIY since I was a teenager. It's kick-ass to see him hit his stride with the donut shop.

As for the donuts, I like the Maple Bacon, of course, but the Root Beer and Fruity Pebble donuts were the ones that threw me for a loop. The Donut Whole - Road Food ready!

Ah, the Dyne Quik. This place is three blocks from the house I grew up in, so it's kind of a fixture in my head. They were closed down for repairs when I was there, but I thought I ought to take a picture, at least of the sign. Love that sign, and Dyne Quik is a good example of something they do really well in Wichita: breakfast. Whether it's The Nifty Kitchen or Toc's or any one of a hundred other greasy spoons, Wichita's got 'em, and you can count on 'em. One of my first jobs was at a place called The Riverside Cafe that was maybe a chest hair nicer than Dyne Quik, but not hard to recognize.

Okay, Road Food suggestion #2 - The Artichoke. It's a bar at night and a sandwich shop by day, and another great example of the kind of place that really flourishes in Wichita. One location, a few employees, beer, and a slightly crooked menu.

Nancy's - Roast beef, Swiss & cream cheese, lettuce & tomato with ranch dressing on grilled onion hoagie.
Our Famous #8 - Turkey, bacon, Swiss & cream cheese, lettuce & tomato, grilled on an onion hoagie, topped with Italian dressing & parmesan cheese.
Paddy's Pickled Pepper Wrap - A whole-wheat wrap with cream cheese, swiss cheese, corned beef, diced pickles and jalapeno peppers, grilled to perfection.
Seester - Pastrami, bacon, Swiss & cream cheese, mustard & jalapenos, grilled on an onion hoagie.

It looks like I enjoy the onion hoagie options the best. I like the Artichoke a lot, great atmosphere, one-of-a-kind sandwiches, and I could name five other SANDWICH SHOPS in Wichita that deserve the Road Food distinction. Get on it, Sterns!

After all of that driving, I was ready for some cooking. Luckily, my people, we're the kind people who turn this -

Into this -
I don't remember what all we made that day, looks like ribs, chilies and sausage, but there were obviously a bunch of foil covered things, and probably something stuffed into the corners, and I'm pretty sure that's a two-tier, double rack system, so. There was a lot of food-with-faces.

First stop out of Wichita was Road Food selection #2, Ike's Chili, in Tulsa, OK.

Ike's was on a very deserted stretch of road in what used to be the Industrial part of Tulsa, it looked like. South Wichita looks a lot the same, remnants of the days when more of America was employed in Manufacturing than Retail. I can eat on Formica, no sweat.

Made from a recipe supposedly secured from a Hispanic Texas employee named Alex Garcia, Ike's chili is a dish of ground beef and a peppery jumble of spice. It comes plain in a bowl, with spaghetti noodles, or three-way, meaning with noodles and beans. Cheese, jalapeno peppers, and onions are extra-cost options, but even a three-way with everything will get you change from a five-dollar bill. Chili is also the star of Ike's Fritos Pie and Coney dog.

I went with the chili three-ways with no extras, which was served in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spork. Why not?

It was alright, but nothing to write a book about. This is what canned chili would taste like if it wasn't canned - small bits, kind of soupy, kind of bland, but kind of beefy at the same time. I was glad I got the spaghetti and beans, that made it a little more of a break from the ordinary. I don't know, nothing in Wichita, but you've got Ike's Chili? Road Food wasn't exactly knocking it out of the park on this trip.

They were dead on with Al's Chickenette, though. Eh, who's perfect?

By this point I had been away from New York for two weeks, and on the road for one. I was ready to make some serious mileage, plus I had the Blue Ridge Mountains to look forward to. I booked it East across the South, stopping only to refuel at my favorite nationwide greasy spoon - Waffle House.

They don't have Waffle House everywhere, it's not like McDonald's or stupid, disgusting IHOP. I've only lived in Waffle House Nation for a little over a year of my life, but it was extremely cheap, open 24 hours and quite tolerant of drunks, so we went there all the time.

I've been in love twice in my life, I realized it once at The Cloisters in uptown Manhattan, and the other time was at a Waffle House outside of St. Louis. And even though things didn't work out either time, it seems like a plate of cheese eggs and hash browns is always the perfect marriage. I'll take mine with bacon, cinnamon raisin bread and orange juice, obviously.

There wasn't much to report after Waffle House. I had one very unsuccessful barbecue stop, and one that turned out great, but I didn't take any pictures. After the BBQ Debacle of '09, I got a sampler plate to go at the next joint and ate it on the road. The place looked a little too put-together, but the food was good. Alas, no memory of the name of the joint, or what town it was in.

The next thing that inspired me was something I saw in a gas station:

Check out the CLOSE UP!!!

"Start Your Day Right!" Push Here To Dispense Gravy

I'm not sure those sentences should exist together as nonchalantly as they do here. I'm a hedonist by philosophy, design and trade, but a freaking sausage gravy Dispenser?! Let's be honest, if there was any way this gravy wasn't wretched, powdered gas station gravy, I'd be on board. But it's like Slushees and Microwave Burritos - within a couple of bites you remember why Jean Georges isn't exactly rushing out a frozen line for 7-11.

And last, but not least (after that gravy dispenser), a pulled pork sandwich and bowl of pinto beans with cornbread, served by a tattooed girl in a mom-and-pop just outside of the Blue Ridge mountains, where I stopped because I was hopelessly lost. I don't remember where the place was or what it was called, but Pinto Bean Tattooed Girl Oasis would have worked for me.

Ceviche de Caracol

2009-11-08T13:31:00.002-05:00

Anybody like beaches, condos laced with marble, ocean kayaking, Mayan ruins, friendly locals and seafood that was in the water a few hours before you eat it? Me toooooooooo.

Went to Belize for the first time last year and, surprise of surprises, took a camera and professional shooter with me. Well, more like Shiloh took me with him, a stowaway on another brilliant vacation with the Farrs.

We did a lot of great stuff, but one of my favorite days was when we went snorkeling on the reef. Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world, it stretches for miles along Ambergris Caye, where we were staying. We took a charter catamaran and sailed out to the reef one day, getting geared up to pet stingrays and sharks. We swam down into underwater caverns where the ocean floor drops off and the crazy plants that make up the reef become a wall of moving florescent colors. Little polka-dotted fish come out of nowhere in schools and swim right through you. It was nuts, I've never seen anything like it.

While we were sailing out to the reef, we ran a fishing line off the back of the boat and hauled in a few jackfish that we ate grilled with garlic and salt & pepper, very simple and delicious, they were so fresh it would have been criminal to put any kind of sauce on them.

That was the thing in Belize, most of the seafood was prepared simply: grilled or as a stew. Most of the resort food was a bland take on Mexican that resembled chain restaurant Tex Mex more than anything else, but there were a number of bars on the water that were serving up somebody's catch of the day with a housemade salsa and tortillas from the press in town. More on that later.

The best seaside tourist meal we had was at a place with a nice bar and tables, and three people playing a dice game while the cook had an after work drink. Two of the dice players were kids, the third was their Mother, also the host and waitress. We could see all of this because there weren't any walls to the eating area, only the kitchen. Not realizing the guy at the bar was the cook, we walked in and asked to see a menu, but got turned away by the hostess. 'The kitchen is already clean', she said by way of explanation.

I worked in a lot of restaurants before I moved to the East Coast, I know what a clean kitchen means. The guy already had a beer open, but he gave us a look and said he'd make us dinner if we were willing to eat chicken. What came out was a spicy, delicious curried chicken with rice and sauteed veggies. I gambled with the kids and drank beer while we waited. Welcome to Belize.

The best restaurant meal we had was at a local place in San Pedro, about as far off the beaten path as you can get in the tiny town. It was tiny with a few picnic tables under a thatch roof with a dirt floor, the restaurant portion having been built around the front and side of a small house that served as the prep kitchen. It didn't look like much was being cooked inside though, because the back of the eating area was dominated by a separate thatch hut with a big fire at the bottom and racks that held huge cast iron pots full of rice, stewing chicken and my favorite, a rich conch soup with potatoes, carrots and herbs.

The owner/chef was sitting at the table in front, talking to a friend who is from Belize but now lives in New York as a personal chef. By the time I figured out one of them made the soup I was eating and the other one cooks for NY's hoity elites, it was all I could do to keep from asking them to take me in the back for a master class.

What I did get was a lot of reminiscing about the food of Belize when they were growing up. The owner's favorite was rainbow fish from the reef, these huge, brightly colored fish that are illegal now. She said they were a little fatty and damned good. By far the oddest thing she mentioned was corned manatee. Apparently there aren't many manatees around these days, and they're all kinds of illegal to hunt, but I guess it was better than any corned beef could ever hope to be.

I'd try it.

She did talk me through the process for conch fritters, but she wouldn't let me tape it. And she wouldn't even describe the conch soup.

We were staying in the Farr's LOVELY condo with a fully stocked kitchen, so I did some cooking of my own. Besides the conch fritters I made that night, there was salt and pepper jackfish with a salsa of butt bacon, onions, garlic and cilantro, fresh snapper with lemon and not much else, tons of fresh pineapple, fruit smoothies and fresh tomato salsa. Coconut and coconut milk from the palm trees all over the island, Belizian coffee grown in the highlands, Belizian breakfast bread, which was a kind of cinnamon babka. Cured pumpkin chunks in plastic cups. Cases of Belikin, the national beer. Shiloh made his specialty, jerk chicken.

But the best thing of all, the most adventurous, local, fun and delicious dish that I made was ceviche, which is basically seafood salsa. I used conch that the guys on the charter boat who took us scuba diving harvested on the way back. Conch is kind of a huge ocean snail without eyes, a big muscle that crawls into a shell and lives a monk's life. It tastes like sun and seawater, at least it does if you cook it a few hours after you catch it.

A local sculptor named Joseph showed me how to make the ceviche, using my favorite cooking technique: cut shit up and mix it in a bowl.

Ceviche de Caracol

Ceviche is the dish, caracol is the Spanish word for conch. If you're in the 95% of the world where fresh conch isn't available, you can experiment with other seafood. Shrimp works, but it has a stronger flavor, so you should increase the amounts of the other ingredients. I've had ceviche made with cooked and flaked fish, it didn't work for me but it might have been the preparation.

Ingredients

1 lb diced fresh conch, or other seafood

2 medium onions

2 medium tomatoes

1 bunch cilantro

2 fresh chiles

Juice of 2 limes

Salt & Pepper

Rough chop and mix everything but the limes. Squeeze the juice of the limes over the salsa and mix. Add salt and pepper to taste and let it sit in the fridge for 15 minutes.

That's it, the seafood is cooked by the lime juice, which is why it's so important to get fresh stuff. You're going to taste it directly, so you want to like it.

CEVICHE!

Unlike the lady at the local restaurant, Joseph didn't object to me taping his instructions at all. So, Shiloh shot Joseph talking and me chopping, and we made a little video.

Enjoy.

How To Make Ceviche De Caracol from Fifth Column on Vimeo.

Running Food: Coconut-Almond Bars

2009-10-18T11:00:00.003-04:00

Adapted from The Bakery in New Paltz, New York. This is a great pre- or post-run snack. It's also a good snack for when you want to kill your hunger totally dead - it's so dense that it fills you up immediately. We cut them, baggie them, and keep them in the freezer - they're great cold. We tried taking them on bike rides a couple of times but they were a bit crumbly after being jostled around for a couple of hours.

Combine:

two cups rolled oats (we've also done this w/ steel cut and that was fine too)

one cup unsweetened coconut chunks or flakes

1/2 cup chopped dates (or raisins)

1/2 cup raw almonds

1/2 cup sesame seeds

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup cashews

Mix:

1 1/2 cups natural peanut butter

1 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

Microwave the PB mix for one minute. Combine with the dry ingredients. On a greased baking sheet, spread mixture into a 1"-high rectangle. Cut into bars and freeze, or, if you prefer, bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, cool, and cut.

Dates = quick carbs

Honey = quick carbs

Nuts = healthy fats; sustained energy

Oats = reduces cholesterol and offsets the risk of upper-respiratory infections (common in runners)

Summer Quickies

2009-09-18T17:59:00.008-04:00

I have a big super-post coming up about the By George Washington-To-Washington Great American Road Trip I went on in August, but there is a little pile of stuff that will grow into a big mound soon if I don't get it out of the way.

Summertime and the Eating is Good

First things first.

Look what fell off a truck the other day!

$50 worth of assorted canned tomatoes, a mere six weeks before chili season kicks off.

I Am Loved. I don't mean that in a creepy "spiritual" sense, but seriously, what luck.

More Funny Plums

I posted a picture of some lemon plums I bought at the farmer's market a couple months ago.

Last time I went the same guy had these:

I didn't get a name for them, but they were good, with sweet flesh and really tart skin. I know that's the basic makeup of a plum, but something about the wrapping on these things was sharper than the darker purple plums I'm used to. I can't say I search out plums, but I've been enjoying these odd varieties.

The Enlightenment of John Thorne

Okay, I've written about Thorne and his book Serious Pig a lot. Thorne writes about Maine a lot, and talks about the blueberries like they hold nirvana in the bottom of the bucket. He's been right about most everything else, who am I to question him on this one?

Axel & Lou in Maine. Nothing special, just a camping trip. They always dress like that.

So while I'm there I drive by four or five blueberry stands on the side of the road before I finally give in and pull over. I bought the big one, of course, and munched delicious blueberries the rest of the way to Penobbmikdaosrpuijwkedchiuo, or whatever that place was called. It was long.

Pemaquid Point. Sorry. It wasn't that long, but I still couldn't remember it all weekend.

The blueberries were perfect, of course, smaller than the ones you buy in the store but with nearly double the flavor intensity. I ate most of my first purchase by the time I got to the hotel.

The place we were staying was beautiful, a bed and breakfast with a view of the lighthouse, a high end restaurant and a bar on premises and plenty of paths for late night beach walks.

Being a full service type of joint, the wedding took place outside and then we came in for drinks and dinner. I had a stuffed lobster that was characteristically small for the self-conscious class of the restaurant, but damn good. It was on a perfectly made risotto with steamed vegetables. Somehow I got a picture of my name card and glass of scotch, but not the lobster. Probably for the best, that's one of those times when your date looks at you like you're insane when the camera comes out.

The next night we ate at the bar, a decidedly un-stuffy place with a five item menu written in chalk near the entrance.

Who could resist?

I got the flat bread with onions, duck fat and prosciutto and then, for good measure, the salmon BLT. I knew that flat bread would go quick once the other drinkers got a look at it.

This was some serious bar food. The sandwich was good grilled bread with an herb mayonnaise, lox, bacon, tomato, small chunks of red bell pepper and fresh mixed greens. I live in the land of the specialty sandwich and this salmon BLT was holding it's own.

As for the pizza, well, I'm not the guy to be rating that dish. I'm biased. Everybody thinks their kid can sing. This is a dish invented for people like me. I loved it, but so did everybody else, so I think I can reliably report that it was excellent.

Okay, back to the blueberries. Just after I got back to New York, I got an email from Jordan, an old friend from Kansas who's a pretty great cook herself, very much in the home-cooking, learned-it-from-my-granny vein that I ride most of the time.

Hey,
I've been rediscovering "reading for pleasure" now that school is done. You won't be surprised that the cookbook section of the public library has been a frequent hangout spot. My current read is "The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper." Decent book, probably not worth a purchase. Anyway, towards the end I stumbled on a recipe for sugared raspberries, apparently taken from "The Gift of Southern Cooking" by Edna Lewis. Lewis, it says, is "a granddaughter of slaves, raised on a farm in Freetown" with a talent for preserving fruit "which keeps its taste fresh because there is no cooking involved." (I'm getting to the point, I swear). Here's the recipe:

2 cups (about 1 pound) fresh raspberries (or strawberries or blackberries)
2 cups sugar

Put berries in a bowl, cover with sugar. Mash the shit out of everything until "they are liquefied and no trace of whole berries is left." Transfer to a jar and refrigerate for at least 2 days. Will keep for up to a year.

It really is just fruit and sugar, and I find it strange too. However, the fancy pants NPR cooking bunch SWOON over these in the book. Maybe you will too.

So I tried it with the blueberries. I did one with the full compliment of sugar and one with half the sugar. They're both good, it's blueberries and sugar after all, but they don't set up into the normal jam consistency. I've never noticed a diminishing of flavor from cooking jams, so I'm not convinced of the 'problem' this recipe is trying to correct.

I've been putting the sauce in oatmeal. It's delicious. And I made these with Weezy:

We called it The Lumberjill: Maine blueberry cupcakes, filled with blueberry sauce and topped with crystal sugar. The sauce cooked into the bread and solidified into a little blueberry nugget in the middle of the cupcake that was sweet and tart and obviously naturally flavored, which is rare in a blueberry treat.

Doing what Mark Bittman says Part II

Mark Bittman is my friend.

Not in a drinking buddy kind of way, more like I'll buy a magazine if it has an article by him in it. For instance - Runner's World, October 2009 has an article called 'The Good Food Diet' where they interview Bittman about his running habit and he suggests a bunch of eating guidelines for training, weight loss, blahblahblah.

I think the first time I heard of Bittman was when my mom bought me and my sisters copies of How To Cook Everything, a general, wide ranging cookbook that he wrote. He also writes for the New York Times, in the food section on Wednesday. I'm borderline obsessive about the Times crossword and Wednesday is a day I usually finish, so I see the Times food section every week.

My brilliant sister Rachel found an article of Bittman's from the Times online, 101 Simple Salads for the Season, she did a short posting from it a couple weeks ago. I actually saved the hard copy from that week, and combined with the article from Runner's World, I'm heading into marathon training with a salad menu for the ages.

Bittman says he's training for this year's New York City marathon in the article. He spends most of his time espousing an entire eating regimen that is focused on plants and lean meats but gives you plenty of wiggle room to eat whatever crap you want, in moderation. It's very sane and very reasonable and how people who run marathons tend to act. The only surprise is that I've turned into one of those people.

USDA data shows most people get about 70 percent of their calories from that heavy side of the see-saw, and only about 30 percent from plants - and almost everyone in nutritional science believes the numbers should be reversed.
Plants, of course, means vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, and nuts. What do these things have in common? One, the don't have ingredients, they are ingredients. Two, they might be shelled, or peeled, or trimmed, but they're essentially unprocessed. Three, for the most part, they have few calories.

And then he goes on to talk about the science of all of it and the CO2 that is created by factory meat farms, and a bunch of other shit people already know and choose to ignore. That's the thing about Bittman, platitudes aside, the guy can cook.

First I made #60.

#60 - Sear tuna, or use good canned tuna. Chop it up and mix with chopped apples, halved seedless grapes, chopped red onion, olive oil, a bit of cumin and black pepper.

My version goes: do all that, grate some Romano on top. This is a good salad, I'd like it better with chicken instead of tuna, but it's the cumin and black pepper that make it stand out.

#41 - Halve avocados and scoop out some but not all of their flesh. Roughly chop and toss with black beans, queso fresco, cilantro, chopped tomatillos and lime juice. Serve in the meaty avocado shells.

That all sounded good, but there was another entry catching my eye just down the page that I thought might send this delicious guacamole salad over the top.

#44 - Make a crisp grilled cheese sandwich with good bread and not too much good cheese. Let it cool, then cut into croutons. Put them on anything, but especially tomato and basil salad. This you will do forever.

This you will do forever. From now on I'm ending every recipe with that sentence.

I added slices of fresh chilies and salt, but otherwise left it alone. Good god.

And, last but not least, some kind of spinach-chicken-apple thing I made and forgot about and then found a picture of on my camera.

Bet it was good!

Our Little Baby's All Growns Up!

2009-09-07T14:55:00.008-04:00

Where does this one even start? How do you describe a transcendent moment in life, those rare times when you climb up from a long held plateau of comfort, stretch your arms and legs into new positions, pump new blood into your brain and see the stars from a fresh position on the planet? How many times do you get to lose your virginity?

First of all, let's hear it for summer. Not to sound like a commercial for Labor Day, but there is a lot to be said for beer and barbecue by the water.

I did a lot of traveling this summer, had a lot of good times, but in August, in the Thousand Islands section of Canada, on the bank of the St. Lawrence river, under a partly cloudy sky, I became a Man.

Michael Hull is dead. Long live Michael Hull.

Barbecued Suckling Pig

I was going to Canada on a working vacation with Shiloh and Melissa, a Cinematographer and Producer I work with a lot. We were going to interview the owner of this completely bad ass catamaran. This boat has twin helicopter turbine engines. It sounds like it's going to SPACE!

He's making adjustments to the boat this year and plans to get it over 200 mph next summer. For now he's having to live with topping out at around 190 mph. Like I said, completely bad ass.

The cook at his day job

But vacation was the thrust of this working vacation and we spent most of our time riding jet skis, playing horse shoes, drinking single malt scotch and starting fires. That's what the boys did. There seemed to be a lot of knitting on the girl's end.

ANYWAY, Melissa went out of her way to find me a little present in the form of a whole pig because she's a sweetheart and a genius. A working woman's philanthropist and a fledgling dream-maker. My best friend the day she called and said she found me a pig.

Melissa's dog Nala, a fan of my barbecue if there ever was one

I've been talking about this, the Holy Grail of barbecue, for years, but I never had the chance to try my hand. It was always in the back of my mind, knowing that in some weird way I was training for the day. Learning how to control heat from live fire, learning how different sections of the animal react to slow heat, figuring out how to tell when the meat is done by touch, without having to cut into it and release juice too early.

I enjoy cooking nearly anything. I enjoy cutting up an apple to go with cheese and wine. I'm not that hard to please, but this pig had the feel of an event. The night before we cooked him the women decided to give the pig a name they didn't like so they could build up a little animosity toward him before I put a big metal spike in his ass. I think they decided on Omar. When was the last time you named an apple?

The place we would be buying the pig, Rick's Butcher Shop in Brockville, Ontario, deals with guys like me all the time. They have kind of a first-timer's package where they rent you an electric spit barbecue on wheels with a trailer hitch and the whole nine. The guy loaned me a big cutting board and gave me an apron and we were on our way.

Did I mention he cut the head and feet off for ease of use?

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The house we were staying in is on an island, which means getting this wheel-mounted barbecue contraption to the island first. Which meant hiring a boat, because the boats we had were driving boats, not grill hauling boats.

Welcome to my world

Once we got to the island we realized there was no way this thing was getting up the thin path to the yard, so we chained it to the dock and ran an extension cord. You know, some real man shit.

And then I busted out the cookbook, the brilliant Pork & Sons by Stéphane Reynaud, a gift from an equally brilliant girl that I ignored for a long time. The book, not the girl. Now that I've opened it up, it's been nothing short of inspirational and was the first place I went when I found out for sure that this pig thing was going down.

The recipe is short, I'll reprint it here in it's entirety.

Barbecued Suckling Pig

PREPARATION TIME: 45 MINUTES
COOKING TIME: 3 HOURS

SERVES 12

1 suckling pig, 5 to 6 weeks old
10 shallots, chopped
10 garlic cloves, chopped
2 1/3 cups chopped smoked bacon
7 ounces country-style white bread, soaked in heavy cream
generous 1/3 cup Dijon mustard
3 eggs
1 bunch of fresh parsley, chopped
20 fresh sage leaves, chopped
scant 1 cup olive oil

FOR THE BASTING LIQUID

4 cups white wine
2 1/4 cups olive oil
scant 1/4 cup Dijon mustard

Ask your butcher to prepare the pig and save the liver and heart for you.

Place all the remaining ingredients with the liver and heart in a bowl, and mix together well. Spoon this stuffing into the pig and sew up the cavity with trussing thread. Tie the feet underneath the pig with wire and cover the ears with foil to prevent them from burning.

Whisk together all the ingredients for the basting liquid in a bowl. Place the pig on a spit over the barbecue and cook, basting frequently, for 3 hours.

Page 278

Okay, sounds pretty simple, but there are a lot of details that are left out. For one thing, the best suggestion I got from the guy running the butcher shop was to separate my coals to the ends of the grill because the shoulder and hips of the pig would need more heat than the empty middle. Made perfect sense, but I never would have come up with that on my own.

I got the fire going and mixed up the stuffing. I couldn't find shallots so I used red onion instead, and I used raisin bread instead of white. It looked good.

I had high hopes for the stuffing, it seemed like this could become my new go-to stuffing recipe, whole pig or no. With the fire building, I stuffed the pig and sewed him up. I suppose if you own a butcher shop in the mountains of France, you're prepared to sew up a pig with trussing thread. I was not.

The pig's skin is really thick, even a young pig like the one I had. I ended up using a 3" nail that I bent in the middle with the thread tied just under the slim head of the nail. I also had to use pliers so I could push and pull this chunk of metal where I wanted it to go. It got done, but I suggest having a tandem pig-sewing team at your disposal if you can.

With the stomach sewed, I tightened the bolts on one side of the spit. They cut the head off at the shop, saying that made it much easier to use the spit because you didn't have to shove it through the skull. There was also a big loose hole where the pig's anus used to be. They asked me if I wanted the head cut off. They didn't ask if I wanted the asshole cut out. Writing it like that, I can see why.

The stainless steel spit slid through effortlessly, and I tightened the bolts on the spikes at the other end. Let's do this.

Omar, after about an hour

One side got charred while we figured out the spit motor

I started basting him immediately. I tried not to baste more than every half-hour, but really I wanted to stare at it and basting was the best excuse. It smelled amazing almost immediately.

The charred side annoyed the hell out of me initially, but once he got going my attitude changed. The other side was crisping up nicely but didn't seem to be in any danger of charring. The burn happened in the first few minutes, so there was no way the meat was overdone under it, which meant that we would have two types of skin to chew on when this project was done. It was an experiment, right? This was my first one, cut me some slack.

Omar's top butt

Omar's bottom butt

My spike wasn't set very well in the back end and after a couple hours he was cooked enough to flop around a little with each revolution. I kept waiting for him to fall off of the spit but it never happened. He just kept getting softer, caramelizing on the outside in the smoke, breaking down into shreds on the inside.

The book suggested 3 hours on the spit, but the book said a 5-6 week old pig. The butcher shop suggested a 25 pounder for my adventure and it never occurred to me to ask how old a 25 lb pig is. At the three hour mark, my pig seemed like he was cooked through, but he had a little more work to do. We started early enough to buy some time, so I headed in to make corn on the cob and my spicy summer slaw.

Omar at 5 hours, soft side

Omar at 5 hours, hard side

The charred side of the pig had split wide open after five hours, the stuffing had dripped out enough bacon oil to make a stinky puddle in the bottom of the grill and the back end was about to melt off of the spit. Betty made an impromptu barbecue sauce and I got the thick gloves off the dock.

Omar, resting

Shiloh, basting

After letting Omar catch his breath, I started in with a knife and cut through both tenderloins and the spine with no effort. I didn't even mean to. I was just poking at it and cut through bone with a little flick of the wrist. I put the knife down and pulled it apart with my fingers.

Omar, butchered

And now I understand why the true traditionalists don't serve ribs at their barbecue restaurants. I always thought it was a silly regional thing, like tomato based sauce or mustard based sauce, but it's about more than that.

Believe it or not, there are smart people who think about things like when and why people started cooking their food. The two best guesses those smart people have go something like this:

1. After naturally occurring fires subsided, people ate animals that got caught in the fire and were cooked. They were attracted to something about the cooked meat, possibly the flavor or texture. And, of course, they were easy to catch. Presumably the marinade was terrible, but it had to be a lot easier to eat than raw meat and a lot better tasting than rotten meat.

2. People hung their meat over a controlled fire at night as a means of deterring other animals from eating their hard won food. When they woke up in the morning they had delicious smoked ham hanging in the tree. Or smoked otter or saber toothed tiger or whatever.

Both theories also rest to some degree on man's natural proclivity for things that don't kill us. Cooking meat is a much healthier way to consume it, especially when you're eating whatever game you can catch with stone tools.

Even undercooked meat is substantially better for you because it is the outside of the cut, the part exposed to the most bacteria, that gets done. One thing I like about science is that the simplest idea usually wins. If you smell a piece of rotting flesh and a piece of barbecued flesh, it isn't that hard to figure out which is more appetizing. We have been eating cooked food for at least 50,000 years now and have most likely evolved the pleasure centers that react to the smell of roasting meat and vegetables. But, like sex and language, these were probably instincts related to survival before they were a source of joy. This was all pre-barbecue sauce, so. They had a long way to go.

Today, realistically speaking, spit roasting a suckling pig over an open flame is probably as close to a pre-historical cooking experience as you're going to get. It is meat eating in it's most basic form, even with an electric spit and a bottomless cooler of imports. The barbecue purists that don't serve ribs know that when you cook the whole pig, pulled pork is all you get. The ribs were so tender the meat jumped off the bones like a tourist stretching her legs after a long bus ride. The bones broke in half with a little squeeze.

Everything shredded in my fingers, both hams and both tenderloins. The front end fell apart on the cutting board while I was working on the bottom, leaving soft bones sticking out all over the place. It was delicious.

Mike tasting, clearly blitzed on smoked pork

Omar, plated

I can be easily tempted into hyperbole, but this was what I like to call a Grand Canyon experience. I saw pictures of the Grand Canyon my entire life on everything from postcards to t-shirts to billboards, but it is impossible to describe the grandeur of the place to anyone who hasn't been there. You can't properly photograph the Grand Canyon.

No matter how many times I read about cooking a whole pig, I never quite grasped what an undertaking it was. I didn't make it any easier by deciding to do it on a tiny island, but regardless of your locale, this is a project. All I can say is that it's worth every penny and every minute. That, and have some helpers.

The only thing I was disappointed in was the stuffing. I don't know if I did something wrong, but it was a sloppy, disgusting mess when we were done. I put it in a bowl and tried to serve it, but even the most adventurous eaters at the table passed. I ate some of it on fresh bread, but it was so soaked through with bacon grease and juice from the pig that it left an unpleasant residue in my mouth. I can even live with that if it tasted good, but it was bland on top of being greasy.

I don't know. The theory was floated that the stuffing isn't meant to be eaten, that it's just there to keep the hollow cavity in the pig's midsection moist. Everything else in this book has been clever, inventive and delicious, it doesn't make sense to me that they would stuff the pig and not figure out a way to eat the stuffing. There are multiple recipes in the book for ears and snouts. If they can figure out how to eat that crap, why wouldn't they eat the stuffing? I still haven't figured it out.

Omar on a stick

After dinner we started a fire and put Omar's head on the end of the spit to keep us company. Everybody drank to the pig and I declared that he had recieved a king's finish.

Omar is dead. Long live Omar.

A big 25 lb thank you to Melissa for working out the logistics of this thing, Shiloh for thinking of it in the first place, and the Farrs & Lumps for being willing to go a bit crazy with me every now and then.

Chowda, Rhode Island Style

2009-08-29T18:38:00.042-04:00

This story starts in Rhode Island. I don't have many stories that start in Rhode Island, so I'm kind of savoring it. I may say Rhode Island 25 or 30 more times before this posting is done.

I was in Rhode Island for work first, shooting a commercial for the Marine Corps. Most of the spot was done in South Carolina, but we did one day in New England. As is known to happen in New England, we were working just down from what looked like a brilliant clam chowder place, Aunt Carrie's. I didn't have time to stop in while we were there, but I looked up Rhode Island in the Road Food book when I got home, and guess what I found?

Aunt Carrie's

Aunt Carrie's, at Point Judith on the ocean, has been a summertime destination since the 1920s. It remains one of the few places in Rhode Island that still lists a full shore dinner on its menu. It starts with chowder: your choice of white, red, or Rhode Island-style, which is clear and bacon-flavored. That's accompanied by crusty gold balls of deep-fried clam-flavored dough called calm cakes as well as steamers with broth and butter for dipping.

Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 63

Okay, between that little opener and the raved about Indian Pudding at the end, I was sold. Luckily I was back to Rhode Island a couple weeks later, including a stop in Narragansett at Aunt Carrie's.

Grey Chowder & Lobster Pizza

As with many good New York stories, this one starts at Grand Central Station. I know I said it started in Rhode Island, but that was more aesthetically true than literally true.

In fact, let's have a digression. There's a lot of crappy food in Grand Central, but when I was looking for something to snack on while riding the Metro North to meet My Friend With A Car, I found the Grand Central deli. I don't know what they actually call it, but that's what it is - a super fancy deli squeezed into what looks like an entrance hallway.

I can't say I know the history of the Grand Central deli, but the first time I ate lox and cream cheese was from whatever version of a deli they had when I was 18. I was riding to Boston with my uncle Tom and he bought bagels with lox, cream cheese and onions before we got on the train.

The place they've got now is brilliant, probably 100 yards long, crammed on both sides with display counters of fancy shit. It's expensive, but hey, if you want cheap move to Nebraska and eat spam. How often are you in Grand Central? I live here and it's maybe once a year. How could you resist?

Cheese!

Fancy Cheese!

Meat for your cheese!

Cured peppers, fat slices of tomato and fresh mozz

I'll take one of everything

For all my talk, I chose simply. Coffee and a danish. I hadn't been awake long, and besides, there was all that chowder coming.

First stop of the day, the famous Aunt Carrie's

I had to get one of everything, of course, especially the Rhode Island-style 'grey' chowder. The corn was good and sweet, the shrimp roll was awful. Breaded, frozen shrimp that had been over cooked in french fry grease and scooped onto a dry roll was not doing it.

BUT, that wasn't what we were there for. The clam cakes were great, very dense hush puppies with whole clams in them. I didn't taste much clam in the dough, but there were enough pieces in each one to get the point across.

I had the clear chowder, which didn't actually taste like bacon at all. It didn't taste much like clam either, it had more of a salty potato flavor than anything else. I had some of my lunch mate's chowder, she got the white, and it was perfect. Something about the creaminess of the milk cut through the salt, leaving room for the clam flavor to come out. Neither of us tried the red, but those two small cups were enough to convince me that, like chili is better off with beans, chowder and milk are natural, if not completely necessary, compliments.

The other big surprise of Aunt Carrie's was Indian Pudding, a tasty dish that is similar to sweet potato pie, but with a lot less sugar. It seems to be a mashed and probably baked sweet potato dish, spiced more or less like pumpkin pie.

Wait. According to Wikipedia, there's no sweet potato in it:

Indian pudding
Indian pudding is a more elaborate form of corn hasty pudding. It consists of milk, corn, and molasses, (or, alternatively, maple syrup and honey, and sometimes sugar), spices (nearly always including cinnamon and ground ginger), butter, and usually raisins and nuts, baked in a slow oven for several hours. It is a traditional New England dessert.

From Wikipedia entry for Hasty Pudding

Tasted like sweet potato to me, but I barreled through it pretty quick, it could have been the spices that I associate with sweet potato and not the base itself. Either way, it was good.

When we got to where we were going, it was beautiful.

Beach

Gull

Lighthouse

Surfers

And then it was time for dinner.

We didn't have a plan for dinner, but we were in Newport by that point. Newport is a neat little town with a bunch of small houses that overlook the ocean. There was a wharf area with a large seafood market, an area where personal boats were docked, multiple ice cream and taffy stands and a bunch of restaurants.

We chose the Rhode Island Quahog Company, but fresh seafood was the lick at every eating establishment on the strip. We ate at one of the fancier places, but there were lobster specials advertised up and down the strip, 2 for 1 beers and all the steamers you could handle.

I ate enough steamers dipped in butter to make a meal, but it was the only appetizer size they had. Oh well!

The steamers were good. They tasted like the ocean, a sense you can only get when you're at the coast. Like vegetables lose the hint of dirt after 24 hours off the vine, these clams must have been dug that morning.

But like I said, lobster was the thing. We started with a stuffed lobster that came with the claws intact and the tail shell filled with a minced lobster and crab meat stuffing that was buttery and delicious.

The large pieces of claw meat were a good offset to the stuffing and kept the whole thing solidly in 'lobster dinner' territory. But a good stuffed lobster is something most decent coastal restaurants can get right.

What I was excited about was the lobster pizza. Seriously.

Baked cracker crust pie with a layer of white sauce, topped by chunks of fresh lobster meat, sauteed mushrooms and chopped scallions with a coating of melted mozzarella. There were herbs in the sauce, but I don't recall what they were.

This was one of the best pizzas I've ever eaten. The crust was just right, the sauce was great and the chunks of lobster big enough to remind you of why you came to Rhode Island in the first place. We were on the deck, the sun was setting by this point and the air was starting to get thick with ocean water. I had a cold stout to compliment the pie. It was the perfect set up for that meal.

Fully satiated on lobster and beer, it was about time to start heading back to the city. My friend's Father is a big fan of Rhode Island and used to bring her and her siblings to this area when they were kids. When he found out we were in Newport he gave her a laundry list of stuff to bring back, including a gallon of local chowder and a couple pounds of steamers. So we had a little shopping to do before we could get on the highway.

I got coffee and taffy. And an awesome magnet.

Kansas: A State Of Excitement

Someone's clearly been lying to them.

All in all, the trip to Rhode Island was a huge success. Our work got done at a very leisurely pace, great local seafood was had by all and I marked off another entry in the Road Food book.

Nicely done.

Any Excuse To Use Cinnamon

2009-08-29T16:46:00.005-04:00

The good news is, I have a friend. I know a guy, so to speak.

Actually, it's not a guy, it's a girl, and I know lots of girls, but now I know one who has a backyard. It's more of a deck really, but that's beside the point. I know a girl, who has a back deck, big by New York standards, and it's open air. AND it's on 12th St, a half-block from The Strand and about 5 blocks from my place.

Needless to say, I started talking barbecue as soon as I saw the deck for the first time. Sarah's a brilliant girl and world traveler, but I'm not intimidated. By her own admission, she can't barbecue worth a shit, so she has a deck to offer and I have a service to provide. We were fast friends.

Thing is, as Andre 3000 says, 'you can plan a pretty picnic but you can't predict the weeeaaather!' It started raining the night before our cookout, and didn't stop until two days later. SUCK!

Which leaves me stuck with all this meat.

Meat Sauce

Calling this simply 'meat sauce' might be an understatement. I could come up with something more detailed, but there's so much going on it would have to be a nine word name that includes at least the words ribs, sausage, cinnamon, wine, herb and tomato. It's too much. Cook it, make some pasta. Call it purple polka dot bikini.

The idea for making a sauce came from Martin Scorcese's documentary about his parents, Italian American. You'd recognize his mom from Goodfellas, she plays Joe Pesce's mother who loans him a knife to cut the 'deer' from the front grill of his car.

At one point in the doc, she's making a classic New York Italian meat sauce. Scorcese gives the recipe in the credits, like a proper '70's auteur.

The Sauce:
Singe an onion & a pinch of garlic in oil.
Throw in a piece of veal, a piece of beef, some pork sausage & a lamb neck bone.
Add a basil leaf.
When the meat is brown, take it out & put it on a plate.
Put in a can of tomato paste & some water.
Press a can of packed whole tomatoes through a blender & pour it in.
Let it boil.
Add salt, pepper & a pinch of sugar.
Let it cook for a while.
Throw the meat back in.
Cook for 1 hour.
Now make the meatballs.
Put a slice of bread, without crust, 2 eggs, & a drop of milk, into a bowl of ground veal & beef.
Add salt, pepper, some cheese & a few spoons of sauce.
Mix it with your hands.
Roll them up, throw them in.
Let it cook for another hour.

This is a pretty standard recipe, time tested and hard to get wrong. I was watching the movie at work the night before our rained out barbecue, so it was on my mind when I was looking at the pile of fresh meat I had in the fridge the next day.

The recipe I used is my version of the classic, the main difference being spicing. I add cinnamon, an idea I picked up from a rib sauce recipe that has long since been lost. Also, I never have spare veal or a leftover lamb neck bone laying around, so my meat selection is always determined by whatever looks good at the store that day.

On this day it was ribs and sausage.

Ingredients

2 tbl olive oil
2 lbs beef ribs
2 lbs sausage
1 cup red wine
1 28 oz can of stewed tomatoes
1 small can tomato paste (optional)
1 medium red onion
5 cloves garlic
5 basil leaves
Salt & Pepper to taste

Rub for the ribs

2 tbl salt
1 tbl pepper
1 tbl cinnamon
1 tbl brown sugar
1 tbl ground chilies or chili powder
1 tsp ground nutmeg

Mix the rub ingredients in a bowl and rub it on all sides of the ribs.

Rubbed Ribs

Put the olive oil in the bottom of a deep pan and heat it over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add as many ribs as you can fit on the floor of the pan. You want to brown all four sides of the ribs, so piling them won't work.

Brown the sausage too.

Flip the ribs until they're brown on all four sides. Tongs are great for this job.

As the ribs and sausage brown, take them out of the oil and drain them on paper towels. Chop them into large pieces. They'll look delicious, like this:

While the meat is browning, chop the onion and garlic. When all of the meat is out of the oil, add the onion and garlic and saute until they're starting to go soft. Add the wine and scrape any crusty bits off the bottom of the pan. Bring the wine to a boil and add the chunks of meat back in, simmering until the wine reduces a bit, about 10 minutes.

Chop the canned tomatoes, reserving the juice from the can. Add the chopped tomatoes and juice to the meat, along with the tomato paste, if you want it. The wine can be too strong for some people, the paste goes a long way toward cutting the acidic taste of the grapes. If you don't plan to add the paste, you should plan on cooking the sauce for a little longer, in order to help it thicken.

Depending on how you like your sauce, some recipes would double the amount of tomatoes and wine and chop the meat into much smaller pieces. The meat is the star of this dish for me, the sauce is a compliment to big chunks of ribs and sausage. A classic meat sauce is more about the sauce with the meat as a filler/flavoring agent. The difference, really, is one can of tomatoes.

With the tomatoes in, add the basil leaves and stir it up. Taste the sauce now and add salt and pepper if you want. I usually also add more cinnamon and dried chilies, some people may prefer to add sugar. This is where you make it your own.

At this point you're pretty much done. Lower the heat and let it bubble slowly for 60-90 minutes while you go tease the dog with leftover bits of rib.

Nala, you want some rib?

That's a yes.

Sit Nala. Good girl!

While the sauce gets acquainted with itself, toast some garlic bread and chop a salad. The salad for this meal was spinach, toasted pecans, sliced pears and goat cheese with a blueberry/pomegranate dressing. A little sweet, but it was a good balance to the hearty, savory sauce.

Oh! Make some pasta, something with big holes.

Shiloh got screwed last time I made beef ribs, and Shiloh really likes beef ribs. This time I made sure he got seconds.

Thanks Martin Scorcese's Mom, great idea.

Recipes I'll Never Cook #2

2009-08-24T22:57:00.002-04:00

This recipe speaks for itself. Found in The Complete American-Jewish Cookbook, 1971 edition. The person who lived in Mike's apartment before him left this behind when they moved out. Perhaps because they tried this recipe and came away disappointed.

Quick Mock Welsh Rabbit

Measure 3/4 cup grated American cheese in a cup. Pour boiling water over it to fill cup. Let stand for 10 minutes in a warm place. Drain water off carefully. Pour the remaining creamy mass over hot toast. Season and serve at once.

Mmm, creamy mass...

This page also features the non-quick, non-mock Welsh Rabbit, which is just white sauce with mustard and cheese, also poured over hot toast. The real prize there is the variations, including English Monkey - in which you use stale breadcrumbs instead of flour in the white sauce. Yum! We won't even discuss the Rum tum tiddy variation.

Bacon candy (candied bacon follow-up)

2009-08-24T22:43:00.002-04:00

In December, Mike (Soup's On) posted about how to make candied bacon. December seems like a more natural time of year to make something like candied bacon, but I was invited to a breakfast-themed dinner party in August, not December, and I cannot be blamed for this calendar accident. Kate Flaim commented on the candied bacon post and suggested trying it with maple syrup. I never ignore suggestions involving maple syrup. I own a maple syrup cookbook, after all.

Since I like just the flavor of maple syrup and just the flavor of bacon, I decided not to go complicating things by using any other ingredient at all in my test batch of bacon candy. Instead, I just fried up a pile of bacon (Superartist-style: throw entire package in hot pan in a mangled heap; stir around, unheaping and reheaping carelessly until it reaches desired crispness), removed the bacon temporarily to a paper towel, and drained off I'd say 95% of the grease. Left some blackened bits and a bit of grease in the bottom. Then I added the bacon back to the pan - and here you could either cut or smash it into little bits for easier candy later, or leave the pieces somewhat whole for a more impressive (crazy) presentation. I spread it somewhat evenly around the pan and poured in a whole bottle of maple syrup, brought that to a low boil and then put the lid on the pan and let it cook merrily away, filling my kitchen with the sweet scent. I wish I could be precise about how long I cooked it, but I don't know - I just waited until it looked like it had reduced by maybe 1/3 to 1/2. Then I poured the whole mixture into a greased cookie roll pan (any pan with edges will do), and popped it into the freezer to set. I recommend keeping it in the freezer until about 15 minutes before you are ready to serve it; the water content of crisp, maple-soaked bacon isn't high and it will defrost to the right temp very quickly. The next day I broke the big, dark golden sheet in half, threw each half into a freezer bag and took it to the party. We busted it up with a hammer and sat around eating the bacony maple bits with huge grins on our faces.

Doing what Mark Bittman says

2009-08-24T22:21:00.004-04:00

It's the last week of August, and three weeks before Mike (you know him as Soup's On!) and Jen and I fiiiiiinally rock The Nation's Triathlon after what feels like the longest training season ever. That means it is the time for salad - taking advantage of the local produce, and leaving plenty of room in the calorie bank for these crazy oatmeal-honey-raisin-cashew-peanut butter "natural power bars" we've been eating after workouts (and after dinner, and whenever one of us opens the freezer and sees them sitting in there being delicious). But anyway, back to the salads. In July, Mark Bittman of the New York Times published a lovely article of 101 Simple Salads for the Season. You should click on the link just to admire the pretty salad pictures, if nothing else. I'm so taken with this article. It's all arranged by types - vegan or easily veganable, seafood salads, noodle salads. Nothing complicated but a lot of things that make you say "Why didn't I think of that?" (:Grilled cheese sandwich made into croutons.) So this week four out of our five dinners are coming straight from this article, and three of my work lunches as well. Tonight I made # 60: "Ditto on the tuna [referencing # 59: sear tuna or use good canned tuna]. Mix with chopped apples, halved seedless grapes, chopped red onion, olive oil, a bit of cumin and black pepper." What a lovely, refreshing, easy dinner. I cooked blackfin tuna all the way through because we were a bit uncertain about the source and didn't feel comfortable eating it raw, and it was still great that way. For lunch tomorrow, I'm taking taboulleh - the usual parsley, tomatoes, mint, olive oil and lemon juice - but with chickpeas I just pulsed a few times in the food processor instead of bulgur. Up later this week: apple and fennel salad with "mustardy vinaigrette" (#16), quinoa taboulleh for lunch (#94), sweet, fruity quinoa over greens (#95), and a corn, avocado and tomato seafood salad (#68). He suggests crab meat for the last one and I'm sure that would be better than the random white fish we have in the freezer, but I still think it will work.

Staten Island Hot Dog Magic

2009-07-30T17:28:00.006-04:00

It's Saturday at midnight and I'm at work, woo-hoo!

Luckily they don't expect me to do much at this hour but listen to punk rock radio stations on the internet and type on the food blog. Nice of them, huh?

What did people do before the internet? Read, I guess? Listen to Ramones covers on a tape deck?

Hot Dogs Kick Ass

Potato chips also kick ass, but I never would have thought to combine the two. Leave that to super-genius Mike Caruso, owner of The Gourmet Dog in Staten Island.

One of the best things about Staten Island is riding the ferry. Besides the view, the best thing about the Staten Island ferry is that The Gourmet Dog is right across the street.

I'd never been there, but I was working with Caruso on Monday. He was waiting for us at the dog shop when we got off the boat. Not realizing how close he was, Shiloh and I ended up in a bar right around the corner, eating so-so ceviche and drinking lukewarm beer.

The so-so ceviche I ordered because I didn't realize there was a hot dog shop right around the corner

The Gourmet Dog has all kinds of offerings: chili, hot wings, fries, baked beans, mini-burgers, spumoni & Italian ices, paninis, pretzels, coleslaw. This is the kind of place that considers a knish a side dish.

And it all looked good, but it's not called The Gourmet Dog for nothing.

The Gourmet Dog, with the first good thing I ate that day: The World Famous Crunchy Dog

The World Famous Crunchy Dog

A split grilled dog prepared in our secret sauce, encrusted with potatoe chips served in you classic bun $2.50

from the menu (verbatim)

I'm the kind of dick that notices the typos, but you could call it a Lipz und Asswholes Dawg wit a phat toasted peeece of bred, these dogs were great. A rose by any other name, right?

The bun was butter toasted and the dog was perfect, taut skin, popping with salty hot dog juice. They refused to reveal the secret of the secret sauce, it was good whatever it was.

But The World Famous Crunchy Dog is all about the chip/dog combo, a meal so good and simple a kindergartner could come up with it. Like playing in sand and 'why can't we all just get along', some things intrinsically make sense. This is one of them. I had mine with a little mustard and a lot of 'oh yeahs' and 'that's goods'.

Then we went and worked all day. Not that hard, but hard enough to be hungry when we were done. Which brings us back to point #2 about the Staten Island ferry, as listed above: The Gourmet Dog is right across the street.

Shiloh loved the chili-cheese dog so much he had two more of them that night. Experimenter that I am, I went with two newbies: The Hawaii 5.0 and The Reuben, another brilliant idea from the super-genius.

The Hawaii 5.0

Grilled dog with teriyaki sauce, turkey bacon, pineapples, and chives, served on our fresh baked panini bread $2.50

The Reuben

A grilled dog wrapped with pastrami, topped with sauerkraut, rye bread crumbs, and finished with melted swiss cheese $2.50

My other favorite dog spot is Crif Dogs, they have a dog called The Tsunami that is similar to The Hawaii 5.0, but I'd never heard of anything like The Reuben. Again, I had mine with spicy mustard.

The Reuben sandwich is one of my favorite things about eating in New York. There are diners here that can't cook many things right, but even most of them do a decent pastrami on rye. Caruso's pastrami is laid on the grill and the Swiss cheese melted over it before it goes on the toasted bun, the perfect dog goes next and then sauerkraut is laid on top.

I enjoyed the Hawaii 5.0, but the Reuben was one of the best hot dogs I've ever had. What a weird, brilliant idea. The dog itself is all beef and grilled to perfection as they say, and the add-ons came out of nowhere. I was prepared for a hot dog, but got a great Reuben with it.

That counts as a success in my book.

Belly But Not Bacon Pt 2

2009-07-30T17:21:00.006-04:00

This is the second dish I made out of Pork & Sons, the brilliant book by Stephane Reynaud that was bought for me by the beautiful and talented Ms. E.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've owned this book for over a year but never made anything from it because it made me nervous. It's a little too serious of a book, written by people who are connected to the history of butchering and preserving meat in a way I'm not. It's visually amazing, and the hard cover is slightly padded, giving the book the feel of a picnic table with a nice table cloth on it. I don't know why any of this matters, but the book intimidated me.

This is the second recipe I've made from the book, and both of them went just fine. Just like a part of me always knew they would.

Plain and Simple Rillons

Look at that title, who could be intimidated by a recipe that starts with the words 'plain and simple'?

Of course, since I'm not a French pig farmer I'd never heard of rillons. Clearly I'm not the only one - they included a definition at the bottom of the page:

Rillons are pieces of pork belly that have been cooked slowly in fat (caramelized) in a covered pot. They are often served at breakfast, or as a side dish or with fruit.

So let me get this straight - take pork belly, already a fatty cut of meat, and cook it, in fat.

Why not?

Pork belly, spiced and cooking in LARD

It's really not bad, if you can get past the reasonable mental block you've built up about cooking things in lard.

The recipe, as with most in this book, is very easy. This is the whole thing.

Plain and simple rillons

Marinating time: 24 hours
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 2 1/4 hours

SERVES 4

2 1/4 pounds fresh pork belly
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 teaspoon Quatre-épices (see recipe below)
2 cups fresh lard
3 tablespoons sugar

Cut the meat into 2-inch cubes. Place them in a bowl, add the salt and spice, mix well, and let marinate in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

Melt the lard in a large pan. Add the pork and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, until lightly browned all over. Lower the heat and simmer gently for about 2 hours, until tender. Stir in the sugar and cook, stirring frequently, until the meat is caramelized.

The rillons can be eaten hot or cold.

From Pork & Sons, page 170

Okay, not so bad. Turns out the Quatre-épices is easy too.

Quatre-épices usually includes four or five spices, but here's a blend that includes all five. The recipe is a suggestion only: these proportions are typical but the spice blend can be varied to suit one's own palate. Put all of the following in a spice mill or blender and process until evenly ground. Store in a cool, dark place: 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup) white peppercorns, 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg; 1/2 teaspoon (about 12) whole cloves; 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon; 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger.

First of all, I would put that in almost anything. To think that this spice combination is a suggestion in a pork book makes my little heart flutter.

I marinated the meat and cooked it slow, just like the book said. I thought this dish would be similar to the confit, but the difference in spices and the difference between cooking in lard and cooking in wine were more significant than I originally thought.

The rillons cooking, mostly done

When they were finished I fished out a few pieces and ate them with peaches, like they suggested.

Rillons and peaches

Later we had some with strawberries -

Also tasty

I don't know, I'm not sure how to describe the rillons. They're good and meaty. Like the confit, I immediately noticed how different it was to be eating chunks of belly meat that were mouthful-sized instead of sliced thin like bacon. The rillons aren't as soft as the meat in the confit, but a couple of small chunks goes a long way. They're actually very good served alongside fresh fruit, a little dry/salty with wet/sweet combo that fits my snacking fetish to a T.

Cold rillons in, that's right, an inch deep puddle of lard

The picture in the book shows a few rillons in a basket, obviously cold. And here's the thing - a couple of them are clearly still coated with a little of the lard. What am I supposed to do, it's not like I won't give it a shot.

Final verdict is that a bit of lard on a cold rillon adds a little lubrication, not to mention some flavor. Fuck it right? Considering my attitude toward drinking, drugs, driving fast, biking in Manhattan, and dating, what's a little lard?

Pass the rillons.

Belly But Not Bacon

2009-07-30T01:16:00.004-04:00

A while back I was dating a beautiful genius who went by the name Ms. E. One of the many brilliant things she did was buy me a book called Pork & Sons by Stephane Reynaud.

This is a stunning book with inventive photography and traditional French recipes that I would never conceive of on my own. The author is a third generation butcher and chef who starts the book by describing his first time participating in the butchering of a whole pig at age 7, comparing it to his most recent breakdown, 40 years later. The only difference is the fermenting of the juice that fills his cup on the two days.

In addition to the recipes and photos, the book is also sprinkled with drawings of pigs doing all kinds of human-like activities, from riding a bike and skiing, to having sex and eating delicious pork. It all adds to the charm of the book.

The thing is, this book intimidated the hell out of me. I don't know why, it seems like the perfect gift for a fussy home chef such as myself. But I didn't touch it. I would bring it down and open it up every now and then, but I just never could talk myself into tackling one of the recipes.

Well, enough pussy-footing.

Ribs & Spiced Pork Belly Confit

I bought 8 lbs of fresh pork belly recently, for no reason other than finding myself near the pork store with a mostly empty backpack. Usually the plan would be to cure up a nice hunk of bacon, but for some reason I wanted to try something different this time.

8 lbs of fresh belly, ribs on

The first thing I did was cut off the ribs and cover them in an improvised rub of salt, pepper, dried chilies, coffee, nutmeg and Mexican oregano.

This hunk of meat went in the fridge to rest until the belly was ready for the oven. The ribs were a side issue that day. I had them, I was going to do something with them, but the focus was the confit.

Recipe page featuring a pig with a bucket

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward, so I'll reprint it here in it's entirety.

Spiced Pork Belly Confit

Preparation Time: 20 Minutes
Cooking Time: 2 1/4 Hours

SERVES 6

6 pieces of fresh pork belly, each weighing about 1/2 pound
4 cups white wine
1 tablespoon glace de veau
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon saffron threads
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons brown sugar
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 cup sweet butter
6 large potatoes, cut into thin rounds

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Head a griddle pan, add the pieces of pork, and cook over medium heat, turning occasionally, until golden brown all over. Add the white wine and stir, scraping up any sediment from the base of the pan, then transfer the mixture to an ovenproof dish.

Bring 4 cups water to a boil in a pan. Stir in the glace de veau, paprika, curry powder, saffron, ginger, cumin, sugar, and garlic and pour into the dish. Place in the oven and cook, basting and turning the meat frequently, for about 2 hours, until almost all the liquid has evaporated and the pork is very tender. If necessary, add more water during cooking.

Melt the butter in a nonstick pan and add the potato rounds arranged in the form of rosettes. Cook over high heat, turning once, until the rosettes are golden brown.

Place a slice of pork and a potato rosette on each of six plates and serve immediately.

From Pork & Sons, pg 246

Now, I always thought the meat and fat were broken down into smaller pieces in a conft, like it was more of a meat and fat jelly than a way of preparing large pieces. But this recipe seemed pretty simple, and there would definitely be wine leftover if I got two bottles.

The only thing I had trouble with was the glace de veau, a reduced veal stock that is a regular feature of French cooking. I didn't have any and couldn't find any that was convenient, so I used pork stock instead. It didn't seem to ruin the dish.

Pork belly in spiced stock, with the first empty wine bottle

When the belly was ready to go, I threw it in the oven, along with the ribs out of the fridge. 2 1/2 hours later it looked like this.

What can I say, it was great. The kitchen smelled like a comfort food factory.

The meat itself was very tender, and because it wasn't cured and sliced, there were big chunks of meat to grab a hold of. There were also long slices of fat that I didn't eat much of, but getting at whole mouthfuls of belly meat was a new experience. I also discovered that there is a layer between the fat and meat that can only be described as meaty fat. It has the color of fat, but it's stringy like meat. It's soft like fat, but not nearly as greasy. It's odd, and I've never seen it in bacon, where the meat/fat delineation is very clear.

All in all, the confit was a success. I've already made another dish from this book, and have 4 more picked out to try as time allows.

Thanks, Ms. E. Pork & Sons kicks ass.

Oh! And the ribs were great. I put some barbecue sauce on them for the last half-hour and jumped in with both feet shortly after they came out of the oven.

Nicely done.

Recipes I'll Never Cook

2009-07-29T03:54:00.003-04:00

I don't know if this will be a repeating thing to write up or not, but sometimes I run into recipes that I know there is zero chance I'll ever cook. I found one recently, walking around the city at 3 in the morning. I walked by a pile of books that someone had thrown out and couldn't help but check them out. And there she was, wet from the light rain that had been falling, Microwave Meats Step-by-Step.

What a weird book, what a weird concept. I carried it with me for a while but finally jumped on the train so I could have some light. This book is amazing, offering up tips for how to nuke the most expensive cuts of meat into brittle balls of gristle.

Most people plan their menus and their food budget around meat. Preparing meat is the cook's most important task, and one of the benefits of a microwave oven. Microwaved meat not only cooks faster, but generally shrinks less and retains more juices than conventionally cooked. Microwaving brings out the full flavor of fresh, quality meat.
Microwave Meat Step-by-Step, page 5

Needless to say, I'm skeptical.

But the greatest thing about this book isn't the gravitas it takes to say all this shit about a microwave with a straight face, it's the combinations they come up with. I've got a lot of old cookbooks with a lot of recipes that Rachel Ray won't be trying to pass off on anyone anytime soon, but some of the pages in this book read like Dada constructions, like the authors were so bored with the available ingredients they were throwing random crap into a casserole dish and going for it.

Exhibit A, one recipe I'll never cook.

Ham, Cheese & Asparagus Loaf!!!

Featuring (drum roll please): ground beef, boiled ham, mozzarella cheese and asparagus! Asparagus?

I would write out the recipe, but it sounds tastier in their fancy old stylee font. Click the photo above for a full size version that you can marvel over yourself. Thank god there's a picture, lest we miss out on the trippy visual.

Blueberry Muffin French Toast

2009-07-25T02:56:00.006-04:00

Necessity is the mother of invention and so on and so forth. Then there are those times that laziness becomes the father of something completely different. Innovation? That may be stretching it, but these muffins were great.

Blueberry Muffin French Toast

Picture this - a half-dozen left over Jiffy blueberry & raspberry muffins from a batch I made to compliment something I can't remember cooking. I had one box of blueberry, one box of raspberry, mixed them together and voilà! Muffins that are good as long as they're hot.

Leave them on the counter for a couple of days, however, and they're stale. Meanwhile, I have three eggs left over from a bake day with Weezy, a swallow of milk that didn't make it into the coffee I was drinking and part of a stick of butter. And some Pick-a-peppa sauce, but that's irrelevant.

Suggestions?

Three neglected muffins, suffering from rigor mortis.

The solution - blueberry/raspberry muffin french toast. Genius, pure genius. And one hell of a way to finally bring a little equality to the whole muffin top/muffin butt debate. All parts are equal when dipped in eggs and fried in butter.

Ingredients

6 leftover muffins, cut in half horizontally
2 eggs
1/2 cup of milk
Cinnamon to taste
Butter for frying

This is as basic a french toast recipe as I can come up with. For regular french toast, do the same process only with stale white bread, cinammon raisin bread or croissants. The bread doesn't have to be be stale, but where we call the dish French Toast, the actual French call it pain perdu, lost bread. It does soak up more of the egg mixture if the bread is drying out, so the pieces are a bit egg-ier and more substantial. And you bring bread back from the brink, it's a win-win. The fact that I used blueberry muffins should give you some idea of the flexibility of the recipe.

First melt a bit of butter in a skillet over medium heat. Combine the eggs, milk and cinnamon in a bowl and mix well.

When the skillet or griddle is heated, dip one piece of muffin or bread into the egg mixture and turn it over a couple of times, making sure it's saturated. Move it from the bowl to the skillet and let it sit until it starts to cook through, 2 to 3 minutes. Repeat the process until you're out of bread.

When a piece has started to cook through, flip it over and let it cook for 2 to 3 minutes on the other side. This is usually sufficient to cook a piece completely, but you should judge it for yourself, depending on the heat of the stove and your preference for harder or softer eggs.

The final french toasted muffin halves, topped off with a leftover homemade chocolate sauce from some stuffed cupcakes I made with Weezy and a side of scrambled eggs. This isn't the kind of thing I could eat very often, but it made for a decadent 'nothing left in this house to eat' meal.

Quickies

2009-07-24T23:35:00.003-04:00

These are some brief but notable items, and a quick recipe for a sharp cabbage dish.

I love the summer. Things have been nice in New York this year too, hardly a day over 85°. I've been to the beach a few times, spent a few late nights wandering through empty neighborhoods, and done a shit-ton of farmer's market shopping.

Besides my standard end-of-jogging stop at the Union Square market, I've been having good luck at stands in Long Island, New Jersey and upstate New York on day trips. Peaches, millions of peaches, peaches for me! I think that's how that stupid song went.

I was riding my bike back from Brooklyn over the Manhattan bridge a few weeks ago and found out that the Chinese set up tables at the base of the bridge on the Manhattan side and sell all of your standard vegetables at about 1/4 the price of the Union Square market. They don't have any of the artisnal stuff, but the basic vegetables are great. They also have a bunch of Chinese fruits and vegetables that I don't know what to do with, but I'll get to it all at some point.

Recent farmer's market haul and a cup with a smiley face. One of my favorite stands had two tables full of Kirby cucumbers that day, so I have pickles galore right now. Besides green garlic, there's also my favorite thing-I-never-knew-about: garlic scapes. They're young garlic shoots as far as I can tell and they're addicting. They're fresh like a scallion but they have a strong, sharp garlic taste with more layers than the bulb.

These are lemon plums, same market, later in the week. I'd never heard of lemon plums, but they had a sign that claimed they were sweet and juicy, so. They were bright yellow all the way through and very good. They were a little bit mellower than a red plum, but not much different.

I ate a couple of them whole and then cut the rest up and had them with blueberry yogurt.

THIS IS THE MY FAVORITE SANDWICH EVER.

Fried pork chunks, fried onions and fried plantains. I saw it in the menu, I almost didn't believe it. It's got a little spicy dressing, I added some hot sauce and a little homemade salsa.

I'm going to start doing write-ups of New York restaurants soon. I'm not sure why I haven't done that before, I write about all the barbecue I eat when I leave the city. To begin with, I'm going to write about the restaurants I usually order from, topped off by a visit to the location.

The place that makes this sandwich is on 8th Avenue, Cafe Havana. They have a killer Cuban sandwich, that's what I heard about the place before I went, it's the only thing I ever order.

Until I saw this completely unreasonable mix of madness. I'm big on mixing the savory and sweet, and I'll take onions with damn near anything. The marinated pork and soft, near-candied plantains are two things I never would have put together. I didn't grow up eating plantains, so I think of them as a dessert. The only problem with the sandwich is the bread. The same thin pocket works for a Cuban because it's filled with flat items and is finished in a sandwich press. In this beast the bread doesn't have anything to grab a hold of. The pork and plantain pieces are too big. I ate it with a fork and slipped into a nice woozy trance state when my arteries spontaneously clogged en masse and blocked the cycling of blood to my brain. I immediately ordered another one when I woke up six hours later.

No-Mayo Spicy Summer Slaw

This is another version of the farmer's market picture, but look at the black roots in the lower left, by the cup. Black radishes. Never heard of such a thing.

I love radishes, I used to eat them with my grandpa on my mom's side. He liked red radishes, raw horseradish, prepared horseradish. But I don't remember him eating black radishes.

This booth also had heads of red and green cabbage, so I figured a slaw was in order. I got one of each, a bunch of red onions, a bunch of carrots and two red bell peppers. I needed prepared horseradish for one of the pickle batches I was doing anyway, it wasn't too complicated from there.

The black radishes were good, not as hot as a red radish and a little softer to chew. I can never figure out how to cook a radish, and the same goes for black radishes. But they were great in this slaw, adding to the substance and flavor without overwhelming anything.

Ingredients

Salad

3 medium black radishes
substitute one bunch of red radishes if you aren't blocks from a radish nerds root stand
1/2 head green cabbage
1/2 head red cabbage
1 large red bell pepper
2 medium red onions
4 carrots

Dressing

1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup grainy prepared mustard
2 tbl prepared horseradish
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
2 tsp crushed dried chilies
Salt & pepper to taste

Grate the radishes and carrots in a food processor and cut the cabbage halves into quarters, then cut them into shreds. Quarter the onions and slice them thin, then cut the pepper into small chunks. Mix the vegetables in a large bowl.

To make the dressing, combine everything in a clean jar and shake it up. Pour it over the salad and mix. Delicious, spicy slaw, with flavors strong enough to stand up to the cabbage base without having to soak it in mayonnaise.

Semper Fi, MF'er!!!

2009-07-24T23:14:00.014-04:00

Oh the places you'll go. I took a job on a Marines commercial recently, agreeing to drive a truck full of camera gear to Parris Island, South Carolina, work for a week in a swamp, then turn around and drive the truck to Providence, Rhode Island. The job turned out to be 12 days surrounded by very sincere southern Christians, even more sincere young Marines and people who have chosen to live in Los Angeles. I got in trouble on the first day for wearing a shirt with George Bush sucking blood from the neck of the Statue of Liberty. Isn't that what the Marines are supposed to be there for, to protect my right to wear that shirt? Obviously, that argument got no traction.

Politics aside, you know I brought Road Food, right? An indispensable book written by Jane & Michael Stern, who write the column of the same name for Gourmet magazine, I have the 7th edition. It's not like it's hard to find good local food when you're traveling, but this book has never steered me wrong. Plus, having the book handy helps you avoid emergency breaks at a rest stop Hardees because you're convinced you can't make it any farther on an empty stomach. I find that the assurance of a solid barbecue joint down the road makes those hungry miles pass by a lot quicker.

I tried to provide links to websites when the restaurants have them, but every place listed in this posting is near I-95. If you're traveling on that highway and want to stop at any of these restaurants, you should be able to get directions from the highway if you call 411 and get the number for the establishment. I had to call most of them to make sure my GPS wasn't going to send me under any short bridges in the truck and they were all very helpful. Except for that one lady, who shall remain nameless, that gave us the wrong instructions THREE SEPARATE TIMES. It was like she was throwing darts at a list of possibilities.

Road Food by ~~Jane &~~ Michael Hull

Of course, after saying all of that, the first place isn't in the book.

The trip started with a great omen: the best burger I've had on either coast, by a long shot.

The White Mana Diner, literally the first American Diner in what we now consider the Classic style, anywhere in the world. This is the building that premiered at the 1939 New York World's Fair as the "Diner of the Future", now relocated to New Jersey, the current Diner Capital of the Known Universe. In fact, there are even more diners in New Jersey than in this paragraph!

The White Mana Diner, holding it down

They had another bad-ass old school sign at the entrance to the parking lot that was advertising 10 burgers for $10. Something about the building, the old lettering on the signs and the bizarre offer of 10 burgers all at once drew me in. What's weird is that the place is in Jersey City but I never knew about it. I lived in JC for five years, and while this is the kind of place that you need a car to get to, and I never had a car, it still seems odd that I'd never even heard of it.

The place was deserted when we walked in, quiet, especially compared to the din of Highway 1 & 9 right outside. The cook was a short man with a dark mustache, sitting in his greasy apron reading the Daily News. It smelled delicious.

We ordered the 10 cheeseburgers with two fries and two cokes to go. I went outside to take some pictures and wait. I didn't want to get my hopes up that these would be the flat, greasy, unappointed burgers that I grew up on, but if they were, I didn't want to watch them being built. I just wanted to bust open the bag and be faced with the amazing problem of figuring out what to do with five cheeseburgers.

There were three places within a ten minute bike ride of the house I grew up in that sold similar burgers and fries to the same people year after year. One place had chili and onion rings, the others didn't, two of the places had seats, one was strictly takeout, but they all relied on thin patties, thin grilled buns and tiny pieces of grilled onion for 80% of their business. Cheese, crinkle fries and root beer dominated what was left of the kitchen, the only way fast food was ever meant to be served.

The closest burger most places have is a slider, but the burgers in Wichita were twice that size at least and never had the anemic, plastic quality that usually defines slider meat. The burgers in New York are goofy, dramatic constructions that invariably come on a massive roll. The burgers in LA all have lettuce, tomato and Thousand Island dressing on them, three things that were never meant to be mixed with the sizzle of a greasy burger grill. You run into interesting burgers on occasion, like pizza and sex, it's good even when it's not that great. But the way they did it on 13th Street felt like the way it was supposed to be done.

Well, that's how they're doing it at the White Mana. My truck partner walked out of the place already holding the bottom of the bag so it didn't rip out from the grease. The burgers were perfect, a little smaller than the Wichita burgers, but I had FIVE OF THEM. I ate three while driving a 16' box truck through rush hour traffic from Jersey City to Secaucus, New Jersey, a narrow, winding, pothole strewn hell road that I barely paid attention to. I killed the other two within five minutes of hitting the parking lot at our last pick up, and we were on the road. They were long gone before I realized I didn't get a picture. Ah, the Bigfoot of burgers, the White Mana Diner.

Okay, to the book! The first Road Food sanctioned stop was Philip's Continental Lounge in Richmond, Virginia. In a funky little brick building on a block of bars, restaurants and shops, Phil's is a good example of the Stern's interest in local ambiance. It has that comfortable feel of a good college bar, but they have onion rings and homemade limeade.

A favorite haunt of students at the University of Richmond for seventy years, Phil's is famous for outsize sandwiches ranging from grilled cheese to Reubens and Reuben variants. The turkey club is tall and ravishing and the hamburgers, while not at all fancy, are diner delights, especially when topped with cheese and accompanied by an order of brittle-crusted beer-batter onion rings or French fries. Crunchy pickle wedges come alongside.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 198

I'm sold.

I would get drunk here.

They must be doing something right.

We walked in and there's a long bar, checkerboard tile on the floor and the smell of a place that serves beer. They were talking up the turkey club pretty good, saying it was the 'best turkey club you'll ever put in your mouth'. I'm still not sure what else you'd do with a turkey club, but I figured I'd take them at their word.

I don't know if I'd call it 'tall and ravishing', but it was the best turkey club I've ever put in my mouth. It's hard to see in the picture, but each layer was so thin and soft that the whole thing melted into your mouth at once. With most turkey clubs you're eating it in sections, some turkey here, bacon there, a bit of lettuce that falls onto the plate. This sandwich was built out of small bits to meld into one experience. Look at the layers of lettuce and ham - present but not obtrusive. I realize I've gone off the sandwich superlative deep end, but this was a truly great sandwich.

I also had the onion rings, crispy, fat, homemade, and the limeade, tart, bright, also homemade. Worth every minute I spent playing video game bowling while we waited for our food.

My truck partner got the cheese steak and fries. He seemed happy, but he didn't talk much for the first 1,000 miles, so I could have misread his reaction. It smelled good.

Of course, barbecue is the prize when you leave New York. It used to be barbecue and proper Mexican, but there have been so many good taco joints open in Manhattan in the last three years that now I get my fill. There's even a taco truck that sets up two avenues from my house, excellent tacos and tortas, and they have horchata. I walked by it a couple of times before stopping, but the line is always made up of Mexican immigrants, so. Not that hard to figure out.

New York has gotten it's fair share of barbecue restaurants over the last few years too, but I haven't been to one yet that compares to the gems scattered across the South. Barbecue in New York mostly means ribs but they never have that smoke flavor that comes from spending hours in an old outdoor smoker. And the sauces aren't much to write home about. And the sides are usually awful, pasty imitations.

In New York, eat the Greek and the sushi. In South Carolina, stop at Maurice's.

Maurice's is a local chain that I'd never heard of. The book didn't have anything of note in the direction we were heading for quite a stretch, but this place was sitting right off the highway, near a handful of gas stations, a big box store and some fast food septic tanks. They had numerous signs that said 'Best Ribs In Town'. I'm willing to call that bluff.

This is a fine, fine sauce.

Pretty standard Southern barbecue menu, focused on the pulled pork, your choice of tomato or mustard based sauces. They had a few oddities like pig faces, but I chose to keep it simple and order the biggest thing they had: the Big Pig.

#1 - Big Pig®
Maurice’s Favorite Dinner!
Half a pound of pit-cooked BBQ Pork, 2 large tender BBQ Ribs, Carolina Hash over rice, homemade cole slaw, hushpuppies and dinner roll.
From the menu

The Carolina Hash was very good, using bits of shredded pork that were as soft as mashed potatoes. I'm always a fan of hush puppies, the slaw was a little sweet for me but served it's purpose and the pork was moist. Hell of a score for what was supposed to be a gas-n-go stop.

The Big Pig - we call him Mike

Don't forget the ribs that came with it.

I asked the cute blond girl behind the cash register some questions that were better suited for kitchen help and, in return, got a very charming story about the Black guy that tattooed her mother with a Confederate flag and some kind of 'South Will Rise Again' slogan. She seemed genuinely surprised that such a thing could happen. For some reason this story was her response to finding out we were from New York. Free association is awesome.

We were hurrying to get to the training base at Parris Island, so that was all the eating we had time for. The week in South Carolina was hot and insanely humid, but the catering was actually very good. My favorite thing about catering in the South is that they always, without exception, have a cooler of tea and a cooler of lemonade at the end of the serving tables, offering a ubiquitous lunch time drink: the Arnold Palmer.

At the end of the week, we packed the gear back in the truck and headed for Providence, Rhode Island. Of course there was barbecue on the way back up, in the form of Dixie Bones, another Road Food sanctioned stop.

Dixie Bones was pretty fantastic. It's in the DC metro area, I'm not sure what the distance is from the city. It's right off of I-95, so it isn't hard to find.

Cooked at least a dozen hours over smoking hickory logs, the meat is velvet soft, served in sandwiches heaped on a platter with such side dishes as Laura's favorite macaroni salad, French fries, baked beans, limp greens, and a terrific item known as muddy spuds. That last item is chopped-up baked potato dressed with barbecue sauce.

Dixie Bones offers three kinds of Carolina-style sauce (tomato-sweet/vinegar-tangy), the hottest of which is not incendiary. In addition to boneless pork, there are ribs sold by the rack and half-rack, pork sausage, beef brisket, pulled chicken breast, and fried catfish fillets.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 195

I'll take one of everything, wrap half of it for the road.

In fact, this is what I got, fat boy combo numero uno for all I know. I wasn't impressed with the sides - the beans were straight out of a can from what I could tell, and the muddy spuds were limp and uninteresting. Potatoes and barbecue sauce are not each other's best compliment.

But the meat was spot on. I always enjoy a smoked sausage when they're on the menu and the Dixie Bones sausage was damn good, just spicy enough to keep my attention without causing drama for the next 10 hours I was in a little cube. The ribs came dry and a little crunchy on the outside, but soft and greasy in the middle. They were great.

And, it has to be said, the people working at Dixie Bones were very nice, very welcoming. We stumbled in wet from the rain and funky from the truck and the lady at the door damn near hugged us on the way in. That has to be worth something.

One thing they do in New England that nobody I knew in Kansas even considered is eat seafood for breakfast. I'd heard of bagels & lox, but never understood what all the hoopla was about. I've seen many variations on the seafood for breakfast theme now that I've lived here for most of my adult life and it makes a little more sense. Seafood in Wichita when I was growing up meant fried catfish from the river or tiny frozen shrimp that had been breaded and fried until they were crispy all the way through. Not very inspiring and definitely not breakfast material.

I still can't get over a feeling of nausea when people mention the vile tuna melt, so my compromise with traditional New York eating goes like this: I'll continue to sample seafood for breakfast as long as I never have to see or touch another tuna melt. I get along well with most foods that seem indigenous to this town, your Reubens, knishes, pizzas and falafels. But the tuna melt is not my friend. Tuna from a can should be served cold, if at all, end of story. I had to make hundreds of these things in my days working in kitchens, and most of them had melted American cheese on them! Oof. Yuck.

All of this is prelude to how I ended up with the crab omelet at Kitchen Little on the way back to New York from Rhode Island. I didn't plan to engage my compromise that morning, but I did, and it was a good decision.

This is Kitchen Little from the outside. It has, in fact, a very little kitchen.

This is the back seating area at Kitchen Little, with sturdy picnic tables in a gravel yard next to a huge lake. A lake. Eating breakfast, drinking coffee, in the morning, next to a lake. I could do this everyday.

Look at the specials that day. Kielbasa, chorizo patties, avocado tomato or Portuguese OR lobster Benedict, Fresh Apple Cornmeal Pancakes!

But, let's not get carried away. Go to the book.

Because this little eating hut has exactly twenty-three indoor seats, including a handful at a counter with a view of the closet-size kitchen, plus a handful of picnic tables ona deck out back, you must expect to wait almost any day, especially on weekends. If the weather is pleasant, the delay can be delightful. There are a couple of wood-slat benches out front under a tall pole topped with the U.S. flag, and the steel-blue water lapping up against the grassy shore just beyond the cafe is hypnotic.

"AM Eggstasy" is the house motto, and the omelets are stupendous, as is the Mystic Melt, which is eggs scrambled with crabmeat and cream cheese served with raisin toast on the side. There are Benedicts, heart-healthy egg-white omelets, and sizzled-crisp corned beef hash. If you don't come for breakfast, there is a whole menu of fried clams (strips or whole bellies), a beautiful hot buttered lobster roll, and a half-pound hamburger, plus excellent clam chowder. It is southern New England style chowder - creamless, steel-gray, and briny - a great winter warm-up meal.
Road Food, 7th Edition, pg 12

I got the Mystic Melt. I think it was the raisin toast that sold me.

I used to have plates just like that. It looks like I cooked this.

Anyway, it doesn't look like much, and you can't see the crab or the cream cheese in the picture, but this was the best seafood for breakfast experience I've had yet. The eggs were cooked soft and the cream cheese was mostly melted, so the whole thing would surrender as soon as you got it in your mouth. The sweetness of the crab and the cream cheese went great with the raisin toast, the coffee was strong and hot. This was a fantastic breakfast and another perfect example of the ambient factor that the Sterns appreciate so much.

And, we didn't have to wait.

I'm driving from Washington the state to Washington the DC in a few weeks, definitely bringing the book along. I managed to catch three of their recommendations on this trip and they lived up to their usual standards. Thanks again, Sterns!