two. ate.

This past Monday, Jan left an avocado on the counter with a note that said, "Have a 'cado on your salad if you want...". Monday are usually our salad nights because it's sometimes a late day for me and dog training classes at night for her. I snickered at the word-play of her note but wasn't in an avocado mood so I left it alone. By Friday, it had gone all bad inside it's skin and was put out to pasture. However, I felt just bad enough that I decided to make *something* with avocado and it just had to be a hand-chopped burger...

The theme was bacon-avocado burgers but with a twist. Instead of bacon, a thin but very crisp slice of pancetta. Instead of avocado mush, a "ring" of avocado. And instead of caramelized onions...um, well caramelized Maui onions.

I usually buy a New York "cut" steak (with a bit of extra fat) which is not the same as a New York steak for some reason. It is not as expensive and surely not as tender but for a hand-chopped burgers it does nicely.

My "hands" in the operation is a small food processor in which cut up chunks of the aforementioned meat and extra fat are placed. Pulse 10 or 12 times and voilá, "hand chopped" burger meat.

OK, onto the rings of avocado. I found a baby-huey-shaped avocado which allowed me to cut off it's bottom about 1/4" into the seed. The trick now was to extract the seed. I used the tried and true "whack it with the sharp edge of the knife and pull up" method which worked to loosen the seed but it was now like an ungainly eyeball rolling around in a socket (yeah, yeah, not appetizing but one has to be descriptive to get the point across).

I stabbed the seed with the pointy end of the knife and slowly pulled it out. What was left was perfect for slicing "rings" of avocado. Inside those rings was a perfect compartment of a small pile of the caramelized onions.

So you get the drift...sear/cook the burger, toast the egg-bread rolls pressed into duty as buns, stack burger, pancetta, avo, onions, a grinding of black pepper and dinner's served. Oh yeah, and I flash-fried some long and thin pieces of yam for a twist on ye olde French fries as well. Nice.

Posted by wjc at 11:36 PM | Permalink

Alright, it's late and I smell vaguely like lobster. Strange? Read on...

After the McFaddens left, I proceeded to take all of the cooked lobster shells and grind as many of them as I could into small bits along with two pounds of fresh creamery butter. What a freakin' mess. Ok, I knew how messy this was going to be but I never quite get used to the fact that the shells and butter get EVERYWHERE. After 20-30 minutes of grinding and smashing, we're ready to cook.

Except for the smashing and grinding of shells, lobster butter is pretty simple to make. After you have scooped the large mass of itsy-bitsy shell fragments and butter (which, by the way, looks suspiciously like salmon mousse...) out of the mixer bowl, you put them into a large oven-proof pot (so that the butter mixture fills the pot half-way or less) and gently heat until the butter is liquified. See, easy.

While the butter is melting, you heat your oven to 250 degrees. Once the butter is melted, you take the pot and put it into the oven for about a hour checking every once in a while to make sure the butter isn't browning (or burning).

After an hour, you take the pot out of the oven and pour enough hot water into the pot to bring the liquid level to 3/4 full. Then you let it cool for a while. What the water does is allow the shell fragments to float to the bottom of the pot and the butter to float on top of it. When it's cool enough to put in the fridge, do so. Chill until the butter is solid. When it's chilled, you should have a pot-sized hockey puck of butter that will be a deep orange-coral-red color.

Once the butter is solid, pry it out of the pan, blot off any excess water and put it into a saucepan to re-melt it. (You can discard the water and shells now...) Strain the melted butter through a piece of cheesecloth and put it back on the heat on the lowest setting to drive off some of the excess water. Strain it again to remove any other particulate matter and let it cool in the fridge.

I usually soften the finished butter and roll it into sliceable logs then freeze it. Since there is very little (if any) water in it, it freezes indefintely but it tastes so good you'll probably want to make another batch in a month or two. One caution though, the butter is very favorful and a little goes a long way...

Posted by wjc at 12:45 AM | Permalink

We had been meaning to invite the McFaddens over for a post-wedding celebration dinner so tonight we finally got it together. Ok, it was really also just a gigantic excuse to make a couple of pounds of lobster butter. More on that later.

About a year ago, I received a Saturday afternoon call from Tom. He said that he was making lobster butter and he was sad to inform us that we had to come over and help he and Carol eat the three gianormous lobsters that he had chillin' (heh) in the fridge. Needless to say, we did our grim duty and feasted. So we used the same excuse on Andy and Suszi...

I thought Andy also might like to know how to dispatch and split a lobster with ease so he could cook for his lovely and talented wife so I set up a little workshop. It all went well until it was Andy's turn to "do" the lobster. It seemed that the lobster had it's eye (er, tail actually) on his finger and when it came time to do the deed, it curled reflexively ('natch) and his thumb was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ouch. I should have fired the professor that taught the class...er, oh, that was me. No matter, one dinosaur band-aid later and the grilling and feasting went back on schedule!

Once split, the lobsters were cleaned of their digestive system(s), slathered with last year's batch of lobster butter and some parsley. The hot charcoal grill awaited the cloyingly tasty looking crustaceans and it was on!

The four of us managed to eat about five pounds of lobster without incident. We lingered, chatted, ate some more, unwrapped gifts and ate some more. Sated. Satisfied. Content.

To be continued...

Posted by wjc at 10:25 PM | Permalink

Yesterday was Tom's 2003 Summer Party. Along with the usual enormous amounts of food came another realization: the ratio of profiteroles per person needs to go WAY up.

Actually, Friday was the sausage making day and we pushed 10 pounds of pork-beef-italian-spiced sausage meat through Tom's sausage "horn" to make some nice, fat (as in plump) links. Those turned out very nicely after about 2 1/2 hours of smoking.

I'm not even going to try and describe everything that we made but will say that the "Five Ways To Sunday Spicy Ribs" were very innovative even if we filled everyone up with the first batch of smoked-rosemary ("Carol's") ribs. Those were delicious too. Someone asked me to describe the Five Ways flavorful beauties and I really couldn't remember the exact details so I said this:

1) The ribs were marinated in something hot.
2) The ribs were then dry-rubbed with...something hot.
3) The ribs were smoked over Tabasco barrel wood which used to contain...something hot
4) The ribs were mopped with...something hot (well, Tapatio hot sauce and water)
5) The ribs were accompanied with a very hot jalapeno sauce which looked one hell of a lot like pesto.

Were they unbearably spicy? Nope. The fifth way definitely put them in the brow-sweat category but you wouldn't believe richness of the overall flavor. Little zings of hotness darted in and out of the smoky, moist meat. Heh, it puts most porn to shame...

So...those profiteroles were gone in about three minutes. It looked like there were about 60-70 of them and one second they were there, the next second completely surrounded by hungry guests and the next second...gone. The rabid guests "found" the backup tray of the delictable treats and restocked the serving plate themselves. There were three sauces for them as well: vanilla, chocolate and carmel. I swear that when they profiteroles were gone that people were drinking little cupfulls of the sauces. Amazing.

Posted by wjc at 10:05 AM | Permalink

The REALLY bad thing about work is that it is, for me, often all-consuming. That means nothing gets done around the house save for the bare essentials. That also means basic survival cooking if even that and we have done lots of that at home in the past 6 weeks. When it's too much to get a home-cooked meal together, we'll opt for something cheap and fast. Now, we don't eat fast food or anything like that--when we go out it's usually to a place where there is either a certain amount of comfort or homemade food. Neighbourhood taquerias, any Chinese/Vietnamese/Korean food places where I'm the only white guy in the place and so on. But even then, going out later in the evening is usually difficult because of the long work day and/or places choosing to close at a regular hour.

So now, the work crunch has been over for a week and things, cooking-wise, are getting back to normal. Last weekend, we took our touring motorcycle (a BMW K1200LT) north of San Francisco for a little pre-flight of a longer trip we intend to take later this year. It dawned on us just about the time we got to Mill Valley that the Johnson Oyster Company was in the area. The chase was now on.

We tooled up past Stinson Beach and headed for Inverness. After a wrong turn (my fault and Jan made sure that I turned around real quickly), we were headed for Point Reyes. The sign said about 17 miles to there and I thought that the oyster company was there. It was getting late for lunch, I was getting cranky and tired from being in the saddle so long. However, just a mile or two into the trip to Point Reyes, our Mecca sat staring us in the face: the access road to the Johnson Oyster Company.

I don't know what I was expecting but I was hoping for a sit-down place where we could slurp some freshly farmed oysters and relax. Alas, it was not to be. They had a fairly large facility and one smallish shack with a bunch of freshly harvested oysters and a couple of refrigerated cases. No real place to sit down, no drinks, lots of dust and sand. However, the trip's worth soon became evident.

You can buy their oysters in bulk (in their shells) and packed in jars. Lots of people in line ahead of us were buying fairly large bags of the tasty morsels. But WE needed them raw and NOW. Fortunately, they had what they called a "oyster cocktail" which was 3-4 "extra small" oysters in a small plastic cup. We ordered two and were directed to a small table where there was plenty of sauce in both quantity and variety plus forks and napkins. We were all set.

The moment I had one of those delectable things in my mouth, I knew that I had the best tasting oyster ever. A few minutes later, I was back in line for another cocktail and a pint jar of extra smalls. The taste of these oysters was exquisite. Extremely clean, a hint of brine, a nice little firmness that gave way to a foie gras-like taste and texture. You really didn't need sauce but their homemade tomato-based one complimented nicely. They were, in a word, fantastic.

Johnson's is apparently the only "approved" oyster farming company in Northern California (and maybe the entire state). It's on Drake's Bay which is also apparently some of the least polluted water on the California coast. I think that this is why their oysters taste so good.

We had our jar of gold packed in a bunch of ice and carefully put it into the motorcycle's side pack for the trip home. This past week, we both had at the jar in the form of "kaki fry" which is the Japanese style of breaded and quick-fried oysters. Jan took that one and they were delicious. Today, I made a basic gumbo (see one of the recent previous entries for a recipe) but substituted some fish stock, used a smoked bratwurst, some medium shrimp and about 12 of Johnson's oysters. That turned out real well too...the trick being putting the oysters into the gumbo about 10 minutes before serving and heating very gently so they'll cook but not break. I'll use the rest tomorrow for a classic appetizer of Oysters Rockefeller.

Posted by wjc at 09:25 PM | Permalink

This month's theme dinner was about to be "diet" food but that was quickly scapped for a much less intense theme: A-P-R-I-L. That was...of the five dishes we all make, each of the letters of the month April had to be the main ingredient in the dish. Hmmm...interesting.

We (Jan and I) drew dessert and the letter "L". We thought immediately of lavender and lychee ice cream with a lemon bar but ended up with a lime tart with a lavender sweet tart crust.

The crust was a butter-based crust out of the trusty Fannie Farmer Baking Book with about three small handfuls of dried lavender mixed in. It wa fragrant and I'm glad I thought I used too much because baking drove out some of the scent and left it nicely scented (as opposed to intensely scented...)

The filling was a simple 5 egg yolks, 14 oz. sweetened condensed milk and about 10 tablespoons of lime juice. Beat the yolks, stir in the milk, stir in the lime juice, pour into the pre-baked crust and 20-25 minutes later the filling is set enough to eat. We cooled it, of course, and garnished with thin lime slices...

Posted by wjc at 07:13 PM | Permalink

OK, I have been bad for not writing as much as I want or should...gumbo day was at least two weeks ago but that's the way it goes...

I made another huge-ass pot of gumbo from some of the barbecue meat from the recent meat-fest and it turned out really well. I think that gumbo is easy and difficult all at the same time. Easy because in the end, it's just a lot of simmering. Difficult because making roux is a pain in the ass and there's lot so choppin' going on with what with meats, vegetables and what-have-you.

This time, I broke the cooking up into two stages that I'll call Day One and Day Two. Since I was in a slight rush to make the dish for the last Gourmet Club dinner (see the entry above...), I did the chopping and roux'ing on Day One and got the gumbo cooked to the point where it had a chance to simmer for about 30 minutes. Day Two was all about simmering the deep brown mix for dinner. The result of letting the pot sit for a day was a deepening of flavor and a nice rich taste. Here's what I did:

Wm.'s Basic Gumbo
Part 1:

  - 1 lb andouille sausage, cut into bite-sized pieces. (or 1/2 lb andouille and 3/4 to 1 lb of barbecued-smoked pork shoulder or 1/2 lb tasso (cajun spiced ham), cut all of these into bite-sized pieces )
  - 1 chicken cut into pieces (or five leg-thigh combos cut into two pieces each)
  - Oil for frying/sautéing

Part 2:

  - 1/2 cup flour
  - 1/2 cup oil (canola or vegetable, not olive oil)
  - 1 yellow onion, chopped, medium-dice
  - 1 green bell pepper, chopped, medium-dice
  - 2-3 ribs celery, chopped, medium-dice
  - 3-4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  - 2 quarts chicken stock (or 1 1/2 qt chicken stock, 1/2 qt brown or pork stock)
  - 2 Tablespoons Creole seasoning (see below)
  - 2 bay leaf
  - 1/2 bunch of italian parsley, chopped/minced
  - 3 scallion tops (the green part), chopped medium-coarse
  - Salt and pepper for seasoning, to taste

Creole seasoning:

  - 2 1/2 tablespoons paprika
  - 2 tablespoons salt
  - 2 tablespoons garlic powder
  - 1 tablespoon black pepper
  - 1 tablespoon onion powder
  - 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
  - 1 tablespoon dried leaf oregano
  - 1 tablespoon dried thyme

Cook Part 1:

  - Heat a deep, heavy pan with 1-2 Tbsp oil (medium-high heat)
  - Sauté sausage (only) for 5-6 minutes and reserve.
  - Brown chicken well (skin-side down first to render the fat) in same pan (same oil and fat sausage) and reserve.
  - If using other meats, sauté lightly to soften and reserve.
  - Discard the oil and fat from the previous steps and clean the pan.

Cook Part 2:

  - Heat the 1/2 cup of oil in the same pan over medium-high heat for 1-2 minutes
  - Add the 1/2 cup flour and stir until the flour is mixed with the oil.
  - Reduce heat to medium-low and cook flour until it's a medium brown color ( a brown roux ), stirring regularly so the flour doesn't burn. This will take from 20-50 minutes so be patient...the darker brown the roux, the better.
  - Add onions, celery, green pepper, garlic to the pan and stir/toss for 5 minutes. The roux will become sticky and attach itself to the vegetables.
  - Add Creole seasoning and continue cooking for another minute.
  - Add stock and stir to incorporate then add all of the reserved meat and the bay leaf and half of the parsley.
  - Bring to a simmer and simmer at least 1 hour on low heat, stirring occasionally. (I usually simmer for 90-120 minutes then let it cool overnight in the fridge then heat and simmer it for another hour before serving. However, you can serve it anytime you want, it will still be pretty flavorful...I also take the chicken pieces out and debone them. You can do this before serving too. Or not.
  - Just before serving, check seasoning and stir in the green onions. Remove from heat at this point.

Serve over long-grain rice and top with remaining parsley. The consistency of the gumbo should be loose-thick-ish soup consistency. If it's too thick, thin it with a bit of water or stock. The rice should just barely swim in the gumbo...

Posted by wjc at 07:00 PM | Permalink

A guy that I work with (hi Patrick!) was telling me about a recent culinary experience which involved eating scrapple. I don't remember just where he got it but from what he described, it didn't sound anything like what I understand scrapple to be. He said that it was a runny mess of corn mush and pork (lips and assholes) which had an overwhelming semi-rotten taste to it. OK, it sounded like he got a bad batch (or maybe frozen-too-long) of processed scrapple. He and his roommates all were slightly sick from it.

I described what I perceived scrapple to be and told him that I would prove to him that it was actually the tasty breakfast treat that it's purported to be. Not that I actually believed that it was something to go out of one's way for but I wanted to give it a shot. Plus, I had about 5 pounds of pork trimmings left over from our barbecue and when you've got pork, you might as well try making scrapple.

Last night, I gave it my best shot. I researched it and found some thoroughly complete recipies replete with scrap-pork meat and pork liver suggestions. Hmmm...what to do. I didn't have any of those--I only had some good meat to use. Bummer. I guess it would just have to taste good...

I made a nice, rich pork stock from the trimmings on Sunday and had shredded the meat I used for the stock and had the stock cleanly de-fatted. I was set. All I needed was some corn meal and my spice rack. I used:

- 1 1/2 quarts of the pork stock
- 2 cups of corn meal
- approximately 2 cups of the shredded pork, chopped into small bits
- three slices of bacon chopped and crisped with the bacon fat reserved
- salt, pepper, dry mustard, paprika, sage

This recipe was a amalgam of an old Jeff Smith (Frugal Gourmet) recipe and a Paul Prudohmme one--both of which had elements of what I thought would taste good in a mixture such as this. So...off to the lab.

The stock was boiled, a small combination of the spices ("to taste", heh) added, and the corn meal stirred into it slowly to avoid lumpiness. After cooking it down a bit (15 minutes or so on medium heat, stirring all the while), I added the pork and lowered the heat to low and stirred ocasionally to keep anything from sticking. I added the bacon and the bacon fat at about the 15 minute mark and continued for another five minutes.

I was surprised that it tasted real good although I adjusted the seasoning a bit more. I poured it into my paté terrine, smacked it down to get rid of any air pockets, covered it with some plastic wrap and got it into the fridge for a bit of ye olde over-night chilling action.

This morning, I took the scrapple out, unmolded it, sliced off a small piece and it still tasted good (even though it was cold--too lazy to heat up a pan before work...). I brought half of it to Patrick and he'll give me a report next week. For me, I'm having mine sliced and fried in a bit of butter with some soft fried eggs on Saturday morning.

Posted by wjc at 10:37 PM | Permalink

So...yesterday, we decided to have a large shindig and our first barbecue for 2003.

A while back, I bought a New Braunfels Bandera barbecue/smoker. It's a beast of a rig with a separate fire box and chimney-like smoking chamber. I don't use it nearly enough partly because I figure that as long as I'm burning wood, I should at least fill the thing to the brim with meat. The Bandera can hold one hell of a lot of meat and we can't possibly consume that much in a week. However, if people are coming over to help us consume then I'm happy to fill it.

Most of the stuff I ("we" actually with Jan, tom and Carol) did was pretty standard.

Here's what meat went into the Bandera:
- a 12 lb beef brisket
- three pork shoulders (about 3-4 lbs each)
- eight racks of ribs (about 24 lbs total with trim and ends)
- four whole chickens (2-3 lbs each)
- a bunch homemade sausage (2-3 lbs total)

The brisket, the pork shoulders and four racks of the ribs were dry rubbed. The other half of the ribs just salt and pepper. The chickens were brined with a brine-beer-garlic mixture. The sausages were simply oiled. I got up at 5 am to start the fire. The brisket and pork shoulders were first to go in. The ribs went in at 7 am. Chicken at 9:30 am. Sausage at 2 pm. The brisket was pulled last nearly 11 hours later at 5:30 pm. The rest of the meat was out by then and resting in an unheated oven.

The brisket was fantastic. The 11 hours of slow cooking was worth it. The pork shoulders were a close second an were served "pulled" Carolina-style. The chicken also came out very well. The ribs suffered from being a bit to close to the heat source (pecan wood) and were a bit too cooked. That resulted in some pretty tasty "burnt" ends that a handful of people "found" on the kitchen counter. Some of the ribs were pulled early in the day, wrapped in foil or parchment and placed in an empty ice chest. We hit them with some glaze to break down the slightly singed surface. That actually did a lot to smooth out the taste. The sausage (brats, italians, polish) were decent as well.

The apps and sides were:
- vegetables with a dijon-sour cream-dill dip
- a cheese tray (6 cheeses including Cotswold--my favorite--plus purple seedless grapes, cashews and crispbreads)
- smoked-barbecue'd beans (in the smoker at 10 am, out at 3 pm)
- a lentil salad with a dijon vinegarette
- a huge green salad with red onions, cherry tomatoes and Tom's "lazy" vinegarette
- lots of French bread

Pretty standard stuff--lots of cutting and mixing and arranging. The beans were the absolute hit of the night. They are cooked in the smoker so they soak up lots of flavor from both the smoke and the sweetish-hot sauce mixture that they are mixed with. The resultant deep maroon pot o' pleasure was all but licked clean early on in the evening.

For dessert:
- a fairly gigantic peach cobbler with sweet dough crust

This was fun to make (as all cobblers are) and the peaches, for being early in the season, were decent. The sweet dough is a variant of Queen Ida's version with a bit more egg and a bit less flour. That results in a softer dough although I should have pulled it 10 minutes earlier than I did to get that barely-cooked, pasta consistency, cobbler dough. It still turned out well. After cutting up 12 cups of peaches, it damn well better have...

There's not much else to say except that getting up at 5 am gives one a new appreciation for cooking a huge meal for 30+ of your friends. At 2 pm, I was starting to panic a bit as things were not going quickly as I had wanted them to. Then Tom and Carol showed up and they were very helpful in getting a lot of the extra stuff taken care of--that was very, very cool of them. We ended up having almost everything done at 4 pm--right on time.

Lots of our friends came over and we had a rockin' good time. Jan and Carol set up the patio to fit 30 people (we actually had 34). It was a bit cold so the patio heater we rented ended up being one of the best things we used. Lots of wine and mojitos (Jan set up a small mojito bar) were consumed and we were left with a tankload of beer and soft drinks. Note for next time: less beer, more wine.

My personal goal was to start drinking (as soon as the food was plated) and get sloppy drunk by 7 pm but I actually started around 8:30 and decided that I wanted to stay lucid to enjoy the party.

Posted by wjc at 10:04 PM | Permalink

When Jan and I first met, one of our first dates was at an Indian restauarnt. The only thing I knew about Indian food was that I thought the curry powder in my mom's spice rack smelled terrible--a cross between severe body odor and high spice...

I was reluctant but because I really liked Jan, I went along. I had a red lamb curry and it was pretty good but I was still wary.

Zoom up to 20 years later and curry is a part of at least one meal every week. We usually make it from scratch. Once you start to experiment with spices, there's no end to the combinations you can make.

Tonight I made a red curry chicken which follows a pretty standard method:
- cook sliced onions until lightly colored
- add dry spices and cook as a roux
- add meat or veg and saute
- add wet, pureéd spices to further moisten the roux
- add stock or water and cook until "done" (10-120 minutes)

For dry spices, it was a combination of tumeric, ground corriander, kashmiri chili powder (medium-hot) and garam masala powder.

For wet spices, it was two small seeded roma tomatoes, one hot green pepper, whole cumin seed, a couple of cloves of garlic, a finger-joint sized piece of peeled ginger, and a small teaspoon of cahsew butter all whizzed up in a blender.

I let the whole thing cook for about 90 minutes at a very low simmer then let it cool for a couple of hours before reheating in a smaller pan. It was spicy hot and went well with the lentil salad (homemade) and lentil rotis (bought at a local farmer's market).

Posted by wjc at 12:43 AM | Permalink

The theme of this month's dinner was starters. Appetizers, tapas, noshes. Stuff you eat before you really eat...

Balancing a dinner like this was as tricky as the comfort food dinner from last month in that there was the possibility of having too much of one type of food (starches for instance...) but everything seemed to work out. I think that the fact that two of the group are vegetarians gives us balance by default.

Jan and I made two tapas: patatas bravas and Spanish chorizo crostini.

The Spanish chorizo we made a few weeks ago was done just for this dinner. This tapa was just a variation on something we had at Iberia in Menlo Park which was crumbled chorizo on a slice of French bread. Our version has Manchego cheese in addition to broiled slices of chorizo. Pretty simple: slice all, assemble and broil.

The patatas bravas was a classic that I first had at one Howard's food parties--he's very fond of tapas...it is essentially a roasted potato dish with tomato sauce and aioli. This was also pretty easy to do with oven roasting chunks of potatoes with olive oil in the oven, making a simple moderately-spicy tomato sauce and a batch of aioli. You could cheat and use canned tomato sauce with some tabasco added but I usually make my own.

The aioli is actualy the most labour intensive part so here's how:
- four cloves of garlic
- kosher salt
- two egg yolks
- one cup of olive oil
- dijon mustard
- lemon juice (1/2 lemon)
- room temp water
- white pepper

1. Mince garlic with a pinch of salt and keep chopping until you achieve a paste-like consistency.
2. Add garlic to the egg yolk (which should be in a small-ish bowl) and whisk to break the yolks.
3. *This is the labour intensive part* Start adding the olive oil drop by drop and whish well after every one...after the yolk starts emulsifying you can add the oil in a thin stream. Keep whisking until all of the oil is incorporated. The mixture should be thick and mayonaise-like.
4. Add a bit of the lemon juice and water to thin. The lemon juice will "whiten" the mixture a bit.
5. Add a small (1/4 tsp) amount of the dijon mustard and white pepper to taste

Just make sure to thin the aioli enough so you can have it flow on top of the potatoes. I used a squirt bottle to finish the dish with the aioli. (See below)

I was in a bit of a dilemma with the potatoes--they started to stick to the pan and didn't brown as well as I had wanted them to. They were soft enough so I took them out of the pan, gently so they wouldn't break them too much, and cooled them slightly on another pan. To give them some colour, I dunked each of the pieces into the tomato sauce and then shook them off so they had a thin coat of sauce. I put them under the broiler for a few minutes to dry and set the sauce on them. Now I had the colour I wanted.

Plating was dead-easy. A layer of potaotes down on the plate, a bit of sauce, another layer of potatoes, more sauce then a drizzle of aioli over the whole thing (the squeeze bottle was very useful for this) and some minced parsley for final garnish.

Next month: diet(!) food

Posted by wjc at 01:03 AM | Permalink

The single most greatest thing about making your own sausage is that you get to see exactly what goes into it. No one can say that my sausage is filled with lips and assholes...

We stuffed all of the sausage (that we made yesterday afternoon) into casings this morning using the hand-press sausage stuffer. We had some blowouts (working the sausage down into the casings is tricky business especially if you like a firm pack on the Polish and Brats) which caused some consternation but for the most part it went smoothly. The hand-press stuffer made quick work of each type but it was definitely a two-person operation.

The Brats, Polish and Italian are all "fresh" sausage which means that the meat isn't cooked and only lasts a few days in the fridge. We saved a few of these to eat this coming week but the rest went into the freezer for our big smokeout at the beginning of April.

The French cervelas were stuffed and then tied and poached exactly like a boudin. The Spanish chorizo was baked for 3 hours at 200° and then cooled. These two last about 10 days in the fridge because they're cooked. We froze most of the chorizo and ate the French cervelas tonight. We brought a sample of each to Tom and Carol for lending us the sausage stuffer.

How did they turn out? The French cervelas were very good. We had them semi-cold with some grain mustard and a salad. The pistachios really permeated the meat and lent lots of nuttiness. The one small plate grind seemed to be enough to make that smooth boudin-like texture.

We broke open one of the chorizo and thought they were nice tasting but we'll see when we do tapas mid-month at the next Gourmet Club event.

The Brats, Italian and Polish were all tasted before stuffing (the French and chorizo too) by forming a small patty and frying them. The Polish was the best tasting, the Brats had the best texture and nice flavor and the Italians were pretty good. I was a bit wary of the bulk spices and the Italians proved my fear--I'll do my own blend next time but the Polish were outstanding and I'll use the bulk spice for them next time.

The Brat bulk sausage was very moist (from the milk) and spit a lot in the pan. The texture was near perfect. I'm looking forward to these later in the week.

Posted by wjc at 08:27 PM | Permalink

Late night, time for...soul food. Howard mentioned last week that he was in the mood for fried chicken. I mean real fried chicken. So when he called this afternoon (as I had my hands full of bulk chorizo), I thought that getting out to feed the chickens was right and proper.

Now, I'm sure that there is at least one other good place in the area that makes fried chicken but there's only one place I'll go to *if* I'm not making it myself: The House Of Soul Food in Santa Clara. We were pretty beat from grinding sausage all day and thought it was a better idea to have the nice folks at THOSF make us dinner.

THOSF is a small, side-of-the-road place on Lafayette Street in Santa Clara. This area is mostly industrial buildings and chip-fab plants and so it's a diamond in a rough of silicon and sheet metal.

They have barbecue and greens and cobbler and everything you'd expect from a place that serves soul food (yes, black-eyed peas too...yum...) but the fryer gets all the attention from me...

Between the three of us we got two fried chickens and an order of fried catfish. The chicken is amazing--the catfish even more so (which is why it's my favorite, ranking just above the chicken...). They had hushpuppies tonight (they run out quickly because they're that damn good...) and we got some of those. Sides of beans, macaroni and cheese and slaw made it complete.

Man, what a feast. I'm not supposed to eat quite this much at one meal (can't tax the blood sugar machinery, if you know what I mean and I think you do...) but for tonight it was ok (I brought home leftovers, natch...). The styro-box is calling my name as I write this...

Posted by wjc at 11:09 PM | Permalink

I love charcuterie-based food. Even more, I love making charcuterie-based foods--there's something about working with meat in such a way as to transform it into mixed and/or preserved forms. It's very challanging and rewarding.

This weekend is a sausage-making weekend. This afternoon, we made the start of five kinds of sausage:

  - a French "cervalas aux pistaches" (pork boudin-style with brandy and pistachios)
  - Bratwurst (pork, veal, mace, majoram and milk)
  - Spanish chorizo (smoked pork with lots of spices and red wine)
  - an Italian with bulk spices
  - a Polish with bulk spices

We did roughly two pounds of each. The pork was from both pork butt and pork belly (for fat content). The veal was a bit of veal stew meat. All spices were dried. The "bulk" spices were ones that came in a sausage making kit I ordered online. The kit had a variety of casings plus two plastic containers of pre-made "styled" flavors. The casings were pure pork preserved in salt.

The first time we made sausage, we made 15 bloody (literally) pounds of it. Believe me, that was a PITA. Doing two pounds of each was much more, well...manageable.

The Kitchen Aid mixer got a full workout with grinding being its primary task. I drove to Tom's house to pick up my American Charcuterie book and he asked me to test his newest kitchen toy: a hand-press sausage stuffer. The genesis of this was one particularly grueling day that Tom spent putting finely ground sausage meat back into his Kitchen Aid mixer (w/sausage attachment). Finely ground sausage sticks to everything that it touches and jamming that back into the mixer was too much. Time for some old fashioned technology.

The stuffer looks like cross between a medieval torture device and a Viking horn. You can quickly see its one and only use...getting meat into the big hole and forcing it through the small hole. Elegant.

We just worked through the batches of meat and spices doing these grinds:

  - French cervelas: small plate grind, mix
  - Bratwurst: medium plate grind, mix, small plate grind
  - Chorizo: small plate grind, mix, small plate grind
  - Italian: medium plate grind, mix
  - Polish: medium plate grind, mix, small plate grind

Most of the base recipies were from The Savory Sausage by Linda Merinoff. Additions to (or subtractions from) were all done by cooking and tasting the mixed sausage. All sausage meat was put into the fridge to sit overnight for development and distribution of flavors.

More tomorrow...

Posted by wjc at 06:16 PM | Permalink

Inspired by an Oliver's Twist episode about curry, we wanted curry but we wanted something other than our usual Pasand bowls of curry, naan, pappad and masala dosa. And we didn't want to have to drive very far either...so, Chowhounds to the rescue.

Lots of people recommended The Udupi Palace but several were raving about Dasaprakash in Santa Clara. So, after reading about what we might expect, we pulled the trigger and decided on Dasaprakash.

The restaurant is in an ages-old strip mall in Santa Clara across from where the Santa Clara Main library used to be. In fact, it's right next door to Stan's Donuts which I'm sure I'll be writing about some day.

Dasaprakash has South Indian cuisine which means very few bowls of curry (bonus for our quest) and lots of dosai (crepes filled with vegetable curry), vedus and, my favorite, bajhis.

From the time we sat down, the seemed to be very concerned about whether or not we liked spices. We told them "yes" and that we loved spicy food. They also steered us toward the Thali dinners and combinations but since we both eat moderate amounts of food, we didn't want to be saddled with full dinners. We basically wanted to graze with a dish from here and there.

It actually got kind of annoying until we said we wanted to order from different sections of the menu and that the best thing the waiter could do was to tell us what was missing from the selection of dishes we chose. They still seemed reluctant to do that but, in the end, agreed.

We ordered:

  a bowl of rassam
  an order of onion bajhis
  a mixed lentil (masala) vedu
  a masala dosai
  a bowl of bisebelebath lentils and rice

The rice was their suggestion...

Everything we ordered was dead-on excellent with spices in complex combinations that it would make your head spin. This is no ordinary Indian food. Well, "ordinary" as far as what we're used to.

The rassam was thin but had substance and not just throat-scorching heat. The bajhis were delicious little disks of onion and lentil batter that went well with all three sauces (tamarind, cilantro, coconut). The mixed vedu were a variety of lentils packed together in small, falafel-like disks which were a bit too crunchy which detracted from their flavor. They were good but not great. The masala doasi was one of the best I have ever tasted. The filling of onion, spice and potato was complex and flavorful and not at all like other renditions which employ frozen (!) vegetables and bland spicing. The bisebele rice was a pleasant surprise as it was a rice/lentil mixture with a very rich and complex set of spices running a thread through every mouthful. It was hot (spicy) at times and fragrant at others. I would order this again.

After our meal, we talked with the owner of this branch of the small chain and he told us that they were very cautious in making sure that people who had never been to the restaurant or that were unfamiliar with the style of food were prepared for the spice level. That's why we were asked so many times before the meal if we were "ok" with spices. They had apparently lost customers who expectations were firmly in the northern Indian food camp with pungent curries and good but not adventurous spices.

Posted by wjc at 10:32 PM | Permalink

One rainy Mardi Gras night, my friend Amy said that it would be great if her husband Don and I had a home-Iron Chef competition. Bring it on, I said. We never did but the whole concept turned into something that she called "The Gourmet Club".

So now, my wife and I, Amy and Don and three other couples get together on a monthly basis and we cook to a specific theme. It's great fun actually and we hosted the February 2003 edition with the theme "Comfort Food".

Several days before this event, I realized that lots of comfort food (well, at least with this group) was made up of starch and cheese. So, I wouldn't call this the most balanced of dinners. We made an extra dish (chicken pot pie) to give some sanity...the dish we did plan to make was good old fashioned (sort of) macaroni and cheese.

Before last weekend, I had never made this from scratch. I didn't eat much of the boxed kind either except when I was camping. So, it was an education or sorts.

Tom clued me into what turned out to be the key to really tasty mac and cheese: don't pre-cook the macaroni. Yes, I know it sounds insane but it really works. Here's what'cha do:

  - 9-10 oz of your favorite macaroni or pasta
  - 2 cups white sauce (2 TBSP flour, 3 TBSP butter, make a white roux with the flour and butter, add 2 cups of heated milk to pan offheat, return to heat to just simmering)
  a bunch of your favorite cheeses (fresh asiago, cotswold, cheddar, gruyere are a few I use) about 1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cups depending on your cheese needs
  - butter
  - white pepper, salt for seasoning
  - some sort of topping that will crisp up (optional), I used fresh bread crumbs whizzed up with a bit of butter to make (duh) buttered bread crumbs

  0. Heat oven to 375°.
  1. Buttter a baking dish (I use a ceramic high-sided oval casserole dish)
  2. Grate/crumble the cheese
  3. Make the white sauce.
  4. Stir in cheese into the white sauce (save some for the top at the end) until sauce is smooth and cheese is melted. Then add about 1/2 cup of milk to thin the sauce slightly. Taste and season as necessary.
  5. Pour pasta/macaroni into baking dish.
  6. Pour cheese sauce over pasta and stir until pasta is coated.
  7. Smooth the top and evenly spread the remaining grated cheese over the top.
  8. If you made a crispy topping, put that on now.

Bake for 20-45 minutes, depending on if the dish looks cooked or not. How can you tell? Dig in a grab some and taste it. If the pasta appears to be "cooked", it's probably done. Don't want to ruin your masterpiece? Look for a thin dark brown ring around the top of the baking dish where the cheese sauce has shrunk away--it you see that then it's probably done.

Posted by wjc at 05:19 PM | Permalink

This blog was originally called "food porn". That name was inspired by my friend Carol who once used that term to describe my cooking. Well, not excatly my cooking alone...

You see, I cook. A lot. And sometimes with my friend Tom (see his link on this page). Carol is his s.o. and she commented once that Tom and I (as well as the other guys who cook with us) don't merely cook food, we create "food porn".

Nice compliment. Most of the time, I'd rather look at food than porn anyway.

However...after thinking about it, I decided having the name "porn" in the title was too easy and way too joke-y for a subject that I take great pride in. I thought at length what cooking terms are my favorites.

"Charcuterie" is my absolute favorite cooking term and indeed, making sausage and other items in that realm is one of my favorite things to do but I couldn't come up with something ultra clever using that word.

Then I flashed upon the one thing any chef ends up setting up when cooking: a "mise en place" (say 'meez-ahn-plass'). "Mise en place" is a French term for "put in place" and refers the various bits of starter, garnish, and often-used items while cooking. Mine often looks like olive oil, kosher salt, chopped shallot, garlic, black pepper (in a grinder of course) and other stuff to make my life easier when either prepping or cooking off a dish. It's stuuf that is either at my immediate left or right so that I can stay centered and in front of the task at hand...

So I had it. The writing here is a collection of items that are hopefully and ultimately useful to whoever is reading them. Hopefully, one of the "meeeez" you use will be this one. Cheers.

Posted by wjc at 04:53 PM | Permalink