Category: Cucina

The New York Times puffs specialty salts as the major new secret ingredient of chefs in the know. What a bunch of hooey. Everyone knows salt is where it’s at. Even a simple home cook like me has four different kinds of salt in the kitchen—regular Morton’s table salt and kosher salt for dishes I don’t care about or cases where I need fine salt (I don’t have a salt grinder), a can of La Baleine Sea Salt for intermediate uses, and a bag of Flower of the Ocean sea salt from the Baker’s Catalog for truly advanced recipes.

Okay. Maybe I just made their point.

Tonight (the second night after our dogs’ spaying and neutering) neither of us wanted to cook much. On the other hand, there were the remains of an eight-pound ham shank in the fridge, calling out to have something done with it. Something had to be done.

Lisa went to the store and came back with farfalle and asparagus. A bag of frozen peas came out of the freezer, and a sprig of sage from the garden. I steamed about 2/3 lb. of asparagus while I cooked onion in olive oil and a little butter until it was translucent and slightly browned around the edges, then browned diced ham and added minced sage. When the pan showed signs of browning in the bottom, I added a splash of an excellent Oregon pinot gris, then added the peas (still frozen) and the asparagus (steamed, chopped into 1-inch pieces), and added a little more olive oil.

We ate the ham, asparagus, and peas over farfalle with a little extra olive oil (or butter), sea salt, and grated parmigiano reggiano. I doubt this was an original recipe—I’ve probably eaten something like it before in a restaurant—but it was put together with no guides but our senses and experience, and turned out really well.

Dinner tonight, improvised: lamb chops with rosemary, garlic, and sea salt, in our grill pan, with oven roasted potatoes in olive oil with more garlic, rosemary, and sea salt.

Is garlic a sublimity for everyone or just for me? Is it a cultural thing, a biological thing, or what? I know that for me it’s not a childhood taste or anything; I love my mother’s cooking dearly, but garlic in the cuisine of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is nonexistent—or powdered. Never roasted. Never diced on lamb chops, or sliced thin and roasted on top of a bed of sliced potatoes.

And rosemary? That’s for remembrance. (Warning: stupid college dating story ahead.)

Two months away from graduation, I had a talk with my then-girlfriend that ended in us agreeing that we needed to be apart. I was okay with it. The next day we had scheduled a cookout with our friends outside my Lawn room, on my little hibachi. We decided to go ahead with the cookout.

The next morning in her apartment I marinated chunks of meat and vegetables in rosemary, Worcestershire, black pepper, onion. That afternoon shish-kabobs on the hibachi. After everyone left I sat by the hibachi on the ground, threw whole rosemary sprigs on the coals and breathed in the fragrance. It was then I knew that I wasn’t okay with it. It took a long time to erase the hurt. But rosemary’s remembrance can be cleansing too.

Last night, Lisa and I took it easy on dinner (after a holiday week with ham, turkey, seven fishes, pork tenderloin, and stuffed flank steak), with a “light” dinner of lemon risotto and grilled shrimp.

Tonight, by way of compensation, we, um, went whole hog. I wanted to use lentils and pork, combining southern and Italian traditions. But I didn’t want to do pork for the main meat. So the final version: Leg of lamb, lentils with pancetta and prosciutto, and asparagus. The lamb was rubbed with garlic, rosemary, olive oil, lemon zest, and sea salt and roasted medium rare; the asparagus, steamed, then dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. The lentils took a little longer. I rinsed them in cold water and drained them, then cooked pancetta and some prosciutto (aside: prosciutto ends for less than $5? priceless), added onions, stirred in the lentils, then slowly cooked them while the lamb roasted.

With a 2002 Bordeaux from Rothschild: fabulous.

And, omiofriggindio, am I heading back to Weight Watchers after this is over. Although, I only gained a pound and a half over the holidays.

My in-laws decided to compensate me for my trip in coach with a special meal, so they purchased some pork tenderloins at Costco. (Because I eat pork chops, which she despises, Lisa thinks my favorite meat is pork.) We dumped them, still mostly frozen, into marinade (hoisin, soy, peanut oil, and sugar) after Monday night’s turkey dinner, and let them sit overnight.

Last night, we started putting them on racks to cook, and discovered the Immutable Law of Costco: things never come in manageable packages. What we had both assumed (and had seemed, when frozen) to be plastic packages containing a single tenderloin each contained two instead. So instead of three tenderloins, which would have fed seven, with enough left over for subsequent meals and dog-bribery besides, we had six.

But roasted for thirty to forty minutes in a 350° oven, with brown rice in broth with scallions and stir-fried broccoli with garlic and hot pepper, they were still excellent. Now we just have to figure out what to do with the leftovers.

It has been a lazy holiday day—well, lazy if you don’t count housecleaning and some desultory day-after-Thanksgiving shopping (at Lowes, so I’m not sure it really counts).

Tonight I repeated the sautéed duck breast recipe from last night (when I bought the breasts from Larry’s, I didn’t realize the package had four breasts, not two. It made me feel slightly better about paying more that $25 for duck breasts). I made one change: instead of doing the apricot sauce, I did a pan sauce with drippings from the cooked duck, onion, fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) from our garden, salt, pepper, veal stock, white wine, and a little butter. It was much better.

We had the duck with some steamed green beans dressed with olive oil, lemon, and sea salt, and the rest of the bottle of the 1993 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino (link goes to the 1994 vintage) that we opened yesterday to taste with the duck teaser. Omiofriggin’dio. So fabulous.

A great thread on Plastic about cooking turkey reminded me of my own favorite poultry cooking recipe. It hasn’t been turkey tested but might just work with the Big T (where T stands for tryptophan). (Note: original recipe published in Cooks Illustrated, but (a) it’s not on line, (b) I don’t have the magazine any more. But credit where due.)

Note 2: I originally wrote about this approach last year. But it being the holidays seemed a good excuse to drag it back out. Or at least that’s my excuse for having no brain. 🙂

The recipe is a high temperature roast, meaning that the meat cooks at 500° F, but don’t be scared. It solves three problems of high temperature roasting (dry meat, uneven cooking, and smoke) by the following easy expedients:

1. Brining the meat (see the Plastic thread for a good discussion of the pros and cons of brining). For a chicken, a really large glass bowl is sometimes the right size to hold the chicken and the water. There are also five-gallon tupperware-esque containers that hold a full chicken and brine. If it’s Thanksgiving, your garage may be cold enough to hold the bird outside. Use a thermometer to make sure you’re not breeding bacteria in your brine. As for the seasoning, I use a quarter cup kosher salt and a quarter cup sugar to a gallon of seasoning, and sometimes add juniper berries or whole peppercorns for additional flavor.
2. Flattening the bird so that all the meat is the same distance from the heat. They recommend doing this by cutting out the backbone of the chicken, spreading it out flat (skin side up) on a slotted roasting pan, and flattening the breastbone by pushing down with the heel of your hand.
3. Great. But at 500 degrees, or more, all the fat from the chicken will drip onto the bottom of the slotted roasting pan and smoke like crazy, right? Not if you put a single layer of thin-sliced potatoes (appropriately seasoned) on the bottom of the pan first.

So: juicy, crisped-skin, tasty roast chicken, and crispy potatoes, all in one fell swoop. And quick: about forty-five minutes if I recall correctly, though since I don’t have the magazine any more I wouldn’t try to do this without my programmable thermometer set to alarm me when it gets hot enough.

<julia>Bon appetit!</julia>

George has had some bad luck with Indian dining. I have higher hopes for the Italian place we’ll be visiting with them on Friday in North Beach (details afterwards; I don’t know ’em).

Meanwhile, we’re discovering the joys of cheap Asian food. Our latest foray was a Vietnamese place in the local shopping center that provided take-out pho for two for less than $15. Although we had figured out how to cook an inexpensive rice noodle and beef dish—a kind of faux pho, as it were—the real thing was impressively rich in flavor…and much quicker than making it ourselves.

I also enjoyed the return of Samuel Smith’s Winter Warmer, which got here early this year. As always, spicy, malty, and full flavored. I’ll try to do a fuller tasting when I don’t have taste buds slightly numbed by pho.

Glimpsed on Off On A Tangent, courtesy the BloggerCon Feedster group blog: Harpoon is now doing a limited series of “one-of-a-kind creations”—specialty brews in 100-barrel lots. The current one is Wit, and an Abbey version has been spotted. Um, waaah.

Redmond’s own Irish-Cajun brewpub, the Celtic Bayou, just took home a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Barbarian’s Best Bitter (in the Extra Special Bitter category, naturally). No tasting notes because you can only get the beer at the pub. Maybe I should swing by again…

Can there be anything more civilized than reading the New York Times’ Dining section on Tuesday night, the night before it makes it into print, and finding the following:

• For a Genius of the Off-Cut, Lunch Time Is the Right Time: variety meats (kidneys, marrowbones, spleen, etc.) on the menu of St. John’s in London, by the author of Nose to Tail
• Hey, Po’ Boy, Meet Some Real Heroes: Italian subs in New York
• Duck Honors Its French Kin: domestic female ducks cross-bred with wild mallard males for incredibly flavorful, rich tasting “Duclair” ducks (named after a variety of duck from Normandy)
• Meet Bourbon’s Cousin, a Real Smoothie: small batch grain whiskey made in Kentucky—not bourbon because not 51% corn

Man. Who needs to eat? Just reading the articles is enough.