Abby & Sam's Kitchen

Ad Hoc Buttermilk Fried Chicken

2011-09-05T14:51:00.001-07:00

I've cooked a lot of dishes out of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home, but, until yesterday, I had not tried to make the book's signature dish, buttermilk fried chicken. I had some buttermilk leftover from a cobbler that I made last week, so the half empty carton provided the perfect excuse to give this recipe a try. It's good. In fact, this recipe produces the best fried chicken I have ever had. I can see why this is the signature dish. The key is the super lemony brine that infuses the chicken with flavor. I also really like how Keller cuts the chicken breast into quarters, so you get a better crust to meat ratio.

If you aren't afraid of deep frying (something I am reluctant to do at home since it makes the apartment smell like frying oil for a few days afterwards), try this recipe. It's been posted about a million times on other blogs and websites, so I won't repeat it here.

Hurricane Dinner Party

2011-09-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

It's been more than six months since my last entry here....I've been busy, and, when I have been cooking, I've mostly been repeating dishes that I've already posted here and/or forgetting to take pictures. Last week, the confluence of friends from grad school coming into town (some moving here, others passing through for a conference) and a hurricane provided the perfect excuse to stay indoors, cook lots of food, drink lots of good wine while we waited out the weather. The theme for this dinner party was Asian, or, more specifically, the Momofuku cookbook, which I have been reading a lot of but not cooking a lot of. Two of the four courses for this dinner were directly from the cookbook, one borrowed an ingredient from the cookbook to jazz up an old favorite, and the fourth dish involved me just cutting up some super fresh fish from Black Salt.

We started out the meal with a trio of raw fish. Here's an action shot of the dishes being prepared.

Here's a finished plate.

In the foreground are slices of ivory salmon (which I had never heard of before I walked into Black Salt looking for fish earlier that day) and king salmon. Being late August, king salmon are at their peak. I love the bold striations on this salmon. The ivory salmon was soaked in lime juice for a couple of seconds, then topped with a Spanish olive oil, smoked salt, and a lime zest. The king salmon was simply topped with some nice grassy tuscan olive oil and a bit of cracked pink peppercorns. The third dish, in the little bowls in the background, was an Ahi tuna poke. To make the poke, I cut the ahi into cubes (about 1 cm) and let it marinate in a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil, and scallions with a dash of rice wine vinegar, and pinch of red pepper flakes. Just before serving, I tossed in some sesame seeds and then topped the poke with some strips of toasted nori.

Next came the veggie course: pan roasted asparagus and grilled king oyster mushrooms with miso butter and slow poached eggs.

Although I don't really like mushrooms, I really like the look of this dish. For some reason, the combination of the mushrooms and asparagus piled on top of the miso butter with the whole eggs has a really rustic, "farm to table" look to it. To make the slow poached eggs, you need to let the eggs sit in 140F water for around 45 minutes. If you were plating these individually (as they do in the Momofuku cookbook), you would spread out a bit of miso butter, artfully arrange the asparagus, and then place the poached egg across the top of the asparagus. In this family style preparation, the eggs would have all slid off to the side of the plate and, when serving, the yolks surely would have broken on the serving plate, leaving all of the yolky goodness behind. When served this way, everyone gets to crack their own egg, which is much cleaner and, besides, its fun.

The third course was miso and sake marinated sea bass with scallions, sunchoke puree, and bacon dashi. Sea bass is something I've posted before. It's a great dish for a dinner party since all the flavor comes from letting it marinate for a long time (in this case, 48 hours), but it is really quick to cook. While we were eating the second course, I just stuck the fish under the broiler for about 10 minutes. You will need to flip the fish about half way through so it cooks evenly and the sugar in the marinade doesn't burn too much. The bacon dashi is a pretty straight forward (and brilliant) recipe from the Momofuku cookbook. Just steep some konbu in water for a few minutes, remove, then simmer some smokey bacon in the broth for about 30 minutes, chill, skim off the fat, and reheat before service. For the sunchoke puree, just peel the sunchokes, boil until tender, and puree in a food processor with butter. Season with salt and pepper. If you wanted to make this really rich, you could simmer the sunchokes in cream.

For the last course, we had steamed Chinese buns that Abby had made earlier in the day (see the freshly formed buns, waiting for the steamer below) with roasted pork belly, quick pickles, and other accoutrements.

Like the fish, the pork belly is a dish where all of the work is done ahead of time. I cured the pork belly in salt, sugar, pepper, and five spice powder for 24 hours, then roasted it at 450F for 45 minutes followed by another 3 hours at 250. Then, I chilled the pork belly over night, sliced it, and reheated it just before serving. Here's a finished pork belly bun.

Asian style snapper baked in parchment

2011-02-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

Baking fish in parchment is a great way to infuse a lot of flavor into the fish. It's also really easy to make, which is an added bonus. Just throw in the ingredients you want, wrap everything in a parchment envelope and roast for about 30 minutes. You can be pretty creative with the ingredients, but keep in mind that the whole concept of this type of cooking is that moisture released from any of the ingredients or generated from any liquid that you add will steam the fish. As such, more aromatic ingredients will probably do a better job of flavoring your fish. For this dish, I added lemon slices, ginger, garlic, cilantro, jalapeno and scallions. I also drizzled the fish with a little soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and sesame oil. Because you don't have to do any complicated prep work, this is the sort of dish that you can have done, start to finish, in under an hour.

Valentine's Day Dinner for Abby

2011-02-19T12:34:00.000-08:00

Seared muscovy duck breast is one of Abby's favorites, so this was at the center of our dinner on Valentine's day. I made a blackberry, rosemary and ginger gastrique to go along with the duck breast, and served roasted sunchokes and roasted brussels sprouts with maple syrup, pine nuts, and shaved parmesan as side dishes.

DUCK w/ BLACKBERRY, ROSEMARY, AND GINGER GASTRIQUE

Muscovy duck breast
1/4 cup blackberrys
Ginger (just cut a couple thin slices)
1 sprig rosemary
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
salt, pepper

Score the skin side of the duck breast, season both sides with salt and pepper. Preheat a pan over medium heat, and add the duck, skin side down. Cook for about 6 or 7 minutes, lowering the heat if the rendered fat begins to smoke or the skin begins to char. The duck will render a lot of fat, so you may have to drain some of it midway through. Turn and cook until done. You can begin checking after it has cooked on the second side for three or four minutes. You can test by feel or, if you just make a little incision into the middle of the duck breast, you can test by sight. The middle should be rare. Let rest for 5 to 10 minutes and slice.

To make the gastrique, add the sugar to a saucepan with a splash of water over medium heat. Eventually the sugar will melt. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally until the sugar just begins to turn a golden brown color. Quickly, add the vinegar and stir to recombine everything. Add the black berrys and rosemary and let the mixture continue to cook for a few minutes over medium to low heat. Add the ginger and let the mixture simmer for another five minutes or so. Remove from heat and pick out the ginger and rosemary. The gastrique should thicken up a little as it cools down, but if it is still thin, just reduce everything until it gets to the desired consistency. Reheat before serving. The gastrique should keep in the fridge for a few weeks and would probably go really well with something like a roasted pork tenderloin.

ROASTED SUNCHOKES

Sunchokes
Oil (grapeseed, canola, or olive)
Salt and pepper
Rosemary and thyme

Cut larger sunchokes in half. Toss with oil and season with salt and pepper and herbs. I used some garlic oil that is the byproduct of garlic confit, which I regularly keep in my fridge. Roast everything at 425F to 450F for 45 minutes to an hour.

ROASTED BRUSSELS SPROUTS WITH MAPLE SYRUP, TOASTED PINE NUTS AND SHAVED PARMESAN

Brussels sprouts (~16)
Maple syrup (2-3 Tbsp)
2-3 Tbsp pin nuts, toasted
Oil
Salt and pepper

Cut the brussels sprouts in half, lengthwise. Toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I used garlic oil, but you can also just throw in a couple of chopped cloves of garlic. Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil, and place the sprouts, cut side down, on the backing sheet. Roast at 425 to 450 for 25 minutes. Remove from the oven and drizzle the maple syrup over the sprouts, using tongs to toss everything together. Return to the oven (the sprouts don't need to be cut side down anymore) and roast until they are done (another 15 minutes or so, depending on the size of the brussels sprouts and the heat of the oven). Once the sprouts are done, toss in the pine nuts (candied walnuts would also be a really good substitute) and then top with shaved Parmesan.

Crispy, braised chicken thighs with oven roasted tomatoes, olives, and garlic confit

2011-01-23T07:56:00.000-08:00

This dish utilizes a couple staples that I like to have in my fridge at all times: garlic confit and oven roasted tomatoes. To make garlic confit, just buy a bunch of peeled garlic cloves at the grocery store, throw them in a small pot, cover with canola oil, and simmer over very low heat until the garlic cloves are very soft and a knife or fork easily slides through them. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up a month.

For the oven roasted tomatoes, cut a bunch of roma tomatoes in half, lengthwise, place them cut side up on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and then scatter some fresh thyme over everything. Roast in the oven over very low heat (~250F) for 8 hours. Store these in an airtight container, covered in oil, for up to a month.

Now, on to this dish.

INGREDIENTS:

(2 servings)

4 chicken thighs, bone in, skin on.
8-10 oven roasted tomato halves.
6-8 cloves garlic confit.
1 cup assorted olives.
2 tsp sherry
1 Tbsp garlic oil (from the garlic confit)
1 shallot, minced.
1/2 to 1 cup white wine.
2 sprigs thyme
salt and pepper.

Preheat a 10 to 12 inch skillet over medium to medium high heat and preheat the oven to 350F. Season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper. Add oil to the pan, and once the oil begins to shimmer, add the chicken, skin side down. It is important to make sure the pan and the oil are adequately preheated before adding the chicken, otherwise the skin will stick to the pan. Let the chicken cook for a few minutes. Periodically, check the chicken by seeing if you can move it around without getting any resistance. At first, the skin will stick to the pan, but once it is cooked enough, the cells in the skin contract and, magically, almost, they stop sticking to the pan. If you try moving the chicken to early, you'll get burnt skin stuck to the bottom of the pan. No good. Once the skin is nice and crispy, turn the chicken thighs and cook for another minute on the other side. Remove to a plate, drain the oil and accumulated fat, reserving about 1/2 Tbsp.

Add the shallots and garlic confit. Cook until the shallots become translucent, then add the wine, sherry, tomatoes, olives, and thyme sprigs (you can leave these whole and remove before serving). A little smoked paprika might be a nice addition to this dish as well, if you happen to have some lying around the pantry. Let this mixture simmer for a couple of minutes.

Add the chicken back to the pan along with any drippings that have collected on the plate. Place the whole thing in the oven, covered, for about 15 minutes. Remove the cover and blast the chicken under the broiler until the skin crisps up again. Alternatively, you could just leave the chicken uncovered in the oven.

This dish goes well with roasted potatoes.

Christmas Dinner

2011-01-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Our Christmas Day Dinner menu featured a prime rib roast, garlic smashed potatoes, brussels sprouts with bacon and apples, and a beet and orange salad, along with some really nice wine from Matthews Estate, provided by family friends.

For the rib roast, I followed the advice given here, and was pretty pleased with the outcome. I let the roast sit out on the counter, covered, for a couple hours to bring it up to room temperature (this helps ensure even cooking), then I cooked it at about 250F until the center reached the desired temperature (about 5 hours), followed by a 15 minute blast at 500F to brown the outside. This approach helps ensure more even cooking and I would highly recommend checking out the link above next time you make a roast.

Christmas Eve Dinner

2011-01-23T06:45:00.001-08:00

For Christmas Eve, my sister and I put together a number of different dishes for a buffet style dinner. Here are a few of the dishes that we served.

Deviled eggs.

Brie en croute.
Mushrooms, sauted with butter, garlic, and thyme.
Braised kale with smoked ham hocs.
And braised short rib sliders with homemade cucumber and onion pickles.

Braised oxtail with gnocchi

2010-12-31T08:41:00.000-08:00

Braised oxtail is soooooo good, and it's pretty easy to make. Gnocchi, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult. There are a number of gnocchi recipes on the web, so I won't put anything specific here, although there are a couple of things worth noting when it comes to gnocchi making. One of the objectives of making gnocchi is to have it as light and "cloud like" as possible. This, I found, involves a trade off in structural integrity and appearance. Basically, the lighter the gnocchi, the more you have to coddle it as you prepare it.
The basic ingredients in gnocchi are potato, flour, and egg. Egg is a binder that helps all the ingredients stay together. More egg, along with kneading the dough more, will give the gnocchi more structural integrity. It will also make the gnocchi heavier. Less egg and less kneading will lead to lighter gnocchi. I tried adding a minimal amount of egg (real pros can get away with no egg) and kneading, and while the gnocchi was very light, the first batch basically fell apart or was squashed into flat little discs when I tossed it in the pan.

Here's the recipe for the rest of this dish.

INGREDIENTS:

-oxtail (~3 lbs)

-1/2 bottle red wine

-1-2 cup veal or beef stock

-1 carrots, diced

-1 stalk celery, diced

-1/2 onion, diced

-1 small can crushed tomatoes or 1/2 small can tomato paste

-1-2 bay leaves

-1 Tbs black pepper corns

-1 clove

-2 cloves garlic, smashed

-1 sprig rosemary

-2 sprigs thyme

-canola oil

-flour

-salt and pepper

Season the oxtail with salt and pepper and dredge in flour. Heat up 1 Tbsp of canola oil in a heavy pot or dutch oven large enough to hold all of the oxtail in a single layer. Sear the oxtail on all sides at medium high heat. Remove the oxtail and add the onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Cook the vegetables, over medium heat until soft. You don't want to brown them.

Add the wine, stock, tomato, rosemary, thyme, bay leaf, clove, and peppercorns and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and place a cheesecloth over the top of the braising mixture. Put the oxtail on top so that it is partially submerged in the liquid, but separated from the onions, etc.

Cover and place in a 250F oven for 3 hours. Remove, the oxtails, strain out the solids in the braising liquid, and then reduce the braising liquid until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. While the braising liquid is reducing, use a fork to remove the oxtail from the bone and break it into small chunks. Toss with the reduce braising liquid and let simmer.

While the oxtail is simmering, heat up a nonstick skillet, add butter, and the gnocchi. Brown the gnocchi, then add the oxtail. Toss everything together and let sit in the warm pan for a minute or so. Place in a serving bowl, garnished with grated parmesan cheese, parsley, and olive oil.

Ramen noodles with ginger scallion sauce, ginger-honey-soy glazed pork belly, and stir fried broccoli and carrots

2010-12-31T08:18:00.000-08:00

This dish is pretty straight forward. For the noodles, I followed this recipe from the Momofuku cookbook, and the veggies were just stir fried over high heat with a little ginger. Here's the recipe for the pork belly:

INGREDIENTS

1 lb pork belly

1 c soy sauce

1 c honey

~2 inch piece of ginger, grated.

5 spice powder

Preheat oven to 225F

Remove skin from the pork belly, rub five spice powder over the surface, and sear on medium high heat on all sides in an oven proof pan. Remove the pork belly and pour off most of the fat.

Add the grated garlic. You may also want to try throwing other aromatics such as garlic, bay leaf, or cloves. Cook for about a minutes, then add the soy sauce and honey. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to make sure everything is combined.

Put the pork belly back in the pan and place everything in the oven and let roast for 2.5 to 3 hours, turning and basting occasionally.

When the pork belly is done, remove it from the oven and reduce the soy-ginger-honey mixture over high heat until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Add the pork belly to the glaze, and turn in the pan so it is thoroughly coated.

Slice and serve with the noodles and stir fried veggies.

Pickles galore

2010-12-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

Finally, a post from DC. A few weeks ago, Liz and Zach came over to make tons and tons of pickles. While it was a fun operation, it left my apartment smelling like vinegar for several days afterwards.

I've actually only opened up one jar so far, but that one turned out OK. Most of the veggies we used came from the farmers' market, which were in their closing weeks here in DC at the time. The checklist of pickles includes typical cucumber pickles, green beans, red peppers, onions, hot peppers, carrots, fennel, radishes and garlic. We also made some jars of mixed vegetables along with some preserved lemons. Hopefully these pickles will make appearances in meals throughout the winter.

Last dinner in my Chicago kitchen

2010-12-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

Here's the last dinner I made in my Chicago kitchen. Tomato salad, braised greens, grilled corn with chile and lime, and grilled steak. It was a bit of an eclectic mix. But it used up the last of the vegetables in the fridge.

The tomato salad was pretty straight forward. Just slice up the tomatos, mix with thinly sliced shallots, capers, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper.

The greens (purple kale) were braised in some pork stock and a smoked ham hoc that had been sitting in my freezer. I also added some red pepper flakes and raisins. The raisins add a nice bit of sweetness and they soak up a lot of the savory flavors from the braising liquid. To make this dish, you want to start by sauting one bunch of sliced up kale along with a few cloves of sliced garlic. Add the stock, ham hoc, raisins, red pepper flakes, and maybe a tablespoon of cider vinegar. Let this simmer for a while (until the greens are very soft), remove the ham hoc, pick off the meat and toss this in with the greens.

I served the corn with a chile lime spread. I made the spread by mixing melted or softened butter with mayo in about a 1 to 3 ratio, and then adding lime juice and Mexican chile powder. Slathered over some grilled corn, this stuff is really, really good.

Eggs in purgatory

2010-12-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

I made this as an appetizer for a going away party Abby and I had back in Chicago. It's a crowd pleaser that's easy to make. Start with a basic tomato sauce recipe, such as the one used for this dish. Add a healthy amount of red pepper flakes to make the sauce nice and spicy.

Once your done with the sauce, pour it into an oven proof serving dish, crack some eggs on top, and bake until just done. Serve this dish with bread. I think it's best when you can brush the bread with some olive oil and throw it on the grill until it gets some nice grill marks on it.

Grilled pork tenderloin with apple cider reduction, grilled sweet potato with rosemary, and wilted escarole with garlic chips

2010-12-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

Here's another dish from back in Chicago. It's been a while, so I don't remember all the details, for the escarole, tenderloin and sauce. The sweet potatoes couldn't be easier though. Just chop up some rosemary, mix it in with olive oil, and toss this mixture together with some sliced rounds of sweet potato. Grill until finished. This is one of my favorite side dishes for summer grilling.

Catching up

2010-12-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

It's been more than three months since I moved from Chicago to DC, but I still have a few photos from Chicago. Most of the dinners I cooked last summer were pretty straight forward preparations of ingredients I would pick up at the Wicker Park farmer's market (btw, I am shocked at how much more expensive the farmer's markets are here in DC). Here is one of those meals: a grilled lamb shoulder chop and roasted carrots with dill. I had made roasted carrots from one of the stands at the Wicker Park market earlier and they were soooo good. Here, I just tossed them with a little dill, olive oil, and salt.

Tasty, tasty goat at Birrieria Zaragoza

2010-08-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, we inadvertently did a tour of Yelp's top Chicago restaurants. That Alinea would be near the top of Chicago's Yelp ratings is obvious, but we had no idea that (as of this posting) Birrieria Zaragoza would hold the top spot. A lot of people have issues with Yelp, and Zaragoza's perch on top of the Chicago Yelp scene has a lot to do with these issues: namely, small, self-selecting samples can hardly be expected to yield reliable results. Leaving aside the sampling issues, though, one fact remains. Birrieria Zaragoza makes some damn tasty goat. And it's a good thing they do, because that's really your only option if you choose to dine there. The menu consists of large plates of goat, small plates of goat, and goat tacos. If you aren't in the mood for goat, you can order quesadillas or tortillas and salsa, but if you aren't in the mood for goat, I have no idea why you would make the trek down to this place.

Zaragoza is a family run place, and everyone working there is super nice and clearly enthusiastic about what they do. So, while the food is great, the friendly service may be even better.

Birria is a stewed meat dish, typically made with goat, that hails from Central Mexico. Zaragoza's version is absolutely delicious. It's not too far away from Midway airport, so it's definitely worth checking out if you need to go there for any reason. The birria (pictured above) comes in a variety of different textures - from crispy to falling apart tender - depending on the particular cut. A plate of goat is served with freshly made tortillas, and it's a good idea to order a side of their salsa

You can eat the birria alone or you can make your own tacos. I recommend the later because the fresh tortillas are so good.

A couple Alinea pics

2010-08-05T09:13:00.001-07:00

While we didn't take pictures of most of the meal, we did manage to grab a couple of snap shots...they aren't great, but I might as well post them. A shot of Alinea's impeccably clean, calm, quite kitchen. It seems like more of a lab than a kitchen.

Here is a picture of the English Pea dish that I liked so much. The dark spheres are "sherry caviar" that explode in your mouth when you eat them. Very cool.

And here are some shots capturing the process for the chocolate dish that they finish with. They start by laying out a rubber or latex table cloth, painting it with white chocolate sauce and arranging chunks of meringue, some type of coconut pudding or mousse, and chocolate disks (in the cups)

Then they spread chocolate cookie crumbs around the table and place these big, freeze dried chunks of chocolate mousse in the center

They smash the mousse into smaller pieces and then add chunks of menthol that are very, very intense....like Altoids on steroids.

And here is the finished product. Quite a complicated dish for something that the menu calls "Chocolate, coconut, menthol, hyssop."

Alinea

2010-08-04T16:45:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, we finally went to Alinea. We didn't get any pictures of the meal, but they probably wouldn't have done the food justice as the light in our dining room was pretty low. Here's a copy of the menu, though.

Each course has such a simple name that belies its sophistication. For example, "Tomatoes" included a number of different types of tomatoes, cut into different shapes with a variety of accompaniments such as a caramelized, balsamic onion, bits of grated parmesan, basil seeds, and crushed pine nuts, to name a few. However, the dish doesn't stop with the food on the plate. The plate is served on top of a pillow filled with air that is infused with the aroma of fresh cut grass. The air slowly escapes as you eat the dish, which manages to combine the summery, fresh taste and texture of tomatoes with a scent that is unmistakably summer. This might sound pretentious, but it works. The level of thought that went into this dish is typical of each course we had.

While it is hard to pick a favorite, I think the standout dishes were English Pea, King Crab, Hot Potato, and Black Truffle. The pea dish was incredibly creative, and I loved how each bite had a different combination of ingredients and flavors that worked together beautifully. The potato and truffle dishes were both single bites that were overwhelmingly flavorful. The King Crab dish was interesting because it presented the main ingredients - crab, rhubarb, lilac, and fennel - in three different preparation: one cold, one room temperature, and one hot. Each one was incredibly flavorful and completely unique.

While I'm typically not a dessert person, the Chocolate dish was also really impressive simply because of its presentation. The chocolate dish is prepared directly on your table, and resembles something like a cross between a moonscape and an edible Jackson Pollock painting. We were fortunate enough to have Grant Achatz assemble the dessert for us. I think my favorite part about the dessert, though, was the fact that they paired it with a port that was older than I am.

I've eaten at a number of really nice restaurants, and it is rare that I have a dish that surprises me. Usually, a dish impresses me because it represents a precise execution of familiar flavors. I know where the dish came from and, given enough practice, I might have been able to come up with something similar in my own kitchen. At Alinea? Not even close. Every single dish introduced completely different flavors and flavor combinations prepared in ways that I never would have dreamed of.

A meal here can be prohibitively expensive, but if you care about food, this is a place worth saving up for. If you're a sports fan, you shell out for tickets if your team makes it to the finals; if you're a food fan, you go to Alinea. This place serves the most interesting, if not the best tasting, food that I have ever had.

Grilled leeks with basil vinaigrette and grilled Mint Creek Farms ham steak

2010-07-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

Here's another meal from the farmer's market. This is a fairly simple dish, so it was a good week night meal. For the leeks, just cut off the dark green parts, cut a slit, lengthwise, down the leeks, leaving a half inch intact near the base, and rinse the leeks. Braise in water with some bay leaves and peppercorns for about 15 minutes to soften them up. Remove the leeks, finish cutting them in half, and then grill for a few minutes on each side until they are slightly charred. Top the leeks with any vinaigrette and let sit for a few minutes to soak in the flavors. I made a vinaigrette from red wine vinegar, olive oil, basil, garlic, and mustard. While the leeks are marinating in the vinaigrette, grill the ham steaks for a couple minutes on each side. Since the ham is already smoked and cured, you only need to grill it long enough to warm them up and add grill marks. As with most other pork dishes I make, I finished them off with some fennel pollen.

My "Go-To" Pasta Dish

2010-07-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

I probably make orechiette with rapini and sausage more than any other pasta dish. This is an easy dish to make, which may be why I turn to it so frequently, but it also has a really nice balance of flavors. Another nice thing about this dish is that you can leave the meat out without losing too much flavor, making it a nice option for vegetarians.

You can make this dish with regular supermarket brocolli, and it is quite good, but I prefer the more bitter rapini, or broccoli raab. This is a classic dish that appears on numerous restaurant menus and on this blog here and here. Because I make this dish so frequently, I have had the chance to tweak the recipe several times. The main difference between this dish and the last version that I posted is the addition of oven roasted tomatoes. In my opinion, the "brightness" and acidity of the tomatoes is a welcome addition to this dish. I've made this iteration of the dish three or four times and am pretty pleased with it, so I thought I should include a step-by-step on how to make it.

First, we'll start with the necessary ingredients. This recipe makes two large servings or four to five servings if it is served as the pasta course for a multi-course meal. If you gather and prep your ingredients ahead of time, assembly is a snap.

You will need 2 cups of dried orechiette, 1/4 cup walnuts (toasted), 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, 3 cloves of roughly chopped garlic, 2-3 oven roast Roman tomatoes, 1/2-3/4 bunch of rapini, 1 Italian sausage, 1-2 anchovy fillets, olive oil, and red wine or balsamic vinegar. You may also add 1/2 to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes if you want to add a little heat.

Start by bringing a pot of water to a rapid boil. Salt the water and blanche the rapini for a little over a minute.

Remove the rapini and rinse under cold water. Set the rapini aside and let it drain in a collander. Bring the water back to a boil and add the pasta (you can add a little oil to the water to reduce foaming in the pasta water). The pasta will be done in about 10 minutes, and you can use this time to finish the other ingredients. First, remove the sausage from the casing and break apart into small chunks.

Cook the sausage with 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 2 to 4 minutes over medium high heat. When the sausage has browned, drain on a paper towel, leaving the oil in the pan. Add the garlic, anchovy, and red pepper flakes to the pan and cook over medium until the garlic just begins to change color.

Once the garlic begins to turn golden brown, add the rapini and the oven roasted tomatoes. Before adding these ingredients, cut the rapini into 1 inch length, and cut the oven roasted tomato halves (you will have 4 to 6 of these halves) into quarters. (To make oven roasted tomatoes, just cut the roma tomatoes in half, length wise, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast in a 200F oven for about 8 hours).

Toss everything together and let the mixture cook for another couple minutes.

Next, you will need to add the walnuts. Make sure to toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan, toaster oven, or oven before using them. This brings out the flavor a bit. If you don't toast the walnuts, they can have a sort of stale flavor to them, so this step is key. Roughly chop the walnuts and then toss them in with everything else.

When the pasta is al dente, add it to the pan with all of the other ingredients along with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the cooking water.

Toss everything together, then add the parmesan cheese, 1 Tbsp vinegar, and season with a pinch of freshly cracked black pepper.

Roasted chicken, carrots, spring onions, and blue potatoes

2010-07-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

A lot of times, you hear cooks say a key to good cooking is to buy good ingredients, and try your best not to mess them up. This was one of those dinners. The farmers markets here in Chicago are in full swing, and just about everything I used in this dish except for the olive oil, butter, and lemons, came from either the local farmers market or the community garden. What I love about the farmers market is that when you buy something like a carrot, you have a huge variety to choose from. The same goes for just about every other vegetable or fruit, including the onions and potatoes I used in this dish. While roasted chicken and root vegetables are typically thought of as a fall or winter dish, the way I look at it, anything I get at the farmer's market is, by definition, seasonal cooking, and it tasted just as good on a warm summer evening as it would on a cold winter night.

Here's the recipe. It could not be more simple.

Brine the chicken (look up your favorite brine recipe online).

Remove from brine, pat dry, and let come to room temperature.

Season with salt and pepper, put a lemon wedge, herbs, and some smashed garlic cloves in the cavity.

Truss the chicken.

Toss the vegetables with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

In a 12 inch skillet, arrange the vegetables and place the chicken on top. Add a few lemon wedges to the skillet.

Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the chicken or place a couple pieces of butter on top of the chicken.

Roast in a 450 to 475F oven for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 400F and continue to roast until the chicken breast is 160F.

Remove the chicken and let it rest on the cutting board for at least 15 minutes.

In the meantime, toss the vegetables in the pan to glaze them, and add any herbs. I used a bit of dill, chives, garlic scapes, and parsley.

Golden beets with beet greens, farro, guanciale, garden herbs and lemon

2010-06-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a recipe for a salad I made using some ingredients I picked up from the farmers market and the community garden this weekend. The main ingredients for this salad are farro and golden beets. I like to use golden beets for a dish like this because they are a little less sweet, so they don't overpower the other ingredients, and they won't stain every other element of the dish red, so the presentation will be nicer. Farro has a nice, nutty flavor that goes well with the beets.

RECIPE

1 cup farro

2-3 medium golden beets with greens

1/4 cup diced guanciale

2 cloves garlic

1/2 cup+1 Tbsp olive oil

1/4 cup lemon juice

2 tsp mustard

1 Tbsp chives, minced

1 tsp mint, chopped

1 tsp oregano, chopped

1 tsp tarragon, chopped

1 tsp dill, chopped

salt, pepper

Srubs the beets clean. Make a foil envelope for the beets, and roast with 1 Tbsp olive oil and salt and pepper. I roasted them for 1 hour at 400F, and I thought they could have used at least another 15 minutes in the oven. While the beets are roasting, remove the thick stems from the beet greens and thoroughly rinse them. Bring about 2 cups of water or chicken or vegetable stock to a boil and add the farro. Let the farro simmer over medium heat for 25 minutes (longer if not semi-pearled). Blanch the beet greens in heavily salted water for about 1 minute. Remove, and immediately rinse with cold water or place in an ice bath. Next, saute the cubed guanciale (about 1 cm cubes) over medium heat to crisp up and render some of the fat. Once the fat has begun to render, and one smashed garlic clove to the pan. Remove the crisped guanciale, and add the beat greens. Saute the greens in the rendered fat until they are tender. Season with salt and pepper.

To make the vinaigrette, whisk together the remaining olive oil, lemon juice, herbs, mustard, and a smashed garlic clove. Season with salt and pepper and remove the garlic cloves.

When the farro is done cooking, drain in a collander. When the beats are done (a knife should slide to the center with little resistance), peel and cut into 1/2 in dice. Combine all the ingredients while they are still warm so the farro and beets absorb more of the flavor from the vinaigretter. Chill or serve at room temperature. This can be made a few hours before serving.

If I make this again, I might try adding toasted almonds or feta to give the dish another dimension. A little bitterness from parsley would have been nice as well, but I was limited to the herbs that were growing in the garden around the corner and, sadly, no one planted parsley this year. I also might dial back the dill a little. Dill has a pretty assertive flavor that can dominate the other herbs in the dish.

Monkfish with grilled asparagus and romesco

2010-06-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here is yet another dish from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. The recipe calls for baby leeks, but since those are hard to find, I went with asparagus instead. I used the leftover romesco sauce from the previous blog post, and then I pan roasted the monkfish with rosemary, thyme, and garlic. I bought the monkfish at Isaacson and Stein, where they just sell whole monkfish tails, and they leave it to the customer to actually fabricate the fish. Monkfish are really ugly, prehistoric looking creatures, and a giant fish doesn't really yield that much edible meat. Monkfish are almost all head and jaws connected to a tail that propels said head and jaws towards its pray. With most fish, you can fillet them fairly easily with a couple quick swipes of the knife down each side of the spine. Monkfish are not so simple. I have seen monkfish fabrication as a challenge on Top Chef before, but I had never actually taken apart a monk fish myself.

To prepare the monkfish, remove it from the fridge about 30 minutes before cooking to let it get to room temperature. Season with salt and pepper, and then sear over high heat in a pan with canola oil for a few minutes (after about 3 minutes check to see if a crust has formed). Add 2 tablespoons of butter turn the heat to medium (you don't want to burn the butter) and, once melted, tilt the pan and baste the monkfish as it is frying. Once one side is nicely browned, turn the monk fish, add a couple sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and garlic along with another tablespoon of butter. Continue to fry/baste for another 3 to 5 minutes until the fish is cooked through and a golden crust has formed on the other side of the fish.

Romesco sauce

2010-06-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

Last week, we had a great dinner with friends at Mercat a la Planxa (definitely get the tasting menu if you go there), and, being a Spanish restaurant, romesco sauce made more than one appearance in our tasting menu. While I've made several variations of roasted red pepper sauces before, I had never actually made this classic sauce. It's pretty easy to make, and, as this dinner shows, it goes well with quite a few dishes. Here, I served it two ways: with asparagus topped with a fried egg, and with lamb shoulder chops.The lamb shoulder chops had been marinated in a vacuum sealed bag with some oil that had been infused with garlic, pepper, bay lead, rosemary and thyme. Both the lamb and the asparagus were cooked "a la plancha" on my big cast iron griddle.

You can look up several variations of romesco sauce online. Here's what I ended up making, based on the ingredients I had on hand.
RECIPE

2 red bell peppers

4 plum tomatoes

1/4 onion

2 piquillo peppers

1 ancho chile

4 garlic cloves

1T red wine vinegar

1T sherry vinegar

1/4 c olive oil

2-3 inches of a bagguette, crust removed, cubed, and toasted.

1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted

1 tsp paprika

salt, pepper to taste

Half and core the tomatoes and bell peppers. Cover the tomatoes, bell peppers, onion, and garlic with some a couple tablespoons of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Roast at 400F for an hour. Let cool and remove the skin from the tomatoes and peppers. Meanwhile, soak the ancho chile in warm water to rehydrate. Combine all the ingredients in a blender and season to taste with salt and pepper. Make sure to toast the almonds, otherwise the nutty flavor of the almonds (which is the thing that makes romesco sauce special) won't come through.

Porchetta with roasted fennel, salsa verde, and smokey pork broth

2010-05-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

During the butchering demo at Mado, the chef described a porchetta dish that they had been running as a special for a while. It sounded so good that I had to give it a shot. Porchetta comes in various shapes and sizes, but it always involve a big hunk of pork, stuffed with something and slow roasted.

Roasted fennel makes a nice accompaniment to this dish. Roasting fennel completely changes it's flavor, mellowing it out and bringing out its natural sweetness. The pork shoulder that I used for the porchetta had a really strong, porky flavor to it, so the sweetness of the fennel provided a nice counterpart. I also added some sweetness to the dish by mixing raisins into the sausage stuffing.

DIRECTIONS:

This dish takes a long time, but the actual active prep time is fairly minimal. Start by getting yourself a nice big pork shoulder, preferably skin on. You can also just use a pork loin, but thats a pretty lean cut, so you'll need to be more careful with your cooking time. If you are using a shoulder, remove the bone (here's where I used some of the butchering tips I picked up at the Mado demonstration), and cut it so that it can be rolled out in one flat piece. Look up a recipe for you favorite pork brine, and let the meat brine over night, or as long as your recipe says it should (you don't want to leave it in the brine too long...I've ruined a couple roasts this way).

I had some pork fat in the fridge, so I used this to make a spread that would add some fat and flavor to the porchetta. I melted the fat and added a few cloves of smashed garlic confit and a bunch of chopped rosemary and thyme. I poured this mixture into the bowls of the stand mixer and then let it sit in the fridge for a little while until it began to set, then I removed it and whipped it into a spread using the mixer. After the pork was brined, I spread this mixture all over the inside, added raisins and a layer of sausage that had been sitting in the freezer since the confit collective dinner, rolled it up and tied it together.

I roasted it at about 275F until the the center of the porchetta was 160F. This took about 5 hours, but the time will vary according to the size of the roast. Next time I do this, I'll probably bring the heat down to 250F and cook it for longer (~8 to 10 hours). I might also try basting the roast more frequently and finishing it with a blast of super high heat. I think it takes a long time for the skin to get crispy, and it was nowhere near edible on this version. At least it looks pretty.

To serve, slice off big chunks, top with a piece of roasted fennel and some salsa verde and serve in a shallow bowl with pork broth.

To make the pork broth, I followed a pretty standard stock recipe, using pork neck bones (which I roasted beforehand) as the meat, but I added the fennel fronds that I had reserved from the roasted fennel and a smoked ham hock, which adds a nice smokey hint to the stock. I let the stock simmer all day, then I reduced it to about 1/3 of its original volume to get a really rich, flavorful broth.

Not only is this dish great right out of the oven, it makes awesome sandwiches. We had a ton of leftover, so we had porchetta sandwiches for lunch all week. Yum.

Black spaghetti with shrimp, soppresata, and green chile pesto

2010-05-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

You can find the recipe for this dish here. It's one of the signature dishes at Babbo. Ideally, I would have used the tastier, smaller rock shrimp that the recipe calls for, but they didn't have any at the fish market. You can get the squid ink pasta here. As I've mentioned in previous posts, they (Maestri Pastai) make the best pasta out there.

Pea, fava bean, and shrimp salad with mint, chives, parsley, and lemon.

2010-05-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

This is more or less a reproduction of one of the dishes we had at the Purple Pig a couple weeks ago...you know a restaurant is good when it inspires you to go home and recreate everything you ordered.

INGREDIENTS:

~ 20 Shrimp, peeled and deveined

~ 2 cups of peas (fresh if possible)

~1 cup of fava beans

2 Tbsp Mint, chiffonade

1 T Parsley, finely chopped

1 T Chives, finely chopped

Zest and juice from 2 lemons

Olive oil.

Salt

Steam the shrimp for about 3 to 4 minutes. Shell the fava beans and steam for about 2 to 3 minutes. After steaming the fava beans, they will be much easier to remove from their skins and perfectly cooked for this recipe. If you are using frozen peas, just thaw them out in some water. If you are able to get your hands on fresh, English peas, boil them in salted water for a little over a minute and then cool them down in an ice bath. You still want the peas to have a bit of a bite to them. Toss together all of the ingredients and season to taste with salt. This should be a very acidic dish, so add more lemon if necessary. The lemon will cause all the nice green stuff to discolor over time, so you don't want to assemble this more than an hour or two before serving. You should serve it cold, so give it around 30 minutes in the fridge before serving.

White asparagus soup with prosciutto chip, crispy asparagus tips, chive blossoms and truffle oil

2010-05-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

I started off our dinner menu with a white asparagus soup. Asparagus is in season and the chives in the local garden were blossoming, so I wanted to come up with a dish that would take advantage of this. I really like how the white soup acts as a blank canvas for the garnishes. It really makes all the individuals pop. It tastes pretty good. The only thing I would change about this dish is the cooking liquid. I had to use chicken stock, but I would have really preferred a crab or lobster stock. I just wasn't able to find any shells to make a good stock with.

In previous dinner parties, I've had issues getting everything done on the timeline I was shooting for and pacing dishes so that they were served at the right time/temperature. This time around, I decided to do a lot of things at the last minute so they would come to the table fresh. To make that work, I had to act more like I was in a restaurant and get all my mis-en-place taken care of ahead of time. Garnishes for the soup are above, and the assembly line is below.

Here's the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

2 bunches white asparagus

1 leek

1 small potato

1 bay leaf

Stock

1/2 cup heavy cream

2 T butter

Various garnishes

Cut off the white part of the leek, cut it in half and thinly slice. Cook in a pot with the butter over medium heat for 1 to 2 minutes. Break of the tough ends of the asparagus and chop into 1 to 2 inch sections. Add to the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, for another 2 to 3 minutes. Peel the potato, dice, and add that to the pot along with enough stock to cover everything by about 1 inch. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Add the bay leaf and let simmer for about 1 hour, until the asparagus is tender. Remove the bay leaf and puree the soup with an immersion blender. Stir in the heavy cream and season with salt and pepper. The quality of the soup will depend a lot on the stock that you use, and if it tastes a little thin, you can try adding more butter or cream, but keep in mind that the garnishes will add a lot of flavor.

The soup is best if you make it a day ahead of time and let the flavors mix. This makes it a great dinner party dish since it is one less thing you can do the day of. Reheat, serve, and garnish with what ever you like. I used crispy asparagus tips that I had reserved from the asparagus salad, prosciutto chips, chives and chive blossoms, and a few drops of truffle oil.

Garnishes:

Crispy asparagus tips - Just toss with olive oil and a bit of kosher salt and roast at a very low heat (180-200F) for about 2 hours. They get nice and crispy and take on a very meaty flavor.

Prosciutto chip - Cook in a very hot pan with a small amount of oil for about 30 seconds to 1 minute on each side. The prosciutto will still feel flimsy when you remove it, but it will crisp up once you let it sit on a cooling rack.

Another big dinner

2010-05-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

Abby and I made another big dinner last week for a multi-purpose celebration: mother's day, parent's anniversary, family friend's birthday. Here's the menu. Some of the dishes (asparagus salad and langoustines) are repeats from the last dinner party we did. I'll post pictures of new dishes separately.

Pig Butchering Demo at Mado

2010-05-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, Abby and I attended a pig butchering demo at Mado. This restaurant is one of those places that specializes in head-to-tail cooking. Every week, they get a whole side of pig from a local farm, that they use to create specials throughout the week.
They sent us home with a sampling of different cuts that included some pork belly (see previous post), a cut from the leg, and a loin chop. Below is a picture of one of the dishes that I made. I made a confit of pork leg by slowly poaching it in rendered pork fat for a few hours, then I seared it and served it over white beans with bacon and rosemary, grilled asparagus, and a spicy aioli. The recipe for the white beans is below.
INGREDIENTS:

2 small cans of white beans.

chicken stock

2 sprigs of rosemary

1 bay leaf

2 strips of bacon, chopped, or 1/4 cup chopped pancetta

1 shallot, finely chopped

6 cloves of garlic confit

salt, pepper

Render the bacon in a saucepan, remove bacon bits and drain all but 2 tsp of the fat. If using pancetta, use some olive oil to cook the pancetta.

Cook the shallot and garlic confit over medium heat for about 1 minute. Add the beans, along with the rosemary and bay leaf. Keep the rosemary whole, so you can remove it later. Add chicken stock to cover, bring to simmer, turn the heat down to low, and simmer for about 30 minutes, partially covered. Remove the rosemary and bay leaf. If the beans are still soupy, turn up the heat to reduce it more.

Spring menu

2010-05-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, we went to the Purple Pig (see a friend's review here), where we had a truly fantastic, seasonal meal full of ingredients like asparagus, peas, ramps, rock shrimp, and fava beans all dowsed in a healthy dose of lemon. That put me in the mode to do a few spring dishes, so, yesterday, we had a couple people over for a big spring dinner. Here's the menu: cannellini bean salad with grilled tuna and endives, a shaved asparagus and pecorino salad, confit pork belly with fennel pollen and spicy piquillo aioli, seared scallops with meuniere sauce, langoustines a la plancha with anchovy and caper butter, minted pea ravioli with shaved parmigiano-reggiano, mint, chives, chive blossoms, and truffle oil, heirloom potatoes roasted in duck fat with garlic confit and thyme, and lake trout, roasted whole with lemon, served with classic aioli and a roasted red pepper, piquillo, and miso sauce. We served it with the following wines, which I thought were all pretty good: 2007 Cellar Can Blau Montsant, 2007 Pio Cesare Cortese di Gavi, and 2007 Domaine de la Villaudiere Sancerre. Yes, it was a lot of food.

We didn't get a picture of the cannellini bean salad, but you can get the recipe from an earlier post.

We got the asparagus salad idea from our meal at the Purple Pig. It's similar to a brussels sprout salad that we make a lot.

INGREDIENTS

1 bunch asparagus

1-2 lemons

Extra virgin olive oil (preferably Tuscan or something with nice grassy notes to it)

Pecorino-romano

Salt, pepper

Break off the ends of the asparagus stalks, slice thin, on a bias. To make slicing easier, keep the asparagus bound by the rubber band that it comes with. Since this is a raw preparation, you want to cut the asparagus as thin as possible so it won't be too tough. Use a mandoline if you have one.

Add the zest and juice from one to two lemons. Add about 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil along with about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of grated cheese. Season with salt and pepper. Add more olive oil and lemon juice if necessary. The amount of lemon to add depends on your preferences. This should have a very "bright" taste to it, so the juice from 1.5 to 2 lemons is probably best.

We got bits of pork belly from a butchering demonstration at Mado, which I'll post more on latter. The recipe comes from Ad-Hoc At Home, so I won't repeat it here. I served it with a spicy aioli that was left over from a yet to be posted meal.

The scallops, along with the langoustines, were impulse buys from our trip to Isaacson and Stein. They had big tubs full of big, fresh scallops and lovely, lovely langoustines. The scallops were given a quick salt water brine, then dried off in the fridge for a couple hours. I seared them over medium high heat in clarified butter. To make the meuniere sauce, simply add lemon juice, capers, and parsley to the butter and swirl around for a minute or so to emulsify the mixture a bit.The langoustines were definitely the highlight of the meal. We first had this dish at Prune, and we've bean wanting it again ever since.

INGREDIENTS

langoustines

butter

anchovies

capers

lemon

salt

Brine the langoustines in a salt water solution (2 cups water to 5 oz. salt) for 10 to 15 minutes and pat dry with paper toils.

Get a cast iron griddle piping hot. It may take up to 5 minutes. Turn your fan on, open the doors and windows. This will create a lot of smoke. Spread clarified butter over the cooking surface and immediately add the langoustines. If the smoke gets too out of control, turn the heat down a bit. Cook the shrimp for about 6 to 7 minutes on each side. While the langoustines are cooking, melt a stick of butter in a small sauce pan. Add about 10 anchovy fillets and crush in the pan with the melted butter until they break up into really small pieces. Add capers.

When the langoustines are done, place them on a serving plate, season with sea salt, pour half the butter over the top, and reserve the other half in a separate bowl for dipping. Serve lemon wedges on the side. Try to contain yourself.

We didn't get a picture of the ravioli. It is similar to this dish, but I added ricotta to the stuffing and took advantage of the community garden that has a bunch of blossoming chives right now.

For the fish, I just used this recipe, but I increased the cooking time to 50 minutes since this was one huge fish. It probably could have used another 10 minutes in the oven. I served it with a classic aioli and a red pepper sauce (you can find the recipe here). I really love this sauce. It goes great with grilled and roasted vegetables and meats and will probably be a staple of my summer cooking.

Handmade spaghetti with ramps

2010-04-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Signs of spring have finally begun to show up in the local grocery stores. The other week, I bought a bunch of English peas at the market, and yesterday, the market had a bunch of ramps.
Ramps with spaghetti is a pretty classic combination, and I think that they go especially well with fresh pasta.

RECIPE (2 servings):

1 cup flour

2 eggs

2 bunches of ramps (about 16)

1-2 strips bacon (optional)

salt

pepper

red pepper flakes

grated parmesan cheese

Form the flour into a mound and create a well in the middle. Add the eggs to the well along with a pinch of salt. You can also add some pepper at this stage if you like. Beat the eggs, slowly incorporating the flour. Knead the dough for about 5 to 10 minutes. Keep adding flour if the dough feels too wet. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest for at least 30 minutes. After resting, roll out the pasta and cut it to the desired width.

While the pasta is resting, bring a large pot of water to boil and add a generous amount of salt. Rinse the ramps thoroughly, and cut them in half crosswise to separate the leaves from the bulbs. Cut the root ends off of the bulbs and wipe off the outer layer of skin on the bulbs. When the water has reached a rapid boil, blanch the root ends until tender (about 4 to 5 minutes). Remove and place in an ice bath to stop the cooking, then let drain in a colander. Blanch the leaves for about 30 seconds, place in an ice bath and drain.

Meanwhile, cook the bacon. When the bacon is crisp, remove and drain on paper towels and then crumble into small bits. Remove any excess fat, leaving 1/2 to 1 tablespoon in the pan.

For the final step, you need to do a couple things really quickly. You don't want to over cook anything, so pay attention to timing here. Make sure the pasta is at a very rapid boil, and add the pasta. Next, add a pinch of red pepper flakes and saute for about 30 seconds over medium high heat. Add the ramps and the crumbled bacon, and saute over high heat for about two minutes, tossing frequently. After the pasta has been cooking for two to three minutes, it will be done. Reserve about 1 cup of pasta water, then add the cooked pasta to the saute pan, and toss thoroughly along with about 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese and pepper. Add a bit of pasta water if the mixture looks to dry, and keep tossing the mixture until everything is well incorporated. Serve immediately.

Paella meets risotto with beet salad

2010-04-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

This dinner was a bit of a pantry raid. I didn't feel like going to the store, but we had some beets, radishes, and guanciale in the fridge and some shrimp and peas in the freezer. I started out thinking I would do a risotto with shrimp and peas, which is something I've made several times before, but then I realized that I had some guanciale in the fridge and a bunch of saffron in the pantry, so I decided to go a different route and make a "paella inspired" risotto. The result actually turned out pretty good.

RECIPE:

-3 to 4 oz. guanciale, diced into 0.5 cm squares (you can substitute pancetta or chorizo)

-1/2 white onion, fine dice

-3 cloves garlic, minced

-1/2 to 1 tsp saffron

-3 sprigs thyme

-1 cup arborio rice

-1/4 cup grate parmesan

-2 Tbsp creme freche

-1 cup peas

-6 jumbo shrimp, shells off and cut into 4 pieces (or an equivalent amount of smaller shrimp)

-salt, pepper

-1/8 to 1/4 cup white wine

Heat up 4 to 6 cups of chicken stock. Put the thyme sprigs in with the stock so that the cooking liquid becomes infused with the thyme flavor,

In a separate, medium sized pot, heat up a little bit of olive oil over medium high to high heat. Add the guanciale and cook until the fat has rendered and you are left with crispy little bits of guanciale. If the oil begins smoking, turn the heat down. Remove the guanciale and drain on paper towels.

Turn the heat down to medium and pour out any excess fat. You only want about 1 T in the pan. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are translucent. If the onions begin to brown, turn the heat down. After about 5 to 6 minutes, add the saffron and continue to cook for another minute or two. Add the rice and cook for another minute, stirring frequently to coat the rice.

Add the white wine, stirring constantly until the wine is absorbed, then begin adding chicken stock, 1.2 to 1 ladel full at a time. Keep stirring the risotto. After about 15 to 20 minutes, begin checking the rice. Keep adding the liquid and stirring until the risotto is done. You want to get the rice to a point where it still has some bite, but the interior is no longer chalky.

While you are cooking the rice, cook the shrimp. Since shrimp are usually previously frozen, they tend to be waterlogged, so to cook them properly, you will need to cook them in small batches in a screaming hot pan. The shrimp will give off a lot of water, cooling the pan down, and it will be difficult to get them to cook right if the pan is too crowded. You may end up stewing or steaming the shrimp instead of searing them, and they won't taste nearly as good. When the shrimp are nearly cooked, add a small pat of butter. You don't want to add the butter beforehand or it will scorch. Drain the shrimp on paper towels and sprinkle a pinch of salt over them.

Once the risotto is done, stir in the grated parmesan and creme freche. This gives the risotto a nice, creamy finish. Season to taste with salt and pepper and stir in the peas, guanciale, and shrimp. If the risotto is too thick, stir in a bit more stock. The risotto should be runny, and not have enough body to stand up on its own.

The recipe for the beat salad is a bit simpler: roast beats, peel and cube, toss with orange zest, some orange juice, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Add sliced radishes and pieces of orange. Chill for at least one hour. Serve at room temperature.

Bibimbap

2010-04-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

I went to an Asian market earlier this week and picked up a couple of dolsot (stone bowls), so I could make some legit bibimbap. Here's a picture of the finished product.

Roasted branzino with lemon and capers, Braised chard with pine nuts and raisins

2010-04-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

Few things are easier to make than a roasted fish. For this dish, I just seasoned the fish with salt and pepper, fill the cavity with lemon slices, rosemary, basil, and thyme, place the fish on top of slices of lemon and place another layer of thinly sliced lemon on top, cover with 1/4 cup olive oil, and add another 1/4 to 1/3 cup of white wine to the roasting pan along with some capers and olives, if you have them. Roast the fish at 400F for 20 to 30 minutes, and use the reserved liquid from the roasting pan as a sauce.

Chard is a nice accompaniment to the fish. Start by rinsing the chard and slicing it into strips that are about 1" wide. Saute with olive oil and garlic. Season with salt (I used smoked salt), paprika and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Add a splash of white wine and about 1/4 cup of water or broth along with a handful of raisins. Cover and let simmer for around 20 minutes. When the chard is done cooking, garnish it with toasted pine nuts.

Ceviche

2010-04-13T08:01:00.001-07:00

The last couple of times I've been to Isaacson & Stein, they've had some nice looking corvina, a white fish that is commonly used to make ceviche. So, of course, Abby and I had to try our hand. This picture comes from our second batch of ceviche. The first time around, we just used the corvina, but we added shrimp and scallops to this batch.

RECIPE:

-1/2 lb corvina

-1/4 lb shrimp

-1/4 lb scallops

-1 serrano pepper (minced)

-6 limes

-1 lemon

-2 shallots

-1/8 cup chopped cilantro

-1 Tbsp basil (chiffonade)

-2 shinly sliced radishes

-1 green onion, thinly sliced

-salt, pepper

-olive oil

Cut the fish, shrimp, and scallops in cubes (about 1cm). Season with a pinch of salt and pepper. Cut the shallots in half, lengthwise, and then cut into long strips. Toss together the seafood, shallots, serrano pepper, radishes, and green onion. Reserve the zest from one lime and one lemon, squeeze the juice from the lemons and limes and add to the fish mixture along with the zest. Mix together, cover, and refrigerate for 3 hours. Make sure there is enough liquid to cover most of the fish, and check in on the ceviche occasionally to give it a stir. Keep tasting the fish until it has "cooked" to your liking. When it is ready, stir in the basil and cilantro. Season with more salt if necessary, and garnish with olive oil. Serve with corn chips to add some texture.

Roasted leg of lamb with lamb jus, grilled asparagus with red pepper and piquillo sauce, and saffron rice

2010-03-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

The last time I bought a leg of lamb for a dinner party, the butcher did such a number on the leg that I had to braise it instead of roast it. Ever since, I've been looking for an excuse to get another leg of lamb for a roast. This weekend our local grocery store was stocked up with lamb roasts for passover, so we picked one up and went over to my sister's for a pre-passover dinner.

In addition to the leg of lamb, I made grilled asparagus with a roasted pepper sauce, and saffron rice. The lamb and rice recipes are from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook that I've been using a lot lately.

The lamb and rice recipes are both pretty straight forward, so I'll just paraphrase them here. You can check out the cookbook if you want more detail.

As with any roast, you want to bring the lamb out of the fridge early enough so that it can come up to room temperature before you put it in the oven. Make several incisions in the roast an insert garlic cloves, halved lengthwise. I made a few more deep incisions down the length of the roast for sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Cover the roast with canola oil and season with a big dose of salt and pepper. Place the leg on a roasting rack and sprinkle with more rosemary and thyme. The recipe recommends roasting at 325 F until the internal temperature near the bone is 135F. I decided to use a lower heat (275F) instead, then I let the roast rest for 30-45 minutes before blasting it in the oven at 475F for about 10 minutes to generate a nice crust. I thought this method worked really well. Using the lower heat ensures very even cooking throughout the whole roast, and finishing it off with high heat after resting give you a nice crispy exterior without cooking the rest of the meat (see here for a more thorough explanation of how this works). The lamb was served with a lamb jus that was a variation of this recipe.

For the rice, just mince up an onion very small, cook with some oil over medium heat until translucent, add two cups of short grain rice and a teaspoon of saffron and cook for another 3 to4 minutes, add about 3 cups of chicken stock and bring to simmer, stirring occasionally. Put a lid on the pan and let simmer over low heat. Test occasionally, and add more heated stock as necessary until the rice is cooke through. When finished, season with a pinch of salt.

The asparagus was grilled with a little salt, pepper, and paprika and served with a sauce made from roasted red and piquillo peppers that I had made for brunch the day before. This sauce makes a great topping for asparagus, but it would go well with any number of grilled vegetables.

RECIPE:

1 roast red bell pepper, seeds and skin removed

1 roasted piquillo pepper

2 tsp red wine vinegar

1 Tbsp white miso paste

2 tsp soy sauce

2 tsp sugar

olive oil

Combine all the ingredients in a blender. Start with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and add more until it gets to a consistency that you like. I don't remember the exact amounts I used for the miso, vinegar, soy, and sugar, so you may need to adjust these ingredients until you get the right balance of flavors. The vinegar and sugar gives a nice sweet and sour element to the sauce, while the miso and soy help add depth.

Confit collective, part 3: The big dinner

2010-03-26T07:34:00.001-07:00

A while back, a bunch of us got together to make a huge batch of duck confit. Several weeks later, the duck confit was ready to go, so everyone gathered at our place last weekend for another meal celebrating all things duck. Our first meal focused on a lot of the fresher preparations for duck (roasted whole duck, pan roasted duck breast, duck sausage, and duck tartare), whereas this meal relied on preserved or secondary preparations such as confit, prosciutto, stock, and fat that were all byproducts of our earlier meeting. This type of food has a distinctly fall/winter feel to it, and the weather obliged by interrupting what had been a string of nice spring days with a cold, dreary, rainy day. Perfect for cassoulet.

The amount of food that ended up on our table was reminiscent of a Thanksgiving feast, only better. Duck clearly dominates turkey in every respect...I might have to think about just substituting duck for turkey next Thanksgiving. You can see the menu above, and many pictures of the preparation and final product follow.

For the most part, I didn't do too much more than prep ingredients, clean dishes, and ensure a healthy flow of drinks for the several cooks that were buzzing around the kitchen. We started out by preparing some of the non-duck ingredients for the cassoulet. This involved braising lamb and making sausage.

As if this whole meal wasn't ambitious enough, we decided to make two different types of sausage: one with pork, the other with rabbit. I had never tried to debone a rabbit before. It's nearly impossible.

Once these ingredients were ready to go, Dara mixed them together into a big pot along with some whole legs of duck confit...

...and we let it bake in the oven until it looked like this.

Meanwhile, we took some of those duck legs, and shredded them up for a couple of other dishes.

First, we had a frisee salad with poach duck eggs, croutons cooked in duck fat, and some crisped up duck confit served on the side. Here's Mike getting some duck eggs ready for poaching

and here's the salad.

Next, we (and by we, I mean Anna) made a pizza with duck confit, fig spread, and Morbier cheese. This was a perfect flavor combination. Here it is in construction

And here it is fresh out of the oven.

For our last "starter" we reserved a bit of the shredded duck confit to be served with steamed Chinese buns

and various accoutrements like carrot, cucumber, scallions, hoisin, and hot sauce.

In addition to the cassoulet, we had another main course of pan fried duck legs and risotto that Bryan put together.
The risotto was cooked with squash and duck stock and finished with a little truffle salt.In the end, I think we needed about twice as many people to eat all of the food that we had.

Salad with steak, soft cooked egg, and garlic croutons

2010-03-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

We had a bit of steak left over from Tony's birthday lunch, so, rather than reheating it (I think that always ruins the texture) I sliced it thinly and used it in a salad. The salad was dressed with some olive oil from Liguria, and 15 year aged balsamic vinegar. In addition to the beef, it was topped with shaved parmesan, a soft cooked egg, and croutons made from a slightly stale baguette and some garlic oil.

Tony's birthday lunch

2010-03-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

Sunday was Tony's birthday, so Abby and I had some family over for a birthday lunch. Since I've been experimenting with sous-vide lately, I was looking for any excuse to try something new out, and this provided the perfect opportunity. The menu included sous-vide New York strip steak, and I also made a great asparagus salad recipe from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. I just got this book, and absolutely love it, so I'll probably be posting a lot of creations from this book over the next few months.

We started the meal with some home made rilletes, warm, marinated olives, and Societe roquefort (this cheese is awesome).

For the first salad course, I put together a salad of prosciutto, arugula, and shaved parmesan. This dish is so simple, yet so good. As long as you use good ingredients, you can't go wrong. Just cover a plate with very thinly sliced prosciutto, toss some arugula with some nice extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and kosher salt and put this on top of the prosciutto. Cover with shaved parmesan, and finish with another drizzle of olive oil.

The second salad course was a grilled asparagus dish with poached eggs and prosciutto. The eggs are lightly poached, so the yolk is still runny, and when you break them, they make a nice sauce for the asparagus.
The main course was garlic mashed potatoes with sous-vide NY strip steak. I cooked the steaks in a water bath at 135F for about 3 hours. The steaks were seasoned with salt and then I include one sprig of thyme, one sprig of rosemary, and some canola oil in the vacuum pack with each steak. I seared the steaks over high heat on a cast iron griddle for about 1 minute on each side. By the time we finished the salad courses, the steaks had been sitting for quite some time, and they weren't nearly as good as they were immediately after being seared. Next time, I'll make sure to serve these immediately after searing.
For dessert, we had carrot cupcakes from Alliance Bakery.

Pork goulash

2010-03-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

I tried this Jamie Oliver recipe out the other day, and, after a few modifications, it was pretty good. I started by following the recipe to the last detail, but the finished product was pretty weak. The problem with this recipe is that it calls for water as the main cooking liquid, but the pork, peppers, and seasoning alone don't give off enough flavors in the cooking process to give the broth any body. The result is a lifeless, insipid dish, but it is easy to improve. In order to fix it, I strained out all of the solids, reduced the liquid to about 1/4 of its original volume, and then mixed some stock into this reduced mixture. (If you are trying to reduce a large volume of liquid, divide it into a couple pans) I mixed the liquid back in with all of the solid ingredients, added a couple of anchovies to give the dish a boost of savoriness, and let everything simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes. The resulting dish was a huge improvement over the original. If you try this recipe out, which I would highly recommend - it's good, easy, and even better the next day - replace the water with chicken or pork stock, and add 3 or 4 anchovies. The recipe calls for it to be served over basmati rice, but I prefer to serve it over buttered egg noodles, which is the traditional accompaniment for goulash.

Confit collective, part 2: Duck prosciutto

2010-03-02T11:14:00.001-08:00

In addition to the many things documented here, we made some duck prosciutto during our first meeting of the "confit collective." We put together two different cures for the duck. One used a more traditional blend that included rosemary, thyme, cumin, and crushed bay leaf; the other included some five spice blend and grated orange peel. The orange peel really came through in the cure and added a nice dimension to the finished product. We left the cure on for about two days, which turns out to be far too long. From the little bit that we sampled, I thought it was way too salty. Next time we'll just give it a 24 hour cure and see how that turns out.

Making duck prosciutto cannot be more simple. First, put together a cure mix and coat the duck breast. We let the duck cure in ziploc bags in the fridge.

Rinse off all of the cure, pat the duck breasts dry, wrap in cheese cloth, and hang in a cool, dry place for at least a week. I set up a drying line in my fridge, which worked out pretty well.
After a week or two, the duck breast should be pretty firm and ready to go. Slice and enjoy with bread, on a salad, or on its own.

Sous-vide lamb loin with lamb jus, toasted orzo with sundried tomato and garlic confit, and broccoli raab with anchovies

2010-02-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is my first foray into sous-vide cooking, and I am completely sold. I have never cooked something so perfectly. The difficulty with most cooking methods is that you are using a heat that is much higher than the temperature that you want to bring the meat up to. As a result, the outside of the meat may be a little too well done by the time the core reaches the desired internal temperature. With sous-vide, you get the water to the temperature you want to hit, throw the meat in a bag with some seasonings, aromatics, or a marinade, set it in the water and let it go. Since the temperature will never go above the desired internal temperature, you can forget about it for a while and not worry about overcooking. When you are ready to plate, remove the meat from the bag and give it a sear in a smoking hot pan. You want to use a super high heat so you can develop the Maillard reaction as quickly as possible. (The Maillard reaction occurs when you expose proteins to high heat. This is responsible for the nice crust associated with seared pieces of meat.) The end result is something that is cooked perfectly and consistently from the center to the very edge.

Here's the recipe for the meal that I made:

LAMB

-1 lamb loin

-6 cloves garlic confit*

-2 Tbsp chopped rosemary

-1 Tbsp thyme

-2 tsp lemon juice

-1/4 cup olive oil or canola oil

-salt, pepper

Blend together the garlic, rosemary, thyme, lemon juice, and oil. Season with salt and pepper. Cover the lamb loin with the marinade and let sit for a couple hours. Add the lamb to a plastic bag and vacuum out the air and place in a water bath set at 125 to 130 for rare or 130 to 135 for medium rare. If you like your meat well done, maybe you should rethink your preferences. The cooking time will vary depending on the thickness of the meat. I let my lamb loin sit in the water bath for about 2.5 hours.

LAMB JUS

-4 cups chicken stock

-lamb bones

-2 sprigs rosemary

-2 tsp sherry

-1.5 Tbsp red wine vinegar

-1 Tbsp sugar

-1 tsp salt

Try to buy the lamb loin on the bone so you can use the bones and scraps to make a lamb jus. Add the bones and scraps to the chicken stock and bring to a gentle simmer. After about an hour, add the rosemary sprigs. Lighly crush the rosemary with your knife handle to help release some of the oils. Turn the heat up a little bit and simmer for another 30 minutes. Remove the bones and rosemary and strain out any impurities. Add the remaining ingredients and then turn the heat up and reduce the mixture until it gets down to about 3/4 cup.

ORZO

-1 cup orzo

-2 cups chicken stock

-4 sundried tomatoes, diced

-6 cloves garlic confit

-1/4 cup white wine

-1 Tbsp olive oil

-chopped parsley

-salt, pepper.

Heat the oil in a saute pan. Add half the orzo and the garlic confit. Cook until the orzo begins to brown. Add the wine to stop the browning, and then add the rest of the orzo. Add the sundried tomatoes and begin adding the chicken stock a little bit at a time and stirring as if you are making risotto. Keep adding liquid and stirring until the orzo is just al dente. Remove from heat, stir in about a tablespoon of chopped parsley and season with salt and pepper. This dish is also good with pine nuts and artichoke hearts.

BROCCOLI RAAB

-1/2 bunch of broccoli raab

-2 anchovy fillets

-2 tsp olive oil

-1 tsp lemon juice

- clove garlic confit, smashed.

-pinch of red pepper flakes

-salt, pepper

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and prepare an ice bath. Chop the broccoli raab to the desired size and add the thick stems to the pot. About 30 seconds to a minute later, add the rest of the broccoli and cook for another minute. Remove the broccoli to the ice bath to stop the cooking and set the color. Set aside in a strainer. Heat the oil in a saute pan over medium high heat. Add the smashed garlic confit, anchovies, and red pepper flakes and stir/smash everything together. Add the broccoli raab and cook, stirring frequently until the broccoli is cooked to your liking. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice, and season with salt and pepper.

*To make garlic confit, add peeled garlic cloves to a pot with enough olive oil to cover by about an inch. Heat up the oil enough so that small bubbles just begin to rise to the surface (about 180F to 200F). Let the garlic cloves cook for about 20 to 30 minutes. Turn the heat off and let everything cool down. The garlic confit should keep for about a month.

The McGuyver Sous-vide

2010-02-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

For various reasons, I've been thinking a lot about trying out sous-vide cooking lately: I see it on cooking shows like Top Chef, food blogs that are much fancier than mine have been abuzz with the recently launched "Sous-vide supreme," an immersion circulator scaled down for home use that hit the market a couple months ago, and, more recently, I met a neighbor who has his own immersion circulator. I thought that my own forays into sous-vide cooking would have to wait until I felt like ponying up the $500 it would cost for the Sous-vide supreme, and then yesterday, I had one of those rare Eureka! moments when I was making a big batch of stock.

For some reason, I decided to monitor the temperature of the stock with my digital thermometer, and I noticed that when the burner we at it's lowest point, the equilibrium temperature was very stable. I realized that I could take advantage of this to set up my own water bath for some improvised sous-vide cooking. The difficulty with sous-vide cooking is that you want to set the water temperature to be at desired internal temperature for the meat that you are cooking, and for many meats, the temperature you want is pretty low. My stock pot was holding steady at around 180F, which is far too hot for most meat, fish, and poultry. The solution to this was to increase the surface area to volume ratio. This allows the heat to dissipate more rapidly, resulting in a lower equilibrium temperature.

I decided to use a heavy roasting pan for my make shift sous-vide. There are a few advantages to using a roasting pan. First, it has a lot of surface area, allowing you to achieve lower equilibrium temperatures. Second, it spans two burners, giving you an extra level of control over the heat. Third, it can fit a long cut, like a loin. And, finally, since this is a fairly heavy pan, it did a good job of maintaining a steady temperature.

When the pan was filled to about 3/4 of its capacity and both burners were on the lowest setting, the steady-state temperature was 133F. It was able to maintain this temperature for several hours. If I wanted to go lower, I could just use one burner, and if I wanted to go higher, I could just turn one or both of the burners up.

While it takes a bit of experimentation to figure out how to get to your desired temperatures, some might find it preferable to spending $500 on your own immersion bath. Eventually, I think it will be worth it to me to have the level of control that you get from an immersion bath that is expressly made for sous-vide cooking, but for now, this is a more than capable substitute. All it takes is a gas range, a large roasting pan, a digital thermometer that you can set to alert you if the temperature gets above a set point, and some plastic, vacuum sealed bags (You can get these at Target with a hand held vacuum sealer for a few bucks).

Abby's mushroom sandwiches

2010-02-13T13:33:00.000-08:00

We never cook mushrooms because I hate them and, since I do most of the grocery shopping, they just never show up in our house. I've been out of town a lot recently, though, so that gave Abby a chance to cook up one of her favorite ingredients: mushrooms.

She used the recipe for the Hamersley's Bistro mushroom sandwich, which you can find here. This must be a good recipe, because when we went there, I even thought it was OK, and I never think that mushrooms are OK.

Grilled, stuffed avocado

2010-02-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

We had purchased a few avocados to make guacamole for the Super Bowl last week and had a few extras sitting around. You can only have so much guacamole, so we turned the last one into a salad of sorts by grilling the avocado halves and stuffing them with a salad of hearts of palm, roasted corn, diced cucumber, tuna, cilantro, and lime juice. It's lightly dressed with cilantro oil. I'm not a huge fan of avocado unless it's in guacamole, but Abby said it was pretty good.

The Confit Collective, Part 1

2010-02-13T12:52:00.001-08:00

Our friend Mike has helped Abby and I get in touch with the local food scene since we moved to Chicago. Last weekend, we joined him and several other slightly to obscenely obsessed home cooks for an afternoon filled with duck. The purpose of the event was to make confit, which I'll post more on latter once the confit has had the proper amount of time to age, and, for that reason, the group is, at this point, referred to as the confit collective. We'll see if that sticks. If we decide to do something with a whole pig later on, we might call that gathering that pork polity or some other clever alliteration.

While confit was the main event, we ended up doing a lot of other things with the duck as well. At the beginning of the day, we had something like 40 duck legs, 3 whole ducks, 2 large duck breasts, and a couple vats of duck fat. Here are some of the duck legs, waiting for a nice long bath in a vat of hot duck fat...

...like this one.

Several minutes later, here's another vat of duck fat, filled with legs, simmering away at 190F.

Once you get the confit started, there isn't that much left to do, so we spent the rest of the day putting all of the other duck to good use. Everyone brought knives, cutting boards, and various additional kitchen gadgets

so we were able to set up a number of different work stations, allowing everyone to participate in the process of taking apart the whole ducks and doing the fabrication necessary to make the various additional dishes that we had planned.

We separated the breast from two of the ducks and pan roasted half of them and used the other half to make tartare; we used the rest of the meat to make duck sausage; we made stock out of the carcasses, we kept the third duck whole and roasted it, we made cracklins' out of some extra duck skins, and we put together two separate cure mixes to make the remaining duck breasts into duck prosciutto. I'll go over this in a separate post when the prosciutto is ready in a week or so.

I didn't get that many great pictures of the finished dishes since I was too busy eating or prepping, but here are a couple snap shots from the evening. Here's the sausage being made:

and here is the finished sausage

Here's a shot of the cracklins' which we ate as is, added to a salad, and used to add texture to the tartare.

Here's what's left of the roasted duck, which was covered with five spice powder and filled with assorted aromatics such as orange peel and cloves.

and here is the pan roasted duck breast, which was served with a cherry gastrique that Bryan whipped up (Bryan lives right next door to Abby and I and is one of the few people I've met who appears to be more obsessed with cooking than I am).

I didn't get any pictures of the tartare because I was preoccupied by my quest to McGuyver a ring mold out of a paper towel tube and some tin foil...I mean, if your serving tartare, you have to make it look pretty.

After everything was finished, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the kitchen. Empty wine bottles and serving platters occupied every last square inch of the counter top. Good times!

Being the good guests that we usually are, Abby and I had to excuse ourselves before kitchen cleanup began because we had tickets to a play that evening - August: Osage County. It's good, but a bit depressing. It sort of reminded me of The Corrections. Next time, we promise we'll stick around to help clean up.

Gnocchi with lamb ragu

2010-02-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

We had a lot of lamb leftover from our last dinner party, so I made a batch of lamb ragu and served it with some homemade potato gnocchi. The recipe for the ragu was pretty standard: dice one red onion, thinly slice three cloves of garlic, brunoise one carrot. Saute the these ingredients over medium heat until the onions are translucent, add a few anchovies, add one large can of canned tomatoes, hand crushed, along with some sprigs of thyme and the lamb. Season with salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar. Let everything simmer and reduce for a couple hours. You want to keep the heat fairly low, otherwise the lamb will get tough and stringy.

Cold weather food

2010-02-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

We're in the dead of winter here in Chicago, and while it hasn't been that bad, it's still cold enough to warrant some good, cold weather comfort food. So, last week, a few friends came over and we all put together a nice winter meal of leg of lamb, polenta with broccoli raab, pine nuts, and sundried tomatoes, roasted root vegetables, cahldo verde, some berries with balsamic vinegar and mascarpone whipped cream for dessert, and plenty of wine. This dinner party also gave Abby a chance to test out a camera lens that she's borrowing from our friend, Archie.

We started with a some of Mike's cahldo verde, a Portuguese soup with potatoes, kale, and chorizo or linguica. Here's the chorizo, served on the side.

and here's the soup.

I was thinking of just roasting the leg of lamb, but the butcher I got it from butchered the leg so poorly that I decided to go for a braise instead. Here's the braising vessel, our dutch oven, sealed off to keep everything inside during the cooking process.

And here's what the lamb looked like after a good sear (~8 minutes on medium high heat) and 7 to 8 hours in the oven at 275.

You can strain and degrease the braising liquids, reduce it a bit, and serve it with the lamb. Polenta is a great accompaniment for braised dishes since it soaks up all of the braising liquid.

Mike also whipped up a little brocolli raab dish to serve on top of the polenta,
and we also made some roasted root vegetables (celeriac, turnips, carrots, and parsnips).
Finally, here's a couple pics of the berry dessert that another one of our guests put together.

Bittman/Vongerichten fried rice

2010-01-30T10:23:00.000-08:00

This recipe was posted on Mark Bittman's blog the other day. I thought I would give it a try. The crispy garlic and ginger was really good. I also added thinly sliced lap cheong since we had some sitting around our fridge. Here's the recipe.

Roasted chickpeas, swiss chard, and lamb sausage

2010-01-30T10:04:00.000-08:00

This meal is quick enough to do on a weeknight. I've made a variation of this same chickepea dish here, and I've made several variations of chickpeas and greens here. Usually I stew the chickpeas with the greens, but this time I roasted the chickpeas with some olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika. For the chard, I just seared them with some olive oil, garlic, and red wine vinegar. To cook the sausage, just throw them in the oven along with the chickpeas. This only takes a few minutes of prep time.

RECIPE:

1 large can chickpeas

1-2 bunches of Swiss chard

2 lamb sausages

Olive oil

6 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp paprika

1-2 tsp red wine vinegar

salt, pepper

Preheat the oven to 350F. Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Toss together with olive oil, half of the garlic, cumin, paprika, and add salt and pepper to taste (toast the spices before using them to bring out the flavors). Place the chickpeas and sausages on a baking sheet/pan and roast for about 30 minutes.

While the chickpeas are roasting, rinse the chard, cut off the thick stalks, and cut crosswise into 1 to 2 inch strips. Heat up about 1 to 2 Tbsp of olive oil over high heat in a large saute pan. Add the remaining garlic. After a few seconds, when the garlic begins to brown, add the chard in batches. It will cook down fairly quickly. Season with salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. You only need to cook the chard for about 5 to 10 minutes.

When everything is done, mix together the chard and chickpeas. Serve with the lamb sausage.

Christmas Dinner

2010-01-11T12:47:00.001-08:00

This year was the first time that I spent Christmas outside of Washington state. While my family has a tradition of getting together on Christmas Eve, this year, it was a bit quieter. Nothing was planned for Christmas Eve, so Abby and I decided to have her brother, Tony, and my brother-in-law, Mitch, and niece, Midori, over for dinner. We did a "surf-and-turf" menu with salt baked branzino and an herb-crusted rib roast served with brussels sprouts and bacon and roasted potatoes. None of this is really new. I've made each of these dishes before, so I won't go into detail about the preparation, but here are some pictures.

Above is the branzino, peaking out of the salt crust, and below is a picture of the finished product with some olive oil that we brought back from Tuscany.

Here's the rib roast.

And hear are the brussels sprouts. Usually, I half or quarter the brussels sprouts and roast them, but this time around, I just shelled (peeled off the leaves) and sauteed them.

Top Chef Finale Dinner

2010-01-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

Abby and I had a couple friends over for the Top Chef finale. I didn't get many great pictures, but you can check on one of our guests' blogs for an account. We forgot to record the episode of Top Chef, so we were never actually able to watch the show on our "Top Chef Dinner Night." At least the food was good.

A few meals from this fall

2009-12-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since anything I've cooked has shown up on the blog. Looking back through the archives, the last posting that featured something that I cooked was way back in July. Between moving, vacation, and getting ready for the job market, we haven't had a lot of time to cook and have been eating out a lot. I have been cooking, though. I just haven't been taking pictures or updating the blog. I won't post recipes here since I can't really remember a lot of them at this point, but here are pictures of a couple of the meals I've made this fall.

Earlier in the fall, I was able to take advantage of some of the great farmer's markets in Chicago. There is a weekly market a few blocks from us in Wicker Park, where I was able to get fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn to make a nice gazpacho.

On another trip to the farmers market, I got a bunch of cherry tomatoes, green beans, and fingerling potatoes and used these along with toasted pine nuts, shaved parmesan, and aged balsamic vinegar, and fresh hand cut noodles for a nice pasta dish.

As the weather got colder, I started buying veggies like brussels sprouts and beets. In the picture above, I roasted brussels sprouts and beets. The brussles sprouts were roasted with garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. The beets were roasted with olive oil, salt, pepper, and orange zest. I served this with a pork tenderloin that had been brined in a mixture of apple juice, salt, brown sugar, mustard seed, thyme, and bay leaf. The roasted pork loin was dusted with fennel pollen and served with an apple reduction and some couscous.

Since moving back to Chicago, I've also had the opportunity to have a few meals with my sister's family. It's nice to have family in the same city and do family dinners. For one of the meals, I made a tagine with chicken, chickpeas, and apricots. This is a really good dish, so I'll try to post a recipe at some point. I really like this picture of my niece, Midori, waiting patiently for her dinner.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of my shopping in the Fulton Market area where there are some great butchers and fishmongers. Most of the stuff here is wholesale, but they have a few retail outlets. Isaacson and Stein is a great place for seafood and its only about a 5 minute drive from my place. On one of my more recent trips there, I picked up some Chilean Sea Bass.

I marinated it in a sake-miso mixture using the Nobu recipe and served it with crispy sushi rice cakes and seared spinach.

Chicago dogs

2009-12-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

Chicago has an amazing culinary scene, but to most people, it hot dogs and pizza may be the first things that come to mind when thinking about Chicago food. While I haven't had time to do a comprehensive tour of all of the best hot dog joints in the Chicagoland area, I've had the opportunity to check out to of Chicago's finer hot dog establishements: Hot Doug's and Superdawg. These places are both very good and very different.

Superdawg is a drive-in place that looks like it hasn't changed in several decades. A somewhat creepy pair of hot dog statues sit on top of the drive in. They had red lights in their eyes, making them look like demented dolls from some B-level horror flick. Their hot dogs are awesome, though.

Superdawg is a great example of a classic, Chicago style hot dog.

The Superdawg comes tucked in a box with fries and a pickled green tomato. Both of the accoutrements are awesome, but the real star, of course, is the hot dog.

A Chicago style hot dog must have a giant pickle, mustard, and no ketchup. This is the only kind of dog they serve at Superdawg, and they do it well.

In contrast, Hot Doug's serves a vast array of different dogs. This place is a tribute to all things sausage. When you walk in, you see this quote on the wall, and this more or less captures the vive of the place.

To give you an idea of the variety they offer, here are some of the specials.

And they always have a weekly special.

This is the kind of place that carnivorous foodies love. It has been feature on "No Reservations" and I'm sure it has received all sorts of foodie hype in other venues. With this hype comes long lines. When we went here, the line was wrapped around the block and we had to wait around 45 minutes to order. At Superdawg, we waited about a minute.

We tried a number of different hot dogs at Hot Doug's, but because of a memory card glitch, we only saved pictures of the Chicago style dog

and the "Game of the Week"

We also tried the Foie-gras dog and a few other specials. The foie dog was probably the most novel dog that we ordered, but I don't think I would try it again. It's a bit rich. The other dogs were awesome, although I think that Superdawg's Chicago style dog is better.

I thought that both of these places were really good. For a great Chicago style dog, do to Superdawg, but if you are in the mood for something a little more adventurous and you don't mind long lines, you should definitely hit up Hot Doug's.

While I'm on the topic of Chicago dogs, Abby and I have become proud new dog owners since we moved to Chicago. Here's our pup, Hachiko. We adopted him from a rescue organization in late September, and he's about a year old now.

New city. New workspace

2009-12-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

In August, we moved from our old apartment near Harvard Yard in Cambridge to a nicer, newer place in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. Among the many new experiences associated with moving to a new home and city, a new kitchen is one of the things that is most pertinent to this blog. It is, after all, where a lot of the food on this website is produced. While my new kitchen is certainly a cut above my old Cambridge kitchen in form, I'm not sure that it is a step forward in function.

Here's the old kitchen in Cambridge:

and here is the new kitchen in Wicker Park:

The new place certainly looks nicer. We traded linoleum floors and faux granite counters for hardwood and real granite, and I love our giant new fridge. We also got a lot more cabinet space and, thankfully, our new cabinets don't look like they are straight our of the 1950s.

We also got this nifty chalkboard and a built in wine rack.

I love how the new kitchen looks, but there are some things about the old kitchen that I miss. In our old place, we had a big walk in pantry that had tons of storage space. There's no pantry in our new place, so, in spite of all the extra cabinets, I feel like I have less storage space. We also don't have space for a breakfast table or kitchen island, so we don't have as much usable counter space. I often like to have several different things going at once in the kitchen, so this is a big drawback. Also, the sink in our new space is smaller, which is really annoying.

I'm sure I'll love the new kitchen after I've had some more time in it, but for now, I'm still getting used to it.

Venice: Our last supper at Osteria da Alberto

2009-12-19T16:05:00.000-08:00

Nearly four months after returning from our trip, I finally am getting around to the last post from our Italy trip. Staying true to our strategy of eating at Slow Food endorsed restaurants, we decided to stop in at Osteria da Alberto for our final meal in Italy. The food here was simple, flavorful, and provided a fitting end to a fantastic culinary trip.

We started our meal with mussels with parsley and lemon and a big bottle of white wine. Like just about every other restaurant we went to in Italy, the house wine here was high in quality and low in cost.

Next, we had a seafood risotto. Usually I'm not that impressed with risotto. It's something I make often, and usually, I think that the stuff I make at home is just as good as anything I invariably pay too much for at a restaurant. That was not the case here. This was, hands down, the best risotto I have ever had. The rice was perfectly cooked. A lot of the time, risotto is overcooked so it gets all mushy, making it impossible to distinguish each grain of rice. Here, each grain had a little bit to it, but it was cooked just long enough so the interior wasn't chalky. The rice was perfectly flavored with a subtle seafood broth and bits of assorted seafood such as mussels, scallops, and fish.

We finished with squid cooked in its own ink served with polenta. Again, this dish was perfectly prepared. The squid was nice and tender, and the lightly grilled polenta was perfect for sopping up the tasty squid ink sauce.

Venice: Cicchetti

2009-12-19T15:46:00.000-08:00

I've neglected my foodblog for a while, so here are a couple more posts to finish off our Italy trip and then I can move on to Chicago, our new home (for this year, at least).

Anyhow, back to the food. As I've already mentioned, Abby and I were really surprised about how much we liked Venice. The food here is fantastic, and, like Spain, they have a great tradition of "small bites" that you can wash down with a glass of wine.

Referred to as "Cicchetti," these small bites could be described as the Venetian take on tapas. Like tapas, they come in a variety of forms, and they are perfect for food oriented travelers who would spend all day hopping from one restaurant to another if constraints - both on your wallet and stomach capacity - didn't interfere.

We spent most of our time in Venice wandering through the back streets and stopping in at every cicchetti bar we could see. There is a considerable variance in quality, but two of the more memorable places we went to were "Cantina do Mori" and "All' Arco"

These two places are right next to each other. We had seen Cantina do Mori on an Anthony Bourdain show, and it has to be, by far, the oldest eating establishment I have ever been in. It has been in business for around six centuries!
All' Arco was significantly more modern, and we were drawn in by the numerous "Slow Food" awards posted in their window. We ordered several different varieties of bruschetta
and an amazing tomato salad. While Cantina do Mori was good, I think All' Arco takes the award for best cicchetti in Venice.
Cicchetti isn't just bruschetta, though. We went to places serving poached artichoke, grilled fish and shrimp, croquettes, arancini

as well as seafood salads and fried anchovies.

Venice: Wandering the streets and markets

2009-10-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Venice was the last stop on our trip. We almost didn't come here. We heard it was overrun with tourists (true), smelled bad (not true), expensive (true), and was not nearly as romantic as everyone made it out to be (not true).

In spite of all the tourists and the obvious "Disneyland" feel that the whole city has, Venice was a thoroughly enjoyable place with great food and stunning architecture. As I've mentioned before in posts about Siena, there is something very peaceful about a city without cars. The air feels cleaner, you notice your neighbors more since you have to walk everywhere, and everything just seems to slow down a little bit. In Venice, you get all of those benefits plus canals. There's no other place like it, and as you walk around the city you are constantly struck by the opulence of it all. To build an entire city state on water at the time that Venice was built takes an extraordinary amount of wealth and no small measure of conceit.
In building there city, it is clear that Venetians wanted no visitor to have any questions about the extent of their wealth. While modern Venice may be overrun with tourists, they are all concentrated in a very small swath of the city. It's almost as if they are cattle, being herded along the widest streets and canals which are lined with shops, stands, and restaurants all selling the same thing.

If you go off these well trodden paths, however, Venice offers a maze of quiet streets full of curiosities....like these doorbells.

I'm not sure how anyone could walk by these and not press them. Among the many places to visit is the Rialto market. This market, which is more than 900 years old, is THE place to go for fresh food, and, when we went, it was surprisingly uncrowded.

The Rialto market is divided into two sections. One sells a large selection of seasonal produce ranging from assorted mushrooms

to squash blossoms, tomatoes, and cucumbers

and a colorful assortment of chiles.
The second part of the market is filled with tables piled high with fresh seafood, much of which comes from the waters surrounding Venice.

Fresh scallops are in abundance, and, unlike many of the scallops I see for sale here in the U.S., these are sold in there shells, so you can use the whole scallop, not just the abductor muscle. I actually didn't know you could eat the other parts of the scallop until we had an amazing scallop tasting at Sushi Yasuda, where Chef Yasuda served us every part of the scallop.You can also get octopus
freshly caught sardines and anchovies

and monkfish. I really wish I had a market like this near my place.

Cinque Terre: Osteria a Cantina de Mananan

2009-10-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

Unlike its four sister villages, Corniglia sits high up on the hillside, affording amazing views of the coastline, but at a cost. In the the summer, or, at least, in August, the long staircase up from the train station can be an unpleasant effort, and it acts as a deterrent to many of the tourists that pack the waterfront cafes of Cinque Terre's other villages. Those who take the hike up the hillside are able to stroll down the single street of this tiny village in relative solitude and, if you make a reservation at Cantina de Mananan, you can have some of the best Ligurian food around
One of the first things that catches your eye as you pass by (actually, the only thing, since there isn't much else) is the doorway, which is plastered with endorsements and awards from the various groups that hand these things out to deserving restaurants.
Hidden behind the door is a tiny little dining room with stone walls, a chalkboard with the daily menu, and precious few tables. Every seat in this restaurant is by reservation, and they are only open for a few hours around lunch and dinner each day. Most table don't get a single turn in, so don't expect to eat here as a walk in.
In keeping with the Cinque Terren tradition, this place specialized in seafood dishes. We began out meal with a seafood antipasti consisting of anchovies three different ways (with vinegar and lemon, olive oil and garlic, and fried), smoked tuna, white beans with tuna...
...and, on the side, salt cod with olives, tomatoes, and capers in a light broth.
we also had artichokes, which were good, but still no match for the legendary artichokes of Volpetti, in Rome.
Next, it was on to the main courses. It's worth noting, if it wasn't clear already, that this place takes its food very seriously. They even offer eating instructions on their place mats.
The directions were printed in English, German, and French, and perhaps they were prompted by one too many tourists asking for cheese or pepper to put on their pesto or seafood pasta. These are perhaps the two most popular dishes here. We didn't order the seafood pasta since you could only order it in servings for two and we wanted more variety. Instead, we opted for the pesto, which, they boast, is the best in all of Liguria.
We also had a whole, grilled branzino, which was served with nothing but a slice of lemon. The fish was so fresh and well prepared that it needed nothing else.
We ended our meal with a panacotta with blackberries, huckleberries, and blueberries. This was a really light, tart dessert. Neither of us really like sweet food, so this was perfect for our palates.
I would say that this was one of the best meals of our whole trip. If you are in Cinque Terre, this is a restaurant that you cannot miss. Just make sure to make a reservation ahead of time or you will miss out on this gem.

Cinque Terre: La Lanterna

2009-10-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

On our second day in Cinque Terre we decided to get lunch at La Lanterna in Riomaggiore. While it wasn't a Slow Food restaurant, it was recommended in our guide book and it was just down the street from where we were staying. La Lanterna is located in the marina area of Riomaggiore, pictured above, and if you can land a seat on the patio you get a nice view over the marina.

Like most of the restaurants in Cinque Terra, La Lanterna excels in preparing seafood dishes. Many of them were displayed in bright lettering on the chalkboard by the entrance.

Of all the choices, the fried anchovies have to be the best. These things are sooooo good. I have no idea why they aren't everywhere in the U.S. The only other time I had fried anchovies was in Spain, where a beachside bar near my apartment in Malaga would serve up plates of these. Few things go together better than fried anchovies, an ice cold beer, and a nice hot day at the beach.

We followed up the anchovies with a dish that was described as green "gnocchetti," or tiny gnocchi, with tuna in red sauce. This dish was another winner.

All in all, I thought La Lanterna was a solid place, and I would highly recommend it if you are looking for a meal in Riomaggiore.

Cinque Terre: Enoteca Internzionale

2009-10-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

Cinque Terre is one of the places that gets rave reviews from just about everyone who has ever travelled through Italy, and with good reason. This is a place of breathtaking beauty, and the food and wine don't disappoint either. For those of you who haven't read about this place, Cinque Terre (Five lands) are a string of five small villages built into the steep hillsides of Italy's Ligurean coast. Villages are connected by a single train line and a footpath, and, if you're the active type, you can spend your day hiking through all five villages, winding your way along the coastline and through the terraced vineyards that hug the hillside. These vineyards produce some excellent wines, which go well with the seafood dishes that Cinque Terre specializes in.

We had read that anchovies were a popular snack in Cinque Terre, so we ordered up a plate at the first place we could find, a beachside bar filled with tourists. This was a total waste of money, but it was also the last bad thing we ate on our trip. It was at this point that we started following the snails to our meals. Our first "Slow Food certified" snack came shortly after our failed attempt to get good anchovies on the beach. As we were wandering around some of the interior streets of Monterrosso, we happened across Enoteca Internazionale.

This little shop claimed to be the oldest wine shop in town, and they proudly displayed a Slow Food sticker in their window and their chalkboard advertised a trio of anchovies.

This seemed like as good a place as any to have another go at anchovies. These more than made up for the crappy anchovies we had at the other place. They were awesome. All of the anchovies were cured in house, and the trio consisted of anchovies with slow roasted tomatoes and capers

anchovies on a thin slice of lardo (yum!)

and, last but not least, anchovies on toast with butter. This last preparation was awesome. I've made anchovy butter a number of times, but for some reason, serving anchovies on toast with butter never occurred to me. It is such a good combination (if you get high quality ingredients, that is).

Florence: Trattoria Marrione

2009-10-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Florence has a ton of good restaurants. At least, that's the impression I got while sifting through various online sources. We were in the mood for something simple and inexpensive, so we opted for Trattoria Marrione. I really don't have too much to say about this place. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. It was more or less what we were looking for, a simple meal that tasted more like home cooking than restaurant food. Perhaps that's why this restaurant gets a fair amount of local business even though its located so close to all of the tourist attractions.

We started with a caprese salad, which Abby followed up with yet another salad. This one, a panzanella. This panzanella was quite a bit different from the version I make. They use bread crumbs rather than chunks of bread and I like to cut the vegetables into a smaller dice.
I had roasted lamb and potatoes. It was good, but I'll bet it would have been twice as good if it had been the middle of the fall or winter. It's one of those warm, savory dishes that is best enjoyed on a brisk November night rather than a humid August evening.

Florence: Cooking lessons at Toscana in Bocca

2009-10-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I really wanted to do during our trip to Italy was to attend a cooking class. We looked into several different options and settled on Toscana in Bocca since it fit into our schedule and budget. One of the things that appealed to us about this cooking school is that they offered private lessons, which enabled us to give some input into the dishes that we wanted to make. Stefania, the instructor, runs the private lessons out of her bed and breakfast, which is located here, just south of the Porta Romana area in Florence. Stefania has several years of experience as an instructor at a local culinary school, so she could probably teach you how to make just about anything you can think of. She sends you home with a cookbook that includes many of her own recipes. I have yet to try any of them, but I am sure that they are all fantastic.

For our lesson, we made squash blossoms filled with ricotta, stuffed pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, an eggplant souffle with a tomato salad, chicken cacciatore, and a plum and apple crostata. I had made chicken cacciatore and stuffed pasta before, but everything else was pretty new, and I specifically requested the stuffed pasta since I haven't been happy with my previous attempts to make them. Everything was very good, and we were left with more food than we could possibly eat.

Here are some more pictures from the lesson:

Abby mixing together the egg and flour for the pasta.

Stefania shows us how to make the stuffed pasta before letting us give it a shot.

She showed use how to make two different shapes. Here they are, assembled and uncooked.

Bakes, stuffed squash blossoms.

Abby, looking about as domestic as she ever will with her freshly baked crostata.
Here's the finished pasta. The sauce is simply fresh, diced tomatoes with a bit of salt, basil, and olive oil, quickly sauteed and tossed with the pasta. This is a really nice way to do pasta in the late summer when tomatoes are in season.
Here's the eggplant souffle and tomato salad. The souffle is wrapped in squash blossoms and stuffed with provolone cheese.
And, here is the chicken cacciatore.

Florence: Bistecca alla Fiorentina @ Perseus

2009-10-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

In Florence, steaks are such a tradition that they have their own name, bistecca alla Fiorentina. Usually measuring at least two inches thick, these giant T-bones come from special cows, I am told, which sets them apart from a "regular" T-bone. Aside from the breed of cow, these steaks are not cooked to order. If you order bistecca alla Fiorentina, you are ordering a rare steak. That's just how it is. A bistecca alla Fiorentina that is cooked to medium or well done is not a bistecca alla Fiorentina. Personally, I would call such a steak a waste of perfectly good beef.

Given the special place that this dish has in Florentine cuisine, it was a "must have" on our list of things to try. The hard part was finding a place to try it. We searched through the online forums, where scores of different eateries received the "best steak in town" title from as many different reviewers and settled on Perseus. This restaurant did not disappoint. When you walk in the door, one look at their refrigerated display case (above) signals that this place doesn't mess around when it comes to steak. They aren't an all purpose restaurant that happens to serve bisteccas. They are a steak place that happens to serve a few other dishes.

Of those other dishes, we decided to try the grilled vegetables, and the beef carpaccio with arugula and grana cheese. This was similar to the salad we had at Pierluigi and it was every bit as good.

The main event, though, was the bistecca. These massive steaks are adeptly carved tableside by the servers, and served with no accompaniments (not that there was any room on the plate).

I can't say whether this was the single best place to get bistecca alla fiorentina in all of Florence, but I can say that if you eat here, you won't walk away disappointed. The restaurant had a nice atmosphere, good service, great side dishes, good house wine, and, being a bit off the beaten path, they don't get a ton of tourists. I think this is a good thing since you have to turn out a better product to attract local customers.

Siena: Il Carrocio

2009-10-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure where to start with this restaurant. There was just so much that was good about it. Abby and I both agree that this was easily our best meal in Italy. From the ambiance to the apertif, this place was just perfect. It is not, mind you, a fancy restaurant with white tablecloths and intricate plating, but there is more to restaurants than that. This is a different experience. It's like being invited into someone's home and having them cook a big Sunday dinner for you, except this person can cook really well and they happen to be cooking really well in Tuscany, where they have access to all sorts of amazing ingredients.

Il Carrocio occupies a small space on the Via Casata di Sotto, just off of the Piazza Il Campo. When the weather is nice, the tiny dining room spills out onto the sidewalk, offering a few more precious tables to potential patrons. Inside, the multi hued walls are adorned with old family portraits, shelves full of wine, including the ubiquitous straw covered wine bottles in which they serve their house chianti.

To one side of the restaurant, the open door to the kitchen affords guests a view of the kitchen, where the chef churns out classic, Tuscan dishes on colorful plates, all under the watchful eye of the owner's King Charles Spaniel.

When we looked at the menu, we had a difficult time deciding what to order -everything looked so good - so, we did what all indecisive dinners should do, and ordered a tasting menu.

The menu started with an "antipasti di Toscana" that included an assortment of salami, cheese, and crostini (one with chicken livers and one with mushrooms). Abby tells me the mushrooms were the best she had ever tasted.

Next, we had the ribollita, a hearty, white bean and bread soup garnished with minced onion and olive oil. This dish is a classic autumn dish in Tuscany, and I'm going to have to try making it myself this fall.

After the soup, we moved onto the pasta course: pici with a ragu sauce. It was simple, but perfectly executed. The pasta was the perfect consistency, and the sauce was applied with appropriate restraint.

The next plate we had included two dishes. One was a salad of sliced pork, lightly grilled with herbs and served with lettuce, sundried tomatoes, and shredded parmesan. The second dish was stewed veal with tomato, herbs, and white beans.

Finally, we ended the meal with biscotti and vin santo.

From start to finish, this meal offered everything we had hoped for out of a Tuscan restaurant. Every single dish was a regional classic that was prepared simply and beautifully, letting the quality of the ingredients shine through. It was certainly deserving of the "Slow Food" endorsement displayed in their window.

Siena: The markets

2009-09-29T11:55:00.001-07:00

A lot of travel guides recommend picnics as a great way to economize while traveling through Italy. While this may be the case, it's not really the only reason to do so. Cheeses, cured meats, olives, artichokes and a whole host of other great foods are really best enjoyed when you go to the market and buy the ingredients yourself. The shopping is part of the experience, and the fact that its cheaper than if you ordered food at a restaurant is sort of a pleasant bonus.

Siena must be the wild boar capitol of Italy, and, as such, sampling the various wild boar salamis, or salame di cinghiale, to use the local parlance, makes a great lunch. I can't remember the name of the place, but there is a great market in Siena off one of the main pedestrian streets that has a whole assortment of boar salami, pictured in this post.

Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't travel too well. Fat, begins to melt at a pretty low temperature, and the salami goes bad soon after, so it never would have survived the rest of the vacation. Otherwise, I would have had to buy another suitcase to fit everything I would have bought here. I was especially intrigued by the lardo, below. This stuff looked sooo good.

At the market we went to, a company called Il Borgo produced all of the salumi. I don't know if they shop to the U.S., but if they do, someone please let me know.

The market also carried a nice variety of tuscan olive oil (In my opinion, the best olive oil comes from Tuscany), balsamic vinegar, local wines (chianti), and some pickled and oil cured seafood items.

Siena: La Sosta Di Violante Osteria

2009-09-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

For the record, I love Siena. We decided to work this place into our trip a day or so before we left. I didn't know anything about it, but our friend, Katy, reported that this was one of our favorite places. I'm glad we followed her suggestion. While Rome is an amazing place, I would not call it relaxing. Siena moves at a much slower pace, and it is beautifully quiet. Few cars venture into the old city center, allowing you to wander around the narrow, twisted streets and take in the sounds of an old, old city, without the constant buzz of cars and scooters drowning everything out. The food here is excellent as well.

Since this was a last minute addition to our itinerary, we didn't have time to research restaurants here. We checked into our hotel around lunch time and asked the guy working at the front desk where he liked to eat lunch. He pointed us to La Sosta Di Violante Osteria, which was just a short walk from the hotel. This place was awesome. We ordered three dishes here.

Risotto al chianti e pecorino di Pienza (risotto with chianti and pecorino): I had seen this recipe in cookbooks before, but I had never actually tasted it. The chianti lends a really nice flavor to the risotto, and it pecorino balanced the chianti quite nicely. The risotto was perfectly al dente.
Pici con ragu di maiale alla vecchia maniera (handmade pasta with pork ragu): I've had pork ragu several times. In fact, it's one of my favorite sauces to make. I really like how they made it here, though. I usually shred the pork into smaller pieces, but they left it in larger chunks. The pork had probably been stewing all morning, and broke apart really easily with the side of the fork. The pici was the perfect pasta for this. It had a really nice texture to it. It's a round pasta, but thicker than spaghetti, so its had a nice chewiness to it. I'm a big fan.
Ceci al rigatino e ramerino (chickpeas with Tuscan bacon and rosemary): Yet another fine dish. The Tuscan bacon and rosemary added nice, savory elements to the chickpeas.
All in all, a great meal. If you are in Siena and need a spot for lunch. Give this place a shot.

Rome: Taverna dei Fori Imperiali

2009-09-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

We were steered towards this restaurant by one of the Frank Bruni articles I linked to in the previous post. In it, he lavishes praise on this low key, family run restaurant. To be sure, this is a very quaint place. Located on a quite side street in an otherwise busy part of Rome's touristy center, Taverna dei Fori Imperiali's serves it's patrons in a cozy, brightly lit dining room filled with tables covered in the somewhat cliched red and white checkered table cloths.

My take on this place? It was good, but inconsistent. If you happen to be staying near this restaurant (as we were), this makes a nice place for a casual diner. I wouldn't trek across town for it, though. I'm not saying this place was bad, I just don't quite understand why this, of all the restaurants in Rome, received so much praise on the "Diner's Journal" blog. I would not rank this as one of the more memorable meals we had on our trip to Italy.

We started out with carciofi alla Romana (Roman style artichokes) and a plate of prosciutto and mozzarella. The artichokes were good, better than the carciofi alla giudia we had for lunch the day before, but nowhere close to Volpetti's artichokes. Than again, I will never again have an artichoke that compares to those. The prosciutto and mozzarella also just gets an "OK." I thought they were a bit stingy with the cheese, and the prosciutto was cut too thick. This dish is also best when served with a bit of olive oil, which they failed to do.

Next, we ordered two pastas. One was a ravioli in a red sauce with salt cod. It sounded good on the menu, but it wasn't as great on the plate for a couple reasons. First, the flavor of the fish was a bit lost in the red sauce, and, second, the pasta used to make the ravioli was just too thick.
The other pasta dish we ordered, papparedelle carbonara was truly a standout dish. While I thoroughly enjoyed the carbonara from Alfredo's this one was notably better. It included a better portion of guanciale as well as a healthy dose of black pepper, which I'm always a fan of. This dish is a must have if you dine here.

We still had a bit of room after the pastas, so we ordered their provaleta. This was one of our favorite things to order when we visited Buenos Aires, so, perhaps out of nostalgia, we jumped at the chance to order this. Provaleta is basically just a big, cooked, piece of cheese. Not much you can do wrong with that. The key to this dish, though, is to get a cheese that will not melt completely when you cook it. In Argentina, they often cook the cheese over the grill, but here, they cooked it "a la plancha" to get a nice, golden crust. They also added a bit of truffle oil to the cheese. I wouldn't say this is the best dish ever, but if you're a fan of big hunks of melted cheese (and who isn't?) , it's a solid choice for an appetizer.

Rome: Lunch at Da Giggetto in Rome's Jewish Ghetto

2009-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

We wanted to eat at one of the restaurants in the Jewish Ghetto while we were in Rome since we thought that would be the best place to try a Roman specialty, carciofi alla giudia (Jewish style artichokes). For this preparation, they simply deep fry the artichoke.

The place that we really wanted to try out was closed for the month of August, so we ended up settling for Da Giggetto. We rounded out our lunch with a few other typical Roman dishes.

Fried squash blossoms stuffed with mozzarella and anchovy

Bucatini all' Amatraciana

and tripa alla romana

The squash blossoms were the best dish of the meal. The bucatini was OK, but, ultimately, forgettable. The sauce was a bit too thin for my taste and the pasta was slightly over-sauced. I prefer my own version. They used the same sauce for the tripe, so the same complaint holds. The only other time we had this dish was at Babbo, where they slice the tripe into much thinner strips. I thought that way of preparing it was much better.

In spite of the nit-picking, this was a fine place for lunch. The food wasn't amazing, but it was world's better than any of the tourist restaurants you might run into lining any of Rome's major piazzas. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Colosseum and the Jewish quarter is a very quiet, pretty area to walk through, so it might make a natural stop for lunch.

Rome: Dinner at Pierluigi

2009-09-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

I just finished raving about the "Slow Food" recommendations, basically saying that you just need to pick up a copy of that book and end your research there, but if you are heading to Rome, the New York Times entries by Frank Bruni and Mimi Sheraton here, here, and here are useful reads.

Pierluigi was one of the restaurants that we learned about from these articles. As with just about every other restaurant in the city, Pierluigi was closed the night before (a Monday on August), so we came back on Tuesday and it more than made up for our bad eating experience the night before.

This was actually one of the nicer restaurants that we went to, in the sense that it had white table cloths, nice table settings, a high wait staff to customer ratio, and price tags to match. All of the food here was very well executed and I would say that it is a fine example of what good Italian food can be.

Pierluigi is located in a small piazza near the Campo de Fiori, and when the weather is nice, the restaurants seating expands to fill much of the small piazza. As a nice bonus, it sounded like a conservatory of some sort was located in one of the buildings adjacent to the plaza, and the music from practicing students was a nice accompaniment to the beginning of our meal.

We started with soppressata di pulpo (an octopus carpacio) and bresaola di Valtellina (a salad of brasaola topped with arugula and pecorino.

The octopus was a really cool looking dish and it was quite a novel preparation. The braseola salad was a really great, simple dish that I'll definitely be repeating at home.

For our primi, I ordered orecchiette with wild broccoli and Abby ordered the taglioline with porcini mushroom.

The orrechiette was perfectly cooked and the sauce was nice and light, bringing out the flavor of the broccoli without overpowering the pasta. I didn't try Abby's dish, but she said it was really good. I'll take her word for it.For secondi, we ordered scaloppini al pepe rossa (veal scaloppini with a pink peppercorn sauce) and zuppa di vongole veraci.

The scaloppine (above), certainly wasn't very picturesque, but it tasted great. The veal itself doesn't have a really powerful flavor, so this was all about the sauce. The pink peppercorns were, for the most part, left whole. These are much mellower than black peppercorns and they had a nice piquant flavor that lingers for a while.

The clam soup included fresh tomatoes and a bunch of small climbs, sort of like cockles, in a white wine broth along with a bunch of croutons that were perfect for soaking up the sauce. This was a really nice, clean dish.

All in all, this was a successful meal and I would second the NYTimes recommendation for this place.

Our worst meal in Italy and learning how to eat well

2009-09-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

As with much of our vacation, our first day in Italy was spent wandering around in search of good places to eat. I had spent a lot of time combing through the New York Times food review archives, message boards on Chow Hound and other foodie forums, and other websites to compile a list of places to eat in Italy and, from this long list of options, I was sure that the only problem we would run into would be a good problem. Of all the fine restaurants to choose from, where would we eat? This may have been the case if we were looking around on a Friday night in June, but it was a Monday night in August. It turns out most of the good restaurants shut down for the month (or at leas the last two weeks) of August, and those that remained open don't operate on Mondays. What we were left with, then, were the tourist restaurants. And, in fact, while these places do claim to serve food, I hesitate to call them restaurants. The place we ended up eating at was really just an embarassment to the country of Italy and to the whole concept of restaurants in general. The food made Olive Garden look good, and the sad thing was, this place had some of the better looking food of all the places we went to. The most tragic thing about all of this is that this is the type of crap that many tourists to Italy end up eating when they visit the country. Every tourist venue is surrounded with these restaurants that have menus in fifty languages, are packed with tourists, and serve up poorly prepared versions of Italian classics that use only the worst ingredients that money can buy. I suppose this makes sense, though. Serving a tourist is a single period game. Restaurants that are well located can catch all sorts of stray tourists, and they know that these tourists will never come back. The type of tourist that typically eats at these restaurants isn't going to go off and write a scathing online review, and they certainly aren't going to be reading such reviews even if they did exist. Locals wouldn't be caught dead eating at these places, so there is absolutely no incentive to produce food that is good enough to bring customers back. All you want to do is make food as cheaply and quickly as possible so you can rake in that tourist money. And, all the while, the customers are sitting there thinking "Hey! I'm in Italy eating real Italian food. This is just like the Olive Garden. I love that place!" Ugghh.

So, the lessons learned from all of this are: 1) If you expect to eat well on a Monday evening in late August, plan ahead and make sure your place is open, 2) don't eat near tourist attractions. In general, there is an inverse relationship between food quality and tourist density.

The most important lesson was not learned until a few days later, but, this is important and really all you need to know to eat well in Italy. FOLLOW THE SNAILS.
There is an organization, founded by a group of foodies in Italy, called Slow Food, that is dedicated to the preservation of traditional ways of cooking. While it started in Italy, it has become a global presence in the food world. Among other things, this organization reviews restaurants and if the editors believe that a restaurant does an exemplary job preparing and presenting regional Italian food, they will include it in an annual publication. If you are planning a trip to Italy, buy this book. It will be one of the best investments you'll make.* Restaurants that receive the Slow Food stamp of approval display a sticker in their window with a little snail on it. If you follow these snails, you will never ever eat a bad meal. It is worth noting that if you want super fancy modern cuisine, you probably won't find it in the Slow Food guide. This is the resource for simpler, traditional fare. But isn't that what you want on a vacation to Italy? If you want high end, consult the Michelin guide.

Once we started following the snails and eating at Slow Food approved restaurants, the quality of our eating picked up considerably. While you can get some great recommendations from food critics and fellow travelers on websites and message boards, that's time consuming and the quality control is questionable. Sure, someone may have written a review of a great restaurant they went to in Rome, but how do you are they know how it compares? A tourist can only eat at so many restaurants, so if they say, "This place is the best," they are really saying "Of the thousands of restaurants in Rome, I ate at five and this was the best of those five." The Slow Food editors have a bit more perspective. They eat at more restaurants and they have a better sense of the history of the food in a region. Just as important, though, is the fact that you can just get this book and be done with it. You don't have to spend hours collecting random recommendations from strangers. Instead, when you get hungry, just open up the book and see whats nearby.

*In addition to the Slow Food book, I would recommend that any iPhone users purchase the international data plan when they travel to Italy. The streets here are poorly marked, rarely straight, and always confusing. The iPhone map and compass are awesome for navigating cities like this. Want to find out how to get somewhere? Open up the iPhone map, search for your destination, and it will plot out your course. In the middle of a piazza and don't know which way to start walking? Just turn on the compass function and it will set you in the right direction. It really is an amazing travel tool.

**The picture at the top is not of the horrible restaurant we ate at...I just need a picture of neon restaurant signs.

Rome: Volpetti

2009-09-20T06:11:00.000-07:00

Volpetti is one of those names that comes up a lot when you are searching for the hot food spots in Rome. In the Lonely Planet guide book, there are actually two places called Volpetti. One of them is in the heart of the city where you would most likely find yourself as a tourist. This is not the one you want to go to. The Volpetti that gets rave reviews from all the foodies on various internet chat boards is located in Testaccio, just beyond the area of Rome that most tourists inhabit. For those of you familiar with Boston, I would describe this place as the Formaggio of Rome. Or, perhaps, it's the other way around.

It's not a sit down restaurant (although they do have a cafe that is open for lunch. I'll get to that below). It is, instead, a purveyor of high quality cured meats, cheeses, breads, olives, and other assorted goods.

While this place certainly sees its fair share of tourists, they make there living off of local patronage, and everything they carry is of the highest quality.

We spent a bit of time trying out bites of various things and attempting to communicate in English (which the man behind the counter didn't really know), Italian (which we didn't know), and Spanish (which turned out to be our happy common ground).

We went in to the shop hoping to get supplies for a little picnic, and the friendly man behind the counter (below) did a fantastic job upselling us on just about everything. We're glad we went with his suggestions, though, because everything was fantastic.

We were able to try several different types of prosciutto that blow away anything that you can get back here in the states. Sample there various cured meat if you stop by here. If you happen to be vegetarian, I would still recommend coming here. The single best thing that we tried here was from their artichoke bar. No place does artichokes better than Rome, and this place may just have the best artichokes in Rome. There are a number of different types of artichoke to choose from. Our man at Volpetti recommend what he described as the strongest ones. I have no idea how they were prepared, but they were, without a doubt, the best artichokes I have ever tried.

As I mentioned above, Volpetti also has a cafeteria that many locals favor for lunch. We ordered a plate of pasta

and an assortment of fried things.
The food here was nothing special, so I would save your appetite and your money for the products they sell out front.

Rome: Gelataria del Teatro

2009-09-18T19:35:00.001-07:00

We had a lot of good food in Italy. Some of it was amazing. A lot of it, while good, was familiar. But a few things we had were truly revelatory. The gelato at Gelateria del Teatro was one of them. It is not the most famous of the Roman gelaterias, but it was recommended in the Lonely Planet, so we decided to give it a shot. This was hands down the best gelato of our trip.

This small place, tucked away in an easy to miss corner boasts an array of interesting flavors. Each one successfully distills the essence of its key flavor component into an intense, icy form that is out of this world. The lemon gelato was the perfect refresher on a hot August day, and the strawberry gelato tasted like freshly picked strawberries at the height of their season. It was the less pedestrian flavors, however, that made this place special. We tried a ginger gelato that was so full of that spicy ginger kick that you could only take small bits of it...but you had to keep eating it because it was so darn good. We also tried a sage gelato. Words cannot describe how good this was. Sage is such a great complement to sweeter flavors, but to have it in ice cream form was a revelation. We often associate mint with "coolness," and when I had that sage gelato, I realized that sage could have the same effect. That gelato was quite simply the best non-savory food that I have ever tasted.

Rome: Our first meal in Italy, Lunch @ Alfredo

2009-09-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks of our life have been full of traveling, moving, and adjusting to our new life in Chicago. We've finally settled back down to a somewhat normal routine that will give us some time to catch up on the blog, so expect a heavy does of Italy over the next few days.

Prior to our trip, we had spent a bit of time scouring the New York Times food page, Chow Hound, and a few other similar places for restaurant recommendations, but our first meal ended up being a somewhat random stop. We were trying to find a place called Volpetti, but weren't having much luck. Our flight into Rome was an overnight flight, in which we couldn't really sleep much (tip to travelers: avoid Alitalia like the plague. The Alitalia plane we flew on was hands down the crappiest plane I have ever been on.) and the night before our flight we only had about 3 hours of sleep. Needless to say, we were hungry, exhausted, hot, and in need of food. When we decided to throw in the towel for our search for Volpetti, we were right next to a restaurant called Alfredo of "Fettucine Alfredo" fame. We didn't order this dish, and I wasn't expecting much. I thought that it might be the kind of place that was a total tourist trap. The food turned out to be pretty good. We ordered the spaghetti carbonara and tagliolini with speck, squash blossom, and asparagus.

The carbonara looked a lot different than the version that I make, and it had a nice bright yellow color to it that I assume came from the yolks of some good eggs. They were much yellower than any non-farmers market eggs that you get in the states. They also used guanciale instead of pancetta or bacon, which are often used back here in the states. Guanciale is a far superior choice for this dish as it has a much less dominant flavor and does a better job blending in with the other ingredients of the dish.

While the carbonara is a mainstay of Roman cuisine, the tagliolini tasted much more like a seasonal specialty.

There are hundreds of great restaurants in Rome, so I don't know if this merits a dinner stop if you are traveling through, but it was a good place for lunch. The pasta was pretty good, and it is located in the midst of a number of the main tourist attractions in Rome, so it might make a natural lunch stop.

Vacation

2009-08-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

In just a few short hours, Abby and I will be boarding a plane to Rome. We're calling this vacation our honeymoon (nearly one year after our wedding), but it could also be a one year anniversary trip or Abby's "bar trip" (I guess it's so common for young lawyers-to-be to take a nice vacation between the bar exam and the start of employment that the vacation has its own name. It's like a high end version of spring break.)

We've planned a whirlwind trip, which is exactly what most people recommend not to do. Italy, it is said, is the type of place where you want to spend time in each location to savour the local customs (food). That's not how we like to travel, though. If any particular location deserves more attention, we'll be back. For now, though, we'll make due with a couple days in each of the locations on our itinerary. Here's where we'll be going:

-Rome

-Siena

-Florence (where we hope to fit a cooking lesson)

-Cinque Terre (where we'll spend our one year anniversary)

-Venice

Hopefully we'll have a number of "blog-worthy" meals and nice pictures that we'll post after we return in early September, and I'm sure the trip will inspire a several Italian meals, not that there's been any shortage of those on this blog.

The Clam Box

2009-08-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

When you think of New England regional food, you think of seafood, and fried seafood is shacks are ubiquitous on the New England coast. One of the oldest, and best, fried seafood shacks, the Clam Box, actually isn't located on the coast, but don't let that keep you from trying out this historic little roadside stop.

The Clam Box is a short drive north of Boston in Ipswich. While they offer a number of different items on their menu, it would be foolish to come here and order anything other than the fried, big belly clams.
One of the things that I don't like about a lot of fried seafood is that it usually comes out being a bunch of fried batter that completely dominates whatever it surrounds. Not so here. The Clam Box has achieved a harmonious balance between batter and clam. The big belly clams are dipped in evaporated milk and corn flower and fried to perfection. The batter is crispy and light, and the big belly, Ipswich claims are juicy, briny, and full of flavor. I'm glad we were able to fit this in on our farewell to Boston food tour. It truly is a New England classic.

Farewell Savenor's

2009-08-18T08:52:00.000-07:00

For the last three years, I've been fortunate enough to live about 500 feet from Savenor's. I've raved about Savenor's in numerous blog posts, and I'll miss their fantastic, friendly staff and amazing selection. As their motto proclaims, they truly are "The Best on the Block" and then some.

Living next door to a place like this was the height of convenience. I never really had to plan meals ahead of time because I knew I could always just run around the corner and get anything I needed. I hope I can find a comparable butcher somewhere in Chicago, but, unfortunately, I won't be living right next door to one.

At Savenor's you can get the standards like beef, chicken, and pork (all locally raised, if you like), as well as more interesting meats like muscovy duck breast,
kobe beef and a number of different types of sausages, including the buffalo sausage picture below.

Savenor's also carries a number of different meats that you will never see at your local Whole Foods. The selection varies, but here's a sampling of some of the weird meats available the last time we went into the store: wild boar and yak

kangaroo loin and venison rack

bear shoulder roast

and even python fillets

This place was once a favorite shopping spot of Julia Child, whose "Bon Appetit-JC" inscription greets customers on the sidewalk by the entrance, and it was certainly a favorite of mine that will be missed.

Alive & Kickin' Lobster Sandwich

2009-08-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Lobster roll is a New England classic, but they don't serve these at Alive & Kickin' Lobster's in Cambridge. Located off of Putnam Street in the Cambridgeport neighborhood, Alive & Kickin' is a small lobster shack filled with tanks of, well, alive and kickin' lobsters. In addition to selling fresh lobsters, they make an awesome lobster sandwich.
The lobster sandwich is pretty simple. It's just big chunks of lobster dressed with a small amount of mayo, served between two slices of buttered, toasted scali bread. I think that lobster rolls usually include too many other things that detract from the main event, the lobster. To me, this lobster sandwich is perfect. There's nothing here but bread and lobster, and the bread is pretty unobtrusive. It's pretty much there to ensure that you aren't just eating chunks of lobster with your bare hands. Not that there would be anything wrong with that.

Brunch @ East Coast Grill

2009-08-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

The brunch at East Coast Grill is famous for their DIY bloody mary bar. In my experience, this doesn't always translate to great bloody marys (I often over do it on the habanero sauce), but it sure is fun. This is my favorite place to get brunch in the Boston area, so we decided to go here with some friends for our last day in Cambridge.

The bloody mary bar starts with a choice of tomato juice, ECG's house made bloody mary mix, and clamato juice. You then move on to a dizzying array of pickled vegetables and peppers, hot sauces, chutneys, salsas, and spices to add to your bloody mary.
When you order a bloody mary, the server brings you a large cup filled with vodka and ice. This time around, they included some beef jerky that they had made out of a brisket that had been served as a special the previous evening. The East Coast Grill always has great specials, and they often do some really cool theme dinners, such as Hell Night, and the previous night they had done a whole roasted pig. The leftover pork was used in the next morning's brunch menu with a carnitas plate served with fried plantains, cole slaw and grilled corn...

...and pork tostadas.
Both were good, but by far, my favorite dish on the brunch menu is the tortilla relleno. The tortilla relleno is a large tortilla stuffed with shredded duck and monteray jack cheese and topped with a red enchilada sauce. All of this is served over sauteed garlicky greens and yucca fries.

Dave's Fresh Cubans

2009-08-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

Between Darwin's, All-Star Sandwich Bar, Hi-Rise, and Dave's Fresh Pasta, the Cambridge-Somerville area has an amazing number of great sandwiches. One of my favorites is the Cuban at Dave's Fresh Pasta. Dave's used to be a small storefront selling pasta and other select Italian groceries, and they would occasionally offer sandwiches. Every so often, they would offer their version of a cuban sandwich, which happens to be one of my favorite types of sandwiches. Dave's version is one of the better Cubans I've tried. Fortunately, you can get this sandwich anytime now thanks to their recent expansion.

L'Espalier

2009-08-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

Our friends Leann and Josh gave us a gift certificate to L'Espalier for our wedding last year, and for some reason, it took us until one of our last nights in Boston to actually use it. I can honestly say that I would never have gone here without the gift certificate (this place is expensive. We spent $70 on a juice tasting for 2....juice!) So, in that sense, it was a really great gift. It was something that we really enjoyed that we never would have bought for ourselves. The previous two nights we had eaten at Prune and Oleana, so this just continued our excessive "Goodbye Boston" week.

Abby and I both decided to try the summer tasting menu, which consisted of the following dishes:

Butter poached Maine Lobster, Apple Street Farm brocolli with comte cheese sauce, black truffles, and a dehydrated fennel chip. This dish was really, really good. The lobster was perfectly cooke and the fennel chip was a nice complement to the sweetness of the lobster.
Torchon of foie gras with black truffle, Muscat gelee, stone fruit, red wine pickled shallots, and toast points. This dish was pretty good, but, honestly, I wasn't blown away by it. Foie gras and truffles are decadent, but they're also something that I've had a number of times before. I also can't say that I'm crazy about foie gras pates. If I'm going to eat foie gras, I much prefer it seared.

Roasted wild striped bass with black trumpet mushrooms, cauliflower puree, truffle emulsion, fried squash blossom, and dill. This was the highlight of the meal and may very well be one of the best seafood dishes I have ever had. The fish had an amazing texture to it, nice and firm with a crispy skin, and combining a little bit of each element on the dish into one bite created an incredibly complicated, yet well balanced flavor that was unlike everything I had ever tried. Usually I think of seafood dishes as light and delicate, but this was a full flavored, rich dish.

Loin of Colorado lamb with eggplant chips, roasted beets and carrots, and wild greens. This dish was a big let down after the bass. Loin is one of the most insipid cuts of any animal, and one of the things I like about lamb is its big bold flavor. The salad was good, but the lamb was just OK.

Cheese course. The cheese course they serve varies depending on the whims of the server and the requests of the customer. I don't recall the different cheeses that we had, but they were all fairly good and represented a nice variety of textures and strengths. By this course, we were pretty stuffed, so I don't think I was able to enjoy it properly. This was one of the things the surprised us about this restaurant. Usually when we get a tasting menu, the portions are so small that, while I may not be hungry after the meal is over, I'm certainly not full. Not so here. Everything was so rich that by the time we were done I was entering a food coma.

I don't recall the exact names of everything in the dessert dishes, but here are the pictures...as if we needed more food.

All in all, I thought eating at L'Espalier was a great, but pricey experience. The final bill was jaw dropping, and we didn't even order wine. That said, you get what you pay for. The setting, service, and presentation are all top notch, and while our dishes were not consistently awe inspiring, the high notes really were amazing. My only complaint was that we were seated next to a really, really annoying couple that, at the beginning of the meal could not stop talking about their trip to France and, by the end of the meal were trying to avoid each other because they got in some stupid argument about who knows what, but that's a different story.

Oleana

2009-08-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

If I was going to recommend one nice restaurant to someone visiting Boston, I think Oleana would be near the top of the list. You can find fancy French, Italian, Japanese, and New American restaurants in any city, but I think top notch, innovative Mediterranean food is much harder to find. This the niche that Oleana fills, and it does so exquisitely. Abby and I had been hear a couple of times (including the day we became engaged) and it was one of the few restaurants we absolutely had to go to before moving to Chicago. Our previous trips to Oleana were in the fall and winter, so we opted for the dining room, but, being a nice summer day, we were able to get a table outdoors this time around. Oleana's patio, pictured above, is really nice and I would recommend asking for a seat out there if you go here on a nice day.

Again, Abby and I followed the strategy of ordering a number of appetizers and splitting an entree. We both agreed that the highlight of the meal was our first appetizer: shrimp cocktail and cucumber spoon salad with sorel ice.

This cold dish came served in a mason jar the contained the cucumber salad and the sorel ice with three large shrimp draped over the edge. All of the flavors worked together perfectly, and between the shrimp, cucumber salad, and ice, there was an interesting mix of textures and temperatures that combined to make a perfectly refreshing starter for a warm summer evening.

Next, we had fried mussels with hot peppers and Turkish tartar sauce. This was good, but nothing to write home about...
...so I'll just cut to the next dish, which was another home run: heirloom tomato kibbeh with heirloom tomato dolma and hot pepper labne. As with the shrimp cocktail, this was another dish that was perfectly matched to the season. The tomato for the dolma was lightly stewed, but not so much as to lose its firmness and fresh taste.
For the fourth course, we ordered one Oleana's signature dishes, Sultan's delight. This dish includes a smokey eggplant puree with urfa chiles and pine nuts and a tamarind braised short rib.
Our fish and sixth courses were Oleana's takes on two staples of mediterranean street food: falafel and shawarma.

I usually don't order falafel because it tends to be too dry, but that was not a problem here. The falafel were served on a thin flat bread with house made pickles. The shawarma sandwiches were filled with duck and served with fried potatoes and broccoli.

Prune, round 2

2009-08-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Of all the restaurants Abby and I went to last summer in New York, Prune was one of our favorites. Abby was fortunate enough to get a spot in Manhattan for the New York Bar Exam (most out of staters get stuck in Albany or Buffalo), so we went back to Prune to celebrate the end of the two day ordeal. In addition to the bone marrow dish that we had on our last trip, we ordered and octopus salad with celery and chile flakes

fried sweet breads with bacon and capers

green beans with crab broth and almonds

and the special of the night, which was roasted suckling big with black eyed peas in a spicy broth.

As expected, everything was really, really good. Of the new dishes that we tried, I thought the suckling pig was the standout. It included bits of crispy cracklins, and the broth that it was served with was nice and spicy. It had a familiar, Sunday dinner feel to it, yet, at the same time, the spicy broth made it completely unique. It's too bad this was just a special. It would have made a nice addition to the permanent menu.

Wild boar chop with fennel pollen, flageolet beans with rosemary, and grilled asparagus

2009-07-24T19:56:00.001-07:00

This dish continues my quest to clear out as much of my pantry and freezer as possible before we move to Chicago. 9 days to go, and so many more items left. For this meal, I cleared out some flageolet beans that had been sitting in the pantry for ages and a bag full of chicken bones that had been sitting in the freezer. Often, I buy whole chickens and part them out at home so I can keep the bones for stock. This is one of those things that is a good idea that is only rarely executed on, so I had a whole bunch of bones for stock that I needed to put to use. I used the bones, along with some carrots and celary that were sitting in the fridge, to make a really strong chicken stock. After soaking them overnight, I cooked the flageolet beans in the chicken stock along with some crushed garlic and a couple sprigs of rosemary (from a plant on the back porch that I'm also trying to get a lot of use out of). Most of the effort went into making the boring starch and, as usual, I turned to Cambridge's excellent food purveyors to make the rest of the meal interesting. Wild boar chops came from Savenor's and fennel pollen came from Formaggio. Fennel pollen is tough to track down, but if you ever come across it, buy it. I can't think of a better thing to season pork with. It's amazing stuff. Here's the recipe. As usual, it's for 2 servings.

INGREDIENTS
-1.5 cups dried flageolet beans
-3 qt chicken stock
-2 sprigs of rosemary
-2 crushed garlic cloves
-1 minced shallot

-2 wild boar chops
-fennel pollen

-asparagus
-cayanne pepper

-salt, pepper, olive oil.

Soak the flageolet beans in water for a day.
In a medium pot, saute minced shallots and crushed garlic clove over medium heat for about five minutes or until the shallots become translucent. Add the soaked beans and chicken stock. Raise the heat to bring to a boil, and then return to medium heat. Add two sprigs of rosemary. It's best if you wrap the rosemary in some cheesecloth so the needles don't fall off and get mixed in with everything else.
Let the beans simmer for a looooonnnng time (a few hours). Flageolet beans have a really firm texture, and they take forever to soften up. Over the course of the cooking period, the stock will reduce. Add water to keep things from drying out. (Note: flageolet beans are usually a light green color, but the stock gives them a dark brown color in the picture above.)
Once the beans are done, keep the pot simmering over low heat and prep everything else. For the asparagus, break off the tough part at the bottom of the stem, dress with olive oil, and season with salt, pepper, and a pinch of cayanne powder. Season the boar chops with salt and pepper and a dash of oil.
Cook the asparagus on a grill pan over medium high heat until done. For the boar chops, heat a cast iron skillet, griddle, or stainless steel pan to a super high heat (give the pan at least 5 minutes over the flame before starting to cook). Sear the boar chops for two to three minutes on each side. Remove from the heat after a nice crust has formed and sprinkle a little fennel pollen on each side and finish in the oven at 350F until done. The cooking time will depend on how big the cuts are. You can check by using a thermometer or just checking the consistency of the meat after two to three minutes and every minute thereafter. For the chops I was dealing with, I just needed another two minutes in the oven.

Fettuccine with Lemon

2009-07-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

I had some pasta dough leftover from dinner last night, so, for lunch today, I made some fresh fettuccine and took another Batali recipe for a spin. This one, fettuccine with lemon, hot peppers and pecorino is really simple. Here's the recipe:

Fresh fettuccine (enough for two servings)
1 -1.5 lemons, zest and juice
1 jalapeno, seeded and cut into slivers
1/2 small to medium red onion, thinly sliced
1/4 to 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2.5 to 3 T butter
1/4 to 1/2 C grated pecorino romano
1 T olive oil

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large saute pan.
Add the onions and red pepper flakes and cook until soft and translucent. Keep the heat low enough so they do not brown.
Add the jalapeno, cook for another minute.
Add the lemon zest and lemon juice. Cook for another minute.
Remove from heat, stir in butter and season with salt and pepper.
Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling, salted water for about 2 minutes.
Drain pasta and toss in with the sauce. Turn heat back on to medium, and toss in the grated cheese. Add a little bit of the pasta water if the lemon onion mixture needs to be thinned out. Serve the pasta after about a minute of letting everything cook together.