Hurricane Dinner Party

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.

Another big dinner

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.

Spring menu

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.

Confit collective, part 3: The big dinner

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.

Tony's birthday lunch

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.

The Confit Collective, Part 1

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.

Cold weather food

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.