Ktepi
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campari beginners should give the eden a whirl. served at the flat iron lounge its gin campari lemon and rose syrup. very subtle.
cheers
This reminded me of the Rooh Afza syrup that I've had sitting around for a while, so I tried something like that just now -- about 1:1:1:.5 gin/Campari/lemon/Rooh Afza. The Rooh Afza is a rosehip-screwpine syrup, very sweet, very strong -- it's still very pronounced here, and I need to play around with proportions more, and I might try lime instead of lemon. The gin practically disappears, and the Campari bitterness is very muted, to a level I associate with pink grapefruit.
But it's a good flavor combination, in any case.
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I have a chocolate-cherry-coffee-pecan fruitcake in the fridge, waiting to be splashed with a little more bourbon when I get back from the liquor store tonight. Last year we made a white chocolate fruitcake which was fantastic -- essentially using the fruitcake recipe in one of Steingarten's books, with a bunch of white chocolate and Benedictine -- but we've made it twice since then and it didn't fly. We've decided the white chocolate itself was the key, but the stuff we used for the first one was bought out of town, and neither of us can remember what brand it was.
I think I like the new one better, even if it's less traditional -- none of the glace fruits (I would have used them, mind you, but I started the fruitcake in October and no one here had them for sale yet), just dried tart cherries, pecans and hickory nuts. It's still unmistakably fruitcake -- but I'm going to buy some of the glace fruit this season and put it aside for next year.
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The most complex stress analysis I've ever done was figurin' out how much gum I was gonna need to quit smoking, but I'll try to take photos when I do mine at Christmas. The Missus may take the camera when she visits her family, though.
I'm figuring on leaving the skin on, but I've always had trouble getting salt to stick to pork skin, so I'll wind up checking it and making sure the salt's still there more often than's probably necessary.
Another corned pork fat idea: I'm making duck confit for New Years, I could add it to the duck fat there. Hell, it'd probably make good cornbread, too.
(I'm thinking about curing bacon for that week as well, and am going to be ordering chaudin and tasso from Poche's, so this is shaping up to be the porkiest Christmas ever.)
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Recipe books I can give away without a problem -- I'm giving most of mine to my ex this Christmas, now that she's cooking more. With the exception of the baking recipes and other things that depend on specific proportion, I've found that once I make something a few times, I get it well enough -- and if I don't make it a few times, I'm not likely to need the recipe anyway.
But the Steingarten books, on the other hand, are staying. The Larousse Gastronomique isn't going anywhere. The McGee won't budge until I get the second edition. Anything with lengthy or helpful discussions of ingredients or techniques stays.
Now, if I had a decent sized kitchen and/or a convenient place to put these, it might be another matter -- and if you'd asked me ten years ago, I'd have a different answer -- but really, these days I'm much more likely to be spurred to try something new by an eGullet post or blog entry than I am by flipping through cookbooks I've already read half a dozen times.
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Take it from someone who knows where all the chocolate in the house is hidden -- the past tense of "snuck" is "snack."
I didn't use 1/2" dice on any of the meat in the cassoulet chili, but the cassoulet method really breaks the meat down. I can't actually distinguish the chorizo in it at all, not visually or texturally -- see, this is why I'd hoped to find Spanish-style chorizo with the chunks of lomo in it, and Louisiana smoked chaurice would've been a fine substitute -- and the skirt steak (in pieces ranging from 1/2" to maybe 2"x1") wound up in pieces barely bigger than the beans, by and large.
(Interestingly, the smoked pulled pork is still pretty intact and dicernible. I kind of sort of think that makes sense but can't figure how to put it.)
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Oh, Linda had mentioned cheap Mexican-style chorizo having lips and lymph nodes, so when I was shopping for it, I found two brands, and checked the ingredients -- sure enough, one of them had lymph nodes listed; the other, just pork. I bought the pork -- I've bought the noded one tons of times in the past, but it's one of the chorizos I complain about for disintegrating too quickly into a pool of grease studded with suggestions of meat, rather than something I can actually work with.
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Would you mind explaining the flavor of the grains of paradise? I've never tried them, but the name makes them sound awfully tempting.
Thanks
-Linda
Oh sure. They're very peppercorn-like, although you can notice the difference right away -- I'm not sure how to characterize that difference, but it's like the way chicken and turkey certainly taste similar while still being distinct. Warm, and sometimes a little bitter, enough so that I don't use it on hamburgers and am more likely to use it when it cooks in something rather than on the surface of something.
I shouldn't be doing this, but I've been using them as a peppercorn substitute lately, only because I'm out of peppercorns and I'm not out of grains of paradise. Financially, this is really not a good idea, and I'm sure I'm shaming my Yankee mother.
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Oh my . . . Words fail me, Bill. That looks just gorgeous. Did the smokiness of the smoked meat come through?
I have got to try this. Or at least some version of it.
The smokiness is right about at what I would have called a compromise level -- smoky enough for me to pick it up, unsmoky enough that my ex who doesn't like too much smoke flavor (especially if it isn't barbecue) wouldn't have a problem with it. I should probably have put more smoked pulled pork in it, but it's a new addition to the butcher's, and wound up being so good I wanted to save more of it for sandwiches.
I forgot to mention that I garnished it with bacon, but you can see that in the photos -- and the bacon definitely brings out the smoke flavor, as I'm noticing from today's baconless leftovers.
(And I figure most people don't know what jowl bacon is, since I didn't before moving to Indiana, and even most people I know here don't know what it is until I tell them: it's just what it sounds like, bacon made from smoked pork jowl instead of the belly, and it's amazing. It's sometimes skinned if it's sold sliced, but when it's whole, it comes with the skin on. It looks incredibly fatty, but comes out very crisp and rich. It, shagbark hickory syrup, and Montmorency cherries have been my best food discoveries here; when we move, it'll be with ten pounds of jowl bacon in a cooler in my lap.)
Unlike most chilis I make, it turns out Louisiana hot sauce is not a good garnish on these leftovers, I don't know why. I have some habanero roasted ketchup from a few days ago, but it's potent stuff and I wasn't sure I was awake enough for it.
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Chili cassoulet!
Bear with me if the photos don't work at first, I don't believe I've posted images here before and might get it wrong.
Like I said above, what I had in mind with "chili cassoulet" was something which would come out with deep flavors, something rich. I was figuring on a lot of smoked flavors originally -- chipotle, smoked pork -- but scaled that back.
Some of the ingredients --
Not pictured: lots of stuff that wouldn't fit there, actually, and of course all the meat.
I precooked 8 oz. of Mexican-style chorizo (no lymph nodes), 8 oz. of skirt steak roughly chopped, and 2 pounds of chili-grind chuck, and combined those with a couple handfuls of smoked pulled pork from the butcher.
Cooked a few strips of jowl bacon, reserved them, and sauteed two bell peppers, two onions, one Anaheim chile, and one cayenne chile in the bacon fat. (Note: this is a lie. I ate the bacon and cooked more later. I was supposed to reserve it, though.) Cut the skin off the block of jowl and tossed that in with the mixed meat.
Ground some spices -- the grains of paradise and cumin pictured there -- and added them, along with Mexican oregano, smoked bittersweet paprika, coarse paprika, a pinch of cinnamon, a bulb of roasted garlic, and half a cup or so of strong demiglace, to a box of Swanson's beef broth, simmering it until the demiglace melted. I didn't have any homemade stock -- any time I do have it, I make demiglace.
At first I layered things (meat, veggies, pinto beans, repeat x2, pouring the broth over at the end) --
-- and then I realized they weren't going to fit, and I've have to sacrifice layering in favor of the larger cook pot:
Those chunks of pork really needed to be buried further down anyway.
Cooked it most of the day. About three hours at 300, two hours rest, two hours at 350, and then topped it with a layer of crushed Fritos (thank you, Linda) and baked it for another 40 minutes or so at 400.
The final product, minus two servings. See that orange grease pooling up? Yeah you right.
We had it with Boulanger bread on the side, shredded Tillamook cheddar and chunks of queso fresco, and caipirinhas. And although I've frozen a third of it, I think it's gonna be lunch all week.
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I have used that technique to salvage what looked like a lovely carpet of fond but was, alas, much too salty. The whole idea is that salt will dissove preferentially in the water. If you use cool water in a cool pan, you will lessen the amount of flavor components that leach out. This is a bit fiddly but is the only way I know to get a pretty darn good pan gravy out of salty fond.
YOIKS! I just checked the calendar. If you are thinking about this for Thanksgiving action begins next week in order to get two weeks corning time.
Nov 7-8 buy ham
Nov 9 in the fridge to corn
Nov 9-23 check on ham to drain and resalt where necessary
Nov 23 rinse ham and put in cold water in the fridge
Nov 24 (early am) put on to bake
Oh excellent, thank you -- I wondered about the salt and had figured that maybe I'd have to dilute the drippings with cream gravy, for instance -- but your technique is better.
I'm making the ham for Christmas, so I'm all set timing-wise -- I almost wish I were doing turkey for Christmas and the ham for Thanksgiving, so I could use the fat from the ham to rub the turkey with (Rosengarten's turkey uses prosciutto fat, doesn't it?). But it doesn't work out that way.
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I would resist adding seasoning. I think the idea is to end up with pure pork goodness. Yes . . . I know that will be hard. I am similarly tempted. Get thee behind me evil cajun mix!
At least I'm not alone. We've been making a lot of "lamb ham" -- leg of lamb cured with Morton's Tender Quick -- and I really like the combination of TQ, brown sugar, smoked paprika, and cayenne. I just have to keep telling myself this is a different sort of ham, and that tinkering should be deferred to the second or third time anyway.
Besides, come to think of it, I'm really curious about how the pan drippings are going to turn out, and seasoning would mess with that.
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Bought my ham today, just under 20 pounds. Butcher's hanging onto it until December so I don't have to worry about keeping the freezer nigh-empty. I only just made room in there after buying a three-legged goat in August.
Googling around, I found a lot of references to corned ham as the necessary ingredient in a stuffed ham popular in Maryland, and this blog entry -- http://www.jimandchris.com/weblog/archives...01_archive.html -- which has a photo of a ham that sounds like it was wet-cured. Either my screen is too small -- or my eyes too mumblemumble -- for me to tell if the skin's on, but it looks like it.
It's going to be hard to resist the urge to add some kind of seasoning to that salt, but I'll try.
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It's just the two of us for Thanksgiving -- our families are on opposite coasts and the Missus's sister doesn't live nearby anymore, and the friends who might otherwise come will be here for New Years instead.
So it's going to be a scaled-down Thanksgiving. Turkey, of course -- I'm talking to my butcher this week about what heritage turkeys he can set me up with, and what it'll cost me -- and an as yet undetermined stuffing. I've never cooked any sort of heritage turkey -- I'm not sure if there's anything I should take into account in terms of what flavors would work best in the stuffing (which will absolutely be in the bird).
At the moment, I'm planning on brining the turkey in diluted apple cider with sage, but it depends on what I do for stuffing.
Sides --
Two cranberry sauces. We always get the canned so the Missus can use it for leftover turkey sandwiches, and I make a whole berry sauce to have with the meal. Last year's was on the tart side, with Coca-Cola and orange zest; this year I'm leaning towards a cranberry wine jelly like the latest Gourmet had.
Maybe mashed potatoes. I'm going to see if she minds me leaving these out, which surprises me, because since I was a teeny tiny kid, the mashed potatoes have been my favorite part of the meal other than the stuffing. But I'm tired of these sorts of meals being so carb-heavy. If this is a thirtysomething thing, I wouldn't've minded a warning.
Roasted Brussels sprouts, probably with bacon fat and some of the old balsamic vinegar I never use because no occasion seems "special" enough. Maybe a little Japanese chile.
Corn macque choux. I have a bunch of corn kernels I froze during the summer from the folks whose corn was sweet enough that people would wait in line for half an hour at the Farmer's Market. Usually I make dirty rice with the turkey liver, but again, I'm going for sides that aren't that heavy -- that'll be something for lunch the day before, most likely.
Pumpkin pie for dessert, maybe with a little goat yogurt in the filling. Toffee bacon to serve with it.
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Yes, the crushed chips cook up to a wonderful texture in the old tamale pie. I think it would do very well in a "Chili Cassoulet." Talk about fusion cuisine.
If Wolfert ever hears of this she will probably go into apoplexy. (Just kidding. She is a very adventurous lady.) Oh, I dunno . . . I have run into some pretty bad chorizo here. You have to really read the label to get something other than lips and lymph nodes. (I am NOT kidding.) The Mexican style here is basically the meat, paprika, garlic and vinegar. It is fresh, not smoked. I am learning that Spanish chorizo may be a very different thing. (BTW, I use smoked kielbasa in my gumbo all the time if I can't get my hands on andouille. Works great.
)That's true, I've had lip chorizo ... I just miss the frequent trips to San Antonio to visit my ex's folks, and the inevitable chorizo and potato tacos for breakfast and four or five pounds of chorizo in the cooler to bring back with us. The biggest problem with travel is learning to miss things you don't have at home.
I'm going to try to make this this weekend. The Missus loves the black bean cassoulet I make sometimes, and while she's not as big a pinto bean fan as I am (she's from WA, she doesn't know from beans), I'm sure I can sell the concept despite the fact that we just had chili last week. And if I wait till the weekend, I can see if there are any fresh chiles left at the Farmer's Market.
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I've been trying to clean out the freezer, partly to prevent any mishaps of the "I left this in the back of the freezer for three years" sort and partly to make room for a large ham in case I get ahold of it before I'm ready to make the Corned Ham talked about elsethread.
So this morning, I filled a pot with goat brisket, smoked ham hocks, pigs tails, a sliced cayenne pepper, bay leaves, and garlic, meaning to make feijoada ... only to discover we had gone through the black beans already, faster than I'd realized. Well, I told myself, potatoes and milk are both mostly water -- it's the rest of what's in there that counts. So I dumped in the last of my coconut vinegar, some wine vinegar, some honey, a lot of soy sauce, and some water, and the feijoada became adobo.
I was cleaning up just now, separating some of the bones from the meat and straining the sauce so I can freeze it to add to some other adobo, and fooooooshp, two little tubes of sauce-soaked goat marrow slid right out of the goat bones. Goat marrow! I've never knowingly had goat marrow before. Hello, breakfast.
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That is a fascinating concept. A common use of your basic chili here is as a chili pie. This favorite of the pot luck circuit is normally assembled using masa or crushed tortilla chips or corn chips, cheese, onion maybe. You could switch the balance to more beans, maybe use crushed chips in place of the bread crumbs, vary the meat mix . . . HMMMMM!!! Yeah . . . pinto beans. How about some chorizo sausage? This has possibilities.
Oh, I like the idea of using crushed chips. I wish I could get the kind of chorizo I'd like to use here, but all we have is very finely ground, very fatty chorizo which is decent but not much like anything I've had in Texas (although I've certainly had very fatty chorizo in Texas, so I'm not explaining the difference well). What I'd like is chorizo links that could be cut into bigger chunks that wouldn't disintegrate after the long cooking time (I'm just now realizing I don't know what terms to use for the many kinds of chorizo I've run into, the raw stuff, the smoked, the canned-with-lard, the links with big chunks of meat in them...)
If I were going to do this, I'd probably use Emeril's Smoked Sausage -- it's the best sausage for gumbo that I can get my hands on here (where everything is kielbasa and brats), and this isn't gumbo of any sort, but it's ... well, it's as far from brats as gumbo is.
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Has anyone played around with a chili cassoulet? Or a cassoulet-style chili, if you like that labelling better. Susan's mention of cooking her beans in the oven made me think of it.
Maybe smoked sausage and hand-cut or chili-grind chuck, for the meats -- smoked pork of some kind maybe (tasso if I could get it here) -- kind of reluctant to put duck in chili, for some reason. Chipotles, garlic (roasted?), cumin, roasted tomato puree, rich stock, masa. Pinto beans?
I'm imagining something rich, deep, and spicy, with lime wedges to accompany -- or the orange slices of feijoada -- instead of the richness of sour cream, cheese, and avocado.
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Eagle Rare 10 yr is my go-to bourbon and one of the liquors I replenish most frequently, so I'm pretty confident you'll like rye whiskey, since I do
I haven't tried any of the ryes you list, though -- here, the only ones I'm able to find are Wild Turkey and Old Overholt. Of those, not only do I like Old Overholt better, it's cheaper. I'm less likely to drink it straight than I am the Eagle Rare, but it makes a good Old-Fashioned (and replaces bourbon just fine in any other cocktail I've tried). -
Haven't got any photos -- I'm not a big food photographer to begin with, but tonight it's really just not an option, with a flashless camera phone, a light out near the stove, and meat-in-dark-sauce cooking in cast-iron -- but I made chili tonight 'cause of this thread. Goat chili.
In August, we got a goat -- minus the head and one leg -- from our butcher, who'd ordered it to fill a special order and had a lot left over so gave us a good deal on it. There's not much of it left now, but there were two packages of assorted chops, which I had found were best braised: they're bony and fairly small, so although they can be seared/baked/sauteed/whatever, if served on the bone they're pretty hard to eat.
This is a pretty young goat, I think -- milder than the lamb I buy, and many of the cuts would be more likely mistaken for pork. The ground meat made the best non-beef hamburgers I've had.
Anyway, though -- today I braised the chops in my cast iron "chicken fryer" (so Lodge calls it), with two diced cayenne peppers frozen sometime in the summer, a few cloves of elephant garlic, a mixture of spices (cumin, grains of paradise (I'm out of peppercorns), oregano, paprika, dash of cinnamon, dash of sugar, dash of salt), the half cup of coffee we hadn't drunk this morning, and enough stock to cover.
Once the meat got to the point that it was hopping off the bone, I strained out the liquid and popped it in the fridge -- it's very fatty, and I want it to cool down enough for me to get most of that fat out, especially since this goat fat is fairly gamy. I've got beans -- straight up red beans like we'd be using for red beans and rice -- cooking in a little stock, and some roasted tomatoes, and I'll toss those all together in about an hour, after I've made some cornbread to go with.
The one thing it's really missing is onion, which I'm out of cause we skipped the Farmer's Market yesterday morning in favor of a Halloween party. But it's a nice halfway point between "what I think of as chili" and "what I think of as stew," and spicy enough -- thanks to those midsummer cayennes -- that the Missus is gonna ask for some cheese on top.
ETA some chili-making background:
Chili is the first dish I learned to make, if you don't count "watching Dad cook while Mom's sick" type stuff (scrambled eggs, hamburgers, ... more scrambled eggs). I'd been "baking" for a few years, making cakes from mixes while my mother was out running errands, because I'd realized that asking, "Mom, can we have cake?" often yielded a "no," while "look Mom, I made a cake!" might get an exasperated "and look at the mess you made," but we still had cake. The kitchen's a mighty powerful place.
I'm not sure why I switched from sweet to savory, and neither's my mother, who points out she'd make chili any time I asked for it, since it was something the whole family'd eat -- so that cake-making motivation wasn't there. But whatever the reason, I started making it when I was about 12 or 13, which means I've been at it 18 years now. When I was in college and was "the guy who can cook," chili was the main thing people came over for.
I've gone through every phase with it, adding all the ingredients you suddenly think are brilliant, all the CASI recipes, peanut butter chili, sweet potato chili, a chili I called "Chili Palmer" after Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty (pork chops and ground beef, lots of papaya), Texan purism, etc. At this point, I just make whatever I'm in the mood for. Usually I prefer chili-grind beef and/or pork, onions, chile, tomato, a minimum of garlic and bell pepper, and enough stock in the liquid to encourage a thick sauce to the final product (the stock I used tonight is heavy on the gelatin). If it's more finely ground beef, I like it to be thick enough to spread on toast without soaking through.
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For the past few years, our Thanksgiving stuffing has been a doctored Pepperidge Farm with tart apples, shredded rabbit, and lots of sage added; this year I may abandon the rabbit, since I'm aiming to get a heritage turkey and am not sure if I can really afford both (rabbit costs me a lot more here than I'm used to, and Thanksgiving's just the two of us since our families live on opposite coasts). The running joke had been that the stuffing cost more than the turkey.
Bell's seasoning (which is heavy on the bay leaf) and sage sausage were the traditional additions when I was growing up -- that Bell's in the turkey stuffing was the most seasoning I ever tasted as a kid. (My mother is an old school New Englander who never touched her spice cabinet except to sprinkle cinnamon on applesauce, Lawry's on chicken, and Bell's in stuffing.)
Oyster stuffing makers: do you use fresh or canned oysters? I can't get fresh here, but have only had oyster stuffing in Louisiana restaurants, where I'm pretty sure they were using fresh.
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My butcher just started carrying fresh picnics (I've had a rough time finding decent pork since moving here) -- I'm absolutely making a corned ham for Christmas. If I'm able to get kale in December, too, Santa can just go on ahead and skip my chimney.
Thanks Varmint.
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A piece of pie -- apple, with dried tart cherries and a little bourbon -- and a "test piece" of the spiced sweet potato fudge I'm making for a Halloween party on Saturday (I don't have a candy thermometer, so on the rare occasion I make candy, I'm winging it -- and the fudge cooked slightly too long, so it's very dense; still "breaks" like fudge, but doesn't melt in your mouth. I don't know how much the sweet potato affects this, of course).
Last night, a piece of gingerbread which was good but had me wishing it was more intensely-flavored -- the Missus had dark chocolate creme brulee, and I wanted something that intense without being chocolate.
(Tomorrow: ahem, "test pieces" of the other desserts -- mesquite brownies with saffron dulce de leche, and burnt-citrus tarts with dark chocolate and cinnamon.)
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During Farmers Market season, I get a bagel every Saturday at the Bloomington Bagel Company (the other place in town -- a Panera -- makes bagels that taste like perplexed danishes) -- after the market, and before the butcher. Today's was a salt bagel with lite veggie cream cheese to make up for the Barq's red cream I had instead of my usual Fiji water.
But man, I want a lamb burger for lunch.
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Please tell me you meant loin not lion! And given that choice (or either) nothing wrong with a rib-eye.
No no, lion. There's nothing wrong with a rib-eye -- or loin -- but they aren't hard to find, either. Neither one of them's an opportunity missed. But lion? She moved out of Philly, neither of us has been there since, and while I've had plenty of ostrich, elk, venison, kangaroo, and so on in the eight years since then, I haven't seen lion for sale anywhere else. (It might have been mountain lion, I don't know. But I haven't seen that either.)
Pigs' Head
in Cooking
Posted
Pig's head is great -- when I can get one, I just roast it plain and simple (and serve it with greens and barbecue sauce). You get a lot of crunchy skin and a couple kinds of meat -- not a whole lot, relative to the size, but it depends on how it was carved (and usually I cut the jowls out to cure and cook separately).