Chris Hennes

Why, what did you have ScottyBoy? Snack time: salsa. Straightforward prep, made in a food processor in three steps. I like the Muir Glen whole tomatoes for this one. Ingredients: Step one, hand chop garlic fine, onion coarse, slice chile, add with salt and lime juice to food processor: Pulse a few times to chop: Add whole tomato Stir in tomato puree and serve: A little thinner than usual tonight: there were only two whole tomatoes in the can this time, the rest was puree (usually there are three).

Are you asking from a technical perspective, or a general cooking/flavor perspective? I know nothing of the technical makeup of either, but tallow is rendered from beef (technically I believe "tallow" refers specifically to rendered beef suet), whereas lard is rendered pork fat. I've never tried to purchase tallow, I make my own when I've needed it, so I'm no help there. Unflavored lard is easily available, but also worthless. Flavored lard is available from Mexican markets that make things such as chicharones.

Here are the roasted beets and onions: And the roasted poblanos: That gets tossed with lime juice, Worcestershire, and cilantro and served at room temp. My wife got hold of the camera and shot this: Here are the steamed tamales: And here it is served:

Sure not me, when I moved here! I think I've been into dozens of markets in the metro area to find these gems. But man, now that I've found them! There are very, very few ingredients that I cannot find locally (not counting various Modernist powders, etc. that everyone orders over the internet anyway). I was worried when we moved to Oklahoma that finding ingredients would be a problem, and it turns out that with enough searching, you can get it all. The only thing I have ever bought at that mercado is the lard, actually: it's typically my last stop on the grocery tour because of its location, so by that point I've got everything already, and have often just eaten lunch. Thanks. You're right: I ate two of them, which was enough sugar to last me a week. These will go into my wife's office tomorrow, I think. I didn't even realize that with corn husks closing them off was an option: I close banana leaf tamales, but leave the corn open. I never really thought about it, it's the way Consuelo Hester taught us at the tamale-making workshop I went to a few years ago. I use string because a) I an not as deft at producing them quickly as the real pros, so I like to make sure mine are tied at the bottom and b) I find it easier to work with than shredded corn husks for the same purpose. I have a huge spool of butcher's twine: may as well get some use out of it!

ScottyBoy, I think you will appreciate what I have in store for Friday

Yes, absolutely: you need everything in front of you. I've never tried doing it assembly-line style. Even when I've made tamales with a group of people everyone had their own stations (sometimes with shared bowls in the middle. And add my vote for tamale-making with margaritas (preferably with a few friends over to enjoy them with).

Yes, they keep very well: we'll only eat four of them tonight, and then freeze the rest. To reheat you just steam them until hot.

They just passed over as I was filling the tamales. Speaking of which: Here is the batter after the last 1/2 cup of stock was added and it was re-beaten The filling is ricotta and red chard, steamed and tossed with the remaining garlic: Here is my assembly station: Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: And finally into the steamer. I don't have the right kind of steamer for this, so I just sort of tie them together into a standard vegetable steamer. So those are steaming now, and I've got the vegetables for the beet salad roasting as well:

After years of watching all of your incredible creations, and then observing all the flaws in my own, I finally have an entry for this topic. As mentioned on my foodblog, these are filled with Wybauw's "Toscana" ganache (which is superb, by the way):

When we talk about chocolates with that showroom finish, this: is what we are talking about. YYEEEEEAAAAHHHHHH!!! Finally, after years of trying, today I have an entry for that topic! Yes! (yes, I really am that excited, this is far an away the best batch of chocolates I've ever made. Also, the taste is fantastic too). Here's the interior:

The problem with spring starting so early here in OK is that I just spent an hour weeding. However, a couple of the "weeds" I went to pull were not weeds at all, but rather neglected parsnips just coming in again for the spring: I've never tried to overwinter parsnips before. Are these still going to taste good?

Agreed: I made it using the volume measurements a LONG time ago and thought it was excellent.

And onto dinner: Roasted Garlic Tamales with Ricotta and Swiss Chard, from Rick Bayless's Fiesta at Rick's. The ingredients for the tamale batter: There are 10oz of lard to 2lbs (32 oz) of masa, for reference, for a corn:fat ratio of about 3:1. The tamale batter has roasted garlic in it, so the first step is to pan roast that: Next up, finely chop the garlic (I mashed it too, obviously): You whip the garlic, lard, salt, and baking powder together first: Next add the masa in a few batches: Add enough stock to get the right consistency (about a cup): Then beat like mad. Bayless's doneness criterion for beating is when 1/2 teaspoon dollop floats in cold water: This is in the refrigerator cooling down and hydrating now: there is a second liquid addition and beating stage in about an hour.

Alright: so the 2012 eG Candy and Confectionery Conference is coming up soon, I've got to get warmed up. I am starting out with a ganache-filled bon bon: the ganache is the "Toscana" from Jean-Pierre Wybauw's Fine Chocolates 2: Great Ganache Experience. It's flavored with orange and lime zest, vanilla, honey, and cognac (I used bourbon). As usual, I doubled Wybauw's flavoring quantities, I usually find that the recipes could stand to be more assertive. I used my new SideKIC sous vide rig to melt my cocoa butter: I wanted to use orange and lime green, but I don't have them, so I used gold and "peridot green": I've taken to tabling my chocolate to temper it: I find I get better, more consistent results this way than with the seeding technique. Plus, it's fun to simply pour a bunch of chocolate on the counter and swirl it around. Shelled in E. Guittard 62%: My filling station: I'm currently waiting for the ganache to cool before piping it into the shells. Here's my kitchen in something closer to its usual state:

My thinking here is that when I develop a new sausage recipe, I tend to think in volume terms: to one pork shoulder add a pinch of this, a handful of that, etc. OK, now write it down... well, that was probably about three tablespoons of X and a teaspoon of Y. OK, now convert to weight.

That cilantro conversion is most likely purely the result of an automated conversion process, one that you see in a lot of US cookbooks that are trying to be nice and give metric conversions. Of course, the US measure is a volume measure, not a weight, and what many authors (or publishers) seem to do is assume that because a tablespoon of water weighs about 15g, so must a tablespoon of anything else! So they simply apply the conversion as 1T=15g, regardless of what the substance is. Obviously with most dry substances this is WAY off.

OK, lunchtime before the fun stuff begins. I have a smoothie for lunch maybe 50% of the time. They are fast, easy to eat at my desk, and reasonably nutritious.

Absolutely: alas, they don't sell Batali's stuff. But I use the Fra' Mani as the definitive flavor reference for my own salume, that stuff is fabulous.

Wow, you're absolutely right. I think my brain was interpreting that as the shadow of the gratin, or something like that.

OK, I better get some photos of the kitchen up in its clean state! It's only ever this clean right before a cooking extravaganza, otherwise there is almost invariably some stuff on the counter that I was just too lazy to clean in the last round of dishes. If I ever manage to get up the motivation to clean it completely, I tend to then look at my nice clean kitchen and say to myself hey, look at how clean the kitchen is! I should cook something crazy! From the living room: From the dining room: From the kitchen window: As you can see, it's a pretty big kitchen, with lots of storage, and lots of counter space. Plus, I've added a 4' stainless steel work surface where I do most of my prep. My only complaints are that I hate the huge, deep grout lines on the floor, which are impossible to keep clean, and the kitchen was designed to have a small island in the middle, so has too much floor space. Pretty minor, all told. I thought upon moving in that I'd want to replace the electric smoothtop range, but now I think I'm more likely to replace a gas range with an electric smoothtop in my next house. I love that thing!

All shipped up to Chicago for processing! I don't have much beef on the menu this week, I'm afraid. Some pork, and actually a lot of vegetarian and mostly-vegetarian fare. That's just how we eat most of the time, now that we have access to all this great produce.

Yeah, they really are. The Sunflower is a little on the smaller side for OK, but the Whole Foods is gigantic, the largest I've ever personally been in. The energy company across the street (Chesapeake) owns the land and negotiated with the Whole Foods to go in there as part of their attempts to "upgrade" the neighborhood: I suspect WF is getting a sweet deal on their lease. I hope so!

It's not separated: it's still warm. They had just finished frying a couple hours earlier. ETA: It's also got a fair amount of solids in it from the chicharrones. I'll show a photo of the one I wound up buying when I start the tamales in a bit here.

Rounding up the market tour so that we can get to some cooking... Forward Foods is a small two-location organic-y sort of store with a fantastic cheese counter, and some very, very good charcuterie. I usually go to their original Norman location, but since I was driving by anyway, this time I stopped at the new OKC location (note that they are actually moving their Norman location down a few blocks sometime this spring, so if you are looking for them make sure you get the correct address). Exterior front sign: Half of their cheese case: well affinaged and a nice selection. And a blurry cell-phone photo of the main meat case: they carry both La Quercia and Fra' Mani, basically two of the best charcuteriers in the States. And a couple shots of the new Sunflower Markets and Whole Foods to wrap things up. I'm very happy to see these two stores in OKC: some people are upset that they wound up putting the oldest grocer in town out of business, but as far as I'm concerned we gained more than we lost. Sunflower and Whole Foods simply sell better-quality food: I can support higher prices if the quality is good, but unfortunately the old grocer simply wasn't that great. I like to think that maybe, just maybe, people in OKC are starting to care about the quality of their food.

While I get the majority of my Mexican ingredients at the Buy For Less, there is one that I have to head out to a Mercado for: Liquid gold: They make their own chicharrones here, and then sell the lard they fried them in. Absolutely the best stuff for making tamales. I actually try to buy the whiter of the available containers since otherwise the roasted pork flavor completely dominates the tamales, and I usually want to taste the filling, too.