patrickamory

EMP was fun in its last incarnation, but fussy & full of gimmicks and staff interventions. Le Bernardin is incredibly overrated in my opinion - yawn city. Del Posto - 14 courses of extreme boredom punctuated by yet more inter-courses to keep you full Nakazawa is an overhyped joke. Neighborhood places in LA serve better fish. I have never been to Jean Georges.

Catching up after the holidays. Dahi murgi with rice, spinach, lime pickle and chili pickle: Lamb rib chops with a grand cru Burgundy, rice and white cassoulet beans for NYE: Some road food... Jack's Hot Dog Stand in North Adams, Mass., and George's Coney Island in Worcester, Mass.: Decided to try to re-create the incredible Sucelt stewed chicken with black beans and rice again (some of you may have followed my earlier efforts). Combining a couple approaches online worked pretty well. Marinated the chicken in lemon juice, onions, green pepper, tomato (frozen from the summer), garlic, oregano, turmeric, salt and pepper: After a couple hours I removed the marinade, reserving it. Then I caramelized sugar in olive oil and vigorously browned the chicken on all sides. Added the marinade back with some water and tomato paste and cooked until the meat was falling off the bone. Meanwhile I had midnight black beans going in the slow cooker all day, with some toasted cumin, black peppercorns, bay leaf, allspice (I know, more Jamaican than Cuban), a whole serrano chili and salt. When creamy I added in a sofrito: and cooked for another hour or so, adding some cider vinegar as well. Yeah it was good... I was just missing that incredible homemade salsa they had at Sucelt, I do have a line on a formulation though. Finally - I don't really eat dessert and I didn't make this (my mother and brother did), but this boûche de noël is so pretty I thought you might all enjoy it. Merry Xmas & Happy New Year!

Gorgeous.

Wow sartoric that looks fabulous. Beautiful nubbins on the pork skin.

Interesting - I've never had this problem with Indian cuisine. However I do always use full-fat yoghurt, and usually a Middle Eastern brand when I can find it... never added at boiling point.

Rancho Gordo scarlet runners soaked overnight with bay leaves and carrot: While these were simmering with some salt and some more bay leaves, I roasted a head of garlic: That went into the beans at the end: After some sitting I dug the soft cloves out and dusted the top with some of the peel. Served with just peas: I should have dug out the green sprouts from the garlic... a bit bitter...

I do this all the time - for chicken, duck, turkey and goose. You'll be fine. Definitely place it on a rack - not just good for catching the juices, but also for maximum air circulation around the bird. Btw, from my experience, salting the outside - a dry brine - is better than a wet brine. But I will admit I've never injected.

BKEats was the final dish Khao Soi? Looks delicious.

I use a Pyrex measuring cup - holds the main spoon, and if there is a secondary spoon for say a pasta or some rice, it goes in there upside down so that the scoop doesn't pick up any sauce. Tongs can go in there too the usual way since they don't tend to catch anything to any great extent... works as a triple spoon rest that is stable and doesn't take up much counter space (very valuable in my small apartment kitchen).

An old, pasture raised bird. Pressure cooked with an onion, a couple carrots, not quite enough water to cover and some celery for 2 hours plus natural release. Only partially defatted. This was incredible with our Thanksgiving stuffing...

Lamb with pickling spices (achar gosht), a Bengali recipe that is listed in the Uttar Pradesh section of Madhur Jaffrey's A Taste of India. I'd made this before so knew to make some changes... 1/4 tsp salt for 2 pounds of lamb never seemed right. I subbed ghee for the specified vegetable oil. I got bone-in shoulder instead of the boneless specified, which meant a longer cooking time. And I doubled the amount of lemon juice. It's an odd recipe - a semi-braise with almost no liquid. The meat simmers in the copious quantity of ghee plus its own rendered fat, and then a very small amount of lemon juice. The result is dry on the outside, juicy and falling apart on the inside, and incredibly tart, aromatic and spicy. You start by stuffing slit chiles with a mixture of whole spices: cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, fenugreek seed and nigella seed: A bunch of whole spices then go in the oil (bay leaf, cinnamon, black cardamom, whole peppercorns and cloves), followed by onions, and then after they are browned, the lamb (which I salted as it browned, French-style): Once the lamb browns, you add a ginger-garlic-onion paste and brown that thoroughly (and really thoroughly - 10 minutes - needs a lot of attention). Then salt, turmeric, cayenne and a ton of ground coriander seeds, well mixed. This simmers for a while tightly covered, then you add the chiles and lemon juice: I served it with Tilde rice and apple raita with black cumin seed:

I always get my pork belly with the skin attached! Crucial in red braised pork... Actually, I am a skin freak.

liamsaunt that truffle is beautiful.

BKEats, it's good to have you back. One of these days I have to make it out to Mekelburg's...

Some recent meals - Chicken paprikash, Kenji's simpler version from his recent SE article. I used sweet paprika from the Spice House and No Yolks egg noodles from Pennsylvania (I think). It was excellent, but next time I think I'll try the browning technique - not the fish sauce thanks, I love fish sauce but I can find different ways to add umami for Central European cuisine - and go lighter on the sour cream: A couple nights later I did delivery. There are a lot of great Sichuan restaurants in this part of Manhattan and Lan Sheng on West 39th Street is one of them. I got dan dan noodles, pan fried pork dumplings (probably not echt Sichuan but delicious), Sichuan cold pickled vegetables, and what was called "Chongqing braised fish" - and looked like this: Yesterday I noticed David Tanis's simple lamb curry and carrot raita recipe in the Times and was immediately intrigued. I always like Tanis's approach to cooking, but I make a lot of Indian food from various regions and had never seen an approach with a dry marinade. So I made it more or less as written, except that I couldn't find lamb shoulder at my butcher on a Sunday so made do with stew beef (pretty sure it was chuck). The raita turned out okay (Madhur Jaffrey's un-cooked version with apple kicks its ass), but the curry was fabulous.

huiray thanks for the headsup on that brand of chili bean paste. I have just ordered some from PoSharp.

Btw that's a two day prep... and make your own salt pork - it's key. This dry method works really well: http://www.aliyaleekong.com/blog/salt-pork So add another week to your prep if you don't have any.

I've mentioned it here more than once, but this recipe from janeer on her blog makes the best baked beans I've ever had in my life, bar none: http://littlecomptonmornings.blogspot.com/2008/03/butterscotch-beans-saturday-night.html

Catching up again here, with all your fine cookin! I've always enjoy amatriciana and was excited to see guanciale at my local artisanal butcher... I felt like I had a concept of how to make this. I knew I wasn't going to do orthodox bucatini, and in fact thought maybe just tomatoes simmered in guanciale instead of olive oil. Did a quick search and oddly ended up going with the first recipe I found, which is this: https://oldtiogafarm.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/cooking-with-guanciale/ Coarsely chopped the guanciale as instructed and simmered at the same time as the onions. All looked good except that the onions browned extremely fast, as would be expected, while the guanciale remained unrendered and rubbery. I added the tomatoes and then rapidly decided I'd made the same mistake as I had with my early Texas chilis, with chunks of unappetizing unrendered suet floating in it. Dumped the whole batch and started again! This time I chopped the guanciale more finely, rendered it first and then added the onion, which created lots of yummy looking (and smelling) little lardons in the liquid fat: And then took it all the way to linguini all'amatriciana: Looks delicious right? Well, it wasn't. Skunky and offal-ly tasting, and not in a good way. Plus a really greasy texture. I'm not sure what I did wrong, because I like all'amatriciana in restaurants. Maybe too much guanciale for the recipe? Maybe a skunky guanciale? I don't know. I threw out the leftovers. Subsequent meals have been more successful. Chicken thighs marinated in mixture of well-blended parsley, lemon zest, lemon juice, sweet paprika, onion, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. Cooked on a rack over onions and tomatoes so that the juices dripped all over the vegetables. And another great pork chop (from Hudson & Charles, the place that sold me the guanciale), dry-rubbed Julia Child style, seared in a Griswold number 10, and served with spinach, rice and sweet potatoes. Heaven really, especially with a couple asphalty-tasting glasses of this good Cote de Rhone I've found:

OMG Shelby you're killing me! as are you sartoric.

@sartoric that looks lovely!

All good advice above - and don't overthink it. The wok will get seasoned fine from almost any preparation and progress from there the more you cook in it. It's hard to go wrong.

Catching up here... Grass-fed strips, grilled over wood coals and served with local (Boston) acorn squash and spinach: Chicken thighs marinated in a citrus-garlic-herb-olive oil mixture and cooked at 450F on a rack in a half sheet, with rice and greens: Couple of ribeyes from Hudson & Charles in the West Village, broiled: Those came with rice and green beans, as well as boule-miche from Orwasher's, which did double duty to make steak sandwiches with the leftovers the next day. Not shown: pork chops cut from the loin also from Hudson & Charles, rubbed in Julia Child's spice marinade and sauted in cast iron (still have one of those in the fridge). Finally a non-meat moment... the last of the heirloom tomatoes from Hepworth Farms - simple salad with parsley, and cannellini beans soaked overnight and cooked Tuscan style with a tomato, aromatics and a lot of time. Plus rice of course. Really a recipe for yellow-eye beans but they worked with the more subtle cannellini flavor... I'd bought guanciale as the base but to be frank I was a bit meated out (rare for me!)

Florida butter beans with caramelized onions and bacon

So here's my take: it was excellent, and even reheated well. It's also an enormous amount of work. Was it worth it? In my mind I compare it to Laurie Colwin's fried chicken from Home Cooking, which almost set my house on fire, but was otherwise superb, and took a fraction of the time and ingredients. However I have not made the Colwin recipe in a couple of years, and I suspect that the brining in buttermilk is a good thing for the meat of the chicken no matter what, so I'd like to try this again. Whether it needs everything else - the garlic powder, the whole saving the brine to rub into the flour etc. - that all needs testing. Of course, I'd also prefer not to create a near disaster in my kitchen again. Covering a cast-iron chicken fryer with the little spikes at that high temperature is probably risky at the best of times.