Steve Irby

Sous vide pork chops with a lemon caper sauce.

Here's a few "pot cam" photos from this week of my meals on wheels. I have a couple of neighbors over 95 years old and one neighbor that had a knee placement so the meals where well received. I made Estoufadda with pork and beef from a recipe by Mireille Johnston. A triple batch of chicken and dumplings with a small pot of dumplings in a vegetable stock for a non meat eater. Both stocks were prepared with generous amounts of sautéed leeks, dice carrots and green peas. And gumbo with smoked turkey, roast chicken, shrimp, crabs, Conecuh sausage and venison sausage.

An alternate method to portion the demi-glace is to pour into a couple of small cookie sheets lined with plastic wrap. Freeze as a block then section out after it has set. Here's a few photos of a turkey demi-glace made with three turkey carcasses.

Lunch was spaghetti with a quick meat sauce made with Rao's Marinara. Served with a couple of grilled links of homemade Italian onion sausage, Salsiccia di Cipolla. The recipe for the sausage came from the Len Poli Sonoma Mountain Sausage site. I've prepared a number of the sausage formulations over the years and they have all been excellent. All of the recipes open as pdf files so it's very easy to build a sausage library!

I was in charge of dessert for a New Years gathering so I made a strawberry tart. The crust for the tart was a pate sablee. The recipe called for a 9-inch diameter tart pan and I used a ~ 4" x 13.5" rectangular pan. I used four prepared tartlet shells to use the excess pastry cream. The strawberries were grown in Florida and were very even in size and made for a nice presentation.

Here's a sampling of the output from the past several days. I've made Cornetti from the Carol Fields bread book for years. Not Instagram ready but so good hot out of the oven. The trim was placed in a muffin cup with homemade pear preserves. Chocolate Seduction from a little Consumer Guide booklet that I was gifted around 1982. The recipe calls for a 10 inch tart pan but I made five 4-inch tartlets. And from a yard sale cookbook by Linda Collister - Divine Chocolate Recipes. Maybe my favorite chocolate and pecan cookie recipe. I used Callebaut 811 in all of the recipes.

Last night's dinner was a sampling of sausages from the weekends effort. I prepared 10# of fresh Spanish Longaniza sausage, 10# Bubba Five Alarm Hot links and 8# of Italian onion sausage. All formulations are from the Len Poli, Sonoma Mountain website. The temperatures have been low enough for me to air dry the longaniza sausage in the garage for a few days. The hotlinks were smoked on my gas grill using my Smokai smoke generator. Here Charlie patiently waiting for the batch of mixed songbird and lizard sausage

I've been making this recipe from the New York Times for quite a few years now - Galatoire’s Sweet Potato Cheesecake. This year I finished it with praline pecans from JW Renfroe Pecan Co. and a butterscotch drizzle.

This ones going to be lunch for days! Smoked turkey with a cabbage and potato concoction. The turkey was smoked pretty hard but pulled from the grill when the meat was still a little pink. The meat was perfect after being reheated in the stew -moist and very tender. The dish was seasoned with some mystery spices that my sister brought back from a recent trip to Turkey. I used a red spice blend labeled meat and ground chilis labeled black, black pepper. I think the chilis are black urfa.

I'm getting started on my annual loss leader turkey fest. This year I bought a 21# turkey and defrosted it in an ice chest. I was afraid it would break the glass shelves in the refrigerator! The breast were dusted with a combination of Tony Chachere's seasoned salt and a Dangold seasoned salt. The wings were bagged with sage, lemon, butter and S&P. The tenderloins were trimmed of the sinew, dusted with meat glue and Tony's and wrapped in bacon. They'll be in the hot water bath for about 3 hours @ 141F. I'll chill and finish the items later. The leg quarters were heavily seasoned and are smoking on my Weber kettle.

Grilled pork chop dusted with Penzey's Revolution spice blend then finished with a soy-satsuma-honey glaze.

I've had better luck using two squares and sandwiching the bone or carapace. I've tried to wrap bones with one sheet but the boneguard shifts making it a little fiddly to adjust.

BJ's had a really nice package of thick cut pork chops so I stuffed four of the six and cooked them sous vide. I used some homemade longaniza for the stuffing and made a quick sauce of heavy cream, pork gelee, tomatoes and green onions. I used a boneguard from JVR to prevent the dreaded puncture in the hot water bath.

Shrimp remoulade and fried green tomatoes.

Tonight's dinner included a pear and starfruit salad. The pears were downed fruit from a neighbors tree and the starfruit came off the reduced for quick sell table (6/$1.50). The salad ingredients included surprisingly hot serrano peppers, mini red peppers, red onion, walnuts and blue cheese. The dressing was a pear preserve vinaigrette. The preserves were prepared with the scavenged pears, lemons, oranges, cinnamon and candied ginger.