I love bacon enough for my sister and I to make an all-bacon Thanksgiving feast with 8 dishes including bacon stuffing, bacon mashed potatoes, and bacon-wrapped turkey. I love bacon enough to go to a Bacon Camp and make bacon sushi and take random photos of beautiful bacon dishes. I love bacon enough to do a 4-course Iron Chef-style bacon smackdown that included bacon chocolate and bacon cookies and have been known to make bacon cupcakes and even bacon macaroni-and-cheese cat cakes. Don’t ask. I even love bacon enough to tattoo it on my face.

So you can probably comprehend my fat-kid-in-a-candy-shop-on-Christmas-morning level of excitement when this package arrived in the mail. I actually jumped up and down and squealed like a pig.  A delicious, dry-cured British pig.

Understandably, most people’s first question on hearing about my bacon package is ‘How did you get that?!?!’ Meaning, obviously, ‘How can I get that!?!?!’  The answer is that I was sent the bacon from a PR company promoting ‘Real Bacon’; that is, British bacon dry-cured in a traditional manner that involves hand rubbing with salt and spices and at least 21 days of air-drying.  In contrast to a lot of imported bacon that’s injected with water and chemicals, this bacon doesn’t shrink to half its original size in the frying pan or give off a funky white gloopiness when being cooked which comes from the injected water leaching out, two things I’ve actually noticed recently when cooking bacon. Plus, the bacon comes from pigs that are compassionately farmed, which I’m all about. Well, that’s what the press release says, which may require a little more investigation.

However, the interesting thing for me was that the press release didn’t come from an expensive artisan bacon company, or even from one company at all. In fact, the bacon came from multiple different supermarkets at a range of prices from M&S to Morrisons, all in support of the ‘I love Real Bacon’ campaign.  And while I’m trying to look for supermarket alternatives for a lot of my shopping, it’s a bit unrealistic to get all my groceries at farmer’s markets  so it’s great to know that there are some better options. And the bacon certainly looked better than a lot of the inspidly pink, monotonously hued, fleshy rashers you sometimes see down those flourescently highlighted megamart aisles.

P.S. For those of my friends back home wondering why the bacon is a funny shape and less fatty and stripey than normal, this is what is called ‘back bacon’ in the UK, which is essentially a bacon-cured pork loin. The typical long and skinny slice of pork belly that we just call bacon, they call ‘streaky bacon’. In case you were wondering.  They held their size pretty well when fried up with none of the gross white stuff, had a nice salty meatiness and got a good seared crisp on the fatty bits.  Pretty damn good stuff.

Now I love bacon, and you love bacon, and I want to share the glories of bacon. Getting a massive box of bacon is definitely a good opportunity to have a dinner party.  But as much as I would like to just hand over strips of bacon for our mutual enjoyment, I figured it should actually be incorporated into a dish before I get accused of endangering the cardiac health of my dinner guests. Enter Ottolenghi’s Caramelised Garlic Tart of amazingness.

I’ve talked about genius chef-man Ottolenghi before and the usefulness of his incredible vegetarian cookbook, Plenty, during my month of meatlessness.  Every recipe I’ve tried so far, from the Very Full Tart to this ridiculously good soba noodles with mango and eggplant recipe, has been absolutely stellar.  But of course, even stellar can be better with bacon. I bet Ottolenghi himself, as a meat eater with an appreciation of the glories of vegetables, would agree.

Caramelised Garlic Tart with Goat Cheeses and, Obviously, Bacon.

All credit to Ottolenghi, except adapted slightly in honor of bacon.

What You Need:

375g puff pastry – easy to buy pre-rolled in the store

a few tbsps olive oil

Salt and black pepper

2 heads garlic, cloves peeled – I did this once and my hands smelled of garlic for hours. My recommendation for lazy people who don’t mind spending an extra pound – buy them pre-peeled. Your fingers and your friends will thank me.

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1½ tbsp caster sugar – that’s just regular sugar for you Americans.

1 tsp chopped rosemary

1 tsp chopped thyme, plus a few whole sprigs to finish

120g rich, creamy goats’ cheese

120g harder goat’s cheese

2 eggs

100ml double cream  - heavy cream if you’re in the US

100ml crème fraîche

What You Do:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F and then roll out your puff pastry in a tart pan or pie tin. Create an outer crust lip, place some baking paper down, fill with beans and blind bake for 20 minutes. Take out the beans and bake for another 20 minutes or so, until the pastry is a light golden brown.

2. While the pastry is baking, cover the garlic in water and simmer for 3 minutes to blanch. Drain, then return to the pan with a splash of oil to lightly fry for a few minutes. Add the vinegar and 180 ml of water (about 3/4 cup) and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the sugar, the thyme and rosemary, and a pinch of salt.  Simmer for another 10 minutes until the liquid is reduced to a delicious-smelling dark syrup and you are tempted to eat whole cloves of garlic straight out of the pan.

3. Crumble the goat cheese and strew across the pre-baked tart case. I’m interested to experiment with some other cheese here, but I used one log of chevre and another white hard goat cheese and they were delicious.

4. Now this part is pretty exciting. Spoon the garlic and the sauce across the cheese. It looks pretty already, and you will want to try to eat it now, but don’t. It gets much better.

Hello Beautiful.

5. Whisk together the eggs with the double cream and creme fraiche and some salt and pepper. Pour into the tart case, letting some of the garlic peek out and show their face.

6. ADD YOUR BACON! I only did half because one of our guests doesn’t eat bacon. Sad, I know, but that’s more bacon for the rest of us.

7. Bake the tart for about 35-45 minutes, until the filling sets and the top is a lovely golden-brown color that you just want to lick.  Mmmmmm.  I’ve made this thing of beauty twice now for dinner parties and brunches and it’s always a huge hit.

For those of you who might want a healthier or non-meat version, remember that it started as a vegetarian tart and is still seriously delicious that way. Although….well, come to think of it, given the eggs and the cream, I should probably avoid references to health altogether.  But the important thing to know is that this tart, like just about everything, including breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, Thanksgiving, is just better with bacon.

Hooray! It’s time for another Rambling Restaurant Singles Night featuring an aphrodisiac dinner, so you know things are bound to get hot.  Particularly when you have five people in a veryverycozy kitchen and have fresh bread baking in the oven, a giant vat of soup bubbling on the stove, and ten large pork loins popping and fizzing boiling oil all over the place.

Really. Hot. Temperatures. Luckily, there was also a dining room full of really hot people (yes yes, as in extremely attractive) all mixing and mingling on the other side of the curtain.  To get their taste buds primed and hearts racing, we served four courses featuring ingredients thought to have aphrodisiac qualities.  Of course, both dessert courses featured what is inarguably the most guaranteed aphrodisiac of them all – a large quantity of alcohol. Which is how we started the night as well, with glasses of passionfruit, raspberry and rosebud fizz.

Each cocktail came with a little tag marked with a suit denoting where to sit for your first table, along with some silly icebreaker questions inside to spark conversation or incite passionate debate.  Our eleven brave men and eleven brave women scattered amongst four tables to wait for these shiny happy braids of dough…

…to toast to perfection into these lovely browned plaits with a soft and fluffy white interior.

Ripped into chunks wafting thin trails of steam, these rolls dipped and dived  into large bowls of rich and creamy Jerusalem Artichoke soup, garnished with a swirl of hazelnut pesto, a flourish of extra virgin olive oil and a twist of crushed black pepper.  My apologies for the blinding glare of reflective soup.

While soup was seductively sipped, Michelle and I played with the searing loins. Seriously, that joke kept us entertained throughout the entire dinner service. She and Sarah had busted their asses stuffing and assembling the pork loins over the last few hours and the marscarpone, sage, asparagus, and pancetta – filled rolls were works of art.

Take the pork loin, pound it furiously, and lay it out on a flat surface. Line up your fresh ingredients in a narrow strip lengthwise about two inches in from the edge.

Roll the flattened loin into a narrow tube, keeping the pile of ingredients towards the center, and secure with an array of torturesome looking toothpicks.

And then…ta-da! A beautiful, colorful, and flavorful cross-section of meat, vegetable, and cheese. It’s like all your  essential dietary needs in one satisfying bite.

Sear the loins (don’t be restrained here – make it hot and fiery!) for a minute or so on each side until lightly browned, then wack them into the oven until your desired level of doneness.

We served the pretty little meat spirals (prettier in person, I promise) with gravy, roasted potatoes, and a wilted spinach and toasted pine nut salad with a red wine-honey-english mustard dressing.

Following the main course, it was time for more table switching, more new friends, and of course, more food.  For dessert, we served a fantastic find of Sarah’s called a St. Valentine’s Syllabub – an old school English pudding, popular from the 16th-19th century, consisting of heavy cream, lemon, brandy, white wine, sugar, and…some other stuff.  Since the cream required a lot of arm action to whip and solidify, I handed the bowl over to the lone male in the kitchen and instructed him to ‘beat it until you get a bulky whiteness.’

Uh. Oops. Sexual innuendo so thick you could scoop it with a spoon.  And layer it with toasted almonds, juicy red raspberries, and top it with a tuile biscuit heart (in my defense, ‘bulky whiteness’ is exactly what you’re aiming for in the recipe. I did not make that up).

Such adorable tuile hearts, just the right consistency to break or crush or stomp into pieces, as foodrambler said. However, we should also remember that hearts can jiggle and wiggle, bewitch and bewilder, and they can most certainly intoxicate.  Especially when served as a Glow-In-The-Heart Gin & Tonic Jelly, as molded by the fabulously inventive jellymonger duo of Bompas & Parr.

Under normal light, it’s an architecturally impressive jello mold that packs the wallop of  a silky smooth G&T in one cool and condensed mouthful. Way classier than a cherry red gelatinous mess of jello shot in a Dixie cup.

But it gets so much cooler. Just add blacklight and it glows! It’s like magic! Especially after ingesting many spoonfuls of gin-soaked jello!

We gave one to each table to share and then split another one behind the scenes. And then another. By then, things were starting to get a bit hazy.

Which meant, time to head off to the pub!  A Rambling Restaurant Singles Night would never be complete without a proper visit to the pub.  At which point this story must end. Can’t give away any secrets! You’ll just have to come along next time…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/16/a-rambling-aphrodisiac-dinner-complete-with-searing-loins-and-gin-tonic-jelly/feed/ 6 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/01/31/adventures-in-haggis-making-sheep-innards-beef-kidney-fat-and-fun-with-a-deep-fryer/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/01/31/adventures-in-haggis-making-sheep-innards-beef-kidney-fat-and-fun-with-a-deep-fryer/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:34:37 +0000 mei http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=2720

When I was told we’d be celebrating our Rambling Restaurant Burns Night with poetry, whiskey, and homemade haggis stabbing, my thoughts went like this:

1. Awesome! I’ve always wanted to try haggis.

2. By the way, what’s Burns Night?

3. And while I’m asking…what, exactly, is haggis?

4.  A sheep heart, lung, and liver minced and mixed with oatmeal and onions and stuffed inside a sheep stomach? <gulp> We are definitely going to need that whiskey.

Haggis, to most ignorant Americans like myself, is one of those iconic Scottish associations like kilts, bagpipes, and Mel Gibson covered in blue facepaint and exuding a throaty roar for ‘FREEEEDOOOM!’ We might have heard of it but almost certainly wouldn’t be able to say what it’s made of, only that it has something to do with terrifying animal parts and probably shouldn’t ever be consumed until after seven shots of Scotch.

Well, let me set the record straight on two fronts.

1. As much as you may love William Wallace in a skirt, kilts weren’t invented for another three centuries (one of the many twists of truth contributing to Braveheart being second on a list of ‘most historically inaccurate’ movies ever made).

2.  Haggis is, shockingly, absolutely delicious.

However, it took quite a long time and a lot of work to get it to that point. And I’ll be  honest, there was a fair amount of  grimacing, gagging, nose-holding, and are-we-really-serving-this-to-paying-customers?-questioning along the way.  It all started with my haggis-making partner-in-crime, foodrambler, hunting in vain and then finally securing three lamb’s plucks – the windpipe, heart, lungs and liver – for our haggis adventure. Following this recipe from the Guardian by Tim Hayward, she began the adventure the previous evening by cutting out the windpipes (blecch), boiling the plucks for several hours then leaving them to cool overnight in the murky cooking liquid.

A rubbery white sheep heart above and a massive chunk of liver below. Not exactly the most appetizing start to a meal, is it?  Don’t worry though, there is deliciousness to come…

Once out of the liquid and cut into cross-sections, the lungs were smooth and vaguely spongy while the heart was uncomfortably pink and muscly looking.

Being the intrepid culinary explorers/deluded masochists we are, we sliced off minute pieces of the heart, lung, and liver to taste them in all their unadulterated glory.  I’m sure you’re not surprised, but this turned out NOT to be a good idea. Offal is generally not the most appetizing of foods when you haven’t added any additional seasoning or flavor. Then add in the fact that the innards were ice cold and straight out of a disturbingly sewage-colored meat bath and both of us ended up jumping up and down and squealing in disgust at the musty lumps of chilled sheep innards in our mouths.

Lesson learned, we returned to the daunting task at hand. Dicing six onions was the easy part. Next, we tossed the heart and lung into the food processor and pulsed it gently into a fine mince.

Next, we grated the liver in the food processor to avoid the pasty textured chunks from turning into pate. Here’s a photo from foodrambler’s haggis post of me working the magimix on the meat.

I think the expression on my face is veering between skepticism, bemusement, horror and disgust. Note how I am as far as humanly possible away from the food processor in a vain attempt to avoid directly inhaling the stench of chopped lamb bits.  Below, the pungent strands of sheep liver.

All the dicing, slicing, and mincing of the heart, livers, and lungs began to fill the kitchen with a distinctly unpleasant smell. The thought crossed both our minds simultaneously: this smells exactly like cat food. Then the uncomfortable realization came to us…in fact, this is what cats eat. We are literally making cat food.

As you can see, it looked like cat food too. But just when we couldn’t really hold our noses much longer, we started mixing in the onions lying underneath the offal mince and all of a sudden, the smell changed. The sharp onion scent cut into the decaying meaty odor and the mixture somehow became warm and almost familiar, like the rich wafting steam of a slow-cooked stew.  The transition was aided by the inclusion of a generous amount of salt, white pepper, sage, thyme, and mace (the outer layer of nutmeg) for a layered and wintry hint of spices.

The general smell of the kitchen was further enhanced by the comforting aroma of toasted oatmeal, both of the rolled and Irish steel cut variety, which we wacked into the oven until lightly browned and then added to the pot.

But haggis wouldn’t be complete without one last element of grossness and that came in the form of eight boxes of shredded dried suet.

I had to look up ‘suet‘ on wikipedia to even find it in the grocery store – in case you’re wondering, it’s the raw fat that surrounds beef kidneys.  It looks like rodent turds made of candle wax.

Once we’d added a few ladlefuls of the sheep pluck stock to moisten and plunged our hands deep into the pot to mix, the haggis was smelling remarkably good and ready to be cooked.

Except, unfortunately, due to a stolen sheep stomach incident at Selfridge’s as well as a mail-order mishap with a backup ox bung (the attractively named last yard of a cow’s large intestine) we had nothing to stuff our haggis into.

Forced to experiment, we came up with a bunch of alternate showcases for our haggis:

1. Steamed in the oven by surrounding scoops in a layer of plastic wrap and then aluminum foil.

2. Oven roasted

3. Pan-fried

4. Formed into balls, dipped into batter, and deep fried. Having just acquired a deep fat fryer for Rambling Restaurant, you can expect to see a lot of deep fried items making an appearance on this blog.  Right up until my first heart attack.

5. Finally, after playing around a bit in a game of What Tastes Good Deep Fried? (Answer: EVERYTHING!) the ultimate haggis preparation came to us in a simultaneous bizarre great-minds-think-alike moment.

I present to you – Haggis. Stuffed into an English muffin. And deep fried.

It’s a Boston creme donut gone wrong or maybe so right – a rich, warm, meaty inside surrounded by a crunchy, oily,  golden exterior.  It was shockingly, decadently delicious, but I couldn’t eat more than two bites without feeling my arteries harden in protest.

The verdict of the haggis cooking comparison? Steamed was unanimously voted the best, as it allowed the oatmeal to cook, soften, and become infused with the intense meaty flavors of the offal. The roasted was okay, the pan-fried was too dry and crunchy with bits of oatmeal, and the deep-fried options were delicious but way too over the top for a meal ending with deep fried Mars bars.  Instructions for that coming up soon…

All in all, haggis making was an entertaining, educational, at times both delicious and disgusting experience.  Along with the traditional accompaniments of neeps (mashed swede, or rutabaga), tatties (potatoes) and cranachan (a Scottish dessert of whipped cream, honey, whiskey, raspberries and toasted oatmeal), my understanding of Scottish culinary brilliance has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few weeks. Add in a real Scot reading Burns’ Address To A Haggis followed by a stabbing…and the haggis experience is complete.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you know quite well that Irene and I have a bit of a thing for David Chang and his small East Village Momofuku restaurant empire.  The cookbook has been bedtime reading for both of us as well as the source of three or four or maybe eight dishes over the past few weeks. I’m almost glad I left the book back in Boston with Andy (it was ostensibly his Christmas gift anyway) because things were getting a bit out of hand.

I first ate at Momofuku Noodle Bar in its initial tiny incarnation about four years ago and felt a pressing and insistent desire to return after finishing the cookbook.  Luckily I was leaving for New York the next day, so less than 24 hours later I found myself alongside devoted noodle fans Lexi and Rachel, hunkered down over steamed buns glistening with fatty pork belly, pungent and slippery ginger and scallion noodles, and a steaming hot porky bowl of classic Momofuku ramen that I could now recreate if I had a ridiculous amount of time and an even more ridiculous amount of pork.

(An aside: I’ll be honest, we actually tried to go to Ippudo first, but 90-105 minutes is too long to wait on an empty stomach, even for what some consider to be the best ramen in New York.  Frank Bruni’s NYT review on their ramen includes some of my favorite food writing ever, particularly the first four paragraphs which are so descriptive and poetic and so perfectly true: ‘The taste of ramen isn’t just layered and complex; it’s almost murky, but a good murky, an enthralling murky, the kind of murky in which greedy eaters contentedly lose their way.’ Rarely has any food writing made me quite so insistently crave anything so viscerally and immediately as Bruni on ramen. Which reminds me that I’m really hungry for ramen, right now).

But I was only the tiniest bit sad to walk away from Ippudo because it meant I could taste more of Momofuku with a deeper understanding of the dishes and the impetus/inspiration/happy accidents behind their creation.  Speaking of inspiration and happy accidents, the supposed topic of this post  – a last-minute-invention dish of miso butter scallops – owes its existence to both. Momofuku gets props for the inspiration and the lack of clams at Whole Foods deserves credit for the resulting purchase of local Gloucester wild-caught scallops instead.  Chang’s recipe for scallops in kohlrabi puree using an entire stick of butter got transformed into this recipe using slightly less miso butter which adds a rich warmth to the fresh scallops.

Miso Butter Scallops

This recipe’s pretty simple.

What You Need:

A bunch of good quality, fresh, ideally diver caught scallops (less destructive to the ocean environment)

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp white miso paste

A splash of vegetable or grapeseed oil – something neutral tasting

What You Do:

1. Combine the butter and miso and mix thoroughly to get miso butter.  You should probably make extra because you’re going to want to slather it on everything you can possibly think of. Like your face.

2. Heat a neutral oil in a frying pan and once the oil is hot, place the scallops in the pan and press down to ensure full contact with the pan.

3. After two minutes, the bottoms of the scallops should be lightly browning, at which point you pour the miso butter into the pan and let it melt. Tip the pan towards you to collect the melted butter in a spoon and then pour it over the scallops to baste.

4. Let the scallops cook until you have a nice browned bottom, at which point they still may have a hint of translucence but the scallops should be warmed through. I like scallops barely cooked, but you can also flip them and cook for a minute or two on the other side if you want. Overcooked scallops are like rubbery

5. Serve over roasted brussels sprouts – wack ‘em in the oven with olive oil, salt and pepper until they brown and crisp up.

Thanks Momofuku. I’ll see you soon, even if I have to fly around the world to do it.

Since the mere reading of the recipe made my stomach grumble with longing, we decided to make the pork shoulder for three consecutive Rambling Restaurant suppers. After a day’s worth of roasting, you pry apart the brittle outer shell of crackling and dig through a shuddering layer of burning hot pork fat to find the most perfect, tender, juicy, falls-apart-with-the-tug-of-a-fork meat. Shredded with two dueling forks and bathed in an impromptu soy-hoisin-chili-garlic-leftover spring roll dipping sauce mixture, we had guests raving that it was the best pulled pork they’d ever tasted.  And so I recreated it for my family back home in Boston, introducing them to the joy that is garlic and spice-rubbed, high heat-blasted pig skin.  Here’s the recipe so you can do it yourself, very very slightly adapted from Hugh F-W’s recipe in ingredients and time, should you decide at lunch that pork shoulder is essential for dinner, without quite enough time to ‘fuhgeddaboutit.’

Ridiculously Delicious Roast Pork Shoulder With Crackling

What You Need:

A large hunk of pork shoulder with skin – mine was about 8 pounds and fed 8 people
Five cloves of smashed garlic
A thumbsize piece of peeled ginger, if you had impressively large thumbs
1 tbsp chili flakes
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp Chinese five-spice
4 tbsp salt
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tsp white pepper
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce

Also helpful if you want gravy:

Stock (in a perfect and happy world,  freshly homemade from the carcass of the ever-giving Samson the Turkey of the previous day’s Thanksgiving extravaganza)
A few shakes of flour
Soy sauce
Red Wine
Chili Sauce

What You Do:

1. Take a very sharp knife and score the pork skin into parallel lines about a centimeter apart, which means attempting the slightly awkward process of cutting into the skin deep enough to reach the fat but not so deep to cut into the meat. It feels sort of wrong,  but it will make you happy in about six hours when you have crackling in hand.

2. Dice the garlic and ginger and mix with the spices and liquids to form a chunky paste. I did this by hand, but even better if you’ve got a mortar and pestle.

3. Give the skin side of the pork a nice deep tissue massage with half of the tasty paste, then place it skin-side up on a rack in a roasting tray. Then you can make tasty gravy with the meat juices below.  Blast the meat for half an hour at 450º.

4. After what Hugh F-W calls the ‘half-hour sizzle’, grab a pair of oven mitts and flip over the shoulder. If you have the ability, it is particularly amusing to make your little sister stand by the oven holding the scorchingly hot hunk of heavy meat while you do something, I can’t remember what. Once you allow her to put the meat back in the tray upside down, rub the other side with the rest of the, um, rub.  In case you have no common sense, I will remind you not to do this with your bare hands and to use a wooden spoon instead.

5.   Pour a glass of water into the roasting tray, bring the temperature down to 300º and leave the meat to slowly increase in tastiness for about six hours. Adjust temperature accordingly depending on how much time you have – Hugh F-W does 16-24 hours at 110º, I increased the heat because I only had 6 hours instead of overnight. If you’re not sure, just make sure the internal temp is at least 165º before pulling the shoulder from the oven. Regardless of cooking time, flip and baste the meat halfway through.

6. About 45 minutes before you’re ready to eat, turn  the heat back up to 450º to get your crackling all crispety crunchety.

7.  When the meat is done and cooling, you can make a quick and meaty gravy by heating some of the pork fat from the roasting tray and whisking with a few shakes of flour to make a roux. Then pour in the rest of the pan drippings, stock, some soy sauce, a bit of chili sauce, some red wine, whatever you’ve got around that tastes good.  The sauce will thicken and become awesome.

8. Eat pork, audaciously bathed in prodigious amounts of spicy, meaty sauce. Allow to melt into mouth. Crunch into a few happy little strips of crackling. Serve, if at all possible, with leftover stuffing/mashed potatoes/cheddar and scallion scones/homemade bread and finish off with leftover pie. Feed (and impress) your whole family with pork and happiness. Oh, how I love the holidays…

This may look appear to be normal pasta – if anything, a bit mushy and brown looking,  but otherwise nothing special. But no. This is some seriously, insanely, unnecessarily butteriffic pasta.

Butteriffic: (adj) infused with a completely superfluous amount of butter to the point of unsurpassed deliciousness and extreme caloric overload.

TV is generally full of all sorts of useless drivel, which is why I don’t own a television. However, sometimes TV teaches you important things. For example,  how to take a decadent and already relatively unhealthy dish such as macaroni & cheese and then infuse it with more deep, rich, buttery flavor to the point of…well, I was going to say heart attack, but I’m still standing.  So then, more accurately, to the point of AMAZING.  For this knowledge, I owe thanks to the final episode of MasterChef, which, based on my one viewing, appears to be  a British show of similar concept and nearly identical name to Top Chef.  In the ultimate challenge to determine a winner, the contestants had to recreate the dishes from a Michelin-starred chef for thirty other Michelin-starred chefs.  Yikes. I learned that Michelin-starred food is precise, complex, innovative, boundary-pushing, technological, demanding, beautifully presented, really ridiculously complicated, and most importantly – you guessed it, butteriffic.

The macaroni & cheese, elevated to Michelin-starred standards, involved dried pasta pan-roasted in butter,  simmered in veal stock, covered in stock glaze, cut into perfect circles, and stacked into a tower with layers of butternut squash and another over-the-top indulgence, duck confit.  Apparently the dish took four hours to make,  and that’s along with the 18 ducks that Steve, the ultimate winner, had to simultaneously roast.  Obviously I have neither the skill nor the time to recreate this dish, although maybe I should try because then I could eat it. But pan roasting in butter and simmering in stock? That I can do.

And now you can too, if you’re looking for that extra hefty dosage of calories. But hey – it’s also an extra hefty dose of seriously tasty comfort food, perfect for curling up in a comforter on the couch on a cold day.  This would also be an excellent dish if you were a bear looking to stock up on fat for hibernation. If you’re not a bear…well, you’ll just have to take my word for it that the buttery goodness is worth the fat.

Butter-Fried, Onion Soup-Simmered Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash and Ricotta

What You Need:

about 1 cup dried pasta (shape-wise, something like rotini, ziti, or farfalle is probably easiest)

a huge hunk of butter

about 1 1/2-2 cups of stock – I happened to make beefy onion soup the day before (with enough white wine for a long lunch date of desperate housewives), which worked perfectly and added a nice layer of caramelized onion taste. however, you could use any kind of storebought stock for minimal work or homemade for more work but totally worth it. also, you could easily make this meat-free by using veggie stock.

1 cup roasted butternut squash (easy instructions below)

1/3 cup ricotta cheese – the fresher the better

Note: as usual, I didn’t actually measure any of these amounts, so take with a grain of salt. Feel free to add or subtract as seems appropriate. Also, this made food for two girls with the appetites of competitive eating champions. Possibly not recommended as a serving size.

What You Do:

1. If you haven’t made the squash yet, slice into thin pieces and place into a lightly olive oiled baking tray and whack into the oven on high until it’s browned and soft. I like to peel it first if possible, but you’ll need a decently sharp peeler to attack the squash. If you don’t have one, you can remove the skin post-roasting or just eat it.

2. Place the hunk of butter into a large saucepan on low heat. Let the butter warm a little until it starts foaming a bit, then pour the dried pasta into the saucepan. Yup, just dunk it in the butter.

3.  Let the pasta pan-fry in the butter, stirring occasionally for fair butter distribution, until the pasta gets a little toasty and browned.

4. Add the stock to the pan (whooosh of hot onionyness) and then let the pasta simmer in the soup  until al dente. It’ll start to get thicker and mushier, so use a spatula to stir every so often to prevent sticking.

5. Cut your roasted squash into yummy bite-size chunks.

6. Once cooked, place the pasta in a bowl and mix in the squash bites. Top with a sprinkling of ricotta cheese and a few twists of fresh black pepper.

7. Begin the  cholesterol-building, stomach-satisfying process of downing this insanely indulgent dish.

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/11/10/insanely-indulgent-butter-fried-onion-soup-simmered-pasta-with-roasted-butternut-squash-and-ricotta/feed/ 4 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/03/25/bacon-camp-recipes-round-two-panko-encrustifried-avocado-and-bacon-sushi-with-wasabi-bacon-mayonnaise/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/03/25/bacon-camp-recipes-round-two-panko-encrustifried-avocado-and-bacon-sushi-with-wasabi-bacon-mayonnaise/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:31:23 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=873 three of the most i-could-eat-you-any-time-in-any-form-and-am-totally-head-over-heels-obsessed-with-you foods in my world of edibility: 1. bacon. 2. avocado. 3. sushi.

add them all together. toss in some deep frying action. squiggle on some bacon mayonnaise. OH HOLY CRAP!!!!!

RAOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWR.  inspired by kwame’s trio of pork fat nigiri from the bacon iron chef competition, i decided to make bacon maki for bacon camp on saturday.  it was a bit of a last minute decision, mostly cause i wasn’t happy with the bacon hot pocket crust but was too lazy to experiment more.  bacon camp was scheduled for the morning (yes, 1pm is basically the morning) after our PANDAMONIUM! party, so clearly i wasn’t in a state to be testing multiple dough recipes before noon.

inspired by the fried avocado taco from torchy’s tacos in austin last week, i decided to do a panko-encrusted avocado for the roll. obviously avocado is awesome, obviously deep fried avocado is TRIPLE AWESOME!!! man, nothing like bacon avocado sushi to spur me into extreme exclamation  overuse and unnecessary capitalization mode. WHOOPS!!!!

anyways, here’s how you panko encrustifry avocados (that’s my made-up word of the day). you could pretty much do this to any remotely edible item and it would taste f*cking delicious, although you should probably experiment with length of deep frying time before serving to people. avocados obviously don’t need to be cooked, they just get become a warm and mooshy flavor explosion inside a crunchy coating. but if you’re trying to encrustifry chicken or something, you may need to cook it a little first so you don’t end up with a delicious crispy outside and a raw pink inside. mmm, salmonella.

the encrustifrying process, broken down in a clockwise manner:

1. begin on the top left with perfectly ripe avocados or whatever tasty item you would like battered, fried in hot oil, and placed in your mouth.

2.  dredge the avocados in flour.

3.  dip the floury avocados into an whisked mixture of one egg, 2-3 tbsps water, and 1/2 tsp salt.

4.  place the soggy, eggy, goopy pieces into the panko flakes (they’re basically japanese bread crumbs).

5. drop the freaking mess into a pot of boiling oil. you’ll want an oil without a lot of flavor like peanut or canola oil. i used a small saucepan with about an inch of oil and let it get hot enough to brown a flake of panko pretty quickly when dropped in. btw, it’s helpful to be near a sink during this process because your fingers will get caked with a batter-y mess and you won’t be able to do another round without washing your hands first.

6. let the encrustifrication process occur in the saucepan, then use a slotted spoon to fish out the avocados and put onto a paper towel to let some of the oil drain off.

7. start squealing with excitement when you find yourself in possession of this plate of fried spectacular:

jesus. encrustifrying is like plastic surgery for food – whether it’s a boob job or a thin layer of crispy crunchetiness, everything is suddenly more extreme and in your face.  this can be good or bad depending on your opinion of fake tits and deep frying.

okay, let’s say you’ve now made your bacon and done some encrustifying.  in order to roll with the homies, hopefully you will already have made some sushi rice and acquired sheets of nori (seaweed).  here’s a crappy photo of the necessary ingredients:

i used to own a bamboo mat for sushi rolling, but have discovered that you don’t actually need one to roll pretty decent sushi logs.  here’s my quick, easy, and totally untraditional m.o. for making rolls. if you don’t like it, do some googling of your own, you ungrateful wretch.

1.  set up a bowl of lukewarm water to help seal the rolls and for assistance getting sticky rice off your hands

2.  take one sheet of nori and a handful of sushi rice. press a thin layer (maybe 1/2 centimeter thick) of sushi rice all over the nori, leaving about half an inch uncovered on one end. this will be the sealing point of the roll.

3.  on the opposite side of the nori from the uncovered strip, place your sushi innards in a  line down the roll, parallel to the strip. for the bacon, i made a thin layer of bacon covering half the nori. however, for most other sushi you can create a thick line of all the ingredients.

4.  using both hands, carefully pry up the side of the nori with all the ingredients and fold over the edge. continue rolling bit by bit, stopping every so often to squeeze the roll together. you may find ingredients splooshing out the ends like a tube of toothpaste, in which case you can do your best to shove them back in. next time don’t pile the ingredients so high or don’t squeeze so tight.

5. once you’ve reached the uncovered strip at the end, use a finger to wet the nori and then press the strip down on the roll to seal. now you are in possession of a delicious log of sushi!

i recommend using a sharp serrated knife to cut the sushi roll so everything doesn’t  spill out all over the place. sushi rolling is a really fun dinner party activity – you can prep a bunch of ingredients by cutting them into long thin strips and make sushi rice beforehand.  when everyone arrives, they can grab a sheet of nori and the sushi innards of their choice and make their own roll! this is also super easy and cheap to do all vegetarian by just buying whatever vegetables  you like and cooking them as necessary. cucumber, avocado, and sweet potato are pretty classic, but i’ve also done red peppers, eggplant, carrots, and other tasty veggie combos. here’s a cross-section of the sushi roll:

not the most attractive photo ever, but i wouldn’t kick it out of my mouth. however, i felt like the sushi needed a last bit of oomph. thus spawned the wasabi bacon mayonnaise action. i used this recipe from the fat cookbook (which i bought my bacon lover friend lauren for christmas along with a bacon air freshener) via the bittman blog as an inspiration, and added some wasabi powder and horseradish. it wasn’t tasting right so i added another egg yolk to thicken and then some water to thin. a little salt and pepper. i kept mixing it up in my immersion blender and adding more stuff until it tasted okay. those are my oh-so-helpful recipe instructions for wasabi bacon mayonnaise.  to add some visuals, here’s a relatively unappealing photo of the lemon, wasabi powder, egg yolk, and bowl of bacon fat used to make the sauce:

once i was satisfied with all the pieces, i loaded up all the food and headed downtown to bacon camp. more on that coming up. i’ll leave you with a final teaser shot of the finished product…

pssssh, you say. everyone thinks they have the best chili recipe.

well, does everyone have a ‘people’s choice’ award from an actual legit chili cookoff?

‘people’s choice?’ you disdainfully snort. that’s like the loser miss congeniality award for the girl that doesn’t have big enough fake boobs to actually win Miss New Jersey Junior Teen America.

the deal is though, this chili also won third place in the entire competition. and you wanna know who came in first? THE FIRE DEPARTMENT. sheesh. who do these guys think they are? just because you save lives every day and can drag a 200 lb dummy up a 30 foot ladder while surrounded by burning flames AND rescue cats doesn’t make you special, guys. sometimes cats even save YOUR ass.

wanna know who came in second? THE POLICE DEPARTMENT. hello!? corrupt cops much? we’ve all seen training day and the departed and lakeview terrace (okay, nobody saw lakeview terrace, but you get the point). clearly, the judges in this competition gave out the undeserved second place win in exchange for a duffel bag full of unmarked bills and bags of medical-grade columbian cocaine. which means third place in the cookoff, edging out the sanitation department, the finance department, and the dudes who maintain the parking meters (i made that up), is a huge freaking deal. it’s true. this chili rocks. it starts off with a pound of bacon, how could it not be spectacular? make it yourself and find out…

jack and jeff’s award-winning chili:

1 lb bacon

3 lbs beef or pork (any cut is fine, trimmed into smallish cubes)

3 cups diced onions

6 cloves of garlic, minced

4 cans red kidney beans, drained

½ cup honey

¼ cup mild molasses

½ cup cider vinegar

2 ½ cups ketchup

¼ cup yellow mustard

8 cups chicken stock

2 bay leaves

4 tbsp cumin (to taste)

2 tbsp cayenne (to taste)

2 tsp salt

pepper to taste

Cook bacon in a large pot until rendered, about 6-8 minutes. Add meat and continue to brown until all meat is uniform in color. Add onions and garlic, continue to cook until onions appear translucent. Add the rest of the ingredients to the pot and bring to a boil. Let simmer for about 3 hours or until reduced by about a third. When the meat starts to fall apart, and the sauce is thick, it’s ready to go. Enjoy!

mmmm. it’s like pulled pork in a pot. sweet and savory, tender and hearty, just a little bit spicy, this chili is absolutely fantastic. i don’t have a photo of it, but this is a picture of the super cool vintage stove in jeff’s dogtown, west oakland converted garage loft where the chili magic happens.

word on the street is that i had four bowls, but there is no proof of that outlandish statement. although there was barely a square inch left in my stomach for anything but meat, you can spy on the right in the above photo a salad made from ingredients from the ferry building farmer’s market. this one great greens stand will let you mix and match all sorts of lettuce types for salads, i highly recommend.

farmer’s market salad with broccolini, sundried tomatoes, chickpeas, and homemade croutons:

1 big handful miner’s lettuce, similar to spinach but a tiny bit sweeter

1 big handful arugula

1 big handful assorted pretty colored lettuce

1 big handful broccolini, blanched and cut into small pieces

1/4 pound barrel-aged feta from cowgirl creamery

1 small handful sundried tomatoes, cut into small pieces

leftover olive and sourdough bread from grilled cheese making, toast at 350° for about 15 minutes until hard, then torn into small pieces. look ma, i made croutons!

1 can garbanzo beans, aka chickpeas, aka not from the farmer’s market but a random can of beans i happened to have in my cupboard. these, like artichoke hearts, are useful to purchase, forget about, and then seredipitously find when you need something last-minute to add to a salad or pasta

dressing: splash of olive oil, splash of pomegranate vinegar and red wine vinegar (but you can use pretty much anything), minced shallots and garlic (always adds a nice kick to dressing), salt and pepper. if you’re taking a salad somewhere, it’s nice to bring your own dressing in a jar and toss it right before eating.

directions: put everything in a big bowl. toss with dressing.  eat!

the thing i like best about cooking with leftovers is that there are no rules. it’s like the ultimate cage fighting of cooking  – you can forcefully fish-hook someone in the nostrils or make brown sugar pork pie if you that’s what you fucking feel like doing. you’re not trying to follow a predefined recipe or get your souffle to rise, you’re just tossing together what you’ve got in a way that hopefully tastes delicious. so what if it’s not an actual dish? when you’re done mixing shit up, it will be.

food porn and alien pigs after the jump.

for my leftover cooking challenge (to myself), i found myself with the following ingredients: a huge bag of king trumpet mushrooms, a cup of plain cream cheese, some chipotle-bacon-jalapeno cream cheese, half a can of chipotles in adobo, half a pound of ground pork, and a box of fresh chives. i also had some pantry staples bought for the smackdown like garlic, onions, and eggs and a half a can of artichoke hearts from dinner last week.

here’s my manifesto for leftover cooking – come up with your kitchen rules and cook by them. if you find they aren’t working for you, make new ones. what do i mean by kitchen rule? i mean ideas about food that almost universally hold true for you and the food you like to eat. some of mine are 1) mushroom and eggs taste good together, 2) cream cheese is good with just about everything, 3) you can start almost every savory dish by sauteeing garlic and onions, 4) a splash of soy can do wonders, 6) frying things makes them delicious, and 7) you already know how i feel about chipotles.

i hate to let anything go to waste, which is why i enjoy a leftover cooking puzzle challenge.  i started by trying to figure out what to do with the king trumpet mushroom, also known as the french horn, the king oyster mushroom, and the surprisingly erotic-sounding pleurotus eryngii. i figured based on rules 2 and 6, that fried mushroom chips with chipotle-bacon cream cheese on top would be delicious. i sliced the mushrooms into discs, fried them in some olive oil until they were like crispy chips, then spooned some cream cheese on top.

yes, that weird elephant trunk looking thingy is a king-size mushroom. the mushroom chips were nice and crispy on the outside, but a little rubbery in the center, so next time i’d try to sauté them or something. obviously the cheesy bacon-chipotle part was awesome.  they’d make cute hors d’oeuvres.

the next recipe is called mix-a-bunch-of-tasty-shit-into-cream-cheese-and-it-will-be-deliciouser. i feel like most savory items can be chopped up and stirred into cream cheese to become an impressive dip. i had a few leftover artichoke hearts, which are great to have around all the time (you can buy them canned pretty cheaply) for adding to salads and pasta, frying with eggs, mixing into cream cheese, and various other endeavors.  i cut a few up, chopped some chipotles, diced some chives, and mixed them all up together. delicious with tortilla chips.

lastly, a recipe featuring almost every one of the above-mentioned kitchen rules. i love mushrooms and eggs together (mushroom and egg on pizza…fuck yeah. mushroom pasta with an egg on top…GAAAAH), so i decided to do a corned beef hash-inspired ground pork and mushroom dish. i diced some onions and garlic and threw it in the pan with some sesame oil (although you could use pretty much any oil here), then threw in some diced trumpet mushrooms. Gave it a splash of soy to flavor the mushrooms, then added some ground pork and chipotle pieces. once all the pork was cooked, i put it on a plate and made a fried egg. my friend olivia taught me to always cover your eggs when cooking sunny-side up so it gets heat from all sides and doesn’t get that snotty shit on the top. when it’s done, put it on top of your mound of fried-up tastiness, then crack the yolk and watch the deliciousness flow.

music piggy, stop looking at my breakfast like that! it’s fucking twisted, that hash is made of ground pork!  just because you are a weird alien pig with music coming from your eyes does not mean it is okay to eat your own kind.

btw, i also had a variation on this dish for lunch and midnight snack.  rule fried eggs are good all the time.

i was having trouble selecting a single dessert recipe, so i ended up making two bacon dessert items plus a bacon cocktail (considered but discarded ideas included a maple bacon bread pudding, candied bacon popcorn, and maple icecream with bacon bits…i’ll save those for the rematch). two of the dishes included the fabulous duo bacon and bourbon together. here’s a photo of the new BFFs for life.

i really wanted to try chocolate dipped bacon, so i bought some really good dark chocolate in huge chunks from rainbow. i wanted to add something else to bridge the salty/sweet divide between the bacon and chocolate, which made me think of peanuts. one of the most effective uses of salt in a dessert i’ve seen was the ‘elvis has left the building’ dish from spork featuring bananas, peanut butter, vanilla ice cream, and caramel sauce and it was definitely brought to the next level with a sprinkling of salted peanuts.  while shopping,  (rainbow has a fabulous selection of bulk flours, nuts, pastas, sugars, beans, spices, and teas) i stumbled upon a bin of mixed maple nuts, which turned out to be the perfect salty-sweet taste combination.

to make chocolate dipped maple nut bacon: (thanks to the awesome john from bi-rite for some dipping advice, although his big contribution to the meal comes later…)

1. fry your bacon and place the slices on a paper towel to drain. make sure they’re cooked enough so there’s not too much fat or the chocolate won’t stick. i placed a plate on top to get the bacon to lie flat for easier dipping.

2. set up a double boiler with a heatproof bowl over a pot of water. turn on the heat and let the water boil with the chocolate in the upper bowl.

3. smash the shit out of the nuts (this is also on the list of instructions for your rape awareness self defense class). for maple nuts, i’d advise rolling a can or something else heavy over them with a layer of parchment paper or plastic in between. for the dude attempting to steal your purse, i’d advise a knee to the groin.

4.  once the chocolate melts, submerge the bacon in the gooey pool (you can go the whole way for ultimate chocolateyness, or just halfway for some visual bacon contrast) then roll it in the nut bits, then set down to cool. fyi, i really like using chopsticks for bacon frying as well as chocolate dipping activities.  trying to stab thin pieces of fatty bacon from a pan radiating hot oil is tough and chopsticks allow you to grab and flip the slices with ease. they’ll also let you dip anything in chocolate without having fork holes.  but don’t worrry all you chopstick incompetents, if your chopsticks skills blow you can always use tongs. i think irene originally came up with this ingenious move. way to go, bean.

5. eat that shit.

the second component of the dessert showcase consisted of a bacon fat oatmeal maple chocolate and bacon bit cookie. i basically took this recipe by a pastry chef at a brooklyn restaurant and added a few tablespoons of maple syrup and it turned out freaking delicious. fyi, if you’re considering making this recipe, make half if you’re not making sandwiches. i halved it and ended up with about 36 cookies.  if you’re michael phelps post-bong hit, you may want to make the whole recipe to hit your daily regimen of 8000 calorie and get your munchie fix.

you’ll need a shitton of bacon fat, which i luckily had around thanks to our apartment receiving a lovely christmas gift of four packs of artisanal bacon from our oh-so-awesome friends and bacon-off attendees alejandro and jess. mmm bacon fat in a cup:

here’s a step by step process of the baking process. adding oatmeal basically makes it a health food, right?

i made a version with and without chocolate flakes. i vote pro-chocolate, pretty much always. iron sous chef jess made a caramel sauce and poured in some bacon fat and bourbon, which we then drizzled onto a scoop of vanilla gelato on top of the cookie. holy fuck yes.

cookies and baconnnnn. bacon in coooookies. wouldn’t this be a nice present? you will be my new best friend if you come up to me and say ‘i made you cookies and bacon.’

for the final part of my dessert, i made a bacon cocktail with maker’s mark, guinness, and vanilla gelato from ciao bella. i got this recipe from my favorite foodie friend, john from bi-rite. he gave me this recipe pretty much word for word about three hours before the bacon-off started. the only thing i changed was using vanilla gelato instead of chocolate, since i like the combos of bourbon and vanilla as well as guinness and vanilla.

here’s how to make the ‘car bombed on bacon’ cocktail:

1. make a shitton of bacon. eat the bacon. let the fat cool a bit. pour it into a bottle of bourbon (you may want to take a shot first to give yourself some room) and let the bacon fat congeal at the top. i only had about three hours to let the bacon fat infuse the bourbon so it wasn’t super bacony. it would probably be killer if you left it for a week or two.

2. the bourbon will develop a fatty seal at the top. poke a hole in it with a chopstick and decant the bourbon out through the hole. pour into a glass and add a shot of guinness. btdubs, if you’re ever in dublin, go to the guinnness museum at the factory. you can learn all about guinness production, see all the historical ad campaigns, press a button to start a batch of guinness, and sip a perfectly tapped draught at the gravity bar with a 360° view of dublin. yeah boyyyy.

3.  add a scoop of vanilla gelato. prepare for crazy insane taste sensations. drink.

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