Very busy.

Busy eating, obviously.

Here’s a recap with absolutely no worthwhile information but lots of quality food porn from Germany to Glasgow to London to LA to  a secret little garden party in the country.

We’ll start with the phenomenal brunch platters in Berlin, which should be available at all brunching locales around the world.

Same goes for the street markets with fabulous bread and pretzels…

beautifully constructed goat cheese balls with honey and dijon and pink peppercorns…

and not to be forgotten, an enormous hungry Pac-Man masquerading as an orange juice stand.

From Berlin, we travel back in time to an early summer visit to the south of France, complete with trips to the famous weekend markets of Sarlat, famous for foie gras…

and of course, cheese. No visit to France would be complete without serious cheese gorging. And if you get really lucky (by which I mean live through a near-death experience of renting a charming little cottage directly under a gargantuan cliff in imminent danger of falling so your village gets evacuated and your rental agent pulls some strings to have you moved to an honest-to-God baron’s house with a pool, tennis court and caretakers) then you can eat your market cheese in the ‘outdoor lunching’ area below rather than the ‘outdoor dinner’ area.

Apparently, barons must have a different locale for each dining experience, accurately calibrated for the particular time of day and position of sun and attractiveness of view. Speaking of barons, the Rambling Restaurant crew served a feast fit for kings at the Secret Garden Party based on a medieval menu of choches, pottage, and and buttered wortes on trenchers.

Our kings and queens gnawed through a pit-roasted wild boar, encased for hours in a hole with hot rocks and cabbage thanks to the hard work and strong arms of people like Nick, Alice, Sid…

and displayed here by the lovely Liane.

The following picture epitomizes every surreal, magical, dirty, glittery, messy, bizarre, dancey, amazing  moment of this secret party in the countryside.

IreneBean and I also got to enjoy some pop-up coffee perfection at Penny University, the short-term cafe creation of everyone’s favourite world barista champion, Gwilym, and the folks making the magic at Square Mile.

Sipping our way through their coffee tasting menu was like being fed mysterious potions expertly crafted by a mad scientist with bubbles and burners and tubes and quite possibly a magic wand.  Bean is also quite sure we were sitting next to Kiera Knightley.

I got to spend more time with the fam in LA for my cousin Evelyn’s wedding. We tore our way through some of the best restaurants in LA thanks to Yelp! and my friend Marc’s spot-on recommendations (he also makes a mean New England Crab Roll with homemade potato chips).  We had some spectacular dishes at Animal including oxtail poutine, foie gras on a biscuit with maple sausage gravy, ‘buffalo style’ pigs tails, marrow bone with chimichurri, lamb sweetbreads, and the beautiful barbecue pork belly brioche sliders as shown in all their orgasm-inducing glory by Kel.

A close-up to see these melt-in-your-mouth things of beauty in all their magical perfection, along with some kickass slide-off-the-bone ribs.

And some amazing speck and sunnyside up egg breakfast pizza, stuffed into my mouth along with wild boar bacon, some mystifyingly good golden crunchy fried potatoes and mushroom eggs benedict with fennel pollen hollandaise, consumed with big brother and food enjoyment enabler Andy.

Lest you think my summer’s been all baron’s houses, feasts for kings, and secret laboratories, we’ll end with some exciting shots of the most magnificent destination of them all….the SCOTTISH CHIPPIE. Home of chips, cheese and gravy (aka disco chips). That little blob of brown nastiness at the bottom just makes it all more delicious.

How can something so horrifying taste so good? And then, after you’ve eaten a whole box, taste so bad? It only gets better when placed on top of one of Scotland’s greatest treasures…the deep fried and battered pizza. Oh, the glory of pizza crunch.

Forget houses of aristocracy and secret parties and coffee contraptions. That’s magic, right there.

We promised pig photos, and pig photos you’re going to get. Be forewarned though; spit roasting a 50 lb pig in the backyard is not exactly a pretty process, although it ends in lots of happy deliciousness. If you’re squeamish about meat, weird animal parts, nose-to-tail eating, or happen to be (gasp!) vegetarian…you probably shouldn’t click the button below. But if you’re curious about how to roast your own whole pig on a bed of charcoal in your backyard, then choose the blue pill and take the plunge into our carnivorous world…

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

7am: Above we have big brother Andy, hero of the day for sourcing the pig from his restaurant, Harvest.  Andy also hooked up the motorized spit rental, essential for a day’s worth of slow roasting.  Andy made it all happen, but the center of attention all day was assuredly Antonio the pig.

Over the course of the day, we got better and better acquainted with Antonio.

8am: We prepare Antonio for salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Antonio manages to be a little bit cute and grotesque at the same time, stirring up within us twinges of sadness, appreciation, squeamishness, maybe even guilt. But we know that Antonio lived a good life, and we know he will be extremely tasty after hours of slow-roasting, and so we begin scoring the skin in 1/2 inch lines with a pocket knife for crackling.

Daniel graciously removes the eyeballs, because really, they’re too gross, even for us.

They are not, however, too gross to take creepy photos with.

We remove various things from Antonio’s cavity.

We replace them with apples, red onions, and butter.

We rub Antonio down with aforementioned ingredients, plus some wine, cider, and and more butter. Because everyone likes butter, even Antonio.

9am: We put Antonio on the roasting apparatus.

He starts to brown and crackle juuuust the tiniest bit. Our stomachs start to howl.

10am-2pm: Antonio gets progressively browner, but is still rather undercooked on the inside. Daniel loyally applies love and butter sauce to the roasting process.

Our guests, once arrived, congregate around Antonio. He’s a conversation piece. He’s better than TV.

3pm-ish: It’s about time to eat, but Antonio still isn’t quite done, so we cut off some crackling to pass around. It’s insanely good.

4pm: We declare Antonio thoroughly roasted, and begin dismantle him in the middle of the party.

His tongue/face region are particularly creepy. Sorry.

People tell Irene that she shouldn’t be working so hard at her own birthday party – it seems they don’t understand that this is the kind of thing she does for fun.

Finally, the roast is served: we honor Antonio with sandwich rolls, hoisin sauce, spicy mustard, and homemade pickles.

We spent the next few hours cleaning up, and making preparations for pork shi fan, pork soup, beer braised pork, red wine stewed pork with fresh linguine, pork and collard green stuffed ravioli, and even more pork sandwiches. Antonio’s head is still in the fridge.

Thanks to all for joining us on this epic journey of pork and delight! What will we roast at the next party? Suggestions so far include goat, lamb, four and twenty blackbirds, and a baker’s dozen of ducks. Honestly though, we’d be happy to just eat Antonio all over again.

Because I’ve self-medicated with an assortment of pharmaceuticals and can’t really read anything, I opened my Google Reader for the first time in about 6 months to look at all the pretty pictures.  Oooh, pretty pictures.  I will share some of them with you now.

First off, a great photo from a great article called Northeast China Branches Out In Flushing in the New York Times.

Wait a minute. Those are sticky-sweet caramel sugar strands stretching off chunks of deep-fried sweet potato? And that’s Chinese food? Holy crap. My world is rocking right now and it’s not just me overdosing on cold meds.  Perhaps my deep-frying obsession is coded deep within my DNA.  Irene Bean sent this article to me at about the exact moment the drool hit the keyboard upon reading it myself.  Go read about the cuisine of the Dongbei (literally ‘East North’) region and look at the slideshow: I promise you’ll do some serious drooling yourself.

Next, up: Boston Creme Pies from Design*Sponge

Ooooooooooooohmyyyygod.  Despite being proudly Boston born and bred, I’ve never really liked Boston creme pies.  But seeing this photo made me want to scoop up that cheeky little cake and smooosh it into my mouth in one bite.  Look at how mini it is!  It would totally fit.  Design*sponge is one of my favorite design blogs and their foodie/recipe series  ‘in the kitchen with’ has some of the most gorgeous food styling I’ve ever seen, along with some great recipes.  My camera whimpers a little in shame every time I look at the photos.  But my heart sings a bit with joy at the beauty of it all, so I do my best to temper the rising bile of inadequacy. I mean, really…how has a messy, half-eaten plate of radishes ever looked so good?

This spectacularly beautiful radish explosion is better described as a Spicy Heirloom Radish Salad and the recipe can be found  ‘In The Kitchen With’ Penny De Los Santos.

My last photo (because I reeeeeallly needed to go to bed like 3 hours ago, but I am not up of my own volition. Damn the batter in my head!) is from Slice: America’s Favorite Pizza Weblog, which is part of the jolly, fat, and friendly Serious Eats family.  If I manage to stay up to date with my Reader, it will probably be due to the daily dose of deliciousness  from Serious Eats.

Scrolling through the several hundred posts I missed over the past few months, my eyes starting to glaze over, my brain beginning to succumb to the dripping ooze of fry batter, I was shocked out of my stupor by the following photo:

Hey! I know that pizza! I know that pizza damn well, and glancing at this photo again has me tempted to book a flight to New Haven, Connecticut as we speak. Rather, as I type. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a huge fan of Connecticut. But seriously, Sally’s Apizza is some of the best pizza you’ll ever have.  It’s absolutely orgasmically good.  It’s also the home to one of my favorite food stories…

Assuming you have a generally adequate level of vision and sense of  spatial reasoning, I think you get an idea from the above photo how large the ‘Large’ pizza at Sally’s is.  16 slices!  It’s about the size of a small stovetop,  a mid-size bath mat, two normal ‘Large’ pizzas, or perhaps a very big catskin rug if your cat were one of those hilariously overweight cats whose pictures make me laugh on a regular basis.  Regardless, the Larges should more aptly be called Enormously Huges, and then the Large pizzas from every other pizza institution would not suffer the intense shame of comparison.

I went to Sally’s with four girlfriends – Rachel, Lex, Olivia, and Helen, all champion eaters and all wanting a different kind of pizza. I wanted to try the classic White Clam, Rachel swore by the Eggplant Parmesan, Lex refused to leave without the Mixed Hot Peppers No Mozz, and Helen preferred the Pepperoni and Onion. So of course, after waiting in line for almost two hours, we decided to get all four. In Large. For five girls. We had so much pizza, they had to bring over another table to put it on.  The guys at the table next to us started heckling – like straight-up shit talking – but we shut them up when we took down approximately 3.15 of them and had just enough to divide for leftovers the way we intended. It was one of the most satisfying eating experiences of my life – mostly because the pizza is unquestionably amazing and we waited two hours for it, but also seeing the grudging looks of respect in the eyes of those dudes.

Or maybe it was horror. I might have been too high on tomato sauce to know the difference.

Oh, and then Lex ordered another one to take home.  Seriously people, it’s that good.

Also…you’d think if I could ingest almost 16 slices of pizza, I’d be able to ingest enough Tylenol PM aka Lemsip Max All Night Cold & Flu Tablets to knock myself out  for the night, wouldn’t you?

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/15/weekly-link-roundup-the-food-porn-version/feed/ 10 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/09/random-food-porn-or-what-i-accomplished-in-sophomore-fall/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/09/random-food-porn-or-what-i-accomplished-in-sophomore-fall/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:27:42 +0000 irene http://eatfamilystyles.com/?p=2825 As the spring semester starts up, I find my mind wandering back to all the things I did in the fall. Remember the fall semester? Walking up the slope without getting my face windburned off? Four months of classes and pouring money into this lovely Ivy League institution? Learning about things like neuroscience, psychology and the legal system, human development, and so on? Brutalizing your savings account and learning how to bake flourless chocolate torte, braise pork belly, poach eggs, make hollandaise sauce, butcher a deer, french ribs, and so on? Becoming a shameless fan of the blood-spatter-style plating of sauce (pictured below)? Do I remember all that? Not really. Good thing I took pictures, and we’ve got recipes coming in future posts.

The whole flourless chocolate torte thing started for us with Daniel Barbolobew’s birthday. We had espresso in the first incarnation of this absurd dessert, but eventually cut it out, adding instead raspberry coulis underneath and chocolate ganache on top. Here’s another peek:

Another project we took on last semester was the celebrated and scrumptious pork belly. Lots of people think of stomach – tripe, really – when they hear us talk about pork belly. No, no, no, no. Don’t get crazy. All we’re talking about is the cut of meat – the tummy, not the stomach – from which the holy grail of meat and fat and tasty (BACON) comes.

Uncured, dry-cured, beer-braised, cider-braised, torched, roasted, we did it all. The only really important part is that we braised it for three hours. (The reason we know that’s important is that we failed to do it twice, and with terrible, chewy, tough, no-fun results). Here’s a look at the belly before curing: shiny, fatty, and, if you have good spatial reasoning, obviously identical to bacon.

And here’s a shot of the pork belly, after curing, browning, and a little bit of braising.

Next, as we all know, we love Julia Child (but not that whiny Julie!) and so when we came home from the farmer’s market with a dozen fresh eggs, it was obvious to us that we needed to learn to poach them. This is one recipe I’m definitely posting. There seems to be a few different groups of people when it comes to poached eggs – those who’ve loved them forever and ate them all the time as kids, those who have never had them, those who hate them because they don’t understand the beauty of runny yolk, and those, who, like me, have recently become completely obsessed. It doesn’t hurt that Daniel is an egg-poaching pro.

Look at those wispy sheets of delicious egg white. Daniel and JC (you know which one) have so much in common. I think that’s why I like him so much. Anyway, poached eggs are also great because you can eat them in any number of ways: with traditional breakfast food, smooshed into a mini pita, next to your standard meat and potatoes, or on a salad with a plop of caramelized onions and some hollandaise sauce. Who invented this shit: take an egg, and then cover it with more egg – but not the whole egg, just the best, fattiest, most disgustingly tasty part – and mix that egg with butter. Crazy.

Finally, I won’t rehash all the gory details of our deer killing/butchering/eating experience (but you can: here!), but let me tell you: venison is awesome. We made bourguignon, curry, stirfry, but more often than not, just panfried little bits of steak (or, alternatively, heaven) and ate them with our fingers. To save you all that nonsense, here’s a rather unattractive pictures of the most attractive thing we’ve done with that animal so far: balsamic glazed frenched rack of ribs. Check it:

That concludes our review of the fall semester. Already, the spring has been extremely fruitful (or, to be more accurate, meatful), so look out for a recap of our Deadpan Entree Smackdown, and our first Deadpan event!