Cooking

Last weekend I had friends over for a nice dinner: a delicious whole leg of lamb (from a local farm, slaughtered and butchered by a friend just a few days before), a salad of wild arugula + homemade ricotta + roasted yellow nectarines, roasted eggplant with dry-farmed tomatoes and preserved lemon, and a platter of five kinds of figs. This is the story of the food: The lamb was from Amador Grazers (all grass fed, no antibiotics or growth hormones). If you’re not squeamish about such things, you can see a photo of my friend slaughtering and butchering it here. ...

I have no photos (though maybe a fellow camper will dig one up). So I’ll just say: making grilled cheese over charcoal turns out well. Especially if you use three cheeses, good bread, heirloom tomatoes, and avocados, and brush the bread with huge amounts of melted butter and then grill until crisp.

Using nearly the same ingredients as Tuesday’s dinner, something simpler (about 20 minutes from start to finish, 2 pans) and still tasty: The sauce was a shallot and a huge pile of minced garlic (about half a head), sauteed in olive oil for maybe 5 minutes until golden brown, plus cherry tomatoes, a little chicken stock, olives, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, simmered for another 10+ minutes. The nearly-done bowtie pasta was then finished in the sauce for another 2 minutes. Plus parsley and haloumi. ...

I’d been craving kasha, that staple of russian jewish grandmothers everywhere, so I sat down and made it. A cup of buckwheat groats mixed with a beaten egg and toasted for a few minutes in a skilled until dry. Onion, salt, and pepper sauteed in oil. Chicken stock boiled in a heavy pan and then both of those added to it, and cooked covered over low heat for about 12 minutes, before adding in cooked bowtie pasta. Solid. ...

I should really turn my food-splurge impulses into cooking more often. I bought the most exciting version of everything I wanted without thinking about price (a BN Ranch grass-fed sirloin steak, local padrone peppers, blackberries, a nectarine, olives, a shallot)… and the total came to about $17. Not cheap, but inexpensive for a “special splurge on dinner”.

For a camping trip with a few friends, I decreed “no burgers, no sausages”, and a very loose theme of “Korean BBQ”. I don’t think I’d ever cooked Korean food before, but the general idea of marinated, grilled, thin-sliced meat and lots of banchan (side dishes, most of which could be made ahead of time) seemed feasible for camping, and a break from the ordinary. I bought a nice large marbled ribeye steak and sliced it thinly against the grain (following an online suggestion to pre-freeze it for an hour to aid with slicing thin helped): ...

What I ate for dinner: fresh mozzarella (not made by me), the first dry-farmed tomatoes I’d seen this season (sweet and intense), basil, olive oil, salt, pepper.

Last weekend I took a sausage-making class (hands-on practice, recipes, and helpful Q&A from the owners of Jablow’s Meats). I don’t have time to write much up, but it was fun, informative, and I especially like the sweet italian sausage we made (with plenty of garlic and toasted fennel seed): (yes, everyone photographs sausage being extruded out of the piston into pig intestine:) Hat tip to relatively new organizations Curiosity Atlas for organizing and Good Eggs for hosting. ...

For dinner: bread, cheese (Humboldt Fog and a Neals Yard cheese that wasn’t their cheddar), mixed greens with roasted peaches and radishes, and a bowl of figs. Followed by lentil soup based on the version I liked so much earlier this year, involving sweating the lentils, shallots sauteed in bacon fat, nora pepper, and this time a dried ancho pepper for a little extra kick. I did the “add a big bunch of spinach a few minutes before serving” thing again too: ...

I love the fresh-from-the-Bay-a-few-hundred-feet-away oysters at Tomales Bay Oyster farm in Marshall, about 6 miles North of Point Reyes (both the sweet Golden Nugget and the more briny regular Tomales Bay oysters). However, I realized I’ve never been a huge fan of Tabasco or soy sauce on oysters (too tart, too thin – I think I want something more buttery and spicy to balance out the brine). So as an experiment I made my own inspired-by-harissa sauce: dried ancho chiles from Tierra Farms (reconstituted in hot water for 10 minutes), pureed with olive oil, a few cloves of garlic, and a little toasted coriander seed. This turned out a thick, slightly spicy, mouth-coating paste that you could dab on the oysters. I declare it a success! ...

Between travel and work it hasn’t been a great few months for cooking. Trying to get back (on/off) the wagon, I went by Bi-Rite and picked up some sole and some newly-in-season vegetables and fruit. What can I make, while hungry, without a plan? Sole filet– should I bread it? Fry it? It’s so thin… hmm. I peeked in The New Best Recipe and took their suggestion on cooking style, which worked well– salt and pepper on both sides, let the filets sit 5 minutes, heat 1 Tbsp oil and butter together to high heat (butter alone would burn), bring it down to medium-high once the butter melts and saute the fish (3 minutes on the non-skin side, then about 2 minutes on the skin side, until it flakes apart under a toothpick). Then I browned half a Tbsp of butter in the pan as a sauce, along with some minced up salt-cured olives. This was excellent. ...

Hey, this was a more successful than usual “leftovers hash”, and only 20 minutes. (cue typical low-light cell phone photo:) Some good pancetta fried at low heat. A little water added to deglaze the pan and get the crusty bits off the bottom. A minced shallot sauteed in the fat. Then a few brussels sprouts I had (sliced thin), a coarsely chopped head of broccolini, and a few big pinches of white pepper, for variety. With the pan covered, fried/steamed on medium-low heat (stirring occasionally) for about 10 minutes. ...

I splurged a bit on ingredients– some wild-caught (I’d just read Righteous Porkchop) salmon, between layers of sliced shallots, hedgehog mushrooms (so disturbingly spiny-looking when fresh…), black trumpet mushrooms, and kalamata olives, along with black pepper and Meyer lemon juice. No added salt (letting the olives stand in for that). I wrapped the whole stack in foil, crimped the edges, and baked it at 400 for about 17 minutes. Delicious! ...

I had a box of turkish delight and some turkish tea from Istanbul, so that seemed like a good theme for a dinner party… while trying to shoehorn in whatever vegetables I got in the CSA. A range of vegetarian mezzes: Kalamata olives (greek, I know) Watermelon radish pickles (three days in rice vinegar, a little sugar, meyer lemon, and mustard seed – it turned the brine red). This isn’t at all Turkish, I just had so many pounds of radish to deal with… and I’d planned to put some powdered sumac on it to have it fill the raw-onions-with-sumac appetizer role in many turkish meals, but forgot. Turkish black tea (5 minutes in a french press, served in the specific fluted glasses and saucers they use in Turkey, which I’d impulsively picked up in the airport). Anchovies, from a can Homemade whole wheat lavash bread, based on an arbitrarily chosen internet recipe but quite successful (1 packet yeast proofed in 1/2 cup lukewarm water, then 3/4 cup more water added, and this added to 2 cups white-whole-wheat flour w/ 1 tsp salt, mixed into sticky dough, kneaded (more flour needed), coated heavily in olive oil and set to rise in a warm place for an hour, punched down, rolled thin, some sesame seeds sifted on top, then cooked on a medium-heat griddle for a few minutes on each side). There was a surprisingly big difference between the perfect fresh-off-the-stove lavash and even the 30-minutes-off-the-stove texture and taste (it became chewy and tough). Roasted parsnips (30-40 minutes at 425F in olive oil, salt, black pepper, turning once) mixed with lots of fresh mint Cacik (pronounced something like jay-juhk): Greek yogurt diluted with perhaps 25% water to thin it out, cucumber, fresh mint, coarse salt, olive oil An attempt at Kısır (pronounced kih-sish), a Turkish salad in the same vein as tabouleh: 2 Tbsp tomato paste and a Nora chili mixed into 2 1/2 cups of hot water, poured over 2 cups dry bulgur to soak for 15+ minutes, then olive oil, a Tbsp pomegranate syrup (strong), lime juice, and a whole bunch of minced fresh parsley added, and served over sliced cucumbers and tomatoes. Plus lots of black pepper. While some people said this was their favorite, I thought it was missing something, and maybe the bulgur should have been further cooked and chilled? Hmm. “Harem’s Delight” brand Turkish Delight, pomegranate flavored. And of course, a few fine beers: Upright Flora Rustica (with spring yarrow and calendula – floral, interesting, and pretty good this time, not gone-bad like the last bottle), Allagash Hugh Malone Belgian IPA (slightly fruity, huge head, an interesting hop taste that I couldn’t place, nice [edit: more info from the Allagash web site]), and a saved bottle of Almanac summer blackberry ale from a friend (a bit more acidic and less blackberry-distinctive than it was originally, unfortunately). ...

Another (busy-at-work, forgot-to-invite-anyone-over) Tuesday CSA, another attempt to cheat time with the pressure cooker. I’d give this one a B+. Similar to the last lentil soup: I sauteed some home-cured-by-a-friend and deliciously fatty/salty lambcetta, shallots, celery, carrots, and onions. Then I sweated a pound of lentils with it over medium heat for 5 minutes. Plus a few dried Nora peppers, chipotles, cayenne, a pinch of smoked paprika, 8 cups of water, and the lid came on, for 10 minutes at pressure. I opened it, added salt and black pepper to taste, and simmered it another 5 minutes. A whole Meyer lemon squeezed into the bowl for the last-minute acid. Pretty good. Could have used more meat or a meaty stock. ...