What's Cooking (Take Two!)

Sounds great. Do you really get real tasso up in NH or do you use another ham as substitute?

It's real tasso. Years ago North Country Smokehouse in Claremont NH got authentic recipes for andouille and tasso from a restaurant in New Orleans in exchange for some of their smoked meat recipes. I used to get tasso mail order from K-Paul's. The North Country Smokehouse tasso has the same taste, but it's more tender--the K-Paul's tasso tended to be on the tough and chewy side.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

I remember now--you've spoken of that smokehouse before. Lucky you to have a resource like that close by.

Last night's dinner here was a simple Meatless Monday meal: sliced russet potatoes oven roasted in a cast iron pan with parmesan cheese, pan-roasted chayote squash, and a tomato-basil salad.

[Jenise]

Tonight I'm doing some high class Mexican food. That is--a new book (not just published, merely new to me) book on Mexican cuisine that I just love because it provides not just recipes but a lot of information, as in this case--explains that upper class Mexican food did not traditionally contain chiles. That was for the poor and indigenous country people. He didn't point to the obvious Spanish heritage in the dish I'm going to make, but it does involve grinding almonds and bread into the sauce as the Spanish have long been known to do. I don't actually care who invented this dish or why--I just loved the sound of 'Chicken in Red Almond Sauce', so that's what we're having.

I just loved the sound of 'Chicken in Red Almond Sauce', so that's what we're having.

How was it? It sounds tremendous!!

Made a red-sauce seafood lasagna tonight with shrimp, scallops, lobster, and mussels. And lots of cheese. Who can resist?

[Robin Garr]

Roasted brussels-sprouts Korean-style with a spicy garlic-ginger-tomato sauce, a concept borrowed and back-engineered from a seasonal dish at Louisville's RYE restaurant last winter.

That looks delicious, Robin.

-Paul W.

[Robin Garr]

That looks delicious, Robin.

Thanks! This has gone into the rotation since we had it a couple of times at RYE. I can't say that I loved B sprouts - or even LIKED them all that much - until this came along. It hides the sprouts very nicely.

Several people on Facebook asked for the recipe, so I jotted down a rough procedure. I'll post it separately as an RCP.

We were headed over to our friends' place for supper last night and wanted to bring a salad with us. I found a recipe for one that involved roasted lemons, cherry tomatoes, red onion, mint, parsley, and a vinaigrette made with allspice and pomegranate molasses. Sounded great and seemed like yet another possible solution to the overabundance of Meyer lemons here. I followed the recipe closely, slicing the lemon thinly, boiling the slices, then tossing them with a little oil and some fresh sage and roasting them. When I put the salad together, though, the first thing I realized was that the cherry tomatoes I got were undoubtedly the worst I've ever had. They were hard little under-ripe sour things and were pretty much not fit to eat. At my wife's urging, I ran over to the corner market and picked up some better ones. Unfortunately, when tossed with the rest of the ingredients, it became clear that the lemon part did not work at all. Even though I cut the thin roasted lemon slices into pieces before tossing them in, they were way too bitter and sour and completely dominated the salad in an unpleasant manner. I'm pretty sure I followed the recipe to a 'T', so maybe Meyer lemons aren't right for such a dish. Or maybe the recipe just sucks, I don't know.

At this point, it was time to head over to our friends' place, so we again stopped at the corner market and picked up some broccoli salad to go.

[Robin Garr]

Napa (or is it "nappa"?) cabbage stir-fry with carrots, onions, garlic and ginger, five-spice and Sichuan spices.

sm-nappa-stirfry.jpg

An unsuccessful dish tonight: I adapted a fancy-shmancy timbale recipe. Instead of individual ramekins, I filled a deep-dish pie plate with layers of potato, gorgonzola, pear, fennel, and a layer of potato on top. Poured around and in was a custard of one egg, a little milk, a clove of garlic, and quatre epices.

My first mistake was that I bought floury potatoes instead of waxy so the texture was way off (and there were crumbs everywhere in my workspace). Then, it turns out that Pumpkin isn't too fond of hot pear, which flavor was quite pronounced. The whole thing lacked color and lacked texture. We are not going to try to redeem this recipe; out it goes.

And, yes, Jenise, the website I got it from is run by a food stylist....

Dinner last night was gaeng hanglay moo (Northern Thai pork Hanglay curry), made using a from-scratch recipe for Hanglay curry powder that I found. It came out very tasty.

-Paul W.

not an exciting day in the kitchen but very productive.
I have just "put up" 40 kilograms of tomatoes to keep me going for the next year hopefully.
Sadly not my own homegrown but from" my" tomato man who appears with, literally, truckloads when the time is right
I have been buying from him for years now. So I now have bottled peeled whole and bottles of passata, I don't do any
fancy stuff, that comes on the day when it is to be used. Very satisfying looking at the day's production.

[Jenise]

another possible solution to the overabundance of Meyer lemons here. I followed the recipe closely, slicing the lemon thinly, boiling the slices, then tossing them with a little oil and some fresh sage and roasting them.

I've used chopped raw meyer lemons in seafood relishes and it works beautifully. I've also blanched Eureka (the standard un-Meyer) lemon rind to de-bitterize the peel, a procedure that calls for draining and re-blanching 2-3 times to tame it fully. So based on both I would think the method you describe would work perfectly with Meyer, I'm surprised that the result was overpowering.

[Jenise]

not an exciting day in the kitchen but very productive.
I have just "put up" 40 kilograms of tomatoes to keep me going for the next year hopefully.
Sadly not my own homegrown but from" my" tomato man who appears with, literally, truckloads when the time is right
I have been buying from him for years now. So I now have bottled peeled whole and bottles of passata, I don't do any
fancy stuff, that comes on the day when it is to be used. Very satisfying looking at the day's production.

Good for you, Barb! I'm so jealous. Meant to do that this year myself when tomatoes were at their peak, but never found the time and the season peaked/passed quicker than usual as it was so warm. Or was it just because I'm another year older?

not an exciting day in the kitchen but very productive.
I have just "put up" 40 kilograms of tomatoes to keep me going for the next year hopefully.

Outstanding. Congrats.

I've used chopped raw meyer lemons in seafood relishes and it works beautifully. I've also blanched Eureka (the standard un-Meyer) lemon rind to de-bitterize the peel, a procedure that calls for draining and re-blanching 2-3 times to tame it fully. So based on both I would think the method you describe would work perfectly with Meyer, I'm surprised that the result was overpowering.

Yeah, I expected something completely different. I couldn't eat the stuff.


Tonight, I threw together risotto with Italian sausage and fennel. Normally, I would have sauteed onion and garlic, put in the rice, and then added the fennel and cooked sausage at some point in the proceedings. This time, I cooked the onion, garlic, sausage, and fennel separately from the rice and mixed them in (along with some Meyer lemon zest and juice) after the rice was done. I also added a couple of shots of Chalupa chipotle sauce, which worked really well. I don't know that there was a big difference between cooking the rice separately from the rest of the stuff vs putting it in during the cooking process, but the results were very good.

[Jenise]

Tonight's the first night I'll be cooking at home in many days, and it's the last night on which we can eat normal food because Bob is having a colonoscopy on Wednesday and such is his plumbing that unless he wants to take another one in three months like he did last time, today needs to be light proteins and tomorrow all soft food/vegetarian before starting the all-liquid diet on Tuesday.

So tonight's like The Last Supper, an event not the least bit Biblical except for the extent to which he's moaning about it. And for that I've planned grilled boneless/skinless chicken thigh pieces that are marinating right now in an exceptional concoction of sriracha, sesame oil, sugar and soy sauce. I'll serve that with green onion fried rice, and we'll have a starter salad of frisee and enoki mushrooms tossed with a vinaigrette made Asian-spicy with my favorite garlic-chili paste.

Tonight we enjoyed our Shrove Tuesday Meal. It consisted of broiled loin lamb chops, baked sweet potatoes, eggplant salad; and washed down with 2012 Cline, Lodi, Zinfandel.

[Jenise]

Tonight we're having our first real meal in three days. On the plan: seared pork chops, butter basted in the skillet like one would a rib eye, in this case with garlic/butter/mint, served over grits. As always, a salad of some kind will precede that course, not sure what yet.

An unsuccessful dish tonight: <snip> The whole thing lacked color and lacked texture.

Waste not, however. How to make it palatable? Well, it's mostly potato so I put a good wallop of oil in a pan and fried it. That worked.

We had invited my pal Nilo and his wife over for supper last Monday night. Nilo's coming off of shoulder surgery, has been in some pain, and has his right arm in a sling. When I asked if there was anything we could help with, his wife replied that she thought he might get sick of her cooking, so supper Monday night seemed like the thing to do. I picked up a 7 lb. bone-in, skin-on pork shoulder on Sunday and stuck it in an ice chest (no room in the fridge) with an ostensibly Puerto Rican marinade that included 40 cloves of minced garlic, red wine vinegar, orange juice, brown sugar, oregano, cumin, salt, and pepper. Unfortunately, by Monday, my wife and I were laid low by the latest nasty respiratory virus to come through town. We canceled the get-together but I went ahead and put the pork in the oven at 325 for about 5 hours. I tented it with foil for much of that time but with our oven, I should have tented it longer. It ended up a bit dryer than I like but with pretty good flavor. We didn't really do much with it on Monday night, but I had a sandwich made with it yesterday and a couple of tacos today. It's excellent in such applications, where a little mayo or some salsa is just enough to make up for any dryness in the meat.

The recipe was from Saveur and is here, if anyone's interested.

[Robin Garr]

It was unpleasantly cold yesterday, so I made a pizza to have an excuse to crank the oven up to 575F. Good pizza, too, basically using a faster-rise version of baguette dough for the crust plus a quick tomato sauce, fresh mozz' and - in the absence of fresh basil - crushed dried basil from last summer's crop. (High-quality flour, too, hard-wheat unbleached bread flour, locavore from Weisenberger Mill in Midway, Ky.)

pizza20140220.jpg

[Jenise]

Lovely pizza, Robin.

Tonight we'll be watching the Oscars, so I was thinking why not Veal Oscar--but for the fact that there's nowhere around here to buy a veal chop unless it's around Father's Day (not Mother's Day mind you, just Father's Day). And crab season isn't open yet either. So I thought of a silly, but not unintuitive, substitute: Pork Oscar, wherein a pork chop (a single large chop for two) stands in for the veal and shrimp stands in for the crab. You may not be used to putting pork and shrimp together--unless you're Chinese, then you do it all the time! In combination these two will probably make more sense to my palate than veal and crab ever did!