What's Cooking (Take Three!)

Comfort food in South Gippsland tonight as well. Meatloaf just went in the oven as a loaf of bread came out. Onions caramelising. Brussels sprouts blanched ready to finish off somehow. Still debating the final garnishes.

Dinner tonight will be Sichuan dry-fried beef with celery (gan bian niu rou si).

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

So a friend gave me some halibut he caught in Alaska a few months ago. I'm going to cut it into two pieces that will get coated with panko and ground star anise and served with a sauce made from fresh tomatoes. I haven't done the dish in over ten years--I'm hoping the recipe (which I created after having a dish like it in a Vancouver restaurant) is still on this site. Came to look for it. If not, I'm still doing the dish--it's just back to the drawing board trying to remember what I did.

So, too lazy, and too wet to walk to the shop. My excuse is we are going on a holiday ina week so have to use stuff up!!
So scrounged around and found a tin of confit duck wings, some frozen pheasant stock. ( yeah I know, whaaat? Pheasant stock!? We had pheasant for ou Christmas in July, gotta make stock from the trim and carcasses ) arborio rice, so off we go to confit duck risotto. Butter, reggianno, shallots nearly always in the house and sage in the garden.

[Jenise]

Barb, how elegant. Perfect solution for those leftovers. I'm fascinated by the tin of confitted duck wings. Have never seen anything like that here! Is that a common ingredient in Australia?

Last night I made Sichuan chao larou. This is a variant on twice-cooked pork that uses smoked bacon instead of fresh pork belly.

-Paul W.

Barb, how elegant. Perfect solution for those leftovers. I'm fascinated by the tin of confitted duck wings. Have never seen anything like that here! Is that a common ingredient in Australia?

Probably as common in Aussie kitchens as Vegemite in the USA

It is a good product and we discovered it on our travels, always on the lookout for interesting foodstuffs and also good proteins which don't need refrigeration, for the RV travels.
A French couple came to Australia and set up a facility manufacturing pates, rillettes, confit duck both wings and legs, cassoulet all from local produce. They also import some canned French stuff like, foie gras and sell that. It was surely a labour of love as it cannot be easy to get the accreditations that must be necessary to do canned meat products.
I am always happy to support good products and their email order system works brilliantly. The factory is in rural South Australia and I can out in an order on a Friday evening and have it at my post office Tuesday! And with the state of our postal service that is remarkable.

Dinner tonight is masoor dal and iddlis.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

We're smoking Chinese style ducks today. Invited a few couples over to share, and I'll serve a charred corn and bok choy fried rice, tamari eggplant, oyster sauce shitake mushrooms with shaved macadamias, and a sweet-sour japanese cucumber salad on purple nappa cabbage.

Yes, PURPLE nappa cabbage. Just bought it, never saw it before. It's lovely!

We're smoking Chinese style ducks today.

Is that like the "tea smoked duck" I sometimes make, Jenise? (A packet of tea leaves mixed with dry rice and sometimes other aromatics heated til smoking in a wok, with the duck on a rack over it.) Or are you putting it in an actual smoker?

Either way, smoked duck is one of my favorite dishes. Let me know how yours came out!

[Jenise]

We're smoking Chinese style ducks today.

Is that like the "tea smoked duck" I sometimes make, Jenise? (A packet of tea leaves mixed with dry rice and sometimes other aromatics heated til smoking in a wok, with the duck on a rack over it.) Or are you putting it in an actual smoker?

Either way, smoked duck is one of my favorite dishes. Let me know how yours came out!

Tom, no--I love that method, but we smoked them in a real smoker over cherry wood. They'd been heavily rubbed with a salt-sugar cure with tons of Five spice, bay leaves and star anise for 48 hours prior, baked for an hour at 300 to melt the fat (literally, hand rubbing it out works, and then you have delicious duck fat to collect for some amazing pan roasted potatoes), then into the smoker at 200 for about three hours finishes the bird.

Dinner last night was a Meatless Monday meal of boiled corn we'd picked ourselves out of Merwyn's corn field a few hours earlier and sliced tomatoes. Simple but divine. It's a good idea on several levels to skip meat occasionally, but believe me when I've got corn THAT good it's no hardship, I'd rather OD on corn!

...we smoked them in a real smoker over cherry wood. They'd been heavily rubbed with a salt-sugar cure with tons of Five spice, bay leaves and star anise for 48 hours prior, baked for an hour at 300 to melt the fat (literally, hand rubbing it out works, and then you have delicious duck fat to collect for some amazing pan roasted potatoes), then into the smoker at 200 for about three hours finishes the bird.

Dinner last night was a Meatless Monday meal of boiled corn we'd picked ourselves out of Merwyn's corn field a few hours earlier and sliced tomatoes. Simple but divine. It's a good idea on several levels to skip meat occasionally, but believe me when I've got corn THAT good it's no hardship, I'd rather OD on corn!

Oh man, that duck sounds wonderful! I wish my wife liked duck...or chicken...or lamb...lol. I'd be making that every week. (Strangely, she absolutely swoons when I cook potatoes in duck fat - I can buy tubs of the stuff around here - but duck itself is verboten. Women!)

"Meatless"..."meatless"....hmmm...nope. Doesn't ring a bell.

But the corn sounds equally awesome. I know what you mean about how heavenly it is when it's uber-fresh. We have lots of cornfields around here, and I'm lucky to be able to score a fair amount every year.

[Jenise]

So Wifey only eats pork and beef?

We were at The Slanted Door last weekend and had a melon salad that involved fish sauce and really nice honeydew. When I got home, I looked around for something similar and found one at Saveur. It wasn't really all that similar other than that it used melon and fish sauce, but it came out really nicely. It involved making a dressing with the fish sauce, lime juice, honey, garlic, shallots, a Thai pepper, and canola oil. That was tossed with watermelon, feta, and some thin sliced jalapeno. It was finished with torn up mint and basil leaves. Very delicious.

So Wifey only eats pork and beef?

Pretty much. Heavily weighted towards beef, but pork on occasion. Credit her Kansas City BBQ-centric upbringing, I guess, although she will deign to have a boneless, skinless chicken breast once in a while. However considering the price of beef and boneless skinless breasts, we tend to do vegetarian a lot.

[Jenise]

Mike, I've had and make melon salads, but not with the complexity of fish sauce added. Love the sound of that, and the jalapenos, too.

Tom, vegetables are excellent food. And good thing she eats them, as a red meat diet wouldn't be too healthy!

Speaking of red meats, I saw a pic on Facebook yesterday of a short rib someone ordered in a San Francisco restaurant and that forced, forced I tell you, me to get a package of Bryan Flannery short ribs out of the freezer for dinner. I seared them then braised them in chicken broth, water, wine, onions, garlic and fire-roasted tomatoes and added whole aleppo chiles, black and szechuan peppercorns. Removed the meat, shredded it, then put it back with broken lasagna noodles until we had a rich bowl of tomato-beef noodle soup. Killer with a nice Chateneuf du Pape.

...until we had a rich bowl of tomato-beef noodle soup. Killer with a nice Chateneuf du Pape.

Killer indeed. Well done!

[Jenise]

On the smoker right now: another duck. We're trying to get the timing perfect. Sunday's ducks were good but this should be better. And we're comparing alder to cherry on the wood. Side dish will be fried rice (if I quit pecking at the cooked rice and there's some to stir fry) with purple nappa cabbage and chopped shitake mushrooms. And I'm not sure about what else. This wasn't a very planned-out exercise.

On the smoker right now: another duck. We're trying to get the timing perfect. Sunday's ducks were good but this should be better. And we're comparing alder to cherry on the wood. Side dish will be fried rice (if I quit pecking at the cooked rice and there's some to stir fry) with purple nappa cabbage and chopped shitake mushrooms. And I'm not sure about what else. This wasn't a very planned-out exercise.

Woo hoo!

Planning is overrated. How was it? I'm betting: TREMENDOUS!

[Jenise]

Tom, I'm totally there with you. Planning results in doing things a prescribed way, and on-the-fly often results in inspiration you wouldn't have planned with more time or access to typical ingredients.

Last night's dinner was FANF--KINGTASTIC.

So here's the skinny:

1. Alder is as good as cherry, but more intense. It wasn't too much for the bird, though to compensate for the anticipated heavier smoke I served a gamey Chateauneuf instead of a pinot noir. (I concluded that my preference goes with cherry, but this was good too.)

2. Bob bitched about all the fat so I volunteered to pre-bake the bird for an hour in the oven at 300F. That was enough to melt the fat that I could then extrude by rubbing the fattiest parts with the back of a tablespoon. Less fat in the smoker, and I got to capture the fat for a future pan of duck-fat roasted potatoes. The finished bird was no less smokey. Genius.

3. The fried rice was the best I've ever made. Other ingredients were green onion and diced scrambled egg as usual, but this time I had a bit of leftover oyster-sauce fried shitake mushrooms with shaved macadamia nuts from Sunday, so those got diced and went in. Not many, so what there was disappeared into the rice and brought new textures as well as hugely amping up the umami effect--surprisingly so considering the small amount (about 1/4 cup).

4. The cabbage. OH MY GOD. Purple nappa cabbage wok-fried Chinese technique (cook ginger in oil first, add cabbage, then add a small amount of broth to steam the cabbage while cooking off.) Finished it with a big tablespoon of this new Chile Sauce I'm crazy about that's all the hard bits left behind from the making of chile oil. No leftovers of this, I ate it all.

FANF--KINGTASTIC.

In retrospect, I seem to have married the wrong woman.

[Jenise]

But I'm not a redhead.

But I'm not a redhead.

I can forgive almost anyone one great sin.

[Jenise]

Okay, so yesterday we went to the Farmers Market in little Lynden, the Dutch town near by, where there were only three vendors selling food. One had a bunch of pretty ripe red heirloom tomatoes, so I cleaned him out and today that's going to become an a'la amatriciana sauce--probably my favorite end-of-season way to use tomatoes.