Breakfast
Baked Eggs w/ Shrimp and Capers
The French may be annoyingly provincial (to be polite) about food, but I must say, they’re damn good with eggs. Short of personally laying one, French folks can do virtually everything with an egg: hollandaise, béarnaise, béchamel, omelets, soufflés, crepes, custards, crème anglaise, and so on.
Given that eggs are extremely difficult to get right, it’s an impressive legacy, much of which gets lost over here, where generally we throw them into a hot pan or a pot of boiling water. If you’re looking to expand your repertoire, Michel Roux’s book Eggs is useful to have around; each chapter begins with a master recipe for that section (pasta/soufflés/etc.), followed by several simple yet pleasing dishes.
We chose eggs en cocotte because of our love for a runny egg, and if you don’t overcook it, a baked egg is the best of all runny egg preparations: unctuous and slightly runny, heightened with a little cream and an assortment of flavorings. The white, usually an unfortunate, tough flap, virtually dissolves in this rich bath.
We tweaked the recipe a bit, chopping up a few medium shrimp instead of using the 48 tiny sweet shrimp called for. I’m grateful for French egg cookery, but making me bust my butt looking for teeny tiny shrimp? That’s cocky.
Baked Eggs w/ Shrimp and Capers (adapted from Eggs, by Michel Roux)
Serves 4
8 medium shrimp, chopped in ¼ inch pieces, tail blanched and reserved
2 tablespoons butter
4 eggs
4 tablespoons heavy cream
24 capers
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 325
- Brush 4 ramekins (about 3 inches high and 1 inch deep) with butter on bottoms and sides. Season with salt and pepper. Carefully tip an egg into each mold, drizzle cream over the egg whites, then scatter the shrimp and capers over the yolks. Bake about 10 minutes and serve garnished with a tail.
Yorkshire Pudding w/ Candied Orange Syrup
The 5-volume Modernist Cuisine arrived at our place like a barbell dropping to the gym floor. The pictures are cool, and the glossary of pantry ingredients reads like an AP chemistry textbook, but for my money there’s no better example of molecular gastronomy than the Yorkshire Pudding (or popover).
Flour, milk, and eggs: whisked up, surrounded with heat, and 15 minutes later they’ve puffed up like an inflated paper bag. People always cite the Maillard reaction by which food browns in a hot pan. This has always seemed an overrated, overtaught, and frankly unimpressive discovery: if I accidentally grasp a searing hot pan, it only makes sense I’ll end up with a nicely charred extremity, no explanation needed, thank you very much Mr. Maillard.
Most so-called molecular gastronomy bores me. Just as I’m not surprised that inhaling black cigarette smoke might just possibly affect the lungs, it’s not improbable that shaking some weird powder into your soup could have a gastronomical impact. Just to name two examples of which I’m aware: bubble bath powder turns water into soapy bubbles, and baby powder soothes a baby’s butt.
But Yorkshire Pudding is another matter entirely: without any leavening assistance, the mixture balloons into a soft, slightly eggy pastry. Traditionally, they’re served with a roast as a means of sopping up gravy, a delicious application, but one which doesn’t take full advantage of the miraculous transformation: a toasty, warm hollow center.
The Yorkshire Pudding has a whale’s blowhole begging for a spoonful of, well, anything. In this case, we decided on a caramelized (yes!) orange syrup. The cool thing about this recipe is it turns your YP into a reversible jacket: spoon in syrup it’s dessert; spoon in syrup and lay a fried egg over the whole thing and it’s breakfast. Save some for the evening roast and it’s dinner.
That’s chemistry.
Yorkshire Pudding w/ Orange Syrup
Serves 8
For the Pudding
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs, beaten
1 ¼ cups milk
Fried Eggs (optional, though basted in brown butter would be nice)
- Preheat oven to 450.
- Sift flour and salt into a bowl. Whisk in the eggs and half the milk until smooth then stir in the remaining milk.
- Add a teaspoon of the oil to each hole of a muffin tray. (This makes about 8 puddings.) Heat tray in the oven until very hot, almost smoking.
- Ladle or pour (we used a measuring cup) the batter into each tin, ¾ of the way up and bake for about 15 minutes, or until browned and puffy.
- Serve with the syrup and candied orange slices. Fried eggs go nicely.
For the Orange Syrup
½ cup sugar
1 large navel orange, sliced paper-thin
1. Heat the sugar with 1/3 cup water in a small saucepan over high heat until amber. Watch carefully so it doesn’t brown. Immediately add the orange slices and turn gently in the syrup. Reduce heat to low and let the orange slices become candied, 5 or 6 minutes. Remove from heat.
Leftover Steak and Eggs
I ate my first plate of steak and eggs in college at daybreak after a night of drinking. It was at a Boston IHOP and I remember it was very delicious. It is possible, however, that my standards were slightly compromised, no offense to the IHOP chefs. Tastiness aside, I do recall the extreme thinness of the steak; a chewy, overdone affair, a poorly cooked minute steak. But such a cut is precisely what’s called for: it’s breakfast, not a steak dinner; it would be a waste to use a fancy cut like strip or ribeye.
Perhaps because it’s tattooed on my brain as hangover fare, I haven’t eaten steak and eggs since that morning. But as a family man, I find myself living in a universe of leftovers. Last week I ate split pea soup three times; so far this week it’s been slices of Monday’s roast from my man Pino the Butcher.
Pino, actually, suggested steak and eggs as a good leftover option. A sensible and original notion, I gave it a shot. The problem is that I wasn’t sure how to proceed. My recollection from IHOP was that the dish is hot, and I wasn’t about to reheat my perfectly pink steak. Leftover or not, I don’t like grey steak.
And so I hit on cold steak and hot eggs. Hot and cold on the same plate is done all the time. And, more to the point, the only leftover steak is cold steak. It was very good; better than some half-assed, fried piece of gristle. Some cold slices of a good roast, hot scrambled eggs. Steak and eggs for the mature guy.
Leftover Steak and Eggs
For 1, up to 3 days post roasting
3 pound rib roast, with about a ¼ inch layer of fat
3 eggs
touch of milk
coffee
toasted English muffin
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 425. Season heavily all over with salt and pepper. You want a nice crust. Roast on a rack for ½ hour until browned and sizzling then reduce heat to 350 and roast to an internal temp of 130 (for medium rare). This may take another 40 minutes, but check after half hour. Remove and let rest about 15 minutes before carving.
- Over the next 2 or 3 days make sandwiches, eat plain with salt, or make steak and eggs. Scramble the eggs with a touch of milk. Season with salt and pepper. Serve piping hot with slices of steak and buttered muffin and a cup of coffee.
Bacon and Eggs
Some things are so fundamental that to screw them up is a crime. Walking across the street without looking both ways would seem to qualify. Even if you make it out alive you still feel like a fool. Eggs and bacon also merit consideration.
Egg mastery has been, for centuries, revered as the ultimate mark of a chef’s skill. They’re incredibly sensitive little orbs, and in some cases you can’t even massage the process since they cook inside a shell. Nevertheless, good eggs can be made at home. The first step is to recognize bad eggs. Or bacon and eggs, as per this post.
Lousy diners serve crummy eggs. I’m not sure why, but odds are they don’t care, never a good start. Which also makes you wonder about the stuffed sole. In fact, why is stuffed sole a diner staple? And the menu several bound laminated pages long? Because, again, they don’t care: increase volume and push out the product. Yet we keep coming, purely for convenience, and eat unloved eggs.
Bad diners blast the eggs on a griddle until they achieves a nice, leathery consistency. Accompanied by limp, paper-thin bacon, it makes for a sad plate of food. Good eggs, on the other hand, should taste like butter and eggs, be a lively yellow as well as tender and delicate. Even ideal hard-boiled eggs are radiant, with a soft white and flaky yolk, as opposed to the overcooked article, more suitable for the golf course.
If there’s one thing as depressing as rubbery eggs, it’s bad bacon. Even well cooked supermarket bacon is slightly dismal if you’ve had the real thing. Thick, smoky, meaty and fatty, great bacon is like a great steak.
Fortunately, when it comes to eggs all you need is practice. You’ll succeed when you’ve become a bacon and egg snob and an unforgiving diner critic.
Eggs and Bacon
Serves 1
1 piece slab bacon, about ½ inch thick
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large eggs
salt and pepper
- Slice the bacon into lardons, about 1 inch by ½ inch. As many as you’d like (4 or 5). Reserve the remaining bacon for another time.
- Heat a small sauté pan over medium heat, add the lardons, and fry until well colored. Remove to a paper towel to drain.
- Heat the butter in a small pan over medium high until melted and the foam subsides. Swirl to cover the surface of the pan. Crack in the eggs.
- When the eggs are nearly done, you’ll be able to slide a rubber spatula around the edges, working it gradually under the center without breaking the yolk. Slide out onto the plate when the white is cooked. Season with salt and pepper. (You could cover the pan but keeping uncovered is delightfully risky.)
- Reheat the bacon briefly in its pan then plate alongside the eggs. Serve.
Sous Vide Egg w/ Sea Salt
Ate a pot of quinoa the other night, which is unusual for me. Quinoa has always tasted like dust, only made up of larger particles. The texture, if cooked properly, is okay-very slight crunch, soft inside. But since the best part of a grain is its texture, that slight resistance splitting open into a creamy inside, quinoa is unexciting. Beans, for instance (I guess that’s a legume, no matter), or wheatberries, whose giant crunch makes up for wimpy guts.
The rare instance of a delicious overcooked bean is the Boston baked bean, which is so doused in sugar and molasses and sweet onions, that in the end, who really cares? Yet, having thrown in a few pinches of chopped scallion and mint, a little lemon juice and olive oil, I found myself hovering over the pot, chowing quinoa with a sizeable metal spoon. The lemon, olive oil, and the herbs were flavorful enough to dissolve the dust factor
We keep a bowl of kosher salt on the stove at all times. Also at all times, after cooking, the surfaces resemble a midwestern town post-blizzard. Placing the pot in the sink, towel at the ready to scoop up the salt, I noticed a clean stovetop. No salt mess. For once I hadn’t used any salt. Which got me thinking.
We all know food tastes better with salt. Yet by itself, salt is vile. Yes, there’s chemistry involved here, but in the macro view, especially in our brave new crunchy organic food world, theoretically, food should taste good as is. Ask the ultra-seasonal chef for whom off-season cooking is a virtual crime.
In-season berries, tomatoes, apples (our specialty), etc. are uneatable precisely because they taste as nature intended, adulteration unnecessary. So why not glorify any food that tastes as it should, such as a good burger or, yes, a pot of quinoa. Yet to serve an unsalted burger, bean salad, or curried vegetables is criminal.
It’s sort of sad, I suppose, akin to some sort of environmental violation, bending nature’s intentions to fit our desires. Thirty years ago, it was rare to see a 300-pound nose tackle. Now these guys are undrafted and ignored unless they’re well over that ungodly poundage. To weigh 320, one must adopt a porcine lifestyle, face hovering over feeding trough, breaking only for sleep and practice. It’s a habit as unintended by God as raining salt over everything in sight. But football is no more enjoyable because these guys weigh a ton. And so it follows that we’d adapt, over time, to less, or even zero, salt.
Except for the egg, which throws a wrench in my entire argument. Particularly a bit of salt drizzled over a pan of scrambled eggs, in which the seasoning works its way into the eggy crevices, creating scrumptiousness. Same goes for a tiny pinch of the stuff coating the thin, translucent surface of a poached egg, which, when pricked with a fork, absorbs the seasoning into its exploding, creamy yolk. A poached egg on toast or English muffin is even better since the faintly salty interior seeps into the bread’s crevices.
Maybe crevice is the defining word in the salt argument. But at least when it comes to eggs, I’ll guiltlessly and greedily grab the salt bowl any day.
(NOTE: You may notice from two posts ago, this is another sous vide egg. Not necessary: a poached egg will be just as good or better.)
Sous Vide (or Poached) Egg with Sea Salt
Serves 4
4 large eggs
olive oil
1 baguette or other form of crusty bread, sliced (1/2 inch)
Sea salt
- Bring the water to 142. Gently add the eggs and cook 45 minutes or up to 3 hours. Or poach the things.
- Meanwhile, drizzle olive oil over the bread and toast until golden.
- If you’re doing the sous vide thing, peeling is a little annoying. Peel about an inch off the large end of the egg, hold the open end over a bowl. It’ll just slide out. If poaching, just remove and drain on paper towels.
- Rest the eggs on the toast, sprinkle with sea salt and serve alongside a little cup of extra salt.
Garlic and Bean Ragout, Potato Cake, Poached Egg
Driving to Truro from Provincetown the other day, rack of spare ribs in the rear seat to be smoked on the small grill in the backyard. Well, it’s less a backyard than a thin deck which rises up a hill of high grass bordered on the left by climbing grape vines at the summit of which blackberry bushes shoot out from the woods.
It’s a layout emblematic of the Outer Cape: unkempt without being overgrown, layered yet not manicured, subtle but interesting and varied. That day we discovered a pond at the end of a trail, empty of swimmers, with a tiny beach bookended by lily pads and tall, purple flowers.
After swimming, wrapped in towels, a lady came down the trail and waded into the water, stopping to say that her kids learned to swim in this very water. Like our yard or the acres of low marsh at the end of the street or the seals which play in the waves, it was the essence of the Cape.
At the wheel, I came upon a common theme: nothing is “taken”. Here, families learn from, rather than take from, the environment. Nature is appreciated, and we feel lucky to be able to enjoy it. The restaurants aren’t just okay but identical: roadside fried clams, lobster rolls, fish and chips, chowders, etc. and many are BYOB. It is what it is: locally sourced, pretty tasty, and highly casual. Things are scruffy and unpolished rather than “taken”, or removed, gutted, renovated, polished and replanted in the form of topiaries, leveled hedges, fancy menus, and upscale wine stores.
A few weeks ago the Times published a piece on the renewal of rich galas and outscaled dinner parties. Exhibit A was the birthday party hedge fund billionaire Leon Black threw for himself at his oversized Southampton beach house. Two hundred guests showed up to hear Elton John perform (paid $1 million dollars) and snack at the foie gras station.
It was, I thought, the perfect illustration of the anti-cape: taking rather than appreciating. Taking your ego and money a few hours east and replicating your giant Manhattan apartment; taking a hunk of beach and calling it your own, thereby prohibiting swimmers from enjoying the unparalleled Hamptons beaches. Taking the livers from hundreds of ducks and returning them, grotesquely fattened. (Caveat, I enjoy foie gras.)
I slapped the spare ribs on the grill, stepping over the tree branch cracked off by the recent hurricane, happy to be out of the house after a day of weather-induced confinement. Hurricane Irene passed through the Outer Cape yesterday, and we hunkered down, as instructed by tv and newspaper. We shut the windows, emptied out the jigsaw puzzles, and attempted to read The Dead to our 3-year-old. Mostly, we stood by the porch door, watching trees bend in the wind.
Crafting a meal from the pickings was a challenge bred mainly in defiance of the weathermen who ordered us to hoard pasta and canned soup.
When confronted with limited pantry items, I recommend going for texture. Texture is the ultimate boredom reliever-crunchy croutons scattered over a bowl of soup, say-after a day of puzzles and crummy tv.
Ironically, we were on the Cape, and not just the Cape, but also the Outer Cape, in other words a landing spot for the early settlers, who must have faced their own culinary challenges. Of course, texture likely wasn’t a major consideration as they rummaged for hardtack and attempted to fend off the urge to eat each other.
We were a bit more fortunate. Electricity allowed for eggs, and in case of power outage, the gas stove would come in handy. Otherwise we had a bag of dried beans (flageolet, brought up from home), dried ancho chiles, cherry tomatoes, garlic, and a potato.
Ready to dodge flying roof shingles, I stood over the cutting board contemplating texture. Beans, tomatoes, and eggs are soft; fried potatoes are crunchy. Done. Like a flavored risotto (asparagus, etc.), the beans would be a perfect vehicle, and so I tossed it with some hurricane ingredients necessarily elevated by a few techniques (roasting and confit) to avoid a mush of, well, raw hurricane food.
The result is tasty and, while somewhat involved, a relief from jigsaw puzzles and explaining The Dead to a pre-schooler.
(NOTE: forgive the vague measurements-the house didn’t come with a lot of kitchen equipment. Also, if your power blows out entirely, omit the eggs, it’s still pretty good. If the power goes out and you don’t have a gas stove, figure out something else. It’s also a recipe that takes a bit of time.)
Crisp Potatoes w/ Bean Ragout and a Poached Egg
Serves 4
For the Bean Ragout and Plating
2 cups dried beans (white or flageolet)
2 heads garlic, peeled into individual cloves
Olive oil
Roasted Tomatoes (see below)
Splash tomato oil and garlic oil (see below)
Potato Cake (see below)
Poached Egg (see below)
Salt and pepper
- Soak the dried beans overnight in enough cold water to cover by several inches.
- Add garlic to a small pot and cover with enough olive oil to cover by several inches (at least 2 cups, depending on the sized of the pot).
- Place a sauté pan over a very low flame and the pot on top. This diffuses the heat and prevents the garlic from coloring too much. The oil should barely simmer.
- Cook for about 45 minutes and remove from heat. The garlic should be very slightly colored and tender. Reserve and when cool, cover in oil, and refrigerate.
- The next day, add the beans with the soaking water and more water to cover, again by several inches, in a large pot. Bring to a low simmer and cook, skimming occasionally until perfectly cooked i.e. tender inside but not mushy. Add water if necessary.
- When cooked, drain the beans reserving the excess water and return to pot. Stir in enough reserved water to achieve a pourable, oatmeal-like consistency.
- Gently fold in roasted tomatoes and garlic confit, stir in a splash of excess tomato oil and garlic confit oil, and season with salt and pepper.
- To serve: spoon beans into bowls, top with a potato cake and poached egg.
For the Roasted Tomatoes
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tsp chopped thyme
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 375.
- Spread the oil over a baking sheet and gently place the tomatoes cut side up over the sheet. Sprinkle with the thyme and garlic and season. Splash remaining oil over the top. Place in oven and roast for 30-45 minutes until a bit shriveled and colored. They can be a bit charred.
- Let cool, cover and refrigerate.
For the Potato
1 russet potato, peeled and grated or julienned finely
1 egg, beaten
¼ cup flour
½ cup canola oil
salt and pepper
- Toss the first 3 ingredients in a large bowl and season.
- Heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. When hot, scoop 1/3 cup of the mixture and drop gently into the pan. Press lightly into a round, cake shape.
- Saute till crisp and browned, flip and repeat on other side. The inside should be cooked with no trace of raw potato, so test if necessary. Drain on paper towels and season.
For the Poached Egg
4 eggs
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1. Bring a large pot of water with the vinegar to a very light simmer. Meanwhile, crack the eggs into a bowl, or, if easier, crack one into a cup, slide gently into the water and repeat with the remaining 3 eggs. Poach for 2-3 minutes, remove and drain on paper towels.
Upma-The Art of Spice
There’s okra and there’s okra. I haven’t done a formal survey, but it’s a fair bet a lot of people don’t like the stuff. It’s cool-looking-a green, faceted pod-but tough to cook. You can’t eat it raw, and, heated, it releases a strange sticky white gel. Sound gross? Not at all. The entire thing-nutty, crunchy seeds and toothsome skin-is edible and even hearty, a rare quality in a green vegetable.
That is, if you cook it right, i.e. nicely browned and al dente. If you screw it up you get that plateful of nasty vegetal ooze, which scares, off cook and diner alike.
To my mind, Indian cooks have truly mastered okra. They slice it in small chunks and give it a quick toss in a hot pan with plenty of spices. Not only does the vegetable retain its integrity, but the spice heightens the flavor. It’s what I love about Indian cooking: respect for the ingredient paired with respect for the spice.
Tamarind, a few blocks from us, is a fantastic Indian place. A giant, airy two-level loft, it attracts a sharp-dressed crowd. A far cry from the neighborhood Indian place of my childhood, with its oppressive red velvet walls, neon-red tandoori chicken, and soul-deadening sitar music, Tamarind is an Indian restaurant for the modern era.
The spice pantry at Tamarind must be cavernous, and most of it seems to go into the okra, a mixture of okra, ginger, and a wild handful of ground and whole spice. Whole spice is among the best elements of this cooking: the seeds add crunch and a strong but not overwhelming flavor, which is muted by hot oil.
Upma, introduced to me years ago, is the quintessential whole-spice Indian dish. Like the best quick curries-okra, eggplant, or other-it’s a mix of a simple ingredient and complex spice. Although fortified with potatoes and tomatoes, the main ingredient couldn’t be more basic-cream of wheat-making upma essentially a dish as suited to breakfast as it is lunch or dinner.
Lending a great crunch to the otherwise soupy cream of wheat, the whole seeds make upma a great starting point for anyone interested in cooking Indian food. It’s like sinking into a bubble bath: the warm water is great, but nothing without the bubbles.
Upma
Serves 4
¼ cup olive oil (or canola)
3 tablespoons toor dal (or any small-sized dal, i.e. not chana)
2 tablespoons cumin seed
2 tablespoons mustard seeds (black, preferably)
2 yukon gold or red bliss potatoes, peeled in 1-inch chunks
3 plum tomatoes in chunks
1 inch ginger, peeled and minced
1 cup cream of wheat
salt
3-4 small red chiles, chopped thinly, with seeds (if you can deal with the heat)
- Add the oil and spices to a medium pot over medium heat. When the mustard seeds pop and the dal starts to color (about 30-40 seconds), add the ginger, potatoes, and tomatoes.
- Cook a few minutes, stirring, and season with salt. Not too heavily-this is just the first seasoning-you don’t want the final product to be too salty. Adjust at the end.
- (This is where we go off recipe a bit.) Add enough water as you want-it’ll determine how much upma you want. For this amount of spice and other ingredients, I add quite a bit-enough to cover the veg by probably 2 inches.
- Raise the heat a bit and bring to boil. Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, add the cream of wheat in a thin, slow stream. You don’t want lumps.
- Reduce to low heat and cook, stirring, until the upma thickens. You don’t want cement, rather, a smooth, thin porridge. Season again with plenty of salt. If you’re being fancy, plate it and garnish with chiles. Otherwise, just stir em in. Serve hot. (But it’s great cold the next day.)
Makin’ Bacon
I smoked my first bacon this weekend. It was at my parents’ place outside the city.
Two Wednesdays ago I bought a giant slab of pork belly, smothered it in salt, sugar, and pink salt, and let it sit in a few ziplock bags. We drove up there, me in the passenger seat clutching my pork like an old lady grips her purse on the subway.
Already it was early afternoon, and I needed to get this thing on the fire. First to Wal-Mart for the chips then shoot down the curving country roads to the house.
A partially used weekend house isn’t like other homes you pass by on suburban roads. No one’s standing in the kitchen stirring tomato sauce dodging a pack of little kids. There’s no “mud room”: I learned what that was about a month ago. The garage isn’t full of toys and bikes. Life inside the weekend place doesn’t evolve. Neither the contents nor their placement have changed in decades. Books, magazines, photographs, light switches, television: everything is decades old, but tidy as the day it came.
Having hacked away at the rust-coated grill grates and shoveled out half a foot of ash, I started the pork and eased into the pool with our little kid. He loves to swim but started screaming inconsolably when we uncovered a frog caught in the skimmer.
Like the rest of us, he’s pure city, through and through.
Meanwhile, the bacon came out great: salty and smoky, dark and a tad sugary from the molasses.
(Note #1: If you don’t have a butcher, get the supermarket guy to remove the bones from a slab of spare ribs. However, supermarket spare ribs are skinned, so your bacon will lack that critical smoked pork skin. The first step, namely, drying it over a very gentle heat, is absolutely not my invention. I copied it from bbq expert on the web, who claims pork and other meats have to be fully dried before they can “accept” smoke. I assume he’s right, but I don’t even own a grill. I did rub the pork with a touch of nitrites, probably not necessary, as I’ve seen a bunch of recipes which don’t use them. I’m going to slice it up and freeze in batches.)
(Note #2: As amateurs, we wanted to confirm meat safety, hence the final low-oven roasting-it’s easier than dealing with more coals. I recommend this stage, but who knows. All I know is we made a mean bacon.)
Makin’ Bacon
2 ½ pounds pork belly, skin-on
½ cup kosher salt
¼ cup sugar
½ cup molasses
pinch nitrites (pink salt-optional)
- Mix the spices in a bowl. Spread half on the bottom of a baking sheet and lay the belly on top. Spread the rest over the belly. Massage the cure all over the belly. It should really be worked into the meat. Cover and refrigerate. We sliced it in half so it fit in ziplock bags, which work well.
- Cure the belly for about a week, flipping it every day. Ziplock bags make this easier.
- When ready to smoke, soak several handfuls of wood chips (I used hickory) in a pan of water for 1 hour then drain. Meanwhile, remove the belly and rinse under running cold water. Dry well.
- Heat about 12 coals and use a grill rake or some other utensil to divide the coals to opposite sides, leaving the center bare.
- Lay the belly over the center of the grate skin up. Close the grill and roast for ½ hour. Make sure the temperature doesn’t exceed 150. If so, remove a few coals.
- After the ½ hour, add the same number of coals to the fire and divide a small handful of chips over each mound of coals, close and keep the temp at 150 or so. Do this every ½ hour. We did it for 2 ½ hours.
(See note #2 for this step.) Preheat oven to 150, lay the pork on a rack over a sheet pan and roast 2 hours. Remove, rest, slice, freeze, or whatever you like. We immediately roasted delicious, crispy lardons
Summer brunch-preserved cherries
A restaurant menu is like an anagram. Ingredients are shuffled, puzzle-fashion, from dish to dish, facilitating smooth and quick service. It’s often said the test of a chef is if he can he make a perfect omelet. Equally important, he should be a good Scrabble player.
This is especially necessary when it comes to pricey perishables. Those parsnips, tossed in olive oil, salted, and roasted to a rooty candy? Glance over at the next table; there they are, pureed with cream and butter, peeking out from underneath a braised short rib.
Brunch is the ultimate mix and match meal. Brunch dishes tend to be fatty, sweet, salty, and confined to homey tastes. It’s a time to splurge rather than strain the mind choosing between cod and calf’s liver or lamb curry and four types of dal. Hence the heavy use of a a limited number of ingredients: eggs, bread, etc.
Still, there’s brunch and there’s brunch, and the Barbuto version is exceptional: frittatas, strawberry and ricotta filled crepes, fontina and pancetta panino, spaghetti carbonara, poached eggs on crusty bread with a small salad.
Untangle the menu, you’ll discover the same 5 or 6 items woven throughout. The same wonderful caramelized onions melted into the fontina on my panino show up in the spinach frittata. The same fontina oozed like a warm blanket over the charred brick oven pizza. Not to mention the crusty bread and arugula salad, which lands on every table and plate in one form or another.
Behind the scenes lies a truly utilitarian universe. Celery trimmings, onion peels, meat and fish scraps: all chucked into a vessel for stock, sauce, flavored oils, preserves, and so on.
It’s possible to construct a similar, miniature, larder at home: condiments and sauces which cut down on food cost and complement a variety of foods.
Only three people occupy our apartment, one of whom is 3 ½ and likes to dress up as Buzz Lightyear, leaving two normal (sort of) inhabitants. Pots of relishes, pickles, preserved lemons, oil-packed vegetables, multiple varieties of salt, etc. would wither and die a sad, moldy death.
One or two such items, however, prove nearly as useful as the caramelized onions in Barbuto’s brunch kitchen. Especially if seasonal, as they pair with other timely items. Right now, cherries are everywhere; preserved, they can be spooned into a small bowl and served with cheese. Or heated and arranged around slices of roasted lamb. The liquid alone can be reduced to a glaze, brushed on grilled meats for a last minute sear. Or dunk those meats and poultry into the liquid and marinate a few hours.
Toss a few cherries with vinegar and stick them in a jar. Follow your tastebuds and play around with combinations, which is a lot easier than mastering Scrabble.
Preserved Cherries
Makes 1 quart
½ cup sugar
1 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 sprigs thyme
1 pound cherres, pitted and halved
- In a small saucepan combine all ingredients except cherries and bring to simmer, stirring to dissolve sugar.
- Pour liquid over the bowl of cherries. Let cool, pour into a container, cover and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks.
Upma – Are You A Homecook?
I have a problem with the term “home cook”. Does it refer to someone who cooks at home? If so, I suppose my dad qualifies: he’s an expert at peeling carrots as well as burning bagels. Granted, he just eats said carrot raw. I mean, that thing isn’t a recipe ingredient. Also, too impatient to wait for the toaster, he balances a frozen bagel over the stove, charring the outside just enough to soften. He just wants something…anything to eat while he reads the paper.
In colonial times, people cooked out of necessity. There wasn’t anyone else around to make food for them. More important, they were close to the food source: pigs, fish, fruits and vegetables…orchards. Frankly, though, I doubt they savored braving the freezing dawn air to milk the cows, purify the maple syrup, churn the butter, press the apples into cider, or whatever else you do on a farm. If someone opened a takeout Chinese place down the cobbled road, there’d be a run on dumplings.
So were the settlers home cooks, or did they cook out of necessity? In the last century, we’ve been moving away from cooking. Food is prepackaged, pre-frozen, pre-fried, pre-dried, pre-sliced, pre-diced, pre-jarred, pre-canned, pre-rolled, pre-squeezed, pre-shredded, and the price is right.
Yet, the thought process is warped. A whole chicken with some side will feed a family for a reasonable cost and minimal labor. Though we’re obsessed with people who cook on tv, studies have shown that we cook less than ever.
So where are the home cooks? And I’m not talking about hipsters in Brooklyn who butcher pigs on their rooftops. I mean the family that cooks together every night, that enjoys putting together a bunch of ingredients and laying out a simple meal-people for whom it’s in their DNA. If you choose to make spaghetti with meat sauce from scratch a few times a week, you’re a home cook.
First generation immigrants have us all beat. They cook out of necessity, but also because they’re steeped in the tradition of the home country, where you can’t hop to Walmart, where families live together, and every grandmother plucks recipes from a copious mental cookbook.
I had an acquaintance whose parents were South Indian. The house was fragrant with toasted spices, curry leaves, and baking naan bread. Lunch was homemade chapatis (round flatbreads) with a simple cauliflower curry and mango pickle: scoop up the curry with the bread, add a little pickle. Dinner was whipped up in perhaps a half hour: baby eggplants stuffed with a curry mixtures, sambal (a delicate tomato chutney), yogurt rice (basmati rice with cashews, lemon and yogurt), a variety of dals (dried legumes stewed with ginger and spices).
Breakfast was dosai (a thin, crispy, torpedo-shaped pancake rolled around a mild potato, cabbage, or other curry. But most of the time for breakfast they ate upma. Upma is essentially cream of wheat, but like all Indian food, it’s layered with complex flavors. You fry cumin, mustard seeds, ginger, onions and tomatoes, add water, add potatoes, simmer, stir in the cream of wheat and season well with salt.
Make upma. For breakfast, lunch, dinner. It’s real home cooking.
Upma
(Note: this is an approximate recipe, jotted down on a stained piece of notebook paper, lost, and semi-recovered from memory. It’ll work out but it’s mainly by eye so pay attention. Read the recipe for moral guidance.)
Serves 4-6
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 tablespoons urad dal
2 tablespoons black mustard seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 ½ inch piece of ginger minced
1 medium onion, diced
3 small tomatoes, diced
½ russet potato, diced
Cream of Wheat (see recipe)
A few chopped green chilies
Salt
- In a medium pot over medium heat, add the oil and spices. When the mustard seeds pop, add the ginger, stir until fragrant, then add the onion and tomato. Stir well.
- Add enough water to cover. The amount of water you add determines the amount of upma, but don’t add too much, as the upma will lose flavor. Add the potatoes and simmer until cooked through.
- When the potatoes are done, slowly whisk in the cream of wheat. You’ll probably need less than one cup. You want it to be sort of soupy, not too thick. Season with plenty of salt and serve hot.
