To celebrate two years of sobriety, I had a few friends over for a summer dinner party. This was the menu:

Zucchini Bisque – An old favorite from a Cuisinart recipe booklet. Easy to make and can be served hot or cold–perfect for hot California evenings.

Arancini (balls of risotto stuffed with mozzarella & peas) – I still haven’t mastered making these yet; they always end up as huge, crumbling balls, but they are delicious and I was able to make and fry them several days in advance.

Prosciutto & Gruyere Pinwheels – Easy to make ahead. Cheese, pork and puff-pastry… what’s not to like?

Asparagus w/ Mayonnaise Verte – Counteracts my tendency to serve all meat dishes; my standby when veggies are needed.

Dry Ribs – My absolute favorite. Crisp and salty on the outside and meltingly tender inside.

Panzanella – Toasted cubes of bread in a balsamic vinaigrette. The arugula and cheese are just an added bonus.

Shrimp Salad in Endive - Crunchy, sweet shrimp on crisp, slightly bitter endive.

Gnocchi w/ Roquefort Cream – French gnocchi (made with Pate a Choux) baked in a luxuriously rich Roquefort sauce.

Bacon Wrapped Water Chestnuts – Not your typical bacon wrap; these have a sweet mayonnaise and spicy chili coating.

Semifreddo – A great, creamy, frozen (or half-frozen) dessert. I couldn’t find marionberries (my favorite), but the blackberry substitute worked out fine.

It took about three years since the last candy making attempt to try again. This time we were armed with a little more knowledge, better tools and a good night’s sleep.

I though it would be fun to make something from my vintage cookbook collection, so the first recipe, Dulce de Panocha (or Penuche) was from “Trader Vik’s Book of Mexican Cooking” (1973).  It tasted a lot like maple sugar candy–insanely sweet and slightly grainy. Not my favorite, but simple to make.

The second recipe was my old standby: peanut brittle. This year we made it in an enameled le creuset so we could clearly see the color of the syrup (which is crucial). But it was taxing (and damn scary) to lift a 30 pound pot of 295 degree sugar and pour it out onto sheets. The secret weapon was silpat; NOTHING sicks to these babies. I keep trying to find something that will, but haven’t so far. I didn’t even butter it and the brittle literaly slid right off. Last time (with buttered baking pans), I needed my spackling tool to force the brittle off!

The final recipe was my favorite: salted caramels! We made pans, and pans of this. I bought a cheap chocolate fondue pot, which was small (only holds about a cup) but i could dip around 50 caramels with one pot. It took about 10-15 minutes to melt on melt mode, then warm mode kept the chocolate at the perfect temperature for dipping—even down to the last caramel. We dipped milk and dark chocolate and finished with a variety of salts: Maldon Sea Salt, Australian Murray River Salt Flakes (a beautiful pale pink hue) and Hawaiian Alaea Sea Salt (brilliant orange, but maybe a bit too coarse for this usage).

Next time my new gadget will be candy-making gloves (and a cooler apartment).

Hmmm. Trying to write from memory over a year later? Not the best idea. But I’m having an OCD moment of needing to finish all my old draft posts before starting a new.

This was a beautiful day at the “Incredible Feast” event in the University District with my girlfriends. But three things stand out:

1. Mini Cows – ADORABLE little (alive) cows, mulling around in their trailer available for petting.

2. Bacon Dogs from the Swinery – Not those wussy hot dogs wrapped in bacon, these are homemade kielbasa-like sausage with bacon INSIDE. OMG.

3. Beef tenderloin poached in olive oil, with arugula pesto on faro cakes. So many good ideas here. Beef treated almost like a confit. Faro ground up and cooked like polenta, formed into cakes and fried in olive oil. This is begging for a remake at home.

I’m sorry we’ve drifted apart. I know it’s my fault. The calls became less and less frequent, until I stopped calling all together. I know it’s been over a year, but I miss you. I’ve been going though old photos and remembering what fun we had together.

Maybe we can start seeing each other again and see what happens…

M

http://www.readydepot.com/servlet/the-204/Yoders-Canned-Bacon-Celebrity/Detail

Technorati Tags: bacon, survival

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theethicalbutcher/the-ethical-butchers-custom-cured-bacon-heritag

You can pledge any amount to help fund this project, but if you pledge $50 or more you get to create and name your own bacon which will be sold at Portland Farmer’s Markets beginning March 2010.

Yes, I pledged. I wonder if they can make bacon-flavored bacon.

Technorati Tags: bacon, ethical butcher

http://www.deandeluca.com/chocolates-and-confections/confections/sir-francis-bacon-peanut-brittle.aspx

Technorati Tags: bacon brittle, francis bacon

I’m in NYC visiting my brother and, per usual, he has a list of restaurants he wants me to try–with Momofuku Ko at the top. He warns me that it’s crazy hard to get a reservation, especially since they only have two seatings of 12 per night. Luckily, checking at 10pm on a Friday night turned up three open spots. Go economy!

On the night of our reservation we meet up in the East Village and find the restaurant on an unassuming street, marked only with the trademark peach. I sneak a shot of the door, as they have a strict no photo policy. Once inside we are greeted immediately and led to our spot at the counter. The restaurant is very small and centers around an open kitchen where three chefs are at work.

We decide to splurge on the $100 (per person) wine pairings, justifying it with “when in Rome.” We start out with three amuse-bouches, all beautifully plated. The braised fennel on quark with hazelnut oil is a nice bite of fresh, but forgettable. The chicharon with togarashi is downright bad and akin to gas station pork rind snacks. Our last bite of biscuit with honey and black pepper is the best of the three, but overwhelmingly oily, sweet and dense.

Our next course of fluke with buttermilk, poppy seeds and chives arrives and our taste buds perk up. We both confess that the rocky start had us worried. The fluke is raw, thinly sliced and melts in the mouth. The combination of sour buttermilk and crunchy/nutty poppy seeds is intrinsically strange, but marries beautifully with the fluke.

The sea urchin with pea vines in dashi is gorgeous: bright orange urchin against dark green pea vines and cleverly disguised cucumber shaped like peas. I briefly wonder if they make a melon-baller that small or if someone cut them by hand. My brother and I are not fans of sea urchin texture, taste or smell, but this is creamy-sweet and wonderful with the cold, savory dashi broth and bright taste of  shiso. I look at my fork then back to the bowl of broth, wishing they served spoons with this course. I turn to my brother to comment and watch with abhorrence and jealousy as he tips the bowl to his mouth and slurps the remaining dashi. He sheepishly gives me a shrug that implies it was too good to waste.

Next comes hand-ripped pasta with snail sausage and crisped chicken skin in butter sauce. I think snails are repugnant and I don’t find them redeeming in the garden or on the palate. However, I learn that if you grind them into a sausage, mix them with spices and drown them in butter they can be quite tasty. The sauce is like a beurre blanc but without the wine or shallots; yeah, basically like a stick of emulsified butter on the plate (not complaining). This dish is rich, rich, rich and the added treat of crispy chicken skin garnish sends me over the top. Someone should market crispy chicken skin snacks. I would eat them morning, noon and night.

I’m overwhelmed with tastes, smells, sights and drink, but we plow on with a smoked egg with caviar, potato chips and sweet potato vinegar.  The egg has a wedge cut out of it, with caviar spilling out, like the egg has eggs. It’s so beautiful that we pause to ooh and ah… possibly a bit louder than intended. I think the chefs are smirking. The smoky egg splits open and barely cooked yolk combines with vinegar and crisp potato the size of garlic chips. It’s oddly comforting, like eating sunny-side eggs and crispy hash browns. I contemplate licking my plate.

I watch the chef prepare our next course:  pan-fried soft-shell crab with birred onions, celery noodles and fresh hearts of palm. I see him pull the apron off, snip the legs and slide the still moving crab into the pan. I hope my brother hasn’t seen this, but he casually asks if I’ve ever read “Consider the Lobster.” I don’t feel like debating the ethics of crustacean pain, so I change the subject until the dish arrives. According to the dictionary, birred means: “To make or move with a whirring noise, as of wheels in motion.” As far as I can tell the bed of onions on this plate are cooked down and “whirred” with a ridiculous amount of butter. Delicious. The celery noodles are long shaves of celery that resemble fettuccine. The fresh hearts of palm are miles better than the canned version, but kind of bland. I am usually disappointed with soft-shell crab; rarely is it crisp enough to mask the chewy shell. This fared better than most, but it’s my second least favorite dish on the menu.

Here is where I start counting how many dishes we’ve had, what’s left to come, and how much more I can eat without exploding. But it’s my favorite dish of the night: foie gras over lychee nuts, pine nut brittle, and riesling jelly. I have a thing for foie gras, my brother doesn’t. I offer to eat his portion; he declines. The foie gras is formed into a torchon, which is then frozen and finely shaved over the top of fresh lychee nuts and a sweet, crunchy brittle. Very odd, not in flavor, but in texture and temperature–chewy, crunchy, cold. Addictive. Giddy from wine, we affectionately refer to it as “meat sundae,” again rather loudly.

I flat out sigh when we get deep fried spare ribs with lots of different kinds of onions. I write “lots of different kinds of onions” because at this point I’m drunk and so full that my brain has stopped functioning and I can’t tell the difference between ramps, green onions, or Walla Wallas.  Is it good? Unfortunately yes, so I eat the whole thing.

Before the next course comes I visit the restroom to see if emptying my bladder will make more room for my stomach (it doesn’t). I return to find the beautiful and technically inventive guava ice cream with cream cheese crust. They make a quenelle of ice cream and dip it into a liquid cream cheese mixture, which evenly coats the oval and forms a semi-hard shell. I take only one bite… apparently, I do not like guava.

Our final course is black sesame ice-cream with lemon coconut curd and funnel cake. Eating black ice cream is a bit strange. It tastes dark, earthy and sweet. Not unpleasant, but it taxes the brain because the flavors are so diametric. The funnel cake is delicious/sweet/fried goodness. And also about the size of my head, so I only manage about a quarter of it.

I eat. A lot. And sometimes I even feel full. But this is I’ve-never-been-this-full-in-my-life-and-I-want-to-die full. I roll to the subway station and pass out happily on a cold, orange plastic-moulded seat.

For $100 each (not including the wine pairings), this dinner felt like a steal; basically $10 per course. Ko also serves a $160 lunch, which is more tastes / smaller portions, but I bet you’ll still have to let your belt out a few notches. If you go, I recommend not eating anything else for the entire day. And if you’re planning on wine pairings, do not, I repeat, do not stop for cocktails before dinner.

P.S. Due to the no photo policy, my brother kindly re-enacted some dishes for your viewing pleasure.

Technorati Tags: delicious, ko, momofuku, NYC

Food Jammers consists of three brilliant, inventive and persistent guys who love food and power tools. It’s like watching friends sit around and talk about food, playing “what-if”, but then you actually get to see the follow-through.

In one episode, they want to make SuperFoods. Which in and of itself doesn’t sound that hard: get your seeds, pack them into jars and let them sprout. But they take it one step (or several) further and end up making a rotating carousel in which the seed jars move around a light source that simulates the sun.

In another episode, they are going camping and want a full thanksgiving dinner. By trial and error they end up freezing the turkey solid, slicing it with a saw, dehydrating each slice and reassembling it into a whole turkey (or something that resembles a whole turkey). And while it doesn’t exactly turn out as planned, it was fascinating to watch, and as a by-product, they end up making a kick-ass fruit leather jacket with the dehydrator.

The last episode I saw involved a food train that served up an amazing looking dinner. Each item was cooked in a hollowed out log and transported to the dinning area on a cobbled together track.

I’m lucky enough to have seen a few episodes because my brother knows them and has their dvds. But in trying to view more recent shows I’m dismayed to find out you can’t buy them, rent them or stream them (legally). You CAN get them via torrent, or if you’re a technical god and know how to spoof your IP so it looks like it’s coming from Canada, you can view them on foodtv.ca.  I suppose you could also plan your future trips to Canada, Australia or Latin America based on tv scheduling.

I wish, wish, wish American Food TV would pick them up. I really want to see the Hot Tub Shabu Shabu and the office filing cabinet smoker. If you too would like the see these, you can email Food Jammers at iwantfjonmytv@foodjammers.com or contact foodtv to request American programming. Please.

Technorati Tags: dehydrated turkey, food jammers, hot tub shabu shabu