Depression Food is not so Depressing

I’m posting this for those who have never known real hunger. On it’s face it appears to be a doleful monologue about how to make do with pedestrian ingredients when you are so poor that eating money might seem cheaper than exchanging it for food. However, having spent more than a decade of my childhood eating stuff like this. I can assure you that, if you ever happen to be forced into similar circumstances, you will find that hot dogs and eggs can make a joyful repast when when eating nothing is the alternative.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Depression Food is not so Depressing

I’m posting this for those who have never known real hunger. On it’s face it appears to be a doleful monologue about how to make do with pedestrian ingredients when you are so poor that eating money might seem cheaper than exchanging it for food. However, having spent more than a decade of my childhood eating stuff like this. I can assure you that, if you ever happen to be forced into similar circumstances, you will find that hot dogs and eggs can make a joyful repast when when eating nothing is the alternative.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Good Stuff

Few things are more useful to me than my old Mouli grater. It’s a simple thing and about as pretty as rusted out Oldsmobile in a feral field. Yet it is on my family’s dinner table 4 nights each week (We eat lots of pasta and rissotto. I make no apologies for that.) and when it becomes defunct, I will not replace it with anything other than another version of the same thing by the same company. Of course, Mouli does not make this kind of thing anymore. Modern iterations are all stainless steel or plastic. None of these will do for me; cheap tinned steel is the only form that will suffice.

I think this grater is my third, maybe fourth Mouli in 32 years. They are great, but like all things, entropy gets the better of them and they go. I’ve recrimped them, built new handles, and used them until the metal became fatigued enough to use as foil before I tossed them out. I wonder if any of you have kitchen tools that are no longer produced, but are so useful that you do not want to imagine being without them.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Good Stuff

Few things are more useful to me than my old Mouli grater. It’s a simple thing and about as pretty as rusted out Oldsmobile in a feral field. Yet it is on my family’s dinner table 4 nights each week (We eat lots of pasta and rissotto. I make no apologies for that.) and when it becomes defunct, I will not replace it with anything other than another version of the same thing by the same company. Of course, Mouli does not make this kind of thing anymore. Modern iterations are all stainless steel or plastic. None of these will do for me; cheap tinned steel is the only form that will suffice.

I think this grater is my third, maybe fourth Mouli in 32 years. They are great, but like all things, entropy gets the better of them and they go. I’ve recrimped them, built new handles, and used them until the metal became fatigued enough to use as foil before I tossed them out. I wonder if any of you have kitchen tools that are no longer produced, but are so useful that you do not want to imagine being without them.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Charcuterie Demo at Cia w/ BdG

by Mike Pardus

Here’s a slide show of Robert presenting his world class charcurterie at the CIA last night.

Tonight we’re holding a small seminar on “how to blog”, this post is an example – hence the short prose and unedited photos – tomorrow I’ll give Bob some hair…..

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Not Dead, Just Skiing

by Mike Pardus

Summer is for traveling and doing things at the farm, but when winter sets in I become a ski-dad. My daughter races on the junior circuit in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, so almost every weekend is a road trip for practice or to a race. We’re lucky enough to have friends whose daughter skis with mine and who own a weekend place near the mountain – a big, rambling ex B+B with a commercial kitchen and plenty of prep space.

Apres ski lends itself to braising – I can make something unctuous on Wednesday in New Paltz, and have it ready to re-heat on Friday or Saturday at the mountain. Usually it’s something pretty basic – see past posts on the subject – but this weekend Vietnam met New England. Vietnamese Style BBQ Berkshire Pork Belly Braised in Fish Sauce and Caramel. Served with plain jasmine rice, stir fried cabbage, and plenty of beer, it was a big hit.

Here’s how:

Tuesday:

5# Fresh Pork Belly (butt or shoulder would work also)

4 Tablespoons Chinese 5 spice powder
1 cup Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce
1 cup Hoisin sauce
1/2 cup Fish sauce

Combine Sauces
Rub Pork with 5 Spice Powder
Slather sauce combo onto pork
Let marinate over night

Wednesday:
Set oven at 300F
Place marinated pork on rack over drip pan
Slowly roast pork until meltingly tender (about 2-3 hours)
Cool Pork

Thursday:

Make caramel from 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water – combine, bring to a boil, simmer until deeply amber, add 1 tablespoon of cool water to arrest browning, remove from heat but keep warm and fluid

Cut cooked Pork into lardons about 1″x 1/2″
6 Shallots, sliced thin
8 garlic cloves, sliced thin
1 quart Chicken (or pork) stock
4 oz caramel
4 oz fish sauce
1 Tablespoon cracked black pepper

Sweat shallots and garlic in a bit of vegetable oil until pale golden
Add black pepper
Add all of the other ingredients
Bring to a simmer and cook slowly for about 1/2 hour.
Cool in the pot

Friday:

Pack the kid in the car with the dog and the skis remember to keep dog away from Pork pot
Drive to ski house
Open Beer #1
Reheat contents of pork pot while consuming beer #1
While pork reheats, make steamed rice and cabbage stir-fry
Plate Rice, and cabbage, spoon generous amounts of pork and sauce over both
Sit with friends in front of fire place
Open more beer
Eat

It turns out that the Ski house is just down the road from Dan Barber’s Blue Hill farm…haven’t been there yet, but race season is almost over……I’ll be looking for new things to explore.

Hey BdG – See ya tomorrow at CIA!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Insider Story

Aidan Brooks a young British cook training in Spain posts on the effects of the global economic crisis on the haute end of the restaurant business spectrum.

Good stuff; check it out.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Insider Story

Aidan Brooks a young British cook training in Spain posts on the effects of the global economic crisis on the haute end of the restaurant business spectrum.

Good stuff; check it out.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Sublime is the meat from a bull that we butchered today and ridiculous is the bread. Both can be seen in the slideshow below.

The last time I saw anything the color of this meat was in 1980. It was in a small church in the Ticino of Switzerland whose apse was fronted by Doric columns whose shafts were made from marble that I’m guessing was from the Levant. The marble matrix was the color of coagulated oxblood interspersed with brown globs of what I assume was calcareous mud. Although I’d studied geology in college and had learned to expect miracles like this, I was blown away by the esoteric luxuriousness of the stone, made all the more poignant, I suppose, because of their presence in a church that was pretty much of Podunk.

Anyway the meat is from Devon bull from the farm that was slaughtered last week. Unless you hunt or work with meat all the time, or you work in a context similar to mine, you probably have never seen anything like this. There is almost no inter or intra-muscular fat. I cannot describe the aroma without going hyperbolic (So I won’t.) and the color well, it is what it is. All of it together is sublime.

The bread is another story altogether.

This bread should have been brilliant. It was made over a period of a week by me and baked on Wednesday (yesterday). As it turned out, it’s a mess because after it finished its oven spring and reached it’s maximum height in the oven, I backed the temperature down from 500 to 450 degrees, went back to the computer to work on a document and forgot about it.

I’m not sure there is anything profound about the congruence of these images. I’m not even sure why I put them up for any reason other than that they feel like good examples of complementary opposites.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Service Announcement

I changed the way comments are collected at this blog and I’m not at all sure that I like what I’ve done. Please let me know if the new setup is not working for you. Or, to put a more positive spin on the matter, not too much of a drag.

Bob dG

The best sauce in the world is hunger.