It’s almost the whole process. I didn’t show how to cook the spaghetti. The sauce is minimally cooked. Really it’s only the pulp that cooks (10-12 minutes) while the filetti (made from the skinless outer flesh) and the basil are merely warmed through.
Filed under: great food, how to, slow food | 8 Comments »
Last night (Friday) we celebrated our daughter’s 15th birthday by hiding in our bedroom with the door locked while she and four of her friends had a “sleep-over” party. Actually, I’m kidding about hiding in the bedroom. I thought about doing something like that all week but it turned out to be unnecessary because the kids were extraordinarily well behaved. I suppose I can thank my daughter’s computer for keeping them occupied by tricking them into spending hours making videos and posting them on Facebook along with comments that might have been written in glyphs for all the sense they make to me. But the better part of the credit for how well they all behaved has to go to them, because they are all good kids. And now I think I know why.
I think all of them, including my 12 year old son, is extremely religious. This surprised me a little because I’m not a very spiritual being at all, and am always slightly taken aback when I witness others who reference gods or God in casual conversation. So imagine my surprise when I hear these 5 teenagers and my son offering practically every other comment that came from their mouths up to the Creator. If I had a dime for every time one of them said “Oh My God!” I could forget about the miserable condition of my investments and put a down payment on Bernie Madoff’s Palm Beach house.
Of course, I’m kidding around about the religiosity of the kids. But they did keep me up way past my normal bedtime with their OMGod-ing. So, today I decided to stay home and get a leg up on Sunday dinner.
Earlier in the week I made 3 pounds of pasta dough and today cranked it out and into 2 lasagna. There was some dough left over so I rolled and cut that into pasta alla chitarra and two forms of short noodles. I also baked off a loaf of bread. You can see most of this in the slide show below.
Tomorrow I will pull out the pork shoulder that I brined (10 days) and studded with garlic and rosemary. Then I will cook it, low and slow, on the charcoal grill.
By the way, this is the style of cooking that I grew up around. It’s not anything I learned in school or from a book. It’s the way my mom and my paternal grandparents and all of my relatives from Borgotaro and Porcigatone, Emilia Romagna addressed a meal. It’s odd to think that someone might consider this fancy cooking when in reality -my family’s reality anyway- it’s just Sunday dinner.
Here is the basic menu. I’m sure it’ll change a bit by tomorrow evening.
Filed under: cooking techniques, great food, slow food | 11 Comments »
For someone who spends as much time cooking and thinking about cooking as I do, sometimes it is difficult to think of the act of preparing a meal that does not involve some esoteric ingredient or cooking technique as worth recording. Occasionally though, something about what I am doing while I’m cooking simple dinners for my family will strike me as interesting enough to pull out my camera and shoot, which is exactly what I did last Thursday when I shot these photos of grilled pork chops, sauteed broccoli rabe with garlic and basmati rice.
I think what moved me to grab the camera had something to do with me recognizing how much I take these meals for granted. In a world where millions don’t have enough to eat, and where millions who do have enough to eat don’t eat nearly as well as they could if they only took the time to cook their own food, it seems wrong, amoral even, to be unmoved by a meal that looks as nice as this one does to me. Also the fact that I knew the pig who I was cooking, the smell of the charcoal fire in the damp November air, and the glass of sauvignon blanc that drained so fast that I was afraid that I was being gas-lighted by a poltergeist had something to do with it too.
Filed under: bread, Ethics, great food, musing | 7 Comments »
My wife and I spent last Saturday and Sunday at what in retrospect seems like the most unlikely place in the world: a meticulously presented fin de siecle mansion nested in the heart of an old American factory town.
The place seems unlikely not only because it is a very grand house in a sea of contemporaneously built modest-to-humble commercial and residential structures (I cannot imagine why H.D. Sheppard, the man who commissioned the house in 1911, would chose to put such a grand house here.) or because the house is furnished with very posh looking stuff bought and beloved by it’s original inhabitants, but also because it is all of that and it is home to rare culinary talent.
Now I don’t mean to suggest that this talent is rare within the town of Hanover, Pa. where the Sheppard Mansion hangs like a cherished family portrait in a quaint home that needs a good dusting. (I’d never been to Hanover before Saturday. How would I know anything about how people cook there?) And I’m not going to say that it is rare relative to any geographic area because if I did, I know I’d end up insulting some feverish and talented chef whose only “fault” is that he or she works in some place that I have never visited. That’d be wrong and dumb.
When I write that Chef Andrew Little and his crew have rare talent, I’m using my professional experiences as a basis of comparison. I’m comparing their work to my own work and to the work of every student and professional cook that I have come into contact with -and I’ve known thousands. I’m also comparing Chef Little’s work to what I know from the literature of the tradition within which he is working: that quantum of cooking techniques, service schema, naming conventions, ideology and aspirations that I think of as the haute cuisine, La Grande Cuisine or Classical French Cuisine.
Of course, I cannot quantify how often I have come across someone who shows the kind of serious of purpose and commitment to craft and aspiration to art that Chef Little showed me. But I suppose I could guess that out of the more than six-thousand students who came through my classrooms and kitchens at The Culinary Institute of America and the various restaurants where I have worked and eaten, maybe one percent of the cooks appeared to have this kind of aptitude and ambition?
I will not do a line-item review of the food I ate to attempt to prove to you that this kitchen is worth paying attention to. But I will say that the ten course tasting menu we had was beautifully executed (No small feat for a kitchen with only four cooks, chef included!). Every dish except one, showed solid command of technique. No portion was too big or too small and the sequence of the dishes made perfect sense. A sequence of two dishes representing the fish and meat course in the classical dining form could have been a little deeper, but what they lacked in depth they recouped in composition and demonstration of classical cooking technique. I was really impressed by how chef tries not to waste any part of any ingredient (thrift is sine qua non in classical cooking). A superb sweet custard made from scraps (corn cob) proved to me that he really does get it.
In sum: The menu was absolutely true to the form of a classically composed meal and very much like a mildly challenging piece of classical music. The overture was quite and slow and established the theme. The tempo got a little quicker through the second movement until things started to get pretty serious. There should have been an intermezzo to break the tension, but I’m not complaining. The third movement, the finale, resolved all conflict and made everything okay.
The front of the house, the domain of Karen Van Guilder and Timothy Bobb, was inspiring. The service was polite and crisp and every one seemed imbued with the spirit of hospitality. It was the kind of service I’d expect in a Manhattan New York Times 2-3 star property or at a Ritz Carlton almost anywhere. It’s never easy to get Americans to be comfortable serving people. So many of us seem to think that there is something deeply wrong with a job that requires that we defer to the needs of others. In places where the labor pool is broad and deep and the competition for jobs in prestigious restaurants is tough, it’s relatively easy to find people who are willing to put their egos on a back burner and be nice to needy, sometimes demanding guests, but Hanover is not Paris or London. Whatever Karen and Timothy are doing, they are doing it better than I thought possible outside of the big cities.
Finally, I need to apologize and offer a sop to those of you who may have found my “review” of the food hard to relate to because it is so full of chef-speak. So let me leave you with this.
The standard that I use to decide if a meal is worth remembering, says that at least one dish has to move me to tears. That does not happen very often. Last weekend my eyes welled up with tears twice.
Man, you can’t beat this stuff with a whisk!
Here is the menu and the names of the staff.
July 26, 2008
Red Thumb Baked Potato
Housemade Bacon, Black Truffle Crème Fraiche, Garden Chive
Schramsburg “Mirabelle” Brut Rosé (Napa) NV
______________
Smoked Ham Hock ‘Tartine’
Rillette Of Ham Hock, Sliced Radish, Frisee Lettuce
______________
Scott Robinson’s Berkshire Pork Sausage Pizza
Grilled Ratatouille, Three Sisters ‘Serena’
______________
A Salad Of Kathy Glahn’s Heirloom Beets
Creekside Farms Micro Lettuces, Black Truffle Vinaigrette
Gainey Vineyard Riesling (Santa Ynez Valley) 2006
______________
Whole Roasted Hudson Valley Foie Gras
Balsamic Glazed Shiro Plums, Toasted ‘Palladin’
______________
Crispy Skinned Chesapeake Rockfish
A Salad Of Heirloom Tomato, Corn, Black Beans And Grilled Corn,
Chimichurri Sauce
Famiglia Bianchi Chardonnay (Argentina) 2005
______________
Roasted Rettland Farms Milk Fed Poularde
Peaches, Frisee Lettuce, Sweet Corn Jus
______________
Cherry Glen Farms ‘Monocacy Crottin’
Sweet And Spicy Pecans, Honeycomb
Late Harvest Chardonnay, Bouchaine “Bouche D’Or” (Napa), 2006
______________
Sweet Corn Custard
Blackberries, Garden Mint
______________
Boyers Orchard Peach Tart
Honey Ice Cream
Filed under: great food, opinion, restaurants | 7 Comments »
My wife and I spent last Saturday and Sunday at what in retrospect seems like the most unlikely place in the world: a meticulously presented fin de siecle mansion nested in the heart of an old American factory town.
The place seems unlikely not only because it is a very grand house in a sea of contemporaneously built modest-to-humble commercial and residential structures (I cannot imagine why H.D. Sheppard, the man who commissioned the house in 1911, would chose to put such a grand house here.) or because the house is furnished with very posh looking stuff bought and beloved by it’s original inhabitants, but also because it is all of that and it is home to rare culinary talent.
Now I don’t mean to suggest that this talent is rare within the town of Hanover, Pa. where the Sheppard Mansion hangs like a cherished family portrait in a quaint home that needs a good dusting. (I’d never been to Hanover before Saturday. How would I know anything about how people cook there?) And I’m not going to say that it is rare relative to any geographic area because if I did, I know I’d end up insulting some feverish and talented chef whose only “fault” is that he or she works in some place that I have never visited. That’d be wrong and dumb.
When I write that Chef Andrew Little and his crew have rare talent, I’m using my professional experiences as a basis of comparison. I’m comparing their work to my own work and to the work of every student and professional cook that I have come into contact with -and I’ve known thousands. I’m also comparing Chef Little’s work to what I know from the literature of the tradition within which he is working: that quantum of cooking techniques, service schema, naming conventions, ideology and aspirations that I think of as the haute cuisine, La Grande Cuisine or Classical French Cuisine.
Of course, I cannot quantify how often I have come across someone who shows the kind of serious of purpose and commitment to craft and aspiration to art that Chef Little showed me. But I suppose I could guess that out of the more than six-thousand students who came through my classrooms and kitchens at The Culinary Institute of America and the various restaurants where I have worked and eaten, maybe one percent of the cooks appeared to have this kind of aptitude and ambition?
I will not do a line-item review of the food I ate to attempt to prove to you that this kitchen is worth paying attention to. But I will say that the ten course tasting menu we had was beautifully executed (No small feat for a kitchen with only four cooks, chef included!). Every dish except one, showed solid command of technique. No portion was too big or too small and the sequence of the dishes made perfect sense. A sequence of two dishes representing the fish and meat course in the classical dining form could have been a little deeper, but what they lacked in depth they recouped in composition and demonstration of classical cooking technique. I was really impressed by how chef tries not to waste any part of any ingredient (thrift is sine qua non in classical cooking). A superb sweet custard made from scraps (corn cob) proved to me that he really does get it.
In sum: The menu was absolutely true to the form of a classically composed meal and very much like a mildly challenging piece of classical music. The overture was quite and slow and established the theme. The tempo got a little quicker through the second movement until things started to get pretty serious. There should have been an intermezzo to break the tension, but I’m not complaining. The third movement, the finale, resolved all conflict and made everything okay.
The front of the house, the domain of Karen Van Guilder and Timothy Bobb, was inspiring. The service was polite and crisp and every one seemed imbued with the spirit of hospitality. It was the kind of service I’d expect in a Manhattan New York Times 2-3 star property or at a Ritz Carlton almost anywhere. It’s never easy to get Americans to be comfortable serving people. So many of us seem to think that there is something deeply wrong with a job that requires that we defer to the needs of others. In places where the labor pool is broad and deep and the competition for jobs in prestigious restaurants is tough, it’s relatively easy to find people who are willing to put their egos on a back burner and be nice to needy, sometimes demanding guests, but Hanover is not Paris or London. Whatever Karen and Timothy are doing, they are doing it better than I thought possible outside of the big cities.
Finally, I need to apologize and offer a sop to those of you who may have found my “review” of the food hard to relate to because it is so full of chef-speak. So let me leave you with this.
The standard that I use to decide if a meal is worth remembering, says that at least one dish has to move me to tears. That does not happen very often. Last weekend my eyes welled up with tears twice.
Man, you can’t beat this stuff with a whisk!
Here is the menu and the names of the staff.
July 26, 2008
Red Thumb Baked Potato
Housemade Bacon, Black Truffle Crème Fraiche, Garden Chive
Schramsburg “Mirabelle” Brut Rosé (Napa) NV
______________
Smoked Ham Hock ‘Tartine’
Rillette Of Ham Hock, Sliced Radish, Frisee Lettuce
______________
Scott Robinson’s Berkshire Pork Sausage Pizza
Grilled Ratatouille, Three Sisters ‘Serena’
______________
A Salad Of Kathy Glahn’s Heirloom Beets
Creekside Farms Micro Lettuces, Black Truffle Vinaigrette
Gainey Vineyard Riesling (Santa Ynez Valley) 2006
______________
Whole Roasted Hudson Valley Foie Gras
Balsamic Glazed Shiro Plums, Toasted ‘Palladin’
______________
Crispy Skinned Chesapeake Rockfish
A Salad Of Heirloom Tomato, Corn, Black Beans And Grilled Corn,
Chimichurri Sauce
Famiglia Bianchi Chardonnay (Argentina) 2005
______________
Roasted Rettland Farms Milk Fed Poularde
Peaches, Frisee Lettuce, Sweet Corn Jus
______________
Cherry Glen Farms ‘Monocacy Crottin’
Sweet And Spicy Pecans, Honeycomb
Late Harvest Chardonnay, Bouchaine “Bouche D’Or” (Napa), 2006
______________
Sweet Corn Custard
Blackberries, Garden Mint
______________
Boyers Orchard Peach Tart
Honey Ice Cream
Filed under: great food, opinion, restaurants | 7 Comments »
In an earlier post I wrote with some trepidation about a couple of IBP loins that had come into my possession under questionable circumstances and how I decided to cure them just see how they turned out. Well, they turned out much better than I thought they would.
The cure I used was a mixture of salt, salts of nitrate (Instacure) sugar (sucrose) dried thyme, black pepper and bay laurel. The loins were in the cure for ten days, rinsed tied and hung for a little over 4 weeks. The texture is superb, really chewy but not in any way tough. The flavor, alas, is a little disappointing. Like most pork that comes out of the mass production sector of the farming community, you have to spend a lot of time reassuring yourself that what you are eating is really pork and not a facsimile created by a gifted chemist. However, if you chew it slowly and breathe deeply to make sure that your olfactory bulb gets a good dose of aroma, your palate will, I assure you, begin to rock a bit.
The upfront taste is salt with bitter and numbing notes from the pepper, bay and thyme. After those sensations fad, the sweet earthy aroma of thyme and pork appear. There is not enough of the aroma of fermentation and decay that I have come to crave in a piece of air dried whole muscle. But that’s no surprise because the loins did not hang for very long. I certainly would have hung them longer, but they were beginning to case harden (dry too much on the outside) and without a way to drive up the humidity of the drying room (our cheese room) I was faced with the choice of either harvesting them now, or letting them hang an shrivel into a a couple of bull pizzles.
Filed under: charcuterie, great food | 1 Comment »
In an earlier post I wrote with some trepidation about a couple of IBP loins that had come into my possession under questionable circumstances and how I decided to cure them just see how they turned out. Well, they turned out much better than I thought they would.
The cure I used was a mixture of salt, salts of nitrate (Instacure) sugar (sucrose) dried thyme, black pepper and bay laurel. The loins were in the cure for ten days, rinsed tied and hung for a little over 4 weeks. The texture is superb, really chewy but not in any way tough. The flavor, alas, is a little disappointing. Like most pork that comes out of the mass production sector of the farming community, you have to spend a lot of time reassuring yourself that what you are eating is really pork and not a facsimile created by a gifted chemist. However, if you chew it slowly and breathe deeply to make sure that your olfactory bulb gets a good dose of aroma, your palate will, I assure you, begin to rock a bit.
The upfront taste is salt with bitter and numbing notes from the pepper, bay and thyme. After those sensations fad, the sweet earthy aroma of thyme and pork appear. There is not enough of the aroma of fermentation and decay that I have come to crave in a piece of air dried whole muscle. But that’s no surprise because the loins did not hang for very long. I certainly would have hung them longer, but they were beginning to case harden (dry too much on the outside) and without a way to drive up the humidity of the drying room (our cheese room) I was faced with the choice of either harvesting them now, or letting them hang an shrivel into a a couple of bull pizzles.
Filed under: charcuterie, great food | 1 Comment »
With the kids away at camp I have more time to screw around with the camera while I’m making dinner. That’s why I’ve been posting so often about what I cook for my family. I cook like this (simply and with an abiding devotion to simplicity and fundamental technique) almost every night but, because the kids tend to get in the way, I rarely bother to take pictures and even more rarely blog about what I make for family meal.
Update:
I’ve had enough inquiries about how I make the dough, that I have decided to post the recipe. It will appear in a new post later today.
Filed under: cooking techniques, foodways, great food | 5 Comments »
If you love pure food, this will set your teeth on edge.
Filed under: great food, Hendricks Farms, ingredients | Leave a comment »
When you spend as much time in the kitchen as I have, the stuff that billows up from the memory well often has something to do with food. Such was the case last week as I was trying to figure out what to do with a surplus of pie dough. I could have frozen the dough, but doing that would have required that I remove all of the stuff that was piled on top of the chest freezer which, on Friday, included 5 gallons of stock, my tool box, 50 pounds of turkey, ten pounds of chicken, my camera bag and well, you get the idea. So anyway, I’m staring at the pie dough and then I look over at the big bag of potatoes in the corner of the room and I start thinking about Richard Avedon and then something along the lines of “Damn, I have not made Dorian’s torta rustica in over twenty years.”
My father’s family has been cooking and eating torta rustica, a very simple double crust pie made from lard dough filled with rice or potato or spinach for generations. But the rusitca that I was thinking of was a much fancier version that I was taught to make by Dorian Leigh , (who had posed for Richard Avedon, hence the connection) at her home in Ridgefield, Ct in the early 1980’s.
Dorian’s torta rusitca was a magnificently complicated and delicious construction made from brioche dough and layers of spinach, Gruyere cheese and black forest ham, all baked in a spring form, allowed to cool and then pressed overnight. On the basis of the combination of ingredients alone I would have loved this dish, but what killed me was how it combined techniques from the sophisticated charcuterie I was trying to learn (layering of internal ingredients, pressing under weights to compress air pockets) and by how much the final product reminded me of a geologic stratigraphic section when it was cut. It also did not escape my attention that she had done something that well-heeled chefs have been doing forever: turned a peasant dish into haute cuisine and rendered it’s name oxymoronic.
(What can I say? I’m easily amused.)
So with all this stuff scudding around in my head, I decided to make two torta rustica based on Dorian’s model. Both were filled mostly with potatoes, leeks and Trent’s (Hendricks Farms and Dairy) Gruyere cheese, but one I added a ring of Chicken sausage that I developed for the farm only two weeks ago (It’s seasoned with lemon, thyme and a suspicion of garlic).
Er, ah, I did not write a recipe for this, but if anyone would like a walk-through, just email me and I’ll throw something together.
Filed under: great food, recipes | 2 Comments »
A Hunger Aritist (Redux) 
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