Hey folks,

It has been awhile for an update and I really have been slacking on the posting front.  The usual excuses: work, physical activity (training for bike racing season), moving, moving, and getting fed up with my old place.  The old kitchen was tiny and cramped and shared with J who is awesome, but not really sharing a cramped kitchen with material.

But all that has changed!  I’ve moved in with  B (talk about pulling the wool over someones eyes) to a place in the heart of downtown Vancouver.  I don’t know how I never lived here before.  Pop outside the door and it’s a bajillion sushi places.   Food shopping is a little trickier though –oh young’s brothers and parthenon how I miss you– but costco isn’t too far and there are some promising asian grocers.  A good butcher may be a bit trickier now that Market Meats is a ways away –time to do some serious exploring in Chinatown to find Save On Meats and Dollar Meats and scope them out.  I want beef shin.  I’ve been biking a lot, I need iron.  IRON.

Food posts should start rolling in as my life is much less hectic after the move, my commute is half the time, the new roommate is gorgeus and awesome, and the kitchen is amazing:

The stovetop.  Electric, but it gets really hot fast so I’m quite pleased with it.  Still need to mount the knife rack (cardboard box) somewhere.

The giant oven –I can fit two turkeys side by side in this thing!  Or the odd wayward child, if you’re the witchy type.

I don’t know how I lived in a place that had basin in the kitchen sink. Garbage.  Now I have two –and a garburator.

I stupidly left two cabinets open.  Sue me.  There’s the kitchen.

I’m happy, even if I am hemorrhaging money in rent.

Cheers,

-m

You’re looking at someone who likes their ribs. All kinds of ribs. I love my proper southern BBQ ribs (which I can get from various places in town) but lacking a yard and the right tools, I must eat that out. I’ve always been a fan of boiled ribs –best if boiled in tomato juice, marinaded over night, and then onto the grill for the finish with some sort of sweet glaze. My grandma’s borscht used to contain pork ribs while it was cooking which would be removed when the borscht was done, deboned, shredded, and added into the final product. I also love braised ribs, of all kinds.

I keep catching pork rib sales and who am I to say no when the good lord / gravity monster / spaghetti monster decides to thrust cut-rate priced pork in my direction? Rum ribs, ribs baked in red wine and glazed under the broiler with a mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, and Worcestershire sauce (B’s favourite, from The New Spanish Table), or any other way you do em .  Though I rather unenthused about the Vietnamese ones braised in caramel sauce.  You would think they would be amazing but they were merely ho-hum, and kind of awful the next day.  The smell of fish sauce hitting hot caramel is special too –if you try,  I suggestt you do this stage out doors.  However, you can almost never go wrong with pork ribs.  Porky goodness, goey, messy, and all the fun of finding bits of meat you missed tucked away on the bone somewhere.  So what if it’s not proper “bbq”.

I was feeling like something a little mexican, or tex-mex (what the hell do I know, all the way up in frozen Canada) and inspired by Homesick Texan’s West Texas Asado, I gave them a good south of the border treatment.  I think these have displaced my favorite baked ribs.  Spicy, delicious, sweet, perfect ribs.  Good with some cumin and hotsauce spiked rice with a few green beans tossed around to make me feel less guilty for mowing down on some serious pork loving.

M’s “I’m an igloo salesman cooking mexican” ribs:

ing:

• 2 pounds pork ribs
• 1 large onion, diced
• 5-6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup of OJ (+ more if the braising liquid really disappears)
• 5-6 dried ancho chiles (soak in hot water for an hour before using)
• 2-3 teaspoons dried chili flakes (or chili garlic sauce, or cayenne, whatever you want to use for heat, to taste)
• 1 heaping teaspoon smoked hot paprika
• 1 tablespoon freshly ground cumin
• 1/2 tablespoon freshly ground coriander
• 1/2 tablespoon oregano
• 1/2 tablespoon sweet paprika
• 2 tablespoons drained soffrito (optional, but imparts a great earthiness)
• salt + pepper, to taste

dir:

1. Soak the chiles in hot water (boil it first) for an hour or so.  Remove stems, deseed, and rough chop.  Mix garlic and chiles in a food processor and blend with a bit of the OJ to form a smooth paste
2. In a dutch oven, brown the onions in a bit of oil.  Once browned, add the chili/garlic paste and stir for a few minutes.  Add in the spices and stir for a minute.  Add the pork and give a quick searing.  Dump in the OJ.  You may want to dump in a 1/3 – 1/2 cup water at this point if the vessel is large.
3. In an oven at 325 F, bake the ribs for 2 – 2 1/2 hours.  Check the liquid levels after 90 minutes, they may be low in which case top up with a bit of OJ / water as you see fit.
4. Salt and pepper to taste

-m out

Slowly getting back into the swing of this blogging thing and dusting out the cobwebs of my brain.  I haven’t done any serious writing since I finished off my thesis and have slipped into a lot of bad habits.  I mean, I cranked out an impeccable 210 pages and now my brain thinks it can stop paying attention to things like grammar and proper spelling.  Yikes.  Work has not done much on the report writing front –though it is coming.  Endless analysis, figure editing, and excel work.  I am a professional table creator.  Sigh.

On to the food!  I have a secret to share.  Two things that make everything they touch taste better.  One is really easy and cheap to make (garlic confit), while the other is more of a labour of love and does not keep as long (soffrito).   Both of these come courtesy of Bouchon, which is worth picking up (as I’ve said before).  Though there are many takes on garlic confit (a roasted version in Les Halles) which is just a fancy term for any sort of soft caramelized garlic.  Oh, reminds me, if you are are a garlic junky and looking for an easy appetizer this new years look no further than G.O.O.P. (the garlic olive oil plate).  Delicious and easy.

I particularly like the garlic confit from bouchon as it’s all done on the stovetop (rather than the oven), uses cheap oil (not olive), and lasts for a month in the fridge (though I eat it all before the expiry date).  The leftover oil is pretty fragrant and is a good base to fry potatoes or eggs in as well.  I put this stuff in everything: smeared on toast, added to sauteed spinach (which lets me reduce the amount of butter while still having a tasty product), in the sauce to duck confit, in any sauce, to mash potatoes, with green beans, etc, etc.   A few cloves adds a little oomph, while a lot of cloves adds a fantastic garlicky flavour.

The soffrito is tasty too.  I need to find more soffrito recipes as there appears to be endless variations.  This one from Bouchon is very earthy, and maybe even a little bitter.  Pungent.  Strong.   Great with mussels and clams, mixed into sauces,  on green beans, on spinach, cut with roasted peppers and spread on toast, mixed into mash, topping meats, grilled fish, etc.  A little goes a long way.  Unfortunately it takes awhile to make (but makes your house smell lovely) but is awesomely cheap to make.  It keeps for about a week in the fridge.

Garlic confit
(mostly from Bouchon)

You can make this stuff in a tiny batch if you want but it’s best to be doing a few heads at once as it keeps long and you go through it so fast.

- 1 – 5 heads of garlic (it doesn’t matter), separated and peeled into whole cloves
- some amount of oil (anything works really, I use canola, or olive, or whatever is on hand)

In the smallest pot you can find that can hold everything in a single layer, put in the garlic.  Put in enough oil to just cover the cloves (or mostly cover).  Put it on a very low element –you want the oil to have some lazy bubbles, but not to be really bubbling.  Shake every so often.  After anything from 50 to 90 minutes, they should be nice and caramelized and soft.  Remove from heat.  Let cool.  Store, in the oil, in the fridge for up to a month.

Soffrito

- 3 cups of onion, diced

- 1 cup of pureed tomato (I use good quality canned tomatoes, but feel free to peel tomatoes, seed them, and puree them in a food processor)

- 1 cup of olive oil (I use 50/50 olive oil and canola oil, it’s recession times and I’m cheap!)

- 1 clove of garlic, minced

- pinch of salt

1.  Put the onion in the pan with the salt and the oil and over low eat, caramelize for 2 – 2 1/2 hours.  You want a very low heat, a few bubbles.  This is a long, slow caramelization.  Stir every so often, and get the stuff that is stuck from the sides in there so it doesn’t burn.  If it looks done after an hour and a half, taste it.  It just might be.

2.  Add the tomato puree and cook for another 2 hours.  Or hour.  Or hour and a half.  Taste every so often.  When you think it is done, add the garlic, stir, and remove from heat to let cool.

3. Shove in a jar and stick in the fridge for up to a week.  Drain small amounts when you want to use it

Some things both of these made their way into:

Spinach sauteed with shallots, butter, soffrito, garlic confit, and lemon juice. My favorite way to now eat spinach.

Red sauce variation #eight million.  Tomatoes, thyme, chili flakes, garlic confit, soffrito, lemon zest.   Very earthy.

I’m alive!

The thesis craziness is all over and it’s submitted.  No one wants to read it.  Trust me.  It is likely riddled with grammatical errors, theory errors, research errors, interpretation errors, and all the other kind of errors you can think of.  Shhhhhh.  I don’t want to think about it.  I’m working, for the time being (freaking recession), for a company now doing what I do –designing open-pit mines.

Paycheques are awesome.

An old set of pictures from thanksgiving (the canadian one, so even older than november!) but full of yummy tasty things.  Me and B collaborated on a meal and spent a lot of time cooking it while getting sauced on wine and beer the entire time.  End result?  Tasty.   Lots of stuff cooked from the (now old) copy of Bouchon, which I recommend to anyone.  It’s certainly opened my eyes quite a bit in terms of technique, particularly when coupled with Cooking, by Peterson.  I’ve started paying a lot more attention to the ingredients and my food has certainly gotten better because of these two books.  Worth the investment.  Come on, I know some of you have Chapters gift cards from christmas!

In sort of matrix row from (acros, down, across, down, across.. 1,1 1,2 2,1 2,2) and so forth:

1,1: cutting up roasted cornish hens

1,2: cornish hens coming out of the oven

2,1: butternut squash soup with nutmeg creme fraiche (bouchon) with marinated goat’s cheese salad (hot! hot! hot!)

2,2: vanilla crepes with vanilla pastry cream and peaches (bouchon)

3,1: me working behind some flowers

3,2: breaking my pastry cream cherry

4,1: plated duck confit (this is worth the price of Bouchon alone! So freaking amazing that I keep making it over and over)

4,2: B making the soup from vegetable stock

5,1: me with a fro mowing on the duck confit (contented)

5,2: trussing cornish hens (it looks like I know what I’m doing but really folks, no BDSM leanings here)

6,1: B being my kitchen wench

6,2: happy B post duck confit looking a little cow-eyed

7,1: butternut squash soup in the making

All in all it was a yummy yummy dinner.  Really folks, go out and find a copy of Bouchon.  The duck confit alone (better than a lot of duck confit I’ve had in restaurants) is worth it.  I cheated a bit though as I have a wonderful sausage, pate, and other meat king in town who sells amazing duck confit for $3.99/leg which is cheaper than I can make it myself (and probably better).  At that price, I find myself buying them all the time.  Shredded into salad, smeared on bread, stuffed into ravioli, tucked into crepes.  The stuff is amazing.  If you are lucky enough to have a source of cheap duck confit, the recipe in Bouchon will blow your socks off.  Go buy it.

I’m not going to give up the recipe (buy the damn book!) but two seconds of googling found me, uhm, this: http://www.thepauperedchef.com/2007/04/the_duck_confit.html which should more than answer your questions.

Not bad for two students (then) on a budget, no?

-m

I have a huge back log of yummy things to post that have been made.  Honest.

T-minus seven days until my thesis is in.  Those of you who have done this know the special hell that is editing a ~180 page document that you have been working on for two years.  Sick of it.

Some things I have made recently:

-one damn fine roast chicken (comparing and contrasting methods from Cooking (peterson) River Cottage Meat, Batalli, and Bourdain)

-pork chops in morel sauce (yum)

-roasted red pepper soup (for the freezer)

Sept will see a flurry.  I promise.

It’s just that my thesis is due in 35 days.  Kind of ruins any semblance of a life as the soulcrushing weight of it makes me drink crappy coffee and sweat at my computer, print, edit, rewrite, cringe, panic, etc.

Looking forward to finishing and working a normal 9-5 instead of a ?? – ?? sun-sat

I’ve been craving clams for months. Every recipe I came across in every cookbook would slay me. I’d linger on pictures of clams and stare wistfully at them at the fish monger. But I never bought them for no clear reason than I can.

K gave me back my copy of Heat and I was re-reading it the other day while doing my laundry. There is a section in there where the author comes to an epiphany about clams in the linguine that goes against what he has learned already (that the pasta is about the noodles, not about the sauce) EXCEPT for this case where it is all about the sauce and not at all about the dinky little scrap of meat in the clam. Mind you, this dinky little scrap is delicious. There are some rough directions for how to make something simple and yummy and I pretty much just ran with what was on hand.

Clams are cheap in these parts. I picked up a pound for something like $5.50 –effectively nothing. B was supposed to come over for dinner but bailed again, her loss. The roommate got the other serving instead. These were great! Slippery and slimey and sweet and homey and tasting like the sea. A little bit of punch from the lemon zest was perfect. Quick, cheap, and didn’t require turning my kitchen into an inferno. This is certainly something going on the list:

Clams! - with linguine in a lemony-C2H5OH sauce (pour deux)

• 1 pound clams, scrubbed under cold water, opened one that don’t close when you touch them and broken ones chucked out
• 250g linguine
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 large shallot, chopped
• 1 cup white wine (or if you don’t have that… 1/3 cup brandy + 2/3 cup chicken broth)
• 3-4 1″ chunks of smokey bacon, salt pork, or similar (optional, but adds a bit of depth to the cooking liquid)
• Lemon (for zesting)
• Parm (for grating)
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 handful of fresh thyme, picked for leaves
• Pinch or two chili flakes

Heat some olive oil over medium heat and add the onions, thyme, and bacon (if using) for 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sweat for another 2 minutes. Add wine (or other liquid) to stop the cooking process. At this point, have a pot of water on a good boil and add the linguine. FIre the other pan up to hot and reduce the wine by half. Add the clams and cover for 3-4 minutes, stirring once. At this point most of the clams should be open. If they aren’t, cover and give them another minute. Discard any that don’t open. Remove the bacon and discard (or munch on). Add butter and chillies swirl for another minute. Linguine should be done, so add and swirl everything around. Taste, season with salt if needed. If the liquid seems too thin add a bit of the starchy pasta water. Plate and add (using a microplane) some lemon zest shavings and a thin vaneer of parm. Serve with a bowl to dump shells. Yummy deliciousness from the clams barfing up their juice when they open into the sauce. Mhm.

-m, out

On the day I smoked the bacon I was stuck at home cleaning and though the bacon would have been good for dinner it would not be ready in time (smoking + freezing + cutting = too damn long for this hungry guy) so I hit up the butcher originally looking for chicken to cook for me and B. You know, because roasting stuff in the oven is such fun in a crappy ventilated hell-hole of a tiny 4th floor kits kitchen. Whatever. I like roast chicken. Besides, excessive heat keeps me skinny, right?

Well, chicken’s were ridiculously expensive at my butcher and Large. I’m all for organic and all but I’m not willing to shell out $25-$30 for a fucking roast chicken. Not on what I get paid for slaving to my ivory tower overlords anyways. But, tucked away in the corner were some gorgeous GORGEOUS thick berkshire pork chops staring at me in the face saying “mat… eaaaat me… it will make you more attractive, honest”. Ok, maybe I lied about the last part. Regardless, two were snappd up for the scandalously low price of $9. Bite me chickens.

As I was sitting around smoking all day what was to stop me from sitting around brining all day too? Apples go with pork so I grabbed a tallboy of horse piss (aka: strongbow) which is a foul substance to drink but delicious to marinade with. I had some sage and thyme leaves kicking around too so I used those. Basically, for 2 1 1/2″ thick pork chops (double for 4, triple for 6, etc), the brine:

• 500 ml hard cider (strongbow, okanagan springs, etc) –I’m sure apple cider or even apple juice would work. But I like C2H5OH and so do my pork chops.
• 500 ml water
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup kosher salt
• lots of black pepper
• handful of fresh sage leaves (2 tablespoons?)
• handful of fresh thyme (2 tablespoons?)
• 2-3 garlic cloves, crushed

Heat all that up on the stove until the sugar dissolves. Cool. Toss in pork chops and refridgerate for 2-4 hours. Remove, wash off brine, pat dry and let stand (in the fridge, uncovered) for another hour before removing 20 mins before cooking.

Then it’s just a simple pan-to-brown-then-in-oven deal. Heat over medium-high-high heat a good cast-iron pan that can go in the oven and add a thin film of canola oil and add seasoned (salt, pepper) pork chops to the pan. Move them around a bit after a minute so they don’t scorch/burn. Do this for 4 minutes a side before tossing in 350F preheated oven. Depending on your chop, you will want to leave them in for 8-15 minutes until an internal temp of 135-140F. Remove, let stand covered with foil. Mine were about 12 mins and pink inside (but clear juices). The meat will continue to rise in temperature (mine hit around 149-150) while standing and be safe to eat, don’t worry. Pork chops are easy to overcook and that’s a crime, man up people. Man up.

Remove the pan and set on a medium burner. Remember at all times that the handle is fucking hot so don’t burn your hand like I did. Smooth. Now you need to make the pan gravy:

• 1 small onion (or a 2-3 shallots), chopped
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon flour
• Few splashes of worscheshire sauce
• Few splashes of bitters (hey, they were around)
• 250 ml chicken stock
• 1/3 cup brandy
• 1 tablespoon mustard

Toss butter into the pan with the onion and give it a good browning for 5-6 minutes. Add the flour and stir for about a minute. Deglaze with the brandy and scrape up all the yummy burnt crunchy bits. Add the chicken stock, and splashes of various things. A bit of pepper probably wouldn’t hurt. Reduce this liquid by half, remove from heat, stir in mustard, and season to taste. Plate pork (maybe with some oven roasted potatoes and green beans) and dump the sauce on top.

Not the most photogenic of dishes (is that poo on the top?) but honestly really delicious. One of the better pork chops I’ve had actually, fairly quick, and would probably impress the ladies without turning your apartment into a sweltering vietnam POW camp like roasting a chicken in the heat.

-m, out.

Hey gang… behold my belly!  9 lbs of fresh organic berkshire pork from my butcher

While everyone else was out enjoying the gorgeous day in Vancouver I’ve been slaving away at home cleaning my house. Made a nice batch of iced tea, went out shopping, picked up some good looking pork chops from my butcher for me and B who then bailed on dinner (boo) and keeping me company. Company you ask? I needed someone to keep me busy while I smoked a 5 pound pork belly. It’s my first shot at something from Charcuterie and one I’ve been looking to do for awhile. I’ve done bacon once before and it turned out ok. And by ok I mean it didn’t kill me. It was horridly salty. Different technique this time. A 7 day brine in:

• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons pink salt / prague powder #1 / instacure #1 or whatever it’s called in your area
• 1/4 cup maple sugar or dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 5-pound pork belly, skin on

I mixed all the dry ingredients and mixed for awhile then mixed in the maple syrup. Rubbed it all over the belly. Tossed in a giant ziplock bag with all the cure that was left over. Rubbed  it around for awhile. Refrigerated it, turning the belly and redistributing the cure (now a liquid brine) every other day, for 7 days. At this point the meat was pretty firm. Remove the belly from the cure, wash it well under cold water, pat dry and put back in the fridge uncovered for another day. Then… well, it’s time to choose your wood. I went for a mixture of 75% hickory and 25% apple, as that’s what I had on hand. Hot-smoke the belly on a weber for about 3 hours (to a internal temp of 150 F).

I have a little chief smoker that I use for smoked salmon that became the bacon smoker in this case. It doesn’t quite get hot enough in there for 150F (I got to about 115F), so after three hours of smoking I threw it in a low oven @ 225 until I hit an internal temperature of 150F.

Let the belly cool and then cut off the skin leaving as much fat as possible. Let it cool, wrap it in plastic and fridge/freezer until you want to use it.

I wish I had a meat slicer as cutting slices with a knife is a bitch. I semi-froze most of it and sliced it into thin slices (approx. thick cut, actually didn’t do a half bad job) and then wrapped breaky/dinner sized portions very well and stuck in the freezer.  This stuff JUST froze which is probably due to the depression of the freezing temperature from the salt.

Luckily, this stuff was done for Canada Day and my friends had no plans.  I set out the call for canada day brunch BLTs and drinks and stuffed my friends faces with my sketchy (to them) house cured hickory bacon.  The taste, well, the taste was awesome!  Not the best bacon I’ve had but certainly some of the better bacon I’ve had the pleasure of eating.  The best bacon still goes to the bacon found once in a brunch sandwich at Fuel.  Damn.  That stuff was good.  This stuff was certainly worth the experience and much better than the stuff you would get in a supermarket.  Different.  Very, very smokey due to the harshness of the hickory.  Sweeter and saltier too.  Texture was good, crisp, but still a bit of chew.  The bacon did not shrink very much in the pan and surprisingly rendered only a small amount of fat for the 4ish pounds I cooked up for everyone.  Everyone loved it and was suitably amazed.  I have serious street cred now in food amongst my friends.  People I barely know at school heard about my bacon and deemed it badass as well.  Gogo science experiments.  This is certainly one I will repeat from now on but more playing with the cure and trying various woods and combinations there of.  I think a lightler, softer, fruiter wood will be next to tone down the extreme smokey flavour from the hickory.  Still, it made for a damn good BLT.

-m, out.

sidenote:  who the hell is Luhr Jensen and why is he on my smoker?

Let’s see what kind of google searches find THIS post.

Really, I’m just cracking into Charcuterie that B got me for xmas.  I have a smoker on loan from a friend stuck in the bush for another month so it’s tempting fate with the botulism gods time.  Teaser shot for the house-smoked maple bacon currently curing in my fridge:

-m, out.