CONSUMED(I,THIS)

superbowl friday lunch: everything bagel, roast pork loin [made by c], green apple, red cabbage, whole-grain mustard, cider vinegar.

1. While your bagel toasts, slice cabbage and apple in equal parts into fine batons and and put them together in a bowl. Add just a touch of cider vinegar and good olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat.
2. Thinly slice some cold, leftover roast pork loin. As much as you want.
3. Slather some good whole-grain french mustard (I like mustard labelled “a l’ancienne”) on the cut side of your bottom bagel-half. Layer the sliced meat atop the mustard. Grap a fist full of apple-cabbage slaw and place it atop the meat. Chomp.

relish: red onion, currants, balsamic vinegar, ginger, five spice, sugar.

1. Get a large well oiled pan wicked hot, until it starts to smoke. Add two large red onions, sliced an eighth of an inch thick, to the pan. Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally (and more frequently as time goes on) until the onions are richly browned. Hold off seasoning the onions until they are caramelized.
2. Whisk together half a cup of cheap balsamic with a cup and a half of water and three or four tablespoons of sugar, and set aside. Add a third of a cup of dried currants, two tablespoons of grated ginger, and a teaspoon of five-spice powder to the pan along with a little more oil to coat the new ingredients. Mix around for a moment (taking care not to burn the ginger or the spices), and then pour in the vinegar mixture.
3. As the black waters bubble, scrape the fond off the bottom of pan with a wooden spoon. Simmer over medium high until almost all of the liquid has evaporated. Taste for salt and sugar. Serve with whatever you want, but obviously you’ll want to serve it with pork!

baked beans: navy beans, homemade berkshire bacon, onion, clove, bay leaf, stout, maple syrup, ketchup, worcestershire sauce, dry mustard, dijon.

1. Cover a pound of dried navy beans in cool water and let them soak for 4 to 6 hours. Drain the beans, and then transfer them to a deep saucepan and cover with several inches of water. Bring to a boil over high heat, and then lower the heat and simmer for an hour, skimming the white foam off the top after 15 minutes. Drain the beans and reserve their liquor.
2. Preheat your oven to 325˚F. Transfer beans to a roasting pan, and nestle the following among the beans: a half pound of good slab bacon (fat-side scored and oriented upwards), a large onion (cut into half-inch wedges) two cloves, and two bay leaves. In a bowl, whisk together a bottle of stout (I used Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout.), a half cup of grade B maple syrup, a quarter cup of ketchup, three tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, two teaspoons dry mustard, and a teaspoon of salt. Pour this liquid over the beans, and put the pan in the oven.
3. After two hours, take the pan out and stir the beans around, exposing the pale ones underneath the browning crust. If the bacon is getting too dark, give it a flip. Put the pan back in the oven.
4. After another hour stir another two cups of bean liquor and another teaspoon of salt into the beans. Stir the beans, and then put them back in the oven.
5. After another hour and a half, whisk together the rest of the bean liquor (not to exceed two or three cups) with a teaspoon each of ketchup and dijon mustard. Pour this mixture over the beans and stir. Flip bacon if necessary, though you want to aim to get the fat side crispy at the end.
6. Bake until the beans are a deep mahogany and the liquid has reduced to a sludge, about another hour. You can serve the beans with bacon chunk(s) intact for a nice effect, or teach and cut the bacon up for even distribution. In any case, this is a meal in itself.

dinner for a cold night: chicken thighs [mustard, honey, lemon, paprika, bacon drippings], red cabbage [carrot, onion, caraway, stout, bacon drippings], potatoes.

CHICKEN

1. In a metal or glass bowl, combine several heaping tablespoons of dijon mustard with the juice and zest of a lemon, a tablespoon or so of honey, a good drizzle of olive oil or bacon drippings (guess which one I used?), some paprika, and salt and pepper. Stir well, and then add four to six bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs to the bowl. Mix around with your hands until everything well-coated, then over and put in the refrigerator to marinade. I’d give it about an hour, but more or less won’t hurt you.
2. Preheat your oven to 375˚F. Remove the chicken thighs from their marinade (it’s good news if some marinade continues to cling to the chicken) and arrange them on a wire rack set in a sheet pan. Season both sided of each thigh with salt. Roast in the oven to an internal temperature of 165˚F.

CABBAGE

1. Crack a nice stout. Take a swig or two. Go ahead, it’s been a long day and you deserve it. There it is. Ahhhhhh. Okay, now down to work.
2. Coarsely grate a couple of large carrots and thinly slice half of a large red cabbage and two or three onions. In a very large pan with a lid, heat up some bacon drippings and olive oil. Add the onions to the pan, season with salt, and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the cabbage, carrots, and some caraway seeds to the pan, season, and continue to cook until the vegetables have given up their rigidity and have collapsed into the pan.
3. Turn the heat all the way up, and add whatever’s left of the bottle of stout to the pan. (I used Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout.) Bring to a simmer and then lower the heat and cook, covered, until everything has gone soft, about 10 minutes. If there is too much liquid left in the pan, turn up the heat and boil it off a bit.

obama inauguration night dinner: whole yellowtail snapper, orange, fennel, black olive.

1. Crank up you oven to it’s highest temperature. Thinly slice a few bulbs of fresh fennel, and keep the fennel fronds handy. Supreme three or four oranges, squeezing the juice out of the leftover membrane. (The Cara Cara oranges I’m getting right now are awesome, but go with what’s good where you are.) Halve some pitted black olives.
2. Get yourself a whole gutted and scaled yellowtail snapper of about 2 pounds. Any small fish with relatively firm flesh will do. Slather the fish in olive oil and season with salt, inside and out. Stuff the cavity of the fish with a few half-circular slices of orange, some sliced fennel, and some fennel fronds. Score the flesh a couple of times in the middle of the fish, the short way. Place the fish on a wire rack set in a sheet pan and put it in the oven.
3. While the fish roasts, toss together the sliced fennel, the orange sections and their juice, some black olives, and some chopped up fennel fronds with olive oil and salt.  Allow the fennel salad to sit at room temperature while the fish finishes cooking.
4. Once the fish firms up and begins to become flaky—about 20 minutes, but there are a ton of variables here—remove it from the oven and carefully transfer to a serving platter. Plate it up at the table on top of the fennel salad.

“what am i going to do with all of this bacon broth?” dinner: onion, bacon broth [bacon, clove, cinnamon, apple cider], homemade smoked bacon, thyme, butter.

Update: There’s a new version of this recipe that doesn’t require bacon broth, here.

1. Preheat your oven to 350˚F. Peel and quarter eight or twelve small yellow onions, leaving the root end intact. Toss the onion quarters in fat (I used olive oil and bacon drippings), then arange them cut-side-up on a wire rack set in a sheet pan. Sprinkle with salt and sugar, and roast in the oven, turning the onions over once, until lightly browned and tender—about an hour or an hour and a half. Cut the inedible root ends off the onions.
2. Bring about three cup of rich stock or both to a boil. (I used the liquid that I froze after after braising bacon.) Reduce the broth by a third. Add the reserved onions and some chopped thyme to the stock, and continue to boil for another five minutes or so until the broth is reduced more and the onions are very soft.
3. Add half of the mixture to a blender along with an ounce or so of butter. Blend until smooth. Repeat with the other half of the mixture. Reheat if necessary, and serve, garnished with chunks of smoked bacon and thyme leaves.

winter project: liqueurs, from left to right — ginger, grapefruit-coriander, bartlett pear with lemon zest, walnut-clove.  [This is an update of an earlier post.]

The recipes for these liqueurs—which are adapted from A.J. Rathbun’s great book, Luscious Liqueurs—each use the same technique. Note, however, that this technique is only a guideline; it won’t yield the best result for every imaginable falvoring ingredient.

1. Break down any fruits you’re using to flavor your liqueur into smallish pieces, exposing the tasty bits. Be sure to remove any parts of the fruit that have a bitter flavor, such as citrus pith and membrane, and apple and pear seeds. Don’t forget to include the zest of your citrus if you want its flavor. If you are using a root, such as ginger or horseradish, peal it and grate it finely. Keep spices whole. Bruise herbs a bit to release their flavor.
2. Place flavoring ingredients in a large glass container with a tight-fitting lid. (I use one-gallon glass jars.) Bearly cover with vodka or another spirit. Of course, in cases where you are using only a very small volume of flavoring ingredient, such as ginger, you’ll want to add a lot more alcohol than it takes to cover the ingredient. (All of the liqueurs pictured here used vodka, but brandy also makes a versitile base for infusions. For some preparations, especially when a higher level or residual alcohol is desired, grain alcohol is preferable.)
3. Seal the container and let the mixture sit for two weeks, swishing the ingredients around every few days.
4. After two weeeks are up, open the jar and add simple sugar syrup to the mixture to taste. In general, you’ll want to add a little more than half of the volume of the spirit you used in sugar syrup. Use a one-to-one sugar to water ratio as a baseline for your syrup, but switch to a high ratio if you want a more potent result. You might also consider using can also use honey or brown sugar syrup or other flavored syrups. This is also the time to add flavor extracts such as orange flower water or vanilla.
5. Reseal your container and let the mixture sit for another two weeks, once again swishing the ingredients around every few days.
6. Now you are ready to strain. Different mixtures will have different amounts, sizes, and kinds of sediment in them, so use your best judgement about how to clarify your liqueur. Once you get out all of the big chunks, it’s almost always a good idea to run your mixture at least twice through a double layer of cheese cloth.
7. Once you put your liqueur in a pretty bottle you’re all done! You can drink it straight up, or chilled, or on the rocks; as an aperitivo, or a digestif, or in cocktails. Or give it away and you will be viewed as a rockstar. (At least, that’s what I tell myself to convince myself to part with my precious liqueurs!)

cocktail ingredient: sugar, water, green cardamom, clove, coriander.

1. Place six or eight whole green cardamom pods in a mortar, and gently pound them until they release their flavorful little beads. Transfer the cardamom to a small sauce pan. Now place a teaspoon or two or whole coriander seads in the mortar, and gently crack them open, taking care to minimaize the amount of fine particulates you create. Add them to the pan along with six or eight whole cloves.
2. Add a cup and a half of water and the same volume of granulated white sugar to the sauce pan. Turn the heat of to high, and stir nearly constantly until all the sugar has disolved. Bring to a boil, and then turn down to a simmer. Simmer for five minutes or so.
3. Turn off the heat and let the syrup steep at room temperature for an hour or so. Strain through a fine mesh seive, and then through cheese cloth, into a storage vessel. This infusion keeps for a month or more, and is an excellent way to add spice and sweetness to cocktails.

[Update, 1/11: I used this syrup to sweeten a punch of fresh sqeezed blood and cara cara pink oranges and lemon, gin, grand marnier, orange bitters, and sparking wine.]

new year’s dinner leftovers: short ribs with their juices, mirepoix, garlic, canned tomato, chili flake, rosemary, thyme, parsley, orange zest, fresh parpadelle (made by c).

1. Braise short ribs. Don’t eat all of them. Keep leftover meat and braising liquid.
2. Shred the short ribs, tearing them apart with two two forks moving in opposite directions. This will be easier if the ribs are hot and tender, so either do this before putting them away after braising, or reheat the ribs for a while, covered and in a bit of liquid, until warmed through, and then shred. Discard bone, fat and connective tissue.
3. Fine dice onion, carrot, and celery, and sauté them in some olive oil until tender and browned a bit. Add some finely chopped garlic, several finely chopped canned tomatoes (without their juice), some fresh thyme and rosemary (go easy on the rosemary!), and chili flakes to taste. Turn down to medium-low, and cook for a while.
4. Turn the heat up, and add the shredded ribs and braising liquid to the pan. Simmer for a while to reduce until saucy. Don’t season too much until the end. You may not nead to season at all.
5. Add your favorite cooked pasta to the pan, toss, turn off the heat, and then toss again with finely chopped parsley and finely grated orange zest. Serve, with parmigiano if you so desire.

pantry dinner: casarecce, homemade bacon, peas, onions, cream, parmigiano.

1. While your pasta is cooking, cut your bacon into nice fat cubes, and cook slowly in a skillet. Once the bacon has given off some of its fat, add a diced onion to the pan.
2. When the onion is translucent, the bacon is cooked to your liking, and the pasta is just about ready, turn up the heat add frozen peas to the pan and toss a few times. (I like “petite” peas.)
3. Add the pasta with some cooking water to the pan. Toss, and then turn off the heat and add a few tablespoons of cream and some finely grated parmigiano. Toss again and serve, topped with some ground black pepper and more parmigiano.