What's Cooking (Take Two!)

[Jenise]

Tonight it is pork tenderloin, marinated in balsamic, apple cider vinegar, evoo, fresh rosemary, garlic and grilled. I saved some of the marinade to cook down a little and serve with the finished meat. Tomato paella, a rice dish cooked with red onion, garlic, saffron, smoked paprika, tomato paste, topped with thick tomato wedges coated with a bit of olive oil, and finished in the oven, then garnished with parsley or cilantro. Tuscan green beans.

Our Farmer's Market is loaded right now, everything is about one month ahead of schedule. Peaches, cherries, tomatoes, cukes, garlic, loads of lettuce, onions, baby squashes and potatoes, all kinds of herb plants, tomato plants, flowers everywhere. I had to force myself to leave today and still came home with too much. We will be eating good and healthy this week! I love that the grower's are branching out now with more offerings, but there is still only one that does asparagus! I had to decide today which was more important, asparagus or cherries...I will not stand in line!

I'm so jealous! As for asparagus, though, I am now growing enough to supply two of us with a handful every about every week-to-10 days.

[Jenise]

Those two photos of the potatoes and coleslaw have me drooling...beautiful! I'm a fan of mayonnaise, however, I try and keep it to a low consumption. I like any coleslaw that is tasty, and well made by hand. I hate those coleslaws with all the veggies run through a commercial slicer and they are all the same size. I like my coleslaw rustic.

The problem with those is they've been not just cut but also washed and dried by machinery--robbing it of at least half the flavor and adding some citric acid to keep the package contents from rusting. YUCK.

[Jenise]

Going to be spending all afternoon with friends. At 1:00, we go sailing. Around 3ish, we return and play bocce. Around 6ish, we'll sit down for dinner. All this was planned around me wanting to make a dish I've had swirling around in my head for some time and owing to the quantity it will make, a need for victims.

The dish is porchetta, something I've had several versions of where all were good but none were compelling enough for me to say, "I want to make that." Sometimes the seasoning seemed insufficient. Other times, the flavors were good but as with the stuffed pork belly version a friend made recently, I found all the fat layers offputting. Others were too simple, like one where you just cut slits into a ham cut (the upper back leg, raw and uncured) and force a garlic-rosemary mixture into it. I was imagining all that garlic and rosemary and pork combined with the technique of bracciole (pinwheel stuffed and rolled) and polpettone* (forcemeat with deli meats rolled around a center of hardboiled egg or something). In my version, the outer layer would be a boneless pork butt splayed out to about 1" thickness spread with a raw pork forcemeat made of ground pork, rosemary, garlic, black pepper, ground salami and sauteed onions, bread crumbs, egg, cream and jewels of salami in small dice for texture/color. That would get pinwheel-rolled around a center of pork tenderloin wrapped in mortadella. I love the way a cut slice of this looks in my head. So yesterday I made two versions. A large one to serve to my Supper Club in two weeks' time (theme: Tuscan feast alla familgia), and a smaller one to serve tonight, with a bread crumb based pistachio stuffing in the center instead, as I didn't have enough pork tenderloin for both. I'll make a rosemary-garlic-parsley paste to season the outer meat layer with as it roasts.

So, tonight's menu:

Amuse: Frico nests filled with roasted olives and artichokes
Primi: Cheese tortellini with brown butter sauce, gorgonzola and walnuts
Secundi: Porchetta with glazed baby carrots and roasted broccolini
Dessert: Italian peaches with vanilla bean Haggen Daz and 100 year old Balsamic Vinegar


*http://www.wineloverspage.com/forum/village/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=40374&p=332522#p332522

Karen, it doesn't surprise me that you take that approach.

Louise is a good cook, particularly a good baker, but I always get a little shocked when she will start frying stuff while she is still chopping. I mean, what sense does it make to have half of your chopped onion turning brown in the saute pan, while the other half is on the cutting board?? I like to get a "mise" together for myself, I like to have everything done and measured and ready before I put a fire under the pan. Usually we don't have to cooperate because she gets back from work later than I do -- but 2 recipes from Ottolenghi with about 45 minutes to get everything together meant I had to rope her in.

When she cooks from my "mise" she is always really impressed at how easy it is.

[Jenise]

Tiny new white creamer potatoes parboiled, then poached in melted butter and dressed with Italian parsley and black pepper.

This potato shot qualifies as food porn! The colors are intense, and the potatoes themselves are wondrously uniform in size.

[Jenise]

I've been eyeing the fresh green almonds for the past month or so, but only got around to buying them today, at what is probably the near end of the season. They're new to me and I was always afraid they would require some extensive preparation. I was wrong.

So, we enjoyed them for dinner. A salad of fresh sliced raw green almonds and an underripe mango. And pasta with asparagus, green almonds, herbs, cheese and a bit of lime. Nice to eat new things.

Delish menu. If you have any almonds leftover, consider a quick pickle.

[Robin Garr]

This potato shot qualifies as food porn! The colors are intense, and the potatoes themselves are wondrously uniform in size.

Ha! I let out my Inner OCD at the produce market that day and carefully picked through a bin until I had about 50 (enough for two meals) all as close to the same size as I could get. This seems to be the season for the tiny white creamer potatoes, and I do love them.

Breakfast this morning was appam, a rice and coconut milk based yeasty pancake with chicken currry, also coconut milk based with lots of pepper and some curry leaves. Dinner tonight will be grilled chicken marinated in something of a Moroccan slant, accompanied by warmed pita bread and lots of hummus (thank you Costco!)
-Shaji

The wife and daughter are off on a trip for the next week or so, so I wanted to make something I can eat for the next couple of days. I went with a big ol' mess of a kitchen sink pasta. It's penne with white beans, roasted cauliflower, chard, garlic, leeks, cherry tomatoes, basil, and burrata. Came out pretty well. The basil got lost in the mix, but everything else goes together well.

[Jenise]

Mike, that sounds great--I wouldn't have thought of adding burrata to pasta, but it would add a lovely creaminess. Your post reminded me that today's Monday, and most Monday's are meatless for us--less a political choice than a way to curb my too protein-centric dinner planning. I'm long on asparagus and zucchini today, so will either make a cream of asparagus soup (maybe an asparagus vichysoisse?) or zucchini couscous to pair with a baby kale salad tonight.

Asparagus vichysoisse? Really? I never would have thought of that. If you end up making it, lemme know how it came out, willya? That sounds really good.

[Jenise]

Asparagus vichysoisse? Really? I never would have thought of that. If you end up making it, lemme know how it came out, willya? That sounds really good.

I've done it before--it's divine. I don't have a written recipe to share, but just cut back a bit on potatoes and add the asparagus to the leeks and chicken broth: puree, add cream and chives, and you're good to go.

Sounds faaaaaaaaantastic. Thanks!!

A friend showed me the "weeds" she was pulling from her garden and said she wondered if they were edible....I was almost apoplectic. She was about to compost wild cicoria...chicory. I rescued 1 kilo of those greens and made the classic dish from Puglia- cicoria et fave. The most humble of dishes but simply fantastic with excellent olive oil and garlic and a bit of hot pepper. I happened to have dried, baby, skinless fava beans that cooked up quickly. Peasant food at its best when the ingredients are right. We love any kind of bitter green and earlier in the day I harvested a huge bowl of rapini senza testa from my garden and cooked it in my home cured guanciale . Will use this in a two crusted torte with pine nuts, capers and chopped raisins...a classic Sicilian dish.
So far this year have foraged in the wild for watercress, ramps, cicoria, standard dandelion and wild mustard greens. I see a few sprigs of purslane starting to appear. What a bounty !

Christina - What did you start with for the home-cured guanciale? Was it just slices of cheek meat?

That torte sounds great.

[Jenise]

A friend showed me the "weeds" she was pulling from her garden and said she wondered if they were edible....I was almost apoplectic. She was about to compost wild cicoria...chicory. I rescued 1 kilo of those greens and made the classic dish from Puglia- cicoria et fave. The most humble of dishes but simply fantastic with excellent olive oil and garlic and a bit of hot pepper. I happened to have dried, baby, skinless fava beans that cooked up quickly. Peasant food at its best when the ingredients are right. We love any kind of bitter green and earlier in the day I harvested a huge bowl of rapini senza testa from my garden and cooked it in my home cured guanciale . Will use this in a two crusted torte with pine nuts, capers and chopped raisins...a classic Sicilian dish.
So far this year have foraged in the wild for watercress, ramps, cicoria, standard dandelion and wild mustard greens. I see a few sprigs of purslane starting to appear. What a bounty !

I'm so humbled by your knowledge; I have no idea what wild chicory looks like. There's a book hereabouts that helps one identify the edible greens which are all around us--Susan B has it, and I should probably get it. Because of posts here I now harvest chickweed for salads, but that's about all I know of what is safe to eat.

[Jenise]

Sounds faaaaaaaaantastic. Thanks!!

The soup was just that. But I ended up not having a leek after all, so used: 5-6 small yukon golds, about a pound and a half of asparagus (before trimming), 2 shallots, and a quart and a half of salted chicken stock which covered the veggies by an inch or so. Then I went to scrape in half a cube of unsalted butter (1/4 cup), but both halves leapt off the paper and went in and I just thought "oh well". The only seasoning added was black pepper. When it was cooked well, it went into the blender and the result was so perfectly creamy and flavorful that no further addition of cream or seasoning was needed after all: just a healthy dose of snipped chives. Perfect!

Way to ad lib there, Jenise! I know how horrified you must have been: extra butter usually ruins a dish. It's almost miraculous that it didn't this one and only time in all history. What luck!

Oh - and it still sounds faaaaaaaantastic. Or "perfect", as you put it perfectly

Mike,
I use 8-16 oz hunks of jowl and cure it according to Batali's method in Molto Mario with the exception of less sugar, more herbs including rosemary. I follow his technique otherwise and it keeps quite a long time.
We have a source for Berkshire pig grown on an organic farm. They knew not about guanciale and head meat was never sold. I started asking them for head meat and caul fat and tail and they are more than happy to oblige.
The jowls I get generally have more streaks of meat than you see in commercial guanciale. I have been trying to find time to go to the meat processor when a pig gets cut up to direct some of the cutting. As I've said before, proper meat cutting is a lost art and nowadays all you need to know to work in one of these places is how to turn the switch on a saw.

Jenise, I think you would love purslane. It is quite common and the highest plant source of omega 3 with a wonderful fleshy texture and tart taste. Wonderful in salads or cooked or pickled. look at pictures on line...easily recognized. I think it has a wide range and you now can buy seeds from catalogs for cultivation.
What ever happened to Euell Gibbons ?

What ever happened to Euell Gibbons ?

He died of an aortic aneurysm in 1975. Today's forager movement would have loved him.

Mike,
I use 8-16 oz hunks of jowl and cure it according to Batali's method in Molto Mario with the exception of less sugar, more herbs including rosemary. I follow his technique otherwise and it keeps quite a long time.
We have a source for Berkshire pig grown on an organic farm. They knew not about guanciale and head meat was never sold. I started asking them for head meat and caul fat and tail and they are more than happy to oblige.
The jowls I get generally have more streaks of meat than you see in commercial guanciale. I have been trying to find time to go to the meat processor when a pig gets cut up to direct some of the cutting. As I've said before, proper meat cutting is a lost art and nowadays all you need to know to work in one of these places is how to turn the switch on a saw.

Thanks, Christina. There's a guy here that might sell jowls - I'll have to see if he'll provide me some.

[Jenise]

Panang-style shrimp curry on rice with lime-mint vinaigrette side salad.

I am not much of a baker but have a Polish honey cake in the oven right now (weekend guests coming) and it is looking and smelling great!