Last Night’s Dinner

We love our pasta, but it’s rare that we have it two nights in a row. However, my week turned pretty hectic, and as a result I’ve been feeling tired and uninspired. I still wanted to get a home-cooked meal on the table Wednesday and Thursday nights, and these pasta dinners were just the ticket.

We brought a package of Simmons Farm bacon and a big bag of pea tendrils home from the farmers’ market last weekend, and had some (non-local) fresh peas from Whole Foods, so I decided to combine them for Wednesday night’s meal. I chopped up six slices of the bacon, cooking them until crisp, draining the pieces on a paper towel, and using a tablespoon or so of the fat to sauté a cup or so of chopped shallot. I blanched the shelled peas in my boiling pasta water, and then removed them to an ice bath before dropping half a package of bucatini into the water.

While the pasta cooked, I beat four eggs in a warmed serving bowl and added copious amounts of grated Parmagiano Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, and cracked black pepper. I roughly chopped several handfuls of the pea tendrils and added them and the blanched peas to the pan with the shallots along with some fresh thyme leaves, cooking it all until the peas were warmed through and the pea tendrils slightly wilted. I added the pea mixture and bacon to the beaten eggs, and then added the bucatini a little at a time, tossing gently.

When everything was combined and the sauce slightly thickened, I plated the pasta in shallow bowls, adding additional grated cheese and cracked pepper on top. I used as many eggs as I normally would have for a full package of pasta so this was a bit eggy for my liking, but it was still good, with the sweet peas, smoky bacon and slightly peppery pea tendrils playing well off each other.

While Wednesday night’s pasta was at least spring-like, last night’s pasta dinner was not exactly what I’d have planned for the first of May. Since I didn’t have anything planned, Mike’s request for ragu Bolognese was a welcome suggestion, and it turned out to be just the thing to take the chill off on a damp, cold night. I put together a quick version of my standard sauce when I got home and tossed it with chunky rigatoni, topping each serving with a dollop of Narragansett’s creamy Renaissance ricotta (one of my favorite ways to finish a serving of meat-sauced pasta since my lunch with Claudia at A Voce). This may not have been the most exciting dinner around, but it hit the spot, and I’m always happy to be able to whip out a meal without too much thought or effort.

We’re meeting good friends for dinner and a movie tonight, which should be just the boost I need. Enjoy your weekend, everyone!

Whew! I am bruised, scraped, and generally banged up from packing and shifting boxes around the apartment. I think I broke every fingernail (not that they were long to begin with). We accomplished a lot over the weekend, but we also made time to eat well. Here are a few photos:

So did I mention I sent my husband to a butchering demo at the Brooklyn Kitchen last week? And that he got to bring home some amazing pork?

Oh, yes. (You can read his thoughts on it here.)

We spent a nice block of time on Saturday enjoying the 76 degree weather, hanging out with the outdoor kitties and slow smoking the beautiful pork shoulder he brought home. We ate a good chunk of it for dinner that night, simply sliced and served with my first potato salad of the season.

I turned the rest of it into Sunday brunch, browning it in our cast iron skillet with onions, potatoes and red bell peppers, and serving this smoky pork hash with a couple of fried eggs alongside.

We went for a lighter dinner on Sunday night to balance out our rich morning meal: wild Alaskan salmon, quickly seared in a hot pan and served over a salad of mixed baby greens and thinly sliced cucumbers and radishes. I had the rest of a container of Greek yogurt in the fridge, as well as more fresh dill, so I combined them with some minced shallot, lemon juice and zest to make a tangy sauce for the fish.

As much as we got done over the weekend, we still have a lot to do, and I’m trying hard not to feel overwhelmed. I can’t promise consistent posting until after the move, but I’ll do my best. Cheers!

Did you know that March 1st is National Pig Day?

I didn’t find out until recently, but once I did, I knew that as such big fans of the pig and her gustatory gifts, it was our duty to celebrate. Luckily, the fridge and freezer were well stocked will all manner of porky goodness, and the pantry with tasty accompaniments, so we put together our plan: Rancho Gordo Marrow beans, slow cooked and studded with chunks of Mike’s pork confit; center cut whey-fed pork chops from Bobolink, lovingly rubbed with a mixture of smoked paprika, fennel seeds and ground chipotle then seared to perfection; and chard wilted down in the same pan the chops had cooked in, lightly glazing the leaves in rich and smoky pork fat.

Dinner was set, and in the end it was delicious, but we had no intention of putting off our celebration until the evening – oh, no. Pork is fantastic any time of day, and we wanted some sooner rather than later. Bacon and eggs would have been a great choice, as would biscuits and good sausage gravy, but I was really craving Mexican, so we made our way to the Fort Greene outpost of Bonita for a hearty, pork-centric brunch. With full bellies and satisfied smiles, we drank a toast to the pig – a truly magnificent beast.

This post was going to be all about my love affair with Anson Mills grits, and how excited I was to finally get my hands on some and cook them at home, but then a little something weird and wonderful happened.

See, I wanted to approximate the creamy texture of the grits I get at places like iCi and egg, so I decided cooking my grits in plain water just wouldn’t do. I got out a heavy bottomed pot and put in a little over 2 cups of Evans Creamery milk, a healthy dollop of their butter, and a cup of good old Brooklyn tap water. I covered the pot and turned the burner to medium heat, then turned my attention to prepping the rest of our meal.

I turned back to my pot after a few minutes and gave it a stir to incorporate the melted butter, and it looked a little strange. For some reason that I still can’t quite figure out, the milk had separated into curds and whey, and when I stirred it the curds stretched and came together to form a mozzarella-like ball. I was curious so I pulled it out of the pot with a slotted spoon and tasted it. To my surprise and delight, it was good, very fresh and milky. I set it in a little ramekin to cool, and later wrapped the ball tightly in plastic wrap and set it in the fridge while I finished making dinner.

I went ahead and cooked the grits in the remaining liquid in the pot, and they turned out beautifully. I stirred in a little grated cheese (Mecox Bay Sigit and Evans Chenango Jack) at the end and spooned them into bowls, topping them with some of the pork shoulder Mike made earlier in the week, which I shredded and reheated in some of its braising liquid along with a splash each of rye whiskey and sherry vinegar.

This was a good, hearty meal on a cold night and a great use of leftover pork, but I have to say the highlight of the night for me wasn’t a successful first go at making cheesy grits at home – it was the accidental cheese.

I wish I could say that I was responsible for the contents of this beautiful plate, but the only thing I did was take pictures and dig in.

Not only did my awesome husband bring home a delightful surprise for me last night, but he didn’t let me lift a finger in the kitchen. He cooked up these gorgeous Flying Pigs chops with pan gravy, smashed sour cream-spiked potatoes, and garlicky Red Russian kale while I relaxed on the sofa with a cocktail and we chatted about our day. It was heavenly.

Have I mentioned lately what a lucky girl I am?

As has been mentioned many times on this site, our favorite restaurant in the city is Marlow and Sons. We’ve had countless special meals there, and we have often been inspired to try our own spin on dishes from their menu. They’ve made it easier for us to try to duplicate their recipes by publishing them in the excellent Diner Journal (a quarterly publication put together by the folks behind the food at Marlow, Diner and the two Bonita locations), and dinner last night was pulled from the pages of the current issue.

We jokingly refer to Chef Caroline Fidanza as “the pork whisperer” because she has such a way with pork dishes, and her recipe for pork rillons did not disappoint. We originally had this at Marlow a few months back, and while Mike feels that his version needs a bit of tweaking, this is definitely a dish we’ll make again soon. The slab of belly we had weighed in at 1.7 pounds, so Mike used four cloves garlic and probably 10-15 sprigs of thyme; you’ll want to adjust the proportions in the recipe below to the size of the piece of belly you’re using. And don’t discard the fat that’s left after frying the rillons - slice up some potatoes, season with salt and pepper and fry them in the fat until they’re golden and crisp.

Pork Rillons with Salsa Verde
Recipe by Caroline Fidanza, Marlow and Sons/Diner
Published in the Winter 2007 issue of Diner Journal

3 lb. pork belly, cut into 2 inch cubes
1 small bunch thyme
8 cloves garlic
Red wine

Season the belly well with salt and pepper. In a large sauté pan brown the cubed belly on all sides. You will probably need to do this in batches. Remove browned pork from the pan and place in a roasting pan. Add 1/3 wine, 2/3 water, enough to cover the rillons 2/3 of the way. Nestle the sprigs of thyme and halved cloves of garlic around the browned pork. Roast uncovered in a 350 degree oven, rotating the rillons as they cook. Essentially the water and wine will cook off and the rillons will confit in the fat that they render, turning brown and tender. This won’t take too long, about 45 minutes. Remove the rillons from the oven and drain off the liquid. Reserve this for cooking if you like.

To make the salsa verde:

1 bunch parsley, picked
1 bunch mint, picked
1 bunch cilantro, picked
1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced on the bias
1 fresh red chile or chile arbol to taste
1/2 cup cornichons, sliced
3 tablespoons capers
Extra virgin oil
Red wine vinegar

Mix the herbs with the chile, cornichons and capers. Season with olive oil, vinegar and salt.

Serve rillons on a platter with plenty of salsa verde on top.

So an American, an Italian and a Mexican walk into a pork store…

Okay, lame joke, but seriously, isn’t it amazing how the same piece of pork can yield three very different meals? I think Mike and I were both surprised that we haven’t felt like we were eating leftovers all week, though we really were. A little creative remixing works wonders.

The third and final embodiment of our pork shoulder was a savory Mexican stew called posole (or pozole, depending on who you ask). I think the most important components of the dish are a good, rich stock and flavorful chile powder, and I was happy that we had both – chicken stock left over from the batch I made Sunday, plus Mike’s take on Alton Brown’s chile powder (which he generally makes with whatever varieties of dried chiles we have in the pantry, so each batch is a bit different).

I began by softening about a cup and a half of diced onion in olive oil, and added three fat garlic cloves which I had peeled and smashed. I seasoned them with salt and allowed the onion and garlic to cook until the garlic was fragrant, then I added a tablespoon or so of tomato paste to a hot spot and allowed it to cook for a few moments before stirring it through. I then added two generous tablespoons of the chile powder to the onion mixture and stirred so the onions were coated. The pork went in next – the shoulder bone along with all the meat still clinging to it, plus the fat I had trimmed off after the initial braising. I added two cups of our chicken stock plus two cups of water, covered the pot and let it come to a boil, then reduced the heat and let it simmer for about half an hour.

The pork that had been left on the bone had mostly fallen off in big chunks at that point, so I removed the meat and bone from the pot and set them aside for a moment. I added two cans of white hominy, drained and rinsed, to the broth, chopped the pork into chunks and returned the meat to the pot. I added the juice of one lime, adjusted the salt, and let the pozole cook for about 10 more minutes before serving. For garnish, I used lime wedges and thinly sliced radishes; you can also use diced avocado, tomato, fresh cilantro or grated cheese.

Mike said that this was by far my best posole yet, and I have to agree with him, though I can’t take all the credit since his chile powder played a major part. But the way the pork bone and especially the pork fat enriched the stock was really something special – using those parts that I might have otherwise discarded or used another way added a wonderful richness to the broth. Our pork shoulder is now gone, but we got three great dinners out of it (four if you count the remaining ragu in the freezer), and I think this cycle was a big success.

The next couple of weeks are going to be all about frugality at Chez Dietschyblossom. We have a short trip ahead, and we want to save up so we can splurge a bit while we’re away. As others have pointed out, one great method of doing this is to prepare one big piece of protein and give it new life in a variety of ways, so that’s just what I’ve planned to do for many of our meals this week.

The protein we started with for this round of dinners was a beautiful bone-in pork shoulder from Flying Pigs Farm. I braised it for several hours on Sunday, and served some of the meat with a pan reduction that night for the first meal of the cycle. The pork shoulder was just shy of 4 lbs. at the start, so we had quite a bit of meat left over to use in other ways.

For our meal last night, I decided to make a pork ragu to serve with strozzapreti pasta. I started with a couple of diced shallots, seasoned with salt and sautéed in olive oil, and then I added about 2 cups of diced pork to the pan. I added a tablespoon of tomato paste and allowed it to caramelize a bit before stirring it through. I had softened about a 1/4 cup of dried porcinis in hot water, so the coarsely chopped, softened mushrooms went into the pan next along with the strained porcini liquid and some dried marjoram. I added a splash of red wine and a cup of my homemade basic tomato sauce, and then let it all simmer, uncovered, while the pasta water boiled.

When the ragu was reduced to the consistency I wanted (the meat soft and shredding apart, the sauce juicy but not soupy), I spooned about half of it into a separate bowl – I ended up with a lot more ragu than I had expected, so I decided rather than make a huge amount of dressed pasta, I’d freeze half of the par-cooked pasta and half of the sauce separately, and combine them later for another meal. I finished cooking the remaining half pound of my strozzapreti in the ragu with a splash or two of the pasta water as I usually do, added some finely grated Parmagiano Reggiano cheese off the heat, and spooned it into our bowls.

We ended up with four good-sized servings of pasta (one of which Mike is having for lunch today), and if you didn’t know any better, you’d have no idea this was a meal based on leftovers.

We kicked the weekend off with dinner out at our favorite little place, and as always, we had an excellent meal and came home inspired. I plan to try my spin at some of the dishes we tasted there very soon.

Now that Mike’s not working Saturdays, I’ve got him back for “food safari.” We headed into the city fairly early on Saturday morning, stopping for dumplings and pork buns before making the rounds. After we got home and put away our haul, we sat and relaxed with a snack: a chunk of Mossend Blue from Saxelby Cheesemongers, slices of Mutsu apple from the Greenmarket and some walnut halves.

Then I got to put my feet up while Mike took apart the bigger of two stewing chickens we picked up from Flying Pigs Farm and got to work on Saturday dinner: Coq au Vin a la Julia Child. Delicious.

I spent Marathon Sunday doing a bit of a marathon of my own in the kitchen. Our second stewing chicken, along with the neck, wings and backbone from the first, spent the better part of the day in a pot with water, herbs and vegetable trimmings, yielding more than a gallon of rich, deep golden stock.

In a second pot, I braised a 4 lb. piece of pork shoulder for about 6 hours. I carved off a few big chunks and served them with potato croquettes (made with leftover mashed potatoes, chopped parsley and grated Gruyere cheese), sautéed chard, and the strained and reduced braising liquid (a bit of a hodgepodge of rye whiskey, flat ginger beer, dry mustard, cumin, wine vinegar, bay leaf and mirepoix).

We’ve got quite a bit of pork left over, which was part of my plan: with a short vacation coming up, we’re trying to be a bit thrifty, so I intend to use the remaining braised pork as the base for a couple of future dinners. Stay tuned for more fun with leftovers…

Until this weekend, I had never cooked meatloaf for my husband. He just wasn’t a fan, he said, having had too many experiences with dense, greasy versions. I love the stuff, but it’s hard to make a proper meatloaf for one person, so I went without. I satisfied my comfort food cravings in other ways, but I still pined for meatloaf, and especially for that most perfect use of leftover meatloaf ever, the cold meatloaf sandwich. From time to time I would suggest meatloaf for dinner, but my suggestions were always met with a less than enthusiastic response. But then came the meatballs, and things changed.

Meatballs aren’t exactly summer fare, but I found myself making big batches of them over the summer, tinkering with my recipe until I found a mix of meats and seasonings I was happy with. And Mike loved them. And then one day a couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, he told me he might be ready to try my meatloaf whenever I wanted to make it, because really, isn’t meatloaf just meatballs on a larger scale? I giddily agreed, and planned to work it into our menu for the coming week. But then we had that ridiculous spell of near-90 degree weather. And then came Mike’s birthday week, and special dinners to prepare, so the meatloaf was put off yet again.

But then, just when I was wondering if I would ever get to make my meatloaf, came the announcement: National Meatloaf Appreciation Day was coming, and the folks at Serious Eats were looking for people to share the love. No more excuses, I now had a reason to go forward and a date by which to do it. Saturday was the day – it was meatloaf or bust.

I took our remaining package of ground pastured veal from Bobolink out of the freezer to thaw on Friday night. I had picked up a package of grass-fed ground chuck after our dinner at Marlow and Sons on Friday, and I planned to pick up a package of ground pork from Flying Pigs during my Saturday morning Greenmarket trip, but they were sold out. I really wanted to do a beef/pork/veal mixture, and we don’t have anything resembling a meat grinder at home, so I had to come up with a Plan B. I perused their selection of sausages and grabbed a package of their herbed pork variety - seasoned with mustard, thyme, rosemary, sage and bay leaves, I thought it would work well. I picked up some potatoes, carrots and Brussels sprouts for sides and some mushrooms for my gravy and headed home to start cooking.

We had a hunk of whole wheat pane integrale left from earlier in the week that I decided to turn into fresh breadcrumbs for the meatloaf. I cubed it and put it into the mini chopper, then pulsed it. And pulsed it. And pulsed it some more. Little was happening to the bread, and I could smell the chopper’s little motor beginning to burn, so I gave up, tipped the bread cubes out into a bowl and began tearing them into tiny pieces with my fingertips. It would have to do.

I moistened the breadcrumbs with a bit of water, then squeezed them dry and placed them into a large bowl. I peeled a smallish red onion, chunked it up and pulsed it in the mini chopper, then added that to the bowl. I added a tablespoon of Worcestershire, two teaspoons of tamari, a teaspoon each of dried marjoram and garlic powder, a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper, and an egg, which I beat lightly with a fork before blending it with the rest of the ingredients in the bowl.

I added the beef, pork sausage and veal to the wet ingredients, washed my hands well, then dug in and mixed it all up. I turned the mixture out onto a foil-lined sheet pan and formed it into a loaf, spreading a generous amount of Annie’s organic ketchup on top, then I placed it into a 400 degree oven. I’m not sure of the exact cooking time, but I would estimate it took about an hour and 15 minutes (I checked it periodically after 45 minutes in the oven, and let it continue cooking until its internal temperature was 160 degrees).

I worked on my sides while the meatloaf baked – German butterball potatoes, boiled with their skins on and smashed with a generous amount of butter, milk and cream; sliced carrots and halved Brussels sprouts, tossed with salt and olive oil and roasted until tender; and a mushroom gravy made with criminis sautéed in butter, a bit of flour, and our rich homemade brown chicken stock. When everything was ready I plated it up and served it, holding my breath while Mike took his first bite.

The verdict? It was good. “Really good,” in fact. So good that he said he’d eat it again. My days of pining for meatloaf are over, though wouldn’t you know it – we ran out of bread, so that most perfect of leftovers, the cold meatloaf sandwich, will have to wait.