A Very Piggy Birthday | Charcutepalooza, challenge no. 9

I am participating in Charcutepalooza, a year of meat which entails twelve monthly challenges to prepare dishes using various charcuterie techniques.  For more information about charcutepalooza, click here.  To read why I decided to partake in the meatmaking festivities, read my first post here.

 

This past month, I turned 30.  My birthday always falls around labor day, which used to be a huge pain in the ass back when I had to start school around the same time.  But now that I am several years out, it has become something to look forward to (aside from the getting older part), and usually involves a full three day weekend in which to celebrate. This month I was blessed with a particularly perfect weekend - an oasis of good weather during a month of floods, rain and earthquakes.  

I planned to spend the weekend upstate with my parents, but my weekend started much earlier than expected when ken returned home from work, only a couple hours after he left, and hustled me into the car.  Forty minutes later we pulled into the site of every farm to table foodie’s wet dreams: Blue Hills at Stone Barns.  It turns out ken and my parents had been plotting this outing for weeks, and managed to keep me completely in the dark until the very last second!

 

We got there early enough to check out their farmers market, and walk around a bit before our 5:30 dinner.  This place was the platonic ideal for what every farm should be: bucolic & pristine.  And the animals were all happily doing what animals do.

And of course my favorite...  

The baby pigs were particularly adorable.  So much so that I couldn't pick just one photo to share:

After exploring the grounds, we changed into proper dinner clothing, and ate the eight course farmers feast.  It was a very good start to a very delicious and porky birthday weekend.

The next day we consumed our bounty from the blue hill farmers market which included pork hot dogs and a simple tomato salad.

On Sunday, in a combined celebration with my cousin whose birthday is one day before mine, we planned a lunch party.  I’m not a huge fan of sweets so instead of a birthday cake, I planned to serve a meat pie.  I had made Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s raised pork pie back in February, and briefly considering finding a new recipe.  However, the first pie had been such a hit that I decided not to mess with what was already a very good thing.  I hoped that by repeating the same recipe, ken and I could improve our technique, and start ourselves on the path to the pork pie nirvana.  This time around, we put in more herbs (last time we had accidentally left out the thyme), and made it far enough in advance to let the gelatin set.  I also think I improved on the decorations!

 

Back in February we had procrastinated and baked the pie on the same day we planned to eat it, hence the failure to gel.  This time around we prepared the pie the Thursday before we left, to be eaten on Sunday.  (I now know why ken insisted we finish it Thursday night, rather than my original plan of doing it during the day on Friday... sneaky boy!).  I think the time made a big difference in the final product.  While delicious, the February meat pie tasted a bit like an encased meatloaf, while the filling in this one was much more reminiscent of a real pate.

The pie was served with mustard, green tomato and pearl onion pickles (recipe from the blog of charcutepalooza’s co-founder, Cathy Barrow), a german potato salad and grilled eggplants.

And finally , as a bonus, a close friend, and a loyal reader of this blog (thanks, marc!) included these apropo office supplies in his birthday gift to me, perfectly rounding out my very piggy thirtieth birthday.

Tip-to-Toe Terrine | Charcutepalooza, challenge no. 8

I am participating in Charcutepalooza, a year of meat which entails twelve monthly challenges to prepare dishes using various charcuterie techniques.  For more information about charcutepalooza, click here.  To read why I decided to partake in the meatmaking festivities, read my first post here.

The sweetest meat is closest to the bone.  Although the Chinese did not coin this aphorism, they certainly live (and eat) by it, as exemplified by my family’s eating habits.  At yum cha, my grandmother would methodically and joyfully (gluttony is a trait that runs rampant up and down my bloodlines) reduce spare ribs and chicken or duck feet into a neat, ever-expanding pile of delicate white bones, clear of all meat and cartilage.  At an early age, I too was taught to tear flesh off bones and crush shells between my teeth to get at the “best” bits, which were always those hardest to obtain.  Once, in my grade school cafeteria, I was mortified when my dining companion commented on how funny it was that I kept eating chicken wings long after the meat was gone.  Mortified, because in third grade I didn’t want to be “different” (who does?), but I also couldn’t understand how someone with fully functional eyesight could not see the very visible scraps of meat still attached to the wing bones.

To a very small extent this embarrassment has survived into my adulthood.  When served bone-in meat dishes at fancy restaurants, I often ask to get the bone to-go for my non-existent dog, so I can gnaw at it in the privacy of my own home.  Other than that one lapse, I am for the most part proud of my ability to get at every tasty tidbit of meat on a bone and every succulent morsel out of a lobster.  Like learning to make charcuterie and to appreciate offal, eating every scrap of meat is one of the ways I show respect for the animals that die for my enjoyment and sustenance.

I suspect the Chinese love affair with the hard to eat bits originated in frugality as much as in respect.  Regardless of the source of this obsession, its influence can be seen in all Chinese cuisine from street food to banquets.  There are some Chinese delicacies, chicken feet or fish heads for example, that are impossible to finish eating without a mound of soiled and shredded paper napkins piling up next to your plate.  The few bites that you work so hard to get are incredibly delicious and usually more than worth the entire undertaking.  But sometimes I’d prefer to walk away from a Chinese meal without grease stains on my clothing and animal bits in my hair.  For this month’s terrine challenge I chose to turn a traditionally messy Chinese dish, jellied pig feet, into easy-to-eat, slice-and-serve presentation.

At the butcher, in addition to pig feet, I picked up a tongue, two pig ears and, as suggested by Cathy Barrow a pork shank for added meatiness.  I brined the meats for 24 hours as called for in the Charcuterie head cheese recipe, but chose to omit the pink salt.  After blanching the meats to rid them of impurities, I put them in a pot to simmer with onion, ginger, garlic, star anise, several tablespoons of both dark soy and light soy, and water to cover.  This concoction is very loosely based on the recipe for Chinese-style pig’s trotters in The River Cottage Cookbook.  At this stage I was careful to avoid over-seasoning the liquid, knowing it may need to be reduced at a later time.

clearly our "big" pot wasn't big enough - I finished it all up in a stockpot

After about three to four hours on the stove, when the meat was tender and the ears offered only the mildest resistance when pierced with a chopstick, I removed the pieces and strained the liquid, which should have absorbed enough gelatin from the pig skin and cartilage to bind my terrine together.

Last month, I had written about how sausage making was finally coming more easily to me.  I think my arrogance seriously angered the charcuterie gods, who decided this month to make me pay.  My memory of everything after the meat finished cooking is hazy.  I remember it was very very very hot that day.  I remember shredding meat off the pig feet and realizing why glue is made from animal hooves.  I remember ken coming home from work to find every surface in the kitchen - walls, appliances, pots, pans - sticky with the gelatin which seemed to have found its way into everything except into my cooking liquid.  The damned thing would not gel.

Ken somehow wrestled me down off the edge of depression and convinced me to put the terrine aside completely until the morning (and he cleaned! Once again, I am struck by how lucky I am to have him).  The charcuterie gods must have been satisfied with my penance, because everything pulled together the next day.  After reducing the broth by about a third, it gelled up nicely.  From there, the process was straightforward, if a bit messy.  I combined the shredded trotter and shank meat with slices of pig ear and diced tongue and pressed the mixture into a terrine.  I kept one ear intact so I could form a decorative stripe of pig ear through the center of the terrine.  Once the stock was poured over the meat, the entire thing was weighted and put in the fridge until ready to be unmolded and served.

Since presentation was a big part of this months challenge, I wanted an appealing spread of accompaniments.  Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking opens with a chapter on the Philosophy of Chinese Cooking in which she describes an overriding characteristic of Chinese cooking to be the “conspicuous juxtaposition [of]...flavors, textures, colors, food types, and cooking methods.”  It was with this principle in mind that I chose the dishes which would accompany the terrine.  From Tropp’s book*, I made fire-dried walnuts, which were crunchy, meaty, and slightly sweet and bell pepper pickles with vibrant colors that contrasted their subtle sweet-soy seasoning.  

*I see the irony that my Chinese recipes come largely from Western writers.  I have a theory which I won’t go into today, that often the best culture-based cookbooks come from outsiders to that culture.  

adorable mini-bell peppers I found at the greenmarket

Szechuan cucumber pickles, from Su-Huei Huang’s Chinese Cuisine contributed a bold spicy flavor with bright vinegar overtones.  And finally, the meal was rounded out with stir-fried bitter melon.  All, of course, served over a bowl of steaming white rice.

The terrine was good, although I’d do some things differently next time I make it.  For one, the gelatin itself needed much more robust seasoning.  I was so worried about adding too much soy the first day, that I overcompensated, and ended up with a slightly bland binder.  Also, next time I would probably leave out the ears.  The crunch was slightly disconcerting (which is odd because I am quite fond of another Chinese dish, pressed pig ear terrine), and there was a slight off flavor to it which I couldn’t help but associate with ear wax.  If I ever get around to making an actual headcheese, I will need to find something more palatable to do with the ears.  These complaints are just nitpicking, though.  Altogether this was a nicely balanced meal, where each component complimented the others.  I’d never had a terrine over rice before, but found it to be a very pleasant combination.  While mostly holding its shape, the gelatin melted just enough to season the rice beneath it.  The dish was complex in flavors and textures, and perfectly showcased the terrine.

unfortunately it didn't slice as cleanly as I'd hoped

How to half-ass a weisswurst | Charcutepalooza, challenge no. 7

I am participating in Charcutepalooza, a year of meat which entails twelve monthly challenges to prepare dishes using various charcuterie techniques.  For more information about charcutepalooza, click here.  To read why I decided to partake in the meatmaking festivities, read my first post here.

Usually I approach my monthly charcutepalooza challenge like a celebration, with days of planning and eager anticipation.  This month it was hard to muster up a similar level of enthusiasm.  Not that I was unhappy with the challenge.  On the contrary, I had been anxiously awaiting the emulsified sausage challenge, for which I had planned to create my own version of the Chang Dog, completely from scratch with homemade buns, kimchee, bacon, and of course the hot dog.  But when the challenge finally rolled around my heart wasn’t in it.  With a big trip to Maine approaching all I could think about was seafood.  For the first time since this year of meat started, I just wasn’t craving any.
 
Beside all that, finding time to get upstate where we have access to the smoker, which we needed to make hot dogs, was simply not feasible.  Not only was I occupied with all the normal things that need to be taken care of in the weeks before traveling, but ken managed to come down with a bad three week long summer cold which left him for all practical purposes, incapacitated.  I never realized how much ken does to make my life easier and better until he went out of commission, and everything just started falling apart.
At first I considered skipping this challenge altogether, but couldn’t justify it to myself as we had all the equipment necessary plus about a lifetime supply of hog casings in the freezer.  We chose to make weisswurst mostly because it was simple enough to do in the limited time we had, and mild tasting enough for ken to eat on a queasy stomach.  So on a day that ken was feeling well enough to help out, and I had a few free hours to kill before running out to meet some people at a party (gay pride - this year you couldn’t live in ny and not celebrate!), we banged out three pounds of weisswurst.

Unlike the fresh sausages we made last month, the meat in emulsified sausages is ground twice, the second time with ice, and then whipped into a stiff paste before being stuffed into a casing.  Maintaining the temperature is extra crucial because the meat is so extensively manhandled.  Otherwise, the process is pretty much identical.  And the practice we had making the fresh sausages paid off - we had a surprisingly easy time making these weisswurst.  It still took a lot of time, but everything felt like it came together rather seamlessly - even the pastry bag technique felt less onerous.  I guess it’s really true what they say that doing is the best form of learning. This may be an obvious lesson to most, but I’ve always been the type to over-think any potential undertaking.  I had owned and sporadically read through Charcuterie for years, but all that reading and learning didn’t teach me how to make sausages.  It was only by using the grinder, and stuffing sausages regularly the past couple months that I finally started to get the hang of it.

That’s not to say that we are experts, or even particularly good yet.  I mean, check out the air pockets in the casing!  But the process is finally feeling a little more routine, and less like a huge and unpredictable endeavor.

Once, years ago, after cooking a huge multi-course meal for my family, I asked my grandmother what she thought.  Her reply was that it was good but that I was a “fun cook”.  At the time, I was confused, and probably slightly offended, but I now understand what she meant.  Any reasonably skilled cook can make a great meal when it is for an event or a meal that they are excited about planning and preparing.  The true test of a good cook is how well they can put together a meal when they are tired or cranky, or would rather be doing other things.  Although we’ve made sausages successfully a couple times now, it took making them when neither of us were at all excited about eating them (ken ate reheated soup that night and I went out), to finally start feeling proficient at it.  

I thought I could muster up the enthusiasm to make homemade pretzels and mustard to go with them the next day, but after waking up with the worst hangover in existence, it was clear that was not going to be an option.  So without further ado, our charcutepalooza dish: weisswurst and, um, sliced bread.

I sincerely hope a recipe is not necessary.

And just so I’m not a total downer, here are some of the things we were actually excited about this past month:

lobster roll that we ate on our way out - first meal in Maine!

the view from our home away from home

fox living on premises, who made an appearance every day
around cocktail hour

learning how to humanely dispatch a lobster

cooking shellfish on the beach

 

fried clams that we ate on our way home - last meal in Maine

With a headcheese challenge on the way, I can assure you, I’ll have more enthusiasm for next month’s charcutepalooza post!


P.S. If anyone knows how to better control the spaces between pictures in blogger, please please please let me know.

Farmer's Market Finds

I am in the midst of packing for a week long trip up in the wilds of coastal Maine.  While there, I hope to be completely offline except when absolutely necessary, and yes, that includes twitter (eep!).  Before disappearing I wanted to share a couple things I've been working on.  

The warm weather and amazing produce at the Greenmarket has been pushing me to experiment more with color in my artwork.  This past wednesday I finally made it out to the market early enough to have my pick of the goodies at Honey Hollow Farm.  Most of their produce is foraged, so it is highly seasonal, susceptible to vagaries in the weather (as I learned when I attempted to buy morels this past spring), and like all scarcities, are in high demand.  There have been times that I've gotten to the market around noon, and find their stand completely wiped out.  

This time, however, by stopping off before my early morning printmaking class, I had all of their early summer bounty to choose from.  Here are some sketches of what I picked up:

Daylily Buds

Chanterelles

Happy Fourth of July!

Two Tastes of Family | Charcutepalooza, challenge no. 6

I am participating in Charcutepalooza, a year of meat which entails twelve monthly challenges to prepare dishes using various charcuterie techniques.  For more information about charcutepalooza, click here.  To read why I decided to partake in the meatmaking festivities, read my first post here.

THE FIRST TASTE: the apprentice challenge

Its funny how much you can learn, just by acknowledging the limits of your own knowledge.  I was born in New York City, a hot spot of culinary adventuring, to parents who took full advantage of all that the location had to offer.  To my inflated city girl ego, I was a worldly diner who knew everything there was to know about Italian food.  And then I met ken.  The first time he made me a real marinara was a revelation.  For some reason, entirely beyond me now, I had always thought that the type of  food served at red sauce pasta & pizza joints was somehow fake or americanized: the chop suey of Italian cuisine.  The slow cooked sauce ken made me was perfectly smooth, sweet, but far from cloyingly so.  It has since become a favorite of mine, perfect with meatballs over homemade orrecchiete.  Once I opened myself up to learning more about Italian food, I found ken and his family a wealth of information.  I learned about the timpano, a multi-day cooking production of Big Night fame.  Another dish I learned of, Italian greens and beans is so simple, and so satisfyingly rich and comforting, that I am sad just thinking of all the years I didn’t know of its existence.  Since then, I have come to associate this dish closely with ken’s family.  The first time we went to L.A. together, ken’s uncles welcomed me into their home, and served me this dish: tender cannelini beans with wilted dandelion greens, fresh from the farmers market.  Ken’s mom makes a more traditional version with escarole, a green I had never tasted before, but which has a bitterness I have since learned to love.  At a restaurant in Utica, the city where his family is from, we had a version so loaded down with pancetta and pepperoni that I had trouble recognizing it as the simple hearty, healthy dish I had first been introduced to.

 

Last fall, we had purchased a ton of fresh cranberry beans from Bodhitree, one of our favorite farms at the Union Square Greenmarket.  Most were eaten almost immediately, but we saved a quart of cooked beans in the freezer, planning on using them with the first greens of spring.  This past month, with greens finally abundant at the market, a half pound of leftover pork in the fridge, and a sausage making challenge on my mind, I decided it was finally time for me to come up with my own version of greens and beans.  Back at the Bodhitree farmstand, I hit my first hiccup: no escarole.  No worries, they recommended curly endive, another new vegetable to me, and one which worked beautifully.  It had the same bracing bitterness, but with a sturdier leaf which took a bit more time to become tender.

I am a fortunate girl in that I am often given very good advice.  A good friend of mine, who also happens to be a professionally trained chef, recommended using the kitchenaid sausage stuffer attachment with all its known imperfections, over my planned method: a pastry bag.  Unfortunately, I am also a very stubborn girl (there goes that ego again) and that is how I found myself alone in the kitchen, swearing at a pastry tip for being too damned short, while trying to thread three feet of hog casings onto it.  Suffice it to say, there are no pictures of the process.  It took about two hours before I finally had my first sausages, exactly three links of hot Italian (based on the recipe in Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie).  And now I also know why people don’t make sausage in half pound batches.

Regardless of the myriad inefficiencies in the making, these sausages were juicy, flavorful, and tasted great in greens and beans.

Greens and Beans with Italian Sausage
This dish is hearty enough to be a meal.  If there are unexpected diners, it can easily be stretched into a soup with the addition of water or stock (and salt to taste!).
Ingredients:
½ lb hot Italian sausage
1 onion, chopped 
olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1 bunch curly endive or other bitter leafy green, such as escarole, dandelion greens, washed and cut up.
1 quart cooked beans, preferably fresh, but fine if dried, or even canned 
parmesan for grating 
salt and pepper to taste

1.  In a large pot, saute the sausages until the skin is caramelized, and they are just cooked through.  Remove the sausages from the pot, being careful to leave behind as much of the fat as possible.  When they are cool enough to handle, slice them and set them aside.
2.  Add olive oil to the pan if there is not enough of the reserved sausage fat.  Add the onion and cook until sweated but not browned.  Then add the garlic and the bay leaf and saute for another couple of minutes, until the garlic is fragrant.
3.  Stir in the greens, and cook until wilted.  Add about a half cup of water, turn down the heat, cover the pot and let it cook until the greens are tender.  Feel free to add more water if it boils off before the greens are to your liking.  Once you are happy with the texture of your greens, remove the lid, and turn the heat up until most of the water has simmered off.
4.  Add the cooked beans, stirring gently to avoid smushing them.  
5.  Stir in the sausage slices, and let the whole thing simmer for a few minutes while the flavors blend together.
6.  Add salt, pepper, and grated parmesan to taste.
7.  Serve alongside parmesan for grating, for those who prefer a cheesier taste.

THE SECOND TASTE:  the charcutiere challenge

Since ken’s family was so well represented in this challenge, I didn’t want my own to feel left out. For the second part of the challenge: inventing my own poultry sausage, I drew inspiration from my parents.  Although my personal heritage is Chinese and Eastern European, my culinary background is much more complicated.  My dad did most of the cooking for us growing up, and has always loved to experiment with various cuisines from around the world.  A week of dining in their household could easily start with a simple pasta or risotto, followed later in the week by a Korean inspired braised short rib dish, and end with a Mexican grilled chicken taco feast with all the works.  A recent addition to his winter repertoire of braised dishes is a chicken tagine.  Although usually a staple of cold weather cooking, this dish and Moroccan food in general has been on my mind, because currently, my parents happen to be vacationing in Marrakesh.  Jealous of the food they must be enjoying, I decided to take the exotic flavors of a tagine and stuff them into a casing: a sausage perfect for summertime grilling.

Wanting to use some of the gorgeous preserved lemons I had in my fridge, a generous gift from a friend (the same friend, in fact, who wisely but unsuccessfully tried to guide me away from sausage stuffing via pastry bag), I chose to base my sausage on a preserved lemon and olive chicken tagine, for which many recipes exist online.

The largest impediment to the making of these sausages was the terrible heat wave we experienced here in the Northeast last week.  Sausage meat has to be kept exceptionally cold to keep the fat from separating.  Usually this requires keeping all the grinding equipment, bowls and meat in the freezer, something I am ashamed to say was not really an option for me.  They say confession is good for the soul, so at the risk that one of my concerned readers will be reporting me to the producers of Hoarders, I would like to show you all the inside of my freezer:

Yes, that is a bag falling out as I took this picture. My freezer is a deathtrap.

Clearly I have a problem.  There was zero possibility of fitting a bowl in.  I only managed to get the meat in by cycling out quarts of stock, and the grinder hardware, by wedging it between a bag of chicken carcasses and a tupperware full of duck fat.  As a safeguard against the oppressive heat, I ground my sausages (4 lbs this time around) in two batches, cleaning and rechilling all the equipment between each round.  Apparently the fat survived because these were some of the juiciest sausages I’ve ever eaten!

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my hands on the kitchenaid stuffer attachment in time to make these sausages so once again I had to make do with the pastry bag.  But this time, with some experience, and an extra set of hands (ken’s) to help out, the stuffing went much faster and with a lot less swearing.

Having issues with twisting links, and no kitchen twine on hand, I tied each link
off with extra casings.   It's not pretty but it worked!

We were just planning to eat these with regular pitas, but ken took it upon himself to find this recipe for Morrocan flat bread known as a batbout.  Batbouts are not baked, rather they are cooked on a stove top, making them ideal summer breads.  Although similar to pitas, these flat breads were a bit chewier because of their high semolina content.  

We ate the sausages gently grilled, with a tzatziki-like condiment of diced cucumber, greek yogurt, mint, garlic and lemon zest.  Even wrapped in the batbout, this was a messy meal, best eaten outdoors with those closest to you, who won’t mind you licking your fingers.

Chicken Tagine Sausage with Preserved Lemons and Olives
The base recipe for these sausages came, as always from Ruhlman and Polcyn, this time from their Chicken Sausage with Basil and Tomatoes recipe.  I wanted to use their meat to fat to salt ratio but discovered too late, that I had only half a pound of back fat in the freezer, a full pound less than they called for.  Still the sausages were sufficiently juicy and fatty, a fact I attribute to the quality of the chicken thighs.  I will write the proportions I used here, but more fat certainly won’t hurt.  Also, the spice amounts included are approximations.  Season, as always, according to your tastes.
Ingredients:
3 ½ lbs chicken thighs, diced
½ lb back fat, diced
30 g salt (careful here as the preserved lemon and the olives add a fair amount of salt, especially if you, like me, forget to rinse the lemons before prepping them)
1 preserved lemon rind, rinsed and then minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp grated ginger
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp tumeric
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ cup green olives, diced
¼ cup red wine vinegar, chilled
¼ cup olive oil

1.  Combine all the ingredients except for the olives.
2.  Let the meat and seasonings sit for as long as overnight, in the fridge.
3.  Grind the meat according to the instructions in Charcuterie, being very careful to keep everything cold.
4.  Mix the ground meat using the paddle attachment on the mixer for a couple minutes, adding the vinegar, the olive oil, and lastly, the diced olives while mixing.  
5.  Fry up a small portion of the sausage to taste.  Adjust the seasonings accordingly.
6.  Stuff the sausages in hog casing.
7.  Grill the sausages gently and enjoy!

Springtime on a Plate

Not too long ago, my printmaking teacher said something quite humbling to me in response to a glib remark of mine: that current methods of art history education (requiring large amounts of rote memorization) were obsolete in the current age of google.  His response was that through reliance on technology we forfeit our abilities.  

In hindsight, it is unsurprising that someone who teaches printmaking would see the value of preserving skills many would consider obsolete.  The real question is why, as a student of printmaking, I didn’t instinctively feel the same way.  The truth is, that in a lot of ways, i do.  Take cooking for instance.  Almost all the cooking I do, practically speaking, is obsolete.  I could just as easily buy everything premade and packaged, ready to be microwaved.  But I choose to preserve my cooking abilities because I find it enriching.  And my teacher was absolutely correct about the effects of our reliance on search engines.  Since getting a smart phone and consequently always having googling capabilities at my fingertips, my memory, which has served me well in the past, is suffering.  I used to be able to ace exams that I crammed for the night before, vocab and grammar rules used to come easily to me when learning new language.  Now, those memory feats seem entirely unattainable.  One summer shy of thirty, I’m certainly not old enough to blame my age for my forgetfulness.  By always taking the easy way out: constantly checking wikipedia for facts, bookmarking information instead of retaining it, I have forfeited, i.e. actively surrendered my memorizing abilities.  

So what’s my point?  I’m not saying that I want to go live under a rock, eating termites, so I don’t lose my poking-sticks-in-logs-to catch-bugs skills.  Clearly no one person can be highly skilled at everything.  My point is that I need to be more aware of the payoff, or cost of convenience.  The decision of which skills I want to maintain, and which I am willing to relinquish must be made consciously and deliberately.  

In considering what other abilities I have put in danger of forfeit, it is clear to me that technology is not the only culprit.  Any voluntary relinquishment of a responsibility can effect a forfeiture.  Ken and I almost always cook together and the division of labor naturally gravitates towards our respective strengths.  I realized that over the years my comfort level with the tasks he usually assumes has fallen although I was perfect adept at them before we started seeing each other.  I would never give up cooking together.  Our ability to cook so well together (despite the fact that I am a recovering kitchen bully* with occasional relapses) is one of my favorite things about our relationship.  But I have decided that every so often I should cook an entire meal from conception through execution alone, just to maintain those skills which I would be loath  to lose.  

* years ago the nytimes published an article on kitchen bullies and my first thought on reading it, unhappily, was that it described me to a T.

My first solo meal was inspired by the early spring produce at the farmers market, and by this Hank Shaw blog post.  I was hoping to mimic his use of the season’s trifecta: ramps, fiddleheads and morels, but unfortunately, according to the folks at the greenmarket, the weather (constant rain, followed immediately by intense heat) ended our morel season early.  No worries, the fiddleheads and the ramps paired with a roast rack of lamb more than represented for the season.

 

I prepared the fiddleheads by trimming them and rubbing off their brown papery husk.  They were then pre-boiled for about five minutes in well salted water.

Usually we are so enamoured with ramps when they finally show themselves after a long winter, that we do as little as possible to them, opting for just a basic saute.  While I certainly enjoy them that way, I find two faults with our usual preparation.  First, the greens on top tend to cook much faster than the pink bulbs at the root-end, leaving either overcooked greens, or too crunchy bulbs.  Second, I find that merely sauteing the greens tend to leave them a little too fibrous and difficult to eat. For this meal, I chose to separate the two parts, and prepare each differently.

I made a sauce for the lamb by combining blanched and chopped ramp greens with greek yogurt and lemon zest.  This yielded way too much for one meal, but the leftover sauce, enhanced with an assertive addition of paprika and cayenne, made for a great chicken marinade the next day.

I sauteed the bulbs and the fiddleheads together and served them with crisped gnocchi.  (I have to confess that the gnocchi were in the freezer, and most likely made by ken).  Alongside a roasted coriander spiced rack of lamb, this dish was a lovely celebration of the spring.