gastroblog

the babbo cookie jar

2012-01-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

I always plan to do holiday baking. But i never do. So when I started this project and saw there were six cookie recipes, I figured I had the perfect chance to get it done. I made all six in one day.

It required:

A pound and a half of butter

Eleven cups of flour

Four cups of sugar

A dozen eggs

Six cups of walnuts

Only five ounces of chocolate. Weird.

Anyway, it took all day, but here are brief reviews of the six cookies we ended up with in the deal:

Walnut shortbreads: I had made these before, when I made the maple-mascarpone cheesecake. They were worth making again.

Bittersweet chocolate cookies: I sort of flubbed on these. As the name sort of back-handedly implies, if you're really paying attention, you're supposed to use bittersweet chocolate. I had a bar of unsweetened Scharffenberger open, and wasn't paying attention that it was, well, unsweetened. There was plenty of sugar in the cookie, so the unsweetened chocolate worked fine. Loved these.

Amaretti: These are sort of like macarons without the filling.

Polenta shortbread: Definitely interesting. Not sure I got the texture right. I had some olive oil gelato in the freezer, left over from a dessert that will be posted soon, and these went well with that. The corn cookie has promise.

Fig and walnut biscotti: I've never made biscotti before, and this one is a little weird. With all the fig in the dough, it never really dried out on the second bake. I thought I did something wrong, but that's just how its supposed to be. This seemed to be everyone's fave, which is cool, because the yield on this was about twice that of everything else.

Mascarpone thumbprints: Loved these, but they needed to be eaten fast. They didn't stay fresh very long.

Verdict: I would make them all again. But I might have to dig into Babbo pastry chef Gina DePalma's cookbook and make some of her other cookies first.

Up next: Why it has been so long since I posted.

gnocchi with venison and rosemary

2011-12-07T08:30:00.000-05:00

This one is one of the dishes that presented me with an interesting challenge. Sure, i could buy venison somehow. But when people eat venison, isn't it usually venison they hunted themselves? With this -- one of two venison dishes in the book -- and a wild boar dish, I wondered if i shouldn't be going out and harvesting a wild animal. And part of me still thinks I should.

Here's the thing: I know nothing about hunting. I've shot a gun about three times in my life, and I was probably pre-teen last time it happened. And it was never at anything more animated than a beer can.

So there was a little bit of talk about me going hunting while I was in Texas. It was deer season. I was intrigued. Then I heard that it was going to cost me at least $300 to get an out-of-state license. I needed like a pound of venison (actually, about three pounds for the two venison dishes I have to do.) That seemed extreme.

Then I heard our Texas friend Tam already had plenty of venison in the freezer from a previous hunting season, and while I was in Texas, I could use that meat and Tam's kitchen. Done and done.

The meat was sooo lean. I've never seen meat with no fat on it before. I mean none. I was a little unsure how it would stand up to long cooking. But I did what I was told and assumed the best.

For the rest of the dish, I got to go shopping at a farmers market in San Antonio and at Central Market, a store I really wish was here.

Oh, and the rosemary. Well, I sort of didn't buy that. At home, I'd just go outside and pick some rosemary. I sort of did that in Texas, too. Except in Texas, I picked the rosemary from a plant that was technically landscaping outside the Culinary Institute of America. Shhhhh.

Once I got the meat, this dish was pretty easy. It just simmers in red wine for a couple of hours.

And the gnocchi go together fast. Just boil the potatoes, mix in a little flour and egg and shape and boil them. To get the potatoes ready for the other ingredients, you'd usually pass them through a ricer. I didn't bring my ricer. So my potatoes were meticulously mashed with the back of a fork. Here is what one gigantic, uncooked gnocchi looks like:

That got separated into about 60 individual gnocchi, then boiled.

Then toss them with the ragu and it's done.

I added a little but of micro arugula on top because they had it at Central Market. And I thought it looked cool. Not in the recipe. I went a little nuts.

Once the meat was cooked and shredded, it was still totally … I don't know if "tender" is the word, because it's all shredded up. There's really nothing there to be tender. But it was a really nice texture, and seemed to soak up a lot of the reduced wine sauce and tasted great with the gnocchi. I get a little testy about gnocchi if they aren't the right texture, but these stayed pretty light. I'd do this again anytime.

Particularly if I have access to venison again, I guess.

Up next: Christmas baking.

5 autumn vegetables

2011-11-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

This one came together fast as I was planning Thanksgiving dinner. I was shopping at Whole Foods for the annual feast, and I saw Jerusalem artichokes. I didn't have any of Ted McLaren's Jerusalem artichokes left, and I wasn't sure the general availability of them throughout the year, so I figured I better get on it.

The other four Autumn vegetables were all things I knew I could pretty much get anytime. Butternut squash. Leeks. Parsnips. Celery root.

About celery root. It's sort of ugly.

But it cleans up nice.

The first time I had celery root was at a grand tasting at the Epcot Food and Wine Festival in 1999. Tom Gray, the chef at Bistro Aix in Jacksonville, was there and served a mashed potato and celery root puree with seared halibut. I immediately loved the taste of the puree, and decided I would, henceforth, ALWAYS puree celery root with my mashed potatoes, because it was so good.

I've tried it a bunch of times. Never really got it right. Invariably, I don't cook it enough and it ends up chunky and texturally unappealing. I've tried other dishes where it is roasted, and it just never seems right. It always seems undercooked.

So imagine my surprise when I read the directions for this dish, and there is no step in which the celery root is cooked. It is cut in julienne, and thrown in raw.

And it was the first time I've ever made celery root where it tasted right. Go figure.

The other thing with this dish was it called for goat cheese ricotta. No one here has that. Well, except the Dancing Goat lady at the farmer's markets around here, but i didn't have a chance to get to a market she was at before Thanksgiving. I have made goat milk ricotta before, and it would have been perfect for this application, but my cooking timeline didn't really have room to add "make ricotta." So I looked for alternatives.

My favorite cheese store makes ricotta, and that would have been a good choice. More on that later. That store also had a very fancy brand of goat cheese that I had not seen there before, one that is oft suggested in the book. It isn't ricotta, but I figured I'd splurge and use that. I got two packs of it, for a total of about 8 oz., and about twice that many dollars.

So the dish is ready. I had anointed the salad with pumpkinseed oil that was also about twice as many dollars as it was ounces. I got the toast off the grill and opened the fancy goat cheese. It was brown. Like, grossly brown, with warts. Maybe this cheese is sooo fancy that it has a rind, I thought. So I cut the edge off. Still brown. Then I cut it in half. Brown all the way through. Took a sniff. Lost my breath. Opened the other package. Repeated every step. Was distressed. Tore apart refrigerator and my cooler looking for the ricotta that I thought I had in reserve. Couldn't find it anywhere.

Guests were arriving in about 15 minutes. It was a holiday, so Publix, the closest supermarket, would be closed. While I finished everything else, Pam and Cyndi ran out to Winn-Dixie and bought a carton of ricotta and a small log of goat cheese. We mixed equal parts of the two and spread them on the toast. It wasn't remotely fancy, but it tasted fine.

And that's how Winn-Dixie contributed to this project. Will probably be the last instance. But thanks!

Between the goat cheese that I pitched and the pumpkinseed oil, this might have been the most expensive dish of the project. Certainly the most expensive without meat. Of course, truffle season is here. And there are two truffle dishes I need to do.

As for the salad itself, I liked it a lot. All those vegetables at the top? Here they are all chopped up and ready to go:

Loved the celery root (remember, best way to cook it: don't). That was the primary flavor, I thought. Everything else was good. But I'll remember this as a celery root dish.

Oh yeah, the toast with goat cheese. Here it is with that.

Up next: Not sure. Still trying to catch up on those pork chops.

pork tenderloin with jerusalem artichokes

2011-11-19T11:17:00.001-05:00

A couple of months ago, we were doing a photo shoot at the house for a story I was doing for work, and my friend Ted was here. He knew about this project, and has eaten some of the results. He was looking through the Babbo cookbook, and he got really excited when he came across this recipe.

"I'm growing Jerusalem artichokes! You want them?"

Yes.

Ted grows a lot of stuff. I try to grow stuff, and have had a little bit of success with things like greens and tomatoes.

Ted grows Jerusalem artichokes.

At the time, he didn't know what would come of them, if they would be usable. I shrugged. My alternative was to wait to see when Whole Foods got them, so I was happy to wait out Ted's attempt.

They came out fine.

The Jerusalem artichoke, also called a sunchoke, is the root of a sunflower-looking plant. So there was a lot of cleaning going on. That's a photo of them at the top of the post (taken, with permission, from tinyfarmblog.com. Thanks!)

This what they look like when they come out of the ground:

And this is what they look like after they are trimmed and cleaned:

The recipe calls for the chokes to be packed in salt and roasted. Here is what that looks like:

OK, it looks like a bowl of salt.

I suspect there is science involved with the salt roasting, but I don't really know what it is. When you salt roast fish, the salt is in sort of an egg slurry and it gets all hard when it cooks, and seals in juices or something. This was dry salt, and sunchokes aren't juicy. I suspect that the salt, being a rock and all, heats up fast, and the direct contact with the food probably applies heat to the food more evenly, and probably more quickly.

But that's a total guess.

Otherwise, we had a pork tenderloin that was rubbed in sugar, chili pepper and porcini powder. Rub anything in porcini powder and it gets better. Don't think about that too hard. The pork gets grilled. I have experience with grilling pork. All over it.

I followed the directions for the cinzano vinaigrette, but I felt like I mostly just got olive oil with a little sweet stuff in the bottom. Luckily, I use really good olive oil. There were blanched green beans.

It was a good dish. Liked the pork a lot. Still not 100 percent sure what to make of the sunchokes, but I'd eat them again. I wish I had had a better balanced vinaigrette. Could have used a little more punch. I probably needed to get rid of the oil in the pan before adding the vinaigrette. Don't know.

FYI: There is one other Jerusalem artichoke dish.

Up next: grilled pork chops w peaches.

steamed cockles with habanero chive broth

2011-11-15T08:30:00.000-05:00

I could almost say this was an easy one. I mean, it's steamed shellfish. How hard is that?

Here's the thing: cockles are little clams. They're kinda cute. But they grow in New Zealand. Technically, right off New Zealand, but you know what I mean. I live in Florida. In Florida, we have clams growing right off the shores. So we get those. Cockles, not so much. I was ready to unapologetically make this dish with Florida clams.

But I've had clams in a few dishes in this project. So I wanted to at least try to get cockles. When I was planning a trip to DC, I figured that was a good time to try. Big city, they probably get all sorts of seafood in from all over the world, right? And this wasn't a complicated cooking procedure, so I felt confident that if I found them, I could cook them there without trying to bring them home.

I was sort of right.

I found them almost immediately. My pal Carol told me to try Black Salt, which is where she gets a lot of her seafood. I called them, they said they had it, told me the price. But then I ran into a problem I never have in Florida. I couldn't really get there.

It was only a few miles from where we were staying, but we had no access to a car that day. And the Metro in DC didn't go there. And there would be multiple bus transfers. So my pal Melanie set to work looking for an alternative that we could actually get to. She found a place in Bethesda, Md., A&H Market, that was actually farther away than Black Salt, but it was near a Metro stop. Turns out it wasn't really as near a Metro stop as they said, but after a half-hour or so on the train we were there. They had cockles, and we were in business.

Other key ingredients:

Habanero. They are right there in the title. So they must be important. My colleague Chris had given me a bag full of habaneros from his garden, so knowing I was going to try to make this dish, I brought them with us. I put them in checked luggage. I doubt you can carry on habaneros.

Basic tomato sauce. Sure, I have a freezer full of officially sanctioned sauce at home. But I wasn't at home. And I didn't really feel like bringing tomato sauce with me on the trip. Luckily, Jeremy had this in the kitchen:

That works, right?

From there, it was all just steaming them open and dressing it up with some chives.

The broth was super wine-y, which is good. And the cockles were tender and sweet. And there was a kick from the habanero, but it was subtle.

I bet this dish would be awesome with Florida clams.

Note: We had this dish when we were at Babbo in the spring. And they have the recipe on the website.

Up next: pork tenderloin with jerusalem artichokes.

mustard-crusted salmon with pressed beet vinaigrette

2011-10-31T08:12:00.000-04:00

Well, if there is a way to catch my attention on a salmon dish, it's to add pressed beets to it.

I'll eat beets any way you put them in front of me. Some people say they hate beets because they used to have to eat the nasty ones out of the can. I love the nasty ones out of the can. They're just fine! They're beets! It's like candy vegetable. I don't understand how anyone doesn't love beets.

So let's talk about the beets. First you roast them. Then you run half through the processor and the other half through a juicer. Then you mix the results of those two processes with some sherry vinegar, olive oil and salt and pepper.

I have to say, I think the juicing step was unnecessary. The beets I put through the processor were pretty well bleeding, so adding juice to them seem a little redundant. Maybe I processed them too long? Maybe I roasted them too long? Dunno. All it really did was give me an excellent opportunity to freshly wash the juicer.

But it was awesome. The recipe made about 10 times more than I needed, but I'll find a use for my leftover pressed beet vinaigrette. Don't you worry.

Let's see, what else was there … oh yeah, salmon. It was fine. Good even. The trick was to firmly press the fillets into a boatload of mustard seeds. Here's a closeup:

I was wary. I figured that would be strong. Wasn't. The seeds were really all about texture. It looked cool, and was crunchy. And I kept the salmon minimally cooked, so I liked it too.

Up next: steamed cockles

planked king salmon

2011-10-28T08:27:00.000-04:00

Self-inflicted controversy: Mario calls for king salmon. I couldn't find king salmon. So I had a choice: Try to find the prescribed fish, regardless of cost and likely at a potential hit to quality, or get the best I could from what was available to me.

Frankly, it wasn't a tough call on this recipe. I'm totally sure that king salmon is super special, but this dish was on the menu today, and since I'm not a big fan of salmon in any event, I was going with the best available salmon.

In this case, that was a Scottish salmon. And it turns out that the latitude of Edinburgh isn't that far south of that of Juneau, so, I'm totally rationalizing cheating. Still, I sort of hate salmon, so I'm happy to get them out of the way.

The preparation is pretty simple, especially since I have had cedar planks sitting on my window sill for about a hundred years. I considered cooking it on the grill, because that's what i figured you did with cedar planks, but the book said in the oven, and that was easier anyway. Totally simple, actually. I heat up the planks for 20 minutes, then oil, salt and pepper the filets.

And they cook for 9.

And, ta-da: it's magic.

While all that is happening, I chop up cucumbers for the salad, and that goes together in a very familiar way. I've made Asian cucumber salads that seems a lot like this one, with a swap of vinegars and a few spices.

It looks nice on the plate, right? And almost embarrassingly simple. Wasn't even hard to shop for.

So this is the part where I tell you that even though I hate salmon, I looooooooooved this dish. That would be an exaggeration and will have to wait until this blog is converted into a movie, at which point it will be preceded by an emotional, soft-focus montage of me hating salmon before finally deciding to try this particular salmon in a moment of epiphany. There will probably be an Aerosmith song playing. Because if there is one thing I dislike as much as salmon, it is a Aerosmith-backed montage.

For the time being, I'll admit that I did like it. But that brings the number of times I have had salmon that I actually liked up to a total that is still able to be accounted for with the fingers of one hand.

Up next: mustard-crusted salmon, completing the salmon trilogy

minibar, washington dc, oct. 14

2011-10-23T09:08:00.000-04:00

Some blog somewhere recently listed the 11 U.S. restaurants where reservations were hardest to get. It was a little humorous, because I had been to almost half of them. Minibar, Jose Andres' six-seat restaurant within a restaurant was on the list. The process of getting this nearly impossible reservation went much like the others I have gotten.

I dialed the phone at the appointed hour. It rang. Person picked up.

But instead of just giving me a reservation, she said:

"Sorry, all the seats for that night are taken already, but we can put you on the waiting list. You're second on the waiting list!"

The nice person made it sound like that was great and likely to be a success. I considered the math, and figured that insomuch as I wanted one-third of the covers they'd be doing that night (six seats, two seatings; so they serve 12 people a night), it was highly unlikely. But I felt confident that if we didn't get in, we'd have fun somewhere else that night. So I shrugged and hoped for the best.

Three weeks later -- one week before the reservation date -- I got a call that we were in. It was sort of a rush.

So, with Melanie, Becky and Jeremy, above, all of whom you might recognize from photos of various dinners at my house, we walked downtown, through the National Portrait Museum, up three flights of stairs, to Minibar.

We were told we could take as many photos as we wanted, which is cool, because not everyone is so accommodating. I've kind of gotten out of the habit of taking photos at restaurants, but since the chefs we're cool with it, and the only other two people at the bar with us also had a camera, I decided to let fire. I didn't take a photo of anything that was time sensitive: i.e., for the most part, melty. But really, the chefs presented each plate on a glass shelf above the bar, and while they explained what it was and how to eat it, there was plenty of time to snap before we needed to eat.

There were 26 courses. I got photos of most. I will keep descriptions brief.

The first three things came in rapid succession, and I did not get photos. The first was a "cocktail" called the Oaxacan snowball. Irony alert: no snow in Oaxaca. It was a two-bite white ball that tasted like a margarita.

Next came a "gift" from the chef. It was called the golden nugget, and it was in a jewel box, which we opened and it looked like a chocolate truffle, but was filled with lychee and black garlic. I thought it tasted earthy, like porcini or truffle, but apparently, black garlic.

Then the Ferro Rocher, which was a chocolateless version of the candy. So, very hazelnutty.

Then I had my bearings, and started taking photos.

Sea bean tempura. Literally two sea beans, fried. There was an sharp sauce.

Almond tart with blue cheese. The almond is the half-sphere shell. The blue cheese is the mousse inside. We didn't eat the rocks. Well, I didn't. Jeremy?

Did not photograph the mint leaf mojito, because it was ice. But I wish I had. It was served on a silver flip flop and a bed of mint. It tasted like a mojito in ice form, and had a syrup on top that tasted like rum concentrate. Very strong. Everyone liked it, but we thought it might have been better if the leaf-shaped ice had been 2-3 smaller leaves, so we could have put a whole leaf in our mouths and let it melt. It was large, there was biting. Minor point.

Steamed pita with avgotaraho. As I google that last word, I learn that it is the Greek version of bottarga, which is cured, pressed roe of tuna or mullet. I felt that the bread was very steam bun-y, but now that I know that, it makes sense that they call it a steamed pita. Nice, aggressive flavor, and a soft bun. Or pita. Whatever. Liked it a lot. Below is a photo of our chefs Charisse and Aitor filling them.

Coco steam bun. Almost didn't take a photo, because it was melty. We were supposed to lick it off the paper. More foam-y than bun-y, a word I thought I made up in the last paragraph, but here it is again already.

Below is a photo I took between courses of some of the stuff that was ready for a subsequent course. I actually have no idea what that is on the plate, but I suspect it might be sea cucumber. But that's later.

Oyster sequence I: An oyster served classically on the half shell with mignonette and a garnish. Well, almost. The oyster was from a chicken, and the garnish was an oyster leaf, a plant that tastes like oyster, apparently. They grow it in Ohio, we were told. Kinda cool. This dish reminded me of the big Top Chef dust-up between Richard Blais and Mike Isabella ... who, coincidentally, used to work for Jose Andres. Hmmmmmmm.

Oyster sequence II: This was an actual oyster, served under a dome that was filled with smoke. I want a smoking gun, though I know I'll never use it. So don't get me one. But I do, because it's cool. And there were little chanterelles. I forget the sauce. I'm not big on raw oysters, but I liked this.

Zucchini in textures: This was the dish, surprisingly enough, that we were talking about the rest of the night. It was three layers of zucchini. The top was a gel, then a layer of seeds, then a layer of puree. Each tasted distinctly of zucchini, but in a different texture. So, very well named. It was very interesting. Again, I'm not a fan of zucchini, but this was good.

Thai peanut soup: There were two textures of ginger, neither of which I cared for. The frozen peanut puree in the shape of a peanut was really good. I wasn't a fan of the topographical bowl. Made it hard to combine the flavors. Meh.

Sea urchin ceviche with hibiscus: This one was a talker. I've never had sea urchin, because I have never heard a description of it that left me thinking I wanted to. But here it was. It was fine. I had been told the texture was akin to snot. Shrug. Maybe? I liked the hibiscus foam, though. That's the purple cloud. Would be happy with more of that.

Chicken "shawarma": Probably the simplest thing of the night, and maybe my favorite. The chicken is a piece of crispy skin wrapped in the lettuce leaf. The lettuce leaf is secured with what appeared for all the world to be a clear piece of rice paper, but was probably something else. It was structural, not a flavor. You dipped the lettuce into the sauce, which was a yogurt with a super-intense garlic flavor. I'd order this from the minibar food truck, if there was such a thing.

Fabes con almejas: Beans and clams, or, a study in spherification. The clams were suspended within clam juice and the beans were actually puree, spherified to look like, well, beans. Discuss.

Shrimp & grits: The grits were like large creamy corn gnocchi. Perfect shrimp (I suspect rock, but didn't confirm). I think the broth was chorizo flavored, though I don't remember for sure. It would make sense.

Espardenyes with bone marrow: Espardenyes = sea cucumber. Sea cucumber ≠ vegetable. It's like a sea slug or something. Surprisingly fine, though I am not rushing out for the recipe. And I didn't care for the bas relief plate of the Rockies more the second time.

Charcoal salmon toro with black garlic: Straight forward.

Parmesan egg with migas: From my seat, I could see an immersion circulator behind the barm and see that it was set at 63 degrees (Celsius). So from the time we sat down, I was pretty sure there was a poached egg coming. It was like custard. Always a fan of the egg.

Adam & Eve: I'm not sure what the "bread" of this sandwich was. It was sort of like a meringue, but not sweet. Regardless, it was all about the filling, which was foie gras and apple. So, so rich; so good. Although, on the way home, we were scratching our heads about the name. The apple, we guessed, referred to Eve. Which would make Adam ... a fattened fowl liver? Curious. But when I make my ribs with apple glaze, I'm stealing the name.

This is just a photo of Jeremy staring adoringly at chef Jorge at some point in the meal. If you zoom in, you can see the impure thoughts.

And then it was time for dessert. It is possible the apple and foie was a dessert, actually. But for the purposes of this post, this was the first dessert ...

Vermont snow: There was a metal canister. Charisse and Jorge were looking into it. There was liquid nitrogen, and the associated steam. Then there was scraping. It looked like snow. We were told to wait a minute. Then they poured a maple syrupy thing over the snow. There were maple candies sticking out of the snow, and there were fruity bits -- lychee, I think -- underneath. Light, a lot of fun, a ton of flavor. Liked it a lot.

"Mango" coconut rice: The two things that look like perfectly wedged bits of mango? those are sorbet. Even the skin was painted on to the wedge. Clever. The one in the middle was actual mango, and the funny thing is, that was the confusing part. The rice component was crunchy puffed rice, which was good, but I loooooove me some sticky rice, so that was a bit of a letdown. But the sorbet was great.

Terra(misu): "Eat this in one bite. There's liquid in the center." Cool, but it was pretty big. I managed. Chocolate shell, quick frozen with liquid nitrogen. I presume the flavors of the inner goo were those of tiramisu, but the shell was the whole game. Big chocolatey cool.

Profiterole: A dehydrated meringue that tasted like a passion fruit pina colada. Nice.

Bacon and chocolate: The bacon was super thin and crispy, and is on the bottom here, so you just see chocolate. Happy.

Fizzy paper: Just a piece of paper, that you are supposed to tear apart and eat. But when it hits the tongue, it gets all effervescenty. Lemon-limey. Very refreshing.

Overall, it was fun, required a lot of thought, a little concentration, and some leaps of faith. I think the best part about it was watching it all happen in front of us. Sometimes when I have people over, I get upset when the plates don't look gorgeous, or when things have cooled by the time I get them out. That's when I'm plating by myself for 8-15 people. Here, there were three people standing over six plates every course. And they all had tweezers. I'm giving myself a break after seeing that.

grilled king salmon with favetta

2011-10-11T11:34:00.001-04:00

Editor's note: This is the first installment of a miniseries on salmon. There are three salmon recipes in the book all in a row, so the posts will all be in a row, as the artist intended.

I've seen fresh fava beans at few produce stands around here, and every time I see them, I feel like they aren't the fava beans I'm looking for. So I had been putting off this dish. Then I was in New Orleans, and went to a farmer's market, and they had favas that looked like this …

… so I brought them home and bought some salmon.

I've never been too interested in favas, because they seem like a lot of work. And I hate a lot of work. First you open up the pods and pull out the beans.

That leaves you with a couple of piles that look like this.

Then you dunk the beans in some boiling water, shock them in ice water, then peel them. Every freaking one. With your hands. And it looks like this.

And it leaves a bowl of crap that looks like this. Well, compost. Not crap. But it's a fine line.

I started out with about 2 pounds of favas, and I got about 9 ounces of beans.

For this recipe, the favas get pulsed with some olive oil, salt and pepper, until, as the book says, it looks a little like guacamole. Which is a good description.

Then I took some celery that I picked up from a Sweetwater Organic Farm in Tampa … here is a photo of the celery in its natural state …

… and mixed it with radish and a citronette of lemon and olive oil. Cooked the salmon medium rare and put it all together.

And that photo at the top of the post is probably the best-looking dish of the project so far. If there is a better looking one later, I can't wait to see it.

AND … it tasted great. Despite having salmon. The favas were really good, and the lemon dressing on the celery and radish was spectacular.

Up next: planked king salmon

a tale of two tails

2011-10-05T08:25:00.000-04:00

They call monkfish "poor man's lobster."

It costs $15 a pound. I don't know.

I never used to see monkfish in the stores around here. Now its almost always in the stores around here. So I guess the word is out. I hope that doesn't mean it will be extinct soon.

But if you've ever seen a monkfish, you have to wonder who the first person to think that eating it was a good idea was. It's a scary looking creature. Sure, when you see it in the store, its just a mostly white piece of tail meat. There are some blue and red striations on the meat, but nothing too disconcerting. (That's it on the left above,) But if you saw the fish with the head on it, you'd presume it was a prop from a horror movie. A particularly frightening one.

It doesn't come from around here. My fish store says they get their's from Oregon.

This was a dish I was looking forward to, and since it is in all the stores lately, I decided to knock it out. Not a hard one. The texture of the fish makes total sense for a picatta, which is a preparation I'm a big fan of for standard stuff like chicken and pork. The pieces of fish get pan fried, and the lemon and wine gets pumped up with preserved lemon. Big caperberries dot the plate. Here's the recipe.

When I make typical picatta, it's usually a pasta dish. While I didn't want to just plate this on top of a bowl of pasta -- though I'm sure that would have been quite good -- I wanted to find something that would go with this dish. I looked through the Babbo book for a pasta or a contorni to go with it, and didn't see anything that made sense with the monkfish.

So as I was starting to go through my pantry options, I saw some carnaroli rice and realized that there are no risotto recipes in the book. (There are risotto-inspired dishes with barley and farro, but they weren't what I wanted this day.)

Then I looked at the bookshelf and wondered if any of Mario's other books had a risotto that would be what I was looking for. I picked up his first book, Simple Italian Food, literally let the book fall open, and there it was:

Lobster risotto.

Since I wanted it to go with something called "poor man's lobster," I thought this was perfect. Then it got better.

In the first book, Mario talks about his preference for spiny lobsters, like those from the warm waters around Italy in the Mediterranean.

Guess what kind of lobsters come out of the warm waters around Florida. And guess what season just started. That one above? It's at the Florida Aquarium. Total coincidence I was just there.

And the recipe was a breeze. You boil the lobsters, then use the water they were cooked in to cook the rice. Super simple, and super luxe.

Well, that was a great idea. I should look around to see if there are any other cookbooks in the house with fabulous recipes I haven't tried yet.

Up next: Not sure yet.

"black bass" with "taylor bay scallops"

2011-09-28T07:55:00.000-04:00

Yeah, with the quotes again. The actual recipe doesn't have the quotes.

Here's the thing: We get a lot of seafood around here. But we don't really get black bass. I mean, I'm sure I could figure out a way to get it. But why would I? There's fish that they pull out of the water around here. Why would I get something shipped from somewhere else. I picked black grouper. I looked at the description of black bass, and I was comfortable making that reach. Plus, black bass and black grouper are the same color, right? And sort of surprisingly, that color is white. At least with regards to the meat.

Shrug.

Now let's talk about the Taylor Bay scallops.

When I started this, I looked into what Taylor Bay scallops were. Taylor Bay is off the coast of New England. Again, I suspected I could get them, but we have a scallop season right here in Florida. Why not just get them here.

In fact, why not actually go get them here?

Scallop season in Florida is a summer thing, so I decided I'd make this dish when I could go get the scallops myself. It's a weekend warrior kind of thing. You don't have to be a trained diver to go get them, making me totally qualified.

So as the season was waning (I wanted to wait until the heat was down as much as possible), I booked a trip on a charter and headed out with Capt. Leo Riddle out of Homosassa Springs. That required waking up at 5:30 in the morning so I could drive 2 hours north before I'm normally awake, but what the heck.

So when I got there, I was anticipating getting a quick lesson on what it was I would need to do. But Capt. Leo just set out with me, Alan and our two new friends from Palm Beach, Crystal and Giorgio. Maybe when we got there, we'd be taught what we needed to do.

As we we're heading down the Homosassa River toward the Gulf, we spotted some dolphins. Six, we counted. More importantly, the dolphins spotted us and decided to escort us out to the bay. Here's what that looks like (Before pressing play, turn down the volume. You've been warned):

So we get to a spot in the gulf where we can still see land, but just barely. Now we'll get the lesson.

"All right, let's try it here," Capt. Leo said.

And thus ended the lesson.

I was given a mask and snorkel and asked if I wanted to use dive fins.

"Um, dunno. Do I?"

"Yes, you do," said Giorgio, who was in the water by now, wearing his own dive fins.

So I put them on and jumped in. Despite the fact that we were far enough away from land to barely be able to see it, the water was only 6-7 feet deep. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that, but I never believed it. It's true. I could almost stand in most of the water we were in.

Then I started getting acclimated and looking around. I saw nothing but grass.

"What am I looking for," I asked Capt. Leo, thinking there were secret signs I should watch for.

"Scallops," he said.

There is something to be said for not overcomplicating the issue.

I started floating around in the salty water -- it's really salty -- and getting used to breathing through the snorkel. I did this for 10 minutes or so, but saw nothing. Giorgio had found some at this point, but I had nothing.

But, I figured, hey, we saw the dolphins, I'm floating in the Gulf of Mexico, it's a nice day … I hope to get something, but if I don't, it was still a win.

I was rationalizing.

So I kept floating around thinking of reasons it wouldn't be a total disaster if I got nothing when it happened. I totally saw a scallop. All I had to do was go get it. So by now there was water in my mask. I surfaced to clear it, put it back on, went under and … Wait! Where did my scallop go?

Whether I drifted in the current or got turned around while surfacing or what, I have no idea, but there was no scallop anywhere. So I started floating again, this time going in circles (I think), until I finally saw it. I prepared to go down to get it, got to the point where my head was going deeper, reached out to grab it … and then I floated back to the top.

Hmmm.

I re-spotted it, and tried again. No luck. I'm way too buoyant, I thought. There are probably applications in which that would be a great thing, but not this one. So I kicked and flailed and struggled and reached. Finally I got down and grabbed my first scallop.

I tried to be nonchalant, act like I'd been there before. I got it in the bag and started floating again, knowing if I got nothing else, I had a story now.

Then I found another one. It was the same story as the first, but eventually I got it. Then Capt. Leo decided we should try another spot, so I headed back to the boat. About halfway there, I realized something.

My bag was gone. With my scallops.

Crap.

I looked around a little, completely defeated, knowing that in the unlikely event that I saw the bag, I'd probably never get it. So I looked, and cursed, and swam. Giorgio was behind me. "Did you lose your bag? I see one down there."

Whew.

We went a little further up the coast. While we were on the boat, I mentioned how much trouble I had descending.

"Breathe out before you dive," Giorgio said. "I told you that before."

He had. I thought he meant it as if to say "relax." Turns out, he meant it as if to say "breathe out before you dive."

Now it all made sense.

We got to the new location, I jumped in the water, and with this new information, found that I could get down pretty well. It was still inelegant, I'm sure, but I could do it.

And I saw a scallop. I went and got it. Came up, got it in the bag. Went back down, saw another. Pretty soon I had a decent number. I felt a little sick from swallowing salt water, and was exhausted, so I got back on the boat. I counted my haul and had 21. Not bad. I really only needed 10 for the dish. I figured I'd go back in the water when I felt ready. But that never happened. I was zonked.

We got back to the dock, got them cleaned, because otherwise they look like this ...

And you want them to look like this ...

(The secret is a shop vac. Seriously.)

The other thing that I didn't do according to the recipe is I didn't use Hubbard squash. I bought seeds to grow them, but squash season doesn't coincide with scallop season here, so I got a butternut.

Sear the fish, steam the scallops, sauté the squash, and assemble a lemon brodetto, which is a combination of capon stock and preserved lemons that I made previously. That's the dish.

Of course, the dish is Black Grouper with Homosassa Bay Scallops. In Lemon Brodetto.

Up next: riffing on lobster

peach crostata with honey gelato

2011-09-23T08:32:00.000-04:00

I think my favorite things in this project are the dishes that are things that I never would have made before, but that I learn are pretty easy. And the weird thing is, that applies to all three elements of this dessert.

First there was the peach crostata. Admission: I used to never consider making pie dough. Never. Ever. Not once. It was something they sold in the supermarket. Kept in the freezer. Thawed it out. Fill it. Why would you go through the trouble of "making" it?

That it didn't really taste like anything? I guess that's just how it's supposed to be.

Do you have any idea how stupid easy pie crust is? It's like four ingredients, and you spin them in the food processor. Then you wait. Then you roll it out. Then you pat yourself on the back.

Do you have any idea how much better a pie crust you make is? And its not just the knowledge that you took $1.27 worth of ingredients and turned it into something. It's that you took $1.27 worth of ingredients and turned it into awesome.

So, here is the pie crust with the almond curd, the macerated peaches and the crumbly bits.

Here it is after I added the almond curd. That leaves the peaches and bits.

Here it is after I added the peaches. Pretty proud that I put them in there all nice and tidy and organized. That leaves the bits.

Here it is after I added the crumbly bits.

So, making the peaches all nice and tidy wasn't really the best use of time, it turns out. But I know how nice they looked before they were cloaked in bits.

The other things that I try to not do too much is a caramel sauce, because I always burn it, and honey ice cream because … well, I have no idea why. I make ice cream several times a year. I have always liked the idea of honey ice cream. Never made it.

Here, my caramel sauce was largely some sort of mistake. It was supposed to be honey butter. But I cooked it, and when I cook sugar, I mess things up. But not so much, because this still tasted great, though there was an issue we'll discuss in a minute.

And the honey gelato was outstanding. Sort of subtle, but it was distinct.

Here is the finished plate. Times 8.

The only issue was that the "honey butter" was only saucy when really warm. It started firming up really fast when not exposed to heat. But guess what it wasn't exposed to when it was laying all over some honey gelato. Heat. So it got a little chewy.

But come on. Look at that plate. It almost looks like I know what I'm doing. And it was so freaking good.

Up next: "black bass" and "taylor bay scallops" in lemon brodetto. (no quotes around the lemon brodetto. it's totally legit.)

baby chicken alla mattone

2011-09-19T08:24:00.000-04:00

My pal Laura moved back to town after a year in Europe, and I wanted to make dinner for her on her return. So I looked through the book at various dishes I might make, and thought this would be a good one, because we had just been talking about spatchcocking a chicken, a procedure required for this dish. Sometimes that's the kind of thing we talk about.

But I talked myself out of it about four times, because when I did this dish, I wanted to make the panzanella with tomatoes I had grown myself. So I put together a list of 3-4 dishes and asked what sounded best to her, including this one, but with the aforementioned caveat.

"So, you don't want to make that dish … because you didn't grow the tomatoes?" she asked. Those were the words she said. But here was the subtext I heard: "Are you freaking serious? You're insane. Go buy some #*@! tomatoes."

So I went and bought some tomatoes.

It happened that I was doing this dinner the same week that I was procuring some ingredients for a parallel but separate project from a real-life farm up in Brooksville (more on that in a future post), and I got the last-minute idea to see if I could find a farm at which to get actual baby chickens.

I did not. But at Whole Foods, the same place that I found the pre-grown tomatoes, I found these …

How's that for product placement. And Bell & Evans didn't even pay me to do that. Believe me, they really didn't. Quite the opposite.

Here is a more generic shot of the Cornish hens, which are for all intents just baby chickens …

There. That's less egregious. A little more fleshy, though.

The birds get spatchcocked, which sounds either sexy or painful or both, but is really just removing the backbone of the bird, which, under different circumstances, would probably be super painful. Then you push it flat. Which I really should have taken a photo of. You can sort of see what I mean in the photo at the top.

Then they go on the grill, and a foil-wrapped brick goes on top (alla mattone).

I had preheated the bricks on the grill. The birds are small and thin, so when they cook over high heat, with a hot brick on top, it doesn't take long before they're done.

There was just enough time to make the panzanella, which is a bread-based salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and dressing.

Laura made the bread, because she told me she had perfected the art during her time in Europe.

A quick mix of all those ingredients and the salad is ready in no time. Lay a hen on top of the salad, garnish with lemons and go.

This dish had zero chance of failing. Grilled chicken is always going to be one of my favorites in any form, and the salad was terrific.

The best panzanella I've had was at Ad Hoc in Yountville, Calif. The tomatoes were like candy. But I was intent on putting together as good a panzanella as I could, and with that bread, I was really happy with how it came out. Ad Hoc's was still better, but then, Thomas Keller grows his own tomatoes, doesn't he.

Up next: Peach crostata with honey gelato

antipasto plate

2011-09-12T08:32:00.000-04:00

For a dinner party, I decided to do an antipasto plate. I have these cool glass plates with four sections on them that I got from Crate and Barrel during an online clearance for 95 cents each, so I decided I'd knock out four of the antipasto from the book.

I ended up making five, and only two came from the book. It's a long story.

OK, here's the start of the long story. We have an avocado tree, and it has probably hundreds of pounds of avocado on it right now. So I decided I wanted to make something with them. But there is nothing in the book that uses avocado. Shrug. Minor problem.

I knew I was going to make cold avocado soup.

I made up my own recipe. It's avocado pureed with vegetable stock and heavy cream. Some salt and some lime juice. I couldn't believe how thick it stayed, so I added a little water, because I was afraid the vegetable stock was going to change the color. I wanted green. Then I made a little salad of crab, red onion and lime juice as a garnish. Done.

Meanwhile, I took to Twitter and asked Mario what he would do if presented with a tree full of avocados.

Then this happened:

“@jwscoop: @Mariobatali hey chef, no avocado in babbo book. my tree is groaning. ideas?” I like a salad w grapefruit endive and avocado yum,

That sounds easy. I got some endive and grapefruit, added some mango because I picked one up at the office, then made a champagne vinaigrette. It ended up looking like this:

He's right. Yum.

The two I made from the Babbo cookbook were the beet and parmagiano bruschetta, which is pretty easy. Just roast and chop the beets, toss with balsamic and caraway, put on toast and shave cheese over it. I'm sure I could have found a way to make it sound difficult. OK, I had to go to a second store before I found caraway. But it was one on my way home from work, that I go to all the time. Not much drama.

Then there was the cod in saor. I didn't know what to think of this dish. It sounds like a bad idea. Take fresh fish. Fry it. (That's not the questionable-sounding part.) Then make a mix of currants, pine nuts, onions and vinegar and soak the fried fish in there for 24 hours. Huh?

To be honest, when I was preparing for this dinner, I failed to see the "soak for 24 hours" step. By the time I started, I only had 8 hours. And I was OK with that, because I kept having to pull my eyebrow down, anyway.

It was fantastic. One of the things I'd like to make again. I don't know what saor is, but the effect is basically pickled fried fish. Even though I have definitive evidence that it works, it still sounds like it shouldn't. But it does.

Also, one of the main ingredients, celery, originated in Oviedo, my homeland.

The last antipasto I made for the dinner was not from the book, but it was straight out of the Mario playbook. Just slices of mortadella, the fat- and pistachio-studded bologna that was illegal in the states until a few years ago (seriously), wrapped around slices of robiola, a soft, creamy cheese. For good measure, I put a dab of cherry-pepper jelly in mine. Then they get grilled.

This is a dish we had when Pam and I went to Fort Worth last year to work at an event for Mario's foundation. Here's a gratuitous photo of Mario and me eating this dish in Texas.

It was great that day. But I liked it with the cherry pepper jelly, too.

Up next: baby chicken alla mattone

barbequed octopus

2011-09-04T11:29:00.001-04:00

Last time I needed to make octopus, I went to the store and asked for baby octopus, and they pointed me to the freezer where there was a grayish purple ball in a baggie and they told me there were like 20 of them in there. But there was one. Regular sized. I mean, I guess it was regular sized. I don't know how big an octopus regularly is. But it was no baby.

This time, I needed for there to be just one in the bag. So I told the clerk what happened last time, and she seemed stunned to the point that I sort of think she thought I was lying to her. Why I would choose the subject of how many octopi were in a frozen ball to be the thing that I started off with in my attempts to deceive her, I'm not sure. But that was the vibe.

So she tells me there are going to be like 20 in this bag, and they don't even sell bags with just one in there. "No one buys the big ones. People like the little ones."

OK, I thought. I'll take my chances.

Got home, thawed it out. And this is how many I found in the bag:

Just like I needed.

I even called the store and told her. I offered to e-mail a photo, but I don't think that would have helped. She was convinced that I had now bought the only two single-octopus bags ever to enter the store. Whatever. I got what I wanted this time. Last time, it was a problem.

So, this time the octopus gets baked for two hours. Last time it was boiled. Last time, I was surprised how much I liked it. This time, I remembered how much I liked it the last time.

It was ok. Not memorable. I liked the potato salad with the tangerine dressing that went with it. But if I make octopus again, it will be the bavette.

And I'll buy them pre-thawed, so I know I how many I'm getting.

Up next: an antipasto plate.

maccheroni alla chittara

2011-09-01T05:07:00.000-04:00

For such an easy dish, I went a long way for some of the ingredients.

Namely, I went to New York, and shopped at Eataly, which celebrated its first anniversary this week, and can open up a location around here any time it wants.

Namely, there were two things for this dish that weren't turning up anywhere in the greater Central Florida area, as best I could tell. Bottarga and the dish's namesake maccheroni alla chittara.

The bottarga is a little strip of tuna roe that's pressed and cured. You shave it like cheese over a dish, and it adds a little pescesalinity to a dish. Pescesalinity is a word I think I just made up, but that everyone should start using to mean "fishy saltiness." Pescesalinity sounds way better, right?

So the bottarga was easy to bring back to Florida on the plane. Just had to wrap it up tight.

About the maccheroni …

It's a pasta. it is basically spaghetti-shaped. But while spaghetti is formed by forcing the dough through a metal die, for "alla chittara," a sheet of pasta is placed against a contraption with a bunch of evenly spaced strings (reminiscent of a guitar), and the pasta is pushed through the string, which cut it into the long strands. The story goes that pasta cut on a chitarra has a little more texture than that extruded through a brass die, and therefore holds the sauce better. Sounds reasonable.

I couldn't find it anywhere in Florida. I considered getting a chittara and making it myself, because I was confident I could. But I wasn't excited about buying another piece of equipment, especially one as big as a chitarra, so I kept looking. And i considered just making fresh spaghetti. But then when I was heading to New York, I knew I'd find it.

So it was one of the first things i looked for in the pasta department of Eataly. Let me clarify: the dried pasta department. Because there is also a fresh pasta department. And after much searching in the dried pasta department of Eataly, I found spaghetti alla chitarra. I decided that was close enough and threw a couple of bags in my basket.

Then I got to the fresh pasta department, and right up in the front of the case, there it was: maccheroni alla chitarra. I was instantly hit with a decision. They had it. The right pasta, with the right name. I could buy it with money. They would sell it to me. But I would have to figure out how to transport fresh pasta from the city to Newark, then Newark to Tampa, then Tampa to Clearwater. Without smashing it. Kept at temperature. I hated my chances. The dry, I just had to keep from breaking, which I thought was possible.

So, I spent more time than I care to admit staring at the fresh pasta case and weighing my options before I finally asked the woman behind the pasta counter, "What exactly is the difference between spaghetti alla chittara and maccheroni alla chitarra?"

And I braced for the answer.

"They're exactly the same thing."

Whew. That was the answer I wanted, and I thought there was a zero percent chance of getting it. I bought the dried.

After all that, the dish was pretty easy to make. Sure, I had to oven dry some tomatoes the day before I wanted to make the dish, but that's just good exercise. And sure, the habanero is really hot, but that's what makes it fun.

And dangerous

The pepper and some garlic gets cooked in some tomato sauce, then the pasta is tossed with the sauce and the tomatoes, and some bottarga is grated over.

Wait! I forgot about the bread crumbs.

Mario often tops pastas with toasted bread crumbs, and I have to admit, I was skeptical. Seemed weird to me to put bread crumbs on top of pasta.

That's because I had never done it.

I took some leftover bread made by a friend, cubed it, toasted it, ground it to coarse crumb and toasted it again, expecting it to add little.

It was awesome. The textural change from the pasta to the crumb was so cool. Now I want to put bread crumbs on everything.

I'm not a big fan of big heat, and this dish was really spicy, but I loved it. Even though the heat was prevalent, it wasn't the only thing there. It tasted like pepper, not just like hot. And the tomato -- sauce and dried -- was sweet, offsetting the heat. Loved it. Want it again.

I didn't really taste the bottarga, and Pam said that it was too strong. Which was weird, because I grated more of it on mine than hers. And there was no plate mixup. Next time, I'll put even more on mine, and none on hers, and see if that solves both problems.

Oh, there will be a next time. In fact, there are more dried tomatoes in the fridge, and I heard that I'm getting some habanero from Velouria Farms.

Oh, and I found the recipe for this one online, too. And in it, it is suggested you could just substitute another pasta for the maccheroni. I guess assuming you won't fly to New York for it.

Up next: barbecued octopus

spaghetti w sweet 100 tomatoes

2011-08-26T08:02:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago, we split a share in a CSA at Geraldson Farms in Bradenton. I love the idea of this. I was less excited about the execution.

First, we had to drive to Bradenton a lot to pick up the weekly take. Since we were splitting the share, we didn't have to do this every week, but when you live in mid-Pinellas, any number of times you drive to Bradenton becomes a lot.

Second, it was mostly greens. Sure, we got beets, and the occasional … other stuff. But mostly we got greens. I like greens. And they were really good, interesting greens. But I don't love them. Even at half a share, we couldn't eat the greens as fast as we were getting them.

But one other thing we got was little tiny tomatoes. We could have all we wanted of those every week, but we had to pick them ourselves. Which was fun. So we got a ton of them. They were tiny and super sweet, very low acidity.

Pam planted some seeds from those tomatoes. And ever since, we have plants bearing tiny, sweet tomatoes all over the yard. Front yard. Back yard. Side yard. I haven't looked on the roof, but I wouldn't assume they aren't there.

I noticed that several of the plants were ripe at once. And I saw this recipe.

Done.

Caveat: I couldn't find lemon basil anywhere -- and didn't have the foresight to grow it -- but we had regular basil all over the place outside. Near the tomato plants. So I used that and some lemon zest to get the same effect.

So simple. So good. Can't wait until the tomatoes are ripe again.

Here is the recipe on Epicurious. Told you it was easy.

Up next: maccheroni alla chitarra. It's practically a theme.

sweet corn crema

2011-08-23T08:32:00.002-04:00

Here's the hilarious thing. The two main components of this dish are corn and blackberries. We are not far from Zellwood, which has a hugemongous corn festival each year. And I had been hearing about a farm north of Tampa that was growing blackberries.

So, since I hadn't grown either of these things myself, I thought I'd go do U-pick's for both ingredients. Possibly while wearing overalls and a straw hat. And one of those long pieces of grass sticking between my teeth.

OK, that wasn't the hilarious part. But this is: The season for U-pick corn ends two weeks before the season for U-pick blackberries starts.

The more you know.

I decided to do this dish because it was blackberry season. Which, at the U-pick farm I went to, lasts like three weeks. So there was urgency. That's when I went looking for U-pick corn in Zellwood, or where ever, and learned that the season had just closed.

Imagine my despair.

But it was OK. I got up way, way earlier than usual on a Saturday and drove up to north Tampa and started picking blackberries.

Did I mention I'm allergic to blackberries?

Actually, I didn't know that was true. And it isn't an absolute. I knew I was allergic to raspberries. Even handling them makes me break out, and it gets worse if I eat them. And blackberries sort of look like raspberries, right? But with me and a lot of fruits, if they aren't pristinely fresh, it's a problem. (It's a mold thing, and fruits grow mold long, long before you see it. It's no big deal for most people. But it makes me light up like a Christmas tree.)

But with many fruits, if they are really, really fresh, they don't present a problem for me. And I figured if I'm pulling them off the vine and making them that night, that's pretty much as good a chance at success as I had.

I picked up the corn at a farm stand near the blackberry field -- so apparently corn was growing somewhere -- and headed home.

The berries just got macerated in some sugar and berry flavored booze.

The corn, which I didn't take a photo of, got stripped from the cob and turned into a custard. Excuse me … crema.

It got heated up in some cream with some vanilla, then with egg yolks.

Then it went into my soup/tea/crema cups, and into a water bath in the oven, and I cooked them for the prescribed 40 minutes. At which point they were pretty much still soup. So I left them in 10 more minutes. Still soup. Then I checked them every 5 minutes until they set up. I think it was a total of about 20 more minutes. At that point, they still looked soft, but they looked set enough that maybe a night in the fridge would work wonders.

It did.

Before serving, made some cornmeal zeppole, which are fried, making them delicious. It was like deep-fried cornbread. Win.

When we had this, it was mentioned that it tasted like buttered corn pudding, which I totally agreed with. It wasn't until the next day that I realized something funny about that: There is no butter in the dish. So I had another one that night, to see if I still thought that it tasted like buttered corn, now that I was aware of the lack of butter … and it still did. I have no idea. Supposing that the cream and the salt acted in concert to trick us into thinking butter.

This was not one of the desserts we got hit with when we went to Babbo in May. But pastry chef Gina DePalma recently tweeted that this was one of Mario's favorite desserts, and it was season in New York, so it was back on the menu. So if you're in New York, and can get a Babbo rez, the sweet corn crema comes highly recommended.

Allergy update: The blackberries made me a little itchy. But no big deal. I've dealt with worse. But I don't so much want them again. I have some more in the freezer, where they won't grow mold. We'll see.

Up next: spaghetti with sweet 100 tomatoes

babbo garden closed for summer

2011-08-22T08:31:00.000-04:00

In Florida, we're all backward. Our farmer's markets open when everyone else's are closing, and they close when they open everywhere else. It's because it's hot here, and humid, and even if people are willing to go outside, plants are smart enough to avoid growing.

So the Babbo garden is pretty brown right now. But before we close it down for the season, here is a recap of some of the dishes we got for about $6 worth of seeds:

From the bitter greens (dandelion and escarole, both easy to grow, but not my favorite to eat):

grilled quail with "scorzanera" alla romana

This was my favorite of the bitter green dishes. But if I made it again, I'd use spinach.

escarole contorni

capocollo with dandelions and fiddlehead pickles

and halibut in cartoccio

bitter green ravioli

From the sungold tomatoes:

tilefish with tomato and cucumber gazpacho
that one was a keeper, too

lobster salad

snapper in cartoccio

From the teardrop tomatoes:

baccala mezzalune

pork chop milanese

jellyfish salad

The sungold tomatoes were my favorite thing of the things we grew, and I would grow them again. The teardrops also tasted good, despite the fact that two of the three dishes they were in were not my favorite. But they were a little weird to grow. It was hard to harvest them before they developed splits in the skin. Really sweet, though. And the pork chop was one of my favorite dishes.

So, I'm about to put in tomato seeds for Babbo Garden 2.0. And will try again with the sweet peas, the only thing that was a total fail in 1.0. Considering a couple other things, too, but not sure yet. I think I have a couple more weeks to decide.

Up next: sweet corn crema.

pork chop milanese

2011-08-08T08:58:00.000-04:00

With this dish, we closed the Babbo Garden 1.0, the teardrop tomatoes making the last appearance of the crops I grew this year.

Otherwise, its about as straight-forward as a recipe can get. I have coated pork chops with bread crumbs before. I had never made my own bread crumbs to coat a pork chop before, so there's a little new ground.

The lemon made sense, and the teardrops had a nice acidity too them, too.

I feel certain I will make this dish a million more times.

Up next: Babbo Garden 1.0 roundup.

snapper in cartoccio

2011-08-04T22:28:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to think of any drama I can attach to this post.

"Oh man, the fish was so hard to get." Well, no. It's snapper. It's always in every store around here. Usually minutes off the boat.

"The recipe called for sungold tomatoes, and no one around here sells them." True, but I grew some. I have gone on and on about this, I know. But I love that photo at the top.

"I had to saute garlic cloves in sweet wine to make this dish." Wait. That was easy. And delicious.

Maybe i should've grown the tree to make the parchment to wrap the fish in. That would have been hard core. And dumb.

So I made the sweet garlic cloves and put them in a piece of parchment with a filet of snapper and the tomatoes, and pea pods and clams and wine.

All good.
Up next: pork chop milanese, also not dramatic.

baccala mezzalune

2011-07-31T10:37:00.004-04:00

This was my first time working with salt cod, and all I can say is that I anticipate that future endeavors will go better.

I soaked the salted fish for two days, just like it said.

I cooked it with the potato until it all mashed together, like it said.

Then I put it in pasta circles, like it said.

Then I sauteed it with tomato sauce, teardrop tomatoes and olives, like it said.

I will say that the tomato sauce, the teardrops and olives were delicious. And the pasta itself might have been the best pasta I've made. But the filling was … weird. I've had baccala before, and liked it. So I was optimistic here. But this had a weird texture. It didn't taste bad, but the texture was oddly grainy. Not pleasant at all. Not sure if i got bad baccala, or didn't soak it long enough, or what.

And since I was using salt cod, I was careful about adding more salt. That was a mistake, because it needed more salt. But that wouldn't have saved it. The texture was a dealbreaker.

For photographic purposes, it looked sort of awesome, anyway.

Shrug. Next time.

Up next: snapper in cartoccio

grilled quail with "scorzanera" alla romana

2011-07-25T08:09:00.000-04:00

Ed. note: You'll notice the title of this includes a word in quote marks for no apparent reason. This is a trick used in both menus and journalism to suggest that the word in quotes isn't actually true. Now you know.

"How many more dishes do we have to eat with weeds?"

I'm not saying who asked that question, but they might live here.

I'm not the only one in the house who isn't necessarily down with the bitter green thing. And this one called for quail, which I thought would also go over real well with the asker of that question, as that person may be predisposed to boneless, skinless white meat chicken. Quail is pretty much all dark meat.

So as an insurance policy that someone who liked bitter greens would be eating one of the bitter greens dishes, we invited our pal Lawrence over. He is an actual Italian, and loves bitter greens. And dark meat. So this would only go well.

Except for one thing. I was so busy being all smart and growing my own dandelion greens -- which you can buy in every store on the planet -- that I forgot to make sure I could get salsify somewhere. Remember "scorzanera" in the title? That's salsify.

Well, crap. I went to all my stores, a couple of produce stands and called a farm. I was most stunned and amazed when I called a fairly huge purveyor of, um, whole foods, and they didn't even know what salsify was. Not naming names here. It was then that I figured I better start looking for alternatives.

So I went to a site which suggests substitutions for ingredients. It suggested artichoke, asparagus or parsnip. Which immediately made me curious about this magical vegetable that would put those three things in the same sentence. I passed on the artichoke and asparagus, because they wouldn't look right. I considered the parsnip, because at least it was a white root vegetable, which, after you peel it, is what salsify is. I think. But when I got to the supermarket, they had white carrots. That sounded different, and looked like it would work. So I got them.

Here they are.

And here they are naked.

And this link goes to a picture of salsify. I'm calling this a win.

The other cool part about this dish was that the glaze for the quail -- aren't they cute all lined up up there? -- includes saba, which is a sweet grape syrup. The quail were quickly grilled and glazed, then put on top of the what we are now calling carota bianco alla romana and greens. The quail were amazing, the sweet glaze playing well with the liver-y nature of the meat. Also, that sweet glaze was the antidote for the bitter greens. Total success.

Up next: baccala mezzaluna

bitter feast: bitter green ravioli and halibut in cartoccio

2011-07-21T08:20:00.000-04:00

I'm not big on bitter. My Starbucks barista will attest to this. So when I saw all the recipes in the book that called for bitter greens, in my mind I was substituting spinach. I like spinach. It's easy to find. And it's not bitter.

But that seemed like a cop out. So I did the next-best thing, and I tried to make the bitter green dishes as close together as possible.

There was actually a logistical rationale behind that, too. I was growing the greens, and when they were ready, it was go-time on the dishes that called for them.

There are two dishes in the book that called for dandelion greens, and one that called for puntarella. The book gives a description of puntarella, but while I knew I had seen dandelion in every store I shop in, I'd never heard of puntarella. I plugged it in to the search on Johnny's Selected Seeds website, and got nothing. That concerned me. So then I Googled it, and learned that it is also known as "catalogna." So I searched Johnny's for catalogna, and they had that. So that became my default dandelion for all the dishes in the book.

Here is my puntarella early on (that's it on the left) …

And here it is at harvest time …

I knocked two of the dishes out on the same night. First the ravioli, which, in addition to the escarole and the dandelion I grew, required extra bitter from chard and sorrel. Here they are in a team picture:

The sorrel took me some time to find. No markets had it, so I ended up finding it at a nursery.

That's sorta like growing it, right?

Then, because that wasn't going to be bitter enough, I practically burned the greens during the saute step. At this point, I wasn't hopeful.

But I made the pasta, and sauced them with butter, and they were decent. Not my fave, but a decent dish.

I credit the butter, in large part.

The halibut was the dish that specifically called for puntarella. It amounted to a beautiful piece of fish wrapped up with some stock, wine, greens and grapefruit and baked.

A little bit of the puntarella goes on the paper ...

Then the fish and everything else ...

Then it gets wrapped and baked ...

And cut open to reveal cooked stuff ...

It's a dramatic presentation, with paper, and cutting, and steam. And again, it was good, but not a favorite. If I were doing it again, I might make it with spinach and orange and be happy. But I can be boring like that sometimes.

Up next: grilled quail, and the end of the bitter greens.

montauk lobster salad

2011-07-15T09:10:00.003-04:00

I brought two lobsters home, Kitterey and Ogunquit. This is Ogunquit.

Then this happened.

Then this happened.

And ultimately this.

I won't go into anymore detail on that process.

After all that, this was an easy one. I knew that I could get the flowering chives at any of a number of Asian markets. And I new I could get mache at … wait … where's the mache?

I knew I had seen mache at many markets before, so I never considered it a problem. Yet there I was, with Kitterey and Ogunquit in the car, and I couldn't find any stinking mache. So I substituted a mix of field greens. I read the ingredients, and it suggested that it was possible that mache might be one of the greens included. Win.

It was beautiful, and delicious.

Oh, but I didn't get Montauk lobsters. I wanted to wait until next month and get Florida lobsters, but I wanted to use the sungold tomatoes I grew, and they weren't going to last until lobster season here. And while the tank at the store said these were Maine lobsters, the bands on the claws said they were from Canada. Who knew outsourcing was getting this bad?

Postscript: Two days later, I was in Whole Foods. They had mache.

Up next: a bitter feast

tilefish with tomato and cucumber gazpacho

2011-07-12T01:19:00.006-04:00

I had never heard of tilefish. So when I set out to do this recipe, I assumed it was some rare fish that is only found in the northwest Adriatic during the fourth week of October on Leap Years, and that I would have to figure out what tilefish was like, so I could make an intelligent substitution.

So, I type "tilefish substitution" into Google, and the first hit comes up as a food reference site. It says that tilefish is a firm, white meat fish. OK, that's easy. I can substitute a million things for that. Then it says that lives in tropical waters, and is caught in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico is way closer to my house than the Adriatic. Things are looking up.

In the weeks leading up to my sungold tomatoes being ready for harvest, I was in my favorite seafood store and asked if they had tilefish. They said no, but they can get it anytime. They'd order it and let me know.

Then my sungolds ripened, and it was go-time. So I called my favorite seafood store and asked if that tilefish was in.

Never got any.

So I return to Google and ask it for the names of seafood markets in Pinellas County. It came back with 20. I'm sure there are more, but this was a start. I called 19 of them and got answers ranging from, "No," to "Not today," to "What's that?" And a few didn't answer at all. Stupid economy. And oil spill.

The last one on the list was the one farthest from my house, Pelican Point Seafood. "Sure. We have five. How many you want?"

So I drove 25 miles to Tarpon Springs.

When I got all the way to the end of Dodecanese Boulevard, there was Pelican Point. I went in and told the woman I needed tilefish. "You want them fileted?"

I've fileted fish before. Hell yes, I want them fileted. It doesn't cost extra, and if it did, it would be worth it.

"You want the skin taken off?"

Here, I made a strategic blunder. I'm not a huge fan of fish skin. And I didn't recall it being mentioned in the recipe. And I didn't have the book on me.

"Yes, please take the skin off."

Babbo Cookbook, Page 185, ingredient list for Tilefish in a Sungold Tomato and Cool Cucumber Gazpacho, reads in part:

… 4 6-ounce tilefish fillets, SKIN ON …

And then in the directions, we skip to step 2:

"… Score each fish fillet on the SKIN side … and place in the pan, SKIN side down. …"

My memory clearly sucks.

Anyway, even in its skinless state, the fish was good, and the gazpacho came out really well. It has been averaging about 350 degrees around here, so a cool dish was perfect.

Up next: montauk lobster salad

jellyfish salad

2011-07-08T00:34:00.004-04:00

"Have you ever cooked with jellyfish before?"

The clerk at Oceanic Market in Tampa was looking at me with such a goofy grin that for all intents and purposes, her question was rhetorical.

"Nope," I said with confidence in an effort to hide the fact that I was sort of weirded out by the prospect. "You?"

"No, I don't cook much," she admitted, almost embarrassed. "But I've had it before. It's crunchy."

So I now know at least that much about what I'm in for.

There are a lot of dishes in the book that are going to present some challenges, either to cook or to eat. I'm not looking forward to the calf's brain much. Or even any of the livers, really. But I'm not really worried about those. They'll be fine. May not be my thing, but they sound like food.

I just don't know that I feel the same way about jellyfish.

When I started this project, I made a list of the ingredients in the book that I wasn't sure where I was going to get so I could start researching. Tops on the list: salted jellyfish for this salad. It so happened that I was at Oceanic that week for something else, and I was looking at its selection of eggs, and I noticed right next to the eggs was a vat of weird looking blobs floating in water. I looked for the sign, which was buried under something else in the case. "Jellyfish $8.99/pound."

So, that was easier than I thought it would be.

The book says to rinse it off, and I rinsed it off for a good long time. Then it says to cut off the tentacles. Mine didn't seem to have any tentacles, at least not in the classic horror movie sense. Just to be sure, I cut off the area where I thought the tentacles may have once been. You can't be too sure. Here's what it looked like to that point.

Sort of like something you get as a souvenir after surgery. Moving on.

Then I sliced it into thin strips. The book says to slice it thin, but I sliced it thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin. I don't know. I wasn't getting more excited about this.

So, once the jellyfish is sliced, it's easy. Put it into a bowl with the greens, yellow teardrop tomatoes -- preferably that you grew yourself and harvested from the back yard -- olive oil, opal basil and sherry vinegar. It will look like this:

Then toss it and put it on top of a piece of toasted bread and take a photo.

And maybe a second photo …

Wait, the light was bad on that one. Try again …

Oh, damn shadow. Here's another …

Truth is, I took a lot of photos. Mostly because I knew that when I was done taking photos, I was technically going to have to eat it.

And if this post got picked up by a jellyfish Twitterbot, boy are they going to be disappointed in this next part.

Not my favorite dish in the book.

Funny thing was, as concerned as I was about the texture, the texture wasn't the problem. It was kind of cool, actually. The problem was that it was like eating straight salt. I tried getting more greens and tomato and bread in a bite to counteract the salt, but there was never enough.

But I feel better for having tried it.

Up next: tilefish

maple and mascarpone cheesecake with walnut shortbread

2011-07-05T09:35:00.003-04:00

I did everything I could to mess this dessert up, and I was unable to.

First of all, the recipe says to reduce some maple syrup by two-thirds over low heat. I decided to try to do this despite the fact that maple syrup is basically straight sugar, and anytime I apply heat to sugar, bad things happen. Bad, burned, bitter things.

But I decided I was going to follow the recipe, and not my better judgment.

I put the maple syrup on the stove, over low heat, for the prescribed amount of time. And what happened?

Bad, burned, bitter things.

I got more syrup and decided to skip the reduction step and just accept that it might be a little less maple-y, which I am sure is a word.

Next, I tried to decide whether I wanted to halve the recipe or not. We were going to need four, and the recipe said it made eight. I thought about it hard, consulted a Magic 8 ball and decided that it would probably not be a problem having some extra mini cheesecakes around the house. Full recipe it is.

The recipe said it makes eight cakes cooked in 4-ounce ramekins. My "ramekins" were 8-ounce muffin trays. I thought this might tend to lower the yield. Maybe I would only get six? Maybe karma was taking care of me?

I got 17.

I went back to the recipe to figure out what I had done wrong, and figured out a mistake I made that accounted for part of that whacked yield.

The recipe called for 1 1/2 pounds of mascarpone, and 1 1/2 cups of cream cheese. I missed the different measures, and used 1 1/2 pounds of each, and it turns out 1 1/2 pounds of cream cheese is way more than 1 1/2 cups. I decided not to start over after that mistake, and just accept the cakes in whatever messed up, distasteful state they came out in.

But they were awesome.

The maple that I didn't reduce was used to flavor heavy cream, that was the sauce for the cake, and it tasted fine. I suspect my flubs impacted the texture of the cake, but not in a way that led to complaints.

The cookies were standard shortbreads, except that much of the flour was replaced with ground walnuts. To serve, I cut some up and sprinkled them over the cheesecakes.

This is one of the desserts we had in the great NYC Dessert Blizzard of '11. Despite all the screwups I made, I thought that the flavors were dead on. The texture was a little different. Mine was a little more dense. But I would make this again. And again. Maybe I'll even try to make it the right way.

Up next: jellyfish salad

new york trip

2011-07-04T01:11:00.008-04:00

Our recent trip to New York was planned around the James Beard Awards and fell around our anniversary. But here is the meal-by-meal breakdown:

-- We arrived on Sunday morning, with Jeremy in tow, and went to Momofuku Noodle Bar for lunch. Variations on pickles and bowls of noodles, all great. New thing was smoked brisket buns with horseradish mayo (above). Seemed unfair. Also, for dessert, we had cake balls. Make your own joke.

-- Sunday night we met with old pal Wayne and went to Casa Mono, which is the Batali empire's Spanish tapas place. The place was tiny, but we got the choice table in the front corner, possibly because we know someone. We had an embarrassing amount of great food, my fave being the videos with chorizo and clams.

-- Monday afternoon we went to Kin Shop for lunch, where we were blown away. I figured it would be good, but it turned out that I now have another place that I'm going to want to go to every time I go to New York. It is Thai food as interpreted by an American chef, Harold Dieterle, who won the first season of Top Chef. While we were there, Stephanie Izard, who won the fourth season, and Lee Ann Wong, who was also on the first season, were having lunch. But we were too busy tearing into duck laab and beef madtarbark to stargaze. Ok, we stargazed a little. But only after we were done eating. I later found the recipe for the laab online, and I think I'll be making it often. Bonus: In the photo on that link, Harold is sitting where Jeremy was when we were there.

-- We said goodbye to Jeremy, who had to go back to DC to work or something, and I went to the James Beard Awards. What I learned at the James Beard Awards: I am every bit as awkward in a tux as I presumed I might be.

-- Tuesday we had coffee at Bouchon, then walked around and had ok dim sum in Chinatown. Will study the dim sum options and do better next time. Then for dinner we went to Torrisi Italian Specialties, which was one of the finalists for Best New Restaurant at the Beard Awards. Tiny dining room, and we were sitting at a table with a poster of Billy Joel, circa The Stranger, watching over us. Pretty freaking cool. Its one of those places where there is no menu, they just bring you what they are serving that night. Turns out, everything they were serving that night was awesome. So that worked out.

-- Wednesday we went to the Bronx to walk around a botanical gardens on the Hudson River, then had a slice of pizza while waiting for the train back into the city. Then dinner was Mexican near the hotel. it was all fine. It can't all be Torrisi and Momofuku and Kin Shop and Babbo, I guess.

-- Thursday we had planned to go to Ma Peche, the newest link in the Momofuku dynasty, but we got sidetracked and ended up at Lupa, which is Mario Batali's Roman osteria. We took it easy, because dinner was at Babbo, Mario Batali's flagship and mecca of culinary hedonism. But we tried the antipasto sampler (above, I loved the beets) and the bucatini alla Amatricana, because I knew I would be making that when I got home. Theirs was awesome. Would mine be?

Then at Babbo, we sort of devised our own tasting menu, and let the pros pair wines for us. Then we ordered one dessert. After a little commotion at the kitchen door, I knew something was going on. One by one, every waiter in the place walked past our table, and set down a dessert. They brought us the whole dessert menu. It was a scene. People were staring. It was hilarious. They didn't all fit on out table, so they pushed a little auxiliary table next to ours to hold the last plates. There were nine, including a plate with all the gelato flavors available that day. (There were seven of those.) "This is something Mario likes to do for his friends," the maitre d' told us. (I think he meant Pam.) Then I tried everything on the table. Didn't finish anything, but tried it all. The banana crostada was my favorite. That's it on the far left. Several of the desserts are things that are in the cookbook and I'll be making, so it was fun to have a baseline to compare it to. One is one I've already made, and I'll post that one next. (Hint: It is sitting right behind the wine glass, on the left side of the photo.)

-- Friday morning we went back to Eataly to stock up on provisions and get something to eat at the airport.

Up next: maple and mascarpone cheesecake

smoked sable

2011-06-21T01:26:00.004-04:00

"Have you ever been to Russ and Daughters on the Lower East Side?!?!?!?!" Mario asked me on a Sunday morning last fall when I was in Texas working at an event he was hosting. I realize that that sentence has a lot of punctuation, but Mario talks with a lot of punctuation. It's awesome.

That was before I started this project. So when I went through the book looking for potential challenges, and I saw a dish calling for smoked sable, I knew I had a problem. We don't have stores around here that specialize in high-end smoked fish. Then I remembered Russ and Daughters, and since I was planning a trip to New York, I decided I would get it then, bring it home and make the dish.

Then I looked at the recipe and decided that once I got the fish, it was going to be easy, so why not just make it while I'm in New York? The video below documents how that went:

(If problems viewing or to get better definition, click here to go to vimeo.)

Then I went to Babbo

Up next: New York City.

capocollo with dandelions and fiddlehead pickles

2011-06-15T08:41:00.003-04:00

I started making this dish about two months before we had it. To do it the way I would have liked, I needed to start it about four months before we had it.

When I knew I was going to do a charcuterie plate for the recently mentioned dinner party, I decided this dish would be part of it. After all, it required dandelion greens, and I grew dandelion greens, and they were nearing the end of their potential life cycle.

That meant that I needed to find fiddleheads, which I have heard have a notoriously short season. So when I was in Whole Foods one day in April and saw them, I almost bought them. Since they were going to be pickles, I figured I could buy them, make pickles, then figure out when to have them. But the fiddleheads they had didn't look so good. Kind of dry and with black blotches on them. So I passed, despite the fact that the produce guy said they probably wouldn't get anymore.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I'm in New York at Union Square Greenmarket. And, apparently, it is fiddlehead season. Everyone had them. So I bought them, kept them in the fridge at the hotel, and smuggled them back to Florida, where I made pickles as soon as I got home.

Then it was all about the capocollo.

I wanted to make my own. I made all the other stuff on the charcuterie plate for that dinner party, why not the capocollo? Plus, throughout this project, I'm trying not to use any finished products as ingredients, even when they are called for, if it's something that I could make. I have a recipe for coppa, which is another word for capocollo, according to my research (which consisted of asking Michael Ruhlman on Twitter. He said yes. Good enough for me.).

Here's the thing: Making your own coppa, according to Ruhlman's recipe, takes about three months. And when I talked to some other people that make it, they said four to six. I'm in Florida, so any aging/curing/hanging is happening in the fridge. I wasn't sure enough in my curing ability to hang a piece of pork in the fridge for several months, then serve it to 10 friends. So I made the executive decision to buy my coppa.

My first plan was to buy it at Mazzaro's, where I get any Italian thing I might need. But then, as the date of the dinner party drew close, I realized Mario's dad has a salumeria in Seattle and sells cured meats over the Internet. I could buy coppa that Mario's dad made! That seemed highly appropriate. So I e-mailed them. There were two problems. First, I missed the last shipping day before the party, so I wouldn't get it in time. Second, even if i had been on time, shipping would cost more than the meat. I'm willing to pay almost anything for good food, but I'm willing to pay almost nothing to FedEx. So that would have created a moral dilemma for me even if i had thought of it in time.

So I bought it at Mazzaro's. And it was terrific.

I arranged the capocolla slices on the cutting board, topped with the dandelion greens and fiddlehead pickles, then shaved some parm over the top. Total win.

And, now that I think of it, I actually did start making this dish about four months ago. That's about when I planted the dandelion seeds. (In the second photo, the sprouts are on the left side of the tray.)

BONUS: For the charcuterie plate, I wanted cherry mostarda. So I looked on the Internet for cherry mostarda recipes and found this one on a totally appropriate website for this project. Warning: It is restaurant quantities. I quartered this recipe, and actually still had about twice as much as I needed. But it's good, and will hold up awhile. I think. We'll see.

Up next: I think actually seriously maybe the sable post. Because I got Pam to do it, which made it much easier for me.

swine & spirits, 6-7-11

2011-06-13T00:37:00.006-04:00

So, on the night before Becky and Jeremy left for DC, a group of us assembled here to see them off. And by see them off, I mean eat until we got food drunk. I cooked. I will offer photos with just a little in the way of explanation. The theme was "Pork."

chicharone, with malt vinegar salt, paprika and parmigiano (I ripped the idea off Publican in Chicago, and based my interpretation off a recipe in the Momofuku cookbook.)

piquillo popper, piquillo pepper, stuffed with machego, coated with panko, fried, topped with saba (This was a late add to the menu. I felt I didn't have enough cheese. And I happened to think it while looking at jalapeno poppers on a menu.)

charcuterie, pork rillette with pickled kumquats, cured mangalitsa lardo on soft pretzels with fennel salt, duck prosciutto with cherry mostardo, capocolla with pickled fiddlehead ferns. (I started curing the lardo a month before the party, and the prosciutto about a week before hand. The capocolla was from the Babbo cookbook, and will get its own short post, which will include more info on the cherry mostardo, as well.)

dim sum, left to right, undone ramen, pork laab, lobster bisque soup dumpling. (The ramen broth was also Momofuku, and the meat in it was a wagyu hanger steak that I cooked in a sous vide set up that i concocted myself. And it sort of convinced me that I want a real one. The laab -- aka larb, laap, etc. -- was something we had in New York last month at Kin Shop. We loved it, and I found the recipe on Serious Eats' website. The soup dumpling was something I always wanted to try to make, and I don't think it came out well. So I may have to try again.)

pork belly, with apple slaw, maple mustard and miso-candied pecans. (This was a riff on a dish we had at Michael's in Miami. I used a Kurobuta belly, and the meat was great. I thought I might have been able to get it crispier.)

pop tarts, puff pastry with gorgonzola dulce and cherry pepper jelly. (Another late add, due to previous lack of cheesiness.)

popcorn, a la alinea. (I tried to get tricky, and it backfired. I wanted to make a dessert to evoke the bubble gum we had at alinea in Chicago a couple of years ago. So I made tapioca flavored with buttered popcorn, and added a shot of cajeta, then loaded it all in a tube. The plan was to make it taste like caramel corn without looking like caramel corn. And when I tested it, it worked. But I loaded the tubes and put them in the cooler. That made the tapioca set up too much, and created a scene that would have been hard to explain to the uninitiated, with a roomfull of people using all their power of suction to access dessert. What that means is that we have a whole bunch of photos of people trying to have this dish, but they are not really suitable for the Internet, and might possibly make it look like the party was way more interesting than it really was. Oh well, now I know. ps: little-known fact ... the popcorn was popped in mangalitsa lard. OMG was it good straight up.

georgia peaches/california nectarines, grit cake, chai latte gelato. (I was just going to get peaches, but when I was at Whole Foods and saw the where everything was from, I amended the plan. It was states-of-origin serendipity for the guests of honor. Plus I got to use the little cast iron skillets I brought back from Texas.)

guanciale chip cookies. (Just because I could.)

I apologize to anyone who got hurt in the eating of this menu.

classic tortellini in brodo; capon stock

2011-06-03T00:59:00.006-04:00

OK, let's start with the brodo.

Despite the fact that I have a freezerfull of brown chicken stock, I wanted to do the right thing and make the recipe as it is in the book, and this recipe calls for capon stock. So I set out to find a capon.

Turns out that a capon is an altered rooster, one that has lost its, um, cock-a-doodle-doo. Probably in a horrible barnyard accident. There are sharp things everywhere in those places. You'd think that would make the old bird more than a little bitter, but really just makes it tougher and more full of flavor somehow. I want to stop thinking about how and why that happens. Right now.

I went to several stores that I thought might carry capon, but didn't find it. But I felt like I had seen it in a store before. So I thought really, really hard about it, and decided that it might just be in the store I used to do most of my shopping in, a large Publix that I now have to pass two smaller Publi to get to. Went there, and sure enough, there they were in the freezer.

They were pretty expensive for what amounts to old chicken, but I got over it.

So after making the stock, I learned another thing about capon: They have a lot of gelatin in their bones. That stock set up like jello before I even put it in the fridge. Awesome.

So the next step was to make the filling, which meant spinning some chicken, pancetta and mortadella in a food processor ...

... until it was finely chopped.

Then I made pasta using the previously posted pasta process. This time, instead of using the long sheets, I cut them into little, um, trapezoids. The recipe calls for squares, but, I mean, anyone can cut a square. Right?

Each, um, let's just say "square" got a spoon of filling …

Folded over ...

sealed ...

The opposing tips were brought together ...

And we have a … wait, let's get a close up.

Is that a wonton? It looks like a wonton. It was supposed to be a tortellini. Do tortellini and wontons look the same? Has anyone investigated this? I suspect Marco Polo is involved.

Oh well, whatever they are, they get tossed into the heated broth, and next thing you know, there's soup.

And while I hesitate to consider what the per-ounce cost of that stock was when compared to regular chicken stock, it was really good.

Up next: I really hope smoke sable. But we'll see. I suck at iMovie.

two-minute calamari, sicilian lifeguard style

2011-05-27T01:18:00.003-04:00

I need to stop saying I don't like calamari. I guess I don't like the idea of calamari. I think because I used it as bait when I went fishing as a kid. But I've had it several times in restaurants, and the only times I haven't liked it was when it tasted fishy, and anytime that happened, I had reason to suspect the kitchen.

Still, I had never cooked with it.

So this was a first, and I loved it. Great dish.

The base is Israeli couscous, which is a pearl-shaped pasta. That gets hooked up with tomato sauce, pine nuts, currants and caperberries.

The two minutes in the title presumes your couscous is already cooked, but I'm willing to presume that. Once everything is mixed and heated up, throw in the calamari and get a spoon.

Up next: Not sure again. Either New York or tortellini.

Sunday dinner

2011-05-23T01:51:00.002-04:00

I talk to my parents on a Saturday night to determine where we'll meet for lunch the next day with my grandmother. I'm thinking that I'm not going to get to cook anything this weekend. So then the idea that they would come over to our house comes up. Problem solved.

But new problem started. What dishes can I acquire the ingredients for with minimal shopping. I have about 15 hours, and will be sleeping for most of that time.

I target two antipasto, one of which will become a main with the addition of steak, and a dessert.

Gulf shrimp and mahogany clams: Gulf shrimp are pretty easy to come by here, so that was no problem. My fish store didn't have mahogany clams, probably because they seem to come from New England, and since we are down here where there are plenty of Gulf shrimp, we have Florida clams. That seemed the way to go here.

Actually, the hardest thing to get was the purple basil that is shredded over the dish as a garnish. None of my markets carried it, and neither did Home Depot. But I stopped in at Dolin's Garden Center on the way home, and they had some plants. I needed 10 leaves, but had to spring for the whole plant. The price of authenticity.

Saute, steam, serve. Simple as that. It was impressive how much clam flavor got into the wine-and-oil broth. And the dish looked as good as it tasted. Will make this again.

Cool-roasted shiitake: The only ingredients for this dish that I didn't already have in the house were the mushrooms and some sage leaves. Neither of those were hard to find. The mushrooms get tossed in oil and garlic, roasted, then tossed with an anchovy vinaigrette. Grill some onions (or broil, in the event you haven't replaced your recently deceased grill yet) and dress with basil oil. Done.

Here's what the mushrooms and onions looked like:

I served the mushrooms with sliced skirt steak on top to make it more of a main. Here it is with the meat, and some olives:

Olive oil and rosemary cake: I didn't have to shop for anything for this. And I got the rosemary from plants in our yard.

Actually, the hardest thing was the fruit to accompany. We are only about 20 miles from Plant City, where they are somewhat famous for strawberries, and it was still strawberry season there. But I went to three stores, and every strawberry I saw was from California. For a previous dish, I had gotten organic Plant City berries from Whole Foods, but I didn't have time to drive there. But I was adamant that I wasn't buying California strawberries during Florida strawberry season. It wasn't even about regional pride, just common sense. So I stopped at a produce stand on the way home, determined to get whatever fruit looked good. They had Plant City strawberries. Not organic, but they looked and tasted fine.

Why did that part have to be hard?

Up next: Not sure yet, but a fun one is coming soon

updates: garden and guanciale

2011-05-19T01:23:00.005-04:00

I've done everything possible to kill all the plants I had growing for recipes for this project. And, I had a degree of success.

It wasn't all my fault. I set up the boxes in what I felt was the place that would get the most sun, because I've heard that can be quite important in growing things. That was in the front courtyard of our house. But the sun wasn't great there.

Then a tornado hit our neighborhood. It didn't do any damage to our house, or even knock over my planters, but it rained pine debris all over, and damaged a lot of the plants.

So I moved the boxes to a different spot, and put them up on racks that I made of pvc. I glued them together and everything. But one of them collapsed. Surprisingly little damage was done to the actual plants, but I had to replant several of the boxes.

Then I moved them to their current location, which seems to get a ton of sun. And I elevated them on a system of pavers and 2x12s. And I added a drip irrigation system.

Things started looking up at that point. The greens I'm growing -- escarole and dandelions -- have taken off. In fact, here is a photo of the escarole in the planter:

And here it is in the pan, with some roasted shallot:

This dish was a contorni, and I served it with a steak. I don't love bitter greens, so this wasn't my favorite. But, um, I grew it. Pretty freaking cool.

(Technically, for the rest of the book, I need exactly three escarole leaves. Anyone want some escarole?)

The tomatoes are doing pretty well. I have two kinds going, sungold and yellow teardrop. I started out with about a dozen of each kind, and I have them whittled down to six of each in EarthBoxes. The rest either withered or are in other parts of the yard, and some of those are doing fine, too.

But so far there are tomatoes on the vines of almost all the sungolds (as pictured at the top), so I hope to get some of those soon. And the teardrops are all blooming, so still holding out hope for them.

Speaking of hope, remember this photo?

Yeah, well, that was a sweet pea, back in March, and I was growing them for two dishes I'm looking forward to. The week before we left for vacation, they looked like this:

There were probably some actual peas in there. But no where near the 12 ounces I needed for one dish, or a pound for the other. So I set up an automatic drip system and left confident that the peas would go crazy while I was gone.

This is what I came home to find:

I know I started them too late, but I figured it was worth a try. I'm going to give it another shot in late fall, maybe. Sigh.

I also have a box of herbs, and they aren't doing great. My basil, in particular, looks bad. And I never had trouble with basil before. Weird.

I've also been curing my Mangalitsa jowl for guanciale, and I think it's ready. Here's what it looks like now:

Before I use it in recipes (I think there are two or three in the book that call for it), I'll probably try it by itself this week. But it looks pretty good so far, I think.

Up next: A Sunday dinner

Asparagus and ricotta ravioli

2011-05-09T01:21:00.001-04:00

More asparagus! I was in Miami and knew I wanted to cook something as soon as I got home. I checked out the farmers markets there as we were about to head north, and was underwhelmed.

But I was committed.

So I popped into Whole Foods and found nice asparagus and decided that I would break out the pasta roller.

I first made Mario's pasta recipe a few years ago, and since I hadn't made much pasta, I assumed I did something wrong when it didn't come out right. But I'm usually pretty honest with myself on such issues, and I felt confident I hadn't screwed up anything. So before making it this time, I studied the recipe, looking for what could have gone wrong. And I hit upon a variable:

Four eggs.

The recipe calls for four eggs. My pasta dough was really hard and didn't want to roll. It needed more moisture. So, my theory was that Mario's eggs were bigger than mine. Believe me, I tried to find a different way to write that sentence, but that's just the way it's going to have to go into the permanent record.

So this time, I tried six eggs. Smooth as silk.

(I have since read, in the book Heat, that the recipe they use in the restaurant calls for eight yolks. I made all-yolk pasta once, from a Thomas Keller recipe, and I really didn't love it. It was fragile to roll, and tasted a bit like strands of souffle. I mean, it was good. I'd have it again. But it was a pain and not really worth the effort.)

So, I should probably just do a separate post on the pasta, but here's what happens:

Start with a mound of flour and form a well.

Add four eggs, or maybe six, and put them in the well. The walls of flour will act like a bowl. Start beating the eggs.

When the eggs are beaten, start incorporating flour from the mound into the eggs. This goes really well for about 10 seconds.

Then start chasing the eggs around the board, trying to recapture them in some modified form of flour mound after a wall breaks.

You'll have to excuse the fact that I have no photos of this happening. I was busy recapturing the eggs that were running around the board.

Eventually, all the eggs and flour will come together, and you knead it a little. Then let it rest. Or maybe you let you rest. That actually makes some sense at that point.

At this point, it is very easy to take its photo.

After it rests, it goes through the roller until long sheets are formed. Since I was making ravioli, I didn't have to cut the pasta. Woohoo.

It is hard to tell the scale from this photo, but I would estimate that this sheet of pasta is 17 miles long.

The filling is ricotta mixed with some blanched asparagus stalks.

A spoonful goes onto the pasta at regular intervals.

Then the pasta gets folded over.

Then it gets cut and sealed.

It's true, mine are not meticulous and beautiful. Oh well.

From there, the ravioli take a quick bath in boiling water, then get sauteed in butter with the tips of the asparagus. Actually, pretty easy. And I can't wait to make more pasta.

Up next: garden update

asparagus vinaigrette with black pepper pecorino zabaglione

2011-05-05T01:19:00.003-04:00

Pretty easy one. I saw good looking asparagus at the market and knew this dish was out there, so grabbed them.

Looking at the photo in the book, I thought the sauce on the asparagus was going to be mayonnaise-y, even after I saw that it said "zabaglione" in the name.

But it isn't mayo, which is a combination of oil and eggs. This is combination of eggs and whipped cream. It's a custard. Flavored with Marsala.

Super simple, but the quick sherry vinaigrette and the zabaglione both made the asparagus better. And it was good to start.

Even if it wasn't mayo, there was some leftover, and for several days, it ended up on sandwiches I made.

Up next: asparagus and ricotta ravioli

bonus: nutella cookies

2011-05-02T10:08:00.003-04:00

This isn't from the book. I made these up. But these cookies certainly fit the theme of the Babbo book, and there are cookies not unlike this in there. I keep a ziploc full of these, unbaked, at all times if possible.

This was what we had at the end of the meal that has been the subject of the past five posts. Since its my recipe, I can post it here.

Nutella cookies

3/4 cup unsalted butter
4 cups dark chocolate chips
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup Nutella chocolate-hazelnut spread, refrigerated
1 cup hazelnuts, toasted and chopped

Melt butter in a saucepan. Over very low heat, add chocolate chips, stirring constantly until melted. Remove from heat and set aside.

In electric mixer, cream together eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla. Add chocolate. Sift the flour and baking powder together, then add that to the mix. Refrigerate dough for about an hour.

Take a spoonful of dough and roll it. It should be about the size golf ball. Stick a thumb in the ball to make an indention. Using two teaspoons, take a little of the chilled Nutella and put it in the cookie. Roll the cookie again to close it. (at this point, you can put them on a tray in the freezer, not touching each other, for a couple of hours, then transfer to a ziploc bag to bake later.)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Top with the chopped hazelnuts (if frozen, the cookies can go straight to the oven from the freezer, but wait until about half-way through the baking time to add the nuts.).

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes (13-15 if frozen). Cool on a wire rack.

Makes about 3 dozen.

strawberries and peaches with balsamic zabaglione

2011-04-29T01:30:00.004-04:00

There really wasn't anything hard about this. Other than cutting into a peach that was worth cutting into. I bought more peaches than I would have imagined I needed to feed the eight people at the table, but every time we opened one up, it looked nasty, all brown and totally unpeachy. We finally cut one that looked good, and made it work for the whole table. And it isn't impossible that the very best looking slice of peach ended up with the featured role in the photo above. Luckily, this was at the height of Plant City strawberry season, and they were pristine.

Also lucky: The vin santo syrup that is part of this recipe. It would have made anything taste better. And the balsamic zabaglione was really good.

So, basically, everything but the peaches. If I had waited for good peaches, the strawberries wouldn't have been good anymore. Maybe I'll make the vin santo syrup again when the peaches are in season.

Up next: bonus cookies.

osso buco

2011-04-25T00:17:00.005-04:00

I tried really hard to get veal shanks that originated somewhere around here.

This recipe calls for a whole shank, 3 to 4 pounds. I didn't expect to find those at a supermarket, and we don't really have real butchers around here, so I started out with two specialty purveyors I know. Both could get cut shanks. Neither could get whole.

I called a couple of ranches between here and Ocala. Most of them didn't deal in veal. One of them told me that their veal didn't have legs. Which, I mean, I've heard horror stories about veal, but I've never heard that.

Then one day I was in Whole Foods for something else, and figured I'd ask.

"Yeah, of course we have that. We cut them ourselves, but you can buy it whole if you want."

Glad I asked.

Whole Foods gets their veal from a consortium of ranchers in Wisconsin, so, so much for a local cow, but at that point I was committed. I read the mission statement of the consortium, and it said they are pastured, raised on mother's milk, antibiotic and hormone free. The calves, I mean. Not the consortium.

Anyway, since I was making this for eight, I got extra shanks, and that made this the most expensive dish in the book so far. Until I get to the stuff with truffles. Then all bets are off.

The dish was pretty easy. It started by putting the shanks in the biggest roasting pan that will fit in my oven.

Then I browned the shanks on the cooktop. Since I used a big roaster, I had to do it over two burners.

Then added the vegetables.

Then added wine, stock and tomato sauce.

Then put it in the oven and forgot about it for a couple of hours while I made everything else for the dinner.

At the last minute, made the gremolata to go over it. The photo at the top of the post is as it was taken to the table. Yes, a little sloppy again. I wasn't so much styling that night.

Also, made two contorni from the book to serve with this dish:

Polenta: Too easy to get its own post. I made it to the recipe. Sort of. I substituted grits for polenta. I buy stone-ground organic grits whenever we go to South Carolina. I love polenta, but I'll take these grits every time. Every. Time. The only other ingredients are water and mascarpone. I used those as directed.

And broccoli rabe: Boiled and shocked, then sauteed with some anchovy. Just fine.

I have to say, going with the whole shanks is really cool. The cut shanks are nice for individual presentation, but the whole shanks, served family style, was pretty primal. Especially when everyone started looking for tools to use to extract marrow.

Not naming names.

Up next: strawberries and peaches with balsamic zabaglione

bavette

2011-04-18T10:06:00.005-04:00

Well, except for the octopus and the pasta, getting everything for this dish was easy.

The octopus was sort of easy. Almost. This dish calls for a pound of baby octopus. I was doubling the recipe for a dinner party, so I needed two pounds. I went to IC Sharks and saw that they had baby octopus right in the case. I told the lady that I needed two pounds, and she pointed me to the freezer case, because they didn't have two pounds thawed. Not a problem, it'll thaw fast, and it wasn't like any octopus I was going to buy hadn't been in the deep freeze at some point, anyway.

So I go to the freezer and grab two plastic bags, each purportedly holding one pound of baby octopus.

Purportedly.

It was just a big ball of purple at that point, so there was no reason to presume that there weren't several teeny octopi in there, waiting to be thawed. When I got home, I put them in some water to thaw them quickly. The more they thawed, the more I realized one thing: There was only one octopus in each bag.

And I can't believe I didn't take a photo of the thawed octopus.

The recipe had a contingency for a larger octopus, so I dealt with it, but I was sort of disappointed. The photo in the book looks really cool with the little octopus on top of the pasta. Sigh.

Also, the pasta.

I looked a lot of places and couldn't find any stinking bavette. The descriptions made it sound like it was basically linguine, possibly a bit thinner. If I had had more time, I would have made my own linguine, possibly a little thinner, but I had no time. So I stopped in at Mazzaro's and bought some fresh linguine. Sigh II.

Cooking the bigger octo meant cooking it a little longer. The recipe calls for it to be boiled in water with a little vinegar and a wine cork (something about enzymes). I used a cork from a bottle of 2008 La Mozza, but I'm sure that any cork would suffice.

(Note: Don't use any of you favorite, souvenir wine corks in this recipe. It gets all purple and bloated. Unless you want your favorite souvenir wine cork to get purple and bloated. In which case, this is how you want to do it. Or am I the only one with souvenir wine corks? If so, nevermind.)

The sauce went together with basic tomato sauce and jalapeno pesto.

This was my first time making octopus, and since I was a little off the reservation in terms of the recipe, I wasn't sure how to cut it for serving. I knew you can eat the legs, so I cut those off and threw them in the pan. I wasn't as sure about the body. I felt like I've heard there is something you have to take off, and I had no time to research, and no one knew. So we just at the legs.

And they were delicious. The whole dish was. Truthfully, the two octopus dishes in the book were things that I was planning on just sort of getting through, but I liked this a lot. Enough that I might try to make it again.

With baby octopus. And bavette.

Here is the final dish. I didn't lead with this photo because the plate is a little sloppy. This was a middle course of a big night, and i must have gotten sloppy. That and I was disappointed that I couldn't replicate the photo in the book because I didn't have baby octopi. Sigh III.

Up next: osso buco

goat cheese truffles

2011-04-13T10:49:00.000-04:00

So, I did decide to make my own goat cheese. It is way easier that making prosciutto.

The recipe calls for goat cheese from the store, and specifies a preference for Coach Farm. I found Coach Farm goat cheese at a store in Miami. But they only had little things that were like 2 ounces. The recipe called for 2 cups, and I was planning to double the recipe. And that 2 ounce package was like $11. A little quick math, and I figured that 4 cups was going to cost, like, a bajillion dollars, and that was assuming the even HAD that much back in the safe, or where ever they were keeping quantities more than 2 ounces. Plus, I didn't marry into the Coach Farm family, so I sought options.

There is a woman that sells goat cheese at the Saturday Morning Market. She makes it from milk she gets from her very own goats. My initial plan was to get the cheese from her, because that sounded cool. But she told me her goats weren't giving her enough milk to make cheese for now, and she told me why, and it had to do with bodily processes that I totally know are related to milk and everything, but sometimes just don't want to think about them relative to beautiful goat cheese truffles. I can be like that.

So I went to Whole Foods and bought goat milk. I read instructions on making goat cheese on the Internet, and it all seemed pretty simple: you heat milk to somewhere between 180 and 185 degrees, add some lemon juice, stir and strain. The thing I couldn't find in any Internet-based recipe was the yield. Literally, the recipe would say, "Heat a quart of milk. Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Stir. Strain. You have cheese."

"HOW MUCH!?!?!?!?!?" I would yell at the Internet. But it never answered. So I bought a gallon of goat milk and hoped for the best.

I heated the milk. I added the lemon juice. I stirred. I strained it, then I wrapped it in cheese cloth and hung it in the refrigerator to drain overnight. The next three photos totally document that process:

Dear Internet, the yield on one gallon of goat milk is roughly 3 cups of goat cheese.

I tasted it the next morning. It was fine, but not great. Kind of bland. I added more lemon juice and some salt, and suddenly it tasted a lot like goat cheese. I think if i had let it set a few days, it might have developed more flavor on its own. So I sort of cheated.

At first I was kind of annoyed that there wasn't enough. Then I just decided that it was enough, and the truffles would be made such that however much cheese there was there would become the number of truffles I needed. I tasked Jeremy with portioning out 30 mini-balls of cheese. Here are his hands:

The cheese balls are rolled in different coatings to make them all pretty and tasty. The first is poppy seeds. I had those already. The second is pimenton (Spanish paprika). I had that already. And the third is fennel pollen, which is a cool ingredient that I had been searching for for years without finding it nor knowing what i would do with it if i did. But last October, I was in Napa, Calif., and went to the Oxbow Market. There was a spice shop there, and they had fennel pollen. I bought about $5 worth, which, when measured out, is visible, but just barely. I had no idea what I was going to use it for at the time. But now, I needed fennel pollen. And I had it.

I can't believe i did not shoot video of the rolling process. it was SO exciting.

The plate goes together with some blanched arugula and bell pepper tossed in sherry vinegar. Then each truffle gets a little round of toast (MORE TOASTING!). In the photo in the book, the toast rounds are standing up on end in a really cool composition with the truffles. I couldn't make that happen. So mine looked exactly like they do in the picture here. Because, well, this was them.

Postscript: one of the reasons I wanted to make my own goat cheese was because I figured it would be cheaper. I crunched the numbers, and it really wasn't. I probably would have paid about the same for that amount of goat cheese as I did for the gallon of goat milk at Whole Foods. Now, I have seen Internet ads for local goat farmers who sell milk for about half the price i paid at Whole Foods. But for this night, I didn't have time to track them down. Maybe I will and I'll try it again and see if it makes for better cheese.

And we totally miscounted. So there were leftovers:

Up next: bavette

top chef all stars, postscript

2011-04-10T22:44:00.002-04:00

I went back and looked at my preseason predictions for Top Chef: All-Stars, and have determined that I suck at predicting.

My biggest success was that I felt pretty good about Richard winning. I didn't come out and say he would, but he was my favorite, and he won, so I'm taking all the credit for that.

My biggest miss was probably Antonia. I had her among the first six out, and she made the final three. I don't know what to say. I didn't remember her at all. Looking back, I do remember her from season four now, but I didn't when this season started. I remember that Lisa was the last to be chosen in the elimination before the finale, and that it was a bombshell upset because the person that was eliminated was largely considered superior. But I didn't know who that was. It was Antonia.

So, I said the first six to be eliminated would be Antonia, Stephen, Elia, Spike and both Dales.

It was actually Elia, Jen, Stephen, Dale L, Spike and Casey. So I got four right, and missed the two stunners (literally and figuratively), Casey and Jen.

My prediction for the middle six to be eliminated was Marcel, Angelo, Mike, Fabio, Carla and Jamie.

As it happened, it was Tiffani, Jamie, Marcel, Tre, Fabio and Angelo. So, actually, I got four right again, missing only Tiffani and Tre. I was trying to will Tre into the finale, because I just like him. Looking back, I'm sort of stunned I got Angelo right, because I sort of can't believe he didn't make it until the end. Weird.

For the final six, the little mistakes I made in the first two sections compounded. I had predicted Richard, Jennifer, Casey, Tre, Tiffani and Tiffany. So I only got two right (Richard and Tiffany). But, hey, one was the winner. I probably used poor logic on Tiffani. If I was predicting again, I would still expect Jen to be in the final, and her exit was one of the weirder moment in the series, so I don't feel bad about that one. I underestimate Carla, admittedly. And Mike surprised me. He made it reasonably deep in what was probably the strongest season, but I wouldn't have guessed he would make it as far as he did here.

Anyway, couldn't be happier that Richard won. Can't wait to see what he does as a result.

I did start to think about who wasn't in the cast that probably should have been. (I presume the chefs I name here were probably asked and declined). Top omission was Kevin from season six. And Bryan from that season. Sam Talbot, who should have won season two. Lee Ann Wong from the first season, though she worked on the show for years after her appearance, so that might have been a conflict. Stefan from season five was supposed to be hot stuff, but glad they didn't inflict "Team Euro" on us again.

That said, I'll watch Top Chef Masters, but don't have high hopes for it. Sort of fatigued of Curtis Stone. And I am happy that I haven't heard anything about them bringing back Just Desserts for another season. If they do, hopefully there will be more cooking and less stupid, fabricated drama. That show was a mess.

prosciutto san daniele

2011-04-04T01:21:00.004-04:00

I decided not to make my own prosciutto San Daniele.

For a lot of reasons, really. First of all, it takes like two years. Who has that kind of time? In two years, I hope to have someone cooking through MY cookbook. OK, so, not really, but it's a long time.

Second, there is probably some specific kind of pig required. One that has a purple halo around its right ear in fall, or shoots glitter out of its tail. I could probably get a decent pig leg, but who knows?

Third, I'm not in Friuli, and that's where they make San Daniele. Location, location, location. What are those pigs eating? And I don't have an old barn to hang a pig leg in just they right atmospheric conditions. I read one time that Mario had imported a barrel of Friulian dirt and put it in a basement where he was making sausage. The thinking was, according to the story, having the northern Italian dirt would season the air.

I have no idea how that worked out.

But for my purposes, I just went down to Mazzaro's and asked for a half-pound of it, then made my way home.
The recipe also calls for winesap apples. Never seen them before. I thought it might be because I never looked. So I looked, but still didn't find any. Apparently they grow in Virginia and have a fairly short season in fall. Purple halos and sparkles may be involved. So there's a good chance I have never seen them. The research I did suggested that they were sweet and tart with a slight hint of wine flavor. Thus the name, I guess. So I took equal parts Granny Smith (tart) and Fuji (my favorite, and sweet), and sliced them and, since the recipe called for the apples to be cooked anyway, I cooked them in a little wine. That resulted in apples that tasted a lot like what I read winesap's should taste like.

I was also supposed to find black mustard seeds for this. After going to every store I know that might sell mustard seeds of any ethnicity, I could find none. So I went to the Internet and found that black mustard seeds and brown mustard seeds may very well be the same thing. Every store I went to had brown mustard seeds. So I got them at the store that I happened to be in when I discovered that they were both the same thing. Also, gas costs like $3.50 a gallon. Just seemed a relevant time to mention that.

I made this to be the passed appetizer at a dinner party for 10. I made the marmellata. Which is cooking down apples a little, then adding dry mustard and mustard seeds. My instinct told me to peel the apples, but the recipe did not tell me to. So I didn't. I sort of wish I had, because the mixture was really nice and I thought the peels detracted from the texture a little. Shrug.

It doesn't look pretty, but it was delicious. Sweet and hot.

Other than that, all that was left was toasting bread and assembly. I say "toasting bread" like its easy, but the truth is, around here it's sort of a feat. We toast under the broiler, and the broiler in our oven is kind of schitzo. Its the only oven I've ever seen that won't let you broil with the door open. And when I broil with the door closed, fire often ensues. But we survived.

The recipe describes a plated presentation, but the photo in the book makes it look sort of like a bruschetta thing, and that fit my plan better, so we did that. Spread a little apple-mustard on the toast, top with a slice of ham and some spinach, and you are declared a genius.

Up next: goat cheese truffles

snapper tartare

2011-03-26T13:47:00.006-04:00

I'm expecting to create some opportunity for adventure with this project, and since snapper is available right off the shores here, I considered going out and catching it myself.
But then I saw all the citrus that was in this dish, and decided I would make this post about the acquisition of it. Which, for the most part, didn't involve putting on shoes.

Here is a picture of a grapefruit tree.

There are grapefruit in this dish. There is a grapefruit tree in my backyard, about 30 feet from my kitchen. They are pink grapefruit. We don't so much eat grapefruit, unfortunately. Unfortunate because this tree produces probably a couple hundred pounds of it a year. So whenever I see a recipe for something that might include grapefruit, I at least consider making it. So getting the grapefruit required for this dish was easy.

Here is a picture of a lemon tree.

I have been trying to grow Meyer lemon trees since we moved to Clearwater 11 years ago. I always have one or two going. Usually they die without ever giving any fruit. In 11 years, I have gotten two usable fruits from a collective four or five trees.

This tree is doing well, and is growing. So I'm hopeful. But it doesn't have any fruit on it. It was in bloom a couple weeks ago, and the backyard smelled great while it was. But now the blooms are all spent, and I don't see where any fruit has set. Grrrrr. So I got the lemons for this dish at the farmers market.

Here is a photo of an orange tree.

Note the fence between me and it. That's because it is in my neighbor's backyard. So to get the oranges for this dish, I waited for the dark of night, scaled the fence, picked the oranges and ran back to my house.

Not really. Actually, I picked a half-dozen grapefruit, walked next door, knocked and offered to trade the grapefruit for a couple oranges. They don't eat grapefruit either, but told me to go ahead back and take whatever I needed. It was such an easy transaction that I wished my neighbor had a bearing lemon tree.

Enough with the citrus. Here is a photo of a red snapper.

This red snapper was in the counter at IC Sharks, which has become my go-to fish place. I tried to go to a couple of the well-known, established places around here, and each time was stunned by the smell when I walked in. They smell like fish. A good fish store shouldn't. When I walked into IC Sharks, it smelled like there was fish smoking in the back. That is a completely acceptable smell.

So this isn't the fish I bought, because they already had filets cut in the case. I told the woman behind the counter that I needed a really, really fresh piece of fish because I was going to be serving it raw. She looked at me like I had just said that her kid was ugly. And, like, her favorite kid. "It was on the boat a couple of hours ago," she said. I took a whiff. It smelled like nothing. Exactly as it should. She took the skin off the filet for me, and I went home. Maybe next time I'll go fishing.

The rest of the produce came from the farmers market.

Putting this dish together was embarrassingly easy. A red pepper jus was just a matter of blending some peppers and straining. A jalapeno salsa requires a couple of seconds in the food processor. The citrus has to be segmented and juiced. The fish was diced in two minutes. The asparagus was on the grill for a few minutes to get a char.

Loved this dish. The key is the fish (as much as I tried to make it about the citrus). I got a great piece of fish, and it was totally worth it. It was like Italian sashimi.

Up next: san daniele, or dinner party, part I

bonus: charcuterie

2011-03-20T21:56:00.007-04:00

Technically, this won't be a Babbo post, though it sort of is. There are a couple of recipes in the book that call for guanciale, which is cured jowl meat. There is a recipe in the Babbo book for guanciale, but here is the issue:

The recipe in the book is for a standard jowl, which would be about 2 pounds. I have been angling for awhile to get my hands on some Mangalitsa jowl. I could tell you all about what a Mangalitsa is, but I would be re-writing the information from the Heath Putnam Farms website, so I'll just link to them if you want to know why they are special.

Anyway, through Culinary Classics in Orlando, I got access to Mangalitsa jowl from Pasture Prime Farms, near Ocala. Here is how my e-mail conversation with Dave from Culinary Classics went, edited of nonessential material, but complete in context:

Him: Jim, I have some Mangalitsa jowl that I can send you at a good price.

Me: Ok, I'll take whatever the minimum order is. When can I give you payment info?

Before I got a reply to that, I came home to find a huge box on my doorstep. I had no idea what it even might be until I saw the return address.

Me: No freaking way!

The box was far too big for what I had ordered, or so I thought. I opened the box and saw a piece of meat that I didn't even understand. I thought it was a belly. A whole belly.

Me: I didn't order a belly.

I looked closer. It wasn't shaped like a belly. There was a label. It said it was a hog jowl. And it said its weight.

Keep in mind, one pound is a reasonable weight, and two is normal. Three is not crazy.

This one went to 11. And a half.

I'm not familiar enough with the anatomy of a pig to know how that happens, and I told Dave that I was confused and assume that the pig this came from must have weighed 1,000 pounds.

Him: It was 280 pounds hanging weight. They are all jowl.

Okay, then.

So I took to Twitter and asked Michael Ruhlman, who wrote a book on curing meat, if I could reasonably turn this T-rex jowl into guanciale. He responded almost immediately:

Him: "Not can. Must."

Marching orders accepted. After I asked a follow-up question regarding adjusting the recipe, I have started the process.

The first thing I did was separate the lobes and for now I'm only curing the smaller one. Still, that smaller lobe is almost 4.5 pounds.

Then I trimmed off the skin.

Then I mixed salt, sugar (I usually only keep brown sugars in the house, and this is demerara) and pink salt.

Then I put the jowl in a bag with some of the salt mix, and now that bag resides in the bottom of my fridge for a week. At that point, it will get a good rinse, then hang to dry for several weeks.

Then we'll start cooking.

some staples

2011-03-17T11:10:00.003-04:00

This is a short post, because there wasn't any drama in the acquisition of ingredients.

I made preserved lemons. A couple of cuts, some salt and some juice. the recipe says to put in a jar, but I tried that and it was going to take too much salt to cover everything, so I put them in a zip bag. I put them in the bottom of the fridge, and in a month, I plan to look like a genius.

I made the basic tomato sauce. I looked at the recipe for this, and was like, well, yeah, tomato sauce. Yawn. It isn't a lot of ingredients, and I was expecting really basic tomato sauce. But when it was done, it was really good. Like, stunningly. I suspect it was partly because I started with San Marzano tomatoes, and partly because it reduced a good bit, but I can't wait to use that stuff.

I made brown chicken stock. Actually, there was a little acquisition drama here. I asked the guy at Whole Foods if they had any chicken backs, because I didn't want to buy too much chicken to basically boil away. He said they did, and they were 69 cents a pound. The drama: I FOUND SOMETHING IN THE WHOLE FOODS MEAT DEPARTMENT THAT COST LESS THAN $1 PER POUND!!!!!!!!!! It felt like magic.

I used the backs and some drumsticks, as well as the herbs and aromatics. Then when it was done, I picked the meat off the bones and made chicken salad with it. It felt like it was free at that point. And it was good chicken salad.

Oh, and when it came time to freeze the stock and the tomato sauce, I learned something: The silicone cupcake pans that I bought way too many of a couple of years ago hold exactly one-half cup. So now I have them perfectly portioned in the freezer. And I am keeping December open so I can go collect my Nobel prize.

Up next: snapper tartare

planting stuff

2011-03-14T01:29:00.004-04:00

This photo represents the most ridiculous extreme ever in the world of mise en place.

In fact, I'm not even going to say what it is. But if all goes well, this will be a featured ingredient in a couple of dishes coming up from the Babbo cookbook.

I have five things growing right now, and plan to grow at least three more things for in the fall. I haven't had much luck in growing things in the past, so I'm keeping my optimism in check. But according to the seed packet, we might be able to have them by mid April.

I got the seeds through mail order from a place in Maine. Last fall when I was in Napa, Calif., I met Aaron at the garden of the French Laundry, and he told me about Johnny's Seed in Maine. Here is my personal policy: If someone associated with the French Laundry makes a food-related suggestion to me, I follow it. In fact, Aaron also suggested a place for dinner that night near our hotel in Santa Rosa. (Rosso Pizzeria and Wine Bar, in case you're wondering. And it was a great suggestion.)

I started the seeds about a month ago. Here is what they looked like after a week …

And after two weeks, I transplanted them into Earthboxes …

I also have a planter of herbs going.

I have thyme on the right and oregano on the left. Those I bought as plants from Home Depot because I figured I needed them as soon as possible. Thyme and oregano seemed to be the herbs called for most in the book, so I figured growing my own made more sense than constantly buying it. There's also basil in there, just because I like basil.

Caveat: The oregano is Greek and the thyme was German. If there are Italian-specific versions of those things, my Home Depot didn't have them. Oh, well.

There is also some rosemary called for in the book. But we have one of those in the front yard that I hit all the time.

We'll check in with the progress of the plants every now and then. Now I just have to figure out how to keep the raccoons away.

We'll check in on the plants again along the way including if they totally fail. And admit it, that would be more fun. Eventually I'll even tell you what they all are.

Up next: staples

grilled lamb chops scottaditi with broccoli rabe pesto

2011-03-07T07:15:00.004-05:00

OK, let's just get this out of the way, and I won't have to spend the rest of the post fighting it …

Nice rack.

Believe me, if we hadn't done that, there would have been double entendres buried through the rest of this post.

Moving on.

The first thing I did was take the lamb and break it down into chops, mostly so I could take this picture …

… but also because I needed chops for the dish.

I like lamb chops. Don't have them often, but I never had a doubt these would be good. They were rubbed with lemon zest and mint before the grilling, and that sounded like a fine idea.

My doubts crept in with the pesto. I've only had broccoli rabe a couple of times. Mostly because I never wanted it again after the couple times I had it. So I picked up a … whatever unit of measure broccoli rabe comes in at Worden Farms' stand at Saturday Morning Market and hoped for the best.

The rabe is blanched and the pesto goes together with capers, anchovy, mustard and garlic, so there was reason for hope.

It all goes into a food processor looking like this ...

... and it comes out looking like this ...

The plate also got goat milk yogurt flavored with cumin, a sauce of red pepper and sherry vinegar -- yum -- and some parsley oil. So, it was beautiful.

The lamb chops were as good as I expected them to be, and the pesto was spectacular. I don't know if I got the best specimen of broccoli rabe ever, or if something magical happens at Worden Farms, but it wasn't bitter at all, just extremely bright and vibrant, with highlights from all the strong flavors in it. I knew I wouldn't use all the pesto on the plates, and before trying it, wondered what I would do with the leftovers. Mainly, I assumed I would let it sit in the fridge for a few days before I threw it out. Instead, it ended up on pasta, the next night.

Epilogue: This was the last session for my gas grill. I tried to clean it the next morning, and things just started disintegrating under the pressure of the brush. It was 3 years old.
Jeremy Bowers is arranging a proper memorial.

I have decided to take a little time to work through my grief before replacing it. Partly because of the intense emotions involved, partly because our pool and patio are being renovated, and partly because I am about to go to the International Housewares show in Chicago, and suspect I may find something awesome there. But mostly the grief thing.

Up next: gardening, part I

cardoon gratinato

2011-03-04T07:15:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of things in this book that I don't know where I'm going to get. Which, ultimately, will be part of the fun. But it was really cool that with the first two dishes I made, I got to check two of the ingredients that concerned me off.

I have seen cardoons before, but only once or twice. I saw them at the Fresh Market once, and I felt like it was in the fall of whatever year I saw them. So I was initially penciling this and two other cardoon dishes in for later in the year.

But I heard that Tommy's produce stand in Clearwater often had them. So I gave them a call, and sure enough, they did. So much for a challenge.

I knew that they basically looked like an out of control celery plant, possibly with a bad attitude. When I got there, I felt like they weren't spectacular specimens of cardoon. But then I had to admit to myself, I had no idea what they should look like. So maybe these were great. They were light green, with a few brown spots. But not too bad. By then, again, I was invested, so I got them and came home.

I peeled them and trimmed them, then cut them into what amounted to a rough julienne, and boiled them for 45 minutes.

The cooked cardoons -- which is fun to say -- go into a casserole in alternating layers with heavy cream and parmigiano-reggiano cheese, then into the oven for 20 minutes.

While all that is happening, there is a little artichoke-radicchio salad to go with the gratinato. And sort of like the fennel in the last post, artichokes are something I always love when I have them at a restaurant, but I've never cared to try to deal with them myself, other than out of a can. They just seemed like so much work.

So, this recipe doesn't call for artichokes from a can. (In fact, off the top of my head, I think the only thing in the book that calls for something out of a can is a vinaigrette that calls for canned truffles. And I just saw what a can of those costs. Yikes.) Here, I took baby artichokes and trimmed and quartered them, then put them in a skillet and covered with oil that is infused with mint and red pepper flakes (above). Here's how hard this dish is: You bring the oil to a boil, then turn off the burner and walk away. The artichokes cook in the cooling oil. To spectacular effect.

Like the fennel, I will do this again. And again. And again. I see that these artichokes are involved in a number of dishes in the book. This makes me happy.

So the gratinato comes out of the oven, and is plated with a little artichoke tossed with some shredded radicchio. Mine didn't come out quite as cohesively as it appeared to in the photo in the book. It is quickly apparent why the cardoons are paired with the artichoke. They are definitely similar in flavor. The cardoon was soft and nutty. Pam said it was a little bitter, but I didn't get that. The cheese also has a nuttiness, and it all worked. Well, I don't love radicchio, so that part wasn't great. But there wasn't much of it.

So, so far, we are two recipes in, and I have learned to gut a fish, roasted a whole fish, figured out how to make fennel that I like, and ditto with artichokes. If I get nothing else out of this project, I feel good about that.

Up next: Grilled lamb chops scottaditi

whole roasted branzino

2011-03-01T09:32:00.008-05:00

"Do you have anything that's the equivalent of branzino?"

I thought it was a reasonable question. I was at the farmers market in Sarasota, and the fresh fish vendor had a list of available species behind him. With fish, often times the same fish can be called different things in different parts of the world, so I figured it was worth a shot.

"That's the same thing as swai," the guy tells me. "It's a trash fish they farm in Asia. We don't carry anything like that."

I know he is wrong, but I smile, say thanks, and walk away.

He is right about swai being a trash fish they farm in Asia. Well, it's a catfish, anyway. Maybe "trash" is a little pejorative. But branzino is a small sea bass, mostly from the Mediterranean. I didn't know if maybe there was an equivalent elsewhere, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a catfish.

At this point, the branzino dish was just on the list of dishes I might make, because I had to figure out what I could get first. So I went into Whole Foods, which is right next to the farmers market, and saw that they had bronzini. Logic and Wikipedia told me that that was the same as branzino. But they only had one. sigh. I needed at least two. So I called the Tampa Whole Foods, which had two, and I went there to pick them up.

When I got there, they were already bagged and waiting for me. I was a little wary of this, because it's fish, and I want to see it before I buy it. But I figured, what am I going to do at this point? Not buy it? I was committed to the dish, and I've never had anything but good luck with fish at this Whole Foods. So I asked the clerk if the fish was cleaned, he said yes, and I bought the rest of the ingredients.

I got home, and apparently "cleaned" meant something entirely different to the Whole Foods guy than it did to me. See, I was expecting no guts. This was a bad expectation. Apparently, cleaned just means descaled. I wanted "cleaned and gutted." Now I know.

What this all means, is that I got to learn how to gut a fish. Turns out, there is nothing to it. One big pass with the knife, then just be OK with sliding your fingers through a bunch of slimy bits, and it's all over.

From there, it was easy. I washed my hands. Three times. Sliced up the fennel, olives and herbs, and put them in the cavity of the fish, where all the guts had just been.

I made the lemon jam that goes along with it, but I think all my ratios were off, because I was using some really big Meyer lemons, and the skin was sort of bitter. I'm looking forward to trying to make the jam again. It didn't come out great.

What did come out great was the braised fennel. I love fennel in restaurants, but whenever i make it at home, not so much. But this was really easy. Just braise in white wine, then saute with some sugar. It was fantastic.

The fish was good. Not my favorite fish dish ever, but decent. Not sure I got great fish, because the meat was a little soft. Or maybe that's just how branzino is. It was fine. We finished the fish.

Up next: cardoon gratinato

the beginning

2011-02-23T01:24:00.013-05:00

I didn't really need a new hobby, but this seemed like fun.

I like to blog, but I have not been good at it. I like to think I have excuses. My first blogs were based on places we ate while traveling, and we don't travel that much, so I was sporadic. Then I started adding posts about cooking, and that didn't always work because I cook off the cuff so much that by the time I'm done, I often don't know what I did. Then my job started to entail writing about most of the things that I blogged about, and it started getting a little weird.

So, I needed something to focus on. And I decided to cook through a cookbook. I've seen friends do it, liked the results, and I thought it sounded like fun. I started reading cookbooks with an eye toward choosing one to cook through, and I picked three finalists: Live to Cook, by Michael Symon; Il Viaggio di Vetri, by Marc Vetri; and Momofuku, by David Chang. The thing they all had in common was they were all by chefs whose restaurants I had been to and loved, they all were of cuisines that were among my favorites, and they all had challenging elements. So then I had to pick one.

So, after much consideration, I picked … the Babbo cookbook, by Mario Batali.

Wait. How did that happen?

Well, I had been trying to figure out what to do with a bag of beef cheeks that was in the freezer. Oh, don't tell me you don't have a three-pound block of frozen beef cheeks sitting in your freezer. You know how it is. Anyway, I knew one of the signature dishes at Babbo was a beef cheek ravioli. I like ravioli. So I grabbed the Babbo cookbook off the shelf to see if it was in there. It was. The recipe looked kind of hard. So I started to put it away, then decided to look closer. I was capable of doing all the steps, it was just that there were a lot of them, and there were ingredients that would be hard to get. Harder than beef cheeks, which weren't easy. Then I looked at the other recipes, and thought the same thing about most of them.

So, why not do all of them?

That way, I can sort of feel like I'm eating at Babbo all the time, even though I live a thousand miles away. Sounded like a good idea.

The way I see it, there will be three major challenges:

Sourcing. There are going to be ingredients that are hard for me to get. We don't have proper butcher shops around here. Our seafood is excellent, but it is intensely regional and doesn't necessarily match that of New York. We have a long growing season, but for the most part, that translates into citrus, corn and tomatoes. I have plans to attack each of those issues. I'm going to take some pains to not get things the easy way. I mean, if I can get it easily, I will. But I'm planning on growing some of the things I need. And going out of my way to get good ingredients, not just whatever I can find. And I may get wet. We'll talk about that more as the dishes come up.

Timing. To get through the book in a reasonable time frame, I'll need to know when I can cook things as they relate to when things are available. Plus, when I make a sauce or something that goes in more than one dish, I'll want to do all those at the same time, so I don't end up making parsley oil -- or whatever -- a bunch of times. And when I go out and get lamb's tongue, I might as well do all the dishes that call for lamb's tongue, so I don't have to source lamb's tongue more than once.

Discipline. I suck at discipline. But there are about 110 main and side dishes in the book, plus associated sauces and drinks and desserts. I'm not setting a deadline, but I figure if I do a main (fish, meat or pasta) and a side (antipasto or contorni) every week, plus any associated sauces along the way, and throw in drinks and desserts as extras on occasion, we're looking at about a year. That sounds reasonable. And it sounds like a deadline. A soft one, anyway. Also, I don't usually follow recipes, and learning to do that will require another kind of discipline.

So, I don't list the actual cooking as a challenge. That's a little bold, probably, because I'll be working with a lot of ingredients I've never considered eating, much less cooking. And while one of the reasons I chose Babbo was because it was the most challenging of Mario's books, the techniques are things I can do. I think. I mean, we'll see.

As I get started, I throw out there that most of these recipes are for four or eight people, and we only have two here. So some of you will be required to help us eat this stuff. And if you want a specific dish -- say the calf's brain ravioli, or one of the lamb's tongue dishes (there are two) -- you might want to reserve your spot early. I figure those are premium dates, like when the Yankees or Red Sox are in town.

Up first: Whole roasted branzino

top chef all stars

2010-12-01T11:35:00.003-05:00

last season of top chef was a dud. after tiffany got booted, i didn't care anymore. i might have just punted on the show, except that the new season that starts tonight is an all-star season, in which they are bringing back favorite non-champs from previous seasons. that's either going to be awesome or awful, and i am willing to bet awesome.

i was talking about the cast yesterday with jennifer decamp, and here is how i handicapped the field, using little more than my wishful thinking:

first six out: the first six weeks or so weeks of any top chef season is usually spent culling the field and setting up drama between contestants that will be going deep into the season. so we never really get to know the people that go out early. this season is different because we start out knowing all the contestants, and most already went deep into their season. so here are the ones that i think will be the first to be eliminated, in no particular order:

antonia, stephen, elia, spike and both dales. i remember antonia, but was stunned to go back and realize that she made it so deep into her season, because i remember almost nothing about her. anyone who watched season one remembers stephen, with a roll of the eyes. elia was good
but i just don't see her sticking in this crowd. it will be interesting to see if dale l has overcome his lack of confidence, and it seems unlikely that dale t has overcome his overabundance of it.

i feel confident that antonia and elia will be out early. i am less sure about the guys, because three are dramatic, instigating pot stirrers. which is how they made it deep in their respective seasons. dale l is not a pot stirrer, but he seemed legitimately good, so he could stick

the middle six: my guess at the middle tier of eliminations would be marcel, angelo, mike, fabio, carla and jamie. marcel was stephen 2.0 and the runner-up on what i think was the worst season (season 2). i could never figure out how carla made it past week 3 of her season, and she made it to the final. angelo may or may not have been amazing, i could never decide whether to believe the hype. it seemed too much. ditto fabio. i love jamie, so i hope i'm wrong there. mike, meh.

the final six: richard, jennifer, casey, tre, tiffani and tiffany. all were people i thought could have/should have won their seasons. richard was odds-on fave in his finale, and while i think that stephanie kicked butt in the final and deserved to win that one, i thought richard's biggest mistake came at judges' table, when he started talking about mistakes he made, then the judges started agreeing with him. they weren't saying anything bad about him until then. granted that could have all been editing, but still.

casey was in the weird season where they taped the finale in aspen, then did a live judges table in chicago who-knows-how-long later. so she spent the interim thinking she did fine, then learned that the judges didn't like it. that was a bizarre finale. (and here's praying they don't spend this season overdramatizing the situation between casey and carla, where casey was carla's sous chef in carla's finale. it was carla's fault. totally.)

tre was the earliest to be booted off in his season among the all-stars. he got kicked off during restaurant wars because he took too much responsibility. i still don't understand that one.

jennifer looked like she was going to be awesome in her season, tearing it up in the early episodes. then one episode she was sick, and it seemed to zap all her super powers or something. she limped into the finals, but never really seemed like she would win. my guess is she'll be strong here.

tom colicchio often mentions how much he liked tiffani from season 1, so i suspect she'll be strong. and tiffany's departure from last season was sort of stunning. she was the only person in the cast that i wanted to see win.

all that said, my two favorites are richard and casey. i'll be happy if either of them win.

so, we'll see. i'm probably totally wrong.

this week's review: paella!

2010-09-30T09:31:00.003-04:00

went to a place called tapas garden on the beach for this week's review. loved the paella, and was even able to sit outside, in september, without dying of heat stroke. here is the link.

i made paella a few weeks ago, and i think i liked mine better, but this was good. and they had some other interesting things going on.

is this thing still on?

2010-09-22T00:20:00.002-04:00

most of my blog posts seem to start with an excuse as to why it has been so long since my last blog post. but this time, its a really good one. i have another blog, one for work. and i have a new job, one that modestly overlaps with what i was doing here. which is good and bad. good because my job is now related to my hobby. bad because i'm now always doing it, and i am still trying to figure out where the divide is. like, is it a problem if i write a blog post on osteria in philadelphia, which i totally should have done and now am annoyed with myself because i didn't? or frasca in boulder, which, i mean, ditto. and then ajax in aspen was a different issue, because i was actually sort of doing work while i was in aspen. so can i post something that is quasi work-related on my personal blog?

if you didn't know, my job is to write about eating now, so writing about eating as a hobby is sort of a gray area. so i don't know.

anyway, i think i will start posting links to the stories i write for the paper here, in case anyone here sees it that isn't in our coverage area. and here is one i did this week about new gluten-free restaurants in the bay area.

momofuku ko, new york, april 12

2010-04-22T02:36:00.003-04:00

last fall, i got the momofuku cookbook. while i usually use cookbooks as jumping off points to get ideas on some weird thing i want to do, with this book, i find myself wanting to make everything, by the book. as it were.

the book chronicles the three new york restaurants of david chang. momofuku noodle bar, momofuku ssam bar and momofuku ko. i've been to noodle bar and ssam bar and loved them both. cooking out of the book has been an exercise both of replicating favorite dishes from those places and trying things i haven't had there, since i like 1,000 miles away and all.

but ko is different. ko has 12 seats. and no waiters. and a ton of buzz. unlike the other momofukus, it takes reservations. unlike the other momofukus, it doesn't take phone calls. getting in means winning an online lottery held every day at 10 a.m., a week before the day you want to go. by all indications, in the early days, this was an improbable lottery to win. but as time has passed, some of those seats are still available a full 35-40 seconds after they become available at 10 a.m. so if you want them, you can probably get them.

i did.

ko is a couple doors down from noodle bar. the first time i went to noodle bar, we walked past it three times before we found it. i was better armed with the actual address for ko, and managed to only walk past it once. it has a bit of a speakeasy quality to the outside. there is a window and a door, and they are covered in decorative armor. on the door, there is a small cutout with a peach logo (momofuku means "lucky peach." allegedly.) it even says "ko" on the door. barely. if you look close. and are previously aware that it might.

so i walked in with my pal wayne, and it was not unlike walking into my favorite book. it just so happens my favorite book is a cookbook.

all the seats are at an L-shaped bar, 10 down the length of the bar and 2 at the end. wayne and i scored the 2 seats at the end, which is like winning the lottery twice as far as i am concerned. dishes are prepared by the 3 chefs behind the bar and handed to the diners. there are 2 wait staff on the customer side of the bar to clear plates and deal with drinks. but that's it.

there are no choices to be made. there is no menu. you sit down, are asked if you have any allergies they need to know about, and then it starts. you don't see a menu to get an idea what's coming, and you don't get a menu afterward for posterity.

i was warned by my friend christine that they frown on you taking photos of the dishes. and while i often like to take photos, i wouldn't have here even if they were ok with it. it's sort of like you're sharing a table with 10 strangers, and i only take photos when i can be stealth. there was no being stealth here. so, that's why you get the one photo of the door.

so, the food. there is no menu, not even a printed copy of what you ate afterward. so this is all from memory, and could be wrong. an overview: i liked everything except on dish. we'll get to that one.

-- amuses: we sat down and almost immediately got four small starters. first was a tiny cube of cornbread with a translucently thin slice of pickled turnip on top. then a spoon with a littleneck clam and crispy buckwheat and black garlic. the clam was in a broth that i suspect was bacon dashi. then a togarashi-dusted chicharon. very spicy fried pig skin. finally a black pepper biscuit with mirin glaze. each thing came at you with a different kind of big flavor in a tiny bite.

-- first: sashimi of long island fluke. the raw fish came with very bright english peas and a salad of sea beans and rice pearls (think rice krispies, only better, with more crunch). this course was very subtle and understated after the amuses, and wayne said it was "nice to turn down the volum," which was a good way to put it.

-- second: beef carpaccio. never had carpaccio before, and now its like people are throwing it at me everywhere i go. this one came on a rectangular plate, and the paper-thin sheet of raw beef was slice to fit perfectly in the flat of the plate. it was dressed with quark cheese, horseradish, radish greens and rice chips, which are different than rice pearls, but similar in crunchy effect. this plate looked like a painting. makes me sad that i don't have a photo of it, because i would put it on my wall.

-- third: brioche toast. we get a bowl with a piece of toast in it. it is slathered with bone marrow. there are roasted pearl onions and wood sorrel in the bowl. then the chef pours a broth over it. it's a cheese broth, made of gruyere and comte cheeses. it was like the best cheese toast ever.

-- fourth: poached egg. one of the sorta famous dishes. a soft poached egg is split open on the plate and the opening is filled with hackleback caviar. on the side were tiny potato chips, and underneath was onion soubise. onion soubise is in the cookbook, and i kind of read over it because there didn't appear to be anything to it. there is something to it. i loved the whole dish, and i think it was because of the onion. it was like candy.

-- fifth: pasta. after i had this, i presumed nothing could overtake it as my favorite. we'll see how that turned out in a minute. it was hand-torn pasta on top of cubes of sausage made of chicken and snail. i dunno, but it was good. on top of the pasta were chips of crispy chicken skin. oh yeah. there was no mention of the sauce, so i asked. it was a reduced chicken stock. it was like butter.

-- sixth: skate. this one never really had a chance with me. skate is one of my least favorite fish. i always find it unpleasantly mealy. and if that wasn't enough, it was sitting on top of cauliflower, which is my least favorite food on the planet, i think. also under there were olives and fresh water chestnuts, both of which i like, but not enough to enjoy it. there was an almond milk foam there, too. in the pantheon of dishes combining some of my least favorite foods, this wasn't bad. i finished it. but i didn't love it.

-- seventh: foie. another of the famous dishes. we make a torchon of foie gras, which is sort of like making a smooth sausage of goose liver. we freeze it. then we put lychees, reisling gelee and pine nut brittle in a bowl and shave the frozen foie over it until all the other stuff is covered in a brownish snowdrift of liver. taking a spoonful and putting this in your mouth is sort of like a reese's experience on steroids. its like, about, eight great tastes that taste great together and in every conceivable permutation. when you eat it, you taste everything individually, then the foie literally melts in your mouth, and the fat incorporates with every other thing, and makes a new flavor. in every bite. its genius. loved it. i loved it SO much, it ended up being my third-favorite dish of the night. because next came ...

-- eight: muscovy duck breast. i wasn't full at this point, but close. and when i saw this course coming, i was afraid because it looked huge. i didn't need huge. but then i realized it was duck, and everything was suddenly ok. it was the best duck i've ever had, and duck is what i order anytime i am at a restaurant that has it. not close. the meat was perfectly cooked medium rare, and the skin was cooked shatteringly crisp. so, so good. it was on top of charred mustard greens, which were fine, their bitterness counteracted the sweetness of the duck. and there was a honey-braised turnip beside, but the duck! wow. when we were served, there was no mention of the sauce, and it was amazing, so i asked. pomegranate glaze with foie gras. of course there was more foie.

-- dessert 1: spiced white wine sorbet with pear. that about says it all.

-- dessert 2: pretzels and root beer. the "pretzels" were panna cotta, so, like creamy gelatin. take my word for it. it tasted like pretzels and there was salt on top. the "root beer" was a sorbet, and also delicious. it was sitting on some sort of bread crumb, but i forget what. like mustard with your pretzels? that was there too. in the form of gelee (think jell-o). it was one of the most interesting desserts i've had, and loved it.

afterward, we talked to the chef who had been camped out near us, shawn (or sean? sorry, don't know) and told him what a great time we had. by that point, i had been awake for almost 21 hours and i was ready to collapse. but i was happy.

bella brava, st. petersburg, march 18

2010-04-20T11:07:00.006-04:00

so, i have been trying to write this post for more than a month now.

for my birthday, we went to bella brava, which is where my pal domenica macchia has been the chef since last fall. ever since she moved there, i have been plotting a night when pam and i went in, armed with becky and jeremy, and ordered a bunch of stuff so i could do a comprehensive post.

so on my birthday, we got becky and jeremy and went in, suspecting we were committing ourselves for the next several hours. dom knew we were coming in and we left it to her to decide what we were going to eat. as it turns out, just about everything on the menu.

here is where it got complicated for me to write about: everything was great. and i knew it was going to be. there was stuff i had had before, stuff i never had before, stuff that was on the menu, going on the menu soon, or just for us. we loved it all. so when i started to write about it, it all started seeming like a lifeless list of things we ate more than a description, and i felt like i wasn't doing it justice.

i can't be remotely objective when it comes to dom. i mean, you've read previous posts. i like just about everything. but the only way i can write anything worth reading is if i went in to the meal thinking that there was some chance i might not like it. i mean, i had concerns going into babbo. i suspected that i wouldn't find french laundry to be perfect. i was openly skeptical as to whether i would even like alinea. and those were three of the best meals i've ever had.

but i walked into bella brava knowing i would love whatever was about to happen. because i wasn't just going there for dinner. dinner was being made for me. for me.

dom refers to me as the brother she never had, and i love that. i have to be careful about reciprocating that sentiment because it would probably really piss off my sister. but you know what i mean.

so, in list form, here is what we had. everything was great, so i can dispense with individually nothing that everything was great.

-- roasted beet salad. sliced red and halved baby golden beets with a vinaigrette. everyone else got cauliflower on theirs, but i did not. because it was my birthday, she didn't even try to talk me into eating cauliflower. dom said after peeling the baby beets, she would only serve regular beets in the future. i understand. but they're so cute.

-- beef carpaccio. i had told dom that i never had carpaccio, so boom, there it was. thin slices of barely seared filet with parm, arugula, preserved lemon and fried capers.

-- two pizzas: the vegetali with roasted vegetables on it, and a sausage.

-- gorgonzola fonduta: a blue cheese sauce served with grilled bread for dipping. jeremy said he gets this whenever he comes in because he loves it so much, and after tasting it, said there was something different. he said it had a different alcohol taste. he told dom this, and she said she just got a different, better brand of sherry. this is why i hang out with jeremy bowers.

-- lamb porterhouse: tiny little grilled t-bones. she had just changed over to the spring sauce for them, a mint-pea pesto.

-- duck: always my menu fallback. love it. she has a cherry-port sauce.

-- roasted half chicken: the marsala-lemon jus was amazing.

-- crab cakes: they were huge. tiny would have been great at this point. no one could eat a whole one.

-- polenta and mashed potatoes

-- green beans and spinach

-- salmon fettucine: this was a sample of a new thing. not a big salmon fan, but am a big pasta fan. this was good.

after all that, as if we could still move, dom sent out a plate of all their desserts. the open-faced canoli is always a favorite. and the nutella cheesecake. and the chocolate torte. and the vanilla panna cotta. and a bunch of strawberries, to keep it healthy.

see, didn't that work better as a list?

all this to say, i highly recommend becoming best friends with dom and going to bella brava on your birthday.

ps: when we arranged to go in, i told dom that i would let her cook for me on my birthday only under the condition that she let me cook for her on hers. her birthday was a week after mine, but she was busy, then i was gone, but this is just to make it publicly official that it has to happen. and soon.

sanaa, disney, feb 27

2010-03-06T15:43:00.004-05:00

so, we had timeshare points to kill, which seems to happen a lot in february the past couple years, so we spent a weekend at the animal kingdom lodge. we stayed in the new kidani village, which is the new part of the lodge, where they only have disney vacation club rooms. so there is none of that riff-raff that only can afford to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars a night for a room. at kidani, it is exclusively the people who paid thousands for years and years of access.

yet we still ended up with noisy yahoos on the next balcony over. so much for exclusive.

we did still get tremendous views of the savannah (see above), with giraffe, and zebra, and some animal that looks like what happens when a giraffe and a zebra get left in the same barn accidentally overnight. there were also various cattle looking things, and deer looking things, and elk looking things. and ostriches. as far as a view, it was cool.

we had dinner at the new restaurant in kidani. its called sanaa, which in swahili means "work of art." sets a high bar, but it was pretty good. the web site says it it is african food with indian flavors. i honestly don't know enough about either to differentiate, but its all good. what it seems like to me is that the assumption is that the resort is african-themed, even though its really not, and that they wanted to do an indian restaurant, which would have been a perfectly legitimate fit on its own, but they needed to justify it somehow. i don't know.

anyway, there were three things on the menu that allowed for multiple selections in each course, so we did those and split them.

there was the bread service, which is sort of what they're known for. y'know. in some circles. like among people who would know that a restaurant is known for its bread service. admittedly, it's not a big club. but i'm in it.

anyway, they have four breads and six accompaniments. you get to choose three of each. all were flatbreads. we got the naan, which is classic and plain, the onion kulcha, which was filled with sweet onion and spices, and a paneer paratha, which was very spicy. paneer is a cheese. i was looking for the cheese, but i wasn't aware of any cheese as i was eating. for the toppings, we picked the garlic pickles, which was kind of like a spicy relish, the cucumber raita, which is a yogurt-based sauce, and tamarind chutney, which was smooth and tangy. i mixed them up, trying various toppings with various breads. i liked the raita with the paratha and i liked the pickles best with the naan. i think my favorite topping was the chutney, but i didn't think it went well alone with the breads. i thought it would have been awesome on a grilled chicken sandwich or something, though.

they had a salad sampler, so we got that. they offer five and you get to choose three. we chose the chickpeas with cucumber and tomato, the watermelon with radish and lime, and the roasted beets. i have been told that i have a rep concerning beets. i'm ok with that. all of them we're really good. i am allergic to watermelon, but i am ok with it when its really fresh. my allergy manifests in my hands getting itchy. they did not. so, good watermelon.

they had a braised meat sampler for an entree. they had three braised dishes, and you could choose two. we picked the chicken with red curry and the beef short ribs. liked both. the ribs were very good, but i have no idea what was either african or indian about them. they just tasted like a good short rib to me. the chicken was all dark meat, best i could tell, which makes sense in a braise. but it was really, really tender. it was in a tomato-y sauce that was really good. we got the five-grain pilaf to go with it. you can't really beat getting five kinds of rice all at once.

thought about skipping dessert, but decided i wanted to try something. nothing jumped out, but i noticed the orange-sesame cake came with passion fruit kulfi. i remembered having a kulfi at tabla and new york and thinking it was awesome, so i got that. the cake was cool. nice orange flavor, and the top of the cake looked like one of those sesame candies, but it was soft. and the kulfi, which is sort of a cross between a frozen mousse and ice cream, was awesome. i love that texture. it's now on my list of things to replicate.

the next night, we went to boma, which is the african buffet in the old wing of the animal kingdom. usually, we get a reservation there, and we still have to wait an hour or so for our table. on this trip, we decided to go there that day. when i called in the morning for a reservation, they said we could have 430 or 9. no thanks. so we went over at 645 to see what the wait would be just walking in. they said 45 minutes to an hour. we shrugged and said sure. then we were seated in less than 10 minutes. i swear it was shorter than any wait we have ever had there with a reservation.

the highlight of that dinner was the corn and spinach pudding. never had that before, and why it was not among the desserts, i have no idea. it was delicious, and very sweet. loved, loved, loved it. the other thing that was cool was that they had pap with chaka laka. i just wanted to type that. its basically grit cakes with a chunky tomato sauce. good, but mostly a cool name.

except for the fact that we missed the cats, totally successful weekend.

guest blogging!

2010-01-27T23:05:00.002-05:00

i spent the past couple of days blog sitting for my pal sean daly at the paper. here are links if you're interested:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3.1

Day 3.2

masterchef audition, coral gables, jan. 17

2010-01-19T02:32:00.005-05:00

a lot of people tell me i should try out for top chef or next food network star. i always take it as a compliment, but here's the thing: neither of those shows is looking for me. i'm not a chef, so i can't go on top chef. i can cook, but that is a whole different thing from what those folks do. and i have way too much respect for chef's to imply in any way that i am one.

and i have no intention of being the next food network star. there are parts of the food network that i still like, but they seem to narrow by the minute, and the kind of shows that the winner of that show usually ends up doing, its just so not me. they call that show what they do for a reason. they are looking for a tv star. not a cook. i actually stopped watching this show this year. i rarely stop watching shows.

when i demur, i find that the best way to change the subject is to say that if they ever did a top chef-type show for home cooks, i would try out.

so when a production company made a call for people to audition for a new reality cooking show for home cooks for fox, starring gordon ramsay, i kind of exhaled deeply and watched as the e-mails started popping in my mailbox.

yeah, that's what i said i'd try for.

a casting call was set for miami, and i decided to go. and since its the only way i know how to do things, i decided to jump in with both feet, without looking over the edge first.

you had to bring a dish, and there would be no promises you could heat there. so i figured that since i would be traveling 4.5 hours to get there, i better bring something that can be cold or room temp. i recently had luck with cooking with the grapefruit that grown in my back yard, so i thought that it would be fun to use those. then i thought it would be cool if everything came from right around here. and i thought of ceviche.

i got terry tomalin, the outdoors editor at the paper, to help me line up some fish. he put me in contact with madeira beach seafood, which got me a red snapper and a scamp right off the boat.

i went to gateway organic farm near my house, where the farmers gave pam and i a tour of the grounds and kept pulling up samples of stuff for me to take. i wanted some small greens that i could use for garnish. we got that an a lot more.

i wanted fresh hearts of palm, and i texted dom macchia at bella brava to ask if she knew where i could get that. she texted me back that she just ordered it and it would be in in two days.

to that point, i had been planning to do one ceviche from everything i had gotten, but decided i had too many things to do that. i decided i could do one ceviche with each fish, and pair them with each of the citrus i have in the yard (grapefruit and tangerine). but i didn't want two, so i went to saturday morning market and found stone crab and decided to make a third out of that.

so what i did is turned it into a formula. each ceviche would be fish + citrus + crunch + chile pepper + herb. and i ended up with:

-- scamp + grapefruit + fennel + red serrano + red lettuce (this would be served as a wrap in the lettuce)

-- snapper + tangerine + hearts of palm + jalapeno + beet green (this would be served in a cone i made of a baked wonton skin)

-- stone crab + lime/coconut + red onion + green serrano + mint (this would be served in a spoon made of coconut wood)

so then, i packed it up in a cooler and left for miami with jeremy bowers, because i knew he would make me laugh for the entire trip.

we got to the coral gables whole foods and it was drizzly out and there was a line of people outside with umbrellas. i had an appointment to be seen at 4, so i wasn't worried about the line. then when we parked and went to the line, we found it was all people waiting for people who were auditioning inside. they said i could go right in.

the rules said you would have five minutes to plate, so i had myself set up to be able to do that. then i looked around, and there were people who had brought their own gas burners and were clearly planning to be there as long as it took. the room was set up with a series of folding tables in a u-shape with small square work areas taped off. i got in mine and started unloading my cooler and plating.

while i did that, someone came up and took my application and asked a couple of questions. so far so good.

then i started cutting my mint, and i realized my hands were shaking. since i already lost part of a finger last year, this concerned me. i got the mint sliced and put the knife away.

once i got everything plated, a tasting judge came by. as best i could tell, there were three of them making their way around the room, and some of the people auditioning would get the attention of more than one at a time. i just got one. she asked me if i had been to culinary school. nope. she asked if i knew terminology. i said yes. she asked me what an emulsion was. i told her. then she asked me something a little more difficult, but i knew it too, and she seemed satisfied.

she tasted my scamp first. the look on her face was not good. "it doesn't taste seasoned. all i taste is fish, none of the other things you say are in there." sigh. the scamp had not been my favorite of the three, but i didn't think it was bad. and i had intended for it to be eaten like a lettuce wrap, but she had just picked a tiny piece of fish up with the tip of her spoon. i accepted the critique and hoped for better with the snapper.

"it's a little better, but i still wish it was brighter." again, she took a little bite from the tip of a spoon, instead of eating it like a cone. sigh. i mean, i understood why she was being conservative with how much she was going to eat, given that she was tasting hundreds of things over the course of the day, but ... ugh.

so then she tried the stone crab. "that's pretty good. but the red onion is too strong." well, i'll take it at this point.

she takes notes and says, "your presentation is wonderful. it really looks nice." whew! though she sort of said "looks" like it was a backhanded compliment. but i took it.

she walked away, then came back and said i was done and could leave. i was like, well, that's bad, because there were other judges i thought might talk to me, and there was a camera crew recording interviews. if i was going to do any of that, i figured i was screwed. while she was standing there, another judge, who didn't seem to be part of the tasting trio, came over and started asking me questions that were like ones on the application. i think she tasted as we talked, but she didn't comment, and the first judge watched while she did. she looked at my application and asked if "pig-wrapped pig-stuffed pig" was a typo. nope, i said, and told her all about the contest. she seemed to like that.

so then the taster lady told me again that i could go. i was still disappointed that i hadn't done the on-camera thing, so i started cleaning up. s-l-o-w-l-y. as i was cleaning up, the interview guy looked at me from across the room and said "do NOT leave until i talk to you." at which point i nodded and let out the longest internal sigh ever. so when i finished packing, i was standing there and the taster lady asked me why i was still there, and i said because interview guy told me to stay. that seemed like a good enough answer.

so i did the interview, and as i was walking out the door afterward, i was coming up with all the answers i SHOULD have given. none of my answers were bad, but they could have been better. and at least one, if i had thought about it two seconds, it could have been more interesting AND more accurate, which would have been a double bonus. i won't get into the particulars.

jeremy had been waiting outside, and said that there were several people who had gone in after me and left before. i was too dialed in to notice. but that has to be good, right? i think? then jeremy and i went back to the car and we finished most of the ceviche that i had brought. i agreed that the scamp was the least assertive of the three, but we thought they all tasted fine. and she missed out by not eating the cone. that thing was good.

so anyway, the moral of the story is: apparently, i am someone who will spend two days trying to get on a reality cooking show that i have no real information about. does anyone have any idea when that happened to me?

i left miami not knowing if i had a chance or not. maybe they would want someone who would underseason a ceviche, right? it gives them something to fix. maybe? i don't know. anyway, i felt like even if i didn't blow anyone away, i didn't fall on my face. and when i am playing that far out of my comfort zone, i'll take that.

mazzaro's, dec. 31

2010-01-01T11:31:00.004-05:00

hey, wait a minute.

so, i went to mazzaro's to pick up some pancetta on thursday, and while they were cutting it to my exacting standards, i looked in the deli case and saw this! and without a credit, even!

not mad. i probably wouldn't have won if mazzaro's hadn't let me stand out front on a saturday morning and shill for votes. but, i have to say, if i had named mine "bacon-wrapped pork roulade sausage stuffed," i suspect there is exactly ZERO chance i would have won.

i wonder if they used orange-fennel sausage. i doubt it.

anyway, below is the original pig-wrapped, pig-stuffed pig. award winning, btw.

eat!, hilton head island, s.c., dec. 8

2009-12-13T15:24:00.002-05:00

while we were in hilton head earlier this month, we went to a restaurant by a food network chef. one reason we went is because he was supposed to open a restaurant in st. pete, to great fanfare, but in the process, we reported that most everything he claimed on his resume was a lie. word was his business relationships were already shaky at that point, and eventually the project was scrapped. but then a very similar project opened in hilton head.

i wrote a story about it for the paper. i was going to blog in more detail about the food, but scrapped it when real life took over. (see previous post.)

anyway, we thought most of the food was pretty good. here is link to my story in the times.

meeko, 1995-2009

2009-12-13T14:22:00.014-05:00

it started out under a lawn mower south of miami.

my herald colleague bill van smith was about to mow his lawn. before starting the mower, he heard something from underneath. so he looked. there was a stray cat nursing three new-born kittens.

it was the summer of 1995. well, it was miami, so it was always summer. it was june. pam and i had just bought a house, and one of the reasons i was looking forward to owning instead of renting was that there would be no extra charges on the mortgage for having pets. it was a big deal for us at the time to pay the extra fees and deposits for razzle, the cat that we already had, so as long as we were renting, we couldn't take on a second.

so when bvs said he couldn't keep the kittens because he already had too many cats, we said we'd take one. sight unseen. bvs decided to give us the black and white one with the white-tipped tail and the peace sign on his forehead. so when the kitten was old enough, bvs brought him in and gave me the kitten and $40 to get him snipped when he was old enough. i told him we'd take care of that, but he insisted.

so that night i took home a cat that would become a huge part of our lives for the next decade and a half. and $40. best deal i ever made.

when it came to naming him, we waited to see what would fit his personality. and he had so much of that. we were struck by the mask-like markings on his face. disney's pocahontas was in theaters at the time, and while we weren't crazy about the movie, her scampish raccoon was named meeko. he sort of looked like a raccoon. it sounded good. it stuck. (years later, our niece was at the house. she was young enough that i really didn't understand anything she said. but when we told her the cat's name was meeko, her face lit up and as clear as anything, she said, "MEEKO!" )

a big reason we wanted a second cat was because we thought that our cat razzle, who was 6 or 7 at the time, would like having another cat around. her pet. we were wrong. there was a lot of growling and hissing for the first couple of weeks. meeko wanted to play. razzle didn't. ultimately, they came to a truce. i don't know if they ever really liked each other, but they tolerated each other.

meeko was amazing. when we brought him home, we weren't sure if he was a long hair or a short hair. all his white hair seems long and fluffed, while his black hair was short and shiny. and he was round as a tennis ball with a tail.

he did not stay tiny.

he quickly graduated to juvenile-sized. he was long, tall, strong and lean. and as big as he was, his legs and ears seemed disproportionately huge, which we were told meant he wasn't done growing.

it was true.

eventually, he hit 19 pounds. and for a long time, it seemed like he was 19 pounds of solid muscle. his black hair eventually caught up with the white hair, giving him a beautiful coat, a muscular build, an expressive face and a lot of attitude. he knew how good looking he was. it wasn't unusual to catch him sitting there, looking in the mirror. well, ok, it was unusual. but it wasn't something that surprised us when we saw it anymore after the first few times.

at our house in deerfield, we had to be careful what room we put him in if we needed him to be locked up. the house had lever-style door knobs, and if the door opened out, we couldn't leave him there. because as soon as he was tall enough, he figured out how to reach up, pull the lever down and push.

we lost razzle shortly after moving to clearwater, and when we decided to bring in a new cat, we picked up najah. she was about 6 months old, fluffy and full of energy. she wanted to play. meeko didn't. and so we learned about a whole different kind of circle of life. when we brought home jazmine a couple of years ago, meeko all but rolled his eyes and said "here we go again."

but with a houseful of cats, he became an elder statesman. at times when we was obviously not feeling well, the girls would defer to him, leave him alone, wait in line behind him. and when he was feeling better, all bets were off. he was fair game to be chased and jumped on. it got to the point that one way to tell how meeko was feeling was to see how the girls were treating him.

while our other cats seem to gravitate to either me or pam, meeko was truly "our" cat. he didn't have a favorite. he loved us both. if the two of us were sitting, watching tv, he would sit on one of our laps, then after a while, get up and go to the other. and it wasn't always a matter of who had food.

i had a million nicknames for meeko. bubba. buddy, chico. meeko-chico, panda cat. meek-meek. he ignored them all equally. i always figured that since he was from miami, he just spoke spanish. but i talked to him all the time. i think he understood.

we lost meeko friday night. there a several scenarios that could have played out that would have had us not be home at the time. but we were. and as awful as it was, it would be immeasurably worse right now had we not been. i can make arguments that i didn't see it coming or that we've seen it coming for two years. he had been sick, but he seemed to be doing well lately. he climbed to the top of his tree on friday morning to take his pills. he jumped up to sit in my lap on friday afternoon. and then a little after 11 p.m., he was gone.

as far as i'm concerned, razzle is showing him around the new digs, and telling him what territory she has staked out, and where she'll let him go. and deep down, they like each other, and that all those times where she tried to eat him when he was little, she was just kidding.

peace.

(pam put together a short video tribute click here to go to her blog to watch it.)

hominy grill, charleston, s.c., dec. 7

2009-12-10T16:17:00.005-05:00

so, rachael ray went to hominy grill on $40 a day. anthony bourdain went there on no reservations. adam richman went there on man vs food. so when we were within two hours of charleston, we made a point of hitting it for lunch.

after i made plans to go there, i learned that chef robert stehling won best chef-south from james beard in 2008. which makes it funny that it took three tv shows to get me there. the best chef thing is usually all it takes.

anyway, rachael had the catfish. bourdain had the shrimp and grits. and adam went for breakfast and had the big nasty, a fried chicken biscuit.

didn't want catfish. i made shrimp and grits at the hotel one monday night. and while i would have liked to try the big nasty, we didn't get there until after noon. so, no dice.

once we found a parking space on the second pass, we went in. nice townhome-y kind of place. very southern look. all the specials and desserts were up on chalkboards. i like that.

we started off with the picnic sampler. it had some pimento cheese, some country ham, some beet-soaked boiled eggs and okra pickles. i hat okra, but hadn't had it pickled, so i tried it. it was fine. the pimento was very garlick-y. i don't know that i had ever had country ham before, but had heard and read about it so much that i was looking forward to it. i heard it compared favorably to prosciutto and serrano. i don't know about that, but it was good. my favorite thing,
though, was cleaning up. after the toasts were gone, there was a little of everything left over. the pimento cheese was in a butter lettuce leaf, so i picked it up, added the rest of the ham and the
last quarter of egg and had it like a low country lettuce wrap.

then i had the low country purloo. i'm sure there's a really long, interesting story on what the heck purloo means, but here is what i determined: seemed like jambalaya to me. and no, i don't know what the heck jambalaya means, either. is was a rice stew with sausage and ham, and on top were chicken wings and cornmeal-crusted fried shrimp. i liked it. all the components were good. they worked well together. while there was plenty for lunch, i thought it was kind of expensive for how much there was. i wondered if the prices were at that point before it was on all the tv shows.

oh, and i had a side of fried cheese grits. they were actually in a light batter. very creamy and tasty. love grits, tho. i'm easy.

i had actually considered having the fried green tomato blt instead of the purloo. that sounded like a really good idea. but i wanted to try more than a sandwich.

after that, we consulted the chalkboards for dessert and asked our waitress for suggestions. she said that all three of the cakes were served at her wedding. and she also said that the chocolate pudding was the "best in the world." so we got that. none of the cakes appealed to me, so we also got the buttermilk pie. i wasn't sure what buttermilk pie was, but the waitress told me it was a lot like chess pie. um, oh. didn't have the heart to tell her i had no idea what chess pie is. it was lemon-custardy. i'll take it. was the pudding the best in the world? well, i haven't had all the others, so i don't know. it was really thick, chocolatey and nicely not-too-sweet. it was more mousse-y than pudding-y. that is officially not a complaint. apparently, the pudding has been featured on food network's best thing i ever ate, where someone -- our waitress thought maybe bobby flay -- had declared it his fave. i can see it. it was good.

love to go back for breakfast sometime to try the big nasty. i don't see ever being in charleston at breakfast time, tho. we'll see.

-- so, i mentioned that bourdain had the shrimp and grits. that is a signature here, and normally i like to order the signature stuff, but we avoided the shrimp and grits because i had made it at the hotel the night before. we always buy grits when we go through south carolina, and since our hotel in hilton head has a kitchen, i make shrimp and grits. this is this year's attempt. looks good. tasted fine. but something was missing. i realized this morning that it was tabasco. i thought i packed it, but i guess i forgot. oh well.

about those beef cheeks ...

2009-11-19T11:26:00.008-05:00

everyone was curious as to why i needed beef cheeks a couple weeks ago. well, here it is. on the left are michael symon's beef cheek pierogi.

on the right are david chang's pork buns, made with roasted pork belly. for the sake of the photography, i wish the one on the front corner wasn't broken, but, oh well.

i did a story for the paper that started off as a review of new cookbooks by symon and chang. but in the end, it was more like a personal challenge. i got to recreate two dishes that i had when i went to their restaurants.

i want to go back to both places, but until i do, looks like i have it covered.

you can read the story here.