grilled pork chops with peaches; scallion barlotta

Pork chops. Probably the easiest thing in the book for me to get ahold of and cook, right? So why did I drive two hours -- twice -- to get them?

I met the pig first.

After dinner at the Refinery in Tampa one night, chef Greg Baker and I were talking about where to get good pork. He told me that they were getting theirs from a small farmer in Brooksville and gave me her name.

I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to buy at that point. Initially, I thought I'd get all the pork pieces I needed for the book, and maybe a couple other things to play with. But then I started exchanging e-mails with Rebecca Krassnoski of Nature Delivered in Brooksville.

She sent me a "cut list," which I didn't really know what to do with. I studied it, and thought that maybe it was like an order form. Turns out, that wasn't what it was. It was more like instructions to the butcher on how to break the animal down. When it came to the "order form," there were only really three choices: 1/4, 1/2 or whole. Meaning, that was how much of a pig you were buying. The rest came down to how it got cut up.

So, the process by which the pig went from a pen in Brooksville to my freezer in Clearwater (and the final parts made the trip to Washington and are in my tiny freezer here) will be chronicled elsewhere one day. Suffice to say, I was there for its final moments, and I went back a couple days later when it was broken down and wrapped up for me to take home. For the purposes of this dish, I pulled four thick, pink, gorgeous pork chops out of the freezer. They get brined in a sugar-salt water for several hours and then hit the grill. I like it when a recipe ends up with things hitting the grill.

The peaches get grilled briefly, then hit with some balsamic vinegar. Better than applesauce.

Notice how the pork chops seem to have tails? That's all in the butchery. What it is is a little chuck of pork belly hanging off the end of the rib. So, basically, there was bacon hanging off the pork chop. They should cut all pork chops that way.

The recipe calls for broccoli rabe as a contorni, which I previously made for the osso buco. I made it again, but I also made the scallion barlotta as a contorni. I'm a fan of barley. Scallions, however, are pretty much a nice garnish to me, and this was a dish that they starred, so not my favorite.

The pork chops were amazing. The texture and the flavor of the meat -- it had flavor -- was like tasting pork for the first time. It made me less interested in ever buying meat at the supermarket again. It was so good, I don't know if it even needed the brining, but it didn't hurt, I'm sure.

Up next: asparagus with duck egg

grilled guinea hen with sweet corn fregula

I'd never seen guinea hen at any store. Anywhere. Ever. But I was going to have to find it somewhere. Frankly, this dish was only high on my list of things to do because of the fregula. That sounded really good.

Anyway, I figured I'd get to this dish eventually. Then one day I was at Cafe Largo in, well, Largo, on a photo shoot for a story I was working on. During a break in the action -- oh yeah, there's action at those photo shoots -- I was looking at the menu. I know: Stunning. I noticed that there was a guinea hen dish on the menu. And there was the chef, Chef Dominique. He's kinda like Madonna that way. Just Chef Dominique.

"Where do you get your guinea hen," I asked.

He pulled one out of the walk-in and looked at the package.

"Looks like North Carolina," he told me.

I meant a little more retail than that. But the brand was Joyce Farms, so that gave me something to work with. He offered to sell me what I needed, and my eyebrows stretched to the ceiling, then I decided there was probably some ethical journalistic thing that would make that a little unwise, at best.

A couple days later, I get the weekly sales e-mail from the supplier in Orlando that I get some of the crazier stuff from. It said they had pork belly on sale, which only has a place in this post in that it focused my undivided attention to the e-mail. Later in the e-mail it mentioned guinea hen were on sale.

Hey! I need guinea hen! And pork belly! (I mean, not for this dish, but I always need pork belly.)

Technically, I only needed leg quarters, but that's not how guinea hen come. So I got them whole -- and they were Joyce Farms -- and quartered them. Despite the fact that the recipe only calls for the leg quarters, I grilled the whole thing, and the funny thing is, the breast meat of the hen is sort of dark. So it all worked out.

The secret weapon of this dish was the pomegranate vinaigrette, in which the main ingredient is, not surprisingly, pomegranate molasses. Sweet, tangy, delicious.

About the fregula: It's an odd-shaped pasta from Sardinia, sort of like Israeli couscous, but not as uniform. I had seen it, literally every time I went into Mazarro's. Never bought it. So now I need to buy it, I knew where to go. It's nowhere to be seen. Seriously? I kept going back to the shelf where it should have been, where I had seen it a hundred times, and it wasn't there.

"We don't have that right now," dude behind the deli counter tells me. As he tells me this, I look up. Literally right above the guy, there is a string on which a bunch of Italian-brand pastas are hanging. The one directly above his head? Fregula.

"Can I have that one?"

"No."

Truth was, it was probably 10 years old and it was dusty. I didn't really want it. But I was already annoyed at that point.

They had it at Fresh Market. With the charred corn, this was probably the best contorni in the book. Or any other book.

Up next: We'll see

espresso torrone with drunken cherries

I'm absolutely sure there is someplace that you can buy dried Michigan cherries. Probably even nearby. But what's the fun in that? I was up in Northern Michigan a couple years ago, and Pam Radabaugh sent me home with a big bag of dried cherries. They were awesome, but by the time I got to doing this recipe, they were long gone. So when Lawrence Hollyfield was going back up, I asked him to bring me back some. He did, and then when I heard the Radabaughs were coming to town, I decided that was when we'd roll this dessert out.

The cherries get soaked in Vermouth, so there was really no way they were going to be bad.

The torrone was interesting. It's a frozen, nougatty candy thing, flavored with coffee. It was good, too, but I couldn't wrap my head around the texture. It wasn't ice cream, it wasn't marshmallow, it wasn't nougat as I think of nougat (which, admittedly, is to say a Three Musketeers bar). It was something altogether different. Which is good. I just couldn't figure out how to categorize it in my head.

Meanwhile, I ate more cherries. Now I'm out again.

Up next: grilled guinea hen with sweet corn fregula

sweet pea flan

We don't really get fresh peas in Florida. I knew that. So I needed to grow them if I wanted them. I knew that, too. Well, I knew I had to try.

Peas were one of the first things I tried to grow when I started this project. It was too late in the year to get peas in Florida. Truth is, it never really is early enough to grow peas in Florida. They like mild temperatures, much like I do, and Florida doesn't really have those. Ever. Well, OK, a few days a year, but not long enough for the peas. Or me. But for the purposes of this dish, the peas.

I tried again in the fall, and I got … some peas? A few. They were viable, there just weren't a lot of them. So I cheated. I used frozen peas to make the flan and I used my peas for the garnish.

Mainly I needed to grow the peas for this dish because it required pea tendrils as a sort of salad on top. I knew I had zero chance of getting tendrils.

The vinaigrette for this is made with carrot juice. So it's peas and carrots. Genius.

 

Mint is the dominant flavor. I grew that, too. Mint is pretty easy to grow. When we sold the house, it was all over the backyard. Hope the new owners like mint.

All in all, it was worth the wait.

Up next: espresso torrone

beef cheek ravioli

The case could have been made that this should have been the first dish I made for the blog. It might have been the impetus behind the whole project.

As much as the underlying theme behind most of the dishes is, "well, I couldn't find (some ingredient), so I went to (some unreasonable end to acquire it), with this one, I had a three-pound bag of beef cheeks sitting in my freezer.

They had been there since I did a story several months early -- and by "several," I mean, probably, ummmm, 24? -- where I needed them to make beef cheek pierogi from Michael Symon's book. Back then, I finally found them at Master Purveyors, a place in a warehouse district of Tampa that sells to restaurants. To get the two pounds of beef cheeks I needed for that recipe, I had to buy an 18-pound box of them. Inside were 6 three-pound cryovac bricks of beef cheeks. I got some of my favorite culinary cohorts to go in with me, and they took most of them off my hands, did their own things and left me with two packs. One went into the pierogi, the other went into the freezer. 





Fast forward … well, a long time … and I was watching an episode of No Reservations in which they showed Mario making Babbo's signature dish, beef cheek ravioli. It looked complicated. In the clip, I think Mario implied it was complicated. But I knew that I had that big brick of cheeks in the freezer, and I knew I had the Babbo cookbook sitting on a shelf next to it. (Back then, the book was mostly pretty clean.)

I looked at the recipe. Squab liver sauce? Really? Two sticks of butter? Well, yum, but are you sure? Black truffles? Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

So I put the book away. But I didn't stop wanting to make it.

I was, in fact, going to make this the first thing that I made from the book. But one thing got in my way: Truffles.

I started cooking for this project last January, before I knew where I was getting some of the stuff I would need. By the time I found Culinary Classics in Orlando, which I found had a lot of the crazy stuff I needed for these recipes and others that I've done lately, black winter truffles were no longer in season. Summer black truffles are cheaper, but I'm a snob, so I figured there was a reason for that, and decided to wait for the winter truffles. 



But on an afternoon excursion to Orlando, I stopped in to say hi to the people at Culinary Classics, who I suspect think I'm insane for some of the crazy e-mails I fire off to them at 2 a.m. ("I see you have mangalitsa pork belly on sale; How much is kurobuta? Where does the wagyu hanger steak you have come from?) They knew I was coming and offered me a tour, and if there was armed security, it was stealth. 



While we were in the walk-in cooler, gawking at a sheet tray full of foie gras, I noticed a plastic container full of rice. I knew it wasn't just rice in there. Turns out there were two containers of rice. One for white truffles and one for black. The white one was empty, except for the intoxicating aroma whatever was in there had left. I asked if i could buy the rice. My guide, Dave Adby, thought I was kidding, or maybe it was just nervous laughter. Then he opened up the other container, with the black truffles, and there were about a dozen of them nestled into the rice. They're sort of like mushrooms, only more awesome, and more expensive. They were each a little smaller than a golf ball. 



"I'll take two."

At different times of the year, black truffles can cost almost anything. At Culinary Classics, I've seen the price fluctuate from about $25 an ounce to almost $100. The day I was there, they were $26 an ounce, and the two that I bought totaled a little less than 1.5 ounces. This is why you don't find them at Publix.

(By the way, the white truffles, the ones they were sold out of: They're way more expensive. The day I was there, if they had had any, they were going for $175 an ounce. I still don't know how much the rice they store them goes for, though.)

In the TV clip, Mario talked about squab livers. In the book, it said that you won't be able to find squab livers, and should just make the sauce with chicken livers. Pffft, I thought. I can find anything. I'll find squab livers and do it right. 




(FYI: This is a photo of chicken livers. Here's how we got there:)

The first place I found that I thought might have them was the Squab Producers of California. So I e-mailed them and asked if I could buy livers.

"We don't sell just the livers. If you want livers, you'll have to buy the whole bird."

This was an intriguing suggestion. There is a squab recipe in the book. Maybe I could kill two birds … wait, no, maybe I could avoid killing two birds for two dishes. So to speak.

I looked at the squab recipe. I'd need four squab. I needed a pound of squab liver. I suspected the math would not work for me.

"How much does a squab liver weigh?" I asked.

"Maybe three-quarters of an ounce."

So, I would need more than 20 squab to get a pound of livers. And I really wanted two pounds of livers, to do another recipe in the book.

"Thanks anyway!"

I found another place in California -- apparently squab are a big deal in California -- but I could never figure out if they really existed, or wanted to sell to me, or how much they might charge. So I did the logical thing, and did what the cookbook said. Chicken livers are at every supermarket I've ever been in. 



One potential problem I was left with was truffle slicing. Truffles have their own tool so you can slice them really thin. I've never had a truffle, so I've never had a truffle slicer. I told my pal Domenica Macchia that (she's a chef), and she told me she had two, and I could have the one that Daniel Boulud didn't give her (it is seen above, with the remnants of a truffle). That was fair. I looked in my kitchen for something I had two of so I could reciprocate, and all I could find was gnocchi boards. So I gave Dom the one that Laura Reiley didn't give me. Totally fair.

So my ravioli were kind of rough. They weren't beautiful. Some of them broke open in the cooking process. They wouldn't have made the cut at the restaurant, I feel confident.

But they were pretty good. The filling was meaty and tender, and the sauce was butter with a little funk from the liver. I'll take it.

Up next: Sweet pea flan

we now return to our regular blog, already in progress

I have a new kitchen, in a new city, with new purveyors and new opportunities.

So I have a pot of basic tomato sauce (page 220) on the burner and I'm ready to get cooking again. 

I left Florida in January, and I had about a dozen dishes that I hadn't posted yet. I knew it was going to be at least several weeks before I started cooking regularly again -- turns out a few months -- and I figured that I could just post those things in the interim. What I didn't count on was it taking so long to find a new place and get settled. And to get Internet. Sheesh, Comcast makes it virtually impossible to become their customer. 

Anyway, the next several posts will be mostly cleaning up the Florida dishes, but there will no doubt be some current ones thrown in as I get cooking in the shadow of the Washington Monument. 

Being in D.C., I feel confident that there will be fewer sourcing issues. And I don't know how much I'm going to be able to grow, even with my swank 13th-floor, south-and-east-facing balcony. We'll see.

And yes, this tomato sauce became delicious pucks of awesome in the freezer, just like the previous batches. 

Up next: Beef cheek ravioli

the babbo cookie jar

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.