fennel-dusted sweetbreads

Well, doesn't that look attractive.

No, no, that's not brains, though it sort of looks like it might be, right? It is veal sweetbreads, which, as the punch line goes, is neither sweet nor bread.

(And there are still brains left to be cooked. We'll get there.)

This was an opportunity buy. I was at Wagshal's Market because I heard it was a cool meat shop, and I wanted to see if they had anything that was on my hard-to-find list. They had rattlesnake, but that isn't in the book. All of the traditional meats behind the counter looked good, but all i really wanted was to get something -- anything -- that got me a little out of my comfort zone.

The directions for the sweetbreads include blanching them for 10 minutes, then peeling off its membrane. Mmmm. Membrane. That's outside the comfort zone.

On the door of the freezer case at Wagshal's, it listed some of the items inside. Other than the rattlesnake, the only thing that jumped out at me was the sweetbreads. I thought it was possible that I could get sweetbreads from a meat vendor at a farmers market, but I was willing to consider buying it here if they were local. So I asked where the sweetbreads came from.

"I'm not totally sure," he told me, "but I think from right around here." He was gesturing toward the side of his neck.

In a completely literal sense, he was right. Sweetbreads are a gland in the neck of a cow. I was glad he knew that, but it wasn't what I meant.

"I meant, where was the cow from?"

"Oh. They come from a farm between here and Baltimore."

Perfect.

So I blanched them. And I peeled the membrane. And I learned that blanched sweetbreads smell like farts. Yes, it was definitely the sweetbreads. The next step was to soak them in cold water until ready to cook, and that seemed like an excellent idea at that point. 

The rest of the dish goes together fast. There is bacon. There is a dressing made of quince paste. There are vinegar-y onions. There are fennel fronds.

The sweetbreads are then broken up into lobes -- mmmmmm, lobes -- and dredged in flour that's spiked with ground fennel seed. I actually didn't have any fennel seeds, but rather than run over to the supermarket, I grabbed what I did have, which was fennel pollen. For those not familiar with fennel hierarchy, that's what they call "an upgrade."

The dusted sweetbreads get a quick sauté and stacked with all the other stuff mentioned earlier. 

Suddenly, it looks way better, right? 

It's an organ meat, so it has that organ-meat texture. But it's also basically fried. So it also has that texture. And it has bacon. And the quince vinaigrette. Where we're going is, even for someone generally not crazy about the texture of organ meat, there is so much good going on here, that it's a really good dish.

I've had sweetbreads a few times, and the first several times I kind of had to turn my brain off to what it was before I could eat it, but I've always thought they were good. I did that again with this dish, multiplied by the fact that I was handling them raw for the first time, but I would totally make this again.

And it turns out, sweetbreads are everywhere here. After I made this dish, I saw them at Whole Foods. Who knew?

Up next: catching up/quick hits

bigne with honey mousse and red currants

This dish was so epic, only a guest appearance on the Washington Post All We Can Eat blog could handle it. Click here to read it!

Up next: fennel-dusted sweetbreads. 

pumpkin cake with olive oil gelato

The hardest part about this recipe was explaining to everyone at the table that they were about to eat olive oil gelato. Not that it was hard to persuade them to do it, they just hadn't heard of it and might not have totally believed that there was olive oil in there. Which is funny, because that's pretty much the story in the headnote to the recipe in the book: The same thing happened with the staff and guests at Babbo when this dessert was introduced.

But once you taste, it all makes sense. If you use good olive oil. I do.

The pumpkin in the cake comes from a can, so that was pretty easy to find. The cake gets a little bit of rosemary, which turns up in a couple of desserts in the book, and is just fine. Plus, the cake is garnished with raisins that are soaked in booze.

I diverged from the recipe a little. In the picture, the individual cakes are square. Mine were round. Shrug.

Up next: Bigne and the hunt for the elusive red currant

asparagus with duck egg

Some dishes require a lot of planning, strategizing and shopping. This one didn't.

I was at the farmer's market at 14th Street & U, and the first vendor I saw had duck eggs. The second vendor I saw had asparagus.

I knew there was a recipe in the book in which those were the two main ingredients. So I bought them and hoped that I could easily acquire the other ingredients to knock this dish out.

Here are the other ingredients: Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Olive oil. Salt. Pepper. So, I only had to go to my kitchen to acquire the other ingredients.

In the picture, it looks like the asparagus are miniature. They weren't. It was part that the egg was big and part that the photo was from a weird angle, I suspect. And the egg sort of looks overcooked. It wasn't. I briefly put the lid on the skillet to encourage the white to set a little. There was just more white covering the yolk than I ever might have imagined. When I broke the yolk, it became a rich sauce for the asparagus. As intended.

Maybe I should've done video.

Up next: pumpkin cake with olive oil gelato

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