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.

gnocchi with venison and rosemary

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

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

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.