29 Feb
Recipe: Smokey Sweet Beans and Quick Chicken Sausage
It’s miserable outside; 34°F, snowing, windy and cold. I was drenched walking the dogs this morning, in spite of all my wet weather gear. I know the snow won’t stick, and I’m grateful for the crocuses, cherry blossoms, extra day light and the early tulips at the farmer’s market. But spring still feels a long way away.
6 Dec
Recipes: Duck Prosciutto Fig Spread, Mostly Poultry Cassoulet
It’s been a year of living dangerously: curing raw meat, making cheese, tending bread and yogurt starter, making sauerkraut in crock that belonged by my great-grandmother – a year of re-defining normal. And I owe the attitude that fueled all that to Charcutepalooza. I started out nervous. And I’m ending triumphant, with a renewed enthusiasm for all things culinary.
Would I have started making my own cream cheese if I hadn’t signed on? Would I have decided my diet is best defined by a proactive standard, i.e. humanely raised, locally grown, fair trade, etc. versus just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and eating “no mammals” without Charcutepalooza?
1 Dec
Recipe: Duck Salami
Charcutepalooza is almost over. And with the second to last challenge we’ve come full circle – back to curing. I choose the apprentice challenge this time, curing Salami. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a long time.
My mother’s mother and her step-father were both great cooks. My grandmother, who was born in 1910, never saw a reason to pay for something she could make or grow at home and so largely missed out on the food that was normal in my childhood years – Wonder bread, Tang, Hamburger Helper, and frozen peas. My grandparents had a large garden, fished in Puget Sound, ate seasonally, and cooked with butter, olive oil, and lard. Grandma Blanche lived to be 87, Grandpa Con, 91. Continue reading
15 Oct
In an ideal world this post would include a recipe, rather than just a link, for cassoulet– the classic French bean dish that I have yet to make. I’m half way there – yesterday I made duck confit – duck legs preserved in fat; an essential element of cassolet.
But while I’m excited about what I have done this month for Charcutepalooza, skinning and boning a duck for roulade, rendering duck fat, and making the confit, the cassoulet will have to wait.
An old friend I haven’t seen in five years arrives for a weekend visit tonight with her daughter. And someone very close to me goes in for important surgery next week. I’m saving the duck legs for her recovery. It’s going to be a celebratory cassoulet for a Sunday dinner sometime soon. I’ve got a lot of hope pinned to those duck legs.
15 Aug
Smoked Trout and Halibut Mousseline with Champagne Vinaigrette
Presentation: a word that strikes fear into my heart – and the most important element of this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge. I know, I know, presentation should be important to anyone who loves food – but I have to be honest, I’m really all about the taste. If you are eating in my home, I want the food to look appetizing, enticing, sure, but as elegant as restaurant service? I’m just not that detail oriented. I’m already too much the type-A person.
Once when I managed a bakery in Boston, a wedding cake order was misdated. We thought the cake was for Sunday, but the wedding was on Saturday. In the middle of a busy afternoon, the panicked call came in from the caterer. Where was the cake? It was baked and frosted, but all the fresh flowers still had to be prepped and put on the cake. I called the wedding cake person, I called the owner. No answer. Everyone who works in retail food service knows the only way to maintain your sanity is never, ever to answer your phone on a day off – unless the call is from the cops or the fire department, because at that point, the crisis is actually over.
15 Jun
Recipe: Blazing Hot Turkey Sausage
Failure is always an option. The Mythbusters slogan, coined by Adam Savage, is meant to show the value of failure in science – as long as you get good data no experiment is a failure. In cooking though, sometimes failure is just failure. Most of the time failures get eaten anyway; but not every time.
My duck sausage for this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge was a spectacular fail. Fifty dollars’ worth of duck, three days in the making; it had the texture of overcooked cornmeal, and tasted like cardboard – with a hit of orange.
15 Apr
Smoke is magical; difficult to control; fickle with a hint of danger. No matter how well built your smoking apparatus or precise your temperature measurements, no two fires, even in the confines of the same backyard grill, are ever the same. You either love the process, or hate it.
I am a live-fire freak. So I went all out for this month’s Charcutepalooza challenge. I smoked salmon and trout, I made another batch of bacon, I made Canadian bacon – I even smoked a couple of pheasant breasts. Not to mention the almonds, and the cheese.
15 Mar
What happens when a boy whose parents are from Belfast marries a Catholic girl, whose not-so-distant roots go back to Poland and southern Ireland? Their children grow up skeptics, who are not inclined to discuss religion. And St. Patrick’s day is a pretty subdued affair.
My parents had already been married twenty years by the time I came along, so whatever discussion or discord the holiday may have once caused in our household was long over, with only two tangible results: I was forbidden to wear green on the 17th of March, and we always ate corned beef for dinner, always with sauerkraut.
I hated them both. And don’t ask me why the sauerkraut, rather than cabbage. None of it is authentically Irish, anyway. Maybe it was rebellion on my mother’s part. All I know is that both the sauerkraut and the beef came from and tasted of, their respective cans.
15 Feb
My homemade bacon turned out to be emotionally complicated. I’m still wondering if maybe rather than write about it, I should have just developed a recipe for bacon ice cream.
Close friendships are sometimes hard to hang on to. Especially the ones that define you when you are young. You grow, you and your friends take different paths, your life’s realities, good and bad, change you. You make new friends, maybe you share your life with one, two or a few people who become part of the continuing nexus of who you are. If you are lucky, as I am, some of those people are the ones who “remember you when”, and love you anyway.
14 Feb
Charcuterie is alchemy; the power to transform one substance into another using simple ingredients and patience. I’m not saying that salt has the power of Midas. That’s something you have to decide for yourself.
I started February’s apprentice Charcutepalooza challenge with three pounds of pork belly, lots of salt, some pink curing salt, brown sugar, coriander seeds, black pepper and less than a ¼ cup of really good local cider. As much as I wanted to use all nine pounds of my pork belly and plunge into the more advanced charcutrie challenge (making pancetta), along with the bacon, I decided to pace myself – though only in terms of pork.
Right now, I’ve got preserved lemons aging in the pantry, a filet of salmons curing in the garage and a crock of sauerkraut fermenting in the closet under our stairs. I suspect my husband might be planning some kind of an intervention.
Eat Drink Man Woman Dogs Cat 