The House of Good Smells

Happy 11th Anniversary to Us!

Saturday the 30th was the 11th anniversary of the sunny and happy day that we gathered with friends and family in our back yard in Winchester, Virginia and made our marriage official. Naturally, we wanted to celebrate and had been planning our anniversary dinner for a couple of weeks, both of us having arrived separately at having dinner at home versus going out to eat. Restaurants in Bend have let us down consistently this summer and I think we were both looking for something really good for dinner.

I call this post "The House of Good Smells" for a very obvious reason. Thanks to cooler outdoor temperatures, this was really the first time that I cranked up the oven and cooked for a lengthy period of the day, perfuming the air with the sinful smells of baking bread, sautéing mushrooms, and braising pork. After a warm summer, what a treat and a tease! There is nothing like smelling great food cooking all day and knowing that you cannot dig in until dinner time!

Happy Anniversary to Us!

After kicking around several ideas for our celebratory dinner, no doubt informed by the turn of seasons, we arrived somehow at milk-braised pork shoulder as the main course. Then Ann asked if I would make pommes Anna to go with it. Of course. I then thought, seeing how rich those two dishes are, that we should have a simple green salad with an acidic vinaigrette to cut through the fat. And then, no doubt responding directly to the chilly fall weather, Ann asked if I would reprise my mushroom toasts for an appetizer. And voilà! Menu planning done. And darned if we didn't come up with a classic French bistro menu.

Wild Mushroom and Cheese Tartines

Pork Shoulder Braised in Milk

Pommes Anna

Green Salad with Tarragon Vinaigrette

All that was left was to invite our good friends Rob and Dyce to celebrate with us. They arrived for dinner with outstandingly gorgeous flowers, a maple-pumpkin pie, and a bottle of olive oil-washed The Botanist Islay gin for pre-dinner martinis. They are experimenting with fat-washed spirits for their menus at their restaurants in Florida and decided that Ann and I should be guinea pigs. Poor us! I've had bacon-washed Bourbon, but never olive oil-washed gin before. The Botanist, on the spectrum of gins, is on the more delicate and floral side and is perfect for the application of olive oil, which softens the alcoholic feeling of the spirit and contributed a vegetal green olive component. Interesting. Very interesting to my chef palate.

How Stunning are Those Flowers?
Thank You Rob and Dyce!

Pouring Olive Oil-Washed Gin for Martinis

Ann's plan was to sit outside around the fire pit and have appetizers and drinks as the sun was setting and she had been making sure that our courtyard was just so with candles and fall-colored, terracotta-hued throw pillows. Naturally, the weather did not cooperate, with a multi-day rainy streak and cold to cool temperatures leading into the weekend. As needed as our first bit of rain since May was, and as beautiful as the powdered sugar dusting of snow on the Cascades is, I could tell that she was bummed by this turn of weather.

Weather: Rainy, Cold, and Gray
A Marked Contrast to our Sunny Wedding Day

Martinis poured around and toasts offered, we got to finishing up the wild mushroom tartines to accompany our drinks. Earlier in the day, I had made the tartines from a baguette; I would have made them the day before, but our rare patch of high humidity would have been working against having crisp toasted tartines. Early morning, while the tartines were browning in the oven, I prepped and cooked the mushrooms. When we were ready to eat, all we needed to do was to melt some cheese into the mushrooms, top the tartines with the mushrooms and some extra cheese, and put them into the oven to warm.

Tartines Ready for Oven

At the restaurant, we made thousands upon countless thousands of tartines. The process is simple and begins by slicing baguettes on the bias about 7mm wide, call it 3/8 of an inch. These go onto a sheet tray and get drizzled with oil. We used to brush the oil onto them with a paint brush at the restaurant, but really, drizzling works just fine. Then flip them over and drizzle the other side. Place another sheet tray on top such that the bread slices are trapped between the two pans; this will keep them from curling as they cook.

Put them into a moderate oven (call it 350F) and pull them after 20 minutes. Flip the tartines over and put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes. Pull them and flip them again. Cook until they are colored and crisp. Remove from the oven, uncover them, and let them cool to room temperature. If you are not going to serve them right away, store the cold tartines in a sealed bag or container so that they do not go soft in the ambient humidity.

Mushroom Mise
Rehydrated Porcini, Shiitake, Oyster Mushrooms, Shallot, Thyme

Mushrooms Ready to Cook

Mushrooms Ready to Add Cheese

At its essence, this appetizer is simply sautéed mushrooms on toast. But it is a bit more than that and its genesis is in Ann asking me years ago for "something with mushrooms, gooey, and sexy!" Although the mushrooms have varied each time that I have made these delicious bites, rehydrated porcini are the sine qua non of the dish. Their earthy and inimitably delicious flavor, I augment with fresh mushrooms, chanterelles (girolles) in the past, but this time, shiitakes and oysters, about a third each.

I always start by sautéing either leeks or shallots and fresh thyme (I just adore thyme with mushrooms) in butter or olive oil, then add chopped fresh mushrooms. Once these mushrooms have cooked down, I chop the rehydrated porcini and add them to the pan along with the carefully decanted mushroom soaking liquid. Porcini will often have sand or debris on them that will sink to the bottom of the rehydrating bowl and you really don't want that stuff in your dish, so be careful.

Just as we were ready to assemble the tartines, I melted a decent amount of Tallegio cheese into the mushrooms. I wanted, in this instance, to use a French cheese such as Reblochon, but Reblochon was not to be found at our store. This dish, made to pair with an older red Burgundy, really relies on using a stinky cheese. An aged Munster would have been delicious as would have almost any great washed rind cheese, such as Grayson from my talented friends at Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax, Virginia, great purveyors to my restaurant. Tallegio is just perfect as well and that is the cheese I used. Just before the tartines went into the oven, I put another slice of cheese on top to melt over the mushrooms.

[Total aside about Reblochon: Long, long before 9/11, I once went on a wine-buying trip to France and returned on Air France from Charles de Gaulle back to Dulles. At the duty free in Paris, I picked up a Reblochon to take home and boarded the flight. On arriving back stateside, I filled out my declaration card indicating a Reblochon and four cases of wine. After retrieving my wine in the baggage section, I loaded a handtruck with the wine and placed the Reblochon on top. At Customs, they had a conniption about the cheese and confiscated it without even glancing at the four cases of wine on which I owed duty, but which was never assessed. The cost of the Reblochon was far less than the duty (a dollarish per liter) on the wine, a very fair trade!]

Assembling the Appetizers

Mushroom and Tallegio Tartines

When I put the tartines on the top shelf of the oven, I had a chance to glance at the pork shoulder that had been braising in milk most of the day. Milk braising is a very old technique, documented way back into the 1600s, but no doubt predating the invention of books. If you think about it, cooking lamb shanks slathered in yogurt is a classic Persian technique that is still common from the Indian continent to the Middle East.

While pork shoulder braised in milk is known as an Italian dish (miale al latte), I learned the dish in my study of French peasant cooking. Ann owns a gorgeous cookbook called Pork and Sons (originally in French, Cochon et Fils) by Stéphane Reynaud that documents this technique among many others. Some years ago, this book re-reminded me of the milk braising technique which had slipped my mind.

The beauty of this technique is that the lactic acid in the milk helps tenderize the meat and ultimately, the milk mixes with the pork juices and reduces to an incredibly flavorful and gelatinous sauce. It is a technique worthy of remembering; the results are so sublimely good and tasty. It will have you asking how something so terribly simple can be so amazing.

Pork Mise: Milk, Pork, Thyme, Rosemary, Garlic, and Bay Leaves

Still Life with Pork

The Finished Product, 6 Hours in the Braise

I don't know how many times in my life I have made Pommes Anna, that classic French side dish that converts the three simplest ingredients (potatoes, butter, and salt) into something incredibly sublime, something way, way, way more than the sum of its parts. I've been making it so long that I have forgotten how I learned the dish. Although it was probably documented in La Technique by Jacques Pépin, my bible when I was teaching myself classic French technique in my late teens, I no longer remember with any clarity. And it is impossible for me to check, having donated about two thousand cookery volumes to the library at my local culinary school when I retired from the restaurant.

In any case, the dish involves layering potatoes, melted butter, and salt in a heavy pan over a low flame. When the pan is full, you cover it and put it in a hot oven for 20-25 minutes. Then you uncover it and cook it until it is just done all the way through, another 20-25 minutes. After pouring off the melted butter (and saving that for another day) you put a plate on top of the pan and invert it. Presto!

Pommes Anna, Just out of the Oven

Pommes Anna, Unmolded in All its Glory

To finish off our meal, I made a super simple salad. I had been thinking a classic bistro salad such as frisée with lardons, but with all the richness in our dinner, I really wanted something simple, peppery, sharply acidic, and palate cleansing. That ended up being baby arugula (salade de roquette) with a tarragon vinaigrette, a dressing that my dear wife just loved. I hadn't known before this year how much she adores tarragon, an herb that is much underappreciated in America. It is an herb whose licorice undertones I thought might put her off. My bad!

The night before making the salad, I chopped finely a handful of tarragon leaves and placed them in a newly-emptied mustard jar with a quarter cup or so of rice vinegar, a super mild and only lightly flavored vinegar. After sealing the jar and shaking it up to get all the mustard off the walls of the jar, I let it stand on the counter overnight to infuse. My tip to you: keep your emptied mustard jars in the pantry until you are ready to make a dressing using the leftover bits of mustard remaining in the jar. After using the jar to make a dressing, then you can recycle it.

When ready to make the dressing for the salad, I added a tablespoon or two of roasted hazelnut oil and then enough really good Tuscan extra virgin olive oil and salt to taste. Shake it hard to emulsify between tastes and additions. I probably used two parts oil to one part vinegar. Less to my taste would be a milder dressing closer to the classical vinaigrette ratio of three parts oil to one part vinegar.

I don't have a set recipe for vinaigrettes at home: they depend on my tastebuds and each dressing has to be adjusted just so. If I want a more acidic dressing (for counteracting a fatty pork shoulder, for example), I would use a lower oil to vinegar ratio. Otherwise, more oil. Also, the quality of the acidity matters too. Some vinegars are really acidic and require more oil (or even water) to tame them. Some vinegars are very mild and want less oil so that they are not overwhelmed. My rule of thumb: start with two parts oil to one part vinegar and add oil bit by bit until you are happy with it.

My Stealth Vinaigrette Maker: Newly-Emptied Mustard Jar

And that's pretty much the saga of our anniversary dinner. The food was so good, even if I say so myself. That pork, I cut it with my fork, it was so freaking tender. From the umami-laden appetizer to the crisp acidity of the salad, it was just a memorable meal. And the maple-pumpkin pie that the guys brought over was the perfect little bite to finish it off with, not too sweet and not reeking of pumpkin pie spice. The pie was well done.

After Rob and Dyce departed, I realized that there's only one real downside to celebrating at home and that is the somewhat large pile of dishes that has to be attended to after your guests have left. It's a small price to pay, but cleaning the cocotte below was a pain in the butt. I'd do it all over again for another bite of that damned pork, though!

Dirty Dishes: Fun Times!

Our anniversary celebration was a great one and I am looking forward to spending the time until the next one with my very best friend, the woman that I adore and who loves me to death. Ann, I love you!