Pork and Potatoes

So Ann has this habit of picking up people wherever we happen to be, and if she likes them well enough, inviting them to dinner. Such was the case recently when we met Evan and Justin around the fire pit at our local pub while we were getting a couple beers after a movie two Fridays ago. Ann decided that they were coming to dinner along with Justin's fiancée and soon-to-be wife Maria, who was not in attendance around the fire.

Ann also decided that I was making pulled pork. To be fair, she did ask me to make pulled pork, but she knows that I will never refuse her requests if I can fulfill them. Besides, I am too happy to cook for anyone who is a good human and a good eater. I'm no longer in the restaurant business, so my tolerance for picky and high-maintenance eaters is nil, having had to cater to such people all my life. But for good people, I will gladly cook any time and any place.

Ann, Maria, Justin, and Evan
We Had a Great Night with Great People, Food, and Wine

I still approach dinners at home the way that I would at the restaurant. Even though we changed the menu every day at the restaurant, we would start the week off by sketching out where we wanted the menu to be by the weekend, and trying to pull as much of that prep forward into the earlier part of the week when we were not as insanely busy as on the weekend.

Ditto for dinner at home. On the day of the dinner, I don't want to have spent the entire day prepping such that I am too tired to spend quality time with my guests. So when I sketch out a menu for a dinner, I try to spread the work out over multiple days. In this case, the menu was not very complicated so for the Saturday night dinner, I started with some small tasks on Friday.

The menu was straightforward:

Whipped Goat Cheese with Puttanesca Topping

Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder

Scalloped Potatoes with 'Nduja

Green Salad with Pickled Shallots, Spiced Pecans, Pomegranate Seeds, and Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Pulled Pork, 'Nduja Scalloped Potatoes, Green Salad

The tasks that I could do ahead on Friday I did on Friday: making the dry rub for the pork, spicing the pecans, and making the puttanesca topping for the whipped goat cheese. I've covered my spice rub for pork ("Butt Rub") in detail before and you can find a recipe here. I pretty much followed the recipe except for when I tasted this batch of rub, I wanted both a bit more sugar and salt which I added.

"Butt Rub" for the Pork Shoulders

Spicing pecans is a useful technique and we used to make many pounds at a time at the restaurant as they were a key component in certain dishes, such as our Fall Salad, a mix of cubed roasted winter squash, cubed Asian pear, and Cajun-spiced pecans, all dressed in a vinaigrette made from local apple cider reduced 8-fold, and served molded in a ring mold with a flourish of just-cut micro-arugula on top. [I sure miss the days when our growers would deliver living flats of microgreens to the restaurant, micros that we would clip seconds before they hit the plate.]

I used to toss the pecans in melted butter and then add some spice rub and mix them well to coat them with the spices. And that was good, but I noticed that when one of my line cooks prepped the pecans, they always tasted way better than mine. I watched her when she made the next batch and saw that she heated the pecans and butter together in a pan until the pecans were well-roasted before coating them in the spice mix and a generous pinch of additional salt. Even an old chef can learn new tricks.

While at the restaurant we used our Cajun spice mix (aka "Magic Dust") to spice pecans, I wanted for this dinner to echo the same flavors in the pork, so I used the pork rub to spice the pecans. I have found that menus hang together better if you can echo some flavors throughout, but not so much as to be tiresome.

Spicing Pecans: Cook Until the Pecans are Roasted

Spicing Pecans: Tossing with Spice Mix and Salt

The next Friday task was to start in on the goat cheese that we would have for our pre-dinner appetizer course with sparkling wine. The idea for this appetizer was to whip some fresh goat cheese to a light, airy, and spreadable consistency and then to top it with a highly-flavored olive oil.

But what to top the goat cheese mousse with? I wanted to be a bit creative. When I start thinking about creating dishes, I am often influenced by ingredients on hand, dishes that have appealed to me recently, or some other external input. In the restaurant, I would often, when in need of inspiration, walk into our well-stocked pantry (We stocked 15 different types of rice, for goodness sake!) where I would surf the shelves, seeking ideas.

In the case of this appetizer, I have been thinking a lot recently about making a chili-garlic crunch as that has been all the rage in the last year or two, and for good reason. Moreover, I have been thinking about spaghetti alla puttanesca as those bold flavors really appeal to me.

And there you have it, this topping is the answer to the question everyone has been asking: What if chili-garlic crunch and pasta puttanesca had a baby?

Chili-Garlic Crunch
Boiling Olive Oil Poured over Chile Flakes and Fresh Garlic

I started by making a simple chile-garlic crunch. While heating a cup of olive oil on the stove, I put 7-8 cloves of minced garlic, a couple tablespoons of chile flakes, and a tablespoon of dried basil in a heat-proof bowl. When the oil got very hot, I poured it over the mixture, instantly frying it, and let it cool on the stovetop.

Whipped Goat Cheese with Puttanesca Topping

Once the oil cooled, in went the remaining ingredients: minced anchovy fillets, brined capers, oil-cured sun-dried tomatoes, and chopped green olives. Then Ann and I tasted the mix and adjusted it. The oil seemed too prominent, so I added some acidity in the form of first a touch of balsamic vinegar for sweetness and acidity, then a touch of red wine vinegar for straight-up acidity. A bit of salt helped round out the flavors (surprising to me that it needed salt because of the anchovies, capers, and olives).

I left the mix on the counter overnight to macerate and for all the flavors to come together: it takes time for flavors to infuse into oil. The flavors were definitely better on Saturday morning than Friday afternoon. We left the whipping of the goat cheese to minutes before our guests arrived and one the mousse was spread on a plate and topped with the oil, I scattered on a large handful of chiffonaded fresh basil to lighten and freshen the appetizer.

Slow-roasting 15 pounds of pork shoulder is an all-day affair. A prior post outlines my method in which I bring the roasts up to 165F, wrap them, and return them to a very slow oven to bring them up to a final temperature of 195-200F. Despite it being an all-day affair, I couldn't bring myself to get in the kitchen until after my morning coffee, so I did not get the two shoulders into the oven until just after 9am. Accordingly, they were not ready until roughly 7:00pm.

Spice-Rubbed Pork Shoulders Ready for Oven (or Smoker)

Pork Shoulders at 165F, Ready to be Wrapped and Put Back in Oven

Fall-Apart Tender Pork Pulled Using Tongs

To go with the pulled pork, I had the idea to do scalloped potatoes with thyme and 'nduja, the Calabrese spreadable salame. I was hoping that the 'nduja would melt into the cream and I was not at all disappointed. I built the casserole by putting a layer of sliced raw yellow potatoes in an oiled gratin, then topping the layer with a sprinkle of salt, fresh thyme, little dots of 'nduja, and a drizzle of heavy cream, continuing in this fashion until the gratin was full. It baked for an hour, covered, in a moderate oven, and then uncovered for another half an hour or so until it browned on top.

Building the Potato Layers

The Finished Potato-'Nduja Gratin

To act as a foil for the rich pork and potatoes, I wanted a green salad with a relatively acidic dressing. I decided to put spiced pecans, pomegranate seeds, and pickled shallots in the salad and because the pomegranate was really ripe, I got a good bit of juice in the process of knocking the seeds out. That pomegranate juice would form the basis of the dressing when combined with whole-grain mustard, Sherry vinegar, agave nectar, and extra virgin olive oil, all buzzed together with the immersion blender.

Greens with Spiced Pecans, Pomegranate Seeds, Pickled Shallots,
and Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Pickled Shallots Put up in December

By the time the potatoes and pork came out of the oven, we had been talking and drinking wine for a good hour and perhaps 90 minutes. Everyone was ready to eat and it all turned out wonderfully. We continued the merriment well into the evening when someone, Ann I think, suggested opening a bottle of Port.

1992 Quinta do Bomfin Port

By the time the Port was opened and decanted, a lot of wine had been consumed and we had all got a hankering for something a little sweet to go with the Port, despite having gorged ourselves on pork and potatoes. I stood at the counter and assembled crackers topped with Cambazola cheese and fig compote, the remainder of the compote that we made at Christmas to give to our friends.

This 375ml 1992 Quinta do Bomfim is fully ready to drink; the tannins have mellowed and the fruit on the wine is no longer improving. This is unlike the 750s of 1977 Warre's whose tannins are still rough and youthful. I can hardly believe the $16.95 price sticker on the bottle!

It was a great night chez nous and I thank our lovely dinner guests for sharing in the merriment with us!

Easter 2022

It's been a long time since we held an Easter dinner. In fact, I don't recall having cooked a nice Easter meal since 2017, the year that my mother died and the year that we decided to pull up stakes and move across the country from Virginia to Oregon.

We didn't really find a tribe to celebrate with in McMinnville in 2018 and 2019 and then COVID obliterated the opportunity in both 2020 and 2021. Things have changed in 2022. Since moving to Bend in February, we have not only found a receptive group of friends, but thankfully COVID has relented, at least for the time being. It wouldn't surprise me, however, to be re-reading this post in a few months, once again in lockdown. It wouldn't surprise me at all, so it is now or never to celebrate.

For this particular celebration, I thought I'd go back to my roots and classic schooling to do some really simple French bistro-style food for dinner, starting with a classic terrine maison, then onto dinner with lamb chops, a green peppercorn sauce, asparagus, and pommes Anna. Although the food is simple, the devil is in the details.

John and Heidi in the Spirit!

Shanda Brought Ann Beautiful Sunflowers

Pregaming it at the Kitchen Island

Cocktails

Tom and Shanda arrived within minutes of John and Heidi and we got our cocktail on. For events like this, I prefer to spend my time visiting with friends rather than tending bar, so I generally make one or two cocktails in advance. Ann picked the cocktails this time: a classic Crusta and a cocktail that I worked out involving Mezcal and Maraschino. I don't have a name for the latter cocktail, but I really enjoyed it, so I may come up with a name at some point.

Cocktails, Awaiting Guests

Cheers! Santé! Skol!

The Crusta, pregenitor of the Sidecar, comprises Cognac, lemon juice, simple syrup, triple sec, orange bitters, and Maraschino, stirred on ice, strained up into a stemmed glass with a sugared rim, and garnished with a lemon twist. Classically, I've seen the drink served in a coupe lined with a wide slice of lemon peel around the bowl, but I didn't have enough lemons for that. 

The Mezcal cocktail is all about a smoky profile. It starts with high-quality muddled Maraschino cherries, a bit of syrup from the cherries, a little Maraschino liqueur, lime juice, and a low-end Joven Mezcal. Save the good Mezcal for drinking neat! It is served at room temperature, strained up into a stemmed glass rimmed with smoked salt and garnished with a cherry. It is not at all sweet and the Maraschino adds a floral character to the smoky Mezcal.

Appetizers

Terrine, Cheese, Pickles, Bread, Mustard

What's more French bistro than cheese and charcuterie? For appetizers with our cocktails, I made a terrine and some pickles, and Ann made a delightful loaf of bread. We bought a hunk of Sawtooth cheese, a washed rind raw cow's milk cheese similar to Muenster, from Cascadia Creamery in Trout Lake, Washington, across the Columbia River about three hours north of us.

The terrine is ground pork garnished with ham, pork fat, pistachios, green peppercorns, porcini mushrooms, and dried cherries. I would usually use pork liver in the terrine, but being brand new to Bend, I have no idea where to source good pork liver and moreover, I like to take guests' temperature on liver before I serve it to them.

Ann's Boule

Pommes Anna

Invented in Paris in the 1800s, pommes Anna is one of those classic dishes in the French culinary pantheon, a layered cake of potato slices, butter, and salt, browned on the stovetop and baked to doneness. Although it is surely out of favor in the 21st century, I like it for a party because it is impressive to look at, meltingly delicious, and best of all, because it cooks in the oven, I can spend my time with guests while it cooks. I think that it is such a wonderful dish that is in danger of being forgotten that I trained all my sous chefs in how to make it so that they can pass it down to their crews. 

Slicing Yellow Potatoes Old School
on the Mandoline

Pommes Anna, Pre-Slicing

To make pommes Anna, you should slice potatoes thinly, about 1/8 inch or 3mm. To do so, I use my old-school French stainless steel mandoline, pictured above. I don't use it much any more, but it used to get a workout at the restaurant. This is probably my third or fourth one, several having been destroyed by the rigors of the restaurant kitchen.

If you are looking for something just to make this dish, I would not recommend that you spend $200 on a classic mandoline. A cheap Japanese benriner or even a knife will work just fine to slice the potatoes, as much as I do love the heft of the old-school hunk of French stainless steel. 

The choice of potato is up to you. Starchy russet potatoes hold together better and brown better, but the texture is drier and way less sexy. Waxy potatoes, such as the Yukon Golds that I used for this one, don't hold together or brown as well, but my God, is the texture ever sublimely sexy! I would say choose starchy potatoes until you have a few pommes Anna under your belt and are comfortable with the technique, then switch to waxy potatoes.

To bake the potato cake, you will need a heavy, fairly straight-sided, oven-proof pan. I use my antique Griswold #8 cast iron frying pan. The company that makes my copper pans, Mauviel, actually still makes a $500 copper pan just for making pommes Anna, entirely overkill! If you don't have a cast iron pan, maybe this dish will convince you to get one at a thrift shop near you.

My frying pan holds about five pounds of potatoes, so I sliced five pounds of Yukon golds in the afternoon before guests arrived. One of the good things about waxy potatoes is that they don't really oxidize all that much (as compared to say russets which brown while you are peeling them) and can be prepped well in advance.

I assembled the gâteau just as we were finishing our appetizers, by arranging the potato slices in pretty rings, doused with clarified butter and sprinkled with salt every layer. I always build up the center higher than the edges because the center will sink, yielding an uneven cake. The first step is to build the cake on the stove top over medium heat. Then you cover it with foil, weight it with a very heavy pan, and bake it covered for about 25 minutes in a really hot oven, say 450F. Finally it gets uncovered and baked until it is cooked through and nicely colored, say another 25 minutes.

When it went into the oven for the initial covered bake, I went outside and fired the grill to preheat in anticipation of grilling lamb chops and asparagus for dinner. Grace, who is making her final Easter appearance with us (she has only days to live), watched the proceedings outside from the comfort of the dining room rug, looking through the French doors to the patio where all the action was.

Queen of the Dining Room

Easter Dinner

Dinner was a really simple affair. Along with the pommes Anna, we had grilled lamb chops and grilled asparagus paired with a northern Rhône, a Crozes-Hermitage rouge, always my go-to wine for lamb.

As for all simple cooking, the devil is in the details and in the quality of the ingredients. I marinated the lamb chops in red wine, garlic, rosemary, and black pepper for three days before hand. The marinade, I strained and reduced, then finished with Dijon mustard, shallots, green peppercorns, glace de viande, a splash of heavy cream, and at the end, a little cold butter swirled in, to make a refined flourless sauce poivrade for the lamb.

I found some beautiful large asparagus at the market, it being the height of asparagus season. For home cooking, I snap the stems off where they will break, assuring that they will be tender. But because this was for a special occasion, I cut the stalks all to the same length and then peeled the tough outer skin off them. If you are going to peel asparagus, you really should invest in a serrated edge peeler which will make your life so much simpler. For thick asparagus headed for the grill, I like to blanch them first. Otherwise, you risk charring the outside on the hot grill before they can cook through.

Almost Ready to Feast, Filling Water Glasses
and Lighting Candles

Pommes Anna and Grilled Asparagus

Lamb Chops: The Main Attraction

For dessert, Ann dipped cannoli shells into chocolate and made a filling of ricotta, tiny chocolate chips, and lemon zest. She also made the excess dipping chocolate into bark sprinkled with salt and toasted pistachios. Along with those, I opened a 1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port that I bought on futures 30 years ago. At it's current state of evolution, it tastes like a warm marionberry pie and blackberry syrup.

1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port

It really was great to get in the kitchen and cook some real food for a change, although the pile of dirty dishes at the end is always a bit of a bummer! John, Heidi, Tom, and Shanda, many thanks for your great company and for sharing a meal with us in our new home!

Sablefish with Balsamic-Roasted Onions and Quick Pickles

One of the best, most luxurious fishes on the planet is the sablefish, locally known as black cod, though it is not a cod at all. It is a fish that I have worked with sporadically over my career. We would get some flown in to the restaurant in Virginia from our purveyor in Alaska, but it would come in only infrequently along with our salmon and halibut, most of my fisherman's catch being sold to Japan.

Because it is so good, it wants to be treated simply so that it can be the star of the show. Moreover, because it is so high in fat (good fish fats), it wants something acidic to help balance it. In this case, I decided to use two different vinegars to help balance the dish: balsamic and rice.

Sablefish with Balsamic-Roasted Onions and Quick Pickles

I decided to plate the sablefish on a bed of onion slabs first marinated in and then roasted in balsamic vinegar. Then I decided to quick pickle some cucumber slices to garnish the top of the fish. The two sources of acid complemented the unctuous fish.

Onions with Balsamic Vinegar, Prior to Roasting

I slabbed a big onion and poured on a bit of balsamic vinegar and let the slabs stand for twenty minutes, turning the slices once, to marinate. After I sprinkled them with salt and pepper, I put them in a moderate oven until the onions were soft, but still holding together, and the balsamic vinegar reduced to a syrupy glaze.

Cucumber Slices in the Pickle Brine

Quick pickles are just that: pickles that take no time. They pick up a bit of the pickle brine, yet they retain the fresh snap and crunch of the raw cucumber. I make my brine by taste. I start with a bit of rice vinegar and then dilute it with water until I am happy with it. Then I stir in salt and sugar, tasting as I go, until I am happy with the flavor of the brine. In go the cucumbers for a short stay, an hour or less. These were in the brine just about an hour.

Searing the Skin Side of the Sablefish

Sablefish is among the easiest fish to cook for two reasons. First, because of the fat content, it is very hard to overcook it to the point where it is inedible. And second, because it has a built-in timer. When the flesh starts to flake apart, it is ready to serve. You can see the very visible flakes in the top photo.

I always serve sablefish with the crispy skin attached. It is a treat on par with and perhaps surpassing salmon skin. One day, perhaps I will make sablefish skin hand rolls as a special treat for Ann and me; I suspect it will be far better than the same sushi made with salmon skin.

As always, hats off to Northwest Fresh Seafood for impeccable fish.

Summer Vegetable Dinner

Since retiring from the restaurant, I have cooked a handful of real meals, meals into which I put any effort at all. After coming home from the winery, I am mainly about getting something on the table rather than being creative. I need a reason to cook now, it seems. And that reason would be our good friends Pat and Mary Jo just two houses down.

We invited them over for dinner and since they are vegetarians, I cooked vegetarian. Because my diet is mainly vegetarian, this is a non-issue and truth be told, I've never needed meat to make my life complete. Well, there is pork belly. If I have any weakness at all, it would be for pork belly.

This meal was guided by the time of the year and what was in season, the very same ethos that drove the menus at OBW. For a first course, seeing some beautiful Kuta squash in the market made me think back to a dish I did for a vegetarian summer squash-themed dinner more than a decade ago. I made a classic vichyssoise substituting squash for potatoes and calling it rather tongue-in-cheek squashyssoise.

Only one problem. I have real problems with lactose and a bowl of the original chilled soup would certainly be painful. No worries: coconut milk to the rescue for that same unctuousness that heavy cream provides. The soup involved sweating squash and leek with a bouquet of Thai basil from the garden (because is not the combination of coconut milk and Thai basil one of the most glorious flavor combinations ever?) and then into the blender.

After the soup chilled overnight, I pulled it out of the fridge 90 minutes before I wanted to serve it to let it warm to the point where the fat in the coconut milk would be liquid, cooler than room temperature. Only one problem: the soup was so desperately flat that I thought of pitching it out rather than serving it.

I don't know if I am out of practice or if my chef mind failed me, but it actually took me what seemed like several minutes to figure out how to rescue the soup. A sprinkle of salt and a squeeze of agave syrup took the soup to a new plane: one of the three best soups I have ever made and I have made thousands. The garnish is a simple relish of raw corn, raw tomato, Thai basil, salt, and agave nectar.

Lacto-Friendly Squashyssoise

Squash cakes. A year ago, I would have screamed "f*cking squash cakes!" at the thought of making another after a decade and a half of having them on summer menus and the incessant requests from customers as soon as spring arrived, "When are you going to put squash cakes back on the menu?" Squash cakes sound pretty bland, boring, and healthy, but these are none of those things and once someone tries them, she is pretty well hooked for life.

A quick fresh salad of black-eyed peas and vegetables dressed in red wine vinegar and olive oil sits under the cake and a quick pickle of cucumber brings a little more acid to the party to complement the incredibly rich squash.

Squash Cake, Black-Eyed Pea Salad, Quick Pickled Cukes

And for dessert, I had to do a sorbet. Why? My wife made me schlep my huge commercial sorbet machine 3500 miles across this country and it had been sitting in the garage, unpacked and unloved. I made a simple syrup of Pinot Noir with a hint of cinnamon and blended it with watermelon to yield a fun summer sorbet.

Watermelon-Pinot Noir Sorbet

Pat and Mary Jo, thanks for all you do for us. We'll do it again. When I get the itch to cook again.

Cuban Sandwich

Cuban Sandwich

Ann and I have been discussing Cuban sandwiches a lot recently. César used to make great Cubans on bread he would bake daily at Sweet Sunset Bakery, but it's been years ago now that he closed up shop and moved back to California. We have heard about good Cubans at Throx Market, but haven't had the time to get there. So, today, I took matters into my own hands.

It was a hell of a long day at work (especially since it is in theory a day off), getting all my ducks in a row for the upcoming New Year's Eve circus and by the time I got ready to leave, it was late in the day and I was tired. I needed something I could make quickly and I didn't even ask Ann for suggestions. I just grabbed what I would need to make Cubans and got home as quickly as I could.

Easy, delicious, and what a classic sandwich! I made six. Ann and I split three; Carter ate three.

Honeymoon: Olympic Provisions, Portland OR

Friday May 3, SE Portland OR


How to Tell You are in the Correct Location

After begrudgingly leaving Lardo and its wonderful pork sandwiches, Ann had the idea of finding a place to hole up and have a bottle of wine while waiting to check in to our B&B. We started driving around Southeast looking for a place to sit and have some wine, but nothing doing. Very few places are open before 5pm.

I admit that I was getting a bit frustrated (read "bitchy") when Ann hit on the brilliant idea of going to Olympic Provisions' original store in SE. We had already visited the "new" store in NW, where the charcuterie fabrication has now moved, the preceding Sunday on our way from the airport to the beach. Are you sensing a theme here? What could be better on top of meat than more meat? It's really kind of funny, but in our regular diets, we don't eat much meat. But we do have a crazy fondness for the pig!

I Want One!

When we arrived at the beautifully restored industrial building right on the river, the telltale hambulance was parked beside the building. We meant to get a picture of it when we visited the Thurman St NW store, but we forgot.

We perched ourselves at the bar just opposite the range at the tail end of lunch service and right at the beginning of happy hour and happily chatted away with each other and the staff as they were changing shifts. One thing is very apparent when talking with the people at Olympic Provisions and that is that they are all very proud of the product that they serve and are happy to be working there. As well they should be: their charcuterie is the best I have yet tasted anywhere. I've got a couple of other places I want to check out, but they have it down.


Yeah! Go Meat!

While sitting there, we ordered another bottle of Scott Paul "La Paulée" (the first bottle of which we purchased at OPNW and consumed the previous Sunday). We found this wine a bit disappointing the second time around after we had calibrated our palates to really good Oregon Pinot earlier in the week.

Once Again, Not Quite as Good

After a glass of wine and a few minutes to digest lunch, we ordered a chef's choice charcuterie plate. From the upper left corner clockwise, there was lomo, nduja, pork and pistachio terrine, loukanika, and chorizo andalucia, along with fabulous pickles: celery, bread and butter, and rhubarb.


Chef's Choice Charcuterie

For those of you without a working vocabulary of Italian charcuterie, nduja ("en-doo-ya"; recognize the similarity in pronunciation to andouille?) is a spicy and spreadable Calabrese salame. Nduja is cured in a casing like a hard salame, but it has a soft, spreadable texture because it is made from about three parts of fat to one part of lean, just the opposite of a hard salame.

Hamburger!

Sometimes when the weather is right and that grill gets calling, you just have to have a burger. Last night was such a night for us to sit out on the patio and devour burgers.

Ann's Burger in Progress

Mmm!

Can you tell anything about a person by his burger condiments?

Ann: mayo, arugula, red onion, tomato, cheese, bacon, pickles, and potato chips.
Ed: Dijon mustard, lettuce, red onion, cheese, bacon, and pickles.