Category: In the Kitchen

The delights at Bacon Club run the gamut from subtle scones to insane desserts to the bacon-wrapped classics. Everything was good, some things were great. We are full. Note to self: Miller High Life is the perfect beer for Bacon Club.
The photographic evidence:
hunter bacon (raw smoked/cured bacon from the russian shop, very chewy & salty and lovely on a vimta cracker), and choco maple bacon bites
did i mention, choco maple bacon bites? holy crap. yum. crispy bacon, with maple cream made with maple syrup and bacon fat cooked & whipped, and topped with a roasted cocoa bean from the Dominican Republic.
crustless fluffernutters with bacon. Elvis-rific.
Korean braised pork belly (braised plain with garlic) with salty sesame sauce & scallions
brussels sprouts with bacon & hot pepper flakes
my bacon cups with mac & cheese on the left, arancini with asparagus & bacon on the right. The bacon cups with mac-cheese did in fact work well — they were tasty and popular, and even the shaggy and tiny ones held their filling well. We filled them before we left home, then ran them through the oven to heat through and crisp the last flabby bits of bacon.
arancini (mmmmmmmm)
tomato-bacon soup (also nice as a sauce for arancini)
bacon-pepper-cheese scones
bananas foster with bacon & pecans
bacon flavored toothpicks
lentils with carrots, celery, onions with slab bacon
artichokes & mushrooms with pancetta & lemon
artichokes with mustard, wrapped in bacon and broiled — this is a really tasty thing, and probably quite easy… i may steal it for my next party
borscht with bacon… i didn’t actually try this last one, as its maker arrived with it long after I had already stuffed staggering amounts of bacon down my gullet
Also, special bonus recipe from our lovely Bacon Club hostess: for bacon caramel popcorn, cook equal parts B-grade maple syrup and bacon fat to the hard crack stage, mix with popcorn, crisped bacon pieces and pecans. She said that 2 cups each syrup & bacon fat was enough for 10 cups popcorn. Let me know if you try it before i do.

We have some friends who came over for Chow & Chow, and we got to talking about other forms of gastronomic excess… which led us to discuss their ongoing potluck series, Bacon Club. You see where this is going, don’t you? Heh.
Bacon Club involves a number of pork-fat-loving folk gathering together, each with their own bacon dish, and consuming all those bacony treats and compatible alcohols in one evening of porcine delight. Obviously we were not going to miss this.

It’s tonight, and we are making bacon cups filled with macaroni and cheese. We’d recently seen the bacon cups on Not Martha and been exceedingly impressed, so of course they sprang immediately to mind. Those had been filled with lettuce and tomato, for a breadless BLT, but tomatoes are appallingly out of season at the moment, so we cast about for a more suitable filling. Mac & cheese seemed suitably excessive and decadent.
I never like most homemade mac & cheese, because it’s insufficiently cheesy. So i surfed around, and my conclusion is that the inadequate cheese flavor is due to two things: use of mild rather than strong cheeses, and use of bechamel. The flour dulls the taste of cheese. Interestingly, a 19th century recipe involved only laying slices of cheese in layers with macaroni and baking till melted.
stove-top mac & cheese, smooth and cheesy like it should be
I found a few recipes without any flour, and it’s easy enough to swap in whatever cheeses you like… so i settled on Alton Brown’s stovetop recipe, with a bit heavier hand with the hot sauce and mustard powder and cheese (12oz instead of 10), and a bit of sauteed onion just for grins. This came out rather good, though tallasiandude thought it too sharply cheesy (sigh). Anyway, i think that i will stick with this as a basic template, and perhaps next time i will add a bit of prepared mustard to give it a little acid zing to balance the cheesy richness. Or swap in a little chevre for some of the cheddar, mmmm. Or perhaps even a little Velveeta, for that low-rent orange meltiness — i used to make my grilled cheese sandwiches with one Kraft single and one slice of sharp cheddar, to get the best of both worlds. Those were frickin’ awesome.
But back to bacon… the first few woven bacon cups came out perfect, though they took about 40 minutes to fully cook, but the last few batches have shrunk too much too fast and been done in about 20 mins. Part of it is that the different packs of bacon have slices of different widths, and it’s harder to get it right with thinner slices, but the other part must be that the oven is now too hot. So we have a number of raggedy-ass bacon cup-slash-scraps, and a few that are tiny little thimbles, but perhaps once they are topped with creamy mac-and-cheese, no one will notice.
first cups
tiny cups, falling off the forms
ragged cups
Hmm, I’ve just now done another batch and they seem fine, and i think i’ve figured out the problem: one of my muffin tins is modern and flimsy, and another is vintage and heavy… and the problem was with the heavy old tin. As I was pouring off the fat from a pan that’s been sitting out of the oven for 15 minutes — the cookie sheet base was cool enough to lift up and pour from — I noticed that the muffin tin itself was still hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold. If the inner support is hot enough to cook the bacon from inside at the same time as the oven cooks from the outside, that might be what’s shrinking them up and popping them off the tins.
       
I’ll post again once we’re back from Bacon Club, with the final verdict and photos. Either way, it’s awfully fun to spend a morning doing arts and crafts with raw bacon and then filling the house with the smell of crisped bacon. Yay.
BTW: we used 4 12oz packs of regular thin-cut bacon for this, which filled two large trays (maybe 25 cups). I made a whole pound of pasta rather than Alton’s 8oz, and it seemed cheesy enough, but perhaps it would be saucier with less pasta. In any case, a drier, clingier mac-n-cheese was just the ticket for this application, as it stayed in the cups properly and didn’t ooze liquid cheese through the holes in many of the cups when re-heated. Not that you need even close to that much mac-n-cheese; we’ve got 2/3 of the pot left for dinner tomorrow.
(PS: I don’t seem to have any posts about Chow & Chow, and neither does tallasiandude — we must have been too busy. This was a rather fun party in which we made a boatload of dumplings and other chinese dishes, ate them, and then stayed up far too late watching Stephen Chow movies. Recommended.)

We were lucky enough to be invited to tag along to a fabulous dinner party thrown by friends of friends on New Year’s Eve. They managed a fully-plated, multicourse dinner for 20, incorporating dishes from all over the french-speaking world, including both fish and lamb chops that were cooked *perfectly*.
I was impressed. And very well fed. Here are pictures:

brik of chicken, charmoula and egg, with homemade harissa

amuse bouches: cherry tomato with feta, potato with truffled foie gras, creme fraiche and caviar

vietnamese crab and asparagus soup (in an exquisitely subtle pork/ginger broth)

sea bass in madagascar spices, with cucumber-onion salad

palate cleanser of mango and grapefruit granitas

gorgeous lamb chop in homemade demiglace, with wok-fried green beans and a phyllo package of lobster, chanterelles & nuts, in a red-wine-cream sort of sauce. purported to be quebecois; delicious no matter where it’s from.

cool rice salad with chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, yellow peppers and scallion

cheese plate, including dried cherries, date paste and home-candied grapefruit peel

chocolate gateau and gelee of champagne with winter citrus fruit

We didn’t have many fresh vegetables of the non-root variety, but i really felt the need for a salad. What we did have was a bunch of pears that were about to go overripe.
So i sliced up the pears, sliced up some celery, and chopped some walnuts, then drizzled the works with sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt & pepper.
Holy cow. YUM. Even the tallasiandude, who was monumentally struck by the weirdness of this food, thought it was tasty and snarfed half of it right up.

I went to the Korean market to buy kimchi, because we were completely out, and this household does not run smoothly without kimchi for the spicy ramen that functions as security blanket and default nourishment for a stressed-out tallasiandude, and for the tofu kimchi bokum that is my most favorite treat.
And while i was waiting in line, clutching my big jar of kimchi and my plastic box of spicy garlic cucumber pickle, I didn’t go even 5 minutes before i was overcome by the most intense craving to run home immediately and scarf down delicious kimchi and pickles with steaming hot rice. (Clearly I have gone completely native.)
And it didn’t stop there. Tallasiandude looked longingly over his ramen bowl at my hot rice, fried egg, and kimchi deliciousness. He made some for dinner that night. And we both had more for lunch yesterday. The craving appears to be bottomless right now for plain hot white rice, eggs over easy, super-fermenty kimchi (some thicker pieces have bubbles you can feel on your tongue), and salty garlicky cucumber pickle.
I figure it’s the weather — it’s finally gotten really and truly cold, and there’s ice everywhere — and the fact that we’re both tired and sick and struggling to recover.

we’re having people over tonight, so i am cooking for pleasure, hurray! tonight’s menu is fennel-orange-radish salad, stracotto (aka italian pot roast, with red wine and tomatoes), and either chocolate fallen souffle cake or cinnamon poached pears. Tallasiandude is agitating for cake. 🙂
Fennel-orange-radish salad, aka happy summer sunshine on a plate
Trim a bulb of fennel, slice in half the long way, then slice very fine; a regular size fennel bulb is usually enough for two salads or one giant lunch salad. Slice up some red radishes. Supreme some oranges, usually one per salad unless you have giant navel oranges: slice off the top and bottom, then slice off the peel in vertical strips, making sure you get all the grody white pith off. You’ll lose a few microns of pulp, but it’s worth it. Use the paring knife to cut out the individual sections of orange, pith & membrane free. Cut the sections in half. Combine the fennel, radish & orange bits on a plate. Drizzle over some olive oil and a splash of mild rice vinegar, grind over black pepper and sprinkle with salt. Or, you can make an actual dressing with the juice from the bowl you cut the oranges into, a bit of vinegar, the olive oil, and salt & pepper, but i find it’s easier to just drizzle things over the salad.

Last night i caught up with work by about 5:30pm, astonishingly enough, and so i went downstairs and made that apple pie. The apples were just about to croak, but they were still fine, and last night’s first slice was delightful.
I am really trying to work on my pie crust, since i come from a line of women who make truly great pie pastry and mine is not yet up to snuff, my impending middle-age notwithstanding. Last night’s crust ended up being extra-flaky, which i attribute to the speed with which cold butter can be cut in when using an old-school wire-style pastry cutter (which i’ve not done lately, because I forgot where it was). It was shatteringly crisp and golden, but yet somehow still a little bit tough. I wonder if I overworked it a bit, trying to get the water incorporated? Or trying to roll it out thin enough? Or perhaps it’s because I made the crust then realized I’d not peeled a single apple, so I put the crusts into the fridge to hold for a half hour or so while I cranked out filling. Not sure, but will continue to experiment.
Also, I am not sure I approve of tapioca as a thickener for apple pie. It seems texturally weird to me, in a way that it doesn’t when it’s in a berry pie. Perhaps I will go with flour next time.
(photo coming)

okay, so my normal life with no massive task to accomplish seems to be still a little hairy, as i am finding myself without any time to blog. Part of that is that we are throwing our big summer shindig this weekend, and we came back from honeymoon to a house we’d still barely moved into, littered with boxes and wedding crap and half-unpacked suitcases, so we have a lot of setting up and tidying up to do, so that our friends won’t trip over boxes of records on their way to the beer tub. And of course work got nice and busy just as I got back in the saddle, so you really can’t win.
Anyway, while you wait for me to start posting all the great pictures and stories I have in the backlog (really, i swear), try this one on for size. It’s kind of timely, seeing as how I bet many of you have 18 zucchini in your fridge right now, giving you the nasty eye when you open the door to get a lemonade.
Our friends C & P gave us a great cookbook for a wedding present, Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and I have been poking around in there for fun things to do with the excess of produce currently on my hands. No one surpasses the mid-eastern cultures for great vegetable preparations. Yummy.
There are a few recipes in there for mashed or pureed zucchini, and i was just dumbstruck by this — how could i have failed to think of doing that!?! The damn things get all nice and mushy and soft when you cook them properly, so DUH.
Anyway. There are a few variations, but the basic idea is the same, and quite easy. Fry or boil zucchini until soft (I microwaved it), then mash with a fork in a colander to drain off some of the liquid. Make a paste of garlic and salt, and mash this into the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice. One recipe then adds raisins and pine nuts and a bit of dried mint; another one adds a dab of harissa and some ground coriander and a few caraway seeds; and so on — i think this would work with just about any Turkish/Persian/Moroccan/etc. spice combo you like.
These are intended to be served cold, as a dip or spread or side dish/salad. It seems to me it would make a lovely addition to a meze plate with bread and feta, or a tasty sidekick for grilled chicken. And I now have a nice compact tupperware of zucchini mash with raisins and pine nuts, instead of the 7 zucchini that used to be taking up space in my fridge. Hurray!

I have been trying to find someone to make me a plain white or yellow cake with passionfruit filling for my wedding cake, and by god it’s been a friggin’ hassle. Either people just flatly refuse to even try, or they charge 8 jillion dollars a slice, or they make some half-assed filling that is insufficiently passionfruity. I want to be whacked over the head with passionfruit goodness when i take a bite of this cake.
And when i told this tale of woe to spleen, she decided to make research and see what could be done. The result was a lovely yellow cake with bright and tangy passionfruit curd and a marshmallowy frosting. Delicious!
Now, granted, it’d have to be a cooked buttercream rather than a marshmallow frosting to hold up properly on a wedding cake, but i can handle that. So i think what i am going to do is convey this recipe, with appropriate modifications, to the bakery that’s most likely to be getting the gig, and see if they’ll humor me.
passionfruit curd recipe
Spleen used a bit more passionfruit, maybe 8 oz, than the 6 oz called for, in her efforts to give me the fruity punch I’m looking for. Otherwise, simple curd recipe, standard procedures. And you can buy frozen passionfruit pulp at the Shaw’s market on River Street in Waltham (thanks, chowhound message boards).

Kebab Kubideh
large yellow onion, peeled and grated (i run it through my immersion blender’s chopping attachment, which purees it perfectly)
1/2 lb ground lamb + 1/2 lb ground beef (or 1 lb beef)
1 clove garlic peeled and finely chopped
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
1/4 tsp paprika
1 pinch saffron threads
1 tbsp butter, melted
ground sumac & lemon wedges (optional garnish)
Drain the grated onions in a sieve over a bowl for 2 hours. Press onions to release more juice. (Onion juice is good to use in soups — I use mine to cook some carrots, then whizz them with yogurt & milk to make a soup, flavored with fresh dill or middle-eastern spices.) Add onion pulp to large bowl, then add meat, garlic, egg, crumbs, salt, pepper, turmeric and paprika; mix well. Divide into eighths and make each into a 5″ cylinder, and slide it onto a large flat wide metal skewer, forming and flattening around the skewer — if you don’t have this type of flat skewer, just do as I do and make 8-10 rectangles about 8″x1.5″ and 1/4″ thick. Melt the butter and crumble in the saffron (or crush it in a mortar, then add). (Technically, this step is supposed to be toast saffron 30 seconds in dry pan, crush, add 1 tbsp boiling water, then add butter to melt. I’ve done the shortcut with no ill effect.) Brush kebabs with saffron butter and grill over medium hot coals or in a grill pan or cast iron skillet, brushing each side with more butter as you go. This brushing with saffron butter is the key to the deliciousness, so don’t skip. Serve with buttered basmati rice and grilled tomato halves, and sprinkle with sumac and/or offer lemon wedges if you like. I also make a yogurt/dried mint/chopped cucumber salad to go with this.