OBW Company Christmas Dinner

We closed early on Friday night the 23rd to all sit down to Christmas dinner together. Although we are often together, the whole crew sits down to dinner together once a year. The planning started a couple weeks out with me canvassing the crew about what they wanted to eat.

We all still had visions of last year's dinner dancing in our heads: ossobuco of pork, risotto milanese, and kick-ass collard greens braised with smoked turkey necks. You can see from last year's menu what we like to eat: hearty braised comfort food with no frou-frou. Keep your lobsters and caviar, bring on the braised meat.

Everyone except me would have been satisfied with the same menu as last year; I always want to do something different. This year, after much soul searching, it finally came to me while watching the Food Network; this would be the year for porchetta, that crackling piggy delight of Italian heritage. Add some gnocchi with pancetta and black truffles and a reprising of the braised collard greens and the menu was set.

Wild Boar-Stuffed Porchetta

Porchetta is a stuffed pork roast that probably originated in central Italy. Often you will see a whole pig stuffed and spit-roasted. Here we imitate that with pork belly that I prepped by butterflying it and curing it for 48 hours with ground fennel, ground coriander, salt, and sugar.

After rinsing the cured belly, I covered it with a wild boar forcemeat flavored with orange zest, black olive purée, ground fennel, and minced garlic. You see the belly here rolled and tied, ready for the oven, and then once it is cooked, all crispy and brown.



Potato Gnocchi with Black Truffles and Pancetta

I took this opportunity to show Tony and Travis how to make traditional potato gnocchi, without eggs. Anyone can add eggs and make gnocchi. It takes some practice to make gnocchi without eggs and the practice is worth it. With eggs, you get lumps. Without eggs, you get light pillows of goodness.

Tony, peeling the potatoes for the gnocchi. Travis in the background. We generally don't serve potatoes at the restaurant and when we do, they are not the russets that make the best gnocchi. You may notice the retail bag of tiny russets that I had to run out to the grocery store to fetch.










Travis, ricing the potatoes.
















Gnocchi on the hoof, awaiting their turn in the pot of simmering water.









The finished product, mixed with butter and truffles and pancetta, topped with grated cheese, and baked.

Collard Greens Braised with Smoked Pork Neck

$50 Gift Certificate Photo Caption Contest

For all of you who follow the blog, but not our Facebook page, we're having a photo caption contest over on facebook.com/OneBlockWest for this photo. Keep it clean!

Truth in Advertising

Here's a new one on me. We get all kinds of excuses why people need to cancel reservations, but never heard this one before.

"I need to cancel my reservation because my husband's being a big jerk!"

Photo Caption Contest

This evening a customer (unknown to me, please identify yourself) sent this dish back to the kitchen with the message, "For the blog." This is clearly the detritus from a couple of Hawaiian Blue Prawns that we served with Hebi (Shortbill Spearfish) and Seaweed, Edamame, and Pickled Ginger Salad.

I've named these guys Fred and George after the Weasley twins. Clearly something has clearly gone wrong with one of their pranks—their midsections are missing.

I have a $25 gift certificate for the person who comes up with the best caption for this photo. Decision is mine alone and I will decide on March 1, 2009. Post your caption as a comment or email it to me and I will do it. Make sure you identify yourself so that I can notify you if you win. Have at it!

A Quail and a Duck

A humorous thing happened tonight and happily for us, the customers involved saw the humor and were not upset.

The menu contained a bird duo of grilled quail and smoked duck. It also contained a roasted breast of Moulard duck. Said customer to the server, "We'll have the quail and duck." And it being a night of several tables ordering a single entrée and sharing it, the server put in the order for the bird duo. And when it arrived at the table, the customer wanted to know where the duck entrée was.

Now I should be upset that the server did not clarify the order with the customer before putting it into the kitchen, but I'm just not in the mood for that. Rather, I find myself chuckling about it (and relieved that the customers were good sports).

Chef for a Day

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I'm busy revamping the restaurant web site by rewriting it from the ground up to make it much easier to maintain. This is causing the old dog to learn new ASP and CSS tricks. I hope to launch the new site at the beginning of the year. Bear with me while most of my energy goes into completing this much needed renovation.

We have a great program here at the restaurant called Chef for a Day and it is much like what it sounds, a chance for our customers and others to come spend a day working as part of the crew here at the restaurant. Here is our latest victim, Dr. Natasha, a real live medical doctor too, working on the Farmers Market Slaw for our crab cakes.

Not only do our chefs for the day enjoy the program, we do too. Being stuck here inside our four walls all the time, we don't get out much and this is a way of bringing an outside perspective into our kitchen.

We host our chefs for the day on our slower days of the week so that we can integrate our guests into the flow as much as possible. On busy weekends, it's all our crew can do to get the food out, without having to worry about a newbie in the kitchen.

It's an interesting study in personality. Some of our guests stand around timidly, afraid to make the slightest mistake, while others just jump right in. We prefer the ones who just jump right in.

For more information about the program, refer to the restaurant web site.

Low Country Cooking Class

Recently I posted about how much I like to cook Cajun and Creole food. For my latest cooking class/dinner/party, I decided to tackle Cajun's cousin Low Country food, cuisine that's indigenous to the South Carolina coastal plain from Pawley's Island in the north, down to Savannah in the south. I haven't spent much time in this area, but as a Southerner, I have an innate feel for the basics of the cuisine.

Our menu was:

Shrimp and Grits
Pilau
Smothered Quail
Collard Greens
White Chocolate, Caramel and Pecan Bread Pudding

To keep this post from becoming book length, I'm going to give an overview here and deal with each dish on its own in subsequent posts. You can follow the links in the menu above to the article on each dish. And see the post entitled Grits 101 for the basics on grits.

The first thing to know about these dishes and recipes is that they are my own. I've tasted many versions of each of these dishes and these are my versions, informed by my sensibilities and the ingredients available to me in my locale. That is to say that I am treading on some sacred ground here: I'm not a native Sandlapper and I know that your grandmother makes the best version of each of these dishes. People have started small land wars over the "correct" version of shrimp and grits, for goodness sake. I have no wish to be involved in your little wars, so I make no claims about these dishes other than you will enjoy each and every one of them.

My shrimp and grits is made with very coarse grits from Anson Mills in Columbia SC. The all critical sauce for the grits is made from shrimp, shallots, green onions, Surry sausage, garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, loads of fresh thyme, fresh parsley, lemon juice, white wine, and sweet butter. Sure, this is not how your grandmother makes it, but I love it.

I make my pilau in quasi-risotto style; well, maybe I should stop beating around the bush. I make it jambalaya style. I start with a mirepoix of onions, celery, and poblano peppers sautéed with Surry sausage, garlic, fresh thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes. To this I add Carolina Gold rice, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and chicken stock, stirring and adding more stock until the rice is done. I know others insist on having separate grains of rice; that's just not for me. Here's Randy chopping onions for the pilau.

Smothered Quail is what we would call in my family Fried Quail. This is my favorite way of eating both rabbit and pork chops. I dredge the quail in seasoned flour and brown all sides, then remove the quail from the pan, and make a light brown roux from the drippings and additional oil as necessary. Then I add water to make a gravy and put the quail back in and simmer until tender, about 20-30 minutes. Onions and pork products always help the gravy; yesterday we used Surry sausage. I seasoned with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and fresh thyme.

I can't eat anything cooked in gravy like this without rice (hence the pilau) and a big pile of greens. My preference is turnip greens (which we call turnip salad), but in the market on Saturday, we had nothing but collards, which also suit me fine. At the restaurant, we chiffonade collards, blanch them, and sauté them quickly in olive oil and garlic. But that just won't do for a good Southern dinner which requires long slow cooking of the greens with smoked pork products.

We ended the meal with a glorious bread pudding, puffed up to almost four inches in height. Here you can see Tim whisking the custard before we added the stale bread to soak. Into the mix went caramel, white chocolate, pecans, and the guts of a vanilla bean. Quipped one of the jokers in attendance, "A vanilla bean is what we use when we run out of vanilla extract!"

You've seen the photos of some of the husbands in the class at work, but none of the wives. And what were the ladies doing during our class? What they do best: playing the role of technical advisor from the back row! It wasn't really so, but I managed to catch them chatting while the guys were whacking and stirring things.

How Slow Is It?

Gee, who would have figured that 9/11 would be slow? ;) Not me. I should be in the kitchen cooking, instead of blogging. It's so slow we have to entertain ourselves, witness Rasta Chef here. At least we're having fun.

This begs the question, "Do you really want this guy near your food?"

OBW Employee Arrested for GWI

Winchester, VA—One Block West sous chef Brandon Comer was allegedly detained by security personnel at the Old Town Wine and Fine Arts Festival and charged with GWI, Grilling While Intoxicated. A source close to the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival indicated that Mr. Comer was observed making frequent trips to nearby wine vendors' stands, fraternizing with female customers, and operating his grill in a manner consistent with GWI. Chef Ed Matthews refused to comment on the allegations, but remarked that "having fun while we work is inconsistent with running a serious restaurant."

Thanks to all our customers who braved the heat and thunderstorms to come support us and Old Town at the wine festival! And, here's to a little GWI with friends!

What's Your Mascot?

About three years ago, a big black cat with golden eyes adopted our restaurant. I have no idea what sex it is, but I prefer to think of it as male, for it is quite large. One Block West Cat, as I have come to think of it, moved into the tiny crawl space under our deck and I see it a couple of times a week, mostly around 7:45am when I arrive or sometimes very late at night I see its eyes glowing back at me when I leave.

OBW Cat clearly is not a social creature and I've never been within 20 feet of it: one look at a human and it disappears. None of the neighbors are feeding it and certainly nobody at the restaurant is either, but it seems healthy enough. At least we don't have to worry about mice and rats around our dumpster. Or the cat pestering diners on the deck.

I've never been close enough to get a photo before: this one was taken from inside the dining room through lace sheers, which Photoshop was kind enough to remove. Every restaurant should have a mascot, don't you think?