Winter Tasting

We're getting to that time of the year (and we still have months to go) which taxes our ability to put fresh and local ingredients on the table. We're having to get creative with storage vegetables, winter greens, and items from the pantry.

Sopa de Ajo, Chorizo, Chorizo Oil

Stuffed Mussels, Chickpea Salad, Safrron Aïoli

Brussels Sprouts Salad

Scallop, Sweet Potato Purée, Black Truffle Beurre Blanc

Five Spice-Orange Pupusa Stuffed with Duck Confit, Curtido

Ballotine of Quail Stuffed with Pork/Pistachios/Cranberries

Rabbit Bourguignon, Broccoli Raab, Rabbit Demi

Venison and Cavolo Nero, Five-Spice Black Vinegar Sauce

Risotto of Thai Purple Rice, Coconut, Persimmon

Early Autumn Tasting

I know that it's not fall yet and won't be officially for another couple of weeks, but mentally, Tony and I are off creating fall menus already. As much as we love tomatoes, squash, squash blooms, and peppers, we are ready for the change to game, mushrooms, braised dishes, conserved pork products, and bacon, bacon, bacon.

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Figs

Grilled Prosciutto-Wrapped Goat Cheese-Stuffed Figs. This is not an earth shattering new dish, but it is wonderful nonetheless for having been made with local figs and local goat cheese. Next up, we're already scheming to make our own prosciutto when it gets cold enough. Served with a glass of prosecco, these are a great start to any meal.

Sausage and Eggs

Breakfast. Yet another in the long list of dishes that we have so titled, this one starts with a bed of chanterelle buttons cooked up with our bison and our venison sausages. On top is a spoonful of oeufs brouillés, duck eggs with chives and a splash of cream that have been whisked over a water bath until just set, more like a heavy sauce than traditional scrambled eggs and so, so much more sinful. Maple syrup around the edge adds a sweet note.

Truffled Steuben Yellow Eye Bean Soup; Potted Confit

Beans. Definitely my favorite dish of this whole tasting, and for being a soup, the most complex to make. My guests for this tasting are frequent diners and lovers of cassoulet, and so I worded the menu in such a way as to make them think that this course was going to be cassoulet. The beans are my favorites, Steuben Yellow Eyes, soaked overnight, drained, cooked to tender, and recooked with the juice that comes from roasting our pork belly (what we call "goodness"), mirepoix, smoked Surry sausage, garlic, thyme, bay, rosemary, and sage. It's all blitzed in the big Vita-Mix and passed through our finest chinois for an ultra-silky texture. Thinned, splashed with a touch of cream, seasoned, and lavished with a big spoonful of chopped black truffles, this is a soup for the culinary gods. Served with a croustade topped with potted confit. We finely chopped some of our duck confit and pork shoulder confit, then mixed it with softened butter, nutmeg, mace, and fresh thyme.

Braaied Skilpadjies

Skilpadjies. You South Africans might recognize the minature skilpadjies that we braaied on a skewer and served with geelrys. The rest of you see small tortoise-shaped patties of minced lamb and rabbit liver wrapped in caul fat, which have been grilled and served with a fragrant yellow rice and a green tomato ketchup. Somebody brought us a bunch of green cherry tomatoes from a field that needed to be tilled under for fall crops and so we made a big batch of spicy green tomato ketchup from them.

Corn Crème Caramel with Duck Breast

Duck. Here's another savory crème caramel. I just love the silky texture that it brings to a dish. This one is made from fresh corn flavored with thyme. You also see grilled Moulard duck breast, baby brussels sprouts, and a fresh fig. I made a jus (almost a consommé but I didn't technically clarify it) from more pork belly goodness, defatted Surry sausage jus, and star anise. This jus I spooned over so that its salty essence could marry with the caramel giving a delicious sweet-salty contrast with a haunting star anise note to bring out the spice in the accompanying Barossa Shiraz.

Pawpaw Panna Cotta

Pawpaw. We've been fortunate this year to have a local forager supply us wild pawpaws which have a banana-melon-mango flavor very similar to jackfruit. But pawpaws are a gigantic pain in the ass to prepare, unlike jackfruit. Here you see a plate with pawpaw purée, crème anglaise, and maple syrup on the plate, with miniature pawpaw panna cottas scattered about. Though it's hard tell, the large ball is a ball of coconut sorbet rolled in crushed black walnuts, with an oatmeal lace cookie sticking out of it.

Vegetarian Wine Dinner

Each August, we hold our annual Harvest Dinner to celebrate the hard work of Beth and Gene Nowak at Mayfair Farm. Beth and Gene supply the vast majority of produce to the restaurant and this is our way of saying "Thank you!" for all that they do for us and for our community. The dinner is made, as much as is feasible, exclusively from products from their farm. And because they produce no meat, the dinner is vegetarian.

This year, our dinner was almost entirely vegan although that wasn't a criterion in designing the menu. It was an artifact of our taking a tour through Asia with our dishes. This was our seventh Harvest Dinner and after working with the same vegetables and fruits each August with the same American/Western European mindset, we needed to do something entirely different. And so we embarked on a tour of Asia.



Melon Soup with Lumpia

Filipino Melon Soup with Lumpia. The soup is made from cantaloupe and cucumber and seasoned with a few aromatics and a touch of chile. The lumpia are filled with a mixture of red and green cabbage, onions, green onions, and carrots seasoned with soy sauce.



Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce

Vegetable Satay with Peanut Sauce. We marinated strips of eggplants, yellow squash, and green squash in soy sauce and garlic, then grilled them. When cool, we threaded them on skewers in the manner of satay. The plate is finished with a peanut sauce (natural peanut butter, hot water, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sambal oelek, palm sugar, and a lot of lime juice to balance).

Building the Eggplant Bánh Mì

Eggplant Bánh Mì

Grilled Eggplant Bánh Mì. We decided since we were doing tasting portions for a crowd to build our bánh mì on grilled focaccia for ease of handling. The large eggplants were sliced; marinated in a slurry of kaffir lime, Thai basil, cilantro, ginger, and garlic; then grilled. We have developed our own style of dressing bánh mì: we first brush the bread with the same slurry that we marinated the eggplant in and then we drizzle the bread with a sweet and spicy chile sauce that we make in house. The layers are pretty traditional: cucumbers, lots of cilantro, and carrots. We don't pickle our carrots in any way.



Soba

Soba. One of the beautiful things that we got from Beth was a haul of cheese pimientos, red peppers so called because pre-annato they were used to color orange cheese. Another was some really pretty broccoli. For some reason, they both triggered visions of soba in my head. So here we have buckwheat noodles, green onions, peanuts, broccoli, cheese pimientos, and white sesame seeds in a dressing of rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and sesame oil.

Green Vegetable Curry on Thai Fried Rice Cake

Green Thai Curry. Curries are never beautiful dishes, but they are so fragrant and so delicious. We made a classic Thai fried rice by first frying a shallot-cilantro-Thai basil paste in oil and then frying the vegetables and rice. Then we added egg to the cool fried rice and made rice cakes from that, cakes that we subsequently re-fried. On top is a curry of a eggplant, squash, the broccoli stems from making the soba, yellow peppers, and cherry tomatoes. The curry paste we made very heavy on kaffir lime both for color and for fragrance. We finished the curry with huge handfuls of cilantro and Thai basil leaves. The tricky part of this dish, because it is vegetarian, was getting the flavor just right without the use of fish sauce.

Plum Clafoutis

Plum Clafoutis. This is another in a series of experiments in making gluten- and dairy-free desserts. To give our clafoutis an Asian feel, we made it with rice flour and coconut milk. Quite delicious if I do say so myself and really wonderful when paired with an Orvieto Amabile.

Early March Tastings

Here are photos from a series of tastings we've done this week, playing games with what we have on hand.

Salmon Tartare. There's [sc]eviche, tartare, crudo, poke and all manner of other names for raw fish dishes. I'm calling this tartare and not seviche because the citrus juice goes on seconds before the dish hits the table so that there is no discoloration/firming of the flesh. Any time that we have a fatty fish belly, you can rest assured we're making a similar dish, whether or not it appears on the menu. It makes a great chef snack. This one contains red and yellow peppers, capers, green and red onions, Meyer lemon juice, and extra virgin olive oil. And as an accidental metaphor for the list of ingredients, note kitchen sink in background.

Mussels with Coconut-Yuzu Sauce. Finally, some good lighting in a kitchen picture! Sure I'd love to have a reflector behind this, but the quality of light on my cutting board versus on the main plating line is much nicer. Note to self. This is mussels steamed in coconut milk with yuzu juice and the sauce finished with a touch of fish sauce, lime leaves, and sugar. Grated lime zest and green onions over.

Grilled Shrimp. This all started early in the week when a customer inspired us to create a Provençale style pasta sauce. On the plate are two tiny wedges of a duck egg frittata made with roasted red peppers and goat cheese. These are the sops for a sauce of grilled peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, caperberries, black olives, fennel fronds, and orange zest. Propped up on all this is a grilled shrimp, marinated in black olive, garlic, and orange zest paste.

Duck Salad. This dish was really an exercise in how to use a new bottle of butternut seed oil. We're experimenting with it and naturally, it crossed our minds to make a dressing from it and Meyer lemon juice. The dressing is delicious. From there it's just a matter of building a salad around the dressing: local mesclun tied with Meyer lemon rind, duck confit, duck cracklings, duck fat croutons, orange segments, and toasted pumpkin seeds.

Rabbit Loin. Rabbit and fennel were made to go with each other: it's a magical combo. We've pounded out rabbit loin, dusted it with fennel pollen, and stuffed it with goat cheese mixed with fennel fronds and confit of fennel. Then it's rolled and wrapped in prosciutto, seared and finished in the oven. Purée of fennel and celery root down with a few cubes of fennel confit. We made the fennel confit in duck fat rather than olive oil.

Mushrooms and Bacon. We received a lot of brown beech, white beech, and pioppini mushrooms this week; you see them here featured with slab bacon on top of polenta. Nothing earth shattering or fancy about this, just plain old comfort food.

Teriyaki Royal Trumpet Mushrooms. In with the rest of our mushrooms this week were a few large royal trumpets, a mushroom that I like best when grilled and glazed with teriyaki sauce.

"Arancino." Here's a little play on food. When you hear arancino, you expect the deep-fried Sicilian risotto ball, perhaps stuffed with cheese or maybe even a ragù. But I doubt you expect our Northern Chinese Style pulled lamb stuffed into a fried rice ball. A little local bok choy to complete the dish.

Pork Belly. We were playing with the idea of Chinese steam buns stuffed with pork belly. But I'm not big on the texture of steamed dough, so I grilled it. There is something magical about tucking into a slab of pork belly with freshly cooked bread!

Here you see two different presentations. I'm not super happy with either presentation. The flavor was excellent, but the presentation is still lacking.

Jackfruit and Meyer Lemon Granita. This is a dish that had customers raving. The combination of the hyper-tropical flavors of the jackfruit with the lemon-orange tartness of the Meyer lemon yielded the best sorbet/granita I have ever tasted. Topped with a touch of amarena cherry mosto cotto and set on a piece of sinful coconut French toast.

Truffles. So every now and again, we make truffles. They're a fun way to end the evening. These are rolled in toasted coconut and in crushed candied walnuts. Plated with raspberry coulis and fried salted rice paper for a little texture.

Alien Ingredient #12: Tteok

There's a whole lot I don't know about Korean food, and unfortunately, I don't have anyone to teach me about it. Volunteers? Email me. Twenty or so years ago, there was a Korean restaurant here run by two old grandmothers with some interesting dishes that they never put on the menu. Sadly, I was just getting to know them when they pulled up stakes and returned to Hawaii where it was easier to sell Korean food. A couple of fairly worthless Korean restaurants have come and gone very quickly since, for lack of any Korean base here in Winchester and honestly for lack of skill in the kitchen. What's more, all the Koreans I know around here are busy running Japanese restaurants which is decidedly not helpful in increasing my knowledge of Korean food, which I find to be utterly delicious.

My working Korean food vocabulary is limited to the dozens of kinds of kimchee that I have made, a few soups of which kimchee jigae is one of my favorites, and a few other standards of Americanized Korean restaurant menus. Korean staples such as tteok are really foreign to me.

Tteok (as I understand it pronounced somewhere between duck and dock) is a rice cake made from ground glutinous rice. They come in all shapes: balls, logs, and the sliced logs that you see here. As this package says, this particular sliced tteok often ends up in the celebratory New Year's soup called tteokguk.

I tried a piece uncooked and as I expected, it tastes like uncooked Thai sen yai rice noodle. Simmering the tteok bits in water for 30-60 seconds rendered them softer and chewier, a pretty neat texture. Aside from their natural affinity for soup, they'd be perfect sauced or tossed with stir fries of any kind. And for giggles, I fried some of them. Just like rice noodles, they puff up when fried. The fried ones would be pretty sick drizzled with honey as a riff on funnel cakes or Greek loukoumades.

Vote: Cheap and delicious, tteok are a useful addition to my repertoire.

Summer Bounty Chef's Tasting

Here are photos from a recent Chef's Tasting, inspired by the produce that we found at the farmers market.


Patata a la Flamenca. A new potato stuffed with shrimp, chorizo, and red pepper. Pimentón sauce on the plate. Conceived as a way to use the fabulous new potatoes and a really cool flattened, thick-fleshed cheese pimiento pepper.

Scallop and Watermelon Seviche. We have a watermelon in house so we can pickle the rind and we had to have a way to use the flesh. This is a start.

Summer Salad. How to showcase fresh tomatoes and fresh mozzarella without doing the same old insalata caprese? We let the bowls shape the warm mozzarella into disks, marinated them in a pesto made from lemon verbena, and then built the salad on top of the mozzarella. Garnished with cherry and pear tomatoes, fresh corn, tomato dice, and sliced West Indian gherkins.

Arctic Char. We went round and round on what to do with the char. I love char (and any of the salmonids, really) with fresh tomato. I won the argument. Hmm, I sign the paychecks. Any correlation? And once more with the gorgeous new potatoes, because they are new but once a year. Some really garlicky aïoli and a little dill to finish the dish.

Red-Cooked Lamb Shank. This dish could appear at any season, but we just got a lamb in with its tiny shanks just begging to be braised. Full on northern Chinese treatment, braised with soy, rice wine, brown sugar, five spice, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, green onions, and star anise. Quick fried rice for garnish. Fried rice contains chives, egg, country ham, black trumpet mushrooms, and carrots.

Plum Cake. A less is more dish. Plum soup down, half a split polenta cake topped with roasted plums, topped with the other half of the polenta cake, zabaglione, and a half a plum. This was all about showing off these wonderful round plums that taste like prune plums. The grower doesn't even know what kind of plum it is. All I know is that they taste great.

Paella Cakes

Gary, here's the recipe you asked for. This week, we've been serving Shrimp and Chorizo Skewers with a Paella Cake as a starter.

Paella Cakes

The term "paella" is a bit of a misnomer. For this dish, we're making basically a paella-flavored risotto; just a slight difference of technique from paella but one which yields a creamier rice from which to make cakes. The word paella conveys just the right flavor and concept, so paella it is, with all due apologies to my Spanish friends.

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion in fine dice
1 poblano pepper in fine dice
1 red pepper, roasted, in fine dice
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large pinch saffron
2 teaspoons pimentón
2 cups paella rice (or Arborio)
1 cup white wine
24-32 fluid ounces seafood stock (or water)
salt and pepper, to taste
3/4 cup grated Manchego cheese
1 large egg
vegetable oil
Wondra (or all purpose) flour

Heat a pan over medium high flame and film with the oil. Start the sofrito by adding the onion and both peppers and cooking until the onions become translucent. Add the garlic, saffron, and pimentón and cook for another minute. If I were using chorizo in my paella cakes, which I often do, I would add it to the sofrito and cut back on the pimentón.

Add the rice and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring, until the edges of the rice become translucent. Add the white wine and stir well. Lower the flame and let the wine evaporate slowly, stirring occasionally.

Then, as for risotto, add sufficient stock or water to just cover the rice (shown in this photo) and stir often as the rice cooks. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and continue to add stock 2 ounces at a time as necessary. As the rice nears doneness, adjust the seasoning to your liking. The rice will take about 20 minutes to become tender, but still a touch chewy in the center.

Remove the rice from the flame and help it cool quickly by spreading it out on a tray. When cooled to just above body temperature, stir in the cheese and the egg. Refrigerate until cold and firm.

Shape the cold, firm rice into patties (wetting your hands between cakes helps), dredge in seasoned Wondra (or regular flour), and brown in a pan filmed with more oil over medium heat. Reserve warm.

Makes 12 3-ounce cakes.

I often apply this technique to any leftover paella or risotto, as either an appetizer as in this case, or as a garnish for an entrée.

Burning Questions: Vegetables and Grains

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with vegetables and grains.

Parsnip Tastes Like. Parsnips taste a bit like the green tops of carrots smell when you bruise them. They're sweet like carrots with a bit of an herbal edge to them. I love them.

Cooking Filet Beans/Cooking Fin de Bagnols Beans. You can cook the little filet beans any way that you would cook the larger green beans: steam, fry, tempura, roast, boil, stir fry, etc. Try tossing them with a little extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic and roasting them in a very hot oven, turning every five minutes for fifteen minutes until they become brown and wrinkled.

Difference between Poblano and Piquillo. A Poblano is a large, dark black-green, triangular fresh pepper. A Piquillo is a small red triangular pepper that you will only find canned or jarred here in the US. Both are mild and have excellent flavor. See also my Chile Primer.

Torpedo Onion Difference between Shallot. The torpedo onions that I am familiar with are red onions that take shape of an elongated football. The ones that I get from the farmers market are about 4 inches long and about an inch and a half in diameter, but I've seen much, much larger ones from the produce company. Torpedo onions are very mild and work great for raw applications. Some shallots are light purple like torpedo onions while others are yellow and some are white. While torpedo onions have a mild onion flavor, shallots have a different flavor, a delicately garlic flavor. For torpedo onions, substitute any red onion. For shallots, nothing else will do. See also the Cook's Thesaurus onion page.

Best Rice for Paella. Paella rice is a medium-grained rice that separates well when cooked and does not release as much starch as risotto rice. From Calasparra in the Murcia region of Spain, these rices were at one point almost extinct. Bomba is the premium variety. Anything labelled simply Calasparra is likely to be the Sollana variety. All the paella rices produce a very dry grain at harvest, allowing them to absorb a lot more liquid than most rice. You can substitute Arborio or other risotto rice for paella rice in a pinch. See also my rice primer.

Burning Questions: Substitutes

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with substituting one ingredient for another.

Demi-Glace Substitute. Demi-glace is highly reduced stock, so you can substitute stock for it, but you're going to have to reduce the stock to thicken it. It's probably best to make a big pot of stock one weekend and reduce it to about a fourth of its volume, then freeze it in ice cube trays. You can put the frozen cubes in a seal-top bag in the freezer and have them at your disposal at any time. No need to thaw them, just drop the frozen cubes directly into the pan. You could thicken stock with a starch such as corn, potato, or arrowroot, but you're not going to get the depth of flavor that demi-glace brings to the table.

Andouille Sausage Substitute. Andouille as we think of it here in the US is a firm sausage stuffed with chunks of pork shoulder and seasoned with a good helping of cayenne pepper. You could substitute tasso or a firm city ham such as Hormel Cure 81 and some cayenne. Tasso or ham would have the closest texture to andouille. Or you could substitute another smoked pork sausage such as kielbasa and some cayenne. Kielbasa's texture will be wrong because it is made from a ground forcemeat. Me, I'd just go to Comeaux's web site and order the real andouille. I've been buying from Ray Comeaux since the early 1990's.

Can You Substitute Clam Juice for Oyster Sauce? Not exactly. Oyster sauce is a thick soy-based sauce. Clam juice is a thin stock akin to fish fumet or fish stock. I'm not sure why you would need to substitute for oyster sauce because it seems to be stocked in most groceries. You could thicken soy sauce with a little corn starch or substitute some other kind of soy product such as bean paste.

Fish Stock Substitute. Easy. Bottled clam juice or steam some mussels and save the liquid.

Can I Use Long Grain White Rice in a Risotto? No, I wouldn't recommend substituting long-grain rice for one of the Italian short-grain rices in risotto. You're going to end up with a soggy, non-creamy mess.

Differences Between Italian Parsley and Cilantro. Visually, you can see that cilantro on the left has rounder lobes than Italian parsley on the right with its more pointed lobes. Generally, you cannot substitute one for the other: they have vastly different flavors, but you should never need to because they're both available in most grocery stores. If you are confused about them at the market, crush a leaf of each and smell them.

Replacement/Substitute for Pasilla. If I don't have pasillas in the pantry, I would use guajillos. The important thing to remember is that the pasilla is a fairly mild red chile, so you should substitute another mild red chile for it. You could use anchos, but they have a much deeper, richer, more chocolatey flavor. You might want to view my Chile Primer.

Substitute for Pimentón. Pimentón is a paprika from Spain made from peppers that have been dried over oak fires, giving the resulting product a truly smoky flavor. There is no good substitute for pimentón. You could use any paprika in a pinch, but the smoky component would be lacking.

Poblano Chile Substitute/Replacement. I use poblanos as tasty substitutes for Bell peppers in almost all cooked applications. I suppose you could go the other way and use Bell pepper, but Bell peppers are very vegetal where poblanos have a nice round chile flavor. For most applications, I would probably go with a mild green chile such as an Anaheim.

Red Yellow Onions Interchangeable. Yes they are in most applications, unless color is a factor in the dish.

Can You Use White Wine Vinegar Instead of Sherry Vinegar? Yes, but you will miss a bit of nuttiness in the sherry vinegar. Technically, sherry vinegar, like Champagne vinegar, like Chardonnay vinegar, is a white wine vinegar.

Substitute for Corvina. Corvina is a mild, white, firm fish with small flakes in the Drum family. I serve it at the restaurant in preference to the similar Grouper which is overfished. Any of the larger drums would be fine substitutes: Black Drum, Red Drum, etc. as well as all of the groupers. Striped Bass which we call Rockfish is also a great substitute.

Non-Pork Substitute for Prosciutto. For those of you who cannot eat pork, I suggest that you use a similarly cured beef called Bresaola. A similar Swiss product is called Bündnerfleisch. You may also see it labeled as beef prosciutto.

Cooking with Herbs

[Here's another article that I have migrated from oneblockwest.com.]

Here are some recipes and notes from a demonstration of cooking with herbs at Blandy Farm, the State Arboretum of Virginia, on Sunday October 10, 2004, a gorgeous fall day in a most beautiful location in Clarke County. Thank you to the volunteers at Blandy for all their help. I had a wonderful time and the audience was super, asking questions, tasting dishes, and tasting the herbs.

When I was asked to do this demonstration, I knew that on one hand, it would not be difficult for me to find dishes to do because cooking with fresh herbs is one of the key differences between restaurant and home cooking. But, on the other hand, it would be terribly difficult to pick just a few dishes to do, because most of our dishes involve fresh herbs. I tried to pick dishes that span a wide spectrum of cuisines and techniques.

I also need to preface this article by saying that these recipes are just guidelines, written after the demonstration. Those of you present know that I measured absolutely nothing. Here then are the dishes.

Veal Medallions with Prosciutto and Sage
Grilled Herb-Marinated Pork Tenderloin
Lemon-Dill Risotto
Thai Fried Rice with Roasted Pork
Corvina in Warm Vinaigrette aux Fines Herbes
Apples with Thyme and Honey

Veal Medallions with Prosciutto and Sage

I don’t really expect that you have access to good veal. If you do, good for you. If you don’t, use pork tenderloin, turkey, or chicken medallions. Also, you may not be able to make your own demiglace or have access to commercial demiglace. For a substitute, use a bit of any meat broth.

8 ounces veal tenderloin
Wondra or plain flour
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
salt and pepper
4-5 leaves of sage, finely sliced
2 slices prosciutto
2 teaspoons veal demiglace
splash of water

Slice the veal into medallions. Heat a sauté pan over high heat and film with vegetable oil. Dredge the veal in Wondra and shake off the excess. Place in the pan and cook for a minute. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and add the sage and prosciutto. Turn the medallions and after 30 seconds, add the demiglace, stirring to melt. If the sauce is not liquid enough, add a splash of water. Remove the meat to hot plates and pour the sauce over.

If using meat broth rather than demiglace, after the medallions have cooked, remove them from the pan and keep warm. Continue reducing your sauce over high heat until it is a thick as you want it.

Grilled Herb-Marinated Pork Tenderloin

Although I cut the pork tenderloin into medallions and then marinated them at the demo, that was because I didn’t have a grill. This recipe was designed for grilling whole marinated pork tenderloins.

This is one of those freeform recipes in that it really doesn’t matter what herbs you use in the marinade. At the restaurant, we use whatever we happen to have on hand. Whatever mix we make, it is generally half parsley. We use assertive herbs such as rosemary and sage sparingly. There can never be enough garlic. We avoid licorice tasting herbs such as tarragon and chervil. I don’t think cilantro has any place in this recipe; you may disagree.

The mix I made at the demonstration consisted of parsley, thyme, sage, rosemary, basil, and chives.

1 or more pork tenderloins
1 cup assorted minced fresh herbs per tenderloin
black pepper
garlic, minced, one head per tenderloin
extra virgin olive oil
salt

Mince the herbs and garlic. Add them along with black pepper and enough olive oil to form a fluid paste to a seal top plastic bag. Remove the silverskin from the tenderloins. Place the tenderloins in the bag and massage the herb paste all around them. Place in the refrigerator overnight or longer.

Grill on medium high heat, turning the tenderloin twice (they have essentially three sides), until done. Do not overcook. Medium to medium well is a good stopping point.

Lemon-Dill Risotto

This is a wonderfully subtle risotto that I use as a base for seafood, especially our house specialty caramelized scallops. Risotti are very easy to make, provided that you start with the correct Italian shortgrained rice. We use Arborio at the restaurant, but Carnaroli and Vialone Nano are just as good.

The canonical recipe for risotto is half a diced onion, 2 cups of rice, 1 cup of white wine, and 6 cups or more of other liquid. From here, it is merely theme and variation.

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 yellow onion, finely diced
2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dry white wine
6 cups warm water (or vegetable broth or seafood stock or chicken stock)
1 pinch saffron
2 tablespoons chopped dill
zest of half a lemon
2 tablespoons grated cheese (Romano, Parmigiano, or any other grana)
2 tablespoons butter
salt

Heat a pan over medium heat and add the oil and the onion. Cook the onion until it turns translucent, then add the rice, stir it to coat with the oil, and cook until the edges of the rice become translucent.

Add the wine and let it all but evaporate. Add enough liquid to barely cover the rice and adjust the flame so that the rice is barely boiling. Add the saffron. As the liquid is absorbed into the rice, add more liquid by the ladleful until the rice is cooked to your liking. Stir frequently to keep from sticking. We stop cooking the rice when the center is just cooked through, about 20 minutes or so.

When the rice is just done, stir in the dill, lemon zest, cheese, and butter. If the rice is not a fluid consistency, add a bit more liquid. Stir very well to incorporate all the ingredients. Taste for salt after adding the cheese, which has a lot of salt. Serve immediately.

Thai Fried Rice with Roasted Pork

Here’s a dish that shows off some non-Western European herbs that are very simple to grow at home: cilantro and Thai basil. No two batches are the same because this is another clean out the refrigerator dish.

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon essential fried rice paste
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
1/2 cup each of various ingredients (diced carrots, green onions, cherry tomatoes, roasted pork, etc.)
3 cups cold long-grained rice
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1/2 cup cilantro leaves
1/2 cup Thai basil leaves

Heat a large sauté pan over high heat and then add the oil. Then add the paste and black pepper. Stir well and cook for a minute or so. Then add any raw ingredients that you want to cook (such as carrots). When they are cooked, add the rice and any ingredients that just need to be warmed. Stir well. Add fish sauce to taste. When done, stir in the fresh herbs off the heat and serve immediately.

The white and black pepper kick in a surprising amount of heat. Should you want more, make some nam prik, sliced Thai bird chiles in fish sauce, to spoon over according to your tolerance for heat.

Essential Fried Rice Paste. Many Thai dishes start with a paste fried in oil and this dish is no different. The pastes are made in large granite mortars with heavy pestles. I use one at home. At the restaurant, we use the huge Vita-Prep which will liquefy anything in seconds. At your house, do your best with what you’ve got, although a household blender or food processor isn’t going to do a great job.

1 bunch cilantro, preferably with roots
1 bunch Thai basil
3 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
2 T white peppercorns (or 1 T ground white pepper)

Remove the stems and roots from the cilantro and Thai basil and roughly chop. Reserve the leaves (for the fried rice recipe above, for example). Pound all the ingredients to a paste in a mortar, or do the best that you can with a blender (in which case, start with ground pepper). If you need to add liquid to get the blender to work, add vegetable oil.

Corvina with Warm Vinaigrette aux Fines Herbes

I love to make fish this way: sautéed and finished with a vinaigrette. I actually came up with this idea during the middle of another demo. But, there’s nothing original in the cooking universe. A quick search of the Internet shows that this has been done time and time again by countless chefs. Here’s my take.

Corvina is a lovely small-flaked sweet white fish in the drum family, the same family that includes grouper and croaker. Customers seem to prefer corvine to grouper. Substitute any white or non-oily fish that you like. I would stay away from salmon and char, however.

Fines Herbes is a classic French combination, traditionally of four herbs. Years ago, I used to be certain what the correct four herbs were; however, the older I get, the more things tend to gray, not only my hair. Each chef has a preferred combination of fines herbes. Herbs that are more or less traditional are parsley, chervil, chives, tarragon, and perhaps dill. My combination is parsley, chervil, chives, and dill, in equal proportion.

1 tablespoon vinegar (rice, white wine, sherry)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil (pure olive, soy, canola, grapeseed)
2 tablespoons minced fines herbes
salt
2-4 fish fillets

Mix your vinaigrette by whisking the vinegar, oil, herbs, and salt to taste. Sauté the fish fillets until they are done. Pour over the vinaigrette and cook for 30-45 seconds. Serve immediately.

Apples with Thyme and Honey

I just wanted to show that apples respond well to savory seasonings. Think about all those German and Alsatian dishes of apples with caraway and/or juniper berries. Thyme is probably my favorite herb and would always be number one on the list of the five herbs I could take with me to a desert isle. I’m not going to give quantities here—they really don’t matter.

Key here is the quality of the apples. I used Blushing Goldens because they are one of the finest cooking and eating apples that I know. Look for a crisp apple with good flavor and excellent acidity. Hint: go to a farmer’s market. You are not going to find such an apple at the supermarket.

When we cannot get wild local honey (winter), we use honey from Virginia Honey in Berryville. Remember to shop locally.

butter
apples, in slices
fresh thyme
salt
honey

Melt the butter in a sauté pan and brown the apple slices. Add fresh thyme, salt, and honey to taste.

¿Risotto in a Box?

My mother-in-law came to visit last weekend and as always came bearing bags of groceries, for which I am not ungrateful given my rather straitened means. It wasn't until today that I noticed one of her gifts, a box of "Italian Herb Risotto" sitting on the counter. You may already understand why she comes bearing gifts: there are no preprepared foods at my house. To the uninitiated—such as my children—it appears as though we have nothing to eat. I have learned that the verb "eat" now encompasses a complex idea that runs rather breathlessly something like "find something preprepared and throw it in a microwave and bolt it down so that I can get on to the rest of my life."

I have always been and I will always be a scratch cook and cooking has never been a bother or chore: it is something that I take pleasure in. I had nearly the same reaction to seeing that box on my counter as I imagine that I might have had if I had seen a miniature Martian sitting there, such is the scarcity of such things as risotto in a box at my house.

I cook risotto from scratch almost daily at the restaurant and don't find it particularly laborious, so curious about how the rest of the world lives, I flipped the box over and read the ingredients. Here's what I would put in an herb risotto: olive oil, yellow onion, Arborio rice, white wine, water or stock, salt, pepper, herbs, garlic, butter, and pecorino cheese.

And here's what is in the box that would never touch my risotto, ever: rice flour, onion powder, garlic powder, cane juice powder (fancy name for sugar, don't you think?), dehydrated tomato, buttermilk powder, whey powder, turmeric, and safflower oil.

Reading all this junk was enough to turn me off, but I then went seeking the preparation instructions, figuring that the boxed risotto had to offer some convenience, such as a significantly shorter cooking time. But no, you still have to cook it for 20 minutes just like scratch risotto. Who's zooming who? This is not convenience food; this is just junk marketed to people who think they cannot cook risotto. Folks, if you can cook what's in this box, you can make risotto from scratch with almost no additional effort. And I guarantee that what you make will be an order of magnitude better tasting than the junk in the box.

I apologize again for the recent paucity of posts. Most of my free time is devoted to the rearchitecture of the restaurant web site. It comes along nicely: the prototype is complete and tested with the major browsers. I'm looking forward to launching it around the first of the year.

Pilau

Here's the next to last recipe from my recent Low Country cooking class. This recipe is for a classic rice dish called pilau. The word is quite obviously a variant of pilaf, but the Sandlappers have invented their own pronunciation that is more at "perloo" than anything.

It seems to me, but I'm no expert, that the pilaf originated in what is roughly Persia and dispersed throughout the world. The similarity among pilau, pilaf, pullao, polow, paella, risotto, jambalalya, biryani, and like dishes is amazing. The majority of these dishes, like pilau, call for adding rice to boiling liquid. Some, like risotto, are stirred until the end; others are finished in the oven; still others are steamed. Other dishes such as biryani are completed by mixing cooked rice with the sauce and garnishes. In any case, they're all delicious.

My pilau is started as for jambalaya and finished by stirring like risotto. This is not atypical of pilau, but there are as many variations and methods as there are cooks. I would say that more cooks cover their pilau and let it gently steam itself rather than stir it as I do. I love the texture of my version.

The key to pilau for me is the rice. I use Carolina Gold rice, an heirloom Low Country rice available from many outlets including Anson Mills.

Ed's Pilau

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large poblano chile, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 bunch green onions, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
4 Surry sausages, diced
2 cups Carolina Gold rice
1 cup diced tomatoes
4-6 cups stock
1 T minced garlic
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
fresh parsley
crushed red pepper flakes to taste
salt to taste
black pepper to taste

Heat a heavy bottomed pan over medium high flame and film it with the oil. Add the onions, peppers, celery, and sausage and cook until the yellow onions turn translucent. Add the rice and stir for a couple of minutes. Add the tomatoes and two cups of the stock. Let the rice come just to the boil and adjust the flame so that it simmers. Add the garlic, thyme, parsley, red pepper, and a little salt and pepper.

Continue to stir as necessary to keep the rice from sticking and to release the starch from the rice into the liquid. It is this starch that gives this pilau its silky texture, like risotto. As the stock evaporates, add small quantities of additional stock as needed until the rice is done to your liking, about 20-25 minutes. Season to taste.

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.