So following the barbecue, me and the housemates went out sailing on Lee's sailboat, the Ali-Ocea. We took the leftover Jerk Chicken along with some baguette, avocado, C.H.B., coconuts, cheeses, peppers, cherry tomatoes, beers, etc. and just sailed around under the bridge. It took me a while to get my sea legs back (it had been a few years, but I recovered). Twas a good refresher course for me; learning how to tack & jibe and whatnot. Fortunately, Lee is master sailor so he guided us back into port safely. The coast guard is out in force on the Hudson recently, so you probably shouldn't drink out in the open, lest they board you.
After the aquatic expedition, we went back to Annika's aunt's house, where we shredded up the leftover Jerk Chicken and ate it with the apple corn bread and a delicious herbal potato pesto salad.
This past Saturday I had a big barbecue at my house. The main dish was charcoal grilled jerk chicken, with sides of rice & beans, apple cornbread, sangria and a tons of liquor. Despite 2 thunderstorms throughout the day, me manage to feed people the i-re food and git bomb-a-clot drizzy.
For the marinade: (I tripled this for all the chicken I had)
3 scallions, chopped
4 large garlic cloves, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
4 to 5 fresh Scotch bonnet or habanero chile, stemmed and seeded
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons ground allspice
2 teaspoons black pepper
3/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Mix everything together then blend it into a thick paste. Spread this over your chicken (I bought four pre-cut up whole chickens- but this recipe would call for less) and marinade overnight. Grill until done.
Thanks to my friend Kat, for the photos I was too busy to take:
http://sheslipsintofocus.blogspot.com/
Stick of unsalted Butter
8 Large Onions
2 oz. Port wine
2 oz. balsamic vinegar
2 quarts chicken stock
4 or 5 slices of thick cut bacon
1 bouquet garni (sprig of parsley, few sprigs of thyme, one bay leaf - wrapped and tied in cheesecloth)
salt and pepper
2 baguettes of french bread (sliced on the diagonal and pre-toasted)
Gruyere Cheese (enough to cut into thick slices that will cover how many bowls you're intending to produce)
In a large pot, melt the butter and brown the onions over low heat (20 minutes). Bring up the heat to medium and stir in the port and vinegar, scraping up all the fond. Add the stock. Add the bacon. Add the bouquet garni. Bring to a boil.
Reduce to a simmer and add your salt and pepper. Cook it all down till it's good enough (an hour?)
Have your oven preheated to BROIL. Ladle out your soup into small bowls or mugs and float one of your pre-toasted baguette slices on top. Place the slice of Gruyere on top (you could also shred the cheese, but it's better if corners of a slice hang over the edge of the bowl and burn into a crust).
Heat a dish of your soup bowls on a baking sheet under the broiler until the cheese is scorched and bubbling (you could also use a butane creme brulee torch for this purpose).
Dig into that melted/crusted/onion/wine/herb conglomerate, and eat spoon-fulls of stinky melted dairy mixed with crunchy crusted and rustic onion lacquer. Do it with your mouth.
Borscht is a very hearty Russian soup made with beets, which make it extremely red. Ukraine Borscht has meat in it and if you wanted you could probably also add beans. But this is more of a regular vegetable Borscht. How thin or thick you want it varies from the different recipes I've tried, but I like it kind of clear with big chunks floating in it. This is a recipe which I've simplified. There's a lot of different ingredients, but not a lot of steps. The only tricky part is grating a beet, because they stain everything dark red, including hands and wood with the juices. To remove the stains, sprinkle surfaces with salt and then wash with soap and water. You could also wear latex gloves when handling them.
6 cups cold water
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup diced carrots
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 cup diced yellow bell pepper
1/2 cup diced onions
1 cup diced yukon gold potato
1 beet, scrubbed and halved
1 large can crushed tomatoes
Add all of the ingredients above to a large stock pot. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 45 minutes. Remove the beet halves and discard. During the meantime, prep all the ingredients below.
2 tbs. unsalted butter
1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced
4 small tomatoes, quartered
2 cups Red Cabbage, sliced
1 beet, run through a cheese grater
2 yukon gold potatoes, chopped
1 tsp. dried dill weed
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
chopped fresh parsley
Juice of 1 lemon
In a skillet, saute the onions in the butter until glassy. Add the garlic and cook till onions become golden. Add the tomatoes and stir for 1 minute. Then add the cabbage and cover until slightly wilted. Dump the contents of the skillet into the rest of the soup within the stockpot.
Add all other ingredients to the stockpot. Bring to a boil once again, then simmer uncovered until the chopped potatoes are tender. Serve hot in a bowl with a dollop of sour cream, and some crusty bread.
This dish could easily become vegan by using Canola oil instead of butter and omitting the sour cream.
Betty gave birth to 3 healthy puppies 3 days ago. It's hard to tell by the pictures, but each pup is about the size of 1 and a half wine corks. Food related posts to come soon; I promise.
I haven't posted in a while because I've been real busy working at the moving job. I was gonna make an article for this fig dish that I learned from Annika's cousins, but I accidentally deleted the photos on my camera. So instead, here's another narrative of hijinks.
So me and my brother Josh are really bored and my parent’s had just left the house to go to the grocery store or something. As usual, when we have the house to ourselves, we opted to blow something up. I had a bunch of pulverized “D-engine,” powder hiding on of the back shelves of my basement, so once my parents left, I stuffed it into a toy car. It was a little aluminum die-cast model of a British taxi-cab, and we rigged it with a sparkler firework as a fuse.
It wasn’t really a fuse though. The basic plan was to light the sparkler and then just shove it into the payload of explosive powder inside the little toy car. So naturally we elected my youngest brother Zach to perform this task.
So Zach is standing in the driveway with a lit sparkler in his hand looking at me and Josh, who are safely ensconced behind a wood pile 15 yards away. Sitting at his feet is an explosively-rigged toy car, when he looks at us and says, “wait, where do I put it?”
At that point, a single spark drops off the end of the lit sparkler and ignites the toy car which in turn produces a massive fireball that completely engulfs Zach’s hand with the sparkler.
He starts screaming bloody murder and running around the driveway waving his hand around because it is on fire. I don’t remember it clearly, but I’m sure our neighbor saw the whole thing- cause I know he said, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” And I yelled back, “NOTHING!”
So we tackle Zach onto the pavement and swat out the fire on his hand. It’s all fucked up. Basically, the skin is now grey and there are yellow blisters on the surface. The rest of the arm is flushed red with blood and so we are basically fucked because my parents will be home at any moment and the first thing they’re gonna ask is, “what happened to Zach’s arm?”
So it’s me and Josh standing around in the driveway with a hysterical Zach, and we need to make an executive decision. We decide to lie to our parents. We need an innocuous reason for Zach to have burned his arm that doesn’t involve explosives, and then we realize, “wait a minute, Zach really likes Ramen Noodle Soup! What if he burned his arm with soup?!!!!”
So we clean up the driveway and we start boiling a ton of water on the stove in our kitchen. We wait untill my parents pull their car into the driveway and start walking into the house. Then, on cue, we pour the boiling water onto the floor and take a glass bowl and smash it on the floor of the kitchen. Zach starts screaming again because we told him to, and then he runs up to my mom yelling, “the soup burned my arm!!!”
They buy it hook line and sinker, but the worst part was that after they brought him to the hospital, the doctor gave them instructions on how to treat a water burn. At first me and Josh were relieved that a medical authority would buy our lie, but then later we were like, “what the fuck kind of ignorant doctor did you bring our brother to?”
I bought these two little chickens that came in one package at the local Korean market. I guess they're comparable to Cornish game hens. Basically, you want to cook these on a metal baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes; or until the skin is a golden brown or the internal temperature reads above 160. They're a little bit tricky to roast because of their size. They came out just slightly overdone, but still delicious. The skin was the best as I had basted them repeatedly with Chili-Honey-Butter.
After removing the guts and adding a generous amount of salt and pepper to each chicken cavity, I stuffed them with:
Half a medium yellow onion, quartered
1/4 of a honey tangerine
5 cloves of garlic
sprigs of thyme
sprigs of pineapple sage (or just regular sage)
Truss up the chickens and rub a little salt into the outside skin. Pop them in the oven and start basting after 15 minutes. Rotate the pan each time you open the oven.
This was served with some mashed butternut squash and some leftover salad and rice with balsamic dressing.
Last weekend I cooked barbecue ribs for a pool party at the Lindgren School. I've cooked ribs about 5 times now, each time I try to improve, I become more greatly aware of how little I know about slow cooked barbecue. It's an incredibly finicky science. But here's this method. It made ribs that were just on the edge of medium-rare with a great flavor. My frustration was with the texture of the end product. When ribs are really good, they should be falling off the bone, or at least, the rib bone should be able to freely rotate in the sockets. The ones I made here came out a little on the stiff side.
The Rub (from "The Southwestern Grill":
2 tbs. chile powder
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. GRANULATED brown sugar
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. salt
I've also heard that you should never use salt or sugar in your rub, but I haven't been able to find any recipes that follow that rule. I don't know if I trust it either, cause I like my ribs sweet and wet.
The night before you barbecue, prepare however many sides of baby-back ribs you want to cook (I made 3). Remove the membrane and trim excess fat. Apply the rub moderately over both sides of each rack. Rub it in. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
Now the hard part. To cook these I used a standard Weber charcoal grill. I made a small pile of hot coals arranged on one side, with steel baking pans of water located directly above and to the side of the coals. These are supposed to work as heat baffles, so that your ribs don't scorch and so that they stay moist.
To prep the ribs, I curled each rack into a spiral and secured it with a chop-stick. This is maximizes the use of space within the grill, and I didn't have a lot of room with the heat baffles in place.
So the grill should operate between 220 and 250 degrees fahrenheit for 5 to 6 hours. Low and slow is the key. Add coals as needed and check the temperature often with a digital thermometer, so you don't have to open the lid and waste the cooking heat. I also added wet hickory chips every now and then. When the ribs are almost done, baste them with barbecue sauce and let them cook for another 5 minutes.
So I thought this method would render me some fall-off-the-bone ribs, but I didn't get that. If anybody has a tip as to what I did wrong or any guidance, it will be welcome.
So, at a party 2 weeks ago; I was talking to my friend Nick on the topic of hot dogs, and he mentioned his favorite way to cook hot dogs is "hot dog bacon." The instructions are basically "microwave the shit out of it." When I want a hot dog, I usually wrap one in a paper towel and microwave it for 1 minute. Nick was like, "not one minute, 5 minutes. It turns into bacon."
Well, it didn't turn quite into bacon, but it was not unpleasant I must say. Imagine a kind of hot dog flavored pretzel stick covered in scalding grease.
