So we went and got ourselves a cool little gadget, a Kodak Zi8 pocket video camera. Picky took the opportunity to show off our awesome range and show how he likes to prepare an egg sandwich, in this case an egg sandwich like the one in this post with the addition of some double hickory smoked bacon from Gap, PA (the best bacon in the land). There's no narration, just the sounds of cooking and clanging in the kitchen. We might be doing some video stuff in the future, pending on how much Picky wants to render files.
Archive for the ‘Recipes’ Category
Video: Cooking Duck Eggs
Sunday, May 30th, 2010Ramps for Breakfast
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Today was the first day I was able to sleep in (no work, no photo gigs, no wedding planning, no nothing) in several weeks and it was grand. I planned to make myself a decadent breakfast/brunch and it was going to include the hot ingredient of the season: ramps. I really like the taste of ramps, not to the craziness some people have over fiddlehead ferns and ramp season, but I do enjoy them. We've prepared ramps with asparagus, sauteed greens and other dishes over the last few weeks, but I had recently read that ramps go well with eggs and I was hooked on the idea. Above is the cutting board loaded up with sliced ramps up top (leaves separated from cleaned bulbs), sliced shiitake on the left, on the bias sliced asparagus on the bottom and farm fresh eggs in the middle.
The ramps were foraged by a friend of mine and his friend, LJ and Lou, in Chester County. Where you ask? They could tell you, but then they'd surely have to kill you – perhaps even before they told you. Locations for ramps, which grow wild, are like old family recipes or locations for chanterelle and morel mushrooms. Closely guarded secrets which one can enjoy the fruits of, but never can the secrets be revealed. The asparagus from Buzby Farm in South Jerz. The shiitake from the mushroom capital of the world, Kennett Square. The eggs from the man with 16 heritage breeds of pastured hens, Mark Skinner of Natural Meadows Farm.
I melted some unsalted butter in a pan and dropped in the ramp bulbs (3 or 4) to cook for a minute and then added in the asparagus slices (3 or 4 spears). A pinch of fleur de sel and fresh cracked pepper are added to the mix. Let the ingredients cook for another minute and add in a handful of sliced shiitake (I have big hands and love the strong flavor of shiitake) and another pat of butter into the pan. Toss them around for another minute. Sometime around when you add the mushrooms to the pan, start up another flame for your eggs. I love cast iron for eggs and I cook them in unsalted butter, always. Lightly beat the eggs with some salt and pepper and few sprigs of chopped chives if you have them handy. Once the pan is hot, pour in the eggs and stir them around a bit to get them cooking. Slivered up some Hillacres Pride habanero cheddar with a veggie peeler and spread it over the cheese. Now I add in the ramp leaves to the pan of veggies to wilt them. Above is a shot of all the veggies removed from heat for a sec for me to get a pic in.
After a final minute of sauteeing, add all the veggies atop the eggs and let them warm up the cheese below. Fold over the other edge and presto, you've got an omelet fit for a king.
A Griddle
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Two longtime friends of ours were very, very, very kind in giving us a [early] wedding gift. It's something Picky has wanted for a little while now – a Lodge Logic Pro Grid/Iron Griddle. We quickly put it to use a couple days after lugging it home when a hungry friend came over. Picky cooked up a pair of double egg and cheese sandwiches on the flat side (we used the grill side for asparagus a couple days later).
Anybody out there have one of these as well? Any favorite things to make on it? Picky is not a fan of pancakes so he won't be making any of those. The griddle sits very low on our rage so it's hard to see just how high the flame is underneath. It's gonna take a little bit of getting used to, but given our experience with cast iron cookware, we should get the hang of this beast fairly easily. This is going to be a great alternative to firing up an outdoor grill and this one's all season!
Recreating a Southwark Entree
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Above is an in-house recreation of what was Picky's favorite entree he has eaten all year: Southwark's Barbequed smoked pork belly, baked beans, wilted collards, and Birchrun blue cheese sauce. But we made the pork part vegan and kept the blue cheese sauce.
Above is a shot from our dinner a few months ago which we recapped here. It was some seriously good eats. It was so good, we kept the thought of Picky's entree rattling in our heads to recreate, but so that Messy could enjoy as well. We've become seitan fiends over the last few years and we've settled on Ray's Seitan as the real deal, hands down, best we've had. One day, we'll get around to making our own wheat meat, but that's another story. Ray's is available all around town in places like Fair Food in RTM, Whole Foods, Essene, among others. It's an incredibly flexible meat alternative which can take on flavors, but it's got tons of flavor and not much like tofu which relies more on soaking up flavors. The texture is close to shredded pork.
We use a shake and bake (actually, fry) recipe from our friend Liz comprised of nutritional yeast, flour, garlic salt, salt and a liberal grind of pepper. Dredge the seitan after squeezing out some water and toss in a container. Fry up in some oil – we prefer it in a cast iron skillet. Add in a pour of your favorite BBQ sauce and let the sauce carmelize. For the rest of the dish we used sauteed savoy spinach (with salt and pepper and garlic in oil, from FFF), a can of beans from TJs (yeah, yeah), and 1/4lbs. of bleu d'auvergne (from Salumeria in RTM) reduced over low heat.
Plated, it looks pretty similar. As similar as you're gonna get without the piece of "meat" being a single, huge, 9" slab of delicious belly fat. The taste was, as you guessed it, not the same. But – it was fantastic. We can't think of a way to vegan up a blue cheese sauce, but if you've got a recipe, let us know.
Fig Jam
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
So I'm pretty crazy about figs. Fortunately, or unfortunately, Messy is not a big fan of raw figs. BUT, we've reached a common ground on fig jam. Now that stuff is just delicious and everyone agrees. I foraged for figs all over Philly (Center City, Queen Village, South Philly, Old City, West Philly) and I enlisted the help of friend, Philly's own canning expert and now newly married Marisa McClellan of FoodInJars.com. If you're unfamiliar with jarring/canning and want to learn more about it, I implore you to head on over to FoodInJars.com and take a good read, you'll thank me later (but probably not now as I'm about to show you the behind the scenes of making something that's currently just out of season).
I headed over to ForkYou HQ with just under 4 lbs of figs. Yeah, that's right – I foraged 4lbs of delicious brown figs right off the streets of The City of Brotherly Love. I probably ate a dozen or so between the foraging and the 2 days before I went over to Marisa's house to make the jam. Unfortunately, fig season is done. Kaput. Bye bye. Sure you may find some errant figs here and there, but the big production is over and it's just too cold and not sunny to make the delicious orbs. The agonizing wait until next September begins, but we'll have a few pints of fig jam to lessen the pain.
Step one (after marveling at the mound of freshly picked and rinsed figs before us) was to cut the figs into eighths. Each of us took a knife and a cutting board and went to work.
Into the big orange pot it went and half the weight of the figs in sugar was added to the mix. Marisa dove right into it with a wooden spoon, mixing over some good heat.
The juice of 1.5 lemons were squeezed in.
And then everything was brought up to a boil. You can see some of the figs already starting to come apart here with seeds lining the sides of the pot.
After a burner mishap, a roiling boil was achieved. At some point, Marisa added one packet of pectin gel. Why? Because it cuts down the time to make jam. And no, Marisa didn't do all the work; I chipped in too. She had me stir the pot o' figs at various points so that I could feel the difference in viscosity as the figs became jammy.
Half-pint jars were sanitized in the jarring pot to kill two birds with one stone.
Marisa got out her widemouth funnel and poured in the slurry. There was actually more jam than she anticipated!
The bottom of the pot.
I took home 5 half-pints of fig jam and Marisa kept 4 or 5 herself. In addition, she gave me a jar of pear butter and plum jam (at bottom right). We ripped through the first jar of fig jam in a week. One jar went to a locavore friend as a birthday present. Another will go to Messy's mom, another lover of all things fig. That leaves us 2 half-pints of delicious, sweet, homemade fig jam to bring us through to next September. They will obviously not last the whole way, but it'll make the wait that much less painful.
Thank you, Marisa for the private jarring lesson. It was pretty sweet to take in all that geeky information.
Figs with Goat Cheese
Monday, September 21st, 2009
So, more figs! We're in season for a few more weeks, right?! So, let's say you have a dozen of Giovanni's paradiso figs and you have a little bit of patience and don't want to just rush in and eat them all in one sitting. Well, you've got some options, but one option is to put a dollop of Shellbark Hollows goat chevre and either some balsamic vinegar (I chose some sweeter stuff to balance out the sharp tang of the chevre) or some sweet local wildflower honey (which I get from Bee Natural in Reading Terminal Market. If you can wait a little while longer and stick them in the oven at 350° for about 8 minutes, you'll be in for a real treat.
I'd totally understand if you didn't get that far though. Slicing them in half (or simply chowing down on them sans utensils like I love to do) is a perfectly good way to eat them. But let's say you do get to the point of putting on all the ingredients listed above. That leaves you at this photo above. It's quite tempting. I know. I prepped half a dozen figs on a 1/2 sheet to stick into the oven, but had to keep one pair of halves to try raw. Messy liked the one with honey better, but she's generally not the biggest fan of figs – it's a texture thing for her.
It's not easy getting the figs to stay nice and level. Well, it's impossible I guess without additional support – they're round! This will result in the honey drizzling off and pooling a bit at the base of the figs in the oven. No worries, enough will bake in. The goat chevre didn't run off the figs which was nice. I've heard people subbing in mascarpone which sounds great. But I love me some chevre so that's the route I went.
HEIRLOOM QUEENSLAND BLUE SQUASH SOUP
Monday, January 5th, 2009
What you see above is half of a 10lbs. (they get above 20lbs.) heirloom Queensland (as in Australia) Blue squash plucked from the aisles of Picky's workplace: Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market. It's a funky looking thing, but if you're not one to be intimidated by squash, it yields some delicious innards. The squash was introduced stateside in 1932 and Picky first laid eyes on one a few short months ago. We've made butternut squash soup before from our friend Liz's recipe (no idea where her recipe came from) and we decided to substitute the Queensland Blue and tweak the recipe a tad for our tastes. It should be noted that Messy has a strong aversion to all things squash-like, but for some reason, she likes this soup (although she preferred it with the butternut squash).
Ingredients:
5lbs. heirloom Queensland Blue squash (you can use butternut squash for a much sweeter soup – 2 medium or 1 large)
1 can of unsweetened coconut milk (the original recipe called for an 8 oz. can, we used 13.5 oz. and it tasted awesome)
2 ribs celery, diced
2 cloves garlic, sliced
3 scallions, sliced
1 small shallot, diced
3 dried Thai peppers, diced (use a jalapeño if you don't like things too spicy)
6-8 cups vegetable stock (we use bouillon)
splash of dry sherry
salt and pepper
Here is an interior look at the squash. Almost a solid 2" of flesh at the edges. The flesh is quite aromatic. The skin is on the thin side and the flesh is soft and easy to cut with a good sized cleaver or chef's knife, whatever floats your boat. Once you pierce the skin, you'll be treated to a lovely nose of light pumpkin and fresh bread.
Onward to the recipe! You'll need 5lbs. of Queensland Blue squash (conveniently found at Fair Food Farmstand [closed Mondays] for about $1.50/lbs.). Line a tray with parchment paper or one of them fan-cay Silicon mats. Stick it in a 400°F oven for about 40 minutes. You may have to cut the squash further to get the innards nice and soft in a reasonable amount of time.
Dice up 2 ribs of celery; slice 3 scallions (we don't call them "green onions" in this house!); dice 1 smallish shallot; slice 2 cloves of garlic. Lay them all out nicely on a bamboo cutting board with 8" chef's knife and take a nice photo (this may take awhile). Everything will be puréed, so the chopping doesn't have to be perfect for show.
Get out a nice big soup pot and set it over a medium flame. Pop open a can of unsweetened coconut milk (8oz. or 13.5oz depending on how much you like the stuff – we really like it) and spoon out the solid coconut fat. If there's not enough to coat the bottom of the pot, add olive oil. Once it's nice and hot, add all the chopped veggies, until soft, for about 5 minutes. Once soft, remove from heat and wait until the squash is done.
Check on that squash. Stick a fork in it and see if it's soft. It should be a little mushy and not need much force to get the tines of the fork deep into the flesh (not from the skin side). Remove the squash from the oven and peel it. It'll be piping hot so use a potholder to hold it steady. You might be able to peel off the skin with your fingers. Picky used the big knife while Messy tried her hand with a butter knife. You might want to let the squash cool a little before handling it –this process was kind of delicate and a little messy for one of us (guess which one!).
Slice up the squash like a melon and cut the slices into chunks and toss them into the big pot with the veggies and fire up the burner again.
Add a splash of sherry, a chopped hot pepper or 2 or 3 (we used 3 very small spicy Thai peppers from Messy's mom's friend's Connecticut garden) and the coconut liquid into the pot, bring to a boil and cook for 5 minutes. Add in 6-8 cups of vegetable stock (we used 6 cups for a thicker soup), return to a boil and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from heat. (Note: photo is prior to adding in veggie stock.)
Now the kind of tricky part. You're going to ladle, bit by bit, the contents of your large pot into a food processor to purée it all. We'd advise you to not fill past the halfway mark with each batch. Messy did that the last time we made this soup and the result was — surprise! — extremely messy. Pour the puréed soup directly into bowls or into another container for keeping. We opted to empty the big pot into a smaller pot and pouring the purée back into the big pot for storage. Add salt and pepper to taste and you're done!
For added awesomeness, whip up some croutons in a pan. Thickly slice off a piece or two of some tasty bread. We had a gigantic loaf of Le Bus's golden wheat bread at hand so all it took was one 6" tall slice for the two of us. Dice that up into nice big chunks. Heat some butter (or oil) in a pan – our favorite is our 10" cast iron skillet. Add in the bread cubes and sprinkle some herbs for flavor. Our purple sage and rosemary plants are still going strong in our windowsill so that's what we used. Flip the cubes once lightly (or darkly is you prefer) browned and let the other side get flavored and toasty. This should take all of 5 minutes tops.
Ladle some deliciously orange heirloom Queensland Blue squash soup into a bowl and add in a few fresh croutons. The soup is nice and thick, using 6 cups of stock, but not clumpy. You'll get a nice tingle of heat from the hot pepper to complement the creamy pumpkin sweetness of the Queensland Blue squash. Add an extra crack of pepper for a bit more of a kick. The croutons will give a nice crunchy texture to fill out the bowl of liquid warmth.
Winters don't have to be boring while striving to eat locally. Squash is your friend! [Note: squash is actually not Messy's friend. But it might be yours. . .]
