by Don on August 27, 2010
So, last night I took a pork loin that I’d rubbed with Ras al Hanoutand let sit for a couple of days (refrigerated) then cooked slightly underdone (155 not 165), sliced it and simmered in a thickened veal stock with green olives, chopped prunes, cumin and a couple of sprigs of thyme. Sort of a cross between Chicken Marbella and the Moroccan recipe that Hannah always called Slime Chicken. I took some leftover grilled eggplant and peppers, with black olives, leftover from Katie’s birthday last weekend and mixed it with some chunky tomato sauce that I’d cooked last night to keep from losing some tomatoes that were overripe. I found some sliced of tomato and basil in the fridge and added them and simmered into a thick ratatouille. I sliced the polenta I’d made last night, mixed with some leftover cooked corn, and sauteed it in butter.
What a season. Even the leftovers are spectacular.
And sorry about the title. Until I can find a better one, this one says it all.
by Don on August 26, 2010
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Ware lately–business–and there is always the issue of lunch. Since I’ve sworn off fast foods (with about 98.9% compliance), I’ve been trying the gamut of sub shops and such with little satisfaction. I stumbled on ASIAN GARDENS (123 West Street, Ware, 277-0724) a couple of weeks back. I selected it as the better choice of two Chinese restaurants based entirely on its lack of lunch buffet, but when I checked the menu, I was surprised. Not just a Chinese restaurant, but more pan-Asian, with Thai, Vietnamese, and Polynesian sections to the menu. No sushi, which I took to be a plus–it doesn’t look like they’d move enough to keep it fresh and were wise not to try.
The first dish I tried was BUN BO XAO, beef with onions and lettuce over noodles. The portion was large and the flavor was good. In fact, I began my now standard modus operandi of taking half the lunch back to the office and relying on the sub-arctic air conditioning to keep it chilled until evening. The waitress was shy and pleasant and her daughter (I assume), a pre-teen, helped out and greeted me quietly on my second visit.
The next time, I tried the combination platter with ASIAN GARDENS SPECIAL CHICKEN. The sauce was pleasant enough, but nothing special. What got me was that it was pretty grease-free and tasted good. I have this category of restaurant food that I call “honest” by which I mean you can see the ingredients and know that actual meat and vegetables went into the dish, rather than something canned, frozen, or pre-cooked. This food was honest.
Yesterday, I had the GREEN CURRY WITH PRAWNS–six or seven shrimp in a coconut curry sauce studded with creamy eggplant and mushroom chunks. The eggplant was, I think, one of the Thai or Asian white varieties, and was cooked well. Creamy was exactly it–it was tender and melted in your mouth. The sauce tasted of coconut milk and lemongrass. I’d asked for it hot. “Extra hot. OK,” the waitress had said. It was hot enough that I could feel it in my mouth when I sipped water or tea (you know that burn, don’t you?) but not so hot that I couldn’t taste all the flavors. As usual, I took half of it back.
If you find yourself in Ware, you should check it out. Just down Route 32 from the center of town.
by Don on August 22, 2010
This time I tried making mozzarella with raw milk from Cook Farm. It is a local dairy that serves ice cream (try the Inez–coconut with chocolate chips). You have to order the raw milk in advance. Interestingly, before I could order, they wanted to make sure I understood what I was ordering and made sure I knew the pros and cons of raw milk. Above is the Heirloom Tomato, Mozzarella, and Basil salad I made with it. Since Hannah’s kids refer to Cook Farm as the Pooping Cows, for obvious reasons, I named the Mozzarella “Poopin’ Cows Mozzarella” and served it as part of a birthday dinner for my daughter-in-law Katie.
Anyway, I made mozzarella last Friday night with it. I used Ricki Carroll’s website recipe, which is a little different from the one we used in the class I took with her. A gallon of the raw milk mixed with 1 ½ tsp of citric acid and heated to 90. Stir in the quarter tablet of rennet mixed with filtered water, cover and let sit for 5 minutes. I went closer to 10 since the curds were pretty soft and the whey wasn’t a good yellow.
In class, we simply worked the curds at that point. On the website, she has you cut the curds and reheat to 105, stirring. The extra heating and stirring let the curds start stretching a little. When I ladled the curds into the bowl for heating, I was amazed at the yield. (I use her microwave method which has never failed.) Twice what I normally get, and even after draining the whey, I ended up with about two softball sized pieces instead of the usual one.
It stretched wonderfully. I tried to form balls, but it kept melting into flat pancakes. It would be the perfect texture for burrata–mozzarella stuffed with the mozzarella curds. We had some at Il Casale, which was also meltingly tender. Some other buratta we had in Seattle was much more firm and not as amazing. The key, I think, is to serve it that day. But I digress.
The taste was milky and pure. I had enough mozarella to form a sheet and roll some of the basil from our garden up into it. I made whey ricotta by adding additional milk (about a quart and a half of Cook’s regular milk—I was out of raw) and another tsp of citric acid and heating to 190. I drained the curds into a cheesecloth lined colander. I used small binder clips to hold the cheesecloth in place since without them, it tends to float in the liquid curds and become a mess. After it drained, I twisted the cheesecloth into a ball around the ricotta, twisting it to firm up the cheese. I got a softball sized ball that I scooped into a fresh hot pasta salad I also served for the birthday party.
I am sold on raw milk mozzarella. Perhaps it was the technique, but from now on, I’ll use raw milk whenever I can. For taste if nothing else.
My only question is when the add the salt. Every recipe Ricki publishes calls for it, but neglects to mention when to add it. I’m thinking after the curds are ladled into the bowl so it won’t interfere with the curd formation. I’ll try that next time.
My first encounter with homegrown meat was in my first year in grad school. I was living in Belchertown, about 15 miles from Amherst, in a sprawling old faramhouse in the center of town. Only one of my housemates was a student. Of the other two, one was a horsewoman and, among other things, worked at the Belchertown State School giving riding lessons to the patients there. She was friends with a lot of local people–she’d bring home a quart of raw cream in a mayonaise jar, unpasturized and smelling of the cow, for a buck.
Anyway, she was friends with these two guys who owned a farm just down the road. I think there were two brothers and either a cousin or best friend living there. The brothers had inherited the farm and were farming it. In their 20’s, they seemed pretty ill-at-ease around the ladies and I used to think of them as the Batchelor Farmers. They raised three pigs, feeding them grain and the slops from their regular beer parties. Unaccustomed to cooking anything besides pork chops, they didn’t mind parting with some roasts. My housemate brought one home one day for me to cook.
I laid it on a bed of chopped onions, celery, carrots, and apples and mixed in some sage and thyme. Salt and pepper over the meat. I roasted it and made a rough pan sauce with the caramelized vegetables and probably some baked potatoes. It tasted strongly of animal. There was no mistaking that this had come from a once-living thing, not something that came in a wrapped package. It was almost too strong, but it was tender and juicy and I liked the idea of eating something that was pretty pure.
I got another one for a pot-luck some friends in Boston threw. I showed up, but they had canceled the party. I stayed for a bit, then took the roast back to my friend’s house where I was staying. Her housemate attacked the meat, thinking it was leftovers. I managed to grab some away for my friend and me and it was damn good. I moved out of the house and lost touch with my equestarian housemate and the Batchelor Farmers, but never forgot the taste of the meat.
From such small beginnings…
Eclipse Restaurant Northampton MA – Take Two
by Don on August 14, 2010
My last restaurant article for the Daily Hampshire Gazette was for Eclipse Restaurant. Since my “retirement” I haven’t eaten out at all (if you don’t count shipboard meals during a week long cruise in Alaska). I was curious about what a non-professional meal would taste like. When my friend Paul and I decided to meet for dinner last week, we both decided on Eclipse.
Zach remembered me and we got to chat a bit before dinner. The kitchen at Eclipse is open–taking up the back part of the room–and it is nice to be able to watch them working. It’s not a question of clean–any restaurant that has an exposed kitchen and unsanitary cooks is simply asking to be shut down–but a question of style and pace. We ended up in a booth and I ended up sitting with my back to the kitchen so I couldn’t watch, but whenever I turned around or when we were leaving, it was a steady and calm pace.
The food was as good as I remembered. There was a beet, mango, cherry tomato, and goat cheese salad on the menu. Drizzled with a little balsamic reduction, it came to the table a study in purple, yellow, and red, dotted white and black. Each individual piece was OK, (beets well cooked, mango ripe and sweet) but nothing special. It was when you combined tastes, taking some beet and mango and a little goat cheese, that the salad sang. The combination was sweet, creamy, and savory from the beets. I enjoyed it a lot. Paul had the Caesar with white anchovies. He liked it a lot, but I couldn’t tell you what it tasted like. Non-professional eating didn’t demand that I taste it. I would have, but it was kind of nice to simply taste my own food.
Same for the entree. I had the rack of lamb-4 cutlets-served over mashed potatoes with a side of haricot vert. A ginger-fig chutney accompanied it. The chutney was perhaps a day old, but the ginger was muted and the fig was a great condiment for the lamb. I’d asked for medium rare and got it. These days, I feel like rare meat is too often raw meat and that I should be crouching in a corner and tearing it from the bones caveman style. The lamb was subtly seasoned and quite tasty. Paul had a pork chop with a sauteed cake of grits or polenta and a white bean-corn succotash. Again, I’ll have to take his word on it–he liked it all. And, the real test, nothing was left of our dinner except for four bones on my bread plate.
Dessert was a chocolate cream pie. I picked it because of it would have the same crust as the coconut custard pie I’d loved on my first visit. Clearly the same crust, but not quite as crisp, but still good. I can’t remember what Paul had–no notes!–but his plate was empty by the time he was done. I’d forgotten that Eclipse serves coffee in French Presses, which means you’ll never get the bottom of the pot. I got to play with my iPhone’s timer.
Anyway, I still like the place, still like the food. And, it seems I still like to write about restaurant meals.
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