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Oct 08 2010
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Pork

Peppery Slow-Roasted Pork

When you live alone it can be challenging to try certain recipes, or sometimes just to cook in general, if you don’t want to be stuck eating leftovers for a week.  That’s what makes dinner parties so fun (never mind the fact that I only have two chairs in my apartment – that’s what step stools and stacks of law school books are for!).  Aside from the whole hanging out with friends and drinking wine thing, dinner parties allow me to try out recipes that I’ve been wanting to make but seem impractical when I’m just cooking for myself and one other person.  While some recipes can easily be scaled down to serve two or four people instead of eight, this recipe isn’t one of them.  Well, I suppose it is feasible to halve it, but I wasn’t willing to give up the thrill of marinating several pounds of meat in two full bottles of wine to find out.  What fun is it to pour one bottle of wine over a pork shoulder when you could be pouring two?

I’ve been holding onto this recipe since last fall when I found it in Martha Stewart Living, and my mom was nice enough to let me take her copy of the magazine – at least I think I didn’t just sneak it out the door.  Nope, I believe that was that bottle of vodka – thanks, Mom!  Anyway, this particular issue has a few recipes that I’ve been wanting to try, and this pork was at the top of my list.  On the page opposite the pork recipe is a picture of crispy fried chicken sprinkled with salt and drizzled with honey, which will for sure be up next.  Then perhaps the kale and squash salad?  Or maybe the peanut butter and jelly thumbprints?  Or pumpkin seed trail mix?  We shall see…

I should mention that making this recipe is a two-day process, so plan accordingly.  The actual execution is really easy and only requires a handful of ingredients, so don’t be scared off by the two-day thing.  Also, leftovers make a great filling for tacos and enchiladas.

Peppery Pork

From Martha Stewart Living, October 2009

1/4 cup whole black peppercorns

1 bone-in pork shoulder (6 to 7 pounds, or about 5 pounds boneless)

20 garlic cloves, halved

6 rosemary sprigs

2 bottles full-bodied red wine, like Chianti (I just found something that was reasonably priced and described as “full-bodied”)

Salt

3 tbsp olive oil

Crusty bread for serving

Cut twenty slits in the pork’s surface, and stick half a clove of garlic in each slit.

Use a heavy skillet or mortar and pestle to coarsely grind the peppercorns, and then press them onto the pork.

Place the pork fat side up in a large bowl.

Add the rosemary and the remaining garlic.

Pour the two bottles of wine over the pork.  Whee!!!

This is the wine that I used.  I think it was about $10/bottle at Trader Joe’s.

Cover and refrigerate overnight or up to one day.

Day two: purple pork.

Preheat your oven to 300-degrees.  Remove the pork from the marinade, reserving the marinade, and pat it dry.

I can’t get enough of that color!

Season the pork with four teaspoons of salt.  Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a dutch oven, and then add the pork, fat side down.  When it’s golden brown, flip the pork and add the reserved marinade.  Bring it to a simmer, and then transfer it to the oven.  Cook until the meat is tender and can easily be pulled apart with a fork, about 5 hours.

Remove the pork from the dutch oven, pull apart the meat, skim fat from the surface of the broth, and season the broth with salt.  Serve the pork in bowls with a little broth and crusty bread for dipping.

We were too excited to feast for me to get any pictures of the plated food, so you’ll just have to imagine how amazing it looked.  Go ahead and imagine how it tasted, too – rich, peppery, salty…  This recipe is a keeper.

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Feb 18 2010
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Beef, Cheese, Chocolate, Dessert, Holiday, Sides

Valentine’s Dinner

For Valentine’s Day I really, really wanted to make nachos for dinner. I’m not joking. I had some spicy chorizo, a couple of ripe avocados, and, as you might expect, a huge stash of cheese, and aren’t holidays an excuse to splurge and eat unhealthy things that you wouldn’t normally eat? I think so. Unfortunately my valentine wasn’t down with the nachos idea, so I ended up going a little more traditional and made steak. It worked out for the best, as Matt told me that it was the best meal I’ve made in a very long time. A compliment like that is the best Valentine’s gift a girl could get. At least I think. Now that I’m repeating it it sounds a little backhanded, but I can assure you that he meant it in the nicest possible way.

The menu:
Homemade rye bread
Roasted broccolini
Blue cheese mashed potatoes
Rib eyes with chimichurri
Chocolate mousse with freshly whipped cream

The bread recipe is from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I recommend both the book and the bread.
I bought these gigantic rib eyes because they were on sale at Whole Foods for something like $10.99/lb, far cheaper than the $23.99/lb. filets I was planning on buying. Between the two of us we didn’t even eat one, which means steak salads all week for me! Just as I started to get nervous about how my pesky fire alarm was going to react to me cooking a steak on the stovetop I saw Matt’s friend Sarah’s tweet about Bittman’s method for pan-cooking a steak in a poorly ventilated apartment with no smoke. Miraculous!

Speaking of Bittman, I used his recipe for chimichurri to top off the steak. It was so good that I used it top off the potatoes and the broccolini as well. Then I used my bread to sop up every last drop. You can find a recipe here, and I would recommend making it in a food processor as he suggests in his book rather than chopping it by hand.
I had some red potatoes that I’d boiled earlier in the week for a salad that I turned into blue cheese mashed potatoes. Simply mash up some boiled potatoes and add any combination of milk, cream, sour cream, cream cheese, and butter, season with salt and pepper, and crumble in a generous amount of blue cheese.
Since my potatoes were cold I transferred them to a baking dish, topped them with some pats of butter, and baked them with the broccolini until they were heated through.

Oh yeah, the broccolini. Toss it with a little olive oil, sprinkle with salt & pepper, and bake on a cookie sheet at 375 or so for maybe 10 minutes. It’s to die for. I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.
This meal was incredibly delicious and very easy to whip together. The chocolate mousse was the only thing that took more than about 15 minutes to make, but it was far from difficult. For as delicious as it is, it’s totally worth the effort. If it weren’t for the sinfulness of the mashed potatoes and the fact that I don’t eat much steak I would make this meal all the time.
All of that chocolate is proof that this dessert is worth making. And check out my reflection in the double boiler. Hello, me!
The chocolate mousse recipe I used was from Orangette. You can follow the link to her recipe; I’ll just show you some pretty pictures of the process. The only change I made was the addition of a little cinnamon to give it a little Mexican flavor. It was my consolation prize for not having nachos, I guess.
Molten chocolate.
+ egg whites
Folding in the egg whites.
WHIPPED CREAM
Sigh.
Sigh again.
There’s nothing better than licking a spoon and discovering a second layer of chocolate underneath. NOTHING.

Extra whipped cream to top it off.
The big blue bowl remains. Who wants to help polish it off?

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Feb 13 2010
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Salad, Seafood

Blackened Salmon Salad, Two Ways

It’s be a rough few weeks here in More Cheese More Chocolate land. Matt and I suffered a huge loss a little over a week ago, and cooking, let alone blogging, haven’t been much of a priority. (Thanks to my big brother for filling in a little while I’ve been gone!) We spent many, many days surrounded by family and friends and ungodly amounts of comfort food, with nary a vegetable in sight. While the outpouring of support in the form of home-cooked meals was completely overwhelming, there comes a time when you’re ready to stop eating platefuls of meat and bread and you no longer want to be surrounded by a dozen varieties of cookies, brownies, and cakes.
When I returned to Minneapolis a few days ago I was excited to get back into the kitchen, and a big salad was at the top of my list of things to make. I had originally planned on making a niçoise salad, but when I realized that my co-op didn’t have tuna steaks my plans changed a bit. My focus shifted from my list of ingredients for niçoise salad to random things that sounded good and seemed to fit together. The next thing I knew I was making blackened salmon, crumbling blue cheese, and slicing new potatoes. This salad base would work well with steak or chicken in place of the salmon, and the vinaigrette could easily be swapped out for blue cheese dressing.

The base of this salad consisted of green leaf lettuce, spinach, boiled new potatoes, roasted red peppers, cucumber, green pepper, and blue cheese. For a dressing I drizzled it with olive oil, red wine vinegar, and a little lemon juice.

Blackened Salmon
Adapted from Real Simple
Preheat the oven to 400.For the salmon spices I combined 2 teasp

oons paprika, 2 teaspoons cayenne, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a shallow bowl. The cayenne came flying out of the bottle when I was measuring it, so I probably had a little more than 2 teaspoons and it was very hot. If you’re not that into spicy foods you can reduce the cayenne by half or more. This spice mixture will coat 3-4 servings of salmon.
Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, remove it from the heat, and stir in the juice of 1/2 to 1 whole lemon. Transfer the mixture to a shallow bowl.
When the oven is nearing 400, heat an ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Dip the salmon in the lemon butter and then in the spice mixture to coat. Cook the salmon on the stove for about 2 minutes per side, and then transfer the skillet to the oven for about 8 minutes to finish the cooking. Place the salmon atop the salad and eat, eat, eat.
The second salad had more of a Mediterranean twist with green leaf lettuce, tomato, cucumber, olives, sliced pepperoncini, and a lot of crumbled feta. The dressing was a vinaigrette made up of one part dijon mustard, one part red wine vinegar, and three parts olive oil.


Leftover salmon topped off the salad, and it was delicious.
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Jan 16 2010
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Seafood

Fried Rice with Soy-Ginger Salmon

Strange things have been happening around here lately. For one, the temperature has been at or above 32 degrees the last few days. That’s not normal for January in Minnesota. A year ago yesterday the high was -6, and I don’t think the temperature was above freezing for the entire month of January. Also a little strange, but in a totally awesome way, is my new eye doctor who serves you lattes while your eyes are dilating. Well, the doctor doesn’t actually go behind the counter to steam the milk, but someone in the office whips up custom drinks while your pupils expand. I will never go to another eye doctor again.
Even stranger than warm temperatures and lattes at the eye doctor is this desire I’ve had all week to eat Asian food. I frequently crave Mexican food and sometimes french fries, but I generally have little desire to eat any kind of Asian food. In the last week, though, I’ve had pho once and this fried rice with salmon twice. Three times in one week. Unbelievable!
If Matt had his way we would probably eat at Chinese buffets five nights a week, but Chinese (with the exception of cream cheese wontons and soup) and buffets are not really my thing, so he’s generally out of luck. Maybe it’s a sauce thing. I’m not a huge fan of meals drenched in thick sauces, and Matt could live on sauces and condiments alone. At any meal you can find a minimum of three sauces surrounding his plate. When we go to restaurants he orders two kinds of dressing with his salad because two condiments are certainly better than one.
Getting back to the point, I was flipping through a cookbook a few days ago trying to figure out something to do with a piece of salmon and a soy-ginger sauce jumped out at me. I decided to take advantage of it, whipped up the sauce and marinated the salmon. I started cooking some brown rice to go along with the salmon, and before I knew it I was making fried rice. The only thing missing was some fortune cookies, but even without them it was a really good dinner.
The recipes I used for both the fried rice and the sauce for the salmon came from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I cut the recipe for the sauce in half and left out the scallions because I didn’t have any, and I combined elements from two fried rice recipes to make the one below.
If you follow these amounts it should serve 3-4, or it will serve 2 with leftovers.
For the salmon:
Salmon
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp dark sesame oil
1-1/2 tsp sugar
1 garlic clove, minced
1-1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger
Black or white sesame seeds for a garnish (optional)
For the fried rice:
2 cups cooked rice, chilled
3 carrots
1 cup or so of frozen peas
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp dark sesame oil
1/4 cup of some type of neutral, high-heat oil (I used sunflower, although Bittman is not a fan of it. He recommends peanut, grapeseed or corn.)
Salt & pepper
Preheat the oven to 350. Combine all of the ingredients for the sauce in a bowl. Pour about half of the sauce over the salmon in the dish you’re going to bake it in. Stick the dish in the fridge to marinate until you’re ready to bake it.

I was making brown rice, and while it was cooking I decided to make fried rice out of it. You’re supposed to use rice that has cooled for a few hours, but since I didn’t want to wait until 10 o’clock to eat I threw a few ice cubes in when it finished cooking and stuck it in the fridge. That’s what a real chef would do, right? I thought so.

Cut the carrots into small discs or roughly chop them.  Steam them until they can be pierced by a fork but still have a little bite to them, maybe 5 minutes. Remove them from the heat.

In a large fry pan heat the oil over medium-high heat and then add the carrots. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and turn the heat up to high.
Cook the carrots, stirring occasionally, until they start to brown. It should take several minutes.
Once the carrots are done add in handfuls of rice, breaking it up as you add it to prevent clumping.
This is a good point to put the salmon in the oven, when the rice has about 10 minutes to go. It might be helpful to set a timer so you don’t get sucked into the rice and overcook the salmon.
After you’ve added all the rice, make a well in the center, and pour in the eggs.
Scramble them a little, and then stir it all together.
Add the peas, the soy sauce, and the sesame oil.

Stir everything together and let it cook for a few more minutes to warm up the peas. Make sure you scrape up the bits that get stuck to the pan – it’s the best part.
Spoon some rice into a big bowl and top it with a piece of salmon. Drizzle some of the remaining sauce over the top and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
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