Dinner for Columbia Profs, Duck Confit, and some Chili Too

Well I have been in a rut since my New Years energy boost ran out about a fortnight ago, but baby, my new job starts unofficially tomorrow, so guess what? I'm back.  I'm bringing a recap in reverse so i remember everything best.  Lunch today was fabulous because i made my last confit'd duck leg over a sweet potato latke.  I'm very anxious about a few things so i needed some solid cooking and this was it.   A few nights back, Akiko Moorman and I caught the last few acts over at the Poptank Festival, and the 2nd to last act, Quitzow, played a banging electro sexy set!  Quitzow is super cool because they are actually two different bands, both led by a couple, but Quitzow is the girlfriend's band and the boyfriend's band is Setting Sun, but they are the same people just playing different instruments!  Earlier that same evening, i sous'd for a friend of mine for a private dinner up at Columbia for some professors having an 'important' meeting...ha well i dont think they would have known the difference between some crap crudite from a supermarket, but our plates were spot on.  

Menu was as follows: 

Canapes - Greuere-farm egg gougeres, shrimp and goat cheese salad on endive, pomegranate-fouxgrax-pistachio financier tarts, sweet-potato latkes with homemade creme fresh and American Paddlefish caviar, and crispy lamb sweetbreads on toast with Berkshire's made hot garlic and berry jam from the Greenmarket.  

Main Course - wild Coho Salmon with local swiss chard, whipped celery root, and chive oil

Salad - baby spinach with New York pears, cepes, maple-candied bacon, and buttermilk dressing 

Desert - vanilla custard with roasted pear and pecan crumble...

The search for an espresso begins!

Ok i have not had a great espresso since i arrived back in nyc.  In the late Fall, I attended Terra Madre, Slowfood's international conference in Turin, Italy and i had some nice latte.  In the Berkshires, Matt Ruibiner's self-titled cheese shop's cafe, Ruby's, serves my favorite coffee anywhere in the world. Where in NYC can i find a proper nice espress?   

I'll tell you where i've had crap coffee, the Chelsea market's italian sandwich shop, and first ave's great pastry shrine, Venerio (all the sweet bites were amazing though).  This is a big more to follow post, stay tuned...

Afternoon Delight Polish Style: My Pierogi Adventure!

So I've had nagging hunger pangs all afternoon but i could not figure out what cuisine to pursue on this dark winter evening.  O yea, I have been bored out of my mind watching milk curdle too. Paul Nahm and i were talking 2nd Ave Deli delights, he said he wanted pierogi and boom, my afternoon bloomed into life.  Simmered waxy potatoes, lovely fried onions, and sweetly rendered garlic all matured into my heavenly, fluffy filling.  Hey, whats the first step in making dill bread? Make a dill dough.  Luckily, i needed pierogi wrappers, not an herby bread, so after consulting a couple dozen different recipes online, both traditional and contemporary, i ballparked the ratio of flour, water, eggs, and buttermilk and mixed it all together.  The dough, sort of a cousin to pasta, formed in about 5 mins of kneading and after a 30 minute rest, time to pierogi!  While i was cleaning up, i took one of the potato shells, diced up some scrap potato, mixed in some garlic and some paneer cheese from my previous post and 20 mins later, walla, my awesome twice baked spud.  Gluten-relaxing break over, i twisted up a few beauties, boiled them for about 5 mins, drained, into a butter-laden fry pan, and doneski.  Finish with a bit of rock salt and a little cracked pepper.  So so so good, forget about restaurant pierogi, they suck compared to mine.   

rennet cheese adventure

So in honor of my Boston Celtics currently routing the Mavs, i'm making cheese!  This attempt is my first with any type of rennet so i chose to try the inferior, but readily available at the market, vegetable rennet to make cottage-style cheese.   I figure why not try this amateur version on a lazy sunday and with the last of my Blue Hill milk coming up to just under 90 degrees on the stove, the game was afoot.  I added the prescribed mix of buttermilk and diluted rennet and the curd is weird.  The milk has not broken like with a ricotta or paneer, but its coagulating into a solid block.  Well i am going to put up some photos, but this is a twice cooked cheese that takes about a full day, consider this to be continued...

Great Success! Homemade cheese + Pork/Paneer Empanadas

We ain't going out like that.

Switching to dairy rather than braising legumes, i warmed up most of a gallon of Dan Barber and Sean Stanton's awesome farm milk and added some italian sea salt and some cracked pepper from Spice House (present from sister).  Just before boiling, i broke the milk with lime juice and left the curd and whey to separate and cool for about an hour.  After lining a colander with two layers of cheesecloth, i strained the whey and left it to drain further for a few hours. When it was similar to ricotta, i spun the cheese into a disk and wrapped it to cool.  Really flawless awesome paneer, the best one i've made yet.  

So i strained my beans from earlier and reduced the juice by half, they held up better than as noted in my earlier complaint.  I cooled each separately so i can mix the beans into the empanada filling without sogging out the dough.  Using the recipe in the earlier linked 'Pie' i mixed up a batch of pocket pie dough by hand in about 10 mins time.  30 mins later, i took some leftover braised pork, some beans, and some of my paneer and stuffed two glorious empanadas.  

Waiting for work to start is the best kind of vacation, so i'm cooking at home today

I over cooked some beans.  Rummaging around my kitchen supplies, i found a bag of dried cranberry beans just staring at me, begging for some heat and a pork massage.  Good thing i have just returned from the Berkshires, from Dominic Palumbo's incredible farm and education center, The Moon in the Pond Farm, with an ice-box full of offal and smoker treats just begging for some Slowfood style cooking.  Lets go through my list of booty, thats right, booty.  All the pork is the noble Berkshire breed, a black pig, and a killer awesome heritage animal that has loads more fat than industrial crapola pork.  Very multicultural too, as the breed began in China, over to the UK, and finally over to our USA a few hundred years ago, and while was never used by factory farms, Dom and the other small farm heroes all over the country are bringing it back and raising happy, fat piggies.  I've got ears, tails (both raw and smoked), trotters, heart, Dom's bacon, and tongue as well as goat's oysters, veal short ribs, and heritage-breed chicken's feet. O yea and Blue Hill raw milk and farm egg too... Locked and loaded, allez cuisine!  

After an overnight soak, the rinsed beans hit a dutch oven with some bacon, onions, garlic, celery, with some leftover braising liquid from spare ribs i made last week, everything up to a simmer, and into a 325* oven for about an hour.  Sounds ok right, well wrong.  Not horribly wrong, still nice and delish and a fabulous base for ribolitta, but about 15 mins past my perfecto point of parliamentary procedure.  

After a bit of time feeling sorry for myself, i picked up this great little cookbook Akiko gave me called Pie, so i'm going to parlay my motivation to make something awesome today and bang out some sweet pie pastry and make a pork and spice pockets... I gotta start thinking about my offal menu as well and use some limes to make some more indian-style cheese.

welcome to my blog, i dont yet know its personality, so for now it will chronicle tales of me plus food things.  Since I've just moved back to NYC, this spring is a new start for me as well as the country, so no better time to get writing.  Most excitingly, I've finished looking for a new and awesome job, successfully!  Keith Mcnally hired me for the opening crew of his Minetta Tavern rebirth project, we hope to start early/mid February.  More details coming very soon...

I cannot stop listening to this mixtape Paul Nahm shot over to me from legendary UK dj Greg Wilson, its the jammyjam.

So my friends from Brooklyn, the dopefunk supperclub, A Razor, A Shiny Knife, are moving their operation westward to Chicago for the 2nd installment of their recreation "Keller-Achatz Booktour $1500/person trio of meals" dinner -- The link to the Timeout article about their NYC dinner in december is at the bottom of the page - They are recreating the culinary insanity for a mere 300 bucks, and while you many not get the reserve VC 1970 champagne for the canape course, the enormity of their success will wet your palette.  

Check out Chef Akiko Moorman, one of the chefs with ARASK, who has just posted the menu from her mulitcultural Happa-inspired Obama dinner this weekend in DC.  She cooked with Cathy Erway of the legendary 'Not Eating Out in New York' project and a few other sexy chef friends from the ARASK crew.