I have always hated advertisements; back in the days when we had TV I was lightning fast with the mute button. I think they look tacky and ugly on websites, too, and the more they move around or occlude what I’m looking at the quicker I leave the site. I’m clearly not anybody’s target audience: I believe that voting with our eyeballs (and wallets) is as important as voting in elections these days, and I find commercials to be ugly. So while I ponder and slowly lurch towards several possible futures as a food writer, I can offer a few examples of what I absolutely do not want this happy second career to become.

Bow and Scrape

When I began paying attention to other food blogs, I started to notice some interesting patterns, especially in . . . → Read More: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food]]> There’s been an ocean of indignant digital ink spilled already about Paula Deen’s disgraceful deal flogging diabetes drugs after making herself sick eating the ghastly “food” she has become very wealthy advocating for years. As I mentioned on the Twitter, it’s like having unprotected sex with lots of junkies and hookers and then scoring a fat endorsement deal for STD meds. I’m not going to spend any more time on it, since it’s boring as well as depressing. But it did get me thinking, since it happened around same time I was reading about a few other equally distasteful subjects, all the while thinking about what it is that I want for this blog in the future.

I have always hated advertisements; back in the days when we had TV I was lightning fast with the mute button. I think they look tacky and ugly on websites, too, and the more they move around or occlude what I’m looking at the quicker I leave the site. I’m clearly not anybody’s target audience: I believe that voting with our eyeballs (and wallets) is as important as voting in elections these days, and I find commercials to be ugly. So while I ponder and slowly lurch towards several possible futures as a food writer, I can offer a few examples of what I absolutely do not want this happy second career to become.

Bow and Scrape

When I began paying attention to other food blogs, I started to notice some interesting patterns, especially in the comments. A hefty percentage of comments were the useless, generic compliments and emoticons that always felt like de rigeur “I read yours, so come read mine” scorekeeping. One dude in particular would always cut and paste the title of someone’s post into his comment so that it said “That [title of post] looks great!” or some variation thereof, every single time. On hundreds and hundreds of blogs, like a tireless little spambot. He never left me a comment, but then my post titles are always witty, witty puns or obscure song lyric references so he couldn’t do the cut and paste trick for me. Some friends were in on the joke, and we laughed and laughed about how lame he was. His work is lackluster, written at an eighth grade level, and his content is all but scraped from other blogs, so I never paid it any attention.

The thing is, he now has like 12,000 followers on Google and Facebook, and gets tons of comments on his posts. That transparent, shamelessly impersonal, nearly mechanized pandering in the service of utterly lackluster content worked. And therein lies a lesson about popularity on the web: people like attention, even if it’s from near-bots and trolls. Everyone who is not famous cherishes everyone who makes the effort to leave a message after the post.  And there’s a tendency to lean into that attention, to do more of what conjured it out of Internetular ether. And when there is potential ad revenue at stake, the incentive is tangible. The problem is that the urge to pander ruins credibility and makes for weak content. And it’s a slippery slope, since the traffic and compensation can seduce.

Redundant Blogger is Redundant

Someone even crankier than I wrote a rant recently about a particularly dumb piece of whining that I dutifully clicked over and read because watching the defectives in the GOP primaries clearly isn’t enough fail for me.

The “author” contends–with lots of bold type for people in a hurry–that the label “Food Blogger” plays into negative stereotypes of lazy, basement-dwelling, cheeto-munching hobbyists who get no respect from the people one bumps into at the Beverly Hills farmers’ market. Thus, in over 1300 words of painfully adolescent prose, she determines that “Internet content producer in the culinary sector” best conveys the gravitas and legitimacy of her job. Seriously. Apart from the plodding stupidity of the whole damn thing–and the two identical author portraits helpfully placed at the top and bottom of the post–what struck me most was the abject horror of somebody so desperate to be co-opted by corporatism that she invented a tortured mouthful of jargon that could make an HR manager at Cargill pump his fist in the air so vigorously that his polo shirt would come untucked from his pleated chinos and obscure his phone holster.

The palpable aspiration to mutilate language into verbose yet vapid constructs that manage to be simultaneously self-aggrandizing and totally humiliating speaks volumes, but not at all in the way she wants it to. And when it’s couched within a blog that is a cluttered visual train wreck of advertising and obviously sponsored posts that are not labeled as such, the overwhelming meta-message is a clear and blaring “I’m for sale!”

With buyers aplenty, it would appear. She has 80,000 fans, the person who wrote this: “A ‘blog’ is really just a series of posts written from someone about some topic.”

Dear diary!

It Rhymes With “Whore”

This article does a pretty good job of describing the degree to which Marco Pierre White has debased himself from influential wunderkind to corporate shill. For those of you dying to know exactly how much money it would take to get a chef with three Michelin stars to repeatedly tell lies in public about his love for Knorr stock cubes–which are, like all such bouillon products, complete garbage–the answer is 1.9 million dollars. That’s a lot of money; the man clearly has a talent for self-promotion as well as cooking. But after this complete and total sellout, nobody serious will ever take him seriously again. Maybe that won’t matter; he can be famous for being famous and make lots of commercials. But to people who know and love good food he’ll just be another insufferable douche who went over to the dark side.

The credibility one accrues through cooking or writing or doing anything else well over time is a fragile commodity; it is not easily regained if squandered. And since most of us do not have reputations with street values in the millions, it is up to us to determine what they are worth. I replied to a friend’s tweet recently, and only realized later that it was part of a PR campaign s/he had joined. So the sponsor’s subsequent retweet of mine was free advertising and momentum for them (however tiny) and it made me feel a little dirty and annoyed that I’d been suckered. Disclosure matters. A lot. If you take money to write about something and don’t say so right up front, you’re a shill. My aversion to good old American fee-for-service content might seem quaint, but if I don’t trust you, I won’t read you. And I expect my readers to hold me to the same standard.

The Land That Belongs To You Is Grand

Recently, I was talking in real life to a couple of other food bloggers and someone mentioned the Pioneer Woman. I was only vaguely aware of her, but I was surprised to hear that she’d made a million bucks last year off her site. So I went and took a look. It’s awful. The food is barely cooking; dumbed-down dump-and-stir “recipes” where there’s photo illustrating every single step, practically down to opening the jar of Kraft mayonnaise. There’s a picture of how to rinse your grape tomatoes–still in their plastic clamshell container, shipped from Ecuador or somewhere–before cutting them in half. There’s a picture of that too. One post has–I shit you not–two consecutive pictures showing salt and then pepper being added to a pot.

She even has a grammar section where twice in one month the “lesson” was the difference between “your” and “you’re.” Now as a knee-jerk grammar fascist, I suppose I should applaud her efforts to educate the less lettered among her audience, and yet this part of the site is so dismally depressing that she or her designated minion for this page has stopped writing new posts for it. This section of the site is a blatant admission that her readers are not fluent in their first language, which might be why it seems to have been discontinued.

But besides these side shows, the “pioneer” aspect is fraudulent on its face, reminiscent of nothing so much as George W. Bush’s “ranch” which was really just an estate that he bought because Karl Rove told him to so he could be elected Governor and then President. It’s not to say that they don’t live on a ranch; they do, it seems, in Oklahoma. It’s just that there aren’t any pioneers any more; the frontier ceased to exist 100 years ago. So they’re ranchers, but they’re not farmers. If they eat food that they grow and/or raise, the recipes she offers don’t show it; she appears to mostly buy processed stuff from the nearest supermarket and make lousy meals with it.

I spent a meaningful and car-crash fascinating period of time scrolling back through her cooking posts and besides some arugula on a pizza could hardly find a green vegetable in anything, let alone much talk of growing, producing, or preserving her own food, which is of course what actual Pioneer Women did every day of their difficult, dangerous, non-millionaire lives. There are occasional gardening posts, but they contain no actual information, just a picture of some dirty potatoes or the like accompanied by a very few lines of trademark bubbly pride at having grown them.

She is a pioneer of nothing except making lots of money writing a blog that peddles a fantasy lifestyle. What’s really American about this site, though, and the key to its massive popularity, is the safety of it all. She regularly implores her readers “don’t be like me,” as she describes using a whole stick of butter (OMG!!!) to make her French toast topping, but of course that admonition is intended to be taken ironically because it’s nothing but her version of Emeril’s “Bam!”: It’s a catchphrase that she uses constantly to underscore how she’s just like her readers, even though she’s very wealthy and thus not at all like her readers, who she acknowledges are sub-literate and who line up in desperation for her handouts: a recent giveaway for a Target gift card got over 47,000 comments.

She also says “Amen” a lot, usually when talking about butter, just like the Bible does. This, combined with the home schooling page on the site, would seem to indicate that there’s some faith at work in her ethos, and yet there’s hardly a mention of it on the site anywhere, probably because religion is too divisive when it comes to making millions of dollars from something that is not expressly about God in the first place, like the 700 Club. And don’t for a minute think that I have some liberal coastal elitist problem with sites that view food through a faith-informed worldview; I recently wrote a guest post on a wonderful blog where the author’s faith features prominently. But the Pioneer Woman traffics only in the trappings of faith, at least as far as her glib writing is concerned.

There’s lots of lite, sassy sarcasm, but it’s the brand talking; she never breaks the tone of breezy, insubstantial banter that reassures constantly, even when the task set before the reader is as simple as dipping bread in beaten eggs. “It’s all going to be OK,” she says, “I live out on the prairie and my husband (whom she calls Marlboro Man) wears a cowboy hat.” Besides maybe an account of going to a football game, she doesn’t deal with autobiographical specifics, just appealing generalities that her readers can color in with the crayons of their imaginations.

She’s like the hideous offspring of Martha Stewart, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Rachael Ray. Recently she posted picture of a gallon jar with a spigot near the bottom for dispensing iced tea and the like, encouraging readers to buy one. “I die,” she wrote beneath a picture of a glass jar, without disclosing whether the link was a paid endorsement or not. “I die.” It’s another of her catchphrases. She goes out of her way to say when her various giveaways and endorsements are not paid for, but neglects to ever mention when they are. That sin of omission reeks of old-fashioned frontier shilling so brazen that it would make Al Swearengen blush. And this sort of Chatty Cathy hyperbolic pitch is the entirety of her tone and content, so when the cheerful veneer is thus punctured by meta-awareness, the entire edifice collapses under the weight of its abject money-grubbing. Her whole site is an infomercial.

But that semiotic Snuggie of safety and validation, that coddling embrace of encouraging approval is still seductive, evidently, even when the bar for receiving the Pavlovian pats of approbation is set so low. Hell, you don’t even have to make anything she describes; you can just read about it and imagine being married to a cowboy and making butter-drenched pancakes in a consequence-free environment. Her prose reads like some New Country lyrics where every line is a cliché and there’s not an original phrase in the entire song. And that content, as with the music, is obviously enough for very many people to be content with.

And there’s the rub. To have your food blog become famous and lucrative on this scale, you pretty much have to dumb it down to this level. Like insipid pop music or reality shows, her site isn’t really malicious; it’s just peddling a fantasy lifestyle that’s unmoored from reality, particularly for people who don’t have a staff working for them. It’s escapist, aspirational lifestyle porn for stupid people who can’t cook.

Now I know nothing about her as a person. I’m sure she’s very nice, and a good mother. She’s clearly a good businesswoman. But her content is crap. I know I’m very far from her target audience, but beyond self-enrichment where is the justification for what she does? She’s maybe teaching some deeply inept people to cook very basic things, sure, but only with packaged goods from the store. She eschews vegetables and spends zero time talking the way a real farmer would about where food comes from and what that means and entails. She’s a floating signifier, begging to be filled with her readers’ longings for some mythic, archetypal way of life, but she’s not offering her actual life as an example. She’s doing shtick for money.

Besides the millions in revenue from the website, she has a book deal and just shot episodes of a TV show on (of course) the Food Network. Her internet acumen may ultimately bump up against the harsher, even shallower standards of television: she’s not beautiful, her husband appears to be a real dick, and hundreds of thousands of readers don’t necessarily equal squat when it comes to ratings. Whether or not the TV show succeeds, though, the website remains an outsize part of the landscape, and something that influences many people who should know better.

Don’t be like her.

But Wait, There’s More!

In the last couple of years, the Internet has expanded and professionalized to a degree where as a medium it is no longer a scrappy upstart any more. Sure, there are infinite nooks and crannies of unread content, like this blog, but the widely familiar terrain is slick, well produced, and bristling with SEO savvy. Popularity doesn’t equal quality, though; I for one enjoy the nooks and crannies of uncensored self-expression. My most-read posts are usually the ones where I say exactly what I think and feel, not the polite version of it.

Too many people are not comfortable cooking for themselves or others. Those of us who are–and who enjoy communicating–can explain how much joy and pleasure making and sharing real food can be for cook and eater alike in ways that can demystify and entice. Our rivals in this struggle to connect our fellow citizens more deeply with their food are all the many monied interests at every stage of the vast and rapacious industrial food system. When we give them money, we help enrich them. When we take their money, we give them purchase in our own identities. This is why our politics are so wretched: most elected officials owe whole or partial fealty to their contributors, not their constituents.

If you write about growing food, or making things from scratch, or advocate actively or by example for not using processed and industrial foods and you have an ad for Miracle Whip in your sidebar, you’re undercutting your own argument before you type a single word. Your message becomes polluted and diluted by the tacit admission that you still need the industrial system to supplement your income. It reminds me of Reason magazine; that most strident advocate for the free market is not profitable, and would not exist without subsidies from the Koch brothers, which means they’re bought and paid for and thus have vastly diminished credibility. If you advocate for a lifestyle of minimal corporate contamination, why would you give them a garishly visible toehold right in the middle of your own platform? If you agree with the Occupy movement, start by occupying your own damn blog.

This site could easily pay for its hosting and much more if I put an ad up on it, but I hate ads so I don’t. I designed this site to be a clean, well-lighted place, and that’s how I like it. I hope you do too. Having said that, lots of people are struggling and I do not begrudge anybody making an honest living. I don’t think you’re a sellout if you put a banner ad on your site, but I’d rather you didn’t, because they are ugly. If you really need the $20 or $100 a month that your ad gets you, I’m not going to tell you to take it down. If you get enough traffic that you can pay for your health insurance with ad revenue, zei gesunt. But if you don’t need their money, don’t take it.

This is all easy for me to say; I am allergic to advertising and am lucky enough to make a little money writing for magazines. But in this age of weaponized bullshit, the truth has never been more important. I like telling the truth, and I aim to keep doing it.

If you doubt that, send me 1.9 million dollars and I’ll take it all back.

The other night I remembered the venison our neighbor had given us just before Christmas. He’s a bow hunter, and did well this year, so we got two nice bundles of meat. I defrosted one of them, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: gyros.

If you’ve read my bread post, you know that pita bread are absurdly easy to make. Because this was to be a same-day operation, with no time for an overnight ferment, I added some dried yeast to the regular recipe and gave it a thorough knead after the 20 minute autolyse. Come dinner time, the dough was pleasantly plump. I punched it down, cut it into eights, formed balls, and rolled them out into circles, letting them rest on the counter while I prepped other things and heated up the iron skillet.

It never ceases to impress: these limp discs of dough go in the skillet on medium heat and within a minute or two they inflate like dirigibles. If you’re not equipped to do my version (yet) try this with whatever bread dough you already make.

A quick flip to brown the other side, and they’re done.

Stack them on a plate as they come off the heat and they stay warm and soft until serving.

The servings in this case–unsexy but oh so very edible–were the imagined gyros: hunks of venison trimmed, browned, and rested (while still very pink in the middle) while I sautéed slivered onion, pak choi, garlic, grape tomatoes and blueberries in the . . . → Read More: Pockets Full Of Meat]]>

The other night I remembered the venison our neighbor had given us just before Christmas. He’s a bow hunter, and did well this year, so we got two nice bundles of meat. I defrosted one of them, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: gyros.

If you’ve read my bread post, you know that pita bread are absurdly easy to make. Because this was to be a same-day operation, with no time for an overnight ferment, I added some dried yeast to the regular recipe and gave it a thorough knead after the 20 minute autolyse. Come dinner time, the dough was pleasantly plump. I punched it down, cut it into eights, formed balls, and rolled them out into circles, letting them rest on the counter while I prepped other things and heated up the iron skillet.

It never ceases to impress: these limp discs of dough go in the skillet on medium heat and within a minute or two they inflate like dirigibles. If you’re not equipped to do my version (yet) try this with whatever bread dough you already make.

A quick flip to brown the other side, and they’re done.

Stack them on a plate as they come off the heat and they stay warm and soft until serving.

The servings in this case–unsexy but oh so very edible–were the imagined gyros: hunks of venison trimmed, browned, and rested (while still very pink in the middle) while I sautéed slivered onion, pak choi, garlic, grape tomatoes and blueberries in the meat pan and then deglazed them with blackcurrant vinegar. The tomatoes and blueberries were from the store, purchased in plastic clamshell containers shipped from afar. I realize that my use of these non-local products is every bit as bad as Dylan plugging in his Strat back at Newport in ’65, but my wife had taken the kid shopping and his curatorial influence was clearly visible within the bags they brought back.

I also made a bastard tzatziki with Greek yogurt, diced celery and scallion, lots of garlic, lemon juice, and a dribble of truffle oil. It didn’t suck. All together, this made for a sumptuous sandwich. And there are plenty of pita left over for grilly, melty goodness in the future.

There are dozens of posts out there about preserved lemons, so to avoid redundancy I thought I’d take the idea one step further and share an idea I had a while back. Preserved lemons are an item that my pantry is never without. They’re easy to make and keep forever, and their bright, unmistakeable flavor is essential to a variety of dishes, particularly Moroccan. What I love about them is that to the nose, they smell candied; it’s impossible to tell that it’s salt that has concentrated their flavors rather than sugar. That sweet, lemony aroma permeates any dish they’re added to, but when the lemons are gone the salt that worked its osmotic magic on them has accrued a great deal of interest in the process. This may already be a thing, but I haven’t heard of it before: preserved lemon salt.

The process is easy. Wash and quarter organic lemons and pack them in a jar with salt and lemon juice and such spices as you are inclined to add. I like clove, star anise, cinnamon, and black pepper. Between the salt and the acidity, nothing at all is going to grow in there and over time they turn into homely brown crescents with a intense and powerfully illuminating lemon flavor. It works with other citrus just as well; I have done the same thing with limes and yuzu to excellent effect. Cover the jar, making sure the lemons are submerged in the liquid, and leave it in a cupboard . . . → Read More: Like Salt, Only Better]]>

There are dozens of posts out there about preserved lemons, so to avoid redundancy I thought I’d take the idea one step further and share an idea I had a while back. Preserved lemons are an item that my pantry is never without. They’re easy to make and keep forever, and their bright, unmistakeable flavor is essential to a variety of dishes, particularly Moroccan. What I love about them is that to the nose, they smell candied; it’s impossible to tell that it’s salt that has concentrated their flavors rather than sugar. That sweet, lemony aroma permeates any dish they’re added to, but when the lemons are gone the salt that worked its osmotic magic on them has accrued a great deal of interest in the process. This may already be a thing, but I haven’t heard of it before: preserved lemon salt.

The process is easy. Wash and quarter organic lemons and pack them in a jar with salt and lemon juice and such spices as you are inclined to add. I like clove, star anise, cinnamon, and black pepper. Between the salt and the acidity, nothing at all is going to grow in there and over time they turn into homely brown crescents with a intense and powerfully illuminating lemon flavor. It works with other citrus just as well; I have done the same thing with limes and yuzu to excellent effect. Cover the jar, making sure the lemons are submerged in the liquid, and leave it in a cupboard for at least a month.

To use them, scrape the pulp off the peel and discard it. Mince the peel before deploying in soups, stews, tagines, vinaigrettes, or anything else. Rinse them first if you want, since they’re very salty. As your jar nears the bottom, make another one.

And once you’ve used the last sticky, slimy, fragrant wedge of glory from the first jar, pour the lemony brine through a strainer onto a silpat and pop it in a low oven or dehydrator (or out on the porch or in your car in summer) until the moisture evaporates.

Give the fully dried out salt a bit of a grind to powder it, and put it in a spice jar. The spices and residual lemon solids in the brine will caramelize if you dry it out hotter than a dehydrator (I did this in the oven at about 150˚) which adds another layer of flavor. I also ground this up with a little plain sea salt to tone the flavor down a bit. Other spices and herbs can also be added to obtain a custom mix.

The uses are infinite: sprinkle it on a chicken before roasting, cure gravlax with it, make brine for olives, hit some scallops with it before you sear them hard. Use a bit as finishing salt on lamb or fish, or sprinkle a little bit on top of lemon squares or tarts to give them a sublime salt caramel vibe. It plays superbly with ras-el-hanout or 5-spice in rubs. It’s a fabulous ingredient, and it makes something sublime out of the drab goop that we might otherwise pour down the drain; as with fermented pickle brine and whey, the byproducts of these techniques are often worth the effort all by themselves.

Thanks to the votes of many of you, I won the charcutepalooza contest. To be honest, it was really only at the very end, as I was compiling my posts in the email to Cathy and Kim, that I realized how badly I wanted to win. Since I’m neck-deep in CAD hell right now, I’ll keep it short: thanks for your support, and your readership. Regular blogging should resume shortly. Happy, happy 2012 . . . → Read More: Les Jeux Sont Faits]]>

Thanks to the votes of many of you, I won the charcutepalooza contest. To be honest, it was really only at the very end, as I was compiling my posts in the email to Cathy and Kim, that I realized how badly I wanted to win. Since I’m neck-deep in CAD hell right now, I’ll keep it short: thanks for your support, and your readership. Regular blogging should resume shortly. Happy, happy 2012 to all.

Just a quick post to beseech you all to head over to Food52 and vote for my entry in the Charcutepalooza finals. I’m amazed and humbled to be one of the two finalists, and since the prize is a week in France learning butchery and charcuterie, it’s hard not to be anxious about the outcome.

Be sure to scroll down a bit; there’s a contest at the top of the page that’s charcuterie-themed but closed to voting. You want to vote for mine just below that, where you see the picture of my egg yolk raviolo. If you haven’t read my Thanksgiving post yet, please do so. I cooked my ass off to try to win this thing.

This year has been a great deal of fun, and has made me a better and more adventurous cook. If you had told me a year ago that I would be a finalist in an Internet food contest, I would have laughed at you. But this competition was one in which I could really be myself, without feeling any need to pander. Anybody having doubts about whether to speak their mind and be themselves in their blog should take comfort from this; I am the world’s worst panderer and tried hard to write each post as if it was just another description of a meal with nothing more at stake.

I’ve been stunned at the good wishes and support that have been pouring in over the last 24 hours. Your vote for my entry will be . . . → Read More: A Year-End Appeal]]>

Just a quick post to beseech you all to head over to Food52 and vote for my entry in the Charcutepalooza finals. I’m amazed and humbled to be one of the two finalists, and since the prize is a week in France learning butchery and charcuterie, it’s hard not to be anxious about the outcome.

Be sure to scroll down a bit; there’s a contest at the top of the page that’s charcuterie-themed but closed to voting. You want to vote for mine just below that, where you see the picture of my egg yolk raviolo. If you haven’t read my Thanksgiving post yet, please do so. I cooked my ass off to try to win this thing.

This year has been a great deal of fun, and has made me a better and more adventurous cook. If you had told me a year ago that I would be a finalist in an Internet food contest, I would have laughed at you. But this competition was one in which I could really be myself, without feeling any need to pander. Anybody having doubts about whether to speak their mind and be themselves in their blog should take comfort from this; I am the world’s worst panderer and tried hard to write each post as if it was just another description of a meal with nothing more at stake.

I’ve been stunned at the good wishes and support that have been pouring in over the last 24 hours. Your vote for my entry will be most appreciated, and if I win I promise to document the trip in vivid detail so you don’t miss a thing. Thanks for reading.

(Above is some seared duck breast with duck fat potatoes and leeks, celery root purée, homemade black currant mustard, and a friend’s carrot jam).

Instead of fulfilling my patriotic obligation by whipping myself into a shopping frenzy worthy of Todd Palin in the Sudafed aisle of the Anchorage Piggly Wiggly, I have instead been a near shut-in, toiling away on this infernal device making CAD drawings in advance of an upcoming show. It has been fun, in its way, since the steep learning curve offers plenty of satisfaction; increasing fluency is its own reward. The resulting drawings are even more exciting, and I can’t wait to get the hundreds of little pieces milled so I can paint them and put them together. It’s been a while since I learned to do something new at this level, and it feels good.

I’ve been cooking, but taking time off from this has been most enjoyable. There will be plenty more to write about in 2012, but I thought I’d put up some pictures of recent meals to assuage what is no doubt a mounting and febrile panic on your part that I haven’t been getting enough to eat. To which I say, “Smelts! With caramelized turnips and leeks!”

There has also been a trip to Chicago, where I made a pretty nice Christmas dinner, but apart from a few phone pics on Twitter I didn’t bother to document it. It’s been happening a lot lately, especially when there is company; the photography gets in the way of both cooking and enjoyment.

Before we left, I made my famous Korean chicken wings again, except they were thighs. Just as good, and . . . → Read More: It’s Not What You Look Like When You’re Doing What You’re Doing, It’s What You’re Doing When You’re Doing What You Look Like You’re Doing]]>

Instead of fulfilling my patriotic obligation by whipping myself into a shopping frenzy worthy of Todd Palin in the Sudafed aisle of the Anchorage Piggly Wiggly, I have instead been a near shut-in, toiling away on this infernal device making CAD drawings in advance of an upcoming show. It has been fun, in its way, since the steep learning curve offers plenty of satisfaction; increasing fluency is its own reward. The resulting drawings are even more exciting, and I can’t wait to get the hundreds of little pieces milled so I can paint them and put them together. It’s been a while since I learned to do something new at this level, and it feels good.

I’ve been cooking, but taking time off from this has been most enjoyable. There will be plenty more to write about in 2012, but I thought I’d put up some pictures of recent meals to assuage what is no doubt a mounting and febrile panic on your part that I haven’t been getting enough to eat. To which I say, “Smelts! With caramelized turnips and leeks!”

There has also been a trip to Chicago, where I made a pretty nice Christmas dinner, but apart from a few phone pics on Twitter I didn’t bother to document it. It’s been happening a lot lately, especially when there is company; the photography gets in the way of both cooking and enjoyment.

Before we left, I made my famous Korean chicken wings again, except they were thighs. Just as good, and with even more meat. I could eat these every night.

Seared scallops and polenta made another nice dish, with a messy but lubricious brown butter pan sauce:

And more seafood: damn good panko-crusted fried calamari with a wicked sauce of Greek yogurt, capers, relish, yuzu juice, and mustard:

Finally, a cold and congealed gravy puck left from roasting a chicken (and some of the meat from same) gave me inspiration to make pot pies. Roots from the garden, leftover creamy celery root soup, the gravy, herbs, frozen peas, and garlic gave some serious body and flavor to the filling, and the caps of crust of course dressed up what is just a big steaming pile of leftovers into something positively luxe.

Next year I’ll get back into this writing thing, I swear. It’s been a nice break, after almost six years of pretty steady posting.

For this month’s curing challenge, I took some of the knowledge I gained from making chorizo and fennel salami a couple of months ago and applied it to a more ambitious quantity and variety of salumi. Properly equipped, better skilled, and inspired to try a couple of unorthodox flavors, I ended up with about 20 pounds of five different types.

To start with, I got beef middles. Hog middles are great for fresh sausages, but they dry to a skinniness that limits their use; they’re fine for taking on a hike, or supplementing a charcuterie plate, but not so easy to build a big sandwich out of. The beef middles are ideal, making good-sized salami without requiring a huge amount of meat to fill like the Genoa sack I also ordered but haven’t used yet. I also got elastic webbing to help them keep their firmness and shape as they dry and contract.

I also did this work over the course of a few days, fitting in sessions of either grinding or stuffing when I could. It’s far easier to grind one day and stuff the next than it is to try to bang it all out in one marathon. And since I was dealing with two pork butts, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed. The first two were hot soppressata and fennel salami, using recipes modified from Ruhlman/Polcyn’s Charcuterie and Rustic Italian Food by Marc Vetri (which I received as a review copy). I made them pretty much by the books, . . . → Read More: I Always Take A Meat Sandwich With Me]]>

For this month’s curing challenge, I took some of the knowledge I gained from making chorizo and fennel salami a couple of months ago and applied it to a more ambitious quantity and variety of salumi. Properly equipped, better skilled, and inspired to try a couple of unorthodox flavors, I ended up with about 20 pounds of five different types.

To start with, I got beef middles. Hog middles are great for fresh sausages, but they dry to a skinniness that limits their use; they’re fine for taking on a hike, or supplementing a charcuterie plate, but not so easy to build a big sandwich out of. The beef middles are ideal, making good-sized salami without requiring a huge amount of meat to fill like the Genoa sack I also ordered but haven’t used yet. I also got elastic webbing to help them keep their firmness and shape as they dry and contract.

I also did this work over the course of a few days, fitting in sessions of either grinding or stuffing when I could. It’s far easier to grind one day and stuff the next than it is to try to bang it all out in one marathon. And since I was dealing with two pork butts, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed. The first two were hot soppressata and fennel salami, using recipes modified from Ruhlman/Polcyn’s Charcuterie and Rustic Italian Food by Marc Vetri (which I received as a review copy). I made them pretty much by the books, with a couple departures. The basic technique is simple: cube the meat and fat, then put it in the freezer to chill and partially harden. Toss with all the dry seasonings and grind. Put in the mixer bowl with the wet stuff (wine, brine, syrup) and churn it for a minute or two to develop myosin and get everything thoroughly distributed. Then stuff (or chill overnight and stuff the next day).

I don’t use a powdered bacterial culture for fermentation; I dribble in a bit of kimchi or other lacto-fermented brine and pour in a glug of maple syrup to feed it instead of using refined sugar. I always have brine and syrup on hand, and I prefer them. Vetri’s recipes call for grinding the meat and fat twice, but to my taste that makes for too homogenized a mix. Speaking of the mix, I also learned that cold months are a much better time for grinding and stuffing. It’s much easier to keep everything cold when the kitchen is already cool, and this helps keep the fat from smearing all over the meat and ruining the nice contrast of dark red meat against creamy white fat. No matter what time of the year you do it, freeze the grinder parts, and put the mixer bowl into a bowl of ice water to keep everything as cold as possible.

Another point to consider is that while many recipes call for five pounds of meat and fat, that adds up to a fair amount of salami which is all going to be ready at once unless you stuff different diameter casings. So while I made five pounds each of both of these, it was with an eye toward gifting many of them since they should be fully ready in time for the holidays. The second shoulder I broke up into smaller batches, making two pounds each of my two experiments and then about twice as much chorizo with the rest. This way, if the experiments are good I can make more, and if they suck I didn’t waste too much meat.

I have a friend in Seattle who sent me one of Armandino’s mole salami for my birthday a few years back and it knocked me out. It’s intense: spicy, chocolatey, complex, and utterly addictive. So I thought I’d give something similar a shot. I combined minced dried aji cereza chilis from Peru with cumin, coriander, ancho powder, cocoa powder, cinnamon, marjoram, garlic, the white and pink salts, and lots of black pepper. I also added pumpkin seed oil along with some wine and the brine and syrup while the ground meat was combining in the mixer bowl with the paddle attachment.

The second experiment was a Thai curry-flavored salami, using fresh Thai chilis from the bush I potted and brought inside, lime leaves, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, a bit of five spice, fish sauce, and shredded dried coconut. As with the mole, I guessed with all the amounts, so there’s no guarantee they will turn out well, but I’m hopeful.

My stuffing technique has improved, too. I use a wooden skewer to poke a hole just above the knot, so the air has somewhere to escape through, and I figured out that if you push back gently against the pressure of the meat you can avoid air bubbles almost entirely and get a nice consistent shape. The thicker-skinned beef casings also make for much easier stuffing. It’s a good idea to leave a couple inches of casing outside the knotted string on at least one end; come hanging time the weight of the sausage can cause the skin to slip out of the string if there isn’t enough extra.

I made little tags for each, showing the flavor, the date, and the weight after stuffing so I can determine when they’ve lost about a third of that and thus have dried enough. After stuffing, I put them in a closed container overnight in the warm furnace room where I rise bread dough to give the fermentation a jump start. The next day I webbed and hung them. Wrestling the webbing onto them required a bit of finesse, but I got it done pretty quickly. It really adds that professional “real salumi” look to the result, I must say.

So a few hours of work on two consecutive weekends turned two big local, pastured pork shoulders into a whole lot of fragrant, meaty goodness. It’s an appropriate sign of the times we live in that my wine fridge is increasingly becoming a meat and cheese aging facility. This last picture was taken before I hung the four chorizo, but you get the idea. Between the pungent, garlicky meat and all the camembert, the wine fridge smells pretty insanely good; as I mentioned on Twitter a while back, it smells like Italy, France, and Spain are having hot, meaty sex in there.

One of the smaller soppressatas has lost a third of its weight, and a fennel was getting close, so they seemed like logical choices for trying out right now. To celebrate the glory that is a good salami, I thought that one of my trademark from-scratch sandwiches would be in order. So I baked a miche–my usual sourdough boule made from the local white 00 flour ground with the germ mixed with about 25% rye for flavor–and broke out the cheddar.

I made this back in June, so it’s only five months old instead of the six I was hoping for, but the one I made in May perished in the power outage during the heat wave in July so this is the oldest one I have.

OK, so bread, salami, and cheese are all set. Next up, condiments. I took some black mustard seeds, mustard powder, mustard oil, spruce vinegar, and salt and ground them all together into a coarse paste in the small suribachi. This tool is pure genius for grinding seeds up in short order, and makes me marvel at the near-uselessness of smooth marble mortars. This is some seriously tasty hot mustard, and has awakened in me the urge to make much more, in a variety of flavors. But that will be another post.

For the mayo, I kept it pretty simple, not wanting to distract from all the wealth of flavor accrued over the weeks and months within the meat and cheese: egg yolk, olive and (local, organic) sunflower oils, a bit of the mustard, cider vinegar, and salt. And I cut some arugula from one of the salad beds.

It’s been a while since I was this excited while assembling a sandwich. It was an effort to not try the salami by itself first, but for some reason I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Normally, I keep the meat and cheese layers modest; I had a deli sandwich a while back with about an inch of salami in it, and it was massive overkill. I think one layer of each is sufficient. But I did go a bit thicker than normal for this one to maximize the experience and celebrate the end of a wait that was much longer than we normally associate with food.

And what an experience. The cheese is not as hard and crumbly as I expected, but that’s due in equal measure to my lack of a proper cheese press and the shorter aging time. It tasted pretty sharp, though, and the creaminess was not a negative per se. The two salamis, still on the tender side, had remarkably rich and vivid flavors, with an especially pronounced tang due to the kimchi brine I think. I can’t wait until the other four flavors are ready.

The thing about that long wait for a payoff that, while immensely satisfying and far superior to store-bought alternatives, it’s a lot of work for a salami sandwich. The solution to this, as with all the other techniques from baking to pickling to cheese making, is to do them regularly, in manageable amounts, so that at any given time you have enough to assemble a meal with your own food. It’s a very different relationship than the one most of us have to what we eat, and it fluctuates depending on the season and what’s mature at any given time. But that’s part of the appeal, and the gratification–sensual and intellectual–of assembling one’s lunch from the array of homemade delicacies is surprisingly powerful.

I’m going to make a point of setting aside a few hours every couple of months to grind and stuff a couple of pounds of meat to hang and cure. There’s no reason ever to run out of this fabulous food, and it’s an ideal medium for indulging my need to always change up the recipes and flavors and try new things. And since making bread, cheese, pickles, and charcuterie are now fully integrated into my regular kitchen routines, it’s safe to say that I’ll never want for great sandwiches, let alone all the other possibilities.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, centering as it does around food. I usually take a day or three off leading up to it and cook my ass off, often making ten or so courses for whoever comes to visit. It’s my chance to stretch out and try some ideas that require special ingredients or techniques, and to make the best food I possibly can, in sequential courses, using my own ceramics, and try to nail all the details and timing for each dish. It’s also a holiday that’s relatively free of crass commercialism–although that appears to be crumbling in the face of earlier and earlier riot-inducing sales–but these things are easily avoided by not having TV and choosing not to shop in the days that follow the big meal. I think it should be about the food and the company, period. The timing also neatly coincided with the last Charcutepalooza challenge, which was more of a dare: show off, using any and everything we’ve done so far.

So I did. Eight courses, each of which contained some quantity of homemade charcuterie.

This meal came into focus in my mind very late; normally I have it all worked out several weeks ahead of time. I chalk this up to my general state of preoccupation on many creative fronts, and the mini vacation from the blog that I’ve been enjoying. But by Tuesday I had it clear enough to do a comprehensive shop and bring home everything I needed for the next two days of . . . → Read More: Gratitude Is The Attitude]]>

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, centering as it does around food. I usually take a day or three off leading up to it and cook my ass off, often making ten or so courses for whoever comes to visit. It’s my chance to stretch out and try some ideas that require special ingredients or techniques, and to make the best food I possibly can, in sequential courses, using my own ceramics, and try to nail all the details and timing for each dish. It’s also a holiday that’s relatively free of crass commercialism–although that appears to be crumbling in the face of earlier and earlier riot-inducing sales–but these things are easily avoided by not having TV and choosing not to shop in the days that follow the big meal. I think it should be about the food and the company, period. The timing also neatly coincided with the last Charcutepalooza challenge, which was more of a dare: show off, using any and everything we’ve done so far.

So I did. Eight courses, each of which contained some quantity of homemade charcuterie.

This meal came into focus in my mind very late; normally I have it all worked out several weeks ahead of time. I chalk this up to my general state of preoccupation on many creative fronts, and the mini vacation from the blog that I’ve been enjoying. But by Tuesday I had it clear enough to do a comprehensive shop and bring home everything I needed for the next two days of serious cooking. I crossed a couple of prep steps off the list Tuesday evening, and Wednesday was an eight hour marathon. Thursday got it all together, finishing prep, hitting the garden for all the greens and garnishes, and then cooking the various components as the menu required. Dinner was about three and a half hours, and I did a decent job of cleaning as I cooked so the aftermath was not onerous for my wife and brother to deal with.

OK, the meal. First up, a chicken liver and foie gras crème brulée. I’ve been into chicken liver lately, and am always into foie gras, so I thought to combine them into something that had livery heft and foie-foie elegance. I puréed livers and foie with egg yolks, reduced liquors (slivovitz, whiskey, port), cream, thyme, and a little garlic, then pushed the mixture through a strainer to ensure a silky texture. Then I poured it into small dishes and froze them solid so I could vacuum-bag them (unless you have a chamber sealer liquids need to be frozen or they go straight up into the pump).

I cooked them for a couple of hours at 65˚C, then chilled them and opened the bags and gave the edges of the plates a wipe to remove the fat that had leaked out during cooking. It’s much easier than cooking them in a bain-marie, but there is some wiping off required. I sprinkled the surfaces with unrefined sugar and popped them under the broiler for a brief time, watching them like a hawk lest they burn or spatter. To serve them, I cut rounds out of a freshly-baked loaf of my usual wheat-rye sourdough and grilled them in the dry iron skillet on both sides, then served them alongside a marmalade I invented a couple of years ago: sliced kumquats simmered with local absinthe and this store-bought mango chutney we like a lot. It’s a freakishly good combination, and it was exquisite with the liver.

Next up, salad, made special by two attributes. First, I cut all the greens mere minutes before we ate them, so they were as good as greens get, and second, I made a gentle bacon fat vinaigrette (with some of the rendered fat from the bacon you’ll read about later on) that was about three quarters olive oil and one quarter fat for a subtly rich smokiness that really enhanced the bold winter greens: arugula, wrinkled cress, red mustard, frisée, mâche, and several lettuces. The vinegar was homemade red wine. Mustard, a bit of grated garlic, and salt and pepper made up the rest. This is some serious dressing.

A few months ago, I made a trio of pâtés that included one made from rabbit and spruce. While the duck and pork terrines were more popular, something about the rabbit compelled me to do it again. There’s a sweetness inherent to the meat that responds very well to the citrus/resinous qualities of spruce, making for something delicate but richly flavored; the spruce brings out the umami in the rabbit and gives it an intensely savory depth. I added a splash of spruce vinegar for good measure along with a little bit of limoncello that a friend gave me some time ago. Per usual, an egg yolk and panko made the panade. I don’t use egg whites in my pâtés, and in fact I didn’t use any for any part of this meal; there’s a pint container full of whites that need making into meringues soon since I used over a dozen yolks in various forms throughout. Yolks are much softer binders than whites, and taste far lass eggy, which matters a lot in ice cream especially. Along with the rabbit, a suitably rabbit-friendly combination of shredded red cabbage and carrots from the garden that I lacto-fermented a month ago. It’s a lovely combination in both taste and color.

Next up was an idea I had after seeing something they make at Coi in San Francisco: popcorn grits. You can see their video on YouTube, but it’s very simple: make popcorn, then cook it in water (or stock) and butter until soft, then mash it through a sieve, then season and add more butter.

The result tastes like buttered popcorn and is creamy and buttery like the velvetiest grits you’ve ever eaten. Twenty percent of good restaurant cooking is passing everything through strainers to make it smooth and sexy. The other eighty percent is butter. I wanted to riff on shrimp and grits and popcorn shrimp, and I found some gorgeous prawns on my shopping safari, so things were looking good.

I marinated them in sherry vinegar, pimentón, saffron, and garlic overnight, then shelled them and skewered them so they would stay relatively straight during cooking. I took the shells and the marinade and added homemade chorizo from the first attempt (which is kind of dried out and great for stocks now), chicken stock, water, a bit of celery, and a hunk of onion and simmered it to make a very aromatic broth, then strained it and reduced it with gochujang, maple syrup, and shredded coconut. This was another example of celebrating the many interesting ways in which Spanish and Korean flavors get along marvelously, and allowed me to add coconut shrimp to the list of dishes that this one played around with. Once it was thick and sticky I brushed it onto the prawns and broiled them quickly on both sides.

Then I stuck them into little puddles of popcorn polenta and added some claytonia leaves for garnish and a bright lemony tang. This was a good dish.

To follow, two different ravioli. The first one was a variation of something I came up with a few years ago during the first epic Thanksgiving where I glued slices of ham together around butternut squash and served them in gelatin-clarified squash soup. This time around, I refined it in several important ways. First, instead of store-bought ham, I used homemade bresaola that was perfectly ready in time. Second, the filling was homemade ricotta mixed with freshly-dug horseradish from the patch under the currant bushes by the garage. I love this plant; you can go out and maul it with a shovel and all the bits of root you don’t dig up grow into big fat roots the following year. Just don’t plant it in your vegetable garden.

I washed, peeled, and grated it up on my wasabi grater to get a nice fine paste, then folded it into the ricotta along with a pinch of salt and (surprise!) an egg yolk.

I trimmed the beef slices into circles and brushed them with a slurry of Activa GS, which is formulated specifically for slurry application, then added a dollop of filling and pressed another round on top.

Then I vacuum-bagged them and put them in the fridge overnight to fully bond.

The third refinement was that instead of gelatin-clarifying the soup, I used agar and the method developed by Dave that’s ten times easier and quicker than using gelatin. Dissolve .2% agar by weight in your liquid by boiling it for a few minutes, then chill, then break up the loose gel with a whisk, then ladle the “curds” into a jelly bag and let syneresis do your work for you by dripping clear liquid into the bowl below. Compare the opacity of the gel in the upper picture with the clarity of the liquid in the lower one:

In this case, the liquid was beef dashi, made with a semi-fossilized hunk of bresaola that overdried. I talked about this discovery back at the beginning of the year; it involves using shaved beef like bonito. This time around I added phở flavors: charred onion, ginger, clove, cinnamon, star anise, and black pepper. It smelled and tasted superbly beefy.

So the ravioli went in the hot soup with a few paper-thin radish slices to allude insouciantly to the filling and a couple of baby tatsoi leaves for color and vitamins and shit. The result was an ode to beef, but in a nearly weightless form; big steaky flavor with the powerful embellishments of cheese and horseradish but very little heft. It made for some seductive slurps and a couple of vivid chews, and then it was a long, lingering steak sandwich of the mind.

The second ravioli dish was inspired by a post of Linda’s about miso-curing egg yolks. I cooked some eggs at 65˚ C for an hour, then peeled away the whites to reveal squishy little pillows of intense yellow.

I wrapped them in cheesecloth and packed them in white miso for five days to cure.

Once they came out, they had darkened and firmed up some.

I had made some pasta dough (using, of course, nothing but yolks) and rolled a bunch of parsley leaves through it at various stages. To get the gorgeous green zebra stripes, you do it just once at the end, but in this case I really wanted the pasta to have some noticeable parsley flavor so I added them in waves and folded and rerolled the dough many times.

I gave these a bare blanching in just-simmering water to avoid cooking the yolks any more, then served them with homemade guanciale (cured and hung along with the bresaola so it was perfectly ready) and a dribble of truffle oil to make a sort of carbonara. Guanciale and bresaola are as easy to make as duck prosciutto, and even more useful; where the duck is best sliced thinly and enjoyed as is, bresaola makes a mean carpaccio when not fully dried and can obviously be used to make dashi if overdried. Guanciale is a desert island meat for me; a diced tablespoon or so adds fabulous porky richness and depth to anything you might want to make. In both cases, all you have to do is slather the meat with salt, garlic, and herbs, let it sit 3 days for beef and a week for a jowl (skin the jowl first) and then rinse and hang them somewhere cool. When they’re firmish, they’re ready. I use a little guanciale in almost everything saucy, soupy, or stewy, and try hard to never run out of it.

This one really worked: classic carbonara taste, but with surprising textures and elegant presentation.

A keeper for sure.

Next up, Thanksgiving. Every year I do a multi-course thing like this I have to include a traditional plate to keep the wife happy. Usually it involves confit, usually of duck, but since I just did a bunch of that I thought I’d try something different. I took a duck breast, trimmed most of the fat off it, and ground it up with sage, roasted chestnuts, and blackcurrant vinegar.

I added the obligatory egg yolk and panko, and seasoned it, doing a quenelle test to make sure it was spot on, then scooped it into the pastry bag and piped it into quail. These I bagged with rosemary, thyme, and a knob of butter, and then cooked at 65˚ C for three hours. If that temp seems rather like the sous vide temps of many other dishes, that’s because it is. I cooked all the meat on Wednesday, then cooled it in an ice bath and reheated or cooked it before serving during the meal. This made for a much easier day on Thursday.

To go with the little birds, I made a root vegetable gratin using the best of what the garden has to offer these days from at or below the soil’s surface: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and celery root. I mandolined them all into thin sheets and layered them, adding glugs of cream and sprinkles of salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary, and chives from time to time.

At the halfway point, lacking truffles, I made a layer of foraged and dried black trumpet mushrooms that I had soaked in water to soften. I baked it until the cream all evaporated, then weighed it down in the fridge overnight to compress.

Once out, I trimmed the edges and cut it into rectangular bricks.

These got floured, egged, and pankoed in the classic fashion and then deep fried to a golden hue.

Once all the pieces were done, I floured the quail and deep fried them as well. Everybody thus got their own individual plump, crisp little Thanksgiving bird with a golden brick of gratin and three sauces. I made Cranberry-blackcurrant pudding by cooking cranberries with blackcurrant vinegar, maple syrup, ginger and some agar until soft and then stick-blending it all smooth and passing it through a strainer. Once gelled, I stick-blended it to an unctuous pudding. I cooked burdock and some of the chestnuts together with a few dried porcini until they were all soft, then blended them smooth and strained the purée, adding it to a nice nutty roux made with more of that bacon fat and using chicken stock to dilute it just to the point of a thick gravy. I didn’t want it to run all over the place, but instead stay put as an assertive dollop that would work visually with the other two sauces. The third sauce was a green mash made from frisée, pan di zucchero, and sorrel, with mustard, cider vinegar, garlic, and olive oil plus enough Ultratex 8 to keep it from weeping.

The flavors were good, the textures varied, and tradition was maintained. Victory. Plus, there were no leftovers. The duck stuffing was a good contrast to the crispy quail, and all the meat was still rosy pink from its water bath cooking. The agar and Ultratex (like the flour in the gravy, another hydrocolloid) did exactly what they were supposed to do: keep the liquids where they belonged.

Lastly, dessert. I posted back near the beginning of this crazy contest about some miso-cured bacon tartes tatin that I had made, and they seemed like a fitting dessert for a charcuterie-centric feast such as this. So I cooked a slab of the bacon in the water bath for six hours, then cut it into biggish cubes that would just fit into my muffin tins and browned them hard on all sides to get crisp and flavorful and render off a bunch of fat (which I then used in the vinaigrette and the gravy). I made a very thick and dark caramel with light brown sugar and maple syrup and poured it into the bays of the tin, followed by the chunks of bacon, and capped each one with a round of tart crust (my Grandmother’s recipe, of course).

To accompany, something else I came up with last winter when we were playing around with the birch syrup we made from the trees next to the garden: parsnip ice cream. This time around I used some sugar and maple syrup since the birch trees sadly won’t be making sap again until March. I also added about a quarter of a vanilla bean for complexity; vanilla and parsnips love each other. I shaped the ice cream into quenelles and put one next to each tart.

And that was it, though the adults did have some homemade camembert a bit later because we are sophisticated like Europeans.

There was going to be another dessert, but we were full and so I decided to make it later and give it its own post. It didn’t have any meat in it, so that’s probably just as well.

The eight courses made use of just about all the techniques we’ve covered over the course of the year. The trick was to keep it from getting too heavy, which I pulled off pretty successfully until the bacon tarts. But then a bacon tart is not likely to be a light thing. These were small, though, like all the courses except the main one, and made an appropriate conclusion to the meal.

In the spirit of the day, I’m grateful to my family for getting the hell out of the kitchen for two days so I could concentrate, and to all my departed ancestors who taught me so much about how food (and its corollary, yelling) can be a powerful example of love made manifest. and I’m also grateful to Cathy and Kim for putting this thing together and pushing me to try several things I hadn’t mustered the nerve for previously. As a result of this year, I can bang out a pâté on short notice with no recipe, and I have twenty pounds of salami hanging in the wine fridge for the last post (this should have been the last one, but I wanted to give the salami the maximum drying time). I’m also grateful that my lovely wife has made dinner for two evenings in a row. Man, is it nice to be cooked for sometimes.

UPDATE: Thanks to all of you for commenting, and I’m sorry I have but one copy to give away. The winner, chosen by Random.org (because I couldn’t find my 33-sided die), is Mark S. of From Belly to Bacon. I see a bunch of unfamiliar names below, so when I have a few minutes I’ll click your links and see what you’re all about. Stay tuned for the Thanksgiving post (I think you’ll like it) and more giveaways down the road . . . → Read More: Cyber Monday Madness]]> I get books in the mail from various publishers as review copies from time to time, and they run the gamut from wonderful things that I’d actually buy to things that make me laugh and/or gag in disbelief. Shelf space is limited, so I thought I’d start occasionally giving away some of the worthy titles that I just don’t have room for. First up is Menus for Chez Panisse by Patricia Curtan. It’s a book about her letterpress work illustrating and typesetting menus for the restaurant through the years, and would make a meaningful gift for someone who loves printmaking and/or Alice Waters. Keep in mind that this is a coffee table book, not a cookbook; there are no recipes. It’s a hardcover copy, and it goes to a lucky commenter to this post who will be chosen at random after the comments close at 9PM on Monday, November 28.

UPDATE: Thanks to all of you for commenting, and I’m sorry I have but one copy to give away. The winner, chosen by Random.org (because I couldn’t find my 33-sided die), is Mark S. of From Belly to Bacon. I see a bunch of unfamiliar names below, so when I have a few minutes I’ll click your links and see what you’re all about. Stay tuned for the Thanksgiving post (I think you’ll like it) and more giveaways down the road a piece.