A few days ago Mr. Henderson signed onto to Twitter with a short, yet very quaint greeting.

Testing, testing, 123… good afternoon.

Since Mr. Henderson’s tweets are highly relevant to my site, I’ll be adding a twitter feed of his posts in the sidebar.  Here’s a link to his twitter page if you feel like telling the gentleman hello!

If you’d like to share your version of pickled gherkins, feel free to post it in the comments and I’ll gladly add it with proper credit.

In New Zealand we just use white vinegar, always have. I don’t know where she got that recipe from, but it isn’t here. I’ve never even seen that acid stuff you mentioned as being part of a Kiwi recipe.
The recipe I’ve had for the past 20 years and use is:

750mls white vinegar
small tbsp pickling spice (in mesh bag)
4 cups sugar
2 tsp salt

Boil all together with pickling spice in a bag.

Cover the gherkins (I use sliced and chopped cucumbers too) with boiling water, leave to cool and drain x 4.

Pack the gherkins into jars, cover with boiled vinegar solution, cap and store in the dark.

Mixture can be reboiled after 4 days if desired but it’s optional.

Thank you very much Tish!

And while George Freuden’s recipe isn’t for a pickled gherkin, it’s too wonderful not to share.

Each December my family celebrates my birthday by getting our Jule-cozy on with a Sunday visit to the Solstice & Christmas revels in Hanover, and then we head over to enjoy dinner at my favorite local restaurant, West Lebanon’s Yama.

Huang and Insook, the owners, along with the lovely staff, are warm and welcoming all the year long, but for my birthday dinner they pull out all the stops and shower our table with the special treats that they know I enjoy most.

Huang always finds something in the kitchen to offer as a gift, which he presents with a giant grin and hug. This year it was two big packages of sweet-potato starch noodles, which he knows I love to make japchae with, a mound of lovely jiggling glistening noodles liberally shot through with bright veggies and drizzled with a sweet & soy-saucy dressing.

So when I was encouraged to submit a charcuterie recipe for the Charcutepalooza Final festivities over at Food52, I had Korean cuisine on the brain, and it didn’t take long to come up with these Korean-inspired crepinettes. Basically a meatball, and often made from various bits of good pork offal, crepinettes are made a little more festive by being wrapped in a delicate négligée of caul fat, also called lace lard.

If you are new to making charcuterie, crepinettes are a nice introduction to using your meat grinder, to creating a forcemeat mixture, and to dealing with caul fat, which is featured in many traditional French pâtés.

This version includes a mixture of beef chuck and lean pork belly for the forcemeat, and is brightened by typically Korean flavors: soy pickled shiso, gochujang, soy sauce, garlic, and scallions. Luckily for me (as this was to be my birthday lunch) this fusion of Korean and French turned out delicious.

If you’re not familiar with some of the ingredients in this recipe, take a look at the bottom of this post for information about the more noteworthy ingredients.

Bright Korean-Inspired Crepinettes

Ingredients

5 ounces lean pork belly
13 ounces beef chuck
1 cracker
3 garlic cloves
1 scallion
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 heaping tablespoon gochujang paste
1/2 pound caul fat
1/2 teaspoon peanut oil
6-7 soy-pickled or fresh shiso leaves

Mince garlic and scallion fine, and fry gently until just softened. Set aside to cool.

Chop all meat into approximately 1-inch pieces and toss with the pepper, salt, gochujang sauce, and cooled fried garlic and scallion. Process first through the large plate of your meat grinder and then once more through the fine plate. Lastly, break up your cracker and process it through your grinder; it helps to get the last bits of meat through the plate and adds a bit of binding to your forcemeat as well.

It’s helpful to fry a little bit of your meat to taste at which point you can adjust the seasoning to your preference.

Carefully spread your lacy piece of caul fat onto your clean workspace. I find it easiest to work with the delicate caul fat on a food-safe plastic cutting board just wiped with a cold wet cloth. Depending on the stretchiness and composition of your piece of caul, you may have leftovers. Caul fat freezes beautifully!

Place one shiso leaf in the center of a section of the caul fat closest to an edge.

Take an egg-sized portion of your forcemeat and shape into a slightly flattened oval patty, and place it centered over the shiso leaf. Use a sharp knife to trim away a piece of the caul just large enough to wrap your meat in, and gently wrap the edges of your little caul fat wrapper up and over your meat patty.

Roast leaf-side up in a 375°F oven on a rack over a silver-foil lined roasting pan for 20-25 minutes or until the crepinette feels firm to the touch and is nicely browned.

Serve warm with rice and japchae. I’m very fond of Maangchi’s version of japchae, though when I make it as a side I will simplify it, for instance by not adding meat or mushroooms, and with respect to the contents of my larder.

Thanks to all of you who made my birthday splendid this year!

Special Ingredient Notes:

Caul Fat: Also known as “lace lard,” this is a sweet and incredibly useful pork product for wrapping crepinettes, faggots, frikadeller, and pâtés. Ask your butcher or look online to order.

Gochujang Paste: A savory and pungent fermented Korean condiment made from red chili, glutinous rice, fermented soybeans and salt. Delicious, complex, and warmly spicy.

Soy Pickled Shiso Leaves: Also known as “perilla” and “beefsteak plant,” shiso has been described as an Asian version of basil, but it has its own unique and delicious flavor. I grow it and pickle it in soy in the fall. Try find it in a large Korean or Japanese market, or substitute fresh shiso leaves, which are easy to find at Asian markets.

Thank you Iliana so much! -Ryan

First up are my good friends April and Sean Woods.  They had a lovely anniversary meal at  St. John.

Housed in what used to be a smokehouse, St John has whitewashed walls and is spare in decor. We were seated at communal tables and served by polite but succinctly efficient waitstaff. I could not have been happier. There was no fuss, no dinner theatre … I’m not even sure there was garnish – just plate after plate of locally sourced, decidedly British, perfectly-prepared food.

Next up is Arnold Gatilao’s take on St. John’s fare.

We started with the Roasted Bone Marrow & Parsley Salad, which is just about as classic as you can get. I loved that there was still meat on the bones for us to gnaw on along with the marrow and toast.

I look forward to the day I can sit down and enjoy these same dishes to see how well I’ve managed to recreate them at home.

This is not really a recipe, more of a suggestion to bring together three basic, but very suited textures and flavors.

This was another recipe that was completed during the 24 hour cooking marathon. The credit for putting it together goes mostly to my lovely wife and Jennie Chen of MisoHungry fame.  I was busy with other recipes-and fairly sleep deprived at the time-so they took the reigns and belted this one out in no time.

At the beginning of the marathon I placed a pound of dried chickpeas in water to soak, then moved on to other things.

Later on the girls took the chickpeas and boiled them for two hours with a whole head of garlic until they were cooked fully.

Half of the cooked chickpeas went into the food processor along with some peeled cloves of garlic, lemon juice, tahini, olive oil and a splash of tabasco for heat. This seem like the making of a basic hummus to me.

A quick whizz later the chickpeas were the perfect coarse texture that Mr. Henderson asks for.

Next up were the pigeons, which the girls roasted exactly how I roasted them a few years ago.

And here’s the completed dish. As Mr. Henderson pointed out, this really doesn’t seem like much of a recipe does it?  Simple, straightforward, and absolutely delicious is more than fine by me.  The combination of the gamey meat with the smooth nutty chickpeas is just perfect, and when you add the pungent raw nature of the scallions it just makes everything in the world seem right.

Special thanks to Jennie and my wife for the help on this one.

One down, thirty seven to go.