Yum and Yummer

Beef Shank Stroganoff Recipe & Pasture Prime Farm

September 22, 2012 – 12:15 am

My friend Heather — an old friend whose dirty mouth rivals my own — told me about a place. A special place. A special place where one can buy locally-raised meat, and where the animals are fed a diet conducive to healthy, happy lives while being allowed to roam free in pastures in humane conditions. When you read as much as I do about the horrors of America’s food production and its many, um, hiccups, hearing about such a place is like being told that fairies are not only real but also delicious.

So last weekend my friend Dee and I decided to investigate.

The sun was high above us and it’s warmth beat down our bare arms through the car windows as we drove through the countryside. Swarms of lovebugs slapped against my windshield as we barreled through the dirt roads toward the 400+ acre farm.

Torm, the owner of Pasture Prime and one half of the manpower behind its operation, had agreed to meet us on short notice after I’d contacted him the night prior asking if I could drop by the farm to pick up my order. Dee and I ended up spending an hour and a half with him as he gave us the tour of its operation.

“I believe in transparency,” said Torm as we drove through a large grassy field, droves of feeding cattle haring from the moving nose of Torm’s slow-moving truck. Most mooed and side-eyed us with disapproval, but one heifer kept excitedly attempting to mount the other heifers, because heifers be so cray.

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Garlic Anchovy Aioli Recipe

September 8, 2012 – 10:23 pm

***Pre-post: You might not have heard, but I’m giving away a $50 Williams Sonoma gift card! No strings attached. I won’t make you grovel for it, though I’d like to. You just have to go to this post to enter. /pre-post*** CONTEST IS CLOSED. Congratulations to the winner, Denise M., who is going to put the $50 gift card toward a dutch oven!

Okay, yes. I know. Anchovies are gross. I get it, but hear me out.

I know exactly why you’re giving me that stink face, and for the most part I’m right there with you. When anchovies are slandered high and low, with their presence in any dish a criminal offense worthy of cook’s castration, it’s hard to want to give them a chance.

When I was a kid, I offered them a chance at overcoming the libelous venom directed toward their existence in American cuisine. I ordered a pizza whose crisped mozzarella was crosshatched with slick bodies of salted anchovies and figured, how bad could they really be? That uneaten pizza has been festering in a dump somewhere for the last fifteen years.

Anchovies, to be polite, taste like grizzly bear grundle in the summer. They’re only about nine shades more favorable than sepsis, and the smell does them no kind favors either. But sometimes even the most foul of ingredients can be used for good.

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Recipes Sweet

Chocolate Basil Cake + $50 Williams Sonoma Gift Card Giveaway [Contest Closed]

September 3, 2012 – 11:59 pm

Basil is usually treated as a two dimensional commodity, which is upsetting for our sensitive friend. It’s the shining star in pesto, the uniting factor in the group of pine nuts and Parmigiano, and trying to make caprese without basil is trying to conduct a chorus without harmony. It’s like John Daker singing “Amore.” It just doesn’t work, does it?

Still, basil is pretty under appreciated for what it really brings to the table. It’s asked to creep behind the veil of the savory, only being offered a supportive role when it was born to lead. If you look at what basil lends to the flavor of any particular dish, it becomes glaringly obvious how underused it is.

Sweets, man. Basil is sweet, and while its herbal sister, mint, has found glory in ice cream, candy and other sugary applications, basil is left wading in a murky red puddle of marinara and despair, seething. Basil gets no respect. But nobody puts basil in the corner. Nobody.

Recently I did a guest post for Stark Bros on Blueberry Basil Meyer Lemonade (Shout out to me!), but thought, why not chocolate? So I put it in this chocolate cake. That’s…actually the whole story. It’s anticlimactic, but what do you want from me?

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Recipes Salty

Oven Roasted Coq au Vin with Mushroom Duxelles Recipe

August 25, 2012 – 1:46 am

Coq au vin is thought of as a fancy pants specialty by American standards, but like many French recipes, it comes from a very modest background. Coq au vin – literal translation: rooster with wine – is a rustic, poor-man’s recipe born from the agitated and exhausted farmer who, tired of early wake up calls, chopped the roosters right in their garbling necks and then had to find a use for its meat.

Only the rooster meat wasn’t tender. When roosters spend their waking hours chasing plump-breasted hens, fighting dogs and generally being farmhouse terrors, their meat toughens. If you’ve never spent time on a farm, let me lay it out flat for you: roosters are assholes, and hens are hardly any better, which is why when I eat them, I laugh. I laugh for the time a chicken jumped in my face when I was a preteen and got its claw caught in my golden hair, and also for the time when, unprovoked and out of absolutely nowhere, a rooster flew at me and clawed my arm deep. The Amish farmer shrugged, probably thinking, “what did you expect from an asshole?” I laugh now because the tables have turned, chickens.

Roosters, as high-energy bros with a taste for blood, build tough, fibrous rooster muscles that aren’t really good for roasting, so other methods were employed.

The time-strained farmers of yore would throw the rooster in a stock pot with a bottle of burgundy, lardons or bacon, spring onions, carrots, celery and some herbs – or whatever they had on hand, really – and set it on low to cook while they worked their bones throughout the day.

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Recipes Salty

Foolproof Rice

August 14, 2012 – 1:29 am

Oh, hello there.

I know that this is my first post since being back in the States and I bet you think that I’m going to start this post with an introduction that emphatically shouts that I’m back and then predictably go on about how it’s good to be home in spite of how amazing Europe was and then segue into how trying to grocery shop in the States after 3 months of unbelievable European freshness is more painful than a bad case of dengue fever, but you’d be wrong. Let’s instead just skip it altogether and jump right into the good stuff!

Rice.

Why am I doing a whole post dedicated to bland, boring, plain ol’ rice? Well, for one, rice is a staple for many cultures worldwide — most notably Asian and Hispanic cultures comprising the majority of the world’s population — who annually consume over 400 million tons globally. That’s a lot of rice. Also, there are literally tens of thousands of varieties of rice leaving no shortage of recipe variations. DOUBLE ALSO, it’s one of the most versatile grain in the world as it can be developed into starchy breads, creamy puddings or used as a basic side next to a Sunday night roast chicken. So while it may seem bland and boring on the surface, it has multiple dimensions to it and loads of potential to be made into a variety of impressive dishes.

I may have also forgot to mention that it’s incredibly easy to screw up, but worry not because I’m going to be your rice savior. By the end of this post you might be bowing your heads to a new divine being altogether: in rice we trust.

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