fauren

Celebrating Our Independence with Gran Dan's Bar-B-Que Sauce

A.A. Bondy - American Hearts (buy)
Estelle featuring Kanye West - American Boy (buy)

First, a happy belated 4th of July to you all. I hope yours was filled with friends, food, and fireworks. And freedom! Can't forget the freedom.

It rained for the third or fourth year running here in New York, but not before some friends and I got in a solid 7 or so hours of beer drinking and barbecuing at my friend Eric's house (home of the garden, not to mention two grills). Somewhere over the last two summers, it seems we all reached an implicit understanding that each barbecue would have to be better than the last, which means that the food keeps getting better and more elaborate. I couldn't tell you the last time someone dared show up with hot dogs. Or actually, I can, but it involves getting scalded by a core of molten cheese that exploded forth from the cheddar dog belonging to a woman sitting next to me, and I'd really rather not relive the details.

Anyway, this year's 4th of July feast included grilled jalapeños with cheese and grilled tortillas, mesquite smoked baby back ribs; elotes with cotija, chilli, and lime juice; a garden salad with Japanese turnips (I figured out what to do with them), fennel, red onion, and orange-almond dressing; roasted Chioggia beets and lemon thyme; grilled skewers of zucchini, golden zucchini, and summer squash; and what is definitely the best barbecued chicken I have ever eaten.

Dan's mom emailed him a copy of his Gran Dan's barbecue sauce recipe a couple weeks ago, and he had been itching to give it a try ever since. I couldn't wait, either. Growing up in New England, we didn't have much of a barbecue culture -- grilling, sure, but not barbecue -- and I'm still in the process of learning the intricacies. Vinegar, mustard, or tomato base; smoking or grilling; wood, coal, or gas. I had no idea it was so complex.

This particular barbecue sauce is straight from Dan's home base in Raleigh, NC, where vinegary barbecue reigns supreme.

Delicious and Funny-Sounding, It's Rhubarb!

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I lived the first 27 and a half years of my life without ever knowingly consuming rhubarb. What?!

Happily, that changed yesterday. I'd gone up to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket this past Saturday and rhubarb seemed to be everywhere, its red and green stalks poking out of crates at more than a couple stands. They were a hard sight to resist, so I went ahead and bought myself a bunch despite having no idea what I would do with it.

Remembering that I had some boneless pork chops in my freezer, I thought I might try out a sauce for them. I love sweet and savory combinations like pork chops and apple sauce, so maybe something similar could be done with rhubarb, which is so tart on its own it almost always needs to be sweetened.

The result of this experiment was a simple compote. Combining the rhubarb with shallots and fresh thyme yielded a dish that's indicative of this time of year for me - somewhere between winter and spring, at once hearty, fresh, and crisp. Needless to say, I was pleased. And, by the end of it, quite full.

Can It.

The absence! The neglect! Oh, the humanity!

Hi friends. It’s been one heck of a summer. Between starting gainful, full-time employment and attending approximately 236 weddings, there was little time left for blogging. But food adventures abounded, and my next few entries will be dedicated to the ones worth sharing, if well after the fact.

Most recently was my first foray into canning, which was inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s first book of non-fiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver, an author whose fiction I’ve always loved, documented a year in which her family moved from their home in Arizona for a more sustainable location – their family farm in Virginia. The work is inspiring; they raise almost all of the food they consume in a year on their own land, both consuming it fresh and preserving it to last them through the winter. They raise and harvest their own poultry, bake their own bread, and case their own sausage. And while it may not be feasible for us all to do exactly the same things, Kingsolver’s partner Steven Hopp and daughter Camille offer sidebars of wisdom about how to adapt the same principles for where and how we live, even in the city (fire escape gardens, anyone?).

When I reached the chapter about August and Kingsolver began talking about preserving peaches and tomatoes for the winter months, it got me thinking. While I was home in Massachusetts for a vacation at the end of the summer, my mother made and canned beach plum jelly from fruit we’d picked off the trees in the front yard. I loved the idea of making these little fruits, which I definitely would not find anywhere in Brooklyn, both transportable and longer-lasting. Just having that little jar in my Park Slope refrigerator reminds me of the trees growing out of the sandy soil of our front yard and of spending an hour in the sun with a giant bowl, plucking the dark purple fruit off the trees (and maybe snitching a few in the process).

Since September is really the last hurrah for a lot of wonderful fruits, I got to thinking about this canning stuff. At first it seemed too daunting to try at home (I just count my mother among the wizards whose success in the kitchen is unattainable by mere mortals), but the more I read about it, the more I realized you don’t need a water bath canner or a magnetic lid lifter. Sure, they help, but with a deep sauce pot, a good pair of tongs, and a couple other standard kitchen utensils, it’s not hard at all.

So a couple Sundays ago, when I realized I had some time on my hands and the farmers market up the block was still selling beautiful New Jersey tomatoes, I went and bought three bagsful and started in on some Family Secret Tomato Sauce. Much to my amazement, the sauce turned out great, my jars did not explode in the canning bath, and the next morning I had four beautiful, sealed jars of fresh tomato sauce to use at my leisure over the winter months.

There are tips on home canning all over the web, so I'd suggest just typing that phrase into your search engine. I definitely plan on using this newfound knowledge again soon; with green tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and green beans filling tables at the farmers markets these days, I’m planning on taking a stab at homemade pickles. In the meantime, I’ll continue to stare fondly at my marinara every time I go to the pantry cupboard.

Adventures in Swordfish

My afternoon class is not meeting this week, which gave me a chance to hit the Union Square farmers market (East 17th Street and Broadway, Manhattan) after work yesterday.  I didn't have my trusty extra tote bag with me so it wasn't a big trip, but I knew I wanted to get something to cook this week that I wouldn't normally make.

Enter the swordfish.

I don't cook a lot of fish, mostly because I don't trust myself to do it well, mostly because I don't cook a lot of fish.  So I was on a mission to break this vicious circle.  Blue Moon Fresh Fish (Mattituck, NY) has tempted me with their dry-erase board fish list in past trips to the market, and after making a couple other stops, I approached the kind woman behind the counter to order a couple of swordfish steaks.  She said I could pick out my own, but before I had the chance she stopped me and grabbed two steaks herself, holding them out to me.  "I'm giving you these because they're the best pieces.  See that?" She pointed to a little peninsula of meat at one end of the steaks. "That's the best part.  They don't usually include it."  Of course, she could have told me anything and I'd have smiled and nodded just the same, but I appreciated the gesture.  It's all part of the charm of farmers market shopping.

So I toted my swordfish steaks home (along with lots of other goodies, including some delicious late-season tomatoes) and studied some cookbooks for ideas.  The possibilities!  Not good for us indecisive folk.  It wasn't until I turned my key in the front door this evening that I finally decided on how I would put dinner together.

I made a dill aioli for the fish, wanting something simple but flavorful.  And my god was it flavorful.  I will probably still be emitting garlic from my pores at dinner time tomorrow night.  The fish itself was broiled with olive oil, salt, and pepper.  I covered the rest of my meat-and-two-veg meal with yellow wax and green beans in lemon butter and a salad of Boston lettuce, radishes, walnuts, goat cheese, and a balsamic mustard vinaigrette.  Everything but the dressing ingredients, butter, and walnuts came from the market, and that felt pretty good.

If I do say so myself, I tasted this meal, and I am awesome.  That's actually the whole point of this post.