regrettable food (vote for your favorite!)

One of my birthday presents this year was a truly enthralling item: The Sunday News Family Cook Book. It was published in 1962 by the New York News, and includes “favorite recipes” from readers as well as recipes from the paper itself. Many of the dishes in it sound just fine, although instructions are occasionally a little vague. Others, however, are mind-numbingly weird, and the food photography is…um…fascinating. Have you seen James Lileks’ book The Gallery of Regrettable Food? This book is right up that guy’s alley.

Some highlights (you can vote for your favorite at the end):

Hamburger Bean Medley. This includes baked beans, kidney beans, lima beans, and chow mein noodles, and makes my eyeballs ache. And just think of what it might do to your digestion.

the perfect soft-boiled egg

It’s no secret that I love fried eggs – I do tend to put them on every possible type of leftover. But I also love boiled eggs, and often have one for breakfast with cereal and a pot of tea.

Everyone seems to have their own method for boiling eggs, and I have different methods depending on what final result I’m going for. If I want them hard-boiled for making devilled or curried eggs, I use the approach of putting them in cold water, bringing the pot to a boil, then turning it off and letting it sit covered for exactly twelve minutes, then quick-chilling the eggs. But when I’m boiling an egg for breakfast, I want it soft and runny inside, with the white just set.

crunchy bunny

Our friend Katharine, who seems to be determined to keep us in rabbits, tracked down a source for local, farm-raised bunnies and brought us one. This one, unlike the one we braised last week (which she shot in her garden), was a tender young thing and nicely fat, which opened up the cooking possibilities considerably. I decided to follow my friend Laura’s suggestion and fry it like chicken. I found a recipe for Buttermilk Fried Rabbit on the site Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook, and given that I’ve never even fried chicken before, I thought this came out very well.

hortopita

For our end-of-summer party this year, we let ourselves be inspired by the latest issue of Saveur and made food with a Greek or Mediterranean slant: dolmades, tzatziki, tabouli, grilled flank steak, lemon chicken, grilled eggplant dip, hummus, and so on. For a while we were considering pastitsio (sort of a Greek lasagna), but decided on a greens-filled phyllo pie instead. I thought this would be spanakopita, the classic buttery spinach-feta pie, but then I discovered hortopita.

Hortopita is like spanakopita, but better. It uses any sort of greens mixture (horta in Greek) plus scallions and fragrant herbs, and instead of butter you brush the phyllo with olive oil, making it much less rich. I ended up making this twice this week – the one I made for the party disappeared almost instantly, and since there was phyllo left over I figured I’d just make us another one.

braising a bunny

I really don’t know why Americans don’t eat rabbit. There’s definitely a factor of “oh, it’s too CUTE to eat” which is part of why we don’t eat much lamb as a nation, either. But it’s really hard to find rabbit in grocery stores – we asked once at our usual market and I think they could special order it frozen for us if we gave them enough notice, and it cost an arm and a leg. Weird.

So when a friend of ours, a local farmer, asked if we wanted to take one of the rabbits she’s been shooting to keep them out of her vegetables, we said Definitely. Even before we received the rabbit, I started looking through my British and Mediterranean cookbooks for possible recipes. We haven’t had much experience cooking wild game of any sort, so I wanted to get a feel for the most common treatments. Rabbit isn’t a strongly gamey meat, but it’s still liable to be stronger-tasting than, say, a farm-raised chicken, and the meat is very dense and low in fat, so it requires some care in preparation.

chess pie

You may have noticed by now that I don’t make a lot of sweets – I honestly don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and when I do crave dessert it’s usually chocolate chip cookies. One type of dessert I do go for, however, is custard. Whether it’s an old fashioned cup custard, a fancy crème brûlée, or a pear custard pie, I love the creamy tartness of it.

I had had a piece of plain custard pie – no fruit – a few years ago when we happened across the Pie Lady’s shop in Blackwater, a tiny town in central Missouri. It was incredible, and I always said I was going to make it at home – then, of course, never did. But I recently became aware of the existence of something called chess pie. A plain, very sweet custard pie, it’s a classic Southern dessert often made with cornmeal and lemon, but sometimes buttermilk. I had buttermilk in the fridge this week, and decided to see what I could do with it.

and the house smelt of truffles

On Monday I really, really didn’t feel like going anywhere, including the grocery store. I rummaged through the refrigerator, then tossed a tweet out asking for suggestions based on my main available ingredients: macaroni noodles, fresh tomatoes, feta and salami. Cook Local (as well as my cousin Katherine) came through with an improvised pasta idea – thanks! I decided to add arugula at the last moment, partly to add color but mostly because a friend gave us a bag of arugula that still needed to be finished off – I had forgotten to list it among my assets.

IFBC: a brief food report

So I went to IFBC again this year (the International Food Blogger Conference, for those not in the know). There are going to be a lot of other roundups out there, and I didn’t stay for the entire conference, so I’m just going to put up a few pictures of food here, I think.

MxMo: brown, bitter & stirred

Mixology Monday is here again! After the last few themes (Tom Waits? Really?) I wasn’t sure if we would be entering again, but this month it’s a good one: brown, bitter and stirred. We love a good smooth bitter cocktail, so we were anxious to do some experimentation. Some of the ensuing cocktails were excellent, some not so much. We won’t talk about those.

Cuban pork

Ever since we picked up our half-pig from the butcher, I’ve been wanting to make Cuban grilled pork. This urge was heightened by the pork sandwiches we bought at Paseo to take to a Zootunes concert – savory, rich, and so thoroughly sopping with dressing we went through a vast pile of napkins and still needed to pour water over each other’s hands afterwards. Given that we don’t live around the corner from Paseo, it seemed that we needed to be able to recreate the phenomenon ourselves.

We had one pork roast in our freezer labeled “shoulder”, apparently the closest we were likely to get to the recommended Boston Butt. We thawed it out and put it in a bag with a marinade (recipe below) composed of juice, garlic, herbs, zest and oil. The next day Jon tore himself away from his garage-painting project early enough to start the grill and get the pork going. He piled hot coals on either side of a metal roasting pan, put the grates in, then positioned the pork over the pan and closed the lid. We left it more or less alone for two hours, checking occasionally that the temperature was staying between 300-325°. At one point it dropped a bit and Jon added a few more live coals. When the pork seemed sufficiently blackened and fragrant, we took it out and tented it with foil to rest.