Camping Food!

We feel the need to welcome you back to the blog after another long spell between posts. And really, what better way to welcome you back to the end of summer as we look forward to fall than to offer some thoughts and recent experiences on camp food cooking! Helen and I just completed a wonderful camping trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and enjoyed a variety of tasty camp cook cooking.

Thanks to our friend Shanna, we had a giant hunk of flank steak to bring with to our campsite; we also brought along a couple of bags of bacon, some canned beans, a couple of other random items (and some soup and stew in case we had massive failures).

Our first lovely evening camping featured a dinner of seasoned flank steak, potatoes, carrots and brussel sprouts. We wrapped all the delicious ingredients up into tin foil and placed them on the handy-dandy grill grate that flipped over the fire pit. One potential pitfall of cooking all your ingredients in a tin-foil package is that some items may cook more quickly than others - we encountered this problem as the diced potatoes you see in the background of the above photo were not diced finely enough to cook quickly enough to match with the beef. Overall, the dinner was absolutely lovely and a true indulgence on our first night of camping together.

Our handy-dandy flip-over grill grate and Helen's fine fire-building skills are featured above.

No weekend breakfast is truly complete in our minds without some bacon, so we brought along a couple of ziploc bags of frozen bacon to cook up on our not-so-chilly mornings. For quick morning cooking, nothing beats a single burner propane or Iso-Pro camp stove. We were able to quickly heat up water for coffee, cook bacon, cook pancakes and heat up more water for oatmeal with a couple of twists of the wrist (to connect the fuel) and a single click to light the flame.

After breakfast, our Sunday eating featured a couple of items that we didn't bring camping. Following a lovely hike and scenic drive we entered the "quaint" town of Glen Arbor and enjoyed a nice sit-down lunch at a local eatery. Our discerning eyes, and rumbling stomachs, led us to a spot that offered local beer and menu items that featured adjectives such as "wild-caught" and "organic grass-fed." Conveniently located across the street was a little grocery store where we purchased some Boar's Head Beef Franks (in natural casing) for later consumption.

Our Sunday dinner was perhaps our simplest (and possibly our most quintessential camping) meal. Skewered hot dogs, can o' beans and S'mores for dessert. I don't need to say anymore. Ya'll know it was delicious - but we can HIGHLY recommend the Boar's Head hot dogs for any future grilling or camping experience. We also prepared our lunch for the next day on Sunday night, using more flank steak, brussel sprouts and carrots. With proper dicing technique - everything cooked wonderfully evenly and we enjoyed the fruit of our efforts on the Lake Michigan shore Monday afternoon.

Valentine's Day 2010

This past Valentine's Day we decided yet again to eschew the overpriced-yet-prix-fixe, often hurriedly cooked (the horrors of overbooked restaurants trying to speed up turnover), and sometimes uninspired and not-very-romantic-when-fifty-other-couples-are-trying-to-do-the-same-thing Valentines dinners around town, and figured that we should make it our own annual home cooking tradition.

Given that last year we had, on the last minute, grabbed some lamb shanks from the farmer's market, we turned to shanks again. Our butcher had some lovely veal shanks on display in the counter and the braising angels sang out loud - Ossobuco! We picked up some fixings to go along with it and quickly found we had a two/three course meal all set to go. Then we wandered down to our town's love-child, Zingerman's Deli, to browse around (OK, really I wanted to eat some free bread and sample olive oils to help fuel me for the walk home). A quick stop at the gelato counter and we VERY quickly fell in love with their Chocolate Balsamic Strawberry gelato, fresh from the creamery.

The menu: California dried figs wrapped in bacon; baked brie with honeyed walnuts; ossobuco with balsamic white beans and salad; gelato.
1. California figs wrapped in bacon. We had done this before for a Thanksgiving feast, but with Medjool dates, which are syrupy sweet and squishy. Figs, delicious and often overlooked, provided a similar flavor but less sweet and more bite. Mark wrapped about 1/2 to 3/4 a slice of applewood bacon around each date, and put it in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes.

2. Baked brie with honeyed walnuts. Seriously, the easiest, "fancy" thing you could do in a hurry. We just picked up a small wheel of brie, plunked the whole thing in an oven-proof dish, threw some walnuts on top, drizzled honey over it, and put it in the oven with the figs. You can imagine all the other things you could put on top of it - more figs, currants, different kinds of nuts... the options are endless. You know it's done when you can press it (gently!) with a spoon and it looks soft and squishy. We ate this with the bacon figs, some crackers, and grapes... then took a break to relax our bellies before the next course.
3. Ossobuco (veal shanks). Ossobuco has to be one of the heartiest, melt-in-your-mouth stew-type foods out there. The way these shanks are cut, the marrow in the bone begins to melt and mix into the sauce as it braises, making the whole thing velvety and gelatinous.
There are many variations of ossobuco - traditionally, it is braised in white whine with herbs and broth, with whatever flavors (mushrooms, balsamic, marsala) that you like. Other varieties include a tomato-based sauce, which is what we used. The process was to us, at this point, almost intuitive - the same as any other braising dish you might cook: browning, veggies, flavor, liquids, braise.

So, first, we tied the shanks (we bought two, which was more than enough) up with twine. Eventually the meat will fall off the bone, but it helps to have them fairly uniform to start. We seasoned them with salt and pepper, then covered them with a light dusting of flour and browned them in a dutch oven. When those were nice and brown, we took those out.

Then, veggies: the go-to celery, carrots, and onions. Stirred up with tomato paste, then with the shanks added back in to get all the flavors going in the pot. Then add your liquid - whatever broth, wine, or sauce you like. I believe we added some white wine (maybe a cup), reduced it to half, then put in our tomatoes (a large can of stewed whole tomatoes would work too) and cut it with broth. Either way, you want to make sure there is enough liquid to reach almost all the way up (about 3/4) up the meat you are cooking. We also added a mix of sage, cloves, and rosemary into the liquid and let it go for about 2 hours.
When the shanks were done we sprinkled it all with a simple, rough gremolata - a mix of fresh chopped parsley, minced garlic and lemon zest. This might seem to some like adding more work to tedious cooking, but the lemon really made the flavors SING - plus the parsley helps add even more fresh taste to a very meaty dish. On top of adding flavors, the yellow and green really make the dish a lot prettier.

3. Balsamic white beans and salad. This was probably the most time consuming dish to make given that we bought dried cannellini beans and had to soak them for most of the day. One cup of beans will yield enough soaked beans to feed about three people, so measure accordingly. Of course, we made too much and ended up eating beans with everything for a couple days... But anyway, we soaked the beans then boiled them a little while with olive oil and seasonings in the water. Then we drained them, and sauteed them up with some shallots, diced yellow bell pepper, and lots of garlic. Then, we deglazed the pan with balsamic and added more and more until we liked the taste. We served this on top of a simple greens salad.
4. Gelato! Zingerman's describes their balsamic strawberry gelato as "fresh strawberries macerated for two days in syrup made from reduced balsamic vinegar, then blended with dark chocolate gelato." Perhaps we shall find a way to make this at home... because it will be easy for us to burn a hole in our pocket buying this gelato gold from Zingerman's.

So there we have it - another Valentine's Day 3 course meal (or 4, depending on how you look at it!)!

New Year Decluttering

Well, it's the new year and things have been a little quiet here on FLD. One new year's resolution for us might be to update the blog a bit more frequently! Despite Mark's incessant blog reading, writing seems to be a difficulty (seeing as how he still hasn't posted some of the things he said he would). And, despite my academic life revolving around writing and procrastinating on the interwebs, blogging doesn't seem to be part of my usual repertoire yet.

As evidence of our slacking off, here is the picture we took of our holiday dinner:

A five pound, cut-and-tied, bone-in rib roast fresh from our lovely butcher, which we roasted with slices of kobucha squash (a new house favorite) and served with fresh winter salad. But yeah. All we have to show for it is the meat out of the wrapping.

Anyway, over the winter holiday, Mark and I took our first big trip together and traveled to Hong Kong (I will post some Hong Kong food chronicles soon; also keep your eye out for potentially more Hong Kong cooking-related posts in the future, as my suitcase to return is full of random utensils and sauces; and, perhaps, a blog re-design???). He had to go back a week before me to return to work, but I, in the meanwhile, am still here -- enjoying food and fiddling around with the blog.

Since we haven't cooked anything due to travels and half the world separates us from being together in the kitchen, I've decided to use a post to clear out some old photos of food. In other words, posts-that-could've-been -- those well-intended cookfests that inspired us to get the camera out, but where something happened along the way to prevent their appearance here. Upon seeing these photos, I realize a lot of these have to do with meat. Perhaps another new year's resolution: post more vegetables.

Well, this dish involved veggies, just stuffed with meat. I think the consensus might have been that this was too "ugly" to put on the blog: but honestly, we weren't going to sit around and sculpt our refried beans into eye-catching displays. This meal featured roasted poblano peppers, stuffed with pork sausage fried with jalapenos, onions, and cilantro, covered in queso fresco. We served it next to quartered potatoes fried till crunchy, with chunks of homemade bacon and cilantro. We also rendered some bacon fat in a pan and emptied a can of refried beans into it. A super quick and easy weeknight meal!

Since we started FLD, bacon had/has become an obsession with us. Honestly, if you can get your own, fresh pork belly and have the patience to cure it, I wouldn't think of having bacon any other way. I don't know the last time we bought bacon from the store! We've made "regular" bacon, garlicky bacon, and are just now starting to play around a bit with what goes in the cure. Another minor obsession was the Bravo show Top Chef (big surprise), and my heart strings totally, 100% completely went out to 26 year-old Kevin Gillespie (there is nothing more inferiority-complex inspiring than seeing someone so young do so well on TV; you can be his facebook friend here). When those heart strings broke, I decided to take my next hunk of pork belly to do a molasses and black pepper cure, in the true manner of Gillespie flavors. I mean, the man has a pig tattoo, for crying out loud.

The pork belly got covered in salt and molasses and tons of black pepper. You can find all sorts of different recipes on the internet for molasses cures; at this point, I have been doing things by sight/feel. I put in an airtight, plastic container for 7 days, flipping each day. By day 2 or 3 you can see the meat get harder, darker, and the molasses mixture get runnier from the water expelled from the curing meat.

Then Mark rinsed it, let it sit for another day, put it in the oven at low temps and then smoked it on the grill. Dee-licious. Maybe next time, a molasses and coffee cure?

Then, we had some new neighbors move in across the street: mom, dad, and newborn son. When dad went off on a research trip, we decided to invite mom and son over for a big feast. Seeing as how everyone who has feasted with us seems to love pork, we decided to continue our porkfest -- prosciutto-wrapped, garlic-rubbed pork tenderloin (generic recipe here). Unfortunately, this was the night the oven decided to stop working, which ended up with us running everything over to the neighbor's half-unpacked house to use her oven to cook.

We lay out strips and strips of prosciutto on the mat (I suppose you could weave it together, but we were lazy) and then wrapped it around the roast seasoned with salt, pepper, minced garlic, and thyme. Tied up in a nice little bundle, it roasted in the oven with some vegetable broth which we used as a jus to serve over the sliced pork on our plates. We served this next to roasted kobucha squash slices (slice, put on pan, sprinkle with dabs of butter and brown sugar and roast till soft), fried brussels sprouts, and a spiced apple cake. While the oven was a bust, using the neighbor's house was a great way to make new friends and new dishes.

We also made barbecued ribs, with onion mashed potatoes and collard greens;
Jerk chicken (not pork!) with big ol' sweet potatoes;
And braised beef short ribs (also not pork! ...But also not braised quite enough, due to a rushed dinner schedule) with carrots and parsnips roasted with sage. One nice thing about this dish was, upon realizing the not-soft-enough texture of the meat, creating a savory sauce to go along with it by merely pureeing the braising liquid (filled with the usual stuff: onions, carrots, celery, spices). This 'sauce' was a super-concentrated kick of flavor. We should, and probably will, try this again with the proper amount of time allotted to braising.
There's more, but I'll stop there.

All I can say is, looking at these pictures has brought back good memories and has inspired me to continue playing/cooking/experimenting in the kitchen and, hopefully, has inspired you all too. That was definitely one of the things Mark and I had in mind when we started this diary of sorts -- to keep folks inspired and to share the ups and downs, the pretty and the ugly, the easy and the difficult, of our food and labor. Happy new year!

Bacon!

Bacon, bacon, bacon - that's what this post is all about, and if I had it my way, that's all I'd need to survive in this world.

Helen and I were shopping at Sparrow's Meat Market (they should host bar nights too, just to take advantage of their name, there's already a gym associated with it, so all the components are there) in Ann Arbor one Saturday after attending the farmers market and saw that pork belly was available for just $1.69 a pound. So, we picked some up, froze it, and later made tasty braised pork belly. Later though, we realized, duh! - we can make our own bacon. And we love bacon, and haven't really found a decent, reasonably priced bacon provider in the area, so let the bacon creation experiment of 2009 begin!

We picked up 2 lbs of bacon from Sparrow's, and after letting it sit around for a while in the freezer, we got some pointers and pink salt (aka saltpeter aka sodium nitrate) from Walsh's friend and housemate Nels. After allowing the pork belly to thaw, Helen mixed up the curing rub for the bacon, which included Kosher salt, pink salt (not too much though, cause that shit is toxic at high levels), sugar, some pepper, and maple syrup. Curing is decidedly simple - it just requires about 7 days in a container in the fridge with daily flipping of the meat and emptying out liquid expelled from the meat.

After 7 days (or less) the pork belly is cured (you can tell, because the cut firms up due to the expulsion of water from the tissue via fancy salt action). Once the meat is cured, you're supposed to rinse the meat well to remove any left over rub, and let it rest for 24 hours in the fridge to allow the salt to distribute evenly - we didn't do this (which led to a slightly salty bacon). We then slow roasted the bacon for about 2.5 hours at 200 degrees, to get the temperature of the meat up to 150.

Finally, time to smoke the meat! We don't have a smoker, so we used a standard grill, with hardwood charcoal for the fuel and wood chips soaked in water to provide the smoke. After a bit of time in the smoker we had this beautiful hunk of bacon:

Before cutting it, we first let it sit over night in the fridge to firm up for easier cutting. And finally, we have our delicious, home-made bacon: