Mire poix pork chops

It ain't much, but we want you to know we haven't abandoned you.

Well, I'm a big fan of one-pot meals. Easy to prepare, easy to serve, and less stuff to clean up afterwards. What's not to love? Okay, so I'm actually using 2 pots here, okay a pot and a baking dish. But the concept's the same. Especially since I'm using a non-stick pot. Good ones are criminally easy to clean. Start by lubing up a 9x13x2 baking dish. I used spray. Like I said, I cheated.

Up next, prepare a mire poix. I think mine isn't exactly right, because I used equal amounts carrots, celery, and onion, but it still tastes fine. And smells great too. Use a little butter to induce a little color in the onion and carrots. (According to Greg Dean, it's an old culinary school hazing prank to tell the freshmen to brown celery. Celery doesn't have the required sugar to undergo the Maillard reaction, so it doesn't brown. Think about it: You spend more energy chewing celery than you get from eating it, so how much nutritional value do you think it has?)

When you're done with that, add some cubed bread to make croutons in there, and mix it up.

Now lay down a little stuffing, followed by some pork chops. I've used cuts of loin. Salt and pepper each layer, then lay down more stuffing and repeat.

Bake until the pork chops are done. Umm... I really don't know how long. When in doubt, go with 350, and just check on it at 15 minutes, and every 5 after that until your pork is the doneness that you like.

Voila! One pot meal, with your starch, your vegetables and proteins. Easy money.

Something more interesting next time, when I'm not getting crushed. Stay tuned, I promise it will be more entertaining next time.

Apple butter cookies

As you all know, there are three rules here about Caes brother cooking. Rule number one is that everything is better with butter. This entry is an exploration of possible corollary to this rule: things with "butter" in their names are good.

At our Mart of Wal, they keep apple butter right next to the peanut butter. And since I was running low on PB, I figured I'll take some AB along for the ride.

Also in this neighborhood is jelly and jam. I guess I should have realized that apple butter would be closer to those because it comes in a similar jar. But it'll be close enough for what I want to do with them. I think.

What I have in mind is apple butter cookies. In my childhood we had this cookbook we got from a local hospital. I don't know how, but there it was. And in it was a dirt-simple peanut butter cookie: 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg. Bake. It's really that simple. So let's see what happens if we try to make apple butter cookies instead.

Hmmm.... That consistency of apple butter has bitten me in the butt. But I had a feeling this was going to happen, so I figured I'd just add flour, a little at a time, until it becomes a cohesive dough. Or least a thick batter. Well, there's a spare 1/4 cup measuring cup that lives in my flour jar. Perfect, right?

2 1/2 cups of flour later, this is what we have. It's close enough. So. Apparently it's traditional to ball up peanut butter cookies and mash them down with a fork. I decided to mash the apple butter cookies down with a spoon. You'll want to spray the back end of the spoon with some nonstick spray. Pour out a blob of batter then mush it around into a disk. Bake at 350 for about 10-12 minutes or when you figure they're done.

Looks pretty good, right? Well, there's a bit of a problem. Remember how I added 2 1/2 cups of flour 1/4 cup at a time? You can surmise I beat the batter after each addition. Now, if you follow the gospel according to St. Alton, you'll be familiar with the muffin method: Mix your dry ingredients together, your wet ingredients together, then pour the wet on the dry and mix as little as possible. Beat it senseless and you'll get a very glutenous creation that will end up chewier than you'd like. But it's still edible...

...it even looks like a cookie. And it tastes quite nice. Apple isn't one of those flavors you see in cookies very much. That's a shame, and you should join me and correct that.

But now that I mentioned "muffin"....

Bacon sausage

Oh crumbs. We got linked from Mr. Baconpants's blog, due to my post about the Blue Ribbon Bacon Tour. I guess we have to get back on the ball and start updating more often. And since we'd like to retain readers, let's start with some more bacon!

Now then. I would like to make a bold proclamation. I am a god.

Not buying it? Can I get at least a saint?

Why? Did you not read the title of this post?

I have made bacon sausage. Think about that for a second. Roll those two words around in your mind for a bit.

Bacon.

Sausage.

Okay, enough self-congratulatory babbling, let's talk procedure. Remember that $70 Kitchenaid doohickey I bought from the pasta trilogy? Well, one of the things it comes with is a grinder. Use a coarse grind on slightly frozen bacon. That's about 3 pounds sitting in the $10 feeder tray attachment. Grind it, in case you haven't figured that out yet.

Next, you'll need some sausage casing. This may be a little tricky to find. I got mine from Wholey's, the crazy high-end wacky grocery store that has just about any obscure infrequently used ingredient you could ask for. And if they don't have it, someone in Pittsburgh's Strip District will. Follow the directions. Soak it in water first to untangle it and rinse off some of the salt. Clamp it on to your $10 sausage stuffer with a bit of butcher's twine, then tie a knot in the end to keep it from escaping.

Twist the links about 1/3 longer than the length of your bun. That's because you'll lose about 1/4 of its length to shrinkage.

Now, isn't this a thing of beauty?

C'moooooooooooooooooooooooooooon.

A little precaution: Yes, it's bacon. Yes, it's greasy. If you grill it, do so with a piece of aluminum foil, or you'll have grease fires and flareups out the ying yang.

But to be honest, I'd recommend against the grill for that reason. Go with a half an inch of water in a frying pan to steam the sausages through, then let them develop some color once the water all evaporates. If you must have grill marks, may I suggest a grill pan?

Serve on a hot dog bun or sausage roll. Add some mayo, lettuce, and tomato to create a cylindrical BLT. Or hell, just eat it straight up.

How could you not love that?

How?

Ya heretic.

Blue Ribbon Bacon Tour

My good buddy Dave found this event coming to Pittsburgh, and decided to get me my birthday gift early. He asked if I was interested, and just thought, "C'mon, it's called a Bacon Tour, how could it be bad?"

Now that's a welcome sight if I've ever seen one.

Let me explain something about the Harris Grill. It's not really a hole, in fact, it's got a pretty nice restaurant upstairs. The main feature is that instead of those little baskets of peanuts most bars have, during Steelers games, the Harris Grill has little baskets of bacon. Oh, and every Tuesday night from 6:30 to midnight.

You are not imagining things; that is a pitcher of bacon in the upper right. They use it for their bacontini. You are not imagining things there either; they have a bacontini.

We're immediately greeted by Mr. Baconpants, a guy who wears red pants with pink bacon stripe pattern painted on them. He hands us two tickets for drinks, plus a "Man Bait" maple bacon lollipop.

That disclaimer, if you can't read it, goes: "Not valid with any other specials, offers, or after the above date. Not to be used by minors, miners, ditch diggers, or elves. Void where prohibited, including Wisconsin. Drink responsibly, or else we will."

But we're not here to snicker at the drink tickets, we're here to get our bacon on! And right when we get into the back room that I've dubbed the Hall of Bacon, we are greeted by our first treat, bacon sushi.

They're actually really well made sushi rolls. Some had avocado, some were cream cheese, but the ones that were really good were the ones with tomato and lettuce. Oh, and the unadulterated bacon nigiri, there's no stopping that.

Up next, a quartet of bacon hors d'oeurvuerrs (I have no idea how you spell that, and I'm too lazy to look it up.)

Bacon and shrimp is a classic you can't go wrong with. Pierogies are Pittsburgh local favorite, these had a little bacon in the mashed potato filling, but they were dressed with bacon bits and sauteed onions, very, very nice. After that were the bacon wings, which were basically wings seasoned with bacon salt. Not very impressive. But then they ripped off our deep fried bacon! Damnit! We should have patented that!

And what meal would be complete without dessert?

On the right is a tray full of bacon brittle, or more accurately, maple brittle with bacon bits. It's okay, but they didn't boil the sugar long enough to get to the hard crack stage. Either that, or the grease from the bacon interfered with the brittle setting up. On the left are bacon cupcakes. Or more accurately, maple cupcakes with the lightest maple frosting I've ever had, with a chip of maple candied bacon on top. Oh so good... And I won a door prize $25 gift certificate to the cupcake shop that made them. Score!

Last, there was a bacon eating contest. With no entry fee, I figure, what the heck, why not? Maybe all those Nights of Bacon could finally pay off.

Ha! No. We all started with about 3 pounds of bacon, and I probably ended the 3 minutes with 2. Three spots down from me was a guy who's apparently a competitive eater, since he plowed through all 3 pounds. He's eaten 6 pounds of chili in 10 minutes. And after all three pounds, he finished off the trays of the four guys around him. That's when I started trying to goad him into shooting the grease. Ha! No.

All in all, a lot of fun. Look up Vande Rose Farms if you get a chance -- they make some really fantastic bacon.

Pluots

Welcome to the first installment of What The? Theater, where we investigate the rare, quirky, and sometimes downright weird food we find in the grocery store. At the one near my office building has in its opening a display for "Flavor Grenades", at $1.99 per pound. What the...?


The stickers say "Dinosaur Egg", and the receipt says "Pluots". Pluwhats? Turns out it's some kind of plum. So what the heck, let's buy some. It'll be interesting.


So... it peels kinda nicely, or delicately. The sticker ripped of a bit of skin when I tried to take it off. And that's a nifty color stryation (?) when you slice it across the meat. Biting into it? Well, you better have a plate handy. These things are juicier than the worst office gossip. This thing shot juice across my cheeks and created a big honkin' puddle on the plate.

So what's it taste like? Unsurprisingly, it's got the consistency of a really wet plum. It tastes kinda like a plum with tangy acidic, mildly citric tones, and then the sweetness is turned up a notch. The flesh does its best to disintegrate when you put your teeth through it. Surprisingly, it holds together okay when you take a serrated knife to it.

Speaking of which, that gave me an idea of what to do with them. St. Alton makes a neat individual peach upside down cake, so I thought I'd adapt the recipe to take pluots. The recipe calls for four individual 6 oz. ramekins. Seeing as how I was really broke at the time, I decided not to drop $8 on a new piece of kitchen equipment and made one big cake in a 6" cake pan.


That's some butter and brown sugar at the bottom of the pan. It's supposed to be followed up by some candied ginger, but I couldn't find any. The batter you mix up as normal, and you pour over the pluot slices artfully arranged in the bottom of the pan. (Image of batter accidentally not taken.)

Because you're going from little ramekins to a [comparatively large] pan, double the cooking time.


It's got a nice color, and a toothpick will come out clean when inserted. Well, the pluots are gooey, so it won't be completely clean. Run the knife around the edge, put a plate on top, and flip the whole thing over. Use a big plate because the pluot's juiciness will cause it to splut out as it's freed from its 6" prison and into a wide world of horizontal space.

Cut the cake in quarters (so it would be the same serving size as the ramekins) and serve. The buttermilk in the cake makes a nice tangy counterpoint to the pluot's now almost excessive sweetness. But overall, it's very nice. I strongly recommend it.

Remember folks, just because it's foreign to you, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve an audition in your kitchen.

I know, I know...

I've been slacking lately. Well, this isn't going to be a big post, I'm just shooting off a couple of random shots I've been taking.

Ever since I've moved, I've been trying to eat healthier. But sometimes, you just have to backslide a little to remind yourself just how good you have it. For instance, I hadn't been to Red Lobster in so long that I had forgotten that their food was terrible. Their biscuits, however, remain out of fucking control. So I decided to make the most of it and stuffed mine with an assortment of tasty fried fishy bits.

A squeeze of lemon, and the end result was outstanding. I think I'll remember that the next time I've got enough scallops for a good fryathon.

In other news, my dad and I found peeled tenderloins on sale for megacheap. Never one to look a cheap tenderloin in the mouth, I jumped right on stuffing it with fresh herbs and blue cheese. As for the side, well, neighbors had veggies that needed plunderin', not the least of which were a series of ridiculously sweet heirloom tomatoes and a couple of really happy-looking bell peppers. The end result made for an excellent sauce to go along with some cheese ravioli.

This last bit is a snapshot of the sour cream we use at work. Those of you who are faint of heart, look away.

That shit is unreal. Take it easy, guys. I'll see you soon.

A quick interlude of cheese

Two little things I thought I'd share with you. First, ever wander through your grocer's cheese cave and wonder, "Can I really buy half a wheel of parmigiano reggiano?" Now, how many of you are thinking, "What does half a wheel of parmigiano reggiano look like?" Here's the answer, along with an average female hand in the frame for reference.


Next, I bet you're thinking, "How much is it?" Right now, I'm thinking, "Have you ever suffered sticker shock from cheese?"


That's right. 21.81 pounds at $19.99 a pound makes for $435.98 of cheese. If any of you come across a bigger or more expensive hunk of cheese, please send the pictures to derBayani@gmail.com. I'd love to see them.

Up next, we have an indulgence. I love mac and cheese. A lot of you do too. What could be better than macaroni and a nice, thick, rich cheese sauce?


Think now.... Verrrrry carefully....

Give up?


That's right -- macaroni and fondue! Sure, it makes the entire thing cost $40, but oh ho ho, is it totally worth it. Richer than rich, extra tang delivered by the cider and brandy, with a smoky smooth texture thanks to le gruyere and smoked gouda. Don't bother baking it, just dump the macaroni in and go. You won't be disappointed.

'Til next time, stay hungry and full. Alternate between the two.