Smoked Pork

I was thinking of smoking pork last week at our pre-reunion gathering, but I was nervous about trying it for the first time when serving thirteen dinner guests, not because thirteen at dinner is unlucky--and anyway there were fourteen including me--but because I'd hate to serve a failure to that many people. When I tried pizza, it was so easy I went with that instead, but just as good dress rehearsals reputedly make for bad performances, pizza was not easy on the night.

So perhaps it is foolish of me to decide, based on how easy (if time-consuming) it was to smoke this pork, that it is the perfect choice if everyone comes again next year, but I am refusing to learn from my mistakes.

This year, along with the disappointingly slow and difficult pizza: blackberry-lime gin fizzes, zucchini with lemon and mint, lentil salad with carrots, and lemon berry tarts.


Though the pizza was difficult the company was delightful:

  

Blueberries

After a hot morning at the charmingly-named Peasley Poor Farm, we came home with about twenty pounds of outstandingly delicious berries. With my share (about a quarter of the total) I made Individual Berry Crisps with the help of Betsy, Hedy, and Joe.

They were tart and wholesome.








Then, in addition to eating plenty raw, I made a blueberry pie with multigrain butter crust from the King Arthur Flour Cookbook (delicious but not very pie-like and a bit crunchy from the stoneground cornmeal) and Blueberry Snack Cake (not too sweet and very easy: one for the permanent collection).

This Picture Makes Me Sad

I took this just a little over a month ago (February 3rd), undoubtedly to preserve in my memory what must have been a delicious meal, but already I cannot remember how I sauced the pasta. I can see there are toasted slivered almonds, and I'm assuming there was garlic and olive oil, but I can't identify the larger-than-the-almonds pieces-of-something also tossed in there.

I'm glad I didn't forget the roasted asparagus: I've been eating it regularly and it's my current favorite vegetable, possibly my current favorite food.

So it occurs to me, instead of thinking of this blog primarily as a way to share recipe experiments, I need to do a better job keeping up with it for my own sake. In the past I forgot recipes and ideas and didn't regret them, but now that I have this darn picture-taking habit, I see the pictures and am frustrated by the imperfection of memory.

At least I can remember what I cooked last night:

At Marc's shopping for ingredients for next soup-and-bread-Tuesday, I saw beautiful green bunches labelled "broccoli rappini." The odd name looked like a mash-up of broccoli rabe and rapini, and that's what it looked like, so I treated it as such. Vegetable Love gave a simple method for braising it with garlic, olive oil, red and black pepper, and what looked like far too much salt. I used less than half the salt the recipe called for and enjoyed the result with a glass of red wine and felt so good and so healthy. Then I ruined it by eating too much crackers and cheese immediately afterwards.

The Next Night

We began with Cucumber Basil Lime Gimlets, which became my new favorite summer drink after I tried something similar at Brio. Betsy, Hedy, and Joe entertained us in their way and George in his.

Then we ate radishes with Danish butter and French salt. 

When I finally tore myself away to make dinner it was getting dark and by the time we ate it was so late no one thought of taking a picture until after we'd eaten most of it. I used the red peppers we'd grilled the night before to make Penne with Asparagus and Red Pepper from a Cook's Illustrated recipe, which was good but no better than the average decent pasta dish. I washed the leaves from our appetizer radishes and dressed them with a Dijon vinaigrette: a fine idea in theory, but I made the mistake of using the vinaigrette recipe from the magazine article that suggested using the whole radish this way, and it was hopelessly bland.

Dining in the Basement

I was pretty excited about how my basement looked with paper lanterns and cheerful plastic carpet-substitute, but it's still not exactly a beautiful dining room. Nevertheless, I'm so happy having a table set up down there. Not only is it a tremendous saving of effort (carrying tables and chairs from an attic closet to the living room or backyard was no fun, nor was it much fun having a table filling my entire living room when I had guests), but also it stays cool down there in the summer even when I've been cooking all day.

The peppers are for the next night's pasta

We ate marinated grilled steaks and grilled artichokes with a mustard/mayo sauce I found online somewhere. Both were pretty good but tough, the steaks because they were from a healthy grass-raised cow who lacked tenderizing fat, the artichokes probably because I bought exceptionally cheap ones (the only reason we had them at all was because I was amazed by the low price). After twice in my life experimenting with doing other things with artichokes (and ordering them grilled at both Cheesecake Factory and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant whose name I don't remember), I think in the future I will stick with steaming them and eating them with melted butter and maybe a touch of lemon. Why mess with perfection?

The outstanding parts of the meal were Summer Vegetable Gratin from Cook's Illustrated (which called for a crazy number of steps but might actually have been worth it) and Herbed Potato Salad with Bacon and Scallions from The Union Square Cafe Cookbook (which was not only easy but also could be made ahead).

Someone's second helping

Dessert, from a magazine-clipping recipe, was also amazing but a recipe was hardly needed. It was just fresh berries macerated in lightly sweetened citrus juice topped with whipped cream. The secret to its amazingness was that I was using homemade vanilla extract (a bottle of vodka in which vanilla beans had been soaking for months) to flavor the whipped cream, and it was so pale I feared it lacked a strong vanilla flavor so I used lots. The resulting cream had just the right level of booziness to cut the sweetness and give the dessert an almost elegant feel. Of course the picture couldn't be less elegant, because I forgot to take pictures at all until we were scraping the bowl. With it we drank cold-brewed coffee flavored with spearmint-infused simple syrup.

Afterward we drank delicious cranberry wine that George and Jamie bought at a vineyard in Michigan.

The grilling, the clothing, and the green leaves probably seem odd for a late October post; I'm behind again: this meal took place August 2nd.

Smoky Fried Chickpeas

Smoky Fried Chickpeas: good but insanely filling. I ate half-a-bowl late one morning and don't remember getting hungry again all day. I don't know that I'd make them again, for while they weren't exactly difficult, frying in large amounts of oil is a messy nuisance.

Hot out of the pan they had a delicious crunch that made me decide the smoked paprika and salt were overkill, but the next day when they'd softened and absorbed the spice I was glad I'd included it. If I did make these again, I'd omit the lemon zest which was hard to filter out so fried during both batches and came out bitter and burnt. Or perhaps I'd fry it with the garlic.

Double Broccoli Quinoa

Double Broccoli Quinoa is from 101 Cookbooks and the pictures there are far more beautiful than mine. It was OK and healthy enough to make me feel good about eating it, but much as I love cream, I wouldn't bother with it here if I made it again. It didn't seem to add anything and using more olive oil instead would have been healthier.

But I don't think I would make it again. With its barely boiling the broccoli and food-processoring the pesto, it was too fussy for such an ordinary dish and left me with more dirty dishes than it was worth. I could have simply sauteed broccoli in olive oil, tossed it with quinoa and garlic (while hot, to take the raw edge off the garlic), and sprinkled it with lemon, toasted almonds, and Parmesan, and enjoyed it more for far less effort.

Healthy eating aside, vegetables sauteed in olive oil with salt, pepper, garlic, and maybe some lemon has become one of my favorite things just because it tastes so good. Here I sauteed mushrooms as I just described and ate them over romaine lettuce with shaved Parmesan on top. It was both better and quicker than the broccoli quinoa.