That's a wrap

The very last of the Thanksgiving turkey holidays get used up. Rather than the usual turkey sammiches at this time of the year, we go Southeast Asian with rice paper. If the pilgrims had GM's corporate jets, they would have made these too.

I heart pork

The last of the old sprinkler valves are at the end of their useful life. Well, one of them is still good. But my anal retentiveness has been bothered by the non-matchy matchy valves for years now. And the PVC work is really just haphazard.

And now I have updated virtually the entire irrigation system. We now have matching valves, and pipes that are less spaghetti-like. And it only took one trip to the hardware store. I may have a future as a surgeon.

Twice cooked pork lettuce wraps. The chili peanut sauce... whoowhee... packs a whallop. My own valves and pipes are totally going to need some work too if I keep eating like this. But my sinuses are clear.

Happy Birthday Doug

Cheap greens, shiitake, and bamboo fungus. Brown sauce. In the pan, the ingredients were beautifully fanned out in concentric circles. But then I realized I don't own a serving platter large enough to serve in. Aie-ya! Food styling be damned, we scoop and plop cafeteria style. I will make a large serving platter the next time I'm in the clay studio.

Hellfire and brimstone in Southern California means I lose my view of the mountains. It also means itchy eyes, hacking coughs, and sooty boogies for a week.

For supper #1, we serve gnocchi with gorgonzola shimeji cream sauce. Luscious unctuous heart attack on a plate. This would instantly kill my dairy avoiding lactose intolerant kin. The fat content would kill my dairy loving friends a day later. If I served this to guests, would this be pre-meditated murder?

For supper #2, we crank up the fat knob to 11 and make pork belly two ways. First, pork belly braised in tamarind habanero cilantro jus. Big pieces of pork belly shrunken into soft porky jiggly jello cubes.

And salt cured pork belly roasted with plum vinegar. With a crispy cap.

Tamarind habanero braised pork belly with hibiscus reduction. You can't eat just one.

And sliced roasted pork belly. These would be awesome in sammiches- perhaps in a baguette. Or Korean style wrapped in a lettuce leaf with shiso and kochujang chili paste. A bit crunchy, a bit soft and squooshy, a bit chewy, and a bit tender. Pork heaven in a bite.

I'm setting myself up for failure by attempting to bake birthday coconut cake. Distracted by eating delicious pork, I've over baked the coconut layer cake and burned the shredded coconut. And I would probably ruin the coconut buttercream tomorrow. I am such a horrible horrible horrible baker. Why do I even try? Perhaps if I tried to make a pork cake, I will have success. We WILL have meat cake in the future! Meat cake!

Project layaway

There is only one habanero pepper in this year's pitiful harvest. Mucho Pitiful. My thumb is not so green this year. But it's the first year tromboncino squash and basil were fruitful. So I count my blessings and save my cursing and ill thoughts for Dick Cheney and Proposition 8.

Because a clean and fluffy Preston is such a rare occasion, I will document each occurrence. This time, Preston models a fierce new safety orange dog collar for that early 2000's state penitentiary look. Heidi Klum and PetSmart would approve. Work it for your bitches Preston!

My poor planning requires that I make some curried cous cous to tide me over because ratpatootie will take over 4 hours to make. Hunger and ratpatootie don't go together well. Why do I attempt time consuming recipes late at night? I wonder how the French do it?

Ratpatootie ala Pixar is delicious, but painstakingly slow to make without interns and sous chefs. Costco needs to sell interns and sous chefs.

Pig latin

It's been ages since I've seen one of my favorite Sachi's. We will catch up and reminisce with the aid of pork dishes. Sachi brings gifts of beautiful irises. Are irises edible?

A bit of wine, some manchego, and a nibble or two of salame while I finish up the other courses.

We will be guinea pigs* to my new invention. Interactive caesar salad. Slightly grilled romaine lettuce for a bit of smokey flavor. And the components of a traditional caesar dressing broken out and treated as their own individual side dishes of fried eggs and warm bagna cauda. Just mix everything together however you wish when you eat it. This was a bit too interactive for my tastes. I'm essentially lazy, so I'd rather not play with my food on the plate and would prefer something pre-tossed. Sometimes, it can be too much work to eat something. But I have to admit it looks nice on a plate.

But the old standby of tomatillo braised pork loin never fails. It's doubly wonderful today because pork is cheap this week due to the Jewish holidays. I have 18 lbs of pork in the refrigerator.

I kleenz krumms auf u.

*there was no lipstick on the above mentioned guinea pigs

Plane crazy

The airport "limousine" is optimistically named. Sigh. Less than 3 days on the ground, and I'm heading back to California already. I'll just have to squeeze all my restaurant hopping in the limited time I have at the airport. 

Korean draft beer is good.

So-so bulgogi. I guess most airport food is of similarly overpriced quality all over the world.

I found a gelato stand in Korea! Black sesame and yogurt flavoured gelato. Surprisingly good. And the yogurt gelato texture was spot on. I got two spoons so I can share with myself.

Black bean tea tastes like dirt. The dirt that the beans grew in. Blech.

Colonel Sanders looks Asian. I'm not sure this will go over well in Kentucky.

And one last fiery seafood tofu stew pot. Then onto the airplane for the 12 hour flight back to LA! Aie! (And yes Meg, I did eat all that.)

Fiesta!

The long awaited Mexican feast I've been obsessing about all week. Thinking, dreaming, planning for days! Most items made from scratch. Strawberry agua fresca with mint syrup. Serving anything in a tall skinny glass makes it fancy. Grilled corn, potatos, and poblano peppers. Tomatillo serrano salsa. And carne asada tacos with roasted tomato garlic salsa and mango jicama slaw.

Will power

I need adult supervision when I go to grocery stores. It's impossible to practice restraint and self control. I want to try everything I see. It's like I'm five years old.

Crazy soda pop. Rather than the usual screw top cap, pressure generated from carbonation forces a glass marble in the upper chamber to seal tightly against the opening. The pinch in the middle keeps the marble from settling into the bottom after it's been forced down by the bundled punch mechanism. A marvel of pointless physics and engineering.

Anything sporting panda illustrations or panda logos will pretty much guarantee a spot in the shopping cart. 

The first of the string beans this season are ready. I started with an equal number of green, yellow, and purple bean seeds. For some reason, the yellow beans have taken off, followed by purple, and the more common green beans are withering away before producing flowers. A lone strawberry survivor. And it wasn't even all that tasty. Slugs got to all the other ones.

Nowhere near a peck of pickled peppers. But we don't need that much quantity as these peppers are intense enough to strip varnish. The radishes will turn a shade of flattering pink as it pickles.

Looing assorted items. This is the start of a master loo juice sauce base that can be passed down many generations. Each time it's used, you add a little more spice, a little more water, a little more soy sauce. It's supposed to darken with age and bloom with complex flavor like a fine wine. If you treat me right, I will bequeath this sauce to you upon my death.

Loo lo. Loo gee. Loo zhu. Loo hsiang goo. 

Sautéd dandelion greens. My mulching efforts over the past year have cut down the number of weeds growing in the yard. So I actually paid good money at the farmer's market for these weeds.

Chocolate blood orange sorbet refuses to freeze. The flavor is incredible, but WHY WON'T YOU FIRM UP?

Tonight's batch of chicken stock yielded over a gallon and a half. I'm not going to will this to anyone upon my death, so you'll have to make your own.

Thai peanuts

Red curry and yellow curry with chicken thighs, purple dragon carrots, and potatos. Trader Joe's curry bases were made for delicate white people taste buds, so I'm zinging them up with hot chilies, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves from my sad looking kaffir lime tree (twiggy shrub.) If Charlie Brown was born Thai, he'd adopt this tree.

Southern hospitality

The holidays would not be the holidays without tamales. We celebrate with tomatillo green chile and chicken tamales. Home made, save the corn masa powder from a bag. 69 cents per 5 lb bag, branded in Spanish, but proudly grown in the USA.



And for those of us with Guatemalan tendencies, red chile and pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves. Exactly like how my imaginary Guatemalan grandma made them.



And an over-baked anise scented flan. I really gotta do something about that over-achieving oven.



Hannah likes chicken. Hannah already exhibits Central American affinities through her love of Dora the Explorer.

Butt crack

Dear Santa, I've been a good boy this year. Please bring me skunks and squirrels and chipmunks and possums and ducks and geese and cows and sheep. No cats please. And I like the dog biscuits that smell like stinky ass.



Some killer swiss chard from the backyard. I may have been a bit aggressive with the chile peppers.



Mushroom pasta, and tuna bean salad. Just one fish this year. We'll ease into Italy's traditional feast of the seven fishes slowly.



Some rosemary lemon chickens. Christmas goose would have required a lot more planning and effort. This year's holiday theme is Sloth. So this year's Christmas dinner I pulled out of my ass in a couple of hours.



And my pumpkin pie cracked. I may have to dial down the temperature of the oven.

Cold call

Spaghetti rigata carbonara. The spaghetti is ribbed for oral pleasure. I warmed the bowl by using it as a lid for the boiling pasta water. Who wants to turn on the oven or buy an expensive warming drawer to keep one single cold bowl from seizing up the carbonara sauce? This works just as well.



Theoretically worked as well. I had to take a conference call right in the middle of the mixing process. And I wound up curdling the carbonara AND it promptly seized up minutes later because the conference call ran 25 minutes long. Seriously, people should know enough not to call me during meal times.



I've always wanted to bake a fish in salt crust ever since I saw it on the original Iron Chef show 8 years ago. I had to work very quickly in forming the salt crust due to nasty paper cut. Salt and sliced lemons. Ouch! And to make matters even worse, I get ANOTHER conference call mid-smooshing salt around. What IS it with these conference calls today? Stop the madness, a man's got to eat!



Deliciously sautéed swiss chard with pine nuts. I would have used fewer pine nuts for sake of aesthetics if I was cooking for others. But it's just lonely old me tonight. And I love buttery pine nuts. And I'm going to eat the entire thing. And try to fill the gaping hole in my empty lonely heart. I fill my empty lonely heart with cholesterol and saturated fats.



Fishie done after half an hour. I'm on the edge the rest of the night when I'm around food. I just KNOW those conference calls know when I'm eating.



The fun is in liberating the trout from the crust. The salt crust technique is pretty forgiving, and the fish can be kept quite moist. But now I remember why I don't ever buy trout. There were lots of great herbal flavors from the chervil and savory stuffed in the belly, texture was moist and not overcooked. But the trout itself was kind of muddy tasting. This technique would be so much better with a fattier ocean fish. Preferably something endangered and over-fished.



Anyway, working late tonight, so onto dinner #2. Tonight's second dinner is Spanish tapas inspired. Sweet baby peppers stuffed with a mix of tuna, capers, chard stems, breadcrumbs, and brie. Is it still tapas if you eat a dozen of these at a time?