22 Mar 2013
by scolgin
in Food, Humor, Recipes
Tags: confit, cracklings, duck, Paul Prudhomme, pizza, Priscilla Presley, Spago, Wolfgang Puck
I remember when Wolfgang Puck was cooking at Spago, the original one above Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. I went there a few times as a kid, always glancing about for a Warren Beatty or Jack Nicholson sighting. Years later, I would find myself sandwiched between Priscilla Presley and Paul Prudhomme at a private Chinese New Year dinner at his second restaurant, Chinois on Main. But that’s another story. Back to Spago… it was here that in addition to star spotting, you could sample such radical and then unimaginable pizzas as goat cheese and sun-dried tomato (wow!), smoked salmon with caviar and Thai chicken.
John Huston’s table, Spago Oscars party, 1986
I’ve made a few strange pizzas in my day. Never one to extol novelty for novelty’s sake, I mostly hew near to the Neopolitan standard, sometimes getting a little creative with my toppings — fresh eggs and caramelized fennel, for example, or Kurobata pork belly and pickled red onion — or exploring different cheeses. Occasionally I’ll build a pizza around a single unique ingredient — a particular wild mushroom I’ve found highlighted in a cream reduction. But every so often, I throw convention out completely to the whim of inspiration. More
19 Mar 2013
by scolgin
in Food, Humor
Tags: Bill Murray, Caddyshack, gardening, gardens, gopher, spring, swiss chard, tomatoes
In a word: crappy, that’s how.
But every year come March, hope springs eternal, and I plant the spring garden.
The first of my spring greens
Preparations for this year’s garden included fortifying it against one of last year’s greatest foes — the chickens. The very first year I put terraces in on our back hillside, it was a lost cause — the hens took over, scratching, rolling in the soft soil, sunning themselves, and nibbling young greens until nothing was left but stem. So I fenced the enclosure in. But while not acrobatic flyers, the most athletic of the chickens soon figured out they could fly up and over. So this year I extended the height another few feet with additional chicken wire. Even still, every so often I inexplicably find a chicken inside. More
15 Mar 2013
by scolgin
in Food, Humor, Pork, Recipes
Tags: Asturian beans, chorizo, Fabada, fabes, fagioli, La Tienda, morcilla, paella, Spain, Spanish cooking
Our friends, Dan and Nonie, spent part of last summer in Spain. (Or was it the summer before? Time flies…) Good friends that they are, they were thinking of us as they browsed that wonderful country’s grocery stores and open markets. And they brought us back a large shrink-wrapped plastic package containing dried white beans and several pork products — fabada Asturiana.
Beans, salt pork & blood sausage on the stove
They bought one for themselves as well, and invited us over to sample it. They threw everything into a pot of water, covered it, and let it simmer for a few hours until the beans had assumed the orange of pimentón from the chorizo and general porkiness from that and the morcilla blood sausage and salt pork also included in the package. More
08 Mar 2013
by scolgin
in Food, Humor, Recipes
Tags: Baja California, cochinita pibil, machaca, margarita, Mexican cooking, Mexico, Milton Brook, Nayarit, Sonora, tacos
Unless you’re a drug runner, things in Mexico generally move pretty slowly. I remember watching an entire construction crew working on a resort collapse in the heat and humidity of the late morning in Nayarit, and nap on site until the mid afternoon.
Machaca, mid-mash
A lot of the foods of Mexico are slow, too. In the Yucatan, for example, they wrap pigs in banana leaves and bury them in the ground to cook for a day. Nobody’s setting timers or watching the clock. And in the cowboy cattle country of the desert north, they hang strips of beef in the sun to dry out in the blazing sun. Up there, they call it machaca. More
01 Mar 2013
by scolgin
in Food, Humor, Pork, Recipes
Tags: beef short rib, Chinese cooking, Don Schnieder, five spice, guanciale, Japanese cooking, jowl, Matthew Tekulsky, monkfish liver, Pork
The other night I was drinking wine and eating monkfish liver with my culinary soulmate, Donnie, and lamenting about when odds-and-ends meat cuts become trendy and then are suddenly expensive.
Pork pops
Take the case of the aforementioned monkfish liver. It used to be the rare non-Japanese person who would try this odd delicacy at the sushi bar, and I could buy a whole softball-sized liver at the Japanese market for a few bucks. More
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