She Who Must Be Obeyed informed me that I have not been referring to our son correctly in these posts. I have been using “He Who Must Not Be Ignored,” when, in fact, the more accurate description is “He Who Will Not be Ignored.” The former implies I have a choice in the matter, the latter makes it clear he is in control. Which he is. Except when she is.
Management regrets the error; just don’t hurt me.
When Harmonix released the first Guitar Hero game I was rooting for them. The company had been co-founded by an old MIT friend, and the game looked like a lot of fun. I was rooting for them again when they were purchased by Viacom, which resulted in their “reboot” of the guitar game as Rock Band.
When they announced that they would be producing a Beatles version of the game, I was rooting for them again, but I also found myself thinking “Please don’t screw this up, no one will ever forgive you.”
At this week’s E3 conference in Los Angeles, Harmonic gave us two sneak peeks of The Beatles: Rock Band. Here’s the opening sequence for the game:
And here’s a sample of the on-screen gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGBF6AHaaS0I recognized the Cavern Club, the Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, Abbey Road Studios, and the Roof of the Apple Corps building. You can also see that three-part harmony vocals will be a part of the game.
It looks like the game won’t suck after all. I won’t be buying the replica Hofner bass (Paul), Gretsch Duo Jet (George), or Rickenbacker 325 (John) guitars — or the Ludwig drums replica (Ringo) — but I have pre-ordered the game for September.
And if anyone knows what the artist who designed the “I Am the Walrus” marching elephants sequence was drinking, send me a few bottles.
Yesterday’s post was number 100: Woo hoo! I’m not posting every day as originally planned, but an average of 20 a month isn’t too shabby. I’ll try to step up the frequency a bit, as long as the pesky job/child/wife/life don’t get in the way.
This is a quick one, mentioned in the previous Food Mashup post. Make this recipe soon, while asparagus are still pencil-thin.
I saw Anne Burrell make this recipe on Food Network. It couldn’t be simpler. Start with an entire bunch of thin asparagus, good pecorino cheese, a small red onion, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and salt.
Trim off and discard the bottom third of the asparagus stalks, then cut them into thin slices, including the tips. Cut the onion into small dice. Coarsely grate the cheese, enough for a cup. Measure out half a cup of the vinegar.
Toss the asparagus, onion, and pecorino in a bowl, then dress with the vinegar, some olive oil and salt to taste. Let the mixture sit for an hour, the vinegar “cooks” the asparagus.
This is a great late spring/early summer dish. Crunchy asparagus, sharp, salty cheese, pungent onion, and tangy vinegar — all very bright on the palate. And, as with all good warm-weather recipes, it takes almost no time to make and doesn’t require using the stove. Tasty and lazy: my two summer bywords.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, it should be no secret that I am a sucker for well-constructed mashups. Find a clever way to combine previously available elements, and I’m your new best friend.
Although my audio/video manipulation skills are amateurish at best, I’m a regular Danger Mouse in the kitchen. It’s one thing to prepare a enough of a recipe so that it can be served again a few night later, it’s a whole other skill to look in the fridge and combine disparate bits into a new — and tasty — meal.
For example, here is what I made from extra salmon from this meal, morel mushrooms from this meal, and hollandaise sauce from this meal:
Voilá: pan-seared salmon with morel mushrooms, haricots verts, and hollandaise (with an extra piece of duck roulade as an appetizer).
What to do with frozen quail, extra asparagus salad (an upcoming post), some pomegranate jus, and the last of the black truffles?
Serve black truffle risotto (also an upcoming post), followed by grilled quail in pomegranate jus with asparagus salad. Dessert for this dinner was also a mashup: chocolate idiot cake with red beet ice cream and candied walnuts.
Cook enough of your own meals and you can’t help but wind up with a fridge full of new meal components. So, the next time someone complains “leftovers again?”, you can tell them “It’s not leftovers, it’s a food mashup. It’s art.”
Now if I can only figure out what to combine with the extra Bacon Explosion…
While watching Heston Blumenthal’s Tudor Feast, I had to agree with Blumenthal that during the reign of the Tudors the English ruled the culinary world. He staged a modern version of a typical Tudor feast to demonstrate the level of sophistication Tudor-era food reached.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etSuOfs8558He did all the research, used authentic recipes, and made modifications only when the source material was unambiguous. Being the chef/owner of one of the best restaurants in the world, with instant access to a research-lab quality kitchen and the world’s foremost food scientists, he was in a unique position to redevelop historic recipes. What he didn’t do, however, was attempt to cook with Tudor-era equipment. That might have been too much of a handicap.
During the family vacation in London, we visited Hampton Court palace, where I took the “kitchen tour.” The photos that follow speak for themselves.
The room for basic food preparation.
This is the hearth used for cooking smaller dishes. Note the swing arms used for suspending kettles.
This is a "five-burner stovetop," a brick cooking surface with five small charcoal-fired fireplaces underneath. The three-legged copper pot on the left would be right at home in a modern kitchen.
The roasting fireplace. The iron bracket on each side are for suspending multiple spits of meat for roasting.
The "back office," where menu planning, inventory, and accounts are managed.
The toughest audience in the world: She Who Must Be Obeyed and He Who Must Not Be Ignored.
You can impress me with frog blancmange, a roasted cockentrice, and rice pudding that looks like bangers and mash, but if you really want to blow me away, cook it at Hampton Court. The kitchens are still working.
I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. Senate Republicans are focusing on a speech made by Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor in 2001 at Berkeley. As reported by The Hill, a conservative news site:
Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.â€
This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with chickpeas — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.
Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.
“It’s pretty disturbing,†said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial … allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.
Yes, you’re reading it correctly: Sotomayor’s love of Puerto Rican food may influence her imprtiality on the bench. Talking Points Memo contacted trhe reporter to determine of the article was a parody, and was assured it was not:
He confirmed, saying, “a source I spoke to said people were discussing that her [speech] had brought attention…she intimates that what she eats somehow helps her decide cases better.”
Bolton said the source was drawing, “a deductive link,” between Sotomayor’s thoughts on Puerto Rican food and her other statements. And I guess the chain goes something like this: 1). Sotomayor implied that her Latina identity informs her jurisprudence, 2). She also implied that Puerto Rican cuisine is a crucial part of her Latina identity, 3). Ergo, her gastronomical proclivities will be a non-negligible factor for her when she’s considering cases before the Supreme Court.
Is it the ethnic diet in general, or the pork component in particular that leads to problems? Maybe it’s the pork parts that are the problem. After all, the south is the home of barbecue and conservativism, but they stick to the less threatening parts of the magical animal.
I propose that the upcoming confirmation hearings for Sotomayor be held at a full-blown pig roast on the White House lawn. Then we’ll see what effect pork has on decisioon-making. Who can be a heartless bastard when he has a plate full of lechon and tostones?
While describing the suckling pig I saw (but did not eat) at St. John restaurant in London, I alluded to having already eaten the Best Pig Ever. That happy event began, as did many of my recent food epiphanies, with an Anthony Bourdain video — this one from the Puerto Rico episode of No Reservations.
http://blog.belm.com/belmblog/video/lospinos.flv&imageWhen I first saw this episode in 2006, I thought “Maybe I’ll eat there someday, in the unlikely event that I wind up in Puerto Rico.” A year later, fate conspired to do just that. She Who Must Be Obeyed’s mother came up with the idea of gathering her children, grandchildren, and in-laws together for a winter vacation, so in early December of 2007 we spent a week and a half at a resort timeshare in Humacao, Puerto Rico.
What prevented this Spectacularly Bad Idea from tipping over into Complete Disaster was my knowledge that I’d be making the pilgrimage to Cayey — with company, or alone if necessary — to feast on lechon. I trusted Bourdain implicitly, but decided to check with the locals as well. The guy who came to fix our air conditioning unit (Disaster #1), a transplant from Yonkers, NY, told me I picked the best of the lechoneras. So did the receptionist at the resort’s doctor’s office (Disaster #2), also a NY transplant.
In her infinite Solomon-like wisdom, She Who Must Be Obeyed came up with the idea that each of the adults would get to pick one thing that they wanted to do and devote a day to it. Ben wanted to surf, Cathy wanted to hike in the rainforest, Solomon wanted to see the radio telescope at Arecibo, and I — well, you know what I wanted to do. So on a cloudy Tuesday morning we piled into the van (minus mother-in-law, who could not bring herself to try “obviously unsanitary food”) and wound our way through the central mountains. An hour and a half later, despite the best efforts of the GPS to run us off sheer cliffs, we arrived in Cayey.
I recognized Lechonera Los Pinos from the video; it hadn’t changed at all. As I walked up to the counter, the server launched into her well-rehearsed explanation of what they served. I politely cut her off, saying “Give us enough of everything to feed six hungry people.”
“Everything?”
“Yup. Lechon, guinea hen, sausage, tostones, rice, all the sides – everything.” Before she turned away, I added “And I’d like some of the pig’s cheek, please.”
She gave me a big smile, turned to one of her co-workers, and said what I assumed to be “This guy wants the cheek!” in Spanish. He looked at me, gave me a big thumbs-up, hacked off a piece of cheek and presented it on a plate for my immediate consumption. And oh, was it good: crispy, salty skin with a thin layer of fat beneath, covering moist, tender meat.
Look carefully, you can see the spot where the cheek was sliced off.
They worked on the rest of the order, making short work of what was left of that day’s pig.
They handed us two trays overflowing with porky goodness.
He Who Must Not be Ignored needed a bit of convincing, so I handed him a piece of the crispy skin. “This is like a pig potato chip!” was the last thing he said before proceeding to eat everything on his plate.
It was all good. You could taste the sofrito used to marinate the meat, it added a bright acidic note to the rich pork flavor. The hens were just as tasty, and, as mentioned in the video, there was even pork in the rice. We were all happy to be eating the perfectly cooked offerings from this wonderful, magical animal.
Some of you may have received this holiday card from us that year; now you know where the photo was taken.
We headed home stuffed and happy, with enough leftovers to make pork burritos for two more days.
Later that week, while perusing the city block’s worth of food stalls by the beach in Loquillo (Ben’s surfing spot), I noticed this fellow:
Did I ask for the cheek? You know I did. And a half pound of lechon to go.
Best Pig Ever?
For me, there is no question that what I ate was the Best Pig Ever. For Bourdain, however, that honor is a moving target. A year after the Puerto Rico episode he had this to say about a roast pig he ate in Bali:
This is it: simply the best goddamn pig in the universe. Whole hog, stuffed with fresh herbs, then lovingly slow-roasted over a low open flame, constantly mopped with coconut milk to crisp its skin. The guts are also made into a spicy blood sausage, which alone is reason to make the trip to Bali. Kick off your shoes, climb up onto the communal dining area, sit down at one of the long, low tables, and dig in. It’s a quintessential Ubud experience — and a true “food epiphany.” You will never be the same.
I’m holding fast with my assessment. Unless, of course, mother-in-law plans a family trip to southeast Asia.
I was at Costco on Wednesday, getting a head start on my Memorial Day weekend barbecue preparations. I already had two full racks of pork ribs (St. Louis style) in my cart and a box of three one-pound bacon packs in my hand, when I noticed a two-pound tube of Jimmy Dean pork sausage on the shelf. As my gaze shifted between the two processed pork products, the gears in my head slowly engaged: There’s something you can cook with both of these things.
Then it hit me: the Bacon Explosion, a recipe forwarded to me by a friend last winter. He dared me to cook one, and now it was time to take on the challenge. What follows is my humble execution of this epitome of the barbecued pork arts, handed down from on high by the geniuses at BBQ Addicts.
I began by frying up an entire pound of bacon until it was crisp. You’ve seen bacon frying, so the photo is completely gratuitous, but still: Bacon!
While the first pound of bacon sizzled away, I built the first bacon layer. My bacon wasn’t thick-cut, so I upped the dimensions from 5 by 5 to 6 by 6. I had to reach back to my Cub Scout potholder-making skills to construct the weave.
I sprinkled the weave with my favorite barbecue dry rub: All-South Rub from Chris Schlesinger’s The Thrill of the Grill.
I spread the loose sausage on top of the bacon mat, making sure it reached the edges and had an even thickness.
I spread the crumbled cooked bacon — minus a few slices I sampled for quality control purposes — over the sausage.
I sprinkled more dry rub over the bacon, then doused it with barbecue sauce. I used Cattlemen’s Golden Honey sauce.
Then came the tricky part: I rolled the sausage and crumbled bacon layer away from me, leaving the bacon mat untouched. I tried to keep the roll uniform and free of air pockets and sauce leaks.
For the final assembly I rolled the sausage back toward me, including the bacon mat. I ended up with a weave-covered sausage with the seam on the bottom. (Those BBQ Addicts thought of everything — there was clearly research involved with this step.) I finished off with another coating of dry rub on the outside.
I dropped this pork bomb on my smoker at the halfway point in my rib cooking time. (Did I mention that I was cooking ribs? Because the Explosion was meant to be a side dish.) It cooked for 3 hours at 225°F, bathed in cherry wood smoke.
I skipped the sauce glaze on the outside since I’m a sauce-on-the-side guy. After a brief rest I sliced the roll into half inch thick rounds.
Look at that cross section: bacon, pink smoke ring, cooked sausage, and more bacon. It tasted as good as it looked: a slight sweetness from the cherry smoke, more sweetness from the sauce, soft bacon on the outside contrasting with crispy on the inside, with the firm sausage giving it a bit of chew.
I’ll certainly be making this again. Now that I know how good it tastes and how relatively simple it is to prepare, I’ll splurge on loose Italian sausage next time to add more spice. Oh, and the ribs were also tasty.
Making this delectable treat resulted in a song being stuck in my head, the “Deththeme” from Metalocalypse, the animated series. I kept hearing the singer’s name — “Nathan Explosion,” the last two word of the song — as “Bacon Explosion!” And now you will, too.
http://blog.belm.com/belmblog/audio/deththeme.mp3
