One of my favorite parts of fall is the food. Now that the weather has turned chilly, I’ve been on a soup bender. This one will warm your toes quite nicely. Enjoy it in front of a crackling fire. If, like me, you don’t have a fireplace, now is the time to pop in your fake fire DVD. Continue reading
For Easter, I made an Italian pork roast called porchetta. The labor-intensive recipe came from my favorite bread book, Tartine Bread. The Tartine recipe starts with a boneless butterflied pork shoulder. This gets smeared with a mix of olive oil, fennel tops, fennel seeds, crushed red pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, salt, and — because this is a bread book — bread crumbs. Then you roll the whole thing up like a rug and bind it with string.
The roast should resemble a Hostess Ho Ho, albeit with pork instead of cake and fennel stuffing instead of cream. This pork Ho Ho gets roasted at 220 degrees for 8-10 hours. I did the roasting while I slept, but I wouldn’t recommend this. My dreams were haunted by pigs, smoke alarms, and kitchen fires. Sweet dreams aren’t made of these.
The pork turned out delicious. But the stuffing was . . . meh . . . not great. First, there was way too much of it. Second, it was too fennel-y. Or too bread-y. Definitely too something. I may try this recipe next.
On the bright side, we had tons of leftover pork. Tartine recommended making Vietnamese sandwiches aka bánh mì. And so I did. Continue reading
For years, I’ve been circling pizza perfection. I’ve tried more crust and sauce recipes than I can count. Two years ago, Soren accidentally mangled an unbaked pizza trying to get it off the peel and onto the pizza stone. What had been a thing of beauty ended up half upside down, cheese sizzling on the searing hot stone. Maybe there’s no crying over spilled milk. But spilled pizza? You’re goddamn right I cried. I cried my face off. I’m kind of emotional like that. The incident became known as the Pizza Fiasco of 2010.
I still haven’t achieved perfection, but these days I’m much, much closer. Continue reading
