“Can you grab that?”
The Wife and I pulled into the driveway at almost the same time tonight. The Kid was at The In-Laws, so she had a handful of work stuff. The “that” in question was a large, unmarked box that sat in the vestibule by our main entrance door, the mysterious contents of which occurred to us at the same time.
Let’s talk about Christmas for a second. The haul was nice. I restocked the closet at L.L. Bean, added some new Under Armour to the arsenal and got a new iPhone dock/alarm clock. The big news, though, was the addition of two items to the kitchen: a panini press and an ice cream maker.
Cuisinart’s ice cream maker is pretty nifty and simple to use. Freeze the bowl. Mix the cream/sugar blend. Assemble and start the mixer. Add the cream. Mix for 15 to 20 minutes. Add any other stuff. Freeze. I’m simplifying of course, but my first outing — coffee toffee pretzel ice cream — was basically that. I mixed a double shot of espresso from Starbucks with some instant espresso powder, then whisked together in a vanilla ice cream base (heavy cream, sugar, 1% milk). About five minutes before I was done mixing, I tossed in the toffee and pretzels. Done.
The inlaws like frozen yogurt, so I thought something made with Greek yogurt would work for dessert when they came over for dinner last weekend. I had mixed berries in the freezer, so all I needed was a container of plain yogurt to make this happen. I used frozen because, well, it’s January. Berries are not in season. Plus, you will macerate the berries anyhow, so fresh really doesn’t matter here. Being frozen helps keep them from falling apart on the stove. Continue reading Al Dente Frozen: Mixed berry frozen Greek yogurt
I’ve wanted to do a porchetta for a very long time. The allure of that fatty belly meat means flavor by the truckload. I liked the notion of this recipe from Bon Appetit, which wrapped the slab of belly meat around a loin. A good quality piece of pork from a butcher or farm, not a grocery store, would be a winner in this recipe. I figured that the crowd accompanying Christmas dinner would make a great venue for this sort of big recipe.
Luckily, I have a connection. Okay, so it’s really not a connection. It’s a booth at the Central New York Regional Market. I’ve purchased bacon from Bostrom Farms in the past. Bostrom, based in Penn Yan, sets up shop weekly at the market. Their meat is cut and packed by a third-party, but the pork is bred and raised by the family. You can taste the difference between their product and the grocery store/factory pork. Actually, you can smell it. Sometimes grocery store pork has that briny pork smell. It has been frozen, defrosted, frozen, etc. so many times that it just doesn’t smell healthy. I mean, that’s why you had to cook it until 160 degrees all of those years. The processors didn’t treat the meat well. Anyhow, there’s no smell to Bostrom Farms pork. Even though it is frozen for sale, the defrosted loin had a fresh meat smell.
This is a three-day recipe: prep, rest, roast. The prep is pretty cut and dry. Tenderize the belly, rub the herbs in and wrap it around the loin. Letting it rest in a fridge for two days lets it “dry age” and absorb the garlic and herbs. Then, the blast of a hot oven followed by slow roasting gives a nice exterior crust with a juicy inside.
Even with my stepmother home sick and my father leaving early to tend to her, this was the mess left from Christmas dinner 2012. The dishwasher ran four times yesterday, though I’m a little underwhelmed with Cascade Complete. I had recently given up on Finish dishwashing tabs because they were really expensive and not very good. That said, Cascade was a supreme letdown yesterday.
More on dinner later as I sort through photos and do a little writing.
Al Dente: A Blog About Eating 