Meal for the last fling of summer

The storm arrives tomorrow. Wind, rain, clouds. Things that have been scarce these last five months.

The weather situation will be grim, so only one thing to do: make a final tribute to summer meal.

Summer's Last Fling

- Sourdough whole wheat rosemary boules (bread).

- Sencha infused roast acorn and kabocha squash with butter-sautéed pippin apples.

- Ratatouille

- Poached and planked pork shoulder with chimichurri sauce

- Slow braised chicken with three mushrooms

- Baklava

___

Vinho verde
Cava
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It was a great day to sit outside in the warm sun, something to remember when the tule fog wraps everything in its cold embrace.

Chili verdirojo burrito, old school tortillas

What do you call it when you replace the tomatillos in a chili verde with red tomatoes, but leave the green chilies? It's not really chili verde, since in addition to be sin tomatillos, the other spices are different - no cilantro, for example. Nor is it chili colorado since no dried peppers are used. Whatever it is, it tastes good.

My idea came from a restaurant that makes this stuff, but they call it chili verde. Theirs is more chili anaranjado than verde, thanks to the tomatoes. 

The nice thing is that I didn't have to sneak into their kitchen disguised as a giant piñata to pilfer their secret recipe. They pretty much gave away their process on a food show, right in front of the camera. Then I thought of some tweaks. Cook the meat differently. Use frozen Hatch chilis instead of canned, play with the seasonings...

Now, if I'm ever tempted to open a Mexican restaurant I've got a good, scalable recipe that will work for any color of chili.

Since I'd fussed around making the meat, I decided to go whole hog and make a burrito from scratch. That meant tortillas, too. Old school tortillas, the kind they used to make before people became more afraid of rendered fat than chemical additives*.

Yes, old school. Unbleached enriched wheat flour, salt, baking powder, pork fat.

I don't really get the hypocrisy about tortillas and pork fat. Somehow, it's healthy if there's no pork fat in the tortilla, even if it's wrapped around fatty morsels of carnitas. So, the pork fat is OK when it's in the meat, but put it in the tortilla and it's taboo?

These are my tortillas, from scratch, my way. No canola oil here! I just took the fat that rendered out of the meat during cooking and set it aside. When it was time to make the tortillas, it was cooled down and ready to go. Mix salt and baking powder with flour, cut in the fat, add enough water to create some non-sticky dough, give it a rest, and it's ready to go.

So, the verdict? Was there a flavor payoff? Yes. There really is nothing like slow-cooked pork wrapped in a porky tortilla accented with savory avocado slices. The white rice was there to soak up the sauce, and because I wanted to highlight the flavor of the meat with something neutral.

* commercial flour tortilla ingredient lists can be long and difficult to pronounce: enriched bleached wheat flour, water, salt, palm oil and fractions with BHT, BHA and TBHQ (preservatives), rice flour, mono & diglycerides, fumaric acid, calcium propionate, potassium sorbet (preservatives again), methyl and propyl paraben (preservatives again), sodium meta bisulfite. Oops, that's potassium sorbate. Good. That would have made a horrible dessert.

¡Tortas!

Sometimes inspiration comes from several places, all hitting you within the space of a few short days. The Oak Cafe at school is doing a Mexican street food menu this week. I've been sort of craving tortas. I was curious about making a version of bolillos, the rolls used for this sandwich. Then, a Mexican friend tried some bread that I'd made and said it tasted like the bolillos she had as a child in Mexico.

My bread was sourdough, so I started thinking. Maybe bolillos, like most food in Mexico, taste different than our version. Maybe they've got more flavor, more complexity. So, why not use a light sourdough formula from a poolish and see what happens?

The other ingredients - carnitas and chile colorado - are simple enough to make if you have time.

For the carnitas, I cut some pork shoulder into 2" cubes, added a quartered lime, some salt and some garlic and braised it for about three hours. The fat slowly renders out as the water evaporates, so in the end the meat can fry a bit and brown in its own fat. You can also take the meat out, increase the heat to high and boil away the water. When you're down to the fat, reduce the heat and brown the meat. Done.

The chili colorado was a bit different. I thought I had a great stash of chilis, but only had cascabels, moritas and some hot New Mexico Hatch peppers I'd dried last summer. Chiles negros, anchos and guajillos are now on my shopping list, so I can get more chili flavor without the heat. I had all the other ingredients: brown stock, fresh garlic, a bit of ripe canned tomatoes, salt, black pepper, onion, celery, carrot, cumin and coriander seeds.

The chilis get seeded, then sautéed in a bit of vegetable oil after the spices, onions, carrots and celery. The trick is to heat them up without scorching them, to release their flavor. Then the chopped garlic, and finally the stock and tomato to cool things down. After that, a bit of simmering and into the blender for a quick purée. The sauce gets returned to the pan, and dosed with red wine vinegar according to how tart you like things. Finally, adjust the salt and everything is ready to go. One local restaurant goes fairly heavy on the vinegar, but it's safer to add in increments while tasting to find the level you prefer.

When everything's ready, cut a bolillo in half, toast it lightly, add a layer of salsa, some carnitas, some more salsa or cilantro and sliced avocado. I never get enough avocado in restaurants, so this transforms the torta into a real luxury.

You can serve tortas open faced, covered or wet. If you like them wet, completely drowned in salsa, make the salsa more liquid, almost soupy, by adding more stock.

Garlic & Brandy Sausages

 

The best thing about making your own sausages is that you can do what you want, add what you want and create something that you either couldn't find or would cost you five times more than the ingredients.

These were the result of looking at pre-made sausages, checking the price and saying "wait!". About $4.00 worth of pork shoulder, some spices, some herbs (mostly from the garden) and a generous dash of brandy: something good, cheap and unique.

This is what went into them:

• Pork shoulder
• Salt
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Fresh garlic, fine mince. Be generous.
• Fresh thyme, from the garden
• Fresh sage, also from the garden
• Dried oregano, harvested in the garden last summer and left to dry in the garage
• Pâté spices, also known as four spice: cinnamon, powdered ginger, nutmeg and cloves. Mixed at home because I don't like buying blends - buying individual spices lets you create your own blends as needed for greater flexiblity
• Urfa chili- a dark, almost coffee-like dried chili.
• Roasted cumin seeds, whole. Just a few, so every so often the flavor profile will change.
• Brandy (Cognac or Armagnac would work, too). This was cheaper.
• Dried milk powder - this is a kind of protein binder.
• Pork sausage casings, soaked and rinsed. Don't get the foolish type with plastic thingies inside the casings. Just simple casings packed in salt will do fine.

These could have had more pork fat added, but I decided to keep them lean.

Just grind everything up, fry a patty to taste, adjust the seasonings and stuff some hog casings with the forcemeat. 

Let them dry in the fridge for a day or so, then grill. Don't overcook or they'll be dry, since the extra fat was omitted.

Stuffed cabbage (and a pepper)

Lately I've been looking at the question of how to use my new-found skills to create delicious yet cheap food. It must be cheaper than going to some fast food joint and eating Mystery Meat topped with Mystery Sauce mixed with Unusually Colored Vegetables.

Yesterday, it was eggs on a bed of kale. Yes, I'd if I must abandon junk food the alternative should be healthier.

Today, stuffed cabbage sounded good. The basic process goes like this:

1. Make some sausage meat from pork shoulder, red wine, cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, scallions and garlic. Add a bit of powdered milk for protein binding.
2. Blanch some cabbage leaves in boiling water, then shock them by dunking them in ice water.
3. Wrap the sausage meat in the leaves, tuck everything in neatly, and arrange in a baking dish.
4. Throw in a pasilla pepper, too. Stuff it and place in the dish with the cabbage.
5. Sprinkle with a bit of salt, then add some unsalted chicken stock to keep things moist.
6. Bake the stuffed leaves at 350° for about an hour.
7. Use the excess cabbage leaves, along with some stock and garlic to make some cabbage soup (soupe aux choux) while you're waiting for the leaves to be ready. Purée all this stuff to make it feel richer.

There were no tomatoes in this, because they're not in season and I like to work up dishes that are made from things that are fresh and good now, not dependent on canning technology to make them work.

This would probably be better with red bell peppers than the pasilla. It really doesn't need a pepper at all, but I needed to clean out the refrigerator.

In through the Open Door

Do the words, "Berkshire Pork Fat Mochi" give you any instant cravings? Or do you wince in disgust, thinking that only a pork-addled fool would even consider ordering such a thing? I hope it's the latter, because that leaves more for me!

The pork fused with the mochi by some alchemical magic, creating a smoky, umami mouth bomb accented with confetti-like nori. That shishito is more for looks than heat, since this is December after all: the plants need heat for heat. Dribbled over and around this marshmallow-shaped ball of doctor-scorned wonder lies a light ochre sauce. Maybe it's miso based. Maybe not, but it's the grace note that really makes the dish happen. This is not a regular menu item, so if pork is your thing be sure to order some while you can.

The scene is the Open Door Restaurant, a tiny izakaya nugget encrusted in a thick vein of mini-mall. Their take on this cuisine is fusion French-Japanese-everything else. You might find bone marrow logs sliced down the center and roasted. Perhaps duck confit tacos. Maybe something involving foie gras, maybe paired with sea urchin. You never know, but the odds are that the dish will indeed work, no matter how strange it may seem.

Whatever isn't on the menu gets scrawled in multicolored chalk on a large blackboard. Right now, Christmas lights provide most of the illumination, so diners would cross the dark room, squinting, to find their amuse-guele nirvana. Like those pork fat mochi balls. Heaven.

Adventures with small plates is what this place is about. Go ahead, mix it up. Everything is à la carte. Take some risks. If you don't like something, odds are someone else at your table will. There are twists on Japanese street food. Truffle butter edamame, takoyaki, inari... but they're elevated to fine dining status by an inventive twist where a sauce drizzles in, an extra step is applied. Often they pair ingredients, juxtaposing something unknown to your typical Samurai with something his obaa-san would have served.

We typically start with our favorite sashimi, white fish yuzu. They don't specify the fish - a wise move allowing them to pick the freshest white fish for their menu without getting locked in to a particular variety. The plate is a simple fan of thinly sliced fish, dabbed with something green, drizzled with yuzu, accented with a shiso leaf and a pickled cherry. At least I think it's a cherry. It's red, sour, and has a pit.

Then something perhaps a bit bolder, building up to bigger flavors. Chawanmushi arrives in a heavy bowl heated hot enough to burn Asian symbols in your arm, the custard inside heaving like something from Yellowstone. Hints of fish and vegetables infuse the soft custard. Another bite, a piece of shrimp this time, another.... shiitake. Another? Nope. Empty.

More food arrives. Takoyaki: little balls of something resembling pancake batter, topped with a bit of sauce, bits of seafood inside. Spicy weiners, really spicy. Hotter than those shisitos. Then eggplant miso cools things down again with simple eggplant rounds tossed in some kind of miso-based sauce and sprinkled with roasted sesame seeds. Then the yaki onigiri, triangular rice balls, fried, sitting on a sheet of seaweed (nori), topped with ume (pickled plum), shredded salmon or nothing at all. Break off a piece of the rice, wrap it with nori and enjoy. Yes, you need to eat the nori or the thing will taste flat. Besides, nori is good for you.

They don't stop with the food, either. Japanese micro-brews? How about a beer made from rice, like a gently bubbling very light sake? It's here. If you can pronounce it, it's yours for the tasting: koshinikari echigo. Say it just like it's written and you'll do fine. Don't expect big, bold flavor. It's extremely subtle, light and ever so sake-like. Some fools have called it bland, but pair it with delicate food and you'll find that it's the perfect foil to something like sashimi where you don't want an Arrogant Bastard who will grab all the glory.

Or, if you'd like a white ale that's a bit more Belgian, just say Hitachino Nest White Ale, o kudasai. There's even a cute red owl on the label. Sugoi!

Yes, they have sake. Probably more kinds than the beer, so if sake adventure is your thing, you'll be happy. But you get more beer for your buck.

Service is very attentive, and they will happily tell you of their current favorite dishes. You could get a comment like, "not many people dare to order that." Don't worry - if you like the main ingredient, you'll probably love the dish. My wife still talks about that bone marrow log, months after the meal (it's off the menu now, alas).

They don't allow photos of their food. There's a big sign on the door, then a notice in bold on the menu. No photos of any kind, not even blurry low-light grainy out of focus horrors snapped by cell phones. I would think that photos posted all over the place would be free publicity, but since those photos rarely if ever look appetizing they may have a point. They didn't say anything about doing an illustration afterwards, so hopefully they won't send Hideo* after me for retribution.

The Open Door sits in the back corner of a mini-mall at Atlantic and Garvey in Monterey Park (on the southeast corner if you're approaching from the South on Atlantic). Their address is 122 South Atlantic Blvd, but that may not help much unless you're just using it to program your GPS.

* Neuromancer.

Banh Mi!

It was a long, hungry drive from Sacramento to L.A. Although it's great getting here early, it also means no In-N-Out stop for lunch, since they don't open until 10:30 am. Nobody would likely call glass of orange juice and a banana hearty fare for the road, healthy as it may be.

So, upon arrival I headed to Banh Mi My Tho in Alhambra for a very tasty grilled pork sandwich. In case you've never heard of them, banh mi are a Vietnamese-French hybrid sandwich: French baguette, Vietnamese grilled pork, fresh hot chili slices, cilantro, shredded carrots, green onions, cucumber, vinaigrette. They're a great deal - a sandwich maybe six inches long won't even cost you three bucks.

These guys make the sandwich to order while you wait in a crowded, tiny market-like space, surrounded by Asian language newspapers, a large refrigerator full of all kinds of drinks, packaged foods, a display case full of egg rolls and some kind of meatballs, and other people waiting for their orders.

There's nowhere to eat inside, although there is a bench outside, more for waiting than eating, I'd guess. So, away we went, a sack full of sandwiches in hand.

After starving half a day, I grabbed my sandwich at the first red light and took a bite. The baguette crunched, yielding to softer dough, then the chewier meat and fluffy veggies. I took another bite, as the banh mi's mix of sweet-sour and savory flavors filled my mouth. Hunger began to abate. Another bite - this time with a big hit of fresh chili flavor, then feel the burn. Then cilantro... A very interesting sandwich and a great way rescue myself from the clutches of road trip hunger.

In case you're in the area with some cash money (they don't do plastic) you can visit Banh Mi My Tho at 304 W Valley Blvd in Alhambra.

Pork chops, avocado, fancy salsa

Today I ripped out most of my tomatillo plants to make way for the winter garden. There were more tomatillos than I'd expected, so now I'm up to my ears in chili verde sauce.

Not to worry, though. Reduced, strained and lightly monté au beurre it becomes positively snooty, far from that stuff served in little plastic cups all over California.

Here's how the acid balance worked out: Neutral/acid pork chop, slightly sweet avocado, sour sauce, sweet carrot/potato/onion. Dark beer to stand up to the bit of morita chili that's in the salsa. Not that it's hot. Just a tingle of heat to keep things interesting.

I still have about a pinto of chili verde, unstrained, that I can use for something else. Maybe those schweinschnitzel left over from dinner with my uncle. Maybe some kind of torta milanesa. That could really hit the spot on a fall Sunday.

Pork meets bitch, they fall in love, live happily ever after

Yesterday's culinary event featured some fascinating beer tasting after I'd finished working a table.

We talked about food and beer pairings, notably the question of which beer, exactly, goes better with cassoulet (lamb/duck/white bean stew). Nobody at the event seemed to know, but there was a beer expert who gave a talk last year and said that such a beer does indeed exist. And once you've had it, he claimed, you'll never go back to Cahors (a Malbec-based wine from France).

Another thing I found was that a chef's uniform gets you a lot of very generous pours. Wine and beer. You also get to skip the "this is a Cabernet Sauvignon and it goes with..." type of conversation and jump right into the style of the wine, its terroir, and the things you really want to know if you're going pair it well with food.

So, inspired by some intriguing flavors brewed in Belgium, I decided to head down to the big liquor store, buy a few intriguing bottles, and experiment.

My first idea was to make a Flemish Carbonnade, basically beef stewed in beer and brown stock. It has onions and herbs, but the main flavor comes from the beef, stock and beer slowly simmering together. Once I'd bought the ingredients, I realized that it was already 4:00 pm. That would put dinner around midnight since I'm out of brown stock. Something for tomorrow, then.

I bought a bottle of Mc Chouffe, my favorite from last night's tastings, to pair with the carbonnade. Expensive, but then it comes in generous 750 ml bottles, all the way from the Ardennes region of Belgium. Too expensive to pour into a stew. So I bought a six pack of Bitch Creek ESB Ale for the cooking end of things.

I suppose I should back up a minute here. I thought the bottle said, "Birch Creek" until my wife pointed out the actual spelling. A bit of research, and yes, there is a Bitch Creek, it is in Idaho and I would not want to try piloting a kayak down that maelstrom of water crashing over rocks. It's rated Class 4+. Dangerous.

Hmm. This ESB Ale looks pretty tasty. What if, I thought... So, my first foray into beer-food parings matched the ESB with well-spiced country style pork ribs, marinated with some deep, toasty chili urfa, a bit of brown sugar, some salt, some balsamic vinegar, a bit of garlic and... stop. That would do it. That would throw grilled pork, roasty, toasty, coffee deep chili flavors, salt and cilantro at the ale.

Into the fridge for a couple of hours to get the flavor into the meat (longer would be better, but we were both starving).

The meat would sit atop some Isreali couscous, made with a vegetable base: sautéd mirepoix with a bit of finely diced bell pepper and a bit of minced garlic. A bit of dry Vermouth to deglaze the pan, then enough water to cook everything to al dente.

Finally ready for  plating: mound some couscous in the plate, fan the meat over it and garnish with a bit of cilantro. Time to put ale to food and see if they get along.

Yes! They're not hissing and spitting on my tongue like alley cats eager for a rumble. They're actually purring, rubbing against each other, and acting like friends.  The spices and some red Hawaiian finishing salt paired well with the beer where a wine might have struggled. So did the cilantro garnish. My conclusion: a successful pairing, and something to consider proposing if I ever work in a beer pub.

This ale would probably go well with beef, too. Maybe a perfect hamburger ale, assuming that the hamburger in question was heavy on beefiness and maybe mushrooms, too.

Venezuelan style arepas with pork

 

Leftover slow-cooked pork shoulder. Arepa flour. That skinny chili from the back of the garden. A leftover carrot. Some cilantro. The other half of the onion I used for some stock. Sounds like a recipe.

This time, Venezuela is the starting point. The formula for the arepas is even simpler: 1/2 arepa flour, 1/2 water. Some salt. Mix. Sit. Mold. Fry. Bake. Slice open. Fill. Eat. Burp.

I think a bit of cheese in the arepa dough wouldn't hurt them, so more experimentation will happen in the future. Maybe some dry goat, Parmesan or a mix of Mozzarella and dry goat... or maybe it's time to clean out the cheese drawer in the fridge and see what happens.

This is the slow cooked pork from a previous posting. Pork shoulder, white wine, garlic, more garlic, onions, fresh thyme, fresh oregano, the tomatoes that needed to be used, pronto.

The relish is chopped raw onions, cilantro, carrots, that funny red chili that was supposed to be hot but wasn't, and a garlicky herbal vinaigrette.

Frites à l'ARC

We had to sacrifice potatoes to the knife today. Julienne. Bâtonnet. This dice. That dice. So, the result is lots of potatoes in different cuts.

Serving different cuts of the same vegetable is taboo in chefdom. Chef Teresa once graded me down for exactly this kind of sin against the Gods of Gastronomy. It's just not correct. It shouldn't be done.

Yet, here I am with all these potatoes. They're sitting there in the refrigerator, soaking in water and hopefully losing starch minute by minute. It's either offend the Gods by mixing cuts, or offend them by wasting food. A real dilemma.

In the end, the ingrained adage "don't waste food" won out. I remember when they used to say, "think of all those starving people in China. Eat your broccoli". I wonder if the Chinese now say, "think of all those --- big noses in America. Finish your char siu!". Not that I ever had any problems finishing my char siu, considering that all those people in China would surely disapprove of my throwing it, uneaten, into a landfill.

So, here it is, apologies to Chef Teresa for my indiscretion. It is definitely more trouble, since three different cuts all have different cooking times. Definitely not economically logical for a restaurant, but I'm at home with nothing better to do than finish projects, study, do homework, answer e-mails, deal with cat/rat issues, try to tame a half-wild cat who might want to adopt us but isn't quite sure, bake some bread and cook the rest of the pork.

This pork is a great example of fat is flavor. Almost enough to make me want to get that tattoo for real. Oh, I never posted it...

Fat is Flavor

 There it is. Chefs have lots of tattoos. It's all the rage to work 16 hours a day then go under a buzzing needle to have something ridiculous engraved on your flesh that you can watch blur, sag and uglify as you grow older. Still, sometimes it's tempting to sheep out, join the crowd, jettison one's individuality for the sake of group fashion and nonconforming conformity. Back to the pork.

The pork is just some ingredients and lots of time. Pork shoulder, cut into 3" cubes, white wine, fresh thyme, fresh marjoram (or oregano, but the marjoram needed trimming). Bay leaves, onions, garlic, more garlic, red, ripe tomatoes that it was really time to use, Yolo Wonder peppers, salt and black pepper. Throw it all in a pot and let it simmer for about three hours until the pork is meltingly tender and imbued with all the flavors floating around it. Unlike carnitas, I don't take fry the chunks in their rendered fat. The acidity of the tomatoes and the flavors of the other vegetables just seems to make any caramelization superfluous.

Meanwhile, about those potatoes. They should have soaked overnight, since every good plate has something that requires preparing a day ahead. But since I'm breaking the rules, a few hours will have to do.

Take the potatoes out of the water, dry them. Heat some oil. Fry the three types of potatoes separately, just to where they begin to take on color. Put them on a plate and do something else for an hour or so. Just before serving time, re-heat the oil and fry the three cuts separately until they just begin to show some color. If they overcook, they'll turn bitter and that would not reflect well on ARC, especially as it's an added sin over and above mixing cuts.

Toss the potatoes with some smoked salt, maybe a bit of Maldon sea salt for big flakes, a bit of fresh ground pepper, plate with the pork and serve. Eat the shoestring (julienne) and diced potatoes first and be hasty. Once you've polished them off, your sins are extirpated and you may continue your meal at a leisurely pace, sipping some Vinho Verde to keep Bacchus happy. Might as well have one happy god on your side, right?

Bacon Salad

The French know how to eat. Really. This is proof. Bacon salad. Bien sûr, they don't call it that; they use the much more refined term, "Frisée aux lardons". Or in this case, "Frisée aux lardons, vinaigrette aux mûres". Pork fat, by any other name, would taste as sweet.

This is a great dish to munch while you're waiting for your mesquite-grilled chicken or some other port-deprived dish. One of the best things about bacon is that after eating it, you're not hungry and can wait as long as it takes for the next course to be ready.

Frisée aux lardons, sauce mûres

Ingredients

• Frisée, one head, base cut off, washed, artfully arranged on a plate in a mound of frizziness.
• Bacon, in this case uncured (that makes it health food)
• Fresh blackberry juice/pulp, seeds strained out
• Brown sugar
• White sugar
• Water
• Red wine vinegar (formerly Two Buck Chuck and mixed reds)
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Lemon juice
• Lime juice
• Garlic (this was some fancy French stuff, and it worked well)
• Pine nuts

(yeah, that's a lot of ingredients for a salad but not to worry)

Process

1. Pour the sugar (to taste) into the water in a pan, reduce down until it caramelizes (this is the base for a gastrique).
2. Add the blackberry juice, reduce some more.
3. While the gastrique is doing its thing, sauté the bacon with the garlic and pine nuts. Reserve.
4. Arrange the washed frisée leaves on a plate, making sure to create an artful and appetizing mound of leaves.
5. Spoon the bacon/pine nut mixture over the frisée.
6. Add the lemon and lime juice to the blackberry sauce.
7. Spoon or pour the sauce over the bacon mixture and frisée.
8. Taste for saltiness. It should be adequate because of the bacon. Likewise, you don't need to add oil because the bacon takes care of this for you. If it needs a bit more salt, garnish with something cool like Maldon smoked salt flakes or Hawaiian black sea salt.
9. Serve immediately while the bacon is still warm.

You don't have to use bacon. You could use Pancetta or some other fatty, porky delicacy. You could even use gésiers de canard confits... but then that would be more of a salade landaise (my absolute favorite, but getting preserved duck gizzards is a challenge here).

Corn dogs!

You're at the fair. It's summer. This is what you want. Corn dogs. Better yet, Jumbo Corn dogs. One of America's most beloved additions to the world's culinary culture. Served with ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, BBQ sauce...

So, with all the supposed American creativity going on here in the birthplace of corn dogs, why are they all pretty much the same thing? A large hot dog or Polish sausage with a stick up its nether end, battered and fried. Ok, they're tasty, but what if you were at the fair every day? Would you perhaps yearn for a flight of corn dogs, each one different? So different that you could eat them for at least a week and never repeat the experience? No, we're not talking calories or belly diameter here. Just flavor.

The basic corn dog has a flour/corn meal batter, baking powder/baking soda, salt, pepper, milk (or buttermilk) and oil (from frying). They can have egg, bacon drippings, sugar... Plus sauce.

Chef Ray at ARC once made corn dogs using Toulouse style French garlic sausages. I ate too many, and I wasn't the only one. Proof that there's room for creativity in the dog-on-stick realm.

So, after my three days at the fair, where I diligently inspected more booths than you could shake a (corn dog) stick at, I started thinking... corn dogs for a week... two weeks...

Day 1:
Basic corn dog: standard batter, beef hot dog. Get this part done and end your jonesing for the traditional.

Day 2:
Green chili corn dog: Green chili/pork/tomatillo sausage in Chili/fresh corn batter. Cilantro mayonnaise.

Day 3:
North African dog: Spicy lamb merguez sausage in Corn/cilantro batter. Harissa sauce (red peppers, chilis, garlic, olive oil...)

Day 4:
Clucking Corn Dog: Chicken mousseline in garlic/parsley corn batter, dipped in beer batter and fried again for crunch. Served with aioli.

Day 5:
Salmon dog: Thin-sliced salmon fillet, doused with lemon-dill sauce, rolled, wrapped in nori (seaweed), rolled in rice, dipped in wasabi tempura batter. Served with tempura dipping sauce.

Day 6:
HogDog: Italian pork sausage with fennel, wrapped in bacon, lard batter. Served with bacon dripping - basil mayo.

Day 7:
Squash Dog: zucchini with burdock (gobo) root inside, rosemary/garlic/sage paste, blue corn/quinoa batter, garlic aioli. All organic, of course.

Day 8: 
SheepDog: ground lamb, bulgur wheat, pine nuts, cinnamon, sesame seed batter, tahini sauce.

Day 9: 
DimSumDog: ground chicken, garlic, chives, five spice powder. Rolled in dim sum dough (like for char siu bao) and steamed. Black bean/chili sauce for dipping.

Day 10:
Melanzana: Grilled eggplant round, Parmesan cheese, Pecorino romano cheese, Garlic paste. Onion-Parmesan batter. Marinara sauce for dip. Alternate: use polenta instead of corn dog batter.

Day 11:
Molé Dog: sage/turkey/garlic/chili sausage, chocolate/chili batter, five chili sauce for dipping.

Day 12:
Fire Dog: Habanero/onion/pork sausage, bhut jolokia pepper batter, habañero chili relish.

Day 13:
Wimp Dog: Potato/turkey/chive sausage, parsley/chive batter, lemon thyme sauce. This is sort of medicinal, to help people get over the fire dog.

Day 14:
Mastiff: One pound ground beef/pork bacon sausage, horseradish batter, beef jus for dipping. This is so they don't leave hungry.

There are still a few more options, but two weeks of corn dogs should keep anyone happy. If you make any of these, please let me know how they came out.

Asian pork with sumo wraps

Digging through the pantry and the refrigerator can lead to some interesting recipes.

Asian wraps
Serves four
Ingredients

• 2 pounds boneless country style pork (or leaner if you like), cut into 1" cubes
• salt to taste
• black pepper to taste
• cloves, ground (to taste)
• cinnamon, ground (to taste)
• fennel seeds, ground (to taste)
• New Mexico chili powder (to taste)
• 1 cup garlic chives, fresh
• 1 cup snow peas, fresh
• Sumo mandarin
• Flour tortillas

Process

1. Toss the pork cubes in the spices, salt.
2. Heat oil in wok, brown meat. Remove and set aside.
3. Quickly sauté the snow peas in the wok, set aside.
4. Sauté the garlic chives in the wok, set aside.
5. Finish cooking the meat in the wok. 
6. Heat the tortillas, set aside
7. Slice the sumo mandarin into about 1/2" to 1" pieces or wedges. Set aside.
8. Toss the meat, peas and chives in the wok to mix together quickly and re-heat. Adjust seasoning if needed.
9. Place the warm meat in a bowl, bring the tortillas and sumo slices to the table and assemble the wraps. 
10. Enjoy.

Torta de carnitas

 

French baguette à l'ancienne...

...meets Mexican carnitas. The world will never be the same.

Before I really get started, I'd like to say one thing. Carnitas has ONLY three ingredients. Pork, Salt, Water. The water doesn't really count since it evaporates during cooking, leaving really only two ingredients. Any more - even a little hint of pepper, citrus, garlic - is overkill. The other secret is to use very low heat to coax out all that porky goodness.

So, as everyone knows by now with torta madness sweeping the land, a torta is a Mexican sandwich. There are a lot of variations beyond the traditional bolillo bread.

This is my take on what is fast becoming as ubiquitous as tacos. Instead of a bolillo, I used a French baguette à l'ancienne. This is a complex, slow fermented wonder that transforms the lowly torta into something worthy of passing up a meal at the French Laundry. The meat: carnitas, slow braised then delicately fried in its own rendered fat. The salsa: cilantro, pineapple, serrano pepper, green onion. The pièce de resistance: fresh slices of avocado.

Just FYI, I've never seen a baguette à l'ancien outside of France - but they can indeed be made here with American flour, yeast and a good formula. And a fair amount of time.

¡Cemitas!

¡Que rico!

A trip to Los Angeles just wouldn't be the same without a cemita for lunch. Here in Sacramento, nobody seems to even know what a cemita is, let alone where to actually get one. Well, the answer to the second part of that question is simple: drive to L.A.

You can make your own cemitas, if you can find a source for papalo or Papaloquelite. Papalo is the herb that gives a cemita its unique taste, although the chipotle sauce has a bit to say about the flavor, too. It's like precolumbian cilantro, but from a totally different plant family.  I suppose you could substitute cilantro for papalo, but enough substitutions and you'll have a carnitas burger with chipotle sauce and not a real  cemita autentica.

Making a cemita should not be too difficult, if you already know how to make bread and chipotle salsa - just follow the sketch above. The buns are more of a French style lean dough than a fluffy, puffy bun style dough or or bolillo like they use for tortas. I would start by adding tomato paste to canned chipotle to reduce the burn factor, then experiment a bit by adding perhaps a bit of cumin, a bit of garlic, a bit of Mexican oregano. Quesillo is a type of string cheese. The meat is relatively simple, and all that's left is some hefty slices of avocado.

You can vary the meat, too. Although I like carnitas, you can also use milanesa (pounded, breaded chicken or veal). There are so many ingredients, you could probably even leave it out for an ovo-lacto version.

If you're not going to make your own, and you're in Los Angeles, my favorite place to get this things is at Cemitas Poblanas Elvirita, 3010 East First Street, across the street from the cemetery at Evergreen. You may not see the place at first; it's kind of nondescript. It's pretty Spartan inside, too. Some tables, a big menu on the wall, a counter, a cooler along the wall and someone to take your order, preferably in Spanish. You can get the chipotle sauce on the side to let people unaccustomed to this sauce ease in gradually. Better yet, if they don't like it that leaves more for you. Beware, though. Some people's intestines don't take kindly to this kind of shock. For seasoned chiliheads, it should not pose any problems. I like the carnitas because it's moist, but the chicken - breaded like milanesa - is a good choice, too.

Alas, there don't seem to be any cemitas served in Sacramento restaurants.