Charcutepalooza and Food52



I absolutely could not resist.  When Food52 posted this past week's contest requiring a pairing of citrus and olives, and I knew I would be bringing a pancetta and comté cheese quiche to a Superbowl party, I had to enter....Plus, Mrs. Wheelbarrow had, just the week before, announced the new Food52 and Charcutepalooza partnership.  It was fate....

I love orange and olive salads.  I like the color of black olives, although my favorite for taste is the picholine.  Since I live in a very rural area in north Idaho, I was lucky enough to receive a jar of mixed "French" olives for Christmas.  This became the perfect moment to enjoy those olives.  I know that some are picholines and some are niçoise, but other than that, it's a gamble.  At least they still had flavor.  I put several in the salad.  I used both navel and blood oranges because I cannot resist the color.  And, at the moment, we have Maya sweet onions at the local grocery store, so that became my onion of choice.  Actually, they are sweet, but they don't hold a candle to our almost local WallaWallas.

As for the quiche, well, I have been making a number of pancetta dishes for the February Charcutepalooza challenge, and for the Superbowl party I thought a quiche would be a good "finger food."  Since the pancetta has such a different flavor than bacon, and since I had some Comté, I thought that sounded like a rather good combination and, from comments made, people really liked it.  Two challenges, two simple and classic dishes. What could be better?

Orange Suprème and French Olive Salad with Sherry Vinaigrette

1 navel orange, suprèmed

1 blood orange, suprèmed

French olives, to tasted, pitted

Thinly sliced sweet onion

Romaine lettuce

Salt and pepper

Suprème both oranges by removing all membranes, skin, and pith.  Many videos are available online.  If you're relatively skillful with a knife, hold the peeled orange in your hand, over a bowl, while cutting out the membranes.  This saves the juice for the salad.

Using the flat blade of a knife, push down on the olives to remove the pits. 

Very thinly slice about a quarter of a sweet onion. 

With your hands, tear enough romaine lettuce for two into your preferred bite sized pieces, add salt and pepper to taste, and mix in the simple sherry dressing.

Top with some navel and blood orange suprème segments, olives, and onion.

Sherry Vinaigrette for Two

1 T. Spanish sherry vinegar

2 T. olive oil

1 T. juice from orange suprèmes

Mix thoroughly.

Pancetta and Comté Quiche

Pie Crust:

1 1/4 c. flour

Pinch of salt

1/2 c. chilled butter (unsalted)

scant 1/4 c. ice water

Combine flour and salt in food processor bowl.  Cut the butter into approximately 12-14 small pieces.  Add to flour.  Pulse on and off until it resembles coarse crumbs.  Drizzle in water until it loosely comes together after several more pulses.  Lie large crumbles on plastic wrap,  Using the wrap over your hands, slowly mold this into a flat round.  Refridgerate for about 15-20 minutes.

Remove from fridge and roll, turning, until large enough for quiche pan.  Make sure you have enough to cover the edges.  Cut off excess.

Filling:

1 1/2 cups shredded Comté cheese

4 eggs

1 3/4 c. half-and-half or cream

1/2 tsp salt

pinch of nutmeg

4 slices cooked pancetta, cut into large dice

1 T. butter

Sprinkle 1/4 - 1/3 of the cheese over the bottom of pie shell.  Beat the eggs with half-and-half, salt, and nutmeg.  Fold in the pancetta and cheese.  Pour into quiche crust and dot with butter.  Bake at 375F for 35-40 minutes, until middle is slightly puffed and golden brown.  Let cool and serve.



Pancetta Heaven

Pancetta beginnings.  So, before the February challenge, my husband and I had already received a pork belly for Christmas, so, we ate half the pork belly braised, and now we're making foods using our cured pork belly.  However, I want to be part of the monthly challenges and deadlines for Charcutepalooza so last Thursday, I picked up another half of pork belly.  On Friday I started the curing process and have been massaging the salt and herb into it everyday.  We'll probably do the tight roll on Saturday.

In the meantime, my dear friend, Mark, gave me four wild goose breasts that a friend had given him.  Mark is sooo generous!  Since they had no skin, and, being wild, no fat, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them.  But, in true Charcutepalooza spirit I said to myself, "wild goose breast confit"!  I have enough duck fat frozen so I only needed to defrost the fat and season the goose breast (again, Charcuterie).  Tomorrow morning the confit begins...sigh...I can already feel the love.

So Much Pork Belly

The pork belly was a Christmas present from our son to his father.  However, after wringing my hands and claiming that two pancettas would feed us the rest of our lives, I did get half the pork belly.  Devious, I know.  Actually, I don't think my husband minded because I told him I had been dying to try braised pork belly.

Our son bought the pork belly, special order, from our local USDA butcher, Woods Meats, aka Wood - (Bar) X Ranch.  We like them: no hormones, no antibiotics, no steroids, locally grown, grass fed all summer, and it can't get more pastoral than Woods.  Once presented to his dad, we cut the pork belly in half, and started the curing process for the pancetta.  Worrier that I am, I wanted to make sure that conditions were as close to pristine as possible, posted earlier on this blog.  Needless to say, it turned out perfect: now I'm afraid to do it again in order to quality for the grand prize at Charcutepalooza.  Plus, that's a lot of pancetta for two people but ah, what we sacrifice for love.

Back to that pork belly.  I have been reading for some time about braised pork belly and when I finally got my hot little hands on that half a pork belly, I knew I wanted something close to heaven.  Perusing the internet, I happened upon Anne Burrell's Crispy Mustard Braised Pork Belly. As "sous-chef" to Mario Batali on Iron Chef America, Food Network's Anne Burrell, with the tight, straight skirts under her chef's jacket, spiked blond hair, and her seemingly lackadaisical but incredibly trained approach to food, offered the braised pork belly recipe of my most decadent dreams.  It had my favorite ingredients, including fennel, onion, and mustard and that was enough to capture my imagination.

The preparations began, and the house smelled like my little bit of heaven for six+ hours.  One of the comments at the recipe's site said "OMG.  Words fail me," and that is exactly how I felt.  I made plain, steamed Viking potatoes, so that they could soak up all that luscious onion/fennel/mustard/pork fat flavor.  In order to cut some of that fat with some acidity I added some sauteed cabbage with the addition of some sauvignon blanc wine.  That helped, but next time I would just make German slaw for both the acidity and the texture.  This time around, it really didn't matter much how I tried to accentuate the main course because on its own it won first place in my heart.

Addendum:  I didn't add as much fennel and onion as I should have.  Fennel, which grow like a weed along the freeways of southern California, where I was raised, is $3 for a an almost dried out bulb.  Highway robbery!  Also, I'm almost out of my own onions so I've been conserving...  it must be the depression influence of my grandma upon me.  But the meat, which cooks like a confit in its own fat, that was the star!

So for anyone ambitious enough to make their own bacon, their own guanciale, their own pancetta, seriously think about braising the other half of that pork belly.

A Little Bit of Heaven

I have been wanting some good, very French, very Parisian brioche for months!  Months!   Around Christmas, one of my favorite food bloggers, A Hunger Artist, said he had just made brioche on his Facebook page.  I requested, graciously enough it seems, for the recipe and he obliged me.  Last week I made this unbelievably delicious brioche loaf and have been eating it every day for breakfast. It has been my "little bit of heaven" for a week, but, alas, that week is over.

The crab apple jelly that I spread on the brioche was made by me last fall.  I cannot even believe that I've had a beautiful, bountiful crab apple tree for about fifteen years and never thought to make crab apple jelly....  What was I thinking???  I guess it's because by that time of the year, I have so much harvesting, so many canned good to put up, and so little time on my hands (I teach), that my mind couldn't handle one more chore.  How sad!  Because this is one of the best jellies I have ever tasted!  Right up there with this is chokecherry jelly.  Wow!

So I started off the year with a lovely taste in my mouth and now I have two more taste/cooking goals to keep me busy: Charcutepalooza and Michael Ruhlman's Bread Baking Month.  I had been wanting to do a year with both of these favorite foods and now I have my inspiration. I'm a bit behind on the bread baking, and I may not do every loaf because that is a lot of bread for just two people, so to begin I will try either the Classic Rye Bread with Caraway Seeds or the Ciabatta.

I missed the first Charcuterie challenge, duck prosciutto, but my husband made the same recipe last year so we may or may not try that challenge this year.  We started "curing" our Pancetta before Christmas, and just brought it in the other day.  It looks superb and tastes so much better than anything we ever bought in the stores.  I'll try to post how we are now using the pancetta and what we did with the other half of the pork belly. 

Since dinner utilized some of the pancetta and I am completely satiated, I'll wait until another day to describe that fulfilling dinner.

Pancetta

Need I say more? Of course, that's a lot of pancetta but I'll use it. In the meantime, much of it is frozen in convenient packages.

This was really the brainchild of my husband. He wanted to make pancetta. Since I'm the chef in the family, I had to rain on his parade. I think he deserved that for so often hogging my book, Charcuterie, by Ruhlman and Polcyn.

We followed the recipe in the book exactly. I worried about the humidity, so I quickly ordered a hygrometer and calibrator online. We have a building outside that houses a pool table and some exercise equipment so we decided to use that as our place to hang the pancetta. We set the heat at 55F, and made sure the hygrometer measured around 60% humidity. It hung for two weeks and this is the result.

It's delicious! Luckily we rolled and tied it very tightly so mold did not become a problem. I never knew pancetta could taste even better than what the Italian deli in Spokane has. This is the way to go.

I Love Nepitella!

I love nepitella! Also known as Lesser Calamint, or, in Latin as calamintha nepeta, this herb grows wild in Italy, especially in Tuscany and Umbria, as well as in other parts of Europe and North Africa. It tastes like a cross between mint and oregano. Although the mint is the primary flavor it gains a warmth and fullness from the oregano flavor, thus it not only brightens a dish but adds richness as well. It is a beautiful albeit petite plant, growing about twelve to eighteen inches in height and only about twelve inches in width. Small, lavender/pink flowers appear before it goes to seed. Watch Fabio Trabocchi's video to what it looks like and how to use it.

It is traditionally matched with mushrooms as well as artichokes but I use it with so many different ingredients; indeed, wherever I could use mint and/or oregano, I usually opt for the nepitella. I found a website that reports that in Italy a sprig of nepitella is often packaged with mushrooms. Although this website is Henry's Farm, I could only find the information about nepitella through a google search. I've often used this and other mints in a tea for an upset stomach, but I guess not everyone should feel free to use nepitella this way, because, as Rosalind Creasy reports in her book, The Edible Herb Garden, "...evidence indicates that nepitella should be avoided by [a] pregnant woman."

It's supposed to withstand cold to almost zero degrees, but it has survived my north Idaho wintry days of at lest ten degrees below freezing. It doesn't seed itself like it does in Italy, and I'm not sure why. However, it does seem happy to be growing in my sandy, glacial silt soil. And, whether rainy or dry, it seems to thrive year in and year out.

I used my nepitella yesterday in a white bean salad that I brought to my friends' annual July 4th celebration on the Moyie River. Strangely for north Idaho, it was cold and rainy, so instead of cold greens, I wanted to bring something a bit hardier, but still a salad. So I decided to make an Italian style white bean salad. I had some canned white beans so I could be somewhat lazy and use them to make one of my favorite dishes.

I sauteed some onion in olive oil with some salt, then added garlic and cut up cherry tomatoes. After the tomatoes just began to break, I added the beans, stirred well, and removed from the heat. Then I added my favorite herb, nepitella. Finally, after the beans came to room temperature, I added freshly squeezed lemon juice and some chiffonaded spinach from my garden. It was so yummy! And the ingredient that really made it special was the nepitella.

Grilled Venison

Ah, heading into summer with some grilled venison, marinated in red wine, a bit of Dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and some drops of already reduced balsamic vinegar. I threw it on the barbecue, one minute each side, and it was oh, so good! Red inside and dark brown outside. Mmmm.... However, it did have a problem: I so wanted steaks that I left them whole instead of making kabobs. Yeah, I should have cut it up because it was cut so oddly that it really was meant to be three individual pieces instead of one with silver skin separating the pieces. Ugh! Nothing chewier than silver skin. My bad! or lazy as the case may be. But everything else was perfect.



I ended up being so busy in my garden (a rainforest of weeds), and, I didn't know that my boys had eaten most of the potatoes while I was away, so instead of finishing the potatoes on the barbecue I made mashed potatoes and carrots with a bit of onion. They were delicious, especially with the reduced meat marinade, finished with some butter, flowing from the meat onto the potatoes. Finally, I topped the whole thing with mushrooms that had been reduced with white wine, a few droplets of the reduced balsamic vinegar and finished with butter. It was a feast! And a great way to say goodbye to spring and welcome the endless sun of summer. Yeah, even in north Idaho.