Oh I have made some deliciousness to send out into the world in the last couple days and will be heading home today to create some more!
So next month we are doing a special feature menu centered around Belgium and I want the cheese boards to be the real deal. I spent yesterday making up a country style pate with pistachios and orange & fennel chicken terrine. Love them both. Ive been on a pate buying kick lately for home, but just havent found one that I am over the moon about. I compare them to my own and am always kind of disappointed in the flat flavor. Ive gotten it from Crested Duck at Pittsburgh Public Market, D'Artagnan from Market District and they were both good, but fell kind of flat for me. Honestly I think its because when they are made the folks forget that anything served cold has to taste over seasoned when hot to taste right when chilled. If you cook off a sample piece it should taste salty almost when its eaten so when pressed & chilled its right. Either way I had a how to make & press pate lesson with my production guy, unmoled those puppies today and they are PERFECT. This makes me happy.
The terrines are something I like a lot. They are a bit "old school" as far as when they were popular, but when they are made well they are simply divine. They are generally made with a relatively universal meat - like chicken, turkey, even pork - and are garnished with so many different things. Personally I love a dried cherry & cashew terrine, or a spinach & feta. More or less they are a shaped & seasoned forcemeat that is poached very slowly, chilled & served cold. The one I made yesterday was fresh fennel braised in fresh squeezed orange juice with some orange zest. I generally am not a fan of fennel, but these came out absolutely perfect. The terrines are really nice as a luncheon dish, accoutrement for a cheese board or on finger sandwiches with some flavored mayo.
Also made a beer brined roasted half chicken that is going to be served with a dried cherry stock reduction sauce. This dish w that sauce may get me into my restaurants to eat multiple times when Im off work in May. Brined the chickens for about 36 hours in a Belgian beer brine, spritzed them with some extra virgin olive oil and then dusted with herbs de provence & cracked black pepper. The brine makes them so tender & the skin crisped up beautifully. The sauce for this is one of my absolute favorites veal stock reduction sauces made with a cherry lambic & dried cherries, oh so perfect for this chicken dish. I cant wait to eat it fully assembled.
Loving that I am having a close to flawless cooking week :-)
Tonight I am adventuring into the wide & wonderful world of sausage making. My Popop (Dad's Dad) was a foreman for Armour for years & used to make, every Christmas & Easter, a special fresh Kielbasa with my Nana that was a family favorite. He didnt use any curing salts so it was gray, but it was rich & loaded with garlic and spices. It is one of those food memories that I will never ever forget. I remember watching him make it, getting yelled at by my Nana to get my fingers away from the manual meat grinder, the smell of it simmering on the stove when I walked into their house that meant HOLIDAYS, the amazement of watching him stuff the natural casings with ease and wondering if I could do that too (for the record every time I tried back then it was an amusing FAIL, but I never gave up); it didnt start out as one of my favorites, but I always ate it and as I got older I learned to love it ~ the gray color was a turn off for me, once I got over it it was wonderful!
Fast forward to now - I'm no longer a kid, my Popop has been gone for close to a decade now, my Nana, thanks to a fall, is just starting her new life in an assisted living home and the huge family gatherings of my past are no more. I actually miss having the 30 of us all together for the holidays like we used to, but it just doesnt happen that way anymore. My uncle & his family moved to Florida. My Aunt & her family have decided their status & their McMansion make them too good to spend the holidays at home with their family so they are skiing, beaching or golfing for every major holiday. I can honestly say I dont think Ive actually spoken to my Aunt in about 5 years, not due to some huge falling out - we just live on different planets and she happens to think my planet is a scary scary place.
Since Popop passed my Dad has tried, valiantly, to recreate what Popop used to make. Now in traditional old school methods there are no recipes to follow ~ you ask Nana now and she says "oh you need a bowl of fresh ground pork the size of my favorite ceramic mixing bowl I got as a wedding gift, you need the marjoram from the 4 plants in the yard to dry over the winter (thats a measurement in her world) and enough garlic so you can smell it"...so yeah not very helpful. But I get it. Thats the way I cook. I cook from taste, not from a book or recipe. If Ive eaten it there is a really good chance I can recreate it next to perfectly within 2, at the max 3, shots at it. Its a pretty awesome skill if I do say so myself. Dad's attempts have been pretty disastrous, really. He kept trying to make it lean. Lean & sausage are not ever meant to go together. He also isnt a fan of seasoning, so his 2 or 3 attempts have been dry, hard & bland....sounds delicious, huh?
So this year I have decided to try to resurrect this tradition and am going to try to make Popop's Kielbasa for Easter. Ive got the goods at home (sans the marjoram dried from the plants in Nana's yard, some dried from Penzy's will have to do) and plan to spend my evening with The Mister grinding 20 pounds of pork butt & salt pork, seasoning it up & stuffing it into yards of natural casings. If I am lucky I will be able to make the neat coils of kielbasa he used to make and neatly wrap in butcher paper to take to Mom & Dad's on Sunday. I miss my Pops...he was a ornery old man but he was our ornery old man & I hope I can do it justice. At the very least I know Ill be able to get it closer than Dad did :-)
I will have to let you know how this turns out - if it is a success I am also going to try to make Nana's Cinnamon Cake on Saturday. it isnt really a cake as much as it is a sweet egg bread, similar to a Challah with raisins actually, but instead of braiding its loafed up and topped with this cinnamon crust that kind of reminds me of that sweet cinnamony stuff on top of the sun dried tomato bread at Panera. Its one of those recipes that you have to follow to the letter or it doesnt come out right. Mom has been making it for years and its pretty good, but she goes back & forth between undercooking, which makes it wicked heavy and doughy, or overcooking, which makes it dry & hard. Its not a recipe I have ever struggled with & Mom is up to her eyeballs dealing with 2 Nanas in 2 different assisted living joints that both want her undivided attention ~ not jealous of her at all.
Hope you all have a great holiday however you plan to spend it. I plan to spend mine in a food & beer induced coma :-) Happy Weekend!!!
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