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Burgers!

I've been burger crazy, lately.

It started last summer, when I made the grilled pork burgers recipe from the Lucques cookbook--ground pork, chorizo, and bacon burgers, topped with romesco and manchego cheese: yes, they're incredible--but it's kicked in properly over the last couple of weeks, as I've been making burgers from Great Burgers.

Thus far, our favorite has been the Negimaki burgers, with the Picadillo burgers (which I made tonight) a close second. But the best part is perfecting the mixing, the timing, and the process of making the burger: I like to get better and better at things as I make them more often, and the benefit of burgers is that I can make many variations on the burger whilst still improving the basic techniques.

Foie Gras

Incanto, one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, recently posted "Shock & Foie", a long & thoughtful piece about why they'll continue to serve foie gras at the restaurant:

Working to ban something that 99% of people never eat is not an act requiring great moral or physical courage in the same vein as was, say, the fight for civil rights in the U.S. or the fight for self rule in India. By comparison, the anti-foie gras movement is – at best – founded upon a shrewd political calculation in which the professed indignation of a few is used to harness the indifference of the many to the inherent political cowardice of elected officials, in order to achieve a desired political outcome. In essence, it's a confidence game in which participating meat-eaters, by agreeing to condemn something that they don't care about, receive the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail card, i.e., the right to feel slightly less guilty as they bite into that factory-farmed McNugget.

And from Serious Eats, a photo of Incanto's corzetti with foie gras, trotters, dates, and pangrattato. Now, I'm hungry.

Knowing your stuff

From Michael Ruhlman:

I repeat, a few of the best ways to improve your skills in the kitchen is, one, to use really sharp knives, two, to buy grapefruit in February, and three, to know why you buy grapefruit in February.

What I love most about this--as with a lot of things that Ruhlman writes--is the focus on technique, the right (simple) tools, and knowing your stuff.

Coconut Cupcakes

I've blogged about coconut cake; now, coconut cupcakes.

I made Mini Coconut Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting for a super bowl party the other day, and they were delicious.

If you're going to make these cupcakes from the recipe, note that the frosting recipe seems to make way more than the cupcakes require. Or, maybe, I just applied the frosting in a really miserly way. But so I halved the frosting recipe, and it still made more than enough frosting for 24 mini cupcakes and a 9x9x2 inch cake. Which was, of course, fine with us.

The Modern Pantry

I loved Mark Bittman's article about the modern pantry (via Ruhlman, who has a great comment thread going on the subject).

076 | Arborio rice
Originally uploaded by woordenaar

One of my absolute pantry favorites is arborio rice, because I love making & eating risotto. There are so many things you can do with it!

Just over the past couple of months, I've made a cauliflower risotto, a beet risotto, a sausage & pea risotto, a kabocha squash & arugula risotto, and a wild mushroom risotto. And those are just the ones I remember.

Once you get the technique down, risotto's easy (and even soothing) to make. A truly great fall & winter food.

Thanksgiving Food

Thanksgiving dinner:

Persimmon and Pomegranate salad with Arugula and Hazelnuts, from the Lucques cookbook: a delicious and light start to the heavier courses to come. (Watch Suzanne Goin and Martha Stewart make this salad.)

Chestnut Stuffing, as delicious as the first time.

Roast Chicken with potatoes. Simple and wonderful.

Pumpkin Pie with Spiced Walnut Streusel. Lovely the first night still warm; even better the second day cold; and, I'm guessing, better yet the third day. I'll know, tomorrow!

But the best of all, frankly, were the sandwiches we made tonight: leftover roast chicken, stuffing, cranberry sauce, homemade mayonnaise, and frisée, all on toasted white bread; served alongside roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, the only way to make them: roasted for 20-25 minutes at a high temperature until they're almost blackened on the outside.

Bread

Oh, the things that you can do with bread!

1. Suzanne Goin's Chestnut Stuffing (from Lucques), with fennel, pancetta, and many other wonderful things. This was the side dish to a veal chop, marinated in thyme, rosemary, garlic, and olive oil, and which was itself incredible, and yet: I'm going back for the stuffing.

2. Bread Pudding, from Simply Recipes. Odds are, you've got everything you need to make this bread pudding; I decided to make it at 9pm, because I wanted something sweet, and I had leftover bread from the stuffing, and, because I'm a normal person, I have milk, vanilla, eggs, sugar, and spices. And that's all you need! And it's absolutely delicious.

Steak!

Dinner tonight: a boneless ribeye (around 10oz), pan-roasted, with a shallot & red wine sauce; fries [1]; and a watercress salad dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Absolutely wonderful.

And here's a photo, albeit taken with an iPhone:

[1] This is a great, easy recipe for french fries. But that recipe there doesn't say how long the fries will take, which makes it difficult to time against the other stuff you might be making. So, from my experience, it's somewhere between 15 minutes, or around the time it'll take to heat your pan, cook your steak, and let it rest for a couple of minutes. Which is sort of perfect, really.

Coconut Cake

Last night we watched this coconut cake episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay, where Flay challenged the head chef at Charleston's Peninsula Grill to a coconut cake challenge. And Bobby Flay actually won, which seems ludicrous to me; now, obviously I didn't taste his coconut cake, but in 2004, we ate the coconut cake from the Peninsula Grill, and I can say, with certainty, that it's the greatest cake in the entire world (and it better be, with 3 pounds--12 sticks--of butter in it!).

The broccoli people

This is my absolute nightmare: little tiny green heads on broccoli stalks. I can never eat broccoli again. (via Serious Eats)