Salmon-head soup
With this one, I’ve set a personal record for the highest ratio of work to results. It took more than two hours to turn this:
… into something much less imposing:
Root Beer Manhattan
It’s been quiet here. Long did I wander in the desert, working all the damn time, arriving home late and too exhausted to cook, living on the same Bittman chicken recipe and delivery food, with nothing to show for it but the perfect ingredients for delivery pizza (alfredo sauce, garlic, ham and green onions, with jalapeños for the adventurous. Trust me on this one.) But I am back, with something wonderful: the root beer Manhattan.
It turns out you can buy stainless steel straws on Amazon!
And it also turns out you can get old and nerdy enough that instead of thinking “That looks totally useless, how could any loadie snort anything through an eight-inch straw, the ones I’ve met all have the lung capacity of a chain-smoking raver with a Peter Pan complex,” you think “Damn, those would look great with the cocktails I’m making up for my food blog,” and then you buy tiny baby-bottle brushes for cleaning them, too.
The Softball
A.k.a. “what happens when you’re trying to make a cocktail out of whatever’s lying around once you’ve run out of real booze.” This is usually disastrous, cf. that one cocktail I made with sloe gin and liquid smoke that tasted like McDonald’s BBQ sauce. But this time, it made for a slightly fruity, slightly herbal, nicely balanced drink.
Peach-corn chowder
It’s summer! It’s the season for corn! And stone fruit! And bizarre exercises in overthinking food! Which isn’t actually a seasonal thing at all, chez PBR Fisher.
Manhattan Greens
“Manhattan” as in the cocktail, not the place, since Oakland is about as far from Manhattan as you can get.
More jam experiments. I think I might have to start making art for every flavor. Which leads to the eternal question: How the hell do I draw a Schezuan peppercorn?
Jamie Oliver: Pork belly roast »
Essentially, pork belly with a crispy layer of something resembling chicharrones on top.
Takes like three hours all told, but Christ on a pony, this is AMAZING. I made it with a couple pounds of side pork from Taylor’s Sausages, a.k.a. the best thing about my neighborhood.
The recipe is classic Jamie Oliver: simple; writing that’s casual verging on twee; and FUCKING DELICIOUS. This was the first time I can remember eating bite-sized chunks of pure buttery pork-belly fat with my fingers instead of politely steering overlarge chunks to the edge of the plate. I poured some of the half-reduced gravy over this near the end — we mostly skipped the gravy since we’d finished all but two bites of the pork by the time the gravy had reduced — and we, uh …
… drank the pork-and-gravy dregs right from the bowl.
Check it out yourself:
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pork-recipes/pork-belly-roast
iPad: the cookbook that plays music and that you can wipe down with a sponge.
