On Monday I really, really didn’t feel like going anywhere, including the grocery store. I rummaged through the refrigerator, then tossed a tweet out asking for suggestions based on my main available ingredients: macaroni noodles, fresh tomatoes, feta and salami. Cook Local (as well as my cousin Katherine) came through with an improvised pasta idea – thanks! I decided to add arugula at the last moment, partly to add color but mostly because a friend gave us a bag of arugula that still needed to be finished off – I had forgotten to list it among my assets.

The truffled salami here was in my IFBC goody bag. It was extremely fragrant – when I cut into it the smell of truffles infused the entire house and lingered for hours and hours. I used half of it in this pasta and we ate the other half last night, sliced thinly and tucked into hot gougères alongside Negroni cocktails. To quote James Oseland, Oh my god that was so good.

The main thing I learned here is that feta is a great thing to add to pasta. I’ve recently started buying an Israeli sheep feta that is gloriously soft and salty, and it vanishes into hot macaroni like butter. I had thought about making an actual white sauce for more of a mac-and-cheese effect, but it really wasn’t necessary. Yum.

Truffled Salami Macaroni

A highly improvised recipe. Serves two with lots of leftovers.

• half a truffled salami, finely diced
• two handfuls fresh ripe tomatoes, halved or quartered
• one handful arugula, roughly chopped
• half a pound macaroni noodles, cooked and drained (reserve a cup of the cooking water)
• random quantity feta cheese (maybe a cup?), crumbled

Saute the salami in a little olive oil, then add the tomatoes. Once they are heated through, toss in the arugula to wilt, then stir in the macaroni. Sprinkle the feta over the top and gently stir it all together until the cheese is melted. Add leftover pasta water if the sauce needs loosening. Serve immediately.

When we flew into Kansas City last week, getting in just in time for dinner, we were sorely tempted to go back to our favorite BBQ joint, Oklahoma Joe’s. In the pursuit of knowledge, however, we felt that we really needed to try somewhere new – you know, so we can say with authority where our favorite KC barbecue is. We’ve tried Gates, Smokestack and Joe’s, but we had never made it to one which is often touted as the best in the city: L.C.’s Bar-B-Q.

Located on the corner of Blue Parkway and Sni-a-Bar Road, just off of the eastern curve of 435, L.C.’s isn’t hard to find – there are even signs on the freeway to get you there. It’s not much to look at, and they don’t serve beer, so I would suggest getting takeout – that’s what almost everyone else was doing when we stopped in. If you eat in, though, you get a big bottle of extra sauce and plenty of paper towels.  We also got to eavesdrop on a really interesting conversation L.C. was having with another guy at the corner table.

I knew the servings would be generous, but we ordered plenty anyway: burnt ends, a sliced beef sandwich, fried okra, and baked beans. The sandwich came with fries as well, which were obviously cut in-house.

The burnt ends were fantastic, fatty and rich and doused in L.C.’s tart, cuminy sauce. They were served piled heavily on plain white bread, and pretty much needed to be eaten with a fork.

The beef sandwich was awesome, almost too big to bite into. The smoke ring on the beef was brilliant pink, and the meat was tender and flavorful. It was modestly sauced, which really gave the flavor of the smoked meat a chance to shine.

We love fried okra, and can hardly ever get it on the west coast. This was blazingly hot and crisp. The only thing I wished for was a dish of mayo or ranch dressing to dip it in.

And the baked beans! They were thick, sweet with molasses, and well studded with shredded beef. Some of the best beans I’ve had. I could easily make a meal of a bowl of these and some cornbread.

We ate about half of all this, and took the rest home to my in-laws’ house, where it all got eaten for lunch the next day. L.C. does not skimp on his servings. I would love to come back and get a vast amount of takeout from here, especially ribs, and have a proper feast with Boulevard beer and lots of napkins.

By the way, this post marks the end of NaBloPoMo! Posting may be a bit less frequent for a while, but I guarantee I won’t stop talking about food anytime soon.

If you ever hop off of Interstate 5 north of Mount Vernon and take Chuckanut Drive north as a scenic route to Bellingham (a side trip well worth taking, except when the road is closed by rockslides), you’ll pass by a number of great opportunities for local food buying. Without going very far out of your way, you can hit Slough Food for cheese, wine and salumi, Breadfarm for wonderful bread, cookies and crackers, Taylor Shellfish for oysters, Samish Bay Cheese (for cheese, obviously), and the Edison Inn for shuffleboard and a burger. Just to mention a few.

Just recently, we started noticing a bison farm out on Chuckanut, advertising meat for sale. We’d never cooked with bison, that I could think of, and weren’t really sure what it might be like. So a few weeks ago Jon was out getting us some oysters and he made an executive decision to stop at Rockin R  Bison. He bought a pound of chuck steak and a pound of “bacon.”

The chuck steak was easy, we cut it thinly and seared it to make a Thai-style stirfry with bamboo shoots. It was delicious, with a strong beefy flavor but marbled enough to be tender. But what to do with bison bacon?

The first few strips I tried cooking in a skillet like pork bacon. It didn’t work particularly well – the meat was done well before the fat rendered, and the taste was very much like beef jerky – not what I really want with my breakfast. Then Jon had a brainwave – use it in a Sichuan-style stirfry, based on the dry-fried beef recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s book!

It worked really, really well. Well enough that I might actually consider buying bison bacon again just to make this. I got home from work as things were just finishing up, so I wasn’t involved in the cooking (other than reminding him to actually use the bok choi we had bought at the farmer’s market, instead of wondering why there wasn’t anything green in the stirfry) – so I asked him to tell me how it was done.

Here’s his explanation of how the stirfry came together. The bok choi was in little tiny fresh heads from Colony Creek Farm, and the mushrooms he refers to were oyster mushrooms from Frog’s Song Farm, which he sauteed with just a little garlic and green scallions to go on the side. The saltiness of the bacon was perfectly balanced by the greens and the mushrooms, along with some plain white rice.

From Jon:

So, as near as I can remember, here’s what I did.

Prep:
I cut the base off of one of the baby bok choys.  I cut my finger [he was using my new Shun knife from IFBC - it's incredibly sharp].  I rinsed my finger off and got a bandage.  I cut the bases off of the rest of the baby bok choys.  I tossed the bok choy in the colander and rinsed them off (they were rather dirty).  Next, I cut the leaf part off of the stalk part of the bok choy, then cut the leaves into strips and the stalks into short lengths.  I julienned a bunch of ginger (1-1/2″ maybe?), and the white parts of two scallions (the green parts went in the mushrooms, along with some garlic).  I then cut the bacon on the bias into thin strips, similar in size to the bok choy leaf strips.  Finally, I mixed about a tablespoon of chile-garlic sauce with a little less than a tablespoon of black beans and the last little bit of the chile-black bean sauce (the recipe calls for 2-3 Tbsp of chile-black bean sauce).

Cooking:
I heated the wok, and when it was hot, I added some oil.  I then dumped in all of the bacon and stir fried for ~10 min.  I then pushed the bacon to one side, tilted the wok and pressed the bacon so that the oil ran down into the empty part of the wok.  I stirfried the chile-black bean sauce in the oil for ~30 seconds, then added the ginger and scallions and stirfried that for another ~30 seconds.  I then stirred it all up and added the bok choy, stirfrying for maybe another 2 minutes.  Ta-da!

It’s been a fragrant week around here.

First, I was walking home for lunch, and was waylaid by a neighbor who was engaged in cutting down several large white lilac bushes that had been attempting to take down some powerlines behind her house. The lilacs were in full bloom, and she insisted on cutting me a large bouquet to take home before they wilted on the downed shrub. I put them on the kitchen table, and every time the evening sun hits them the room fills with the scent of lilac.

Then, of course, the daphne odora is in bloom by the front porch steps. It’s old for a daphne, and beginning to list alarmingly to starboard (I may have to attempt some pruning this year), but when it blooms the smell is an astonishing sugary explosion, drowning out all other scents within a fifteen foot radius.

And finally, we made pork vindaloo. The house smelled wonderful for days.

I haven’t eaten a lot of vindaloo in my life, generally gravitating towards things like butter chicken and large bowls of creamed eggplant in Indian restaurants. But we’ve been getting more diverse in our Indian repertoire at home, and have recently discovered the joys of vinegar-based curries. I love how the sharpness of the vinegar heightens the effect of the chiles, producing a truly nose-clearing dish. (Plus it makes me think of the memorable scene in Red Dwarf: “lager – it’s the only thing that can kill a vindaloo!”) 

This particular curry is pork vindaloo #3 in Rhagavan Iyer’s 660 Curries (which, dare I say, everyone should own a copy of). It’s not too complicated, and it strikes me that you could simplify even further by using ground spices to make the marinade. I have absolutely no complaints about the final product, however.

If you’re afraid of chile heat, I should say that this wasn’t nearly as hot as it sounded. The okra dish we made to go alongside turned out to be much hotter (woo! We went through a lot of kleenex at this dinner). Just make lots of white rice and have some yogurt handy, the pungency is worth it.

Pork Vindaloo

adapted from 660 Curries by Rhagavan Iyer

• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1 Tbsp cumin seeds
• 8 slices ginger
• 8 garlic cloves
• 8 dried red chiles
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 pound cubed pork
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 2 Tbsp canola oil
• 2 Tbsp chopped cilantro

In a blender jar combine the vinegar, cumin, ginger, garlic, chiles and cinnamon. Puree into a rough paste.

Mix the pork with the paste in a bowl and add in the salt and turmeric. Refrigerate at least half an hour or overnight.

Heat the oil in a skillet and add the pork with its marinade. Cook uncovered until the liquid evaporates and the meat begins to brown. Add 1/2 cup of water, scrape the bottom of the pan, reduce the heat to medium low and cover. Let it cook 15 minutes, then uncover and stir in the cilantro.

Serve with plenty of white rice and a vegetable. Have kleenex handy. And probably a lager.

We consider ourselves very lucky to finally have a local grocery store that actually carries lamb. Usually, each new store that opens up includes lamb in their meat case, just to make themselves look interesting, but as soon as the novelty wears off they drop it, except for the occasional leg at Easter. Boo. We did once get some lamb from a farm near my parents’ place, but it was closer to mutton and very badly butchered, to the point that the cuts were unrecognizable and hard to deal with.

But to our delight, Haggen (our favorite grocery store, apart from the co-op) has actually continued to have lamb in their case – we can always get leg and ground lamb, can often get loin chops, and every once in a while there is a package of riblets – what’s left after the breast meat is cut away. They’re dirt cheap, so we snatch them up and stuff them in the freezer until we have enough for a meal.

What to do with them? They’re pretty fatty, without much meat on them (so it takes quite a few to make a meal), and they’re always cut apart instead of left in a rack, so they’re a bit awkward to work with. I follow Mark Bittman’s suggestion of parboiling them for 20-30 minutes, then grilling. It works very well, since the fat has a chance to melt off a bit in the pot and the meat is cooked through - then all you have to do is oil and season them and broil or grill until crispy. The leftover broth from the boiling makes a fine addition to, say, lentil soup.

You could season the ribs any number of ways – I almost always go with a rub of salt, pepper and fresh rosemary mixed with some olive oil, but cumin and chile powder would be fabulous as well. The real star, though, is the crackly savoriness of the lamb, as you pull the bits of meat and fat off the bone. This is not a tidy meal – expect to go through a lot of napkins. You might want to take your glasses off first, as well. Or maybe that’s just us.

You could, of course, make traditional Parsi kebabs. If you’re feeling more casual, you can simplify the technique and make Parsiburgers. More casual yet is Parsi meatloaf. I recommend it.

The flavors of this meatloaf are bold and sparkling: fresh ginger, green chiles (seeds and all), cilantro and mint, all jumping out of a simple meat-and-potatoes framework. It’s spicy enough to make you want some salad or a beer, and complex enough to eat without any condiments or sauce (if you want).

There’s also a nifty added punch of flavor from the pomegranate molasses that gets brushed over the top before baking. You could certainly skip this step, but it’s a nice touch.

It makes quite a lot, obviously. We ate it the first night with fresh blanched asparagus (not as radioactive as the picture below makes it look – I was amusing myself with digital effects) and a spoonful of mango chutney, then I had it for lunch with leftover tabouli and plain yogurt, then again for lunch with a cup of broccoli cheddar soup. It was delicious with all of it.

Parsi Meatloaf

adapted from My Bombay Kitchen by Niloufer Ichaporia King

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 pound ground pork (we accidentally used pork sausage, but it worked fine – ground turkey would also work)
• one small onion, chopped
• 12 slices fresh ginger, minced
• 4-8 green chiles, minced
• 1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
• 1/2 cup mint leaves, chopped
• 2 eggs
• 4-6 oz grated potato
• salt
• 1 Tbsp oil
• 2 tsp pomegranate molasses

Mix everything but the oil and pomegranate molasses together in a large bowl. Shape into a loaf and set into a roasting pan, then mix the oil and molasses and brush it over the top. Bake at 375° for about 50 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 155°-160°. Slice and serve.