For my second Cochon dinner, I invited my cousin over to enjoy the lovely boneless pork loin. This is a very special and expensive cut of meat; I did not want to screw it up. I had picked up some wonderful bacon from the Butcher and Larder, so a bacon-wrapped pork loin seemed like the perfect choice.
Bacon makes everything better. I never need reminding of this principle, but I especially liked Louis CK's take on bacon from his HBO special: "When you have bacon in your mouth, it doesn't matter who's president or ANYTHING!"
And that's just bacon. Just think of what would happen if you took that bacon and wrapped it around some meat! I served this decadent pork with a side of roasted apples and sweet potatoes (they cook underneath the pork and catch all its drippings) and a beet and greens salad. I happened to have beets around, but any green salad would cut the richness of the rest of the dish.
Bacon-wrapped pork loin with apples and sweets
Time: 10-15 minutes to prep, 90 minutes to cook and rest
Serves: 6 for dinner (or 2 with lots of leftovers!)
Ingredients
2 apples
1 large sweet potato
4 sprigs rosemary
8 sprigs thyme
16 leaves sage
6 cloves garlic, minced
Olive oil
2 lb pork loin
1/3 lb of bacon (enough to cover the loin)
Method
1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Chop the apples and sweet potato and place in bottom of foil-lined roasting pan.
3. Mince the garlic (I like to use a garlic press) and chop the herbs. Place in a small bowl and add olive oil to form a paste. You could add salt, but the bacon may be good enough.
4. Dry the pork loin with paper towels and rub with the herb mixture.
5. Cover the loin with bacon and place on top of the apples and sweet potato (either directly or with a rack in between).
6. Roast for an hour and 10 minutes. Let stand for at least 10 minutes before carving.
My cousin recently defended his dissertation, a huge milestone for a PhD student. To celebrate, I took him out to dinner at the Publican. We stopped by Maude's Liquor Bar for some pre-dinner cocktails, and then walked a few blocks north for the main event.
Oh what a main event. If pressed to choose my favorite restaurant from the seemingly infinite list of great Chicago eateries, I would probably pick the Publican. The food is always great, and I feel at home there. I could wax poetic about my love for the Publican in general and this meal in particular for pages, but instead I'll let these images from our dinner to the work for me.
Our beers. Mine (on the right) was something in the sour lambic family.
Daily pickles.
Spicy pork rinds. Like delicious pig-based popcorn. A must.
Mussels. A classic. Bay, celery, and beer. They gave us a sample to accompany the mussels and our next course. Even a half order was huge.
Potted rillettes with rhubarb jam and sourdough bread. Creamy, delicious, spreadable pork. Rhubarb was just coming into season and pervaded the menu.
Grits and greens, listed in the vegetable section of the menu but no doubt there was some ham in there. This was so good. One of the best things I've ever eaten here, and that's saying a lot.
Pork belly. For a restaurant so devoted to pork, this cut is rarely on the menu (I've only had it one other time) so this was a treat indeed. Topped with an asparagus and mint salad to cut the richness of the belly. This dish paired so well with the grits and greens.
Frites. Great but so ill advised. We were already pretty full. We also got dessert (cheesecake with something rhubarb-y) but I forgot to snap a photo. Oops. It looked like a piece of cheesecake.
I am now leaving class to pick up meat. Lecture started at 3pm. My CSA share arrived at 3:16pm. I could have made an alternative plan. Picking up meat isn't complicated. Hold on to my phone, answer it when the call comes that meat is almost here, go outside and pick it up, put it in the department freezer with a note pleading not to trash my bag of meat. I could have easily asked someone to take care of this for me.
But instead I took my chances. I selected a seat near the door; I needed to be near a plug anyway because my laptop will die after about 30 minutes. I kept my coat on; it was cold outside, and I didn't want to make extra noise or waste extra time by putting on my coat for my brief escape.
I couldn't wait to see what was in my magical meat bag. So many great items; the wheels in my head immediately started turning. Ground goat could become homemade goat sloppy joe's (inspired by a dish I saw on the menu at Little Goat), or perhaps some chili. My first bit of beef! More raw material for my slow cooker.
I am now writing about meat in class. Someone had taken my carefully chosen seat; she is now sleeping. I am stuck sitting on the floor next to my plug. But I have meat waiting in my office freezer, and that's really all I can think about right now.
Share #3:
Bone-in pork chops
Beef chuck roast
Ground goat
Lamb medallions
Sausage
Turkey drumsticks round 2. As excited as I am to try these Ron Swanson-style turkey legs, their long cooking time pushed them out of my schedule for the moment.
I decided to try this recipe instead, swayed by its promise of 30 minutes of cooking time. I invested a short amount of time the night before to make the brine, letting the turkey legs marinate while I was at work, and then a quick pop into a hot oven before their final stop on my dinner plate.
But I should have realized that there are no shortcuts when cooking large pieces of poultry. I added some cooking time (20 minutes at 300 instead of 10, an extra 10 minutes in the residual heat after I turned off the oven), but still wound up with underdone turkey legs. I trust my source of meat so I think I'll be fine, but this would have been a dinner-party disaster.
Though this was not my most successful kitchen endeavor, there are still a few lessons to be gleaned from the experience.
Lesson 1: Either turkey legs and turkey drumsticks are two entirely different things, or my turkey comes from the biggest turkeys in the Chicago area. If you have some chicken legs or normal-sized turkey legs, I think this recipe would work nicely. My colossal drumsticks look much bigger than those featured in the recipe. They barely fit into my 8x8 inch pan when I was brining them.
Lesson 2: I'm not perfect, and occasionally I cook things that don't turn out that well. I won't skip over these failures here, but I won't go through all my methods and adjustments in detail. Lots of spices would work well in this dish and I used things I happened to have around.
Lesson 3: I assumed that Montreal Seasoning was the same as Old Bay (it was not), and then discovered that my Old Bay was shockingly old and barely had any flavor at all. Spices really do lose their potency over time, so go through your pantry periodically and get rid of things that won't add good flavors to your cooking.
Lesson 4: Don't try to eat undercooked poultry. Even if you don't get sick, you'll be wary about it and won't really enjoy your meal. I salvaged these drumsticks by cutting the meat off the bone and finishing it in a hot pan.
I served some of the meat with some Spanish-style spinach (a dish that I discovered in a set of tapas recipe cards that my mom gave me) and roasted string beans, and some of it in a lunch salad.
Spanish spinach
Time: ~15 minutes
Servings: 1 entree-sized portion, 2 smaller sides
Ingredients
1 apple, diced (peeled if you like)
1/4 cup raisins
1/4 cup nuts, chopped (I had cashews, but any nuts will work)
2 large handfuls spinach (regular or baby; baby will cook faster)
Method
1. Coat a pan with olive oil and heat over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the apples to the pan. Stir occasionally and cook until the apples are slightly browned, about 3-5 minutes.
2. Add the raisins to the pan, stirring frequently for about 30 seconds.
3. Add the nuts to the pan, stirring frequently for another 30 seconds.
4. Fold the spinach into the mixture, stirring so that the apple, raisins, and nuts are not all at the bottom of the pan. Cook until the spinach is wilted. If you use regular spinach instead of baby spinach, you might want to cover the pan so that it steams a bit.
Serve alongside meat, fish, eggs, or a grilled cheese sandwich!
I love cookbooks. There are so many great recipes online now that I find it hard to justify buying them, yet I most of the books I own are cookbooks. I've read about the wonders of Jerusalem: A Cookbook on 101 Cookbooks and Smitten Kitchen. When I found this recipe for lamb-stuffed eggplant on Serious Eats, I unearthed a tube of ground lamb from my freezer so that I could try it out for myself.
Roasting the eggplant transforms an everyday vegetable into velvet decadence. And then you stuff it with lamb! I worked on this as a nighttime kitchen project, what I do after I eat dinner when I have a recipe that is too time consuming for a weeknight.
One tip: Thoroughly read a recipe before trying to make it for the first time. Sometimes this process goes awry when I try to cook things at 10pm. I definitely screwed up the sauce (no water! oops!), so I'll omit it here since I thought the eggplant came out quite nicely in spite of this misstep. But following the original recipe would probably be even more luxurious.
If you don't have lamb around, any ground meat could be worked into this recipe, though the mixture may require additional seasoning since lamb has a pretty strong and distinct flavor. Maybe even seitan? I don't really know how that stuff works, but go for it!
Meat-stuffed eggplant
Adapted from Jerusalem: A Cookbook, via Serious Eats
Time: ~2 hours
Servings: 8 small, 4 large
Ingredients
4 eggplants, sliced lengthwise into 8 halves
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 heaping teaspoon smoked paprika
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
2 onions, diced
1 pound ground lamb (or another ground meat)
2 teaspoons tomato paste
1/2 cup cashews, chopped (the recipe calls for pine nuts, so chop to about that size)
Large handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Small handful of mint, chopped
2 big sprigs of rosemary, chopped
4 sprigs of thyme (remove leaves from stems)
Method
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2. In a large roasting pan, lay your eggplant halves cut-side facing up. Drizzle the eggplant with olive oil and gently rub into the flesh (or you use a brush, but why wash another thing?). Season with salt and pepper and roast for about 20 minutes. Your eggplant will be golden brown and velvety.
3. Turn the oven temperature down to 375 degrees when you take out the eggplant. Make a dent in each eggplant half with the back of the spoon -- this will create a cavity for the meat.
4. Meanwhile, get started on the stuffing. In a small bowl, put together a spice mix: cumin, paprika, and cinnamon.
5. Coat a pan with olive oil and bring up to medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the onions and the spice mix to the pan. Stir frequently and cook for about 8 minutes.
6. Add the lamb, herbs, and nuts to the pan, along with 1 teaspoon of salt and a few shakes of pepper. Stir often and cook for about 8 minutes until the meat is cooked. The paprika makes it a bit hard to tell when the pink is gone, but the meat will continue cooking in the oven so don't worry too much.
7. Spoon the stuffing into the eggplant halves. Cover your roasting pan tightly with tin foil (be careful -- your pan might still be hot). Return to the oven and roast for 90 minutes.
