Chicken and Cheese Please

Got the winter blues? Get some fresh parsley; the color and the smell will remind you that Spring is not far away. Now that you have some parsley you might as well make some sausage.

Italian Style Chicken Sausage with Parsley and Parmesan

633 g (1lb 6oz) Chicken
130 g Parmesan Cheese
12 g salt
7 g white pepper
7g coriander
10 g dry milk
25 g parsley
A little water and vinegar
medium hog casings

Cut the chicken and the cheese into cubes. put the cheese in the freezer for a few minutes. Meanwhile grind the pepper and coriander together then mix with the salt and dry milk. Stir the spice mixture into the chicken and refrigerate for a few minutes. Rinse and chop the parsley. Combine the chicken and cheese and grind them through a medium plate. Stir the chopped parsley into the ground mixture along with a little vinegar and water to smooth out the texture continue stirring for about a minute. Chill. Stuff into casings.

Yield: 760 g (1 lb 11 oz)

If you are feeling daffy, get a whole chicken, use the carcass and wings for stock, use the meat and skin for sausage. I have used this recipe as a stuffing for ravioli, and I have also made it with pork. Have fun with it.

Cheers.

The Accidental Foodie in Milwaukee

Cold enough for ya? If not then try Milwaukee in the Winter. We headed up there last weekend for a change of scenery. It was actually pretty warm there when we arrived Saturday morning, around 25F, little E kept calling it Hawaii.

Our first stop was The Milwaukee Art Museum. I highly recommend parking in the museum garage, it's the coolest carpark I have ever seen. Next we tried Wicked Hop for lunch, it had a nice pub atmosphere, and a lot of wraps on the menu. I had a wrap. After a couple of Lakefront IPA's, we sashayed across the street to the Milwaukee Public Market.

Sausage in the shape of a football, what will they think of next? At the market we loaded up on snacks for the slumber party: Beer, cupcakes and cold pack. Time to check in.

We booked into the Milwaukee Hilton. The front desk was kind enough to put us up in a "Murphy Bed" room ("You mean an executive suite?"): Double sized room, wet bar, fridge, and one full sized bed. We pushed the furniture around, set up a tent for the kids, and then went to the water park.

You see, the kids don't care too much about fine art, pub food or cheese counters, they came for the waterslides. Paradise Landing is a part of the hotel, so we were set for the evening.

For dinner we had smoky bacon cold pack and a chunk of Pleasant Ridge Reserve (my favorite cheese), along with the last of the magret sec and the smoked trout. We also had a focaccia from home and six pack of pilsner from Lakefront Brewery. We fell asleep watching cable.

Sunday morning H took pictures of the Ninjas he had won playing skee ball, and then we headed for our next stop the Sprecher Brewery Tour.

It was a brief tour that ended in a beer garden like setting where we could sample the brews and the kids could drink their fill of root beer.

After draining that joint, we headed down the street for a late lunch at Solly's Grille.

For those of you that are up on your hamburger stand history (I'm not), This place is a Mecca, making claim as the originator of the butter burger (Yes, a regional specialty where they put butter on their hamburgers). Food writers from around the nation travel to the counter service spot to bow down before the butter burger. The boys each had a Solly cheeseburger (ez butter), I had a Super Glendale.

That would be a burger with Monterey Jack, mushrooms and grilled onions. Boo-ya. I liked the size of the sandwiches (small) you could enjoy it without feeling like you ate a whole cow. Everyone was very friendly and the service was great.

That's about it, We made the late afternoon drive back to the Southside and got to bed early. Milwaukee is a great place to get away for the night, two hours or less away from Chicago and it's very reasonable: The Hilton, with admission to the water park, and parking, and some voodoo drink Bonne Femme ordered, was less than $175. Fun and food without a fuss.

Cheers.

Smoked Trout

Like I was saying in a previous post, I brought some fish home from Rushing Waters Fisheries in Wisconsin. I was ready to try my hand at smoking some fish. Since I had never smoked fish before I consulted The Easy Art of Smoking Food, by Chris Dubbs and Dave Heberle. The book suggests curing fish such as trout for five to eight hours before smoking.

For the salt mixture I used the proportions from my Gravlax recipe, about 3 grams of salt and 5 grams of sugar for each 100 grams of weight. So I applied the cure, put it in the fridge and took the boys to the Museum of Science and Industry.

When we got back, we fired up the cold smoker. The cold smoker consists of my Weber Bullet, an electric burner from K-mart, and a stainless steel bowl in which heated hickory sawdust smolders.

However on this day instead of saw dust, I used the branches from a basil plant I had saved from the garden. I got the idea from The Herbfarm Cookbook, by Jerry Traunfeld, it's at the library go check it out.

I chopped the shrub into bits. By the handful, the basil burned for about an hour. Due to the cold outside temp, the smoker stayed around 100F. The basil had a light sweet smoke, an hour was all the smoke I wanted, so I took the fish inside.

I brushed them with a little canola oil then finished them to firm and flaky in a 250F oven, about 30 minutes.

Holy smokes is it good. Bonne Femme ate a whole filet during the taste test. The skin is very good too. Mix it up with some crème fraîche and some herbs or make rillettes and you got yourself a smoky canapé. But like I said most of this fish didn't even make it to the toast. To Conclude: You don't need to live near a fancy pants deli to live the high life, just fresh ingredients and something in your yard that can burn.

Cheers.

Poet Laureate to America: Learn to Cook

Today's New York Times reports Charles Simic's advice for those looking to be happy.

In-Verse Thinking

Elsewhere in the paper, a book review excerpts bits by another poet laureate, Robert Pinsky:

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

The Civic Poet

My mash-up of these two ideas renders thus: Happiness can be achieved by a consideration and a control of what we put into our pie-hole. Once that has been achieved, tell somebody about it.

Poet happy paper.
Lean happiness, teach happiness.

Cheers.

Duck and Ham: The Final Chapter

Birthday Weekend in Wisconsin.

Le Diner

Magret Sec (duck prosciutto)
Bacon and Onion Tart
Trout a la Meuniere
Cassoulet
Sticky Date Pudding


Le Petit Déjeuner

Croissants avec:
Jambon et Comté
Pâte d'Amandes
Chocolat

It been a busy couple of weeks here at the hermitage, but we will always take time for food and friends. This past weekend we took the show on the road to celebrate birthdays and to execute the final chapters of Ham Serial and Duck Tale.

Magret Sec (duck prosciutto)

It embarrasses me to say duck prosciutto. I suppose it's a good name, it succintly describes the flavor and the process, and it certainly has a better ring than dried duck breast, but it's not ham. So I came up with a new name, Magret Sec. It's French for dry duck filet. Sliced thin, the magret does taste a lot like its former namesake, but instead of curing for a year or more, I got mine in about a week.


I dried them for about ten days achieving about a thirty percent reduction in weight. The temperature stayed in the fifties but my humidity dipped as low as forty percent. Well worth the effort. For anyone thinking about curing duck, go for it.

Bacon and Onion Tart.

Next on the appetizer parade is Bonne Femme, with her signature Bacon and Onion Tart. Her recipe is adapted from the cookbook, Cooking with Master Chefs.

The tart is wicked easy, especially when you have frozen puff pasty dough and a Cuisinart. The bacon was cured in the pot with the ham and cold smoked for six hours.

Trout a la Meuniere

People often ask me: Are you learning anything at culinary school? Oui. On the day we were pan frying fish, Chef talked about a hatchery in Wisconsin that was great place to get fresh trout. Turns out this place is about ten minutes from where we were staying.

Rushing Waters Fisheries was pretty cool and the fish doesn't get any fresher. Since I just wanted a quick and easy appetizer, I pan fried the filets in clarified butter, then finished with a whole butter and lemon sauce served on mixed greens. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode when I cure and cold smoke some filets I brought home.

Cassoulet

Oh boy I love this stuff. I wrote about cassoulet last year and I focused on the idea that this dish is a combination of items that come from your pantry and larder (pronounced beer fridge). This version raids the pantry again but I also made a quick trip to Walt's for some lamb.

I started with salt pork. This is cured pork belly trimmings that I did at the same as the bacon and the ham. Salt pork is bacon that has not been smoked. I chopped this stuff up and blanched it before throwing it in with the beans to cook.

While the beans are simmering I started the ragout with a couple of jars of tomato sauce (the pros call it tomato coulis), duck stock, a bouquet of rinds, and some cubed lamb shoulder.


For the sausage portion of the program, I made two kinds: A garlic recipe adapted from Ruhlman's book Charcuterie, and a Toulouse sausage.

Toulouse Sausage is required ingredient to that city's version of cassoulet (Toulouse is the Holy Ghost to Castelnaudary (the Father) and Carcassonne (the Son) in the Holy Trinity of Cassoulets) The sausage is supposed to be roughly chopped, I made mine with pork, some salt pork, salt and quatre épices.



Remember our crock of canard from two weeks ago? I had to warm the vessel in the oven so that I could wrestle the legs from their larded slumber. I browned them up in a pan along with the sausages and then assembled the whole lot (Beans and ragout too) into the biggest pan I could find.

Bubble in the oven for several hours, serve with love.

Here are the birthday girl(s) at about 23:30. JJ brought a cheese plate and Chrissy made the sticky plum pudding, shown here with candles and a caramel sauce. Zach discharged his duties expertly, sommeliering his way through the courses with some great wine choices, mostly Côtes du Rhônes, but also some domestic white and Austria red (who knew?) just to mix it up.

With dinner service concluded, time to hit the hay. The kids will be getting up in a few hours and they are going to want breakfast.

et le Jambon?

I am happy to report that the ten day long transformation from leg of pork to country style cured ham was successful. Most of it is still waiting to be made into sandwiches, the bones I saved for lentils, but some of the choicest slices went to Wisconsin last weekend to play the lead role in breakfast,

the ham and cheese croissant.

I made some chocolate ones and some almond ones too.

After breakfast we went outside.

Good food, good friends, great weekend. Anyone can do this anywhere.

Don't fuss, just cook.

Cheers.