Sunday Dinner Part Two: Pork Fat

Blueberry & Sage Pork Sausages with Potatoes Anna As much as I am loath to admit it, Whole Foods often has excellent meats (even if they burn 10 barrels of oil getting here from New Zealand). Traditionally a hallowed flesh-and-fat institution, over the years people have tried making sausages with leaner meats and intervening with various sources of moisture. There have been dry, crumbly, flavorless chicken and apple sausages; lifeless wild boar sausages (the thought being the added gamy flavor would make up for the loss of juiciness survey says: ennnnnnnnnnnnh!); and the thoroughly entertaining but equally characterless “thanksgiving” sausages that I- thankfully- have not seen in years: dry, stringy turkey with bread and cranberries. Shudder. At any rate, the idea of a sausage with whole, fresh fruits in it intrigued us so much that, for better or worse, we had to try it.

It turns out it was worth the gamble. After a brief stovetop browning, they were pierced a few times with a fork and cooked in the oven with a sprig of rosemary. A crisp natural casing crackled into a moist, fleshy sausage, simply seasoned and- amazing- with the rush of a warm, fresh blueberry. With Pommes Anna: potatoes layered with salt and melted butter, cooked in a hot oven.

How does it get better you ask? With wine. Telmo Rodriguez (the previous link is to a different wine, but a good blurb about the producer) Deheso Gago, Toro 2005. Made of tinta de toro (a clone of tempranillo), it’s nice when the grape and the place have the same name. Incidentally, this wine is at Astor Place for $13, significantly less than advertised at the link (Astor’s site isn’t conducive to linking). I don’t have clear tasting notes from Sunday, but it was a dry, bracing red that was flavorful, but still a little tight. When we opened it, we went after the tannins with a pick and shovel (but in a good way). It could stand a little time in the cellar, and would benefit from extended aeration. We had it sitting out in glasses for an hour or so, but it could have gone even longer.

I’ll do the cheeses later. We had etorki and Maytag blue. For dessert, apricots and some good but ludicrously priced bonbons from Whole Foods.

Sunday Dinner Part One- a little late

I’ve learned a valuable lesson in blogging: the whole point is that the entry is momentary. IE, it’s a blog entry not an article. I have been working on the entry below since Sunday evening, and this morning it hit me that it’s ok to do these things in installments. Enjoy. More to come.

Cooking has become a decreasingly frequent activity for me because of moving, renovating and moving again (and getting ready to renovate again), among other things. Recently, however, part of my batterie de cuisine has seen light for the first time since October. Some very familiar pots and pans came out recently to dull the sleeping-with-another-man’s-wife sensation of cooking in a foreign kitchen.

To celebrate this coup, I enlisted a veteran taster to make an evening of it. On another day, say a Monday, Wednesday or Saturday, we could have taken a short walk to the greenmarket, but being a Sunday, we were left to go to our local Whole Foods. (I could take this as an opportunity to rant about said ersatz health food store, but I’ll leave that for every other waking moment of my life.) Here’s what we came up with:

Mozzarella Salad with Tomatoes Just like it sounds. Extra virgin olive oil, sea salt (coarse), black pepper. What else can you say about it? It’s not really tomato season yet, and it shows. To drink, we opened the Toro mentioned below, had a few sips and let it air out. We also drank water like it was going out of style: the new kitchen isn’t air conditioned yet.

Steamed Striped Bass with Tapenade on Dinosaur Kale The steamer basket is still in storage, so I did the the old Jeff Smith: four tinfoil balls in a frying pan full of water. Balance a plate on top, and just like that, a steamer. (You could also turn a little heatproof bowl upside down, but they tend to rattle, and I’m jittery enough when I cook.)

The cuisinart is also in storage, and the blender happened to be out so I learned not to make tapenade in a blender. It seems to go right from the too-big-pieces stage to the liquid stage. Eh, it’s certainly not hard to make by hand. Ordinarily, tapenade is what some people would call a “pantry item,” meaning something you always have around, or something you always have the makings of around, but since I formulated the idea while still at the store, I managed to forget that the kitchen still is not yet wholly mine, and therefore the pantry is not yet so equipped. Usually it is a salty punch of a spread/sauce made of chopped oil-cured olives, anchovies, capers (tapeno: the provençal word for caper), olive oil and- learned from maitre cuisinier Jacques Pépin- a dried black mission fig for sweetness. This time it was something different, but not bad.

A slice of steamed fish was anointed with a dollop of oily tapenade and situated on a bed of sauteed “dinosaur” kale. Washed and shaken, but not spun, dry- with the stems REMOVED- the kale was cooked with olive oil, salt, pepper and, just before plating, a squeeze of lemon.

Not that it has anything to do with anything, but dinosaur, tuscan (cavolo nero) and lacinato kale are botanically identical; they are just names. I include this tidbit because it took me 2 years to determine this definitively.

What did we drink? Albert Mann Cremant D’Alsace, a dry, minerally sparkler. Like prosecco’s teutonic cousin, it was crisp and austere, but refreshing and refreshingly free of the sweetish confines of a lot of chardonnays, and a totally different animal than all that pinot grigio every magazine editor seems to have been drinking lately. (Everyone keeps telling me there is a wave of bone dry non-oak American chardonnays about to wash me from the shores of incredulity, but here I stand, incredulous.)

TTFN.