Duck Foie Gras and Pork Shoulder

PorcSalt's duck foie gras, La Tur,
and La Brin Camembert

On the third day of Christmas blogging.... DCWB found homemade duck foie gras.  As faithful readers (a.k.a. friends and family) know, I love appetizers.  They're perfect little bites and allow for variety and fun combinations.  So you can imagine my reaction getting the call that foie gras had been purchased and a meal would be built around it.  Hello, Sunday dinner.


See the amazing spread below -- mixed Greek olives, three amazing cheeses, including a La Tur and a La Brin Camembert, two different date varieties, roasted garlic, balsamic vinegar, baguette and water crackers, all highlighting the foie gras.  Served with Sancerre, of course.  

A word on the foie - it was purchased from PorcSalt and it was exquisite, featuring a full-bodied richness with a hint of deeper game flavor than the traditional goose.  Apparently, this local company supports the slow food movement and likes to flavor its foie gras with truffles, white wine and a splash of cream.  Um, wow. On the PorcSalt representative's recommendation, we tried the foie on baguette with a drop of balsamic vinegar.  The tangy sweetness highlighted the flavors in the foie perfectly.  It also prompted combinations of the cheeses, balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic on the bread. 

A decadent hour or two later, the slow roasted pork shoulder was hitting its stride.  Roasted in a dutch oven in broth and a host of spices, including rosemary and sea salt and other fresh herbs, the pork was falling off the bone.  After warming corn tortillas over an open flame, drizzling sour cream and sour cream on the base and topping with roast pork, the result was mouth-wateringly amazing.  And happily appetizer-like with its bite-size goodness.

Who knew that this season, I would add duck foie gras and roasted pork to my list of things-to-be-grateful-for? 

PorcSalt is a "slow food evolution in Bucks County," and can be contacted through http://www.porcsalt.com/.

Pumpkin Pizza

Another October brought another Scary Movie Night, my annual ode to finger food and classic horror movies.  This year, Scary Movie Night fell in the midst of my being overextended, with little time to prepare the French classical food of last year or really anything taking over an hour to prepare.  I reverted back to the pumpkin theme and went with pre-made pizza dough, making a variety of flatbread-style pizzas with anything that sounded appealing.

The pumpkin pizza began with the small decorative pumpkins you find in front of the grocery store.  After several failed attempts to cut into those turtle-like shells, I reverted to just sticking the entire pumpkin in the oven.  Sure enough, after 40 minutes, it was soft enough to open and brush with olive oil and salt.  It finished about 20 minutes later, after which I threw it in a pan with sage and butter.

While that was happily sauteing, I tackled the dough.  This is the dough you can find next to the buttery biscuits in the cylindrical cardboard cans in the dairy aisle.  I boldly chose "thin style," and after dividing it into two and contrary to its instructions, rolled it out a bit thinner, with flour and a rolling pin, to the shape of two rectangles.  Roughly speaking of course.  The dough is very buttery and fluffy, not what I would choose for pizzas, so rolling it out is key, as is committing to imperfection when schedules have you constrained.  The instructions call for pre-baking for 5 minutes, which results in the version of the dough you see to the right. 

After the pre-baking, I topped with gruyere mixed with a light dusting of romano and as much of the pumpkin sage as made sense, and baked for another 5-6 minutes or until the cheese seemed adequately melted and browned.

Et voila!  Pumpkin pizza with sage and gruyere.  Enjoyed while watching "White Zombie," the Boris Karloff classic.

Veal Chop, Roasted Garlic and Fresh Mozzarella Ravioli with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage

There is something uniquely wonderful about creating a meal around ingredients that you find appealing at the market that day. And so I found myself at the Ardmore Farmers' Market on a beautiful fall afternoon, making impulsive decisions with no agenda other than enjoying the process of cooking. The resulting meal was a mouthful, both in name and flavor: Veal Chop, Roasted Garlic, and Fresh Mozzarella Ravioli topped with Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage with Leek, Parsnip and Ginger Soup. (I'm not entire clear on why I'm capitalizing these words, but perhaps the cooking effort merits such treatment).

After fortifying ourselves with interesting cheeses and champagne ginger cocktails, DCWB and I embarked on, for lack of a better term, making stuff. Bulbs of garlic were thrown into the toaster oven, butternut squash was cut up (much to the detriment of DCWB's hands, with the squash's apparently common skin irritant reaction) and roasted, and the Kitchenaid was removed from its shelf to make the pasta. The following recipe emerged on the spot:

Veal, Garlic, and Mozzarella Ravioli with Butternut Squash and Sage
1 veal chop
2 heads garlic
1 med. ball fresh mozzarella
fresh pasta sheets for ravioli (semolina preferred)
1 large butternut squash
1 container fresh sage leaves
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp rosemary
1 tsp paprika
2 tsp your favorite salt blend

Begin by cutting the heads off of the two garlic bulbs. Drizzle with olive oil and salt, wrap in foil and roast (375 degrees or so) for 1 hour+, until the garlic starts to become soft and slightly caramelized. Do essentially the same with the butternut squash: Peel and chop butternut squash. Wear latex gloves to avoid skin reaction. Drizzle with olive oil and salt and roast until golden and slightly browned.

Make the pasta (Use your favorite recipe here).

As the garlic and butternut squash are finishing, combine the last three ingredients in a mortar and pestle. Find the strongest person around to mortar and pestle them all together and dust the veal chop with the spices. Broil the chop, flipping mid-way, until nicely browned on both sides. Let rest for 5 minutes and finely chop. Shred the fresh mozzarella. Combine the mozzarella, chop, any remaining spices and the roasted garlic. This is your ravioli stuffing. At this point, stuff away! (Boil your water to cook the ravioli).

While the water is boiling, heat the butter with a splash of oil in a pan until hot and then add the sage. Cook for several minutes and add the chunks of the roasted butternut squash. Add more butter, sage, or squash to taste. Top the cooked ravioli with the squash.Light some candles, open the windows, put on a sweater, and voila, a perfect meal. I've skipped describing the soup, which is always a good fall fall-back, ahem, but any squash soup will be a great accompaniment, albeit unnecessary.

The experience affirmed my longstanding intuition that the best meals come out of seasonal ingredients and a willingness to depart from recipe and routine long enough to create something great.

The Ardmore Market is located at Anderson and Coulter Avenues, Ardmore, Pa.

Scary Movie Night

Every October, I strive to throw a small dinner party, involving a culinary theme and "scary" movies (old school horror, no gore). My French theme this year was a challenge; part of my personal culinary objective is to make everything in finger-food version so it can be consumed while watching the movie. With tremendous gratitude to Clothilde at Chocolate and Zucchini (http://www.chocolateandzucchini.com/), I was able to come up with attempted variations on French classics. Pictured above are mini-tartlets with goat cheese, quince, and pine nuts (Clothilde favors "brousse," or fresh cheese, with quince, no pine nuts). This easy recipe is available on her site and I ordered a square mini-tartlet pan from Fante's, which has an amazing selection of any baking pan you could imagine. I also used Clothilde's "Terrine de Viande a la Ricotta" recipe and made this veal, pork and cheese terrine that was mild but satisfying. Think I should have upped the herb content. I added chervil, sage, thyme and Italian parsley, but think I somehow missed the mark.Thanks also go out to Martha Stewart who, in her hors d'oeuvres book, suggested the following cheeses for a French cheese plate:
I loved the strong earthy taste of the Morbier, was sucked into the alternating consistency of goat cheese and brie of the Bucheron, and thought the Pave d'Affinois was what the combination of butter and cheese should taste like. Pretty amazing.

The surprise hit of the evening were the gougeres (French cheese puffs), consumed so quickly I failed to get a picture. I followed Ruth Reichl's recipe (love her and the chapter of Garlic and Sapphires that precedes the recipe) and amazingly, that combination of butter, flour and gruyere melted together held some appeal. It did go wonderfully with champagne cocktails.

I attempted boeuf bourguignon in small roasted red potatoes and coq au vin in mushrooms. The reason you may have never heard of such ambitious appetizers is that they really don't work. Stews should be consumed in shallow bowls, not bite-size portions. Oh and coq au vin? Not the appetizing red color pictured in the Julia Child book, but more a purple-grey-ish. Let's just call it camera shy and leave it at that. (Both tasty, however, once I transferred them to larger bowls for unfettered enjoyment).

I stayed away from dessert and let my far more talented friends like MCRF bring peanut bars and brownies -- the perfect munchies for the second movie.

Pumpkin Soup Update

Perhaps the key to a good dinner party is going with the flow. It's a practice that I've heard about, but never quite got the hang of. However, equipped with a burnt arm, an ambitious menu, and one ever-positive helper in the form of my cousin, I'd like to think I did just that. Guests arrived while my cousin and I were still cooking (as it turns out, a recipe that will produce 50+ blinis cooked in batches of 8 max takes a long, long time), but I think it was okay. You can't really wrap a slice of filet around a lump of crabmeat, but it didn't stop me. The hollandaise sauce approached solid form as it waited to be dolloped, but I plowed ahead. About an hour after the party was scheduled to start, I took off my apron and sat down.

And the soup? I warmed it up but it took a sideline to the hors d'oeuvres. In fact, a few people were too full to eat it. But it was good.

My lessons learned: 1) creme fraiche is better spread thin on bread than something savory like a sweet potato pancake; 2) everything you have planned to make will take double the time you allotted for it; 3) next time, explore the "chafing dish" option; 4) have a bar at the ready with an ice bucket for guests to help themselves; 5) give serious consideration to the concept of catering; and last but perhaps more important, 6) remain grateful for your friends.

All in all, a great evening.

Pumpkin Soup Meltdown

Never bite off more than you can chew. All of us have recurring lessons that we never quite learn or process and this particular cliche is my cross to bear in the kitchen. The lesson was brought home last night in my four hour foray into pumpkin soup.

Harvest Pumpkin Soup, to be exact, a recent Martha Stewart recipe. My approach to cooking is often to research recipes (preferably on epicurious.com or any site with reader feedback), and then modify them with anything I think might improve the dish. With guests coming on Friday night (and my working during the day), I needed something to make in advance. And I trust Martha's judgment, which often errs on the side of adding butter. This approach really works, by the way.

My menu includes the pumpkin soup, surf and turf appetizers consisting of steak, crabmeat and hollandaise (with a shout-out to Top Chef for the inspiration), sweet potato pancakes with creme fraiche and caviar, and good bread and herbed butter for the soup. My Chiles Rellenos friend is bringing dessert. Pumpkin cocktails, spiced sweet potato chips and dip and caramel popcorn complete the meal. Thanks go out to Whole Foods for carrying sugar pumpkins, the state store for miraculously carrying pumpkin liqueur, Caviar Assouline for not just caviar but also creme fraiche, and DiBruno's for their recently expanded meat and seafood selections. I've managed to collect decorations, carve a pumpkin and purchase an extra chair.

So back to t-minus two days until I will have officially bitten off more than I can chew. I made the classic mistake of not reading the recipe before beginning to cook. Which means, as you would predict, it was quite possibly the hardest recipe short of making bread. Martha asked me - yes, I began to take it personally - to make pumpkin broth first, which then is added to a more typical soup puree base. Of course, the recipe read something like this: 1. remove the seeds and stringy fibers from two sugar pumpkins. (done! threw those right in the trash!) 2. bake the pumpkins for 50 minutes. (they're in there! baking away!) 3. take the reserved seeds and fibers and begin the broth. (huh? really? the ones in the trash?)

After carving up additional pumpkins for the sole purpose of obtaining said seeds and fibers, and after chopping and cooking the numerous turnips, potatoes, and parsnips, I then was instructed to blend the mixture in the batches. A couple of blends went well and then things got ugly. The soup was probably a little too hot and I was a little too tired, but the lid popped off and pumpkin soup dribbled forth. Which would have been a good wake-up call, if I choose to heed that warning. I didn't. I only became less patient. The next batch I chose to blend more without any wait. Resulting in a pumpkin soup explosion. Over me. Over the kitchen. Over the cats. Later, as I discovered, over the ceiling, if that's even possible.

Prompting the meltdown. The Patient Boyfriend ("T.P.B.") fetched ice. I announced, "that's it! I'm not making dinner! I'm not finishing the soup! I'm done!" There may have been tears. T.P.B. tasted the soup and thought it was good. I modestly protested and was not so modestly pleased. Over the next two hours, I managed to clean the explosion, apply lidocaine and aloe to my arms, make dinner, eat ice cream and watch a scary movie.

And the dinner's back on. Wish me luck.