Pasta carbonara

They say adding constraints to a creative process will keep the creative spark alive, and apparently this principle totally applies to my relationship with food.
Tonight's dinner exists because we have no milk, no onions, no bread, no greens, and we are tired of bean soup (I made a very mediocre soup). What we did have were: really good farmer's market bacon, frozen green peas, two eggs, and pasta.

Or I thought we had pasta.

Since we didn't, I had to make some. By hand. Because kneading dough is a great way to blow off steam, and because by then I was set on having pasta carbonara for dinner.



My previous attempts at homemade pasta have been pretty poor. Learning to handle dough (thanks to bread-baking) made the outcome a whole lot better this time around. The real secret to getting lovely smooth fresh pasta dough is giving it multiple rests throughout the mixing, kneading, and rolling out processes. Five minutes after mixing for gluten formation and starch hydration, then a good 5+ minutes of kneading (it's a stiff dough), then a few 1-2 minute rests while rolling out to counteract the dough's inherent elasticity.

I started out with the Italian grandmother method: cracking an egg into a little well made in a mound of flour. I wound up adding another egg's worth of water to the dough to extend it, since one egg doesn't make for very much dough.

Rolled out, floured well, rolled up, and sliced like (rustic) fettucine:



I had to unroll the noodles and dust them with more flour immediately after cutting to keep the cut edges from sticking.

BACON. Bacon which we got from a charming meat and pork sausage vendor who said his family was Jewish.



Would have used onions. Instead you get minced garlic.



GREEN THINGS. And salt & black pepper were added at some point.



I prepared the remaining egg to use as the carbonara "sauce" by beating it with a pinch of salt and some water (so I wouldn't wind up with an accidental omelette)



Shortly after this point, I gave the noodles a quick tumble in boiling water too cook (they just need a minute) and added them to the pan. More salt to taste, a few grinds of black pepper once plated, and a generous grating of Parmesan followed:



I'm eager to try making fresh pasta again and possibly freezing little pasta nests for future use, because fresh pasta is fucking amazing.

Creamfest 2009 epilogue, and bacon toffee.

We've been busy ignoring this blog but now I am back to report the final outcome of Creamfest 2009:



- The mascarpone was incorporated into a lemon chiffon cake with strawberry & mascarpone filling, of which Emily has photos. It was my first time making a chiffon style cake and it turned out awesome, and I want to flavor more things with lemon zest because of how delicious it was.

- The remaining 2 gallons of cream went south shortly thereafter and were rendered into cultured butter. It took pretty much a whole weekend and my freezer is so full of butter, you have no idea.

Now, bacon toffee:

I stayed home sick today after waking up to the third straight day of a migraine. Being a neurotically industrious person (no really), I decided to do stuff in the kitchen in my less-than-coherent state.

First I caramelized some onions, because I felt like I should make them and save them for later or something:


Then I set to work on the toffee:


Mise en splat



Toffee is pretty much the worst thing you could eat, ever. It's butter and sugar melted together with a pinch of salt and vanilla, then allowed to recrystallize. Hence the gross picture of butter & sugar melting in the pot.


In case you forgot what bacon looked like, or if you thought we hadn't posted enough pictures of the horrible things we do to bacon.


Butter & sugar boiling

The ensuing steps in the process happened rather quickly, and my alternate photographer was sleeping on the couch, so I don't have pictures of me stirring the crumbled bacon and vanilla extract into a pot of 300F bubbling sugar and fat. You'll just have to imagine it as being rather warm and dangerous.

I poured the mix onto parchment paper on a baking sheet:



After it cooled (and I broke off bits of the edges that cooled first for quality control), I punched it some and put the pieces in a ziploc bag to keep humidity from making it soft and sticky.


Mmmm, shards of death.

Verdict: Tasty and kind of weird. Mostly tastes like a medium-to-dark caramelized toffee, and the bacon flavor only surfaces upon encountering a piece embedded in the candy.
Definitely a novelty, and I'm trying to figure out who I can get to help eat this batch, because a pound of toffee is a lot of candy.

Bacon Sausage

Got a food grinder accessory for the kitchenaid today. So what do you do to break in a food grinder?





So now I've got a pile of ground up bacon. Which smells ...very very bacony.

Welp.

This is your heart.


This is your heart on a lot of bacon.





At this point I feel pretty sick. But Nick tried them.



and is delighted. It's very intensely bacony, with a crisp outside and a chewy inside. I would not eat these on a regular basis. If ever again.

I think we're going to mix the ground bacon into hamburger meat. my other idea is to mix with a touch of maple syrup and cook these into thin disks and put them in the middle of pancakes.

I kind of want to die now.

Bacon Mac and Cheese, Brussels Sprouts and Cornbread

We're kind of addicted to Costco. I mean. It's a lot of food for not much money and we sure do go through a lot of food. And they have giant packs of 4 of bacon.



And I kind of had a bunch of leftover cheeses from adventures in the snippins bucket at Whole Foods (where they have a bucket of the tiny bits of leftover cheese and sell them for buck or two or three each. great way to sample cheese!)



I have no idea what kinds of cheeses these are anymore. I know one was a goat gouda. I don't remember much else.

And...these noodles.



OK. I got a rotary grater for Christmas and there was much gratage. And a pile of cheese to show for it.




Aaaand then we chopped up four or so strips of bacon into little pieces and fried them up and Steph got mad at me because I didn't think it was enough fat and there needed to be a little dairy fat soooo BUTTER!



Yup. That's bacon fat and butter. Mmmm. Add a few tablespoons of flour to make roux.



That consistency. Let that cook for a couple of minutes. And then add a cup and a half of milk and stir. And then dump in the cheese and let it melt. Ours was grated very fine so it didn't take long at all. (Edited, thanks Mike!) And it'll thicken. Steph likes to add a little mustard at this stage - it adds a little to the sharpness.



In the meantime boil the noodles to just short of al dente, drain, dump into 13x9 pan and pour the sauce over and shake the pan a bit to distribute. This gets baked at 350 for about 20-30 minutes until brown on top. By the time I got to the pan after it was pulled out, it was too late.



And Steph made these totally tasty lemony Brussels Sprouts and then there was dinner.



AND. with the bacon grease leftover from another dish: we made the Coleman family recipe for cornbread. I will let Bob explain.

"This is Coleman Family Cornbread.

2 cups white corn meal, Half cup flour, 1tsp baking soda, one fourth tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups buttermilk, 2 tbs bacon grease. The only thing you need is a well seasoned skillet outside of those ingredients.

Preheat the oven to 450, mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Put the skillet and heat it on the stove. While it's heating, add the eggs and buttermilk to the dry ingredients, and mix it all together till it's nice and liquidy. Then put your bacon grease in the skillet, enough to cover the bottom of the skillet, but no more than that.

When the grease starts to smoke, pick up the skillet, pour the grease into the bowl, mix it for a second, then pour it all back into the skillet, and put it into the oven for 28-30 minutes. It ought to come out and you can just turn it over and delicious, yummy, amazing cornbread comes out and you butter it up and eat it."

And you know. It did and it was awesome!

Stewed Pork Belly! Part two!

OK!  So.  Here's the cut of meat.  Pork Belly.  Proto-Bacon.  I got mine from the Chinese supermarket.

You also need a fair knob of ginger, some garlic and some star anise.  

The ginger and the garlic get chopped up and thrown in some heating oil with the anise.  Anise gets left whole, but will eventually break down.  You just want it to remain as whole as possible so you don't bite into it later.

While waiting for the flavors to infuse into the oil, I chop up the belleh.

I think I would cut it a big larger next time as it shrinks down a lot as the fat renders.  (...yeah.  There's.  a lot of fat.  Proto-bacon!)

Brown the pork in the gingery garlicky oil.

 

This is the wrong kind of cooking wine.  You want Chinese cooking wine or shaoxing or something like that.  Usually comes in squarish containers.  I.  was impatient and had run out.  You want about half a cup of that, half a cup of dark soy and a few tablespoons of oyster sauce.  and a tablespoon or so of sugar.  Brown rock sugar is proper, but I don't usually have that around.  Adjust to taste.  

 Add this to the pork.  Add water until just to the top of the pork.

I threw this into the oven at 225 and did some gardening.  Three or four hours later I came back and put it on the stove to reduce down for another couple of hours.  You wind up with this.

So shiny.  So bad for you.  It should be rich, not fatty tasting, and a little sweet.  The fat should have pretty much come out on top and leaves behind all the ... stuff that's not fat.  Now if you want to do this the long way, you can put this in the fridge, chip off the fat, and warm it up to eat.  But if you're us, and impatient, you skim off the fat, put it in the freezer, chip off the fat and add the gelled sauce back into the rest of the pot.  The fat is pretty solid.

We made congee, or rice soup.  It became kind of a nail soup situation where Dan brought leftover tilapia, I snipped garlic scapes from the garden and we threw in some dried shitake mushrooms and leftover chicken stock.  The basic deal is just take leftover rice, boil it with water until it becomes a thick soup.

 

Also fried up some premade turnip cake and chive flowers from the market and had a nice traditional dinner.