Very chill Sunday at casa lingua. A lavish breakfast of Nueske’s bacon, fingerling home-fries & 2 eggs over-easy for each, followed by sports watching & catching up on NYers — you may take a very gendered guess who did what
A short & sweet band practice for our First Night gig, more reading & kitty cuddling. Dinner was salad bc duh & leftover Tuscan soup that was good even a week later. We sent my keyboarder home with about 1.5 bowls worth of the soup, plus a couple of slices of my PIC’s orange cake. His partner is off pet/house-sitting, so he was very happy camper
The owners of The Farmer’s Daughter restaurant, that we dined at last night, recently opened an excellent little cheese and charcuterie shop around the corner, called The Curd and Cleaver. We ordered over $200 worth of stuff to have for dinner tonight and New Year’s Day. We purchased Fossil Farms Venison, Elk, Wagyu beef, lamb, and wild boar salami; black and blue goat cheese, balsamic onion cheddar, and Humboldt fog cheese; some excellent spicy tangerine and Calabrian chili olives. We also had some Cajun mac n cheese (not pictured). We also ordered some DeBragga filet mignon for New Year’s Eve to be part of surf and turf. The cheese and charcuterie went great with an Amici cabernet (not pictured).
after a HUGE brunch the BF made us today, i asked him for a super light dinner, and he complied. Small salad for me, just greens, shallots, radishes, avo, a little parm, with an anchovy smushed into the dressing, and capers.
Friend gave me a bunch of lemons from her tree, so I’m working on a lemon ginger shrub.
here’s that brunch:
My first time buying one of those ubiquitous panettoni that are always sold at local stores for Xmas, because they’re always too $$$. so i waited until they went on sale and picked one up, and the BF made French Toast. Really good, super custardy, with orange notes. Fatted Calf bacon and Bi-Rite bfast sausage rounded out the delicious fat & cholesterol fest. Hence the small salad for dinner.
Little lamb meatballs, browned in the air fryer, then simmered in the braise liquid that I saved from the lamb shank I made earlier this month. Over TJ’s cacio e pepe ravioli. The meatballs kept their crunch, and they absorbed the rich braise inside.
One of these dishes which taste as planned by the texture/visuals went into the wrong direction - Beef Stew with Potato Crust
You braise diced beef chuck with onions, tomato paste, paprika, caraway seeds and marjoram. Add some carrots and braise a bit more. Add some red peppers and braise until you have only a little bit of nice viscous braising liquid left. In parallel, you make mashed potatoes with milk, manchego, ghee and nutmeg and top the stew with it before baking it for 20 minutes. Instead of forming the expected potato crust, the mashed potatoes became more liquid and mixed with the braising liquid. The flavor of the dish was great (and as expected) but the texture was obviously quite different than planned
I made the mistake of buying and freezing a whole pork shoulder without cutting it into more manageable chunks for a two person household. It’s been languishing in the freezer for ages, so I decided to take the pig by the horns today and deal with it.
I ground about 5 pounds, then made the remaining 6 pounds into three dishes: posole verde, a braised pork “arrabiata” loosely based on an NYT recipe, and another braise loosely based on a Food and Wine recipe with apples, fennel, maple, white wine and herbs. The latter two are meant to dress pasta and will be used as such. I’ll report back when I’ve decided which one to eat tonight!
Made a small batch of beef short ribs the other day, defrosted the last piece of potato gratin, sauteed green beans with some onion and diced tomatoes in bacon fat = dinner. Not the meatiest pieces of short ribs, but man they were delicious.
Chill Monday. Gotta love the time between the holidays. Just a quick stop at the dispo, the new Chinese grocer in town for possible NYE dim sum, and Aldi for tonight’s broc.
Our poor buddy who was supposed to fly out to Taiwan to be with his boo was delayed by an entire day — and today happens to be his birthday. While I’d hoped to continue my booze break for a lil longer than 24 hours, ya gotta do whatcha gotta do: we picked him up & met the gang at the gay bar for a very early HH drink. Poor guy has to get up again at 3:30am tomorrow
I had one of their holiday cocktails, the Abominable Gin Fizz with pomegranate.
As for dinner, my PIC marinated Peruvian chicken earlier this afternoon & made the green sauce. I blanched some broc & had the brilliant idea to toss it with the chicken jus & fat from the roasted thighs, instead of the OG plan of adding a recently purchased deep-roasted sesame kewpie dressing. Didn’t’ need it
Do you mean with the ground pork? Generally no issues as long as the pork doesn’t fully thaw before I grind it. I thawed the shoulder overnight in the fridge so that I could get a knife through it but leave it semi-frozen for grinding. This worked well - I cut off the more-thawed ends for my braises and then hacked the more frozen center into smaller pieces for the grinder. They were still solid enough that the resulting ground pork was ice cold. I packed it up for the freezer immediately so I don’t expect any texture problems.
