Labor Day: Kegs and Cluckers!!!

Want to sleep out under the stars without leaving New York City?

Want to enjoy some Brooklyn Brewery's finest suds while chowing down on a BBQ pulled chicken sandwich, smoked by butcher Tom Mylan?

Want to enjoy some warm peach pie from Sweet Deliverance and dance the night away with DJ Sam Kim? How could you not?

Come spend Labor Day at the Queens County Farm Museum. Camp out in the orchard, eat a down home dinner of smoked chicken, pickles, baked beans, corn on the cob, coleslaw, pie, and more from Sweet Deliverance.

Brooklyn Brewery will provide their Autumnal offerings, Oktoberfest and Post Road Pumpkin Ale, in addition to the tried and true Brooklyn Lager. Your $80 ticket covers the cost of beer for the whole night.

And wake up the next morning to Bloody Mary's, biscuits, fritattas and coffee.

Join us on the farm anytime and we'll set you up in the orchard at 5p.m. We'll have dinner, bluegrass, a DJ and dancing, a camp fire, pie, watermelon, capture the flag, breakfast the next morning and of course, enough kegs and cluckers to go around and then some.

In the morning we’ll be serving a breakfast that includes frittatas, biscuits, bloody mary's, coffee, and fruit.

Food, beer, music, games, a camping spot and parking all included in your $80 per adult ticket. Kids and families are welcome. Tents, which you can rent here, or car camping is fine. Transportation is up to you. Get tickets here.

NOTE: We will not be renting tents the day of the event. Please visit our friends at Tents & Trails to rent a tent for the camp out.

The farm is open to visitors all day, but the fun and food will really get started shortly after 5 pm, when the gates close to the public.

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WHAT: Chicken BBQ & Camp Out at the Farm
WHEN: September 6th and 7th, 2009
PRICE: $80 per person
FOR: Beer, Food, DJ, Live Music, Games, Campfire, Parking, Camping Spot, Breakfast, Coffee

Book: Moro or Why You Should Stop Buying Cook Books You Can't Actually Cook Out Of.

I'm not sure what it is but it seems like the British, the Japanese and hell, even the Canadians are better at putting out really awesome cookbooks than we Americans. I'm sure that there are plenty of junky foreign books out there but I haven't seen them.

Part of the problem I have with American cookbooks can but summed up by this experience: Every time I look at my Amazon suggestion list, there it is, looking at me like I want to buy it:Under Pressure: Sous Vide. Why? How many people have $4000 worth of food technology sitting around their apartment? Who cooks like that? Who has the room?

The answer is that obviously cookbooks have lapsed completely into the realm of lifestyle literature. They're not written to be cooked out of but simply read as a type of pornography.

That's not really a dig, literature is important in it's ability to inspire the reader, but literature (or pornography) also can't help you make dinner unless you're looking at the kidney recipe in the beginning of Joyce's Ulysses.

Anyway, real cookbooks with real recipes are where the British seem to be whipping our asses in the last few years and Moro is one of the books that has been doing it. Moro is a restaurant in London that mixes North African flavors with the food of southern Spain.

Great. That doesn't sound douchey at all.

But, then you open to the first few pages and here's a bunch of bread recipes. Simple recipes to make good bread from scratch. You have my attention. Now a tortilla recipe Next is how to make your own membrillo (quince paste) again simple, again from scratch. Then yogurt. Then yogurt cheese and Harissa and on and on.

I'll admit it, books that teach me how make things most people buy are a major turn on. Moro could have gone on to talk about how to poach horse turds for 24 hours in an immersion circulator and I would have still slept with this book under my pillow for a few months.

But it doesn't.
Instead it starts dropping the People's Elbow of flavor and simplicity. Poached eggs with yogurt, fried sage and chili flakes? Fried liver with cumin? Roasted pork belly with fennel seeds?

Even if they all tasted like throw-up I would still make myself a Moro t-shirt with a magic marker like it was 1992 and they were Fugazi. Why? because they are real recipes that I would enjoy making and moreover could make with nothing more complicated than a knife, an oven and some pots and pans. What's better is that the cooking directions could be given to you over the phone by someone playing Buck Hunter and guzzling Wild Turkey.


Anyway, I was going to talk a little about the recipe for mackerel a la plancha that is in the above photo but it's early in the morning, I'm hung over and I lack the words to describe how awesome butterflied mackerel, cooked in a skillet and dressed with minced garlic, paprika, shallots, olive oil and parsley is. Forget about how cheap and sustainable a fish it is and how few really great recipes for it exist in today's stupid, tenderloin-centric food culture.

Put your French Laundry cookbook on eBay. Buy this book before the warm weather hits. Cook like a real person instead of of a precious gaylord.

Get Mezze

It seems like everyone I know is broke right now. It seems like even if people aren't broke, they feel kind of ashamed of blowing all that money on records, pot and sex furniture back when the economy was doing ok.

It also seems like every swinging dick in the world is writing some kind of cooking-on-a-budget piece that is about dressing up pot roast or telling people to switch from boneless/skinless breasts to boneless/skinless thighs.

Bullshit. How about we eat a little less meat and do it with style!

One of my favorite jams in the less-is-more category is a mezze plate. Baba Ganoush, hummus and couscous or tabbouleh salad with a little bit of kibbe or braised chicken in the middle, what more could you want out of dinner, or life for that matter? The best part is that if you're really caught short you can skip the meat and no one will really notice.

Now

For the basics of this recipe you'll need:

Baba G

1 big purple eggplant or a few small ones
Garlic
Salt
Pepper

Hummus

1 can Chickpeas/Garbanzo beans
Tahini
Garlic
Salt
Lemon juice
and a Food Processor

For Kibbe recipe check here

Start Your Oven

First thing you want to roast your eggplant until it is soft and mushy (about 45 minutes at 350' for an average big eggplant) and set aside to cool. Meanwhile puree a clove or two of garlic with your can of chickpeas (liquid included!), a tablespoon or so of tahini and a good drizzle of olive oil. Check the seasoning and adjust with a few pinches of salt and the juice of half a lemon. If you go overboard on the lemon just add more olive oil.

Next take your cooled and peeled eggplant and jam it into the food processor. Don't bother to clean out the processor as you'll need the leftover hummus to give your Baba some body. I know that it might not be totally cricket in Morocco but I even add a little extra hummus or tahini to make sure the texture is right. Add your clove or two of garlic and some olive oil and let it go until pretty smooth. Taste, adjust seasoning with lemon and salt and add more olive oil if needed.

Now all you have to do is make a salad with couscous or quinoa or some other grain/pasta. I like lots of chopped cilantro instead of parsley along with lemon juice olive oil and a bit of minced shallots and salt.

Plate

Now plop your various delicious goops in thirds around the plate, drizzle with olive oil or good quality sunflower oil, chopped cilantro and drop a big scoop of kibbe or stewed Moroccan chicken in the middle and eat with pita bread (if you want to make your own you can make them in a hot oven on a oven stone using any decent yeast rising pizza dough recipe). Grand total for the meal, meat included, is about $8 most of which is the half pound of ground lamb. Go meatless, make your own bread and you could be staring down the barrel of a super-tasty dinner for like $4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt never tasted so good.

For the Cheap Seats

It's not like it's a big secret that everyone is fucking broke right now. I mean, the media went straight from obsessing over Hillary voters who jumped ship to McCain to "Soon we'll all be eating dog food," stories.

With that in mind Brooklyn Based, my other endeavor, put together these holiday discounts. Even if you don't live here there are some web deals, like 10% off a subscription to the Diner Journal where you can read more of my work (and Tom's too) or 15% off online orders at Brooklyn Kitchen. It's pretty sweet, really. So check it out. And sign up for BB if you haven't already -- show a little Brooklyn pride.

Yes, a Chili Recipe

I figure that I have been pontificating enough about making chili that I'm required at this point to actually come correct and put forth a recipe for it so that I can be further judged. Like I said, it's not really nuero-science. It's just dried chilies, spices onions garlic corn meal and good ground meat.

Anyway, lets start with the most important part which is the chilies. For a 3 gallon batch you'll need a small plastic grocery bag made up mostly of guajillo (juajillo) chiles and a fist full of puja (puya) chilies. New Mexicos are OK and anchos, chipotles and mulatos are to be avoided as they make a dark and bitter flavor that tastes like chewing on spicy aspirin. The more heat you want the more puya you need but keep them separate for the time being.

Now take your chilies and pull off the stem and shake out the seeds. If your anal and also want a milder chili you can also remove the white veins too. Make sure to get all the seeds as they'll ruin the whole deal if you get one in your teeth. Once you have your deseeded chilies you want to boil water equivalent to the volume of chilies and the turn off the heat. Make sure that the pot has a lid or when you add the chilies you'll pepper-spray your apartment with the spicy steam. Now add the chilies, punch them down and put on the lid. Basically you want to wait until the pot has cooled to the point where you can touch the sides with your hand (45 minutes or so) and then puree the whole shiterie with an immersion blender until it's smooth. This might be a good time to run the paste through a china cap to get the big chunks out but if you're not trying to impress anyone with your flawless French Laundry chef skills skip it.

Another alternative if a) if it's late Summer and b) you're lucky enough to have a farmer that raises flavorful, ripe red peppers you can fire roast the skins off them, de-seed them and make a puree of fresh chilies, though you might need to add dried ones to add some bottom end.

Anyway, next you want to brown your meat. I like ground short rib, brisket and some pork scrap but really it doesn't matter that much. Ideally I would also throw in a small amount of lamb to give it some gamey punch, just don't over do it or it'll start tasting like kibbe. I like add a little salt, pepper and toasted, freshly ground cumin at this point. Again, don't over do it you just want to make the meat suck in some flavor but not make it bitter and over spiced. Brown until, well, brown.

For some reason I like to saute the ton of diced onions and garlic separately, though I don't think it matters that much. If you're going for that perfection fetish shit you could immersion blender this stuff after it's cooked and then add it to the meat.

Now add your chili paste and more cumin and maybe more black pepper. Taste it you fool! It should be tasting nice but raw and not quite integrated. After it simmers for a while taste it again and correct the seasoning. Usually I find that it either needs more garlic, heat (add powdered cayenne), cumin or black pepper and salt.

You're chili should have simmered a good while now. Time to add hominy. I like white hominy but hey it's YOUR chili. You want the water in the can and everything unless the water tastes like a can. At this point your should gradually add corn meal a few tablespoons at a time. Let it settle in for ten minutes and then reevaluate and add more if needed. You're shooting for Hormel consistency here no further explanation needed. Too thick? Add beer or chili water or stock. Too fatty? Add some white wine vinegar or cider vinegar.

Done. That wasn't hard was it?

A Few Thoughts on Chili

First things first. As you may or may not have read on some of the various blogs in our fair city, I am making chili and selling it at the 3rd Ward Craftstraviganza this Sunday. Because I was alerted that some people might have gotten the wrong idea about what this thing was from reading the daily candy or something: I am making chili, not the Diner or Marlow and Sons. Clear? Yeesh.

Anyway, chili is like risotto or some other thing that is supposed to be super-hard to make well but really is stupid easy, so long as you abide by the Five Pillars of Chili:

1) The red color in your chili should come from dried chiles (pasilla and guajillo are my faves with a bit of puya) that have been de-seeded, soaked in hot water and then puréed with their boiling liquid and maybe some garlic. Powders? Non! They make the chili too spicy long before they give it the depth of flavor you get from the paste of a shit-ton of dried chiles.

2) Cumin is important. Toast it whole and grind it for best results. Don't go crazy with it.

3) No black beans. Black beans are stupid and they make your chili go from a fetching bright meaty red to a dried blood band-aid color.

4) No tomatoes. Unless you need the acid from the tomatoes to balance a particularly greasy grind of meat I would stay away from them.

5) Cornmeal. It seems like cheating to thicken chili with corn meal but what it really does is give your chili a texture that is so round and perfect that you would swear it's fake.

Someday this War is Going to End

The seven words from Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now have been used and even been abused to comment on the state of gentrification in New york as it pertains to the sales of luxury condos.

My father really liked Robert Duvall's character. Mostly, I think, because of that one short sentence. Kilgore's realization on the beach of the Mekong Delta summed up in a few words what my father had been trying to come to terms with since he boarded a plane and left Vietnam for good in 1971: War was fucked up but it was also kind of awesome... for certain kind of guy.

Kilgore and my father were those guys. They thrived on chaos because it was also freedom. How does anyone make sense out of track homes and EZ Bake ovens after spending years not knowing which breath would be your last?

Tying this profound and brutal truth to the kind of dooshy lifestyle-porn that me and thousands of others, online and in print, create is so ridiculous it hurts my heart's colon. However it is how I felt this morning when I woke up and started thinking about what stories I was going to try to pitch to who and in what order. Suddenly it didn't matter. Suddenly I realized that this wave of food-dork-chef-worship-foie-gras-ramp-sandwich-bullshitfest had to end somewhere, had to end sometime.

Why am I thinking this way? I guess it has to do with a few relatively minor and seemingly unrelated things happening in the last little while:

One: Gael Greene gets canned from NY Magazine


Jesus fucking Christ! Look, I don't even like Gael Greene. I tried to read one of her goofy memoirs where she fucks a bunch of chefs and couldn't even pretend that I was going to make it through the thing. But I mean, shit dude, it's like firing Dan Rather from CBS or, oh wait, that did happen. Anyway, she wasn't even making that much money (word on the street is under $50k) from what can be gleaned from the rumor-mill and she'd worked there since 1968. Which brings me to..

Two: Sarah Vowell publicly eviscerated in the NY Times.

Sure, I know, I'm being a little naive here. People get slaughtered by the Times or the NYRoB all the time. Right. I get it. I just never thought Sarah Vowell would get it. I mean for years I've been secretly whispering to people at parties "um, can I ask you a personal question? Do you actually like Sarah Vowell or do you just pretend to so you can have sex with girls that look like they were exported from 1996?"

I guess I just thought that everyone had agreed to say nothing about Sarah Vowell until after she was dead, you know, like everyone knowing that Liberace was queer as the day was long (including my grandparents who used to sell him dogs) but not really saying anything until 1987.

What does Sarah Vowell have to do with food writing? Nothing at all. But it does mean that in the rapidly contracting world of publishing and journalism (as we used to recognize it) is so fucked up and freaked out that it is eating it's own young. Look, if people start telling the truth now what's next?

Is Alton Brown finally going to freak out and go into an hour and twenty minute monologue about all the ways in which all the people involved in the Kabuki-turd-circus known as the Food Network are without any value, integrity or worth?

Lets be honest: Lying is the sub-prime, leveraged mortgage backed security, credit default swap of the media world. If everyone started telling the truth about how most people are totally full of shit where would it end? I mean, the only person left standing in food would be, I don't know, Paul Bertolli and Harold McGee maybe? Not really that bad of vision of the future in my opinion but still.

Three: My Best Friend, who doesn't give a shit about food, Sends me an email recommendation from the iTunes podcast store about a show about foie gras

This is when I knew it was really over.

How does one see a crash coming? It's easy. Whenever people who wouldn't normally care one way or the other about anything (your parents for instance) are suddenly doing stuff like:

A) Getting an E-Trade account (crash 1999-style)

or

B) Watching Flip-That-House (crash 2007-style)

and now

C) Sending you quasi-esoteric-foodie-bullshit (cultural backlash it-can't-be-long-now-style)

Anyway you slice it, the end draweth nigh for us my twerpy little shit bags. You can't argue with the facts or the signs. I hope we're all capable of becoming some real hard, pipe-hitting food journalists within the next few years because the days of getting floated on a cloud of web 2.0 titties is about to end.

Am I saying that food journalism, if that's what you call food blogging in it's typical form, is going to dry up and blow away? No! Of course not... I think.

I guess it could but more than likely it's just going to contract back to the ghetto from whence it came. Irritating rich people talking bullshit about lame places that serve crap food on nice China to other irritating rich people with a small trickle of really good, classic shit sneaking out the door along with it. Maybe they'll stop giving away book deals to every swinging dick and make the rest of us get back to the hard work of trying to say something real and lasting about the food we eat, how we prepare it and why we eat it. If you need a fucking book to tell you how to make food from a combination of canned goods (A Man, a Can, a Plan, etc.) or need to buy another extreme food, beaver testicle cookbook (here I'm thinking of the Nuge's Kill It and Grill It and on and on) then, well, actually, now that I think of it, those books might come in handy when the revolution (apocalypse, blood-barfing zombie attack, peak oil, whatever.) comes and the only things you can eat are either in cans or found skulking around Central Park and you have to shoot them with a bow and arrow like a painted Montagnard in the service of Col. Kurtz.

Yes. Someday this war is going to end.

I could think of worse things.

Boneless Thanksgiving

This was the third annual T & A Thanksgiving Freakout spread... right before most of our friends showed up late with a bazillion sides, cheese and appetizers.

Let's just say that our cup totally fucking overfloweth this year, which is funny because we sort of phoned-it-in with only three desserts, a metric ton of stuffing, garlic red-skinned mashed potatoes and a 30 lb boneless turkey(!)

I won't lie to you and say that I didn't have a moment of light bowel evacuation when I opened up the offal-party-pack box last Tuesday to discover that when I talked to Josh at Fleisher's and said "Bigger is better for me" he would translate my words to mean "Could I get the biggest fucking turkey that has ever walked the earth?"


Apparently the kids at the 4-H club that raised my turkey must have fed this bastard snickers bars, muscle milk and, presumably, smaller turkeys. What was a Grocery Guy to do with a turkey so big that smaller fowl orbited around it except... completely de-bone it!

I'm not going to bore you with a long procedural break-down of how to de-bone a turkey here because I have actually already written one (Gasp! For real money!) here.



What you do need to know is that once you manage to get your turkey all floppy and boneless (A-train, when she first opened the door to the fridge shrieked "There is a dead, naked fat lady in our ice box!") you'll need to stuff it with something, making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies of the boneless thigh, etc., and then sew it up using (in my case) an upholstery needle I borrowed from Harry at Brooklyn Kitchen.

Just make sure that your stitches are about 1/2 inch a apart, tight and even. Run them from the base of the back up to the neck flap and then turn the turkey over to lace up the cavity. Last chance to add something goofy like fresh rosemary or lemon zest to the inside of the bird!


Once you're done you can gently set it in a roasting pan. Our typical roasting pan was WAY too small for our bird this year and so we ended up flopping it into a tin-foil hotel pan, which it completely filled!

I think you might think that you know that you think that you know how big a turkey would have to be fill up a hotel pan but, really, you have no fucking idea! I know I didn't.

The worst part was that, besides it collapsing the baking rack in my oven that was BARELY able to fit my turkey inside it, NO ONE could even begin to give me any clue how long to cook a boneless, 30 lb turkey for or at what temperature. Turns out it doesn't fucking matter that much. The turkey was reading 180' inside the breast only three and a half hours in but, unfortunately it had to sit in the oven warming for 2 1/2 hours while we waited for all of our tardy, drunken houseguests to show up.

No matter! The theoretical genius of the boneless turkey turned out to be borne out by empirical fact: despite spending more than 5 hours roasting away in my crap-trap oven it was tender, juicy and as flavorful as a turkey could possibly be.





For the record: I would say that you can cut the text book cooking times by 30% by removing the bones so long as your stuffing is warm when you put it in the cavity.

I've Given You All My Good Advice

If you're ever going to listen to me about anything now would be the time to tune in. You might notice that this year we've done exactly jack and shit as far as run up recipes for Turkey Day. Turns out Grocery Guy readers are not going to pay for me and the A-train's wedding so we've been busy writing for money. Nothing against your broke-asses but it's a hard world out there. Besides we've already done Thanksgiving recipes so use the search feature and pretend that you know how websites work.

Anyway, if you find your stuffing lacking a certain something every year you probably need to make an early morning run to your local C-Town to pick up a little box of Bell's poultry seasoning.

What's in it?

I don't know and I don't care if it's made of the powdered bones of Darfurian children and Melamine. I would still use the shit out of it because it can even make stuffing with stupid shit like dried fruit in it taste just exactly like StoveTop with almost no effort other than making the trip to the store and dosing your stuffing liberally with it.

Bell's poultry seasoning could make dead cockroaches, mouldy bread and pig urine taste like you got it out of the steam table at Boston Market.

If you sprinkled Bell's poultry seasoning on your deceased grandma if would bring her back to life and smell deliciously of sage and marjoram and then she would fix you dinner.

Barack Obama uses it instead of Gold Bond on his junk after a tough game of hoops.

Kilgore Trout used it to brush his teeth.

Later in life Vanilla Ice actually admitted that if there was a problem yo, Bell's could solve it.

Even Martha Stewart bows at the feet of Bell's poultry seasoning.

Chuck Norris actually stole all of his facts from Bell's poultry seasoning.

Prologue for Cheap, Sharp, Lasts Forever

As some of you might have noticed, Ahem, I have a piece in this weeks New York Magazine about buying a cheap yet functional and attractive chef knife. To NYMag's credit they didn't give me very much room to prattle-on about knives in general or cheap knives in particular and, through a combination of brutal, Daniel-Craig-in-Casino-Royale-style beatings and bribing me with money, somehow reigned me in long enough to produce a very tight and focused little article.

I'm almost proud of it. I, well, uh they obviously cut out all of the parts eluding to wizardly Jethro Tull lyrical references and the article deals not at all with my ongoing love-hate relationship with the band Kyuss. But then I suppose this is really the difference between a blog for fun and a magazine for profit. When money is involved Cross eyed Mary gets tossed into the street.

ANYWAY, a few quick, efficient notes expanding on my terrifyingly small piece:

The Knife

While the 8 inch Forschner in the article is one of the best cheap knives you can get that doesn't look stupid there are other options. Personally I like to have a little bit bigger of a knife for chopping onions and such which is why you might want to consider the 10 inch or even the 12 inch version of the same knife depending on how much length or girth you might be making up for.

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make in the article was really that you should spend less on the knife and more on the maintenance of the edge so you have a knife you actually enjoy using.

The Steel

I'm not sure how much more clear I can be about this: If you don't have a quality steel and know how to use it to keep your knife sharp you're SCREWED. First, what is a quality steel? Ok, you want a basic name brand steel made by Forschner or F. Dick. I am sure there are other good makers out there but I haven't used their steels and thus don't trust them. A shit steel will do nothing for you while a good steel will save your very culinary life.

Anyway, what you want is a 10 inch medium cut steel from either of the above mentioned manufacturers. These don't have to be fancy looking. A plain plastic handled steel will run you $30 and last forever. That said, you might want to pay more for a pretty hardwood handled jammie, keeping in mind that you're going to be looking at it everyday forever.

Using the Steel

It's not hard but it isn't easy. First figure out what the bevel of your knife edge is. Huh? Right. Generally American and European knives have about a 20' angled bevel while Japanese knives have something more like a 17'-15' bevel. Ultimately this is just to give you an idea as to what angle to hold the knife at in relation to the steel while you VERY GENTLY glide the blade down the steel simultaneously drawing the knife towards the hilt of the steel and across the the length of the blade. It is totally OK if this makes you nervous to do the first dozen times you try it but keep it up because eventually you'll get good at it and it will make you look really cool.

Keep in mind what you're trying to do here which is to re-align a beat up edge that has been knocked off the axis of the blade but is not actually destroyed. So what is going on when you lightly drag your knife across the steel is kind of like styling that Faux-hawk you had three years ago: make it pointy and tall. Obviously you can't see it but you can feel it when you test the blade for sharpness by cutting a piece of newspaper by dragging the blade perpendicular to the edge of the paper. If it cuts right through and doesn't hang up anywhere then you're great but if it does hang up then you know where on the blade you need to re-hone and then try again.

The key thing to note here is that you should keep at it and know that you really can't fuck up your knives too bad even if you're a complete retard. When in doubt ask the chef at your favorite restaurant to show you how to do it.

So Dull

Eventually, no matter how well you take care of your blade, your knife is going to get dull. It only takes one or two people cutting a pie on a Pyrex plate to say goodbye to your edge and then you must have it sharpened. There are many ways to make that happen for yourself that include accruing hundreds of dollars in exotic whetstones and practising furiously to perfect your technique. If you suspect you might have Aspergers-lite this is your jam. If you are like most people, BUSY, then you should just get in the habit of dropping your knife off every few months to have it professionally sharpened by someone who knows that they're doing.

The guy you end up with should not be a "Grinder" as the run of the mill destroyers of blades are known. You want a guy (probably at a housewares store) that has a water-cooled powered wheel like a Tormek.

While you're there think about what this guy can do for you. If you usually only slice veggies and wished your sliced through them better have the guy put on a 17' bevel. If you tend to beat up your knives more and want to go longer between sharpenings then have him put something more like a 22' bevel. This is the same guy that can re-shape and make new again an old knife that your grandma doesn't use anymore. Chances are if the knife is old and made from stainable carbon steel you will have one hell of a knife.

Protect the Edge

Last thing. Get a plastic sleeve, case or something to protect the blade of your knife from getting banged around if you don't have a magnetic rack or knife block to store it in.

Leaf Lard Party

Here's my weekly ritual: the chopping of the leaf lard. Leaf lard, as if you didn't know, is the layer of fat that lines the gastrointestinal cavity of a pig. When the pig is slaughtered leaf lard looks like milky, half set, jello and when chilled it hardens to a waxy firm leaf-shaped solid. If you ever wondered why crisco was developed it was because leaf lard is awesome but relatively hard to get if you weren't killing your own pigs. Rendering leaf lard is pretty easy. Just chop it up, as shown, and place it in an oven safe pot with a half inch of water and place in the oven covered at 350' until the fat has rendered and the cracklings are golden brown. Strain and chill the lard and save the cracklings to sprinkle on top of a salad or flavor corn bread with. After the fat has solidified seperate the white lard from the liquid. Failure to do so will give you bad lard. Use in any recipe that calls for crisco.

Pictures from the Brooklyn Based Pig Roast

This is where I thank everybody who schlepped out to the weird industrial nowhere between Carol Gardens and Park Slope that is the Yard last Friday. Special thanks to Kelly and Annaliese of BB, Josh from Fleisher's for talking words and Harry and Taylor for helping out and bringing me Tequila.

If you didn't go and want to see what you missed click Here.

Pochetta, July 2007

Brooklyn Based Pigtoberfest Pig Roast Oct 10th

Yes, that's right kids! Another exciting whole hog roast hosted by me, Brooklyn Based and my Moo-Ru, Joshua Applestone from Fleisher's Meats October 10th at the Yard in Gowanus located on the lovely Gowanus canal. We will be putting the Pig in Pig Roast and the Anus in Gowanus with bands, beer and slow roasted pork tacos 'till you drop. Starts at 6 PM and goes to 10 PM. Click here to get tickets before they sell out.