Cooking
- Asparagus Hot Brown Recipe
When I was in Louisville Kentucky a couple of weeks ago I tried the famous Hot Brown sandwich at the Brown Hotel. It's a rich combination of dreamy Mornay sauce, hearty turkey, a couple of tomato wedges and crisp bacon on top. Broiling the sandwich...
- Cobb Sandwich: Recipe
I don't know if Mae West ever ate a Cobb Salad, but I bet she would have loved it. After all, she was the one who said "too much of a good thing is wonderful". A Cobb Salad begins with a bed of Romaine lettuce, think of it as your basic crunchy blank...
- Wartime Wednesday: Country Club Sandwiches
Sandwiches "An encyclopedia published about 1900 defines a sandwich as "an article of food consisting of a slice of meat, fish, fowl or other food placed between two slices of bread, which may be plain of buttered." No such simple definition could be...
- Wartime Wednesday: Chicken Club Sandwich
Defying the laws of gravity, this Chicken Club Sandwich is simple & fattening. Three slices of toast are buttered and removed of crusts. The bottom layer is spread with mayo, then topped with lettuce and cooked chicken (in our case, roasted), which is...
- Ten Pounds Of Pork Belly
Photo by Melissa Schneider. A ten-pound slab of pork belly blankets my large cutting board. From the top, the white smears of fat look like wavelets in a sea of pink meat. From the side, the meat is the interloper, pushing its way through the thick...
Cooking
Recipe for Happiness
- Buy some artisan bacon from a smokehouse so good that when people visit the town it's in, they pack empty coolers just to fill with bacon. Roundmans Smokehouse is a good choice (search for "Roundmans" on that page, the listed website doesn't work).
- Have a co-worker bring you some fresh, ripe tomatoes from his garden.
- Buy some organic Romaine lettuce and an Acme Bread Herb Slab, a flat rectangular bread spiked with fragrant herbs.
- Preheat oven to 400°. Slice tomatoes. Wash lettuce.
- Make some mayonnaise with a big clove of hardneck garlic, the most flavorful subgenre of garlic breeds.
- Slice the Herb Slab into pieces that look about sandwich size. Then cut horizontally through the crumb to separate the top and bottom.
- Brush the crumb side of all the Herb Slab pieces with olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt, and put crust side down on a sheet pan. Toast in the oven until brown, about 17 minutes.
- Gently fry thick bacon slices over medium heat, flipping occasionally. Run back and forth through the apartment to get the most exposure to the intoxicating smell. When bacon is cooked, lay on a plate lined with paper towels. Reserve bacon grease in pan to use for hash browns the next night.
- Spread mayonnaise on all the Herb Slab toasts. Lay one toast down, put bacon on top, then lettuce, then tomato slices. Top with another toast
- Serve with a bottle of Txakolina, a crisp, very slightly effervescent white wine from Northern Spain's Basque country that smells and tastes like a fruit-laden apple tree on a stony outcrop just after a cleansing rainstorm.
- Asparagus Hot Brown Recipe
When I was in Louisville Kentucky a couple of weeks ago I tried the famous Hot Brown sandwich at the Brown Hotel. It's a rich combination of dreamy Mornay sauce, hearty turkey, a couple of tomato wedges and crisp bacon on top. Broiling the sandwich...
- Cobb Sandwich: Recipe
I don't know if Mae West ever ate a Cobb Salad, but I bet she would have loved it. After all, she was the one who said "too much of a good thing is wonderful". A Cobb Salad begins with a bed of Romaine lettuce, think of it as your basic crunchy blank...
- Wartime Wednesday: Country Club Sandwiches
Sandwiches "An encyclopedia published about 1900 defines a sandwich as "an article of food consisting of a slice of meat, fish, fowl or other food placed between two slices of bread, which may be plain of buttered." No such simple definition could be...
- Wartime Wednesday: Chicken Club Sandwich
Defying the laws of gravity, this Chicken Club Sandwich is simple & fattening. Three slices of toast are buttered and removed of crusts. The bottom layer is spread with mayo, then topped with lettuce and cooked chicken (in our case, roasted), which is...
- Ten Pounds Of Pork Belly
Photo by Melissa Schneider. A ten-pound slab of pork belly blankets my large cutting board. From the top, the white smears of fat look like wavelets in a sea of pink meat. From the side, the meat is the interloper, pushing its way through the thick...