Update (1/22/11): This short rib polenta won Food52’s contest for Your Best Short Ribs, and will be included in their next cookbook, out later this year!

Maybe it’s the tomato tooth I was born with instead of a sweet tooth, maybe it’s the towering heels I rock when my old bones let me, or maybe it’s only that Marcello Mastroianni was perfection on two legs, but I’ve always wanted to be Italian, just a little bit.

Exhibit A: Photographic evidence of alleged perfection, minus corroborating proof of two legs.

It isn’t that I don’t love a good bowl of shrimp & grits or that I don’t get a nostalgic glow from a breakfast of couche-couche and cane syrup, but polenta has been my go-to corn base of late. And after a long work week, what could be a more welcome sight or more soul-satisfying over cheesy, buttery polenta than a ragu of braised short ribs, I ask you?

It’s a dish that’s nearly impossible to mess up, which I think we all can appreciate in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. With so much else on the mind, it’s nice to throw something into the oven for a few hours and get on with other things. Of course, the initial prep work takes some time — chopping the vegetables, trimming and searing the beef, getting all of the elements in balance before the extended stay in the oven — but your time and patience will be well-rewarded by the outcome.

If you can manage not to devour it right away, let the ribs sit overnight in the refrigerator. This serves two purposes: as we all know, this type of dish is always better on the second day, and you’ll be able to remove some of the ungodly amount of fat the ribs throw off so much easier than if you only skimmed the surface while it was still hot. Of course, chilling the ragu overnight doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do a little quality control while it’s still hot, just to put your mind at ease that you have, in fact, made something that will be worth the wait.

But woman cannot live by polenta and short ribs alone. As a nod to the tables of so many of my fellow North Jerseyans, I made a Sunday gravy recently. It’s not something I tackle more than once a year because of the sheer effort and number of calories involved, but man, this makes for a pleasant food coma. I make no claims to authenticity, but I’m not sure too many others can either; it’s one of those dishes that seems to have as many variations as people who make it. The recipes may disagree on specifics, but all are unified in the insistence on Meat And Lots Of It. Me? I only used a paltry four types — pepperoni (not too much of it), sweet Italian sausage, pork butt and beef & pork meatballs. I browned everything but the pepperoni, then simmered it all for hours in tomatoes swimming with garlic until we were going mad (in the best possible way) from the smell.

My gluten-free adaptation of this polenta cake didn’t quite pass muster, but with a little creme fraiche, it was still a nice way to end the meal. I’ll keep working on it and report back when I’ve found success.

recipe after the jump

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Week 3 at the Ringwood Farmers’ Market was all about dogs and berries for us. It took almost an hour to make a full circuit as we stopped to play with other dogs, chat with their owners and meet fellow dog lovers who happened to be without canine companions at the time. One of the best things about heading out there every Saturday is getting to chat with the people in our neighborhood we’d never see otherwise.

And the berries – oh, my, those berries. See, I’ve always loved the idea of strawberry pie or tart more than the actuality of it. Reason consistently took a back seat to desire whenever I’d see those plump, glistening berries perched atop a golden crust until I took my first bite and found … nothing. No satisfaction, certainly, but not even much in the way of flavor. Too often, those strawberries bore a striking resemblance to supermarket tomatoes — beautiful, and about as tasty as plastic. With that disappointing history, I put the thought of a strawberry tart out of my mind until I realized the Orchards of Concklin’s berries are so juicy and luscious that any dessert featuring them must be just as spectacular.

To up the ante on the tart, I decided to go with a butter/lard crust instead of a regular all-butter one. To be honest, I chose to use lard as much for its reported baking benefits as for the cracklins that come as a by-product of the rendering process:

Cracklins and a quart of lard. Is it just me, or are you looking at that Mason jar and thinking, “This cow got into an onion patch,” too?

As far as I can tell, our local market doesn’t carry leaf lard, so I ordered a couple of pounds from two sources — Flying Pigs Farm and Bobolink Dairy. It’s important to me to get quality animal products from reputable sources; factory farms have horrible reputations for animal welfare and antibiotic use, so I just avoid them and (admittedly) buy more expensive meat, but eat much less of it than I used to.

The rendering process wasn’t as difficult as I’d imagined nor as smelly as its reputation. In fact, if a person is willing to eat lard at all, I don’t understand how they wouldn’t want their house to smell the way mine did while the lard was on the stovetop, bubbling away. If you’re looking to render your own lard, I found this to be an invaluable resource.

Despite the deep color of the lard when it came off the burner, the tart crust didn’t have a porky flavor in the slightest, but instead was slightly nutty with a rich and decadent feel. I chose an Emeril Lagasse recipe mainly because it came up first in my search and called for pastry cream instead of berries glazed with a sugary syrup; pastry cream is one of those things that just makes my toes curl. Instead of the crust in the recipe, I tried a gluten-free version, but wasn’t happy with the combination of flours I used. I’ll continue to experiment and will give you something that really works…soon, I hope. But for now, we’ll just enjoy the penultimate tart we have, instead of crying over missed perfection:

Later on, I glazed the berries with some of the raspberry-plum jam I’d happened to pick up from B&B Jams. It added a much stronger flavor than plain apricot jam would’ve without overpowering the fresh berries; in fact, I think it complemented them very, very well.

Oh, and the peonies we picked up a couple of weeks ago? Still beautiful, though decaying:

Next up: Vegetables of Insane Greatness.

Well, it’s been quite a couple of weeks, once again. Though work continues to occupy most of my waking thoughts (and many of my sleeping ones), I’ve still managed to keep my pointy-headed geek side fed with election and economic news as well. And I’ve been cooking, turning out lots of comfort food, mostly. It’s the perfect thing for the moment, with the nasty economic downturn, uncertain times ahead for many of us, and winter coming on strong. Comfort food is accessible, imminently affordable, adaptable and delicious to boot.

I’ve really been making an effort to buy quality ingredients and eat locally since reading about the abuse at large-scale farms and slaughterhouses. I just can’t stomach the thought of contributing to that kind of depravity, so when I got an email from the Bobolink folks announcing the sale of their whey-fed pork, I placed an order for some of the nasty bits that are pretty hard to find, anyway — feet, knuckles, and necks.

For my first meal, I made a basic, but delicious pork neck ragu shamlessly ripped off from inspired by Jen’s post from a few weeks ago. You traditional types out there will be horrified, but my family’s red sauces always started with a roux, so that was my jumping-off point; it really adds a depth of flavor you just can’t get otherwise. I heavily salted the pork necks and browned them very well in the dark roux, moved them from the pan, then sautéed chopped onion, celery, garlic, carrot and a bay leaf in a little extra olive oil added to the roux. Once the vegetables had softened, I added a few tablespoons of tomato paste to a hot spot in the pan, stirring until it caramelized; a few glugs of dry white wine, some fresh thyme springs, and two cups of chicken stock went in next, and once it came to a boil, I nested the pork necks in the sauce. After covering the pan tightly, I put it in a 325-degree oven for about three hours.

I took the necks out of the sauce and pulled the meat from the bones once they were cool enough to handle. Then I simmered the shredded pork in the sauce until much of the liquid had evaporated, set aside 2/3 to freeze for a later meal, and served the rest (loosened with a little pasta water) with penne.

Totally comforting, completely delicious, and didn’t break the bank. I’d call it a success.

And Happy Halloween, everyone! May your evenings be filled with candy and costumes.

I fully intended to give you a rundown of our July 4th menu today, complete with a couple of lovely side salads inspired by Mark Bittman’s picnics column from last week, but today’s fare was ribs and there’s just no way I can write about vegetables at a time like this.

Since I first posted about the grilled vegetable salad I found on The Kitchen Sink, it’s been a weekly fixture on our table, so I knew Kristin’s featured recipe for baby back ribs wouldn’t disappoint. As ever, through poor planning or simple willfulness, I adapted the recipe a bit, but can’t imagine them being any better even with the full complement of ingredients.

The adaptations were fairly minor, but worth pointing out. To start, as embarrassing as it is for a Southern girl to admit, I have no bourbon in the house. Lucky for me, there is a lot of Jack leftover from some party or other, so that went into the glaze instead.

Though I seem to have an extremely well-stocked spice rack (okay, well-stocked spice bins), my refrigerator is lacking in the saucy condiments department, so I went without the plum and hoisin sauces called for in the glaze. I thought the finished product would lack some depth because of these omissions, so I tinkered a bit on the front end, baking the ribs in a favorite marinade for flank steak — equal parts pineapple juice and soy sauce with a hefty dose of garlic — instead of the stand-alone pineapple juice in the recipe.

Gil and I ran out while the ribs were baking and we were treated to the most mouthwatering smell as we walked up to the front door two hours later. Poor Rufus was left alone with the baking ribs and was beside himself with pork lust by the time we got home; to reward his patience, I gave him a tiny piece of meat with a little fat attached, fresh from the oven.

And I’m not too proud to admit I rewarded myself, too. Mmmmmmm…

At this point, it was a simple thing to fire up the grill, brush the ribs generously with the glaze, and grill them until the crispy bits outnumbered the soft.

As Rufus would (and did) say, “NOM! NOM! NOM!”

recipe after the jump

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And I aim to please. With gorgeous weather predicted for this Memorial Day weekend, I knew I’d have to break out the smoker, and what better way to kick off the summer than with a 7 1/2-pound pork butt?

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lf you’ve spent any time at all around these parts, you’ll know that I haven’t historically concerned myself with superspecial high-end ingredients. I do what I can, but if it’s a question of getting in the car and driving to Whole Foods in north Jersey traffic for something decent or just down the street for passable, I’ll admit to the laziness that so grips me.

But. During my dinner with Claudia of cook eat FRET fame, we discussed this very thing and I realized there’s absolutely no reason for me to live this way. I’m a food (for the most part) blogger, found my first NYC apartment online, met my roommates that way, and even met my husband online ferpete’ssake! Why wouldn‘t I think to order better-quality ingredients online? Clearly, I have a brain defect.

So order online I did. Looking for organic meat purveyors in the area, I found Fossil Farms and sat drooling as I clicked on page after page of meats both exotic and commonplace. They don’t have a store front, but that didn’t deter me; I contacted their customer service department and was assured we could pick up our order at their office, which just happens to be over the mountain, one town away. Yippee! After much deliberation, I chose a variety of their best offerings, but was most excited about the pork belly.

Obviously.

I’ve had pork belly in restaurants, sighed over countless versions on any number of blogs and pined for it incessantly, unable to find it in stores nearby. But now, I have a pork belly of my very own. And I will love him, and pet him, and name him George.

So let’s just take a moment to meditate on the porkly pleasures that await from this lovely 8-10 pound specimen of loveliness. That knife is there for scale: it’s about a foot long.

I quartered it, vacuum sealed three of the portions for the freezer, and set about preparing the fourth, which was still at least 2 pounds.

Witness the Stack o’ belly:

Indeed, it was a Great Wall of Belly — the only man-made porcine structure visible from space!

So again to teh interweb I turned. I didn’t want to waste this little bit of heaven on some crackpot idea of mine, but knew I wanted to use soy, brown sugar, and star anise in the braising liquid, so I entered my search terms and off I went down the google slide. It led me in short order to Gastronomy Domine, run by Liz Upton, who loves her pork perhaps even more than I do. Her recipe for braised belly had me licking my screen, so I knew it would be the perfect thing for my first adventure.

And here we go. After cutting the belly into 3/4-inch strips, it marinates for an hour in a mixture of soy, honey, and five spice powder.

Stir fry the aromatics and brown sugar until they turn golden.

The pork and its marinade go in next and get tossed about until they’re beginning to brown. It doesn’t look like much at this point, but the smell was maddening and had Rufus pacing the kitchen, hoping for a handout. He didn’t get it, but still pined for the next two hours while the pork braised.

You’ll find this nigh-impossible to believe, but we waited until the next day to dine! Not that I didn’t nibble. I mean, quality control, right? I would’ve been too alarmed to even think of having some of that fatty sauce with the belly (which, I’ll admit, is mostly fat anyway).

After refrigerating the sauce overnight, we were left with a fat mantle thicker than the antarctic ice shelf.

But let me take a moment to reflect on another web purchase that completed the meal. I first read about Rancho Gordo at Last Night’s Dinner and wondered how much better heirloom beans could be than the regular dried stuff you buy at the store. Then they got a mention at cook eat FRET, and then seemingly everyone else in the known universe picked up on the idea, so I knew I had to place an order. And oh, let me tell you, if you haven’t tried them already, you must. They’ll change your life.

I cooked a half pound of marrow beans very simply, with onion, garlic, and bay leaf in water, adding salt near the end. They were a great complement to the belly, especially topped with some of the braising liquid.

To serve the belly, I just crisped it up in a frying pan for a few minutes before topping it with braising liquid for serving. It isn’t beautiful, but the the aroma, taste, and simple texture of the dish more than made up for any lackluster visual.

recipe after the jump

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Though I hesitate to call it a resolution, we are trying to eat a bit healthier now that the holidays are over. I’m not going to extremes, of course, but I am trying to incorporate more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables into my cooking, so our crisper drawer is full and I’m working my way through it faithfully.

But getting back into the old routine takes time, so I started the weekend completely unprepared for our dining needs. Flipping through the pages of Cooking Light for inspiration, I ran across a wild rice salad that looked completely scrumptious and sounded like it’d be perfect with a little pork. As luck would have it, our freezer is stocked with obscene amounts of pork (and beef. and chicken) thanks to Gil’s company’s annual holiday gift of Omaha Steaks. There was also a jar of peach sauce from our last Trader Joe’s run, so all I needed was a recipe to tie things together. Inspiration for the pork came from the Epicurious website, where I found a recipe for pork with brandied peaches that called to me. I did change the recipe a smidge — I used peach sauce instead of frozen peaches and preserves, cooked the butter in the recipe a little longer than suggested for that rich, delicious, brown butter note under the fruit and brandy, and added cumin … because I’m incapable of not adding cumin.

The salad satisfied my non-resolution requirement for healthy dining, while the pork chops were just rich enough to keep us from feeling deprived. But the sauce was the real highlight of the meal.

It was all I could do not to lick the plate.

recipes after the jump

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I realized last night that my closet and my pantry have a lot in common — both are pretty well packed, but nothing really goes together. The closet situation makes getting ready for work a challenge, while the pantry challenges me to make dinner on the fly without a trip to the grocery store. Seriously, I don’t even have an onion (An onion! I’m the most pathetic of food bloggers!) in the house, but I did find a big bag of porcini-encrusted country ribs in the freezer from my last slow cooker experiment. And, after rummaging around in the pantry, I found a can of hominy I’d picked up on a whim a few weeks ago.

Have you ever had hominy? I hadn’t until last night, and just naturally assumed it would be a lot like grits with gigantism, but hominy’s actually very nutty, with an almost roasted corn flavor — quite tasty. I decided to make a quick “stoup” — part stew, part soup — influenced by a few recipes for posole I’d read along the way, using ingredients I had on hand.

I sautéed a couple minced garlic cloves in olive oil and added a bunch of chopped swiss chard that had seen better days, like just last weekend:

When the chard started to wilt, I added the pulled rib meat, some hot pimentón, and chicken stock and brought it to a boil, then added the hominy. Because I made the original rib dish with soy sauce and porcini powder, the stoup had a pretty complex taste, and the orange zest carried through nicely, adding a fresh note to what could’ve been a heavy dish. After it simmered for a while, I garnished the stoup with minced green onion and cilantro, and we had a very enjoyable dinner of leftovers. Go figure!

I look forward to cooking with hominy again, and soon. Maybe a real posole is in order once it cools down more.

No matter how hard I tried this morning (after waking up at 4am), I couldn’t get the idea of pasta out of my head. It was a little frustrating, as that’s the last thing I wanted to attempt following our week in Milan. After pondering for a little while, nothing else would come to me, so I resorted to searching through my files for something to cook today. That’s when I ran across a soy-poached chicken recipe I’d filed away a couple of weeks ago and it dawned on me: Umami!

So off we went to Zeytinia at 7:30, where we had the place to ourselves. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future sleepless weekends. Don’t laugh — it happens. While we were shopping, I saw a nice package of bone-in country ribs and thought I could get a lot of my cooking for the week done in one day, so we came home loaded with groceries and I set to work.

Soon after, one of Gil’s friends called with ONE ticket to the Giants-Jets game today, so I cooked up a storm. Alone. Oh, woe unto me! Actually, it wasn’t a bad day at all, and I finished a lot of nagging chores that I usually put off when Gil’s around.

So back to the food. This poached chicken recipe couldn’t be easier, just as promised on the Cook Think blog. Assembling the poaching liquid was the only thing that took any effort, but seeing (and later smelling) the result was so worth it:

After simmering it for 30 minutes, I dropped a whole chicken into the pot breast-first, simmered for 15 minutes, then covered the pot to let it poach in the residual heat for 3 hours. I didn’t bother crisping the skin in the oven as instructed because I didn’t want to eat the skin, anyway, but I’m sure it would be a delicious addition to the recipe.

It wasn’t much to look at, I’ll admit, but I can’t rave enough about it: The house smelled glorious, waiting three hours for the chicken to cook was maddening (as was taking the picture before eating), and the chicken itself was perfectly moist and tender and a great counterpoint to the aggressively seasoned broth. This stuff is magical: I’ll be freezing any leftover broth to use in future dishes.

Immediately after covering the chicken, I set to work on the ribs, this time without a recipe. I’ve been reading about increasing the umami of meat dishes by coating the raw meat in porcini powder before browning, so I thought I’d give that a go. I whirled a few dried porcini mushrooms in my spice grinder, and added the powder to a hefty dose of chipotle chili powder, ground coriander, and a touch of salt.

I coated the ribs in the mixture and browned them in a pan in a few batches, then transfered them to my slow cooker. Once they were all browned, I deglazed the pan with 2/3 cup each of soy sauce and beer (Pacifico, because it’s what we had in the fridge), lots of garlic, the zest of one small Valencia orange, 1/2 teaspoon grated ginger, a bay leaf, and one whole clove. I poured the mixture over the ribs and set the slow cooker to 7 hours, then started my chores. Whew!

Seven hours later, Gil and I sat down to our slow-cooked dinner and were really pleased with the results. It’s a cliché, I know, but the ribs really were fall-off-the-bone tender, and they picked up a lot of orange flavor from the zest while staying savory. The taste of the mushrooms wasn’t really noticeable, but they added a nice depth to the dish.

We ate the ribs with long grain rice and sautéed bok choy, and won’t mind eating leftovers at all.

Despite my well-documented love of the other white meat, there’s a cut of pork I don’t often cook — tenderloin. Pigs have been put on a diet over the last 20 years and are much leaner as a result. (I’ve even read that a trimmed pork tenderloin has less saturated fat than an equal portion of skinless chicken thigh, which is easy for me to believe.) But what’s good for our hearts isn’t necessarily great for our tastebuds or enjoyment in the kitchen — the tenderloin is a little temperamental to cook these days, as the time between undercooked and shoe leather grows ever smaller.

But I needed a project this weekend, so I put my mind to cooking a tenderloin in a way that would give it some wiggle room. My sage plant has been out of control for the past couple of months and this seemed like an ideal occasion to prune it a bit, so I coated the tenderloins with a lovely sage and walnut pesto.

Then, in a riff on one of my preferred ways to cook loin*, I wrapped them in some leftover prosciutto (remind me not to overdo it at the deli counter next time).

They roasted for about 30 minutes, until the internal temperature reached 160 degrees. After resting for a few minutes, they were juicy and very, very flavorful.

To accompany the pork, I made potato croquettes seasoned with a little bit of the pesto and fried in duck fat. And, for something resembling a healthy item on our plates, we had crisp-tender boiled asparagus drizzled with lemon juice.

You may think this is an extravagantly porky meal, but you haven’t met my dad. Last Christmas, he managed to feed us four types of pork in a dish where pig wasn’t even the focus. That’s dedication, my friends. The mind, it reels. The memories, they linger. The arteries, they clog.

* I can’t find the original recipe anymore, but basically, I rub a combination of mustard, garlic, and dried sage over pork tenderloins, then wrap them in prosciutto before roasting. Very, very flavorful.

Update: I’ve found the perfect pork-in-milk recipe. 

recipes after the jump

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