The Well Fed Bachelor #3; Smoked Pork Chop & Curried Cauliflower/Broccolli

With a soft avocado. 

The Well-Fed Bachelor #2; Red Beans & Rice

I have been hella jonesing for New Orleans lately. What's new? And I got a crock pot for my belated birthday. NOLA Jones + crockpot = red beans. This is my third use of the crock, and the first time I have managed to take a picture, even a picture of my second bowl of leftovers, as, when the food approaches readiness, I become busier with preparation and overexcited to eat so picture taking tends to get forgotten. Only later, looking at the wreckage of dirty dishes and compost slop that I think, "Oh yeah, if I had taken pictures, I coulda blogged about that, and then, well, then there would be a blog about it." 

The first outing was a skin on pork shoulder, acquired at the impeccable Bi-Rite Market. It was a pretty expensive iteration of a "cheap" cut of meat, and I stewed it in beer, cilantro, onion, and garlic. It came out pretty good, but it actualized its full potential the next day, when I cubed it and fried it. There was a generous amount of well distributed fat that created a lot of hot grease that sealed the cubes and transformed them into nearly-perfect little golden nuggets. The second outing was adobo pork. Rest assured this will be repeated, so there is strong potential that there will one day be pictures of a crockpot adobo in this very space. More pork shoulder, this time a pretty cheap iteration. Soaked and cooked at length in vinegar and soy sauce and peppercorns, the pork becomes weirdly flaky and almost dry, but infused with flavor, and the sauce was engineered generations ago to make plain, steamed rice into tangy nirvana. Next time, I will include chicken wings, and make enough to make bahn mi with the leftovers.

So, red beans. This meal would have been ridiculously cheap had I not passed by the aforementioned Bi-Rite Market for a bag of coffee and stumbled over a two-pack of house-made andouille links (All the other packages were triples, which would have left me a spare, as I was having a friend over for dinner. I could have used the spare to put into the pot, or with leftovers, but the two-fer made it feel like kismet.) full of heritage pork and smoked paprika. Then, to further run up the tab, there was no line at Tartine, and my feeling about Tartine is that since I refuse to wait in line for their delicious output when it is ridiculously long, no matter how hungry I am for it, when there is no line, I should get in there and buy something whether I am hungry for it or not. So, when I got inside, I got a morning bun, because it represents a kind of platonic perfection that gives me reason to keep breathing in generally meaningless world, and I hadn't had breakfast despite it being nearly 1 o'clock. And, in keeping with the Franco-NOLA theme, I got pear-laden brioche bread pudding which would make my diabetes counselor lunge for my throat and then break down weeping at the futility of her task after she has been restrained. I got a serving size they called a "cup" packed to go, and it easily weighed twice as much as the half pound of sausage. It was the kind of good that necessitates no discussion whatsoever of its goodness, a goodness that can be conveyed completely with glances and small facial gestures. These two late additions to the meal cost about twice as much as the pot of beans and rice.

Pound of rice and pound of beans in bulk (.99 cent a pound!), celery, bell pepper, yellow onion, garlic from the Evergreen Market.  The Evergreen is run by a several generations of Chinese family and caters to a Mexi/CentroAmericano clientele. It used to be the neighborhood's infirmary, back when this was a different kind of neighborhood. A guy like me wandering the store for too long would be approached by an old woman and asked if I felt ok or needed anything special and after some short vetting and maybe even a discussion of symptom, be sent out with Mexican pharmaceuticals. I don't think it goes on too much anymore, or if it does it has gotten much more discrete. I tend to cheat up on the garlic and down on the celery in my red beans. I got a pound and a half smoked ham hock at the Mission Meat Market for  2 dollars and change. There was no discussion of the heritage of this particular swine.

I cooked the beans for about 4 hours on high and then another 3+ hours on low. One thing I did differently this time that I have never done before when making red beans was cooking down the onion/peppers/celery /garlic with a little bacon. The flavor (and bacon) were well worth having to wash the extra pan and I will certainly do this in the future, maybe with a link of andouille.

Little Pigs BBQ, Asheville NC

This place claimed to be "Georgia Style", which I have since learned is a vinegar ketchup sauce over hardwood smoked, often pecan, meat, even though it was located in urban North(east) Carolina,pretty far from the Piedmont home of vinegar sauces and lowland home of mustard-based barbecues that carry the (North) Carolina label, even farther from Georgia. My parents really loved the ribs at this place; they were very saucy (the ribs, not my parents) and tender, as though they were cooked in a lot of liquid or something. I found the sauce a little soupy/ketchupy, and my "Carolina-style", meaning it had cole-slaw inside (Which I would have called Memphis style, or Tennessee style, but whatever. The parsing of the regional orthodoxy of BBQ styles gets real tedious for me real fast, and is ultimately meaningless, having more to do with turf than taste, but this sentence is already a run-on...), pulled pork sandwich was nearly impossible to eat as a sandwich. Both the pork and the slaw were really loose. It was plenty tasty, though. My phone/camera was out of juice, so these pictures of the parking lot were taken while it was charging in the car, but I didn't take it inside, so I didn't get any pictures of the food. I also didn't get any pictures of the food at the Arbor Grill on the Biltmore Estate, where I had what was my maybe my best meal on the whole trip, a chicken salad with local bacon and blue cheese. The only picture I did manage to take at the Biltmore Estates was this one below, which a docent yelled at me for taking.

Faidley's, Baltimore

The first time I went into Faidley's, it was late in the afternoon, well after the lunch rush. It was made clear tot me that I was breaking local custom, I was wearing seersucker after Labor Day, but that as I was clearly an auslander, I would be indulged. The young woman under the counter had better than a half dozen piercings in her face of the type I am used to seeing on South of Market bears--heavy gauge chrome hoops and horseshoes and barbells in her septum and lower lip and ears--and thick blue-black tattoos barely decipherable on the brown-black skin of her neck and arms and face. 

"Hey. Can I have a crabcake, please?" I say to her, moving up to the counter.

"You want our best crabcake?" She says, with a little suspicion, certain she is talking to a person who hasn't a clue as to the best crabcake, graciously, though, giving me entre to her expertise.

"Well, yeah." I say, knowing how to take a cue, if nothing else.

"One lump." She says to the guy at the fryer, who drops one of the fist-sized balls of lump crabmeat and little  else (something else, surely, something that holds it together and gets crispy, but no bullshit, no breadcrumb, no celery...) into the oil. And then when she hands it to me she says "We have tartar sauce, but I wouldn't recommend it."

I don't use tartar sauce anyway, but I said "If you don't recommend it..." in an attempt at being funny, but she is already ignoring me, had already finished her job with me and was no longer listening.

That was almost a year ago. I have been back to Baltimore, and therefore Faidley's, twice since, most recently at a little past one in the afternoon, in time to see the lunch rush, workers enjoying the delicious lump crab cake with a short plastic cup of draft beer.

Behind the sweet potato cake, lump crabcakes await their destiny in the fryer basket.

Muskrat was not in season during this visit.

"Every subsequent crab cake will be measured against hers."

Saltines are provided, and shown here for scale. They were out of T-shirts.

18 Reasons Hog Butchery Demo With Morgan Maki, Week 2; A Few More Pictures of Meat

Week 2 of this demo was a little more relaxed and had more and porkier snackage. This all happened back in January, and I have been lax posting, sorry. As though you care.

Here we are looking at an almost empty plate of the was once piled with mortadella, a very mild, emulsified sausage made out of last week's pig. This is a way to use up some of the excess fat we cut away, or watched being cut away and the scrap/offcut bucket we filled up in the previous session.

This week's hog was not quite as cleanly cut, headwise. 

The Saints had just beat the Vikings and were on their way to the Super Bowl. My admiration for Morgan the butcher was only increased as he talked about the crab boil he had had the previous weekend at his grandmother's house in New Orleans. Perhaps my favorite non-eating second of this whole seminar-thingy came when someone asked him about what he boiled his crabs in, and for a second he seemed confused and then a little apologetic almost when he said sort of sheepishly "We just use Zatarain's. Everybody just uses Zatarain's. Or Old Bay, maybe." For the record, I find old bay

cloying and nearly inedible, but I think it is just because I expect boiled seafood to taste like Zatarains and  that clovey thing Old Bay has hit's me dead wrong.

Dude made pretty short work of breaking down the carcass, retrieving the tenderloin and the chops and whatnot, and kinda putting them away because they are/were not really the focus of the class. The back leg was buried in salt, where it will be rest for a number of day/weeks determined by its weight, a formula I don't really remember, I figure I can look it up if I need it, and then be hung and aged for a matter of months until it is a prosciutto.

One of the guys in the group had asked specially about porchetta, so we watched as Morgan herbed and spiced and rolled up a handsome hunk of hog belly, which he then tied so it was all skin on the outside which was going to get all crispy and golden brown and keep all the delicious juices sealed inside.

The the customer who wanted the trotters from the previous hog had flaked, but then called and asked that the trotters from this hog be saved. I have only ever attempted trotters pickled, out of a jar from behind the bar at the Saturn in New Orleans, and this attempt did not last long. You can get a lot of pickled hog parts from out of jars behind bars in New Orleans, whole maws being the most arresting from where I sit. But anyway, back to the hog at hand, Morgan boned out the shoulder and prepared it to be made into tasso ham, which is not really ham at all, because it's made out of the shoulder. The meat is packed in salt, a little sugar, and some nitrates. It cures in the this salt mixture for a few hours, maybe a day, and then it get rinsed and herbed & spiced & garlicked up and hot smoked. Tasso is rarely served by itself, it mostly goes in beans or gumbo or jambalaya. They don't display it in the case at Bi-Rite, but Mr Butcher says he usually has some there, so if you are making something that needs it, Bi-Rite is a source, and I can't think of anybody else offhand who would have it. 

The session sort of broke up early, with discussions of delicious charcuterie, including a pancetta Maki had made or acquired recently from an acorn fed Iberico hog. It was only so long before the talk had to stop and Maki retired to the market to slice us some of the meats of which he spoke. The pancetta was indescribably sublime. The tasso, which Maki warned was overly salty, was way past edible and would have been fantastic on pizza. All of it was gone before I could get pictures.

The Well Fed Bachelor #1; 3 Ingredient Tomato Sauce

The internet was all chubby over this super simple tomato sauce. I was intrigued by its simplicity, and by the fact that the onion didn't need to be chopped. I was unable to resist the urge to crush a couple of garlic cloves into it.

It was good. Easy as advertised. but if i did it again, and keep in mind that the only cookbook I owned before my mid 30s was Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, I would cut back a little on the butter and maybe go this route, with the bay leaf and herbs. I put on some green fettucini. Came out ok. I'm not gonna go evangelizing it, but I ate it all.

Torpedo From Lucca Bros.

There are times when the thought terminating cliches are true. Rarely is "it" "all good". But, in the case of torpedo sandwiches from the Lucca deli, it really, truly is.  The torpedo is a semi-random collection of coldcuts, whatever the early meat cutter has a lot of or just plain fancies, on a hard sour roll. The morning shift makes up a bunch of them early and wraps them up for sale at $3.00 a pop over the course of the day. They usually sell out early, so I can't really go in planning to get one, but whenever I go and they have them, I buy one, no matter what else I came in to get.

When I went in for some sandwich meat Friday, it was late in the afternoon, the time of day when the torpedoes have usually long since been sold and eaten, so I was surprised to see torpedoes in the case.  It was tasty. Hot coppa, some kind of large-format, summer-sausagey wet salami, pepper turkey, and pastrami on a hard, sour roll. Couple mustard packets and some napkins. Three dollars. All good, I ask? What part isn't?

Moronically, I left my camera charger someplace that is not my home and where it does not help me in charging my image-capturing device, so I don't have a picture of the sandwich. You've seen a hard roll with some cold cuts on it before, though. Seeing it is far from the important sensory component with regard to this sandwich.