I'm back on Blogger.

Well, it seems that not only did the Mac I was using to build the website at jarcane.info die, but my server host apparently died as well, and I can't even get ahold of the owner right now to find out what the hell's wrong.

So I'm back on blogger, and working to set up a redirect to bring jarcane.info traffic back here.  

I'm also back cooking again, so maybe I'll start writing about food and such again.  

The site to end all sites.

So, I have a new website.

It's at http://jarcane.info

It is, essentially, an attempt to consolidate all my various scattered blogs and web presences, as well as serve as a single repository for any future writing, of which I hope to make quite a lot more, as I intend to actually keep up with content updates in this new venture. I've also added a forum, with the hope of making it a great place to hang out and talk about food and games and things with all my various online friends and readers, and anyone else who happens to pop by.

Check it out, add it to your bookmarks, subscribe with your favorite feed reader. See you there!

Puerco al disco, sorta.

Last night, I caught a snippet of the Argentina episode of No Reservations, in which he visits a sort of commune there, where they prepared a rather magnificent looking dish, carne al disco, a dish of sliced beef, onions and peppers, cooked in garlic oil over an open flame in a shallow cast iron pan.

It looked absolutely amazing. So, naturally, I had to rip off the concept as best I could, and create a dish of my own inspired by what I saw. After a bit of fruitless searching on the internet for a recipe, I ultimately decided to just wing it, and we headed off to the store.

I wandered about, rounding up ingredients as inspiration struck me. I grabbed a yellow onion, a red bell pepper, one each of anaheim, habanero and yellow chiles, a can of coconut milk, a bag of key limes, a pound of linguica, and some corn tortillas.

The vegetables all got thinly sliced with a mandolin, except the habanero, which I diced. The linguica I cut into thin rounds as well. I also took out 4 thin sliced pork chops from the fridge, pounded them a bit, then seasoned with salt and lime juice and left to rest.

Come cooking time, I quickly seared the chops, then took them from the pan and tossed in the linguica, heating them a bit before tossing in all the vegetables, reducing the heat, and letting them sweat a bit, just long enough for the juices to start deglazing the pan. Then, in went the can of coconut milk, the juice of 4 of the key limes, and the pork chops. I threw a lid on top, and let them simmer on about medium heat for a bit.

For serving, the pork chops were served just with a bit of the resulting coconut sauce, while the remaining mixture of sausage and vegetables was served on tortillas as tacos. The pork was a bit dry, I think it would've been better if I'd basically poached it in the cocount milk without searing first, but the tacos were absolutely excellent. Rich, flavorful, truly a dish to be proud of.

Something to make again, that's for sure, and another pork recipe for that restaurant concept I've been pondering about lately . . .

A peace offering.

http://xkcd.com/418/

I haven't posted in even longer than usual. I haven't honestly done much lately I felt worthy of writing about. I've been on tighter finances than usual, and it's left my diet consisting of a hell of a lot of pasta and ramen.

There have been a few highlights. Homemade orichiette with butter and parmesan, for instance, probably the best damn pasta I've ever had, and I didn't even do that great a job with it. The esteemed Mr. Batali is right on when he says it's always better homemade with love, and he's equally dead on when he talks of the beauty of simplicity. Of all the pasta dishes I've prepared of late, that one was, without doubt in my mind, the absolute best.

I've also been playing with a Yucatan inspired ramen soup, made with shrimp broth and a healthy dosage of achiote. It develops this amazing, rich flavor and texture, and a gorgeous deep red color. It actually coats the side of the bowl. I also made a pretty damn nice turkey ramen with black pepper the other day.

I'm hoping soon to actually finally find a new kitchen to cook in, it's just a matter of finding the right opportunity. I stupidly let a shot at the Blacksmith slip by me out of lazyness and I'll regret that one forever. I'd really like to get a spot in a real haute cuisine sort of establishment, somewhere I can really learn the ropes, instead of the amateur fumbling about in the dark I do now.

Today's important culinary tip.

Stay away from the cheap Mexican sardines.

Thanks to a can of El Mexicano sardines, I've spent the last few days in general misery. I knew I should've stuck with a more traditional puttanesca recipe.

The folks over at Chowhound described them as "last on the list of over 39 canned sardines sampled. If I ever do buy a worse tasting sardine, it will go directly in the garbage." I can certainly attest to their foulness, indeed, it was rather apparent upon opening the can even, but I figured the rest of the dish would balance their overt fishyness. Indeed, the final dish was much more mild, though still a bit strong.

I didn't expect to actually get sick from the damn things though.

Catching up on events.

So the last week or so has been an almost exhausting cavalcade of new recipes and experiments, as well as an interesting new development in the form of me actually getting paid for doing this now.

Yup, that's right. The folks at Bend's Source Weekly have seen fit to give me irregular column space. The first piece, a profile of cook/owner Tammy Mills of Cross Creek Cafe, ran a few weeks ago, though due to some confusion had to be cut down considerably. I hope to post the extended profile soon.

Walking back through the menu over the last week, the biggest adventure was the smoke roasted pork tacos, for last weekend's D&D game.

I started with two roughly 6.5 lb boneless pork shoulder roasts, and brined them for two days in a brine seasons with whole dried japonica chiles, peppercorns, mustard and coriander seed, lime juice, and bistek.

This then got thrown on my smoker over hickory chips at about 250-300 for two hours, topping them off with a few slices of fresh pineapple. However, the temperature proved insufficient to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, a fact that was unfortunately largely the fault of the weather.

So I brought them inside and threw them both on a cookie sheet, and popped them in the oven for a bit. Unfortunately, I'd neglected to consider that the pan I'd grabbed had no edges on it, and the running molten fat from the pork wound up starting a bit of a fire in the bottom of the oven.

So the pig got yanked back out, and the oven left alone for a bit, and some rapid brainstorming occurred. One of my fellow players, and also a fellow cook, spotted a crock pot on the counter, and upon pointing it out, it occurred to me that if we were going to finish one of the roasts in that, we should take advantage of all the beer lying about, and cook it off in that with some more of the pineapple slices. The other roast meanwhile, went back on a proper baking sheet this time, and back in the oven at 350 degrees.

The oven roast went in for another hour, before, all of us quite hungry, we decided to pull that one out and carve into it. The thickest portion in the middle was still a bit rare in the center, but a good two thirds of it was quite done at this point, so we went ahead and carved off a healthy portion, and went about making tacos of it, served on corn tortillas with some fresh pico de gallo and a squeeze of lime. The oven pork was absolutely fantastic, moist, salty, rich with fat. The flavor was sort of like a pastrami, crossed with bacon, and the texture was perfect.

The remainder went back in the oven for another hour or so to finish, at which point we returned again to crack into both the oven and crockpot versions, which were both well and cooked by this point. The crockpot version, by contrast to it's oven compatriot, was almost a totally different animal. It was moist and tender, and the flavor of the smoke had mellowed and blended with the bite and the acidity from the beer and pineapple to create a whole different flavor from it's dry roasted counterpart.

It was well more food than any of us actually needed of course, and I wound up still having a third of the oven roast to take home, sadly leaving the crockpot one behind, having only really had the chance to give it a taste.

This wound up finding it's way into many of my recipes the following week. The next morning, we decided to make sandwiches with it, and I discovered that, now that it had chilled, I could slice it and use it rather like bacon, and so made some open faced sandwiches, by placing slices of the pork on a baking sheet under the broiler, before putting that back onto some bread with some healthy slices of pepper jack over the top. I served this with some Campbell's tomato soup, itself seasoned with a bit more of the pork, sliced thin, broiled until crisp, and then tossed back in the soup for flavor.

I also used it, sliced, then chopped into smaller pieces, to add some extra body and flavor to a few other dishes, like chicken and rice with sauce veloute, and a southwestern chicken lime pot pie. The last bit of it wound up coming full circle, and again being turned into tacos, this time diced, tossed with bistek and Tapatio, and then refried in butter on a flattop griddle.

I had considered repeating the experiment on a much smaller scale this weekend, but ultimately wound up taking a bit of a break from cooking over the last few days. However, tonight, my break ends, and I shall be returning to the kitchen to prepare a lovely spaghetti puttanesca with sardines.

A flavor trip to the real Mexico.

Recently, I hace discovered a new favorite taqueria, El Cochinito Contento in Redmond Oregon.

A small Mexican market on 6th, tucked in it's back corner by the butcher counter is a little taqueria, that serves some absolutely fantastic, and really authentic tacos and menudo that is simply to die for. The taco selection is a smörgåsbord of nasty bits, from tongue, to tripas, to cabeza, my personal favorite. Fatty, tender head meats on a warm corn tortilla with some chopped onion and cilantro, all it needs is a little squirt of lime to be one of the best things I've ever eaten. For the less adventurous, there's also some fantastic adovada, azada, and al pastor as well.

And the best part? Tacos are a mere $1.50 each. The amazing menudo, which takes me two sittings to finish? $5.50. It's an absolute steal, for some of the best damn REAL Mexican food you'll find short of travelling there.

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The other night I found myself with a strange craving for fish. I don't often eat seafood these days, largely because I've been quite broke, and any sort of seafood has a tendency to cost an arm and a leg.

But the power of one of my strange cravings is not to be trifled with, and rather than find myself fighting off said craving for the literal weeks it was likely to linger, I instead wound up going to the nearby Safeway to take a look at their seafood stock, hoping actually that they had gotten a share of the massive shipments of smelt that the Redmond Safeway has been getting of late.

They did not turn out to have any such, but they did have some surprisingly nice, surprisingly fresh, sole, which I acquired immediately, and then set about wandering through the store, trying to come up with a recipe for it. Wandering through the "ethnic food" aisle, I somehow hit upon the concept of poaching it in some kind of green salsa.

A brief perusal of my available options in the store, led me to promptly check out, and rush over to the Colima Market to acquire some real ingredients, in the form of two tomatillos, one each of pasilla and Anaheim peppers, two limes, cilantro, shrimp boullion, and bistek.

A sudden flash of inspiration on the way back home led to me swinging back by the Safeway for a can of coconut milk for which I was horridly over charged, and a can of Jumex mango nectar.

Once home, the tomatillos and the peppers were roughly chopped and tossed in the food processor, along with the juice of both limes, a healthy dose of cilantro, a sprinkling of bistek, salt, pepper, and Tapatio. this all got pulsed until very finely chopped but not quite pureed, essentially making a nice mild tomatillo salsa.

This then went into a saute pan, along with the coconut milk, a cube of the shrimp bouillion, more bistek and tapatio, a splash of the mango nectar, and salt and pepper. Into the resulting liquid went about 3/4 to 1 lb of sole fillets, on a high flame until the liquid just started to simmer, then reduced to a very low flame, covered, and them simmered for about 15 minutes, then removed from the flame and let to set for another 10 while the rice I intended to serve it over finished cooking.

For the rice, I made a 2 cup helping, substituting some of the liquid for half a lime's juice and some more of the mango nectar, and also adding a touch more bistek, tapatio, a couple whole sprigs of cilantro, and some salt and pepper. This gets brought to a boil and then covered and reduced to a very low flame for about 20 minutes, then taken off the flame and left to sit for about 10 minutes with the lid still on.

Once it's all done, fluff the rice with a fork, serve some out over the plate, and then top with sole and the left over cooking liquid.

The sole is positively melt in you mouth tender, and the sauce is tangy, sweet, savory, all at once, and almost no trace of heat surprisingly enough.

It was a great meal, and my dining companion said it was the closest to Yucatan style cuisine he's had since living there.