All Things Chill

Organic Pork Loin with an Almond Wild Mushroom Crust and Roasted Organic Walla Walla Onions

The last course from from Sunday’s spoils from the Ballard farmers’ market is a pork loin with roasted veggies! EEEEEEE. This is the last post I swear – we had Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. LOL. Never underestimate the powers of fresh farmers’ market produce!

For the pork, I made a quick crust by putting dried wild mushrooms, garlic, dried thyme, crushed red pepper, a few glugs of olive oil and almonds (for texture) into a food processor and chopped until fine. I then carefully placed it on the top of my pork loin and baked it in a 350 degree oven until the internal temperature (using my Polder Thermometer) reached 150 degrees – about 45 minutes – 1 hour.

I also threw in a few young Walla Walla onions that I cut in half and tossed in olive oil, black pepper and Kosher salt while the pork was cooking for 30 minutes or until the onions become golden brown and tender. If you’re dealing with larger or older onions, I would blanch them first to reduce the “stringiness” that you normally get with supermarket produce. The onions make a great side dish by themselves and are really easy to do!

Again, if you have any questions about any of the recipes I post here, feel free to ask. The sooner you do the better, I tend to forget a lot of things as the day passes. Hee hee.

Pork, the other white meat!

~Spec

As a continuation of the spoils from Sunday’s farmers’ market trip, I made a simple organic beet salad with goat cheese and edamame. $1 for 5 baby beets, with an abundance of greens for another meal? Amazing!

I chose edamame for its “crunch” and the ability to add a firmer texture to the tender beets and the creamy goat cheese, plus it looks really cool on the plate. Hee hee. Deep purples matched with “institutional green” really pops on a white dish! Fabrications follows below:

All I did was trim the beets of their “tails” and cut off the stem 1 inch from the top. I started them in cold water and put the pot over high heat until it came to a boil and the beets were knife tender. I let them cool for a bit, then gently rubbed the skin off with a paper towel and cut them in halves. Finally, I tossed ‘em in a little Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, lemon juice and olive oil and placed them on the plate with the goat cheese and edamame!

It’s a really simple dish, but the flavors that come from it are delicious! The smooth texture of the goat cheese, the sweet baby beets, the twang you get from the lemon juice and the bite of the edamame really whets the palette for the next course… which will be posted shortly. Get your baby beets now before it’s too late!0

YAY BEETS!

~Spec

Breeze. Bare feet on grass. Neighbors’ dinnerware making clanging noises as they wash their dishes. The sky turns violet as the trees sway too and fro to catch the last wisps of sunlight. I sit here rather comfortably on poorly aged wooden benches with my laptop, a cell phone and a mason jar full of cranberry juice, lime and Tanqueray. Relaxed.

It may be the gin talking, but this is the first time that I’ve really felt tranquil here in the emerald city. Seattle is a completely different city when the skies clear and the dull melancholy-stained blanket of blah is stored away for the Summer. The city is filled with good humor. Spilled libations on the sidewalk mark late nights of debauchery. Douchebaggery also halts to a minimum (except when guys hit on your girlfriend lawl) & pure unadulterated kindness pours from the sky (gyros for free? amazing).

So, to all of you who have asked me “How do you like Seattle so far,” my reply will no longer be…

“It’s killing me,” but…

“It hasn’t killed me yet.”

Baby steps people, baby steps.

~Herschell

*Ahem* Hypothetical, y’all:

So, if you’re a (drunk) guy and you’re trying to hit on a girl with a boyfriend… what kind of shot would you buy for her? Let’s assume said boyfriend is really handsome and smart trusts his girlfriend 100% and really wants to see if a line like “well, is it serious?” works on an already taken girl.

Liana’s still <3’s me, so apparently lemon drops are not the answer. LOL. Dumbass.

Oh wait, that was a hypothetical.

Don & Jen – good times, good times.

~Herschell

Since it was a beautiful day in Seattle (1st one since September 2007 lol), Liana and I hit up the farmers’ market in Ballard on Sunday to pick up a few things and soak up the sun. We picked up a canvas bag full of produce and before we left we checked out the Skagit River Ranch tent to talk to Mary (Hi Mary!).

It was about 11am, which meant the mainstream cuts (ribeyes, pork chops) were gone. Boo. Apparently, there’s a huge line before the market opens that extends 2 blocks! LOL. People love their organic meat I guess. LOL. So, as I learned that all of the “good” meat coolers were empty, I decided to walk to the corner and find a lonely container marked “offal” – entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal – and opened it to find overlooked treasures. LOL.

I found a ton of items that I would have brought home (mMMmmM tripe), but when I saw the package of organic chicken hearts, I had a flashback of all those visits to Brazillian Steakhouses that served me pairs of those delightful chewy bits, carefully roasted on a skewers. $5 later, I was walking home a happy man!

When I got back home, I decided to find a recipe on google to provide me with some guidelines. Epicurious had one, but I didn’t want to use soy sauce. No dice. I called a few culinarians (hey guys and girl! hee hee) and they reiterated the use of strong flavors. I figure that I’d try and mimic everything that I liked in the past to make my dish a reality. w00p w00p recipe follows below!

Chicken Hearts with Cilantro and Lime Crema

Ingredients:

Chicken Hearts
1/2 lb. Chicken hearts
3 tbsp. lime juice
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 shallot, minced
Kosher salt
Freshly Cracked Pepper
Olive oil

Lime Crema
1/2 cup sour cream
1 lime, juiced & zested
Cilantro

Fabrication:
1. Combine all ingredients in a zip top bag – let marinade for at least 2 hours or overnight.
2. Preheat broiler on high.
3. Pull hearts from marinade and pat dry. Discard liquid.
4. Place in oven-proof container and broil for 10 minutes, or until golden brown on top.
5. Mix ingredients for lime crema while hearts are cooking
6. Serve on a pre-heated plate with crema and garnish with cilantro

Delicious! Nice and tender, but with the robust flavors from being under intense heat. The lime juice really give it a nice twang and provided a safety net that could cover up any off flavors. I’d totally serve this again with toothpicks and a party of 5 or more!

Since this experiment, I’ll prolly go ahead and pull the trigger on The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating , a book that’s been patiently waiting in my Amazon Wishlist. You never know when you’ll find some frozen animal parts in your friend’s freezer!

Offal-ing in love with the nasty bits!

~Spec

I like surfing the Internet. No, I HEART surfing the Internet. But with all the time spent between work, talking about getting a dog chillin’ with Liana, I don’t really have the willpower to dig deep into the trenches of the ‘net to procure delicious nuggets of information for everyone to enjoy. Well… that is until I started using Google Reader.

Ok, before I get into the details, do you have an RSS reader / aggregator? Yes, scroll down a few paragraphs. If no, pay attention! *siren* Wiki has the deets!

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or “personal newspaper.” Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being “pulled” to the subscriber, as opposed to “pushed” with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some “pushed” information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Once you find a website to <3 forevar, just find the RSS icon (above), copy the link and paste it into Google Reader. You’re now subscribed! You’ll be able to read all of the site’s posts from one spot and better yet, be able to share your most interesting links to the masses (and your fellow google mail contacts). Clint drops the knowledge on all of the latest gReader funtions.

Ok, now to the meat of the post. Google Reader also allows you to have a “shared page” where all of your tasty links are stored with your notes and commentary attached. Feel free to bookmark that page to follow what I’ve been diggin’ lately – food, style, nerd fodder, Seattle and dj stuffs. I’ve been trying to integrate all this information it onto my site, but I find that it looks (and works) best as a separate page. We’ll see we’ll see.

YAY RSS!

~Spec

Coco Puffs & Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch. YAY. I’ve decided to abstain from cooking breakfast on weekends that I have off because it takes up so much damn time to make something good without making us OMGTUMMYSOFULLANDHEAVY. So, when I have weekends off, cereal is now a morning standard. I just wish we had Saturday morning cartoons! I mean, at the very least, gimmie some Beakman’s World. LOL.

Google didn’t help, do you guys have a great cereal mashup? C’MON HOOK IT UPS.

Yup yup tasty!

~Spec

I found a post on Seattle’s Metblog about Molly Moon’s Ice Cream, a new ice cream joint a leisurely stroll from our place in Seattle.

Normally, when I experience something (brace yourself for the pun) savory or unsavory, I post about it in my blog… but since this post presented itself at the right place and the right time, I decided to unload and leave a comment.

I don’t want to get too harsh, but the salted caramel was wayyy too salty and gave an “off” flavor. It didn’t taste like Kosher or sea salt to me… more of an iodized tint.

All the way back home, I kept murmuring to myself “I really want to like this, I really, really do.”

That being said, the scoop underneath, vivant coffee, was good… but not good enough to make me forget about the caramel.

I’ll definitely be back, I *need* them to succeed!

Maybe salted caramel just isn’t my thang (even though I so want it to be). Yes, it was kinda harsh, but I made a promise yesterday that I’d be back to support the shop. I really want it to be a place where I can take all of my visitors and say “YOU WILL NEVER GET BETTER ICE CREAM ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.” (or at least wherever the heck the person is visiting from.) Hee hee.

Go indie ice cream!

~Spec

We’re going on a trip in a few months to do some things that require… not being out of shape and eating GREASE. LOL. So, in the effort to not gain any more weight, we have cut out a few things in our diets:

Soda, Coke, Pop – whatever you call it
Fries, chips and tater tots (I just wanted to type tater tots lol)

While it’s not a long list and also the fact that we don’t drink / eat these things regularly… when we do (or when *I* do for that matter), I go all out. And we all know how kinda gross and ugly that can be.

This won’t help me get into shape, but not defaulting into a ravenous gastronomic rampage is a good thang. Moderation people…

…moderation.

~Spec

I made lamb shanks on my day off for Liana, myself and my buddy Don today! EEEEEE. Just so we’re on the same geographical page (skip to the next paragraph if you *luvy wuvy* your petting zoo animals), the shank of an animal is the area below the knee and above the foot. The protein is tough and lean and should be cooked low and slo’ to break down fibers to make the meat oh so succulent. Braising FTW!

I used the same braising techniques and guidelines as I did with the beef shanks I made last year, but I added 2 tbs of tomato paste ’cause the color really wasn’t there 1/2 in the cooking process (it also adds another layer of rich flavor). If you’d like the step by step recipe, let me know. I’d be glad to help!

I served the shanks with some polenta (can I say corn grits without anyone screaming at me?) that I cooked in a 4 to 1 water to grain ratio. I added 1/2 cup of Romano cheese, stirred it together and plated it right away. I then placed the shank on top with a little extra sauce and topped it with a gremolata garnish – finely minced garlic, parsley and lemon zest – to cut through the heavy flavors from the dish.

I wish I made more! I’m going to take the leftover braising sauce and probably pair it with some pasta (or some polenta quickly cut and fried into shapes) and quickly sauteed shiitake mushrooms… can’t let it go to waste! MMmMmMMm!

YAY Shanks!

~Spec

Youtube link here. It’s late, but I thought I’d share some crazy footage of a new video game that’ll be released for the Xbox360 and the PS3. Apparently (and you can’t get more apparent that a video at the top of your post hee hee), Mirror’s Edge, a game by EA’s DICE division, is all about parkour -just like in the last 007 movie:

an activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body.

While this is the first game of this nature, my friends can attest this is how I PLAY VIDEO GAMES. LOL. Back when we were playing Serious Sam (with invincibility and most cheats on), the games from the Halo series, and the many iterations of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6, I was ALWAYS in the front… not because I wanted to lead… because I have no patience just wanted to finish the level / game. If bullets only do “so much” damage, one could survive running through the firefights with pure abandon and come out unscathed… right? RIGHT?

So apparently, the world in Mirror’s Edge is scattered with color coded “hints” that can show the player the path towards the goal. Wiki has the deets:

In order to assist the player in creating these chains of moves, the game employs a system called “Runner Vision”, which derives its name from its purpose: to depict the environment the way a runner would see it, instantly recognizing escape routes. It is a highlighting system that emphasises environmental pieces useful for progression—like pipes, ramps, and enterable doors—with the colour red as Faith approaches, though it does not always indicate the best route.

Sounds cool. Now I can decide whether or not to slide under that gate or climb over that fence… something that I TOTALLY do on a daily basis. Or not. LOL.

W00p Parkour!

~Spec

The Seattle International Film Festival, lovingly shortened to The SIFF, kicks off on May 22nd and runs through June 15. I read a great overview of the festival on Seattle.Metblogs, which is really giving me some sort of a pulse on this city.

One of the movies that I *did* want to check out is Bottle Shock… which tickles every culinary bone in my body in all the right culinary places. LOL. That sounds dirtier than I’d like. Oh well… summary below!

…another based on real life feature, this one about the shockwaves sent around the world in 1978 when the Paris Tastings revealed that Californians could produce wine every bit as good, if not better, than the French.

It’s gon’ be a showdown here tonite fellers! While I’d love to go in depth about how some regions in California have the same longitude (dude, it’s not latitude, I looked it up) as the well respected areas in France thereby creating a similar grape growing eco-system (pushes up glasses in a snobbish way)… I’m sure the film will explain it better than I ever could. Hee hee.

The film was an offical selection for the 2008 Sundance Festival and includes actors and actresses such as – please forgive me for the vague *also in* film references - Steven Spurrier (That bad guy in Harry Potter and the cheating dude in Love Actually), Eliza Dushku (she was in Buffy) and Bill Pullman (ya know, the president in Independence Day).

Bottle Shock will close out the festival, so there’ll be plenty of other movies to see! I hope it’ll be just as fun as the SFIAAFF!

Go Movies!

~Spec

Per Liana’s instructions, I made some Sangria for a get together at Deb’s house yesterday. Good times, good times! Quick recipe below:

Two bottles dry red wine (nothing too tannic, merlot works well – I used a cabernet sauvignon, will write winery later)
2 D’anjou pears
2 Fuji apples
1 16oz. can of lychees (with 3/4 of syrup reserved)
Slices from 2 oranges, lemons and lime
3 cups Orange juice
1 can organic black cherry seltzer
4 splashes of bourbon (traditionally brandy)

As you can see above, I cut the apples and pears into semi-uniform chunks (perfect cubes look kinda… excuse the pun – square) and sliced the citrus in very thin slices. I poured all of the liquid in and reserved the splashes of the bourbon (I believe we used Basil Hayden, smooth smooth bourbon) right before we served it.

I also made beef empanadas as a quick “make & assemble last minute” meal to go with the sangria… but that recipe will come when I run through it a few more times to perfect it. All I can say is that FRIED > BAKED. ALWAYS. Hee hee.

YAY Sangria!

~Spec