Pleasant House

I have put a lot of hard work into our home, gathering years of inspiration from Dwell magazine. This week Chelsea; our dog, Porkchop; and I are on the cover.

I knew that the magazine would be out soon but I didn’t know when exactly. Chelsea collected the two enveloped copies of the issue that we received in the mail before I could get to them, and hid them at home. I had to follow a series of clues to find the magazines.

For months I’ve been looking for an excuse to prepare Bruce Aidells’s recipe for brisket braised in porter, from Bon Appetit’s October 2009 issue. Brisket is one of my favorite cuts of beef; though I don’t often eat it nowadays, it conjures many fond memories from my years growing up in Kansas beef country. Because the recipe insists that the brisket will taste best if braised on the day before it is to be eaten–and nevermind the nearly four hours of braising time alone–it’s not the sort of recipe that lends itself well to last-minute plans.

As luck would have it, both Art and I came down with a bit of a cold late last week. So the only items on our agenda this past weekend were staying at home and nursing ourselves back to health. Since good food can cure just about anything, and with 48 hours to spare, we decided to feed our colds with a four-course meal–with the brisket as centerpiece.

I should point out that during the last of those aforementioned years in beef country, and the nine years that followed, I was a vegetarian. Before this weekend, I hadn’t actually cooked a brisket, though I have worked with a variety of other cuts and meats since I fell off the wagon. That Art was at home from work and able to instruct me on how to butcher a whole brisket was an added bonus to the process of making and eating this delicious meal.

A restoratively good stew it was, complete with sweet from carrots, onions, mushrooms, and prunes; earthiness from thyme, bay, and sage; sour-tart from mustard, porter, and malt vinegar; and rich, fatty, robust meatiness from an especially flavorful cut of beef. Served with braised leeks, it woke up our taste buds and knocked out a few germs along the way.

Hint: It’s even better on the third day. After tonight’s leftovers, the brisket may be gone, but so are our colds.

Chelsea and I took a couple of days to visit with my grandpa on the occasion of his 90th birthday. He’s still full of spunk and eager to put on the kettle and tell stories. While staying at my parents’ house, a freezing fog rolled in during the night and blanketed the trees with a crystalline fuzz. The Midwest gets cold in the wintertime, and every once in a while there is some beauty in it.

Some people go disco dancing at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, some watch the news, and some get ready for bed.  Chelsea and I had dinner. It’s not that strange for us to be eating that late; after all, I am a chef and have slightly non-conventional work hours. I knew that Chel would be doing some cooking, but the menu was a surprise. The aromas of Provencal cooking were heavy as I walked through the door: olive oil, garlic, onion, herbs, lemon, evidence of something baked.

I spotted crispy-skinned chicken thighs, cooked halfway in a skillet, and knew I was in for a real treat. We don’t do a lot of searing and frying in the condo because of the splattering, so the fact that Chel seared these chicken thighs meant that she wasn’t messing around. Chel didn’t set out with a particular theme for the dinner, but her recipe selections and natural tendencies led her to create a very California/French menu where olives and olive oil were the common thread woven throughout the meal.

We started with some triple-creme cow’s milk cheese with olive oil crackers. The main course of crispy chicken thighs with fennel, olives, Meyer lemon, and plenty of extra virgin olive oil served upon herbed farro was adapted from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc cookbook.  The final course was a moist olive oil cake with a tangy Meyer lemon glaze. A slightly oaky California chardonnay was devoid of any “oliveness,” but its buttery finish and aroma reminded me of California wine country, which is often peppered with olive trees.

I don’t have much to say about The Atlantic piece “Cultivating Failure,” by Caitlin Flanagan, though I’d like to counter a few of the writer’s points. Hopefully by doing so I can show how practical both school gardens and the food education that goes along with them could be for our society.

Here’s a post that Chelsea and I put together as a reaction to a “60 Minutes” segment that featured Alice Waters and aired last spring. I hope you read it. The ideology behind this post is that we not only have the potential to increase our access to real food no matter where we live, but we also have the ability to learn how to prepare that food.

But learning how to prepare it is not an easy task. This education has to take occur in the same location where math, English, social studies, history, and art takes place: at school. If we teach our children where their food comes from, how it is grown, and how to prepare it, we will be both teaching them how to healthfully sustain themselves and offering them the ability to choose the direction of their diets. This knowledge is something that many Americans do not learn at home.

Flanagan says, “The suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself. The solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better.”

I wholeheartedly disagree. As a food professional, I see firsthand how many people who happen to be of the highest socioeconomic status–people whom I serve on a daily basis–make terrible eating choices, are overweight, and have multiple health issues related to poor diet.  A big salary is by no means the answer to eating better. Education–knowing what real food is, where it comes from, its nutritive and restorative qualities, and how to grow it, and what to look for when buying and preparing it–will be the only way to make a difference.

This ideology can help build upon the greatness that grows around us and within our diverse population. It is a plan to structure a food culture, one that should have an opportunity to get off the ground.

Flanagan says that this movement is being pushed by “an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology.”

A “foodie” is someone who looks at food as entertainment; this trendy term suggests a sense of non-seriousness and fun. Flanagan is not considering the serious (yet hopefully fun loving) food people and educators who could potentially propel this ideology forward. Foodies are more like the fans of the movement. At the end of the day, it’s not the foodies who will change policies and institute change, it will be those professionals and doers who have the practical, working knowledge of the land, livestock, pots, pans, knives, and science behind it all. Nope, propelling ideology is not fun foodie business; it is a movement by real food professionals, among others, in the fields of education and politics.

Twitter is proving that a lot can be said in 140 characters. More specifically, a lot can be said in a flurry of 140-character posts. If you are familiar with Twitter you will know that by adding a hash tag to a term within your post, your post will be lumped together with all the others that have that hash tag, too. This is called a trending topic, or “trending,” and the trend that I’m talking about here is called #meatcamp.

#Meatcamp is pretty much what it sounds like: a Camp David of “tweeters” from around the country and around the globe who are interested in meat, mostly beef, and who get together to discuss everything about it you could possibly imagine. Everyone who engages in this conversation is part of this “long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food–not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced” as quoted from a recent LA Times piece that I learned about here.

The Times piece mentioned that the current climate of food conversation is more like an argument than an actual discussion.

“On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.”

The thing that impresses me about #meatcamp is that its participants–who range from marketers to beef farmers to meat scientists to gun-toting, red-meat-eating, church-going ranchers to chefs with questions (that’s me!)–have differing levels of knowledge on the subject of meat, and disparate political viewpoints and careers, and are conversing, never shouting, about food.

Some participants are “deep in it,” raising and slaughtering animals for food on the tiniest and the largest level; some are trying to help certain producers stand out. Some are answering serious questions about the serious subject of meat safety. And some people, including me, are asking questions and learning more about something that I purchase and prepare on a daily basis.

So, if you want to learn more about meat, participate in the conversation or just observe. Tune in to #meatcamp on Thursday nights and be part of a national and potentially quadruple-continent discussion, like this past session.

I know there are other food-world trending topics out there like #meatcamp, and I’m trying to learn about them. What topics do you think add to this national food conversation?

I find myself rooting for new restaurants in my own city and in places I’ve never been. I have “friends” with blogs, flickr, Facebook, and Twitter sites that have opened restaurants in such cities as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. These places are worlds apart, and I may never have met anyone involved with them in person. But the way I see it, a restaurant opening these days serves its demographic–both local and virtual–directly on opening day, opening its doors to the world.

Most people view restaurants as strictly eating places. Ultimately, that’s what restaurants are, and that’s how they make money. But to me, restaurants, bakeries, markets, and bars are so much more than just places to eat and drink. They can be kind of like friends themselves, distant buddies or even athletes in the sense that I can follow the progress of their projects and performance from idea to fruition or from pre-season to opening to peak season. I can keep up on how they perform, what the fans and critics are saying about them, and sometimes, fortunately, I can visit them in person and put my money in their register. The eventual firsthand experience is kind of like seeing your favorite band in concert or getting to see a team that you’ve been following play in their stadium for the first time. By sitting down to that first meal or first cocktail, I’ve filled the role of customer and the establishment has been paid. Just like that concert or that game, I feel like I’ve had an experience worth much more than what I’ve paid.

Just like the qualities that draw people to each other, or that attract us to one type of music or another, I keep up on these places, in part, because I’m in the industry; there’s something about them that I can relate to and I think their story is interesting. Maybe we share a certain style, or gain our inspiration from similar places and have a similar food philosophy. In the end, we can’t be that different–we’re seeing restaurants personified to a degree.

It’s an interesting time for restaurants. It seems as if many are closing and struggling. However, many are opening every day, and I’d imagine a lot more visitors are admiring their menus online or looking forward to their openings than can fit it in their seats on a daily basis. This should make these restaurants feel good and, hopefully, give them something to count on in the days to come. I’m enjoying this new world of restaurants and chefs connecting directly to their clientele and their admirers. Is this connection borne out of necessity? Or are the Internet age and the nearly $600 billion per year food industry just meant to go together?

Thin slices of pork heavily marinated in guajillo chili, garlic, onion, pineapple, and clove, and slow-roasted on a spit. Crispy and tender pieces of meat are sliced off and served on fresh, warm tortillas. More al pastor pictures here.

More spit-roasted action:

Duck

Venison

Lamb

Pork shoulder

Pig

Chicken thighs

The Pleasant House blog has had a good one-and-a-half-year run. So what’s new for 2010? Well, it’s a new decade, so I say out with the old and in with the new. I think that the current look of the blog is pretty “first 10 years of the decade,” so I think we’ll give it a new one.

Hopefully, we’ll also be able to give you something tangible from The Pleasant House–you know, something you can put in your hands, or in your belly.

Something that will stay the same is our personal take on cooking and food culture. We hope that you find our range of content enjoyable and fun, and that you see The Pleasant House as much more than just a recipe blog. Here’s a quick-guide, a table of contents if you will, to some of our highlights from this past decade:

Living History: There will always be lessons to be learned from the “old” ways of doing things and from those that do them.

The Boot Doctor

The Chief

The Knife Sharpener

Caribbean Flavors: From grouper rundown to conch stew, tropical flavors will always warm our soul.

Caribbean Christmas

Grouper rundown

Restaurant Tales: I’m not a professional restaurant reviewer, but I know that restaurants have the ability to create special moments. It’s those moments that I like to reflect upon.

Delfina and Da Delfina

Xoco

Urban Belly

Fado

Happy Chef

Nightwood

Betto e Mary, Rome

Los Calaos de Briones, Spain

Butchering and Wild Game: Butchering your own meat is a dying art. I’m constantly learning new butchering techniques, and cooking and curing methods for wild game and whole animal carcasses.

Whole animal butchery

Venison

Lamb

Pheasant

Duck

Offal Cooking: The nasty bits or the off-cuts, these are the organs of the animals that are usually discarded. They can be delicious and healthy. Last summer I worked my way through lamb tongue, heart, kidneys, and liver.

Tongue

Heart

Kidneys

Liver

Local, Midwestern Cooking and Ingredients: There is a bounty of natural food to be found in the Midwest, and it should be celebrated with every opportunity.

Peak-season locavore menu

Midwestern “crudo”

Home Brewing: Beer, wine, soda.

Home brew

Juneberry wine

Food and Politics: Every day I think about the idea that what you choose to put on the plate or on your fork or what you choose not to put on your plate or on your fork is a form of activism.

Beef choices

Year-round market concept

Foraging: Urban, suburban, rural, or tropical, wherever I am, I’m constantly tuning myself in to what edibles are growing around me and finding ways to utilize them.

Wild fruit

Lamb’s quarters

Juneberries

“Eat This City” video podcast

Chokeberries

Roots

Mulberries

Top 10 Lists: I highlighted 10 significant food experiences every week for seven weeks.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Staging (stah-jing): Chelsea, who proudly earned her baking and pastry certificate from Kendall College, did a a few stages, chronicled in her series “All the World’s a Stage”:

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Food and Design: I have a tendency to immerse myself in the things that interest me, and design has become one of those interests. From my home kitchen design to restaurant design to books about cooking and design, food and design can be an exciting combination.

Living and Eating by John Pawson

Spain: Looking Forward While Embracing the Past

Recipes, Techniques, and Cooking Philosophy: There’s not a whole lot of “measure and stir” recipes in The Pleasant House, but I”m sure you will enjoy the ones that are there. I like to talk about some of the conceptual things that I think are helpful when cooking. It’s easy to read a recipe and combine the ingredients, but it can also be fun to think about how emotion and philosophy can play an important part in your recipes:

An Extra Ingredient This Holiday Season: Love

Food and Emotion

On building a dish

Meyer Lemon Granita Recipe

Mashed-up and spit-roasted Sunday supper

Raspberries and Creammm

Wood-grilled spring onions

Tamales

Chicago-Style Stuffed Pizza

Burgers

Party Mix

Food and Culture: Every culture eats. And every culture eats different foods. I like people, and food is a great way to connect with them. If you know a little bit about what other people eat, you could have something to talk about.

Carrera de los Muertos

Canadian Thanksgiving

Seven Spices in a Garam Masala

Gardening and the “Urban Prairie”: I have a balcony that serves as my little urban garden. I’m constantly testing the limits of the balcony to get the most out of it. I love growing herbs and vegetables, and hope to expand the garden into a decent self-irrigating planter garden this year. I consider the “urban prairie” to be the natural/overgrown areas around the city that often have many attractive varieties of native and invasive plant species.

Good Food: It’s Out There, You Just Need to Know What to Do with It

Foraged Ingredients Tell You How to Cook Them

Urban Prairie: Before and After

Food and Travel: From a New York City restaurant tour to the plains of Kansas to San Francisco, Europe, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Eater’s Weekend in NYC

Kansas in the Summertime

See you next year!

Waste not want not! Working your way around a whole lamb is just like working your way around a whole deer. If you purchase a whole lamb from a commercial butcher that deals with the public or a farmer’s market, it may may come without the head and the hoof joints. What you are left with is a quite manageable carcass.

You can begin by thinking about the animal in quarters. There is the front quarter, or the shoulders, as well as the hindquarter, which is the back leg or the rump. Then there is the saddle, which is in between and contains the loins and ribs. You can think about the front and back quarters as the portions that will need longer cooking methods such as a long, slow roast or braise, and the saddle as the portion that contains the lean, tender, quicker-cooking loin meat.

The shoulder would be delicious cooked up the way I did this front leg of venison, from Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson. To remove the front legs, find where the shoulder blade meets the back, near the neck,  and carefully separate the shoulder from the body, keeping the leg attached. Think of it as a giant chicken wing. The shoulder meat can also be cut off and cubed for lamb stew. The neck can be removed by cutting between the vertebrae and reserved for roasting. The neck meat is deliciously gelatinous and wonderful when used for a soup or stew.

The back legs are a little trickier to remove as they are a bit hefty. Begin by turning the lamb on its back and pressing the legs down like a butterfly, then work your knife between the body and the inner thigh. You will find the hip joint, which is where you will separate the leg from the body. One thing that you will notice when removing the quarters is that you will be cutting very little meat; instead, you will be following the natural seams and joints. Think of two big chicken leg and thigh quarters.

Preparation of the hindquarter meat is varied. A classic preparation is none other than the roast leg of lamb. To prepare a leg of lamb for roasting, remove the lowest joint, the shank, and reserve it for stewed beans. Secondly, marinate the leg with salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary, and olive oil, and roast it to your desired temperature. As you become more ambitious with your boning knife, the further you will be able to go with preparing the leg next time. You may want to try removing the thigh bone while leaving in the shank bone, stuffing the thigh and then tying the whole thing up. Or, you can divide the leg naturally into various roasts with your boning knife by following the natural seams in the meat.

It’s no coincidence that the most expensive cuts of the lamb also require the most skill to butcher. The loin, or saddle, is where the tender lamb noisettes, chops, and T-bones are located. The easiest, albeit the least earth-shattering way of dealing with this portion, is to run your boning knife down each side of the spine and under the meat while angling your blade at the ribs to remove the whole loins. These loins can then be sliced into noisettes or medallions for sauteeing or grilling.

Advanced lamb saddle butchery requires a saw and some special techniques to achieve the classic lamb rack and chops that you see in the premium meat case or on your $35 restaurant plate.

Finally, let’s not forget the typically forgotten parts of the lamb. If you buy a whole lamb it may come with some of its organ, such as the heart, tongue, liver, and kidneys. These parts are called offal. Liver and kidneys have very strong flavors that people tend to either love or hate.

Lamb liver is very tender and requires minimal preparation. There will be a very fine membrane covering the liver, which can be easily peeled off with your fingers. Any white pieces of vein or tissue should be cut off. The liver is then ready for sauteing or grilling. Here, I skewered the lamb with a fresh laurel leaf and piece of bacon, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and grilled it until medium rare.

The kidneys are also easy to clean. I like to split them through the middle, opening them like two sides of a book, and snip out the the veiny part that is in the little inside curve. I recently incorporated lamb kidneys into a sweet-and-savory pithivier.

Unlike the liver and kidneys, the lamb heart lacks the strong flavor many people expect to taste in organ meats. But it is also the toughest organ and requires a long cooking time. Trim any extraneous tissue from the heart and stuff it with some good bread stuffing. Wrap it in bacon and braise it in the oven for a couple of hours.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another useful organ(s) of the lamb. The testicles, or lamb fries, don’t typically accompany the whole lamb; you’ll have to buy them separately, but definitely give them a try. Sweetbreads and brains are also other tasty organs that can be purchased separately.

Finally, after all the butchering you’re left with a pile of bones and bits of meat. Roast the bunch and make a hearty stock. You can freeze the stock for the future, or when it is nice and rich, fish out the scraps, pick the bones clean, and return the bits to the broth with whatever else you think would make a nice soup. Bits of scraps can also be ground to make a delicious lamb burger.

That’s lamb butchery with one knife, in a nutshell.