blood’s a rover

This past summer turned out to be the best one of my life thus far- it was completely overflowing with family and friends, food, music, travel and love. I saw countless good bands play live, drove cross-country, spent one day in San Francisco and five days in Hawaii. Amazing food was prepared and shared. There were two weddings, numerous birthdays, and I made new friends all over the place. I also began making music in earnest, and started mentally and financially preparing to travel around the world again a few years from now.

During the last few weeks of summer, my friends Heather and Bill and I began planning the only suitable ending to such an amazing summer: hosting a gigantic food and friend focused southern picnic. The inspiration for it came in part by Heather’s idea to have a chicken fry, and things just spiraled completely out of control from there.

For me, the end of summer southern picnic was to be more than just a great way to say farewell to summer. It was also the culmination something that began a year and a half ago when I found myself back in Portland after fourteen months of traveling, recently divorced, and with no real social circle to speak of. Food and Friendships soon became the twin priorities of my new life, and though it took some real effort when I was starting out, I have learned how to make them both, and to make them both well.

***

The Prep:

Not long after I slaughtered a rooster a few months ago, Heather floated the idea of having a foodie field trip to to the Blaine Broilers farm to see them in action. We would each buy a couple of birds, and then fry the all up the following afternoon. One thing or another prevented the field trip from happening, but the week before the southern picnic we got ten (ten!) of their birds to fry up, all of which just barely fit in my freezer.

At this point I still had no idea what I was going to make for the picnic. Then I remembered that a coworker had given me an electric smoker a few months ago and that it had been sitting outside since I brought it home. I’d never smoked meat before, why not give it a try? But what to smoke? This was my very first attempt, so why not start with one of the most challenging cuts of meat to smoke: a huge beef brisket? My internal debate about whether or not to smoke a brisket ended when I mentioned the idea to Heather and she said, “Oh, well I have an eight pound, grass fed, hormone-free brisket in my freezer, if you want it.” Amazing. 

A brisket is essentially a connective tissue filled pad of chest muscle, and is extremely tough due to the fact that when the cow lays down it carries about 60% of its body weight in that area. By contrast, the muscle that filet mignon is cut from carries no weight at all, which is why it those are so tender from the start. But here’s the thing: cooked long enough at a low enough temperature, all of that collagen melts and leaves behind a huge slab of meat so tender that it can literally be cut with a fork. Actually making that happen was the challenge I set for myself.

On Wednesday afternoon while riding my bike across the Burnside bridge after a visit to a finish carpentry shop for scrap pieces of oak for the smoker, I had what could only be described as a vision: the picnic needed a mascot, something memorable, and one image in particular came to mind. I’ll get to what it was in a minute.

Prepping the brisket for the picnic on Saturday began that night. The meat needed to be thawed. This would take some time. I decided to unwrap the cut, place it in a garbage bag, and then submerge that in my sink while regularly changing the water to keep the thawing process going.

While the brisket thawed, I began to paint the vision I’d had earlier in the day. It went pretty well. 

 
 

Saint Sanders, acrylic on canvas, Summer 2009.

I can’t explain why the image of Colonel Sanders as a religious icon popped into my head fully formed, but this turned out surprisingly close to what I envisioned. I hung Saint Sanders at the top of my stairs, and he served as a sentry, alerting me to people coming up the stairs by making them laugh every time they saw him.

***

After a good amount of time in the sink the brisket had thawed enough to unfold, but it was still very solid in the center. I left it covered in my fridge overnight and all the next day.

On Thursday night it was time to dry rub the brisket. After laying it out on a large baking sheet I suddenly grew intimidated by the possibility of ruining such a large, beautiful, expensive cut of meat.

Hmm.

The dry rub that I used was a mixture of smoked paprika, cayenne, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, sugar, and black and white peppercorns. It tasted fantastic.

As I began to apply the dry rub the meat took on a velvety texture. I massaged the mixture deep into the fat and muscle before wrapping it back up and putting it back in my fridge for another 36 hours.

Oh yes.

On Friday night Bill and Heather came over to disassemble their birds. It was a lot of work and it may have left every surface of my kitchen coated in a think layer of Salmonella, but things turned out great in the end. Heather generously left one of the chickens whole for me to do what I wanted with.

Before going to bed, I set up the smoker in the back yard and left a bunch of oak chunks and hickory chips soaking in water in my bathtub. Then I set my alarm for 4 a.m. and went to sleep.

The Big Day:

4 a.m. came too soon. Around 4:30 I finally crawled out of bed, put some clothes on, and stumbled out the door. It was raining lightly, but the weather report said it would end in the early afternoon, before the picnic began. I hoped so.

After arranging the oak blocks close to the heating element and placing two aluminum bowls full of hickory chips on top, I assembled the rest of the smoker. Above the heating element sat a deep metal pan that I filled with apple cider and beer. The pan is important because it helps regulate the smoker temperature and keep the meat moist. 

Next came the brisket. It looked amazing, and just barely fit on the upper grill of the smoker. The design of the smoker is such that the wood will get hot enough to smolder, but with no source of oxygen to burn, it can not catch fire.

In tests conducted earlier in the week, my smoker tended to reach 275 degrees and then stay there. 225 would have been ideal, but there was no way to adjust the temperature- if I cracked the lid slightly fresh air would get sucked in and light the wood on fire. I decided that the most important thing was to check the internal temperature of the brisket regularly and just hope for the best.

The reason that I started so rediculously early in the morning was that I’d been reading about how to smoke a brisket all week and the general consensus was that it needed about 1.5 hours per pound. Mine was just under 8 pounds, so I figured I would need about 12 hours on the smoker. 4:30 a.m. + 12 hours = 4:30 p.m. + resting time = 5:00 p.m., just in time for the picnic.

After laying a bunch of slab bacon over the brisket, I went back to bed for a few hours. Around 7:30 a.m., I came out to check on it. The internal temperature was already 180 degrees, which shocked me because I was planning to take it off once it reached 190. Even so, the brisket had shrunk dramatically, and things seemed to be going well.

And then… after I putting the top back on I tapped it a few times to make a tight seal with the base, which cause the pan filled with liquid to slip off its hooks and fall onto the wood and element. A massive plume of cider steam erupted from the top of the smoker, hissing the whole time. Within a minute, I had transferred the brisket to my grill, disassembled the smoker, refilled the pan, and reassembled the whole thing. Disaster had just barely been averted.

After conferring with the meat counter guy at my local grocery store I decided to take the brisket off the smoker after only 5 hours. It turns out that most of the smoke flavor that the meat will absorb happens in the first few hours, anyway, and it made more sense to keep it wrapped and warm in my oven for the rest of the day than risk drying it out. At 9:30 in the morning, 7 hours earlier than I expected, my brisket was pretty much done.

Heather and Bill arrived in the afternoon to begin the chicken fry. They had decided to fry some of the chickens in advance so that we’d have some to set out right away, but there was still a lot of work to be done.

Heather had bathed all of the chicken pieces overnight in buttermilk, and somehow procured several gallons of high quality, snow-white, mildly porky lard in which Bill fried them. Before frying the chicken in the bubbling lard, they first fried some slab pork in it for some additional flavor. Then they removed the pork, sliced it up, and set it out as hors d’oeuvres. They went very quickly. 

The thing that I love about those two, the thing that makes us such good friends in food, is that they always take things much further than they need to. Because I am the same way, when we join forces it just gets rediculous.  

While Bill and Heather toiled away in my smoky, greasy kitchen, I went outside to greet our first guests and prepare a large bowl of boozy southern punch.

5 p.m

Earlier in the day I had made a frozen fruit ring out of fresh fruit and juice, which went into the punch and kept it cold without watering it down.

The punch was made with 2 bottles of cava, pineapple juice, orange juice, 7-up, fresh fruit, and a healthy dose of bourbon whisky.

 
It was all I drank for most of the night.

Running back upstairs, I found that the first batch of chicken was ready to be set out.

A few days before the picnic I bought 60 ears of corn on Sauvie Island. The morning of the picnic I shucked and stacked them in my steamer, and then completely forgot about them until much later in the evening.

7 p.m.

By 7 a number of guests had arrived and they had all brought something to share. On the picnic invite we admonshed our guests to pull out all the culinary stops for this thing, and they did- there we an endless array of salads, sides, southern specialties, and drinks. Soon, two tables were completely packed with food, and the thing weren’t even in full swing yet.

My brisket turned out as perfect as I could have hoped. It was smoky, with a kick of heat from the dry rub, but tender and moist and delicious. Heather and Bill’s buttermilk fried chicken was the best I’ve ever had.

It would have been nice to sit down and mingle with guests then, but I still wasn’t done cooking. There was one more dish I wanted to make: an apple cinnamon and honey glazed roasted chicken, which I stuffed with fresh apples and an aluminum bag stuffed with hickory chips. That’s right- there was wood steaming and smoking inside the bird.

In addition to the massive amounts of fried chicken, Heather and Bill also contributed 120 (120!) fresh, delicious oysters. Most of them were eaten raw with a delicate mignonette, but some were grilled over mesquite.

That’s the apple cinnamon honey chicken roasting alongside the oysters.

Evening at the C.J. corral.

By 9 the party was going in earnest. I finally made a plate for myself and sat down to eat. I wanted to try a little bit of everything on it, but in order to do that I would have had to fill four plates. The food was amazing.

As countless different conversations swirled around us, Heather dutifully manned the oyster station, tutoring newbies on proper schucking technique and trying to keep anyone from stabbing themself in the hand. We didn’t have any major mishaps that night, and a lot of people had the first oyster of their lives at our picnic, which was cool.

It was interesting to me that a number of people who absolutely refused to try a raw oyster spent so much time near the oyster station. It was clear that they really wanted to try one but were too afraid to take the plunge. I ate about 9 of them myself. 

The food just kept on coming. With each succesive wave of guest the table was stacked higher and higher with treats. Strawberry rhubarb pie, cornbread, bacon sliders, arroz con leche, pulled pork on bourbon butter toast… our friends understood exactly what we had been going for with this and they did not disappoint.

At 11 things were still going strong, as new guests kept arriving to replace the ones who were leaving.

11 p.m.

Around the time I realized that I was still almost completely sober, my friend Dan arrived with a bottle of sweet tea infused vodka. A dash of that in a glass of lemonade became my drink of choice for the rest of the evening.

Sometime after midnight I disassembled the smoker and dragged the bottom part of it into the center of my yard. Resting it on several bricks, we built an ad hoc firepit and gathered around for a couple more hours of conversation, music, and southern hospitality.

Shortly after 2:30 a.m., everyone called it a night. Everyone agreed that it had been a huge success, and one attendee even said it was the greatest potluck she’d ever been to, which meant a lot to me since she was an older woman and had presumably attended numerous potlucks over the course of her life.

The Morning After:

7 a.m.

Cleanup wasn’t as much of a hassle as I expected it would be. Marissa helped out cleaning up the backyard and Heather came by and washed dishes for a couple of hours.

I take a perverse pleasure in my kitchen being this messy.

 
What was left of the oysters and brisket

 
What was left of the booze. Note bottle opener with cork still in it.

While we cleaned, the three of us marveled at how well the picnic had gone. We traded our favorite anecdotes from the previous nice and then pulled out a paper and pen to tally how many people had actually showed up. After a lot of consideration, we put the grand total of guests at seventy six. Seventy six people who we’d fed and entertained and be fed and entertained by. Seventy six guests who we cared enough about to invite and who cared enough about us to come. Seventy six guests, most of whom arrived as strangers, and many of whom left as friends. Perfect.

Because we had left all the food outside when the epic picnic had finally ended, I suspect my compost pile was among the most delicious in the world that morning. While walking over to toss something in it, I came across an unshucked oyster in my yard and picked it up. A tiny striped slug was exploring its cratered surface with great interest.

The seventy seventh guest.

I rarely bake or eat cookies or pastries, but for some reason I really wanted to make cookies for Justin and Julieth’s dance party wedding reception. It took place the day after the wedding, so I had lots of time to think about what kind of cookies I wanted to make.

Perhaps inspired by the countless blooming roses on display in Peninsula Park, I decided to make a recipe that I’d never heard of, a recipe that as far as I can tell is wholly original: ginger rose thumbprint cookies.

Basically, I made regular thumbprint cookie dough using flour, sugar, eggs, and vanilla, and then added a healthy dose of rose water to the mix.

Then, after forming them on the cookie sheets and baking them briefly to set a little, I dented the tops with my thumb, filled them with really delicious ginger preserves, and then baked them the rest of the way.

While they were baking I ran outside and stole two big roses from my neighbors, which I pulled apart and washed. Rose petals are edible- they don’t really taste like anything, but they do have satiny texture and make a beautiful garnish.

After the cookies were done and completely cooled I topped each of them with a single petal. The sticky ginger preserve held the petals firmly in place, and after that I used a misting bottle to spray more rosewater onto the cookies.

They looked beautiful and while aesthetics are important, even more important is flavor: happily, they tasted even better than I thought they would: neither the rose nor the ginger flavor dominated; instead, they seemed to flirt with other on my tongue:

Ginger: “Hey beautiful.”
Rose: “Hello lovely.”
Ginger: “Let’s make out!”
Rose: “Here? In this cookie? OK!”

I tried to let the flavors linger for as long as I could, because as soon as I presented the partygoers with my creation they were gone and that was it. Omar Khayyám said that the rose that once blooms forever dies, but fortunately I can always make more of these.

Paella is not the kind of dish I make all the time, in fact, I’ve only made it twice now. But it’s surprisingly simple to put together when you want to feed a lot of people a bunch of really delicious food.

First: buy all this stuff.

In the wrappers are chicken thigh, pork loin, chorizo, sole, mussels, and clams.

Grind saffron, sea salt, Spanish paprika and some dried chiles into a powder. Add lots of chopped garlic and grind it into a paste. Then stir that into four cups of chicken broth and let it begin to simmer.

Brown the pork, chicken, and chorizo in a deep pan and then remove, leaving the liquid. In that, sauté seeded tomatoes, artichoke hearts, onions, garlic, bay leaves, and diced bell peppers. When they’re getting close to done, spread the veggies in a layer at the bottom of your well seasoned paella pan. Top the veggies with the meat and sprinkle as much Spanish paprika over everything as you can imagine wanting to taste, then add a little more.

Top the meat and veggies with bomba or arborio rice, and pour the garlic saffron chicken stock over everything. Add shrimp, fish, mussels, clams, and garnish. Wrap tightly with aluminum foil and place it in the oven at 400 degrees.

My god, how I’ve missed this color.

The last time I made paella it was uncovered on a ceramic grill, and by the time I got it assembled the coals were dying so it took a long time to cook. This time everything was cooked perfectly after only 30 minutes. I couldn’t believe it.

The rice was soft and fluffy. The shrimp were crisp and plump. The mussels were firm but tender. And the meat and veggies hiding below were a delicious surprise.

In fact, everything came together so well that I won’t wait for a wedding to make it again. If you were really motivated, you could put everything together in an hour and eat it for the rest of the week!

Well, I could, anyway. 

Start with some Pastaworks foccacia.

Then add toscana salami, fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes.

Then add avocado and sundried tomatoes.

THEN add fresh basil, capers, and balsamic vinegar.

 
Then grill.

Then OM NOM NOM!

This isn’t all of the food I’ve made in the last month or so, but it’s most of it. It seems that fruit, veggies, peppers, and seafood are all I feel like eating when the temperature rises.

Homemade coconut prawns, the result of a particularly insistent craving I had.

Corn husk wrapped grilled salmon. I did this because
I couldn’t find any aluminum foil, but it totally worked.

 
Grilled sea scallops topped with a seven pepper salsa.

Wasabi prawn cocktail cooked in lobster stock and served with
sushi rice in saki cups, aka the “Gourmet Magazine shoot” plating.

And this is the ”how many people are coming?” plating of the same dish.

Fresh caught salmon with ginger, soy sauce and chili oil.
This is the “Everyone is hungry, who cares what it looks like!” plating.

Shrimp Diavolo in the “who needs a plate?” plating.

All of the stuff above was pretty brilliant, but the seafood dish that I was most excited about making was one that I had been thinking about for over a year: Dungeness crab stuffed artichokes.

I began with a whole mess of fresh crab- some that I had bought at the store and a lot more that was donated by my friend Marissa.

This portends great things.

In fact, we had so much crab that I decided to make two dishes with it: the artichokes that I was planning to make already as well as some rediculously overwrought bruschetta.

The mixture that I stuffed the artichokes with contained crabmeat, panko crumbs, Parmigiano Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, and lots and lots of fresh chopped thyme.

After generously hand filling each of the artichoke’s leaves I still had some filling left over, which allowed me to do extravagant things with it such as stuffing it into tiny yellow pear tomatoes before popping them in my mouth.

Yum.

While I was busy trying not to eat everything before it was cooked, Marissa went to town on the bruschetta preparation: it consisted of toasted focaccia bread topped with a blend of organic cherry tomatoes, basil, cheese, and white wine vinegar, avocado and lime, crabmeat, chives, salt, pepper, and a basil leaf as garnish. Eating one immediately made me want another one, and then another, so as appetizers go they worked perfectly.

The artichokes steamed for almost an hour using water that I had tossed a bunch of thyme and terragon in. Those herbs definitely came through in the end result, though not so much in the flavor as in the aroma.

Just as the artichokes were finished steaming, my friends Heather and Bill arrived. Heather was holding a still hot pan of summer tomato and Spanish chorizo paella that went perfectly with the hearty artichokes and tangy, acidic bruschetta.

I suspect that part of the reason I’ve always thought that crab stuffed artichokes seemed fitting is that artichokes are like crustaceans of the vegetable world- you have to put a lot of work in to get a little bit of a reward.

Also, both artichokes and crabs are really just an excuse to dip things in clarified butter before eating them.

Oh yes.

Shortly after we began eating, three more friends arrived, which was good because there was more than enough to eat. Later we all headed out to go to a concert, a little bit fatter and a whole lot happier than we would have been otherwise.

Several months ago I was in a coffee shop near my house when I met a young woman named Annie. Annie was busy calling all of her friends and asking them if they wanted to pre-order various varieties of beans. After a while it became clear that she wasn’t the one selling the beans, she was only an intermediary- a bean pimp, if you will. A few minutes later I interrupted her calls and said, “Ok, what’s the story with the beans?”

Annie explained that she had been to a farming conference the week before and met a group who was planning to plant beans for harvest in the fall. They were taking pre-orders so that they would know how much to plant. During the course of the conversation, I ended up on Annie’s mailing list and also learned that Annie’s sister Heidi raised chickens out in Beaver, Oregon for both eggs and meat. This discovery led me to mention a culinary challenge that I’d been thinking about for some time: preparing a strictly traditional Coq au Vin using a tough old rooster that I had butchered myself.

Now, I’ve made Coq au Vin a number of times before. When people ask me what my favorite thing to cook is, I usually mention it, if only because it’s one of the few dishes I’ve prepared more than once. In the past I’d only used young, flavorless chickens, which required me to dress up the dish with lots of non-traditional ingredients. But the whole point of the recipe, the reason it came to exist, was that it uses an old bird with tough, deeply flavorful meat that isn’t good for anything else to make something incredible. That’s what I wanted to attempt.

About a week later Annie informed me that she had asked Heidi about my idea, and Heidi happened to have a rooster that had been attacking her sons and generally needed killing. Great, I said, sign me up. Then almost six months passed, and the rooster that I’d come to think as mine grew older and meaner by the day, which was perfect. I wanted that thing to be as tough as nails.

Finally, a month ago, Heidi’s and my schedules synched up, and my friend Marissa and I headed down to Beaver for the express purpose of killing an animal for food. And not just any food, but great, rich, traditional French farm food.

Part One: The Death

We arrived at Heidi and Annie’s parent’s farm on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Heidi’s farm was located a few miles from there, but all of the chickens are kept on her parent’s land. After making our introductions, it was time to round up the birds we’d come to butcher.

When I finally met my rooster, I was stunned at how large and handsome he was. It didn’t change the fact that in a few minutes I was going to slit his throat, but look at him, he’s gorgeous. I decided to name him Vincent. 

Vin le coq deviendra coq au vin.

He knew something was up by this point.

BOK BOK BOK

On some weekends, Heidi and family butcher up to 60 birds, and they do it by placing them upside down into metal cones and then slitting the jugular veins to either side of the windpipe. Apparently bleeding out is less stressful (in terms of adrenaline entering the bloodstream, which effects the quality of the meat) than chopping their heads off with the thwack of a hatchet.

Sorry, dude.

Continue Reading…

Wow, it took me six months to finish writing about two weeks worth of travel. That’s  rediculous, and I don’t plan on letting it happen again. The delay was due in large part to the fact that I was completely overwhelmed at work, particularly in the first few months of the year. I also wanted to finish writing about the trip before moving on to other things, which caused a sort of blog logjam- a blogjam, I suppose.

Oh well, one thing that I did manage to keep up with over the last was cooking new and exciting meals:

Shrimp fajita in a homemade tortilla bowl and organic refried beans.

Tapas Night: Scallops and bacon, pan fried mushrooms, blood orange
chicken and brussel sprouts, and Spanish rice stuffed peppers.

Casserole and roast chicken prepared to celebrate the
purchase of a bright red enameled cast iron casserole dish.

Continue Reading…

On the day before I headed to Europe, with Portland heavily blanketed in snow, my friend Marissa and I prepared what might just be my new favorite comfort food: Russian borscht and cabbage rolls. It was the last meal of the year that I prepared at home.

We started out with:

Borscht
3 beets
2 hanger steaks
2 carrots
1 cabbage
1 tomato
2 potatoes
1 onion
1 quart beef broth
1 bunch parsley
Salt & pepper
Dill & bay
Sour cream

Cabbage Rolls
1 cabbage
1 carrot
1 onion
1/3 lb mushrooms
1/3 lb ground pork
1/3 lb ground turkey

Begin the borscht by filling a large pot with all of the beef broth and several cups of water, set the burner to high. Wash and shred the beets, and slice the parsley, carrots, onions, potatoes, tomato, and beef.

Add the parsley, onions and tomato, bay leaf, and dill to the broth. Lightly sauté the beets in a little olive oil and then add them to the broth and stir well.

 While that begins heating up, sauté the potatoes and carrots until nearly tender. For some reason, carrots don’t cook through very well when you boil them. Also, cut up the hanger steaks into bite size pieces and begin simmering them on low, adding some of the liquid from the beef to the soup as it collects.

When the carrots are ready, add them to the soup. Cover, reduce to medium-low and let everything cook together for a long while. 

Now is a good time to prepare the cabbage rolls. First, steam the cabbage lightly until the outer leaves are flexible. Shred the vegetables and sauté them together, just enough to mix the flavors. 

Next, mix the veggies with the ground meats in a bowl with your hands. If you don’t want to use your hands, just have Marissa do it. She’s very tactile.

Next, remove several outer leaves from the steamed cabbage and begin rolling the filler in them the same way you would make salad rolls.

Last, stack the cabbage rolls together in a small, deep pot. Add enough water to cover them along with some salt, pepper, and sour cream. The cabbage rolls below are red because we tossed a little borscht broth into the pot.

By now the borscht should be coming along nicely. Now it is time to purée the soup. It might be a good idea to let it cool a bit first, but I didn’t. Working in batches, slowly ladle some vegetables and broth into a food processor and puree well. Then empty it into a different pot and do some more. If your like me, you lost the top to your food processor and have to use a pot lid instead, which means that your shirt and kitchen will be lightly borscht splattered in no time at all.

Return the puréed soup to the original pot, and then add the beef, which should be perfectly tender by now, and salt and pepper to taste.

Note: If you’re planning on serving any of the borscht cold set some aside before adding the beef.

Finally, dish up the borscht with a dollop of sour cream and the cabbage rolls over rice, plain, or topped with sour cream and a little borscht for color.

Приятного аппетита!  (Bon appetit!)

Prior to 2008, I rarely cooked more a pack of ramen noodles for myself. Then two important events occured:

1. I got divorced and had to either cook, or eat out all the time, or starve.
2. I returned from traveling around the world with a deep respect for regional cuisine and cooking traditions, and realized that I’d acquired a rich cookbook-of-experience from which to draw.

In response to those two things, I decided to make cooking a priority in 2008. Here’s how it went:

There were homemade pizzas:

Tiny turkey dinners:

Beef stews:

Tandoori prawns, red curry prawns, and prawn salads:

Dishes that I ate for one week straight:

One week of Pad Kee Mao

One Week of Phở

Numerous sandwiches:

BST (Bacon, Shiitake & Tomato) and G&T

Aged gouda cheesesteak

Roast beef with stilton and pear raisin butter sauce on rye

Lots of pork:

Herb encrusted pork shoulders on a bed of onions and apples

Paprika rubbed pork chops

Melon wrapped in prosciutto

Scallops wrapped in bacon

Plenty of seafood:

Squid stuffed peppers

 
Cod ala pil-pil

Seared ahi on a bed of shaved fennel

And then the real highlights:

Clambake with chicken breast, dungeness crab, steamer clams,
chorizo, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, jalapeños and sweet corn

Steak Oscar (filet mignon and dungeness crab in a terragon butter sauce)

Confit Byaldi

Coq au vin with grilled asparagus

Bacon apple pie with bourbon and maple syrup filling

Beet & Beef Borscht

But if I had to choose, my favorite dish of the whole year was this:

Ultimate paella with chicken, pork loin, chorizo, squid,
sole, mussels, and shrimp, cooked over a ceramic grill.

I made more good stuff to eat this weekend than usual.

Amsterdam Cheesesteak Sandwich (using aged gouda instead of provolone):

 Seared Ahi Tuna on a shaved fennel, parsley, parmesan and lime juice salad.

 Jasmine Rice Pudding with cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom pods.

 Butternut Squash roasted with maple syrup, walnuts, and nutmeg.

Artichoke, Asparagus and Brussel Sprouts steamed with whole shallots, black pepper, and olive oil.

And then there were my lunches and dinners, but I didn’t take any pictures of those.