An 1/8 of a pig

It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Blue Rooster Farm, which started selling its meat at the New Morning Farm market in DC a few months ago, emailed customers with an offer to buy 1/8 of a pig in late September. The haul is a collection of pork chops, bacon, sausage, Boston butt, cured ham slices and a couple of other cuts. Some cuts aren't included and are presumably sold separately. It is essentially a big shopping bag of frozen meat that fit easily into our limited side-by-side freezer.

So far, as with all the other meat we've gotten from Blue Rooster, the pork has been terrific. These are Berkshire pigs grown only to a year old and a hundred pounds. The bacon and ham have been flavorful and juicy (saftig in the German sense), the sausage fresh and mildly flavored. It's not that it's a big savings buying in "bulk" like this -- it's only a 10% discount from buying each cut retail -- but that you get it at all and you get it all at once so you have a nice store in your fridge.

When I picked up my 1/8 pig I jokingly told Julie Hurst from Blue Rooster that I've decided to regard buying meat frozen as a plus. For a long time, I resisted buying frozen meat at farmers' markets. I longed for the markets in France where refrigerated counters display the fresh meat openly. That's just not the way it's done here, and these vacuum-packed fresh frozen meats don't lose any quality over what you buy in the supermarket, even WholeFoods. After all, how does that lamb get here from Iceland and New Zealand?

The advantage is you get local farm-raised meat, butchered by local butchers, that is healthier, fresher, and as a rule tastier. Blue Rooster's lamb and beef are also delicious.

I'm  not quite there yet but I don't exclude the possibility of getting a deep-freeze in the basement to store a side of beef or a 1/2 pig. Once growing up, we bought a side of beef and stored it in a rented freezer locker. I thought it was pretty cool at the time to take a trip to the locker and pick up some steak and ground beef. It seemed like free food, though of course it wasn't. My mother grew up on a farm and I think for her it was a small way of recapturing that feeling. Maybe I have that gene.

e-Cookbooks

The New York Times had a story last week about how Julia Child's pathbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking was now available, finally, as an e-book. The article discussed the particular challenges of putting a cookbook onto an e-reader, from the often complicated layout and color photos to the concern about splattering grease onto your Kindle or iPad.

Now apparently technology has advanced enough to have column formats in e-books, and new readers like iPad and Kindle Fire have all sorts of color. As for the grease, I have experimented with downloading a Kindle single by Mark Bittman on grilling and using it. I usually keep the recipe across the kitchen on the table anyway, so the real danger, especially with a touch screen, is having dirty or greasy fingers when I want to consult it.

What would really be cool and would get me to take the plunge immediately is if somehow your entire cookbook collection would be searchable (or even your entire Kindle library because the search terms would be specific enough). The big plus of Epicurious, of course, is that you can search by ingredient or technique. This is virtually impossible to do with the hard copies, because you pick a likely book, check the index, are invariably disappointed, check another index, and so on, and usually end up at Epicurious anyway.

The only way I can navigate my print cookbooks is to pick one arbitrarily at random and leaf through it looking for likely prospects that use seasonal agreements. It would be more satisfying to go to the store or market and simply pick what looks good, then come home and easily find the right recipe.

Nonetheless, I may experiment. Paula Wolfert has a new cookbook out, The Food of Morocco, and it will be available in a Kindle edition on Nov. 15. I love Paula Wolfert's books and we have been on a real Morocco kick, so I will get one edition or the other. The hardcover print edition is just $27 on Amazon, and the Kindle edition, at the insistence of the publisher, will be $20, so it's hardly competitive given the uncertain performance of a cookbook on an e-reader. We'll see what people say.

Chicken with escarole, apples, and potatoes

Sara Jenkins has done it again. A delicious, simple, elegant dish for a weekday that is really something special. The trick here is that everything gets cooked in the same skillet, so the flavor accumulates.

You boil 12 oz. of new potatoes until just tender (7 min.), let them cool and flatten them a bit. You season 4 8-oz. boneless chicken breasts with skin with salt and pepper. WF doesn't have boneless breasts with skin so we deboned regular breasts -- the skin adds a lot of essential flavor in this dish. You cook the breasts in 2 Tbl. oil until skin is golden and then turn over for another 3 min. Transfer to baking pan, cover with foil and put into preheated 250-degree oven. Drain oil and melt 2 Tbl. butter in skillet and cook apple sections (2 tart apples, peeled, cored and cut into eighths) in single layers. Add more butter and saute the potatoes. Add a garlic clove smashed and peeled and escarole leaves (WF had no escarole so we used spinach). Wilt and add 1/2 c. wine to finish cooking. Put apples back in to warm through. Assemble on plate with potatoes, chicken breast, escarole and apples. Syrupy, buttery, flavorful, rich and satisfying. Drink white or red wine with it.

HalfFoods and other disappointments

WholeFoods has been at pains to expand its prepared food offerings -- it's a shame they don't take a little more pride in it. I was astonished to see how unappetizing all of it has become by the late afternoon since I'm not often there shopping for dinner. The hot food was dry or mucky looking, the deli counter dull beyond belief, the kabob station offered nothing enticing. Went to the meat counter and got a ham steak packed in cellophane. What a half-a***d approach to food service!

We've had other disappointments lately in the DC food scene. Brunch at the Poste restaurant in Hotel Monaco was no culinary delight. An uninspired menu and half-hearted execution made it truly lackluster. We had an out of town guest so brunch was not just about the food and we had a good time, but it's sure off our list for the future.

An even bigger disappointment was Oyamel, which we always treasured for its fresh, inventive rendition of Mexican cuisine. It seems to have fallen into some sort of rut. The food was just all right, but these small plates seem to have gotten even smaller -- and way to small for $10-11 a pop -- so it's kind of hard to tell with what you actually get to eat. If the food isn't magic you notice much more how loud and unpleasant the ambiance is.