Sauteed snapper fillets with apples

When I had a little weekend house in Normandy I grew to appreciate the joys of sauteed apples in the local cuisine. There you usually had the apples to accompany a good pan-fried beef liver or boudin noir, the characteristic blood sausage, or black pudding, of the region. It was fun to go to the market in Verneuil-sur-Avre on a Saturday morning in the fall to shop for the local apples and charcuterie.

So I was attracted to Mark Bittman's recipe when I came home with some fillet of red snapper. He says it is from Brittany and he lists it under rockfish, with snapper as one of the substitutes. It's a simple recipe for 2 (I halved it for just myself, but here is the full recipe): Peel and core 4 not-too-sweet apples (I had a couple of Fuji apples in the bowl and they were surprisingly tart when cooked), slice into rings or wedges and saute in 3 Tbl butter, tossing and stirring until browned. Take 1 to 1-1/2 lbs fillet, skin on or off (I removed the tough snapper skin), dredge in seasoned flour, dip in egg, coat in unseasoned bread crumbs and saute in another 3 Tbl butter for 6 to 8 min. on both sides. Drizzle the juice of 1/2 lemon and an optional 1 Tbl Calvados or brandy over the apples and serve together.

I'll eat anything breaded and the breading combined with the mildness of the snapper meant there weren't too many fish smells in the kitchen, but you still had the great subtle flavor of the fluffy white fish, still quite moist. I think I would season the fillet directly rather than lose all that salt and pepper in the flour, and I would probably sprinkle some sugar over the apples as they cooked to add a little sweetness and help the caramelization. I didn't have Calvados so used Cognac, but would just skip it next time if I didn't have the Calvados to enhance the apple flavor. I suppose another alternative is to flambee the apples at the end.

Pork tacos al pastor

I think I tried this recipe from Cheryl and Bill Jamison before, back in the prehistoric days before I started this blog. It is keeping with my new passion for spit-roasting, and we always like Mexican-type food and adore pork.

The day before, make a rub/paste by starting with a loosely packed 1/4 c. garlic cloves, roasted in a dry skillet over medium heat until just browned, crush and peel. Pan roast 2 plum tomatoes over high heat until blistered and soft. Put these in a blender with 2 Tbl achiote paste, 2 Tbl ground Ancho or New Mexico chile, 2 tsp salt, 1 Tbl olive oil, and puree. In a resealable plastic bag, spread this paste over a 4 lb. tied boneless pork roast.

They looked at me like I was a Martian at WF when I asked for achiote paste. It seems to me that we found it at a Latino market last time, where it is also known as annatto. This time I searched the Web for substitutes and found one that combined paprika, ground cumin and olive oil to make a paste. The pork roasts at WF ran about 2-1/2 lbs so I special ordered and got one for 3-1/3 lbs that was kind of long and thin -- but it was wonderfully tender and flavorful.

The next day, take the pork out of the fridge 30 min. before cooking. Put it on the spit with a peeled white onion and a peeled half pineapple on each end (this was supposed to be oiled with olive oil but I missed that step and doubt that it really mattered). Put on the spit and cook to an internal temperature of 150 to 155 degrees. I usually ignore the times on these recipes (on this one 1-1/2 to 1-3/4 hrs) because the WF charcoal runs very hot and in this case the roast was fairly thin. I checked after 35 min. and it was ready after 45 min.

Let the roast sit at least 10 min. Chop the onion and pineapple and mix together as a relish. Slice the pork (they say thin, though I actually made it pretty chunky) and then cut into strips. Serve with warmed tortillas, tomatillo salsa, and the relish. I cooked some Rancho Gordo Santa Maria pinquito beans as a side (great as always!) and we drank margaritas with the meal.

The pork was nice and moist and I carved it in the juices rendered as it sat. The rub caramelizes into big black patches and the pineapple-onion relish sets the porky taste off really well. A keeper -- we'll do this one a third time!

Mustard-crusted roast potatoes

Yes, it's just a side, but such a good side I thought it was worth a posting. This Molly Stevens recipe has a lot of mustard, but most of it goes to forming a nice crust on the potatoes, so it does not taste too mustard-y.

Take 2 lbs of red potatoes or any low-starch specialty potato like fingerlings and cut into 3/4 to 1-in. pieces. Whisk together 1/3 c. Dijon mustard, 3 Tbl olive oil, 1 Tbl lemon juice, 2 minced garlic cloves, 1 Tbl chopped rosemary, 1/2 tsp Aleppo or Marash pepper (or 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes), salt and pepper to taste, and then toss the potato pieces in the mixture to coat. Spread them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and put them in a preheated 400-degree oven for 50 to 55 min.

These were delicious with one of those steaks from BBM and Stevens recommends them to accompany roast chicken, pork or beef.

BBM

I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that I'm starving in between postings. Most meals are not noteworthy but many of the meals I don't write about are very good, and that's often due to Broad Branch Market.

In just a few years, John and Tracy have made this an indispensable combination of deli, gourmet emporium and convenience store. We often rely on their prepared foods -- whether fried chicken or prime rib or veal stew -- but also are big customers of the meat counter, where especially the beef is excellent (steak!) and very competitively priced. Most things are good and some are very good -- such as the baguette (best we've found in DC), the mac and cheese (beats anything else you find), the homemade sausage, etc.

Saw on Yelp that some people complain about the prices. There's no way a small store like this can match supermarket prices. It's probably not the best place to shop if you're feeding a large family (though I suspect some in the neighborhood do just that), but the convenience of the location, the small size, and the selection are worth paying a premium for. If John stocks it -- whether it's coffee, or olive oil, or wine, or whatever -- it's like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

I was impressed the other day when I was there for their fish delivery and saw that they actually break down the whole fish themselves. I've been wondering how much turnover they have on the fish and whether it could be as fresh as The Fishery, but now I'm willing to try it.

Produce is a bit of a problem, I suppose because it's so perishable, but they are good about looking for something in their own kitchen if it's not in the produce case. The bulk food at times seems a bit half-hearted -- stocks are not quickly replaced and you wonder if there's enough turnover in those products.

But the shop has been a work in progress from the beginning and it keeps getting better and better.

Mechoui

Parents of a friend of mine in France had a chateau (modest) in Roussillon outside of Perpignan very near the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. Once when I visited there, the locals were having a mechoui, where they spit roast a whole lamb in the field and people bring sides and wines for a big communal meal. It was delicious and very convivial.

So I wanted to try Molly Stevens' Mechoui-style roast lamb in her All About Roasting, and in keeping with the outdoor cooking, wanted to do it in the Big Green Egg. I had a lamb shoulder roast from Blue Rooster Farm in the freezer and this is one of the options Stevens described, although her 5-6 lb. shoulder was bigger than my 3-1/2 lb one. (Her other option is a whole bone-in leg of lamb weighing 7-8 lbs., feeding 8 to 10, as opposed to her shoulder feeding 6 to 8.) We invited a couple over and I was a little worried about the amount with the smaller shoulder, but it was enough (though sadly no leftovers).

Prepare the lamb 1 or 2 days ahead of time by making a paste to rub on it. Toast 1-1/2 Tbl coriander seeds and 1 Tbl cumin seeds for 2 or 3 min., cool slightly, and grind to a coarse powder. Stir in 2 tsp sweet paprika and 1/2 tsp sugar. Make a garlic paste in a mortar with 8 peeled garlic cloves and 2 tsp salt. Add this to the spices and work in 8 Tbl softened butter with a wooden spoon. Make a dozen or more incisions in the meat and rub the paste all over, working it into the incisions. Let sit uncovered or loosely covered in the fridge for 1 to 2 days. I prepared it Thursday evening for roasting on Saturday afternoon.

Take the lamb out 1 or 2 hours before cooking. I followed Stevens' directions for roasting in the oven, only used the Egg instead. Start with a 450-degree oven to sear the meat for 25 min., and then lower to 325 degrees to roast 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 hours longer. Shoulder goes more quickly, she says, and since my shoulder was smaller than hers, I figured, correctly, it would take a maximum of 2 hrs longer. Internal temperature should be 170 to 180 degrees and meat should come easily off the bone. The butter in the rub is supposed to keep the lamb moist.

When done, let the lamb sit on a cutting board for 20 to 35 min. and then use a meat fork and tongs, pull the meat off in chunks for serving. When roasting in the oven, you can deglaze the pan with water and pour this over the lamb chunks. I thought of just heating up some broth to moisten the meat, but didn't do it, though in retrospect a little moisture wouldn't have hurt. But the lamb had a delicious, mildly exotic flavor with a little smokiness from the Egg. We served the cumin salt make of 2 Tbl cumin seeds, toasted and lightly cracked, mixed with 4 Tbl salt for dipping the lamb pieces in.

Stevens recommended sides of couscous and carrot salad, so I used Ghillie Basan's Plain, buttery couscous recipe from Tagines and Couscous (soak 2 c. of couscous in 1-2/3 c. warm water for 10 min., massage in 2 Tbl olive oil, dot with 2 Tbl butter, cover with foil and pop in 350-degree oven for 15 min.) and Sara Jenkins' carrot salad from Olives and Oranges (grate or julienne 4 large carrots, mix in 5-1/2 Tbl of lemon juice and 1-1/2 tsp of salt in bowl for 5 min., then mix with 1/4 c. olive oil and 1/4 c. chopped parsley and let sit for up to 6 hrs at room temperature). The suggestions were perfect -- simple, very flavorful, and colorful on the plate. Likewise, her recommendation for a Spanish Garnacha to accompany was just right.

As a first course, I fixed a recipe from our herb wall calendar for a Potato soup with mixed herbs. The 6 to 8 oz of peeled and diced potatoes were really just a thickener. The potato gets cooked with 1 c. of diced onion in 1/4 c. olive oil for 10 min. (covered over low heat). Then add 2 c. vegetable broth, 1-1/2 c. milk and 1/4 c. heavy cream and bring to a boil over medium heat. Add 8 oz. of chopped herbs -- marjoram, thyme, chervil, sorrel, borsage, basil, tarragon were among those listed. Now 8 oz. of herbs is a lot of herbs and unfortunately our garden is not yet planted for the summer and neither WF or the Silver Spring farmer's market had any big supplies this early in the season. So I chopped the little packages of marjoram, thyme, and tarragon, chopped up one of those big basil plants, and used a bag of sorrel from the farmer's market and still probably had only half the amount required. Cook the herbs in the broth for 2 to 3 min., then purree.
This soup had a great, fresh flavor from the herbs (heavily skewed to sorrel). I didn't strip the thyme so there were little bits of twig in there (I would just avoid thyme in the future). You could make this soup any number of times and it would always be different, depending on what herbs were available.

For hors d'oeuvres, Andrea got very creative and whipped up a wonderful tomato jam of green heirloom tomatoes from the market, garlic and honey, that she put on top of burrata for one type of crostini, and cooked up some baby yellow beets from the market with onion to put on top of ricotta for the other type of crostini. Sitting on the patio with a cremant de Bourgogne, it was the perfect start for our Mediterranean meal. For dessert, we had a very seasonal (and more American) strawberry and rhubarb bread pudding. Again the products from the farmer's market ensured this had a wonderful, fresh taste, that the sugar, bread and creme anglaise only enhanced. It was a great little menu and a very nice spring meal!

Italian-style roast pork shoulder

I stumbled upon this recipe when I was looking for an image of spit-roasted chicken and found a blog with a spit-roasted porchetta, citing the recipe in Real Cajun by Donald Link. The book looked good anyway, so I bought it and, to my surprise, found that Link does not spit-roast the pork shoulder -- he just sears and roasts in the oven.

What a revelation! I can take any roast that fits on a spit and cook it in my grill! I finally was able to try it as we marked the victory of I'll Have Another (love the name) in the Kentucky Derby. (I was rooting for Bodemeister, but a good race is worth celebrating.)

The recipe calls for a 7 lb boneless pork shoulder (Boston butt). My butcher friend at WF explained they cut the shoulders in half, so that generally they weighed 3-1/2 to 4 lbs. Plus there's a small bone in it. He offered to remove the bone, so I had him do the butterfly part, too, since I didn't find Link's directions for doing it very clear. I was leery of cutting the seasoning completely in half, and as a result the roast was a bit salty and garlicky (which we didn't mind). I'll give the portions for the full 7-lb roast and you can safely cut in half to get the taste Link wants.

Mix together 2 Tbl minced garlic, 3 Tbl salt, 1 tsp ground black pepper, 1 Tbl ground fennel, 1 Tbl chopped thyme or rosemary and spread the seasoning over the inside of the butterflied shoulder. Link also makes several incisions of an inch or so to get the seasoning into the meat. Roll it up and tie it and put 2 Tbl salt and 1 tsp pepper on the outside.

Link sears the meat and roasts it in a 325-degree oven for 1-1/2 to 2 hours to an internal temperature of 145 to 155 degrees. I put it on the spit and roasted it for about 50 min. Link has you put the roast on a bed of sliced onion and vegetable oil in the roasting pan, so I just onion and oil in the drip pan underneath the spit. We had steamed artichokes as a starter (and we couldn't figure out why we don't do that more often!), and accompanies with braised endives.

The first time I had real Italian porchetta was in a little hole-in-the-wall hostaria in Assisi and of course I fell totally in love with. This great recipe is as close as I'm going to get to it here, I think. We thought it tasted a bit of pancetta, so maybe fennel is one of the ingredients that gives pancetta its taste.

Chicken and dumplings

One of my fondest food memories is a Methodist church dinner which had the best chicken and dumplings I've ever eaten. I was young and I don't remember where it was -- probably Pittsburg. I try new recipes now and again in the hopes of finding something as good, but haven't had any luck so far. But that's OK -- it's fun trying.

This recipe from Andrea Reusing's Cooking in the Moment has a lot of steps but is basically pretty simple. The result is quite tasty, though not as great as that Methodist church dinner in my memory. One is tempted to think you could get as good a result with fewer steps. She recommends a real laying hen, but I have no idea where you'd find one of those. I used one of the kosher chickens from WF.

Put the chicken (including neck, gizzard and heart, if available) in a 6-qt pot and cover with 3 qts water. Bring to a boil. Start skimming off scum as it gets to a simmer and continue skimming and simmering for 5 min. Then add a carrot, a celery stalk, an onion cut in half and an unpeeled head of garlic cut in half crosswise, as well as 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp salt and 1 tsp black peppercorns. Reduce heat to low, cover and cook for 10 to 15 min.

You're supposed to pull out the chicken and cut out the breast meat at this point, which is supposed to be done and just pink at the bone. My chicken breasts were still partly raw so I put it back in for another 10 min. Reusing says to put the chicken back in the pot and cook for a further 20 min. (I shortened because of extended time for the breast meat), then add the dark green top from a large leek and 20 (count 'em!) parsley stems (chop the leaves for garnish) and cook for another 10 min. Remove the chicken, cut off the legs and let cool. Strain the broth and discard the vegetables and chicken carcass. Reusing says you should have 2 qts of broth. I didn't measure, but the end product came out soupier than I like, so maybe I had more than 2 qts or 2 qts is too much. I would reduce or simply siphon off some of the broth. (Though her photo of the dish, shown here, looks about as soupy as mine.)

Make the dumpling batter by whisking together 2 c. flour with 1 Tbl. baking powder and 1 tsp. salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together 2 eggs, 1/2 c. buttermilk and 1 stick (8 Tbl) melted butter. Combine the liquid ingredients with the dry ingredients and stir with wooden spoon to make (very thick) batter. Add 2 Tbl each of chopped parsley and "thinly sliced" chives (why not say chopped?).

Remove the skin from the chicken, tear the meat from the legs and tear both breast and leg meat into bite size portions. Rinse pot and pour broth back into it. Bring to a boil and put 2 diced carrots, 2 diced celery stalks, and the diced white and green parts of that large leek into the broth with 3/4 c. white wine. Cook for 4 min., then add the chicken meat with 1 c. heavy cream. Check seasoning and bring to a simmer.

Form the dumplings with 2 teaspoons and drop them into the simmering stew. Stir around to keep separate. When all the dumplings are in, cover and cook for 5 min. Serve with garnish of chopped parsley and chive batons and plenty of ground pepper.

The chicken takes on a lot of great flavor from the aromatics. The broth is a little thin. Maybe it was just too much but it might help to boost the flavor with a bouillon cube. We made the full recipe so I'm eager to see how it tastes reheated as leftovers.

Bandolero

An outing this week reinforced my already confirmed opposition to small-plate restaurants and Top Chef and added something new for me to dislike: Pop-ups. I think they should be more honest about this new trend to preview restaurants in another locale and just call them rip-offs.

So visiting the Bandolero pop-up, previewing a new DC venture by Mike Isabella of Top Chef fame, turned out to be a perfect storm of things I don't like. Worst of all, the food wasn't that great. Mediocre is the word that most often comes to mind. (Fortunately, good company and Negra Modelo draft beer made it a great evening anyway.)

One of my companions at dinner, Peter Gilbert, offered a blow-by-blow account of the meal in his No Limits blog that I'm pretty much in agreement with, though I question how any other Latin cocktail could surpass a caipirinha.

Certainly the $65 prix fixe, not including drinks, ridiculously overpriced the food we got in terms of quantity and quality (hence, rip-off), even if you consider that since tax and tip was included it corresponded to $50 on a normal menu. While it's long been clear that the primary purpose of a small-plate menu is to increase the restaurant's profit margin, a prix fixe pop-up seems designed to amplify that effect, even though it should essentially be a marketing expense.

The reason I don't watch Top Chef -- I only know Isabella was on it because Andrea is an avid watcher and for  that reason was eager to try this restaurant -- is that it turns cooking into a sport, making food something like a football that gets skillfully passed around until it lands on the diner's plate. I have no illusions that Top Chef is closer to what happens in a restaurant than anything that goes on in my kitchen, but I don't have to watch it (you know the old saying about sausage...).

Bandolero was not very Mexican, confirming once again my belief that it's pretty much impossible to get good Mexican food this side of the Mississippi. I liked the Umbels' previous restaurant, Hook, and wish them well in this endeavor, but as Peter optimistically says, it is a work in progress.