Blue Cheese, Brussels Sprouts, Pecans, and Pasta

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a seminar by Dr. Rachel Dutton. You may have seen her name in the "recommended blogs" section of this blog. Or perhaps you read the article about her in the NYTimes, or heard about the chef-friendly microbiologist through the culinary grapevine. She's a "super postdoc", or a young research scientist with her own lab at Harvard that studies the microbial ecology of cheeses. Not only does she seamlessly connect my two passions - food and science (specifically microbiology), but I believe she is also precisely the link we need in science right now between basic research (i.e. cell biology) and field research (i.e. ecology).

(photo taken from the Dutton Lab)

On the rinds of cheeses across the globe, Dr. Dutton has found a delectable diversity of fungi and bacteria happily cohabiting. Importantly for science, all the microbes on cheese will also grow individually in the lab (because a wheel of cheese is really just a giant fancy agar plate). This means Dr. Dutton's lab can take apart the microbial community on cheese, and then try to build it back up again to learn how microbial communities are structured in nature. The other advantage of being able to manipulate cheese microbes in the lab is that it makes it much easier to study what exactly these microbes are doing on the cheese at multiple scales from tracking the path of single molecules to the behavior of species. I find this really exciting because cheese might be the answer to unlocking the mysteries of microbial community ecology that have previously been difficult to study in far more complex systems like soil or the gut.

Since I was so stoked about seeing Dr. Dutton's seminar, Alex got me some super stinky moldy cheese for my birthday last week. Unlike Dr. Dutton's cheese's, this is a fresher cheese that has been injected with Penicillium spp. (as in, Penicillin). This cheese is VERY moldy, and while I do study mold, I wasn't entirely prepared for the quantity of Penicillium in my birthday cheese.

I realized I wasn't just going to eat this cheese on it's own. I needed to make something with it. I needed to dilute its funkiness with other flavors. Though, a part of me cringes typing that last sentence. Shouldn't I embrace the gloriously complex flavors of this robust delicacy? Shouldn't I appreciate filamentous fungi alone for their culinary contribution? Perhaps I should, though it's going to be a long time before I become a bonafide mold snob.

Anyway, I was feeling inspired by the brussels sprouts I had just gotten at the farmers market and the pecans I received in the mail, fresh from my uncle's tree in Arkansas! Pasta with brussels sprouts, pecans, and blue cheese cream sauce seemed like the best way to eat some very blue blue cheese without eating it straight.

I make pasta the Italian way - pasta first, then water:

 I also throw in a few frozen cubes of my homemade chicken demi-glace:

While the pasta cooked, I got my mise en place together: onions, brussels sprouts, carrots, garlic, blue cheese, and my uncle's pecans.

The pasta should be boiled in just enough water to cover it so that by the time it's done, it's starting to poke out of the water. Ideally you should strain the water over another pot, cook the pasta water down and use it to thicken the sauce, but I don't always do this.

Saute the onions, garlic, and carrots in butter.

add the brussels sprouts.

Sprinkle in some flour and let it cook for just a minute or two (this is the Singer Method of making a roux)

Add a decent amount of milk.

I always end up adding more milk as it cooks and thickens. The goal is pasta-sauce-consistency. Also, anytime you cook with milk (or cream), always add nutmeg. Nutmeg is the secret ingredient to all things dairy.

Just before you turn off the heat, add some blue cheese and stir it in till it melts.

Add the cooked pasta and mix it until everything is saucy and delicious.

This turned out to be simple and pretty darn good, though for anyone inspired to recreate this: add bacon, or possibly sausage. Bacon would have made this perfect. Just imagine powerful musky blue cheese and sweet, salty bacon waltzing across your tastebuds.

Honey Mustard Pork

For the record, here is Alex's honey mustard pork recipe. I believe this recipe is still evolving, but we wont know unless we have a record of it now, to compare to it later. Perhaps one day we will mine the data in this blog to construct a phylogenetic tree that explains the evolution of our recipes and eating habits. But in the mean time - pork!

We had a lonely pork chop in the freezer that Alex used for this, though he would have preferred a Boston Butt, or a similar cut of pork better used for slow cooking.

Brine the pork for 1 hour prior to cooking, though Alex is curious to explore alternatives/longer brining procedures.

Brine

2 Tbsp Salt

2 Tbsp Sugar

1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

Water

Mix together the ingredients for the brine, plus enough water to cover the pork in a baking dish. Let sit in the fridge for an hour.

Take the pork out of the brine and sear it in hot bacon grease in a cast iron skillet. It should be thoroughly seared, a little charred even.

Dump the brine out of the baking dish, place the seared pork back in the dish.
Deglaze the cast iron skillet and caramelize some sliced onions and garlic in the skillet.
Top the pork with the onion/garlic/pan-juices.

In a small bowl or 2-cup measuring cup, prepare the sauce:

Sauce

2 Tbsp Honey

1/4-1/2 cup Coffee, fresh brewed

1/4-1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

1 Tbsp Molasses

at least 1Tbsp+ of Mustard Powder... probably more

a healthy dash of Saigon Cinnamon

sizable pinch of Applewood Smoked Sea Salt

some Crushed Red Pepper Flakes

a healthy amount of Cumin, maybe 1-2 tsp

~1/2 cup Boiling Water

Vigorously stir together all the ingredients for the sauce, then pour it over the onions, garlic, and pork in the baking dish. Cover the dish with foil and bake at 250F for 2 hours.

Remove the pork from the sauce, blend the sauce, then reduce it on the stove until it has a good BBQ sauce like consistency. Alex also made cornbread and I whipped up a coleslaw to make a meal out of it.

The Joy of Cooking has a great cornbread recipe. I make coleslaw a little different every time. My goal is to make it as colorful as possible, here's the gist of it:

Coleslaw

Red Cabbage - very thinly sliced

Carrots - grated

Peppers of every possible color! - grated or thinly sliced

Cilantro - coarsely chopped

Green Onion - sliced

Red Onion - minced (maybe a Tbsp-ish)

Dolup of Mayonnaise

Big splash of Apple Cider Vinegar

Dash Cinnamon

Big dash Paprika

Huge pinch of Salt

...

Additional suggestions for coleslaw:

Kale - thinly sliced/chopped

Beets of any/all colors - grated

Lemon and/or Orange Zest

Apple - diced
Mustard

Herbs! - play with herbs!

Play with Spices too! (Fennel an Cumin come to mind first..)

Meatballs & Yogurt Sauce

My camera has sadly passed on to silicon heaven. Luckily, my iPhone has a surprisingly decent camera, so here's a post made entirely of iPhone photos!

It's been heating up here in the Bay Area, and the other evening Alex and I crafted a quick and (mostly) cool dinner. Alex made a yogurt sauce...

Strauss Plain Yogurt with hella chopped garlic!

The spice line-up for the yogurt:

Coriander, Red Pepper, Tumeric, Cinnamon, Cumin...

Garlic, Yogurt, Spices, Olive Oil...

Chopped tomatoes and cucumber to finish the yogurt sauce

...In the end, perhaps the yogurt sauce was more like a saucy tomato-cucumber salad. Anyway, moving on to the meatballs:

Ground beef, chopped garlic, corn meal, cilantro, cumin, paprika, salt.

My favorite part is mushing all the meatball ingredients together with my hands! Also, we were all out of both flour and eggs, so I improvised with cornmeal and completely left out the egg. Turns out eggs are totally unnecessary for meatballs.

Searing the meatballs in olive oil

Meatballs with Cucumber-Tomato-Yogurt Sauce, garnished with Green Onion.

Orange Chicken

Last night I waltzed into the kitchen with the idea that I was just going to whip up a quick veggie stir fry, rice, and orange chicken. While the techniques are simple, it's not exactly what I'd call a "quick dinner" in the end...

First I put some brown rice on to cook while I did everything else (1 cup rice : 2 cups water/stock).

Then I started working on the chicken. I had two chicken breasts that were left over from roast chicken dinner the night before, so I just cut these into bite-sized chunks and then breaded them using a modified Standard Breading Procedure:

1. Coat with flour, shake off excess.

2. Coat with egg (3-4 eggs), allow excess to drain off.

3. Coat with corn starch.

I also add salt an pepper to the flour and cornstarch before using it to coat the chicken. While I breaded the chicken, I had a pot of canola oil warming up on the stove, so that as soon as my chicken bits were breaded, I could immediately fry them in the oil.

When the chicken was just barely beginning to brown, I pulled them out of the oil and placed them on a paper-towel-covered-plate to soak up any excess oil. The fried chicken sat in a warm oven while I made the sauce.

Orange Sauce

1 cup Water

1 Lemon, juiced

1 Orange, juiced and zested

1 cup Brown Sugar

1/3 cup Rice Vinegar

3 Tbsp Liquid Aminos (or soy sauce)

Sprinkle Cayenne

............

3 Tbsp Corn Starch + 3 Tbsp Water

Bring everything above the dotted line to a boil. Dissolve the corn starch in the 3 Tbsp water. When the water-juice-sugar-etc. is at a rolling boil, add the corn starch solution while stirring. Continue to stir over heat until thickened (this should happen fairly quickly). Garlic and/or ginger would also be awesome in this sauce.

When the sauce is thick, pour it over the fried chicken to coat them.

Then I put the chicken back in the warm oven while I whipped up a few sauteed veggies...

Reference: Chinese Orange Chicken

Basil-Cilantro Pesto, Beef, and Strawberries

Beef and strawberries, and strawberries and herbs, and beef and herbs, and strawberries and beef and herbs are all magical combinations.

I made some pesto with a bunch of cilantro, two bunches of basil, and enough olive oil to make it saucy:

Then I sauteed ground beef, onions, garlic, and zucchini.

I turned off the heat and added asparagus...

In a seperate pan, I warmed the pesto, then combined it with the beef saute.

Pesto beef & veggies with brown rice and strawberries

Beef & Butter Pasta

I was feeling the need to put something else on my blog besides mobile-mini-restaurant-reviews. Having a smartphone is nifty and all, but it just seems so much more meaningful to update my blog the old-fashioned way -- with a computer that has a real keyboard and far more editing capabilities. Anyway, here's what I made for dinner tonight. Just a simple beef and pasta dish.

A while ago I started re-thinking pasta. It all began when I saw my step-mom throw a few hand-fulls of pasta into the saucy juices at the bottom of a pan of roast chicken.She let the pasta cook while the chicken finished cooking, and in the end she had pasta that was flavored with stock and roast-chicken-drippings, delicious! It had previously been pounded into my head that pasta should always be cooked in a humongous pot of boiling water -- I started to question this after watching my step-mom's method. I've since realized, it really doesn't matter how you cook pasta. As long as there's liquid and heat at some point, the pasta will get cooked. So whenever I make pasta now, I put the dry pasta in a dry pot and then fill it with water so there's about 1-2cm of water above the level of the pasta. This is usually just enough water to cook the pasta, with just enough left over to make a sauce. Waste not!

Always salt your pasta water liberally and stir often!

To make the sauce I started with half a stick of butter.

Then sauteed ground beef, onions and garlic until they were browned.

Meanwhile I strained the pasta by balancing a colander on top of a measuring cup in the kitchen sink. Check out that thick delicious pasta water!

I used some of the pasta water to de-glaze my sauce pan...

...and I added several ice-cubes of chicken demi-glace from the freezer...

...and some lemon zest to brighten the mood. Oh yeah, and more butter! Always more butter.

Once the sauce was thick, I stirred in the cooked pasta, topped it with cheese, and voila!

Sriracha Pasta

Alex came home tonight declaring that he feared he was getting sick and intended to eat something smothered in Sriracha for dinner. I had already put a pot of pasta on the stove... so, I decided to improvise a Sriracha cream sauce for the pasta and it turned out fantastic!

Ground Beef, Onions, Garlic, Carrots, Cremini Mushrooms, Butter, Flour, Milk, Sriracha, Chopped Cilantro.

I simply sauteed everything in butter, then added more butter and a small hand-full of flour. I stirred the flour in well and allowed it to cook for a few minutes before adding in a few cups of milk and a very liberal drizzle of Sriracha. Once the sauce had a good consistency, I finished it with some salt, then added the pasta and finally cilantro.

Oh yeah, and this isn't the Sriracha also known as Cock Sauce, we found a groovy (less chemical-y) Sriracha at our local grocery store! ...I love the label:

You don't need no teef to eat this beef!

The man at Fallon Hills Ranch has been trying hard to sell us a brisket at the farmers market every Sunday. A whole brisket is quite a commitment, but a few weeks ago, he had half-briskets and we decided to go for it. Alex did a bunch of research on traditional Texan barbecue and then spent a day while he worked from home making this incredible BBQ brisket!

It began with a dry rub the night before:

The Rub

2 Tbsp Roasted Ground Cumin

1 Tbsp Spanish Sweet Paprika

1 Tbsp California Paprika

1 Tbsp Hungarian Sweet Paprika

1 Roasted Dry Ancho Pepper (stem and seeds removed)

1 Tbsp Crushed Red Pepper

1/2 tsp Mace

1 Tbsp Alaea Hawaiian Salt

1 Tbsp Salish Smoked Salt

2 Tbsp Black Pepper

Grind everything above in a coffee grinder without cleaning any residual coffee grounds out of the grinder! Then add a whole bulb of chopped garlic to the ground spice mix and rub it in to the meat. The rubbed meat sat in the fridge for 11 hours, and then moved to the counter to warm up to room temperature for about 2 hours. Sear the meat in a cast iron pan with a sliced onion. Remove the meat from the pan when it's good and brown and place it fat-side-down in a tagine (or dutch oven). Let the onions caramelize in the cast iron pan and then add the sauce mixture below. Cook the sauce for about five minutes and then pour it over the seared brisket.

The Sauce

2 Tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
1/4 Cup Apple Cider Vinegar
1/4 Cup Bragg's Liquid Aminos
1/4 Cup Black Coffee
1/4 Cup Sugar
1 Tbsp Molasses
1/2 Cup Water
1 Shot Jameson Irish Whiskey
1 Tbsp Garlic Powder
1/2 Cup Rub (see above)

Cook the brisket for 6 hours in a 250F oven. Take the brisket out of the sauce to let it rest while you make the rest of the sauce. Use an immersion blender (or a normal blender) to blend the sauce with 2 large tomatoes, about a teaspoon of fresh ginger, juice from half a lemon, and a tablespoon of yellow mustard seeds. Then cook the sauce on the stove for about an hour until it's thick. Pour the sauce over the brisket and it's ready to eat!

I whipped up some cornbread and a slaw out the veggies we had in the fridge - carrots and poblano peppers. I grated the carrots and peppers, chopped some cilantro, and mixed it all up with  big splash of apple cider vinegar, a few scoops of mayonnaise, and a dash of cumin, paprika, and salt.

Alex made Black & Tans by mixing 1:1 Peregrin Pilsner and Sierra Nevada Porter.  Supposedly you can get the porter to float on top of the pilsner if you pour it over the back of a spoon into the glass... we didn't have much luck with this, perhaps the density of the beers we used was not right. Either way, it was darn tasty!

 When all was said and done we had a fabulous BBQ dinner!

And Alex even paired the meal with some music from Reverend Payton's Big Damn Band: