Hola, I am Al Pastor, the Christmas Ham

Hola and feliz navidad! I know you have been waiting for the Christmas ham, and here I am! My name is Al Pastor, and as you can see, I am from Mexico. What do you mean I don't look like a Christmas ham? My jokes are excellent!

I was a little bit afraid when I heard about deep-fried bacon. But then, I thought, it's ok, that bacon is no skin off my back! Also, these people, I heard they like to cure meats. But I told them, I'm feeling ok, I don't need to be cured. Plus, I hear a lot about smoked hams, but the last ham I saw that was smoked just got the munchies and ate a bunch of corn.

Ok, ok, enough with the jokes for now, I'm here all night! Don't worry, the 10:00 show is completely different from the 8:00 show. Tip your waitresses!

So aside from me, there was another Christmas ham in the house this year. He was a 10-lb bone-in fresh ham. These guys, they sliced up his outside into that diamond shape you always see on hams, and then soaked him in 6 liters of coke, kosher salt, bay leaves, garlic, and pepper for a day. 6 liters of coke! I guess that's the little piggy that went wee, wee, wee all the way home, if you know what I mean.

At first I was afraid they were going to use me for the ham, but then I realized they were just pulling my leg. Actually, they were pulling another pig's leg! Ha, get it? I kill me.

On Christmas morning, the ham emerged from his salty soda bath, and they dried it off and rubbed him down with some sage, parsley, garlic, and other stuff. It maybe wasn't a smoked ham, but it sure liked the herbs! Come on, you like my jokes. Oh, you don't? You think I'm a boar?

Anyway, during roasting, the ham got glazed with a mixture of apple cider, cloves, and brown sugar. The ham was a magnificent sight to behold and the last time I heard someone enjoy pork so much was Kermit the Frog's wedding night! Sorry, that one wasn't safe for the kiddies. Seriously though, the skin was perfectly crispy, and the meat tender with a subtle hint of the coca cola coming through the other flavors.

Thin slices served atop creamy grits with cheddar cheese and jalapenos and a side of kale and swiss chard braised in apple cider. The tanginess of the apple cider off set the bitterness of the greens.

Freshly baked biscuits finished off the plate - just the thing to sop up any missed bites. These biscuits are fluffy, buttery and an ideal comfort food.

Since there was so much leftover ham, a lot of it made its way to the Jet game, and then there was a dinner of fried eggs and ham over cheddar grit cakes, with some homemade chipotle hot sauce. Man, those Jets, if you're tired of my jokes, you should talk to that Favre guy! I may not know when to quit, but I wouldn't let that guy play with my pigskin no matter what.

So, signing off for now, I am Al Pastor, the Christmas Ham, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you and good night!

Shopsin's

I know, you're all waiting for pictures and accounts of our Christmas dinner. Don't worry, you'll get it soon, and it will be worth the wait. I think so, anyway. For now you'll have to settle for an account of breakfast this past Saturday, and an introduction to Shopsin's for those of you who are heretofore unfamiliar.

Shopsin's has been the subject of many fine articles and reviews. It's the home, and brainchild, and seeming embodiment of the worldview of, a madcap cook, host, philosopher, and truly one-of-a-kind human being named Kenny Shopsin (pictured at left). There's no way I can describe him better than the others who have already devoted considerable ink to the task, so let me just recommend: (1) the excellent documentary I Like Killing Flies, which started us on our recent fascination with Kenny and his restaurant, (2) Eat Me, his new cookbook which gives you a pretty good idea of who and what Shopsin's is, and (3) perusing the menu, which is amazingly just a small fraction of what the menu used to be in the restaurant's previous locations.

No write-up of Shopsin's is completely without the obligatory letting you know that there are lots of rules: no groups larger than 4, even if you pretend you're two different groups and don't know each other. No 2 people at the same table can order the same thing. Don't order too much food. Everyone has to order a meal. You may get yelled at or cursed at. You may get thrown out. You may get cursed at, thrown out, and told not to come back.

We were certainly anxious going in, and had studied the menu to make sure we didn't make any mistakes. It made us feel a little better when the friends we made at the table next to us, a mother and her son who had been going to Shopsin's every week for the past several years, didn't order a sandwich they wanted because they didn't know if it was served hot or cold, and were afraid to ask. Which is to say: you may go every day, you may never have gone before, but the rules are the rules, and there's a certain degree of unpredictable irrationality to keep you on your toes.

To the food, though: awfully good stuff. Sliders, just about the best I've ever had (maybe the best?) (pictured below, not taken by me). Excellent little burgers on potato rolls, with crispy onions, done absolutely perfectly. A Mexican breakfast skillet with egg enchiladas, brisket-green chile hash, and s'mores pancakes. No, I don't know why those go together, how that ended up as a combination but the egg nachoes come with banana french toast and chipotle grits, and the egg quesadilla comes with a pork tamale and ricotta cilantro guacamole.


A couple final notes about the place: it's open Monday through Saturday, until 3, in the Essex Street Market. It was in its original West Village location for decades, and then in the space now occupied by Market Table for a few years. Watching the documentary, filmed during the transition from the first to second Shopsin's location, makes you marvel that such a place could be transported.

And, most importantly, I was happy to see that Kenny appears to be a Mets fan, yet another reason I will surely return.

So, in short: see the movie, get the book, play by the rules, go eat some good food.

Pizza for Breakfast?? Pizza for Breakfast!!

So maybe we've gone a bit overboard with the pizza lately. We just can't stop. I don't know what to say. And, yes, some have turned out better than others, but they've all been at least very good and a few have been even better than that. I'm not tooting our own horn, just saying that pizza making is pretty straightforward, and fun, and offers some opportunities for creativity. Plus, who doesn't love pizza?

We had a couple good friends stay over last weekend, and decided to make some breakfast pizzas. We had some leftover sauce from the huevos rancheros, so that would come into play. Should we fry or scramble our eggs? How about a pie of each? Hmm, there's chorizo, bacon, a couple kinds of cheese . . . I see where this all is going.



One lesson learned: make sure to construct the pizza in a way that the egg, when cracked onto the partially baked pie, does not run all over the place. Use strategically placed onions maybe, or leave spaces with no other toppings that can contain the egg, whatever. Because, of the three eggs I tried to crack onto the pie, you can see below that one worked, the other two, not so much. Still yummy, but a bit haphazard-looking.



Anyways, this worked out well. Really tasty stuff. And, since breakfast on the weekends is probably my favorite meal to eat, I was a very happy boy.

Huevos Rancheros Muy Buenos

We made Huevos Rancheros for dinner last Wednesday using a tomatillo sauce from Rick Bayless's "Mexican Everyday" cookbook. Mexican food is one of my favorite things to make as a home cook. I often rely on Rick Bayless's recipes because they are easy to follow, he knows what he is talking about and just about everything that I've made with his recipes has been delicious. For the tomatillo sauce we blended garlic, serrano chiles, tomatillos and some chopped cilantro in a food processor. In case you were wondering where the bacon comes into this, we fried up some bacon and used the bacon drippings to cook the pureed sauce.

I am a huge proponent of making homemade corn tortillas using masa harina and reconstituting it with water. I divide the dough into balls and use a tortilla press to flatten the dough into a disk. Once the dough has been flattened, I throw the tortillas onto a skillet on the stove and cook until the surface is less shiny and light brown. Using the tortilla press is one of my favorite kitchen tools and the taste and texture of fresh tortillas can't be beat. Below is the final dish. A layer of tortillas with a layer of sauce, two fried eggs, bacon and mexican crema. Yum!

45 Peso Pizza

Here's a story some of you might have heard, but I'll re-tell it anyway. A couple months ago, we went to this awesome place in Derby, CT called Roseland Apizza. Great red sauce Italian place. We ordered much too much food, including a shrimp casino pizza (the seafood pizzas are a specialty). Shrimp, bacon, peppers, onions, what could be bad? It was marked "market price," but how much could it be? I mean, yeah it's got shrimp, but it's a pizza!! When the lobster ravioli in lobster sauce is the most expensive thing on the menu at $33, the shrimp pizza can't be more than 20 bucks or so, right?

Well, the pizza was delicious. Which is a good thing, because when the check came, if we found out that we had ordered a 45 DOLLAR pizza that wasn't delicious, there would have been trouble. By trouble, I mean, us paying our bill respectably and complaining a lot to each other on the ride home. As it was, we were befuddled, but at least enjoyed the pizza, and knew never to make that mistake again.

So last night we made our own $45 pizza, but with a Mexican twist. So let's call it 45 peso pizza. We briefly marinated the shrimp in a tequila-lime mixture, tossed on some bacon, added house-pickled jalapenos for good measure, and some cilantro. Very good, and the peso-to-dollar exchange rate left our wallets a bit heavier than our trip to Roseland.

Also on last night's menu: a pie with tomatoes, monte enebro, chevre, and kick-ass chorizo. Monte Enebro is a pretty intense goat cheese; it was a great combination, but not for the faint-of-heart. Tasty stuff.

Sausage Stuffers

Sausage stuffing is kind of like stocking stuffing, except instead of filling a big red sock with little presents, you are filling intestines with ground up meat and fat and spices.

Answers to some common questions: yes, they are pig's intestines, you can generally get them at a butcher or maybe even your friendly neighborhood supermarket, if you want thinner sausages you've gotta get sheep casings which are pricier, and they are surprisingly resilient when stuffing them full of meat.

For an excellent demonstration of sausage-making technique, we highly recommend finding the old Julia Child episode where she stuff sausages with any variety of devices. Quite a hoot, and also quite informative.

We had some help stuffing the sausages (thanks, Chuckanucka).


Some people stuff the whole thing and then twist off the links. In our experience, twisting off as you go works a little better. Just be careful - you want them full (air bubbles are not your friend), but not too full (casings popping in the middle is a big pain to deal with).


The finished product, all ready to be cooked and eaten and enjoyed.

Just a couple breakfast shots for you - 1) fry up patties of the fried rice we made earlier in the week (does that make it double-fried rice?); 2) heat up leftover meat from Dinosaur BBQ the night before, with some bbq sauce; 3) fry some eggs; 4) assemble and enjoy.

Making Legislation

What's that you say? We just made duck proscuitto, why do we need to grind Donald up into sausage so soon after? It's a good question, and I'm not sure I have a better answer than that we don't hate ducks, we love them. They are delicious.

Also - for you law and politics nerds out there - how bad is is that we call making sausage "making legislation?" Very bad, I think.




Anyways - to the task at hand, and thanks again to Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie - take the duck, butcher it up so all that's left is meat, no bones or skin or sinew (that sinew is the biggest pain to deal with, maybe there's some easy way to do it I just haven't figured out yet?). Mix up the meat with some pork fat, mix in with spices and seasonings, freeze for a bit, grind, mix in some red wine and water, and there you go.

I've gotta say, I love making sausage. It is always sad when my partner in the kitchen has to get up super early on a weekend to head to work, and I'm left doing the butchering myself, but I suppose someone needs to bring home the bacon, since that bacon of the month club won't last forever.

For everyone who loved playing with Play-Doh as a kid, you should make sausage. For those of you who are freaked out by the idea, you shouldn't be. Controlling the process - what goes in, what comes out, and everything in between - should allay any misgivings about sausage generally. And, if you have a Kitchenaid mixer, the meat grinder attachment is a good add-on; who knows, you may end up grinding a lot of your own meat.


Of all the sausages we've made, the duck is probably my favorite. It's a bit decadent, and a lot delicious.







At the end, of course, make sure you taste what you made. Because you want to check for seasonings, and you want to eat it as soon as possible. This is some tasty stuff, to be sure.

Tomorrow we'll stuff the sausages; keep your eyes peeled for pics of the finished product.

Quack Quack Quack

About a week after we hung it to dry, it was time to cut down the duck and see how we did.

The answer? Pretty good, but we might do a couple things differently next time.

The meat was very nicely cured and dried, but could have maybe used just a smidge more time in the salt, and maybe an extra day or so hanging. It's tough - the ends of the breast, which were much thinner, were a bit too dry; the middle could have used a little bit more. But not terribly so, it was still a success I think. Also, I might add some other flavorings to the mix, maybe some fresh herbs.

My biggest frustration was just that I couldn't get it sliced thinly enough. We have an awesome slicing knife, and I'm not sure if I just couldn't slice it so great or if the meat needed to be a bit firmer. Or, of course, it might just be that we need to get a tabletop electric meat slicer.

But very tasty. When we put up pictures of our cheese dinner from last night, you'll see a nice heaping pile of housemade duck prosciutto.

What should we hang next?

The John Dory

So this past weekend we went to check out The John Dory. It's the new British fish place from April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman (the folks behind The Spotted Pig). Still haven't been to The Spotted Pig, what with the extra long waits and no reservations, but figured since the new place is taking reservations it's worth making one to see how they do things. The short answer is: remarkably well.

Since we're not really the sort of people to take lots of pictures in restaurants (except when we're on vacation, I guess, as anyone who's seen our vacation pics knows), there's none here. Which makes this just a plain, boring, restaurant review.

But: if you're looking for a great seafood meal, check out The John Dory. I'm usually wary of brand-spanking-new places, just getting things sorted out, lots of hiccups in terms of food and service, etc. No problems here at all.

We sat in the small room off to the side, with a giant fish tank to entertain us. Lots of fun watching the banana eel slither around, the blowfish, and all their aquatic friends. And the whole place is very over-the-top with fish themed stuff everywhere, a little bit gaudy and a little bit tasteful at the same time.

I know, you don't care. What did we eat and how was it? First they bring out some housemade potato chips with smoked arctic char, very tasty, and a slightly larger portion would have been welcome. Then, for starters, some oysters (east and west coast), and the fish soup (not to be confused with the fish stew entree). Oysters good and fresh, fish soup rich, flavorful, plentiful, awesome. It was almost a bisque - thick, just enough texture, lots of fish and shellfish flavor, tomatoey, spices, etc. Very much hit the spot on a cold night.

For entrees, we split the whole grilled sea bass with anchovy-rosemary pesto, and the black pepper crab. Hot damn. The sea bream was perfectly cooked, nice crispy skin, well-seasoned, and the pesto complemented the fish without overwhelming it at all. But the star of the show, which I would order over and over again, was the black pepper crab. Did I feel a bit self-conscious in this hip meatpacking location surrounded by beautiful people, up to my elbow in crabshell and peppercorns and meat and spice? Maybe just a bit. But seriously, there's no excuse for not ordering the crab. It's a 2 lb whole dungeness crab, cut into pieces but still in the shell, in a fire-but-not-too-fiery black pepper sauce, with whole roasted peppercorns, scallions, and who knows what else. Went nicely with the IPA I was drinking.

As for desserts, eh, a pretty good ice cream sundae and a decent eccles cake (look, Brits aren't known for their sweets) with the saving grace, some tasty stichelton (sort of a raw-milk stilton but tweaked a bit).

In a nutshell - well worth it, if it sounds like your sort of place, by all means go check it out.

Low-fat Sugar-free Cinnamon Rolls

A few things occur to me as we start to put this blog together.

First, probably we won't use our names, or anyone else's, because who knows, I might want to run a kosher processing plant some day, and this might prevent that from happening. Or, my doctor could stumble upon the site, realize I haven't listen to a thing he's told me, and fire me as a patient. So we'll just keep this on the mildly anonymous side.

Second, you may notice gifts you've given us being put to good use - frying pans, pizza making classes, pizza stone and peel, bacon of the month club, bbq sauce of the month club, you get the idea. Thanks!! Not that getting hitched is all about the loot or anything, but we've got some great friends who know our food-related predilections all too well. So thank you.

Third, it may be that not everything we make or eat is interesting to you or even us. If it's dumb as all heck, and still makes it up here, well, sorry about that.

Fourth, this probably won't be the place to come for recipes, just pictures document our lives cooking and eating. But by all means, make suggestions if you think we should do this differently.

Fifth and lastly (for now), this is new to us. We're not very good with the formatting. Apologies if things are all out of sorts layout-wise.

Anyways - we had a brunch on Sunday and made some cinnamon rolls. A pretty quick, non-yeast dough recipe courtesy of the almost always right folks at Cook's Illustrated. We made a double batch, which means melting two sticks of butter to start. Something heartwarming about the sight of two sticks of butter sitting in the pan, no?

From melted butter, to buttered dough, to rolled up log of cinnamon rolls, to the finished product - well worth it.

If brunch hadn't been with a crowd that included a couple of vegetarians or non-pork eaters, bacon may have found its way either into the icing or the filling. Is that a horrible idea? Or a good one? We may never know.

Saturday morning with bacon

Making breakfast is one of our favorite ways to start a Saturday morning. We started with the essentials to a good breakfast - bacon and coffee. One the menu: bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches and muffins toasted in bacon grease.

Our Saturday morning breakfasts are some of my favorite meals of the week because we rarely plan for the meal. As long as we have eggs in the fridge, it is pretty easy to use ingredients that we already have to put together a tasty breakfast. After scrambling the eggs, we added some chopped oregano and crumbled some leftover Roquefort cheese from a salad we made earlier in the week. We had a blueberry muffin on hand that we decided to lightly toast in the bacon grease.

The final product.

Duck Proscuitto (Donald and Daffy at the Gallows)

The beginnings of our duck proscuitto. Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie gets as much use as any book in our kitchen, and so far, no clunkers. We didn't get pictures of the duck breast pre-cure, or the day it spent covered in salt, or emerged from the salt, so let's start the experiment here at the hanging stage. Check back in about a week to see how it turned out.

Pizza is the Best

We've started making pizza. We'll make some dough on the weekend, and then have pizza night once a week, more or less. MMM mmm good. Last night's pies - Clams and Bacon, and BBQ Chicken - were excellent, I must say. Broiling the pie for the last minute or so seems to help crisp up the crust a bit.

If you look, you'll see that we misguidedly started this blog a couple of years ago, and did nothing with it. A picture of bacon tempura sat there for a long time, unaccompanied by anything at all. That's about to change.

The plan is to document our food obsession: our sausage making, meat curing, pizza making, omnivorous existence. Professionals by day, ravenous eaters by night, with nothing better to do than spend much too much time thinking about food, and much too little time doing the work we're supposed to be doing.

Also, no one visits us way out in the fancy shmancy burbs where we live, so perhaps documenting what goes on in our kitchen and into our stomachs will prompt some more visitors.

Enjoy!!