Have you met Leo?

Leo. Lox, eggs, onions. I mean, our kitchen is no Barney Greengrass, but we do what we can.

Take a couple of onions. Cook until soft in a little bit of oil, then cover, stirring occasionally, until they begin to turn golden. Maybe 30 or 40 minutes.


Beat however many eggs you want, mix them in with the onions, and let them cook on medium-low until they're just about set, maybe 10 minutes or so.

Then, take smoked fish -- the food that, more than any other, bridges my people and my wife's -- and mix it in. Cook just until the eggs are set. You don't want the fish to cook, just warm through. Eat with some rye toast.

Happy National Pancake Day!!

February 23rd: Six month wedding anniversary.
February 24th: Fat Tuesday a/k/a Mardi Gras a/k/a National Pancake Day.
February 24th: the missus goes down to DC for a conference.
February 23rd: celebrate Pancake Day a day early, with some bubbly.

We had some latkes in the freezer. So, to start, a little canape of latke, sour cream, and smoked salmon.

Then onto the good stuff. Cornmeal pancakes (you’ve seen them here before). Topped with macerated strawberries and blueberries, plus some real maple syrup. Cracked pepper bacon on the side.

What an anniversary! Do we know romance or what?

Deep-Fried Bacon Goes to Florida

Florida is a strange place. You’ve got a lot of sizeable contingents of different demographic groups - old Jews, African Americans, latinos, very southern Southerners, and cartoon mice. You’ve got tropical weather with flora and fauna to match, not to mention tasty seafood (mostly eaten at early bird specials). (If you’re from Florida, please, don’t take too much issue with my gross over-generalizations.) And, for one long weekend in February, Florida has Deep-Fried Bacon. Or, to be more precise, four good law school friends catching up plus one uncle, generously sharing his Palm Beach condo and his knowledge of the romantic lives of Florida retirees. Whatever you do, stay away from the Boca babes.

You know how these weekends go – a bit too much sun, a few drinks, a trip to the grocery store, and before you know it, you’ve decided to make the bacon explosion. A few weeks ago, when many of you fine readers sent the NY Times bacon explosion along, you probably thought it was funny. Let me tell you this: there is nothing funny about the bacon explosion. This is serious business. Allow me to explain.

First off, when was the last time any of you wove anything? Especially without a loom? And when was the last time any of you wove a 5x5 lattice of thick cut bacon strips? Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that question.

Understanding the bacon explosion means understanding that it is all about layers. Layers of flavor, layers of fat, and layers of mmm mmm goodness. The reason I loved Legos and K’Nex and Erector and Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys growing up was that it’s fun to build things, layer-by-layer, from the ground up. This is not so different. So, on top of the bacon weave, goes some bbq spice rub.

Then the next layer. Sausage. We chose hot Italian, although whatever sausage you’d like will do just fine. Either buy it uncased, or take it out of the casings, and make a nice even layer on top of the bacon weave. If I were at home, I would have ground my own, certainly, so (if there is a) next time, that what I’ll do.

Next: barbecue sauce, cooked and crumbled bacon, and more of the spice rub. We went with a hot barbecue sauce that was from somewhere down in Florida; I don’t remember the name. It was a little sweet, a little tangy, a little spicy, and complemented the rest of the explosion well.

And now’s when the madness begins to take form. layers are all well and good, but you’ve got to bring them together to truly make the bacon explosion greater than the sum of its parts. So, first, roll up the sausage layer on up, leaving the bacon weave flat and untouched for now. Do this carefully - you don’t want to break it, and you want to get it nice and tight. No air pockets. Smush in the sides and the seam to get a nice, smooth, enclosed cylinder of meat.

Then, roll it all up in the bacon weave.

Add some more rub. And then pop it in the oven.

Low and slow is the name of the game here. Ideally we would have had a smoker, and we could have smoked the bacon explosion, giving it some extra flavor, but alas, we only had an oven. It’s ok though! The oven’s not such a bad choice. 275 degrees for about an hour per inch of thickness (in our case, about 2½ hours) ought to do the trick.

One beautiful thing that happens: as it all cooks together, and the bacon and sausage fat render and mix with the spices, and pools on the baking sheet, you are making the pure essence of bacon explosion awesomeness. This stuff is good – dip your bread in, whatever – but powerful. Proceed with caution. One member of our party thought he should pour this stuff all over his meal. It’s like looking right at the sun. Really, I mean it - big mistake. Big, tasty, mistake.

After it’s out of the oven, slather on a bit more bbq sauce, to get a nice, burnished look.

Because we had a lot of time to wait for the explosion to cook, I decided to caramelize some onions on the stove top. A nice accompaniment to the star of the meal. The time while it’s cooking is also a perfect opportunity to drink a few glasses of whisky. Just a suggestion.

The finished product.

Afterwards, you may have some leftovers. Now, as one particularly astute reader has noticed, I love breakfast sandwiches. You could say they are my muse. The many ways to combine some sort of carbohydrate/breadstuff, some sort of protein, an egg, perhaps some cheese, maybe a sauce of some sort. Open-faced, closed-face, the possibilities are endless. But, in the end, a bacon, egg, and cheese or sausage, egg and cheese sandwich doesn’t need much tinkering.

Oh, wait a minute. Just wait a minute here. What about a bacon explosion, egg, and cheese sandwich. Madness? Beauty? Is this truly the ideal breakfast sandwich?

Is it bad to have bacon explosion for two meals in one weekend? I’ll leave the answers to you.

Thai Me Up, Thai Me Down

Just about every time I eat Thai food, I look for this soup. Places spell it differently, but it's called (something like) Tom Ka Gai, and it hits all those hot, sour, sweet, salty notes that make Thai food as good as it is, in perfect balance.

Also, I don't think I mentioned, it seems like the missus and I (well, mostly her) have been fighting off colds or the flu or at the very least stuffed-up-edness for most of the last couple months. Because it's winter, soup sounds good; because the cold and flu make it so we can't taste anything, something spicy is in order.

So: first, the aromatics, mostly shallots and lemongrass, just cooked til soft.


Slice up a bunch of mushrooms. White button mushrooms are fine; there's so much flavor in the soup, you don't need any sorts of fancy mushrooms at all.


The soup itself has all sorts of great stuff - coconut milk, chicken broth, fish sauce, lime juice. After it simmers for a bit, add in the mushrooms, just until softened.


At the end, add in some red curry paste (to taste - a few tablespoons is plenty), and some thinly sliced chicken, and some shrimp (any protein is fine, preferably if it'll cook in just 2 or 3 minutes).

Garnish with some fresh chiles, cilantro, scallions, lime, and enjoy! Clear up your sinuses.

No, kitty, that's my pot pie

Look, I'm not complaining about the bacon-of-the-month club at all. I love it. Do you have any idea how amazing it is to get 2 pounds of artisan bacon in the mail every month? Black pepper, country bacon, maple-smoked, the fun never ends. Trust me. But sometimes it is hard to use up all that bacon.

Plus, we had some leftover biscuits from our recent brunch. So, after some thinking, we decided that chicken pot pie filling on top of those biscuits was something we could sneak some bacon into, a good use of the biscuits, and a way to sneak in some veggies (I was particularly happy for the green beans; they're among my favorites).

I'll admit that whenever I buy a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store I feel like a sad single guy who buys himself a chicken, takes it home, and eats it alone in the dark out of the carton. Not that I've ever done that, but ever since the time I bought a rotisserie chicken and nothing else, I get a bit self-conscious.

This chicken was way overdone, and the meat completely fell apart, but the filling was moist enough to keep the chicken from being too dry.

It's not the prettiest, but very tasty.

This blog is working! (In other words, if you come to Greenwich, we will feed you)

Last weekend the mood in our kitchen was upbeat as we prepared to host a Sunday brunch for friends. We take so much pleasure from preparing food and sharing it with friends and is something we don't do as often as we like living in Greenwich.

Setting the menu was the first order for the weekend. We made homemade chorizo earlier in the week to give to a couple co-workers and had enough left over to use it as a starting point for the brunch menu. We considered doing some type of tacos but ended up settling on open faced breakfast sandwiches.


We chose a Mexican Chorizo recipe by Michael Ruhlman. The sausage is pork based with hot paprika, chipotle, garlic, oregano, cumin and tequila. Here is the meat mixed up with all of the spices before it was ground.

Below: fresh ground sausage. We stuffed about half the sausage into casings and left the other half loose to be formed into breakfast patties.

Here are the little breakfast sausages sizzling away on the stove.











These buttermilk biscuits have made an appearance elsewhere on this blog. This time, they will be used to hold sausage and egg goodness.


We made oven roasted creole potatoes to accompany the biscuit sandwiches. Cut up and boil the potatoes for five minutes before spreading them in one layer onto a baking sheet. Sprinkle with chili powder, Cajun seasoning, paprika and olive oil and bake for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.








16 eggs for scrambling.














Roasting tomatillos and garlic for the salsa.















Open-faced chorizo, scrambled egg, cheese and tomatillo salsa breakfast sandwich.















Of course no brunch at our place would be complete without something sweet. We made a coffee cake with crumb topping. A small piece of this goes a long way, but everyone managed to find space for one piece at the end of the meal.

Thanks to everyone who came up to see us last weekend!

Who wants to come up next?!

Salmonella-free cookies are the best!

Here's a quick one.

As you should all know, when life gives you salmonella, make peanut butter cookies. Is that how it goes? Something like that anyway.

But: we haven't had enough cookies sitting around the house. And America has a love affair with peanut butter. And a little salmonella scare never stopped me from making cookies, dammit.

So peanut butter cookies it is. If you're my coworker who loves peanut butter but can't eat it around her super-peanut-allergic boyfriend, this makes you happy. If you're my wife who counts peanut butter cookies among your top 3 or 4 favorite cookies, this makes you very happy. If you're the good people at Jif afraid that some tainted PB is scaring off us peanut butter nuts (bad pun intended), you should be happy too.

Super Bowl Chili

So for the past three years my brother's annual Super Bowl party has also been a chili cook-off. I've made a different chili each year, and not done too well the last couple of years. Which doesn't make me too happy. I wanted things to be different this year. I really did.

This year we picked a recipe that is maybe a bit too fancy-pants. Homemade chile powder with five different kind of chiles, ground and cubed beef, some corn masa to thicken things up, nicely balanced flavors. I added an extra habanero to spice things up, upped the chile powder, and really thought I was on to something.

So to start - brown a bunch of beef. Then cook a bunch of bacon.


Then add in onions and garlic and spices and peppers and aromatics, etc. This is when a lot of the chili's flavor is going to develop.


Then the chili powder, and then pretty much everything else.


Here it is before going into the oven to braise for a couple hours:



And, in the end, well, our chili pulled up the rear. Booooo. I'm not happy, and I don't agree, but I'll do better next year, I'm sure. I hope. I would have preferred this were a bit spicier, and I think it just didn't really stand out in any particular way. But the flavor was very nice, I think.

Anyways, at least we got some tasty chili dogs out of it in the end.