Life and work has been absolutely crazy these past few days, so I do apologize for the lack of activity. I just got done with an article about brains for Eat Me Daily, so expect that to show up come this Friday. I’ll try my best to get something posted by Saturday.
In the meantime, check out Hunter Angler Gardener Cook‘s latest post about goat. Right now my favorite dish from “The Cookbook” is still the Kid and Fennel recipe I made a while back. Goat is good eats!
Up two spots from last year, St. John is ranked at position number 14 in S. Pellegrino’s 2009 World’s 50 Best Restaurants List.
Congrats to Mr. Henderson and the world class crew at St. John!
There is also a great article up at The Independent about Mr. Henderson cooking for the top 50 chefs at St. John. Isn’t it interesting how some of the greatest chefs of our time like to dig into a plate of offal?
What do you feed the 50 greatest chefs in the world? The answer, according to a top London chef, will be staring them in the face. As the greatest culinary minds, with palates to match, gather for the 2009 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards on Tuesday, Fergus Henderson will be putting the finishing touches to his signature dish: pig’s head and potato pie.
Another classic sauce, which has been chronicled many a time; I recently made it and found it so good, I cannot resist mentioning it. The ingredients should expand experimentally to achieve your chosen movement in the sauce.
Before I start the post, I’d like to mention something about the pictures I’ve been posting here on the site. It turns out that I’ve been encoding pictures incorrectly this whole time, and people who use Internet Explorer and Firefox have been seeing some very lackluster images. I’m a Mac person, and the web browser Safari uses the correct color profiling, while IE and Firefox don’t without some futzing.
Here’s an example of the problem:
The left side is what people using IE and Firefox see, while I’ve been seeing the right side this whole time. Big difference, huh? To atone for my sins, I’ll be fixing every image I’ve posted as the week rolls on. The pictures below should show up correctly…I hope.
I love lamb in its various forms, be it rack or leg or brain, but until I made this “sauce”, mint had never entered the picture. Sure, I had always known about the paring of lamb with mint jelly, but the thought of marring lamb’s lovely flavor with something that I could only imagine as being sickeningly sweet made no sense to me. Then I found out that this recipe is nothing like mint jelly at all, and the cogs started churning–albeit slowly–in my head. It turns out that mint jelly is something that only Americans use with lamb, and folks from the UK joke that we should really be using it with peanut butter to make sandwiches. They might very well be right.
When I initially read the recipe, it seemed as though the amount of ingredients were off and there might have been one or two things missing. I mean, Mr. Henderson asks for teaspoons of sugar and malt vinegar. Teaspoons?! This recipe is supposed to make enough sauce to be served with a whole leg of lamb?! It turns out that this is a “sauce” in the same way that Green Sauce is considered a “sauce” and that the proportions are indeed correct, but I’ll explain that later. The components were combined with three simple steps:
1. Finely chop the mint
2. Melt the demerara sugar with a small amount of boiling water and add malt vinegar
3. Pour the sugar/vinegar mixture over the mint and mix
That’s it! With a little prep you could have a mint sauce in about four minutes. I wish I had chopped the mint a bit finer to make it more sauce-like, but the flavor was still there. Highly minty as one would expect, but with a slight kick from the malt vinegar and a subtle sweet finish.
Shortly after I completed the mint sauce the oven timer went off as my rack of lamb had finished. For a flavor comparison, I took a bite of the lamb alone. Yep, that’s lamb: meaty, perfectly gamy, and just a little sweet. The next bite had a tiny amount of the mint sauce applied to test the waters. It was completely different, almost as if I wasn’t eating lamb at all. Considering the minuscule amount of mint sauce I had eaten, I can understand how a little bit of this stuff goes a long way. The flavor had changed dramatically, there was no gaminess at all. It just tasted like meat. It was nice, but I eat lamb because I enjoy the unique taste that lamb brings to the table. Adding the mint sauce might be more important when it comes to eating mutton I suppose, but I think I’ll still be taking my lamb plain.
It is nice to know that I could whip up a batch of mint sauce in a very short period of time for guests that want it.
One down, eighty one to go.
I know what I’ll be doing while writing a cooking update tonight-watching the preimere episode of this season’s Bizarre Foods. I’m a big fan of Andrew Zimmern so this is just a small reminder to tune in as he hits Tanzania for lots of interesting eats.
Happy Friday! What a week, huh? Here are a few neat things from around the web that I’d like to share with you.
AS if a menu with lamb’s tongue, calf’s heart, rabbit’s kidney and pig’s foot left any doubt about their whole-hog approach to food, the three proprietors of the restaurant Feast recently went out and branded themselves, more or less.
They got matching tattoos — three little pigs, each spotted, with an upturned snout, just like the adorable oinker on the restaurant’s logo. These fanciful brands were statements of culinary orientation, opportunities for epidermal advertising and, most of all, celebrations of a milestone.
One of the three owners worked at St. John off and on for six years. How lucky am I that they’re located in Houston?!
Thanks to Ken Gallaher, Frank M and Melissa P for the link!
The other article is an opinion editorial by James E. McWilliams about free range pork vs. pork that was raised by conventional means, sent in by Ben Lippincott. I’m in agreement with Mr. Lippincott about his reservations on some of the things the author mentions. I’m going to have to do some research later on to see where the truth really lies.
UPDATE: My sources shot me two links that counter the op-ed above. Point one. Point two. I feel better now.
Austin American-Statesman copy editor, Addie Broyle was the force behind the meeting, and Saveur photographer Penny De Los Santos–check out that link, stunning pics–was kind enough to host all of us in her incredibly chic house.
Addie has a post up about the meeting here, and Boots in the Oven–a blog I just added to my RSS reader ’cause it’s a great read–has a post up here. The woodcock inquiry was mine.