Well, that was a week. An external review ate up a fair amount of my time, and then I had a jam-packed schedule on returning.
While trying to decompress on Friday by watching TV with the family, we all had to witness the horror of this meal being served in an advertisement for an assisted-living facility.
Like, what is even happening here. It’s a potato half-menorah with six whole chives jammed through it sticking up out of a huge filet mignon sitting on top of a weird aspic-mold of white beans and something-something with a bit of chocolate sauce, peaches and peas circling around it like soldiers closing warily on the Fortress of Evil. This is not the retired good life: if someone plopped that down in front of me in my dotage, I think I’d probably have a stroke just trying to figure out what to do with it using the ordinary implements commonly supplied at a dinner table.
At the least this vision of the least appealing institutional meal imaginable spurred me to try and do better in this weekend’s cooking.
I wanted to make a mole sauce for some pork tenderloin, but I also felt that I’d gotten into a bit of a rut with that. The usual thing for me has been a sofrito of onions, garlic, carrots, sweet bell peppers and poblano peppers, then beef broth and crushed tomatoes, then a paste of old bread, pumpkin seeds, soaked dried chile peppers (usually anchos), currants and chipotle peppers in adobo. It’s great, but it it’s a heavy, strong sauce.
I wanted to go lighter this time, and give it a different taste altogether. So first off I made a broth with a ham hock I had, some old mushrooms, and some arugula that was a bit over the hill for a salad, plus some little dried chiles and cumin seed. The resulting broth was, not surprisingly, very hammy but pretty tasty.
So that kept pushing me in how I thought about the rest of the sauce. I added some canned tomatoes and some smooth aji amarillo puree rather than the usual dried chiles, and then a paste of old bread, peanuts, pepitas, corn and a bit more tomato for thickening. And then I decided it needed some more sweetness, so I added some sorghum syrup. The result, at least to me, tasted more U.S. Southern than it did Tex-Mex, which was not at all a bad outcome.
I still served it with tortillas and cheese, but I’m thinking that I’ll put the leftovers in with some pasta early this week and bake it a while.
Still trying to exorcise the Mignon Tower from my brain, I wanted to do something a bit more visually elegant and tasteful for Sunday. I dug into Reem Assil’s cookbook Arabiyya and came up with some lamb dumplings that looked really great.
It was a bit of a multi-step recipe and I decided to commit, as her cookbook has previously rewarded me when I did things her way. That included blanching some mint in boiled water and then plunging it into ice water so it didn’t cook.
The dough was a bit hard to roll out to the point of being thin enough. I might actually think instead about putting it through my pasta maker in the future for a more delicate outcome in the actual dumplings.
The minced lamb and red onion dumplings are gently warmed in a yogurt sauce after cooking in boiling water, then served with mint oil, sumac, aleppo pepper and pine nuts on top. Everybody’s got an ingredient that tastes weirdly unpleasant to them—mine is pine nuts, which always numb my tongue and have a strange metallic taste to me. So I sprinkled a few fried chickpeas on my final version of the dish instead.
Next up this week, another try at making a levain. My last one died just as it was getting started because of our two-day period of no-furnace cold inside the house. Fingers crossed: I am feeling ready to recommit to bread-making.
For pork chilis and stews, sometimes it's good to use a couple tablespoons of uncooked grits as a thickener. You can even prep them (as you would a roux) by gently sauteeing the grits in a skillet with a little oil, butter, or pork fat.