Sunset and Smoked Shad Rillettes
When I lost the James Beard Award to the crew at Sunset magazine’s One Block Diet this May, I found myself far less disappointed than I thought I would be: After all, their message is pretty similar to what I am trying to do. Besides, as we got our snark on during the insanely long [...]
A Time for Drying
Hot weather has finally arrived here in Sacramento. We’d been having an unusually cool summer up until yesterday, when the temperature in my backyard hit 101 degrees. Today should be the same, and temperatures higher than 90 should be the rule until September. While Sacramento can be simmer in the summer — we had 114 [...]
Pork Fat Orgy
I was awash in pork fat this past weekend. In the past few days I have made two types of bacon, a dry cured wild boar salami, more than six pounds of lardo — cured back fat — not to mention a gallon of fresh rendered lard. I blame John Bledsoe. Bledsoe is the local [...]
Wild Boar Testa – Don’t Call Me Head Cheese
Coppa di testa. In France it is Fromage de tete. In England, it’s called brawn. All decent enough names; but they don’t translate well. At some point in the past, our ancestors decided to forgo the muscular moniker brawn for a direct translation of the French word for this fascinating cold cut — and by [...]
Because I Can, Vol. 2 – Chicory Coffee
For a time, my favorite coffee was New Orleans style, where the coffee is cut with roasted, ground chicory root. The result is smooth, a little more acidic than normal coffee, with a taste and aroma similar to a mocha — and it makes a drink darker than the inside of a cow. I used [...]
Success and Failure in the Garden
When it comes to my garden, the story always has been “you win some, you lose some.” Never a season goes by without some little victory or some new failure. I’ve had both this week. Yesterday I wanted a salad so I decided to cut a head of romaine lettuce I’d planted in early March; [...]
Spring Porcini Madness
I was wandering around the Davis Farmer’s Market Saturday and spotted something rare: spring porcini mushrooms. Then I noticed the exorbitant price — $30 a pound — snorted, and walked on. But as I walked, a thought wormed its way into my brain. “You know you’d need to drive to Shasta or Mendocino to even [...]
