May 2004 Archives

Hooyah. Got me a slab, it be rubbed. Happy pink with bones and meat. A great day and a memorial day treat. Or the day before, either way it's bound for the smoker.

Here we find this week's Fatted Calf News posted at MeatHenge. The two highlights we see featured are the organic brandied cherry crepinettes and Taylor's wife Toponia will be working right along side. This is going to be a really great Saturday morning. Count me in for at least two packages of the Crepinettes, maybe 3.

You are planning on grilling this weekend, aren?t you? Maybe even entertaining a little bit? We?re always looking for ways to make entertaining more unique and delicious, and we think grilling Fatted Calf sausages is a great way to do that. You can serve a variety of styles and flavors to suit all of your guests, and our sausages always grill perfectly over medium heat (off to the side from the hottest coals), about 7 minutes per side, maybe 8-9 for crepinettes. And, speaking of crepinettes, ours are extra-special this week, made with organic brandied cherries. The smokiness you get from grilling these will leave them nothing short of sublime. Burgers? Who needs burgers? Also, please stop by the Berkeley Market this week and say hi to Toponia, the very hard working, more behind the scenes partner of The Fatted Calf. She is very excited to meet all of you.

Brought to you by Mama! Biggles sliced up and heated the ham, that's meat and it is my department.

What does one do with that great big leftover leg o' ham? You make a lot of dishes with ham of course. Last night, it was corn chowder with ham which was very good indeed and inmouth. Tonight, it was spinach-rice casserole with ham. A very tasty dish, even if it is spinach.
I pulled the recipe for Spinach-Rice Casserole outta Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook (New Revised Edition); hacked it up, and called it my own.

All ya'lls should just ponder this picture for a moment. Cause brother (or sister), it isn't going go get much better than this (it's a ham, eh).
A few weeks ago, The Fatted Calf's email newsletter rolled in. Somewhere buried in the prose was a mention of two hams available for purchase after the following weekend. My knee-jerk response was to email to see if one was still available, it was. I was set. I remember standing there over my computer thinking what the HELL am I going to do with a 9 lb. ham in the middle of May for crissakes !?!? No birthdays, no holidays ... nada. Oh well, make the best of the situation, I say.
The week came and went, it was Saturday morning and time to leave for the farmer's market in Berkeley. My little 4 year old boy was along for this trip, which guaranteed me no time to hang out. It was going to be a quick trip, grab the meat, look in on Jan at The Blue Bottle Coffee stall and off we went. Really quite uneventful.

mama did this one eh!

Okay, I took my first crack at cooking paella last Wednesday. I used a one
of the simplest recipes, "Tricolor Paella with Cheese, Anchovies, and
Almonds," found in the Vegetable Paellas section of Penelope Casas's
Paella!: Spectacular Rice Dishes From Spain. (I didn't realize that
anchovies were vegetables.)

Anyway, I picked that recipe because we had all of the ingredients to
make it go, except the anchovies and the bell peppers, so it wouldn't
cost us an arm and a leg to prepare it. Since I'm no longer working, I
have to be more conscious about keeping our arms and legs, uh... I mean
maintaining a modest food budget.

Of course, the anchovies turned out to be more expensive than I had
anticipated, because Dr. Biggles (bless him) brought home a whopping
ten-dollar, econo-sized can of anchovy fillets when I only needed six of
the little dudes. I don?t know what the hell I?m gonna do with all the
surplus fishies. Anchovy pancakes, anyone?

Please note: El Cerrito Natural does sells itty, bitty cans of anchovy
for $1.09, but they were fresh out that day.

There are a few things one shouldn't attempt after a large meal, one of them that comes to mind is swimming. The other, not quite as obvious is making a blog entry. I'm a bit muddled by the intake of El Salvadorian food, really good El Salvadorian food. I'll take it slow and we'll see if we can make sense of this wonderous spread.
I am by no means an authority of people and food south of California's border. But I do enjoy a good meal and am interested to see what others have to offer. One of the things I notice about our local El Salvadorian eateries is their Pupusas (hand made somewhat thick corn tortillas stuff with cheese/pork/beef/chicken and then grilled with manteca (pork fat). These are about 4 or 5 inches across and are absolutely delightful. Something else comes to mind are their tortillas, they tend to be a thicker more homey type rig. A far cry from those dry paper thin things in the grocery store. I keep having to tell myself that a lot of what we try here has to have been "americanized" to some degree. Even so, it's worth our time to go see.

Hey hey hey !!! Fatted Calf has t-shirts and a lunch box and an apron and a tote bag and a baby bib ... oh man, how cool. But they ain't got a trucker hat. Dang.

Fatted Calf at Cafepress.com

MeatHenge, some day soon, will also have these fine product available. But we'll have our own logo, not f.c.'s.

XO XO

This posting is dedicated to Kim. Without her care and enthusiasm I probably wouldn't have found this salt. She tells me late last year she traveled to Italy, to the little town that produces this fine product. I can only imagine ...

Yay for salt !! Sure sure, most everyone needs to watch their sodium intake. And I catch nitwits telling me to "just remove the table salt from the table". I casually sneer, "and which salt should I be removing? " I don't usually get a reply. Feh. Ya know, there's more than one use for salt pal and most certainly more than one kind of salt.

Mmmmkay, so here is a little yummy from my wife. Everything turned out just fine, as near as I could tell. I really enjoyed it, especially for a Wednesday's supper.
However, IT finally happened. That's right, the dreaded battery failure. Yeah yeah yeah, I know. If I'd used my old bitchen' mechanical 35mm rigs I would have been able to continue. But using film cameras with web logs isn't practical.
Anyway, first off the batteries died in my flash unit (commonly known as a 'potato masher'). Okay, no biggie. I can live without a flash. I snapped off a shot of something and the battery in the camera went dead. No problem I have a backup battery that I charged the other day! ... and promptly left it at work. Sigh. So I grabbed my wife's digital camera, but I didn't know its specs and got too damned close with it. All the really nice shots of the finished meal are WAY out of focus. Way out. Feh. At least the meal came out like it was supposed tah.

Go Mama:

Tonight's dinner was Kashmiri Kofta Curry which I adapted from Indian
Food & Folklore edited by Jo Lethaby. It's much spicier than our usual
fare, but the kids were out of the house and I wanted to have some
flavor on my plate. Never mind that the dish, although wonderful, was
still a bit too hot for me. Yes, I'm a wienie. Fortunately, it was
just right for Dr. Biggles, as would be for anyone else who can stand
the heat.

Arrr, here be the Fatted Calf news letter for this week.

Have you seen all of the Spring produce at the Market yet? Is it just us, or is spring the most exciting produce season of them all? It must certainly be the most anticipated. We are truly inspired by the bounty: Asparagus, English peas, morel mushrooms, favas beans. Broccoli is good and all, but thank God we don?t have to eat it unless we?re actually craving it now. And, please, put that parsnip away. This is probably going to surprise you, but you know what we think of when we think of Spring vegetables? Meat. Yup, there are a lot of yummy things to do with meat that are just made all the better by the pristine pale green (and brown) things. We suggest English peas sautéed with Little Piglet Pancetta, asparagus on the grill along side Pork Crepinettes with Duck Liver and Pistachios, or scrambled up in some eggs with Breakfast Sausage. And, back by popular demand, one of the most perfect marriages of Meat and Spring Produce: Skinny Pork Sa usages with Morel Mushrooms. Like all spring things, these won?t be around for long, so come early and buy lots.

The dust still hasn't settled here at MeatHenge Labs. This last Friday, May 7th marked my wife's last day at work. She quit that job to take on our home and two chillins full time, including but not limited to home schooling our 8 year old boy. So far the 4 year old has been behaving long enough to let the education fly, we're both amazed.
Yeah yeah, okay what in the hell does this have to do with M.H. ? Well, I'm coming home a few hours later and not doing the cooking on a daily basis any more. I haven't quite figured out how M.H. fits in to our daily routine yet. Sure I could write articles and just plain blather, but this isn't what I do, well. What I do is cook, take pictures of my adventures and force you, the audience to endure.
So, just hang tight and we'll see where this new turn of events takes us in the near future.

If you feel the need, drbiggles (at) meathenge dot com.

XO XO

Back on April 30th I posted something about working with E's new Easy Bake Oven. He and I worked through a few things such as cookies and a heart shaped cake. I ran in to a few snags, but I have to say it was an awful lot of fun. Well, last week we ran out of 'mixes' and figured we would order some replacements online.
Nah, we found them at Toys R us a few days ago and last night Mama and E made a cake. E wanted me to do it, but it was Mama's turn this time. Besides, she's the baker.
During this adventure, she found out that one door is smaller than the other (scraped the top off the cake) and you need to make sure you push the cake all the way in. This means I'll be taking it apart, again, and scraping the interior clean.
Drop what you're doing and go git one of these things, they fun !!!

This week we find MeatHenge and myself featured in The Fatted Calf's Newsletter. Neat huh?

I would like to preface this with my own special note. If you click through and read the rest of the post, you'll notice their Crepinettes will be the pork ones with Morel Mushrooms. I just had some of their Duck Crepinettes the other day and just about fell off my chair they were so damned tasty. And since a week ago or so we had the Skinny Pork Sausages with Morels, this week's Crepinettes will most certainly be a sell out situation. Please stop what you're doing and make sure you make it to the market this coming week and get yourself some. Do NOT miss this one.

So you think you love meat? You must love it a little, if you subscribe to this newsletter. Well, meet Dr. Biggles. Biggles, meet all the fans of Fatted Calf Charcuterie, soon-to-be fans of www.meathenge.com. Meathenge is a hilarious, yummy and sweet web site/blog. It really was a match made in meat heaven when he discovered our stall at the Berkeley farmer?s market, and we discovered a meat lover extrordinaire, and a web site that always makes us hungry. Frequent are the Saturdays we see him at the market, sell him some sausages, salami, confit or a special roast, finish our day, pack up, and go home, only to check Meathenge and see whatever we sold him cooked up, photographed in living color, its? virtues extolled in detail. On the same day. Before dark! Biggles isn?t afraid to use duck fat in cornbread, call a particularly rich stock ?chicken Jell-O?, or help his son with a new Easy-Bake Oven. No Cooking Adventure Too Big or Too Small. And if you think our products look good on your kitchen table, you should see them on his, next to a plastic palm tree or a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. So awesomely yummy.

Think back, back to that all night party that found you sicker than a dog (sorry canine lovers). You know how your mouth salivates right before you wretch? Yeah? Well, when I look at the pictures I took of this meal versus what it tasted like ... that's how I feel. Like wretching. Sure you're thinking to yourself, "dang man, it's just Chicken Cacciatore, lighten up pal." Yeah, well you didn't have any.

Here we find herby lemon marinated pork loin steaks with Skinny Pork Sausages with Morels, Merguez sausages and a Toulouse or so. I know the Pabst Blue Ribbon should have been a Schlitz, but those are hard to find around here. Hell even the PBR was a true rare find.

preface - Many if not all of MeatHenge's postings include yummy shots of the meal in question. Well, I got pictures this time, but the final shot (for me anyway) didn't look all that enticing. However, all my fears disapeared when I took my first bite. The brother/sister taste of the Merquez sausage and the Kalamata olives was outstanding. As you dug through the bowl you got something warm and happy each time. I'm a big fan of the couscous, so I figured I'd eat it no matter what it looked like. I'm tellin' ya, if you enjoy couscous write down this recipe and make damned sure you follow my wife's changes, they're necessary.

May 6th UPDATE: Well, it's been a few days and we had our second round of leftovers last night. As long as you don't store the couscous with the stewy portion of the meal, it keeps VERY well and tastes wonderful days later. XO

Here is Mama:

When Biggles introduced merguez to me several weeks ago, I became an instant fan of these flavor-packed little bundles of love. They are spicy, yet not hot, and they remind me of one of my all time favorite dishes -- couscous. The rumor was Taylor had merguez available this week, I knew what I had to do...