If you have some of the above attributes but are not a geezer nor even approaching pre-geezerhood, thank God for that, press on regardless, and welcome.

Sautéed Duck Breast with Green Pepper Sauce and Wild Rice Pilaf
Boneless duck breast halves are available in high-end markets.  They are easy to prepare and they make a grand occasion whenever served. One side is lean meat and the other is skin and heavy with fat, so you start with that!  Score the skin and fat in a cross hatch pattern with a sharp knife but don't cut so deep as to score the duck meat. Salt and pepper both sides of the duck and set aside. 

When all else to be served with the duck is ready, fire a heavy skillet to medium hot and pop in the duck, skin side down.  The fat will begin to render quickly but there is a lot of it so it will take about five minutes before it really starts to melt off.  Then adjust the heat downward and simmer for another five minutes.  Then lift up the breast and take a peek.  The cross hatch cuts should be getting shallow and the skin should be turning brown.  Continue to simmer and peek another five to ten minutes until the skin is golden brown and crispy with only a little fat under it. (Control the heat so it doesn't burn in the process.)

Remove the duck from the pan and carefully pour off the hot oil leaving enough to cover the bottom of the pan (2 or 3 tablespoons). Refire the pan to medium.  Return the duck to the pan, meat side down, and sauté until its medium rare (125F). This may take anywhere from two to five minutes depending how far through the meat cooked on the first go. Remove the duck to the warm place and let rest before slicing and serving on heated plates.  From start to finish, you have sautéed duck breast in 25 minutes. 

As good as it is, wild rice is too intense and too chewy to eat straight (it's also too expensive).  So it needs some help while holding its own as the predominant taste.  Here is a wild rice pilaf that I have favored  for years, though I can't say it came from Mom.  It has a recipe within it, which I try to avoid, but it's a great dish and worth the effort.

Yield:  About 8 servings
See abbreviations, if needed

•  5          scallions or spring onions, diced
•  1          carrot, finely and precisely diced (brunoise)
•  ½         stalk celery, sliced large (it will be discarded)
•  1.5C    wild rice
•  4C       chicken broth
•  2C       water 
•  ½T       RWV
•  2T        light EVOO
•  ¼C      chopped fresh parsley
•  ¼C     chopped fresh mint leaves
•  2          oranges zest
•  ½C      chopped walnuts or pecans
• S/P
•  ½C     basmati rice (or other long grain rice) prepared as basmati rice pilaf

1.  Place wild rice in a large fine strainer and wash under cold running water until 
     water is clear
2.  BTB broth and water, RWV, wild rice, scallions, carrot, celery and pepper.  Simmer covered until 
     rice is plump, intact and tender, about 40-50 minutes, Taste as you go the last ten minutes 
3.  Prepare Basmati rice pilaf and set aside 
4.  Drain wild rice and remove celery parts. 
5.  Combine the rices in a bowl w/ EVOO and add the remaining ingredients. Taste.
    Add salt, toss and adjust seasoning 
6.  Serve warm or ambient. 

Family Dinner
Simple:  Breaded catfish in peanut oil, TLW's zucchini medley and chips.

I decided that I would liven things up by smoking a pork shoulder for the event. Further down on this page are the results of our first effort with the Weber Bullet:  a pork shoulder that looked great but was really fat. I paid $1.95 a pound at the supermarket for a 6 pound shoulder that yielded less than 2 pounds of barely edible meat.  It was awful.

TLW always says that Mr. Arbuckle was right:  "you get what you pay for." My experience is otherwise with most food products described as organic.  The only exception, to date, is meat. So this time I bought a well husbanded boneless pork shoulder from our local Organic Butcher.  This shoulder, from a farm in Pennsylvania, came in at 8.5 pounds and went for $6.00 a pound! 

I brought the hunk home and vacuum-marinated it overnight in Scott's Barbecue Sauce, as before. I then got up early the next morning and started the smoke at 0730.  13.5 hours later, the shoulder's temp hit 200F as I took it off to cool.  It shredded effortlessly and has great color and a nice smoke ring.  Above all, the meat is as lean, moist and tasty as this cut can get.  Yield?  4.2 pounds. I threw away at most a half pound as too fat-ladened.

Bargain pull pork sandwiches coming up this Saturday.  Meat and charcoal: $65.  . . .yet sandwiches will go for $2.50 each.  Maybe Mr. Arbuckle will show up. 

Update:  Go they went!  We sold out the pulled pork half way through the event.

Notes:
The Organic Butcher has an informative Web site at:  theorganicbutcher.com.

The Weber Bullet, at least at our deck, needs to be more mobile. So a trip to the hardware store and we have . . .

I replied that: they are very good, that I am an untroubled carnivore and that I most often use them as a sauce under grilled chicken or pork tenderloin, or in the tagine or for lunch over toasted artisan bread. The flavors include veggies with chickpeas in tomato sauce (shown in photo with pork medallions), veggies with tomato, lentils in butter sauce, with spinach curry and cheese and with potatoes and peas--all well seasoned.  Look for them, they're quick and yummy.  They have a Web site:  ADF-foods.com.

I was surprised to see this book on the JB Cookbook award nom's for this year.  There are a lot of Weber-based grill books out there.  This one is by Jamie Purviance and is published by Sunset Books, both good names.  At first glance, it looks like a good basic grilling 101 book.  It has great photos and layout, as one would expect from Sunset editors.  It does not have much on the Weber Bullet but what is has is good.  It has so many rubs, marinades and sauce recipes that it might be worth the price just for those. 

I read through this book and found it more substantive than at first appearance. Yes, it covers basic grilling for meats, fish and veggies.  But along the way, Purviance presents the reader with culinary how-to tutorials that border on the comprehensive.  This ain't Jacques Pepin's La Technique, but thorough enough that the editors made a index of techniques--there must be 400 of them, most with very useful photos!  Not just how to truss a boneless roast, but how to puree garlic and how to spatchcock a chicken.  Recipes too go beyond the basics--his bacon wrapped turkey breasts almost makes me want to buy the tasteless things and give them another go.  Sauces = 48; rubs = 20 and marinades = 27. Wow.

If your grill book is a third your age, toss it and start anew with this one, where you will learn a thing or two and have recipes that are politically correct with lower salt and fat content. This book is a must gift to your son in law who char  burns most everything and for the grandchild who aspires to conquer the great American cook-out.

New Smoker
TLW got me a birthday present that has been on the wish list for years.  A smoker.  I chose Weber's Smokey Mountain Cooker (aka The Weber Bullet) because it's only a smoker (I don't need two grills), it's a Weber product, it's fairly compact and it's tried and true with a big following of Internet devotees. 

Finally found the time to try out the The Weber smoker. I got a pork blade shoulder from Safeway, marinated it with Scott's Barbecue Sauce (red hot vinegar-based) in a vacuum bag for a day and started up the bullet for a ten hour smoke.  Lighting the charcoal and placing in some hickory wood and adjusting the resultant heat to 225F and keeping it was there was straightforward. We brushed the roast with a tomato-based barbecue sauce at the start and again mid-way through. 

So here we have:

A 7 pound  pork butt yielded only 2.25 pounds of shredded pork ready for tacos or pulled pork sandwiches.  But I have a problem with this meat.  It's fat.  I didn't pull the roast apart until the following morning when the meat was cold, so the fat was more clearly apparent than if the roast was pulled hot and served a la minute. 

I am beginning to gain insight as to why every smoker chef to publish a cookbook and put his picture on it appears, shall we say, well rounded.  First, one needs fortification during the arduous ten hour smoking process--perhaps a beer an hour.  Second, the product has a high fat content.

Frankly, we're not sure we're going to eat this stuff . . .

Now, a compact  home water oven is on the market called the SousVide Supreme.  It goes for $450.  Also needed is a vacuum sealer, like the one I've used for many years, which runs another $150 to $250, plus the pouch material at 50 cents a running foot. It would be fun to have this thing and prep a stack of steaks to a perfect 125F ready to be grill marked and served;  to buy veggies in large quantities and sous vide them and then freeze 'em;  to toss in a seasoned Boston Butt and forget it for a couple of days and have it emerge as ready to serve pulled pork. 

On the other hand, sous vide is essentially a slow cooker.  A smart crock pot with water in it.  For us geezers who no longer leave home for work at 0700 to return 10 hours later, planned and slow cooking methods have lost their time saving attractiveness. (We haven't used our crock pot or an oven timer in years.) Which only leaves the culinary value of sous vide, which is substantial and attractive enough to the seasoned home cook that I'm writing about it. Sur la Table carries the SousVide Supreme and reportedly sold out their initial buy of a thousand units in two months.  I'm going to pass. 

In this Momofuku Era, Kimchi is Flying Off the Market Shelves
David Chang, chef/author of the best selling cookbook, Momofuku (see below), likes kimchi, and so too his readers.  Well . . ., the Koreans have been serving it most meals since the 16th century.  Kimchi is combination of cabbage, other veggies and bold seasonings pickled in vinegar and then fermented to produce a pungent spicy hot condiment.  It serves well also as the supporting ingredient to wok-prepared or stir fried meat and fish dishes. It likes rice.  Recipes for the stuff abound:  "winter" kimchi is hot, "summer" kimchi is more fresh and light.  In the West, it comes in glass jars and is often make with napa cabbage and spicy but not flaming hot peppers, ginger and garlic.  It keeps forever in the fridge.

So, while reading and thoroughly enjoying Momofuku, TLW found a kimchi and pork recipe there and also in the latest issue of Fine Cooking, (they read the book too).  "Let's have a couple over and make this in the wok fired on the Blue Star," said she.  Here we have the results inspired by the book and magazine recipes.  This dish is best prepared a la minute with guests watching the show. Have courage!  Do it. It takes about five minutes, if you have your mise en place.

Wok Stirred Pork and Kimchi 
For four
(See abbreviations, if needed)
1         pork tenderloin, cut in quarter inch slices and then into half inch strips
2 T       soy sauce
4 T       grapeseed oil or peanut oil
8 oz      fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and hand-brokened into quarters
8          scallions cut in 1.5 inch lengths, white and green
16        broccoli, small flowerettes (not shown in photo--after thought)
1 T       garlic, pureed
3.5 C    kimchi, drained and coarsely chopped
4 T       mirin (sweetened sake) or white wine and some sugar
1/2 t     sesame oil (for aoma--not taste)
1/4 C   beef or chicken broth
2 T       white and black sesame seeds, toasted

1.  Prep pork, toss with a tablespoon of soy sauce and set aside
2.  Prep mushrooms and veggies and have them lined up ready to pop into the wok
3.  Add 2 T of oil to the wok, heat gently and swirl carefully up the sides
4.  Heat the oil to shiny hot and then add the marinated pork (don't splash)
5.  When pork strips break free of the bottom, stir or toss until pork is whitened but still rare
6.  Scoop out the pork and hold in a clean container (not the one used to marinate)
7.  Add 2 more tablespoons of oil and when very hot, add the scallions, mushroom, garlic and broccoli, 
     in that order--about three minutes for this step 
8.  Add the kimchi, another tablespoon of soy sauce, a few drops of sesame oil and toss or stir
9.  At this point, if the whole mess looks too dry (no sauce for the rice), add some broth and BTB
10.  Serve immediately in heated bowls over rice with maybe a side of Asian Cucumbers
11.  Garnish with the toasted sesame seeds

Notice that the eyes have a pattern to them that can be lined up to cut out, 3 or 4 at a time, with a sharp paring knife making v-shaped trench cuts. 

This method leaves more pineapple on the pineapple. 

Then quarter the fruit, trim off the hard part, dice and place in containers to cool.  A $4.75 pineapple yields two nice containers of chunks that go for $4.50 each at the market. 

Waste not, want not . . .

Read the whole thing here

A Brief Salad Amusement
For a Christmas Day dinner salad we wanted something light and amusing, since the entree was Osso Buco Milanaise with Butternut Squash Soup and mashed potatoes and  parsnips--all pretty heavy stuff.  So here we have fresh tender watercress simply dressed with sugared rice wine vinegar.  On top of that is one small just-sauteedcrab cake,  piped with a spicy hot raspberry wasabi mustard dressing. Nice contrasts here:  bitter watercress, sweet rice vinegar, seasoned crab cake and spicy hot creamy dressing.

I always use ring molds to shape crab cakes.  You will find 80mm and 60mm stainless steel rings molds in good kitchen supply stores.  Both sizes too big for our purposes here.  So at the hardware store, buy a length of PVC pipe with an ID of 40mm.  Take it home and cut it into rings about an inch high.  One pound of crab meat prepared as crab cakes yields four 80's or six 60's or twelve 40's. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tilapia Stuffed With Crabmeat
We had a little canned crabmeat left over from Thanksgiving and an unfinished container of tabbouleh, both of which we got at Costco.  Though vacuum sealed, the crabmeat had to be used soon. Tabbouleh is a tasty low fat Middle Eastern spread made with bulgur wheat and finely diced tomato, onion, cilantro, mint and lemon in EVOO. It goes great at room temperature on taco chips, crackers or bread points.   So what to do?  Make a fish dish.

Tilapia is a major food fish, farm raised. It is fine textured and low fat, a bit more so than flounder. Cheaper too.  So we seasoned the crabmeat with a few ingredients from our crab cake recipe and layered it onto one tilapia fillet and topped it with another and tied them off, as shown. The fillets were seasoned with S/P and EVOO.  I then dumped the tabbouleh into a buttered dish, plopped the tied fish fillets on top and baked the whole mess in a 400F oven for about 30 minutes.   The fillets were 3 inches thick stuffed and tied.  So, using the ten minutes an inch rule, 30 minutes was right on.

How'd it come out?  The tabbouleh got a little too crispy in the baking process and lost the individual tastes present when served uncooked.  But it was OK. The crabmeat did not come through, as distinct from the talapia, as I had hoped.  Recipes abound for crab stuffed sole with the crabmeat usually fattened up with cream or mayo, which I didn't do.  Since the cost of the lump crabmeat is greater than fish, there are better uses for it. Why not do crab cakes one day and fillet of tender sweet fish the next? 

But we're talking leftovers here.  We agreed that it was a nice dish and an interesting use of tabbouleh, but we would not brag about it at the bazaar in Marrakash.

This is a Cook's Cookbook
Would you believe that over 3200 cookbooks will be published this year, up from 2800 last year?  If there is any hidden meaning in that, it escapes me (recession, home vs restaurant, etc...., bah).  One of these cookbooks--forthcoming--looks promising. 

A young fellow named David Chang is a "hot chef" these days according to the foodie media. An early review of his forthcoming cookbook caught my attention because a) he's grounded in French technique, b) combines Asian with American, c) likes pork, d) hasn't dumbed down his recipes for a book contract and e) is a restaurant chef versed in that world's grueling work and not a TV star where line cooks do the mise off camera. (His penchant for profanity might  save him from TV fame.) 

He's cooked in Japan and in NYC where he opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar. Since, Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Momofuku Ko both high end restaurants have opened, with rave reviews.  Chang and his cookbook, of course named Momofuku,  got a nice enough review in the Wall Street Journal to prompt me to order it.  It's due out next week. 

So wait, there's more...
------------------------------------------
Got the book today, here's the photo (new camera: Canon G-11). At second glance:  well edited, good photography on coffee table grade paper, heavy on commentary regarding the art of cooking and the trauma of making it pay, with recipes at the margin--all very well written and nicely presented.  Awful introduction. Contents are organized by Chang's restaurants:  Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar and Ko.

This is a French Laundry type cookbook that takes the reader into the head of another innovative chef  and his crew.  In the book at least, these concepts drive Chang: 

• "Serve food with integrity at an affordable price.  That is, undersell, over deliver. 
• ...do not subscribe to the idea that there's one set of blueprints that everyone should follow.
• . . . you take it, cook it, make it delicious . . . elevate it, honor it, lavish it with care and attention.
• when you start to cook on autopilot, when you stop paying attention to details--not to mention big things like seasoning--no amount of press will make up for it. What is the point of cooking at all if you're not gonna do it right?" 

This cookbook is an important addition to the literature and it's a fun read.

PS:  A reader asked where "Momofuku" came from?  Chang says that one of the most important events in the history of food was the invention of instant ramen by "Momofuku Ando."  Best read the book for the origins of  Ssäm and Ko.

In school we were instructed to look for a trace of browning around the edge of the cookie. Corriher says the same thing.  Reichl says 'until golden.'  I'm now convinced that waiting for evidence of browning results in an over baked cookie:  one that dries when cooled and gets hard when stored.  The 'until golden' works better for white sugar than brown sugar'd cookies. The conundrum is compounded in a convection oven, which shortens baking time by 20%, for sure, and maybe more.  Which also means that the time to take out the cookies comes sooner and passes faster.

So . . .

I just baked a batch of Pantry Cookies and a batch of my new Nut, Coconut and Health Bar Cookies.  I took them out when they appeared set.  That is, when they were fully shaped, with a dry surface top and with edges sharply defined and not clinging to the silicone pad.  No evidence of browning.  The result:  moist, chewy cookies!

This is heavy...but a change is required on all my cookie recipes.  Got to do it.