Recipes by Ingredient + Prep – Page 71 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Bacon Corn Muffins

One of the best presents I received this year was a 3-month Bacon of the Month Club membership from Zingerman’s. Cameron just knows what the hell I would squeal over for my birthday. I love that Aaron and Pete understood that a box of pork delivered at work would be something I would actually want.

For the first installment, I received a pound of Applewood bacon. I could have easily had bacon and egg breakfasts throughout my entire week off from work until all the fat killed me, but I wanted to do something more special with my present. I searched for several bacon recipes, edited them to my own style and shared the bounty with family and friends. After all, what is Christmas without the sharing? When these bacon corn muffins were warm enough, they were packed in a large Ziploc bag and stuffed in a hand-carry tote, eaten onboard a plane.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups whole milk
1 large egg
3/4 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 cup yellow cornmeal
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
4 stalks scallions, chopped
4 bacon slices
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
pinch of salt

1. Cook bacon. Using a skillet, cook bacon until almost-crisp. Remove to a paper towel-lined plate. When cool to touch, roughly chop. Set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 375Âº. Whisk together milk, egg and butter in a small bowl. In a different bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients. Add bacon. Combine both mixtures and stir.
3. Grease a 12-muffin pan and fill in with mixture. Bake on middle rack until golden and a toothpick comes out clean, about 15 minutes. Turn off heat and cool in oven for about 5 more minutes.

Cornish Hens with Pomegranate and Orange Zests

This was probably the easiest Christmas dish I’ve ever cooked. The two Cornish hens I bought in Chinatown cost me less than $10. All I had to do was ask the butcher to cut off the head and the feet. My large Dutch oven fit both of them that I was able to brown and roast under 45 minutes. The first time I tried this recipe, I used Silkie chicken. This time, I used the game hens but made the marinade with pomegranate molasses rather than seeds. My favorite part is sautÃ©eing the orange peels in butter until fragrant–one of the least expensive ways to make a dish smell and look festive. I wish you were here. Merry Christmas.

Ingredients:
2 Cornish game hens, rinsed and patted dry
1 cup Marsala
2 tbsps pomegranate molasses
fresh sage leaves
a handful of mint leaves, chopped
zest of 1 orange, cut into 1/4-inch strips
1 tbsp butter
salt, pepper, olive oil

1. Make marinade. In a small bowl, mix the Marsala with the pomegranate and mint. Set aside, covered, for 1 hour.
2. When ready to cook, preheat oven to 350Âº. Season the birds inside and out with salt and pepper. Tie the legs together with kitchen twine. In a Dutch oven, heat the butter with olive oil over high heat. Add 3 sage leaves and cook for 1 minute. Brown the hens on all sides. Lower the heat and add the rest of the sage leaves.
3. Transfer the pot to the oven and roast the hens for 7 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven, drizzle 3 tablespoons of the marinade and dot with some butter. Baste the hens with the juices and roast for another 10 minutes or until the juices run clear when the thighs are pierced with a fork.
4. Meanwhile, in a small pot, heat some more butter and cook orange zest for 5 minutes until the zest absorbs the butter. Remove from heat.
5. Transfer the hens in a dish, sprinkle with zest and drizzle with pan juices.

Braised Pork Belly

For Christmas Eve dinner this year, I wanted something more substantial than just lechon kawali. Deep-frying was the only way I knew how to cook pork belly until I ate at Gramercy Tavern for the first time years ago. So of course today, I turn to Tom Colicchio’s recipe to recreate the eyes-rolling-back feeling at home. The photo below looks a lot like the one from the Filipino version but this one was heftier–you can smell and taste the concentrated flavor of the braised vegetables. The skin was chewy on this version and it’s recommended that it be discarded before serving, but the meat and the fat easily give when pierced with a fork. Patience is a virtue. This dish will make any pork lover swoon.

Ingredients:
2 pork bellies, cut into 4 large chunks
2 carrots, coarsely chopped
2 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
1 leek, white part only, trimmed and chopped
1 onion, coarsely chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled
3 cups chicken stock
1 tbsp peanut oil
salt and pepper

1. A day or a few hours before cooking, rinse the pork bellies and season with salt and pork. Air-dry for several hours and then store in freezer, each piece separated, on a plate.
2. When ready to cook, preheat oven to 350Âº. Heat the peanut oil in an ovenproof skillet over medium heat. Remove the pork from the freezer only when ready to cook. Add them, fat side down, to the skillet. Cook until the skin is browned, about 15 minutes. Brown the other sides for a few extra minutes then transfer to a plate.
3. Pour off all but about 2 tablespoons of fat and add the garlic, onion, carrots, celery and leek to the skillet. Cook the vegetables, stirring occasionally, until they are tender and beginning to brown, about 20 minutes. Return the pork belly to the skillet, fat side up, and add about 2 cups of stock, enough to surround but not cover the meat. Bring the stock to a simmer, then transfer the skillet to the oven.
4. Gently simmer the pork, uncovered, for 1 hour, then add another cup of stock. Continue cooking until the pork is tender enough to cut with a fork, about another hour. If necessary, keep adding stock to keep the skillet from burning.
5. Allow the pork to cool in the braising liquid. Remove the pork from the liquid, then gently lift off and discard the skin using a small knife.
6. Strain the braising liquid and discard the vegetables. Return the liquid to the skillet, bring it to a simmer and skim off the fat. Serve the pork in a shallow bowl moistened with a bit of the braising liquid.

Christmas Goose Brooklyn Style

Because the suckling pig feast was a success, I put my name down for the Christmas goose. Cameron named her Shazia, after another NY1 reporter who does the Zagat reviews on TV. It wasn’t difficult to carry her home like Rog; I just put her in my tote bag, dragged it to work and made the trip uptown. I picked up Shazia last week after Mike from Tamarack Hollow Farm hand-plucked the feathers for about two hours. I thought you could just submerge any bird in hot water and the feathers will easily come off like for chickens, but I learned that because geese are water fowls, they have oily feathers. Soaking them in water would only repel their natural oil–you really have to hand-pluck them.

We didn’t do anything special for Shazia. We only let her thaw in the fridge for a couple of days and just went to Chef Weld’s Brooklyn apartment for our holiday dinner. I saw him tie it up and rub it with some spices and next thing I know, it was in the oven. I saw him remove the goose fat and later used some of it for gravy with the liver. It was a huge bird, about 11 pounds, and I was a bit curious at how long it was, instead of, say, round like a turkey.

We spent a couple of hours hanging out and eating sausages, prosciutto and cheese while the bird stayed in the oven. There was sparkling wine and a few bottles of red. I was so glad to finally open a bottle I’ve been saving–a 2004 ChÃ¢teauneuf du Pape. Sharing it with good company and good food made it even tastier.

A bowl of roasted potatoes was served together with some sautÃ©ed purple cabbage and apples and frisÃ©e and endive with roasted red beets. It was my first goose so I was very surprised that it didn’t turn out tasting like duck, as I expected. The meat was, for a lack of a better word, tighter. It was also more gamey and had a taste of offal. A few pieces later, I was already full. It was like eating a big chunk of beef steak.

Christmas goose to me is very Charles Dickens. In Manila, we always had ham for noche buena or crispy pata (pig’s thigh) with the other traditional Filipino dishes, but I suppose the Victorian way was to always included game meats because they were expensive back in the days. My goose cost a lot of money but I bet we had a better time than the Cratchits.

Chicken Stew de Campagne

I stopped by the Dr.’s apartment the other night looking for something to eat and discovered a big pot of chicken stew on the stove. For the past few years, I’ve seen him cook big pots of anything-stew because of his schedule. He’ll have time to pick up groceries but not enough to cook, so they end up sitting in the fridge. The next time he gets a break, he throws them in a pot before they spoil, cook and eat it as a stew for a couple of days–it’s the recipe that keeps on giving. He didn’t have cooked rice so he quickly boiled some water and cooked pasta to match. I ate two bowls’ worth and basically finished what was supposed to be his packed lunch the next day.

Over the weekend, I found some leftover herbs in the fridge from my last trip to the grocery store so I thought I’d make my own. I picked up a couple of boxes of golden raisins to make the stew sweet and used up the chicken legs and breasts I’ve been meaning to cook since last week. Campagne means “countryside” in French and I use it for this chicken stew recipe because it is so simple to make, yet rustic and hearty to eat. It’s so easy “your country-ass can make it,” as Anthony Bourdain would say. Serve it with the leftover white wine you used to cook and pour over rice, pasta or bread. Save some to share with your own Dr.

Ingredients:
6 chicken pieces, excess fat and skin removed
6 slices of bacon, cut in small pieces
2 cups dry white wine
1 large plum tomato, chopped
1 bunch of baby carrots, peeled and cut in small pieces
1 red bell pepper, julienned
1 yellow bell pepper, julienned
1 orange bell pepper, julienned
2 small boxes of golden raisins
1 red onion, sliced thinly
2 garlic cloves, minced
thyme sprigs
rosemary sprigs
red pepper flakes
salt

1. Preheat oven to 300Âº. In a large Dutch oven, render fat from bacon. Sprinkle in red pepper flakes. When there’s enough fat, brown chicken pieces on both sides in batches to avoid overcrowding. Remove chicken and bacon to a plate.
2. Lower the heat and sautÃ© garlic until light brown and onions until transparent in rendered fat. Add herbs, peppers and carrots and cook for a few minutes. Add tomatoes and cook until a little bit crushed. Add wine and cook, uncovered, until liquid is reduced by a third.
3. Add raisins, season with salt and simmer for a little bit before covering and putting in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. Serve with rice, pasta or country bread.