Some links for a Wednesday

Going right to the top of my Christmas list is "The Hemingway Cookbook," which, according to the publishing blurb, assembles recipes from his favorite places to eat and "other sources." Truth be told, I will probably never have occasion to make "Fillet of Lion washed down with Campari and Gordon’s Gin or a cool Cuba Libre," but if the opportunity ever does present itself, I intend to be prepared!

Meanwhile, Slate offers this advocacy of using lemon in just about everything. I mostly use lemon in lamb, but should probably expand my horizons, there.

For the ambitious among you, Michael Ruhlman has posted instructions on making your own salt. We're a little too far from the ocean for me to try this regularly, but I may give this a whirl the next time I'm vacationing near a beach.

I'm linking to The Guardian not once, but twice today. First, they have this selection of recipes for 1920s cocktails -- there's a bit of irony here in that the fruity cocktail was essentially invented in the 1920s in order to disguise the godawful taste of the bathtub liquor Americans were drinking during Prohibition. Then, they have this collection of cooking advice for the student who just returned to college.

Obligatory bacon repost

Having already linked to bacon salad bowls and bacon truffles, I would be remiss if I didn't point you folks at this recipe for bacon cupcakes.

Enjoy.

I'll be back later with part two of the Friday Night Food Fight recipes, the sweet corn hash.

Awesomely bad idea of the week: Bacon Cups

There is, if we are honest with ourselves, no good reason to make small bowls out of bacon to hold our salads. We should not necessarily allow that to stop us.

Some might argue that having five to seven strips of bacon along with your salad defeats the purpose of having a salad. They would probably be right. Ask yourself this, though, what would you rather have: something sensible or a salad bowl made of bacon?

That was a rhetorical question.

I'm gonna need more ice trays

I have already mentioned the incredibly handy practice of freezing stock in ice trays and pulling out individual cubes as-needed.

Today, I learn that you can freeze fresh herbs in cubes of frozen olive oil or butter and thaw them as-needed. I plan to get going on this tonight because I'm in love with the idea of using basil from my garden to make pasta sauce in February.

Drink-and-a-snack linkdump

There was an odd convergance of the random culinary tidbits I came across this weekend.

First, did you know the lines on Solo cups are measurements? I sure didn't.

The bottom one is one ounce, the middle one is five ounces and the one above that is 12 ounces. The bottom two make it very easy to measure out any number of two-ingredient cocktails -- one ounce liquor, four ounces mixer and top off with ice.

What I have trouble understanding is how Solo would build such an obvious selling point into their product and not tell anybody. I guess they probably aren't hurting for market share.

So, now that you have your cup, you need a drink. How about a cucumber gin fizz? I'm going to have to see if I can make a vodka tonic variant.

Finally, some munchies are in order. The folks at RAFFL would like you to try kale chips. While that picture does not, at least to my eyes, look all that appetizing, I've had kale chips that were really good. I think the ones I had were made with parmesan, though, so I don't know if they still count as healthy. I should probably give this unadulterated version a whirl.

Vietnamese-ish noodles

I think at this point Tony Bourdain has done in the neighborhood of 47 Vietnam episodes, and last night Travel Channel reran the one in which he visits "The Lunch Lady."

(For some reason I couldn't find a reference to the segment on the "No Reservations" website, hence the link to a seemingly random blog.)

As the camera lovingly showed her assembling soup ingredients and Bourdain gushing over the quality of the resulting broth, my mind went to two things I needed to use up -- a jar of pork stock with about a cup left in it and an open package of egg noodles.

I've been playing more and more with those noodles that come as a stack of disks, each disk being a serving, and you take out however many servings you need. They cook fast and take on flavors from stir fry or soup pretty well. I've been getting them at Hannaford.

As for the stock, I'd thawed out one of my Mason jars for a pot of chorizo and hominy and didn't quite need all of it. I've been very pleased with my most recent batch of pork stock. It's been particularly rich and gelatiny because I used mostly feet in making it. I hadn't stored up much in the way of neck bones when Price Chopper suddenly had several marked-down packages of feet and hocks.

So, when I popped home for dinner tonight, I minced up half a small onion and started to cook it in some butter in a small pot. Then I grated in a small piece of ginger and a clove of garlic and added sprinkles of fish sauce, dried coriander and half a dried red chili pepper, chopped up, along with some salt and pepper.

Lemongrass would have been appropriate here, but I didn't have any. However, I should note that Price Chopper is carrying lemongrass again -- they had it Satuday next to those plastic packages of herbs. Lime zest also would have fit in but, again, I didn't have any.

In went the stock with a splash each of Madeira and rice vinegar and I brought the whole thing to a boil.

Please note, I've never set foot anywhere near Vietnam, much less eaten anything from "The Lunch Lady" or even anything proclaiming to be an imitation of her work. These are all (except maybe the Madeira) ingredients that lodged themselves in my head during cooking shows about Southeast Asia, and I make no claims to authenticity. This is not Vietnamese, it's Vietnamese-ish.

While that cooked down a little I got a pot of water going for the noodles. Those cook for two minutes, get drained and go into the broth for another minute, stirring all the while.

There are a whole bunch more ingredients I would have added if I'd had them on-hand or thought of them in time. Some baby spinach wilted during the last minute of cooking would have fit in well, as would some sliced carrots cooked in the broth from the beginning. Shredded raw cabbage and/or fresh bean sprouts would have made great toppings, and I have various pieces of pig in my downstairs freezer that would have been right at home in this bowl.

Even without any of that, though, it was marvelous. It was rich and meaty, tangy, with a nice bit of warmth from the ginger and the chili pepper. I am not normally one who slurps broth from the bottom of a bowl, but I did tonight.

Fun with veal stock

I used to read Michael Ruhlman's blog regularly, but not for most of last year for some reason. So, it wasn't until he collected his favorite posts of 2011 that I saw the entries on veal salt and veal stock and Guinness bread.

I'm going to have to try both of those. While I've given thought to stock-based breadmaking, I haven't gotten up the courage to try it in anything more unorthodox than a fritter batter.

(Chicken stock + sofrito = an awesome batter for black bean fritters.)

Have you tried making stock yet?

On the origins of duck pie

I was originally going to post the recipe for the duck pie I made for Christmas Eve dinner, but it wound up going straight to the print edition.

The dish was inspired by the "No Reservations" Christmas special, the highlight of which was probably Christopher Walken boiling octopus for an Italian-style holiday dinner. The relevant segment, though, had April Bloomfield describing how smaller English families might substitute duck for the traditional Christmas goose and mentioning the English love of meat pies.

"Let's do both!" I immediately thought to myself.

Most of the reader feedback I've gotten on that piece has been along the lines of "That sounds like it's really good, but way too much work." The next time I make it, I think I'll stretch it out over a couple days. You could braise the meat the first day, combine it with the rest of the filling on the second day and make the pie itself on the third.

This may be the coolest thing you see all week.

A couple years back, I had what I was sure was the most brilliant idea of my life: chocolate-covered bacon.

Everybody loves bacon. Everybody loves chocolate. Everybody loves salty-sweet snacks. How had no one thought of this?

Vosges had, as I discovered a short time later. I sighed. I had been beaten to it, but at least I had thought of it on my own.

What hadn't occured to me, until I saw this guest post on Michael Ruhlman's blog, was bacon truffles. Don't even pretend you don't want one.