Survive the Apocalypse in Style

When the nukes wipe out the cities or the zombies begin to ravage all heavily populated areas, the most important aspect of modern civilization will go quickly. Climate control, ladies and gents, is arguably the most crucial development of modernity. Through our ability to manipulate the environment we ward off 105 degree summers and 5 degree winters. Obviously, we'll start using fire for the winters, but the summers will still attack us relentlessly. We'll suffer through it, but our food will have some problems. Once we've tired of fighting turf wars over control of the canned foods aisle, we'll have to re-learn to preserve our own food.

As it turns out, commercially canned food kinda blows anyway. Predictably, it tastes like somebody put bad food in a metal can and sealed it for ages. At right, you can see samples from a Sunday afternoon spent making pickles and jams. These jars are sealed and pasteurized, just like the commercial stuff. The difference is that they taste better, look cooler, and the skills involved are transferable to life in Bartertown. My most recent addition to the pantry was a killer puttanesca sauce made with home-grown roma tomatoes simmered for a day in a cast-iron pot. Suddenly pasta with sauce from a jar doesn't seem as lame.

Try canning jars from Rocco Bormioli or Le Parfait. They last forever, and they look pretty impressive in your kitchen.

A Greek Lamb in Morocco

Greek Lamb recipes are pretty basic, though I bet that most Greek grandmas have a secret ingredient that they don't share with anyone but their sworn-to-secrecy family members. Typically you see garlic, oregano, lemon, salt, and perhaps a few other herbs and spices. Morocco also has a serious history with lamb, but with a much spicier tone. I'm trying to combine the fresh, lemon-herb character of Greek recipes with a hint of the exotic Moroccan tradition.








I used:

• 1 Leg of Lamb (5 lb. leg, purchased from my local halal butcher, butchered right in front of me, then trimmed at home)
• 4 large cloves of garlic, sliced in half
• 1 shallot
• 1 handful of fresh oregano
• 1/4 preserved lemon peel
• 1 tsp coriander seeds
• pepper to taste
  
• coarse sel gris (kosher salt will do in a pinch)
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 3 tbsp olive oil (I'm using L'Olivier from France.)
  

Trim the lamb. The meat at the end of the shank (narrow end) will be too tough, so trim it off around the bone, leaving the bone protruding. If your butcher leaves the backmeat and bones on like mine does, go ahead and cut those off leaving just the leg. Trim around the joint with a sharp knife until the hip bone releases. Then trim off any loose pieces.

Cut slits into the meat and insert the garlic cloves.

Coat the leg with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt so that there's a nice, even coating. Do the same with the pepper and coriander. Finely dice (brunoise cut) the shallot and the preserved lemon, and sprinkle it over.

Put under a broiler for 2 minutes (no longer).

Remove from the broiler, and spread the oregano over the top and splash it with the lemon juice and a little olive oil.


Roast covered in the oven at 375 degrees for 20 minutes per pound or until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the meat away from a bone reads at least 140 degrees for medium. Well done is 160.

New Breakfast of Champions (Or Girliest Recipie I've Ever Concocted):

Lavender Infused Preserved Lemon Muffins

Miss SG asked me to come up with a lavender muffin. As much as I like lavender in principle, it runs the risk of making your food taste like bath products and your friends think that you've switched teams. So, I decided to contrast it with something powerful and salty: Moroccan Preserved Lemons. They're exotic, easy to make (just mash quartered lemons rolled in salt and spices into their own juices for a few weeks), and deeply weird in pastries. I included lemon juice in these muffins, but you could leave that out and let a little more lavender shine through. They're sweet and salty with a mildly floral character, a fitting tribute to Miss SG.

1 Cup Semolina Flour
1 Cup All-Purpose Flour
1 Cup Demerara Sugar
2 Eggs
3 Tsp Baking Powder
1/2 Tsp Salt
1/4 Cup Butter
1 Cup Heavy Cream
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
2 Tbsp Lavender Blossoms
1 Tsp of Ground Spices (Allspice, Cloves, Star Anise, Corriander, and Cardamom)
1/2 Preserved Lemon Peel Finely Diced (Brunoise Cut)

Preheat oven to 400 Degrees.

Melt the butter on a double boiler, add the cream and the lavender. Allow the liquid to infuse.

Meanwhile, mix all the dry ingredients (not the egg or lemon). Beat the eggs until slightly foamy. When the cream mixture is infused adequately, strain it into a pitcher. Then pour a quarter of the liquid into the eggs while mixing. Once incorporated, pour the egg mixture back into the cream mixture and incorporate thoroughly. Add the dry mixture a little at a time, folding it in and incorporating thoroughly. Continue folding in the lemon juice and preserved lemon.

Pour into muffin tins and bake for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Brush tops with honey and raw sugar. Allow to cool for 5 minutes in the pan. Then finish cooling on a rack.

Serve with fresh whipped cream while trying to convince your friends that you're not gay.

Dropkick Your Bread Machine

My grandfather was fascinated by power tools. He also loved fresh bread. When some jackass invented the "bread machine," a tiny mixer, bread hook, and oven all in one space-consuming, single purpose, kitchen appliance, it was destined to find its way into my grandfather's house. It did, and I was subjected to bizarre-tasting, coffee-can-shaped loaves of bread for years. Bread should come in loaves, baguettes, batards, and rolls, but it should not look like an emigre from a child's block set. Further, those machines force the rise, resulting in bland, dull bread with a lot of alcohol steamed through it.

Dropkick the thing and get yourself a baking stone instead. My new favorite book is Peter Reinhardt's Artesian Bread Every Day. Reinhardt, a bread instructor at Johnson and Wales and the former proprietor of Brother Juniper's Bakery in San Francisco, is probably the foremost expert on bread baking in the U.S. right now.

Every Day is all about using the "cold ferment" process to make sumptuous, flavorful breads. The book isn't just recipes, but instead his heavy on theory and technique. The cold-ferment/slow -rise process ages the dough for a period of one night to four days, allowing you to make a batch that you can bake from daily while only having to do the more labor/dish-intensive tasks weekly or bi-weekly. The best part is that you get brilliant breads without using starter.

These slow-rise breads can be shaped and risen while you're doing prep for the rest of dinner, baked, then cooled while you finish cooking. Bread that's 45 minutes old beats the hell out of day-old baguettes from the Whole Foods.

What to Drink: Pimm's

Summer's ending. It's cooling down, and, in the South, that means that it's time to vacate the air conditioning for the patio for one last summer cocktail. The SG endorses a Pimm's No. 1 Cup. Dating back to the mid-19th century, Pimm's is a gin-based liquor involving quinine and herbs. Pimm's is one of the two official drinks of Wimbledon (along with Champagne), and it's probably one of the most under appreciated drinks on earth. The traditional (read: common) Pimm's cocktail is Pimm's and ginger ale or 7up with a cucumber and lemon. Try this: mix a shot or two of Pimm's with... well... anything. It's one of the most versatile liquors around. Here are two recipes worth trying:

Pour Over a Collins glass full of ice:

1 1/2 oz. Pimm's
1 oz. Lemon Juice
1/2 oz. Key Lime Juice
1 oz. Simple Syrup

Stir and Fill with soda
Stir again and garnish with a cucumber and lemon

or

Pour Over a Collins glass full of ice:

2 oz. Pimm's
5 dashes Peychaud's Bitters (A New Orleans classic)
Fill with a blackberry soda (Izze works best) and garnish with an orange

Here's a link to an incredibly snobby, but accurate blog on the subject of Pimm's.

Grandma's Apple Pie 2.0

A friend of mine once told me that if you like to drink, you have to like to eat. I think that if you like to eat, you have to like to cook. Thus if you like to drink, you have to like to cook. So, pour yourself a mint julep and get thee to the kitchen.

I like pie (in all of its myriad forms). The two best kinds of pie are Euphemism Pie followed distantly by pecan pie. Bronze medalist? Apple pie. Try this:

White Pepper, Cardamom Apple Pie

First Make the Crust
2 3/4 Cups of Flour
1 Teaspoon Sugar
1 Teaspoon Salt
2 1/4 Sticks of Butter straight from the fridge and cut into tiny pieces
5ish Tablespoons of Ice Water

Put the dry ingredients and the pieces of butter into a mixing bowl. Blend by hand with a pastry blender or pulse in a food processor (if you're lazy). The mixture should not be smooth. It should remind you of the stuff left at the bottom of a can of nuts when you're done with the pieces worth eating.

Slowly drizzle the Ice Water over the mixture. Using the blade edge of a spatula, slice into the mixture at different angles until it starts to form larger balls. When these balls stick together with slight pressure, you've got enough water. Roll the mixture into two balls and put it in the fridge.

Then Make the Filling

5 Cups Apples (Sweet Ones), cored peeled and sliced.
1/4 to 1 Cup of Sugar depending on how sweet you like it.
1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1/2 Cup of Dark Rum
Juice of 1 Lemon
Healthy Dashes of Cardamom, Coriander, and Cinnamon

Mix it all in a bowl and let it stand.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Then Finish the Crust

Roll the dough out into two flat round sheets. Form one into the pan for a lower crust. Trim the edges off with a paring knife once it's in the pie pan. Cut the other into strips to make a lattice top. You can weave them together if you like, or you can just have one row going one way and one row the other.

Fill and Bake

Pour the liquid off of the filling mixture into a hot saute pan and let it reduce to syrup. Meanwhile, back at the pie, put the apples into the crust. Then, pour the syrup over the apples. Dot the top of the pie with a tablespoon or two of butter chunks. Put the lattice over the top and push the crusts together with your thumb or a fork. Bake it for 20 minutes at 425 degrees. Turn it down to 350, and bake for another 20-30 minutes or until a rich bubbly fruit syrup starts bubbling up over the lattice.

Take it out, and let it cool for a few hours.

Eat it with a healthy serving of Eiswein or Trokenbeerenauslese from Germany (Dr. Hugo Thanisch or Wegeler from the Bernkasteler Doctor Vineyard if you can find it).

What to Drink: Mint Julep

Summer is here, or at least April is. In the South that's good enough. This means it's mint juelp time. This is the ultimate in refreshing, intoxicating, and distinctly Southern beverages. These used to be the staple of many a Southern club and hotel, but in recent years they don't usually bother. It's best to have pewter or silver tumblers for these, but a standard highball glass will do. For the Bourbon (or Tennessee Whiskey) I suggest anything that you like that you wouldn't necessarily drink by itself. I like Maker's Mark, Gentleman Jack, or Knob Creek. Save the Blanton's for sippin' whiskey.

Fill the glass 1/3 full with crushed ice;
Drop 5 mint leaves into the glass;
Bruise them with a muddler or a spoon until they're broken but not mush;
Fill the remainder of the glass with crushed ice;
Add 1 1/2 oz. (1 shot) good Bourbon or Tennessee Whiskey;
Add 1 oz. simple syrup;
Stir;
Fill the glass with soda water;
Stir again and garnish with a mint sprig.