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.