Tomato fever

It's been a long time since we've posted to the "cooking" portion of the site. Frankly, we cook all the time. We cook so much that it almost feels ridiculous to post to the cooking section, because cooking has ceased being special for us.

The fact that we cook every day, or nearly every day, is actually pretty special on its own -- but if we posted about that with any diligence, this would cease to be a house blog and would be just a blog about what we're cooking every day.

However, in the past few days an abundance of tomatoes has led us to a cooking arena which is off our normal routine. We broke out the hot water bath canner (and a trusty canning/preserving cookbook) and put up some tomatoes.

We actually had buckets and buckets of tomatoes. Here are some of them, including heirlooms. We also had tons of plum tomatoes:

After we cooked down the most ripe ones, Evan put them through the food mill. We then cooked that sauce some more:

Then we ladled them in quart jars with 2 tbsp of lemon juice apiece. We ended up with five quart jars, which we put in the canner for 35 minutes. Here they are before I lowered the canning rack into the canner for processing:

I burned myself a couple times on hot water. And the kitchen got very hot. We actually did the cooking and canning at night, which was good because the temperature was lower overall, so it only got to like 90 in the kitchen.

After they'd processed in boiling water for 35 minutes, I let them sit in the canner for another five minutes, then extracted them from their steaming bath so they could sit quietly overnight. Voila!

Bulking up for winter

When Gina and I lived in Philly, one of my favorite spots was a place called the Standard Tap. Located in Northern Liberties, on the Northeast side of the city, it's a casual bar-restaurant that understands that "low-key" doesn't mean serving Budweiser and frozen burgers. It has a great menu, a fabulous selection of local brews, some of which are hand-pulled, and a terrific jukebox. It's the kind of place where it's easy to while away several hours (days) with friends over a few pints (lost count) and a light meal (I need to eat?). One of my favorite items was their duck confit salad: a leg of duck slowly cooked in its own fat and then roasted until crisp, laid across fresh greens dressed with a rosé vinaigrette. Pair it with a hoppy ale, a basket of fresh-cut fries and I'm in heaven.

Since we no longer live in Philly, though, I can't just whimsically stop by the Tap for my favorite dish. Recently I've been longing for some duck confit, especially as cooler weather arrives, and I needed to quash these terrible cravings. My solution? Make it myself. I found a recipe in my Charcuterie book, ordered six ducks legs and two pounds of rendered duck fat from Hudson Valley Foie Gras in Ferndale New York and went to town.

Overnight, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., the legs and fat cooked in the oven at a measly 160 degrees. Afterwards I stuck the entire dutch oven - fat and all - in the fridge for a few days. Last night I pulled out two legs, roasted them for twenty minutes, and lulled my system into a fat-induced coma. The meat just tumbled off the bone. True, I didn't have a hand-pulled Yard's ESA to wash it down or a basket of fries to further clog my arteries, but it was almost as good.

On scrambled eggs

I know, this is a house blog, which should contain musing about home renovation, repair and the like, but really, what's a house without food? Nothing more than shelter. Add the smell of fresh baked bread or a roast chicken, and a house becomes something entirely different – it becomes sustenance, the place where you take nourishment, recharge, and share your bounty with others. It's cliché, but the kitchen is truly the heart of the house. And what's the heart of cooking and baking? Eggs!

One of the simplest things to make is scrambled eggs, but it's not a simple as it seems. Years ago, when I'd wake after a night of heavy drinking, the only thing on my mind was a mound of scrambled eggs, a heap of bacon, a cup of coffee and half-pack of cigarettes. That was my aspirin. I'd crank up the stove, slap a pan on the burner, swirl some butter, and then dump some quickly-whisked eggs into the hot pan. All wrong. The suckers would start to draw up like a scared turtle and in a flash they'd be dry and chewy. What the hell did I know? I was hung-over and just wanted some grease.

Then I had a revelation. The revelation came, again, after a night of heavy drinking, the day my good friend was getting married. All the groomsmen had stayed at his house prior to the big day, and our friend Ed, who happened to be a chef, offered to cook eggs. I watched with marvel as he put a pan on the burner, dropped some finely-diced cold butter in the pan, and then dumped whisked eggs in the cold pan. What the fuck? This guy is a chef?! He doesn't even know how to cook eggs!

Ahh, but he DID! The eggs were soft and luscious; they just melted in your mouth. This is what they're supposed to taste like. Thanks to that lesson, and with a little help from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I now prepare a proper plate of scrambled eggs. You should try it: Cold pan, medium-low heat, butter, gently whisked eggs with a splash of cream, and stir and stir and stir. As soon as they start to come together in a custard consistency, remove them from the heat and continue to stir. Be careful not to bring them off the heat too late, as they'll continue to cook in the pan. Salt and stir in one small pat of butter for good measure and plate. Enjoy!

A side note to Alton Brown: Dude, last week I went to a place that serves pig's stomach! We should definitely check it out, because I'm certain you never had that on your drive across the middle of America. I'll be waiting for your call.

Beet it

The many outdoor projects planned for the month of July have been put on hold thanks to two constants: rain and grass. The rain, however, has been good for one thing other than the lawn: the garden. I'm worried about the tomatoes -- we've had others rot on the vine during periods of steady rain -- but the other goods have been doing just fine, including our beets. We're slightly late in harvesting them, but during my mowing tasks on Sunday Gina got to work and started pulling them.

I had planned to grill some sockeye salmon for dinner and decided the beets would make a perfect side. One of my favorite summer salads is beet with watercress and goat cheese. The sharpness of the goat cheese, the peppery watercress and the sweetness of the beets are a perfect combo.

Remove the stems, boil the beets for 30 minutes or until tender, then drop them in a bowl of ice water. Remove the skin, then cut the beets into 1/4" cubes. Toss them with some watercress and balsamic vinaigrette, and then top with crumbled goat cheese.

Also, I can't take credit for all the mowing around here. Gina's dad, Ken, borrowed an old John Deere and helped us tackle some of the meadow. Here he is working on the upper field:

I could really use an old tractor like that...

Blueberry Jam

We have a few blueberry bushes on our property and although they've been neglected over the past few years, they've been kicking out the fruit this season. While I worked on reglazing some windows Gina decided to make use of the bountiful harvest. We even have a few more pints frozen!

Thank you Mr. Keller

Outside of gardening and mowing the lawn – which, I might add, takes up an unbelievable amount of time – we haven't made much progress on the house recently. Part of the problem is cooking. As much as we truly enjoy it, the process sucks up most evenings and leaves little time for after-work home improvement projects. A typical evening involves arriving home around 6 p.m., doing prep work, assembling the dish, applying heat, waiting for magic to happen, and then sitting down for chow around 7:30 or 8 p.m. By the time we're done, I have no energy left. (As an aside, Christ, do we need a dishwasher. I feel like it's an endless task – dirty dishes just multiply continuously. To think I used to say I enjoyed doing dishes. WTF?)

Anyway, just to make it seem like I'm doing something other than sitting on my ass, I'm sharing with you my favorite roast chicken recipe. There is nothing quite as satisfying as a good roast chicken, and everyone should know how to do it. Plus it's easy. Our kitchen is circa 1950, has an oven the size of a shoebox and we pull it off just fine. This particular recipe is stolen from Thomas Keller.

Shopping list:
- 1 chicken, free range if possible, around 3 or 4 lb.
- butcher's twine (ya gotta truss the sucker)
- 1 heavy roasting pan or large cast iron sauté pan
- 2 tsp chopped fresh thyme.
- 1 TBSP butter
- kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Meanwhile, take the chicken and dry it thoroughly, even inside the cavity (paper towels work well). Dry heat is the key here; otherwise you risk a finished product that lacks a really crisp, flavorful skin. After the bird is dry you'll need to truss it. This is not rocket science, and really keeps the breast moist. Next, rain salt all over the bird, even inside the cavity. You'll probably use close to 1 TBSP. Place the bird in the roasting pan or the sauté pan (I like my cast iron sauté pan for this purpose). Cook the bird for 40 or 50 minutes, until the skin is nice and brown. Remove the bird from the from the pan and whisk in the fresh time and 1 TBSP of butter. Baste the bird and let it rest for 10 minutes. You can serve it however you like – I take off the wings, remove the legs, and slice the breast off, serving one leg and one breast / person. The chef gets to enjoy the crispy, fatty tail. It's unbelievably tasty.

I especially enjoy it with some sautéed brussel sprouts and a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc or chardonnay.

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em

One of the outbuildings on our property is what most folks around here call a summer kitchen, though I'm not sure that's entirely accurate for this structure. Inside is a massive, cast-iron wood-burning stove – the sucker is probably 5' wide by 2' high by 4' deep – that was used to cook scrapple, among other things. The stove is essentially a giant box with two doors in the front for loading wood and four burners of varying sizes on the top. Just to the right of the stove is a large pivoting post, sort of like a block and tackle, that has a huge hook hanging from a horizontal crosspiece. This was used to swing the huge vats of pork fat and spices on and off the burners.

In a small addition off the original building, though, is another room, approximately 15' x 8', that's been constructed out of cinderblock. The place smells like burnt wood, with the subtle lingering odor of dog piss, an olfactory clue to the building's insubstantial role over the last several years. Carved out of the back corner is what looks like a closet measuring about 4' x 5', with one door and a small hole notched out of the wall. Open it up, and the interior is charred black. This is the smoker, and it's become a mild obsession of mine.

This winter I bought Michael Ruhlman's book “Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing” and I've been slowly working my way through it – slowly because there are plenty of other things vying for my attention lately. Like Ruhlman's other books (“The Making of a Chef,” “The Soul of a Chef,” etc.) it's a fantastic read that details the process of smoking and curing in terms that a novice can understand. He does it so beautifully, though, that you can't help but want to become a professional boutique charcutier, living amidst salts, pork and smoke as a means of income. I dream of getting some good cuts of pork and smoking my own ham or bacon, or even curing some nice Prosciutto di Parma in the root cellar.

First, though, there's painting to be done.