My Zucchini Carpaccio

Before I get to the carpaccio utilizing zucchini from the garden, I bring you a freak from the garden. A Siamese-twin type green bean. I found this one and somebody else found another. Take a gander: Now, the carpaccio:
I was inspired by the recipe for Zucchini Carpaccio with Raspberry Vinegar in the Chocolate and Zucchini Cookbook by Clotilde Dusoulier. But, I think I strayed far enough with the basic concept to call it my own. To her, I owe the idea of arranging thin slices of zucchini, sprinkling them with an herb, salt, pepper, olive oil, vinegar and cheese.

The addition of sliced tomato was entirely my own. While her recipe calls for thyme and I could have gotten some, I was using tomato so why not put basil on it. I think it worked. Tomato, basil, and zucchini are all summertime flavours. They should work together and to my mind they did.

The original recipe calls for raspberry vinegar, but I wasn't about to buy some (and it really wouldn't go so well with tomato). So, I subbed in some red wine vinegar and it tasted good to me. The Amateur Gourmet made the recipe truer to Clotilde's vision with balsamic vinegar and liked it, actually she recommends balsamic as a variation in the book. (Looking at his photo, I'd say my knife skills were better than his. Those are some thick slices. Too bad I'm not such a good writer.)

As for the cheese I sprinkled on top, it's Parmesan, nice and Italian to go with tomatoes and basil. Clotilde recommends the use of Parmesan in variations on this dish. So, I guess I didn't stray too far. Basically, you layer up the ingredients, put on the oil and vinegar dressing, and sprinkle some salt and pepper. Then, you cover it with plastic and let it stand at room temperature for 10 minutes. This is what you get:

What you're probably wondering about is how it is to eat raw zucchini. It's important to use fairly small and very fresh zucchini, mine was cut that day. It's crispy and slightly sweet, really enjoyable and totally different from cooked. I love the idea of eating things in an unconventional state, like raw zucchini or perhaps conversely cooked cucumber.

So, if you're confronted with a glut of zucchini right now as many gardeners are, consider cutting some young and tender ones and experiencing them raw. As a bonus, you don't have to turn on the stove on a hot day to make this. I made it on a very hot day and appreciated the dish's coolness.

Ratatouille: Au Four and the Movie

Ladies and gentlemen, I have become obsessed with Ratatouille. I decided to host a small dinner party on Saturday with hopes of going to see Ratatouille after because I heard it was a good food movie. The dinner party part went off fine and I had five friends over for a meal that I will probably describe over several posts. The revelatory dish that I made was incidentally ratatouille. It's the dish I felt was "must make" to fit my theme, not to mention I was curious about it. Here's my ratatouille from that night:

Actually, that's leftover ratatouille because I forgot to take any photos that night. It's freaking good leftover anyways. I used Clotilde Dusoulier's recipe for Ratatouille Au Four in the "Chocolate and Zucchini" book, because well I wanted to use her recipe since it worked so well for her. There's a recipe here on her blog, but it's not quite like the book one. The recipe in the book is. . . larger, even as I made it with only 5 or 6 tomatoes and two zucchini. Actually, it's really large and i couldn't fit it in my largest mixing bowl to mix or in a single baking dish. It's a variation on traditional ratatouille because it's oven roasted.

I didn't get a lot of browning on the vegetables for the dinner party, but the results were. . . amazing. I absolutely loved it and my guests enjoyed it too. It produced plenty of sweet, intensely flavoured veggie juices. The onion became very sweet, the yellow and red bell pepper strips were really sweet and tasty as well. I liked the tomato, zucchini and eggplant pieces as well. There were fabulous contrasts in texture and flavour in the large vegetable chunks. They retained a lot of character of the individual vegetables while being enhanced by the "sauce" of veggie juices, herbs, salt, pepper, and olive oil. I suppose it could have been better if I used fresh rather than dried thyme. I highly recommend this recipe, though. It's tasty and easy.

Unfortunately seeing Ratatouille didn't' work out in conjunction with the dinner since dinner went to long and some people had to leave early. But, I did have a special "chef experience." I got a minor burn extracting the ratatouille from my oven. I know you want to see it:

You mean you didn't want to see that? Well, it's my blog and I feel I have a public responsibility to warn people not to touch the inside of a hot oven's door like I did.

After my dinner party was over I still wanted to see Ratatouille. So, I went downtown on Sunday afternoon and watched it by myself like the pathetic, obsessed person I am. I really liked the movie, but not the loud children in the theatre. It's really unlike other children's movies. The plot is not really predictable and. . . I'm not a movie reviewer. It's a good movie to see if you like food and are fascinated by restaurant kitchens.

Looking at what what in my fridge in the aftermath of the dinner party, I was excited to find most of the ingredients for another ratatouille au four. I had a remaining zucchini, a tomato (not in the fridge of course), a green bell pepper, rosemary, onions, and garlic. Yesterday I bought a small eggplant and a second large tomato. Today I cut a medium to large zucchini from the garden. I combined all these ingredients into another, smaller ratatouille. This one was not quite so juicy. Perhaps this is due to there being fewer tomatoes or a bit less olive oil. The eggplant browned quite nicely, though. The batch was still enormous, requiring two baking dishes. Using green peppers made it perhaps slightly less colourful and sweet than with red and yellow peppers, but the green pepper adds a savoury complexity that the other peppers lack.

Anyways, here's a pick of my second batch of ratatouille this week:

You know it must be good if I made it that quickly again.

Zucchini Absorption Pasta

Zucchini Absorption Pasta with Sliced Pork Chop, originally uploaded by lisbear18.

I ordered a bunch of cookbooks online. . . plus one novel. One of the books is Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen. It is a really cute book with a lot of inspiring ideas. I haven't read it all, but I quite like it. The only problem is that it's hard to keep open, say when you're cooking from it due to its small size and binding style.

Anyways, above you see my version of the Pates Par Absorption, Courgette & Cacao from the book, which is like risotto-style pasta. However, I made 1/4 of the recipe to serve one. I used Asiago instead of Parmesan, omitted the cacao nibs (don't know where to find those), added some flat-leaf parsley at the end, and put skillet cooked pork chop slices on top 'cause this girl needs some protein too. Anyways, this recipe worked pretty well and was tasty in a starchy-creamy way. I like carbs so it was good. It was a nice use of zucchini, which is one of my favourite vegetables. At the end I found that I had to turn up the heat and uncover the pot so the dish wasn't too watery. I liked that it was faster to make than rice risotto.

Hmm, I seem to be on a risotto-type kick. I might try making risotto-style barley like Heidi Swanson suggests. Her book, Supernatural Cooking, is one of the other books I ordered.

My Version of Snout to Tail Eating

Why no posts in so long?
Simple, I didn't have an Internet connection for a while plus I felt sick.

Anyways, about two weeks ago I decided to go for it and buy the pork hocks I often see and Safeway and cook them up using a modification of this Bon Appetit recipe that can be found on Epicurious. It's a recipe for "braised and roasted pork shanks with prosciutto and porcini mushrooms" but don't worry, I didn't actually use most of those exotic ingredients. I didn't use porcini mushrooms or any mushrooms at all. I cooked about 700 grams of hock. . . I think that's almost the same as shank. There was no leek or prosciutto. The herbs were oregano and thyme. I used a famous Belgian beer shown here in place of red wine:
What did this have to do with the recipe then? Well, I followed the braise then roast method. Here are the piggy bits in their braising liquid:
I did the braising and roasting on two separate days. When the liquid cooled, I spooned the fat off the top and noticed that it was like Jello. Is that the gelatin in the animal bits?
Here's a glamour shot after it was all roasted up and placed on the braising liquid:

The one big problem? That liquid was really beer-bitter. And while I like to drink beer, I couldn't bring myself to eat much of it. I had sweet potatoes on the side, and that might have made it more difficult with the contrast. The meat was okay though. But there wasn't too much of it for all the bone, skin and fat. I guess it was tasty and okay for a three dollar experiment. It looks pretty crazy. I like that.

Anyways, the second piece that I ate the next day had less meat and I didn't want to eat the liquid and vegetables. So, I stir fried the meat and some skin (yes skin) with zucchini and onion and probably some other stuff and mixed it with rice.

This is probably extremely unhealthy and makes me feel guilty. But pork skin has some appeal.

And that's how I ate a piggy part that many people wouldn't. I hope you were amused.

You Are What You Eat

In that case, what am I you might ask? Assuming I'm not a grain, fruit, or vegetable.......I'm probably a pig. That's me....

Living in Alberta, you would think I would eat a lot of beef. Or being a North American in general, a lot of chicken. . . because everything else tastes like chicken anyways. It's not that I never eat those things, it's just that in the last couple of weeks I don't think I've eaten chicken or beef since April 13. I know I ate burgers on that day.

So if I've been chicken and beef free, what have I been eating for that all important protein? As far as animal protein goes mainly pork and a touch of lamb. I've also been eating eggs and various seafood. Plus, I've had beans in my delectable vegetarian chili. I prefer it to my beef chili. I guess that's just because I love beans. But today, I want to talk pork.

I think pork is incredibly varied in its applications. A lot of people think of bacon when they think of tasty pig flesh. I'm not really a fan of bacon, I eat it on occasion and never make it at home. I do like back bacon though, that stuff is lean and tasty. Pork is also found in sausages, hams, pork chops, pork roast, cured meats, and many other things. I would love to cause someone with a religious ban on eating pork to lapse. . . I'm a little evil like that. I also want to see vegetarians lapse.

Anyways, I went on a "special" food shopping trip yesterday. The stuff I bought mainly fell into three categories: produce, cheese, and pork. Obviously, Canada's Food Guide recommends that we all eat mainly full fat cheese and pork. I'm probably going to post about cheese later, so let's talk about the pork products.

I'm a very, very frequent sandwich eater. So naturally, I got something made of pork for my sandwiches....hot, lean capicollo. It's pretty good stuff, I like the spiciness. It beats my usual hams because of that and makes me feel like a proper Italian, even if my mom doesn't make great cannelloni all the time.

I was more excited about the sausage I got, a Spolumbo's spicy Italian sausage. This is the most decent Italian sausage I know of in Alberta. I always hear about how great the sausages are at the Italian grocery stores my uncles visit in Ontario. I haven't been there in three years, so I don't know much about them. Anyways, I was inspired to combine my sausage with a really long eggplant, pictured here:

You might notice a theme with this meal....everything is a bit phallic. So anyways, I cobbled together my culinary not-quite-masterpiece by roasting the chopped eggplant with olive oil, pepper, and salt in a 400 degree oven for about 25 minutes until it was a bit brown. Meanwhile in the bat cave, I partially cooked the sausage by boiling it in a frying pan. . . kinda weird I guess. Then, I cut it up and browned it in a saucepan. When the sausage was cooked, I added a chopped zucchini (phallus number 3), and a chopped clove of garlic and sauteed those a bit. Then, I added about half a cup of water to deglace the pan--that means to remove the brown tasty bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. When the eggplant was ready, I stirred it in and kept it cooking a bit longer. The end result, severed on a piece of toast because I always need me some carbs, looked like this:

It looks weird and not necessarily appetizing. You might wonder how it tasted, or you might not care. Either way, I'm going to say: it was okay. The sausage was good, but somehow I think it's better in a tomato sauce on pasta. I quite enjoy zucchini, so it's good if you like that. The eggplant though is interesting. I like it, but I could see how a lot of other people would be turned off by the texture. It can be a touch slimy, but I like unusual textures so it was good. Maybe this would have been better with couscous, but I'm out of that. Also, I think the sausage wasn't spicy enough to flavour everything like I thought it would.

I'm sure you're dying for one more pork related comment. My favourite cut of plain pork is the tenderloin--so tender, so lean, so delicious if you don't really, really overcook it like Albert and I did once. I once made this pork tenderloin with mango chutney for Leslie. I cooked the pork in the oven, not on a barbecue. It was really good, easy, and pretty impressive.

That's enough about my pig eating habits, I'm sure you agree.