The Fine Art of Butchering a Pig

I was invited to an interesting event this week, hosted by Great Taste Magazine and Chef James Chavez at the Doubletree in Anaheim.  They were calling it a "Pig Potluck" and the local chefs who are a part of the magazine's networking group were asked to bring a pork dish to share. The highlight for me was a demonstration of breaking down a whole pig by Chef Amar Santana of Charlie Palmer's at South Coast Plaza.

The Organic Cellar was there, and as we all stood, genteelly sipping our wine, Chef Amar took knife to pig.

Pig has really taken a front seat on many restaurant menus in the last couple years and just about every interview you read with a chef under the age of forty will include an testimony as to how much he (yes, usually it's a "he") loves pork.  I see new barbeque restaurants opening monthly here in Orange County, and even attended an event at BlogHerFood 2010 which featured bacon as appetizer, main course, pasta and dessert. 

What do you think about this trend of people going pork crazy? 

Is That Your Garden?

We get that question a lot when new people come over. Any visitors have to pass by our garden in front, on their way to our apartment.  If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you'll know that the garden started out as a small little patch for a couple tomato plants back in 2008 and has doubled every year since.

Onion sprouts and a potato plant. I know! I had no idea what potatoes looked like either!

In addition to all the space, we now have a composter and drip irrigation. We're moving on up in the gardening world! But nothing can help the rain and cold we've had this year and the garden is not what we dreamed of. Add to that the small amount of sun the garden sees in the winter and it's not flourishing the way the summer garden does.  Nevertheless, we've done really well with a couple plants.

I guess we should eat the spinach already...

Carrot sprouts! We only got about four carrots last winter, hopefully more this year.

While the cabbage, carrots and onions calmly thrive outside, I'm nursing some long-term prospects inside. Our friend sent us home from his mom's house at Christmas with an armload of tangerines that were absolutely weighing down the little tree in their backyard. I sprouted two of the seeds and they are snuggled into these pots on the window sill.  What do you think--10 years until we see our own tangerines?

Nuts About Cheese Plates

Our cheese plate tradition began last spring on our vacation to Paris. Wanting to be very European, to really live the life we imagined people do in Paris, we ended each exhausting day with a nice bottle of wine, a baguette and a couple kinds of cheese. (Of course, if we really wanted to be authentic I guess we would have had the cheese after dinner, rather than before, but we were making our own reality.) We would put our feet up, download pictures, watch the local news and talk about our plans for the next day.

It was really a very civilized way to unwind and we carried on the tradition when we got back to real life. We don't do it every day, but at the end of a long, hard week it's a nice little luxury, and when we have people over for dinner, nothing is easier to put out as an appetizer. As a result, Anson has become a rather gifted cheese plate maker, adding in fresh fruit, tomatoes from the garden when we have them, basil leaves, mustard, whatever strikes his fancy. My contribution has been these spiced, roasted almonds.

We first had these almonds this past summer in Sonoma at Gloria Ferrer and Domaine Carneros. Both wineries served them alongside our sparkling wine and we wondered about it at each place. Curiously, there were no almonds in sight when we visited Pommery in France. We figured it must be an American wine country tradition, but whatever the case, we loved them and I can't stop eating them.

The first time I made them, I found some recipes on the web and used the guidelines they provided. I found that really none of the spices stood out (except for cinnamon) so now I just sprinkle a bunch of savory spices into a bowl, add some oil and it always comes out good.  Like a lot of the recipes I post, this is a guideline, so feel free to customize it to your taste.

Spiced Roasted Almonds

1/4 teaspoon of the following:
chili powder
cumin
ground ginger
allspice
cayenne pepper
white pepper
salt
sugar

a dash of cinnamon*
2 tablespoons of vegetable or olive oil
2 cups of unroasted almonds

Mix it all together in a bowl, throw it on a baking sheet in a single layer, and bake them for about 35 minutes at 375°. Stir them half way through and take one out towards the end to test doneness. Keep a close eye on them too because they can go from perfect to burned really quickly. And like most things you bake, they will continue to crisp up a little after you take them out of the oven.

*I've found this is the only spice whose potency doesn't mellow as it roasts, so be careful not to over do it, unless you want to make cinnamon spiced almonds. If that's the case, add more  sugar too.