Food

And yesterday I read a whole slew of Michael Tremoulet's posts which were all about food. If you don't know Michael (sorry, Michael, I've known you ALL your life and as far as I'm concerned, you're Michael, NOT Mike...you adopted that too late for me).

Well, Michael has become a fan of Michael Ruhlman's Ratio book, which I actually haven't read, although I've read a number of Ruhlman's books about food and chefs and things like that. It seems he's started making bacon, rillettes, etc., from scratch. I've made sausage before (cf. Julia Child, except I never put a lot of fat in the ground pork like she says, but homemade sausage from ground pork is great, not unlike the stuff we used to get fresh from the grocery stores in Goliad back when they existed...). And I've tried making her Jambon Persille (Persillee?) it's actually chopped up cured ham cooked, with jellied meat stuff and lots of garlic and parsley. Problem was, it always ended up too salty. You can get it everywhere in France and it's great.

And the rillettes...pork, duck, goose? you can get them sort of everywhere in southwest France, too. It's how they deal with the rest of the meat, the little bits that are left over after you make confit out of the duck or goose legs, render the fat to use to cook with, scrape the bones and then use them to make stock, etc. The little bits that are left are turned into rillettes. DO NOT WASTE ANYTHING. Also, the confit and the rillettes, etc., not to mention the cured pork (here in Kentucky they call the stuff "Country Ham" and we actually have a curing shed on our farm), keeps beautifully over the winter. And if you kill the pigs and/or birds (ducks, geese, etc.) in the fall you don't have to feed them over the winter. Wonderful stuff born of necessity.

Soooo, Michael is now making bacon and rillettes, from pork belly, which he cures in the fridge. My next project is to find some of the stuff somewhere in central Kentucky.

So there. You can actually check out all his stuff (including the dreadful dinner he made of leftover pancakes, processed ham and cheese, and scrambled eggs) at coffeecorner.com. Or maybe it's www.coffeecorner.org. Something like that. So there.

The other day, while I was in Lexington, and in a bit of a snit about having to nurse the boys here at home (will they do this for me? well, NO, not in a million years...) I bought some sweetbreads at Critchfields. We had some sweetbreads in an appetizer at Holly Hill some time ago, and they were really good. I had seen them at Critchfields, but had never either made them or had them before Holly Hill (except when my mother made them, and sorry, folks, that does NOT count).

So I dug out Julia's Mastering Vol. I, and a couple of other books, and did basically what she said. But I stopped at the braising part, and didn't bread them and fry them (wasn't in the mood to start frying stuff, as I was still nursing sick boys...). They DID NOT like them AT ALL. I thought they were fine, albeit not great. And nobody got sick.

Next time I will bread them and fry them, after I braise them. The trouble with all these internal organ things is that they aren't straightforward. You have to do all this stuff before you finish them.

So there