Hard Day's Night

Hi All,

It's been a while since you've heard from me.  Months to be exact.  I'm really sorry about that.  I can't say that it won't happen again, but I can say that I've been thinking about Big Man all this time and trying to figure out how to write more with everything else that is happening.

When you last left your fearless hero, he was a new father and studying for the NJ and NY bar exams.  Months later, I'm still a new father but am now working in a law firm at the schedule and pace of a young attorney.  I passed both exams, and tomorrow will be sworn in as an attorney in NJ.  I still have to send in a bunch of paperwork before being admitted to NY.

Work is interesting.  I like my firm and I like the sophistication of most of my cases.  But it really doesn't leave me much time to write or to even to cook.  Mrs. Big Man has really stepped up her game in the last few months, cooking most of the dinners on the weeknights.

I did have a massive culinary victory on my birthday when I invited 15 people over and made Indian food for everybody.  This was one of my goals, to get some proficiency in Indian food.  I bought a cookbook on the subject, pretty thorough in my opinion.  I'll put up some amazon link at some point in the future to point you to how to buy this book if you are interesting.  Some percentage of the proceeds will go towards justifying the time that I spend thinking and writing about food.

Anyway, while I've been thinking about how to keep Big Man going while also keeping my day job, I think the answer is just to re-adjust some of my expectations about what this blog is.  It began as an experiment, and I made no promises.  But, naturally, pretty quickly in fact, I worked toward improving the look and quality of the content, substantively and presentationally.  I created some recipes, and reprinted a few old favorites, with the hope that maybe at some point in the future, they would be the makings of a cookbook or magazine article.

The truth of the matter, however, is that I'm not Orangette.  She blogs and writes cookbooks with her blog and gets magazine gigs and takes prettty pictures of her husband's pizza shop.  I blog and practice law and raise my son and go fishing and look for a house to buy and spend time with my wonderful wife.  I'm a renaissance man, which means that I'm limited in the time that I can spend on this.  So, going forward, rather than publishing recipes, I will likely stick with pictures and shorter posts.  Brevity if a virtue, they say.  And to the extent that I am up to that task, I'm going to give it a try.

So, I hope this means I'll be writing more.  Maybe not.

Enjoy the pictures!  But if anyone is offended by a pig roast, you might not want to scroll all the way down.

Damn Good Fried Chicken for a Yankee (I cheated, I'm half-Texan).

Beautiful Tomaters

In Texas, Basil is free.

So we eat it with tomaters.

Summer Sweet Salad

I don't totally remember what this is, but it looks delicious.

What is a summer fair without a prize winning rooster?

Lobster Roll in Portland, ME.

I picked blueberries in Bar Harbor.  There were more than I could fit in a paper bag.

It's a salmon, stupid.

We drank well in Maine.

Jersey Tomaters.

Best damn BBQ I've ever had.  Even better with a hangover.

This is what I had for lunch.

                           

Jersey does BBQ, too.

It gets hardcore at the Jersey Shore.  Don't mess wit NJ.

Pizzaaaaa

Don't mind me.  I'm not really here.  I'm actually studying for the bar, so I am DEFINITELY not blogging right now about food.  I am way too busy to be doing anything remotely like that.  Although, I do have a couple pictures of pizzas that I've been making.  I've been working on really perfecting my pizza making.  Right now, my pizzas are way better than your average pizza place pizza about 75-85% of the time.  Although, occasionally I do have pizza disasters where you have to scrap the dough off the pan with a paint scraper. 

I have no sage advice about how its done right now, except to say that, yeah, throwing the dough in the air is ACTUALLY necessary to making a good thin crust.  You need the centrifugal force that is only available in a zero-gravity, spinning, floury, environment.  O.K., enough talk.  I have to go.  I really do have to study for this thing.  But here are some pictures in case you are wondering what I'm having for dinner tonight.

Also, my friends Burkett and Katherine had us over for dinner yesterday.  Dinner was amazing, and I got this pretty picture of our first course.  They were extraordinary with grilled lemon squeezed over them!

Springing

The Lake has thawed. The Devils are about to begin their playoff run at the Stanley Cup, St. Patrick's day and Easter both came and went. Things are moving quickly folks.

For some reason that is surely related to John Jameson's life's work, I failed to take any pictures of the food that I made on St. Patrick's Day. That was really weak, I know. But, if you were there, you know that there was nothing weak about my Colcannon, which contained a 1/2 lb. of butter, and 1 lb. of bacon. Purely awesome, my friend.

Once spring gives way to summer, you'll probably notice that a lot of cooking expeditions mentioned on the site will change too. I do about as serious a BBQ as someone from New Jersey can do. I smoke ribs. I smoke shoulder. I've been smoking chicken since last year, and this year I'm thinking about smoking some fish.



In the mean time, I'm still pretty focused on perfecting my Chinese food. I could eat Chinese food just about everyday; there are over a billion people on earth who do! Ok, that was a lame joke. I admit it.



Anyway, I've got pictures. There is no guiding theme other than the fact that this is what I've cooked recently. I would give you the recipes, but frankly it's been so long since I made them that I barely remember what was in it.

The first picture at the top is of a tofu and vegetable stir-fry that came out really well. Tofu can be hard to make well, but I've found that using a REALLY hot pan, and getting a good crisp going on the outside does wonders. Also, pat the tofu dry before cooking, knucklehead!

The second picture is of a curry sole stew with sweet potatoes. I had a hell of a time getting the sweet potatoes to fully cook without murdering the fish into a mush, but I found a balance somewhat and it was pretty good.

The third picture is of zucchini mac and cheese with salted chopped chilies. In case you haven't heard, you need salted chopped chilies in your life. Here's how.



The picture immediately above this paragraph was of some noodles with ginger, garlic, and chopped leaks.

Ok, now to other big news. The beer is FINALLY done! Yes, you heard right, I tasted the beer today.



I have to say that it smelled absolutely wonderful. This is some of the toastiest, delicious smelling beer I've ever had. It's also a pretty good looking beer. My wife and son are both redheads, and it seems that my beer is a redhead too now. I don't mind that one bit. The taste is something else though. I made this beer with the intention of producing a hoppy batch of beer with a VERY high alcohol content. I wanted this beer to knock you on your ass. And it does. The beer is at least 10% alcohol. And it tastes like it too. It's a somewhat bitter, very intense flavored beer. The jury is still out on how well it'll age. It might mellow out a bit in the next few weeks and taste like the complex thing that it is.

I Make Broth and I Take Pictures

I gather that noodle bowls are all the rage at Momofuku, or something like that. I've got the Momofuku cookbook now, but haven't had a chance to take a look at it yet. Anyway, I took some pictures the last time I made ramen and they were probably some of the best pictures I've ever taken of anything, so I had to show you the pictures and tell you about one of my favorite lunchtime treats. I took a bunch of other, unrelated pictures that came out pretty well too and have scattered them throughout the post. Hope you like them!

It all started because whenever I eat something that I really like, I want to make it myself at home. I can't just have a favorite place to get pizza. I eat the pizza, and then I want to go home and make my own. And then, of course, once I make the pizza at home, then I need to make the sauce myself, and then the dough. Before long, I'll be trying to figure out if I can manage to make my own cheese (By the way, I haven't made my own cheese yet, but I'm still young and I emphasize the word "yet").



One reason I seem to keep drilling down to make the ingredients is because I think I can make it better myself. Of course my spaghetti sauce is better than something from a jar in the supermarket! Duh! But I find that I've been doing this more and more often now in order to avoid preservatives and all of the other bad stuff that is in almost anything that is not a fresh, raw ingredient.

Lately, for this very reason, I have been obsessively making broth. No, seriously, I've been tending to my broth almost everyday for months now. I have two batches going now, my Chinese pork broth, inspired by Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe for "everyday broth", and my chicken broth, which I use to make chicken soup and as well as flavor a whole slew of dishes, including one of my favorites: roast chicken with gravy.




Dunlop gives us a vivid description of "everyday broth" in her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, my favorite cookbook. It is a broth consisting of all sorts of meats, especially pork, which is kept simmering all day everyday. That's right, all day every day. It gets replenished, and it gets used. Street vendors cook street food in their everyday broth, which adds flavor to the meat, and adds some flavor to the broth, sort of a symbiotic relationship between sauce and entree. Dunlop claims that some everyday broths have been sustained for entire lifetimes, up to 50 years of taking some and giving some. And, of course, it is claimed that the older the broth and the longer it has been sustained, the better the flavor.


As for me, I keep mine in the freezer, and I thaw it and give to it and take from it as needed. It is seasoned with a little soy sauce, some fresh ginger, and five spice powder, then I strain it through cheesecloth to keep it nice looking. Add whatever you want though.

One of my favorite things to make with my everyday broth is ramen. Imagine all of the succulent goodness of a Cup Noodles, with none of the MSG and sodium and preservatives and god knows what else. Once you have the broth, it takes about 10 minutes to have a steaming hot bowl of deliciousness.



Freestyle Ramen

Ingredients
2 cups Everyday Broth
1 Leek
Ramen Noodles (any noodles can substitute)
1 Tbsp Soy Sauce per bowl
1 Tbsp Oil
optional: Chili-Garlic Sauce, Radishes, Scallions, Chicken, Pork, Egg, etc.

This recipe should be more inspirational than instructional. The important thing about freestyle ramen is that the broth be homemade. If you haven't already strained your broth, make sure you do so. It really makes the broth look nicer.

Beyond that, all there is to it is heating up your broth to a near boil, cooking your ramen in boiling water (not in the broth!), and slice up your leek. In each bowl, I add a dash of soy sauce, a dash of oil, and a dash of chili-garlic sauce (Sriracha is a fine substitute). Then I put in the leaks and any other fixins that I have lying around that might be good. Then I fill each bowl 3/4 of the way up with cooked ramen noodles. Last, add the broth. You can mix up the bowl a bit then to get the chili sauce and everything evenly distributed. Another way to do it is to add a dollop of Sriracha at the end. This not only flavors the broth, but also makes a nice garnish.

If you are using anything that really needs to be cooked before consuming, make sure you do that before adding it to the bowl. Egg is borderline. If your broth is hot enough, it will probably cook the egg, but it is kind of gross if it doesn't, so better be safe than sorry. If you do add raw egg to it, at least take the egg out of the fridge 20 minutes before using it so that its a little on the warmer side.

More and Better Pictures Please

Look at Orangette. Now look at Big Man with an Apron. Besides the fact that she actually writes recipes in a clear and concise manner, the biggest difference between her posts and mine are that she's got fantastic pictures (people also read her posts, although I guess if you're reading this, then I have readers. Wow!). So, I'm trying to remedy that (the part about the pictures, not about the readers, cause I already know now that you are reading).



Bam! There's a picture! See how easy that was?




There's another one! Same dish, of course, but you get the idea. That was a fun night, by the way, making Chinese food for family in Texas. Don't worry, we got some BBQ the next day.




Tricked you that time! That's my dog. She sits in the kitchen while I cook because she thinks that I will drop some food on the floor. She is usually right.



This was one of my most favorite lunches ever. It was at the Franciscan in San Francisco during my honeymoon.

Hopefully I'll do a better job of adding more pictures and getting better at taking them. This will be practice for parenting anyway, since apparently I'm supposed to take pictures of everything that the baby ever does.