How can you not love a place called Chicken & Beer? Even if it’s really just the subtext for the actual name of the Korean chain – BBQ Chicken. Whenever I’m driving home from Greenville (which is often), I make a point to stop in Duluth for some grub. I usually check out Chow Down and Blissful Glutton’s sites for the must-visit places and make lists of where I want to go, this being one of them.

Which reminds me, I really want to write an iPhone app that is similar to Yelp, except it’s only for viewing (no feedback) and the only content is from bloggers, allowing you to filter by blogger and search geographically. So if I’m in Duluth I could check out a map and see pin points of all the places Chow Down recommends, maybe a 1-2 sentence summary, address/phone, and a link to her full blog post to view in Safari.

The whole problem with Yelp is credibility. As I mentioned yesterday, part of following a single blogger is you can develop a level of trust between blogger and reader. I keep whole lists of restaurants that Gene (Eat Drink Man) recommends, because I generally enjoy the style of food he cooks and the type of restaurant where he dines. It’s much more valuable to me than a bunch of aggregated data from random “Elites” or people with very different tastes. One day. If anyone wants to help, let me know.

Back to the chicken, which was really good. The olive oil fried surface is as crunchy as it gets, with more than a little spice and plenty of seasoning. I dug the flavor from the oil, which they must cook at a lower temp to avoid a bitter, singed crust. Olive oil burns somewhere around 320F. It’s not perfect as the chicken was overdone and not moist enough, but I’d rather more flavor and a super great crust than have a particularly great bird on the inside (LeRoy’s). Recommended for shizzle. It’s right next door to Honey Pig in a newer strip mall. Free Wi-Fi.

I also wanted noodles so I hit up Dan Moo Ji, where I feel about as old and boring as a white guy can feel in Duluth. They’re chock full of young and good looking Korean youngsters, sucking down noodles, and watching Biebs videos on the television. And apparently writing cutesy stuff on the walls. Tee hee hee!

Gratis pickled radish and broth (good even on a hot day) to start.

I started with kimchi gimbap, which is reminiscent of a maki roll. They aren’t mind blowing, but it’s a nice way to get your kimchi and rice fix in bite size form. They’re cheap too.

I also ordered the cold noodles with vegetables and spicy sauce, jjolmyeon. I had not read Jen’s post since last year, and I was definitely put off for a moment when the petite waitress asked me if she could mix up my bowl.

Though I was confused as to why she thought I couldn’t mix my noodles up with my chopsticks, I said sure, and she proceeded to put on a plastic glove and dove her hand into the bowl. As she man-handled my noodles, she gazed at me and asked, “How do you know about this place?”

To which I replied, “the internet.”

“Ah”, she said, as if that made perfect sense.

Just like that my first, and best, handle noodle mixing job was over. I hope it was good for her too.

The noodles were great, super chewy and a bunch of sauce ended up on my shirt as I had difficulty snapping the strands with each bite. Appropriate spice level, I think. Plenty leftover to take home too.

After all that fried chicken and carbs I made a veggie plate for dinner. Tomatoes with chive and balsamic. Pink eye peas with pimienton and a shot of good sherry vinegar. Mandoline sliced squash quickly marinaded in chili oil. And yuzu kosho dosed cauliflower mash (sort of a play on the old horseradish mashed potatoes of twenty years ago). Katie and I were quite pleased with this impromptu and quickly produced meal. Summer vegetable season is a great one.

The Key West space has been much improved, creating a more open feeling in the front dining room. The bar in the back looks nice too and has a few tables in the surrounding area. In general, I like it more than the old location.

The menu is the same as far as I can tell. I ordered a steak with chimichurri for $12. The flank steak had deep knife scores across the width, relaxing the connective tissue and allowing the seasonings to penetrate the tougher cut of meat. It was served over a bed of fries, but also came with two sides. It was served with a scallion and garlic heavy chimichurri sauce that was too oily and just ok. I prefer more cilantro and parsley. For $12 I thought it an oustanding value, and I really enjoyed the steak.

I’m hesitant to post this god awful picture, but here ya go.

Chili has been on my mind. It is every winter, especially when it comes time for our annual chili cook-off. We hope to have a lot of attendees this year. Hopefully we have solved some of last year’s logistical issues due to having so many people/entrants. As there are a lot of details to plan, I don’t really get to spend much time preparing what I hope will be the winning chili, but I still kick around a few ideas and try out some new recipes in the kitchen.

This one is the first time I’ve tried a vegetarian chili, based on a recipe from 101 Cookbooks. This was the best vegetarian chili I’ve tasted. Very spicy, but also hearty with a texture reminiscent of a classic meat-based chili. I added a puree of porcini mushroom and guajillo chili for body. I like to think it helped round out the flavors. The recipe goes something like this:

• Saute onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent
• Soak porcini and dried guajillo peppers in hot water
• Meanwhile, mix seasonings as you see fit – chili powder, cumin, cayenne, Mexican oregano, paprika, salt
• Add seasonings to pan and stir for a few minutes to activate
• Add a can of crushed or chopped tomatoes with liquid, bring to a boil
• Add lentils and farro
• Add 1 can of beer and a few cups of water, return to boil, then simmer (add more water as needed during cooking)
• In a blender, puree the porcinis & guajillo with some of the reserved soaking liquid
• Add the puree as well as some of the soaking liquid to the chili
• The chili is done when the lentils are cooked, but still somewhat firm. Season to taste. Add canned beans if you prefer.
• As with most chili, it’s better after a day or so

I bought a whole duck at Buford Highway Farmer’s market. Whole, as in, the duck’s head and feet were still attached and its tongue was hanging out of its mouth. It cost $15.

I’ve had never purchased a whole duck, but I proceeded to break it down similar to a chicken. I cut off the head and feet. Then I popped the thigh joint out and cut the thigh/leg away from the body. Then I stood it up and cut down the breast bone to remove breast meat, one side at a time. I made sure to leave the fat on the breasts, then I wrapped them and froze them.

You can see in the photo that only one thigh/leg has fat on it. I planned on making confit with those, and call me stupid but I wasn’t actually sure if I should leave the fat on the thighs when doing confit. I could have easily looked it up, but I have a friend/cooking mentor who talks about experimenting in the kitchen and learning on your own versus reading about it. You get to see with your own eyes why something does or does not work. So I went with one with fat, one without. The rest of the fat on the duck went to rendering fat, which is the picture below.

I strained the fat through cheese cloth, and was left with roughly six ounces of rendered fat. It wasn’t enough to cover the duck for confit, so I used olive oil for the remaining quantity needed. I cooked it in the oven at 190F for 6-7 hours.

The rest of the duck went into a stock, which I slowly simmered and skimmed occasionally for four hours. Once it was about a quart of water, I thrice strained it, then put it back into a sauce pan and simmered it for over an hour, until it was reduced into a demi-glace, maybe 1/4 cup in volume.

I used a tablespoon of the stock to make a quick sauce for some marrow beans, which I served with the confit. The demi-glace can produce a deeply flavored pan sauce in a matter of minutes.

Next time I’ll buy a few ducks to make better use of the time involved in all of this. Doing it all for one duck isn’t really a great return, but it was a fun learning experience.

One cool item I picked up from Caw Caw is smoked slab bacon, or “bacon ends”, the large chunks of trimmings from when the belly is cut after it has been cured and smoked. Pieces of bacon this large are hard to come by, and it has some great applications. Frisee au lardon and carbonara were the first uses.

Then I tried to get a little creative. Once I added large crispy pieces to a warm tomato salad.

Another day when I started thinking about how to make a good vegetable based burger, I thought to myself that just because the burger is a vegetable patty, it doesn’t have to be vegetarian.

I thinly sliced carrot and onion and sauteed them in oil, added white wine to deglaze, and finished up the sauce with butter and veal demiglace. I threw it in the processor with peas, basil, black beans, the crispy bacon, and some salt and pepper.

I formed a patty and seared it in a pan on very heat heat.

Besides the fact that there was way too much moisture, it was relatively successful. The flavor was a little smoky, plenty salty, it had good body, and I really liked the aroma from the basil. I’d like to try this again and make it drier and thinner so it can retain it’s shape while eaten.

I had some leftover filling which was perfect in a breakfast burrito the next day.

Why do all vegetable based burgers have to be for vegetarians? I think it would be cool/unique if a restaurant in town had a badass non-vegetarian veggie burger.

Months ago I attended a fantastic multicourse dinner by Decatur Wine and Food Dude, and though all the dishes were impressive, I was blown away by the French Laundry salad of haricots verts, tomato tartare, and chive oil. The concentrated flavor of the tomato is explosive while remaining natural. The cool whipped beans, the glowing chive oil, and the impressive presentation send it over the top. I knew I was going to make this dish someday, and Dude was kind enough to send me the recipe last week.

The tomato confit recipe is readily available online, and you can pretty much follow the complete salad creation process on the French Laundry at Home blog. I didn’t bother with the tomato powder as I didn’t have enough time to experiment with the notoriously finicky process.

This post really only follow the process of creating the tomato confit, which is some incredible stuff that you should try, whether or not you want to make this salad. I used the extra confit as a soup garnish, spread it on toast, and I ate spoonfuls of it by itself. It’s that good. Though tomatoes aren’t in season, the slow roast extracts puckering sweetness from even the blandest of grocery store tomatoes.

Step 1: Beer (name on glass optional)

Step 2: core the stem end, score the opposite end

Step 3: Pour boiling water on the tomatoes

Step 4: Quickly drain and allow them to cool until you can peel them

Step 5: Cut the naked tomatoes into quarters, length wise, and scrape out the seeds and loose flesh

Step 6: Lay tomato “petals” on a line baking sheet, drizzle olive oil, dust with salt and fresh chopped thyme for 2-3 hours at 250 degrees

Step 7: Store the tomatoes in a bowl, pouring the oil from the pan over them – refrigerate for up to 1 week

I used this biscuit cutter to plate the salad, which begins with the chopped tomatoes, shallot, and balsamic vinegar

The beans are blanched and folded into the red wine vinegar laced, lightly whipped cream. The beans are stacked on the tartare, followed by a handful of salad. The plate is finalized with the chive oil, which is simple to make and looks gorgeous.

I started by making refried beans. I had some Rancho Gordo black beans soaking in a water/garlic/bay leaf mixture from the previous day. Shown beside it are the Napa-based Rancho Gordo Rosa de Castilla beans, part of a joint venture called the Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc project, a partnership with Mexican bean growers to promote and ensure the survival of heirloom Mexican bean varietals. 

You can get a lot of great bean cooking ideas from the RG blog. The next day I ended up sautéing the rosa de castilla beans in bacon fat with onions. These beans are fantastic. You can buy RG beans online for $5-6 a package, or you can also pick them up at Star Provisions for $8.50 a package. $5 a package is expensive, but you get a lot of varietals that you won’t find around Atlanta, and the taste is 300% better than store brand beans.

I also ordered some Mexican oregano from RG, which has a slightly stronger and more distinct oregano flavor.

The beans weren’t quite tender yet, so I sautéed some onions and garlic, then added the beans, water, fresh ground cumin, chile powder and cayenne until they were soft and the liquid was almost totally reduced. Actually, these black beans never really got as tender as I wanted. And I cooked them a long time, probably an hour, adding water a few times.

I don’t have a masher, so I used my “mallet”, which also has the potential to be the most dangerous weapon in my kitchen. I mashed up the bean mixture, added some olive oil, and turned up the heat to finish the beans.

While all of this was going on, I also cooked some bacon and crisped potato cubes. I began creating the burritos – tortillas, then refried beans, then queso, potato, and bacon.

Followed by rice and scrambled egg. When I cooked the scrambled egg, I cooked it like an omelet, keeping it in one large piece. My thinking is that there would be less surface area of egg exposed to the deep freeze, so there’s less chance of textural issues when they are reheated.

I ended up making five burritos.

I ate one right away.

And froze the other four. I wrapped them tightly in aluminum foil. I should have wrapped them first in plastic wrap, then in aluminum foil, as the aluminum foil stuck to parts of the burritos when I tried to unwrap them later.

Here is a frozen burrito. The frozen bean end looks gross. I cooked it in the microwave for three minutes at 70% power. Don’t ask me why I selected 70%. I’m slightly neurotic about choosing microwave power levels. I come up with all sorts of internal justifications regarding why I chose a particular setting. “I’m warming up a pint of chili? Well Jimmy, we don’t want to cook the exterior of the chili, we want to slowly warm the chili, followed by a quick nuke to ensure the chili surface is hot enough to melt shredded cheese. Let’s go four minutes at 40%, followed by sixty seconds at 100%”.

Guess what, they were pretty good. I ate one almost every day for the following six days, and I never noticed a degradation of quality from day one to day six. The eggs didn’t even taste weird. I wish I had used more cheese, which I think helps balance out the rice and beans, which get a bit dry upon reheat. But additional salsa helps with that too.

I drive to South Carolina one morning every week, so these were especially convenient for that trip. Right before I jettisoned Atlanta, I microwaved the burrito, wrapped it in foil, and went on my way. It was still warm by the time I hit Monroe, GA.

Burrito success!

I started by soaking beans. I go with the quick soak method, whereby you bring the beans to a boil then remove them from the heat and let them sit for two hours. This is quicker than letting them soak in cold water overnight.

After the soak the beans are cooked until tender with garlic, sage, pepper, and olive oil. I really don’t think this imparts much flavor on the beans, but the cooking liquid will be used later in the dish, so I guess it helps out there.

When that was done I cooked the sausage. Rather than just slicing it up in the casing, I removed the casings and tore the pieces into various sizes. I got the idea from the wonderful soup I had at Bocado.

I broke up some canned Roma tomatoes by hand and added them to the pan with sage and a cup of the bean cooking liquid.

Then add the beans.

The beans will thicken up the sauce.

And done. Very good, simple, and rustic.

One thing I love about Christmas is our family traditions. For instances, Christmas morning we always follow the same protocol. As soon as we get up and we’re ready to open up gifts, the breakfast egg/sausage/cheese casserole goes in the oven, and we start opening up presents. We set a kitchen timer, and when the alarm goes off, this marks the gift opening interlude. We head to the kitchen for a quick bite, then we go back to the tree and continue with the gifts.

The great thing about these breakfast casseroles are that you can prepare them the night before, so there’s no cooking Christmas morning. It pairs fabulously with mimosas. Here’s a Mexican version from Emeril that I’ve had a few times, and is very good. 

Jumping backwards to Christmas eve dinner, my mom made her baked clams. Butter, breaded clam goodness, I think I could eat a dozen of these as a starter. Even before I loved seafood, these have always been a “mom favorite” of mine.

This year we had a special dish for Christmas Eve – cassoulet. My mom spent days sourcing the ingredients and preparing the duck confit, following the Les Halles method of preparation.

It’s not a cheap dish to prepare from scratch, but if you want to cut down on costs and time, you can order the D’Artagnan kit. It was awesome. Duck fat, pork belly, garlic sausage, and Tarbais white bean goodness.

We paired this with the ‘03 Domaine Bois De Boursan Chateaunuef du Pape. This wine was still extremely astringent, but with tons of fruit, and a looooong finish. I saved a glass and it continued to get a bit smoother and more intriguing as the night went on.

We also sipped on this Windy Oaks Pinot Noir that evening. Pure California Pinot, it had the overt jammy ripeness of a quality California Pinot, but with enough dirt to make it interesting to me.

Over the holiday my parents also soaked a cured country ham over a few days (changing the water multiple times to remove the excess salt), then roasted it to finish it. We were gnawing on this bad boy the entire holiday.

With Christmas day dinner I made the Ad Hoc at Home celery root with melted onions, a dish that I’ve tried twice now. It’s extremely rich (don’t ask how much butter is in it), but it’s a nice accompaniment with red meat, and a welcome change from the normal starch side dishes. I haven’t cooked with celery root until recently, and I love the aromas when it’s cooking. Celery root needs to be added to your repertoire if it isn’t already.

The last few years we’ve done an herb crusted New York strip roast for Christmas dinner. It’s not an inexpensive cut of meat, but it’s super easy and elegant at the center of the table.

With dinner we had a magnum of ‘02 Trespass Cab. Delicious California juice that went perfectly with the New York strip roast.

What are your family cooking traditions for the holidays?

I can’t believe it’s already Christmas. It always sneaks up on me. So is it any shock that I’m behind on buying gifts?

This Saturday I made a mad dash to try to wrap up my Christmas shopping, plus I needed to buy some stuff for a cheesy Christmas sweater/pot luck party that night. Instead of cooking I decided to get a spread of charcuterie and cheese from Star Provisions, but on my way there, I hit a pothole (seen above) on Huff Rd. and blew out two tires. Merry Christmas.

So as I sat there in my car waiting for a tow truck, across from the street from a speaker store that was blasting rap music in the parking lot (“I wanna, lick lick lick lick ya from ya head to ya toe”), thinking about how this was some sort of penance for prior sins, when I realized I was walking distance from urban pl8.

I walked over to find they were still serving brunch. I contemplated eating in so I could relax with a bloody mary, but decided missing the tow truck would be the icing on the cake, so I ordered huevos rancheros to go, then sat in my car and ate while the apartment complex security guard curiously watched me from afar.

I enjoyed the breakfast. Two corn tortillas with two sunny side eggs, salsa, refried beans, sour cream, and cilantro. You can’t really see the beans in the picture, but that was the best part. They created a refried bean cake and cooked it on a griddle so that it was crusty on the top and bottom. The salsa was above average too. Recommended. Also, the staff at urban pl8 are super nice.

The tow truck finally arrived and towed me to Gordy Tires, across from Flip. A little over $400 later, and I was on my way.

I finally did get that charcuterie at SP. It was a hit at the party.

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This photo has nothing to do with this story, but it’s my Sunday breakfast from this weekend. I’ve been making rice bowls a lot for breakfast since our house got a rice cooker. They are great for using up vegetables in the fridge. This one is rice + bacon + asparagus sautéed in bacon fat + two poached eggs + sriracha + soy sauce. Delicious.