Month: July 2010

delicious li’l pork meatballs

Today I made some tiny meatballs and miniburgers out of:

1 lb ground pork
5 soaked and minced shiitake caps
a minced scallion
juice from a thick slice of ginger
2 or 3 tablespoons of oyster sauce
ground pepper
a crust of multigrain bread
1 egg

I browned ’em in peanut oil, and I just had some now as a snack, and they came out pretty good. Good with rice, Asiany in flavor but not so much so that they won’t also be tasty with the peas-and-turnips in butter I’m making next. Nom.

hit and miss at The Publick House

I really enjoy The Publick House in Brookline. It has awesome beer and very good french fries, and a congenial atmosphere. (I enjoy nerdy beer snobbery.) But it does seem there’s a spottiness to the quality or at least the execution.

The french fries are even better than last time, which would have been difficult, but now they are *crunchier*. I didn’t detect quite as much meaty flavor, which makes me wonder if they changed cooking fat. If so, I guess I am willing to trade crunch for porkiness. And the sauces, good lord, the sauces: truffle oil mixed into ketchup. garlic mayo. spicy mayo. mayo-mustard whatever it is. YUM.

But my arugula salad with duck cracklings really missed the mark. The cracklings tasted off, stale, as if the fat was old or they’d been sitting around. It made the otherwise acceptable baby arugula mostly unpalatable, and I would go further to say that the goat cheese didn’t do the duck flavor (even had it been at its best) any favors. Bummer.

The ribeye was delicious, with a bit of truffley butter and an unusual and surprisingly complementary diced salad of minted tomato and cucumber, but its shaved potato gratin wasn’t sufficiently cooked. Just because you cut a potato paper thin, y’all, doesn’t mean you get to skip out on cooking the damn thing. I dunked it into the truffley ketchup and ate it anyway, but it bummed out the tallasiandude.

All was forgiven, though, because the Rodenbach beer was so terrific. It’s a Flemish red ale, light in body and extremely easy to drink, especially on a hot day, with a strongly sour flavor, almost like a citrus drink but with more complexity and a bit of bubble and bitter. Absolutely delightful, and just the thing for me after a long couple of days at work getting to a release deadline. Hurray!

summer vegetable yum, right quick

Cut up about 3 summer squashes (yellow/zucchini/whatever) and an onion into large dice. Sweat the onion in a scant tablespoon of bacon fat (or butter or olive oil), then add 2 large cloves minced garlic and the squash. Sprinkle with Lawry’s seasoned salt, and let cook, stirring occasionally, till squash is almost tender. Dump in a bag of Trader Joe’s Soy-cutash, grind in some pepper, add a little more Lawry’s if needed, and cook till hot and squash is tender.

Eat over rice with grated cheddar. Yum.

clove buds rendered in gold and diamonds

Padma Lakshmi has a new line of jewelry, and all of it is pretty, but one item in particular stands out. She made a pair of earrings in the shape of clove buds, with square diamonds in the center. They’re pretty just as abstract organic shapes, but food nerds will almost certainly recognize them as cloves immediately, and that makes them so much more awesome. Why have plain diamond earrings when you can have FOOD-shaped diamond earrings?