Home Made Absinthe

Around this time every year I am usually fermenting grapes from the backyard. But the rats got them before I did, I mean every single grape, before they were ripe. Oh well, I guess they have to eat too. But I did manage to find some bottles of wine from last year and had a pleasant day making absinthe. It is not only local but small batch to a ridiculous degree as you can see. If the wine was about 12% I guess this is not bad for three bottles. It was soaked with dried Artemisia absinthium, which a friend brought me (the only imported ingredient) with herbs from the backyard including southernwood (a close relative), rue, sage, bay, beebalm and fennel. Then distilled. It was the slowest distillation I've ever done, not sure why. Maybe it was all the herbiage. Next to it is the tiniest batch of distilled mead made from 2 lbs of local honey. I'm not sure if anyone on earth does make a honey distillate, and I can certainly understand why they wouldn't. From about 1.5 liters of mead I got a few shots of hooch, which I guess makes sense if it was about 5%.

Njera

 How to Make Njera
Start with some teff, a tiny Ethiopian grain and pound it furiously in a stone mortar until you have flour. Or you can buy teff flour. Any good health food store will have both. Put about a cup of the flour in a bowl and add water until you have a smooth batter. Cover with a towel. The next day add a little more teff flour and water. Continue for one week adding more each morning. It will be sour and smell funky. Next heat a very large non stick skillet and generously daub with butter. Make sure your batter is quite thin, add a pinch of salt too. Pour in about a cup of batter and swirl around so the entire pan is evenly covered. It will hiss and sizzle and little holes will appear. Cover the pan briefly to steam through. You don't need to turn it over or flip, just carefully remove with a spaluta and set aside on a platter. It will be nice and tart and chewy. On top you put little piles of stewed lentils, spicy stewed chicken (doro wat) and cauliflower or okra. Anything. You eat by tearing off little bits of the njera and picking up mouthfuls of the food.

Blood, Sweat and Ears

I don't need to show you what this actually looks like in the flesh, but it is a chili, based on blood, pig ears, pork belly, onions and other odds and ends. I was fully prepared to make a raw vegan chili. (YES! Just for the challenge!) And then I found it already made and my kitchen preoccupied all morning. SO what can I do but go the utter opposite direction? It's for a chili contest tonight.

The cover parodied here is a post BS&T era album of recovered recordings. I dare you to listen to some of their best songs, absolutely fantastic. And after tasting this chili just now, this is too. Tastes like chocolate, which is SO weird because there is none in it. Just smooth, really dark, a little bitter, some sweetness, iron, spice. And nibblie bits of ear. Wonder if I could make this into a candy bar? Notice the blood stain on the poster too!

Schmaltzerdoodles: Duck Fat Onion Cookies

Begin by finely dicing one small onion and brown very gently in duck or chicken fat with a good pinch each of salt and thyme. Let cook about 30 minutes on the lowest heat possible, stirring often. Then place in a separate small bowl and chill thoroughly in the freezer, at least 20 minutes.


Take one cup of well chilled solid duck or chicken fat and cream in one cup of coarse grained unrefined sugar. Add one egg, a capful of vanilla and a dash of cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg. Add in the chilled onions, a handful of crushed walnuts and enough flour to make a dough you can roll into balls. The more flour you add, the more cakey they will be. The less you add, the crisper. Roll out small balls and place them on a baking sheet lined with tinfoil. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. They will look and have the texture of Mexican wedding cookies, so sprinkle with powdered sugar if you like.

Makes 28-30 cookies. Serve with good bourbon, sit on the porch and enjoy at about 5:00 on a Sunday afternoon on the first day of fall.

Another interview for RTV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rToJxtjD6M&feature=player_embedded

Beef Middles

I forgot what a delight it is to use beef middles to make salami. It's been more than a year. They're maybe 2 1/2 inches in diameter, and you can simply place the chopped meat inside by hand and squeeze it down hard, because they don't break. These are pork on the periphery, some with fennel, some with chili pepper. In the center are beef and in the back left a pair of lomo, i.e. cured pork loin, which is actually very tricky to stuff. And to cure, it needs to soak with salt and spices a week or so in the fridge first. So how nice is having a cave stuffed with salami? About 20 pounds, in a few hours, without a single machine. A WHOLE lot of fun. Whatever works best I'll bring to the party for The Lost Arts in SF next month. So my recommendation: forget about small diamater beef rounds. Not worth the effort and they dry out way too much before the meat has a chance to cure and get a good sour bite. And Pig Middles, work fine, but they sure do stink! These barely smell at all.

Monteverdi

http://www.3sat.de/mediathek/?display=1&mode=play&obj=32345

This is a clip from a film about Monteverdi by Theo Roos. I'm in it.