Spam Candy

After the decent reception of my bacon candy recipe of a couple of weeks ago-

(Bacon Candy)

I decided to further push the envelope of candied, processed pork products when I came across a random can of Spam in my pantry. I have had it for quite some time now for what purpose I do not know.



With the expiration date of February of 2010 rapidly approaching I felt the need to make some use of this classic American pork delicacy. It seemed to me that the sweet/savory tastiness of the bacon candy application would work equally well with Spam. However, as I have never actually eaten Spam before the success or miserable failure of this was up in the air. The unholy alliance between pork and sugar has not let me down yet, so I hoped for the best.



I decided to attempt two candying methods on the spam. The first was to cook the stuff down in a simple syrup, and the second was identical to the method that I used on the bacon. I began by cracking open the Spam can and shimmying out the quivering, jelly covered cube of pork. I was not really surprised that it smelled like ass, but I was a little shocked at the vibrant pinkness of the meat.



I cut the Spam up into thin, lozenge shapes about the size of a Squirrel Nut Zipper or a Mary Jane. Slightly unsettling was the resemblance of Spam pieces to human tongues. I threw the pork bits into a shallow bath of brown sugar syrup and set it to boil at a medium heat.



Pretty soon a lot of the moisture had boiled away and I really had to start watching the porky brew. You do not want the smell of burnt sugar and spam floatin' around your kitchen, wakin' up your maniacal pregnant wife sleeping in the other room. You really want to boil off as much of the water as you can though.



After they looked about done, I took the spam candy out and let it cool on a slightly oiled piece of aluminum foil. These little guys actually looked kind of innocuous, and they actually smelled kind of good.



When well cooled the Spam candy was fairly brittle, kind of like peanut brittle. I have decided to call this variation Spam Brittle. The verdict on these was fairly satisfactory. They had a nice porky flavor and were very sweet, a little mushy in the center, but overall kind of good. They looked pretty cool as well.



For the second Spam candy experiment I cut the pork into similar shapes and crisped them a little in some butter.



When they were lightly browned, I sprinkled on some of the brown sugar. I was going for more of a caramel thing with these guys as opposed to the hard candy type of the first method. After the sugar melted a little I flipped them over and sugared the other side.



These came out fairly crispy with a nice caramel/buttery flavor. Again, I was surprised about the fact that these were pretty good and almost normal tasting.



All in all I think that the Spam Brittle and Candied Spam were a success. They are pretty good munched by themselves, but I am currently trying to come up with a baking/pastry application. I have a couple of ideas, so look forward to a reappearance of these pink, porky delights in the near future.

The Weekly Excuse to Eat Bacon

Sometimes, if done well, dishes comprised of only a few ingredients are better than complex froo froo recipes. The following snack has only 3 ingredients but was good as hell.

I picked up some nice looking peppers at the store, some red ones and some of the green frying ones. I am big on peppers, and they were on sale. Also on sale was fresh mozzarella. The store I go to seems to consistently overstock fresh mozzarella, and hence, when it is close to its expiration date it sells mighty cheap. I got a couple tubs of mozzarella balls for 1.79$ a pop. Anyone wanna guess what else was on sale? Bacon! I can't resist cut-rate bacon, so I grabbed a package. Out of these three finds was born a satisfyingly fattening snack.

First I roasted the peppers until they were soft and pliable, but not total mush.



While the peppers where cooling, I got the cheese and bacon ready. Following is gratuitous meat/cheese porn.



After removing the seeds from the peppers I stuffed them full of mozzarella and then tightly wrapped each pepper in 2 or 3 slices of bacon. I attempted to prevent oozing cheese by securing the bacon with skewers.



These went into the oven at 425 for like 20 minutes at which time the bacon was temptingly crisped and delicious looking. I was happy to note that there was only minimal cheese seepage.



After letting them cool for a while, I deskewered one and dug in. I am not going to lie, these were pretty good. This would work great as a substantial first course along with some crusty bread and some beer or wine. They were equally good at room temperature, and also somewhat easier to eat. If they were not full of so much delicious fat I would put these guys into a heavy dietary rotation.

Wild Boar Bar-b-q

To continue on my recent theme of cooking meat that is less than common I picked up a small rack of wild boar ribs at the local weird meat mart. I originally tossed around the idea of cooking these char-siu style, but I thought that this might mask the flavor of the meat too much. When trying a new type of flesh I like to really get a sense of the quality and flavor and I don't want too much other stuff monkeying with it. If I am eatin' some boar, I wanna be tastin' some real boar flavor. I decided to use a more traditional dry rub on the ribs.

I used some brown sugar, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper.



The rack of boar ribs did not look too much different from a rack of normal pork. It was slightly smaller and the meat was a little darker. There was a fairly thick layer of fat on the surface of the ribs so I kind of cross hatched them to let a little of the fat cook off.



I liberally applied the spice rub to both sides of the rack and put in the fridge to dry marinate overnight.



As I (unfortunately) do not have a pit smoker in my apartment I had to make do and cook the ribs in the oven. I put them in a 250 degree oven with a pan of water on the bottom rack for about 3 hours. I make a lot of fake barbecue in my oven using this method, the pan of water creates some steam which seems to keep the meat a little moister. I basted the ribs every half-hour or so with some apple cider vinegar with some Tabasco mixed in.



The ribs came out looking pretty good. I especially liked the way the meat pulled back from the bones. It kind of made it look like I did a French-cut on them. I was surprised at how tiny the bones were, I thought boars were large and fearsome beasts. I cut the rack up and threw it on a plate with a roasted sweet potato with some butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon.



Verdict: There really was not much extreme about this dish, it was actually kind of unremarkable. The flavor of the boar is less porkier than pork, its taste is a little red meatier, but the consistency and texture is pretty much the same as pork ribs. I generally enjoyed the ribs but found them to be a little tame. All in all the boar was a nice change of pace and at only seven dollars a rack it is a little less expensive than some other exotic meats. When I was buying this meat I saw a frighteningly large filet of python that I was hankering to buy, but it was like 40 bucks! Maybe next week.

Pepto-Pismo

After our trip to Cooperstown I wanted to quaff my haul of Ommegang Three Philosophers with a fitting meal. A while ago I had seen Alton Brown butcher up a beef tenderloin on the Food Network and I had been hankerin' to try my hand at doing it. I recently joined BJ's (our local members only buy in bulk establishment), and I noticed that they had a big ol' pile of PSMOs (Peeled, Side Meat On- butcher talk for the primal cut from which the tenderloin of beef is cut). The beef was very reasonably priced at about 8.50$ a pound, so I thought why not? After getting back to Albany, I convinced the somewhat tired and cranky troops to come with me to grab a magnificent 9 pound pismo, all the while promising the unsurpassed meaty smörgåsbord of their dreams. Here is lovely meat-snake, shrink wrapped and bathed in its meaty liqour.



Tearing the thing open and draining the juice into the sink I realized that this was going to take a little while. Besides the side muscle, which comes off fairly easily, there is a lot of surface fat and silver skin. Silver skin is a serious pain in the balls to cut off and you can really make a mess of the filet-proper if you are not careful. I started by cutting off the large side muscle found on the big end, and followed that by lopping off the long meaty rope thing which runs the length of the tenderloin(I believe butchers call this the "chain"). After exposing the tenderloin I carefully removed the silver skin and excess fat and was left with a beautiful red tube of buttery filet mignon. Below is the results of my amateur butchery. You are left with the tenderloin as well as a hearty amount of high quality stew meat to be used in delicious stews and chilies at your leisure.



From the tenderloin portion I managed to extract 5 beautiful filet-mignons of substantial size, as well as a couple baby tournados. To buy these puppies pre-butchered at your local supermarket's butcher section of cellophaned horrors you would probably pay more than what I dished out for the entire pismo, and you would not be left with all of the delicious scraps!



I threw these suckers onto my wee charcoal grill with nary a seasoning save salt and pepper. They were so fresh and delicious looking that any further nonsense would have been criminal. I had to throw a couple fat lengths of kielbasi on there for my wife who is squeamish about rare meat. I would rather shoot off my grilling-tong hand then cook a filet past medium-rare so I had to make her a tasty alternative. I also had to resist making jokes about giving the kielbasi to my wife.



About 6 minutes on each side over pretty hot coals gave me a nice rare/medium-rare temperature. I set these in the kitchen to rest for a few minutes while I popped the cork on a wine bottle sized flagon of Three Philosophers. I decided to serve the steaks unaccompanied, in all their meaty glory, with no sauces or sides, and with nothing but the beer to wash them down.



Verdict: They were simply delicious. I ate two massive filets, as did Tom and Robin. We did not leave a single morsel of cooked beef on the plate, much to the chagrin of my 18 pound feline black boyfriend Brady. The pismo is totally worth the pretty substantial investment in time and duccets, I have not had a better steak outside of a restaurant. This is definitely something you could whip out a dinner party to wow the in-laws or your friends who have not beheld such luscious offerings of beef. I do recommend, however, that you serve some roughage with the meat. I think I woke up the next morning with some sort of meat hangover.

Cooperstown Invaded By Ravenous Turd Flies...

This weekend the rapidly expanding pregnant wife, some friends (Tom and Robin...now you are famous), and I decided to go to Cooperstown. Besides from being the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown is smack in the middle of upstate New York farm country and is actually a very scenically beautiful area. If you get past all the cheesy baseball themed ice cream/burger shacks it is a nice place to visit in the summer. Our original mission was to visit the Ommegang brewery, but we made a couple stops along the way.

Before leaving Guilderland we had to stop and get the wife a cheeseburger to prevent her from trying to eat my arm or the car upholstery or Robin. I did not partake, so after about an hour of driving I started to get a little hungry. We first stopped at a little cheese shop on the outskirts of Cooperstown that looked promising. I bought some Jersey Girl Raw Milk Colby made just up highway 88 in Worcester. At 3.99 for a giant hunk, this was the littlest I have paid for cheese of this quality in quite a while. This stuff was excellent and we devoured it in hunks whilst standing outside the store, probably to the horror of the nice old lady who ran the place who, incidentally, had just finished babbling out some story about her granddaughter making cheese curd sandwiches.



The cheese took the edge off my hunger but I was soon craving something more substantial. We drove by about 200 baseball themed restaurants serving items randomly assigned baseball references. You will get a coke, but instead of just coke it becomes Honus Wagner Coke or something else equally absurd. We ultimately decided on the Redneck Barbeque because I thought the name was funny.



I apologize for the generally poor quality of the following pictures, I was too busy dodging the hundreds of flies and wasps flying around the joint. Apparently, Cooperstown has a serious fly problem during this part of summer. Everywhere we went there were hordes of starving flies trying to enter our orifices. The guy who did the brewerey tour later in the day said this was becuase the local farmers were fertilizing their fields this week. This led me to decide the the flies were actually called turd flies.

The menu at the Redneck Barbeque, as well as the decor, were definitely weird.



We actually found an incident of "Engrish" that you would expect at a Chinese restaurant, not at a seemingly all-American barbeque shack in upstate New York. As close as I can figure the description of a sandwich called the "Elvis" is "Spotted banana lords sweetness honey and smucker all natural PB..." I still have no idea what any of this even means and no one ordered it.



For appetizers we started with some fries covered in melted cheese and jalapeno strips and some fried green tomatoes. Nothing impressive, but solid grub of the cheap and fried variety.



I had an interesting sandwich consisting of baked beans, fried egg, and cheddar. This was OK but kind of bland. The wife had a chicken sandwich and potato salad that she did not even finish, as she is pregant and not in the habit of leaving leftovers this does not speak well for the restaurant. Don't know that I will be stopping into this place again. I have a feeling that I might have consumed a few flies during this meal, I am not joking I have never seen that many flies in a restaurant in my life. I did see one of the younger waitresses pulling basil leafs off a plant growing in a pot outside which I liked. I like any evidence that a restaurant grows/produces and then serves something, even if it is just herbs.

After lunch we headed up to the Ommegang Brewery. I have been drinking this stuff for years starting in the late 90s during my days in New Paltz. Ommegang makes several varieties of very decent Belgian brew. The tour was a little underwhelming, I have worked in a brewery before so I kind of know the drill. I did not get much of a kick out of looking at brewing machinery, bottelers, etc... The tasting afterward was nice, considering the fact that it was gratis. They had some cheeses, chocolates, pickles, and pretzels to go with small samples of their beers. I was a little disappointed that there was not a bar or opportunity to consume beer in more substantial amounts. I had expected to leave the place thoroughly soused. I did pick up some of their Three Philosophers brew, an awesome church key, and a cool growler on my beautiful wife's dime. The Three Philosophers is a very tasty lambic style cherry deal. The cherry flavor is not overwhelming in the manner of many other fruit lambics that I have tried. It packs a wallop at 9.8% alcohol.



We finished the day with a nice dinner (which necessitates a further post). I always forget how much I like upstate New York. There is really decent farm country within an hours drive of where I live, but you don't have to deal with the strident, facist types you meet in similar areas down south or out west. I always get the urge to cut sling load and move out into the hills.

Kibby, Kibby, I like saying Kibby.....

The other day me and a few gents ate at a Lebanese restaurant in scenic downtown Troy. Come on now, I see you raising your eyebrow, downtown Troy is actually getting kind of nice. There are lots of really decent little restaurants in vicinity of River Street. As I have been working in Troy, I have been making a point of popping into every place I can find for lunch. This has led to some interesting lunches and gassy afternoons, but we won't get into the curry goat incident of last Wednesday at this time.

The Lebanese restaurant we ate at is called Al Baraki and was highly recommended to us by some guys who work down the hall. As I am wont to do at a new place, I ordered the special which was a kibby wrap. Kibby is the tasty national dish of Lebanon. It is beef/lamb mixed with bulghur, onions, and allspice. Usually it is served in a conical, fried fritter kind of deal. The wrap version I had was some squished Kibby with hummus and pickles on a thin flat bread. After eating this wrap I was instantly converted into a hardcore Kibby enthusiast and decided to eat it at least twice a day for the rest of my life. Following, is my attempt at an at home version that hopefully will save me from daily runs across the river for kibby fixes.

The first step is to soak a good cup or cup and a half of bulghur in cold water for about a half hour. Drain the grains and then squeeze the water out of them (I used a muslin cloth). Along with this you are going to need a pound and a half of lean ground beef, half of a large onion, a teaspoon of allspice, a half teaspoon of cumin, a hearty amount of salt, and pepper to taste.



Take the beef and bulghur with spices and seasonings and pulse in a food processor until well combined. Alternately, pound with a mortar and pestle for an hour until the right consistency is reached, apparently this is the traditional way of doing this business. Afterwards throw in the onion which should be finely minced. At this point you should have a giant meatball. As a footnote, kibby is traditionally eaten raw. Only the leftovers were cooked for the next day's meal. I somehow resisted the urge to go at the raw kibby ball with a fork and a bottle of Tabasco.



I flattened the ball-o-meat into a half inch thick rectangle and cut into square shaped patties.



These guys went into the oven at 450 for 20 minutes on a cookie sheet with oiled parchment. I don't think you want your kibby medium rare, it should be cooked through. When the kibby is done set aside to cool for a little bit. When you will no longer burn your fingers slice a pattie lengthwise into two quarter inch patties. I then took a flat bread, spread it with a couple tablespoons of good quality hummus, slapped down the kibby, and then topped it all off with some paper thin slices of kosher dill pickle.



This gets rolled up tightly into a delicious tube of beef and bulghur filled goodness.



Verdict: My version was no where near as good as the real thing at Al Baraki, but it was a reasonable facsimile and perfectly fine for home consumption. The consistency of my kibby was little firmer then what I had at the restaurant. I think that the cook there used a much fattier ground beef mixture, and I think he might even have browned his kibby on a griddle as opposed to in the oven. I think it will take me a couple more attempts to close in on Al Baraki's product.

Tonight I am plotting what to do with the rack of wild boar's ribs that has fallen into my hands, mwah ha ha.

Vealy Veal

I was walking through the grocery the other day and I spied some veal shoulder roasts for sale. I am not usually a fan of buying meats from big box supermarkets (we are lucky to have a sweet local butcher), but these looked reasonably fresh and were decently priced.



I was kind of perplexed about what I wanted to do with this beautiful hunk of baby cow. It is a fairly fatty piece of meat with lots of connective tissue and what not. A lot of people would tie it and braise it for a few hours at low temp and then serve it sliced. I personally have too many memories of dishes like this from Army chow halls the world over. It is common to get a fatty, gray slice of meat from god knows what kind of animal that has been braised in monkey urine and served with bland mashed potatoes. I decided to make a kind of twice cooked veal hoopty that I thought would come out good. First I browned the meat in my wee casserole.



I intended to first braise this in some home made stock, fresh onion, garlic, and carrot, but I got too lazy to go shopping. I had some canned chicken stock, canned tomatoes, and.....



Thats right folks, Goya Sofrito. I have always been a fan of the Goya family of products. They are cheap and tasty, and if they stopped putting MSG in everything I would use them all of the time. I randomly get pissed that they don't sell frozen Goya Papusas in the local P-Chops. Sofrito brings me back to my younger days of cooking when one was too drunk, hungover, poor...etc... to purchase and chop fresh vegetables. This is definitely a weird accompaniment to veal but hey, I will try anything once. I threw a few spoons of sofrito, a cup of stock, and a can of whole stewed tomatoes (crushed by hand in the sink, watch the squirty ones) into the casserole with the veal and gave it a good shake. I brought all of this to a boil and then threw in a 325 degree oven for around 3 hours. It looked and smelled pretty good when it came out.



I could see that there was a lot of fat floating around in there so I decided to chill it for a while so I could skim of it off. After chilling and discarding the fat, I kind of shredded the veal like you would do pulled pork or something. I decided to throw this back into the pot with some more stock and some chopped fresh tomatoes. Also, to give a little heat and flavor I threw in a couple healthy teaspoons of good quality (read expensive) Hungarian hot paprika.



The tomatoes are from my garden, I am very proud of them.



I simmered the mixture for another hour on the stove top. Towards the end, I threw in some beurre marnier to tighten up the liquid. When it was good and ready I whipped up some whole wheat couscous and ladled some of the stew on top.



Verdict: I actually really liked this. It was good and spicy and went well with the couscous. The veal was a little too tender, it almost became merely a texture component in a spicy tomato sauce. Next time I might cut the roast into chunks and brown those to make a more traditional kind of stew. Hopefully I won't get any headaches from the MSG in the sofrito.

Summer Eatin' In The '518'

Two summer activities that are dear to every Hudson River Valley boy worth his salt from the Albany/Guilderland area are the Altamont Fair and the Saratoga Racetrack. Every summer since I can remember I have spent a couple weekends a summer at each and many good memories of drinkin', eatin', and gamblin' have been had. The food at the fair and the track, while not sophisticated or particularly refined, sparks cravings every time I have to miss a summer season due to my gallivanting. I thought I would document one particularly cheese sauce soaked weekend that me and my wife just shared.

Firstly, the old lady and I piled in the old RAV 4 and headed north across the Twins (Thaddeus Kosciusko Bridge) into the abysmal traffic that must be endured on the way to the Saratoga Racetrack. I always have mild coronaries in the car once embedded in the gridlock in Saratoga proper. This always subsides into a pleasant feeling of expectation when you get up to the main gate. There is absolutely nothing I like more in the world then drinking beer while eating cheese fries while gambling on horses.



In case you don't know, Saratoga is supposedly the birth place of the potato chip. You know the story about the Indian and the Ornery customer and the home fries, blah blah blah... You actually walk up Potato Chip Lane going towards the gates which is pretty funny. There is a booth that sells traditional "Saratoga Chips" which are pretty awesome. They are fresh fried potato chips which are thicker than you usually get, served warm with cheese sauce. The best ones are found at the bottom of your order and are soft and kind of chewy from sitting under their hot greasy brother chips.



Nathan's Famous is another fixture at the track. The hot dogs need no description because if you don't know what a Nathan's dog is all about, you have problems that won't be solved here. I take mine with kraut and mustard, ketchup is for deviants (except for my wife who drinks the stuff). The cheese fries are what I am all about while at the track. There is something about eating a large order of crinkle cut fries, drenched in cheese sauce, with a tiny, red, two-pronged fork all the while swilling cheap beer that is life affirming.



Another favorite of mine is the Manhattan Clam Chowder they serve at the little kiosk under the grandstands. The soup contains some vegetable matter which helps me feel a little better about all of the oil, meat, and cheese consumed earlier.



Me and my wife share one order which is comprised of cardboard tray, 2 plastic soup spoons, 2 packs of saltines (they howl and throw hot soup in your eyes if you ask for more crackers), and one nice sized cup of molten, red chowder. This stuff is surprisingly good, I think they actually thicken it with a real butter rue.



That is pretty much the highlights of the track food. This was a particularly good day as I hit a Trifecta and Exacta on the same race for a cool 75 clams.

The Altamont Fair is another classic in this area. It reminds you of the truly rural nature of parts of upstate New York. This deal is all about 4H exhibits, FFA contests, poultry/livestock beauty contests, etc... Here is my bud who I named "Crazy Legs McChicken".



It is an old-timey festival of Americana that I fear will not survive intact for too much longer. Also, if you are a fan of mutant, creepy, Carnies than the Altamont Fair is definitely the place to be. All of the usual suspects of Fair food are represented on the fairway.



We started with a paper cone full of roasted cashews and a small bag of Squirrel Nut Zippers, but unfortunately we mowed them before they could be documented on film. No matter, we soon stopped at another kiosk advertising Rib Eye Sammitches'. This tickled my fancy and I was not let down. This sandwich was made with a single thin slice of recognizable rib-eye steak. It was thrown on the grill and left in one piece, not chopped up a la cheese steak. Topped with peppers and onions and served on a grilled hot dog bun it was delicious. My wife had a surprisingly tasty Chicken Pita at the same joint. We shared an order of cheese covered shoestring fries and a fresh squeezed lemonade. All in all an impressive fair lunch.



Later I had to photograph a bizarre looking funnel cake that someone was about to consume. It was covered in multiple dollops (globs) of fluorescent preserves of unknown pedigree. I am not a big funnel cake fan, and this frightened me a little. However, I did get a weird urge to steal it and throw it at my wife, I don't know why.



All in all, this was my ideal summer weekend and was much welcomed after 21 work days without a break. I gained 3 pounds and won about 150 bucks. If that is the wrong way to spend a Saturday and Sunday, well, I just don't want to be right.