FoodSexLit

Right now, I have a plethora of pork at my house: all the makings of a cassoulet.

Specifically, I have an heirloom pork shoulder from Seabreeze Farm slow-roasting in my oven, brown-wrapped packages of their handmade sausages and bacon on the top shelf of my refrigerator, two tubs of their meat and bone broth, and one precious quart of their duck stock.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, not even sex, (well, maybe writing, but we’ll ignore that for now) that matches the feeling I get when I arrive home with the makings of an entire meal or dish from the farmer’s market.

That feeling is one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog.  I instantly start thinking about

1) taking pictures of the food,

2) writing about the food, and

3) feeding someone said food.

For example, one memorable day this fall, when I was eagerly pursuing perfecting my stock technique, I bought all the ingredients for chicken stock: a huge plump free-range, organic chicken (from Seabreeze), and onions, carrots, celery, and parsley.  I did need to add the peppercorns, but they don’t grow those in Washington.  I mean, spice route, motherfucker.

As you know from my post last week, I have a restaurant-crush on Spring Hill.  In addition to having the element of surprise down, they cure their own pork belly.  I had some of it floating in their special saimin at their spectacular brunch after a particularly devastating weekend and a wicked hangover.  What is not fucking hot about pork belly?    Nothing.

Note: Look for a future blog entry—“Pork Belly Threesome”—coming later.

And yes, I have a meat crush on Seabreeze farm.

These last few weeks of winter, I’ve been craving meat: oxtail, liver, pork chops, pate.  So on Sunday at the Seabreeze stand, after I bought handmade ricotta, cream, milk, butter (raw milk butter!  So good!) and hard cheese from Seabreeze, along with two tubs of meat and bone broth, I eyed the thick-cut pork chops with their lovely white rim of fat.

But this week, I was craving a different kind of meat.  Pork chops weren’t going to meet (heheh) my needs.  I wasn’t sure what would satisfy me, but I knew I’d figure it out.  To buy myself some time, I ordered a hunk of pate studded with pistachios.

And then I saw what I needed, all pink and white and lusty—bacon.  I didn’t know what I would do with it, but even as I ordered it, even as I watched him slice me a thick slab of bacon, I suddenly had visions of it cut into cubes and sautéed in butter as the basis of a risotto.  Topped with blue cheese, of course.  Maybe apples too, also sautéed in butter.  And suddenly my imagination was working.

I’ve also been craving greens, so I stopped by Willie Green’s to get spinach and their braising mix—which would also be good tossed with sautéed cubes of bacon—and some of their decadent dried cannellini beans.

A word here about my imagination and Willie Green’s produce: I love to imagine the vegetables growing in the nutrient-rich dirt.  While I am no stranger to Safeway spinach, or O organics, I just know that food grown sustainably in gorgeous, well-maintained, pristine soil (“dirt in the stuff in your ears,” said my fifth grade teacher Sister Marie.  “Soil is what is on the ground”) is giving all those nutrients to my vegetables, which in turn go to my body. Which I use.  Daily.

Anyway, those dried beans put supermarket beans to shame.  They are big, sweet, luscious.  They melt in your mouth.  I also bought some of their onions.   And after I bought some tulips from Alm Hill Gardens, I headed home, where I unpacked my groceries, unwrapped the pate (it wasn’t even going to last 15 minutes), and started thinking.  Broth.  Beans.  Bacon.

If I go back, I mused, I could get those pork chops and make a version of a cassoulet.

As I’m sure you can tell, my meat crush on Seabreeze isn’t my first farmer’s market crush—or, as my friend Maddy said on few nights ago, my first time at the rodeo.   A few years ago, I had a vegetable crush on Willie Green’s organic farm.  I had a share, which meant every week I received a huge box of vegetables—whatever was in season.

My share introduced me to braising greens, numerous kinds of chard and kale, baby bok choy.  I received pristine onions and tiny carrots.   A huge Romanesco cauliflower that looked like something from outer space that I sliced thin, doused in olive oil, and roasted, as Molly Wizenberg suggested in their newsletter.  And mache, a French salad green.  Oh GOD.  Mache.

And of course, there were recipes from Jeff, the owner and a professional chef.  I never met Jeff.  Well, once.  It was a busy summer day.  He handed me my change.  I felt like I had had a brush with Dave Matthews.  After making Jeff’s food and reading his writing on a weekly basis, anticipating new recipes that would help me explore new foods and dishes, I felt like I knew him.  Like we were close and personal food friends.  Because of course, in addition to a meat crush and a vegetable crush, I also develop cookbook crushes—most notable are Nigel Slater, a British food writer, and Jerry Traunfeld of Herbfarm fame and now of Poppy.

Yes, they are both gay.  The mouth wants what it wants.

It was during the time of my love affair with Willie Green’s that I discovered Seabreeze.

I fell in love with their stock first.  I had given up on making my own and I bought a tub of theirs on a whim.

Just taking off the lid was like discovering what sex really was after years of thinking that a man just put his penis into a woman’s vagina and then just held it there without moving.  Hey, I was innocent once.

But I knew instinctively this was how stock was meant to be.  After using canned broth for so many years, using the stock from Seabreeze for the first time the first time you have sex with a really good lover—someone who knows what he was doing.  You’re like, Oh.  What the fuck was I doing before?  I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t sex.

“Like chicken jello,” George said, when I commented on its consistency, its heft, its jiggle.

But back to the cassoulet.  You know how there are foods you love to cook and feed to people, and you make them all the time, and then one day, you stop?  And then, years later, you ask yourself, “Why did I stop making that?”

That’s me with both pork loin and with cassoulet.

Maybe because I’m a writing teacher, my cassoulet was a “Revisionist Cassoulet” from Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook; the pork was “Honey-Cured with Peppery Juniper and Fennel Seed Rub” (also from Scheider’s book.)  

So now, years later, I’m rediscovering cassoulet, and I like to think I’m making a real one.  But I am doing what Wikipedia refers to in somewhat derogatory terms: a haute cuisine version, where I cook almost all the ingredients separately and then combine them, complete ignoring, as Wikipedia says, the peasant and rustic orgins of the dish.

What the fuck.  I just like clean flavors.  I love high quality ingredients.  I love preparing food simply.

A New Way to Cook is all about how to cook low-fat while still making luscious and decadent food.  Schneider has amazing techniques to help you develop flavor without extra calories.  And the revisionist cassoulet is the fucking bomb, as is the honey-cured pork loin.  However, the latter recipe was devised due to the institutionalization of pork and the breeding, breeding, breeding of pork to the point where it lost all flavor and texture.  At the time, I didn’t know where to find good meat.

And now I do.

So I’m slow-roasting the pork shoulder in a low-heat oven, and I just finished simmering the beans.  Tomorrow, I’ll get duck confit from Metropolitan market and heat the legs and their delicious, decadent fat slowly, alongside a roasting pan filled with the sausages from Seabreeze.  I haven’t decided yet how I’ll incorporate the bacon.

Then I’ll nestle everything together– the drained beans, the duck confit, the pork shoulder, the bacon, the sausages– into my 5 quart All Clad Dutch Oven, douse it all with the duck stock, then top it with the traditional bread crumb topping.  I’ll let it gently heat in my oven for a half-hour or so, and then serve it in big white bowls.

And I’ll make the bread-crumb topping from my old standby, the Revisionist cassoulet.  I’m still a writing teacher, after all.