Zombies, Yo! And Crispy Grilled Lamb....

Postprandial viewing on the wall next to our house, courtesy of Zora and Peter's PROJECTOR.
Aim for the head!



Oh jeebus...

It always starts with bacon, doesn't it?... Well, it always seems to, at our place. This week it started with a slab cut of bacon, which cooks up much nicer than yer regular packaged, commercial, machine-sliced variety. That is, unless your regular commercial variety involves a local farmer who raises and butchers pigs, and slices and packages delicious bacon for you.

I, personally, am on the lookout for that kind of arrangement. Tricky in Queens...

This week's Sunday Dinner fell on a Saturday, (keeps people on their toes!) and featured an outdoor showing of Shaun of the Dead. I couldn't really subject everyone to "zombie food", so I decided instead on:

Charcoal Grilled Leg of Lamb Marinated In Pomegranate Molasses With Herbs
Late Summer Tomato Bread Salad
Au Gratin Corn, Butter Bean & Summer Squash Salad w/Basil & Chili Flake
Bastardized Ratatouille
Grilled Escarole In Anchovy Dressing
Lemon Coconut Bundt Cake

Think of it as a celebration of late summer veggies. With a movie. In a parking lot. Next to the house. Like a drive in without the tight sweaters.

Here's the lambiekins marinating. 2 full legs boned, butterflied, and rubbed down with a rough paste of garlic, pomegranate molasses, salt, pepper, lemon, olive oil, tarragon (just a little!) basil, parsley, oregano and sprigs of rosemary resting on top to finish. Rosemary would have ordinarily been inside, but I forgot it. I like to let it marinate for around 24 hours.

Here are the beasts on the counter, "resting" before we grill 'em

We learned the hard way, a few years back, that grilling chilled meat = a tough piece of lamb, charred outside/raw inside. Not a crowd pleaser. Lamb sat out at room temp for about an hour before grilling.

Here is a little mezze platter I put together, with ingredients courtesy of Greek House on 30th ave. Dates, grape leaves, olives and these insanely delicious sundried hot peppers with sugar and olive oil (!!!).

Just a nibble to distract the zombies while I am furiously finishing dinner and everyone is getting drunk. Plate courtesy of a small town in Portugal.



So, while Karl was grilling the lamb....




...I made Bastardized Ratatouille. Made from memory of an Eggplant La Tavernetta Style that appeared in Mark Bittman's NY Times column a few weeks ago. At the time I couldn't find the recipe, so I winged it. Here's how I roll:

Cut up 7 medium eggplants and sautee them in garlic and olive oil, then pull them out of the oil and set them aside. Rinse a few anchovies of their salt, and add to the same skillet with some capers, and fry. Then add a few chopped tomatoes, and sautee until soft. Then add canned tomatoes; I busted out 3 pints of the ones I canned myself a few weeks ago, but you can use canned from the market. When this boils, reduce heat and simmer about 15 minutes, then add the cooked eggplant. Stir, pour it into a serving bowl, squeeze a little lemon over it, and serve. Can be served at room temperature, if you prefer-- that's the beauty of it. Gorgeous. Tastes like Summer.

Delicious little eggplantusses...

K.T. Loves Cake...

This was dessert. Lemon Coconut Bundt Cake, that eats like pound cake. Cream cheese AND butter. Yeah, baby... Finished with a glaze of sugar, lemon juice and water (photo below), heated to the point of boiling, and then fresh mint added. You pull the mint out before pouring it over the still warm cake. Mmmmmmm... Katie's Birthday (Belated) Cake. She was lucky enough to be born on Sept 11th, so we like to celebrate whenever the ruckus dies down.

Delicious, minty cake glaze...

These chopped tomatoes are waiting to be nestled in a baking dish among hunks of toasted, crunchy bread, then lightly tossed with a mixture of melted butter, salt, and pepper. Then, you melt another stick of butter, dress the whole business and bake for 30 minutes at about 400º.

Another bit of brilliance from our patron saint, Edna Lewis. Then...

The only thing that scares Karl more than zombies... Eek!

I confess, I don't like okra. Never understood it. But I keep at it, because I really want to like okra. This round went pretty well, also thanks to Saint Edna. I took the little stems off, and left the caps ON. Then I shanghaied a poor unsuspecting guest, and had him snap a bunch of beans-- green and yellow wax. I tossed the veggies with roughly smashed garlic, red onion, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a few oil cured olives. Roasted on Silpat® (Edna says it makes the okra crispier, which I couldn't make happen) on 450º for about 20 minutes. I think the oven should probably have been hotter to achieve the crispy. When it came out, it got the bits of fried, chopped SLAB BACON that you saw first in this post.

You knew it was coming, didn't you?

Let's just say, that it went so fast, i didn't even get any. I must assume it was good.

22 hungry people. Few leftover veggies, quite a bit of leftover lamb. Made some late revelers very happy by sending them home with some. I had brief dreams of using mine to make harira, but it was still too hot outside. Maybe next week.

The movie was a grand success-- Rachel kindly provided copious movie candy for the crowd and an aerobed for herself and her friend. Highly dedicated.

Perfect end of summer, food and activity wise.

Cornetto!

Here There Be Monsters...

We've Got Crabs...

Hideous? Yes. Pinchy? Nasty? Yes, and yes.

But so fucking delicious.

MENU: Summer Corn Salad • Salt Boiled Pertaters (lord have mercy) • Bawled Scrimps • Big Ol' Pot Of Crabs • Peach Pie with Buttermilk Cayenne Ice Cream



So, we decided to do a smaller event, just six of us, this time, and cook up a whole mess of bugs. Karl busted out dessert, and after the potatoes and corn salad were done, Zora, Karine and I set to work on the crabs.

Loading the crabs into the steamers and seasoning them was the fun part. We had a couple of minor crab skirmishes:

"No, no... but, you would be better the other way..."

As it turned out, Karine was really good at dealing with the more aggressive, snappier crabs, and she knew how to serve the crustacean smackdown. We sent her in as the enforcer, just to show the little monsters that we were smarter and tougher.

"They're ugly, and they're food..."

Once she had eliminated all pockets of resistance, we covered the beasties with a whole lot of Old Bay® and salt, and steamed them in vinegar, beer and water for about 15-20 minutes. Just for the record, all of the online recipes I could find recommended 45 minutes, but that seemed waaaaaay too long. Peter and Zora acted as final arbiters of when they were done.






We cooked up the shrimp in a delicious old school shrimp boil broth. Pickling spice, yellow and black mustard seed, green cardamom pods, a whole head of garlic, large quartered onion, lots of kosher salt, water, beer, whole allspice and star anise. Oh -- and a lot of bittersweet smoked paprika, which I can only ever find at Kalustyan's, and now I am out.


Then, we took the party outside to the yard, and dumped the crabs out on a newspapered table.



Finally, we beat the hell out of them with hammers and picks and ate them.






















We anticipate a torrent of angry "Crab Meat Is Murder" emails.

There was also pie.

Following dinner, we retired to the Parking Lot next door to watch Peter's inspired performance as Doody in Grease!, Clamshack's equally inspriring turn as Marty in Grease! (though at a different college), and Tamara's gung ho go as a country singing nun in Sister Amnesia's Country Jamboree-- Nunsense 3. Oh yeah, baby. The power of vhs, a projector, a white wall and an empty parking lot. We are still waiting on Zora's "porn" debut.....

Astoria's Master Of Egyptian Hocus Pocus meets the King Of Kitchen Konfidential...

Anthony Bourdain's job is to travel to distant, exotic destinations, eat beautifully prepared food and say "Mmm! That's delicious!"

The Travel Channel sent him on safari to Astoria, Queens with his faithful, cravatted sidekick, Andrew Zimmern, to eat some lamb testicles... erm, I mean prairie oysters at Ali's Kabab Café.

If you have a sharp eye, you can see me, Zora, Peter and Dapper Dan in the background...

Watch him eat like it's his job. Oh, wait... It is his job.

Zora's Dream of Paella in the Fire

She had a dreeeeeeeeeeam...

... So, It's 9 am, and I'm at The Russian River Valley Pinot Noir Forum, on my seventy-fourth glass of wine, when Zora calls. Did I mention it was 9 am?

She'd had a dream.

A dream about paella, Tamara.

It's gonna come true, Tamara.

She wanted to cook paella on the grill. And she was gonna put it together. Awesome. My inebrio-paralysis notwithstanding, all I had to do was write an invitation. The tricky bit was finding the keyboard... Here it went:

Exhibit A: She had a dream.......
a dream of Paella in the fire, as in... on the grill baby. Sort of like the Brunhilde immolation scene in Ride of the Valkyries, except Paella.

I am in Sonoma, drinking like it is my JOB. Oh wait... it IS my job. at any rate, I can barely get myself out of the room for classes in viticulture, so I am using zora's email to me to describe what will be happening.What I can tell you is that it will be happening THIS SATURDAY, AUG 18 at 7pm in the Reynolds/Wasserman ranch back yard. Usual rules apply. Usual rules being $25 and a bottle of wine per person. More wine if you drink more. Which you probably will.

Zora: "I think you could just say paella is one of those things they always say is "a meal in itself," which just means we reserve the right to decide at the very last second what else we might give you along with clams, mussels, sausages, fish chunks, chicken bits, saffron, lemons, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and maybe people should be instructed to bring cheap red wine plus orange or lemon soda to experience the miracle of "tinto en verano"--the Spanish technique for making even the cheapest vino palatable and refreshing. Maybe we could have a Syria-style spread of little apps out while we do the paella--sort of as a nod to the alleged Arabic origins of the word "paella" (perhaps from baqiyah, for leftovers). And by Syria-style, I mean served on newspaper, and so tasty it will make you weep..."

As you can tell, The invitation was pretty much all Zora. People started emailing instantly -- a virtual frenzy of starving paellaphiles hoping for some saffron and smoke infused rice.
It's... The Bomba, yo...

By Friday night, Z had finished the menu and sent the shopping list. It involved fish, shellfish-- whatever other edible fruits of the sea I wanted to get, some spanish rice called Calasparra, whole greek yogurt, Syrian cheese, capers, olives, gigantic thin Syrian-style pita -- the biggest and floppiest kind, and wonderful, wonderful butter beans.

Mmmggghaaaarrrrllllmyaaahm...


Lucky for us, I also had some tomatoes freshly yoinked off the plants in my garden -- Yeah, baby, Yeah!

Saturday afternoon, I did the shopping, but got slightly sidetracked in the Euromart near the bitter lemon. I remembered that Dapper Dan loves the stuff so I bought a sixpack. Plus, I was positive it would work to create the Tinto Verano stuff-- wrong. Oh well, mighty good on its own.

Ah, the bitter and the sweet...

When I returned to the with all the goodies to find that Zora had deposited even more bags on my porch. Ripe tomatoes in pink, green, red and black, herbs, big inky-dirty beets, 2 chickens with their heads and feet intact (yikes!) and glorious chorizo. When Zora arrived I poured some champagne cocktails, turned up the Dolly Parton, and we were off to the Spanish races.


Speaking of tomatoes...

Zora was running the show, so I was on kitchen slave detail. My first task was to make the tomato salad-- cut up the ripe tomatoes and layer them on a platter.

Well, hello, ladies...

Blanch the superripe ones and peel them, and then puree with a ton of garlic, olive oil and sherry vinegar.



Can I just say... fucking delicious?!?!?! So delicious, in fact, that later, after the appies and during the pre-paella lull, I poured the dressing into teeny glasses, added several drops of sherry vinegar, and served it as gaspacho. I kid you not.



So Karl cleans out our handy BBQ pit, and after the traditional debate about grill height vs. charcoal temperature/density, we get to it.




Outstanding... The pictures don't show it, but Zora was Grillmeister on this one, and worked her little hotgloved fingers to the bone grillin' up sea monsters and crispifying and saffronizing rice... Zora kicked ass with the paella, and also taught us the authentic contemporary Spanish sangria recipe, which is made with, um.... Fanta®. Seriously. Lemon-Lime flavored, fucking FANTA®.



A good time was had by all, and we ended up serving dinner only about three hours behind schedule, which is pretty damn close to our average. Besides, everyone was too drunk to care.

Happy Birthday Julia!

Happy Birthday To You,
Happy Birthday To You,
Happy Birthday, Saint Julia,
Happy Birthday To You!