Boston Bento

While I am hoping to post something food/bento related this week, I wanted to take a minute to let you all know about a project a friend of mine is doing.

Please please donate if you are either a Troma fan or just a fan of indie films. In this final days of pledging, the goal is in reach and I’m hoping that letting the word out a bit more might help. Geoff is a stand-up guy and a true foodie, so you can give yourself a strong pat on the back for donating or even forwarding the message along.

Assuming I still have any readers out there, feel free to spread the word and let me know in the comments with a link or something. I might even reward your efforts with a little bento something if you are in the first few people to notify me. You gotta do your part before he reaches the goal to be eligible.

I am the first person to admit that I never really thought much about traditional Canadian cusine.  It’s not that I didn’t think it was any good, I just never stopped to think about what foods they might eat in Canada.  I just assumed they put mayo on their fries and pretty much called it a day.

Luckily for me, I have a friend who is not only Canadian, but she also revels in “setting me straight.”  Horrified by my lack of interest in the food enjoyed by our neighbors to the North, we took a trip up to Manchester to a little place called Chez Vachon.

See that?  Little, right?

Famous for their Poutine (more on that later) we managed to get there before their closing closing time of 2pm and had some lunch.

I had their pork pie, which was pretty much your basic meat pie with a few things of note.  Firstly, the slice was drenched in thick gravy.  Secondly the meat itself was seasoned with what seemed like allspice and cinnamon.  This turned out to be a nice contrast to the gravy.  And thirdly, the meat itself was so soft that you barely had to chew it.  My guess that is that pork is blended with mashed potatoes or something because it was almost like a pate in texture.

Poutine (which sounds more like putsin when you say it) is a very popular Canadian comfort food. So popular in fact, that in addition to an Ice Cream Truck, my friend claims that a french fry truck used to drive down the roads of her youth selling its delightful gravy-covered spudsy wares. Poutine itself consists of three things: french fries, gravy, and fresh cheese curds. While it isn’t uncommon for people to add additional ingredients, it’s not poutine without the cheese curds. The cheese curds must be fresh and almost squeaky as you chew them. To me, they tasted like a mild cheddar which in addition to gravy, pretty much goes well with almost anything. I will say this though, we barely made a dent in that plate. However, next time I find myself drinking in Canada, this is going to be the only thing I am going to want.

We finished up the meal by sharing this crepe which came swimming in maple butter. Before you ask what maple butter is, allow me to spare you the smack on the head from my crazy Canadian friend. There is no butter in maple butter. Like apple butter and other such things, it is only butter in that it is smooth and spreadable like butter. Maple butter is made by heating and cooling maple syrup while stirring it. After some time it becomes lighter in color and takes on a consistency closer to frosting. I was worried that this crepe would just taste like it was doused in syrup, but the taste was much lighter than that. Since I’m not normally all that into sweets, I must admit that this was a pleasant surprise.

Overall, it was worth the hour trip from Boston for a really reasonably priced meal. It’s certainly not something I can eat very often, but if you are looking for comfort food, this kind of thing really hits the spot. Now, I just wonder what their salmon pie is like…

A few weekends ago I went to the house of some friends to try my first fried turkey.  I suspect that our chef that day was annoyed that he made it through the holidays either without getting his fill of turkey or he just didn’t get to have his turkey made the way he wanted.  Regardless of the reason, he set up his propane burner in the snow and we were off.

Before we even got there, my friend had seasoned the turkey with cajun spices both inside and out with the use of one of those flavor injectors. Then after a decent amount of measuring (so the oil wouldn’t spill over when you add the turkey) and keeping a close eye on the temperature, the turkey was lowered into the vat of boiling hot oil.

Three to four minutes a pound later, we got this:

And let me tell you people, yes…fried turkey is just as good as people claim it is. The skin is crispy while the meat inside is nice and moist. I blissfully chewed on a wing and some dark meat while completely forgetting about the snow falling outside. Seriously, if you are careful and know what you are doing, this can be an extremely enjoyable meal…especially with good beer and good friends.

Some of you out there may remember my sadness over the closing of Kotobukiya in Porter Square. No really, the loss of that store really did change the look of my bentos and though I know there is another shop in Union Square…well, things haven’t been the same.

Then today, my sister sent me a link to Ebisuya. Rumor has it this store is owned by some past employees of Kotobukiya! Could this mean that I will be able to find my usual products with no problems? And what is this about free parking? Be still my little heart. There is hope for my poor lonely bento boxes yet.

I hope to get to the store myself within the next few weeks, but if anyone has been there yet, please feel free to write a comment below to let us know how things are looking.

About two years ago, my friends and I got together to make blueberry mead. We combined several pounds of honey, bags of blueberries that we picked ourselves, water, and yeast. Once the fermentation process had begun, we pretty much left it in a carboy in my friends’ basement and forgot about it.

Not many people are all that familiar with mead. And a lot of people who have had mead before usually think of a sticky sweet honey alcohol that you get every year at your local Renaissance Faire. The truth is that mead is a lot more than that. While it can be quite sweet, it can also be dry, fizzy like champagne, and everything in between. It’s also known as “honey wine” which is a good way to think of it because it can be just as complicated as any other wine. The mead we made this time around is a melomel. A melomel is a mead made with honey and any kind of fruit.

We chose to make a blueberry mead because we had access to an amazing crop of blueberries grown by a neighbor in New Hampshire. We wanted a fruit that would add color and flavor. The end result was better then we hoped:

As for the flavor, it begins with a slight fruity taste followed by a drier honey taste that has really nice floral notes. I’m not the best at describing tastes, but it’s the kind of drink that you could lightly sip all day and appreciate how good it tastes with every sip. In fact, I had just recently bought a honey wine that I ended up throwing away out of disappointment. It was terrible. This mead, we are hoping to bottle this weekend and have already been discussing how we are going to be able to ration it out until we are able to make some more.

Preparing the cure and combining it with the pork belly was probably the most fun part of the process for me. This is the part where you can start to get creative if you want. I chose a more mundane route myself, mostly because I wasn’t feeling all that creative yet and I wanted to make sure that I could actually make bacon before experimenting with the recipe.

This first step in this process is preparing a basic cure. This is simply a combination of kosher salt, sugar, and “pink salt.” “Pink” or “Curing Salt” contains sodium nitrate. While some people choose not to use this product when making their bacon, low temperature foods (like bacon) are considered to be in the “danger zone” when is comes to growing bacteria. Curing salts prevents this from happening. And since I believe in that whole “better safe than sorry”-thing, I chose to use the pink salt in my cures.

Once you have your basic cure ready, you can start thinking about the flavors you would like to add to your bacon. Recipes and ideas can be found in books and online, but I chose to follow the recipes in my Charcuterie book. I went with one batch of sweet brown sugar cured bacon, and the other a more savory recipe with garlic, black pepper, and bay leaves. So as not to break any copyright rules, I am leaving out the recipes from the book I used. However, if you are not using any specific book to guide you through the process, there are a million online sources out that there that you can use.

In order to apply the cure, you simply coat all sides of the pork belly with your mixture. It’s just like applying a dry rub, but in my case I poured my cure into a cookie sheet first so that I could get an even coating.

Here we can see what my savory cure looked like once it was on the pork belly:

The hard part over, the only thing that was left was to put the pork belly into a ziplock bag and place in the refrigerator for a week. During that time, the meat sweats a bit and creates a liquid int he bag with the meat. Since this liquid needs to be in contact with all sides of the meat, you need to remember to flip the bag over once a day or every other day.

Here you can see the two slabs curing in my fridge. The darker brown one is the brown sugar cure and has already been curing for about 3 days. The lighter is the savory bacon and that one has only been in the fridge an hour or so and has not yet created much liquid.

Next time: now what?

This weekend my friends and I hold another one of our Iron Chef battles. Well, perhaps “battle” isn’t the best word to use here. Really they are more like themed ingredient potlucks. Each time we try to challenge ourselves with an ingredient that is going to be a stretch for us without it being something that (in the end) we realize we had no desire to eat that stuff with or without the wacky fun of the event. Trust me, we learned this the hard way with the Spam night that most of us went home hungry or nauseous from.

The ingredient this weekend was squash, any kind you like. Since I was chomping at the bit to give my KitchenAid a go, my contributions were both a pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin spice martini’s.

The cheesecake was made using a Paula Deen recipe from the Food Network website. It was one of the easiest ones I could find, and since I was new to making cheesecake, I didn’t want to push myself over the cream cheese covered cliff.

The “Pumpkin-tinis” were really like drinking candy. So unless you like things like Appletinis and booze that doesn’t take like booze, you best steer clear. But, if you are one of those people who has been wondering why you can’t find more drinks that are the color of traffic cones, then this stuff is for you.

The trip to London was so great that I’m almost sad to announce that I have returned to my usual schedule. The good news is that I have returned with lots of goodies and a few new projects in mind.

But rather then spend all my time posting pics of my sightseeing, I give you what might have been one of the best things we ate our entire stay in London…Jam Roly Poly:

Jam Roly Poly is a traditional British Pudding made with suet dough. The dough is rolled flat, spread with jam, then rolled into a log shape. I believe our Roly Poly was baked, but in the past it has also been steamed in men’s shirt sleeves, giving it the nickname Dead Man’s Arm.

This Roly Poly was served with a warm custard sauce and a bit of extra jam. The dough itself was chewy rather than spongy. My sister described it best when she said that the dough reminded her of a soft pretzel.

I’m hoping to recreate a reasonable copy of this dessert sometime in the future, though I will need to figure out if this was made with suet or not. Because something tells me, suet might not be all that easy to find. Either way, I am sure that I will be able to find people willing to taste my first few efforts. The hardest part for me is going to be deciding on a jam flavor, unless I can get my hands on some boysenberry preserves this fall.

In case there are any of you out there wondering how I served the Devil Duckie cake to the birthday boy, please see below:

The Boy was able to get a shot with his phone before mass consumption ensued. The red is raspberry sauce, while the crossed out eyes were just some licorice string. Quite an impressive presentation if you ask me!