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Recipes
Over the weekend, I hooked up a tomato tart that was pretty solid for a self-professed non-baker. If sifting dry ingredients and stand-mixer attachments have the same unnerving effect on you, this is a recipe you’ll dig; the open-faced tart comes together in about an hour, only 10 minutes of which is spent physically doing something, and results in a real showstopper that’ll have dinner guests prostrating themselves at your seemingly talented feet.
Inspired by some Maine Lobster Tracks ice cream we had last week, we asked you to come up with a "Tracks" recipe to represent our fair town. From Bee Tracks to SEPTA Tracks to Teenage Flash Mobber Tracks, we received some rad scoop suggestions, but the clear fave was reader Phanatic Tracks, an easygoing strawberry-studded pistachio ice cream coined by reader smellody. It taste subtly sweet, nutty and unequivocally like victory. Learn how to make it after the jump.
Ever since Scott Schroeder launched a grilled halloumi salad with galia melon at SPTR (1509 Mifflin St.), I’ve been thinking how good that honeydew/cantaloupe crossbreed would be buzzed into a chilled summer soup. Well, summer's almost over, but we're high in melon season, and this 5-minutes-flat recipe will work with any ripe specimen.
Over the weekend, an attractively packaged quart of ice cream caught my eye in the snug freezer section of Casel's supermarket in Margate. The flavor: Lobster Tracks, churned by the fine folks of Maine stalwart Gifford's (who incidentally claim dominion over the invention of Moose Tracks ice cream). My fiancée, who spent childhood summers building houses for the underprivileged in Farmington, Me. — I do not deserve someone this virtuous — recognized the Gifford's name. "We went there every night for ice cream!" she erupted. "It's amazing!" So we bought some.
Dear Friend of Meal Ticket Neal Santos, CP's immensely talented staff photographer and co-proprietor of Farm 51 in Southwest Philly, is a fellow Filipino — which means he possesses an unshakable genetic affinity for sodium-laden canned meat products. Here he shares his very own recipe for Spam musubi.
Spam is in my blood. Long before I considered myself a photographer or "urban farmer," I was eating Spam for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My Filipino parents stockpiled our pantry with cans of the good ish: Vienna Sausage, Ligo Sardines, BumbleBee Tuna and, of course, Spam.
I'd eat Spam and egg, Spam and rice, Spam sandwiches, Spam spaghetti, Spam salad, Spam pizza, Spam and cheese. We'd have it raw, fried, deep-fried, boiled and microwaved. There wasn't any combination of Spam plus something else that we haven't tried.
In this week's food section I wrote a little about my recent experiment cooking dinuguan, a traditional Filipino pork stew whose scariest ingredient — pig's blood — miiiight come off slightly off-putting to some. Look, I get it — it terrified (and fascinated) me as a kid, and it's not uncommon to hear Filipino cooks perform some adorable misdirection on children by telling them that muddy gray-brown color is derived from chocolate. (Ha!) But just as Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan wrote in their book Memories of Philippine Kitchens, one of multiple sources I used to develop the recipe below, the dish sounds totally fucked up but it's shockingly accessible and middle-of-the-road. I understand if you're skeptical, but hear me out. Wait, where are you going?! Wow you can run so fast!
On the real though, pork blood and pork liver are the only two quote-unquote "peculiar" elements of dinuguan. (The name derives from the Tagalog word "dugo," meaning blood.) The characteristic funkiness of both ingredients is present in each bite of the stew, but a handful of other important additions do a hell of a job of slicing right through it, and rather dramatically at that. The most prominent non-porky member of Team Dinuguan? Vinegar, specifically rice vinegar. Added in the same stroke as the blood and liver, late in the cooking process, its sour, cleansing personality is imperative. The aromatics of the stew — every recipe's different, but my batch included bay leaf, ginger, lemongrass and long hots — also serve as vital flavor foundations, especially since this recipe requires patience to coax the best out of it.
Look, this is all you need to know: Yes, dinuguan has blood in it. Yes, you'll be able to tell that it has blood in it, but it's just one of many ingredients. No, it's not all you taste. Yes, it is delicious. At least it is to me.
We've fielded plenty of queries about making the simple heirloom tomato salad featured in the most recent edition of Notes from the Weekend, so here y'all go. It's so easy it's not even really a recipe, to be honest; the most effort goes into the tarragon vinaigrette, which we snagged out of food writer Jessica Strand's cute little book on salad dressings, entitled Salad Dressings. For the rest — just halve up a pint of so of heirloom cherry tomatoes, peel and chop a large cucumber into chunks and add crumbled feta, salt and pepper to taste. Dress with the tarragon vin (recipe after the jump), toss and then eat that shiz.
Remember my monster watermelon dilemma last summer? History repeated itself last week, only this time with pounds upon pounds of sour cherries from Three Springs Fruit Farm. Thirty-five of them to be exact. After pitting a few pounds (about two hours of hard, sticky, finger-staining labor), I set out to make a sour cherry pie.
There are few things more disappointing than buying wine and hating it. I suppose it serves me right for being taken in by nice packaging, but I was searching for a palatable boxed red wine — something to keep in the fridge for cooking, and for the occasional glass with dinner — and ended up with a 3-liter box of this stuff, which was nigh-on undrinkable. With guests coming over and the liquor cabinet mostly bare, we picked up some cheap brandy and triple sec at the PLCB store to try and salvage the plonk by making sangria.
If there's one thing I like better than drinking Dogfish Head's Festina Peche (a Meal Ticket favorite!), it’s cooking with Dogfish Head's Festina Peche. Because Sam Calagione & Co.'s new-school Berliner weisse finishes as dry as Piedmont pinot grigio, it's more versatile than you might think in savory applications, but its subtle peachiness makes it a natural in desserts.
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