Ginger and Sage Breakfast Sausage

I have the book: Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing

I've bought a meat grinder (though I'm still waiting for the sausage stuffing attachment).

I then noticed some pork butt chops at the market. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to make the two previously mentioned items useful. So one Saturday morning after coming home from the market, I got to work in the kitchen.

Something the authors of Charcuterie stress when grinding meat is to keep the ingredients and the tools cold. This proved to be the most inconvenient part of making sausage since my freezer has limited space. Beyond this however, making sausage from scratch was fun, easy and super cheap!

I'm not going to give away the recipe here but I will say that sage, ginger, garlic and pork go beautifully together. Following the authors' instructions on giving the meat a tacky texture turned out some succulently juicy sausage patties. What's even better is the fact that I had tonnes! If I'd stuffed them into sheep casings - which is what was suggested - I probably could have made between one and two dozen sausages for the price of not even a half dozen.

So far, Charcuterie is all easy and fun. Now all I need is to have a kitchen empty of the crap of roommates...just a few more months...

The finished product which tasted way better than it looks here

Ultimate or Proper Ceasar Salad

What makes a ceasar salad ultimate or proper? Is it the fact that the recipe came from Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Heaven? Or is it attention to detail, the elements of a dish all fully understood, made from scratch and combined in a way that is more inspired by a recipe rather than being the recipe? I think it's a little of both. Ramsay certainly has more imagination and skill than me when it comes to food.

As you know, ceasar salad is very simple: lettuce (the celebrity chef calling for baby gem lettuces but the resourceful me settling with organic romaine), croutons, some sort of bacon, and dressing. The dressing is really the make or break here. That crap they sell in bottles which overpowers everything is NOT ceasar salad dressing; that's what it says on the bottle but they're lying. Real ceasar salad dressing is garlic to taste, Parmesan cheese, eggs, Dijon mustard, lemon, anchovy fillets or paste, and olive oil. The egg and the olive oil make a sort of mayonnaise while the other elements add most of the flavour.

What the recipe called for afterwards was:
- baby gem lettuces (see note above)
- ciabatta loaf to make croutons (I just used some stale bread I had on hand)
- pancetta thinly sliced and crisped (which I replaced with crisped prosciutto)
- soft-poached eggs (no modifications there)
- fresh anchovy fillets (the canned variety was fine...plus I don't know if I've ever seen a fresh sardine)
- Parmesan cheese shavings (all out unfortunately)

The only thing I added to the salad was pork which I'd thought would be necessary in order to make this salad a meal; it wasn't.

What I find interesting about salads is their versatility. They're fresh, usually healthy, and when done right they're arguably better than a steak dinner. Unfortunately, proper salad, like proper soup, is something people are no longer used to. We've been accustomed to crap imitations which are just as expensive as the real deal. But I don't feel like going off on a rant tonight. Just know that this salad was good and proper. There.

Homemade Crumpets

As far as I can tell, crumpets aren't really a Canadian thing. Maybe it's because I'm not in the least bit British and so don't have an innate appreciation for all things tea time. Now what I'd tasted before were ready made crumpets in a cellophane wrapper and little cardboard brandishing the Union Jack. I enjoyed these in the morning, toasted and covered in honey which would get into all the little holes and absorbed by the sponge-like texture of the crumpet. Like most things, crumpets are a million times better when made at home.

The recipe I used came from http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/homemadecrumpets_70053.shtml.

Though I thought the whole thing would be difficult, it wasn't. To prove that it wasn't difficult, I totally ignored the whole greased crumpet ring thing - going instead with the ever so versatile free form - and I am usually useless as pastries. These crumpets turned out great. They were easy to prepare, easy to cook, had the perfect texture and absorbed the honey I spooned over them.

Now I all need is tea, cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches. Oh and a tea set.

Guillons de canard

What do you get as a bi-product of rendering fat from duck skin? Crispy bits of duck skin. What do you do then? Why you add a bit of duck meat, onion, salt and pepper, put the whole in a terrine mold, bake and eat as you would creton. This invention of my favourite charcutier is smooth textured and has a taste which reminds me of pork rinds though a million times more sophisticated. This is the breakfast of champions and those unafraid of cardiac arrest for sure.

Sweet Dumpling Squash

Before my local, organic farmer closed shop for the season, I bought some winter squashes from her. This was back in September. One of the squashes was my beloved sweet dumpling squash. As the name would suggest, this squash is not of the savory sort but could almost qualify as desert if you baked it into a pie or muffins. However, even roasted it's terribly delicious.

The fact that I'm writing this in February about a food item I bought in September is amazing for me. This is what seasonal eating is all about. I can't say I'm the best spokesperson for eating within the season but I'm easing my way into it since I believe that in order to move away from the globalised system of food we currently rely on, it's essential for people to make these sort of changes in their diets. The more people eat local, organic food in season, the more we will support our communities and fight the modern monsters of industrial agriculture, monoculture, pesticide use, homogenization of food and the disastrous impacts that moving all that food has on the environment.

So sweet dumpling squash in winter. Asparagus in the spring. Tomatoes in late summer. It's all very logical.

Gahan House's Honey Brown Ale

On our trip to PEI before the holidays I took the opportunity to purchase some beer from Gahan House, the island's microbrewery. Sir John A's (as in John A. MacDonald, Canada's first Prime Minister and a key player in the establishment of our 1867 Confederation which just so happened to having been signed in Charlottetown) Honey Wheat Ale is a great example of this sort of beer; light, slightly sweet with a pleasant roasted grain taste. In order to properly test the valour of this beer, I would have to have a taste test with Gahan House taking on Sleeman's variety of the same type of beer. In my opinion, the microbrewery's version should be better than Sleeman's mass produced variety. If it isn't, something's wrong. I'll keep you posted.

John A. in bronze on a bench in Charlottetown. Canada rocks!

Duck Prosciutto

So for Christmas I got something I really, really wanted: Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This book is all about prosciutto, pancetta, sausage (fresh and dried), bacon, pâtés, smoking, etc. etc. etc. I've already read the whole thing from front to back and have recently purchased my very own manual meat grinder. For my first stab at the fine art of charcuterie, I wanted something simple, something I wouldn't totally mess up and that wouldn't cost me a fortune. When it comes to artisinal food making, I like baby steps. It's like bread. There's a learning curve there and it's no use trying to overrun it.

So I decided to go with something cured. Curing is simply leaving something in salt long enough that some liquid is extracted and the salt penetrates the meat in order to stop any harmful bacteria from forming (or something like that). Above is a photo of duck aiguillettes which is the tenderloin of the magret which is the breast of a duck raised for foie gras. I decided to go with the smaller aiguillettes first because they're cheaper and smaller which means that there's less chance that I'll mess things up. Or so I thought.

My charcutier friend at the market told me that 1 or 2 hours would be fine for curing the meat. However, this being my first venture into the world of charcuteries, I left the aiguillettes in kosher salt for about 4 hours (the recipe in the abovementioned book calls for magrets and 24 hours). After this, I rinsed the aiguillettes and patted them dry. I then wrapped them in cheesecloth and strung them up. Now the ideal location for hanging drying duck meat is a cool (8 to 15 degrees Celcius), humid place. The only part in my apartment that sort of fit the bill is the drafty window in the dining room. So up went the aiguillettes, my roommates looking on and wondering what in the world I was doing...I didn't tell them.

After 4 days, the aiguillettes were hard as a rock. As you can see above, they were done though they weren't the rich, soft texture of prosciutto but rather the chewy texture of jerky. And oh my god were they ever salty. A white crust of salt had coated the exterior of the aiguillettes which I scraped off thus making the duck edible.

Though I did leave the aiguillettes in the salt too long to start with and didn't use a thick enough piece of meat, I now feel confident in moving onto the full magret. Through the salt the rich taste of the duck came shining through. It was really a decent first taste at the potential of my charcuterie skills.

So next stop, real duck prosciutto and then fresh morning sausage with ginger and sage. Oh yeah!

P.S. Michael Ruhlman, the co-author of Charcuterie, maintains a pretty shnazzy blog at http://blogs.ruhlman.com/. Check it out.