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Chipotle Pork Cheeseburger

Chipotle pork cheeseburger, from gourmet.com

This--a chipotle pork cheeseburger--is what I'm going to eat tonight. We have leftover chipotles in adobo, and I bought some ground pork at the farmers market, and I made some mayonnaise, &c. I'm excited about this [1].

Updated 10pm: and it was good.

[1] Less so by the glass of water, though.

Farro salad with roasted beets

Beets, originally uploaded by Ed Yourdon

I love farro, and I love beets. And they make a great combination!

Here's what I did the other night to make a farro salad with roasted beets, arugula, walnuts, and goat cheese.

1. Prepare beets: toss with olive oil and salt, splash of water, cover with foil, roast for 30-40 minutes until done. Then remove skins and slice into wedges.
2. Prepare farro: boil in salted water until tender (but still with a bite).
3. Toast walnuts.
4. Make a vinaigrette: combine diced shallot with red wine vinegar, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, and a little bit of salt. Let sit for 5 minutes. Add olive oil.
5. Toss cooked farro with arugula and some of the vinaigrette.
6. Toss beets with some sliced shallots and some of the vinaigrette.
7. Combine farro, arugula, and beets, and transfer to a platter.
8. Top with toasted walnuts and crumbled goat cheese.

Easy, and delicious!

From scratch

Homemade, from scratch, is in the air.

Ruhlman announces his BLT from Scratch challenge:

From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

And in the June 2009 Gourmet, a burger with homemade everything: homemade buns, ketchup, mustard, and pickle relish, with a burger made from ground skirt steak.

For dinner

Who needs cookbooks, when you've got food blogs? For a delicious dinner, tonight:

• Flat iron steak and arugula salad with blue cheese and Catalina dressing (I altered the original a bit, since I prefer flat iron to skirt steak)
• Zucchini carpaccio
• Watermelon agua fresca
• Apple pie, with vanilla ice cream (I used a combination of Elise's recipe and Ruhlman's crust for his rhubarb pie)

Cheese

Last Monday, May 25th, the annual Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake was held near Gloucester, England. In a tradition that dates back at least 200 years, possibly much longer, groups of fearless competitors chase an 8 pound (3.5 kg) round of Double Gloucester Cheese down an extremely steep and uneven hill, with a 1:1 gradient in some parts.

This is fantastic. I feel that this is the sort of urgency that everyone should feel about cheese.

Farro

Suzanne Goin, my favorite chef in the whole world, is a big fan of farro, according to Sunday Suppers at Lucques. And it's from Lucques that I first tried a couple of farro recipes, and I was intrigued enough to want to try more.

Which led me to Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks, and her Citrus Parmesan Farro Salad, variants of which are my current favorite ways to use farro: I've made that recipe verbatim, as well as a variant with roasted spring onions. I've also made a version with roasted beets and a balsamic/red-wine/shallot/lemon-juice vinaigrette, and that was also delicious.

On Cheap Wine

A recent New Yorker had a story about Fred Franzia, the CEO/co-founder of Bronco Wine Company, the makers of the Charles Shaw wines you'll find at Trader Joe's and other places. To be honest, I'm not much a fan of the Charles Shaw wines; nor am I much a fan of Franzia, after reading the article.

However, I'm all for cheap wine: over the past couple of months, I've been drinking boxed wine pretty much exclusively (the NY Times approves, for environmental reasons).

Of the boxed wines I've tried, I like Bandit and Bota Box. Bandit makes a 1-liter TetraPak wine (as well as kid-size packages that remind me of the juice packages that I used to drink after soccer games) in a couple of varieties; I like the Cabernet best. Bota Box makes a 3-liter box (equivalent to 4 standard 750ml bottles of wine), again in a couple of varieties. I've had the Cabernet and the Merlot, and I like both.

As the New Yorker article puts it (and I'm paraphrasing, because I'm lazy), there are Sunday wines, and there are Wednesday wines, and there's a need for both. I just happen to really like Wednesdays.

Free Cocktails

Cocktails+, my favorite cocktail application for the iPhone, is free for the next 7 days:

Skorpiostech, Inc. is proud to announce its “Free Taste of Cocktails” promotion at the App Store. We are officially lowering the price of Cocktails+ to $0.00 for a limited time to promote our new “Publish to Facebook” feature. Customers who wish to take part in this limited offer need to hurry, as the offer begins Monday, April 6th at 12:00pm EDT and ends at the “stroke of midnight” on Sunday, April 12th. The Cocktails+ application downloaded will be full and unlimited, including free updates for the life of the major version.

Bahn Mi

I am indescribably hungry after reading about bahn mi in the NY Times this morning.

Michael Ruhlman: Ratio

Michael Ruhlman discusses his new book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, which is all about the fundamental ratios behind recipes:

I like the bread dough ratio mentioned in the video (5 parts flour, 3 parts water) because it shows how a ratio takes the mysterious art of bread baking, and by paring it down to the essential balance of two ingredients, renders it the opposite of mysterious, and therefore, I hope, not so intimidating. With this bread dough ratio, you don’t have a single recipe, you have a thousand. Ratios are the launching point for infinite variations.

Ruhlman's "__ of a Chef" trilogy of books (Reach of a Chef, &c.) are some of my favorite books ever about food and cooking.