Hedonia

Carne de porco com amêijoas à alentejana

No Iberian meal is complete without pork. The importance and prevalence of the meat in the national cuisines of Spain and Portugal cannot be overstated. In fact, had I not already been weaning myself off my fishetarian ways, I would surely have starved to death during our month-long sojourn in Spain.

But that's okay, for the pork in Iberia is exceptional. There are of course the cured hams, such as the famous jamòn serrano and jamòn iberico, the latter of which comes from pigs that dine exclusively on the acorns of black oak trees in central Spain. Iberico in its uncured state is succulent and tender, and unlike anything we have here in the states. The meat itself is darker, with a strong nutty flavor.

I knew the main course of the dinner had to be pork, but sought inspiration. I turned to the trusty Time-Life Foods of the World series, expecting to find a Spanish recipe that would transport me back to our trip. In fact, the recipe that spoke to me was Portuguese.

Pork and clams: What a delightful turn on the classic surf and turf. It sounds incongruous at first, but the two proteins have a strange affinity, as if they were long-lost cousins, star-crossed lovers from different worlds. Only in the sweet afterlife, and on the dinner table, could they be united.

A sidenote about Spain v. Portugal. Despite their tightly linked heritages, there is a clear tension between the two cultures. Whilst in Granada, enjoying a sherry at a local restaurant, we were entranced by the music. The bartender informed us it was a Portuguese group, Madredeus. We loved the soulful, fado-inflected songs. Later, in Madrid, we were perusing a record store, looking for a few choice items to bring home; Madredeus was at the top of our list. We searched through pop, to no avail. Asking one clerk after another, we ended up working our way through several sections, down floor after floor, until we finally found them in the "World" section, alongside tribal drumming and chanting. Keep in mind we are talking about a contemporary popular group from a country that shares the same peninsula.

Intra-Iberian politics aside, this dish is a keeper, though I cannot help but feel like it constitutes a culinary "screw you" to the Jews and Moors so maligned in Iberian history. I mean, pork and clams? Why not throw some milk in for good measure? Gentile that I am, I take no exception.

Pimientos piquillos rellenos de bacalao en salmorejo

All right, kids, I'm gonna finish this dinner party if it kills me.

During our month in Spain, despite traversing many regions with distinct culinary and linguistic dialects, a few dishes were constant. Tapas were of course an everyday occurrence, and we easily fell into a routine of a handful of favorites: croquetas, tortilla español and above all else pimientos rellenos. I'm a big fan of bacalao, the salt-cured cod, under any circumstances, but mixed into a creamy filling inside a sweet red pepper is perhaps the most enjoyable application. I knew I wanted to reproduce this for the party.

A couple weeks beforehand, I was thrilled to see muy autentico piquillo peppers appear in their explosively colorful glory at the Happy Quail Farms booth at the farmers market. I had assumed I would end up resorting to either tinned piquillos or roasted bell peppers. Eagerly, I asked how long they would have them on hand, and was assured they'd be appearing in abundance for weeks if not months. The Spanish sun was shining on my dinner plans.

I roasted the peppers, blackening the skin under the broiler for easy removal. This is my normal method of roasting peppers; in this case, however, the thin-skinned piquillos might perhaps have benefitted from blanching instead of roasting, as the flesh of the peppers became too fragile and lost their shape. Live and learn.

Salmorejo was another regular item on our table in Spain. This emulsion of tomato, bread and olive oil appears as many things -- sauce, dip, soup. I figured it would make a pleasant counterpart both in flavor and texture to the pepper.

The recipes I used as foundation came from a tourist-grade cookbook we bought in Spain called, simply, Classic Tapas. We were assured by a friend in Marbella that the recipes in the book were in fact quite authentic, and indeed we saw many dishes that we had enjoyed throughout our journey. But by virtue perhaps of poor translation, many of the recipes lack precision or even omit key steps, so it is at best a guide and not a bible. Fortunately, I am comfortable enough with basic techniques, like making a béchamel, that I was able to navigate successfully.

Effortless entertaining

The name of this post is a bald-faced lie. A ruse, a marketing hook to make you read on.

You see, there truly is no such thing as effortless entertaining. But you can make it look effortless. All it takes is a little ... effort.

Ah, delicious irony.

In point of fact, there is a perfect inverse relationship to the amount of effort you put into entertaining, and the amount perceived. Cut corners and skimp on prep, and you will look like a crazed weasel throwing pans and dishes around. Make a plan and start well in advance, and food magically appears as if on command from a sparkling clean kitchen.

DPaul and I entertain a lot, and over the years we've developed a few tips and tricks. We've learned a lot from über-organized kitchen mavens like our friends Anita and Kathleen, and DPaul himself, being one of the more detail-oriented people I've ever met, brings a lot to the table, so to speak.

Planning and organization is everything. We may start working on a dinner party two or three days in advance, more if we're charting new territory. Case in point, we recently hosted an Iberian-themed dinner for eight at our house, and I thought it worth documenting our processes (and recipes) for posterity.

We conceived a five-course menu (elucidated in future posts):

• A mixed plate of cured meats, cheeses and grapes.
• White gazpacho
• Pimientos piquillos rellenos de bacalao en salmorejo
• Carne de porco com amêijoas à alentejana
• Crema catalana

Normally, I have little trepidation about trying out new material on guests, even those that have never been to our house before. But this time, we were having among our guests one notable chef who specializes in Spanish fare. (Ballsy of me, no?) And while I know that chefs and foodies are in fact generally more appreciative than overcritical, I still wanted everything to be just so.

And you know what? It was.

So please follow me on a multi-post excursion exploring the ins and outs of entertaining in the Castello di Noi.

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One year ago today ... speaking of pork, read all about Moonlite Bar-B-Q (which I later covered again for their mutton).

Wine country picnic

Summertime, and the living is easy ...

What a crock. The living's no easier in the summer. Work goes on every day as normal, tourists flood the farmer's market and a thick blanket of fog ensures that I lose my hard-earned trucker tan. Summer, feh.

But it is easy to get a small taste of the simple life, to bask in a carefree afternoon of food, friends and frivolity under a balmy summer sun. Certainly chief among the reasons we love living in San Francisco is fast and easy access to the wine country.

DPaul and I make excursions pretty frequently; in fact, we explicitly joined a few wineries' clubs just to have the excuse to get out of town once in a while. We've long been big fans of the Dry Creek Valley area in Sonoma County, but for the last year and change we've been enamored with Carneros, the region alongside the north side of San Francisco Bay that straddles the southern ends of both Sonoma and Napa counties. And even more specifically, we're best buds with Bouchaine.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Bouchaine rocks. I won't pretend to be any kind of wine expert, and certainly cannot rank their wines against comparable quaff from more esteemed producers (though their rosé of syrah got good marks in our taste-off). All I know is that I enjoy their wines immensely. But what Bouchaine does excellently, better than most, is deliver a flawlessly enjoyable wine country experience. No tour buses and limos, no snotty bling-laden tourists and harried winery staff. Just a sun-dappled back deck overlooking vineyards and serenity interrupted only by a cooling bay breeze.

Bouchaine is an ideal spot for a picnic, and so for DPaul's birthday last week, that's precisely what we did. Ten of us met to enjoy a flight of tastings alongside some tasty treats. Bouchaine does offer a picnic program, where you can purchase baskets of meats, cheeses and other goodies, and that's all well and good. But I thought it would be fun to bring our own picnic of wine-friendly foods to enjoy.

Crowning achievement

Just as you must kiss many frogs before finding your Prince Charming, you must stumble your way through many awkward, mistimed or outright embarassing dinner parties before you reach entertaining nirvana. But then, sometimes the stars align and everything goes exactly according to plan. We had one of those nights. And it was magical.

We had been planning this dinner party for weeks, debating menus, negotiating dishes, drafting timelines. This is the sort of thing we love to do. Our typical approach is to shoot for the moon up front, devise a menu that is impossible by mere mortals and their terrestrial kitchens, then tweak and scale it until we have something achievable yet still remarkable. We like to try new things, and to do new things with old ideas. We have fun in the kitchen.

A holiday meal needs a masterful centerpiece, and we were inspired by Gourmet magazine to do a crown roast of pork. Not only is it elegant and impressive, it is also charmingly old-school, like something from a Norman Rockwell painting.

The art of entertaining involves knowing your boundaries, and delegation is key. Initially we had planned to do everything, including wine pairings. It's always lovely when guests bring wine, but then you end up with mismatched bottles that have little relevance to what you're serving. This time, we delegated the pairings, asking each couple to bring wine appropriate to a single course. Each couple knew the course they were pairing, but none knew the entire evening's menu until they arrived.

Courses (all five of them) and wine flowed seamlessly, and we started early enough to allow for time to hang around afterwards, digest, play parlor games and still be in bed at an almost-reasonable hour for a school night. Almost.

Lots of clean plates, and precious few leftovers -- except, that is, for the pork. This week, it's all about the pork as we repurpose a mountain of porcine protein into new dishes: Curries, pastas, what have you. I am not complaining.

Horn-tooting details and luscious photographs after the jump!

A night in Tunisia ... or Persia

Dinner parties. Dime a dozen. Appies. Salad. Entree. Dessert. Lots of wine. Yawn.

There's nothing wrong with the workaday dinner party -- heaven knows we've thrown hundreds of them -- but sometimes we like to zest things up a bit. Break away from the confines of our Eurocentric upbringing. Dabble in the dark arts of spicecraft. And when we do want to do so, we focus our eye squarely on the Middle East and North Africa.

So we were watching the always alluring and seductive Nigella Lawson on her new US TV show, Nigella Feasts. We've loved Nigella for years, her carefree approach to cooking, the sloppy measuring, the flirty bedroom eyes and, most importantly, the interesting cultural influences she brings to the table. On a recent episode she covered a couple of lovely Mediterranean dips, a spicy fattoush and some miniature lamb meatballs. Like a genie from a lamp, our menu began to manifest. A pan-Islamic menu anchored in Persia but borrowing heavily from the Mediterranean.

We liked what Nigella was offering, but wanted to develop the menu beyond a sampling of finger foods into a more substantial sit-down meal. We also wanted to have certain repeating themes and flavors that would echo through the evening. Saffron. Cinnamon. Mint. Rose water. Gorgeousness.

Taste for yourself after the jump. (Sorry, only one dish photographed -- we were busy entertaining rather than taking pictures.)

Sacrifice is not our strong suit

We've been busy as heck lately. Since my transition from underemployment to overemployment it's not uncommon for me to work until 9 pm. DPaul's back pain and mobility issues are a continued drain on his time and energy. I still go to tai chi on Tuesdays but haven't been to the gym in weeks. And we do still have a rather full social life to maintain. So what gets sacrificed? Unfortunately, our food situation suffers in such times.

When we're crazy busy like this, it's easy to switch into food-as-sustenance mode, ultimately resulting in some less than stellar decisions: A little more delivery pizza and Indian than is wise; subjecting ourselves to completely substandard sushi at Hamano just because it's close; slap-dash meals made from whatever nuts and berries we can find in the encrusted corners of the fridge. I'm not happy about it.

Mind you, it's not all bad. We did have a lovely dinner with friends last night. We've had a yen for risotto lately, and it's definitely a more-the-merrier kind of dish. So we kicked things off with a simple caprese salad of heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and what will probably end up being the last of the basil from our window boxes. (I am determined to kill the stuff, clearly, as I end up forgetting to water it for days at a stretch. But it's going all woody and is evidently near the end of its natural lifespan.) Some lavender salt, a crack of pepper and a drizzle of McEvoy EVOO made it very nice indeed.

We stuck to a basic cheese risotto made with light chicken stock, but I cooked some romano beans alongside to add a little green. Simplicity sometimes is best. Besides, we deliberately made more than we intended to serve. Do you get where we're going with this?

Alas, we didn't have the time or energy to make dessert from scratch, but that's OK because we live very close indeed to Noe Valley Bakery. For those not in the know, NVB sells ready-to-bake cookie dough, as well as a few other treats, in the freezer case. It's wonderfully convenient, except for one thing: They sell it in two large wads, wrapped in plastic and shoved into a plastic bin. I would so rather they actually portion the dough and sell them as frozen balls of sweet yumminess. But ultimately it's not hard to chunk it up and lay out on a Silpat.

All this, and we got home literally a matter of minutes before our guests arrived. There's a lesson in this that I seem to need to teach myself again and again. It is possible to eat well even under duress. I just need to get my head out of the sand. With a little advance planning, thoughtful prepping and the inclusion of acceptable shortcuts, we shouldn't have to sacrifice anything at all.

Cocktail party appies

It started out as a dinner party. Our friends Steve and Domonick (and their adorable schnoodle, Sophie) have relocated to the Bay Area from New York City, and we wanted to show them off. But why have a dinner party when you can have a lovely cocktail party with heavy hors d'oeuvres? Vodka is a vegetable, sweetie. It's made from potatoes.

We love to entertain, and have thrown events ranging from groups as small as four people to as large as 75 or so. We've even taken groups on the road, once renting an entire hotel in Palm Springs for a big Mardi Gras fête.

The cocktail party is its own beast with its own rules. Ten to 12 people is usually best. We like to make one house cocktail by the pitcher for easy service; we then offer standard boozes and mixers -- for our crowd, vodka and gin for liquor and tonic and cran for mixers -- as well as wine and beer for those who prefer an alternative. For this event, I decided to make a hurricane, in part due to its seasonal relevance and in part because we have too damn much rum in the house. My derivative version, dubbed the Florence, follows after the jump.

Timing is everything for a cocktail party. Passed hors d'oeuvres make for a convivial atmosphere, so you have to plan ahead to keep the stream of food steady yet diverse. Some of the highlight appies, with pics (courtesy of my husband) and recipes, also after the jump.

Everything went smoothly ... except one thing. Inspired by Sam's Bakewell tarts from the Food Bloggers' Picnic, I thought they'd make a lovely little sweet treat, ideally bite-sized for party fare. I'm not much of a baker, so this was kind of going out on a limb. Sadly, the results were unservable. My short crust didn't set right, and the resulting tarts were gummy and sticky on the bottom, and the tartlets exploded as I tried to extract them from the pan. Ah well, that'll teach me to experiment on the day of an event. I roped in our friends Nick & Russ to make an emergency pastry run for me, so everyone was treated to a lovely CItizen Cake confection. No one complained.

Seafood tacos

We were feeling summery this weekend, having finally gotten our May weather fully halfway into June. As we've had Mexican food on the brain of late, we decided to pull out a light, nummy meal of seafood tacos. And because I never, ever do things the easy way, I simply had to make everything but the tortillas from scratch. So off we went to the Mission to stock up.

First things first. After roasting up some chiles, I whipped up a nice batch of salsa:

Plus a bit of guac (not judged in the Great Guac Hunt, as it's not restaurant guac. Gotta play by the rules!):

And then something struck me ... got limes, lots of limes ... big old batch of cilantro ... head of garlic. Sounds kind of like a Mexican gremolata! So I zested each lime before squeezing, chopped in the garlic and cilantro. In the end, I had to add some lime juice and even a bit of the pulp from a somewhat dry lime to reintroduce the bright citrus flavor as opposed to the intense and rather bitter lime zest. But in the end, an interesting and potent condiment:

We marinated the shrimp in some tequila with a wee bit of lime juice and some of the gremolata. Shred up some cabbage, grill up the shrimp and scallops, and voilà!

We bought some very thick, chunky handmade tortillas at the Mission Market, thinking they would be oh, so rustic and authentic. Perhaps that's so, but they really worked out to be too thick and inflexible -- as well as extremely filling! If I had it to do over again, I'd just buy the standard corn tortillas, which were fully half as thick, much more pliable and taste just fine. But no one was complaining too loudly.

Quick paella

Continuing our rerun theme, lately we seem to have been falling back on our standbys -- dishes so deeply entrenched in our repertoire, we built a cookbook around them last year. Paella was one of the anchor recipes (the other was kofta ... guess it's time to make that again).

We've been making paella for years, even well before we ever set foot in Spain. In fact, we were rather disappointed by the paellas in Spain, but I suspect it was because we were eating in restaurants and not at an abuelita's table in a peasant village.

Full-on paella is a project, and can  take the better part of a day to pull together. However, you can cut some corners to make the time pass more easily, and the flavor won't suffer unduly. In this case, we had both drumsticks leftover from the roast chicken, and that was what kicked this off.

Of course you're supposed to have a real paella pan -- one of those wide, flat, shallow pans that maximizes surface area and creates the best crust on the bottom. Yes, that's all good and well if you're cooking over an open fire in the backyard. For those of us at home, a 12" fryer does very nicely, thank you. Just don't use non-stick -- you really want  that crusty bottom. Mmm ... crusty bottom.

The real trick is seasoning -- you have to do it all up front, so salt generously and often. Once everything gets composed in the pan, if it's not properly seasoned, it's not going to be. So be sure to season the chicken, salt each vegetable as you add it, and season the stock well. If you think it's too salty, it probably isn't.

My favorite bits are the clams and mussels that fill with rice as they open in the pan, commingling with their briney juices. Well, that and the crusty bottom.

Paella is excellent food for entertaining for two reasons: It's a one-pot wonder, and it goes into the oven just as guests are arriving, minimizing mess. Oh, and it tastes great and it's got something for everyone. So there's at least four reasons why you should make paella for your guests. The abbreviated paella recipe, and a bonus shot from the cookbook, after the jump.