bacon – The Kitchen Illiterate

Mushroom and Cipollini Onion Pasta

For Christmas, my partner’s sister gave me a copy of the Bi-Rite Market’s Eat Good Food: A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food. Bi-Rite Market is a former convenience store turned gourmet grocery in the heart of the Mission, in San Francisco. I’ve been hearing great things about this place since before we moved to the Bay Area, but we hadn’t taken the time to check it out…until I got this book. This is a beautifully produced book about food: not just cooking it, but sourcing it and growing it and buying it and, well, loving it. The book is broken down into chapters roughly by grocery department (butcher, produce, bakery), and while the author highlights lots of excellent local producers (I love living in the Bay!), he also talks about how to find excellent goods if you live outside of this glorious little foodshed.

After one day of flipping through the book, I knew I had to go check it out, so on our final day off before heading back to work, Sean and I jumped on BART and headed into the Mission for lunch and general food perusal. I am a complete sucker for lovely little markets. Grocery shopping is actually one of my favorite things to do. So this place was kind of like heaven to me, even though it was awfully cramped and crowded. The shelves are stuffed full of lovely goodies like locally produced olive oil, fresh baked bread, crisp cellophane packages of delicate cookies and candies, round tubs of housemade salads, tins of Spanish sardines and bottles of unusual sauces and ketchups. The produce is gorgeous (I couldn’t stay away from the blood oranges), the meats are all thick and deep red and beautiful…the whole place had me swooning.
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Celery Root Soup with Pomegranate and Bacon

I got my hands on my first every celery root last week, when it made its homely appearance in our CSA box. I felt a little intimidated by the thing. It looks so tough. I really wasn’t sure what to do with it. I put it in the crisper and pretended it wasn’t there for a few days. Then I came across this recipe for Celery Root Soup in Gourmet Live, and I knew what I had to do. It was time to face the celery root.

Celery root is also called celeriac, but that makes me think of a disease, which you really don’t want to think about in relation to food…which means I probably shouldn’t bring that up…moving on. It is not, as I once thought, the root of a common celery plant. You probably already knew that. It’s very knobby looking and gnarled, and for those of us use to more suburban vegetable offerings, but celery root can be a bit of a mystery. I had no idea what this thing would smell like or taste like, or how it would cook. Luckily, once you break past its daunting exterior, the celery root isn’t challenging at all.
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Wine and Dine: Bolognese

I’ve always loved the idea of spending a Sunday afternoon with a bubbling pot of tomatoey ragu sitting on the stove, and last weekend, I finally did it. You can read about my Sunday Supper Bolognese at the Union Bulletin’s Wine and Dine Blog, where I’m now writing a weekly (roughly) column about my cooking adventures.
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BLT (or BBT) Risotto

Sorry for the radio silence folks. Life got pretty dumb there over the last few weeks, and I had a hard time keeping my shoes on the right feet and my head on straight, much less finding words to write down about food. Which is a crying shame, because this risotto recipe has been sitting here, patiently waiting to be shared, for almost three weeks now. Three weeks! It’s just not right. This risotto recipe was so tasty, even with me burning the bacon, that really, you should have been privy to it right away. But hey, sometimes life gets dumb.

And I’m here to share it now! I urge you to make it soon, while there are still flavorful tomatoes to be had, and basil coming out the wazoo. Because it is good. See, I started getting all these beautiful tomatoes from the CSA, truly beautiful tomatoes. And I had some bacon leftover from making corn pesto (which, really, you should also try). And one night for dinner, visions of BLTs went dancing through my head, but I had no lettuce, it being rather late in the season. However, I did have a crap ton of basil, and some wine, and some arborio rice, and it had been awhile since a lovely risotto had graced my kitchen. So I was inspired to make BLT risotto, or really, BBT risotto, seeing as there is no actual L for lettuce here.
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Spicy Spaghetti with Fennel

From the moment I saw this recipe in January’s issue of Bon Appetit it went on my list. I don’t usually eat a lot of fennel. It doesn’t occur to me to pick it up. But the photo was so alluring, and I’m a sucker for a big ol’ bowl of pasta. It sounded different from my normal cream-heavy pasta dishes, so I had to try it. And wowza, it was amazing. A touch of thick-cut bacon, fennel braised long enough to become silky and rich, and just enough spice to keep things interesting, and I was hooked. You probably will be, too.
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Bacon and Aged Gouda Scones

Update! Doh, I forgot that I added mustard powder to the recipe, as well. Subtle, but a nice touch.

I woke up last Saturday morning several hours later than my usual rising time with a serious hunger. Unfortunately, we had no bread in the house, and I don’t consider breakfast at all satisfying without bread. So I turned to Mr. X and asked, “Should I bake English muffins or scones for breakfast?” And he did the only thing he could do: He laughed at me. My Saturday morning proposal pretty much encapsulates me at my most ridiculous: Rather than settling for a sub-par breakfast, I will gladly satiate my hunger pangs temporarily with a small handful of chips while I embark on an elaborate cooking project.

As you can see, I decided on the scones. And these aren’t just any scones. These are light, flaky scones made with thick cut bacon and aged Gouda cheese. And they were totally worth the wait.
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Laura’s Mike’s Mess

My first year of college I wasn’t quite ready to leave the comforting embrace of my small hippie college town. Unfortunately, I found it a little bit tricky to find a job in that town. I graduated during the last serious plunge in the employment rate, in 2001, and it was not a good time to be a newly graduated Lit major, I can tell you that. I ended up working in various coffee shops and restaurants before I finally landed that first desk job, and while I was certainly extremely poor and had to defer payment of my student loans for too, too long, I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. I met great people, I had a lot of fun, learned to carry multiple cups of coffee at once, and I discovered what remains to this day my favorite breakfast: The Mike’s Mess from Zachary’s, in Santa Cruz, California. This year, I decided I need to try to make it myself.
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Happy New Year Hoppin’ John

When I first moved to Boston I lived with a girl from Texas. She was the first Texan I knew and from her I learned that Texans are a bit unlike the rest of us. There are things about living in Texas that you just don’t get anywhere else, and Texas food is a big part of growing up Texan. There were special brands of beans in the cupboards of the house I shared with her, and jars of bacon drippings in the refrigerator, and spice blends I’d never heard of. And on New Years day, she made a big pot of black eyed peas and rice and collard greens. She called it Hoppin’ John and told me that it is very important to eat Hoppin’ John on New Years day, for luck.

I never got a recipe from her, and when I decided to make Hoppin’ John this New Years day, thinking that perhaps I need all the luck I can get, I found a pretty wide disparity in recipes online. So I decided to go ahead and make my own. It is, after all, really the black eyed peas that matter here. Eating black eyed peas for luck is a tradition that might date back as far as 500 CE. Much like lentils in Italy, the peas are meant to be symbolic of coins, and eating them should bring prosperity in the coming year. So I’m eating black eyed peas and hoping for a little more prosperity for all of us.
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