Summer Dinner

Occasionally, I have the great fortune of being put in charge of cooking for people with deeper pockets than my own. On a recent summer getaway, I was lucky enough to devise and prepare dinner for thirteen vacationers, who specifically requested "seafood risotto" and who, because of health reasons, could not eat red meat. I settled on a warm peach, beet and mint salad; a squid, clam and fish risotto; and a nine pound roasted pork shoulder inspired by Mario Batali's pork shoulder alla porchetta.



For the peach, beet and mint salad I halved six under-ripe peaches and seared them face down in an extremely hot skillet, flipped them, and cooked them covered for several minutes. I let them cool enough to handle with bare fingers, then sliced them. I roasted the beets whole in a 550° oven until they were tender, cooled them under cold water, peeled and sliced them. I arranged the beets and peaches on a platter and scattered julienned mint leaves over them.



For the risotto, I settled on coarse cut squid, little neck clams and cubes of a wonderful dense white fish whose name I had never heard before and immediately forgot. Unfamiliar with the fish, I ate a slice of it raw once back in the seclusion of the kitchen. Normally I dislike raw white fish, but this was quite delicious. If only I could remember the name! Texturally reminiscent of shark, it was robust enough to maintain its shape and not flake apart or dissolve into the hot starch bath of the risotto.

There are many recipes for risotto. In my experience, it is a superlatively easy dish. What I take to be the rudimentary steps are these: create a rich and oily base (shallots and whole garlic cloves in olive oil, say), add raw Arborio rice and let it sit in the hot oil for quite a while (the heat opens up the rice's pores), pour in a generous amount of white wine and stir (this locks a subtle wine taste in the center of each kernel), cover with broth and cook down and recover with broth until the rice is just shy of starchy (the richness of the broth will largely determine the richness of the risotto), add loads of black pepper and Parmesan cheese. In this case I used a relatively light vegetable stock.

For this risotto, I sauteed the three seafoods individually with rosemary, parsley, shallot and garlic, deglazing the pan with a hearty dose of white wine, and set them aside. When the risotto was creamy and just past al dente, I stirred in the seafood and its rich brined wine, along with grated Parmesan and coarse black pepper.



The pork roast I prepared was deeply indebted to Batali's recipe for Tuscan suckling pig. I dispensed with the jelly rolling and the egg wash and basically sauteed an unholy amount of shallot, garlic, fennel bulb and rosemary in olive oil and slathered the mixture over the pork shoulder, the flesh of which I had filled with knife sliced pockets of garlic clove. I cooked the 9 lb shoulder at 150° F from eight or so in the evening until eight in the morning, then let it rest all day before reheating it an hour or so before serving.

I believe Batali's cooking instructions go like this: put the pork in a very low oven and go to bed, in the morning take it out and let it sit until you want to eat it, then heat it up.

A note on garlic: in both the risotto and the pork marinade, I employed a new favorite method of using garlic. I find garlic poses one of the simple koans of cooking: cook it too long and it develops an unpleasant burnt garlic flavor reminiscent of cheap everything bagels or garlic salt; cook it too little and you come away with a sharp and intense raw garlic flavor that turns off many diners (though not this one). Instead (and I think I learned this from Batali by way of Heat) saute double or triple the amount of garlic, but leave it in its paper. After long exposure to heat, the garlic reduces to a smooth paste (effectively roast garlic) that can be easily squeezed out of its natural packaging. This paste produces a rich flavor of garlic that is less piquant than its raw brethren, without the dissuasive burnt flavor garlic often has. I think I used a head of garlic for the risotto, a second head of garlic for the marinade, and a third to fill the perforations I had made in the pork shoulder with a paring knife.

It made for a delicious and hearty meal. A million thanks to my hosts!

Porcine Canticle No. 1

Then a bit of money appears and one can do a little shopping. Never before had I understood the third-world vision of the American grocery store, the Allen Ginsberg vision of its technicolored, lysergic acid plenty until last week when we visited the emporium of detritus and rediscovered the cornucopia of American food distribution. So many shapes and colors! So many textures! Butter leaf lettuce! Gala apples! White button mushrooms! Just looking at the food arrayed under the lights was a filling meal.

After a careful appraisal of the rising costs of food (generic brand pasta at $1.25 per pound, a 25% increase in price from six months ago) we opted for russet potatoes, yellow onions, carrots, dried beans, pearl barley, green cabbage, eggs, and milk. From the shelves of the meat department I managed to scrounge remaindered beef chuck roast, beef spare ribs and pork loin -- none of which was more than $2.99 per pound. Compared to the usurious cost of bacon these days ($5/lb) one would be a fool to pass up a nicely marbled chuck roast or svelte pork loin for nearly half the price.

After a bit of inquiry, it was decided that Ms Vidal preferred a roast pork loin over beef. The next night, after returning from a day of manual labor, tired from my efforts, yet wanting to pour love into my woman's life in the form of food, I prepared the old standby -- Roast Pork Loin in Herbed Salt.

This is a variation on a dish I learned years ago from my mother. It's quick and easy and almost fool proof. In essence, you rub a pork loin in chopped herbs and salt and cook it at 400° for an hour. I believe the original recipe called for sage. I use whatever is handy. Given the enormous rosemary bush in our neighbor's yard, I crushed rosemary with garlic, a bit of lemon juice, butter and kosher salt in a mortar and pestle. As an experiment, I jammed the knife sharpener down the length of the two loins and stuffed the herbed and salted butter into the loin -- envisioning some specie of pork Kiev. That didn't work. The butter melted out and left the herb stuffing a little trop vegetal, but delicious none the less.

The basic recipe is to grind sage, kosher salt and olive oil into a rudimentary pesto and spread that over the loin. Copious amounts of olive oil are a very nice touch if you can afford it. Then fire it into a heated 400° oven for one hour.

For our dinner, I mixed potatoes with garlic, butter and rosemary and cooked them in the same dish as the pork loins. The potatoes came out a little underdone and the water they released accumulated in the casserole, submerging the lower portions of the loins. While it didn't quite have the usual color, the pork was extremely tender and enough of the potatoes were crispy to fill two plates. In the future I'll cook the pork and the potatoes separately.

Normally I serve the roast plain, but to experiment I made a quick sauce for the pork. I mixed Kelchner's hot mustard with added horseradish, James Keller and Son Dundeee Three Fruits Marmalade, and some cheap apricot jam in equal doses and spooned a little glob onto each slice of pork. Hot, sweet, fruity, delicious.